Eat-em up Google Eye!
I had assigned a couple of readings from the New York Times to my students this week, and right before they were needed, the site fritzed and wouldn’t allow people to access them due to a “database upgrade.” Thankfully, I had back-up .pdf versions so I distributed them instead. Then, on the day of class, the reason for the change at their web site became clear:
What changed, The Times said, was that many more readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to NYTimes.com. These indirect readers, unable to get access to articles behind the pay wall and less likely to pay subscription fees than the more loyal direct users, were seen as opportunities for more page views and increased advertising revenue.
“What wasn’t anticipated was the explosion in how much of our traffic would be generated by Google, by Yahoo and some others,” Ms. Schiller said.
Earlier in the week, I had them sign up for the free “Times Select” offered to .edu subscribers, but now that is no more—instead, there is free access to most content (except of course, that fat pile in the center of the twentieth century where most people would like to research).
The Times isn't ready for its own free runway just yet. I suppose they need to chew their content into smaller pieces to qualify. This sort of invalidates the timeline in Epic 2014/2015.
The Best Mug Shot Ever
A man robbed a woman of her keys and cell phone in downtown St. Paul early Saturday morning before he took off her shoes and licked her toes.
"It's just weird sexual behavior," said St. Paul police Cmdr. Kevin Casper.
The 24-year-old St. Paul woman was leaving work about 1 a.m. when Carlton Davis, 27, approached her near the corner of Fourth and Cedar streets, according to police. Davis "aggressively demanded" her keys and phone before he removed her shoes and began licking her toes, police said.
story here
helicopter blades would be very useful
via eyeteeth
September 9, 2007 10:22 AM | Comments (1)
Strike the Profile
A Syracuse University graduate student taking photographs outside the VA Medical Center says she was questioned and ordered to delete several images by hospital security officers Thursday afternoon.
Mariam Jukaku, 24, of Michigan, said the officers also photocopied her university ID and driver's license and asked if she was a U.S. citizen. She wonders if her appearance played a part in how the incident was handled.
Jukaku, a U.S. citizen of Indian descent, said she is Muslim and wears a head scarf.
Sobriety
I was reading the rest of the story from alluded to by Odd Wisconsin and was shocked by the matter of fact nature of its conclusion. The description of Pinneo is vivid:
After he had endured a week's drunk, his red face and bare breast shone in the sun with a peculiar brilliancy, and he was a sight as seen in the morning after a night's lodging under a tree, or under some outhouse shelter, as he shook himself and started for his morning potation at the nearest drinking house.
He had not worn shoes for years, and in his drunken frolics he had acquired the habit of kicking out grubs and roots with his bare toes. This he was often induced to do for a drink, and many was the grub kicked out of King Street by Pinneo long before Nicholson pavement or the office of street commissioner was thought of. His feet looked in shape and color like mud turtles, and his toes resembled so many little turtle heads half drawn in, so bruised and battered were they by hard usage.
The conclusion is matter of fact:
Pinneo had but little to commend him even to a passing notice still he was a type of many vagabond frontier men who whatever their origin accomplished nothing useful in life. They generally lived and died wretchedly, as did this Pinneo who lost his life in a miner’s cabin his clothes taking fire while he was on one of his drunken frolics.
He was burned alive? That seems to be a strong argument for sobriety, as does this modern example. Waking up minus $41,093 and your pants is a good reason to quit drinking.
The State of Cool
Minnesota Monthly has an article about the Twin Cities that makes some interesting observations. These are a few of my favorites:
Sure, there are some fluky reasons for our distinctive quality of life: a diverse economy, good health care, water. We owe a lot, in fact, to a man with a pencil-thin mustache and a dislike for socks: Sir Tyrone Guthrie, the man architect Ralph Rapson called “an exciting, invigorating, dynamic, arrogant, obnoxious bastard,” who chose Minneapolis for his world-class theater. Among the other contenders? Milwaukee and Detroit. We now have one of the country’s most vibrant theater scenes; they have light beer and Oldsmobiles.
But mostly we’ve become cool not because of our blessings but because of what we’ve done with them—shared. Minnesotans, like most pioneer peoples, are hardly clubby, preferring open spaces, open government, heck, even open-faced sandwiches. We’re all in this Jell-O salad together. It’s a particularly Midwestern thing. I was once in a Kansas City store (okay, a hip underwear boutique) for no more than 10 minutes when the owner asked me what I was doing at 1:30 a.m.; a funky theater troupe would be performing then down the street. Could you imagine a New Yorker asking that of a tourist?
What’s more, we Midwesterners even kinda like each other. The Twin Cities, in particular, have what Bowling Alone author Robert Putnam calls high social capital—about the highest in the country—and it’s why Putnam recently suggested that if Hurricane Katrina had struck here instead of New Orleans (the capital of low social capital), the response would have been different. “The folks in St. Paul wouldn’t have been standing with guns on the bridges across the Mississippi up there,” he said, “trying to keep the people who were trying to flee devastated Minneapolis from getting into St. Paul.” To say the least.
I spent most of my life in California, half a year in Las Vegas, and around a decade in Arkansas— but this has been my favorite of all the places I've lived so far. It's not just cold, it's cool. I also like Wisconsin more than I ever thought I would, where stories like this are still relatively common.
