Media

On Monday afternoon, around 5 pm Eastern, I’m going to be on “Bud Hedinger Live”, a news and topic oriented talk show on WFLA radio in Orlando to talk about my recent piece in Wired News. Now I just have to make sure I’m near a landline. Hmmm, I wonder if I can use the ISDN line here at school.

LA Times: Porn is suddenly sexy to a cable TV company once considered the industry prude. Adelphia Communications Corp. has quietly become the nation’s only leading cable operator to offer the most explicit category of hard-core porn. Come Friday, triple-X-rated programming will be available on cable for the first time in a major media market: Southern California. “People want it, so we are trying to provide it,” Adelphia spokeswoman Erica Stull said. “The more Xs, the more popular.” WashPost: He…

NPR’s “All Things Considered” had a great show on Friday, in case you missed it. There were two segments that I really loved: The first, about the Internet in Iran (two of my favorite subjects), called “Internet Popularity Soars in Iran”, featured my second cousin, Karim Sadjadpour, who was quoted as an analyst in the piece. The second, called Exploring African Hip-Hop, profiled a West African and East African rap group and how rap, in Africa, is starting to really…

So I was watching the clips that Boing Boing has posted from The Daily Show and I was reminded of a recent idea I had for a new television paradigm: A la carte television. I don’t watch enough TV to justify owning one, let alone paying $40 a month for cable. There just aren’t enough shows that I want to watch on a regular basis. The three things that I do watch, baseball games, Enterprise, and The Daily Show, I…

Or is this the first NYT article that when it appeared online contains an external link — as opposed to stories such as this one, which have internal links about political figures?

So I’m listening to a story about Ousmane Sembène, and his new film coming out this weekend called Moolaadé on NPR and they’re doing two things that really bother me: – First, they keep called him sem-BANE, and not sem-BEN. Argh. – Second, they perpetuate the stereotype of “African” issues — he’s referred to as an “African” director, and talks about the reactions of “African” people, and not once during the interview do they mention that he’s from Senegal. C’mon…

Pickers to Vintners: A Mexican-American Saga (New York Times, October 17 2004) Living la vida vino ÁQue rico! More winemakers of Mexican heritage are making their mark on the wine world (The San Francisco Chronicle, October 7 2004) I feel like the Chronicle did something like this about a year ago, but I can’t find where. Gordon Thomas, this author/journalist living in Ireland, has written an article in El Mundo (Spain) saying that Bin Laden is in China, and that…

Somehow, Sacha Baron Cohen, in the guise of a British would-be gangsta with a penchant for malapropisms and misunderstandings, managed to secure another passel of interviews with people like former EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman (who conceded that, yes, whale feces “have got to be massive”) and archconservative Patrick Buchanan (who said that Saddam Hussein “was using BLTs on the Kurds”). In one episode, Richard Kerr, a former deputy director of the CIA, found himself debating whether terrorists could drive…

For some reason my Airport card decided it doesn’t want to work anymore. I tried pulling it in and out again and it doesn’t seem to fly. Sucks. I guess I’ll have to go to the Apple store in SoHo tomorrow. Hey, Dan Rather, CBS et al., can you say “Whoops!” ? Expert Cited by CBS Says He Didn’t Authenticate Papers [Washington Post, Sept. 14 2004] Oh, and uh, you Bush Administration folks. Can you guys say a bigger “Whoops!”…

Neat/infuriating articles from around the country/world: [Neat] Muslims in Las Vegas, Part I: A Straight Path Through Sin City “What happens here, stays here,” winks the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority in a national advertising campaign. The cityscape is awash in straightforward invitations to adult frolic. Seminude vixens beckon from freeway billboards, taxicab placards and newspaper racks, taking seductive bites out of apples, coiling themselves around serpents, posing seven across, hip to bare hip, buttocks flexed. What’s a good…