Radical Georgia Moderate

Due to the possible impending death of Internet radio, Jimmy the Hand and Moe Beers will drown their baby in the bathtub tonight.

Listen tonight at 8 p.m. on Carp Circles Radio. If you’re on Yahoo Messenger, check out the webcam at user griftdrift.

GoVolsXtra, the premium college football news outfit of the Knoxville News-Sentinel, is emerging from behind its paid subscription firewall today (it’s down right now). Take that New York Times!

h/t Rocky Top Talk

USSF kicks off with a 2 p.m. march from the Capitol to the Atlanta Civic Center, where most of the activities will take place (films, workshops, etc.). The event’s web site uses Drupal, which is awesome.

There’s also a competing event for Christians meant to fill the void left by MegaFest that started early this morning. It’s being put on by Full Gospel Baptist Church Fellowship International at the Georgia World Congress Center, and expected to draw 30,000 people, according to the AJC.

If I weren’t, like, working I’d check them both out. Ought to be an interesting cross-section of cultures downtown over the next couple of days. Hope they can play nice. Anybody going to either of these events?

Even though I knew today was going to be Internet Radio Day of Silence, it was still jarring to fire up 3WK in iTunes and hear Monty Python skits instead of semi-obscure 60s and 70s rock.

So what is Internet Radio Day of Silence? I’ll let 3WK tell you.

3WK has, along with most U.S. webcasters, declared today, June 26, as a DAY OF SILENCE. This is our way of showing our listeners what Internet radio will sound like if a new sound performance copyright fee is allowed to go into effect.

New Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) sound performance copyright fees are so high it will make existence impossible for 3WK and most webcasters. This new increase will not only hurt the fledgling webcasting industry, it will also devastate independent labels and musicians who look to internet radio as a primary source of airplay and promotion of their music. If most independent webcasters disappear, this directly affects the musical choices available to you, the listener.

Among local companies, Earthlink Radio is participating. In fact, pretty much every major (in terms of audience size) webcaster and webcasting company is participating except for Last.fm. Visit this site to view a full list.

The new rates are scheduled to go into effect July 15, and are retroactive to Jan. 1, 2006. Effectively, this will put most internet radio stations out of business.

As Techcrunch notes, since large broadcasting companies are incapable of winning new listeners over with compelling content in an open market, they have resorted to lobbying for laws to push the competition out. And they’ve succeeded.

What can you do? Call and/or write to your Congressman. Be polite but make it clear you are unhappy. If you’re in Georgia (which you probably are if you’re reading this), I recommend pointing out that this is precisely the interference with the free market that many of them ran for office promising to prevent.

Here is contact information for the Georgia delegation:

Jack Kingston, 1st District
Phone: 202-225-5831
Fax: 202-226-2269
Email:jack.kingston AT mail.house.gov

Sanford D. Bishop Jr., 2nd District
Phone: 202-225-3631
Fax: 202-225-2203
Web Email

Lynn A. Westmoreland, 3rd District
Phone: 202-225-5901
Fax: 202-225-2515
Web Email

Henry C. “Hank” Jr. Johnson, 4th District
Phone: (202) 225-1605
Fax: (202) 226-0691
Web Email

John Lewis, 5th District
Phone: 202-225-3801
Fax: 202-225-0351
Web Email

Tom Price, 6th District
Phone: 202-225-4501
Web Email

John Linder, 7th District
Phone: 202-225-4272
Fax: 202-225-4696
Web Email

Jim Marshall, 8th District
Phone: 202-225-6531
Fax: 202-225-3013
Web Email

Nathan Deal, 9th District
Phone: 202-225-5211
Fax: 202-225-8272
Web Email

(10th District is vacant)

Phil Gingrey, 11th District
Phone: 202-225-2931
Fax: 202-225-2944
Web Email

John Barrow, 12th District
Phone: 202-225-2823
Fax: 202-225-3377
Web Email

David Scott, 13th District
Phone: 202-225-2939
Fax: 202-225-4628
Web Email

Cross-posted on my Georgia Podcast Network blog.

