Month: December 2003

If you’ve ever heard the saying …

…” we didn’t have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of,” then this link is for you. KENNEWICK — Forced to clean up an increasing number of jugs and bags of human waste along…

Digging for news

Joe Adams’ “I Dig Answers” blog is mostly about using public records in Florida (which has about the best open-records laws anywhere) to find out stuff and keep people honest. Joe was chief of the Peninsula Bureau at the Tampa…

Talk about a scoop

The Virginian-Pilot tells how it broke the news of the Wright Brothers’ first successful attempt at powered flight. Even in 1903 the Wrights knew the value of manipulating the news: they wanted to give the exclusive to the paper back…

A fun read

Doug Marlette: “I Was a Tool of Satan.” I love a swell rant; this is his: With the rise of the bottom-line culture and the corporatization of newsgathering, tolerance itself has become commodified and denuded of its original purpose. Consequently,…

How they spent their Sunday

Mark Glaser at Online Journalism Review writes about how newspapers reacted to the Saddam story breaking at the worst time possible. Mainly it was about getting the sleep out of their eyes. One editor describes how the Web changes his…

Hunter Thompson breaks a leg

In my quest to link every scrap of Hunter S. Thompson news I happen across, I share the following: He’s back in Colorado nursing the leg he broke when he slipped on the bathroom floor of a Hawaii hotel. Thompson…

‘Why I Hate Weblogs’

An irate rant against blogs. Caution: F-bombs abound (for those who know me in person: not that there’s anything wrong with that.) Found via Weblog Hype, a new blog about the hype about blogs. For future reference: the arrival of…

The physics of Santa

Snopes.com points to a commentary which concludes, “If Santa ever DID deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he’s dead now.”

Rules for media critics

The latest BONG Bull contains these handy guidelines for media critics. Jackman Wilson of the Eugene (Ore.) Register-Guard, serving a college burg that, like all college burgs, has a hundred press critics for every working stiff going into the icy…