A sample text widget

Etiam pulvinar consectetur dolor sed malesuada. Ut convallis euismod dolor nec pretium. Nunc ut tristique massa.

Nam sodales mi vitae dolor ullamcorper et vulputate enim accumsan. Morbi orci magna, tincidunt vitae molestie nec, molestie at mi. Nulla nulla lorem, suscipit in posuere in, interdum non magna.

Brooklyn half

So 1:41:15 in the Brooklyn half-marathon this morning… good for a 7:43 pace, and 606 out of 3325 finishers (520 out of 1951 men).

I was pretty alarmed when I ran the first mile and the split was 6:50 – but afterwards people were saying the first mile’s measurement was off. For the first four […]

People of interest

So John Evander Couey, the “person of interest” in the disappearance of 9-year-old Jessica Lunsford, has confessed to her murder.

As sad and horrific as that is – can I make a side point? Even yesterday, police were denying Couey was a suspect, opting for the nebulous phrase “person of interest.”

CNN’s Sara Dorsey: “John […]

ultramarathon man

Good NYT article on ultramarathons:

Dean Karnazes thinks that comfort, convenience and quick gratification – the Big Three of the middle-class American lifestyle – are not making us happy and that we should seek out more suffering.

“Dostoyevsky had it right: ‘Suffering is the sole origin of consciousness,’ ” he writes in his new […]

last statements

I was doing a little research on executions in California for a Scott Peterson sidebar when I stumbled across this page from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice on their executed inmates.

The page details the last statements of many of the 340 convicts Texas has executed since 1982. A few samples:

“Yes I do […]

more details on gma incident

I just updated my account of the GMA blowup …

A few more details. Apparently this was literally Nagel’s first assignment, and he didn’t realize he was in the live shot. Nobody at GMA wants to travel, so they use these newbies, and it finally came back to bite them.

Basically, the plan […]

media survey

I was one of a random sample of journalists selected to take a survey by the Annenberg Foundation’s Commission on the Press, which I did yesterday by web poll. (They called to remind me that I hadn’t taken it, so it seems to be serious). There’s obvious limits as to how insightful any multiple-choice survery […]

15 minutes of fame

So my genius is finally being recognized!Well, either that or the screenshots are incredibly popular. Thank you Michelle Malkin, Crooks and Liars, TV Newser, Newzjunky, Wizbang, the AIM blog, and Newsblues. Four thousand visitors in 24 hours I guess isn’t much compared to the ~700,000 people who read what I write in my day job, […]

how to lose an interview

As people familar with the media business know, the network morning shows are the only segment of the network news business actually gaining viewers. They’re actually quite profitable … and therefore very, very competitive. Apparently the intense competition even extends to “friendly” softball matches.

Stories of dirty tricks abound. I’ve also reliably heard of instances […]

fantasy draft

So had the fantasy baseball draft this morning … I was half-asleep for it. Twelve team Yahoo! head-to-head league. Had the first overall pick, went with Pujols. Schilling and Eric Chavez with No. 24 and 25. Stole Brad Penny in the 17th round. We’ll see.

wisdom from Barron’s

Commentary by Howard Gold:

[W]hen it comes to the news, there’s no substitute for the mainstream media. Despite our problems, we do our best to report as honestly and professionally as we can.

The American people clearly agree. Numbers don’t lie.

goodbye dan!

(Oops – I wrote this post earlier, but somehow never posted it. Old news now, I guess – Oh well!) So Dan Rather is gone, and I missed his final goodbye, dammit. I don’t care what y’all thought in the blogosphere — I liked Dan. Yes, he had his flaws, but jeez — what an […]

blogospheric musings

Here’s a portion of a comment I wrote on my Giuliana Sgrena article. I was so impressed with my reasoning, I decided to make it it’s own post! (I edited myself, slightly).

The mainstream press certainly has plenty of flaws, and there sure is some dishonest reporting out there. But I think American journalism is […]

Falun Gong

The Falun Gong protesters outside our building I wrote about here are still there, more than a month later.

There’s now only a handful of them — but today they raised their protest up a notch with a bit of creepy performance art. There’s one person being kept in an itty-bitty cage (maybe 4×4) […]

coptic cop-out

So there was a lot of blogospheric speculation that Muslim extremists may have been behind quadruple-murder of a Coptic Christian family of four in Jersey City last January. On Friday, authorities charged two men with the murder, including the upstairs tenant of the family. It seems like a rock-solid case against the pair, with video […]

martha martha martha

Spent today up outside Martha Stewart’s home in Bedford, N.Y. It was cold! And we couldn’t even cluster in our cars, had to park two miles away. But before I got there, she sent out hot chocolate to the press corps. How nice was that???

terrorists vs. insurgents

Riehl World View takes the MSM to task for calling the guerilla fighters in Iraq “insurgents” rather than “terrorists.” Other bloggers have the same gripe here, here, and here.

I explained a little bit here why I generally use the term “insurgent” in my articles, but I thought I’d defend my usage a bit more […]