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Tuesday, January 31, 2017

SPACE CADETS / SIGHTS WE NEVER THOUGHT WE’D SEE


WOW. Cassini Captures Another Stunning View of Saturn and Its Rings NASA's Cassini Orbiter captured a breath-taking view of Saturn impossible to see from anywhere else. Using it's wide-angle camera, with the violet filter, the spacecraft snapped this incredible image on Oct. 28, 2016.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
GUEST BLOG—By Space.com--NASA's Cassini spacecraft is known for some of the most extraordinary images of Saturn, and its rings and moons, that we have seen. And this view over Saturn's "shoulder" is no exception.

A telescope on Earth could never capture a view of Saturn like this, NASA officials wrote in an image description. The photo looks from dark side of Saturn (lower left) toward the sunlit side of the planet and its rings from roughly 25 degrees above the ring plane. Saturn's weird hexagon-shaped storm is clearly visible churning at the planet's north pole.

While Cassini captured this view of Saturn with a wide-angle camera on Oct. 28, 2016, NASA only released the photo Jan. 16. Cassini was about 810,000 miles (1.3 million kilometers) away from Saturn when it captured the view.[Photos: Saturn's Glorious Rings Up Close]

Launched in 1997, the Cassini spacecraft is nearing the end of its nearly 20-year mission. In September, the spacecraft will be intentionally crashed into Saturn as a safety measure to protect the planet's icy moons from contamination by the probe.

The Cassini mission to Saturn has been a cooperative project by NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The probe arrived at Saturn in 2004 and is named after the famed Italian astronomer Giovanni Cassini. In addition to studying the Saturn system, Cassini also carried ESA's Huygens probe, which landed on Titan — Saturn's largest moon — in January 2005.



Monday, January 30, 2017

MEDIA MONDAY / PITTSBURGH PAPER GIVES OLD NEWS A TRY




Why one local paper launched an online section for older readers

GUEST BLOG—By Trudy Lieberman, Columbia Journalism Review--Figuring out how to reach younger readers online is one of the perpetual concerns of the newspaper business. But a new effort from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette this spring is a little unusual: It’s aimed directly at older audiences.

In April, the paper launched Aging Edge, a section of its website dedicated to the interests and concerns of the area’s “older adults, their families and the professionals who deal with them.” As Gary Rotstein, a veteran Post-Gazette journalist who proposed the idea and is running the section, explained in an inaugural message to readers:

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Trudy Lieberman is a longtime contributing editor to the Columbia Journalism Review. She is the lead writer for The Second Opinion, CJR's healthcare desk, which is part of our United States Project on the coverage of politics and policy. She also blogs for Health News Review. Follow her on Twitter @Trudy_Lieberman.

It’s an innovative web venture that few other media in the country have attempted, but we deem it all the more important in Pittsburgh, a region long known for its high proportion of elderly. (Census data show 18.3 percent of the metropolitan area’s population to be 65 or older, compared to 14.5 percent nationwide.)

The section features regular blog posts from Rotstein; aggregated and curated stories that have appeared in the paper or in other outlets like the New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer; and interviews with local experts in the aging field. There are also resource pages on topics like “Staying Healthy,” “Aging at Home,” and “Preparing for the End.”

In the course of covering aging issues on and off over the past 20 years, Rotstein said, he observed that they are “pretty complex to get into. I would get calls from people looking for help and guidance.” So it’s not surprising that the section has a strong “news you can use” component: A recent blog post that discussed when to take Social Security benefits was the best-read story on the site the morning it appeared, Rotstein said. He believes the section’s archive will have lasting value, as readers come back to look for information on common concerns.

The Post-Gazette’s effort is not the first time a newspaper has put a digital focus on aging issues, said Paul Kleyman, who directs the Ethnic Elders Newsbeat for New America Media. So far, he said, its focus appears newsier than some earlier efforts.

“It seems like a good experiment to connect local readers to national stories and offer an outlet for local reporting,” said Kleyman. “My hope is that it provides a model for other news organizations.”

Kleyman also wondered whether the section’s future would depend on the response from advertisers. I asked Rotstein about that, and the vision for the section’s long-term viability.

He told me there’s a belief some ads can be sold for Aging Edge, but nobody at the paper has indicated that would be a determining factor in the section’s future. “I don’t intend to be guided by whether or not the content creates advertising, but it’s great if it does.”

