I hesitate to call most television reporting “journalism.� Yet, I got a very good taste of the difficulty of creating a TV news broadcast today in News On Screen. Our in-class writing assignment gave us 80 minutes to distill a NY Times article, some shots, and a couple interviews into a 300 word news story. At the end of that time, I wasn’t finished, nor was half of the class. It is very very hard to simplify down a story for television, to write to your footage, and to get the facts across in one and a half minutes of screen time. I have a newfound respect for news writers now, although I still don’t really approve of the whole process.

Last I wrote I fell asleep. Well, it took me until about now to really wake up, which is really…odd, but now I feel great. I’m awake, I’m healthy, and I’m loving listening to Miss Saigon on my new iTunes 2 installation.

Between that time and this, the ‘rents came over for Family Weekend. We hung out, they got to see one of my teachers, and I got to go to Cheesecake Factory (with Sophie and her parents), where we celebrated my mom’s birthday. Then I gave her a giant alligator, and challenged her to find a way to get it on the plane. Well, apparently, she succeeded, cause Crockett is safe and sound at home. Oh, and I got to meet Sophie’s dog Daisy. Aww!

Today was rain and cold, and it was fun because I got a chance to wear my big jacket for the first time. It is excellllllent! Big hood, very comfy, not too cold nor too hot. I like! I like!

Quiz today in CS, at 9:00am. But the quiz is late in the class, so I could have gotten there at, say, 9:40 and still been fine. But I didn’t.

Every day for the last week I’ve been going to bed before 1 AM and waking up before 8:15 AM. It just worked. My alarm is set for 10:00 AM, my body is set for 8. It WORKED, and flawlessly. Then my stuffy nose got the best of me and I figured, what the hell, I’m going to sleep anyway, I’ll take some of my Tylenol Allergy and Sinus medicine, it will help me sleep. Hah. It certainly did. That is the only change in my routine, and now I wake up…uh…now. And not my lucid self, but a walking zombie. Ten minutes I was saying something or other to Kelson and half way through I forgot what it was. Now I’ve forgotten completely. Damn you Tylenol!

I’m going back to sleep. No, wait, must….stay….awakeeeeeee………sdvnm,./kl; j

I was very pleasantly surprised to receive today an e-mail from the NPR Human Resources Department offering me the opportunity to apply for an internship in Washington, D.C. Of course, all college students are allowed and invited to apply, but after my poor experience last year trying to get the application information, I really appreciate NPR making the extra effort to let me know about the new application.

So for the summer I have two internship ideas – the Pew Internet & American Life internship, doing some research for a very respected organization, or the NPR one, doing some radio work for another greatly respected organization. And both of them are in DC. Hmm. I’ll apply for both and see if either wants me. If by some fluke they both do, then it becomes more complicated…

On second thought, I think I’d jump at the chance for NPR above all else. It would get difficult if NPR referred me to KCRW or KPCC, my local public stations, and it was a choice of that (and being at home) or the Pew thing. That would be a toughie…

Everyone assumes I’m against the war in Afghanistan. Truth is, I am happy that I have not yet had to decide my position. I don’t really know. I know on the one hand that war is hell and all that, that it takes it biggest tole on people my age – 18-25, and that it is bloody, evil, misguided, destructive, and counter-intuitive. On the other hand, of course, I know that there are many people out there that, for legitimate reasons or not, are violating the laws of the land and international conventions (eg the Geneva Convention) is terrible ways, and there is no easy diplomatic solution to bringing them to justice.


I won’t talk about the million things that everyone else talks about – anthrax, smallpox, war, recession, peace, civilians, children. I will say that I have long ago and frequently said that the US is in no way prepared for a real war in the new world. We haven’t been ready since the Soviet Union fell. We never got the organizations on the right track. Remember that just a few months ago President Bush brushed aside proposals by a joint senate and house comittee for an “office of homeland security,” saying that Dick Cheney would look at other alternatives (probably involving missile defense, cause look how helpful that would be in the present case). We will learn the hard way that hazmat units, decon teams, and counterterrorism units are vastly understaffed, underfunded, and underequipped, especially in the big cities where terror is most likely to strike. I’m just glad I’m not living in a major metropolitan center right now.


On a related note, and the real reason I am writing, is to point out yet another excellent article on Salon.com about the war. I really, really, really hope Salon stays in business, because their reporting is just the best I see anywhere. This article is headlined:

The sorrow of war

With every heartbreaking picture of innocent victims, more of the world turns against the U.S. bombing. But the American military has taken more care to minimize civilian casualties than any other armed force in the world.

