quick dump of clips - lots of great snips to catch up on

NY Times lots of good Palin stuff
(PS if you haven't seen Tina Fey as Palin on SNL, its in YouTube & hilarious)

Film - Revisiting Coen Country for Odd Men in ‘Burn After Reading’ - NYTimes.com.pdf
‘Hounddog,’ With Dakota Fanning - A Heroine and a Movie Savagely Abused - NYTimes.com
Spanish town still haunted by its brush with Armageddon - International Herald Tribune.pdf
Wind-Power Politics - NYTimes.com
Saying “No” to Chemical Farming in India.pdf
Film - Wayne Wang, Bridging Generations and Hemispheres - NYTimes.com
Pope Visits Shrine at Lourdes, Focusing on Social Problems - NYTimes.com
Film - Revisiting Coen Country for Odd Men in ‘Burn After Reading’ - NYTimes.com
This Land - In the Wilds of New Jersey, a Legend Inspires a Hunt - Series - NYTimes.com.pdf
New election low_ distorting the fact-checking - Los Angeles Times.pdf
Once Elected, Palin Hired Friends and Lashed Foes - NYTimes.com
Active Role for Palin’s Husband in Alaska Government - NYTimes.com
organic India
Wind-Power Politics - NYTimes.com.pdf

dump:
9-14 NYT

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/15/us/15crash.html?ref=todayspaper

Warning System Could Prevent Train Crashes
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
Published: September 14, 2008
LOS ANGELES — Federal investigators said Sunday that a collision warning system they have long called for could have prevented the head-on crash here last week between a commuter train and a freight train that killed 25 people.
The system, known as positive train control and in use sporadically in parts of the country, “would have prevented this accident,” said Kitty Higgins, a member of the National Transportation Safety Board, which is investigating the accident.
The board has long pressed for such a system on all trains, but the industry has resisted on the grounds that it is expensive and in some cases not reliable.
But Ms. Higgins, speaking at a news conference here Sunday evening, said she made her assessment after reviewing the preliminary evidence of the investigation, which she said showed that the commuter train bypassed a red signal and barreled through a switch, bending it “like a banana.”



http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/us/politics/14palin.html?sq=palin&st=cse&scp=2&pagewanted=all

Once Elected, Palin Hired Friends and Lashed Foes
WASILLA, Alaska — Gov. Sarah Palin lives by the maxim that all politics is local, not to mention personal.
So when there was a vacancy at the top of the State Division of Agriculture, she appointed a high school classmate, Franci Havemeister, to the $95,000-a-year directorship. A former real estate agent, Ms. Havemeister cited her childhood love of cows as a qualification for running the roughly $2 million agency.
Ms. Havemeister was one of at least five schoolmates Ms. Palin hired, often at salaries far exceeding their private sector wages.
When Ms. Palin had to cut her first state budget, she avoided the legion of frustrated legislators and mayors. Instead, she huddled with her budget director and her husband, Todd, an oil field worker who is not a state employee, and vetoed millions of dollars of legislative projects.
And four months ago, a Wasilla blogger, Sherry Whitstine, who chronicles the governor’s career with an astringent eye, answered her phone to hear an assistant to the governor on the line, she said.
“You should be ashamed!” Ivy Frye, the assistant, told her. “Stop blogging. Stop blogging right now!”
Ms. Palin walks the national stage as a small-town foe of “good old boy” politics and a champion of ethics reform. The charismatic 44-year-old governor draws enthusiastic audiences and high approval ratings. And as the Republican vice-presidential nominee, she points to her management experience while deriding her Democratic rivals, Senators Barack Obama and Joseph R. Biden Jr., as speechmakers who never have run anything.
But an examination of her swift rise and record as mayor of Wasilla and then governor finds that her visceral style and penchant for attacking critics — she sometimes calls local opponents “haters” — contrasts with her carefully crafted public image.


http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/us/politics/14todd.html?ref=politics

