newspapers

I LOVE THIS STORY. People across the country are lining up...to buy newspapers! The Post sold out, even after they upped their print run, and then they did a special run, and that sold out, too. This morning at 8:30 when I got on the metro, the guys who hand out the competing free newspapers were already both empty-handed. The Express guy had even given away the copy from the clear plastic window in his vest.

Yay old media.

brothers in audio

Funniest moment of the debate last night: After the festivities, on PBS, they were showing the commentators talking in the studio about how the debate went. Then they put up this shot of these two scruffy-looking guys. The guys were standing outside. They looked like brothers, maybe middle-aged farmers who'd been pulled aside on their way out of the auditorium to give their opinions on the candidates.

Yeah...it was Don Gonyea and Scott Horsley. Talk about a face made for radio.

another reason new bedford is awesome

Check out the logo of the local newspaper:


And the front of the newspaper itself:

sloppiness

I just heard a one- or two-minute story on the radio with three (three!) unexplained acronyms: WASA, WSSC, and NRDC. Holy cow, people. I know it's just the local public radio station, but surely there must be *one* editor over there.

names, names, names

Check out this column from the Washington Post about evil condo associations. For one thing, it makes me happy I rent. (And rent from nice people.) But check it out: The main characters both have first names for last names. So the story is all about "Alexei" and "Olivia." Especially odd because they're both men.

center for excellence

This morning Kay Ray and I were IMing while listening to a phone-in press conference about this news (in fact, the guy who wrote that story asked a lot of questions). Probably neither Kay Ray nor I will actually write about this news, but hey, it was something to do on a Thursday morning, and it's good to keep up on climate and ecology research.

One of the scientists' affiliations included some center for excellence on something-or-other.

Kay Ray: man, i need to be a member of a center of excellence

me: I'm creating one now. You're a member.

Kay Ray: awesome.

We added S.Vix to the roster later in the day. Anyone else want to join? It's called "The Center For Excellence In My Office." Kay Ray is excellent at knitting baby blankets, I am excellent at sleeping, and I haven't checked with S.Vix yet on her particular brand of excellence, but I bet it'll be good.

readers: not that smart

Many times in the six or seven years since I decided I was going to be a journalist, I've heard people in some kind of media say something like, "Our readers/listeners/viewers are smart, they know we didn't mean [thing X]."

You know what, media person? They aren't smart. They don't know what you meant. Your readers/listeners/viewers are going to assume whatever fits their prejudices. Many lack critical thinking skills. Many are in a hurry and do not put what critical thinking skills they have to use. Many of them assume that you are evil. Whatever the reason, your readers are going to fail to see things in the way you see them, even if the way you see them seems, to you, completely freaking obvious.

How do I know readers are dumb? I'm a dumb reader. I once read an article by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker and read the final anecdote and thought, wow, he approves of how that went down? Weird! I interviewed him about the story for a class and didn't ask him about that anecdote directly, but it came up when he was talking about the editing process and how the story changed as he worked on it.

Here's what he said: "Originally when I wrote that, I didn’t make it clear...I didn’t set it up properly. So it made it sound like I thought it was good that the cop blew this guy away as opposed to, this is evidence of an ambiguity. I spent a lot of time revising the end so that it was more ambiguous. But even then there are people who - there was a flurry in the Village Voice or something over that piece. Some readers aren’t very sensitive to ambiguity and they think you’re saying something that you’re not. But, you know, that’s the way it goes."

Here's what I was thinking: "OHHH! That was supposed to be ambiguous!!?!"

Example of readers/viewers being dumb that brought this particular rant to mind right now: This post on Cute Overload. Several of the people leaving comments seem to be unclear on the concept of green screens and the fact that stuff shown in a commercial didn't necessarily happen. I think that is a basic level of sophistication that a person making commercials would assume, and I think they would assume wrongly.

I think this is part of the basic problem we humans have of seeing things from other people's perspectives. On both sides - both the reader and the media person, a category which of course now includes me. I try to be clear when I write, but I can never really know how a reader is going to read my words - and I should remember to think about it more often.

geckos

Doesn't this totally sound like the kind of urban myth chickens would come up with? If you're not careful, a gecko will crawl up your cloaca and get into your eggs! I know it's true, it happened to my neighbor's aunt's friend!

do not interrupt my quiz show, monkey

I just got home from a highly crankifying day at work, and I thought, oh good, I can watch Jeopardy. Jeopardy will make me happy. And 30 seconds into the intro - it's the college tournament - they break in with an ABC News Election Update in which Charlie Gibson tells me that he is confident in making the prediction that Hillary will win the primary in West Virginia, where the polls just closed. Seriously? This was worth breaking into programming for? *I* could have confidently made that prediction. A *monkey* could have confidently made that prediction.

Here's something else a monkey can do. (See also the Date Lab editors' chat.)

money

Is it just me, or is this one of the dumbest articles ever? I mean...seriously, there are people who don't realize that if you're making $47,000 a year, maybe you shouldn't be spending $300 a week on going out? Ok, obviously there are people who don't know this, because she writes about them.

But this quote is what really annoys me most about the story:

D.C. is also a town where networking is part necessity, part hobby. It's a town of lawyers, lobbyists and consultants, a town of power lunches, happy hours and party-hopping. There are people who make tons of money and people who make so-so money, and you don't want to be shut out of the social scene even if your salary is not up to par.

