Saturday, February 07, 2004
Saturday Quickies
Last year we learned about the gay penguins at the aquarium at Coney Island, now we find out there's another gay penguin couple at the Central Park Zoo. The New York Times story, with the subhead "Homosexuality Among Animals is Common," runs through a few other non "Roman-Catholic" animal sex practices. (Though no mention of the crazy teen-aged otters at the Monterey Bay Aquarium who were observed engaging in necrophilia for days with a dead otter corpse 10 years ago.)
Charlie at Manhattan User's Guide writes about the let-down that is the new NYC "mall" at the Time Warner Center and nails on the head one of the beautiful elements that makes the city great. He observes that "New York derives a lot of its energy from fresh, absurd, or delightful juxtapositions." The new mall has none of that but loads of traditional Mall of America retailers. "Until then, give us the slush, and trucks beeping as they back up, and the promise of something unlikely."
My friend Koll e-mailed me a story in the Orange County Register with the Southern California quality of life report card done by the region's main (though totally toothless) planning agency. The grades are poor: traffic D-; housing D+; education D; income C-; air quality C (but slipping); jobs B-; crime B. A couple facts I found particularly alarming: public transportation accounts for only 5 percent of total work trips and 2 percent of all trips in Southern California. And then there's this in the education category: "Fifty-six percent of the Hispanic adults in the region did not have high-school diplomas, compared with 20 percent of the African-Americans and 10 percent of the non-Hispanic whites. Southern California had the smallest percentage of adults with high-school diplomas among the country's nine biggest metro areas and the second smallest percentage of adults with bachelor's degrees." (The OC Register's archives are a nightmare, but the full SCAG report is here.)
The Shifted Librarian reports that the BBC is offering a spyware-free version of Real radio player.
Thursday, February 05, 2004
Exactly Like Bakersfield
Forgot to pass along my favorite moment from that breakfast sponsored by The Week. The German reporter seated next to me asked where I was from originally. "California," I said. Her eyes lit up and she said "Oh," expectantly and smiled. "No," I shook my head. "It's not what you're thinking. I grew up in the wrong part of California." "Oh, I see," she said. "Like Bakersfield?"
Wednesday, February 04, 2004
Comparing Freston Reports
Media reports from that breakfast thing I attended yesterday: The Financial Times was surprised "no one questioned the sincerity of the normally prurient MTV's new-found prudishness." AP leads with "MTV says it got punk'd by Janet Jackson," while the Reuters story gets Freston in an interview saying that Justin Timberlake was "informed of the stunt just moments before he took the stage."
I don't mean to be dwelling on this thing, so just a few other quick things. I think it's just as bad that Jackson/Timberlake pretended it was an accident and then lied about it after the show. Also, what's with Jackson saying "unfortunately the whole thing went wrong in the end"? What does that mean? Because she is telling us that she meant to reveal her breast and that she did mean to trick MTV, CBS, the NFL, etc. So was it the audience reaction that went wrong?
Tuesday, February 03, 2004
Don's Band Gets an Offer!
My little brother, who has been playing in bands since he was in junior high school, just called to say his band Squatcho has been offered a production deal to make a record. Apparently a production deal is the next-best thing to a real record contract and is nothing to sneeze at. They'd be working on the project with Greg Fidelman, who Don was especially excited to meet since the guy worked on the Jet album. So join me in wishing him good thoughts that this turns into something great.
Listen to a snippet from Squatcho's Nutcracker, which was included on the soundtrack for Paintball the Movie.
A Birthday MUG
Happy birthday to Manhattan User's Guide. Normally this would be rude, but you look older than your age. MUG is only 1 year old. If you live in New York, you should be on the list for this free daily newsletter.
Laughing at Hitler
"The Producers" might make a run in Germany? (via G.A. Cerny) Reminds me of the time my friend Lois unsuccessfully tried to explain "Hogan's Heroes" to some German tourists.
Brooklyn Links
Kevin at Forgotton NY e-mails with a link to SmallTownBrooklyn, which looks like it's in the process of re-launching with new maps of all the Brooklyn neighborhoods between Brooklyn Bridge and Prospect Park.
My School Board Sends Book Banners Packing
The Kern High School District last night voted down a petition to ban Toni Morrison's "The Bluest Eyes." The mother who is leading the fight for the ban gathered 750 signatures, started her own book-banning website, and vows to keep up the fight. From the Bakersfield Californian story:
Morrison's "The Bluest Eye" is a 200-page novel about a young black girl, Pecola Breedlove, her abusive family and the 1940s America around her. Pecola desperately wishes for blue eyes so she can be beautiful. In a drunken fit of desperation, her father rapes and impregnates Pecola. After she miscarries, the 11-year-old slowly spins into insanity.
The controversy started almost three months ago, when East High teacher Jean Nilssen assigned the novel to her 11th grade honors English class. Porter's daughter, Sarah, brought the book home to her mother and said it made her uncomfortable.
