Before leaving for a week’s vacation on Cape Cod, my mom flagged me down as I was on my way out the door.

“Villiam, vater da plants dis time,” she reminded me in her thick Italian accent. Last time she left me to tend the garden, she returned to a barren wasteland. But this time, she took precautions by installing a trusty timer in our sprinkler system and left me only one task: to water one potted plant on my deck every other day.

This green shrub peppered with the occasional goofy, over-sized pink flower was her pride and joy. A few days before leaving, she asked to borrow my digital camera and proceeded to document the plant from its roots to the tips of its branches with the meticulousness of a crime scene photographer.

One of my mother's photos

Determined to atone for my lackadaisical caregiving, in the next week I proceeded to be the most diligent plant-sitter since Gregor Mendel. I watered it precisely every 48 hours using only the purest and coldest waters available. I even sat out on the deck for hours and spent time with it.

Despite all this, every morning when I went to water it, several shriveled pink flowers lay scattered around the base of the pot. It was shedding flowers and I could not get it to stop!!! It drove me insane for a week. I didn’t want to upset my mother, but most of all; I had been determined to prove to myself that I was capable of performing this very banal and supposedly simple household task.

The mysterious epidemic

Every time my mother called to ask about her baby, I lied enthusiastically. “It’s beautiful,” I told her.” One day I was feeling cocky and offered to send her more pictures of it, claiming it was looking even fuller than before. She didn’t call my bluff and take me up on the offer.

Days before her return, the bastard had gotten even worse. Though I still watered it every morning, it made me feel so futile I could barely stand to look it straight in the petals.

Finally, I worked up the courage to come clean to my mother just one day before she returned. “Mamma,” I confessed. “Something’s wrong with your plant. It’s losing its flowers and I don’t know what to do. I swear I’ve been watering it.” Expecting a shrill “Villiam!” I was surprised when she chuckled. “It’s a hibiscus, the flowers die after two days. But they grow back” I breathed a huge sigh of relief and scurried out to the deck to verify this important, albeit delayed piece of information. Low and behold, I realized that I had been too upset about the dead petals to notice the new buds forming. Apparently, in a couple days my mother’s hibiscus should be in fine form.

As I often do when I feel stupid, I surfed the web to see if any other urbanite suffered so needlessly by the flowers of their hibiscus. Low and behold, an entry by i_am_kuku7 on Yahoo Answers reads:

How long do Hibiscus flowers last?? or how long are they supposed to? i have a hibiscus plant, and the flowers all die after 24 hours is this normal? or should i be concerned?

His fears were quickly laid to rest by Wize_woman, who responded:

The flowers last from a few hours to several days depending on the species of Hibiscus (200-220). I hope it helps. Source(s): Wikipedia.”

Next time, I will be sure to consult with the Internet’s not-so-bewildered herd on all matters horticultural.

P.S. Check out the pen I used to write the first draft of this post.

Thanko's EMP-708LITE Vonia earbuds

These new Thanko earbuds may look fairly standard, but wait ’til you hear how they work. Unlike regular headphones and speakers, which produce sound by using a small expanding and contracting electromagnetic coil to pump sounds out through a cone, these EMP-708LITE Vonia earbuds emit vibrations at a frequency that actually reverberates through your skull, thus literally turning your skull into the speaker. They can even work up to fifteen feet underwater.

This “bone conduction” technology is not exactly new (the first gadgets hit the market around 2005), but Thanko’s model is the first evidence that its reached reached a level where practical design is possible. Compare Thanko’s to these more primitive bone-conduction apparatuses:

The first one is the Finis SwiMP3. Apparently geared towards swimmers, it can be attached to their goggles (as if those aren’t dorky enough). And no, it cannot straighten your teeth, but it supplements regular headphones by sending vibrations through your cheekbones. The center one is the Audio Bone 1.0. Unfortunately, it looks like a mini cochlear implant. Finally, Tecmo’s rather sharp looking bone conduction headset.

Paranormal State billboard in SoHo. Take a look at the audio transmitter on top of the building to the right

While bone conduction is definitely handy for people in noisy, windy or aquatic environments, I think it will perhaps head in another direction. For example, to advertise their new series Paranormal State, TV channel A&E erected a billboard in NYC in 2007 that used bone conduction technology.  Manufactured by Holosonics, a narrow ray of subsonic waves was aimed at the street right in front of the billboard (called an “audio spotlight”). As  pedestrians walked through the spotlight they heard a panicked whisper: “Who’s there? Who’s there?” Then a few seconds later, “It’s not your imagination.” Of course, nobody else could hear it because the subsonic waves were resonating only in their head. Talk about schizophrenia. At least one person every day must have wet their pants.

