“Q” for Quintessential – Remembering Steve McNair

“Q” for Quintessential – Remembering Steve McNair

By Michael – Louis Ingram

BASN/FRO



PHILADELPHIA (BASN): News out of Nashville, Tennessee report that on or about 1:30 P.M. on July 4, 2009, former National Football League MVP and three-time Pro Bowl quarterback Steve McNair was shot several times and killed in a downtown condominium.

A female, who as of this writing has yet to be identified, was also shot and killed.

McNair, born in Mount Olive, Mississippi, set passing records at Alcorn State and won the Walter Payton Award for best 1-AA college player in 1994; McNair would become the first round draft choice of the Houston Oilers the following year.

After a year on the Oilers’ sidelines, McNair became a starter, and the team’s most valuable player as the Oilers left Houston to become the Tennessee Titans.

McNair would go on to play for 13 seasons, appearing in Super Bowl XXXIV against the St. Louis Rams, where he rallied the Titans on their fateful game-tying drive, falling a yard short after a completed slant pattern to WR Kevin Dyson at the Rams’ six-inch line.

Traded to the Baltimore Ravens in 2006, McNair would appear sparingly due to injuries, and retired in 2008.

Now that’s the factual stuff. Forgive me if I stray slightly off target, but this is where my senses and sensibilities have hit the saturation point:

It’s bad enough when someone dies; and it is always a “someone” – someone’s father, someone’s son, someone’s husband, someone’s lover, someone’s partner.



What makes it worse is that only in death does anyone become a “someone” regardless of what they were before.

Only in death do we all become human.

But the actions in how the story gets out hits at the heart of what we here at BASN endeavor to do in getting the story right.

One particular site (which was so disgusting I will not dignify by giving credit) was so irresponsible in their presentation of the information; first by saying McNair was the victim of a murder-suicide along with his wife approximately three hours after the story hit.

They eventually retracted the information in an update – but left the original info in plain sight – even after requests to take it down!

This is indicative of the downward spiral the mainstream media has helped enable – by lowering the standards; and implying that anyone who can operate a computer automatically qualifies as a journalist.

While there will be more coming out regarding the death of Steve McNair, BASN plans to celebrate McNair’s life with a special edition of Tony McClean’s “The Weekend Sports Rap’ today(Sunday 7-5-09) at noon EST. Featured as guests are BASN’s Lloyd Vance, L.A. Batchelor and myself; along with Dr. Bill Chachkes and Ralph Garcia from the sites Football Reporters Online & the Gridiron Draft Guide.

The broadcast can heard on www.blogtalkradio.com/Tony-McClean



michaelingram@blackathlete.com
mike@footballreportersonline.com
mingram@suavvmagazine.com

Steve McNair found shot dead

News Flash: Steve McNair shot dead.

Special Radio show tomorrow at 12 Noon Eastern on Blog talk radio's weekend Sports Rap with Black Athlete's Tony McClean

Listen to Tony Mcclean on Blog Talk Radio

Michael Jackson | Jackson's kids should decide their fate

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On YouTube.com

The latest issue in the ongoing story of Michael Jackson's death is who should get Jackson's kids that he had with his third wife Debbie Rowe. Apparently, Debbie Rowe wants custody of the children, son Michael "Prince" Jackson and daughter Paris-Michael Jackson. Reportedly, Jackson's will states that he wants his mother Katheryn Jackson to take care of Prince and Paris, while Rowe wants them to live with her.

There are many reasons why Jackson's children should go to either person, but what I object to is the fact that what the kids want and where they want to go is not the first consideration of the judge. I write and say that because those kids are taking an emotional beating: they've lost their father and now don't know where their home will be or who they will be living with. That's enough to make any decent person cry for them. There's no reason at all the judge can't let their desires be consideration number one, and the only one.

The children undoubtedly feel like their lives are entirely out of their control, give them final say over their own destiny. It's the only fair thing to do.


A side note on how to look for tv



I was taking a sideways gander at Chris Matthews' show "Hardball" on MSNBC when Chuck Todd, who filled in for Matthews had on as guests Gloria Alred and an African American gentleman who's name I didn't catch appearing on a segment about Jackson. The dude's name's not important; how he looked is: terrible. He had on a slightly wrinkled shirt without a tie, open at the neck, a big 'fro that really needed trimming, and a weird blue colored something-like-a-cheap-blazer. It was as if they just pulled the brother off the street to come on the show. Then Todd asked him the standard issue "questions one would ask a black entertainment reporter" like "Can you comment on the cultural significance of three news networks playing the same video at the same time?"

