Over the Edge

Dreadful news today. Just awful. My heart goes out to the family, friends and colleagues of the astronauts.

Astonishing story from the Boston Globe. Sen. John Kerry, D-MA, presidential candidate, practicing Catholic, member of the prominent Winthrop and Forbes clans, husband to the Heinz food fortune is (wait for it)....

Jewish.

The Globe did some deep genealogical research into Kerry and dug out stuff like his grandfather committing suicide in the men's room of the Copley Plaza Hotel (with considerable press coverage of the event). And in among it all, they tracked Kerry's family back to what is now the Czech Republic and a man named Fritz Kohn, who became Frederick A. Kerry.

The senator has known he had a Jewish grandmother for about 15 years but didn't know much about her, and claims to have long tried to disabuse people about his presumed Irish heritage. The Globe sounded awfully surprised -- five grafs worth -- to learn that he's not of the Auld Sod:

Numerous publications, including the Globe, have stated that Kerry is Irish-American.

''I'm sure some people see the name and say, `Hey, I think it's this or that,' but I've been clear as a bell,'' Kerry said. ''I've always been absolutely straight up front about it.''

Kerry spokeswoman Kelley Benander said the senator has corrected any misstatement he became aware of. When she was read three examples from Globe clippings in which the senator was misidentified as Irish-American, she repeated that Kerry had corrected misstatements when he read or heard them.

Kerry ''has never indicated to anyone that he was Irish and corrected people over the years who assumed he was,'' Benander said.

''It is certainly an understandable misimpression,'' she said. ''His name was Kerry, he represents Massachusetts, and he attended the St. Patrick's Day breakfasts, like everyone else in public life in the state.''

Newsday's got a story about how young folk get their news from the Web instead of TV or print. The headline:

Why Won't Johnny Read?

... missing the point completely that getting information online is reading. Maybe it should have been "Why Won't Johnny Pay Us $1/Day to Get Only the Information We Want to Give Him in a Format He Doesn't Want?"

From the AP:

 PANAMA CITY BEACH, Fla. 淼 A couple is suing the franchisee of a McDonald's restaurant, claiming an improperly prepared bagel damaged the husband's teeth and their marriage.

 <snip>

 Tracey Johnstone, owner of Johnstone Foods, said she never before had a bagel complaint and had no idea how it could have been prepared in a way that would damage teeth.

"It's a bagel," she said.

Heard any good jingles lately? I thought not.

A piece in AdAge points out that

For New York music houses -- recording studios with paid staff and a stable of exclusive writers and producers -- the estimated $150 million business was off by 25% last year, according to the Association of Music Producers. That's following a soft 2000 and 2001.

What's taking their place? Pop songs. You hear them all over, usually in ludicrous places. The Stones' "Start Me Up" for Ford and Microsoft. The Clash's "London Calling" for Jaguar -- an link so inappropriate as to be almost obscene. And nearly an entire album of Beck's has been culled for advertising use.

The trouble is twofold. The first, and lesser, issue is that brands suffer from this. A successful jingle is for the ages. Think "two all beef patties." Think "the heartbeat of America."

More troubling is what this means for pop music. It's not exactly news that what used to be revolutionary and counterculture is now mainstream. But something important is lost when the soundtrack of our lives -- the personal connection we have with certain songs -- can be co-opted in an attempt to plug that emotion into building loyalty to a product. The Beatles had it right by not licensing anything; Michael Jackson screwed it up by letting Nike use "Revolution."

Much of this is a lost cause, I know. But so help me, I'll bust the first TV that I hear using "What's Going On" to sell me something.

From Reuters:

Men who don't shave every day enjoy less sex and are 70% more likely to suffer a stroke than daily shavers, a new study shows.

A team at Bristol University in England who examined the link between shaving, coronary heart disease and stroke in 2,438 middle-aged Welsh men found that men who did not shave every day were also more likely to suffer a heart attack.

A few months ago, I got to perform in the New York premiere of The Water Passion after St. Matthew, by the Chinese composer Tan Dun. (If the name sounds familiar, it's probably because wrote the Oscar-winning soundtrack for Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon.)

One of the other members of the chorus (and a good friend) was Jeff Lunden, a composer and independent producer whose work frequently appears on NPR. Jeff was so moved and impressed by the experience -- which indeed pinned the needle on the Coolness meter -- that he produced this piece, which aired on NPR this weekend.

