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Tuesday, August 20, 2002
• Quote of the Day: "I have no problem whatsoever in walking on red carpets, because I've certainly washed enough of them in my life." Benedita da Silva, a former maid who became Rio de Janeiro's first black woman governor http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/17/international/americas/17FPRO.html • Number of the Day: 2.4 Percent of SUV drivers in New York who use cellphones while driving, three times the percentage of car drivers. Overall usage dropped from 2.3 percent to 1.1 percent since a state law banned drivers from using cell phones. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/19/nyregion/19CELL.html • Yesterday's quote, link and number Um, remember the Pentagon? You know, where 184 people, more than the number who died in the Oklahoma City bombing, were killed September 11? It was somewhat forgotten in the shadow of the World Trade Center ruins, and now workers are moving back in to the damaged section. I can't believe how little coverage the Pentagon has gotten compared to Ground Zero, and even this piece is unoriginal, reading like military propaganda until about halfway through: http://www.usatoday.com/news/sept11/2002-08-20-pentagon_x.htm Boom? Bust? Both? Here's why I'm so freaking confused about the economy: two blurbs, both from the front page of USA Today's Money section yesterday: Economic recovery may have 'hit a wall' in July; Chances of a double-dip recession have increased to 20% or more WASHINGTON -- Anxious economists are downgrading their forecasts, and some crucial sectors of the economy are pushing the likelihood of a rebound into next year because of the abrupt slowdown in the economic recovery." Rally extends into 4th week Investors fixated on the chances of a double-dip recession and whether CEOs would sign off on the books may have missed something more important: a rally. Stocks rose for a fourth-consecutive week for the first time since May 2001. Recession? Consumer spending is good, the housing market is booming, and the GDP was up 6.1 percent in the first quarter. This is complicated. Alan Blinder, formerly of the Federal Reserve and now economics professor at Princeton, wrote last month in the NY Times: Those who get their economic news from television may come away with the impression that the economy and the stock market are two sides of the same coin. If the market is heading south, then the economy must be, too. But it's not true. The United States economy is most emphatically not falling right now. The stock market may be the TV star. But it is the economy that generates the jobs and puts the food on our tables. And fortunately, the economy is doing much better than the market. It's confusing, so the media focuses on "national mood" news about the economy that oversimplifies things, said Wall St. bigwig Holman W. Jenkins Jr. last month at Slate: Thank you for not using the words "restore investor confidence." Have you noticed how almost every solution touted by everybody sounds like it's meant to jolly up investors so they start throwing money at stocks again? I swear if you read Hank Paulson's speech or listen to anything Harvey Pitt says, it seems as if they think the best reform is one that serves its psychological purpose without changing anything substantively. http://slate.msn.com/?id=2067448&&entry=2067602 My advice is to read the rest of Blinder's breakdown for an accessible explanation of where we stand. ...2002_08_18_nbiermafile_archive.html#80488773 Notebook Reader is back, after a hiatus, of which there might be more thanks to my schedule over the next few weeks. Anyway, women gaining ground in governor's races and other important discourse below the media's hype radar in today's edition: ...2002_08_18_nbiermafile_archive.html#80488395 Previous Reader Thought of the Day: would we be better of if everyone went to college? Of course we would. And yet ... As I was chewing on this NYT piece and this e-mail from the prof who runs the History News Network, I started thinking about some of the contrarian talking points. I believe it was Ellul who said the problem with higher education is that rather than creating the most well-adjusted citizens, it can become a detached elitist left-wing subculture. Indeed, if you're interested in the most extreme left-wing groups, look at the student organization bulletin board at a college campus, not the lunchroom at the factory or other places the educated look down their noses at. College faculties are collections of 60s holdovers, often liberal with blinders. As a liberal myself, I'm not completely disappointed by this, and I'm grateful to my college for taking me beyond simple-minded conservatism. But at mainstream state colleges and universities across the nation, students are gettting their supposed wisdom filtered through very narrow channels. We'd have at least two other major problems if everyone went to college. First, alcoholism would go up, as America's otherwise potentially useful underclassmen would continue to drink themselves stupid every weekend. This is enlightenment? It's bacchanalia behind the ivy. And then there's the mind-numbing success narrative--many colleges breed in students the belief that people are there just to sit, take notes and tests, receive a formal-looking piece of paper, for the sole purpose of getting a high-paying job. Fewer schools inspire students to love learning more than money, to be promiscuously curious about the world, to become not just a learned but a perpetually learning adult, interested in the fullness of life. Sometimes I wonder if you learn the most, and the best, outside the classroom. That's why I'm shelving my graduate school plans for the time being to be a journalist, where I get to actually go out and see the world and talk to people, rather than just read about it in a dorm room or library. What do you think? Previous Thought • Money&Culture from this morning's newsstand: "Boom shared by all races in Chicago" Chicago Sun-Times front page headline, August 20 "Rich 90s failed to lift all: Income disparity between races widened greatly, census analysis shows" Chicago Tribune front page headline, August 20 Actually, both are right. As the Trib says: "The good news: Poverty and unemployment among all racial and ethnic groups fell in the city and region as a whole, although this data was collected before the current economic downturn. Nevertheless, in Chicago, nearly 30 percent of blacks, 20 percent of Latinos and nearly 18 percent of Asians lived in poverty in 1999. That's compared with just 8.2 percent of whites who reported incomes below the poverty line." • Income-by-neighborhood census chart • Etymology Today from M-W: ambrosia \am-BROH-zhuh or am-BROH-zhee-uh\ *1 a : the food of the Greek and Roman gods b : the ointment or perfume of the gods 2 : something extremely pleasing to taste or smell 3 : a dessert made of oranges and shredded coconut "Ambrosia" literally means "immortality" in Greek; it is derived from the Greek word "ambrotos," meaning "immortal," which combines the prefix "a-" (meaning "not") with "-mbrotos" (meaning "mortal"). In Greek and Roman mythology, only the immortals -- gods and goddesses -- could eat ambrosia. Those mythological gods and goddesses also drank "nectar," the original sense of which refers to the "drink of the gods." "Nectar" (in Greek, "nektar") may have implied immortality as well, as it probably translates literally as "overcoming death." (Even today, you'll often find the words "ambrosia" and "nectar" in each other's company.) While the "ambrosia" of the gods offered immortality, we mere mortals use "ambrosia" in reference to things that just taste or smell especially delicious. Previous E.T. Monday, August 19, 2002
• Link of the Day: www.politicalpredictions.org "Holding unsuspecting media types accountable for their oracular pronouncements." Lists bold and often unfounded predictions by pundits for the purpose of public ridicule. • Quote of the Day: "My favorite part is just seeing those monstrous jets roaring with their thrusters. It's just a nice family thing." Gary Solomon III, Chicago resident attending the city's Air and Water Show. How exactly do those two things go together? http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/showcase/chi-0208190200aug19.story • Number of the Day: 17: Percent increase in free trips claimed by frequent fliers in the last 12 months, adding to the airline industry's headaches. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/17/business/17MILE.html Recycled Thought of the Day: One of my college mentors, Bill Romanowski, adds helpfully to my thought here and article elsewhere on the American view of morality It's what I call the Wizard of Oz syndrome. Dorothy and her friends have within themselves everything they need to secure their own destiny and salvation, and their journey helps them realize that. As Christians we realize we don't do it on our own. We need God. It's a very different way of looking at the world. Even evangelical Christians sometimes trip up on this and frame personal salvation as an Oprah-style improvement exercise. Romanowski's fascinating book has won the Gold Medallion from the Christian Publishers Association, a well-deserved honor from an unlikely source. Calvin College news release: http://www.calvin.edu/news/releases/2002_03/romo_award.htm • History&Today It's the 25th anniversary of the death of Groucho Marx: http://www.usatoday.com/usatonline/20020819/4371184s.htm • Blog Watch: The latest blog headlines being linked around lately...more at my Blogathon page. How could a tech-savvy paper like the San Jose Mercury-News write a intro-to-blogs story so late in the game? http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/news/local/3883026.htm Newsweek also tries to keep up: http://www.msnbc.com/news/795156.asp On file: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/05/books/review/05SHULEVT.html http://www.epnworld-reporter.com/news/fullstory.php/aid/229/Top_Journalist_Weblogs.html A journalist's view from Pakistan: http://www.petermaass.com/weblog/ Somewhat related: The NYT says college papers are much more popular on dead trees than online: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/19/technology/19PAPE.html?todaysheadlines It's good, but unlikely, to see the staid old NY Times continue to try to prove its progressive mettle by deciding to list same-sex unions in its Weddings pages. 'We recognize society remains divided about the legal and religious definition of marriage,'' says editor Howell Raines, but "we acknowledge the newsworthiness of a growing and visible trend in society toward public celebrations of commitment by gay and lesbian couples ... The Styles pages will treat same sex celebrations as a discrete phenomenon meriting coverage in their own right.'' NYT-owned Boston Globe will mull this over: http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/230/nation/N_Y_Times_to_print_same_sex_unions-.shtml Latest Trib piece: another of my valuable contributions to major public discourse: How To Waste Time: http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/showcase/chi-0208190164aug19.story more of my Trib articles E-mails Eric Zorn: "Only one time in the nearly 20 years that the Tribune has been electronically archived has any writer touched on the question of what the Q in Q-Tip might stand for. Today, however, it happened twice..." That was in my story and in Dawn Turner Trice's column, "Caring teacher left lasting mark on 1st graders." "I had watched the way he listened intently to enthusiastic and wide-eyed students who always had something important to say or ask, like: "Tell me again, when is `Y' a vowel?" and "Do you know what the `Q' in Q-Tip stands for?" The only other citing was a Tribune Magazine report ten years ago on an author of a book of little-known facts. So I helped made history. My epitaph is nearly complete. • Etymology Today from M-W: canard \kuh-NARD\ 1 : a false or unfounded report or story; especially: a fabricated report 2 : an airplane with horizontal stabilizing and control surfaces in front of supporting surfaces; also : a small airfoil in front of the wing of an aircraft that increases the aircraft's stability The French had an old saying (going back to Middle French), "vendre des canards a moitie," literally, "to half-sell ducks." It meant "to fool" or "to cheat." That expression led to the use of "canard," the French word for "duck," to mean "a hoax" or "a fabrication." English speakers adopted this "canard" in the mid-1800s. The aeronautical sense of "canard," used from the early days of flying, comes from the stubby duck-like appearance of the aircraft. "Canard" can even mean simply "duck" in English as well, but this use is limited to the specialized realm of cooking. The French word itself is ultimately derived from "caner," Old French for "cackle," a word of imitative origin. Previous E.T. • Places&Culture from 
LAKE LOUISE VILLAGE, Alberta, Aug. 13 — It is the most famous picture postcard image of Canada's Rocky Mountain splendor: lovely Lake Louise shimmering under the giant Victoria glacier and surrounded by a dense forest of spruce and fir trees. Normally, the only interruption to the tranquillity is the occasional thunderous clap of ice breaking off the glacier, bringing cries of glee from tourists paddling canoes below. But the emerald lake in Banff National Park has become a battleground between a large Canadian hotel chain and environmentalists who say they must make a stand here to save the country's 39 national parks from developers http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/14/international/americas/14CANA.html The only sound in this flat green settlement on the Mississippi River is the whisper of leaves. Just off the Grande Rue, at a shrine beside the abandoned rectory of the gothic brick Immaculate Conception Church, visitors press a green button on a wall to look inside. An automated door swings open to reveal a view of the Liberty Bell of the West. No one is in there. No one seems left in Kaskaskia, the first capital of the state of Illinois, from 1818 to 1820. The bell, 11 years older than the one in Philadelphia and almost as large, was King Louis XV's gift to French settlers here. More than 2,000 people lived here once. But the Census Bureau found only 9 in 2000, down from 32 in 1990. Flood upon flood, most recently the Great Flood of 1993, have left Kaskaskia an island with more egrets than people. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/16/national/16GHOS.html Everywhere you turn on Washington's fashionable Embassy Row, a new palace-size building is under construction, a testament to the frenzied competition of other nations to gain attention in the capital of the last remaining superpower. More than a dozen countries have built or are in the midst of building embassies the size of castles. They come adorned with faux towers and real waterfalls in what one diplomat called "neo-this and made-up-that architecture." From these castle-bastions, foreign diplomats conduct what they call the new Washington diplomacy, an explosion of events geared to reaching the broadest possible audience in hopes of being heard above the din of other countries competing for the same elusive prize of influence. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/17/international/17EMBA.html Previous P&C Friday, August 16, 2002
• Quote of the Day: "The hinge of a door is never crowded with insects." Chinese proverb • Link of the Day: www.phonespell.org What does your phone number spell? I entered mine and it said it doesn't spell anything. I was strangely disappointed. • Number of the Day: 4 Rank of Canada, up from 9 one year ago, among 14 countries as a response to this Harris Poll question: "If you could spend a vacation in any country in the world, outside the United States, and you would not have to worry about the cost, what one country would you choose?" http://www.pollingreport.com/places.htm#Foreign Letter from an ex-dot-commer: Today is my last day at a web design company I’ve worked for since August 1999. In the span of three years, I have: survived 13 rounds of lay-offs; moved offices twice; sat in five different cubicles; received three complimentary massages; drank, approximately, 732 free beverages, mostly seltzer; reported to four different supervisors, bosses, or mentors; received one promotion, two department changes, and a raise; been paid twice what my mother earns as a teacher, and made more than three times what my father was paid at my age, with child; sat frozen at my desk by a large window overlooking Park Avenue, unable to move even my fingers, in complete panic and fear, having no idea what was happening or why; watched a friend vomit outside our office once the leftover IPO champagne was finished after-hours; complained about my boss in front of her husband, the CEO, who generously gave me a job in the first place and then, wracked by guilt and shamed, approached him and apologized, nearly freaking out, explaining the whole thing and about to cry and then a little startled, even more ashamed when he laughed, patted my shoulder, and explained he hadn’t heard a thing but ‘it didn’t really matter anyway’... And it goes on like this! http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/letters/rosecrans/quitter.shtml • History&Today: On the 945th anniversary of Macbeth's death, it's worth revisiting a defense of the real-life namesake of Shakespeare's play, says 
"The real Macbeth, it seems, was Lord of Moray in the 11th century and was, by the standards of the time, a decent and an honourable man," wrote Brendan McWilliam in The Irish Times in 1995. "He legitimately succeeded Duncan I as king of Scotland -- not by stabbing the latter as he slept, but after killing him in battle in a fair fight. Moreover, Macbeth's 17-year reign was genial and a prosperous time for Scotland and came to an end . . . when Duncan's son Malcolm assassinated poor Macbeth at Dunsinane near Perth." Who knew? They're practicing for tomorrow's air show here on the lakeshore, and it's scaring the $*&! out of me. If you don't know there's an air show on, you'd think it's the second coming of September 11 in the Loop, as planes streak over skyscrapers and drown out conversations. It took me three or four flyovers before I stopped being startled. One liberal and one conservative rant for today: From yesterday, Mickey Kaus deconstructs a NY Times series slanted to scare people about child welfare. http://slate.msn.com/?id=2069339&#scare From my file, Molly Ivins bashes simple-mindedness on school prayer: We had one of those "What was he thinking?" moments with Gov. Rick (Goodhair) Perry the other day. The only governor we've got decided to bring back that old bone of contention: prayer in the schools. Nice timing, guv.The very first clause in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution establishes freedom of conscience. The majority does not rule anyone's faith. If we wanted the state to coerce faith, we would have voted for the Taliban. Look, as we all know, the religious majority in Texas is hardshell Southern Baptist. Splendid people, the Southern Baptists, but the fact is, if the rest of us had wanted to join their church, we would have done so. Our next biggest faith is Catholicism, and if the governor wants to spend the rest of his term convincing Baptists to say "Hail Mary," that's fine by me. As is obvious to all but those of the most limited intelligence and the governor, by the time you get the Catholics, Jews, Episcopalians, Methodists, Muslims, atheists, agnostics, Church of Christers, Buddhists, Sikhs, New Agers and the County Line Salt of the Earth Church of the Predestinarian Faith to sign off on one prayer, it begins "To Whom It May Concern, If There Is a Whom." Prayer in school is quite perfectly legal, and is especially common before algebra exams. Mandatory prayer organized by, led by and broadcast over the public address system by paid agents of the state is unconstitutional.Matthew 6: 5 and 6. WILL HAS A WEBLOG: http://refvem.blogspot.com/ Bring your thinking caps. I met Will in a class at Calvin. It is hard work for him to be boring--he is so well-read and well-spoken that he intriguingly tackles philosophy, religion, literature, and a little of everything else in his thinking, and now in his weblog. I'll bookmark it to the left. In an e-mail, he says in a few words what I was trying to say in many more: "I love the liturgy because it reminds me of who God is, not who I am, which is all contemporary services do for me." I'll let that be today's Thought of the Day. Important follow-up to my breakdown of personal media and public responsibility--this provocative memo about writing vs. reporting from the Arizona Republic. "We have to get reporters away from the mistaken notion that we are writers first and reporters second. ... We are not about writing. We are about getting facts and telling people about them." Recipe for boredom and irrelevance right there. Although I'm sympathetic to the problem of lazy reporting, I think bad writing is actually one of the top three problems in media. I've rebutted this the way I want to in my earlier rant, and I'll again link to this fabulous Wash. Monthly symposium on objectivity: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/1999/9901.symposium.html The Phoenix New Times, which posted the memo, spoofs the Republic in this PDF. Good for some chuckles.  Architecture Watch: Manhattan's Citicorp Center gets a sturdier leg. Roughly the 24th anniversary of the quiet panic surrounding the realization that the building was in grave danger of being toppled by an approaching hurricane, which prompted welders to stiffen in clandestinely during the night. Here's yesterdays NY Times article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/15/nyregion/15TOWE.html And the website for PBS' documentary that featured the bizarre '78 episode: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/buildingbig/wonder/structure/citicorp.html My pictures of the building last summer: http://nbierma-ny.freeservers.com/pictures/citicorp.html Previous Architecture Watch • Word of the Day from M-W: tatterdemalion \tat-er-dih-MAIL-yun\ 1 *a : ragged or disreputable in appearance b : being in a decayed state or condition : dilapidated 2 : beggarly, disreputable The exact origin of "tatterdemalion" is uncertain, but it's probably connected somehow to either the noun "tatter" ("a torn scrap or shred") or the adjective "tattered" ("ragged" or "wearing ragged clothes"). We do know that "tatterdemalion" has been used in print since the 1600s. In its first documented use in 1611, it was used as a noun (as it still can be) in reference to a person in ragged clothing -- the type we might also call a ragamuffin. ("Ragamuffin," incidentally, predates "tatterdemalion" in this sense. Like "tatterdemalion," it may have been formed by combining a known word, "rag," with a fanciful ending.) Within three years of the first appearance of "tatterdemalion," it came to be used as an adjective for anything or anyone ragged or disreputable. Never mind, someone stole my pool car. So... Thoughts&Culture from
