You may have already noticed over the past few days, but I've been making another run through the Blogger toolbox and seeing how I can fill the place out.
Noting the changes quickly:
*There's a 'contact' page now at the top. The info is repeated in the introductory post way back from the day the blog kicked off, but it recently occurred to me that that arrangement is getting more ridiculously inconvenient every day.
*There's now a share function over to the side. I tried attaching it to the bottom of each post, but the only way I could get it to work was when it attached to the bottom of the page, not bottom of the post.
*Finally, there's a most-popular page listing. Due to the unwieldy design and size (those stupid, stupid diamonds, mainly), though, that may not last long. I'm still trying to work out how to make it so that it doesn't stretch a page the length of Route 66.
Showing posts with label personal. Show all posts
Showing posts with label personal. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Updates, Updates, Three Bags Full
I've been getting a little overboard with my writing hours lately and it caused me to bonk on Sunday at the job that actually pays me money after I forgot to eat lunch. This explains the off day I took yesterday.
Let's see if I can avoid being so monumentally stupid in the future.
Today, there's a little bit of updating we need to do. First, Duke Nukem Forever ships today. A delay (what else?) forced it to today from the May 3 date reported here back in January. Review copies are in, scores have been given.
How is it? Bad. Really bad. Screamingly bad. Intestine-twistingly bad. Maybe-it-would-have-been-better-to-remain-a-joke bad.
Sorry, fellow Penny Arcader slash000. (That pre-order is dated 2001, just in case the text is too small for you.)
Secondly, a second sustained protest has emerged in Madison; I attended the earlier one back in February. This is a little tent village set up across the street from Capitol Square, albeit a somewhat disorganized one, as Russ Feingold found out when he dropped by for a visit on Sunday. The AV Club- the Onion's non-satire branch with local coverage of Madison, Milwaukee, Chicago, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Denver/Boulder, Austin and Philadelphia- has further current updates in the linked article on Wisconsin's ongoing partisan battle to the death. (Battle does not actually entail death.) Things are moving rather quickly now as the recall election ballots get scheduled and confirm their various challengers, and also as Republicans gear up to pass the budget that started the whole mess in the first place for a second time; the first attempt has been mired in a legal battle over the procedure used. This second run is sounding the alarm enough on the Democratic side that we may have a much larger protest once again.
Finally, back on March 5, I passed along Microsoft's request for you to stop using it. Microsoft's goal is to get worldwide IE6 usage down below 1% so providers can save themselves the hassle of supporting it.
As of then, worldwide usage was 12%. Norway and Finland were under the 1% threshold. As of now, the percentage is 10.9% still on IE6, with Sweden and Denmark now also under 1%. About half of the people still using it are from China, which still shows 33.9% usage of IE6. South Korea shows 22.3% usage, Vietnam 11.6%, India 11.5%, and Taiwan at 8.6% rounds out the bottom 5. The United States currently sits at 2.3%, with Canada and the UK both at 2.7%.
Also, sometime in the past month, someone rolled into here using Netscape. What's up with that?
Let's see if I can avoid being so monumentally stupid in the future.
Today, there's a little bit of updating we need to do. First, Duke Nukem Forever ships today. A delay (what else?) forced it to today from the May 3 date reported here back in January. Review copies are in, scores have been given.
How is it? Bad. Really bad. Screamingly bad. Intestine-twistingly bad. Maybe-it-would-have-been-better-to-remain-a-joke bad.
Sorry, fellow Penny Arcader slash000. (That pre-order is dated 2001, just in case the text is too small for you.)
Secondly, a second sustained protest has emerged in Madison; I attended the earlier one back in February. This is a little tent village set up across the street from Capitol Square, albeit a somewhat disorganized one, as Russ Feingold found out when he dropped by for a visit on Sunday. The AV Club- the Onion's non-satire branch with local coverage of Madison, Milwaukee, Chicago, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Denver/Boulder, Austin and Philadelphia- has further current updates in the linked article on Wisconsin's ongoing partisan battle to the death. (Battle does not actually entail death.) Things are moving rather quickly now as the recall election ballots get scheduled and confirm their various challengers, and also as Republicans gear up to pass the budget that started the whole mess in the first place for a second time; the first attempt has been mired in a legal battle over the procedure used. This second run is sounding the alarm enough on the Democratic side that we may have a much larger protest once again.
Finally, back on March 5, I passed along Microsoft's request for you to stop using it. Microsoft's goal is to get worldwide IE6 usage down below 1% so providers can save themselves the hassle of supporting it.
As of then, worldwide usage was 12%. Norway and Finland were under the 1% threshold. As of now, the percentage is 10.9% still on IE6, with Sweden and Denmark now also under 1%. About half of the people still using it are from China, which still shows 33.9% usage of IE6. South Korea shows 22.3% usage, Vietnam 11.6%, India 11.5%, and Taiwan at 8.6% rounds out the bottom 5. The United States currently sits at 2.3%, with Canada and the UK both at 2.7%.
Also, sometime in the past month, someone rolled into here using Netscape. What's up with that?
Saturday, May 14, 2011
Do Not Let This Man Near Your Smartphone
So let's recap where we stand on the upgrade-ancient-computer front...
THE INTENT: Buy a webcam. Also, buy computer- as it turns out, an HP carrying 4 GB of RAM- to replace the current computer carrying 256 MB.
THE REALITY:
Hoo boy.
Buy webcam, buy computer. Have brother install computer because I know not what the hell I'm doing. Things go semi-smoothly right up to the point I install the brand-new webcam which should now easily run on the literally-just-out-of-the-box computer. A restart is required to complete installation. I restart. The webcam works fine- though it turns out my voice, long thought to be at about the pitch of Local Newscaster, is actually about at the pitch of Star Wars Basement Dork- and also the Internet no longer connects. Call to Charter tech support ensues. Call ends when, instructed to disconnect the router, I discover that the very first plug out of the router was for the phone I was currently using. Call to HP tech support ensues. An hour and 26 minutes later, I have reformatted my just-out-of-the-box computer and am now stuck at a screen where I'm asked the name and password the computer is registered under. This information has been lost to the mists of time as the person who supplied it has since moved to Colorado and changed his phone number. Many blind guesses ensue. Shockingly, none of them work. A SECOND call to Charter ensues, in which we start by asking for the password. They don't have that. After long-winded bouts of frustrated babbling, I hand the computer off to a member of the family that can sort of speak Tech Supportese. Bouts of alchemy later, a guy is scheduled to come over on Monday, and until then I will have essentially swapped my old, fuddy-duddy 256 MB computer for a spanking-new, freshly reformatted 0 MB computer.
In the meantime, I attempted to throw a pizza in the oven for lunch. By the time I was roused from computer malinstallation long enough to remove the pizza, it had turned roughly the color of Selena Gomez's hair and could be turned upside down without losing its shape or any ingredients. Potential use as a Frisbee was considered.
In the meantime, here are people with brains.
THE INTENT: Buy a webcam. Also, buy computer- as it turns out, an HP carrying 4 GB of RAM- to replace the current computer carrying 256 MB.
THE REALITY:
Hoo boy.
Buy webcam, buy computer. Have brother install computer because I know not what the hell I'm doing. Things go semi-smoothly right up to the point I install the brand-new webcam which should now easily run on the literally-just-out-of-the-box computer. A restart is required to complete installation. I restart. The webcam works fine- though it turns out my voice, long thought to be at about the pitch of Local Newscaster, is actually about at the pitch of Star Wars Basement Dork- and also the Internet no longer connects. Call to Charter tech support ensues. Call ends when, instructed to disconnect the router, I discover that the very first plug out of the router was for the phone I was currently using. Call to HP tech support ensues. An hour and 26 minutes later, I have reformatted my just-out-of-the-box computer and am now stuck at a screen where I'm asked the name and password the computer is registered under. This information has been lost to the mists of time as the person who supplied it has since moved to Colorado and changed his phone number. Many blind guesses ensue. Shockingly, none of them work. A SECOND call to Charter ensues, in which we start by asking for the password. They don't have that. After long-winded bouts of frustrated babbling, I hand the computer off to a member of the family that can sort of speak Tech Supportese. Bouts of alchemy later, a guy is scheduled to come over on Monday, and until then I will have essentially swapped my old, fuddy-duddy 256 MB computer for a spanking-new, freshly reformatted 0 MB computer.
