Saturday, May 16, 2009

Weekend Tids and Bits

 

Help To Keep Your, uh Chin Up came Thursday from Pfizer, Inc., which announced that Viagra and Lipitor would be among the 70 widely used drugs it would make available for free to those who have lost their jobs since January 1 and have been taking one of the drugs for three months or more. Cynics groused that Pfizer would use the tax write-off to build brand loyalty and avoid trimming its production; Pfizer, the world’s largest drug company, says it’s just trying to help folks who are down on their luck. More information is at 866-706-2400.

 

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Hasta la vista seems to be what illegal immigrant are saying in these tough employment times, according to figures released by the Mexican government. Emigration from Mexico to other countries declined about 25 percent for the year ending in August 2008. That’s about 226,000 folks who decided they’d rather be unemployed at home than in the United States, since the USA is the overwhelming destination for those leaving Mexico legally or otherwise. While Americans are reacquainting themselves with lawnmowers and discovering that you don’t have to speak Spanish to put up drywall, experts say this is all a blip. When prosperity returns, so will the illegal workers.

 

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A New Game of Chicken is emerging, and we don’t mean the kind involving head-on hot rods. Turns out that an increasing number of otherwise sane urban folk are starting to keep a few chickens in the backyard for eggs, companionship (no, I’m not kidding) and the occasional Final Dinner Invitation. That’s a problem in some areas, where zoning laws call fowls foul; in others, zoning laws are quiet on the subject, one lawmakers never expected to confront. Whether you think this is the Next Big Thing or the last straw in declining neighbor relations, check out Backyard Poultry at http://www.backyardpoultrymag.com/ . The featured article in the April/May issue is Chickens Make Great Neighbors by Peter Brophy.

 

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China Puritan No Mao it seems with the development of Love Land, a sexual theme park in Chongqing, according to the UK’s Guardian. Chairman Mao is said to have enjoyed many a roll in the bird’s nest, but his Cultural Revolution made the Puritans of American fame look positively libertine. The Guardian says the park is set to open in October and will feature naked human sculpture, giant genitalia and information on technique and safe sex.

 

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Friday, May 15, 2009

A Tortured Republican Argument

 

The United States of America routinely tortured suspected terrorists during the administration of Republican George W. Bush, in flagrant violation of American law and tradition.

 

And it’s all Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s fault.

 

The Republican National Committee’s website at gop.com, has a page titled “Nancy’s Debunked Denials,” where the text begins in boldface: “New Intelligence Documents Prove That Pelosi Has Not Been Honest About What She Knew And When She Knew It.”

 

The Republican reasoning is that since Pelosi knew about what the RNC stubbornly calls “enhanced interrogation techniques” and failed to stop them, she is complicit in their use.

 

And since she’s complicit in the use of torture, she shouldn’t make it a “political issue,” which is how Republicans prefer to describe conduct that would be a crime if it took place in a police station or jail.

 

The GOP says Pelosi learned about the torture (oops! Enhanced Interrogation) in a Fall 2002 briefing. Pelosi says that briefing’s only mention of water boarding, the torture technique of choice, was that it wasn’t being used.

 

Thoughtful Republicans – there must be a few somewhere – might recall that the “what knew/when knew” query reached its sloganeering peak in the Watergate burglary hearings about another GOP guardian of our liberties, Richard M. Nixon. But let’s not focus on the past, especially the past in which Republican operatives broke the law.

 

We should stay focused on the present in which Republican operatives broke the law because the Democrats failed to stop them.

 

Never mind that Democrats were in the minority in 2002. Today’s Minority Leader John Boehner, Republican of Ohio, is quoted in Wednesday’s New York Times as sayingIt’s pretty clear that they were well aware of what these enhanced interrogation techniques were; they were well aware that they’d been used; and it seems to me that they want to have it both ways. You can’t have it both ways.”

 

Sure you can John. You can do the crime, and when you’re caught, you can blame the cops for not preventing you.

 

Not to be outdone by the John Boehner Theory of Criminal Law, Republican Senator Kit Bond of Missouri thundered from his web site: “Instead of prosecuting or persecuting, our country should be supporting our intelligence professionals who work to keep us safe.”

