Tweet Tweet

After examining some 300,000 Twitter accounts, a Harvard Business School professor reported last week that 10 percent of the service’s users account for more than 90 percent of tweets. The study dovetails with recent analysis by the media research firm Nielsen asserting that 60 percent of Twitter users do not return from one month to the next. Both findings suggest that, thus far, Twitter has been considerably better at signing up users than keeping them.

People who sign up for Twitter, post once, then never return. – By John Swansburg and Jeremy Singer-Vine – Slate Magazine

After a few weeks of reading celebrity tweets I have (again) stopped using Twitter. There’s better stuff to read. (See the next post, for example.)

June 9th, a national holiday for sure

Donald Duck, Cole Porter and Les Paul!

Lester William Polfus is 94 today. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as Les Paul.

The name Les Paul is synonymous with the electric guitar. As a player, inventor and recording artist, Paul has been an innovator from the early years of his life. Born Lester William Polfus in 1915 in Waukesha, Wisconsin, Paul built his first crystal radio at age nine – which was about the time he first picked up a guitar. By age 13 he was performing semi-professionally as a country-music guitarist and working diligently on sound-related inventions. In 1941, Paul built his first solid-body electric guitar, and he continued to make refinements to his prototype throughout the decade. He also worked on refining the technology of sound, developing revolutionary engineering techniques such as close miking, echo delay and multitracking. All the while he busied himself as a bandleader who could play both jazz and country music.
…

In 1952, Les Paul introduced the first eight-track tape recorder (designed by Paul and marketed by Ampex) and, more significantly for the future of rock and roll, launched the solid-body electric guitar that bears his name. Built and marketed by Gibson, with continuous advances and refinements from Paul in such areas as low-impedance pickup technology, the Les Paul guitar became a staple instrument among discerning rock guitarists.

Robert S. McNamara is 93.

Dick Vitale is 70 today, baby! Not exactly a diaper dandy.

Michael J. Fox is 48.

West Wing producer Aaron Sorkin is 48.

Two-time nominee for the Best Actor Oscar, Johnny Depp is 46.

Tedy Bruschi is 36.

Natalie Portman is 28.

Cole Porter was born in Peru, Indiana, on June 9th in 1891.

Mr. Porter wrote the lyrics and music for his songs, and to both he brought such an individuality of style that a genre known as “the Cole Porter song” became recognized.

The hallmarks of a typical Porter song were lyrics that were urbane or witty and a melody with a sinuous, brooding quality. Some of his best-known songs in this vein were “What Is This Thing Called Love,” “Night and Day,” “Love for Sale” and “Begin the Beguine.”

But an equally typical and equally recognizable Porter song would have a simple, bouncy melody and a lyric based on a long and entertaining list of similarities, opposite or contrasts. “Let’s Do It” ticked off the amiable amatory habits of birds, flowers, crustacea, fish, insects, animals and various types of humans, while “You’re the Top” was an exercise in the creation of superlatives that included such items as “the nimble tread of the feet of Fred Astaire,” “Garbo’s salary” and “Mickey Mouse.”

Still a third type of Porter song was exclamatory in both lyrics and melody. “Just One of Those Things,” “From This Moment On” and “It’s All Right With Me” were instances.

Obituary, New York Times (1964)

Donald Duck

Night and Day was one of the NPR 100, their list of the 100 most important American musical works of the 20th century. The first note is repeated 35 times.

Donald Duck is 75 today. He debuted in the Disney Silly Symphony cartoon “The Wise Little Hen” on this date in 1934. (Donald Duck is one of three Disney characters with an “official” birthday. The others are Mickey and Minnie, who debuted on November 18, 1928.)

Donald Duck actually appeared in more theatrical cartoons than Mickey Mouse — 128. Donald’s middle name is Fauntleroy.

Half a Tank – Riding Shotgun

“Half A Tank is a summer-long quest to find images and stories of people whose lives have been altered by a flattened economy. Starting from home in the D.C. suburbs, Theresa Vargas and Michael Williamson are traveling around the country to experience how people are coping, struggling, even flourishing as we all reconsider how we live.”

Good stuff. Begin with the first post — Half a Tank: Along Recession Road. At the bottom of each post, before the comments, is a link to the next.

Quarterback Princess

Six-year-old Kiley has quarterbacked her co-ed flag football team this spring. I thought we needed some photos (hard to get, so many games have been rained out). Click on the image below for a larger version and two other photos of our very own Quarterback Princess (eat your heart out Tami Maida/Helen Hunt).

Quarterback Princess
Quarterback Princess

Photo 2
Photo 3

Kiley is wearing — and apparently chewing — a mouthguard. Photos taken yesterday by Auntie Jill.

A triple crown winner after all

Yours truly made a much procrastinated trip to the dentist this morning. Oh, I’ve been to the dentist regularly for cleanings and a few restorations. Even had a wisdom tooth removed in December. But today’s visit was for two crowns that I’ve been told I needed for a few years now. Between the anxiety and the cost, I had put them off.

