What Are Your Favorite Romanian Websites? OK, maybe you can't name many … at least not yet! But I've stumbled across a few, learned quite a bit, and thought I'd share.

@rgumente -- Business-oriented weblog of a bright young software company chief named Dragos Novac.

Halfway Down the Danube -- So named because proprietors Douglas and Claudia Muir, an expatriate couple with small children, started it when they still lived in Belgrade. Wry observations about life; here's the Romania-centric stuff.

The Bullet: Shooting Down News for Students -- Edgy looking online newspaper put out by the smart kids at the Bucharest School of Journalism, with help from the local Center for Independent Journalism.

Ulmablogger: The Media Blog From Alex Ulmanu -- Alex is an assistant journalism professor at the University of Bucharest, who helps out with The Bullet.

Albino Neutrino -- The weblog of expatriate Frank O'Connor, who runs a web design firm. "Where art and mathematics meet, shake hands, stand in an awkward silence and then kind of shuffle off wondering what happened," his tagline/motto reads. Here's his Romania page.

USbiz.ro -- "The American Business Community in Romania website." Biz-related headlines & stories; exchange rates, links.

Kit Blog -- The site of Christian "Kit" Paul, founding partner of an advertising company called Brandient. Writes about branding, art, technology … and Romania.

Flogging the Simian -- A pretty amazing and mysterious site, explained only as "a paxblog by Soj," who is also seen contributing over at the Daily Kos. Don't know her nationality (seems to be able to translate from Spanish and Romanian, and writes English perfectly well), don't know if that's her picture, don't know what she does … but she certainly writes in enormous detail about stuff like terrorism investigations in Saudi Arabia.

Kitsched -- Weblog of young freelance web developer who lives in the small town of Baia Sprie (known in Hungarian as Felsöbánya), and likes drum n' bass music so much that he contributes to, well, drumandbass.ro. Make a note, Pieter!

Perfectly Imperfect -- Reflections of a young, free-thinking mother.

That's just a sampling. If they or anyone else can offer some recommendations and/or clarifications, fire away in the comments!

06/02/2004 12:03 AM  |  Comment (1)

Romania Tips? So, we're going to Romania for a three-week working vacation starting a week from today. Bucharest, Carabia, the Black Sea, etc. Question for the assembled: Recommendations? Comments, concerns, factoids? Particularly useful books? Advice for what to do when confronted by vampires, or packs of wild dogs? I've never been there before, so I'm flying somewhat blind. Also, if you live there, or will be vacationing there during that time, let's hook up!

05/31/2004 04:51 PM  |  Comment (25)

Heaven Knows We're All Miserable Now: I made a lot of cheap comments last night on Cathy Seipp's blog panel (and at the after-party) about how weblogs are "narcissistic and stupid," how I'm trying to make mine less relevant and more frivolous, and how music is ultimately more interesting than politics. So, in an effort to illustrate all of the above, I present to you this truly unfortunate live recording I made this afternoon (with some heroic engineering assistance from Emmanuelle.net).

The back story: Occasionally topless Canadian blogger Raymi the Minx recently made the following random offer:

If you do a cover of a Morrissey song of your choice, and put it on your blog I will mail you a photograph of mine that you can either keep or sell (they go for a pretty penny these days).

05/30/2004 04:12 PM  |  Comment (20)

Long Intervew With Me Over at Norm Geras' Site: See what I'd do with the UN, what I don't like about weblogs, who I want to be president, how many times I can pretentiously drop Vaclav Havel into a conversation, and so on. The questions were answered in great haste, but that's still probably no excuse for my execrable Favorite Song entry.

05/28/2004 11:39 AM  |  Comment (16)

Five-Word Movie Review, The Day After Tomorrow: Utter horseshit, but damned entertaining.

05/28/2004 12:40 AM  |  Comment (10)

New Reason Online Column From Me -- 'Flaming the Messenger: Looking for a Fifth Column in the Media? Try Try Again'

05/27/2004 01:12 PM  |  Comment (10)

Say Goodbye To Leaving L.A.: For the past six months my favorite weblog has had nothing whatsoever to do with politics, "fisking," confident pronouncements about opaque matters in faraway countries, or drama-queen declarations of political "I break with thee"s. No, it's been Nancy Rommelmann's Leaving L.A., a series of almost painfully honest and acute observations and anecdotes from a terrific writer trying to grapple with leaving Los Angeles for Portland, Oregon after 17 years. Today, she put up her final post; I encourage you to start from the beginning and take a read. It may not run to everyone's tastes, but it sure ran to mine. Thanks, Nancy.

05/26/2004 11:56 PM  |  Comment (3)

Come Out and See Me (and Seipp, Simon, Drum, Kaus, Moxie & Johnson) Blather About Blogs! It's this Saturday night at the American Film Institute. RSVPs for the limiting seating (and boozing!) are necessary, because rumors are that slime-mold wielding terrorists are going to strike down Mickey Kaus at the stroke of midnight. (Just kidding Mickey! I think!) No, it should be fun, and there's a Hollywood/bloggy panel before, all hosted by Seipp. I plan on saying nothing but "et tu, Simon?" over and over again until he becomes uncomfortable.

05/26/2004 11:42 PM  |  Comment (9)

Finally: Tony Pierce is interviewed about blogging in today's New York Times. Best quote: "If this were beer, I'd be an alcoholic." Though it woulda also been funny if he'd said "If this were dope, I'd be a -- nevermind" .... Anyway, I can't wait to meet his "girlfriend."

And hey, Tomdog's in there too!

