Colbert interview links
Here is the main index page for recent Colbert interviews, and here is a direct link to the one I did with him (or he did on me, or whatever) last night. Another direct link: here.
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March 2007 Archives
March 28, 2007
Life is interesting (Gotham edition)
Staying at the unbearably hip Hudson Hotel in NYC. Too hip to need normal-sized rooms; too hip to need more than two light bulbs per room (three, counting a little desk light) or fridge or other features standard at, say, Hawthorne Suites. Ah, variety in life.
But hip enough to have the front entrance jammed with beautiful people in their 20s.
Colbert-ology, or what you know if you've seen the show live..
... as I did, a couple of hours ago, for what will be broadcast a couple of hours from now.
* Extremely nice-seeming guy (out of persona), which is another way of saying: phenomenal acting job the instant the in-persona segments begin.
* Larger and sturdier-seeming guy in person than on TV, reversing the normal "gee, you look different in person" effect. The normal rule is that famous people look smaller in real life than you're expecting, with a few obvious exceptions
Continue reading "Colbert-ology, or what you know if you've seen the show live.." »
March 26, 2007
The theater of "security," part 1037
United Air Lines, San Francisco-Dulles, oversold plane, passengers fighting to avoid being bumped. My wife and I luckily end up with really nice seats. In keeping with our larger attitude these first few days back from China, we are actively grateful for every comfort.
While waiting for the flight we end up sitting in the area where all the flight attendants are congregating and chatting about their schedules. From this vantage point, 30 minutes before boarding time, we see two people who are obviously this flight's air marshals walk down the jetway toward the plane. To ensure the safety of the traveling public, I won't give further details, except to say:
March 25, 2007
The hot frogs ask: Et tu, Al?
I finally took the unwise step of searching Google News for recent uses of the (totally fictitious) boiled-frog cliche.
Sigh. Of the many examples, these two were most dispiriting:
March 23, 2007
What you first notice if you're in America after six months in China...
It is obvious, but: The wealth. The things. The overall abundance. (And, yeah, well, that you can speak English.) Plus, how clean the air is, and how many trees and birds and flowers there are, and how few unfinished edges -- open ditches, stacks of construction beams -- you come across. Since I'm in Northern California I haven't yet had the cliched reaction of how large the people themselves look. But I notice how sparse they seem to be on the streets, compared with any Chinese town.
The name for America in Chinese and several other Asian languages is 美国, or meiguo, "beautiful country."
Continue reading "What you first notice if you're in America after six months in China..." »
March 22, 2007
Reason to live: beer in Shanghai, cont.
Now that I have spent 24 hours in America, where every product is available every place all the time, this observation seems pathetic, but: this was what I was excited about the day I left Shanghai.
The best news I have heard on the globalization front in a long, long time is that into the sea of indistinguishable, flavorless, soulless, depressing Tiger, Chinese-Suntory, Chinese-Carlsberg, Qingdao, REEB, and the rest of the sorry lot will soon arrive.... good beer. Great beer! Rogue Dead Guy Ale!
Continue reading "Reason to live: beer in Shanghai, cont." »
March 21, 2007
Airline security update: the knives are back!
Shanghai-San Francisco, UAL, 10 hours+ in the plane, the magic of business class! I am tall enough, and old enough, and have had enough experience with the 31" seat pitch in economy, to appreciate every minute in which my knees are not jammed into the seat ahead.
Bigger surprise: full set of metal cutlery with the meal, knife too!
Continue reading "Airline security update: the knives are back!" »
March 20, 2007
Translation tool bonus: Pera-kun and Wakan
In the current issue of the Atlantic, I have a tech column about new translation tools by Google and Yahoo for coping with "hard" languages, notably Arabic and Chinese.
Here are two more free utilities I learned about too late to include in the column, but which I now use frequently for dealing with Chinese.
Continue reading "Translation tool bonus: Pera-kun and Wakan" »
March 19, 2007
Silent Spring
A week ago I noticed a dark object arcing across the sky, at eye level from our 22nd-floor apartment in Shanghai. I just caught it in peripheral vision, rather than looking at it directly. Without thinking consciously, I began speculating: maybe a hawk? Maybe one of those turkey vultures that seem to show up against stormy springtime skies? Maybe just a crow, or a large and very dark pigeon?