Anyone who doesn't recognize the power of "post" in intellectual strategy just hasn't been watching. It can gel loosely related phenomena into a major intellectual movement or cultural vanguard without having to be very precise about what unites them or what they are rather than what they are not. Postmodernism is the reigning example. ... Those who study, articulate or propound the beliefs and practices by which most of humanity tries to place itself in relationship with the transcendent should post themselves. They should simply drop that old-fashioned word "religion." What they are about, they should announce, is "postsecularism." http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/03/national/03BELI.html Thursday, August 15, 2002
• Quote of the Day: "Preach the Gospel at all times. If necessary, use words." St. Francis of Assisi The slow but necessary death of the college lecture, "that mysterious process by means of which the contents of the professor's notebooks are transferred by means of the fountain pen to the pages of the student's notebook without passing through the mind of either," from
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/14/education/14LES.html  Vanilla Coke is off to a good start, says Time. Unlike New Coke, and Pepsi's latest creation, Pepsi Blue, which tastes and looks like Windex, Vanilla Coke actually tastes good.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101020812-333893,00.html Thought of the day: time and worship "I like connecting to something older." I think those were the exact words of my friend yesterday on the topic of church worship. We each attend Fourth Presbyterian here in Chicago and appreciate the formality, the beauty of the cathedral, the interesting preaching and intellectual engagement. His quote may seem a fogey-ish statement for two men under 40 to endorse, but we both have our problems with the Overhead Projector Revolution in churches over the past two decades--play the drums, make some noise, flash the words onto the overhead, and POOF! you have Instant Relevant Worship (TM). It's emotional, it's engaging, but it's also fleeting, here one moment and gone the next--just another momentary flash pulsating at us in our modern MTV culture. It doesn't feel connected to anything that came before it, nor, like my friend said, does it often have clear theological roots, which may make you roll your eyes but can anchor and sustain the experience of worship. Connecting to something older. We seem to have dwindling opportunities to do so today. Touring historic sites, voting, celebrating Christmas--these rituals place us in time, in the context of something larger, tying us to other human experiences beside our own. In an MTV world there are no such ties, little context, little that is larger than yourself except for the projections of performers before you. So each Sunday I like to sit in church, try to take it all in, let my eyes leap to the grand arches of the building around me, sing or recite familiar words, participate in the ongoing story and fellowship of the Church, and feel my soul come out of its media-battered shell during a rare hour of actual peace and renewal. Previous Thought • Word of the Day from M-W: purfle \PER-ful\ to ornament the border or edges of Today we use "purfle" mostly in reference to setting a decorative inlaid border around the body of a guitar or violin, a process known as "purfling." In the past, "purfle" got the most use in connection with adornment of garments. "The Bishop of Ely . . . wore a robe of scarlet . . . purfled with minever," reported an English clergyman in 1840, for example. We embellished our language with "purfle," first as "purfilen" in the 1300s, when we took it with its meaning from Middle French "porfiler." Related to "purfle" is "filigree," which is used as a noun for ornamental work made of fine wire, and also as a verb meaning "to adorn with filigree." "Purfle" and "filigree" share the Latin source "filum," which means "thread." • Money&Culture File Now is the time that gold—solid, immutable, real—should be rocketing toward $800 per ounce, yet the yellow metal has confounded its long-suffering devotees by remaining tethered to the $300-per-ounce level, where it has been stuck for years. Either things are not as bad as they seem, or gold may finally be losing its ancient status as the investment of last resort. "About time," mutters the ghost of John Maynard Keynes, who long ago pronounced gold "a barbarous relic." http://slate.msn.com//?id=2069302 Deep in the pine forest of the Russian north, a battle is being fought over the shape of a Russian economy increasingly concentrated in the hands of just a few tycoons. ... The scene is more than just a fine piece of Russian corporate theater. These are the front lines of a phenomenon that has transformed the economy in the last three years. A handful of large business groups have been moving through systematically, buying up entire industries. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/13/international/europe/13RUSS.html Wednesday, August 14, 2002
Consumer Reports does the math on book buying and other essentials in its back-to-school guide. Wait a minute, when did DVD's become must-haves for schoolgoers? Heck, in grade school I was glad to get colored pencils. http://www.consumerreports.com Chicago Architecture Watch: 311 S. Wacker changes hands: http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/showcase/chi-0208100147aug10.story A related thought to below: I've noticed a couple of examples of so-called gentlemen's agreements lately--there was the case of the out-of-town Broadway review and talk show bookings. I was just thinking, isn't the term "gentleman's agreement" very British, very deferential, and in the light of my rant below, very un-American? But again, we value these things to keep society ticking. Thought of the Day: the tension between democracy and power. America was founded as the anti-Britain, rejecting hierarchy and elitism in favor of democratic ideals. That was the idea anyway (see the Dec. of Independence). It was part ideology, part geography--the new continent had so much more land mass that the equation of land ownership with power no longer made sense: there was enough breathing room for anybody to be anyone they wanted, own as much land as they wanted, and escape from the tight, stuffy social hierarchy of Britain. Hierarchy works better on a small continent than in an vast, untamed new wilderness. Then again, no one was stuffier or more elite than the Founding Fathers--a well-educated, aristocratic breed who valued deference, looked down upon women, and calculated slaves to be 3/5 of of a person. Egalitarian these guys were not. Since then our economic ideals have always seemed to clash with our democratic ones--we don't really want egalitarianism--anyone being just as important, having just as much power, as anyone else--we just vaguely think we sort of want it. Otherwise we wouldn't so laud the powerful and envy the rich. Otherwise we wouldn't view the poor as an undeserving, underachieving lot that just has to work hard, the American way, in order to prosper (I would submit most of the poor are hard-working, and most of the rich are not and some of them never were). I was re-reading Anna Deavere Smith's Talk to Me and came across this quote from Hayden White, professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz: The assumption is that the free market and democracy go hand in hand. If you buy into the free market, you have to take a certain amount of unemployment, a certain amount of exploitation, a certain amount of corruption, and so forth. It has nothing to do with democracy. ...That's been the greatest triumph of Western capitalism, to identify democracy with the free market. Insert Enron rant here. Now, of course our economic mechanisms look good compared to the tyranny of Communist and dictator states, and I don't want to downplay that. I'm just saying that I think we value power more than democracy would suggest we would: if we really believed "all men [sic] are created equal," we wouldn't willingly play politics so much in our workplaces, our homes, our churches, heck, our softball leagues. We value seniority, putting in your dues. I was comiserating with a reporter here at the Tribune about how the mentality is that you graduate to the Tribune from other places, not necessarily that you are a better writer than someone with less newspaper experience, which some major newspaper reporters indeed are not. Then I was thinking about this scenefrom Mr. Holland's Opus the other night where Mr. Holland is waiting in the lunch line in his first day of school, and the football coach comes along and tells him to move to the front of the line: teachers don't wait with the students. "High school is not a democracy," the coach says. We value these imbalances in power, however small a scale they may be on. We function according to seniority, putting in your dues, earning it. Sometimes that has little or nothing to do with equality. Previous Thought Footnote:This tension between equality and elitism has throbbed through American political thought. Walter Lippman was one of the great American journalists, and yet he believed news should come from an oligarchy of elite journalists--ministers of culture. As I wrote before, do we really want everyone to vote? Similarly, look at Argentina--this creep is democratically elected, and the U.S. supports a coup that removes him (he's back now). We're saying, we, an elite few, know better than the masses--there is no inherent wisdom in democratic decisions (as I believe Tocqueville put it: the tyranny of the majority). • Word of the Day from M-W: perpend \per-PEND\ 1 : to reflect on carefully : ponder; 2 : to be attentive : reflect "Perpend" isn't used often these days, but when it does show up it is frequently imperative. As such, its use can be compared to the phrase "mark my words." "Perpend" arrived in English in the 15th century from the Latin verb "perpendere," which in turn comes from "pendere," meaning "to weigh." Appropriately, our English word essentially means "to weigh carefully in the mind." "Pendere" has several descendants in English, including "append," "compendium," "expend," and "suspend." "Perpend" can also be a noun meaning "a brick or large stone reaching through a wall" or "a wall built of such stones," but that "perpend" comes from a Middle French source and is unrelated to the verb. • Places&Culture from
"Last year we did only 50 roof gardens. So far this year we have already had 200 orders." The realization that Tokyo is becoming a vast "heat island" is behind the boom in roof gardens. Here, centuries of gradual climate change are telescoping into decades. "Over the last century, Tokyo temperatures have increased five times as fast as global warming," said Takehiro Mikami, a professor of climatology at Tokyo Metropolitan University. While the world's average mean temperature has increased by one degree Fahrenheit since 1900, Tokyo's has increased by 5.2 degrees. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/13/international/asia/13TOKY.html Avenir P. Ovsyanov was only 20 but can still recount in exacting detail how in 1957 he helped destroy this city's German soul.Following orders from local Soviet bosses, Mr. Ovsyanov's military engineering class bored hundreds of holes in the ruins of the city's 13th-century castle, packed them with dynamite and began blasting away 700 years of history. It is perhaps a fitting twist of fate that now, as director of the region's historical preservation department, Mr. Ovsyanov's job is to protect — or recover, as is more often the case — the art, culture and history lost first by war and then by Soviet rule. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/13/international/europe/13KALI.html The Harlem Little League was founded in 1989 by Dwight and Iris Raiford at the urging of their son Joshua, who was 9. They struck a deal; if he agreed to take piano lessons, they would start a Little League program in Harlem. The league's early fields had broken glass, discarded crack vials and tire ruts. But the Raifords and other volunteers worked to make the fields safe places to play, and the league has grown from 129 players in its first year to nearly 700 now. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/14/sports/baseball/14LITT.html (log in with member name and password of "nbiermaread") Tuesday, August 13, 2002
• Quote of the Day: "Don't worry about the world coming to an end today. It's already tomorrow in Australia." Charles Schultz • Link of the Day: www.crazythoughts.com Imponderables include: If they develop a supersonic train, will they give it a whistle? Do fish ever get thirsty? What happened to the first 6 ups? If you keep trying to prove Murphy's Law, will something keep going wrong? Meager offerings here today, I know (in quantity but not quality!). I've been busy polishing a piece for the Trib. Thought of the Day, Notebook Reader and other favorites return tomorrow. No, there aren't any pirates in Pittsburgh, says Answer Guy in 
http://msn.espn.go.com/magazine/vol5no17answerguy.html  It's true, says the stellar urban legends site Snopes.com: this Billy Ripken card contains an obscenity:
http://www.snopes.com/business/hidden/ripken.htm It's a movie kind of day (see below...): Saw A Few Good Men recently, with one of the all-time well-acted scenes with Jack Nicholson in the courtroom at the end. Worth reading in this script I found: http://www.godamongdirectors.com/scripts/fewgood.shtml Watched Mr. Holland's Opus with my wife last night--one of the richest movies to have such a low ratio of action-per-minute. But very meaningful, especially for this soul-searching college grad. I thought Jay Thomas looked familiar, playing the football coach, but I haven't seen anything IMDB says he's been in. Which includes Who Wants To Marry a Multi-Millionaire, that creepy Fox-ploitation nightmare he hosted a couple years ago. What kind of measure of your career is it to say you've been in Mr. Holland's Opus and Who Wants To Marry a Multi-Millionaire? Is that supposed to be versatility? Word of the Day from M-W: palmary \PAL-muh-ree or PAHL-muh-ree\ outstanding, best English speakers have been using "palmary" since the 1600s, and its history stretches back even further than that. It was the ancient Romans who first used their "palmarius" to describe someone or something extraordinary. "Palmarius" literally translates as "deserving the palm." But what does that mean exactly? Was it inspired by palms of hands coming together in applause? That would be a good guess, but the direct inspiration for "palmarius" was the palm leaf given to a victor in a sports competition. That other palm, the one on the hand, is loosely related. The Romans thought the palm tree's leaves resembled an outstretched palm of the hand; they thus used their word "palma" for both meanings, just as we do with "palm" in English.  A scientific breakdown of Signs from 
• In 1991, British artists Doug Bower and Dave Chorley confessed to having created the [crop circles] that started the craze, and several Web sites now provide detailed instructions on how to make your own. • Let's consider why man-eating is an unlikely motivation. First, our proteins and fats and nucleic acids almost certainly would not agree with an independently evolved alien digestive system. Second, any civilization that can travel between the stars necessarily has access to tremendous reserves of energy and materials. Finding a snack is not going to be a problem. And even if terrestrial flesh were a unique taste treat, wouldn't cows make a better choice? They have a lot more meat and put up less of a fight. • A civilization that can travel through light years of empty space probably would not need to send scouts onto the ground to find conveniently located farms and then knock down their corn. http://www.discover.com/science_news/features/gthere.html?article=feat_signs.html Monday, August 12, 2002
• Link of the Day: www.coolsig.com You know those pithy quotes and funny quips people insert after their e-mail signatures? The best are collected here. • Number of the Day: 27: Percent of male drinkers who have at least one drink a day, compared with 10% of female drinkers. http://www.gallup.com/poll/releases/pr020809.asp Less than a month until the first anniversary of September 11, so it's as good a time as any for a couple of reality checks to keep it in perspective. This is not to deman the horror and suffering of the attacks, only to go beyond the simplification of the mainstream media. First of all, more Americans die from food poisoning each year than died in the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks (the Centers for Disease Control estimates 5,000 Americans die of food poisoning each year). About 40,000 Americans die of gunfire each year, while slightly more die of Alzheimers. Almost 100,000 Americans per year die in accidents, while over 700,000 die of heart disease. In other words, far more Americans die at each other's hands (thanks to guns or drunk driving) or of disease than are killed by al-Qaeda. And yet the constant stream of headlines each morning suggests that terrorists are the primary threat to our existence and happiness. CDC stats: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/lcod.htm I e-mailed Rick Shenkman, a history professor at George Mason University who runs the left-leaning History News Network, and asked him what he thought was the greatest myth about September 11. Here's his thorough answer. ...2002_08_11_nbiermafile_archive.html#80146941 From Chimes: Sept. 11 not a turning point. Thought of the Day: when to go to war? Right now there's so much talk in the media about whether and when we're going to attack Iraq that Saddam Hussein may as well fire all his spies and get a subscription to The Washington Post. What was raised in a story meeting here this morning is, What is the tipping point that makes us go to war? What makes it OK, when is it agreed to be necessary, when do all but the pacifists (a noble breed, it should be noted) quiet down and march or cheer? The question is made all the more poignant by a stellar Time magazine cover piece on the pre-9/11 plans to attack al-Qaeda. Throughout, it seems leaders pocketed the plans as an effect of 1) labyrinthine Washington bureacracy and 2) the paralysis of public opinion--the country wouldn't have supported the messy business without more palpable cause, which September 11 horrifyingly provided. Back to Iraq, which seems to have nothing to do with September 11 but is now public enemy number one. If we don't attack them and they nuke us or someone we like, will we have numerous more magazine stories on What We Should Have Done and Donald Rumsfeld wearing a T-shirt to press conferences that says I Told You So? On the other hand, if we go in there tomorrow, will we be just as predictably subjected to the scores of naysayers, the Congressional opponents sounding righteous and snide about a president's supposed hubris? The Gulf War introduced a war fought on TV. This possible round two may be the first one planned on TV. http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101020812/story.html Previous Thought Word of the Day from M-W: oneiric \oh-NYE-rik\ of or relating to dreams, dreamy The notion of using the Greek noun "oneiros" (meaning "dream") to form the English adjective "oneiric" wasn't dreamed up until the mid-19th century. But back in the early 1600s, linguistic dreamers came up with a few "oneiros" spin-offs, giving English "oneirocriticism," "oneirocritical," and "oneirocritic" (each referring to dream interpreters or interpretation). The surge in "oneiros" derivatives at that time may have been fueled by the current interest among English scholars in _Oneirocritica_, a book about dream interpretation by 2nd century Greek soothsayer Artemidorus Daldianus. Why the Trib, for all my beefs about it, will always be the authoritative newspaper in Chicago, and the Sun-Times will always be a second-rate goofoff: An S-T front page teaser this morning: "Jennifer To Brad: 'Time To Shave.'" Then again, I did do a sidebar on Friday for the Trib on tabloid headlines about Angelina Jolie... Only You Can Prevent Suicide: From a memo last week to Tribune employees: Tragically, in the past 15 months, two employees have lost their lives here at the Tower through apparent suicide. Sadly, these isolated incidents serve as an important reminder that we all should try to look out for the well being of our fellow employees. If you are concerned about a coworker, contact your supervisor, a Human Resources manager, or Tribune's medical director, Dr. Mary Beth Richmond at ext. [xxxx]. If you are having trouble coping with difficult or stressful situations, there is a resource available to help you: Tribune's Employee Assistance Program (EAP). Employee Assistance. I feel better about life already. While I'm ranting about the inanimate corporate being that is the Trib Co., here's a breakdown from NewCity of the Trib's takeover of Chicago Magazine: ...2002_08_04_nbiermafile_archive.html#80037667 P.J. O'Rourke interview in 
