What a great language

Margalit Fox, Hugh Massingberd, Laureate for the Departed, Dies:

Hugh Massingberd, a celebrated former obituaries editor of The Telegraph of London who made a once-dreary page required reading by speaking frankly, wittily and often gleefully ill of the dead, became the recipient of his own services after dying in West London on Christmas Day. He was 60 and lived in London.

The cause was cancer, according to The Telegraph. The newspaper announced Mr. Massingberd’s death in an expansive obituary that described, not unkindly, his being “invariably strapped for cash” and the “gourmandism” and “bingeing” that had turned him “into an impressively corpulent presence whose moon face lit up with Pickwickian benevolence.”

Sometimes called the father of the modern British obituary, Mr. Massingberd was The Telegraph’s obituaries editor from 1986 to 1994. He was also a shy autodidact who had never been to college; a past editor of Burke’s Peerage, the venerable record book of the titled families of Britain and Ireland; the author of dozens of books on the English aristocracy; a recognized authority on the country homes of England, stately and moldy alike; and a rabid theatergoer whose enthusiasm for “Phantom of the Opera” was undimmed by the fact that he had seen it more than 50 times and knew every word and every note by heart.

In 2002 The Spectator, a British weekly magazine, described Mr. Massingberd as “an English eccentric of the sort Hollywood imagines shoot snipe in their underpants.” ...

To dispatch his subjects, Mr. Massingberd used the thinnest of rapiers, but also the sharpest. Cataclysmic understatement and carefully coded euphemism were the stylistic hallmarks of his page. Here, for the benefit of American readers, is an abridged Massingberd-English dictionary:

¶“Convivial”: Habitually drunk.

¶“Did not suffer fools gladly”: Monstrously foul-tempered.

¶“Gave colorful accounts of his exploits”: A liar.

¶“A man of simple tastes”: A complete vulgarian.

¶“A powerful negotiator”: A bully.

¶“Relished the cadences of the English language”: An incorrigible windbag.

¶“Relished physical contact”: A sadist.

¶“An uncompromisingly direct ladies’ man”: A flasher.

Next up: Blackface!

The Times' Sunday paper, always an adventure.

What the Times calls 'exotic' is always the same

Yemen’s Exotic Secrets, headline writer's name not known. The article is forgettable (Tom Downey manages to write about Yemen while talking to and citing only fellow Westerners), what's interesting is this list of Travel articles where the Times uses the word exotic--they're always non-white countries, and in a city that's 60% immigrant or children of immigrants, it's ridiculous that places like 'the Middle East', China, Thailand, Brazil, etc. get labeled "Intriguingly unusual or different; excitingly strange."

You forget the Nazis were great patrons of classical music

Anthony Tommasini, A Patience to Listen, Alive and Well: In recent years a spate of articles and books have lamented classical music’s tenuous hold on the popular imagination and defended its richness, complexity and communicative power. I’m thinking especially of the book “Why Classical Music Still Matters” (University of California Press, 2007) by Lawrence Kramer, a professor of English and music at Fordham University.

Just this month classical music emerged as pivotal to international relations. With the blessing of the State Department, the New York Philharmonic announced that it would present a concert in North Korea during its Asian tour in February. Some consider this plan an outrage that will allow a totalitarian regime to use the Philharmonic musicians as puppets for propaganda. Others see it as at least a chance to pry open a door and share Western culture with a closed society, which is pretty much my view.

Either way, implicit in this plan is the idea that classical music matters. It’s not a sports team or pop group that has been enlisted to begin a thaw with the government in Pyongyang. It’s the musicians of a premier American orchestra.

What effect might this concert have on an audience in a repressive society? To Professor Kramer, as he recently told The New York Times, classical music by definition “is addressed to someone who has a certain independence of mind.” It “almost posits for its audience a certain degree of Western identity, which includes that sense of individual capacity to think, to sense, to imagine.”

At some point, they'll just call it looking out the window

Matthew Gurewitsch, Learning to Move Under the Sea, on Wheels: Two years ago Mr. Mear was pondering the challenge on a Christmas visit to Disneyland, when a little boy walked by and then all of a sudden whizzed away. “I literally chased after him and asked his parents what he was wearing on his feet,” Mr. Mear said. That was his first exposure to Heelys, the shoes built with a wheel in the heel, now ubiquitous at every mall and playground. As Ms. Zambello said: “Serendipity guides you. More ideas come walking down the street than from sitting in think tanks.”

By his own account Mr. Mear was mesmerized. “You can walk,” he said. “You can glide. You can turn. You can spin. You can jump. Once I saw them, I knew.” ...

Recreating that “Eureka!” moment in Disneyland, 12-year-old Cody Hanford, as Flounder, whizzed in from the sidelines to join the multiracial, multicultural sextet of Ariel’s mersisters in the sassy number “She’s in Love.”

“We didn’t just want to have tall, skinny girls,” Mr. Mear said from the sidelines as the women ran their engines, one of them with the curves and charisma of a junior Jessye Norman. “We wanted bodies of all shapes and sizes. That way, people relate: ‘If they can do that, so can I.’ We chose people for their personalities. You can’t beat character.”

Let them? How about howled for blood

Manohla Dargis, War Stories, What’s really been shocking about this year, though, aren’t the idiocies of “Hostel: Part II,” but rather the rage radiating off the movie screens. Brian De Palma’s “Redacted,” about American soldiers who rape and murder an Iraqi girl (and her family), falls short in many ways, but the director’s anger is itself a tonic. I think that Mr. De Palma’s focus is misplaced — you can certainly blame these soldiers, though the tougher film would blame people like us, who let them be sent to Iraq — yet I am grateful for his fury. Just as I am heartened by the anger of Sidney Lumet’s “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead” and Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood,” each a savage moral reckoning of the contemporary American soul.

He's Scottish. Not that you can tell from the article

Rebecca Milzoff, A Sampler of Roles: It's not every young actor who, free of a rigorous schedule of interviews, takes his father and sister along for an evening on the town. Then again, Khalid Abdalla, the 27-year-old star of the new film adaptation of “The Kite Runner,” has not followed the path most traveled in his career.

Last year, Mr. Abdalla (who is of Egyptian descent and grew up in Scotland and England) played a terrorist in “United 93,” the Paul Greengrass film about the 9/11 attacks. In “The Kite Runner,” Mr. Abdalla stars as Amir, an Afghan writer who has moved to the United States but is haunted by memories of his native country.

Composite photos from Marc Jacobs' 'Arabian Nights' event from the Times, as compiled by Bill Cunningham

Teach yourself

Some interesting reading in Jonathan Dee's unlikely profiles, A Toy Maker’s Conscience:

With just a few weeks to go until Christmas, the sensory onslaught inside the Times Square Toys “R” Us was well into its merciless ratchet upward. The infrastructure of aggression — the indoor Ferris wheel, the roaring animatronic T-rex, the woman who blocks your path as you enter the store to snap a picture of you that another employee will try to sell to you on your way out — was augmented by the holiday tension on the ground: mothers on cellphones, seasonal employees in the store’s dark blue shirts pushing carts full of inventory, children banging away at the sample electronics. It seemed as loud as a factory floor; but that is only because most of us cannot imagine how loud a factory floor actually is.

Toy Factory Floor Mattel did more than most companies to improve the conditions for workers in Chinese factories. But when it recalled toys with lead paint it still faced a public-relations disaster.
Prakash Sethi, though, didn’t really see any of it. Instead, standing before a vertiginous wall of toys while shoppers eddied around him, the 73-year-old business-school professor and grandfather saw only what the tens of thousands who march through here every Christmas season fail to see, which is how all these toys came to be here in the first place. ...

The work is hot and loud and exhausting and hazardous and underpaid. But it is also, at least for the 60,000 to 80,000 (or many more, according to Sethi) Chinese factory workers employed directly or indirectly by Mattel, measurably less so than it used to be, and that is in large part the achievement of Sethi himself. A career academic, he is the founder and president of the idealistically named International Center for Corporate Accountability, an operation run out of a two-room faculty office at Baruch College in New York. It may be a reach to style a University Distinguished Professor of Management at Baruch’s Zicklin School of Business as a radical, but in that academic context, at least, he’s something of a flamethrower. He has suggested that multinational companies with manufacturing bases in China and elsewhere not merely raise the pathetically low wages of their factory employees but also pay them restitution for years past. When asked why more companies don’t take steps to monitor wages and working conditions, he once answered “bigotry.” This sort of bluntness makes it less than completely surprising that the I.C.C.A. doesn’t have a long list of clients for its monitoring services. “I don’t work with very many companies,” Sethi says equably. “They don’t want me.” ...

