Do you win a pony?

not that kind of porn...

Because otherwise I'm not seeing the upside.

true. kitchens are fun.

Excellent essay on what's gone wrong with the news media these days:

One of the things I got them to do was to go back through the annual reports of every Fleet Street company going back to 1985. 1985 is an important year because in January 1986 Rupert Murdoch moved his newspapers into Wapping and broke the print unions. He broke the resistance, such resistance as there was in Fleet Street, to the logic of commercialism, to what those big corporations which had taken all those newspapers over wanted to do.

The academics did two things. Year by year they looked at what happened to the editorial staffing levels of those Fleet Street papers over the next 20 years. The second thing they did was they measured the space which those editorial staff were filling, how many column inches of news. You crunch all those numbers for all these companies and you come up with something that is really important – essentially, your average Fleet Street reporter now is filling three times as much space as he or she was 20 years ago. Turn that round, look at it from the reporter’s point of view: we only have one third of the time to do our job. That’s terribly important.

If you take time away from some processes, like if you’re manufacturing cars and you take time out so you do it quicker you can argue that this improves the process, it makes it cheaper so you can sell more and put more money back into production. But if you take time away from reporters you take away our most important working asset. We cannot do our jobs properly if they won’t give us the time to do it. It’s as simple as that. We’ve been caught in this pincer movement where our staffing levels have been cut, our output has been increased – all the newspapers have extra supplements, you have 24-hour broadcasting – the whole nature of being a reporter and the back-up journalists involved has changed: instead of being active news gatherers we’ve become passive processors. Most reporters nowadays don’t have contacts, we don’t go out and find stories, we don’t check facts.

...

Whereas you should have a system where journalists, working honestly and independently, make what used to be called news judgments and say this story is important, this angle needs to be expressed, this research needs to be done, instead now we sit there passively and those decisions are made by Alastair Campbell and the whole magic world of PR and the public and private and the charity sector and the terrorist groups. They write the press releases and we bung ‘em in.

And it isn’t just about press releases. It’s about deeply manipulative behaviour. So for example, PR companies work very assiduously to set up front groups. These are phony grass-roots groups. There are so many phony grass-roots groups in the US that they have a nice little term for them, they call them Astroturf, because their not real grass.

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Yeah, my mom had one of the marble ones. If cold matters for what you're making, you could stash it in the freezer for a while before using it.

does my cordless apple mouse really need Lithium batteries?

Jesse, you need IO digital cable. Then you can watch a lot of channels, whenever you're able.

If only she could remember the phone number...

I actually just went and looked it up, and I couldn't get IO digital cable even if I wanted to! A bunch of people on my street have satellite dishes on their fire escapes, so I guess I could do that, but then I'd have to figure out a new ISP, and I don't have a phone line, so I don't know what that means. Eh. I'm sure I'll keep Time Warner, and keep bitching about it!

I have a wooden French-style rolling pin that I use all the time, and a marble one with handles that I use never ever. (There is also a matching marble slab to roll pie crust out on that goes with the marble pin. It currently lives on top of my refrigerator.)

I like the non-handled varieties for their ease of use and cleaning - sans handles, there's nowhere for bits of dough to get caught and stuck in.

I spent all of yesterday in a dark, quiet room trying not to puke because of a sinus migraine. I'm glad it wasn't today, because I'm supposed to go to a concert later and not being able to handle light or noise would have been inconvenient.

Mm. Food now.

The Cocktail Party Physics blog has an interview with the author of The Physics of NASCAR: How To Make Steel + Gas + Rubber = Speed. It's pretty interesting. The author talks about how she was essentially embedded in a NASCAR team to learn stuff....

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Ugh, shrift. I'm sorry you got visited by the Migraine fairy.