16 August 2009

Linkpost and bison photo (08/16/09)

Whoops, I haven't updated here in a while -- busy with the Houston blog, friends, grilling, gym, blah blah blah....

Here's a picture of a bison herd crossing the road at the Nature Conservancy Tallgrass Prairie Preserve in Osage County (OK) earlier today. Pretty cool stuff:

And here are some links on journalism and theft (or not, depending on your perspective I guess):

Most of us who have been blogging for a while have surely blockquoted too many grafs and given too little attribution with a fair number of news stories. Indeed, the Gawker example isn't even particularly bad compared to the 10-11 graf rips with perhaps a sentence of original commentary that aren't unusual these days.

I'm trying to be much better about less blockquoting and more attribution on non-linkposts. The people/institutions who actually do news coverage deserve that much (even if they are lax in saying as much most of the time). As far as schemes to try to ban scraping and linking and aggregation.... that seems ilke an overreaction.

Posted by Kevin Whited @ 08/16/09 21:56 | Links | Technorati |

02 August 2009

Linkpost: 08/02/09

Uncle Walter: Not so sadly missed (Mark Steyn, Macleans)
Tax Burden of Top 1% Now Exceeds That of Bottom 95% (Scott Hodge, Tax Policy Blog)
A Hole They Dug for Themselves (Steve Chapman, Reason)
The L goes to Washington: White House becomes 51st Ward (Lynn Sweet, Chicago Sun Times)
Teaching on tap at White House confab (John Kass, Chicago Tribune)
Obama's ignorant attack on cops (Heather MacDonald, City Journal)
Unteachable (Harry Stein, City Journal)
From president to pundit (Steve Chapman, RCP)
Stop calling it a "teachable moment" (Ruben Navarrette, RCP)
Death of a doctrine: Obama discovers engagement's limits (Michael Gerson, WaPo)
A post-racial president? (Thomas Sowell, RCP)
Our angry aristocracy (Victor Davis Hanson, RCP)
Obama's 32 czars (Eric Cantor, WaPo)
There Is No ‘Right’ to Health Care (Theodore Dalrymple, WSJ)
The Blue Dogs’ Final Dilemma is Health Care (Daniel Henninger, WSJ)
This struggle over health-care legislation isn’t just another battle between the Democratic and Republican parties. It’s about which force is going to take the United States forward for the next generation: the public sector or the private sector. If by now you haven’t figured out which sector you are in, then you’re a Blue Dog Democrat.
Fannie Med (WSJ)
The death of journalism, Gawker edition (Ian Shapira, WaPo)
Intown Q&A with mayoral candidates (Off the Kuff)

I have no idea why some of these little local pubs do it this way - 002 Magazine does as well - I find it really off-putting. It’s like they don’t want anyone to bother linking to them.

Don't treat firefighters like children (Rick Casey, Houston Chronicle)

That's what makes me nervous about calls for “zero tolerance” for sexist and racist behavior in the fire department.

Next hurdle for Bagwell: Entry to Cooperstown (Steve Campbell, Houston Chronicle)
Bagwell has always steadfastly denied going down the PED route, and nobody has turned up any smoking specimen bottles with his name on it.
Neither clause in that sentence is untrue, but what Campbell is implying by putting those two clauses together -- that nobody has tied Bagwell to PED use -- is manifestly untrue. Steve Campbell's own colleague at the Chronicle Jerome Solomon has reported on his blog that Bagwell used andro, and that his source was none other than Bagwell himself. Now, andro was not banned by baseball at the time, but that does not change the fact that it IS a PED. When I asked Campbell on twitter why he didn't pursue that admission, he basically told me he wasn't his colleague's keeper (huh?), andro wasn't illegal at the time (agreed), he didn't have space to pursue that angle (never mind the multiple grafs devoted to Bagwell's denial of PED use), and that readers weren't interested in that story. Ultimately, it seems Campbell (and perhaps his editors) made the editorial decision not to go down that road in the story's discussion of PEDs. That's certainly their right, and fits the Chron's usual sports cheerleading preferences to a T. Nonetheless, a key bit of information was withheld from readers, information that doesn't completely fit the narrative above.
What If: The New New York Times (Michael Arrington, TechCrunch)
2005 Colgin IX Estate - Red Wine (The Wine Cult) It sounds like a nice bottle of wine, and it damn sure should be at Brix's list price of $691/bottle (the highest price wine on their list). And just to illustrate how the Texas system of wine distribution absolutely rips off Texas wine consumers, the best price on that wine on wine-searcher as of today is just under $200/bottle.
Crus, the Better Beaujolais (Dave McIntyre, WaPo)
I’m All Ears About Texas Wines and I am Giving Away Prizes (VintageTexas)
Recession Puts Squeeze on California Wine Industry (Eric Asimov, NY Times)
Dante's descendants face a new inferno (John Phillips, The Independent)
Bad Apple: An Argument Against Buying an iPhone (Lifehacker)
From the fates worse than death department… (Trent Seibert)
Berlin Is Little More than a Beer-Drenched Tourist Paradise (Reinhard Mohr, Spiegel)

Posted by Kevin Whited @ 08/02/09 13:21 | Links | Technorati |

27 July 2009

Linkpost: 07/27/09

I really should clear out the links a little more often, eh?

