Each Friday Every so often, we share our Web discoveries, mostly pulled from our RSS feeds and Twitter accounts. If there's something we should know about, please write to thesadbear [at] gmail [dot] com.
The long delay that prefaced the posting of these links had me thinking: I spend half of my work day reacting to news NOW! and the other half trying to coordinate the exact right time to publish everything else.
So here's a story about hockey, a buck short and a dollar late (or something like that):
While Tkachuk’s injury was only a footnote in most game stories, Edwards spent three hours that night picking fragments of bone and teeth from his mouth. Tkachuk’s surgery this week involved a transplant of bone from his hip to restore his upper jaw. If that process is successful, false teeth will be implanted when the area is healed.
Her work created doubt, and doubt was an ally of the defense. Part of it was her empathy for the accused: She had always been suspicious of criminal allegations and lenient toward small-time offenders. And where empathy failed, scientific rigor took over. Memory's fallibility was a fact. By testifying to that fact, she believed she was serving justice.
Each Friday Every so often, we share our Web discoveries, mostly pulled from our RSS feeds and Twitter accounts. If there's something we should know about, please write to thesadbear [at] gmail [dot] com. This week, we'll be focusing on stories about the World Cup, but anything good you see, on any topic, send it over.
Mr. Noonan is among the vendors who don't expect much from sales of souvenirs for one of the tournament's biggest underdogs, considering the unpopularity of the government and the lack of access to customers within that country's closed borders.
So far souvenirs like "I DPRK Football" infant bodysuits, which Mr. Noonan's company sells online for $12.99, have accounted for .025% of the company's World Cup-related sales.
As for questions about the morality of making a buck off Kim Jong Il's favorite soccer team, the merchandisers say they don't worry about that.
"We're a football company," Mr. Smith says. "We're not a political adjudicator. We trade in polyester."
One thing Americans agree about soccer—the fans and cynics both—is that goals are rare things. The critics will say this critically, of course; how could anyone love a game in which neither team might score at all? Who can sit through 90-plus minutes of that sort of drudgery? We are a nation of the tangible. We are a country of Avatar (in 3-D!), slam-dunk contests, NFL's Greatest Hits music videos and Lady Gaga. Subtlety isn't our thing.
[snip]
Oh, there have been competent U.S. players through the years, even good ones. Goalkeepers, for example: Kasey Keller and Brad Friedel and Tony Meola—as a nation, we are good with our hands. For a time the inescapable American player was Alexi Lalas, a big, strong defender who was not overly skilled but was a master of positioning, self-promotion and beard-growing. Occasionally, but not often, there were creative players, like Tab Ramos (who was born in Uruguay) and Claudio Reyna (whose father played professionally in Argentina before moving to the States). On the right day, under the right circumstances, they could do special things.
And then Landon Donovan just ... well ... happened.
The tone of Sunday's Washington Post front page, despite military and drug cartel emphasis, was fun. Fun doesn't always win, but this weekend it does. I'll playfully mock the Times for being so maniacal about delivering serious news about BP and the sneaky dealings of the salt industry.
Here, a ruler is almost as important as a rifle. Everything must be in its place -- medals half an inch above the breast pocket, U.S. insignia one inch from the lapel edge, buckle two inches from the belt loop. Nothing in the constellation of the many decorations on Pata's uniform may be outside a one-sixteenth-of-an-inch margin of error -- two tiny tick marks on the inspector's ruler, about the width of this o. Anything more and Pata gets what the Old Guard calls a gig. Three gigs and you fail.
There is a saying about not messing with Texas, and the idea that criminals are preying on American anglers is raising already-high temperatures along the southwest border
...
The traffickers cross day and night, driving boats with bales of marijuana right into the backyards of homes along the lake. They rent cabins at the lakeside state park and stash dope there. The border agents point to a three-story house built like a watchtower on the Mexican shore. The officers frequently see observers with binoculars on the roof. Up and down the lake, netting boats are idled. Nobody waves.
I really like the visuals this story invokes. The Wild West imagery comes out pretty naturally, and the "local color" elements and the detail about the binoculars in the three-story Mexican-side tower really make me want to go see the situation for myself.
Some people fall on their heads and wake up with their memory wiped out. A few revive with their personality totally changed. Others die. Robin Jenks Vanderlip fell down a stairwell, smacked her head and woke up speaking with a Russian accent.
Reviewing the links that I've pulled from the Times reminds me to mention that they put out an important and fun paper as well. I've really taken a liking to the Week in Review and Sunday Styles sections. And the visual components of the Times are gaining my esteem as I select stories and photos and layouts that will later be used in some handmade books.
But the [salt] industry is working overtly and behind the scenes to fend off these attacks, using a shifting set of tactics that have defeated similar efforts for 30 years, records and interviews show. Industry insiders call the strategy “delay and divert” and say companies have a powerful incentive to fight back: they crave salt as a low-cost way to create tastes and textures. Doing without it risks losing customers, and replacing it with more expensive ingredients risks losing profits.
