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Sunday comics

3/30/2014

I'm a regular reader of letters to the editor and obituaries. I find some of the best writing in obits and enjoy the stories of famous and not famous people' lives. One letter and one obit stood out to me the past couple days.

The letter was in the Washington Post yesterday. It was in reaction to a language usage in the Post. Reader Audrey O. Stewart had said she didn't understand a quote containing the phrase "a social more." William Collinge of Gettysburg, Penn., wrote: "I'd have thought it was widely known that when the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie -- that's a more!"

Then there was the obit today of Jack Ready, a former Secret Service agent who was in the car behind JFK's when the bullets flew in Dallas. At one point in his career, Ready had been assigned to protect then-National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger. The obit closes with this story:

"Kent Jefferies, a younger Secret Service agent and friend of Mr. Ready’s, related one episode in a eulogy at his memorial service. 'I know you are brave and are good with a weapon,' Kissinger once told Mr. Ready. 'What would you do if we were attacked by terrorists trying to kidnap me?'

'I have my instructions, sir,' Mr. Ready replied, knowing that the secretary would not mind his ribbing. 'You are not to be taken alive.'"

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End-of-the-week news summary

3/28/2014

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So, as we end the week:

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's own people, well the people he hasn't fired yet, have found him innocent of any wrong-doing in the George Washington Bridge shutdown. My guess is the report writers, including those objective lawyers hired to investigate and be paid by taxpayer dollars, won't be fired
President Obama, whose favorability numbers are down, met with the Pope, getting, pardon the expression, the halo effect from the Pontiff
They are beginning to find pieces of the Malaysian plane that disappeared, we think, kinda sorta near where they kinda maybe figured it went down. Don't worry, tune into CNN and they will, I'm sure, clarify the reporting they are doing
Dayton, an 11 seed in the March Madness of the NCAA basketball tournament, is still alive
Russia's Vladimir Putin is still a thug, and now is pushing his thuginess on to his neighbors, which will keep gaining in number if he continues annexing countries
Disgraced (well that may be the wrong word, embarrassed maybe? No that doesn't work either, uh, inconvenienced? Ok we'll go with that) ex-politicians Andrew Weiner and Eliot Spitzer are now members of the Fourth Estate because they are paid columnists. In related news, the newspaper business has been declining for many years. Just one more milestone on that journey

Have a great weekend.

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What day is it, kids? It's Throwback Thursday!

3/27/2014

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So, there's apparently now something called Throwback Thursday. This is a day (oh my, it's today!) when you can post a picture online that takes one (or many) back to a different time and place.

Apparently (I keep using apparently because no one is certain what the exact origin of this idea is), Millennials, really like nostalgia so they designated a day on which one can be nostalgic and feel part of something at the same time. So, what you do is, you post a picture online, on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram, for example and don't forget the hashtag. A hashtag, for those who throw back to at least my generation, is a word or saying (no spaces) that has a "#" in front of it. Thus, "hashtag."I believe that means you can find other postings with the same hashtag easier, but I haven't tested that theory. So, if you post a photo on Throwback Thursday you might hashtag (a new verb) it, #throwbackthursday or #bt (I trust you can figure that out). The cool thing, they say, is that Throwback Thursday occurs every week -- and that is because, well, there is a Thursday in every week! It's not like you have to wait a year for the holiday or 17 for the cicadas. It's every week!

Now another thing. Whichever picture you post need not have anything to do with Thursday. So, it isn't that you're positing a picture that was taken on a Thursday. Nor does the topic of the picture need to have any connection with Thursday. This could have been Fallback Friday. But I have a feeling whoever came up with it liked having "TH" at the beginning of each word. A little onomatopoeia, if you will.

The picture need only be nostalgic. And probably should be at least five years old because, well, what isn't nostalgic about 2008??

