February 21, 2008
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MAUREEN DOWD,Today’s Papers,Juke Box,Good Health,Punctuation,
- Put Another File in the Jukebox, Baby
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The New York Times
BasicsPut Another File in the Jukebox, Baby
IT’S only a mild case of audiophilia, according to the professionals, but
it’s causing me significant discomfort.Until recently I had considered my appreciation of good-sounding music more
boon than bane, but the moment my wife and I decided to move, I acquired a harsh
new perspective.I possess a fairly nice stereo (not a problem) and some 2,500 CDs (a
significant problem, according to my wife), but the biggest problem is the
custom-built cabinet I commissioned to house my music. It sits on an astounding
20 percent of the usable space in our living room.I’m unwilling to subject our new house to that sort of treatment.
I have resisted converting my CDs to the MP3 digital format for two reasons.
The thought of feeding discs into my computer, one by excruciating one (I
believe this was the ninth labor of Hercules), not to mention organizing it once
it is digitized, is painful just to contemplate. More important, I’m entirely
unwilling to sacrifice sound quality in return for less clutter.Recently, however, trends have been working in my favor. Data storage prices
are in perpetual free fall — at 50 cents a gigabyte, even giant hard drives are
within most budgets — and the FLAC (free lossless audio codec) audio format has
gained widespread embrace by mainstream media hardware manufacturers. Like MP3,
FLAC is a compression standard for music files, but unlike MP3, it is lossless,
meaning it doesn’t degrade sound quality. With it, I could fit 3,000 CDs in a
terabyte of storage.These are details about which my wife does not care. What she is passionate
about is floor space. I set about seeing how to help us both.First stop was Logitech in Mountain View, Calif.
Logitech recently bought Slim Devices, which makes the Squeezebox, a handy
little $299 unit about half the size of my desktop keyboard. It relays music
from computer to stereo system and then, if the user so wishes, around the rest
of the house.It’s a viable solution, but it still puts me back at my computer, ripping my
CDs while I grind my teeth down to the nerve. Even if I outsource the job, with
ripping services like Ready to Play (www.readytoplay.com) and Riptopia (www.riptopia.com) that charge about $1.60 or so
for each disc, that’s an extra $2,500.Logitech makes three products — the Squeezebox, the $399 Squeezebox Duet and
the $1,999 Transporter — which do more or less the same thing at varying levels
of quality.The first two items are extremely compact. The Duet receiver is just
two-thirds the size of the Squeezebox. The Transporter offers a higher quality
of sound from a typical size stereo component. All three connect wirelessly to
the server — in most cases, a computer — and must be run through an amplifier or
powered speakers.A similar wireless audio-streaming device is the Zone Player 100 ($499) from
Sonos, based in Santa Barbara, Calif. Unlike the Logitech devices, it has an
integrated amplifier, so all one needs is an audio source and a pair of
speakers.For those who prefer to power their music through an existing stereo system,
the Zone Player 80 ($349) is an amp-free alternative. Each unit is commanded
through a feature-laden remote control ($399), complete with scroll wheel and
full-color screen.While Sonos does a capable job of retrieving one’s own stored music, the
company is banking on users obtaining music online, both from services like
Rhapsody and Napster — which are essentially fee-based online
jukeboxes — and Internet radio.But I did not build a CD collection just to ignore it. More exploration was
in order. Second stop was the high-end test drive.There is little argument that McIntosh makes among the best — and most
expensive — audio components. So when the company came out with the MS750 last
year, my ears perked up. Knowing much of the $6,000 price tag was going toward a
level of sound quality that may well be lost on my good-but-not-great stereo
system, I proceeded with caution.From an ease-of-use standpoint, the McIntosh was exactly what I was looking
for. A simple interface allows for automatic CD ripping (into FLAC or a variety
of other formats) in about four minutes.“I have people write in all the time and say, ‘You know, I could do the same
thing with a $400 computer and this program or that program,’ ” said Ron
Cornelius, a McIntosh project manager. “And they’re absolutely right — they can.
