Tom Mangan’s home page

Just got it up and running this morning at www.hikehacker.com. The idea is to amass handy tips for trekking, camping, backpacking and general walk-in-the-woods stuff.  Should be great fun.  

So, how good is your cat?

I suppose I could beat the cat at chess.

An icon of my childhood, one of the most important men alive in the 1970s (after Muhammad Ali), has passed at age 69.

Age did what gravity and his utter fearlessness could not.  Farewell to a daredevil.

Marin Headlands, originally uploaded by busybeingborn.

Pretty pic from a couple months back.

Half Dome from the Geology Hut, originally uploaded by busybeingborn.

Took some pretty pictures at Yosemite yesterday. Evidence here.

Snow in P-town, originally uploaded by busybeingborn.

Ed, my stepdad in the Peoria area (downstate from Chicago) and my mom have a place in the country with a nice paved driveway. He even has one of those mini-bulldozers to plow his drive. But when the big snows come, the county snowplows leave a ridge of frozen, filthy snow that has the folks locked on their land for now.

The tracks in the snow here are as far as the ol’ Jeep Grand Cherokee could make it, apparently.

Haven’t done this since January so it’s time to point out all the good, friendly people who link to these friendly environs.

PJ Net — Blog of the Public Journalism Network.

Shake the Cat — “pardon me, but there’s a bear in your hot tub.”

Tinsley Spice — Santa Cruz, Ca., group blog.

Suburban Guerrilla — former newsie’s politics blog, mostly Democratic.

Beaneball — A baseball blog.

The Media Drop — Commentary by another blogger named Tom.

Hypergene Media Blog — All about participatory journalism.

True Blog — Miko Matsumura’s Java blog.

Just a Gwailo — Canadian techie guy’s blog.

Dubya’s Dayly Diary –
Madeleine Begun Kane tracks presidential strangeness.

PR meets the WWW — Constantin Basturea’s public relations blog.

Cyberwriter — German media blogger.

Weirdwriter — “Giant monsters, giant squid and giant weirdness.”

Some of the lefty blogs have started calling the “civilian contractors” in Iraq mercenaries. The idea being: they’re mostly ex-military and they’re in Iraq for the big bucks. Guns for hire, mainly.

But my understanding of the term is that a mercenary would fight under any flag in any land if the paycheck is big enough. Does anybody seriously think former Navy Seals are going to hire on for brushfire wars in central Africa or take jobs protecting drug kingpins in Colombia? Could happen, I suppose, but it seems unlikely.

What’s really happening in Iraq is that guys who signed up for enormous risk as U.S. special-ops troops are finally getting some of the monetary rewards denied them by us, the U.S. taxpayers.

Having all these private employees and all their lethal training outside Pentagon control raises any number of worrisome issues, but that doesn’t really mean they’ve become mercenaries in the widest meaning of the term.

So keep an eye out: “mercenary” has a politically charged meaning these days … it’s become a fresh buzzword that we should be keeping out of news copy, except in direct quotes.

We have this fine thing called a union contract that obliges some of us to stay home on Presidents Day, so blogging will be limited today.

I do have one thing to pass along, though: Tim Porter sent some fresh doggerel for my new Banned For Life blog. It’s a collection of handy bits of hackdom assembled by the late Ed Beitiks, who died in 2001 after a long career as a writer for the pre-sale San Francisco Examiner. Beitiks was quite the colorful character, according to his obit in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Beitiks served in Vietnam in 1967 and ‘68 with the U.S. Army’s First Cavalry Division and was awarded three Purple Hearts. In combat, he was shot in the face. The bullet entered through his cheek and left through his mouth, which had been open because he was talking. If not for his gift of gab, the doctor told him, the bullet would have lodged in his face and he probably would have bled to death.

I wonder how many of the Ivy League-minted newsies at the New York Times could claim something like that?

… and Mondo Winkie’s at it again.

At Journalism.org.
An update: wouldn’t you know that there’d be actual news on the one day I linked to a site that hasn’t been updated in a week.

And why a redesign was imposed on the good people of Miami. (Link via the Journalism Blog)

Here’s the Herald’s guide to the redesign.

So I click on this link at Editor and Publisher about the Denver Post’s new web site (more like a newspaper, they say), then I click on the link for the actual site and it won’t load. And I wonder: what is it about newspapers that causes them to buy crappy technology that drives people crazy? I’m hoping the problem will be fixed by the time you read this; all I can say as a cautionary comparison is that Knight Ridder did something similar to us ages ago and our site – you know, in the Cradle of Technology — still loads like a boot stuck in the mud most of the time.

CJR has a few pictures you can use for comparison.

Sure, it’s guy talk, but there’s an interesting thread about both at testycopyeditors.com

These are pretty darn funny.

I got great laughts on the metro desk on night when I mentioned that one of my grandma’s favorite sayings was, “stirrin’ up shit just makes it smell worse.”