NYCity tickets coffee roaster for stinking up its industrial neighborhood. Methinks someone’s had too much caffeine. From the NYTimes:

 “From time to time,” he said, “what can be normal smells that one might appreciate in the city can be, if they continue for hours and hours, considered noxious by some people. We’ve given these violations to Krispy Kremes. We’ve given them to pickle manufacturers.”

 

 

An Austrailian mathemetician has figured out the best way to lace your shoes. From the NYTimes:

A shoe with two rows of six eyelets offers 43,200 different paths for a shoelace to pass through every eyelet, even with the added condition that each eyelet must contribute to the essential purpose of pulling the two halves of the shoe together.

Want to know his findings? Click the link.

 

The American Society of Newspaper Editors has suddenly discovered that reporters are not in touch with lower- and middle-class Americans. From the LATimes (free registration required):

 As recently as 1971, only 58% of newspaper journalists had college degrees; now 89% have degrees, according to the American Society of Newspaper Editors. But only 15.5% of the total population age 25 and older have finished college.

The median annual salary for “experienced reporters” working at newspapers with more than 250,000 daily circulation — the 40 largest papers in the country — was about $56,000 last year, according to a newspaper industry study. Pay for “senior reporters” — and for top reporters and editors at the largest of these papers — is substantially more. But median income for all U.S. workers over 15 is about $31,500.

OK, picture this. An unemployed 23-year-old laborer walks into the city room of, say, the Albany, N.Y. Times-Union and asks for a reporting job. No college, no clips, no experience, but he knows tons about the working-class community of the Capital District. Think he gets a job?

Of course not. First of all, he’s not even getting into the City Room of the T-U, because he first has to get past Security, which is designed to keep people like him out. Secondly, he probably doesn’t even read a daily newspaper, so what are the odds that he’s going to be asking for a job to begin with?

FYI, my starting salary at UPI in 1978 was $224.04 a week — about $12,000 per year. When I left in 1983, I was making $512 a week, which at $25,000 was top scale. Not much danger of getting rich there.

 

So there’s going to be a new face running the Treasury Department. I was wondering when that would happen; it struck me as odd that the Treasury Secretary was traipsing around Africa with Bono when the U.S. started bombing Afghanistan. Still, I wonder about this new guy.

It’s hardly unusual to pick someone from Industry to run Treasury, but it’s not like the U.S. rail business is so beautifully run that one of its leaders will cause the economy toss off its crutches and declare itself healed.

What’s more, it turns out that John Snow is a member of the Augusta National golf club — home of the Masters Tournament and currently under withering editorial and news-side heat from the NYTimes about its lack of female members. Snow will quit the club, of course, but the timing of his departure doesn’t resound with conviction.

Also, the WSJ last week listed 10 top candidates for the job — none of them Snow.

None of these things is exactly damning, but none is exactly encouraging either. Why is John Snow really the best candidate to run the U.S. Treasury Department?

 

You’d think that for a place that had so many reporters, there’d be better stories coming out.

I’ve been trolling around for reports from the Pentagon’s pre-invasion boot camp for journos. By far the best is from UPI’s Pam Hess. (Yes, Virginia, there’s still a UPI, even with some of the old hands at the switch — though the institution is of course vastly diminished).

7:30 a.m.: My “platoon,” the Third, musters outside the dormitory. As usual, two of our number are missing. It is never the same two people although it is frequently a certain Network News Star. This fact — along with our inability to line up, walk straight, or follow even the most basic directions — has earned us a nickname among the Marine trainers that will stick through the rest of the week: Booger Platoon.

It is strangely fitting. We are so bad we don’t even know we’re bad and we are blithely unconcerned when we find out. We wander around like demented kittens, defenseless and uncontrollable. We wear our Boogerness as a badge of honor. We are most definitely not Marines…..

Let the record show these are not friggin’ psychopaths. These are committed, underpaid, brave and physically fit young people who endure privation and follow any order issued to them under terrible conditions by their superiors, no matter how hare-brained, as long as it is lawful. It is not a job I would want myself, nor am I capable of it.

But out here under a cold moon next to a warm fire being addressed as “ma’am,” I can’t help but be impressed

The NYDaily News’s Dick Sisk (an old UPI hand himself) got a little too close to a phosphorus grenade but lived to write about it. Even Grandma eventually turned in a serviceable story, though its first piece was as dry as week-old pita bread.

 

You all know about the Apple “Switch” campaign. One of the spokespeople, a teenager named Ellen Feiss, became an instant Internet celebrity (for some small value of “celebrity”) not so much for what she said but because she truly looked and sounded like she was on another plane of sobriety when she said it.

Feiss, bless her heart, has been pushing away most of the attention but gave her first interview to the Brown (University) Daily Herald. Why the Brown Daily Herald? Who knows — maybe she took a campus tour. Pretty good interview, though — both questions and answers. If she’s a stoner, she’s a pretty on-the-ball stoner.

 

If you know a singer, you know that they’re heading into the heavy season now. If a vocalist isn’t busy in the months before Christmas and Easter — even if there isn’t a single other booking for the year — something is very seriously wrong.

For November 1 (All Saint’s Day), I was in a pretty successful J.S. Bach’s Missa Brevis in A at the church I sing in. It was fun — a small string ensemble, some brass, an organ, and 14 singers. On November 11, I was privileged to sing in New York City’s simple first-anniversary memorial service for the victims of Flight 587. (I’m all the way to the right in this picture; the combo is prominent in the coverage.)

Then last Sunday afternoon, my big choir sang an Ives’s Fourth Symphony and John Alden Carpenter’s “Skyscrapers” at Avery Fisher Hall with the American Symphony Orchestra. That was a lot of waiting around to do just a little singing, but the Ives in fascinating to hear up close.

This coming Saturday night, my early music group is performing, well, some early music. Small ensemble work is pretty much the polar opposite from something like the Ives, which calls for about 200 people on stage — nine of them percussionists. This concert will have 11 singers plus continuo. If you’re in town, come hear.

And in mid-December, I’ll be appearing in the New York premiere of a new work by the Chinese composer Tan Dun, who’s best known here for his score of the movie “Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon.” We’ll be performing his “Water Passion After St. Matthew,” a truly extraordinary piece of work, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave festival. I’m told it’s been sold out for months, but tickets sometimes become available.

And oh yes, then there’s Christmas week. But I don’t have the music for that yet, so it doesn’t really exist, right?

 

I am not alone.

I’ve known for some time that there are other Dan Rosenbaums out there. One of them is an economist, I think with an undergraduate degree from Princeton, where he played softball (Google is a wonderful thing). Another is an editor at Tennis magazine. Yet a third contributes every so often to Opera Digest. None of them is me.

I bring this up because there’s a music writer in Atlanta named Bill Wyman. He is not the former bass player for the Rolling Stones, though it now appears that some bored lawyer is worried about that. Funny story, and a good read with a kicker ending.

 

In a way, you can’t blame the Pentagon for wanting to keep reporters away from the action. Since the draft ended,  few writers have ever served in the military, so they don’t have much idea of what they’re writing about. Though it’s true that any good reporter can learn most any beat, it’s a little late for tutorials when bullets are flying.

So the Defense Department has taken a page from the playbook of any good PR effort: teach the beat. If a big company has a newbie reporter on its hands, the smartest thing the company can do is take the time to educate the new kid. It makes friends, and it gives the company a great opportunity to introduce its own spin from the get-to.

The Pentagon is running a Media Boot Camp, teaching journalists what it’s like to go to war. It’s a fine idea. One the one hand, it gives reporters some idea about how the military works and what they might face in a combat zone. On the other, it’s certain to engender some badly needed mutual respect between reporters and brass. And that can only help in getting accurate, timely and non-hysterical war reportage with actual eyewitness reports.

 

Just in time for Christmas, a couple of New York Post reporters have come out with a game that can make you — yes, even you — a tabloid-headline-writing machine. From Editor & Publisher:

“The one thing we really noticed in developing this is that most people who played the game, including journalists, ended up trying to make funny headlines, and not even worrying about points,” [retired crime reporter Mike] Pearl said. Released this month, Man Bites Dog has sold out (at about $10 a game) from many online distributors.

I don’t even need to try this to know it’s great. A bunch of years ago, Dick Stolley (founding editor of People and master hed scribe) ran a session at the Stanford Professional Publishing Program. He showed a dozen or so students a bunch of photo layouts and challenged us to shout out heds and deks, based solely on the picture. We had so much fun the session ran far beyond the allotted hour.

Keep a tabloid reporter from starving. www.areyougame.com