CBS News 60 Minutes: Taylor Swift: A young singer's meteoric rise. November 20, 2011. Correspondent Lesley Stahl profiles and interviews the dynamic 21-year old singer who keeps her feet firmly on the ground while entertaining and charming her millions of fans all over the world.
Below is a copy of a pithy email about last night's GOP presidential debate in South Carolina that I sent out to some media friends and acquaintances across the country last night.
Likely, during a timeout of a college football game I was watching.
That is, unless it was while I was watching Four Weddings and a Funeral for about the 50th time. What can I say, I've always been a Hugh Grant fan, and he's been in three of my favorite films, the aforementioned Four Weddings, Notting Hill, and Love Actually, all written by Richard Curtis, who directed the latter.
Coincidence? I don't think so.
My last post mentioning Hugh Grant was on September 28, 2010, in a post titled, Gloria Estefan climbs windows during Dolphins-Jets game, but Hugh Grant was The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain. Winner: Grant!
(For some people, I sent a screen grab of the Twitter section in the right-hand column of the LA Times website, for others, I just copied and pasted. The latter seemed easier to post here so it'd be legible.)
It's self-explanatory:
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Just saw this on LA Times website.
If someone is a professional journalist, shouldn't facts matter even in your Tweets, or is it every man for themselves?
Really, tweeting about something you think you might have heard on a streaming event?
It was on TV to make it easy and accessible, so who's watching the streaming version?
Breaking News: USA Field Hockey earns spot at 2012 London Olympics with a 4-2 upset win over #1 Argentina in Finals at Pan American Games in Guadalajara, Mexico.
I found out via the UVAField Hockey Twitter account shortly after 8 p.m. tonight while watching Game Seven of the World Series:
Congrats to @USAFieldHockey who just punched a ticket to London with a 4-2 win over world No. 1 Argentina! Well done Paige & Michelle!
(I tried to take a screen shot of it but it was too faint to post here.)
Paige Selenski (Virginia), Shannon Taylor (Syracuse), Katie O'Donnell (Maryland) and Michelle Vittese (Virginia) scored for the underdog American squad.
More soon on the upcoming Field Hockey conference tourneys which start next week, inc. the always tough ACC tourney in College Park that members of my FH-loving family may be attending at some point.
2011 ACC Field Hockey Championship at College Park, Maryland.
SVT Rapport video: Överlevande åter på Utöya. August 19, 2011.
SVT's Thursday night news segment on the survivors returning to Utøya for the first time since the armed attack one month ago, along with dozens of family members of the survivors and deceased and an army of psychologists.
Both videos available at SVT Play website until August 19, 2012.
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Sunday's LIVE telecast of the National Memorial in Oslo regarding the attacks in Oslo and Utøya on July 22 can be seen via computer at NRK at 9 a.m. Eastern U.S./Canada.
According to the latest information on SVT's website, the following individuals are scheduled to participate:
Music: Kringkastingorkestern, Susanne Sundfør, Leif Ove Andsnes, Karpe Diem, Dumdum Boys, Sivert Høyem, Jarle Bernhoft, Bjørn Eidsvåg, Ingrid Olave, Sissel Kyrkjebø and A-ha.
Readings will be led by actors Aksel Hennie, Anders Baasmo Christiansen, Ane Dahl Torp, Adil Khan, Ingrid Bolso Berdal, Sofie Gråbøl and Maria Bonnevie.
The ceremony will be hosted by (reporter/singer) Haddy N'jie.
I've refrained up 'till now from writing about what transpired a month ago in Oslo and Utøya on July 22nd for reasons that are not entirely worth getting into right now. Perhaps in the not-so-distant future.
There were some things, though, that I wanted to share now that I think reflect my frame of mind and what I will eventually post here, and will give you some small guidance if you watch Sunday's national memorial service.
First and foremost, as it always does, timing and opportunity rules everything.
I was reading/watching the LIVE reports of the armed attacks in Norway by Anders Behring Breivik -via Stockholm and Oslo- within mere minutes of it happening, even BEFORE it was being reported in the U.S. media, because of the fact that that particular morning -my time- I was already looking at Swedish news websites like Aftenposten, SVT, TV4, Svenska Dagbladet, Expressen, et al.
