I <3 The Scorpions

Woohoo! With Dolly officially a Hurricane, I’m ready to kick off cable news’ favorite season with one of my favorite songs.

And apparently Dolly could be a sequel to the one that happened a few years ago. Katarina? Korrine? Damn, I forgot its name.

Coastal officials worried today that Hurricane Dolly may bring so much rain that flooding could break through the levees holding back the Rio Grande.

The Rio Grande? I wonder if that’ll bring in a flood of illegal immigrants too? Let’s enlist this guy to hold ‘em back:

Here’s to levees, makeshift plywood window covers, high winds, flooding, exploding glass, sinking cars and weather reporters making asses of themselves!

Click, Flash, Ka-ching

Only time stood in the way of profits.

Hosting events in Times Square, advertisers said, is like buying product placement in a TV show or a movie — except the cameras are held by consumers and the placement is on the Internet.

You don’t impress me

  Respect should be earned, not handed out like Halloween candy.  But the supposed authority of NY Times columnists drives me mad.  The assumption being their credentials speak for themselves, and we can just shovel their shit into our minds.

Ignoring the fact that the majority of them are horrendous writers (Tom Friedman, I’m looking at you), adding voice and obvious opinion to a story that was on the front page two days ago offers little value. “No shit” isn’t the reaction you’re looking for.
But I read them anyway.  So what exactly does that say about me?  Perhaps that I’m an instigator who actively seeks out excuses to bash people in better places than I am?  Could be true.

Or maybe I’m looking for ways to make it better.  For once, I’d like to see a columnist assume a counter-intuitive reaction to an event and defend it.  Just for shits and giggles.

In the last issue of Rolling Stone, Maureen Dowd slaughtered what could have been at least a remotely funny piece about Stewart and Colbert.

In the latest issue, Paul Krugman writes a DOA assessment of the growing gap between rich and poor.

Huge disparities of wealth give the rich the means to corrupt the system on their behalf.

No shit!

Or try to wrap your head around this little comparison…

 To get a sense of how dramatic [the growth in the gap over the last 30-plus years] has been, imagine a line of 1,000 people who represent the entire population of America.

Oh fuck, we have a line of people.

The are standing in ascending order of income, with the poorest person on the left and the richest person on the right.  And their height is proportional to their income - the richer they are, the taller they are.

I’m keeping up so far.

Start with 1973.  If you assume that a height of six feet represents the average income in that year, the person on the far left side of the line - representing those Americans living in extreme poverty - is only sixteen inches tall.  By the time you get to the guy on the extreme right, he towers over the line at more than 113 feet.

I’ve tuned this nonsense out, but isn’t there a more concise way to say this?

Now take 2005.  The average height has grown from six feet to eight feet [...] And the poorest people on the left side of the line have grown at about the same rate as those near the middle - the gap between the middle class and the poor, in other words, hasn’t changed.  But people to the right must have been taking some kind of extreme steroids:  The guy at the end of the line is now 560 feet tall, almost five times taller than his 1973 counterpart.

“How to build a Nuclear Submarine” isn’t this complicated.  What should I expect from an economist?  This kind of writing.  What should I expect form a respected Times drone?  Something more than this swill!

I’ll leave the David Brooks and Tom Friedman bashing to Matt Taibbi.

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Pop an eye at Georgia’s assessment of the Week In Review.

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Mucho garcias to Joy for this.

Waddle

intransitive verb
: to walk with short steps and a clumsy swaying motion…

Much has been made of the word “waddle.” I used it to describe the way a woman moved down the street in my New Jersey Election story.  And Stephen Baker mentions it in BusinessWeek.com.

“The woman throws her hands up in exasperation and waddles away, leaving Coutinho and the rest of his sentence.” (I haven’t been allowed to call a walk a waddle in my entire career.)

Like it matters.

I’ve been approached by too many people and asked too many times why I used the “waddle,” or some cute nudge-wink joke telling me I waddle.

Has journalistic writing become so decrepit and stale that it considers “waddle” a departure from the norm?

Maybe new media isn’t the only thing terrorizing circulation numbers. Maybe the brittle old editors - who stop a wild and unruly departure like “waddle” from reaching their pages - block progress too.

Some days I have to tie my hands down when reading the major papers. If I don’t, my thumbs will dig into my eyes and tear them straight out.

Stories with great potential die after two paragraphs of Dull Dribble. The written equivalent of television static.