But try to use it every day. If you’re not a computer geek, forget it. It’s just
not a friendly portal.”The MS750 is named for its 750-gig hard drive, big by most measures but still
only enough to handle about two-thirds of my music in FLAC format. And this is
where my dreams of a McIntosh began to evaporate. I could buy another MS750, the
pair connecting wirelessly as if they were a single machine.Clearing a $6,000 piece of machinery with my wife will be tough enough;
doubling that price tag would be akin to asking for a divorce. The fact that the
MS750 needs a video screen to use its navigation fully — it can be run through a
TV or a laptop, but I would more realistically have to buy a devoted L.C.D.
screen — adds to the cost.Third stop was Olive Media Products, San Francisco.
At first blush, Olive’s product line is not dissimilar from the McIntosh —
internal hard drives, easy ripping of CDs and high-end circuitry. Like the
others, Olive’s highest-capacity machine, the Opus N°5, comes with a 750-gig
drive. Unlike the others, however, it has a U.S.B. 2.0 port with which to attach
an external hard drive, letting users more than double its capacity for less
than $200. Why doesn’t every system have this?Additionally, the front-panel display is fully navigable, without need for an
additional screen. The Opus connects to the Internet, allowing not only for
online radio, but giving users remote control once its included software is
installed on a touch-screen P.D.A.The main downside is that Olive does not offer a device to deliver music into
additional rooms, though industry whispers hint that could change within the
year. Perhaps the biggest bonus is that Olive will rip my CDs for me. The first
300 are included in the price of the machine, and the rest can be done for as
little as 50 cents each. I can send my CDs to Olive and the machine I order will
be delivered with my music already on it.If there’s anything closer to my pipe dream, I can’t imagine what it is. With
the Opus N°5 priced at $3,999, even if I choose to outsource my ripping I can
still be home free at just over $5,000.Seems like a small price to pay for a happy marriage and a bigger living
room.
- Celebrating the Semicolon in a Most Unlikely Location
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Cary Conover for The New York TimesNeil Neches, on a No. 5 train, underneath the placard that has earned him
plaudits for his proper use of the semicolonCelebrating the Semicolon in a Most Unlikely Location
Correction Appended
It was nearly hidden on a New York City Transit public service placard exhorting
subway riders not to leave their newspaper behind when they get off the
train.“Please put it in a trash can,” riders are reminded. After which Neil Neches,
an erudite writer in the transit agency’s marketing and service information
department, inserted a semicolon. The rest of the sentence reads, “that’s good
news for everyone.”Semicolon sightings in the city are unusual, period, much less in
exhortations drafted by committees of civil servants. In literature and
journalism, not to mention in advertising, the semicolon has been largely
jettisoned as a pretentious anachronism.Americans, in particular, prefer shorter sentences without, as style books
advise, that distinct division between statements that are closely related but
require a separation more prolonged than a conjunction and more emphatic than a
comma.“When Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his life,” Kurt Vonnegut once said. “Old age is more like a
semicolon.”In terms of punctuation, semicolons signal something New Yorkers rarely do.
Frank McCourt, the writer and former English teacher at
Stuyvesant High School, describes the semicolon as the
yellow traffic light of a “New York sentence.” In response, most New Yorkers
accelerate; they don’t pause to contemplate.Semicolons are supposed to be introduced into the curriculum of the New York
City public schools in the third grade. That is where Mr. Neches, the
55-year-old New York City Transit marketing manager, learned them, before
graduating from Tilden High School and Brooklyn College, where he majored in English and later
received a master’s degree in creative writing.But, whatever one’s personal feelings about semicolons, some people don’t use
them because they never learned how.In fact, when Mr. Neches was informed by a supervisor that a reporter was
inquiring about who was responsible for the semicolon, he was concerned.“I thought at first somebody was complaining,” he said.
One of the school system’s most notorious graduates, David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam serial killer who
taunted police and the press with rambling handwritten notes, was, as the
columnist Jimmy Breslin wrote, the only murderer he ever
encountered who could wield a semicolon just as well as a revolver. (Mr.
