It's a potpourri, a grab-bag, a veritable mish-mash today. What the heck: It's Friday!
Alert Reader Officer Jim writes: "Apparently our favorite plucky tow-headed 'newsgal' got herself into quite a pickle at Harrisburg International Airport last week. It appears she was asked to step aside and submit to a more thorough search, including a pat-down, by a TSA screener. This must have really distressed our Miss Coulter, to the point where she wrote a column that allegedly resorted to first mocking the name of the security screener and then suggesting that airport security spend their time looking only at 'swarthy' Middle Eastern looking-males. Presumably this would not include our country's good allies, the Saudis."
According to a story in the Harrisburg Patriot-News:
Coulter, a conservative firebrand known for verbally eviscerating the likes of former President Clinton and Sen. Edward Kennedy on Fox News and MSNBC, took aim this time at Krista Snook of Middletown. Coulter began by making fun of Snook's name. It went downhill from there.
"The last time I was mauled like that, I at least got a couple of cosmopolitans and a steak first," she wrote.
Coulter did not respond to requests for an interview made through e-mails and a voice-mail message.
Of course not. Then she'd have to explain herself to a real reporter from the Harrisburg Patriot-News, unlike the clown that wrote the puff piece for Time magazine. The Patriot story continues:
U.S. Transportation Security Administration officials said yesterday they have not received a complaint from Coulter. However, after hearing about Coulter's comments on her Web site, they decided to look into the matter. They interviewed Snook and watched a videotape of the search, TSA regional spokeswoman Ann Davis said.
"Her account of the screening of Miss Coulter was reflected in the tape and it appears [Snook] followed standard operating procedure to the letter," Davis said.
During the investigation, Davis said, agency officials learned that Coulter arrived at the Northwest Airlines ticket counter 30 minutes before her flight, got into an argument there and showed up at the security checkpoint agitated.
Ann Coulter? Agitated? Perish the thought. She's America's sweetheart, Annie is.
Adds Officer Jim: "I hope no one ever examines my hard drive and discovers www.anncoulter.com; I'm perfectly happy with them finding www.reallybighooters.com (I like owls, after all) but finding any reference to Ann Coulter would really ruin my reputation if it got out."
Don't worry. We won't tell a soul.
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It's a little late to wish people happy Passover now, I suppose, but happy Passover. These people in Arlington, Mass., however, seem a little unclear on the concept. (Tip of the Tube City hard hat to Alert Reader Alycia)
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In honor of last night's news conference, here's a look at "One-Take Georgie." And to think that we lost the brilliant oratory of his dad after only four years in office.
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Every hubcap you ever wanted, but were afraid to ask about.
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Actual letter to the editor of The Washington Post (hard-hat tip: Gene Weingarten):
Among the guilty pleasures I may one day have to account for, I admit to being a regular reader of "Hints From Heloise." But the April 17 column in the Comics section reached a low-water mark. "Mark in Philadelphia" suggested that readers use pencils to fill in crossword puzzles. That way, Mark triumphantly declared, you can erase your answers without messing up the puzzle.
I can accept a certain amount of folksiness, some backwoods simplicity and a fair degree of low-tech common sense from Heloise. But this "hint" is a large step in the direction of devolution of the human species. It's on a par with suggesting that we use spoons rather than forks to eat our soup.
Donald Evans, Washington
Didn't "Donald Evans" used to be the Secretary of Commerce during Georgie's first term? You don't suppose ... ? Nah. Although he does have a lot of free time these days.
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Actual email sent by a Pennsylvania newspaper to its circulation department. The names have been changed to protect everyone, especially me:
If you sample again in the ---- area, please do NOT drop a paper off at ---
No time write complete sentences! No time make Almanac!
OK, it's not quite that bad, but it's bad enough. So, I'll keep this brief.
From the Praising-With-Faint-Damns Dept. comes Pat Cloonan's story in The Daily News about the move of Huckestein Mechanical Services from Sharpsburg to Our Fair City:
"I don't have any body armor."
Ouch!
So John W. Bouloubasis told partner Keith Staso when the Huckestein Mechanical Services co-owner suggested moving from Sharpsburg to RIDC Riverplace Industrial Center of McKeesport.
After Staso assured his partner that he was serious about the move, which would bring between 75 and 85 employees to the city and eventually mean up to 25 additional jobs, they sought out Mayor James Brewster. ...
