Chris Boese's Weblog

R.I.P. Geraldine Ferraro, a feminist pioneer

1984. I was in college. The '70s feminist movement was more than a memory. It was present tense, active, on campus and off.

For a time, I was a president of the Student Feminist Alliance. I was an appointed student representative on the University Commission on the Status of Women.

I attended and shot (as a photojournalist) sporting events that would not have been allowed to exist, would not have been funded, if it weren't for Title IX. (Even so, the women's basketball team wasn't allowed to play in the best fieldhouse on campus, except for big tournament games. Not in the early '80s, yet. By the late '80s, I would find myself shooting NCAA Women's Basketball in the University of Arkansas's primary arena).

We got a woman chancellor hired on campus, the first. We pushed for women to be legitimately considered for every major administrative position national search on campus. We didn't push nominally. Nobody just paid us lip service and hired some crony of a crony instead. Not unless they wanted to feel our wrath.

And somewhere in there, it all got woven in with Geraldine Ferraro. Back then we didn't falter. Didn't accept second-best or also-ran (not the way I see it repeatedly accepted now). Sure, good old boys made harumphing jokes about our lack of humor. How dare we refuse to laugh over being belittled or made the butt of unquestioned jokes?

I really don't think too much of all the compromises and "settling" that happens with the so-called "third wave" feminists. Give me some uppity, strident women any day. We've got NOTHING to apologise for.

And if we had any doubt about that, Geraldine Ferraro's nomination as the first woman as the Democratic Party's vice presidential candidate blew that doubt away.

We'll miss her. But then, we have already been missing her and her (our) generation of feminists for a long time.

That said, we might also note that the first woman who was Speaker of the House, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is a 71-year-old grandmother, and besides making history as one of the most effective Speakers ever, now as House Minority Leader, she is still taking NO prisoners.

I just wish we could get Hillary to run again. I'm not ready to let that greatest generation (after the Suffragettes, of course) pass into retirement.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/27/us/politics/27geraldine-ferraro.html

New York Times Obituary:

Geraldine A. Ferraro, First Woman on Major Party Ticket, Dies at 75

Geraldine A. Ferraro, the former Queens congresswoman who strode onto a podium in 1984 to accept the Democratic nomination for vice president and to take her place in American history as the first woman nominated for national office by a major party, died Saturday in Boston.

[...]

“If we can do this, we can do anything,” Ms. Ferraro declared on a July evening to a cheering Democratic National Convention in San Francisco. And for a moment, for the Democratic Party and for an untold number of American women, anything seemed possible: a woman occupying the second-highest office in the land, a derailing of the Republican juggernaut led by President Ronald Reagan, a President Walter F. Mondale.

[...]

But Ms. Ferraro’s supporters proclaimed a victory of sorts nonetheless: 64 years after women won the right to vote, a woman had removed the “men only” sign from the White House door.

It would be another 24 years before another woman from a major party was nominated for vice president — Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, the Republican running mate of Senator John McCain, in 2008. And though Hillary Rodham Clinton came close to being nominated that year as the Democratic presidential candidate, a woman has yet to occupy the Oval Office. But Ms. Ferraro’s ascendance gave many women heart.

Ann Richards, who was the Texas state treasurer at the time and went on to become governor, recalled that after the Ferraro nomination, “the first thing I thought of was not winning in the political sense, but of my two daughters.”

“To think,” Ms. Richards added, “of the numbers of young women who can now aspire to anything.”

In a statement, President Obama said Saturday, “Geraldine will forever be remembered as a trailblazer who broke down barriers for women, and Americans of all backgrounds and walks of life.”

[...]

Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking make beautiful music together

Link: YouTube - Carl Sagan - 'A Glorious Dawn' ft Stephen Hawking (Cosmos Remixed).

You know you want to watch it!

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.

[...]

 

This NPR piece on Vietnam moved me to tears

Not just tears. It broke me up.

Maybe it was just the day, or my mood, which seemed just fine before. I guess the fact that this story could move me so deeply is a good sign that I haven't lost a sense of empathy yet. But it is a Most Emailed story on the NPR site, so others must be having the same response too.

It's a Vietnamese diary found from the Vietnam War, and it's being compared to The Diary of Anne Frank. It's a bestseller in Vietnam, and should be coming out in the U.S. next year. Watch for it, called "Last Night I Dreamed of Peace."

Don't just read the link. Listen to it. The very last diary entry that ends the piece is where I just lost it.

Link: NPR : A Wartime Diary Touches Vietnamese.

A Wartime Diary Touches Vietnamese

by Michael Sullivan

Dang Thuy Tram, seen in an undated photo, began writing her diary shortly after arriving in Quang Ngai, fresh out of medical school, to care for wounded Viet Cong and North Vietnamese soldiers. Vietnam Center at Texas Tech University

[...]

The Diary's U.S. Publication

The diary of Dang Thuy Tram is scheduled to be published in September 2007 under the title Last Night I Dreamed of Peace. It's being translated by Andrew Pham and Thong Van Pham, with an introduction by Frances Fitzgerald. The publisher is Harmony Books, a unit of Random House.

All Things Considered, November 15, 2006 · President Bush travels to Vietnam this week for a summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum. He's the second U.S. president to visit communist Vietnam since the war ended in 1975.

In Vietnam, the publication of a wartime diary written by an idealistic young doctor has captured the imagination of readers, and become a runaway best-seller. The diary of Dang Thuy Tram was rescued from destruction by an American soldier.

[...]

                                           

Elephants: A great big canary in the coal mine?

Link: An Elephant Crackup? - New York Times.

It appears that wild elephants around the world are going ballistic, worse than the attack of "must" written about in George Orwell's classic "Shooting an Elephant."

I can't read the New York Times story below without thinking once more of Orwell's prescience, and how much the story, this time of wild, not tame, elephants, echos Orwell's symbolic warning of the dangers of a slowly dying but deeply exploitive Empire, the British Empire as the slowly dying elephant.

The article cites stress and habitat reduction as possible causes for elephant craziness (male elephants raping rhinos?!), but these are large and highly sensitive mammals who, like whales, communicate by subaudible sounds (to humans) over long distances. I'm wondering if some of the stress on the elephants might not also be from the air-transmitted equivalent of Navy sonar on whales, sounds we don't hear that mess with the elephants' finely-tuned hearing. You know, like what would happen to you if you had a stuck and constantly buzzing doorbell in your home.

But mainly I just wanted an excuse to quote two of my favorite passages from "Shooting an Elephant." This essay is just too profound for words to explain.

"Shooting an Elephant," by George Orwell

[...]

For at that time I had already made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I chucked up my job and got out of it the better. Theoretically, and secretly, of course, I was all for the Burmese and all against their oppressors, the British. As for the job I was doing, I hated it more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear. In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been Bogged with bamboos, all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt. But I could get nothing into perspective. I was young and ill-educated and I had had to think out my problems in the utter silence that is imposed on every Englishman in the East. I did not even know that the British Empire is dying, still less did I know that it is a great deal better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it. All I knew was that I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible. With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in saecula saeculorum, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest's guts. Feelings like these are the normal by-products of imperialism; ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you can catch him off duty.

[...]

In that instant, in too short a time, one would have thought, even for the bullet to get there, a mysterious, terrible change had come over the elephant. He neither stirred nor fell, but every line of his body had altered. He looked suddenly stricken, shrunken, immensely old, as though the frightful impact of the bullet had paralysed him without knocking him down. At last, after what seemed a long time, it might have been five seconds, I dare say, he sagged flabbily to his knees. His mouth slobbered. An enormous senility seemed to have settled upon him. One could have imagined him thousands of years old. I fired again into the same spot. At the second shot he did not collapse but climbed with desperate slowness to his feet and stood weakly upright, with legs sagging and head drooping. I fired a third time. That was the shot that did for him. You could see the agony of it jolt his whole body and knock the last remnant of strength from his legs. But in falling he seemed for a moment to rise, for as his hind legs collapsed beneath him he seemed to tower upward like a huge rock toppling, his trunk reaching skyward like a tree. He trumpeted, for the first and only time. And then down he came, his belly towards me, with a crash that seemed to shake the ground even where I lay.

[...]

I have to add one godawful Orwell quotation at the end of the Times excerpts. I don't know why I have to, because the Charles Siebert piece is excellent and very well-written, and it moves me greatly. But it just seemed appropriate to give Orwell the last word.

Link: An Elephant Crackup? - New York Times.

An Elephant Crackup?

By CHARLES SIEBERT

Published: October 8, 2006

[...]

All across Africa, India and parts of Southeast Asia, from within and around whatever patches and corridors of their natural habitat remain, elephants have been striking out, destroying villages and crops, attacking and killing human beings. In fact, these attacks have become so commonplace that a whole new statistical category, known as Human-Elephant Conflict, or H.E.C., was created by elephant researchers in the mid-1990’s to monitor the problem. In the Indian state Jharkhand near the western border of Bangladesh, 300 people were killed by elephants between 2000 and 2004. In the past 12 years, elephants have killed 605 people in Assam, a state in northeastern India, 239 of them since 2001; 265 elephants have died in that same period, the majority of them as a result of retaliation by angry villagers, who have used everything from poison-tipped arrows to laced food to exact their revenge. In Africa, reports of human-elephant conflicts appear almost daily, from Zambia to Tanzania, from Uganda to Sierra Leone, where 300 villagers evacuated their homes last year because of unprovoked elephant attacks.

Still, it is not only the increasing number of these incidents that is causing alarm but also the singular perversity — for want of a less anthropocentric term — of recent elephant aggression. Since the early 1990’s, for example, young male elephants in Pilanesberg National Park and the Hluhluwe-Umfolozi Game Reserve in South Africa have been raping and killing rhinoceroses; this abnormal behavior, according to a 2001 study in the journal Pachyderm, has been reported in “a number of reserves” in the region. In July of last year, officials in Pilanesberg shot three young male elephants who were responsible for the killings of 63 rhinos, as well as attacks on people in safari vehicles. In Addo Elephant National Park, also in South Africa, up to 90 percent of male elephant deaths are now attributable to other male elephants, compared with a rate of 6 percent in more stable elephant communities.

In a coming book on this phenomenon, Gay Bradshaw, a psychologist at the environmental-sciences program at Oregon State University, notes that in India, where the elephant has long been regarded as a deity, a recent headline in a leading newspaper warned, “To Avoid Confrontation, Don’t Worship Elephants.” “Everybody pretty much agrees that the relationship between elephants and people has dramatically changed,” Bradshaw told me recently. “What we are seeing today is extraordinary. Where for centuries humans and elephants lived in relative peaceful coexistence, there is now hostility and violence. Now, I use the term ‘violence’ because of the intentionality associated with it, both in the aggression of humans and, at times, the recently observed behavior of elephants.”

Josh Kucera is back blogging again

And this is one terrific post on his blog at www.joshuakucera.net:

Link: Joshua Kucera: "A real tragedy and a waste".

I should say more by way of introduction, because I did help Josh get a new blog back up and running again, but when it comes to Josh, he figures everything out pretty quickly, so there wasn't much for me to do.

I'd been waiting until he hit his stride to put up a "Grand Opening" announcement link to it, but you need to read this post. The site's already deep and rich with a full stock of his research and article archives on international affairs.

It also is a terrific story research resource for generalist journalists who don't have this kind of specialist background, for when they're working on international stories.

I hosted Josh's first (and ground-breaking) Iraq warblog, The Other Side, here on serendipit-e.com in March 2003. It was a short run, but his observations from on the ground in Kurdistan easily rose to national attention in the Blogosphere and Mainstream Media, largely on the specific and reflective nature of Josh's observations.

