8.04.2008 | Newsy grab bag

Professional life is full of joys and hardship, one of the latter being that I don't have as much time to keep up with the news as I used to. But I still snatch enough peeks that something catches my eye, so in case you missed it, here goes:

• Global warming has a new victim. There were penguins, island natives and seaside residents; now landlubbers have something to worry about: their kidneys. Increasing temperatures will mean people might be more susceptible to getting the painful little buggers – more than 2 million in America alone, but fortunately the cure's easy enough (assuming enough of it will be around given the droughts going on in certain parts of the world): drink more water.


• Chavez wants a hug. That evil little Latin American dictator that called Bush the devil (and has the power to shift time)? He's a softy. After a spat last year in which the King of Spain told the Venezuelan leader to "shut up," Chavez offered the guy a hug. And you know what? The guy took him up on it – sort of (The New York Times has the full story). Maybe international relations aren't so complicated after all.


• Going boldly where New Media has been before — a recent study shows that online ad campaigns are more effective when they can also be printed out, a new twist on Internet advertising for "old media" print publications that are making the jump online. Don't forget to make those ads printable, guys. Are you listening, Washington Post? (Not to mention — many Internet users will link to printable editions of articles to avoid all the clutter.)

There you go – just a taste. Hopefully more to follow.

8.13.2007 | A trip down memory lane

How many of you remember what you were doing in 1994? For these two Republican political figures, it was saying things that could be used against them later. Consider these:

If we'd gone to Baghdad we would have been all alone … There would have been a U.S. occupation of Iraq … Once you got to Iraq and took it over, took down Saddam Hussein's government, then what are you going to put in its place? … It's a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq.

— Vice President Dick Cheney explaining why the first President Bush decided not to go on to Baghdad in 1991

That one made it into a YouTube video that went from 100 to over 200 thousand views in the same day. Now this second quote is a bit more interesting because it involves a current presidential candidate. At the time, mayor Rudy Giuliani was talking about getting tough on crime in New York. But now, some are afraid the same philosophy could apply to terrorism and the debate over civil liberties. If you Google freedom and Giuliani, here's what you'll find:

What we don't see is that freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.

For this latter quote, one creative Digger rephrased that sentiment as "Freedom is slavery," a reference to part of the slogan of the English Socialist Party in George Orwell's 1984. But we don't know if that's a fair interpretation unless we get an answer from Giuliani himself how he feels today. And in Cheney's case, certainly there must have been some kind of evolution in his philosophy that caused him to take a different tack on the Iraq war today.

Hopefully some journalist out there reading this now has an idea of what question he needs to ask when he next sits down for an interview with either of these politicians — assuming he can get a straight answer.

8.11.2007 | iPod to iPhone: The War on Terror

In an example of how print doesn't always translate well online, one alternative weekly columnist's look at the “War on Terror™” lacked a direct link with the sidebar that did a better job (in my view) of putting into perspective how long we've been at war: the distance of time between the release of two seminal Apple products. Even the online version of the sidebar lacked the graphics of Apple technology that — especially for an Apple fanboy like me — gave a sense of progression to the story. Compare what you see online with this photo from the print version below: