Every Holocaust story is unique, but Joe Pell’s is so extraordinary it transcends the genre.Pell’s book, “Taking Risks,” is part World War II saga, part adventure tale, part memoir. It encompasses the tragedy of the war and the triumph of the survivors. It goes from Pell’s days sleeping on leaves and digging for potatoes in the Ukrainian woods to his life among the Bay Area’s most successful businessmen.
It’s also a great read.
The recent trials and tribulations around the space shuttle have made a nearly ideal story for the 24 hour networks to obsess over for several days.
The story has three of the key elements necessary for CNN or MSNBC (Fox only needs a Clinton angle) to enter into a serialized stupor of repeated coverage (well, in the case of CNN, there is the added question of whether or not anyone can manage to explain the issue to Larry King):
1. Weather. Enough said. If you haven’t noticed the 24 hour nets’ obsession with weather related news, then I’ve got a some beach-front property in South Florida I’d like to sell you.
2. Space. It’s not mandatory. But the news nets do lean towards stories sans gravity (not to mention the fact that in space, you can’t hear the words “no comment”).
3. Scandal. Nasa, as it turns out, has not figured out how to solve that problem with the large pieces of foam that have fallen off shuttles past. That means someone didn’t do their job (forget about that fact that these folks have figured out a way to send people into outer space, a mistake is a mistake and there is likely a decent chance for one political party to blame the other for the foam dislodging).
All that’s really missing for this story to reach the next level is a little good old fashioned sex appeal. Slap a pair of Angelina Jolie lips on the side of the shuttle and then we’ll be talking major coverage.
Forbes is out with their latest list of the world’s most powerful women. Here’s a look at the top 5:
1. Condoleezza Rice, U.S.Secretary of state
2. Wu Y, China, Vice Premier, Minister of Health
3. Yulia Tymoshenko, Ukraine, Prime Minister
4. Gloria Arroyo, Philippines, President
5. Meg Whitman, CEO, Ebay*
Here’s the question: What is more immediately surreal about this list?
That the head of an online flea market ranks this high, or that Oprah’s not on it.
Anyway, stay tuned for next year’s list…
*It seems to me that the fifth most powerful woman in the world would be able to do something to stop all of those damn phishing emails I get from spammers pretending to be PayPal.
There are some interesting findings in the latest Pew survey on teens and the ways they communicate.
Teens use landline phones a lot more than you might have imagined (hint: Mom and Dad pay for the landline).
Girls are becoming the power users among this demographic (which mean teen boys are now officially better at nothing other than answering trivia questions about the various nicknames Chris Berman invents during Sportscenter and NFL Primetime).
Contrary to what you might have imagined, social teens are the ones who are more likely to put in extra hours in front of the computer.
We have some findings that suggest that teen Internet users are more connected. They spend more time face-to-face than non-Internet users. They seem to have more friends and spend more time with them. The Internet is not necessarily taking people away from their social lives.
No word on whether this trend extends to 38 year old men with receding hairlines, TiVo addictions, a false sense of youth (thinking, for example, that they could still probably blend in during Spring Break in Cancun), carpal tunnel, low back pain, and an urgent, unholy need to immediately publish every random thought that pops into their noggin.
Oh yeah, and the survey also found that the teens questioned think people who give, analyze, disseminate or blog about surveys are complete dorks.
It only took a few minutes for me to develop a pleasant addiction to an open source Mac instant messaging program called Adium. Whether the person on the other end of my text message uses Yahoo, AIM, MSN or some other system, I can seamlessly chat with them (whether they like it or not) sans annoying ads, and a tab system allows me to manage several conversations at once. And yes, I have my pick of emoticons from any of the services!
Adium’s developers deploy regular software updates while the user community provides a constant stream of custom skins and event sound-sets that range from alerts you’d hear in a Tokyo train station to the guy from Napolean Dynamite screaming, “You idiot!” every time I log on. Add to this the simple elegance Mac users have come to expect and you’ve got the perfect instant messaging client.
The open source movement is remarkable when you consider massive projects like Firefox and Apache. But it’s these little projects that never cease to inspire me. And I don’t just mean the program itself. I even am even moved by the custom skins that users create and share via the Adium Xtras site.
Who would have guessed that open source and the seamless sharing of creativity would work work so well in so many different areas?
Come to think of it, who would’ve guessed that you’d be reading this right now?
The latest micro-battle when it comes to the Roberts Supreme Court nomination process is over access to past tax returns. This will, of course, just be one small element in several days or weeks of positioning and politicking.
But the details of this nomination (and let’s be realistic, its a go, period) are really just a story within the broader story of this era.
So what’s the big story? It’s the one many of us don’t want to think about, much less accept: One can easily make the argument that we are one robe away from seeing battles we thought were long over, reopened, refought, and resulting in very different outcomes.
Prayer in schools. Come on, we’ve been there and done that right? Debates over the teaching of evolution in school. Wait, am I watching Fox News or a remake of Inherit the Wind? What’s next, restrictions on free speech based on the split second unveiling of a nipple belonging to an android pop star?
Cultural questions that many Americans assumed were asked and answered years if not decades ago are back in a big way.
One side assumed these debates were over, and they stopped fighting. The other side didn’t get the memo and they are running at a full sprint right now.
The broader issue is not Roberts, but rather that the cultural and intellectual issues many thought were on solid ground are actually hanging by a thread.
