Te’o Media Fail, Barbusse’s Under Fire, Subway Footlong, AFC and NFC Championship Picks
Thursday, January 17, 2013I’d like to concur with SBNation’s list of failingly lazy media outlets in the whole Manti Te’o fake-dead-girlfriend scandal:
The following is a list of organizations and people who, to varying degrees of incompletion, never bothered to check to see if Manti Te’o’s girlfriend was real.
1. Us.
2. You (Jack Dickey and Timothy Burke excepted)
4. ESPN
7. The Chicago Tribune
8. The Chicago Sun-Times
9. The Sporting News
10. USA Today
11. The Boston Globe
12. CBS Sports
13. The New York Post
15. Yahoo
16. The Associated Press
17. The Palm Beach Post
18. The Miami Herald
19. The Tampa Bay Times
20. Grantland
21. The Los Angeles Times
How hard is it to Google a person? I do that every time I have a meeting with someone new and I want to see how overblown they are in their LinkedIn profile, much less when I’m running a national sports-news story on a Heisman candidate’s deepest personality traits. It’s disappointing every time I’m reminded that as lazy as I can be – for probably the 12th workday in a row today, I listened to “Leper Messiah” 25 times rather than bothering to search for new, interesting music – there are people higher up who are even lazier than that when performing far more high-visibility tasks.
- On the subject of pessimism, if I had to pick a single one of all the subjects on which I nerd out – excluding the Internet because that comprises more or less every subject – I probably nerd out the most frequently on the First World War. Something about the self-congratulating 19th century crash-landing into the bleakest dehumanized misery, particularly in the Western Front, grabs me in both visceral and philosophical ways that make me turn the era over in my mind again and again. (Cheery!) So much great art and analysis came out of the turmoil that I read or view pretty much all material I can find dealing with the leadup, duration and aftermath of 1914-1918. Recently I got around to reading Under Fire by Henri Barbusse, one of the earliest (1916) first-person accounts of the war that led to the infamous All Quiet on the Western Front that we all know from ninth grade.
I’d say this book is worth a read if you’re the type of person who’d read every WWI panel at Les Invalides (at right), because it’s like All Quiet but, to match Under Fire‘s longer length, features more quantity but not necessarily quality: more gore, more sitting around behind the lines, more background men who get killed, more soldiers shooting the shit, and more moralizing via an end segment very much like the extended argument for socialism at the end of The Jungle. Remarque did a better job distilling a similar story to Barbusse’s, so you can check out Under Fire if you want to get into a higher level of detail and are willing to read what from a literary perspective is extra padding to get at that detail. - Today I saw the story about the Subway footlong controversy — the sandwiches are actually 11 inches in many cases — and at first I was annoyed that we all thought it important enough to document this and make it into a thing. (More than 22,000 comments on that story!) Then I remembered that this is actually an example of the market keeping its companies honest, and that’s a good thing. I can still be mad that we don’t apply this level of vigilance to environmental or policy issues, but it’s nonetheless a good thing that this level of vigilance does exist somehow, somewhere.
And for the last NFL picks before the Super Bowl:Last week: 1-3; Overall: 129-130
San Francisco -4 at Atlanta
At New England -9 BaltimoreNew England in the Super Bowl, again. I still like it better than Baltimore.
