Bill O’Reilly said nasty things about my sister, a journalist. He took her words out of context. I want to take his nose out of context.
Anyone want to wager on how long it’ll be before Disney has all of them under perpetual copyright?
Collection of fairytales gathered by historian Franz Xaver von Schönwerth had been locked away in an archive in Regensburg for over 150 years
So here’s an interesting thing, particularly for my friends in the journalism universe.
It’s an article from a former high-level CIA officer about how to produce high-quality intelligence analysis. It’s a really good read, though, for anyone who produces (or consumes) intelligence of any kind, including news.
One of the best things — the notion of “What are we not seeing, which we would expect to see, if our analysis is correct.”
From the piece:
“During one of the most challenging times in my analytical career, I worked for the finest analyst I ever knew. In the middle of the Tiananmen Crisis in 1989—when everyone’s hair was on fire—I found him late one afternoon going through a stack of musty old reports. I asked him what he was doing. He said, “I am looking for things that did not make sense then, but do now.” “
What a great insight.
Full article, PDF, “What I Learned in 40 Years of Doing Intelligence Analysis for US Foreign Policymakers”:
Just mail in your photos. They’ll post them for you.
Television commercial for The Facebook from the mid-90s.
He Took His Skin Off For Me from Ben Aston on Vimeo.
More romantic than you’d expect.
Back in 2013 we posted about “He Took His Skin Off For Me,” a strange short film by Ben Aston about a man who removes his skin in an effort to please his girlfriend. At the time, the film was in pr…
The friendly Irish pub in my neighborhood hosted a little chili cook-off last night. Naturally, I assumed it was to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the release of Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3, but apparently it was really about some kind of sporting event.
I felt pretty good about my entry, but alas, it seems that my palate is not so finely tuned to the average tastes as I thought. I used all the tricks in my book for maximum flavor; I used five different chilis to make the base, I maximized glutamates, I slow-cooked the heck out of it for optimal tenderness, I finished it with masa to thicken it up, I made sure it was pretty darn spicy, but not so spicy that it gave you hiccups ….
But for all that, I came in fifth place. Out of seven. Philistines.
We celebrated my buddy Eric’s birthday with a fancy pop-up dinner here in Chicago. Good fun with interesting people.
Hundreds of bodies — too many to count — remain strewn in the bush in Nigeria from an Islamic extremist attack that Amnesty International suggested Friday is the deadliest massacre in the history of Boko Haram.