Friday, March 12, 2004

Like Stern only legal and funnier

While it's still okay to mix the profane and the profound, it remains a crime that nobody has given RageBoy's EGR Weblog an award for a damn thing. Even though it's funny as shit and perhaps the most artfully done (or overdone) blog in existence. Also, certainly, the smartest and most likely to bite you on the ass. Or worse. With or without reason. Pun intended, for witness his unprovoked and unreasonable assault on Virginia Postrel today. And there's this result of a recently discovered unburned bridge:

Oh dear, it's so sad to see the fate that has befallen one of my former consulting clients. I told them they were scum, I told them they were carrion vultures and venal miscreants. But did they listen? Of course not. And now God has punished them. Good. Saves me another long climb up the bell tower. Must be old age. That assault rifle is getting heavy.

Bonus dude: Brian Millar.

Remembranes

Ran into Michael Bauer in Denver a few days ago. Michael once made me blow food out of my nose by using the word "celeprosy." Not sure I ever gave him full credit on that one. It showed in a couple of UpFront items in Linux Journal a few years back.

House fucks broadcasting

Howard's coming in this morning (we live beyond the fringe, reception-wise). Sounding like Lenny Bruce, he is. Here's his list of "required reading".

Here are mine for this morning: 1) The FCC's "Obscene and Indecent Broadcasts" page; and 2) News that the House voted to raise fines for "indecent" broadcasts to $500,000. The herd (Jeff Jarvis calls them "our American Taliban") voted 391-22 for the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act. (Here's the Senate's variant, still up for a vote.)

Here are the Ayes and Nays. One Republican and 21 Democrats voted against it. Bless 'em.

So when do they come after the Net? Again?

Fortunately, we're just cockroaches here.

More at Free Stern.

Bonus link: First they came for the shock jocks, by Ted Rall. Good read, even though he calls blogs "a genre dominated by right-wingers."

[Later...] Contrarian opinions by Big Rick and Reid Stott.

Both say Howard's martyr-talk is nothing new. Nor is heavy-handed speech regulation by the FCC. Rick says, I continue to be amazed by the assumption that broadcast talent have "freedom of speech". I do? Wow I didn't know that.

I'd like to hear, however, how threats of half-million dollar fines for undefined "indecency" infractions serves the cause of free speech — or anything other than a repressive agenda by a government cowed by noisy Puritans.

If Howard gets fired because he's too expensive for stations to hire, or because people don't listen, or because he can't sell advertising, fine. But if he gets fired because stations are afraid they'll get fined just for running his show, that's a dead canary in the coal mine.

Zero-basing the new music industry

Brian Doherty's The Music Never Stopped is required reading in the current Reason.

Music was a vital part of human culture long before anyone was able to mass reproduce and sell recordings of it. And music will survive any number of upheavals in the systems for selling recordings that developed in the last century.

Treasure Buried

Next month the Kennedy Center in Washington will be showcasing the best in American college level theater as part of its national festival celebrating educational theater excellence.

It is with a measure of pride that I plug the showcase, because one of featured performances is this one:

BURIED
Conceived by Colette Searls, University of Maryland-Baltimore County
An original puppet performance about the casualties of war mixing actors with animated objects and humanoid puppets. Buried takes us into a world where spirits enter objects, long-scattered bones rejoin, and abandoned possessions reach out to the living.

Colette, my firstborn, is brilliant, funny, deep, beautiful, and does amazing work. If you're in town (as I intend to be), catch the show. It's on Monday, April 12 and Tuesday, April 13, 7:30pm, at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater.

Here's the Theater Festival home page.

And here are some images from the show, at the UMBC Arts site, plus a few quotes from the director,