Then I turned and saw what it was: a black heavy-duty plastic trash bag, swooping up and down in the turbulent wind. I thought a minute more and realized what I had been seeing but not noticing through the previous months: there are no birds in big Chinese cities.
March 17, 2007
Congressional hearings update: welcome back, C-Span
As mentioned previously here and here, Congressional committee hearings are the most interesting and usually the most important parts of what the House and Senate do. But until now they have been nearly impossible to observe if you didn't queue up that morning outside the hearing room in Washington, if C-Span didn't choose that particular session to cover, or if you didn't tune into C-Span (or set the TiVo) between 1:45am and 3:20am when the hearing was being shown. All that is about to change.
The main players in this process have been Carl Malamud, who has been forcing the issue; House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, to whom Malamud recently delivered his "unsolicited report" explaining how webcasts of hearings could be made available in a standardized, searchable, downloadable form; and of course C-Span, which has recently done something very admirable.
Continue reading "Congressional hearings update: welcome back, C-Span" »
March 16, 2007
Improbable but true: Colbert Report appearance March 27
Or at least, improbable but currently scheduled. First trip to the US in six months coming up soon. If current plans hold, it will include an appearance on the Colbert Report on March 27. We'll see.
I just hope that my latest unfortunate made-in-China haircut, an unintended Tintin-style (but for the middle aged) fauxhawk has come closer to growing out by then.
March 15, 2007
Happy Birthday, Tom
At the White House press briefing on March 15, 1977, Jody Powell, then the press secretary for President Carter, had some important business to cover. The President was about to give his first major speech on foreign policy, an address to the U.N. General Assembly, and Powell would offer a preview. There were twists and turns to discuss in the development of Carter's National Energy Policy, which he had introduced in a "fireside chat" in February and which he would lay out in detail in a major address in April. The Administration proposed to liberalize the rules for Americans who wanted to travel to Cuba, North Korea, Cambodia, or Vietnam. And so on.
But before getting into the murk of policy, Powell announced a bit of in-house news. The first child born to a member of the new administration's staff had made his appearance. Very early that morning, Thomas Mackenzie Fallows had been born at George Washington University Hospital; he and his mother, Deborah, were both doing well.
Thirty years to the day later, both are still doing very well. To Jody Powell, thank you for this consideration. To our son Tom: Happy Birthday today!
'Declaring Victory' on free part of Atlantic site
The National Magazine Awards are a highly quirky part of journalistic culture, but magazines naturally embrace any good news they offer and scratch their heads at the nuttyness of it all when the results are disappointing -- I mean, "surprising." Meaning no disrespect to anyone, it was, umm, surprising last year when ESPN: The Magazine beat The New Yorker in the "General Excellence" category.
This year's crop of finalists was just announced, and the news the Atlantic will embrace is that we are in the finals in three categories, including my "Declaring Victory" article for the "Public Interest" award. The Atlantic's web site has, for now, made its nominated entries (and many past winners) freely available, not just for subscribers. My article, from September 2006, is here.
March 14, 2007
Observer vs. Economist, or Yanks vs Redcoats yet again
The fraternity of American journalists who have dared speak irreverently of The Economist in public has just grown by 25%:
Previous members were: Michael Lewis (soon after Liar's Poker); Richard Stengel (in his pre editor-of-Time days); "Humphrey Greddon" (not in Zuleika Dobson but in yesteryear's Spy, under what must have been a pseudonym, and if I were a New York guy I'd know who the writer really was); and me, 15+ years ago. We now welcome to the club Tom Scocca of the Observer, on the strength of this offering, which (disclosure) refers back to other members, especially Stengel and me.
The 1991 Washington Post article of mine that Scocca mentions is here, and the updated intro to it is here.
If I've lost track of other people who meet the eligibility standards, sorry! And, by the way, the people I've come to know from The Economist are actually very nice. You can't help admiring the feat they have pulled off.
