Slow News Day

Just thought I would spice it up with a little home video of me about the town.



I'm just lucky this didn't catch on until after I graduated high school.

Necessary Action

It is obviously a sad day when actions such as these are required, but thankfully the State of Kansas has a Catholic leader that will not allow the governor to continue to abuse her marginal association with Catholicism to the detriment of other Catholic believers in the State.

Here's his actual statement in The Leaven.

The governor has spoken to me on more than one occasion about her obligation to uphold state and federal laws and court decisions. I have asked her to show a similar sense of obligation to honor divine law and the laws, teaching and legitimate authority within the church.

I think he has always been a good bishop, but I wonder if having the support of other strong bishops to his North, South and East makes it easier to hold his ground publicly.

Blogs: The Bane of Journalism?

So Bob Costas held a townhall meeting recently discussing several current topics in sports. One of those topics was the tension between newspapers and blogs, particularly in the world of sports. Here's the video and some interesting tidbits of commentary about the whole affair.

Here's an interview with Costas after the affair.

From a blog run by one of the best sports writers out there:

On W.C. Heinz: The classy and wonderful sportswriter writer Steve Wulf (who, among many other things, co-wrote Buck O’Neil’s autobiography “I Was Right On Time”) wrote in to confirm my theory that Heinz absolutely would be a prominent blogger in today’s new world.

He wrote: “Heck, in (Heinz’s) day, with multiple editions and lots of friendly competition, newspapers were the blog equivalents.”

This is really a great point, and one that just gets overlooked. There have always been blogs. What do we think Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” was? He wasn’t working for any mainstream media — there really wasn’t a mainstream media. It was a blog written long before the Internet. It was a published as a pamphlet and published anonymously — and James Chalmers (playing the role of Revolutionary Buzz) called him a “political quack.” You could certainly argue that Paine’s blog, more than any single work, spurred the Colonies to break from England.

What do we think Martin Luther’s “95 Theses“ was? A blog. Of course. There was no WordPress for him to post, so he nailed the 95 Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenburg. The door, he found, was a better operating system than Vista.

It isn’t that I miss what people don’t like about the blogosphere. I get it. There are some dirty words out there. There are some rather embarrassing photographs*. There are some nasty and unfair rips out there. Hey, I would love to see the tone lighten up a bit. I would love to see people enjoy sports more and scream less. But that’s not the blogosphere. That’s just America. It’s been that way for a long time. In 1975, people vented by throwing whiskey bottles at players and fighting on 10 cent beer night. Now, they write angry blogs. I think that’s an improvement.

He goes on to complain about Facebook, which would make me respect him even more except for the fact that he now has a Facebook account.

Another writer for the same paper that covers the Royals and also runs a blog had this to say.

And here's a follow up from the NYTimes.

I don't have enough time, nor do I care enough about this issue to dig much further, but I do find it incredibly interesting that you have the paper writers that are facing extinction (or at least believe that they are), and their defense against this onslaught is focused on both quality and morality.

If I really believed that newpapers in particular represented those qualities and that writers before blogs sat around thinking, "At least we write really well and don't swear or smear people," then perhaps I would be inclined to jumped behind Mr. Bissinger. But I just don't see how that's the case. I think I can jump behind the idea that for the most part newspapers offer a better quality of writing. That's not to say that their content or message is desirable. If anything Bissinger's attitude reinforces the long-held perception that newspapers think they know better than we do. They don't just cover the news, they drive it and they create it. On the other hand, I think there's definite merit in attacking the moral and professional quality of many blogs and their comments, but to say that newspapers carry the standard of class and morals is rather disingenuous. I suspect that one of the reasons that blogging is so popular is that people felt the mainstream media wasn't adequately covering or discussing issues that they felt were significant. And placing the power of the press into as many hands as possible should be admirable, even if it means that many people show themselves to be completely inept as writers or just generally buffoons.

Like me, for example.