"on the Middle East, the universality of the absurd, and his beef with Mark Twain." http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/interviews/int2002-08-08.htm Morning news from 
Buffeted by the economic slowdown and the fallout from Sept. 11, US Airways last evening filed for bankruptcy protection under Chapter 11. Following the terrorist attacks, the airline industry is facing its most dramatic period of upheaval since deregulation 24 years ago. ... Arlington, Va.-based US Airways, which carried 56 million passengers last year, is the first major carrier to declare bankruptcy since the attacks. http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/224/nation/US_Airways_seeks_Ch_11_protection+.shtml For years, medical researchers were largely immune from lawsuits. While other doctors faced a wave of malpractice suits, researchers seeking cures for diseases such as cancer found patients eager to participate in experiments and unlikely to hire a lawyer if something went wrong. But the death of Jesse Gelsinger in 1999 changed all that. ... http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/224/metro/Lawsuits_target_medical_research+.shtml Calling himself ''the currently designated fall guy,'' the Maryland scientist at the center of the anthrax investigation denied yesterday that he is responsible for the mailings that killed five people and infected 13 others last fall. Steven J. Hatfill, a former Army research scientist described by federal investigators as a ''person of interest'' in the anthrax probe, said he had nothing to do with the mailings and decried the intense scrutiny he has been under. http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/224/nation/Scientist_denies_role_in_anthrax+.shtml more BG headlines Friday, August 09, 2002
• Link of the Day: www.oxymoronlist.com You may have too much of a life to compile literally hundreds of oxymorons in alphabetical order, but these people don't! • Number of the Day: 126 Factor by which shortstop Alex Rodriguez's salary is larger than the lowest-paid player in Major League Baseball. The league minimum for player salaries, $200,000, is almost five times the U.S. median household annual income. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61496-2002Aug8.html Is it just me, or is there something a little incongruous about Garrison Keillor forming something called "Grand Prairie LLP." Such a confluence of a corporate boardroom-ism and America's down-home, mom-and-apple-pie-in-the-heartland icon is somewhat disconcerting: http://www.twincities.com/mld/pioneerpress/news/local/3826503.htm  China's hover-train highlights the weekend edition of my Notebook Reader:
...2002_08_04_nbiermafile_archive.html#80037199 Yesterday's Reader Let the Pulitzer nominations begin: My sidebar with trimmed tabloid headlines about Angelina Jolie and Billy Bob Thornton runs on the Tempo front in this morning's Tribune. How's that for quality journalism. Are we challenging our audience as much as catering to them? Or would you say that these two obviously mentally unstable celebrities have brought it on themselves and deserve our gawks? http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/showcase/chi-0208090003aug09.story Thought of the day: religious freedom We were founded by pilgrims fleeing an overbearing religious institution. Now religious conservatives (disclosure: I'm a Christian liberal) say our country needs to get back to its roots by listening to our religious institutions. I thought of this while reading Harpers last night and coming across a note about divorced mothers in Nigeria. If you're divorced and pregnant in that country's northern states, you are stoned to death for adultery, no questions asked. A new law will defer the sentence for one and a half years to allow the mother to care for the newborn. As horrified as I was, I couldn't help thinking: this is very compelling enforcement of sexual morality--as opposed to the United States, where, thanks to the sexual revolution, people interlock genitals at the drop of a hat. But is this what the Bill Bennett's of the world desire? Clearly not, and that's where the irony comes in. These conservatives are so gung-ho about American Freedom as a sort of faith unto itself--the belief that the spread free expression and capitalism will lift poor nations from their depths (also deconstructed nicely in the latest Harper's), as if wisdom and goodness were somehow inherent to free expression and free markets--America itself is proof they're not. But it is this very engine of freedom that empowered the sexual revolution, that empowered the pilgrims to thumb their noses at the Church in the first place--in both cases, people were saying, "I know better than you, and because I love Freedom I'm going to do what I want." Now surely I can locate some middle ground between America's bacchanal sexual mores and Nigeria's Taliban-like oppression, and so can Bennett. But is there not a tension between conservatives' desire to promote freedom and religious authority at the same time? What do you think? Yesterday's Thought • Word of the Day from M-W: mordacious 1 : biting or given to biting; 2 : biting or sharp in manner or style : caustic The Earl of Carnarvan, referred to in 1650 as "mordacious," didn't go around biting people; it was his "biting" sarcasm that inspired that description. The word's association with literal biting didn't come up until later, occurring first in an 18th-century reference to "mordacious" bats. The "caustic" sense of "mordacious" is the more frequent use these days, but admittedly, neither sense is especially common. If you prefer a less esoteric option you can choose "mordant," a synonym that sees a bit more use. Both adjectives descend from Latin "mordere," a verb meaning (literally) "to bite or sting." If you want to sink your teeth into more "mordere" derivatives, you might use "mordacity" to refer to a biting quality of speech, or substitute "mordancy" for "incisiveness" or "harshness." • Places&Culture File As a journalist and cultural critic, to me economic news is at its best when it is about people, places and culture and is not just a dry listing of stock prices and earnings reports. A classic example is this piece by Mark Lewis in Slate from earlier this summer that dug into the colorful cultural context of a little-noticed news item: the de-listing of Bethlehem Steel from the NYSE. The little town of Bethlehem (Penn.) produced the guts of Rockefeller Center, the Golden Gate Bridge, Chicago's Merchandise Mart, the U.S. Supreme Court Building, and Madison Square Garden, and that's just where the story begins. Worth another look: http://slate.msn.com/?id=2067068 • more cultural economics from Slate: Adam Smith and stock options: http://www.slate.msn.com/?id=2068693 more Places&Culture from
Old-timers here still arrive by pickup truck to have their coffee and biscuits at Marty's, a plain-looking restaurant that has been a fixture for decades. Nouveau Bentonville, on the other hand, gravitates to a soaring space called the Market at Pinnacle Point, which appeared out of nowhere two years ago just down the highway in Rogers, surrounded by an office-and-shopping complex filled with Fortune 500 companies. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/07/business/07SHOP.html Dr. Donald E. Nemer does not like to make people in pain wait. So when the patient of a vacationing dentist called with a toothache one recent afternoon, Dr. Nemer squeezed him into a full schedule already made fuller by a walk-in denture readjustment, an emergency filling and an unscheduled root canal. Yet Dr. Nemer himself has been waiting for four years to retire, as a shortage of dentists in rural stretches of the upper Midwest reaches crisis proportions. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/07/health/07DENT.html For countless tourists over two and a half centuries, the Trevi Fountain has been a source of awe and a wellspring of hope, promising another visit to the Eternal City, and a wish fulfilled, to anyone who tosses coins into its gurgling waters. For Roberto Cercelletta, it has been a lucrative pool of clandestine profit. What tourists gave, Mr. Cercelletta took away — six days a week, under the cover of early-morning darkness, with a rake or magnet or his own hands, as he splashed through the late Baroque masterpiece like Anita Ekberg in "La Dolce Vita," albeit less cinematically. Early this morning, when he took his usual dip under Neptune's feet, police officers were watching, and arrested him. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/07/international/europe/07ROME.html On its face, it sounded like the perfect share-the-wealth plan. Amid the sugarcane fields here on the island of Negros, one of the Philippines' most powerful tycoons, Eduardo M. Cojuangco Jr., the chairman of the beer and food conglomerate San Miguel, offered nearly 1,800 peasants who worked about 10,000 acres of land under his control a free stake in a plantation venture he would run. A "corporative," he dubbed it. But ever since that deal five years ago, the "shareholders" have not received their share of the plantation's profits, nor seen a statement of what those profits are. Instead, they have been paid an annual dividend of roughly $200, a sum critics denounce as a pay-off to discourage the peasants from asserting their rights to the land. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/02/business/worldbusiness/02PHIL.html Thursday, August 08, 2002
I recently received a couple variations of the years-old Nigerian e-mail hoax, As a public service I'm posting them here. A word of advice: when the letter says, The following information are required from you urgently: Your personal telephone and fax numbers, your banking details where the money will be transferred, your full names and contact address and your date of birth (indicate sex and marital status) --WALK AWAY! Unbelievably, the Washington Post says over 300 people, who bled $20 million, didn't. ...2002_08_04_nbiermafile_archive.html#79993736 links: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A64335-2002Apr28 http://www.zdnet.com/products/stories/reviews/0,4161,2609884,00.html http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,53115,00.html http://www.motherlandnigeria.com/scam_page.html http://www.quatloos.com/cm-niger/nigerian_scam_letter_museum.htm http://www.state.gov/www/regions/africa/naffpub.pdf Urban Issues Watch: I'm keeping an eye on city issues and thought for my book on theology and the city, so I clipped this piece from 
The four-day "Cities and Globalization" summit at the 71st annual Couchiching Institute on Public Affairs conference explores issues facing Canadian cities trying to cope with globalization at a time when most decision-making power lies with the provincial and federal governments. Some of the issues that the conference will be addressing are: How local communities can turn globalization to their advantage and mitigate any destructive effects; How cities and regions can carve out an identity and maintain their historic role as economic engines, immigration melting pots and cultural powerhouses; How other foreign cities are evolving to survive in the global economy. http://www.torontostar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?... Also see: in-depth review of the American angle on this at http://www.thepublicinterest.com/current/article1.html  Headlines that actually matter: Russian floods...China chooses Australia for big gas deal...Planet Earth gets pudgy...and more in today's edition of my Notebook Reader:
...2002_08_04_nbiermafile_archive.html#79988845 Yesterday's Reader I was looking for a way to include these longtime bloggers in my blogging story last week, but it didn't happen. They're worth a read: WilWheaton.net NeilGaiman.com And here's one I included in the full Blogathon blog but not the story, that's worth a bookmark: AndyDeHnart.com • Thought of the day: the ambiguity of human nature: Are people basically bad or basically good? Ever since the Enlightenment the consensus has seemed to be "good" after centuries of "bad," but since the genocide-laced 20th Century we haven't been so sure. My own strand of Christianity--Calvinist Protestantism, has always said "bad," and not to be a pessimist, but I agree. Every human being is vulnerable to his or her own pride, lusts, envy, and every human being hurts others because of them. We all need mending, the type of self-transformation which Oprah-variety cheerleading suggests you do yourself (more here) but which reason holds can only come from a higher power (i.e. the Cross). I'm a little torn by the "bad" verdict, though, because human goodness, programmed into our DNA before evil entered the world, still shines through in striking moments. Here on the streets of Chicago I can see strangers being kind to each other, patiently giving directions to tourists, giving up their seats on the bus to older riders; more profoundly, the altruism poured out at Ground Zero on September 11 almost seems to support America's view of its own righteousness, if not the simple-minded moralism of President Bush's good-vs-evil worldview (although the silly relativism of liberals hardly holds much water, either--unless you think Osama bin Laden was just expressing his equally valid point of view). But the "bad" seeps through in subtle, countless ways. Americans have long believed most people are good, evil is the result of a few evil people, and evil can be reduced by eliminating evil people--this view, the Hollywood Catechism, is the basis for 99 percent of American movies. By contrast, I believe all people have latent evil in them and evil can be reduced only by divine transformation (cue the Cross again). If President Bush still doubts this, he should ask his friend Ken Lay, a seemingly righteous man who succumbed to his own lust for power and devastated the lives of many he had been called to serve. There's nothing morally clear about your outer projection--no such thin as national or geographical righteousness--only every human being's struggle to balance the good and evil within them, a hopeless struggle without the Cross. Yesterday's Thought • Sports&Culture: Keith Olbermann in 
If David McCullough's next biography informs me that one of the few remaining unprofiled Founding Fathers had, in 1775, christened his plow oxen "Lexington" and "Concord," I wouldn't be a bit surprised. Appropriating the transcendent for our own personal use -- whether to make a buck or enhance the meaning of our lives -- is all-American. Still, there is something over-the-top about Florida State football coach Bobby Bowden's selection of his team's 2002 slogan, "Let's Roll." http://salon.com/news/sports/col/olbermann/2002/08/07/lets_roll/index2.html Thomas Friedman's Sunday column, worth a second look, from
The State Department, in a real profile in courage, said it was "deeply disappointed" by the conviction of Mr. Ibrahim, who holds a U.S. passport. "Disappointed"? I'm disappointed when the Baltimore Orioles lose. When an Egyptian president we give $2 billion a year to jails a pro-American democracy advocate, I'm "outraged" and expect America to do something about it. ... This ties in with a larger concern that human rights activists share toward America today — a concern that post-9/11 America is not interested anymore in law and order, just order, and it's not interested in peace and quiet, but just quiet. ... How about before we go trying to liberate a whole country — Iraq — we first liberate just one man, one good man, who is now sitting in an Egyptian jail for pursuing the very democratic ideals that we profess to stand for. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/04/opinion/04FRIE.html Wednesday, August 07, 2002
• Link of the day: www.allfreeessays.com The joke's on you if you try to cheat (you slime) and download these papers to turn in as your own--they're not that good! • Number of the day: 14,000 ATM's in the national network of Bank of America--2,000 of which, in California, will feature on-screen ads on a trial basis. http://www.morningnewsbeat.com/#MNB1 • Quote of the day: "People have been asking me how this happened, and I have to tell them, 'I don't know.'" Jefferson County (Ky) deputy coroner Richard Siclari, after a local family found the wrong body lying in the casket at the funeral of their son, who turned out to be alive in a nearby hospital. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/... A letter-writer to MediaNews happens to make a useful addition to my thoughts yesterday on personal media, and this young newspaperman is all for the letter-writer's plan to let the rookies rule the roost! ...2002_08_04_nbiermafile_archive.html#79954729  That's one small step for woman: Jennifer Granholm wins her primary on her way to being Michigan's first woman governor. Wouldn't that be a welcome sight. Although we should probably guard against making too much of her being a woman and too little of her as a politician; that's a reverse form of sexism. Coverage in the Detroit News and Free Press.Editor Ann Marie Lipinski says her vision for the Chicago Tribune is to be "the leading citizen of this great metropolis." This morning my assignment was to prepare a sidebar highlighting the bizarre developments in the Angelina Jolie-Billy Bob Thornton breakup. Sigh. Speaking of leading citizen, the Trib's Jim Kirk writes of his employer: The Chicago Tribune's $35 million purchase of Chicago magazine again raised the specter of big media's influence on readers and advertisers by having one company own the area's top-selling newspaper, the top-rated radio station, a big TV station, a professional baseball team, a cable station and Internet sites--and now a city magazine. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/showcase/chi-0208070308aug07.story How exactly is this good for Chicago? Double sigh. After weeks of worrying someone on the sardine-ish subway will slip their hand into my bag and snatch something valuable, I emerged from the El last week with a gray pen clipped to the front pocket of my bag. Sorry! If anyone wants to claim it let me know.  Oh, no, not a return to summer shark news! Other probing questions, including the fate of Germany's chancellor and the future of San Fransisco's WW2 memorial, in today's edition of my Notebook Reader:
...2002_08_04_nbiermafile_archive.html#79945369 Yesterday's Reader • Thought of the Day: Would we be better off with lower voter turnout? The conventional wisdom is that the public is increasingly cynical, detached, disengaged, uninformed, overentertained, and downright disrespectfully neglectful of its privilege to vote. All of which is true, as I've ranted before. But what is the alternative? The utopian vision is that the masses would embrace enlightenment, crave information about politicians and policies, and make wise choices with high standards that would force our leaders to be more principled, clear, intellectual, and substantive. The more realistic vision is this: the public would benefit little from consuming more news (case made beautifully in this article), which, in TV's case, oversimplifies, cheesifies, and ignores issues in favor of images, and which, in newspapers' case, are mostly about political strategy and not public policy. So if driftwood apathetic moderates did glance over at the news more often and/or vote, it would mean an influx of people who are ill-informed to make good decisions, fueling the current problem of making politics a glamor-and-sound-bite contest. And we saw in 2000 the problem of candidates paying attention to the middle--a watered-down contest that was so stale it turned everybody off. If fewer people voted, only the die-hards would be left and candidates would feel free to be more ideological and worry more about coming up with useful ideas than selling platitudes as though at a shopping mall. Besides, if more people voted, it would only make politicians feel more powerful, and their Macy-balloon-sized egos are big enough already, thank you. This is all a little tongue-in-cheek, I hope you realize, prompted by reading this sentence in the Detroit News this morning about yesterday's Michigan primary: "Turnout was sluggish in some locations, despite -- or because of -- sunny and cool conditions through Metro Detroit." If the democratic future of our country depends on the weather, we are worse off than I feared. What do you think? Yesterday's Thought I meant to post this, too. Slate's Dahlia Lithwick is one of the few to actually ask what exactly Zacarias Moussaoui is being tried for: Scrutinizing the indictment, three possibilities emerge: the government is not presenting crucial evidence tying Mr. Moussaoui to the Sept. 11 attacks; the government has no evidence tying Mr. Moussaoui to the Sept. 11 attacks; or federal conspiracy law is so infinitely elastic that Mr. Moussaoui could receive the death penalty for simply buying knives, learning to fly and training in Qaeda camps. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/02/opinion/02LITH.html (I was, though, bugged by the grammatical error is the first sentence, which suggests that the possibilities themselves have done the scrutinizing. Grrr.) I meant to post this last week: who has lived as much 20th Century American cultural history as Irv Kupcinet, the Chicago Sun-Times columnist who turned 90 last week? He's been a newspaper columnist, an actor, and a football player, ref, and announcer, just to begin with: http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/31kupstory.html • Thoughts&Culture File: Benjamin Barber, author of Jihad vs McWorld Capitalism is not too strong; democracy is too weak. We have not grown too hubristic as producers and consumers; we have grown too timid as citizens, acquiescing to deregulation and privatization (airlines, accounting firms, banks, media conglomerates, you name it) and a growing tyranny of money over politics. ... Market fundamentalism, which defined the era of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, encourages a myth of omnipotent markets. But this is as foolish and wrong-headed as the myth of omnipotent states, which reigned from the New Deal to the Great Society. It tricks people into believing their own common power represents some bureaucrat's hegemony over them, and that buying power is the same as voting power. But consumers are not citizens, and markets cannot exercise democratic sovereignty. The ascendant market ideology claims to free us, but it actually robs us of the civic freedom by which we control the social consequences of our private choices. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/29/opinion/29BARB.html R.C. Longworth, Chicago Tribune Through small steps, like the cheese verdict, and big ones, like the creation of a single currency, Europe today is less than a United States of Europe but much more than a loose group of nations doing business with each other. The European Union is unique in history, and its success has emerged only gradually through a system so complex that it is barely understood by many Europeans and almost not at all by Americans. This success and this American incomprehension are causing real trans-Atlantic problems. The EU has emerged at age 45 as a partner and rival to the United States, potent in some areas such as trade and incomplete in other areas such as defense. The way it operates, through tortuous negotiations and compromise, baffles and frustrates the hard-driving unilateralists of Washington, who are increasingly intolerant of the slow-motion decision-making of their closest allies. European officials say they want to keep Washington happy. But they aren't willing to abandon a union and a process that has turned their continent from a war-flattened wasteland to a landscape of peace and prosperity unprecedented in European history, just to please the Americans. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/showcase/chi-0207310289jul31.story Tuesday, August 06, 2002
Analysis of analysis: All things Madden in today's Salon. This covers it well. But in the discussion about whether people are tuning into Monday Night Football for Madden or for the game, what about the fact that a huge chunk of MNF watchers are at sports bars, where the sound may be off or drowned out? (These folks aren't counted by Nielsen, by the way, last I checked, which is never mentioned in stories about MNF's ratings.) It seems that should be part of the Madden and MNF speculation. http://www.salon.com/news/sports/col/kaufman/2002/08/06/madden/index.html A footnote from Quentin Schultze on personal media and public responsibility: I think the personal voice is important for "good" journalism, which stands above plain reporting (or telegraphic reporting) in my book. But the personal needs to be tied to the public, to the common, shared interest (and shared good).  I've been thinking about this in relation to the future of newspapers, which are captive to old-fashioned standards of "objectivity," which so neutralize and paralyze the text that they become almost unreadably boring (great read on this here). The opposite problem is columnists (and increasingly reporters) raving wildly off the top of their head, merely puffing up their own egos and peering for their own reflection in the mediated space. I was trying to toe the middle ground with my blogging piece in the Tribune and make it personal but also responsible and useful. This balance must be the future of newspapers. As fantastic LA Times columnist Steve Lopez says in a must-read
Howard Kurtz profile today: A column ought to have blood pumping through it... [Too many people today] don't feel a human connection to this newspaper. That's exactly it. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A47872-2002Aug5.html  This image thing is fun, and will inevitably lead to the gratuitous posting of various pictures hereafter. You've been warned. Here's a photo of Hawaii's Kalauea volcano spewing lava last Friday. It's been going for 19 years. I feel bad about this. Should I? I was glad to get a mailing the other day from the Veterans of Foreign Wars, since they sometimes send you return address labels in the unsuccessful (in my case) attempt to collect a donation. Alas, I was greatly disappointed to instead get a calendar. I need those labels!  <--This is just a completely random, irrelevant attempt to post this picture of Boston from yesterday's Boston Globe, just to see how images work in weblogs...I grit my teeth and include a simplistic romantic riff about the American frontier from the boilerplate-predictable Wall Street Journal in my Notebook Reader today, trying to prove I'm not all left-wing-conspiracy: ...2002_08_04_nbiermafile_archive.html#79899774 Yesterday's Reader My friend Nathan checks back in from Canada, this time from the Hudson Bay, where he's again rubbed sensitive local government the wrong way--...2002_08_04_nbiermafile_archive.html#79852287--and passes along this story from the Globe and Mail, which has a little bit of everything--drama, power, pastries--all in one article. Thought of the day: the constant push-pull tension of relationships. I should be able to dig this up, but one of the theories I studied last spring in a communications class was the push-pull phenomenon of relationships: in a relationship with another person, we are in constant tension between the need to get closer and the need to pull away. The two are always butting heads, and which one emerges, and when, explains most interpersonal conflict and most solutions to it. This is usually said of romance, but I think it holds for friendships. We are constantly calculating, or just constantly in emotional flux, weighing or feeling our need to get closer to someone else, to open ourselves up more to them and invest more in them, versus our need to pull back, maintain our space, stay in our safety zone. It's not just psychobabble; it's simple math. It's science. It's abstract art. For me the question is poignant when it comes to my new marriage. Now is the time to mark my territory, right? To be heard, to announce where I stand, for now we are establishing lifelong patterns of communication and problem-solving. But at the same time I need to get closer to my wife, to pour myself out for her, to take risks by being more vulnerable to her. So which do I do--stand my ground or be vulnerable? When do I do which? This is why relationships are so complicated in a broken world--we all are struggling with this tension, this fluctuation, and we all resolve it in different ways at different times. Pull back, and we can harm ourselves by thinking ourselves righteous and ignoring (or solely shouldering) our own brokenness. Get closer, and another person can hurt you, since they are broken, too. It is this tenuous equilbrium that defines practically all emotional human interaction. There actually is a town called Knockemstiff, Ohio, says Tim Jones in today's Trib: Knockemstiff is one of the peculiar historical pleasures that is ignored as Ohio prepares to celebrate its 200th anniversary next year. The rough-and-tumble history of the town is sketchy and largely anecdotal, but unlike oddly named places such as Tightwad, Mo., Nimrod, Minn., and Monkey's Eyebrow, Ky., Knockemstiff's history, until recently, has been true to the town's name. Especially at the Bull Pen Bar, where life resembled the bar scene in "Star Wars."http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/showcase/chi-0208060175aug06.story Election Day handicapping from the Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A49504-2002Aug6.html Daley blasts Trib: Boy, who do you root for in this one--a consistently arrogant city government or the overbearing Tribune Co.? What a clash of disagreeable titans. The city is blocking the Trib's longed-for expansion of Wrigley Field, seemingly for stubborn, nose-thumbing reasons--Daley wants to slap back at the other major power in town. It's your job to criticize me; it's your job to bring negative news, not good news ... You want people to fight with each other, you want to bring out the worst of society. Hizzoner sure picks his spots--he unburdened himself of this rant "at a news conference unveiling a program for at-risk youth." http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/showcase/chi-0208040388aug04.story How'd we get here? Says the smirking Sun-Times: A vindictive mayor grappling with a budget crunch on the eve of re-election. A corporate "culture of arrogance." An astounding string of public relations blunders by a company that's supposed to be in the communications business. But, the S-T says, it's not all a battle of pride: Throughout the weekend, sports talk shows were filled with speculation that Mayor Daley had finally gotten even with the Chicago Tribune for the newspaper's crusade against the renovation of Soldier Field. But that explanation--as plausible as it seems for a mayor who loves to get even--conveniently ignores the fact that Daley has a history of siding with local residents on development issues. http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-wrig06.html Ah, politics in Chicago. A sport only die-hard fans can bear to watch. Monday, August 05, 2002
Link of the day: www.savemartha.com Not everybody is jumping to conclusions on the Martha Stewart scandal. See this write-up in Newsweek: http://www.msnbc.com/news/788685.asp Number of the day: 70: Number of movie theater screens in the United States equipped to show digital movies, out of a total of 36,700. http://www.usatoday.com/life/movies/2002-08-04-digital_x.htm Quote of the day: "People don't realize there's a person behind the tattoos." Melissa Noble, tattoo-covered gym regular in Denver http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/... Here's today's edition of my Notebook Reader, a daily digest of noteworthy public discourse: ...2002_08_04_nbiermafile_archive.html#79858724 Previous Reader Two more of my Trib pieces, actually one story and one Q&A, in the paper's city-cheerleading vein: http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/showcase/chi-0208040399aug04.story http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/showcase/chi-0208040393aug04.story - archive of my Trib stuff I love John Madden, but the big man can come up short on hard-hitting analysis. In one of his first columns for ESPN.com, Madden uncorks the word "great" 6 times, the phrase "look forward to" 3 times, and throws in a pair of "good"'s and a couple "big"'s. The insight hardly matches the energy. Still, I'll be watching the first Monday Night Football tonight in its most promising rebirth since the Cosell era. Leftover (but important) link from Friday: partisan independents. The Wash. Post says the majority of independents sway left or right. That seems to make sense; I know that I pride myself on being an independent, but will vote Democrat 99% of the time. I guess what I really value is independence from the institution of the Democratic Party, with all its flaws, failings, and hatred of people and ideas I love on the right. But I'll still vote for candidates I more often agree with. What do you think, is that a common phenomenon among independents? http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35685-2002Aug2.html Thought of the day: what "difference" does it make? A visit to the breathtaking Shedd Aquarium on Saturday was dulled only by a smug lecture by a pedantic oceanarium trainer on how you, too, can make a difference--by not littering plastic bags in the water, where dolphins chomp down on them thinking they're squid, by not wasting paper napkins, and so on. Point taken, and it's truly sad how marine life is gravely threatened by people's stupidity. But I started wondering about the constant plea to make a difference. (After all, the sermon went, imagine if everybody here littered one bag...so you see, you too can make a difference.) The more I thought about it the phrase seemed odd. I mean, there are other options for expressions of idealism: make the world a better place, save the dolphins, and so on--but they don't come up as often as make a difference. And I couldn't help but think that the phrasing is a little fatalistic, a little stab at immortality--make a difference so you won't feel futile on your deathbed, so you can know that your brief life made some sort of imprint on the globe. And then you have to wonder about the motivation implied here--clean up not just because it's the right thing to do or because it's good for the ecosystem, but because it's your chance to matter, to not fade into oblivion. And part of me wonders, wouldn't I rather have people valuing environmental health for animals' sake than for their own? Friday, August 02, 2002
You could say this rotisserie geek got a life: ESPN The Magazine reports that Ernie DiFranchi, a Port Authority technology officer, left his co-workers at breakfast on the morning of September 11 to go up to his office on the 71st floor of the World Trade Center's north tower, arriving early in order to make a fantasy baseball transaction before his league's 9 a.m. deadline. As soon as the first plane hit, DiFranchi escaped down the stairs, but he believes his two friends died in the elevators going up--where he would have been had he not been playing fantasy baseball. In a somewhat morbid gesture, a Phillies beat reporter heard about the story and arranged for a meeting between DiFranchi and Chicago White Sox right fielder Magglio Ordonez, the player DiFranchi waived in his 9-11 move. DiFranchi gave Ordonez his Port Authority survivor's pin, and Ordonez said DiFranchi "owed him one." That's just weird on several levels. We still have yet to hear an example of one columnist's suggested urban legend that a World Trade Center worker is awakened at a girlfriend's house by a desperate post-attack cell phone call from his wife on the morning of the 11th, and indicts himself by lying that he is at work. It should be just a matter of time before these stories start to emerge. One of the finest political authors and analysts is Kevin Phillips, most recently the author of Wealth and Democracy: Political History of the American Rich. He goes back and forth with The Atlantic's James Fallows in an e-mail exchange: The Democrats have for some years now had a large slice of the richest Americans who make their money from high tech, the media, entertainment, and, increasingly, finance. Could they lose some of the Jewish portion of this "high end" support to the Republicans because of Bush's pro-Israel position? Yes, but if something resembling World War Three starts in the Middle East in 2002 or 2003, the backlash against Bush's regional policies could be powerful. The Bible Belt may be willing to go in Armageddon's way, but I wouldn't be so sure about Colorado, Illinois, or New Jersey. http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/fallows/jf2002-07-03/phillips1.htm Also see: Phillips on being FDR for a day: http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/fallows/jf2002-07-03/phillips3.htm And, from The New Republic, an emerging Democratic majority? http://www.thenewrepublic.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020805&s=judis080502 I watched one episode of the highly acclaimed Six Feet Under, and that was enough. It's well-written but heavy and dark (both in tone and in actual lighting). I thought it was just me but Slate's Emily Nussbaum articulately says she is not impressed: http://www.slate.msn.com/?id=2068478 I knew the Tribune's TV critic, Steve Johnson, was one of the show's supporters, so I asked him what he thought of Nussbaum's review: Debunking a crowd favorite is certainly a fun thing to do when you can, in good conscience, do it. She convinces me that she believes what she's writing, which is, amazingly, often not the case with attempted debunks. And while I certainly recognize the show in her characterization of it, I disagree with most of her key opinions, especially about Brenda. As for the melodramatic piling-on, I've come to believe that's just something you have to accept if you are to live with a TV series. When you like a show, you make peace with the absurdity; when you don't, it is, of course, absurd. Every so often, when hearing Christian conservatives (I'm a Christian liberal, FYI) bloviate about America's abandonment of its (supposedly) Christian roots, I wonder if they take heart that we're not Europe, whose church attendance is one fourth of ours. So I e-mailed former presidential candidate Gary Bauer to find out. "Yes I do take comfort in the fact that religiosity is still relatively high in the U.S. compared to Europe. Sincerely, Gary Bauer." Sure enough. God Bless America. http://www.amvalues.org/ Philly corpses get pensions...Japan challenges counterfeiters...U.S. to drill in Siberia ...and more from today's installment of my Notebook Reader: ...2002_07_28_nbiermafile_archive.html#79739856 My on-the-scene report from last month's Blue Man Group auditions was trimmed from the Tribune, so I'm posting it here: http://chicago.freeservers.com/features/blueman.html My Blogathon report runs this morning in the Chicago Tribune. (you can log in with my member name and password of "nbiermaread") permanent link: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/chi-0208020005aug02.story A few footnotes : - I had some creative differences with my editors over the tone of the piece which seem to strike at the heart of blogging itself. I tried to write with a more reportorial than personal tone because of 1) my disgust with the endless blogger blather out there about pointless personal details, 2) my goal to show that blogs could be informative, even discursive, rather than just a personal blowhole, and 3) the fact that my life that Saturday wasn't particularly fascinating, but (at least I thought) my subjects--the state of blogs and the future of words--were. But I deferred to their view that readers would wonder how someone reacts to staying awake, let alone typing, for so long. In so doing, I may have tilted it to far to the personal side. - I asked if the text of the article could be represented differently in the paper somehow--the hyperlinks could be underlined and the quotes italicized (as they were in the blog). But it turns out such font-fiddling wouldn't be compatible with our CCI editing system. I took it as a revealing and awkward confrontation of new media and old. (By the way, I don't mean to be knocking my editors; they gave me wise help to steer the piece and I trust their judgment.) - I'd feel awful if I didn't correct one copy editing error that made UC-Berkeley professor Paul Grabowiczsay that his course is a sign that the academy has lost its mind, rather than that his course has irrationally been taken as a sign that the academy has lost its mind. It was right in the weblog and got screwed up in the editing phase (see, blogs can be more reliable than print, not just the other way around!) As the saying goes, the Tribune regrets the error. - Outstanding Trib cultural critic Julia Keller did a fine piece this week on the digitalization of the Gutenberg Bible, which is in keeping with my ponderings of the future of words in a digital age http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/lifestyle/... Thought of the day: the idyllic notion of home as haven vs. the need to get out and change the world: Even though my wife and I life in an apartment in the heart of the city, blocks away from housing projects, I think we feel our home is a safe haven from the noise, grit, and anonymity of city life. It's a far cry from the artificial suburban existence of our Michigan hometown, where people groom their huge lawns and lock their double- or triple-stall-garage doors and rejoice in their safe, saccharine lives. Since the suburbanization of the 50s (and perhaps industrialization around the turn of the century), it has been consummately American to think of the home as a holy sanctuary from outside life. As far as I know, this is a recent and odd cultural value. Before, home life blended into public life casually, intimately, and, yes, odorously. Perhaps never before the American 20th Century did people value private life and fear public life, rather than the other way around. This suburban-bred impulse of my wife and I to lock our doors to the outside is in one sense a survival function and in another a flaw. We have been called to serve the city, as citizens, as workers, as Christians. If everybody stayed inside and feared the outside, the world would only get worse. The home-as-haven myth ignores 1) the evil and sorrow that can lurk inside the home 2) the pleasantness and happiness that can lie outside it and 3) our calling to make the world a better place. The baby daughter of one of my favorite writers, James Lileks, sums it up profoundly, as he asks her where home is: She pondered, and said: outside. She's right, of course. Our house is outside. It just seems like a strange way of thinking of it, because we think of houses as defining interior space. But she's right: all the houses in the world are outside. http://www.lileks.com/bleats/archive/02/0702/070302.html#080102 Thursday, August 01, 2002