While advertisers are drooling over this idea of “highly directional sound advertising,” a similar audio spotlight could have very cool implications for home entertainment and private listening. Imagine an audio spotlight aimed at your favorite armchair, so that when you sat down only you could hear the transmission. Finally, I could sit at listen to the game in peace as I pretended to watch a chick-flick with my girlfriend.

Fellow techno-enthusiasts, what do you think? Possible? Probable? Or not so much?

NBC News correspondent Dan Abrams

Veteran journalist and former NBC News legal correspondent Dan Abrams is jumping ship after 15 years in the industry and moving to the private sector. His newly formed media consulting firm, Abrams Research, is actively recruiting working journalists, bloggers and radio and news personalities as “media experts” to advise their corporate clients.

In a New York Times article, Abrams said there is “an enormous number of very talented, experienced media professionals around the world who would be ready, willing and able to advise businesses on media strategies” and bragged that in just five days, Abrams Research received over 600 applications, many of them household names in journalism.

Having endured the treachery of home town heroes as a sports fan, I understand loyalty only goes so far and sometimes you need to think with your wallet. As the economy worsens, journalists, especially print journalists, aren’t going to pass up the opportunity to make some money on the side as consultants. The real problem here is that instead of defecting completely, they’re becoming double agents, cutting through the spin as journalists during the day and helping companies dish it out as consultants by night.

In his Gawker post “Dan Abrams’ Ring of Media Informants,” Ryan Tate sums up the issue at hand: “But a general magazine editor, or blogger… really should not be getting paid to answer questions about how a publication — like, say, his — might cover something when he may well have to decide how to cover that very thing a short time later, with the added complication of having been paid/bribed by the subject.”

(Photo from Fox News Channel)

Fox News anchor Greta Van Susteren had beef with this portion of Howard Kurtz’s Nov. 13th column for The Washington Post about her latest interview with Palin.

[Balitomore Sun TV Critic David] Zurawik calls the Van Susteren interview “beyond friendly,” saying: “Greta Van Susteren is totally sympathetic to her and makes no secret about it.”

In the blog post (which was removed shortly after it was posted, here is a screenshot), Greta complains that Kurtz didn’t give her the opportunity to defend herself against Zurakwik’s criticism, even though Kurtz had called her about another topic the day before. Fox News’ mantra “fair and balanced” must be going to her head. Kurtz is under no obligation to provide all sides of every single assertion in a column and should feel free to quote a prominent TV critic without the journalists reference complaining.

Does this seem like a healthy working environment?

On his blog “The Feed” media critic for St. Petersburg Times Eric Deggans wondered how CNBC’s tourette’s afflicted financial “guru” Jim Cramer (host of his show Mad Money) kept his job after telling investors to get out of the market on NBC’s Today show.

On October 7th, Jim Cramer defended his statement on NBC’s Today show, saying he still stands behind what he said. According to anchor Meredith Vieira, his comments caused a “firestorm.” One email likened his comments to “yelling fire in a crowded building.” Another email pointed out that the financial system is based on “trust” and that Cramer was sabotaging it. What makes this all very ironic is that Cramer has been giving bad advice for a while (he told people to buy Wachovia and Bear Stearns stock), but he’s taking criticism for giving good advice this time: SELL!

Jim Cramer and business journalists (not that he is one) are stuck in a very odd position. Because the market is based so much on confidence, their collective coverage can affect the confidence of the market. It’s sort of like the “observer effect” in science that says in some experiments in quantum physics, the very observation of the experiment could change its outcome. Business journalists are in the same boat.

Howard Kurtz’s column “Press May Own a Share in Financial Mess” is about how business journalists failed to foresee this economic crisis. He acknowledges their difficult balancing act: “If these journalists shout too loudly, they can be accused of scaremongering and blamed for torpedoing the stock of outwardly healthy companies.”

Using The Wall Street Journal as an example, he says some stories and opinion pieces did warn about possible collapse, but they failed to paint a full picture of the economic crisis. Basically, they played it down. Some of the journalists he quotes in his piece offer hints as to why:

“…If we had written stories in late 2000 saying this whole thing’s going to collapse, people would have said, ‘Ha ha, maybe,’ and gone about their business.” – Fortune Magazine Managing Editor Andy Serwer.

“When I would cover these very issues about problems with regulation, problems with ‘is this a disaster waiting to happen?’ people would say: ‘Well, young man, you don’t have an MBA like I do. Trust us. We went to business school.’” – David Brancaccio, PBS.

