Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

So last week, I told my friend Amanda that I would put her picture on my blog, for a reason that's too long and mundane to explain (suffice it to say, if you want your picture on the blog, all you probably have to do is ask).

However, comma, now there's a news hook, so to speak, as today, she finally cut off the pink portion of her hair. It's the start of a new era, I suppose. Amanda has had pink hair as long as I've known her. So, because Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun loves its friends, this is your favorite blog wishing Amanda the best of luck in the new, non-pink-hair epoch.

Bayonne on the teevee

A few big Bayonne-related events on big-time television recently:

# Young Mackenzie Brown, a 12-year-old Little Leaguer, threw a perfect game, becoming the first girl in the history of Bayonne to throw a perfect game. She struck out 12 batters, including the final six. She was invited to throw out the first pitch of last Saturday's game between the Mets and the Nationals at Citi Field. (Is there any doubt that she threw a strike?) Ninety-nine out of a hundred kids would pop their jersey and start acting like the king (or queen) of baseball if they threw a perfect game. However, comma, 99 out of a hundred kids aren't from Bayonne. Here's Mackenzie, displaying the type of poise, purpose, and sense of priority that's pure, archetypal Bayonne:

Although the perfect game has earned her national attention, including television interviews and seeing her own highlight reel on TV, Brown said the best thing about it is "probably just being able to throw like that," according to the newspaper.

Awesome.

# This is a segment from CBS Sunday Morning about my friend's dad. Long story short (and I'll try to make it real short, because you should really watch the video): Jonathan Singer is a podiatrist in Bayonne. He's also a photographer, and he's got a novel technique for photographing flowers (not that novel, of course, since it's derived from the Dutch masters). His photographs are so good that the Smithsonian Institution gave him access to their rare and endangered flower collection, flowers that now appear in Dr. Singer's opus, Botanica Magnifica. They say, without irony or exaggeration, that he's done for flowers what Audobon did for birds. High praise indeed.

Dr. Singer was always an interesting character, but who expects their friend's pal to get a segment on a morning show? Or an article written about him in Vanity Fair? Or write a huge book? Isn't that cool?

Important question

Why is the closed-off, under-construction half of the Arlington Green Line stop lit like a dentist's office, and the open-for-business half is lit like Buffalo Bill's basement in Silence of the Lambs?

I don't begrudge the construction workers their well-lit jobsite; they should have as much light as they need. But now that we know that it's possible for that station to have bright, inviting light, isn't it about time we gave the actual station, where thousands of commuters wait for the train every day, the same treatment? I don't often use the Arlington stop, and I'm glad I don't. It's like the train station in downtown Bratislava down there. Soul-crushing stuff.

Official friend of DD&U

For those of you who, like Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun, are living up here in the Hub of the Universe and thinking "where can I possibly go to eat tonight," I've got a tremendous treat for you: Dish This!, a blog written by my pal, um, Dish Gal. (Her true identity is a tenaciously guarded secret. I'll never tell!)

Dish This (and Dish Gal will forgive me if I dispense with the exclamation point) is great for a number of reasons. There's a ton of restaurant reviews from a bunch of Boston neighborhoods, and they almost always include pictures, so it's easy to judge how big portions are (and Dish Gal's opinions are spot-on: I've been to two Dish This–recommended restaurants in the past week, Gaslight and Antico Forno, and they were great.) And it's not just reviews. Dish This points you in the direction of all the food-related ephemera out there on the Intertubes you could possibly need.

And finally, Dish Gal writes with the whimsical style of someone that actually enjoys what she's doing. So good for her for finding a nice little niche (unlike some other blogs, which write about TV commercials, Gossip Girl, politics, laundry, journalism, the T, music, and nonsense. Woops.) Go throw Dish This in the ol' Google reader, folks.

Music is my imaginary friend

Listen to a little Blink 182.

But before you do, let me vent for a sec about how this song was like, my anthem when I was in grammar school and high school. Younger readers will be mystified by this, but every day after school I would go to my room and turn the radio on while I did my homework, and I would always leave a blank tape in the stereo. Every time "Dammit" came on, and then later "Josie," I would hit "record." As a consequence, I had a stack full of radio mix tapes, the majority of which had this song at least once on them. I've never seen the video, and I was disheartened (to say the least) that it took such a conceptually goofy (and childishly literal) approach. You guys are killing my youth!

blink-182 |MTV Music

A day late, but hopefully not a buck short: the GG diary

You can imagine that after like, a hundred weeks of no new Gossip Girl, I would be 100 percent on top of yesterday's new episode. Unfortunately, it's playoff season, and my roommate absolutely NEEDED to watch the Rangers get shut out by the Capitals on our big TV. Fortunately, your favorite blogger has the patience of . . . that guy that has a lot of patience. And also compassionate, because I know you folks have been jonesing for some GG levity on the ol' blog. This one was a stunner.