Readership will likely take some time to grow, he added. “Older adults are the ones least likely to use the web. We were aware of this going in, but we are in for the long term.”

That’s good to hear, and the resources and explainer guides are promising. Going forward, one thing to watch for will be how often the section digs in to some of the thorny political issues surrounding aging, which can bump into the interests of powerful stakeholders and big companies.

The Post-Gazette already offers readers some coverage that gets into the weeds here. For example, the paper recently featured a fine story by The Associated Press, which examined the nursing home practice of kicking out difficult residents. A local piece, by reporter Steve Twedt, told of an 86-year-old retiree who saw her costs for an IV drug treatment balloon when she switched Medicare Advantage plans, though the manufacturer had not raised the price.

Both stories seem to hold potential for follow-ups. On the nursing home front, what are the practices of local facilities? What do state inspection reports reveal? As for drug costs, were the sales material about the insurance plans clear? When the pitches for these plans begin again in the fall, will the paper and the section take a critical look at how Medicare Advantage plans are being sold?

It’s that sort of content that could make Aging Edge a real stand-out.

Speaking of old news:

Back on February 1, 1956, the editors of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette placed on page one a story on the excellent safety of U.S. ocean liners.
Makes one curious why such a puff piece ran on the front page?  Five months later, on July 26, 1956, the Post-Gazette page one coverage went wall to wall on the sinking of the Andrea Doria passenger liner.  Saving the paper from having too much egg on its face, was the fact the stricken liner was not U.S. made.

Feb. 1956. Note article lower left hand corner of page one.
July 1956 (below) ocean liner sinks








Sunday, January 29, 2017

SUNDAY REVIEW / RAYMOND CHANDLER’S BIG SLEEP EXCERPT


Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep is a class American detective story first published in 1939.

THE BOOKSTORE CHAPTERS.

CHAPTER FOUR

A. G. Geiger's place was a store frontage on the north side of the boulevard near Las Palmas. The entrance door was set far back in the middle and there was a copper trim on the windows, which were backed with Chinese screens, so I couldn't see into the store. There was a lot of oriental junk in the windows.

I didn't know whether it was any good, not being a collector of antiques, except unpaid bills. The entrance door was plate glass, but I couldn't see much through that either, because the store was very dim. A building entrance adjoined it on one side and on the other was a glittering credit jewelry establishment. The jeweler stood in his entrance, teetering on his heels and looking bored, a tall handsome white-haired Jew in lean dark clothes, with about nine carats of diamond on his right hand.

A faint knowing smile curved his lips when I turned into Geiger's store. I let the door close softly behind me and walked on a thick blue rug that paved the floor from wall to wall. There were blue leather easy chairs with smoke stands beside them. A few sets of tooled leather bindings were set out on narrow polished tables, between book ends. There were more tooled bindings in glass cases on the walls.

Nice-looking merchandise, the kind a rich promoter would buy by the yard and have somebody paste his bookplate in. At the back there was a grained wood partition with a door in the middle of it, shut. In the corner made by the partition and one wall a woman sat behind a small desk with a carved wooden lantern on it.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Raymond Thornton Chandler (1888-1959) was a British-American novelist and screenwriter. In 1932, at the age of 44, Chandler became a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Great Depression. 

She got up slowly and swayed towards me in a tight black dress that didn't reflect any light. She had long thighs and she walked with a certain something I hadn't often seen in bookstores. She was an ash blonde with greenish eyes, beaded lashes, hair waved smoothly back from ears in which large jet buttons glittered. Her fingernails were silvered. In spite of her get-up she looked as if she would have a hall bedroom accent.

She approached me with enough sex appeal to stampede a business men's lunch and tilted her head to finger a stray, but not very stray, tendril of softly glowing hair. Her smile was tentative, but could be persuaded to be nice.

"Was it something?" she inquired.

I had my horn-rimmed sunglasses on. I put my voice high and let a bird twitter in it. "Would you happen to have a Ben Hur 1860?"

She didn't say: "Huh?" but she wanted to. She smiled bleakly. "A first edition?"

"Third," I said. "The one with the erratum on page 116."

"I'm afraid not—at the moment."

"How about a Chevalier Audubon 1840—the full set, of course?"

"Er—not at the moment," she purred harshly. Her smile was now hanging by its teeth and eyebrows and wondering what it would hit when it dropped.

"You do sell books?" I said in my polite falsetto.

She looked me over. No smile now. Eyes medium to hard. Pose very straight and stiff. She waved silver fingernails at the glassed-in shelves. "What do they look like—grapefruit?" she inquired tartly.

"Oh, that sort of thing hardly interests me, you know. Probably has duplicate sets of steel engravings, tuppence colored and a penny plain. The usual vulgarity. No. I'm sorry. No."

"I see." She tried to jack the smile back up on her face. She was as sore as an alderman with the mumps. "Perhaps Mr. Geiger—but he's not in at the moment." Her eyes studied me carefully. She knew as much about rare books as I knew about handling a flea circus.

"He might be in later?"

"I'm afraid not until late."

"Too bad," I said. "Ah, too bad. I'll sit down and smoke a cigarette in one of these charming chairs. I have rather a blank afternoon. Nothing to think about but my trigonometry lesson."

"Yes," she said. "Ye-es, of course."

I stretched out in one and lit a cigarette with the round nickel lighter on the smoking stand. She still stood, holding her lower lip with her teeth, her eyes vaguely troubled. She nodded at last, turned slowly and walked back to her little desk in the corner.

From behind the lamp she stared at me. I crossed my ankles and yawned. Her silver nails went out to the cradle phone on the desk, didn't touch it, dropped and began to tap on the desk.

Silence for about five minutes. The door opened and a tall hungry-looking bird with a cane and a big nose came in neatly, shut the door behind him against the pressure of the door closer, marched over to the corner and placed a wrapped parcel on the desk.

He took a pinseal wallet with gold corners from his pocket and showed the blonde something. She pressed a button on the desk. The tall bird went to the door in the paneled partition and opened it barely enough to slip through.

I finished my cigarette and lit another. The minutes dragged by. Horns tooted and grunted on the boulevard. A big red interurban car grumbled past. A traffic light gonged. The blonde leaned on her elbow and cupped a hand over her eyes and stared at me behind it.

The partition door opened and the tall bird with the cane slid out. He had another wrapped parcel, the shape of a large book. He went over to the desk and paid money. He left as he had come, walking on the balls of his feet, breathing with his mouth open, giving me a sharp side glance as he passed.

I got to my feet, tipped my hat to the blonde and went out after him. He walked west, swinging his cane in a small tight arc just above his right shoe. He was easy to follow. His coat was cut from a rather loud piece of horse robe with shoulders so wide that his neck stuck up out of it like a celery stalk and his head wobbled on it as he walked.

We went a block and a half. At the Highland Avenue traffic signal I pulled up beside him and let him see me. He gave me a casual, then a suddenly sharpened side glance, and quickly turned away. We crossed Highland with the green light and made another block. He stretched his long legs and had twenty yards on me at the comer. He turned right. A hundred feet up the hill he stopped and hooked his cane over his arm and fumbled a leather cigarette case out of an inner pocket. He put a cigarette in his mouth, dropped his match, looked back when he picked it up, saw me watching him from the corner, and straightened up as if somebody had booted him from behind. He almost raised dust going up the block, walking with long gawky strides and jabbing his cane into the sidewalk. He turned left again. He had at least half a block on me when I reached the place where he had turned. He had me wheezing. This was a narrow tree-lined street with a retaining wall on one side and three bungalow courts on the other.

He was gone. I loafed along the block peering this way and that. At the second bungalow court I saw something. It was called "The La Baba," a quiet dim place with a double row of tree-shaded bungalows. The central walk was lined with Italian cypresses trimmed short and chunky, something the shape of the oil jars in Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. Behind the third jar a loud-pattered sleeve edge moved.

I leaned against a pepper tree in the parkway and waited. The thunder in the foothills was rumbling again. The glare of lightning was reflected on piled-up black clouds off to the south. A few tentative raindrops splashed down on the sidewalk and made spots as large as nickels. The air was as still as the air in General Sternwood's orchid house.

The sleeve behind the tree showed again, then a big nose and one eye and some sandy hair without a hat on it. The eye stared at me. It disappeared. Its mate reappeared like a woodpecker on the other side of the tree. Five minutes went by. It got him. His type are half nerves. I heard a match strike and then whistling started. Then a dim shadow slipped along the grass to the next tree. Then he was out on the walk coming straight towards me, swinging the cane and whistling. A sour whistle with jitters in it. I stared vaguely up at the dark sky. He passed within ten feet of me and didn't give me a glance. He was safe now. He had ditched it.

I watched him out of sight and went up the central walk of the La Baba and parted the branches of the third cypress. I drew out a wrapped book and put it under my arm and went away from there. Nobody yelled at me.

The Big Sleep on the silver screen with Humphrey Bogart and 20 year old Lauren Bacall, 1946
CHAPTER FIVE
Back on the boulevard I went into a drugstore phone booth and looked up Mr. Arthur Gwynn Geiger's residence. He lived on Laverne Terrace, a hillside street off Laurel Canyon Boulevard. I dropped my nickel and dialed his number just for fun. Nobody answered. I turned to the classified section and noted a couple of bookstores within blocks of where I was.

The first I came to was on the north side, a large lower floor devoted to stationery and office supplies, a mass of books on the mezzanine. It didn't look the right place. I crossed the street and walked two blocks east to the other one. This was more like it, a narrowed cluttered little shop stacked with books from floor to ceiling and four or five browsers taking their time putting thumb marks on the new jackets. Nobody paid any attention to them. I shoved on back into the store, passed through a partition and found a small dark woman reading a law book at a desk.

I flipped my wallet open on her desk and let her look at the buzzer pinned to the flap. She looked at it, took her glasses off and leaned back in her chair. I put the wallet away. She had the fine-drawn face of an intelligent Jewess. She stared at me and said nothing.

I said: "Would you do me a favor, a very small favor?"

"I don't know. What is it?" She had a smoothly husky voice.

"You know Geiger's store across the street, two blocks west?"

"I think I may have passed it."

"It's a bookstore," I said. "Not your kind of a bookstore. You know darn well."

She curled her lip slightly and said nothing. "You know Geiger by sight?" I asked.

"I'm sorry. I don't know Mr. Geiger."

"Then you couldn't tell me what he looks like?"

Her lip curled some more. "Why should I?"

"No reason at all. If you don't want to, I can't make you."

She looked out through the partition door and leaned back again. "That was a sheriff's star, wasn't it?"

"Honorary deputy. Doesn't mean a thing. It's worth a dime cigar."

"I see." She reached for a pack of cigarettes and shook one loose and reached for it with her lips. I held a match for her. She thanked me, leaned back again and regarded me through smoke. She said carefully:

"You wish to know what he looks like and you want to interview him?"

"He's not there," I said.

"I presume he will be. After all, it's his store."

"I don't want to interview him just yet," I said.

She looked out through the open doorway again. I said: "Know anything about rare books?"

"You could try me."

"Would you have a Ben Hur, 1860, Third Edition, the one with the duplicated line on page 116?"

She pushed her yellow law book to one side and reached a fat volume up on the desk, leafed it through, found her page, and studied it. "Nobody would," she said without looking up. "There isn't one."

"Right."

"What in the world are you driving at?"

"The girl in Geiger's store didn't know that."

She looked up. "I see. You interest me. Rather vaguely."

"I'm a private dick on a case. Perhaps I ask too much. It didn't seem much to me somehow."

She blew a soft gray smoke ring and poked her finger through. It came to pieces in frail wisps. She spoke smoothly, indifferently. "In his early forties, I should judge. Medium height, fattish. Would weigh about a hundred and sixty pounds. Fat face, Charlie Chan moustache, thick soft neck. Soft all over. Well dressed, goes without a hat, affects a knowledge of antiques and hasn't any. Oh yes. His left eye is glass."

"You'd make a good cop," I said.

She put the reference book back on an open shelf at the end of her desk, and opened the law book in front of her again. "I hope not," she said. She put her glasses on.

I thanked her and left. The rain had started. I ran for it, with the wrapped book under my arm. My car was on a side street pointing at the boulevard almost opposite Geiger's store. I was well sprinkled before I got there. I tumbled into the car and ran both windows up and wiped my parcel off with my handkerchief. Then I opened it up.

I knew about what it would be, of course. A heavy book, well bound, handsomely printed in handset type on fine paper. Larded with full-page arty photographs. Photos and letterpress were alike of an indescribable filth. The book was not new. Dates were stamped on the front endpaper, in and out dates. A rent book. A lending library of elaborate smut.

I rewrapped the book and locked it up behind the seat. A racket like that, out in the open on the boulevard, seemed to mean plenty of protection. I sat there and poisoned myself with cigarette smoke and listened to the rain and thought about it.


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