Thursday, April 16
Nice set of front page stories today. The Afghan women protesting newly passed Shiite laws against a crowd of violent, vulgar men had a lively scene, with pictures that made the story very engaging.
The update on Sarah Palin was a curiosity as well. It fit nicely over the Afghan story. She is so often a Fox News martyr, apparently on her way to future glory, or the butt of jokes that seem less like jokes and more like factual storytelling, that it’s nice to read about her in depth elsewhere, where she gets agenda-less coverage. What’s amazing is she still comes off as a woman out of some latter day Voltaire’s satire. Even the NYTs has to get information from her people to try to do a fair story with both sides on her, and everything they got is spun to death. It worries me. When I hear so much bs and no admittance of failure or insufficiency, I think she must be hiding some truth that’s even worse than what has been revealed.
The third-world country soot story probably shouldn’t have surprised me. Sure, black carbon…seems intuitive that it would contribute to global warming, but nevertheless thinking of some villager without a car, cooking, as a cause, is novel, at least for me.
And Gay Talese’s “Honor Thy Father and “Thy Neighbor’s Wife” are back in print!

Tuesday, April 14
The comical GM car show story and the Disney “kid whisperer” were the best reads today. This research that Disney uses, I guess like all media companies that want to minimize risks and make money as safely as possible rather than create avenues of genuine expression or ideas, sounded kind of like dedication until I thought of what comes on Disney, what their popular shows are, and what comes out of those after they’re gone. I almost threw up in my mouth a little bit, figuratively, when I recalled Hannah Montana, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, The Jonas Brothers, and realized that all those little kids who idolize these people have been so severely and intentionally manipulated. Every move their Disney heroes make is calculated from what a “kid whisperer” dug up in some other kid’s underwear drawer rather than genuine sympathy between them and Miley Ray Cyrus or Joe Jonas.

Monday, April 13
I had no idea that toilets were such a problem at baseball games. Guess it’s obvious that the same amount of toilets in the ladies and men’s bathrooms wouldn’t equal the same potty line wait time. Cool story that brings the seemingly unimportant to light and gives it the space it probably deserves. I’m sure if it’s a problem in ballparks it’s a problem everywhere that folks need to relieve themselves in mass.
On A16, there’s a nice story about immigrants from troubled countries learning to express those troubles through theater. It made me wonder whether go into a theater and acting problems out is better than keeping them to oneself. I’m still not sure after reading the story.