Fitzgerald presented what he called “the concept of Prakash” to the Mattel executives at their corporate headquarters in El Segundo, Calif., and they brought him out for a meeting that led to the establishment of the Mattel Independent Monitoring Council, the precursor to his International Center for Corporate Accountability. (When, several years later, the possibility arose of Sethi and his staff’s monitoring other companies as well, everyone involved agreed it would be best to get Mattel’s name off the door.) What the council was being asked to monitor was Mattel’s adherence to its own “global manufacturing principles” — a two-page pledge consisting mostly of vague ethical declarations to which no one could object, like “facilities must have environmental programs in place to minimize their impact on the environment.” For Sethi — who had spent his career publishing books and delivering lectures on corporate morality more or less into a void — this was an almost unbelievable opportunity to carry his ideas inside the walls of a commercial behemoth, one with sales of more than $5 billion a year. “It was totally unprecedented,” he says. “Really intoxicating. I was inventing everything as I went along. There just weren’t any systems of its kind. Nobody could say, ‘It can’t be done.’ ” ...

Resistance can take different forms. On one audit, a Chinese colleague called Sethi’s attention to a group of men standing beside a black S.U.V. parked outside the factory. At first Sethi didn’t see anything unusual about it. “Where,” his colleague asked him rhetorically, “would you see a group of such healthy Chinese men standing around smoking cigarettes and doing nothing?” The intimation was that the men might be the local police sent by someone to intimidate them. (Sethi had been followed in other countries before.) Rather than risk some sort of incident, the rest of the audit was called off, but six months later Sethi returned to the same factory and wasn’t bothered. ...

Fitzgerald, who left Mattel in 2000, says: “The changes we made in the living conditions in China were extraordinary. I think you can tell from the passion in my voice that I am very proud of what we accomplished. It was a big damn deal. And without Prakash, it could never have worked.”

Sethi remembers one epic argument with a factory manager who didn’t want to upgrade his filthy dormitory on the grounds that it was built before the company created its global manufacturing principles. In the end, Mattel worked out a deal that resulted in a new dorm, and the manager and Sethi became friends. According to Sethi, the manager said, “Prakash, these workers and the ones after them, they’ll never know what a crummy Indian did for them.” ...

But the global manufacturing principles are all about protecting workers; as it developed, there is another constituency whose welfare has been put at risk by Mattel’s operations in China: namely, the consumers who bought and the children who played with what was made there. In early July, a European retailer discovered lead paint on some of Mattel’s toys; on Aug. 2, Mattel announced the recall of 83 different toys, a total of 1.5 million items. Twelve days later, more than 400,000 additional toys were recalled for containing lead-based paint — together with millions more recalled for the choking hazard posed by tiny magnets, which had nothing to do with production shortcuts but were instead caused by flaws in Mattel’s own designs. ...

Alan Hassenfeld, the chairman of Hasbro and the co-chairman of the ICTI CARE foundation, called for a one-code approach in remarks at a Columbia Business School forum last spring that seemed directed at Mattel, offering a somewhat tin-eared anecdote about a Chinese factory that moved the fire extinguishers six inches up and down the walls depending on who was monitoring its conditions that week — as if the real hardship inside these factories was an excess of bureaucracy. ...

There will always be those who consider big business’s vows to make the world a better place fundamentally cynical. But capitalism has often longed for, if not technically required, a moral justification, and for most of the 20th century it was provided by socialism and the various forms of government representing it. Now that opposition is gone, and in search of a nonmaterial rationale, the lords of acquisition have to look elsewhere. The sense of moral aspiration behind corporate social responsibility seems mostly genuine — which is somehow both the most and least appealing thing about it, for it encourages a lot of back-patting among the world’s economic elite, whose members seem able to discern, in their own hunt for the cheapest possible work force, a humanitarian aim.

“I know we have brought a lot of modernity to that part of the world,” Hassenfeld told the audience at that Columbia forum. He said Japan, Korea and Taiwan “exploded” when Hasbro was manufacturing there, adding, “We had to be doing something right.” As for the ICTI CARE code, which now governs the welfare of almost a million Chinese workers inside 1,461 factories, he said: “We’re an industry-driven code. It’s the old ‘fox guarding the henhouse.’ . . . But I made an agreement and shook hands that no matter what we found, we would try and remediate that factory. Be a teacher.”

When I relayed the gist of these remarks to Sethi, he smiled angrily and shook his head. “That’s why I don’t get invited to those things,” he said.

Ah, be a teacher--I wonder if the textbooks will include The Jungle, How The Other Half Lives, and manuals on how to design lead-free toys.

Not to mention each of those countries Hassenfeld thinks Hasbro taught actually invested in education themselves--which is why they outperform us on study after study.

Incongruous

Some things from the Sunday Times that caught my eye, generally making me laugh.

Motoko Rich's Remembrance of Things Unread:

YOU would have to crack open “The Landmark Herodotus” and get as far as Page 41 to discover this oo-la-la piece of a lecture given by the sage Sandanis to Croesus, the king of Lydia: “You are preparing for war against the sort of men who wear leather trousers and leather for all their other garments as well.”

William Hamilton's The Unmaking of a Technophobe:

Henry Petroski, a professor of civil engineering and history at Duke University and the author of “The Toothpick: Technology and Culture,” explained that the toothpick’s adoption was pure fashion.

“It became fashionable to stand in front of restaurants and chew on wooden toothpicks,” he said. “It was not function, but the fact that you had one. The best people of society were chewing on toothpicks, and women began to adopt the practice. Most people didn’t know what they were.”

Micahel J. de la Merced's A Conference Call That Backfired

With one conference call and one unprintable word, Sallie Mae’s chief executive learned a $3 billion lesson.

That’s how much market value the company, formally known as the SLM Corporation, lost last Wednesday after that call. It was scheduled by Albert L. Lord, who is also the chairman of Sallie Mae, the student lending giant, to reassure shareholders and analysts alarmed by the company’s deteriorating financial health.

Instead, Mr. Lord delivered one of the worst conference calls since the infamous attack by Jeffrey K. Skilling of Enron on an analyst — using another expletive — in 2001. Shares in Sallie Mae fell nearly 21 percent.

Here are some highlights from Mr. Lord’s performance.

When an analyst asked how Sallie Mae would regain its single-A credit rating: “You’re talking to the wrong guy,” he said. “I don’t know that answer.”

On announcing a shareholder meeting next month: “I would suggest maybe you get there early because I can assure you, you will be going through a metal detector.”

As the conference call operator was asking for further questions: “Steve, let’s go. There are no questions.” And then came the expletive.

Christopher Caldwell's Intimate Shopping:

The concept of “implicit contracts” was developed in a landmark 1988 paper by the economists Andrei Shleifer and Lawrence Summers. Their subject — hostile corporate takeovers — seems far from cyberprivacy, but it is not. Shleifer and Summers showed that increases in share price following takeovers were not due to gains in efficiency, as the defenders of those buyouts claimed. There often were such gains, but they were not the source of the profits. The profits came from reneging on implicit contracts — like the tradition of overpaying older workers who had been overworked when young on the understanding that things would even out later. These contracts, because implicit, were hard to defend in court. But the assets they protected were real. To profit from them, buyout artists had only to put someone in place who could, with a straight face and a clean conscience, say, “I didn’t promise nothin’!”

As commerce moves from Main Street to the Web, lots of businessmen are in that position. All bets are off, and entrepreneurs are seeking new ways to make money by trial and error. Sometimes they do so by adding value to the economy. Sometimes they do so by abrogating implicit contracts. Like managers newly seated after a hostile takeover a quarter-century ago, today’s online innovators are not always skilled at telling the difference: “Your friendships are your own business? Golly, I wasn’t here when they negotiated that.”

Beacon was a clumsy attempt to reset the default on the common-sense understanding of discretion and to profit off the resetting. As in the 1980s, technological sophistication, entrepreneurial genius and gains to efficiency are a part of this story — but a larger part was the attempt to monetize and sell a vulnerable implicit contract. Facebook was thwarted, as the corporate raiders of years past were not, because it aimed not at pension plans and seniority-based pay scales but at something considerably more valuable — the unwritten rules of privacy that make civilized human interaction possible.

Times photo of Julia Boorstin, Couper Samuelson and not-their-groomsment by Misha Erwitt.

Missing his own point

A line in David Colman's brief Times sketch of David Henry Hwang made me laugh out loud.

IT would be nice to believe that words are exact, like neat little keys that fit into locks and open doors. But words are picklocks at best. And they become even less precise when discussing ethnicity, as is clear in David Henry Hwang’s new play, “Yellow Face,” at the Public Theater.

The play, which has just been extended through Jan. 13, addresses what happens when the words Chinese and American end up hyphenated. The results are in turn funny and tragic, and always complicated.

This is fitting for Mr. Hwang, who was born and raised in suburban Los Angeles by Chinese-born parents who had almost no interest in bringing their heritage with them.

“I was just an American kid,” he said of his childhood. That certainly changed. After his play “M. Butterfly” won the 1988 Tony Award for best play, he became a kind of spokesman in the early 1990s for Asian authenticity in the theater. The strange events that followed made for complications of their own, which he mines, to his credit, pretty fearlessly in “Yellow Face.”

