Earmuffs! What are we shielding our kids from?

Yes, that's right, this is the shield you usually see covering racy headlines on Cosmo. This week Harps grocery stores of Arkansas, Oklahoma and Missouri were protecting their shoppers' children from ...

(Drumroll, please)

... Elton John's baby.

Somebody should tell them it's 2011 already. I can think about SO MANY things I'd be less comfortable explaining to my son than a baby with two dads:

Thanks to Matt Pasetsky's Cover Awards for originally posting on this and to Charles Apple for re-blogging about it. I share in your general shock of this chain's treatment of this magazine cover.

Media Monday: How to correct a Tweet

The media is having a frenzy over Twitter correction ethics after false tweets reporting Rep. Gabrielle Giffords had died, when in fact she had not. Twitter moves fast and big news can be re-tweeted hundreds of times over quickly.


Regret the Error has a rundown of the false posts and aftermath.

The main concerns:

• Is it ethical to delete a false tweet? 
• How do you properly correct a false tweet?
• How do you minimize the impact of re-tweeting? 

Craig Silverman wrote an excellent article on Columbia Journalism Review on the subject suggesting Twitter come up with a correction function in which you could direct messages anyone who re-tweets an incorrect post.


Damon Kiesow on Poynter suggests a strikeout option. His article end with a video chat on the issue.

There's something happening with technology

I waited in line Saturday afternoon holding my precious laptop bag while the Geek Squad helped the people in front of me. I shifted foot to foot. Davin spun circles on a nearby stool.

When we got the the front, the woman behind the counter fired up my computer and asked me questions about the problem. Windows look-alike pop ups were telling me "Your computer is infected. Do you want to download anti-virus software now?" They weren't my Windows-style windows ... they were suspicious, with sharp corners instead of rounded ones; blue instead of silver header bars told me the thing giving me warning signs was probably the problem itself.

"You can't even add or delete programs in the system controls," the woman observed. I told her I knew that. Was it fixable?

"I had something like this the other day," she said grimly, and then she quoted me an estimate. For that price, I'll probably just buy a new computer I told her. I signed a permission slip to have my files backed up on an external hard drive.

The same day my friend Lisa blogged about her Mac giving the light gray screen of death. And on the same day my favorite ADN columnist published a column about her coffee pot AND her Mac crashing on the same day.

When I think about it, I think it seems silly to be devastated over a simple possession. But it's so much more than that. It's my pictures — memories, my design portfolio, my wedding guest list/plans, my college projects. All of those are now backed up and ready to load onto a new computer. I'm lucky they are salvagable.

But it's also late nights finishing college papers. And later nights watching TV online when I had no cable, worked the late shift and lived alone in a new city. It's my blogging-ground, my connection to people far from Alaska, my way to waste 20 minutes, my yellow pages, my road map, my answer to what movie I've seen that actress in before.

I'm not sure when we all became so dependent upon technology, but my colleague's column and my friend's blog tells me I'm not the only one.

Friends, back up you files tonight. You'll never know when you'll have cause to be happy you did.

While you do so, I'm off to pick up my external hard drive and shop for a new computer.

Cellular silence

An ADN story on today's blizzard reports: "AT&T's cell phone network had problems across Anchorage this morning, and many users still had no cellular coverage by midafternoon, though it was not known if that issue was weather related. An AT&T spokeswoman working at home Wednesday could not be reached because her cell phone did not have service."

the wrong larry

A printing company printed Larry Craig's face on this Idaho Democrat button promoting Obama for president and Larry LaRocco for U.S. Senate. The brite ran on the front page. It made me giggle.