Imagine for a moment....

     .....that your company transferred you to a big city up north, perhaps New York, or out West to San Francisco...someplace you  would suddenly have to raise your school aged kids.
     How would you manage to raise them to hold your Alabama values without having them influenced by the liberal environment in your new home town?
     Now think of the question in reverse.

     Read this article in The Nation about "Raising a Progressive (i.e. liberal) Kid in Alabama!"

In-humanity

     The Washington Post story calls the photo below "poignant". I say just plain sad will do.
     The mother elephant was apparently poisoned to get her off land in Malaysia that new owners want to convert into plantations. The Pygmy elephants were just in the way. Ten have been found dead.

Detroit, Lord, Detroit

You'll find an interesting collection of photo---like this one!--- of the motor city, in Wired this morning. The site reports Detroit has lost half of its population in 40 years.

Moore Paints Alabama LOSS?

     Daniel Moore is known for his painted tributes to The Crimson Tide, even though the University of Alabama sued to have his work declared a copyright violation.
     Now he's going to create a painting commemorating an Alabama loss. It will honor Texas A&M QB Johnny "Mr. Football" Manziel in the 29-24 win over Alabama, reports The Birmingham News.

Medicaid under Obamacare

What percentage of YOUR state's adults would be covered? For Alabama, the answer is 11.3%, but Governor Robert Bentley, a physician, has decided the state will not agree to the expansion.  See the original Pew Center on The States chart here.

Weather

     There is a potential for severe weather in parts of Alabama today...and the CBS 8 First Alert Weather Network team is on duty to keep you up to date. Join us in Montgomery on WAKA-CBS 8 now!

Only the small die young.

     An NPR commentator is causing a furor over...over...whether big creatures live longer than small ones. Really.
     Despite her misuse of the word literally, it's an interesting piece. Read it here.

MMMM # 260 -- The News responds & FREE Video!

     The Birmingham News has responded, kinda, to Diane McWhorter's op-ed piece in the New York Times last week.
     "Community engagement specialist" (is some retired general in charge up there?) Edward T. Bowser wrote this piece for the paper and their online alter-ego, al.com.

***    

   The EWTN Catholic TV cable network operating out of Irondale, near Birmingham, Alabama, is offering free high quality video for TV stations of an anti-abortion event in Washington in March. They wrote:

Irondale, AL – Every year, tens of thousands of people converge on our Nation’s Capitol for the annual March for Life. And every year, organizers complain that the media ignores it. We think that may be because media “outside the beltway” don’t have access to footage or can’t afford it. EWTN Global Catholic Network is the largest religious media network in the world and we’d like to change that.

This year, for the first time, we’re offering our own top quality video clips, sound bites and high resolution photos from Washington, D.C.’s largest march of the year – FREE! We ask only for appropriate attribution to the EWTN Global Catholic Network.

      Remember the old line about there being no such thing as a free lunch?
      I expect there will be few stations that use the "free video". It comes from A TV network owned by a church that funds the anti-abortion effort worldwide. It won't show anything remotely pro-abortion-rights. And the reverse is true as well. A pro-abortion-rights group's video of the march would only show scenes that might reflect badly.
     I've written about VNR's in previous MMMM postings....they are professionally produced "TV reports" created for companies to sell their products and services. A TV station in this market has run them before... without telling viewers they were produced by a firm with a dog in the fight, so to speak.
     If there is bias in network coverage of the march in D.C., replacing it with bias in the other direction is hardly a solution.


[The Monday Morning Media Memo is a regular feature of www.timlennox.com.]

Now THIS is a card.

     You can't beat this Valentine's Day card for cleverness! 
     I know the "needle" is NOT really playing the "record", but it sure is convincing. (-:

 

I found a list of top musical valentines cards from 2012 that's worth a listen, with Sinatra in the number one position.

Are There Really Tornado Alleys?

     Probably not, says a professor who has studied the historical creation of such geographic areas compared to the reality of tornado strikes.
    Virginia Tech Social Scientist Jennifer Henderson finds:

“.....no universal definition...exists; they shift, expand, and shrink with different publications, authors, and purposes. They are sociopolitical rather than scientific concepts.”

     Alabamians who have lived though tornado outbreaks more than once may argue with her findings.....(you can see poster with them here.).... but if avoiding living in certain areas does no good whatsoever in tornado avoidance, I guess we should know that.

