They teach you in journalism school that “Dog bites man” isn’t news. “Man bites dog,” on the other hand, is definitely news. They never said anything about “Dog shoots man,” but I’m guessing it’s news. And this is hands down the coolest pup in the world aside from Ronan…..
Read moreNY Times Op-Ed guy David Brooks has a piece today called “Cult of Death,” in which he tries to tidy up the tragedy in Beslan, suicide bombers in Palestine and 9/11 by reducing it all to some sort of irrational pure evil. Dissertations will be written about the euphemisms the media used to describe these murderers. They were called “separatists”
Read moreMuch has been made lately of the group calling themselves the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” (SBVT) and their little slander campaign against John Kerry. Kerry initially tried the old “I won’t dignify that with a response” tactic, but in doing so dramatically overestimated the intelligence of the electorate (I mean, come on, when has that one ever worked?) This
Read moreIf your fairy godmother appeared and offered to send you on a trip to any place humans have ever been at any moment that has occurred in your lifetime, what moment would you choose? I posed this question to several dozen friends, colleagues, family members, and stray acquaintances. Their responses are below, and we’ll start with my own answer. I
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In 1968, I was born again. I’d been Christian my whole life, of course – I was raised in a staunchly Southern Baptist home, and you were Baptist whether you’d been born again yet or not. Not a lot of people know this about me, and given what I have become over the years, most folks simply don’t have the
Read moreThrough the years, Jamie Hoover has not only produced a string of fantastic records with his band, The Spongetones, he has also produced, engineered, played with, and hung with damned near everybody, or so it seems from reading a comprehensive credit list. Yet somehow he remains one of those incredibly talented people who never quite reap the acclaim they deserve
Read moreWe are the New World’s 13th generation, first citizens of the Next World: whiners, malcontents, slackers, bitching at the taste of boot; blind-stepping teledonnas, our avatars more human than human. Dark little rooms, catatonic terminal glow. We’re vagabonds, rummaging through the machinery of our parents’ high towers, ruthless tribes of marionettes jacked in the trance, the cult of computerized dance,
Read more2003 was The Year When Everybody Died. The music world alone lost Johnny Cash, June Carter Cash, Hank Ballard, Howie Epstein, Johnny Paycheck, Barry White, Elliott Smith, Herbie Mann, Robert Palmer, and Bobby Hatfield. But for some of us, the worst blow came when the great Warren Zevon finally lost his battle with cancer on September 7. Fortunately, Warren had
Read more“One Thing Leads to Another” originally appeared in the Summer 2003 edition of Wilmington Blues. It’s Saturday morning in Wallburg, North Carolina, and Rocky Rigby is sitting in his house on Baptist Church Road listening to KC McKey on The X, 96.3 FM. At the moment, Rocky is drinking a cup of coffee and puzzling over what it means to
Read moreSome stray thoughts on the whole Kobe Bryant debacle: 1: Kobe admitted that he committed adultery with the woman who’s charging him with rape. I’m betting all my money that this isn’t the first time Kobe has “wandered in foreign lands,” if you catch my drift. In fact, if this woman was among the first 20 or 30 he’s doinked
Read moreFriends have lately had to endure my ranting about how pathetic and irresponsible the media is when it comes to reporting on things scientific and statistical. The issue that has most commonly set me off lately has been the way the US press has turned SARS into the Black Death, damned near annihilating the Ontario economy in the process. Fact
Read moreSteve Reynolds, friend of the Pit, sent me today’s NY Times op-ed by Bob Herbert, and it just set me off on some things I’ve been meaning to say lately. So I said them. Have a look at the op-ed first, though. Sorry folks, but this little editorial just caught me wrong. The ultimate irony is the nature of who’s
Read moreA couple interesting links forwarded to me by a co-worker: “The Battle Between Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon” “What Was Rumsfeld Thinking?” The first is a good analysis of the planning leading up to the war, while the second speculates on why Rumsfeld has been so insistent on a policy that stretches US forces so thinly. The reasoning seems plausible
Read moreA roundtable between Paul Barrow, Jay DeFrank and myself . It began last night when Aaron Butler sent me Mark Franchetti’s recent piece for the London Times, “Slaughter at the Bridge of Death: US Marines Fire on Civilians.” Brutal, ugly, horrific – this was war at its most disturbing. So I sent the URL around and encouraged people to read
Read moreOkay, I did my little evil scenario blog the other day. Next morning, out of feckin’ nowhere, ABC News (Diane Sawyer Division) is doing this story in southern Iraq, I think, where people were happy to be liberated (they hate Saddam), but were already bitching about where’s the humanitarian aid. One guy they have on camera is saying there’s no
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