Saturday, November 16, 2002
What’s in Your Garage?
Quentin Tarantino is filming his new movie in Marc Brown’s garage. (Link via Tony Pierce, who observes that without Marc Brown at KCSB, grunge might have never taken off and Kurt Cobain might still be alive.)
DOJ Opens Alt-Weekly Inquiry
Great story in the LA Times that reports the Department of Justice has begun an antitrust investigation into a deal that shuttered New Times in Los Angeles. More context from the LA Examiner.
Friday, November 15, 2002
Crossing the Line
I was in my old neighborhood yesterday and stopped into a shop to buy some birthday cards. Since the shop was on Christopher Street, you have to walk past all the gay porn items in the front in order to get to the likes of “Happy Birthday, You’re 1!” and straight greeting-cards in the back.
I was reading through the section with the fake George Bush quotes and was pretty shocked to find a belated birthday card that parodied the theory that Bush knew about the Sept. 11 attacks in advance but failed to act. The card was along the lines of – my advisors said your birthday might be coming, but there was no definitive evidence. And when I was told a cake was being made with your name on it, I still didn’t believe it, but now I know I was wrong and I’ll never let this tragedy happen again.
Welch v. Layne
For some reason, this exchange gives me a mental image of Ken Layne and Matt Welch sitting in a retirement home, poking each other with their canes.
Wednesday, November 13, 2002
No More Live from the WTC
Live from the WTC, which is likely among the most-trafficked blogs in New York, has traded in its name and adopted a new look. The proprietress, who goes by the nom-de-blog of Jane Galt, until a couple months ago worked in a trailer on the WTC site. But now she’s passed the Foreign Service exam, switched to Movable Type, redesigned and changed the blog’s name to Asymmetrical.
Journalists with Personal Lives
Page Six of the New York Post is reporting that a reporter at the New York Daily News has been suspended for two weeks after he placed a kinky personal ad on a cable TV show and at Nerve.com (which was co-founded by one of the photographers from my college paper.)
The reporter, who has been dubbed "Tickle Me" Egbert by the Post, is an example of why some journalists are afraid to blog. If this guy can get suspended for talking about his sex preferences in public, what’s to stop someone else’s employer from taking action after reading the employee’s blog about his severe hangovers, political leanings or tasteless Halloween costume?
According to the Post, the Daily News EIC sent around a memo critical of the reporter's actions:
"As many of you know, a member of the staff showed woeful judgment the other day and embarrassed himself, his colleagues and the paper on cable television," Kosner wrote.
"As far as the paper is concerned, private behavior is just that - so long as it doesn’t break the law or violate the News’ code of business conduct, which we all sign when we join the News. But private conduct disclosed publicly or advertised is another matter.
"The News code says ‘integrity, credibility and trustworthiness’ are the ‘essence’ of the paper’s business policy. They are indeed. I urge all of you to take seriously your obligation to your colleagues not to embarrass the paper or yourselves. Violations of our mutual trust are not acceptable. Common sense is your best friend when temptation knocks."
The item ends with another interesting detail:
One source claimed Kosner was incensed by Egbert’s answer on a questionnaire under the heading "Best (or worst) lie I’ve ever told: That I was totally prepared to be a big-city tabloid reporter when I had no experience as a journalist."
But News spokesman Ken Frydman blamed it all on Egbert’s embarrassing MetroChannel ad: "Whatever disciplinary action was taken was for inappropriate behavior, not for the answer on the questionnaire."
NYC Blog Map Nears 1,600
NYC Bloggers is just shy of registering blogger number 1,600. I find it astonishing there are that many blogs in NYC. The big map breaks it down by borough: 755 in Manhattan, 484 in Brooklyn, 251 in Queens, 73 in the Bronx and 35 on Staten Island.
Until I interviewed the founders in June for an article I later sold to the New York Times, they hadn’t met each other face to face (a fact regrettably edited from the story.) To be precise, Liz Maryland Hiraldo and Matt Johnson knew each other, but neither had ever met Mike Everett-Lane until the week after they actually launched the site together. The whole thing was done via e-mail and IM.
The London blog map now has 234 weblogs. Washington D.C. has a similar map and L.A. Blogs has some sort of list, but I can’t find totals on those pages.
Tuesday, November 12, 2002
Drudge at a Billion
Say what you will, but as of today Matt Drudge has had more than a billion page views this year.
