alocispepraluger102

wenty years in a dying industry Commentary: Why media revolution only just beginning By David Callaway, MarketWatch Last Update: 12:01 AM ET Sep 13, 2007 SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- The daytime city editor at The Boston Herald came running over the minute I sat down at my desk that Monday morning. "Dave, I'm glad someone from (the business desk) is here. The Dow is down more than 300 points in the first hour. This seems big. What do you think?" Well, even for a young reporter four weeks into his first full-time job, I could figure this one out. While any 300-point drop in $INDU) is news, the one that morning of Oct. 19, 1987 represented almost a 14% drop in the famous stock market index, equivalent to a loss of more than 1,800 points on the Dow at today's levels. Not bad for the first hour of trading. By the end of the day, the Dow had fallen 508 points, or almost 23%, triggering declines in markets around the world, fears of a global recession after five years of boom times on Wall Street, and the coining of the term Black Monday. By sheer luck, I happened to be in the right place at the right time in the Herald newsroom that morning, and got to write the story. The news business is like that. It remains one of the biggest news events I ever covered -- so big that I didn't even get a front page byline. The tabloid newspaper blew out the whole front page with a frantic image of the New York Stock Exchange trading floor and the headline "Meltdown on Wall Street." Twenty years later, as I prepare to mark a different September anniversary this week - two decades in business journalism -- the sense of fear and foreboding among readers and investors remains fresh in my mind. Crowds of people massed outside the Fidelity Investments walk-in center on Congress Street that day to watch the Dow plunge on the window ticker. The Boston Stock Exchange was locked down to reporters. The words recession and stock market crash rang from Boston to Wall Street and every other regional stock market in the country, most of them now closed. Those same words ring through the markets today. The same concern and fear are out there, just hiding behind terms such as subprime, hedge funds and credit crisis, instead of junk bonds, program trading and portfolio insurance. The market looks vulnerable. Even Alan Greenspan, a rookie Fed chief in 1987 who faced a trial by fire, says the current markets look a lot like they did that autumn. But the difference between now and then is that we know what happened then. The markets rebounded at the end of 1987 to finish the year higher. The crisis ended. And though we've endured several more crises in the intervening decades -- the Salomon Brothers trading scandal, the Mexican currency crisis, the collapse of Barings Plc, the Long-Term Capital Management crisis, the bursting of the Internet bubble -- the markets over the long term have managed to continue rising. The Dow today is more than six times what it was 20 years ago, despite the daily fear and loathing chronicled by the business press. Investors who hung in there and did not give way to panic did great. Which brings me to my own industry. Back in 1987, it was widely assumed that newspapers were dying. The post-Watergate rush to become a reporter was over. Circulations were down. And new technologies were threatening. At one point, the hot new thing was to deliver news by fax machine, and papers were going to die because readers would be able to get news quicker by fax. They would even be able to tailor the type of news they wanted to receive. Imagine that? In my section of the paper, which we affectionately called FIN for "financial," we kept abreast of the market's movement with an old Dow Jones news ticker, which clacked out spools of dark blue, inky copy all day long, and market updates once an hour. You had to get up from your desk, where primitive word processors had been installed only a year before, and walk over to the ticker, which was close to a blood stain on the aging carpet that newsroom legend held had been there ever since a printer coughed up a lung two decades before that. It was right out of The Front Page. I'm told the rug has been cleaned. But 20 years later The Herald is still there, breaking news and still providing a daily slap upside the head to its larger, more comfortable rival, The Boston Globe. In the meantime, the industry has morphed completely. Business journalism took off in the late 1980s, then continued to grow in the 1990s as companies like Bloomberg News came on the scene. The Wall Street Journal launched a subscription Web site in the mid-'90s and soon after companies like MarketWatch, TheStreet.com, The Motley Fool, and a host of new Web sites from legacy business began competing for the online financial news reader. But while the names changed and new companies came on the scene to compete with old, the stories remained the same -- thrilling, devastating, frightening, heart-wrenching -- all in need of real journalists to report them and tell the world. There's been a lot said about the latest craze in news dissemination recently, in which some Web sites electronically post news based on how many readers have hit the stories, instead of letting editors decide. This is a fascinating development in online community and user-generated editorial. But go to any one of these sites and ask yourself the simple question, what's going on in the news today. At one of the sites Wednesday afternoon, the lead story was a video from YouTube headlined "Leave Britney Alone." Another site led with "How to hide beer in the office." Clearly an under-emphasized talent, but hardly newsworthy on a day oil prices hit $80 a barrel and Vladimir Putin dissolved the Russian government. I know I'll come under fire for stepping into this, and maybe after 20 years I'm in danger of becoming the curmudgeon I always thought some of my older journalistic brethren were. But as long as there are Enrons and Worldcoms out there; hedge funds and pyramid schemes; crimes and wars and corrupt leaders, there will be journalists who will find platforms to report on them -- whatever the technology. Indeed, this is not the beginning of the end for journalism. It wasn't 20 years ago either. It's a bull market for those who can write a sentence and tell a story and know how to do it across the mediums of print, Web, audio, video and mobile. The stories are there for the taking. Oh, and one more thing about my first job at The Herald. It was owned at the time by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., in-coming owner of Dow Jones & Co., which publishes MarketWatch. So 20 years of excitement later, here we go again. End of Story David Callaway is editor-in-chief of MarketWatch.

