Yearly Archives: 2009

We were?

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Frank Rich looks back on the Gates-Crowley-media jitterbug:

We’ve been reminded repeatedly during Gatesgate that Cambridge’s mayor is a black lesbian. 
I missed out entirely. Anyway, here she is — Mayor E. Denise Simmons. She’s got a master’s degree in psychotherapy from Antioch. Good frigging God, it’s like the people of Cambridge phoned Alison Bechdel and asked her to pick somebody. (Actually the city council chose Simmons and did so unanimously. As Wiki will tell you, Cambridge’s chief executive is the city manager; the mayor is in charge of the council.) 
denisesimmons

No real explanation

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After Cronkite died, the New York Times ran a brief essay about him that contained a disastrous number of factual mistakes. The NYT’s public editor (or ombudsman) tells us:


The newspaper had wrong dates for historic events; gave incorrect information about Cronkite’s work, his colleagues and his program’s ratings; misstated the name of a news agency, and misspelled the name of a satellite.


The ombudsman says no one subjected the piece to “rigorous fact-checking,” but what he means is that they didn’t check Wikipedia. It’s not hard to find out what day Martin Luther King was shot. Of course none of the details matter so much. The disaster is just that now people can laugh at the Times and wonder what the hell its people are up to. Or, as the ombudsman puts it: “Seemingly little mistakes, when they come in such big clusters, undermine the authority of a newspaper … “(If you want to join in, the article and its two corrections are here. By my count the corrections add up to 249 words.) 

The ombudsman offers a sweeping explanation for what happened: a whole lot of people screwed up. He isolates one solid factor, namely that the article wasn’t on deadline and therefore everyone figured they’d have time for it later. From his description, it would also appear that the Times piles so many editors on a given story (this is called “layers of editing”) that people may get mixed up about who’s doing what and assume the niggly stuff is being covered by someone else.

This pair of factors explains why feature articles at big-deal publications are always so full of mistakes about material available by browser. Except that they aren’t, really. So the ombudsman article doesn’t explain anything. It just shows that when the Times is embarrassed enough about something small enough (Telstar, damn it, not Telestar!), a gang of screw-ups will shuffle forward to hang their heads and take their licks. 

If so many people screwed up so badly, the logical line of inquiry would be to look for a common thread that connected them but did not rope in hordes of people at other institutions, people who had not committed a similar clusterfuck. That is, why is it that the Times hired such a bunch of incompetents? Or, if they’re not incompetent, how did the Times arrange matters so as to drive them into such a slipshod performance? It’s called the systemic approach to a problem.

A marvelous pain in the ass, is more like it

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update, edited for brevity

Matthew Yglesias says Knocked Up and Judd Apatow’s new one, Funny People, offer “a bracingly conservative vision of family life and obligation.”

I can’t remember anything specifically conservative about Knocked Up except the decision not to have an abortion. All the other stuff — such as holding down a job — is pretty well disseminated thru the rest of the population.
I think it’s very, very dumb to decide not to have an abortion on the grounds that life is a marvelous, multifarious thing and you must roll on its waves toward your unknown destiny. From what I’ve seen, having a kid can bring a whole lot of anger and frustration into your life if you’re not ready to give yourself to your kid’s needs. And if you’re afloat on the idea that producing another life is a good way to goose up yours, then probably you’re not in a giving frame of mind. 

Harry Potter: WTF?

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I’ve been reading Twilight, which isn’t bad; I may do a review at some point next week. In poking around the Internets though, I found this quote from Stephen King:

“Both Rowling and Meyer, they’re speaking directly to young people. … The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good.”

I don’t know that I think either Meyer, or Rowling, or (for that matter) King are especially good writers if we’re talking about prose style (which seems to be what King is talking about.) King has lots of good ideas; Meyer seems to really plug into something important about female adolescence in a way that’s particularly blatant, and I can see why that’s appealing.

But J.K. Rowling — I really don’t get it. The Harry Potter books are fine…but I don’t see why they should be more popular than any number of similar, and probably better, fantasy-books-for-kids (Patricia Wrede’s excellent Enchanted Forest series, for example — or the Lloyd Alexander books, or what have you.) So…anybody have a theory? I’m honestly curious; I just can’t figure it out.

The wingnut is correct

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Pretty much. I think he implies that the liberals have kept quiet on this one, which a look at Memeorandum indicates is not the case.

 Brian Beutler / TPMDC:

In Beer Summit “Spoof” Milbank Suggests Hillary Drink “Mad Bitch” Beer  —  If I were on the board of directors of the Kaplan test prep company, and discovered that the people running a money-losing Kaplan subsidiary affiliate (better known as the Washington Post) had greenlighted a feature called …
RELATED:

 Megan Garber / CJR:

The Washington Post’s Priorities, Beer Goggles Edition  —  By my count, the people mocked in the latest episode of “Mouthpiece Theater”—the Washington Post Web series starring Dana Milbank and Chris Cillizza, in which the pair, billing themselves as “two of the biggest maws in Washington” …

If You’re Against Elitists, Why Then Do You….

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talk like a poncing grad school cult stud liberal elitist?

Deppey’s rhetoric of evanescent childhood wonder and the necessity to put aside the search for it, to “move on,” might possess some substance if he or like-minded elitists could demonstrate that comics-fans were in some way unique in this regard, as against other patrons of modern entertainment-media.

Here, let me rewrite that for you in English rather than elitese, shall I?

Dirk Deppey insulted my friends by calling them little whining babymen. But everybody is a babyman, so it doesn’t matter. Our society and all its entertainment are great, so comics must be great too! And I can’t be a stupid snuffler of nostalgic babycrap, because…I use big words! And I don’t like elitists anyway, so there!

I may have more about this later…but it really frosts me when people pretend that cultural studies is somehow a movement for the people. Putting yourself above the fray on some lofty academic perch and presuming to speak for the people: that’s the very definition of elitist, my friend. Because you know what? Most everyday, regular people who haven’t undergone academic lobotomies — they think the stuff they like is good, and that the stuff other people like isn’t. And the only people who think that the people can do no wrong are ivory tower intellectuals cavorting about in proleface.

Update: I was so irritated I forgot the link; it’s been added now.

Update 2: Just trying to read through the whole series of posts…and, yeah, I have to agree with most commenters here that the game isn’t really worth the candle. He’s sufficiently confused that further argument seems pointless.

Update 3: Phillips responds here.

Some nice panels from art comics

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One from Fantagraphics, one from Top Shelf, another from Fantagraphics.

First, Interiorae #3 by Gabriella Giandelli.
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Hieronymus B. by Ulf K. of Germany.
And Reflections by Marco Corona. Like Giandelli, he’s Italian.
corona 1