Be The Smartest Person On Your Block! (On Paper, Anyway...) Handing out diplomas is big business these days, and not just for the colleges and universities that actually expect you to go to class to earn one. "Diploma mills," online companies which churn out fake diplomas, either purporting to be from real, prestigious schools, or from obscure schools which aren't actually schools at all, have become a major problem for employers seeking to verify the credentials of job applicants. Now, two members of the US Congress have "asked the [Government Accounting Office] to investigate the matter after reports surfaced last summer that a high-level employee in the Homeland Security Department claimed to have three degrees from a suspected diploma mill." Wired 03/18/04
Posted: 03/18/2004 5:29 am
ROM To Get $25 Million Gift Canada's second-wealthiest family is set to announce a massive gift to the Royal Ontario Museum, which is in the planning stages of a CAN$200 million expansion project. Galen and Hilary Weston will contribute as much as CAN$25 million to the ROM's capital campaign, a donation which will buy the Westons the naming rights to at least some part of the new expansion. The contribution means that the ROM should have all the cash it needs to go ahead with the first phase of its expansion. The Globe & Mail (Canada) 03/18/04
Posted: 03/18/2004 6:27 am
Thieves Hit Elvis Museum Thieves have raided the Las Vegas Elvis Presley Museum - known as Elvis-A-Rama. "Police said the suspects stole a tow truck and drove it into the museum's rear door, then used lead pipes to break open three Plexiglas cases. The bandits were in the museum less than five minutes, police estimated. Among the stolen inventory: a gold-plated handgun, a custom scarf, a bracelet and watch, Presley's Humes High School ring from 1953 and a Louisiana Hayride "E. Presley Day" ring from 1956." ABCNews.com 03/17/04
Posted: 03/17/2004 9:33 pm
Brilliant: I'm Naked On A Plinth In Trafalgar Square After 150 years of debate, the sculpture for the fourth, hitherto empty, plinth in Trafalgar Square was chosen on Monday; the winning artwork was Marc Quinn's marble statue of Lapper, naked, eight months pregnant and as smooth and exposed as a newborn chick. 'I think it's absolutely brilliant. I don't feel the least bit embarrassed about everyone staring at me naked - I wouldn't have done it if I felt like that. I hope it opens their eyes'." The Guardian (UK) 03/18/04
Posted: 03/17/2004 9:20 pm
Archaeologists: Stonehenge Tunnel A Bad Idea Archaeologists are protesting the British government's plan to build a £200 million 2.1km tunnel tunnel under Stonehenge. They charge that the project will result in "irreversible damage to the World Heritage site". Salisbury Journal 03/17/04
Posted: 03/17/2004 5:10 pm
Small Orchestra Struggles, Part LXXVI "Plagued by poor ticket sales and high costs, the Long Island (NY) Philharmonic has canceled the last two concerts of its 25th anniversary season, its second cancellation within four months. What should have been a year of celebration has become a time of trial, with missed payroll deadlines and a $250,000 deficit in the orchestra's $2.1 million budget." Newsday (New York) 03/18/04
Posted: 03/18/2004 5:54 am
A New Orchestra, And A Lot Of Russian Politics... Two years ago Vladimir Spivakov resigned (or was let go) as music director of the Russian National Orchestra. Within hours, Vladimir Putin heard about it and asked Spivakov to form a new orchestra. Many of Spivakov's former players joined him, and a new orchestra was born, and now ... The Guardian (UK) 03/18/04
Posted: 03/17/2004 9:26 pm
The Case For A Jazz Museum Harlem will get a jazz museum, and the need for it is great. "Since the music has long been an international language, tourists from around the world will be coming to Harlem in ever greater numbers. They won't see a statue of Charlie Parker, but they'll be in his presence, along with that of his progenitors. They, and visitors of all ages, will learn, interactively, dimensions of American history through the lives of embodiments of what Ellington called the 'unhampered expression of complete freedom reflecting the ideals of American Independence'." OpinionJournal.com 03/18/04
Posted: 03/17/2004 8:39 pm
CD Sales Up 8 Percent In Australia Recording companies have been screaming that music downloading is killing there business. So why are sales going up? "After several years warning of dire consequences for record companies because of rampant music downloading and copying, the Australian Record Industry Association yesterday released sales figures for 2003 showing an increase of nearly 8 per cent." Sydney Morning Herald 03/18/04
Posted: 03/17/2004 4:15 pm
Creating A Cultural Cluster Nashville officials have begun to plan what is being described as a "cultural cluster" for the downtown neighborhood which will soon play host to a new concert hall for the Nashville Symphony. The thinking is that while a concert hall alone can be good for a neighborhood, a vibrant collection of entertainment options is better, and if all goes as planned, the new concert hall could anchor a thriving district which would include a minor league baseball park, the Country Music Hall of Fame, and a massive entertainment complex. Of course, these things cost money... Nashville City Paper 03/18/04