Update 11:46 a.m. See also: Griftdrift.

Image ripped from this Las Vegas Sun article

You may have read on Amber’s blog that we went to a sex club this past Friday night in hopes of watching some people have teh sex. She’s already written a great wrap-up that I don’t think I could add much to presently. I will say that this is the third time recently that an experience has reminded me of the scene in the film version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas where Duke and Dr. Gonzo were twisted on ether and got kicked out of a Debbie Reynolds concert. I’m surprised there weren’t flapper girls roaming around offering shots of formaldehyde.

In the interest of science and unintentional comedy, we plan to tour both of the metro Atlanta sex clubs that we know of that aren’t S&M- or otherwise-themed and post a compare-and-contrast podcast in a few weeks. The mistake we made in going to Trapeze on a Friday was they were letting single men in. Saturdays are couples-only, so we’re going to see how the crowd is on one of those nights.

On a positive note, I did get to watch Amber pole dance, and she looked good! She’ll look even better when we get her pole installed that’s, like, clean. We’re hoping it will arrive this week in time for the party Saturday, but we haven’t heard anything yet.

FINALLY, the AJC has made all their news sections available as RSS feeds. I emailed them about this like two years ago and they sent me the email equivalent of a shoulder shrug.

Amber used to work at Cox and brought places like the Waco Tribune into this century long ago, so it’s not like they didn’t know how to do it. But this is a positive development nonetheless.

UPDATE: I never would have read this chilling obituary of former city of Atlanta official Robert Sumbry if I hadn’t subscribed to the Atlanta news feed. I knew there had to be somebody there still doing good reporting, I just didn’t ever get to see it because the home page is littered with headlines about Prince William getting back together with his girlfriend and Foxy Brown getting mugged:

Update June 25 10:05 p.m. Apparently these have been around for a while and I just never noticed them.

This is like, uh, a good, like, uh, demonstration of, uh, the self-policing nature of the blogosphere. Yeah, that’s it.

Because I didn’t get it right the first time, here’s a slightly shorter version of my question for the Democratic candidates participating in CNN’s July 23 debate.

See the older post for background. I agree with what Mel wrote that this isn’t a (little-d) democratic process, and that there’s a lot wrong with it.

It’s elitist because only a small percentage of the population has access to the necessary equipment to record a video. And the questions aren’t being determined by a popular vote of YouTube users/CNN viewers, but by the gatekeepers at CNN. Those are huge fundamental problems.

Still, faulty as it may be, it is (maybe) an opportunity to ask a presidential candidate a question I haven’t heard asked anywhere else. And it is more engagement with the little people than I’ve ever known a news company that size to do. Baby steps…

Georgia politics season is over for a little while.
College football season isn’t for another two months.
At least there’s baseball season.

And we’re going to Chicago next month!

This seems like a good time to solicit suggestions for stuff to do in Al Capone’s stomping grounds. I plan to mine this site later. As of now, we’re planning to go to Blogher, a Cubs game, a chick hatchery, and a museum of surgical history.

Also, I’m probably skipping Pride this weekend in favor of catching up on some freelance work, even though a follow-up interview with Billy Ball would make for great unintentional comedy (and would possibly even be informative, considering his pending court case). Listen to last year’s interview here.

Because Shelby asked, here are still frames from about the 25 second mark of my question to Democratic candidates that I posted last week. Keep an eye on the upper right corner. The original raw video was 25 frames per second, so each frame is 1/25 of a second. The object, whatever it is, hovers for 2 frames, and then whizzes off to somewhere, and is gone a few fractions of a second later.

And here’s the original video, as posted to YouTube. Watch the upper right corner around the 25 second mark.

Any predictions?

Much as I’d like to believe people will reject Whitehead like the ridiculous backwards rube he is, I’ve got this nagging feeling that he might make it through without a runoff. That’s contrary to what I believe to be the logical outcome, which would be a Whitehead-Marlow run-off. I mean, pulling 50 percent among that many candidates would be a tall order. Hopefully, I’ll be wrong.