After he’d ground away enough of tooth #2 and tooth #3 the dentist could see tooth #4 needed a crown, too.

As my loving daughter Jill wrote, “Is that what they mean by Triple Crown winner?”

($2485 if you must know. Insurance pays half. Last month it was my car (including a timing belt). In April it was my trees that needed pruning. Recession my a**.)

Idle thought

Apple may need to reconsider its new product announcements.

Apple keeps new products a secret and then make a presentation to keynote techie conferences, like today. The problem is, with so many bloggers, the speculation and rumor-mongering runs rampant for the weeks leading up to the event. Like Christmas, there’s almost no way the reality can match the wishes.

Disappointment seemed much in the air during today’s event, despite many product improvements and price REDUCTIONS.

BTW, the new iPhone software (available next Wednesday) has a potentially important feature. If you lose your iPhone and are a member of Apple’s MobileMe, you will be able to locate your phone (on a map) from any internet browser. The software will tell you where the phone is, send a message to the phone (with a sound signal that can be heard even if the phone is muted). The message will tell how to contact you. You can also, if you wish, delete all the private information on the phone (that is, you can delete it remotely). Should you get the phone back you can restore the data, of course.

UPDATE: For existing iPhone 3G owners an upgrade will require a new two year contract and an $18 activation fee, plus a surcharge of $200 if you upgrade before eligible. (It appears eligibility for an upgrade occurs at 17 months, or at least that’s true in my case.)

If you’re a new customer off the street the phones will be $99, $199 and $299.

Good-bye Tiger Stadium

“Two machines went to work today on the what remains of the old stadium. One tore through the stadium structure, and the other picked up the falling debris and moved it to the side.”

Freep.com | Detroit Free Press

It’s appropriate that they tear it down, but I can’t say I’m happy about it. I went to a lot of Tigers or Lions games at Briggs/Tiger Stadium — with Dad, with Mom, with Grandpa, with Grandma and Grandpa and my sister, with my uncle, with Dad and my uncles, with my then fiancé and with my then father-in-law. I saw Mickey Mantle’s first career grand slam, and was there one of the times the Mick put it out of the park onto Trumbull Street. I was present when Denny McLain won his 29th game (of 30) in 1968. (The only time since 1938 a pitcher has won 30 games in a season.)

Good memories.

The mind boggles

“A dropped watermelon may have led to the deadly shooting of a 6-year-old boy by his grandfather Sunday afternoon.”

ajc.com

“Two longtime friends today were accused of murdering a suspected drug dealer, dismembering the body, and then cooking the remains at a Walpole concrete business.”

The Boston Globe

Flight 447’s perfect storm

The gist of the accident appears pretty clear: Air France Flight 447 was victimized by a terrible storm.

How the airplane got into this storm, and what exactly happened once it got there, are two fascinating if perhaps unanswerable questions. The plane’s flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder — the proverbial black boxes — are apparently lodged amid undersea mountains, beneath thousands of feet of water. They may stay there forever.

And so we are left to speculate — as to how an experienced crew, at the controls of a $100 million jetliner, could have found itself in such deadly circumstances.

Pilot Patrick Smith speculates.

June Eighth

Barbara Bush is 84.

Jerry Stiller is 82. Stiller and Anne Meara have been married since 1954 and they are, of course, Ben and Amy Stiller’s parents.

Joan Alexandra Molinsky is 76. That’s Joan Rivers. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Barnard College.

Moondoggie is 73. James Darren to us; born James William Ercolani.

Nancy Sinatra is 69. Her boots have done a lot of walkin’.

Robbie Douglas is 65. That’s the second of “My Three Sons,” Don Grady.

Scott Adams (“Dilbert”) is 52.

Keenen Ivory Wayans is 51.

Julianna Margulies is 43.

Kanye West is 32.

Eddie Gaedel was born on this date in 1925. The 3-feet 7-inch Gaedel came to bat for the St. Louis Browns in 1951. He was, according to Browns owner Bill Veeck, “the best darn midget who ever played big-league ball.” As told in the first chapter of Veeck’s autobiography, Veeck as in Wreck — “When Eddie went into that crouch, his strike zone was just about visible to the naked eye. I picked up a ruler and measured it for posterity. It was 1½ inches. Marvelous.”

Frank Lloyd Wright was born on this date in 1867. PBS has a locator to the more than 60 Wright buildings open to the public. It includes building names, locations, photographs and maps.

Wright.jpg

For more than 70 years, Frank Lloyd Wright showed his countrymen new ways to build their homes and see the world around them. He created some of the most monumental, and some of the most intimate spaces in America. He designed everything: banks and resorts, office buildings and churches, a filling station and a synagogue, a beer garden and an art museum.

Bryce Canyon National Park (Utah)

… was designated a national monument on this date in 1923. It became a national park in 1928.