Everyone has their daily on-line routine -- the dozen or so websites that you check out of interest or habit. You should add one more, because 2004 gets closer every day.

By mid-morning every weekday, ABC News' Political Unit puts together something called The Note. It culls the best of Big Media's political reporting for the day and distills it into a zeitgeist. (It's so hard to find a good distilled zeitgeist these days. Most liquor stores hardly keep it in stock.) More than a "who's up/who's down," The Note details who says who's up and who's down -- and puts the lie to the notion that Big Media walks in lockstep while simultaneously illustrating how it picks a direction to drift in. They'd probably hate the description, but it's a hell of a weblog.

Hard as it may be to believe, George W. Bush is up for re-election in only 640 days and people are already choosing up sides. If you want to know who, why and how, read The Note.

If you watch the federal courts for any length of time, you may well come to the conclusion that the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals -- the district that includes California and most of the Pacific Northwest -- is off-the-charts liberal. This is the gang that declared the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional, backed medical marijuana, and (if I'm not mistaken) has overturned tons of death penalty sentences.

USA Today has a good piece this weekend about the 9th Circuit, arguing that the judges are not so far left as you might think -- and that its approach to the law may have more to do with the differences between East and West than Left and Right.

Electronic cash and universally usable stored value cards are coming to France, according to the AP.

There's a ton of reasons that stored value cards are a good idea, some of which I outlined in this piece from netWorker magazine about five years ago. There's also a ton of reasons that they're a bad idea; the most compelling one being that people have demonstrated several times all over the world that they don't seem to want them.

But them wacky French, they pushed Minitel on their country, then let the Internet run right over it. This story seems to be saying that the trial phase is over, and that the French banks are simply going to push e-cash on the country. It'll be interesting to see how the French central bank deals with non-currency currency.

The Smoking Gun reports that Benjamin Curtis, the Dell Dude, was arrested last night at the corner of Ludlow and Rivington Streets for possession of a small bag of marijuana.

As TSG wrote, "Dude, you're gettin' a cell...."

The site says Curtis is being held on a misdemeanor charge. According to New York penal law, there are two degrees of misdemeanor possession:

• Fifth degree, which is either smoking a joint in public or holding more than 25 grams, is a class B misdemeanor, punishable by up to 30 days in jail and a fine of $500, and 


• Fourth degree, which is holding between two and eight ounces, is a class A misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail and a fine of $1,000.

Two ounces of marijuana is not a "small bag" -- or so I'm told. So it looks like our boy was locked up for 5th degree possession. TSG says Curtis was kept overnight at Central Booking, pending arraignment.

Pitchers and catchers report today to Spring Training.

It is now safe to read the sports pages again.

Dan Gillmore of the San Jose Merc points out an interesting new initiative at the Beeb. Recognizing that the latest generation of cell phones can not only take photos but send them out wirelessly, the BBC has set up a phone number for people to send in pictures of news events they witness -- or are part of. The best of them are published at the BBC's web site, and possibly on the air.

This is a significant change in the news paradigm. When MSNBC went on the air in 1995 or 1996, I buttonholed Andy Lack -- then president of MSNBC, later head of NBC News, then NBC, and now Sony Music. I asked him if Microsoft's involvement in the channel meant there would be any kind of electronic interactivity with viewers. He kind of snorted and wondered aloud why any news organization would want that.

On September 11, I bet he wished he'd had some better way of hearing from viewers in place.

It used to be that candidates for prominent office might get some discreet plastic surgery or lose a little weight well before campaign time. Doesn't it seem like the Democratic presidential candidates are going a little overboard?

The AP reports today that Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) will have his prostate removed tomorrow (Wednesday) to cure a "very early, curable" form of cancer. And Sen. Bob Graham (D-FL), who had heart valve replacement surgery on Jan. 31, is out of the hospital, making phone calls, and will apparently announce by March 1 whether he'll make his run for the White House. (Link courtesy of The Note.)

Almost makes JFK's Addison's Disease or Dick Cheney's heart attacks seem pedestrian, doesn't it?

You may have heard that New York's Biggest Loudmouth, Al Sharpton, is running for president. As a Democrat. Now, while there's precisely zero chance that I would vote for him or suggest that anyone else should (Tawana Brawley, anyone?), I must say that I'm kind of looking forward to his campaign.

