Ryan Teague Beckwith, the primary reporter for The News & Observer's Under the Dome blog, is doing some interesting work on BlueNC, a liberal blog that focuses on North Carolina issues.
As the NCAA basketball tournament rolls on, I am seeing and hearing references to a place called Tobacco Road. Here are some recent examples:
Finally, there is The The, a British band whose heyday was in the 1980s. More recently, The The's song "This Is The Day" was used in a candy commercial. (Listen here and see whether the tune sounds familiar.) The group's name seems to be an inside joke on the naming conventions of rock 'n' roll. Unfortunately, the joke is now on The The, because the name isn't friendly in the Google age of distinctive search terms.
Many newspapers are taking note of the anniversary of the Iraq war. Such stories are tough to write, edit and present, but they can provide an opportunity to step back and assess what has happened and what is ahead.
Cary has a population of more than 100,000. To many of us, that would make Cary a city. North Carolina law, however, allows a municipality to call itself whatever it likes. (Hello, Village of Charlotte!)
William Kristol had to know he would be under a microscope when he accepted a columnist position at The New York Times late last year. As a well-known advocate of the Iraq war and other Republican causes, Kristol has formidable political opponents. Those opponents were shocked and angered that Kristol would be given a weekly column on the Times op-ed page. They wanted him fired before he had written a word, and their complaints prompted a response from the public editor at the Times.In this column, I cite a report that Sen. Obama had attended services at Trinity Church on July 22, 2007. The Obama camapaign [sic] has provided information showing that Sen. Obama did not attend Trinity that day. I regret the error.This is a step in the right direction, but it doesn't go far enough because the error is still in the column. It's an assertion that is central to Kristol's argument, not just a piece of trivia. That part of the column needs editing as well, which is easy enough to do online.
The whole thing about Susie being an opera singer, that was trying to prove something. You know what the headline was the day before the election, "Candidate Kane found in love nest with quote, singer, unquote." He was gonna take the quotes off the singer.Unlike some Hollywood writers, Orson Welles understood the power of well-worded headlines when he created "Citizen Kane." The "singer" headline is not just used to move the story forward. It's an integral part of the plot as another push toward Kane's downfall. That headline also reads well and has the "sizzle words" that managing editors love the desk to use in display type.
He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this :The passage epitomizes Vonnegut's view on war as well as his writing style, which has a journalistic tone. Like much of his work, this is absurd, hilarious and heartbreaking all at the same time.
American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.
The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.
When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.
The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn't in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.
She is a monster, too – that is off the record – she is stooping to anything.
The Huffington Post uses this collage of newspaper front pages to illustrate its big story of the moment. Mashing up the print media is a curious way for an online-only publication to show the importance of the news, no? Then again, HuffPo also promises to "watch TV so you don't have to."
