Wednesday, May 30, 2007
BOS bound
Flying from Oakland to Denver to Boston, starting in several minutes (6am). See ya on the First Coast.
Livelier Live Web search
I much prefer the new Technorati home page to the old one, and the way it now combines tag and keyword search. Also, in case you missed it, search.tehcnorati.com is nice, straightforward search, and is much faster. More here.
Crow for McCaw
Not sure the rest of the country wants to keep up with it, but the continuing meltdown of the Santa Barbara News-Press is one boffo soap opera, even if it's a real tragedy.
Denial is the ink with which Wendy McCaw writes her paper's slo-mo obituary, every time it runs one of her surreally one-sided and fact-deprived defenses of choices that have been, one after the other, so odd and self-defeating that they defy explanation.
The latest of these head-shakers ran on Memorial Day. (No link, of course, because the News-Press puts everything beyind a paywall.) Craig Smith, as usual, is On The Case, with long, detailed and entertaining posts here and here. My fave line: Give me one name, other than your boyfriend, who agrees with that statement.
Country just got smaller
This is such sad news.
Laura Ellen, the heart and soul of KPIG and all that came before — and comes after — has died at 57, just two weeks after being diagnosed with lung cancer. She was loved, and she'll be more than missed.
Because Ellen kept great radio alive. Thanks to Laura, we can still listen not only to the peerless KPIG, but to the long-gone and always legendary KFAT, plus the still-current Cowboy Cultural Society. Thanks to Laura, the Americana format is alive and well on what's left of American radio — not to mention what one KPIGGy once described as "mutant cowboy rock & roll". I hope it can all go on without her.
They've been running reminiscences of Ellen on KPIG, which I'm listening to right now in a low-end Oakland hotel, where the station's AM night signal, coming from a couple exits up 880, barely gets in the window. Still, even though I can also get the MP3 stream, I like the low-end authenticity of it. Seems right somehow, today.