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Gannett bashing and worry for newspapers in general.
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ConvergeSouth. Darkmoon’s real motivation for the annual Greensboro blogfest.
links for 2007-10-29
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Hands Off Boys, er, Happy Birthday Erin
One of the reasons I wasn’t exactly chomping at the bit to make this trip to Germany is that today is my daughter Erin’s birthday. I’ve never missed one of the kids’ birthdays and I hope I never have to do it again. Ironically the more birthdays we celebrate with the kids the more I treasure each one, because when I think about it we’ll have three more with Erin’s older brother Michael and four more with Erin before they go off to college and then it’s highly likely we’ll miss lots of their birthdays after that. Ah well, gotta put food on the table and all that.I’m also feeling particularly nostalgic because the past year has seen Erin truly blossom. She’s truly becoming a young lady, a fact that was hammered home when she tried on the dress she’s going to be wearing in her aunt’s wedding. Let’s just say I’m going to be fighting off some drunken louts in a few weeks and I won’t be taking prisoners. The girl’s gonna drop some jaws and if any of them drop the wrong way Daddy’s gonna have to do some peacekeeping.
Of course I’m like every other Dad out there, wanting my little girl to stay just that. Unfortunately time and biology have conspired against my wishes and she just keeps getting more lady like and less girlish. At the risk of repeating myself from last year’s birthday post, I have to say again that she’s eventually going to be some lucky guy’s boyfriend, fiance and wife. But be warned fellas, you better be prepared to impress because you’ll have to be better than any man I’ve ever met to take my girl away from her mother and me.
For now we’re going to hold on to Erin as tight as we can and enjoy the soccer games and practices, the family dinners and the silly stories. We’ll treasure her laugh, watch with wonder as she continues to thrive in school and let her bedazzle us with her smile. In short we’ll enjoy every moment we can with our young lady because they are becoming too few.
Happy birthday sweetheart. See you in a couple of days.
links for 2007-10-22
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Japanese women encouraged to disguise themselves as vending machines to avoid street predators.
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Damnit, damnit, damnit. Lenslinger’s write-up of ConvergeSouth makes me regret missing it even more. Maybe next year.
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Product lets you read French books without a dictionary.
German TV
So I woke up last night at 2 a.m. Frankfurt time, and that was after sleeping five hours. Unfortunately I knew right away that I wasn’t going to get back to sleep any time soon so I decided to call home and then do some reading. After the call and an hour or two of reading I clicked on the TV and started surfing through the 40 or so channels of TV that the hotel carries. In the process I discovered some interesting things:
- Girls doing things to girls, if you get my drift, is a staple of German late night television. At first I thought this was an interesting departure from the infomercials that are a staple of late night TV in the states, but then I realized that they were all hawking SMS p-rn services and s-x lines. As I surfed the channels I counted at least five that ran these things, which means that over 10% of the stations had them.
I’m still trying to figure out what kind of guy would get worked up with some supposed woman sending him messages like "U R so hot U R mkg me…" Of course the wireless services here are so far ahead of ours in the US that it would be a good bet that they deliver high quality video to pervs’ phones and they’re just using "SMS" in the same way that some people call all sodas "Coke". Either way, you don’t see the "commercials" or the wireless p-rn back in the states.
- They carry Al Jazeera and I have to tell you that if it wasn’t for the little symbol in the corner I would have thought it was another version of CNN, except with real reporters. All the reporters I saw were British and considering that they were running opposite Wolf Blitzer they came off looking like geniuses. Only when you get a chance to watch BBC, Sky TV and, yes, Al Jazeera do you begin to appreciate what unmitigated crap we have for national TV news programming in the states. I think what I like best about the non-US networks is that they don’t all assume that the average viewer is ADHD and on his sixth cup of coffee in the last hour. Stories have depth, some running several minutes, and the reporters and commentators address the audience with a calm and reserve that we haven’t seen on US television in at least 20 years. What’s interesting to me is that Sky and Fox are both owned by Rupert Murdoch, but Sky makes Fox look like a production of some local high school’s Young Republicans group. Shows you what he thinks of we Amerikaners. Not that Sky comes across as particularly great, but in comparison to our junk it seems almost NPR-worthy. FYI, one of the most viewed videos on Sky’s site is the manager at the KFC in Statesville NC (about 1/2 hour from my house) fighting off a shotgun-toting robber. It really is a small world.
- EuroSport is the anti-ESPN. Nary a studio full of retired players or coaches as panelists to be found and lets just say that the sports they carry are hard to come by on the west side of the Atlantic. In the course of browsing I saw sumo wrestling, snooker and team handball. The last is a hybrid of soccer and basketball that I’d love to give a try, but I doubt I’ll ever get the chance. Note to ESPN execs: can you please dial back the BS and start just giving us the sports? You’re beginning to remind me of MTV (what happened to the music?) and not in a good way.
