Lewis Black exposes the LIBERAL MEDIA

Lewis Black sums up The 1/2 Hour News Hour, Rupert Murdoch's bid for Dow Jones / WSJ, and Conservapedia in one glorious segment. Probably the best Back in Black I've seen in months:

I don't read the Bible

I don't trust disciple!


Sounds like every other one of their songs - but that's okay, because they're fun.

Dumb internet memes, local indie bands, and Rolling effing Stone

Joey just sent me this link, via Philebrity, of a video on Rolling Stone's website that features local act The Teeth. Of particular interest to us is the setting for the first half of the video, which just so happens to be the music library of our old station, WCUR. Early on in Joey's and my reign of terror at that station, we decided to heft those huge shelves full of vinyl you see in the background out of the middle of the room and against that back wall so that bands could play in there. We also went on a somewhat rabid search for cheap used couches to place in that areas so that bands could also sit. Anyway, what I think this all boils down to is that WCUR just made a cameo in Rolling Stone, which means that it's not cool to like that place anymore. Shame.

In other news, I almost decided to make a habit out of reading Philebrity, which I hear a lot about, but decided not to based on the title of their Rolling Stone / Teeth post: "OH HAI, IM IN UR SCENE, PUTTIN UR BANDZ ON VEEDEE-OH". Mmm....no. Not even in jest. No, sorry.

Link: [Philebrity]
Link: [Rolling Stone]

Good news, everyone! Pt 2

Here's a brief summary of what the girl and I have been doing over the past couple of days:

1. Knock on friend/family member's door
2. Shoot the shit for a couple minutes in the kitchen
3. I announce "We've got some good news!"
4. We both stare at the friend/family member waiting for them to guess the good news
5. Friend/family member either guesses it or shrugs, clueless
6. I shout "DO IT!"
7. The girl swings her lovely hand out with a whip-cracking motion
8. Jumping/screaming/shouting/hugs/kisses
9. Repeat

So, can you guess? Did you guess it?

Radio geek links

If you're a radio geek like myself, there are a few crucial links you ought to have stashed away in your special bookmarks folder titled "Nerd Alert!" It's how I stay so up-to-date on current events in the radio industry, and it's also how I got this hot ass.

First, of course, is FMQB. I first discovered this site the morning Jamie called me in a panic early one morning in February 2005 to tell me that Y-100 was going to flip formats that day and that she had been maced and drug out of the studio by Radio One riot police along with the rest of the interns. I read updates on that site for the rest of the day and have been hooked on it for industry news ever since. One of their feature articles today, FCC Opens Commenting On XM/Sirius Merger, deals with a topic we've touched on here at Open All Night a couple of times, and is worth checking out.

The second link was relayed to me by one Dany Sloan and is called Arcane Radio Trivia. It can be a bit dry at times but for the most part it's filled with interesting, uh, trivia. What did you expect?

The last link is one I found while trolling around the internet looking for dirt on a former employer that fired me some years ago (not obsessing, I swear - just bored). The search was sparked by a link Bob sent me regarding a station I've applied for work with on more than one occasion and it ultimately led me to this message board: Radio-info.com. Here is the Philadelphia sub-forum, where people call each other names, geeks with delusions of grandeur claim to have inside information, and radio snobs quietly peck at each and every change or rumored change in the #7 market. It is here that I have delightedly taken to trolling the folks that claim that the Kidd Chris show is the zenith of talk radio, or that contestant callers on Power 99 are to blame for the skyrocketing murder rate in Philadelphia. (It's pronounced "Sep-tem-BER" not "Sep-tem-BAH"! If those black folks would only talk right, we might see an end to the violence around here! )

Speaking of racism and radio, check out this commercial for WHIT - Power 102FM if you haven't already.



