The Icepick Cometh

Just a quickie — the staff are still recovering fromo too much soy sauce. I don't know, news like this always seems to make me a little cranky.

Read More…

We are so plucky, are we not? Just check out the end of this Forbes column for proof. So if you're a Gen Xer (or a younger, unnamed generationaly grouped person), don't worry about the coming (arrived) recession — those pesky perky Baby Boomers will only be partly hanging onto those jobs. And if you get laid off, it's all good. We "expect" to switch jobs frequently — it's just that, it used to be by choice, not by layoffs. Here's an excerpt:

In the immediate future, if there are widespread layoffs, younger generations will likely handle it differently than their older peers, says Mary Crane, a career consultant who specializes in bridging the generation gap. "They've come into the workplace never suspecting they'll take one job and have it for life," says Crane.

"Lots of them will look at it as an opportunity to explore career opportunities. They might take six months off-- that's how long recessions last--and work on a political campaign because they can build their resume and make great contacts. Or they'll teach. They look at this as opportunity."

So just go out and take this “opportunity” to take advantage of this “opportunity” of being laid off to not earn money and go and build up your contacts — and build up your credit card debt, too, while you charge basic groceries to live (if you haven't already been doing that). At least you won't need to charge gasoline to commute, since you won't be, you know, commuting any more. Oh, and tell the landlord or the bank that you won't be making the rent/mortgage this month, get used to bean sandwiches and (gasp!) dump that latte for a Stewart's coffee (which just went up 10 cents to $1.20, tax included, just to keep my priorities straight).

Or while you're at it, go teach. Just like that. Because teaching is a great, you know, fallback option — maybe it could be a hobby!

Oh, just to fill it out: opportunity, opportunity, opportunity, opportunity, opportunity. There, now I said it more than Forbes.

Read More…

Hmm, or maybe not: Perhaps my faith in us all working in retail in the future was, er, misplaced. Check out this article and excerpt from Slate.com:

In the coming years, retailers, who are integrating online sales into their business models, simply won't need the same amount of acreage. The upshot: Demand for retail space is likely to grow at a pace far slower than that of the overall economy.

So, in other words, there's going to be no jobs for us in the future, including retail. Are we at world's end? Or do we all just join the fastest ships in the shipping industry?

More from the Slate article:

But e-com­merce has quietly been growing at a rate far higher than that of the overall econo­my. For the last four years, online retail sales have grown at an annual rate of more than 20 percent.

And this, with perhaps a hint of a silver lining for all our future jobs at Target, Wegman's and Stop & Shop (unless, of course, you were planning on working at the Carousel Mall, apparently)…

For 2008, [research firm] Reis projects there will be 159 million square feet vacant … But landlords shouldn't lose faith just yet. While vacancy rates are high in some depressed markets — 15 percent in Syracuse, N.Y. — there's no imminent danger of America's malls turning into ghost towns. The minute the credit crunch breaks, consumers will surely hit the malls with a vengeance.

And then there's this column from Forbes.com, which has little to do with this article and has more to do with The Present and (at least in this pull-quote) My Past and many of My Friends' Present and Past, rather than The Future…

Eventually, companies who strangle and handcuff their employees lose valuable workers and will lose market share; they will be left unprepared when the economy recovers, which it inevitably will. In reality, the abusive or neglectful boss will only be left with people who will take the abuse, and all too often these are underperformers who have little choice in the job marketplace. So, incompetent managers actually weaken the organization for the next economic cycle, while, of course, diminishing their own value and credibility. So, if you are like most managers, complaining about your distressed workload and a life out of balance, ask yourself how many great employees you helped to (unnecessarily) exit the business.

Not that I'm bitter or anything. Just needed something extra to put on my Price Chopper job application.

Read More…

Yeah, but if this passes, what becomes of LOLBrit? Though frankly, I'd like to take off on the NPR reporter's idea and turn it into "I Can Has Paparazzi." Oh hai, People. Mah 1st Amendment, let me mokk it.

Read More…

Best in Show is an acknowledged classic over in these parts. No discussion. It's like a unanimous decision, only with more people.

But even I wouldn't wish this irrelevant silliness on the yuppie couple with the weimaraner and the busy bee.

