Cyrus Farivar

Dear Friends, The powers that be have told me that my piece on the rise of foreign YouTube clones will air today on The World (and of course on the Internet on any of these stations’ streams.) New York – 3 pm Eastern – WNYC – 820 AM – www.wnyc.org Washington, DC – 3 pm Eastern – WAMU – 88.5 FM – www.wamu.org Los Angeles – 12 pm Pacific – KPCC – 89.3 FM – www.kpcc.opg Boston – 4 pm…

While I’m not much of a coffee drinker myself, I was introduced to Peet’s Coffee at a very young age. My grandparents’ home, perched alongside Claremont Canyon, is about a 20 minutes’ walk from the fourth location of Peet’s Coffee, on Domingo at Ashby Ave in Berkeley. When our family would gather around holiday times, we’d make the trek down the hill to Peet’s. The adults would get their lattes, while the kids would get their hot chocolate. Peet’s was…

This LA Times article provides some suggestion as to what I’d wondered about for some time: Beneath the feel-good simplicity of buying your way to carbon neutrality is a growing concern that the idea is more hype than solution. According to Native Energy, money from “An Inconvenient Truth,” along with payments from others trying to neutralize their emissions, went to the developers of a methane collector on a Pennsylvanian farm and three wind turbines in an Alaskan village. As it…

“Had nations better understood the potential of the Internet, I suspect they might well have strangled it in its cradle. Emergent technology is, by its very nature, out of control, and leads to unpredictable outcomes.” — William Gibson Directors Guild of America’s Digital Day Los Angeles, May 17, 2003

Big ups to Tom Randall for scoring this fascinating piece. Well done, sir! Bloomberg: Aug. 31 (Bloomberg) — The United Nations has sent about 10,000 text messages on mobile phones to help inform Iraqi refugees in Syria that an international food distribution program for them begins tomorrow. The UN Refugee Agency and the World Food Program will initially distribute enough rations to feed 33,000 Iraqis in Syria and about 50,000 by the end of the year, the UN said today…

If there’s one thing that I love to imagine, it’s how much more liveable Los Angeles would be if there was a decent transportation system. Turns out, the future of LA’s public transportation might be in Shanghai: Los Angeles Times: In 1990, four years after Los Angeles broke ground on its Red Line subway, Shanghai began to build a subway system too. Los Angeles was one of the richest cities in the world, with an extensive freeway network, top-notch engineers…

Booya. Takes me back to Astro 10 all over again. Come party hardy with me at Chabot. I’ll be there sometime after 1 am.

by John Ashbery (1966) Barely tolerated, living on the margin In our technological society, we were always having to be rescued On the brink of destruction, like heroines in Orlando Furioso Before it was time to start all over again. There would be thunder in the bushes, a rustling of coils, And Angelica, in the Ingres painting, was considering The colorful but small monster near her toe, as though wondering whether forgetting The whole thing might not, in the end,…

Reuters: The U.N. panel of 2,500 scientists said in February that summer sea ice could almost vanish in the Arctic towards the end of this century. It said warming in the past 50 years was “very likely” the result of greenhouse gases caused by fossil fuel use. “There may well be an ice-free Arctic by the middle of the century,” Christopher Rapley, director of the British Antarctic Survey, told the seminar, accusing the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)…

This past weekend I’ve been helping Aaron set up a new blog called “East . . . a windup chronicle of Baseball, Culture, Art, and Politics from the Pacific Rim.” He posted today about Yu Darvish, a new 20-year-old hotshot Japanese pitcher who has an Iranian father and a Japanese mother. He’s the ace for the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters. He’s got his own site, and his own fan site. I think he just might be the first pro baseball…