"The Bluest Eye" describes a woman's orgasm, Pecola's rape by her father and a husband making unpleasurable love to his listless wife. It wasn't the events themselves that irritated Porter, she said, it was the graphic details Morrison included.
"Knowing about incest and pedophilia is not the same thing as knowing what happens to a man's anatomy when he's raping his daughter," she said Monday night.
Porter says the book is obscene. Whether "great literature" or not, it's inappropriate for children, she said. Besides, she added, teachers are not counselors -- they're not qualified to guide students through a discussion of rape, sex and incest.
Porter was offered an alternate assignment, as is policy, administrators said.
But Porter wasn't satisfied. She didn't want any students reading the book in class. She filed a formal complaint with the district, forcing Hatcher to create a committee to review the novel. She also wrote a letter to the district accusing Nilssen of sexual harassment by assigning the novel.
Kind of makes you want to go out and buy a copy of "The Bluest Eyes," doesn't it? And in case you don't know, the Kern High School District is where I got my small-town public high school education. It's also where my mom worked as an English teacher until she retired just a few years ago.
MTV's Freston Blames Janet
I just got back from the odd little newsmaker breakfast hosted by The Week and The Conference Board. Getting right to it, I thought there was a little bit of news made right at the start. Tom Freston, the chairman and CEO of MTV Networks, blamed no one but Janet Jackson for her peek-a-boobie Super Bowl special. From my notebook:
"We didn't think we were taking a risk with Janet Jackson," Freston said. "Nothing in her career indicated we would have ended up where we did last Sunday."Freston said that MTV, which produced the half-time show, had no prior knowledge and that an investigation by the FCC will prove him correct. Later in the morning, Freston also made an interesting remark about whether his properties (among his company's 93 networks around the world are MTV and VH1) have missed the boat for music downloads. His quote:
"By no means do we think it's too late because it's still in its nascent stages."OK, so I did mention this event was a little weird. It started at 8:30 a.m. at the Four Seasons restaurant. The speakers were seated around the tiny pool which was covered by a hard Plexiglas-looking thing. ("I'm walking on water," moderator Harold Evans said as he paced among the panelists.) Maybe 200 or so people were there, very much a business and media bunch. Tina Brown, Maria Bartiromo, Myron Kandel were in the audience along with the likes of Nick Denton, Jeff Jarvis, Nick Gillespie and Liz Spiers. The thing was sponsored by Altria (cough, Philip Morris) and UBS. Lots of suits and schmoozing. I was seated between a reporter for the German edition of the Financial Times and a very nice woman in a fur hat who works in the fashion industry and admitted she has a foot in the socialite circle. She kindly pointed out to me who was whom among the professional socialites in the audience.
I think the weirdest part of the event was when they started taking question from callers (as if this thing was televised or something?) and the big voice of a rather irritated Jack Valenti filled the room. I thought Mr. Head of the MPAA might have merely been grumpy for agreeing to do this call at 6:30 a.m. California time - but no, he said he was in an ice storm in D.C. Valenti first ignored Evans' "lovely question" and then went on some rant that I failed to comprehend. Finally he got to a nugget that got the audience's attention. He said he was recently at CalTech where he was shown a new computer technology of some sort that allowed the user to download an entire DVD in 5 seconds. The CalTech professor (Dr. Neuman, I think) told Valenti that a company with enough money could bring that technology to market in 18 months to 2 years.
I should mention again that I was at this event solely on the invitation of weekly magazine The Week, whose PR department thought it would be good publicity to invite some bloggers to these events. And as my fur-hat wearing friend informed me, the only reason The Week has been holding these events is for the publicity.
Talking Risk with ... The Week
I'm off to Midtown this morning to attend a meeting of bigwigs from MTV, Vivendi and New Line Cinema who will be talking about risk. I was invited by The Week -- ready for this? -- because I have a blog.
Monday, February 02, 2004
Anonymous Sources
I've been biting my tongue on a rambling rant about how the BBC has handled the whole Andrew Gilligan reporting mess. In short, I think the BBC screwed up by pretending their reporter didn't screw up in the first place. Tony Blair's people, despite what the Hutton report said last week, surely did some measure of wrong and weapons inspector David Kelly is not without blame either. Plenty of guilt to spread around.
But I'd like to use this mess as a jumping off point to discuss some things about anonymous sources. As a reporter, I've used them. As an editor, I've approved them sometimes knowing, other times not knowing who the source was. As a random newsroom flunkie, I often learned the names of other reporters' sources because other careless editors decided to banter the name about in the newsroom forgetting that names sometimes leak out that way.