"You sure this guy is the mayor?" Bouloubasis asked after that first meeting with Brewster and City Administrator Dennis Pittman. "He has a lot of creativity."
Ouch, ouch, ouch!
This is all-around a positive development for Our Fair City --- Huckenstein is going to invest about $3 million in the building and equipment --- but it's still distressing to see what the public outside perception of the area is.
Also in the News, Jennifer Vertullo had a nice article about the auction last weekend at Chiodo's.
In his syndicated "Movie Answer Man" column, Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times made a Bob & Ray reference that I appreciated:
Q. In your "Sahara" review, you refer to Bob & Ray's "Blake Dent, Boy Spotwelder." Bob & Ray fans near & far are, I'm sure, letting you know that it's "Matt Neffer, Boy Spotwelder" ("Over here behind the duck press, Todd."). With hundreds of hours of B&R indelibly etched in my brain, I cannot recall a Blake Dent in any context. --- Art Scott, Livermore, Calif.
A. You are absolutely correct and win a year's supply of Parker House rolls with rich creamery butter from nearby farms. I was delighted to learn that virtually the entire Bob & Ray archive is available at www.bobandray.com. Not many people know that when you solve the Da Vinci Code, that's where it leads you, right there to the archive's friendly front parlor, where on a good day you might meet Kent Lyle Birdley, Wally Ballou, Charles the Poet, Dean Archer Armstead and Mary Backstayge.
Just the other day I dropped in and overheard a scintillating conversation:
"Golly gee whillikers, Mr. Science! What's that long brown object?!?"
"That's known as a board, Jimmy."
As anyone who knows me can testify, I have a large collection of Bob & Ray material, which I'll be glad to discourse on at length to anyone unlucky enough to wander past. Instead of going off on a tear, I'll point you to a lengthy Bob & Ray appreciation from Neil Schmitz, a professor at the University of Buffalo. Aunt Penny of "Aunt Penny's Sunlit Kitchen" would probably tell Schmitz to "dry up," but I thought it was interesting reading. (It's one of the few academic explanations of Bob & Ray's humor that actually captures the flavor.)
In fact, right now, the Webley Webster players are getting ready to dramatize Schmitz's essay: "It's three days at sea on the pirate ship now, and as we look in, we see the first mate and the captain ..."
(Here are two box sets that will provide a nice introduction to Bob & Ray, for those of you so inclined: Classic Bob & Ray: Selections from a Career, 1946-1976: (Volume One: 4 Cassettes, 4 Hours (75 Selections)); Bob & Ray: A Night Of Two Stars (Two Compact Discs--2 Hours) Remember, buying things at Amazon.com through Tube City Online enables us to keep this high-quality material coming your way. Ha! Ha! Ha!)
Until tomorrow, this is radio's highly regarded, blonde-haired "boy wonder of broadcasting," Wally Ballou, sending it back to the stu-
The National Weather Service has been providing free weather information to sailors, pilots, long-distance truckers and pretty much everyone else for its entire 135-year existence, and once the Internet came along, it naturally started delivering the information online.
(Actually, that's not entirely true. Even before the Web, you could get weather information from NWS via your computer. You used to have to dial into the NWS computer with your modem, and it would spit back a bunch of numbers and codes at you that you could translate into the current weather and sky conditions. But only geeks knew about that, which is why I can remember it.)
Of course, the reality is that the National Weather Service isn't really "free." Your tax money is paying for it. Realistically speaking, though, the NWS would have to collect the information anyway for all of the government agencies that use it, and the amount of money it takes to run the NWS is miniscule compared to, say, the amount of postage Congress uses in a week. So, for all intents and purposes, let's say it's free.
Since it's a government service, the information is available to everyone equally --- if you're an airline dispatcher, you have access to the same data as a Cub Scout pack planning a camping trip, a PennDOT salt truck supervisor preparing for a storm, or Joe and Jane Homeowner getting ready for the weekend. If you're a smart cookie like the people up at AccuWeather, you can even take that data, reinterpret it, dress it up with snazzy graphics and resell it to TV and radio stations for a tidy profit.
Then again, if you're AccuWeather, that's not good enough. You've given a couple of thousand dollars to Rick Santorum's re-election campaign. Why should all these Cub Scouts, truck drivers and homeowners be getting the data for free, when you're trying to charge them for it?
