Data Visualization

I have some problems with this— it seems to me as if truly local news is as hard to come by as international news in most locales in the US. Instead, what we get is the same top stories repeated by localized talking heads, mostly because it's cheaper. This does present a great way of visualizing the problem, though.

Posted by Jeff at May 16, 2008 10:49 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Out of Print

Posted by Jeff at February 9, 2008 2:10 PM

The High Bridge

Perhaps the oddest suicide associated with the High Bridge occurred in 1979. On August 23, 15-year-old St. Paul resident Eddie Seidel Jr. was despondent over the cancellation of his favorite television program, Battlestar Galactica. He wrote to ABC asking that they reconsider the decision, to no avail.

There were other signs all was not well with the teenager. His father had recently learned that Eddie had been sniffing gas with friends, and sent him to counseling. "The psychiatrist said he was just kind of bored with life, that there was nothing here for him to excel in," his father later told the Associated Press. "There was no real challenge here on this earth."

Roughly three weeks after the final rerun of Battlestar Galactica aired, Seidel returned home from his job as a supermarket stock boy and retreated to his room. He scrawled a last will and testament and sped off on his moped toward the High Bridge. Police officers responding to the scene attempted to talk the troubled teenager down, but he couldn't be dissuaded from his grim mission. Seidel jumped to his death, landing on the ground below. His family arrived at the scene 10 minutes after the fateful leap.

"I hope we never ever see [Battlestar Galactica] on TV again, because it would just crush us," his mother, Dawn Seidel, said at the time.

Citypages

Posted by Jeff at February 7, 2008 5:10 PM

Enlargement

Posted by Jeff at January 31, 2008 7:57 PM | Comments (1)

Smiling Bob

James Teegarden Jr., the former vice president of operations at Berkeley Premium Nutraceuticals, explained Tuesday in U.S. District Court how he and others at the company made up much of the content that appeared in Enzyte ads.

. . . When customers ordered a product, the company’s goal was to keep charging their credit cards for as long as possible, Teegarden said.

He said first-time customers were automatically enrolled in a “continuity program” that sent Enzyte to their homes every month and charged their credit cards without authorization. . . .

If customers complained, he said, employees were instructed to “make it as difficult as possible” for them to get their money back. In some cases, Teegarden said, Warshak required customers to produce a notarized statement from a doctor certifying Enzyte did not work.

“He said it was extremely unlikely someone would get anything notarized saying they had a small penis,” Teegarden said.

Cincinnati Enquirer

Posted by Jeff at January 30, 2008 1:19 PM | Comments (1)

Even

The pain started on last Thursday and has been taking a number of twists and turns through the weekend. I went in for oral surgery on Friday, expecting that I’d experience the usual pain/relief cycle as my jaw healed. Instead, it’s been days of ups and downs—sleeping on an icepack when the weather outside is in the teens. I’d give anything to be “even” just about now.

Along the way I’ve been watching movies, and particularly enjoyed Guinevere, an interesting update on the old “life lessons” Scorsese plot arc. But it makes me wonder about the horrible cliché that artist must be emotionally stunted people who use their partners while offering some sort of fast track to creativity for the uninitiated. Part of the P.R. package, I suppose. Romantic instability is a prerequisite for producing moving art? Upon closer inspection, the traditional Hollywood/potboiler novel trope hardly seems accurate, or even all that interesting to me as I get older. Sheesh. But the increased complexity of the social circle in Guinevere puts it ahead of Scorsese’s simplistic depiction of the dynamic, at least in my opinion.

*Update, via the Chronicle:

Surely all this happiness can't be for real. How can so many people be happy in the midst of all the problems that beset our globe — not only the collective and apocalyptic ills but also those particular irritations that bedevil our everyday existences, those money issues and marital spats, those stifling vocations and lonely dawns? Are we to believe that four out of every five Americans can be content amid the general woe? Are some people lying, or are they simply afraid to be honest in a culture in which the status quo is nothing short of manic bliss? Aren't we suspicious of this statistic? Aren't we further troubled by our culture's overemphasis on happiness? Don't we fear that this rabid focus on exuberance leads to half-lives, to bland existences, to wastelands of mechanistic behavior?

I'm more suspicious of the bland celebration of melancholy in the face of deeper, more incurable suffering and insoluble crises. Perhaps creativity and happiness/stability are simply unrelated and of no real importance to each other.

Posted by Jeff at January 15, 2008 4:07 PM | Comments (3)

Get Real

via

Posted by Jeff at January 9, 2008 7:20 PM

The Wank Zone

There was a movie that I just couldn’t get out of my head. Not because it was good, but because it had come so highly recommended at the time and was such a big letdown. The time was the mid-eighties; sometimes disappointment really hangs in there. At first I thought it was Blow Out (a ridiculously lame riff on Blow Up and The Conversation) but it wasn’t that turkey. It turned out that the scene that I couldn’t forget was from the sonic extravaganza To Live and Die in LA.

The spotting brush (usually these things are about four or five hairs round) hit the Kodalith with a scratching sound and I was gone in a rage. When a spotting brush makes that kind of racket, I know I have entered into some sort of alternate universe where a pin dropping can shatter an eardrum. The rest of the clip is pretty indicative; it’s foley gone mad with a relentless Wang Chung score.

I was reminded of this stuff this morning when I read The Death of High Fidelity. I don’t think it was MP3s that were responsible for the death of natural sound—I think it happened long before that, in the mid-eighties. No, I’m not just talking about the advent of digital sound in general, either. I think the movies helped kill high fidelity sound.

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Posted by Jeff at January 8, 2008 12:55 PM | Comments (1)

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