Live blog on Thanksgiving

Here is a video of one of my younger cousins counting to 10 in Spanish after being a little shy at first. 

THANKSGIVING SLIDE SHOW

9:13 p.m: Everyone is gone. My family had a talent show. One of my favorites was one of my little cousins who counted to 10 in English, French, and Spanish. I thought it was really funny so I took a video of it and embeded it from YouTube. Overall, it was a good night and I'm going out with my sister, my uncle's au pair, and the girls who helped my mom cook the dinner at midnight to show them around town. Midnight shopping is a new concept for them so I got the go ahead from my parents. 

7:20 p.m: The family has settled in and we just finished dinner and dessert. Picture No. 4 shows the family at one of four tables we had set up. I had a 392 moment tonight because one of my cousins owns a few bars (one of my other cousins works with him). He told me that he needed to learn how Twitter works to promote his bars since that is the new marketing tool. I got them both set up with Twitter and Twitterberry so that they can now update from their phones. 

4:20 p.m: Strike that first phrase from my last post. Mom is starting to panic with 10 minutes before people arrive. My dad is stepping in by cutting the turkey as you will see in picture No. 3. People will be here shortly so I should probably be downstairs getting ready to greet people.  

2:45 p.m: Mom is relatively calm, but has made even more food than I originally thought. In other words, she could probably feed two third-world countries. I have no complaints though. My job for the past hour was to take my dog for a walk so she doesn't flip out when family comes in (see picture No. 2). Thanksgiving officially starts in T-105 minutes. 

1:02 p.m: iWebPhoto didn't work so I'm now switching my album to flickr. I talked to my grandma a little bit and have been watching my mom make food. I wanted to get an action shot, but she felt that she needed to be more dressed up before blogging on her cooking. 

Here is a link to my photo album. 

10 am Central Standard Time: Good morning everyone! I'm finally up, showered, and about to help my mom get ready for Thanksgiving. This has already been very interesting as my mom is nowhere near as stressed as she has been in the past because she hired help. Her help consists of two attractive girls from Denmark that I've been told are around my age. Aside from feeling a little uncomfortable about that, I'm looking forward to today. The family should be over at around 4:30, but there will be plenty of excitement before then. Check back throughout the day as I will be blogging about the day and will also have a photo album up on iWebPhoto. 

The Deerfield Review

As Scott pointed out, the Deerfield Review isn't exactly Mass Live when it comes to 21st century journalism. They just recently added a comments section but they also have blogs. None of those have to do with Deerfield, though.

The Sun-Times owns the news group that produces the Review which is why the paper and site are very similar. If there is any crime in Deerfield, it's usually for weed or DUI so the front page generally contains a lot of puff pieces like the one on the front page now about different Thanksgiving recipes. 

There are plenty of videos, but they seemed to be copied from the Sun-Times website. There are barely any ads and if there are any, they are Sun-Times related ads. Another thing I don't like is that there is too much news from other areas on the page and it's very plain looking.

I have to click on the Neighborhood Circle website (which I didn't even notice until Scott pointed it out to me) to get more information on Deerfield but even that is skimpy. They only thing from this site that catches my eye is the event page, but they're all pretty boring so I don't really care.

Great criticism of ESPN

Any wanna be sports journalist should read Rick Telander's column about ESPN. It is about how ESPN is allowed to do whatever it wants because it hires so many columnists that nobody can challenge it and the only person who does is the Ombudsman, paid by ESPN. 

It's a great read.

Chicago Tribune Photo Gallery

The Chicago Tribune does something every day that I think is a good way of getting the news across quickly and visually. It's called, "Photos in the news." The Tribune takes the top photos of the day that describe everything that happened around the world and put in a short caption with each of them.

I like this picture the best because it sort of resembles what journalists have to do since the woman is holding a video camera and digital camera. This picture is her getting shots of a tree that will be used in a holliday event.

The Big Picture

This picture comes from Boston.com's "Big Picture" describing the California wild fires. I think using pictures to tell a story is an effective way of describing what happens and I wouldn't be surprised to see this happen more often. It's a good way of doing what you often hear from your English teachers, "show, don't tell."

I think the captions at the bottom do a good job of explaining what happened and for something like this, it could be useful but there aren't any quotes in the stories and I don't think it should replace regular reporting. I still like reading about what happened, but if there isn't much time to go over a news story, this is a good alternative. The pictures themselves are so big and crisp, that it's easy to see every detail in the picture. 

I also like that there are so many pictures to give a full description of what happened. The pictures show how bad the damage was and do a good job of drawing emotion. I chose the picture above because it's clear damage of what the fire is doing to a certain house and I'm sure a lot of people look at that and wonder how they would react if that was their house.

The only thing that I would really change about this is possibly making it so that the reader has to click to get to a new picture because otherwise it can take too long to load and there's too much scrolling. But I think the idea is really cool.

PUPPIES!

One family with a lot of puppies wanted to find a way to know what their puppies were doing at all times when they were away from home. They decided to put a web cam near the litter of puppies to solve that problem. Recently the Today Show published the family's site and now thousands of visitors watch the puppies as well. Here is the link to look at the puppies if you are interested.

Can Obama fix the BCS?

President-Elect Barack Obama may be leaning towards a new kind of sports reform in congress. No I'm not talking about steroids, but the Bowl Championship Series. Obama is dead-set on having an eight-team play-off in college football, going as far as saying, "I'll throw my weight around."

Deadspin does a good job of outlining Obama's plan for college football. It's actually pretty good and would be very fair for the teams who could be the college basketball version of Roger Mason. The BCS isn't too crazy about this idea at first saying there is no chance of such a change happening. They say that they are willing to talk, but we all know that's code for the president of the BCS saying to the president of the United States, "shut-up and let us govern ourselves."

But they like the enthusiasm. Economy? War in Iraq? Who cares, let's fix the BCS.