Never knew if the whole Fishkill thing was a hoax or not (this was a PoJournal front pager), but this is about when I finally stopped paying attention to these people. Y'all remember that, don’cha?

But, hey, you don't think self-promotion — rather than shedding light on the pet-shelter crisis — was their real motive, do you?… Don't look at all the fat-ass losers, they're freaks! You look at us!!!




I think that's about enough on this topic.


moar humorous pics

Read More…

Fun week for newspapers! Thanks, Romenesko at Poynter, for rounding them up. You made my evening mix of Coffee Milk and Jameson justified. Mmmm. Let start with the biggest one: the New York Times will cut 100 newsroom people. The L.A. Times is cutting, Baltimore Sun is cutting (David Simon is boiling, and so am I), everyone is cutting. What to do with all these soon-to-be out-of-work journalists when they join our jaded ranks, hopefully in gainful (and sometimes ungainful) employment? I know, how about this?

Actually, I'm not really kidding. My prediction, to anyone who is listening, is that in 20 years, most of us will be working retail full-time, most likely in supermarkets. And this is no knock on retail. It's just going to be the only work left in this country.

Think about it: All the remaining manufacturing jobs will be gone, and most white-collar jobs will be outsourced by then, too. With video and telephone conference-calling and high-speed connections, call centers won't be the only branches exported to central Asia. So why will they need you to sit in that cubicle? (Small consolation: why will they need your middle-manager boss in her tiny mid-row office, either?)

With most major events televised, and even the smallest city council meetings on TV or streamed through the Web, they've even experimented with outsourcing journalism overseas. That includes outsourcing the graphic artists. And check out this one, where the guy naively thinks this won't work for local news because corporate editors are going to worry about having to “spend time and resources on training these [outsourced] reporters to 'know'” their coverage areas. Papers don't spend that money to do that now in their own newsrooms, fool!

So what's left? Retail, my friends.

Ah ha! What about Amazon, you say, and all those reports about chain stores having a shitty Christmas sales season? True, that will mean fewer stores, but they will be there. Put simply, people like to shop, and there is a large segment of people that still like to go out to shop, or just walk the malls. This country's credit love affair (the subprime crisis aside) will continue to make this so.

Plus, fresh (and even frozen) foods will still make supermarkets appealing, even if you can buy boxed stuff over the Internet.

And with retail shipping growing, there will be more of a need for packagers at the various warehouses, truck drivers and deliverymen.

So essentially, we will be a nation of retail workers buying and selling from each other. I work at Stop and Shop, you work at Target, let's make a deal.

The only other growth industry I see is in trash collection (especially with all those shipped boxes to throw away, er, recycle). That is, until Mr. Fusion comes along.

Read More…

Found this indirectly in one of the comments on a Poynter story about narrative writing. They're talking about newspapers and magazines, but I liked the idea that this might apply to blogs also.

Anyway, the Gangrey collects some of these stories. It is worth a look.

Took me a second to figure out its format — the links under the authors' names and sometimes the links within the posts send you to the full-length narrative story. The title of the post is the permalink, but it is not the full-length version of the story. Fooled me (if this was obvious to you, chalk it up to a lack of coffee intake on my part today), but it is worth checking out.

I liked this one, and I've never been to L.A. (again click on the author's name for the full story, or the link I just provided).

Read More…

Am I too naive to think Krugman is wrong? If so, why doesn't he ask Eliot Spitzer how well that worked out so far. Of course, Spitzer came in with great promise, then went on to antagonize everyone, his own party members included. Not that the state Legislature didn't deserve it, up and down. But do we really need another combative and polarizing president?

Sorry, cranky and naive this morning. Still, the NY Leg is self-interested, preservationist and essentially useless, doing more bad than good most times. Not that Congress ain't (can't believe I'm sort-of defending Congress), but maybe because more people (slightly) give a shit about Congress — whereas only politcal junkies and people in Buffalo follow the mostly irrelevant Statehouse — whereas you might be able to shame Congress into working with you. I know that's somewhat of Spitzer's failed strategy from a year ago; the difference is, no one really cares about the NY Leg.

Of course, with Cranky Post 1. this morning, no one's gonna be following Congress either pretty soon, because they're ain't gonna be any more newspapers.

