Shallow Thoughts : : 27

Clueless Cellphone Users

"Funniest headline of the week" award goes to The Register:

HELLO... I'M ON A PLANE...YES...A PLANE!!
Bad news for regular fliers

Okay, maybe it's only funny if you've heard someone doing this. For me, it was being at a spectacular scenic vista at the Grand Canyon and seeing someone get out of his car, pull out a cellphone, exclaim to his companion "Hey, I'm getting reception here", poke at it, and proceed to spend the next five minutes shouting inanities like:

I'M AT THE GRAND CANYON!

THE G R A N D C A N Y O N!

THE CANYON! YOU KNOW, THE BIG HOLE IN THE GROUND!
YES!

I guess The Register has encountered people like that, too.

Tags: headlines
[ 23:21 Sep 27, 2004    More headlines | permalink to this entry | ]

CBS explodes "liberal bias" myth

Nice editorial by Ethan Rarick in today's SF Chron: CBS explodes liberal media bias myth.

After watching the Bush/Gore campaign, I have a hard time believing that anyone really believes the news media have a liberal bias. (Hint: count the number of pages of free coverage each candidate got each day.)

Perhaps no one actually does believe it, and conservatives just say it to try to persuade the credulous.

But for anyone who wasn't paying attention during the campaign four years ago, Ethan Rarick's editorial gives a nice, and contemporary, example, comparing the flap over Dan Rather's documents on Dubya's military service, which turned out to be false (the documents, that is; the military service is probably false too, but that remains to be proven), with the non-flap over the similar but more serious (in that it led to declaring war on another nation, and to the deaths of many US soldiers) NY Times admission that they had been "taken in" by the president's misleading statements regarding WMD and the Saddam threat.

Reporters do seem inclined to be liberal. But publishers -- the people who actually control what gets printed and where -- are inclined to be conservative. It's not surprising: newspaper publishing is Big Business, especially in these days when most venues are served by one monopoly newspaper owned by a conglomerate publishing house.

Tags: headlines
[ 23:05 Sep 27, 2004    More headlines | permalink to this entry | ]

Biking the Flume Trail

We joined Bill and Benita over the weekend for some mountain biking. Saturday, we sampled their fabulous trail system (all hand-built technical singletrack on their own property) and Sunday we joined up with six other riders (and two Australian shepherds) for a ride on the famous Flume Trail at Tahoe (photos here).

Dave actually liked Bill & Benita's trails better than the Flume -- the trails themselves are a lot more fun and technical, even if the view isn't quite as good. Me, I'm not going to choose. I had fun both days.

Tags: travel
[ 18:31 Sep 27, 2004    More travel | permalink to this entry | ]