Category Archives: Work

tow the thin blue line

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From the Archive
  Tuesday, October 01, 2002

If you’ve ever wanted to know what resigned dutifulness looks like (and it’s not something we see very often, you must admit) you would have liked to have been with me this afternoon. As I was passing the cop shop, just at the start of rush hour(s) I saw somebody getting towed. Now, no biggie, you think, that happens all the time, all over town. Three PM sharp they start picking up cars and too bad for the owners. Happens all the time. Sure, but to a cop?

Yes indeedy, there, on Cordova, right in front of the Police Station, was a big beefy cop of the wholesomely mustachioed variety, dutifully-resignedly watching his patrol car get towed. And ticketed. And he just stood there and took it; what else could he do? But his mustache was a couple of inches shorter by the time the towtruck driver drove away.

welcome back, don’t unpack

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your bivouac’s back in Iraq.US soldiers are screwed

Fark passes on the bad news from Reuters that 300 American soldiers who just last week returned to the US from a year’s tour of duty in Iraq, will be shipped back over to compensate for the short supply of recruits. Nobody wants to wear the red jersey.

About 300 U.S. soldiers who just weeks ago returned home to Alaska after a year in Iraq are being ordered back to try to help bolster security in Baghdad, the U.S. Army said on Monday.

The soldiers are part of the 3,900-strong 172nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team from Fort Wainwright in Alaska. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on July 27 ordered the unit to remain in Iraq for up to four months past its scheduled departure.

The order provoked anger and disappointment yay?among some of the soldiers’ families in Alaska. It also made clear that any significant reduction in the 135,000-strong U.S. force in Iraq was unlikely in the immediate future.

The brigade was so far along in the process of flowing out of Iraq after its yearlong tour that 380 soldiers had returned home to Alaska and 300 had arrived in Kuwait en route home, the Army said…

Pentagon policy is for Army units to serve 12-month tours in Iraq and Marine Corps units to serve seven-month tours. Army soldiers kept longer than one year in Iraq get an extra $1,000 in pay per month, the Army said…

After some troops and families complained earlier in the war about lack of predictability in the length of tours in Iraq, the Pentagon instituted the rules on deployment duration. This was intended to reduce emotional stress for troops serving in a hostile and unpredictable environment…

The Army said the brigade has not received any assurances it will not be extended even further, but said Rumsfeld would have to approve any such move.

US Soldiers in Iraq

Sploid R.I.P.: let’s not shed a tear

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for when they die, we get their stuff.

Yes, Sploid, one of my favorite sites, is no more. Axed. Deep-sixed. Ah, well, I can’t say it any better than they did.

Just like YouTube, Lebanon, Joe Lieberman, newspaper circulation and airline travel, Sploid is being demolished.

It is a great victory for bullshit peddlers everywhere … if they had any idea Sploid existed.

Shut down, laid off, on the nickel, run out of town, shown the door, eighty-sixed, suicided, under heavy manners, finaled by the fuzz, down in the hole, out of the groove, sadder than a map, under the Hoover blankets, taking a bank holiday, riding the rails to Hungry Town, brought down and fought down.

Winners write the history books, but anybody can write the blog post. So get right up close to your computer screen and we’ll tell you a little story…

And so they do, at length, but who cares? More interesting to me is their secret file of Weekend Filler How-To’s, as apparently Denton didn’t want them to play with real news on the weekend, as they might break it. So here’s their secrets to handy-dandy filler, secrets which I intend to carry to my grave.

After posting them here, of course.

This magical world

When in doubt, run a picture of a monkey

Sploid wasn’t just a 24-7 news operation — it was a painstakingly engineered information factory.

While free from the dull tyranny of “Headline News” or “whatever’s on the front page of the New York Times,” Sploid editors nonetheless followed careful instructions formulated by senior editors.

Say it was a Saturday, and nothing was happening in the world except bombs in the Middle East and world leaders dying or lapsing into comas, and maybe the planet was getting hotter or whatever. On those “slow news days,” and even on some exciting days, the editors had to rely on a detailed technical manual with exact instructions for filling the “news hole.”

Following the Sploid Topic List requirements resulted in the following wonders from this magical world we share:

Animal adventures

* Violent deer
* Cat-eating raccoons
* Insidious marmots
* Puppy bombs
* Fainting goats
* Disgraced goats
* Worthless panda bears
* Christmas-ruining possums
* Headless roosters
* Monkey cops

Nation of …

* Foreclosures
* Gangsters
* Murderers
* Retards
* Teenage crack whores
* Witches

Hoboes

* Killed for a beer
* Secretly practicing law
* Rioting
* Talking on cell phones
* Acting righteously
* Roughed up by high schoolers
* Killed by elderly sociopaths
* Suing libraries

Jesus

* Not screwed by Judas
* Appearing in a plate of manicotti
* Appearing in asparagus
* Coming out
* Being blond
* Lacking health insurance
* Probably died hanging upside down like a bat

NASA

* Kills the Ivory Billed Woodpecker
* Launches a non-exploding shuttle
* Enlists the aid of robot lemurs
* Valiantly battles an army of roadkill
* Hits a run of even worse luck than usual
* Bans dangerous foreign 5-year-olds

Other topics of constant concern included robots, monkeys, occult killings, X-rays of humans revealing foreign (and frequently disturbing) objects lodged within, Nazis, dismemberments, frightening conspiracies featuring the Knights Templar and/or Dick Cheney, dumb and/or evil cops, UFOs and the many problems faced by America’s obese citizenry.

We hope you continue to enjoy these timeless tales from our most delightful planet.

Sara K. Smith was Sploid’s bureau chief in Austin and is a novelist, which means she has to get a job now.

pimp my poetry

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Pimp my ethnicity

From Greatest Living Poet who, if he changes his URL one more time, is going to get dropped off the blogroll, dammit.

picture this: photojournalism and fairness in the War in Lebanon

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Fair and balanced? 

Here’s an interesting articticle from the New York Times about how the American media is dealing with the challenge of showing the war. Traditionally, media have displayed images from one side of the conflict against images from the opposite side, striving for that journalistic impartiality that everyone worships except Hunter Thompson, and look what happened to him.

But is that really fair or objective, when one sides casualties outnumber the others’ by a factor of ten? What is objective coverage in that case? Ten photos of dead Lebanese for every one of a dead Israeli? And of course, Hezbollah has fired more on Israel than Israel has on Lebanon, although with less effect. So do you show ten times the tracers going south as going north?

What is objective journalism when the facts themselves can be interpreted as prejudicial?

Particularly vexing for many American news organizations is the struggle to determine how and in what proportion images of civilian dead and injured should be displayed in their coverage, when one side’s casualties greatly surpass the other.

The journalistic calculus is made tougher by the involvement of the Arab-Israeli conflict, a topic that bedevils news editors like no other, and an organization, Hezbollah, that is considered a terrorist group by the United States government. But the decision-making becomes even more fraught because of the power of photographs and TV images, which are evocative — and provocative — in ways the written and spoken word are not.