Note: After writing this I reconsidered my opinion. I am leaving the original up, but you should read the comments which were important in my decision. – Geoff
The Philadelphia Eagles play the Minnesota Vikings tomorrow night. The game was originally scheduled for Sunday night at 8:30 PM. At game time nearby Philadelphia International reported visibility of 3/4 mile in moderate snow and blowing snow. The wind was out of the northwest at 21 mph. It was 25°.
Under anyone’s sense of the word it was cold… brutally cold in Philadelphia. It was unpleasant to be outside. For those improperly prepared it was dangerous!
The game shouldn’t have been postponed!
Speaking on KYW-TV in Philly former Philadelphia Mayor and current Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell said,
This is football; football’s played in bad weather. I think the fans would have gotten there, the subways work and the major arteries are still open, and other fans would have stayed home – but you play football regardless of the weather.
He’s right even though the current Mayor had declared a State of Emergency in the city.
If I was broadcasting in Philadelphia I would have encouraged viewers to stay home. People would have anyway! The game would have still been available on TV staffed by a crew ready for bad winter weather.
I’m an Eagles fan. This delay probably benefits the Eagles. It makes no difference.
It’s unfair to the other NFL teams who’ve had to suffer through pass deflecting winds, frozen fields and limited visibility.
I am incredibly disappointed and angered the repeal of “Don’t Ask. Don’t Tell” failed in the Senate. The defeat was procedural as ‘only’ 57 senators voted to bring the bill forward. That meant a Republican filibuster was certain. The minority ruled!
It’s 2010. Gay Americans are a mainstream part of our society. Haven’t the senators watched cable recently?
Gay people aren’t a threat. They’re just people! That’s why my personal policy is “Don’t Ask. Don’t Care.”
DADT in general and today’s debacle in particular will be looked upon as an embarrassing moment in our history. We ought to be ashamed of ourselves.
My buddy Farrell shot me an email Thursday. Here’s the gist:
I attended the Radio & Television Correspondents Dinner last night at the DC Convention Center. Joe Biden was the main speaker. A couple of funny lines in the beginning of his speech. Also, look for Joe Wong, a comedian, who wrapped up the evening. He has a final line about global warming. I thought of you.
First, I’m impressed Farrell was at the dinner. He is the International Man of Mystery™, but he’s never been a correspondent. At least he hasn’t been in the nearly thirty years I know him¹!
Second, who the hell is Joe Wong? Am I that far behind on comedians? I went to the C-SPAN site to look at the video. That’s when I found out this broadcast wasn’t even on ‘real’ C-SPAN, but C-SPAN 2–The Deuce.
Joe was introduced as having been on Letterman and Ellen Degeneres. That’s OK on a resume, but not great. He walked to the podium. If you were looking for a comedian he is not what you would have been looking for! Yet as soon as he began to speak the audience roared–and this is a very tough crowd!
Joe Wong is Chinese born, Rice educated. His accent is strong. His observations of our, now his, culture are dead on.
This was a great surprise–a wonderful surprise. I am now a Joe Wong fan.
Here’s the video from C-SPAN 2.
¹ – I met Farrell on the phone about 15 minutes before I knocked over and then met Helaine. That was a VERY good day!
Michael Buckley was in the station this afternoon. Until recently he was a worker bee for Live Nation the concert promoter. No more. Michael Buckley isBuck Hollywood.
Seriously, you don’t know Buck Hollywood? What are you, my age?
Mr. Buckley, 33, was the part-time host of a weekly show on a Connecticut public access channel in the summer of 2006 when his cousin started posting snippets of the show on YouTube. The comical rants about celebrities attracted online viewers, and before long Mr. Buckley was tailoring his segments, called “What the Buck?” for the Web. Mr. Buckley knew that the show was “only going to go so far on public access.”
“But on YouTube,” he said, “I’ve had 100 million views. It’s crazy.”
All he needed was a $2,000 Canon camera, a $6 piece of fabric for a backdrop and a pair of work lights from Home Depot. Mr. Buckley is an example of the Internet’s democratizing effect on publishing. Sites like YouTube allow anyone with a high-speed connection to find a fan following, simply by posting material and promoting it online.
Of course The New York Times only counts so much. My 22 year old daughter is probably a better authority. She went slightly delirious and totally breathless when Michael sent me a message via Twitter. I have 806 followers. He has (seriously–no BS) 478,829!
There is no secret recipe to what Michael does in front of the camera. He is just a more frenetic, more amplified, more flamboyant version of himself. Think ‘reducing’ a gravy to enhance its flavor. In online video that really works!
Michael Buckley’s product is Michael Buckley, though a more concentrated version than you’ll meet in real life.
We, the denizens of a rapidly shrinking TV universe, marvel at his ability to make a living without worrying about whatever the boss is worrying about.
I think he looks at me as a historical artifact of television. I see him as the future of video. We’re both happily impressed.
On March 11, 2010 NBC announced this documentary would re-air. More details here.