Maybe there’s a dual lesson behind the new media explosion. Maybe we should consider entertaining as well as informing. Or at least keep it interesting.

Why did I write the old woman waddled? Because she did.

Trouble for Popeye

Sometimes there’s this knee-jerk blue-collar aversion to industry and it’s leaders. Whether it be oil, or Wal Mart… or porn. But it seems agribusiness hasn’t gotten the full level of shit it deserves.

See, I have a particular beef with Natural Selection Foods, and especially Earthbound Farm. I was getting mugged by two ninjas on steroids, who really wanted my iPod.

I did what any squinty eyed, robustly fore-armed, iPod loving sailor-man would do… I whipped out a can of spinach. Then one of the ninjas took a break from thrashing me to tell me not to eat it, it could contain E. coli. I ripped the can in half and shoved one down each their throats. Soon they were so concerned with their bloody diahrea that they forgot about my iPod. Amateurs.

Back to the problem at hand… which isn’t so much the deadly leafy greens. I’ve seen them as hazardous since I was a child. The problem is the New York Times’ lackluster info on this dilemma. Yes, I’ve got a beef with the Time’s website.

Here’s what I’d include alongside the article on the website. (Note: this is an assignment for class, so give me a break).

First, you have a video. Not of people with E. coli, but all the spinach that’s going to waste. Get some viral video of Costco dumping all of the spinach and baby greens it has. Have a video of a refrigerated tractor trailer stopping in it’s tracks, turning around and going home. Now that’s got some depth.

Have a diagram of the human body, with lines that branch out and tell you possible symptoms (cramping, bloody stool, etc.)

An audio slide-show tracking the path of the the spinach from the illegal worker’s hands to your supermarket would be nice too. Then can point out possible points of contamination.

And of course, a giant picture of every Exec over at Earthbound Farm, so you know who you’re legally bound to kick in the shins.

Include some delicious cooked-spinach recipes from Emeril Lagasse for delicious E. coli free consumption. Correction: Emeril and delicious do not belong in the same sentence.

BAM!

Finally, a time-line of all the other ways mass-agriculture has almost poisoned us.

I still like spinach. It helped save my iPod.

Unwarranted apologies

Zeyad finally showed up at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism after leaving Baghdad and spending three months in Jordan. I showed him where the offices were. Hey, it fulfilled my one good deed of the day.

In case you’re wondering, Blog Jarvis described Zeyad as:

the amazing blogger behind Healing Iraq, a founding father of the Iraqi blogosphere

A classmate and I had the opportunity to spend some time talking to Zeyad today, and I was overwhelmed by the urge to apologize. I wanted to grab him by the shoulders and say, “God dammit man! I can’t imagine what you’ve seen or felt, but I’m sorry we lit the fuse on the firecracker!”

I really wanted to apologize for being the dumb, “Support our troops” and Freedom Fries American. For not being able to point out Baghdad on a map.
Zeyad gave me some peace by telling me the war is beyond America now. He might have said that just to make me feel better. Or he could be right.

In the bombings in Baghdad on Thursday, a roadside bomb that exploded about 7:30 a.m. near the mosque in the Cairo neighborhood killed three people and wounded 16 others, the Interior Ministry official said. About 9:30 a.m., a suicide car bomber detonated a bomb near police vehicles whose tanks were being filled at a gas station in the Karrada district, killing 10 people — some of them police officers — and wounding 17, the official said.

At 10:45 a.m., two more people were killed and 23 wounded when a second suicide car bomber exploded a bomb in the Bab al Sharji district, a mile north of the gas station, near the Interior Ministry’s headquarters. At 3:30 p.m., a third suicide car bomber blew up his vehicle in the Kadisiya neighborhood near a police convoy, wounding seven police commandos, the Interior Ministry official said. At 7:15 p.m., a roadside bomb killed a woman and wounded 13 others in the Amil district.

On Wednesday, Ahmad al-Mashhadani, nephew of Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, the speaker of Parliament, was abducted while driving his car in northwest Baghdad, the Interior Ministry official said. Also on Wednesday, a roadside bomb killed two people at the funeral of a Shiite militia leader.

I wonder if Zeyad’s as upset about news like this being buried as I am. I wonder if he realizes just how embedded we are in a bubble of ignorance.

It’s here that our news media, even the Times, has become impotent. They all need a solid brass set and a double dose of Viagra.

Maybe that’s where Zeyad can help.

I was surprised to find out that no one gave him a New York Salute yet. That would be this: