Chris Boese's Weblog

We're all going to miss Molly Ivins...

Even those who didn't agree with her positions will feel a blank spot. I'm not in that group, however. I can't tell you how many times I wish she was a permanent replacement for the NY Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who often took similar positions, but with greater straining toward eloquence or cleverness, an eloquence and cleverness that just seemed to fall effortlessly from Ivins's pen.

I'd wondered, last month, when Ivins declared a wall-to-wall column campaign against "The Shrub's" proposed troop increase in Iraq, how she could hope to sustain her extended protest, her fever pitch. I must say, I didn't know what was going on with her health. I thought she'd inadvertently given herself an assignment that would be impossible to sustain. But I've no doubt, she knew she could sustain it for the time she had left.

As with another dear friend I lost just a few weeks ago, I have to say it's just that the time they both had left ended too suddenly, for us at least.

Link: Syndicated columnist Molly Ivins dies - Politics - MSNBC.com.

Syndicated columnist Molly Ivins dies at 62

Best-selling author, sharp-witted Texas liberal succumbs to breast cancer

Taylor Jones / AP file

Syndicated columnist Molly Ivins poses for a portrait at her home Sept. 22 in Austin, Texas. She died Wednesday at 62 after a long battle with breast cancer.

View related photos

BREAKING NEWS

Updated: 7 minutes ago

AUSTIN, Texas - Best-selling author and columnist Molly Ivins, the sharp-witted liberal who skewered the political establishment and referred to President Bush as “Shrub,” died Wednesday after a long battle with breast cancer. She was 62.

David Pasztor, managing editor of the Texas Observer, confirmed her death.

The writer, who made a living poking fun at Texas politicians, whether they were in her home base of Austin or the White House, revealed in early 2006 that she was being treated for breast cancer for the third time.

[...]

To Ivins, "liberal" was no insult. "Even I felt sorry for Richard Nixon when he left; there's nothing you can do about being born liberal — fish gotta swim and hearts gotta bleed," she wrote in a column included in her 1998 collection, "You Got to Dance With Them What Brung You."

In a column in mid-January, Ivins urged readers to stand up against Bush's plan to send more troops to Iraq.

"We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war," Ivins wrote in the Jan. 11 column. "We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, 'Stop it, now!'"

[...]

Ivins' best-selling books included those she co-authored with Lou Dubose about Bush. One was titled "Shrub: The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush" and another was "BUSHWHACKED: Life in George W. Bush's America."

Ivins' jolting satire was directed at people in positions of power. She maintained that aiming it at the powerless would be cruel.

"The trouble with blaming powerless people is that although it's not nearly as scary as blaming the powerful, it does miss the point," she wrote in a 1997 column. "Poor people do not shut down factories,... Poor people didn't decide to use `contract employees' because they cost less and don't get any benefits."

 

Link: Molly Ivins, known for poking fun at politicians, dies at 62 - CNN.com.

[...]

Ivins loved to write about politics and called the Texas Legislature, which she playfully referred to as "The Lege," the best free entertainment in Austin.

"Naturally, when it comes to voting, we in Texas are accustomed to discerning that fine hair's-breadth worth of difference that makes one hopeless dipstick slightly less awful than the other. But it does raise the question: Why bother?" she wrote in a 2002 column about a California political race.

Born Mary Tyler Ivins, the California native grew up in Houston. She graduated from Smith College in 1966 and attended Columbia University's journalism school. She also studied for a year at the Institute of Political Sciences in Paris.

Her first newspaper job was in the complaint department of the Houston Chronicle. She worked her way up at the Chronicle, then went on to the Minneapolis Tribune, becoming the first woman police reporter in the city.

[...]

n the late 1960s, according to the syndicate, she was assigned to a beat called "Movements for Social Change" and wrote about "angry blacks, radical students, uppity women and a motley assortment of other misfits and troublemakers."

Ivins later became co-editor of The Texas Observer, a liberal Austin-based biweekly publication of politics and literature that was founded more than 50 years ago.

Bare feet too much for New York Times

She joined The New York Times in 1976. She worked first as a political reporter in New York and later was named Rocky Mountain bureau chief, covering nine mountain states.

But Ivins' use of salty language and her habit of going barefoot in the office were too much for the Times, said longtime friend Ben Sargent, editorial cartoonist with the Austin American-Statesman.

"She's a force of nature," Sargent said.

[...]

Microsoft bribing bloggers with free gift$?

David Pogue nails it today. Journalists have already covered this ground, and the field looks hard at conflict of interest issues, as a major tenet in journalism ethics. If bloggers expect to be taken at all seriously, they need to NOT EVEN GO THERE.

Link: A Wake-Up Call to Microsofts PR Team - Pogue’s Posts - Technology - New York Times Blog.

A Wake-Up Call to Microsoft’s PR Team

From the January 1, 2007, edition of The New York Times:

“Several bloggers reported last week that they had received Acer Ferrari laptops, which can sell for more than $2,200, from Microsoft. A spokeswoman for Microsoft confirmed on Friday that the company had sent out about 90 computers to bloggers who write about technology and other subjects” that could be affected by the release of Windows Vista, Microsoft’s new operating system.

“Being provided an evaluation computer from Acer is not a ‘bribe,’” argued blogger Blake Handler, after receiving one of the free laptops. “It simply allows me to accelerate my evaluations, documentation and demonstrations of Windows Vista.”

OMG! You’ve got to be kidding me, Blake. I guess just being *lent* a laptop wouldn’t have been enough to accelerate your evaluations? I guess only being given a freebie from Microsoft would do the trick.

Now, I realize it must be hard to send a shiny new laptop back to the mother ship just because it’s the right thing to do. Still, I think very little of the bloggers who are keeping Microsoft’s bribe laptops.

Clearly, they’re exploiting the lawless, Brave New World of the blogsophere, where, since they’re Not Quite Journalists, they don’t feel constrained by any of those pesky journalistic ethics guidelines. Like the one that says, “You don’t keep $2,200 gifts from the subject of your review. You might think you can still write an impartial review, but it’s highly unlikely-and either way, nobody will believe it.”

But Microsoft gets much of the blame, too. It deliberately exploited a weak spot in today’s court of public opinion: how bloggers influence consumers, but generally don’t have conflict-of-interest policies.

[...]

The End is near?

Link: Doomsday Clock ticks up 2 minutes, to 11:55 | Chicago Tribune.

I have a special interest in the ticking of The Doomsday Clock, a symbol set by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. An unusual interest. That's because at the time I was born, doomsday  was as close as it has ever been, with the tensions of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists didn't move fast enough to change it at that time, up from two minutes to midnight in 1953, but in 1962, still sitting at five minutes to midnight from a 1960 adjustment.

I used to tell my students the story about how Kennedy and Kruschev were each sitting there, poised with their fingers on the button that could start a nuclear conflagration that would end the world as we know it. Then I was born, and the two world leaders backed down, and everyone breathed a sigh of relief.

I mean, what kind of karma would make a person want to incarnate on Earth right at one of the major forks in the road in human history? I know, I probably had nothing to do with saving the world. Actually, aliens had been swooping around leading up to this time, I'm told by those who say they've been abducted, because the aliens knew it had to be prevented from happening, somehow. You know, those aliens can see the timeline of human history the same way we can look at a long stretch of a river from the air, right?

And we know now, from old Soviet records, what we didn't know for sure then: those missiles in Cuba were armed with nuclear warheads. We were even closer to doom than most of us even suspected.

Doomsday Clock ticks up 2 minutes, to 11:55

By Elizabeth Williamson
The Washington Post
Published January 18, 2007 

WASHINGTON -- The Doomsday Clock, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists' ticking nudge to the world's conscience, moved two minutes closer to nuclear midnight Wednesday, the closest to doomsday it has been since the Cold War.

 North Korea's nuclear bomb test, Iranian nuclear plans and atomic energy projects posed as an answer to climate change prompted the Chicago-based scientific journal to move the hands of its iconic clock on its cover to 11:55. Midnight represents doomsday on the clock, for six decades a symbolic indicator of the threat posed by nuclear proliferation.[...]

Decisions to change the clock come from the Bulletin's board of sponsors, a group of scientists and policymakers that includes 18 Nobel laureates.

The group unveiled the new clock and a statement at a joint news conference in Washington and London Wednesday. "Not since the first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki has the world faced such perilous choices," the statement declared.This is the 18th time the clock's hands have moved since it was created in 1947. In 1991, after the Soviet Union and U.S. signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, the clock moved the furthest from doomsday it's ever been, to 11:43."Bush the father's policy decisions produced the biggest one-time move away from midnight the clock ever experienced and Bush the son's policy decisions have pushed the clock almost as close to midnight as it's ever been," said Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archives at George Washington University, and a former member of the Atomic Scientists board that sets the clock.

Wednesday's announcement was attended by scientists and policymakers including Stephen Hawking, University of Cambridge mathematics professor and author, Royal Society President Martin Rees, and Leon Lederman, former director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

[...]

I like Stephen Hawking's take on the matter too, and it's worth quoting.

Link: ABC News: Hawking: Climate Change Worse Than Terror.

Hawking: Climate Change Worse Than Terror

Hawking Says Climate Change Poses Greater Threat to Humanity Than Terrorism

The Associated Press

LONDON - Scientist Stephen Hawking described climate change Wednesday as a greater threat to the planet than terrorism.

Hawking made the remarks as other prominent scientists prepared to push the giant hand of its Doomsday Clock a symbol of the risk of atomic cataclysm closer to midnight. The move will mark the fourth time since the end of the Cold War that the clock has ticked forward and Hawking warned that "as citizens of the world, we have a duty to alert the public to the unnecessary risks that we live with every day."

Steve Jobs: The Greatest Living Showman on Earth?

Link: Apple - QuickTime - Macworld 2007 Keynote.

Doesn't everyone sit and play Steve Jobs's new product introduction keynote addresses over and over?

I know, it's his schtick, and comedians should be parodying it, but he does it because it works, even with the predictable jeans and black mock turtleneck. Each time I try to guess how much more his hair has thinned, how well he looks in recovering from his illness. I have to care. What would my world be like without Steve Jobs in it?

In the world of traditionalist High Priests (Hierophants), he's a High Priestess. He sits between the two pillars in front of a pomegranate curtain, the bottom of the skirts of the Empress (the goddess of creativity). He says, "Come, let's see what's behind my curtain."

And we watch as he starts his reveal, peeling back the layers in the extended "and... and... and..."

Which would mean little if what was behind the curtains were not so utterly dazzling, were not such exemplary design. Put me in an audience with Steve on stage, and you couldn't make me leave, not for a movie premiere, or a cliffhanger of my favorite TV show. Right now I can't even think what it would take to upstage Steve, for me, at least.

Yes, I know this is demagoguery, and I'm very silly. Gush gush gush. I want to invent things with huge teams of engineers, like Steve has at his disposal.  In another age, he might be William Blake or Shakespeare or Picasso, but his canvas is technology and communication devices, communication revolutions. I've been on this ride since BEFORE 1984, and I'm not getting off any time soon.

Link: Apple - QuickTime - Macworld 2007 Keynote.

Here's another fun article on the topic:

Link: Apple's Steve Jobs: A man with plenty of options - The Boston Globe.

BOSTON CAPITAL

The iReality of options

By Steven Syre, Globe Columnist  |  January 11, 2007

What a show.

Steve Jobs is in a class by himself when it comes to the technology product launch as consumer spectacle. Jobs practically invented the concept years ago, and proved this week that he remains peerless in his ability to knock the socks off a normally jaded crowd. Apple Inc.'s glitzy iPhone isn't for sale yet, and the company doesn't even own the rights to the name. But the new phone is an unqualified hit.

The iPhone launch went so well this week that it was easy to lose sight of the fact that Apple and Jobs have a big problem on their hands. Apple's acknowledged past practice of backdating employee stock options and the company's investigation into its own actions leave a lot of serious questions to be answered.

Of course, Apple isn't the only company with a stock-option investigation on its hands. Nearly 200 public companies have been caught up in the scandal. Dozens of executives have retired, been fired, or otherwise pushed out of their companies, and a few have been charged with crimes.

Not everyone is incensed by the options scandal. Some see it as an empty creation of corporate governance scolds. Those skeptics have seized the Apple situation and posed a question: What are you going to do, fire Steve Jobs?

That's a good question because we could come to learn that Jobs did or failed to do things, crossing thresholds that got other chief executives fired. And that would be a disaster.

Steve Jobs is the force of ambition, innovation, and vision at Apple, influencing a big company to a degree matched by few other chief executives. He has built Apple into a real leader and made his shareholders huge amounts of money in the process.

Since Jobs returned to the company as interim chief executive in 1997, Apple shares have earned more than 34 percent a year. The stock has appreciated by nearly $10 billion in just the two days since the iPhone was unveiled. Whatever Apple's future, it depends heavily on Jobs.

While Apple was preparing for its iPhone launch, the options-backdating story dripped out in stages, and Jobs seems to be more involved in each new version.

More than 6,000 options grants were improperly dated at Apple, and Jobs sometimes recommended specific dates. The record shows Jobs himself was awarded options at a board meeting that never really took place. But Jobs did not get much, if any, personal benefit from the options that were later swapped for stock.

A small committee of outside directors, including Al Gore, investigated. Its conclusion: Two former executives were to blame. Jobs didn't appreciate the accounting issue. He's all clear.

Apple was never going to throw Steve Jobs under the options bus. But how should stockholders think about Jobs and all the other executives in similar situations?

That depends on the answers to these three questions:

How bad were the specific offenses? What was the motivation? What has the executive contributed to his company and its shareholders?

Apple's misdated options were widespread, but I'm still not sure how culpable its chief executive is. Some executives who lost their jobs were options-abuse pigs, but Jobs clearly does not fall into that camp. Finally, Jobs has directly created many billions of dollars of value for Apple stockholders in the past decade.

[...]

 

One of my most influential teachers has died

Drury "Dean" Long died November 21, 2006 in Thousand Palms, California

He was a high school teacher for me, and one on whom I modeled many of my own teaching techniques. The one high school teacher I had who was so powerful and communicated so much to me, I didn't meet another on his level until I got into my MFA program at Arkansas and met Jim Whitehead.

I took every literature class Mr. Long taught, and my senior year I was a T.A. for those same classes, just so I'd have an excuse to sit through them again. I'll never forget Mr. Long saying there was no point in reading all the footnotes on T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," since most of them referenced Sir James Frasier's "The Golden Bough" anyway. He said just go to "The Golden Bough" instead, and he did, introducing us to archetypal and mythological literary criticism at the high school level.

Oh, and going on 30 years later, I still have those classical lit notes, and found them the other day, while packing for my next move. So bite me, Edith Hamilton. I never needed you. [grin]

I didn't realize until I got to college lit classes and discovered none of my classmates had ever heard about any of that stuff that it was anything out of the ordinary. We finally did get to it in college, but not until my SENIOR year, in the upper division literary criticism course for English majors (and I wasn't even technically an English major, so don't ask me what I was doing in there. I ended up three credits short of a double major with Journalism/English, just because I was obsessed with Emily Dickinson and decided to do an independent study on her instead of that last required course for the major).

I took Mr Long's drama classes too, although I didn't do so well at those. I was too much of a "speech student" to lose myself in the parts the way he wanted me to. He gave me a shot at "Mammy Yokum" in "Lil' Abner," tho, even though our musical never made it to the stage that year.

I never got the part I really wanted in "The Effects of Gamma Rays on Man-on-the-Moon-Marigolds," so I became the stage manager instead. It was a crazy schedule, because I was also on the basketball team, so I'd get to school really early, write my newspaper stories, go to classes, then basketball practice, and then late play practice.

The only way I could do it was because Mr. Long actually lived out my way, almost to Wasilla, and he'd give me a ride home, often not until 11 pm when we got done. Then I'd get up the next day and do it again. I wouldn't trade that experience for anything, though, because I got a rare treat. On the way home, Mr. Long would go over that night's rehearsal with me and ask my opinion about what was working and what wasn't. He really listened to my ideas and even ended up incorporating some of them into the play. I'm sure he never knew how much that meant to me, to be treated with such respect and have my ideas valued that way, by someone I thought so highly of.

We didn't always get along so agreeably, and I think he even gave me a C in drama one semester. But "Gamma Rays" was a really neat time, and an amazing play. I've seen many productions over the years, and it always amazes me to see higher level and even professional productions that fall short of performances I saw Mr. Long get out of high school students.

And I still have my copy of "The Golden Bough," even if archetypal literary criticism is now out of fashion. I use it in other ways now, with Tarot cards. And I do still read Edith Hamilton's "Mythology," when I need to bone up a bit.

Link: adn.com | obituaries : Obituaries.

PALMER

Dean Long, 78

Drury "Dean" Long, 78, of Palmer died Nov. 21, 2006, at his winter residence in Thousand Palms, Calif.

A celebration of life for friends in the community who would like to share memories will be held in spring, when he normally would have returned. An announcement will be published beforehand.

Mr. Long was born May 8, 1928, to Lucinda and Floyd Long in Hindsboro, Ill., and was reared in Illinois.

An educator who taught in Missouri, California and Alaska, Mr. Long was respected by his students and fellow teachers. He retired after teaching English and drama for several years at Palmer High School. He also led the production of numerous plays and musicals at the high school and in community theater.

Family wrote: "Dean touched the lives of many, many students and community members who participated as actors or in other capacities in one or more of the myriad dramatic productions that he directed and produced.

"Subsequent to his retirement, he traveled extensively with his wife Jean, and became an avid writer, joining writing groups and publishing several works. He continued to write until his final illness and leaves a novel ready for editing and submission.

"Dean was also an avid golfer who traveled to play the finest courses in America and abroad and as a lover of flying, he flew his own plane in Alaska, Canada and the Lower 48.

"Dean will be forever missed by his family, friends and former students who valued his company and counsel."

He is survived by his wife, Jean Long; son, Gary; grandson, Christopher; granddaughter, Donna Jean Kramer; great-grandson, Ethan Kramer; and sisters and brothers, Dorothy Koelsch, Garnet Kincaid, Paul Long and John Long.