Hail the conquering hero

I was not paying attention when this happened, but the ailing Roger Ebert has begun to write film reviews for the Chicago Sun-Times again. This comes as a great relief -- I love the Roger Ebert. Read his recent remarks about what happened to him here.

Crutches

I suspect I am not the only writer who overuses certain words and phrases. One of those is locution, appropriately enough, and another is discomfitingly. And I just noticed that twice in recent months I have, in the pages of Isthmus, described someone's garment as being not merely red but vivid red -- as though that actually means anything, which it doesn't.

Yum yum

Now that my employer, Isthmus newspaper, has redesigned its Web site, my monthly column of food news has begun to appear on the Web. Check out the latest installment here.

All debts

A recent Explainer column on Slate examines whether private businesses are obligated to accept cash. Evidently they're not, but what gave me pause was the link to the article on Slate's main page. It reads, "Why stores don't have to take your dirty cash," and I thought that meant the article was about whether private businesses are obligated to accept dollars that are filthy, tattered or otherwise mutilated.

That question made me recall my trip to Cambodia a few years ago. American dollars are widely accepted in Cambodia, and some businesses that cater to tourists (restaurants, firing ranges) even refuse to take the local currency, the riel. I was surprised to encounter our familiar greenbacks in the kingdom, and even more surprised when I closely examined what looked like a crisp, new dollar bill, because it bore the signature of W. Michael Blumenthal. He was Jimmy Carter's treasury secretary, you'll recall.

Yes, Cambodians regularly handle American bills that here would have disintegrated into microbes ages ago. The bills look new because Cambodians are very careful with their sawbucks, and merchants there indeed do not accept dollars that are filthy, tattered or otherwise mutiliated. I learned that when I had a torn dollar handed back to me with a polite shake of the head.

I later gave that torn dollar, and other dollars, to a Phnom Penh policeman who randomly shook me down on the street one evening. I guess members of a debased constabulary don't have to be so choosy.

As any traveler would, I brought home riel notes as souvenirs. But had I been thinking, I would have brought back some of those disco-era dollars, too.

School daze

Today for the third year running I journeyed to the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater to speak at the the fall conference of the Kettle Moraine Press Association. That's a group for journalistically inclined high school students, hordes of whom converged on the small campus to hear presentations by the likes of me. I talked in one session about food writing, and in another about feature writing.

On the whole the talks were fine, but the kids seemed more unruly than in previous years. Things never reached this point, happily.

On a completely unrelated note, check out my writeup on the Daily Page of David Maraniss' appearance at the Wisconsin Book Festival yesterday.

Good word

"The moment Mr. Foley's e-mails became known, we saw that brand of fearmongering and bigotry at full tilt: Bush administration allies exploited the former Congressman's predatory history to spread the grotesque canard that homosexuality is a direct path to pedophilia. It's the kind of blood libel that in another era was spread about Jews."

-- Frank Rich ($)

Yes, I'll hold

Yesterday on CNN's "Reliable Sources," Ana Marie Cox of Wonkette fame (and now of time.com) said this:

Bloggers really are kind of parasitic on the actual reporting that many mainstream media outlets do. Let's face it, reporting is very expensive, it's very time consuming. It's not something that has immediate rewards. And blogging for all the good things that it can do, the kind of collective intelligence can bring to analysis, isn't -- isn't the kind of medium that really sustains any kind of thoughtful investigation.

Bloggers indeed are not known for doing original reporting, and instead commonly link to mainstream news outlets as their sources -- and, as commonly, to other bloggers.

Why is this? Does anything prevent bloggers from, to paraphrase Nicholas Lemann, calling powerful people on the phone and asking them blunt and impertinent questions, then reporting the responses? And would we all benefit if bloggers habitually did? Probably, though the change would come at the expense of newspaper journalists like yours truly.

But the fact is, it's not particularly fun to call powerful people and ask them blunt and impertinent questions. It can be downright uncomfortable, actually, though it gets easier with practice. It's a skill, really, and it helps make journalists journalists.