Weekending

First: Overheard today in Silicon Valley: "I always put 25% of my investments into the high-risk category," said the first man. "I know what you mean," said his companion. "I put 33% of mine in high-risk."



Second: It's time to get ready for the weekend. Plans include a sleepover for four boys tonight.

Tomorrow, my little redheaded, freckle-faced Norman Rockwellesque 12-year-old plays with his team in the championship game.

He can be a fierce competitor in these games. He loves being on this team. It is filled with friends, including kids he's played soccer with for six years.

They are very well coached, and know each other so well that they play as a unit, moving down the field in an orange wave.

Although there are teams with older, bigger kids in their league, they have usually been able to hold their own.

That they are in the championship again, I believe for the third straight year, is remarkable.



They always seem to peak for the playoffs. They got beaten badly a few weeks back, but in the first two rounds of the playoffs, they've been superb.



Anyway, you can tell I'm excited, anticipating this contest tomorrow afternoon, even though it is supposed to rain.






(All photos courtesy of Richard Lawler)

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Third, in the morning, I'll drive to San Jose State University to participate in a conference held by the Asian American Journalists Association and SJSU on narrative journalism. Here are the links to the articles I'll be discussing, none of which are unknown to regular readers of this blog:

Everything's Broken

This is my reaction to what I saw in Biloxi last Thanksgiving. It's one year old!

Wenner's World

Something strange is going on with this article in Salon's archive. I have heard for years how much Wenner hates my piece. The first thing he said when he became an investor in Salon was that he wanted them to pull the piece down from the Internet.

Salon resisted initially, but perhaps Jann is finally getting his way. I notice that the name of the article has been changed recently to "Jann's World;" whereas when we published it, the title was "Wenner's World." This may be an attempt to lower the article's "score" on Google's crawlers, and thereby eventually demote it from its traditional place at the very top of Google's results page.

Furthermore, inside Salon's archive, the article is no longer listed at all, whether you search under "Jann," "Wenner," "Jann's World," or "Wenner's World." The original headline and graphic still appear in the archive of Salon's "Brilliant Careers" section, but the link is the only one on that list that doesn't work?

Coincidence, all this? I note that Wenner has also created a photo link about himself that now is first on Google. Plus he has purchased paid links in the right-column sponsored links area of Google's resultys page.

All of this amuses me. Jann could never buy me off, but could it be that his money gives him a bit more clout at Google and at Salon? Stay tuned. If I notice further attempts to bury this article, I'll start to make a lot more noise about this matter!

In the moment of truth

The third article is straight from this blog, a very personal story, but one of the best, I believe, I've been able to write here so far. Thanks to my dear friend Julie Patel for the invitation to participate.

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