nancynall.com » First a hologram, now this.
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First a hologram, now this.

I wan­dered through the room as Lester Holt was lay­ing out the pirate-rescue details on NBC, and of course I stopped. (I can­not walk past Lester Holt with­out stop­ping, I am so fas­ci­nated by his utterly immo­bile upper lip. My old neigh­bor, the ex-dental hygien­ist, the­o­rized he’d had extremely good cleft-lip surgery at some point in his life. But never mind that.)

What fas­ci­nated me this time was the ani­ma­tion of the res­cue of Cap­tain Richard Phillips. They needed an ani­ma­tion — a re-creation, based on infor­ma­tion pro­vided by the Navy — because of course reporters weren’t there. I don’t know how close the U.S. news media was able to get to the scene, but the cor­re­spon­dent on the scene was in Kenya, so that’s a pretty good bet. Any­way, the ani­ma­tion was very odd. You know those car­i­ca­tures you see lately, where the car­i­ca­ture is all done in Pho­to­shop? (Exam­ple.) No need to learn to draw when you can empha­size fea­tures with dig­i­tal tools. It was like that — the “ocean” was plainly a water tank, the “ships” were toy mod­els and the Somali pirates were sym­bol­ized by three black sil­hou­ettes; when they were “shot,” the sil­hou­ettes popped into the air and then flew out of frame.

Oh, hell — let’s just go spelunk­ing for the damn clip. Here it is. Sorry about the Applebee’s ad.

I’m not opposed to re-creations or ani­mated graph­ics. This one was just weird. And sorry, but I’m a word per­son. Describe it sim­ply and clearly, and I can see it in my head. Lots of peo­ple prob­a­bly think a lifeboat resem­bles a giant row­boat, how­ever, like the ones in “Titanic.” So I can see the problem.

By the way, is there any­thing to these reports, about why the pirates feel jus­ti­fied in rob­bing Amer­i­can and Euro­pean ships? I know, I know — failed state, war­lords, etc. But if Ital­ian mafias were ship­ping toxic wastes to my coast­line to dump, I’d be pissed, too.

How was your Easter? Mine was lovely. We went to the Detroit Insti­tute of Arts, not to see the Nor­man Rock­well exhibit or any­thing, but just to poke around. I hadn’t been since the big reno/reorg a cou­ple years ago, so that was inter­est­ing — it really is a bet­ter museum now, with rooms grouped around ideas rather than strictly by peri­ods. (Two ways of look­ing at an arch, Gothic and Renais­sance, for instance.) Alas, we couldn’t linger with the Diego Rivera murals; there was some sort of pre­sen­ta­tion going on there, a dra­matic sto­ry­telling thing that required a loud, screechy voice that echoed around the space and was not exactly con­ducive to art appre­ci­a­tion. Another time.

I also stayed away from my com­puter for much of the week­end, although I did fin­ish my taxes and dis­cov­ered, mirabile dictu, I’m get­ting a refund. Noth­ing like hav­ing a lit­tle money worry go away to make a per­son feel mel­low and happy. Which is why I don’t under­stand Car­o­line Kennedy these days — glut­ton for pun­ish­ment, or does she really think these things should be hers? The Vat­i­can? Why not Ire­land, or Lux­em­bourg, or some nice, incon­se­quen­tial minor prin­ci­pal­ity with good food and a decent party cir­cuit? Who in their right mind would want to grovel before Ratzi? As Michael Wolff puts it:

Car­o­line Kennedy has come to rep­re­sent some­thing that makes peo­ple crazy. What­ever she wants, peo­ple don’t want her to have. This is partly because she can’t but seem to act like she’s enti­tled to it. And it is partly because she does not seem to want to bother erect­ing the pre­tense that she is qual­i­fied for it (after all, she, of all peo­ple, knows that most politi­cians are not brain sur­geons). And it is partly because her des­per­a­tion is so appar­ent. She needs a job. Any job. Please. Which is not a good way to present yourself.

Well, yeah. Is being rich that bor­ing? Hav­ing made one’s choice (to be quiet and wealthy and good), is it so hard to real­ize it doesn’t come with all the ben­e­fits one would like? This girl needs a good therapist.

And that’s it for me, today. Off to speak to a jour­nal­ism class out in Dear­born and then to con­tribute to my IRA. And then to e-file.

Posted on Monday, April 13th, 2009 at 8:18 am
in Current events, Detroit life, Media.

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27 responses to
“First a hologram, now this.”

  1. brian stouder said on April 13th, 2009 at 9:16 am

    even if we judge that Somali’s Huff­in­g­ton Post (oddly proud) apolo­gia for “our pirates” on the ‘thin reed’ scale, it’s STILL excep­tion­ally weak. But what­ever floats his boat (so to speak); that art museum sounds inter­est­ing. Maybe this sum­mer the young folks and I will do Dearborn/UGRR/Tigers in D-town.

    btw — aren’t refunds great? For years, bean-counter types have told me that if I get more than a thou­sand bucks back, I should reduce the with­old­ing rate and keep more of our money on the FRONT end, and that I shouldn’t let Uncle Sam have inter­est free loans, yadda yadda yadda. etc etc.

    I say “Pffffft”. A chunk of money in April is a very nice thing, period!

  2. Julie Robinson said on April 13th, 2009 at 9:34 am

    We were both struck by the NBC ani­ma­tion – it appeared to have been done circa 1968. Was there no one on duty with graphic skills? We don’t nor­mally watch any news on NBC, so I can’t com­pare it to what they usu­ally have. I’m just grate­ful that Cap­tain Phillips is safe.

    Easter Sun­day was sunny and almost warm, and here in the Fort that’s as good as we can expect. Sat­ur­day we had a great time dye­ing eggs, and yes our youngest is 21. He even posted the pix to his face­book page.

    Christ is risen. He is risen indeed. Alleluia!

  3. whitebeard said on April 13th, 2009 at 9:49 am

    Abysmal ani­ma­tion! Was it take your two-year-old to work on Easter Sun­day at NBC and have him/her help out in the graph­ics depart­ment?
    But that was a feel-good story for Easter Sun­day; the Navy snipers were incred­i­ble, the cap­tain was saved and the U.S. Navy and their commander-in-chief are roy­ally stirred up to do some­thing about the pirates.
    I can­not imag­ine how the Repugs can twist that around to explain the fail­ings, but I am sure they will try.

  4. jcburns said on April 13th, 2009 at 9:54 am

    Well, believe it or not, they did use mod­ern tools, but they tried to so some­thing fancy…they motion-tracked the fake boats to the fake waves, and the result ended up look­ing especially..uh..fake.

  5. James said on April 13th, 2009 at 10:09 am

    Nancy:

    Just checked out the ani­ma­tion, and weird is indeed the word for it. It might have been 3D water, but maybe they put in a weird fac­tor for the rate of change in the water. Can’t imag­ine them actu­ally shoot­ing water — too labor inten­sive, but you never know.

  6. MichaelG said on April 13th, 2009 at 10:25 am

    That ani­ma­tion was pretty funny. It reminds me of some of the kiddy kar­toon shows. No awards for NBC for that cov­er­age. Every­body keeps say­ing that the Maersk Alabama inci­dent is the first expe­ri­ence with piracy for the U.S. in two hun­dred years. That ignores the Mayaguez deba­cle of 1975 which, while it may or may not tech­ni­cally have been piracy, must cer­tainly have been on the minds of those who were run­ning the show off Soma­lia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayag%C3%BCez_incident

  7. moe99 said on April 13th, 2009 at 10:49 am

    Let me be the first to go off the tracks, but here is a wor­thy fol­lowup to the Antwerp, Bel­gium train sta­tion video. Just think, we could all sing together using this method:

    http://​scdfa​.org/​l​e​s​-​f​r​e​r​e​s​-​d​e​-​s​t​-​f​r​a​n​c​i​s​-​d​e​-​l​a​-​s​i​s​s​i​e​s​-​h​a​l​l​elujah

  8. billw said on April 13th, 2009 at 11:06 am

    The ani­ma­tion was bad, but so was the whole report. I haven’t watched a teevee news report for many years and this was a reminder why. Two simul­ta­ne­ous infor­ma­tion sources of vary­ing qual­ity to keep track of, off­hand unsourced unchal­lenged state­ments pre­sented with author­ity but con­tra­dicted by read­ing I’ve done on the net, a point­less low-quality ani­ma­tion that dis­tracts atten­tion from the nar­ra­tive, the inabil­ity (with­out tivo) to go back and make sense of some­thing or check other sources, etc. These teevee jour­nal­ists need to learn to dis­till the facts into a coher­ent truth­ful story. Any­more, teevee jour­nal­ism is for old folks who don’t know how to check sources on the net.

