Now we're in Paris!

We found an open Wi-Fi router to leech from, but we probably won't have time to post many pictures until we get back. And yes, we'll properly label all the pictures. Maybe I'll even put together a little slide show.

Photos!

Here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ken_brown/

We're here!

Here in London, that is.

Just a quick post from an Internet terminal at the hotel -- apparently, free Wi-Fi is a foreign concept here. I should be able to post a few photos tomorrow night.

Redefining “Christian” music

Interesting article mentioned on the site of some of my favorite conservatives:

CCM (formerly Contemporary Christian Music magazine) is going to start covering music on non-religious labels. Considering that some of the best Christian artists despise Christian music labels (take Sam "Leslie" Phillips as an example), this move should have happened years ago. As Phillips' husband, T-Bone Burnett, once put it: "You can sing about the Light, or you can sing about what you see because of the Light. I prefer the latter."

Anyway, from CCM:

“We’re going to start mixing indie and general market Christians such as The Fray, Mary J. Blige and Sufjan Stevens in with artists with traditional Christian label affiliation. Rather than define ‘Christian music’ just by its label or distribution, we’re now defining it as Christian worldview music. CCM Magazine has always taken its role as a leader seriously, and we believe this is the way of the future.”

Or as David Byrne would say, "Same as it ever was." Or at least "should have been."

Source: CCM, via Christian Realism

Journalism-is-doomed roundup

• Timothy J. McNulty on why local journalism can't be outsourced.
  
  Unlike most of my colleagues, I think PasedenaNow's experiment is actually pretty interesting, if only for forcing journalists to ponder the value they bring to readers and what makes journalism different from, say, PR.
  
  But I agree that PasedenaNow's effort will fail badly. And it suggests that the editor there doesn't understand his own profession.
  
  
• The San Francisco Chronicle is cutting 100 newsroom jobs, or 25% of its news staff. Ouch.
  
  
• Susan Goldberg, Andrea's now-departed boss, addresses both of the above-mentioned points, at least obliquely, in an interview for the Cleveland Plain-Dealer.
  
  Notable quotables:
  "As painful as any kind of cutting can be, the upside is that it does force you to focus on your priorities. ... You really need to think long and hard about what makes you special in your marketplace. In San Jose, one of the things that made us special was our technology coverage. So, if that's at the top of the heap, than maybe something else falls off the bottom so you can keep doing technology coverage incredibly well. So in Cleveland, perhaps that would be coverage of the growth industry here -- the medical industry."
  
  "Whiny people who live in the past, they drive me crazy. Because, there's nothing we can do about the massive changes in our industry. ... Just whining and moaning about the way it used to be will not solve anything. ... I find as time goes on and our problems become more and more apparent, and our need to change becomes more and more apparent, my patience for 'whiny people who live in the past' becomes shorter."

Google: better and better

Not to sound like a fanboy or anything, but it's now officially easier to find a library book on Google (well, WorldCat through Google, actually) than on my library's own Web site.

Switching hosts

I'm moving the blog portion of this site over to Blogspot. This should result in better performance (and more flexibility with photos), but I may run into some transitional issues.

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What does it take to get fired from this administration?

Apparently, nothing short of losing a war or an American city.

From the Washington Post:

The Justice Department said yesterday that it will not retract a sworn statement in 2006 by Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales that the Terrorist Surveillance Program had aroused no controversy inside the Bush administration, despite congressional testimony Tuesday that senior departmental officials nearly resigned in 2004 to protest such a program.

The department's affirmation of Gonzales's remarks raised fresh questions about the nature of the classified dispute, which former U.S. officials say led then-Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey and as many as eight colleagues to discuss resigning.

I think it's about time for Congress to exercise its constitutional prerogative and impeach the lying SOB.

P.S. I just realized that "lying SOB" could apply to any number of people in the White House. In this case, I mean Gonzales.

Interactive guide to Republican scandals

Just in case you have trouble keeping up -- and who doesn't? -- Slate has a handy interactive feature. Unfortunately, it doesn't cover instances of the administration's staggering incompetence, just those that justify impeachment and/or jail time. 

Source: Slate Magazine

Shopping for Europe

Actually, this is mostly a test to see whether blogging in Europe is practical through the phone.

Joost invites

Chris Lanier is giving away Joost invites on his blog.  All you have to do is reply to his post and/or blog about it and you have a chance to win an invite.  This is my entry, but you can click here to find out more and enter for yourself.

For those who don't know what Joost is, it's a peer-to-peer TV download service created by the same guys who did Skype. Supposedly, it will revolutionize television.

But will it play on my Xbox Media Center Extender?

A good first step

Someone else notices the too-chummy relationship between the Washington press corps and the people they're supposed to be covering, as manifest by the annual White House Correspondents' Dinner.

Tucked inside Frank Rich's Sunday column in the New York Times is indication that the newspaper will no longer play ball with the annual White House Correspondents Association dinners in Washington, which he calls "a crystallization of the press's failures in the post-9/11 era." He writes that the event "illustrates how easily a propaganda-driven White House can enlist the Washington news media in its shows....

"After last weekend's correspondents' dinner, The Times decided to end its participation in such events," wrote Rich. "But even were the dinner to vanish altogether, it remains but a yearly televised snapshot of the overall syndrome. The current White House, weakened as it is, can still establish story lines as fake as 'Mission Accomplished' and get a free pass."