And I'd missed his voice. Not that he wasn't still working in traditional journalism, chugging away on military and international news at Jane's Defense Weekly (and other pubs in the information group, I guess).

I know he's still working out what he wants this blog to do, and maybe figuring out how its voice fits in with all his other voices, but when I saw the post above, I knew Josh the blogger was back. It just hits me like a fist to the gut.

It's the fact that he wrestles with the stuff in this post that makes his perspective so valuable. Kevin Sites can run all over hell in Yahoo's "Hot Zone," playing "Joe International Journalism Guy" with a  marketing campaign, slick design and all, but give me someone who reflects on what their position in the world means, what it intentionally and unintentionally inscribes, even while still dedicated to doing the work.

(I'm not saying Kevin doesn't do that, but you just gotta get past all the flashy stuff to dig for it. Kevin's embedded work with that one Marine unit in Iraq was nothing short of tremendous, and courageous. The photography on the Yahoo site reminds me of that early Rick Smolan CD-ROM I loved in the 1990s, Passage to Vietnam. I can't complain too much about a site that showcases photo essays as a genre).

It takes brains, heart, and reflexivity. It's a hard row to hoe, but the insights that come out of the wrestling are all the more valuable because of it, even if the ideas feel unfinished, unresolved, and maybe even resist closure altogether.

I'm far more suspicious of journalists who tie everything up in a neat little bow. In the part of the field I work in the pressure to do that with stories is intense.

Better to resist closure than to fall into stock journalism tropes, story arcs, templates of heros, anti-heros, underdogs who prevail in the end, etc. It's a lot less tidy, and you feel a lot more exposed doing it. And it isn't as easy to stick a pat marketing elevator pitch on it.

Who's questioning what's lost when bloggers start squishing themselves into look-alike slick professionally-designed sites that are really "ventures" and get all polished up with advice from "effective blogging" sites?

What my roundabout rambling means is that I'm proud to be working with Josh again, even if I did have a flashback to the old anxiety I had from worrying about him when he was in Kurdistan in 2003 and the war had just begun. Just the other day he'd sent an email that he was off to Somalia, and that same day, I went into work and the story flashed over the wires of the journalist killed in Somalia, and I was just like, "oh shit."

Go read his account of that incident, and the article in the Guardian that he cites. They need to be read together. He tells it better than I do.

I'm going nutso for Rocketboom!

It is just bizarre how much I love Rocketboom. Did I mention I love Rocketboom? Amanda Congdon is the it-girl Yah. This is just so goofy, I'm dying. I could just watch hours and hours of nothing but Rocketboom. Rocketboom rules!  Amanda Congdon don't ever change a thing. No teleprompter, no fancy effects. I love you Rocketboom, stay just the way you are. xxooxxoo

Link: Rocketboom.

U.S Women Snowboarders ROCK!

FINALS:  American Hanna Teter (left) won the gold medal in halfpipe Monday, with fellow teammate Gretchen Bleiler earning the silver.  FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

I just had to blow that bit out in here, cuz I know from one of my students in Montana that the Flying Tomato guy (Shaun White) is totally amazing, but 'scuse me cuz I'm really just enjoying what these women can do. Totally fun to watch.

And I just can't figure out how Kelly Clark could just catch that much air. Sorry she didn't win, but what an amazing run.

Woo woo!

Link: Salt Lake Tribune - Torino 2006.

U.S. finishes 1-2 in women's halfpipe

By Kurt Kragthorpe
The Salt Lake Tribune

BARDONECCHIA, Italy - This will be the last time the U.S. Olympic team is mildly disappointed with a 1-2 finish in the 2006 Games - if there's even another one like it at all. Women's snowboarders Hannah Teter and Gretchen Bleiler earned gold and silver medals Monday in the halfpipe competition of aerial tricks and turns - matching Sunday's achievement of American men Shaun White and Danny Kass. [...]

