Cyrus Farivar

LA Times: 4:39 PM PST, November 4, 2008 Gertrude Baines’ 114-year-old fingers wrapped lightly over the ballpoint pen as she bubbled in No. 18 on her ballot Tuesday. Her mouth curled up in a smile. A laugh escaped. The deed was done. A daughter of former slaves, Baines had just voted for a black man to be president of the United States. “What’s his name? I can’t say it,” she said shyly afterward. Those who helped her fill out the…

Props to Slate for calling it first. 200 + West Coast = Obama win. Still, I’m not going to bed (it’s almost 4 am here in France) until I hear the words “President-Elect Obama.”

Written: November 3 2008 As I type this, we’re on the slow train back to Lyon. We opted to take an earlier, but slower train, instead of braving the rain here in Marseille. It’s been raining on and off here for the last couple days, as was the same in Corsica. But overall, we had a great first vacation — after having only worked a couple of weeks! (God bless the French!) And we’re very much looking forward to getting…

Happy voting! We’ll be up late over here in France watching results online, streaming NPR and on French TV. Anyone want to call us, use the SkypeIn number. First polls close at 12 am Wednesday morning France time (that’s 6 pm Eastern) — but we may not have to stay up as late as we’d thought. Either way, I think it’s pretty clear who I voted for.

It’s the All Saint’s Day holiday week this week in French public schools — we get a week and a half off from teaching — and so Becky and I are on a working vacation in Corsica working on this pig and chestnut farm (last post on that page) in Lustina, Corsica (about one hour’s drive south of Bastia). So far we’ve met Jean-Mathieu, the 3rd generation Corsican charcutier (he speaks the language, too), his friendly Colombian buddy Felipe (who’s…

My pal Bonnie Ruberg IMterviewed me for this Forbes.com piece that she did on social networking yesterday. I hope I don’t sound like a total douche. Freelance radio journalist Cyrus Farivar saves valuable time by bringing the power of many social networking tools to bear at once. To help him stay in touch with his readership while working from Lyon, France, Farivar took all of 10 minutes to set up a Twitter account, which blasts a post every time he…

Marco Werman interviewed me on yesterday episode of PRI’s The World to talk about my post over at Machinist about the controversy over LittleBigPlanet and the use of Malian music that quoted the Qur’an. Listen here: Koran lyrics delay Sony videogame release (3:30)

1) Estonia’s minds key, says president, Wales Online, October 16 2008: [Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves] does not believe the collapse of Icelandic banks has doomed the concept of small, “clever” countries. He said: “In terms of small countries, it’s basically how you do things. The financial sector in Estonia represents 4% of GDP. “The financial sector in Iceland represented 25% of GDP.” Boasting of Estonia’s economic progress, he said: “We started out with a GDP of about $800 a…

Hey guys, Sorry I haven’t emailed or blogged much since I’ve been here. We’ve been couchsurfing and can’t move into the aforementioned totally awesome apartment until the 16th, at which point I’ll have regular Internet access and will be able to respond to the backlog of emails that have been piling up in my inbox. But the short version is that yes, we’ve started school. We’re still in the sort of introductory phase — I’m spending a lot of time…