Author Archives: Tom Crippen

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. 

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” …

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.
Photobucket


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

With a slice

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The mug with the slice of lemon is in front of Officer Crowley. So the one actual working man at the “beer summit” either drinks beer with lemon or ordered  ice tea. How do you like that? (Update, James Fallows says Crowley drank Blue Moon Wheat Beer, which Fallows calls “Faux microbrew.” Update 2, The NYT says that’s orange, not lemon, in Crowley’s mug, and that Biden had a lime slice in his; Biden’s mug is the one in the left foreground. Bottom line: no actual lemon around, so I changed the title of the post.)





The photo series shows Vice President Biden present but not talking. (Update, It says here Biden is a teetotaler and drank nonalcoholic beer. Imagine if he did drink.)
Prof. Gates’s statement contains the following:

Sergeant Crowley and I, through an accident of time and place, have been cast together, inextricably, as characters – as metaphors, really – in a thousand narratives about race over which he and I have absolutely no control.

 

Yeah, inextricably as metaphors. I guess that’s Harvard for you.

The quote from Officer Crowley in the AP story is pretty vapid: 

“I think what you had today was two gentlemen agreeing to disagree on a particular issue. I don’t think that we spent too much time dwelling on the past. We spent a lot of time discussing the future.”


What particular issue? I guess Crowley said it was okay for him to arrest someone because he doesn’t like the guy’s conversation, and Gates said he wasn’t so sure. Then, looking to the future, they discussed getting a time-share in Nantucket. (Update, Crowley told reporters he and Gates are going to meet again on their own. His video clip is at the bottom of the linked-to post.)

Prof. Harvard, to go back to his comments, was generous in his hopes for the outcome of the “national conversation” (yikes) about his arrest:

There’s reason to hope that many people have emerged with greater sympathy for the daily perils of policing, on the one hand, and for the genuine fears about racial profiling, on the other hand.


I say generous because the policing peril in this particular case was being mouthed off to by a professor.

I’m always polite to police officers. On the other hand, they’re always polite to me, and from what I’ve seen the good ones stay polite in some fairly difficult situations. (My neighborhood fills up late at night with drunken clubgoers of all races, and there have been a couple of shootings over the years.) They’re called peace professionals for a reason. They keep the peace and they’re professional about it. They don’t go dragging you off to booking just because they lost an argument.

Crowley gets to go to the White House because he screwed up his job, and now he wants to “agree to disagree” about his behavior. Life is hell for the beleaguered white man in Obama’s America. 
(update, I edited this post a bit to make it read better. After posting it first, I mean.)

It’s a Marvel, Man! Surridge does Gaiman

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My friend Matthew Surridge just interviewed Neil Gaiman! It was for an article Matthew’s doing about Anticipation, the 2009 World Science Fiction Convention. Gaiman’s going to be the guest of honor, and the convention’s right here in Montreal (Aug. 6 thru 10).

Go here for what Gaiman told Matthew about the Marvel purchase of Marvelman. Short version: Gaiman’s “delighted” and he may write the title again, but no promises — “I hope so. I don’t know. It would be very, very good.”