Rex Hammock twittered an April Fool’s piece about the L.A. Times converting to an all-Wiki format. http://tinyurl.com/2oyej3
The fact that I find this funny and highly entertaining must mean I’ve transformed into a bigger geek than I thought. I know my kids agree.
I rarely indulge myself with a purchase of the Sunday NY Times, but yesterday was an exception. I’m still reading the thing today and as I wade through page 85 of the business section (okay I’m exaggerating just a little) it occurs to me that there is more original staff written content in one section of the Times than in the entire Winston-Salem Journal. Heck, there’s probably more original content than the Journal and the Greensboro News & Record combined.
I don’t point this out to slam either of those local papers per se, rather I think it highlights how lean those local operations are running these days and how much they rely on wire services.
Of course the Gray Lady isn’t what she used to be either and one could argue that her quantity does not make up for her supposedly declining quality, but it is still somewhat bothersome to realize how slim and homogenized our local rags have become.
It’s easy enough to lay the blame on market dynamics but I also think that the folks at the local level could get a lot more aggressive in mining local talent for content. They’ll probably never be able to hire and pay the number of reporters and writers to produce even a percentage of the original content that they’d like to, but they could definitely do more to open their walled gardens and work with independent writers, photographers, essayists, videographers, etc.
I mean if the Journal can get three or four book reviews written by local, independent reviewers for each Sunday paper then why not do something similar in other areas?
Esbee lists some euphemisms for "died" that were used in today’s obituaries in the Winston-Salem Journal. Most involve God which is no surprise for this town, but when I’m ready to chew dirt I hope those responsible for my obituary come up with something quirky, odd and downright offensive. I was thinking I could mandate it in my will, but that requires the kind of planning everyone knows I’m incapable of so I’ll just leave it to my dearly un-departed.
I’m a huge fan of PBS’s Frontline. So much so that it’s my top ‘Season Pass’ on Tivo so that I’m sure no other show will preempt it for recording. Last night PBS aired part 1 of Frontline’s Bush’s War which was duly recorded and I’ve now had the chance to watch about half of the 2 1/2 hour segment. The quality of the show surpasses even Frontline’s excellent standards and I look forward to watching the rest of it at the earliest opportunity.
If you didn’t see it or get it recorded you can view it online at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/bushswar/
Fec points to a write up in Reuters about the show and excerpts a part that includes this paragraph:
In dozens of interviews and with meticulous fact-gathering, “Frontline”
makes a convincing case for two important aspects of the war. First, it
was primarily orchestrated by Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Bush was only “the decider” insofar as he
signed off on their plans, often paying no heed to Secretary of State
Colin Powell and others.
Fec also loaned me Suskind’s The One Percent Doctrine which I’m about halfway through, and when you combine that book with this show you have pretty convincing evidence that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld bent us over and were none too gentle with us.
Longtime readers of this blog will know at least two things about me. First, I have a tendency to get stuck dealing with all things turd-related in my house. Floaters, pluggers and just strange s*** included. Second, I’m the least handy person ever born. I can take a thirty minute project and turn it into a two day docudrama. And of course there’s the fact that everything about my house is all kinds of effed up. Okay, that’s three things.
Last week we discovered that the toilet in our basement bathroom was leaking. The leak seemed to be emanating from one of the bolts that secures the tank to the seat so I thought I had an easy fix. On Sunday I made my way over to Lowe’s and purchased a neat little $4 kit that includes the two 5/16" bolts and all the nuts, seals and washers needed to secure any standard tank to any standard bowl. Ah, but what was I thinking? Nothing in my house is freakin’ standard so when I get home and start to put the bolts in I find that the holes in the tank are probably a millimeter too small, which explains why the previous owner had used 1/4" bolts and then put a bunch of green putty around the holes to seal them. Dumbass.
So I headed back to Lowe’s to see if I could put together my own little DIY kit that ended up costing me about $9. When I got back home I quickly discovered that my DIY kit would have been just as crappy as the previous owner’s so I took my preferred tack on any such endeavor and just muscled the 5/16" bolts through the holes using the biggest screw driver I could find. Once I got them through I proudly re-mounted the tank, hooked everything back up, flushed the toilet and watched a fountain of water spew from the main hole that connects the tank to the seat. Apparently I’d upset some sort of delicate balance between the seat and the tank because no matter what I did to re-seat the tank it continued to spew forth water.
Since I’d already been told by my boss/wife that we’d soon be replacing the toilet when we put a new floor in that bathroom I decided that Easter Sunday was as good a day as any to replace it. We had friends coming over for dinner so I thought I’d head over to the store afterwards. Celeste and I headed out after our guests went home and of course Lowe’s and Home Depot were already closed. Perfect. This morning I arose early and headed off again to the store and purchased our new single-piece toilet. (I wasn’t going to risk another bad hookup experience between tank and seat). When I got home I removed the old toilet from it’s seat above the poop-pipe…always a pleasant experience… and started to unpack our new toilet. That’s when I discovered its base was broken. Much cussing ensued as I re-packed the toilet, loaded it back in the van and headed back to the store.
The folks at Lowe’s were very nice and predictably unsurprised at my tale of woe with the broken poop pot and they efficiently processed my return. I grabbed the one remaining toilet of the model that I desired and prayed that it was intact. You see it was the only single piece toilet that didn’t cost as much as a semester of college so if it was broken I was faced with another two-piece assembly that I just wasn’t up to.
Thankfully the unit was indeed intact so I headed home, unpacked the toilet, put the wax seal on the base and then tried to put it on the poop-hole while getting the floor bolts to go through the bolt holes. That’s when one of the bolts fell through some sort of gap in the floor and disappeared. Much cussing ensued. I grabbed one of the old bolts and re-used it and, voila, I had a new toilet installed. Time elapsed from first effort at repair to final solution, not including breaks: Roughly eight hours. Trips to home improvement stores to complete task: Four.
If my life was a home-improvement show and it had one of those little "This will take you x hours to complete" graphics it would show two numbers; X would represent the number of hours it would take an average person and X to the 10th power would represent how long it would take me.
So I joined up to play in an over-40 soccer league. I’m thinking, "Hey, I’m on the younger end of that spectrum so how bad can it be?" I played the first couple of games and discovered how truly out of shape I am. Since I haven’t played competitive soccer in over 23 years and I’ve put on more pounds than I’d like to admit, those 40 yard sprints ain’t to easy to recover from. So this week when they asked me to play goalie I thought, "Hey, why not? At least I won’t feel like I’m gonna pass out after five minutes."
Sunday I stepped into goal and little did I know that the team we were facing was a perennial power in the league. Thus I found myself flopping around like a fish on land as I went after shots, crosses, through balls, etc. I really enjoyed it, but yesterday when I woke up I felt like someone had beat me with a 2×4. Then on top of that I got hit with a mild case of the flu bug which engendered me not venturing too far from the facilities all day long. By last night I had the shakes something fierce and all I could do was lie in bed under several blankets with a heating pad on my lower back.
Thankfully a good night’s sleep seems to have cured all that ails me, with the notable exception that I’m still over-40 and wondering why I can’t party like its 1984.
Laura Hendrix writes from Kenya: “It’s very frustrating to know that we have created a culture that expects a handout…We invite the elders of villages to an educational session on how to prev
Befuddled 