Bryce Canyon

Bryce Canyon, famous for its worldly unique geology, consists of a series of horseshoe-shaped amphitheaters carved from the eastern edge of the Paunsaugunt Plateau in southern Utah. The erosional force of frost-wedging and the dissolving power of rainwater have shaped the colorful limestone rock of the Claron Formation into bizarre shapes including slot canyons, windows, fins, and spires called “hoodoos.”

Bryce Canyon National Park

Bryce is named for Mormon pioneer Ebenezer Bryce.

Twelve Angry Actors

Albuquerque’s Adobe Theater is presenting “Twelve Angry Men” through June 28th at its intimate venue on Fourth just north of Alameda. NMK and Donna attended the performance last night.

This is a tough play to present I’d think. Many of those most likely to attend have undoubtedly seen (many times perhaps) the classic 1957 movie with Henry Fonda, Lee J. Cobb, Martin Balsam, E.G. Marshall, Jack Warden and Jack Klugman. (There was a made-for-TV version produced in 1997 with Jack Lemmon, George C. Scott, Ossie Davis, James Gandolfini, Tony Danza, Hume Cronyn and others. Watch both, but especially watch the 1957 version.) In any case, because those 52-year-old characterizations are such a part of pop culture, how does the amateur theater compete artistically?

At Adobe the actors portrayed the jurors a little more angry, a little more on the edge. The dialogue was Reginald Rose’s original, somewhat reorganized, but the tension, if possible, seemed more on the surface than I remember from either film. It being New Mexico, I half expected someone to pull a concealed weapon.

This, of course, may be the direction, or the most skillful these actors could be, but it came across a little less as jury room and a little more as barroom.

Still, an enjoyable time and recommended. When a movie costs $9 or more, seeing a play in a very small theater for $14 ($12 senior and student) is quite rewarding.

I wonder BTW when someone will rewrite the play as “Twelve Angry Women.” It seems to me the dynamic, even if the same biases were represented among the jurors, would be quite different with an all-female jury. Well-done it could be a striking antithesis with the classic movie.

Chrysler and GM and accidents yet-to-be

Under the terms of the rescue, NewChrysler would be freed of current and future lawsuits seeking money damages for injury (or death) caused by cars or trucks that were sold by “old” Chrysler before the sale deal took effect.  Millions of those cars, oif course, are still on the road.

If that provision remained intact, there is almost no doubt that it would be repeated in any deal to spare bankrupt General Motors Corp. from existing and future accident claims, thus affecting millions more cars and trucks now in use.

Keeping the victims from suing, their lawyers argue, is not only beyond the power of a bankruptcy court, but raises “an important constitutional issue” about cutting off legal rights of people who, as of now, have no idea that they may someday be hurt in an auto crash.

SCOTUSblog has more. Interesting look at due process.

Bank failure update

Number of banks closed 2003: 3

Number of banks closed 2004: 4

Number of banks closed 2005: 0

Number of banks closed 2006: 0

Number of banks closed 2007: 3

Number of banks closed last year: 25

Number of banks closed so far this year: 37

Number 37, the Bank of Lincolnwood in Lincolnwood, Illinois, was closed by the FDIC on Friday.

Those cheerleader moms

Via Sideline Chatter:

Two bits, four bits, six bits, a court date.

A grand jury in Wintersville, W.Va., has indicted Linda Tate, 47, on charges she used her computer to send nude pictures of her daughter’s cheerleading rival at Indian Creek High School, Wheeling’s WTRF-TV reported.

How’d she get the photos?

Another item from Sideline Chatter:

Question: Why do so many kids play soccer?

Answer: So they don’t have to watch it.

Big new role

A brief, interesting profile of Edie Falco, so different from Carmela. An excerpt:

Ten years ago I could have gotten breast cancer and would have been no less worthy of all this fancy treatment, but I wouldn’t have gotten it. My family’s like, ‘Shut up, just go to these doctors.’

“I would be whisked off to these rooms, while there are women in the waiting rooms in their hospital gowns looking down with their arms around a cup of tea, and it’s [deleted] heartbreaking, because that’s me, that’s the real me, that’s the me that I’ve been far longer than this other one. I feel like a fraud, because I feel like I should say, ‘No, I’ll wait in the waiting room like everybody else.’ But part of me is, ‘Take it, take what’s being handed to you.’

When the Thrill of Blogging Is Gone …

[M]any people start blogs with lofty aspirations — to build an audience and leave their day job, to land a book deal, or simply to share their genius with the world. Getting started is easy, since all it takes to maintain a blog is a little time and inspiration. So why do blogs have a higher failure rate than restaurants?

According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled.

From When the Thrill of Blogging Is Gone … , a brief New York Times article on the subject.

Best summing up of the day

Call this the rule of law, or protection against being expropriated, or sufficient constraints on executive power, but it adds up to roughly the same thing.  We strongly limited the power of the most powerful in our society – and this is in striking contrast to what happens in much of the rest of the world.

But over the past 20-30 years, we took our eye off this ball. 

Simon Johnson with a quick historical look at power and the rule of law.

Recommended — and it’ll just take you two or three minutes.