 

Senator Bond’s four-paragraph statement made no mention of who would keep us safe from our intelligence professionals.

Let’s just say that when looking for an answer to that question, the present Republican Party doesn’t immediately spring to mind.

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Thursday, May 14, 2009

Wanted: Editors

(Proofreaders Need Not Apply)

 

Once upon a time in a place called Journalism, there were editors.

 

Editors were powerful. It was they who decided what was important enough for print or broadcast, and how important it was in relation to everything else that competed for attention.

 

Editors were wise. They had lived long enough to spot most frauds, whether it was the kind that got elected or the kind that had a sure-fire investment scheme.

 

Editors could be blunt. Louis Clifford, city editor of The Cleveland Press, told a cemetery owner who complained about a story on vandalized graves, “We’ll run our newspaper and you run your God-damned cemetery.” The damp-behind-everything cub who had written the story won’t ever forget that.

 

Editors could also teach, threaten, cajole and demand until they got more excellence out of you than even your mother thought might be there.

 

But editors weren’t immortal, and they’ve joining the long, sad line of the Pre-Internet Old shuffling into darkness to make way for the Insistent Internet New.

 

The number of eyeballs that pass on a story before publication is often just the pair belonging to the writer. The sense of what ought to be published and what should be ignored has given way to the fickle guidance of focus groups and consultants whose only bedrock principle is that the check clears. They are offering guidance to editors so green they need a note from their parents to work the overnight shift.

 

You can see the evidence all around you. Here’s the mighty Associated Press on its internet front page proclaiming itself as “the essential global news network,” telling us that in Clarksburg, W. Va., mail delivery “to seven homes on Milford Street was halted because of the 20-pound  terrier.” That’s the news, except that the dog is named Cozmo, he hasn’t bitten anyone and his owners are looking to find him a new home.

 

Maybe he can become a web editor.

 

Online readers of the Tucson (Ariz.) Citizen had their lives enriched May 11 with the news that police arrested a woman in Clearwater, Fla., for being naked while knocking on a stranger’s door to ask for cigarettes. That was another AP story, although it was first reported May 8 by the St. Petersburg Times.

 

Maybe the Tucson editors were just being prepared in case the woman, who was charged with disorderly conduct, decides to hitchhike naked to Tucson.

 

A Kalamazoo (Mich.) Gazette report on May 11 that an Otsego woman had died in a chain saw accident while cutting a tree with her husband was legitimate local coverage. The AP ran a much shorter version and it appeared the same day on wltx.com in Columbia, S.C.

 

Maybe the folks at WLTX were just interested in promoting chainsaw safety.

 

And maybe this is all just the grumbling of an old has-been who doesn’t understand that the Age of The Internet has made us all editors.

 

But if that’s the case, we’re sure doing a lousy job.

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Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Barn Doors and Newspapers

 

 

Alarmed after finally noticing that readers and advertisers were out of the barn, the American newspaper industry has thought long and hard about what to do.

 

The emerging consensus is that it needs to design a better barn door.

 

Most designs lean heavily on subway turnstiles for inspiration – no pay, no service. It’s a concept simple enough for most newspaper executives to understand, which is a large part of its attraction.

 

Where the emerging designs are weakest is in a nagging little detail – getting readers and advertisers now frolicking in the fields of hypertext to want to come back in the barn.

 

As posted on Poynter Online’s Romenesko, a May 8 MediaNews memo from Dean Singleton and Judy Lodovic to their many minions embraces the turnstile, noting “First, we continue to do an injustice to our print subscribers and create perceptions that our content has no value by putting all of our print content online for free. Not only does this erode our print circulation, it devalues the core of our business - the great local journalism we (and only we) produce on a daily basis.

 

Although coming from MediaNews brass, the sentiments are a safe bet to get embraced at other media companies, where doing an injustice has also become unpopular at about the same pace as it became unprofitable.

 

The memo goes on in MarketSpeak, but one quote stands out “To be clear, the brand value proposition to the consumer is that the newspaper is a product, whether in print or online, which must be paid for.

