rantlust

Posted by anupcs on January 18th 2008 in Character, Crime, Internet, Journalism
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The latest New Yorker has a very disturbing article about the suicide of a thirteen year old girl after becoming the victim of a tragic hoax played on her by vile neighbors. The incident happened in late 2006 but came to light to the public only in November of last year. I don’t want to summarize the story. Read it at your own leisure. It’s written by restaurant critic extraordinaire Lauren Collins.

Once you read it, I’d be curious to know what you think of the perpetrators. Are they guilty (as you will discover, no charges were brought)? Especially the adult(s) involved?

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Posted by riyer on July 15th 2007 in Humor, Journalism, Trivia
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Rejection and the regret letters that are associated with them are mostly stock letters, mundane and very boring. I have received my share of them - yes there was a time before email when companies would write you a formal letter rejecting your application and offer regrets.

My wife collected all the rejection letters she received as an aspiring letter and made artwork out of it. It spells out the simple word WRITER with a montage of all the regret letters. By the time you get to the final R, it is a montage of “congratulations” and “acceptance”

Today I came across a wonderful rejection of a rejection letter. Here it is. Enjoy.

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Posted by anupcs on July 03rd 2007 in History, Journalism, Music, USA, Women
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I wasn’t born then (no, really) but the summer of 1967 came to be known as the “Summer of Love.” This was when young people looking for a new social experience descended in droves to San Francisco, especially the Haight-Ashbury district and gave birth to the hippie counterculture movement. It was a time for free sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. No one embodied that time better than bad girl rocker Janis Joplin. Joplin and a bunch of other rock stars of the time including guitar legend Jimi Hendrix and incomparable beauty Grace Slick lived near Haight-Ashbury. Even today, you can see the remnants of those hippie days while strolling down the district with its motley collection of tattoo parlors, bong selling joints, and tie-dye clothing shops.

In today’s Journal, frequent hunter and washed-up rocker Ted Nugent opines [subscription] that this time should be re-classified as the summer of drugs. The Motor City Madman has choice words for the likes of Joplin: “I often wonder what musical peaks they could have climbed had they not gagged to death on their own vomit.” He also weighs in on what the hippies did to themselves: “Turned off by the work ethic and productive American Dream values of their parents, hippies instead opted for a cowardly, irresponsible lifestyle of random sex, life-destroying drugs and mostly soulless rock music that flourished in San Francisco.”

Soulless rock music? For someone who mostly delivered crappy music, the Nuge shouldn’t be the one judging that. Drugs or not, the music of Joplin and co still incites passion in every rock music fan. It’d be easy for me to dig up a nice performance by Joplin on youtube to accompany this post but instead, I’ll leave you with one of the best covers of Joplin’s songs ever performed: by soul wunderkind Joss Stone and a bald but fabulous Melissa Etheridge at the 2005 Grammy Awards.

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Posted by tafkap on April 12th 2007 in Journalism, Rants
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Come Monday, the Don Imus Show (not the CBS one, but the circus show featuring “nappy headed hos” that we are now witnessing) will meld into the low frequency drone of our hypermedia induced ADD existence. The Wikipedia entry for Mr. Imus will have replaced its current even tracker icon with a has been icon.

If a remedy for ignorance is more ignorance, I am happy to report that any shortcoming in my knowledge of haute coutre has been plugged by a heretofore lack of scholarship in the life and times of Don Imus. I can’t say I feel too sorry for Don, he surely understands the occupational hazards of being a shock jock and as it turns out, this one may have been a volt too many.
(Read more…)

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Posted by riyer on March 19th 2007 in Education, Internet, Journalism, Productivity, Statistics, Women, World
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A few of my friends, my wife included, frequently bemoan the fact that the world as we know it is coming apart and things are getting worse every day. The daily onslaught of news on the human condition does not help alleviate this feeling for them.

Ever the optimist, I assert that on the whole this generation is doing better by itself and by its fellow man compared to any other generation in the past. Obviously I say this with no data, only as someone who is actively engaged in a grounds-up effort to provide opportunity to those who have none. Personal experience of being with some of these people gives me that optimism. Now it turns out that there is also data available to show that our lot is getting better, not worse.

Take a look at Gapminder They present human development data across the world in some very cool and innovative ways (Google has acquired their technology to make it available for free).

Go to the tools section and try out the GapMinder World, 2006 (the first one on the Tools page). You can change the X and Y axes (It defaults to Income v/s Life Expectancy but you can change them (e.g. you can compare Life Expectancy v/s Military Spending). It gives you a clear indicator on how things are changing around the world (except in Sub Saharan Africa where, due to the AIDS crisis, things have slipped back a bit).

BTW: It is also a fantastic way to get kids interested in statistics. Over the weekend my 6 y.o look at it over my shoulder and the next thing you know she spent more than an hour in front of the computer playing with the X and Y Axes. She kept telling me everything from “How Malawi compares with the United States in Child Mortality (I explained to her what that is)” , she was playing with Physicans per 1000 people etc, population growth over time etc.

I would also recommend the 1 hour Tech Talk they have posted (given at Google) and the video on Slums.

(Sorry, this post does not fit into any one category that we have - so I choose a few of them)

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Posted by papi on March 02nd 2007 in Journalism, News, Raves, Sex, Society
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Associated Press (AP) was all in a tizzy today, wringing themselves into all kinds of yogic postures in a veritable orgy of back-slapping self-congratulation. The reason? Well, they ignored Paris Hilton for a week. Yes, they did it… those guys. This bout of self-denial was so cleansing to their soul-collective that it was worthy of a news article all on its own. Now, they’re preparing a new list of people or things to ignore and see if people notice. Some of the nominees - North Korea, Barack Obama, and Global Warming. The New Way Forward in Iraq is being considered as well.

None of those bother me, by the way. But this blatant disregard for Paris Hilton really gets my goat. I’m a consumer of news, and if I demand that every time Paris flashes her underwear, I be notified immediately, then news organizations better step up and deliver. As the wise man said - “If Paris flashes, and no one photographs it, does it make a noise?” AP has thrown down the gauntlet, and I propose to take it up. Someone has to take a stand for rich heiresses, and where better than right here on rantlust?

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Posted by anupcs on January 30th 2007 in History, India, Journalism, Politics
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Mohandas Gandhi died fifty-nine years ago today. He was killed by a lone gunman, Nathuram Godse, who fired three bullets at close range. The South Asian Journalists Association (SAJA) has put together a page with links to PDF files of the original press (mostly from The New York Times) coverage on that day.

Check it out here.

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Posted by anupcs on December 20th 2006 in Blogs, Internet, Journalism
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Joseph Rago, an assistant editorial features editor at The Wall Street Journal today writes an entertaining editorial on blogging and how it has supplanted mainstream media (MSM) albeit in a bad way. He makes the point for the relevancy of MSMs even though he concedes that it collapsed itself “by playing on its reputed accuracy and disinterest to pursue adversarial agendas.”

Most memorably, Rago quotes Joseph Conrad’s famous take on newspapering, “written by fools to be read by imbeciles,” while saying that bloggers are filling out this role themselves. The article is a scathing rebuttal on behalf of a dying breed: journalists of the MSM. Rago signs off with this:

Of course, once a technosocial force like the blog is loosed on the world, it does not go away because some find it undesirable. So grieving over the lost establishment is pointless, and kind of sad. But democracy does not work well, so to speak, without checks and balances. And in acceding so easily to the imperatives of the Internet, we’ve allowed decay to pass for progress.

This is one of the best editorials I have read on the blogging phenomenon. You can read the whole piece here.

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