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Fair and balanced, too!

November 7, 2003 6:43 p.m. -- (Last week's weblog)

Total eclipse of the moon: Saturday night, between 5:15 and 11:22 p.m. (EST) the earth's shadow will obscure the full moon; the eclipse will be total from 8:06 to 8:31.

Viewers in much of North America, all of South America, Europe and Africa and in the western half of Asia will be able to see it, if local weather permits. As of Friday afternoon, the forecast for Rhode Island is clear and cold.

Space.com offers an Observer's Kit for the Nov. 8 Total Lunar Eclipse. In the image at right, from that site, Steve Rismiller of Milford, Ohio photographed the May 15-16 eclipse just as the Moon was about to cover a star. (You'll have to click for a larger version to see the star.)

Several readers have also contacted me about another sort of celestial event happening simultaneously: The Harmonic Concordance (there's an annnotated table of contents), based on an astrological pattern this weekend that resembles a six-pointed star. Another reader sent a link from a different angle.

I stayed up way too late Wednesday night poring over search results, trying to get a handle on what readers were suggesting and, from a news perspective, it looks like an entirely interior event. (There are observances, but not around here.) If you're a rationalist, stick with the eclipse. If you're spiritually adventurous, read on.

I found references to the current bestseller The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown; many comments by astrologers (here's perhaps the simplest) although some aren't impressed by the inclusion of the planetoid Chiron to complete the hexagon; even links to the Mayan calendar. There's a very cool crop-circle photo associated with all this, and an even cooler animated gif of a 3-D version of this two-dimensional Star of David. (If you look at it carefully, focusing and unfocusing on it, you'll see the "pyramids rotate in opposite directions. I had to download it and view it in a photo viewer to keep it moving; your mileage may vary.)

No, I don't know what it all means. But if enough people thinks it's important enough to contact the king or the press, it's a historical event, whether the sky falls or not. So says the Chicken Little theory of History that I learned in grad school.
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Rock the pols: Tell Us the Truth tour kicks off tonight. From Rolling Stone, Steve Earle Speaks Truth,

The Tell Us the Truth Tour launches tonight in Madison, Wisconsin, during, appropriately enough, the National Conference on Media Reform. The tour was hatched by Steve Earle, Billy Bragg and Tom Morello -- and subsequently snowballed to include R.E.M.'s Mike Mills, Jill Sobule, Lester Chambers, Boots Riley and others at select dates during its run -- with the purpose of addressing the Bush administration and the media's coverage of its doings, with the 2004 presidential election just a year away. In addition to spoken word and music, the tour also seeks to register fans to vote and inform them about issues like free trade and the war in Iraq.

"My concern is the way corporate media has affected the news that we receive and the quality of information that we receive," says Earle, who joins the tour on November 15th. "We've got a really heavily slanted playing field right now, and it will continue to tilt dangerously to starboard if this administration stays in power. The problem is that we went to sleep. The tour is to instill in people the sense that they can do something about this." ...

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Relaunched Creem To Revive Irreverent Style: From Billboard,

When Creem relaunches on newsstands next year, the rock magazine hopes to bring back the sarcastic wit and intelligent, observant voice that Creem CEO/publisher Robert Matheu says has been lost in much of today's national consumer music magazines. ...

"We're probably going to get a lot of abuse," laughs Matheu when talking about bringing back the humorously irreverent attitude that Creem was known for in its heyday. "Some publicists and record company people may not like what we have to say about some artists, but those are the people who won't get what Creem is all about."

Creem has undergone several incarnations: The magazine launched in 1969, went out of business in 1988, was revived from 1990 to 1994, and then became a Internet-only publication (creemmagazine.com) in 2001. During the 1970s, the magazine was responsible for nurturing the careers of notable rock writers such as Lester Bangs and Cameron Crowe and photographers like Neal Preston and Ebet Roberts. Crowe's experiences with Bangs and Creem were featured in Crowe's Oscar-winning 2000 movie "Almost Famous."

Here's some of the abuse, from the Toronto Globe and Mail:

Gonzo with the wind: "A new owner's promise to revive Creem magazine is prompting skeptical guffaws from some of its original writers, including ALAN NIESTER, who here recalls the golden age of a publication that lived and breathed rock 'n' roll"

Back in the early seventies, the Detroit-based Creem billed itself as "America's Only Rock 'N' Roll Magazine." And while there were myriad other rock-music publications around, at the time it seemed to us that the only two that mattered were the calculatedly outrageous Creem and the more establishment Rolling Stone.

