Agree or disagree? "Tablet computers and electronic readers promise to
close the book on the ink-and-paper era as they transform the way
people browse magazines, check news or lose themselves in novels."
“It is only a matter of time before we stop killing trees and all
publications become digital,” according to an observer overseas: "However, the jury is
still out on how the reading brain is adapting to screens. We need to
wait for the current reserach with MRI and PET scans to tell us
whether reading on paper really was superior, brain-wise, in terms of
brain chemistry, to reading off screens."
Readers are showing increased loyalty to digital books, despite
reservations about how the reading brain "reads" off screens,
according to a U.S. book industry study group.
"The e-book market is developing very fast, with consumer attitudes
and behaviors changing over the course of months, rather than years,”
said a study group spokeswoman, who added: "But yes,
if it can be shown that the reading brain finds reading on paper
superior
to reading off screens, then we are going to be in big trouble."
Concerns about e-book reading are diminishing, with people mainly
wishing for lower device prices, and not concerned
at all about how ''the reading brain'' is adapting to screen-reading, or
in the words of Cory Doctorow, ''screeniness'', according to a survey.
“I'm among those who believe that the new e-book craze expands a
person's interest in reading overall,” said another analyst
in Britain. "However, I must agree with experts that how the reading brain
adapts to screen reading is of paramount importance. We might be
barking up the wrong tree with these reading devices. Then what?"
"When you can get someone excited about reading in any way, you turn
on the reading ignition and it leads to all content,” he said,
adding that ink-and-paper works will continue to hold a place in the
mix because the reading brain seems to prefer reading on paper, in
terms of
brain chemistry."
He also believes it will be at least a century or more before print is
obsolete, and if current research shows scrreen reading to be vastly
inferior
to paper reading, it might never happen.
"Print might wind up extinct for newspapers, while magazines will need
to figure out the balance between print and digital,” he contended.
"It all depends what the final studies with MRI and PET scans show us
about the reading brain in terms of reading on paper compared to
screen reading. What if we are wrong?"
Friday, December 30, 2011
TABLETS CLOSE BOOK ON PAPER
Tablets, e-readers close book on era of paper, but questions remain about 'the reading brain'
Tablets, e-readers close book on era of paper,
but questions remain about 'the reading brain'
December 31, 2012
By Ben Lappaine, AFP
SAN FRANCISCO -- Tablet computers and electronic readers promise to close the book on the ink-and-paper era as they transform the way people browse magazines, check news or lose themselves in novels.
“It is only a matter of time before we stop killing trees and all publications become digital,” Creative Strategies President and principal analyst Tim Bajarin told AFP, adding: "However, the jury is still out on how the reading brain is adapting to screens. We need to wait for the current reserach with MRI and PET scans to tell us whether reading on paper really was superior, brain-wise, in terms of brain chemistry, to reading off screens."
Online retail giant Amazon has made electronic readers mainstream with Kindle devices, and Apple ignited insatiable demand for tablets ideal for devouring online content ranging from films to magazines and books.
In 2011, digital books earned about US$3 billion in revenue, an amount that the combined momentum of e-readers and tablets is expected to triple to US$9 billion by the year 2016, according to a Juniper Research report.
Readers are showing increased loyalty to digital books, despite reservations about how the reading brain "reads" off screens, according to the U.S. Book Industry Study Group.
Nearly half of print book buyers who also got digital works said they would skip getting an ink-and-paper release by a favorite author if an electronic version could be had within three months, a BISG survey showed.
“The e-book market is developing very fast, with consumer attitudes and behaviors changing over the course of months, rather than years,” said BISG deputy executive director Angela Bole, who added: "But yes, if it can be shown that the reading brain finds reading on paper superior
to reading off screens, then we are going to be in big trouble."
Concerns about e-book reading are diminishing, with people mainly wishing for lower device prices, and not concerned
at all about how the reading brain is adapting to screen-reading, or in the words of Cory Doctorow, screeniness, according to the survey.
Owning e-readers tended to ramp up the amount of money people spent on titles in what BISG described as a promising sign for publishers.
Major U.S. book seller Barnes & Noble responded to the trend by launching an e-reader, the Nook, and other chains are picking up on the strategy, according to Juniper.
“I'm among those who believe that the new e-book craze expands a person's interest in reading overall,” said Gartner analyst Allen Weiner. "However, I must agree with experts that how the reading brain adapts to screen reading is of paramount importance. We might be
barking up the wrong tree with these reading devices. Then what?"
“When you can get someone excited about reading in any way, you turn on the reading ignition and it leads to all content,” Weiner said, adding that ink-and-paper works will continue to hold a place in the mix because the reading brain seems to prefer reading on paper, in terms of
brain chemistry..
Bajarin believes it will be at least a century or more before print is obsolete, and if current research shows scrreen reading to be vastly inferior
to paper reading, it might never happen.
“For one thing, there is a generation of people above 45 who grew up with this reading format and for many this will remain the most comfortable way for them to consume content for quite a while,” he said.
“However, younger generations are already moving rapidly to digital representations of publications and, over time, they will be using e-books and tablets to consume all of their publications, even if the reading brain finds screen-reading to be inferior to paper surface reading.”
Weiner expected hardback or paperback books to be preferred in some situations, such as home reading, even as digital dominates publishing.
“I think it is a myth that it is going to kill the print book business,” Weiner said.
“Will it force publishers to think differently?” he asked rhetorically. “Absolutely, but it doesn't spell the demise of print (book) publishing.”
Newspapers and magazines, however, should read the digital writing on the wall, according to analysts.
“Newspapers and magazines have different issues,” Weiner said.
“Print might wind up extinct for newspapers, while magazines will need to figure out the balance between print and digital,” he contended. "It all depends what the final studies with MRI and PET scans show us about the reading brain in terms of reading on paper compared to
screen reading. What if we are wrong?"
Newspapers spend a lot of money printing and distributing daily editions that can't be kept as fresh as stories on the Internet.
In related news, Dr Ellen Marker, who studies reading and the reading brain in Boston, has her own ideas. The pioneering neuroscientist analyzes brains in their most enthusiastic
reading state, hoping to understand the differences between reading
off screens and reading on paper surfaces.
Dr Marker feels that her studies will show reading on paper
is superior to reading off screens in terms of
retention, processing, analysis and critical thinking.
Among the things that Market has discovered so far is that reading on
paper might be
something we as a civilization should not ever give up.
“Even though reading on screens is useful and convenient, and I do it
all the time, I feel that
reading on paper is somethine we should never cede to the digital
revolution,” Marker, 43, says. “We need both.”
With the invention of the fMRI only 20 years ago, along came the
ability to look at brain activity. Marker says that by understanding a
function as gigantic as reading, how the reading brain does its magic
dance, a response that hijacks all of
one’s attention, she might also learn how reading on screens could be
inferior to reading on paper.
Research and teaching take up most of Marker’s time, but when she has a
spare moment, she thinks about what all this might mean for the future
of humankind.
She discusses what her research could do for the future of
humankind. “We need to know
if reading on screens is going to be good if it replaces all our
reading on paper.”
“There’s no premium on studying paper reading modes versus
screen-reading modes in this society,” she tells me
as Smith murmurs, “What do you expect? The gadgetheads want to take over.”
One of the biggest conundrums turns out to be a nagging
question for all mankind: What if reading on screens is not good
for retention of data, emotional connections and critical thinking skills.
Marker begins slipping more and more
into her thoughts. “Neurons, little bags of chemicals, create
awareness,” he says, “but how? How does the brain create the mind?
What is reading, really?”
but questions remain about 'the reading brain'
December 31, 2012
By Ben Lappaine, AFP
SAN FRANCISCO -- Tablet computers and electronic readers promise to close the book on the ink-and-paper era as they transform the way people browse magazines, check news or lose themselves in novels.
“It is only a matter of time before we stop killing trees and all publications become digital,” Creative Strategies President and principal analyst Tim Bajarin told AFP, adding: "However, the jury is still out on how the reading brain is adapting to screens. We need to wait for the current reserach with MRI and PET scans to tell us whether reading on paper really was superior, brain-wise, in terms of brain chemistry, to reading off screens."
Online retail giant Amazon has made electronic readers mainstream with Kindle devices, and Apple ignited insatiable demand for tablets ideal for devouring online content ranging from films to magazines and books.
In 2011, digital books earned about US$3 billion in revenue, an amount that the combined momentum of e-readers and tablets is expected to triple to US$9 billion by the year 2016, according to a Juniper Research report.
Readers are showing increased loyalty to digital books, despite reservations about how the reading brain "reads" off screens, according to the U.S. Book Industry Study Group.
Nearly half of print book buyers who also got digital works said they would skip getting an ink-and-paper release by a favorite author if an electronic version could be had within three months, a BISG survey showed.
“The e-book market is developing very fast, with consumer attitudes and behaviors changing over the course of months, rather than years,” said BISG deputy executive director Angela Bole, who added: "But yes, if it can be shown that the reading brain finds reading on paper superior
to reading off screens, then we are going to be in big trouble."
Concerns about e-book reading are diminishing, with people mainly wishing for lower device prices, and not concerned
at all about how the reading brain is adapting to screen-reading, or in the words of Cory Doctorow, screeniness, according to the survey.
Owning e-readers tended to ramp up the amount of money people spent on titles in what BISG described as a promising sign for publishers.
Major U.S. book seller Barnes & Noble responded to the trend by launching an e-reader, the Nook, and other chains are picking up on the strategy, according to Juniper.
“I'm among those who believe that the new e-book craze expands a person's interest in reading overall,” said Gartner analyst Allen Weiner. "However, I must agree with experts that how the reading brain adapts to screen reading is of paramount importance. We might be
barking up the wrong tree with these reading devices. Then what?"
“When you can get someone excited about reading in any way, you turn on the reading ignition and it leads to all content,” Weiner said, adding that ink-and-paper works will continue to hold a place in the mix because the reading brain seems to prefer reading on paper, in terms of
brain chemistry..
Bajarin believes it will be at least a century or more before print is obsolete, and if current research shows scrreen reading to be vastly inferior
to paper reading, it might never happen.
“For one thing, there is a generation of people above 45 who grew up with this reading format and for many this will remain the most comfortable way for them to consume content for quite a while,” he said.
“However, younger generations are already moving rapidly to digital representations of publications and, over time, they will be using e-books and tablets to consume all of their publications, even if the reading brain finds screen-reading to be inferior to paper surface reading.”
Weiner expected hardback or paperback books to be preferred in some situations, such as home reading, even as digital dominates publishing.
“I think it is a myth that it is going to kill the print book business,” Weiner said.
“Will it force publishers to think differently?” he asked rhetorically. “Absolutely, but it doesn't spell the demise of print (book) publishing.”
Newspapers and magazines, however, should read the digital writing on the wall, according to analysts.
“Newspapers and magazines have different issues,” Weiner said.
“Print might wind up extinct for newspapers, while magazines will need to figure out the balance between print and digital,” he contended. "It all depends what the final studies with MRI and PET scans show us about the reading brain in terms of reading on paper compared to
screen reading. What if we are wrong?"
Newspapers spend a lot of money printing and distributing daily editions that can't be kept as fresh as stories on the Internet.
In related news, Dr Ellen Marker, who studies reading and the reading brain in Boston, has her own ideas. The pioneering neuroscientist analyzes brains in their most enthusiastic
reading state, hoping to understand the differences between reading
off screens and reading on paper surfaces.
Dr Marker feels that her studies will show reading on paper
is superior to reading off screens in terms of
retention, processing, analysis and critical thinking.
Among the things that Market has discovered so far is that reading on
paper might be
something we as a civilization should not ever give up.
“Even though reading on screens is useful and convenient, and I do it
all the time, I feel that
reading on paper is somethine we should never cede to the digital
revolution,” Marker, 43, says. “We need both.”
With the invention of the fMRI only 20 years ago, along came the
ability to look at brain activity. Marker says that by understanding a
function as gigantic as reading, how the reading brain does its magic
dance, a response that hijacks all of
one’s attention, she might also learn how reading on screens could be
inferior to reading on paper.
Research and teaching take up most of Marker’s time, but when she has a
spare moment, she thinks about what all this might mean for the future
of humankind.
She discusses what her research could do for the future of
humankind. “We need to know
if reading on screens is going to be good if it replaces all our
reading on paper.”
“There’s no premium on studying paper reading modes versus
screen-reading modes in this society,” she tells me
as Smith murmurs, “What do you expect? The gadgetheads want to take over.”
One of the biggest conundrums turns out to be a nagging
question for all mankind: What if reading on screens is not good
for retention of data, emotional connections and critical thinking skills.
Marker begins slipping more and more
into her thoughts. “Neurons, little bags of chemicals, create
awareness,” he says, “but how? How does the brain create the mind?
What is reading, really?”
Thursday, December 29, 2011
Krantzstone (@Krantzstone) on : ''Brand yourself before somebody else does''
in response tomy comment:re an internet guru [Rob Pegoraro] said ”Like it or not; people can be brands.” .......I had said: ........''NO NO NO,,,,people cannot be brands…this is a perversion of culture and civilization….people are people. PERIOD. we are not brands and this whole empowerment ME ME ME self-branding entitled BS is just that, BS!''
Krantz Stone or Stone Krantz, in Canada, replied in the comments section:
Dear Angry Luddite:
I don't think yours is a realistic attitude to hold in the age of the internet and of social media.
The term 'branding' may have corporate connotations which emphasize the commoditization of people's personas and reputations, but the fact remains that when our names and reputations are but a Google search away, no one can really afford to leave their personal reputations in hands of others: we have to take proactive steps to ensure that when employers (for example) Google our names, they don't come up with anything that would make them not want to hire us.
That's just one example of what personal branding means.
It's about controlling our image, our names, our reputations in the on-line, public sphere of the internet.
Even one comment on one blog post can speak volumes about a person: it doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to deduce whether someone is callous and thoughtless or kind and considerate by what one says on the internet, or how one says it.
If a post is full of spelling and grammatical errors and is incoherent, like it or not, people who read the post make pat judgements about the kind of person who wrote the post.
Likewise, what one says on Twitter (as Ashton Kutcher discovered to his dismay) can create a huge firestorm of controversy, even if the intent behind it might have been innocent at best and simply not phrased right, and so it's important that people make an effort to comport themselves on the internet as one might do if one were out in real life, speaking publicly, because that is in essence what they are doing every time they post something on Facebook, or tweet, or comment on a blog or website.
No matter how decent a person, or how well-spoken and urbane, if they don't make the effort to control what is associated with their (brand) name on the internet, they run the risk of having their online (and subsequently their real life) reputations tarnished as a result.
Whether that should matter much in journalism is a different story, although I would argue that journalism that is not read by anyone isn't really very useful, no matter how good the integrity of the journalist or how well-written their piece, and especially in the now precarious world of print journalism, journalists are basically being left to fend for themselves in terms of promoting their own work and thus, the need for personal branding.
A decent journalist might be able to garner sufficient Twitter followers, blog readers, Facebook fans, etc. solely through word of mouth of the quality of their work by reputation alone, but it's an uphill battle in a world increasingly stuffed full of self-styled news bloggers marketing themselves so that they might be heard.
There are only so many people whose Twitter feed people are going to want to read on a given day, it's not like there is an infinite amount of tweets that people have time or inclination to read, so they're going to start getting picky about who they follow.
A journalist who wants to earn a living and keep feeding their families needs to be able to generate the kind of following that social media can provide: at the very least, having that sort of following is exactly the kind of cachet needed for a journalist to be able to snag a job at a newspaper (where they care about whether a journalist has or will have the kind of following that will mean more people who might read (and buy) their newspaper and not some other, not to mention it mattering to the advertisers who largely financially support those papers).
