It’s June 17, the thirty-second anniversary of the Watergate break-in. Man, does Nixon look good now. But I digress. To mark the occasion, a minor-league baseball club in New Hampshire called the Nashua Pride is sponsoring a giveaway: The first 1,000 fans through the gates will get Richard Nixon bobblehead dolls. And that’s not all! Anyone named Woodward or Bernstein will be admitted free, public-address announcements will be suspended for 18 and a half minutes. (This news by way of a segment on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation.”
Ralph Wiley, 1952-2004
Just saw this on ESPN: Ralph Wiley, an author who worked on the network and for a long time as a feature writer for Sports Illustrated, died. OK: I have not read one of Ralph Wiley’s books, and didn’t follow his magazine career avidly. But I remember him when we were both “copy clerks” (an upgrade from “copyboy”) at the Oakland Tribune in 1977. I was personally in a pretty bad state at the time — was angry with my life and the paper and treated the job like a piece of crap. The Tribune let me go at the end of my three-month probation period. That felt bad, though entirely deserved, and for years I thought I would never work for a paper again. Eventually, I learned something from the episode about not burning bridges.
Ralph learned something else. On the job — at a not-first-rate paper run by a publisher who liked to put on disguises to visit the city room, a paper living under constant threat of going under or getting sold — Ralph made an impression Smart, quick, good-looking, and funny; he seemed like someone who was having fun and was really on his way someplace. He moved up from copy clerk to writing for the sports department, then became a beat writer and columnist, then moved
on to Sports Illustrated. Here’s a decent obit from theWilmington (N.C.) Journal.
Next-morning update: The San Francisco Chronicle has a nice piece on Wiley by columnist Ray Ratto this morning. And the Oakland Tribune remembers him, too.
Funeral, Hold the Blather
Kate wanted to watch the Reagan service before she went off to school this morning, so she turned on CNN about 6:30. Within a minute or so, one of the “hosts” asked such an offensively insipid question about Reagan’s legacy that we switched to C-SPAN’s coverage. Not a new observation, of course, but it’s great to get a chance to watch events like this free of the network’s insistence on providing running commentary on everything. Aside from the awful quality of most of the noise the TV people provide, it’s like we in the media are terrified of ever letting anything speak for itself.
Gmail
Through the intercession of a friend, I got an email account on Google’s Gmail beta. That was a couple weeks ago, and so far I’ve sent exactly three messages and received three. If I like it, I’ll make it my primary address, replacing my venerable but spam-bombarded Well account. The controversial aspect of the service is automatic text analysis of incoming messages so that Google can deliver ads tied to keywords it finds in your friends’ and business associates’ notes to you. That hits the privacy nerve big time. This morning, I got to see how this works in practice. A friend sent a note mentioning “Lightning Field,” an amazing-sounding art installation in New Mexico. Cool! On rereading the note, here’s what I see on the page’s right-hand margin:
Related PagesLightning Bolt
Lightning Bolt — Franklin’s Philadelphia [The Electric Franklin]
www.ushistory.org“The Lightning-rod Man”
From The Life and Works of Herman Melville.
www.melville.org
First thought: Look at that!
Second thought: Interesting that of all the things mentioned in the note, the only hit was on lightning. And the results are obviously noncommercial; maybe a feature of the beta to deliver sites relevant to keywords rather than ads for now.
Third thought: The privacy concern is real. How do I feel about even an automated analysis of messages that *must be* traceable to me or my friends if someone decides there’s a basis for interest (not to be too vague there, but the first issue here is the USA Patriot-era expectation that the FBI and other counterterrorist police will cast a wide net in the search for people thinking about or writing about or contemplating the wrong things; and the second is that textual analysis has been a major challenge for the police agencies, and here someone has created a service that probably accomplishes a lot of useful work for them).
Still thinkin’.
Reagan’s Dead
Now is no time to be uncharitable. Ronald Reagan died a long, lingering death that was doubtless heartbreaking for everyone close to him. I never thought I’d find myself saying so, but I admire Nancy Reagan for responding to her husband’s decline by taking on the fundamentalists and flat-earthers (like Bush and cronies) to demand more aggressive embryonic stem-cell research that might lead to treatments for Alzheimer’s. Good for her.
As for the former president himself, it must be noted from the Infospigot perspective that he became the answer to a big presidential trivia question: Which former chief executive lived to the greatest age? (I think John Adams, who remained lucid to the end, was the former title holder; he died at age 90, but that’s a well-known story).
Standing apart from the instant canonization and overnight hagiography of Reagan the Great, the Pious, the Good-Humored, the Brave, the Handsome, the Rugged, the Well-Spoken (who looks especially good when compared with the resident White House squatter), let us remember the Ron who (short list, and everyone has their own favorites):
–Played war heroes and talked tough, but never served in the ranks himself.
