WOXY is returning to the digital airwaves this morning ladies and gentiles at 10 A.M. EST! As previously mentioned here, here and here, WOXY was a great FM station out of Cinci that was by all means “independent” and family-owned. They decided to sell out after many years of serving the public, and sadly the webcasting stream went with it. That is, until now! Some very kind folks swooped in to save the webcasting portion of it (which, I might add, was terribly popular).

News Hounds is to cable news networks what Television without Pity is to uh, well, television (but not cable news networks). They recap cable news programs summarizing interesting tidbits throughout the day, so you don’t have to sit through it. Both TV Without Pity and News Hounds can smell bullshit and then promptly skewers it. With TV without Pity, the comedy usually arises from the witty summaries. In the case of the couple of stories I’ve read on News Hounds, the comedy is usually provided by the shouting, derisive gasbags. One cool thing is that they’ve got it categorized by both network and by show. I suggest you check it out.

Now for a little foot-notery. Thanks to Drudge, I was alerted to a (unnamed by Drudge) documentary about Fox News’ “Fair and Balanced” coverage called Outfoxed that will be debuting in New York very soon. Having searched the google, I found the site, and they linked to News Hounds. Outfoxed and News Hounds, by the way, were and are supported by MoveOn.org. Further, Outfoxed seems to be compiled of raw satellite footage much in the same way Brian Springer’s brilliant Spin (1993) was, regarding Gulf War v1.0. You can download Spin in it’s entirety at Illegal Art, which is brilliant in and of it’s own right.

That is all, hippies, good night.

Checking my gmail email address (hamsandwich AT gmail DOT com) today, I noticed I had a piece of mail! Exciting!

Hi Ben,



I thought you might be interested to know that I used some of your Creative Commons licensed photos as part of a presentation that I did recently on wikis. In case you might be interested, here is a link to the presentation “slides” (click on the photos to advance):



http://www.minezone.org/wiki/MVance/Introduction


And here is the “thanks” page:



http://www.minezone.org/wiki/MVance/ThanksTo


Thanks for making your photos available.



- Matt

http://www.minezone.org/wiki/MVance/AboutMatt

Well, I must admit that I didn’t even think about the Creative Commons and my photography — but yeah, it’s in the footer, and yeah I don’t mind if you use it! Matt’s a true champ, though, by A) giving me credit and B) letting me know! Thanks a bunch, Matt.

It would appear that WOXY will shortly be continuing it’s webcasting, according to an article in the Cincinatti Enquirer forwarded to me by long-time lurker (and Cinci resident) Kevin McCarty (sup Kev!).
This is also backed up by WOXY‘s frontpage.

To quote:

Kind fate has sent us two dedicated listeners with the vision and courage to step up as partners to fund the continued broadcast of 97X The Future of Rock and Roll over the Internet.

These magnanimous folks want to remain anonymous, but they feel passionately about “doing the right thing” and “doing good work,” and we are the lucky recipients of their generous spirit.

Like Phoenix rising from the ashes, 97X – just as we have always loved it – will be returning soon. It will take us a few weeks to get set up for the future, but be assured that Mike and Barb and Shiv and Bryan Jay are already hard at work to bring it all back.

Keep checking woxy.com for updates … we’ll announce an air date just as soon as we know it.

Give a little shout of thanks to our “angels” – and stay tuned!

Awesome!

After a couple of weeks of floating around the bus-station outside of the Coolsville known as GMail (Google’s web-mail venture), I was finally invited aboard by Louisville’s own Jason “Fluffy” Clark. Rad. You can now email hamsandwich AT gmail DOT com, and I shall be there, awaiting your communique from Dorksville.

You see, GMail is still in “beta”, so the only way to get an account is to be “invited”. This inevitably sparked a bit of a caste system among those people who follow such webnovations™®. Even just last night I was feigning sadness to Najati over my lack of GMail. True to American form — I have lusted after it, but really, I don’t have much use for it, as I lease my own colocated rack server. In any case — the skinny on the invitations is this: invitations are sent from existing GMail users to friends, and those invitations pop-up randomly as a link in the GMail user’s inbox. So, make friends or be shunned — shunned I say!

