Focus!

Here is my first attempt at focused writing on this blog. I predict it doesn't last very long...

Part 1: The Media
I think I'm getting tired of the news. Or at least the spin that you inevitably encounter, and its effects on life in this country. I have a long history with The Media. In high school, I worked for The Prime, our underground paper, my freshman year, and then helped resurrect it during my junior and senior year. In college, I was a copy editor, Commentary editor, Copy Desk Chief, and Deputy Managing Editor for The Diamondback, the UMD paper. My time with the DBK did not end well, but for the most part it was a good experience. I am also the former Managing Editor for JYI, an online, undergraduate, peer-reviewed science journal, and had a stint as a "war copy editor" at Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services in 2003. Not to mention, my boyfried is a career journalist -- we met at the DBK, and he has edited for a number of papers between Northern Virginia and New Jersey and is now a news reporter at the New Albany Tribune in Indiana. I like staying abreast of the news, whether it be national, local, or scientific (I actually flip through all of my JAMA issues at least once before throwing them away!). I have to admit, though, that I am pretty selective about which media sources I use.

When I lived on the east coast, I only read the Washington Post and Philadelphia Inquirer. I occasionally read the New York Times online when I hear about a big story (like "Contra-Contraception," the big contraceptive history piece in the NYT Magazine last month; let me know if you'd like a copy). Here in Louisville, I get the Courier-Journal on the weekends to keep decently abreast of local news, read the style sections, and clip the Sunday coupons. Ever since college, I've headed to CNN.com at least once a day to stay up-to-date on anything late-breaking and/or exciting. But lately, I'm getting tired of two things: politicized news and the one-hour news cycle.

In case you didn't know, I am a democrat. It has occurred to me that the news sources I turn to are part of the "liberal media" that Fox news reporters and Stephen Colbert lambast so much. (I still have not quite figured out Stephen Colbert; IS he a republican or does he just mock them so well that other republicans don't realize it?) Overall, that doesn't really bother me; the news I read seems to be impartial and fact-driven, and I never read editorial pages or watch TV news pundit shows, anyway.

But the other night, we were at dinner at Los Aztecas downtown (we walked there -- yay for downtown living!), and the TV behind the bar was tuned to Fox news, and Bill O'Reilly happened to be on. I couldn't help but watch some of the closed-captioned "conversations" Bill was having with various guests, and I just became angrier and angrier. I can't stand people like him, with their crazy right-wing opinions and religion-based views. That's why I prevent as much as I can any exposure to programming or people like that. But then I realized that the people I disagree with prevent themselves from being exposed to the so-called "liberal media." If you ask me, someone who says that American troops are being killed in Iraq as punishment for homosexuality in the U.S. is crazy and out of touch with reality. But the question becomes, whose reality are they really out of touch with? The answer is, MY reality, which is pretty much the same as the reality most people I know are living. But one could argue that I am out of touch with a crazy conservative's reality, and therefore just as crazy. And I would agree with that point. So because we do have politicized "news" reporting, it's perfectly logical that people would seek out news sources that they tend to agree with. I do, and that's why I only ever hear from the "liberal" media. Pat Buchanan does, and that's why he only ever hears from the "conservative" media. Are we both like ostriches with our heads in the sand? Pretty much.

My other gripe about the news these days involves the fact that we live in an (to use the overused description) increasingly plugged-in society, with the Internet and cell phones and PDAs to keep us up to date with everything going on in the world. If there's an earthquake in Asia, we know about it right away. This immediate access to absolutely everything has its benefits and downfalls. The benefits are pretty obvious: we know what is going on at any given time. The downfall is that the news has become so pressed for actual news that at any given time of the day, what passes for news is likely to be nothing more than filler. And that gets old. Case in point: on Tuesday, the lede story on CNN.com for most of the day was about the anniversary of Natalee Holloway's disappearance in Aruba. There are NO new leads in this case, it's been talked to death a million times over already, and frankly, I'm kind of tired of it. Until the day she is actually found, there is no justification for her being a lede story. None.

If you were unlucky enough to tune into a broadcast news channel last week when the Rayburn Congressional building was under lock-down, you undoubtedly would have been inundated with reporters giving a blow-by-blow description of each and every emergency vehicle arriving, what each emergency personnel uniform looked like, and what the mood was like on Capitol Hill ("quite tense," "still very tense," "unsure what is going on," etc.). Did the reporters have any actual information? Probably not. ("I'm not sure of that, exactly," "We are not sure what is going on right now," "We have not been told what the legislators are doing inside the building," etc.). This is the problem with 24-hour news channels -- they're forced to report the news for 24 hours, but there isn't that much news in the world! The other problem that has stemmed from the 5-minute news cycle is that online news sites aren't very well edited anymore. On any given day, I catch mistakes on CNN.com -- and not just pesky little AP style errors, either. I'm talking stories with inconsistencies because grafs were taken out and no one bothered to check if the story made sense anymore. It's so frustrating to read. I don't have much of a solution, though, other than to remove myself from the non-stop news sources and only watch the evening news and/or read the morning paper. Then I would just get news updates at most every half-day, which is all, frankly, that most people should subject themselves to.