Berkowitz, by the way, is now serving an even longer sentence.)But the rules of grammar are routinely violated on both sides of the law.
People have lost fortunes and even been put to death because of imprecise
punctuation involving semicolons in legal papers. In 2004, a court in San
Francisco rejected a conservative group’s challenge to a statute allowing gay
marriage because the operative phrases were separated incorrectly by a semicolon
instead of by the proper conjunction.Louis Menand, an English professor at Harvard and a staff writer at The New Yorker,
pronounced the subway poster’s use of the semicolon to be “impeccable.”Lynne Truss, author of “Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance
Approach to Punctuation,” called it a “lovely example” of proper punctuation.Geoffrey Nunberg, a professor of linguistics at the University of California,
Berkeley, praised the “burgeoning of punctuational literacy in unlikely places.”Allan M. Siegal, a longtime arbiter of New York Times style before retiring,
opined, “The semicolon is correct, though I’d have used a colon, which I think
would be a bit more sophisticated in that sentence.”The linguist Noam Chomsky sniffed, “I suppose Bush would claim it’s
the effect of No Child Left Behind.”New York City Transit’s unintended agenda notwithstanding, e-mail messages
and text-messaging may jeopardize the last vestiges of semicolons. They still
live on, though, in emoticons, those graphic emblems of our grins, grimaces and
other facial expressions.The semicolon, befittingly, symbolizes a wink.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: February 19, 2008
An article in
some editions on Monday about a New York City Transit employee’s deft use of the
semicolon in a public service placard was less deft in its punctuation of the
title of a book by Lynne Truss, who called the placard a “lovely example” of
proper punctuation. The title of the book is “Eats, Shoots & Leaves” — not
“Eats Shoots & Leaves.” (The subtitle of Ms. Truss’s book is “The Zero
Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.”) - Today’s Papers
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The Big Steal
Posted Wednesday, Feb. 20,
2008, at 6:32 A.M. E.T.The Washington Post and USA Today lead with Sen.
Barack Obama’s decisive victory over Sen. Hillary Clinton in the Wisconsin primary. With almost
all the precincts reporting, Obama managed to get 58 percent of the vote to
Clinton’s 41 percent to mark his ninth-straight victory since Super Tuesday. On the
Republican side, Sen. John McCain continued racking up victories over Mike
Huckabee in Wisconsin and Washington. During his victory speech, McCain acted as
if the Democratic nominee had already been decided and pointedly criticized
Obama for offering “an eloquent but empty call for change.” As was widely
expected, Obama also won the Hawaii caucuses by a landslide, according to
early-morning wire reports.The Los Angeles Times and the
Wall Street Journal‘s world-wide newsbox lead with, and everybody
fronts, Fidel Castro’s announcement that he will step down as Cuba’s head of
state after holding on to power for almost 50 years. “The resignation
closes a singular chapter in modern political history,” says the Post. Leaders
in Washington emphasized there aren’t likely to be any modifications in U.S.
