Tag: news

The June swoon

The big thing, though, was that the Daughter had not one, but two dance recitals.


This has been the busiest June I can remember. I was in charge of the Friends of the Albany Public Library annual meeting, which involved arranging for the speaker, planning a dinner for 20, and getting a plaque made, the latter two of which had more complications than I need to go into here. But it ultimately went off successfully. The best part is that I discovered an old-fashioned drink called a sidecar; I loved it!

Our church is in covenant with one of the local schools, and one Saturday, that meant putting together a playground, which entailed, among other things, clearing a field of weeds and a tremendous amount of trash. Here’s a brief news story.

I attended a comic book show. Went to at least three parties, with another two this upcoming weekend. I’m not even counting visits to the dentist and eye doctor.

The big thing, though, was that the Daughter had not one, but two dance recitals. The first was at her public school, where she was a new recruit in something called Step. A couple of weeks later, her ballet school was having its annual recital. That school’s founder is one Madeline Cantarella Culpo. One of her grandsons is Michael Culpo, a Division I basketball player, while one of her granddaughters is the new Miss USA, Olivia Culpo; she is understandably proud.
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Why I am getting so much spam on this site, over 300 per day? The filter catches it, but it’s still tedious to remove. And most of it is of the bad spam variety, from companies selling electronic cigarettes, payday loans, or “pantyhose covered female foot fetish,” filled with suspicious links and unreadable text. Whereas GOOD spam is: “Helpful info. Lucky me I discovered your website by chance, and I am shocked why this accident didn’t happen earlier! I bookmarked it.” I know it’s a lie, but at least it’s pleasing to the eye.

TV: from 90% to 50%

I had been viewing ABC News, more out of habit. I thought the late Peter Jennings was excellent, but through the reigns of Charles Gibson and now Diane Sawyer, the news has gotten softer and mushier.

I don’t write about TV much for one simple reason: the little I watch, I don’t usually see in real-time. Depending on the show, I could be a  week to a couple of months behind, though I tend to stay current with the news. By the time I see it, much of it is an old story. Which begs the question, how long should one wait until writing about “spoilers”? After all, many people timeshift their viewing with the TiVO or VCR or, in my case, DVR. As of this writing, I STILL haven’t seen the season finale of Grey’s Anatomy, which aired two weeks ago, but I read, in a passing message on a blog, a major plot point that I wish I didn’t know. Whereas my wife still doesn’t know who won Dancing with the Stars, at least until she sees her hairdresser Wednesday, though, in fact, I do. It’s not a show I watch, so I’m not upset about that.

When I came back from my trip at the beginning of May, our DVR was 90% full. But with seasons finally ending, first Parenthood, and the The Good Wife in April, then the rest of my shows in May, the list slowly but clearly is on a downward plane, running anywhere from 48-52% full. I’m hoping that by the fall preview season, it’ll be close to zero.

It helps that there are so many reality shows in the summer that I’m not interested in. The only thing on the recording list is the final season of The Closer. And at least so far, I’m not likely to add a show to record in the fall; in fact, I haven’t added a show in a couple of seasons.

And the shows everyone tells me I SHOULD be watching, such as Mad Men, I’ll have to get the DVDs of the previous seasons first. But I never do – I STILL haven’t watched The Wire, and it’s been off the air about half a decade. Instead, I’ll watch baseball or something I already own on DVD, such as an old Dick van Dyke Show.

I have to figure out which national news broadcast I should watch. I had been viewing ABC News, more out of habit. I thought the late Peter Jennings was excellent, but through the reigns of Charles Gibson and now Diane Sawyer, the news has gotten softer and mushier. The final straw was Friday when the SpaceX rocket docked on the International Space Station. The LA Times thought it warranted a special notice, which I Facebooked. The NBC News teased about it. But ABC News had not a word one about it. It’s become almost as bad as ABC’s Good Morning America and NBC’s the Today show, full of personal dramas and puff pieces; the CBS morning news is CLEARLY better, and on those rare occasions I view morning TV, I watch that.

Roger Answers Your Questions, Tom, LisaF, Arthur, and Scott

In May 1980, when the semester was over, Tom nagged me to work at the store.

Lisa from peripheral perceptions, who has very nice toes, writes:
You may have already been asked and answered this one, but…How and why did you get into blogging?

