Art Bell Remarries, Will Leave U.S.

Paranormal radio host Art Bell told listeners on Coast to Coast AM last night that he has remarried, given his pet cats away and will be leaving the country, according to the show's web site:

During the first hour, Art shared the story of how he met, fell in love with, and married a very special Filipino woman, Airyn Ruiz. Art also announced that he will be moving to the Philippines on April 29 to be with Airyn, but will continue doing weekend Coast programs from that location.

Art Bell's wife Ramona died in January at age 47 of circulatory failure resulting from an asthma attack.

Last night, Bell announced his new marriage on the air and shared photos of the wedding to Ruiz, 21, who met him over e-mail after Ramona's death.

Bell broadcasts his late-night talk show and an FM oldies station from his home in Pahrump, Nevada, a desert town 50 miles from Las Vegas near Area 51. He left regular hosting duties behind on Coast to Coast in 2002 and now appears on weekends.

Some fans on an Art Bell online forum took the news personally:

What is even more shocking to me, is that he's leaving EVERYTHING behind ... the desert area, his home, his cats, the list is endless. ... I never would have thought a time would come when Art would go a day without his cats, no matter what. On his first show after Ramona died, he said that at one point, his cats were what kept him from suicide.

Update: I've posted the audio of Bell's announcement of the news on Coast to Coast.

Radio · 2006/04/16 · 1451 COMMENTS · Link

Sports · 2006/04/15 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

Remembering Brian Buck

A comment spam showed up today in a year-old Workbench entry marking the death of Brian Buck, a blogger who told the story of his five-year fight with cancer to its end last April.

The entry about Buck was the last before I created an international incident by popesquatting Benedict XVI. So in a nice bit of serendipity, thousands of people drawn here by international press coverage read about Buck, a remarkable person whose blog stands testament to the power of personal journalism. In a seven-day period, his picture was requested on this server one million times.

Buck was passionate about the inequality of health care in this country:

If you don't have good private health insurance, you are not going to be seen by anyone but the complete bottom of the barrel MDs. And this won't be at a nice facility, it will be at the ------ hospital in town, you know, the one on the 5 o'clock news where people die all the time of simple, treatable diseases like bronchitis.

Politics · Domains · 2006/04/14 · Comment · Link

Web Publishers Take Gamble with Casino Ads

One of the biggest losers is Sporting News, the media company owned by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. In January, the company surrendered $4.2 million in revenue to avoid prosecution for advertising gambling sites between 2000 and 2003 in its magazine, as well as on its website and syndicated radio network.

Tune in Sporting News Radio today and you'll hear the other half of the settlement -- a $3 million, three-year barrage of anti-gambling public service ads.

I've listened to Sporting News Radio since it was One on One Sports in the early '90s. The network began in Las Vegas and had frequent gambling coverage -- hosts Arnie Spanier and Papa Joe Chevalier regularly discussed betting lines with callers -- but the practice seemed to occur less frequently after the network moved to Chicago.

In recent years, the network ran Internet casino and sportsbook ads so frequently I wondered if Congress had legalized the activity.

The announcers on the network's anti-gambling ads have an eat-your-vegetables delivery that's not quite as enthusiastic as the old gambling commercials.

Wired News · Sports · Politics · Podcasts · 2006/04/14 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Denise Lavoie, Associated Press:

Five-year-old Kai Leigh Harriott sat in the front of the courtroom in her wheelchair and looked directly at the man who had just pleaded guilty to firing the shot that paralyzed her.

At first, she broke down, crying harder than she ever had since the night nearly three years ago when Anthony Warren fired three rounds at the house where she was sitting on a porch.

After a sip of water and some consoling from her mother, Kai spoke.

"What you done to me was wrong," she said to the man seated just 10 feet away. "But I still forgive him."

2006/04/14 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

A Florida company has received an $112,500 fine for violating the state's do-not-call list:

A lawsuit filed in 2003 accused Fort Lauderdale-based Sports Authority Florida, a chain of sporting goods stores, of making 77 calls to state residents on the list and playing a pre-recorded message to many of the consumers who answered the calls. Under Florida law, it is a separate offense for a telemarketer to play a pre-recorded message when a consumer answers his or her phone.

I wasn't aware Florida had its own do-not-call list., which looks to be less useful than the national version.

You have to pay $10 to get one number on Florida's list and $5 for each year thereafter. Newspapers, charities and survey companies are exempt.

Florida · 2006/04/13 · Comment · Link

Google Calendar Makes Date with Atom

Only a small minority of people will care about this obscure technology fact, but in the syndication community I think this is tremendously significant. To an engineer, adding RSS support is trivial, so the syndication industry must ask themselves, and the RSS folks especially, why did Google only support Atom?

Google also introduced their own proprietary Atom elements or what I could only call the "Google Calendar Atom Extension."

Public calendars -- such as the upcoming U.S. soccer schedule -- are available in Atom 1.0 and iCal formats and can be imported into another calendar.

The Atom feeds have items with published dates in the future that coincide with the scheduled date of the event, which sometimes triggers a warning in the Feed Validator.

Rss · Google · Atom · 2006/04/13 · 4 COMMENTS · Link

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