Air America Struggles to Stay Afloat
I'm a day one listener to Air America Radio, yearning to hear liberal talk since Rush Limbaugh first slouched towards a microphone in the '80s. I've never understood how there could be no market for it, especially in places where conservative gasbags saturate the air. In Jacksonville, at least three different stations broadcast Limbaugh's show live, so you can travel the length of the area and keep up with the latest world crisis or societal moral collapse caused by the Clintons.Air America's in financial trouble, which is no surprise because the network's been horribly mismanaged. An original founder ripped off a charity, misdirecting $875,000 to the fledgling radio network. The money's been repaid to an escrow account, but the scandal and the charity's shoddy financial accounting practices led to its closure.
You can say a lot about Limbaugh, and I have, but the guy never killed a children's charity.
Liberal talk would survive the closure of Air America, because two of the most successful hosts aren't members of the network: Ed Schultz and Alan Colmes. Colmes, who gets unfairly hammered as a liberal milquetoast, runs a funny late-night show after his Hannity & Colmes gig.
If Air America folds, I hope that it doesn't mean the end of Rachel Maddow as a nationally syndicated radio host. No one ever talks about Maddow -- Al Franken, Randi Rhodes and the unlistenable Jerry Springer get all the press -- but she's the best thing about Air America. She has a skewed sense of humor, an optimistic liberal take and likes to obsess over odd stuff, such as the announcer who introduces the presidential radio address each Saturday. Her program moves to 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Eastern beginning on Monday.
One good thing that might come from the network's closure is the end of Springer's radio career. He's terrible, throwing out soggy liberal platitudes, agreeing with each caller and constantly pimping his own projects. If you think his Dancing with the Stars stunt is dull television, imagine hearing him devote an hour a day to it on the radio.
Five Years On, 2,992 - 19 Lives Remembered
Today's remembrances of 9/11 use an official count of 2,973 people who died at the World Trade Center, Pentagon and in Pennsylvania.Someone at CBS News this morning goofed and used 2,992, a count that includes the 19 hijackers, as this screen grab from Google News shows:
SMU's Loss to UNT Its Worst Ever?
Covering last night's UNT-SMU game, Dallas Morning News columnist Gerry Fraley writes, "The alumni wanted coach Ray Morrison's head after the Mustangs lost the first game in school history -- at TCU in 1915."SMU had no alumni in 1915. That's the year the school opened.
Speaking as a UNT homer, the rest of Fraley's commentary is equally sloppy. The North Texas team that beat SMU as a five-point underdog Saturday is one season removed from four consecutive Sun Belt championships. Though the Belt's deservedly the worst-ranked conference in I-A, SMU is nine years removed from its last winning record. The Mean Green have been a better team than SMU for most of the last decade. It's no shock they're the better team this season.
Besides, if North Texas is lowly enough to hang the "worst loss ever" on SMU, a better choice for Fraley would've been 1990. During that season, SMU came to Fouts Field to play UNT when the school was still in Division I-AA and lost 14-7.
As a North Texas alumnus, that's my favorite game to have witnessed in person. The rivalry was so heated between crosstown schools that players and coaches exchanged a few punches at halftime in an incident that came close to being a full team-on-team riot. The incident would have been in heavy rotation on SportsCenter for days if it happened at a bigger school. Because it didn't, the media missed it entirely.
President Bush is a Gas, Gas, Gas
According to U.S. News and World Report, legislation isn't the only thing that President Bush is interested in passing:He loves to cuss, gets a jolly when a mountain biker wipes out trying to keep up with him, and now we're learning that the first frat boy loves flatulence jokes. A top insider let that slip when explaining why President Bush is paranoid around women, always worried about his behavior. But he's still a funny, earthy guy who, for example, can't get enough of fart jokes. He's also known to cut a few for laughs, especially when greeting new young aides, but forget about getting people to gas about that.
He wasn't the first president to violate the Clean Air Act, according to Capitol Hill Blue:
Harry Truman belched and farted in front of people, much to the consternation of wife Bess. Dwight Eisenhower may have been in the Army but he cussed like a sailor. John F. Kennedy would leer at young women and make comments about their attributes. He was, according to historians, a breast man.
Lyndon Johnson scratched his crotch at Cabinet meetings and in front of female White House staff members. Richard Nixon, as the Oval Office tapes showed, cussed a blue streak.
Jimmy Carter, on the other hand, may have been the last President too tight-assed to do anything untoward while in office ...
