Over the Edge

Many of you know that I watched the second plane hit the South Tower. I wrote this piece for the following day's Fort Worth Star-Telegram, which ran it with minor changes. There's a word or two I'd change, but I'm letting it stand as an example of deadline writing.

He somehow doesn't seem to be the type, but Neil Young is apparently a big model train fan. In fact, according to Reuters by way of the New York Post, he owns about 20 percent of Lionel, which is currently going through a bankruptcy reorg.

The story says Young and Lionel have a joint venture to sell some of Young's technology as part of Lionel's Trainmaster control system. I guess when you hit 60, the rock-and-roll thing gets pretty old and you'd rather just stay home and work on your layout.

So the magician David Copperfield and his two lovely assistants were robbed at gunpoint in West Palm Beach. The local newspaper reports that while he has a gun on him, Copperfield

pulled out all of his pockets for Riley to see he had nothing, even though he had a cellphone, passport and wallet stuffed in them.

"Call it reverse pickpocketing," Copperfield said.

He probably was going to make the two of clubs jump out of the guy's ear while he was at it.

The perps were caught about 10 minutes later.

From the AP, via the NYTimes:

A guy got on a JetBlue red-eye from San Juan to Newark with a couple of undeclared lovebirds in his carry-on. (I mean, he didn't fill out the right form; I don't know what declarations the lovebirds made.) Sure enough, one of them got out and made a break for it.

It all ended happily, though. The bird was caught and both were impounded until the unnamed passenger -- who was not held -- finishes the paperwork.

Leaving aside the fact that the idea of "one-day potty training" is, well, so much ca-ca, this clip from Good Morning America illustrates just how sexist people are being about Katie Couric taking over the CBS Evening News.

If Charles Gibson, who himself just ascended to the anchor chair at ABC, gets off scot-free for this piece, no one can reasonbly complain about Couric's gravitas.

Cute kid, though. And you've gotta love the crew's reaction at the end.

Every time the RIAA or MPAA file a lawsuit, they're only proving their intellectual bankruptcy. You sue to protect your rights when you haven't figured out any other way to make money. The TV networks and TiVO this week are looking like they're smarter than the movie or record businesses.

When YouTube made stars out of SNL's Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell by carrying the show's wonderful "Lazy Sunday" clip, NBC threatened a lawsuit, never mind the spectacular publicity bump for the net and the show. Now, well aware of YouTube's buzz-making power, NBC's cutting a deal that will let put ads for NBC on YouTube and let the site carry NBC promos. The network continues to threaten Bolt.com for doing the same thing as YouTube. From the WSJ:

From today's NYPost:

Police arrested a Manhattan subway flasher after one of his grossed-out victims gave officers an Internet address that was emblazoned on the back of his jacket - and busted him when they found X-rated pictures of him on the site.

The paper tastefully doesn't give the URL. One wonders if it was on MySpace, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch, as is the Post.

So it seems that a carry-on bag belonging to a writer for Saveur magazine caused authorities to shut down the Tallahassee airport.

The bag has audio and video equipment, honey, an oyster shell, and rub. Somehow, a screener mistook all this for something far more sinister.

As a freelance writer, I especially like this graf:

Coleman had come to Tallahassee to visit his parents, who live here, and do a story on the food of nearby Apalachicola, Florida's oyster capital.

When I was writing the FierceVoIP newsletter, I met the founders of GrandCentral. I'd been looking for a service like this for decades: a single phone number that could find me anywhere. That founders Vincent Paquet and Craig Walker are genuinely nice guys with a social conscience was icing on the cake.

Rumors had been flying for about a week, but the companies announced today that Google bought GrandCentral. Congrats to Craig and Vincent; it's nice to see good work pay off.

But why did Google want GrandCentral, anyway?

Google's stated goal is to organize the world's information. Its ability to do that with textual information worries me not at all, and its ability to do that with mapping and video doesn't really bother me, either. I'm a little bugged that I've given Google permission to follow me around the Web, but I can rationalize that by telling myself that it will help Google help me search.

But GrandCentral, used to its fullest, can associate me with phone numbers I call, phone numbers (and -- when they're in the GC phone book -- people and addresses) who call me. GrandCentral stores voicemails; doesn't Google do voice-to-text transcription, too? And when I pick up an incoming GrandCentral call, Google can then tell where I am at that very moment.

Total Information Awareness, indeed.

Consider that when a company or governmental entity (or, for that matter, a matrimonial lawyer) wants dirt on someone, the first thing they try to do is pull phone records. Phone records are incredibly revealing.

GrandCentral is a great service that can revolutionize the way you use your phone. But Google's owning it just kind of creeps me out. Maybe some things are better left unorganized.

Over in the swamps of Jersey, they renamed what was once the Brendan Byrne Arena and was then the Continental Airlines Arena after Izod, the popular leisureware of the 70s and 80s. (The news angle is that someone's suggesting that the building will be more valuable, not less, when there are no pesky tenants left.

But look at the photo. All the place needs now is one of those little crocodiles that adorned the Izod shirts, and the look will be perfect. (I'd even forgo the pink or green color. So not Jersey.)

And yes, I know that the croc was because of the long-standing and now-ended licensing deal with Henri Lacoste, the tennis player. Gimme a break.