While the play ultimately wonders, as many do, what the word American means, it also wonders what, if anything, it means to be Chinese. Both terms are simultaneously fraught with significance and so vague as to be virtually meaningless.

“Our notions of authenticity and purity are really just convenient and ultimately superficial,” said Mr. Hwang, sitting in the Brooklyn Heights town house he shares with his wife, Kathryn A. Layng, who is American (whatever that means) and their two children. “Increasingly, race and culture are two different things. The world is a mongrel place.”

Layng is American? So is Hwang. I think the distinction Colman meant to point out is 'Layng, who is white.'

Their year in review

The Times' Arts section is doing its annual review of the year's best, much of which seems unalluringly foreign to me and--especially in the television and film sections, notably not in the music lists--reflective only of how white and myopic the Times' critics are as a group.

You'd think in a country that's 1/3rd non-white, in a world that's trading everything back and forth furiously, it'd be impossible for a Times critic as prominent (if tin-eared) as Alessandra Stanley to present, with a straight face, her ten fave tv shows, every one of which is aggressively all-white (go ahead, try to imagine a non-white person driving shows like Mad Men, 30 Rock, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Gossip Girl, House, The Riches, and Friday Night Lights)--with the exception of not-set-in-our-world Battlestar Galactica.

You can read it as much a commentary on tv as on the famously vacant Alessandra, except for the fact she has no awareness of that fact, and contributes to it with her passion for shows set in her world. It so fits that her favorite show of the year was AMC's Mad Men, she's essentially living 40 years in the past.

Then there's the list of Stanley's equal in cringeworthy, miss-the-point reviews, A.O. Scott, who also without irony manages to serve up a list of more-than-10 films he loved in 2007, not a single one of which stars a non-white person.

I mean, at a certain point you've got to wonder if the comedy duo of Stanley and Scott--who theoretically live in a city where 60% of the residents come from another country or have parents who do--have any awareness of how much they're missing, or if they're just keeping their heads down and hoping they can pass off their myopia as universal for a few more years.

I don't think it's a coincidence that the only Times arts field that wasn't dominated by whiteness is music, where it's possible to listen without seeing, making it easier to 'like' or 'connect with' things you wouldn't think you would.

Music to track down

Based on the Times' music critics list of what they liked best in 2007....

Ben Ratliff's jazz-inflected best of music, 2. GILBERTO GIL: ‘GIL LUMINOSO’ (DRG). This is the album I have listened to most: a master Brazilian singer-songwriter, alone with guitar, sanding down old and new songs to the core. Few records are as beautiful.

9. ALICIA KEYS: ‘AS I AM’ (J Records). This is new R&B as new R&B, with no deeper guiding philosophy. But these cagey, obsessive songs on the good old themes of innocence and experience can grow on you wickedly, and some of the grooves, whether electronic or live band, are deep enough to roast a pig in.

Kelefa Senneh's list: 1. FEIST: ‘THE REMINDER’ (Cherry Tree/Interscope). Her modest, beguiling CD is full of carefully composed songs that sound like happy accidents. And even after a ubiquitous iPod commercial, that famous first line — “1-2-3-4 tell me that you love me more” — still sounds inviting. In a year with shockingly few big albums, Feist made the best small one.

10. NINA NASTASIA AND JIM WHITE: ‘YOU FOLLOW ME’ (Fat Cat). The American Ms. Nastasia writes songs about love, doubt and fear and sings them with acoustic guitar; the Australian Mr. White plays drums in sketchy, painterly phrases. It’s a concise, mysterious record.

6. TRACEY THORN: ‘OUT OF THE WOODS’ (Astralwerks). The year’s most pleasant surprise: After a five-year absence the singer from Everything but the Girl returned with a beautiful solo album that expands the boundaries of grown-up pop. Gleaming dance tracks, glimmering ballads: How did this CD stay a secret?

7. JENS LEKMAN: ‘NIGHT FALLS OVER KORTEDALA’ (Secretly Canadian). This mild-mannered Swedish indie-rocker is also a shameless flirt, an alternate-universe disco star, a witty raconteur and a first-rate crooner. Never underestimate the power of pure ambivalence: “Sometimes I almost regret it, like I regret my regrets/I see myself on my deathbed saying, ‘I wish I would have loved less.’ ”

10. THE-DREAM: ‘LOVE/HATE’ (Island Def Jam). In which Terius Nash, the songwriter behind Rihanna’s “Umbrella” and J. Holiday’s “Bed” recommits himself to gooey, robotic ’80s-influenced R&B. He calls himself The-Dream, and his debut album captured the ecstatic sound of pop radio in 2007.

Pink!

What a great photo... too bad it comes with a thumbsucker of an article, Where Boys Were Kings, a Shift Toward Baby Girls.

New York Times photo by Seokyong Lee

Things change

WHENEVER Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
“Good-morning,” and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich—yes, richer than a king—
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.

Those deconstructionists who say only the text matters are sure missing out on some interesting reading. From today's Writer's Almanac:

It's the birthday of Edwin Arlington Robinson, born in Head Tide, Maine (1869).

His family was wealthy, and he expected a life of ease, but his father died, the family's investments in the West went bad, and his mother contracted an illness so contagious that no undertaker would touch her body. Edward and his brothers had to dress her, make the coffin, and bury her themselves.

Robinson continued to write poetry unsuccessfully and he lived on the brink of starvation, until one day Kermit Roosevelt read Robinson's poems and he gave them to his father, Theodore Roosevelt, who gave him a cushy job in a Customs House.

President Roosevelt told him, "I expect you to think poetry first and customs second." All Robinson had to do was show up, read the morning newspaper, and leave it on his chair to prove he had been in.

This sustained him until he started to write poetry that won some praise. Edwin Arlington Robinson won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1922, the first year it was awarded. And he won it again in 1925 and 1928.

By the time he died, Edwin Robinson was one of the best-known poets in the country.

Teddy Roosevelt is one of those historical figures that turn up in the most unlikely places, like da Vinci and his cannons. Good thing for us he gave Robinson a hand up.

Mr. Flood’s Party

OLD Eben Flood, climbing along one night
Over the hill between the town below
And the forsaken upland hermitage
That held as much as he should ever know
On earth again of home, paused warily.
The road was his with not a native near;
And Eben, having leisure, said aloud,
For no man else in Tilbury Town to hear:

“Well, Mr. Flood, we have the harvest moon
Again, and we may not have many more;
The bird is on the wing, the poet says,
And you and I have said it here before.
Drink to the bird.” He raised up to the light
The jug that he had gone so far to fill,
And answered huskily: “Well, Mr. Flood,
Since you propose it, I believe I will.”

Alone, as if enduring to the end
A valiant armor of scarred hopes outworn,
He stood there in the middle of the road
Like Roland’s ghost winding a silent horn.
Below him, in the town among the trees,
Where friends of other days had honored him,
A phantom salutation of the dead
Rang thinly till old Eben’s eyes were dim.

Then, as a mother lays her sleeping child
Down tenderly, fearing it may awake,
He set the jug down slowly at his feet
With trembling care, knowing that most things break;
And only when assured that on firm earth
It stood, as the uncertain lives of men
Assuredly did not, he paced away,
And with his hand extended paused again:

“Well, Mr. Flood, we have not met like this
In a long time; and many a change has come
To both of us, I fear, since last it was
We had a drop together. Welcome home!”
Convivially returning with himself,
Again he raised the jug up to the light;
And with an acquiescent quaver said:
“Well, Mr. Flood, if you insist, I might.

“Only a very little, Mr. Flood—
For auld lang syne. No more, sir; that will do.”
So, for the time, apparently it did,
And Eben evidently thought so too;
For soon amid the silver loneliness
Of night he lifted up his voice and sang,
Secure, with only two moons listening,
Until the whole harmonious landscape rang—

“For auld lang syne.” The weary throat gave out,
The last word wavered; and the song being done,
He raised again the jug regretfully
And shook his head, and was again alone.
There was not much that was ahead of him,
And there was nothing in the town below—
Where strangers would have shut the many doors
That many friends had opened long ago.

Poems from Bartleby.com; photo via Modern American Poetry

Funniest thing this year

The howlers we know about

From Regret the Error's round up of the year's 'best' newspaper flubs. It really ought to be required reading in journalism schools and for newspaper staffs, puts it all in perspective.

-Hmmm, why the UK?

We once again saw a high number of instances in which people with Middle Eastern-sounding names were mistakenly labeled terrorists. This primarily occurred in UK publications. There were several cases of mistaken photo identification, while others were outright false accusations. One of the worst saw Metro UK run a photo of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed and identify him as terror suspect Kahlid Sheikh Mohammed.

-What a professional tone

The Sentinel-Review (Woodstock, Ontario): In an article in Monday’s newspaper, there may have been a misperception about why a Woodstock man is going to Afghanistan on a voluntary mission. Kevin DeClark is going to Afghanistan to gain life experience to become a police officer when he returns, not to shoot guns and blow things up. The Sentinel-Review apologizes for any embarrassment this may have caused.

