“Today is Katie Couric’s last day as anchor of the CBS Evening News. Couric received $15 million dollars for each of the five years she held the coveted position. As Michael Massing at the Columbia Journalism Review calculated, this number is more than the combined amount NPR spends each year on its two biggest shows, Morning Edition and All Things Considered.”
Stay Out of My Dropbox
As a recent but wholly enamored user of DropBox — that is, I was enamored until the security B.S. became known — I found this interesting. What is private and what is “who cares” anyway?
It’s from Susan Orlean who writes the Free Range blog. You need to read the whole thing (it’s only three paragraphs), but I liked this line:
“In fact, most of what I store there is so boring I can hardly read it myself, so it’s hard to picture it titillating a Dropbox programmer. (Note to the programmer now reading my files: can you remind me when my son’s next soccer game is? I think I uploaded the schedule last week. Thank you.)”
Yes, the Virginia Sweeties sports schedule matrix is in my DropBox — how else could I find it on my two Macs, iPad and iPhone. But my financial files are no longer.
Most provocative line of the day
“As a kind of masochistic experiment, the other day I tweeted ‘#TwitterMakesYouStupid. Discuss.’ It produced a few flashes of wit (‘Give a little credit to our public schools!’); a couple of earnestly obvious points (‘Depends who you follow’); some understandable speculation that my account had been hacked by a troll; a message from my wife (‘I don’t know if Twitter makes you stupid, but it’s making you late for dinner. Come home!’); and an awful lot of nyah-nyah-nyah (‘Um, wrong.’ ‘Nuh-uh!!’). Almost everyone who had anything profound to say in response to my little provocation chose to say it outside Twitter.”
The Twitter Trap – Bill Keller, executive editor, The New York Times from a piece on how “we are outsourcing our brains to the cloud.”
Read. Discuss (if you still can).
Best line of the day
“I hate when an actor I admire turns out to be a crappy person. That’s the one consolation of the Schwarzenegger thing.”
Wikipedia and the Death of the Expert
Wikipedia And The Death Of The Expert is an interesting and somewhat lengthy look at Wikipedia and expertise. I found it interesting mostly for its look at what Wikipedia is and does, including this from near the beginning of the essay:
It’s been over five years since the landmark study in Nature that showed “few differences in accuracy” between Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica. Though the honchos at Britannica threw a big hissy at the surprising results of that study, Nature stood by its methods and results, and a number of subsequent studies have confirmed its findings; so far as general accuracy of content is concerned, Wikipedia is comparable to conventionally compiled encyclopedias, including Britannica.
There were a few dust-ups in the wake of the Nature affair, notably Middlebury College history department’s banning of Wikipedia citations in student papers in 2007. The resulting debate turned out to be quite helpful as a number of librarians finally popped out of the woodwork to say hey, now wait one minute, no undergraduate paper should be citing any encyclopedia whatsoever, which, doy, and it ought to have been pointed out a lot sooner.
A prayer beneath the Tree of Life
Roger Ebert has written a very personal tribute to a film more than a review. It really resonated with me (we are about the same age). One paragraph:
Many films diminish us. They cheapen us, masturbate our senses, hammer us with shabby thrills, diminish the value of life. Some few films evoke the wonderment of life’s experience, and those I consider a form of prayer. Not prayer “to” anyone or anything, but prayer “about” everyone and everything. I believe prayer that makes requests is pointless. What will be, will be. But I value the kind of prayer when you stand at the edge of the sea, or beneath a tree, or smell a flower, or love someone, or do a good thing. Those prayers validate existence and snatch it away from meaningless routine.
May 18th
31 years ago today the Mount St. Helens volcano exploded, killing or hiding 57 people.
Maude’s husband, Walter, is 89. That’s actor Bill Macy, still adding to his credits last year. He was a character named Whiskey Pete on My Name Is Earl a couple of years ago. His name at birth: Wolf Marvin Garber.
Dobie Gillis is 77. That’s actor Dwayne Hickman who played the high school chum of Maynard G. Krebs when he was 25 (and Bob Denver was 24).
Brooks Robinson is 74.
Known as The Human Vacuum Cleaner, Brooks Robinson established a standard of excellence for modern-day third basemen. He played 23 seasons for the Orioles, setting Major League career records for games, putouts, assists, chances, double plays and fielding percentage. A clutch hitter, Robinson totaled 268 career home runs, at one time an American League record for third basemen. Robinson earned the league’s MVP Award in 1964 and the World Series MVP in 1970, when he hit .429 and made a collection of defensive gems.
