Yeah, yeah, yeah, we need the moisture, right, I gotcha. Still.
April showers
Author: Patrick O'Grady
After decades with his scabby little nose pressed to various grindstones of journalism, Patrick O'Grady came away with plenty of mental scar tissue, a good deal less hair to cover it, and an undiminished appreciation for three subsets of the craft: drawing cartoons, writing commentary, and composing headlines. All three are short, punchy attention-getters, the literary equivalent of yelling, "Hey, look at me!" before hanging a moon out the school-bus window, and thus own a natural appeal for an overgrown class clown with the attention span of a rat terrier raised on angel dust and bong water. And thanks to the Internet, the best thing to happen to journalism since the invention of movable type, he gets to do all three of them without having to go to work at a newspaper, where management has slowly devolved into a button-down mutant hybrid of the worst aspects of the Spanish Inquisition, the dental bits in "Marathon Man" and the DMV of your choice. He and his wife, the long-suffering Shannon, share an adobe hacienda in The Duck! City with their cat, Miss Mia Sopaipilla.
Scrambled Easter eggs
Up from the grave he arose,
With a mighty triumph o’er his foes
And a corncob pipe and a button nose
And two eyes made out of coal.
Hm. I seem to have scrambled my religious holidays again. No wonder the Easter Bunny didn’t leave an iPad under my pillow in exchange for that tooth.
OK, ’fess up, now — how many of you crazy kids rushed out to score iPads yesterday? I won’t make fun of you, I promise. You can trust me; I’m in the media.
If you had one and were able to figure it out in time for the Tour of Flanders this morning, you’d know that Fabian Cancellara crushed Tom Boonen to win the cobbled classic. Dropped him like a used syringe on the Muur, he did. But you might not have been able to watch any of the live video feeds ’cause they’re probably Flash-based, which makes the iPad hork. Pray for the rapid expansion of HTML5.
Launching (i)Pad
In comments Steve O’ is placing bets as to whether I’ll be buying an iPad. Sad to say, if any Dog-catchers are staking out the Briargate Apple Store in hopes of throwing a net over me, they’ll be disappointed.
I’m pretty much in agreement with former Apple marketing guy Guy Kawasaki, who told The New York Times: “The first 5 million will be sold in a heartbeat. But let’s see: You can’t make a phone call with it, you can’t take a picture with it, and you have to buy content that before now you were not willing to pay for. That seems tough to me.”
Well said. I think the iPad is a nifty little toy with a wealth of possibilities, but in its infancy it’s clearly more about consumption than creation, and I already feel a tad overwhelmed by the wonders of the digital world, thanks all the same.
If I were to spring for some new technology in the iPad’s price range, I might go for a netbook Hackintosh, if only to drive myself further around the bend with technical problems. A guy can write and edit on the run with one of those.
Meanwhile, the NYT is live-blogging today’s iPad mania. That’s about as close to one as I intend to get. For now, anyway.
• Late update: Jesus, Apple’s marketing department must love the media foofaraw over the company’s every product release. Every major daily and most of the minors sent the troops out to cover today’s iPad feeding frenzy. Gene Munster, an analyst with Piper Jaffray, told the NYT that he estimates Apple will spend $77 million promoting the iPad. Uh, why, exactly? Why buy what everyone’s giving away?
Tour de farce
It was April Fool’s Day at VeloNews.com yesterday, and as usual we managed to snooker a few people.
My contribution — an entirely bogus item about VeloNews launching a touring magazine, headed by yours truly, with accompanying website and online store — apparently caused a minor stir among some folks in that niche. It was a calculated risk, since I’m writing a piece for Adventure Cyclist magazine about my tour of southern Arizona and really don’t need to piss off anyone holding a checkbook. Happily, editor Michael Deme was a good sport about it, having published his share of April Fool gags over the years.
I can’t remember how long VN’s been pulling these pranks. They date back to the newsprint edition of the magazine, and Charles Pelkey guesstimates the tradition to be 17 years old at least.
My favorite gag remains the time we “fired” me and posted the news online. I still can’t decide whose letters were funnier — the outraged readers who were canceling their subscriptions or the O’Grady-haters who were saying, “About damn’ time!”
On an unrelated note, I stumbled across a Rick Bayless recipe for tacos de papas con chorizo y salsa de aguacate last night and cooked the sumbitch right up. It was both easy and delicious, and that’s no joke.
Don’t touch that dial
Seems like the print media aren’t the only journos suffering in the Internet era. The Gaslight writes of how the local TV stations are hiring only people “capable of being able to do it all,” which is the kind of English one has come to expect from the video crowd.
Notes Paul Kavanaugh: “The local stations’ Pueblo bureaus, for example, used to be staffed by a reporter and a photographer. Now, they’re staffed by so-called ‘one-man bands’; one reporter writes, shoots, edits and broadcasts.”
Well, shucks. It makes a man’s eyes damp, for sure, as the late Hunter S. Thompson once said. The print people have been in that sinking ship for quite some time now, augmenting pad and pen with digital sound recorders, point-and-shoots and camcorders, and dashing out quick reports for dead-tree edition, website and blog.
And it only seems fair that TV should join newspapers in the Information Age tar pits, since the Internet is only finishing the job on the print media that TV started. Back in the day the local TV crowd piggy-backed on the daily newspaper, eschewing original reportage for the rip-and-read, whipping a slight rewrite on an ink-stained wretch’s story and shamelessly reading it before the camera. Occasionally we could recognize entire sentences lifted whole.
When the vidiots bothered to attend an event in corpus, the cameraman would often pan around over the audience. I had long hair and a beard then, and was something of a camera magnet, scribbling away on a note pad, and after seeing myself on TV a few times I took to scratching one cheek with an extended middle digit whenever the camera panned my way, bringing a quick end to my TV career.
My favorite moment remains an important school-board meeting disrupted by the video circus, which showed up late as always and bustled about, setting up tripods, lights and whatnot. The superintendent was well into his opening remarks, so naturally they asked that he start over from the beginning.
This was the last straw for my colleague from the smaller paper across town. She remarked, “Hey, assholes, the news doesn’t come packaged in tidy segments of 30 seconds apiece.”
It still doesn’t, of course, but that’s all you’re going to get in the era of the one-man band.