 

Newspapers are compilations of the news of the day, whether that is a change of government or the price of broccoli. For readers, they compiled events and information that would be difficult or impossible for most readers to match. For advertisers, they compiled an audience, some of whom might be thinking of broccoli with dinner tonight.

 

Both readers and advertisers might grumble, but they paid up because there was no other practical way.  They stayed in the barn, and when they strayed with alternative media or direct mail, they came back.

 

That’s changing.

 

For readers, gathering – and often, publishing -- information is easy, quick and cheap. The old saw “Freedom of the press belongs to he who owns one,” is true with a vengeance. Just about everyone owns the means to distribute information widely, which is the same tool used to gather it.

For advertisers trying to peddle broccoli, it’s no longer required to pay for all the readers who don’t cook, or those who do but hate broccoli. Online ads after the first click are by definition viewed by those who might be interested in whatever you’re trying to sell. And if you have your own web site, regular customers will come to you for information instead of you sending it unbidden to them.

 

Newspaper brass should ponder that scribes in centuries long past once had a lucrative trade, since they could both read and write and a largely illiterate population had to use them to communicate at a distance. And then change in the form of widespread literacy came along.

 

Scribes disappeared.

 

Change has come again.

 

Newspapers. . .?

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Monday, May 11, 2009

The Virginia Problem

 

Virginia was readmitted to the Union on January 26, 1870, closing a chapter on the Civil War and Reconstruction, and opening the guerilla warfare between Virginia and Yankees that continues to this day.

 

After four days behind Virginia’s lines visiting a granddaughter, I’m able to report on the main Virginia strategy for the South To Rise Again. Having failed to kill sufficient Yankees with bullets and bombs, they are resorting to politeness and charm.

 

It is insidious and evil and effective. Consider:

 

Having spent my adult life in Chicago, New York City and New York-suburban Summit, New Jersey, I have the typical Yankee driver’s reflex upon seeing a pedestrian enter a crosswalk – accelerate. When I walk, the same background instincts teach me to avoid crosswalks and instead cross mid-block, walking aggressively into traffic at a steady pace.

 

It is a calming and natural a part of life, and occasionally death when either motorist or pedestrian lose their timing and verve.

 

But go to Virginia, say Harrisonburg, and even think you might consider crossing the street and cars immediately stop in both directions. And they do this with evil intent whether or not you are in a crosswalk, some of the drivers adding insult to injury by smiling and wishing you well.

 

Yes, and in broad daylight, too, so brazen are they in their politeness.

 

Their evil is present in their speech as well, and I’m not talking about the accent, with which men, women and children of all ages flog innocent vowels in endless torment. That’s just your ordinary everyday evil.

 

It’s the forms of address that strike Yankee ears with supreme evil intent. If you are male and not noticeably dead, your name is Sir. You may insist that your name is Larry, or Jim or John, but the only response you’ll generate is “Yes, Sir.” Women are subjected to the same cruelty, but in their case the verbal bludgeon is Ma’am.

 

Try to befriend a Virginian by explaining that to Yankee sensibilities, “Sir” and “Ma’am” are reserved for judges, parole officers and cops you’re trying to talk out of a speeding ticket. You can conclude the mini-lecture by saying “…so just call me Larry, please.”

 

“Yes Sir, Mr. Larry!” is their inevitable cruel rejoinder.

 

For women, the title of torment is “Miss,” as in “Yes Ma’am, Miss Sally,” even though it’s clear to anyone with eyes that whatever old Sally may have missed in life, it wasn’t her opportunities caloric or carnal.

 

 

There are many, many more forms of abuse that visiting Yankees must endure in Virginia, including inquiries about your health made by persons who aren’t peddling life insurance or hoping for a lead on an apartment that might soon be vacant. Those details, while gruesome, all contribute to the force of the overall attack.

 

And the core of that attack is the hope that after days of being subjected to this assault of politeness and charm, you are corrupted by it and carry it back to your home in the North, with often lethal result.

 

New York City doesn’t keep statistics on how many pedestrian fatalities had recently visited Virginia. Nor does the NYPD tally how many otherwise unprovoked assaults were triggered by a flagrant “Yes Ma’am.”

 

But just spend some time in the Old Dominion and ask yourself (politely) if they were all really accidents.

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