Tag: washington post

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Wednesday Notebook

Operation Narrow Stall: My friend Pete alerts me to a groundbreaking piece of investigative journalism from the Washington Post: One of the paper’s bloggers went all the way to Minnesota to cover Senator Larry Craig’s heroic withdrawal of his guilty plea for disorderly conduct (next from Senator Craig: a patent filing for a “a method and device for getting toothpaste back in the tube”). While he was in Minnesota, said blogger visited the very restroom where Senator Craig made/didn’t make sundry sordid advances to an undercover cop earlier this year. The blogger’s conclusion: The stalls in the restroom are very narrow, so maybe Senator Craig’s assertions about his intentions being mistaken aren’t as ridiculous as they sound. The blogger even discovered that there were scraps of toilet paper on the restroom floor — just as Craig has insisted there were the night of his arrest. Wow. This is starting to sound like something Oliver Stone could run with. As Pete says, “If our nation’s media had directed this level of scrutiny to the bush administration’s pre-war machinations, how different the world might be. …”

Grisly Find: By way of my brother John, this AP item in the Times, datelined Maiden, N.C.: “Man Buys Smoker, Finds Human Leg Inside.” It’s a classic of the “bondage file” genre as we called it at the San Francisco Examiner (“The Monarch of the Dailies,” R.I.P.). The key graphs:

“The smoker had been sold at an auction of items left behind at a storage facility, so investigators contacted the mother and son who had rented the space where the smoker was found.

“The mother, Peg Steele, explained her son had his leg amputated after a plane crash and kept the leg following the surgery ‘for religious reasons’ she doesn’t know much about.

” ‘The rest of the family was very much against it,’ Steele said.

“Steele said her son, John Wood, plans to drive to Maiden, about 35 miles northwest of Charlotte, to reclaim his amputated leg, police said. ”

… Or Two Balls: I half-heard something on the radio during the Giants broadcast Tuesday night that I found a little hard to believe I was really hearing. An ad from a local group promoting testicular cancer awareness. And the group’s name: the Have A Ball Foundation.

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Can You Hear It?

“He emerged from the Metro at the L’Enfant Plaza Station and positioned himself against a wall beside a trash basket. By most measures, he was nondescript: a youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. From a small case, he removed a violin. Placing the open case at his feet, he shrewdly threw in a few dollars and pocket change as seed money, swiveled it to face pedestrian traffic, and began to play.”

That’s the opening paragraph of an April 8 piece in the Washington Post Magazine that explores how disconnected modern urban American humans are from each other and the world around them. At least that’s my take on what the story’s about. In brief: Joshua Bell, a renowned violinist, went with his Stradivarius to a subway station in downtown D.C. There, he set up as a street musician and over an hour played some of the most celebrated and difficult pieces ever written for the violin. Bottom line: hardly anyone in the 1,100 people who passed Bell as he played seemed to register what was happening. The consistent exception: young children, who when they appeared seemed drawn to Bell and the music. Unfortunately, they were in the company of adults who hustled them on their way — to day care or other appointments.

Great idea for an article, even if the conclusion one is led to is somewhat disheartening:

“In his 2003 book, Timeless Beauty: In the Arts and Everyday Life, British author John Lane writes about the loss of the appreciation for beauty in the modern world. The experiment at L’Enfant Plaza may be symptomatic of that, he said — not because people didn’t have the capacity to understand beauty, but because it was irrelevant to them.

” ‘This is about having the wrong priorities,’ Lane said.

“If we can’t take the time out of our lives to stay a moment and listen to one of the best musicians on Earth play some of the best music ever written; if the surge of modern life so overpowers us that we are deaf and blind to something like that — then what else are we missing?”

The Post followed up with a couple more pieces: An online discussion of the experiment and the article and a more optimistic take on what it all means from poet laureate emeritus Robert Pinsky.

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‘Brute Force’ Meets ‘Great Escape,’ Iraq Style

A great read in the Washington Post on Wednesday about one of the major detention centers for suspected insurgents in Iraq. The tale is complete with a “Great Escape”-style tunnel, a breakout foiled partly by satellite surveillance, and a prisoner insurrection of surprising scale and skill:

“On the fourth day of the riots, the Americans called in a Black Hawk helicopter, the video showed. The helicopter descended over the camp, the force of its rotor flattening the tents that hadn’t already been burned down by the detainees. Bulldozers and 200 heavily armed soldiers encircled the compound. The Shiite prisoners finally gave up, complying with a list of demands that included handing over their weapons: the remaining floorboards and cinderblock rubble.

“Little was left of the camp; it smoldered, smoke mixing with the stench of overturned portable toilets the detainees had used to barricade the entrance. Heaps of garbage, rocks and used tear gas canisters littered the yard.

“It was the end to what had been a sobering period for the Americans, coming just days after the tunnel was discovered in Compound 5.”

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Word of the Day: Rendition

The Washington Post published a fascinating account Monday of how the CIA has used a Gulfstream V executive jet and a non-existent front company operated by non-existent people to ferry terrorism suspects from various locales around the world for “rendition.” The article explains that rendition is an extralegal process in which the agency transports “captured terrorist suspects from one country to another for detention and interrogation.” In practice, this involves taking some suspects from countries that don’t condone torture to those that have no qualms about it in order to get intelligence information.

One of the most interesting aspects of the story was the role of amateurs — bloggers and citizens plane spotters around the world — in tracking this plane’s movements.