Quote of the day: I never envisioned the purpose of life as taking a piece of metal and pushing it toward a hole. People ought to be pushing children out of poverty. Ralph Nader, telling Time magazine why he won't retire and play golf. Great interview, by the way: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101020805-332031,00.html Number of the day: 6: price, in dollars, to which a barrel of oil could fall (from around $20) if the U.S. invades Iraq and forces OPEC's hand. Of course, it could go up to $60, too, says Thomas Friedman: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/31/opinion/31FRIE.html (log in with member name and password of "nbiermaread") Peace in Africa? ... Princess Di memorial designer chosen ... Dishwashing detergent, ducks and oil spills --and more in today's installment of my Notebook Reader: ...2002_07_28_nbiermafile_archive.html#79697034 Yesterday's Reader Urban planning think tank to Louisville: Cooperate or become the next Atlanta: The Brookings Institution's verdict is in on the need for "regionalism" in Kentucky's largest metropolis: http://www.courier-journal.com/localnews/2002/08/01/ke080102s251581.htm Tourism is down at the Taj Mahal, says the BBC: The Taj Mahal, India's world-famous monument to love, has for years been the country's biggest tourist attraction. But in the northern city of Agra, home to the 17th century palace, tourists are now almost nowhere to be seen. ... Daily admissions of foreign tourists are usually low in July, averaging about 400-500 on week days. This year, however, that figure has fallen to 150 - less than a third of the normal level - according to a senior security official. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/2164632.stm Welcome to August, or A Different Kind of Priest Scandal In Rome: An August 1 history special... The Roman emperor Augustus may have had the messy assassination of his adopted father, Julius Caesar, and the pesky emergence of Jesus of Nazareth on his mind, but it didn't keep him from overlooking a quirk in the calendar. It seems the priests running the official Roman calendar missed the memo saying leap year is every four years, not every three, as they had been doing for decades. So Augustus fixed it by doing nothing--declaring no leap year for 12 years to get the calendar back in sync with Mother Nature's body clock. This act of calendar-calibrating was enough to get a month named after him, as the consuls of the day rechristened the month of Sextilis, and even gave him an extension, stretching the month from 30 days to 31. http://www.greenheart.com/billh/julian.html Typos and Polygamy: Freudian typo in yesterday's Maureen Dowd column? In my copy of the NY Times, printed in Chicago, a sentence about Hillary Clinton ran as such: She made a boffo keynote speech Monday at the Democratic Leadership Council meeting in New York, bashing the president's economic record compared with her husbands. The missing apostrophe in the last word seems to change it from a possessive to a plural, with adulterous consequences (though perhaps not incongruous with the a-monogamic legacy of the administration). I noticed the error was corrected online. The Internet is getting less and less free, says the NY Times, and surfers are seemingly softening their resistance to paying for content. Seems to validate the prophecies of TheEndOfFree.com. My fears about this are similar to my fears of pay-per-view TV--it's a can of worms which, once opened, will someday lead to having to pay for everything from "SportsCenter" to stock quotes to nickel-per-message e-mail. But pragmatically, the-end-of-free may be a natural reaction to the dramatic failure of banner ads (and those insidious pop-up ads). http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/01/technology/01ONLI.html (log in with member name and password of "nbiermaread") Wednesday, July 31, 2002
Chicago architecture watch: The Trump Tower is back on track, says Blair Kamin: http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/lifestyle/chi-0207310004... (log in with member name and password of "nbiermaread") Today's edition of my Notebook Reader, a daily digest of noteworthy public discourse, is off the presses. ...2002_07_28_nbiermafile_archive.html#79652969 Number of the day: 400: Americans who die each year from heat-related illnesses, more than double the annual fatalities from tornadoes, earthquakes, and floods combined, says Eric Klinenberg. Word of the Day, from M-W: abecedarian \ay-bee-see-DAIR-ee-un\ (adjective) *1 a : of or relating to the alphabet b : alphabetically arranged; 2 : rudimentary Example sentence: The children recited an abecedarian chant, beginning with "A is for apple" and ending with "Z is for zebra." The history of "abecedarian" is as simple as ABC -- literally. The term's Late Latin ancestor, "abecedarius" (which meant "of the alphabet"), was created as a combination of the letters A, B, C, and D, plus the suffix "-arius"; you can hear the echo of that origin in the pronunciation of the English term (think "ABC-darian"). In its oldest documented English uses in the early 1600s, "abecedarian" was a noun meaning "one learning the rudiments of something"; it specifically referred to someone who was learning the alphabet.The adjective began appearing in English texts around 1665. So there's an ombusdman for ombudsmen. Who knew? Much-needed, given below: http://www.ombudsgod.blogspot.com/ ANOTHER BLOW IS STRUCK AGAINST MEDIA INDEPENDENCE: The Chicago Tribune has just bought Chicago Magazine, continuing its ravenous gobbling of local (and national) media. Publisher Scott Smith cheerfully announces in a memo: "This acquisition allows Chicago Tribune to continue expanding the ways in which it serves local readers and advertisers in Chicago, just as it does through several other targeted publications it owns and operates." Underscore the word "advertisers" in the above. The winners in this deal are the Trib's ad sales people, who can now sell meatier ad packages that include space in the Trib and Chicago mag (and WGN TV and radio and...) The readers are losers, since they will get less reporting and writing done by fewer people spread over more media synergistic space, as the Trib and Chicago mag start to share resources. Meanwhile, what of Steve Rhodes' media column? How can he possibly claim to speak as an independent watchdog of local media? A friend who just came to the Trib from Chicago mag says one of Steve's worries will be having his e-mail address end in "@tribune.com" and then ask for tips. As Romenesko asks, is this the end of profiles of Trib people? Not to bite the hand that feeds me, but how can the Trib come across as so self-righteous about its ethical hairsplitting on the question of the Ground Zero photographer while smugly plowing ahead with this disservice to its readers, this watering down of their media diet? (And don't get me started one of the all-time major breaches of conflict of interest, the Trib's ownership of the Chicago Cubs...) Cleaning out my notes on blogging, here's a Time Inc. magazine editor I got to know in New York whose judgement I respect: I think the blogs-vs-old media story is overblown, largely because when the media reports on itself, the hall-of-mirrors effect magnifies everything. That said, many blogs are a refreshing alternative to the stale and predictable punditocracy, but ... offer no real challenge to the meat-and-potatoes business of news gathering. Letters to Sports Illustrated about its recent NASCAR cover: - Thank you for your article on the booming interest in NASCAR (NASCAR Nation, July 1). After I started following NASCAR in 1996, I found I did not miss talk of collective bargaining agreements, lockouts and strikes, inflated egos, trade demands, salary caps, athlete arrests and drug use. NASCAR is about real people. The drivers are great role models, and their accessibility to the fans is unmatched in any sport. Can you imagine being able to listen to Shaq's thoughts during a game the way fans can tune into their favorite drivers, via radio scanners, during a race? DEE DEE MULLENIX Las Vegas - NASCAR may yet replace baseball as America's national pastime, but I wonder if this is necessarily a good thing. In your picture of two bikini-topped fans, I can make out at least five Confederate flags in the background. Somehow I doubt that those flags are being flown only to commemorate the tradition of gentility and charm that the South is known for. How many drivers in NASCAR are nonwhite? NASCAR races are fun to watch, and the drivers are certainly very skilled, but until the sport acknowledges its lack of diversity, I don't think NASCAR deserves all the fawning adulation that it gets. MARK JEANFREAU, New Orleans Tuesday, July 30, 2002
My latest story for the Tribune: http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/lifestyle/chi-0207300156jul30.story?coll=chi%2Dleisuretempo%2Dhed (log in with member name and password of "nbiermaread") Thought of the day: More Blogathonning, please! 48 hours after I rose from my post-Blogathon hibernation, I feel, strangely, fine. I'm awake and chipperly chatting with people at work, and on as normal a sleep schedule as I ever am. I napped for the last two hours of the event, then slept three and a half hours, and got 8-9 hours each of the last two nights. Not as bad as I thought. I just turned in my article for the Tribune; it will be running Friday. I got 190 unique visitors on Blogathon day, I appreciate the interest. Sunday, July 28, 2002
That's it. I made it 24 hours straight. Tribune Charities is $100 richer, which would be even more comforting if I were more than half-conscious...good night (or morning), and I won't be blogging again for a few days, if not a few weeks... Here is an index of highlights (again, using the term generously) from my blog during Blogathon:
The end is in sight. The light at the end of the tunnel is the rising sun. I really have enjoyed this, although my body is now violently protesting the lack of sleep; I haven't felt this ill in a while...thank goodness the following is pre-written: I thought I should end by doing a little more explaining about what this blog is about; particularly what you might see when you come back here (don't worry, I'll mostly shelve the metaphysical discussions about the ontological nature of words).
As I said in my Blogathon Guide, I keep my blog 1) as a personal resource for column ideas and links, 2) for writing practice, to keep my writing gears greased, and 3) to try to contribute a little substance to the high-waste world of the blogosphere. My topics include news, politics, media, culture, history, religion, the arts, movies, sports, and anything else that catches my fancy.
I also post e-mail feedback to my stories in the Tribune and elsewhere. Recently I've been posting anecdotes and other quotes from sources I picked up from the cutting room floor when my stories go to print. I find this a fascinating extension of the journalist's job; every other forum I enter, the more accountable and helpful I am to readers, and that can only be good for everyone.
This does raise some interesting questions. Should I be bashing the Tribune Company in my weblog, since they write my paychecks? (Andrew Sullivan was cut loose from the NY Times in part because of his Times-flogging in his blog.) Could someone sue me for defamation of character based on something I post in my blog ?(which laughably assumes I have any wealth worth suing for...) In the meantime, it remains a great outlet for writing and communicating. One last angle to explore here on the question of the future of words, and that's the hyperlink. Basically, a hyperlink is a word like this that links to something else, in this case home page. The hyperlink, developed two or three decades ago, changes the fiber of the word more than anything else, and largely for the better. For centuries words were printed on a page, dried and dead until the paper was destroyed. With hyperlinks, the basis of blogging, words take on a new dynamism. They organically connect to other ideas, other words, or images or sounds. The interconnectedness is unprecedented. The downside is that blogs can link without context, fraying the fabric of the text until it is so broken down that all hope of context and coherence is lost. Literacy Online calls hyperlinks "the computer's capacity to create such fluid textual structures and present them interactively to the reader," and continues:
And although I will bemoan the e-book's eventual corrosion of bound books, I will grant the authors this:
And that is why the fluid format of the Web, and weblogs in particular, contain a nugget of promise. My friend Nathan once mentioned that one of the casualties of e-mail is the joy of looking through old letters a generation later. E-mails you wrote in college are gone when you graduate, vanishing under a delete function. Whereas before you would pass on letters by grandma or mom to the kids. The thought made me go through my e-mail folders and print some correspondence that stood out, and file it in my college scrapbook. Hunger is clawing at my insides. I just looked out the window and did a double take as I saw the sky brightening with the hint of Chicago's sunrise. I need a nap, see you at six. Relevant clipping from Time magazine a week or two ago by Harold Bloom, author and literary critic: Regard for poetry has slipped a great deal. That is because at its best, with very rare exceptions, even simple and very direct poetry is now quite difficult for most readers. But what is not difficult for most readers? In our society, in which the screen dominates and everything is visual and the flood of information is incessant, teaching people how to read is a major enterprise. From The Electronic Word How can one argue that rhetoric, an education built on the word, has regained its centrality when the word itself shows every symptom of radical decline? When the test scores that measure popular literacy worsen each year? When the logos, the long-lasting Western centrality of the word, seems to evaporate before our eyes, and the characteristic Western conception of self and society with it? Ouch. I actually would make more of a case that the Internet has revived writing in a TV age, but again, I can't argue with the literacy tests and the tripe I've seen on the Web today. Back to reverence and words--when there are fewer words we value them more. In Augustine's day, books were so scarce and costly that they came with no spaces between words and paragraphs; owning a book was like owning a Mercedes. Today I can walk into any number of Bargain Books outlets and scoop up any number of nonsensical titles for $3.98. I can buy the New York Times for a buck. With spaces between the words. But when words hit the Web, and appear and disappear like lightning, they have almost zero value, they hardly exist at all. We have gone from reverence to hardly noticing. In Quentin Schultze's aforementioned upcoming book, he mentions how Vaschlav Havel came to value reading and writing while a political prisoner in Europe. He was allowed only four pages of written correspondence each week, with the threat of censorship and no promise that they would ever be delivered. Havel writes that he came to treasure each word on each page; he realized what a gift communication was. The danger of blogging is that the easy ability to do it endlessly means we stop caring about words themselves; and judging from many blogs I've seen today, that is exactly what has happened.
This is how I put it to a friend earlier this week in an e-mail: "Words in cyberspace are ephemeral, fleeting, and nonexistent at the push of a button, whereas they were held, pre-Gutenberg, in reverence, and ever since, words on paper have been enduring, anchored on the page, held in the hand." This notion of the divinity of the word is intriguing to me. Getting back to the staggering volume of words in the age of the blog, it certainly is exponentially more difficult to think of words as sacred or even slightly special when they are so cheap and so plentiful. I'm not saying we should return to the age of deifying words and reserving them for the elite, but cherishing words is an idea I would hope is retained in this century. I suppose some would want to read all sorts of spiritual things into the fact that the founder of Blogathon is an athiest, who posts athiest news headlines at her blog (it turns out she's very sweet to talk to), and although I'm a firm believer in God (it seems to me it takes incredible faith to be an athiest), I'm going to call off those dogs. Here it is the dead of night and I'm talking about the spiritual side of blogging... back to longtime blogger and word treasurer James Lileks to steer us back on course, from an e-mail reply to my question about the McDonald-ization of writing a couple years ago.
This is the golden age of text. More words fly over the net in the course of a day than were published in the entire 19th century. (Rough guess, unscientific.) The level of disquisition isn't great, but for one glorious moment in human history millions of people are banging out millions of words every day and millions of people are reading them. Most of those words, of course, seem to be an effort to prove correct the million-monkeys-typing-Shakespeare-by-accident theory, but if I can judge from the scrawls on the back of my substantial old postcard collection, people have been committing drivel for a long, long time. Chat rooms are nothing but bilge pumps. E-mail is as good as the sender. Web pages permit the publication & dissemination of ideas and projects that would have languished unread just 15 years ago. On balance: it's good. Of course, I ate at McDonald's today, so that should tell you something. From On Literacy, an engaging sociological history of literacy, even if it doesn't pierce right to my question of the ontological nature and technological elasticity of words (what is this, 3 in the morning?) Philosophers of the ancient world and the early Church evolved the celebrated Logos doctrine, best known from the opening verses of the gospel according to St. John: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." Many volumes have been written to explicate the word Logos, but the translation of the Authorized Version is entirely apt. In the Logos doctrine, God is not merely thought to be like language in its most sublime sense, he is equated with it.
Words were worshiped, then, throughout history, for their indirectly or directly divine nature. Perhaps this is what contributed to the sad legacy of written words being the privilege of the elite--the church, the government, the few educated--for centuries. The average person throughout human history, until the 20th, simply did not encounter many words on a daily basis.
This is why my magazine editor in New York I talked to last summer said the bemoaning of the state of reading in an MTV age is off the mark--only very recently in history has mass literacy been the norm; before that people used speech, song and images to communicate. So do people today. So what's the problem? I knew I'd be thinking about this topic of the future of words, so I went to the library this week. I used to love libraries as a kid--the sweaty smell of books idling on endless shelves, the hushed tones that made it feel like a church, the promise of new ideas bouncing off the shelves at you. Being back in a library -- and the massive Washington Library in the Loop, no less -- was an anchoring experience for this word hound. All the shelves, all the words, all the wisdom and history; every writer should spend time in such surroundings to be humbled by them. Here's what I found for the topic of the day: The Psychology of Literacy by Silvia Scribner and Michael Cole, On Literacy by Robert Pattison, Literacy Online by Myron Tuman, Writing Space by Jay David Bolter, and The Electronic Word by Richard Latham. Tidbits of their wisdom, yanked from the page to the screen, to come. As you read, keep in mind the current issue of the transition in medium and what it means for the word (holy cow, I just sounded like a professor or something).