policy toward Cuba, and most believe there won’t be any big changes in the
island while Castro is still alive. Meanwhile, in Pakistan, the winners of
Monday’s election made it clear there are lots of changes in store, says the
New York Times in its lead
story. The leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party said his party would seek to
hold talks with militants in the country’s tribal areas and move away from a
reliance on the military that is widely seen as following orders from the United
States. He also said the new parliament would quickly restore independence to
the judiciary and get rid of restrictions on the media.The most revealing aspect of the Wisconsin vote was how Obama continued to
take away voters from Clinton’s base, which could spell trouble for her in the
Texas and Ohio primaries on March 4. The candidates pretty much split the votes
from women, while Obama had a significant advantage among men. Also, Obama defeated her
by a wide margin among voters with incomes of less than $50,000 as well as those
without college degrees, two groups that had been essential to Clinton’s past
victories. Slate‘s John
Dickerson says that by winning “in every key geographical area and
across racial and gender lines” Obama has proved that
“he is not just the boutique fascination of young people and wealthy elites.”The NYT says Clinton will now need to pull off
“double-digit victories to pick up enough delegates to close the gap.” If
Wisconsin is any guide, “the next two weeks could be the most negative of the
Democratic race,” says the Post. After
losing yesterday’s primary, Clinton didn’t mince words and launched what the LAT calls “her most
lancing election night critique of Obama yet.” But the line of attack was hardly
new, as she once again chose to call attention to Obama’s inexperience, which,
as the NYT points out, is an argument she has made many times before,
but it doesn’t appear to be resonating with voters.The Post says McCain’s victory “signaled a
coalescing of a Republican electorate that has struggled for a year to find a
candidate it likes.” It was one of his best nights, but, as the NYT
emphasizes, exit polls showed that many still have doubts about whether
McCain is conservative enough. Huckabee continued to carry the vote of those who
described themselves as very conservative, even as the majority also said they’d
be satisfied with McCain. Slate‘s Chadwick Matlin suggests Huckabee
may actually be helping Republicans get some free publicity, because if he were
to drop out, “McCain’s victories would be completely empty—and completely
unnewsworthy.”It is widely expected that Fidel Castro’s 76-year-old brother, Raul, will be
Cuba’s next president. But some are suggesting there might be a surprise when
Cuba’s National Assembly meets on Sunday, particularly since Castro didn’t
specifically mention his brother in his resignation letter. The LAT
also notes that Castro has recently suggested he might want to hand power
to someone younger. If someone other
than Raul were to be selected, speculation centers around Vice President Carlos
Lage, whom the WSJ describes as the country’s “economic czar.” Other
possibilities include the foreign minister and the president of the National
Assembly (the LAT has brief profiles of the four possible successors).
Regardless, the NYT emphasizes that any decision on a successor “remains in
the hands of the Castro brothers and their inner circle.” And certainly Castro
himself will still play a significant role in the government as a leader in
Cuba’s Communist Party, a member of parliament, and overall behind-the-scenes
adviser. This is why there appeared to be few signs yesterday that Cubans
expected much to change in the near future. “This isn’t news,” a Cuban dissident said. “It was
expected and it does nothing to change the human rights situation. … There’s no
reason to celebrate.”At least some sort of change might be inevitable, though. In a profile of
Raul Castro, the WP notes that if he becomes president, he “is almost
certain to preside over a government based more on a collective style of
leadership, and less on personality.” The NYT points out that he has “a
reputation as a manager who demands results from his cabinet members.” In recent
months Raul has been encouraging more debates about policy and has hinted that
changes are on the way, even if no one really expects them to come quickly. In a
separate Page One story, the LAT says that the changes “may at best resemble
Chinese economic reforms, except on a tiny, Cuban scale.”The resignation is also likely to intensify debate within the United States
about whether the long-running economic embargo should continue. But any big
changes would probably have to wait until President Bush leaves the White House,
and even then, the three presidential candidates “offered little sign that they
will break with the pillars of existing policy,” says the Post inside. “We
always knew the embargo would topple the 49-year-old regime of the 81-year-old
Fidel Castro someday,” jokes the Post‘s Al Kamen. “Patience is finally
being rewarded.”The Pakistan Peoples Party, which was led by Benazir Bhutto, seems to have
won the most seats from Monday’s elections. But the “emerging political
landscape was far from clear” yesterday, notes the Post. Neither of
the two main opposition parties received a majority, and there doesn’t appear to
be an obvious candidate for prime minister from either one. The WSJ
interviewed President Pervez Musharraf, who insisted he has no plans to step down from power
even as some, including former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, called for his
impeachment. Whether Musharraf survives will largely depend on what the ruling
coalition will look like, but it’s clear that his power has been greatly
diminished.Back to the U.S. presidential campaign for a moment: Barack Obama writes an
op-ed piece for USAT where he answers criticism that he has gone back
on his pledge to use public funding in the general election if his Republican
opponent also agreed to shun private money. Obama insists he
will “aggressively pursue such an agreement” if he’s the nominee but emphasizes
that it cannot “be reached overnight.” Obama writes that an agreement would have
to commit the candidates to “discouraging cheating by their supporters” as well
as refusing help from outside groups so that it “results in real spending
limits.” He also suggests that it might have to include what McCain will spend
while the Democratic primaries continue. In a related story, the NYT
notes the Obama campaign will report today that it collected $36
million in January, which is $4 million more than previous estimates.After missing out on some of the most exciting weeks of the political primary
season, Saturday Night Live is back this weekend. One of the biggest
concerns of SNL‘s producers right now is that the show “is bereft of a
Barack Obama mimic,” notes USAT. Auditions are
ongoing, and someone will probably be picked this week. “Finding a way to get
people to laugh at him is complicated right now,” the executive producer said.