This has become a game on the Interweb, I've learned from my five minutes of research this morning. So, by the time you read this, the game may be over and we may have moved on. To what, I don't know. Maybe Magnificent Monday or Wonderful Wednesday. Or, well, tomorrow.

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I can't get more than over

3/21/2014

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"AP Style tip: New to the Stylebook: over, as well as more than, is acceptable to indicate greater numerical value."

With those fewer than (or less than) 140 characters, the AP (Associated Press) waved its magic wand and changed the definition of a word. In this age of tweeting, seflies and twerking, I imagine it is OK (or okay?) for a news service, whose style book is the Bible for many news organiziations and businesses, to make that change for a good reason. So why did they do it?

As lexicographer Peter Sokolowski of Merriam-Webster tweeted:

"Under" can also mean "less than" in @APStylebook. 'Overwhelming evidence' is cited. 'it's futile to fight the tide.'"

It's futile to fight the tide? Gimme a break. The tide is what you fight when it comes to the English language. The English language arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and that was, well, a long time ago! The language has a long tradition and needs to remain clear in its words and the differcences among (yes among, not between) them.

I am not a grammarian nor an expert on language. I have been, for my entire adult life, since starting journalism school in the 1960s, a devotee of AP style. I have preached it everywhere I have worked, saying, in effect, it is the most acceptable of the "style books" out there, it isn't pretentious and you have to be consistent in writing -- so follow a stlyle so you can be consistent. And the AP style has universarlly been most accepted.

I know that dictionaries are adding words all the time, words that I don't necessary agree are real words. But the "less than/over" debate was over (not taller then, but done, finis) a long time ago. Then again, thanks to the AP, it's not more than, uh, over with yet.

Sokolowsi said there were audible gasps (can a gasp be inaudible?) when the change was announced.

Me too, more than that, i can say I won't get over than it.

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Metadating

3/19/2014

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One of the new buzz words is "metadata." Best I can tell (and I checked Wikipedia) metadata is "data about the containers of data." In simple terms, I think, it is detailed data (redundant, I know) collected about each of us and spit back at us in the form of information most specific to us (or me).

Like those ads that show up on your Facebook page. You know, you buy a pair of shoes from Zappos which sucks in all your info, analyzes it, puts it though a complicated algorithm (redundant, again) to ascertain the correct ascertainments about you, figures out who you are and what you like and then...zappo!...you get an ad on your Facebook page for...the same shoes you just bought! Wow. They really, really know what I'd like!!

I think that's how metadata is/are used, at least commercially. I checked my Facebook page the last couple days to see if the Zappo thing was an aberration. Here are some of the ads that were personalized to ME:

An ad on how to flip houses. (well, my current house is on the market so...maybe. But we've been in it for a long time. Must be a slow flip.)
An ad for Amazon touting Ricky Nelson's greatest hits CD for $7 (OK, the price is right, and I have always been partial to his "Garden Party").
An ad for training sessions on furniture building (if any of my male friends growing up saw this was targeted at me, they'd howl. Once, I had a new apartment and they were helping me paint it. I said, where shall I start and they said, in unison, "the closets." Might be where I got the nickname "Fingers" from. It's kind of like the tallest kid in the class being called "Shorty."
The ad headlined "Boyfriend Needed." Uh, no, not that there's anything wrong with that. It was an ad for ourtime.com, which is for dating folks over the age of 60 though.

I assume there are other uses for metadata and it's all way too complicated for my mind to comprehend. For example, I read an article this morning that the National Security Agency has the capability to record EVERY PHONE CALL in a particular country and use them for research. Wow. Some day, maybe they'll allow public subscriptions to that research.

Then the metadating prognosticators might not only know me, they might really, really like me.

.

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Da plane, da plane!

3/17/2014

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This missing Malaysian airliner baffles me, along with everyone else.

