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Last night and today was the first real burst of lake effect snow for the season here in Stow. About 2 inches of snow fell last night and we got a little more today. Not a huge storm by any means - in fact, I don't think there were any school closings. But it's a reminder that winter is here - also my first chance to see what commuting in snow would be like. It wasn't that bad. Last night I was looking up some weather info and was surprised to see that there are a TON of videos on YouTube of news broadcasts here in Cleveland - especially during blizzards. These old newscasts are really wild to watch. The sets, the music, and the clothing are truly from another era. Watching newscasts from the 1980s is downright eerie for me. It's almost mildly creepy to once again see what Channel 5 and Channel 8 news looked like in the 80s and 90s, because it just floods all sorts of old memories in. It can be a little sad too - seeing Casey Coleman or Nev Chandler for example, both Cleveland sports reporters that died of cancer. At the same time it's interesting how many of these people are still around. Anyway, there are a ton of these, just search for WJW, WEWS, WKYC, etc. and you can find a whole lot more. I realize these would probably only be even remotely interesting to people living in the Cleveland area, but I would assume that you can find clips from virtually any station in the country. One thing that consistently amazes me about the internet is that not only did someone record these things, but then took the extra step to put them online! This first clip is from January of 1978, on Channel 8, the day of a huge blizzard that struck Cleveland. My parents were younger then than I am now! In fact, I think this is when Mom and Dad were about to purchase the house I grew up in. Dick Goddard is doing the weather - starting at about 5:40 and 8:08. The "color radar" is hilarious :). And here's a clip from the blizzard of January 1985, on Channel 5, WEWS. Ted Henry is still on Channel 5, and I believe Wilma Smith is now on Channel 8. I think. It's weird - watching this gives me MAJOR 80s flashbacks. I just realized that those little girls at the beginning are probably about my age! If there's one thing to take from this, it's that TV news sets, music, and clothing are incredibly dated :). Man there are a ton of these clips. current weather: Snow, 26, Wind: NW 5 Tags: cleveland, news, television, weather, youtube
Current Location: 41.197N 81.433W
Current Mood:  nostalgic
Current Music: none
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I was wondering, does anyone have any recommendations for good sources of news on the internet? Specifically, local or national news. I've had a "My Yahoo" page set up for some time, that I use as a homepage, with news feeds from the Associated Press and Reuters. I liked that setup, but over time, the My Yahoo interface has gotten sort of bloated and I'm finding myself liking it less and less. For international news, I really love BBC News. They have real comprehensive coverage, and they also tend to cover world stories that I never hear much about anywhere else (except maybe NPR). I would love to find a site which had the same quality and depth of coverage, but focusing more on the United States specifically. NPR has a good site, but doesn't always include transcripts of its stories, just the audio, which require the NPR player application to listen to, and I can never seem to get it to work right. Even if I could, I'd rather just read than listen. I don't like Fox News and CNN's web pages very much. I don't really like Fox News's web page format, and it also has a pretty clear bias to one end of the political spectrum. CNN doesn't have such a clear bias, but it is incredibly sensational, with a lot of focus on pointless stories (like " Kid Rock Waffle House Fight Caught on Tape"). I also have some trouble getting CNN's videos to play nice with FlashBlocker. Reuters has a website, and it's not a bad source of news, but their stories are usually quite short and not particularly in-depth. The New York Times has its own bias, but even worse, its site and the Wall Street Journal require registration. The Cleveland TV stations have web pages, but they're not really that great, and in fact, Channel 3 sometimes puts stories up that don't even feature complete sentences or any kind of coherency. For the most local of news, the Stow Sentry has a reasonable site, but it looks like it was designed in 1998 and doesn't support RSS for reading it on a site like Bloglines. Which is, increasingly, where I read a lot of news. But it's still not any good for any kind of breaking stories. So have a I missed anything? Are there any other good sources for American national news, or for breaking news, on the internet? Tags: internet, news
Current Location: 41.197N 81.433W
Current Mood:  curious
Current Music: none
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If you've watched or listened to any news today you probably already know about the earthquake in Sichuan. I was listening to Morning Edition while I was testing out my new commute today, and apparently Michelle Block and Robert Siegel from All Things Considered (along with an NPR crew) are actually in Chengdu right now, preparing for a week of stories originating in China next week. Chengdu is the capital of Sichuan Province, and the epicenter of the earthquake was only about 60 miles northwest from there. Anyway, the reason I point this out is that I guess Michelle Block was actually in the middle of recording an interview when the quake struck. It's really amazing... an earthquake is a hard thing for me to fathom, I've never experienced anything like that. She's very professional, it's not the stream of obscenities I would expect if I was in an earthquake. The audio reminds me of when I was watching the pre-game for Game 3 of the 1989 World Series, when the Loma Prieta Earthquake struck. The main difference is that the recording of the interview continues, whereas the signal got dropped from the baseball broadcast. One of the audio clips is from Michelle visiting the site of the school collapse. It's very painful to listen to. Tags: china, earthquake, news
Current Location: 41.197N 81.433W
Current Mood:  okay
Current Music: none
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Yesterday's final word on Marketplace (which, I should add, I listened to in podcast form): Bob Moon's final note ...
Remember earlier this week when we told you that American Idol was going to save a season of television crippled by the screenwriter's strike? That people -- listless from so many Law and Order reruns --- would turn to the reality show as a bright spark of original content?
Well, preliminary numbers seem to indicate something else. Nielsen is reporting that ratings are down 11 percent from last year. American Idol is still the most-watched, non-sports show on TV. But the ratings seem to imply that 4.2 million people might just have found something better to do with themselves.
Possibly the Marketplace podcast?...probably not. But I am beginning to wonder if the writer's strike is going to end up seriously diminishing the impact of television in the form that we know it. On a sort-of related note, I can't stand huge amounts of cross-promotion by "news" organizations. The presence of advertising and marketing make me really suspicious of a lot of sources of information. Have you watched any of the nightly news broadcasts by NBC, ABC, or CBS? Ok, I know you haven't, it's ok, no one does anymore (at least, under the age of 40). But if you were to watch them, you'd see that 90% or more of the ads are for prescription medicines, in which commercials promise to do something about the health scourge that is Restless legs syndrome or how to help you get a 4-hour erection, control your heartburn, deal with allergies, shrug off depression, etc. All, of course, as long as you can accept that certain side effects may include vomiting, bad dreams, or death. But my point is this: how could you possibly trust any news story in that setting about a health issue? If, say, ABC were to say something bad about about, say, Pfizer in their news broadcast, Pfizer would pull their advertising dollars. Which is the whole point of the program. You see this sort of corporate dependency in, well... just about everything. It's why it's difficult to believe anything you read from sources that are a part of any industry's hype machine, things like automotive reviews, videogame reviews, movie reviews, consumer electronics, etc. Now, I'm not necessarily making some huge case for public broadcasting here (or Consumer Reports, although, yes, I love it), as I've said before I don't necessarily mind advertising as long as it's targeted well. Unfortunately it never is. And besides, I'm waaaaay off-topic. Really I just wanted to complain about the local morning news on (FOX) Channel 8 feeling the need to spend a bunch of time reporting on what happened last night on American Idol. I'm not going to go so far as to say "nobody cares," because obviously someone does, but I wonder if the person that really cares is the FOX Network, so they promote their own stupid show during a news broadcast instead of covering real news. Ok... I guess I really got the engine fired up on the ol' Rant Train. I'm just sick of eating my breakfast and wanting to get the weather or the news instead of watching clips of those assholes on American Idol laugh in the face of people who honestly don't realize that their singing is really bad. current weather: Cloudy, 33, Wind: S 7 Tags: advertising, marketplace, news, rant, television
Current Location: 41.197N 81.433W
Current Mood:  aggravated
Current Music: American Public Media - Marketplace for January 15, 2008
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My favorite Onion articles are usually the ones that come out immediately after a major story in the news: Earthquake sets Japan back to 2147Abe reassured citizens that the disaster was merely a temporary setback.
