Electric Josh

Speaking of plagiarism
This response, to this, stolen verbatim from Tom Tomorrow:

The media landscape isn't exactly pretty right now, but it's about to get a lot worse.

On June 2, the Federal Communications Commission intends to lift restrictions on media ownership that could allow your local newspaper, cable provider, radio stations, and TV channels all to be owned by one company. The result could be the disappearance of the checks and balances provided by a competitive media marketplace -- and huge cutbacks in local news and reporting. Good, balanced information is the basis for our democracy. That's why we're asking that: "Congress and the FCC should stop media deregulation and work to make the media diverse, competitive, balanced, and fair."

The politicians think that no one cares about this stuff except paid lobbyists. [Did I really just bother to plagiarize that sentence?] This is one of those situations where a couple thousand emails could really make a difference. So go sign the petition, now. Really. Go.
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Reporters
Well, here's Tom Tomorrow's slant on the whole bizarre, extended screwup at The New York Times.

I know that nobody ever said life was going to be fair, but you know...in a just society, fuckups like Stephen Glass and Bill Bennett and Jayson Blair would retreat behind a wall of shame, never to be heard from again.

Hmmm.
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Tunes
So earlier this evening I took part in a phone survey sponsored by one of two local (ha!) radio stations, WBCN and WAAF. They both claim to play alternative music (which was all the rage 10 years ago). Both are mediocre. Both have the amazingly annoying feature that less than 50% of their airtime during music shows consists of music; that is, even when they aren't playing talk shows, more time is spent on advertisements and DJ yammering than on songs. The songs that they do manage to play are variations on a theme or two, mostly attempts to emulate the latest hits, which were, in turn, attempts to emulate the latest hits. Hence my answer to, What radio station do you list to more than any other?: NPR.

It was one of those surveys where they ask you to listen to a snippet of a song and then rate it on a scale of 1 to 5. The kicker: I was to avoid commenting at all on songs I'd never heard! This is the dumbest thing I've ever heard, but makes perfect sense when considered from the perspective of whomever They've found to be programming director at either of the two stations. Don't worry about what we don't play; just listen to it, and identify yourself with whichever of the preprogrammed options you prefer. Consumer punk. Among the few dozen five-second pieces of telephone quality music were two or three songs I didn't recognize and that sounded pretty good, but, of course, the snippet is all you get. No idea where to hear these songs again, or buy them. Ah, well. The car has a CD player, and my friends and little brothers have better taste in music than anyone I've heard on the radio...

How can the entire music industry miss the clue train quite so badly?
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