I've also been used as an anonymous source and one time in particular I was burned in a way that really gave me pause about how many unethical or sloppy reporters there are out there. This one time in particular I talked to a reporter because we had mutual friends. The first time he called me I was in a bar and I joked that even if I was going to talk on the record, he wouldn't be able to use it because I was close to drunk anyhow and therefore unreliable. I did indeed make it clear in that call and all that followed that I was not to be quoted. I gave him names of people to talk to, in some cases phone numbers. I gave him the background and told him what I expected several people would say or not say. I even gave him questions that I would ask if I were doing the story myself. This went on for days and he kept getting nowhere. Before his final deadline he called me begging for me to go on the record. He even read back (hello?!) direct quotes of things I said that he now wanted to use because he had nothing else. Absolutely not, I said. But the story comes out and there are all the quotes he wanted to use, attributed to an anonymous source. The adjectives used to describe me weren't totally honest. I called him and he claims he misunderstood me.
I knew he lied and why. He burned me but didn't care. He knew I wouldn't go public because I wanted to remain anonymous, so who was I going to tell? In retrospect, I realize I should have called his editor.
Now think about weapons inspector Kelly. He speaks to sloppy BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan and gets anonymity from him. Supposedly Kelly (who killed himself as this all unfolded in July) heard the Gilligan report and thought it sounded close to what he had said, but not close enough. So Kelly thinks Gilligan has another source. Then another BBC reporter calls Kelly for his opinion on the first report -- neither of them knowing Kelly is the source for the first report. Then still later a third BBC reporter for yet another BBC show calls Kelly and uses him as an anonymous source to comment on the first two (Kelly) statements.
So even if all parties involved are acting with good faith (and Gilligan, in his second testimony for the Hutton hearings conceded he made mistakes) it would be possible for the same anonymous source to "confirm" his own facts or theories several times over.
And sadly this isn't exclusively a BBC problem. I bet if you gathered together any five reporters -- even from the same publication -- you'd be unlikely to get them to agree what "off the record" means. Some reporters take that promise to mean they will protect the source's identity even from their own editor and a judge if ordered to produce it. Other reporters seem to think that they can do anything with the information short of print the source's name next to the quote. It really runs the gamut.
You've probably heard enough from me on this, but here's a couple of other things on this topic:
* the BBC policies on anonymous sources (pdf file - scroll to page 24)
* details of the Kelly/Gilligan flap as it unfolded in the Brit papers last summer. The whole thing happened to hit the fan just as we arrived in England for the annual visit with the in-laws. I blogged it then -- and as I just looked back on it, I see I was just as ticked off about the anonymous sources thing back then.
Great RSS Site for Treos
For the past couple weeks I've been using the Bloglines mobile site for RSS and the news is good. This is a great way to read your RSS feeds on the go. No glitches to report at all. It's a clean and fast design. And free. (Original tip to Shifted Librarian.) Earlier I tried Hand/RSS but hated it.
Even Medieval Knights Love America!
Instead of watching the Super Bowl last night, we set out for Medieval Times in New Jersey to celebrate a young lad's upcoming birthday. Luckily our knight won the big tournament. At the very end he rides around waving a giant American flag. Who knew the best Medieval knights had the exact same flag as us?
The kids totally loved the show, though it was pretty expensive even before all the price gouging on the extras. (They did little things like send the cocktail waitress around for drink orders. The kids got their drinks - delivered in some fancy plastic horse mugs - and we paid for their drinks along with the wine for the grown-ups. Then a few minutes later, the regular server comes around with pitchers of soft drinks that turned out were already included in the admission price.)
Cooler Than Thou
Village Voice reviews the new Tsar offering: "Straight"/"The Creature in Disguise." It's written by someone who apparently likes the band but loves his own writing even more, as my husband says. I think the review is positive, but I'm not nearly hip enough to translate.
You Say Shield, I Say Ouch
So apparently Janet Jackson was wearing an inappropriately named "nipple shield" when she was exposed at the Super Bowl yesterday. It looks like a metal bar goes through a hole in your nipple to hold the thing in place. So if it was really a "shield" wouldn't you think it was supposed to be there to say, oh, prevent a metal bar from going through your nipple? (link via Gawker and Vivid Blurry.)
AZ Really is Closed
It seems AZ, the worst bar in New York, really is closed. I thought someone was being funny by getting Citysearch to list the place as shuttered. But this morning I saw the New York Times did indeed report the place has been shut down for a renovation. (link via Paul Frankenstein and Ken Goldstein.)
And We're Back
Stop the crying, the hamsters are running again and the site once again has power. Sorry 'bout that little blip.
Sunday, February 01, 2004
Computer Messiness
The silly folks at Sprint sent out a software update for my Treo 600 on Friday. (Correction: It was Wednesday or Thursday.) I've spent many hours since then trying to remove it from my device so I can use it again. I've finally purged it and got old data back bit by bit, though I think all my contacts are wiped out for good along with any pictures taken after January 3. But considering where I was marooned even earlier this morning, I'm happy enough with what I've got.
The moral of my story is -- don't install an update until a lot of other suckers have gone through the trouble-shooting process first.
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