Bay Area readers: I’ve just been asked to do a signing of Prisoner of Trebekistan at this year’s WonderCon up at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. As I am slowly becoming a comics geek in midlife, this is a thrill.
My workload is still pretty thick right now, so it’ll be a very brief visit once we get the details worked out. More info shortly.
A new academic study based on 10 years of financial data has found that media companies which invest in their newsrooms, producing a superior product, are much more profitable than companies that slash and burn, hoping to cut costs.
So Tribune, McClatchy, and the other media companies who have been buying newspapers and then cutting staff aren’t just betraying the public — they’re betraying their own interests as well.
According to the BBC, Baghdad residents are using Google Earth to plot their paths around town, hoping to anticipate and avoid various militias. I cannot begin to imagine.
Meanwhile, these enterprising folks put together this look at Saddam’s Baghdad palace, before and after the US occupation:
I have no additional comment. (Note: their site has started having server troubles, so if you just see a big white box, you’ll have to try again later. Sorry for any inconvenience.)
I’ve been a fan of Ira Glass and This American Life for many years, so it was a kick when Ira was kind enough to blurb Prisoner of Trebekistan.
A few weeks ago, Ira invited me to be a guest on a program themed around quiz shows, so we chatted for about an hour. Our interview will probably be edited down to about a minute or two of the final result, but still, for the curious, the show airs this weekend. You can find your local date, time, and station info here.
Incidentally, there’s also a Showtime TV version of TAL debuting on March 22nd. From what I’ve heard, they’ve done a pretty cool job of re-thinking the program as imaginative TV, not just sticking a camera in the studio a la Howard Stern. So that should be worth seeing.
