Governor Paterson's favorite person in New York these days is probably Hiram Monserrate, the former New York State Senator whose political path has gone from switching parties to an assault conviction to expulsion from the Senate to campaigning for his old seat. Monserrate is a walking distraction, at least until Election Day tomorrow. (more...)

Within minutes of the earthquake just off of Chile's coast early this morning, the US Geological Survey had it pegged - an 8+ on the Richter scale, ten times as strong as Haiti's 7.0.

A short time later, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration presented a map of expected energy distribution throughout the Pacific Ocean. In other words, where one could expect tsunamis. Hawaii, it appeared, was well within the danger zone.

The state moved into action, sounding tsunami warning alarms before sunrise, evacuating beaches and low-lying areas, sending boats out of harbors and into the open sea, where surges of high water posed no harm. KHON Fox 2 in Honolulu went on the air, exploring possible ramifications and providing updates.

Then someone put a camera in front of his TV, aimed it at KHON, and put it on Ustream.tv. At its peak, the stream had over 80,000 viewers.

(more...)

On a sojourn upstate, my wife and I stumbled on a little antique market and, there, a 1977 issue of New York magazine. In this particular issue: Seattle Slew's chances in the Triple Crown (good), the opening of Studio 54 (bananas), and a review of Annie Hall, which is printed below in its historically embarrassing entirety.

While we're feeling superior: check out the cover story. For our friends in the media industry, it should be considered inspirational. For if you're struggling every day to publish magazines and newspapers that, unfortunately, probably won't be along much longer (or websites that, unfortunately, will) - at least you're not making $23,200 a year.* That princely sum was the 1977 annual salary of Eileen Shields, Time's New York reporter. On the plus side, it was a 10% jump over her $21,000 1975 salary. In 2010, twenty-one grand is below the Federal poverty level for a family of four. Ms. Shields wasn't alone - the Times' Judy Klemesrud made only $37,000. Eugene Maleska, that era's Will Shortz, got $26,000 (earning a place on the magazine's "Cushiest Jobs in Town" call-out). Peter Fleischmann, Chairman of The New Yorker, only got $76,800. I know people that make more than that! (Demonstrating that 1977's priorities weren't completely out of whack with our own, A. O. Sulzberger pulled in a much more robust $285,000 - just over a million dollars in 2010 money.) Hundreds of salaries are detailed. Sandy, the dog from Annie (which is also reviewed in this issue), earned $200 a week, twice as much as the doorman with whom he shares the cover. Mario Cuomo, then Secretary of State, made $47,800 - bested by "Duane", a pimp in Midtown who made $54,000. (See, media drones! Some of you are making more than stereotypical late '70s pimps!) The list is amazing - so many names you recognize in jobs that you didn't know they held. (David Dinkins was City Clerk! John Marr was the city's Chief Epidemiologist!) Here is the list, in full. New York has done this since, multiple times, most recently (as far as I can tell), in 2005. This newest list is also very much worth a look, if only to see the athletes and now-disgraced titans of industry and who make their 1977 counterparts look like relative hobos. (Lehman's Dick Fuld made $35,000,000 in 2005; Frank Cary, CEO of IBM, earned $595,000 28 years prior. Raise your hand if you still do business with Lehman Brothers.) These comparisons aren't fair, of course. A dollar in 1977 isn't the same as a dollar today. (In fact, a 1977 dollar is worth about three-and-a-half times a 2010 dollar.) But it's more fun comparing your salary to Rose Ann Scamardella's $60,000 annual earnings than her actual $214,000-in-2010-dollars haul. ("Tony", who passed out flyers for the Harem massage parlor, gets boosted from $3 an hour to only $10, so feel free to act superior.) So ignore those dollar conversions. Our goal here is to make you feel rich, that you're worth more than the Director of the FBI ($42,500) or the Chancellor of schools ($53,000) or, at the very least, the Chair of the Arts Department at Paterson State College ($16,993). And here's another way to feel better. Punch your salary, however meager, into the Global Rich List calculator, and you'll learn that, pretty much no matter what, you're in the 95% of wealth in the world. (Don't ruminate on what that means for the rest of the world. Just feel rich.) I'll leave you with one last ego boost. Robert Moses, the architect of much of modern New York City transportation, earned $35,000 in 1977. In 2005, New York's survey discovered that Anna Wintour's assistant made $40,000. I think we can all agree that when assistants at magazines earn more than public servants, it's a sign that the universe is shifting into proper alignment. Just don't adjust for 2005 dollars.