Shit, 11:30 a.m. ain't close enough.

Read More…

I used to think that in 15 years, we'd be down to about three newspapers — The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the L.A. Times, USA Today (ugh) and (in supermarket-tabloid fashion by then) the New York Post.

Maybe now narrow my survivor list to five.

That's it as far as printed papers would go. Another 20 of the top circ papers would limp along as online-only entities. Everyone else will be out of business. And really, after reading Romenesko on Poynter.com, who would notice?

Read More…

http://www.dailygazette.com/news/2008/feb/13/0213_google/


please you… see moar humorous pics

Read More…

Perhaps the greatest knock against Hillary and Bill's campaign is their overwhelming sense of her entitlement to the office that will be decided this November. It says here that while that seemingly mimics the Clintonian ethos, it has as much to do with two numbers:

• 1947


• 1961

The first number is Hillary's birth year, with her coming into the world smack dab in the original Baby Boom.

The second is Obama's birth year, teetering between the aforementioned Baby Boom and the next generation, one much reviled by their older fellow Americans — commonly, often derisively, but here, proudly known as Generation X.

Hillary has endured many slights in her career, some perhaps imagined, and some very real, despite the propensity for the Republican opposition to taunt that she is claiming false injuries, all the while holding the bloody hammer behind their proverbial backs.

But in competing neck-and-neck with a younger upstart, one who may or may not be considered part of her own generation, Hillary is enduring the sleightest of slights — possibly losing the nomination to a younger, seemingly undeserving Party compatriot.

It's a typical reaction of Baby Boomers, and it shows, without a doubt, what generation Hillary considers Barack to be a part of — and it ain't her own.

Obama may enthuse some of the seemingly naïve we-can-change-the-world attitude that is both the best and one of the worst aspects of the Baby Boomers. But I don't believe his agenda it is born of a naïveté, this yearning for hope. Rather, it is really the best part of my generation — a practicality born of a world weariness acquired before one's time.

Hillary, for sure, deserves some props for her own well-paid-for world weariness, which has helped produce an almost impenetrable suit of armor, which she needs to hold her own against every kind of backlash she faces, some very much of the male chauvanist kind (this armor, unfortunately, renders the wearer incapable of producing empathy for said-wearer, a few well-timed New Hampshire tears aside).

But, remember, Hillary is very much a product of her generation. To quote her Web site, in discussing her parents and upbringing: "The life that Hugh and Dorothy created for Hillary and her two brothers was a classic 1950s middle-class suburban childhood."

Gen Xers, on the other hand, were first portrayed as slackers as young adults. See Obama's high school and college years in Hawaii and then L.A. and New York (he buckled down somewhat when he transferred to Columbia) if you want some examples of honest slacking masking an untapped reservoir of talent and potential. This generation has have been children of divorce, more so than most other generations, certainly the Boomers. Barack has got it on this account, too.

But we have also been a generation to grab what we could when we could, since the Boomers were and still are keeping the best pieces of pie for themselves, and borrowing against our future to make sure their pie is well-filled long into what should be our peak earning years. They're still telling the waitress to put it on our tab, that's all.

Obama, perhaps running before his time, perhaps stepping on some toes as the know-it-all upstart. Maybe his birthdate is a a little too early to be considered a "true" Gen Xer (though the social scientists Strauss and Howe would put him at the start of what they call the 13th Generation, their post-Boomer grouping). But teetering on the brink of both generations, he's looking more and more like he'd fall in the latter one.

And as a truly practical Gen Xer, where many see a usurper, he sees an opportunity, one aided by timing and not a little bit of good fortune (some would call it luck), leading him to this particular momentum swing. That's not only a Gen X trait, that's an American success story.

Meanwhile, this could-be Gen Xer has sped past one Baby Boomer woman, shaking her head, if not her generation's entitled fist.

Read More…

The staff have been permitted soy sauce. In its honour, we present this classic film:…

Read More…

Shafer bats about .700 in my book. I agree with him a lot of the times, and then there are others when the guy infuriates me, or I just say "meh" (get off the anti-Meth-stories kick, Jack, no one reads Meth stories anyway).