Link - [FMQB]
Link - [Arcane Radio Trivia]
Link - [Radio-info.com]

Goodbye, Tony

One of my favorite television programs, The Sopranos, wraps up this Sunday. If you're a fan of the show like I am, you're going to be glued to the set for the finale of one of the best written, acted, and produced programs in the history of the boob tube. I'm not exaggerating when I say this, either: from the beginning, each episode has been treated like a short, one-hour long movie documenting the life of TV's anti-hero king. The show, originally pitched to Fox as what was essentially going to be a Goodfellas TV show (Ray Liotta turned down the role of Tony and Lorraine Bracco originally auditioned to play his wife, Carmela, before accepting the role of Tony's psychiatrist, Dr. Melfi) under the title "Made In America", has morphed into a chilling drama / dark comedy about Tony Soprano, his family, and his Family. It has created some of my favorite characters, only to kill them off at the end of each season, all while paying tribute to the great mob movies. By the way, "Made in America" is the title of the final episode this weekend - take that, Fox.

I can't emphasize enough that if you haven't ever watched the show before, you shouldn't tune in for the last hour this Sunday at 9. Poor idea. If you have any intention of going back to season 1 and starting at the beginning, this last hour could ruin six and a half seasons of the best show on television for you.

Since I'm feeling all nostalgic about this show, check out this clip from the pilot I found on Youtube. It's weird to see James Gandolfini looking this skinny, as he's about twice this size now towards the end of the show. (The rumor was that the weight gain was written into his contract, as Tony was supposed to grow physically in proportion to his greed and penchant for violence.) The tone of everything is a lot less upbeat, nowadays, too -- but there are still little clues even from this scene that keep popping up in scenes seven years later. I mean, check out Christopher's baseball cap - and listen to Tony rant on about the "degenerate gambler" they're whaling on....



edit: OK OK check out this classic scene, also from Season 1:



And while we're at it, this: a short compilation of all the "OHHH"s and "AYYY"s in the entire show:

Radio rock sucks

Proof.

(my apologies if you've seen this a million times already, but there are a lot of folks who still have to see it and it never gets old for me.)

A Scout Is Straight

(Note: the picture above is of Douglas B. Smith, a former National executive now serving an eight-year prison sentence for peddling kiddie porn on the Internet. It's kind of irrelevant to what's written below, but the "scumbag" title sums up my feelings appropriately, so it's staying.)

A long-running tiff between the Boy Scouts of America and the City of Philadelphia, two dysfunctional, time-honored institutions I hold dear, is coming to an end soon. And it looks like the Scouts are going to be losing out.

Good.

The long and the short of it is this: the city has been extremely kind to the Scouts. Since 1928, they've allowed the residents of the Council building at 22nd and Winter Streets to hole up there essentially for free. Cradle of Liberty Council has been paying $1 a month lease to Philadelphia hearkening back to the Philadelphia Area Council era - the good old days, when they could do all the atheist-hatin' and fag-bashing they cared to. Last night, City Council came out of nowhere to vote an end to that golden age:

The long-simmering dispute over whether the Boy Scouts of America's Cradle of Liberty Council must publicly affirm it will not discriminate against openly gay people - or pay fair-market rent for the city-owned Logan Square land on which their landmark headquarters is located - boiled over anew yesterday as City Council authorized the city to end the lease.

Basically, Philadelphia said to the Scouts last year that they'd better fucking cut it out or they'd be out on their asses. And, to their credit, Cradle of Liberty council tried. They had a non-discrimination policy in place as recently as 2003, but BSA National would have none of that. Essentially, their right to keep the queers out is protected under the First Amendment. Irving, Texas called up Cradle of Liberty and told them to get rid of the policy ASAP, as it goes against the backwater "morals and val-yoos" of the grand ole' BSA.

In theory, the Boy Scouts elects not to include atheists or homosexuals in their program, as the Scout Law states - "A Scout is Reverent" and everybody knows that atheism and homosexuality are as irreverent as it gets. In practice, this would probably fly if 99% of the troops, crews, ships, and Cub Scout Packs in the rest of the country weren't chartered to various Christian institutions that are notoriously strict themselves regarding the whole intolerance schtick. If the Scouts were to suddenly do an about-face on National policy and begin to include these groups, you'd bet your sweet ass there would be a lot of local groups without a place to hold their weekly meetings.