“The business press tends to get in with the people that they cover. They get in the bubble that is Wall Street, just like political reporters get in the bubble that is the White House and the traveling press of the campaign . . . and they don’t see the obvious things.” – Steven Pearlstein, Washington Post business columnist, Pulitzer Prize winner.

This does not sound like an environment where honest journalism can go down. Can you smell filters?! How much does sourcing and corporate ownership contribute to the sunny optimism of business pages, even on the verge of a financial crisis? There is real pressure on business journalists to paint a rosy picture and when they don’t, they’re punished, even when they’re giving good advice at the time (a la Jim Cramer). There needs to be enough distance between the business journalist and the market, so that honest, objective reporting can go down.

In the last month, Republican Presidential candidate John McCain has put out two undeniably dishonest campaign ads. The first, titled “Education,” claims that Democratic candidate Barack Obama’s one contribution to education legislation in the Senate was to support a bill that advocated “comprehensive sex education” for kindergarteners. Non-partisan, not for profit political watchdog Factcheck.org declared the ad “a factual failure.” In fact, Obama voted for (but didn’t officially sponsor) a bill that advocated enough sex education for kindergarteners to make them aware of the dangers of sexual molestation and predators.

McCain’s second ad, “Fact Check,” purports to quote Factcheck.org calling Obama’s attacks on vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin “completely false” and “misleading.” Factcheck.org was, in fact, referring to ludicrous anonymous Internet attacks on Palin. Showing Alaskan wolves on the prowl, the ad in question also claims that Obama sent “a mini-army of 30 lawyers, investigators and opposition researchers” to Alaska to “dig dirt” on Palin. The Obama campaign said this was “completely false” and that “no one from the Obama campaign, or the DNC, has been sent to Alaska.” John McCain thinks sly, less than honest campaign ads will help him win the election and he may be right, despite efforts by the news media to expose these falsehoods.

We know and accept, unfortunately, that political candidates, Democrat and Republican, bend and distort the truth regularly. We look to the news media to expose the lies and set the record straight. But with mountains of campaign cash to pay for slickly produced campaign ads and the air time to carry them, candidates can bombard many millions more voters with fictional claims than working journalists could ever hope to reach with the truth.

If a candidate lies in a speech or at a press conference, a healthy press should jump all over it, in which case it will be covered, scrutinized and criticized by commentators on the air and in print. Responsible news outlets would find out we were lied to and broadcast it. As a result, more people will hear about the lie than heard it in the first place. But when a campaign ad maliciously misleads, the news media just can’t reach all those afflicted by the misinformation; the damage seems to be irreversible. According to a Wisconsin Advertising Project press release, by mid-September McCain’s ads had run nearly 600 times in Detroit, Michigan, a key battleground state, with nearly two million reachable households. Do the math. News outlets just can’t compete with that kind of exposure.

Even if a Detroit voter saw one of McCain’s deceptive ads fact-checked on the local news, it might not matter. A study by John Bullock, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University, found that correction doesn’t necessarily fix bad information. Bullock found that when shown an ad by an abortion rights group against then nominee for Supreme Court Justice John Roberts, many Democrats still thought worse about Roberts than they had originally, even after they were told that the charges brought against Mr. Roberts were completely false.

When confronted about his misleading ads on ABC’S The View and MSNBC’s Morning Joe, John McCain shamelessly insisted they were factual. In his campaign, the Republican candidate has been religiously antagonizing the media and accusing them of bias toward Barack Obama. His supporters no doubt applaud his defense of his own self promotion along with his spurious attacks on his opponents. Well aware of their effectiveness, the candidates spend hundreds of millions on ads, spending months if not years before every election to raise the money for them.

What can be done to undercut campaign ad deception? Perhaps the fairest solution would be to ensure that a campaign ad never runs alone – a rival would be guaranteed equal airtime in the next slot. This way, instead of a platform for shameless self promotion and deception, campaign ads could become mini multimedia debates. Also, with the knowledge that an opponent will have a chance to view the ad and craft a response before it airs, a candidate might think twice before bombarding us with baloney.

The New Communists

This image was a full-page ad in the September 23rd’s New York Times paid for by Bill Perkins, a Houston-based venture capitalist, who’s disgusted with the government’s plan to bailout Wall Street. As can be seen, it shows Bush, Bernanke and Paulson erecting an American flag (mimicking the iconic American photograph by Joe Rosenthal called “Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima”) with the hammer and the sickle inscribed with “Big Insurance,” “Detroit Auto” and “Wall St. Banks.” In the background you see the tombstones of “Private Enterprise” and “Capitalism.”

