Neil deMause: The Website

I’m going to be on KPFA-FM in the Bay Area tomorrow morning at 7:30 am, discussing the proposed San Francisco 49ers football stadium in Santa Clara. Those out of reach of KPFA’s signal (like me) can listen live via the station’s Internet streams; it looks like the shows are archived as well, so I’ll post a link here once that’s up.

UPDATE: The segment was postponed thanks to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, and will now air Friday morning at 7:30 am Pacific instead.

UPDATE #2: The show is now online. (Scroll ahead about half an hour to hear my segment.)

Apparently not everybody reads Metro NY. Two weeks after I debunked the claims that the recent theater stagehands’ strike was costing New York City $2 million a day, this week’s New York magazine declaims, in 30-point type no less:

…the stagehands’ strike kept hundreds of people out of work and cost the city an estimated $38 million…

As I wrote in my Metro column: “That’s [only] true in terms of ‘economic activity,’ a nebulous creature that includes all dollars spent on city turf. In terms of fiscal impact - actual city tax dollars lost - the three-week total was likely closer to $1 million, according to the comptroller’s office.”

A letter to the editor will be forthcoming. Then we can see if New York mag is as diligent about corrections as some other news outlets are.

Tuesday’s amNewYork had this to say about late-night shows’ attempts to get back on the air despite the writers’ strike:

Noticeably absent from the hoopla is David Letterman, who is trying another tact, according to Tom Keaney, spokesman for the host’s production company Worldwide Pants Incorporated. Keaney said the production company is trying to secure an interim agreement with the Writers Guild.

For Letterman to use tact certainly would be another tack.

My latest Metro New York op-ed (at 400 words apiece, they’re really more op-aphorisms) takes a shot at digging beneath the surface of baseball’s steroid scandal, or at least coming up with some new topics of conversation aside from whether the Yankees’ World Series titles are “tainted” now that Chuck Knoblauch may have been air-mailing throws into the seats with a juiced right arm:

A few items that were largely missed amid the acres of newsprint devoted to baseball’s latest steroid mess:

Did anyone really expect that the big names in baseball’s drug report would be a couple of aging pitchers? The steroid-abuser stereotype has always been that of an over-muscled batter, but the Mitchell report’s drift net snagged a lot of Ryan Franklins and Kent Merckers along with the Bondses and Cansecos… [read more]

Still nothing on the direct-link front, so to read my weekly Metro NY op-ed, you’ll need to continue to resort to the page image version. This week’s topic: the recent changes to the city’s Gifted and Talented program, and my experiences (or as the Metro changed it to read, “your” experiences - apparently they don’t teach differences between the specific and the universal in J-school) trying to even find a copy of a practice test for my son:

Here’s how it went when one parent of a soon-to-be kindergartener - that’d be me - tried last week to apply for the city’s new, streamlined Gifted and Talented program. The application form is on the Department of Education’s website. Find it, download it and note that while the application is there, the practice test is not.

Instead, you must head down to your local Neighborhood Enrollment Office… [read more]

(One other correction to an editing error: While I myself went to the Neighborhood Enrollment Office, forms should be available from local district offices as well.)

Here’s Emily Friedman of ABC News going all spoilery in her piece on the controversy over “The Golden Compass”:

As Lyra gets closer to her goal of reaching the Magisterium – located in the alternate universe of Bolvanger – she realizes that they have been capturing children, removing their souls and preventing them from being touched by “dust,” a substance that is eluded to be representative of the free will the Magisterium is trying to avoid and eliminate.

What’s eluding Emily Friedman (and the ABC News copy editors): the word “allude.”

Starting today, I’m going to be writing a weekly op-ed each Monday for Metro New York, which for the uninitiated is one of New York’s two free daily papers. (Metro is most readily identified as “the green one.”) For my debut column, I revisit a topic I touched on here before: how much the recent theater strike really cost the city economy, and whether the numbers being thrown around by the news media are really justified.

If most New Yorkers gave much thought to the stagehands’ strike - other than those in the theater district, who were either bemoaning lost customers or cheering the suddenly uncrowded sidewalks - it was because, we were told, the dispute was of vital importance to the city. The shuttering of one of the city’s key industries, news coverage incessantly repeated, was costing the city millions of dollars every day Broadway remained dark… [read more]

[NOTE: I haven’t quite figured out the inner works of the Metro website just yet, so until I do, the only link I have is to an image of the actual print edition page.]