My guess is that no president could clear a room like William Howard Taft, who grew in office to 340 pounds.
I hope the press will get to the bottom of this.
Pope Benedict's New Hat
Pope Benedict XVI donned a new hat for his address at St. Peter's Square today:
My mother remembers seeing this hat, which is called a saturno, on pictures of past popes at the Catholic school she attended in her youth.
With the addition of a leopard stripe band, that would be a bitchin' pimp hat.
Aaron Swartz Running for Wikipedia Board
Aaron Swartz is running for a position on the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, an election that began today and ends in three weeks. A contributor to the site since 2003 with around 2,400 edits, Swartz is running in part to help out on the huge engineering requirements of the project:Since January, Wikipedia's traffic has more than doubled and this group is beginning to strain under the load. At the technical level, the software development and server systems are both managed by just one person, Brion Vibber, who appears to have his hands more-than-full just keeping everything running. The entire system has been cobbled together as the site has grown, a messy mix of different kinds of computers and code, and keeping it all running sounds like a daily nightmare. As a result, actual software development goes rather slowly, which cannot help but affect the development of the larger project.
I can't vote in the election because it requires at least 400 edits, but I thought I'd pass along Swartz's announcement because he'd be an excellent choice for the board. I don't recognize any of the other 16 candidates.
Swartz has been a significant contributor to RSS for six years, which is remarkable considering the fact that he's not yet 20. He coauthored the RSS 1.0 specification and the RSS Content, Dublin Core and Syndication namespaces. He was a member of the W3C's RDF Core Working Group and is a founder of Reddit.
Tim O'Reilly and Dave Winer, Peer to Peer
Six years ago, Dave Winer felt like he was wrongfully excluded from an O'Reilly "summit" on the newly emerging field of peer-to-peer programming:David Stutz, Gene Kan, Ray Ozzie and Dan Gillmor were there. I wish I had been. I could learn a lot from each of them. Wouldn't you have wanted to hear what I think about P2P? I'm curious. Are you? If there are going to be more meetings like this, I want to be there. Ask Tim to explain why I'm not invited, and see if you accept the reason.
Peer-to-peer technology was so white hot back then that Michael Arrington is developing a time machine so he can go back and pimp it.
When some people asked O'Reilly about the snub, he explained:
... why didn't I invite Dave? I was looking for people who I thought would work well together in an unstructured way, without grand standing or insulting other participants if they happen to disagree. My experience in working with Dave is that you never know what you're going to get. He can be a great contributor, but he can also decide, for no apparent reason, that someone is somehow on "the other side," at which point he becomes disruptive and abusive.
I know Dave claims he doesn't like personal statements (except the ones he makes, of course), but he suggested that his readers ask, and you've done so. I've given Dave this feedback privately, and each time he's said it's inappropriate to tell him such things, that he believes his behavior is above reproach, and that I'm out of line for giving him any personal feedback.
When someone reserves for himself the right to "flame at will," and claims that his flames are only his quest for truth, in spite of feedback to the contrary from many people, he should expect that those people will not invite him to their meetings or discussions. I completely grant that Dave has the right to remain on the outside, to critique anyone he likes, and to crusade for whatever causes he believes in, but if he wants to be included in events that I organize, he'll have to behave more politely. He may consider that censorship; I consider it etiquette. No one disputes his right to his views -- in fact, we all still read him because his views and ideas are so interesting -- but I think he needs to recognize that his social habits will, from time to time, lead him to be left out of events and discussions to which he might otherwise be invited.
So, did my personal feelings about Dave (or more precisely, my personal experience working together with Dave in the past) influence my decision not to invite him? Absolutely.
Today, Winer believes he's being wrongfully excluded from Friends of O'Reilly (FOO) Camp, an emerging technology conference:
A dam is about to break. There are a lot of people pissed at O'Reilly, every time you do another exclusive event, more people are getting angry. ... what I do want is to avoid a bloody mess ... We're not going to be able to keep a lid on it much longer, and it's better to let it out in a way where people know we're listening and we want to work with them.
I've been rightfully excluded from every technical conference since 1996, so I'm in a poor position to judge whether these peers should form a network. But if they don't, it may break the lid off the bloody dam of inclusiveness.
Perhaps we can draw some hope from an event that happened five years ago: Winer was invited to speak at O'Reilly's next peer-to-peer gathering:
A quick good morning from the O'Reilly P2P conference in San Francisco. ... Many thanks to Tim O'Reilly for putting on such an excellent conference.
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