“Even a website needs wood,” is, to me, the defining phrase of a novel by Pete Hamill titled “Tabloid City.” The book is not Hamill’s best. After his “Forever” painted the vivid landscape of New York City past and present, it has been impossible for him to do better. “Tabloid City” is a murder mystery wrapped in the demise of a tabloid newspaper that very much resembles the New York Post.
Hamill worked at the Post when he was a newspaperman and his main character, Sam Briscoe, editor of the New York World in the book, could be a mirror image of Hamill himself, tired and aging, being pushed out of print by online media. Hamill even evokes the memory of Paul Sann, the actual executive editor of the Post during its heyday in the late 1950s.
Hamill accurately describes the city room of the Post and names some of its other occupants, the photographers, rewritemen and general assignment reporters, who shuttled in and out creating a buzz. I was there too and, like Hamill, I remember how Sann would pluck lines of led type out of page forms on the stone-topped tables of the composing room to make space for new leads on stories in one of five editions each day.
Hot Competition
Newsstand competition drove the daily newspapers of New York City in those days. There were six dailies then, each with multiple editions. There were the broad-sheets, the Journal-American, the World Telegram and Sun and the Herald Tribune, but the battle for the most sensational front page headline was most intense between the tabloids – The New York Post, the Daily News and the Mirror. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal were in a class of their own, above the fray, setting their own standard whether anyone followed or not.
That’s where the reference to wood comes from. The large letters that made up the words of the front page headline on a tabloid were made of wood. They would call attention to the hottest story of the moment in letters above 48 picas in size. The reporter who got the “wood” was the star of the moment and editors always wanted to know “what’s the wood” for the next edition to beat the competition on the newsstands.
Briscoe’s dead newspaper is survived by an online news outlet in the book that he cannot abide so as he wants to push his former reporter to go after the hot angle on the story of the murder he tells himself that “even a website needs wood.”
That’s an irony that you can only appreciate if you worked for a newspaper in New York City before the age of computers, when newspapers were composed on linotype machines, the pictures were etched in photo engravings and pressmen actually shouted “Stop the press!”
And That Was That…
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Friday, April 8, 2011
The Singularity of Aging
A recent Time magazine cover story told us that technology is advancing at such a rapid pace that the human mind which drives its discovery may be superfluous by 2045. Curiously, around the same time, people will be looking forward to the longest life expectancy of any generation. The number of people 65 and older is expected to more than double worldwide to about 1.5 billion by 2050 from 523 million last year, according to estimates by the United Nations.
More people will be living longer with technology essentially doing all of the work. That can’t be good. Techno-futurists see the moment when superhuman intelligence can take over as “The Singularity,” a term they took from astrophysics that refers to the point at which the rules of ordinary physics no longer apply, Time explains.
‘The Singularity” has taken on a life of its own and become a movement of thinkers at the outer edge of the many ramifications of that moment when artificial intelligence collides with human intelligence. Singularitarians, as they are called, are, for example, seriously looking at the biology of growing old as a problem that has positive solutions. They see the human body as a machine that can be repaired periodically, much like a vintage car. Clearly, advances in everything from heart transplants to more efficient artificial body parts suggest that they may be right.
Meanwhile, marketers and the people who make stuff right now are waking up to the inescapable reality that the population of the world is already aging at a rapid rate, raising hither to for ignored questions about how to appeal to this well-heeled market.
New interest in what older people want and need has led researchers to simulate the physiology of aging so that people who want to capture the billions of dollars controlled by the elderly can experience what it feels like to be old. The experiments conducted at MIT’s AgeLab, which have gotten wide publicity of late in print and on TV, put people in the shoes of the aged so they can know the physical restrictions of growing old.
The AgeLab reportedly hooks up hip young marketing types, who want to experience the pain, to a jumpsuit of pulleys and restraints that restrict movement and function the way the aging process might.