What!?

I couldn't believe the question and "Frumpy 'Fro Brother" couldn't either, trying to duck it for a time before giving in. I'm sorry, but this isn't yet "postracial" America, so why dress to a "You know, I'm just a poor, hard working brother" stereotype? Come on!

Next time, wear a decent suit and tie; it's national television, your image, and mine too.

Irina Slutsky and Tracy Swedlow: vlogging pioneers

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YouTube, MySpace, Metacafe, Blip.tv, Sclipo and Viddler

I had the pleasure of hanging out with two of my favorite "vloggers" Irina Slutsky and Tracy Swedlow, of Geek Entertainment Television and Interactive TV Today. The idea was really just to meet at a cool cafe called "Mission Pie" on 25th and Mission in San Francisco and share ideas as friends - we all know each other already; this wasn't our first time talking but it was my first time getting together with both of them at once. We talked about events, vloggers, t-shrts, boobs, and the Karate Kid.

I've long admired what both Irina and Tracy have done. I met Irina in 2006 at an event in San Francisco she helped produce called "Vloggercon" which was my first introduction to the community of video-bloggers.



But what is "video-blogging"?

Video blogging is the act and art of talking into a camcorder or video recording device to tell a story or share information, then taking that video and editing first and / or directly uploading it into a service like YouTube. Some take the resulting video on the service and embed it into a blog, but that doesn't mean one has to do that for the video-blog to be just that. It's just using video recording systems to talk out and show your ideas and observations rather than writing them down. It's that simple.

Video blogging really grew with the emergence of YouTube and Blip.tv before it. For a time, Blip.tv was the service of choice because its quality was far better than YouTube's and that perception remained active until 2008, when a newly-owned-by-Google YouTube started to upgrade its systems. Now, YouTube is the dominant video distribution system. With that, Irina has almost religiously stuck to Blip.tv (though that's about to change).

Irina's one of the pioneer vloggers - remember, YouTube was established in 2005 and Blip.tv in 2006 so vlogging is still new - along with Amanda Congdon and Andrew Baron who teamed up to created Rocketboom and reached stardom in 2006 only to have a breakup so nasty it became an Internet event, causing Rocketboom to zoom from 125,000 views per day to over a million a day. That fight for control between Amanda and Andrew forced companies like ABC to pay attention to vloggers. Meanwhile, in the same year, Irina was "acquired" by a new firm called PodTech, which made video content and drew corporate sponsors to pay to have their image associated with it. PodTech was the first company established to a degree around the content of vloggers.

Unfortunately, PodTech and Irina came to a parting of the ways I will not go into here, but Irina carried on with her work at Geek Entertainment Television. Meanwhile, Swedlow was doing more than just vlogging, she was paying attention to "Interactive Television", which is where the viewer "interacts" with what they're seeing. The best example being voting on television. Anytime you text a message to a number after watching, say, American Idol, you're "interacting" with the television.

Tracy started Interactive TV Today with her husband Richard Washborne in 1998, and rapidly gained a reputation for producing a cool, cutting edge event called "The TV of Tommorrow Show" held at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and where she brings together products and personalities for a lively discussion on how televisions future is being shaped today. (You can also hear her show on Blog Talk Radio)

More gatherings soon

Irina, Tracy, and I got together to talk and plan, but I can't say what we're going to do as of this writing. It's not that we don't know; we do - I just can't share it yet. We're still trying to figure out how to include "constantly hugged goats!" (See the video.)

Stay tuned!

Judge Richard Posner's misguided view of the Internet and newspapers

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Judge Richard Posner teamed with University of Chicago economist Gary Becker to create The Becker-Posner Blog where the two Yoda-like oracles weigh in on the economic issues of the day. Now, the two new bloggers are no slouches: Gary Becker's contribution to economic thought is something I learned at Berkeley: "Human Capital Theory" or the idea that our age, education, and other factors combine to determine our economic income over time. Judge Posner's a famous legal figure, and currently a lecturer at the University of Chicago and on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago. Both of them are conservative thinkers, so having an intellectual curiosity about those some of us call "Neoconservatives", I was drawn to read what they're distributing. This subject on "the future of newspapers."

