The annual fuel economy report of Gerard Manley Hopkins.
You can barely make it out in this grainy picture I took last night through my windshield with my phone, but the Corvette’s license plate says MR BAD 7. Do you suppose the driver is the seventh-baddest dude in Florida, or that he owns six cars even badder than the Corvette?
The title of this post comes from a line I was happy to see in a job listing for a municipal reporter at the Tribune-owned Sun-Sentinel of Fort Lauderdale. (This being South Florida, the full sentence actually is, “Spanish skills as well as knowledge of computer-assisted reporting are preferred.” Probably in that order.) As Ryan McNeill, who recently joined the Sun-Sentinel and just started blogging, points out:
“Newspapers across America are spending an awful lot of money training reporters how to get audio and video, and then how to edit it. But aren’t newspapers missing the boat by forgetting about content? It doesn’t matter what kind of equipment you have or how much audio/video is on the Web site if the content isn’t there.
Isn’t that what we dislike about TV? All flash but no content?”
Let’s not forget that reporting skill still matters, particularly as we rush to sign up for the A.V. Club.
Another semi-timely one here, given the news last week that Hearst is weighing a sale of the San Francisco Chronicle building. If you’re in the market for some San Francisco real estate mash your mouse on the picture below to do a little shopping. Virtual Earth/Live Maps, San Francisco Chronicle, etc.
And for a street-level view, here it is in Google Maps.
This story in the NYT’s Week in Review section references an amazingly titled document from the National Security Agency: “Redacting with Confidence: How to Safely Publish Sanitized Reports Converted From Word to PDF.” No way I could resist a name like that. So, how does the NSA redact with confidence? Apparently, with the assistance of Links the cat, one of those lovable Microsoft Office cartoon helpers:
I’m overwhelmed with confidence.
Check out the 14-page, 665 KB PDF for yourself here courtesy of the Federation of American Scientists. Or get it direct from the NSA.
As a Florida alum and fan of Gators athletics I watch a lot of SEC football on CBS, which means I get a pretty big dose of Verne Lundquist and Gary Danielson each fall. I’ve long thought Danielson’s broadcasting style is idiosyncratic, a bit like Dan Rather’s election-night “Ratherisms.” (“This race is hotter than the Devil’s anvil.”) But his performance during Saturday’s Florida-Georgia game really has me worried. Consider this analysis of Florida quarterback Tim Tebow’s shoulder injury:
“When you cut yourself shaving, it’s gonna bleed for a week. When you hurt your shoulder like Tim Tebow did, it’s gonna hurt for a week.”
WTF, Gary Danielson?
He also insisted on several occasions that “This is still a football game,” lest the viewer mistakenly conclude that, after two and a half hours of football, the teams were now engaged in a cricket match. And he once referred to Georgia quarterback Matthew Stafford as Mike Bobo, who last played for the Bulldogs a decade ago. Perhaps most perplexing was his mangling of the fable of the scorpion and the frog, which, apart from being creatively reinterpreted to involve a scorpion and a tortoise, was inexplicably employed to illustrate an indecipherable point about Tebow’s tendency to run the ball.
Gary, seriously, have your brain checked out first thing Monday morning.
A dimmable CFL! What will they think of next? Hopefully, a dimmable CFL that doesn’t cost $12.
