I have news for you today about a new award-winning South Beach Hoosier feature to come, one that you can do your own variation of on your own blog if you so choose, depending upon your particular interests or longstanding bĂȘte noire.
You might recall that I hinted at something like this the other day, when telling you about the New York Times finally letting us know via their Corrections box on page 2A -but NOT in their online edition- that the name of the college campus in Coral Gables was the University of Miami and not Miami University.
(You know, the one in the state of Ohio!)
Well, I'm seriously thinking of having a regular review of NYT Corrections on my blog here, one where I can talk and ruminate about what those kind of chronic, deep-seated and engrained misunderstandings of the country, as well as its history, people and pop culture, necessarily portends for the country they're attempting to describe to its millions of readers around the world. (Definitely not good news, that's for sure.)
I say this as someone who had more than a few friends working in the Washington bureau of the New York Times on Eye Street, just two blocks from The White House.
They toiled as reporters, editors and administrators, many of whom I stood up for when necessary, when they were publicly criticized by some for what I saw as overtly political or ideological reasons that lacked a solid foundation in facts.
These were very smart and professional people, folks whom I had meals with, went to ballgames or movies with, and in some cases, I even got to know the names of their kids and spouses -and accompanying family drama.
These were the very people who often told me all sorts of crazy Times insider/bureaucracy dope that I found alternately hilarious or cringe-worthy, and also shared well-founded journalism rumors that I often wished I hadn't known in many cases. Some of them you've no doubt heard of, but most you haven't.
A select few even beat me in the NYT's NCAA tourney pool, which I participated in every year, while still others simply watched as my prescient picks like Valpo sailed thru their brackets.
But it doesn't, of course, make them or their colleagues at the paper immune to reasonable criticism, which is why over the years I've sent more than my share of letters to the Times old ombudsman, Byron Calame, for lapses that should've gotten the reporter sent down to the minors for seasoning and exiled to a small town like, well, to use a Florida reference, Appalachicola.
My first one concerned a beautifully written article regarding a very contentious court case in New York and the rulings issued by the judge. The problem was that the reporter never mentioned the actual name of the judge.
I will take a momentary pass here on the opportunity to get off on a tangent about the desperate need for the Miami Herald to join the 21st century and have a reader ombudsman, though I will mention that I found it very, very curious that in last week's Herald wire coverage of the U.S. National Swimming Championships in Indianapolis, at the beginning of the month, that the Herald sports editor let run at least two stories that NEVER mentioned the name of the venue where the championships was actually held at:
PHELPS WINS; RIVAL IS DQ'D from August 3rd and 'ANOTHER MICHAEL MOMENT' FOR PHELPS from August 2nd.
Hmmm...
South Beach Hoosier, do you mean the national championships at the Indiana University Natatorium, on the campus of IUPUI? Why yes, that one!
Does that make me parochial?
No, just protective of slights to Hoosier Nation, and disappointed that in the year 2007, such a basic aspect of the story doesn't even get mentioned and the Herald sports editor, among many others, is either too stupid or oblivious to notice it
Not that this is a new trend or anything in the Herald's sports section!
Why just today, in their sports TV listings, which as I've detailed here before, is MORE noteworthy for what they often don't include -U-M, FIU and FAU games- as for what they do include, had a Barclay's English Premier League game listed, but listed the league as "Premiere." http://www.miamiherald.com/671/story/203495.html
It was listed as 3 p.m.: English Premiere League, Reading-Chelsea, FOXESP (Spanish).
Hmmm.. that's funny, the league itself doesn't and never has spelled their name with an "e" at the end, much less on their own website, http://www.premierleague.com/page/Home/0,,12306,00.html so I guess that's just another classic case of the Herald being the Herald, facts be damned.
By the way, given the huge mistake described below regarding the ongoing case in Newark, confusing actual numbers with percentages, don't hold your breath waiting for the TV networks to make this correction about the horrendous Newark college kids murder case, as at least two of them I watched reported the wrong info last week also.
Even their mistakes are repeated!
Below: Their words, my highlighted italics.
