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Habla Usted Clear Channel? So Clear Channel wants to dominate Spanish-language radio? Nothing new. From the first link, the final piece in a Salon series on media consolidation: The deal is big and contentious, and involves politics, music and media -- and, to make matters even more interesting, Clear Channel, the U.S. radio station conglomerate, has a starring role. Clear Channel is HBC's largest shareholder, and the company has been accused by opponents of the deal of maneuvering illegally behind the scenes to exert control over HBC, as well as spreading rumors of drug use about the CEO of HBC's chief competitor.
posted by Ignatius J. Reilly at 10:38 PM PST - 2 comments

There was a spontaneity about the crowd that contrasted with the sullenness and silences of the Saddam years. Most converged in the centre from all directions and joined throngs marching up and down Ali Abbas and Hussein streets, next to the Shia Muslims' two holiest shrines. Others exercised the right to do nothing, to sit on doorsteps watching people pass, to play or to cook on open fires. They chanted that they had come to celebrate their martyrs in spite of all the efforts by Saddam to persecute their religion. In keeping with Shia tradition, some tore their clothes and cut themselves, drawing blood. Others flogged themselves with chains, to bring themselves closer to the pain of the martyrs.
Iraqi Shiites Show Their Fervor in City They Hold Holy.
U.S. Planners Surprised by Strength of Iraqi Shiites.
Why the Mullahs Love a Revolution.
The war was won as planned.
The peace was not planned quite as meticulously.
A Democratic Iraq May Not Be Friendly to U.S. (More Within)
posted by y2karl at 10:27 PM PST - 22 comments

What the **** do you think you're doing? People who try to download tracks off of the new Madonna album from peer-to-peer networks will likely get an MP3 full of silence, prefixed by this short personal message from Madonna (nsfw mp3). Hear the remixes that have already begun! Make your own!
posted by Espoo2 at 10:25 PM PST - 80 comments

Is It Fiction If It Says "Fiction" On The Cover? Jorge Luis Borges brilliantly obscured fact and fiction presenting fiction as fact. Things seem to have swung round 180º and fact is now increasingly being sold as fiction. This certainly seems to be the case with Siri Hustvedt's What I Loved. She's Paul Auster's second wife and... Well... now even critics, like The New York Observer's Joe Hagan have joined the fun, as Slate's Katie Roiphe duly noted. Fact is now presented as fiction, without the traditional disguise of the roman à clef. I think it's sad. In fact, it's an attempt on the life of imagination itself. Perhaps these authors who write memoirs masquerading as novels could be sued under the Trade Description Act? [With thanks to the always excellent Literary Salon weblog. Thanks to ColdChef for pointing it out to me.]
posted by MiguelCardoso at 9:14 PM PST - 28 comments

Can open, worms everwhere.
posted by CrazyJub at 9:01 PM PST - 12 comments

"Let me help you. Step down. Here we go!
The drum major's widow! She's worn his coat since the day he died. The horse's head has lost an ear! That's the florist laughing. He has crinkly eyes. In the bakery window, lollipops! Smell that! They're giving out melon slices. Sugarplum ice cream! We're passing the butcher. Ham, 79 francs. Spareribs, 45! Now the cheese shop. Picadors are 12.90. Cabecaus, 23.50. A baby is watching a dog that's watching the chickens! Now we're at the kiosk by the metro. I'll leave you here. Bye!"
posted by MzB at 9:00 PM PST - 12 comments

''It's a bunch of bullshit," said Dr. Donald Low, one of Canada's leading infectious disease experts and a key member of the SARS containment team. ''It's inappropriate.'' The WHO added Toronto to the list of places to avoid due to the SARS breakout. This is certain to f'up T.O.'s economy if Ottawa can't get the WHO to retract the advisory. Are people blowing SARS out of proportion? Perphaps it is time to relax and look at things in perspective.
posted by birdherder at 8:57 PM PST - 37 comments

