• Did you know that The Justice department auditorium statues have been uncovered again? These are the statues of nude Justice that former Atty General John Ashcroft had covered with $8000 worth of drapes so no one would be offended by an occasional photograph including a breast.
  
  
• The Sports Cliche List is a database sorted by topic of all the things we really, really get tired of hearing athletes say during interviews, or sports commentators repeating over and over: "It's a whole new ballgame. They've scratched and clawed their way back into the game. It's a shame somebody has to lose this game.They're playing with a sense of urgency. "
  
  
• The Safest Family Car: a blogger on the new Bayosphere community journalism site posts a thoughtful analysis about how we can all be better drivers (and car owners). (Pointed out by Dan Gillmor.)
  
  
• Medieval Boston: this exhibit on an urban planning forum shows how Boston looked before urban development. I would have thought it was a stretch to call it 'medieval' but there are buildings pictured here from the early 17th century, still a bit late but looking like medieval English towns nevertheless....I'd like to see something like this devoted to Miami.
  
  
• The World's Healthiest Foods: the site is devoted to salmon recipes this week as it's the Food of the Week.
  
  
• Iraq War. No matter how much you hear it's hard to picture the number of casualties that have occurred here over the last three years. This new site has taken the database of casualties and put them on a map. When you start, each casualty pops up on a map with a 'tic' sound. (It didn't work for me at first, using Firefox. But when I clicked on 'play again', it started.) It's a bit shocking when it gets to this year: the number of deaths is low for the first few months, but the red spots (indicating many deaths) proliferate over the last several weeks....
  
  
• Top 5 Gitmo Falsehoods from Media Matters.
  
  
• Detention Practices Project, a Wikipedia from the Daily Kos folks about Guantanamo and other detention questions.

It scales brilliantly, degrades gracefully, supports optional categories and "beaming," and is configurable to an unlimited number of options. Best of all, the Hipster PDA fits into your hip pocket and costs practically nothing to purchase and maintain.

Miami Herald obituary

He may have been my favorite journalist of all time. I met Gene not long after coming to The Miami Herald in 1981. He'd been there for 25 years or so already, and had won two Pulitzers. Not only that, but they were Pulitzers for getting innocent people out of jail. Not often anyone gets to do that.

Gene was irreverent, funny, had a huge laugh you could hear across the newsroom. He had friends all over journalism and was constantly writing letters to them pointing out stories they'd missed, errors, or making suggestions. He'd often bring those letters around to be read, because he enjoyed them so much. He wrote the best ledes ever.

When he was inducted into the Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame, he wrote his own irreverent biography. The Herald obit, mostly written by Gene himself, is a rewrite of the Hall of Fame bio, but adds some commentary by Martin Merzer, who gets the essence:

"His philosophy: Put everything in the newspaper, unvarnished. Just ask questions, write down the answers and put them in the newspaper. Pretty simple.
Gene's first byline appeared in The Herald on Nov. 9, 1957, the day after he came to work. In that story, a BBC executive said, ''There is no substitute for news.'' It became Gene's creed.
'Publish! Journalistic cowardliness and/or soft-headedness is as evil as censorship and is just as harmful to a free society,' Gene wrote in 1984 when a Herald editor made the mistake of sending him a questionnaire about dicey journalistic situations."

Gene died on the anniversary of the Watergate break-in, probably the biggest thing to happen to journalism in his lifetime. I hope he got to enjoy the Deep Throat stories in the last few weeks....I noticed recently that among the files in the Bernstein/Woodward Watergate collection at UT, is one correspondence from someone at The Miami Herald: Gene Miller. Another of Gene's letters.


One thing keeps coming back to mind from the last few months Miller was still working in the Herald building: my desk was near the elevators, and nearly every night as Gene left, I'd hear him telling someone as they went into the elevators: "Puusha da button". I imagined that most of the people he encountered didn't know what he was talking about. But Gene taught me to pay attention to Miami's history, a passion of his, and 'puusha da button' was the thing that Guissepe Zangara was reported to have said just before he was executed for the attempted assassination of FDR and murder of Chicago mayor Anton Cermak in Miami's Bayfront Park in 1933. A crude mockery of Zangara's Italian accent, but part of Miami's amazing history. He loved Miami and its stories, and his enthusiasm infected everyone around him.

Among former Herald reporters writing about Miller: Joel Achenbach at his WashingtonPost.com blog. There will be more. I'll link later.

June 13th, 2005:
Remember this date for it is part of HIStory.

This and other ridiculousness can be found at the The Official Source for Michael Jackson News and Information.

The line of the day came from the jury foreman who during an interview on CNN was asked whether jurors hoped Jacko had learned any lessons from the trial.

"We would hope ... that he doesn't sleep with children anymore."

(Added later:) Joel Achenbach has a thoughtful posting in his WashingtonPost.com blog: Would Michael Jackson have been acquitted if he was black? "Not a chance", says Achenbach. "...as a Bleached American, Jackson served merely as the representative of ALL multi-millionaire, has-been, facially mutilated pop stars who are suspected of touching boys during sleepovers at their mansion.
...During the coverage last night the TV showed young Michael, dancing and singing in his prime, and my eldest daughter said, incredulously, "That's Michael Jackson?" Yes, that was Michael Jackson, doing "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough," handsome, talented beyond belief, charming, smiling, black, and male."

We may never again see, as we saw this week, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward and Ben Bradlee converging at the Post to deal with a breaking story. Forgive the overblown language, but in our profession these men are gods. Their stories are the legends we will tell our grandchildren.

"If Watergate we happening today, the Nixon tapes would be MP3's and downloaded as podcasts. Deep Throat would have used email and of course Woodward and Bernstein would be be bloggers."