A better idea, it would seem, is to hire older people to recount how they feel; what they like and don’t like. If the marketers are concerned about the validity of the findings, there are already machines that do that so that they don’t have to wait for “The Singularity” to determine what aging is all about.
And That’s That…
Friday, February 4, 2011
Hard Economic Times Breed Superheroes
It is not by chance that there is a spade of superheroes hitting the large and small screens of entertainment at this time. Unemployment remains at or above 9 percent across the nation, people continue to lose their homes in foreclosure at record numbers, the rich get richer on Wall Street and there is precious little to suggest any significant change for the better in the foreseeable future.
So let’s create some superheroes to take our minds off of reality for awhile. That’s what happened in the 1930s, when, at the height of the Great Depression, characters like Superman, Batman and the Green Hornet lit up the skies in comic books, over radio and on the silver screen, doing battle and winning the day against larger-than-life villains.
It was 1936 when the Green Hornet and his masked sidekick, Kato, first roared onto the air waves in their futuristic car, the Black Beauty, to fight crime. There have been several manifestations on a variety of media of the mild-mannered newspaper publisher, Britt Reid, by day, who transforms himself into the Green Hornet at night to bring evil-doers to justice with his superior intelligence and martial arts skills. Kids would literally watch the radio, fixated by the theme music, the classical “Flight of the Bumblebee,” which was often their first introduction to the music of masters like Nikolai Rimsky-Kosakov.
More important, the Green Hornet and other similar radio shows provided an escape into fantasy from the harsh reality of bread lines, Roosevelt’s fireside chats and the dust bowl that swept across the previously fertile heartland of America.
Not surprisingly, The Green Hornet is now a major motion picture, playing in theaters across America at this moment, when the scares of the Great Recession still burn, the unemployed are faced with a jobless recovery and global economic turmoil is the new reality.
Escape from Reality
The escape from reality also is reaching into our homes via TV series, such as “The Cape” on NBC. The series depicts an honest cop who is framed by a corrupt private police force, headed by a billionaire seeking to control the fictional Palm City, California.The billionaire is himself the arch villain, Chess, who is behind the crime wave terrorizing Palm City, until the honest cop darns the all-powerful cape that enables him to take on the bad guys.
Another fictitious California town, Pacific Bay, is the setting for “No Ordinary Family,” a comic sci-fi drama on ABC that traces the extraordinary powers of an otherwise seemingly average family of four. They, of course, use their powers, gained after surviving a plane crash in Brazil, to vanquish evil and champion good.
The father is beefy and bald, but he can jump really high and he now possesses Herculean strength, which enables him to foil criminals in the act, while his scientific researcher wife can rush around really fast, making peoples’ heads spin. Why that’s a super power is hard to comprehend, but combined with the daughter, who reads peoples’ thoughts and the son, who figures everything out with his super brain that sees intricate equations and formula in his minds’ eye, they support the bumbling father as he brings super human justice into our homes.
It’s easy to appreciate why both series are set in California. The state has, thus far, come closest to going down the tubes in debt. Jerry Brown, the “new” retrofit governor, should be able to fall back on fictional super heroes as he seeks a way out of near bankruptcy. The rest of the country can blame over-heated liberals and look to the Tea Party for salvation.
Brown’s California is the most debt-ridden state in the union. Its massive deficit is pegged at $25.4 billion through the upcoming budget year.
The many states, in general, face a collective budget gap of $175 billion through 2013, even after closing gaps totaling $230 billion over the past two years, the National Governors Association reported, according to the Reuters news agency.
Brown, a Democrat, wants to fill the gap with a combination of $12.5 billion in spending cuts and $12 billion in tax hikes, and will ask voters for approval, the news agency says. He is no stranger to tax fights. In 1978, during his earlier stint as governor, California voters passed Proposition 13, which constrained the state's ability to impose new taxes.