Deep Throat uncovered. No, not that one, the one of Watergate notoriety. A journalism class at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana has determined that this man is the infamous Deep Throat.
posted by mr_crash_davis at 5:34 PM PST - 18 comments

An interesting modern take on an ancient artform.
posted by saladin at 3:55 PM PST - 9 comments

BookShare is a napster-like service that relies on volunteers to share e-books with as many people as possible, and it's completely legal. The reason? Thanks to a special carve-out in copyright law which states "if such copies ... are reproduced or distributed in specialized formats exclusively for use by blind or other persons with disabilities."
posted by mathowie at 3:50 PM PST - 15 comments

In defense of elitism. For smart people only.
posted by adrober at 2:43 PM PST - 65 comments

What if oil was traded in euros? "Even more alarming, and completely unreported in the U.S. media, are significant monetary shifts in the reserve funds of foreign governments away from the dollar with movements towards the euro. It appears that the world community ... seems poised to respond with economic retribution if the U.S. government is regarded as an uncontrollable and dangerous superpower." An analysis of the previous link. Apologies to those I
posted by Birichini at 2:14 PM PST - 25 comments

Where Iraq's desaparecidos wound up. This is about Iraq, but it's not about the war. It's about a graveyard, its manager, and his "awful green book." The reporter is an Arab, which makes a difference, as you can see in the striking last sentence of this paragraph:

All of the dissidents buried at the Kirkh Islamic Cemetery were once held at Abu Ghreib prison, the country's largest and most notorious jail, from which Hussein released nearly 10,000 inmates last October. When word of their release came, the prisoners—from petty thieves to political dissidents, and all kept in horrendous conditions—overran the guards and stampeded the iron gates. Abu Ghreib is also the name given to Iraqi fathers who no longer have children.

posted by languagehat at 1:43 PM PST - 9 comments

But hey, what do we know? We're the corporate media. Independent Media is thought of as an important source to obtain news on events that are glossed over, or not covered at all, by Corporate Media. But how effective is it at that task, and is Independent Media as clean nosed as it intends to be?
posted by mnology at 1:24 PM PST - 4 comments

Jules is a thief. The fact that "all the embedded reporters were doing it" does not make it right. Presumably the US soldiers who were overseeing the embedded reporters knew of this kind of cultural theft -- more than likely, many were a party to it themselves. I'm sending him an email to remind him of that fact, and I will also contact his bosses, urging disciplinary action.
posted by insomnia_lj at 11:56 AM PST - 42 comments

"Three Kings" almost becomes "Four Kings"
Once again, life imitates art.
posted by mapalm at 11:34 AM PST - 25 comments

Penny Arcade, everyone's favorite gamegeek comic strip(well, not everyone's, but mine) is facing legal action over a recent strip they did, parodying Strawberry Shortcake. It seems American Greetings owner of such 80s icons as Popples and the aforementioned Shortcake, don't take too kindly to folks using their precious nostalgia. Here's the offending cartoon.
posted by hughbot at 11:22 AM PST - 30 comments

The World as Blog : A flash visualization locating recent blog updates on a world map, combining RSS, Weblogs.com, and GeoURL. Gadgety. Neat. Via MingTV, whom I located through another awesome new social-networking gewgaw, Blog Matcher.
posted by hairyeyeball at 11:08 AM PST - 4 comments

Is your cat too superior? Giving itself the airs, is it? Who does it think it is? Deck it out in one of these hats and see its dignity plummet. [Scroll down for the headgear; site in Japanese but pics in universal colour. Via Linkfilter.]
posted by Carlos Quevedo at 11:04 AM PST - 21 comments

Is Grub out of control? Barely more than a week old, the distributed search engine is already causing headaches. It does not properly follow the Robot Exclusion Standard and thus spiders sites against their owners' wishes. Because it is a distributed client run by thousands of volunteers (and therefore connects from many different IP addresses), it is non-trivial to block. The Wikipedia project, for example, is experiencing slowdowns because of it. Let's hope they can solve these problems, as the idea seems to be quite cool.
posted by Eloquence at 10:32 AM PST - 7 comments