I'd also written some recent posts about Norway, so still had the NRK website handy as well on my Bookmark list.
SVT video: NRK:s Peter Svaar direktrapporterar från Oslo. July 22, 2011.
Above, one of the first reports from Norway's TV2 on what happened in Utøya, with lots of helicopter shots outlining the island.
I watched the foreign and domestic coverage for a few hours almost continually for days, constantly amazed at the VERY poor and incorrect reporting being done in the U.S. media on this rapidly-evolving story.
In CNN's case, that is, the U.S. version of CNN, that included reporting low casualty figures hours and hours after it common knowledge among the media on the scene that the grim numbers were FAR HIGHER, an upsetting point that I made in some quick emails to some U.S. media friends around the country, some well-known, that I wanted to know the true scope of the attacks, not the old info being foolishly repeated over-and-over on CNN.
One of the emails I sent was this news about an important Tweet warning being sent around the area as people were warned to turn off their cell phone rings.
My subject header was: FYI: Ominous Twitter warnings went out re Utøya: ”Ring inte ön"
"RING INTE FOLK PÅ UTØYA. De gömmer sig för gärningsmannen. Kopiera statusen! (Ambulansen kommer inte fram ertersom det fortfarande är skottlossning)."
which roughly means:
Do not call the island on your mobile as fake cop re-loading gun in search of people to shoot, is listening for rings from phones. Ambulances won't arrive if shooting is happening.
from Ungdomarnas larm från ön på twitter: Hjälp oss, Nyheter, Aftonbladet
I also watched the LIVE telecast on SVT Play via NRK the following day of the Memorial service at the Oslo Cathedral that drew so many notable figures, as well as the families whose loved ones had perished.
Above, right-to-left: King Harald, Queen Sonja, Princess Märtha Louise and her husband, author Ari Behn.
That started at 5 a.m. Miami and was very tough to watch as you'd see people just start crying, tearing-up or sobbing out-of-the-blue.
Especially after the poignant lighting of the candles!
The emotion of the occasion gets to the King and Queen, too.
Above and below are just some of the screen shots of the dozens I took of that church service which I have been holding onto, knowing that it would be impractical to simply post them all, knowing that 99% of you would not have enough context to appreciate what was taking place just from the photos.
While it might not always seem that way to some of you, especially those of you who are in South Florida, I try my best not to be too preachy here on the blog, and I knew that it would be hard to drop ALL those photos on you all, out-of-the-blue, then as now, without seeming either patronizing or...???
Because if you have to explain everything...
So I've held onto them.
But I thought I'd share a few now...
The Royal Family represents.
Above and below, Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg addresses those assembled in the cathedral and across the nation.
TEN Network News, Australia: Playground inspiration at the railway station in Utrecht, The Netherlands. August 11, 2011. http://youtu.be/vZrUuC8j7XY
Dutch genius and ingenuity at its best -making the familiar even more useful and fun! The quickest distance between two points is a slide!
Despite The Netherlands being a small country, size-wise, it's ranked number eight, right behind Sverige (Sweden), in the number of readers coming to my humble blog, and the home of a few readers who fairly regularly send me a head's-up on interesting ideas, news stories, songs and videos.
Blijvendie ideeënkomen!
Let me take the opportunity to show you some of my favorite recent Dutch treats...
(In case you forgot or weren't reading the blog then, as I've previously mentioned here, The Netherlands is a country that my family has always had a great deal of warm feelings for. We not only knew a few very friendly Dutch emigres in North Miami Beach as I and my sisters were growing up there in the 1970's -esp. me- but one of my two younger sisters studied in Rotterdam at Erasmus University for a semester her junior year atIU -January of 1985- and absolutely LOVED IT.
So much so that four short years later, she had her honeymoon in Amsterdam and the rest of the country after getting married in New Amsterdam -New York!- which is when I first became aware of and a regular subscriber to the salmon-colored New York Observer.)
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KLM Royal Dutch Airlines video:KLM Personal Space Experiment
I first posted this video in my January 10th, 2011 post titled Armin van Buuren feat. Christian Burns - This Light Between Us -Official Music Video; Unplugged version with Christian Burns & Eller van Buuren at
The land that feminism forgot: They wouldn't dream of working full-time, spend three hours a day drinking coffee and their men pay for everything - have Dutch women found the secret to happiness?