Carl Malamud campaign, updated
As mentioned earlier, Carl Malamud has been campaigning to get the real, juicy, usually most important parts of Congressional deliberations -- the numerous committee hearings that take place each day, not just the kabuki-like stylized rhetoric of the House and Senate floor so familiar from C-Span -- availabile for searchable, free, downloads on the internet. Most committees already produce their own webcasts, but there is no easy, standardized way to get at them.
Malamud has just released what he calls an "unsolicited report" to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi about the importance and practicality of his scheme. It is worth reading -- and, from what I can tell, worth implementing. Check it out.
March 13, 2007
Update: something must be happening with the MPAA
It's not just the shuttered video stores! No pirate DVD vendors in their usual spots on Shanghai's Nanjing Lu or Huaihai Lu this afternoon. None of the usual cadre of fake Rolex-Gucci-Prada hawkers on those same streets. Trade negotiators in town? Crackdown in honor of the National People's Congress in Beijing? Maybe a joint delegation from the MPAA and the Italian Ministry of Commerce? For now it's a mystery, at least to me.
The boiled-frog myth: hey, really, knock it off!
Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth is scientifically impressive, politically important, and no doubt personally redemptive for Gore himself, who has endured an injustice that would leave most people screaming all day every day. Plus, it's an Oscar winner! But as noted several months ago, the movie also contains one moment of pure ignoramus-hood: the perpetuation of the boiled-frog myth. ("Put a frog in a pot of boiling water and he'll jump right out, but just raise the temperature slowly and he'll let himself be cooked." In reality the situation is more like: "Put a frog in a pot of boiling water and he'll be scalded to death, but give him a chance to escape when the slowly-warming water gets uncomfortable, and he will hop right out.")
Comes now The Economist, to give Gore (and countless other speech-makers) company.
Continue reading "The boiled-frog myth: hey, really, knock it off!" »
March 12, 2007
Hmm, I wonder if an MPAA delegation is in town
There are two rival DVD stores within a few blocks of my apartment. These are in addition to the street peddlers with little piles of DVDs laid out on blankets, or the semi-permanent vendors with their disks on carts or inside tiny shopfront booths. I prefer the stores because they'll warn you about DVDs that have dubbed-Russian soundtracks (a surprisingly large number, suggesting where a lot of the illicit copying is done) or were shot by someone lurking in a theater balcony. On those, you can hear other patrons coughing or munching popcorn through the show. The stores also have an in-house display machine on which you can try a disk and see whether it works before you shell out your 7 kuai, or 91 cents.
(Ethics note: I'll happily buy a legit DVD if I ever see one.)
Continue reading "Hmm, I wonder if an MPAA delegation is in town" »
Tech column on web translation tools now at Atlantic site
This tech column about improved online translation tools, especially from Google, is now on the Atlantic's site. (Subscribers only.)
Biggest surprise for me while reporting the story: such systems have gone from being pathetically flawed to becoming useable and even, gasp, "useful," within tight constraints.
Continue reading "Tech column on web translation tools now at Atlantic site" »
March 11, 2007
'Win in China' now at Atlantic site
The April issue of the Atlantic is online, including my article on the Chinese reality show "Win in China." (Chinese name 赢在中国, or Ying zai Zhongguo. Chinese home site for the show here.) The main article is for Atlantic subscribers only (subscribe!), but this non-blocked feature has video clips that give the flavor of the show.
Viewing tips: background music for clip #1 is the show's theme song -- really, its anthem of patriotism and limitless ambition. (The song's constant refrain is Zai lu shang, 在路上 -- "on the road" or "on the way.") Clip #2 gives a flavor of the weekly Apprentice-style team competitions, in this case an effort to induce Chinese schoolchildren to try that odd-seeming substance, milk. Clip #3 depicts a showdown described in the article, the final "PK" session, or "Player Kill," between "Wild Wolf" Zhou Yu, the uneducated, hot-tempered, country-boy finalist, and the highest-finishing female contestant, Ms. Zhou Jin, who delivered a baby midway through the series and whose strategy in this session is to provoke "Wild Wolf" into blowing his top.
