Almanacs “The Almanac - OfficialWire” plus 4 more |
- The Almanac - OfficialWire
- On Native Ground - American Reporter
- Forward These E-Mail Suggestions From Readers - Salon
- Daily almanac - Columbus Dispatch
- America's Stonehenge: A Classic Whodunit and Whydunit - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
| Posted: 12 Dec 2009 04:02 AM PST In 1985, the crash of an Arrow Air DC-8 military charter on takeoff from Gander, Newfoundland, killed all 256 aboard, including 248 U.S. soldiers.
In 1989, five Central American presidents, including Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega, called for an end to the rebel offensive against El Salvador's U.S.-backed government. In 1990, 15 people were killed and more than 260 injured in a pileup of vehicles on a foggy Tennessee highway. In 1991, the Russian parliament ratified a commonwealth treaty linking the three strongest Soviet republics in the nation's most profound change since the 1917 revolution. In 1992, Princess Anne, the only daughter of Queen Elizabeth II of Britain, became the first divorced royal in the inner circle to remarry when she wed Cmdr. Timothy Laurence. In 2002, North Korea announced it would reactivate a nuclear reactor idle since 1994. Also in 2002, the European Union invited 10 nations, including Poland and Hungary, to join its ranks in 2004. In 2003, Paul Martin became Canada's 21st prime minister, succeeding Jean Chretien. Also in 2003, armed men attacked military police near the Ivory Coast's national television station in Abidjan, leaving at least 19 people dead. In 2004, seeking to head off a potential trade war with the United States and the European Union, China announced it would place tariffs on textile imports. In 2005, Jibran Tueni, an anti-Syrian member of the Lebanese Parliament and head of a leading Lebanon newspaper, was assassinated when an explosion tore through his armored car outside Beirut. In 2006, a Baghdad suicide bomber, luring the unemployed to his truck with promises of work, killed at least 60 people and injured 220 others. Also in 2006, more than 1,000 federal agents raided Swift meatpacking plants in six states, arresting more than 1,200 undocumented workers in a 10-month probe into identity theft by illegal immigrants. And, Elizabeth Bolden, reportedly the world's oldest person, died at a Memphis nursing home at the age of 116. She was born Aug. 15, 1890, to freed slaves. In 2007, central banks in Europe and North America worked on plans to lend billions of dollars to the U.S. banking system in an effort to ease the credit crisis. Also in 2007, nearly 30 people were killed and 150 wounded when three car bombs exploded in the southern Iraqi city of Amara. And, Alberto Fujimori, the former president of Peru, was convicted of abuse of power and sentenced to six years in prison. In 2008, an Iraqi journalist, calling him a "dog," threw two shoes at U.S. President Bush during a news conference in the Iraqi prime minister's office in Baghdad. Bush ducked and wasn't struck.
A thought for the day: Leon Blum wrote, "I have often thought morality may perhaps consist solely in the courage of making a choice."
fivefilters.org featured article: Normalising the crime of the century by John Pilger | |
| On Native Ground - American Reporter Posted: 12 Dec 2009 02:29 AM PST On Native Ground | MY BACK PAGES: WATCHING MY CRAFT CHANGE OVER 30 YEARS by Randolph T. Holhut American Reporter Correspondent Dummerston, Vt.