* Unless, of course, you do. In which case... man. I mean... man.

For some fairly inexplicable reason, the 2010 Census - that Constitutionally-mandated accounting of the American population that has happened every ten years since 1790 - has become a whipping boy for anti-government activists. Michele Bachmann, a member of said government, told Fox News that she wouldn't fill out her form because of how "intrusive" it is, and something about internment camps. To which the Census Bureau has a response: you ever seen the movie Best in Show? (more...)

Yes, I watched Pretty in Pink last night. I'll pretend it was because my wife hadn't seen it, but it's actually because I still dream of working in a record store with a Smiths poster on the wall. With Chatroulette tearing up the Net, I was struck by this scene which, frankly, I'd forgotten. (Please forgive the awful camerawork; I'm not the responsible party.) (more...)

As you may have heard, the government released numbers indicating that the unemployment rate dropped to 9.7% in January. Hooray! You may also have heard that the country lost 20,000 more jobs. Um, boo? Your natural reaction (as was mine) might be: how does that happen? How do we lose jobs, but still have reduced unemployment? It's not that swine flu, is it? Nope. As explained in this great blog post at NPR, the data come from two different surveys: one of employers (which gave us the 9.7% figure) and another of households (which showed the drop).  The differences between these two surveys are more fully fleshed out by a piece at FoxNews.com, which explains that while the Bureau of Labor Statistics' employers poll covers more people, the survey of households is statistically significant, covering over 100,000 homes. The truth, of course, lies somewhere beyond these approximations. December's employment figures, for example, were recently revised  downward from an estimated 85,000 jobs lost to a whopping 150,000. In other words, take a look at the numbers released today - but be prepared to revisit them in a month or two. Cross-posted from Jspot.org.

I came into the lobby of my building a few weeks ago, and stumbled upon 1974. There, in a brick cube about three feet per side, were the brand new Manhattan white pages. Just off the press, wrapped in plastic, sitting and waiting for people to spirit them away. Which, of course, no one did. It's 2010. It may as well have been a pile of typewriter ribbon or ticker tape. Even if the Internet didn't exist (which it does) (meta!), who has a landline any more? I haven't had a landline since I had to get one for my DSL - in 1999. (more...)

"Is that trouble or not?" That's the question posed by Florida optometrist Jack Moss, who captured this previously unseen footage of the 1986 Challenger explosion. Watching this video so many years later has been gripping, despite the fact that the Challenger launch was broadcast live, an images of the explosion have reached near-iconic status — it all looks familiar, but it's pieced together in a way you couldn't have imagined. (more...)

When I was a kid growing up in Rochester, New York, we took two newspapers - in the morning, the Democrat and Chronicle, and in the afternoon, the Times-Union. I was relatively indifferent to their contents, of course, save one page: the comics.

I took it for granted that everyday I'd work into my schedule of goofing around and melting G.I. Joes two five-minute stretches to peruse the funny pages. Which, of course, was a misnomer. The cartoons were almost never funny, and rarely even amusing. But who cared? They were entertaining. (With the exception of Family Circus.) While my parents read their sections, I read mine.

Being a kid, I assumed that the contents of the comics page were static and everlasting; that my parents in their youth had enjoyed the subtle Christianity of B.C. and the gentle depression of Ziggy. I believed that, I should say, up until my sister brought home from the library a massive tome called The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics for a school report. My eyes were opened; I renewed that book at the library every month for a year. (more...)

In 2002, Stewart Richardson, a widely respected eBay dealer, offered a slew of ceramic figurines for sale on the auction website. With over 6,000 positive reviews, customers lined up to bid, and Richardson took in over a quarter of a million dollars for the pieces. And then he vanished. Richardson saw an opportunity: having built up a great deal of goodwill and respect in the community, he had the opportunity to trade those commodities for a quick payday. He sacrificed the respect of the community, but he calculated that doing so was worth it. At least Richardson got money. For some reason, the Washington Post is making the same calculation, but the payoff for them is harder to decipher. (more...)

