Labor Day Wrap-Up

(1) And how was your Labor Day weekend? Not as wild as Carbondale’s:

(2) I always thought that the media was making a big mistake by telling us the names and life histories of infamous school shooters, such as Columbine, Jonesboro, Pearl, Miss., Springfield, Ore., and Santee, Cal. All they did was give the school shooters what they wanted, and that is eternal fame, or infamy, if you will. As it is, the shootings that happened after the first ones were all copycats of the first and the ones that followed. And now those fruits have really ripened hard in the UK: Two British school students are now on trial for plotting a Columbine-style attack at their school ten years to the day after Columbine.

(3) Kurt Schilling is thinking about throwing his hat in the ring to replace Ted Kennedy in the Senate. I don’t know what I think about his political chops, but I do know that he would be a Republican in any political office he would hold. That said, he might as well forget Massachusetts, even if two of his three World Series rings were won in Boston. I think he would have a better chance in his native Arizona, (where he won the other ring), except that neither John McCain nor Jon Kyl seem to want to retire anytime soon.

(4) Maybe they weren’t kidding when they said that the Swine Flu would hit blacks harder. Stillman college, an HBCU in Tuscaloosa, Ala., had to cancel and forfeit its home opener football game against conference rival Clark Atlanta, also an HBCU. The reason is that 37 members of the Stillman football team have Swine Flu. That’s has to be close to half their roster.

(5) Someone named “Davis” has been named the GM of Clear Channel’s St. Louis radio properties. Too bad it’s not Jefferson.

(6) There’s a jihadist in Alabama. WWGWD? (What Would George Wallace Do?)

(7) When you were about ready to graduate from high school, members of your class voted on who was most likely to succeed, most likely to become President, most likely to have gender-changing surgery, most likely to join a cult, most likely to cure AIDS, and a whole bunch of other “most likelies.” In Chicago, you might well win the title as Most Likely to Get Shot. The CPS will spend $30 million a year to intervene into the lives of the 1,200 students (of all grades) it thinks are most likely to get shot, in order to give every one of them their very own individual social worker, and guarantee each of them some sort of paying make-work job. (Though I would think child labor laws mean that the jobs are given to students that are of a certain age or older; I can ill imagine that first-graders will be made to pull the wagon out there in the working world.) Aside from all the other reasons this idea is problematic, which you already know because you’re smart enough to read this blog every day, the thing that jumped out at me is $30 million a year for 1,200 students, which divides out to $25,000 a year. If I were in charge, the CPS would spend $30m on its 1,200 smartest students before doing this. If they won’t agree to that sensible step, I would rather spend $30m a year on the 1,200 students most likely to shoot somebody.

This puts to bed any concerns about urban public schools being underfunded.

Question: For those of you who are victims of our most recent recession, would it behoove you to paint your face black, fraudulently present your age as a teenager, and move to Chicago? There has been a recent trend of middle aged people taking on a fake ID and going back to high school. Now I know what they’re after.

(8) Speaking of Chicago, a 25-year old gang banger was killed when a member of his own gang accidentally ran over him with an SUV. I hardly think that’s what he signed up for, to get mowed down by one of his own homies. That said, I have an idea for the CPS…

(9) It looks like the topic of President Obama’s much-ballyhooed address to America’s school students tomorrow will be a call to them to do their best. For some students who will be watching tomorrow, that isn’t very much. Talk about the soft bigotry of low expectations.

(10) Canada is mulling a tax on iPods and similar portable digital music devices, money which would be distributed to record labels and movie studios based on the premise that those who own such devices will attain music and movies outside the bounds of copyright law.

Like I have said in this medium before, the RIAA and MPAA (and their equivalents in other countries) are arguing for horses in an automobile world. I would be in favor of this tax IF AND ONLY IF the RIAA and MPAA agree not to sue individuals that download music and movies. In other words, this would be the stop-gap solution to allow the RIAA and MPAA to adjust to the new paradigm.

In the long term, what I think might save the music and movie industry is the Holographic Versatile Disk (HVD), a CD/DVD/BR-sized medium that would allow for perhaps tens of terabytes of storage on one disk. In other words, why buy a CD with music in .wav format when downloaded 192 kbps MP3 files sound just as good? Why buy a Blu-Ray movie of 1920x1080p video resolution when you can download one on a very fast home broadband line in a few hours? (Assuming your ISP doesn’t have bandwidth caps.) But an HVD could store uncompressed audio of extremely high quality, sampling rate, frequency response and dynamic range, in various possibilities of surround sound. An HVD could (and indeed would be needed) to store Ultra High Definition Television (UHDTV) in 7680x4320p resolution, 16 times that of 1080p Blu-Ray, with a 22.2 channel three-dimensional surround sound system, compared to 7.1 channel audio offerings on Blu-Ray. (UHDTV has already been demonstrated in Japan and Las Vegas.) The saving grace for the labels and studios is that even with the fastest available residential broadband connection of the near future, it would take weeks to download (e.g.) 10 TB of data to fill an HVD. The only way to get music or movies of such high quality would be to buy them or rent them on their physical commercially-produced HVD disks.

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