My dad has run a mean victory garden for a number of years … he grows just about everything — corn, tomatoes, onions, beans, bellpeppers, carrots, radishes, sunflowers, rubbarb, etc.
He just sent me a picture of this cauliflour head he picked today … the small orange item is an orange from his orange tree, present just to provide scale.
I would love to blog a bunch this weekend, but I need to realign the anti-matter reactors and do a complete systems overhaul.
In the meantime, check out Jimmy Trageser’s hot ezine, Turbula.
All of you California news junkies will appreciate Timm Herdt’s new blog.
No shit. “Fought Down” is a fucking great CD.
If you like good music — even if your tastes doesn’t always run to country or rock — you will thank yourself from now until the freezing over of the Gulf of Mexico if you buy “Fought Down.”
Ken Layne and the Corvids have managed to cobble together 10 songs that are stellar, not just because the lyrics are witty and the melodies intelligent, but because the playing is as tight and spot on as any band can get, and the production shimmers like a Caribbean seashore.
Songs like “I Should Be That Guy,” “The Sun Don’t Shine,” “Mama, Take Another Stand,” “Here’s to You,” and the title track will bore deep into your cranium and refuse to leave.
Of course great songs make you want to sing along, but the best of these make you want to crawl inside of them and live there for a while.
I want to tell you that “Fought Down” reminds me in parts of Gram Parsons, and the Rolling Stones, and Steve Earle, and Uncle Tupelo, but I’m afraid if you don’t like any of those guys, it will prejudice against the CD. “Fought Down” reminds me of all of that, but it’s so much more than a summation of Ken Layne’s influences, and it’s so much more than just another country album — even as I think of songs like “Here’s to You” as a modern honky tonk classic — or a rock album, and it’s certainly more than just another piece of Americana schlock. It is music that will move you even if you generally shy away from the whole country vibe, but still speak to your hillbilly soul if that’s what you want.
Trust me on this — I’ve listened to tens of thousands of songs over the years, songs from every conceivable genre. What you hear on “Fought Down” is more than just music met to fit in a particular niche, to appeal to a certain demographic or snuggle up to a narrowly defined market. It is music created with a single goal: to please people who love music. Forget whatever labels you think might apply to “Fought Down.” Enjoy it because it is simply too good not to enjoy.
This is a CD that will be in my music collection forever. It will be part of a regular rotation of CDs I never grow tired of. It is simply that good.
The most interesting thing about this article to me is that gamers, at least those quoted, seem to support state regulations to keep violent games out of the hands of children.
J.D. Lasica has turned me on to a great new news and media search engine — Topix.
Do I want the latest news from my old home town of El Cajon, Calif. Well, I just type in one of my old zip codes, and I have my own El Cajon news page — something SignOn San Diego doesn’t provide for me.
And it even provides other useful links, such as links to the San Diego Chargers and San Diego Padres, and the local weather, too boot.
What if my interest is not geographical, but topical. Let’s say I want to keep up on the latest news related to Britney Spears? Well, here’s my link. Honestly, I’m more interested in Dwight Yoakam or Elvis Costello, and while the news may not be as deep, it’s still there.
Nothing on Howard Owens, Ken Layne or Matt Welch, but type in Glenn Reynolds, and you get “blog news.”
You can also do cool topics like Aerospace-Defense, or Water Utilities, or Autos, but not UFOs, sadly. But you can do Journalism.
And the way URLs are constructed — this is the cool part — you can create a whole series of custom bookmarks for yourself. I don’t see where Topix is offering personalization yet, but if you know a little HTML, you can throw together your own bookmark page to check your favorite topics every day. I know I will.
Topix has Google beat hands down for home-page relevance of the latest stories, and it’s focus on topic-drive searches takes a level higher on usability.
The site’s focus on providing local news should give a little fright to online news publishers.
The Annenberg Public Policy Center takes “fact check your ass” to a whole new level. (Via J.D. Lasica)
First listen, first reaction … I’m glad I bought it, and you will be, too. Ken Layne & the Corvids have produced a masterful thing of sonic beauty. Great tunes, great musicianship, great mix — a masterpiece through and through. It will reward repeated listenings.