March 9, 2007
Another win for Carl Malamud (or: news you won't see in the May 2007 issue of the Atlantic)
About three weeks ago, I wrote the following short item while in Shanghai and sent it zooming across the ether to Washington DC, for inclusion as a tech-column sidebar in the May, 2007 issue of the Atlantic. You won't see it there, which is why I'm posting it here.
First, the item:
March 8, 2007
Sympathy for Microsoft, again
Here is what a $1.30 version of Microsoft Vista looks like. Purchased a few hours ago for 10 RMB from a hawker outside SEG Plaza, Shenzhen's incredible bazaar of every electronic component known to man.
Gee, looks just like the real thing! How would anyone ever tell the difference? Or notice, say, that it's "Release Candidate 1," a late beta version, not the "real" thing? Fortunately, that information is concealed in English. ("Get Windows Vista RC1," underneath the girl in the wheatfield.)
As best I can make out, the info that is meant to be read, the Chinese material just above the (undoubtedly bogus) Product-ID number in the yellow background, is a set of helpful tips for installing Vista. For instance, you should reset the computer's system date from 2007 to 2088 or 2099, and you should not push the button that "authorizes" the software by checking with Microsoft HQ.
Maybe I'll try installing it on one of my non-frontline computers and see what happens.
March 7, 2007
Lidle lawsuit update: the myth of "aileron failure"
As mentioned earlier, the families of Cory Lidle and Tyler Stanger are suing the Cirrus Design corporation for "wrongful death" in the crash that killed both men last year.
Also as mentioned earlier, those families deserve every bit of empathy and condolence for the lasting consequences of their losses. If you know what it can mean to children to lose a parent this way, you can only wish these families the best.
But in light of extra details about purported grounds for the suit, I have no sympathy at all for the attorneys who, I can only assume, have used the families' grief to talk them into taking this misguided step.
Continue reading "Lidle lawsuit update: the myth of "aileron failure"" »
March 6, 2007
Folk sociology to the rescue: Chinese driving
I love folk etymology -- the fanciful derivations or histories of words based on explanations that "should" make sense even though they're not true. For instance, someone I know and love has taken to spelling respite as "rest bit," on the theory that it sounds the same and makes the meaning clearer.
Folk sociology is fun too: People do X because their ancestors did Y. This is practically a stand-alone industry in Japan, as wave after wave of defeated Western trade negotiators can attest. Why can't we buy your French skis? Because Japanese snow is different. Why can't we buy your American or Australian or Argentinian beef? Because Japanese intestines are different.
Continue reading "Folk sociology to the rescue: Chinese driving" »
March 4, 2007
The Cory Lidle case: from tragedy to tragic farce
To say it up front and clearly, the airplane crash last October that killed Cory Lidle, of the New York Yankees, and his flight instructor, Tyler Stanger, was a terrible tragedy. In an instant everything changed not just for these two men but also for their wives and small children. Their families deserve the deepest sympathy. Their children deserve to hear through the years that their fathers were widely admired and well-liked men.
The dentist whose condo the airplane hit has now sued the families (really, the men's estates) for damages. On that I have no opinion. But according to this recent AP report, the families themselves have also sued the airplane's manufacturer, Cirrus Design, for "wrongful death," because of product liability, negligence, and other problems.
I have an opinion on this. It is a farce.
Continue reading "The Cory Lidle case: from tragedy to tragic farce" »
March 2, 2007
Arthur Schlesinger Jr.: A nice man, not just an eminent one
I ran into Arthur Schlesinger perhaps ten times in my life. The first was 40 years ago, when he came to visit his son Andy during Andy's freshman year in college. I wandered by, from my room around the corner in the same freshman dorm, and was astonished to see the man whose A Thousand Days I had studied only a few months earlier in high school social studies class in California. With the Kennedy administration still in living memory, he was a real celebrity in those days, not just a successful writer, but he was unaffected and approachable to his son's new classmates.
The last time I saw him was a year or so ago, at a meeting of the Judson Welliver Society, a kind of Friar's Club for one-time presidential speechwriters.
Continue reading "Arthur Schlesinger Jr.: A nice man, not just an eminent one" »
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Blind Into Baghdad: America's War In Iraq
Free Flight: Inventing the Future of Travel
Breaking the News
Looking at the Sun