At best, having that sort of constant and loyal following means that your journalism work isn't in vain, you're not just some schmuck with a blog writing to a nonexistent audience where you're only getting 10 hits on your page in a month, and 5 of those were you checking your own blog from your phone.
It means having the same kind of following that Pulitzer-prize winning print journalists had in the past, or Emmy award-winning news reporters, of being heard, of getting the kind of recognition for your hard work which is as important to career satisfaction as getting paid.
Otherwise, you might as well go do something else which is less stressful and might pay better. That's all personal branding really is, and I don't really see it as being this terrible or perverse thing that you seem to.
http://twitter.com/Krantzstone
re
http://robpegoraro.com/2011/06/27/journalists-brand-yourself-before-somebody-else-does/
We suggest a new term POT for personal operating tag or P.O.T instead of personal brand.
Any other suggestions? All ideas welcome pro and con.
Saturday, November 12, 2011
AP asks newspapers using wire services now to ''report'' that Walk of Fame stars costs $30K each and are bought and paid for by studios as PR gimmicks
AP asks newspapers using wire services now to ''report''
that Walk of Fame stars costs $30K each and are
bought and paid for by studios as PR gimmicks; before
this AP never reported the hidden truth!
MediaRecoder - New Yark Times
by Peter Jeremy and Nick Cardavid
The stars are paid for. We're talking about the paid promotional
gimmicks on the Walk of Fame in Hollywood, where each
star's star costs $30,000 and is bought and paid for by the studios
as part of their marketing costs for upcoming films, concerts, books
and other events that tie in with the "awarding" of each "honorary" star.
Note: Roger Ebert has star there, paid for by some friends in Chicago,
according to a newspaper columnist in the Windy City. CBS TV guy Bill Geist also bought his own star, paid for itself himself.
For years, this crucial background information was kept from readers.
But in 2010, Barbara Munker of the German News Service dpa, reported
a story from Hollywood that laid out the facts: the stars are ordered up by
the studios to coincide with marketing campaigns and cost money, now $30K. the DPA article was on the DPA international wires, but not one USA newspaper printed it or even discussed it. Danny Bloom, lone blogger in Taiwan and a 1971 Tufts grad from Boston, saw the DPA story in the China Post expat
paper in Taipei and could not believe his eyes. All his life, he had
thought the stars on the Walk of Fame were real honors, and
set up by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce to honor celebrities.
Turns out the stars have always been a paid PR promotional gimmick,
according to Munker, who has since been quiet on the subject. But her
2010 article is available online.
Bloom, a big fan of movies and Hollywood stars, yes, set out to ask the
AP and Reuters wire services if they could start reporting the truth
behind each star unveiling photo op ceremony, as the DPA had done.
So he wrote emails to editors at AP and Reuters and the New York Times Phil Corbett and got positive responses. Two years later, the AP told its
Hollywood reporters to start adding a last graf to every Walk of Fame
story that states the cost of the star and who paid for it.
So it's a win win situation for Hollywood, the stars, and the reading
public. And thanks to the AP, where editors read their mail and respond
to good ideas, the truth has now come out in print. thanks to danny Bloom's
patience, persistence and powers of persuasion, the truth has been set
free at the Walk of Fame. Reuters? New York Times? So far, AP is the
only news agency to toe the line and tell the truth. BRAVO!
Friday, October 28, 2011
Coco Lee-Bruce Rockowitz tie the knot
HONG KONG — The beautiful and talented 30-something Coco Lee (李玟) tied the knot the other day in Hong Kong with Canadian billionaire boyfriend Bruce Rockowitz [ אֶלִיעַנָה ] in a posh wedding under a
Hebrew wedding canopy in fragrant China.
Well, not really China, but the ex-British colony once called The Fragrant Harbor (“Hong Kong” in Chinese) that is now a sub-autonomous region of Communist China, which means that freedom and democracy there are now at risk.
Still, it was a very capitalist wedding, and what seemed like half the celebrities of Hollywood were there, even though nobody has ever heard of Coco Lee outside of Taiwan or Hong Kong. She can sing though, and dance, too, and it’s a shame she has never been able to break through the Yellow Ceiling that prevents Asian singers from breaking into the American pop music mainstream.
Truth be told, Coco can sing as well as Mariah Carey and she’s even more beautiful. But for some reason, the North American music industry does not admit singers from Taiwan or Japan or Hong Kong (or Communist China) into its ranks. It’s not racism per se, but it’s racism nonetheless.
Asia has some of the best singers in the world performing live to huge audiences there, but crossover to North America? No way, Jose. For some odd reason, Asian faces and Asian accents are not accepted in the North American music business and that’s a shame. You’re missing some great stuff!
Meanwhile, back to the wedding of the century. Oprah Winfrey and Jennifer Lopez were there, and so was a Very Wang wedding gown and some jewels “sponsored” by Piaget.
According to May Daily in Beijing, “the two-day celebrations started on Thursday evening when the couple held a Jewish ceremony at the Sky 100 Observation Deck” and ended the next day with Bruno Mars, Alicia Keys and Ne-Yo performing at the sweet 36/52 wedding party.
Rockowitz, yes, a young-looking baby-faced 52 mensch, has been president of the Hong Kong-based Li & Fung Group for the past eight years, and he and Coco look set to enjoy their sunset years jetsetting
around the world in high fashion.
Will she continue singing? You betcha! She’s good a voice that does not quit, and some day a Grammy might come her way. She deserves one!
As for Bruce, he’s in 7th heaven and set for life.
Hebrew wedding canopy in fragrant China.
Well, not really China, but the ex-British colony once called The Fragrant Harbor (“Hong Kong” in Chinese) that is now a sub-autonomous region of Communist China, which means that freedom and democracy there are now at risk.
Still, it was a very capitalist wedding, and what seemed like half the celebrities of Hollywood were there, even though nobody has ever heard of Coco Lee outside of Taiwan or Hong Kong. She can sing though, and dance, too, and it’s a shame she has never been able to break through the Yellow Ceiling that prevents Asian singers from breaking into the American pop music mainstream.
Truth be told, Coco can sing as well as Mariah Carey and she’s even more beautiful. But for some reason, the North American music industry does not admit singers from Taiwan or Japan or Hong Kong (or Communist China) into its ranks. It’s not racism per se, but it’s racism nonetheless.
Asia has some of the best singers in the world performing live to huge audiences there, but crossover to North America? No way, Jose. For some odd reason, Asian faces and Asian accents are not accepted in the North American music business and that’s a shame. You’re missing some great stuff!
Meanwhile, back to the wedding of the century. Oprah Winfrey and Jennifer Lopez were there, and so was a Very Wang wedding gown and some jewels “sponsored” by Piaget.
According to May Daily in Beijing, “the two-day celebrations started on Thursday evening when the couple held a Jewish ceremony at the Sky 100 Observation Deck” and ended the next day with Bruno Mars, Alicia Keys and Ne-Yo performing at the sweet 36/52 wedding party.
Rockowitz, yes, a young-looking baby-faced 52 mensch, has been president of the Hong Kong-based Li & Fung Group for the past eight years, and he and Coco look set to enjoy their sunset years jetsetting
around the world in high fashion.
Will she continue singing? You betcha! She’s good a voice that does not quit, and some day a Grammy might come her way. She deserves one!
As for Bruce, he’s in 7th heaven and set for life.
Tintin gets pummeled by British lit crit
How could they do this to Tintin?
Hergé's comic-book hero is one of the great creations of the 20th century. Which makes Spielberg's film version little more than murder, says Guardian boy reporter Nicholas Lezard, a lifelong Tintin fan
Mr Lezard opines on Tuesday 18 October 2011 :
Coming out of the new Tintin film directed by Steven Spielberg, I found myself, for a few seconds, too stunned and sickened to speak; for I had been obliged to watch two hours of literally senseless violence being perpetrated on something I loved dearly. In fact, the sense of violation was so strong that it felt as though I had witnessed a rape. I use this comparison not as a provocation or to cause unnecessary offence: I am using it in honour of a very good joke made by an episode of South Park, in which the cartoon's children watch the final Indiana Jones film and are so traumatised by what they have seen that they go round to the police station and try to get Spielberg and his colleagues charged with the crime. "What they did to poor Indy. They made him squeal like a pig." The tragic irony of this is that it was Hergé himself, Tintin's creator, who, a few weeks before his death in 1983, anointed Spielberg as his preferred director to make a Tintin film; and this after he had seen, and loved, as we all do and did, the first Indiana Jones film.
The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn
Production year: 2011Country: Rest of the worldCert (UK): PGRuntime: 106 minsDirectors: Steven SpielbergCast: Andy Serkis, Cary Elwes, Daniel Craig, Jamie Bell, Nick Frost, Simon Pegg, Toby JonesMore on this filmThe sense of outrage is palpable, and even after two days I find myself moved to pity; to pick up my shuddering, weeping copy of Hergé's The Secret of the Unicorn, cradle it in my arms, and whisper soothingly to it that everything will be all right; but all the time knowing that, after this, it won't be; nothing will be the same again. The forces of marketing, and of global idiocy, will see to that. But I will try to make things better as well as I can and remind you of some of the things that made Hergé's original one of the consistently great works of art of the 20th century.
The elements are simple: a boy, or boy/man; his dog Snowy; and, in later books, his gruff sidekick, a quick-tempered alcoholic old seadog called Haddock; and a deaf, absent-minded professor called Calculus. Tintin, with or without the others, rights wrongs, rescues the innocent, uncovers dastardly plots, goes on mind-boggling adventures; even, in one book, to the moon (a scientifically accurate adventure conceived some 15 years before people actually walked there). All executed in cartoon form, but in a style grounded in meticulous attention to detail and respect for veracity.
The books grew in sophistication: Tintin's first appearance in 1929-30 was a black-and-white rudimentary anti-Soviet potboiler, little more than propaganda; there then followed a trip to the Belgian Congo, which is childishly but still blush-makingly racist (yet still hugely popular in the post-colonial country); yet by the final completed work, Tintin and the Picaros (1976), Tintin is sporting a CND symbol, and helping, albeit with reservations and only on condition of non-violence, a group of not-quite-explicitly leftish guerillas gain power in a despotic Latin American country. It's a long learning curve.
My love of Tintin began, as almost everyone's does, in childhood. The books were translated into English not in the order written, so for a while the chronology of the series was somewhat jumbled: in one book the cars and other urban furniture are all 1940s; in the next, technology has advanced enough to build a nuclear-powered rocket capable of reaching the moon; in the next we were back to what looks like the 1930s, except that – in The Cigars of the Pharaoh – a desert sheikh is able to proclaim himself a fan of Tintin, even getting a servant to hold up a copy of Destination Moon as testament to his devotion. No matter: any child with the Alice books (or, say, The Wind in the Willows, with its car-driving Toad) under his or her belt is not going to be too fazed by the dream-logic of what we may loosely call postmodernism – that is, a work of art that draws attention to its own artifice.
For the adventures of Tintin, although they might have messed around with the conventions a little, such as with the fourth-wall-breaking direct address to readers at the end of The Secret of the Unicorn, in which Tintin tells everyone to pursue the book's follow-up adventures in Red Rackham's Treasure, never left the realm of possibility. The adventures might have been implausible – Tintin's escapes from capture or near-certain death might have often been on the unlikely side – but there was nothing in them that was flat-out impossible. (Except, perhaps, for the brief sequence in which he learns the language of elephants in The Cigars of the Pharaoh, but that kind of mistake was never repeated, and besides, the book itself is, appropriately enough given its MacGuffin, an opium dream of a story.) There is certainly none of the CGI garbage of the film – its flying galleons, its impossibly-well trained falcon etc etc etc.
There is a truism which states that the very appearance of a comic strip is virtually the same thing as the storyboard of a film – the sequence of images which is the intermediate stage between the script and the final product. This is certainly why comic books do, according to the film-makers who use them as basis for their next franchise, scream "Take me! Take me!". But this is very misleading; a faux-ami, as we call a word that is not the same in French as it is in English (eg sensible in French means sensitive, not sensible). The experience of reading a cartoon is not the same as that of watching a film. It is slow, quiet and intimate, and in childhood would be most typically undertaken while lying front down on the floor, the book in front of one, one's legs raised perpendicularly at the knee, ankles crossed; the classic childhood pose of absorption in a text. The images may contain stories of chase and speed; but the frames can move as slowly as one wishes. And Hergé, who was as happy to have a frame crammed with words as he was to have one with no words at all, allowed the reader to be complicit with him in the speed at which the story was taken.
I would often linger over the pictures as I admired Hergé's famous ligne claire, the style in which caricature and realism superimpose themselves on each other. No one's face may look like Tintin's, with its rudimentary ellipsis for a head and its dots for eyes, like a teach-yourself-cartooning book's first instructions on how to draw a face ("Tintin", incidentally, means "nothing" in French); but when Tintin is chloroformed on page 35 of The Secret of the Unicorn, his right foot lifts off the ground in just the way yours would, were you too to be chloroformed by a pair of vicious thugs. Incidentally, look at the strips again: see how many of them have a character whose feet are standing directly on the bottom line of the frame. A huge number. They are, so to speak, grounded – another subliminal stratum of plausibility, which helps us give our assent to the adventures depicted.
A scene from Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn. Photograph: Sportsphoto/Allstar Being as familiar as I am with the books in English, I thought I'd better have another look at The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham's Treasure in French: to slow me down, for my French is not perfect, back to childhood reading speed. This allowed me to appreciate better the art, which, after 40-odd years of reading the books, I had been beginning to take for granted. Hence I finally noticed the impeccable triumph of comic timing in which the Thomsons, putting their bowler hats back on with the dignity which slapstick always subverts, are about to be brained by the enormous files of bogus genealogy that Haddock has just thrown down the stairs (Red Rackham's Treasure, page 4); and finally noticed the little joke at the beginning of the first book, in which, in panels four, six and nine of the first page, we see Snowy scratching himself. Why? Because he's at a flea market! A joke whose corniness is obliterated by the fact that we have to work out the punchline, and even the fact that it is a joke, for ourselves.
But there are other, deeper, darker signals embedded within the books themselves, and for noticing these I have to thank the novelist Tom McCarthy, whose book Tintin and the Secret of Literature, using the astonishing findings of Hergé's biographers (and subsequent interpretations by the French writer Serge Tisseron), touches on an almost incredible story: that the whole Tintin series is a consistent, creative, psychological working-out of Hergé's family secret: that he may well be related to the King of Belgium. A visiting VIP – maybe the king, he did visit – would often pass by the chateau where Hergé's grandmother worked as a maid; one such visit resulted in her pregnancy, the results being his uncles (twins who, dressed identically in bowler hats, suits, and carrying canes, are so obviously the Thomson Twins that no doubt as to the link with them is possible). His grandmother was quickly paired off with the gardener; his subsequent grandfather. McCarthy can give a better account of this, and the subsequent coded resurfacings of this story himself than I can in precis; suffice it to say that his book is one of the few critical works that can truly be called "mind-blowing", and that no adult interpretation and indeed appreciation of the books can now be considered complete without having read it.
For example: I pointed out to McCarthy before we saw the film together that there were an awful lot of beds in the Tintin books. A great deal many more than you would expect in a series carrying the words "The Adventures of …" Tintin has a hospital-like bed in his flat at 26 Labrador Road; we see him in it while Snowy brings him the phone. The Bird brothers, the real villains of the story (not the originally innocent Sakharine, who is the film's baddie), may be nasty pieces of work, but they are considerate enough to provide Tintin with a nicely made-up set of sheets and blankets in which he can recover consciousness; Calculus has made himself a bed in a lifeboat in Red Rackham's Treasure (character and story completely jettisoned from film); and in The Seven Crystal Balls, the next book to be ravished and broken by Spielberg and his cronies, there are beds galore, in which the cursed professors writhe with tormented nightmares. And so on and so on: make your own list of the beds in Tintin. It's fun. (On a personal note, I would often, when feigning or even occasionally genuinely suffering from illness, read all my Tintin books in bed, matching drink for drink, in Lucozade, what Haddock in the books was doing with whisky.) So. What's that all about, I asked McCarthy. Easy, he said: it's because of what happened in bed between his grandmother and the unidentified nobleman.
