Xark!

George Will on bloggers

George Will, driven pissy with offense at Time's choice for its 2006 Person of the Year, says bloggers should be more serious, like he is:

There are expected to be 100 million bloggers worldwide by the middle of 2007, which is why none will be like Franklin or Paine. Both were geniuses; genius is scarce. Both had a revolutionary civic purpose, which they accomplished by amazing exertions. Most bloggers have the private purpose of expressing themselves for their own satisfaction. There is nothing wrong with that, but there is nothing demanding or especially admirable about it, either. They do it successfully because there is nothing singular about it, and each is the judge of his or her own success.

Hey, George, why don't you stop acting like such a self-important dickhead? How's that for serious?

Week 16 NFL picks

Since some of you have actually written me e-mails asking if I can post these picks earlier because of your office pool deadlines, I'm going to put up some picks now and flesh this out between now and the Thursday game.

Not that anyone did particularly well by following my picks last week: I had another sub-.700 outing, finishing 11-5 (.687) in winners and 9-6 (.600) against the spread (plus, I went just 2-3 on my point-spread "best bets," proving once again that I don't know a thing about picking against Vegas).

Those five losses dropped my season record to 156-66, but my 2006 winning percentage stayed barely above the .700 mark at .702. So there's that...

THURSDAY AFTERNOON UPDATE:...ATS Picks filed. This week's best bets ATS: Chiefs and Bears to win and cover...

A sports message from Tarwolf

Xark author Tarwolf has only made one appearance around these parts,  and he doesn't have his author account functioning at the moment, but he sends along this thought which I'm posting on his behalf:

Curious, don't you think, that a single brawl in the NBA elicits howls of outrage, much hand-wringing and angst, oceans of media ink and massive fines,while similar bench-clearing brawls in Major League baseball are met with mild reproach and even some boys-will-be-boys indulgence? Could race be a factor here?

Things that make you go hmmmmm...

Bush the innovator

Jay Rosen has been largely absent from PressThink this fall because he's had his hands full with NewAssignment.Net, but he returned yesterday with one of those signature essays that makes PressThink required reading. His Monday post ("Retreat from Empiricism: On Ron Suskind's Scoop") returns to one of Rosen's best subjects: the Bush White House's innovative approach to dealing with the national media.

Among the various insights it delivers, I was particularly taken by this one, which deals with the tyranny of the conventional. Journalists, Rosen contends, are happy to pigeon-hole new information in hackneyed categories, even if it means ignoring what they're actually witnessing...

...because they don’t have to introduce an unfamiliar language to describe what they are seeing.

Whereas if they tried to narrate the expansion of executive power (led by the vice president) through a revolt against empiricism (led by the chief executive) their story would be more accurate (to what happened) but less credible to more people. Because it sounds so extreme.

This is in fact a way to discredit the press that the press has not fully appreciated. Take extreme action and a press that mistrusts “the extremes” will mistrust initial reports of that action— like Suskind’s. This gives you time to re-make the scene and overawe people. There are all kinds of costs to changing a master narrative that has been built up by beat reporters and career pundits. When the press can hang on to an old and proven one it will. The Bush people understood that. They knew they could change the game on the press because the press finds it hard to act in reply. Therefore it tends to behave.

Bingo.

Week 16 NFL Power Rankings

This week wasn't quite as wild as some others, but several respectable teams wound up pratfalling. And don't look now, but the Steelers are back from the dead...

The Other Side of Sweet 16

On Sunday evening, I went to see The Pursuit of Happyness, the film persistently referred to as Will-Smith’s-gritty-Oscar-worthy-effort.  To be honest, I went to see this film with a great deal of ambivalence.  In general, I find Will Smith to always be a little too “Will Smith” for my taste (i.e., I always find myself in a theatre thinking, “Oh, there’s Will Smith dressed as a cop. Or whatever.  I never “buy” the performance).  Moreover, I only find those “feel good movies of the year” to be satisfying about one out of three times.  However, the trailer—which turned out to be a better version of the movie than the film itself—sold me.

As you most likely know, this “inspired by a true story,” features an early Reagan-era Chris Gardner finding himself broke with a young son and a wife bitter that he has spent their entire savings on portable bone-density scanners  (I kid you not). After his wife leaves and he’s been accepted for an unpaid internship with Dean Witter (a position he pursues with great tenacity), the story becomes a morality-Horatio-Alger tale of how, through hard-work-and-grit, outlasting life on the streets and in shelters with his son, the story turns to the good, and Gardner lives happily (and wealthily) ever after.  By the way:  I don’t think these are spoilers.  I mean, I haven’t told you the types of tribulations he goes through or how he triumphs; I’ve only told you that he does, and you know that from the trailers (and from the fact that it’s a Will Smith film).

Who Deserves a Party Most?

As one of the assignments in my “Rhetoric of Mass Media” course, small groups of students meet once a week throughout the semester, each group watching a television show and discussing it through the lens of critical tools we are currently working with in class.  So, for example, in a given semester, there may be a group focusing on Nip/Tuck, a group focusing on Grey’s Anatomy, etc.  At the conclusion of the semester, the groups present a half hour presentation of the show and of their most interesting critical discussions.  This semester, one of the group presentations focused on MTV’s “My Super Sweet 16.”  For those who don’t know it or watch it (I being one of these), it’s a “behind the scenes” look each week as teens prepare for “their most important coming of age celebrations.”

As the group screened clips of the show, I was predictably floored by the bratty behavior of the soon-to-be 16 year olds.  While I am not so naïve as to take “reality shows” as “reality,” I did ask my students how close their behavior matched their own experiences (through not their own behaviors).  What I found most interesting was the so many of the students were critical of what they saw as the sense of entitlement displayed by the characters on the show as well as the sense of entitlement they felt was often displayed by “real” people they knew from their lives.  While I realize that it is often difficult to know if the next generation is “really” different in attitudes from our own, and while I realize that all I have to work with is anecdotal and observational evidence, I am beginning to wonder about this sense of entitlement.  I wonder about its roots, its implications and its solutions, if such things exist.

Grossman in context

For those of you who are fans of normal NFL teams, this may be difficult to understand, but... Rex Grossman of the Chicago Bears is having one of the best statistical years in franchise history.

I just looked at Bears records back to 1933, and here's what I found:

In which we start a reading-list wiki

One of the things on my mind lately has been thinking of ways to get people to contribute their own selective filtering of information to cooperative communities. Now let me put that in English: I want to benefit from everything that all of you read.

My favorite idea for this is to create a semi-structured database with a web interface, and I'm exploring that idea with some serious interest. But for the time being, I've created a free wiki where any of us can add annotated links to books, blogs, magazine articles, web sites, databases, videos, flash animations, etc.

The idea is that if a group of curious people from multiple perspectives started organizing an annotated reading list, the result could be quite informative.

Anyone is free to add links and summaries, and honestly, the thought of being able to read a wiki with suggested links from people like Dewey Sasser, Tim Schmoyer, Paul Lukasik, John Sloop, Ad Ingle, Janet Edens, Pam Morris, hue, my mom, etc., is really pretty intriguing. So I shoot another arrow in the air...

@ media blog: INVEST OR FAIL

My latest essay is now posted at my media blog, where my big ideas get as many words as I need to describe them. If you think it's boring, maybe that's because I wrote it for a difference audience. Media geeks only, baby.