Active Role for Palin’s Husband in Alaska Government

By WILLIAM YARDLEY
Published: September 13, 2008

ANCHORAGE — In voting to issue a subpoena to Todd Palin in an investigation of the firing of the Alaska public safety commissioner, state lawmakers on Friday signaled that Mr. Palin, the husband of Gov. Sarah Palin, might have played a central role in one of the most contentious episodes of her governorship.
While that suggestion goes beyond the image presented of Mr. Palin during the Republican convention as a blue-collar family man and sportsman, it echoes a widely held understanding among lawmakers, state employees and lobbyists about Mr. Palin’s heavy engagement in state government.
In the small circle of advisers close to the governor, these people say, Mr. Palin is among the closest, and he plays an unpaid but central role in many aspects of the administration of Ms. Palin, the Republican nominee for vice president.
Mr. Palin’s involvement in the governor’s office has prompted an irreverent quip by some capital staff members when decisions are to be made that might affect the governor: “What would Todd do?”
Mr. Palin has encouraged lawmakers to support his wife’s agenda, helped her review budget items and polish speeches, surprised some lawmakers by sitting in on meetings and received copies of top administration staff e-mail messages.
Mr. Palin also has stepped into personnel issues that have personal relevance, most notably his contact with Walt Monegan, then the public safety commissioner, to express concern about the continued employment of a state trooper who had gone through a bitter divorce and custody battle with the governor’s sister. Mr. Monegan was later fired, and it is that firing that prompted the vote Friday on the subpoena.


http://movies.nytimes.com/2008/09/12/movies/12burn.html?scp=2&sq=coen&st=cse

MOVIE REVIEW
Burn After Reading (2008)

Coens Ask the C.I.A. for a License to Laugh
By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: September 12, 2008

Heart isn’t usually part of the discussion when we talk about movies, partly, I imagine, because it sounds too corny. And fuzzy. After all, what does it mean to say this or that director or film shows a lot of heart or too little? I ask only because “Burn After Reading,” the clubby, predictably self-amused comedy from Joel and Ethan Coen, has a tricky plot, visual style, er, to burn, but so little heart as to warrant a Jarvik 8.
Not that you probably won’t choke up a couple of ho-ho’s in between a few hee-hee’s whenever Big Daddy Brad Pitt, as a nitwit gym rat with a Pepe Le Pew two-tone hair-stack, twitches across the screen or the camera nuzzles one of the other goofy gargoyles so beloved by the Coens. Mr. Pitt’s Chad is the overripe second banana to Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand, Joel Coen’s wife), who has some vague job at the gym where the two sort of work. Chad’s a buffoon (the hard body as soft brain), and Mr. Pitt has been charged with delivering a caricature rather than a character, but because the actor loves playing sidemen and conveys such natural, irrepressible (irresistible) sweetness, he’s also one of the film’s saving graces.
It could use a few more. Like most of the Coens’ comedies, “Burn After Reading” is something of a shaggy sendup of an established genre and conventions, in this case the espionage flick. The film opens and closes with a Google Maps view of the Earth that has already become a cinematic cliché, a godly perspective that rapidly narrows in on the headquarters for the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Va. There, an analyst named Osborne Cox (John Malkovich) soon receives a demotion for boozing, the first knot in an increasingly and intentionally tangled thicket of contrivances and coincidences mostly involving three favorite American (and Hollywood) preoccupations: money, sex and self.
/.../
The biggest punch line is Linda, whom Ms. McDormand plays with a grin that tends to look more like a grimace, perhaps because she’s been saddled with yet another one of the Coens’ ghastly pageboy dos. (Really? Again?) It’s a punishing look for a cruelly unflattering character whose narcissism is matched only by her witlessness. Jerry Lewis has made a brilliant career out of playing stupid, but you never feel as if he loathes his disorderly orderlies because they’re slow on the uptake. The Coens in turn have made their careers with impeccable technique and an exaggerated visual style — they sure love their low-angle shots and traveling cameras — but it’s a wonder they keep making films about a subject for which they often evince so little regard, namely other people.


http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/movies/14bloo.html?scp=2&sq=hounddog&st=cse