There's an interesting subtext to today's election in Massachusetts. The Senate's two best-represented demographics are facing off: a woman and a white man. When I say "best-represented", though, it's like the joke in Inglourious Basterds:

Lt. Aldo Raine: Well I speak the most Italian, so I'll be your escort. Donowitz speaks the second most so he'll be your Italian cameraman. Omar speaks third most, so he'll be Donny's assistant. Pfc. Omar Ulmer: I don't speak Italian. Lt. Aldo Raine: Like I said, third best.

Saying women are the second best-represented demographic is like saying Scottie Pippen was the second-best player on the Bulls in the '90s - the leader is so far ahead of the pack, the appellation doesn't mean much. To use an expression I picked up from King Kaufman, the first-place demographic for Senators is white males, then daylight, then women. (more...)

In yesterday's Sunday's Arts section, the New York Times has an interesting piece about the role of graphic design in xenophobic public policy campaigns. It's a slightly wonky piece, the kind that appeals to those with blended interests in politics and design. Like myself. Unfortunately for the New York Times, I'm also a bit of a traditionalist, and I take the actual paper. So I was a bit surprised to see this: (more...)

In 2008, Governor Sarah Palin brought in $125,000 (not counting a clothes allowance from some friends). Last year, presumably about half of that.

This year, she could be on track for a whole lot more. For example, if she can keep landing cushy deals like her current cover photo for In Touch Magazine, which Page Six reports grossed her a flat $100,000. And we're only halfway through January! (more...)

On Wednesday night, while watching 360's earthquake coverage, I was taken aback by Anderson Cooper's stopping, in the middle of his reporting, to read a name off of a sheet of paper. (That report is at left.) He explained that it had been handed to him earlier that day, from a Haitian who wanted to let his family know that he was alive. So Anderson read his name out. (more...)

After the staggering volley fired by Team Conan this week, I scrambled to find data to back what I assumed intuitively - that a large part of the outpouring we saw online was the result of a fortuitous overlap between the users of Facebook and Twitter and Conan's natural audience. But I couldn't find it. Found a variety of ratings data, and a slew of often conflicting information about who uses which online tools. But I couldn't make my point.

That annoys me. I like to think that I'm a data guy. (more...)

The famous Google mantra, "Don't be evil," reflects a optimism born, like the company itself, in the idealism and energy of innocence. While climbing to the top of Internet power-brokers, Google has relied upon a simple philosophy predicated on providing access to all information for every citizen of the world. Today, an unusual admission: their optimism was misplaced. Like a community activist who finally gives up after encountering the most stubborn of cases, Google has announced that, barring some sort of miraculous turn-around on the part of the Chinese government, they're shuttering the Chinese version of their site and, in fact, their offices in that country. (more...)

You may have seen two maps circling the web over the past few weeks (for example, at Queerty or Gothamist). Created, it appears, by The New York Times (though I can't find an article in their archives), the maps are a compelling point in the debate over same-sex marriage. How is it that states that are perfectly comfortable with allowing first cousins to get hitched throw down the gauntlet over the same-sex variety? (more...)

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A big day for Brooklyn's own Boxee: in addition to revealing more details about the previously announced Boxee Box, the company's existing software transitioned into a public beta. Therefore, we should probably answer this question: the f*ck is Boxee? (more...)

3D is old news.

Yeah, it's coming to TV in real-time, and James Cameron seems to have an affinity for it.* Great. But the technology has been around forever. As in, since the 1890s. The classic image of people wearing 3D glasses at the movies is from the 1950s, after all - half a century ago.

What people are eager for, I offer, is 4D. (more...)

No iframes? View this map. This little yellow line, moving southwest to terminate in a small bulb, is 92.85 kilometers long, or about 57.69 miles. It's less than the distance between New York City and Philadelphia; slightly more than from San Francisco to San Jose. 57.69 miles won't even get you from Austin to San Antonio. That line, after hundreds of additions to our Mediaite Census map tracking people's moves between 2000 and 2010, also represents the net movement of our contributors. Moves of 17,000 kilometers from Great Britain to Australia and moves of less than two within a single city all combined to show the decade's total movement: less than an hour's drive southwest - albeit in a boat on the Atlantic Ocean, somewhere off the Delaware coast. (Want to know how this was generated?) (more...)