Glenn F. Bunting is a damn fine reporter — at least as I remember his work with the old San Diego edition of the LA Times, so when Bunting accuses Frank Deford of playing fast and loose with facts, I pay attention.
Especially when some of Deford’s mistakes are whoopers:
“Deford did it again!” he exclaims on the morning of Nov. 6, 2002. Ed says Deford reported that no woman had ever before played in a men’s professional golf tournament. He tells me that Mildred “Babe” Didrikson Zaharias competed in the men’s Los Angeles Open in 1938 and 1945.
Bunting has done his homework, and he has a long list gaffes by Deford.
But then, so what? Sports reporting has long been disparaged as the “toy department” of journalism. And his transgressions certainly pale compared to the journalistic crimes committed by Jayson Blair at the New York Times and Stephen Glass at the New Republic, two writers who passed off outright fiction as truth. Also, given the hundreds of articles and commentaries Deford has composed throughout his career, couldn’t he be viewed as a slick-fielding shortstop who occasionally lets a grounder through his legs?
On the other hand, not all of Deford’s troublesome passages were mere exaggerations. Many were flat out wrong and had not been corrected in print. So, with the assistance of Los Angeles Times researcher John Beckham and my golf instructor, I set out to compile a list of inaccurate statements that have appeared under Deford’s byline in the past several years.
We document about four dozen excerpts that contain factual errors or embellishment. Most come from Deford’s weekly commentaries and columns. That strikes me as a high number, particularly for a writer of Deford’s stature. I know how hard my colleagues labor to avoid mistakes—and how journalists who play loose with the facts do nothing to enhance the public’s trust in our profession.
I’ll leave it to you to read Bunting’s account of confronting Deford with his errors and misstatements.
My latest composition is called “I Think I’ll Buy Some Land in Colorado.”
I kind of like the way the guitar came out on this. Nice tone, I think. I recorded it by using both a sound-hole pickup and a mic. I’ve found the pickup by itself tends to be a little tinny. This helped me grab the bass a little better.
The initial inspiration for the lyric came from the fact that at one time I was in line to inherit some family land near Walsenberg, Colorado. It doesn’t have much going for it, as waterless, flat land goes, but I figure if I ever became so broke and unemployed, I could at least move a trailer there and have some place to stay. The land was sold recently, but listening to a Jerry Jeff Walker song the other day made me think of it, and the chorus pretty much burst full bloom into my mind. The verses were a little harder to come by.
You can decide for yourself if the song is really about Colorado or Los Angeles.
Recording it was difficult because I wanted to stay in time as well as possible (playing with a click track is a new experience for me) and since the finger picking pattern is not straight eighths or anything like that, it was easy for me to lose my place, and because there’s so many open strings ringing throughout, recording it in sections was out. It had to be one take or not at all. A couple of times you’ll hear where I wait just a smidgen for the first beat to come around, but mostly I think I stay in time.
Those who have listened to my previous songs will know that I’ve been doing most of my singing in a lower register. Initially, I recorded this vocal singing low, but I found it hard to stay in tune (some would argue on hearing this version, I still have a bit of trouble), so I redid the vocal today to sing in a what I would call a more natural style.
Again, here’s the song. Give it a listen, and critique the writing, not the performance, please.
Pete Rose doesn’t get it. He thinks he can admit guilt and have it amount to apology. He thinks he can set the timing of his admission, and have it make up for 14 years of denial. He thinks he can dictate people’s response. He thinks forgiveness should come automatically with no questions.
As far as I can tell, Pete Rose still doesn’t understand that his betting on baseball was wrong.
But let’s review what Rose has done:
There is no evidence that Rose is contrite. Instead, he is combative, crying in his beer over the criticism he is getting. This is not the picture of a man who is mature, nor of one who wouldn’t do it all again if given the chance.
Rose should not be in the Hall of Fame. He should not be an official member of the baseball community. Nothing will ever diminish his accomplishments, just as Shoeless Joe Jackson’s great playing record has stood the test of time, but if you bet on baseball, you are banned for life. End of story. And to change that rule for one man, no matter how many hits, would open baseball for future abuses of anti-gambling policies.
As promised, I’ve re-recorded (digitally!) my song “Trouble and Turmoil.”
