"The news cycle is getting shorter --- to the point that there is no pause, only the constancy of the Web and the endless argument of cable. 
This creates pressure to entertain or perish, which has fed the press’s dominant bias: not pro-liberal or pro-conservative but pro-conflict." 
--- Ken Auletta in The New Yorker

Late Night, Part the Second

Leno appeared on Oprah's show yesterday and did himself no favors. Just when you thought he reached rock bottom in terms of ethics, Jay decided to break out the blasting caps to get a little deeper.

25 January 2010

Drove my middle brother (not the one who is deploying... FYI, I am the youngest) into the capital region today for an appointment. Have been doing this semi-regularly since this past summer when he came down with a serious variant of Lyme disease. Have no desire to talk about it in detail here, as the particulars are his private concern that I will not discuss on a publicly-accessible forum. He often advocates for Lyme Awareness among family and a wide circle of friends, so this is not a public "outing" by any means.

Today, as a change, we took his Jeep Commander and my 2-year-old niece. His wife, who usually drives said vehicle to work and drops said niece at day care, is at a training activity down South. Woke up at 6:30 to get over there and get my nephew on the bus and basically act as another pair of hands. Watched "Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs" on DVD, which was surprisingly entertaining on this, my first viewing; evidently, this movie gets much airtime at the house, as many of the lines can be recited by heart. That's the way kids are. Then again, who am I to say anything? --- I've watched "LOST" about eight times over, myself.

Anyway, it was an experience driving today. I'm no stranger to Jeeps, but the Commander model is quite a beast to handle, both in terms of the weight, power and its bulkiness. Kind of like steering a tugboat. And at time today, that simile probably wasn't far off from the truth. It was horrible weather, with 1"-2" of driving rain and 50+ m.p.h. wind gusts. But we made it there and back again, without incident. My niece slept in her car-seat most of the way.

Got home and made a batch of soup that couldn't be beat, and took it over, along with some garlic bread, for the whole family's dinner. And, now, dear reader, I am fairly beat. Honestly, I have done stone wall work for 12 hours a day and not felt this tired. I seriously don't know how so many parents do this day in and day out. ... If I ever talk about having kids, please shoot me with a big gun. The largest you can find.

The Gailey Administration

This week, the Buffalo Bills hired Chan Gailey as their head coach after a protracted search.

I am officially overwhelmingly ambivalent about this. Gailey has had some success in the NFL, reaching the playoffs frequently with teams he has coached in various capacities.

After a decade of missing the playoffs, the Bills have a lot of things to improve on. Frankly, my interest has waned to the point that I didn't watch many of the games this year, because the outcomes were inevitable. More productive to go outside and actually do something on a Sunday.

We'll see what kind of changes this brings and if there's a real sense of improvement rather than the pure ticket-sale marketing hype that's surrounded the team for 10 years of failure.

Late Night

It's been in the offing for a couple-few weeks now that Conan O'Brien would be canceled after 7 months at the "Tonight Show" and that slot will be given back to Jay Leno.

Admittedly, I watched about 10 minutes of late night television in the past year, but I've caught parts of Conan's show since the mess started. It helps comedy when there's an edge to it, and it especially helps the absurdity factor when the person can spout against his own bosses and the network ('What're they gonna do, fire me!?!'), and it'll still be aired.

In the time he's been there, Conan struggled to find his audience. Then again, Leno's 10 p.m. show was a complete flop, and had NBC affiliates steamed at the low lead-in numbers for their 11 p.m. newscasts. Now, as it turns out, Conan has gotten big viewership ratings on "Tonight" during this period of limbo. NBC has handled their late night programming badly since Johnny Carson retired. No need to go into the Leno-Letterman fiasco here. The switch from Leno to Conan worked out on paper in 2005 was equally as ill-conceived. Come the time of the transition, NBC refused to accept that it would be losing one of the two to a rival network. They delayed it as long as they could.

