It was scary, when you're flying high: "Don't tell me about it. I don't want to know what it's like to be dead!"
"...[H]e was showing us his bullet wound. He was very uncool..."From the Wikipedia article on the Beatles song "She Said She Said," which I looked up after reading the she-said-she-said bad editing in TPM (quoted in the previous post).
Michael Jackson was born in August 1958. So was I. Michael Jackson grew up in the suburbs of the Midwest. So did I. Michael Jackson had eight brothers and sisters. So do I. When Michael Jackson was six, he became a superstar, and was perhaps the world’s most beloved child. When I was six, my mother died. I think he got the shorter end of the stick. I never had a mother, but he never had a childhood. And when you never get to have something, you become obsessed by it.She tells about the time she tried to befriend the ultra-strange superstar:
I spent my childhood searching for my mother figures. Sometimes I was successful, but how do you recreate your childhood when you are under the magnifying glass of the world?
I asked him out to dinner, I said “My treat, I’ll drive — just you and me.”I'll drive. Ha ha.
He agreed and showed up to my house without any bodyguards. We drove to the restaurant in my car. It was dark out, but he was still wearing sunglasses.Just one more reason why you need to do the driving.
I said, “Michael, I feel like I’m talking to a limousine. Do you think you can take off your glasses so I can see your eyes?”I feel like I’m talking to a limousine. Ha ha. Brilliant. I wonder if Madonna really does come up with lines like that in real time or some great comic writer punched up the dialogue. Dead men correct no quotes.
Then he tossed the glasses out the window, looked at me with a wink and a smile and said, “Can you see me now? Is that better?”What a goody-two-shoes that guy was! Imagine getting lessons in how to be bad from Madonna.
[I]n that moment, I could see both his vulnerability and his charm. The rest of the dinner, I was hellbent on getting him to eat French fries, drink wine, have dessert and say bad words. Things he never seemed to allow himself to do.
Later we went back to my house to watch a movie and sat on the couch like two kids, and somewhere in the middle of the movie, his hand snuck over and held mine.Who knew the peak moment of Michael Jackson's life was the moment Madonna made him feel — at last! — human?
It felt like he was looking for more of a friend than a romance, and I was happy to oblige. In that moment, he didn’t feel like a superstar. He felt like a human being.
We went out a few more times together, and then for one reason or another we fell out of touch.Dead men tell no anecdotes.
More? 
Maybe they are Transitions lenses.
[H]uman individuals drive the law, as Mr. Toobin tells it. The story of Jay Sekulow, "a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn" whose "ignorance" was "his best weapon," swells the 12-page chapter on the Supreme Court's religion cases, but there isn't a word about the Rehnquist Court's most important Free Exercise case, Employment Division v. Smith. Smith, written by the conservative Justice Scalia, said religion was not entitled to special exceptions from generally applicable laws. (You can't avoid the Controlled Substances Act, for example, by saying you need to use peyote in a religious rite.)There's something else in the religion chapter that I couldn't fit into the review. When Toobin writes that Jay Sekulow's "ignorance" was "his best weapon," he's portraying the lawyer as someone who bumbled into using the Free Speech Clause to win protection for religious activities. Toobin writes that Sekulow didn't realize that "cases involving religion were always argued under the Free Exercise Clause."
Smith doesn't fit the theory that the conservatives are out to favor religion or the proposition that the religion cases "usually come down simply to ‘What will Sandra do?'" Justice O'Connor opposed the doctrinal shift in Smith, as did the three most liberal justices: William Brennan, Thurgood Marshall, and Harry Blackmun. It was a liberal tenet that the Free Exercise Clause relieves religious practitioners from requirements the law imposes on everyone else. To bring up Smith would require Mr. Toobin to acknowledge that conservatives favor equality and liberals want to favor religion and that would mess up the narrative arc of his story.