A natural wine romance (Captain Tumor Man) Dressner rocks.
Native Yeast, Wine and Me and Disconnect (Appellation Feiring)
Oklahoma Wine Country (Beyond Beltway 8)
Qatar Air CEO: 'Star Alliance should invite us to join' (Ben Mutzabaugh, USA Today) I wouldn't mind reward availability on Qatar.
Continental Charts Switch To Star Alliance (David Jones, Transnational)
Why Obamacare Is Sinking (Charles Krauthammer, WaPo)
Health-Care Reform: Why Not Try Ownership? (Deroy Murdock, NRO) I think he means individual ownership -- and that would be preferable to government mandate, regs, rationing, and control of the purse strings.
He Said/V.I.P. Said: Prejudometer cranked up to eleven (Mark Steyn, NRO)
Why not just admit that his teleprompter misled him? (Brothers Judd)
An Ideologue in a Hurry (Rich Lowry, NRO)
Let’s Face It: Obama Is No Post-Partisan (William McGurn, WSJ)
Obama's Domestic Agenda Teeters (Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie, WaPo) The thrill up the leg is gone for some.
Joe Biden's terrible truths (James Lileks, NY Post)
The Unbearable Whiteness of Being Maureen Dowd (Jeffrey Lord, TAS)
Our friend the stimulus package (Off the Kuff)
I will say that the fact that his rejection of the stimulus money for unemployment insurance hasn’t been a negative for him - polls have consistently shown a plurality agreeing with him on this - is a failure of Democratic messaging. If we can’t make that into a millstone for him, we’re not doing our job.
I don't understand why some fellow hobby bloggers consider spreading the Party Message to be their job, but to each his own.
Perry raises possibility of states' rights showdown with White House over healthcare (Dave Montgomery, FWST) Perry's comments are mostly nonsensical constitutionally, since we have much more of a national than federal system these days, but the comments are meant as political rhetoric, and will likely serve Perry's political needs (indeed, cue the predictable screeching from the left).
Texas Trib, one man’s journalistic mitzvah (Reflections of a Newsosaur) Yay nonprofit journalism! Let's have a few more.

Posted by Kevin Whited @ 07/27/09 08:06 | Links | Technorati |

20 July 2009

Linkpost: 07/20/09

Time to dump some links and get back into the game here, so to speak.

Compstat for teachers (Marcus Winters, City Journal)
Obama Loses His Cool (Steve Rhodes, NBC Chicago)
Pundits mostly pile on Obama for a series of gaffes at the All-Star Game, but date the shaky week to the crashing of a teleprompter on Monday that left Obama "in absolute discomfort." But Obama's series of goofs began long before this week. In March, for example, another teleprompter meltdown led to the Irish prime minister repeating Obama's statement word-for-word - while Obama thanked himself for being there. In May, a teleprompter blew over in high winds in Colorado and Vice President Joe Biden, referring to Obama's reliance on the devices, joked, "What I am going to tell the president when I tell him his teleprompter is broken? What will he do then?!"
The Airbus 330: An Accident waiting to happen (David Rose, Daily Mail) I'm a fan of Continental's Boeing fleet.
Europe's dry roses complement a light meal (Frank Sutherland, Gannett) French roses have become a mainstay for us over this HOT summer.
Is the European model of wine regions obsolete for California? (Steve Heimoff Wine Blog) To a large extent -- yes. Because California is more about the grape and the science of winemaking than it is sense of place or natural winemaking (more the focus of the French).
Natural science (oenoLogic)
Anthony dias Blue Goes on the Attack Against Wine Bloggers (1 Wine Dude)
Gators and Gumbo (JC Reid, Houston Press) So Village Voice Houston has now fully embraced food reviews in the print weekly by people who take freebies and who are not anonymous. The amateurization of the local "professional" print press continues apace.
Reflective roof paint repels the heat (Tiffany Hsu, LA Times) Well, sure, but that common-sense solution (or microgrids or solar water heaters) don't enrich former pols like Al Gore or give current pols more power over your life.
Microsoft retains sanity – Marketplace for Windows Mobile coming to WM 6.1, 6.0 after all (WMPowerUser.com) MS gets it right, finally, but one wonders how they were able to bumble for so long with something as simple as an app store.
Hearst Investigative Project Draws From Seven Newspapers (Joe Strupp, Editor and Publisher) And now they go for the "big conglomerate" approach to winning a Pulitzer. Meanwhile, while Hearst throws resources at this, poor Bradley Olson locally gets stuck trying to cover City Hall, city campaigns, and even court cases -- and being stretched too thin to do it very well.
'Experts' stir controversy over social studies textbooks (Gary Scharrer, Houston Chronicle)
But some of the expert recommendations are already stirring controversy, suggesting for example that biographies of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen F. Austin should not be included in books for early grade-school children. And some of the experts want to emphasize the role of the Bible and the Christian faith in the settling of the original colonies.
I guess this is "controversial" to some journalists and progressive reactionaries, but scholars in American political theory have discussed well the role of the religious-covenant tradition in American political thought, not to mention the political role of religious sermons during the Founding era. So sorry if some people find the scholarship "controversial" but maybe they are the ignorant ones?
TV Notebook: KILT's new director has plenty on plate (David Barron, Houston Chronicle)
“He and Marc (Vandermeer) are one of the better play-by-play teams in the NFL, and we didn’t want to upset that,” CBS Radio Houston market manager Brian Purdy said.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha! How did he say that with a straight face?