Almanacs “The Almanac - Feb. 12 - Post Chronicle” plus 3 more |
- The Almanac - Feb. 12 - Post Chronicle
- Celebrating the Chinese New Year in Bangkok’s China Town - PR Inside
- Auto Almanac - Vancouver Sun
- On Native Ground - American Reporter
| The Almanac - Feb. 12 - Post Chronicle Posted: 12 Feb 2010 04:43 AM PST Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it. Today is Friday, Feb. 12, the 43rd day of 2010 with 322 to follow. The moon is waning. The morning star is Mercury. The evening stars are Mars, Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune, Venus and Saturn. Those born on this date are under the sign of Aquarius. They include French architect Etienne-Louis Boullee, French architect in 1728; philanthropist Peter Cooper in 1791; Abraham Lincoln, 16th president of the United States, and biologist Charles Darwin, both in 1809; U.S. Army Gen. Omar Bradley in 1893; actors Lorne Greene in 1915 and Forrest Tucker in 1919; Italian film director Franco Zeffirelli in 1923 (age 87); baseball player and sports commentator Joe Garagiola in 1926 (age 84); Charles Van Doren, subject of U.S. quiz program scandals, also in 1926; U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pa., in 1930 (age 80); basketball Hall of Fame player Bill Russell in 1934 (age 76); actor Joe Don Baker in 1936 (age 74); author Judy Blume in 1938 (age 72); former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak in 1942 (age 68); actresses Maud Adams in 1945 (age 65) and Joanna Kerns in 1953 (age 57); actors Arsenio Hall in 1955 (age 55) and Josh Brolin in 1968 (age 42); singer Chynna Phillips in 1968 (age 42); and actor Christina Ricci in 1980 (age 30). On this date in history: In 1541, Santiago, Chile, is founded. In 1733, the American colony of Georgia is founded by James Oglethorpe. In 1855, Michigan State University is established at East Lansing, Mich. In 1877, Alexander Graham Bell's new invention, the telephone, was publicly demonstrated with a hookup between Boston and Salem, Mass. In 1909, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is founded. In 1953, the Soviet Union broke off relations with Israel after terrorists bombed the Soviet legation in Tel Aviv, Israel. In 1973, with first release of U.S. prisoners of war in North Vietnam, 116 POWs were flown from Hanoi to the Philippines. In 1980, the International Olympic Committee rejected a U.S. proposal to postpone or cancel the 1980 Summer Games or move the site from Moscow as a protest against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In 1993, about 5,000 demonstrators marched on Atlanta's State Capitol to protest the Confederate symbol on the Georgia state flag. In 1997, The Washington Post reported the Chinese government might have channeled money to the Democratic National Committee in order to influence the Clinton administration. In 1999, the U.S. Senate acquitted U.S. President Bill Clinton of impeachment charges. In 2000, final original Peanuts comic, created in 1950 by Charles Schulz, is published. In 2001, a NASA spacecraft landed on the asteroid EROS. In 2002, the war crimes trial of former Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic began at The Hague in the Netherlands. In 2004, South Korean scientists announced they had created the world's first mature cloned human embryos. Also in 2004, despite a state law defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman, San Francisco began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Thousands of couples applied. In 2005, officials in Pakistan said the death toll from two weeks of torrential rains and snowstorms grew to 278. In 2007, a series of bombings, targeting crowded markets, killed at least 90 people in Baghdad as Shiite Muslims marked the first anniversary of a bombing of a major shrine in Samara. In 2008, General Motors, which offered buyouts to its 74,000 unionized employees, reported a loss of $38.7 billion for 2007, largest loss ever for an automaker. Also in 2008, Hezbollah commander Imad Mugniyah, believed to have orchestrated several deadly attacks, including the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, was killed by a car bomb in Syria. In 2009, a special court judge ruled that vaccinations do not cause the mental disorder autism in children. A thought for the day: M.G. Siriam said, "Looking at the proliferation of personal Web pages on the 'Net, it looks like very soon everyone on Earth will have 15 megabytes of fame." (c) UPI Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. | |
| Celebrating the Chinese New Year in Bangkok’s China Town - PR Inside Posted: 12 Feb 2010 04:57 AM PST Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it. 2010-02-12 13:53:52 - New Year celebrations have just start4ed in China and amazingly this year Chinese's New Year is coupled with Valentine day
The Chinese New Year celebrations or this "Tiger Year" celebrations, if you think that you can not miss your beach holiday already planned for Far East, consider going to China Town in Bangkok to experience China while still on a beach paradise. Comparatively, the flights fares for Bangkok are cheaper than many other holiday destinations. For instance cheap flights to Bangkok with British Airways are on annual SALE these days and cheap tickets to Bangkok with other airlines including Thai Airways are also being offered at competitive prices. For more details on Cheap Flights to Bangkok from London UK visit: www.travelhouseuk.co.uk/flights/far_east/bangkok.htmNow that half of the problem, i.e., "Getting in" Bangkok while keeping it within budget is solved, so let's get back at visiting China Town. The history of China Town Bangkok begins with Yaowarat, the oldest Chinese communities in Thailand. Originally, the Chinese community in Bangkok was residing in the Grand Palace area in Rattanakosin, but they had to move here in 1782, when Rama I set up his new capital there. The Chinese immigrants originally settled in the area that is now the Grand Palace had to move out to a strip of land a kilometers down the river. And that is where the China Town