Waste Not, Want Definitely Not

No entry today--it's May Blog Holiday here in the UK--but I offer a commentary I have in the Guardian today on, well, dog crap.

Friday Grab Bag: BritNews RoundUp

Is Bella the mongrel the world's oldest living dog? The Daily Mail says she may be 169 years old "in doggie years." But what's this: The Daily Telegraph says Bella is "more than 200 years in canine years." 169? 200? Which one is correct? British owner David Richardson said he's had the Labrador mix for 26 years and she was about three when he got her, making her 29. And anyway, shouldn't that be in human years, not dog years? This Purina dog year calculator only goes up to 19. And Snopes.com poo-poos the very idea that an easy conversion from dog to human is possible.

According to the Mail Richardson thought he was going to lose Bella recently, and "with a heavy heart" he made an appointment with the vet to put her down and dug a grave in her favourite spot in the garden of his home in Chesterfield, Derbyshire. "However, after a sleepless and tearful night Mr Richardson decided he couldn't go through with it. He cancelled the vet's appointment and as if by magic Bella appeared as good as new as he filled in the grave."

Yeah, nothing inspires a dog's miraculous recover than watching its master dig its grave. As David Richardson has no documentation on Bella, she will not be officially recognized as the world's oldest dog.

While we're on the subject of dogs, police in Buckinghamshire had to rescue two women who went into a river to rescue a dog. One of the women was visually impaired. The dog was her guide dog. Perhaps it should consider a change of career.

"For reasons that remain somewhat unclear" the Jackson 5 appears to be moving to Devon. They've rented a house there anyway, apparently for a reality TV show. Jackie and Tito are already there. The rest of the clan, including the King of Pop himself, are said to be on the way. Perhaps Michael can teach the local Morris dancers some new moves.

It's been a while since we've had a story of a man having intercourse with an inanimate object. The drought is over. Edward Smith is the subject of a Channel Five documentary on "mechaphilia": people who love, and I mean really love, cars. According to the Telegraph, Smith "who lives with his current 'girlfriend' – a white Volkswagen Beetle named Vanilla, insisted that he was not 'sick' and had no desire to change his ways. 'I appreciate beauty and I go a little bit beyond appreciating the beauty of a car only to the point of what I feel is an expression of love,' he said."

It does make you think twice about Herbie the Love Bug.

Oh, in case you wondered: According to the Sun, Christina Aguilera has big breasts. I love how the Sun calls her "Xtina"--just like "Xmas"--but shouldn't that really be "Xina"?

Gargoyle of the Week


What's that you say? That's not a gargoyle, it's a planter or a birdbath or something? Well, sure, it is now, but the person who e-mailed me this picture said it has lead piping through it, suggesting it once performed a gargoylish function: sluicing rainwater away from a building. For reasons that will soon be clear, my source will remain anonymous. Let's just call him T.B. Player of Wolvercote. He explains how he came to possess it: "In '60s I worked for a uni science department out of an old converted house in South Parks Road (next to Rhodes House). This thing just lay in the garden with weeds over it. I asked various important people if I could have it but they were too busy. So one night I went down in my trusty Morris Minor and stole it. She's been with me ever since and now resides in the back garden of my current abode."

I wouldn't mind taking a gargoyle home with me when we return to the United States--which isexactly a month from today, as it happens. But we're already over our baggage allowance.

Blogging will probably be a little light next week. I really must finish my research paper. Have a great (holiday) weekend and thanks for reading.

Get Your Motor Running

I like old cars, interesting cars...any cars, I suppose. In Europe, and in England especially, you have a better of chance of seeing something cool than you do in the United States. Here are a few that have captivated me over the last eight months.

An old Skoda in Prague:



A Fiat 500 in Rome:


A Smart car parked outside the Ferrari dealership in Berlin:


A Citroen that parks around the corner from my house:


A Skoda, in a Prague shopping mall:


A Trabant, Prague:



A Bentley decorated for a wedding, Wenceslas Square, Prague:



An Armstrong Siddeley parked on my street last week:



And here's how I get around:

The 71 Roundabouts

You'd think I would have learned my lesson. After traveling from Oxford to Cambridge by bus last year I did it again this week. It's a punishing trip, not dissimilar to the Middle Passage that ferried kidnapped Africans across the Atlantic. Three-and-a-half hours and only about 20 minutes of that are on roads of anything wider than two lanes. I wrote before about the nausea-inducing whipsaw motion the bus takes every time it goes around a roundabout. And there are lots of roundabouts.

