Soup

If you were intending to send a Christmas card to an American Solider c/o Walter Reed

kaytee:

per this post, Snopes has posted that those cards will not make it to their intended recipients. I’m sorry for any inconvenience that may have been caused.

However, if you still want to send cards, you can do so through the Red Cross Holiday Mail for Heroes program (guidelines listed here).

The address is:

Holiday Mail for Heroes
P.O. Box 5456
Capitol Heights, MD 20791-5456

The postmark deadline is December 7, 2009, so there’s not much time left!

Jenna: You’ve got to lie to her, coddle her, protect her from the real world.

Jack: I get it. Treat her like the New York Times treats its readers.

The Second Annual Interfaith Holiday Baking Competition

jhnmyr:

I’ve always had a problem allowing the full brunt of Holiday Cheer into my heart. It’s not that I didn’t want to - in fact, I tried harder than anyone I knew - but I think I was going for the wrong points of reference; TV commercial holiday cheer can be nearly offensive if you didn’t happen to have the kind of year that saw you making friends with an omni-ethnic fully gorgeous group of friends who like to dance in unison.

Then about this time last year I started getting e-mails from my brother with pictures of cakes he’d been baking. I laughed at first but when he appealed to me without sarcasm that it was undeniably fun and uplifting, I had to try it. Sure enough, baking a cake or two while listening to Christmas (okay, Holiday) music was like a giant dose of premium cheer. I had the happiest holidays in years.

I decided to start a contest on my blog wherein I challenged readers to submit their own baked goods, and the cheer just kept spreading. What I had originally thought was a clever little contest actually turned into a mainline of good feelings for everyone involved.

I’m excited to announce the Second Annual Interfaith Holiday Baking Competition. Spend an afternoon with your family, friends or loved ones and show me (and the internet) what you’ve got. The submission that moves me the most* will win its creator(s) 4 tickets (with meet and greet) to any show on the upcoming US tour and a Martin OMJM Signature Series acoustic guitar. Second place - as I’m sure I’ll be torn between two - will win a Fender JM Stratocaster. The deadline for submissions is December 29, 2009.

*there are no rules as to what I’m looking for. It just has to be baked and make an impression on me.

Here’s how you submit entries:

email your photo or photos of your creations to

interfaithcakes@me.com

*please keep each photo to a file size of under 400k and a maximum of 3 pictures in your email. (Last year the server filled up very quickly because of the file sizes and some of you couldn’t get e-mails through for a while.)

*no repeating submissions. I’ll see your cakes, I promise.

*please keep the server space open by only e-mailing if you’ve baked a cake. If you have a message you have to get to me, it’s going to cost you baking something. :)

*don’t bother sending pictures of cakes you pulled from the internet. I’ve seen them all. Yes, it’s a cake that looks like a hamburger. :)

I’ll be posting some of my work in the coming weeks.

Start your ovens, turn up the music and have a great holiday season!

John

This guy just *gets* it. God (or Allah or whomever or lackthereof higher power of your choosing) bless you, John Mayer.

Someone pass me the flour.

Did anyone else notice that everyone on that trainwreck new MTV show about hair gel and tanning is from New York, not New Jersey?

Leave my state alone, New York elitists.

Mediabistro on Rosen and Shirky

studio20nyu:

Studio 20 Professor Jay Rosen interviewed Clay Shirky as part of the “Primary Sources” series last night. Mediabistro.com wrote about the event below.

NYU Media Professors Discuss Future Of Media By Looking Back

By Drew Grant on Dec 04, 2009 09:30 AM

Last night, New York University hosted a panel in its continuing “Primary Sources” series focusing on journalism, featuring professors and media commenters Jay Rosen and Clay Shirky.

While the topic may have officially been “New Media’s Present and Future,” the conversation quickly moved into the past: specifically delving into five years ago, which Shirky said most people mistakenly refer to as the Golden Era of Journalism — before the Internet came and took all the money away. Five years ago, Shirky stated, newspapers were losing readership left and right, but their revenue was booming. Ironically, now most newspapers actually have more readers due to their Web sites, but the money has dried up.

While most news orgs would have liked to take that conversation in the direction of how to get that money back, Shirky and Rosen were more interested in how the Internet plays into the public’s perception of the mainstream media.

Rosen, known for his work in the movement of public journalism, sited the longitudinal study that showed that in 1976 over 75 percent of Americans had “a great deal of trust” in the press, whereas 30 years later, only 4.5 percent did. Yet journalists on the whole, Rosen asserted, have only become more educated and better informed. So where did this mistrust of the media come from?

Well, from the small groups of Internet watchdogs, which perform the important function of “after-the-fact-checking,” as the professors put it. Starting (debatably) as early as Dan Rather’s MemoGate in 2004, and up to the recent Balloon Boy incident, the Internet has offered up information that contradicts what is being fed to us by our televisions or newspapers. Compare this to 30 years ago, when we may have had a pick of only several outlets of information in which to get our news, which stood as indisputable facts of the world at the time.

So is the Internet bad for all news organizations, undermining the public’s trust in once-reputable sources? Not necessarily, said Shirky, though news publications’ latest act of going to the FTC to regulate the information disseminated on the Web is absolutely the wrong direction. It is the act of forwarding a piece of journalism these days, not the publication of the piece itself, that gets these publishers an audience, he said. And by placing a pay wall or premium on your brand or story — as Rupert Murdoch and several other publishers are trying to do — you’re directly hindering that story’s ability to gain readership.

Then again, if we’re going by the adage of The Golden Age of Journalism, an audience isn’t as important as a profit.