Friday, March 01, 2002
WHITE TRASH WHITE AND REDNECK RED
Looking for something to impress your classy friends? You can try "White Trash White" or "RedNeck Red" from the Oildale Winery. The label touts its distinctive qualities: "Strategically planted between pumping oil wells and oil sumps are rows of grapevines. This blend of oil and tar-tainted soil lends itself to a wine grape flavor seldom duplicated throughout the world of viticulture."
My dad had two bottles of it at my wedding (to replace the good stuff at his friends' table) but now you can find it in stores for $12 a pop. Oildale Winery (coincidentally rhymes with refinery) tells the Bakersfield Californian that if they're successful with the red and white, they'll branch into champagne.
IRS AUDITING MORE, UNLESS YOU'RE RICH
So my tax guy was right. When I talked to him in December, he said he'd noticed a sudden increase in audits. Now USA Today reports that last year, the "IRS reversed a long, sharp slide in the number of taxpayers facing audits." The increases came for those in the low- to middle-income categories, while those making more than $100,000 were audited less frequently.
Not that I have anything to hide, but I fear another evil letter from the IRS. I got several a decade ago. The language from the get-go was terse, accusatory and demanding. I had to send off to the Czech Republic for income verification and dig through years-old boxes of files for other proof that I had almost no income the year I lived in Prague and that my employer paid my income taxes there. I mailed it all in with a very timid letter asking if this was enough proof. And I never heard from them again.
I assumed they'd come after me at some point, since about 20 editors from my college paper were mysteriously audited within a three- or four-year period. Each was making about $8,000 to $15,000 a year (I calculated my hourly salary at 65 cents) but somehow the IRS saw fit to audit a bunch of low-paid 20-year-olds at a spunky college paper. What a coincidence! However it happened, they got my number and I just assume there's a perpetual flag on my file.
Thursday, February 28, 2002
HEAR BUCK LIVE
In his latest column at FoxNews.com, Ken Layne gives a nice plug to my hometown and favorite son Buck Owens. Who knew you could use Real Audio to hear Buck live from his Crystal Palace every Friday and Saturday night?
15 SECONDS FOR 15 BUCKS
Ebay Item # 1708316510: I Will Link You on My Blog. … "Some people have morals, standards, ideals about quality when it comes to linking sites to their Blogs and websites, but I'm an American, I couldn't care less." Tony started the bidding at $1, but it's already up to $15.50. The winner will make an appearance in TonyPierce.com's blog. Only one day left.
BUMPY DAY FOR AIRLINE SECURITY
Not looking so good in the skies today. There are fighter jets shadowing an Air India plane bound for JFK with a "suspicious passenger." LAX had to close five terminals and delay more than 300 planes when an unplugged metal detector was noticed. A federal agent is complaining that those expensive new bag screening devices are seriously flawed. A CBS TV crew said they boarded a plane with fake ID. Twentyfour workers at Boston's Logan airport were charged in connection with falsifying documents to get jobs in secure areas. And World Net Daily says the FAA is trying to cover up a report that a hijacker had a gun on Flight 11 (which hit a WTC tower) and shot a passenger. They refer to this memo with the details.
Wednesday, February 27, 2002
A FREE SPEECH STORY WAITING TO HAPPEN
An L.A. blogger says she was fired based on what she was posting on her personal weblog. (via Mkelley.net and Evhead.com.)
HOW MUCH HATE?
The Gallup organization has finished a far-reaching poll of Muslim attitudes toward the West and found the distrust runs deep. Here are a few excerpts from the USA Today story:
"Although U.S. officials say all 19 of the Sept. 11 hijackers were Arab men, only 18% of those polled in six Islamic countries say they believe Arabs carried out the attacks; 61% say Arabs were not responsible; and 21% say they don't know."
"Two-thirds say the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon were morally unjustifiable, but significant minorities disagree. In Kuwait, which U.S. troops liberated from Iraq in 1991, 36% say the attacks were justifiable, the highest percentage of any country polled."
The story ends with this kicker:
"The poll had about 120 questions, but not all were asked in every country because of censorship. For instance, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Morocco did not allow the question about Arab responsibility for the Sept. 11 attacks."
Gallup pollsters talked to nearly 10,000 people in December and January in Indonesia, Iran, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. There are other stories at Reuters and BBC, which has a separate graphic.
At Half-empty.org there's a beefy post comparing the American-centric CNN.comversion of this story to one in ArabNews.com, which focuses more on how Muslim opinion is finally being acknowledged by the United States since Sept. 11.
BLOG CONSCIOUSNESS
Much is being written these days about the importance of blogging. Henry Copeland, (who wrote the 1992 Details story about Prague) weighs in with an essay praising bloggers' "timeliness, willingness to credit others, passion, blogrolling, human interest, chronology, and devotion."
There has been a fair amount of writing about blogs being a threat to old media, in the way that the Internet was/is supposed to be a threat to newspapers. I've never understood why people feel the need to declare one medium the winner.
Newspapers are great for their depth, breadth and reliability. Wire services are fast and accurate. TV has the best video first. Magazines are good at depth. Online news has (or could have) speed and breadth while bloggers, thus far, are good, unfiltered commentators. We should be happy we have so many distinct choices. That's democracy, baby.
NY BLOG-A-RAMA
New York bloggers will do their part this Friday to help out struggling downtown businesses by … drinking. See, alcohol is the answer. Raghu Ramachandran of Sophismata.com (which has some good stuff on Enron) is responsible for organizing the get-together. It's set for 6 p.m. at Mary Ann's at West Broadway and Chambers. If you didn't get a specific e-mail invite on this, fear not, please come on down and join the gathering. Details here.
