Happy birthday to me

Candles from mom, cake by Jenn. Jenn will pay for her little joke: In about five years, I start telling everyone how good she looks for 40.

Podcast line-up, December 2007

So, you got an iPod for [holiday of your choice] this year, did you? Well, in addition to sticking your entire CD collection into it, you can use it to replace your radio with a custom made channel, which you can pause, rewind or skip ahead with, too, via the magic of podcasting. It’s certainly what I’ve done, although I get a lot of podcasts from radio stations, mixing and matching for my own personal tastes.

Below is what I’m listening to now. Copy the links into the podcast software of your choice, such as iTunes:

• alt.NPR: B-Side Radio
• APM: Marketplace
• Coverville
• Denver Post’s Lyrics Undercover
• From the Pages of the Post
• Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing
• KCRW’s Film Reviews
• KCRW’s Martini Shot
• KCRW’s Minding the Media
• KCRW’s Morning Becomes Eclectic
• KCRW’s The Business
• KCRW’s The Treatment
• KCRW’s Today’s Top Tune
• KQED’s The California Report
• MPR: The Current Song of the Day
• NPR: 10 a.m. ET News Summary
• NPR: Driveway Moments
• NPR: Foreign Dispatch
• NPR: Science Friday
• NPR: Story of the Day
• NPR: The Bryant Park Project
• Official Disneyland Resort Podcasts
• On the Media
• Our Ocean World
• PRI’s The World: Geo Quiz
• PRI’s The Sound of Young America
• StarDate
• That Sound
• The Kevin & Bean Show from KROQ
• The Loh Down on Science
• The Loh Life
• The Official LOST Podcast
• The Onion Radio News
• They Might Be Giants Podcast
• The Week in Tech
• Tiki Bar TV

Not all of these are daily. Some are weekly, a few are monthly and some are quarterly or follow no set schedule. I used to get more, like Fresh Air, but I found myself either not having time to listen to them.

The Coyote Project, afterword

I tried e-mailing this to Sharon, who’s been tracking this story since the beginning, but the glut of images choked the Star’s e-mail. So, here it is, blogged instead:

Photos of Dora from our Christmas visit to Oakland, where the stray cat who came in from the cold is alive and well and a big fan of my dad. As Jenn said, “All’s well that ends well!”

Women in Refrigerators: A response

In the past, I’ve mentioned my association with the Women in Refrigerators site featuring interviews by Gail Simone about why comic creators keep using any available female character (except Wonder Woman, it seems) as a victim for some really brutal stuff.

Today, Something Positive comes up with a response of their own. It would probably help to be familiar with WiR before reading the strip.

Credit crunch delays Freedom buying out minority partners

Via the Wall Street Journal:

Family-controlled Freedom Communications Inc., which owns the Orange County Register newspaper, has postponed a plan to buy out two minority partners, Blackstone Group LP and Providence Equity Partners.

Freedom was planning to spend more than $500 million to buy back the roughly 45% stake held by Blackstone and Providence, according to people familiar with the situation. Freedom had intended to borrow from General Electric Co.’s GE Capital and others to fund the purchase, and the deal was nearly complete a few weeks ago, those people say.

But negotiations were suspended amid the credit-market turmoil. Some banks were leery of lending money to Freedom, in part because of uncertainties facing the newspaper industry, and Freedom also faced higher borrowing costs, a person familiar with the situation said. The Hoiles family, which controls the majority stake in Freedom, decided to wait until the market calms down, this person said.

The article also mentions the Hesperia Star:

In recent years Freedom’s businesses have turned in a mixed performance. While the Orange County Register has been buffeted by the same forces affecting all metropolitan daily newspapers, such as the migration of classified advertising to the Internet, the company’s community newspapers and television stations have done a little better.

Well, sort of.