Interestingly, it becomes clear, from a couple of quite clear references, that at least one of the screenwriters, Stephen Moffat, Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish, have read McCarthy's book. (McCarthy knows Cornish slightly, I gather.) Alas, they have not understood it. There is a great deal about Captain Haddock's genealogy in the film – he is the character who secretly "carries" the Hergé family story in the books – and there is even a bit when he says to Tintin that "you transmit your own signals", an unambiguous lift of one of McCarthy's own riffs. But there then follows a speech, which Hergé's Haddock would never have made in a million years, full of sub-Alcoholics Anonymous self-empowerment rubbish about breaking through walls and finding your true self, which would have made any self-respecting screenwriter insist on having his or her name taken off the credits.
As it is, the film has turned a subtle, intricate and beautiful work of art into the typical bombast of the modern blockbuster, Tintin for morons, and the nicest things one can say about it are that there's a pleasing cameo of Hergé himself in the opening scene, the cars look lovely, indeed it is as a whole visually sumptuous, and (after 20 minutes or so of more or less acceptable fidelity; and the 3D motion-capturing transference of the original drawings is by far the least of the film's problems) it usefully places in plain view all the cretinous arrogance of modern mass-market, script-conference-driven film-making, confirming in passing that, as a director, Spielberg is a burned-out sun. A duel between dockyard cranes? Give me a break. Oh, and the opening credits are nice and witty. But this only confirms a maxim that I have recently formulated: that the closer in spirit the title sequence is to the original from which the subsequent film has been stolen, the more of a travesty of that original it will be.
There may be those who think that to quibble about the traducement of what might be considered a work of one of the lesser arts is to waste everyone's time. But it is not. Something of great subtlety, beauty and artfully deceptive complexity, resonance and depth has been betrayed, and it is time to make a stand.
And Mr Lezard just made his stand! Comments from the Tintin gallery?
Dish!
Hergé's comic-book hero is one of the great creations of the 20th century. Which makes Spielberg's film version little more than murder, says Guardian boy reporter Nicholas Lezard, a lifelong Tintin fan
Mr Lezard opines on Tuesday 18 October 2011 :
Coming out of the new Tintin film directed by Steven Spielberg, I found myself, for a few seconds, too stunned and sickened to speak; for I had been obliged to watch two hours of literally senseless violence being perpetrated on something I loved dearly. In fact, the sense of violation was so strong that it felt as though I had witnessed a rape. I use this comparison not as a provocation or to cause unnecessary offence: I am using it in honour of a very good joke made by an episode of South Park, in which the cartoon's children watch the final Indiana Jones film and are so traumatised by what they have seen that they go round to the police station and try to get Spielberg and his colleagues charged with the crime. "What they did to poor Indy. They made him squeal like a pig." The tragic irony of this is that it was Hergé himself, Tintin's creator, who, a few weeks before his death in 1983, anointed Spielberg as his preferred director to make a Tintin film; and this after he had seen, and loved, as we all do and did, the first Indiana Jones film.
The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn
Production year: 2011Country: Rest of the worldCert (UK): PGRuntime: 106 minsDirectors: Steven SpielbergCast: Andy Serkis, Cary Elwes, Daniel Craig, Jamie Bell, Nick Frost, Simon Pegg, Toby JonesMore on this filmThe sense of outrage is palpable, and even after two days I find myself moved to pity; to pick up my shuddering, weeping copy of Hergé's The Secret of the Unicorn, cradle it in my arms, and whisper soothingly to it that everything will be all right; but all the time knowing that, after this, it won't be; nothing will be the same again. The forces of marketing, and of global idiocy, will see to that. But I will try to make things better as well as I can and remind you of some of the things that made Hergé's original one of the consistently great works of art of the 20th century.
The elements are simple: a boy, or boy/man; his dog Snowy; and, in later books, his gruff sidekick, a quick-tempered alcoholic old seadog called Haddock; and a deaf, absent-minded professor called Calculus. Tintin, with or without the others, rights wrongs, rescues the innocent, uncovers dastardly plots, goes on mind-boggling adventures; even, in one book, to the moon (a scientifically accurate adventure conceived some 15 years before people actually walked there). All executed in cartoon form, but in a style grounded in meticulous attention to detail and respect for veracity.
The books grew in sophistication: Tintin's first appearance in 1929-30 was a black-and-white rudimentary anti-Soviet potboiler, little more than propaganda; there then followed a trip to the Belgian Congo, which is childishly but still blush-makingly racist (yet still hugely popular in the post-colonial country); yet by the final completed work, Tintin and the Picaros (1976), Tintin is sporting a CND symbol, and helping, albeit with reservations and only on condition of non-violence, a group of not-quite-explicitly leftish guerillas gain power in a despotic Latin American country. It's a long learning curve.
My love of Tintin began, as almost everyone's does, in childhood. The books were translated into English not in the order written, so for a while the chronology of the series was somewhat jumbled: in one book the cars and other urban furniture are all 1940s; in the next, technology has advanced enough to build a nuclear-powered rocket capable of reaching the moon; in the next we were back to what looks like the 1930s, except that – in The Cigars of the Pharaoh – a desert sheikh is able to proclaim himself a fan of Tintin, even getting a servant to hold up a copy of Destination Moon as testament to his devotion. No matter: any child with the Alice books (or, say, The Wind in the Willows, with its car-driving Toad) under his or her belt is not going to be too fazed by the dream-logic of what we may loosely call postmodernism – that is, a work of art that draws attention to its own artifice.
For the adventures of Tintin, although they might have messed around with the conventions a little, such as with the fourth-wall-breaking direct address to readers at the end of The Secret of the Unicorn, in which Tintin tells everyone to pursue the book's follow-up adventures in Red Rackham's Treasure, never left the realm of possibility. The adventures might have been implausible – Tintin's escapes from capture or near-certain death might have often been on the unlikely side – but there was nothing in them that was flat-out impossible. (Except, perhaps, for the brief sequence in which he learns the language of elephants in The Cigars of the Pharaoh, but that kind of mistake was never repeated, and besides, the book itself is, appropriately enough given its MacGuffin, an opium dream of a story.) There is certainly none of the CGI garbage of the film – its flying galleons, its impossibly-well trained falcon etc etc etc.
There is a truism which states that the very appearance of a comic strip is virtually the same thing as the storyboard of a film – the sequence of images which is the intermediate stage between the script and the final product. This is certainly why comic books do, according to the film-makers who use them as basis for their next franchise, scream "Take me! Take me!". But this is very misleading; a faux-ami, as we call a word that is not the same in French as it is in English (eg sensible in French means sensitive, not sensible). The experience of reading a cartoon is not the same as that of watching a film. It is slow, quiet and intimate, and in childhood would be most typically undertaken while lying front down on the floor, the book in front of one, one's legs raised perpendicularly at the knee, ankles crossed; the classic childhood pose of absorption in a text. The images may contain stories of chase and speed; but the frames can move as slowly as one wishes. And Hergé, who was as happy to have a frame crammed with words as he was to have one with no words at all, allowed the reader to be complicit with him in the speed at which the story was taken.
I would often linger over the pictures as I admired Hergé's famous ligne claire, the style in which caricature and realism superimpose themselves on each other. No one's face may look like Tintin's, with its rudimentary ellipsis for a head and its dots for eyes, like a teach-yourself-cartooning book's first instructions on how to draw a face ("Tintin", incidentally, means "nothing" in French); but when Tintin is chloroformed on page 35 of The Secret of the Unicorn, his right foot lifts off the ground in just the way yours would, were you too to be chloroformed by a pair of vicious thugs. Incidentally, look at the strips again: see how many of them have a character whose feet are standing directly on the bottom line of the frame. A huge number. They are, so to speak, grounded – another subliminal stratum of plausibility, which helps us give our assent to the adventures depicted.
A scene from Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn. Photograph: Sportsphoto/Allstar Being as familiar as I am with the books in English, I thought I'd better have another look at The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham's Treasure in French: to slow me down, for my French is not perfect, back to childhood reading speed. This allowed me to appreciate better the art, which, after 40-odd years of reading the books, I had been beginning to take for granted. Hence I finally noticed the impeccable triumph of comic timing in which the Thomsons, putting their bowler hats back on with the dignity which slapstick always subverts, are about to be brained by the enormous files of bogus genealogy that Haddock has just thrown down the stairs (Red Rackham's Treasure, page 4); and finally noticed the little joke at the beginning of the first book, in which, in panels four, six and nine of the first page, we see Snowy scratching himself. Why? Because he's at a flea market! A joke whose corniness is obliterated by the fact that we have to work out the punchline, and even the fact that it is a joke, for ourselves.
But there are other, deeper, darker signals embedded within the books themselves, and for noticing these I have to thank the novelist Tom McCarthy, whose book Tintin and the Secret of Literature, using the astonishing findings of Hergé's biographers (and subsequent interpretations by the French writer Serge Tisseron), touches on an almost incredible story: that the whole Tintin series is a consistent, creative, psychological working-out of Hergé's family secret: that he may well be related to the King of Belgium. A visiting VIP – maybe the king, he did visit – would often pass by the chateau where Hergé's grandmother worked as a maid; one such visit resulted in her pregnancy, the results being his uncles (twins who, dressed identically in bowler hats, suits, and carrying canes, are so obviously the Thomson Twins that no doubt as to the link with them is possible). His grandmother was quickly paired off with the gardener; his subsequent grandfather. McCarthy can give a better account of this, and the subsequent coded resurfacings of this story himself than I can in precis; suffice it to say that his book is one of the few critical works that can truly be called "mind-blowing", and that no adult interpretation and indeed appreciation of the books can now be considered complete without having read it.
For example: I pointed out to McCarthy before we saw the film together that there were an awful lot of beds in the Tintin books. A great deal many more than you would expect in a series carrying the words "The Adventures of …" Tintin has a hospital-like bed in his flat at 26 Labrador Road; we see him in it while Snowy brings him the phone. The Bird brothers, the real villains of the story (not the originally innocent Sakharine, who is the film's baddie), may be nasty pieces of work, but they are considerate enough to provide Tintin with a nicely made-up set of sheets and blankets in which he can recover consciousness; Calculus has made himself a bed in a lifeboat in Red Rackham's Treasure (character and story completely jettisoned from film); and in The Seven Crystal Balls, the next book to be ravished and broken by Spielberg and his cronies, there are beds galore, in which the cursed professors writhe with tormented nightmares. And so on and so on: make your own list of the beds in Tintin. It's fun. (On a personal note, I would often, when feigning or even occasionally genuinely suffering from illness, read all my Tintin books in bed, matching drink for drink, in Lucozade, what Haddock in the books was doing with whisky.) So. What's that all about, I asked McCarthy. Easy, he said: it's because of what happened in bed between his grandmother and the unidentified nobleman.
Interestingly, it becomes clear, from a couple of quite clear references, that at least one of the screenwriters, Stephen Moffat, Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish, have read McCarthy's book. (McCarthy knows Cornish slightly, I gather.) Alas, they have not understood it. There is a great deal about Captain Haddock's genealogy in the film – he is the character who secretly "carries" the Hergé family story in the books – and there is even a bit when he says to Tintin that "you transmit your own signals", an unambiguous lift of one of McCarthy's own riffs. But there then follows a speech, which Hergé's Haddock would never have made in a million years, full of sub-Alcoholics Anonymous self-empowerment rubbish about breaking through walls and finding your true self, which would have made any self-respecting screenwriter insist on having his or her name taken off the credits.
As it is, the film has turned a subtle, intricate and beautiful work of art into the typical bombast of the modern blockbuster, Tintin for morons, and the nicest things one can say about it are that there's a pleasing cameo of Hergé himself in the opening scene, the cars look lovely, indeed it is as a whole visually sumptuous, and (after 20 minutes or so of more or less acceptable fidelity; and the 3D motion-capturing transference of the original drawings is by far the least of the film's problems) it usefully places in plain view all the cretinous arrogance of modern mass-market, script-conference-driven film-making, confirming in passing that, as a director, Spielberg is a burned-out sun. A duel between dockyard cranes? Give me a break. Oh, and the opening credits are nice and witty. But this only confirms a maxim that I have recently formulated: that the closer in spirit the title sequence is to the original from which the subsequent film has been stolen, the more of a travesty of that original it will be.
There may be those who think that to quibble about the traducement of what might be considered a work of one of the lesser arts is to waste everyone's time. But it is not. Something of great subtlety, beauty and artfully deceptive complexity, resonance and depth has been betrayed, and it is time to make a stand.
And Mr Lezard just made his stand! Comments from the Tintin gallery?
Dish!
Monday, October 24, 2011
The ''Complex Chinese Character'' edition of Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs' bio is a hit in Taiwan, surpassing Harry Potter sales
The ''Complex Chinese Character'' edition of Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs' biography is already a hit in free and democratic Taiwan, and will likely be a hit in communist
Red China too when the Simplified Chinese Character edition goes on sale in Beijing as well. Jobs has penetrated the Bamboo Curtain separating Taiwan from China. Few people can do that!
In Taiwan, Huang Wan-ru, a 31-year-old female office worker loves the book and says that what interests her most about Jobs is his childhood and early work experience.
"I admired his unique personal style, always being true to himself, which was never affected by others," Huang, who owns an iPod, iPhone and iPad, told a reporter recently.
Eslite, a major book chain in Taiwan, said it was offering offer free apples and apple-shaped notepapers at 12 of its outlets to the first 100 people who showed up Monday dressed in black turtlenecks, Jobs' signature wear., according to TV news reports in Taiwan.
All of Eslite's outlets are packaging the Taiwan edition in paper bags bearing a picture of Jobs.
A 22-year-old college student surnamed Kuo told a Taiwanese TV reporter that for his part he would like to know how Jobs managed to come back from his frustrations.
"I'm curious about the time when he was kicked out of Apple and founded NeXT Computer. I think it was a transition point in his life," Kuo said.
Eslite's sales of the book are expected to reach 200,000 copies in the first three months, approaching the record set when the first book in the Harry Potter series by British author J. K. Rowling was released, according to sources,
Commonwealth Publishing Group, the exclusive Taiwanese publisher of the biography, said it had planned to do a first print of 100,000 copies, but decided to run 220,000 copies instead based on the warm reception.
On a message board outside the Eslite bookstore, fans have posted memorial messages such as "Thank you for teaching us how to think creatively," "Thank you for changing the world" and "We're all proud of you and all miss you."
One fan wrote "Thanks for making us realize the meaning of 'never give up.'"
ALSO
The authorized biography of Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson was released after its early arrival on Kindle yesterday. CBS News’ 60 Minutes broadcast an interview with Isaacson about the book and his conversations with Jobs. The interview is online, via Catharine Smith at The Huffington Post.
Stephen Shankland at CNet looks at the “wealth of detail” in the book, while Bill Weir at ABC News runs through the book’s “11 most startling revelations.” Meanwhile, Zach Epstein at BGR.com writes about one of Jobs’ final projects, Apple’s smart TV, and how it could be a “game-changer for gaming.”
An Interview with Newspaper Pagination Designer Ian Lawson in Maysville, Kentucky
“I just didn’t love what I had been working on for most of the two hours I get to design our A1,” he told Moos by e-mail. “To be honest, I’m still waiting for the email telling me my publisher’s head exploded when he saw it.”
Lawson, who has been with the Maysville, Kentucky, USA, newspaper for [almost 5] years, had no newspaper experience when he started out. But after working on inside pages — and a stint at Disney — he became head of pagination one year ago.
