Is it possible to be a football atheist? Plus Easterbrookian ignorance about guns and stealing jokes from FARK. All in this week’s TMQ after the jump…
Archive for the ‘Media’ Category
TMQ watch: January 18, 2011.
Tuesday, January 18th, 2011What is this I don’t even
Thursday, January 6th, 2011“Phawker knocks down Philebrity report about Philly.com paywall“.
Actual headline on Jimbo’s site.
A handful of randomness.
Wednesday, January 5th, 2011I intended to post this yesterday, but got sidetracked: the SF Weekly and the Bay Guardian have reached a settlement in their legal dispute. I’ve previously blogged about the dispute here, here, and here. (Hattip: Jimbo.)
I’m posting this only because it amuses me: the Statesman has posted the APD’s annual list of “local bars where drunken driving suspects reported having their last drink before hitting the road”. Particularly chuckleworthy to me is the large cluster of places in one block of 6th Street…
Speaking of the Statesman, there’s also a kind of neat profile of Austin writer, former Dell employee, and MonkeyBrain Books publisher Chris Roberson, who is taking over the current “Superman” story line with issue 707.
And speaking of things that amuse me, “Never Said About Restaurant Websites” pretty much hits all of my peeves (and Lawrence’s) save one. And we’ve both submitted that one. (Hattip: Daring Fireball.)
Edited to add: Here’s something else I wanted to blog but forgot: “The Now-You-See-It Restaurant“.
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Crimestoppers! (take 2).
Wednesday, December 29th, 2010So we’ve mentioned previously the theft and recovery of one local food trailer.
We were not aware, until we happened to catch a local television newscast last night, that a second food trailer is also missing.
We have been unable to find any photos of the Hook ‘Em Up Tacos trailer. Nor have we been able to find any media coverage elsewhere (not even a Statesman blog entry), which makes us wonder.
In any case, we suggest that you be on the lookout for any unexplained trailers that mysteriously show up in fields or behind garages near you.
I just read it for the articles.
Tuesday, November 30th, 2010Every issue of Playboy from 1953 to 2010, on a USB hard drive, for $300.
(Hattip: Jimbo.)
I don’t see this on Amazon yet, or I’d throw up a link. In any case, if I was going to get a complete magazine archive, Playboy is pretty low on my list. The Complete New Yorker
Administrative note take II.
Monday, September 27th, 2010Here are the obituaries for my stepfather: HouChron and Statesman. Both are basically the same, as we provided the obit to the funeral home, and they, in turn, provided the obit to the two papers. (We ran it in both the Houston and Austin papers because he has family in Houston.)
I did not get a figure on the HouChron, but the Statesman charged approximately $46 a column inch (there are roughly 40 words in a column inch, according to the funeral home) to run the obit, with an extra charge of $86 if you wanted to run a photo with it.
Edited to add: Actually, it was $42.56 per column inch, and $85.12 for each photo.
K-Geezer.
Sunday, September 26th, 2010I wanted to link to this story about changes at Austin’s KGSR over the past year, and the payoff for those changes (more listeners). The story is somewhat buried on the Statesman‘s web site. I only discovered it because I was reading the Life and Arts section over breakfast this morning.
This story also represents something else that I’ve brought up before; the entitled attitude of so many people in Austin, who think that nothing (public or private) should ever change. Personally, I’m in favor of anything that decreases the chance I’ll hear Bob Schneider or Kasey Chambers on the radio.
Who guards the (Bay) Guardian?
Thursday, August 12th, 2010Answer: the First District Court of Appeal.
We have previously noted the ongoing legal battle between the SF Bay Guardian and the SF Weekly (owned by Village Voice Media) over alleged predatory price-cutting by the latter. A jury awarded the Bay Guardian $21 million, but the Weekly appealed the decision.
That decision has now been upheld by the appellate court.
There is a claim in the linked article that the two parties have “reached a settlement”. Apparently, this settlement came after the SFBG was told they could seize and sell the Weekly‘s delivery trucks.
Random notes: May 17, 2010.
Monday, May 17th, 2010So when Gourmet folded, lots of other magazines apparently thought, “Great! We’ll pick up their subscribers and advertisers!” Yeah, about that: not so much.
Half a year after Gourmet’s final issue, in November, the Gourmet readership and ad base seem to have largely vanished.
I didn’t get a chance to blog this on Friday, as I was distracted by other things, but: the City of Austin released the full, unredacted report on the Quintana shooting incident, blogged here previously. Link goes to a PDF version of the report on the Statesman website.
Edited to add: Also forgot to give the Houston Astros update on Friday, so let’s take care of that now: 13-24, .351 winning percentage, projected 56.862 wins over the 162 game season.
Heroes for more than one day.
Thursday, May 6th, 2010(I originally had this as an “Edited to add” to the previous post, but decided that it deserved to be broken out into a stand-alone entry.)
