Trick or treat

The Bryant Park Project, Sigur Ros and Jancee Dunn

This is a collision of three things that I like:

1. The Bryant Park Project is a new NPR morning show out of NYC with the explicit mandate not to be so freaking dull. I like a lot of NPR, but it says something about their culture that they have to have a special project not to be boring. So far, I think the BPP (which I listen to via podcast) is a lot less pleased with itself than the overly Slate-flavored Day to Day, a midday project from NPR in Los Angeles with a similar mandate.
2. Sigur Ros is a very odd, but very cool Icelandic band I enjoy that plays this sort of spare pop music, not necessarily using a real language. When BPP interviewed the band, they weren’t really feeling it, gave a pretty crappy interview, and the very multimedia BPP then posted the raw video of the interview on the Web. (The raw footage of any interview will look less than perfect, even with a good interview, so this was a brave move.) Sigur Ros fans were unkind about the BPP interviewer’s interviewing skills, to put it mildly.
3. Jancee Dunn, arguably the best music writer working for Rolling Stone, and someone whom I’ve been a fan of for many years, was called in to go through what BPP did wrong and what they did right, and to talk about the pain of interviewing musicians in general. To me, the scene in Almost Famous where the interviewer gets shut out in the hall, the hotel room door slammed in his face, is probably the single most accurate depiction of journalism on film, and Jancee, although not in so many words, seems to agree.

Anyway, worth a listen.

What cats know about war

The NYT’s Baghdad bureau isn’t able to alleviate much of the suffering in Iraq. They are, however, able to save some stray cats:

IT was a bitterly cold night in the Baghdad winter of 2005, somewhere in the predawn hours before the staccato of suicide bombs and mortars and gunfire that are the daily orchestration of the war. Alone in my office in The Times’s compound beside the Tigris River, I was awaiting the telephoned “goodnight� from The Times foreign desk, eight time zones west, signaling that my work for the next day’s paper was done.

That is when I heard it: the cry of an abandoned kitten, somewhere out in the darkness, calling for its mother somewhere inside the compound. By an animal lover’s anthropomorphic logic, those desperate calls, three nights running, had come to seem more than the appeal of a tiny creature doomed to a cold and lonely death. Deep in the winter night, they seemed like a dismal tocsin for all who suffer in a time of war.

With others working for The Times in Baghdad, I took solace in the battalion of cats that had found their way past the 12-foot-high concrete blast walls that guard our compound. With their survival instincts, the cats of our neighborhood learned in the first winter of the war that food and shelter and human kindness lay within the walls. Outside, among the garbage heaps and sinuous alleyways, human beings were struggling for their own survival, and a cat’s life was likely to be meager, embattled and short.

Cat populations in the wild expand arithmetically with the supply of food, and ours multiplied rapidly, with as many as two or three litters at a time out in the shrubbery of our gardens, or beneath our water tanks.

Soon, our compound was home to as many as 60 cats at a time, their numbers carefully tallied by Younis and Saif, the enthusiastic young Iraqis who prepared heaped platters of rice and lamb and beef — and, as a special treat, cans of cat food trucked across the desert from Jordan, over highways synonymous with ambushes, kidnappings and bombings. As The Times’s bureau chief, part of my routine was to ask, each night, how many cats we had seated for dinner. In a place where we could do little else to relieve the war’s miseries, the tally became a measure of one small thing we could do to favor life over death. The American military command has a battery of “metrics� to gauge progress, and the nightly headcount of the cats became my personal measure, my mood varying as the numbers went up and down. Sometimes they went sharply down, during winter epidemics of cat flu, or after attacks by the compound’s two dogs (war refugees themselves) that proved, as they grew beyond puppies, to have a feral antipathy to cats programmed in their bones.

Not everyone in the compound saw the burgeoning cat population so fondly. Some, including my wife, Jane, who works as the compound’s chief administrator, loves cats as much as anyone, but thought matters had gotten out of hand when middle-of-the-night fights between the dominant males outside our building threatened to wake the devil, or when suppertime walks past the “cat motel� we built from a stack of water-bottle crates outside one of our kitchens turned into a pied-piper’s epic, each step followed by dozens of hungry, impatient meowing creatures.

One control measure, having the cats spayed, was unavailable, since all of Baghdad’s domestic-animal veterinarians seemed to have fled, among hundreds of thousands of other Iraqis who have sought sanctuary abroad. One attempt at neutering our female dog, Itchy, by a farm-animal vet, nearly killed her.

Worth registering to read (or using the BugMeNot plug-in for Firefox, shhh).

Predicting the future of English

NPR had a pretty cool story yesterday about what the English language of the future will look like.

Two new studies published Wednesday in the journal Nature explore how languages evolve.

Tecumseh Fitch, a professor of psychology at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, studies the evolution of language and wrote the introduction for the Nature studies.

So, I got an iPod touch

It arrived last Friday, and in between, you know, finishing up the newspaper, raising a child, spending time with my parents, spending time with my wife and doing the Brewfest quests, I’ve been playing around with it ever since.

My last iPod was a monochrome 20 GB one, so there’s a whole lot of upgrades I’m getting at once in this new iPod (a mere 16 GB, and with the addition of video files and baby photos, a lot less space at the end of the day for actual music).

It’s a pretty amazing piece of hardware. The video screen is brighter and sharper than I could have imagined (and the brightness level automatically adjusts based on the amount of light in the room, saving battery power), the Internet access is astonishingly good over wi-fi (and, boy, are there a lot of unsecured Internet connections in Hesperia) and it is astonishingly small for what it does.

My old iPod was about the same size as my Treo 650 — about the size of a pack of cards — and while I love my Treo — I could barely do my job without it — next to the wafer-thin iPod touch, it looks like a product from another era, which I guess it really is.

That said, the iPod touch isn’t perfect. Not yet, anyway.

It gets confused sometimes when dealing with smart playlists, failing to update properly or loading the wrong files in general, even when the same playlist copies just fine to my old 20 GB iPod. This will presumably get patched in the future — there’s already been a new version of iTunes since I received the new iPod on iFriday.

I also don’t find the touch screen keyboard nearly as good as the built-in keyboard on my Treo, and I suspect, even after I’m fully proficient with the touchscreen, my typing will never be as fast as it is with the Treo. (I would buy an add-on keyboard, if such were available.)

The touchscreen aspect also means that I can’t pause, advance or change the volume on it without looking at the unit while driving. Since I’m using a tape adapter to work in the car, I don’t hold out a lot of hope that anyone will create an aftermarket device to help with this, since the number of cars with tape decks is rapidly declining.

And finally, the damn shiny metal back is a scratch magnet. Whatever soft metal it’s made out of has already gotten scratched, since no iPod touch cases are available yet (both ifrogz and iskin will e-mail me when this situation changes). I don’t know why Apple wanted to stick with the goofy old metal backs, when even their new standard iPods don’t have them any more, but it’s sort of irritating. (If a case also allowed it to be propped up horizontally to show videos, that’d be great, too.)

All that said, this was a huge leap forward and the new iPod is like almost nothing else (other than, you know, the iPhone). If the above problems are addressed, I can definitely see upgrading to a second or third generation iPhone in a few years. In the meantime, I’m really going to enjoy this new iPod.