In the meantime, I attempted to throw a pizza in the oven for lunch. By the time I was roused from computer malinstallation long enough to remove the pizza, it had turned roughly the color of Selena Gomez's hair and could be turned upside down without losing its shape or any ingredients. Potential use as a Frisbee was considered.
In the meantime, here are people with brains.
Sunday, May 8, 2011
Or Perhaps Not!
Apparently, completing installation requires 256 MB of RAM. Apparently, I don't have that at the moment.
Fly-by-night operation around here, folks.
Fly-by-night operation around here, folks.
Words! In Verbal Form!
I have come into possession, via a method known in mysterious circles as "purchasing", of a webcam. Specifically, a Logitech HD Webcam C310H. I got it for the purpose of making the occasional post by, well, webcam. Pop it here, pop it up on Youtube, see what comes of it. As a plus, you'll get to see my beautiful visage.
You'll also see my face. Not quite as nice as the visage, but you work with what you got.
Just one issue: my experience with webcams or any sort of video recording is precisely squat. No clue what I'm doing whatsoever. (That's another reason for getting it; to get some experience doing video stuff.) So at least at the start, expect the video entries (I refuse to use the word 'vlog' because it is the worst word ever) to be pretty technically rough, at least at first.
In fact, what I'm most likely to do is make the first entry a reprint of an earlier entry, basically a 'best of', as most of my energy is going to be placed into learning what exactly it is I need to do to make sure I don't do anything that will land me a Tosh.0 web redemption. Once that's covered, we'll get into making new pieces for video, maybe the odd further 'best of' if I feel like it. For now, though, baby steps.
So just a heads-up on that.
You'll also see my face. Not quite as nice as the visage, but you work with what you got.
Just one issue: my experience with webcams or any sort of video recording is precisely squat. No clue what I'm doing whatsoever. (That's another reason for getting it; to get some experience doing video stuff.) So at least at the start, expect the video entries (I refuse to use the word 'vlog' because it is the worst word ever) to be pretty technically rough, at least at first.
In fact, what I'm most likely to do is make the first entry a reprint of an earlier entry, basically a 'best of', as most of my energy is going to be placed into learning what exactly it is I need to do to make sure I don't do anything that will land me a Tosh.0 web redemption. Once that's covered, we'll get into making new pieces for video, maybe the odd further 'best of' if I feel like it. For now, though, baby steps.
So just a heads-up on that.
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Rapid-Fire Book Club, Emergency Breakdown Edition
First off, a little driving tip: If your car is going to break down in Madison to the point where you are coasting with no gas or brakes and barely any steering, try to break down in the rightmost lane, directly in front of an auto repair shop that has a large, half-empty strip mall parking lot next door you can dive into.
True story.
While waiting for my car to get fixed (it had something to do with a sensor), I added to the Rapid-Fire Book Club, because I had to do something walking up and down Willy Street for two hours and there was absolutely no way a longer piece was getting done today for all the time sunk into the breakdown...
*Halliday, Ayun- No Touch Monkey! and Other Travel Lessons Learned Too Late (five books down the shelf from Eat, Pray, Love; I will be damned if the best-seller list is going to tell me what I read)
*Murrie, Matthew; Murrie, Steve- The First Book of Seconds: 220 of the Most Random, Remarkable, Respectable (and Regrettable) Runners-Up and Their Almost Claims to Fame (it was a buck; can't go too wrong at that price)
True story.
While waiting for my car to get fixed (it had something to do with a sensor), I added to the Rapid-Fire Book Club, because I had to do something walking up and down Willy Street for two hours and there was absolutely no way a longer piece was getting done today for all the time sunk into the breakdown...
*Halliday, Ayun- No Touch Monkey! and Other Travel Lessons Learned Too Late (five books down the shelf from Eat, Pray, Love; I will be damned if the best-seller list is going to tell me what I read)
*Murrie, Matthew; Murrie, Steve- The First Book of Seconds: 220 of the Most Random, Remarkable, Respectable (and Regrettable) Runners-Up and Their Almost Claims to Fame (it was a buck; can't go too wrong at that price)
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Queen Sperm The First
I'm not inclined to watch the royal wedding, or care all that much about it really. Don't get me wrong; I'm happy for William and Kate, they seem like they'll make a good couple, but I classify it about the same in my head as I would a wedding of some random A-list celebrity, because given the status of the royal family these days, that's about the place they belong. We give reverence to the Queen, but when we get down to business, we're all looking at the Prime Minister. Let's not kid ourselves. Earlier in England's history, of course. The royal family ran the show for hundreds of years. But none of those years are this one.
Similar feelings pervade this story, concerning a proposal to change the law of succession, in which men take precedence over women; currently a daughter would take over only if there were no sons. On the one hand, absolutely a good move. Yay gender equality and all that. On the other, it might have been an even better move had it been made before the royal family became little more than the English media's personal zoo exhibit.
And besides, the Daily Mail here has now got us- or at least me- talking about the royal status of someone who hasn't even been concieved yet. We're basically sitting here furrowing our brows going "but what if it's a girl?" when right now it's not an anything yet. There's a good chance William hasn't even developed the specific piece of sperm that will become the baby yet.
So let's not get too ahead of ourselves.
(BONUS BACKSTAGE LOOK: When I write something, the first thing I usually do, unless the intended post is really short, is put it on Notepad before I commit it to the 'create post' window. Partially, this is to give myself the time I need to get my thoughts in order. You can save a Notepad file. But mostly it's to give myself a backup file. That, I would very much have liked to have, as I went to spell-check, misclicked, and went away from the page. I got lucky this time; the blog auto-saved somewhere along the line here.
Just to show you what kind of fly-by-night operation we run around here. Sometimes I hit a groove and turn out something I really like in the span of an hour or two, sometimes I'm Craig Ferguson slapping the camera to get it to work.)
Similar feelings pervade this story, concerning a proposal to change the law of succession, in which men take precedence over women; currently a daughter would take over only if there were no sons. On the one hand, absolutely a good move. Yay gender equality and all that. On the other, it might have been an even better move had it been made before the royal family became little more than the English media's personal zoo exhibit.
And besides, the Daily Mail here has now got us- or at least me- talking about the royal status of someone who hasn't even been concieved yet. We're basically sitting here furrowing our brows going "but what if it's a girl?" when right now it's not an anything yet. There's a good chance William hasn't even developed the specific piece of sperm that will become the baby yet.
So let's not get too ahead of ourselves.
(BONUS BACKSTAGE LOOK: When I write something, the first thing I usually do, unless the intended post is really short, is put it on Notepad before I commit it to the 'create post' window. Partially, this is to give myself the time I need to get my thoughts in order. You can save a Notepad file. But mostly it's to give myself a backup file. That, I would very much have liked to have, as I went to spell-check, misclicked, and went away from the page. I got lucky this time; the blog auto-saved somewhere along the line here.
Just to show you what kind of fly-by-night operation we run around here. Sometimes I hit a groove and turn out something I really like in the span of an hour or two, sometimes I'm Craig Ferguson slapping the camera to get it to work.)
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Go Vote, Wisconsin
Today is the spring election in Wisconsin, headlined by the first vote in the Scott Walker saga, challenger Joanne Kloppenburg vs. incumbent David Prosser. Walker supporters are backing Prosser, Walker's opposition backs Kloppenburg.
There aren't any polls on this race. At least, no publicly available polls. Prosser had won 55% of the vote in a jungle primary (judicial elections are nonpartisan, technically), but the race had not yet gained the attention it currently has, and the anti-Walker contingent had not yet coalesced behind Kloppenburg, so the primary isn't really a usable gauge. All I know is when I went to vote earlier this morning, I had never seen such a turnout at my precinct, even in November.
If you have not yet done so, fellow Badgers, go vote. If you already have, pat on the back.
Also, programming note while I've got you: this coming Sunday, the 10th, I'll be at the Cubs/Brewers game at Miller Park. There'll be nothing coming on that day.
There aren't any polls on this race. At least, no publicly available polls. Prosser had won 55% of the vote in a jungle primary (judicial elections are nonpartisan, technically), but the race had not yet gained the attention it currently has, and the anti-Walker contingent had not yet coalesced behind Kloppenburg, so the primary isn't really a usable gauge. All I know is when I went to vote earlier this morning, I had never seen such a turnout at my precinct, even in November.