How many? Seventy-one. I counted them:



There are big roundabouts of the sort that funnel vehicles onto and off of a motorway. There are tiny roundabouts, just card table-sized raised white circles on the tarmac. There are about 10 roundabouts in Milton Keynes alone. Or, rather, the bus goes around roundabouts 10 times. Some of them are multiple passes at the same roundabout, like a bull repeatedly circling back on a toreador or a pinball pinging between posts.

I don't begrudge the English their roundabouts. It's part of what makes this country great. I had an epiphany, though. Many well-traveled English people I've met talk about how they crossed the United States "on a Greyhound bus." They have fond memories of this life-changing journey, describing it as if it was something out of Bob Dylan or a Creedence song: This is the real America. I realize now that, though they may not know it (these things operate on a subconscious level), what they are reacting to is a bus ride without roundabouts. It isn't the sharecroppers' shacks sliding by in the Deep South or the Rocky Mountains marching majestically to the horizon or even the anomie of American ex-urbia that makes such an impression, it's the fact that the Greyhound isn't continuously lurching back and forth like a drunkard looking for a dropped coin.

Seventy-one roundabouts. Between them the bus would pick up speed and the rapeseed fields would flash by, their yellow blossoms making it look as if extra sunlight was pouring down from the sky. I listened to the people around me. A group of teenage apprentices behind me unwound after a day at technical college in Bedford. They were joking about their ineptitude--the roofs they'd fallen off of, the carpet they'd cut wrong--but under that self-deprecating veneer was a new pride. One boy told his friends about the tools he used, his own tools, not rented ones, tools he'd bought with his own money. "If they got nicked I'd be out of pocket well back," he said. There was a girl on the bus sporting a wristful of polished wooden bracelets. "I could make them," he told her. "I'm a carpenter. It's my job."

The boys traded drinking tales--the bartender who knew they were underage but served them anyway, the friend who bizarrely only drank top-shelf liquor, the vomiting, the hangovers.... When they talked about booze they were loud and boisterous, but when they talked about sex--about a girl they knew or wished they knew, about whether "she did or she didn't"--their voices dropped to a whisper. They talked softly for a while, comparing notes, filling in gaps in their knowledge, then the talk turned to football and they were shouting again. "I was playing this kid one-on-one," said a boy. "He says, 'I had a trial with Man United.' Man United must be hard up 'cause I won 5-1 and I'm useless at football."

The bus stopped at one village and a laughing woman with an arm in a cast got on. She nodded to a man weed-whacking his front garden. "He said you'd gone," the woman said to the driver. "I asked if the bus had come and he said it had. If I'd been talking to him you would have gone right by. It wouldn't have been your fault."

She sat down behind me and told the story to everyone around her, how she'd almost missed the bus and how it was her good fortune that she hadn't.

Nick Davies: All the PR That's Fit to Print?

Last night in Cambridge someone asked Nick Davies what he would do if he was given 50 million pounds to fix journalism in the United Kingdom. Davies said he’d set up a "shadow newsroom" to sample all the output of the country's various newspapers to see what proportion of stories proved false or distorted. He’d make it a legal requirement that media products be labeled like food products, with stories rated as to the sources of information: how much original reporting had gone into them and which ones were just re-written press releases. “I think then consumers would start to abandon [the media] if they saw how bad their products were,” said Davies.

I don’t know if Nick Davies deserves 50 million pounds but certainly he deserves more than 6,000 pounds. That's what he said he netted after two years’ hard work on “Flat Earth News,” his delightfully detailed diatribe against journalism as it’s currently practiced. The book has struck a chord--nay, a very orchestra--in British media circles and there was a large crowd last night at the Wolfson College Press Fellowship event to hear him talk about it.

“New owners of the mass media have shifted their priority from propaganda to commerce,” Davies writes in "Flat Earth News." He argues that press barons no longer want to influence agendas but, instead, fatten their wallets. This obsession with the bottom line at a time of increased competition and falling profits has made owners ruthlessly cut costs. Reporters have to squeeze out more stories every day. Forced to increase their output they desperately turn to churnalism: recycling press releases. Writes Davies: “Almost all journalists work within a kind of professional cage which distorts their work and crushes their spirit.”

