Thursday, February 22, 2007
Mischievous genie at N Y Times exposed by Dr. Paranoia
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
Dr. Paranoia writes: I have suspected it a long time, but will not hold still any longer. The truth must be told. There is evidently a mad genie held captive at the staid Paper of Record, who occasionally breaks loose and captures control of the paper.
I have seen it before, when all the articles in the Book Review Section appear written in the styles of the authors reviewed, and when the entire daily New York Times issue is written in the flighty fashion of the Styles section, errors, typos, vanities and all. The djinn gains possession of the columnists with some frequency - not just Maureen t)owd and Paul Krugman but also Thomas Friedman and Nicholas Kristof.
This week, though, the genie has taken on a nostalgic mystery/ pulp writer’s mantle. Not identifying the issue, the front page has an article listing the six numbers of a year-old Connecticut multi- million dollar winning lottery ticket, its deadline about to expire, calling on the owner to save his fortune. A bit cruel, as genies are, the screed was published on the expiry date, St. Valentine’s Day (ouch, I just let the secret date out of the bottle.)
Moving right along, in the National section, the genie treated us to a piece, written tabloid style, about a case worthy of Sam Spade, of the Maltese Falcon that has flown away again. It was a copy, given to a San Francisco bar owner by Elisha Cook Jr., evoking instant recall of the baby-faced killer with the high voice. The figurine, valued at $2,000, was stolen, probably based on the value of the $400,000 original, along with a bunch of Dashiell Hainmett first editions, appraised at considerably more. This story ran alongside a tabloid tale, of a gunman, who lured and killed three members of an investment firm who may have cheated him, and another, of a mass shootup in a Salt Lake City Mall. Yikes!
So far so good, now comes the, tale of a non-computer-savvy substitute English teacher, to warm the hearts of all Luddites. She turned on the machine in a classroom, and it started spewing up lurid pictures from porn sites, one after another, and the poor sorcerer’s apprentice was unable to turn them off. She sent the kids away, and sought help in the teachers’ lounge, but no expert was available. Meanwhile the shooed-away kids returned and had a giggle session. Subsequently the poor dear was indicted, and convicted in the Norwich, CT Superior Court, of exposing seventh-graders to porn, with the potential of a sentence of 40 years in the poky. Fortunately, the computer community has rallied, and the teacher will have free legal help for her appeal. This happened to me too, in the dark ages of early Internet, until I found that nothing short of rebooting stops these porn site streams. Now my machines have appropriate software, unlike the ancient systems at the CT school.
Keeping up with the nostalgia theme, Here’s Looking at You, a review of off-Broadway’s Adrift in Macao, by a master of clichés, Christopher Durang, brings back touches of Casablanca’s Rick, in the transformed role of a Chinese gambling joint owner Rick Shaw, with female characters acting out Lucille Ball, Marlene Dietrich and Joan Crawford roles. If you want more, a film review of The Whacky, the Naughty and the Oh- So-Deep movies, harking back to the auteurs of the noir, will take you further into the yonder. More? Yes, a radio review replays the events after Prophet Muhammad’s death in 632, the rise of the Sunni and the Shia, all the way to the Shah Riza Pahievi and premier Mohammad Mossadegh, and the return of the Ayatollahs, as viewed by National Public Radio in a current five-part series.
Would you like a True confessions article? They have it, in the Business section; Exxon chief Rex W. Tilleson concedes that the planet is warming while the carbon dioxide Levels are increasing, a sort of first from the oil industry’s leader, world’s largest publicly trd company. He does caution, though, that governments rushing in to cut carbon emissions could damage the global economy, acting as though oil and gas were bottomless resources (he should read the BP annual forecasts).
For him corn-based biofuels are ‘moonshine,” although he concedes that grass and wood chips are worthy sources of ethanol. No recognition of the fact that buildings produce 42% of carbon dioxide emissions world-wide, more than transportation, the energy coming from renewable sources, and solar captors flh1in fuel cells that could substantiall alleviate the warming and energ resource exhaustion without af fecthig “the global economy.” Bu this is a beginning. The same NY Times issue also proclaims 2006 to have been the worst year for US balance o trade, down $763B, fifth year in row, the loss up by 6.5%, heavil conthbuted to by oil imports. So there.