DeadMalls.com is celebrating a decade of recording the death rattles of American shopping malls. Chronicling the nasty and brutish lives of malls throughout the fifty states with pictures and anecdotes, the site launched in 2000 and celebrates its first ten years next month. It seems a remarkably appropriate tenure. (more...)

the aughts 2009 is probably feeling a bit abashed, counting down the minutes until the infant 2010 is born. Starting with John Updike's January death, it's been widely decried as the Year of the Celebrity Death. Well, what good is the Internet if not to second-guess the specious claims of people trying to sell newspapers? (Or blog ads?)

Those who are familiar with my pieces on Mediaite may have noticed that I'm a bit of a data nerd. So I took this analysis a step further, grokking every important death listed on Wikipedia and crunching the numbers. (more...)

the aughts Ten years ago today, I lived in a somewhat odd Melrose-style apartment building (with the pool in the middle that was never used, at least not for sexy young hipster soirees) in Northern California, where I'd lived for about five months. I was getting used to the climate, the city, and the fact that it wasn't going to snow, no matter how much I wished it would. I left there three years ago, another eternity in my life. I've lived multiple places in New York City since, and the thought of the young me, new to California, seems so foreign as to be imaginary. Ten years, in other words, is a long time. In ten years, bookmarked by two Censuses, millions move for millions of reasons. We thought, therefore, that the end of this year was a good opportunity to encourage reflection on those reasons and those moves. Below is a map, centered on the United States — but scalable and movable — that shows the moves of visitors to this website (you!). Feel free to add your own - just use the tool under the map to enter the city where you lived in 2000, and where you live now; optionally, you can tell a little bit about why you made the move. (more...)

Among many others, I picked up one particularly pernicious bad habit in college: shaving my hair to a quarter-inch length, by myself, using clippers. It saved money in more ways than one - few women accept dates from six-foot-tall eagle chicks. I stuck with the look longer than I really should have, transporting a 1950s style into the new millennium. Today, I look different. And, not coincidentally, am married.

Few of us, we are all pleased to report, look the same way we did ten years ago (with some notable exceptions). Likewise our favorite brands; the past ten years provided a surfeit of logo redesigns, each documented, critiqued, lambasted and praised on the internet. (more...)

the aughts This week, the New York Times Magazine was dedicated to their newly traditional Year In Ideas thinkpiece. It's always a fantastic collection of new discoveries, shifts in ways of thinking, and products that we're likely to hear more about in years to come. It tries, in many ways, to be predictive; to isolate still-germinating concepts that will shape the world. I thought, therefore, that it made sense to see how they did. In the spirit of the end of the decade, I looked back at their first Year In Ideas released in December of 2001. Heavy on concepts that emerged following the terrorist attacks (such as "American Imperialism, Embraced") and the Internet ("Populist Editing"), the series was born at a fascinating moment in American history. (more...)

the wayback machine A web developer and former Columbia student undertook a unique project: sketching the evolution of a New York City block, from 1795 to today. The resulting animation, dubbed "The Block" (specifically, Eldridge Street between Rivington and Stanton), is rough in its details but gives a good sense of the highs and lows of the street's history. The initial appearance of apartments, fires, neglect, urban improvement projects - all captured. (more...)