"According to a recent study, many of them prefer pasta to all other pleasures. A survey by SWG, a polling company, found that nearly half of all Italian men and women would never give it up and would rather have a plate of spaghetti than sex."

your aviator got me bad. i took a fly swatter to the damn screen!

Pitchfork Gives Music 6.8 September 10, 2007 | Issue 43•37 CHICAGO—Music, a mode of creative expression consisting of sound and silence expressed through time, was given a 6.8 out of 10 rating in an review published Monday on Pitchfork Media, a well-known music-criticism website. Pitchfork Gives Logo According to the review, authored by Pitchfork editor in chief Ryan Schreiber, the popular medium that predates the written word shows promise but nonetheless "leaves the listener wanting more." "Music's first offering, an eclectic, disparate, but mostly functional compendium of influences from 5000 B.C. to present day, hints that this trend's time may not only have fully arrived, but is already on the wane," Schreiber wrote. "If music has any chance of keeping our interest, it's going to have to move beyond the same palatable but predictable notes, meters, melodies, tonalities, atonalities, timbres, and harmonies." Schreiber's semi-favorable review, which begins in earnest after a six-paragraph preamble comprising a long list of baroquely rendered, seemingly unrelated anecdotes peppered with obscure references, summarizes music as a "solid but uninspired effort." "Coming in at an exhausting 7,000 years long, music is weighed down by a few too many mid- tempo tunes, most notably 'Liebesträume No. 3 in A flat' by Franz Liszt and 'Closing Time' by '90s alt-rock group Semisonic," Schreiber wrote. "In the end, though music can be brilliant at times, the whole medium comes off as derivative of Pavement." While Schreiber concedes that music is still "trying to find its aesthetic," he also claims the form has not yet lived up to the lavish praise heaped on it by pop culture journalist Chuck Klosterman and 19th-century French romantic composer and critic Hector Berlioz, among others. Schreiber concludes his critique by calling on music to develop a more cohesive sound in its future releases. "We can only hope that [music] will begin to grow with its fans over the next few millennia," Schreiber said. "If it can stick to what it does well, namely the song 'Peg' by Steely Dan, and Tuvan throat singing, then a sophomore effort will indeed be something to get excited about." The review has split the music community, with many decrying Pitchfork's lukewarm reception of music as a contrarian move designed to propel the publication's tastemaker status. "It's elitism for the sake of elitism," said Rolling Stone senior editor David Fricke, who refuted Pitchfork's middling rating, describing the entire art form as "transcendent." "I've been listening to music for over 30 years, and it's consistently some of the best stuff out there." Despite music's defenders, the Pitchfork review has made a deep impression on the thousands of music fans who slavishly follow the website's advice when it comes to enjoying things. "Music used to be great, but let's be honest, it's a 6.8 now at best," said Los Angeles resident Lowell Radler, 23, who admitted that he just looked at the rating rather than reading the whole review. "I seriously might never listen to music again." Still, most analysts agreed that the impact of Pitchfork's scathing review of music will be dampened by the 2.4 rating it received from Pitchfork staff writer Dave Maher just moments after the initial critique was published online. Maher termed Schreiber's assessment of music "overwrought, masturbatory posturing intended to make insecure hipsters feel as if they're part of some imagined elite beau monde."

