Praise For My Journalism Page

First, this correction:

I enjoyed your column this week. I love the way in which you express a parent's feelings of the moving on transition of a child. Well done. I'm curious about "Chicago". Since Sandy Dennis died on March 3, 1992 of cancer at age 54, it may be more than stubbornness that is keeping her away from those matinees. Or perhaps it is a very special theatre. Was Rod Serling an usher?

Delivered with your usual style, Kent. Sandy Duncan is the correct actress. Many of you may not have seen this error, since I corrected it as soon as Kent pointed it out.

I got another nice letter about my Journalism Movies page:

Dear Mr. Schindler:

I am a high school English & Journalism teacher who is looking for a few new ideas to update and enliven my newspaper class. Today I was fortunate to find your page with all of the wonderful material you have collected about journalism and journalists! What a great site. I hope you don't mind if I pass you site on to some of my colleagues. I think they will be as impressed as I am. I am hoping to use clips from some of the movies to help my students understand the role of the modern journalist. I also hope to use some of the quotes you provided to launch a discussion of the role of journalists and editors. Once again, congratulations for putting together such an educational web site!

Dan Byrne

From Europe, my friend Larry King writes a chatty, discursive and quite readable summary of what's been going on across the pond. Find the full text here. Please do go and read it. I enjoyed it thoroughly. It starts like this:

Very little happens in Europe in August, except for the occasional German invasion of a neighbouring country. Nothing so interesting occurred this year.

Even less than usual was going on in the U.K., Monday being the final bank holiday of the summer, more or less analogous to Labor Day.

The main event in London was the Notting Hill Carnival on Monday, which contrary to what you might expect is not a celebration of the recent Hugh Grant film (as it's referred to locally; I would assume in the states it's called a Julia Roberts vehicle). Rather, Carnival is a massive festival-street party-amiable riot, imported from the Caribbean and enthusiastically embraced by the locals.

My favorite paragraph comes farther in:

I have never been able to decide whether the relatively low-key, unemotional approach to political campaigning in Europe is a sign of good sense or deep-seated cynicism. I suspect the latter. It's hard to credit good sense for the political situation in any continent that includes Italy. I've lost count of how many governments Italy has had since the end of World War II, but it's close to sixty. Of course, you could argue that a propensity to throw out the government on a moment's notice is the epitome of good sense. But if you start ascribing good sense to Italy, you have to come up with an explanation for opera, Venice, and the traffic in Rome, which are, reading from left to right, charmingly detached from reality, a breathtaking defiance of all the usual rules governing the best place to build a city -- few recommend the middle of a lagoon -- and downright deranged.

Craig Reynolds wrote a few weeks ago. I'm just getting around to printing it now:

I hope your week in New York went well and was was the rewarding sort of bittersweet family experience that such landmarks should be.

I was at SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles last week, just me and 40,000 of my closest friends. (It also marked the tenth anniversary of meeting my wife Lisa at SIGGRAPH 89.) It was a good conference with lots of cool stuff in the Technical Program and the Animation Festival. But one paper stood out and I think it might be of interest to the readers of PSACoT and the rest of the Paul Schindler media empire. The paper was by Takeo Igarashi (with his professors) and described "Teddy" a highly intuitive, sketch-based 3d modeler, for a certain class of "rotund" geometrical models. Because its written in Java, anyone can try it:

Teddy

http://www.mtl.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~takeo/teddy/teddy.htm

Also, after I read your column, I ran out to find the August 16, 1999 issue of The New Yorker for Auletta's piece about Bill Gates. But that issue was no longer available. Any idea how I can get a copy of the article?

Surely, someone reading this can help Craig (and me).