Seen an ad parody lately?[pdf alert] What is your favorite ad parody? [There is a great list of sites that feature ad parodies on page 20.]
posted by SandeepKrishnamurthy at 8:51 AM PST - 7 comments

Trent Lott: The Sequel, in which Conference Committee Chairman Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) gives an interview to AP in which he blames the recent Catholic Church scandals on a cultural tolerance of consensual "deviance"; i.e. homosexuality [more inside].
posted by Vetinari at 7:38 AM PST - 109 comments

WhatSpeak?
Republican pollster Frank Luntz realized he had a problem. Many of his GOP clients had a consistently bad rap on the environment. Word on the street was they took in millions in contributions from polluting industries, and either sat idly by while environmental safeguards were weakened or, worse, led the charge to undermine decades of protections.

What to do? Instead of counseling his clients to take a principled stand against these polluting policies, Frank simply wrote a memo and invented LuntzSpeak - an exciting new way to put a positive spin on an abysmal environmental record.

Of course, this memo was supposed to be confidential. But lucky for us, Jennifer 8. Lee at the New York Times was given a copy by the Environmental Working Group. Now all of us can learn how to decode and use LuntzSpeak for ourselves!

Submitted in belated recognition of Earth Day. Hope you enjoy.
posted by nofundy at 7:27 AM PST - 10 comments

Oh, God! Under the Bush administration there were a lot of things we had to forget, things like how democratic presidents get elected, how to sell democracy to undemocratic peoples, how to be free, patriotic, etc. Now, it seems, is the time to forget all about this menace to mankind: SCIENCE.
posted by acrobat at 7:18 AM PST - 35 comments

Chandler Release 0.1, the open source Outlook clone is now available. This piece of software was developed by the Open Source Applications Foundation. "While we're still very early in the design and implementation process, we intend for this 0.1 release to make us a more fully open project." says Mitch Kapor.
posted by riffola at 6:27 AM PST - 10 comments

Have you ever wondered... Just how long would it take to travel through a theoretical hole to the other side of the earth? Apparently 42 minutes.
posted by batboy at 6:00 AM PST - 26 comments

Happy St George's Day. Patron saint of England, Portugal, skin diseases and syphillis amongst other things. Saint George may not have been English, or even have set foot in England, but a poll suggests many English people would like his day to be more enthusiastically marked. There's even an online petition you can sign in support of making St George's day a national holiday.The government shows little interest though. What's wrong with being English, and why shouldn't we celebrate our national day properly?
posted by squealy at 5:44 AM PST - 28 comments

Graphing Google Neat little Java applet which will create pretty graphs of inter-site relationships based on Google's 'Related Sites' feature. Check out MetaFilter,BBC News and Slashdot for good examples of how deep the inter linking can go. Try graphing your own site! Neat. (Requires Java)
posted by metaxa at 3:00 AM PST - 8 comments

Gods of Japan. A photo-dictionary. 'This photo library and dictionary is a labor of love. After moving to Kamakura in 1993, I became intrigued by the many deities and faces of Buddhism and Shintoism. There are over 650 photos in this library ... '
Related :- Quirky Japan. This site is just fabulous. 'Are you tired of shrines and temples, reconstructed ferro-concrete castles and tea ceremonies? Do you like to get off the beaten track? Would you like to meet Japanese people who do not meet the conformist stereotype? Japan, behind the conservative grey suits and formal bows, is a country quirkier than you can ever imagine. The Quirky Japan Homepage provides information about oddities such as the The Meguro Parasitalogical Museum, the Thousand Person Bathtub, Love Hotels, temple lodging, and the Yakiimo man (the ice cream man's evil twin). '
Related interest :- Lost Japan. Here's an interesting interview with the author, Alex Kerr; and here's a piece about his wonderful house.
posted by plep at 2:49 AM PST - 14 comments