BARDONECCHIA, ITALY - FEBRUARY 13: (FRANCE OUT) Gretchen Bleiler of United States competes in the Womens Snowboard Half Pipe Final on Day 3 of the 2006 Turin Winter Olympic Games on February 13, 2006 in Bardonecchia, Italy. (Photo by Agence Zoom/Getty Images)

BARDONECCHIA, ITALY - FEBRUARY 13: (FRANCE OUT) Hannah Teter of the United States celebrates winning the gold medal in the Womens Snowboard Half Pipe Final on Day 3 of the 2006 Turin Winter Olympic Games on February 13, 2006 in Bardonecchia, Italy. (Photo by Agence Zoom/Getty Images)

Link: US snowboarders lay claim to halfpipe | csmonitor.com.

US snowboarders lay claim to halfpipe

Both the men's and women's teams finish 1-2, as the sport becomes one of America's most certain medal hauls.

By Mark Sappenfield | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

BARDONECCHIA, ITALY– At the top of her final run down the halfpipe, her gold medal waiting in the most august competition in all of sport - the Olympics - Hannah Teter danced.

Maybe it was to the music in her headphones. Perhaps it was to the song that thumped over the loudspeakers below and spilled though this dramatic cleft in the Italian Alps like an auditory avalanche. More than likely, though, it was to that same outrageous inner soundtrack that, an hour later, told her it was completely normal to lean back and clunk her boots onto the table during the most important press conference of her life.

[...]

Doncha just love fiesty women at the top of their games? Now somebody puh-leaze tell me why they want to drop SOFTBALL from the Summer Olympics?!

Maybe they need to clunk their boots on the table too.

Monday introduced the world to snowboarding's Odd Couple. There was Gretchen Bleiler, who would win the vote for snowboarding prom queen in a landslide. At the podium, the microphone cupped regally in her right hand, she said winning an Olympic medal has always been a dream. Did the US want a medal sweep? Of course, she answered, but "everybody at the Olympics works so hard."

It is not rehearsed or forced, but familiar. These are the answers Olympians are supposed to give, and she happens to be wired that way.

Then there is Teter, who says that winning the gold medal will change her life. Now she can get a boat - to wakeboard.

She won the gold, she says, by the fortuitous combination of Vermont maple syrup, brotherly love, and yoga. "I lit the candles at night and zoned in," she told a press corps apparently not quite sure if the real Olympic champion was bound and gagged in a closet somewhere.

In truth, the two women champions might not be so different. At the top of her final run - the one that brought her silver - Bleiler paused for a moment to dial in the right song on her iPod. It was no concerto. It was Green Day's buzzsaw "Holiday."

And 30 minutes before their chance at international superstardom, Bleiler and Teter took the chairlift to the top of the hill, hopped under some out-of-bounds ropes, and sought out that greatest of snowboarding treasures: untracked powder.

But this is the Olympics. Weren't they afraid of getting injured? Bleiler corrected: "This is snowboarding."

[...]

[grin]

I did some skiing a few months ago, which did my soul good after so many years in the South. One of the funnest lift conversations I had was with this short, fiesty little point guard from just over the Idaho state line who was out snowboarding every weekend even tho her high school coach had forbidden anyone on the team from skiing/snowboarding lest they risk an injury.

Brought back some memories. I couldn't snowboard or do any of those things if my life depended on it, but I did my share of sneaking off to Mt Alyeska in Alaska even tho our coaches said "no skiing." Not to mention the trouble we used to get into, sneaking off on our own on basketball trips to pull all manner of stunts in the ice and snow.

Follow-up on video iPod...

I'm just wondering what the current television programs will cost through iTunes. Yeah, $1.99. That seems odd to me, as what is charged for a DVD of a various number of series episodes is MUCH higher. And this comes out the day after the program airs, giving TiVo some time-shifting competition.

There's an interesting bit on it in this article below. And I've got some more to say about possible implications of this, below that. Whoa! Great minds think alike. NYTimes David Pogue just dinged into my email box with his Circuits column with some of the same thoughts I'm mulling over. Geez, now I guess I'll have to give him credit for them.