If you have not yet done so, fellow Badgers, go vote. If you already have, pat on the back.
Also, programming note while I've got you: this coming Sunday, the 10th, I'll be at the Cubs/Brewers game at Miller Park. There'll be nothing coming on that day.
Thursday, February 3, 2011
The One-Year Anniversary
Today, Random Human Neural Firings celebrates its first anniversary. For me, this is a bit of an achievement. As I established right out of the gate, this is not my first attempt at running a blog. If you Google the name of this blog- or my name, for that matter- you will quickly see another blog by the same name that I attempted in 2005. I didn't stick with it very long, because I never got any comments but for one guy (who's followed me here, you know who you are). It didn't seem worth the effort if only one person was ever going to see it apart from me.
Besides, as with a lot of my earlier writing, it really wasn't that good. So I went on to other projects. I'd attempt other blogs as well, but each was more abortive than the last.
A few years later, I came across a segment on the Today Show about Lisa Ling's excursion into North Korea. Lisa had been in my consciousness prior, primarily from other documentaries she had done for National Geographic- and, curiously, a Folgers commercial- but pretty firmly cemented her in my mind. I didn't watch The View, I didn't get Channel One in my school, so Explorer and Folgers were where I saw her first. Soon after, I came across a blog she was running on the now-defunct Uber. Lisa wasn't getting too many comments either, though she was definately getting some. There was some sort of conversation going on; more importantly, it wasn't a trollfest or the usual celebrity instance of a bunch of fanboys and fangirls gushing 'omglolILOVEYOU<3<3<3' every time some the celebrity in question ate lunch or burped or posted a vacation photo. There was intelligent discourse going on. And if there's one thing that will attract me to a message board, it's accessible, reasonably intelligent conversation. So after familiarizing myself more with Lisa's body of work (and as I've stated here before, a fine body of work it is), I hopped in. Evidently, I hopped in well, because after a little while, Lisa started noting how much she liked my posts. Well, that's always a bit of an ego-stroke. If she likes what I have to say, who am I to deny her? Uber would instead, shutting down and taking Lisa's blog with it. She shifted to Facebook and Twitter, but since I was on neither at the time, contact was lost. When I registered for Facebook, contact was re-established about halfway through the detention in North Korea of Lisa's sister, Laura, and Euna Lee. I joined thousands of other well-wishers, many of whom were doing more than I was capable of, all of whom deserve due credit (especially ringmaster Brendan McShane Creamer) and the vast majority of which are still friended with her today. After the release of Laura and Euna, things slowly got back to normal, and even though there was the period of no contact and the increased audience (still an intelligent audience; she has a way of attracting that), it became clear Lisa did still remember me, albeit a bit hazily, as on Facebook I was posting under my real name and on Uber I was posting under a screenname, mtvcdm. (It stands for 'MTV Celebrity DeathMatch', a show in which claymation celebrities fight to the death. Interestingly enough, Lisa appeared on the show once, fighting Lucy Liu. She almost threw a punch at one point. You can watch it here if you're willing to deal with an awful pregnancy subplot featuring Debbie Matenopolous.)
Besides, Lisa and I hadn't actually physically met yet. That was remedied when she gave a speech at UW-La Crosse, and since I didn't have a headshot on Facebook- my avatar was and still is the logo from the videogame Mirror's Edge- she didn't have any idea what I looked like. This led to the following first encounter in La Crosse:
Me: "Hi, Aaron Allermann."
Lisa: (quizzical head tilt)
Me: "...from Facebook?"
Lisa (instantly) "OMIGOD HI!"
That night, I first mentioned to her my interest in entering the journalism industry (I currently work in retail), trying to sum up my path so far, and to be honest, I made something of a botch of it. I babbled at her, pretty much, and it's a wonder I was even coherent enough to understand.
This is where another major factor comes into play, my brother, Erik, comes into the picture. He had written for the high school newspaper and majored in journalism at UW-Whitewater; I decided this was a path I wanted to follow. The path, however, was bumpier than I could have ever imagined.
I got onto the school paper my junior year, as the humor columnist (as was Erik), as I wasn't allowed on as a freshman or sophomore. My junior year just so happened to be 2001-02, and 9/11 came along early in the semester. Humor was the furthest thing from my mind, and so was just about everything else, for a solid week. I naturally wanted to do a 9/11 article for the coming issue. I wrote what was, for me, for the time, probably the best article I'd ever written to that point in my life.
It never saw print. My teacher killed it on the grounds that too many other staffers were writing 9/11 articles of their own. I forget what article of mine actually wound up in print. I'm really not interested in looking it up. To add insult to injury, I never got a senior year on staff. There was no staff. There was no paper. The faculty had shut it down because not enough articles had been written praising the faculty.
In college- Madison Area Technical College- I intended to major in journalism, only to find out too late that journalism was not offered as a major. There was one elective course, News Writing and Reporting, and since one class is better than nothing, I took it, taking along the AP stylebook Erik had given me. The instructor was Larry Hansen, the third major factor, who watched as I more or less blew the doors off everything but the human-interest segment (where I still scored a solid B and, as it would happen, my only piece to date that's seen print in an actual newspaper), doing what good teachers do and showing what I still needed to work on. As it would happen, I also had a manuscript for a book on journalism in the works. Again, as one of my earlier works, the writing wasn't very good by my current standards- the prose was rough; I could go back and point out several places where my arguments looped back around and ate themselves- and I've since shelved it. But the class and the manuscript got enough of a rise out of Mr. Hansen to offer me a student-help job as a research assistant for a future class he was creating. I leapt on it like a football player on a fumble. A day still sticks in my mind where I spent eight hours straight crafting a fictional crime report from scratch on basically adrenaline and maybe a bottle of Mountain Dew at some point.
Basically, my idea of fun. I was really rather sad to graduate and have to leave that post.
Since then, things had stalled out; no luck getting further articles placed in papers or anything placed anywhere. That's where I found myself on that day in La Crosse. Lisa's response was to keep at it, because something's got to break through sooner or later. Several months, several articles and rejections from most of the papers of record in the Great Lakes region later, the subject came up again, and this time Lisa suggested I start a blog.
Now, Erik had encouraged me to try blogging again as well. I was apprehensive; I'd tried and failed quite enough times already. But it was Lisa here that pushed me over the hump. The reasoning was, she's the professional, highly successful journalist with 20 years experience, and if the professional, highly successful journalist with 20 years experience says start a blog, what can you do but take another run at it?
That was last February 3rd. Soon after, Lisa reposted my first non-introductory piece, 'Burn The Debt Clock'. This instantly put to rest any 'but nobody's going to read it' concerns. Certainly someone was going to be reading now, and one of those readers is Lisa Freaking Ling. This time, this blog was not going to die in a week and a half.
Over the course of the year, she's continued to be very supportive, including a plug to a Marquette audience the next time she was in Wisconsin. If you've been wondering why her name keeps coming up around here, that's why. If it wasn't for Larry Hansen and Erik Allermann (the latter of which has helped out with editing along the way), this blog would not be worth reading. If it wasn't for Lisa Ling, this blog would not be here at all.
If you've liked anything, if you've learned anything here in the past year, go thank them. I'd appreciate it; I'm sure they would as well.
In any case, because this is, as stated, part of an attempt to break into the industry, being one year in is as good a time as any to see how things have been going on that front. I still have much to learn- one always does- but I'd like to think I've come a long way from where I was back in my high school days. These are what I consider to be my best ten pieces from the previous 12 months, presented in chronological order. Whether I have what it takes, that's up to you.
2/6/10- An Open Letter To The Racists
3/15/10- Japanese Minorities
4/17/10- Rationale and Inhibition, or Lack Thereof
5/4/10- Disrespect The Met
6/21/10- The Xhosa Cattle Killings
8/9/10- What Is An American?
8/24/10- I DON'T KNOW WHY WE'RE YELLING!
9/18/10- Cooper School and Maddow School
12/5/10- Wikiplexed
1/11/11- Easy Answers Where None Exist
Besides, as with a lot of my earlier writing, it really wasn't that good. So I went on to other projects. I'd attempt other blogs as well, but each was more abortive than the last.