But like I said, there are plenty of times when I agree with him. And on this one, he bats it out of the park, hitting into The Black like Reggie's third homer in Game 6 of the 1977 Series.

No, Pat, no, don't sit on that!

(Shafer's column includes some choice rips).

Why the hell not endow a newspaper, as Shafer sort-of uses as a throw-away line at the end of his column? It's worth a try, about as worth it as The National was (and I loved that paper's 16½-month run, which ended 16½ years ago). It would certainly be a lot better than the fucking corporate-owned bullshit printed in nearly every city in America that is in full pandering mode while running the industry into the ground.

Don't get me wrong: There is nothing wrong with honoring journalists who died in the line of duty, who were attacked and killed for doing their job and reporting something unpopular or something someone didn't want the public to know in overseas countries. Remember that the next time some sportswriter bitches about covering the Knicks. But a fitting monument in D.C. is a better way to go, and not an overbuilt, overblown dumb-ass playland (with Gannett connections, natch) [UPDATE: My bad. corpo-journo factory Gannett has nothing to do with the Freedom Forum, according to a Newseum press release.].

Read More…

I am trying to make, before I get through, a picture of the whole world — or as much of it as I have seen. Boiling it down always, rather than spreading it out thin.

Be not afraid — be girthy.

If you’re like us, and your interests include the Sunset of the Empire and Sport (“Gladiators, I salute you”), don't delay. Meet The Girth and Baby Girth. Go click; people, it’s time to get girthy.

The irony. The pity. We’re all in.

Read More…

Don't say I didn't tell you so, but I ain't the only one who thinks Congress is taking the cynically easy answer with this corn-for-fuel bullshit. Check out this story from NPR's All Things Considered. Frankly, I always thought that the answer to the fuel problem and the garbage/landfill problem could be one and the same — and if you were watching closely to the end of Back to the Future you'd have known if for, like, 23 years! Right at the end of the movie, Doc returns in the flying DeLorean and fuels up by dumping household garbage into the "Mr. Fusion" at the back of the time machine. Hmmm, let's see, NPR article, can you help me out?...

But Alex Farrell at Berkeley sees a way out of this. He says the focus of the biofuels industry needs a rapid change of direction, away from using cropland — which is where most U.S. biofuels come from today — and toward other sources of starting material.

"We could replace all of the ethanol that we consume in California just using waste that goes to the landfill today, and turning that into ethanol," Farrell says.

Environmentally friendly biofuels could also be made from agricultural waste or grasses grown on land that's not suitable for crops. The biofuels industry is heading in that direction, but the technology to make use of fuels other than corn and soy is still in its infancy.

Earlier, I was talking about Congress winning easy votes from both the Green types (and sort-of Green types, like me) and from Middle America with this ethanol ploy; instead of doing the hard thing and funding more research into better sources of alternative fuels to wean us off gasoline, Congress grabbed onto the first thing that sounded kind of eco-friendly and then put a bright green sticker on it. But, I didn't know then that ethanol can, in fact, come from sources other than corn — like from trash, as this Berkeley guy said. I also only pointed out the Mississippi-bound sludge and rising farm feed costs (and no change in trucking pollution) angles from the corn-fuel scam. But NPR's story also notes that negative global impacts of clear-cutting land to grow corn to take advantage of Congressional incentives, and the attendant costs of that.

Still waiting on my Mr. Fusion. Keep waiting, and keep waiting for that flying DeLorean, too. According to Back to the Future, we're due for flying cars in 2015, just seven years away, when Congress will likely still be giving us and the environment the ol' spitting corn-cob treatment.

Read More…

Apropos of nothing: There were Kriegel-like sports columns I wanted to write, and then there was this one from the former Boston Sports Guy (Bill Simmons, who has been ESPN.com's Sports Guy for a long time, and was never as good as this after he moved from Boston to L.A. and the Sox in 2004 won their first Series since Oog invented fire — the ESPN platform seemingly went to his head).

Incidentally, this column is from the NBA preview of more than 6 years ago (before the 2001-02 seaosn, I think) and is currently apropos of nothing, except it was late one night and I was Googling and wondering if I could find this column. Really, I don't care about the NBA part of this column because it is so old (except for the Patrick Ewing line at No. 33 — that never gets old), but the Boogie Nights quotes are priceless. How he matched them to the NBA offseason was relevant at the time.