The recently-redesigned newspaper, published 6 days a week, with a day off on Sundays, has a circulation of about 8,501 and is distributed in 7 counties in the region.
In a recent email interview with this blog in Taiwan, where we had been attracted to Lawson's work from Ms Moos' heads up, ahove, Ian took some time to answer our questions.
INTERVIEW HERE ***************
DAN BLOOM: How did you get into page making for newspapers? What was your
career and college student trajectory? Are your parents artists?
Were you exposed to art as a teenager? How your KEEN EYE
that is catching eyeballs nationwide, worldwide even, with your front pages?
IAN LAWSON: I kind of snuck my way in. I was familiar with adobe
photoshop and my newsppaper, the Ledger Independent here, needed
someone who was able to work with it. So I sort of wandered through
the rest and learned the page design part in about a week. Although I
was horrible at it at first.
My parents aren't artists at all. I became interested in art in the
fourth grade of elementary school as a kid because I loved watcing
"The Simpsons." I started to draw them when I was in fourth grade and
I began to get a bit of attention from my classmates -- and that was
that!
I went to college for one year to study computer programming, but I
quickly realized it was not for me and dropped out -- which leads me
back to the first part of my answer above!
DAN BLOOM: After your MLK and Jobs and Gadaffi front pages, you have
been getting
lots of national media attention, at least, from newspaper blogs
and websites. How does this make you feel? Did you ever think this
would happen?
IAN LAWSON: It's defiantly fun. It's always nice to hear compliments
on your work. But honestly, no, to answer your question, I never
thought our little newspaper here would be featured on several design
blogs.
[NOTE: Mr Lawson just turned 31 back in May. He grew up moving back
and forth between Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky.]
DAN BLOOM: Which newspapers and magazines influenced you as you
growing up, in high school and later on as am adult?
IAN LAWSON: I've always read comic books and magazines for as long as
I can remember.
''Rolling Stone'' has always been a favorite magazine for me. And
Wired, spin and Time are others I enjoy.
My favorite newspaper is The Virginian-Pilot out of Norfolk, Virginia.
Its design is second-to-none.
DAN BLOOM: Your newspaper there has circulation of around 8000, and
yet your work is
getting national attention
from designers and newspaper editors -- worldwide! Have any offers for future
jobs come in?
IAN LAWSON: No, so far, no offers for any jobs. Unfortunately, as you
know, newspapers are having a hard time as of late. So being in a
smaller market probably is big help for our publication.
DAN BLOOM: What are your newsroom colleagues and bosses saying about
the increased
attention the Ledger Independent is now getting nationwide?
IAN LAWSON: I think they are happy for me and for the attention given
to our little newspaper.
I think it shows our ''home office'' out in Iowa that even the little
guys can make a big splash in the world!
DAN BLOOM: In 20 years, where do you want to be and what do you hope
to be doing?
IAN LAWSON: I wish to be healthy and happy with my wife wife and son.
Hopefully, someplace warm and still working in a graphic design role
for either a newspaper or a magazine.
DAN BLOOM: Do you ever do you dream at night about front pages while you
are sleeping?
IAN LAWSON: Funny you should ask! I actually had a dream just last
night about whether or not my most recent frontpage covering the
earthquake in Turkey would make the new newseum.org's top ten. And it
did!
DAN BLOOM: In your opinion, what is the purpose of a newspaper's
front page, from your perspective as a page maker?
And also from your own understanding of readers needs?
IAN LAWSON: I look at the front page as a way of grabbing people's
attention. To make them want to stop and look while it's sitting there
on the rack. To make them want to pick it up and take it home with
them. To get them to stop and take some time to slow down and read.
Everything is going digital these days. It just make me sad to think
of a world with no physical books or newspapers or magazines.
DAN BLOOM: What are your future plans?
IAN LAWSON: I guess my future plans are to keep trying to do what I
love, anyway I can.
DAN BLOOM: Thank you, Ian, for taking the time to answer these
long-distance questions.
IAN LAWSON: Thank you so much for the interview and all you kind words.
-------------------------------------
****Note: Newspaper design pundit Charles Apple wrote about Lawson's genius here as well.
Sunday, October 23, 2011
Taiwanese TV award substitute 楊一峯 reads acceptance speech from Director Hung phoned in via text onstage. CUTE!.......電視金鐘獎 - Best Directing for a Mini-series/TV movie (迷你劇集/電視電影導演獎)
UPDATE: .......our Taipei-based Taiwanese informant tells us:......."The man accepting the award for Director Hung who could not be there that night was Yang Yi-feng [楊一峯](also known as Katsuhiko Miki in Japan [三木克彥] who is a friend of Director Hung who won the award of Best Director of TV Drama and Mr Yamg, also a TV direcor and CM director and film director in Taipei accepted the award on stage
on behalf of Hung Chih-yu (洪智育) and effortlessly snapped a photo of the audience with his own camera as he stepped up to the stage.
Mr YAng was reading the ''thank you'' speech that Director Hung sent in to him to the mobile phone on stage. Cute. Technology transforms the Oscars soon, too?''
speech comes in at 3 minutes into video, around 3:01
-- Reads acceptance speech phoned in by text from Director Hung himself to the iPhone screen
The times they are a'changin' -- but perhaps not in the way that Bob Dylan sang
about years ago in his famous folk song.
Case in point: During the recent ''Golden Bell'' Television Awards last week in
Taipei -- Taiwan's equivalent to the Ameican ''Emmy'' Awards -- a man accepted a TV award for
Director Hung who won it but could not be there in person because of outside work -- Mr Hung won the gong for best TV director of a drama series called "Scent of Love" for 2011-- and the other man, named Mr Yang, also Taiwanese, walked up to the stage and snapped a
camera photo of the audience from the stage) while approaching the podium stage, and then took
out an
iphone from his shirt jacket pocket and started reading email messages from Director Hung while
smiling to himself, before finally addressing the
5,000 people in the audience and on national TV by reading not from a
prepared piece of folded dead-tree paper but from the clean screen of his iPhone -- and the speech he read was phoned in, er, texted in, by Director Hung himself from a remote location. His
substitute speech performance for the real award winner might just have made award-show history worldwide,
by replacing a prepared written speech with
a prepared written screen text that was phoned in in real time by text message.
Can the Oscars and the Man Booker Prize next year be next?
REFERENCE 電視金鐘獎
Best Directing for a Mini-series/TV movie (迷你劇集/電視電影導演獎)
*******洪智育╱就是要香戀（CTV - 中國電視事業股份有限公司）
Celebrities and fans crowded the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall in Taipei, exuberant over the 46th Golden Bell Awards (電視金鐘獎), Taiwan's equivalent to the Emmy Awards, which awarded Wilber Pan (潘瑋柏) and Tien Hsin (天心) as best actor and actress, respectively, while some director bloke snapped his own DIY pics while accepting his award and reading from iPhone screen for speech.
htp://www.chinapost.com.tw/taiwan/arts-&-leisure/2011/10/22/320628/Wilber-Pan.htm
GOOGLE or FACEBOOK:
三木克彥 tells this blog:
"My Chinese Mandarin name is Yang Yi-feng (which is the spelling on my Taiwannese passport), and in Chinese characters my name is 楊一峯。.....I am half-Japanese half-Taiwanese so the name on my facebook page is 三木克彥 or Miki Katsuhiko. That is the name I use in Japan. I am a TV comercial director, and I recently started to direct TV dramas in Taiwan, too. ''
on behalf of Hung Chih-yu (洪智育) and effortlessly snapped a photo of the audience with his own camera as he stepped up to the stage.
Mr YAng was reading the ''thank you'' speech that Director Hung sent in to him to the mobile phone on stage. Cute. Technology transforms the Oscars soon, too?''
speech comes in at 3 minutes into video, around 3:01
-- Reads acceptance speech phoned in by text from Director Hung himself to the iPhone screen
The times they are a'changin' -- but perhaps not in the way that Bob Dylan sang
about years ago in his famous folk song.
Case in point: During the recent ''Golden Bell'' Television Awards last week in
Taipei -- Taiwan's equivalent to the Ameican ''Emmy'' Awards -- a man accepted a TV award for
Director Hung who won it but could not be there in person because of outside work -- Mr Hung won the gong for best TV director of a drama series called "Scent of Love" for 2011-- and the other man, named Mr Yang, also Taiwanese, walked up to the stage and snapped a
camera photo of the audience from the stage) while approaching the podium stage, and then took
out an
iphone from his shirt jacket pocket and started reading email messages from Director Hung while
smiling to himself, before finally addressing the
5,000 people in the audience and on national TV by reading not from a
prepared piece of folded dead-tree paper but from the clean screen of his iPhone -- and the speech he read was phoned in, er, texted in, by Director Hung himself from a remote location. His
substitute speech performance for the real award winner might just have made award-show history worldwide,
by replacing a prepared written speech with
a prepared written screen text that was phoned in in real time by text message.
Can the Oscars and the Man Booker Prize next year be next?
REFERENCE 電視金鐘獎
Best Directing for a Mini-series/TV movie (迷你劇集/電視電影導演獎)
*******洪智育╱就是要香戀（CTV - 中國電視事業股份有限公司）
Celebrities and fans crowded the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall in Taipei, exuberant over the 46th Golden Bell Awards (電視金鐘獎), Taiwan's equivalent to the Emmy Awards, which awarded Wilber Pan (潘瑋柏) and Tien Hsin (天心) as best actor and actress, respectively, while some director bloke snapped his own DIY pics while accepting his award and reading from iPhone screen for speech.
htp://www.chinapost.com.tw/taiwan/arts-&-leisure/2011/10/22/320628/Wilber-Pan.htm
GOOGLE or FACEBOOK:
三木克彥 tells this blog:
"My Chinese Mandarin name is Yang Yi-feng (which is the spelling on my Taiwannese passport), and in Chinese characters my name is 楊一峯。.....I am half-Japanese half-Taiwanese so the name on my facebook page is 三木克彥 or Miki Katsuhiko. That is the name I use in Japan. I am a TV comercial director, and I recently started to direct TV dramas in Taiwan, too. ''
Friday, October 21, 2011
OLD TYPEWRITER AND WRITER NORMAN CORWIN, circa 1872
Photographed by unknown person, User:Arrowcatcher, with Honeywell Pentax Spotmatic film camera and electronic flash at Norman Corwin's Wellworth Ave., Los Angeles apartment in February 1872.
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
阿裕牛肉湯
阿裕牛肉湯 in Tainan County, Rende City, No. 525 ChungCheng Road and oishii! and LO LAT!
地址:台南縣仁德鄉中正路一段525號電話......:06-266-8816/ 266-8857
http://www.google.com/search?client=gmail&rls=gm&q=%E9%98%BF%E8%A3%95%E7%89%9B%E8%82%89%E6%B9%AF
Facebook Friend Numbers Linked to Brain Size
MRI studies show reading on paper surfaces lights up superior regions
of the brain compared to screen-reading
By Ben Hirschlerr
RONDON | Wed Oct 19, 2012
RONDON (Reutters) - Scientists have found a direct link between
reading on paper surfaces and information processing compared
to when people read off screens, raising the possibility that using
screens for our daily reading is an inferior method of "reading."
The reading brain in terms of memory, emotional responses and critical
analysis prefers reading off paper surfaces, such as books,
magazines and hardcopy print outs, the research indicates. So far,
however, it is not possible to say whether one
reading mode is superior to the other, reseachers say.
"The exciting question now is whether reading off paper really is
superior in terms of brain chemistry to reading off screens, -- this
will help us answer the question of whether the Internet is changing
our brains," said Astin Kawabata Sensei of University College London
UCL.L, one of the researchers involved in the study.
Sensei and colleagues used magnetic resonance imaging (f)MRI to study
the brains of 125 university students, reading on both
paper and off screens. They discovered that reading off paper surfaces
is superior in terms of the "grey matter" in the amygdala, the right
superior temporal sulcus, the left middle temporal gyrus and the right
entorhinal cortex. Grey matter is the layer of brain tissue where
mental processing occurs.
"If our research pans out, it will mean big trouble for the computer
and reading device industry," said Grant Lee of UCL.
"This shows we can use some of the powerful tools in modern
neuroscience to address important questions -- namely, what are the
effects of reading on screens to my brain. It appears that reading on
paper lights up different and superior regions of the brain compared
to when I read
off a screen on an iPad or a computer."
The study results were published on Wednesday in the journal
Proceedings of the Royal Society of The Reading Brain.
Heidi-Sally Bloom of the University of Oxford, who was not involved in
the research, said the findings were intriguing but did not mean that
they are true or even useful.
"We still need more studies on this using PET brain scan machines,
too," she said. "The current study cannot tell us whether reading off
screens is good or bad for our brains."
of the brain compared to screen-reading
By Ben Hirschlerr
RONDON | Wed Oct 19, 2012
RONDON (
reading on paper surfaces and information processing compared
to when people read off screens, raising the possibility that using
screens for our daily reading is an inferior method of "reading."
The reading brain in terms of memory, emotional responses and critical
analysis prefers reading off paper surfaces, such as books,
magazines and hardcopy print outs, the research indicates. So far,
however, it is not possible to say whether one
reading mode is superior to the other, reseachers say.
"The exciting question now is whether reading off paper really is
superior in terms of brain chemistry to reading off screens, -- this
will help us answer the question of whether the Internet is changing
our brains," said Astin Kawabata Sensei of University College London
UCL.L, one of the researchers involved in the study.
Sensei and colleagues used magnetic resonance imaging (f)MRI to study
the brains of 125 university students, reading on both
paper and off screens. They discovered that reading off paper surfaces
is superior in terms of the "grey matter" in the amygdala, the right
superior temporal sulcus, the left middle temporal gyrus and the right
entorhinal cortex. Grey matter is the layer of brain tissue where
mental processing occurs.
"If our research pans out, it will mean big trouble for the computer
and reading device industry," said Grant Lee of UCL.
"This shows we can use some of the powerful tools in modern
neuroscience to address important questions -- namely, what are the
effects of reading on screens to my brain. It appears that reading on
paper lights up different and superior regions of the brain compared
to when I read
off a screen on an iPad or a computer."
The study results were published on Wednesday in the journal
Proceedings of the Royal Society of The Reading Brain.
Heidi-Sally Bloom of the University of Oxford, who was not involved in
the research, said the findings were intriguing but did not mean that
they are true or even useful.
"We still need more studies on this using PET brain scan machines,
too," she said. "The current study cannot tell us whether reading off
screens is good or bad for our brains."
Is Facebook altering our brains?
MRI studies show reading on paper surfaces lights up superior regions
of the brain compared to screen-reading
By Ben Hirschlerr
RONDON | Wed Oct 19, 2012
RONDON (Reutters) - Scientists have found a direct link between
reading on paper surfaces and information processing compared
to when people read off screens, raising the possibility that using
screens for our daily reading is an inferior method of "reading."
The reading brain in terms of memory, emotional responses and critical
analysis prefers reading off paper surfaces, such as books,
magazines and hardcopy print outs, the research indicates. So far,
however, it is not possible to say whether one
reading mode is superior to the other, reseachers say.
"The exciting question now is whether reading off paper really is
superior in terms of brain chemistry to reading off screens, -- this
will help us answer the question of whether the Internet is changing
our brains," said Astin Kawabata Sensei of University College London
UCL.L, one of the researchers involved in the study.
Sensei and colleagues used magnetic resonance imaging (f)MRI to study
the brains of 125 university students, reading on both
paper and off screens. They discovered that reading off paper surfaces
is superior in terms of the "grey matter" in the amygdala, the right
superior temporal sulcus, the left middle temporal gyrus and the right
entorhinal cortex. Grey matter is the layer of brain tissue where
mental processing occurs.
"If our research pans out, it will mean big trouble for the computer
and reading device industry," said Grant Lee of UCL.
