THE NEWS HACK'S CREED:
I know more than you.
I make lots more money than you.
I'm smarter than you.
I'm sexier than you.
I appear on TV all the time.
I work ten minutes a day.
I rule the universe.
I'm going to live forever.
You are an idiot.
THE NEWS HACK'S CREED, No. 2:
A lie isn't a lie when it tells THE TRUTH.
THE NEWS HACK'S CREED, No. 3:
I've come to realize that the looseness of the journalistic life, the seeming laxity of the newsroom, is an illusion. Yes, there's informality and there's humor, but beneath the surface lies something deadly serious. It is a code. Sometimes the code is not even written down, but it is deeply believed in. And, when violated, it is enforced with tribal ferocity.
--JOHN "OMERTA" CARROLL.
THE NEWS HACK'S CREED, No. 4:
News isn't news when we don't report it.
PERMALINKS:
THE NEWS HACKS' DICTIONARY
THE EUGENE DAVID GLOSSARY
AMERICA'S MOST UNINTENTIONALLY FUNNY WEB SITE!
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Saturday, June 05, 2010
Yes, John Wooden was the Knute Rockne of basketball. We can be sure in this age of criminal coaches a man who won championships with such self-effacement and common sense will never grace the game again.
Friday, June 04, 2010
On Thursday, the National Association of Scholars -- a group that advocates for a more rigorous and traditional college curriculum -- released what it says is the most comprehensive analysis of what freshmen are being asked to read. The findings suggest that certain kinds of books -- on multiculturalism and the environment -- dominate these reading selections. And the study, called "Beach Books," questions whether the choices of colleges are too similar, too left-leaning and not sufficiently challenging....
What are the freshmen reading? Based on the report's analysis of 290 programs (excluding books that are required parts of courses), the top books this year are This I Believe (an essay collection assigned at 11 colleges), followed by Enrique's Journey (the story of a Honduran boy's struggle to reach his mother in the United States, assigned at 10 colleges) and two books assigned at 9 colleges each, Three Cups of Tea (about building schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan) and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (about a poor woman who worked on a tobacco farm whose cells were used, without her knowledge, for research).
These books reflect some of the trends found in "Beach Books" about the genres of choice. Books about multiculturalism, immigration or racism were the most prevalent (60 colleges), followed by environmental issues (36 colleges), the Islamic world (27 colleges), New Age or spiritual books (25 colleges), and issues related to the Holocaust or genocide (25 colleges). Only 6 colleges assigned classics. The study also looked for other patterns in the selections, and reported that 46 of the choices have a film version, 29 are about Africa, 9 are related to Hurricane Katrina and 5 are about dysfunctional families....
Though anti-alcohol initiatives generally target college students, underage drinking, binge drinking, raucous behavior and negative consequences, Americans often think of only the last as a bad thing. “There’s no consensus that alcohol use by college students is a big problem,” Ehlinger said. Though there is agreement about preventing deaths, injuries and crimes, alumni and administrators often “hearken back to being drunk in college” and don’t see binge drinking as a problem.
And yet, underage and college drinking are where efforts to curb alcohol abuse are focused. “Folks, by focusing on underage and college students, we’re missing the boat,” he said. “I think we are being stooges for the alcohol industry. They know what we do [on these issues] is not going to impact sales; they’re fine with us doing that.”
It’s why, he said, Anheuser-Busch happily donates to projects like the National Social Norms Institute, whose executive director is James C. Turner, the current president of the ACHA and executive director of the University of Virginia’s department of student health.
(Turner later defended himself, telling the crowd assembled to hear Ehlinger that the Anheuser-Busch funding “was a gift, they said 'do what you need to do,' ” and came only after the project failed to get funding from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. He left the room a few minutes later to prepare for a lecture on the norms program, which had a far smaller audience than Ehlinger's talk, despite being in a larger room.)
One and the same.
What are the freshmen reading? Based on the report's analysis of 290 programs (excluding books that are required parts of courses), the top books this year are This I Believe (an essay collection assigned at 11 colleges), followed by Enrique's Journey (the story of a Honduran boy's struggle to reach his mother in the United States, assigned at 10 colleges) and two books assigned at 9 colleges each, Three Cups of Tea (about building schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan) and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (about a poor woman who worked on a tobacco farm whose cells were used, without her knowledge, for research).
These books reflect some of the trends found in "Beach Books" about the genres of choice. Books about multiculturalism, immigration or racism were the most prevalent (60 colleges), followed by environmental issues (36 colleges), the Islamic world (27 colleges), New Age or spiritual books (25 colleges), and issues related to the Holocaust or genocide (25 colleges). Only 6 colleges assigned classics. The study also looked for other patterns in the selections, and reported that 46 of the choices have a film version, 29 are about Africa, 9 are related to Hurricane Katrina and 5 are about dysfunctional families....