In a development sure to annoy natives citywide, New York State's highest court says it's OK for pedestrians to stand obliviously in the middle of busy intersections and force people to walk around them.

From the NYTimes:

From the Middle Eastern Times:

I was blown up last Tuesday. Luckily I can write about it. Many others who've shared the experience can't. They're dead, or their bodies and brains are so messed up by shrapnel or concussion they can't remember the details.

It takes a special kind of person to be a war correspondent. I know three: Jon Landay of McClatchy, Marie Colvin of The Times of London, and Robert W. Worth of the NYTimes. I'm glad I know them -- and proud to have worked with the first two early in my career -- but I'm even gladder I'm not one of them.

But if you're going to cover the war in Iraq, and Lord knows we need good coverage, this is a hell of a way to do it.

So now comes word that Starbucks will close 200 more U.S. stores (in addition to the 600 already slated), putting another 6,700 people out of work. I guess all my friends in publishing will now need a new "last-resort" job option.

One wonders if the severance benefits include a high-value Starbucks card and free Wi-Fi. And it this is related to yesterday's counter-intuitive decision to stop brewing decaf in the afternoons....

OK, now that I've got your attention...

At 12:01pm on January 20, the whitehouse.gov Web site got turned over to the Obama administration. The old site was swept away into the loving care of the National Archives, along with the rest of the Bush/Cheney documents -- with the possible exception of the torture docs that I suspect VP Cheney threw his back out moving a few days earlier.

After every inauguration, White House operations start afresh. This is why the W-less keyboard meme from 2000 was so powerful; it was, in fact, possible -- even if it isn't true. But all files, all computers, all phone programming -- all of it -- gets zero-ed out at noon on January 20th. That may be one reason that the White House has been having such terrible trouble with e-mail this week.

But even though an inauguration is a transfer of power, it isn't The Great American Reboot. Government continues. People continue to need services. It's not like a new company taking over vacant office space. It's more like getting a new CEO. The new boss may eventually want his own equipment in there -- and some it may be open source -- but it's wasteful and bad IT practice to crash an upgrade on your way in the door.

Google would like you to believe that it's all automatic, that there is this army of search spiders that digs out every last page and image on the Web and decides which is "better" for any given search term. It's true, as far as it goes, but the company tends to carefully elide the human element that goes into its search result. Until something goes horribly wrong, as it did Saturday morning. For an hour, Google said every site on the Net was dangerous -- itself included.

Ow. Ow. Ow.

From AdAge:

The U.S. advertising and media industry slashed 18,700 jobs in December, bringing industry job losses in this recession to 65,100...

It's not news anymore when a newspaper closes. But it's especially sad that Scripps has killed the Rocky Mountain News. Today was its last edition.

(I'm not going to link to the RMN, because God only knows how long the links would be live.)

For many years, it was the strongest newspaper between the Mississippi River and California. It was the scrappier and more fun of the two papers in Denver, an energetic voice of the Rockies. It was 156 years old, and Scripps -- the one-time owner of UPI that did so poorly by its crown jewel -- decided it wasn't worth the financial drain. The thing is, the RMN wasn't even the weaker of the two papers.

After the jump, there'll be two pieces from RMN writers. Full text, because the links will probably expire sooner rather than later. The first is from a sportswriter. The second is an awfully good obit, explaining why newspapers are important -- and how a great paper gets that way.

It may seem counter-intuitive, but today's announcement that the Palm Pre will become available on Verizon after its six-month exclusive with Sprint is pretty bad news for Palm.

Sprint has had six-month exclusives with Palm smartphones since the first Treo, so a post-exclusive deal is surprising only if you haven't been paying attention. But usually, Palm's next move is to ship an unlocked GSM phone for the world market, with Verizon coming a few months after that. But now, AT&T has its own very nice smartphone -- the iPhone -- not to mention a bunch of Blackberries that people like. And T-Mobile is doing very well with the Android G1 and Sidekick lines, thanks very much, with more Android phones imminent. So the two U.S. GSM players don't care so much about the Palm Pre. Verizon, on the other hand, could use some sex in its handset lineup.

But what's big trouble here for Palm is that the Pre now doesn't have a GSM outlet in the U.S. There's no question that there will be a Pre for the world; GSM is far and away the most popular mobile technology globally. But don't count on a U.S. cellco distributor for it anytime soon, which means it will be wicked expensive because there won't be any subsidized sales. For the U.S. market, the Verizon deal shows Palm's weakness, not its strengths.

Top newspaper execs closeted themselves in an O'Hare airport hotel meeting room today, trying to figure out how to charge for their online content. Note: antitrust counsel was in the room; no word about whether he was bound and gagged.

As a consumer, I like free. As a content pro, I know that "free" has cost many of my friends their jobs -- and that "free" would not have produced journalistic accounts of this meeting. I'm uncomfortable when industry groups convene in private to discuss whether and how to charge for their products. (Imagine if Exxon, Texaco, and Chevron had a meeting where pricing strategy was discussed.) That's why there were lawyers there.

But on balance, I guess I'm rooting for them. Reliable, curated information has a commercial value. I'm just not sure I trust them to set the right price on that value.