The name Shannon Harps rang a vague bell from sustainability circles, so I did a search and there she was in my inbox and address book, in various email threads relating to a Sierra Club project called Kilowatt Ours. Over the next few days other sixth-degree connections will return from ski vacations and holiday excursions, only to open email from the dead. This may be one reason why the community is in such shock. Email and blogs and Flickrs and YouTubes equate to digital immortality far more enduring than anything an obituary can provide. More on Harps, including a sketch of the suspect, in today’s P-I coverage. Yet to be addressed: Is the relative effectiveness of emergency care an issue on New Year’s Eve? Might be a story there.
The Harps tragedy merely builds on 2008’s uplifting theme of death and dying. Over at The Times there is wonderment at whether a mentally ill son who killed his mother has the right to her estate. And the archives continue to swell at both papers with stuff from the Carnation Christmas eve killings, the Christmas Day state trooper shooting and other acts of homicidal holiday cheer.
Also, Seattle police have added surveillance cameras at 18 intersections, which gladdens my bicycling heart (anything to induce paranoia in the few crazy-ass drivers who threaten to give law-abiding drivers like yourselves a bad name) even as I admit these things are not so much for traffic monitoring as just another get-used-to-it data mining of our everyday lives for a plethora of doubtless innovative end uses. Someday we’ll have real-time video of an entire Capitol Hill stabbing and no one will be asking if that’s a good or bad thing.
Apart from that, what’s interesting about The Times opening screen is that a third of it is taken up by real-estate ads. When you’re facing a $6 million deficit, every little bit helps. After all, who knows how many property-ad dollars there’ll be six months from now, as Seattle hits the wall that has squished everyone else (no real-estate ads on the home page of the San Francisco Chron, for comparison). For the time being, we who have no shame humbly point out that HA remains a relative bargain for all you marketers looking to sell to smart investors like the Rabbit.
Perhaps on any other day, oil passing $100 would be Page 1 news. But an anxious nation has the Iowa caucuses to divert its attention. The Times, in one of those “amazing” measures that helped save it $21 million, does not appear to be sending anyone to cover Iowa, something even The Stranger found the wherewithal to do. As for me, pecking away in the quiet comfort of my north Seattle home office, man am I glad someone else has to do tomorrow’s headlines.
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Paul, why are you so bitter towards the Times? Didn’t you used to work there? Did you have an ugly parting? Your daily venom spew is getting very old. Not sending someone to Iowa to join the media cluster-f*** is exactly the kind of smart decision local papers need to make to survive. They need to focus their own reporters on local news.
Is anything gained by the P-I sending Connelly to Des Moines, except to give Joel’s colleagues a couple of days’ break from him?
“Also, Seattle police have added surveillance cameras at 18 intersections, which gladdens my bicycling heart (anything to induce paranoia in the few crazy-ass drivers who threaten to give law-abiding drivers like yourselves a bad name) … ”
Might not be such a bad thing, if it turns out that — after viewing the tape — the crazy ass was the cyclist.
Kind of the traffic equivalent of football’s review of the call on the field.
No one should be surprised by oil passing the $100 mark, as long as the chimp is in charge of the national fisc.
N.B.: It’s not so much that the price of oil is going UP, it’s more that the value of your dollars is going DOWN. Welcome to the zany world of debt repudiation/dollar devaluation!
In other words, your paycheck is 40% smaller than when the chimp took office (and I do mean “took”). Class warfare is real: Republicans are bombing the middle and working classes.
@1 Tony, what about my post says “bitter,” let alone venomous? Heck, I’m just pointing out reality, and that The Times is (smartly, deservedly) using the tools it has to make and save money. Did I somehow imply I disagree with any of this? I feel for my fellow print travelers, it’s grim out there. But documenting reality, which is a journalist’s job, doesn’t make me bitter — just honest.
Whether a newspaper should “send” someone to Iowa is a long conversation, but I’d wholeheartedly agree that the old-school approach would be pointless. Take a look at how Slog is doing it and get back to me on the points you raise.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7169543.stm
Never mind what happened I guess.
As long as crazy-assed right-wing warmongering continues, the dollar will be further debased and people will feel it in higher prices for food and gas.
Never mind what happened I guess.
Heh. Indeed.
Some analysts questioned the validity of the trade, though their concerns faded as oil set a record on Thursday.
New York light sweet crude climbed to a new high of $100.05 a barrel on Thursday.
Aside from authorizing a passel of offshore oil leases in Alaska, has anyone else been keeping track of whatever nefarious “executive orders” Smirk has been foisting of while we’re all focused in Iowa?
@1 con’t: Tony, here’s bitter:
“Today, instead of serving primarily as watchdogs, we deliver entertainment fodder interspersed with glitzy ads for consumers. The newspaper’s value is measured not by how well it reflects and elevates its community, but by how much money it makes…”
I met Shannon a few times 4 maybe 5 years ago. I’m a fairly jaded and closed off person, but Shannon cut right through all that and seemed like a warm, wonderful human.
Red light cameras have been proven to reduce red light running.
On new year’s day, I went to a friend’s house to watch football. He invited some neighbors.
When the news came on, and they mentioned the Sierra Club bag she had dropped on the ground, one of the neighbors commented: “Good. Another Eco-Nazi is dead. Good Riddance!”
Such is the sensabilities of the opposition. Anybody wonder why politics has become so angry lately?
“Good. Another Eco-Nazi is dead. Good Riddance!”
Another wingnut voter for sure. Cheering for a murderer. That folks is what we’re fighting.
I hope that poor girl’s killer is caught and put away for the rest of his miserable days.
I dropped the Times a while ago after growing weary of the Monday one-two NeoCon punch of Charles Krauthammer and Jonah Goldberg editorials with no Molly Ivins to balance them out. That and their self-serving drum-pounding for ending the estate tax.
Well I just noticed that they’ve been running David Sirota (a name I actually suggested to Jim Vesely when he contacted me following my subscription drop). Does anyone know if Sirota will be a regular on the Time’s pages?