Obit

     Al Benn at The Advertiser has written a deserved tribute to a researcher at the Alabama Department of Archives and History who passed away this month.
     Rickie Brunner was a help to me on many stories I produced, for both APT and CBS 8.
     Al reports she died on January 15th after surgery.
     There's a saying that a library disappears when a researcher dies, and surely that is true of Rickie more than most. She knew where to point me, or knew who knew where to point me. Being of assistance to reporters never hurt any institutions public reputation, an I'll bet she won tons of good will through her efforts.
     Rickie was 62.

Oh, THAT law...!

     All the "aggressive, very sassy advertising" in the world isn't going to erase the battering Alabama's reputation has suffered over the past two years, even as...(the state's immigration law)...was being dismantled in the federal courts.

                   Joey Kennedy, in The Birmingham News

Bug's Long View

The Milkey Way

Dung Beetles use the stars to navigate their low-down journeys?

Cheesy Literature

     A NY Times story that probably only happens in places like, well, New York. Who knew?
     I will be looking more closely at the cheese displays in the finer grocers in Alabama now.

DWO

     Drivers who are obese are more likely to die in an accident. So reports an Emergency Medicine Journal.
     That makes the obesity problem in Alabama even more serious.

Fired Sale

     The Birmingham News and The Press Register in Mobile are following in the footsteps of The Montgomery Advertiser and selling their new buildings. Because they "no longer fit the character" of the company operations.
     The decision comes after the company's owners, Advance Publications, laid off hundreds of employees and cut publication to three days a week. They'll keep the parts of the complexes that hold their massive presses.
     Both buildings are relatively new.  The Birmingham News cut the ribbon on their new building in 2006, calling it a "building for the future". The Press Register opened its new building in 2004.

Print Your Next House

     An architect plans to use one of those 3-D printers that can make three dimensional objects to create an actual house. Not a cheap house, mind you, but still, a house.
     These devices truly may change life as we know it, unlike the Segway people movers, which as far as I can tell have changed little except for the lives of some mall security guards.

     The co-founder of Google, spotted wearing the Google Eyeglasses--"Google Glass"-- in a subway. The story is here.

     I just hope that the people developing cutting-edge devices like the glasses remember the huge audience out there who just want a thing to work, without requiring an engineering degree.
     Make it intuitive...and make it kind on Seniors too. (-:

Via John Archibald

     After The Birmingham News critique included in today's MMMM, I felt it right to share this Teaching Tolerance video that John Archibald linked to in his Birmingham News column today.
     I wish he had responded in some way to the NY Times column, but one step at a time. Good column, John.

Medicine

Take Avoid Aspirin

 A new study finds regular aspirin use increases the risk for the biggest cause of blindness in old age.
So here we are, all gulping down baby aspirin every day after all of the doctors said it reduces the risk of death, and we find out we'll be alive but blind? Really?

MLK Day 2013

A portion of the Civil Rights Monument, Montgomery, Alabama

MMMM # 259 -- "True" & Consequences

     What is truth? Student in my TV-Radio course learn in their first class that the one rule with no exceptions is that their copy must be true. But it takes more than a single session to cover the meaning of the word. Are you writing the truth if you quote someone, and that person is lying? Sure. How about if you have reason to believe the person is wrong? Uh...
     Anyway, questions about the truth were all across the media landscape this past week.

     There was one story in which FOX News used The National Enquirer as its source. Truth?

     And Sports Journalism also had a week of defending truth falsehood telling.
     Notre Dame's Manti Te'o was defending his own truth...an apparently made-up online girlfriend who "died", and, of course, Lance Armstrong, who admitted his years of lies about performance enhancing drugs. Were sports journalists too willing to accept both "truths"?
     Washington Post columnist Melinda Henneberger saw the contradiction in the Te'o story immediately. Why was Notre Dame so willing to go along with the fake sports story, but covered up the  true story she had detailed about players being allowed to compete against Alabama despite sexual abuse charges against them?
     [added]---And Diane McWhorter rips into The Birmingham News in a New York Times Op-Ed piece for what she says was their failure to report the truth, and for complicit behavior during The Civil Rights era, suggesting they have blood on their hands.]


[PLUS: In case you missed it...The University of Texas built a beautiful new $54-Million "new media" building, and then decided to ban old media from it. A box for distributing the student newspaper was located in front of the building, but administrators had it removed because of worries about trash...not the kind in he paper, but discarded paper littering the grounds. Perhaps they should have installed a charging station for pads instead? The decision by "lower assistant deans" was later withdrawn and the machine is back.]

[AND: She's just one person, but students considering journalism may want to read this article by an Indian woman who had a great job as a reporter for the BBC and decided to make an early career U-Turn.]

[The Monday Morning Media Memo is a regular feature of www.timlennox.com.]

