« June 2005 | Main | September 2005 »

August 31, 2005

Why Is It Harder to Critique Cars Than Opera?

The 2004 Pulitzer Prize for criticism went to Dan Neil, an automobile critic for the Los Angeles Times. Weird or wonderful? Check out Diane Barthel-Bouchier's terrific essay on the topic, "Gearheads Among the Eggheads."

Car critics differ from art critics in several interesting ways. Both rely on expert knowledge and skills of assessment and interpretation. They both also reveal personal taste: one man's ugly SUV may be another man's "cute 'ute." In addition to these attributes, though, the car critic needs more highly developed physical skills. He literally has to make the car perform, to test it the way a musician might test the abilities of an instrument, to whose performance the music critic then intelligently listens....Opera, by contrast, with its supposed sensory overload, relies primarily upon sight and sound. You don't touch the elephants in Aida; you don't smell Tosca, or, at least, you're not supposed to. Car criticism calls on four senses minimum, beating opera two to one.
...Most car critics leave the high culture to ex-English majors, and work instead on perfecting the homespun metaphor. Metaphors are useful because critics must do the impossible. They must communicate the feel of a car to someone who has his hands on a magazine. So they use images to which the reader can clearly relate. The O-Z Rally is "exactly as racy as a pound and a half of Velveeta." A Mustang Boss 202 sounds like "BBs bouncing inside an empty Folgers can." Some metaphors have a surprisingly long half-life. When Car and Driver's Tony Swan described the Caterman race car as having "all the handling stability of a hog on ice," one reader detected the distant echo of a 1940s critic's assessment of either a Packard or a Mercury as cornering "like a hippopotamus on wet clay" ( June 2004, p. 21).

Go read it.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 05:47 PM | Comments (0)

August 30, 2005

When News Roundups Go Bad

There are times when the New York Times-CNET arrangement is less than the sum of its parts. I just innocently clicked on the "Blog roundup" link on the NYT web site under a headline about hurricane damage in the Gulf Coast and landed at a CNN overview of blogs about Hurricane Katrina. Here's the lead: "As Hurricane Katrina tore across the Gulf Coast on Monday, the Web provided some of the most vivid, first-hand accounts of the storm's destructive path in the form of blogs, online photo galleries and discussion forums."

Like me, you may be interested in some of those vivid, first-hand accounts. Here's one of the riveting examples provided by CNET. "John Strain, a social worker in Covington, La., recounted a sleepless night bracing for the storm in his online journal. 'It is 4:45 am now and I suppose I am up for the duration,' he wrote on Monday morning. 'My next task is to couple my coffee pot with a powered outlet and begin a caffeine transfusion. We are hanging in there, but the worst is yet to come.' " True enough but now I'm the one who needs coffee, this stuff is sending me to sleep.

There was more in that vein. Imagine if the piece had been titled "Newspapers Record Katrina Destruction" and wrote about coverage by local newspapers while leaving out any juicy bits. That bloggers blog has been firmly established for a while now. That's not news, it hasn't been for ages and that kind of coverage makes about as much sense as the early movies that were simply plays on film. For heaven's sake, CNET, get a grip. And if the NYT is going to link to CNET stuff from the home page without labeling it as CNET content, then the NYT editors need to put CNET on a shorter leash and demand better stuff.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 10:42 PM | Comments (0)

But Do Amputees Want 2-inch Heels?

Look out, Heather Mills McCartney! Female amputees are giving the gorgeous former model a run for her money with a new sexy, shapely leg created by a Wakefield man. Paul Harney has developed the LISA (Lightweight Inconspicuous Shapely Active) leg for amputees who want to wear high heels and don't want unsightly lines on their backsides - often caused by the prosthetic limb's edge. ``What women want is a functional, pretty leg. Women can wear a 2-inch heel with this leg and go barefoot,'' said Harney, owner of the FDR Center for Prosthetics and Orthotics, Inc., in Nashua, N.H.
I'm all for functional, pretty legs. But 2-inch heels? Fergettaboutit! From the Boston Herald.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 10:57 AM | Comments (0)

Buggy Collector Has 125,000

From the Arizona Republic:

Albert Thurman's tidy home is full of bugs. More than 125,000, to be exact.

Through a hobby that has spanned three decades and nearly a dozen countries, Thurman, 58, has amassed a collection of butterflies and insects so vast, diverse and well-preserved that two prominent university museums have agreed to accept the collection into their permanent archives.

With no formal training in entomology, Thurman has earned his wings - so to speak - through a passion for creatures that spend most of their brief life spans unnoticed by the average human eye.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 10:44 AM | Comments (0)

August 29, 2005

What's That Stuff?

"Ever wondered about what's really in hair coloring, Silly Putty, Cheese Wiz, artificial snow, or self-tanners?" Luckily for us, Chemical & Engineering news has a special report that examines "the chemistry behind a wide variety of everyday products." Thanks, Tim!

Posted by Deborah Branscum at 10:58 AM | Comments (0)