A painful Round Two

For the second time in as many weeks, I'm ignoring my rule about keeping Tribune matters out of my blog.

Today dozens of my co-workers--the exact number is not clear, but is probably between 40 and 50--were laid off. Some were called at home. Some were at work and heard the bad news in a closed-door meeting.

All of them are missed tonight.

That's all I really have the energy for at the moment.

I've made a huge mistake

Good: Quickest response to query letter EVER. (and my name was spelled correctly)

Bad: It was a rejection.

I'll bet Jason Bateman doesn't have these problems.

Worse: That probably means I didn't read some element of their criteria closely enough, i.e., submitting a teen romance novel to someone specializing in fly-fishing manuals. The clue? NO ONE evaluates a query in a half-hour... not even a query from a literary giant like myself.

The proper cliche to deploy here, I think, is "live and learn."

The Departed

I have tried to keep my day job out of this blog as much as possible, for various reasons.

Today, though, things are different.

On Friday several of my Tribune colleagues in Metro and dozens across all the editorial departments said goodbye. They had volunteered to be laid off. And yesterday, without warning, they were.

Troubling issues around the circumstances aside, this is a sad occurence. Not only because many of them are friends, but because it represents a tremendous loss of skill, intelligence and experience.

Good luck to all of them. The Chicago Tribune is worse for their departure.

Let the games.... tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap

It's Aug. 8, 2008, and that means two things:

1) Good luck.

2) The start of the Summer Games in Beijing.

And what better way to celebrate (2) than by reliving your childhood, in which you went over to your friend's house and pounded frantically on the A and B buttons to make your stupid Nintendo athlete run faster, but he never would?

Higher. Stronger. More pixellated.

Click here... and enjoy!

Photographic evidence

The International Thriller Writers have posted a gallery of photos from this year's Thrillerfest in New York City.

Besides the firearms 'n' such (which we've already discussed), there was this breakfast at which I actually was a guest of honor. To commemorate the occasion, I wore a designer T-shirt and a seersucker jacket. For real:

It's like Where's Waldo for lazy people.

I looked much more alert closer up.

The quoted material below is not my own

Good prose has made my fingertips bleed. I have sat for 10 minutes... 20 minutes... an hour trying to figure out how to make a paragraph sing. Yeah. Writin' ain't easy, but it's necessary.

So how would it feel to learn that an ENTIRE NEWSPAPER was being constructed based on your torturously constructed words? Without attribution, of course. Crazy? Nope. If you live in Houston, you can see it for yourself.

The saga began in the classical manner: with an e-mail about Jimmy Buffett. Several weeks ago, I received a note from a Slate reader drawing my attention to an article published in March 2008 in the Bulletin, a free alternative weekly in Montgomery County, Texas, north of Houston. "I believe your … profile of musician Jimmy Buffett was reproduced wholesale without attribution," the reader wrote. "I thought you should know." I followed a link to "Spring Fling: Concerts That Make the Holiday a Time to Party"* by Mark Williams, a feature pegged to concert appearances by Buffett and country singer Miranda Lambert. Sure enough, the article included 10 and a half paragraphs copied nearly verbatim from "A Pirate Looks at 60," my Slate essay of Jan. 9, 2007. My words were slightly reworked in places, and further enlivened by eccentric use of em dashes and semicolons—a hallmark, I would learn, of the Williamsian style. But the original text was largely unaltered. For example, my Slate piece began this way:

Jimmy Buffett turned 60 this past Dec. 25, a day he undoubtedly spent in a lower latitude, in a meditative frame of mind, in close proximity to a tankard of Captain Morgan. At least that was the case with birthday number 50, which, as recounted in his autobiography A Pirate Looks At Fifty (1998), Buffett celebrated by piloting his private jet from the Cayman Islands to Costa Rica to Colombia and drinking copiously, while contemplating "spirituality" and his goals going forward: "Learn celestial navigation," "Swim with dolphins," "Start therapy."

Mark Williams kicks off his consideration of Buffett with this passage:

Buffett, who turned 60 on Christmas Day, likely spent the day in a lower latitude, in a meditative frame of mind—and in close proximity to a tankard of Captain Morgan. At least that was the case with birthday number 50; as recounted in his 1998 autobiography 'A Pirate Looks At Fifty,' Buffett celebrated by piloting his private jet from the Cayman Islands to Costa Rica to Colombia—merrily drinking while contemplating "spirituality" and his goals: learning celestial navigation, swimming with dolphins and starting therapy.

I recalled writing the Buffett piece, laboring on deadline into the wee hours, hunched over a laptop at the kitchen table in my Brooklyn home. How could I have known that I was previewing a concert to take place some 15 months later at the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion in Spring, Texas?

And, of course, it turns out that it's not just the entertainment stories. You have to look really hard in the Bulletin to find anything original. That bit of content is the punch line... supplied by the original writer of the Slate piece quoted above, Jody Rosen.

Six degrees of too much time on their hands

Microsoft, far from inventing the next you-must-have-it bit of electronica, has been spending its time online, I see. No, not checking out the latest YouTube hilarity. Counting the number of people between you and... well... Kevin Bacon. Maybe.

Kevin Bacon wonders why you haven't texted him yet, LOL :).

The "small world theory," embodied in the old saw that there are just "six degrees of separation" between any two strangers on Earth, has been largely corroborated by a massive study of electronic communication.

With records of 30 billion electronic conversations among 180 million people from around the world, researchers have concluded that any two people on average are distanced by just 6.6 degrees of separation, meaning that they could be linked by a string of seven or fewer acquaintances.

What does this mean? You know someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows Barack Obama. Sweet.