You did it to make a profit?!

I’m having a laugh about all the hub-bub over D Magazine’s latest cover story.
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People are getting seriously mad about it – and probably the majority of them haven’t read the article.
The Star-Telegram says the magazine is causing an uproar – but then they only interviewed three people. Shame.
Pegasus News says Sprout stores (which banned the magazine) just doesn’t get it.

Local media censorship efforts are running rampant lately. First, we get blocked by the Lancaster ISD — now Sprouts in Flower Mound has taken D Magazine off the shelves over complaints regarding the cover story “Why You Should Hate Southlake.”
Guess they failed to read the subhead: “Because the kids are smarter, stronger, and better-looking than yours. And they prove it every Friday night.”
And those smart kids apparently won’t grow up to manage Sprouts stores. They probably understand the concept of juxtaposition.

I think the D Magazine staff are just having fun with it all – and they should.

I do get offended when they say we wrote that headline “just to sell magazines.” I mean, we also wrote it to please Wick (D Magazine publisher). It’s what we live for.

And here’s another comment

It’s a rare day when you can simultaneously prove Stevie Wonder and H.L. Mencken right.

The best part of it is those people who are complaining that D Magazine put that cover on it’s magazines simply to sell magazines.
Hmm. Sounds like it was a good plan then. I think they are in the business of making money. The more magazines they sell the more advertising they can get and the more money they can get to pay their employees and put out a better product (or simply hoard it all to themselves if they so chose ;-))
Either way, you’d think some of the folks in Southlake would have something better to complain about.
I’ve seen a lot worse.

More ways to listen to OrangeNoiseRadio and Live365

If you don’t like being tied to your computer all the time to listen to OrangeNoiseRadio, there are a number of products out now that will enable you to listen to True Music :: OrangeNoiseRadio from anywhere in your home. You can look at each of the items below or at the Casa de Blundell.com store on the right hand side of the page.

4 months ago and 44 years ago

Four months ago today, April 28, 2007, I married My Life, Laurie Janine. I haven’t regretted it one moment since.

Forty-four years ago today, August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington D.C. Few speeches have had the impact MLK’s speech did. And yet we’re still fighting the “the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination…” and people who find themselves in exile in this land.

“Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.”

You can read the full text of the speech after the jump…
Continue reading 4 months ago and 44 years ago

Stem cells could rebuild heart tissue

From NPR:

Heart muscle doesn’t regenerate when it’s damaged, one reason heart attacks are so debilitating. A dream of researchers is to build new heart muscle using transplanted cardiac stem cells. Scientists at the University of Washington have taken a potentially important step in that direction, using embryonic stem cells as their starting material.
Scientists haven’t made much progress obtaining cardiac stem cells that would make the heart cells they would like to see at work. So Charles Murry and his colleagues at the University of Washington have been using embryonic stem cells, which retain the potential to turn into any tissue type in the body.

Listen to the full story

Journalist blogging

Teaching Journalism has an interesting comparison on journalists who blog.
They compare:

  • Bridget Gutierrez, who writes the blog Get Schooled for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Gutierrez covers K-12 education for the newspaper. Previously, she covered K-12 education for the San Antonio (Texas) Express-News
  • Jamie Gumbrecht, who writes the blog It’s All About for the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader. Gumbrecht covers entertainment, media, performing arts, online trends and youth for the newspaper.

It’s a good write-up for journalists and bloggers. I’ve always been a fan of using blogging to extend the newsroom, extend thoughts from the story and to live-blog events that may not translate as well into print. Some of the most fun I had while writing for the paper and blogging was live-blogging city council workshops and budget hearings. There’s a lot of information that gets passed along that can’t always fit into a news story — it also makes for a fun read on the blog. If the money was there it would be fun to start doing that again on my own… hmmmm.