Recently in Media Category

A friend sent along this email tonight that seemed worth sharing:

February 3, 2008 will mark the 49th anniversary of Buddy Holly's untimely death near the Mason City ,Iowa airport....I mark the day every year and often e mail my friends to remind them to mark it as well...for some reason the 49th anniversary has caused me to think about it more than usual...Buddy would be 71 years old now had he lived...he never saw miocrowave ovens...cell phones...8 tracks...home computers..the internet...DVDs or CDs....color TV or flat screens I pods...carbon fiber..and many more things...so the world has changed a great deal...BUT Buddy's music still lives on...I do not use the word timeless because nothing is timeless in the sense that as time moves on everything will be seen with a different perspective..we will never know what direction his work mayt have taken but his own words and his last recorded music such as Leaning the Game and Crying Waiting Hoping along with the orchestra back up in the Pytrhian Temple recordings indicate that he had alot to add to Rock and Roll and that he probably would have added many more hit records to his alrerady impressive body of work that he had compiled the 3 or 4 short years...His work has been played by many of the great Rock and Rollers and although it is not timeless to me it seems as ttimely and fresh today as the day it was recorded...and as Sonny Curtis said in his song about Buddy...the music did not die on February 3,1959 rather it lives every time someone plays roc and roll...so give this very talented musoical genius wgho left us too soon a moment of respect on February 3....I certainly will

A dozen years ago I was living in Nashville and spent some time with Waylon Jennings for my book about country music. He told me the story about the night the plane went down. He was supposed to be on the plane with Holly. It was a lottery system, as some people were driving and others were flying. The Big Bopper was sick that night. He pulled rank and basically bullied Jennings into giving up his seat on the plane. Jennings had no choice, but his dark, joking response was, "I hope the plane crashes."

Looks like someone is going to get a sweet settlement in her future (with a bit of pureed spinach tucked inside).

An author today sued Jerry Seinfeld's wife for allegedly plagiarizing a cookbook she wrote and also accused the comedian of defaming her as a "wacko" during an interview with David Letterman. In a federal lawsuit, Missy Chase Lapine alleges that Jessica Seinfeld "brazenly plagiarized" from her 2007 book "The Sneaky Chef" in the writing of Seinfeld's own cookbook (both volumes focused on how to prepare healthy meals for finicky young eaters). When news stories appeared detailing similarities in the two books, Jerry Seinfeld launched a "malicious, premeditated, and knowingly false and defamatory attack" on Lapine, the complaint charges. As part of that campaign, Seinfeld went on Letterman's show and described Lapine as "angry" and "hysterical." He then compared her to the kind of "wackos" that had previously stalked Letterman. The comedian then added that Lapine was a "three-name woman" and "if you read history, many of the three-name people do become assassins."

Update: The Seinfeld's lawyer has now responded. The Seinfeld's attorney Richard Menaker says of the claims, "Both are without merit. There's no truth in fact or law to this claim of plagiarism. The idea for Jessica Seinfeld's book came from her own experiences with her family out of her own kitchen." As for the defamation claim, Menaker said, "Jerry Seinfeld is entitled to his opinions. Even though Jerry Seinfeld is a public figure, he doesn't lose his right to free speech because of that."

How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice.

How do you get to the Oval Office? Wikipedia.

When Vífill Atlason, a 16-year-old high school student from Iceland, decided to call the White House, he could not imagine the kind of publicity it would bring.

Introducing himself as Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, the actual president of Iceland, Atlason found President George W. Bush's allegedly secret telephone number and phoned, requesting a private meeting with him.

"I just wanted to talk to him, have a chat, invite him to Iceland and see what he'd say," Vífill told ABC News.

A White House official, who asked not to be identified, denied the young man had accessed a private number but instead dialled 202-456-1414, the main switchboard for the West Wing.

Vífill's mother, Harpa Hreinsdottir, a teacher at the local high school, said her son did, in fact, get through to a private phone.

"This was not a switchboard number of any kind," she told ABC News, "it was a secret number at the highest security level."

Vífill claims he was passed on to several people, each of them quizzing him on President Grímsson's date of birth, where he grew up, who his parents were and the date he entered office.

"It was like passing through checkpoints," he said. "But I had Wikipedia and a few other sites open, so it was not so difficult really."

All the bloviating about the so-called "War on Christmas" just might provoke a war after all. New York mag decides to join the fray, on the anti-Christian side.

Amid a welter of publicity for its supposedly anti-Christian message, The Golden Compass finally arrives in theaters today. We've seen it, and despite our high hopes, this neutered adaptation of the first entry in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy will probably not kill God or turn America's children into atheists like the Catholic League promised. But given half a chance, any of the films on our list of the Ten Most Anti-Christian Movies of All Time just might.

Monty Python, I get. But Name of the Rose?

Newsweek has a fascinating cover story this week on the future of the book, timed to coincide with the newest e-reader book silver bullet by Amazon. The retailer is releasing Kindle, which it hopes will do what all the previous e-readers have not done: sell. Here's Newsweek, by contrast, describing the perfect reading device: "It is a more reliable storage device than a hard disk drive, and it sports a killer user interface. (No instruction manual or "For Dummies" guide needed.) And, it is instant-on and requires no batteries. Many people think it is so perfect an invention that it can't be improved upon, and react with indignation at any implication to the contrary." That object, of course, is the book.