“People aren’t seeing the cracks yet, but it will happen.”Daniel Politi
writes “Today’s Papers” for Slate. He can be reached at todayspapers@slate.com. - Gentlemen, 5 Easy Steps to Living Long and Well
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Mike Mergen for The New York TimesFRISBEE, ANYONE? Exercise is linked to living longer.
Gentlemen, 5 Easy Steps to Living Long and Well
Living past 90, and living well, may be more than a matter of good genes and
good luck. Five behaviors in elderly men are associated not only with living
into extreme old age, a new study has found, but also with good health and
independent functioning.The behaviors are abstaining from smoking, weight management, blood pressure control, regular exercise and avoiding diabetes. The study reports that all are significantly
correlated with healthy survival after 90.While it is hardly astonishing that choices like not smoking are associated
with longer life, it is significant that these behaviors in the early elderly
years — all of them modifiable — so strongly predict survival into extreme old
age.“The take-home message,” said Dr. Laurel B. Yates, a geriatric specialist at
Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston who was the lead
author of the study, “is that an individual does have some control over his
destiny in terms of what he can do to improve the probability that not only
might he live a long time, but also have good health and good function in those
older years.”The study followed more than 2,300 healthy men for as long as a
quarter-century. When it began, in 1981, the subjects’ average age was 72. The
men responded to yearly questionnaires about changes in health and lifestyle,
and researchers tested their mental and physical functioning. At the end of the
study, which was published Feb. 11 in The Archives of Internal Medicine, 970 men
had survived into their 90s.There was no less chronic illness among survivors than among those who died
before 90. But after controlling for other variables, smokers had double the
risk of death before 90 compared with nonsmokers, those with diabetes increased
their risk of death by 86 percent, obese men by 44 percent, and those with high blood pressure by 28 percent. Compared with men
who never exercised, those who did reduced their risk of death by 20 percent to
30 percent, depending on how often and how vigorously they worked out.Even though each of these five behaviors was independently significant after
controlling for age and other variables, studies have shown that many other
factors may affect longevity, including level of education and degree of social
isolation. They were not measured in this study.Although some previous studies have found that high cholesterol is associated with earlier death, and
moderate alcohol consumption with longer survival, this study confirmed neither
of those findings.A second study in the same issue of the journal suggests that some of the
oldest of the old survive not because they avoid illness, but because they live
well despite disease.The study of 523 women and 216 men ranging in age from 97 to 119 showed that
a large proportion of people who lived that long and lived with minimal or no
assistance did so despite long-term chronic illness. In other words, instead of
delaying disease, they delay disability.Dr. Dellara F. Terry, the lead author and an assistant professor of medicine
at Boston University, said the study showed that old age
and chronic illness were no reason to stop providing thorough treatment. “We
should look at the individual in making treatment decisions,” Dr. Terry said,
“and not base our decisions solely on chronological age.” - To Catch a Thief MAUREEN DOWD on Election 2008
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Fred R. Conrad/The New York TimesMaureen Dowd
Op-Ed ColumnistTo Catch a Thief
WASHINGTON
Lenny and Squiggy were nowhere in sight.