Read More…

This one was worth sharing, from a Columbia professor who is an expert on gang life. I know, I know. I'm not one to praise the world of academia, especially a professor of the drug trade. But his books sound interesting, and well-researched and I'd give him a chance. I've heard of him before, and he seems to be the real deal, as crazy as that sounds for an academic.

Read More…

I consider myself environmentally conscious, if not true 100% green, but I'm trying, and I want to do my part. I drive a car with pretty good mileage (stick shift, 33 mpg). I recycle, my newspapers especially, obsessively (when I get to them, that's when; so stop asking me about my newspaper stack/end-table).

I guess that makes me Bourgeois Green. But my environmental awareness doesn't include these stupid swirly Compact Fluorescent light bulbs. I cannot stand the light that emits from them — it unmazes me. They are the very definition of "not soft."

I had worries about the mercury in them, but this Slate article puts some of those fears to rest. There's really little mercury in them, so don't worry about it (as the article essentially says). Of course, eating a little asbestos with mustard on it prolly won't kill you, either. Still, I'm convinced the mercury hazard is more or less minimal (but please don't eat them).

No, for me, the CFL light is simply too harshly white (take that whiteys!). It resembles nothing of the softness of a regular light bulb. You say, so what? Deal with it. Or as one obstinate Slate commenter put it (in response to a kind of overwrought defense of the old-fashioned incandescent bulbs that I'd like to distance myself from): So, your personal aesthetics will take a back seat to environmental responsibility. Well, thank you very much, Mr. Decider. It is that kind of "I'm-right-you're wrong" attitude that gives us liberals a bad name. Um, that is not to be confused with my "I'm-right-you're-wrong-attitude." Not in the least. Please move on. Nothing to see here, my fine fellow American human friend.

Make these bulbs emit softer light and make 'em capable of dimming (I can't find any that work on a dimmer, other than dimming directly from "full blast" to "off") and we'll talk. Otherwise, I'm a gonna have to find another way to offset my old-fashioned incandescent carbon emissions. Of course, Congress spent its time dealing with these bulbs rather than, um, the economy, our inner cities, and, like, The War (sort of like the case stated in that previously mentioned overwrought article that I thought I was distancing myself from). Whatevs. Next thing you'll tell me Congress is pushing for a move to corn-based fuel that will inadvertently raise food prices by raising cattle feed prices and produce a sludge that will further muck up the Mississippi and continue to send smog-spewing trucks (ethanol-running or otherwise) out on the road to deliver said fuel, rather than work a little harder and fund research for a better alternative and shun the easy skin-deep popular and politically expedient thing to do in a cynical and transparent attempt to appear "green" and win some alterna-votes and appeal to middle America, to boot. But Congress would never do that.

Read More…

Not so long ago, reporters like Jimmy Breslin would hate being called "journalists" — it was too fancy a word for them. The newspaper business has always been a white collar world, but back in the day, you could make a case to consider reporters out on the beat "blue collar." Many of them didn't have college degrees — shit, some of them probably didn't finish high school. But they were street-smarter and better than most of today's journalists. Instead of looking up to someone like Jimmy Breslin — who learned his trade out on the beat — they now instead learn in the classroom; it's all theoretical and none of it practical. Sadly, none of the MBA-types and Coporate boot-lickers running newsrooms today share this view. Young reporters learned that lesson well — they idolized the Ivy League writers of Washington and flocked to grad school. Now most of them are J-School grads, with a ton of Ivy Leaguers and too many Grad School grads — they're the best classroom-educated bunch of journalists in history — but all they want to write about is Britney and Paris Hilton.

The newspaper world is not a better place for it. It was a better place because of Jimmy Breslin, but he's one of the last of a dying breed of a world long gone.

Here's a good story from the Times: When "how modern journalism became so lame," Breslin replied: “Because everybody comes to work in a suit.”

Read More…

…and we have no soy sauce. This is a bad thing.

Read More…

If you hadn't heard the news, Lisa Olsen, the Daily News columnist, resigned sometime in between the Jints' NFC and Super Bowl championships these last two weeks. Probably unrelated, but six years ago, Mark Kriegel was fired from the News.