First, from the Psychology of Literacy:
Socrates pointed out that ... letters might weaken memories and lead to forgetfulness, as learners came to rely on external aids for reminiscence. ... Socrates feared that the discovery of the written word would have the show of wisdom (they would know the letters) without the reality (they would not necessarily grasp the true ideas).
Resonant words in a new rhetorical age. I'm staring to feel weak--I'm running on pizza, macaroni and cheese, cookies, and licorice--just writing that makes me feel a little queasy. I've got to do some writing ahead and start taking 28 minute naps. But I have so much left to write about! This words and waste question unfurls a deeper question about the fundamental nature of words in a digital age. How do words themselves, and our relationship with them, evolve with new technology? For centuries, scrawlings on paper have represented words as a steady medium. Only in the last few years have printed representations of words become a new life form--a form that instantly appears as a byte on a screen, a flash of light, and can evaporate every bit as instantly with the stroke of a key. (Remember the old typewriters, with the arms that would leap up to slather a letter onto a page? WordPerfect makes it look like a quill and ink.) The question is, what does that do to words and how we see them and interact with them? This article from the Tribune late last year is a good, but very limited start:
As I've said, the most mind-boggling thing about this whole exercise is the sheer scope of blogging. There are hundreds of thousands of blogs out there, hundreds of millions, maybe billions of words. Today alone I will write about 10,000 words in this weblog. The volume of the blogosphere is enough to alphabetically suffocate the brain (that's right, alpha-bytes). Just imagine sitting in front of Weblogs.com all day, with its up-to-the-minute listing of recently updated blogs, and reading everything that is posted. It's a recipe for insanity. That we can make any sense of all of this sea is staggering. This question of the volume of information in a digital age reminds me of an intriguing piece in the Washington Post a couple years ago on the Library of Congress and its struggle to cope with the mass of data being force-fed down its throat. In some cases preservation or mere retention of data means converting from some delicate physical storage to digital bytes. The mass seems to be too much for the maw.
I fished out the file and put it up at my file site:
I think I'm catching my second wind. I don't feel that sleepy and my fingers haven't fallen off yet; they're still tapping away at my laptop as fluidly as they were 10 hours ago. Back to words and waste, technology and wisdom: Tech expert David Gelernter on the perils of imagining the Internet will solve school's problems: The Internet, said President Clinton in February, "could make it possible for every child with access to a computer to stretch a hand across a keyboard to reach every book ever written, every painting ever painted, every symphony ever composed." Pardon me, Mr. President, but this is demented. Most American children don't know what a symphony is. If we suddenly figured out how to teach each child one movement of one symphony, that would be a miracle…It's as if the Administration were announcing that every child must have the fanciest scuba gear on the market - but these kids don't know how to swim, and fitting them out with scuba gear isn't just useless, it's irresponsible; they'll drown.
Instapundit, writing the other day about another blogger with a huge following, the fascinating James Lileks. Gives you an idea what kind of pressure readers put these big bloggers under: LILEKS, as usual, says it best: "As much as I feel guilty about light bleatage, I've always thought that the phrase "blogging will be light today" is akin to saying "the free ice cream cones will be 27 percent smaller today." It's still free ice cream."
I just got done watching Rain Man with my wife, what a powerful but unsatisfying movie (the ending seems incomplete, seemingly deliberately). I'd never seen it before. One of the all-time great acting performances from Dustin Hoffman as the autistic and alien but unthreatening Ray, and Tom Cruise stretches to portray a glimmer of change in the snotty Charlie--it's convincing (but only because we want Tom to settle down and stop whining?) The scene with the pancakes at the end is classic; the scene in the doctor's office helps re-write the definition of what human love can be. I picked a good one to help melt away the countdown to 8 a.m. You may have wondered, why do I insist on proper caps, punctuation, and the whole deal? And why have I been writing out URL's completely at the bottom of posts? (OK, you may not have wondered that at all, but I wanted to explain it.) There's no rule that says that just because it's the Internet, it has to be lower case, poor punctuation and spelling. Part of it is just the journalist and grammar nut in me, part of it is an attempt to bring some more structure to an often unstructured format. As for the URL's, I like to see what I'm linking to before I go there, and the structure of the tree of a URL is often helpful in seeing what kind of site it may be (front page? main sub-page? random article?) When words are simply highlighted throughout a paragraph, you aren't telling the reader where you're going and why. (I've succumbed to that recently today simply because writing out all the links would bog down the blog. [I just wrote "blog down the bog." Must be after midnight.]) For the most part, it's been fun though. And I'm not even done ranting about blogs and the future of words... I may have come across as a little snide about blogs below--yes, I appreciate the irony in talking about blogs in a blog, but my (and Schultze's) point about trying to add to discourse can still hold water--it's been tough trying to carry out Blogathon and spending a day at home with my wife--with AOL plodding along on my dialup, and I feel this obligation to the screen at the expense of this real person next to me. Flesh instead of bytes, that's a workable priority order for me. Saturday, July 27, 2002
The word blog itself suggests, by onomatopoeia, the verbal disgorging it represents. Doesn't it just sound like a synonym for "barf"? "Oh, no, the dog just blogged all over the new carpet!" I much prefer the more dignified (and explanatory) "weblog," but I've been saving space and honoring the genre by saying "blog" all day. Seen at a Salon blog recently: "My friend Robert just informed me that the word "blog" is the ugliest word in the English Language. So I changed all references to "blog" to weblog. Thanks Robert." Not a bad start. Quote of the day: "Furious activity is no substitute for understanding." H. H. Williams Quentin Schultzemy professor and author of the forthcoming Habits of the High-Tech Heart e-mailed a response to my query about blogging. This may come across as party-pooping, but it's a good balance to all the giddy blogo-promotion going on. One of the great ironies of the information age is that so many people feel lonely and isolated from others. Years from now anthropologists will probably conclude that our society was media-rich and communication-poor. No society ever had more means of communication, yet no members of a society ever felt so out of touch with one another. Blogging, like personal Web pages and live Web cams, is one way that individuals can speak out and feel like they matter in this impersonal world. Blogging is a public way of saying, "I'm here. I exist. Please acknowledge me!" ... The problem is that bloggers typically do not see their role as contributing to a shared public life. Instead, they tend to blog as a matter of purely personal and often self-disclosing venting of personal feelings. Too often blogging becomes a strangely public form of talking to one's self about intimate matters, whether faith or personal relationships. The best blogging is truly journalistic--aimed at contributing to the public good, not to personal catharsis. ... There is no high-tech means to instant friendship of lasting merit. ... In fact, the extent to which we spend time online rather than in person, the weaker our communities will become. We need to be sharing lengthy meals together, walking together, volunteering together, worshipping together and the like--not blogging. We need to revive traditional Christian social practices such as hospitality, friendship, neighborliness and Sabbath leisure. Only if these kinds of practices are strong can we really afford blogging. The question of wasteful blogs may seem like a so-what--if people want to burn their lives away posting to weblogs, what harm is it to anyone else? But the twist here is that while the sales pitch of blogs is their opportunity for self-expression, their function may be to create a massive, multi-segmented temple of ego worship. And if that exists by the hundreds of thousands, it's worth noticing the addition to our environment. In a broken world, we seek opportunities to project ourselves, our names, our lives, in sometimes god-like ways, and the Internet is a classic example. The post from above--"Well, here I am, I don't know what to write"--is one of the many sites where Having A Site is a priority over having something to say, in part because Having A Site means its Mine and my name is out there. That's why I try to make my blog more about issues, news, and writing than about Me. Andy Dehnart, whose Web and writing accomplishments I respect, says he likes following certain weblogs where he can encounter different personalities, different dramas and even different characters in the stories that are unfolding in real time. But to me most weblogs sound the same--they're written in the same voice and sound and feel a lot a like. I know there are exceptions. But overall it seems to be digital narcissism--falling in love with your reflection on the screen. A couple years ago I posed the issue of words and waste in the information age to James Lileks who was one of the original bloggers: The level of disquisition isn't great, but for one glorious moment in human history millions of people are banging out millions of words every day and millions of people are reading them. Most of those words, of course, seem to be an effort to prove correct the million-monkeys-typing-Shakespeare-by-accident theory, but if I can judge from the scrawls on the back of my substantial old postcard collection, people have been committing drivel for a long, long time. Part of the reason I asked whether blogs were all about quantity and verbal effluvium was my search of a few blogs this week that turned up the following insights: - MWAHAHAHAH!!! MY EEEEVIL CALCULATIONS WHICH WILL PERMIT ME TO USURP THE ISLAND OF KUDUDU!!! HAIL ME!!!! - In my continuing campaign to remind you all that life on Earth sucks, here are some articles about space. - Well here it is, my first post and I have no idea what to write. I guess i will start by reminding you all of what I am all about. I work for a computer software company in the sales department as sales administrator...basically I am the gopher to the sales managers and I sit at a desk all day. If you're ever online between 8:30am-5:30 pm M-F then you'll see me. ... [more droning bio] I just started a relationship technically a week and a half ago and I have never been so scared. I want to trust her and let her into my heart. ... [sentimental drivel] ... I just hope and pray every day that for once my intuition is right. - I feel like crying. My doom fishie is dead. I am a horrible fish mommy. But I son't know what I did. I didn't do anything differently. But he is dead. He is all floating upside down. But he twitches every so often. And I know dead things do that, but what if he isn't dead? [more unintelligible nonsense] ... Doom fishies are not supposed to die. *sniffle* - Hey Everyone! I was sitting here thinking.... Hmmmm I need ppl to talk to so I'll stay awake. I don't have many friends (mostly cause I'm a jerk in real life ... So Why not just see if I could get some kind of contact list goin for all the ppl taking part in the blog-a-thon. We used technology to get to the moon, now we're doing this. And the 9:30: Nine at night and I just went outside for the first time--that has to be seriously unhealthy at some physical or psychological level. The elevator was as stuffy as a gym bag, but once outside on the sidewalk, the air, though warm, was comfortable. I went to Starbucks with my wife for a caffeine jolt, the first time I've ever been there after sundown. Then we walked down Division between Dearborn and State, a thumping block of bars and the yuppies who make them their habitat. A couple of nutcases were poking their heads out the sunroof of a limo like the mechanical prairie dogs in the arcade game. The proud Hancock stands tall over it all, its necklace of red, white, and blue lights still pulsating through the high night sky. But coming inside to our apartment never felt so cool, or so quiet. OK, the 9:00: It seems to be a digital projection of the old adage about monekys typing Shakespeare by accident: get enough typers and eventually you'll have brilliance by mathematical probability: "two primates, two computers, and we're already rivaling shakespeare," is the slogan of the blog worldwiderant. As if to illustrate the principle that if you have enough bloggers eventually you can find anything, I found these Web pages on the mathematical probability of monkeys typing Shakespeare: Here's one: It has been suggested that an evolutionist first used the now familiar parable of monkeys typing Shakespeare. "It was, I think, Huxley, who said that six monkeys, set to strum unintelligently on typewriters for millions of millions of years, would be bound in time to write all the books in the British Museum. If we examined the last page which a particular monkey had typed, and found that it had chanced, in its blind strumming, to type a Shakespeare sonnet, we should rightly regard the occurrence as a remarkable accident, but if we looked through all the millions of pages the monkeys had turned off in untold millions of years, we might be sure of finding a Shakespeare sonnet somewhere amongst them, the product of the blind play of chance." (Jeans, Sir James, The Mysterious Universe, New York, Macmillian Co., 1930, p. 4.) More recently, the classic monkey myth was employed by Hawking. After citing the monkey illustration he comments, "very occasionally by pure chance they will type out one of Shakespeare’s sonnets." (Hawking, S.W., 1988, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes, p. 123) This is absurd. The assertion that the monkeys *will not* in fact perform this feat is as close as we can get to a scientific fact. There you have it. Here's another one. AOL just crashed--I'm actually stunned this is only the first time today. Now let me go rehash that 9:00 post... The halfway point seems as good a time as any to raise the nagging question that hovers over the blogosphere: are blogs a colossal, global, technological waste of time? All those entries from so many ordinary (or worse, not-so-ordinary) people, day after day--people discovering blogs this day of Blogathon might be asking, What's the point? The giddy promise is the infinite space of the Web -- you can journal till your techno-heart's content and never get to the bottom of the page. But is that the downfall of blogs as well--the quality is trying furiously but futilely to keep pace with the quantity? It's a losing battle. For Blogathon, bloggers enhance their output, and as I noted before, there's some good stuff going on. But as a phenomenon overall blogging may be about just taking up space. Since blogging is like talk radio, you would expect sports blogs to be a big part of the phenomenon. But the number of regularly updated and quality sports blogs is surprisingly few. More in this article. One counterexample: http://bostonmedia.blogspot.com/ Here's a fascinating article from the Trib a few months ago on the juxtaposition of NBA stars and button-down Moody Bible Institute students, brought together by basketball, from my file site: ...2002_07_21_nbiermafile_archive.html#79410611 One last (hah!) thought on the print news/weblogs tussle. I remember last fall seeing a Chicago Sun-Times front page on the arrest of John Walker Lindh. The front page was a screen showing CNN with Walker being carted away. CNN was running live feedback from its viewers, and there was one e-mail posting printed on the bottom of the TV screen: "Leave him there. He's no American." So if you're keeping score, this was a case of a television network broadcasting e-mail, all of which was frozen in time by a newspaper. How's that for new media? Thank goodness for supper. I've hardly eaten all day. Of course, I haven't burned that many calories... My best friend Nathan, the Northern Roving Reporter, transports us to the region of the Hudson Bay, at my file site: ...2002_07_21_nbiermafile_archive.html#79484316 Will has written up a strikingly thorough analysis of the China-Taiwan conflict for the benefit of Blogathon. It's posted at my file site: ...2002_07_21_nbiermafile_archive.html#79484514 My friend Will checks in from Beijing: regarding your pondering your lack of outside-the-US travel, I don't think I've got any necessary advantage over you. Before I ever went to China there were many times in America where I felt like a foreigner. I'm sure everyone has felt this. Everyone has experienced what it feels like to be an outsider, to feel like you don't belong, or that people aren't speaking your language, even if it's only in a metaphorical sense. The one thing you do get by leaving the country, however, is a taste of what life would be like without all the little things you take for granted but are an essential part of your sanity. In China, food is a big thing. It's all so strange and so foreign that after awhile, you just want to say, "Enough! Can't you people eat like normal Americans?!" It makes you realize that it's the little things that make life in a foreign country so drastically different. I never thought there was anywhere in the world where you couldn't get good bread, or cheese, for example. I went nuts my first time in China, because neither of those things is readily available. (Apparently they don't appeal to the Chinese palate.) Neither can you get deodorant here; you have to have it shipped from home. Think that pastry looks appetizing? Take a bite. You'll find some delicious red bean paste in the middle. As one commentator has said, in Asia, at some point you begin to lose your inner moorings, and you can either resist it, and going home having not learned anything, or you can let it happen, go some kind of crazy and come home a different person. I think that's a nice summary of learning/growing in general. That's all it is, you grow when you travel, but you don't need to travel to do it. This weblog itself is an interesting convergence of media--a newspaper reporter covering an event that takes place on the Web, writing about it in real time on the Web, and then writing an article for the newspaper. It's a break from convention perhaps not seen in the Trib's Tempo section since a few years ago, when the Trib published a series of e-mail interviews with precocious author and MTV "Real World" star Dave Eggers and his brother Bill (archived here at my file site) It was published with the e-mail text in a different font, with Web-ish sidebars along the side with additional bits of information. All this on the same printed page as veteran columnist Bob Greene--it was unusual for a broadsheet. It will be interesting to see how the Trib lays out my article. In the discussion of newspapers on paper and on the compuer screen, I'm also thinking about the element of place. Each morning I walk across Michigan Avenue, one of the great city streets in the world, and through the golden revolving doors of the Tribune Tower, a temple of journalism complete with a marble lobby with chandeliers. The thought of all the history the building represents, of the great journalists who have worked there, and the buzz of the place as deadlines come and go, injects me with energy as a journalist. Today I'm working from my home, in khaki shorts, shuffling back and forth from the kitchen, talking to my wife, staring out the window. My "office" is my living room. I miss the energy, but the freedom is interesting. A footnote on the paper question: The NY Times says it publishes "all the news that's fit to print." Actually, it runs all the news that fits in print. Weblogs allow for infinite space and free publishers from the boundaries of physicality. The other thing about this question is that weblogs, void of any credibility and convenience to replace the tradional newspaper, actually amplify a paper's reach. Times stories are linked to by most of the main blogs; same goes for the Washington Post. I read, and link to, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, which I couldn't do before the Internet. The same goes for NPR, which has a fine Web site and can enter mainstream discourse like never before; though they have to take their heads out of the cyber-sand and realize the possibilities of blogging, which they seem to fear: http://www.ojr.org/ojr/kramer/1026265197.php And one other thing about paper. A professor of mine has over 12,000 books at his home. What will e-books mean for him? he asks. The word he uses, though, to talk about the timelessness of books, is their "tactile" quality--the feel of holding a book in your hand and flipping the page, sticking a bookmark in between actual pages. I also love the tactile qualities of a newspaper--I fold it under my arm, tear out articles I want to save, underline things, and generally love the feel of it in my fingers. It's like Nicholas Cage in "Family Man"--"I love the feel of a crisp new Wall Street Journal in my hand each morning." Newspapers' value goes beyond simply the information they relate. I just stepped out into my apartment hallway, where the fire escape door is propped open and allows the sweltering air to enter. And I realized--I haven't been outside the apartment today. I've been in the apartment 18 straight hours. And haven't been outside yet. That will have to change... More on newspapers on paper in 15 years? Rich Gordon: There will be a portable news source absolutely; will it be on paper? I think that's hard to answer. Whether electronic devices can take on enough attributes of paper to be a reasonable substitute for paper, if it gets to that point, paper goes away, but so what? It's still a regularly delivered product designed to be read, carried around with you. Gordon says the NY Times only needs to fear if it is caught off guard by this prospect, and he says it's clear they're readying for it. I heard Fareed Zakaria, the Newsweek columnist, speak on this subject when he lectured at my college this winter. He said you have to keep in mind the 3 B's: the beach, the bedroom, and the bathroom. That's where people want to read, and so far computers are inferior at facilitating reading in them. What do you think? New York Times on paper in 15 years? The newspaper on the desk beside me still has me thinking about weblogs and the future of print news. I posed the question by e-mail this week: Will there be a New York Times on paper in 15 years? Andrew Sullivan of andrewsullivan.com:
The Times sent me this speech by publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., brimming with confidence:
I've transferred to my desk by our bay window, which affords a beautiful 18th-floor view of the Near North Side near Division and Dearborn. The gray morning has succumbed to a solidly sunny afternoon, and sitting by three windows is doing wonders for my eyes, which are beginning to glaze over. Not even halfway home yet... I spoke yesterday by phone to Paul Grabowicz, who will be co-teaching UC-Berkeley's course called "CREATING A WEBLOG ON INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY ISSUES." The journalism course will cover "copyright issues, the battle over free music downloads and peer-to-peer networks, deep linking to Web sites, etc." and will feature a student-produced weblog that contains articles and other online documents, student's articles about relevant issues, and student commentary. Says Paul: The course is symptomatic of increased interest in using a weblog as a journalistic vehicle. ... What is going on here is that there’s an interesting form of communicating and providing information that some journalists are seeing if we can adopt without destroying what already exists, with a more professional journalism approach.
