When control freaks attack (and they sign your paycheck).  Via Robert Feder:

Sure, you’d think the chief executive officer of a company struggling to emerge from bankruptcy and desperate to salvage an $8 billion buyout-gone-bad would have better things to do than pester his underlings with crazy proclamations. But in the case of Tribune Co. CEO Randy Michaels, you’d be wrong.

The man at the top of the troubled media empire took time out of his real job this week to issue a list of words and phrases — 119 of them, to be exact — that must never, ever be uttered by anchors or reporters on WGN-AM (720), the news/talk radio station located five floors below his office in Tribune Tower.

Believe me, I’m not making this up.

WGN news director Charlie Meyerson, good soldier that he is, passed on what he identified as Michaels’ “list of forbidden ‘newsspeak’ words and phrases” in a memo to his staff Monday, with the explicit warning: “Don’t say them on WGN.”

[much more] via Memo puts WGN news staffers at a loss for words | Feder | blogs.vocalo.org.

A well-written piece about a remarkable man:

In his dreams, his voice has never left. In his dreams, he can get out everything he didn’t get out during his waking hours: the thoughts that get trapped in paperless corners, the jokes he wanted to tell, the nuanced stories he can’t quite relate. In his dreams, he yells and chatters and whispers and exclaims. In his dreams, he’s never had cancer. In his dreams, he is whole.

These things come to us, they don’t come from us, he writes about his cancer, about sickness, on another Post-it note. Dreams come from us.

We have a habit of turning sentimental about celebrities who are struck down — Muhammad Ali, Christopher Reeve — transforming them into mystics; still, it’s almost impossible to sit beside Roger Ebert, lifting blue Post-it notes from his silk fingertips, and not feel as though he’s become something more than he was. He has those hands. And his wide and expressive eyes, despite everything, are almost always smiling.

There is no need to pity me, he writes on a scrap of paper one afternoon after someone parting looks at him a little sadly. Look how happy I am.

[more] via Roger Ebert: The Essential Man.

Discover Literary Oddities in the Weird Book Room on AbeBooks.

Or maybe not.  Colm Toibin:

From an early age, I have missed the point of things. I noticed this first when the entire class at school seemed to understand that Animal Farm was about something other than animals. I alone sat there believing otherwise. I simply couldn’t see who or what the book was about if not about farm animals. I had enjoyed it for that. Now, the teacher and every other boy seemed to think it was really about Stalin or Communism or something. I looked at it again, but I still couldn’t quite work it out.

So, too, with a lot of poetry. I couldn’t see that things were like other things when they were not like them. Maybe they were slightly like them, or somewhat like them, but usually they were not like them at all.

And allegory. I never got the point of allegory. If it was a choice between algebra and allegory, I knew whose side I was on. When I picked up Moby-Dick, I liked it because it was about hunting whales. And oh dear I just couldn’t concentrate when everyone began to explain, all at the one time, that the whale was a symbol or something, that it stood for… I cannot remember what.

[more] via Missing the Point « London Review Blog.

LAREDO, Texas — Mary Benavides steps from behind the cash register several times a day to embrace the mourners.

For more than 30 years, she has managed the mall’s B. Dalton outlet — the only bookstore in Laredo. It will close next month.

All B. Daltons nationwide are closing, as corporate parent Barnes & Noble shutters the chain. In this era of mega-bookstores with cafes and cozy couches and 150,000 titles — and with more than a million books available online — B. Dalton’s cramped outlets no longer make economic sense.

So the bookstore here in Mall Del Norte is decked out for its final Christmas season with giant red signs: “Everything on Sale!” Customers keep coming up to Ms. Benavides to murmur: “I’m so sorry. So sorry.”

Laredo sits on the border with Mexico. It’s a poor city filled with immigrants who don’t speak English, let alone read it. A federal survey several years ago found half the adults in the county lack basic literacy skills.

Yet the bookstore has become a touchstone.