Tuesday, February 26, 2002
ENRON ON THE HOTSEAT
If you don't have your TV tuned to the Enron hearings, turn it on now. Great stuff. Whistleblower superwoman Sherron Watkins is testifying simultaneously with ex-CEO Jeffrey "I don't recall" Skilling. As soon as Skilling says something, a senator asks Watkins for her assessment of his defense. Harvard Business School can't be happy with the publicity Mr. Skilling is giving them today.
HELP WANTED
Ken Layne says I need a "non-mouse hand job." Was wondering what he said to send extra traffic to my site overnight.
What's going on here is that in the past week I've started to tell people that I'm thinking about getting out of journalism for maybe two years in hopes of finding a job that would get me away from a keyboard. The reason I'm an idling freelancer is due to a repetitive stress injury in my right hand, caused by a mouse that lived in a bad workstation. Despite too much downtime and an absurd number of failed remedies, the thing has yet to heal completely. So I figured it can't hurt to consider career options that don't entail working at a computer. But the mere suggestion is met by silence by most of my friends, and others come up only with jobs that still involve computer work. I'm open to ideas. Send 'em in. (Please don't mention voice software. Tried it. That stuff is pathetic. It will be years before it really works.)
Monday, February 25, 2002
THE BLOGS OF LUNCH
I had lunch today with soon-to-be New Yorker Nick Denton and Jeff Jarvis, the power behind Conde Nast's online operations and the warlog WWIII. We were on Jeff's home turf, the much-fabled Conde Nast cafeteria on Times Square. (The NY Times Style section treats the Conde Nast cafeteria the same way the LA Times treats Los Feliz.) The talk was about blogging and Denton's planned move away from dreary San Francisco and into the safe, welcoming, over-priced real estate market of New York City. Thanks for lunch, Jeff!
NEWS TOO DANGEROUS TO GATHER
The San Francisco Chronicle has a story about reporters reconsidering their job risks in Pakistan. It quotes a UPI freelancer who says he has already canceled two trips in light of Daniel Pearl's murder. And you know, I hate to say it, but the reporters are right to back off but it also means the terrorists were successful.
For me, I considered the situation hopeless when the kidnappers sent the e-mail offering to send some food to Pearl's family. At that point, I realized they meant to kill him, and more like him, and were laughing about it. How better to scare away journalists than prove that you will pick them off one my one to kill and mutilate them? At the foreign correspondents panel last week, there was talk about kidnapping being more scary than the front lines of a war zone. It means you can't take anything for granted at anytime.
I've been in very few war zones, but I can tell you that over the years I've done hundreds of things as a reporter - thinking I had some sort of magic reporter safety bubble around me - that I never would have done otherwise. I walked alone into how many houses with suspicious men? I've gotten into cars with strangers, walked into freshly cleared bomb threat zones, written things that put people in jail or cost them their jobs. Someone stalked me at one of my newspaper jobs, going so far as to slice up pictures and other items on my desk one night. I got my first death threat while editor of my college paper. While I weighed each of those risks in the process, you are never 100 percent sure of what you're getting into.
What Daniel Pearl's kidnappers have done is let all the foreign reporters know that their odds have just gotten a lot worse. So as a result, readers in the free world will know a lot less about what's going on over there. And that's the way the kidnappers want it. Remember Pearl was following a lead that might have tied al Qaeda to the shoe bomber, Richard Reid. The WSJ, mind you, was the paper that bought the looted computer that holds strong evidence linking Reid to al Qaeda. Having reporters roam freely around Pakistan and Afghanistan is bad news to the bad guys. If these guys think Sept. 11 was fun, there should be no question that they'll take pleasure in chasing the journalists out of their home in as brutal a way as possible. And it's great propaganda for their side, as well. USA Today has a story about Pakistani officials worried that the video will go on sale in stores there. And sadly, we'll see it on the Internet, I'm afraid.
I don't have any solutions in mind. I don't think there are any. It's not as though this is the only place on earth where the people and/or its rulers want the reporters dead. Thailand just ejected a couple foreign reporters who were a "threat to national security," and a prominent reporter was forced to flee Zimbabwe after repeated threats on his life during the past months. He said he will return to report when it is safe.
And you know, that's about all you can do. Go back when it's safe. Let the guys with guns take care of things. Reporters like to think they're super-human and that they're safe despite having no gun and more skepticism than trust. They tend to be smart and lucky, but that goes only so far. And with nine reporters already dead in Afghanistan and Pakistan during this conflict, the odds aren't worth it. But to those reporters who do stay and continue to walk into suspicious situations for the sake of the news, they have my deepest gratitude and I wish them all the luck in the world. It is a noble job.
KEN LAYNE VIA FOXNEWS.COM
I neglected last week to point out Ken Layne's blog column that ran at Fox News' web site. I was reading a Google translation of Emmanuelle Richard's site (from French) which has her describing Ken's column as "funny and is well smelled." What better recommendation could you ask for?
THE DEPTHS OF CONVERGENCE
In an era of increasing media mergers, it's important to understand what convergence is already doing to newsrooms across the country. Convergence is the process of trying to make print, TV, radio and online reporters play nice with each other when their parent company suddenly decides it can maximize resources and increase profits by making their newspaper reporter do something for their TV station, and vice versa. Trouble is, newspaper reporting has a different value system, more depth, later deadline, and longer story length than the others. One type of reporter never naturally plays nice with the others. Convergence is a painful process.
The Phoenix New Times has a column about the media convergence taking place there. My favorite example is the TV consumer "reporter" who looked to the station's partner paper for tips.
The woman held up some Republic grocery ads.
"Albertsons has 33 percent off gourmet turkey breast," she says, showing the ad. "That's a good deal."
"Safeway has this Buy-One-Get-One-Free on Kellogg's cereal. That's a really good deal."
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