Cyrus Farivar

LA Times: Roughly once a month, the NBA cuts 31 checks to NBA teams as revenue from its multibillion-dollar national television contract. There are only 30 NBA franchises, so who gets the extra check? The money goes to brothers Ozzie and Dan Silna, co-owners of the long-forgotten ABA team, the Spirits of St. Louis. Thirty years ago, Ozzie Silna, with attorney Donald Schupak, negotiated a deal that cleared the way for the ABA to merge with the NBA. It ranks…

I discovered a blog devoted to Condolezza Rice’s hair. Really. Tagline: “I keep track of Condoleezza’s hairdo so you don’t have to.” Brilliant. [via MeFi]

“From what little i’ve experienced of euro travel, i want nothing to do with it. no matter how you cut it, that kind of trip is extreme tourism. people show up in a foreign place for a few days, stay with other foreigners, see the sights, carry on the universal practices of drinking to reaffirm their youth, and move on to the next country with a handful of adventure stories but no real life experience. this isn’t to hate on…

LA Weekly: Another day, and what sounds like another arrest on the Arizona border. Naco is a city where “The Border” is no abstraction. It is the painfully real corrugated-steel barrier — rusted in spots, barbed in others — that slices the town neatly in two. One half for the United States, one half for Mexico. In Naco, the border is where illegal immigrants and the Border Patrol come to perform their intricate ballet of catch-and-release. But Helen is no…

GET YOUR OWN ENTRY IN AN ENCYCLOPEDIA. In the media age, everybody was famous for 15 minutes. In the Wikipedia age, everybody can be an expert in five minutes. Special bonus: You can edit your own entry to make yourself seem even smarter. USE THE WORD ZEITGEIST AS OFTEN AS POSSIBLE. Ideally, you want to find words that sound familiar but people don’t really know their definitions: zeitgeist, bildungsroman, doppelgänger – better yet, anything Latin. But avoid paradigm. It’s so…

The bulk of Wikipedia’s content originates not in the stacks but on the Web, which offers up everything from breaking news, spin, and gossip to proof that the moon landings never took place. Glaring errors jostle quiet omissions. Wales, in his public speeches, cites the Google test: “If it isn’t on Google, it doesn’t exist.” This position poses another difficulty: on Wikipedia, the present takes precedent over the past. The (generally good) entry on St. Augustine is shorter than the…

Times of India: HRD contends that spending Rs 450 crore on digital empowerment can be better spent on primary and secondary education. “It is quite obvious that the financial expenditure to be made on the scheme will be out of public funds. It would be impossible to justify an expenditure of this scale on a debatable scheme when public funds continue to be in inadequate supply for well-established needs listed in different policy documents,” the ministry said. It also finds…

So, I’m listed under the Wikipedia category of People from Santa Monica, California. This is a category I share with Tiger Woods. But when I went to read his entry, I discovered that while he’s not actually from Santa Monica, (born in Cypress, CA), he apparently went to my alma mater, and was classmates and golf teammates with Carson Daly. Whoa.

Ethan Zuckerman: BBC reports the death toll from the second intifada at roughly 4000. Iraq Body Count offers an estimate of civilian deaths in Iraq between 39,000 and 43,000 – a study from Johns Hopkins projects a much larger number, 100,000 by October 2004. Marc Herold at UNH projects between 3 and 4,000 civilian deaths in Afghanistan from October 2001 – June 2004. Military casualties include 407 coalition casualties in Afghanistan and 2,564 coalition deaths in Iraq. Using the JHU…

I got my passport back! I had to get extra pages added to my U.S. passport. The website says it can take up to six weeks, but I got mine back in under two. Sweet! Today, I went to the Asian Art Museum and met Ala Ebtekar, a Berkeley-born Iranian hip-hop visual artist. We chatted a bit and he told me to Rose Market in Mountain View to get some real-deal koobideh as well as other staples like bastani (Persian…