Poor New Yorkers

“My niece just bought a home in Atlanta for $85,000,” she said. “I almost spend that on rent and utilities in a year. To them, making $250,000 a year is wealthy. To us, it’s maybe the upper edge of middle class.”

A New Yorker quoted in a NY Times article today. 

Coming Monday in the MMMM

The cardinal rule of journalism. 
Truth.

What Cost Survival?

     Some states in the US have tried to recoup the cost of rescuing someone who puts themselves in harm's way by sending a bill to the endangered individual....wonder how much this French sailor would pay for the cruise ship that went 50 hours out of its way to pluck him from the ocean off Tasmania in the middle of nowhere, so far from land a helicopter couldn't be used?

Da-da-da-da-da-da-da--BATMAN!

 

A collector has paid $4.2 Million for the original Batmobile.

USS Hatteras Civil War Shipwreck - Blueview 3D Sonar fly through

(As I've posted before, scientists have conducted a detailed exploration of the wreckage of the USS Hatteras, worried that storms will destroy what remains in just 60 feet of water off Galveston, Texas. The ship was the only US ship sunk by a Confederate vessel---The CSS Alabama---during the Civil War. Tim)

Published on Jan 10, 2013

In September 2012 ExploreOcean partnered with renowned maritime archaeologist Dr. James Delgado and his team from NOAA, as well as the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, Texas A&M Galveston, the Texas State Historical Commission, and others on a two-day expedition in the Gulf of Mexico.

The goal was to create a thorough 3D sonar map of the USS Hatteras wreck site. Through the great support of Teledyne BlueView, ExploreOcean provided sonar equipment, and an independent operator, James Glaeser of Northwest Hydro. Partners showed up with no fewer than 15 scuba divers to assist in the setup and operation of the sonar on the ocean floor for measurement, assessment, and photography of the wreck site. The result is the 3D flyover video above.

A Toast To Editor Jay!

.....who located this story about some very aged scotch, very much on the rocks.
     In fact were it not for the alcohol content, it would have been the rocks.
       Cheers!

Welcome back APR

     I've been without my early morning dose of the BBC on the way to work each morning since just before Christmas, when something damaged the Alabama Public Radio antenna broadcasting 88.3 to the Montgomery area.
     And while there are two other NPR affiliates that serve the area (From Troy University and Alabama State University), neither of them carry the BBC overnight. Plus their scheduling of other NPR and PRI programs varies, so it has been a long month.
     Finally 88.3 is back, though APR notes on its website that they are broadcasting on reduced power.
     People get into habits with media. They'll watch the same TV news program for years strictly out of habit, and radio too, Sometimes it's because the program has maintained its image, like 60-Minutes, other times not so much.
Tick Tick Tick Tick.

Music

     The group Alabama is taking a few thousand of their (paying) fans on a cruise.

     And Elton John is going to perform in Montgomery, an event so big it called for a news conference by the Mayor.
     No word on whether Rush Limbaugh will open for him.

Spring Flowers

     The wet January we've had in Montgomery should help those "spring flowers", as the saying goes, and now there's a report that climate change is causing earlier and earlier blooming by those flowers.

Cops on Camera

     There are new developments in the continuing story of police in Philadelphia arresting people videotaping them as they make arrests.
     Suits are being filed.

Reconstruction

Rep. Jeremiah Haralson

     Came across this photo of a black Alabama Reconstruction-era Congressman who's death caught my eye. He was killed "by a wild animal" in Colorado in 1877. But Congressman Jeremiah Haralson's life was equally interesting!
     For example: he had been a slave, but was friends with Jefferson Davis!

We The (more) People

 Earliest known photo of The White House

     The rules for the White House website that some folks used to petition secession for Alabama and other states have been changed. The number of signatures needed to get an actual response to a petition has been increased to 100,000. So reports the L.A. Times.
      Before that it was 25,000, and that many people signed the petition calling for Alabama to go it alone. Many of those people weren't even Alabamians.
     One of the new petitions calls on the White House to go back to 25,000. What happens if it gathers 100,000 names?
     The only current petition mentioning Alabama is the one calling on states that have not ratified the 1972 Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to do so. 

CLEARLY Curiosity

Without the dusty lens cap on, the cameras on Curiosity show an amazing clarity in photos, like this composite of its wheels!

Faith Matters

     I've produced a report for the CBS 8 News at 6:00 on Thursday night. 
     It's part of the relatively new "Faith Matters" series, and it tells the story of twin stained glass exhibits at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Art.
       For folks who live outside the Montgomery Market, the piece will be is now online at www.waka.com later that night. here.