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CORRECTIONS: FOR THE RECORD
New York Times
August 13, 2007
Correction: An article in Science Times on July 17 about the widespread distribution of "Atlas of Creation," a book with an Islamic creationist point of view, not only incorrectly identified a company involved in shipping some of the books but misstated its role and its responsiveness to questions. The company, SBS Worldwide Ltd. (not SDS Worldwide, as the article had it, and corrected in this space on July 21), says it cleared a shipment of the books through customs but had nothing to do with their further distribution in the United States. SBS Worldwide Ltd. did not return calls and e-mail messages asking about its role before the article was published because it never got any; The Times had sent the questions to the wrong company. This correction was delayed in the confusion.
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Correction: For the Record
New York Times
August 11, 2007
Correction: An article on Tuesday about the challenges faced by Mayor Cory A. Booker of Newark as he struggles to bring down the city's homicide rate referred incorrectly to the drop in shootings in the city over the past year. Before last weekend, when five people were shot -- four fatally -- there were 80 fewer shootings from January through July compared with the same period in 2006 -- not 80 percent fewer.
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Correction: For the Record
New York Times
August 7, 2007
Correction: Because of an editing error, the "Most Popular" listing in the Most Wanted chart in Business Day yesterday, listing top sellers among re-released music CDs, misspelled the name of a singing duo. It is Simon and Garfunkel, not Simon and Garfunkle.
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Corrections: For the Record
New York Times
July 26, 2007
Correction: A "What's On Tonight" television listing on Tuesday about "Into Alaska With Jeff Corwin," on the Travel Channel, referred incorrectly to Alaska. It was the 49th state admitted to the union -- not the 50th, which was Hawaii.
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In the Heart of a Great Country, Beats the Soul of Hoosier Nation
The South Florida I Grew Up In
Excerpts from Joan Didion's Miami, 1987, Simon & Schuster:
In the continuing opera still called, even by Cubans who have now lived the largest part of their lives in this country, el exilo, the exile, meetings at private homes in Miami Beach are seen to have consequences. The actions of individuals are seen to affect events directly. Revolutions and counter-revolutions are framed in the private sector, and the state security apparatus exists exclusively to be enlisted by one or another private player. That this particular political style, indigenous to the Caribbean and to Central America, has now been naturalized in the United States is one reason why, on the flat coastal swamps of South Florida, where the palmettos once blew over the detritus of a dozen failed booms and the hotels were boarded up six months a year, there has evolved since the early New Year's morning in 1959 when Fulgencio Batista flew for the last time out of Havana a settlement of considerable interest, not exactly an American city as American cities have until recently been understood but a tropical capital: long on rumor, short on memory, overbuilt on the chimera of runaway money and referring not to New York or Boston or Los Angeles or Atlanta but to Caracas and Mexico, to Havana and to Bogota and to Paris and Madrid. Of American cities Miami has since 1959 connected only to Washington, which is the peculiarity of both places, and increasingly the warp...
"The general wildness, the eternal labyrinths of waters and marshes, interlocked and apparently neverending; the whole surrounded by interminable swamps... Here I am then in the Floridas, thought I," John James Audobon wrote to the editor of The Monthly American Journal of Geology and Natural Science during the course of an 1831 foray in the territory then still called the Floridas. The place came first, and to touch down there is to begin to understand why at least six administations now have found South Florida so fecund a colony. I never passed through security for a flight to Miami without experiencing a certain weightlessness, the heightened wariness of having left the developed world for a more fluid atmosphere, one in which the native distrust of extreme possibilities that tended to ground the temperate United States in an obeisance to democratic institutions seemed rooted, if at all, only shallowly.
At the gate for such flights the preferred language was already Spanish. Delays were explained by weather in Panama. The very names of the scheduled destinations suggested a world in which many evangelical inclinations had historically been accomodated, many yearnings toward empire indulged...
In this mood Miami seemed not a city at all but a tale, a romance of the tropics, a kind of waking dream in which any possibility could and would be accomodated...
Hallandale Beach Blog
http://www.hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/
Hallandale Beach Blog is where I try to inject or otherwise superimpose a degree of accountability, transparency and much-needed insight onto local Broward County government and public policy issues, which I feel is sorely lacking in local media now, despite all the technological advances that have taken place since I grew-up in South Florida in the 1970's. On this blog, I concentrate my energy, enthusiasm, anger, disdain and laser-like attention primarily on the coastal cities of Aventura, Hollywood and Hallandale Beach.
