I like to get people’s input when preparing long-standing interviews, so if you have questions for those guys, let me know and I’ll work them in if they fit.

Note: I can think of plenty to ask Placebo, but I frankly don’t know the other guys so well. So do especially share if you’re familiar with Click Five, Duncan Sheik, Kate Miller-Heidke or Pou Khlaing.

I was told last night that I am one conversation with Rita Reed shy of induction into the photo department. Alright, Rita, let’s chat. Why shouldn’t I want to stick around for a photo master’s after all? Didn’t you hear? CoMo is the 11th smartest city in the U.S., and Lord knows I need to surround myself with smart people. You already knew we pride ourselves on having the highest per capita ratio of journalists, but now we also have published proof that we are smarter than the Silicon Valley.

Elinore Longobardi over at CJR has pointed out all the statistical pitfalls of this list, and I make it a habit not to poorly duplicate the good work of others, so I’ll just link. I have to disagree with one point she makes, though.

The business press likes lists. We don’t know why. But it does. List-making seems more a clerical than journalistic function, but that’s just us.

I know why! They grab the public’s attention on your cover better than a puppy hugging a baby (yes, the puppy’s doing the hugging). They usually consist of simply reformatting research done by someone else, giving you super high return of very little time investment. And, every town of significant size is bound to be in one at some point, setting off a flurry of local bloggers advertising your publication for free. Lists are great.

Funny Forbes should praise our smarts, when lack of intellectual simulation is the reason why I couldn’t see myself living much longer in Columbia. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of brilliant, talented people around these parts that put me to shame every day, with a high concentration in an area roughly delimited by College, Providence, Locust and Rollins. CoMo is a neat little town that is dear to my heart, but three years was time enough to walk through the one museum and realize I’ll never find a decent bakery. I don’t think 4.16 percent of residents having a Ph.D. makes a place “a haven for intellectual stimulation and scholarly achievement.”

But you all know what really pisses me off about this list is that somehow Lawrence, Kan., made the top 10 and we didn’t. We want recall.

7- New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2007: I haven’t read a single one, but it feels smart to know I know of them. A couple are on my to read list, especially “Imperial Life in the Emerald City.”  

6- Time’s 50 Top 10 lists: Get your craving satisfied. Among the noteworthy, the Top 10 Awkward Moments (hello, Britney), the Top 10 Man-Made Disasters (global warming, duh) and the Top 10 Green Ideas (Walmart and the U.S., really?). 

5- Ask.com’s Top 10 Search Words: MySpace is the top search (you’d think people could just type in myspace.com in the address field). Also the top 10 presidential candidate searches (Barack Obama at the top), 10 top TV show searches (Hannah Montana, seriously?) and the pregnant celeb watch, if that’s your thing. 

4- Wired’s Top 10 Startups Worth Watching in 2008: It makes me feel smart that I actually know (and use) three out of 10. 

3- OJR’s Top 5 Lessons for Online Journalism: Learn the 5 things to do with your news site right now, including “4) Ask readers for information, not articles.” Amen. 

2- Editor and Publisher’s Top 10 Newspaper Industry Stories of 2007: Of course, Murdoch and WSJ had to top the list. 

1- Foreign Policy’s Top 10 Stories You Missed in 2007: Scary to think I follow the news closely daily and I hadn’t heard of a single one of those major developments. The epidemic of dengue fever is one of the more worrisome ones: my brother got dengue when we lived in the Caribbean islands, and it’s not pleasant.  

NPR’s Foreign Dispatch podcast has turned me on to Free Rice, a word game from the United Nations World Food Program. It’s simple: you match words to their synonym and advertisers donate 20 grains of rice for every word you get right. It doesn’t seem like much, but with the game’s growing popularity among SAT takers, English Language Learners and procrastinators worldwide, the spokeswoman on NPR said they’d already gathered enough to feed 350,000 people. And the game’s only been around for a few weeks. Not too shabby.

The game has 50 levels of increasing difficulty, but they say people hardly ever get past level 48. We’ll see about that.

Lord knows how they got their hands on the book, given the Gulf war-like embargo on it. Apparently, several U.S. booksellers and online stores haven’t had the strength to abide by the official release date and started selling early. Quite foolish of them, for a) the midnight release is a HP tradition which most fans really enjoy. There’s nothing quite like the anticipation. And b) everyone knows that J.K. Rowling, UK publisher Bloomsbury and US publisher Scholastic couldn’t be more deadly serious about the embargo and will sue these bookstores to bankruptcy.

Unlike many, many HP fans, I’m not mad at the Times, the Baltimore Sun, or anyone else who might have posted reviews. J.K. Rowling is understandably quite mad, too. But she should take it out on the retailers who didn’t respect their contract, not the news people.

“I am staggered that some American newspapers have decided to publish purported spoilers in the form of reviews in complete disregard of the wishes of literally millions of readers, particularly children,” she said.

It’s news, they got it, they published it. End of the story. The NYT book editor Rick Lyman put it quite simply and rightly in an interview to the BBC.

“It’s our policy that once a book has been offered up for sale, it’s fair game to be reviewed.

“It’s not our business to help book publishers market their books. We tried very, very hard to give away the absolute bare minimum of the plot.”

Nevertheless, I would have appreciated a little more warning before they spilled the beans so I could leap to my computer and press the space bar. None the matter, I’ll know it all by Saturday night anyway.

Lord knows how they got their hands on the book, given the Gulf war-like embargo on it. Apparently, several U.S. booksellers and online stores haven’t had the strength to abide by the official release date and started selling early. Quite foolish of them, for a) the midnight release is a HP tradition which most fans really enjoy. There’s nothing quite like the anticipation. And b) everyone knows that J.K. Rowling, UK publisher Bloomsbury and US publisher Scholastic couldn’t be more deadly serious about the embargo and will sue these bookstores to bankruptcy.

Unlike many, many HP fans, I’m not mad at the Times, the Baltimore Sun, or anyone else who might have posted reviews. J.K. Rowling is understandably quite mad, too. But she should take it out on the retailers who didn’t respect their contract, not the news people.

“I am staggered that some American newspapers have decided to publish purported spoilers in the form of reviews in complete disregard of the wishes of literally millions of readers, particularly children,” she said.

It’s news, they got it, they published it. End of the story. The NYT book editor Rick Lyman put it quite simply and rightly in an interview to the BBC.

“It’s our policy that once a book has been offered up for sale, it’s fair game to be reviewed.

“It’s not our business to help book publishers market their books. We tried very, very hard to give away the absolute bare minimum of the plot.”

Nevertheless, I would have appreciated a little more warning before they spilled the beans so I could leap to my computer and press the space bar. None the matter, I’ll know it all by Saturday night anyway.

But enough with the commiserating. Here’s a post to put us all in a better mood since Murdoch got its claws into Dow Jones. … Funny, I just naturally used “its” when referring to Murdoch. Lapsus calami.

So speaking of flying and of poor journalistic ethics, I found these when scouring the Internets for design ideas for the new site. You have to appreciate the high standards at the Daily Planet. Here’s misrepresenting yourself to get a story. (Note the great headline writing skills.)

Here’s pulling a Judith Miller and “becoming the news.”

Add to that announcing that you’re going to have a scoop but not publishing it just yet. Fantastic business sense.

The full-page headline always gets people’s attention.

And finally, for those copy editors out there.

(I’d give credit to the site I found these on, but I honestly can’t remember where it was.)

Another pointless post to update you on the goings on at the J junkie. I may have originally overestimated my capacities when I bought the domain and server space. Thank goodness it is our choices that define who we are, far more than our abilities, because my abilities are non-existent. Learning CSS from scratch, with for only coding experience less a baker’s dozen of classes programming math problems in Turbo Pascal, is no easy task. The syntax is fairly logical and transparent, but it’s still a handful. But since it is the unknown we fear, I’ve decided to tackle this strange language. I’ve been learning by reading the code and observing what happens to the page when I change a line or two. So far, I’ve managed to widen columns and move them around the page. Ryan Sholin lent me a CSS book to help me out. That’s the program for the evening.

When I get tired of CSS, I move to Photoshop and other fun little apps to create the graphic look I want for the site. There, too, I couldn’t be more clueless about what I’m doing. (Nevermind that, I know quite a few people who are afraid the computer will strike back if they hit the wrong key. I guess they’d rather not trust anything that can think for itself when they can’t see where it keeps its brain. I, at least, know the power of Apple Z.) Other times, I’ve been quite frankly hiding from my computer, too overwhelmed. But numbing the pain for a while only makes it worse once you finally feel it. Gotta meet the beast.

Despite all the difficulties, I believe I chose correctly between what is right and what is easy. I will soon have a few idle weeks in France to sharpen my skills. I am hoping for a mid-August release, if only because I won’t have much time for designing when I become responsible for getting out a magazine every month. In the meantime, I will attempt to keep updating this (limited) site every other day or so. Now that Ryan has brought me a bunch more readers, I better give them something to read. Or if they leave, I’ll just go have some pudding and wait for them to turn up. They always do in the end.

(HP fans: how many HP quotes can you find hiding in this post? Come on, they’re really obvious. Bonus point if you can tell me who said it and where.)

Those of you who do not understand what I’m talking about have missed the most beautiful show of videography ever made. I’m talking about Planet Earth, of course. While watching the 11 episodes of the show, I was constantly amazed not only by the beauty of nature but also by the amazing talents of the people who captured those images. It’s the kind of project you must feel blessed to work on, no matter what menial work you do, kinda like the guys who spent two years assembling plastic chainmail on the set of the Lord of the Rings.