"This shows we can use some of the powerful tools in modern
neuroscience to address important questions -- namely, what are the
effects of reading on screens to my brain. It appears that reading on
paper lights up different and superior regions of the brain compared
to when I read
off a screen on an iPad or a computer."
The study results were published on Wednesday in the journal
Proceedings of the Royal Society of The Reading Brain.
Heidi-Sally Bloom of the University of Oxford, who was not involved in
the research, said the findings were intriguing but did not mean that
they are true or even useful.
"We still need more studies on this using PET brain scan machines,
too," she said. "The current study cannot tell us whether reading off
screens is good or bad for our brains."
of the brain compared to screen-reading
By Ben Hirschlerr
RONDON | Wed Oct 19, 2012
RONDON (
reading on paper surfaces and information processing compared
to when people read off screens, raising the possibility that using
screens for our daily reading is an inferior method of "reading."
The reading brain in terms of memory, emotional responses and critical
analysis prefers reading off paper surfaces, such as books,
magazines and hardcopy print outs, the research indicates. So far,
however, it is not possible to say whether one
reading mode is superior to the other, reseachers say.
"The exciting question now is whether reading off paper really is
superior in terms of brain chemistry to reading off screens, -- this
will help us answer the question of whether the Internet is changing
our brains," said Astin Kawabata Sensei of University College London
UCL.L, one of the researchers involved in the study.
Sensei and colleagues used magnetic resonance imaging (f)MRI to study
the brains of 125 university students, reading on both
paper and off screens. They discovered that reading off paper surfaces
is superior in terms of the "grey matter" in the amygdala, the right
superior temporal sulcus, the left middle temporal gyrus and the right
entorhinal cortex. Grey matter is the layer of brain tissue where
mental processing occurs.
"If our research pans out, it will mean big trouble for the computer
and reading device industry," said Grant Lee of UCL.
"This shows we can use some of the powerful tools in modern
neuroscience to address important questions -- namely, what are the
effects of reading on screens to my brain. It appears that reading on
paper lights up different and superior regions of the brain compared
to when I read
off a screen on an iPad or a computer."
The study results were published on Wednesday in the journal
Proceedings of the Royal Society of The Reading Brain.
Heidi-Sally Bloom of the University of Oxford, who was not involved in
the research, said the findings were intriguing but did not mean that
they are true or even useful.
"We still need more studies on this using PET brain scan machines,
too," she said. "The current study cannot tell us whether reading off
screens is good or bad for our brains."
The more Facebook friends you have, the bigger your brain is
MRI studies show reading on paper surfaces lights up superior regions
of the brain compared to screen-reading
By Ben Hirschlerr
RONDON | Wed Oct 19, 2012
RONDON (Reutters) - Scientists have found a direct link between
reading on paper surfaces and information processing compared
to when people read off screens, raising the possibility that using
screens for our daily reading is an inferior method of "reading."
The reading brain in terms of memory, emotional responses and critical
analysis prefers reading off paper surfaces, such as books,
magazines and hardcopy print outs, the research indicates. So far,
however, it is not possible to say whether one
reading mode is superior to the other, reseachers say.
"The exciting question now is whether reading off paper really is
superior in terms of brain chemistry to reading off screens, -- this
will help us answer the question of whether the Internet is changing
our brains," said Astin Kawabata Sensei of University College London
UCL.L, one of the researchers involved in the study.
Sensei and colleagues used magnetic resonance imaging (f)MRI to study
the brains of 125 university students, reading on both
paper and off screens. They discovered that reading off paper surfaces
is superior in terms of the "grey matter" in the amygdala, the right
superior temporal sulcus, the left middle temporal gyrus and the right
entorhinal cortex. Grey matter is the layer of brain tissue where
mental processing occurs.
"If our research pans out, it will mean big trouble for the computer
and reading device industry," said Grant Lee of UCL.
"This shows we can use some of the powerful tools in modern
neuroscience to address important questions -- namely, what are the
effects of reading on screens to my brain. It appears that reading on
paper lights up different and superior regions of the brain compared
to when I read
off a screen on an iPad or a computer."
The study results were published on Wednesday in the journal
Proceedings of the Royal Society of The Reading Brain.
Heidi-Sally Bloom of the University of Oxford, who was not involved in
the research, said the findings were intriguing but did not mean that
they are true or even useful.
"We still need more studies on this using PET brain scan machines,
too," she said. "The current study cannot tell us whether reading off
screens is good or bad for our brains."
of the brain compared to screen-reading
By Ben Hirschlerr
RONDON | Wed Oct 19, 2012
RONDON (
reading on paper surfaces and information processing compared
to when people read off screens, raising the possibility that using
screens for our daily reading is an inferior method of "reading."
The reading brain in terms of memory, emotional responses and critical
analysis prefers reading off paper surfaces, such as books,
magazines and hardcopy print outs, the research indicates. So far,
however, it is not possible to say whether one
reading mode is superior to the other, reseachers say.
"The exciting question now is whether reading off paper really is
superior in terms of brain chemistry to reading off screens, -- this
will help us answer the question of whether the Internet is changing
our brains," said Astin Kawabata Sensei of University College London
UCL.L, one of the researchers involved in the study.
Sensei and colleagues used magnetic resonance imaging (f)MRI to study
the brains of 125 university students, reading on both
paper and off screens. They discovered that reading off paper surfaces
is superior in terms of the "grey matter" in the amygdala, the right
superior temporal sulcus, the left middle temporal gyrus and the right
entorhinal cortex. Grey matter is the layer of brain tissue where
mental processing occurs.
"If our research pans out, it will mean big trouble for the computer
and reading device industry," said Grant Lee of UCL.
"This shows we can use some of the powerful tools in modern
neuroscience to address important questions -- namely, what are the
effects of reading on screens to my brain. It appears that reading on
paper lights up different and superior regions of the brain compared
to when I read
off a screen on an iPad or a computer."
The study results were published on Wednesday in the journal
Proceedings of the Royal Society of The Reading Brain.
Heidi-Sally Bloom of the University of Oxford, who was not involved in
the research, said the findings were intriguing but did not mean that
they are true or even useful.
"We still need more studies on this using PET brain scan machines,
too," she said. "The current study cannot tell us whether reading off
screens is good or bad for our brains."
People With Bigger Brains Have More Facebook Friends
MRI studies show reading on paper surfaces lights up superior regions
of the brain compared to screen-reading
By Ben Hirschlerr
RONDON | Wed Oct 19, 2012
RONDON (Reutters) - Scientists have found a direct link between
reading on paper surfaces and information processing compared
to when people read off screens, raising the possibility that using
screens for our daily reading is an inferior method of "reading."
The reading brain in terms of memory, emotional responses and critical
analysis prefers reading off paper surfaces, such as books,
magazines and hardcopy print outs, the research indicates. So far,
however, it is not possible to say whether one
reading mode is superior to the other, reseachers say.
"The exciting question now is whether reading off paper really is
superior in terms of brain chemistry to reading off screens, -- this
will help us answer the question of whether the Internet is changing
our brains," said Astin Kawabata Sensei of University College London
UCL.L, one of the researchers involved in the study.
Sensei and colleagues used magnetic resonance imaging (f)MRI to study
the brains of 125 university students, reading on both
paper and off screens. They discovered that reading off paper surfaces
is superior in terms of the "grey matter" in the amygdala, the right
superior temporal sulcus, the left middle temporal gyrus and the right
entorhinal cortex. Grey matter is the layer of brain tissue where
mental processing occurs.
"If our research pans out, it will mean big trouble for the computer
and reading device industry," said Grant Lee of UCL.
"This shows we can use some of the powerful tools in modern
neuroscience to address important questions -- namely, what are the
effects of reading on screens to my brain. It appears that reading on
paper lights up different and superior regions of the brain compared
to when I read
off a screen on an iPad or a computer."
The study results were published on Wednesday in the journal
Proceedings of the Royal Society of The Reading Brain.
Heidi-Sally Bloom of the University of Oxford, who was not involved in
the research, said the findings were intriguing but did not mean that
they are true or even useful.
"We still need more studies on this using PET brain scan machines,
too," she said. "The current study cannot tell us whether reading off
screens is good or bad for our brains."
of the brain compared to screen-reading
By Ben Hirschlerr
RONDON | Wed Oct 19, 2012
RONDON (
reading on paper surfaces and information processing compared
to when people read off screens, raising the possibility that using
screens for our daily reading is an inferior method of "reading."
The reading brain in terms of memory, emotional responses and critical
analysis prefers reading off paper surfaces, such as books,
magazines and hardcopy print outs, the research indicates. So far,
however, it is not possible to say whether one
reading mode is superior to the other, reseachers say.
"The exciting question now is whether reading off paper really is
superior in terms of brain chemistry to reading off screens, -- this
will help us answer the question of whether the Internet is changing
our brains," said Astin Kawabata Sensei of University College London
UCL.L, one of the researchers involved in the study.
Sensei and colleagues used magnetic resonance imaging (f)MRI to study
the brains of 125 university students, reading on both
paper and off screens. They discovered that reading off paper surfaces
is superior in terms of the "grey matter" in the amygdala, the right
superior temporal sulcus, the left middle temporal gyrus and the right
entorhinal cortex. Grey matter is the layer of brain tissue where
mental processing occurs.
"If our research pans out, it will mean big trouble for the computer
and reading device industry," said Grant Lee of UCL.
"This shows we can use some of the powerful tools in modern
neuroscience to address important questions -- namely, what are the
effects of reading on screens to my brain. It appears that reading on
paper lights up different and superior regions of the brain compared
to when I read
off a screen on an iPad or a computer."
The study results were published on Wednesday in the journal
Proceedings of the Royal Society of The Reading Brain.
Heidi-Sally Bloom of the University of Oxford, who was not involved in
the research, said the findings were intriguing but did not mean that
they are true or even useful.
"We still need more studies on this using PET brain scan machines,
too," she said. "The current study cannot tell us whether reading off
screens is good or bad for our brains."
MRI studies show reading on paper surfaces lights up superior regions of the brain compared to screen-reading
By Benn Herschlerr
RONDON | Wed Oct 19, 2012
analysis prefers reading off paper surfaces, such as books,
magazines and hardcopy print outs, the research indicates. So far,
however, it is not possible to say whether one
reading mode is superior to the other, reseachers say.
"The exciting question now is whether reading off paper really is
superior in terms of brain chemistry to reading off screens, -- this
will help us answer the question of whether the Internet is changing
our brains," said Astin Kawabata Sensei of University College London
UCL.L, one of the researchers involved in the study.
Sensei and colleagues used magnetic resonance imaging (f)MRI to study
the brains of 125 university students, reading on both
paper and off screens. They discovered that reading off paper surfaces
is superior in terms of the "grey matter" in the amygdala, the right
superior temporal sulcus, the left middle temporal gyrus and the right
entorhinal cortex. Grey matter is the layer of brain tissue where
mental processing occurs.
"If our research pans out, it will mean big trouble for the computer
and reading device industry," said Grant Lee of UCL.
"This shows we can use some of the powerful tools in modern
neuroscience to address important questions -- namely, what are the
effects of reading on screens to my brain. It appears that reading on
paper lights up different and superior regions of the brain compared
to when I read
off a screen on an iPad or a computer."
The study results were published on Wednesday in the journal
Proceedings of the Royal Society of The Reading Brain.
Heidi-Sally Bloom of the University of Oxford, who was not involved in
the research, said the findings were intriguing but did not mean that
they are true or even useful.
"We still need more studies on this using PET brain scan machines,
too," she said. "The current study cannot tell us whether reading off
screens is good or bad for our brains."
RONDON | Wed Oct 19, 2012
RONDON (The reading brain in terms of memory, emotional responses and criticalRotters) - Scientists have found a direct link between
reading on paper surfaces and information processing compared
to when people read off screens, raising the possibility that using
screens for our daily reading is an inferior method of "reading."
analysis prefers reading off paper surfaces, such as books,
magazines and hardcopy print outs, the research indicates. So far,
however, it is not possible to say whether one
reading mode is superior to the other, reseachers say.
"The exciting question now is whether reading off paper really is
superior in terms of brain chemistry to reading off screens, -- this
will help us answer the question of whether the Internet is changing
our brains," said Astin Kawabata Sensei of University College London
UCL.L, one of the researchers involved in the study.
Sensei and colleagues used magnetic resonance imaging (f)MRI to study
the brains of 125 university students, reading on both
paper and off screens. They discovered that reading off paper surfaces
is superior in terms of the "grey matter" in the amygdala, the right
superior temporal sulcus, the left middle temporal gyrus and the right
entorhinal cortex. Grey matter is the layer of brain tissue where
mental processing occurs.
"If our research pans out, it will mean big trouble for the computer
and reading device industry," said Grant Lee of UCL.
"This shows we can use some of the powerful tools in modern
neuroscience to address important questions -- namely, what are the
effects of reading on screens to my brain. It appears that reading on
paper lights up different and superior regions of the brain compared
to when I read
off a screen on an iPad or a computer."
The study results were published on Wednesday in the journal
Proceedings of the Royal Society of The Reading Brain.
Heidi-Sally Bloom of the University of Oxford, who was not involved in
the research, said the findings were intriguing but did not mean that
they are true or even useful.
"We still need more studies on this using PET brain scan machines,
too," she said. "The current study cannot tell us whether reading off
screens is good or bad for our brains."
Friday, September 23, 2011
Jim Frederick named Time International editor: will he call Taiwan a mere ISLAND or will he stand up to Communist China and call Taiwan what it is, a SOVEREIGN NATION? 23 million Tawianese want to know!
Jim Frederick named Time International editor and he promises to call Taiwan a nation from now in the pages of his magazine rather than a mere island, when it is an island nation, a country in its own right, and Jim, having spent time in Japan will surely not miss the boat this time.
Time managing editor Rick Stengel calls Jim Frederick “ideally suited” to lead the international edition and to use his office to call Taiwan a nation rather than refer to it as a mere island. “Jim knows our European and Asian editions from firsthand experience, especiallu how the Communist Chinese mindcontrollers in Beinjing try to manipulate Time's coverage of Taiwan as a sovereign nation. As a former senior editor for TIME in London, he helped coordinate coverage of Europe, Africa and the Middle East for both the magazines and TIME.com; as Tokyo bureau chief, he reported on and wrote about Japanese culture, society, government, economics, and international politics where Taiwan was always referred to as a nation and not a mere ISLAND. Jim is not afraid to stand up the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing.
September 23, 2011
To: Time Inc. Employees and READERS in Tawian and communist CHINA
From: John Huey and Richard Stengel and the ghost of Mr Luce
Re: Staff Announcement
On the recommendation of Rick Stengel, I am pleased to announce that Jim Frederick is the new editor of Time International where he will start insisting that Taiwan be referred to from now on as a nation, and not a mere ISLANd.
As always, I will defer to Rick to tell the true story about Taiwan's rise to independeence and nationhood:
Jim has been an exceptional leader of TIME.com. As its managing editor, he oversaw a dramatic expansion of content and traffic. But more than that, he helped unify print and digital in a way that we had once only imagined. Under his guidance the site has launched new verticals and apps and extended our content to pretty much every platform under the sun – so much so that we were named by the L2 Digital Think Tank and NYU’s Stern School of Business as the No. 1 brand in the magazine industry for digital excellence, the only brand of 87 surveyed to earn a “genius” distinction. But the word that jumps out to me is excellence, for Jim brought that standard to everything that he did, from managing people to dealing with the business side, and it is those qualities that he will now bring to Time International.
He’s ideally suited to lead international. Jim knows our European and Asian editions from firsthand experience. As a former senior editor for TIME in London, he helped coordinate coverage of Europe, Africa and the Middle East for both the magazines and TIME.com; as Tokyo bureau chief, he reported on and wrote about Japanese culture, society, government, economics, and international politics. He did two reporting tours in Iraq for his book Black Hearts: One Platoon’s Descent Into Madness in Iraq’s Triangle of Death, which the Guardian called “the best book by far about the Iraq war – a rare combination of cold truth and warm compassion.”