  9. brian stouder said on April 13th, 2009 at 11:41 am

    “That ignores the Mayaguez deba­cle of 1975″

    Or Pueblo 1968

  10. mark said on April 13th, 2009 at 11:48 am

    Per­haps Car­o­line Kennedy could be appointed Spe­cial Ambas­sador to Soma­lia to address the legit­i­macy of ran­dom acts of piracy for profit by drugged up Soma­lis as a response to the gov­ern­ment of Soma­lia con­tract­ing away it’s coastal waters as a waste dump­ing ground.

  11. MichaelG said on April 13th, 2009 at 11:50 am

    That’d work, Mark. She could wear them out with her lib­eral guilt.

  12. Sue said on April 13th, 2009 at 11:53 am

    “And sorry, but I’m a word per­son. Describe it sim­ply and clearly, and I can see it in my head.“
    It wasn’t until I heard a descrip­tion on the radio that I really ‘saw’ it, and under­stood how incred­i­ble it must have been. Unless the radio per­son had the infor­ma­tion wrong, it was three shoot­ers, three bul­lets, three hits, and some­how they were able to do this on mov­ing water, while miss­ing the hostage. A word that is overused in most instances but per­fectly cor­rect here: awe­some.
    My Easter: In an obvi­ous ploy to keep polit­i­cal dis­cus­sion off lim­its, we rudely took over the tele­vi­sion as soon as we got to my in-laws, and kept it on sports all day, going between the White Sox game, the Black Hawks game, and the Mas­ters. It worked. The main gripe point of every­one was that golf was bor­ing and how could we expect them to watch it. An hour later, every­one had a player they were root­ing for and later on the Tiger-Phil thing had every­one fight­ing for room on the sofa. A suc­cess­ful day.

  13. alex said on April 13th, 2009 at 12:16 pm

    Ah, Lester Holt. I used to see him in the Star­bucks on McClurg Court every morn­ing back when he was an anchor at WBBM. Always thought his two front teeth were a tad off center.

  14. Julie Robinson said on April 13th, 2009 at 12:23 pm

    And Sue, the snipers were also work­ing at night! Pretty impressive.

    Thanks, Moe – I’m pass­ing that one along to the music stu­dents in my life.

  15. moe99 said on April 13th, 2009 at 12:29 pm

    ama­zon just got caught tak­ing GLBT books off its vir­tual shelves:

    http://​www​.wash​ing​ton​monthly​.com/​a​r​c​h​i​v​e​s​/​i​n​d​i​v​i​d​u​a​l​/​2​0​0​9​_​0​4​/​0​1​7​7​17.php

  16. brian stouder said on April 13th, 2009 at 3:30 pm

    So I tripped over a BREAKING NEWS ban­ner at msnbc that Phil Spector’s mur­der trial jury has a ver­dict (soon to be released) and then, on the same page, I tripped again — over this story about a death behind the green door

    http://​www​.msnbc​.msn​.com/​i​d​/​3​0​1​94893/

    Together with the pirate sto­ries, and the unhinged reac­tion to yet another Obama suc­cess from the right side of pun­dit­land, this has been an odd news day all around

  17. jeff borden said on April 13th, 2009 at 5:03 pm

    One thing about Lester Holt that stands out –or stood out when he was in Chi­town– was his gen­uine friend­li­ness. He was one of the good guys. No name-dropping. No ego-tripping. He also wore a mous­tache while here, so maybe that lip thing you were dis­cussing was hid­den beneath those whiskers. He was in a “no-win” sit­u­a­tion as the anchor of our sad sack CBS affil­i­ate, which has been in 3rd place since a lit­tle before for­ever. I’m glad he’s doing well on the national stage.

  18. harrison said on April 13th, 2009 at 6:26 pm

    nancy, you said:

    (I can­not walk past Lester Holt with­out stop­ping, I am so fas­ci­nated by his utterly immo­bile upper lip. My old neigh­bor, the ex-dental hygien­ist, the­o­rized he’d had extremely good cleft-lip surgery at some point in his life. But never mind that.)

    another celebrity who had immo­bile upper lip was the actor jason robards, jr. he got it after facial surgery when he was in an auto acci­dent in 1972.

  19. Rana said on April 13th, 2009 at 6:56 pm

    Not only was that ani­ma­tion jaw-droppingly bad, but so was the anchor­ing. It just reeked of the Por­ten­tious Voice of NOOZ! that turned me off of tele­vi­sion news cov­er­age a long time ago. Thanks for the reminder of why I don’t watch it!

    As for Applebee’s — based on my expe­ri­ence there, those pic­tures of food really ought to be called out as false adver­tis­ing. I’ve rarely seen such sad, over-salted, over-cooked things on my plate as the time I was there. Lots of ice­berg let­tuce, too.