So you put the arm on one of your U.S. senators --- say, Rick Santorum, who you've given a couple of thousand bucks. And he says, "Hey! I'll write some legislation that will forbid the NWS from providing the public with the weather information that the public has paid for."
But not in those exact words --- I'm paraphrasing. What the Senator actually says is that he wants to "modernize the description of the National Weather Service's roles" so that it can focus on its "core missions of maintaining a modern and effective meteorological infrastructure, collecting comprehensive observational data, and issuing warnings and forecasts of severe weather that imperil life and property."
Now, it would stand to reason that the National Weather Service can't collect all of that "comprehensive" data and issue those "warnings and forecasts" without doing all of the day-to-day forecasting that Santorum wants to block from being released to the public. The National Weather Service is supposed to collect all of this data and ... do what with it, exactly? Keep it to itself?
Let's cut to the chase, then. In effect, Rick Santorum wants to enact a tax on weather forecasting to help fund his re-election.
No? Well, what do you call it when suddenly you have to pay for something that the government used to do as a public service? A "tax." So wouldn't it be correct to say that Rick Santorum wants to raise my taxes to subsidize a private business and help his own political campaign?
Just checking.
Ol' Froth and 2 Political Junkies have been all over this, and I'm coming late to the party. (Tube City hard-hat tips all around.)
Suffice it to say this may be one of the most hare-brained proposals ever floated by the junior senator (R-Va.) and the fact that he's giving it serious consideration is a strong indication of just how out of touch he's become. Frankly, I liked it better when he was just shining flashlights into everyone's bedrooms.
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On second thought, it may be too simplistic merely to conclude that Santorum wants to ensure that AccuWeather and a handful of other weather repackagers to have a monopoly on weather forecasting (concealing that, like the emperor, they really have no clothes).
No, perhaps this is just part of the Bush administration's ongoing effort to withdraw information from the public record. I'm sure that Santorum is just trying to protect us. If only he had sold this as a homeland security initiative!
Or, maybe this is being offered in the spirit of Social Security "reform." Santorum should be calling these "personal weather accounts": "The National Weather Service trust fund is going bankrupt! It's not going to be there to predict severe weather in 2048 unless we do something now!"
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In other news: One of my all-time favorite writers, Peter Leo of the Post-Gazette, appears to be back in the game (sort of) with a new feature called "The Morning File." It's --- dare we say it? --- a sort-of "blog."
Several writers from the Tribune-Review have been blogging for months now, so this is not exactly any new ground that the P-G is breaking. Still, it's nice to see Peter Leo back on a regular basis. I stole everything I know from him.
In the pantheon of hack writing, one of the cheapest gimmicks has to be the dictionary intro. You know the type: "Webster's defines 'hack' as 'one who works merely for reward and not out of devotion or enthusiasm.'" Writers who resort to the dictionary lede have nothing to say --- for me, seeing an essay or news story with the phrase "Webster's defines ..." is a sure-fire clue to stop reading. (Other sure-fire phrases that signal me to stop reading include "By John Grisham" and "In NBA action today.")
Even when I was a kid, I could tell that using "Webster's defines" as your introductory paragraph was cheesy. It ranked one step below stealing your entire science fair project about glaciers out of the World Book Encyclopedia or copying your book report off of the dust jacket. (Was the teacher really supposed to believe that a sixth-grader thought Charlotte's Web was "a beloved and timeless classic for the ages"?)
Now, it seems, there's a new writer's cheat for those people too lazy even to cross the room and look for the dictionary. It's called the Google search. I've been seeing hack writers use the Google search to justify well-nigh anything (and I found these examples using Google, of course):
Tom Weir, USA Hooray, April 13: "'It's amazing that some of the people who are No. 1 overall on some people's boards aren't even No. 1 on my board at their position,' says Kiper, who has been analyzing the NFL draft for 27 years. His last name generates nearly 1,500 Google hits when paired with 'draft guru.'"
Rick Stone, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, April 10: "PBIFF has become a cultural asset in a state that is mentioned in nearly 11 percent of the Google hits returned by the search phrase 'cultural wasteland.'"
O.K. Carter, Fort Worth Startlegram, April 10: "A prolific producer, she's since had 65 novels published including more than 50 New York Times bestsellers now available in something like 30 languages -- White Hot, Hello, Darkness, The Crush, yada yada. No wonder she has 4.7 million Google hits."
