Heading to the beach for the long weekend. Back on Tuesday.

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Hey, look. Freakin' Noam Chompsky's on myspace.

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OK, so CBS says that the "editorial staff" of its promotional magazine doctored the photo of Katie Couric. Apparently the "editorial staff" is the CBS public relations department.

The $64,000 question -- Is someone going to get fired over this?

Of course not, because photoshopping women to make them look unnaturally beautiful is our current status quo.

Click here for more examples.

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Good story in the New York Post about the doctoring of a Katie Couric photo to make her look skinnier.

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Great column from the Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz on the John Karr fisco:

Will every anchor, correspondent and producer who shamelessly hyped the John Mark Karr story now apologize for taking the country for a ride? ... So Karr was a fake, and the media caravan moves on. But I don't think the public forgets. They should teach this one in journalism schools for a long time.

Good advice.

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Here's a tough news decision:

A Russian scientist predicts a period of global cooling in coming decades, followed by a warmer interval.

Khabibullo Abdusamatov expects a repeat of the period known as the Little Ice Age. During the 16th century, the Baltic Sea froze so hard that hotels were built on the ice for people crossing the sea in coaches.

Is this guy a kook? Or is this scientific disagreement about global warming?

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The new Pontiac G5 coupe will only advertise online:

It's a "radical experiment," said Mark-Hans Richer, Pontiac's marketing director, conceding the effort won't generate as much awareness as TV and other traditional mass media. But it's a calculated risk, because Pontiac is targeting mostly younger men for the niche model. "We know where the bull's-eye is," he added, "so it's easier."

Interesting test of the effectiveness of new media.

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Here's the latest interactive senate and gubernatorial races graphic from the Wall Street Journal. The GOP are expected to lose three Senate seats as of right now.

Interesting addition at the bottom of the graphic -- an ad. A sign of the increasingly robust interactive ad market.

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One of my colleagues, Laureen, has a dog named Mr. Bitts who accompanies her to work every day. He's something of an office celebrity.

On Thursday, Laureen had a bagful of these buttons and was handing them out to co-workers.

Now, I'm not trying to go all Robert Fulghum on you, but I sincerely ask:

What would this world be like without Laureens in it?

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The Wikipedia entry on Pluto has already been updated:

Pluto is a dwarf planet (once classified as a true planet) in the solar system and the prototype of a yet to be named family of Trans-Neptunian objects.[1][2]

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One of my students said that Fox News took a Democratic Congressman's comments made on The Colbert Report out of context to make him look bad. Here's the clip:



It looks to me like the Fox commentator got the joke, and wasn't trying to misrepresent the congressman. In fact, I'd say the author of this clip was trying to misrepresent how Fox presented the clip. Notice how quickly the clip cuts away from the commentator's reaction. He was smiling, after all.

In the end, it all comes down to perspective.

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I'm teaching my Mass Media class right now. I've broken the students out into small groups and they're discussing the critical approach to examing television shows. While waiting, I've been reading wikipedia.

Never knew that the USSR invaded Finland three months after World War II broke out. Click here to read about the "Winter War." Stalin undestimated Finnish resistance.

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Still haven't heard from Tom Price's press secretary, Jim Billimoria, who was supposed to call me on Monday. I called today and was told that the office is running slow because a lot of people are on vacation.

Understandable. So, I asked the aide who answered my call if he could just help me. After all, I'm just a constituent who voted for Tom Price who wants to know if he sponsored any of the $10.5 million of earmarks in a HHS bill.

I was told that only Billimoria, the press secretary, could answer the question. Why, I asked?

"We treat bloggers as members of the press," he said. I asked for his name and he told me he didn't want to go "on the record."

So, here's the problem with this Washington Examiner initiative.

We've been told to "[c]heck out the earmarks for your state and then call your congressman and ask if he or she sponsored any of your state's earmarks."

But, this method only works if our representatives set up policies to easily answer questions from constituents. Apprently, Tom Price's office isn't set up that way.

And, I don't think I'd get more answers if I wasn't a blogger -- I'm sure I'd get less. I'd be easier to ignore.

Please call Tom Price's office at 202-225-4501 and recommend that they answer my question. Perhaps enough phone calls will persuade the staff to get moving.