Like Its Heroine, a Movie Encounters Savage Treatment

By JULIE BLOOM
Published: September 12, 2008


IT was known as the “Dakota Fanning rape movie” at the Sundance Film Festival in 2007. The press screening for “Hounddog” elicited actual boos, not to mention eviscerating reviews. Even before that, evangelical groups protested the film after someone involved in its early financing alleged publicly (and erroneously) that Ms. Fanning was naked in it.
Few movies recover from such a hostile reception, especially a low-budget Southern-gothic tale set in 1959 about a 12-year-old motherless girl obsessed with Elvis Presley who seductively sings for a teenager in exchange for tickets to a concert of the King’s. But thanks to a radically different cut of the movie and the coffers of a new independent film company listed on the Nasdaq’s over-the-counter market, “Hounddog” will finally make its way into 22 theaters across the country on Sept. 19.
Sitting in the Cupcake Café in Clinton this month, the film’s director, Deborah Kampmeier, sipped tea and reflected on the journey of her film, which cost just under $4 million. “The whole process was challenging from the beginning,” she said. “It’s a story about a girl whose voice and spirit are silenced, and then it’s about her reclaiming her voice on a deeper, truer level. It’s very interesting how the story that I’m trying to tell has been paralleled by the actual events of the making of the film.”
The criticism began in July 2006 after Lawrence Robins, the disgruntled producer involved in the early financing, went, Ms. Kampmeier said, to the news media with concerns. The director found herself on the receiving end of death threats. Meanwhile, petitions demanded that Ms. Fanning’s mother, Joy, be jailed on charges relating to child pornography.
“I did not set out to make a controversial film or a social commentary,” Ms. Kampmeier said. “If Dakota Fanning is so shamed for telling that story, what message does that give victims? I did not set out to make a statement, but in the 12-year process of trying to get this film made I have been unable to avoid facing the politics of being a woman filmmaker and telling women stories” — a reference to the industry’s few female directors.
Ms. Kampmeier, who is 43 and lives in upstate New York, wrote the script in 1996. For years she worked to secure financing, which kept falling through. In April 2006, when she finally packed her daughter and her dog and drove to Wilmington, N.C., to begin preproduction, she was still unsure if there would be sufficient backing. “We started with just enough money to get us through one week of production, and it continued that way through the entire shoot,” she said. “It was so stressful.”
Despite the brewing controversy and financial uncertainty, Ms. Kampmeier submitted the film to Sundance, unbeknownst to her cast (including Robin Wright Penn, David Morse and Piper Laurie). When the acceptance came in November, Ms. Kampmeier was forced to scramble. “It was insane what we had to do to get it ready,” she said. “It was a rough cut, I mean, really rough. All we were able to do was get a plot with a beginning, middle and end.”
Ms. Kampmeier does not regret the decision: “If I hadn’t gotten into Sundance, I don’t think this film would have gotten finished.” Eric Parkinson, chief executive of the distribution arm of Empire Film Group, which purchased the film with a $1 million advance, disagrees. “I feel that Deborah made a strategic error when she showed a rough cut at Sundance, and as a result many people who were expecting to see a finished film got something that was choppy, that was pretty long, that didn’t have music, effects, titles, and so it didn’t get the greatest of reviews.”
It hasn’t made finding theaters for “Hounddog” any easier. “I’ve never been in a situation where I’ve had people actually sabotaging theatrical bookings,” Mr. Parkinson said, adding that three theater chains have not booked the film, presumably, he said, because of interest-group pressure. Wanda Whitson, a spokeswoman for the exhibitor National Amusements, said in an e-mail message that her company had heard from Empire but that “we have not yet previewed the film.” AMC and Cinemark, two other exhibitors, did not respond to requests for comment.
Mr. Parkinson said, “I know these same kind of arguments happened with ‘The Last Temptation of Christ,’ and every once in a while there is a movie that really irks some people, but this is America, you are supposed to be able to see movies if you want to.”
The ratings gods have not been helpful, either. The Motion Picture Association of America rebuffed attempts to secure a PG-13 rating. “I think you could argue that there’s nothing else in the film that’s any more exploitive than an episode of ‘Law & Order,’ ” Mr. Parkinson said.
The rape scene does remain in the new version, which also contains a major structural change. “I really wanted to make clear that she loses her voice,” Ms. Kampmeier said. “That she’s silenced, and that she then reclaims her voice, and once she’s reconnected to her true voice instead of the imitation of a man’s voice, Elvis’s voice, she’s able to walk away from this world. In thinking about that, I decided that I would take out after the rape any scene that she was talking in.”
Ms. Wright Penn, also an executive producer, said the delay actually helped the film. “The beauty of time is it destructs on one hand but it gives you an open vein that you didn’t know you had before, and you can be like, ‘Oh, my God, this is exactly what I wanted the film to say.’ ”
Now Ms. Kampmeier has enlisted several advocacy groups to support the film, including the New York City Alliance Against Sexual Assault and First Star, a children’s advocacy group in Washington.
Ms. Kampmeier said she never considered giving up on the film. “It’s my heart,” she added. “Even if people don’t like my heart, if my heart touches someone else’s, then it’s all worth it.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/movies/14lim.html?ref=movies
FILM
Bridging Generations and Hemispheres

By DENNIS LIM
Published: September 12, 2008
IN Wayne Wang’s first feature, “Chan Is Missing” (1982), two taxi drivers go looking for an absent friend in San Francisco’s Chinatown. As they piece together contradictory testimonials from those who knew the missing man, what emerges is almost a composite sketch of Asian-American identity. But the film, which still feels fresh and insightful after all these years, is a mystery without a solution. Its conclusion, unencumbered by the foggy rhetoric of identity politics, is that identity is hard to pin down, up for grabs, something you make up as you go.