"...News Corp dragged its feet over implementing Ajax, a program that allows users to send a message, an e-mail or to post a comment on their friends’ pages without having to open a new browser window." - From the Financial Times' look at the decline of MySpace, emphasis added. Yeah, no it isn't. "Ajax" is a term referring to functionality that allows a scripting language (Javascript) to load content without refreshing a webpage. It's no more a program than HTML is a program. How do I know this? Because I develop web sites. But if I didn't, its Wikipedia page is a Google search away. Who cares?, one might ask. The story, after all, isn't about arcane web protocols - it's about MySpace's inglorious descent into irrelevance. It's about how the News Corp. acquisition of the site transformed from a triumph to a debacle. It's true. It is about that, and it's a very good read (as Mediaite's Joe Coscarelli notes in his review). But the story of MySpace's decline is inextricably linked to the story of its failure to adopt technological changes. The assessments in this story miss crucial steps in Facebook's rise to prominence that were the knives in MySpace's spine. It's as though someone wrote a post-mortem of the American automobile industry without describing Japanese cars. Two examples. Friends' Activity Much is made in the article of Facebook's ability to automatically send invites to the friends of new users. What isn't mentioned is the real change that set Facebook apart, early on: the friends' activity timeline. Now common on social sites, the news feed of new relationships and profile changes was roundly criticized by users at launch. Many considered it invasive, since they were used to the more passive structure of other sites. That feature was added in September of 2006. Here's a chart of subsequent growth. Many of us sign up for a lot of new, interesting websites - but which do we use over the long term? What Facebook realized was that the social component would keep users engaged, spurring growth as they encouraged those they knew to join the network. It's standard logic now, but in 2006, it was groundbreaking. Facebook Connect What's happened since, as Slate's Farhad Manjoo notes in a great piece about Facebook's growth, is that Facebook has become infrastructural. The scope of people's engagement with the site yields exponential benefit to participants old and new. What was missing was only the ability to carry that social infrastructure to other sites. In December 2008, Facebook launched Facebook Connect, essentially a set of tools that allow any website to let users log in with their Facebook identity. The benefits work two ways: sites are given an easy way to not only provide access to site functionality, but are given access to social media's Holy Grail: the Facebook user timeline. Sign into Digg using Facebook Connect, and any links you add to Digg are posted on your Facebook timeline. And Facebook, meanwhile, extends its brand - and its role as the backbone of online interaction. (A quick aside: it's that ability to become infrastructural in a unique way that has allowed Twitter to grow quickly - and why Facebook considers it most threatening. It's also why, in my estimation, Foursquare will never become a long-term blockbuster.) Both of these technologically innovative moves by Facebook were critical in taking MySpace out of the game, the latter being the death blow. (MySpace is even rumored to be adopting Facebook Connect next year.) Neither was mentioned in the Financial Times article because the reporter, Matthew Garrahan, didn't understand the technology. Garrahan got right, it seems, that Murdoch's misstep in announcing a billion dollars in ad revenue in 2008 crippled MySpace's ability to innovate - but MySpace, even early last year, was already doomed by Facebook's tools and its own size. Business reporters need to understand the web and how it works. Merely visiting or using a website doesn't tell you everything you need to know about how it is doing - any more than driving a Chevy Cavalier would be enough to report on expected revenues for its parent corporation. A reporter doesn't need to be able to write Javascript, but they need to understand what they don't know about technology. The Financial Times told a good story about advertising revenue and News Corp.'s decision-making process. The nut of the story, though, was about web technology. And that, they got wrong.

If you have older relatives, and they have email accounts, I'd guess that you're pretty familiar with Snopes.com. It's likely that, for the first few months of their sending you urgent messages about free Applebee's dinners or gang members threatening people's lives, you dutifully found rebuttals from Snopes to pass on, intending to limit occasion for embarrassment when they send such things to others. (more...)

The Wayback Machine Carl Malamud, noted independent archivist and champion of making information from government agencies accessible, is sounding a call (wisely using the robust megaphone that is Boing Boing): public video should be public. A veteran of many institutions you've heard of (MIT Media Lab, Mozilla Foundation, Center for American Progress) Malamud notes that to view public domain video produced by the government, you have two choices: watch only a two minute preview, or buy it from Amazon. So he's developed a workaround - buying the DVDs from Amazon and, since it's public domain, ripping the videos and posting them to YouTube. (more...)

Everyone in the universe is excited about the Time, Inc.'s proposed tablet PC magazines. With some good reason - the demonstration video below, showcasing Sports Illustrated (and narrated with gusto by SI editor Terry McDonell) is pretty snazzy. Think of a Kindle that is in color. And can play video. And runs on a real computer. And that you probably shouldn't take in the bathtub. (more...)

This morning, TechCrunch stumbled across a time capsule: a brand-new video promoting Friendster, touting its upgrade that, it appears, makes it function like the MySpace of eight years ago. They miss, though, the Secret Hidden Message™ of the video. That being: Asians only, please. (more...)

The BBC is reporting (as noted by Dave Winer) that Google appears to have reached a deal to placate content providers: users accessing more than five articles via the search engine over the course of a day can be routed, directly from Google, to publisher payment or registration pages.

In a blog post by Google's Josh Cohen, the deal is explained further.

Previously, each click from a user would be treated as free. Now, we've updated the program so that publishers can limit users to no more than five pages per day without registering or subscribing. If you're a Google user, this means that you may start to see a registration page after you've clicked through to more than five articles on the website of a publisher...in a day. (more...)