Here’s something to get the taste of the last link out of your mouth, and restore your faith in humanity. The Los Angeles County District Attorney gave Courageous Citizen Awards to Quoleshna Elbert and Larry Harnisch yesterday. Ms. Elbert and Mr. Harnisch intervened in a brutal domestic violence incident at considerable personal risk; the victim lived, but sustained serious and permanent injuries.
This is noteworthy to me because Mr. Harnisch works for the LAT as a copy editor. He also runs the paper’s indispensable “Daily Mirror” blog, which highlights L.A. history using excerpts from the local papers. I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Harnisch (though I hope to someday) but I’ve admired his work ever since reading his extensively researched takedown of the horrible Donald Wolfe book about the Black Dahlia murder.
Well done, sir, and thank you.
(Hattip: L.A. Observed.)
Random notes: May 6, 2010.
Thursday, May 6th, 2010OMG! Faisal Shahzad had a Kel-Tec Sub Rifle 2000 in his car!
…all along he possessed a weapon that could have easily done extreme damage, one rapidly fired round at a time.
Later:
It is, in effect, a low-powered rifle. Unlike those of some rifles, its bullets probably would not penetrate a police officer’s bullet-resistant vest, a law enforcement official said.
And:
Unlike the Tec-9, it is not frequently used by criminals, the official said.
Meanwhile, Dana Milbank in the WP asks the musical question:
What prompts this? The NRA’s opposition to barring people on the notoriously unreliable terrorist watch list from purchasing guns.
In other news: Houston rapper that nobody’s ever heard of files lawsuit against local radio station for not playing his “music”.
Trae is suing for general damages to his reputation, character, standing in the community, mental suffering, loss of professional opportunities, performance revenue and record royalties.
I’m looking forward to seeing what legal precedent his lawyer sites that requires a radio station to play someone’s music. Could I sue KGSR for not playing Jonathan Coulton? Even better, could I sue KGSR for playing Kasey Chambers?
Edited to add: “Washington Post puts Newsweek up for sale. Do I hear $1? Anyone?”
Provider 1 bids 300 quatloos on the newcomers.
Edited to add 2: I have been in the practice of noting Roger Ebert’s better negative reviews, especially the one-star and zero-star reviews. A zero-star review from Ebert is pretty rare; he’s stated in the past that for a film to get no stars, it not only has to be bad, but morally reprehensible in some way.
Accordingly, I am going to link to this zero-star Ebert review. I am not going to name the film. I do not encourage you to click on the link. I had heard about this film previously on FARK, and wish I had not.
Soy un perdedor.
Wednesday, May 5th, 2010One of my favorite books (for reasons that should be obvious if you’ve been reading this blog for a while) is Ken Mandelbaum’s Not Since Carrie: Forty Years of Broadway Musical Flops
It looks like we have a new “Carrie”.
(NYT review.)
Setting aside my personal opinion of the Enron debacle, I find myself asking, “Who thought this was a good idea?” Enron’s bankruptcy was in 2001. It has been nine years, people. Move on!
As the NYT points out, though, that question actually has a good answer:
First produced at the Chichester Festival Theater in England, “Enron” transferred almost immediately to the Royal Court Theater in London and subsequently settled into what looks to be a long and comfortable run in the West End, where I first saw it. British reviewers have piled on the superlatives, admiring the show’s thematic audacity, moral severity and all-out razzmatazz.
On the other hand, “Carrie” was produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company, which I guess just goes to show that neither the British nor Americans know everything.
I hadn’t really thought about blogging the announcement that Newsweek is for sale, but as the day wore on, the discussion at Jimbo’s site just got more and more amusing.
For example, Jon Meacham:
The Saturday Evening Post was an institution at one time, too.
“I decline to accept that Newsweek in some form does not have a role to play going forward.”
There may have been a point in time, in the 1970’s and 1980’s, when a weekly magazine that provided a summary of the news, with analysis, played a useful role. With all due respect to Mr. Meacham and the folks at Newsweek who may lose their jobs, I just don’t see that kind of publication being needed in the Internet age, where everyone has instant access to all the news and analysis they want. What does Newsweek have to offer? What can they offer?
“Here Are Five People We Think Should Consider Buying Newsweek“. Nick Denton? Seriously? “Yeah, let me take my profits from my Internet empire and throw them down the drain on a money losing print publication that nobody reads unless they’re stuck in a doctor’s office.” Good plan! Glen Beck? If you don’t think Denton has the money to buy Newsweek, what makes you think Beck does? Arianna Huffington? Don’t think so; to start with, she’d actually have to pay writers.
Edited to add: Lawrence reminds me that he has a poll up on his Battleswarm site related to the Newsweek fiasco. That had completely slipped my mind; I was off the clock when I was writing this post, and was in a hurry to finish before I left work.