Link: Techtree.com India > News > Gadgets > iTunes Offers 'Lost' on Video iPod.

iTunes Offers 'Lost' on Video iPod

Techtree News Staff
Oct 13, 2005

Apple Computer has announced iTunes 6, the Gen-Next version of its popular music jukebox and online music store.

iTunes 6 will enable fans to purchase and download over 2,000 music videos, as also 6 short films from Pixar Animation Studios, for $1.99 each.

Also, thanks to a landmark deal with Disney, iTunes will now offer current and past episodes from two extremely popular television shows, "Desperate Housewives" and "Lost"; the new drama series "Night Stalker"; and two popular shows from Disney Channel, "That's So Raven" and "The Suite Life of Zack & Cody"; for $1.99 per episode.

In effect, customers will now be able to purchase and download their favorite television shows from iTunes, the day after they air on TV; watch them on their Mac or PC; and Auto-Sync them onto the new iPod - video iPod , for viewing anywhere.

Steve Jobs, CEO, Apple Computer, said, "We're doing for video, what we've done for music - we're making it easy and affordable to purchase and download, play on your computer, and take with you on your iPod.

Robert Iger, CEO, Walt Disney Company, said, "For the first time ever, hit prime-time shows can be purchased online, the day after they air on TV.

[...]

[emphasis mine]

OK, I'll get my ideas out here first, and then switch to Pogue. Maybe they aren't exactly the same ideas.

I think Apple scored something WAY bigger than a video iPod here. I think it just did an end run, maybe a major end run, against the oddly intransigent entertainment industry.

Maybe there's a catch. Maybe the video is of terrible quality, a postage stamp. But to my mind, this isn't about the iPod at all. This is about a major concession by the entertainment industry (well, Disney and ABC) to stream time-shifted television shows in their entirety to computers for playback, the next day (what about time zones?!).

I mean, if you had a choice, would you watch lost on iTunes on your computer, or in the teeny iPod window?

I listen to most podcasts daily from my computer at work, running through iTunes, even though I have a perfectly functioning iPod with my music on it (and Harry Potter audiobooks).  Podcasts are great to run in the background behind whatever I'm working on in the office.

My thought is that the video iPod is a TROJAN HORSE! A red herring. The thing Steve Jobs used to pry open a door that would never be opened up for general computer users from their monitors otherwise. And if it goes further and IF the quality is good, it seems to me it could make personal video recorders like TiVo superfluous. What do I care what exact date a show comes out on? TV schedules are arbitrary anyway.

OK, now let's look at what Pogue says. this is from his email column, not the one in the Circuits section. I just looked on the web and on his blog, and I don't think it's posted anywhere there yet, or I'd post the link.

From the Desk of David Pogue: Apple's Sideways Entry Into Portable Video

[...]

To me, the two biggest video iPod surprises were the ways Apple worked around the arguments against one.

For example, for two years, Steve Jobs has maintained that nobody would want to watch movies on a two-inch screen. In an interview in January 2004, he told me that Apple was investigating video. But he noted that people just don't consume music and movies the same way. You might listen to a certain song dozens or hundreds of times in your lifetime. But how many times do you watch a movie? Most people probably wouldn't buy nearly as many movies as they do songs or CD's.

What Apple wound up doing, therefore, was very clever. It sidestepped the movie issue altogether; the new iPod comes ready to play short movies, music videos and certain ABC television shows--but not feature films. None of these items lose much when they're not on a big, wide screen. (It's not clear at this point whether or not you can load the iPod up with your own video, like a movie you've downloaded or ripped from a DVD.)

Nobody's suggesting that you might watch these little video morsels hundreds of times. The price of those ABC and Disney TV shows ("Lost," "Desperate Housewives," and so on) costs $2 per show.