One of reasons chose weblog for [this course] is that it seemed like a very interesting and ideal way to try to cover something that has constant breaking news, documents that are avail online such as court opinions or briefs that are being filed, resources you can point people to, and a lot of discussion, and a weblog combines a lot of that. ... We're trying to take some aspects of traditional journalism and blend them into things that have changed in journalism because of the Web and digital networks.
Are weblogs here to stay on campus? "I've seen a lot of other fads come and go," Paul says. "It's hard to say what the traction is. I think they will be around, but how good is it as a learning tool? I don't know." More on blogs on campus: Gordon helps keep a weblog about electronic media and publishing at Medill's Web site. What is more common, though, than courses about weblogs are courses that use them.
Last week I interviewed Andy Dehnart, a producer with an online recruiting service in Chicago, keeper of a weblog on Reality TV, and guest lecturer on weblogs at Medill's "News and New Media" course, who says the academic intrigue of weblogs is how they create a new genre of writing:
The format just lends itself so well to a new kind of personal expression, and I really think we're seeing the birth of a new genre of writing and personal narrative within them. There has been journal keeping for hundreds of years, but ... now there's also the fact that you're going to publish to potentially an audience of millions, so it's not exactly writing in a closed space. The diverstiy is unparalleled just because of the web's reach. Plus there's this whole ephemeral nature of it. The writing tends to be more spontaneous, more of a transcript of your thoughts at that moment, which people critized saying there's not thought to it ... but it has a tremendous amount of value, because never before have we seen so many people's thoughts captured instantaneously.
Andy expects the presence of weblogs in the classroom to continue, and to become more of the subject matter:
I'm going through my notes on weblogs and the academy. The introduction of a course on weblogs this fall at UC-Berkeley has been cited as the sign that blogs are being co-opted by the establishment (and, says one of the course's professors, Paul Grabowicz, conversely a sign that the academy has lost its mind). Rich Gordon, professor of new media at Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism, says the academy is just playing catch-up:
Overheard on the Blogathon bulletin board: - Too early to think such negative thoughts. But, I am beginning to question as to whether or not I will make the whole 24 hours. Questions such as "I only have one phone line, what if I sign offline and can't get back on?" and "What if I sleep through the egg timer?" are starting to form in my mind. Eventually, I am going to run out of material, as well.
Ah, the life of a blogathoner...
The discussion continues about which time zone has it best--Europe and Australia start in the afternoon, America's West Coast gets up early in the morning. Here in Chicago we have it about right: 8 to 8 in the morning.
Trying to coherently summarize how Blogathon so far is like explaining a mob scene. Most of the couple dozen blogs I scanned are indeed being updated every half hour, though a few are slacking and others don't appear to have even started. The range of creative ideas is striking, making for something of an e-renaissance: there are short stories, poems, songs, pictures, and other stabs at profundity, some of which simply defy category or genre. My biggest frustration is that few bloggers introduce themselves, so you can't tell who they are or where they're coming from; you only know they're blogging. Here's a full list of the highlights:
Just got an e-mail from Cat Connor, founder and manager of Blogathon. She's surviving the crunch admirably. Her weblog features pictures and descriptions of unusual architecture from around the world, definitely worth a bookmark. I interviewed Cat several days ago by phone. She's 37 and lives in Portland, Oregon, working as an automation support specialist (she notes the acronym there) for U.S. Probation, District of Oregon. I asked her how she got started working with computers.
I fell in love with computers when I was a teenager. I'm old enough to remember the first computer show where there was a Commodore 64 and we were all awed by the color screen [laughs]. I thought Tron was really cool. Computers, they still have that magic for me. I still get that thrill of connecting with people from Singapore ... connecting across the globe is a pretty amazing thing for me.
Cat says she doesn't remember how or why she got started blogging, but she does remember hatching the idea for Blogathon:
That was when I first started blogging, I had just been doing it for a few months, and I tend to stay up all night anyway, so I thought, Gee, why don't I just stay up all night and blog, and we'll see what happens. I just did it by myself.
At that time there was a tool out there called Power Bloggers, and a lot of people followed it, and it had updates for the most recently updated blogs, and I blogged every 15 minutes for 24 hours and stayed on the top of that darn PowerBloggers list for the whole time, and got quite a bit of attention, and posted some really weird stuff. I got really tired and started blubbering about my mother.
Just two years in, and Blogathon, as of 1 p.m. Central this afternoon, has 213 bloggers with 2,125 sponsors, so far raising $52, 446.17 (more than double the number of bloggers and dollars from last year).
It blows me away, it just, yeah, it kind of restores my faith in humanity working on this. The first thing I did to set this up was go through a bunch of charity sites and look at who I wanted to use as suggested charities, and working on this is just so good for my soul, I don't think I'd ever give it up, you know, I get so cynical. It's something that I don't think a lot of people spend their time on the Web just going through charities for a day, and it's very restorative. But the numbers, yeah, the numbers have stunned me. I'm anxious to see how we end up, because usually there's a surge in sponsorships the day of, so we'll see. It's exciting to sit an hit refresh and see people show up.
THE POLITICS OF BLOGGING: Like talk radio, the grassroots-ness of blogging seems to have given it a right-wing slant. This has to do, recently, with patriotic reflexes after September 11, and more broadly, with the perception that the media is liberal. I've ranted a lot before (here's a bit ) that while reporters typically vote for Democrats, the function of their work is not necessarily to liberalize the nation (if it were, the media would look at LOT different, and wouldn't make as much money for big corporations). Still, there is a function in grassroots bloggers keeping the institutional media accountable both for reporting errors and what I call cliches of vision--cookie cutter stories that ignore other ways of framing an issue and event. Andrew Sullivan is usually cited as Exhibit A in the blogging revolution. His blog has thousands of readers a day (one of the few to have more than a hundred hits a day). A former writer for The New Republic, New York Times Magazine, and frequent contributor to the Sunday Times of London, Sullivan supplements his essay writing with daily mini-commentaries and reader e-mail at his weblog. I was first interested in Sullivan when I learned he was an openly gay conservative, which you don't see every day. I've been disappointed, though, at how predictable he has been since September 11--reliably cheerleading for the Bush Administration every time they open their mouths. What's the use of that? InstaPundit, the other major news weblog, is also slanted to the right, but is more flexibile in representing other points of view. The irony is these weblogs have arisen to respond to the narrow-minded institutional media, but liberal blogs like mine are arising to yap at the heels of the massive Weblog-istoctracy of Sullivan and InstaPundit's Glenn Reynold's. Let's open the mailbag: As a blogger for almost a year. I write more for more of personal journaling. Certainly linking to a web is a part of Blogging. It gives your reader a glimpse of who you are. I say your blog is more of a news blog where we can keep up to date on info on what going around in the world around us. But it doesn't really gives an aspect of who YOU are. For me I started blogging out reaction of 9-11 but now I blog because I want to give a unique aspect of who I am as a person. I am a gay asian male and there isn't a lot of us out there. And I have readers that get inspired because they finally found someone that they can relate to. About half of my readership is outside of the United States, so in a sense I am their voice where there is supression of the gay life especially in Asia. That is what blogging is to me.
I'll respond to this in a second...
My station just started weblogs for some of our photographers. It all started with a sports photographer, who sent in logs while he was on the road during March Madness... and on Tobacco Road, there's plenty to write about. (there'd be more if UNC gets their act together!) Then some of our news photographers wanted in on the act... we just started a few weeks ago... you might drop by... http://abclocal.go.com/wtvd/features/070002_FS_photogblogenter.html The photogs really like doing it... and I think it gives some good, behind the camera perspective... but I wonder if bloggers would be pissed about a TV station "institutionalizing" blogging...
Your mail at nbierma@yahoo.com I'm finally going to break for that breakfast and shower. See you back here at noon. Here are the highlights (using the term generously) of my blog so far today: - Welcome to Blogathon - Guide To My Blog And Blogathon - Link of the Day: The World Clock - Today's Notebook Reader - Intro to Blogging - Blogging Going Mainstream? Still to come: the politics of blogging, blogs and journalism, blogs and college courses, about Blogathon, interview with Blogathon founder Cat Connor, the future of words, your e-mails, dispatches from my friends in Beijing and Northern Canada, and more. See you at noon. Another twist on the mainstreaming question: blog purists aren't happy with how "warblogging" is taking over. Ever since September 11, right-wing bloggers have been filling the Web with war propaganda and steady news about the so-called war on terror. Andrew Sullivan is a classic example (though most warbloggers have much, much less reach than he does)--more about Sullivan and the politics of blogging later on, but for now, here's an article on warblogging and mainstreaming from the NY Times a couple months ago, posted at my file site: ...2002_07_21_nbiermafile_archive.html#79476641 I'm also wondering, is there something inherently anti-mainstream about blogging? The idea that it's just you and your thoughts against the world, with no editors, no supervisors, no authorities to answer to--is that liberating in a way that is mutually exclusive with the notion of blogging going mainstream? Meanwhile, do we need the "old institutions" to rant against for blogging to be blogging? Let me know what you think by e-mail. So this raises the question, is blogging going mainstream, and if so, how do bloggers feel about it? The answers seem to be "yes" and "bad," with asterisks by both. First, it's impossible to announce precisely when something as amorphous as blogging has Arrived (I suppose my article in the Tribune could be seen as the day newspapers co-opted blogging, and no doubt wails of protest will echo around the Web), and besides, even if the Trib and every "establishment" media institution or college syllabus got its claws on blogging, there would still be hundreds of thousands (and soon millions) of personal journals on the Web that would never be widely read, that would still feel as organic and small as the day in 1999 when Blogger.com launched. Ironically, the more the Tribune talks about blogging, the less fringe it may feel but the more diverse it will be--as people who wouldn't have encountered blogging on their own find out about it from traditional sources, and add a different twist to the blogosphere. So on the second question of how bloggers feel about this, we must consider that diversity was the point to begin with, so for blogging to leap its techno-subculture walls is a step forward. Still, the San Fransisco Chronicle will raise the issue of whether blogging is being "co-opted." Others, like Wired magazine ("Blogging Goes Legit, Sort Of"), have as well--all fixated on the fact that a UC-Berkely course this fall will cover weblogs. There are a lot of misunderstandings about this. More on this later, here are the articles for now: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2002/07/22/blogmain.DTL http://www.wired.com/news/school/0,1383,52992,00.html Oh, and I forgot Salon, which just launched its blog service. With this online magazine, which has been around for a few years now, it's a case of New Media trying to keep pace with newer media. Similarly, MSNBC, furiously merging NBC TV, Newsweek magazine, and Internet news, has launched a blog or two as well. Speaking of Microsoft, which of course owns MSNBC, it should be pointed out that the MS-owned webzine Slate has been posting Today's Papers, a daily digest of major newspaper articles, for years now, so blogging is nothing new. I just picked up today's Tribune; I've been online for two straight hours and hadn't gotten to the paper yet--which may serve as a fitting example of a) newspapers struggling to stay relevant in a digital age, b) my lack of a life today, or c) both. Someday soon, every newspaper will have a weblog on its website. The London Guardian does; in fact, the old lady of London just announced its Best British Blog competition. The Christian Science Monitor, which has a helpful blog overview here, has one of the better news blogs out there. As for the American establishment, the NY Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and most other major papers all have their forms of newsletters that they offer to send to readers, summarizing the news of the day and linking to relevant articles. But there still is a built-in reluctance to jump on the blogging bandwagon, and the feeling, on the part of purist bloggers, is mostly mutual. Blogroots.com on blogging: Weblogs are a grassroots phenomenon. They weren't created in a board room and unleashed on waiting consumers. They were created by people with something to say in a format that works well on the Web. With all of the media attention and debate surrounding weblogs, it's easy to lose sight of what they are: people speaking and connecting online. We called this site Blogroots because we feel it's important to keep this grassroots nature in mind. Blogroots sniffs at the New York Times for its Q&A column yesterday on blogging: "The Times doesn't say who's asking -- chances are they wrote the question as well as the answer." And the site notes William Safire, godfather of Old Media, weighs in on blogging this week in his On Language Column. So it must be official: blogging has made it. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/25/technology/circuits/25ASKK.html http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/28/magazine/28ONLANGUAGE.html (log in with member name and password of "nbiermaread") Diaries have been around for centuries, stuffed under mattresses or hidden in sock drawers, their pages containing the soul searching of countless anonymous authors. For this genre to adapt to a new format with the advent of a new technology may seem less than remarkable. But with the blogging revolution a shift has taken place: when you blog, there's the strange possibility, and in any case, the feeling, that your thoughts are being broadcast to the world. For some people this doesn't impede them at all; they blather on about their cat, their friends, their bodily functions, with abandon. Others try harder to reward the readers who visit their journals by not wasting their time. Four years ago there were maybe a dozen blogs, two years ago, a couple hundred, and this year Blogger.com alone hosts over 375,000, according to Cat Connor, founder of Blogathon. The word "blog," a crude contraction of "weblog," now appears in an online dictionary of marketing terms. Some of the original bloggers explain the recent revolution best: Rebecca Blood has written an essay on the history of weblogs and has just published one of the first books devoted to them. Meg Hourihan, one of the founders of Blogger.com, writes about blogs here. I'll be trying to extract much of the mundanities of my personal life from my weblog today. For some bloggers, this is a violation of a basic tenet of blogging. Others will be grateful. This highlights a tension in blogging that has been there from the start: are blogs more about personal journaling or about linking to the Web? e-mail me Here's today's edition of my Notebook Reader, a daily digest of noteworthy public discourse. ...2002_07_21_nbiermafile_archive.html#79474123 Yesterday's Reader I need breakfast and a shower. I was hoping to have posted more by now, but doing this on a dial-up connection is brutal. Oh well, there's plenty of time for posting.... I'm just about to post my Reader, a daily news roundup. Then I'll begin an overview of recent blog news. Stay tuned... Link of the day: http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/ The World Clock will help us keep track of what time it is where people are blogging from, and just how much their body clock is being knocked off course. There's also time.gov for up-to-the-second precision. I just posted a little Guide to My Blog and Blogathon for those poking their heads in at this site and wondering what's going on. I've posted it at my File Blog, where I stash lengthy posts that would bog down this blog. As the Guide says, I'll be keeping an index of key themes that link to key postings as I write, to try to bring a little method to the madness. The Guide is at: ...2002_07_21_nbiermafile_archive.html#79473097 BLOGATHON BEGINS: This is the first time I've ever gone to work in my underwear. I'm sitting at my kitchen table with my laptop in front of me, stacks of notebooks and manilla folders on each side of me, and my wife looking on disapprovingly behind me. I just woke up and opened the blinds, and it looks like the gloomiest day of the week, with the rain tapping a steady rhythm on our air conditioner, so it will be a good day to be tethered to the computer, keeping my weblog, or "blog," for Blogathon 2002. I'm joining 212 other bloggers from around the world who have all agreed to keep our blogs for 24 hours straight, updating them at least every 30 minutes. Each of us is blogging for charity; my sponsor is the Tribune Co., which will donate $100 to Tribune Charities if I make it the whole way. 8 a.m. tomorrow seems an awfully long time away, but as I look at the articles and jottings I've collected around me, my thought isn't, how am I going to make it, but how am I going to write about everything I want to write about in a measly 52 posts? Friday, July 26, 2002