Later, the article returns to this theme:

"There's 550 years of technological development in the book, and it's all designed to work with the four to five inches from the front of the eye to the part of the brain that does the processing [of the symbols on the page]," says Hill, a boisterous man who wears a kilt to a seafood restaurant in Seattle where he stages an impromptu lecture on his theory. "This is a high-resolution scanning machine," he says, pointing to the front of his head. "It scans five targets a second, and moves between targets in only 20 milliseconds. And it does this repeatedly for hours and hours and hours." He outlines the centuries-long process of optimizing the book to accommodate this physiological marvel: the form factor, leading, fonts, justification … "We have to take the same care for the screen as we've taken for print."

But after singing the praises of old-fashioned books, the article moves into much more interesting territory, namely how books will cease being merely objects between covers.

Google's people have thought about how this connectivity could actually affect how people read. Adam Smith, product director for Book Search, says the process is all about "getting rid of the idea that a book is a [closed] container." One of his colleagues, Dan Lansing, describes how it might work: "Say you are trying to learn more about the Middle East, and you start reading a book, which claims that something happened in a particular event in Lebanon in '81, where the author was using his view on what happened. But actually his view is not what [really] happened. There's newspaper clippings on the event, there are other people who have written about it who disagree with him, there are other perspectives. The fact that all of that is at your fingertips and you can connect it together completely changes the way you do scholarship, or deep investigation of a subject. You'll be able to get all the world's information, all the books that have been published, all the world's libraries."

Jim Gerber, Google's content-partnerships director, suggests that it might be an interesting idea, for example, for someone on the liberal side of the fence to annotate an Ann Coulter book, providing refuting links for every contention that the critic thought was an inaccurate representation. That commentary, perhaps bolstered and updated by anyone who wants to chime in, could be woven into the book itself, if you chose to include it. (This would probably make Ann Coulter very happy, because you'd need to buy her book in order to view the litany of objections.)

This, to me, is very exciting. One of the things I have written about is that I think one problem the Bible has in contemporary life is that people think of it as this object, with black covers, and gilt-edged pages. One result of my travels is that I don't think of it as a book anymore. I think of it first as a map -- with most of its actions occurring in the Fertile Crescent comprised of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Promised Land in between. I think of it next as a great adventure. And I think of it finally as a series of stories, most of which are incomplete, with lots of blank spaces and room for commentary. That's one primary reason why the Bible has survived -- anybody can make his or her own interpretation. I think the idea that these new e-readers will allow people more easily to add their own commentaries, and share them with others, will help the The Book survive even longer.

And, by extension, help all books do the same.

FeilerFaster takes you where few other blogs, or at least few other blogs on Beliefnet, dare to go. Earlier this year, it was backstage at the Super Bowl. Now, the World Series! On Sunday night, following an all-night blow-out for...

Vanity Fair's October issue contains its annual list of "the world's most powerful people," 100 of the bankers and media moguls, publishers and image makers who shape the lives of "billions." A Jewish editor in Chicago has decided to count...

For the last few years I've had a stat I heard once over dinner rattling around my head. The stat was that only ten percent of Americans will ever set foot in a bookstore. It sounded just implausible enough to...

I'm scheduled to board a ship in Athens, Greece, this weekend and sail for Turkey, so I'll be offline for a few days. In the meantime, here are some links to some fascinating pieces I've enjoyed recently. The first is...

Or is it the media? Do we really need a report in every media outlet that Croc shoes can get caught in escalators and threaten the health of Western civilization? They're plastic. They're easily washable. They work. One of the...

Google is preparing to sue the starters of JewTube claiming copyright infringement, but Yahoo avoided doing the same over Jewhoo. What is the Jew.S.A. coming to? Come to think of it, maybe we should start a contest for the best...

CNN called as I was on the Brooklyn Bridge this morning reporting that my appearance has been bumped by Larry Craig playing footsie with the justice system and a terror plot in Germany....

When I went to Iraq a few years ago for WHERE GOD WAS BORN, I drove from the Garden of Eden and Abraham's birthplace in the extreme south of the country to Nimrod and Nineveh in the extreme north. Now,...

I recently got into a little back-and-forth with Mrs. Feiler Faster over whether it is OK to give children iced tea. Now comes word that a teenager in Britain actually overdosed on coffee. Obviously this is an extreme example, but...

A meek defense in the NYT about the use of baby videos contains an interesting stat: Children spend 49 minutes a day in front of screens and only 30 minutes a day in front of books. This applies, in this...

It's television. Longtime readers of Feiler Faster know that I've had a bit of an ongoing battle with certain members of my family. I'm not a lock-the-TV-in-the-basement guy. I realize that there are certain times of the week when a...

If my email is any indication, I would say the use of audiobooks seems to be ticking up. Of course, like any author, I am thrilled when people read my wok in any form. But audiobooks have clear tradeoffs. On...

A few weeks ago I complained (joining what turned out to be a chorus of complainers) when Angelina Jolie besmirched the legacy of Danny Pearl by imposing absurd media-restrictions on her interviews to promote "A Mighty Heart." Now it turns...

Kudos to my brother for pointing out on Saturday night what I've now seen elsewhere on the web. TIME has a provocative cover this week showing a helicopter airlifting the A(merica) out of I-R-A-Q. The image is clearly evocative of...