How do you lose a 777? As the days roll by with no word or sightings, the speculation now is that someone, someone with a great deal of knowledge about 777's, took it and the 200-plus people aboard. To what end? There have been no demands for ransom, that we've heard about. There have been no threats about what they'll do if something else isn't given to t hem -- a release of prisoners or something.

I have nothing to add to add to the debate, because I have no inside info or insights that others haven't expressed already. One thing I'll say though, I have seen experts quoted as saying they didn't know a "handshake" existed in the tracking. A "handshake" is signal that gets emitted every hour and sent to a satellite. It apparently doesn't give a location, though. If the experts didn't' know about the handshake, how did the alleged hijacker?

If you watch cable news (which I haven't), but reviewers write that there is much speculation (guessing) going on. I wish they'd stop that. News isn't guessing. News is, well, news -- fact-based reporting not high-paid talking heads (yes, most of them are paid to have opinions). How do I get one of those gigs?) .

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A video interlude

3/13/2014

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Apologies as I have been remiss in posting the last week or so. I thought, though, we could all use a little entertainment. So, enjoy!

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Atwater-initiated blues' concert on PBS

3/1/2014

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Air duet at the 1989 concert

PBS is premiering a show today featuring a concert from George H.W. Bush's 1989 inaugural.

The late Lee Atwater, his campaign advisor, was a huge blues fan and Lee arranged a concert with the best in the business of that era -- Bo Diddly, BIlly Ray Vaughn, Sam Moore, Willy Dixon, Carla Thomas, Dr. John, and the list goes on. The program only shows Lee for a minute and doesn't show Bush at all (even though there is what I'll call an iconic photo of Lee and Bush playing air guitar at the event).

Many thought the tapes of the show were lost. This show has been pieced together from various sources. The man who produced the show in 1989, Howard Begle, also produced the PBS program, which is coming out on DVD soon. It focuses on the music, not the politics. Which was what Atwater wanted, too. He was a huge blues fan. Cut his own album, in fact, featuring many of the same acts, and B. B. King. The show focuses, the review says, on the music, not the politics of the event. And Lee wanted to showcase that music at the inaugural.

Atwater was pegged as the guy behind the Willie Horton issue used against Bush's opponent, Massachusetts Gov. Mike Dukakis. (Former Vice President Al Gore when challenging for the Democratic presidential nomination was the first to raise the Horton issue in the campaign.)

Horton was a convicted murderer, who escaped while on furlough. He also was African-American. The Bush campaign, and outside groups mostly in paid ads, beat up Dukakis as a liberal who let murderers out of jail for a break. (Aside: my wife, Chris Black, was the Boston Globe reporter who covered the Dukakis campaign and wrote books on it. Coincidentally, just the other day she came across the Horton trial transcripts she used as research in our garage.) The belief was the issue was used to scare white voters away from Dukakis and to Bush.

I worked for Atwater when he was Republican National Party chairman. In spite of what folks think of his politics (and some of you are right, and some are wrong), he was one charming guy who loved the blues. Lee had three goals in life: run a presidential campaign, chair the national GOP, and record a blues album. He achieved all three goals by the time he was 40, which also was the age at which he died from brain cancer.

The artists, most of them African-Americans, the story goes, questioned even themselves as to why they were participating in a concert initiated by people some thought were racists. Bottom line: they were being asked to play for a president of the United States, and didn't want to miss that opportunity.

For the record, Atwater was not a racist. He was a politician who would use most any issue to win an election. We can debate the ethics of that philosophy another time and Lee spent part of his final days apologizing for some of the things he did.

For today: Lee loved the blues. Saw to it that an amazing concert was produced for the man he elected. And I look forward to getting lost in the music.

(Update: In the Washington, D.C., area, WETA says it will air the show March 15. It will be on New York PBS tonight.)

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Sunday comics

End-of-the-week news summary

What day is it, kids? It's Throwback Thursday!

I can't get more than over

Metadating

Da plane, da plane!

A video interlude

Atwater-initiated blues' concert on PBS

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