Homeless Man Redeemed by the Power of the Internet

I’ll keep this short because it’s all over the internet at this point. But I have to post about it, because this stuff gets me all choked up.

Not too long ago, a video of this homeless man with a golden, perfect-for-radio voice went viral on the internet:

Before long, Williams was being profiled by dozens of outlets, including the Columbus Dispatch. Here’s a video of Williams chatting with the CBS Early Show:

In a fitting conclusion for such a story, Williams has been offered jobs by the, ESPN, MTV, and Cleveland Cavaliers. NFL Films has also reached out to see if he’d be interested in doing voicevoer work.

The lesson here? Some people are just born with it. Right? Is that the lesson? Whatever. A down-on-his-luck guy won the media lottery, and we are all edified as a result. That’s all that’s important.

[Update: Here’s a [bad] explanation as to why the video is no longer available.]

Top 10 (Groups of) People I’m Glad I Started Following on Twitter in 2010

Even though I’ve tried my best to move all my Twitter content to my blog, I’m still quite active on Twitter and enjoy scanning through my feed for the latest happenings in the worlds of media, politics, journalism, and film. Here are 10 (groups) of people I’m glad I started following on Twitter in 2010 [If I follow you and you’re not on this list, it doesn’t mean your tweets aren’t awesome and that they haven’t changed my life; just that I probably didn’t START following you this year. By the way, you can always follow me on Twitter, if you wish]:

Maria Popova – If there’s one person you follow as a result of reading this list, make it this one. An incredible writer, Maria is also a master curator of interesting, artistic works from all across the internet. Must-follow!

Give Me Something to Read, Longreads, and Instapaper – Because together, these services have changed my life.

DRUNK HULK – I didn’t get on the Drunk Hulk bandwagon until 2010, but I’m certainly glad I did. Every one of this guy’s tweets always manage to give me a smile or a chuckle. My only complaint? Sometimes he sounds less like “DRUNK HULK” and more like “WITTY AND ERUDITE HULK.” False advertising.

Dustin Rowles from Pajiba and Vince Mancini from Filmdrunk – I would argue that no two people in the film blogsphere are smarter or funnier than these two guys. They also are the only two people who seem to take film and entertainment journalism with the requisite grain of salt that it requires. Many laughs have resulted from their writings, Twitter and otherwise.

Scott Mendelson from Huffington Post, Linda Holmes from NPR, Steven Zeitchik from the LATimes – Zeitchik offers a healthy dose of insight from his post at the center of the entertainment industry. Holmes is probably the most fair-minded writer on pop-culture that I’ve ever read. And I’ve really become a huge fan of Scott’s writings this past year, which are always provocative and well-said. Of course, I don’t always agree, but if I did, life would be boring…

Rachel Sklar from Mediaite – Whip smart and very witty, Sklar’s writings for Mediaite (a site for which I hope to one day write) are always a must-read for me.

Jay Rosen – No other Twitter account I’ve ever followed provides a more comprehensive look at the interesting questions going on today in the world of journalism. If I wasn’t already in a Masters program, I would totally apply to be in his program in NY (which is also being taught by the genius Clay Shirky).

Adrian Chen and Foster Kamer – Speaking of journalism, these guys hail from the Gawker media empire, and it shows: both provide insightful commentary on media and journalism, with a humorous, biting twist (Kamer has gone on to work at Esquire, which will undoubtedly yield interesting results).

Matthew Seitz from Salon and Sean M Burns – Matt Zoller Seitz has forgotten more about film than I will ever know. Also, he’s a damn good writer with an appreciation for what it takes to make a good slide show and/or video essay. Meanwhile, Sean Burns offers fantastic one-sentence reviews of films from the person I know whose movie tastes most resemble Jay Sherman from The Critic. But your Twitter account is locked, Sean, preventing others from getting a taste of your film knowledge glory. WTF, mate?

Tasha Robinson, Nathan Rabin, and Keith Phipps – I’ve been blessed to be able to interact with each of these humongously talented individuals on the /Filmcast this year (and hope to have them on again frequently in the future). There’s a reason why AV Club was singled out as the one publication that would bring about the pop-culture apocalypse…

Honorable mentions: Cole Abaius, The Playlist, Hannah, Jim Roberts, Ray Pride, AdFreak

How Do You Reconstruct a 550-Year Old Battle?

At first, I wasn’t too taken by The Economist’s detailing of how the medieval battle of Towton was reconstructed. But by the end of the piece, I was fascinated and impressed by how much work goes into these things. If you’re any sort of a science dork, as I am, trust me, it’s worth a read:

Piecing together what happened on a single day 550 years ago is exceedingly difficult. Even observers would have found it hard to discern a precise order of events in the confusion. Contemporary accounts of the battle may be politically biased or exaggerated. Mr Sutherland says that the idea of medieval soldiers slugging it out for ten hours, as the conventional view of the battle has it, defies credibility; he thinks there was a series of engagements that led to the main battle and that took place over the course of the day….

The battlefield was first swept for ferrous materials such as arrowheads. That search proved frustrating. The trouble was not too little material, but too much—bits of agricultural machinery and other things dating from after the battle. Looking for non-ferrous items—things like badges, belt buckles, buttons, pendants and coins that would have been ripped off during the fighting—proved to be much more fruitful. After identifying clusters of these personal effects, which seemed to mark the main lines of battle, researchers went back to looking for ferrous materials and started finding a concentration of arrowheads.The battlefield was first swept for ferrous materials such as arrowheads. That search proved frustrating. The trouble was not too little material, but too much—bits of agricultural machinery and other things dating from after the battle. Looking for non-ferrous items—things like badges, belt buckles, buttons, pendants and coins that would have been ripped off during the fighting—proved to be much more fruitful. After identifying clusters of these personal effects, which seemed to mark the main lines of battle, researchers went back to looking for ferrous materials and started finding a concentration of arrowheads.

This Makes Me Want To Be an EMT

Chris Jones, on the strange happiness of the emergency medic:

[P]aramedics are a surprisingly sunny bunch. They understand that it’s all so much randomness anyway, a cosmic confluence of vectors. One night, four kids got into a car and raced down the slushy streets until the driver lost control. The car spun like a roulette wheel before it was finally stopped by a streetlight. One kid, unlucky enough to have chosen the seat that ended up with the streetlight in it, suffered massive head injuries. The other three walked away. They knew the out-of-body feeling that follows the cheating of death, the feeling that every day between that day and their last will be a gift that so easily could have gone unopened. Paramedics know that feeling better than anyone, because they walk out of nightmares unscathed again and again. They know what a genuinely bad day really looks like, and they know that day will come for them, too, but today is not that day, and that knowledge alone was reason enough for Suzanne to smile.