There are two kinds of candidacies. One kind is out to actually win. The other kind is to define issues and simply win a place at the table. No one really believes that the Rev. Al will win a blessed thing, but that's not the point. Sharpton's presence will have a revealing influence on the rest of the field's -- and the party's -- attitude toward racial issues. This may not be a good thing for Democrats, as it could well highlight a tendency toward pandering. But to the extent that that tendency does get highlighted, that'll be a good thing for the electorate, and there's always the possibility that Sharpton will actually effect positive change.

To be sure that as much light as possible gets thrown on Sharpton's candidacy, the Hill reports, the documentary filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker (The War Room, Company) will be following the man around for the next year or so. Yes, I'd pay money to watch a Sharpton back room in action.

That same page on The Hill notes that an entreprenuer is selling yarmulkes emblazoned with "Lieberman 2004."

For those of you who may be wondering, this isn't close to inappropriate; yarmulkes -- at least, those in casual use; synagogue-wear is a bit more conservative (you should excuse the expression) -- have long been fashion accessories. Around New York, it's not all that unusual to see kids wearing Mets and Knicks logos on their kippot. (I've never quite been able to figure out why, but the Mets are the Jewish team, and the Yankees are the Christian team. When a Jewish organization has a baseball outing, it's usually at Shea; when the Archbishop wants to take in a game, it's in The Bronx.)

I love the comment from the Lieberman camp:

ãGiven that heâs a senator, an author and now a presidential candidate, Joe Lieberman has no objection to people wearing many different hats,ä said Liebermanâs press secretary.

Like many geeks, I've got a ton of different e-mail addresses. For the last eight years, though, there's been one main place to reach me. As of tomorrow, I'm shutting that address down. The thing has become a spam-catcher: roughly 70 pieces a day, offering me various toys, nutritional supplements, and nekkidness of all varieties.

Most everyone knows my new address of preference, and mail through the weblog will always find me. But, lord, I do hate being run out of my homestead.

Things are a little tense here in the Center of the Universe. The ratcheted-up terrorism alert means more cops and more visible cops on the streets and in the subways. My local subway stop this evening had *seven* officers on the platform. In midtown Manhattan, I spotted two Emergency Service officers patrolling in full winter gear and heavy external body armor.

Apparently, we're about to have a National Guard presence in the subways for the next few days, and there's nothing that quite relaxes a civilian population like the National Guard. This despite late reports that the heightened alert is based at least partly on a lie.

The Blackberry messaging network is down. So have mercy -- or at least pity -- on any twitchy exec you see for the next few days. It's hell being off the grid.

You know the Blackberry -- the pager-sized device with a thumb-operated keyboard that lets you send e-mails wirelessly. Al Gore wears (or wore) one; he apparently got word to hold of on conceding the 2000 election as he was on his way to give his concession speech.

I've got one that I don't use, because I decided that I don't need to get my spam quite that quickly.

If you want to know what you'll be allowed to know about Gulf War II while it's going on, you need to read this item.

Editor & Publisher -- the newspaper industry's trade magazine -- is reporting which papers will be sending how many reporters and photographers to Iraq, what units they'll be deployed with, and what they'll be allowed to report.

[Col. Jay] DeFrank [director of press operations for the U.S. Department of Defense] confirmed Thursday that more than 500 journalists will be embedded with troops involved in the expected invasion of Iraq.

Those journalists, by the way, will not be required to have completed the Pentagon-run "boot camps."

It's not like you Britain's The Sun newspaper is the height of journalistic credibility, but I just came across a kind of neat automotive review while looking for something else.

Seems there's a company that's done some work to the Mini Cooper S that allows the cute li'l critter -- already no slouch -- to <ahem> get out of its own way with a bit of alacrity:

 ... 0 to 60 in 6.6 seconds and a top speed of 145.

145mph. In a Mini.

Sweet. This is a car that would earn its British Racing Green paint job.

If you've ever filed an expense report, you probably have a funny story about it. Here's one from Steve Otto, a sportswriter for the Tampa Tribune:

``They want my long johns?'' I repeated, in disbelief.

``They aren't yours,'' she said. ``They belong to the Tribune.''

The most famous expense account story I know has several versions, all identical but for the name of the publication. People Who Should Know have sworn to me that it really happened at Time Magazine, so here it is.