By Liz Jones
Last updated at 11:34 PM on 9th March 2011
Have you wondered what life would be like if feminism had never happened? If we were all housewives? If we were not required to live on our wits and our adrenaline, and were able to take up a hobby? If men were happy to step up to the mark and look after us?
Am I talking about travelling back in time to see what life was like in the Fifties? No, it is much simpler than that. I am catching a flight to Amsterdam.
TV4.se Nyheterna video:Kommuner raggar arbetskraft i Holland.
Sverige behöver invandrad arbetskraft. I dag finns det tusentals kvalificerade och arbetslösa invandrare i Sverige. Samtidigt raggar kommunerna arbetskraft utomlands. TV4Nyheternas Lena Sundström har besökt Emigrantmässan i Utrecht.
TV4 Nyheterna reporter Lena Sundström visits an Emigration Fair held in Utrecht, The Netherlands in February that sought to motivate smart and educated Dutch workers to consider emigrating to Sweden, with various parts of the convention space dedicated to different aspects of life in the country, with about 100 cities and towns represented. This fair is very successful as over 700,000 Dutch citizens a year seriously consider emigrating overseas and over 120,000 actually do it.
It's not said in the video but one way of looking at this fascination that Sweden holds for some Dutch citizens is that just as kids who grows up in small towns in the U.S. often aims to go to a big city some day to do whatever it is they they aim to do, so it is that for a person who grows-up in a small and congested country like the NL, where land is precious, going to a country with lots of space to breathe sounds appealing.
For someone from NL, the mid-central and northern parts of Sweden -where as I recently wrote, film director David Fincher has recently recorded some scenes in Sollefteå for the new American film version of "Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" starring Daniel Craig- can be like visiting another planet.
Space is everywhere, along with hills, mountains and lakes.
To quote myself, whether in Iceland or the Hill Country of Bandera, Texas, the Faroe Islands or Holland, "girls love horses..."
And if there are a few things we know about our friends in the land of the Oranje, de nederlandse, one is of them is that Cinzia ♥ horses and Johnny Depp and Pirates of the Caribbean.
That is a stone-cold fact you can't deny.
I first discovered Cinzia's earnest YouTube videos a few months ago after seeing it next to one by Eva Skemm, another devout teenage horse lover -from the Faroe Islands- whom I first mentioned in my July 27th post,
Question: If Miami-Dade County or Broward County had a 'Sister County' sort of deal along the lines of the Sister Cities program, with Amsterdam or Rotterdam -cities where my sister her honeymoon and went to school for a semester while going to IU- and they did an exchange of elected officials and employees, what would happen quicker?
The people from South Florida "accidentally" flooding the city, or the Dutch using common sense and some style to make Miami more sane, livable and possibly, sexier?
Slate
HOME / ARCHITECTURE: WHAT WE BUILD.
Can Cities Save the Planet?
Scientists are skeptical. Planners are hopeful. The Dutch are pragmatic.
By Witold Rybczynski
Posted Wednesday, Dec. 17, 2008, at 6:58 AM ET
Winning With Water
According to Timothy Beatley, an urban-planning professor at the University of Virginia and the author of Green Urbanism, the per-capita carbon dioxide emissions of American cities are almost twice as high as those of their European counterparts. Hardly surprising, since European cities are denser and more compact, homes are smaller, and people rely to a far greater extent on mass transit. So if Americans are to significantly reduce their carbon footprint, we will have to do a lot more than switch to reusable shopping bags and recycle our soda cans. But as a recent conference on "urban design after the age of oil" at the University of Pennsylvania (where I teach) demonstrated, there is something of a disconnect between the global-warming problem and the available solutions.
On Tuesday night I had the pleasure to meet several members of the Dutch delegation that came to Miami for a two-day ThinkBike workshop. The purpose of the ThinkBike workshop was to learn from the expertise of Dutch planners. They came to teach us how we could improve downtown Miami’s bikeability. Unfortunately, I was unable to attend the actual workshop, but I was able to make it to the post-seminar cocktail hour. Over a couple of Cold Stellas I spoke with several members from the Dutch delegation, a gentleman from the County Public Works Department, as well as citizens all of whom participated in the seminar. The feedback I recieved was extremely positive.
