This cracks me up. I vividly remember how some of these principles were hammered in a few TV reporting classes. I knew it then and I know it now that I should have listened to my gut feeling. But I did not and my reports were just as formulaic as the above.
I used to follow Belle de Jour - the diary of a London call girl - back in the days when I was still living in the UK capital. It was titillating and seemed authentic despite the anonymity of the author. The writing was excellent and the subject matter was naturally quite interesting. I was not surprised when the blog won the Guardian best written blog award in 2003. The online success was followed by a few books that proved quite popular (but I never read). However, the identity of the author remained elusive. Until now.
Behold, Belle de Jour is Dr Brooke Magnanti, a PhD in informatics, epidemiology and forensic science. She is a specialist in neurotoxicology and cancer epidemiology currently working at the Bristol Initiative for Research of Child Health. In an interview for the Sunday Times she confirms that she was a call girl for 14 months:
From 2003 to late 2004, Brooke worked as a prostitute via a London escort agency; she started blogging as Belle de Jour — after the Buñuel film starring Catherine Deneuve as a well-to-do housewife who has sex for money because she’s bored — shortly into her career as a call girl, after an incident she thought funny enough to write down.
She charged £300 an hour for her services, of which she got £200. The average appointment lasted two hours; she saw clients two or three times a week, “sometimes less, sometimes a great deal more”. How many men has she slept with for money? “A lot.” Dozens? Hundreds? “I can’t honestly remember,” she says, laughing. “Somewhere between dozens and hundreds.”
Yana Buhrer Tavanier is one of the best journalists I know. She has just completed a four-month long undercover investigation of institutions for people with mental illnesses or intellectual disabilities located in Bulgaria, Serbia and Romania. Yana finds out that the people in our society who need most care get least. This also holds on a micro level in the institutions responsible for those men and women - the patients in direst states are the most neglected. Here are the first few paragraphs.
Reform is coming too slowly to institutions for adults with intellectual and mental health disabilities in Bulgaria, Romania and Serbia, where chronic neglect, filthy conditions, and the use of physical restraints and high-dosage drugs to control behaviour remain routine.
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By Yana Buhrer Tavanier in Sofia, Goren Chiflik, Svilengrad, Radovets, Oborishte, Belgrade, Kulina, Churug, Bucharest, Mocrea and Gura Vaii
~
Someone is screaming.
Someone is screaming her head off in what seems a desolate part of the yard. There is a fence surrounding some shacks and, with each step taken towards it, the shrieks get louder. Ten more steps and there’s a gate in the fence. Another ten and all hell is let loose.
There is the screaming woman – barefoot, skinny and dressed in rags.
There is another woman, unable to walk, rolling on the ground outside. She is literally covered in flies – fifty, perhaps a hundred flies on her face, filthy clothes, bare feet, hands and the two chunks of bread she’s holding.
The story is available in English and Bulgarian. You can find more by browsing the site.
Great job Yana.
that make me happy.
Petya kindly invited me to join a chain of posts. I put down my list in google docs about a month ago and then forgot about it. So, here they are.
1. Coffee. Does not matter if the source is an espresso machine, french press or filter coffee maker. I crave the substance and I drink at least a few cups every day.
2. The return of Fake Steve Jobs. The funniest blogger on my side of the internet is back with the familiar tagline “Dude, I invented the friggin iPhone. Have you heard of it?”
3. House MD. I count the days (42) to the premiere of season 6. I used to wake up at 4 in the morning to grab the latest episode from the torrent sites.
4. Stumbling upon a film I should have seen a long time ago but did not. The freshest one in this category is Martin Scorsese’s American Boy. The movie was actually never released to the broad public but this did not stop movie buffs to seek, watch and directly lift ideas from it. Certainly everyone reading this can recall Uma Turman snorting heroin and OD-ing in Pulp Fiction. The scene below has almost a one to one correspondence with a story told in American Boy.
I have no problem with the good directors borrow, great directors steal approach.
On another note, if you, for some freakish reason, have not seen Pulp Fiction - Get out of here right now! I will quote Marsellus Wallace about the situation your lack of curiosity for quality cinema entertainment has created.
Yeah, we cool. Two things. Don’t tell nobody about this. This shit is between me, you, and Mr. Soon-To-Be-Living-The-Rest-of-His-Short-Ass-Life-In-Agonizing-Pain Rapist here. It ain’t nobody else’s business. Two: you leave town tonight, right now. And when you’re gone, you stay gone, or you be gone. You lost all your L.A. privileges. Deal?
5. Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. It lives right where you do your work—in the web browser itself. I find it extremely useful in making sense of web content. Check it out.
6. Not playing WoW any more. It is nothing less than triumph of my will power. Let’s see how long it will last…
Comedian John Hodgman (PC guy in Apple ads) speaks at the Radio & TV Correspondents’ Dinner. Every sentence is a killer. Watch and learn.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| End Times | ||||
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Jason Jones from the Daily Show goes to the New York Times headquarters. Here is one of the many hilarious exchanges he has with the print journalists there.
Jason Jones: What’s black and white and red all over?
Bill Keller: A newspaper?
Jason Jones: No, your balance sheets.
There is a new star on the news webscape. The Browser is compilation of links by a bunch of smart people which leaves digg, stumble upon and their likes in the dust. I found it via Tyler Cowen (who is also a contributor).
I like it enough to get seriously worried about my personal productivity. Again. Being well informed is one thing but this is turning into a new form of amusing myself to death.
My computer troubles are solved.
And this interview helps me keep my childlike wonder about life.
MICHELLE OBAMA: There is a strong possibility that Barack will pursue a political career, although it’s unclear. There is a little tension with that. I’m very wary of politics. I think he’s too much of a good guy for the kind of brutality, the skepticism.
My laptop is not working. This is the major reason for the recent lack of posts.
When you get an idea, blog it. I had a googol of blog worthy original material in the last 2 weeks but now I hardly remember a thing.