Click here to visit, but without Salon Premium membership you don’t get to see much.

I am the first to criticize our military, but I also believe that our force is probably one of the best ones in the world with regards to precision. Their precision guided bombs may not actually be able to hit a quarter in the middle of Baghdad, and they really should stop claiming otherwise, but you do have to admit they they are lobbing cruise missiles at $10 million a pop instead of just carpet-bombing because they want to fight wars the right way, the way the Geneva Convention and the rules of war dictate. So I give them credit for that.


Okay, i’m done being patriotic. Back to my old complaining self. 🙂

Yet another reason I’m happy I don’t fly: Everyone who knows me knows I’m a big civil liberties nut and I have high-fallutin ideas about joining the EFF or something and protecting people’s rights. If you have doubt as to why this is needed, here is a nice story of security in the wake of the Sept. 11th attacks.

This day was crap, but that’s okay. I woke up, slept, woke up, slept, woke up really late. I missed picking up my laundry. I’ve felt tired and bored all day, despite me having a bunch of essays to write for next week. Actually, this week. But with the apparent time roll-back, this week could be considered still last week….

I made the remark to Kelson that, at 8:00, if it was 2 AM, it would actually be 9:00. I think that made him quite confused. It is just a measure of my here-ness today. How about some quick updates. I like bulleted lists, so we’ll go with that for now:

• Mock Trial is rolling. We’ve secured space for our meetings for the next two months (Schwartz 2), we’ve gotten pledges of support and funding from Legal Studies and American Studies, in addition to the inadequate funds from the Allocations board. Senate people have been very helpful it teaching us how to get things done around there. I spent three hours a few days ago making 4,400 copies using the duplicator machines in the Senate office. Thanks a lot to the Senate guy who helped me, although I don’t recall his name. Now I have to get binders, punch holes, and stuff. No collating on the duplicators, and to get the Copy Center to do it the _right_ way on real copiers would have cost $170, so we’ll just go with this.
  
• In the process of stretching I just smashed my right hand into the wood closet door. Ouch, ouch, ouch.
  
• I’ve gotten most aspects of Mac OS X running to my liking. It has a few programs that aren’t as stable as I’d like, but I’m running Unix stuff through XDarwin with the Oraboro-something-or-other window manager, so that’s cool. I can still have fun sucking Robin’s bandwidth with Opera, but I still need to install some font libraries with Fink, a package manager that I’ve been having some problems with…
  
• Yesterday a group of us went into Boston to eat at Legal Sea Foods. Ouch. I spent $40 on a filet mignon (medium-well, so ha jason, you raw-flesh eater!). I also good a $3 salad, a $3 side of onion strings, adding up to $30. Add about 25% for tax and tip, and you get maybe $37-ish. I paid $40 and didn’t get any change back. Hmm.
  
• On the bus I was crowded in with about 200 other people and I met Robin sitting on a seat. Grr. He’s been doing a bunch of work in the Physics department, setting up SSH servers and such. Sounds like fun, or not. But the best is yet to come when he gets to install a 16 or 32 node Beowulf cluster. Drool.
  
• COSI 2a still is teaching me nothing, I have ceased going entirely. I will have to do the cut and paste homework 3 for, i think, monday, and go to class for whenever the next stupid quiz is.
  
• I’m worried about GeekLog. The system is really nice and getting much nicer. I was a contributor, working on developing the new 2.0 version before I came to Brandeis. As at the time, 2.0 development is basically frozen without me. Sigh. And I lost all my changes in my hard drive crash, so it looks like they’ll just keep adding onto 1.x, the flawed codebase, for the foreseeable future, since I certainly don’t have a lot of time currently to commit to the project.
  
• I was pulled into eating at Sherman Dining Hall, despite my terrible experiences there. The food was very good, with even the vegan meal being quite tasty. Hmm. I’m going to have to try going back again and, if the quality wasn’t a fluke, I’ll be sending another letter to them, only this time not demanding a refund…
  
• I miss my cats. Oh, and my family. 😉
  
• My topic for a paper in conspiracy is conspiracy books dealing with the recent presidential travesty. Except the book Jerry Cohen gave me, Down and Dirty, by Jake Tapper, is actually very well research and very accurate. So not much in the way of conspiracy coming from him. Now I have another one by Vincent Bugliosi called The Betrayal of America, and I have some meat for my essay now, but the problem is I agree with many of his assumptions, which will make it hard for me to try to debunk them. Sigh. Guess I have to give the old journalistic mind a workout.
  
• Fluxx is a cool card game. I now own it.
  