While watching the whole thing, I was constantly wondering how on earth they got each shot. (The French have an expression for that; it’s called “professional deformation.” Whenever I read a story, I analyze it as a writer rather than just read it for what it says. It gets exhausting.) How did they manage to film a bear and her two cubs just as they were exiting their den for the first time? For that matter, how did they know where to point the camera on the whole freaking Antartica? How did they film close-ups of monkeys jumping from branch to branch on some of the tallest trees in the world? How did they go down into one of the deepest, most secret caves on Earth? How did they manage to get the most terrible and beautiful shot of a shark I have ever seen?

And how on God’s Earth did they manage to film a snow leopard, probably the most seldom seen – let alone filmed – animal on the planet?

This is where “Planet Earth: The Diaries” comes in. (I would tell you where to download it, but I can’t support that practice. Right?) As a journalist and aspiring documentary filmmaker (yes, that’s yet another project), I find the making-of almost more interesting than the series itself. That’s where I learned the Planet Earth team mounted to a helicopter a camera with a zoom that manages to capture facial expressions from 1 kilometre away. For the monkeys, they used a filming balloon invented by a man with a Frencher than French accent. Another guy waited weeks in a stake out for a bird of paradise to do its dance. Two other guys (a lot of men in this endeavor) lived in a cabin in Antartica for a year to film male penguins protecting their eggs through the winter.

In the Gobi desert, the team went Little Miss Sunshine style.

And for the snow leopard, they simply waited three years for her to show her face.

As I have devoured every episode more quickly than I had wished, I now need to put on my “Dear Santa Claus, I’ve been a good journalist this year” letter the DVD, which has an extra 2 1/2-hour documentary on endangered species and environmental issues. Besides, if only for the voice of Sir David Attenborough…

Those were tough, but from a strictly journalistic standpoint, I find my most difficult interviews have been with Evangelical Christians. They are often so hell-bent (pardon the pun) on delivering their message, that it’s hard to get past it in the conversation. The Gospel may be fascinating, but I’m not going to print 15 inches of it in the paper. This is not only true of Evangelical Christians, but in general of anyone that believes unconditionally in the message they’re spreading.

For an illustration, check the story I have in the Sentinel tomorrow (I’ll link to it in time). The two or three quotes I have in there are the only decent ones I got out of two 1/2-hour interviews. If you have tips on how to do it better next time, please share.

The interview was fascinating, though, for at least one reason: ever seen a recently Evangelist biker try to convert an atheist Jewish college student? He tried with me, too, but I kept my cool. Not that I don’t find a lot of good things to the Gospel, but I have always been wary of people who can’t find something bad to say about their religion. If it sounds too good to be true, it is. Same goes for the Soka Gakkai people who came to talk to my Buddhism class last semester and couldn’t wipe their contented smile off their face. Smells fishy.

I have, however, finally found my religion, and I have found fellow believers. The Gospel never quite did it for me, or at least not all of it (don’t tell my grandfather). So far, I’ve found bits and pieces of Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Lakota religion that I agree with, but also bits and pieces I have serious issues with. And that’s only in the religions I’ve seriously studied.

But there is one thing that shapes my world view and that I try my darndest to live by (that’s what religions are, right?). That thing is truth. I’m a bit grandiloquent, aren’t I? Let’s rewind.

Tom Warhover mentioned to me a few months ago an NPR segment where Marianne Pearl explained that her and late husband Daniel Pearl’s religion (beyond their Buddhist and Jewish backgrounds) was truth and a religious-like attachment to their principles as journalists. I can’t find the audio anywhere (help, please), but I’m sure she put into brilliant words exactly when I’m trying to explain here.

The idea is to live one’s life, not just do one’s job, by the principles that guide us as journalists, with truth being No. 1 of course. Obviously, it’s not formulated and there’s no Holy Book (Kovach and Rosenstiel’s maybe?). The journalists we admire the most tend to live by that anyway without thinking much about it. Of course, like Evangelicals, we can’t seem to shut up about it and are absolutely insufferable to everyone else, starting with family. So we rant to other navel-gazing journalists.

The ending of this post was beautifully formulated in my head last night, after I saw A Mighty Heart all by my lonely self and couldn’t stop shaking for the rest of the night. I thought I’d sleep on it before writing, and now it’s gone. So much for that.

My less fascinating ending will thus be about the film. Angelina Jolie is breathtaking. I used not to like her, so the compliment means a lot. (On a side note, her subtle accent sounds more French than mine, including when she speaks French. Slightly unsettling at first.) The documentary-like direction makes you feel like you’re standing in the streets of Karachi. Marianne Pearl, and her on-screen version, is sometimes so perfect it’s irking. But she’s one of those people you really can’t say anything bad about. I recommend the film to everyone, except for my parents whom I want to be able to sleep when I start going on assignments abroad (soon I hope).