The point applies equally to this versatile director’s unpredictable career. For more than 25 years Mr. Wang, now 59, has reinvented himself time and again with apparent ease, zigzagging between America and Asia, big and small movies, safe bets and wild risks, insider and outsider status.
“The industry can really box you in, so you try to break the patterns,” he said over lunch in Manhattan in July.
“Chan Is Missing” and Mr. Wang’s second film, “Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart” (1985) established him as a central figure in two nascent movements: ’80s indie cinema and the Asian-American film scene. But he was eager to prove himself in the Hollywood idiom and followed up with the mainstream murder mystery “Slamdance” (1987). After his commercial breakthrough with “The Joy Luck Club” (1993), based on the Amy Tan best seller about two generations of Chinese women, he wanted to avoid being typecast as a China specialist or a director of weepies, and he collaborated with Paul Auster on “Smoke” (1995), a small, quiet drama set in a Brooklyn tobacco shop.
In recent years Mr. Wang has seemed content to play the role of studio journeyman, turning out smoothly anonymous movies like “Maid in Manhattan” (2002), a Jennifer Lopez fable of upward mobility; “Because of Winn-Dixie” (2005), a dog-centric family flick; and “Last Holiday” (2006), a Queen Latifah vehicle adapted from a 1950s Ealing comedy.
That phase of his career, he admits, went on longer than planned: “It was hard to get off the treadmill.”
Course-correcting yet again, Mr. Wang now returns to his first principles, even as he tries out some new tricks, with two of his most intimate films, “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers” and “The Princess of Nebraska,” both based on stories by the Chinese-born author Yiyun Li (like Mr. Wang, a Bay Area resident).
“I felt I should go back to something smaller, more personal, something about the Chinese-American community,” he said. “Walking around Chinatown now, you feel how the community has changed, which has to do with the new immigrants and how China has changed.”
In “A Thousand Years,” opening Friday, a Chinese widower arrives in an American suburb for an extended stay with his divorced daughter, who has lived in the States since college and who resents her father’s intrusions into her private affairs. “The Princess of Nebraska,” which is being distributed free on the Web starting Oct. 17 (youtube.com/ytscreeningroom), concerns a newer arrival, a young woman from Beijing attending a university in Omaha who has traveled to San Francisco to get an abortion.
Both films are subtle updates of the immigrant story, revealing the complexities beyond the customary themes of alienation and assimilation. Mr. Wang’s own biography is hardly typical. Born in Hong Kong — and named after his father’s favorite movie star, John Wayne — he moved to California in the late ’60s for school. His parents, who were Christians, arranged for him to stay with a Quaker family, who turned out to be prominent radicals. “There were crazy meetings with Black Panthers and anti-draft protesters, and Jerry Garcia and his people were there all the time,” Mr. Wang said. “My eyes were completely opened.”
The initial plan, medical school, was soon abandoned in favor of the arts, a decision that did not please his father, a garment manufacturer. The relationship came under strain again in the ’80s when Mr. Wang married Cora Miao, an actress, without telling his parents. (“We didn’t want a banquet,” he said.) But because Ms. Miao was a celebrity in Hong Kong, they soon found out via the gossip columns.
The standoff in “A Thousand Years” between traditional parents and Westernized offspring, negotiating each other’s expectations and boundaries, holds personal resonance for Mr. Wang. He recalled a visit from his father shortly after the wedding: “One night he said to us, ‘How did you think you could get married with only $3,000 in your bank account?’ Clearly he’d been going through our things.”
Parent-child relationships figure prominently in Mr. Wang’s work. “Dim Sum,” “Joy Luck Club” and “Anywhere but Here” (1999) revolve around mother-daughter bonds; “Smoke” is about the search for a surrogate father. The rote psychological explanation would be that Mr. Wang is working through his relationship with his father, who died a few years ago. But it could also be, he suggested, because he and his wife do not have children.
“I don’t think I idealize parent-child relationships,” he said, “but maybe I’m interested in that conflict because I don’t have my own conflicts.” Besides returning him to familiar themes “A Thousand Years” was an opportunity to indulge in a more contemplative pace, a luxury he forfeited on his Hollywood films. “The Princess of Nebraska,” on the other hand, was an outlet for his experimental side, responsible for films like “Life Is Cheap ... but Toilet Paper Is Expensive” (1989), a rambunctious Hong Kong-set shaggy-dog thriller.
By habit Mr. Wang works efficiently, to the point of turning projects into two-for-one deals. With time to spare after wrapping “Smoke,” he dashed off “Blue in the Face,” a freewheeling companion piece. “Princess of Nebraska” came about when he finished under budget on “A Thousand Years” and convinced his producers that he could fill out a double bill.
With “Princess” he was keen to capture the particularities of younger Chinese immigrants, whom he jokingly called an “alien” species. (He is prone to goofy jokes, and his laugh, an infectious, high-pitched guffaw, is perhaps his most distinctive trait.) “They’re Westernized but also ethnocentric,” he said. “Princess” also serves as a bridge between two generations of Chinese-American filmmakers. In search of a younger collaborator for this micro-budgeted film, Mr. Wang approached the Center for Asian American Media in San Francisco and was introduced to Richard Wong, who had just directed a well-reviewed first feature, “Colma: The Musical.”
Mr. Wong, 31, was the cinematographer on “Princess,” which was shot on consumer-grade digital video, and is credited as co-director. “It must have been liberating for Wayne to do something so guerrilla, where you could make every decision on the fly,” Mr. Wong said.
Mr. Wang sees a younger version of himself in Mr. Wong. “There’s a rebellious creativity there,” he said, “and he brought that out of me.”
At his age Mr. Wang admits that he is increasingly wary of the traps of fogeyism. “In some ways I’m getting more conservative, but it’s also part of my makeup to take risks, and I hope I never lose that,” he said. “I never wanted to get old and become one of those 50-year-old guys who are comfortable doing whatever they’re doing.”