Posted: 03/18/2004 6:15 am
Detroit Mayor: Save The Arts School! "Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick made a brief appearance at Wednesday's Detroit Public Schools board meeting to encourage district officials to reconsider plans to close the Communication and Media Arts High School. The school is scheduled to close and merge in January 2005 with the Detroit High School for the Fine and Performing Arts in a new, $120-million building off Woodward near Orchestra Hall... Dozens of parents, students and teachers said they feared the new school's academic structure will not be as stringent as CMA's. Currently, 95 percent of CMA graduates go on to higher education; 85 percent go on to 4-year colleges." Detroit Free Press 03/18/04
Posted: 03/18/2004 6:10 am
Privatizing The Arts In L.A. Los Angeles mayor James Hahn has sent a letter to local arts groups informing them that he plans to slash the budget of the city's Cultural Affairs Department and transfer the money to "basic services" such as public safety and street repair. The exact dollar amount of the mayor's cutback hasn't been specified, but current budget projections show a cut of nearly 60%. In place of direct subsidies, Mayor Hahn is creating a council of wealthy Angelenos to encourage private donations to the arts. Los Angeles Daily News 03/18/04
Posted: 03/18/2004 6:05 am
The New People-Friendly NEA Only a decade ago, the letters 'NEA' would bring a scowl to the face of conservative US politicians, and images of urine-soaked crosses to the minds of the general public. The arts endowment's budget was gutted during those years, and many assumed that the country's tradition of federal support for the arts had finally been killed off. But this year, the decidedly conservative Bush administration called on Congress to sharply increase the NEA's budget, and the taint of controversy seems to have vanished in the hands of the endowment's soothing new director, Dana Gioia. "The NEA's turnaround has been achieved, in part, through high-profile tours of unassailable works and by reaching out to traditionally underserved areas, including Southern states." Akron Beacon-Journal (Cox) 03/18/04
Posted: 03/18/2004 5:58 am
Playing Hot Potato With A Concert Hall A Maryland concert hall scheduled to open next summer is running into roadblocks from politicians who are not overly eager to take responsibility for covering cost overruns. Strathmore Hall, which was budgeted to cost $100 million and will become the second home of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, is supposed to draw the adjoining metropolitan areas of Baltimore and Washington, D.C. together in suburban Montgomery County, but so far, county and state officials can't agree on who should be responsible for unforeseen costs at the site. The county has asked the state for an additional $3 million in assistance to finish the project, but state budget analysts say that they've already contributed more than $44 million, and the county needs to pick up the slack. Washington Post 03/18/04
Posted: 03/18/2004 5:44 am
Robot Wars In The Orchestra Pit "The conflict between theatrical producers and the musicians' union, which a year ago shut down Broadway for four days, has reared its head again. The arena this time is Off-Broadway, where the new musical The Joys of Sex has provoked a standoff with Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians. When it was performed at the New York International Fringe Festival in 2002, The Joys of Sex had three musicians in the pit. For its transfer to the 499-seat Variety Arts, producer Ben Sprecher and composer David Weinstein decided to augment the score with a Sinfonia, an electronic music-making device. Local 802 adamantly denounces the Sinfonia as a 'virtual orchestra machine' and has refused to sign a production agreement with Sprecher." Newsday (New York) 03/18/04
Posted: 03/18/2004 5:50 am
Ten Irish Playwrights Who Got It Right What is it about Irish playwrights? "No one seems to know what makes it happen. Some claim it's the weather, others insist it's the whiskey. But if one of the major qualities that a good stage writer needs is the ability to create sparkling dialogue, then the legendary "gift of the gab" that comes with an Irish heritage must surely be part and parcel of the deal." Toronto Star 03/17/04
Posted: 03/17/2004 4:04 pm
The Blog Niche Goes Mainstream Blogging is no longer a mere blip on the cultural radar screen. In the last year, blog readership has nearly tripled, and bloggers focusing on everything from politics to culture to wartime survival have become fringe players in an increasingly crowded and diverse global media scene. Traditional media sources are predictably wary of bloggers, who have no obligation to follow traditional journalistic codes of conduct and who frequently bring strong biases to their work, but there's no denying that the online journals are becoming increasingly powerful in the information-delivery game. Philadelphia Inquirer 03/18/04
Posted: 03/18/2004 6:41 am