This is a widely held opinion. Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky) is called the bailout “economic socialism and “un-American.” Martin Schram’s column “The September Surprise shows Bush to be a socialist” says Bush will be remembered as a president who “brought socialism to the citadel of capitalism — Wall Street.” Every column by Cliff Kincaid, editor of the right wing Accuracy in the Media Report, invokes socialism: Socialist “Bailout” Could Spark Collapse (9/29), Will Conservatives Embrace Socialism? (9/27/), Senator Bunning Blasts “Financial Socialism” (9/24).

Interestingly, most of these critiques don’t actually explain why the bailout could be a bad idea. They operate under the assumption that Americans will stay true to Red Scare logic: “If the bailout looks like financial socialism and everything socialist is bad, the bailout must be bad.” Last time I checked, China’s economy wasn’t doing too badly. I wasn’t around during the Red Scare; can someone tell me what’s wrong with financial socialism?

These critical voices are not part of the mainstream, they’re coming from the free market freaks on the far-right who want the bill to fail. Sen. Jim Bunning’s quotes are buried in the tail end of hard news stories. The mainstream opinion, as demonstrated by the two presidential candidates (you can always count them to be in the middle of the road on rogue issues) supports the bill.

This pro-bailout stance isn’t surprising coming from the mainstream media, they’re own by corporations anyways. You wouldn’t wish destitution on your parents. But I’d bet in a country with healthy, vigorous, independent media outlets, this bailout would be opposed by editorial pages of all ideological slants: those on the far left are eager to see what happens when Capitalism is left to its own devices and those on the far right want to keep the free market intact.

Bailout = Bullshit (Rainforest Action Network, Flickr)

On Wednesday, October 1st, Activists with Rainforest Action Network hung an enormous American flag with “FORECLOSED?” emblazoned on it right behind the iconic Wall Street bull. I saw the police trying to take it down on my way to work. About 30 protesters gathered around with signs saying “families before finances” and “our money, our planet, our future.”

While Congress is on the verge of a bailout, it’s clear that many people want to hold Wall Street accountable for its own economic downfall. This could be a rare occasion when the commies and some Republicans agree: let Wall Street fail. Those on the far left are eager to see what happens when Capitalism is left to its own devices and those on the far right want to keep the free market intact.

Let’s give it a shot and please ‘em both.

Phelps' first book

I was surfing the Simon & Schuster upcoming books list and clicked on a listing for “Built to Succeed,” Michael Phelps new memoir about his Olympic feat. When I read it is also coming out as a book on tape, my heart froze, I started to panic. I can say with profound certainty I would rather kill myself than listen to Michael Phelps read aloud his own autobiography. Running time is 6 hours!!

Luckily they haven’t decided who gets that lucky job: “Read by: TBA.”

Feel the love

Norman Solomon’s post “Dubious Praise for The Daily Show” (Huffington Post, Sept. 10) examines the enormous amount of love the mainstream media give to Comedy Central’s Daily Show. Referencing the NYT article linked above, Solomon labels their “elaborate praise” as “a tacit form of convoluted self-loathing” and likens them to shackled journalists watching Superman up above. Basically, he thinks The New York Times is jealous of The Daily Show. I’m beginning to agree. 

I’m sure Frank Rich wishes he could be as funny as Jon Stewart but The New York Times doesn’t seem to praise The Daily Show’s humor as much as its ability to “speak truth to power.” Here’s Solomon’s key question: What does this admiration for The Daily Show say about how The New York Times feels about its ability to speak truth to power? In other words, why can’t straight news coverage do that? 

The main difference between The New York Times and The Daily Show is that one has the obligation to be “fair and balanced” (or at least try to be) and the other does not. Solomon’s Superman comparison gets right at this point: if conventional journalists are envious of Jon Stewart’s freedom, maybe they’re fed up with being fair and balanced.

Stewart and his staff and consume the same information for their stories as other reporters. One can only assume that the blatant contradictions that Stewart highlights on his show every day are just as painfully obvious to his shackled counterparts.  If I were them, I’d be sick of playing dumb.

Some broadcast journalists have already outgrown their objective shells this election season: when MSNBC’s anchors Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews tried to keep it real, they were banned from anchoring the presidential campaign coverage. Now they’ve graduated to “commentators.”

But for a print journalist, there’s no such thing as going “off script.” Are broadcast/online journalists the wild-children and print the suck-ups? Solomon describes The New York Times as a “circumscribed” and “lumbering” institution, too heavy to orchestrate an agile critical assault like The Daily Show, almost as if it’s weighed down by its own brand name.

Solomon’s conclusion regarding the media? “That’s the way it goes in medialand. What isn’t conspicuous is apt to be insidious.” That’s smart-talk for, “if it ain’t obvious, it’s probably bad for you.”