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Media
October 23, 2005
You Can Say That Again
As if by divine intervention, Scott Bolinder, the publisher of The Purpose-Driven Life, told the New Yorker's Malcolm Gladwell that "being able to launch that book with eleven hundred churches, right from the get-go" "became the tipping point." Gladwell is, of course, the author of The Tipping Point, so the quote fit in quite nicely in his profile of Rick Warren, author of The Purpose-Driven Life. Perhaps the repeating of Gladwell's pet phrase back to him represents the tipping point of "tipping point"'s mainstreaming. Poor The World Is Flat author Tom Friedman, for all his flogging of the idea that the world is flat, hasn't gotten anyone to repeat it back to him. (A suggestion for a little selective quoting in Friedman's next column: "As even Gelflog has noted, the world is flat.")
Internet
October 18, 2005
JibJab
JibJab, makers of the awesome election video "This Land is Your Land" (see the bottom of JibJab's homepage), are being accused by some of hypocrisy for sending a cease-and-desist letter to The Black Lantern for using snippets of "This Land" in the Lantern's equally amazing mashup, "George Bush doesn't care about black people." JibJab was once sued by Ludlow Music, which owned the rights to Woody Guthrie's song, and prevailed by claiming fair use under the First Amendment (see WFMU's "Beware of the Blog" for an excellent roundup). Gregg Spiridellis, the cofounder of JibJab, talked briefly with Gelf today on the phone (interspersed with a lot of our waiting on hold and listening to "This Land is Your Land" in the background). While Spiridellis declined to tell Gelf his rationale over the phone, he later emailed us JibJab's reasons for sending the letter to The Black Lantern. (Spiridellis also said he may be willing to answer some follow-up qestions. If he does, we'll post his responses here.) (UPDATE: We post follow-up questions from the WFMU blogger who'd been critical of JibJab; we've also emailed these questions to Spiridellis.):
Internet
October 14, 2005
The Origin of the Noodles
Our Noodly Prophet has touched us again! As reported last month in Gelf, the modern-day prophet Bobby Henderson preaches the good word of Flying Spaghetti Monsterism. But this religious craze—with its humble beginnings as a letter mailed to the Kansas State School Board—has more grounding than you might expect. As the BBC reported last week, noodles dating back 4,000 years have been unearthed in Lajia, China. When contacted regarding this discovery, Henderson tells Gelf his take on the unearthed evidence:
Sports
October 13, 2005
Officiating Woes Extend Beyond Baseball
Perhaps it wasn't as high-profile as the blown call that helped the Chicago White Sox win Game 2 of the American League Championship Series (WSJ.com), but this may have been even worse: The first Uzbekistan-Bahrain playoff game in World Cup qualifying last month was annulled because of a ref's mistake. The Toronto Star has the details; the short version is that the Uzbeks were unfairly denied a replay on a penalty kick, nonetheless won, 1-0, and then saw that outcome cancelled because of a call that went against them.
Internet
October 11, 2005
Googling Campaign Donations
When relatively unknown figures make big news, journalists rush to find out more about them, usually by trying to arrange interviews with them and their close associates. Reporters can also try to dig up paperwork on those individuals, using the Freedom of Information Act (Wikipedia) for federal documents, and similar open records requests at the state level. For example, the New York Times ran an article about Harriet Miers after reporters uncovered fawning letters from Miers to then-governor Bush in which she repeatedly calls him "cool." But what can those of us not blessed with the resources to comb through piles of government documents do?
Sports
October 11, 2005
Here, Take Our Playbook
Sports broadcasters get special access to the players and coaches they cover. In the baseball playoffs, Yankees manager Joe Torre and Braves Game 2 starter John Smoltz even gave interviews while games were in progress, by wearing oversized headsets in the dugout. Yet I wonder why the baseball people tell the TV people as much as they do—and whether the TV people ought to believe what they hear.
Science
October 7, 2005
Of Redheads and Anesthesia
A lot of the medical studies that get published—even in respected journals—have faulty conclusions that are later proved to be misinformed or flat-out wrong. John Ioannidis, an associate professor at a Greek medical school, wrote a compelling paper about this phenomenon a couple of months ago in the Journal of the Public Library of Science. (As an example, Gelf found faults with a study that blames Hollywood for normalizing poor public health behaviors.) Gelf emailed anesthesiologist Joe Stirt about a recent posting on the subject he wrote for a section of his blog he calls "Behind the Medspeak."
Internet
October 6, 2005
Hiding from the Crawlers
As far as Gelf can tell, the word 'unGoogleable' first entered our lexicon in late November of 2002, when technology writer Clive Thomson asked readers of his blog to nominate a term for people whose names do not appear on the world's most popular search engine. Of the terms proposed, 'unGoogleable' seems to have taken off, but as a recent article in Wired News shows, the meaning has changed. Instead of simply referring to people whose names do not appear in Google (which could include most of the world's population), the term now seems to be reserved for those people who actively try to stay off of the search engine grid. Gelf emailed the writer, Ann Harrison, to ask some follow-up questions about the piece.
Media
October 5, 2005
The 'Culture of Life' at the BBC
Two different articles on the BBC website mention Terri Schiavo and euthanasia today, and both of them lack the critical reporting needed to determine whether the radical claims being made in them are true. As a result, the stories are based on anecdotes rather than facts, and heavily back the pseudoscientific claims of the "right to life" movement.
Media
October 2, 2005
Sleepless Nights
"Managers of the Interpublic Group of Companies announced a restatement of more than $500 million yesterday, saying they are finally finished with their internal investigation of accounting problems and are working on a revival plan," the New York Times reported Saturday. The misstated financial figures misled investors and may have distracted the company from its clients. But those effects pale before the human toll: Some Interpublic execs missed out on sleep while preparing the restatement.
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