-Hopefully she asserts!

Slate: In the May 25 “Explainer,” Michelle Tsai asserted that an eight ball is about 10 lines of cocaine. While the size of a line depends on personal preference, most users would divide an eight ball into more than 25 lines.

-Sure, 'regret' 'implies' 'sorry'

New York Daily News: A HEADLINE in Monday’s Daily News, “He regrets his role in ‘postal’ vid,” implied that Richard Marino, the subject of a YouTube video, was sorry for an incident in December at a Brooklyn post office. Marino, in fact, is not sorry. The News regrets the error

-Kids remember the darndest things

It wasn’t the most catastrophic error, but it speaks to two larger issues, one good and one bad.

In early August, the state-owned Russian TV network Rossiya (RTR) used a rather striking image of a submarine to illustrate a story about a Russian voyage to the Arctic.

After the story aired, the image was then distributed by Reuters, which meant that it spread to news outlets in countries around the world. It was also used by NBC Nightly News.

Then, days later, reports emerged that RTR’s image was in fact taken from the hit film Titanic.

So who was the first to discover this? Another media outlet? A submarine expert?

A 13-year-old boy in Finland.

“I was looking at the photo of the Russian sub expedition and I noticed immediately that there was something familiar about the picture,” Waltteri Seretin, the boy told a Finnish paper. “I checked it with my DVD and there it was right there in the beginning of the movie: exactly the same image of the submersibles approaching the ship.”

-Right-wing copy editors, I and II

Los Angeles Times: Mexico City newspaper: An article in Wednesday’s Calendar section about an English-language newspaper in Mexico City referred to the many U.S. ex-patriots who live there. It should have said expatriates.

The New York Times: A caption on Saturday with a picture showing a Pakistani man on his bicycle carrying a painting of his son, who he says was abducted by Pakistani intelligence agents in 2001, misspelled the name of the Pakistani capital. It is Islamabad, not Islambad.

-Those crazy Brits and their class obsession

Sunday Times (UK): An article about Lord Lambton (“Lord Louche, sex king of Chiantishire”, News Review, January 7) falsely stated that his son Ned (now Lord Durham) and daughter Catherine held a party at Lord Lambton’s villa, Cetinale, in 1997, which degenerated into such an orgy that Lord Lambton banned them from Cetinale for years. In fact, Lord Durham does not have a sister called Catherine (that is the name of his former wife), there has not been any orgiastic party of any kind and Lord Lambton did not ban him (or Catherine) from Cetinale at all. We apologise sincerely to Lord Durham for the hurt and embarrassment caused.


Tap-dancing hard

Daily Telegraph (UK): APOLOGY: In Friday’s article on Liz Hurley’s wedding it was wrongly stated that the actress is holding a pheasant shoot on the Sunday after the ceremony. Game shooting is of course illegal on Sundays and the pheasant season ended on Feb 1. We apologise for the error and accept that if any shooting is to be done it will be by the paparazzi, who have no season and do not observe the Sabbath.

-How the heck did these guys ever get an empire?

The Daily Express (UK):
ON April 3 we published an article entitled “The hangers-on who are dragging Prince Harry into the gutter” which was accompanied by a photograph of a young woman we identified as Annabel Ritchie. We now accept that the young woman photographed was not Annabel Ritchie. We also accept that Annabel Ritchie is not part of any so called “hangers-on”. We apologise unreservedly to Annabel Ritchie for what we published about her.

Sure, blame the copy editor

Portland Press Herald: A story on Page B4 on Wednesday about foraging for edible mushrooms contained a photo of amanita muscaria, which is a poisonous and hallucinogenic mushroom. It was a copy editor’s error.

The Times is so thorough

The New York Times: A caption on June 8, 1944, with a photograph of Army officers at mess on the Pacific front, misspelled the given name of the first officer seated at the left side of the table. He was Col. Girard B. Troland of New London, Conn. – not Gerand. The error was called to the attention of the editors by his grandson yesterday.

Good use of archives

The New York Times: An obituary on July 21 of Shirley Slesinger Lasswell, who marketed memorabilia and toys based on A. A. Milne’s children’s books about Winnie the Pooh, misspelled the name of the department store that agreed to let her set up Pooh Corners for children. It is Neiman Marcus, not Nieman Marcus. (The Times has misspelled the company’s name in at least 195 articles since 1930.)

Good transition

The Intelligencer Journal: A photograph accompanying a story about Teen Challenge in Saturday’s Intelligencer Journal incorrectly identified the subject, who is the Rev. James Santiago. The story included an incorrect identification of Santiago’s wife, Pam. Also, Santiago was addicted to crack cocaine for 12 years.


What the heck is going on down there?!

A letter published in the Sydney Morning Herald: David Marr unfortunately misquoted me in “A fallen leader of faith” (August 4-5). I actually said that I endured the naked beatings, paternal bum caresses etc from Frank Houston, not enjoyed them. I can assure readers that the experience wasn’t pleasurable but painful, both at the time and for some years later. Peter Laughton Carrara (Qld)

Ha!

Austin American-Statesman: A Newsmakers item on Page A2 Sunday incorrectly attributed a quote to the Rev. Al Sharpton. The item should have said that nationally syndicated radio host Don Imus described Rutgers’ women’s basketball players as “nappy-headed hos” during a segment of his show Wednesday.

Canadians think leaving Detroit is like dying

Toronto Star: A Nov. 19 article about a new study indicating that Detroit is the most dangerous U.S. city incorrectly stated that Detroit has seen nearly one million people killed since 1950. In fact, that number represents the overall decline in Detroit’s population since 1950, not the number of people killed. The Star regrets the error.

Well-worded correction

Newsday: A story Friday about Iona basketball coach Jeff Ruland’s past hardships should not have included a reference to a “battle for sobriety.” He has faced the loss of his father at age 9 and an NBA career shortened by injuries, but his sobriety has not been questioned.

Whatever

The NYTimes: An article in The Arts on Tuesday about the most popular movies of 2006 and others that did not do as well at the box office referred incorrectly to two languages spoken in ”Babel,” one of the films with subtitles that did not draw big crowds. They are Spanish and Berber, not ”Mexican” and ”Moroccan.’”

Circling the wagons

What a surprise... the three white baby boomer women who lead the 6-member Des Moines Register's editorial board endorsed a white baby boomer woman in the Democratic race today.

It's an exceedingly lame endorsement; they say they essentially picked Hillary because she's not too hot, not too oold.

Beyond their personal appeal, the candidates have outlined ambitious policy proposals on health care, education and rural policy. Yet these proposals do little to help separate the field. Their plans are similar, reflecting a growing consensus in the party about how to approach priority issues.

The choice, then, comes down to preparedness: Who is best prepared to confront the enormous challenges the nation faces — from ending the Iraq war to shoring up America’s middle class to confronting global climate change?

The job requires a president who not only understands the changes needed to move the country forward but also possesses the discipline and skill to navigate the reality of the resistant Washington power structure to get things done.

That candidate is New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

As Obama has said repeatedly, being more experienced didn't keep Clinton from making the mistake of backing the Iraq war, the single biggest litmus test of the last few years.

There are reasons beyond race, gender and age that explain why the board chose Hillary, of course--but those commonalities meant Obama was running uphill, as non-white candidates generally are in this country.

And it certainly raises the question of why a tiny rural state that's more than 90% white is serving--along with its sister state, 98% white New Hampshire--as gatekeeper for a country it so little resembles.

Maybe it explains why we keep getting the same old politicians in the White House, experienced at making the same old mistakes; the voters of Iowa and New Hampshire seem to have problems stepping out of their comfort zone, away from their own parochial worldview.

I mean, if Hillary wins by the end of it all it could be nearly 3 decades since we had someone other than a Bush or Clinton running our democracy; maybe Obama should start running against the Clinton-Bush way.

Jeb Bush in '16 anyone?!

Photos of Laura Hollingsworth, Carolyn Washburn and Carol Hunter by Joshua Lott for The New York Times

Words do matter

Some interesting excerpts from the coverage this morning of the Bali environmental talks, which is leading all the news sites. Same story, some pretty different approaches:

Thomas Fuller and Andrew C. Revkin in the NYTimes, Timetable Is Set to Revive Climate Treaty: Delegates from nearly 190 countries wrapped up two weeks of intense and at times emotional talks here on Saturday with a two-year timetable for reviving an ailing, aging climate treaty.

The deal came after the United States, facing sharp verbal attacks in a final open-door negotiating session, reversed its opposition to a last-minute amendment by India.

"We've listened very closely to many of our colleagues here during these two weeks, but especially to what has been said in this hall today," Paula Dobriansky, who led the American delegation, told the other assembled delegates. "We will go forward and join consensus." ...