- It’s a trip seeing movies with German voice-overs, especially the male voices. The Germans all sound much more "manly" than the original actors, especially guys like Steven Seagall.
Hopefully that will be the extent of my German television reviews since I’d like to get at least a little sleep over the next few days.
Travels with Constantine
On my flight from Charlotte to Frankurt I sat next to a little German boy named Constantine who was approximately five years old. Constantine didn’t speak a word of English and my German is limited to counting to ten and saying “please” and “thanks”. Fortunately the boy’s mom was sitting in the row behind us with his brother and was able to provide translation services
Throughout the flight I was under the impression that Constantine had a bladder the size of a peanut because he went to the bathroom approximately 43 times. It ends up he had an upset stomach which I figured out when the cabin lights were turned on so the crew could serve breakfast. That’s when Constantine awoke with that wide-eyed look you get when the smoke alarm goes off at 3 AM and started saying “nein” over and over really loudly. That’s also when he assumed that belly grabbing pose that is the universal symbol for “I’m getting ready to blow chunks.”. Unfortunately for me the meal cart was parked next to me which meant I was fairly certain I was going to be wearing chunks of something if I didn’t move fast
Constantine’s mom handed him a barf bag through the gap between the seats and I’m hear to tell you that when you’re staring down the possibility of a five year olds hurl those bags don’t engender a lot of confidence. Meanwhile the stewardesses all assumed that Constantine was my son despite the fact that we’d been communicating with each other via grunts and hand signals for six hours. That’s why they didn’t act with what I felt was appropriate urgency when I informed them of the situation. When I told them that he wasn’t my kid and he’d probably be happier with his mom the stewardesses moved the cart so mom and I could trade places. I think my look of desperation also helped
In the end we landed safely and Constantine gave me a sweet smile on the way out.
Why do I feel like this is going to be a really long trip? Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
And we’re off
Sitting in the terminal at Charlotte waiting for my flight to Frankfurt (Germany, not FrankfOrt KY) and they’ve announced that the flight is oversold. They’re looking for 15 people to voluntarily drop. Only airlines could do business this way
FYI, I’m flying US DespAirways
Hopefully this isn’t an omen for the rest of the trip. Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
links for 2007-10-20
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Government going overboard with a newspaper in Phoenix.
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Use airlines’ package delivery websites to find out why flights are really delayed
Define Lucky and/or God’s Will
This is a story that Chicken Little would love. A piece of piping hot metal fell out of the sky, punctured the roof of a Delaware woman’s SUV and came to rest on the floor behind the front seats. It happened to hit her SUV while she was shopping in a drugstore. The FAA and the military say that it didn’t come from a plane, and some of the people leaving comments on the story surmise that it’s space junk or something ejected from a machine in the vicinity. I’m liking the space junk theory, what with me believing in Martians.
This is also one of those stories where you ask yourself if the person involved is lucky or unlucky. If you’re a glass-half-full kind of person then you think she’s lucky because she wasn’t in the car when it hit, but if you tend to take a negative view on life then you’re probably thinking she’s the unluckiest woman around since she managed to be the only person on Earth that had an unidentified piece of piping hot metal pierce through the roof of her new SUV just a few days before her wedding.
Whether this gal’s lucky or unlucky if I’m someone in her wedding party I’m angling for the end of the line farthest from the altar. No reason to push my own luck.
Not Converging
The annual ConvergeSouth to-do is kicking off tomorrow in Greensboro and once again I won’t be able to make it. My problem is that they continually schedule these things when I have other work-related things I can’t get out of which leads me to ask, "Have they no consideration?" Do they continually have to schedule this thing when it’s convenient for them and not for me? Sheesh.
Anyway, I wish I could be there but I’ll be helping run the 2007 Competitive Intelligence European Summit in Germany so I won’t be able to do the Converge thing. (Yeah, I know it sounds cool running a show in Germany, but when you consider that I don’t speak a lick of German, that I’ll be confined to a conference hall for seven days, AND I’ll miss my daughter’s birthday it gets considerably less cool sounding). I’m sure ConvergeSouth will be great and I’m fairly certain I’ll get over my disappointment by this time next year at which point I’ll probably be disappointed again. So if you’re anywhere near NC A&T tomorrow you should definitely check it out. They want people to pre-register so they can feed them, but if you’re willing to not eat I’m sure they’ll let you in. And tell ’em I said "hi."
Spellcheck!
One of the kids came home from school with a corrected essay that had been written for language arts, which in my day was called English. One of the corrections was the word "ficticious" being circled accompanied by the word "fictitous" as the correct spelling. At the end of the paper the teacher wrote "Always check the dictionary."
Indeed.
Is it just me or does calling English "language arts" seem a little too vague? After all couldn’t the study of Spanish or French also be called "language arts?" Did the English teachers’ union decide that they needed a fancier title or was this foisted on them by some bureaucrat with nothing better to do? Am I sounding like Andy Rooney, only less wrinkled and slightly less stooped?
Befuddled 