This $2-per-episode pricing, by the way, blows my mind. How on earth did Apple persuade ABC/Disney to sell its shows for $2 an episode? Remember, we live in an era of rampant greed and paranoia in the TV industry. The only other legal TV-show downloading service I've encountered is the Akimbo box, which costs $10 a month AND $3 to $5 per episode AND your downloads expire in 30 days! My guess? Disney, which owns ABC, made this concession as part of a larger negotiation with Mr. Jobs in an effort to persuade him to renew Pixar's distribution deal with Disney.

[...]

You and me both, dude. I just can't wrap my head around how Jobs did it. Pogue is still more amazed at video in your pocket. I'm not a BitTorrent users, as I don't care that much about stupid TV shows (except Xena, of course, but that was back in the day).

I have trouble keeping track of what day of the week it is enough to watch any one show regularly, but I do like "Lost," and it would be worth it to me just to drop it down to my iTunes some time when I missed it because I got busy and didn't notice until a day or two after it aired.

I want to know what kind of quality I'll get on the iTunes playthrough, tho.

 

I'm learning all kinds of interesting things about Montana

Jonathan Weber, a colleague here in Missoula, has a New York Times Op-Ed on some of these interesting land use issues. Great column!

Link: A Class War Runs Through It - New York Times.

September 6, 2005

A Class War Runs Through It

By JONATHAN WEBER
Missoula, Montana

JAMES COX KENNEDY, the head of Cox Enterprises, the Atlanta media company, was just doing what lots of modern media moguls do when he bought nearly 4,000 acres in Montana's Ruby Valley: transforming remote Western ranchland into a private hunting and fishing retreat, and doing some commendable habitat conservation and restoration work in the process.

Perhaps unwittingly, however, Mr. Kennedy has walked into the middle of two separate but closely related controversies, one having to do with Montana's stream-access laws - that one will be the subject of a mediation session next week - and the other relating to conservation easements.

[...]

Montana's 20-year-old stream-access law, which declares that the state's rivers and streams are public property up to the high-water mark, provides a clear window into land-use battles. The law, among the strongest in the nation, has survived numerous legal challenges and become a source of pride for many Montanans (including Gov. Brian Schweitzer), though it's still fiercely opposed by property-rights advocates.

The law does not require property owners to provide entry to waterways through their own land, but it does permit access from any public property. As a result, among the most common access points are county bridges. That's where Mr. Kennedy has run into trouble: his ranch includes all or parts of two bridges that cross the Ruby River, and he has blocked access by reinforcing old fencing along those bridges. Stream-access advocates have sued the county for allowing the fences, setting the stage for a showdown on a controversy that has raged for almost a decade.

Mr. Kennedy claims that the bridges are neither safe nor legal river-access sites. More to the point, though, he says allowing public access would damage the riparian habitat and destroy a fragile fishery that he has spent a lot of time and money nursing back to health. That's a similar argument to one being made by the brokerage mogul Charles Schwab, the rock musician Huey Lewis and others who are fighting to keep the public off a waterway south of Missoula where they own property.

And that brings us to the second controversy. Much of Mr. Kennedy's Ruby Valley property is in a conservation easement, an arrangement under which property owners receive tax breaks for forgoing development on ecologically sensitive lands. Easements have been under fire in Congress in the wake of revelations that some developers were claiming conservation easements for golf courses (hey, it's open space, right?) and otherwise gaming the system.

[...]

Easements have proved to be a very effective means of encouraging land conservation and habitat preservation. But there's something wrong when a billionaire buys a ranch, gets a tax break for an easement and then chases the locals off the river in the name of conservation.

Class, of course, is an issue here. Consider the people who are fighting for access to the river: retired miners and schoolteachers and other working folk, some of whom grew up fishing the local waters and some of whom couldn't give a hoot about fishing but hate seeing the landscape walled off. But there's also wider a social issue involved: if land and water conservation and wildlife protection come to be seen as things that only benefit the rich, it will reinforce the perception that conservation is a luxury of the elite rather than a universal concern.

[...]

Jonathan Weber is the founder and editor in chief of NewWest.Net, an online publication about the Rocky Mountain West.

Go read the whole thing.