The mood here shifted after a speech Thursday by Al Gore, the former United States vice president who shared the Nobel Peace Prize this year for helping to alert the world to the danger of global warming.

After declaring that the United States was "principally responsible for obstructing progress" in Bali, he urged delegates to agree to an open-ended deal that could be enhanced after Mr. Bush left office in January 2009.

"Over the next two years the United States is going to be somewhere it is not now," Mr. Gore said to loud applause. "You must anticipate that."

Wow, it's rare that an American of Gore's stature publicly says something like that at a negotiating session. It used to be politics stopped at the water's edge, so that our domestic differences wouldn't undermine our leverage with the rest of the world.

I guess it's a sign of how frustrated Democrats have been with 7 years of Bush stonewalling that they've resorted to telling the rest of the world, hold on for just a little more, everything will be fixed soon.

Juliet Eilperin in the Washington Post, Nations Forge Pact on Global Warming, Climate Change: The United States, under a barrage of criticism from developing countries, agreed today to accept a framework for future climate change talks that would compel industrialized countries to provide measurable technological and financial aid to lesser-off nations if they take verifiable steps to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.

The compromise, forged mid-day Saturday after a series of around-the-clock negotiations involving 187 nations, bridged the differences between Bush administration officials' insistence that rapidly industrializing nations do their part to address global warming and the developing world's call for greater climate action by Washington.

Under the deal, which will provide the framework for negotiating a new global warming treaty over the next two years, developed nations must take binding "commitments or actions" to cut their emissions, and poorer nations must also seek to reduce their contributions to human-induced climate change.

"This is a real breakthrough, a real opportunity for the international community to successfully fight climate change," said Indonesian Environment Minister and President of the conference, Rachmat Witoelar. "Parties have recognized the urgency of action on climate change and have now provided the political response to what scientists have been telling us is needed."

But the agreement only came together after the talks nearly collapsed Saturday afternoon when Undersecretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs Paula Dobriansky told the delegates that the United States was "not willing to accept" language calling on industrialized nations to produce "measurable, reportable and verifiable" assistance to developing countries.

Those comments sparked a round of boos and hisses from the audience -- a rare event in the context of a U.N. negotiation -- and a sharp rebuke from an array of developing countries. ...

In rapid succession, other developing nations also chastised the U.S. for blocking a global agreement.

"If you cannot lead, leave it to the rest of us. Get out of the way," said Kevin Conrad, Papua New Guinea's ambassador for climate change.

Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy for the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the standoff between American and other nations helped inspire the developing world to "pull together to keep the process alive before it sunk.

"I've been in this business for twenty years, and I've never seen a drama like that in the U.N. process," he added.

The Times does a better job in its lede of pointing to the emotion of the talks; the Post does a better job further down with its quotes of showing that emotion.

But the Times story, as it usually does, reads as the day's definitive account, the one you read first to set up the framework, with the Post filling in with some nice details.

CNN, no byline, U.S. agrees to Bali compromiseThe United States made a dramatic reversal Saturday, first rejecting and then accepting a compromise to set the stage for intense negotiations in the next two years aimed at reducing carbon dioxide emissions worldwide.

The U.N. climate change conference in Bali was filled with emotion and cliff-hanging anticipation on Saturday, an extra day added because of a failure to reach agreement during the scheduled sessions.

The final result was a global warming pact that provides for negotiating rounds to conclude in 2009.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called the pact "a good beginning." "This is just a beginning and not an ending," Ban said. "We'll have to engage in many complex, difficult and long negotiations."

The head of the U.S. delegation -- Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs Paula Dobriansky -- was booed Saturday afternoon when she announced that the United States was rejecting the plan as then written because they were "not prepared to accept this formulation." She said developing countries needed to carry more of the responsibility.

While rhetoric at such conferences is often just words, a short speech by a delegate from the small developing country of Papua New Guinea appeared to carry weight with the Americans. The delegate challenged the United States to "either lead, follow or get out of the way."

Although thinly written, the anonymous CNN staffer did a good job of spelling out the shift in the U.S.'s position, and also gets the Papua New Guinea speech up higher than the others.

I never know whether to trust CNN.com anymore--they often lead with stuff that's just a promo for CNN programming, and generally puff up stories to make them seem compelling. But in this case, they at least got the drama right.

Joseph Coleman, the Associated Press, UN Climate Conference Adopts Plan: A U.N. climate conference adopted a plan to negotiate a new global warming pact on Saturday, after the United States suddenly reversed its opposition to a call by developing nations for technological help to battle rising temperatures.

The adoption came after marathon negotiations overnight, which first settled a battle between Europe and the U.S. over whether the document should mention specific goals for rich countries' obligations to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Upcoming talks, to be completed in 2009, may help determine for years to come how well the world can control climate change, and how severe the consequences of global warming will be.

European and U.S. envoys dueled into the final hours of the two-week meeting over the EU's proposal that the Bali mandate suggest an ambitious goal for cutting the emissions of industrial nations_ by 25 to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.

That guideline's specific numbers were eliminated from the text, but an indirect reference was inserted instead.

The negotiations snagged again early Saturday over demands by developing nations that their need for technological help from rich nations and other issues receive greater recognition in the document launching the negotiations.

The United States initially rejected those demands, but backed down after delegates criticized the U.S. stand and urged a reconsideration.

"I think we have come a long way here," said Paula Dobriansky, head of the U.S. delegation. "In this, the United States is very committed to this effort and just wants to really ensure we all act together. We will go forward and join consensus."

The sudden reversal was met with rousing applause.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who earlier expressed frustration with the last-minute disputes and urged delegates to end the deadlock, praised the United States for showing flexibility in the final hours.

"I am encouraged by, and I appreciate the spirit of flexibility of the U.S. delegation and other key delegations," he told The Associated Press.

Really, the AP is the first draft of history, given how many thousands of websites its words appear on, especially for breaking news. Coleman's story, like all AP stories, is straightforward, dependant on direct quotes, and essentially accurate.

It's also written in the general horse race style--who won, who lost, who said what.

BBC, no byline, Climate deal sealed by US U-turn: Delegates at the UN summit in Bali have agreed a deal on curbing climate change after days of bitter wrangling.

Agreement was reached after a U-turn from the US, which had wanted firmer commitments from developing countries.

Environment groups said they were disappointed by the lack of firm targets for reducing emissions.

The "Bali roadmap" initiates a two-year process of negotiations designed to agree a new set of emissions targets to replace those in the Kyoto Protocol.

The EU had pressed for a commitment that industrialised nations should commit to cuts of 25-40% by 2020, a bid that was implacably opposed by a bloc containing the US, Canada and Japan.

The final text does not mention specific emissions targets, but does acknowledge that "deep cuts in global emissions will be required to achieve the ultimate objective" of avoiding dangerous climate change.

It also says that a delay in reducing emissions will make severe climate impacts more likely. ...

As talks overran their scheduled close by more than a day, delegates from the EU, US and G-77/China embarked with UN officials on a series of behind-the-scenes consultations aiming to break the remaining deadlock.

The EU and US agreed to drop binding targets; then the EU and China agreed to soften language on commitments from developing countries.

With delegates anxious to make a deal and catch aeroplanes home, the US delegation announced it could not support the amended text.

A chorus of boos rang out. And a member of Papua New Guinea's delegation told the US: "If you're not willing to lead, please get out of the way."

Shortly after, the US delegation announced it would support the revised text after all.

There were a number of emotional moments in the conference hall - the UN's top climate official Yvo de Boer in tears after being accused by China of procedural irregularities, and cheers and hugs when the US indicated its acceptance.

The BBC story has the slight attitude characteristic of its stories, like they're always conscious that this is the BBC--literary adjectives like 'implacably', some cheekiness, some random but interesting details--aeroplane reservations can't be changed?!--and of course the ever-present focus on Europe vs. the U.S.

It's interesting that neither Le Monde nor Yomiuri Shimbum have the climate talks updated on their page.

All Anna

The always-interesting Times magazine had a memorable piece last Sunday on Anna Netrebko, the incandescent--to quote the Metropolitant Opera's website--Russian star who it calls A New Kind of Diva.

She strikes me as the kind of person you find in all kinds of fields, people who are driven to succeed by their force of personality, and who are often smarter than people think.

Some telling details from Charles McGrath's piece:

Anna Netrebko is a gifted opera singer who at 36 has already mastered many of the roles — Mimi, Violetta, Lucia, Manon — that used to go to the queenly, temperamental sopranos of the old school, with their furs, their atomizers, their entourages. She is also a media-savvy entertainer from the new school, with the knockout looks, the fans, the celebrity of a pop star. Her “Traviata” at Salzburg two years ago was such a hot ticket that scalpers were reportedly charging $7,000 a seat, and her records regularly top the charts in Europe. In the summer of 2006 she was part of a concert in Berlin that filled a stadium.

