Nothing but links today, folks, so all you dial-uppers (word?) can bail, if you want (oh, no, I was kidding, stay, really). Here we go:

The Star Tribune’s Nick Coleman is just one in the paper’s formidable stable of columnists. I rarely read him, mainy because his headlines never grab me. He writes about “people and events in the metro area”, and has a reputation for having a somewhat liberal bent.

Yesterday he chimed in on the blogs vs. newspapers topic (which counts as people and events in the metro area because one of the main players in the Rathergate controversy, Powerline Blog, is based in Minneapolis). Excerpt:

Do bloggers have the credentials of real journalists? No. Bloggers are hobby hacks, the Internet version of the sad loners who used to listen to police radios in their bachelor apartments and think they were involved in the world.

Bloggers don’t know about anything that happened before they sat down to share their every thought with the moon. Like graffiti artists, they tag the public square — without editors, correction policies or community standards. And so their tripe is often as vicious as it is vacuous.

Uh. What can you say about that? Money quote, from Lileks:

If the Rathergate tale taught us anything, it’s that ordinary people could blow ten-foot holes in the Good Ship CBS simply by comparing their knowledge to the manifest ignorance of the news division’s producers. Because I’ll tell you this about “ordinary” people: they know stuff. Granted, fonts and typewriters aren’t their beat. Fonts and typewriters are their line of work.

But still. That ought to count for something.

And, responding to Coleman’s claim that journalist are more qualified because they “know stuff”:

Coleman, you don’t know quite as much as you may think you do. I bet you don’t know the difference between a resistor and a capacitor. I bet you don’t know what things are holding back development of quantum computing. I bet you don’t know what elements could be used in a dirty nuke. Nick, do you know what makes up a TCP/IP stack? No? Yet journalists write about education like they’re a teacher, about crime like they’re a cop, and about businesses like they’re a CEO.
from The OmbudsGod

So, that’s settled. Moving on:

Here are some old people! From a really interesting report this morning on NPR about “Super-Centenarians”, people over the age of 110. They even have their own YahooGroup (registration required). See, the mainstream media’s not all bad. Just Nick Coleman. (Kidding! Just…kidding.)

And old people aren’t all bad either! Look at this nice lady; Emma Torkelson from right here in Fergus Falls, Minnesota. At the age of 100, she’s going vote for the first time in her life. I knew that MTV Rock The Vote stuff would help get out the young’ins.

Geriatric politics, the name of my next band.

If Emma’s going to vote, it might be especially wise of her (at her particular point on the life cycle) to read up on the candidates’ positions on health care. Cause, y’know, she’s old. So here you go.

And, after all that blog-bashing and columnist-bashing and rocking and rolling the vote, us older folks might be in the mood for a little vacation. How about a road trip? With retro 80s new-wave synth-pop tunes? And a hip convertible? Sure. Let’s take Michel Gondry. (Director of “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”)

And while we’re at it, let’s stop to have dinner with random people we don’t know.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 30th, 2004 at 9:14 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.