A few years later, I came across a segment on the Today Show about Lisa Ling's excursion into North Korea. Lisa had been in my consciousness prior, primarily from other documentaries she had done for National Geographic- and, curiously, a Folgers commercial- but pretty firmly cemented her in my mind. I didn't watch The View, I didn't get Channel One in my school, so Explorer and Folgers were where I saw her first. Soon after, I came across a blog she was running on the now-defunct Uber. Lisa wasn't getting too many comments either, though she was definately getting some. There was some sort of conversation going on; more importantly, it wasn't a trollfest or the usual celebrity instance of a bunch of fanboys and fangirls gushing 'omglolILOVEYOU<3<3<3' every time some the celebrity in question ate lunch or burped or posted a vacation photo. There was intelligent discourse going on. And if there's one thing that will attract me to a message board, it's accessible, reasonably intelligent conversation. So after familiarizing myself more with Lisa's body of work (and as I've stated here before, a fine body of work it is), I hopped in. Evidently, I hopped in well, because after a little while, Lisa started noting how much she liked my posts. Well, that's always a bit of an ego-stroke. If she likes what I have to say, who am I to deny her? Uber would instead, shutting down and taking Lisa's blog with it. She shifted to Facebook and Twitter, but since I was on neither at the time, contact was lost. When I registered for Facebook, contact was re-established about halfway through the detention in North Korea of Lisa's sister, Laura, and Euna Lee. I joined thousands of other well-wishers, many of whom were doing more than I was capable of, all of whom deserve due credit (especially ringmaster Brendan McShane Creamer) and the vast majority of which are still friended with her today. After the release of Laura and Euna, things slowly got back to normal, and even though there was the period of no contact and the increased audience (still an intelligent audience; she has a way of attracting that), it became clear Lisa did still remember me, albeit a bit hazily, as on Facebook I was posting under my real name and on Uber I was posting under a screenname, mtvcdm. (It stands for 'MTV Celebrity DeathMatch', a show in which claymation celebrities fight to the death. Interestingly enough, Lisa appeared on the show once, fighting Lucy Liu. She almost threw a punch at one point. You can watch it here if you're willing to deal with an awful pregnancy subplot featuring Debbie Matenopolous.)
Besides, Lisa and I hadn't actually physically met yet. That was remedied when she gave a speech at UW-La Crosse, and since I didn't have a headshot on Facebook- my avatar was and still is the logo from the videogame Mirror's Edge- she didn't have any idea what I looked like. This led to the following first encounter in La Crosse:
Me: "Hi, Aaron Allermann."
Lisa: (quizzical head tilt)
Me: "...from Facebook?"
Lisa (instantly) "OMIGOD HI!"
That night, I first mentioned to her my interest in entering the journalism industry (I currently work in retail), trying to sum up my path so far, and to be honest, I made something of a botch of it. I babbled at her, pretty much, and it's a wonder I was even coherent enough to understand.
This is where another major factor comes into play, my brother, Erik, comes into the picture. He had written for the high school newspaper and majored in journalism at UW-Whitewater; I decided this was a path I wanted to follow. The path, however, was bumpier than I could have ever imagined.
I got onto the school paper my junior year, as the humor columnist (as was Erik), as I wasn't allowed on as a freshman or sophomore. My junior year just so happened to be 2001-02, and 9/11 came along early in the semester. Humor was the furthest thing from my mind, and so was just about everything else, for a solid week. I naturally wanted to do a 9/11 article for the coming issue. I wrote what was, for me, for the time, probably the best article I'd ever written to that point in my life.
It never saw print. My teacher killed it on the grounds that too many other staffers were writing 9/11 articles of their own. I forget what article of mine actually wound up in print. I'm really not interested in looking it up. To add insult to injury, I never got a senior year on staff. There was no staff. There was no paper. The faculty had shut it down because not enough articles had been written praising the faculty.
In college- Madison Area Technical College- I intended to major in journalism, only to find out too late that journalism was not offered as a major. There was one elective course, News Writing and Reporting, and since one class is better than nothing, I took it, taking along the AP stylebook Erik had given me. The instructor was Larry Hansen, the third major factor, who watched as I more or less blew the doors off everything but the human-interest segment (where I still scored a solid B and, as it would happen, my only piece to date that's seen print in an actual newspaper), doing what good teachers do and showing what I still needed to work on. As it would happen, I also had a manuscript for a book on journalism in the works. Again, as one of my earlier works, the writing wasn't very good by my current standards- the prose was rough; I could go back and point out several places where my arguments looped back around and ate themselves- and I've since shelved it. But the class and the manuscript got enough of a rise out of Mr. Hansen to offer me a student-help job as a research assistant for a future class he was creating. I leapt on it like a football player on a fumble. A day still sticks in my mind where I spent eight hours straight crafting a fictional crime report from scratch on basically adrenaline and maybe a bottle of Mountain Dew at some point.
Basically, my idea of fun. I was really rather sad to graduate and have to leave that post.
Since then, things had stalled out; no luck getting further articles placed in papers or anything placed anywhere. That's where I found myself on that day in La Crosse. Lisa's response was to keep at it, because something's got to break through sooner or later. Several months, several articles and rejections from most of the papers of record in the Great Lakes region later, the subject came up again, and this time Lisa suggested I start a blog.
Now, Erik had encouraged me to try blogging again as well. I was apprehensive; I'd tried and failed quite enough times already. But it was Lisa here that pushed me over the hump. The reasoning was, she's the professional, highly successful journalist with 20 years experience, and if the professional, highly successful journalist with 20 years experience says start a blog, what can you do but take another run at it?
That was last February 3rd. Soon after, Lisa reposted my first non-introductory piece, 'Burn The Debt Clock'. This instantly put to rest any 'but nobody's going to read it' concerns. Certainly someone was going to be reading now, and one of those readers is Lisa Freaking Ling. This time, this blog was not going to die in a week and a half.
Over the course of the year, she's continued to be very supportive, including a plug to a Marquette audience the next time she was in Wisconsin. If you've been wondering why her name keeps coming up around here, that's why. If it wasn't for Larry Hansen and Erik Allermann (the latter of which has helped out with editing along the way), this blog would not be worth reading. If it wasn't for Lisa Ling, this blog would not be here at all.
If you've liked anything, if you've learned anything here in the past year, go thank them. I'd appreciate it; I'm sure they would as well.
In any case, because this is, as stated, part of an attempt to break into the industry, being one year in is as good a time as any to see how things have been going on that front. I still have much to learn- one always does- but I'd like to think I've come a long way from where I was back in my high school days. These are what I consider to be my best ten pieces from the previous 12 months, presented in chronological order. Whether I have what it takes, that's up to you.
2/6/10- An Open Letter To The Racists
3/15/10- Japanese Minorities
4/17/10- Rationale and Inhibition, or Lack Thereof
5/4/10- Disrespect The Met
6/21/10- The Xhosa Cattle Killings
8/9/10- What Is An American?
8/24/10- I DON'T KNOW WHY WE'RE YELLING!
9/18/10- Cooper School and Maddow School
12/5/10- Wikiplexed
1/11/11- Easy Answers Where None Exist
Thursday, November 25, 2010
Hawaii's Art Scene and the Shocking Difficulties of the Rapid-Fire Book Club
I am a day back from vacation, and that means I'm back online. This is the first Internet access I've had; I came home to a busted modem. First off, the Rapid-Fire Book Club has two entries to be made:
Farquhar, Michael- A Treasury of Deception: Liars, Misleaders, Hoodwinkers, and the Extraordinary True Stories of History's greatest Hoaxes, Fakes, and Frauds
Keale Sr., Moses K.; Tava, Rerioterai- Niihau: The Traditions of an Hawaiian Island
That second one did not come easy. Hawaii has a vibrant creative culture. They have their own music style (Don Ho, anyone?), and practice it extensively. Pre-existing songs will commonly be covered in the Hawaiian style, and even if you didn't want to hear it, it's pretty tough to get away from. Artists are even easier to find. I stumbled upon one by accident at one point, named Midori, when a painting caught my eye at a gift shop at Byodo-in Temple. As it turned out, she was the gift shop's cashier. (If you happen to be in the area, stop on by; she's quite good. Wish I could link her, but she doesn't seem to have a link to go to.) Dance is particularly alive and well; not just hula can be found, but also urban-style dancing, clubbing, and if you head out to the Polynesian Cultural Center, the show 'Breath of Life' will take it away, especially when the fire comes out. Paintings, sculptures, murals, jewelry, physical movement, and much any other kind of creative expression is completely at home on Oahu.