Better yet, ask the same question.

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I'm still a little shell-shocked from the Red Sox' embarassing five-game sweep at the hands of the N.Y. Yankees. Here's a great column from the Boston Globe regarding everything that's wrong with the Red Sox.

I've got a friend in New York with whom I trade baseball barbs continuously regarding the Red Sox-Yankee rivalry. I sent him an Instant Message on Friday morning predicting a five-game sweep ... by the Red Sox.

How bad was this defeat? It's been two days since the final game, and he hasn't had the heart to call me and rub it in. That hurts.

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Here's proof that there's a wikipedia entry for everything: Manwich.

What an odd brand name.

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My wife and I both had this Little Professor game when we were kids. I just put a huge bid on it on eBay.

Um, it's for my kids. Really.

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Made a little progress on the boat this weekend but still don't have a battery charger for the camera. Should have one by next weekend.

I'm going to start teaching journalism tomorrow. I took a position as a part-time instructor for two night courses at a two-year college. I'll be covering "Intro to Mass Media" and "Intro to News Writing." I figure I'll be telling the students a lot of what I blog about here. So, this shouldn't be much of a stretch.

Also, I saw "Lady in the Water" last night. Don't believe the hype -- it's a good movie. Its extremely negative reviews stem from the fact that most film reviewers are jaded skeptics who don't like any films that carry themes of hope and providence. It wasn't as good as "Signs" or "The Sixth Sense," but it was definitely a good movie. Go see it. Another good Paul Giamatti vehicle.

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Good read on academic freedom and the lecturer at the University of Wisconsin who thinks 9/11 was a U.S.-government conspiracy.

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Good article from Wired on the next-generation of airline search engines. Sites like flyspy check airfares over several-month period so you can pick the absolute best time to travel.

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Just called Tom Price's office (202-225-4501) again and spoke to a pleasant aide named Ryan. I had to call them again because I hadn't heard anything back regarding my inquiry made on Wednesday.

Ryan told me that Price's press secretary Jim Billimoria will return my call on Monday. "He handles these kinds of requests," he said. Apparently, Billimoria was out for the week.

So, I'll wait to see if Jim calls me on Monday to answer my questions. This is the problem with wikiporting -- you'd think it'd be easy to get answers from your own Congressmen, but it's not. They just don't seem to be set up to interact easily with constituents.

I'll keep you posted.

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This was a tasty milkshake. I even mixed some Olvaltine in it. Mmm. Rich, chocolatey Olvatine.

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Just read the wikipedia entry on Mahatma Gandhi. Read the section on what he had to say about the world religions.

When someone asked him if he was a Hindu, he replied:

Yes I am. I am also a Christian, a Muslim, a Buddhist and a Jew.

Seems like that's a good way to get along.

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Didn't realize a car had been built that broke the sound barrier. The wikipedia entry on the sound barrier is pretty good reading too.

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I just called Tom Price's Washington office (202-225-4501) about Georgia's earmarks in the proposed HHS bill. Our state's got a little more than $10 million in funding coming to it -- and nobody knows who requested it.

I spoke to a very nice aide named Carol who promised me she'd call back with information about Tom Price's involvement in the earmarks.

I'm not saying all these projects are bad, but I would like to know what representative asked for them. Right now, we're just flying blind.

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Google is entering the wi-fi market:

Google is also planning to build a wireless network in San Francisco. But unlike in Mountain View, where Google built the network on its own, in San Francisco most of the heavy lifting is by Google partner EarthLink Inc., the Internet service provider based in Atlanta.

The San Francisco plan envisions EarthLink charging roughly $20 a month to surf at the top available speed, while Google will offer a free service that transmits data at a much slower rate.

Hi-speed wi-fi is definitely on the fast-track. I welcome the competition. I can't wait till its offered in Atlanta because I'll drop my current Internet provider, Comcast, so fast it'll make their head spin.

I hope they realize how many customers they're alienating by making them pay $45 per month for Internet service.

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Pretty good impression, particularly the bit after the singing. The woman really nails Edith.

And I wish I had a LaSalle.