Mike Sunnucks, Phoenix, Ariz., Business Journal, April 8: "A search on Google for 'online degrees' and 'online MBAs' shows just how competitive the higher education marketplace has become, bringing back 60 million hits."
Andrew Wolfson, Louisville, Ky., Courier-Journal, April 24: "The telecast has drawn a flurry of attention. It has been the subject of 40,000 hits on Google, the Internet search site, and more than 300 articles and opinion pieces in newspapers in the United States and other countries."
Etta Walsh, Springfield, Mass., Republican, March 31: "A check of the Internet search engine, Google, elicited 230,000 hits for 'Chicopee Falls,' almost all of them for the area's second-largest city. References were also found to Chicopee Falls, Wis., and Chicopee Falls, Hampden, Maine, but there was no additional information about either locale."
Stop! Please, for the love of all that's right and holy, just stop. You're not "proving" or "showing" anything. You might as well try to prove how many stars are in the sky by standing outside and counting them.
Naturally, once the big boys of "journalism" take up a bad habit, it eventually filters down to the little guys. Over the weekend, for instance, I received my monthly copy of one of my favorite antique car magazines. According to one writer, a Google search for "Henry Ford" returned more "hits" than a search for the names of several other inventors, thus proving that more people are interested in Henry Ford than in any other inventor.
It's enough to make me want to hang myself from the garage rafters with a fan belt.
For crying out loud, Google just looks for the occurrence of the phrase --- it doesn't decide in what context the phrase appears. "Henry Ford" might appear in a text called "Michigan's most famous anti-Semites" or in the sentence, "The most overrated industrialist of the 20th century was Henry Ford." Google would find "Henry Ford" in both of those pages.
And Google returns many false matches --- it might be finding web pages about Henry Ford II, who was a decidedly different kind of a chap than his grandfather; or even pages about people named Henry who own Fords. It might even find some of the 237 people from Anniston, Ala., to Bothell, Wash., who, according to Verizon, are listed in the white pages as "Henry Ford." (The next Almanac entry will be about "writers who try to prove points by searching the telephone directory for funny names.")
Still, I can overlook this kind of sloppiness in a hobby magazine, which goes out to a limited number of people and whose writers aren't paid much, if at all. (Some hobby magazines, and I am not making this up, pay their contributors in free copies of the magazine. Try taking those to the bank and cashing them in.)
I have less tolerance for hackery in a magazine like Time, which has about 4 million subscribers (and presumably they aren't all doctors and dentists). Out of all of the groaners in John Cloud's 5,800-word love letter to Ann Coulter, which I won't bother to dissect (dozens of other people have already done that), perhaps his most egregious howler is the sentence, "Coulter has a reputation for carelessness with facts, and if you Google the words 'Ann Coulter lies,' you will drown in results. But I didn't find many outright Coulter errors."
If you can't prove that something's true via a Google search, then you certainly can't prove a negative, either. I just Googled the phrase "Youghiogheny River" in summer "smells like old fish" and didn't come up with any results, but stand on the boat launch in Boston on a hot day this August and tell me it's not true. (The irony, of course, is that because I've just written "Youghiogheny River in summer smells like old fish," and published it on the Internet, in a few days Google will find that page.)
Perhaps, then, if John Cloud wanted to find some "Ann Coulter lies," he could have done something like, oh, I don't know, fact-checked one of her columns or books. You know, something that would have justified what I suspect is a generous Time magazine salary, and which could have been reasonably considered "journalism." Plugging random phrases into a Google search is most definitely not.
Remember: If you see someone passing off the number of Google hits as "research," it's not. It's hackery, and deserves all of the scorn you can muster.
I wonder what hacks used as a crutch to prop up their lazy writing before they had Google? Oh, yeah, they reached for the dictionary. You know, Webster's defines "dictionary" as a "reference book containing words, usually in alphabetical order, along with information about their forms, etymologies, meanings, pronunciations, and syntactical and idiomatic uses" ...
(UPDATE Correction, not perfection: See the comments. I originally wrote "Bothwell" instead of "Bothell." Hat tip, Heather.)
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Speaking of hackery: The Almanac was off yesterday because I was recovering Sunday and Monday from my annual spring sinus condition. Our customer service representative, Helen Waite, will be refunding the cost of yesterday's Almanac, so if you'd like a refund, go to Helen Waite.
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