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Thirteen-Year-Old Runaway with Asperger's Spent 11 Days in Subways

Someone on the HikiCulture FaceBook group shared a link to this New York Times article about a thirteen-year-old boy from Brooklyn, New York who spent a total of 11 days in a subway station. The boy happened to have Asperger's Syndrome (like myself), which can lead some people to become highly reclusive and anti-social.

I thought I'd share this article since it's not very often that Asperger's is mentioned in major newspapers such as the New York Times.

PS. Thanks for the link Theo.

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What's Stronger, the Media Outlet's Brand or the Journalist's? - Courtesy @RWW

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Amy Alkon is Still Peddling Her One Claim to Fame

I'm speaking, of course, about America's most celebrated insane bag of nuts blogger, one Amy Alkon, who seems to be interviewed here for her ability to be crazy and credibly so:

Amy Alkon, a syndicated advice columnist and self-described “manners psycho,” certainly thinks so. Just ask “Barry,” a loud cellphone talker she encountered recently at a Starbucks in Santa Monica, Calif.

“He just blatantly took over the whole place with his conversation, streaming his dull life into everybody’s brain,” Ms. Alkon recalled in a telephone interview.

Among the personal details Barry shared that day — errands to run, plans for the evening — was his phone number, which Ms. Alkon jotted down.

“I called him that night and said, ‘Just calling to let you know, Barry, that if you’d like your private life to remain private, you might want to be a little more considerate next time,’ “ she said.

Alkon has no ethics, and I call bullshit:

Someone who doesn’t tolerate inconsiderate public behaviour is Amy Alkon, the famous Advice Goddess columnist in the US who is also known as a blogslapper of ‘assclowns’. Recently, Amy was so annoyed by a ‘cell phone shouter’ in a LA café, she immediately posted personal details of the assclown's conversation to her weblog. The icing on the cake was the assclown receiving calls directing her to Amy’s post, using the phone number she’d haplessly broadcast to all and sundry. Fittingly, one of Amy’s mottos is -revenge is the best revenge.

Indeed, shaming websites catering for pissed-off victims of public arseholes are springing up with a vengeance. Check this Wall Street Journal article, inspired by Amy’s experience for a list of blogslapping websites. One potential site not yet created could cater for the common problem of locals and families terrorising the neighbourhood.

Notice anything?

That same incident happened in 2006, and Alkon continues to "peddle" the incident as something recent. So far, the Wall Street Journal and now the New York Times have passed off a single incident (and I'm guessing she's dressing up the same incident and peddling it around--I could be wrong) as being something Alkon has done to unsuspecting people in the name of some sort of morally superior attempt at enforcing "ethics" and here's what she did:

Eva Burgess Is Getting Glasses!
And she’s picking them up Saturday after 4pm! I know this because she was bellowing into a cell phone about it next to me in a café. Apparently, she’s not only inconsiderate, she doesn’t seeem to mind giving a lot of personal information, starting with her full name, to a total stranger.

She continued, Eva and Ken Hashimoto “have insurance there," she said…”under a flexible spending account.” “We just have to pay by the end of the year,” she said. And then she most helpfully bellowed her phone number -- [REDACTED] -- perhaps because she’s lonely and wants total strangers to call and ask how her glasses are working out for her.

Hey, Eva, can I have your bank account number and your log-in so I can transfer a few bucks to my account? I’d like to get a pair of noise-canceling headphones in case you sit next to me again.

On a positive note, the little girl with them, probably Eva’s (and maybe Ken’s) daughter, was very quiet and well-behaved.

Hey, Eva, I know it’s kinda cold in NYC, where you’re apparently from (according to the area code you helpfully dispensed), but here in sunny southern California, at the moment you were talking, it was 58 degrees. Next time, you might take your business outside –- as exciting as I found it, on a morning I would normally have relaxed to the classical music while eating my breakfast and thinking my own thoughts, to instead be a part of your eyecare needs.

Nice going, New York Times. That uncanny similarity is a little too uncanny for my tastes. If she's been running around, doing this sort of thing for years, well, all well and good. But let's not give her a pass on being the unethical-blogger-who-posts-someone's-phone-number nonsense. I don't care how offended someone is--posting their personal information crosses into Michelle Malkin territory.

Sorry, @DQuenqua over there on Twitter. You've been punked by one of the least ethical human beings alive.  Cue 2011, and a rousing story in the Washington Post about how Amy Alkon smacked down someone by publishing their phone number on her blog...

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Untitled

“Fashion is subjective,” says Keith Pollock, executive online editor of Brant Publications, which publishes art magazines and Interview, the pop culture magazine founded by Andy Warhol. “There are very respected fashion journalists that can evaluate the state of the market. However I don’t see how a fashion editor’s perspective on a Prada shoe is more valid than that of a teen blogger in Evanston, Illinois.”

(via http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/14/technology/14youth.html?scp=1&sq=chictopia&st=Search)

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philosophy and nazism (heidegger in NYT)

reading about Heidegger in New York Times, and thinking about re-evaluating historical figures and about Steiner (as usual, so no other connections implied here... (besides, as most of you probably know, Steiner died in 1925)):

'Without understanding the soil in which Heidegger’s philosophy is rooted, Mr. Faye argues, people may not realize that his ideas can grow in troubling directions. Heidegger’s dictum to be authentic and free oneself from conventional restraints, for example, can lead to a rejection of morality. The denunciation of reason and soulless modernism can devolve into crude anti-intellectualism and the glorification of “blood and soil."'