IF you lived in this part of South Florida, you'd ALREADY be in stultifying traffic, be paying higher-than-necessary taxes, and be continually musing about the chronic lack of any real accountability or transparency among not only elected govt. officials, but also of City, County and State employees as well. Collectively, with a few rare exceptions, they couldn't be farther from the sort of strong results-oriented, work-ethic mentality that citizens here deserve and are paying for.
This is particularly true in the town I live in, the City of Hallandale Beach, just north of Aventura and south of Hollywood. There, the Perfect Storm of years of apathy, incompetency and cronyism are all too readily apparent.
It's a city with tremendous potential because of its terrific location and weather, yet its citizens have become numb to its outrages and screw-ups after years of the worst kind of chronic mismanagement and lack of foresight. On a daily basis, they wake up and see the same old problems again that have never being adequately resolved by the city in a logical and responsible fashion. Instead the city government either closes their eyes and hopes you'll forget the problem, or kicks them -once again- further down the road.
I used to ask myself, and not at all rhetorically, "Where are all the enterprising young reporters who want to show through their own hard work and enterprise, what REAL investigative reporting can produce?"
Hearing no response, I decided to start a blog that could do some of these things, taking the p.o.v. of a reasonable-but-skeptical person seeing the situation for the first time.
Someone who wanted questions answered in a honest and forthright fashion that citizens have the right to expect.
Hallandale Beach Blog intends to be a catalyst for positive change. http://www.hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/
http://www.hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/
Hallandale Beach Blog is where I try to inject or otherwise superimpose a degree of accountability, transparency and much-needed insight onto local Broward County government and public policy issues, which I feel is sorely lacking in local media now, despite all the technological advances that have taken place since I grew-up in South Florida in the 1970's. On this blog, I concentrate my energy, enthusiasm, anger, disdain and laser-like attention primarily on the coastal cities of Aventura, Hollywood and Hallandale Beach.
IF you lived in this part of South Florida, you'd ALREADY be in stultifying traffic, be paying higher-than-necessary taxes, and be continually musing about the chronic lack of any real accountability or transparency among not only elected govt. officials, but also of City, County and State employees as well. Collectively, with a few rare exceptions, they couldn't be farther from the sort of strong results-oriented, work-ethic mentality that citizens here deserve and are paying for.
This is particularly true in the town I live in, the City of Hallandale Beach, just north of Aventura and south of Hollywood. There, the Perfect Storm of years of apathy, incompetency and cronyism are all too readily apparent.
Sadly for its residents, Hallandale Beach is where even the easily-solved or entirely predictable quality-of-life problems are left to fester for YEARS on end, because of myopia, lack of common sense and the unsatisfactory management and coordination of resources and personnel.
It's a city with tremendous potential because of its terrific location and weather, yet its citizens have become numb to its outrages and screw-ups after years of the worst kind of chronic mismanagement and lack of foresight. On a daily basis, they wake up and see the same old problems again that have never being adequately resolved by the city in a logical and responsible fashion. Instead the city government either closes their eyes and hopes you'll forget the problem, or kicks them -once again- further down the road.
I used to ask myself, and not at all rhetorically, "Where are all the enterprising young reporters who want to show through their own hard work and enterprise, what REAL investigative reporting can produce?"
Hearing no response, I decided to start a blog that could do some of these things, taking the p.o.v. of a reasonable-but-skeptical person seeing the situation for the first time.
Someone who wanted questions answered in a honest and forthright fashion that citizens have the right to expect.