Reggie Jackson is 65.
Reggie Jackson earned the nickname Mr. October for his World Series heroics with both the A’s and Yankees. In 27 Fall Classic games, he amassed 10 home runs — including four in consecutive at-bats — 24 RBIs and a .357 batting average. As one of the game’s premier power hitters, he blasted 563 career round-trippers. A terrific player in the clutch and an intimidating cleanup hitter, Jackson compiled a lifetime slugging percentage of .490 and earned American League MVP honors in 1973.
U.S. Senator Tom Udall is 63.
George Strait is 59.
Tina Fey is 41.
Frank Capra was born in Bisaquino, Sicily on this date in 1897.
He was the first to win three directorial Oscars — for “It Happened One Night” (1934), “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town” (1936) and “You Can’t Take It With You” (1938). The motion picture academy also voted the first and third movies the best of the year.
Capra movies were idealistic, sentimental and patriotic. His major films embodied his flair for improvisation and spontaneity, buoyant humor and sympathy for the populist beliefs of the 1930’s.
Generations of moviegoers and television viewers have reveled in the hitch-hiking antics of Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in “It Happened One Night;” in Gary Cooper’s whimsical self-defense of Longfellow Deeds at a hilarious sanity hearing in “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town;” in the impassioned filibuster by James Stewart as an incorruptible Senator in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” in Mr. Cooper’s battle to prevent a power-crazed industrialist from taking dictatorial control of the country in “Meet John Doe,” and in Mr. Stewart’s salvation by a guardian angel in “It’s a Wonderful Life.”
The key to l’affaire D.S.K.
Enough about the D.S.K. business, but I found this quick look at hotel procedures interesting.
Today’s Times
NewMexiKen subscribes to The New York Times — yes, beginning again this week to the actual dead-tree version. Anyway, as those of you who don’t subscribe (print or digital) may know, you only get 20 free articles a month. So, borrowing an idea from The Atlantic Wire, I’ll feature articles that I think are worth spending your allowance on.
Here’s two very different stories, which I think describe people and how they react to very real, yet very different kinds of crises. Neither story is particularly long, and both I thought were good reads.
A Town’s Few Holdouts Wait Out the Flood at the Bar
In Misurata, Qaddafi’s Soldiers Receive Respect, if Not Honors
Cartoon best line of the day
Best line of the day, but it’s early
“The homepage on my web browser is Yahoo, which I’m told it shouldn’t be, but I’ve just been too lazy to change it. From time to time I’ll read some of the comments under stories on it to get a sense of what it must be like at a Klan meeting.”
Aaron Sorkin in The Atlantic series “What I Read.” He reads the New York and Los Angeles Times.
Sorkin also has some interesting thoughts on the difference between the Wall Street Journal — where reporters “have cleared a very high bar to get the jobs they have” — and, say, BobsThoughts.com. “Bob could be the most qualified guy in the world but I have no way of knowing that because all he had to do to get his job was set up a website–something my 10-year-old daughter has been doing for 3 years.”
Child Brides
No, real child brides.
Because the wedding was illegal and a secret, except to the invited guests, and because marriage rites in Rajasthan are often conducted late at night, it was well into the afternoon before the three girl brides in this dry farm settlement in the north of India began to prepare themselves for their sacred vows. They squatted side by side on the dirt, a crowd of village women holding sari cloth around them as a makeshift curtain, and poured soapy water from a metal pan over their heads. Two of the brides, the sisters Radha and Gora, were 15 and 13, old enough to understand what was happening. The third, their niece Rajani, was 5. She wore a pink T-shirt with a butterfly design on the shoulder. A grown-up helped her pull it off to bathe.
Read about the child brides from the June National Geographic Magazine.
Twitter update
Most posts will be here on NMK but a few others will be just tweets and some will be both. You can see the half dozen most recent tweets in the sidebar and click on them as you choose (or click on NewMexiKen on Twitter to see more).
Twitter is just another form of communication, no more, no less. I enjoy its conversation-like nature and spontaneity. Like the larger web, much is inane, so selecting the right people to follow makes it more or less valuable. You may assume my tweets will have the same half wise, half whimsical, half wit qualities you find on NMK.
