Radio

Art Bell Threatens Lawsuit Over Weblog Comments

Talk radio host Art Bell is threatening to sue me over comments posted by readers on Workbench. At first I thought it was a hoax, but the emails check out. Writing from the Philippines with an email address at KNYE, the radio station he founded while living in Pahrump, Nev., Bell suggested several times he'd pursue a lawsuit in an email exchange that began Wednesday (full transcript): I am the real Art Bell and your column and the responses to it have just been called to my attention. I am ... (read more)

2006/10/23

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 ... (read more)

2006/09/15

All Art Bell, All Romance, All the Time

I'm surprised the mainstream media has no interest in the love life of radio host Art Bell, which has become a lot more interesting than you'd expect of a 60-year-old man. In the last three days, more than 3,000 people have hit Workbench from search engines looking for information on Bell and wife, posting more than 480 comments. I covered the news because people were showing up here Sunday looking for it, thanks to this blog's top placement in Google for the term Art Bell's wife. There's ... (read more)

2006/04/19

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 ... (read more)

2006/04/16

Handling Numeric XML Entities in a Weblog Move

I'm exporting a Radio UserLand weblog to Movable Type for a client, turning Radio's XML archive of weblog entries into a Movable Type import file. I wrote a Java application that employs the XOM XML library to read Radio's weblog data. Some numeric character entities in Radio's XML data threw me for a loop: â (’), À (¿), Ž (é), ‡ (á) and — (ó). They were transformed -- either by XOM or the Xerces XML parser that it uses -- ... (read more)

2006/04/08

InstaPundit on Alan Colmes

Glenn Reynolds, the publisher of the InstaPundit weblog, was a guest on the Alan Colmes Radio Show last night. The interview, which I've attached as a 17-minute podcast, was to promote his new book An Army of Davids, which has the subtitle "How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths." No knock on Reynolds, whose blog I enjoy in spite of our political differences, but the interview made the book sound like technoutopianism. Since the ... (read more)

2006/03/08

Art Bell's Wife Dies Unexpectedly

Ramona Bell, the wife of syndicated radio legend Art Bell, died unexpectedly Thursday at age 47 while vacationing with her husband in Laughlin, Nev., according to an announcement by Coast to Coast AM, the program Bell founded and still occasionally hosts. "At present, the exact cause of Mrs. Bell's death has not been determined," the announcement states. "It apparently took place during her sleep." An asthma sufferer for years, Ramona Bell reportedly experienced an attack before her death. ... (read more)

2006/01/07

Bill Bennett's Reproducible Error

Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post responds to Bill Bennett's on-air musing about blacks and abortion: He should know enough history to understand why black Americans would react strongly when whites start imagining experiments to limit black reproduction. For hundreds of years, this country was obsessed with the supposed menace of black sexuality and fertility. Bennett's remarks have to make you wonder whether that obsession has really vanished or just been deemed off-limits in polite ... (read more)

2005/10/04

Bill Bennett Races to Judgment

The crime rate would go down in the U.S. if blacks were aborted, former Secretary of Education Bill Bennett said during his nationally syndicated radio show yesterday: ... it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could -- if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. The belief that a particular race is ... (read more)

2005/09/29

Barbara Bush's Texas Hospitality

As Presidents Clinton and Bush toured the Astrodome yesterday, an NPR reporter recorded an amazing comment from First Lady Barbara Bush: Almost everyone I've talked to says we're going to move to Houston. ... What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everybody is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this -- this is working very well for them. Indeed. Losing your home, ... (read more)

2005/09/06

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