Netrebko, whose appearance at the Metropolitan Opera on Dec. 15 in Gounod’s “Roméo et Juliette” will be broadcast live in movie theaters around the world, has a captivating voice that is both high and deep, lustrous and velvety, and she is one of that growing breed of opera singers who can actually act. She is sometimes compared with Natalie Dessay, the French singer whose face has been on posters all over New York this fall, advertising her mad scene in the Met’s “Lucia di Lammermoor,” and who may in fact be technically superior. But Netrebko is the larger presence. She has an earthiness and impishness — a daredeviltry — that may prevent her from ever attaining the kind of rarefied, disembodied sainthood that has been awarded, for example, to the American sopranos Renée Fleming and Dawn Upshaw but that also makes her more fun to watch. ...

It is not true, for example, that she had an affair with Robbie Williams and bore his love child. On the other hand, the reports that she loves to party and to shop and can swear like a trooper in five or six languages are probably not inaccurate.

Netrebko is more of a homebody than she is sometimes given credit for. She spent her 36th birthday, in September, in her apartment in New York cooking dinner for her publicist and his girlfriend. But she is also a serious clotheshorse. In August, when I had lunch with her in Vienna, where she also has an apartment, she turned up wearing purple pumps (which matched her eye shadow), a bright orange duster and the shortest miniskirt I’ve seen anywhere except on Carnaby Street in 1969. The face of her wristwatch was encrusted with what must have been diamonds, because you’d be embarrassed to have rhinestones that big.

“I’m so fat,” she said as she sat down. She explained that she had just come back from a few days’ rest in Italy. “My crazy friends,” she said, “They don’t think about nothing but food, food, food.” (Netrebko, who is a very quick study when it comes to languages, used to speak English with a noticeable Russian accent, but it’s almost gone now, her Russianness apparent only in certain vowels and infrequent lapses into Russian syntax.) ...

Netrebko, for her part, is looking forward to the 2012 production of “Manon.” This is an opera she loves (with reason, her detractors say: it’s about a materialistic airhead), and she delighted in a production that Vincent Paterson created for her in Los Angeles. It was set in Paris in the 1950s and showed Manon evolving from a Leslie Caron character to one modeled on Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe. In one scene she even did a pole dance. “This production was so good,” she said, “because it understands that ‘Manon’ is not a deep story. She’s not a deep character. So it has to be funny, silly, charming, erotical — not dark. She’s not evil. She’s like, I screw up my life, but, well, too bad!” ...

“Look, I am normal,” Netrebko told me last summer. “Normal, normal, normal!” And she is, though at the animated, high-energy end of normality. She laughs easily and gestures broadly, waving her arms, rolling her eyes, sticking out her tongue. When a man suddenly materialized at our restaurant table bearing not one but five copies of her “Figaro” CD, which needed to be autographed on the spot, she sweetly complied and went out of her way to chat with him a bit. When I was trying to discuss her Carnegie Hall concert this past May with the Russian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky, and compliment the fine points of her performance of the Letter Scene from “Eugene Onegin,” she found it necessary to explain that I didn’t know what I was talking about. She did so gently, however, and added, “You are very nice.”

I mean, what a great quote--you get an exact sense of her. And not just her; as McGrath notes:

Netrebko’s friend and mentor, Renata Scotto, herself a diva in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, says that an important clue to Netrebko’s nature is her Russianness. “She’s very humble, very truthful,” she remarked of Netrebko. “And I think a lot of Russians are like this. She’s full of the joy of life and also a very hard worker.”

Netrebko concedes that there may be something to this, but also says that another Russian trait, which she clearly does not share, is melancholy, passivity and being unable to decide what you want from life. A phrase she uses a lot is “I try” or “I will try,” and you get the sense that she is very much the stage manager of her own story. ...

At the time, to make some pocket money and for the chance to watch rehearsals, Netrebko was also washing floors at the Mariinsky Theater, St. Petersburg’s famous opera and ballet house, and this has given rise to a myth that is the Russian version of “La Cenerentola,” the Cinderella opera, with Valéry Gergiev, general and artistic director of the Mariinsky, swooping in and rescuing her from the mop and bucket. In fact, by the time she auditioned for Gergiev she had already retired from scrubbing and had even won the Glinka, perhaps Russia’s most famous vocal competition.

Anyone who'd take a job washing floors to watch rehearsals isn't any kind of diva, I'd say.

Uncredited, as far as I can tell, photo of Netrbko via an Italian blog.

Spanning its world

Gleanings from Sunday's Times.

Idolastic
It's interesting that Ed Wyatt, in his look at the impact of the writer's strike on TV programming come the new year--You Couldn’t Write This Stuff: TV Reality Sets In-- doesn't mention the most obvious outcome: Viewers itching for non-reruns are likely to turn to American Idol in astonishing numbers. If FOX can find a few contestants as talented as the Chris Daughtry/Taylor Hicks/Elliott Yamin/Paris Bennett year, watch out.

Of the new reality shows Wyatt profiles, only this caught my eye:

Among the new reality offerings is “Oprah’s Big Give,” a contest on ABC sponsored by Oprah Winfrey to see who can give away large sums of money to society’s greatest benefit. ABC has long planned to have the series premiere in early 2008, but its potential effect on the network’s ratings is now more important than ever, given that the network’s most successful shows will be appearing in reruns.

False Idols
It struck me as odd that Ted Leonsis, an AOL executive who I previously knew only as an odd owner of the Washington Capitals and part-owner of the Washington Wizards, had made Nanking, a documentary about the mass rape and massacre of Chinese civilians in Nanking by the Japanese shortly before the beginning of WWII.

Why is Ted interested in this topic?

Is he married to an Asian-American? Not that I could find.

Does he have business interests in China, that he's hoping to further by doing the bidding of the Chinese government in the U.S.--like Rupert Murdoch does? Not that I could find.

Hmm, maybe he's an enlightened soul, interested in exposing Americans to Chinese history so we can understand key things about the second most important country in the world, like why the Chinese government, in a series of pre-Olympic programs, needs to make four major points:

Don't insult former wartime enemy Japan; don't swear; respect the referee; and don't snap indiscriminate photos.

Or, it could just be a form of self-worship.

“Nanking,” directed by Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman and scheduled for release on Wednesday, recounts the Nanking massacre, or the Rape of Nanking, a months-long siege on the former Chinese capital by the Japanese Army that began in December 1937. Despite the efforts of a handful of Americans and Germans to create a safety zone for the protection of Nanking’s civilian population, the Japanese soldiers showed scant mercy. By the end of the occupation in March 1938, it is estimated that some 300,000 civilians and prisoners of war were killed and more than 20,000 women raped.

Like many Americans Mr. Leonsis was unaware of these events for much of his life. Three years ago he read an obituary of Iris Chang, author of “The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II,” who committed suicide in November 2004. Haunted by the account, Mr. Leonsis bought her book, as well as two others about the Westerners who attempted to protect the citizens of Nanking, and set out to make a film about the events.

“At a time when Americans are not looked at fondly around the world,” he said, “here’s people that are called gods and goddesses. But their memories haven’t echoed through history, and I wanted to tell that story.”

Jingle jangle
There's an interesting article about interfaith marriages around the holidays... well, interfaith if, as the Times does, you define it to mean Christian/Jewish:

It is a familiar problem, widely known as the December dilemma: the annual conflict faced by millions of adults in interfaith marriages over how to decorate homes, how and when to give gifts, and which rituals to celebrate.

As of 2001, more than 28 million Americans lived in mixed-religion households, according to the American Religious Identification Survey, which is widely viewed as providing some of the best data on the subject. Of those households, the largest group of interfaith marriages (distinct from interdenominational Christian ones) was Christian-Jewish, and few types of couples seem to experience the December dilemma as acutely as they do.

Anyway, there's this interesting paragraph about a third of the way through, which really would seem to warrant its own article:

But even sultry jazz versions of Christmas standards can alienate someone who does not celebrate the holiday, a concern frequently overlooked by those who grow up Christian and never experience the isolation of being part of a religious minority.

I think you can use a stronger word than overlooked--like dismissed.

English teachers rejoice
It's often surprising what people know, what sticks in their brain, what comes out at unexpected moments. Here's a quote from a friend of Sean Taylor, the Washington Redskins player who was so tragically slain in his home recently, from Taylor’s Heart of Kindness Might Have Left Him Vulnerable :

“To me, Sean was like Achilles, because he was this incredible warrior who could run through a brick wall, but these small things brought him down,” said Matt Sinnreich, 21, one of Taylor’s close friends since high school. “He was shot in the leg, not the heart or the head or anything. And he was just too nice. That ended up to be a huge weakness. We learned that the hard way.”

Juliet Macur's piece has lots of other nice touches, like this:

In school, Taylor was a star, though he never acted like one, friends and coaches said. And there, he fell in love. The day he met Garcia, a soccer standout, he ran home and told his grandmother that he had to learn Spanish to impress a girl. He came to enjoy the company of her large, tight-knit Cuban family. ...