Except books, apparently.
Sure, there are your Hawaiian books, there are places to buy them. But there aren't many. It's Borders, Barnes and Noble, and then a smattering of utterly forgettable places that you forget even as you drive past them. And it's understandable. In a city that is such a global cultural nexus as Honolulu, visual and aural art can speak to everyone present, but the written word can only speak to those who speak that language. And when English, Hawaiian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Tagalog, and your more popular European languages all try to fight for airtime in one place, any one book will only have a limited audience.
Which makes it tough to find something good that you aren't just as, or more, likely to find back home.
Eventually, though, I settled on the book on Niihau. The reason for that is, as tough as it was to find a good Hawaiian book, it would be even tougher to set foot on Niihau.
Why? I'm not a native of Niihau. There are only just a few hundred natives of that island, and while they are able to freely travel to and from Niihau, you and I are not. It's known as the Forbidden Island for this reason. Niihau is a place that hangs on, as best it can, to old Hawaiian tradition. Niihauans keep their history primarily through storytelling which sometimes mixes with Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill-style tall tales. The book I purchased was originally published in 1989, and was the first real written history of the island. There are still very few titles out there about the place.
Which, being a guardian of old Hawaiian tradition, likely serves to further explain the dearth of literature on the islands. But seeing as the Hawaiian creative soul has been channeled into so many other outlets, it's rather hard to complain much about it.
Farquhar, Michael- A Treasury of Deception: Liars, Misleaders, Hoodwinkers, and the Extraordinary True Stories of History's greatest Hoaxes, Fakes, and Frauds
Keale Sr., Moses K.; Tava, Rerioterai- Niihau: The Traditions of an Hawaiian Island
That second one did not come easy. Hawaii has a vibrant creative culture. They have their own music style (Don Ho, anyone?), and practice it extensively. Pre-existing songs will commonly be covered in the Hawaiian style, and even if you didn't want to hear it, it's pretty tough to get away from. Artists are even easier to find. I stumbled upon one by accident at one point, named Midori, when a painting caught my eye at a gift shop at Byodo-in Temple. As it turned out, she was the gift shop's cashier. (If you happen to be in the area, stop on by; she's quite good. Wish I could link her, but she doesn't seem to have a link to go to.) Dance is particularly alive and well; not just hula can be found, but also urban-style dancing, clubbing, and if you head out to the Polynesian Cultural Center, the show 'Breath of Life' will take it away, especially when the fire comes out. Paintings, sculptures, murals, jewelry, physical movement, and much any other kind of creative expression is completely at home on Oahu.
Except books, apparently.
Sure, there are your Hawaiian books, there are places to buy them. But there aren't many. It's Borders, Barnes and Noble, and then a smattering of utterly forgettable places that you forget even as you drive past them. And it's understandable. In a city that is such a global cultural nexus as Honolulu, visual and aural art can speak to everyone present, but the written word can only speak to those who speak that language. And when English, Hawaiian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Tagalog, and your more popular European languages all try to fight for airtime in one place, any one book will only have a limited audience.
Which makes it tough to find something good that you aren't just as, or more, likely to find back home.
Eventually, though, I settled on the book on Niihau. The reason for that is, as tough as it was to find a good Hawaiian book, it would be even tougher to set foot on Niihau.
Why? I'm not a native of Niihau. There are only just a few hundred natives of that island, and while they are able to freely travel to and from Niihau, you and I are not. It's known as the Forbidden Island for this reason. Niihau is a place that hangs on, as best it can, to old Hawaiian tradition. Niihauans keep their history primarily through storytelling which sometimes mixes with Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill-style tall tales. The book I purchased was originally published in 1989, and was the first real written history of the island. There are still very few titles out there about the place.
Which, being a guardian of old Hawaiian tradition, likely serves to further explain the dearth of literature on the islands. But seeing as the Hawaiian creative soul has been channeled into so many other outlets, it's rather hard to complain much about it.
Monday, November 8, 2010
Internal Programming Note
On the 16th, I'll be on my way to Hawaii via a stopover in Phoenix (yes, yes, I know my boycott; I didn't pick the tickets and am hoping to buy any in-flight food and drink either on the plane or in Milwaukee). I return to Wisconsin on the 23rd.
If I have enough time to make updates over the course of the trip, I will make an effort to do so. You're pretty much guaranteed not to get anything on the 16th and 23rd themselves; flying from Milwaukee to Phoenix to Honolulu- and coming back the same way- takes a little eensy bit of time.
If I have enough time to make updates over the course of the trip, I will make an effort to do so. You're pretty much guaranteed not to get anything on the 16th and 23rd themselves; flying from Milwaukee to Phoenix to Honolulu- and coming back the same way- takes a little eensy bit of time.
Thursday, October 14, 2010
Rapid-Fire Book Club, Lolcats Edition
Downtown Books in Milwaukee got my business again; as of right now they're expanding into the address next door, which from the looks appears to be a former convenience store.
There are also kitties at the bookstore, two of them. They resemble the two kitties at my house, both in appearance and general demeanor. One of them, a very affectionate black Maine Coon, opted to roll over, display its stomach, and while I was petting it, first tried to grab my hand with all four paws and then used said hand as a pillow. The other, an orange tabby/shorthair/whatever it is you call 'generic breed of cat', while I was looking at one bottom shelf, decided first that it wanted to have a lengthy stay on my lap, then scurried in between my shirt and jacket, crawled on top of the inside liner of jacket thereby pinning the rest of me to the floor, and proceeded to take a nap.
But anyway. Books. Six of them today.
Harris, Bob- Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy!
Hattikudur, Mangesh; Hunt, Elizabeth, and Pearson, Will- Mental Floss presents: Forbidden Knowledge: A Wickedly Smart Guide to History's Naughtiest Bits
Holkins, Jerry, and Krahulik, Mike- Penny Arcade: Attack of the Bacon Robots!
Henshaw, Richard, and LaBlanc, Michael L.- The World Encyclopedia of Soccer (copyright 1994)
Huyghe, Patrick- Columbus Was Last: From 200,000 BC to 1492, A Heretical History of Who Was First
Veeck, Bill- Veeck as in Wreck: The Autobiography of Bill Veeck
There are also kitties at the bookstore, two of them. They resemble the two kitties at my house, both in appearance and general demeanor. One of them, a very affectionate black Maine Coon, opted to roll over, display its stomach, and while I was petting it, first tried to grab my hand with all four paws and then used said hand as a pillow. The other, an orange tabby/shorthair/whatever it is you call 'generic breed of cat', while I was looking at one bottom shelf, decided first that it wanted to have a lengthy stay on my lap, then scurried in between my shirt and jacket, crawled on top of the inside liner of jacket thereby pinning the rest of me to the floor, and proceeded to take a nap.
But anyway. Books. Six of them today.
Harris, Bob- Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy!
Hattikudur, Mangesh; Hunt, Elizabeth, and Pearson, Will- Mental Floss presents: Forbidden Knowledge: A Wickedly Smart Guide to History's Naughtiest Bits
Holkins, Jerry, and Krahulik, Mike- Penny Arcade: Attack of the Bacon Robots!
Henshaw, Richard, and LaBlanc, Michael L.- The World Encyclopedia of Soccer (copyright 1994)
Huyghe, Patrick- Columbus Was Last: From 200,000 BC to 1492, A Heretical History of Who Was First
Veeck, Bill- Veeck as in Wreck: The Autobiography of Bill Veeck
Monday, October 11, 2010
Widget Alert
Two changes to the sidebar, and one to the site design:
A) 'Followers' is gone. Sorry to the one person that actually used it. It wasn't worth the space for the sake of one person.