Who's the bad guy here? Certainly NBC's executives play a big part. By the numbers, Conan couldn't keep or attract the audience, but to yank him off-stage so soon wasn't right. Especially when his predecessor usurped the late night milieu and put it on over an hour earlier on the same network. Not cool, NBC! Wherever Conan lands next --- likely FOX or even ABC in September when the terms of his settlement with NBC allow him --- he will bring a significant amount of viewer goodwill.

Leno isn't going to come out of all this as rosy as he'd like. He and NBC are surmising that his previous "Tonight Show" numbers will jump right back up to where they were prior to his so-called retirement. I highly doubt this happens. Leno has lost a lot of the goodwill he had; many celebrities on whom he relies to appear with him aren't taking a favorable tack to his scheming. "Tonight" to an extent, will be blackballed. Leno should have done the honorable thing and declined NBC's offers --- both to create the 10 p.m. show and to take back "Tonight." He should not have been the third wheel when his contract expired. As it was, Leno was the guy who got his gold watch and retirement party, then hung around in the lobby shaking hands and filling orders like nothing had changed. Leno is the common denominator in the late night feuds. Vouchsafe there's a lot of scheming going on behind the stale laughs.

(Photo illustration (c) Mike Mitchell)

"The only reason that anything ever gets done 
is because there are pockets of competence in every command. 
The key is to find them ... and then exploit the hell out of 'em." 

--- Unidentified U.S. CENTCOM Commander

Whalers Retro

When the Hartford Whalers left town in 1997, it was the end of an era in hockey. The NHL had become a league of "dump and trap" that wouldn't abate until after a season-long work stoppage and badly needed rules changes. In 2004, those changes finally came, opening up the playing surface by removing the center-ice red line (thus reducing two-line pass penalties), giving a competitive advantage to teams and players with speed and skating ability. They have also gotten games out of the 1-0 or 2-1 rut, and the most important occurence of a game is no longer, "Who got in a fight?" We can now look back on those days with a certain sentimentality. But for Whalers fans, those days are all that's left. Still, though, there are many Whalers fans left in Connecticut.

Recently, I ran into the drawing at left, which provides a glimpse at the Whalers' logo design process. The artist who was commissioned for the design was Peter Good, now of Cummings & Good, a graphic design partnership. It's always fascinating (for me at least) to see this idea flow from one concept to the next. Here, the initial stages show an intent to include a negative-space H (for Hartford) to pair with the Whalers W. The design progresses from Poseidon-like hook shapes to a whale fluke. It is still lauded in the logo design community as one of the best designs out there.

Delay of Game

There was an interesting article in the WSJ today by David Biderman that provided a breakdown of the content of an average NFL game.

Now, I had suspected that out of the 60 minutes of game clock, that there would be a lot of dead time e.g. how the clock keeps ticking after running plays are stopped in-bounds. Still, just less than 11 minutes of actual game-play was a little surprising to me at first blush.

"According to a Wall Street Journal study of four recent broadcasts, and similar estimates by researchers, the average amount of time the ball is in play on the field during an NFL game is about 11 minutes.

In other words, if you tally up everything that happens between the time the ball is snapped and the play is whistled dead by the officials, there's barely enough time to prepare a hard-boiled egg. In fact, the average telecast devotes 56% more time to showing replays.

So what do the networks do with the other 174 minutes in a typical broadcast? Not surprisingly, commercials take up about an hour. As many as 75 minutes, or about 60% of the total air time, excluding commercials, is spent on shots of players huddling, standing at the line of scrimmage or just generally milling about between snaps. In the four broadcasts The Journal studied, injured players got six more seconds of camera time than celebrating players. While the network announcers showed up on screen for just 30 seconds, shots of the head coaches and referees took up about 7% of the average show."

Looking at these numbers has to be pretty disheartening to regular viewers who whittle away whole Sundays. When I am watching football, I'm often doing something else at the same time, usually cooking, which cuts down on my NFL-coach-potato guilt level. But to those fans who go to the games, that's quite a price to be paying for 11 minutes of action.