Note: I'm Neoliberal.

Posner's right about the future of news -- sort of

First, The Judge gives a good explanation of what's happening with newspaper revenues, but his discussion of the system behind this decline assumes the importance of newspapers. This is the problem with what I call "thinking within your own age group" because while Posner has a blog and is using it, he fails to mention "blogs" at all in his post and blogging is considered by some to be a "young person's game." Using the term "websites" is incomplete because websites don't allow for the installation and updating of information as fast as blogs do. Blogs are much of the reason newspapers are getting hammered by losses in ad revenues as the money has moved to online information sources. Technorati.com's recent blog study estimated that blogs have a mean annual revenue of $6,000, with $75,000 for those with over 100,000 unique visitors per month. Given that bloggers make money via variations in ad revenue payments, that's money which went to newspapers before the emergence of blogs.

Thus, even with newspapers concentrating online efforts on their own websites, competing with blogs is still a problem: for example, 4 of the top 10 entertainment websites are blogs, including TMZ.com, which turns around news and updates its blog much faster than its old media-on-the-web competitors. Judge Posner does not discuss blogs like TMZ, and seems to imply that all original content comes from traditional news outlets, but the success and operation of TMZ, and ProFootballTalk.com, which I see as the TMZ of the NFL, proves that blogs create their own news from their own sources separate from, say, the New York Times, which Posner uses as an example what to do to save newspapers.

This is where Posner makes a total error in thinking when he writes:

Expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent, or to bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent, might be necessary to keep free riding on content financed by online newspapers from so impairing the incentive to create costly news-gathering operations that news services like Reuters and the Associated Press would become the only professional, nongovernmental sources of news and opinion. (my emphasis)

In this Judge Posner thinks only Reuters and the Associated Press are "the only professional, nongovernmental sources of news and opinion." That's what he wrote. Let's think about that. To be "professional is to get paid for doing a job" as a professional blogger does and as the blogger's not associated with the government, they are nongovernmental.

I think you see where I'm going with this: enter TMZ.com, which is a "professional, nongovernmental source of news and opinion" that has been first with many news stories. Posner might say, "Well, TMZ can also protect its news via copywrite" - true, but given the expansion of blogs and videos and the rise of citizen journalism, the number of outlets producing original stories is expanding dramatically, which increases the chance that TMZ's efforts to protect its news from being linked to would become useless if consumers can go elsewhere for similar news. If there's another blogger making a call to the same news source even to confirm what that person read on TMZ.com, then the game's over, and that happens all the time. And with this process, the demand for that item of information from that single source is reduced.

Judge Posner needs to code a website

The other problem with Judge Posner's idea is it goes against the process of attracting the "in-bound links" a website or blog needs to maintain a high "page rank" and be placed higher in a search for "Michael Jackson's will". No one will link to the NY Times if they fear a lawsuit coming their way; better to go elsewhere to get the information and let the Times suffer from the lack of link traffic. If Judge Posner understood how to write the code for a website from scratch, he'd have been sensitive to the basic practices of "search engine optimization," and jettisoned his own idea.

Hugh Jackman, James Franco, 134 others new Academy members

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Ok. Actor Hugh Jackman, before he ran around in the buff in Wolverine, was the host of this year's Academy Awards ceremonies. But would you believe he wasn't even a member of the Academy? Well, that changed today. Jackman, actor James Franco from the Spiderman movie series, and 134 others were announced as new members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in a  press release emailed to me today.

According to the Academy, the limit of new memberships extended is 166, but as has been the case in past years, the membership committees extended fewer invitations to become members than the limit. What's interesting to me is that one has to be invited to become a member - I assumed that came with being in the Screen Actors Guild or other movie union organizations.

It explains to a degree why the Academy seems so conservative in its movie award choices: it has a membership that is older than that for the Guild because, according to Academy President Sid Ganis “These filmmakers have, over the course of their careers, captured the imagination of audiences around the world", which generally means they've been around for a while. There are exceptions, however, the best one being Dakota Fanning, who was invited in 2006 when she was just 12 years old. But look at the body of Fanning's work: movies like Man on Fire, War of the Worlds, Charlotte's Web, and Push, to name a few. By contrast, well-known names like Jackman, Franco, Casey Affleck, and Anne Hathaway were just invited to become members this year.

The full list of new members, sent to me by the Academy, is below. It includes not just actors, but animators, art directors, cinematographers, costume designers , directors, documentary producers, executives, film editors, live action short film makers, makeup artists and hairstylists, producers, production designers, public relations specialists, set decorators, sound experts, visual effects masters, scenic artists and writers.

Interesting how writers were the last to be listed. Oh well.

There are notables names in that area, too. One that sticks out is Paula Wagner, who teamed with Tom Cruise to make the Mission Impossible series. And another is under "Director" is Tyler Perry. But what's interesting is how we can see the "Hollywood pecking order": if you're in this membership group, your an elite person in the business. Here's the list of new Academy members for 2009:

Actors
Casey Affleck
Emily Blunt
Michael Cera
Viola Davis
James Franco
Brendan Gleeson
Anne Hathaway
Taraji P. Henson
Emile Hirsch
Hugh Jackman
Melissa Leo
Jane Lynch
Eddie Marsan
James McAvoy
Seth Rogen
Paul Rudd
Amy Ryan
Michael Shannon
Michelle Williams
Jeffrey Wright

Animators
J.J. Blumenkranz
Konstantin Bronzit
Kendal Cronkhite
Rodolphe Guenoden
Byron Howard
Kunio Kato
Doug Sweetland
Chris Williams

Art Directors
Andrew Ackland-Snow

At-Large
Matthew D. Loeb
Redmond Morris

Casting Directors
John Papsidera
Bernie Telsey

Cinematographers
Russ T. Alsobrook
Anthony Dod Mantle
Henner Hofmann
Claudio Miranda
Rodney Taylor
Mandy Walker

Costume Designers
Deborah Hopper
Louise Mingenbach
Michael O’Connor
Michael Wilkinson

Directors
Rachid Bouchareb
Danny Boyle
David Frankel
Rod Lurie
Thomas McCarthy
Tyler Perry
Henry Selick

Documentary
William Gazecki
Rachel Grady
Rory Kennedy
Scott Hamilton Kennedy
James Marsh
Megan Mylan
Doug Pray

Executives
Daniel D.A. Battsek
Steve Beeks
Graham W. Burke
Joe Drake
Erik Feig
Paul Hanneman
Donald P. Harris
Claudia Lewis

Film Editors
Roger Barton
Hank Corwin
Chris Dickens
Elliot Graham
Kathryn Himoff
Leo Trombetta
Brent White
Pam Wise

Live Action Short Films
Reto Caffi
Jochen Alexander Freydank
F. Carter Pilcher

Makeup and Hairstylists
Howard Berger
Mike Elizalde
Louis Lazzara
Gerald Quist

Music
Jeff Danna
Andrew Dorfman
Peter Gabriel
Clint Mansell
A.R. Rahman

Producers
Mark Ciardi
Christian Colson
Gordon Gray
Broderick Johnson
Cathy Konrad
Andrew Kosove
James Lassiter
Russell Smith
Paula Wagner

Production Designers
Donald Graham Burt
Michael Carlin
Jane Ann Stewart
Kevin Thompson

Public Relations
Michael D. Camp
Marc Cohen
Megan Colligan
James C. Gallagher
David Kaminow
Sal Ladestro
Maria Pekurovskaya
Elizabeth Petit

Set Decorators
Rebecca Alleway
Peter Lando
Barbara Munch-Cameron

Scenic Artists
Robert Topol

Sound
Michael Barry
Derek Casari
Aaron Glascock
Ren Klyce
Peter F. Kurland
Karen Baker Landers
Hamilton Sterling
Deborah Wallach
Kim Waugh

Visual Effects
Christopher Bond
Matthew Butler
Chris Corbould
Rob Engle
Scott Gordon
Hal Hickel
Van Ling
Shane Mahan
Steve Preeg
Tim Webber
Edson Williams

Writers
John August
Dustin Lance Black
Courtney Hunt
Howard A. Rodman

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Obama Interrupted by Duck Ringtone

Obama handled this so well!