Failing new revenue sources it looks like we’ll all have to wait for the new Superman movie to get lost in the world of the original super hero once again. “Superman: The Man of Steel,” will be played by British actor, Henry Cavill, who is reported to be a “hottie.” The movie is slated for release in December 2012 and, alas, we’ll probably still need the escape from our lingering economic troubles.
And That’s That…
So let’s create some superheroes to take our minds off of reality for awhile. That’s what happened in the 1930s, when, at the height of the Great Depression, characters like Superman, Batman and the Green Hornet lit up the skies in comic books, over radio and on the silver screen, doing battle and winning the day against larger-than-life villains.
It was 1936 when the Green Hornet and his masked sidekick, Kato, first roared onto the air waves in their futuristic car, the Black Beauty, to fight crime. There have been several manifestations on a variety of media of the mild-mannered newspaper publisher, Britt Reid, by day, who transforms himself into the Green Hornet at night to bring evil-doers to justice with his superior intelligence and martial arts skills. Kids would literally watch the radio, fixated by the theme music, the classical “Flight of the Bumblebee,” which was often their first introduction to the music of masters like Nikolai Rimsky-Kosakov.
More important, the Green Hornet and other similar radio shows provided an escape into fantasy from the harsh reality of bread lines, Roosevelt’s fireside chats and the dust bowl that swept across the previously fertile heartland of America.
Not surprisingly, The Green Hornet is now a major motion picture, playing in theaters across America at this moment, when the scares of the Great Recession still burn, the unemployed are faced with a jobless recovery and global economic turmoil is the new reality.
Escape from Reality
The escape from reality also is reaching into our homes via TV series, such as “The Cape” on NBC. The series depicts an honest cop who is framed by a corrupt private police force, headed by a billionaire seeking to control the fictional Palm City, California.The billionaire is himself the arch villain, Chess, who is behind the crime wave terrorizing Palm City, until the honest cop darns the all-powerful cape that enables him to take on the bad guys.
Another fictitious California town, Pacific Bay, is the setting for “No Ordinary Family,” a comic sci-fi drama on ABC that traces the extraordinary powers of an otherwise seemingly average family of four. They, of course, use their powers, gained after surviving a plane crash in Brazil, to vanquish evil and champion good.
The father is beefy and bald, but he can jump really high and he now possesses Herculean strength, which enables him to foil criminals in the act, while his scientific researcher wife can rush around really fast, making peoples’ heads spin. Why that’s a super power is hard to comprehend, but combined with the daughter, who reads peoples’ thoughts and the son, who figures everything out with his super brain that sees intricate equations and formula in his minds’ eye, they support the bumbling father as he brings super human justice into our homes.
It’s easy to appreciate why both series are set in California. The state has, thus far, come closest to going down the tubes in debt. Jerry Brown, the “new” retrofit governor, should be able to fall back on fictional super heroes as he seeks a way out of near bankruptcy. The rest of the country can blame over-heated liberals and look to the Tea Party for salvation.
Brown’s California is the most debt-ridden state in the union. Its massive deficit is pegged at $25.4 billion through the upcoming budget year.
The many states, in general, face a collective budget gap of $175 billion through 2013, even after closing gaps totaling $230 billion over the past two years, the National Governors Association reported, according to the Reuters news agency.
Brown, a Democrat, wants to fill the gap with a combination of $12.5 billion in spending cuts and $12 billion in tax hikes, and will ask voters for approval, the news agency says. He is no stranger to tax fights. In 1978, during his earlier stint as governor, California voters passed Proposition 13, which constrained the state's ability to impose new taxes.
Failing new revenue sources it looks like we’ll all have to wait for the new Superman movie to get lost in the world of the original super hero once again. “Superman: The Man of Steel,” will be played by British actor, Henry Cavill, who is reported to be a “hottie.” The movie is slated for release in December 2012 and, alas, we’ll probably still need the escape from our lingering economic troubles.
