Letters to the Editor
Quiet Type
Published Letters: 655 Editor's Choice: 32
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Ladies' lady.
[Read the article: No apologies, Katie Couric!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"I sincerely don't mean to sound chauvinistic, but it's clear that she was hired not for her journalistic credentials but for her appearance -- Leslie Moonves and the rest of the corporate whores running CBS wanted young horny men, advertising's most lucrative demographic, to tune in."
I'm not a gambler but I'll happily bet my 401K that it is WOMEN they were trying to lure in with Couric. You know, trying to bring in the loyal watchers of Today (hardly horny young men!) to set a spell with their girl-next-door, chatty, comfortable girlfriend. The idea that young guys would find Couric a sexy lure to the news is pretty laughable.
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Yossarian:
[Read the article: No apologies, Katie Couric!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I wasn't talking about Barbie dolls at Fox (nobody watches Fox males OR females for "news") and CNN (who has lots of smart people sprinkled among the mannequins); I was talking specifically about Couric's hiring rationale. Go where young guys congregate (how about bars?) and ask them if they think Couric is sexy enough to attract them to CBS news. They're likely to spill their beer guffawing at the idea. I still say it was Today's young womenfolk CBS was hoping to snag.
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Overbuilding
[Read the article: Ask the pilot]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Thanks for this informative post. Very disturbing -- I could almost smell the nauseating jet fuel and feel the globe warming as I read. I'm not much of a flier and was really not aware of all this sky bloat and the falsity of the frequency lure. I hope you DO become Airline Czar someday and whip this sorry state of affairs into shape.
I'm curious about Southwest's 12 daily flights out of a 110,000-pop. town, which certainly sounds completely crazy. I thought this airline was the smart one, so it would be interesting to know how many planes fly full and what percentage gets canceled.
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Flying 52 miles
[Read the article: Ask the pilot]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Thanks, Pinky. Your tidbit about workers flying in daily from Manchester to Boston sent me straight to Mapquest for driving information: 52 miles, 58 minutes. Wouldn't a train be faster once you figure in security and delays, anyway? (Or maybe there's no train...?)
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An overdue thank-you to bloggers
[Read the article: Little outbursts of journalism -- what causes them?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Blogs by smart, noisy, energetic people are this century's protest marchers, willing to get out there even when it seems futile, then blessedly attaining a decibel level that simply cannot be ignored.
Keep up the internet shouting while you still can! We'd all be in (a lot more) trouble if not for you. I personally am so fatigued by every day's new lies that I get woozy and want to take a nap, so I'm thankful every day for those who manage not to be worn down and keep up the fight.
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Mom might be relieved.
[Read the article: Can I have my wedding money now?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The gold statue analogy doesn't work for me. A work of art lovingly created by one soul especially for another is hardly equivalent to a big show-offy party.
For all LW knows, Mom might be relieved to see all that cash go to something intelligent like paying off debt or putting down a house payment. It could be she only wishes her other two daughters had that kind of sense.
A conversation with Mom shouldn't be too fraught unless she's a control freak, in which case LW may as well not bring it up. But assuming Mom's a reasonable type, tell her you've been doing a lot of earnest reading about our economy, talking to married friends who are slumping under their debt, and crunching some numbers, and you think you have a really smart idea to share with her. (And if she's into Suze Orman, pull out that artillery -- Orman is all for putting your money where it's going to enhance your life.)
One caveat: If the debt you're thinking of paying down consists of lots of dumb things like cash advances, restaurants, clothes and other non-intelligent stuff, Mom may tell you you're on your own, just to teach you a lesson.
Good luck! Count me in the crowd who sees lavish weddings as pathetic brainwashing by the bridal-industrial complex!
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They fear the US (us)
[Read the article: Women fight to lose their rights]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]This country uses propaganda every day to keep American women relatively placid, relatively willing to swallow war and crappy domestic politics, and feeling inferior and obsessed with our attractiveness. (Think of all the brainpower being used up by Britney/Paris/Lindsay, Ann Coulter, hip-hop misogyny, American Idol, "lose weight lose weight lose weight," husbands killing their pregnant wives, internet porn, rampant rape, and on and on.
Is not just a wee bit possible that Pakistani ladies have seen all this and fear becoming just like us? Could that be at the bottom of their preferring the "law and order" of the Taliban to the anarchy we have here?
I'm not rationalizing it; I'm just analyzing it.
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AP gone simpleminded
[Read the article: The AP says Obama thinks genocide is no biggie]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It's very troubling to realize that as younger people raised on this very kind of simpleminded synthesis move into journalism, we're going to see more and more of the same, only worse.
A smart, thinking person such as Obama, who doesn't easily slip into the black and white bleating of most politics, is going to have to fight extremely hard to be heard and understood. Bloggers are our only hope, it seems.