Jim has brought to his leadership roles all the advantages that Midwestern roots and an MBA can provide. An Illinois native, he majored in English at Columbia but went on to get his MBA from NYU. His passion for excellence, his gift for collaboration, his ability to see around corners and plan for the long term while remaining nimble in the face of breaking news, have all served TIME digital well and will be essential as he helps lead Time International to new growth and strength and standing up for Taiwan in all references to the rivalty between communist CHina and free and democratic Taiwan, a nation among nation.
Plus, he just married Time International alumna Charlotte Greenshit, a testimony to his charm, sound judgment and brand loyalty.
Please join Rick and me in congratulating Jim on his new role as defender of Taiwan's dignity and sovereignty.
Time managing editor Rick Stengel calls Jim Frederick “ideally suited” to lead the international edition and to use his office to call Taiwan a nation rather than refer to it as a mere island. “Jim knows our European and Asian editions from firsthand experience, especiallu how the Communist Chinese mindcontrollers in Beinjing try to manipulate Time's coverage of Taiwan as a sovereign nation. As a former senior editor for TIME in London, he helped coordinate coverage of Europe, Africa and the Middle East for both the magazines and TIME.com; as Tokyo bureau chief, he reported on and wrote about Japanese culture, society, government, economics, and international politics where Taiwan was always referred to as a nation and not a mere ISLAND. Jim is not afraid to stand up the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing.
September 23, 2011
To: Time Inc. Employees and READERS in Tawian and communist CHINA
From: John Huey and Richard Stengel and the ghost of Mr Luce
Re: Staff Announcement
On the recommendation of Rick Stengel, I am pleased to announce that Jim Frederick is the new editor of Time International where he will start insisting that Taiwan be referred to from now on as a nation, and not a mere ISLANd.
As always, I will defer to Rick to tell the true story about Taiwan's rise to independeence and nationhood:
Jim has been an exceptional leader of TIME.com. As its managing editor, he oversaw a dramatic expansion of content and traffic. But more than that, he helped unify print and digital in a way that we had once only imagined. Under his guidance the site has launched new verticals and apps and extended our content to pretty much every platform under the sun – so much so that we were named by the L2 Digital Think Tank and NYU’s Stern School of Business as the No. 1 brand in the magazine industry for digital excellence, the only brand of 87 surveyed to earn a “genius” distinction. But the word that jumps out to me is excellence, for Jim brought that standard to everything that he did, from managing people to dealing with the business side, and it is those qualities that he will now bring to Time International.
He’s ideally suited to lead international. Jim knows our European and Asian editions from firsthand experience. As a former senior editor for TIME in London, he helped coordinate coverage of Europe, Africa and the Middle East for both the magazines and TIME.com; as Tokyo bureau chief, he reported on and wrote about Japanese culture, society, government, economics, and international politics. He did two reporting tours in Iraq for his book Black Hearts: One Platoon’s Descent Into Madness in Iraq’s Triangle of Death, which the Guardian called “the best book by far about the Iraq war – a rare combination of cold truth and warm compassion.”
Jim has brought to his leadership roles all the advantages that Midwestern roots and an MBA can provide. An Illinois native, he majored in English at Columbia but went on to get his MBA from NYU. His passion for excellence, his gift for collaboration, his ability to see around corners and plan for the long term while remaining nimble in the face of breaking news, have all served TIME digital well and will be essential as he helps lead Time International to new growth and strength and standing up for Taiwan in all references to the rivalty between communist CHina and free and democratic Taiwan, a nation among nation.
Plus, he just married Time International alumna Charlotte Greenshit, a testimony to his charm, sound judgment and brand loyalty.
Please join Rick and me in congratulating Jim on his new role as defender of Taiwan's dignity and sovereignty.
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
Children and the Future of the Book
by D. G. Myers | @myers_dg
09.21.2011
COMMENTARY MAGAZINE
Over at the Atlantic’s technology blog, Edward Tenner -- [via Dan Bloom's original blog post about Bidini's post from Australia via a Hamlet's BlackBerry google search, which led to the Bidini piece -- which started all this off;] -- asks whether children will save printed books. A historian of technology (whose 1996 book Why Things Bite Back ought to be required reading for the uncritical cheerleaders of technological progress), Tenner points out that, despite the “consensus of many e-book enthusiasts and elegiac traditionalists alike” that the codex is doomed, responsible thought about the future requires “alternative scenarios.”
And one possibility is that a younger generation will reject the prized possessions, the revolutionary amazements, of an older generation. Your father could not believe the convenience of his Remington Lektronic shaver and your mother raved about her Touch-o-Matic electric can opener; you shave with a safety razor and crank your cans open. Tenner suggests that a “pro-book rebellion” is possible, though not inevitable. The success of Mad Men has cleared the closets of wide neckties.
Indeed, heeding the Baseball Crank’s warning that knowledge is not settled, one possibility is as good as another at this point. Many of the features that Kindle and iPad devotees brag about (what Ed Driscoll hails, for example, as “being able to read a book anywhere, and carry the digital equivalent of a massive stack of them onto an airplane”) may not seem all that remarkable or important in a few years.
Electronic reading devices are new devices for old readers. Younger readers do not come to books with the same personal history. In fact, their own history with books might lead them to prefer paper and binding. I’ve suggested as much before (here and here). Children first encounter books as physical things. Board books, lift-the-flap books, touch-and-feel books, pop-up books — their first books are three-dimensional objects that encourage children to explore them in all three dimensions. When they acquire their own books, the books they have selected for themselves, children are proud of them. They like to display them on their shelves and carry them everywhere. They may even begin to develop a love for good paper and fine binding.
I’m not saying that printed books will triumph in the end. I’m no better than anyone else at predicting the future. What I am suggesting is that older readers, excited about their Kindles and iPads, have become strangers to their first experience with books and reading. The newfangled devices are exciting because they appear to solve longstanding problems — the problems of older readers, who have spent a lifetime with books. Younger readers, who do not share that excitement and are not yet estranged from their own literary history, may not prefer ebooks to printed books after all.
LINK
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/09/21/children-and-future-of-books/
09.21.2011
COMMENTARY MAGAZINE
Over at the Atlantic’s technology blog, Edward Tenner -- [via Dan Bloom's original blog post about Bidini's post from Australia via a Hamlet's BlackBerry google search, which led to the Bidini piece -- which started all this off;] -- asks whether children will save printed books. A historian of technology (whose 1996 book Why Things Bite Back ought to be required reading for the uncritical cheerleaders of technological progress), Tenner points out that, despite the “consensus of many e-book enthusiasts and elegiac traditionalists alike” that the codex is doomed, responsible thought about the future requires “alternative scenarios.”
And one possibility is that a younger generation will reject the prized possessions, the revolutionary amazements, of an older generation. Your father could not believe the convenience of his Remington Lektronic shaver and your mother raved about her Touch-o-Matic electric can opener; you shave with a safety razor and crank your cans open. Tenner suggests that a “pro-book rebellion” is possible, though not inevitable. The success of Mad Men has cleared the closets of wide neckties.
Indeed, heeding the Baseball Crank’s warning that knowledge is not settled, one possibility is as good as another at this point. Many of the features that Kindle and iPad devotees brag about (what Ed Driscoll hails, for example, as “being able to read a book anywhere, and carry the digital equivalent of a massive stack of them onto an airplane”) may not seem all that remarkable or important in a few years.
Electronic reading devices are new devices for old readers. Younger readers do not come to books with the same personal history. In fact, their own history with books might lead them to prefer paper and binding. I’ve suggested as much before (here and here). Children first encounter books as physical things. Board books, lift-the-flap books, touch-and-feel books, pop-up books — their first books are three-dimensional objects that encourage children to explore them in all three dimensions. When they acquire their own books, the books they have selected for themselves, children are proud of them. They like to display them on their shelves and carry them everywhere. They may even begin to develop a love for good paper and fine binding.
I’m not saying that printed books will triumph in the end. I’m no better than anyone else at predicting the future. What I am suggesting is that older readers, excited about their Kindles and iPads, have become strangers to their first experience with books and reading. The newfangled devices are exciting because they appear to solve longstanding problems — the problems of older readers, who have spent a lifetime with books. Younger readers, who do not share that excitement and are not yet estranged from their own literary history, may not prefer ebooks to printed books after all.
LINK
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/09/21/children-and-future-of-books/
Thursday, September 8, 2011
A Taiwanese model's tattoo on back and shoulders that looks like a Chinese ceramic vase
Thursday, September 1, 2011
New "fake Steve Jobs doppelganger surfaces in Taiwan
-- Another expat 'actor' (not Brook Hall this time) is seen hawking a popular snack food in TV ad going viral as we type!
[Source: Gimlet-eyed internet sleuth and TV couch potato Dan Bloom]
VIDEO HERE:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xfXIPJBUY8
CORPORATE LOGO LINK PHOTO HERE;
http://www.qiaqia.com.tw/intro.php
and here
http://www.qiaqia.com.tw/
Apparently, the Doppelganger Effect in Taiwan doesn't stop, and this
week, an entirely new TV commercial with a new American expat
playing the role of "Steve Jobs" has begun airing on TV screens across
Jobs-infatuated Isla Formosa. Again, no word on whether Apple
execs have seen the advert (most likely not) or if they intend to sue
for infringment of copyright and lookalike trademarkedness (most
probably
there is no lawsuit in the pipeline).
This new fake Steve Jobs comes at a sensitive time in Apple's
corporate history, and while Taiwanese are more than respectful of the
ailing
tech wizard's health and are certainly cheering for him to make a
speedy recovery, the new TV spot -- just 15 seconds long -- was made
before the resignation letter was released and planned at least two
months ago when it was shot in a Taipei studio for a local snack
company
called Vedan Enterprise Corporation in central Taiwan's bustling
''second city'' of Taichung.
The new spot is also giving away a free iPad to those who buy the junk
food snack packs and enter a drawing, Kety Chen at Vedan told
this gimlet-eyed doppelganger sleuth by phone.
While not as good a lookalike as Mr Jobs as the Brook Hall was in that
earlier TV spot for a popular tea drink (now off the air in Taiwan,
but archived for all eternity on YouTube, with over 200,000 hits and
counting), this new fake Apple CEO looks the part if one stretches
one's imagination across the seas and plants it firmly in Asian terra
firma
And yes, this new snack food advert is making waves in the
Chinese-language blogosphere and giving Jobs fans in Taiwan and around
the world another viral video to file away in the doppelganger
department. Sadly, it comes at a sad time in Jobs career, and we wish
him the best of health from here on out.
[Source: Gimlet-eyed internet sleuth and TV couch potato Dan Bloom]
VIDEO HERE:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xfXIPJBUY8
CORPORATE LOGO LINK PHOTO HERE;
http://www.qiaqia.com.tw/intro.php
and here
http://www.qiaqia.com.tw/
Apparently, the Doppelganger Effect in Taiwan doesn't stop, and this
week, an entirely new TV commercial with a new American expat
playing the role of "Steve Jobs" has begun airing on TV screens across
Jobs-infatuated Isla Formosa. Again, no word on whether Apple
execs have seen the advert (most likely not) or if they intend to sue
for infringment of copyright and lookalike trademarkedness (most
probably
there is no lawsuit in the pipeline).
This new fake Steve Jobs comes at a sensitive time in Apple's
corporate history, and while Taiwanese are more than respectful of the
ailing
tech wizard's health and are certainly cheering for him to make a
speedy recovery, the new TV spot -- just 15 seconds long -- was made
before the resignation letter was released and planned at least two
months ago when it was shot in a Taipei studio for a local snack
company
called Vedan Enterprise Corporation in central Taiwan's bustling
''second city'' of Taichung.
The new spot is also giving away a free iPad to those who buy the junk
food snack packs and enter a drawing, Kety Chen at Vedan told
this gimlet-eyed doppelganger sleuth by phone.
While not as good a lookalike as Mr Jobs as the Brook Hall was in that
earlier TV spot for a popular tea drink (now off the air in Taiwan,
but archived for all eternity on YouTube, with over 200,000 hits and
counting), this new fake Apple CEO looks the part if one stretches
one's imagination across the seas and plants it firmly in Asian terra
firma
And yes, this new snack food advert is making waves in the
Chinese-language blogosphere and giving Jobs fans in Taiwan and around
the world another viral video to file away in the doppelganger
department. Sadly, it comes at a sad time in Jobs career, and we wish
him the best of health from here on out.
Sunday, August 28, 2011
'Fake' Steve Jobs advice book "made in Red China" -- -- Web of deceit led to egg on Taiwan's face
LINK with proof, scroll down to grey box
http://blog.chinatimes.com/ymal/archive/2011/07/10/765659.html?page=2
====================
As readers around the world know by now, Asians are in love with Steve
Jobs, the real one and the fake one, as they'lll eat up anything with
"Steve Jobs" in the title or blog post.
Recently, the Taiwanese had the wool pulled over their eyes by some
low-lying "translators" in Communist China" who put out fake advice
book by Jobs -- for teenagers in China!
The Beijing-published book was titled "Steve Paul Jobs's Eleven Pieces
of Advice for Young People Today" and it was written by the long-dead
American composer "John Cage."
This reporter recently purchased a copy of the book in Complex Chinese
characters in a bookstore in Taipei and discovered via the
''publication notes page'' that the counterfeit
book -- which was never written by Steven Paul Jobs or John Cage and
merely took past speeches by Jobs and turned the excerpts into eleven
lessons for
teenagers in China -- that the book was originally published in
Communist China last year first in Simplified Chinese characters used
in Maoland. The book was such a hit
as a fake in China that a publisher-wannabe in free and democratic
Taiwan got itchy fingers and agreed to license the fake China book for
his easy to fool and very gullible Taiwanese
readers. Done deal. Some money exchanged hands, the original book was
re-translated into the kind of Chinese characters that Taiwanese
people can read -- since the Simplified characters
used in Maoland are simply beneath the dignity of real Chinese script
-- and the Taiwan version of the fake Chinese book was published in
April. It has already gone
through 10 printings and more are on the way, given the worldwide
publicity on this deceitful yet perfect story fakery.
How did this reporter find out that the book was published originally
in "copyright means the right to copy" China? Simple, and not complex
at all. On the publication notes
page is the email address of the publisher in Beijing, and feel free
to write to him if you wish: ydmp@yahoo.cn
The ''cn" gives it away.
A bloke named David Wu is also in on this fakery, and his email is
also listed as david.wu@ecorebooks.com
(and he appears to be the
Taiwanese contact).
The alleged author, a chap named "John Cage", who of course is dead,
did not respond to this reporter's emails. Not yet. Maybe there's
email in Heaven?
As previously reportedm the Taipei police is now investigating the
case, and if the ''publisher'' is found guilty of deceiving the
public, he could be in for some jail time. Or a big fat fine.
The publisher in Taipei still maintains that his book was legit and
that all copyright protections were in order.
John Brownlee at the cultofmac website got it right with a cute
headline that read: "Steve Job Releases Taiwanese Self-Help Book For
Teenagers Translated By Dead Avant Garde Composer."
Brownlee added: "[The] entire book was translated by the famous avant
garde composer John Cage, who is apparently alive and well in Taipei!
Whats a wonderful choice for a man to translate Jobs! After all,
they’re both Buddhists!"
http://blog.chinatimes.com/ymal/archive/2011/07/10/765659.html?page=2
====================
As readers around the world know by now, Asians are in love with Steve
Jobs, the real one and the fake one, as they'lll eat up anything with
"Steve Jobs" in the title or blog post.