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Jay Rosen has a nice roundup on the wikiporting under way between Porkbusters and The Washington Examiner. Here's how he puts it:

Today marks a key moment in the evolution of the Web as a reporting medium. The first left-right-center coalition of bloggers, activists, non-profits, citizens and journalists to investigate a story of national import: Congressional earmarks and those who sponsor and benefit from them.

Bloggers will contribute to the story by calling and getting quotes from their individual representatives. Rosen sees this as a paradigm shift in newsgathering. I'm not sure about that, but I call it a good start.

I guess either Brad Warbiany or I will have to call our Rep. Tom Price's office. I'll give Brad a few hours to beat me to it...

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New post from "Bad News Hughes." He cites the 70s horror film "Burnt Offerings" as the reason he's so screwed up.

Interesting because my brother and I both watched "Burnt Offerings" as kids -- and it definitely screwed us up. Seriously. We've often spoke about the disturbing images in that whacked out movie. And this was watching it censored on broadcast TV -- you know, on "Creature Feature" on Friday night.

Take a look at his post and at least scroll down and look at those pictures. Holy crap! No wonder that film left such an impression.

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Here's a reality check from The Economist:

WHEN activists, journalists and others speak of “Big Oil”, you know exactly what they mean: companies such as Exxon Mobil, Chevron, BP and Royal Dutch Shell. ...

Yet Big Oil is pretty small next to the industry's true giants: the national oil companies (NOCs) owned or controlled by the governments of oil-rich countries, which manage over 90% of the world's oil, depending on how you count. Of the 20 biggest oil firms, in terms of reserves of oil and gas, 16 are NOCs. Saudi Aramco, the biggest, has more than ten times the reserves that Exxon does. ...

But if the amount of oil at state oil companies' disposal is not much of a worry, the way they manage it certainly is. Few of the princes, politicians and strongmen who wield ultimate authority over these firms can resist the urge to meddle. At best, that leads to the sort of inefficiencies found at most state-owned firms: overstaffing, underinvestment and so on. At worst, the business of pumping and selling oil is entirely subsumed by politics, as in the case of Petróleos de Venezuela, one of the biggest NOCs (see article). In either case, NOCs produce less oil, more expensively, than they should.

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Click here to get some free coffee.

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Not much progress again on the boat. I'm still trying to get the chine to attach properly to the stem. Think I've just about got it. But, it's slow going and I'm having to go back and re-chisel the notches on some of the frames. I would post a photo, but I can't find my camera battery charger.

In lieu of boat pictures, please enjoy this other video from OK Go:

This band has definitely exploited the new media channel that is The Internet. Ten years ago, OK Go would just be another garage band playing at The Attic once a month. But with a video camera, some choreography, and a broadband connection, they're famous around the world.

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The Jerusalem Post offers a nice summation of media inaccuracies covering the Israeli-Lebanon conflict:

Two pictures used by The Associated Press and Reuters, in which the same woman appeared to be crying over the destruction of her Beirut home. Distinguished by a red-checkered scarf and scar on her right cheek, the woman was pictured crying in front of two different locations two weeks apart.

Several photographs of a bombed bridge in Beirut which appear on Reuters and AFP with the different captions stating that the bridge had been bombed on July 18, July 24 and August 5. Bloggers claim that the striking image was photographed to look like several different bombings in order to make destruction in Beirut appear more severe.

In The New York Times photo essay 'Attack on Tyre,' a photograph of a man who appears dead is accompanied with the caption reading 'bodies were still buried under the rubble.' However, in a later photograph in the same series, the same man appears to be walking in the foreground of a photo. The Times issued a correction for the first photograph, stating that the man was injured.

It appears the media is often willing participants in the anti-Israel propaganda campaign.

I'd be interested in a content analysis of newspaper coverage to see how many pictures show damage from the Hezbollah rockets in Israel compared to how many pictures show Lebanese destruction caused by Israeli attacks.

I can't recall ever seeing a picture of damage from a Hezbollah rocket attack.

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Here's a promotion from my credit card rewards program, Priority Club.

Now, 10,000 points gets you a room in a Holiday Inn or some-such hotel. Since a room costs about $90, then the law of transitivity means 10,000 points equals $90.