Back when I was a lowly ACE at the LA Daily News, I became one of the first editors anywhere to assign a profile on Drudge, who at the time was working from a tiny apartment in Hollywood. Funny thing was, no one wanted to do the story and I had to shop it around for a few days before I could get a reporter interested in doing something with it.
Going to Eleven
Today’s New York Times has a story about new words and phrases that have been recognized by the “Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.” Among the interesting bits in the NYT story is the fact that due to “technology and the speed of communication, new words and usages become established much more quickly.”
But among the interesting facts in a similar story in The Times of London a month ago is that there is a Spinal Tap-influenced phrase in the list: Up to eleven. (link via SpinalTapFan.com)
Stranger than Saturday Night Live
Dear readers, I’m 34 years old, read a lot of newspapers and got a decent education despite my college’s proximity to the Pacific Ocean. I like to think I have a basic understanding of what goes on in the world and a slightly better than average understanding of the news business. However, I should confess that I first learned about many news events and famous people by way of staying up past my bedtime and watching Saturday Night Live in the '70s.
Among the things I learned: Gerald Ford (US president 1974 - 77) … falls down a lot, fears math; Julia Child (star of “The French Chef” since 1963) ... drinks lots of wine; Czechoslovakia (East Bloc state where I would later live) … home to wild and crazy badly dressed guys; Francisco Franco (Spanish dictator who died in 1975) … still dead.
So you can understand the disorientation when I discovered that one of the SNL skits I was sure was pure fiction was indeed based in fact. Several years ago, there was a very funny skit about Tom Brokaw getting ready to head off for vacation and taping a whole bunch of promos before he left. I can’t find details online, but the “anticipated” news events got more and more ludicrous as the skit went on.
This morning I was clicking around Harry Shearer’s site for something entirely unrelated and stumbled on the actual video of Tom Brokaw taping promos in the event of Frank Sinatra’s death. As Shearer points out on the site:
"Tom Brokaw, never one to be scooped, tapes two versions of a news story months before it actually happens: standing and sitting Also, he gets the cause of death wrong."I e-mailed Shearer and he was kind enough to drop me a reply. And yes, the video’s real.
Bookshop Plug
When you’re in the Village, use any lame excuse you can to stop by the Partners & Crime mystery bookshop. We had reason to stop by Sunday after we did some painting at the nearby Our Name is Mud ceramics shop. We had my stepson with us, who notified us he could handle about 5 minutes in the bookstore, so we had to shop fast.
But we went way over the 5-minute mark, with my charming stepson sprawled on the floor devouring the books one of the shopkeepers pulled from the shelves for him to try. We stopped for a bagel afterward and he couldn’t even be bothered to put his new book down to talk to us.
As for the grownups, we left armed with some of our own. Experience has taught me to never doubt their taste in recommendations. I’ve yet to buy a bad book from that place.
O.J. and the Good Amy
Amy Alexander, writing for Africana.com reviews the new HBO show about O.J. Simpson.
And since it’s a column, she gets to include her own personal but weird connection to O.J.:
“(O.J.’s mother Eunice) even gave my mother a lift down the hill to the hospital when my mother's water broke unexpectedly one morning, and I nearly dropped into the world in a most unhealthy fashion. Thus, in one of those strange, only-in-America kind of coincidences, I had grown up hearing ‘O.J. Simpson's Mama drove me to the hospital on the day you were born.’”
And since this is my web page, I get to point out my connection to Amy Alexander. She is known in certain circles as the “Good Amy” only because someone’s cheating then-boyfriend determined that I was the “Evil Amy” by comparison because I was the one who pointed out his faults to said girlfriend. Said girlfriend previously worked with Good Amy at a newspaper, and I think was then working with Evil Amy at another newspaper. Said girlfriend later dumped the guy, a rugby player, I might add, and is now happily married to a really nice guy. Yet somehow the name Evil Amy stuck and continues to frighten small children and fuzzy creatures to this day.
Monday, November 11, 2002
’Just Stop Typing’
Today I start a new round of doctor visits for the ongoing repetitive stress injury. Crankiness to ensue.
Weird Files Returns
The flu-addled genius Ken Layne has resumed posting at his three welfare sites, KenLayne.com, Weird Files and LA Examiner.
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