The HOW question I answered, among other places, here, specifically in the fifth paragraph; curse you, Fred Hembeck! The WHY I’m sure I’ve answered, but, to reiterate, it’s mostly because I was composing things to write in my head, I didn’t have a place to put them, and the subsequent noise in my brain got too loud; I blogged to stay (relatively) sane. Now it’s so I can “meet” people like you.
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Thomas McKinnon, with whom I worked at the comic book store FantaCo, said:
Hey Roger
Tell us the story of how you met Tom Skulan and started working at FantaCo.
I have never heard the story.

Well, those are two very different things. I’m going to go back to the old days of comic book collecting when you had to get your comics off the spinner racks at the local convenience store. I started collecting comics by early 1972 (Red Wolf #1 was cover-dated May 1972, Luke Cage, Hero for Hire June 1972). My friend and I were at college in New Paltz, NY but we had to go to some little hole-in-the-wall store on 44/55 in Highland, the next town over, to get our four-color fix.

At some point, maybe as early as 1973, a guy named Peter Maresca started a comic book store called the Crystal Cave, buying from a direct market distributor (Seagate? Bud Plant?) It was right across from a bar called Bacchus. It later moved a couple of blocks.

The chronology fails me here, but at some point, Tom Skulan, Mitch Cohn, and Raoul Vezina all worked at the Crystal Cave, so I met them all there. Tom also put bicycles together at Barker’s department store just outside the village limits.

At some point, Peter closed the store and sold the comic inventory, I believe, to Tom. In any case, I would see Tom at these little comic book shows up and down the Hudson River periodically. Then on August 28, 1978, he opened FantaCo at 21 Central Avenue in Albany, with Raoul as the front guy/graphic designer in residence, the same function he served at the Crystal Cave.

I was living in Schenectady by that time, and lost my job at the Schenectady Arts Council in January 1979; the federal funding was cut off. So I couldn’t afford to buy comics for a while. I’d take the hour-long #55 bus from Schenectady to Albany, sometimes do some work in the store, and get store credit in return so that I could feed my addiction.

I did some work on the first FantaCon in 1979. I know I helped schlep stuff into the Egg convention center, and worked the front door and/or the FantaCo table.

In August 1979, I moved to Albany, to attend grad school at UAlbany (or whatever it was called at the time) in public administration. It was a disaster, in no small part because I developed a toe infection two days before registration and literally almost died; I spent nearly a week in the college infirmary and never really caught up. But it was also very cutthroat competitive, unlike my later time at library school, which was very cooperative, and it did not suit my personality at all.

So in May 1980, when the semester was over, Tom nagged me to work at the store. I told him that I didn’t want to work at the store; I needed to go back to college in the fall. But I COULD use a summer job. So I was hired on that basis, primarily doing mail order, and didn’t end up leaving until November 1988.
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Scott from the on-hiatus Scooter Chronicles – come back, Scott! – wonders: What is your take, if any, on the DC relaunch, with 52 new storylines and rebooted famous characters?

First, I know it’s inevitable that characters will get reimagined from time to time, in part a function of them not aging as the rest of us do. Still, the whole renumbering and reinventing the whole line smacks of both a frustrating disrespect for its own history and commercial desperation. If I hadn’t stopped buying new comics, this ploy might have motivated me to scrap the entire line. In other words, I HATE it.

That said, it appears that a couple of titles featuring female characters are specifically problematic.
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A fellow political science major in college, Arthur@AmeriNZ, asked about a story. AP Reporter Responds To Chris Hayes Panel Debate On Racism Of Droppin’ G’s From Obama Speech
On Sunday morning’s Up with Chris Hayes, the panel discussed the contrast between the way Politico reported President Obama’s speech before the Congressional Black Caucus and the Associated Press‘ reporting. Unlike Politico, who used the official transcription to pull quotes, the AP’s article reflected the President’s folksier delivery by quotin’ him without the dropped g’s. Karen Hunter called the AP’s treatment racist, John McWhorter disagreed, and Hayes got a laugh by saying, “I can go both ways on this.”

My first instinct was to say that, if that same news organization would drop the G when quoting, say, George W. Bush (which seems to be the case), it’s a non-issue, but would be if Obama were dealt with differently. However, it is NOT because, as McWhorter argued, “Black English is becoming the lingua franca of American youth, and that ‘America, including non-black America, loves that way of speaking.'” Yuck.

Hunter says she teaches “a journalism class, and I tell my students to fix people’s grammar because you don’t want them to sound ignorant. For them to do that, it’s code, and I don’t like it.” That was an interesting point. I’ve seen literal transcripts in the newspaper, often in criminal cases, sometimes with the (sic) or “as stated” designation, and I’ve been of two minds on that, how that might color the public’s perception of the case.