To the writers at Creem -- a sort of rock 'n' roll Algonquin Round Table consisting of the likes of Dave Marsh, Richard Meltzer, Jaan Uhelszki, Ben Edmonds, Bangs and assorted others -- it seemed that Rolling Stone wrote about the rock-music scene, while Creem was out there living it. Creem, where I was an occasional stringer, was rock 'n' roll in print, as much as the bands it championed (the MC5, the Psychedelic Stooges) were rock 'n' roll on vinyl.

Creem was born during the heady days of the counterculture movement, and lasted until the late 1980s. (A strange and short-lived glossy revival in the early nineties is better left forgotten.) But it was the period from its birth in 1969 until the departure of cornerstones Marsh and Bangs in the mid-seventies that is considered the magazine's golden age, an era characterized by some of the most outrageous, incendiary, earnest, honest, and downright funny commentary of the postwar era.

... An entrepreneur by the name of Bob Matheu, who as a teenager had some of his photographs published in Creem, has scooped up the rights to the name, logo and back catalogue, produced a mock issue, and is actively seeking financial backing. He hopes to have a new magazine off the ground within the next year.

It's a promised revival that has come under criticism from a number of principles from the magazine's early days. Marsh, who came aboard as editor in 1969, argues that "while the resurrection of Creem is not a bad idea, having it done by a guy who thinks that the magazine basically exists as a slick marketing formula for T-shirts and beer cans is a very bad idea indeed."

Related: From Pop Matters, Burying Lester Bangs
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Art for Housewives: via Plep.

An introduction to weblogs: Irish Blogger Diego Doval of d2r whips up a good primer.

November 6, 2003 7:14 p.m.

Rhode Island comes in two sizes, writes Andy Bowers in Slate (you may also listen to it from NPR), but he doesn't really explain "why the state is the nation's yardstick" as the headline promises. Especially since one of the comparisons involves the size of a $12.50 pork chop.

Rhode Island comprises 1,545 square miles. However, if you exclude the area of Narragansett Bay, the land mass of Rhode Island is 1,045 square miles. And those two measurements are handy for journalists, because something can be either 1,000 or 1,500 square miles, and still be about the size of Rhode Island.

I didn't know this:

Rhode Island is about the size of pieces of earth that slide off Hawaiian volcanoes every 300,000 years or so, causing massive tidal waves from California to Australia.

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Tech users want more control, fewer ads: J.D. Lasica points to an AdWeek story at Yahoo News. Here's the most important part to me, as a sometime shopper:

...consumers would be more receptive to ads if they could choose what types of messages to view (44 percent) or if the ads included a price discount (38 percent).

Of course. Show me the sales. And when I'm looking for a car or a couch or a coat, I'd like to see all those ads. But I don't want to see ads for what I bought last month.

There's a lot of talk about "push" technology -- I want to pull what I want.

But, in the real world, sites are happy to sell ads to whomever will buy them, and there's unlikely to be a neat match between my desires and a site's ad offerings at any given time.

Other key quotes:

"As people choose devices for the purpose of gaining more control over content, it's going to be harder ... for advertisers to reach consumers on a mass level," said Doug Adams, director of marketing at Stamford, Conn.-based research firm InsightExpress. (Think pop-up blocking.)

Respondents were most resistant to ads on products used to improve productivity, such as PDAs and cell phones. Fifty-one percent said they find commercial messages on PDAs "offensive." More than two out of five (44 percent) felt the same about ads on Internet-enabled cell phones. But 41 percent of MP3 owners also would find ads "offensive." By contrast, 31 percent of respondents were offended by ads on PVRs, 27 percent by ads on satellite radio and 14 percent by ads on digital TV....

...The problem with such initiatives (an ad that "was produced ... like a short movie") is that they treat the Internet as a "distribution channel" for commercials but do not engage people online in a meaningful way, said Wenda Harris Millard, chief of media sales at Yahoo!. "Consumers want to be able to act when they view an ad on the Internet," she said.

Related: What Shopping Guides Don't Advertise. Useful and timely information for Net shoppers by Leslie Walker at the Washington Post:

Some Internet shopping guides may not be the unbiased brokers they seem at first blush. Rather, they appear more interested in cozying up to advertisers.

That's the conclusion I drew after testing the Web's top shopping guides, several of which underwent dramatic makeovers in recent months. In addition to running searches on each guide, I interviewed the people who run them. While all seem to be struggling to balance the needs of consumers and merchants, few appear to be as frank with consumers as they could be.

You wouldn't guess from visiting Shopping.com and BizRate.com, for example, that both run auctions in the background in which merchants can boost their placement in certain search results by paying the sites more money. The two are the Web's most heavily trafficked shopping guides after Yahoo Shopping, and they market themselves as places shoppers can go to check out prices, read merchant ratings and explore product descriptions for just about anything.

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Rate the candidates' video spots:

Rock the Vote challenged every candidate to produce a 30 second video that would appeal to young people and encourage them to vote. Candidates never do that kind of thing targeted at young people, so this was completely new.

Well, the candidates did it. Now, you get to judge which one did it best. We want you to vote for your favorite video.

From November 5, 2003, until December 8, 2003, Rock the Vote is sponsoring a contest so that the people can decide which candidate video really rocked the vote.

So check them out. Cast your vote (and you can only vote once). We’ll announce the winner on December 9!

Related: Transcript (WaPo) of Tuesday's Democratic presidential debate in Boston, hosted by the Rock the Vote and CNN.
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Audio from a bad night: Projo.com has published (reg.req.) a sample of calls and radio communications among rescue workers, the press and the public on Feb. 20-21, the night of The Station fire in West Warwick. They are drawn from 277 such calls released today by the state Attorney General's Office.

Here's one (in Real Audio format): West Warwick Police Capt. Stephen Boulton fields a call from a Conn. TV station
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Patriarchy.
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November 5, 2003

Casting Call: Liberal Radio Needs an Ann Coulter: Shelley Powers rises to the challenge posed yesterday by Outrage Radio's host, James Linkin. (Our ongoing interview on this attempt to make liberal Web radio has obviously widened to include other blogs and bloggers.)

Shelley humorously declines his invitation (go read that, please -- it's a hoot) to be considered for this way open position, but generously widens the offer:

...However, I don't want to let this wonderful opportunity slide by without sharing it with my weblogging sisters. I think what we need here is a "Why I should be the Ann Coulter of Liberal Radio" contest. To enter all you need to do is write a weblog post (or email if you're not a weblogger), telling the Outrage Radio folks why you think you would be an excellent Ann Coulter of Liberal Radio.

If you have a photo then by all means post it. If it's of you in a short, leather skirt, extra points. We should also insist on an audio recording of your voice, just to make sure that you don't sound like a screech owl. However, if you're blonde enough, and look good in that skirt, I imagine that your voice could be dubbed in.

Since this is a political talk show program, you should demonstrate that you know something about current affairs, and by this I don't mean what's happening with J-Lo. Though I hate to discrimate on the basis of war versus non-war bloggers, since this is liberal radio, you ladies with the "I (heart) Bush" on your pages need not apply.

If you think you've got what it takes, don't be shy.

Jay Rosen of NYU Journalism and PressThink asked, "What do we know about their clearance? Who's carrying them?" The show's host, James Linkin, responds today:

Linkin: I sort of answered this question to somebody else. Let me put it this way. If the Democrats decided to bankroll us, we’d take their money at this point. Their money is just as tender as anybody else’s, and we could use it. They haven’t offered. We haven’t asked. If we had their backing, we’d tell you.

If Bill Clinton himself offered us cash, we’d take it. He hasn’t offered. We’re very unlikely to ask. But if he did, that wouldn’t change our opinion that his name belongs on the list of the 5 people most responsible for our current predicament, and maybe at the top of that list.

There are no candidates, party organizations, or lobby groups among our backers. At least not yet. And we haven’t asked any. Well, let me equivocate ever so slightly. The owners of Trendset Studios, the sound studio that has provided some of our backing, feel pretty strongly about the FCC and the consolidation of radio and we agree. Does that count as a lobby?

If you would like to help “carry us,” please drop us a line. Seriously.

Finally, Lou Josephs responds to Linkin's replies yesterday to Lou's reasons it won't work.
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SharkCam: The Discovery Channel has put a webcam on the New England Aquarium's eels, sharks, barracuda, stingrays and angelfish. The 200,000-gallon saltwater tank is viewable from steerable cameras controlled by viewers.

The fish only work 9 to 5 weekdays, though; 9 to 6 on weekends.
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The Elegant Universe: PBS's Nova mini-series about the nature of reality -- all three hours of it -- is online in digestible chunks.

What's it about? I was intrigued by this item from BoingBoing's Xeni Jardin, but when I went to the Scientific American story, I just don't have the physics chops for it. Nova makes it go down easy:

Hack the universe
BoingBoing patron saint Warren Ellis spake thusly, and lo; it was good:

Read this Scientific American piece. Short version; the universe is actually a two-dimensional plane packed with information, and the three-dimensions universe we perceive is nothing but an expression of that information. Matter and energy and life are, in fact, holograms. It leaves something very very interesting open for the future. If the universe is a vast two-dimensional plane of information -- then it can be hacked.