news I can't snip

.. becasue its aural

http://www.onthemedia.org/

NPR
On The Media
WNYC
public radio

good news I cant snip but worth listening to!

news on news

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-cesca/liveblogging-the-republic_b_123699.html?page=2&show_comment_id=15310477#comment_15310477


BOB CESCA
 
Liveblogging The Republican Convention - Day Three

11:38PM

Brian Williams on MSNBC reading from Joe Klein's very important item today.

But I hope my colleagues stand strong in this case: it is important for the public to know that Palin raised taxes as governor, supported the Bridge to Nowhere before she opposed it, pursued pork-barrel projects as mayor, tried to ban books at the local library and thinks the war in Iraq is "a task from God." The attempts by the McCain campaign to bully us into not reporting such things are not only stupidly aggressive, but unprofessional in the extreme.



http://www.time-blog.com/swampland/2008/09/angry_amateurs.html

SEPTEMBER 3, 2008 2:04
Angry Amateurs
Posted by Joe Klein
The story of the day out here in Minneapolis is the McCain campaign's war against the press. This has been building for some time. Those of us who have criticized the candidate--and especially those of us who enjoyed good relations with McCain in the past--have been subject to off-the-record browbeating and attempted bullying all year. But things have gotten much worse in recent days: there was McCain's rude, bizarre interview with Time Magazine last week. Yesterday, McCain refused to an interview with Larry King, for God's sake, because Campbell Brown had been caught in the commission of journalism on CNN the night before, asking McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds what decisions Sarah Palin had made as commander-in-chief of the Alaska national guard. (There was an answer that the unprepared Bounds didn't have: she had deployed them to fight fires.)
So what's going on here? Two things. McCain is just plain angry at us. By the evidence presented in the utterly revealing Time interview, he's ballistic. This is a politician who needs to see himself as the man on the white horse, boldly traversing a muddy field...any intimations that he's gotten muddied in the process, or has decided to throw mud, are intolerable.

oops

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/09/john-mccain-acc.html


McCain Uses Walter Reed Middle School, Not Army Hospital, as Backdrop
By Sarah Lai Stirland September 05, 2008 | 5:01:43 PM

