Context & Continuity

ZDNet, 10/29/03: IT doesn't really matter--or does it?

The irresistible gravity of capitalism is beginning to pull down the temples built to the gods of IT. The baptistery has been spilled out, and grass is growing in the nave. Good business sense is beginning to look at IT as a simple "make, buy or lease" decision rather than a complex staffing requirement. CFOs, and even some CIOs, understand there simply isn't a competitive upside to having a legion of engineers figuring out how to patch 4,000 computers with MS03-039, but there is considerable downside if they don't.

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c|net, 10/28/03: Why IT does--and does not--matter

IT infrastructure-outsourcing companies are using to their advantage brilliant IT engineers and modern IT automation and management tools and have created state-of-the-art IT management services that are being steadily scaled throughout North America. The success of these companies validates Carr's thesis: IT infrastructure is becoming just another utility for business. And just as it doesn't make any sense for businesses to build, staff and maintain their own electrical generation plants, it doesn't make any sense to build, staff and maintain their own plants to generate datatricity.

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The New York Observer, 10/27/03

Queer Eye, My Eye! Cast Harasses Hairy Heteros
by Simon Doonan

Highly strung homosexuals have got to be stopped! They are terrorizing the mainstream males of Manhattan. The Queer Eye phenomenon has given carte blanche to every boutique salesperson, hairdresser and style guru—call them the lay gay—to "transform" any dopey hetero who happens to wander into their field of vision. The more these wannabes inflict their style makeovers on all the Slob, Dick and Harrys, the more they flatten the landscape of masculine attire into a homogenous pancake. QE’s Carson Kressley et al. seem hell-bent on making everyone dress like … Carson Kressley—i.e., faded low-rise boot-cut jeans, vintage leather jacket, white shirt, wingtips sans socks à la Brad Pitt in Fight Club. Our tribal diversity—such an important part of bloke culture—is in jeopardy.
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Re Tattoos (or permanent bell-bottoms, as a friend calls them): Let’s face it, they are a desperate, pathetic and transparent attempt by middle-class people to acquire some bad-ass grit. They look ridiculous! Stop it!

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The New Yorker, 10/3/03: The End Matter

THE END MATTER
by LOUIS MENAND
The nightmare of citation.

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The chapter on Punctuation (separate from Grammar and Usage) notes that Chicago has finally dispensed with the practice of italicizing punctuation following a title (e.g., “The Chicago Manual of Style, a leading authority”), which is a welcome change, since Word’s click-and-drag highlighting feature has problems performing this function. (If you wiggle the mouse a millimetre too far, trying to get that comma in, you highlight the entire line.) The authors are straightforward on two matters that many students are apparently hardwired at birth to find boggling: whether periods and commas belong inside or outside quotation marks, and whether inverted commas (sometimes called “single quotation marks”) are an appropriate way to indicate an “ironic” usage. (Inside and no.) Some of the advice is frankly a matter of taste. “An exclamation point added in brackets to quoted material to indicate editorial protest or amusement is strongly discouraged, since it appears contemptuous,” the authors counsel. “The Latin expression sic (thus) is preferred.” First of all, the reason the bracketed exclamation point appears contemptuous is that you use it when you wish to express contempt. There is nothing wrong with contempt. Second (which Chicago insists on, although generations of pedants have believed “secondly” to be the proper usage), sic is a far more damning interpolation, combining ordinary, garden-variety contempt with pedantic condescension. Elsewhere in Punctuation, the instructions are sometimes the reverse of enlightened. What could the authors possibly have been thinking when they committed the following sentence to print: “The semicolon, stronger than a comma but weaker than a period, can assume either role [!]” ?

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The Wall Street Journal, 10/10/03:
Kill Bill by Quentin Tarantino

Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill" inflicts intolerable cruelty on its characters, and on its audience -- though I'd like to believe that there is no mainstream audience for what has already been described, quite correctly, as the most violent movie ever released by an American studio. ... "Kill Bill" has also been described as Mr. Tarantino's loving homage to the martial-arts films that inflamed his imagination as a child, and then as an aspiring actor and video-shop clerk. Spare us the fruits of his love.

Indeed.

The NYTimes, 10/6/03: The Media Critic Who Would Be a Mogul

The Media Critic Who Would Be a Mogul
By DAVID CARR

Published: October 6, 2003

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"He is both oracular and reckless," said Simon Dumenco, who edits Mr. Wolff at New York magazine. "He is not afraid to do a little damage, including some damage on himself. By the time it became clear that his column was a hit, it was too late for the people he covered to kill him."

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"Michael eats moguls for breakfast and then takes them to lunch," Mr. Hirshey said.

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"The interesting thing about the guys who run the media business is that they are a sort of special example of people with vivid needs," Mr. Wolff said. "It is almost a confession of weakness to go into the media business. You don't go into the business because you don't want to be noticed and because you don't want to be at the center of attention."

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