...
As a demonstration, Kellogg prepared some of its biggest sellers with most of the salt removed. The Cheez-It fell apart in surprising ways. The golden yellow hue faded. The crackers became sticky when chewed, and the mash packed onto the teeth. The taste was not merely bland but medicinal.
Schoenfeld is at his best when discussing this controversial genre — secrets whose disclosure would, in the view of the government, endanger national security, but whose disclosure, in the view of the press, might ultimately serve the national interest. The real issue is not whether such secrets should be published, [but] who should be entrusted to make this real-time decision.
“So” may be the new “well,” “um,” “oh” and “like.” No longer content to lurk in the middle of sentences, it has jumped to the beginning, where it can portend many things: transition, certitude, logic, attentiveness, a major insight.
Before I hint at analysis, feast your eyes on a photo I'll likely be long obsessed with: Andrees Letif in Thailand for Reuters. Startling and rich, buried there in black-and-white on page A5 (or so) of the Times today.
So I'm back to trying to read the Times, Post, and Journal each Sunday. From now on I'll be writing new posts for each week, and just carrying along the chart that follows below.
The Times thoroughly won the day today, with a front page that took me 30 minutes+ to read. Stories ranged from a deep profile on the Times Square bomber, to exposing continued US spying and controversy over girls' flag football.
Then things got really good inside, where reporter Elissa Gootman embedded herself into New York City's 311 call center. Not an Iraqi embed, no, but she wrote one hell of a feature story about the "questions, concerns, fears, suspicions, frustrations and gripes of city residents" that come into its 311 information call center. Great blend of fact and feature in the story.
Garcia drank in the pretty hats and the sports coats that dotted the grandstand at historic Pimlico. He took in the raucous infield, with its bleary-eyed revelers lifting their plastic mugs.
Behind him, Calvin Borel was stone-faced, crouched over Super Saver, the winner of the Kentucky Derby, and looking as if the weight of his Triple Crown aspirations had caved him in.
Not Garcia, 25.
You can look back at a well crafted Derby story here (and a great photo here). The AP wrote of the Derby:
Calvin Borel deftly tucked Super Saver along the rail Saturday on a track turned into creamy peanut butter by heavy rain. Once again, he was in his favorite spot, getting a clear path all the way through the goo.
That’s why they call him “Bo-rail” and, for the third time in four years, he took the shortest path to the winner’s circle.
Borel found only one horse in his way, and once he steered Super Saver around front-running Conveyance, another Run for the Roses was his.
The most wide-open Derby in years ended with a sure thing — Borel crossing the finish line and punching the air with this right fist, this time raising it toward a leaden sky.
The Times ruled today in all aspects, but the Post's "War of Persuasion" reads well.
Times reporters are adept at telling even-handed, fair stories that include shocking information and records that must have taken great effort to obtain -- personal e-mails of the Times Square bomber, for example -- and rarely fall into the trap of sounding stuffy or oblivious when writing about "real people" type topics. All media has failed at writing about Facebook in a relevant way (except for recently about privacy), but the Times fails least on topics of that sort.
I wonder a bit what it's like to have such great "cherry picking" power as the Times. They dispatch a reporter to Nevada to write about contractors building new neighborhoods alongside totally vacant, unsold neighborhoods, because "consumers want new." They send another to Colorado to learn about sophisticated copper thieves. Not easy stories to get, I suppose, but you know before you go that those topics will bear fruit. What a treat it must be to travel for the Times.
Each Friday Every so often, we share our Web discoveries, mostly pulled from our RSS feeds and Twitter accounts. If there's something we should know about, please write to thesadbear [at] gmail [dot] com.
It's been a couple weeks since we shared links. These are pretty damn good ... perhaps a little media heavy, which is specifically my influence. But I tried to pluck from RSS feeds.
By elevator, it takes about a minute to get to the top of the historic Guardian Building, the new headquarters for Wayne County’s administrative offices that taxpayers recently paid 47 million dollars to buy and renovate. If you’re Channel 7, it’ll take you much longer: about 27 days. It would have taken even more time, but after the county put off our many requests for a tour of the public building, we decided we’d just show up.
Reasons given for staying off the roof have included the danger of falling off, the fragility of the shingles, and what someone driving by might think.
"He knows he shouldn't be up there," Beth said. "That's that."
Each Friday Every so often, we share our Web discoveries, mostly pulled from our RSS feeds and Twitter accounts. If there's something we should know about, please write to thesadbear [at] gmail [dot] com.
Pawel Skoczylas, 26, a clerk, said that he had come to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Pilsudski Square to mourn those killed “because I’m a patriot, because I’m a Catholic, because I’m a citizen of Poland, because I’m just a man, a person.”
Their trip started at least 40 minutes from daylight.