• Len in at home in NY until Monday. Looking around the room, I figure maybe its time I clean up my stuff a bit.
  

Well, there is much more in the way of scattered thoughts, but this is getting unpleasantly long already, so I shall rest now. I’ve started to recreate my playlists in iTunes and get music to restore my collection. Having some background music is nice. And since Len is gone, I don’t have to worry about headphones! 🙂

I bought two cases (64 bottles) of water at Costco. I’m selling the bottles at 25¢ a piece, as a service to the dorm. My cost is something like 22¢. Justin wonders why I even bother if I’m not making a profit. Wow, he really is a libertarian to the core.

Our floor meeting tonight involved five people from Triskellion. Wow. I was thoroughly amused and now feel enlightened. They also answered my question well. And we got to learn more then we wanted to know about various acts that best go unnamed as long as my family is reading this.

Little to report as of late. I’m reading an incredibly interesting book about the American media entitled Amusing Ourselves To Death by Neal Postman. I am finding evidence of everything he says everywhere that I see a television, newspaper, or oral presentation.

Justin, Jonathan, and I went to Costco with Avi from the next building over (he has a very nice Saab with lots of trunk space for his drums). We bought three cases of water, three of soda, and three of root beer, plus muffins and assorted other fun stuff. I fog my favorite Alouet cheese concoction, now I just need to get some crackers and meats.

I’ve been reorganizing all of my music over the last few days, recovering from the Great Hard Drive Crash of 2001 ™. I’m finding stuff all over on all my different hard drives, plus I’m pulling a lot of things from Gnutella, friends, and my CDs to build my collection back up. In the process I’m discovering lots of music that I’d never heard before and really like, so I see a CD purchasing binge coming.

I’m also getting into techno a bit, which might scare my family members but isn’t really seen as very odd around here.

Now back to my Postman reading.

Even when you know exactly what is going to happen going in, it doesn’t make it any more fun. So I met with David (Peter, the Ed-in-Chief couldn’t make it) and we chatted for a bit. I have lots of fun stuff to say about technology, journalism, etc., etc., but I’ll can it for now, and wait until I see if this thing is salvageable.

I’m thinking if I get some free time I’ll hack a mood indicator into AgBlog. Since my first scheduled free time is somewhere around January, and thats when Mock Trial is picking up, I guess I’ll have to hold off.

Speaking of MT, we went before the allocations board, argued our case, asked for the small sum of $350 to cover expenses, and were granted $250. Not exactly sure why, but something to do with inclusiveness. So now we can send one team of 6-8 instead of two, so I guess we can include less people, but hey, it makes sense to someone.

Right now I go to watch The Manchurian Candidate for Conspiracy class.

Other things to do:

1. Add an essay section to AgBlog


2. Setup another roundtable thing for the Justice, and hope it works


3. Read Down and Dirty and write an essay for Conspiracy.


4. Raise my grade in News on Screen from a B+ to an A


5. Go retake the stupid hex quiz in CoSi in person to prove to Hickey that I can actualy do base 10 to base 16 conversions in my head. Not complex ones, mind you, but the easy ones don’t exactly require scratch work. Sigh…

So yesterday I receive a call from a one Dana Kelley who would like to talk to me re: an incident in Usdan. I was out all day so I didn’t call him back, so the next morning bright and early at around 8:45am he wakes me up to summon me to his office. We arrange to meet somewhere around 2, after I get out of classes.

Kelley:   So what do you have to say?
Me:       About what?
Kelley:   About the incident in Usdan.
Me:       I wasn't there.
Kelley:   All right then, goodbye, I'll see you before the
          Judicial Board.
Me:       On what charge?
Kelley:   Lying to a Brandeis police officer.
Me:       I'm not lying.
Kelley:   Well, an eyewitness saw you there.
Me:       Perhaps you can give me a date and time and place.
Kelley:   Robin plugged a...
Me:       A keyboard into a terminal.
Kelley:   Into an Aramark [unclear] machine.
Me:       I wasn't there.
Kelley:   He implicated you.  You work for the Justice?
Me:       Yes.
Kelley:   And you were going to write some big expose about how easy
          it is to steal money from the Aramark computer system.
Me:       Not exactly.  Not how you put it.  But sure, yeah.
Kelley:   Okay, I'll see you at the Judicial Board hearing.  Goodbye.

Funny, because I wasn’t there, but I was at other “events,” but that was the extent of the conversation. So yeah, fun.