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Microsoft's blogging tool: The Blog Herald reports,

Wallop, the Microsoft Blogging tool, is already in beta testing from the site mywallop.com and is slated for release 2nd Qtr 2004 as a stand alone tool, and not part of the next version of Windows as previously believed.

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Las Vegas sign graveyard: Good times gone by, a story told in 32 signs.

Flash Tiles: A game.

Stories we're tracking:

E-voting: Diebold case to be heard Nov. 17

San Jose, CA - A federal district court judge today (Tuesday) set an accelerated schedule for consideration of a request to halt legal harassment of Internet publishers. The suit, brought by a nonprofit Internet Service Provider (ISP) and two Swarthmore college students seeks to bar electronic voting machine manufacturer Diebold Systems, Inc., from issuing further legal threats against ISPs. ...

Judge Jeremy Fogel of the federal district court in San Jose will hear the OPG v. Diebold case (Case Number C-03-04913 JF) on November 17, 2003.

Calif. Halts E-Vote Certification: Wired reports,

SACRAMENTO, California -- Uncertified software may have been installed on electronic voting machines used in one California county, according to the secretary of state's office.

Marc Carrel, assistant secretary of state for policy and planning, told attendees Thursday at a panel on voting systems that California was halting the certification process for new voting machines manufactured by Diebold Election Systems.

The reason, Carrel said, was that his office had recently received "disconcerting information" that Diebold may have installed uncertified software on its touch-screen machines used in one county.

He did not say which county was involved. However, secretary of state spokesman Douglas Stone later told Wired News that the county in question is Alameda.

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November 4, 2003 7:58 p.m.

The Meatrix: Organic turkey for Thanksgiving? The Meatrix is a funny little two-minute Flash movie starring Leo the pig, who thinks he lives on a family farm until Moopheus the cow shows up and tells him,

The Meatrix is all around you, Leo. It is the story we tell ourselves about where our meat and animal products come from. this family farm is a fantasy, Leo. Take the blue pill and stay here in the fantasy. Take the red pill and I'll show you the truth...

Next thing he knows, Leo's looking at a dark, crowded factory farm for pigs. At the end of the movie you can click on a link that leads to an online guide to meat and eggs raised on farms that practice sustainable agriculture.

At this Eat Well Guide, you can search by zip code or state for farms that raise what you're looking for, local grocers that sell it and online sources.

Who's behind all this: The Meatrix was created by Free Range Graphics, a design firm for non-profit advocacy groups, as part of its annual Free Range Graphics Flash Grant, which was awarded this year to the GRACE (Global Resource Action Center for the Environment) Factory Farm Project. The Eat Well Guide is a joint project of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy and GRACE.
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Bloggers question Outrage Radio's host: After last week's email interview with James Linkin and Michael Tulipan, the pair behind liberal Outrage Radio -- set to debut Nov. 13 -- I told them the follow-up questions would come from readers. I sent some reactions from bloggers to to Linkin for follow-up (and a couple of my own), and here's what happened:

Sheila: Are you really two guys who just decided to talk back, or are there connections that will emerge later (e.g. you're friends of a Clinton)? Journalism always wants to know who or what is behind the curtain.

Linkin: We are no friends of the Clintons. And we don’t know them either. We have no prominent connections to the political apparatus of any party. I went to a couple of Kerry meetups, so Paul Rivera, his NY state campaign manager, might remember my name. And Mike Dukakis was my state rep when I was growing up, but I strongly doubt he remembers me. That’s about it.

Sheila: Who's your first guest going to be?

Linkin: Maybe you. But more likely Stephen Kinzer. We’ll let you know.

I sent longtime radio guy Lou Josephs' reaction to Linkin. He answered each line:

Josephs: Lots of chatter about this new liberal internet talk station. This isn't going to work.

Linkin: We appreciate the chatter, if not the sentiment.

Josephs: There are no internet radio stars, can you name one?

Linkin: I’ll take your word for it that there are no Internet radio stars. If you are old enough to remember the beginnings of television, then you remember when there were no TV stars. Are you old enough to remember when there were no just plain old radio stars?

Josephs: While there are lots of things to talk about, no way will they be smart enough to figure it out

Linkin: I’m encouraged that you think there are lots of things to talk about. I agree. Just because you’re not smart enough to figure it out doesn’t mean no one can.

Josephs: Check whose involved in this venture, people who don't know or have ever done talk radio. It takes a certain amount of skill to do this and these folks don't have it

Linkin: It does take a certain amount of skill, but no one has a monopoly on those skills. Certainly not the right-wing pinheads who are doing it now. As for how much skill we have, we’ll get to see about that.

Josephs: The key to a good talk station is the screeners and producers those are the people that can make or break the host. I don't see anything about that in any of the bs put out so far from these folks.

Linkin: We have two producers with 25 years experience between them on staff. The studio adds another 50 or so years of radio experience.

Josephs: The last attempt at internet talk radio was well funded and it crashed and burned, it even had a few 'name' talk hosts.

Linkin: Being well funded is a good thing, but irrelevant if the money goes out the door too fast. As for “name” talent, there’s an old saying in Hollywood: stars don’t make movies, movies make stars.

Sheila: I have assumed that your web radio start is a simply a way to make a relatively cheap prototype. Are you hoping to attract investors that can take you into broadcasting?

Linkin: I think it’s safe for you to assume that we will consider any outlet, such as syndication, satellite, broadcast, etc. So yes, we’re not averse to making this work.

From Shelley Powers (Burningbird), a programmer, photographer and author blogging as : (Here's the item link.)

Sheila Lennon introduces a new radio broadcast called Outrage Radio. What happens if you put Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, and Ann Coulter* through the Looking Glass? You get a new sport called Extreme Liberal Radio.

Sheila interviews the Outrage gang, and the responses show that amidst the passion, there might also be vestiges of humor. My favorite response back to one of her questions: "If you want a nanny, move to Sweden." I hope this humor, and its associated perspective, continue because if I can't handle conservatives who take themselves too seriously, liberals with flecks of foam at the corners of their mouth and a demonic gleam in their eyes also turn me off.

I hesitate when I see something like 'liberal radio', because I don't think we can use labels like 'liberal', 'conservative', or even 'libertarian', the same again. I know so-called warbloggers who are extremely liberal when it comes to social issues and internal politics. I know fiscal conservatives who are pro-choice. And there's even a few libertarians who believe that maybe machine guns aren't really necessary for deer hunting.

Today is a rich and complex time. It's not the same black and white hat, good guy/bad buy world, and cookie cutter labels just don't work. I hope that Outrage Radio goes beyond just being 'liberal radio', or why listen? We'll already know what they'll be saying.

*Speaking of Ann Coulter, where's the Ann Coulter of Liberal Radio, guys?

Linkin: In no particular order: We are all prisoners of language. The turmoil of political discourse over the last decade or so has contaminated the traditional labels on the political spectrum, and frankly, I think that’s mostly a good thing. I think we should distinguish between Southern Republicans and South Park Republicans, for example. But in the end, we have to use a word or phrase to contrast us with the right-wing pinheads that have dominated talk radio up to now. Even the word “outrage” doesn’t say enough.

The grim side of the language turmoil is that right-wingers co-opt the language for the purpose of deception: Clear Skies Initiative, No Child Left Behind, partial birth abortion, tax relief, you name it. Our objective is to shed a little light on these subjects, with the appropriate tone.

As for the Ann Coulter of Liberal Radio, perhaps that could be you. Send us a photo.

Sheila: About that last line, it's true that in our first exchange I inquired about women guests and your suggestions were all men (heavy on Slate men, too!) Comments?

Linkin: …and not just men; white men. The list that I gave you earlier is a list of people who write effectively on issues to which I have rightly or wrongly assigned the greatest priority, the war, the economy, politics. Their gender and ethnicity reflect a range of prejudices over which I have not a lot of control, the organizations that employ them and the resulting access and prominence, their education, etc., etc. This perspective is just a starting point. I appreciate hearing from anyone with a valuable opinion to contribute. And if that person is not male or white, we will appreciate hearing from them at least as much. I guess that’s our affirmative action policy.

More questions, readers? Send them here.
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State environmental chief resigns after over-the-top email surfaces: Jan Reitsma, director of the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management, resigned today after sending a profanity-laced e-mail to the vice chairman of the state Marine Fisheries Council. The angry exchange came over a proposed regulation for catching groundfish.

A full story and the entire exchange -- three emails in all -- are available at projo.com, and an AP story is moving. But for those who might only care to see what kind of email might cause a high-ranking official to walk the plank, here it is (There were no asterisks in the original; this is a nod to the family newspaper site I blog on.):

From: Jan Reitsma [mailto:jreitsma@Oceantide.dem.state.ri.us]
Sent: Friday, October 31, 2003 2:22 PM
To: ralph boragine; Chris Brown (E-mail)
Cc: David Borden; Mark Gibson; Najih Lazar; jmcnamee@dem.state.ri.us
Subject: RE: Fluke aggregate landing

This response makes me puke. Get off the ****ing Council if you cannot control yourself. I will not stand for your outrageous and insulting behavior any longer. You apologize immediately, and copy your whole cc-list, or I'll cc a few people on the entire history of your immature histrionics.

You offered to come up with a proposal. You obviously have not done sh*t about that. And now you think you can blame us, instead. No thanks. Jason did what he should do and what I'm sure the other Council members expected him to do, which is to ask whether you've made any progress or expect to do so any time soon. He does not deserve to get this insulting nonsense from you or anybody else. Nor does the Department deserve to be on the receiving end of your idiotic conspiracy theories and otherwise irrational thinking. The Department works with the MFC exactly like it is supposed to. We try to help with the AP process, not control it. We try to assist the Council. We may **** up from time to time, or simply show the effects of being underfunded and understaffed, but we are not in any way engaged in underhanded attempts to undermine the Council or any other part of what should be a co-management program. We listen to "industry" the best we can. We are sometimes successful in getting the mudslinging to stop but then have people like you who just cannot help themselves and think they can start it all over again. That's your fault, not ours. I cannot stop you from doing the infantile thing with everybody you disagree with but don't you dare put us in the middle of that embarrassing spectacle. If anyone has lost all grasp of professionalism, it's you and you ought to get professional help as far as I can tell. If anyone is destroying the MFC it is you, and don't let your multiple personalities tell you otherwise.

We do not agree with Al Conti. But boy, you don't know how many people might just want to side with him because of your stupidity. We have clearly said that we want to implement the aggregate landing program, but if your insane agitation carries the day and you succeed to drag what I thought were more sane people down with you, why should we even try? Would we just be banging our head against the bricks of shit you keep piling up? Spending precious time and resources that we could apply with more success elsewhere? Is that what your cc's want? Is that what the organizations you pretend to speak for want? I'll be asking them, you can count on that.

Another bad dream you had was this idea of the "whole process being moved to the Governor's office." Do you think the Governor should have interest? If so, would your lordship agree that the Governor should be able to ask questions from the people that work for him? Could your lordship stop barfing long enough to smell the coffee and realize that it's a good thing that he asks questions, and that we try to answer him? Could you interrupt your egocentric babble long enough to recognize that we have consistently advocated with the Governor and his policy staff for the very things that you seem to want us to support (although you'd never know it from the weird ways you go about it)? Can you grow up enough to acknowledge that you and we don't always win, but that that's no reason to turn against your friends? Or are you really the self-destructive, ****ed up, whining baby you present to us?

Sober up, apologize and we can maybe talk after a couple of days. If your ego is too big or tiny for that, all bets are off. I don't mind fighting this one.

Jan H. Reitsma
Director, RIDEM
www.state.ri.us/dem

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Canadian radio: From Eric Lilius, a reader from Ontario, come recommendations:

If you want to get at the best of radio journalism in Canada it is here: The Current. If you poke around you can find archives.

Anything done by Bob Carty is worth listening to. His report -- Too Much Light -- on the "Ecology of the Night" conference is his latest. Here's the actual audio piece. We should all have red night lights.

There is also Sunday Edition

Molly Ivins used to be a frequent contributor to a current affairs show called As It Happens

The host of Sunday Edition recently did an (audio) interview with her

I also recommend Ideas, which "explores social issues, culture and the arts, geopolitics, history, biography, science and technology, and the humanities."

The nice thing about the CBC is that you can get the content over 5 time zones. Newfoundland is a half-hour earlier than Atlantic time. If I miss something out of Toronto, I can pick it up later on the Yellowknife, or Vancouver site. There is a very useful interactive map.

There is also Radio 2 which seems to be only available from Toronto. The content is largely culture and the arts. It is available in Windows Media, Quicktime and RealPlayer.
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Half-life with a half-smile: Tom Mangan (Busy Being Born) writes,

Last week I read an interview with Camille Paglia in which she said most of the writing on blogs pretty much sucks. The link is at salon.com and a pain to click through, so be warned. I felt sort of stung by that so I've made a little promise to myself to write better. One of the ways to do that is to write about the deeply personal stuff that you'd normally never divulge in public. That's what I had in mind with the post below, about one of my defining characteristics, which I have never written about in any of my Web sites, dating back seven years. ...

And he does. Here how it starts,

I was born with half a smile and it's been that way ever since.

It's anybody's guess why it happened, but somehow I ended up with a seventh cranial nerve on the right side of my face that didn't work. Well, the sensory part works -- you could smack me over there and it'd sting just fine. But the muscles won't budge, so there's a permanent frown on that side, and eyelids that don't close all the way. ...

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Old words: Clips from a 1963 interview with William S. Burroughs at the BBC.
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November 3, 2003 7:28 p.m.

Cyberceleb Barlow beckons early adopters back to politics: Surreality TV: From Burning Man To Running Man is John Perry Barlow -- onetime Grateful Dead lyricist, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and more -- talking about apathy, Burning Man, Schwarzenegger and even quotes George H. W. Bush. Here's some:

...But lately, as I've said, it's been plenty weird enough for me and Burning Man weirded me further out. While this year's burn was as fecund as ever in random acts of genius, terrifying beauties, and carelessly open hearts, I found myself shaking my head almost as often as I would at a White House prayer breakfast.

I felt as if I were watching the best minds of the next several generations blowing themselves into starry oblivions as deep as the desert night, pushing the envelope of strangeness into near-psychosis at a time when the world beyond The Playa seems to have gone quite mad enough already.

If someone like Karl Rove had wanted to neutralize the most creative, intelligent, and passionate members of his opposition, he'd have a hard time coming up with a better tool than Burning Man. Exile them to the wilderness, give them a culture in which alpha status requires months of focus and resource-consumptive preparation, provide them with metric tons of psychotropic confusicants, and then . . . ignore them. It's a pretty safe bet that they won't be out registering voters, or doing anything that might actually threaten electoral change, when they have an art car to build. ...

... It's time for the experientialists - those of us who don't get our reality from television, who actually read about what what we can't experience directly - to emerge from our psychic sanctuaries and become seriously involved in the ugly business of politics. If we don't, it's only a matter of time before the dominant culture quits ignoring us and starts actively locking us up in even greater numbers.

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Resort of last resort: A reporter writing a story about property auctions picked up 10 acres in the California desert for $350. He didn't know that his fate -- and inability to say, "Yessir" -- would exile him to that spot:

Smoke Tree Valley, Imperial County -- Phil Garlington is what Huckleberry Finn would have been like had he lived to be 60: a free spirit and former promising young man whose hair has mostly fallen out, someone who loves life but hates work, who lives in the middle of nowhere in a desert so barren the military uses it for bombing practice.

Though he is mostly broke, he lives on 10 acres of his very own land, in a shelter he built himself, a place he calls Rancho Costa Nada. In the lingo of the desert -- where there are also places like Rancho No Gotta and Rancho Elbow Greaso, Costa Nada means "It costs nothing. '' ...

... The son of a college president, in his youth Garlington was simultaneously student body president at San Francisco State and editor of the college paper. Glib, witty, literate, admired by women, Garlington lived a life rich in adventure.

He has been a sailor, a writer of unproduced screenplays, a mosquito killer, a mail carrier, editor of small town newspapers, a reporter on big city dailies. He can fly an airplane and knows his way around cyberspace. He has even written a book, "Rancho Costa Nada,'' chronicling his desert adventure.

What he can't do is hold down a job. "I am not a good employee,'' he says,

"I hate having to walk up the same stairs every day.''

Last year, he was summarily fired as the editor and sole staff writer at the Palo Verde Valley Times, a weekly newspaper in the dead-end town of Blythe...

Great story. Garlington has a website, an essay (Too Busy to Work) about his layoff at Tulevision.com and a book about his digs called Rancho Costa Nada: The Dirt Cheap Desert Homestead. It's available from Loompanic Books, which has an extensive collection of wildly eclectic articles on its site.

Via Romenesko., who includes a link to Garlington's story of how he got fired from his previous newspaper job, My so-called life at Orange County’s biggest daily newspaper.

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The State of Geek: Part 1 -- Temp Job, No Health. Shelley Powers (Burningbird) has written the first of a five-part series we'll be returning to. Here's a taste:

...the dot-com explosion fueled a lot of changes that are going to continue to negatively impact on technology jobs in this country, and the rest of the world, for years to come. This impact is going to be significant enough that if people were to ask geeks like me whether we would recommend that their little Bobby or Susan study computer science in college, we would have to honestly say, "No"; an answer that has serious consequences to the state of geek.

She also includes a link to an interesting story from the Portland Business Journal (Portland techies look for union label) about an attempt to organize tech workers. Here's a quote from that:

"They [techies] think of themselves as highly skilled individuals who are valued for what they are," said Ilya Ratner, a programmer with years of experience working in Portland companies, and a co-founder of ORTech. "They don't understand their place in the food chain," failing to comprehend that despite their skills, executives are looking for every possible way to get "two heads for the price of one," whether through overseas outsourcing, applying for foreign-worker visas, or keeping labor costs low by using contractors, Ratner said.

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Pumpkins as high art: Before we leave this for next year, the best carved pumpkins I've ever seen are at Pumpkin Gutter.

The artist is Scott Cummins, a junior-high school art teacher in Perryton, Tx.