Helaine and I were watching Olympics coverage this afternoon when Tom Brokaw was brought on to introduce a feature piece about Gander, Newfoundland’s part on September 11, 2001. I already knew much of the story. Helaine hadn’t heard any of it. From Gander Airport’s website:
On September 11, 2001, 39 heavy aircraft were diverted to Gander International Airport when airspace was closed in the United States because of tragic terrorist hijackings. Runway 13/31 was converted to a temporary aircraft parking ramp. The airport terminal was turned into an aid centre as food and clothing was distributed to stranded passengers. The airport and its surrounding community afterwards received high praise for their response to the tragedy.
All of a sudden Gander’s 10,000 residents had 7,000 guests¹!
The piece started slowly. At two minutes in it was obvious they’d buried the lede, until I realized this was no two or three minute piece. Brokaw and team had produced and NBC was showing a full length documentary!
It’s a shame to say if NBC had told its audience they were about to see a full length documentary they would have bailed in droves. They probably did anyway in which case they missed a truly wondrous story.
There are few superlatives to describe how kind and generous these Newfoundlanders² were. They opened their schools, homes, and wallets.
Back here in the family room I was crying like a little baby. OK, I’m a soft touch for crying, but this real story is a real tear jerker.
In the crush of news this 9/11 story was mainly lost. Without this Brokaw package it was destined to become more obscure. I was surprised at how many abandoned links I found while trying to find some interesting quotes for this entry.
Mostly the Twitteratti seem to agree with my assesment:
cukawen : Watching the brokaw special on #gander on 9-11-01…all I can say is wow.
porcupineridge : Great NBC/Tom Brokaw story on Gander, Newfoundland during 9/11 ground stop. Why can’t I find it online?
villageous : Just saw Tom Brokaw’s report on Gander, Newfoundland. Compassion people everywhere showed that day truly is lasting legacy of 9/11.
trs614xc : this tom brokaw segment about Gander, Newfoundland’s response to grounded flights on 9/11 is one of the most touching things i’ve ever seen
RoccoDeMaro : Tom Brokaw is a legend. But his never-ending, meandering piece on Gander / 9-11 felt like a trip to my wife’s grandmother’s house.
Thanks Rocco. There’s one in every crowd!
I agree with “porcupineridge.” Why can’t I find it online?
¹ – To say Gander is rural is an understatement! I landed there for refueliing on a westbound Overseas National Airways DC-8 transatlantic flight in the mid-70s. We flew in over a deep pine forest without seeing a sign of civilization. I figured we’d see the town on the way out, but again, nothing but pine trees until we were back over the Atlantic.
² – Originally this entry contained a less elegant nickname describing Newfoundlanders. Brian J. Mallard of Memorial University in St. John’s told me, “The majority of us do not like the term.” My apologies to anyone offended. It was a poor attempt at showing affection.
Recently I’ve come to an Internet epiphany. Don’t worry about the word. I looked it up to make sure I was using it correctly.
An epiphany is a moment of sudden insight or understanding.
I’d always thought as our use of the Internet progressed we’d need beefier hardware (aka more powerful computers) to get the job done. And certainly, that’s what the last few decades have shown us. Better computing experiences followed better hardware.
Recently there have been all sorts of changes to that conventional model. People are computing with devices like BlackBerrys and iPhones. They’re versatile bits of hardware without being all that powerful. Slowly but surely these smartphones have been pawning off the heavy lifting to ‘the cloud.’
Cloud computing means data travels the Internet and gets processed remotely. A Google search takes place in the cloud. My Gmail account lives there. So does the real work that enables the Dragon Dictation app for my iPhone. I downloaded the Siri app this weekend. That doesn’t fly without the cloud either.
This new era of cloud computing is only available because data pipes are fat. In a few years I may look back at the last sentence as a naive observation, but today we’ve got many multiples of what we had a few years ago. Most of us have all the bandwidth we think we need¹.
When bandwidth and cloud computing are heavily involved the power of user hardware becomes less critical. Tablet computing like the iPad or tiny netbooks with weak processors survive because there’s less for them to do to get the job done. Most of the job is accomplished in the cloud.
We’re planning to build and test ultra high-speed broadband networks in a small number of trial locations across the United States. We’ll deliver Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today with 1 and gigabit per second, fiber-to-the-home connections
That much bandwidth and speed means cloud computing can lift even more weight while the user hardware becomes less critical.
Telcos and cable companies must be quaking in their boots. Certainly this kind of bandwidth can open up new communication devices and methods for delivering video and audio. Even Google who’s come up with the idea expects “uses we can’t yet imagine.”
Mass media has been turned upside down within the last decade by advances in computing. Which sector will pay the price now?
¹ – In reality bandwidth is like closet space. There’s never enough.
Oh Toyota. You are this close to becoming a business school teaching lesson. You are this close to becoming Bon Vivant Vichyssoise! Never heard of Bon Vivant? Read on.