Well, we got another broadcast e-mail just now:

TO: The Brandeis Community
FROM: President Jehuda Reinharz

Earlier this morning when a suspicious envelope arrived at the President‚s
Office, the Office of Public Safety immediately notified the Waltham Fire
Department, who, along with other local and state officials, investigated
the incident. They have completed their investigation and have concluded
that the envelope presented no threat to those in the building. Therefore,
employees have been advised it is safe to return to work. The University
responded to this perceived threat in exactly the way President Bush has
suggested, with a heightened sense of awareness. We urge all members of
the community to continue to conduct themselves in that manner.

We understand that these sorts of incidents create an inconvenience and we
appreciate everyone‚s patience and cooperation.
—
Delivered via the absolutely-everybody-for-emergencies-only mailing list.

A “suspicious” package arrived addressed to the president of the university. No details were released, but it is safe to say that there was probably some kind of powdery substance inside. Fun.

Being a chronicle or journal or whatever, it might be good to elaborate on semi-important events in my life right now. That said, I’m tired so I won’t. But look soon for nice info on: chartering a Mock Trial team, becoming an American Studies major, and editing newspapers.

Here is a schedule you should not envy, but it sure makes for an interesting day:

11:30am	Awake, stretch, shower, shave, print philosophy essay, go to class.
12:10pm	News On Screen. A discussion of medium and message in the Vietnam war, and also some talk about the war in Afghanistan now, although Prof. Socolow tried to steer us away from that until next week. Some very interesting points were made with regard to American’s perceptions of war and our tendancy to not want to see things that are occuring. CBS used a “queasiness quotient” during Vietnam to determine what to play — how would it make you feel at dinner time? At this point in the current conflict, the quotient is insanely low. We don’t want to see dead people, period. However, this may change as the conflict goes on and people start to stomach more.
1:40pm	Intro. Philosophy. We talk about various things, including visual perceptions and tricking the brain and such. We turn in essays, I play a bit of Bugdom on my laptop, interesting talk w/ Prof. Teuber about memes.
3:00pm	I was supposed to meet Kelson outside of Shiffman but he forgot, so I went and grabbed a piece of pizza and headed back to the dorm. Kelson and I met up and went to find Prof. Cohen to talk about Mock Trial as planned.
4:00pm	Not having found the American Studies dept. in the Rabb quad (I then realized that its somewhere else. Heh.), Kelson met his UWS TA to discuss his essay. I waited, but he didn’t return for a while, so at 4 I saw David, the Justice Features editor, and we talked for a while, then I went to find Cohen on my own.
4:40pm	With no Cohen in his office, I rendezvoused with David as planned to do some Justice stuff. I learned how to discuss editorial changes with writers and how to plan coverage.
6:00pm	I return to Cable and meet up with group going to dinner. I follow them but quickly decide that, not only am I not hungry, I have a fun headache and I should take a nap. I vow to call my grandpa (and try to get through for the 6th time) when I wake up. Whoops.
12:00am	Not exactly sure when I woke up, but I was probably comprehensible around midnight, which would be 9 PST, so no grandpa call. Discussed Mock Trial with Kelson for a while, helped Sara with her politics essay for a while, ate a lot of chocolate chip cookies (I bought 10 when I found that the cafeteria finally had some again), and then watched an episode of The Pretender before going to sleep, again. That would be what I’m doing now.

So that is my day. Noon to six, Midnight to four, its incredibly odd because I really wasn’t up very long at all, only ten hours, so maybe I’m making up for all the lost sleep during the week. Keep in mind I did stay up until about 4 the night before doing my Philosophy essay. This was not hard at all, because my sleep habits were so strange that 4 was when I did my best work. Dunno how well this going to work out.

Haven’t we been saying for years that the US is completely unprepared for a widespread attack on infrastructure? Not enough medical facilities, not enough antibiotics, not enough computer security? Oh, not to mention that many US nuclear power plants are woefully underprotected. Did I mention the anthrax fiasco? And smallpox? West Nile virus?


My conclusion: we’re screwed.

Mimi Lester is a 14 year old student in a school just down the street from the World Trade Center site. Today, she was interviewed by BBC World, and her words just filled me with so much hope. As best I can remember:

We’re all people, and just because they have been brought up believing things that we don’t believe in, we shouldn’t bomb the civilians.

She lives in the wreckage, military is all around, she has to show ID to get home after school, she and her 7 year old brother are subjected to searches before they can enter their neighborhood. Yet she still worries about the lives of people half a world away.


What also struck me on the BBC this morning is that they go all around the world for their reports on all kinds of conflicts. In the US they never do that, except on NPR. I don’t think I like US media that much.


In other news, the US is killing a bunch of innocents.


Oh, and now Busy is saying there will be terrorism by anthrax. Fun.