The guys known as the "Old Man Crew" had finished their shift digging coal out of Upper Big Branch mine. They walked through its lattice of tunnels to a mantrip, an open-sided cart that runs back to the surface on rails.
There were nine of them in the cart, rolling through semi-darkness. "Head" was the crew boss, whom they ribbed about his giant, rectangular noggin. "Pee Wee" was the new grandfather. Benny was a recovering drinker who beat the bottle with the help of Jesus and a Bowflex machine.
They were smudge-faced miners with decades of experience doing jobs better suited for their sons and nephews. They had become friends in other coal mines, and some had worked together for more than 10 years. Now they worked here, at a high-earning Massey Energy mine.
“We’ve got two cars containing corn syrup, one containing corn meal and two or three mostly empty petroleum cars,” King said. “There is one car with mineral spirits in it, which is essentially turpentine, and if you held a torch to it, it might catch fire, but that's about it."
Each Friday we share our Web discoveries, mostly pulled from our RSS feeds and Twitter accounts. If there's something we should know about, please write to thesadbear [at] gmail [dot] com.
[T]he FAA's Les Dorr, after looking through the database himself, put it to me in an e-mail: "Highway landings are rather more frequent than I would have thought."
At almost every turn at Villa Lorena, animals display indignities suffered at the hands of man. A caiman with a severed limb stretches under the tropical sun. A macaw with a sawed-off beak flutters in its cage. Luís, a cougar who once belonged to a drug trafficker, limps around his cage, the result of having a front leg cut off.
Each Friday we share our Web discoveries, mostly pulled from our RSS feeds and Twitter accounts. If there's something we should know about, please write to thesadbear [at] gmail [dot] com.
Typical women apply about six strokes of mascara per eye. Volume seekers ramp that up to about 30 or 40, then sometimes employ toothpicks, paper clips, pins or the backs of their earrings to poke through the clumps, CoverGirl executives say. "When we asked them why they do this, they blamed their lashes, not their mascara," says Esi Eggleston Bracey, P&G's vice president of global cosmetics, shaking her head. "That's when we knew we had an opportunity."
Jack says: Just found this today while working on that Chamber story. Is this new? I've been playing with it all day. I think we should try and do a post on it, where we basically just fuck around with data for our respective areas.
Each Friday we share our Web discoveries -- culled (if "culled" had a positive connotation) from our RSS feeds and Twitter accounts, etc. If there's something we should know about, please write to thesadbear [at] gmail [dot] com.
A Kansas man sued the Royals earlier this month, alleging that just such a flying sausage struck his left eye, detaching his retina and causing cataracts.
James Summerlott, 27, was hunting pigeons in the backyard of his home on Pembroke-Oak Grove Road around 3:30 p.m. Monday when he noticed an unfamiliar vehicle in his driveway, he told the Kentucky New Era in a phone interview.
Summerlott went inside, carrying his shotgun, and saw his TV lying on the floor. He had left the front door unlocked. A man walked out of his bedroom, and Summerlott held him at gunpoint while Summerlott called 911, said Chris Miller, spokesman for the Christian County Sheriff’s Department.
“He seemed a little frightened, I’ll be honest with you,” Summerlott told the New Era. “I would be too.”
Find the driver with the fewest teeth, the most gray hairs, and the thickest glasses. He's your man: Anyone who has survived to AARP age with these handicaps, on third-world roads, must have an abundance of caution, or perhaps just a jalopy that can't reach the hundred-mile-per-hour standard of Peruvian and Kenyan pistes.
Former American figure skater Timothy Goebel helped popularize the quad by performing it prolifically during his 14-year career ... his rotations per minute were clocked as high as 946; the average rotations per minute for an NBA player performing a 360-degree dunk is 100.
Last week I was a juror in the trial of a man accused of selling a $10 bag of heroin to an undercover police officer. At the end of the two days of testimony, I concluded that the defendant was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. I also concluded that he should be acquitted.
I sign up for a lot free things these days, often magazine subscriptions, and none has proven more awesome than The Atlantic.
I received two issues in as many days (odd how magazines come in bunches), and have spent some extremely satisfying minutes reading about cupcakes, modern mixology, the recession's effect on porn, tech-savvy government websites, and why TV is getting cheesier.
My two favorite stories, oddly enough, deal with the armed forces.
First, in long form: "The Last Ace" goes into depth on the waning superiority of our Air Force internationally.
Then, in short: "Army Food" features an Olympic-like cook-off between the world's army chefs.
The alcoholic comedian W. C. Fields offered this rationale for not drinking water (absent whiskey): “Fish fuck in it.”
I have even found the regular features and section divisions pleasing, most notably In a Word by Barbara Wallraff, which prompts readers to coin new words for odd modern day occurrences and feelings. Examples: a word for the pile of clothes that have been worn but you will wear again but didn't properly put away; a word for the time you sit in front of a DVD's repeating menu screen.
I also like the magazine's design and illustrations.