Least surprising line of the day
“The Bishop of Buckingham — who reads his Bible on an iPad — explained to me the similarities between Apple and a religion. And when a team of neuroscientists with an MRI scanner took a look inside the brain of an Apple fanatic it seemed the bishop was on to something. The results suggested that Apple was actually stimulating the same parts of the brain as religious imagery does in people of faith.”
TUAW reporting on a BBC 3 program, “Secrets of the Superbrands.”
Six-Word Momoirs
Summing up motherhood in just six words is no easy task. But more than 7,000 Well readers did just that, entering their short memoirs as part of our Six-Word Momoirs contest.
The challenge was to explain your mother, someone else’s mother or motherhood in general in just six words. . . .
The six winners are the last listed, but read the whole column.
Six-Word Momoirs: The Contest Winners!
Made me miss my Mom, and it’s been 37 years.
Best line of the day about l’affaire D.S.K.
“(On Monday his lawyer said, ‘this is a very, very defensible case.’) Was the woman suggesting her willingness to be charged at, naked, by a sixty-two-year-old man, by wearing a maid’s outfit?”
The Gentleman Called Killer
Joe Posnanski on Harmon Killebrew.
Text to Speech Software
It’s fun to sample these computer generated voices, various nationalities and accents.
Don’t buy them, though. It’s likely that some will be included in the next version of Mac OS X, 10.7 Lion.
May 17th
Sugar Ray Leonard is 55, as is Bob Saget.
Jim Nance is 52.
Enya is 50. I confess to sort of liking her sound, but jeez does every song have to sound like every other?
Jane Parker (Tarzan’s Jane) and Mia Farrow’s mom was born on this date in 1911. That’s actress Maureen O’Sullivan.
One of the brightest of ingenues, the actress appeared in more than 60 films, from ”Tugboat Annie” to ”Pride and Prejudice,” starring with everyone from Robert Taylor to the Marx Brothers. But she was always identified with the lovely, legendary Jane, teaching the niceties of civilization and romance to the yowling Tarzan, Edgar Rice Burroughs’s King of the Jungle. It was a notable pairing of opposites.
Her other movie successes included ”The Thin Man,” ”The Barretts of Wimpole Street,” Greta Garbo’s ”Anna Karenina,” ”A Day at the Races,” ”A Yank at Oxford,” ”The Crowd Roars” and ”David Copperfield” (with W. C. Fields).
Horace E. Dodge was born on May 17th in 1868; he should have been built Ford-tough, Dodge died at age 52. With his brother John, the Dodge Brothers supplied early automakers with engines, including Ford and Olds. In 1914, they began building their own vehicles, with a much more modern design. Ford bought out the Dodges, who were partners in the Ford Motor Company, for $25 million. John died in January 1920; Horace in December. Their widows eventually sold to Chrysler.
The New York Stock Exchange was founded on what is now Wall Street on May 17th in 1792.
Raiders knew mission a one-shot deal
The most detailed account yet — and one hopes, the most accurate — of the raid in Abbottabad.
Thanks, Avelino, good tweeting.
Best line of the day about gas prices
“Seven out of 10 Americans say gas prices have hurt them. Which means a shocking three out of 10 Americans are oil company executives.”
Best line of the day, so far
“Doesn’t asking if Trump was serious about his presidential bid beg the question of what, exactly, he has ever been serious about before? Have you looked directly at him at all?”
The Worst Pitching Performance Ever
“His line: 2 1/3 innings, 11 hits, 14 runs, all earned, three walks and two strikeouts.”
Joe has the story on Vin Mazzaro’s disaster Monday evening.
If I remember correctly how to figure an ERA — 14 earned runs, 7 outs — that’s 54.00 for the evening.
Even better best line of the day
“These guys would sew rubber pockets in their Armanis so they could steal soup.”
Charles Pierce, referring to Goldman Sachs and a report that the concessionaire at Yankee Stadium, partly owned by GS, is pocketing the 20% “service fee” tacked onto the $10.50 beer, not the vendors.
Best line of the day
“It turns out that the worst mismatch in the Bronx over the weekend was not the Red Sox vs. the Yankees, it was Sarah Silverman vs. Joe Buck and Tim McCarver, both of whom reacted to Ms. Silverman’s presence in Their Booth — to say nothing of her suggestion that, while steroids are bad, perhaps pitchers should draw on the example of Dock Ellis and take LSD before every start — rather like two elderly nuns who have been asked to lap-dance.”