“Good morning, everyone!”
“Good Morning Ms. Huffington!”
“Today we’re going to learn a little bit about irony. I know you’ve heard the term, but can anyone tell me what it means?”
*pause*
“Okay, well, say, for example, that we ran a headline saying, umm, something like ‘Hillary Clinton to go defuse tensions in Israel’, but juxtaposed that against a photograph of her looking like she’s training for the featherweight champ– Hey! That’s not half bad!”
Glynnis MacNicol at Mediaite has already pointed out most of the dodgy fallacy in Peggy Noonan’s column here.
She failed to point out the clumsiness of Noonan’s writing, which I find unbefitting of the Wall Street Journal:
It revealed what the president doesn’t want revealed, which is that he doesn’t want to reveal much about his plan. (emphasis mine)
It occurs to me that it might have been a deliberate attempt at rhetoric or cadence. Fail on both fronts. So what’s worse? Writers who can’t write or writers with an overstated impression of their own cleverness (and which category do we fit)?
This does about as much good as when Time named me and you and everyone we know person of the year. Except this (sort of) actually matters. The Nobel committee needs a no-novelty bids rule, lest it become the Oscars.
[via BBC News]
Okay, fucking journalists, you know the name of the guy who started Gawker. Floss it. It is, for many of you, the one thing keeping you in one piece as your profession falls apart with you inside. But you never hear anyone saying “Why did Arianna Huffington turn her site into a firehose of obnoxious, vapid, pappy crap,” do you? It’s “Huffington Post used to be so much better” or “woe is me, I’m having a bit of trouble finding the nipple slips.”
He’s just a man, man.
If blog software had its way, eight would be the new 13; one trending fail WTPWB has been noticing lately is the inadvertent smiley in numbered lists, where the 8 should be. Take, for example, this list of “types of bitches,” found here.
(cropped at number 12, my personal fave)
This: 
is an emoticon, you see, depicting a smiling face with some sort of glasses on. I guess this is as good a time as any to see if THIS blog will make the same mistake.
UPDATE: So umm anyone know how to turn that off?
Two points to make about this World Editors Forum story:
1. No fucking shit more articles are shared on Facebook over the weekend; most of us have lives, things to do during the day, etc. Doesn’t it follow that not only will one see an increase in article trading by way of FB, but a general increase in site-usage? Particularly if you consider the number of students on there, particularly middle- and high-schoolers, who (if memory serves) tend to live a more regimented life during the week.
2. This sort of data is, or could be, key to emerging forms of ethnography and social science having to do with the internet. This is something of a pipe dream, but it would be better, more accurate, and less onerous for those who study digital culture if Facebook would open itself to the release of these sorts of statistics (taking into account all privacy concerns, of course) to the public. They could probably even sell that data, and I wouldn’t be opposed to that. The bottom line is, they’re sitting on a wealth of juicy sociological and statistical information and being pretty douchy about its use.
[via Mediagazer]
(Trivia: How many times has that been used as a headline on this blog?)
Just heard a little bit of interesting info on the Diane Rehm Show’s Friday News Roundup from last week.
So as we all know, Iran has been building uranium enrichment facilities for a while now, but the number of functional enrichment facilities in Iran is smaller than it was since it began its enrichment program a… while back. A pretty long time ago? Don’t know the year, sorry.
But it kind of puts into perspective why, for example, we haven’t blown that country to smithereens, and why the world community doesn’t seem as preoccupied with it as the U.S. does.
The Gothamist headline, copped from the NY Post says, “Police Bust Massive Rockaway Drug Ring”
But the content suggests neither “massive” nor “ring,” in the Don Corelone sense of the word, anyway. First, lets talk weight:
Police seized 41 bags of crack, 230 bags of marijuana, and smaller amounts of heroin and Oxycontin.
That’s referred to as “a decent weekend” here Where Todd P Won’t Be HQ. As for personnel:
Officers cuffed 45 suspects including members of the Bloods, Crips, and Money Over Bitches gangs.
So what’s happened is, NYPD — after a protracted investigation that I’m pretty sure I could’ve handled over the course of an afternoon — has managed to find 45 dime-bag dealers in the Hammel Houses, a public housing complex in The Rockaways. Its a lot of people, in terms of sheer numbers, but not really all that noteworthy considering the Hammel Houses are essentially a miniature city unto themselves:
Hammel Houses on the Rockaway peninsula in Queens consists of 14 buildings, 6 and 7-stories high with 712 apartments housing some 1,994 residents. Completed April 30, 1955, the 14.16-acre complex is bordered by Beach 81st and Beach 86th Streets, Hammels and Rockaway Beach Boulevards.
So 45 small time crooks in a community of nearly 2,000 people… that’s the approximate rate of return police get running drug dogs up and down the hallways of my high school on the west side of Milwaukee. The difference is, as far as I can tell, that there is no shit tabloid equivalent to the Post/Daily News in Milwaukee, and the real newspaper, such as it is, doesn’t have time or inclination to cover non-entities like this.
So why all the fuss here in the Big Apple? The Post/Daily News emphasize this trash because they emphasize every piece of trash that vilifies poor people or can somehow stir the “us vs. them” pot, where “us” equals their readership which informal observation suggests mainly consists of overweight moustached white men, aged 40-70 and “them” equals anyone who lacks the means to buy a paper. The perfect venue for some good old fashioned scare-mongering. The Post is second to none in that department, and, as always, readers swarm to lap that shit up. One comment, from the Post:
Sharpton, where are you, your brothers need you. Why is it your never around when your people need you, but only when whites are involved?
You’ll find similarly ignorant, though less venomous, commentary in the Daily News.
So, to recap: innocuous drug bust –> victory trumpeting by police –> picked up by crummy daily –> hyperbolized –> misinformed readers figure everyone in the projects deals drugs (which is really code for minorities dealing drugs) –> racism lives another day.
High-atus
Figure its prudent to announce an extended stay-cation for WTPWB. We’ll be back with a new format sometime in the, you know, future. Thanks for reading, keep those RSS subscriptions live, and in the words of Vigo the Carpathian (Scourge of Carpathia, Sorrow of Moldavia and, in some circles, Vigo the Butch), “Death is but a door; time is but a window; I’ll be back.”