A reporter based in Los Angeles was sent to Alaska to cover a story in February. The reporter, living in LA, did not own an adequate winter coat, and so bought one and put it on his expense report. The report was bounced back by New York, with an attached note: "Time Inc. does not buy personal goods for reporters on assignment. Parka expense denied. Please resubmit." The reporter did so, with a report that had the same bottom line and an attached note: "Expense report resubmitted. Go ahead -- find the parka."

Oh, OK, one more. In her excellent memoir And So It Goes, Linda Ellerbee tells the story of NBC reporter Jack Perkins, being reassigned to New York after many years in the Orient. He cabled something like "Presume NBC will pay to move personal effects and junk to new assignment." Of course, the accounting office consented, which is how NBC got stuck moving a full-sized Chinese junk halfway around the world.

I've got a friend I haven't met, name of Jerry McGinn. Like me, he's a Downholder -- an alumnus of UPI. He and I are on an e-mail list of about 400 other Downholders, and discussion frequently veers away from the Old Days and toward an analysis of current events.

Iraq is on a lot of our minds lately, and Jerry's written a particularly good rant about why he's less than comfortable about where our government is leading us, and why. It was an e-mail, written on the fly; I've edited the wirespeak but the rest is Jerry.,

There's a case study in the NYDaily News -- apparently a propos nothing but this Sunday's Grammy Awards -- that breaks down the cash flow of a hypothetical hit album by a hypothetical rock quartet. It illustrates all the people that get paid along the food chain, including some odd recoupable record company expenses, like a 25 percent "packaging deduction" and a 15 percent "free goods charge," off the top, most of which the label keeps.

The bottom line is that a gold record (500,000 copies) selling at $16.98 will gross roughly $8.5 million, of which each member of the hypothetical quartet will pocket about $40,000. (The case study doesn't take songwriting royalties into account.)

So for every $16.98 album you rip, you're costing a performing artist about 34 cents, and the lawyers, producers and labels about $16.64.

According the NYTimes, Coca-Cola is offering its customers an electronic payment payroll service.

Restaurants, of course, tend to have low-wage employees who are barely on the grid. Many of them do not have checking accounts -- and it is the rare company indeed that pays on-the-books wages in cash. Workers who don't have a banking relationship with anyone rely on check-cashing services, which take up to 2.5 percent of the checks they cash.

Coke will market debit cards to restaurants, which will offer them to their employees. The benefit for the workers is that Coke's $1.50 monthly charge is far less than check cashers' fee. The benefit for the employers is saving time and money on processing checks. The actual banking part of the business will be run by Citibank and MasterCard.

It turns out that other businesses with transient employees do much the same thing:

A number of other employers, including McDonald's, FedEx and Sears, Roebuck, currently offer their employees payroll cards, and enrollment has quickened since Visa and MasterCard entered the arena in 2001 and widened the cards' acceptance to all locations that accept their brands.

Offering the cards are payroll processors like Paychex in Rochester, human resource companies like Ceridian in Minneapolis, and more than a dozen banks, including the Chicago-based Bank One and Bank of America in Charlotte, N.C. And even more businesses specialize in payroll cards.

In the relationship chain that Coke is envisioning, however, it's not the employer or the banker or the payroll service. Rather, the company is leveraging its relationship with its customers to market a third-party service that's quite outside what one would think is its normal line of business.

What's next -- Coke offering expansion financing? Or does it do that already, too?

If you live in coastal Washington or Alaska, get yourself down to the beach:

Thousands of pairs of Nike basketball shoes are washing up on beaches from Washington state to Alaska after spilling from a container ship in Northern California.

There's just one hitch to finding a free pair.

"Nike forgot to tie the laces, so you have to find mates," said Dr. Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer who tracks sneakers, toys and other flotsam across the sea. "The effort's worth it 'cause these Nikes have only been adrift a few months. All 33,000 are wearable!"

Back in August, I wrote:

How is possible to be Bruce Springsteen? ... How can anyone deal with a blank sheet of paper when faced with that kind of creative pressure? It wouldn't be at all unreasonable for this guy to sit at his desk with an open notebook asking himself, ãWhat in Godâs name do they all want out of me?ä

In this week's cover story for Entertainment Weekly, the always excellent Ken Tucker asks Springsteen the same question through a slightly different route, and comes away with some great answers. Once they get the obligatory "how do you think you'll do at the Grammy's" stuff out of the way, the conversation shifts into an examination of how a megacelebrity can avoid ending up like Elvis:

The key to survival in the line of work he...INVENTED is the replenishment of ideas. You can't really remain physically or mentally healthy without a leap of consciousness and a continuing, deeper investigation into who you are and what you're doing. Those are the things that will make sense of the many silly and weird things [he laughs] that will happen to you [when you're a star]! [But] what keeps you from maintaining that replenishment of ideas is an insecurity about who you let in close to you. To have new ideas you usually need to have new people around, people willing to challenge your ideas in some fashion, or to simply assist you in broadening them. Which means you have to be open to the fact that your thinking isn't everything, y'know?