Hallandale Beach Blog intends to be a catalyst for positive change. http://www.hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/
Hollywood in Cartoons, The New Yorker
Hollywood in Cartoons, The New Yorker
Hollywood in cartoons, 10-21-06 Non-Sequitur by Wiley, www-NON-SEQUITUR.COM
Miami Dolphins
Sebastian the Ibis, the Spirited Mascot of the University of Miami Hurricanes
Miami Dolphins Cheerleaders, April 28, 2007
Of cheerleaders past and present
Given South Florida's unique version of the melting pot -con salsa- demographics and mindset, these women in the photo above are surely what most South Floridians would consider attractive women. But for this observer, who's spent hours & hours at IU cheerleader tryouts and who has known dozens of cheerleaders -and wannabes- in North Miami Beach, Bloomington, Evanston and Washington, D.C., the whole time I was watching these members of the Dolphins' squad perform, I couldn't help but compare them and their routines to those of some IU friends of mine who ALWAYS showed true Hoosier spirit & enthusiasm.
Sitting at my table right near the stage and still later, while watching the long lines of Dolphin fans of all ages waiting to snap photos of themselves with the cheerleaders, I couldn't help but think about those friends who always left me and other Hoosier fans feeling positive & optimistic.
Was there anyone I saw in Davie who possessed these valuable intangibles: the dancing precision of IU Red Stepper -and Captain- Gail Amster, my talented and spirited Phi Beta Kappa pal from Deerfield (IL), who always sat next to me in our Telecom. classes as we took turns entertaining the other; the ebullient spirit & energy of two Hoosier cheerleaders -and captains- from Bloomington, Wendy (Mulholland) Moyle & Sara Cox; the hypnotic, Midwestern, girl-next-door sexiness of Hoosier cheerleader Julie Bymaster, from Brownsburg; or, the adorable Southern girl-next-door appeal of former Hoosier Pom squader Jennifer Grimes, of Louisville, always such a clear distraction while sitting underneath the basket?
Nope, not that I could see. But then they were VERY tough acts to follow!!!
And that's not to mention my talented & spirited friends like Denise Andrews of Portage, Jody Kosanovich of Hammond & Linda Ahlbrand of Chesterton, all of whom were dynamic cheerleaders -and captains- at very large Hoosier high schools that were always in the championship mix, with Denise's team winning the Ind. football championship her senior year when she was captain -just like in a movie. That Denise, Jody & Linda all lived on the same dorm floor, just three stories above me at Briscoe Quad our freshman year, was one of the greatest coincidences -and strokes of luck for me!- that I could've ever hoped for.
You could hardly ask for better ambassadors of IU than THESE very smart, sweet and talented women. In a future SBH post, I'll tell the story of one of the greatest Hoosiers I ever met, the aforementioned Wendy Mulholland, the Bloomington-born captain and emotional heart of the great early '80's IU cheerleading squads, and the daughter of Jack Mulholland, IU's former longtime Treasurer. The acorn doesn't fall far from a tree built on a foundation of integrity & community service!
(After he retired, Mr. Mulholland was the first executive director of the Community Foundation of Bloomington and Monroe County. I used to joke with Wendy that her dad's name was the one that was permanently affixed to the bottom of my work-study checks for years, while I worked at the Dept. of Political Science's Library, first, at the Student Building in the old part of campus, and then later, after it was refurbished, in magnificent Woodburn Hall, my favorite building on campus.)
In that future post, I'll share some reflections on Wendy's great strength of character and personality; my intentions of returning to Bloomington a few weeks before Fall '82 classes started, so I could help Wendy train and work-out to rehab her knee, so she'd feel confident in trying-out for the squad again, following a bad knee injury that'd left her physically-unable to try-out for the squad the previous spring, a big disappointment to those of us who cared about both Wendy and the team; my incredulity at, quite literally, running into Wendy while walking down a sidewalk one afternoon a few years later in Evanston, IL, when we were astonished to discover we were both living there, with me trying to hook on with a Windy City advertising agency, and Wendy then-attending Kellogg (KGSM) at Northwestern, right when the WSJ had named Kellogg the #1 Business School in the country.
I'll also share a story about Wendy performing a true act of kindness towards me in 1982, when I was having a real emergency, and she went above-and-beyond what I had any logical reason to expect. Yet, Wendy, along with her very helpful dad, Jack, came through for me when I was in a very bad time crunch. I've never forgotten Wendy's kindness towards me, and her true Hoosier spirit.
There's NOTHING I wouldn't do for Wendy Mulholland.
I really like your blog. I grew in NMB also. 154th St. & 13th Ave. NMB class of '76.
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