"You want it to be one way. But it's the other way."
The most unlikely search that landed someone on the blog today was this, which some hapless soul tried on Google:
“how to tie a gangsta headscarf”
We’re proud to rank No. 4 on that particular search result, especially since we offer absolutely zero useful information on the subject.
My friend Ted Shelton did something pretty cool a couple months back: He got in touch with Jerry Brown — mayor of Oakland, former California governor and presidential candidate, aspiring state attorney general — and talked to him about how to use the Net to speak to the people. The result is that Brown started his own blog. It exhibits everything I like and dislike about Brown, who is well into his fourth decade as an elected official. The part I like: The guy’s smart and quick and communicates ideas beautifully. The part I dislike? Well, I said it in a response (below) to a recent post he wrote on all he’s done for the Oakland schools: Brown’s got a razor-sharp sense for telling the story that casts him in the most glowing light. As to the unhappy scene that may lie just outside the frame of his self-portrait — that’s someone else’s problem. But that’s another thing I like about the blog — I can tell him just that, and there’s some evidence he’s actually reading what his audience has to say.
My comments to Mayor Brown:
Jerry, any public education success story is to be applauded, and the Oakland School for the Arts is no exception. It’s also refreshing to hear someone in a position of responsibility say the schools need both innovation AND money; cash isn’t a panacea for our public schools’ problems, but used wisely it’s a crucial part of the solution. You also mentioned "freedom" as a necessary ingredient for success; I’ll get to that in a minute.
But I have to say that your post is full of the kind of attitude and omission that long ago led me to conclude that while your intellect is a couple cuts above the average pol’s and you occasionally seem to be moved by the most noble motives, you’re at bottom a self-promoter and opportunist. …
Even in the Fifth Year of Bush II, the mind maintains its capacity for bogglement. Beyond observing the basic irony — that the right is committed to making the government keep its cotton-picking hands off you, except when your personal life is involved — what can you say? Just this, I guess: Woe betide you if your personal convictions don’t fall in line with the right/right-to-life/wacko Religion R Us agenda, because there’s no constitution or law or court or popular majority or concept of others’ privacy and freedom that will deter these folks from trying to substitute the alleged word of their god for all of the above. That’s all — I’m headed out to the ashes and sackcloth section of the local Seven-11 now.
(That’s all, actually, except for this interesting note on Schiavo from my brother John, received last night via the magic of the Internet:
“Dan: A small trivia fact: “schiavo” is the Italian word for “slave”. I was looking at an article about that poor woman in Florida and recognized the word from my days in Italy. I had met an old guy in Bibbiena, I still remember his name (Giuseppe Feri). Anyway, he was a WW2 vet that who had been sent into Yugoslavia as part of Mussolini’s star crossed invasion. He said –in Italian– that it really sucked, they starved and froze their asses off in 1940-41 until Hitler finally stepped to end the humiliation. But his troubles didn’t end there. He and his buddies were pressed-ganged
into the service of the Germans doing all their shit jobs. He said, ‘we were all schiave,’ the Italian plural for the word slave. He survived the war in this condition, making it back to his little town in Tuscany in 1945.“Anyway, there seems to be a small bit of irony in the name of that woman, who is being tugged at by so many interested parties. Also, the Italians pronounce the word: ski-a-vo, not sha-vo. Exciting stuff, I’m sure.”)
In its listing of today’s important anniversaries and birthdays, the Wikipedia notes that it was on this date in 1970 that Vinko Bogotaj flew into television history. He’s the guy who was featured in the opening montage of “ABC’s Wide World of Sports.” tumbling off the end of a ski-jump ramp. You know — the agony of defeat. The surprise to me is that this happened so late; I would have sworn I’d seen it back during the Johnson (Lyndon, not Andrew) administration.
The anniversary list also reports that Charles Lindbergh received the Medal of Honor — yes, the one usually called “the Congressional Medal of Honor” — on this date in 1928. That’s a new one on me, as I thought the medal was reserved for combat heroics (or for wiping out virtually defenseless Indians, as at Wounded Knee, which produced 18 or 20 Medal of Honor recipients). In any case, Congress’s vote to award the medal demonstrates how huge Lindbergh’s accomplishment loomed at the time. The citation said:
“For displaying heroic courage and skill as a navigator, at the risk of his life, by his nonstop flight in his airplane, the ‘Spirit of St. Louis,’ from New York City to Paris, France, 20-21 May 1927, by which Capt. Lindbergh not only achieved the greatest individual triumph of any American citizen but demonstrated that travel across the ocean by aircraft was possible.”
I’ve always liked online mapping services, especially for getting directions and checking distances between points. Until very recently, I most often used Yahoo! Maps. Probably out of force of habit more than anything else, since there’s not a lot of difference between Yahoo!’s product and that offered by one of the other leading sites, Mapquest. Also, Google has always returned Yahoo! and Mapquest results when you look up place names.
A couple of weeks ago, I noted that there was a third map listing: Google Maps. I took a look. There are a couple significant differences from the others: In appearance, Google appears to be trying to deliver a graphically more finished or tasteful look — clearer labeling and muted grays, blues, yellows and greens. But the big change is in functionality: Google, which is delivering map data from Navtech (the same company that supplies maps to Yahoo!), has implemented a “scrolling” map function. So when you want to take a look at something that’s outside the frame of the map you’re looking at, you hit an arrow and move the map up or down, left or right, instead of hitting a link — as you need to do on Yahoo!, Mapquest or other sites — and waiting for a new map to download. This is a huge advantage when you want to do something like trace a route and allows you to use the online map much the way you’re accustomed to usiing a paper one.
