myths_americana has a nice brief on Thompson, too.

I heard the news today, oh boy… One of the brightest lights in the American firmament blinked out Sunday. Word of Hunter Thompson’s death arrived at our house via the crawl on the network happy news this morning , and there’s irony enough in that fact alone. I barely know where to start. Most of us don’t get a lot

I’ve been waiting to see what was going to happen here, and finally Steve Moore has announced that he’ll be filing suit in his attempted maiming by Todd Bertuzzi. Some thoughts: 1. I’m no lawyer, so it will be interesting to see how the decision to file in Colorado plays out, since the actual assault took place in Vancouver. 2.

Ah, yes. The first three explain about 95% of my life these days… ___________________________________ The Washington Post’s Style Invitational once again asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition. Here are this year’s winners: Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas

Okay, I have now done something that most of the people calling for Harvard President Lawrence Summers’ head have not done – I have read the transcript of his actual comments at the NBER Conference on Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce. If you recall, this controversial speech included remarks some took as suggesting that women simply lack the same

On Thursday Lt. General William Wallace, commander of US Army forces in the Persian Gulf, said “The enemy we’re fighting is a bit different than the one we war-gamed against”….As Slate’s Fred Kaplan pointed out on Friday, however, Wallace’s statement simply isn’t true. “Militia fighters did play a crucial role in a major war game designed to simulate combat in

Bush swears that there will be no draft on his watch, period, and I continue to be skeptical. If I buy all I’m being told, and then do some basic common sensing around some things the administration is pointedly not saying – out loud, anyway – I can’t help concluding that we probably don’t have the manpower we need to

ChoicePoint Inc., a national provider of identification and credential verification services, says it will send an additional 110,000 statements to people informing them of possible identity theft after a group of well-organized criminals was able to obtain personal information on almost 140,000 consumers through the company. According to a statement on the ChoicePoint Web site, the incident was not the

First, is there some way I can get HP to fire me? Seriously – I don’t even need the $45M they paid Carly Fiorina to go away. Give me, say, $2M and I swear, you’ll never hear from me again. In return, I’ll guarantee you more in the way of measurable results than Carly ever did. For a mere $2M

Playwright Arthur Miller dead at 89 Friday, February 11, 2005 Posted: 10:47 AM EST (1547 GMT) ROXBURY, Connecticut (AP) — Arthur Miller, the Pulitzer prize-winning playwright whose most famous fictional creation, Willy Loman in “Death of a Salesman,” came to symbolize the American Dream gone awry, has died, his assistant said Friday. He was 89. Story

I’ve offered up any number of dire pronouncements about the present and future of journalism in America in recent months, but this latest one (thanks to SBU J/MC colleague Pat Vecchio for pointing me toward it) takes the proverbial cake: the Durham Herald-Sun has fired a reporter for the anonymous exercise of free speech. This post, like all entries in

Item: One popular PR yearbook estimates that news releases influence as much as 80 percent of the news. Item: Other studies show that up to half or more of the content in publications like the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal originate from press releases or PR story suggestions. Dr. Michael Turney of Northern Kentucky U adds

I want to applaud the Carolina fans on for the grace with which they are dealing with last night’s defeat. One Carolina fan I correspond with has continued nonstop with the stream of excusemongering he began early yesterday – literally hours before the game even started. So far he has blamed just about everybody short of the Trilateral Commission for

It will be interesting to see how they go about ignoring this one. The NFR team on this one includes a Pulitzer winner, so this challenge is well above partisan hackery… According to several credible reports, “Mr. Gannon” has been repeatedly credentialed as a member of the White House press corps by your office and has been regularly called upon

A recent NY Times editorial makes a sensible argument for the importance of teacher training in the ongoing challenge to fix America’s badly broken school systems.