So they're making a big deal out of Arnold Palmer's 50th time in the Masters golf tournament at the gender-segregated Augusta National Golf Club. He's retiring. So if golf is work for you, what do you do when you retire: play more golf? Or go sit in an office all day, just for fun?
With all the U.S. has put into its invasion of Iraq, would it have been too much to pay some kid $20 to mow the lawn? On Thursday, the BBC's Lyse Doucet reported live from Paradise Square in Baghdad, and the weeds that have grown up there since the Saddam statue was pulled down on TV a year ago -- those weeds were nearly as tall as she is. Why give the locals yet another reason to hate us? Any neighbor who moves in next door and lets the lawn go straight to heck is going to have problems. Doucet reported from near Paradise Square again Friday -- the square itself was closed off, with a U.S. military vehicle circling slowly, its loudspeaker threatening that anyone with a gun would be shot dead. That sound competed with calls from a nearby mosque for blood and humanitarian aid for people trapped by the fighting in Fallujah. Folks, a neighbor who drives around the block over and over blasting his stereo and making threats is also not going to make a lot of friends. Would it have been too much to broadcast a different message, even if it had to be alternated with the threats? Something like this, maybe:
"Greetings, friends. U.S. Military here. We hope you like your country better today than you did a year ago. We don't, ourselves, but that's beside the point. In fact, many of us would like to go home because we only signed up for a weekend a month and two weeks in the summer in the first place. Anyway, enjoy the anniversary, and remember, anyone who appears to have a weapon will be shot dead. You may never travel to our country, but at least you'll get an idea what it's like to be a black man who happens to be packing a wallet on an American street at night. Or, closer to home, what it's like to be one of us well-meaning citizens who signed up to serve our country and ended up patrolling yours. Have a nice day."
Not only is our government paying people to consume pornography, it's we're paying for the counseling they get for the effect that kind of work has on them.
"Second-day lede" is journalistic jargon for putting a new spin on a story for a second or subsequent news cycle. A 'lede" is the lead sentence of an article, deliberately misspelled to make it more easily recognizable as jargon. Once upon a time, news moved in daily cycles, but now it has become a constant flow of rewrites and "second-day ledes."
Second-Day Lede is also the name of this blog, where you'll find commentary on the news, and especially on the industry that cultivates, harvests, processes, packages, distributes and delivers it to us.
Who's writing this stuff?
A veteran of more news cycles than she'd care to admit, Janet Dagley Dagley entered the profession of journalism as a teenager, covering local government meetings at night for the Dayton Daily News in Ohio, becoming a full-time staff writer at 18 and later moving on to the Orange County Register and Los Angeles Times (Orange County Edition). Over the years she has worked as a freelance writer, editor, and radio producer in the U.S. and Europe. Although she has won numerous awards, she lost both times major metropolitan dailies submitted her work for the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing, and also lost on Jeopardy! (though she did win a trip to Hawaii). Most recently, she was editor of AIRSPACE, the journal of the Association of Independents in Radio, a U.S.-based group of public-radio producers, and a member of the AIR Board of Directors. She has been blogging independently at The Dagley Dagley Daily since February, 2003.
