Sunday, April 20, 2008
Campaigns and Strawberries
I found this in the bottom of my bag the other day from the last round of political campaigns in Alachua county. It is definitely the strangest non sequiter I have ever seen in a political mailer:
I could not find a single reference to strawberries anywhere else in the mailer - mainly statements on the candidate's record. In doesn't help that semantically the phrase reminds me of Darth Vader saying "I find your lack of faith...disturbing."
Now the image of Vader enjoying a bowl of chocolate-covered strawberries...that would sell me on a candidate!
Labels: Graphic Design, Politics
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Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Albright - Saget = Awesome
What a day! In the morning, we got to hear a witty and insightful look at the past few decades of U.S. foreign Policy by Madeliene Albright. In the evening, an abortive attempt to see Bob Saget and see how far down he went to find a lowest common denominator in comedy...which instead ended in observations of friends having just a little too much to drink and saying far, far funnier things.
Labels: Politics, Sheer Awesome
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2 Cents Added:
So, you may be a closet Democrat after all...
By 
, at 6:07 PM
"I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own."
Saturday, July 07, 2007
Support the Radio Equality Act
Time is running out for internet radio.On July 15, the new rates for royalties due from Internet Radio stations will go into effect. Terrestrial radio pays 2 to 5 percent of its gross revenue as royalties; satellite radio pays 3 to 7 percent. But thanks to the rate hike, which is based on a per listener charge, Internet radio stations must pay between 50 and 1,000 percent of its gross revenue. This will drive most smaller stations off the air nearly immediately, as well as larger services such as Live365 and Pandora.
According to John Simson, the director of Sound Exchange (the branch of the RIAA created to collect internet royalties), the new unit of measure is not the CD, but the "listen":
"When you have services that are feature-rich like Pandora or Rhapsody, Yahoo or SomaFM, places where people spend a lot of time listening, that time that cuts into listening to CDs — that time's moved to listens instead of purchasing CDs."
What a self-serving argument! If this was indedd the RIAA's viewpoint, then the royalty rates for terretrial and satellite radio - which have a much higher listernship - should also be increasing. The royalty rate simply works to decrease listener choice by eliminating all competition to top 40 stations. The RIAA is blinded bya potential $1.15 billion windfall in royalty rates - which will never come through, because those stations they wanted to charge will simply cease to exist.
It is true that I do not by as many cds as I did ten years ago (I also don't go to the movies as much, buy as many books, or read any comic books, so it's not just an endemic problem for the music industry). However, nearly every choice I have made to purchase a CD or to buy a track from iTunes has been from a "listen" from internet radio. Cutting off a valuable venue for letting people expad their musical tastes and that encourages to delve deeper into label's catalogs that the surface will end up costing them revenue in the long term.
There are bills in Congress that would overturn this rate hike. The Internet Radio Equality Act would nullify the copyright royalty board decision and set royalty rates at 7.5 percent of gross revenue, which is the same at satellite radio. The house bill has 118 co-sponsors of a needed 216, so get on the phones (or the net) and let your opinion be known.
Labels: Anti-Fun, Art, Got a Permit for Breathing, Politics, Unbridled Hope for the Future, We Who Are About to Rock
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Saturday, June 23, 2007
Bicker, Bicker, Bicker, It's Different Than It Was
Listening to NPR today, I listened to a pundit claim that the immigration bill failed because of the "viral effect" of talk radio and conservative listeners sending form letters to Congress. It was the pundits assertion that talk radio undermines the democratic process by urging listeners to take action.Uh, what?
The pundit went on to explain that a recent survey of talk radio showed that 90% of radio programs were Conservative, while 9% of hosts showed Liberal viewpoints. However, the poll did not review Public Radio as it isn't a commercial venue, which I feel already skewed the results. I have no doubt it still falls more to the right than to the left, but leaving out a significant part of the talk spectrum doesn't give an accurate portrayal of the situation.
Furthermore, the pundit also made the assertion that Neil Boortz was from the far right of the spectrum. Neil is a Libertarian, and far more moderate than he was painted in this story - I don't believe a die-hard conservative would have no problem with gay marriage, refuse to talk about banning abortions, or rail against the Christian majority as much as Neil does.
What struck me is that despite this tendency towards the right on the radio, political views in this country are still drawn about 50/50. This to me says that the radio plays just as much an influential role as any other media, or the view and opinions of the individual. Perhaps the key difference is that liberals read those that influence their opinions, and conservatives listen?
Labels: Art, NPR, Politics, Talk Radio, The Great Divide
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Tuesday, March 13, 2007
When 2 plus 2 equals 300
Today I watched a great episode of Voyager that I'd never seen before. "Living Witness" details how an entire alien culture has developed over 700 years, based on an account of an encounter with Voyager that is made up of distortions and half-truths. It's a good parable of how history is written by the victors and, in the words of Obi-Wan "that you'll find that many of the truths we cling to depend on our point of view".In the real world, though, these nuances don't take 700 years. They can occur in just a few decades.
Case in point: the People's Daily from China reported on an Iranian official's announcement that the new film 300 insults Persian civilization.
According to Javad Shamqadri, President Ahmadinejad's art advisor, the film is
"part of a comprehensive U.S. psychological war aimed at Iranian culture...following the Islamic Revolution in Iran, Hollywood and cultural authorities in the U.S. initiated studies to figure out how to attack Iranian culture...certainly, the recent movie is a product of such studies."
If only Javad had checked the internet for all of five minutes before he spoke, he might have been able to discern this film is based on a graphic novel and was not hatched out of some psychological warfare unit in Tinseltown, but a cash machine ready to take another gamble on a film from the creator of Sin City. While the film does cast aspersions on the Persian army, it's the same kind of demonization that's down to the enemy in all of Hollywood's films. Declaring it as anything more involved is simply hyperbole.
Now for an intelligent rebuttal to the film, listen to Ephraim Lytle, Assistant Professor of Hellenistic History at the University of Toronto.
Labels: Hooray for Hollywood, Politics, Retcon
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