The good folks at Mashable today shared the story of perhaps the most insidious marketing campaign in the history of disposable-income-having twenty-somethings: Ikea used Facebook to sucker people into buying a new Figgjo. Here's how this evil tactic worked. A store manager uploaded a number of photos of showrooms to his Facebook account with a message: the first person to tag a piece of furniture with their own name got that piece of furniture. And the youngsters were off to the races. (more...)

One of the more appealing things about living in New York City is that the high number of pedestrians means that an archaic mode of communication remains viable: posters. (One of the less appealing things: that those posters occasionally advertise things like this.) Posters were our forefathers' billboards - but unlike those-that-shall-never-be-lovely-as-a-tree, posters are at eye level, encouraging closer examination and containing a richness of color and design that billboards lack. Posters, in summary, are keen, and seem to be trending online - in particular, historic examples. (more...)

If you've ever seen the television network Video Hits 1 (a.k.a. VH1), you're probably familiar with flamboyant Barney's creative director Simon Doonan and his one-man crusade to reintroduce the cravat into mainstream fashion. He's known for his typically catty comments on the I Love the series, where what follows the word "the" in the title is any number from 1915 to 2020.

In his real life, Doonan is the Creative Director of the New York department store Barneys, and is responsible for, among other things, the store's street-level window displays. Earlier this week, the store revealed its displays for the season the theme of which, in the grandest of holiday traditions, is Saturday Night Live. If you find that to be an odd choice, I'd guess you're not alone.

The displays are heavy on allusion to various characters, scenes and personalities from the series' 35 years - but deciphering each of those references is hindered by the primary mode of presentation, papier-mâché. (Or, as Americans say: paper mache. Barney's generally prefers the fancy French spelling.) I can't help but suspect that this medium was chosen primarily to evoke sympathy - after all, it's possible, if not probable, that they were actually made by a class of  fourth graders. If their teacher saw fit to distribute gold stars for their hard work, who could possibly mock them?

Well, me. (more...)

Soon, my friends - soon we will know who the Gods of Journalistic Objectivity have determined to be the "Person of the Year," as featured in Time magazine. You may have heard that the two people leading the pack right now are Mr. Twitter and Dame Economy. (more...)

The Aughts Rotten Tomatoes has unveiled what it deems its Worst of the Worst, those movies of the past decade that received the worst reviews.

Not surprisingly, Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever was the number one worst movie, with a grand total of 0% good reviews. The cast was promising: - Antonio Banderas, Lucy Liu - so why so bad? Do you really want to see it to find out? That goes pretty much for all the movies on the list — from Glitter to Swept Away to The Hottie And The Nottie. Which prompted a natural follow-up question: what directors and actors had the worst results on Rotten Tomatoes from 2000-2009? Thanks to computers, we have the answer. (more...)

The Awl, the oddly named progeny of Choire Sicha and Alex Balk (who are the oddly named progeny of Gawker), hit the targeted marketing jackpot with an innocent post detailing much sought-after knowledge: how to draw Asian women.

Say what you will about Google Ads - they are right on point in this case.

I don't envy those who have to redesign the website for a museum - balancing institutional structure and needs with the requirement that it reflect the appropriate aesthetic. Moreover, the process of transitioning a sensibility to the web in itself requires decisions about what the organization represents - a staid, classical collection would justifiably be nervous about embracing an open engagement of the general public.

The Metropolitan Museum, for example, probably won't be holding a contest on YouTube any time soon. Its website, which looks like it was created by a medium sized corporation in 2002, is staid, muted, and tucked behind a splash screen. The Museum of Modern Art's website, by contrast, is, well, modern, with a palette and structure that would bore Mies van der Rohe. It's the Obama of websites - so cool, it's dull. Late last night, the Whitney Museum of American Art, known for its modern and contemporary exhibitions and its Biennial, unveiled the latest example from this world. It's a great improvement over what was there yesterday, though that's a low hurdle to conquer. Yesterday, the site was a card catalog. Today, it's a website. (more...)

Veteran's Day My grandfather served in the Philippines during World War Two. My father was drafted into the Army during Vietnam, but ended up working as a reporter in the Panama Canal Zone. My father-in-law followed his father into the Navy, enlisting in the early '60s and ending up in the Mekong Delta and patrolling the South China Sea. What's remarkable about my family's history is that it is unremarkable. Nearly every family in America - and Canada, and Europe - can relate similar tales of family members called to war. For many, these stories end tragically; for the lucky, they end in relief. (more...)