Angry Italians to go on national pasta strike By Malcolm Moore in Rome Last Updated: 12:17am BST 02/09/2007 On the 13 September, there will be no spaghetti, fettucine, farfalle or rigatoni in Italy, as the country goes on its first-ever pasta strike. Angry Italians are downing their forks in response to a 30 per cent price rise in the nation's favourite food, along with steep rises in the price of coffee, mozzarella, bread, biscuits and schoolbooks. Plate of spaghetti Mama Mia! There'll be no pasta in Italy on 13 September A second strike over the increase in the price of a cup of coffee in a cafe, from 70 euro cents (50p) to one euro, has also been threatened. According to Italy's four largest consumer groups, the average household in the Bel Paese will be stung for an extra £700 this year on their shopping. "Giving up pasta for the day will be a symbolic gesture," said a spokesman for the consumer groups. "Italians should not buy any pasta that day, and try their best not to eat it at home." Most Italians eat pasta at least once a day, and consume around 54 kilograms over the course of the year. advertisement According to a recent study, many of them prefer pasta to all other pleasures. A survey by SWG, a polling company, found that nearly half of all Italian men and women would never give it up and would rather have a plate of spaghetti than sex. Consequently, the strike-organisers are prepared for serious withdrawal symptoms. Emergency stands offering free bread and milk will be set up in all major Italian cities for those in need of carbohydrates. The pasta-makers said the reason for the 30 per cent price rise was a shortage of wheat because farmers were switching to produce crops for the biofuel industry. Currently, a half-kilogram (1.1lb) pack of pasta costs around 70 euro cents (50p) in Italy and 70p to £1.10 in the UK. However, a spokesman for the consumer groups said the rises were rampant speculation by the producers. "The statistics show the price of grain has now fallen, but the price of bread, for example, keeps rising, without any link to the wheat price. According to our analysis, bread, fresh pasta and deserts have gone up by 12, 20 and 70 per cent respectively in the last year, while milk has increased by over 300 per cent." The threat of the strike drew has drawn a rebuke from the prime minister, Romano Prodi. "There is no justification for the alarms over price rises," he said. In fact, he said the prices "are in some cases going down substantially". He warned, however, that the "the price of prime materials should not be influencing, in a significant way, the final price that consumers pay. There are ample margins for improving efficiency to recuperate the money, just as occurs in other European countries." Information appearing on telegraph.co.uk is the copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited and must not be reproduced in any medium without licence. For the full copyright statement see Copyright

bill: http://www.allthingsbillbelichick.com/arti...collegechum.htm

September 12, 2007 Man Claims Dry Burp Flawed Breath Test By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 5:23 p.m. ET STRATHAM, N.H. (AP) -- A man arrested for allegedly driving drunk is fighting to get his license back, saying his breath test was flawed because he was burping at the time. Frederick Cronin is appealing a decision by the state Division of Motor Vehicles to suspend his license after his June 15 arrest by state police. According to court papers, Cronin was brought to the Stratham Police Department for booking after he was arrested. Stratham Police Officer Christopher Call was asked to give Cronin a breath test. But before the test could be administered, Call was required to observe Cronin for 20 minutes. During the 20-minute period, Cronin told Call that he had burped. Under administrative rules, police are required to restart the 20-minute observation period if a person ''vomits, regurgitates or belches'' during that time. After learning of the burp, Call restarted the observation period, the appeal said. Following the observation, Cronin was given a breath test, which allegedly showed he had a blood alcohol level of 0.12 percent. The level a driver is considered drunk is .08 percent. Before a required second sample was taken, Cronin told Call that he had burped again. Call then heard Cronin burp, but described it as a ''dry burp,'' the appeal said. Unsure of what to do because of the burp that occurred before the second sample, Call discussed the problem with Stratham Sgt. David Pierce, who told Call to have Cronin blow into the breath machine a second time and accept the results if they were close to those from the first sample. The appeal said Call ordered Cronin to blow into the breath tester again, but the 20-minute observation period wasn't restarted. The results of that second test put Cronins alleged blood alcohol level at 0.13 percent, court papers said. At a hearing before the state Department of Motor Vehicles, Cronin argued that the rules regarding the administration of a breath test after a driver burps were not followed. But the hearings examiner ruled that a ''dry burp'' did not constitute a ''belch,'' and therefore the 20-minute observation period did not need to be restarted again. The examiner also found that the ''gaseous mix that flowed out of (Cronins) mouth had not emanated from (his) stomach and contained nothing but air,'' the appeal said. However, Cronins appeal said the examiner never explained how he found this ''distillation process'' had occurred. ------ Information from: Portsmouth Herald, http://www.seacoastonline.com Copyright 2007 The Associated Press

http://www.andrys.com/hatto.html http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/09...?printable=true

if belichek is as amiable as usual at league offices, the penalty might be severer(sic).

the next jets-pats affair should be a doozy! we wouldnt be lucky enough to have it be a late game.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainmen...018,print.story

now on blue lake radio, also featuring baby face willette.

thanks, love the blue!

http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=18299

browns deal frye: http://www.mansfieldnewsjournal.com/apps/p...NEWS01/70911018

starting 6pm eastern.

a grave of honor, indeed! Bravo, Joe! sure wish i had that last beautiful cd. gonna get it for sure

aloc is a steeler fan.

looks bad, conn man; http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=3012989 obviously all the other nfl teams are squeaky clean.

a lemon

i have had much better luck with my 95 taurus, like 225,000 miles and still going strong.

thank you

Bills' Everett has surgery after severe neck injury. http://www.nfl.com/news/story?id=09000d5d8...mp;confirm=true

proceeding to variations 3

beautiful. evocative. heading for the basement to hit my toy piano a few licks.