I guess I agree with Hayes when he suggested, “journalistically speaking, the AP’s transcription gave a more accurate impression of the flavor of the speech.” Especially when the President clearly intended to be dropping his Gs for the particular audience to whom he was speaking. Or speakin’.
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You have more questions? Just ask away!

Art from Sold Out #1 by John Hebert; story by Skulan, Green, and Hebert

The Lydster, Part 90: Talking about Tragedy

There’s the broader question of explaining the news when there is so much distortion of the facts by some outlets.

It’s been relatively easy to talk to my daughter about individual deaths, such as my mother’s earlier this year. She understands that my father, and my wife’s older brother, died before she was born, and has only photos by which to identify them, and that was helpful in the discussion.

But how does one explain the assassination attempt of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, a shooting in which six people were killed, including the pictured nine-year-old girl – not that much older than she is – whose last name was Green, no less? The natural desire is to protect her from such news, and I don’t think she caught the initial story. But there have been plenty of follow-ups, and I know she’s heard at least bits and pieces of those. What does one say? That there are bad people out there? Crazy people out there?

Then there’s the 10th anniversary of 9/11. Of course, the event took place before she was born, but all of the recollections are hard to miss. And those guys are even more difficult to explain. Does this show up in the school curriculum yet? And if so, what does IT say about those events of a decade ago?

(And there’s the broader question of explaining the news when there is so much distortion of the facts by some outlets.)

I went to lunch with a friend of mine who’s around 30 who has decided not to have any children because the world’s just too scary. If the maternal instinct strikes, she’ll adopt, taking care of someone who’s already on the planet anyway. I must admit that I understand her wariness. The environmental and economic troubles alone are sources of concern.

Ultimately, as it turned out, we watched the evening news – the three of us – on September 11 this year. Not sure how much of it she got. Still, my girl is rather resilient; I’ll keep trying to figure out a way to explain the world to her, somehow. Even when the question is “Why”? Why did people fly planes into buildings? Why do we need to remember?

Regret the Error

The lowered standards are a function of cost-cutting, doing it fast, and a different ethos of publishing than what existed in the past.

One of my favorite websites is Regret the Error, which “reports on media corrections, retractions, apologies, clarifications and trends regarding accuracy and honesty in the press. It was launched in October 2004 by Craig Silverman, a freelance journalist, and author based in Montreal.”

Initially, or at least when I first came across the site, it merely linked to the foibles of the press; hey, as the logo notes, “Mistakes happen.” For instance, recently, the New York Times accidentally traded Alex Rodriguez from the Yankees to the Phillies.

But in recent months, the site has taken a more meta approach. For instance, What Typos Mean to Book Publishing bemoans the loss of “full-time copy editors and proofreaders to filter out an author’s mistakes”, shortcuts taken by publishers, and carelessness of authors.

The piece How to Correct Social Media Errors notes that “There’s no good way to notify those who read erroneous information and moved on, believing it to be true,” because most of those who tweeted or Facebooked the error-laden message may not have seen the follow-up.

Last month had a great link, Have newsrooms relaxed standards, sanctions for fabrication and plagiarism?

It seems that the three examples I cited have some factors in common. The lowered standards are a function of cost-cutting, doing it fast, and a different ethos of publishing than what existed in the past.

From the latter story, Poynter’s Kelly McBride says, “Some editors these days seem more willing to overlook minor plagiarism because it almost always involves writers trying to work fast, either because they have additional duties or because they are trying to publish to ride a wave of interest.”

Can these factors – on steroids – have contributed to the News of the World hacking scandal? Were the editors aware of the sources of the stories their reporters were brought to them or did they totally abdicate their responsibilities? Add hubris and a corrupting amount of power, over politicians and police alike, and you have a massive scandal.

More than one pundit has pointed to an ethics clause in the FCC licensing process requiring a licensee to be of “good character”. Could the Murdoch TV empire in the United States crumble?

Given the fact that a former FCC Commissioner could support the massive Comcast/NBC buyout back in January and become a Comcast lobbyist months later, makes me wonder. The former commissioner did seek ethics advice from FCC attorneys.

In ways big and small, I feel that our media outlets have often let us down, not necessarily in a Murdockian manner, but in a more pedestrian fashion. And I’m at a loss to figure out how to stop it.

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