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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.

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Names on the Land

A picture named herpoco.gif

I printed out a little map from Yahoo! Maps yesterday because I was driving over to the scary suburbs of northern Contra

Costa County to pick up a box of tile. I noticed this morning that the map contained the name of a place I’d never heard of before and thought was a humorous misprint: “Herpoooo.” I know that some mapmakers salt their products with deliberate errors to catch cartographic thieves who betray themselves by repeating the mistakes. I was wrong on two counts. First, the name is “Herpoco” but was unreadable on my poor printout.

But still — Herpoco? Never heard of it. Though when I thought about it, it occurred to me it might have a connection to nearby Hercules, which itself has a link with an explosives company that ran a plant there (here’s the history).

Still — look where Herpoco is placed on the map — smack in the middle of a freeway interchange. But having too much time on my hands, obviously, I plugged Herpoco into Google. The result shows it’s an actual place name, though I don’t think it would mean a thing to most of the hundreds of thousands of people who live close by or pass through every week. The U.S. Geological Survey’s Geographic Names Information System delivers this hit when you query the name Herpoco:

Feature Name: Herpoco

Feature Type: populated place

Elevation: 60

State: California

County: Contra Costa

USGS 7.5′ x 7.5′ Map: Mare Island

380042N

1221612W

And the gay-lesbian community search site ePodunk lists Herpoco, too, with a note that it was named after the Hercules Powder Company (successor to the California Powder Works and a long-ago spinoff from DuPont. But that’s another story).

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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.

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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’.

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Bill and Ivan in WWII

On the Mother Jones site today, there’s a mini-essay that makes the point about the Soviet role in defeating Hitler much more clearly and completely (if also more shrilly) than I did (it’s the part titled “Remembering Bill and Ivan, about halfway down the page):

“… It is no disparagement of the brave men who died in the sinister hedgerows of Normandy or in the cold forests around Bastogne, to recall that 70% of the Wehrmacht is buried on the Russian steppes not in French fields. In the struggle against Nazism, approximately forty ‘Ivans’ died for every ‘Private Ryan.'”

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D-Day Remembered

We all know what happened 60 years ago today. The Allies — really the Allies, not some jury-rigged “coalition” — launched a massive, risky, daring invasion of France, the key stroke in the western offensive against Nazi Germany that would help bring down the Third Reich just 11 months later. That seems like a lot, right? But it’s not enough for the president or nearly anyone else who lives under the Red, White and Blue. Here’s the prez, in part, from his speech in Normandy earlier

today:

“The generation we honor on this anniversary, all the men and women who labored and bled to save this continent, took a more practical view of the military mission. Americans wanted to fight and win and go home. And our GIs had a saying: The only way home is through Berlin. That road to V-E Day was hard and long, and traveled by weary and valiant men. And history will always record where that road began. It began here, with the first footprints on the beaches of Normandy.”

And here’s another stirring example, from the beloved Andy Rooney on “60 Minutes” tonight:

“What the Americans, the British, and the Canadians were trying to do was get back a whole continent that had been taken from its rightful owners by Adolf Hitler’s German army. It was one of the most monumentally unselfish things one group of people ever did for another.”

That’s all great. We’re heroes who saved the world then and are still busy doing it, one Iraqi militant, one Iraqi soccer ball at a time. But you got to wonder what those helpless liberated Europeans — who happen to include Russians, by the way — make of this renewed reminder that we saved their butts.

Yeah, D-Day was huge. But anyone who’s got any idea of the course of the war knows there was an Eastern Front on which Hitler wrecked his armies (but only after inflicting horrific casualties on both civilians and enemy forces); anyone who knows the course of the war knows that American GIs might have talked about Berlin, but that it was the Red Army that fought its way to the German capital; anyone who knows the course of the war knows that U.S. forces were on the sidelines as Germany invaded Poland, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, France, Denmark, Norway, Greece, the Balkans, the Baltic states, Russia and the rest; anyone who knows the course of the war knows that it took the Japanese attack on

Hawaii to kick our sense of selflessness into high gear, a full year and a half after France had fallen to the blitzkrieg.

It’s fitting to celebrate heroism and sacrifice and the nobility of citizen soldiers answering the call to duty. It’s dishonest to rewrite history to defend, implicitly, current policies that have nothing to do with the heroes’ sacrifice. And it’s tiresome and kind of boorish to keep reminding the world of all the great stuff we’ve done on its behalf.

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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.

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Paranoia and Skepticism

A note from a friend:

“Sounds paranoid, but has any news outlet checked this out? http://prisonplanet.tv/articles/may2004/052504digitalwatermarks.htm

[Text at that link:] “There are several postings on message boards

suggesting that the digital watermarks on the Berg and Abu Ghraib

videos are exactly the same. While at this point we have no concrete

confirmation of this, it would fit with other examples of how the Berg

execution and Abu Ghraib torture scenes are very similar. The

contention is that Berg was killed by the US military as a staged

psy-op to distract attention from the torture scandal, an execution

blamed on ‘CIArabs’.”