But Hillary was doing her best to come across as a “Laverne & Shirley”
factory girl as she headed away from not-a-chance Wisconsin and on to gotta-have
Ohio.She was drinking red wine and talking up the virtues of imported Blue Moon
beer with a slice of citrus on her plane and putting up an ad in Ohio about how
she works the night shift, too, just like the waitresses, hairdressers, hospital
workers and other blue-collar constituents that she’s hoping to attract.And she doesn’t mean that being married to Bill Clinton is what keeps her up
all hours. She’s talking about burning the midnight oil in her Senate office.At any minute, she might break out into the “schlemiel, schlemazel” “Laverne
& Shirley” theme:“Give us any chance, we’ll take it.
Give us any rule, we’ll break
it.
We’re gonna make our dreams come true.
Doin’ it our way.”Doin’ it her way, Hillary huffed to reporters on her plane: “If your whole
candidacy is about words, they should be your own words.”I guess that means if your whole candidacy is anti-words, you don’t have to
use your own words.The Clintons are known political cat burglars. They pilfered Republican
jewels in the ’90s, and Hillary has purloined as much as she can stuff in her
pantsuit from her husband and Barack Obama.She changed to Change. She co-opted “It’s time to turn the page” and “Fired
up and ready to go.” She couldn’t wait to shoplift the words “yes” and “can”
from Obama’s trademark “Yes, we can!” — (which he appropriated from Cesar
Chavez) — even though she was cagey enough to put them in separate slogans,
“Yes, we will!” and “Americans still have that can-do spirit.”Bill, master thief, got in on the act, too. After Obama said that his
election would tell the world that America is back, Bill said that Hillary’s
election would tell the world that America is back.Although the only solid voting bloc in Wisconsin Hillary seemed to get was
women over 60 years old, she did seem happy that the press had “finally,” as she
put it, scrutinized him. America’s pretty boy was getting muddied up.The Clinton camp has spent days trying to undermine Obama’s chief asset, the
elegant language that has sparked a generational boom.“We’re seeing a pattern here,” Hillary enforcer Howard Wolfson said, in a
conference call with reporters Tuesday. Yeah, we are. She’s losing, and looking
for anything to bruise Obama.Obama swiped a couple distinctive riffs about words and aspirations — his
supposed specialty — from his pal Deval Patrick, the governor of Massachusetts,
thereby violating the new cardinal rule not only of politics but of life: Don’t
do anything you don’t want to see on the top favorites of YouTube.He had credited Patrick in the past, and Patrick had channeled Obama when he
ran for governor in ’06, so basically they’re like two roommates sharing
clothes. Or two politicians sharing a strategist. Obama’s chief strategist,
David Axelrod, worked for Patrick in the gubernatorial bid.“You may know that both Deval Patrick and Senator Obama have the same
consultant and adviser,” Hillary told reporters, “who is apparently putting
words in both of their mouths.”It wasn’t campaign shredding, as when Joe Biden absorbed Neil Kinnock’s Welsh
inflection and life experiences in ’88. But it was sloppy. If you’re going to be
hailed as the messiah and sermonize about offering a “hymn that will heal this
nation,” you should come up with your own lyrics.Obama is basing his campaign on his freshness and integrity and honesty, so
he shouldn’t cut corners, as he seems to have done with crediting Patrick and
explaining the extent of his relationship with his sleazy former fund-raiser,
Tony Rezko.The attribution problem might be small beer compared with Michelle Obama’s
comment in Milwaukee on Monday: “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am
really proud of my country. And not just because Barack has done well, but
because I think people are hungry for change.”It’s a discordant note for the stylish, brainy 44-year-old Princeton and
Harvard Law School grad. Cindy McCain showed that Republicans would jump right
on a line like that, and twist it into something that sounded extremist and
unpatriotic.Michelle made another of these aggrieved pronouncements at a rally in Los
Angeles before the California primary: “Things have gotten progressively worse,
throughout my lifetime, through Democratic and Republican administrations, it
hasn’t gotten better for regular folks.”Given the way the Clintons unfairly turn the tables, we’re only moments away
from Hillary asking Obama: “Can’t you control your spouse?”
