Month: December 2008

By Patrick Appel
Camille Paglia, still oozing Palin-love, defends the Alaska governor’s odd speaking style:

Guess what: There has been a revolution in English — registered in the 1950s in the street slang, colloquial locutions and assertive rhythms of both Beat poetry and rock ‘n’ roll and now spread far and wide on the Web in the standard jazziness of blogspeak.

Larison rolls his eyes.

Cigar lover Paul Clarke samples a Havana cigar in Turmeau’s, Liverpool’s last remaining tobacconist shop on December 9, 2008. The UK government yesterday announced plans to ban the display of cigarettes and tobacco for sale in shops. Many licensed tobacconists are wondering how the legislation will effect them and are hoping for some sort of exclusion. Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty.

By Patrick Appel
"Chicago is not the most corrupt American city, it’s the most theatrically corrupt," – Studs Terkel, June 9, 1978.

by Chris Bodenner
Though "sexting" didn’t make the list, check out the most popular search terms of 2008.  (Fastest rising?  "sarah palin" … the new year looks good for The Dish.)

By Patrick Appel
A reader writes:

What I found most interesting in this graph were the extremes:  that, across the (reported) political spectrum, at least 20% of people pray several times a day.  And that, across the spectrum, only a tiny number (looks like less than 5%) never pray.  That, and the similarity of all the bars–there really does not appear to be a very big variance, across the spectrum of political positions, in frequency of prayer.

Another adds:

The data provided on the graph labeled "Frequency of Prayer" are interesting but not all that revealing. A good test to apply is asking how well knowing a particular data point allows you to predict behavior. If you "know" that people self-identify as independent and "guess" that they pray daily, you will be wrong approximately seventy-five per cent of the time. If you know they strongly identify as Democrats or Republicans and guess the same, you will still be wrong about sixty-seven per cent of the time. A difference, yes, but how significant?

by Chris Bodenner
College OTR calls it the "word of the week," based on a story of two Seattle cheerleaders suspended (up to a year) for showing up nude on cell phones around school (they’re suing — in part because of the sexist double standard of male abettors going unpunished).  However, based on these stats, the "sexting" portmanteau is more like a word of the year.  Urban Dictionary defines it:

By Patrick Appel
De Long writes:

I can take the book into the bathtub – so it still has one key edge, even though its production process sacrifices timeliness.

Yglesias adds:

The longer I own my Kindle the more I think that it’s a crucially flawed device in a number of respects. Respects that I expect to be resolved by some successor device in a few years that will position the eBook readers of the future to kill off the regular book. But this bathtub issue is hard to solve.

Problem solved! It’s not cheap though. (Related video here). I see it has just been made avaliable to the public.

By Patrick Appel
David Leonhardt, sharp as ever, debunks the claim that the average Big Three autoworker makes $73 an hour. He writes that the "real problem is that many people don’t want to buy the cars that Detroit makes" and has the numbers to prove it. His conclusion is sensible, if harrowing:

There is good reason to keep G.M. and Chrysler from collapsing in 2009. (Ford is in slightly better shape.) The economy is in the worst recession in a generation. You can think of the Detroit bailout as a relatively cost-effective form of stimulus. It’s often cheaper to keep workers in their jobs than to create new jobs.

But Congress and the Obama administration shouldn’t fool themselves into thinking that they can preserve the Big Three in anything like their current form. Very soon, they need to shrink to a size that reflects the American public’s collective judgment about the quality of their products.

Joe Weisenthal adds his two cents.

By Patrick Appel
Tina Brown compares the auto companies to the media business:

As great newspapers, magazines, TV networks, and publishing houses dismember themselves around us, it would be marginally consoling if the pink slips were going to those who contributed so vigorously to their companies’ accelerating demise—the feckless zombies at the head of corporate bureaucracies who cared only about the next quarter’s numbers, never troubled to understand the DNA of the companies they took over, and installed swarms of “Business Affairs” drones to oversee and torment the people “under” them. There are floors of these creatures in any behemoth media company, buzzing about each day thwarting new ideas or, worse, having “transformative” ideas of their own when what is usually required is to revive, with a bit of steadfast conviction, the originating creative purpose of the enterprise. It’s the same with the auto companies.

It’s not the bureaucrats fault that the media market fundamentally changed. The big three stopped making a product Americans wanted to buy. The American media has never had more readers. People want what we make. They just consume it differently now. Creativity isn’t the problem; finding a new way to make money off it is.

(Hat tip: Booksquare)