Caught his eye
The thing about the Times is you never know what kind of article you'll find in its myriad Sunday sections. There's a profile of Kevin Sessums in the Real Estate pages, A Crisis Sent Him Away; Another Drew Him Home, for example, that really could've been in Book Review, Arts--or a political page.

Two interesting things stick out from the piece:

Mr. Sessums was pleased that he had pulled off a hat trick. He had three small apartments instead of one big one. “And I was paying about the same amount of money,” he said. “I set up my closets so I could just get on a plane and arrive and not have to carry a suitcase. Everything was set up everywhere. I did that for almost two years. It was like a fairy tale, and the fairy tale came crashing down on Sept. 11.”

He was in Paris on that day when an old boyfriend in New York, the AIDS activist Peter Staley, called and told him to turn on CNN. “I sat there for 48 hours; I had real separation anxiety,” he said. “That experience sent a lot of people away from the city, but it brought me back. Within 48 hours, I had decided to give up my apartment in Paris and come home. I was very homesick.” ...

Shortly after returning to New York, Mr. Sessums volunteered to be a buddy to Brandon Gonzalez, an 8-year-old boy from Brooklyn, through the Family Center, which specializes in helping children whose parents have life-threatening illnesses.

“I’m a mentor, not a tutor, so we do things like go to museums and the theater, and he spends a week with me in Provincetown every summer,” he said.

“I never thought I would be a 51-year-old homosexual in New York, and the two most important relationships in my life would be with a 13-year-old Puerto Rican kid and a 3-year-old Chihuahua,” said Mr. Sessums, a wide grin spreading across his devilishly handsome face.

8, 13; boy, dog; whatever... clearly Sessums isn't good with certain things, but there's something about him as profiled that's very likeable.

Timesian
We close with what could be the archetypical NYTimes feature--the magazine's yearly roundup of some of the best 'idea's of the year.

How arrogant, how ill-defined, how silly, how interesting.

80%?! Where were the reporters then?!
The Death of Checkers: This July, Jonathan Schaeffer, a computer scientist at the University of Alberta in Canada, announced that after running a computer program almost nonstop for 18 years, he had calculated the result of every possible endgame that could be played, all 39 trillion of them. He also revealed a sober fact about the game: checkers is a draw. As with tic-tac-toe, if both players never make a mistake, every match will end in a deadlock.

Schaeffer did not solve checkers by replicating human intuition or game-playing ability. Rather, he employed what’s known as a “brute force” attack. He programmed a cluster of computers to play out every possible position involving 10 or fewer pieces. At the peak of his labors, he had 200 computers working around the clock on the problem, both in Alberta and down in California. (The data requirements were so high that for a while in the early ’90s, more than 80 percent of the Internet traffic in western North America was checkers data being shipped between two research institutions.)

So why did they eliminate pants?
Left-Hand-Turn Elimination : It seems that sitting in the left lane, engine idling, waiting for oncoming traffic to clear so you can make a left-hand turn, is minutely wasteful — of time and peace of mind, for sure, but also of gas and therefore money. Not a ton of gas and money if we’re talking about just you and your Windstar, say, but immensely wasteful if we’re talking about more than 95,000 big square brown trucks delivering packages every day. And this realization — that when you operate a gigantic fleet of vehicles, tiny improvements in the efficiency of each one will translate to huge savings overall — is what led U.P.S. to limit further the number of left-hand turns its drivers make.

The company employs what it calls a “package flow” software program, which among other hyperefficient practices involving the packing and sorting of its cargo, maps out routes for every one of its drivers, drastically reducing the number of left-hand turns they make (taking into consideration, of course, those instances where not to make the left-hand turn would result in a ridiculously circuitous route).

Last year, according to Heather Robinson, a U.P.S. spokeswoman, the software helped the company shave 28.5 million miles off its delivery routes, which has resulted in savings of roughly three million gallons of gas and has reduced CO2 emissions by 31,000 metric tons.

Can I buy this?
Self-Righting Object: The Gomboc is a result of a long mathematical quest. In 1995, the Russian mathematician Vladimir Arnold mused that it would be possible to create a “mono-monostatic” object — a three-dimensional thingy that purely by dint of its geometry had only one possible way to balance upright.

The challenge intrigued two scientists — Gabor Domokos and Peter Varkonyi, both of the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. They spent a few years doing the math, and it seemed as if a mono-monostatic object could, in fact, exist. They began looking to see if they could find a naturally occurring example; at one point, Domokos was so obsessed that he spent hours testing 2,000 pebbles on a beach to see if they could right themselves. (None could.)

After several more years of scratching their heads, they finally hit upon a shape that looked promising. They designed it on a computer, and when it came back from the manufacturer, they nervously tipped it over, wondering if all their work would be for naught. Nope: the Gomboc performed perfectly. “It’s a very nice mathematical problem because you can hold the proof in your hands — and it’s quite beautiful,” Varkonyi says.

Yet the scientists now say that Mother Nature may have beaten them in the race after all. They have noticed that the Gomboc closely resembles the shell of a tortoise or a beetle, creatures whose round-shelled backs help them right themselves when flipped over. “We discovered it with mathematics,” Domokos notes, “but evolution got there first.”

Don't let Rep. Peter King hear about this
24/7 Alibi: Nine months after 9/11, Hasan Elahi, an art professor at Rutgers University, was detained at the Detroit airport after the F.B.I. received a bogus tip that he had stockpiled explosives in a storage locker. Six months of interrogations and nine polygraph tests later, the F.B.I. let him go. (The F.B.I. declined to comment.) But Elahi wasn’t ready to let go of the F.B.I. In a sly swipe at the surveillance system that botched his case, Elahi has self-consciously, if a bit ostentatiously, surrendered his privacy via a personal Web site. He has an alibi now — a perpetual one.

The project — part performance art, part post-trauma therapy — began as a practical matter. After his release, Elahi, who travels frequently as part of his job, contacted the F.B.I., letting it know his plans in advance. After a few months of this, he had an idea. “Why not share this information with everyone?” he remembers thinking. He began posting logs of his phone calls and pictures of his whereabouts. Up went his banking statements. He took to revealing the coordinates of his exact location on his Web site in real time. He snaps time-stamped digital images and uploads them.

Does everyone leave?
Unadapted Theatrical Adaptation: This year, John Collins, the cerebral leader of the experimental New York theater company Elevator Repair Service, offered a radical solution: adapt without adapting.

Collins mounted a production of “The Great Gatsby” without cutting a single word. “Gatz,” which refers to Jay Gatsby’s original name, is the most faithful version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s book ever produced.

Despite the low-tech production and lack of period details, the show does not seem like a stunt, although it is at least partly inspired by the anticomedian Andy Kaufman’s stand-up routine in which he read “Gatsby” until everyone left.

NYC all over again

Some breathtaking photos of NYC; for impish commentary, click the 'I' on the first photo.

Name them

It's interesting that the Times' Elaine Sciolino seems to think it's normal in her article about riots touched off by the deaths of two young French teens of African descent--As Violence Ebbs, Sarkozy Calls Riots Unacceptable--to not quote or even mention any French people of African descent.

She doesn't even give us the names of the boys who were killed, Moushin, 15, and Larami, 16.

We do get lots of quotes from, and mentions of, Sarkozy in his various guises (“Scum”, “Kärcher”, Boss, Sarko); lots of quotes from elderly non-African Frenchies who like him--but nothing from the population most affected by the deaths, and now the riots.

I think as long as French people of African and Arabic descent are literally unheard even when they take to the streets, they will keep taking to the streets.

And as long as reporters like Sciolino feel they can report a story like this without actually stepping foot in the non-white French world, Americans will have a hard time understanding anything beyond what Sarko thinks.

Love and travel

A couple of particularly interesting items from Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac for today, via the daily email newsletter.

-It's the birthday of American statistician George Gallup, born in Jefferson, Iowa (1901). He was a student at the University of Iowa when he conducted his first poll for the Daily Iowan, to find the prettiest girl on campus. The winner was Ophelia Smith, whom Gallup later married.

-Ticket

I love the moment at the ticket window—he says—
when you are to say the name of your destination, and realize
that you could say anything, the man at the counter
will believe you, the woman at the counter
would never say No, that isn't where you're going,
you could buy a ticket for one place and go to another,
less far along the same line. Suddenly you would find yourself
—he says—in a locality you've never seen before,
where no one has ever seen you and you could say your name
was anything you like, nobody would say No,
that isn't you, this is who you are. It thrills me every time.

Poem: "Ticket" by Charles O. Hartman, from Island. © Ahsahta Press, 2004.

Watercolor of Greek church by Rebecca McGoodwin after photo by Louise Robertson

Name game

There's a protypical well-done Times piece up by crack reporter Sam Roberts,
In Name Count, Garcias Are Catching Up With Joneses, that builds off some Census data.

I'm not sure why more newspapers haven't mastered this type of piece--just take new data, talk to some normal people and some experts, and produce a snapshot of a growing trend.

