Niniane, child prodigy and an old friend of the Pie and Coffee gang, is working out of Google’s China office and blogging about it.
Worcester Movies Weekly: Nobody else in town seems to be doing the web + print thing as well as this publication.
I picked up this month-old copy today. Problem: there’s no mention of the date until page 6! Presumably they’ve fixed this since then.
I have another article about local media at the Worcester Activist blog, now more or less “launched.” They also have an events calendar, wiki directory of organizations, and a place to post comments about T&G articles.
MassResistance Watch comments on an event where gay marriage foes kept drifting into the pro-gay-marriage area:
I guess I could understand the Vote on Marriage people wanting to sit on our side since their side had Larry Cirignano . . . .
Why does Cory Doctorow hate America? Interview via Bruce Sterling:
The American lifestyle frankly sucks. The media is generally shit. The food stinks.
While I agree the combo of print/online content with http://worcestermovies.com is great, I’m now in need of a cornea transplant after allowing their color scheme to sneak up on me in a poorly lit room. Good lord, that’s terrible design.
Note he’s also reporting on local news. Whatever the local game is, he’s winning.
It’s kind of embarrassing for Cory to like Los Angeles, although considering that he just moved here a few months ago and to my knowledge has never lived anywhere else in the United States, he’s pretty much talking out of his ass when speaking on “American lifestyle.” The fact that he says real estate is cheap in Los Angeles should immediately make him suspect. Yes, it’s cheaper than midtown Manhattan and probably London, too, but that’s not much of a yardstick. In the parts of the country where real estate really is, cheap, though, we’re criticized for owning “a lot more house” than we really “need.” I wonder how he squares that.
And the crack about infant mortality is just laughable. Wikipedia says infant mortality in the U.S. is about 6.50 per 1,000. (Slightly worse than Cuba, incidentally.) This site says that in 1899 Liverpool, the infant mortality rate per 1,000 was about 136 for the upper class, 274 for the working class, and 509 (more than 50%!) in the slums.
Just to clarify up there— Cory attributes the “entrepeneurship” in Los Angeles to our “cheap” real estate ($550,000 for a condo, anyone?) before criticizing the effects of cheap real estate (i.e., bigger houses) in this so-called “America” he has little firsthand knowledge of.
Also consider that the guy’s most public gig is as a major contributor to a website that finds many “wonderful things” each day, much of it products of this “American lifestyle” he hates so much. I think he dislikes America in the abstract but tends to like everything that he actually encounters in real life.