9:30 I’m watching on DVR, so the times are all off. Woops. On another note, go Caps.

My other roommate, who barely watches, recognized it at the word go: Blair is a nutcase. Nice dream.

Cyrus is back. This is tremendous news.

9:32 I forgot that Serena made the completely irresponsible decision to take a trip to Spain with Poppy and her boyfriend.

. . . or maybe Poppy wasn’t there. A mystery!

9:34 Nate? Getting into Columbia? By himself? Maybe grandpa didn’t make a call, but I’m sure a call wasn’t even necessary. It’s Nate we’re talking about, people. Columbia material, he ain't.

9:35 Who’s this greasy chucker that Jenny is doing homework with? What a decidedly ordinary looking young chap.

9:37 With Bart out of the picture, I feel like there’s been a manipulative-jerk-shaped hole left in my heart. Thank you, Grandpa Vanderbilt.

I’ve legitimately forgotten all of the little GG spoilers I’ve read online. And now I’m wracking my brain trying to figure out why s needs a lawyer.

9:40 Is it ok for me to read a little antisemitism in B’s steadfast refusal to be around for the Seder?

“You look familiar. Have you worked for me before?” Welcome back. Eleanor.

9:43 Nate, choosing Columbia and showing some rare backbone. What am I supposed to think?

Oh, that’s right. Serena got married in Spain. I knew that!

9:45 I’m glad Dan is displaying a nice little bit of incredulity and indignation at Serena’s ridiculous story. And he’s right! Theirs is a love that transcends reality, and they couldn’t make it work, but then Serena goes and gets married to Poppy’s ex? As Brodie Bruce would say, the guy’s a walking hard-on!

9:50 “If you hear screams, don’t be alarmed. We’re fine.” Welcome back, chuck. Actually, welcome back everybody. How did I survive all those weeks without gg?

9:52 Nate! I’m not prepared for you to not be a drip!

9:53 You do owe Gabriel at least a talk, S.

. . . and Serena, I swear on everything good and holy on God’s sweet and merciful creation, if you drag Dan into this and break his heart . . . well, I don’t know what I’ll do. But it’ll be bad!

9:56 Sitting in Elijah’s seat is bad juju. This Seder can only end poorly!

9:58 Ooooh. The rare bit of long-term continuity on television. I COMEPLETELY forgot about what happened at the Kiss on the Lips party. Bravo, GG writers. Bravo.

What is it with this show and adults mixing kids up in their games? Does Grandpa Vanderbilt REALLY need to exact vengeance on a 17 year old girl?

10:02 Is it bad for me to read a little bit of antisemitism in every character’s willingness to make a mockery out of this most holy of rituals?

The viewing public can’t think of a single reason why you should trust B either, Nate.

Can we get a prequel episode about the Constance Mother-Daughter Luncheon? That incident with the lacrosse team sounds like fun!

10:06 Gabriel leaves, Serena follows, and then . . . hello, god. How did you get out of your machine?

There’s definitely something uplifting about Nate and Chuck actually acting like pals. Remember when they used to smoke joints in the park together?

10:09 And then Rufus suddenly doesn’t like owning an art gallery any more? How convenient. Now Dan can go to college.

10:11 And then Chuck is suddenly apologizing for being a lecherous creep? GG writers, you’re throwing a LOT at us this ep. Take it easy!

10:13 And then Blair is suddenly cool with NYU? And easily reconciles with Nate? My head = spinning

Oooooooh baby! Poppy and Gabriel, conspiring against Aerena. I couldn’t be more excited. And S, don’t forget that I promised it would be bad news if you dragged Dan into your mess for nothing. You better hope he doesn’t take this Gabriel business the wrong way!

Happy Patriots' Day

Well, precious readers, we're approaching the close of the best day of the year, Patriots' Day. It was a good one! I hung out with some friends, had some beers, watched the Boston Marathon. Couldn't ask for much more.

My pal was visiting this weekend, which didn't leave a ton of free time for blogging over the past few days, but hopefully I'll get around to putting up some stuff for you folks. I dumped everything in my Google Reader, so I have absolutely no idea what's been going on in the world. I hope I haven't missed anything.

And did I tell you about the pyogenic granuloma in my mouth? No? Look it up. I don't have the heart to type about it.

FYI

Ben Linus's father on Lost is actually Uncle Rico from Napoleon Dynamite. Cool?