It begs the question, though: How does football dead time compare to other major sports? In basketball with a 24-second shot clock, a lot of time is spent passing the ball and setting up plays before a shot is attempted. Same thing with hockey. Both of those sports have a 60-minute clock in the professional game. Soccer is another serial time-waster, even with longer matches --- 90 minutes, plus so-called "stoppage time" which is a referee-determined add-on of how much time has been spent on injuries, substitutions, etc. --- that often come down to about 5 serious shots on goal. This is an American viewer's oft-bemoaned example of why soccer doesn't have much of a following in this country.

Tens of millions of fans, however, go to Major League Baseball games every year to sit through an indeterminate-timed 9 innings. Indeed, sitting for 3 hours, watching practice swings, bullpen sessions, warm-up pitches, bubble gum chewing and arguments between managers and umpires, while waiting for 27 players to be called "out" is deemed the American past-time. Then again, at our house, it gives a heck of a reason for a nice spring/summer/fall weekend nap when a game is on.

"The air you breathe, the food you eat, the water you drink.... This is what you are." --- Wangari Maathai

"We grew a hundred years older in a single hour."

--- Anna Akhmatova, in her poem "In Memoriam July 19, 1914" about the start of World War I

My oldest brother left last night for Louisiana, a two-week stop-over before his unit is deployed. We have been through this four times previously, three in the current theater and its environs and once in Bosnia. Hence, we are somewhat accustomed to deployment from the "home front" side of things, but the worry is still there, especially now. In the last deployment, things came a bit unraveled; where he was stationed was fairly inaccessible to communication, a strange sickness with a high fever for several days, the loss of two other soldiers in his unit, marital problems which I make a point of not sharing, out of respect for all parties... all of which combined to throw him for a loop.

An uncle who is a Vietnam veteran says, "Everyone who participates in war gets [Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder]. It just varies to the degree." True, that. While my brother was staying with us for a while after his divorce (it was on amicable terms, thankfully), a large halogen lamp next to his bed bit the dust when he woke up punching. There were several life choices in that time when it was like watching a car accident, that from your vantage point, seems to be going in slow motion. He tried reclaiming his old life; for instance, getting a puppy of the same breed he and his wife had. Generally speaking, as even he acknowledges now, he "jumped too quickly" and made some less-than-ideal decisions that will impact the rest of his life. (Writer's Note: I've made my own less-than-ideal decisions, so it is not my intent to be casting stones here). That's what it's like, and he's not alone in any of these things. Science still knows very little about the human brain, but a small irony of the wars is a new attention to brain disorders, physical and emotional.

We attended the deployment ceremony at the Convention Center back in November before they were sent for training in the mid-West. There, we watched and listened to the state's political contingent (mostly Democrats in tony, blue-state Connecticut) make their speeches, of which I clapped for none. My brother is now a First Sergeant, which one hopes would put him in a slightly safer position. But these wars have been rather unforgiving according to rank. There is no real safe ground. And so, when our blue star flag goes in the window, we will still worry. When the news reports are read, we will still hold our breaths a little. And when he comes home again, we'll be there to help however we can.

Looking Backward and Forward

In the past (almost) year, I suppose that I'm dissatisfied with my own performance in blogging --- infrequency, jumbled sections pieced together like Frankenstein's monster, stodgy writing directed at a generic audience or at the other end of the spectrum colloquial writing with many sentences beginning with a verb, and a reliance on some filler material such as quotes are chief among the self-criticism --- but I suppose, also, that it comes from not having more time to devote to it. In the end, it's composed in fits and starts, has incomplete thoughts and lacks a theme. I need to find some peace in that.

Today, as the snowfall here in the Quiet Corner is nearing 6 inches, I have added Judith H. Dobrzynski's "Real Clear Arts" blog to my reading roll. One needs to be rather picky in choosing what to read these days --- try to sort out and highlight good prose from dreck.

Moving into the new year, I aim to make my writing more of the former and less of the latter.

Welcome to 2010!

I've never really done New Year's resolutions. If one wants to do something (or not do something), why wait for an arbitrary date and give the devil time?