Though anti-alcohol initiatives generally target college students, underage drinking, binge drinking, raucous behavior and negative consequences, Americans often think of only the last as a bad thing. “There’s no consensus that alcohol use by college students is a big problem,” Ehlinger said. Though there is agreement about preventing deaths, injuries and crimes, alumni and administrators often “hearken back to being drunk in college” and don’t see binge drinking as a problem.
And yet, underage and college drinking are where efforts to curb alcohol abuse are focused. “Folks, by focusing on underage and college students, we’re missing the boat,” he said. “I think we are being stooges for the alcohol industry. They know what we do [on these issues] is not going to impact sales; they’re fine with us doing that.”
It’s why, he said, Anheuser-Busch happily donates to projects like the National Social Norms Institute, whose executive director is James C. Turner, the current president of the ACHA and executive director of the University of Virginia’s department of student health.
(Turner later defended himself, telling the crowd assembled to hear Ehlinger that the Anheuser-Busch funding “was a gift, they said 'do what you need to do,' ” and came only after the project failed to get funding from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. He left the room a few minutes later to prepare for a lecture on the norms program, which had a far smaller audience than Ehlinger's talk, despite being in a larger room.)
One and the same.
How do we know the MadAve idiots and their enablers are back to burning OUR money? WELL, NASCAR's attendance has been running on fumes -- but wouldn't you know those CEOs WANT THEIR LUXURY BOXES.
McDonald's to recall 12 million 'Shrek' glasses, citing cadmium health risks
It was not immediately known where the glasses were produced or how the paint used in the "Shrek" characters came to contain cadmium.
I have an idea!
(Via TINA!!!!!)
It was not immediately known where the glasses were produced or how the paint used in the "Shrek" characters came to contain cadmium.
I have an idea!
(Via TINA!!!!!)
Gaza's Diplomatic Fallout Less Damaging Than Feared
I guess people realized it was a difference between lots of meaningless talking and lots and lots of meaningless talking.
I guess people realized it was a difference between lots of meaningless talking and lots and lots of meaningless talking.
Wednesday, June 02, 2010
Is the Gulf disaster threatening to become His Omnipotence's version of the Iran hostage crisis?
(Via the Bloomy)
(Via the Bloomy)
Mercury has become such a marginal presence in America's showrooms we are almost not sorry to see it go; but despite so few domestic marques remaining can we be sure our decimated automakers have stopped eliminating them?
We hate giving publicity to cheap publicity stunts for if anyone knows the value of breaking wind in public loudly it's SUMNER. We can predict this has two outcomes: first, that the idiot companies that finance SUMNER's "comedy" outlet will continue doing so, in part because they can justify themselves by playing favorites reaching the usual hip demographic with the big upraised middle finger (this dodo no doubt works as a consultant to ADVERTISERS); and second that SUMNER will try to excuse this cheap stunt by having a live televised "dialogue", possibly through ED MURROW, possibly through PERKY KATIE!!!!!; regardless, that does not ameliorate the "bigotry", a word we heartily endorse though it comes from MR. PATRIOTIC GORE.
Evil like this is not "senseless". Something makes people explode. We do not know what it is, and we cannot stop it, but such acts do not emanate from nowhere; for one thing, they come from the fallen state of man.
Tuesday, June 01, 2010
12:14 PM If U.S. debt is in such trouble, Derek Thompson asks, how come everyone's buying it? Sure, there's a flight to safety, but don't forget how markets can ignore things for a long time and then suddenly notice them.
We've noticed.
We've noticed.
What the Israeli Raid Means for Peace
The violence at sea could have a significant impact on the peace process, according to various reports | Max Fisher
OOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooh, I'm SCARED! Does that mean instead of lots of useless talking there'll be slightly less useless talking?
Must take up residence under my bed.
The violence at sea could have a significant impact on the peace process, according to various reports | Max Fisher
OOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooh, I'm SCARED! Does that mean instead of lots of useless talking there'll be slightly less useless talking?
Must take up residence under my bed.