Elementary, My Dea... actually, it's fairly complicated. "The British Library is urging that the planned sale of 3,000 personal documents of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle this May by auction house Christie's in the United Kingdom be halted until a dispute over the papers' true owners has been resolved. The British Library has argued that some of the papers... actually belongs to them since Conan Doyle's daughter Jean Conan Doyle bequeathed some of the documents to them when she died in 1997. Meanwhile, the Toronto Public Library is concerned that the Christie's material... might actually have been part of a legacy from Conan Doyle's daughter-in-law, Anna Conan Doyle, who left five items to the library's Arthur Conan Doyle Collection, the largest publicly accessible collection of Conan Doyle items in the world." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 03/18/04
Posted: 03/18/2004 6:33 am
- Previously: The Papers, Dr. Watson! A trove of Arthur Conan Doyle's papers - including a record of the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes - has been uncovered. "The archive, which contains more than 3,000 items, including letters, notes, manuscripts and artefacts, disappeared more than 40 years ago during legal disputes over his estate." The Guardian (UK) 03/16/04
Ireland Goes Chick-Lit "Irish literature, that glorious outpouring of eloquence and wit created by great men such as Jonathan Swift, William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, Sean O'Casey and George Bernard Shaw has in our time fallen into mainly female hands." Toronto Star 03/17/04
Posted: 03/17/2004 4:10 pm
Idolizing Lit Idol Lit Idol was conceived as a way to spark interest in writers (well, Pop Idol has done pretty well for ___ "Some 1,400 aspiring authors entered the Lit Idol contest. Five judges, including Curtis Brown's Ali Gunn, narrowed the field to five finalists. About 900 people voted online, which counted 25 percent. The final tally was taken at the book fair Monday night, where about 150 publishers, agents and authors cast their votes after the finalists read." Washington Post 03/17/04
Posted: 03/17/2004 3:56 pm
The NYTBR's New Leader What will Sam Tanenhaus' appointment as editor of the New York Times Book Review mean for the publication? "Tanenhaus said he would re-examine the Book Review’s approach to fiction, which he said had long been 'the great conundrum of the Book Review.' And while he has no plans to abandon fiction—contrary to the fears of many in the publishing world—his enthusiasms seem to lie more in nonfiction. 'We’re living in really an exemplary age of nonfiction narrative, and to some extent nonfiction has taken over some of the earlier attributes of the novel, which is story-telling'." New York Observer 03/17/04
Posted: 03/17/2004 11:50 am
More Troubles For Kazaa Kazaa Media Desktop is the leading piece of file-trading software of the moment, and as such, it is at the center of the firestorm over illegal copying and swapping of copyrighted songs and movies. But Kazaa's legal troubles apparently don't end with the long list of industry heavies and political bigwigs who want to shut it down: now, a Romanian man is claiming that he wrote the source code for Kazaa, and is suing the company for his share of the profits. Wired 03/18/04
Posted: 03/18/2004 5:39 am
Fears Abound As Passion Comes To Germany German officials are warning that Mel Gibson's controversial epic, The Passion of the Christ, could stir up anti-Semitism in the country when it opens on 400 screens today. In contrast to America, where Catholic bishops embraced the film and declared it to be a vivid but accurate representation of Jesus's last days, "German Catholic leaders called the film problematic, and the German Bishops' Conference said: 'We urgently warn against using the suffering of Jesus as an instrument for anti-Semitism.'" BBC 03/18/04
Posted: 03/18/2004 5:23 am
- The $500 Million Pariah Charges of anti-Semitism aside, Mel Gibson is cashing in on his personal faith to a degree that would make a televangelist blush. In fact, when all is said and done, Gibson could make a cool half a billion on his violent little tribute to ultra-orthodox Catholicism. And in Hollywood, where money talks louder than morality, that kind of moneymaking ability is likely to keep Gibson a major player for quite a while, regardless of how many people he offends. Washington Post 03/18/04
Posted: 03/18/2004 5:22 am
I, Disney - Welfare Queen "Scrooge McDuck would be proud. Few have panhandled for taxpayer dollars as successfully as Disney during Eisner's reign. It has received at least $4.5 billion in subsidies, low-interest loans, land grants and "joint venture" investments from governments in Florida, Pennsylvania and Hong Kong. It even managed to get a handout from the French government—not exactly a fan of things American—which sold 4,800 acres just outside of Paris to Disney at a 90 percent discount so the company could build Euro Disneyland. Disney has gotten even sweeter deals closer to its home base in Southern California." Reason 03/10/04
Posted: 03/17/2004 5:01 pm
Satellite Radio's Catch-22 The satellite radio industry is in a pickle. "In order to get permission to exist, XM and Sirius had to swear off local content. But in order to survive, they need to find a legal way to deliver it to subscribers." Slate 03/17/04
Posted: 03/17/2004 4:49 pm
