A list on understanding what makes the news and what doesn’t:
The essay on how news stories are written to be balanced, even if they can’t be, in Sex, drugs, and cocoa puffs: a low culture manifesto by Chuck Klosterman
It’s not news, it’s fark: how mass media tries to pass off crap as news by Drew Curtis, an excellent examination of the types of non-news in the news.
Charlie Brooker’s Newswipe, especially this segment on the structure of a TV news story.
Compare and contrast two paragraphs from an article on heroin purity:
“We found people who snorted it lying face-down with the straw lying next to them,” said Patrick O’Neil, coroner in suburban Chicago’s Will County, where annual heroin deaths have nearly tripled – from 10 to 29 – since 2006. “It’s so potent that we occasionally find the needle in the arm at the death scene.”
and
Heroin metabolizes in the body so quickly that medical examiners often cannot pinpoint the drug as a cause of death unless there is other evidence to back it up – say, a needle or a syringe found near the body. Also, many victims use multiple drugs and alcohol, so citing a specific substance is often impossible.
A Multimedia List on the Subject of Ventriloquism
Ventriloquist Love, a song performed by Martin Mull
The Great Gabbo, a film starring Erich Von Stroheim
The Entertainer and the Dybbuk, a novel by Sid Fleischman
The Puppet Show, an episode of the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer
I’m not a big fan of Top (whatever number) lists, but this one is worth taking the time to enjoy it: Kon and Amir Present the Top 50 Hip-Hop Samples of All Time. They include 50 incredibly catchy soul tunes that made their way into various hip hop songs. I’m not convinced this will stay around forever, so make yourself a sandwich and get ready to take a detour into an astounding record collection.
Graphic Nonfiction That Involves Traumatic Tooth Loss
Smile, Raina Telgemeier
Laika, Nick Abadzis
The Photographer, Emmanuel Guibert, Didier Lefèvre, & Frédéric Lemercier*
*tooth loss in afterword
Say, friends, do you like my reviews? Then perhaps you might take a peek at the reviews at Unshelved: you may recognize a name!
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Agence Eureka has a lovely collection of cocktail and squash syrup labels (some here) that make me yearn for a genteel garden party with genteel drinks. Here is a recipe for syrop de groseille (might have to wait until currant season) and some cocktails to put it in.
Here is a fun craft activity to try (pretend there are helpful line illustrations like in kids’ magazines), making your own magazine!
1. Start a file in a word processing program that can save as a PDF (yours probably does, take a look under Save As or Export or whatever).
2. Every time you run across an interesting looking article online that you don’t have time to finish now, copy and paste it into that file.
3. When you have a good bunch of stuff there, turn it into a PDF.
4. Turn that PDF into a booklet with BookletCreator.
5. Print it out (double sided, flip short side).
6. Fold in half and staple.
This makes an awesome purse/man satchel sized magazine! Tips based on my own various mistakes:
Make sure you set “result sheet size” to Letter in BookletCreator, or to whatever size paper you have. Leaving it on Auto made it look funky.
Make sure you get all pages of the article on those web sites that break them up into pieces. It can be disappointing to run out of article when you read your magazine on the bus.
Make sure you have the article title marked out clearly if you end up losing some formatting, it’s nice to reset your brain for a new article.
Bonus points for making a nice cover.
“In the health area, over 80 percent of the users said they made a change in their diet after using library computers,” Crandall said, adding that he did not know whether the changes were permanent.
“One-third of Americans use library computers” Seattle Times, Wednesday, March 24, 2010