Tax Day hijinks

You can imagine my dismay as I strolled through Government Center on the way home from work when I saw all sorts of Tea Partiers, placards in tow, walking away from Faneuil Hall. I'd missed all the fun!

If you're not aware, these tea parties were organized for sites all across the country, as a protest of . . . I can't really say. Higher taxes on the wealthy? Mortgage cramdown legislation? The Wall Street bailout? Tariffs on newspapers, legal documents, and playing cards? Who knows. The whole movement has become a catch-all for all manner of glibertarian causes célèbres. And I wanted to watch!

I did manage to catch a few pithy signs. "Free markets, not free loaders" was a good one, but not as good as "I can stimulate myself." I ran into someone who was apparently a member of the "Tar and Feather Committee," carrying a large sign entreating her fellow citizens to impeach those responsible for TARP.

However, comma, the highlight of my early evening was walking by a long-haired, bearded gentleman with a professional-looking sign that read "It's time to water the tree of liberty," a sign which, for obvious reasons, I found to be long on rhetoric and short on sanity. So as I read, I shook my head and chuckled, not because I found anything particularly funny, but rather as a cloaking device to hide my dread. As I walked past, the young revolutionary looked me in the eye and thrust an object in my hand. This:


A free book! I had this guy all wrong. Sure, he implied that letting Congressionally approved sunsets on tax cuts for the wealthy take place was cause for bloody and violent revolution, but he gave me a free book. Dedicated readers of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun know that my motto is "If it's free, it's for me." Will I read it? Eh. Probably not, although to paraphrase my boss, Ron Paul is a lunatic, but he's my kind of lunatic. Irregardless, I got something for free, so if you're reading, Angry-Sign-Carrying-Guy, thanks!

. . . without news

I'm a little late to the game on this one, but here's a fascinating piece by Clay Shirky about the tough reality that the newspaper industry has to face up to. Shirky is an Internet consultant, but he puts on his cultural historian hat, comparing the current newspaper crisis to the revolutionary changes that occurred when the printing press was invented. It's a great piece, and I recommend you read the whole thing. Shirky certainly doesn't pull any punches. Here's a great quote:

And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

Music is my imaginary friend

Listen to a little The Academy Is . . .

But before you do, join me in shaking your fist menacingly at bands who post videos on YouTube with the embed feature disabled. I'm looking at you, Mae.

The Academy Is... |MTV Music

This blog was written by a professional

So this afternoon, I participated in a panel discussion, put on by the Boston College Career Center, for students interested in careers in writing. No joke!

My fellow panelists were Michele Meek, a screenwriter/director who founded NewEnglandFilm.com, and Erin Dionne, whose young adult novel Models Don't Eat Chocolate Cookies was recently published by Dial Books.

I gotta tell ya, it was a little jarring, being asked to represent long form narrative journalism, sitting next to one person who has a three-book deal with a Penguin imprint, and another who actually publishes a magazine and has written and directed award-winning films. That is to say, these were real people making it in the writing business, and I was just me. But I like to think I held my own, and I gave some good advice to the youngsters. The organizer from the Career Center said she would do a post on the Center's blog about the event, so as soon as that comes up, I'll pass it along to you guys.

Cassandra shrieks

Hardcore readers of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun (and by hardcore, I mean readers who took the time to pore through my oeuvre in the archives of the Heights, the independent student newspaper of Boston College) will recall a column your favorite blogger penned waaaaaaaay back in 2002 about the Unz Initiative, a ballot initiative which essentially eliminated bilingual education in Massachusetts. As you can tell from my righteously indignant rhetoric (I was able to squeeze in "the voters of Massachusetts fell victim to clever sophistry and a willful manipulation of facts" and accused the fair people of this Commonwealth of perpetrating "an anachronistic display of nativism"), I wasn't a big fan.

Six and a half years later, it appears that the facts are starting to back me up. This isn't an "I told you so" post. Rather, it's meant to make you think, once again, about why we still make decisions on matters as hefty as the education of our children in the same way as we decide the new color of M&Ms.

Music is my imaginary friend

Listen to a little Straylight Run

Straylight Run |MTV Music

Classic DD&U

Never-ending battle
June 7, 2007

Do you ever notice that every commercial for toothpaste, toothbrushes, or mouthwash always mentions that brushing and flossing is the best way to get a healthy smile, but . . . and then the pitch. Little plastic dealies coming out of the bristles. Flavor crumbs in the paste. Some kind of high-tech acid polymer that gets between teeth. The purpose of every advance in consumer dental products, it seems, is to give flossing the old end-around.