I was there to provide an American perspective though I don’t know how useful I was. I’ve only ever worked for The Washington Post and I’m unfamiliar with the assembly-line approach Davies described. We don’t have reporters writing nine stories a day, as Davies’s book claims is common in England. (Things may be different when I return to a post-buyout newsroom.) Nor does The Post resort to the dubious survey story, that is, a story based on "research" that's done by a business solely to get its name in the paper. Of course, the U.S. media makes its own mis-steps. For example, a medical show recently broadcast on NPR has been criticized for not informing listeners that the experts quoted all received money from drugmaker Eli Lilly.

Davies didn’t address some of the contradictions I found in his book. In one chapter he criticizes the lazy or overworked hacks who are content to do all their reporting (such as it is) via telephone and Google. But in another, he lambastes Fleet Street for employing private detectives to unearth private information—police records, phone records, health records—about story subjects. The latter activities imply a scoop-at-any-cost mindset lacking in the former. Davies returned to the economic rationale: Papers slashed their investigative staffs and now are forced to rely on crooked dicks going through trashcans and bribing police sources.

His attempts to wrap everything under the anti-commercial rubric weakens the book, I think. It would be just as strong as a catalogue of the media's shortcomings. His chapter on the failure of the press in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq--the issue that got him started on the project in the first place--is sobering. And his opening chapter on coverage of the Millennium Bug (remember that?) should be read by every journalist ready to pile on a hot story.

Davies doesn't offer any solutions. I think some of Britain's problems are easily fixed. Ban cheesy survey stories for a start. Don't be so concerned with matching dubious non-news events, just because your competitors have them. (That this might prove difficult was underscored by a former Fleet Street editor who pointed out that people need those sorts of trivial stories so they won’t feel left out down at the pub.)

There was definitely a fatalism in the air. Newspapers stink. The publishing business stinks (small, worthy books have to pay for themselves these days, said Davies, rather than be subsidized by blockbusters). One woman in the audience said she sees the same decay in academia—at Cambridge, presumably. “Things are going right downhill," she said. "I don’t understand how I’ve allowed this to happen. How have intelligent people lost control of their institutions?”

I’m not sure we’ve lost control. I'm not sure we ever had control. Things change. Davies writes in his book that there never was a golden age of journalism, but he certainly implies there is an ideal we are failing to achieve. Is there an audience for that ideal? That's hard to say. Going downmarket--flat Earth news, in Davies's parlance--seems to sell. Still, I'm hopeful that the sort of journalism I like to read--and I like to do--will always have an audience. If it doesn't, I don't want to be cramming it down peoples' throats just because it's good for them.

That’s a market solution Davies the socialist wouldn’t like. But it’s all I’ve got.

He Shoots, He Scores: The Brave New Web

I am happy to report that after nine months at Oxford studying citizen journalism I have decided absolutely nothing.

No, that's not entirely true. I've learned a lot and arguably even formed a few opinions. (I sketched some of them out recently in a guest post at Kyle MacRae's Frontline Club blog.) But the main impression I have is of an industry--journalism--in a state of flux that is, depending on your particular outlook and constitution, either nauseating or exhilarating. Or a bit of both.

We're making the rules up as we go along. And how else would we do it? I'm reminded of James Naismith and the game he refined over years: basketball. Here's a great video re-creation of what that process may have been like. Naismith started out with peach baskets nailed to the wall rather than string nets around stiff metal hoops. The baskets still had the bottoms on them, until someone had the idea to cut them off. (Thus depriving some poor unskilled worker of a job: the ladder-climbing basketball basket-emptier.)

I know I'm stretching the analogy past the breaking point--traveling, you might say--but journalism today
probably hasn't cut the bottoms off its digital peach baskets. ("Digital Peach Basket": the new album by Moby.) That we're still finding our way is evident in two stories in today's Guardian. Reader' editor Siobhain Butterworth writes about altering, updating and correcting the paper's stories on the web. I don't completely understand the genesis of the column--something about a freelancer wanting to add material to an already-published piece--but I buy her central argument: You can't go around "invisibly" correcting/changing web stories, even if technology allows you to do just that.

Another issue is raised in a story about newspaper-sponsored blog sites. The Daily Telegraph allows anyone to start blogging under its umbrella (even me; I did it to test the process). Some 20,000 people have signed up and the Guardian points out that a few Telegraph readers have used the forum to promote the racist British National Party. What responsibility does the newspaper have? The Telegraph's Shane Richmond stirs up plenty of debate in his blog posting on that issue.