[more] via City Tries to Rewrite Lone Bookstore’s Last Chapter – WSJ.com.

From Harper’s, an interesting meditation on the death of newspapers:

We no longer imagine the newspaper as a city or the city as a newspaper. Whatever I may say in the rant that follows, I do not believe the decline of newspapers has been the result solely of computer technology or of the Internet. The forces working against newspapers are probably as varied and foregone as the Model-T Ford and the birth-control pill. We like to say that the invention of the internal-combustion engine changed us, changed the way we live. In truth, we built the Model-T Ford because we had changed; we wanted to remake the world to accommodate our restlessness. We might now say: Newspapers will be lost because technology will force us to acquire information in new ways. In that case, who will tell us what it means to live as citizens of Seattle or Denver or Ann Arbor? The truth is we no longer want to live in Seattle or Denver or Ann Arbor. Our inclination has led us to invent a digital cosmopolitanism that begins and ends with “I.” Careening down Geary Boulevard on the 38 bus, I can talk to my my dear Auntie in Delhi or I can view snapshots of my cousin’s wedding in Recife or I can listen to girl punk from Glasgow. The cost of my cyber-urban experience is disconnection from body, from presence, from city.

A few months ago there was an item in the paper about a young woman so plugged into her personal sounds and her texting apparatus that she stepped off the curb and was mowed down by a honking bus.

In this morning’s paper there is a quote from an interview San Francisco’s mayor, Gavin Newsom, gave to The Economist concerning the likelihood that San Francisco will soon be a city without a newspaper: “People under thirty won’t even notice.”

[more] via Final edition: Twilight of the American newspaper—By Richard Rodriguez (Harper’s Magazine).

Erin McKean decodes a modern annoyance:

There’s a certain kind of person – you may even be this kind of person – whose good will after receiving a favor and replying with “thank you” is completely wiped out when the response is not the traditional “you’re welcome,” but instead the breezier “no problem.”

As “no problem” has caught on and spread, replacing “you’re welcome” in situations ranging from casual personal encounters to business deals, the number, vigor, and shrillness of the complaints in etiquette columns and Internet forums has spread along with it.

The reasons given – or unstated – are varied. Many especially dislike hearing “no problem” in commercial transactions and from folks in customer service jobs, since, as the customer is always right, nothing a customer could ask for could ever be “a problem.” “I assume my business is not a problem,” huffed one complainer on the message boards at the Visual Thesaurus. Others on the Internet have taken the same tack: “Why would it be a problem? It’s her job, isn’t it?” and “It better damn well NOT be a problem, because I just gave you my money.” Some dwell on the counterfactual: “I always wonder if the person would have helped me if they had known it would be a problem.” And from Twitter: “I know it’s no problem. You rang up my orange juice. How could that be a…problem?”

[more] via The un-welcome – The Boston Globe.

I really like it, but now I can’t get the tune out of my head.

Or perhaps it was the fact-checker’s day off.  From a recent New Yorker profile of film maker James Cameron:

I first met Cameron in April of 2008. “Avatar” was in its third year of production. For much of that time, Cameron had been working out of a couple of hangars in Playa del Rey, south of Los Angeles, where Hughes Aircraft manufactured fighter jets during the Second World War.

via James Cameron and “Avatar” : The New Yorker.

There were a few jet fighters operational late in the war, in particular the Messerschmitt Me 262, but Hughes wasn’t building them.

Dogs barking at balloon. from Evan Morris on Vimeo.

xkcd – A Webcomic – Flow Charts.

Last month I decided late one night to install Kubuntu (Ubuntu linux with the KDE desktop environment). I was stone sober. I nuked the entire partition the next day after discovering for the 15th time that I absolutely loathe KDE. I always think it can’t possibly be that ugly and stupid, but it is. Always.