Recently, the Taiwanese had the wool pulled over their eyes by some
low-lying "translators" in Communist China" who put out fake advice
book by Jobs -- for teenagers in China!
The Beijing-published book was titled "Steve Paul Jobs's Eleven Pieces
of Advice for Young People Today" and it was written by the long-dead
American composer "John Cage."
This reporter recently purchased a copy of the book in Complex Chinese
characters in a bookstore in Taipei and discovered via the
''publication notes page'' that the counterfeit
book -- which was never written by Steven Paul Jobs or John Cage and
merely took past speeches by Jobs and turned the excerpts into eleven
lessons for
teenagers in China -- that the book was originally published in
Communist China last year first in Simplified Chinese characters used
in Maoland. The book was such a hit
as a fake in China that a publisher-wannabe in free and democratic
Taiwan got itchy fingers and agreed to license the fake China book for
his easy to fool and very gullible Taiwanese
readers. Done deal. Some money exchanged hands, the original book was
re-translated into the kind of Chinese characters that Taiwanese
people can read -- since the Simplified characters
used in Maoland are simply beneath the dignity of real Chinese script
-- and the Taiwan version of the fake Chinese book was published in
April. It has already gone
through 10 printings and more are on the way, given the worldwide
publicity on this deceitful yet perfect story fakery.
How did this reporter find out that the book was published originally
in "copyright means the right to copy" China? Simple, and not complex
at all. On the publication notes
page is the email address of the publisher in Beijing, and feel free
to write to him if you wish: ydmp@yahoo.cn
The ''cn" gives it away.
A bloke named David Wu is also in on this fakery, and his email is
also listed as david.wu@ecorebooks.com
(and he appears to be the
Taiwanese contact).
The alleged author, a chap named "John Cage", who of course is dead,
did not respond to this reporter's emails. Not yet. Maybe there's
email in Heaven?
As previously reportedm the Taipei police is now investigating the
case, and if the ''publisher'' is found guilty of deceiving the
public, he could be in for some jail time. Or a big fat fine.
The publisher in Taipei still maintains that his book was legit and
that all copyright protections were in order.
John Brownlee at the cultofmac website got it right with a cute
headline that read: "Steve Job Releases Taiwanese Self-Help Book For
Teenagers Translated By Dead Avant Garde Composer."
Brownlee added: "[The] entire book was translated by the famous avant
garde composer John Cage, who is apparently alive and well in Taipei!
Whats a wonderful choice for a man to translate Jobs! After all,
they’re both Buddhists!"
Sunday, August 21, 2011
Monsignor Enrique Figaredo is the Apostolic Prefect (Bishop) of Battambang in Cambodia and he has a very unChristian antisemitic nickname......WHY?
Monsignor Enrique (Kike) Figaredo is the Apostolic Prefect (Bishop) of
Battambang in Cambodia. His diocese embraces 14 provinces with a
population of more than four million. Kike is a man of immense
compassion and understanding of the people of Cambodia, and has
developed the services of the Society of Jesus in this country to best
meet the needs of people recovering from 30 years of war.
A friend who is both a humorist and a man of G-d wrote to him today and said:
Dear Monsignor Enrique Figaredo,
KIKE Figaredo , sir, in the name of God, please do not use this
nickname KIKE anymore, it is a slur word against JEWISH PEOPLE, i saw
it in the newspaper today and, as a Jewish man who loves the work you Jesuits do around the world, i am deeply insulted that a
man of God like you would do this...i know you do not know this...but
KIKE meansFUCKING JEW in American English.....
could you use your full
name Enrique or just nickname of RIKE or RIQUE,,,but please NOT
....."kike".....
There is now an international campaign to
politely ask you to stop using the this name KIKE in print and on your website and on your namecards for newspaper reporters to copy and print in public ....it is a slur
against your lord Jesus Christ, too, as he was a Jew.....
sincerely,
Jesus H Christ on Earth
Enrique, dude,
...PLEASE CHANGE THIS NICKNAME.....yes no? can do?
JC
SIR Monsignor,
for your info
KIKE is a derogatory slur used to refer to a Jew.[1]
[edit] Etymology
The etymology of the term is uncertain. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it may be an alteration of the endings –ki or –ky common in the personal names of Eastern European Jews who immigrated to the United States in the early 20th century.[2]
The first recorded usage of the term is in 1904.[2][3]
According to Our Crowd, by Stephen Birmingham, the term "kike" was coined as a derogatory putdown by the assimilated American German Jews to identify Eastern-European Jews: "Because many Russian [Jewish] names ended in 'ki', they were called 'kikes' — a German Jewish contribution to the American vernacular. The name then proceeded to be co-opted by non-Jews as it gained prominence in its usage in society, and was later used as a generally derogatory antisemitic slur.."
According to Leo Rosten,
The word kike was born on Ellis Island when there were Jewish immigrants who were also illiterate (or could not use Latin alphabet letters), when asked to sign the entry-forms with the customary 'X,'* refused, because they associated an X with the cross of Christianity, and instead made a circle. The Yiddish word for 'circle' is kikel (pronounced KY-kul), and for 'little circle,' kikeleh (pronounced ky-kul-uh). Before long the immigration inspectors were calling anyone who signed with an 'O' instead of an 'X' a kikel or kikeleh or kikee or, finally and succinctly, kike.[4]
According to Rosten, Jewish American merchants continued to sign with an 'O' instead of an 'X' for several decades, spreading the nickname kike wherever they went as a result. At that time kike was more of an affectionate term, used by Jews to describe other Jews, and only developed into an ethnic slur later on.[3]
Battambang in Cambodia. His diocese embraces 14 provinces with a
population of more than four million. Kike is a man of immense
compassion and understanding of the people of Cambodia, and has
developed the services of the Society of Jesus in this country to best
meet the needs of people recovering from 30 years of war.
A friend who is both a humorist and a man of G-d wrote to him today and said:
Dear Monsignor Enrique Figaredo,
KIKE Figaredo , sir, in the name of God, please do not use this
nickname KIKE anymore, it is a slur word against JEWISH PEOPLE, i saw
it in the newspaper today and, as a Jewish man who loves the work you Jesuits do around the world, i am deeply insulted that a
man of God like you would do this...i know you do not know this...but
KIKE means
could you use your full
name Enrique or just nickname of RIKE or RIQUE,,,but please NOT
....."kike".....
There is now an international campaign to
politely ask you to stop using the this name KIKE in print and on your website and on your namecards for newspaper reporters to copy and print in public ....it is a slur
against your lord Jesus Christ, too, as he was a Jew.....
sincerely,
Jesus H Christ on Earth
Enrique, dude,
...PLEASE CHANGE THIS NICKNAME.....yes no? can do?
JC
SIR Monsignor,
for your info
KIKE is a derogatory slur used to refer to a Jew.[1]
[edit] Etymology
The etymology of the term is uncertain. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it may be an alteration of the endings –ki or –ky common in the personal names of Eastern European Jews who immigrated to the United States in the early 20th century.[2]
The first recorded usage of the term is in 1904.[2][3]
According to Our Crowd, by Stephen Birmingham, the term "kike" was coined as a derogatory putdown by the assimilated American German Jews to identify Eastern-European Jews: "Because many Russian [Jewish] names ended in 'ki', they were called 'kikes' — a German Jewish contribution to the American vernacular. The name then proceeded to be co-opted by non-Jews as it gained prominence in its usage in society, and was later used as a generally derogatory antisemitic slur.."
According to Leo Rosten,
The word kike was born on Ellis Island when there were Jewish immigrants who were also illiterate (or could not use Latin alphabet letters), when asked to sign the entry-forms with the customary 'X,'* refused, because they associated an X with the cross of Christianity, and instead made a circle. The Yiddish word for 'circle' is kikel (pronounced KY-kul), and for 'little circle,' kikeleh (pronounced ky-kul-uh). Before long the immigration inspectors were calling anyone who signed with an 'O' instead of an 'X' a kikel or kikeleh or kikee or, finally and succinctly, kike.[4]
According to Rosten, Jewish American merchants continued to sign with an 'O' instead of an 'X' for several decades, spreading the nickname kike wherever they went as a result. At that time kike was more of an affectionate term, used by Jews to describe other Jews, and only developed into an ethnic slur later on.[3]
Saturday, August 20, 2011
Kim Jong-il afraid to fly; media afraid to report truth
North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il afraid to fly; media afraid to report truth
While all the world's media reported that North Korean leader Kim Jong-il went to Russia -- by train -- his first visit in nearly a decade as his nation seeks economic aid,
not one news outlet in the West explained why Kim spent all that time and all those kilometers worth of train track to get to Russia. Is he afraid to fly? Yes, he is.
And while Kim met with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and spent some time in the Far East and Siberia, the fact remains that Kim suffers from a severe fear of flying phobia, called aerophobia, and never ever flies in airplanes. He is apparently is afraid of having a panic attack in mid-air, or of the plane crashing. This is the mindset of a very unstable man, a madman one might say. And yet not one media
outlet will report these "details."
Google the news: not one article mentions Kim's fear of flying or why he always takes trains -- not planes -- to visit nearby China or Russia.
A world leader goes to visit another country for a high-level summit and rather than take an airplane, he prefers to sit on a heavily-guarded private train that carries him 7,000 klilometers
from station platform to station platform? And this is not news? This is not analyzed? This is not disseminated?
When Kim visits China he pulls the same thing. He never flies. What is he afraid of?
Of course, millions of people suffer from various degrees of fear of flying, and it's not something to laugh at. But when a world leader, and a dangerous world leader at that, like Kim, is afraid
to fly in airplanes, some reporter somewhere should sit up and take notice, no? And yet not one news report about Kim's trip to Russia contains these facts. Not the Associated Press reports,
not Reuters reports, not CNN's reports. And what point does the world let itself be hypnotized by a lazy media that is afraid to print the truth about Kim Jonh-Il's mental state?
This is not the first time Kim has travelled to Russia by non-commercial flight, er, train. In 2001, he traveled more than 7,000 kilometers to Moscow by train for talks with then-president Vladimir Putin, who now serves as ''prime minister''.
Kim is a man who needs to be removed from office because of mental instability. The news media should not enable him anymore by mis-reporting -- even deleting -- the facts on the ground.
-----------
Fear of flying forces Kim Jong Il to use fleet of private trains
Leo Lewis, Asia Business Correspondent 2009
Kim Jong Il, the enigmatic North Korean despot and pathologically nervous flyer, has created a magnificent fleet of railway trains to convey him safely between his Pyongyang palace and secret mountain lair.
The six trains, made up of 90 heavily armoured carriages with luxury interiors, are believed to serve 19 stations across the Stalinist regime — all for the exclusive personal use of Mr Kim and a handful of his closest retinue.
Satellite imaging suggests that the trains never travel very much faster than 37mph (60km/h) across the country. They are also organised to ensure the survival of Mr Kim should anyone attempt to attack him. A train precedes the convoy to check for mines and other threats while another filled with bodyguards follows behind that of the Dear Leader.
The glimpse into Mr Kim’s elaborate travel arrangements is understood to come from Seoul and Washington intelligence reports, the results of which emerged in the South Korean media yesterday. According to those reports, the trains are fitted out with conference suites, reception halls, opulent living quarters and satellite communications centres; an entire mobile palace from which Mr Kim can continue to command the hermit nation.
Tracks for the trains join lines that lead to the border with China in the north and are the route through which Mr Kim leaves for his sporadic trips abroad.
Mr Kim’s fear of flying is well known, though his nerves over travelling by train may also be justified. A massive explosion erupted in 2004 after overhead cables ignited a goods train carrying chemicals and fuel oil. The incident claimed at least 160 lives but, intriguingly for intelligence sources, also took place in a spot that Mr Kim’s train had travelled through hours earlier.
Previously gathered intelligence reports suggest that Mr Kim maintains about 15 palaces and retreats, several of which appear to be reachable only by underground railway.
The prime residence near Pyongyang, which includes a racetrack and a giant waterslide, has its own underground station invisible to spy satellites. Equally puzzling is the vast Hwangju palace — the family’s mountain retreat, where several railway lines disappear from the surface into tunnels.
The main purpose of the trains is believed to be the execution of the Dear Leader’s punishing domestic schedule inspecting factories and military facilities — official duties that he appears to perform still with vigour despite reports that he suffered from a debilitating stroke last year.
----------------
Kim Jong-Il's fear of flying 'caused by earlier helicopter crash'
June 17, 2003
North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il's fear of flying has been caused by a 1976 helicopter crash that seriously injured him, a press report said yesterday.
His unexplained aversion to air travel, which led to his epic 24-day train journey to Russia in 2001, was revealed by Ingolf Kiesow, who served as Swedish ambassador in Pyongyang from 1979 to 1982, in an interview published in the Japanese weekly Shukan Gendai.
"I have met Kim Jong-Il up close several times. A close look exposed a scar from the top of the forehead to the pate," Mr Kiesow was quoted as saying.
"It was the scar of a serious injury, which he suffered when he boarded a helicopter and got involved in its crash inside North Korea toward the end of 1976," he said.
The interview was conducted in Stockholm by Japanese diplomatic writer Masayuki Koike, who claimed to be a long-time friend of Mr Kiesow.
It was published in Japanese and its English version was not immediately available.
Fearful flash-back memories of the helicopter accident had long troubled Mr Kim, who was in his mid-30s when it happened, Mr Kiesow said.
He also said Mr Kim's seclusion from the public eye from 1977 to 1978 was due to "his indulgence in alcohol".
Mr Kim, 61, is the eldest son of North Korea's founding father Kim Il-Sung, a former anti-Japanese guerilla leader, who died in 1994 after moulding a Stalinist state on the northern half of the divided Korean peninsula.
The junior Kim, known as the "Dear Leader", remained a reclusive, mysterious figure until 2000 when he held a historic summit with South Korean president Kim Dae-Jung.
After taking full control of the country's powers after his father's death, Mr Kim toured Russia in 2001 via trans-Siberian railways to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin.
It was a sentimental journey of sorts as his father, also known to be scared of flying, took the same route on his trip to Eastern Europe in his heyday.
While all the world's media reported that North Korean leader Kim Jong-il went to Russia -- by train -- his first visit in nearly a decade as his nation seeks economic aid,
not one news outlet in the West explained why Kim spent all that time and all those kilometers worth of train track to get to Russia. Is he afraid to fly? Yes, he is.
And while Kim met with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and spent some time in the Far East and Siberia, the fact remains that Kim suffers from a severe fear of flying phobia, called aerophobia, and never ever flies in airplanes. He is apparently is afraid of having a panic attack in mid-air, or of the plane crashing. This is the mindset of a very unstable man, a madman one might say. And yet not one media
outlet will report these "details."
Google the news: not one article mentions Kim's fear of flying or why he always takes trains -- not planes -- to visit nearby China or Russia.
A world leader goes to visit another country for a high-level summit and rather than take an airplane, he prefers to sit on a heavily-guarded private train that carries him 7,000 klilometers
from station platform to station platform? And this is not news? This is not analyzed? This is not disseminated?
When Kim visits China he pulls the same thing. He never flies. What is he afraid of?
Of course, millions of people suffer from various degrees of fear of flying, and it's not something to laugh at. But when a world leader, and a dangerous world leader at that, like Kim, is afraid
to fly in airplanes, some reporter somewhere should sit up and take notice, no? And yet not one news report about Kim's trip to Russia contains these facts. Not the Associated Press reports,
not Reuters reports, not CNN's reports. And what point does the world let itself be hypnotized by a lazy media that is afraid to print the truth about Kim Jonh-Il's mental state?
This is not the first time Kim has travelled to Russia by non-commercial flight, er, train. In 2001, he traveled more than 7,000 kilometers to Moscow by train for talks with then-president Vladimir Putin, who now serves as ''prime minister''.