My response:

“Give me a fucking break. Honestly. The first conspiracy theories about this were floating around on the Web within 24 hours of the Berg news being reported. I’m sorry, I take this as a sign of our spreading sick credulity, in the same category with the reports that all the Jews working in the World Trade Center were told not to come to work on 9/11 (sounds paranoid! but did anyone in the media REALLY check it out thoroughly???). ”

Should the media be skeptical and inquisitive? Of course — much, much more so than they generally hves been in the whole Iraq affair, especially at the outset. And yeah, of course, rumors should be checked out. But take a look at the link, and you find not a rumor, but an urban legend: People posting that they’ve seen messages on the Net about video watermarks, about anonymous experts at Kodak who’ve analyzed the Berg and Abu Ghraib videos, and how the whole thing is going to break on national news “tonite” (at some unspecified point in the past). Do I have a knee-jerk tendency to reject this kind of rumor-mongering? I do, and I often have to check that to see that I’m not reacting out of pure defensiveness or unwillingness to believe unpalatable truths. On the other hand, I wish people were a little less willing to believe whatever some “authority” says on the topic of the day, whether it’s Colin Powell talking about the mobile bioweapons labs in Iraq or some doofus pushing his Nick Berg conspiracy theories online.

I think the damage in focusing on nutso rumors, like the ones about the Kodak experts and the digital video watermarking, is that real aspects of the events that led to the Berg murder are overshadowed or ignored. For instance, it’s clear that Berg was in custody and had contact with U.S. agents, officials, and troops. How about a full accounting of those contacts, a real timeline, so we can get an idea of how he managed to fall into the hands of his captors? (Yeah, I believe some bad Iraqis who don’t like us killed him, not some CIA types doing “psy-ops”; if for no other reason, I believe that because the CIA hasn’t managed to get a single thing right in Iraq that we know about, and I find it hard to believe their first successful operation was cutting off this kid’s head.) If we get that accounting, then we’d have a picture of U.S. officials’ real culpability in what happened to Nick Berg.

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End of TechTV

At 1 a.m. Friday (about two hours and 10 minutes from now), TechTV’s
signal will be merged with G4’s,  and something called G4techtv
will be born. What a business: Ziff-Davis, Paul Allen, and now Comcast
have dumped hundreds and hundreds of millions into TechTV between the
startup, Allen’s purchase from ZDTV and other investors (he’s reported
to have spent $320 million on it), Comcast’s buyout of Allen (they
reportedly spent $290 million), and all the money that’s gone into
operating the beast (an unschooled guess would be $100 million total
over TechTV’s run; though I imagine it easily could have been double or
triple that). And after all that money and six years, the channel is
back to semi-start-up mode (though it’s a very well distributed
start-up, with 44 million households to start). It’ll be interesting to
watch the trajectory.

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Layoff Land

A brief, non-exhaustive accounting of layoffs at my various workplaces since I left the world of secure employment at the San Francisco Examiner a little more than eight years ago (when I got hired there, one staffer said, “As long as you don’t hit anyone over the head with a two-by-four, you can’t get fired here.” He was almost right: He got axed for trying to impersonate a worker at a hospital that was on strike so he could get the inside scoop). A while back, I started to think of the recurring staff-trimmings as resembling the show “Survivor,” and I wondered when it would be my turn to get voted off the island. My time finally came: As Jeff Probst would say, “Dan, the tribe has spoken. It’s time to go.”

Last shift at the Examiner ended at 2 a.m. Jan. 2, 1996. First day for “Project Gulliver” (Web startup that turned into something called NetGuide Live) began 2 p.m. Jan. 2, 1996.

Layoffs:

1. November 1996: About 75 of 150 temporary and permanent employees let go from NetGuide.

2. December 1996: About 40 of remaining 75 NetGuide employees.

2a. Left NetGuide in February 1997, which laid off remaining workers the following month and closed.

I started at Wired News in March 1997.

3. November 1997: About half a dozen Wired News employees, part of larger Wired layoff.

I left Wired News for Wired magazine in June 1998, and left the mag in December ’98 to freelance. I joined TechTV in January 2001 as part of staff hired to launch 8-hour daily tech/market news show called “TechLive.”

4. November 2001: TechTV laid off about half of 130-person “TechLive” staff.

5. April 2002: Laid off about half of remaining 65 “TechLive” staff members, canceled 6 a.m. and 1 p.m. shows, cut newscast to 30 minutes daily.

6. December 2002: Closed TechTV bureaus, which reported for “TechLive”; laid off about 10 people.

7. May 24, 2004: Goodbye, TechTV. Last daily “TechLive” show aired Friday, May 21; I, with most of daily staff, was laid off the following Monday).