Not-Mister-Jobs cares:

Do you feel it in the air? That heaviness and oppression? The smell of sulfur? Yes, dear readers, the Beast of Redmond is unleashing yet another tangled mess of hell-spawned code into the world. We know it is evil. You know it. I know it. But millions do not. Millions, in fact, will race out to obtain this evil, and will pay for the privilege of making their horrible lives just a tiny bit more horrible. I weep for those people. I pray for their souls.

[more] via The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: Oct. 22, 2009: A day of global mourning.

From Life magazine in 1965, a full-page ad for a vocabulary enrichment program my father created for Grolier (click for larger version)

from Wired:

If you just ordered a Kindle, stop reading now or you’re in for a giant dose of buyer’s remorse. Barnes and Noble unveiled a new e-book reader called ‘Nook’, and it is hot, both inside and out.

Nook looks a lot like Amazon’s white plastic e-book reader, only instead of the chiclet-keyboard there is a color multitouch screen, to be used as a keyboard or to browse books, cover-flow style. The machine runs Google’s Android OS and it will have wireless capability from AT&T.

The $260 Nook–same price as the Kindle 2-is expected to be on sale at the end of November.

[more] via Barnes & Noble Unveils Kindle-Killing, Dual-Screen ‘Nook’ E-Reader (Updated) | Gadget Lab | Wired.com.

Looks like some Princeton students prefer, um, real books:

When the University announced its Kindle e-reader pilot program last May, administrators seemed cautiously optimistic that the e-readers would both be sustainable and serve as a valuable academic tool. But less than two weeks after 50 students received the free Kindle DX e-readers, many of them said they were dissatisfied and uncomfortable with the devices.

On Wednesday, the University revealed that students in three courses — WWS 325: Civil Society and Public Policy, WWS 555A: U.S. Policy and Diplomacy in the Middle East, and CLA 546: Religion and Magic in Ancient Rome — were each given a new Kindle DX containing their course readings for the semester. The University had announced last May that it was partnering with Amazon.com, founded by Princeton alum Jeff Bezos, to provide students and faculty members with the e-readers as part of a sustainability initiative to conserve paper.

But though they acknowledged some benefits of the new technology, many students and faculty in the three courses said they found the Kindles disappointing and difficult to use.

“I hate to sound like a Luddite, but this technology is a poor excuse of an academic tool,” said Aaron Horvath ’10, a student in Civil Society and Public Policy. “It’s clunky, slow and a real pain to operate.”

Horvath said that using the Kindle has required completely changing the way he completes his coursework.

“Much of my learning comes from a physical interaction with the text: bookmarks, highlights, page-tearing, sticky notes and other marks representing the importance of certain passages — not to mention margin notes, where most of my paper ideas come from and interaction with the material occurs,” he explained. “All these things have been lost, and if not lost they’re too slow to keep up with my thinking, and the ‘features’ have been rendered useless.”

[more] via Princeton Students: Kindle ‘Disappointing, Difficult to Use’ – Buying Home Computer | Business Solution | Networking Home Computers – FOXNews.com.

YouTube – Patches the human horse.

I wanna be an “Equine Entrepreneur.”

Essay – Why Good Writers Can Be Bad Conversationalists – NYTimes.com.

Sit me in front of a microphone and my IQ drops 75 points, putting me in the broccoli range.  I absolutely loathe radio interviews in particular.  The worst part is that the host inevitably expects you to be able to remember the details of everything you’ve ever written.  I often can’t remember the pertinent facts about words I wrote about last week (and it’s ridiculous to ask me to try, but they always do).

[Booklover's Guide to the Internet] – C-SPAN Video Library.

Fending off psychos and paranoid cranks in the Village while I explain the internet, 1996.  The apex of my chubby and inarticulate period.  My very first public appearance and I was petrified.  Fortunately, they paid me 25 cents every time I said “Uh” or “Um.”

Mortifying.

p.s.  “Words, Wit and Wisdom,” mentioned at the start of the video, was the title of this column when my parents wrote it. I didn’t change the name to “The Word Detective” until 1997.