June 2008
40 posts
Mark Bittman Is My Favorite Food Writer
Rock Band 2 Is Going To Be Awesome →
Great New Bar Last Night
I had read about Eli Cannon’s about a year ago during a spate of boredom with the Hartford bar scene, but it was 20 miles away in Middletown, so I scratched it off the list. Boy was that a mistake.
Eli Cannon’s is one of those bars that you immediately wish you could be a part of. “If this bar was in West Hartford, I’d probably be there every day,” my...
Lazy Saturday Activity: Plowing Through Four...
Are you using Google Reader? No? What’s that?
In my opinion, it’s the furtive steps toward the future of news. It’s a way to organize the vast content of the Internet in a relatively easy format. What if a newspaper had an unlimited number of contributors that wrote about exactly the topics you cared about and was updated in real time? That’s Google Reader.
I got a...
http://www.whyeditingmatters.org →
My New Favorite Band Is The Rock-afire Explosion
If you haven’t seen this anamatronic band from the old Showbizz Pizza chain play Usher’s “Love In This Club,” you’re missing out. While I was looking for the video today on YouTube, I learned that the song was programmed Chris Thrash, a guy from Alabama who is apparently auctioning off similar performances of any song to the highest bidder on his website. For more...
Netflix For Magazines?
I’ll admit it, I’m a sucker for magazines. My family’s weekly subscription to Time was a big reason why I got interested in journalism when I was a kid. So Time Inc.’s fall launch of a pay-by-the-month, mix-and-match magazine service looks pretty awesome to me. It’s called Maghound.com. I doubt they’ll have The Economist available, but I’ll probably end...
I Can't Wait To See This
The city of New York is transforming an abandoned, elevated freight railway into a public park. The project is called the High Line. Here’s the story from the New York Times.
Wow, This Thing Is Actually Being Built? →
Finbarr O'Reily's Life Is Slightly More... →
This Got Me A Little Choked Up...
I was obsessed with LEGO for the vast majority of my childhood. So this look into the company’s vault of every LEGO set ever made put a smile on my face. I actually still have all my old LEGOs, sorted in bins by color (yeah, I was a cool kid), just sitting in a storage room. I’ve been meaning to sell them, but every time I think about it I can’t go through with it.
Sports And The Economists
The interesting thing about athletic competition is that it’s often put into context with statistics, but the data are usually inadequate to explain truly why things happened the way they did. You can’t crunch the numbers and build models that describe what happened on a court or a field or predict some sort of an outcome.
But where would we be without those statlines and almanacs?...
If It's This Easy To Find Spy Satellites, Why Not... →
What can anyone really do about them anyhow?
via Gizmodo
Finally Something Truly Newsworthy Following... →
More Support For Copy Editors
You shake the tree, a leopard is gonna fall out.
Yanks Thump Sox: Prime Rate To Remain Stable,... →
In defense of copy editing.
via Blogslot
Now THIS Is Cool Hyperlocal
Yeah, it’s from an altweekly, but this D.C. neighborhood guide from the Washington City Paper is a great idea. The funny nicknames and arbitrary boundaries are probably a bit edgy for The Courant (although that seems to be what Zell et al. are looking for), but overall it’s very smart. Beyond that great map, look at the website! Each neighborhood gets a specialized Google map, rankings...
Was That Headline Really A Flop?
What’s interesting about journalists who are also bloggers is that often the news behind the news sneaks up on you in interesting ways. Take the example of an article I read a couple of weeks ago in the Wall Street Journal, “Big Daily’s ‘Hyperlocal’ Flop,” which details a struggling website launched by the Washington Post to cover Loudon County, Virginia. I...
Wish I Could Have Been There
via The Big Picture
You Can't Have It Both Ways
I think this is pretty lame and a waste of a perfectly good Moleskine.
But I guarantee there are publishing executives sitting in their offices right now considering this kind of “innovation” to make newspapers relevant again. Forget McLuhan. Until we develop a business model that focuses on producing quality content regardless of how it’s delivered, print media isn’t...
Watch“Study Finds Most Children Not In Favor Of Children’s Healthcare”
The Next Book I’m Buying:
Maybe...
Trouble In Dakar...
Last summer I got on a real geography kick and learned a lot about Africa and its capital cities. In my mind I had etched out a shortlist of those I’d like to visit, and somewhere in the middle is Dakar, Senegal. (No. 1 on the list is undoubtedly Maputo, Mozambique.)
So I was sad to see this troubling report about the growing economic woes in Dakar featured in the mezzanine on nytimes.com....
http://www.onesentence.org/ →
Reminds me of Twitter and “Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure.” I tried to introduce how cool these concepts were to my students last semester, but it was mostly lost on them, sadly.
Via Neatorama
“Before the game, I was going through a lot, especially not playing well on the...”
– Rajon Rondo, Via TrueHoop
Good advice from Ray Allen for all us young guys
http://www.tellzell.com →
“[Colin had] written his new bassline, which transformed it from something very...”
– Nigel Godrich, via The Word
Radiohead’s longtime producer shares some insight into the 12+ years process to bring the song “Big Boots” / “Man O’ War” / “Nude” to fruition on the band’s new album, In Rainbows.
On The Map? →
My friend Hilda is the online reporter for The Courant. Right now she’s working on a Web map that plots murders in Hartford for 2008.
We’re at least five years behind the curve on stuff like this, but it’s a start. We recently moved a bureau chief to a new position involving the gathering and packaging of statistics (mainly for dot com). Much has been written about metro...
Brace Yourself For Irony
NEW YORK — The Associated Press, following criticism from bloggers over an AP assertion of copyright, plans to meet this week with a bloggers’ group to help form guidelines under which AP news stories could be quoted online.
Jim Kennedy, the AP’s director of strategic planning, said Monday that he planned to meet Thursday with Robert Cox, president of the Media Bloggers...
Needs Z Axis: Pop Vs. Hipster
New York Magazine’s Approval Matrix always does a fairly smart job of putting “taste” in perspective without being a self-aware mess like a VH1 show. An old friend of mine from high school, Liz, apparently works for the magazine now, so I wonder if she’s behind some of this?
Anyhow, it’s not every day you find shoutouts to two blogs you frequent (videogum and...
Streamlining
As a chronically messy person, I’m really impressed with this guy’s “100 Thing Challenge” — a decision to pare down all posessions to the most essential.
Time’s Lisa McLaughlin wrote about it a couple of weeks ago.
If I tried the challenge, could I really give up all my books? Does a binder full of CDs count as one thing, or 50? A week of laundry probably counts for 30 things. Add in items like...