Printable version of this story DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- I got my first job in journalism at the age of 18 in the spring of 1980. I was a freshman in college and landed a night shift gig at WSPR, a radio station in Springfield, Mass. News came over an Associated Press teletype machine at 65 words a minute. Changing the heavily inked ribbons was always a chore, not to mention making sure the paper didn't run out. Stories were typed on battered old manual typewriters that dated back to the 1940s. Computers? Still a new-fangled technology that hadn't yet seeped down to this level of the business. The Internet? There were only a few hundred people using it. If you needed to look up an address, you got a phone book or a city directory. If you needed to confirm a stray fact, you pulled out The World Almanac. They were still using reel-to-reel tape recorders, and a razor blade and Scotch tape were your tools for editing audio. It was still an analog world, with dials and meters and black telephones with dials. In the fall of 1985, when I started working in newspapers, video display terminals were cutting edge technology. Two years later, I went out and got my first computer - a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100 laptop. With its built-in 300 baud modem, I could file a story anyplace I could find a pay phone. Cellphones? That was as futuristic as the communicators they used on "Star Trek." There were still a few smokers in the first city room I worked in. The barroom downstairs was still a place where you could find reporters between shifts. The building also shuddered just a little from the giant presses when they fired up, and the stairwells were coated with a thin film of ink. That first newspaper company I worked for - the Worcester (Mass.) Telegram and Evening Gazette - had four morning and six afternoon editions and a dozen bureaus in the county it published in. There were two separate news staffs, and even though they worked for the same company, the competition was still fierce. One of my several jobs was working in the morgue - the newspaper's library - where we still clipped stories out of each day's edition and filed them away in envelopes. When a reporter or editor needed background on a subject, my job was to retrieve the right folders with the right clippings in a room filled with hundreds of cabinets with files that went back decades. Pneumatic tubes brought pictures up to the composing room, and page proofs came down to the copy desk the same way. The darkroom was just that, a dark room filled with a dozen photo enlargers and photographers rushing make prints on deadline. I eventually learned how to do darkroom work and how to go from taking the film out of the camera to producing a finished print in under 30 minutes. The photos from the AP came one at a time from a LaserPhoto printer, in 8 minute intervals. Waiting for photos was a constant hassle. The old photographers I encountered then were old enough to have used Speed Graphics - the bulky, hard-to-focus 4 x 5 inch cameras that were the newspaper standard from the 1920s to the 1960s. The old compositors I encountered then were old enough to remember linotypes and the smell of melting lead. The old editors I encountered then were old enough to remember pastepots and black pencils and making and remaking a newspaper on the fly with a few written instructions and a lot of teamwork in the mechanical departments. Pagination - making a pages on a computer - was just starting to creep into use. I remember the first such unit - a Mac Plus - which was used to make graphic. Within 10 years of seeing that Mac for the first time, I would be making pages on a computer. The compositors - the wizards with Exacto knifes that could do just about anything you asked, just don't touch the type, please - were out of a job. Automation changed lots of things. I was replaced by a computer terminal in the paper's morgue. Indexing was now done with a few keystrokes, not with a heavy steel straight edge tearing pages. Digital photography made the darkroom obsolete. The teletype printers disappeared, and wire service news came flying into the mainframe computers at thousands of words a minute. And now I feel as ancient as the people I met when I started out, the tribe that started out in the 1940s and 1950s, when newspapers were king and the work that reporters did was the stuff of movies. Twenty years ago this month, I went through my first buyout. The T & G had been sold two years before, and changes were in the works. Being a junior member of the staff who lashed three part-time jobs into something of a living, I was thrown overboard immediately. But I was struck by how many people, the elders of the paper that I looked up to and learned from, chose to take a buyout and leave than stick around and face an uncertain future. Most of that generation left, and I got my first education on the harshness of the newspaper business. The morning and evening papers merged the following year. The T & G's bureaus started to disappear. The presses moved out of the hulking old building on Franklin Street and went to a remote site a few miles away. The papers were sold again, this time to The New York Times Co. They eliminated zoned editions this year and the paper is struggling to survive. Since that bleak Yuletide two decades ago, I've been through three more newspaper sales. I've become an elder, talking about the old days of afternoon papers, pasting-up pages, teletypes and darkrooms to a generation that Googles phone numbers and needs MapQuest to find an address. And I've watched my profession go from fat and sassy to threadbare and dying in one generation. I'm still young enough to be a bridge between the analog and digital eras, and still looking forward to the shape of journalism to come. The tools we have now to tell stories were barely dreamed of when I started out, but I recognize how important they are and working to master them. We just have to remember that the need to tell stories is primal, and that storytellers will always be needed. What will the young reporters I work with now be saying when they look back at their careers 20 years from now? Will they be talking about that gruff and crabby gray-bearded editor they had as their first mentor? The rickety first-generation iMacs that they have to use to write their stories on? The lack of reliable Internet and cellphone service? Or will they talk about working in newspapers at a time when they became quaint relics of a bygone age? My love for the printed page is still abiding, but it's hard to remember what it was like before the Internet, before desktop computers, before digital cameras and voice recorders, before the avalanche of data that pours from the Web each day, before the 24-hour news cycle, before all the changes that I have seen in nearly three decades of broadcast, print and online journalism. The past is a nice place to visit, but the future is still the place I hope to see. Randolph T. Holhut has been a journalist in New England for nearly 30 years. He edited "The George Seldes Reader" (Barricade Books). He can be reached at randyholhut@yahoo.com.