in Bangkok got its name form "Yaowarat" (Chinatown). Bangkok's China Town is located just in the neighborhood of Bangkok, centered on Th Yaowarat and Th Charoenkrung, an easy walk from Hualamphong Station and the Si Phraya Express Boat pier (near River City shopping mall). During daylight, although it doesn't look that much different from any other part of Bangkok, but as soon as lady night spreads its dark hair the Chinese culture of colors, lights, food and sheer joy begins to illuminate the surroundings. At night the neon signs blazing with Chinese characters are turned on and crowds from the restaurants spill out onto the streets, turning the area into a miniature Hong Kong. The center of Chinatown is Yaowarat Road with the gigantic neon signs. Running parallel to it is Sampeng Lane, a pedestrian-only lane with great markets, for buying gold. Crossing Yaowarat Road is Soi Issaranuphap, a great lane for food and other Chinese products. The main activities are concentrated in the main street Yaowarat Road. The street is lined with ubiquitous goldsmith shops, sharks' fin and birds nest restaurants, shops and vendors selling Chinese herbal medicine, dried mushrooms, salted fish, roast duck, Chinese calendars, almanacs and of course, lottery tickets. About a kilometer down Yaowarat Road turn left into Ratchawong Road another street full of vendors selling everything from stickers, deep-fried snacks to roasted chestnuts. Ratchawong Road has two significant landmarks in Chinatown. Every year during the Chinese New Year, Yaowarat Road is closed to traffic for street festivities, lion dances and food fairs. A member of the royal family attends the occasion every year much to the joy and pride of the Yaowarat community. Bangkok's China Town or Yaowarat has a different ethnic make-up from the other districts in Bangkok, which makes for an interesting multicultural experience. A tour of Chinatown Bangkok provides a fascinating insight into a very different way of life. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. | |
| Posted: 12 Feb 2010 04:00 AM PST Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it. DRAWING BOARD 2010 Bentley Mulsanne: The long-awaited replacement for the Bentley Arnage -- the Mulsanne -- is here in all its leather-and wood-trimmed glory. This ultra-luxury extravagance arrives with a 505-horsepower 6.75-litre V8 connected to an eight-speed automatic transmission. Building one to your exact specifications requires nine weeks and and about $300,000. IT'S HISTORY - The word "gasoline" was originally a brand name that was trademarked in the early 20th century by Carless, Capel and Leonard, a Great Britainbased refiner of petroleum products. - The Detroit-built, 1908 Wayne automobile, which sold for $2,500 was advertised as being so well equipped that there was "nothing to buy but the license." WHO AM I? To guess his secret identity, read the following clues! 1) He loved to paint, design, write poetry and engineer interesting things. 2) On March 6, 1896, he became the first driver of a gasoline-powered automobile in Detroit, Mich. Henry Ford was riding a bicycle at the time. 3) He served as a mentor to many automotive pioneers. 4) After designing air brakes, an air-controlled clutch and other innovations, he left to study automotive design in Europe. 5) He launched the King Motor Car Co. in 1910 and his entry in the 1912 New York auto show was the first left-hand drive vehicle. STILL STUMPED? Charles B. King left his own company after forming it, saying that he wanted to be stimulated again. He came back 20 years later to found what would later become the Automotive Hall of Fame. WHAT'S UP, AUTO DOC? You might have heard of "throttle by wire," which means there's no physical connection between the accelerator pedal and the engine. The throttle position is fed to the computer, which in turn works the engine in a corresponding manner. Why would anyone want to disconnect the cable from the gas pedal? Likely the biggest reason is that the other systems, such as stability control, can be hooked in to tell the engine to back off the throttle no matter what you happen to be doing to the pedal at that moment. If you lose traction, power can be cut well before you get into trouble. This type of intervention might have some people spouting off big-brother-type conspiracies, but the simple fact is you really have no idea how much intervention is taking place so most people are oblivious to the issue, which makes it a non-issue. If you have a tip, drop us a note on the Web: www.wheelbase.ws/mailbag.html. EBAY WATCH 2000 Plymouth Prowler, 30 bids, sold, US $28,600: The Prowler became a collectible the moment it left the assembly line in Detroit, Mich. Fewer than 12,000 of these V6-powered retro-styled roadsters (all with four-speed automatic transmissions) were built from 1997-'02. Various sources put the 2000-model-year production at less than 3,000 units. This car included an optional trailer in the shape of the Prowler's rear end. Considering the factory hotrod's original $50,000 sticker price (minus trailer), the US $28,600 winning bid has to be considered a bargain. Visit www.ebaymotors.com. PARTS BIN Fuel Bib, US $2 each or US $10 for a five pack, www.thefuelbib.com: Spilling gasoline, oil or other fluids (such as brake fluid and radiator coolant) on your vehicle's finish is not good and often trying to wipe whatever caustic substance off the painted surfaces only makes the situation worse. According to the manufacturer, the Fuel Bib safely absorbs fluids before they cause any damage to paint and before they can hit the ground. Fuel Bib also contains a flame-retardant for an extra measure of safety. To use, just place the fuel bib over filler opening. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. | |
| On Native Ground - American Reporter Posted: 12 Feb 2010 04:00 AM PST Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it. 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 2010 Joe Shea The American Reporter. All Rights Reserved.
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