Austin food watch: May 3, 2010.
Monday, May 3rd, 2010Cissi’s Market on South Congress (right in the middle of the hipster district) shut down Friday. SoCo is kind of off the beaten path for me these days, so I never ate there, and really don’t have much to say.
More interesting to me is the closure of Primizie Osteria. (Hattip: Lawrence, who alerted me to this. I haven’t seen it reported anywhere else.) We had an SDC there, and were generally unimpressed (it struck us as very expensive and not worth it). Edited to add: Lawrence has corrected me: I was actually thinking of Sagra Enoteca Trattoria, not Primizie Osteria. Primizie did come up a few times, but we never actually ate there. My apologies to the Primizie management. However, what makes this interesting to me is the note on their website about the reasons they closed:
Although the down economy has not done us any favors, the main reason for our decision is that our landlord, Austin Revitalization Authority, refused to renegotiate the terms of our lease to make them more aligned with industry averages, the location and the density of the area. All of our decisions and projections for the restaurant were based on four multi-use developments which were to have been completed on the 11th/12thstreet corridors. As you probably know from the countless articles on the development of this area, the City of Austin and the Austin Revitalization Authority have failed to deliver on all accounts.
This isn’t the first restaurant closing I’ve seen that’s been blamed on the ARA. As I recall, Ms. B’s closed both of their locations after running into problems with the ARA while trying to open the 11st Street location.
Something like this is perhaps the kind of thing a real newspaper could look into; what other restaurants have gotten involved with the ARA? How many of them have had satisfactory experiences with the ARA? How many have closed, and how much money is the city out from those closures?
Pullet surprise.
Monday, April 12th, 2010The 2010 Pulitzer Prizes were announced today. Jimbo has a good list, with links.
I’m not as obsessed with the Pulitzers as I was in a past life, but I do want to single out two from this year that I think are particularly noteworthy.
The Pulitzer board, in their infinite wisdom, decided to give a special citation to Hank Williams
for his craftsmanship as a songwriter who expressed universal feelings with poignant simplicity and played a pivotal role in transforming country music into a major musical and cultural force in American life.
Now, I like Hank, and I can’t argue too much with this decision. But to steal a line from Lawrence, “Fat lot of good that does him now.”
The other prize I think is noteworthy is Gene Weingarten’s prize in the Feature Writing category. I have a complicated relationship with Weingarten and his writing. He’s sort of the WP answer to Dave Barry, the go-to guy for funny skewed humor (Barry and Weingarten are close friends). I used to read him pretty regularly, until he made a statement in one of his online chats that I found completely stupid and unforgivable. After that, I tried to quit him cold turkey.
The problem is, Weingarten isn’t just a funny humor guy. Sometimes, he writes stuff that tears your heart out. In 2008, he won the Pulitzer for a story in which he had the great classical violinist Josh Bell play in a subway station, and wrote about the reactions of commuters. That’s not even one of his best works. In 2005, he talked the WP into sending him and a photographer to the small Alaskan village of Savoonga, which is about as far away from everything as you can get. Weingarten figured he’d get a funny cover story out of the deal. What he got was a cover story; a sad and heartbreaking cover story about a remote community that turns out beautiful works of art, and that’s being devastated by alcohol.
The story he won for this year is just as good, and even more devastating; a piece about the grief and agony of parents who accidentally leave their kids in cars. It raises fundamental questions about what justice means in cases like this, and how these incidents might be prevented. Weingarten’s story represents journalism at its best.
Also, Sheri Fink’s story about one hospital during Katrina (which I noted back in September) shared a Pulitzer for investigative reporting with the Philadelphia Daily News. Interestingly, Fink’s story was moved out of the feature writing category into investigative reporting by the board.
Edited to add: The Reason “Hit and Run” discussion of Mark Fiore’s Pulitzer for editorial cartooning is amusing to follow.
Um, seriously, this guy got a Pulitzer and Homestar Runner didn’t?
Edited to add 2: Weingarten’s post-win chat session on the WP website. Radley Balko approves.
Radio, radio.
Sunday, March 28th, 2010I wanted to call out this James Rainey column in the LAT, about LA’s Pacifica affiliate, KPFK, and the infighting there.
There’s two money quotes in this piece, both of them talking about early evening host Ian Masters:
He also has been outspoken in rejecting KPFK programming, and especially fundraising, that he sees as increasingly taken over by fear-mongering and conspiracy theories, like the 9/11 “truther” movement. In a speech a few months ago at All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, Masters derided fund drives that he said recommend “communing with extraterrestrials and munching mung beans and colonic irrigation and drinking liquid silver and not immunizing your kids is the way to a more sustainable and spiritual Pacifica.”
The other quote:
“It seems to me,” one member of the vanguard wrote last year, “that Ian Masters does not believe the United States is really that bad.”