That said, what idiot is going to spend 19,000 points (i.e., about $185) on that clock radio? And how many people are spending $160 for that George Forman grill?

It boggles the mind.

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That's entertainment!

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Every heard of the Seven Bridges of Königsberg mathematical problem? Thank you, Wikipedia.

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Here's the NY Times' take on the latest blogger-inspired, media-bias catch:

Mr. Hajj, a Lebanese photographer based in the Middle East, may not be familiar to many newspaper readers. But thanks to the swift justice of the Internet, he has been charged, tried and convicted of improperly altering photographs he took for Reuters. The pictures ran on the Reuters news service on Saturday, and were discovered almost instantly by bloggers to have been manipulated. Reuters then announced on Sunday that it had fired the freelancer. Executives said yesterday that they were still investigating why they had not discovered the manipulation before the pictures were disseminated to newspapers.

The article's got a distinct this-isn't-really-a-big-deal feel to it.

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Ben Stein's sounding a little leftist in this New York Times column:

Don’t get me wrong. I like profits, a lot. They are what the capitalist society is all about. But why are we outsourcing, why are we moving our work overseas, if our corporations are so profitable? And if our corporate world is so profitable, how come so little of the growth goes to workers’ wages? How come — as an average number — basically none of the growth goes to the ordinary worker’s wages? I am not saying this to encourage strikes. I am genuinely puzzled about it.

He also touts the benefit of the estate tax and wonders why the nobody but the rich is getting richer.

As one of Nixon's speechwriters, Stein certainly does have some conservative credentials. Of course, Nixon wasn't really that conservative.

Stein's not really advocating any heavy-handed government intervention (except with the estate tax), but rather he's just pointing out that there are some odd things happening that the rules of normal economics don't explain.

It's an interesting column. Read the whole thing.

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Just got sucked into this wikipedia article on "This is Spinal Tap," one of the funniest films of all time. It's got a great collection of quotes including: "There's a fine line between stupid and clever" and "You can't really dust for vomit."

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Here's an interesting report:

CHICAGO -- Teens whose iPods are full of music with raunchy, sexual lyrics start having sex sooner than those who prefer other songs, a study found.

Whether it's hip-hop, rap, pop or rock, much of popular music aimed at teens contains sexual overtones. Its influence on their behavior appears to depend on how the sex is portrayed, researchers found.

I'd think that this is more of a correlation than anything causal. It's not that listening to raunchy music on your iPod makes you have sex earlier -- it's just indicative of the environment in which you're living.

Parents who let their kids listen to such music are probably -- sadly -- not very involved in their lives. There's nothing we can do about such parents, but we can at least try to shame the purveyors of such crap out of existence. Let's transfer the social shame of working for Phillip Morris over to Interscope Records and MTV.

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Good article on wikipedia in the New York Times. This is interesting:

[T]he German-language Wikipedia will soon begin creating some "stable entries," good enough to publish in a textbook or other traditional media. Most likely, he said, these entries will exist in two versions, one of which can still be changed by the public.

If that experiment goes well, Mr. Wales said, the English-language version of Wikipedia could follow suit in the next year."

This'll be an interesting development.

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Didn't get much work done on the boat this weekend.

Had to pick up my kids from North Carolina. Oh, and I had to drive my car into a ditch. Torrential rain in an unfamiliar parking lot. Thought I driving through a puddle -- instead I was driving into a ditch. Had to get a tow truck to pull the car out. At least the kids'll have a great story when they go back to school.

Anyhoo, I'll post more photos next weekend.

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Further evidence of the impending fall of our civilization. Here's how Paris Hilton makes some of her money:

I get paid $500,000 to go to Las Vegas or Japan and wave at crowds or go to a party. All the time. Only this week I met a family at the airport who wanted me to drop in to their daughter's 16th birthday party for $100,000. Because I'm her idol. So I will. I'll take her a present, though.

Bringing her a present. That's a sweet touch, Paris.

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The first USA Today college football poll is out -- the most definitive evidence yet that the college football season is just around the corner. My undergrad alma mater -- East Carolina University -- is nowhere on the list.