Some interesting excerpts from the piece:

Step aside Moore and Taylor. Welcome Garcia and Rodriguez.

Smith remains the most common surname in the United States, according to a new analysis released yesterday by the Census Bureau. But for the first time, two Hispanic surnames — Garcia and Rodriguez — are among the top 10 most common in the nation, and Martinez nearly edged out Wilson for 10th place. ...

Garcia moved to No. 8 in 2000, up from No. 18, and Rodriguez jumped to No. 9 from 22nd place. The number of Hispanic surnames among the top 25 doubled, to 6. ...

Luis Padilla, 48, a banker who has lived in Miami since he arrived from Colombia 14 years ago, greeted the ascendance of Hispanic surnames enthusiastically.

“It shows we’re getting stronger,” Mr. Padilla said. “If there’s that many of us to outnumber the Anglo names, it’s a great thing.” ...

The latest surname count also signaled the growing number of Asians in America. The surname Lee ranked No. 22, with the number of Lees about equally divided between whites and Asians. Lee is a familiar name in China and Korea and in all its variations is described as the most common surname in the world.

Altogether, the census found six million surnames in the United States. Among those, 151,000 were shared by a hundred or more Americans. Four million were held by only one person. ...

But the fact that about 1 in every 25 Americans is named Smith, Johnson, Williams, Brown, Jones, Miller or Davis “suggests that there’s a durability in the family of man,” Mr. Kaplan, the author, said. A million Americans share each of those seven names. An additional 268 last names are common to 10,000 or more people. Together, those 275 names account for one in four Americans.

I wonder how many Garcias and Rodriguezes it'll take to prevent the Times from calling stories like this a 'dilemma': Immigration Dilemma: A Mother Torn From a Baby:

Federal immigration agents were searching a house in Ohio last month when they found a young Honduran woman nursing her baby.

The woman, Saída Umanzor, is an illegal immigrant and was taken to jail to await deportation. Her 9-month-old daughter, Brittney Bejarano, who was born in the United States and is a citizen, was put in the care of social workers.

The decision to separate a mother from her breast-feeding child drew strong denunciations from Hispanic and women’s health groups. Last week, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency rushed to issue new guidelines on the detention of nursing mothers, allowing them to be released unless they pose a national security risk.

Lost in non-translation

The Post has a slightly misleading piece up, Looking to Adopt A Foreign Tongue: Student Interest in Asian, Mideast Languages Surging.

Told through the story of an interesting student at Maryland who literally stumbled into studying Persian, the numbers, Susan Kinzie reports, are:

Interest in non-European languages, traditionally less commonly taught in the United States, has been surging, according to survey results released yesterday by the Modern Language Association.

More college students across the country are enrolling in language classes, and that is particularly true for Middle Eastern and Asian languages. Chinese language classes jumped 51 percent from 2002 to 2006 to nearly 52,000, and Korean grew 37 percent to more than 7,000. Arabic classes increased more than 126 percent to nearly 24,000.

And enrollments in Persian language classes nearly doubled nationally, although the total numbers, around 2,300, are still tiny, especially compared to popular languages such as Spanish.

Oddly, the article doesn't list the comparable numbers. Off the MLA website, we find:

The study of the most popular languages--Spanish, French, and German--continues to grow and represents more than 70% of language enrollments.

Inside, in the press release, we find the full list, with numbers of students enrolled/% of all enrollments/increase since 2002:

1) Spanish 822,985 52.2% + 10.3%

2) French 206,426 13.1% + 2.2%

3) German 94,264 6.0% + 3.5%

4) American Sign Language 78,829 5.0% + 29.7%

5) Italian 78,368 5.0% + 22.6%

6) Japanese 66,605 4.2% + 27.5%

7) Chinese 51,582 3.3% + 51.0%

8) Latin 32,191 2.0% + 7.9%

9) Russian 24,845 1.6% + 3.9%

10) Arabic 23,974 1.5% +126.5%

11) Ancient Greek 22,849 1.4% + 12.1%

12) Biblical Hebrew 14,140 0.9% - 0.3%

13) Portuguese 10,267 0.7% + 22.4%

14) Modern Hebrew 9,612 0.6% + 11.5%

15) Korean 7,145 0.5% + 37.1%

Hmm, "surging?" Heck, you could just as easily have written a piece about ASL, Italian, and Portuguese....

The headline's particularly egregious, since it presumes the traditional European trio of Spanish/French/German aren't 'foreign' the way these Asian and Middle Eastern tongues are.

In addition--when you start with such a small base, you'd think it'd be pretty critical to show the other languages for comparison so readers can understand how underwhelming the numbers overall are. And to note similar spikes were seen in other languages that can't be explained by geopolitics.

Maybe all that happened is we're in the middle of a surge in college enrollment, so with more kids around, more of them are taking pretty much all languages.

Or, since we know smaller schools can experience a spike in applications through such random things as one of their sports teams doing particularly well in football/basketball, or through placement on a big TV show/movie, maybe kids walking past TVs are just hearing these countries more, making them seem more relateable.

Really, I think the article should've been: Tripping Over A Foreign Tongue: Student Interest in Asian, Mideast Languages Lags Far Behind Where Reason Would Place It, Experts Probe Impact of Media Portrayal of Non-European Countries As 'FOREIGN'

Ginormous

Every so often you read an article that makes you go 'wow!' Here's the Houston Chronicle's Jonathan Feigen, Yikes! Yao vs. Yi is huge:

Tonight will bring the first NBA meeting of Yao and the player expected to be the next Chinese NBA star, Yi Jianlian, an occasion that could draw the largest global audience to see an NBA game. ...

"Here we have two gentlemen, from different regions, Shanghai (Yao) and the Guandong Province (Yi), and who mean so much to this enormous country, with an enormous television market and enormous love for basketball," [NBA Commissioner David] Stern said. "Now we have the exclamation point."

The game will be on 19 networks in China, including CCTV-5, Guangdong TV, Guangzhou TV, and ESPN Star Sports in Hong Kong and Taiwan. It also will be available live through two Webcasters.

Though ratings estimates in China are difficult and vary widely, today's game is said to be certain to draw 150 million viewers and could reach 250 million. CCTV-5 alone is available in 210 million households.

Yao's first game against Shaquille O'Neal in 2002 drew an estimated audience of 220 million and the largest cable television ratings in the United States for a regular-season game since the 1995 comeback of Magic Johnson.

"I heard there were close to 200 million people that watched," Yao said. "But come on, in our country, we have (1.3) billion. That's still a small part of it." ...

When the Indianapolis Colts played the New England Patriots last Sunday, the average audience during the game was 33.8 million; 66.4 million saw at least a six-minute portion.

The average audience for Super Bowl XLI was 93 million, with 139.8 million seeing at least six minutes. There have been estimates Super Bowls draw a global audience of roughly 150 million.

The audience for tonight's Rockets game, starting on a Saturday morning in China, could exceed the Super Bowl, Colts-Patriots game and the Friday ESPN NBA games combined.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Michael Hunt weighs in as well, Young star puts Bucks on global market:

Almost as many people in a faraway land will watch an NBA game as the number of number of people who exist in the country that invented basketball. Such a staggering notion probably wasn't on Dr. Naismith's mind as he drove home that final nail in the peach basket.

Here's another thing to consider: It wasn't that long ago when the Bucks were happy to get a couple of people in outer Waukesha County to watch them play. To think that someone in Inner Mongolia is going to know that our little team even exists seems almost as implausible as Jake Voskuhl dunking on Yao.

That was one of the reasons the Bucks took Yi with the sixth pick in the draft. The most important reason, the one that is making the Bucks look smarter every day, is that Yi is going to be a tremendous player in this league. You can tell after four games, but more on that in a moment.

"I think there were 100 million (Chinese viewers) for our Bulls game," Bucks coach Larry Krystkowiak said. "As long as they're not in my ear yelling at me, it makes it pretty easy.

"It's exciting for us. It's one of the elements of being involved in this. It raises the level of awareness in a lot of ways. I think our guys know they're being watched a little bit closer and it doesn't hurt our effort at all. It creates more of a sense of urgency and accountability for all of us."

Krystkowiak's quote points to the ultimate effect China whill have on all of 'us'--they're so big that for the first time since the end of the Cold War, Americans are becoming aware that there's another country looming behind us.

We're no longer autarchists, competing against the best in each other--we're back in a race again, with a very different opponent; one in which we have a huge lead, but where the other competitor can't help but gain.

How we handle this--whether we use China as a worthy competitor pushing us to our best, whether we turn surly, whether we ignore reality, whether we lose sight of why we're running--will determine whether the 21st century ends with Americans still free to play our own game under our rules, or just another runner jockeying for oxygen.

Although you wonder with numbers like that, how long until the NBA buys into a Chinese network and starts scheduling Rockets and Bucks game for 9 a.m. EST?

AP photo of Yao and Yi by Darko Vojinovic via MSNBC