Monday, May 31, 2010
Speaking of Bing.com Barnes & Noble is having a "sale". (Plus you get an eight percent Bing Cashback -- enough to save me the sales tax! Wow!) Looking for "classic" DVDs I found all Sonys (i.e., Columbias) and picked eight titles including On the Waterfront (the first time I've seen it for under $10) and Lost Horizon (why can't Sony reissue the musical?); I also bought Funny Girl, the title that pretty conclusively states Hollywood was all downhill for Babs; and The Taming of the Shrew, better called The Story of Liz and Dick. One "classic" I chickened out on is Dr. Strangelove. (This from someone who owns The Ghost and Mr. Chicken! It was on sale at Oldies.com.) I confess to speak from ignorance but from its CRITICALLY-ACCLAIMED REP I guess it's a smug PC "comedy" where good ol' Southern Republicans nuke the world. (YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEHAH!!!!!) That it came out the year some news hacks determined Barry Goldwater was a nutcase doesn't help. What's more it's from ONE OF THE ALL TIME GREAT DIREC-TORS. Besides it set Hollywood's politics pretty well in stone, not that rockheads needed help. To my thinking Dr. Strangelove provided the philosophy, Bonnie and Clyde the attitude, and ST. JACK OF VALENTI the excuses, and the movies have been genius since.
I'm not totally closed to buying it, but to paraphrase a great ad campaign, it will be eventually -- but not now.
I'm not totally closed to buying it, but to paraphrase a great ad campaign, it will be eventually -- but not now.
One reason I've taken time off from blogging (The World Savers of Mountain View notwithstanding) is I've been busy melting my head down figuring when or if I should buy a new computer. My five year old Lenny is perfectly adequate but Firefox and the BUGMEISTERS' Media Player give it seizures; I fear though Windows 7 is merely quirky in a different way, and that 6 or 12 or 24 gigs of memory will be so busily churning away they won't be better than the two in my current box. HP and some eBay seller are having sales on "refurbished" computers (on some models the latter's throwing in Windows 7 Ultimate!) but as I said before I want the ability to expand, however little I may use it, and the I7-900 series Pavilion Elite models come with only four SATA ports, despite having room for six drives (the space for one was taken by the largely useless USB Portable Media Drive, now discontinued, its cubbyhole walled off by a bracket); to complicate things (sorry for this boring exposition) HP has introduced a new model, the HPE-270F, with space for three hard drives; the problem is to get the third in they discontinued the largely useless USB Pocket Media Drive, and meantime the motherboard (the notorious Pegatron Truckee, blamed for all sorts of madness with earlier models) apparently has the same four SATA ports; you must choose between a hard drive and an optical drive. I don't like that kind of choice. I've spent a day gnashing my head realizing you can't jerry-rig a SATA port from a USB port. (Don't bother with HP's site; the installation instructions are from a discontinued model.) Given the motherboard three months' warranty is not reassuring. And Dell keeps a second graphics card off its putative high-end model (I am NOT buying one of those dorky overpriced Alienware robots), and the supreme golfer-CEO still outsources the help to Inja. So I'm thinking of building my own box. The slightly shady retailer TigerDirect.com (which does business under twenty-three names, including Circuit City) has combos and a 12-percent rebate from Bing.com. (The BUGMIESTERS strike again!) Once you decide to do-it-yourself you plunge into a world of debates over angels on the heads of pins, only the angels and pins are motherboards, and the relative speed of Intel's chips -- is an 860 better than a 930? A P55 board or an X58? -- and that geekiness-uber-alles of OVERCLOCKING, and WATER COOLING, and NewEgg.com rankings, and you start to wonder why you want to buy a computer, let alone build one. And DON'T get started on GRAPHICS CARDS -- or even PSUs. And then you must worry that you'll blow your thousand-dollar-plus amalgamation up even though the chances are supposedly remote. Regardless I'm leaning on building one, which Intel has actually made sort-of fun -- you just drop the chip in the slot, chose a latch, pop the stock cooler over the chip, and voila! However having already destroyed one old computer by jamming the memory cards in the wrong way one can't be too sanguine.
We do not know why LALA had to report on this "demonstration", but we do know many hacks don't seem to realize such non-stories are the moral equivalent of writing about certain people whose last name begins with a K, and that they serve to utterly waste our time, and given how they "report" the news these days it's not clear they care.
If this was unprovoked, it was a cowardly act. But the Palestinians are masters at PR, and they play the WORRRRRRRULD COMMUNITY like Nero's fiddle, and it will be a while before we learn the full truth. In the mean time the WORRRRRRRRRULD COMMUNITY can play with what it plays best -- itself.
And because we have come to know such stories by heart, it becomes yet one more nuisance to deal with on the daily Web prowl, like the endless stream of non-Middle Eastern press releases.
And because we have come to know such stories by heart, it becomes yet one more nuisance to deal with on the daily Web prowl, like the endless stream of non-Middle Eastern press releases.