If you scroll to the bottom of the poll, you'll see that Duke University (1-10 last year) received one vote to be in the Top 25. Clearly Duke's coach gets a vote. Or perhaps Carolina's coach thought that'd be funny.

Check out the ECU blog of which I'm a part -- it suffers from a lack of regular posting.

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Great column from the Wall Street Journal today on MTV's unheralded 25th anniversary. I'll just quote the last few paragraphs:

Where MTV stands almost alone, however, where its influence on the culture is most obvious, is as a purveyor of what used to be called pornography. That's 'used to be' because what MTV has brought us -- the rampant sexuality, the crude and debasing language, and the depiction of women as meat for the table -- was packaged as pop entertainment.

So many other channels have violated cultural boundaries in the past few decades that it's impossible to point a finger solely at MTV. But the 'music channel' certainly pushed the hardest, and it was always directed not at adults but at kids. MTV is where most of them learned to pepper their lunchroom chatter with references to 'ho's' and 'bitches' and to mime, after watching its reality shows, 'She's such a slut,' while they dream of dressing like one, too.

All those infamous MTV moments, such as the Madonna-Britney Spears kiss on the 'Music Video Awards' show, are nothing compared with the casual, everyday salaciousness on view, and the constant bleeping of still-obvious dirty words. You can turn it off at home, but not at the gym or retail stores or other households, where flickering images of undulating women and rapacious men are as common as wallpaper.

Yes, MTV has other programs, too. Even parents enjoy some of its reality shows, such as the car-makeover program 'Pimp My Ride.' Twenty-five years on, though, it's dismaying to know that no child of the MTV generation ever needs to ask: 'Daddy, what's a pimp?'"

I agree with every word.

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So, the Boston Globe published a memo from a former Big Dig employee who said he'd blown the whistle on the tunnel back in 1999. Unfortunately, turns out the memo was fake. Sounds familiar.

Here's the Boston Herald's Howie Carr having a little fun with the competition:

Memo to the Globe: Next time, leave the big stories to the big boys. You’ve become an journalistic embarrassment to the journalistic embarrassment that is The New York Times.

He's got a nice list of the Globe's biggest gaffes.

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Check out Wikipedia's entry on the 2006 Qana airstrike -- the Israeli strike that killed all those kids in Lebanon back on July 30.

This is a great example of the power of collective news gathering. Both pro-Hezbollah and pro-Israeli sources are helping to craft the article so the result is a compilation of information in which no fact is assumed true and no statement is without verification.

Here's the summation:

The 2006 Qana airstrike was launched by the Israel Air Force (IAF) on the South Lebanese village of Qana, on 30 July 2006, during the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict. [1] The airstrike came after Hezbollah soldiers fired over 150 Katyusha rockets in a two week period from the village into Israel. The attack is blamed for the collapse of a three-story building onto its bomb shelter, where at least 28 people died, originally thought to have been 54. The cause of death and time line of events are under investigation by the IDF. According to the Human Rights Watch on 2 August, the initial estimate of 54 persons killed was based on a register of 63 persons who had sought shelter in the basement, and the rescue teams first having located only nine survivors. However, it was later established that 22 had escaped the basement and that 28 bodies had been recovered, whereof 16 were children. There were still 13 people missing, and locals feared they were buried in the rubble.[2] The event was reminiscent of the 1996 shelling of Qana in which over 100 civilians were killed a decade earlier.

Seems like a pretty balanced account of what happened.

Check out the "Allegations of a Hoax" part as well, which yesterday was still "in dispute," but the wikipedians now appear to agree on the wording of the section.

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Just saw "A Scanner Darkly," the new Philip K. Dick film. Great movie. So refreshingly original. The entire film was rotoscoped -- filmed with live actors and then colored to look like a cartoon. The effect really fit the film -- after seeing it you can understand why the director, Richard Linklater, decided to go in that direction.

The film deals with drug abuse and appropriately starred a who's who of Hollywood miscreants -- Keanu Reeves, Robert Downy Jr., Woody Harrelson, and Wynona Ryder. (Did Ryder ever get busted for drugs or did she just shoplift?)

Anyhoo, I strongly recommend it. Here are my earlier comments on Dick.

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