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You can reach the person managing the list at [EMAIL PROTECTED] When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than "Re: Contents of Medianews digest..." Today's Topics: 1. Pop-Culture Evolution (Monty Solomon) 2. Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage? (Monty Solomon) 3. Gay by Design, or a Lifestyle Choice? (Monty Solomon) 4. The World Since 9/11, in Detail and Sorrow (Monty Solomon) 5. Are mobile phones wiping out our bees? (Greg Williams) 6. Barry Nelson, the first onscreen James Bond, dies aged 89 (Greg Williams) 7. New art, serialized plot startle fans of Archie Comics (Greg Williams) 8. For some, vinyl still scratches the surface (Greg Williams) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Message: 1 Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2007 00:23:15 -0400 From: Monty Solomon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [Medianews] Pop-Culture Evolution To: undisclosed-recipient:; Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" CONSUMED Pop-Culture Evolution By ROB WALKER April 15, 2007 The Geico Cavemen The recent news that ABC was willing to entertain the possibility of a sitcom starring the Geico cavemen seemed a sort of watershed. Here were characters dreamed up as part of an advertising campaign, potentially crossing over into a venerable form of mainstream, pop-culture entertainment. While that sounds momentous, it misses a larger point. As characters in a successful advertising campaign, the cavemen are already part of mainstream pop culture. More so, in fact, than the characters in most current sitcoms. If you've somehow managed to avoid them, here's a primer. Since 2004, Geico, the car-insurance company, has been running spots that involve cavemen. In the first, a Geico spokesman brightly tells the camera that the company's Web site is so easy to use, "a caveman could do it." At which point the camera pulls back and we realize that the boom-microphone handler is, in fact, a caveman. He stalks off the set, offended. Since then, Geico cavemen have returned in various commercials - and a Web site and carefully strategized public appearances - invariably expressing frustration and disgust at the ignorance and bigotry they face. The campaign is strange. And this probably is largely responsible for the pop-culture status it has achieved. ... http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/magazine/15wwlnconsumed.t.html ------------------------------ Message: 2 Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2007 00:25:38 -0400 From: Monty Solomon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [Medianews] Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage? To: undisclosed-recipient:; Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" IDEA LAB Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage? By DUNCAN J. WATTS April 15, 2007 As anyone who follows the business of culture is aware, the profits of cultural industries depend disproportionately on the occasional outsize success - a blockbuster movie, a best-selling book or a superstar artist - to offset the many investments that fail dismally. What may be less clear to casual observers is why professional editors, studio executives and talent managers, many of whom have a lifetime of experience in their businesses, are so bad at predicting which of their many potential projects will make it big. How could it be that industry executives rejected, passed over or even disparaged smash hits like "Star Wars," "Harry Potter" and the Beatles, even as many of their most confident bets turned out to be flops? It may be true, in other words, that "nobody knows anything," as the screenwriter William Goldman once said about Hollywood. But why? Of course, the experts may simply not be as smart as they would like us to believe. Recent research, however, suggests that reliable hit prediction is impossible no matter how much you know - a result that has implications not only for our understanding of best-seller lists but for business and politics as well. Conventional marketing wisdom holds that predicting success in cultural markets is mostly a matter of anticipating the preferences of the millions of individual people who participate in them. From this common-sense observation, it follows that if the experts could only figure out what it was about, say, the music, songwriting and packaging of Norah Jones that appealed to so many fans, they ought to be able to replicate it at will. And indeed that's pretty much what they try to do. That they fail so frequently implies either that they aren't studying their own successes carefully enough or that they are not paying sufficiently close attention to the changing preferences of their audience. The common-sense view, however, makes a big assumption: that when people make decisions about what they like, they do so independently of one another. But people almost never make decisions independently - in part because the world abounds with so many choices that we have little hope of ever finding what we want on our own; in part because we are never really sure what we want anyway; and in part because what we often want is not so much to experience the "best" of everything as it is to experience the same things as other people and thereby also experience the benefits of sharing. There's nothing wrong with these tendencies. Ultimately, we're all social beings, and without one another to rely on, life would be not only intolerable but meaningless. Yet our mutual dependence has unexpected consequences, one of which is that if people do not make decisions independently - if even in part they like things because other people like them - then predicting hits is not only difficult but actually impossible, no matter how much you know about individual tastes. ... http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/magazine/15wwlnidealab.t.html ------------------------------ Message: 3 Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2007 00:48:45 -0400 From: Monty Solomon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [Medianews] Gay by Design, or a Lifestyle Choice? To: undisclosed-recipient:; Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Gay by Design, or a Lifestyle Choice? By ALEX WILLIAMS April 12, 2007 RON GEREN, an actor in Los Angeles, commutes to auditions and jobs throughout Southern California in a sleek black Mazda MX-5 Miata convertible. But for a recent date with a woman, he rented a Cadillac Escalade because he was so used to friends saying his Miata is "gay." "Guys say, 'Hey, that's cute,' " Mr. Geren, 40, said, adding that the comments come from gay as well as straight men. "You have to fend off that perception." A few years ago, Meghan Daum, an op-ed contributor to The Los Angeles Times, wrote about a promising first date with a man that never led to a second one because, she later learned, the guy saw that she drove a Subaru Outback station wagon and concluded she must be a lesbian. And when Joe LaMuraglia, the founder of Gaywheels.com, an informational site modeled on the likes of Autoweb.com, told his partner he wanted to buy a Mini Cooper convertible, the boyfriend joked that he would not be seen in it because the couple "would look like such a gay clich?," Mr. LaMuraglia said. Cars are no more straight or gay than cellphones, office chairs or weed whackers. But in recent years that truism has not stopped a perception among some motorists that certain cars can, in the right context, be statements about a driver's sexual orientation. At a time when car makers are marketing aggressively to gay consumers and mainstream culture has become more literate about stereotypically gay tastes through television shows like "Will & Grace" and "The L Word" (on which one of the main characters, Alice, drove a Mini Cooper), it may not be surprising that some people make such assumptions about motorists based on their cars. ... http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/fashion/12cars.html?ex=1334030400&en=d2e81da5fa3509dd&ei=5090 ------------------------------ Message: 4 Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2007 00:51:16 -0400 From: Monty Solomon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [Medianews] The World Since 9/11, in Detail and Sorrow To: undisclosed-recipient:; Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" TELEVISION REVIEW | 'AMERICA AT A CROSSROADS' The World Since 9/11, in Detail and Sorrow By ALESSANDRA STANLEY April 14, 2007 Apparently, a church dance in Greeley, Colo., led to 9/11. In 1948 Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian writer who became the father of the radical Islamist movement, was sent to the United States to temper his contempt for the West. What he saw over two years - postwar consumerism, suburban lawns, men and women dancing "breast to breast" - only further inflamed his conviction that the West was the enemy of Islam and doomed. Mr. Qutb went on to work up a pseudospiritual justification of Islamic terrorism that inspired and emboldened many, including Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri. And that modest Colorado mixer - back then, Greeley was a dry town - was Mr. Qutb's "epiphanic moment," as Malise Ruthven, a Middle East expert, puts it in "Jihad: The Men and Ideas Behind Al Qaeda," the first documentary in the weeklong, 11-part PBS series "America at a Crossroads." The title alone suggests the series's ambition: "Crossroads" is an attempt to look at the post-9/11 world as broadly and deeply as possible. It's a worthy and worthwhile examination of the clash between Islam and the West, but it's also the kind of sorrowful, all-knowing look backward that makes viewers wonder why all these journalists, experts, scholars and former government officials were not more outspoken about the impending crisis before it blew up the twin towers and drove the Bush administration to invade Iraq. Probably they were less sure, and we weren't listening anyway. The Washington PBS station WETA guided and oversaw the series, but each documentary is made by a different filmmaker tackling a different but interrelated chapter: it's a "Naked Came the Stranger" for Middle East scholars. "Jihad," tomorrow night, is a two-hour premiere that examines the origins of the Muslim Brotherhood and Muslim fundamentalism to explain that the Koran was hijacked by extremists seeking a religious justification for all-out war against the West and secularized Arab states, even ones that say they are Muslim. ... http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/14/arts/television/14stan.html?ex=1334203200&en=6b96ec7b7f830408&ei=5090 ------------------------------ Message: 5 Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2007 01:08:53 -0400 From: Greg Williams <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [Medianews] Are mobile phones wiping out our bees? To: medianews@twiar.org Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Are mobile phones wiping out our bees? Scientists claim radiation from handsets are to blame for mysterious 'colony collapse' of bees By Geoffrey Lean and Harriet Shawcross Published: 15 April 2007 http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/wildlife/article2449968.ece It seems like the plot of a particularly far-fetched horror film. But some scientists suggest that our love of the mobile phone could cause massive food shortages, as the world's harvests fail. They are putting forward the theory that radiation given off by mobile phones and other hi-tech gadgets is a possible answer to one of the more bizarre mysteries ever to happen in the natural world - the abrupt disappearance of the bees that pollinate crops. Late last week, some bee-keepers claimed that the phenomenon - which started in the US, then spread to continental Europe - was beginning to hit Britain as well. The theory is that radiation from mobile phones interferes with bees' navigation systems, preventing the famously homeloving species from finding their way back to their hives. Improbable as it may seem, there is now evidence to back this up. Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) occurs when a hive's inhabitants suddenly disappear, leaving only queens, eggs and a few immature workers, like so many apian Mary Celestes. The vanished bees are never found, but thought to die singly far from home. The parasites, wildlife and other bees that normally raid the honey and pollen left behind when a colony dies, refuse to go anywhere near the abandoned hives. The alarm was first sounded last autumn, but has now hit half of all American states. The West Coast is thought to have lost 60 per cent of its commercial bee population, with 70 per cent missing on the East Coast. CCD has since spread to Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece. And last week John Chapple, one of London's biggest bee-keepers, announced that 23 of his 40 hives have been abruptly abandoned. Other apiarists have recorded losses in Scotland, Wales and north-west England, but the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs insisted: "There is absolutely no evidence of CCD in the UK." The implications of the spread are alarming. Most of the world's crops depend on pollination by bees. Albert Einstein once said that if the bees disappeared, "man would have only four years of life left". No one knows why it is happening. Theories involving mites, pesticides, global warming and GM crops have been proposed, but all have drawbacks. German research has long shown that bees' behaviour changes near power lines. Now a limited study at Landau University has found that bees refuse to return to their hives when mobile phones are placed nearby. Dr Jochen Kuhn, who carried it out, said this could provide a "hint" to a possible cause. Dr George Carlo, who headed a massive study by the US government and mobile phone industry of hazards from mobiles in the Nineties, said: "I am convinced the possibility is real." The case against handsets Evidence of dangers to people from mobile phones is increasing. But proof is still lacking, largely because many of the biggest perils, such as cancer, take decades to show up. Most research on cancer has so far proved inconclusive. But an official Finnish study found that people who used the phones for more than 10 years were 40 per cent more likely to get a brain tumour on the same side as they held the handset. Equally alarming, blue-chip Swedish research revealed that radiation from mobile phones killed off brain cells, suggesting that today's teenagers could go senile in the prime of their lives. Studies in India and the US have raised the possibility that men who use mobile phones heavily have reduced sperm counts. And, more prosaically, doctors have identified the condition of "text thumb", a form of RSI from constant texting. Professor Sir William Stewart, who has headed two official inquiries, warned that children under eight should not use mobiles and made a series of safety recommendations, largely ignored by ministers. -- Greg Williams K4HSM [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.twiar.org http://www.etskywarn.net ------------------------------ Message: 6 Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2007 04:38:59 -0400 From: Greg Williams <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [Medianews] Barry Nelson, the first onscreen James Bond, dies aged 89 To: medianews@twiar.org Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Barry Nelson, the first onscreen James Bond, dies aged 89 http://www.mi6.co.uk/news/index.php?itemid=4934 Barry Nelson, an MGM contract player during the 1940s who later had a prolific theater career and was the first actor to play James Bond on screen, has died. He was 89 - reports Associated Press. Nelson died on April 7 while traveling in Bucks County, Pa., his wife, Nansi Nelson, said Friday. The cause of death was not immediately known, she said. After graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1941, Nelson was signed to MGM after being spotted by a talent scout. He appeared in a number of films for the studio in 1942, including "Shadow of the Thin Man," "Johnny Eager" and "Dr. Kildare's Victory." He also landed the leading role in "A Yank on the Burma Road," playing a cab driver who decides to lead a convoy of trucks for the Chinese government. Nelson entered the Army during World War II and went on the road with other actors performing the wartime play "Winged Victory," which was later made into a movie starring Red Buttons, George Reeves and Nelson. After the war, Nelson starred in a string of movies, including "Undercover Maisie," "Time to Kill" and "Tenth Avenue Angel." He is the answer to the trivia question: Who was the first actor to play James Bond? Before Sean Connery was tapped to play the British agent on the big screen in 1962's "Dr. No," Nelson played Bond in a one-hour TV adaptation of "Casino Royale" in 1954. Nelson switched to the stage during the 1960s and 1970s, appearing on Broadway in "Seascape" "Mary, Mary" and "Cactus Flower." He earned a Tony nomination in 1978 for his role in "The Act," which also starred Liza Minnelli. "He was a very naturalistic, believable actor," said his agent, Francis Delduca. "He was good at both comedy and the serious stuff." Among his other film credits were "Airport" and "The Shining," and he also appeared on such TV shows as "Murder, She Wrote," "Dallas" and "Magnum P.I." More recently, Nelson and his second wife (they married in 1992) spent a lot of time traveling. He planned to write a couple of books about his time on stage and in Hollywood. Nelson is survived by his wife. He did not have any children from either marriage. Funeral arrangements were pending. -- Greg Williams K4HSM [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.twiar.org http://www.etskywarn.net ------------------------------ Message: 7 Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2007 04:43:11 -0400 From: Greg Williams <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [Medianews] New art, serialized plot startle fans of Archie Comics To: medianews@twiar.org Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed New art, serialized plot startle fans of Archie Comics By BILL RADFORD - The Gazette (Colorado Springs, Colo.) http://www.macon.com/231/story/17179.html You don't tug on Superman's cape, you don't spit into the wind -- and apparently you don't mess with Archie Andrews and the gang. In December, Archie Comics announced that a new "dynamic art style" was coming for its classic characters. Fans were not pleased, managing editor Victor Gorelick says. "Most of the readers were `How can you give them this new look?'" Gorelick said. "'I've read Archie all my life and now you're changing him.'" But the largely negative reaction stemmed from a misunderstanding, Gorelick said in a phone interview from Archie Comics' offices in Mamaroneck, N.Y. "People thought we were going to change the entire line, which wasn't so," he said. The change, coming in May's "Betty & Veronica Double Digest" No. 151, applies only to a four-part story running in that title. While Gorelick doesn't rule out the new look eventually showing up elsewhere, there is no plan for sweeping changes in the classic Archie look set by artist Dan DeCarlo more than 40 years ago. The story in "Betty & Veronica Double Digest" finds Veronica smitten with a new guy in town. "He's kind of a tough guy, rides a motorcycle, a bit of a rebel," Gorelick said. The serialized story -- a change from Archie's usual short reads -- and the accompanying new art style are meant to attract a slightly older readership, Gorelick said. "Most of our readers are between 7 and 12 or 13 years old, and mostly girls. Once these girls finish reading Archie Comics, they'll usually go on to chapter books and a little bit more detailed stories. We want to try to keep that audience a little bit longer. So we're trying out this new look and seeing what the response is going to be." The longer story also offers an opportunity for Archie Comics to enter the booming graphic-novel market by eventually gathering the story into a single book. Though the story, titled "Bad Boy Trouble," is more involved than usual, there's nothing inappropriate for young girls, Gorelick said -- "nothing out of the Archie code of decency, so to speak." The art is by Steven Butler, who has worked for several years on Archie Comics' "Sonic the Hedgehog" but had never before drawn Archie and friends. "The guidelines basically were to make them more realistic, more of a romance-style comic," Butler said. That job was more challenging with some characters than others -- Jughead, for example, with his long nose and crown. "It would be kind of hard to do Jughead without that nose and without that hat," Butler said. His version of Jughead includes a slightly larger hat, tilted more to one side, and a goatee. Plus, Butler said, "I gave him a kind of a Bob Hope nose." Butler hopes readers will give the new look a chance. "I look at the negativity as something that spurs me on to do even better work to prove to them that I'm not just hacking this stuff out, that I really do care about what I'm doing." -- Greg Williams K4HSM [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.twiar.org http://www.etskywarn.net ------------------------------ Message: 8 Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2007 12:00:10 -0400 From: Greg Williams <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [Medianews] For some, vinyl still scratches the surface To: medianews@twiar.org Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed For some, vinyl still scratches the surface http://www.herald-mail.com/?module=displaystory&story_id=163166&format=print By TIFFANY ARNOLD [EMAIL PROTECTED] In an era when CDs are losing their foothold in the music industry, there are music fans who don't care, and it's not because these fans are downloading music. They are sticking to vinyl. "A CD player? What am I going to do with that?" asked Judy Kell, 55, of Chambersburg, Pa., who collects vinyl records. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that CD music sales have sharply declined. Despite the decline in the more up-to-date way to listen to music, old-school vinyl records are still hanging on to a small fan base: collectors and older music enthusiasts who don't see the point in switching music platforms. They are people like Judy Kell, who still listens to records and just recently stopped listening to eight-track tapes. "They're just so hard to find anymore," Kell said. "At one point, all we could find was Christmas music." Another reason Kell ditched the eight-tracks was because she and her family recently replaced their 1978 Buick Electra, equipped with a functional eight-track player, with a '90s-model car that came with a CD player. Kell is married to Richard Kell, who owns Record City in Chambersburg. They admit that they are behind the times when it comes to technology. "She still has cassette tapes," 20-year-old Mary Kell said of her mother. Judy and Richard Kell have nary a cell phone or MP3 player between them, and they rarely if ever use e-mail. But they see their children using the technology. "One night our daughter was sitting on the couch playing songs from her laptop. It was just like a jukebox," Richard Kell said. "Our son is the same way. That's how they do it now." Judy Kell said she doubts she'll be like her children and start swapping her records for online downloads. "I get tired of changing. I don't need to. What's the point?" she said. "If you have (the music) at your fingertips all the time, it's not a treat." ------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Medianews mailing list Medianews@twiar.org http://twiar.org/mailman/listinfo/medianews_twiar.org End of Medianews Digest, Vol 235, Issue 1 *****************************************