Thursday, February 4, 2010
2-4
posted at 6:47 PM | Permalink | 2 comment(s)
Two dreadful news items, for very different reasons: one, that ten missionaries - if that's really what they are - have been charged with kidnapping Haitian children in the midst of the worst catastrophe that country has ever known and that's saying something in their case - which inevitably makes me wonder if the Haitian government is simply taking advantage of a juicy newsy item (children + orphans + parents *are* alive . . .) to keep itself on the front page or if a group of creepy people were making financial and personal hay out of the situation and operating a child trafficking enterprise cloaked in the almost untouchable cape of religious do-gooders; and two, that the MTA may raise fares despite having duplicate books (not according to rumor but according to a judge's finding) in an economic time when lots of people who need public transportation are out of work or unable to work overtime because it's been cut back and there are few if any raises even of the cost-of-living kind and there was a not-inconsequentially large fare hike only a year ago.

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Thursday, January 28, 2010
28
posted at 9:06 AM | Permalink | 0 comment(s)
A short but surprisingly severe snow storm hit parts of NY and CT this morning without any warning or little drizzly snowflakes on the Weather Channel forecast - nothing - and it makes me a little crazy that the omnipresent "they" can assiduously stir up trouble and anxiety for days on end before many storms only to have us get maybe 4 inches and not be buried alive or incapacitated, but then they don't even notice or mention an early morning storm that had enough ice (black as well as visible) to cause dozens of accidents and actually kill at least one motorist.

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Friday, January 22, 2010
No way
posted at 8:56 AM | Permalink | 0 comment(s)
The New York Times will charge for "frequent users" (whatever that means) of their online paper, beginning in early 2011 (read about it here). Given the success (a/k/a failure) of their fee increases in the last few years, measured by the precipitous drop in sales, one wonders what the heck they're thinking. People such as myself want parts of the paper (arts, crosswords, sports, business) but not necessarily the whole paper and some of us have suggested charging for sections. They do offer the puzzles for an annual fee, now. Can you imagine paying forty or fifty dollars just to read it online? (Or is this just me?)

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Tuesday, January 19, 2010
19
posted at 10:18 PM | Permalink | 4 comment(s)
As if it isn't enough that we have to absorb the profoundly sad event of Robert Parker's death, a very strange thing happened in politics today when a 57-year assumed fact was upended and one of Massachusetts' senate seats (the one seemingly owned by Democrats because it had been occupied by only two men - Kennedys - in all that time, since Jack defeated Henry Cabot Lodge in 1952 despite the Eisenhower landslide, and passed it on to his brother Ted after he was elected President) will now be held by Scott Brown, a Republican, the completely clear and competely puzzling reasons for which will be debated over cups of coffee and bottles of wine and mugs of beer (since water coolers are presumably long long passé) for days and weeks to come.

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Sunday, January 17, 2010
Haitian report
posted at 10:29 AM | Permalink | 0 comment(s)
I recommend this blog - he's working with a mission that's been working with Haitian children for the last five years. Reading his hourly reports has the obvious impact of immediacy and is quite compelling.

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Saturday, January 16, 2010
Question
posted at 9:18 AM | Permalink | 3 comment(s)
Isn't it just as ridiculous to assert that the earthquake is a blessing - special love from God for those in the path of the devastation - as to say that it's the devil getting his due in exchange for extricating themselves from French rule?

You can't make up things like this. First there was Pat Robertson's inane commentary and now there's the other extreme (which I heard this morning spoken aloud - I am truly not making this up). One is reminded of being told in elementary school by the nuns that misery and suffering such as childhood leukemia, polio, being beaten by your parents, etc. all show God's special gift to those who suffer. Seriously that's what we were told. Wear a hairshirt and add to your suffering because the more you suffer with grace and sweetness the more God knows you love him and then he'll love you more and will show his love by giving you . . . yup, more suffering.

The fact is that horrible horrible things happen sometimes. It completely s^%&s and it's terrible and it would be great if each bad thing provided impetus to figure out ways of preventing bad things in the future. But I cannot believe it's a devil getting his due or a deity seeing what people can endure so as to give them extra special rewards like testing them further with more bad things nor to give them extra special rewards in heaven.

And why exactly is this kind of thinking different or sillier than suicide bombers who believe they'll gain forty virgins in heaven?

I know there is an intense, vital, passionate urge to explain things but sometimes a cigar an earthquake is just a cigar an earthquake.

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Friday, January 15, 2010
Massachusetts
posted at 8:55 AM | Permalink | 1 comment(s)
I have no idea about either candidate's qualifications or merits in general but this article is one helluva scary thing to read and if this is how Martha Coackley thinks and functions, she would not seem to be a good choice. It's really astonishing to me how often simple logic and reason fail to bring people up short in such intense and important situations. I mean, is there real and reliable evidence? If so, why not use it instead of hyperbolic and outrageous statements? Abusers should not be allowed to see the light of day, no one quarrels with that, but what is to be gained by both building and jumping upon a bandwagon?