Copyright 2009 Joe Shea The American Reporter. All Rights Reserved.
fivefilters.org featured article: Normalising the crime of the century by John Pilger |
| Forward These E-Mail Suggestions From Readers - Salon Posted: 12 Dec 2009 02:51 AM PST Last week I wrote a post titled '10 Proposals for Fixing the E-Mail Glut'. I presented an array of ideas like limiting the length of an e-mail, using a smart browsing history and a cold-blooded extermination of the reply-to-all button. The comments generated some great ideas (and a little vitriol), so I wanted to help highlight some of the fun and interesting posts here: 140-Character E-mails First, my personal favorite by David Sanger of California:
Mark of Connecticut already limits his e-mail lengths with the solutions below:
The End of Reply-to-All Bylo of Waterloo, Ontario:
David of Wallingford, Penn.:
Chaniacreta:
Some New Suggestions
Daniel Reeves of New York had some interesting ideas too, although an e-mail-snooze button could be bad for the procrastinators out there:
And finally, a fun response was by Olddog Stanley of Virginia, who essentially puts everyone in Spam:
fivefilters.org featured article: Normalising the crime of the century by John Pilger | |
| Daily almanac - Columbus Dispatch Posted: 12 Dec 2009 12:42 AM PST Today is Saturday, Dec. 12, the 346th day of 2009. There are 19 days left in the year. Highlights in History• On Dec. 12, 1917, Father Edward Flanagan founded Boys Town outside Omaha, Neb. • In 1787, Pennsylvania became the second state to ratify the U.S. Constitution. • In 1870, Joseph H. Rainey of South Carolina became the first black lawmaker sworn into the U.S. House of Representatives. • In 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt nominated Oscar Straus to be secretary of commerce and labor; Straus became the first Jewish cabinet member. • In 1937, Japanese aircraft sank the U.S. gunboat Panay on China's Yangtze River. (Japan paid $2.2 million in reparations.) • In 1963, Kenya gained its independence from Britain. • In 1985, 248 American soldiers and eight crew members were killed when an Arrow Air charter crashed after takeoff from Gander, Newfoundland. • Ten years ago: Author Joseph Heller, whose darkly comic first novel Catch-22 defined the paradox of the no-win dilemma and added a phrase to the American language, died in East Hampton, N.Y., at age 76. • Five years ago: A bomb exploded in a market in the southern Philippines, killing at least 14 people. • One year ago: A bomb exploded inside the West Coast Bank in Woodburn, Ore., killing a Woodburn police captain and an Oregon State Police senior trooper. (Two suspects -- Bruce Aldon Turnidge, 58; and his son, Joshua Abraham Turnidge, 32 -- face murder charges.) Thought for Today"Experience has taught me that the only cruelties people condemn are those with which they do not happen to be familiar." -- Ellen Glasgow, American author (1873-1945) Source: Associated Press fivefilters.org featured article: Normalising the crime of the century by John Pilger | |
| America's Stonehenge: A Classic Whodunit and Whydunit - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Posted: 11 Dec 2009 09:43 PM PST Salem, N.H. -- At this leafless and gloomy time of year I traveled, in the spirit of the symbologist Robert Langdon of "The Da Vinci Code," to America's Stonehenge, in this town five miles from the Massachusetts border. Scholars have debated whether the stone cairns and chambers here were built by early American Indians, enterprising colonial settlers or, more controversially, a migrant European culture that visited these woods nearly 4,000 years ago. Determined to plumb these mysteries, I arrived at a rustic information center and gift shop on a cold and gray Sunday morning. Inside I was greeted by the aptly named Dennis Stone, 55, a commercial airline pilot who along with his wife, Pat, 59, owns this unusual roadside attraction. (Dennis's father, Robert E. Stone, 80, began leasing the site in 1958 and bought all 105 acres in 1965, saving it from possible development.) A charming mix of prehistoric wonders, alpaca farming and kitsch, America's Stonehenge is an oasis of eccentricity in an ever-growing world of carefully managed and manicured tourist spots. "We don't think it was a 'habitat' site," said the stocky, bespectacled Mr. Stone. "Perhaps a shaman once stayed here, but primarily it's a religious and astronomical site, a gathering place, like