Part 2: My life updates
I saw the Da Vinci Code on opening day, having kept myself from hearing too much about the bad reviews it had gotten at Cannes. I thought it was pretty decent -- worth seeing for a matinee or student price, definitely worth Netflix-ing -- but wasn't the best book-adaptation I've ever seen. First of all, the book built up all of its excitement in the opening scenes in the Louvre, with Langdon explaining the art history behind Da Vinci's works. Instead, in the movie, it's a race from one painting to the next, with Tom Hanks breathlessly spewing out a sentence or two that you, if you're not careful, might miss hearing altogether. I understand that in when put into action, Dan Brown's museum scene has to be rushed, even though in the book it takes up numerous chapters, in order to keep up the realistic sense of being chased, but the movie took it too far, I thought -- it ends up instead being a huge rush to get to the grail quest. Also, I was a little disappointed in the Roslyn Chapel scene -- why isn't the docent introduced as Sophie's brother, and why the unnecessary twist ab out Sophie's grandfather not really being her grandfather? That left a hole at the end, when her grandmother introduces herself but the viewer isn't sure whether the woman is her blood grandmother (in which case, where has she been all these years?) or her adopted grandmother, the husband of the Louvre curator (in which case, why is she so emotional about having been "separated" from Sophie?). I didn't like how all the Priory members just showed up all at once, as though all of them just happen to live within 5 minutes of Roslyn Chapel. Anyway, probably not as bad as the reviews said (I still haven't read them), but not the best movie I've ever seen, either.

Which brings me to another point: I hate movie reviews. I am aware of the fact that I am not a movie critic. I like movies because I like them, or I don't because I don't; you won't find me critiquing the atmosphere or the dialogue of most films. A lot of the time, I want to see a movie to be entertained, and I'm happy having such low standards. Unfortunately, that does not always mesh with a film critic's point of view, and I've found it to just not be worth my time to read movie reviews at all. You can't mention a movie without everyone around you telling you about the bad reviews it got, and that's just disappointing. Not EVERY movie is created with the intention of winning an Oscar (is it?), and that's just fine with me.

Other movies I've seen recently: Friends with Money (OK, but you felt like you were watching a play, not a movie), and Pride and Prejudice (my favorite Jane Austen book, and a great movie). In Pride and Prejudice, I again found myself witnessing a bizarre male transformation on-screen. Mr. Darcy goes from being downright ugly to being actually rather attractive physically, once he changes his attitude and behavior. A similar thing happened in Bend it Like Beckham -- Jonathan Rhys Meyers looks like he has congenital birth defects, and then all of a sudden he shows up at Jess's house looking positively hot in a white collared shirt. Same guy, completely different look. It's the magic of cinema.

In other news, Eric's sister's wedding was this past weekend, and everything went really well. A couple pictures are posted below. I feel kind of bad for Eric, because he got a lot of good-natured ribbing from his relatives about when HIS wedding was going to be, but I only feel kind of bad, because it's his own fault that it's happening :) Before going to PA for the weekend, I was at home in MD for a week, serving as Cinderella to the Cummings household. It was kind of nice doing so much cleaning and organizing, though, because it involved no brain work whatsoever, and it was very cathartic to just run load after load of laundry (there was a mysterious cat pee smell in the towel closet, so I washed everything to get rid of it) and vacuum up all the dust rabbits (too large to be bunnies, really).

Yesterday I woke up and went down to the parking lot, and my classmate Andy who lives in the building was standing in the parking lot next to an incinerated car. His wife Kristen's car caught on fire in the middle of the night, and the fire department put it out but didn't tell anyone, so they discovered it in the morning when they were leaving. The fire department says it was an electrical fire, but that seems really weird to me -- why would a car just spontaneously explode in the middle of the night; doesn't it usually happen while it's being driven or when the ignition is turned? I wonder if someone was trying to hot wire it and everything went bad. Anyway, Kristen's car is completely destroyed, and the two cars parked on either side of it were heavily damaged as well -- one of which was Andy's. Since his car was a 1987 Acura, they're just calling his totaled as well -- he found a junk yard to give him $100 for the metal. So overnight, they went from two cars to none -- I'm never going to park next to Eric again!

This week I technically started my summer research project, but in reality I won't actually have any work to do for the next week or two, so I have some time to finish (read: start) unpacking from being at home and begin my new knitting project. I love not being in school!


Paige and Brian, May 28, 2006!

Me and Eric, at the reception. The whole thing was held on a farm, which was really pretty. As you can see, I wore neither of the dresses I had previously mentioned in this blog -- I got this blue one on clearance at Ann Taylor after I won the other Ann Taylor eBay auction. This one was only $30 instead of $128 (!!!!!), and fit me much better. I'm going to try to re-sell the other one on eBay and recoup some of my losses.