Much like Phil Collins, I can feel it coming in the air, particularly through the mouth and down into the throat where it is manifesting itself as a persistent, burning little itch. I’m getting sick.

In matters of personal health I blame everyone until I find the right person to blame. This is of course an overreaction, but the pretend-angst is a sort of self-soothing, self-medicating technique I’ve been working on these last several years. Besides, it is more proactive than saying “Sinuses” or “Allergies.” Which is hopefully all this amounts too.

But I’m just saying now that this week is going to be Coughy, Achy, Watery, Fatiguey and a few more of the dwarfs that were never cool enough to hang out with Snow White. Fire Marshall ordinance or not, she could have spent some time with those other characters. There were parks they could have visited together!

Anyway, class today, where we heard fine presentations on public relations and advertising. We’ll go visit our friends over at Intermark Group on Wednesday. The rest of today was spent making recruiting phone calls and doing various other things which will no doubt yield small results in big matters.

So I’ll just pass the time with various links I’ve been hoarding with some of the lesser dwarves and sinus symptoms these last few days.

One of my students shared this one, and it is awesome. 8 New Punctuation Marks We Desperately Need. These include the sinceroid and sarcastises, which I would use every day.

Incidentally, punctuation or grammar humor is always welcome from a student. Makes us think our passion for this stuff is contagious.

Here’s a piece designed to make every journalist with arithmophobia feel better: Danger! Numbers in the newsroom — tips from Sarah Cohen on taming digits in stories. Find an anchor, she says:

A standard or goal – Ask yourself, “What would good look like?” For example, what would good GDP growth look like?

Historical numbers – Is there a golden period to which current numbers can be compared? Perhaps in the economy that might be the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Portion of whole – For example, at the time of the Million Man March in 1995, a turnout of 1 million black men would have represented 1/12th of all the black men in the country at the time.

Other places – How do other similar towns or companies compare?

A lot more at the link.

Here’s a great presentation on the functional art of Infographics:

Just a wealth of knowledge here; and here are the slides:

From Poynter: How reporters can become better self editors, a topic we talk about a lot. No doubt I’ll make some hay out of this post in a class somewhere soon.

Hiding in public: How the National Archives wants to open up its data to Americans is a story from the Nieman Lab that generates a lot of responses. Interest! Intrigue! Fear! A challenge!

The National Archives is sitting on massive amounts of information — from specs for NASA projects to geological surveys to letters from presidents. But there’s a problem: “These records are held hostage,” said Bill Mayer, executive for research services for the National Archives and Records Administration.

“Hostage” might be a strong word for a organization responsible for 4.5 million cubic feet of physical documents and more than 500 terabytes of data, most which can be accessed online or by walking into one of their facilities around the country. But the challenge, Mayer explains, is making NARA’s vast stockpile more open and more discoverable. “They’re held hostage in a number of centers around the country — they’re held hostage by format,” Mayer said.

Fascinating stuff, but I’m glad that’s someone else’s challenge.

The Iwo Jima photo and the man who helped save it:

Soon after the photo’s publication, a story began to percolate that Rosenthal had staged the famous scene, that he had posed the men just so. The story followed Rosenthal to his death in 2006. It is whispered in various forms to this day.

Hatch can set you straight on this, just as he has been setting people straight for nearly 70 years.

Hatch enlisted in the Marines in 1939 and worked his way into its photographic unit. In late 1943, some 15 months before Iwo Jima, Hatch had waded ashore with the American invaders at Tarawa, carrying a hand-cranked 16mm camera.

[…]

Hatch came in with the first wave at Iwo Jima, a battle that killed nearly 6,000 Marines.

From that day to this one, he insists there was nothing posed about the flag photo. Though the events occurred a lifetime ago, Hatch speaks about them as if they were fresh in his memory. Hatch can swear like, well, a Marine, and he brooks no argument about what happened that day and thereafter.

What a man.

Finally, an interactive piece from Smithsonian: The Civil War, now in living color.

The photographs taken by masters such as Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner have done much for the public’s perception of the Civil War. But all of their work is in black and white. The battlefield of Gettysburg is remembered as a shade of grey and the soldiers as ghostly daguerreotype images. Photography was in its infancy during the time and colorizing photographs was rare and often lacked the detail of modern imagery.

John C. Guntzelman is changing that.

Not quite right, but gripping, spooky stuff. There are four pictures there for you to see.

And that’s all for today, but there will be more for you to see here tomorrow. Do come back.