One of my more recent follows on twitter is author Damien Walters Grintalis. I enjoy her tweets, but she outdid herself on Friday, with the Alien ABCs (from the movie Alien):

Used under CC license from teachernz's Flickr photostream.

A is for Alien, who lives out in space,
B is for Burke, who is a disgrace.

C is for Crew, they get all eaten up,
D is for Drake, whose guns aren’t enough.

E is for Ellen, Ripley’s first name,
F is for Facehugger, not easily slain.

You gotta read the whole thing on her blog.

Lupe Fiasco is becoming a regular in Words of Others. I love his music, and he is amazing at mixing in commentary, politics, and activism.

He released a mix tape. “Friend of the People” on Thanksgiving, and I have been listening to it a lot. It was obviously put together in a short period of time and then released: the Penn State creep Jerry Sandusky is mentioned, and Occupy Wall Street is in there a lot.

The Words of Others comes from the last song on the tape, which is an anthem for Occupy Wall Street. The chorus is simple but I think it sums up all the disparate messages of the Occupy movement:

This world ends, this world ends
This world ends, this world ends
Now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now

It’s a great song, and I found this video with the music nicely paired with video from Occupy. I can’t figure out if this is some sort of offical Lupe video or not, these mix tape things can be pretty ambiguous:

You can download the mix tape here.

Last week I complained on the Interwebs about newspapers’ common practice of using the names of capital cities as shorthand for the current government of those countries, as it is used in this New York Times article:

It is Berlin, citing the very treaties that it now wants to adjust, that has resisted the boldest answer to the euro crisis — using the European Central Bank as the euro zone’s lender of last resort. Berlin does not even want to sanction American-style quantitative easing to promote economic growth, one recipe to stoking growth and reducing the debt burden.

For me, this always conjures up images of a city talking, or negotiating, or objecting, or whatever. More importantly, it is too ambiguous, I think. Who is Berlin meant to represent here? Angela Merkel? The German Parliament? Both? Neither? It’s really kind of lazy.

At any rate, my complaint prompted my friend and fellow Dow Jones Newspaper Fund Chapel Hill boot camp 2004 survivor Niko Dugan to post this on my Facebook wall. (Contains language.)

IAEA: “Hey, y’all, did y’all know that Iran is working on nuclear weapons?”
MOSCOW: “Pfft, totes already knew that. I wish Washington would stop tweeting about it already. We get it!”
WASHINGTON: “Moscow, you’re such a bitch! I’m just sayin …”
MOSCOW: “You been ‘just sayin’ forever, gurl. You need to get over yourself. Besides, let Tehran do what Tehran gon’ do.”
TEHRAN: “Why y’all gotta be always be up in my business? Ain’t nobody invited you! I ain’t said shit about no weapons program! I need to keep the lights on, dammit! You bitches worry about your own prollems. Sheeeeeeeeeeeet.”
WASHINGTON: “Whatever, Tehran. You crazy. TEHRAN IS CRAZY, Y’ALL!”
JERUSALEM: “What’d this dumb bitch do now? I hope y’all gonna start payin’ attention?! I done told you this stupid bitch would fuck errrything up!”
TEHRAN: “Shut yo mouth, dumb ho!”
JERUSALEM: “Don’t call me a ho, ho!”
JER-RY! JER-RY! JER-RY!

I put it to you that connecting Jerusalem and the Jerry Springer chant is the comic gold moment of 2011.

Back in April before I went AWOL, I wrote that I’d been enjoying Lupe Fiasco’s latest album, Lasers. I still am, and I’ve really come to like “Words I’ve Never Said.” It’s political in a way I mostly agree with, but I think the last verse, which is almost intensely personal, is what really makes the song great.

I think that all the silence is worse than all the violence
Fear is such a weak emotion that’s why I despise it
We scared of almost everything, afraid to even tell the truth
So scared of what you think of me, I’m scared of even telling you
Sometimes I’m like the only person I feel safe to tell it to
I’m locked inside a cell in me, I know that there’s a jail in you
Consider this your bailing out, so take a breath, inhale a few
My screams is finally getting free, my thoughts is finally yelling through

I hadn’t watched the video before, but it is really good too, designed in a near-future kind of 1984 dystopia:

I think a lot about the future of the newspaper industry (as I should, given that I am 28 and still have most of my working life ahead of me). Last week, I read an interesting interview of David Simon, creator of The Wire and a former reporter for The Baltimore Sun. It was wide-ranging, but inevitably it touched on the problems of the newspaper industry. (I say inevitably, because Simon has long commented on those problems, including devoting The Wire’s final season to them.)

He has a very interesting take on it, and I think there’s a lot of truth to it:

Bill Moyers: I read something you recently told The Guardian in London: “Oh, to be a state or local official in America”—without newspapers—“it’s got to be one of the great dreams in the history of American corruption.”
David Simon: Well, I was being a little hyperbolic.
Bill Moyers: But it’s happening.
David Simon: Yes. It absolutely is. To find out what’s going on in my own city I often find myself at a bar somewhere, writing stuff down on a cocktail napkin that a police lieutenant or some schoolteacher tells me because these institutions are no longer being covered by beat reporters who are looking for the systemic. It doesn’t exist anymore.
“We were doing our job, making the world safe for democracy. And all of a sudden, terra firma shifted, new technology. Who knew that the Internet was going to overwhelm us?” I would buy that if I wasn’t in journalism for the years that immediately preceded the Internet. I took the third buyout from the Baltimore Sun. I was about reporter number eighty or ninety who left, in 1995, long before the Internet had had its impact. I left at a time when the Baltimore Sun was earning a 37-percent profit.
We now know this because it’s in bankruptcy and the books are open. All that R&D money that was supposed to go into making newspapers more essential, more viable, more able to explain the complexities of the world went to shareholders in the Tribune Company. Or the L.A. Times Mirror Company before that. And ultimately, when the Internet did hit, they had an inferior product that was not essential enough that they could charge online for it.
I mean, the guys who are running newspapers over the last twenty or thirty years have to be singular in the manner in which they destroyed their own industry. It’s even more profound than Detroit in 1973 making Chevy Vegas and Pacers and Gremlins and believing that no self-respecting American would buy a Japanese car. Except it’s not analogous, in that a Nissan is a pretty good car and a Toyota is a pretty good car. The Internet, while it’s great for commentary and froth, doesn’t do very much first-generation reporting at all. The economic model can’t sustain that kind of reporting. They had contempt for their own product, these people.
Bill Moyers: The publishers. The owners.
David Simon: You know, for twenty years, they looked upon the copy as being the stuff that went around the ads. The ads were God. And then all of a sudden the ads were not there, and the copy they had contempt for. They had actually marginalized themselves.
I was being a little flippant with The Guardian, but what I was saying was, you know, until they figure out the new model, there’s going to be a wave of corruption.

I always had a vague idea that I would like the rapper Lupe Fiasco, based on his single “Kick, Push” from a few years back and one or two other songs I’ve heard. I finally got around to getting his three albums over the weekend prompted by a new single that I heard on the radio, “The Show Goes On.” His music is mostly hopeful, sometimes political, and often dealing with struggling through life. Here’s some of “The Show Goes On,” and the video:

So no matter what you been through
no matter what you into
no matter what you see when you look outside your window
brown grass or green grass
picket fence or barbed wire
Never ever put them down
you just lift your arms higher
raise em till your arms tired
Let em’ know you’re there
That you struggling and survivin’ that you gonna persevere
Yeah, ain’t no body leavin, no body goin’ home
even if they turn the lights out the show is goin’ on!

I picked up a few paperback comic collections at a Borders that is having a closing sale. One of the books I got was The Nightly News, a six-issue series by Jonathan Hickman about a conspiracy to destroy the media. It was pretty well-done, but this week’s quote comes from an afterward about Hickman’s attempts to break into comics. (The Nightly News was his debut comic).

He includes a mantra that he created and uses for self-motivation, and it’s a good one for people like me who sometimes let personal goals slide:

I am my own Enemy.
Resistance is my Nature.

I am aware of Resistance
And it prevents me from achieving the life I am Meant To Have.

Resistance is Self-Generated, Self-Perpetuated.
It Lies and Seduces. Its goal is my Utter Destruction.
Every day is a battle for my soul.

This Moment, This Day,
I change my life.

Help me to defeat myself,
And realize fate.

Thinking that’s all a bit too whiny? He addresses that too:

Now, is all of this a little too spiritual? Is it too much new age, feel good, self-actualization?

Maybe, but am I committed?

Absolutely.

I spent a big chunk of last week in Phoneix at the American Copy Editors Society’s annual conference. It was as great and inspiring as it was last year, when I attended my first ACES conference. I gushed about it then, and it all applies again this year, so I won’t repeat myself. I learned a lot, had a ton of fun, and met up with lots of old friends and made some new ones.

One of Friday’s workshops was Watch Out For the Speed Bumps, with Merrill Perlman, who used to run the New York Times’ copy desk and is now a consultant as well as the writer of the Columbia Journalism Review’s Language Corner column. (She tweets here.) Here’s the workshop’s description from the program:

• There’s fact-checking, and then there’s instinct-checking. There’s rarely enough time to check everything, but you can tune in to what your brain knows and listen for when it reads something and says: “Wait a minute! That doesn’t sound right!” You might be surprised by how much you know that you didn’t know you knew, and by how you can avoid those head-slapping “I WONDERED about that!” moments.

Merrill does great workshops, and this was no exception. She said one thing in particular that struck me as important for copy editors to remember, and that is hard to do as we correct things day in and day out, putting us into a frame of mind where we think there are errors lurking in every corner:

• “Ours is not a search mission. Ours is a receive mission.”

If we are spending so much time hunting, hunting, for mistakes, it can be easy to read right over big picture things. Good to be reminded of that.

This week’s Words of Others comes from the same novel as last week’s, The Book Thief. It is a suicide note from a German soldier who hangs himself months after he comes home from Stalingrad with his fingers blown off and with the memory of a brother who died there. It captures what I would hope to be true, if I believed in an afterlife:

* * * MICHAEL HOLTZAPFEL — THE LAST GOODBYE * * *
Dear Mama,
Can you ever forgive me?
I just couldn’t stand it any longer.
I’m meeting Robert. I don’t care
what the damn Catholics say about it.
There must be a place in heaven for
those who have been where I have been.
You might think I don’t love you
because of what I’ve done, but I do.
Your Michael

Yesterday, I finished reading The Book Thief, which is a novel by Markus Zusak set in a German town during World War II. It is narrated by Death and centers on a young girl who is adopted into a foster family that ends up hiding a Jewish man in their basement. She is the book thief, and the family lives in a town outside Munich, on Himmel Street. It is a book about growing up, learning to both love and hate the power of words, the highs and lows of human nature, and terrible loss. This quote isn’t giving much away, as one of the more interesting things about this book is that it gives away the ending early on, and somehow manages to make that work. The torture of knowing the ending is orchestrated perfectly. The quote comes in the form of one of the many asides from Death as he (it?) tells the story:

* * * A SMALL, SAD HOPE * * *
No one wanted to
bomb Himmel Street.
No one would bomb a
place named after
heaven, would they?
Would they?

I loved this book. It is definitely worth reading.