Dr. Paranoia writes: I have suspected it a long time, but will not hold still any longer. The truth must be told. There is evidently a mad genie held captive at the staid Paper of Record, who occasionally breaks loose and captures control of the paper.
I have seen it before, when all the articles in the Book Review Section appear written in the styles of the authors reviewed, and when the entire daily New York Times issue is written in the flighty fashion of the Styles section, errors, typos, vanities and all. The djinn gains possession of the columnists with some frequency - not just Maureen t)owd and Paul Krugman but also Thomas Friedman and Nicholas Kristof.
This week, though, the genie has taken on a nostalgic mystery/ pulp writer’s mantle. Not identifying the issue, the front page has an article listing the six numbers of a year-old Connecticut multi- million dollar winning lottery ticket, its deadline about to expire, calling on the owner to save his fortune. A bit cruel, as genies are, the screed was published on the expiry date, St. Valentine’s Day (ouch, I just let the secret date out of the bottle.)
Moving right along, in the National section, the genie treated us to a piece, written tabloid style, about a case worthy of Sam Spade, of the Maltese Falcon that has flown away again. It was a copy, given to a San Francisco bar owner by Elisha Cook Jr., evoking instant recall of the baby-faced killer with the high voice. The figurine, valued at $2,000, was stolen, probably based on the value of the $400,000 original, along with a bunch of Dashiell Hainmett first editions, appraised at considerably more. This story ran alongside a tabloid tale, of a gunman, who lured and killed three members of an investment firm who may have cheated him, and another, of a mass shootup in a Salt Lake City Mall. Yikes!
So far so good, now comes the, tale of a non-computer-savvy substitute English teacher, to warm the hearts of all Luddites. She turned on the machine in a classroom, and it started spewing up lurid pictures from porn sites, one after another, and the poor sorcerer’s apprentice was unable to turn them off. She sent the kids away, and sought help in the teachers’ lounge, but no expert was available. Meanwhile the shooed-away kids returned and had a giggle session. Subsequently the poor dear was indicted, and convicted in the Norwich, CT Superior Court, of exposing seventh-graders to porn, with the potential of a sentence of 40 years in the poky. Fortunately, the computer community has rallied, and the teacher will have free legal help for her appeal. This happened to me too, in the dark ages of early Internet, until I found that nothing short of rebooting stops these porn site streams. Now my machines have appropriate software, unlike the ancient systems at the CT school.
Keeping up with the nostalgia theme, Here’s Looking at You, a review of off-Broadway’s Adrift in Macao, by a master of clichés, Christopher Durang, brings back touches of Casablanca’s Rick, in the transformed role of a Chinese gambling joint owner Rick Shaw, with female characters acting out Lucille Ball, Marlene Dietrich and Joan Crawford roles. If you want more, a film review of The Whacky, the Naughty and the Oh- So-Deep movies, harking back to the auteurs of the noir, will take you further into the yonder. More? Yes, a radio review replays the events after Prophet Muhammad’s death in 632, the rise of the Sunni and the Shia, all the way to the Shah Riza Pahievi and premier Mohammad Mossadegh, and the return of the Ayatollahs, as viewed by National Public Radio in a current five-part series.
Would you like a True confessions article? They have it, in the Business section; Exxon chief Rex W. Tilleson concedes that the planet is warming while the carbon dioxide Levels are increasing, a sort of first from the oil industry’s leader, world’s largest publicly trd company. He does caution, though, that governments rushing in to cut carbon emissions could damage the global economy, acting as though oil and gas were bottomless resources (he should read the BP annual forecasts).
For him corn-based biofuels are ‘moonshine,” although he concedes that grass and wood chips are worthy sources of ethanol. No recognition of the fact that buildings produce 42% of carbon dioxide emissions world-wide, more than transportation, the energy coming from renewable sources, and solar captors flh1in fuel cells that could substantiall alleviate the warming and energ resource exhaustion without af fecthig “the global economy.” Bu this is a beginning. The same NY Times issue also proclaims 2006 to have been the worst year for US balance o trade, down $763B, fifth year in row, the loss up by 6.5%, heavil conthbuted to by oil imports. So there.
# posted by Wally Dobelis @ 12:51 PM 