The performers who suffer through their success have a difficult time making those connections, because they come from a different environment. The culture of ideas is usually over here [gestures to his left] and you've grown up over here [gestures to his right]. In between is this tremendous void that, when Elvis started, was rarely bridged. Bridging that void is your ace in the hole, but to do it you've gotta be aware of the limitations of where you come from and be willing to say, ''Well, I've gotta go out and seek new things.''

There probably aren't a ton of musicians who'll spend time in an interview talking about Bob Herbert, Philip Roth, and Rage Against the Machine.

From CNN: If End is Near, Do You Want To Know?

A researcher for Rand suggests that if an asteroid is about to hit the Earth, it may be better if governments didn't tell anyone.

"If you can't do anything about a warning, then there is no point in issuing a warning at all," Sommer said earlier this month at an American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Denver.

"If an extinction-type impact is inevitable, then ignorance for the populace is bliss," he said.

Tom Ridge, entangled in duct tape, could not be reached for comment. Nor could Dick Cheney, who was reported to be in a secure and undisclosed location. (No, the story doesn't say that....)

When I sit in bed, I can see a battery-powered analog alarm clock, the clock on my VCR, and an AC-powered clock radio. I usually wear my watch to bed, and could set the cable box to display the time, too. It makes me nuts when they all display a different time. More than a minute off and I get to work.

The clock in my car has a button that syncs the time precisely to the nearest hour. I usually listen to the CBS all-news station, and press that button more often that I like to admit to.

In the kitchen, there are three clocks. The one on the microwave is usually right. The analog one over the ovens is not; it loses time whenever we use the oven; the heat buckles the paper on which the hours are printed, which interferes with the hands moving. The mechanical digital clock on the ovens themselves hasn't been right since we moved into the place eight years ago and I've long since given up on it.

(I've also given up on my Windows computers' displaying time with any degree of accuracy. The Mac is rock solid, because it automatically syncs up with Apple's network clock.)

I like to think that this obsession is rooted in my background in wire services and broadcasting, where seconds really do matter. It may well be true, however, that the obsession led to the background, not vice versa.

All of this is a long-winded introduction to why I'm glad I don't live in Venezuela. There are many reasons I'm glad I don't live there, actually; a spectacularly painful and enduring sunburn I got there 27 years ago is one of them. But this reason is especially piquant:

Reuters, through CNN, is reporting that clocks in Venezuela are slowing down. It seems that a water shortage on a major river has caused a shortage of hydroelectrical power. In response, the country's electrical current is running a few cycles short of a full 60. (Not unlike the grid's management, it sounds like.) This makes clocks run slower.

By the end of each day, the sluggish time pieces still have another 150 seconds to tick before they catch up to midnight.... "Your computer isn't affected. Your television isn't affected. No other devices ... just clocks," [Miguel Lara, general manager of the national power grid] added. The meltdown has taken a total 14 hours and 36 minutes from Venezuela's clocks over 12 of the past 13 months, he said.

... Groucho, that is. John Steinbeck, too.

Cason showed a waybill for the shipment, which listed Spanish translations of books including "Who Moved My Cheese," by Spencer Johnson, journalism textbooks, Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath," and speeches by the late civil rights leader [Martin Luther] King [Jr.].

Wonderful. Bad pop-management books, too. I'm sure the Cuban government didn't want to raise the question, "Cheese? Oh, yeah -- I remember cheese. Hey, who did take my cheese?"

From the New Scientist:

Fifty years to the day from the discovery of the structure of DNA, one of its co-discoverers has caused a storm by suggesting that stupidity is a genetic disease that should be cured.

A friend of mine who rides mostly BMWs swears that Harley riders are the scum of the earth. Me, I don't care much. I just love the name of this Harley club, reported in the NYTimes.

Instead, the guys with the mezuzas on their Harley-Davidsons will be riding for the first time as a group in Daytona, Fla., during Bike Week, the annual bikers' Woodstock for half a million motorcyclists.