My wonderful wife Michelle had surgery on her heart when she was 3 years old. She received excellent care from her local children’s hospital, staying there for a week to recover.
I owe a lot to the Children’s Miracle Network, so I’d love to give back.
On November 15th, I’ll be playing games for 24 hours to raise funds for sick kids at the Omaha Children’s Hospital!
Over the last few weeks there have been several spectacular copyediting errors in newspapers around the country that probably passed right through a spelling/grammar check but still managed to totally humiliate the publication and the staff members responsible.
For example:
I rather doubt that the Clemson football team was having babies, but….
Then there was this one that looks like a food story…
But was actually about the Roy Moore senate race sexual abuse scandal. By the way, if you search for “sex clams” in Google… well, don’t.
Then finally, there’s the headline that looks like it was written by a couple of snickering teen-aged boys.
It’s not often that a single hyphen will turn something from ordinary into NSFW… Probably not the way this paper wanted a story to go viral.
But this afternoon Disney backed off from that ban after movie critics and pop culture writers across the country responded by standing with the Times, refusing to attend early screenings or consider Disney movies for end-of-the-year awards until the ban was lifted.
The Walt Disney Company, in a statement, said:
“We’ve had productive discussions with the newly installed leadership at The Los Angeles Times regarding our specific concerns, and as a result, we’ve agreed to restore access to advance screenings for their film critics.”
The company said nothing about responding to pressure from the press across the country.
Among the early writers to stand up for the LA Times was Washington Post pop culture blogger Alyssa Rosenberg:
I won't attend advance screenings of Disney movies or publish advance reviews until @latimes critics can, too: https://t.co/RxdtD54THR
But Rosenberg wasn’t standing alone in her support of the LA Times. Joining in the boycott were The A.V. Club and the New York Times. Four of the big critics groups also announced they would not consider any Disney films for their annual awards if the LA Times ban stood:
"Disney's response should gravely concern all who believe in the importance of a free press, artists included." pic.twitter.com/qVPzToQCFL
And then the Television Critics Association weighed in with criticism of Disney as well.
Statement from the board of the Television Critics Association [@OfficialTCA] regarding Disney and its recent ban of the LA Times: pic.twitter.com/soFCekGwhE
All of this only served to promote the story about Disney’s sweetheart relationship with Anaheim that the media conglomerate so desperately wanted suppressed. But this, of course, is among the first lessons in public relations – Don’t give the press an excuse to write about the story you want to go away. As Vox’s Todd VanDerWerff tweeted:
How much does animation cost per second?
It can be a lot! Disney’s Frozen cost more than $49,000 per second, Wreck-It Ralph was a comparative bargain at about $25,000 per second, and the low-tech South Park comes in at $223 per second. (Please note that some of these films/shows are from different years, which will have some effect on prices.)
We often think of comics as being either funny stories or super hero dramas. And they can be all that. But many of the best comics tell intensely personal stories about life, death, and surviving the time in-between.
“When I began working on my ‘Fire’ comic, my wife said the same thing she did when I began ‘Mom’s Cancer’: ‘Well, it’ll be good therapy for you.’
“It is that, but I really see my main motivation as bearing witness,” Fies says. “ ‘I was there — this is what I saw.’ I was a newspaper reporter for a few years after college and have been a freelance writer since, and this comic, like ‘Mom’s Cancer,’ feels like doing journalism to me. I’m using words plus pictures to explain what happened and tell the truth as best I can…
“One thing I think is true is that readers respond to authenticity,” says Fies. “They sense the difference between someone who’s lived an experience and someone who’s faking it. I think in order to be good, a story has to tell the truth. I did the best I could.”
I urge you all to follow the link and read the entire comic. It’s not only a great story, but it will also give you a much better understanding of what’s happening on the West Coast right now. (Please note that the comic contains a limit amount of bad language. Given the context, I think it’s understandable.)
The one thing you need to know about me as I tell this story is that I’m an insulin-dependent diabetic.
My pancreas checked out several years ago and no longer does much. Which means that I have to manually control how much insulin I take in so I can process the carbohydrates I eat too much of.