B) In its place, I've inserted the FIFA World Leagues widget, which is a scoreline update on what appears to be every top-level soccer league on Earth as well as a note on the top five in each league. If it wasn't that comprehensive- if it had just stopped at England, Spain, France, Italy and Germany or something- I wouldn't have put it in. But since it got absolutely everybody, even the rinky-dink outfits in places like Burkina Faso and Vanuatu, I figured it was worth an add seeing as I had a spot now freed up. I like to try and hit every part of the world in my posts, not just the popular parts of the world, and that widget, for the world's most popular sport, does fit that MO. (Though it is set to default at the American league, Major League Soccer. Blogger's perogative.) In addition, as noted here before, I am working on a club soccer book as a side project (on deck: team #432, Ferencvaros of Hungary), and that widget might help me out in finding teams that are worth a once-over.
C) The widget wouldn't cooperate in shrinking to fit, which gave me an excuse to do a side-effect change I've been meaning to do for a while: widen both of the text columns. It was driving me nuts having all that blank green space on either side of all the actual content, and not actually doing anything with it. That should also cut down on the scrolling when longer pieces go up, and maybe it means I won't have to shrink down the YouTube videos anymore every time I want to use one.
A) 'Followers' is gone. Sorry to the one person that actually used it. It wasn't worth the space for the sake of one person.
B) In its place, I've inserted the FIFA World Leagues widget, which is a scoreline update on what appears to be every top-level soccer league on Earth as well as a note on the top five in each league. If it wasn't that comprehensive- if it had just stopped at England, Spain, France, Italy and Germany or something- I wouldn't have put it in. But since it got absolutely everybody, even the rinky-dink outfits in places like Burkina Faso and Vanuatu, I figured it was worth an add seeing as I had a spot now freed up. I like to try and hit every part of the world in my posts, not just the popular parts of the world, and that widget, for the world's most popular sport, does fit that MO. (Though it is set to default at the American league, Major League Soccer. Blogger's perogative.) In addition, as noted here before, I am working on a club soccer book as a side project (on deck: team #432, Ferencvaros of Hungary), and that widget might help me out in finding teams that are worth a once-over.
C) The widget wouldn't cooperate in shrinking to fit, which gave me an excuse to do a side-effect change I've been meaning to do for a while: widen both of the text columns. It was driving me nuts having all that blank green space on either side of all the actual content, and not actually doing anything with it. That should also cut down on the scrolling when longer pieces go up, and maybe it means I won't have to shrink down the YouTube videos anymore every time I want to use one.
Thursday, July 22, 2010
What Else I'm Working On
There is a book project I'm currently working on; been plugging away at it since January. If you've ever been to a bookstore and examined the selection on soccer- the Americans among you, at least- there isn't much to speak of. At all. Most of the books are just a bunch of youth drills, and most of the rest is completely World Cup-oriented.
Not much if anything on the club scene, which is what largely goes on the rest of the four year cycle, if anything at all. And the rare time you do see it, it's just general platitudes about Great Clubs of the World, and very little of which does anything to actually tell you about any of them. Imagine reading this about the New York Yankees:
Bland as hell, isn't it? It talks about the Yankees, but it doesn't say a thing. It doesn't say who Babe Ruth is, or any of the others. It doesn't tell about the first Yankee Stadium, it doesn't mention the Red Sox rivalry, nothing that could tell you who the team IS. If you're just getting into baseball, you've learned nothing.
But that's pretty much what you tend to get for soccer bios, though usually in a longer form.
Now, for TV Tropes' writeup on the same team.
Less about the vital stats, but you come away knowing a hell of a lot more about the team. This is basically the format I'm trying to follow, including the one-paragraph limit- it keeps me focused on what's really important to know about a team, and it also serves to keep any one team from overpowering any other team.
Because I'm doing what is primarily a guide to adopting a club soccer team, and I'm going through hundreds and hundreds of clubs. Far, far beyond 'great clubs of the world'. What about everybody else? What about all the teams those Great Clubs of the World had to step on to get where they are? Soccer doesn't stop at Manchester United.
Let's put it this way: so far I'm on Team #371, with no real end in sight. Two of the clubs done so far are from Botswana. Two more are from Haiti. Another is from the Faroe Islands. By the end I intend to have every single FIFA nation covered with at least one team apiece. (Again, they're why I'm instituting a one-paragraph limit. Yes, Manchester United deserves infinitely more accolades than, say, Presidente Hayes of Paraguay. But there should be at least one place where a lesser team gets to be on par with the big guns. Besides, why obscure the fact that Rutherford B. Hayes, of all Presidents, is the one to get a soccer team named after him? And in Paraguay?)
Just so you're aware, this is what I'm doing IN ADDITION to the blog. Any time I post little more than a YouTube clip, that's probably why.
Not much if anything on the club scene, which is what largely goes on the rest of the four year cycle, if anything at all. And the rare time you do see it, it's just general platitudes about Great Clubs of the World, and very little of which does anything to actually tell you about any of them. Imagine reading this about the New York Yankees:
NEW YORK YANKEES
Home: Bronx, NY
Colors: Navy blue, white
Founded: 1901
Titles (27): 1923, 1927, 1928, 1932, 1936, 1937, 1938, 1939, 1941, 1943, 1947, 1949, 1959, 1951, 1952, 1953, 1956, 1958, 1961, 1962, 1977, 1978, 1996, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2009
"The New York Yankees have won more World Series than any other team in MLB. Their greatest period was in the 1920's, when, led by players such as Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Tony Lazzeri, and manager Miller Huggins, they won the 1927 World Series with 110 wins. Over the years many other great players have been Yankees, such as Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Reggie Jackson, Derek Jeter, and Mariano Rivera. They have played in Yankee Stadium, the second such park by that name, since 2009."
Bland as hell, isn't it? It talks about the Yankees, but it doesn't say a thing. It doesn't say who Babe Ruth is, or any of the others. It doesn't tell about the first Yankee Stadium, it doesn't mention the Red Sox rivalry, nothing that could tell you who the team IS. If you're just getting into baseball, you've learned nothing.
But that's pretty much what you tend to get for soccer bios, though usually in a longer form.
Now, for TV Tropes' writeup on the same team.
"The New York Yankees: Current defending champs. If you can name only one Baseball team, it probably is this one. Being the most sucessful team in the World Series era (27 titles) and the fact that it is based in the Big Applesauce have combined to make the Yankees the most popular team in America.... and the least popular team in America. You must, by internet law, either hate them with a passion that rivals the love you have of your own team or be a obnoxious, unpleasable pinstripe-wearing fan. An entire industry exists of anti-Yankee media, and although primarily centered in Boston, it thrives throughout North America, including New York itself. The same thing goes for pro-Yankee media. Depending on your point of view, is either The Evil Empire or The Chosen Team. Team owners George Steinbrenner and his sons are, however, universally considered an example of Evil Overlord (or at least a Mean Boss), while Lou Gehrig is universally beloved. This is not a new phenomenon. The play Damn Yankees!, about a man who hates them so much he sells his soul to the Devil to beat them, was written over fifty years ago. Notable for having not one (Ruth), not two (Gehrig), not three (DiMaggio), but four (Mickey Mantle) names in the argument for best baseball player ever."
Less about the vital stats, but you come away knowing a hell of a lot more about the team. This is basically the format I'm trying to follow, including the one-paragraph limit- it keeps me focused on what's really important to know about a team, and it also serves to keep any one team from overpowering any other team.
Because I'm doing what is primarily a guide to adopting a club soccer team, and I'm going through hundreds and hundreds of clubs. Far, far beyond 'great clubs of the world'. What about everybody else? What about all the teams those Great Clubs of the World had to step on to get where they are? Soccer doesn't stop at Manchester United.
Let's put it this way: so far I'm on Team #371, with no real end in sight. Two of the clubs done so far are from Botswana. Two more are from Haiti. Another is from the Faroe Islands. By the end I intend to have every single FIFA nation covered with at least one team apiece. (Again, they're why I'm instituting a one-paragraph limit. Yes, Manchester United deserves infinitely more accolades than, say, Presidente Hayes of Paraguay. But there should be at least one place where a lesser team gets to be on par with the big guns. Besides, why obscure the fact that Rutherford B. Hayes, of all Presidents, is the one to get a soccer team named after him? And in Paraguay?)
Just so you're aware, this is what I'm doing IN ADDITION to the blog. Any time I post little more than a YouTube clip, that's probably why.
Thursday, July 1, 2010
Rapid-Fire Book Club, It Was This Instead Of Summerfest Edition
Summerfest, as you may know, is the week-and-a-half-long music festival on the Milwaukee lakefront also known as the 'Big Gig'. My family hasn't gone in years, and there's a reason for that.