By the way, I spotted someone riding one of the Dutch bikes -with the KLM basket- in May in Hollywood, east of The ArtsPark, that I strongly suspect had been stolen
I didn't know what it was, though, since I hadn't read the story yet.
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Houston Chronicle
Steffy: U.S. and BP slow to accept Dutch expertise
By Loren Steffy
June 8, 2010, 10:13PM
Three days after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico, the Dutch government offered to help.
It was willing to provide ships outfitted with oil-skimming booms, and it proposed a plan for building sand barriers to protect sensitive marshlands.
The response from the Obama administration and BP, which are coordinating the cleanup: “The embassy got a nice letter from the administration that said, ‘Thanks, but no thanks,'” said Geert Visser, consul general for the Netherlands in Houston.
Now, almost seven weeks later, as the oil spewing from the battered well spreads across the Gulf and soils pristine beaches and coastline, BP and our government have reconsidered.
Please be sure to read my blog post of almost a year ago, August 18, 2010, titled Fascinating Deutsche Welle TV video of innovative architect Thomas Rau in Amsterdam, and what he's done with the WWF HQ in The Netherlands
Last year before the 2010 World Cup tourney started in South Africa, I predicted that The Netherlands would win, likely beating Spain 4-2 in the final. C'est la vie.
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This was a real gold nugget of useful information.
PBS NewsHour video: New York Times Names First Woman to Executive Editor Job. Jill Abramson speaks to NewHour host Jim Lehrer about her new position starting in September. June 3, 2011.
Page One: Inside the New York Times hits theaters June 24th, 2011
TheWrap'sEditor in Chief Sharon Waxman adroitly sizes-up Jill Abramson's selection as new executive editor of the New York Times -a fine choice, it's just not particularly inspired, or inspiring.
More thoughts of my own are below Sharon's last two posts that connect-the-dots on the Abramson story that lots of people I know will be watching VERY closely -like me.
For the record, I've been reading the NY Times daily continuously for over thirty-five years, starting when I was at JFK Junior High in North Miami Beach, circa 1974 and continuing when I got next door at NMBHS.
Every morning as I walked to school from our family's home on N.E. 159th Street & 14th Avenue in NMB, I picked up a copy of the paper next to the then-Wolfie's Restaurant on the south side of the 163rd Street Shopping Center, often getting a Black & White cookie, before walking thru the shopping center, back before it had the fabric roof installed, as the two schools were just north of it.
(The sugar from those cookies came in handy at NMB since I was on the early shift and had Spanish with Mrs. Adderly at 7 a.m.!)
No matter where I've ever lived in the United States, when I wasn't subscribing to it, I've always known every single nearby location where aNYT could be purchased, whether at a news stand or a vending machine. And I do mean EVERY one, too.
My stack of NY Times Sunday Magazineswhile in high school at North Miami Beach came in handy more times than I could tell you here, and I can still remember certain key stories or fashion essays, which is how I knew who Carrie Donovan and William Safire were long before I got up to Bloomington and IU.
There and then later in Evanston and Arlington County, my stash in banker's boxes was, if not symbols of upper-ward mobility or conspicuous consumption, at least signs of organized affinity hoarding.
The information cache in Arlington, 99% of it anyway, eventually wound-up in the hands of the Friends of the Arlington County Library to sell when I had to return to South Florida in late 2003.
My treasure trove of magazines and journals were referred to by some friends, "The National Archives Annex." Usually good-naturedly, though NOT always.
Something they didn't have on the cover of the Timesmagazine when I was in Junior High in the 1970's -this kind of amazing photography and color composition.
Above, The Self-Manufacture of Megan Fox by Lynn Hirshberg, How America's leading starlet made herself up for the multimedia age, NYT 2009-11-11, Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin for The New York Times
Jill Abramson’s Twitter Account, and a Vision for the New York Times
By Sharon Waxman
published June 3, 2011, 6:29 am
It would be more interesting that Jill Abramson was named executive editor of The New York Times if the paper was not on such a knife’s edge for survival.