Thus, here we are in the 21st century, (an era when, in my estimation, we would have a large majority of Scouts and Scouters in support of a national policy change) and the BSA is sticking to their no-gays rule as if it's one of the foundations of the organization or something. In doing so, they're not only alienating scores of young gents from taking part in what is otherwise a great program, and they're not just making bigotry acceptable to thousands of young, impressionable minds: they're making themselves increasingly irrelevant for it.

There's a bumper-sticker that reads "America is returning to the values that Scouting never left" that truly shows how out-of-touch the organization is becoming by clinging to memories of the Scouting hey-day. By doggedly defending these policies, they believe they're protecting the integrity of the organization, when in reality it's that failure to adapt that is responsible for falling membership, participation, and, let's face it - respect. The City of Philadelphia is well within bounds by telling Cradle of Liberty to get with it or get the fuck out of our building - and unfortunately, they'll either end up paying what everyone else pays to rent in the City or they'll find another place to warp young minds. It seems quite apparent now that although the individual council unit (one of the largest and most influential councils in the country) is willing to make the change, the national organization would pull the rug out from under them in such a fashion.

Nothing's going to change right now, and the Boy Scouts of America will whoop and holler about the great injustices done to it while failing to recognize the irony in that they're doing greater injustices to the gays and atheists they're shutting out in the process. They'll pay more money to stay at 22nd and Winter when they can least afford it, and Jay Leno will make some crack about how everyone in the scouts is already gay.

I've spoken to a lot of scouts, former scouts, and leaders about the subject. I've spoken to folks from all over the Mid-Atlantic region in person, and to scouts from all over the world online. The reactions I've received are mostly supportive of change, which makes the discussion even more frustrating to keep having. The consensus on the topic has been pretty unanimous: if Scouting doesn't want to change an unjust, exclusionary policy, fuck 'em. They deserve what they get.

Link via [Philly.com]

Another Flickr toy - this one is better

We like to bitch quite a bit about how we were supposed to have flying cars by now. Each time I start a discussion about automobiles that starts to focus on gas mileage, hybrid or alternative fuel technology, crash ratings, or CD changers, it almost inevitably degenerates into some oddly jealous rant about "why can't we be more like the Jetsons?" Once in a while something like this comes along that makes you think we're taking little baby steps towards eye-popping technologies that defined that cartoon - technologies we know we want, but we can't yet have.

Here is one such technology. It's more of a toy than anything right now, but when you start to take tools like Digg and Flickr and combine them to make something like Microsoft Photosynth, we're inching closer to creating a collective consciousness (or, more accurately, a group mind) that can actually be seen and felt.

Microsoft's official description of Photosynth:

A Photosynth experience begins with nothing more than a bunch of digital photos. They might all have been taken by one person, or they might be a mixture of images from many different cameras, shooting conditions, dates, times of day, resolutions, and so on.

Each photo is processed by computer vision algorithms to extract hundreds of distinctive features, like the corner of a window frame or a door handle. Photos that share features are then linked together in a web. When the same feature is found in multiple images, its 3D position can be calculated. It's similar to depth perception - what your brain does to perceive the 3D positions of things in your field of view based on their images in both of your eyes. Photosynth's 3D model is just the cloud of points showing where those features are in space.

Imagine a slide projector placed at each original camera position, aimed how the camera was, and projecting the picture that camera took. A screen is placed in the 3D environment at an appropriate distance from the projector. As you move around in the Photosynth environment, projectors turn on and off, giving you a changing perspective on a world built entirely out of the original photos.

You have to hand it to Microsoft on this one. They're starting to match things like Google Maps Streetview and Apple's iPhone tit-for-tat. Before you do anything else, you should watch the video of the demo. Then head over to Photosynth and try it yourself.

Video: [Blaise Aguera y Arcas: Photosynth demo]
Link: [Microsoft Photosynth]