Stonehenge in England." The main site is a half-mile past the gift shop at the top of a small round hill. On the path leading up through a stand of ragged oak trees I'd arranged to meet Alan Hill, 68, a professor of astronomy at New Hampshire Technical Institute. "I don't know of any other group of people besides the Celts who celebrate the 'cross quarter' holidays marked up here," said Mr. Hill, an agile, sparely built man with a neatly trimmed beard. "You'll find the same type of construction in Scotland, Ireland and England," as well as other North American sites stretching from eastern Canada down to the Hudson River Valley, he said as we walked along. Cross-quarter days fall halfway between solstices and equinoxes. Partway up the slope is the Watch House, a small chamber of hand-hewn stones piled to one side of a boulder and covered with earth, forming a space where a sentry could have crouched. "No farmer in New England would've done something like this," Mr. Hill said, dismissing the notion that the chambers were built as root cellars in the 1700s. For one thing, he said, the openings are not wide enough to accommodate a wheelbarrow. As we passed a low-lying brook, he said: "A lot of these megalithic sites have a water source nearby. My theory is, the people who built the sites quarried the stones, waited until winter and then threw water down and slid the stones over the ice. They didn't have machines." The sun was tracking its low arc across the sky, illuminating the stone structures embedded in the earth. At the top of the rise Mr. Hill and I ducked our heads to enter the L-shaped Oracle Chamber. Dark and damp inside, the carefully constructed warren is half buried underground, and includes the sacrificial table, a four-and-a-half ton grooved slab of granite thought to be 4,000 years old. What ancient rituals were performed here, and by whom, remains a subject of debate. "I've never visited a site -- anywhere -- that combines standing stones with stone chambers," Mr. Hill said. "That's a certainly a large part of my fascination." Two days later I returned to America's Stonehenge for a consultation with David Brody, a local lawyer and mystery novelist who shares Mr. Hill's belief that European visitors built this place. Mr. Brody pointed out that the complex of cairns, walls, chambers and huts was encircled, at a distance of approximately 100 yards, by notched "sighting stones" that lined up with the sunrise and sunset on important dates like the summer and winter solstices. "There were no calendars or almanacs" 4,000 years ago, said Mr. Brody, 47, a hearty, goateed man in hiking boots and a flannel shirt. By marking the rising and setting sun on certain days, the people who built the structures "knew when to plant and harvest crops, when to launch their ships and when to pray," he said. Ground mists are fuming up from the lowlands as we ascend the hill. "The colonial argument never made sense to me," Mr. Brody said, squatting beside one of the chambers to indicate how the rising sun would strike a certain stone on the inner wall. Noting that colonial settlers would not have been dependent on astronomical events to track the days of the year, he said: "There's too many of these to write off as coincidence. Sure, there's evidence that the Native Americans used them as sweat lodges. But when you have elaborate stone structures like these, there's a lot of reuse when a new civilization comes along." Departing the raw New Hampshire woods, I encountered a honeymooning couple, Mike and Georgia Sasso, both 23 and history lovers from West Point, Miss. "It makes you feel what it must've been like, living way back then," Mr. Sasso said. With a giggle, Ms. Sasso said: "It was a little scary. What I saw was -- it felt ancient." Driving home in the rain, I recalled something that Mr. Hill told me. "So many things in the world today, we have to figure out exactly what it is. Here's something that's three, four thousand years old, and we don't know who constructed it and how they used it. More than that we're never going to know." IF YOU GO America's Stonehenge (105 Haverhill Road, Salem, N.H.; 603-893-8300, stonehengeusa.com) is open year round. Admission prices are $9.50 for adults, $8.50 for 65 and older, $6.50 for children ages 6 to 12 and free under 5. fivefilters.org featured article: Normalising the crime of the century by John Pilger |
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