First, to the Olsen resignation: Speculation on two somewhat "meh" sites is rampant that wee author Mike Lupica, the name-brand sports columnist with the Napoleon complex, had a hand in undermining Olsen to the point of making her quit. Without any better sources than the rival New York Post and the sports blog The Big Lead, where this rumor appeared, I'll merely repeat the rumor (I just did), but can't put full stock in it because of the sources (it's like the old journalism saw: It's a story so good, you'd hate to check it out). Olsen (at least, someone claiming to be her) said nothing about this and denied another rumor about mistreatment at the News because of her gender while otherwise confirming her resignation on sportsjournalists.com.

If you remember, more than six years ago, the excellent Mark Kriegel was fired by the Daily News. Rumors then had it that Lupica had "blood on his hands," according to this old New York Observer report (last item in the linked report). Kriegel has since written two well-received biographies (I recently finished his Pistol Pete) and is now a national columnist for Fox Sports online.

To be truthful, I wasn't a huge fan of Lisa Olsen's writing, but I respected her writing, and her reporting skills were said to be top-notch. I read her stuff if I bought the News that day, but didn't seek out her work online. I respected her for persevering after what she'd been through with the Patriots and sexual harassment (and one of the reasons I still dislike the Pats).

Meanwhile, Lupica's work reads like he's writing most of his columns (except for, say, really Big-Ticket events) off the TV coverage from his living room in Connecticut (rather than actually going to the game sites, like, um, a real journo — at least, that's how his columns read to me). Is it me, or when was the last time he had a good quote in the paper that wasn't pulled from a press conference?

Nothing was like the final late-heyday of the News in the late 1990s. Pete Hamill edited it for a time and it was a classy tabloid, a workingman's Times, something it never was again after Hamill was fired. It was a place where the late Mike MacAlary won a Pulitzer (I believe that happened after Hamill's tenure, but I feel his influence lived on). Even still, the sports section still flourished until Kriegel was canned around August 2001. But during that stretch, the Daily News sports section was the newspaper-world version of the Yankees (1996-2000).

If there is any justice on the planet, Kriegel would still be at the News and Lupica would be hanging with Wee Man and trying to land a role in The Hobbit, maybe as Gollum's special private "preciousssss."

Read More…

It's been the decade of Quality television — “The Wire,” “The Sopranos,” “Mad Men,” “Rescue Me,” and many others I want to see but haven't like “Deadwood” and “The Shield.” It has gotten to the point where the good TV series have replaced the novel.

This comes back to David Simon and the critics calling “The Wire” a "novel for television." But think on it — the best series today require a similar commitment by the viewer that novels required of their readers. And if you were to add up the time it takes to watch one season of these series, it probably amounts to the same amount of time it takes to read a great novel.

And it is not just the interchanging subplots and story lines, but in their ability to tell mature stories with conflicting, often tortured and sometimes unsavory heroes. Even something as seemingly middlebrow as “Playmakers” (ESPN's one-season dramatic gem on pro football), “Entourage” and the final seasons of “Sex and the City” (great as lighter fare), or “Lost” and “24” (never saw them, but were once recommended before declining into parodies of themselves) have told involving storylines that cut across and over several episodes, sometimes several seasons, and require work on the part of the viewer to remain engaged. That required work does not often make for easy viewing, but it does make for rewarding viewing.

Maybe it's a failing of the current climate of pop culture. Quick: name the best novel (hell, any novel) released this decade that does not contain “Harry Potter” in its title. This, too, with the Rise of the giant chain book stores in the last 10 years.

And to be sure, the rise in dramatic television this decade has dove-tailed, unfortunately, with the rise of some of the worst fast-food crap ever released on TV, like every reality show, new game show, and some of the worst sitcom ideas ever conceived.

Chalk it up to the rise of cable. I always thought it was funny that Time Warner always counter-advertised against satellite TV by using the (now old) argument that you'd lose your local network channels if you switched to the dish. That's a problem? When was the last time you saw something good on one of the major networks? You can say “24” or “Lost” or “Alias.” Those are anomalies, and I've watched one episode out of those three series. I can barely watch sports on the network channels, and that's with the sound off.

Read More…