Source: Editor & Publisher

For once, I'm glad I don't live or work in San Francisco

 Another day, another bridge collapse...

Bay Area residents began potentially their worst commute in almost two decades Monday, a day after one of the region’s most traveled sections of freeway melted and collapsed following a fiery crash.

...

Transportation officials said it could take months to repair the damaged interchanges, and advised motorists to use public transportation in and out of San Francisco. They added trains to the rail system, and bus and ferry operators also expanded service.

There's a "ferries in San Francisco" joke in here somewhere, but you won't hear it from me.

Source: MSNBC.com

Wal-Mart still doesn't get it

From today's Wall Street Journal (reg. required):

Wal-Mart Stores Inc., under pressure to boost productivity at its Sam's Club wholesale unit, is cutting a small number of store-management jobs at the operation as part of a rare nationwide job cut.

The world's largest retailer by revenue plans to consolidate about 3,000 salaried-manager positions at some 580 U.S. Sam's Club stores, according to people briefed on the situation. It isn't clear how many people will lose their jobs. The unit has more than 100,000 employees world-wide.

According to the Consumerist, they're cutting the department-level managers -- basically, the people in charge of the, say, the bakery or the photo department. But this isn't a cost-cutting move. Oh no siree. It's an effort to improve customer service.

Wal-mart: Penny-wise and pound-foolish

A Forbes article explains why short-changing workers actually increases costs for employers. I'm not convinced Wal-Mart's poor stock performance is solely a matter of labor costs; once a company hits a certain size, the law of large numbers begins to take its toll and dampens the growth shareholders demand. But it is nice to see that sometimes, it pays to do the right thing.

In almost all industries, productive, higher-paid workers can more than cover the costs of their salaries and benefits, if they are managed appropriately. For example, Costco Wholesale (nasdaq: COST - news - people ) pays its workers $17 an hour on average, while its competitor, Wal-Mart's Sam's Club, pays only $10 an hour on average; 85% of Costco employees enjoy company-provided health insurance, compared with less than half of the workers at Sam's Club. Significantly, these high wages and benefits do not come out of the pockets of Costco's shareholders. In fact, Costco has outperformed Wal-Mart on the stock market over the last five years. The real reason for the difference in compensation and benefits is that Costco employees have much lower turnover, better interaction with customers and are more productive than Wal-Mart's workers.

Source: Forbes.com

Confused again

Bush on Congress' recently passed troop funding bill:

“Instead of fashioning a bill I could sign, the Democratic leaders chose to further delay funding our troops, and they chose to make a political statement,” Mr. Bush said Tuesday morning before leaving for New York. “That’s their right. But it is wrong for our troops and it’s wrong for our country.”

Someone should probably tell our decider-in-chief that making political statements is precisely what politicians are supposed to do. And in a democracy, it's not the job of Congress to pass only the bills the president agrees with. You know, separation of powers and all that civics 101 nonsense.

Someone also should clue him in on that pesky federal law known as the War Powers Act.

Source: New York Times

One man's trash is another man's Ladmo Bag

A reporter here just got a story pitch from a PR person representing a text-messaging firm, suggesting we do a story on his firm and how text-messaging can be used for large-scale emergencies - like, say, a campus shooting. Nothing like a national tragedy to drum up a little publicity for your startup tech company.

(P.S. If you're confused by the headline, it's a reference to this.)

So much information, so little knowledge

 A recent Pew Research study finds that more than 30% of Americans can't name the vice president and 64% can't name the president of Russia. Wow.

The best part:

[T]he survey respondents who seemed to know the most about what’s going on — who were able to identify major public figures, for example — were likely to be viewers of fake news programs like Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report”; those who knew the least watched network morning news programs, Fox News or local television news.

In better news, another Pew study says more rich people now say they're Democrats.

Source: New York Times

The true cost of that high-paying job in the city (or low-cost mortgage in the suburbs)

An interesting piece in the New Yorker about one possible reason for Americans' ever-increasing commute: they have a hard time tallying the intangible costs of commuting with the tangible gains of living in a cheaper location or having a higher-paying job.

Three years ago, two economists at the University of Zurich, Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzer, released a study called “Stress That Doesn’t Pay: The Commuting Paradox.” They found that, if your trip is an hour each way, you’d have to make forty per cent more in salary to be as “satisfied” with life as a noncommuter is. (Their data come from Germany, where you’d think speedy Autobahns and punctual trains would bring a little Freude to the proceedings, and their methodology is elaborate and thorough, if impenetrable to the layman, relying on equations like U=α+ß₁D+ß₂D²+γX+δ₁w+δ₂w²+δ₃log y.) The commuting paradox reflects the notion that many people, who are supposedly rational (according to classical economic theory, at least), commute even though it makes them miserable. They are not, in the final accounting, adequately compensated.

...

They tend to overvalue the material fruits of their commute—money, house, prestige—and to undervalue what they’re giving up: sleep, exercise, fun.

The article goes on to blame post-WWII zoning laws, which separated residential and commercial areas, but I'm not sure I agree with the thesis: even if workplaces were closer to residential areas, I doubt people would limit their employment options by proximity any more than they do now.