Tomorrow is Blogathon! I'll be posting at least every 30 minutes from 8 a.m. Chicago time Saturday to 8 a.m. Sunday. I'll be writing about a little bit of everything, but the central themes will be the state of blogging, recent blogging news, what's out there in the blogosphere, blogs going on campus, blogs and journalism, and finally the state of the word in the age of the blog. [breath] That should carry me through the night! I'll be adapting my blog for a story in the Chicago Tribune. Check back tomorrow and send me questions and comments by e-mail. Here's the teaser in the Trib today: http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/chi-0207260354jul26.story (log in with member name and password of "nbiermaread") Quote of the day: "I get picked on pretty bad. People say: 'You got knocked down by a fish?' It's not any ordinary fish. It's a huge fish." Tallahassee boater Danny Cordero, victim of a leaping sturgeon (you have to read it to believe it): http://sptimes.com/2002/07/26/State/Leaping_sturgeon_beco.shtml Number of the day: 30,000 Gallons of sewage disgorged each day by cruise ships, according to the Sunday Times of London, quoted in the Globe and Mail: http://archives.theglobeandmail.com/... Here's my Notebook Reader for today, a daily digest of noteworthy public discourse: ...2002_07_21_nbiermafile_archive.html#79448637 Yesterday's Reader John Madden's new deal with ABC means he'll also be making SportsCenter appearances on, and generally being overexposed like crazy by, sister cable network ESPN. And now comes the news that Madden is making a comeback on TV commercials, too, with a new deal with Ace. I like Madden, but have your volume control ready. http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/columnists/... President Bush will give an exclusive interview this September 11 to Scott Pelley, a fine reporter on a fine newsmagazine, 60 Minutes II on CBS. Ari Fleischer says granting just one interview "allows a real focus on what the president wants to say." He didn't say it spares the president from gratingly repetitive questions and an emotionally draining interview regime, but you get the idea. In age of Barbie anchors, it will be good to have the gravitas of Dan Rather, Christiane Amanpour, Ed Bradley, Steve Kroft, Andy Rooney, and other wise veterans capturing the mood of the first 9-11 anniversary for CBS. More from Howard Kurtz in the Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A2904-2002Jul25.html Thursday, July 25, 2002
Link of the day: http://www1.passur.com/lax.html This Los Angeles Airport Monitor tracks airplanes by moving them across a map in real time. Zoom out to 96 miles and they look like ants swarming a picnic crumb. There's one for Atlanta, too. Number of the day: 30: Percent drop in tourism at Pikes Peak in June, after a 5 percent rise in shutterbugs in May. Tourists are freaked out by the fires out West, although 23.8 million of Colorado's 24 million acres are not burning, from the NY Times. Rob Lowe leaves West Wing: From the beginning he was the most intractable star of the brilliant WW, reportedly disappointed the moment Martin Sheen agreed to do all 22 episodes of the show's first season, not just 4. Lowe, who seemed to sign on with the show on the basis of being its focal point, wanted to be the man. He's hinted at leaving earlier, so this is less than a surprise. The circumstances are quite Lowe-ian: he's pouting over getting much less dough than Sheen, although he is getting a little more than the rest of the cast--all of whom were nominated for this year's Emmy's, unlike Lowe. Lowe's character--a razor-sharp, savvy political operative who embodied the show's irony and wit--will be missed; the never-content Lowe will not. AP writeup at my file site: ...2002_07_21_nbiermafile_archive.html#79403427 Quote of the day: "You can [blame] a little bit of it, maybe, on the heat. People being confined in their houses, which may or may not have air conditioning." East St. Louis Police Chief Delbert Marion on what the heat wave has to do with an increase in domestic violence, thus connecting the unconscionable assault of women with the thermometer. http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/... Leave it to the testosterone-pumped, give-em-hell Bush Administration to alienate one of the most popular politicians in the era of unpopular politicians, and one of the world's great peacemakers: Colin Powell. A fine profile in today's NY Times, which I randomly noticed was picked up by the Sydney Morning Herald (don't ask). So Powell's ticking clock is internationally known; that must do wonders for his diplomatic leverage. And, speaking of Starbucks, I noticed the NY Times navbar is now sponsored by the proliferating coffee peddlers. Sheesh! http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/25/international/25POWE.html (log in with member name and password of "nbiermaread") Today's installment of my Notebook Reader, a daily digest of notable public discourse, is off the presses at my file site: ...2002_07_21_nbiermafile_archive.html#79400787 I said earlier this week that I was keeping an eye on Keith Olbermann. Now he's just landed a columnist gig in Salon, which is a great fit for him, although I'm afraid of being cut off once they put his pieces on premium. His first column is free, and makes the surprising connection between the baseball strike and the first anniversary of September 11, which could disgracefully coincide. As baseball players march obliviously and self-righteously toward a strike that could bankrupt several franchises and eliminate 20 percent of the jobs in their industry, they are, from all evidence, wrestling only with exactly when to threaten to walk out. Sources disagree on the logic patterns, and even the process of selection. But they are uniform in reporting that the players are terrified of the public reaction should they actually be out on strike on Sept. 11. http://www.salon.com/news/sports/col/olbermann/2002/07/25/strike/index.html The Starbucks-ization of the world: Business 2.0 breaks down all the numbers: http://www.business2.com/articles/mag/0,1640,41189,FF.html Here's a twist: Joe Lieberman has been wearing a groove in his shin, kicking himself for promising to stay out of it if Gore runs in '04. His growing desire to run has been oh-so-thinly disguised as he shakes hands in coffee shops in New Hampshire and beyond. But what if, Michael Sneed asks, he announces his candidacy later this year? Technically, if he beats Gore to the punch, he won't be infringing on his former running mate, since Gore won't officially be a candidate! It's a technicality only a politician could love. http://www.suntimes.com/output/sneed/cst-nws-sneed25.html Thought of the day: the need to be outside the box to see the box: I thought of this while paging through a coffee table book on cities of the world last night around the corner at Barnes and Noble on State Street. Each flip of the page transported me to a unique point on the globe--the grandeur of Berlin, the sandy vastness of Cairo, the art of Paris, the concrete timelessness of London, the glitz of Las Vegas (Chicago, to my disgust, was ommitted from the tour). My family and my wife have been, among them, to London, Paris, and Germany in the past few years. I've lived in New York and Chicago and considered that a big deal for a Grand Rapids native. But as my college courses, and now my job, have taken me into the thick of cultural studies, I've been thinking--do you have to have a sustained international experience to best view American culture? I try to think of myself as a skeptical, creative, and constructive cultural critic. But can you really do it without removing yourself? The problem may be complicated by the fact that I'm living in the heart of Chicago and loving it--I eagerly immerse myself in the city each day. Then I consider my friend Will who's spending the summer in Beijing, and my best friend Nathan, who has been living in the Northwest Territories, and I realize--they have the most sincere skepticism of their native cultural contexts, not to mention the most compelling praise. I promised my wife I'd take her to London within ten years; I wonder how my work and my worldview will change when I follow through on it. Wednesday, July 24, 2002
Link of the Day: http://www.longbets.org/ Long Bets ponders several long-term possibilities and offers yes and no arguments. The topics range from the metaphysical (By 2020, someone will win a Nobel Prize for work on superstring theory, membrane theory, or some other unified theory describing all the forces of nature click here) to the classic sports bar wagers (The US men's soccer team will win the World Cup before the Red Sox win the World Series--Ted Danson weighs in on this one! click here) The main product of Taiwan's government-owned Tobacco and Liquor Corporation may be in trouble: a 53-year-old cigarette brand named--no kidding--Long Life, "because of a proposed law forbidding any marketing claim or suggestion that cigarettes are clean, safe or healthy," from yesterday's NY Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/23/business/worldbusiness/23SMOK.html I meant to post this with my marriage rant the other day: "Who Needs a Husband" from the NY Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/17/opinion/17COLM.html And today's letters to the editor in response to the column: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/24/opinion/L24HUSB.html (use member name and password of "nbiermaread") My ongoing series on why I'm sometimes embarassed by my profession (then again, nah, TV is a different breed): cheesy TV news headlines. In tomorrow's Tribune, an ad for WGN News at 9: "Help on picking the right style of yoga--and tips to avoid getting hurt." Stop the presses. Then there is the recent series in Baltimore on "How to Escape a Submerged Car," whose melodrama exceeded its substance (seared here by critic David Folkenflik). Reminds me of Sam Donaldson, his ABC talk show run nearing an end, reflecting on the banality of his newsmag "Primetime Live" in this week's TV Guide: "If you like murder or rape or multiple-birth or diet-pill-of-the-week stories and want to watch them, fine. But if we say it's ABC News, we should be a little bit better than that." Alas, he may as well be a dinosaur for such a common sense observation. Commercial news is an oxymoron. Or, as the Washington Monthly put it, the fluff problem is a case (pun intended) of "Substance Abuse." http://tvguide.com/magazine/robins/020722.asp http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2000/0006.robbins.html My best friend Nathan is an adventurous journalist who is beginning his career trekking around Northern Canada. He's producing some interesting stuff, and his writing shows the promise (in my personal, completely objective opinion) of one of the next great Canadian narrative reporters. Here's a recent piece I've posted at my file site. ...2002_07_21_nbiermafile_archive.html#79353376 Thought of the day: Finding the ordinary-ness in the extraordinary. One of the functions of beginning my career in Chicago is to take the city off the pedestal in occupied in my mind. In my constant weekend trips down here throughout college, and even during my semester down here last fall, I revered Chicago as a celestial city, an image the city's majestic skyscrapers and ethereal relationship with Lake Michigan may invoke in the newcomer. But now I live here, and am starting to get used to the ordinary-ness of it. It doesn't cease to be a fascinating place, nor my favorite city on earth, but Chicago is composed of ordinary people, going about ordinary business on streets and sidewalks, businesses and parks like anywhere else. At first I, my mind wrapped around postcards, found that surprising. I thought of that this morning while walking down the Magnificent Mile to work on a cool summer morning--a dream I never wanted to wake up from. While this glamorous stretch of Michigan Avenue is enjoyable, I (and most Chicago purists) bemoan how it is an artificial tourist construct--a pseudo-world tourists visit and then tell themselves they've been to Chicago. The city's true riches, seldom explored, are its historical neighborhoods South and West, in Oak Park, in unmarked lots (such as the one where the famous Haymarket Riots took place), and these are anything but touristy. And yet. Walking down Rush and then Michigan today I saw the most normal sights you can see--a doorman at a hotel, perhaps a student spending his summer lugging bags for the snooty; a worker hosing down the sidewalks of a streetside cafe, the security guards and cleaning ladies in the cathedral-like Tribune Tower where I, in awe, work. Ordinary people with ordinary stories, sadnesses, and delights, and ordinary energies as they carried them out (although city life does add a bit of a spark to people's step), despite their seemingly magical surroundings. But when I say "ordinary" I don't mean to drain the drama from these people's lives; as I writer, I'm convinced that each person is a book waiting to be written. James Brosnahan, attorney for John Walker Lindh, on his client and September 11, in Newsweek: He had nothing to do with it. Nothing. You do not attack civilians based on the Qur’an. You don’t commit suicide based on the Qur’an. As it became more and more clear that Osama bin Laden had done all of this, John wanted to get out of [Afghanistan]. He wanted to go home. But he couldn’t for fear of death. You don’t hail a cab when you’re fighting with the Taliban up there. Brosnahan is more than a little paranoid, blaming the brouhaha about his client on a post-9/11 squelching of civil liberties. I mean, this guy was with the Taliban. Still, it's worth pointing out that until about last October, the Taliban, though not on our Easter basket list, was not an avowed enemy of the U.S. as was the Al Qaeda mob. People are acting as though this guy was having beers with Osama, or worse. http://www.msnbc.com/news/783504.asp Tuesday, July 23, 2002
I suppose it's a trivial detail in a sad, strange story from Sweden in this morning's NY Times, but I noticed that this woman's lawyer, apparently famous, is Leiff Ericksson. I had to double-check that the original Leif Ericsson was spelled differently: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/23/international/europe/23SWED.html (use member name and password of "nbiermaread") http://viking.no/e/people/leif/e-leiv.htm Thought of the day: The spiritual function of temperature. I walked outside my apartment building on the Near North Side this morning and was gently greeted by the coolest morning I can remember since moving here in June. It was only Sunday that my wife and I were weighed down by a 97 degree summer day at Union Station after riding back from Grand Rapids, and since then we've hardly wanted to move off the couch near our fiercely battling air conditioner on the 18th floor. But the tenderness of the atmosphere this morning was refreshing, and not just physically. I remember my mom saying she just felt like a different person after we got central air in our house--before that, she felt like she was moving in slow motion in the sweltering summer heat. Indeed, my mood this morning was altered just by stepping outside and feeling the 70 degrees against my face and seeing the aqua of the sky. Temperature is more than just environment, I think. It can shape the soul. http://www.weather.com/weather/local/USIL0225 John O'Sullivan in today's Chicago Sun-Times "When Pope John Paul II arrives in Toronto today for the World Youth Day Congress, he will be arriving on a continent that still seems largely religious--and leaving a continent that has apparently abandoned religion for agnosticism and the pursuit of material affluence." http://www.suntimes.com/output/osullivan/cst-edt-osul23.html Also in today's paper, Richard Roeper does a nice job of dismantling the rabid assaults of Ann Coulter: http://www.suntimes.com/output/roeper/cst-nws-roep23.html Number of the day: 61: Percent of American adults using the Internet, up from 46 percent two years ago, according to the NY Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/22/technology/22NET.html (log in with member name and password of "nbiermaread") Monday, July 22, 2002
The city of Detroit begins kissing up to the Democratic party today, hoping to land the 2004 Democratic Convention. You have to be a severe case of a political junkie to care much about this, and if you're on the Detroit committee, you have to be a little delusional to think that having the convention will be all that much of an economic boost to the city. It hardly ever is, and with conventions' gradual plunge in significance accelerated by a front-loaded '04 primary schedule, the next round of conventions will be a joke (the Dems are talking about scheduling for September, while their nominee will be settled in February or March). Still, a hosting convention would mean a lot, symbolically (i.e. rebirth), to Detroit or New York, more so than fellow candidates Boston and Miami. http://www.gwu.edu/~action/2004/convs/dsiteselect.html http://www.ci.detroit.mi.us/ccsd/Releases/pr052322.htm "Market forces have no intrinsically moral direction," says Arianna Huffington. "Which is why, before he wrote 'The Wealth of Nations,' Adam Smith wrote 'The Theory of Moral Sentiments.' Ethics should precede economics. But it’s not inevitable that it will." I'm an Arianna fan, but as a Christian liberal, I'm fascinated anytime liberals talk about ethics. Liberals make it their job to say there are no absolutes, only differing perspectives, and that the problem with religion is that it forces one particular institutional view on otherwise independently minded people. So then what is the source of liberals' moral outrage? Didn't these CEO's cooking the books merely have a different interpretation of reality? Or are the Ten Commandments in play here? But I'll always cheer on Huffington et al in her rants against corporate greed, which to her credit she was making before it was recently hip. http://www.ariannaonline.com/columns/files/072202.html The counterfeit coupon caper at Starbucks: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A22433-2002Jul17.html I am a unabashed fan of brilliant broadcaster Keith Olbermann fan, as my fan page attests. Olbermann is somewhat controversial after rapidly dropping a series of TV jobs, and Hollywood Reporter says TV is taking its time in taking him back: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hollywoodreporter/columnists/... From Fortune magazine, the NRA has displaced the AARP as the most powerful lobby in Washington: http://www.fortune.com/lists/power25 That will make you choke if you were just eating something. Also, check out how many (thankfully non-ballistic) NRA's there are, including the National Restaurant Association and Navy Reporting Activity, from Acronym Finder: http://www.acronymfinder.com/af-query.... Thought of the day: Marriage is overrated. I say this as a happy newlywed and something of a marriage purist (in that I believe the wedding ritual as it stands in America today is a tasteless festival of consumption and ostentation, seldom conducted deliberately or thoughtfully). But in the first few weeks, I've also been hit with how much the projection of what I wanted marriage to be--which I formed in a religious community that sees marriage as an end in itself, an elevated universe--was inflated. Marriage is wonderful, but it is also, like everything else in a broken world, real, human, and deceptively incomplete when we expect perfection or nirvana from it. This has deepened my sadness about how religious communities like my hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan, consider married people as morally safe, normal, and often superior over single people--especially women. (Here the social norms of religious communities are more influential than the transcendent personhood of Christ, who was single, as was the apostle Paul and other Christian icons. Singleness is a valid lifestyle, and Christianity was the first religion to validate it.) This feeds my mixed feelings about Sex and the City, a quality show that is almost as well-acted as it is well-written, although at times alarmingly shallow in scope and content. On the one hand, the characters speak honestly and wrestle with the gap between how marriage has always been billed to them and what they actually find it to be, which is a crucial conversation to share with women who are told the significance of their existence hinges on their marital status. "Do we really want these things," Carrie asks after breaking out in a rash while trying on a wedding dress, "or are we just programmed?" On the other hand, it is disturbing to see how these characters' neuroses and even narcissism leads them to sabatoge functional and fulfilling relationships with men--it's as if their lost faith in traditional relationships becomes a continually self-fulfilling prophecy. If doubt about marriage means such self-centeredness, than you begin to have doubt in the doubt itself.
A useful and unusually skeptical review of the show in Sunday's Chicago Tribune by Steve Johnson (who reports this morning that he already has a flood of angry e-mails about the piece),
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