Letters to the Editor
Published Letters: 77 Editor's Choice: 11
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let's all knee-jerk attack James Frey!
[Read the article: My dream TV show, Part 2]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Should Frey's past color everything he writes in the present? Personally, I thought his was one of the few worthwhile responses, and I have no reason to believe his claim of watching Magnum, P.I. is fabricated. And it is kind of sad that the best character-based detective show we have right now is House.
Still, I'm pretty disappointed with the tossed-off quality of the rest of the responses. If everyone involved gave us a real idea, instead of an unfunny throwaway joke (instead of a baby, they're getting all excited over a ferret! Now let's just restate that 20 times and see if it's funny even once), this might be a worthwhile enterprise.
The New York Times Magazine did something similar a few years back, except their responses were good. Conan O'Brien in particular, came up with a great one where the President is also an amateur sleuth - he keeps sneaking out of cabinet meetings to go hunt for clues, and muttering, "but the Russian ambassador was left-handed, so it must have been..." His scheming VP is always one step behind him, shaking his fists in impotent rage and shouting, "but I swear I saw the President leap that gorge in a convertible! Why won't anyone believe me?!?"
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The problem with this sort of thing is...
[Read the article: My dream TV show, Part 2]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]...a good premise does not a good TV show make. Okay, The West Wing had a hell of a premise. But that didn't make it a good show - great writing, acting, and characters did (witness what happened when Sorkin left and the writing went south). You can pitch a concept, but really, do any of these sound like they'd be the funniest show on television:
• A wealthy family goes broke; the only halfway-responsible member has to deal with their legal and financial woes.
• A pseudo documentary about awkward moments at a paper supply company
• Four New Yorkers obsess over minutae and percieved slights
The premise isn't what makes a show good. So tossing out half-thought-out premises isn't really all that interesting.
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one missing piece of data
[Read the article: King Kaufman's Sports Daily]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Are the coaches in question also teachers? That's the way it was when I was in high school, although Texas is probably different from upstate NY. In NY (and probably elsewhere), teachers who run an extracurricular get paid extra. So, the football coach makes a lot more than the average teacher, but the math teacher who coaches the track team makes more money than the science teacher who just goes home at 3:30 (and yes, the science teacher has to grade papers when he goes home at 3:30, but the track coach has to when she goes home at 6:30).
If it's more money for more work, after school and on weekends, travel, etc., and it brings in more revenue, it seems more than fair that they make more money.
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since when has the right cared about the facts?
[Read the article: Is "The Path to 9/11" just "The Reagans" revisited? Not exactly]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]> what's remarkable is how little these angry pundits had to say about actual historical error. What was really bothering them was that the series wasn't sufficiently reverential.
Is that really that remarkable? It's been their pattern going back decades. Liberals are upset when things are factually wrong; conservatives are upset when things aren't sufficiently slanted in their direction.
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Jailynn???
[Read the article: The Fix]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Sean Preston is a nice name. Sean gives you at least a shot of having a normal, well-adjusted life despite having K-Fed DNA in your system. But Jailynn??? You're pretty much setting the kid up for a life of incarceration four letters into the birth certificate!
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BASIC!!! Yes!
[Read the article: Why Johnny can't code]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I was thrilled to read this. I was a substitute computer teacher a few years back, and had I stayed on (the school couldn't guarantee me a job in the fall, so I went back to an office job), I had a whole curriculum based on BASIC.
I learned BASIC when I was in 6th or 7th grade. And when I got to college, one professor praised the language despite its limitations, because it teaches you to think like a programmer. Doesn't matter how simple the program is - you learn how to order your thoughts, break down large tasks into small ones, and small ones into tiny ones. You learn universal truths like "garbage in, garbage out," and "user=idiot". Once you grasp those concepts, learning a more advanced programming language is just a matter of syntax.
And as far as getting the kids interested in learning, you can make your own games. And that's no less of a learning experience than making a database. There's so much potential to do a great curriculum that the kids would like, which would prepare them for more advanced programming, and teach them stuff they would use even if they never touched another computer. BASIC should be right up there with algebra and WWII on the curriculum.
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Bush blaming the troops again
[Read the article: Outside Foleygate: Trent Lott, Bill Frist and "Mission Accomplished"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Bush has claimed repeatedly that the sailors aboard the Lincoln put up the Mission Accomplished banner and that he, poor innocent naif that he is, knew nothing about it. It of course turned out that the banner was made by the White House and provided specifically for the photo op.
But it's telling that, as soon as trouble hits, Bush's first instinct is always to blame our troops. It was the same thing on a much larger scale when the Abu Ghraib scandal broke. Did Bush investigate the brass? Rumsfeld? No, he blamed it on "a few bad apples" - ie. the rank and file.
For all the talk of "supporting the troops" from the right, we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that Bush would throw them all under the bus in a heartbeat if it gave him a momentary political advantage.
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hang on...
[Read the article: Tom the Dancing Bug]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Wasn't this a Simpsons episode already?
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looks good for Obama
[Read the article: For 2008, a hypothetical Democratic victory]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]If Obama has a closer McCain gap than Hillary now, I'd say that makes him the frontrunner. Hillary Clinton has hit her ceiling on name recognition, and everyone's pretty much made up their mind about whether they'd vote for her or not. Plenty of folks still have no idea who the junior Senator from Illlinois is, so he's got a lot of room to improve on those numbers.