And That’s That…
Monday, January 17, 2011
Guns Don’t Kill, But…
The argument that guns don’t kill people, people kill people is, of course, logical to a point. It takes a person to pull the trigger and ideally that person should be of sound mind and well-intended. When the gun in question is a Glock with a 31-round clip all logic ends. That weapon in that configuration has one purpose; to assault, wound and kill people. Sadly that is what we recently saw in Arizona.
In the aftermath of that tragedy there is soul-searching again about how easy it is to acquire a gun in many states. Certainly, even the most fervent supporter of the Second Amendment right to bear arms would agree that guns should be kept out of the hands of the mentally deranged. The process, however, does not allow enough time for that essential disconnect.
In this regard the United States can take a page from its territory in the Caribbean, Puerto Rico. Packing heat is as prevalent on the island (per capita) as it is on the US mainland, however, the process of legally acquiring a firearm is lengthy and costly. The process begins with the purchase of the firearm and an application for possession within ones home. Consideration of that application involves an investigation by the police, including a visit to the home for a personal interview with an investigator, who also talks to the spouse and neighbors to assure that they have no objection to the applicant’s possession of a firearm.
A permit to carry a concealed weapon in Puerto Rico is even more involved. It requires that the individual go to a lawyer for an affidavit establishing a valid reason for carrying a weapon, such as personal safety, which considering the level of criminal activity, is reason enough. However, the person seeking to legally carry a gun must finally go before a magistrate to swear to handle the privilege responsibly.
This whole process can take a month or more before the individual can actually take possession of a weapon. Yes, the procedure is pretty much cut and dried and very few people are denied the right to own and carry a firearm, but the various checkpoints allow the authorities to catch blatant crazies who should be nowhere near a lethal weapon.
Again, people fall through the cracks but the net that tries to catch them is strung more tightly in Puerto Rico than it is in most states of the union. As a result, violent crime in Puerto Rico, and there is much of it, is criminal in nature and mostly drug-related. It rarely is prompted by acts of passion in the Latin tradition, but there has never been a mass murder of the magnitude that concerns everyone in the United States today.
Hopefully, there never will be and, hopefully, our nation will find a way to reduce the risk of similar acts of senseless violence in the future.
And That’s That…
In the aftermath of that tragedy there is soul-searching again about how easy it is to acquire a gun in many states. Certainly, even the most fervent supporter of the Second Amendment right to bear arms would agree that guns should be kept out of the hands of the mentally deranged. The process, however, does not allow enough time for that essential disconnect.
In this regard the United States can take a page from its territory in the Caribbean, Puerto Rico. Packing heat is as prevalent on the island (per capita) as it is on the US mainland, however, the process of legally acquiring a firearm is lengthy and costly. The process begins with the purchase of the firearm and an application for possession within ones home. Consideration of that application involves an investigation by the police, including a visit to the home for a personal interview with an investigator, who also talks to the spouse and neighbors to assure that they have no objection to the applicant’s possession of a firearm.
A permit to carry a concealed weapon in Puerto Rico is even more involved. It requires that the individual go to a lawyer for an affidavit establishing a valid reason for carrying a weapon, such as personal safety, which considering the level of criminal activity, is reason enough. However, the person seeking to legally carry a gun must finally go before a magistrate to swear to handle the privilege responsibly.
This whole process can take a month or more before the individual can actually take possession of a weapon. Yes, the procedure is pretty much cut and dried and very few people are denied the right to own and carry a firearm, but the various checkpoints allow the authorities to catch blatant crazies who should be nowhere near a lethal weapon.
Again, people fall through the cracks but the net that tries to catch them is strung more tightly in Puerto Rico than it is in most states of the union. As a result, violent crime in Puerto Rico, and there is much of it, is criminal in nature and mostly drug-related. It rarely is prompted by acts of passion in the Latin tradition, but there has never been a mass murder of the magnitude that concerns everyone in the United States today.
Hopefully, there never will be and, hopefully, our nation will find a way to reduce the risk of similar acts of senseless violence in the future.
And That’s That…
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