It was a fun learning experience. First, I had to practice playing with the click track. I’ve never played this song with a metronome before, so the discipline of not skipping a beat or two at the turn and never been enforced upon me before. I didn’t even realize I was doing it until I played with the click track.
Speaking of time, this is a reasonably fast song. I ended up playing it here at 139 BPM. After I finished recording it, I found that my original version was faster yet. Still, I think the new version is fast enough to get the feel I want.
Initially, I recorded it with a simultaneous vocal and guitar performance. I wasn’t entirely happy with the vocal performance, but I could have kept the guitar performance if I had been happier with the tone. I had bought a sound hole pick up specifically for this purpose. I couldn’t figure out how to change the tone without re-recording it, so I spend a good deal of time playing with the effects and nothing satisfied me, so I wound up recording the guitar with a mic instead.
Since the acoustic guitar part never varies (except for the two-beat pick up to kick it off), I tried looping it, but wasn’t happy with the way the verses spliced together, so I did record the track straight through as one performance. The problem, though, since I wasn’t singing along, is that I lost track of how many verses I recorded and wound up with an extra verse at the end. I just kept it.
I then recorded the vocal a few times, trying to get a performance I could be satisfied with — mainly trying to cut down on the pops and overdrives.
Finally, I layered on the lead guitar. The BR-532’s punch-in/punch-out feature proved especially effective for this, especially on the last part of the lead, which I altered slightly from my original recording to sneak in a couple of more notes.
This Boss portable studio is really marvelous. Since I bought at a demo, it didn’t come with a manual, but yesterday, at another guitar store, I picked up the video manual for it, which was just the ideal tool to teach me how to use this “bad boy” (as the instructor kept referring to it). Once you understand it, it’s really easy to use, from using effects, to multi-tracking and fixing mistakes to mixing down the file recording. The one thing it lacks, which the better Boss recorders have, is an on-board EQ. Instead of being able to EQ each track, I had to EQ the entire mix on my computer.
I have spent most of my adult life working in and around the media. I’ve been a publisher, an editor, a reporter and a PR-flak. I studied this stuff in college, and I’ve always been romanced by the lure of ink-stained wretches talking fast and getting the scoop, and the girl, all the while driving the city editor crazy — you know, a bad 1940s B&W.
At one time, I was deeply involved in the Society of Professional Journalists. You can’t get too deep in SPJ without getting a good dose of ethical reinforcement. SPJ takes ethics pretty seriously. (ED: So how do you explain the glaring lack of ethics in the profession? Easy. Most reporters and editors are not personally invested in SPJ, to their detriment and the professions.)
At one time, however, I did believe most journalists were like me — eager to get the scoop, but to get it right and get it honestly. Sure, I made my share of mistakes. What young reporter doesn’t? But I believed I was on the right track. And as a consequence, I pretty much believed EVERYTHING I read in the newspaper.
It was only after I got out of journalism for a while that I began to realize accuracy and honesty are not always hallmarks of some reporters’ days. As the subject of some stories (while working as a PR flak for a politician) that were rife factual errors, hyperbole, slanted presentation and sensationalism, it dawned on me that some of the writers I once respected were never really worthy of that respect.
It was a humbling experience. And I realized that one of my greatest sins as a reporter had been a tendency to sensationalize. I called it good writing — finding the conflict in any story, and highlighting it in the first few graphs. That was my style. But I realized that such a practice was potentially dishonest because you were shaping the news instead of presenting it factually. Not all contradictions rise to the level of conflict, and any artificial device aimed at limelighting conflict is potentially dangerous.
From that point forward, my approach to media (as a consumer) was a little more cautious. I wasn’t ready to scuttle the ship, but I was like a duck — sleeping with one eye open.
My confidence the media eroded further as I paid more attention to its tendency to make every issue a crisis, or a threat or a danger. In the pre-9/11 days (not that this practice has stopped, it just seems more ironic to look back at that time now), even everyday activities could be life threatening, according to the media — people were dying from cancer because of their cell phones, buildings with bad fire-warning systems abounded, restaurants were getting better health ratings than they should, old ladies were getting scammed by dating services, your computer monitor could blind you — all generally concerns of some legitimacy, but top of the fold, or top of the hour stuff? I don’t think so.