–Declared with relish that he would “loose the dogs of war” on
protesters at the University of California, which led to National Guard
helicopters gassing the campus.
–Ran up a deficit higher than an elephant’s eye, then shrugged and walked away from it (an obvious role model for Bush).
–Signed off on, then slept through, Iran-contra.
–Appointed James Watt secretary of the Interior.
–Made ketchup a vegetable.
–Pointed with pride to his union-busting (remember PALCO)?
–Invited the Bush dynasty into the White House.
But hey, he loved macaroni and cheese. What a guy.
What Your Neighbor Gives
Hoo-ha today over a New York Times story about FundRace.org, a site that takes public information on campaign donations from the Federal Election Commission and makes it easy to see who’s donating how much to which candidates — and where the donors live. The concern is privacy, whether it’s a good idea to map the donations to names and addresses right in your neighborhood. Here’s the thing: All the information has been publicly available online — for instance, at the Center for Responsive Politics’ OpenSecrets.org — and that’s a central feature of the campaign laws to keep things above board. All FundRace does is to eliminate a couple steps online searchers have to make on the FEC and other sites. I think it’s a great idea, even if it allows me to discover the embarrassing fact that three-fourths of the Brekkes who show up in the database have contributed cash to the wrong guy.
What’s News
A double bankshot from the world of Journalism Navel Gazing: An Online Journalism Review brief on an item on the Poynter Institute site:
“A new Intelliseek service could be a godsend for Web-savvy editors, Poynter Online reports. The ‘automated trend discovery system’ Blogpulse.com compiles the most popular names, phrases and links in more than 1 million blogs to find out what issues and personalities might be tomorrow’s front-page news. Steve Outing, a senior editor at Poynter, was surprised to see that the top news stories — prisoner abuse and beheadings in Iraq — did not top Blogpulse’s “key phrase” list. Rather, according to Blogpulse, many Weblogs are more concerned with the Mexican air force’s UFO sighting, Ralph Nader’s Reform Party endorsement and Abu Musab Zarqawi, the al-Qaeda leader who allegedly beheaded American Nicholas Berg.”
Wow. Torturegate didn’t make the list. And parenthetically, but without the parens, I absolutely love the use of “allegedly” in that description of the Berg murder. Yes, journalists must pantomime their belief in the presumption of innocence and objective distance in criminal matters (even though they generally report the cops’ or government’s word as gospel). But this is where that exercise turns fatuous. Someone proclaiming himself to be Zarqawi is carrying out the murder on camera; further the reported evidence points to Zarqawi’s personal role; and finally, there’s no legal allegation at issue — there’s a video, a claim, and a bounty on a wanted man’s head. So if you want to be careful, you could say “the al-Qaeda leader suspected of beheading Nick Berg” or, “Zarqawi, the apparent self-proclaimed killer of Nick Berg” or something like that. But please, don’t use “allegedly.”
Constructive Criticism
One of the really disheartening things about Bush’s Baghdad Blunder is the fact we’ll be stuck with the consequences for decades beyond the point where Laura Bush holds a press conference at the spread in Crawford to announce W doesn’t remember who he is anymore, much less why he wanted Iraq so bad. The challenge for the Bush opposition now is to offer some constructive ideas for how to do what the reigning boneheads seem incapable of — actually improving the situation in Iraq, if only as a prelude to our saying, “It’s been nice, but now we have to go home and have a nice cold one.” An example of this sort of constructive approach comes from the liberal Center for American Progress, which just put out a list of suggestions for what the U.S. authorities ought to do to deal with the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.
George, Rummy — Listen Up
From Justice Louis Brandeis’s dissent in Olmstead vs. United States:
“… Decency, security, and liberty alike demand that government officials shall be subjected to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen. In a government of laws, existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. …”
More on Torturegate (the Word)
The number of Google references was at 13 on Thursday and is 31 this evening (mostly on blogs, and counting my two earlier posts). Nexis shows two mentions: One during "Hannity and Colmes" on Fox News on Thursday and
one in a short news item in a paper somewhere. Google News shows one reference, Yahoo! News shows zero, and Google’s search ofUsenet groups shows three (all Thursday). "Torturegate" doesn’t appear at all on two
select indexes of blog content, Daypop and Blogdex.
OK, so that’s today’s unscientific take on one new word. However, some people are trying to be a little more scientific about how new wordsand ideas spread in cyberspace. Wired News has a story today called "How the Word Gets Around," on an experiment to follow the spread of a new memeonline. After reading the article, I’m not sure what the project proves, though, because it invited people to participate as a sort of self-conscious exercise. It’d be more interesting to trace an idea that just sort of gets thrown into the collective consciousness. Like
"torturegate."