Dead Ducks
Reading the fake New York Times corrections at gawker this morning made me wonder how post-Blair/Bragg sales are doing for "Kill Duck Before Serving: Red Faces at The New York Times: A Collection of the Newspaper's Most Interesting, Embarrassing and Off-Beat Corrections."

Only one left in stock, Mr. Raines!
- posted by Amy @ 5/29/2003 12:58:00 PM

 

'Idiocy 101'
When I first moved to New York, I lived in a studio across the street from Washington Irving High School. Luckily I was on the 16th Street side, because apparently the charming little tykes have been hurtling stuff out of the sixth-floor windows on the 17th Street side. Yesterday, a stool hit a pregnant woman on the head. Earlier this year it was a chair that smashed into a parked car.

Little hoodlums, huh? Apparently not: "They both appear to be good kids who did something stupid," one cop said to the Daily News regarding the two 15-year-olds facing second-degree assault charges.

School officials are mad at the teacher who forgot to lock the door, but no mention of why there aren't safety screens or something across those windows since this is an ongoing problem. The New York Times ends its story this way:

A teacher at Washington Irving, who did not want to be named for fear of retribution at work, said there were not enough security guards to control students who constantly roam the halls during classes.

"Two months ago teachers were saying, `It's only a matter of time before someone gets killed,' " the teacher said. "The public would be actually astounded if they knew what went on at our school."

Before you go off thinking New York City is a dangerous place, I should point out my mom retired from teaching high school just a few years ago in not-at-all metropolitan Bakersfield. In her last years there, she had kids come to class with guns, she received a death threat in a homework assignment, ("I am going to kill my English teacher,") and another student BA'd the class and when his mother was hauled in for a meeting, she called my mom a "lying bitch" since her little angel would never drop his pants in front of a classroom. Anyone who'd go into teaching now must be nuts.

One more thing ...

When I moved from Union Square, my studio was taken over by my friend Heesun Wee, who coincidentally is turning in the keys to the place today and moving back to California. Since leaving BusinessWeek.com six months ago, she's been unable to find something suitable while she finishes up her novel. The job market really is that bad here. We're seeing her off with drinks tonight at Old Town Bar.
- posted by Amy @ 5/29/2003 12:31:00 PM

 

Into the Void
In case you didn't notice, there's a new ad over there in the right column. A lot of you nice people clicked on it yesterday but the link wasn't showing up right on a lot of browsers. But just like magic, it's fixed now. The link properly sends you to Hugh Macleod's gapingvoid.com. Check it out.
- posted by Amy @ 5/28/2003 11:29:00 PM

 

Where in the World is Bloomberg?
Bloomberg news, which was chastised for using Baghdad datelines on its war stories even though it had no reporters there, has suddenly decided it will use NO datelines at all, according to this Reuters story.

It's a weird way to solve the problem. That said, there has been rampant dateline abuse by many news organizations for years. The way I learned it in college is you only use a dateline if the reporter was actually there. "There" is of course the location of the best action -- the fire, the shooting, the earthquake. Over the years I've been told by editors to use the good dateline if there was a photographer there, or if a press release originated from there or if a completely unreliable stringer whose information we couldn't use was there.

I guess in this era of Jayson Blair mea culpas, news agencies are wisely using this time to fix a lot of the grey-area dirty-little-secret stuff they've had as de facto policy over the years. I guess the thinking is that whatever they admit to right now still pales in comparison to what the New York Times is having to fix. I vote for a long and painful confessional period in hopes that a lot of dirty laundry is aired and lessons learned.
- posted by Amy @ 5/28/2003 01:06:00 PM

 

New LA Media Blog
Here's something for your bookmark collection if you're an LA media junkie: L.A. Observed. It's a new blog about Los Angeles media run by Kevin Roderick, who wrote a book about the San Fernando Valley and then ran Secession Watch, a good site chronicling all the important stuff leading up to the vote on Valley Secession last year.
- posted by Amy @ 5/28/2003 12:27:00 PM

 

West Village Action
I was over in the West Village yesterday evening to meet up with Marc Brown and his girlfriend Nancy Herrmann, who was celebrating a profile of her work written up by STEP inside design magazine.

On the way there, I crossed the West Side Highway for a better view of the new park that looks like it's ready to open any day. We moved to that neighborhood about three years ago and it seemed we only had a few months to enjoy the under-utilized grass strips facing the Hudson before it was closed for massive renovation. They've now built a few extra piers out into the river, and covered them with grass, benches and a playground or two. Fences are still up blocking access to the new stuff, but it can't be long until they come down.

I also walked by those two tall mega-luxury glass towers at Perry and the West Side Highway. From our kitchen window in the old place, I watched those things rise up and slowly eat away my little view of the Hudson River and New Jersey. And you know, since we moved to Brooklyn a year ago, I have no idea what work they've actually done to the place. It's all glass, so you can see into every floor and all the construction equipment piled high. Last I read, Martha Stewart was still trying to sell her floor -- which she bought before the whole Imclone thing happened. Pity.

So the interesting gossip I gleaned at the party was from MC Brown himself, who said the relaunch of Buzznet is near, but it's going to be entirely different than the webmag it was the first time around. Hopefully he'll start leaking more details at his blogblogblog or his moblog.
- posted by Amy @ 5/28/2003 12:00:00 PM

 

Back in the NYC
Good morning, peeps. I'm back in New York, where the high temperature yesterday was about 50 degrees cooler than where I was all last week. It's been a couple years since I'd pulled that need-to-get-on-the-next-plane deal. I was pretty surprised to find that pretty much after 8 p.m., you can't fly from New York to Los Angeles. If my grandmother had lost consciousness about an hour earlier, I could have gotten a nice little $144 one-way ticket on America West via the Internet. Instead, the best I could get was first thing Sunday morning on JetBlue for $300 something. Surprisingly, I tried a bunch of the general travel web sites -- CheapTickets, Expedia, Site59 - and the best they could do was around $1,200 if anything. On the way back, I booked America West for about $160 one-way out of LAX. JetBlue out of Long Beach would have been cheaper, but mom and dad were having their annual Indy 500 party that day, so I didn't want to hit them up for a ride to Long Beach. For LAX, you can just hop on Airport Bus of Bakersfield -- a company that figures prominently in a number of my good-karma travel stories.

As for airport security, they were great at both JFK and LAX. In New York, I was flagged as high-risk when I checked in since I'd bought a one-way ticket the night before. They told me to skip regular security to go right to another place -- so I had to pass really long lines to get to super security, where the line was short and everyone was thorough and nice.
- posted by Amy @ 5/27/2003 11:49:00 AM