Back in the early seventies there was a food company named Bon Vivant. They made high end canned soups under their own name and for others. I’ll let the NY Times pick up the story:
On an early July day in 1971 when it was too hot to cook, a couple in Westchester County, N.Y., sat down to a meal of Bon Vivant vichyssoise, a soup often served chilled (and in this case, straight from the can). The soup tasted funny, so they didn’t finish it; within hours he was dead and she was paralyzed from botulism poisoning. F.D.A. investigators found five other cans of vichyssoise from the same batch of 6,444 that were also tainted with botulism, and spot checks of other products raised questions about the company’s processing practices, so the agency shut down the plant and told the company to recall all its soups.
Bon Vivant tried to fight the recall, calling it an overreaction to a highly isolated problem, but it soon became obvious that few consumers would touch anything with Bon Vivant on the label. And because it was known that the company manufactured store brands as well as its own, people started to be suspicious of every kind of canned soup on the shelf. Bon Vivant filed for bankruptcy within a month.
Instead of getting ahead of the story Bon Vivant pushed back. They put their profits and priorities before their customer’s. We tend not to like that from those who feed us and from whom we expect scrupulous attention to safety.
Nearly seventy years of soup making and Bon Vivant was gone within a month! They became the poster child for what not to do in a crisis.
Fast forward to 1982. Someone injected cyanide into Tylenol capsules after they were already on the store shelf. What did Johnson and Johnson do? They took responsibility and bore the immediate cost though the sabotage happened out of their reach.
Although Johnson & Johnson knew they were not responsible for the tampering of the product, they assumed responsibility by ensuring public safety first and recalled all of their capsules from the market. In fact, in February of 1986, when a woman was reported dead from cyanide poisoning in Tylenol capsules, Johnson & Johnson permanently removed all of the capsules from the market.
You don’t think twice about taking Tylenol today, do you?
I am a Toyota guy. My first new car was a 1970 Toyota Corona. I or my family have had one for most of the time since then. Helaine and Stef both drive Toyotas today.
I have no animus toward Toyota. But seriously, it seems they are following the lead of Bon Vivant and not Johnson and Johnson.
The public trust is not easily obtained nor should it be taken lightly. Toyota has been behind on this story at every step. It’s not going away.
I just watched CNN’s Jessica Yellin play a phone conversation with Toyota about her own Prius. Damning.
I know GM and Ford are licking their chops hoping for Toyota’s downfall. I’m not sure that would be as good for all of us as it is for them. I am not rooting for Toyota’s failure. Their prior attention to quality has forced the US auto industry to step-it-up over the last few decades.
Right now more than Toyota’s cars are speeding down the road out-of-control.
Earlier today I got an email from someone who just discovered this blog. He couldn’t sleep and aimlessly went from page-to-page. He joins the 73,807 visitors in 2009 who came here 165,558 times and viewed 297,223 pages! My page counter currently reads 2,120,588 pages served since I began.
Over the years traffic has gone up and down. It was highest just before I was struck by a hacker and lost my Google mojo. Google has reinstated me to their index, but the traffic has never quite recovered though it’s getting close, again.
All of these statistics are possible because of Google. There’s a little piece of code on every page which connects to Google Analytics. GA quantifies everything that’s going on.
There was a time I was making a few bucks a day¹ from the blog. Now it’s a few pennies. That’s Google related too-Google AdSense.
Posting my blog entries to Twitter and Facebook has made a difference. I know most readers don’t read every entry I write, but from time-to-time there’s something that catches social networking eyes and traffic spikes.
The blog is read around-the-world though over 2/3 come from the United States. Foreign viewers tend to come for something specific, stop by and never return. Connecticut provides the most readers. As far as I remember I have never mentioned this blog on-the-air.
I was REALLY sick… doctor to your hotel room sick… and didn’t post October 22, 2006. That’s probably the last day I missed. An unwritten rule demands a post every day. Often there’s more than one.
Each entry is written and rewritten. Seriously, everything is rewritten. Mistakes still get in. Helaine is my best editor, though she continues to refuse my offer to let her make the corrections on her own.
Writing this blog is the most disciplined part of my life. Until I began I had no idea how much one could enjoy writing.
¹ – Before you poo poo a few bucks a day, over the year it added up to hundreds of dollars, which paid for the web hosting with a little left over for coffee.
I really didn’t want to write about security and the Delta Detroit incident but then Janet Napolitano, secretary of Homeland Security, appeared on Sunday morning TV. She delivered one of the most stupefyingly insipid comments I’ve ever heard–an insult to America.
This week’s suicidal crazy used the same chemical, PETN, shoe bomber Richard Reid used!. That led David Gregory on Meet The Press to ask if this was a security failure. Napolitano answered:
SEC’Y JANET NAPOLITANO: Well, I think we don’t know enough to say one way or the other in that respect. The forensics are still being done, the investigation is still underway. I think the important point here is that once the incident occurred, everybody reacted the way they should; the passengers did, the flight crew did. And literally, within an hour, additional measures had been instituted not only on the ground here in the United States, but abroad and, indeed, on the 128 flights that were already in the air from Europe.
No! The correct answer is, “Yes, this was a failure. We shouldn’t be letting known threats carrying explosives on airplanes. I am very upset. This will be fixed immediately.”
We got none of my answer.
We are trying to protect targets when it seems more manageable to find threats.
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