Where the mainstream online mapping sites are wanting is in providing contextual data. When you drill down to a certain level, especially outside urban areas, the mapping service turn roads into simple lines flung across blank landscapes. That’s true to a large extent with paper maps, too, of course; but one thing that comes with a paper map is a representation of how all the roads and towns relate to each other, even if there’s lots of blank space (take a look at maps of western Kansas or Nebraska). The ideal online map would combine some of the detail you find on topographic maps — like those available online at TopoZone — with the user-friendliness of Google Maps.
For now — well, I guess there’s plenty of cartographic stuff to noodle around with — and I’m sure there’s all sorts of stuff going on out there that I have no idea about.
Happy anniversary, Shock and Awe. What I remember about the first day of the Iraq War — it was early the morning of the 20th in Baghdad, really — is the attempt to kill Saddam Hussein with a massive opening strike. In a way, it’s an episode that’s emblematic of the whole course of the war: The CIA reported it had good inside information about Saddam’s whereabouts, and President Bush decided to try to “decapitate” Iraq’s government and perhaps abbreviate the war. Initially, rumors flew that the strike had narrowly missed Hussein — reports circulated that a grievously injured Saddam had been pulled from the rubble of a bunker. But that, like so much that was perhaps wishfully reported about the war, turned out to be untrue. Three weeks later, a U.S. air strike flattened a Baghdad apartment block that housed a restaurant where Saddam was supposed to be. After an intensive effort to identify the remains of the score or so of people killed in the attack, the conclusion was that if Saddam had been there, he was gone by the time the bombs struck.
Maybe we’re past all the illusions we had about Iraq at the beginning, all the shaky information about the threat Saddam and his henchmen posed, the premature projections of victory, the shortsighted decisions about how to handle the occupation. Maybe we have given an elected government a precious opportunity to take root, and maybe Iraq will flourish even after U.S. troops are no longer there to maintain a semblance of order. All I can be sure of is that, after spending two years, tens of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars, Iraq and the United States are different from what they were when we launched that first strike, and it’s far too early to tell what all the consequences will be.
Not that numbers ever tell the whole story, one view of the U.S. killed and wounded in Iraq:
Killed
Year 1 (March 20, 2003-March 19, 2004): 583
Year 2: (March 20, 2004-March 19, 2005): 938
Wounded
Year 1: (March 19, 2003-April 2, 2004): 2,988
Year 2: (April 3, 2004-March 14, 2005): 8,256
(Source: Iraq Coalition Casualties)
Welcome to a probable one-time installment of a weekly Infospigot feature, the Friday Notebook. It is Friday, right?
Actual quote heard in my household: “Do you even want to reckon with my muscular ass?” The context was G-rated, but still, to protect the innocent I’d rather not identify the speaker.
He’s your what? “Barry’s our figurehead. He’s our man.” Giant’s pitcher Matt Herges talking about Barry Bonds’s impact on San Francisco’s National League nine. On the misdemeanor level, the figurehead, the carved figure at the prow of old-time ships, was usually (but not always) a woman. On a felony level, a figurehead is exactly the opposite of what Mr. Herges proposes. Quoting a work with the word Webster’s in the title: “a person put in a position of leadership because of name, rank, etc., but having no real power, authority, or responsibility.” The living example in baseball is Bud Selig, the man who couldn’t figure out how to untie a game.
That’s enough snottiness for now.
It’s St. Patrick’s Day, so given my heritage I guess I’m obligated to say something about it (my surname, common among the fjords of west-central Norway, obscures a maternal lineage that goes back to County Mayo and includes family names like O’Malley, Moran, and Hogan).
So there — that’s my St. Patrick’s Day essay. Not wearing green. Not planning to sup on corned beef and cabbage. Not planning to sing “Danny Boy” (though it is my theme song the other 364 days of the year) or “Four Green Fields.” I might watch “CSI” tonight, though, if there’s time for it after NCAA hoops.
(By the way: I’d love to take credit as original author of the brilliant phrase ‘Erin Go Blah’: but after posting, I checked on Google and found 215 listings for that exact phrase.)
Doing a little writing assignment — and I do mean little — for a High-End Retail Catalogue that Will Remain Nameless, I hit a snag. I was trying to come up with some copy about an imaginary daydreaming dad. An adjective I might use for this person’s reveries popped into my head: Walter Mitty. For many readers of a certain age, there’s an instant recognition of who that is: the title character of a James Thurber short story, a fictional Everyman whose oppressively mundane daily existence masks a heroic fantasy life.
But something made me ask myself whether Walter Mitty would be too obscure a reference for a turn-of-the-new-century audience. So I asked the person who gave me the assignment, a literate and intelligent person, whether she had heard of Walter Mitty. Or James Thurber, for that matter. She answered no on both counts. Not surprising: She’s at least 15 years younger than me, and came along well after Thurber was a humor icon. Actually, I came along after he was a cultural icon, too — he began writing for The New Yorker in the 1920s, published “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” in the magazine in 1939, and died in 1961. But people still talked about Thurber in the ’60s, and there was even an NBC sitcom based on Thurber’s work, “My World and Welcome to It,” that ran for three seasons starting in 1969.
So I didn’t use the Walter Mitty reference. I could too easily hear people reading it and saying, “Who?” Just the way I probably gave a blank look to older relatives who mentioned Ring Lardner or George Ade (though eventually someone handed me a copy of Lardner’s “You Know Me Al,” so I know now that he wrote one of the best, funniest baseball books ever).
(Of course, Walter Mitty’s day may come again: There are old rumors floating around that Steven Spielberg and Jim Carrey plan to make a movie based on the story. After that’s out, the reference will be current once more.)