Breaking News: Something Happening In Haiti —Breaking News: Something Happening in Haiti (The Onion (Satire)) Great commentary on the accelerated news cycle. Similar:Rubric for the Rubric Concerning Students’ Core Educational Competency In Reading Things I…Sadly, this only barely counts as satire…AcademiaTechnical and Literary Writing: What’s the difference? « DekonztruktschonIn an advanced new media class, I’m intr…AcademiaEvery…
The car could be up on blocks and be just as astonishing. | It goes to show you how we in the press so often miss the big stories that are right under our noses. There is a famous journalistic legend about the time a young reporter covered the Johnstown flood of 1889. The kid…
“At first I didn’t believe a seagull was capable of stealing crisps. But I saw it with my own eyes and I was surprised. He’s very good at it.” —Seagull becomes crisp shoplifter (BBC) Very strange. My brother-in-law Robert sent it to me. Similar:The daughter is in “Very Berry Dead,” a new play which opens this…
—Statetris (mapmsg.com) Like Tetris, but with American states. Similar:One Teacher’s Brilliant Strategy to Stop Future School ShootingsEvery Friday since Columbine, one school…CultureEducators approve national campaign to halt high stakes, “toxic tests”Not a news item, but an announcement fro…CultureLet's face it, it's time to give up on those Portal and Half-Life sequelsReserving judgments is a matter of…
“I have never forgotten the magic night that my own father, like his father and his father’s father before him, gently woke me, bundled me up in a warm blanket and quietly led me outside to see the Northern Lights for the first time,” said the elder Meier, dejectedly sipping a cup of hot cocoa…
An armed gang of four kidnapped one of the world’s top RPG gamers after one criminal’s girlfriend lured him into a fake date using Orkut, Google’s social network. After sequestering him in Sao Paulo, they held a gun against the victim’s head for five hours to get his password, which they wanted to sell for…
Barker: “I think that Roger Ebert’s problem is that he thinks you can’t have art if there is that amount of malleability in the narrative. In other words, Shakespeare could not have written ‘Romeo and Juliet’ as a game because it could have had a happy ending, you know? If only she hadn’t taken the…
As I see it, a good reporter is like a pinball in play, always gathering, writing, revising, gathering, writing, revising–until time runs out. The job is as simple, and as hard, as that. The advice here is based on the teachings of reporters I admire. It is also based on conclusions I have drawn during…
Here’s a quick three-step photoshop tutorial to make coloring pages for your kids from any digital photo. Kids will love coloring pictures of themselves and their family (what could be more fun than giving grandpa spiky purple hair and a green beard). —coloring pages from your photos – 3 easy photoshop steps (fototiller) Similar:Computer grading will…
There once was a horse-riding chap Who took a trip in a cold snap He stopped in the snow But he soon had to go: He was miles away from a nap. —Lore Sjöberg —Famous Poems Rewritten as Limericks (Bad Gods) Similar:Chillax, Wikipedia, and bridezilla are not puns: Against adjoinagesSo if recessionista and fembot are not…
—Echochrome – the Escher Game (YouTube, Via Game Girl Advance) What a hypnotically simple interface! This is a PSP game. Since I’m not a platform gamer, I’ll have to admire this one from afar. Similar:Narrative, Creativity, and EvolutionMy students are finishing up Hayles, My …AcademiaTom Bissell writes a letter to Niko Bellic about Grand Theft Auto…
bootlegs are wierd the only time i gop online is to blog on this my space woich juliet you are free to bring oiver to m,y site as its mine and i own it, anyway i dont know i told all myf riends an dyou too to be there 1030 sharp because weve been allabout…
A string of publishers failed to spot blatant plagiarism of one of English literature’s most famous authors, in a cheeky test to see if she would have secured a book deal today, a report said Thursday. David Lassman, head of the Jane Austen Festival in Bath, sent manuscripts to 18 editors seeking a publishing contract,…
I never thought that I would spend my fifteen minutes of fame dressed as as ostrich. —Megan Ritter —Adventures in ostrich suits…. (Megan Ritter) A member of Seton Hill’s College Republicans posts a brief reflection on her appearance on a Time.com front-page feature, as one of the 10 weirdest YouTube questions posted for the upcoming Democratic…
Interest in ombudsmen has increased in response to all the polls showing that readers do not hold newspapers in particularly high regard. This problem is hardly a novel one. Similar circumstances led Ralph Pulitzer to establish a Bureau of Accuracy and Fair Play at his New York World in 1913. According to a 1916 issue…
When he was editor of a daily newspaper in 1964, “nearly 90 percent of the households in that town subscribed to the paper, and people would get up in the morning and read it,” Mr. Lavine says. With one radio station and one television station nearby, he says, “there were only three places you could…
And as far as I know, no other news outlet in the world got this point wrong except the BBC — not even the tabloids. People often accuse the BBC of agenda-driven falsification of stories. Perhaps that’s sometimes true, I don’t know. But in the cases of science mis-reporting that I’m familiar with — and…
It should be a great moment for the publishing industry, which for years has been limping along with flat sales. But amid this avalanche of commerce and pre-publication hype, the book business is ruefully taking note of a startling incongruity: Very few U.S. booksellers will be making big money from “Harry Potter and the Deathly…
Confusing ”b” and ”d” (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Hold your hands like this, and imagine an “e” in between them, and you’ve got the word “bed”. My five-year-old daughter was having so much trouble telling the difference between her ”b” and ”d” that my wife urged me to look up dyslexia on the internet. Along the way,…
Asking contributors to “write the story on open-source car design” had all the appeal of asking people to rewrite their college term papers. Asking them to talk to someone they admire and respect was met with a far warmer response. —Jeff Howe —Did Assignment Zero Fail? A Look Back, and Lessons Learned (Wired) An assessment of…