His explanation, on the site: "I enjoy sculpting into the actual rind of the pumpkin to get an unusual effect and allow for more interesting possiblities with the pumpkin. Afterward, lighting the pumpkin is especially striking since the change in thickness of the shell allows light to pass through in different amounts.
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Correction: S&L bailout WON'T cost you $50 a month for a life: In Thursday's interview with Outrage Radio's founders, the new Web radio show's host, James Linkin, tossed out an astonishing figure:

"Reagan’s HUD and the Savings & Loan catastrophe: your taxes are higher by $50/month for the rest of your life because of that bailout."

I asked Linkin for a source on that -- how he derived it.

In order not to perpetuate the error in search engines, I've commented out the inaccurate paragraphs. Here's Linkin's correction:

Doing a little research, I discovered that my dated information from the ‘80’s that I described for you does not carry forward. Because the Resolution Trust Corporation (formed to liquidate the assets of the failed S&Ls) sat on its hands for a while, the S&L assets appreciated in value, and by 1995, they had recovered all but $90 billion of the bailout money. There remain some contingent liabilities, but the total bill is probably closer to $100 billion.

In today’s money, that $161 billion. Your household share is a mere $1,610. At 5%, you can pay that off in three years, a mere two decades after the bailout occurred.

The net cost doesn’t include the lost opportunity cost of the money that churned through the insurance fund, but nevertheless the eighties pronouncement is not correct. A fifty year term would require only a payment of a little over $7. So I am only 14% as outraged about the S&L bailout as I was before.

I had also told Linkin, and Michael Tulipan, president of Outrage Radio, that I would blog their response to my questions and follow up with questions from bloggers and readers. Today I sent them more questions, so I expect we'll be hearing more from them before the show debuts Nov. 13.
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Stories we're tracking: Themes develop over time, stories with new developments. I've decided to gang them together, with their updates:

E-voting: Today, a press release, Electronic Frontier Foundation and Stanford Law Clinic Sue Electronic Voting Company

San Francisco - A nonprofit Internet Service Provider (ISP) and two Swarthmore College students are seeking a court order on Election Day tomorrow to stop electronic voting machine manufacturer Diebold Systems, Inc., from issuing specious legal threats. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Center for Internet and Society Cyberlaw Clinic at Stanford Law School are providing legal representation in this important case to prevent abusive copyright claims from silencing public debate about voting, the very foundation of our democratic process.

Diebold has delivered dozens of cease-and-desist notices to website publishers and ISPs demanding that they take down corporate documents revealing flaws in the company's electronic voting systems as well as difficulties with certifying the systems for actual elections.

Swarthmore students Nelson Pavlosky and Luke Smith have published an email archive of the Diebold documents, which contain descriptions of these flaws written by the company's own employees.

They expect a ruling tomorrow (Tuesday) on their request that voting-machine manufacturer Diebold stop sending cease-and-desist notices.

This page at Why-War.com is the best source of developments on this story; it also maintains a current list of links to sites hosting the Diebold files and a pdf listing where Diebold machines are used.

-- The New York Times comes at e-voting sideways (File Sharing Pits Copyright Against Free Speech), focusing on the flap that has kept the Diebold files off Swarthmore servers, but framing it as a copyright issue. The most interesting sentence: "But with each takedown, the publicity grows through online discussion and media coverage, and more and more people join the fray, giving Diebold’s efforts a Sorcerer’s Apprentice feel."

-- CNN runs an AP story:, Worries grow over new voting machines' reliability, security. The straightforward story puts out the essentials for mainstream readers:

The concerns focus on:

• Voter confidence: Since most touchscreen machines don't create a separate paper receipt, or ballot, voters can't be sure the machine accurately recorded their choice.

• Recounts: Without a separate receipt, election officials can't conduct a reliable recount but can only return to the computer's tally.

• Election fraud: Some worry the touchscreen machines aren't secure enough and allow hackers to potentially get in and manipulate results.

-- Aussies do it right: E-voting. At Wired,

While critics in the United States grow more concerned each day about the insecurity of electronic voting machines, Australians designed a system two years ago that addressed and eased most of those concerns: They chose to make the software running their system completely open to public scrutiny.

Although a private Australian company designed the system, it was based on secifications set by independent election officials, who posted the code on the Internet for all to see and evaluate. What's more, it was accomplished from concept to product in six months. It went through a trial run in a state election in 2001.

Critics say the development process is a model for how electronic voting machines should be made in the United States.

Called eVACS, or Electronic Voting and Counting System, the system was created by a company called Software Improvements to run on Linux, an open-source operating system available on the Internet.

Music sharing: MIT's LAMP music network shut down over licensing issues
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Subterranean Homepage News
by Sheila Lennon
features & interactive producer of projo.com