According to NYT, the author of a book about Heidegger argues that

'fascist and racist ideas are so woven into the fabric of Heidegger’s theories that they no longer deserve to be called philosophy.'

And suggests the following bizarre steps to be taken:

'[the author] calls on philosophy professors to treat Heidegger’s writings like hate speech. Libraries, too, should stop classifying Heidegger’s collected works (which have been sanitized and abridged by his family) as philosophy and instead include them under the history of Nazism.'

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The New York Times - Innovation Portfolio

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100 Things Restaurant Staffers Should Never Do (Part 2)

By BRUCE BUSCHEL

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Can Jazz Be Saved? A Humbly Offered Solution.

Click here to download:

103203913.pdf (18 KB)

Over the course of a couple of years, my musical taste radically changed from rock, to progressive rock, to fusion, to straight-ahead jazz and bebop.  During those mid-teenage years, I also went from playing electric bass, to fretless, to upright. I ended up privately studying with a couple of great teachers and was admitted to York University’s jazz program when I was eighteen.

Jazz for me was the greatest, most creative music ever invented. In fact, it wasn’t just invented, it was reinvented every time a standard was called out and improvisation began.

I became so obsessed with jazz that it was musical heresy to listen to anything else. I sold, or traded all of my rock, progressive rock and fusion albums for jazz recordings.

This all abruptly ended when I got married and had to support a family. It was obvious that I couldn’t feed my new family off the business of playing jazz.

Since then, I’ve had plenty of time to open my ears again to other forms of music. It’s also given me some time to consider the problems and opportunities of what still remains my favourite form of music.

In a Wall Street Journal article, titled “Can Jazz Be Saved?” Terry Teachout says:

“In 1987, Congress passed a joint resolution declaring jazz to be “a rare and valuable national treasure.” Nowadays the music of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker and Miles Davis is taught in public schools, heard on TV commercials and performed at prestigious venues such as New York’s Lincoln Center, which even runs its own nightclub, Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola.

Here’s the catch: Nobody’s listening.”

He goes on to pull data from the National Endowment for the Arts’ latest Survey, which presents a picture far less than hopeful on the survival of jazz.

• In 2002, the year of the last survey, 10.8% of adult Americans attended at least one jazz performance. In 2008, that figure fell to 7.8%.
• Not only is the audience for jazz shrinking, but it’s growing older, fast. The median age of adults in America who attended a live jazz performance in 2008 was 46. In 1982 it was 29.
• Older people are also much less likely to attend jazz performances today than they were a few years ago. The percentage of Americans between the ages of 45 and 54 who attended a live jazz performance in 2008 was 9.8%. In 2002, it was 13.9%. That s a 30% drop in attendance.
• Even among college-educated adults, the audience for live jazz has shrunk significantly, to 14.9% in 2008 from 19.4% in 1982.

He then finds direct correlation between the median age of the jazz audience with classical music (49 in 2008 vs. 40 in 1982), opera (48 in 2008 vs. 43 in 1982), nonmusical plays (47 in 2008 vs. 39 in 1982) and ballet (46 in 2008 vs. 37 in 1982) - concluding that the average American sees jazz as a form of high art.

Hey, I’d agree with that. At least I would have, back in the woodshed days when all I did was practice, or perform 12 hours a day. I was a jazz snob. And jazz snobs aren’t just limited to jazz musicians. There’s the aging audience too. Often, and quite understandably accused of being the jazz police. They’re the ones who are always ready with an acid stare or, if that doesn’t work, a bellicose hush, if you dare to even pass wind during a performance.

Jazz wasn’t always like that. Take a look at some of the old Cab Calloway, Fletcher Henderson, or Count Basie film clips. Read some of the biographies. These were party bands. There were the juke joints, after hour jams and the notorious speak easy clubs. There the bands and musicians provided hip, crowd-pleasing entertainment that was anything but stodgy.

Then there were the writers of the standards: Rodgers and Hart, George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Johnny Mercer and the rest. These guys could write words as well as music. Listen to ‘Strange Fruit’ by Billie Holliday. Few songs since have come close to the deep emotions and cultural insight of that song.

That in a nutshell is both the problem and the opportunity.

Jazz needs new standards, both in writing and performance. If music is about anything, it’s about songs and audience engagement. Jazz has to be in the now to gain back an audience.

Any musical art form that considers itself as the sole, core reason for its own existence, rather than placing the audience at the core, is doomed to fail. Any art form that only caters to an aging demographic made up of snobs and fellow musicians, will fail. And anything that depends on government grants, university support and trust fund endowments to survive, is already dead.

To connect, jazz needs an injection of emotion. It needs to be new and important to a broader audience. It needs to take itself less seriously and have more fun. It needs to be simplified – a cascade of clichéd notes and mathematical cycles doesn’t mean anything if it doesn’t connect.

But most importantly, it needs songwriters. Not jazz writers. It needs lyrics that are relevant to today. Insights based on current cultural cues. It needs to get hip with the times and become at least vibrant, if not the leading light like it once was. And, yes, it needs to look to and draw from the past, but without being permanently stuck there.

The world doesn’t need another version of ‘All Of Me,’ or ‘How High The Moon.’ It needs new songs.

Still, the question remains, even with change, can jazz make a comeback?  As the 1921 New York Times article clearly shows – it’s not like as if we haven’t been here before.

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Senate Bill Would Curtail Bank Overdraft Charges - New York Times

Read the rest of the article at the New York Times

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Times Says It Will Cut 100 Newsroom Jobs - Media Decoder Blog

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