Much respected, Abramson can only be considered dynamic when compared to her predecessor, the bloodless Bill Keller. Keller is so laconic that his own wife has commonly disparaged him as a cocktail party killer.
Before reading my comments, see this intriguing insight into Abramson that was in the Wall Street Journal'sBest of the Web column by James Tarnato, a column I've been reading -and occasionally contributing items to- since I was living in Arlington County.
Specifically, read the opening piece titled, All the News That's Fit to Scrub "Absolute truth"? At the New York Times, it's more like Minitrue which includes some great pithy observational comments from Tarantoandblogger Ann Althouse, and a nice tweaking of
Now you know why I said to pay attention to the video at the top, no?
In my opinion, Sharon Waxman's Friday column was MUCH more incisive than anyone else's analysis I've read -and I've read a lot- on not just the well-known and generally understood problems at the Times and it's odd mixture of both high-minded sense of duty and the more immediate need to make (and keep) a buck in the digital age, but also on Abramson's laconic personality and whether that will prove helpful or hurtful to making some necessary changes there, laconic NOT being a synonym for inspiring or motivating.
And, of course, her well-deserved tweaking -but not Tweets- of Bill Keller's well-known social media myopia, even though Times readers are MUCH more likely than other newspaper subscribers to not only have a Twitter account, but actually have something worth saying and reading!
It seems counter-intuitive that someone like Keller, at the nexus of so much useful information and insight, someone who always says the right measured thing on his appearances on The Charlie Rose Show, should be the one who actually thinks they're going to tell/lecture society -and his own readers- that they're engaged in folly.
(In that respect, Keller's myopia is akin to the Miami Herald's/McClatchy's current management keeping their head firmly in the sand when there's a million compelling stories down here in South Florida that they are consciously ignoring, but which a real energetic and properly-motivated newspaper would be doing amazing things with, a point that I've made here many times in the past with specific examples of stories they slept on.
They even bury their own reader blogs that they launched and triumphantly hailed but two short years ago -of which mine was among the originals, to my own surprise, since they never contacted me- but have now ignored them to the point that they "promote" them with nary a graphic or icon on the page but merely the word, South Florida Blogs.
At the very bottom of their web page.
I even forget they exist -and I'm listed.
in the year 2011, despite the fact that many smaller newspapers or niche online publications have them -and have had them for years- the Herald still doesn't even have a simple widget that websites or blogs can post to run their stories about sports or South Florida news or... to send readers their way.
In many respects, to me, the current Herald is like a mediocre college newspaper circa 1992 -their whole world is about to change drastically, but instead of having faculty advisors who are prescient, they have ones who think this Internet thing will have little relevancy for them, so they keep ordering nothing but more barrels of ink.)
I last wrote a lot about the Times here on the blog in April, when I just wanted to unburden myself of some tidbits and random thoughts from my time spending lots of time in and near their Washington bureau, though there was a LOT that I intentionally left out.That post was Memories of D.C. bureau of N.Y. Times; Cool stuff from NYT Graphics: Key states for Obama in 2012; 2010 Census interactive map
Eye Street trivia -I shared this with Rick Berke himself many years ago -Separated at Birth:NYT'sRick Berke and ESPN'sbaseball analyst Tim Kurkjian.
Another take on the whole Bill Keller conundrum is at Forbes' online media blog
Forbes Magazine
Media blog
NY Times Editor Bill Keller: The Exit Interview
By Jeff Bercovici
June 2 2011 - 8:00 pm
Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times, caught media watchers off guard today when he announced that he’ll step down in September, with managing editor Jill Abramson replacing him. After eight years of leading a 1,200 person newsroom through wars, recessions, elections and political sex scandals, he’s returning to being a full-time writer. I caught up with Keller, who told me what made him decide to walk away now, what he finds “damned annoying” about Arianna Huffington, and why he’s hoping the next three months will be filled with worldwide chaos.
A March 21st post of Alan's titled,A shock video to keep news execs up at night
highlighted this video below, and I agree; check it out and think about how different the Miami Herald would be today if someone like this was in charge:
