Five at 8: May 26, 2009

Bob CollinsBob Collins May 26, 2009
4

The Monday Morning Rouser, special Tuesday morning edition. Tuesday’s start in the toes:

Check out the audience at about the 3:05 mark. That’s Chuck Berry playing! And those are music people. What’s wrong with them?

  • Daniel Hauser and his mother are back in Minnesota after a week running from court-ordered chemotherapy, but the sense that someone was pulling the strings behind the scenes won’t go away. WCCO has video from a “documentary” a company has been working on about the story. The production company paid for the charter flight that brought the Hausers back to Minnesota, CBS News reported, raising the “ick factor” considerably.
  • I consider myself a statistics freak where baseball is concerned. I’ve been reading Bill James’ theories for years and generally regard advances in the analysis of the sport to be a good thing. That said, can we please pass emergency legislation banning this graphical representation of baseball standings? And after that, can we bar the Star Tribune from publishing “wild card” standings before August 1?

    Who’s Bill James? The luckiest man on earth.

  • When I was a young college student, one of my journalism instructors (we weren’t so high falutin’ that we had professors) was an editor at the Providence Journal Bulletin who told us the story of the time he had to call the family of a soldier killed in Vietnam to get information for the obituary he was writing. Until he called, they hadn’t heard he was dead. Ugh.

    I thought of that while reading this article from the Washington Post by a reporter who covers funerals at Arlington National Cemetery .

    They all follow identical rules and protocol, but no two can ever be alike — it’s always a different soldier, a different story, a different sacrifice, a different life and a different death.

    Far from being intrusive, many reporters find families more than willing to share their stories about their loved one. By the way, since the weekend News Cut audience is comparatively non-existent, you might’ve missed this.

  • What hath CSI wrought? St. Olaf College News profiles Doug Beussman, an associate professor of chemistry. He and some students are finishing up research on date-rape drugs before he takes a sabbatical to go work with the FBI i Quantico. “Science is exciting, but it’s also a slow process,” says Beussman, who graduated from St. Olaf in 1992. “It takes days, weeks, and maybe years to make progress. Not everything happens in 60 minutes like it does on TV.” (h/t: Northfield.org)
  • Economy down. Vitamin sales up.

    WHAT WE’RE DOING

    Midmorning – How is the economy affecting news converage. NPR ombudsman Alicia Sheppard and Mark Jurkowitz of the Pew Center are guests. In the second hour: Author David Eagleman considers the concept of time and the afterlife.

    Midday – The state of the auto industry with Paul Eisenstein, long-time Detroit auto industry reporter.

    Talk of the Nation – Today the California Supreme Court rules on the Proposition 8 case, to either uphold last November’s ban on gay marriage or overturn it. The opinion will be available here at noon, central time. Second hour: A birth control pill may soon be available for men. Presumably, it can be taken with a beer.

    Oh, heck, why not, here you go, guys. Just the guys, please:

    All Things Considered – Coverage of a court hearing in the Hauser case. Stephanie Hemphill looks at Xcel’s desire to add storage and extend the life of the Prairie Island plant. If you close your eyes, it’s the ’90s again. NPR Washington will profile runpee.com, the latest indication that the end is near.