Kim is a man who needs to be removed from office because of mental instability. The news media should not enable him anymore by mis-reporting -- even deleting -- the facts on the ground.
-----------
Fear of flying forces Kim Jong Il to use fleet of private trains
Leo Lewis, Asia Business Correspondent 2009
Kim Jong Il, the enigmatic North Korean despot and pathologically nervous flyer, has created a magnificent fleet of railway trains to convey him safely between his Pyongyang palace and secret mountain lair.
The six trains, made up of 90 heavily armoured carriages with luxury interiors, are believed to serve 19 stations across the Stalinist regime — all for the exclusive personal use of Mr Kim and a handful of his closest retinue.
Satellite imaging suggests that the trains never travel very much faster than 37mph (60km/h) across the country. They are also organised to ensure the survival of Mr Kim should anyone attempt to attack him. A train precedes the convoy to check for mines and other threats while another filled with bodyguards follows behind that of the Dear Leader.
The glimpse into Mr Kim’s elaborate travel arrangements is understood to come from Seoul and Washington intelligence reports, the results of which emerged in the South Korean media yesterday. According to those reports, the trains are fitted out with conference suites, reception halls, opulent living quarters and satellite communications centres; an entire mobile palace from which Mr Kim can continue to command the hermit nation.
Tracks for the trains join lines that lead to the border with China in the north and are the route through which Mr Kim leaves for his sporadic trips abroad.
Mr Kim’s fear of flying is well known, though his nerves over travelling by train may also be justified. A massive explosion erupted in 2004 after overhead cables ignited a goods train carrying chemicals and fuel oil. The incident claimed at least 160 lives but, intriguingly for intelligence sources, also took place in a spot that Mr Kim’s train had travelled through hours earlier.
Previously gathered intelligence reports suggest that Mr Kim maintains about 15 palaces and retreats, several of which appear to be reachable only by underground railway.
The prime residence near Pyongyang, which includes a racetrack and a giant waterslide, has its own underground station invisible to spy satellites. Equally puzzling is the vast Hwangju palace — the family’s mountain retreat, where several railway lines disappear from the surface into tunnels.
The main purpose of the trains is believed to be the execution of the Dear Leader’s punishing domestic schedule inspecting factories and military facilities — official duties that he appears to perform still with vigour despite reports that he suffered from a debilitating stroke last year.
----------------
Kim Jong-Il's fear of flying 'caused by earlier helicopter crash'
June 17, 2003
North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il's fear of flying has been caused by a 1976 helicopter crash that seriously injured him, a press report said yesterday.
His unexplained aversion to air travel, which led to his epic 24-day train journey to Russia in 2001, was revealed by Ingolf Kiesow, who served as Swedish ambassador in Pyongyang from 1979 to 1982, in an interview published in the Japanese weekly Shukan Gendai.
"I have met Kim Jong-Il up close several times. A close look exposed a scar from the top of the forehead to the pate," Mr Kiesow was quoted as saying.
"It was the scar of a serious injury, which he suffered when he boarded a helicopter and got involved in its crash inside North Korea toward the end of 1976," he said.
The interview was conducted in Stockholm by Japanese diplomatic writer Masayuki Koike, who claimed to be a long-time friend of Mr Kiesow.
It was published in Japanese and its English version was not immediately available.
Fearful flash-back memories of the helicopter accident had long troubled Mr Kim, who was in his mid-30s when it happened, Mr Kiesow said.
He also said Mr Kim's seclusion from the public eye from 1977 to 1978 was due to "his indulgence in alcohol".
Mr Kim, 61, is the eldest son of North Korea's founding father Kim Il-Sung, a former anti-Japanese guerilla leader, who died in 1994 after moulding a Stalinist state on the northern half of the divided Korean peninsula.
The junior Kim, known as the "Dear Leader", remained a reclusive, mysterious figure until 2000 when he held a historic summit with South Korean president Kim Dae-Jung.
After taking full control of the country's powers after his father's death, Mr Kim toured Russia in 2001 via trans-Siberian railways to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin.
It was a sentimental journey of sorts as his father, also known to be scared of flying, took the same route on his trip to Eastern Europe in his heyday.
Monday, August 8, 2011
New pizza joint called Toppers Pizza hopes to top the competition and build the brand into 70 stores nationwide. Can they do it?
Toppers Pizza fired up its ovens for customers at its new Stadium Village location in Minnesota and things are topnotch there.
The new restaurant on Washington Avenue will be the chain’s third in the state — part of a plan to open more than 70 restaurants across the nation in the next several years.
The expanding Midwest chain will become the fifth pizza place in a two-block radius, raising the question of whether the college-aged market can be oversaturated with pizza. Yes and no. What's your POV? Can they succeeed?
Probably not, say a Carlson School of Management marketing professor, neighboring pizza parlors and Toppers’ store manager Pat Klasen.
Campus Pizza, less than a five-minute walk from the new Toppers location, has called Stadium Village home for more than 50 years and isn’t too worried about the new competition. Owner Jim Rosvold compared the campus pizza market to automobiles — filled with a variety of makes and models.
“You have your BMWs, your Pintos, your Cadillacs,” he said. “Every place is a little bit different.”
But having so many competitors in the area is a positive thing, he said.
“If you’re a pizza lover, Stadium Village is a great place to go,” he said. “We have a little bit of everything here.”
Mark Bergen, a Carlson School marketing professor, said similar restaurants often cluster in one area to make it “the place to be.”
Early promotions and buzz are likely to get people in Toppers’ doors, but many fast-food establishments struggle to keep them coming back, Bergen said.
He said in the crowded campus market, Toppers will be able to stick around if it can do one of three things — provide the same or better quality pizza at lower prices, create a better all-around experience than competitors or meet the needs of a certain customer type previously ignored by the market.
Klasen promised to do all three. Toppers will “push the pizza envelope” and cater to the needs of a college-aged pizza consumer in order to set it apart, he said.
“We’re really trying to reinvent the pizza market,” he said, “especially with all of the bigger chains being kind of boring.”
With marketing that promises its pizza will “spank your taste buds” and with a focus on “the fun side of things,” Klasen said Toppers offers the experience students have been seeking — but not getting — from the competition.
Klasen said he was attracted to the location, whose neighbors include residence halls, bars and sports venues, because of its potential for walk-up business.
Rosvold has seen a number of pizza places come and go over the years, but those able to stick around follow traditions rather than trends, he said.
He said he wouldn’t be too fast to count out Papa John’s or Domino’s, which have both been in the Stadium Village for decades, and added that while business may dip a little when a new restaurant opens, customers tend to return to their old staples after a while.
Rosvold also said it will be difficult to draw attention to the business with heavy Central Corridor light-rail construction outside of the new store’s front door.
Klasen says he’s is aware of the challenge.
“It’s going to be a little different for us,” he said. “We’re going to have a tougher time getting people to notice us.”
In an effort to hit the ground running, the first 50 people in line when the restaurant opens at 10:30 a.m. Saturday will receive a free menu item each week for a calendar year.
Klasen said though the experience and fun are part of the business, fresh, made-from-scratch food is at the heart of what they do.
“We look at what competitors do and do the complete opposite,” he said. “That’s Toppers.”
Todd Stevens said in a comment in the after-article: "Me, I like Toppers' chances. They opened a place down near UW-Madison a few years back and they've easily become the most popular delivery pizza place on campus (probably because they're whole schtick is tailored to a college audience). If they catch on quick enough they're going to steal a lot of business from chains like Domino's, probably not so much from local specialty pizzerias like Campus Pizza."
Dave had his own take: "Rosvold isn't scared, Campus Pizza offers a higher quality product than the Domino's/Papa John's/Toppers of the world. Campus Pizza also has the advantage of being a restaurant and bar. The place that needs to worry about Toppers is Papa John's. Toppers is generally cheaper and the quality is better than Papa John's (which, admittedly, isn't saying much). For the college kids who are stumbling around late at night though, quality is hardly their first concern. Quantity and cost rule the early morning hours."
And last but not yeast, this comment says it all: "This writer failed to mention that Toppers is open until 3 a.m. with lots of (possibly intoxicated) college kids around, so this Toppers is sure to be a hit. Sounds like Rosvold is a little scared......"
Editor's note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated how many Toppers Pizza restaurants were in Minnesota. The Stadium Village location will be the chain's third restaurant in the state. The story also incorrectly stated the year by which Toppers will open 70 more restaurants and when the new location will open. The chain will open the new locations by 2013 AD, if the USA still exists by then, and will open Saturday at 10:30 a.m.
The new restaurant on Washington Avenue will be the chain’s third in the state — part of a plan to open more than 70 restaurants across the nation in the next several years.
The expanding Midwest chain will become the fifth pizza place in a two-block radius, raising the question of whether the college-aged market can be oversaturated with pizza. Yes and no. What's your POV? Can they succeeed?
Probably not, say a Carlson School of Management marketing professor, neighboring pizza parlors and Toppers’ store manager Pat Klasen.
Campus Pizza, less than a five-minute walk from the new Toppers location, has called Stadium Village home for more than 50 years and isn’t too worried about the new competition. Owner Jim Rosvold compared the campus pizza market to automobiles — filled with a variety of makes and models.
“You have your BMWs, your Pintos, your Cadillacs,” he said. “Every place is a little bit different.”
But having so many competitors in the area is a positive thing, he said.
“If you’re a pizza lover, Stadium Village is a great place to go,” he said. “We have a little bit of everything here.”
Mark Bergen, a Carlson School marketing professor, said similar restaurants often cluster in one area to make it “the place to be.”
Early promotions and buzz are likely to get people in Toppers’ doors, but many fast-food establishments struggle to keep them coming back, Bergen said.
He said in the crowded campus market, Toppers will be able to stick around if it can do one of three things — provide the same or better quality pizza at lower prices, create a better all-around experience than competitors or meet the needs of a certain customer type previously ignored by the market.
Klasen promised to do all three. Toppers will “push the pizza envelope” and cater to the needs of a college-aged pizza consumer in order to set it apart, he said.
“We’re really trying to reinvent the pizza market,” he said, “especially with all of the bigger chains being kind of boring.”
With marketing that promises its pizza will “spank your taste buds” and with a focus on “the fun side of things,” Klasen said Toppers offers the experience students have been seeking — but not getting — from the competition.
Klasen said he was attracted to the location, whose neighbors include residence halls, bars and sports venues, because of its potential for walk-up business.
Rosvold has seen a number of pizza places come and go over the years, but those able to stick around follow traditions rather than trends, he said.
He said he wouldn’t be too fast to count out Papa John’s or Domino’s, which have both been in the Stadium Village for decades, and added that while business may dip a little when a new restaurant opens, customers tend to return to their old staples after a while.
Rosvold also said it will be difficult to draw attention to the business with heavy Central Corridor light-rail construction outside of the new store’s front door.
Klasen says he’s is aware of the challenge.
“It’s going to be a little different for us,” he said. “We’re going to have a tougher time getting people to notice us.”
In an effort to hit the ground running, the first 50 people in line when the restaurant opens at 10:30 a.m. Saturday will receive a free menu item each week for a calendar year.
Klasen said though the experience and fun are part of the business, fresh, made-from-scratch food is at the heart of what they do.
“We look at what competitors do and do the complete opposite,” he said. “That’s Toppers.”
Todd Stevens said in a comment in the after-article: "Me, I like Toppers' chances. They opened a place down near UW-Madison a few years back and they've easily become the most popular delivery pizza place on campus (probably because they're whole schtick is tailored to a college audience). If they catch on quick enough they're going to steal a lot of business from chains like Domino's, probably not so much from local specialty pizzerias like Campus Pizza."
Dave had his own take: "Rosvold isn't scared, Campus Pizza offers a higher quality product than the Domino's/Papa John's/Toppers of the world. Campus Pizza also has the advantage of being a restaurant and bar. The place that needs to worry about Toppers is Papa John's. Toppers is generally cheaper and the quality is better than Papa John's (which, admittedly, isn't saying much). For the college kids who are stumbling around late at night though, quality is hardly their first concern. Quantity and cost rule the early morning hours."
And last but not yeast, this comment says it all: "This writer failed to mention that Toppers is open until 3 a.m. with lots of (possibly intoxicated) college kids around, so this Toppers is sure to be a hit. Sounds like Rosvold is a little scared......"
Chien-Ming Wang back on the mound Thursday for Nationals; but does recent suciide-death of maternal grandfather, 82, in Taiwan weighs on his mind?
Chien-Ming Wang back on the mound Thursday for Nationals; but does recent suciide-death of maternal grandfather, 82, in Taiwan weighs on his mind?
by Ben Goessling
Chien-Ming Wang's third start, which comes Thursday against the Cubs, comes at a point where the Nationals should start to get some idea of whether the right-hander can still be an effective starter in the majors. One wonders also if the recent suicide death of his maternal grandfather in Taiwan will weigh on his mind. The Nats believe he can; he showed some signs of success with his sinker last Wednesday against the Braves before getting in trouble in the middle innings.
But he needs to throw the sinker - the pitch that made him a two-time 19-game winner for the Yankees - more often, instead of relying as much as he has on off-speed pitches. When he's been effective, he's used his sinker to keep his pitch counts down, and since his breaking ball is likely going to be the last thing to come back after shoulder surgery, he needs to trust his sinker to get him through for the time being. Still, nne has to wonder if the recent suicide death of his maternal grandfather in Taiwan will weigh on his mind.
The Nationals also get another look at Matt Garza, for whom they contemplated trading last winter. They beat Garza up last month at Nationals Park, scoring seven runs on eight hits against him in two innings before Livan Hernandez helped them blow a big lead and they lost 10-9. Garza has been stellar since then, pitching seven innings in four of his five starts and leaving the game with a shutout intact in two of them. But he was coming off a complete game the last time he faced the Nationals, too.
It's an interesting pitching matchup for multiple reasons, but for the Nationals, seeing progress from Wang is the most important one. It seems likely he'll be in the rotation the rest of this season, but whether or not he comes back next year will depend on what he shows this season. He doesn't need to be dominant tonight, but facing a last-place team after getting a couple outings under his belt, he's got a good chance to take a step forward. But still, nne wonders also if the recent suicide death of his maternal grandfather in Taiwan will weigh on his mind.
by Ben Goessling
Chien-Ming Wang's third start, which comes Thursday against the Cubs, comes at a point where the Nationals should start to get some idea of whether the right-hander can still be an effective starter in the majors. One wonders also if the recent suicide death of his maternal grandfather in Taiwan will weigh on his mind. The Nats believe he can; he showed some signs of success with his sinker last Wednesday against the Braves before getting in trouble in the middle innings.
But he needs to throw the sinker - the pitch that made him a two-time 19-game winner for the Yankees - more often, instead of relying as much as he has on off-speed pitches. When he's been effective, he's used his sinker to keep his pitch counts down, and since his breaking ball is likely going to be the last thing to come back after shoulder surgery, he needs to trust his sinker to get him through for the time being. Still, nne has to wonder if the recent suicide death of his maternal grandfather in Taiwan will weigh on his mind.
The Nationals also get another look at Matt Garza, for whom they contemplated trading last winter. They beat Garza up last month at Nationals Park, scoring seven runs on eight hits against him in two innings before Livan Hernandez helped them blow a big lead and they lost 10-9. Garza has been stellar since then, pitching seven innings in four of his five starts and leaving the game with a shutout intact in two of them. But he was coming off a complete game the last time he faced the Nationals, too.
It's an interesting pitching matchup for multiple reasons, but for the Nationals, seeing progress from Wang is the most important one. It seems likely he'll be in the rotation the rest of this season, but whether or not he comes back next year will depend on what he shows this season. He doesn't need to be dominant tonight, but facing a last-place team after getting a couple outings under his belt, he's got a good chance to take a step forward. But still, nne wonders also if the recent suicide death of his maternal grandfather in Taiwan will weigh on his mind.
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