The South

 Sou(ch)thern

     George Packer, writing in The New Yorker, sends a warning to the Republican dominated South, though I doubt it will be heard, much less listened to. Two examples: 

"The region was an American underbelly in the semi-tropical heat; the manners were softer, the violence swifter, the commerce slower, the thinking narrower, the past closer."

When Ronald Regan... "began the 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, scene of the murder, in 1964, of three civil-rights workers, many Southerners heard it as a dog whistle."

Read it all here.

Mississippi?

Can someone explain to me how Mississippi seems to have found a way to keep the flu at bay...with only local cases reported?

MMMM # 258 Wallace's Best Known Speech, RIP Patterson

     Today is the 50th Anniversary of the former Governor's Segregation Now, Segregation, Tomorrow, Segregation Forever speech, a speech that got widespread coverage by the TV networks that evening. and the next day's papers. It would have been a "trending topic" had Wallace existed in the ear of The Internet.
     1963 was a watershed year for the Civil Rights movement, and today's anniversary is just the first in a series to be commemorated.

     If you stand at the top of the Alabama Capitol Building steps, you will see a marker where Jefferson Davis was sworn in as president of The Confederacy.
     There is no such marker for the Wallace speech, which was made from atop a platform built over the steps of the capitol building facing Dexter Avenue.
     If you walk down Dexter Avenue half a block, you'll come to the Dexter-King Memorial Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King launched his mission as a leader of the Civil Rights Movement.
     Quite a convergence of history in such a small area.
     This Thursday, Historian Dan Carter will speak at the Department of Archives and History about the Wallace segregation speech.

[Also, we note the passing of the former progressive editor of The Atlanta Constitution, Eugene Patterson. Among his columns was one about the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, the 50th anniversary of which will come in September. It was titled One Little Shoe, and he said he wrote it weeping. The 89 year old Patterson died Saturday.

 "I was regarded as a Southern turncoat by many of my critics. But I didn't think I was. I thought I was leading us in the direction the South had to go, which was toward justice."

RIP, Mr. Patterson, RIP]

[The Monday Morning Media Memo is a regular feature of www.TimLennox.com]

If anyone cares....

...I'll take one for my next birthday.

The 2013 Chevy Corvette.

 

Sister, I have Sinned

This is a tuna fish.

     Lance Armstrong is set to go on Oprah Winfrey's show on Monday and confess, despite years of denials, that he did use performance enhancing drugs for many, many years of his career.
     A story in the Detroit Free Press headlines the event "PR, not journalism", and that's true enough, though I think audiences have become less and less concerned about what kind of show they are watching. Entertainment Tonight and Ellen are lumped together with the evening network newscasts and 60 Minutes.
     Personally, I believed Armstrong's denials, almost to the very end.
     Perhaps that's part of my insistence in the presumption of innocence for all suspects.
     Tomorrow he'll admit his lies, and probably not be asked many harsh questions.
     He'll likely have to return a lot of awards and a lot of money, but with Oprah's approval of his mea cuppa in hand, perhaps he can recover and be strong again.

Miss Ringer 2013

     Miss "New York" was named Miss America last night, but she was a ringer from Alabama.
     24 year old Mallory Hagan was born in Opelika, after all, and attended Auburn University, and even competed for Miss Alabama several years ago. The 24 year old moved to New York way back in 2007.
     Here in Alabama, we virtually never grant real statehood status to an interloper from outside.
     If you, and preferably your Great-great grandparents, weren't actually born in the state, you are and will forever be, at least an outsider, if not an actual Yankee.
     Apparently New Yorkers don't give a hoot, and will let anyone wear their name.
     Three on a String's Bobby Horton has proclaimed me an actual Southerner, despite my accidental place of birth, and that should be good enough for any of you objecting to this posting. And anyway, I never even considered entering the preliminaries here.

Miss Alabama, Laura Bryan, who was actually born here---in Decatur---placed in the top 12.

Perspective

If you are feeling down, it may help to realize that our existence is miniscule.
     Science has now measured the so-far largest object in space.
     IF you were traveling at the speed of light, it would take you a mere four billion years to cross it.
     Puts that traffic ticket in perspective, no?

Really????

     Someone who has smoked heavily for 30 years should be tested for lung cancer.
That's the rather DUH conclusion of the Medical community this morning.
     There is some logic to it all, since they now believe earlier diagnoses can save lives. But still, a pack a day for 30 years? Any they need to be told to be checked?

Uh, NO!

     Residents of Alabama and eight other states have received an official answer to their pleas to secede from the union.

NO!

     

     The White House "We The People" website posted a response to those pre-election online petitions, though the election itself probably should have been sufficient. It points out we got the answer to that question when went through the bloodiest war in US history 150 years ago.