Just a quick link — here is a decent article on Louisville Mojo, a great local web site that has grown quite a bit in the last year or so. Turns out, I have two (tenuous) connections to it. One is Michael Briedenbach, with whom I worked at Corvus, and the second is Chuck Burke, the founder and el presidente of Louisville Mojo and also had a hand in Dance of Shiva, a wildly popular BBS here in Louisville in the early 90′s where I was a member. They had newsgroups there! It was all very exciting. BBS’ing was very much a “community” sort of thing, and it’s taken a while for the Internet to finally find it’s foothold in the culture to support communities. That’s all really, just thought I’d remember them good old days.

Today, after the batteries on my Nomad drained themselves playing early (read: good) U2, I decided to tune into WOXY up in Cincinnati via their internet audio stream — but it appeared to be down. Checking out their site, I learned that they A) stopped broadcasting on the web May 13th and B) had been sold back in January!!

Ever since I first tuned in to them back in early 2003, I had been smitten. I kept up-to-date with shows in Cinci, as well as good music in general. While it wasn’t perfect, it was still very independent and played good music. 97X was owned by Linda and Doug Balogh, who had solely owned and operated the station since the early 80′s. Being in their mid-to-late thirties at that time, they are now pushing 60, and would like to find time to enjoy the spoils of their labor. As mentioned on Sledge’s (a WOXY DJ) blog, they very well could have sold the radio station in ’96 or ’97 for triple what they received in the sale this year, but they decided to fight the good fight against behemoth corporations. (Don’t get me started on the 1996 Telecommunications Act which allowed corporations even greater ownership percentages in radio markets, please. It also started the broadband internet revolution, so it’s not ENTIRELY bad.) So alas, one of the very few family-owned/independent radio stations has gone off the air.

There were initially some indications of attempts to salvage 97X as an internet-only stream, but after some calculations it would seem that was made impossible by the RIAA‘s insistance on royalties for web broadcasts. Yay, way to stifle independence in radio. I hope thee choke on your foie gras.

For futher reading, check out Sledge’s blog, and his comments on the sale of 97X. Also, oh-so-apropo, PBS’s Frontline will be airing a broadcast entitled “The Way The Music Died” tonight at 9 PM. I’ll be watching, as should you. Oh, and it should be noted that the image used in this article is in fact, not related to WOXY or radio, but the cover image from Matt Fraction‘s great comic with the same title as this post.

In the last week, since we had been on vacation (and though we had ample Internet access) I had not kept up with Achewood, one of my favorite web comics of all time — even outpacing Penny Arcade by a far sight. Well, in the last week the author/artist/artiste of Achewood, Chris Onstad has really hit close to home with ol’ Ben.

“It’s like someone sold the mineral rights to my childhood to this man,” I tell Geoff, “and he’s dosing them out to me in the form of a cartoon strip each weekday.”

Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan, Pinewood Derby cars (and how those damned pre-cut models were all so fab, but then our Troop outlawed them because it took away the spirit of the whole father-son Pinewood Derby car team thing — yeah! That’ll show you, you rich bastards with your fancy cars.), “your momma” jokes — wow. I’m stunned at the creativity of this man, but at the same time I fear when this time in my life will be over. When the artists of my generation have mined the Transformers and He-Man for all their comic worth. Think of the (old) children, Onstad! Conserve thy funny lode.

Greetings chilluns — I have made a couple of new CSS themes for your enjoyment. You will note at the bottom of each page a “theme” selector. Currently, you most likely are viewing the default white/grey/blue theme. May I suggest trying the “tornado” or “old skool” theme? Some of you may recognize the “old skool” theme as the old-old-old theme of thelocust.org.

Wanna see what it really looked like back in the day? Check out thelocust.org, circa February 2001, via the Wayback Machine.

I got some mail (of the electronic persuasion) from yet another Brit with some silly problem with my instantRSS project, so I did a little work, and fixed it up. Voila! New version 1.3, now validates with CSS validating thingies: http://feeds.archive.org/validator/ and http://rss.scripting.com/.