Why Editors Should Spend More Time Online

So AsianWeek has fired Kenneth Eng. For those of you who haven't heard about this, the SF-based weekly paper for the Asian-American community had a columnist, Eng. His latest column, and the one that caused the stir, was a piece called "Why I Hate Blacks," and reading it (if you can find it; it's no longer on AsianWeek's site) you can see why it had everyone up in arms. AsianWeek professes to be shocked, shocked to find that there was racism going on in their pages.

Um, disingenuous. This wasn't Eng's first and only hate-based column. Hate seems to have been his stock in trade: look at articles like "Why I Hate Asians" and the equally cheery "Proof That Whites Inherently Hate Us." It's not like after several months of writing Heartwarming Stories About Heroic Collies he suddenly broke out in oozing sores on the pages of the paper.

For my money Eng's not a particularly good writer, and his arguments are based on sweeping stereotypes and it-happened-to-me-once-so-it-must-be-universal leaps. He bills himself as "God of the Universe." Does this sort of thing sound familiar to you? 'Cause as a veteran of GEnie and a decade of wandering the internet, I recognize his type immediately. He's a Troll. He's the sort of do-not-engage-the-Energy-Monster attention sink whose real currency is chaos. If he'd shown up on Making Light he'd have been disemvowelled within a nanosecond. Next time I read an article in the print media decrying the lowering of standards that bloggers represent, my first thought is going to be that these print media types should spend a little more time online and learn to tell the Trolls from the writers with legitimate dissenting views.

Oh, and Eng is also a science fiction writer. Which is depressing, but somehow (to one who reads the letter columns of the SFWA Forum) not surprising.

Grace. And its Opposite.

If you're not a noise junkie you were very likely in the kitchen getting more popcorn during the Sound Mixing presentation at the Academy Awards. I'm married to a noise junkie--a former professional noise junkie (former recording engineer with a statuette to prove it--an Emmy) so I get to hear some things that otherwise wouldn't catch my ear. One of the nominees in the Sound Mixing category was a guy named Kevin O'Connell, who has been celebrated in the press as the "Susan Lucci" of the technical awards. This was his eighteenth or nineteeth nomination for an Oscar (tm), and he hasn't won once. He lost this year, too. And during the backstage interviews someone asked the winners about O'Connell. It's a long clip; you need to wait through almost five minutes, until the winners are asked if they have anything they'd like to say to their multiply-nominated colleague. Michael Minkler steps up with the most ungracious speech imaginable about the defeated nominee, suggesting that O'Connell had bid to win by sympathy and that he wasn't much of a mixer, and should find a new line of work. The minute he'd finished up his co-winners, Bob Beemer and Willie Burton, immediately leapt in to say gracious things about O'Connell's work, distancing themselves from Minkler's ungraciousness.

I am informed by the household noise junkie that no one he knows in the Sound biz is particularly surprised by Minkler's behavior, but I'm always surprised by what people will say when there are cameras rolling. And hey, this guy knows about recordings and stuff.