They don’t even advertise floss! And it’s not like they haven’t made improvements in the world of floss. I’ve seen all kinds of fancy different flosses at the drug store, but awareness is built solely through word of mouth (Get it? Mouth? ‘Cause it’s floss? Hello?). I understand there are economic factors here, and it’s in the interest of Big Toothpaste to sell ten-dollar electric gizmos as opposed to 99-cent rolls of floss, but doesn’t it bother anyone that our collective oral health is in the hands of people that try to convince that we don’t need the stuff we really need? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.

I’m not really sure where this came from. I just like flossing, I guess.

. . . without news

Lots of stuff piled up last week while I was moaning about my wisdom teeth. Let's take a look at the future of journalism today, shall we?

# Perhaps the biggest news was the announcement that the Huffington Post was teaming up with a number of philanthropies to form the Huffington Post Investigative Fund. The fund will basically support a team of investigative reporters, whose focus will be the economy. Whatever work they do will be available for publication anywhere. Here's a post from Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at NYU who will be a senior adviser on the project, with some more details. Here's my favorite part:

But I also counseled Nick and Arianna (she will help raise money for the fund, and find partners for it) that the best approach is to have no orthodoxy and to support very traditional investigative reporting by paid pros who are good at it, as well as teams of pros and amateurs, students working with masters of the craft, crowdsourced investigations, and perhaps other methods. They were already there with an ecumenical approach, combining old and new.

I won't say that this is THE model that's going to work; I think the point is that the Investigative Fund could be a success, as far as it goes. At its best, I think a non-profit project like this can be a credible and high-profile part of the eventual melange of sources from which we'll all eventually get our news. The idea of leveraging the talents of amateur experts and novice reporters and crowdsourcing certain reporting tasks (something Talking Points Memo does frequently) is very exciting. The more people have a vested interest in the news, the better, I say.

# Two posts on the same topic: the oft-forgotten idea that in many cases, what's bringing newspapers down is plain old poor management. Athenae over at First Draft spews some righteous venom at Conrad Black and David Radner, who escorted the Chicago Sun-Times right into bankruptcy. Daniel Gross in Newsweek has a bit more of a measured approach. Here's a good quote:

The actions of the top executives in other bankrupt newspaper companies were criminal only if you consider gross financial stupidity and recklessness to be jailing offenses. Who loads up newspapers—cyclical companies whose revenues are in secular decline thanks to the disappearance of classified advertisements and the rise of the Internet—with tons of debt at precisely the wrong time? Financial geniuses, that's who.

Newspapers are businesses, obviously. But they're not, as Gross writes, "assets to be flipped, leveraged, and stripped." In any given city, the local newspaper is a public trust, and it fills a need beyond those of other businesses. To piggyback off Gross's example of mattress companies, if Sealy were to go bankrupt, that would be bad, but you could still buy a Serta. If the Baltimore Sun goes bankrupt, well, then Baltimore doesn't have a newspaper, and there are very dire consequences to that prospect.

# At Slate, Jack Shafer calls for a return to yellow journalism. Shafer goes a bit into the history of yellow journalism, and dispels some oft-bandied-about myths. Money-ish quote:

Far from being a flavor consumed by only the poor and immigrants, yellow newspapers enjoyed wide readership across class, sex, and age lines. Media historian John D. Stevens found that the yellow papers "published a fair amount of sober financial, political, and diplomatic information." They crusaded against the privileged and the powerful; they exposed corruption in government and corporations and "probably encouraged the rise of magazine muckraking in the early twentieth century." The yellow papers also paid reporters well, which is a big plus in their favor.

Sober objectivity is important in journalism, and so is the adversarial relationship that journalists are supposed to have with those who pull the levers of power. The problem with many journalists today, especially the big media stars on TV and in the Washington press corps, is that they view that objectivity and adversarial role as states of being, and not goals that need to be constantly striven for. Read any post by Glenn Greenwald or on Media Matters for examples of our media stars acting more as stenographers than as the people who are paid to ask the tough questions and keep our leaders' feet to the fire. (The press corps' general acquiescence to the Bush administration's claims leading up to the Iraq War is the prime, although far from the only, example.) All of this is to say that it's not like we're living in a golden age of quality journalism. It would be arrogant to think that there's nothing we can learn from yellow journalists.

# This was a very interesting post from the Times' Idea of the Day blog. The gist: advertising just isn't enough. The post quotes Eric Clemons, a professor at Wharton, who believes that even if newspapers could develop a decent business model based on Internet advertising, the revenue wouldn't be sufficient. The general Internet-using public has more effective and more trustworthy ways of determining what products they want to purchase. Definitely click through to Clemons's TechCrunch post: it gets feisty!