Bloggasm

Here are some media-related links for your amusement:

1. This blog offers 10 tips to keep your journalism job while your daily paper is being hit with tons of layoffs.

2. Porn star Ron Jeremy says that he would allow his daughter to act in porn as long as she would be a porn star like Jenna Jameson. This revelation is slightly less shocking when you realize he’s talking about his hypothetical daughter, since he doesn’t actually have one.

3. The Columbia Journalism Review on the media’s reaction to the Obama/Wright controversy

4. Michael Arrington, the blogger for the popular site Tech Crunch, argues that blogs should team up to take on big media. I think it’s plausible in some niches, but nearly impossible for stories that significantly drain resources, like war reporting.

5. An interview with a long-time writer for the satirical The Onion.

6. First there were nerdy pick-up lines. Now there are Penguin pick-up lines.

Here are some media-related links for your amusement:

1. There’s a subculture in New York that digs through old buildings and dumpsters to find rare old books.

2. A scientist talks about his experience being interviewed by Stephen Colbert. He actually tried to anticipate Colbert’s faux arguments beforehand for preparation.

3. Note to self: If I ever become an editor of a major magazine, I should probably refrain from using the image of a noose on the cover.

4. Search Atheism on the rise: “A new study from the University of Southern California’s Center for the Digital Future has found that a growing number of people no longer believe that search results are reliable and accurate.”

5. Techcrunch has a rundown of the fastest growing websites on the web compared to the websites that are decreasing rapidly in visitors. Let’s hope that Myspace will soon join the latter list.

6. Speaking of Myspace, they should take a lesson from the New York Times: Visitors hate annoying advertisements.

7. We’ve heard of the Nickelodeon Kid’s Choice Awards, but one geared towards the presidential primary? I think there should be a photoshop contest of Ron Paul trying to appeal to kids voters.

8. Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald made a good catch: Passive Voice Journalism. How could so many mainstream journalists mention the 2000 John McCain smear without talking about the source of the smear?

9. More reports that UK news sites have more readers outside the UK than in.

10. This is pretty cool, The Atlantic Monthly is releasing all of its content for free online.

When I was in college, I took a poetry class taught by a guy of Indian descent named Kazim Ali. A few days ago, in the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shooting, Kazim was reading some poetry manuscripts for a contest he was judging. After he was finished, he packed the manuscripts into a heavy box and brought it to the outside of Wright Hall and placed it besides the trashcan to be recycled– something he’s done dozens of times.

A member of the ROTC saw him place the box there. Or rather, what the person saw was a man who he thought to be an Arab placing a suspicious-looking box next to the building. He immediately called the police, reported that a man of “middle-eastern descent” had placed a box outside of Wright Hall, and within the hour the campus was shut down and a SWAT team was called in.

After it became apparent that the person who had left the box there was Kazim, he was called and put on the line with a police officer, who said that in the “current climate” he had to be careful what he did.

Since then, the university and the police have denied that this had anything to do with his dark skin. Kazim has been interviewed by several major news stations, and writes about his experience over here.

I heard from a friend who still attends the university that Kazim has already accepted a job to teach elsewhere. Thank god for that. What an embarrassment this must be for Shippensburg University.

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Related posts: People who watch The Daily Show and Colbert Report know the most about current events, Oprah’s “secret”, To The People blogger owes the ACLU $100 and me an apology, Christians know very little about their own religion

A few days ago, I posted an interview with the Agitator, and in response to the way I asked a certain question, the blog To the People described it as a turd question. When asked why the question was crap, the blogger had this to say:

Simon,

As Minerva notes, Mexicans are not a race any more than “Americans” or “Chinese” are a race. No “Mexican”, to the best of my knowledge, has ever voted in the United States.

I responded that the term “Mexican” can be used as a racial term, and provided several points as to why this is. So in response, he put up a post in which he offered $100 to the organization of my choice, and a public apology if I were to prove him wrong:

So here’s my offer, Simon: Find a legitimate, scholarly source that supports your claim of one Mexican race. (For example, a university professor who does not belong to the Aryan Brotherhood would suffice.) Then send me information in the form of a paper or link. If you can find such a source, not only will I publish the link and admit I was wrong, but I will immediately donate $100 to the charity of your choice.

Of course, if you look in the comments field of that post, I provided several sources (including one he linked to himself, apparently without even reading it), including one from a professor who “does not belong to the Aryan Brotherhood” (as he put it).

Since then, his readers have engaged in multiple semantics games, but I’ve clearly found several sources that actually used the term “Mexican Race,” and pointed out that Mexicans were labeled as an ethnic group in the Wikipedia article he linked to (and if you look in any thesaurus, a synonym for “race” is “ethnic” group).

So, that was on the 23rd. Has he issued an apology to me yet and sent that $100 check to the ACLU like I requested? Nope! Did I ever think he actually would? No. At best, he’ll either pretend like he never posted that offer and ignore it completely, delete the post, or just run to google in search of a single web-page that argues that Mexicans aren’t a race, and say that this discounts all my sources, even though that wasn’t part of the deal.

Business as usual.