In the run-up to the 2008 Democratic National Convention, Barack Obama was mocked mercilessly by John McCain's campaign staff for the grandiose stage set-up where he was scheduled to accept his party's presidential nomination.
Now it's the Democratic bloggers' turn.
Some watching McCain's nomination acceptance speech Thursday night wondered whether he was asking to be mocked when the screen turned green behind him as he spoke.
McCain became the butt of jokes online and on the The Colbert Report this June after delivering a speech in Louisiana where the stage backdrop was a nauseating green. That spawned Stephen Colbert's "Green Screen Challenge" to make McCain's presentation more exciting. Some of the rather entertaining results can be seen below.
This time around, the green that television viewers saw behind McCain was actually the lawn of the Walter Reed Middle High School in North Hollywood, the name of which can be seen faintly in this picture.
While the giant Hibino video screen was probably meant to give all the delegates within the stadium a sense of context for the proceedings, for many it turned out to be a giant distraction for television viewers.
As some posters on this audio visual experts' forum note, the stage designers probably should have thought more about how the background screen would affect television viewers' experience of the speeches during close-up shots since they're the prime audience.
And as for the use of Walter Reed Middle High School's image in the background? Neither the McCain campaign nor the convention organizers could be reached at the time of this posting. Bloggers suspect that the image that was meant to have been projected was the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC, which would have made more sense since McCain spent a good deal of time talking about his injuries in Vietnam.
The high school's principal Donna Tobin declined to comment about the use of the school's image, but issued this statement, suggesting that she wasn't happy about it, on the school's blog:
“It has been brought to the school’s attention that a picture of the front of our school, Walter Reed Middle School, was used as a backdrop at the Republican National Convention. Permission to use the front of our school for the Republican National Convention was not given by our school nor is the use of our school’s picture an endorsement of any political party or view.”
Nevertheless, it's probably the McCain campaign that's having the last laugh.
Green screen or no, television audience measurement firm Nielsen says that the final night of the Republican National Convention drew 500,000 more viewers than Obama's spectacularly-staged nomination speech did: More than 38.9 million people watched McCain's speech while 38.4 million viewers watched Obama on the final night of the Democratic National Convention.

sex & death

MOVIES
Alan Ball Re-Emerges With Vampires, 'Towelhead'

Day to Day, September 5, 2008 · It's a big week for Alan Ball, the creator of the critically acclaimed death-obsessed series Six Feet Under. After several years out of the spotlight, his two major projects — the film Towelhead and HBO series True Blood — are emerging within a week of each other.
Like all Ball creations, both are dominated by the theme of sex.
Towelhead focuses on the story of 13-year-old Jasira, who goes to live with her strict Lebanese father in Houston during the Gulf War. There, she encounters racism, as well as a neighbor, played by Aaron Eckhart, who is eager to take advantage of her innocence.
"Between being on the receiving end of racism and totally inappropriate attention from an older man, it's the story of a young girl who does not have proper role models in her life," Ball tells Madeleine Brand. "She gets in situations that are pretty traumatic and abusive."
Ball sees his film as more of a tale of empowerment than victimization, unlike other tales of abuse.
What happens to Jasira resonates with him personally, he says, because he was abused when he was young. He also watched as his sister was killed in a car crash when he was just a teen.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations has has urged Ball to change the title of the movie, which is the same as the title of the novel by Alicia Erian that inspired it. Using "towelhead" — a racial and religious slur against Muslims and Arab-Americans — in this way, the organization maintains, will only serve to increase its use.
Ball says he searched for a better title but couldn't come up with one.
"Ultimately, I feel like if you ban the use of such words — it's an unintended consequence, but those words are imbued with that much more power," he says.
Similarly, his new show, True Blood, is about discrimination … against vampires. He sets up a world in which vampires are outcasts fighting to have the same rights as humans.
"There's an anti-vampire church. They show up holding up a sign that says, 'God Hates Fangs,' " Balls says, laughing.
Vampires are often a metaphor for sex, and in Ball's show it's no different. Sex and death — the themes that dominated Six Feet Under — emerge yet again, but this time with fangs.

http://www.npr.org/templates/rundowns/rundown.php?prgId=17

(listen to the entire segment !)