"It's a town where people want to fit in, so I think sometimes people will spend in order to fit in, and that might mean dining out a little too much or buying clothes that are a little too expensive," said Kim Reed, a financial planner with Garrett Planning Network in Chevy Chase. "It's a very prestigious town. . . . If you live here, you kind of get sucked into that."

I don't think I need to point out that that all this has basically nothing to do with my social life. Those stupid stereotypes about D.C. are so. infuriating. And it's particularly annoying when the big local newspaper, which I expect to have a more comprehensive view of the city, runs the same tired old stereotypes as if they're established fact.

scrabulous

Here's how I hope the Scrabulous thing goes: It ends in some kind of settlement thing where they actually have a game called "Scrabble" on Facebook. And Hasbro and Mattel will make money off it, and everyone will live happily ever after, except for the guys who wrote Scrabulous.

Because, really, Scrabulous is the best reason for going on Facebook (well, that and Superpoke) and I think Facebook knows that and will work something out with the toy people. And the toy people will realize it's good for them if bazillions of teenagers discover their game.

I hope.

You think?

parade magazine: wow

Ok, I never really thought Parade magazine, the junky free insert that comes in Sunday newspapers, was on top of the news. But now I know for sure: Today's cover story is an interview with Benazir Bhutto. Who, if you're keeping track, died 10 days ago.

ride safety or lack thereof

This article in today's Post, which points out the near-total lack of regulation of amusement park rides, makes me feel good about hating them. I've always felt kind of wimpy about it. I even went on a big ol wooden roller coaster a few years ago just to prove that I could. I screamed the whole time, not in the "I'm having fun!" way, and I was still shaky a couple of hours later.

tmz

Today I had a profoundly weird experience: reading about someone I know on TMZ. Ok, not someone I know well. I hadn't heard from her in a couple of years. In fact, the last time I heard from her was when she e-mailed me a photo of herself with her then-fiance and now-apparently-ex-fiance. She was on TMZ for trying to destroy his garden. (He asked for a restraining order. I suspect this is an overreaction, but what do I know.)

This gave me the very strange experience of catching up with her through google, which led me to her wedding, which is on youtube. Weird. I suppose we could take from this the lesson that one should not get involved with celebrities, even those of the D-list and below, because the next thing you know, the incredibly dumb things you do with weedkiller will be on celebrity blogs and The Smoking Gun.

In a strange synergy of blog topics, Stimpera did some research for this guy's TV show when we were in college.

not so good guys

Holy cow! Tonight I was driving to Norwegian dancing and a bunch of firetrucks and police cars passed me, and it turned out Wisconsin Ave (major thoroughfare) was closed off. There was a big ol truck with its ladder up and everything. These things are usually way less dramatic than they seem, of course, but when I went by again three hours later, there were still lots of emergency vehicles. Turns out it was this. Yikes!

astronomy tip of the day

If you haven't already seen the comet that's burning up the night sky, check it out tonight! It's ridiculously easy to find, if you can find Cassiopeia (the big "W" near the north star) in the evening - just look a bit down and to the right and there's a superobvious isosceles triangle, and when you look at it you think, that's funny, the star in the lower left corner of that triangle is fuzzy. And that's because it's not a star, it's comet Holmes.

Here, study this map and it will all make sense: map from Sky and Telescope.

genius jealousy

Every year when the MacArthur fellowships are announced, I go to the list to see who I have to hate. Who do I have to hate? Anyone born after 1975. Fortunately, there aren't any this year, and there are only four who I have to resent (1970 or later).

I can't imagine what I would ever do that would make me worthy of a genius grant. I'm not sure writing mildly amusing stories about science is quite good enough.

diana

In case you missed it (how would you have missed it?) today is the 10th anniversary of Princess Diana's death. Which means it's time for where-were-you stories, and I think mine is particularly amusing, so I'm going first. I'd been in Norway since June, but most of that time I was in Oslo at summer school, learning to speak Norwegian. I got to Trondheim in mid-August, and was there just long enough to get into my apartment, be confused, pack again, go to work, and drive off to spend three weeks on the coast, where we were running a big experiment in a little cove. Man, it was beautiful there...if I had a scanner, I'd show you pictures.

So there I was, fresh out of college, limited social skills, everyone was speaking Norwegian, and I hadn't learned enough to even guess at the topic of conversation, most of the time. When people talked to me, they spoke English, obviously, but the rest of the time I was lost. So sometime in the afternoon on August 31, I was filtering some sea water outside when Matilde, whose English was about as good as mine, made some joke about how we should be wearing black armbands because Diana died. And I was like, who? What? And she was like, you didn't hear?

Come to think of it, it might not even have been Aug. 31. It could have been days later. I don't think we had TV there. I do remember puzzling through a tabloid article (in Norwegian) about it.

That pretty much kicked off three solid years of me not knowing what was going on around me. Ah, living in foreign countries. I love it, but it does cut you off from the world. Even when my Norwegian, and later my Japanese, got much better, following a conversation between other people was still the hardest thing.

Anyway. Anybody else have a where-were-you story?

saggy pants

Doesn't it seem that looking like a complete idiot should be punishment enough?

gender studies

Whoa. I mean...you'd think *that* much, a prison guard could figure out.