Breaking News: Something Happening in Haiti

Breaking News: Something Happening In Haiti —Breaking News: Something Happening in Haiti (The Onion (Satire)) Great commentary on the accelerated news cycle. Similar:How Fake News Happens: It's simple! A governor tweets a Fox News graphic from a story that…How dare President Biden be invoked by a…CultureThe Circle (#StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch, Season 2, Episode 2) Kira relocates…

Seagull becomes crisp shoplifter

“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:More Adventures in Suburban AdultingAbout four years ago I bought an electri…CultureHide and…

Statetris

—Statetris (mapmsg.com) Like Tetris, but with American states. Similar:Candyland is a masterpiece of game design (John Brieger unpacks the specific cultural cont… AestheticsAnother 10 sq cm of #steampunk #neovictorian control panel. Not the end product. Just prac…AestheticsNASA Calls It A Mission As Curiosity Rover Fills Up Whole 2-Gigabyte Memory CardMore great satire from The Onion. PASAD…AmusingI…

Beginning Reporting

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…

Famous Poems Rewritten as Limericks

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:New Graphic for MLA Style Paper HandoutThe other day, I noticed that if you Goo…AcademiaStephen…

Echochrome – the Escher Game

—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:Disruptive Decorations: Kids learned better in a sparesly-decorated CMU labKids learned better in a sparse lab sett…AestheticsSweaters from Rover?From Awful Library Books.…

AFP

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,…

Adventures in ostrich suits….

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…

What do ombudsmen do?

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…

They Just Don't Care

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…

Confusing ''b'' and ''d''

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,…