I was just in a state of despair about my chosen profession.
And the ironic part of the 9/11 angle I allude to above is this: While the media warned us about crisis after crisis that weren’t really crises, a real crisis was brewing. How much reporting about al Quada did the media give us prior to 9/11? How much analysis was there of what a threat this group represented, and how they might attack, and how prepared we were to deal with it? Everybody wants an investigation and an answer to the question: Why did our government fail us? Well, what about the media? Doesn’t the media have some responsibility in all of this, too? If the media had been paying closer attention to the real threats we faced, maybe we would have been better prepared, or maybe the government would have felt some political pressure to do something simple — like reinforce cockpit doors?
I wish somebody would fund a study: What the media could have known and reported about al Quada prior to 9/11 and what difference it might have made if there had been more robust coverage?
As the internet has matured as an information resource, with a greater ability to fact check the media, or more easily obtain alternative views, angles and first-person accounts, I’ve become even more distressed about the state of media affairs. It’s almost as if accuracy doesn’t matter, at least on big national and international stories.
I think back to the whole “Shock and Awe” frenzy. I was incredulous that this “strategy” was getting so much ink and air time. By the time the first bombs dropped on Baghdad, the story angle became a joke. Hardly anyone in the media stopped to think about three important things:
As I watched the pre-war and war coverage unfold, I was dumbfounded to find how full of beans it was — full of speculation, unfounded assumptions, rushes to judgment (in supposedly FACTUAL, hard-news stories), unsubstantiated rumor and innuendo, mischaracterizations, wild-eyed predictions, ignorance of the military and military operations, and an overarching sense that everything that could possibly go wrong has or will go wrong.
And the overriding factor in all such reporting — the use of unnamed sources.
Unnamed sources have become the crack cocaine of Beltway journalism.
If you review Editor & Publisher’s journalistic issues of 2003, you see a pattern — no matter what side of the political divide you may fall on some of these stories, you can point to instances where journalists used bad judgment in how they went about getting the story. From the Lynch affair, to the Plame controversy, journalists who paid scant attention to verifiable facts, and too much attention to anonymous sources, overhyped and oversold.
Survey after survey has shown that the American public is becoming increasingly distrustful of journalists. If there is one thing my colleagues should be in crisis mode about is how little they are trusted, but as far as I can tell, few media organizations take such warnings seriously. The kind of major reforms of newsrooms that need to take place — such as banning unnamed sources, jettisoning unsourced speculation, squelching opinion masquerading as fact, toning down crisis-mode reporting, telling a few good-news stories once in a while (and such stories, contrary to journalistic myth can be compelling and sell papers) — doesn’t seem to be happening. It’s business as usual, at least at the major media outlets.
And what inspired this rant — this speech (via Instapundit) by Michael Crichton on rampant speculation in the media and what it means for public policy.
Matt Welch links to Jack Sparks’ Top 50 Country Songs of 2003. This gave me two brilliant ideas:
Am I excited about the Padres signing David Wells, who can be as dominating as any pitcher in baseball he’s throwing well? No. Am I happy about it? Yes. Certainly.
Wells is 41 with a history of back problems. He’s never been known for following a strict physical fitness regime. He’s no Rickie Henderson, my friend. But when Wells is healthy, he’s quite good. And I also believe he’s charged up and motivated to pitch well for the Padres in 2004.
But here’s the real reason I’m glad the Padres signed Wells: He’s always dreamed of being a Padre. It’s a dream I can identify with.
I interviewed Wells his rookie season with Toronto. We had an immediate affinity — two San Diego boys who loved Nate Colbert growing up. Wells used to play shadow baseball in his back yard, as I did. He would be either a player on the Yankees, or a player on the Padres, usually Colbert, who’s bat-on-the-shoulder crouch was easy to imitate (first homer I ever hit in a game that counted as a child was the first time in a real game I used the crouch — with the results never to be repeated).
So I understand David’s dream. And knowing David, there is a bitter sweet element to fulfillment of the dream — his mother didn’t live to see him in a Padres uniform. But I know there’s a bunch of guys in Ocean Beach this morning who are celebrating — their buddy is coming home.