the art of writing is discovering what you believe
Do you know what never ceases to amaze me? Baggage claim. All of those bags sitting there! And you can just take one! And nobody checks which one you take! Or if you take the right number! Or if you were even on a flight!
I don’t know about other big airports, but I flew and and out of Atlanta many times over the 14+ years I lived there, and even before 9/11 changed everything, I had to demonstrate that the bags I was leaving with were mine before I could exit baggage claim.
Russia’s Bomber Force Resumes Long-Range Patrolling:
Russia’s strategic bombers have not ranged far from home since the collapse of the Soviet Union. But Vladimir Putin orders the resumption of long-range missions, mostly to give the American flyboys something to think about.
Life above the 47th parallel takes on a little extra thrill with news like that.
Now playing: Lustre from the album “Priest = Aura” by The Church
This opus — Index for the Atkinson theory of civilization — is quite a piece of work, not unlike it’s author I suppose. Keener (and funnier) minds than mine could sift through it for loads o’ funny. But take a look at a subject heading you know something about, and see what you find.
Did you know that AIDS was caused by the use of crack and amyl nitrate? Did you know that Greenpeace is a self-perpetuating scam? The decline of cricket is also detailed. His opinion of 9/11? “This attack was a Barbarian Raid signalling the start of hostilities that will only cease when the citizens of Western Civilization have all been killed or enslaved.”
This is the kind of thing that a. has to be monitored, in case whackos like this gain any mindshare outside their little mobs and b. debunked, less the credulous fall into its loathsome toils.
In sum, this is just another lengthy whinge about the loss of entitlement by an unbalanced and nostalgic nutter with a few topical bits added to give it wider appeal.
[via]
Conservative Calls for Bush to Name Himself ‘President for Life’:
On Aug. 3, a writer for Family Security Matters, a national security group associated with a conservative think tank, argued that President Bush should appoint himself “president for life” and “empty Iraq of Arabs and repopulate the country with Americans.”
Only if he then goes there to run it.
Business & Technology | Former whiz kid Andreessen isn’t done just yet | Seattle Times Newspaper:
[Marc Andreessen, t]he man who helped commercialize the Web rails at industries, from music labels to newspapers, for whining and wasting time before committing themselves to digital strategies.
“I’m astonished by some industries’ ability to sustain chronic pain to avoid acute pain,” he said. “You have to take drastic action.”
Talking Points Memo | Annals of Reporting:
[T]his morning I was alerted to an opinion column in the Los Angeles Times by Michael Skube, a journalism professor at Elon University. The sum of the piece is that the blogosphere is as rife with disputation as it is thin on information, or more specifically, reporting, writing that demands “time, thorough fact-checking and verification and, most of all, perseverance.”
[…]
I followed up noting my surprise that he didn’t seem to remember what he’d written in his own opinion column[…].To which I got this response: “I said I did not refer to you in the original. Your name was inserted late by an editor who perhaps thought I needed to cite more examples … ”
And this is from someone who teaches journalism?
Perhaps I’m naive. But it surprises me a great deal that a professor of journalism freely admits that he allows to appear under his own name claims about a publication he concedes he’s never read.
Actually, if you look at what he says, it seems Skube’s editor at the Times oped page didn’t think he had enough specific examples in his article decrying our culture of free-wheeling assertion bereft of factual backing. Or perhaps any examples. So the editor came up with a few blogs to mention and Skube signed off. And Skube was happy to sign off on the addition even though he didn’t know anything about them.
I remember this guy when he was at the Atlanta papers: 10 years haven’t improved him. What’s ironic about this is the claim that bloggers don’t have editors to keep them on the reservations, that discipline and true attention to detail can only be learned at a Real Newspaper, preferably after getting a degree from a reputable J school.
So a professor at a J school, who used to work at a big newspaper, allows an editor to insert copy into an OpEd, copy he doesn’t know enough about the subject to object to, and we’re supposed to take him seriously?
Excellent.
Technorati Tags: journamalism
Pretty innocuous, coupla spelling errors, and factual corrections for clarity.
Just had a jerk seller issue an unpaid item strike against me for an item he refused to ship. On the one hand, is it worth a dollar (the closing price of the item) to avoid this kind of thing? On the other, why reward someone who is obviously a chiseler?
Hope he finds his dream local buyer. That, or learns to write a factual item listing.
[update] And eBay removed it when I explained what had happened. The fact that it was my first in 100+ transactions may have helped.