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Wonderful story
posted at 8:44 AM | Permalink | 4 comment(s)
It's a year later. Hard to believe it's been a whole year since that crazy, frightening, wonderful day. It's so cold this winter and I don't remember that it was this cold - maybe it wasn't and maybe that's partly why they all made it. The captain has proven to be as judicious in his choices of where to lend his name as he was calm and leaderly in the crisis. And none of the passengers or crew has capitalized in a bad way, as far as I know. Now there is another nice twist. Read this and weep - well, I wept because the story is so nearly tragic but is instead miraculous. Best wishes for Laurie and Ben and thanks for them telling their story.

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Thursday, October 29, 2009
One can only hope
posted at 9:03 AM | Permalink | 0 comment(s)
An article in the LA Times today says that many people have petitioned for Polanski's extradition. It would be rational and fortuitous to have him serve his sentence, it seems to me, both because of the horror of what he did (and admits to having done) and because neither time nor talent nor prestige nor celebrity friends should be sufficient to exonerate him.

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Thursday, August 6, 2009
Pay for news?
posted at 9:27 AM | Permalink | 0 comment(s)
According to this article, at some time in the not-too-distant-future, we will have to pay a fee to get news on the internet. You'd think - considering plummeting hard-copy newspaper sales and all - that the people planning this (if indeed they are planning it and this isn't just them throwing the idea out to see if it floats) would realize its folly. For one thing, there will (continue to) be ways around subscription articles (a solution for some subscriber-only articles at present, for example, is copying a headline then plopping it into a search engine and opening the free result). Also, although television news is far less detailed than print or internet, and the anchors usually shout a lot or flirt with the camera/viewer, and the content emphasizes way celebrity/ gossip/ entertainment, tv news is available eighty gazillion hours a day. Also, too, there are bound to be services providing news for free so that will mean that any that charge fees will have fewer subscribers than they expect and/or count on. As with hiking commuter and other fees, there is always a balance to consider between increased revenue from increasing or adding fees and decreased revenue from refusal to buy a product at that or perhaps any fee. And is it a good idea to add one more claim on people's money at a time when there's not quite enough to go around for most of us? My prediction - hope - is that they will realize this is a bad idea and not do it.

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Monday, August 3, 2009
A few minutes of fame
posted at 12:48 PM | Permalink | 0 comment(s)
A friend of mine was on a panel about Woodstock at the Darien Library last week. Apparently he was a young boy at the time, in a car on the way to spend some time at a house by a lake near Bethel and they got stuck in the traffic (as I did too, on the way to my family's house in Vermont). Well, apparently my friend wrote a short story/memoir kind of thing about it and someone saw it and showed it to a woman who was writing a book about Woodstock, what with the 40th anniversary and all, and one thing led to another and now he's having his fifteen or so minutes of odd fame. I say "odd" because (a) he doesn't remember it because (b) he wasn't actually there and (c) he was only 7 and anyway (d) his father hated "those annoying hippies."

An amusing/cynical side note is that the book is entitled "Woodstock Revisited: 50 Far Out, Groovy, Peace-Loving, Flashback-Inducing Stories from Those Who Were There" and is therefore an example of how untrustworthy titles and perhaps reporting in general are since we have personal knowledge of one of the 50 eponymous people not being there. But I'm happy my friend is getting time in the limelight - he's a really nice guy - and he does know what he's doing and he's having a blast with it. He's being interviewed by newspapers and was taped for appearances on NY1 as well as some stuff on WLIW.

Oh, AND he thought Darien Library was awesome - as indeed it is - and was delighted that I know and like it too.

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Thursday, July 2, 2009
News of the week (not quite in review)
posted at 5:45 PM | Permalink | 0 comment(s)
I LOVE CNN's weekly news quiz. Take this week's here.

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Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Ethical conflict?
posted at 9:06 AM | Permalink | 0 comment(s)
There was an article in yesterday's NY Times about Greta Van Susteren and Sarah Palin and their husbands. Its point is that the two families have had personal and business interactions while Van Susteren was reporting on the Palins. It poses the question as to whether, when news reporters and news subjects become entwined, in whatever way(s), there may be a huge, dangerous and ominous cavern that sucks down reliable and objective news reporting.

It does seem self-evident that objective reporting is impossible when investigator and investigatee are friends or associates. Of course, 24-hours-around-the-clock coverage demands constant verbiage, which doesn't help.

My personal favorite is Alan Greenspan and his wife (i.e., the woman with whom he presumably shares a bed as well as breakfast and dinner and all manner of casual conversation and intimacy). Andrea Mitchell, premiere NBC news reporter, was his close friend and then his wife for years, all the while he held the country's chief financial post. She wrote hundreds of pieces on politics and the economy and one wonders how any of them could possibly have been neutral or objective. Even more, one wonders why it was never a cause for alarm and the subject of loudly-voiced concerns.

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