We're bad luck.
Every single year we have ever gone, the weather has either amounted to oppressive heat of the frolic-about-an-open-fire-hydrant variety, or driving rain such that it doesn't even matter how fast you run your wipers, you're still not seeing out of it. We came home miserable year after year after year and eventually we just all made a pact to never speak of the accursed place again.
I hit up a bookstore or two instead, meaning we have four new additions to the Rapid-Fire Book Club:
*Uncle John's Bathroom Reader: The World's Gone Crazy, by the Bathroom Readers' Institute
*Stupid American History, by Gregory, Leland
*The Shadow of the Sun, by Kapuscinski, Ryszard
*Kabul Beauty School, by Rodriguez, Deborah
We're bad luck.
Every single year we have ever gone, the weather has either amounted to oppressive heat of the frolic-about-an-open-fire-hydrant variety, or driving rain such that it doesn't even matter how fast you run your wipers, you're still not seeing out of it. We came home miserable year after year after year and eventually we just all made a pact to never speak of the accursed place again.
I hit up a bookstore or two instead, meaning we have four new additions to the Rapid-Fire Book Club:
*Uncle John's Bathroom Reader: The World's Gone Crazy, by the Bathroom Readers' Institute
*Stupid American History, by Gregory, Leland
*The Shadow of the Sun, by Kapuscinski, Ryszard
*Kabul Beauty School, by Rodriguez, Deborah
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Internal Way-Too-Far-In-Advance Programming Note
A) American Idol, in its 10th season, has finally seen fit to show up at the hometown of Summerfest, Milwaukee. That will be happening on July 21st at the Bradley Center.
I will in all likelihood be nowhere near that even if I happen to have off that day from work. I am no singer, and the fact that that first round is a capella does me no favors. I'd simply be wasting time that could be going to someone with an actual singing voice.
B) I'll in November be in Hawaii for a week, specifically Oahu; that'll be the 16th-22nd.
I will in all likelihood be nowhere near that even if I happen to have off that day from work. I am no singer, and the fact that that first round is a capella does me no favors. I'd simply be wasting time that could be going to someone with an actual singing voice.
B) I'll in November be in Hawaii for a week, specifically Oahu; that'll be the 16th-22nd.
Saturday, June 19, 2010
I Don't Get It
Usually around here, whatever I post, be it on baseball or Japanese minorities or something I call 'fuigmism' or attempting to bypass the public positions of racists so as to address what I believe they're actually thinking- gets, on average, 15 hits a day, give or take.
But you bash one World Cup referee and the hit counter spikes fivefold.
It just mystifies me.
But you bash one World Cup referee and the hit counter spikes fivefold.
It just mystifies me.
Saturday, May 1, 2010
Programming Note
For the next three days (Sunday-Tuesday), this blog will be on hiatus, as I'll be roadtripping to Minneapolis. I'll be at the Mall of America whenever it is I arrive in Minneapolis tomorrow, and at the Tigers/Twins game on Monday night. (It'll be the first time Detroit has been in Minnesota since their one-game playoff.)
Projected starters are Max Scherzer for Detroit and Scott Baker for Minnesota. They previously faced the same opponents in a series in Detroit. Each was promptly shelled and yanked in the 4th inning. So if you're in that perfect-game pool all the kids are talking about, best to look elsewhere.
Projected starters are Max Scherzer for Detroit and Scott Baker for Minnesota. They previously faced the same opponents in a series in Detroit. Each was promptly shelled and yanked in the 4th inning. So if you're in that perfect-game pool all the kids are talking about, best to look elsewhere.
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
A Note On My Name
Yes, this needs to be noted. It's more common for someone to get it wrong than for someone to get it right.
My last name is pronounced 'ALL-er-mann'. 'ALL' as in 'All My Children'. Not 'AL-er-mann' as in 'Al Bundy'. The last two syllables, 'er-mann', are pronouced- and spelled- exactly the same as that of Keith Olbermann. There are two N's in my last name, not one. And definately not three.
Ways my last name is not pronounced:
AL-er-mann
AL-er-MAN
ALD-er-mann
ALE-er-mann
BALL-er-mann
A-dog
And while we're at it, 'Aaron' is pronounced the same way as everyone else's 'Aaron'. It is not pronounced 'A-RON'. It is spelled with two A's, not one.
Thank you.
My last name is pronounced 'ALL-er-mann'. 'ALL' as in 'All My Children'. Not 'AL-er-mann' as in 'Al Bundy'. The last two syllables, 'er-mann', are pronouced- and spelled- exactly the same as that of Keith Olbermann. There are two N's in my last name, not one. And definately not three.
Ways my last name is not pronounced:
AL-er-mann
AL-er-MAN
ALD-er-mann
ALE-er-mann
BALL-er-mann
A-dog
And while we're at it, 'Aaron' is pronounced the same way as everyone else's 'Aaron'. It is not pronounced 'A-RON'. It is spelled with two A's, not one.
Thank you.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Welcome, Golden Eagles
It appears as if I'm getting an influx of visitors from Marquette, after having this blog plugged by Lisa Ling during her speech earlier today in Milwaukee. (Thank you, Lisa, by the way; it's much appreciated.)
This blog, so you're aware, works on the concept of learning something. Anything. No knowledge is bad knowledge. Sometimes it's extremely relevant and important, sometimes it's completely random and seemingly useless. Believe me, no knowledge is useless. You never quite know for sure what knowledge you'll end up using at some point in your life or for what purpose. Sure, some things you will absolutely need to know, and you know how, but there are countless times in my life that my brain has unearthed some random piece of trivia in order to help a more relevant topic make more sense. Sometimes that random piece of trivia becomes relevant in its own right.
Remember Balloon Boy? That was the little silver balloon in Colorado that we all thought contained a kid, floating a fair ways at screamingly high altitudes, and then it turned out there wasn't actually a kid inside. A couple weeks later, the show Mythbusters aired a 'Balloon Boy Special'. The 'special' turned out to be a rerun of the episode wherein they proved, several years earlier, that in order to lift even a 3-year-old kid just barely off the ground, you would need a quantity of balloons- and, thus, helium- closer to what you saw in the movie Up.
The knowledge was there. It had been gathered. We just forgot about it.
Anyway, for the Marquette newcomers, we'll expand on Lisa's topic of choice for her speech, that is, the state of journalism. I'll point you to a previous post, concerning the focus on acquiring sponsors and eyeballs at the cost of the actual reporting, and leave that topic at that.
That aside, I'd like to add an addendum on the topic of story choice. Lisa talked about 'American-style glasses', where you don't really hear about a lot of international stories in the American media except if it's something shocking and massive and often don't hear about it at all unless there are Americans involved (note how a death toll always makes sure to include how many Americans were killed, even if it's in a ridiculous ratio such as '100,000 dead, including three Americans'), and a lot of domestic stories don't get play either.
To me, a part of the problem she didn't address is repetition.
You've probably heard an old joke about how it's amazing that the amount of news just fits into a half hour/hour/newspaper. That joke stems from back when you just had the three network broadcasts. Today, with 24 hour cable news, you would think there'd be a much wider variety.
The problem is that there isn't. If you watch enough, you'll start to notice that the actual amount of news presented by a cable news channel in a day probably covers two, maybe three hours. Four at the most. The rest of the day is usually spent rehashing those two, three hours, ostensibly for the benefit of those just tuning in, and often only one hour's worth of news, the same five stories or so, will get saturation coverage for the day and everything else just fights for elbow room on the ticker.
This is not to say that you should never give anything that kind of saturation coverage. Far from it. Some stories absolutely deserve it. In fact, as Lisa said, some deserve more saturation coverage than they get, and for longer duration. You only hear little bits and bites about Haiti at the moment, as if everybody went 'Well, Haiti's over, great job, all.' (They do still greatly welcome donations, if you're so inclined.)
But... it's a big world out there. There's a lot of stuff going on. I recently introduced the Random News Generator based on that- I make a list of all the countries on Earth plus a number of territories and dependencies, pick one at random, and report something from there. And so much of it gets squeezed out because of this imaginary cutoff line after which everyone apparently has to loop back around to the top stories. The only difference throughout the day is who's reporting the story and what their personal take on it is. We're gonna report the news like this. We're gonna report the news like that. We're gonna report the news this other way you won't see anywhere else. And then all three end up doing the same set of stories.