The thing non-diabetics might not know is that insulin is a relatively perishable medication. You need to keep insulin in a refrigerator for long-term storage, and you absolutely must keep it from getting too hot — like hot-summer-day hot. If you run out of insulin and can’t get a fresh vial or pen of it, your blood sugars shoot up, you start feeling terrible, and, if this goes on too long, you do serious damage to your body and eventually die.
In the story, diabetic Juan Natal came to Puerto Rico to visit ill parents, and he got stranded there because of Hurricane Maria. His trip home to the mainland was delayed about a week, and during his unexpectedly long stay, he ran out of money, and, more importantly, insulin.
And yet, even as tough as things were for him, Natal by now is likely (hopefully!) on his way back to his home where there are refrigerators and drug stores stocked with insulin. But my heart continues to break for those living in Puerto Rico who have no idea where their next vials of fresh insulin will come from.
So I was thrilled to see this tweet from diabetes advocate Ally (who tweets under the handle @verylightnosuga) that the Lilly Corporation was distributing vials and injection pens full of fresh insulin around the island of Puerto Rico.
When I saw this, I thought about Natal’s story, and I wanted to do everything I could to help spread the word. But what could I do here in central Nebraska?
Of course!
Ask Hamilton composer superstar Lin-Manuel Miranda, whose family is from Puerto Rico, to help. He’s been very busy with fund raising and activism for PR since Maria stormed through. But he’s got 1.8 million followers. What chance is there that he will see and pass this on? Can’t hurt to ask…
— RalphIsNow@rhanson40@threads.net (@ralphehanson) October 9, 2017
And within a couple of hours, this very simple reply pops up:
And with that emoji pointing to my request, Ally’s message took off. From Lin-Manuel’s account, within 24 hours it has been shared more than 3,500 times and liked more than 7,000 times. From my much more modest account, it’s been shared and liked more than 400 times.
And because of that, word of the problem of insulin shortages in Puerto Rico and news of the locations where Lilly is distributing it has been boosted massively. Ally’s message alone has had more than 1,100 shares.
So, thank you so much Mr. Miranda for your help! And thanks to everyone else who helped share this important message.
I recently watched the movie The Fifth Elementon TV at home, and I don’t believe I posted anything about it, though I certainly searched it for cast and crew information. Fascinating to see that such a low level of online engagement has produced this ad on my Facebook page… (I did, however, watch it using iTunes on my Apple TV.)
This ad for Fifth Element t-shirt showed up on my Facebook page this morning.
Are there two or more women in the movie who have names?
Do they talk to each other?
Do they talk to each other about something other than a man?
There has been a lot of controversy over the test that include the fact that movies that pass can be quite sexist, the fact that movies with prominent roles for women don’t pass, and that the test ignores the role of women behind the camera. Here are a couple of videos that deal with these issues:
Top 10 Movies that Surprisingly Pass the Bechdel Test (From MsMojo)
The Bechdel Test is the WORST
An intersting video about the role (or lack thereof) of women behind the camera in the movies, from indie filmmaker Bri Castellini.
As the story started to break, there were lots of contradictory versions of the story circulating. Fake news? No. It’s just that when something big and horrifying happens, the truth can be hard to come by.
NPR has been including the following statement at the bottom of their web stories, in their their podcasts and over the air:
And journalist/journalism professor Steve Fox reminds us that the desire for speed by journalists is more likely to lead to errors than is any agenda of the journalist:
Media sociologist Zeynep Tufekci points out this morning that as reporters, we must always keep in mind what the effects of our coverage can be:
Media: the next potential mass shooter is watching the current media coverage intently. Right now. Your coverage is a factor in this crisis.
Boston Globe reporter Astead Herndon noted in June 0f 2016 following the Orlando night club shooting that the National Associations of Black Journalists and Hispanic Journalists warns against using superlatives in stories about mass shootings:
Today, NPR’s culture blogger Linda Holmes put up a tweet that really spoke to me as a media professional:
It's like every day you have to get up, put your heart back together, and get going again. What a time.
— Linda Holmes thisislindaholmes.com (@lindaholmes) October 2, 2017
Finally, on days like this we must remember the words of Fred Rogers:
The one thing you need to know about me as I tell this story is that I’m an insulin-dependent diabetic.
