Helen Thomas died this weekend. She worked for UPI for more than half a century, most of it as a White House correspondent. My time at UPI (1975-76) coincided with her middle period. We were not buddies; I worked in Boston, she worked in Washington. We talked on the phone now and then, I rewrote her copy when she coverted Ford's visit to Boston in April 1975 (it was no secret that she was a better reporter than writer). She gave me a tour of the White House on a Sunday in the summer of 1976, and got me a ticket to the Ford-Carter debate in SF in the fall of 1976 (the one with the failed microphone and the Poland gaffe). Helen  was a perfectly lovely woman, a pioneer, and a special kind of journalist. We will not see her like again. My college roomie, Norm Sandler, worked side by side with her for almost a decade. I'd love to hear what he'd have to say, but he's been gone for six years now.

Turns out I misspelled scot free last week, according to my friend
Kevin Sullivan:

It has been 14 years since I needed to prepare a dummy
web layout with dummy text. For decades, the standard for this layout
method in print was something called Lorem Ipsum, which is Latin.
Nowadays there are generators for pork-based filler, filler based on
Samuel L. Jackson dialog from Pulp
Fiction, and hipster Lorem. In fact, courtesy of my former
boss David Strom, here are 13
Funny and Useful Lorem  Generators.
The only problem I can see is that a  couple of them generate
readable text, which some reviewers of the design will find
distracting. That's the magic of Lorem; it looks like real text (in
terms of word length, spacing and punctuation), but can't possibly be
read.

My
friend and colleague Richard Dalton found two things this week that
contain clues to the death of print journalism: a defense of partisan
reporting
from Jack Shafer, a long-time media critic, and this from Australia
(equally true here; I remember the advantage I had in finding an
apartment because I worked at the newspaper and saw the ads an hour
before the public) from TheMonthly.com.au’s Eric Beecher:

He also discovered a fascinating British screed about the
Google Buses in SF.

Dan Grobstein File

• Op-Ed Columnist
  My Case Against Twitter
  By
  JOE NOCERA
  Poor Joe Nocera, the Yankees fan of Randolph, N.J., has been getting
  some pretty insulting Twitter messages. But they weren?t meant for him.
• NYTimes:
  Hauling New Treasure Along the Silk Road (by railroad)
• NYTimes: A
  Shuffle of Aluminum, but to Banks, Pure Gold  Regulators
  have allowed banks to buy companies that trade in commodities,
  resulting in huge profits for the banks and higher prices for consumers.