And if you switch to another channel, at least in America, you'll get much the same set of stories. Perhaps they're rearranged, but it's still the same stuff.
This is one reason (of many) I personally respect Lisa so much. She makes a conscious effort to go report on something else. Something that didn't quite make that cutoff. The fact that she does an outstanding job of it makes me respect her all the more.
Lisa said in the speech that those stories are out there; you just have to look. Couldn't agree more. There are some really great stories, some really great reporters and writers out there if you know where you're looking. This is why I pepper my bookmarks with aggregators, places whose primary purpose is to put all that news in one place so your task of finding the good stuff is that much easier. As a nice side effect, it serves to get you in front of a wide variety of sources, which is good, because that way you can stave off the echo-chamber effect that has a nasty tendency to take hold if you only get your news from one source, a small cluster of places.
Specifically, I've got three aggregators bookmarked:
*Fark. You'll find me posting here as 'Gosling'. (Warning, though; lately there's been a problem in the Politics tab with a large quantity of taglines whose sole purpose is to create a flamewar in the comments thread. I've talked to owner Drew Curtis about it; remains to be seen if he's gotten the message to tone it down.)
*Google News. It's Google, but with news. Enough said.
*wwiTV. This is an aggregator of TV channels, often live streams, available online, news included. In addition to all three major channels- Fox News, CNN, MSNBC- you've also got a variety of local stations and a myriad of foreign channels. BBC and Sky News of the United Kingdom, Al Jazeera of Qatar, France 24, NHK World of Japan, CCTV of China, channels from India and Saudi Arabia and Argentina and South Africa and Panama and even North Korean state television if that's what you really want to look at.
We really do need more contrarian reporters in Lisa's vein. With everybody falling all over each other to cover the same stories, there gets to be a competition over who can report it in a more interesting manner, and the result is the quality of reporting comes down all around. Not enough journalists take the approach of simply covering something new.
It's not all that hard once you know the trick to it:
1: Be intellectually curious.
2: Keep your eyes open for something you didn't know before.
3: Find out as much as you can about it.
4: Tell everyone what you learned.
The quality of writing will come the more you work at it. I once had a humor column for a high school newspaper, also carrying the name 'Random Human Neural Firings'. (It just sounded good.) You don't want to read those old columns. I don't want to read those old columns. That's a pretty good sign that you're improving as a writer: when you look back on your own past writing and cringe.
Marquette, you guys are new, you guys are green, you don't have any bad habits yet. Make sure you don't pick any up.
This blog, so you're aware, works on the concept of learning something. Anything. No knowledge is bad knowledge. Sometimes it's extremely relevant and important, sometimes it's completely random and seemingly useless. Believe me, no knowledge is useless. You never quite know for sure what knowledge you'll end up using at some point in your life or for what purpose. Sure, some things you will absolutely need to know, and you know how, but there are countless times in my life that my brain has unearthed some random piece of trivia in order to help a more relevant topic make more sense. Sometimes that random piece of trivia becomes relevant in its own right.
Remember Balloon Boy? That was the little silver balloon in Colorado that we all thought contained a kid, floating a fair ways at screamingly high altitudes, and then it turned out there wasn't actually a kid inside. A couple weeks later, the show Mythbusters aired a 'Balloon Boy Special'. The 'special' turned out to be a rerun of the episode wherein they proved, several years earlier, that in order to lift even a 3-year-old kid just barely off the ground, you would need a quantity of balloons- and, thus, helium- closer to what you saw in the movie Up.
The knowledge was there. It had been gathered. We just forgot about it.
Anyway, for the Marquette newcomers, we'll expand on Lisa's topic of choice for her speech, that is, the state of journalism. I'll point you to a previous post, concerning the focus on acquiring sponsors and eyeballs at the cost of the actual reporting, and leave that topic at that.
That aside, I'd like to add an addendum on the topic of story choice. Lisa talked about 'American-style glasses', where you don't really hear about a lot of international stories in the American media except if it's something shocking and massive and often don't hear about it at all unless there are Americans involved (note how a death toll always makes sure to include how many Americans were killed, even if it's in a ridiculous ratio such as '100,000 dead, including three Americans'), and a lot of domestic stories don't get play either.
To me, a part of the problem she didn't address is repetition.
You've probably heard an old joke about how it's amazing that the amount of news just fits into a half hour/hour/newspaper. That joke stems from back when you just had the three network broadcasts. Today, with 24 hour cable news, you would think there'd be a much wider variety.
The problem is that there isn't. If you watch enough, you'll start to notice that the actual amount of news presented by a cable news channel in a day probably covers two, maybe three hours. Four at the most. The rest of the day is usually spent rehashing those two, three hours, ostensibly for the benefit of those just tuning in, and often only one hour's worth of news, the same five stories or so, will get saturation coverage for the day and everything else just fights for elbow room on the ticker.
This is not to say that you should never give anything that kind of saturation coverage. Far from it. Some stories absolutely deserve it. In fact, as Lisa said, some deserve more saturation coverage than they get, and for longer duration. You only hear little bits and bites about Haiti at the moment, as if everybody went 'Well, Haiti's over, great job, all.' (They do still greatly welcome donations, if you're so inclined.)
But... it's a big world out there. There's a lot of stuff going on. I recently introduced the Random News Generator based on that- I make a list of all the countries on Earth plus a number of territories and dependencies, pick one at random, and report something from there. And so much of it gets squeezed out because of this imaginary cutoff line after which everyone apparently has to loop back around to the top stories. The only difference throughout the day is who's reporting the story and what their personal take on it is. We're gonna report the news like this. We're gonna report the news like that. We're gonna report the news this other way you won't see anywhere else. And then all three end up doing the same set of stories.
And if you switch to another channel, at least in America, you'll get much the same set of stories. Perhaps they're rearranged, but it's still the same stuff.
This is one reason (of many) I personally respect Lisa so much. She makes a conscious effort to go report on something else. Something that didn't quite make that cutoff. The fact that she does an outstanding job of it makes me respect her all the more.
Lisa said in the speech that those stories are out there; you just have to look. Couldn't agree more. There are some really great stories, some really great reporters and writers out there if you know where you're looking. This is why I pepper my bookmarks with aggregators, places whose primary purpose is to put all that news in one place so your task of finding the good stuff is that much easier. As a nice side effect, it serves to get you in front of a wide variety of sources, which is good, because that way you can stave off the echo-chamber effect that has a nasty tendency to take hold if you only get your news from one source, a small cluster of places.
Specifically, I've got three aggregators bookmarked:
*Fark. You'll find me posting here as 'Gosling'. (Warning, though; lately there's been a problem in the Politics tab with a large quantity of taglines whose sole purpose is to create a flamewar in the comments thread. I've talked to owner Drew Curtis about it; remains to be seen if he's gotten the message to tone it down.)
*Google News. It's Google, but with news. Enough said.
*wwiTV. This is an aggregator of TV channels, often live streams, available online, news included. In addition to all three major channels- Fox News, CNN, MSNBC- you've also got a variety of local stations and a myriad of foreign channels. BBC and Sky News of the United Kingdom, Al Jazeera of Qatar, France 24, NHK World of Japan, CCTV of China, channels from India and Saudi Arabia and Argentina and South Africa and Panama and even North Korean state television if that's what you really want to look at.
We really do need more contrarian reporters in Lisa's vein. With everybody falling all over each other to cover the same stories, there gets to be a competition over who can report it in a more interesting manner, and the result is the quality of reporting comes down all around. Not enough journalists take the approach of simply covering something new.
It's not all that hard once you know the trick to it:
1: Be intellectually curious.
2: Keep your eyes open for something you didn't know before.
3: Find out as much as you can about it.
4: Tell everyone what you learned.
The quality of writing will come the more you work at it. I once had a humor column for a high school newspaper, also carrying the name 'Random Human Neural Firings'. (It just sounded good.) You don't want to read those old columns. I don't want to read those old columns. That's a pretty good sign that you're improving as a writer: when you look back on your own past writing and cringe.
Marquette, you guys are new, you guys are green, you don't have any bad habits yet. Make sure you don't pick any up.
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