The irony is that the Guardian's Comment Is Free section is chockablock with vituperative backbiting of a most disagreeable nature. The Guardian points out that those sorts of comments are posted by readers in reaction to sanctioned bloggers and that the remarks are moderated (as are MyTelegraph's; and both sites allow readers to report posts they find beyond the pale). I suspect the Telegraph thinks this is a bit like the pot calling the kettle black.

But, see, this is us experimenting to see what works. Years from now we may look back and think it was crazy to host reader blogs, or we may wonder what all the fuss was about.

Video Killed the Internet Star
I was curious what sort of video quality my Canon compact digital camera was capable of, so I shot a couple of events this weekend. And, being the compleat digital journalist, I stuck them on YouTube. Here's some of the Summertown Street Festival (the fast-mo, slow-mo is an "arty" effect I added in iMovie):



And here's a bit of the Oxford Town & Gown 10K:




While I wouldn't want to use the camera to shoot an Indiana Jones movie, the quality's not too bad. And note that as of 9:30 this morning about a dozen people had watched each. True, that's not very many, but it's amazing that anyone watched them at all, given that I just slipped them into the great vat of YouTube content. There's probably a Long Tail point to be made here.

Stop Your Sobbing
Don't forget: "Flat Earth News's" Nick Davies, speaking in Cambridge tonight. I'll be there too.

BritNews RoundUp: It's the Pits

Let's jump straight to the news that's been sweeping the United Kingdom this week:

You will recall that "The Weakest Link's" Anne Robinson was lampooned in the Daily Mail not long ago for having a "trout pout," the unfortunate byproduct of poor cosmetic surgery. The good news is that Robinson's trout pout is gone. The bad news is the Mail's long camera lenses have been trained on her armpits. The pit-arazzi snapped the gameshow hostess arriving last week at a party and the Mail announced she "had apparently overlooked a step in her preening routine, giving onlookers more than they bargained for with her unsightly hairy armpits."

I know what you're thinking: Well it's all well and good to zoom in on Anne Robinson's underarmular regions, but what about Sarah Jessica Parker's pits? Does she do the Gillette tango? Wisely, Parker decided not to expose her underarms to Fleet Street's ravenous photogs on a recent trip to England. But she forgot to wear oven mitts, prompting this headline in the Mail: "Veins and the City: Sarah Jessica Parker reveals her old woman's hands on a night out in London."

I'm sure it's just a matter of time before someone invents a hand-held CAT scan so we can be treated to: "Pirates of the Duodenum: Keira Knightley Can't Hide Her Polyp Heartbreak."

Sorry about that. Cleanse your mental palate with this sweet story about a golden retriever in Cheshire who is nursing her six puppies and six kittens. All together now: awwwwwwww. Don't like puppies and kittens? How about cygnets?

Okay, that's enough sugar. Who can explain the English affection for corporal punishment? Perhaps it has something to do with the boarding school culture. It's all a harmless bit of fun (well, not harmless) until it shades over into sexual predation. Which takes us to the trial of an Oxford man charged with asking teenage girls to kick him in the groin. "They each kicked him a number of times," said the prosecutor in the case against David Aston. "Eventually he asked them to stop because it was hurting." I'll bet.

Among the many great lines from Monty Python is the one that goes: "I fart in your general direction." I'm not an expert in gas dynamics, but "general direction" seems about as specific as you can get with a fart. Unless you're David Nye, a Kent office manager who regularly "lifted his right cheek" and broke wind at his employee Theresa Bailey, 43. Mother-of-three Bailey was awarded 5,000 pounds by an employment tribunal for the abuse she had to suffer at the firm. Nye is being scouted by Britain's Precision Farting Team.

I don't think I can really add anything to this headline from the Telegraph: "Lost cat spotted on webcam by woman in US," unless it's "Lost cat spotted on webcam by lonely, obsessive woman in US."

Finally, the expression "fat cat" isn't just a metaphor. Nor is "fat guinea pig" or "fat squirrel." Meet the world's most obese animals.

Gargoyle of the Week
According to its web site, Oxford's Merton College has "been on the cutting edge of teaching & research for over 700 years." Wow. I wonder what sort of research they were doing back then. "Advances in witch detection" "Cupping or leeches: Which is best for curing excesses of yellow bile?" "Lead into gold: We're nearly there."

Or maybe "Gargoyle Engineering 101." Writer and blogger Sarah Laurence toured Merton last week and sent me this example:


Is he giving the international symbol for the Heimlich maneuver?

Chew your food carefully, shave your underarms (or not; really, it's up to you) and have a good weekend.