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=94321662

AND

Related NPR Stories

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=94320825


On Television
by David Bianculli
 
'True Blood,' Tasty New TV From Alan Ball And HBO
 
Fresh Air from WHYY, September 5, 2008 · Ever since The Sopranos cut to black, HBO has been searching for the next big thing.
The show that replaced it, John from Cincinnati, sure wasn't it. Not only was that David Milch series a big disappointment, but its appearance meant the disappearance of Milch's Deadwood — the HBO series that, at the time, was the best drama on television.
Showtime, meanwhile, captured lots of attention — and deserved every drop of it — with Dexter, its creepy, funny, bloody drama about a serial killer who kills other serial killers.
So it makes sense that HBO, which was in need of a creative transfusion anyway, went with its own creepy, funny, bloody drama series — and went back to one of its successful producers, Alan Ball, who spent years on Six Feet Under surrounded by death and the dead.
In True Blood, which premieres Sept. 7, he's surrounded by death and the un-dead. Adapted from a series of novels by Charlaine Harris, True Blood is set in a small Louisiana town — small enough to be near both bayous and run-down plantation mansions. It's based on the premise that vampires, two years earlier, finally admitted they were real, not myth, and started to mainstream into regular society. They "came out of the coffin," as one character describes it, because of the invention of a synthetic blood that could sustain vampires, so they no longer had to drink human or animal blood.
They can even go into bars and diners and order some — which is just what one vampire does in the opening episode of True Blood. His name is Bill, he's played by Stephen Moyer, and he's served by Sookie, a charming young waitress played by Anna Paquin.
Sookie has her own secrets and hidden strengths; she's telepathic, for one thing. But Sookie can't hear Bill's thoughts at all — so when he enters Sam's Diner, she knows he's different. And she's not scared. She's fascinated, and as excited as a preteen girl meeting a Jonas Brother.
If you were a fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and I hope you were, you're already familiar with the idea of mixing terror and humor in a vampire story. Buffy was better, and actually a lot more subtle, but True Blood approaches things differently.
Buffy, like a David Lynch drama, was about finding darkness hidden in the sunniest of places — it was set, after all, in Sunnydale. And more than anything else, Buffy was about the epic, endless struggle between good and evil.
True Blood has other things on its mind. It's big on allegory, and the tension about accepting vampires into society is an obvious play on civil rights in general, and gay rights in particular. (Sometimes too obvious, but it's interesting anyway.)
Even better is the idea that just as vampires can feed on humans, certain humans in True Blood like to feed on vampires: They either seek them out as exciting, dangerous sexual partners or synthesize vampire blood as a potent new black-market drug.
So while some outlaw vampires continue to hunt humans, there are some outlaw humans hunting vampires. Others, like Sookie and Bill, just want to get along.
But what chance do you have to love one another "till death do you part," when loving a vampire means it's death at the start?
True Blood explores that question, and others, in a show that builds slowly but surely. Stay with it for a few episodes, and you'll be craving your weekly dose of True Blood.
It's not going to replace The Sopranos — but as a synthetic substitute, it'll do for now.
David Bianculli is TV critic for Broadcasting & Cable magazine and TVWorthWatching.com.

inappropriate reactions

Angry Argentine commuters torch train in rush hour
Thu Sep 4, 2008 2:13pm EDT

BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) - Furious rail commuters in Argentina set fire to a train on Thursday in anger over delays during the morning rush hour....

Many passengers said the delays, caused by a broken down train, had cost them a day's work.

Argentina's dilapidated rail services are plagued by delays and travelers' anger sometimes erupts into violence....

http://www.reuters.com/article/email/idUSN0448099220080904

Frisco Tar Art 2

channel 5 also did a piece on the artist's work, but nothing national like I hoped.

tar art channel 5

http://www.nbc5i.com/news/17385059/detail.html

FRISCO, Texas --

Some residents have found art in an unlikely place after a Frisco city worker took it upon himself to get creative as he patched up the street.

With a quick glance at the street, there appears to be just a lot of squiggly lines, but closer inspection reveals what some are calling tar art.

"Might as well have fun with, it's not like those squiggly lines look good," resident Margie Calder said.

The designs include a picture of a dog, sailboat, flower and a sun.

The new additions to the neighborhood went unnoticed for months, until someone called the city of Frisco with questions about how the city's tax dollars were being spent.

"It probably took about five minutes to do the pieces of art, and the materials were probably $5, $10 at the most," Gary Hartwell of Frisco Public Works said.

A city street worker confessed to creating the art in December as he patched up the street.

"We've talked to the employee and told him not to do it again and that will be the extent of the discipline," Hartwell said.

The city of Frisco said the overwhelming response from neighbors has been positive, so they have no plans to remove the artwork.