Month: November 2004

  • Ten Yards, Loss of Down For Clipping

    Jarrett Murphy, in the Village Voice today, complains that the media was quick to cover the infamous NBA brawl, and to put it into saturation rotation. He enumerates the coverage in newspapers and TV broadcasts, inferring that it was as salacious as it was unwarranted. (Not “hard news!” Not hard news! Foul! Is anyone listening?)…

  • Scooper & Scooped

    One of the things we miss most about TMFTML was his Monday-morning quarterbacking of the Sunday New York Times. (The critic became the critiqued, and that’s a helluva promotion! We like to believe we beat the Times to the punch bowl, though.) TMFTML somehow managed to scan and summarize the whole paper—usually in the yellow…

  • Thankful For: Good Design!

    We were chatting yesterday with an editor at the New Yorker, and the conversation turned on the role of design in modern magazines. The New Yorker, of course, is an old-fashioned magazine that has not changed in any major way for more than seventy-five years. To be sure, there were some dramatic touches added under…

  • Radio Flyer

    Last night, the wife noticed that WCAL has now changed hands, and is being operated by MPR. The wife is a contrarian in all things, and she said the new announcers sounded “robotic.” But the wife is, like us, a St. Olaf graduate. She is predisposed to resist change (like us), especially when it involves…

  • God Bless Me

    This weekend, I was hanging around the house trying to beat this nasty rhinovirus—a convenient excuse for laziness, I know. I happened to be listening to MPR, and felt lucky to have the house and the radio to myself for “This American Life,” one of life’s serendipitious little pleasures. (I wouldn’t want to arrange my…

  • Desert Island Duffel

    Boehlke, the Jungle Theater’s artistic director, is currently hard at work reprising Under Milk Wood, Dylan Thomas’ radio play that takes place in Llareggub, a fictional Welch fishing village. Despite its name, which happens to be “bugger all” spelled backwards, Llareggub is a quaint, charming place where everyday folks just happen to speak in Thomas’…