  20. alex said on April 13th, 2009 at 7:53 pm

    At one point WBBM handed their los­ing news show to Carol Marin and gave her free reign to rein­vent it, which she did. As I recall, she tried a show that was much more heady, more like the shows of Jim Lehrer or John Call­away on PBS. The rat­ings still didn’t budge for Chan­nel 2, and in fact might have got­ten worse.

    Carol got her seri­ous news creds largely by way of very pub­licly jump­ing ship at Chan­nel 5 when the sta­tion threat­ened to install Jerry Springer as a co-anchor in order to goose the ratings.

    EDIT: Rana, it’s amaz­ing that peo­ple pay their hard-earned money for this when there are so many bet­ter alter­na­tives, includ­ing what they could pour out of a can in their own damn kitchens.

  21. LA Mary said on April 13th, 2009 at 7:55 pm

    The dish of what I assume is arti­choke parme­san spinach dip, looks revolt­ing in a tuber­cu­lar sort of way. I work in health care. Every­thing is about disease.

  22. LA Mary said on April 13th, 2009 at 8:00 pm

    Just watched the video again, and now I remem­ber what it reminds me of. My kids used to watch a show on Nick­elodeon called Kablaam! and on that show was some­thing called Action League Now, which had kids toys play­ing the parts in some adven­ture. It was a lit­tle bet­ter than that boat/ship ani­ma­tion. I think you can see Action League Now some­place online.

  23. Dexter said on April 13th, 2009 at 9:15 pm

    …never saw ani­ma­tion like that…say good­bye to three pirates, cour­tesy of Eugene Field, and yes, the god­dam shoe really did come down from the sky:
    “All night long their nets they threw
    To the stars in the twin­kling foam—
    Then down from the skies came the wooden shoe,
    Bring­ing the fish­er­men home;
    ’T was all so pretty a sail it seemed
    As if it could not be,
    And some folks thought ‘t was a dream they ‘d dreamed
    Of sail­ing that beau­ti­ful sea—
    But I shall name you the fish­er­men three:
    Wynken,
    Blynken,
    And Nod. “
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~.….…and I get cash back, too, which is already spent, of course.
    And Detroit and the base­ball world mourn Mark Fidrych,The Bird, killed at his farm, work­ing on his truck. I saw him pitch one fine day in Cleve­land, 1976. He was truly spe­cial, 54 years old and still much-loved in Detroit.

  24. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on April 13th, 2009 at 9:15 pm

    Can’t imag­ine why you’d think the Irish Repub­li­can Party is worth a dona­tion, Nancy.

  25. Connie said on April 13th, 2009 at 11:16 pm

    I get a big refund too, thanks to the var­i­ous tax breaks for those of us who are pay­ing our kids’ col­lege tuition. And just like last year, the refund goes right into the tuition account to be recy­cled. One more year! No more FAFSAs!

  26. Dexter said on April 13th, 2009 at 11:29 pm

    I caught the last inning of the NY Mets opener at …gulp!… Citi Field.
    At least the Astros of Hous­ton pulled the plug on Enron Field and changed the name ASAP…the Mets are open­ing a sta­dium hon­or­ing Citi!! It’s really very incred­i­ble. …ok now..chillin’ to some John Prine and Townes van Zandt tunes.…

  27. Dexter said on April 14th, 2009 at 2:34 am

    OK, I know sports takes a back seat at NN.C, but here’s my Freep post:

    Mark Fidrych was lit­tle dif­fer­ent in fame than a pop band as huge as The Bea­t­les. Every­body loved him.
    Lit­tle kids tuned in to his per­sona, old grand­pas laughed and shook their heads and prob­a­bly recalled the Dean broth­ers of the old Gashouse Gang.
    Young girls went crazy over him and old women gazed with approval.
    Above all, Mark made us feel good about our­selves.
    I would catch a report on the pre­vi­ous night’s game and it would make me feel good about doing eight or twelve hours in a hot fac­tory, run­ning and main­tain­ing huge punch presses for the auto indus­try.
    He wasn’t a clown and he wasn’t really any­thing but a gen­uine star, and we all loved him. I would lis­ten to the games on WJR and lis­ten to J.P. give the recap in the morn­ing on the way to work.
    I would drive to Cleve­land or Chicago , too, for games on week­ends or off days . We’d see Mark and say “hi! ” and he’d always wave back and some­times exchange a few words with us. He was just spe­cial, one of my favorite people

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