"It should only be a matter of days before the Asahi Ultima Crisis chronotriggered reversion engine is once more online," Abe said. "Citizens of Japan, I promise you: Once our folded-space-time technology is again functional, this whole earthquake will never have happened."In other news, I am officially in long-work-hours-sanity-protection mode. Having Deathly Hallows to read helps. currently reading: "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" by J.K. Rowling current weather: Cloudy, 69, Wind: calm; It was cloudy all day today, which made me realize just how rare that actually is here this time of year (but just wait till September!) Tags: harry potter, humor, japan, news, the onion, work
Current Location: 41.197N 81.433W
Current Mood:  calm
Current Music: Bleach - Shiro Sagisu - On the Precipice of Defeat
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I haven't really followed the disappearance of Jessie Marie Davis all that closely, but it's been hard not to - the disappearance of the Canton woman was a local news story before I left for Colorado, but while I was out there it transformed into a national story. I did pay some attention to it, but not a whole lot, I mean, it involved people I didn't know and wasn't all that close to home. They found her body yesterday, however, and in Summit County. Mark sent me an e-mail and pointed out that they actually found her body in Hampton Hills Metro Park, which is where Gregg and I hiked last Sunday. She was last seen June 13th, and we were there June 17th, so it's highly likely that her body was in the park while we were hiking through there. Today's Akron Beacon Journal points out the section of the park, and we definitely walked through there... Maybe not a huge deal, I mean, lots of people walked through the park that day, but still a little creepy I guess. Tags: local, news, ohio
Current Location: 41.197N 81.433W
Current Mood:  uncomfortable
Current Music: none
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I was getting caught up on Marketplace today at work, and there was one segment I found particularly interesting, from last Thursday's program. They were talking to Benjamin Barber, author of " Consumed," who believes that modern American consumerism is harmful to free market capitalism, which was focused on production and meeting people's needs (while making money doing so) instead of buying, buying, buying, just for the sake of it. Here's the full text of the segment. ( http://marketplace.publicradio.org/shows/2007/03/22/PM200703226.html) This part in particular sticks out at me: ...in the beginning of capitalism — in the 15th and 16th century —capitalism was focused on production, on hard work, on deferred gratification, on altruism. People investing and saving and capitalists acquiring wealth and keeping it in order to do further investments. All in the name of producing goods for people with very real needs and down the line making some profit from it as well. The problem is, today we have not a productivist economy but a consumer economy. And the emphasis today is not on production, but on consuming. And you've got a capitalism which is producing an awful lot of goods which are chasing very few needs, while real needs are going unmet around the world.and: I like shopping. This isn't a argument about abstemiousness or about asceticism. My problem is we live in a world where shopping and consumerism and advertising are ubiquitous and omnipresent. They're everywhere we go. I mean, imagine a world in which for every sign you see advertising something, we saw a sign about how wonderful the party or the president was. You know, we call that totalitarianism. But when we have a society totally dominated by consumerism and markets, we say, "Oh! That's liberty." I don't get it. Muhammad Yunus gets a mention in the story as well. I had intended to write about him some time ago but never got around to it. If you're not familiar, he won the Nobel Peace Prize for his concept of microcredit, the very cool concept of providing very small loans for the unemployed, poor entrepreneurs and others who lack collateral. As he said when he received the prize: We must address the root causes of terrorism to end it for all time, I believe putting resources into improving the lives of poor people is a better strategy than spending it on guns.**** On an unrelated note, I just wanted to point out that the charges against that man who made the "drunk pilot" comment at CAK were dropped yesterday. Good. **** Also, for some reason it seems odd to me that there isn't more news coverage of the " Iran takes 15 Royal Navy sailors prisoner" story. Maybe it's just because I don't have cable so I don't have 24-hour coverage bombarding me with it, but it seems to me like a really big deal and it's not even on my list of Reuters Top World Stories at the moment. It just seems strange, this seems like a really big deal to me, maybe it's just because there isn't much new to report on it? currently reading: "Final Impact" by John Birminghamcurrent weather: Mostly Cloudy, 63, Wind: NW 3; Some rain around today, but none here Tags: capitalism, economics, local, marketplace, news
Current Location: 41.197N 81.433W
Current Mood: curious
Current Music: none
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