Corinne McCormack, 53, started her own eyewear and accessory company in Manhattan in 1993 when she noticed that people were walking around with Rolex watches, Jimmy Choo shoes and $10 drugstore glasses. Hers average $50 a pair, and business, she said, is great.I have about 20 pairs of reading glasses -- upstairs and downstairs at home, in my car, in my office. But, you know, if you use this strategy, you will also be losing them and breaking them a lot. And also buying new ones for very little reason. This new pair may look sort of cool or cute, but the fact remains: Reading glasses make you look old. It's the way you wear them, pulling them down low on your nose -- because that really does adjust the focus -- and peering over the top. You can take them off every time you need to look out at the less-than-close world, but that looks bad too.
Craig Roessler, 60, a school superintendent in Silverton, Ore., said he prefers not to have to worry about losing his reading glasses and has devised a loose strategy. In addition to one pair of prescription reading glasses that he carries to work, he keeps eight or so pairs of inexpensive glasses scattered throughout his daily surroundings: two in his car, one in his golf bag, one in his desk drawer at the office and several around the house. He has also noticed that at the clubhouse of his golf club, a pair of reading glasses is tied to the computer terminal.
At Romano’s Macaroni Grill, a nationwide chain of Italian restaurants, reading glasses are provided upon request, as are large-print menus.
The glasses are often kept at the hostess station, and they often disappear.
“We used to have two to five pairs to give out, but they’re all gone,” said Kelsey Betzelberger, the hostess at a Macaroni Grill in Hillsboro, Ore. “People just forget to return them. We got replacements, but those are gone, too.”
Six people, including twin infants, were shot dead Saturday night inside an apartment house. The shooting also wounded a 2-year-old girl, who was still fighting for her life Sunday....The helicopters to the hospital fly over my house. I heard a helicopter in the middle of the night last night.
The wounded girl was flown to the University of Wisconsin Hospital in Madison.
A man tried to jump into Pope Benedict XVI's uncovered popemobile as the pontiff began his general audience Wednesday in St. Peter's Square and was wrestled to the ground by security officers.The assailant "was wearing a pink T-shirt and dark shorts, a beige baseball cap and sunglasses." That says a lot.
The pope was not hurt and didn't even appear to notice that the man had jumped over the protective barricade in the square and toward the white popemobile as it drove by with the pope waving to the audience.
At least eight security officers who were trailing the popemobile grabbed the man and wrestled him to the ground. The pope didn't even look back.
Mullah Dadullah, an amputee, was recognizable in part from his missing left leg and thick black beard. He had been shot in the head and in the stomach, the governor said. His face and chest were bloodied. He wore traditional Afghan clothes and an ordinary shoe on his good leg.ADDED: And check out the picture the NYT website has right next to its front-page teaser about the one-legged Dadullah:
Sarah Reinertsen, 31, an athlete who runs with a prosthetic leg, is a member of the hard-charging vanguard. She was a contestant on CBS’s “Amazing Race” last year (her team came in 7th of 12) and has no qualms about competing against the able-bodied.
“Believe me, I get a thrill when I do pass two-legged people,” she said.
But she said she never leaves the house without sunglasses.
“People always stare,” she said. “It’s part of human nature and it’s tough to be this animal in the zoo.”
But Ms. Reinertsen said people have stopped looking at disability as “total tragedy.” “People have changed a lot,” she said. “They ask, ‘Are you wearing one of those cool legs?’ ”
The news that Mr. Hussein was indeed dead came late on Friday night, and anticlimactically after hour upon hour of creepy music, blood-colored graphics and montages of Mr. Hussein’s most infamous moments, particularly his spider hole capture in 2003, when an American military camera recorded a hairy, befuddled Mr. Hussein being prodded and poked like a vagrant being searched for lice.On Saturday, there was a long ceremony about Gerald Ford that sounded like the funeral as I overheard it from the next room where I was working. But the state funeral will be on Tuesday. Last night was a preliminary ceremony as the body was brought to the Capital rotunda:
As the deadline loomed, and commentators filled time with pronouncements like “the clock is ticking on Saddam Hussein,” even on-air personalities looked restless. After devoting his entire hour on CNN to the impending hanging, Larry King asked, “Is there something ghoulish about this?” Mr. King looked a little let down when he had to sign off before the execution, promising viewers, “It is really imminent now.”...
Fox was much less squeamish, pumping up the Friday night vigil with graphics that promised “The end is near!” and “Date with Death” and urging viewers to stay tuned to Fox News.
Vice President Dick Cheney, who served as Mr. Ford’s chief of staff and was an honorary pallbearer, said, “Few have ever risen so high with so little guile or calculation.”...Who can read that and not think he's pleading for respect for George W. Bush?
Mr. Cheney praised his former boss for his “capacity to forgive” and for being “always a striver — never working an angle, just working.” He noted that Mr. Ford had been treated more kindly in hindsight than when he was in office, after he pardoned former President Richard M. Nixon.
“In politics, it can take a generation or more for a matter to settle, for tempers to cool,” Mr. Cheney said. “The distance of time has clarified many things about Gerald Ford. And now death has done its part to reveal this man and the president for what he was.”
Brown's body lay in an open-topped golden coffin in front of the stage at the James Brown Arena...
The legendary showman, known as the "Godfather of Soul," was dressed in a black suit and gloves with a ruby red shirt. Jewels sparkled on his lapels and the tips of his shoes....
"The whole world changed their beat because of James Brown," civil rights leader Al Sharpton said in a eulogy. "Nobody started lower and ended higher than James Brown did."
In a brief speech [Michael] Jackson, who wore a black leather jacket, black pants and sunglasses, said he'd watched Brown perform on television as a 6-year-old and was "mesmerized," deciding right then to follow in Brown's fancy footsteps.
"James Brown is my greatest inspiration," said Jackson, who has spent little time in the United States since being acquitted of child molestation charges in 2005....
In a passionate speech, comedian and activist Dick Gregory reminded the audience of the oppressive racial environment of Brown's early life rather than simply focusing on his music.
"We didn't get this (civil rights) out of the goodness of America's heart," he said. "We didn't get this because they sent the Marines in ... We got this because with love and willing to die we said, 'We gonna change it."'
Veterans of campus public relations disasters warn that presidents blog at their peril; “an insane thing to do” is how Raymond Cotton, a lawyer who advises universities and their presidents in contract negotiations, describes it. But these presidents say blogs make their campuses seem cool and open a direct line, more or less, to students, alumni and the public.Hey, coolness comes at a price. Blogging is risky. If you think it's an efficient PR tool, you deserve to screw up. You screwing up is important for maintaining the coolness of blogging.
“When I first started learning about blogs, I said, ‘Well, here I like to discourse on issues of the day, connect with the campus community,’ ” recalled [Trinity University president Patricia A.] McGuire, who said she wrote all her own entries. “Here’s a way I can talk a couple of times a week to everybody.”"A couple of times a week"? That's not blogging.
And so she does: about Representative Nancy Pelosi, class of 1962, who will be the first female speaker of the House; about election results; about breaking ground for a memorial to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; and about lesbian alumnae and the Roman Catholic Church, sensitive ground for a Catholic undergraduate college serving mostly minority and low-income women.What drives me up the wall about the NYT online is that at this point in the article, there's still no link to the blog, but "Nancy Pelosi," "Martin Luther King Jr.," and "Roman Catholic Church" are all hotlinked to whatever old articles happen to be in the NYT archive. (Here's the missing link.)
Dr. McGuire wrote that the church’s rejection of same-sex unions did not mean that the “alma mater must shun her own daughters.” She added, “All alumnae are welcome at Trinity, always.”Oh, come on. This is a PR outlet in blog form. Why is this front page news?
At Towson University, outside Baltimore, the president, Robert L. Caret, who writes Bob’s Blog, appears online in sunglasses, casually unshaven and smiling gamely alongside the Towson Tiger mascot. Dr. Caret’s blog, though, plays it safe, mostly praising particular programs like summer courses or studying abroad, or urging students to join clubs and to help spruce up the campus.Sunglasses + blogging = ???
But that does not mean the students play it safe.If you can't talk directly to that student at that point, your blog is a dismal failure. It is revealed as only intended as a PR outlet, and then it's not even an effective PR outlet. You wanted to give off the vibe that you are available and casual, but you retreat behind a bureaucrat's wall as soon as anything real is about to happen. (And, NYT, you want to give off the vibe that you are connected to the blog world, but you don't link to the post you're talking about... or even to Caret's blog. Here's the link.)
Dr. Caret’s post titled “Education vs. Training” prompted a graduate student to complain about what he called a language barrier with foreign-born teachers. To illustrate his point, the student reprinted a note in broken English from one of his professors, which ended: “Of course, some class(es) may not satisfy your thirsty in terms of your learning expectation. But even those classes will be a small stone to build your career.”
The student asked Dr. Caret, “Can students learning a new subject be expected to comprehend the new topic when they are too busy trying to comprehend what was just said?”
Though Dr. Caret’s site posted the letter, he did not answer the question on his blog. In an e-mail message, he said he forwarded the complaint to the provost.
It is this kind of exchange that prompts Mr. Cotton, the lawyer, to urge caution. If trustees are dissatisfied with a president, Mr. Cotton said, blogs offer a president’s adversaries ready ammunition. A casual comment taken out of context, a longstanding problem not addressed, or a politically controversial position can all torpedo a president, he said.Lawyers!
“In this day and age of political correctness,” Mr. Cotton said, “it exposes the president to all kinds of unfair and unwarranted criticism.”
So perhaps it is no wonder that Dr. Caret is not live on the keyboard. An assistant posts the thoughts that Dr. Caret dictates, while an employee in the marketing department screens responses and posts them.And that detracts from the blog... to the point where it isn't even a blog. "An atmosphere of excitement"... bleh!
“When you’re fund-raising, a big part of that is creating an atmosphere of excitement, of a campus that’s going places,” Dr. Caret said. The blog, he said, “adds to that.”
Lou Anna K. Simon, president of Michigan State University, ... condemned a conservative group’s plan to stage “Catch an Illegal Immigrant Day” on campus. The event would have involved finding a student to play the role of an illegal immigrant and turning the “immigrant” in. Dr. Simon derided the game as “a way to mock and demean, not to educate; a way to exclude, not include, voices.”I'd like to see the quote that got paraphrased "no professor or administrator should express an opinion publicly about anything." If professors and administrators are going to blog -- really blog, not just do PR in blog form -- they need to express opinions. But the decision to be censorious about student speech activities is a profound one. It's a bad opinion, and it ought to be criticized. Blogging facilitates that. People like Bristow should blog back at the administration.
That posting won her praise from the student government and others, said Lindsey Poisson, a reporter for the campus newspaper. Though the president’s choice of subjects did not always resonate with students, in this instance, students wanted to know where the president stood, Ms. Poisson said.
“Her blogging is one of the things that changed the image of the president on campus,” she said. “A significant part of everything she’s trying to do to is to reach out to students.”
But the group that planned the event, Young Americans for Freedom, said that the blog inhibited free speech, and that no professor or administrator should express an opinion publicly about anything.
“We’re here to be educated, to get our degrees,” said Kyle Bristow, chairman of the group, which dropped its plans in favor of a forum on immigration later this semester. “They’re here to provide an atmosphere where we can be educated. We should be able to think for ourselves and not have people like Lou Anna Simon thinking for us.”
All the stuff that's in stores this fall - skinny blazers, stovepipe jeans, boatnecked, French-philosopher striped shirts, fitted peacoats, flat-heeled, mod boots, Wayfarer sunglasses, striped scarves - it's all Dylan, totally owned and not done better than the chain-smoking, puckish, "Don't Look Back"-era Dylan.
Fifteen jugglers
Fifteen jugglers
Five believers
Five believers
All dressed like men
Tell yo' mama not to worry because
They're just my friends
:.