05/26/2004 09:48 PM  |  Comment (2)

You Like the Guitar Playing on Fought Down, Don't You? If so, and if you also enjoy putting the rawk in Brit Pop, then act now to buy one of the handful of remaining limited-edition copies left of The Mere Mortals' excellent debut EP. Also, the lads are playing this Thursday at the Silver Lake Lounge, around 9:30 p.m. It was a treat to hear them on Indie 103.1 last night (here's the request line info, hint-hint).

There's an unholy mess of happy Corvids news to report; start over at Layne's, and I'll chip in one of these days.

05/24/2004 11:01 PM  |  Comment (7)

Whoops! My Reason Loh Column Is Actually Online: It's called "Fair-Weather Friends: When Journalists Desert From Free Speech Battles." I did a whole hour on an NPR affiliate the other day on this, and the exchange was certainly lively.

05/24/2004 10:15 AM  |  Comment (14)

Loh Framing: The June issue of Los Angeles magazine (or, as I label it in my closet folders, "52 great weekend getaways") has something in common with the June issue of Reason -- the media column in both discuss the micro-media case of Sandra Tsing Loh being fired by public radio powerhouse KCRW for saying the word "fuck" in one of her essays, and failing to make sure that it was bleeped. The L.A. Mag piece was written by R.J. Smith; the Reason bit by me. Neither is online. My piece, broadly speaking, is how journalists can be mighty evasive on free-speech issues when A) it involves someone they either like or hate; or B) when it pales in comparison to whatever other "Big Picture" they'd like you to care more about. Smith's piece is, typically for him, more of an above-it-all, skeptical-of-all take, with grafs like this:

Technically speaking, this whole media frenzy was triggered by somebody stubbing her toe in the dark, and not by the profanity that followed. We want our free speech test cases to be a little bit brave. We want them to say something that needs to be said, or at least say something and mean what they say. In l'affaire Loh, though, the bar falls close to the ground. If the typical free speech martyr is somebody wanting the right to curse, it's a step down to find somebody who cursed but didn't intend to.

Consider the scene an exploratory salvo by the anti-Seymour forces. Today they are legion, squaring off against a station with sizeable clout. […] In Los Angeles, Ruth Seymour drives people bonkers.

One problem with painting Seymour as a First Amendment assassin is that she didn't censor her commentators.

And save a little mercy for the engineer who failed to bleep the obscenity. It was all his fault, Loh's defenders shouted without acknowledging that Loh never checked to see if her piece was finished to her satisfaction.

Then there's this section, which was the framing issue that caught my eye in the first place:

In talking with reporters, Seymour was quick to link Loh with Janet Jackson. It took her a week to cool off, to hear Loh's side and realize Loh wasn't sabotaging KCRW. But in that week a funny thing happened: People mounted an attack on Seymour's station. On her.

It began when Loh placed a call to Catherine Seipp, a conservative columnist for National Review Online and the media critic for the upstart alternative weekly Los Angeles CityBeat. Seipp and Loh have been friends from the time they worked at the now-defunct Buzz magazine. Just as Seipp's first CityBeat column on Loh ran, Loh was also conferring with former Buzz editor Allan Mayer, now a senior partner for the PR firm Sitrick and Company, which specializes in helping celebrities who are in trouble. (He's currently working with Rush Limbaugh.)

Well, as anyone who knows (or asks) him can tell you, Allan's a liberal. "Ruth Seymour's behavior here is contrary to everything the station is supposed to stand for," he told Seipp. "As a liberal, I'm ashamed of her."

The ridiculous notion that those criticizing Seymour were a bunch of KCRW-hating right-wingers was popular among the Loh-trashing Seymour-supporters over at L.A. Observed, no matter how many times Seipp (the only knuckle-dragger of the bunch, as far as I know) said stuff like "for the record, I'm no enemy of NPR. I often listen to it and have sometimes been on it." The charge amounts to a laughably inaccurate evasion, and Smith seems to have bought into it. Final example:

This might be the first time National Review Online has taken the lead on a free speech issue.

Well, as regular readers to this site may suspect by now, NRO is not my favorite publication in the world. I am usually on the opposite side of most issues as conservatives, and I find some (though certainly not all) of their regular columnists horrid. But please. I know it must be pretty to think that liberals = free speech, and conservatives = duct tape on lips, but that's a cliché that has long outlived its axiomaticism. Why, is that First Amendment scholar Eugene Volokh I see contributing regularly to NRO? A Google search on "free speech" and "National Review" yields 32,400 results; one on "free speech" and "Los Angeles Magazine" produces 207 (there are 481 "free speech" results on NRO's site alone).

The truth, which may hurt just enough to be worth noting, is that a conservative political magazine actually does give a fig about free speech with some frequency, while Los Angeles' self-satisfied liberal glossy of record, when confronted with an admittedly minor free-speech issue in its own back yard, sees instead yet another chance to bash conservatives. How sophisticated.

05/23/2004 11:41 PM  |  Comment (20)

Baltimore and D.C. Now: So, Washington, D.C. is a really bizarre place for a person like me. All kinds of interactions happen there that are literally impossible here in L.A., such as the following conversation:

Human, at a bar, meeting me for the first time: "Hey, I saw you on C-SPAN last night!"

More banal observations about D.C.:
* Man, people jog all the damn time. Jog jog jog. I can't believe that L.A. still has the reputation for high jogging density; feels like Washington invented the damned habit.
* People making right-hand turns on red lights actively try to kill pedestrians, out of apparent class hatred.
* All the cab drivers are from Ethiopia or Ghana, and they know more about the California initiative process than you do.
* Cicadas aren't so bad. Least, they don't try to kill you, unlike the black bumblebee who lives in my back yard.
* Sure is warm and sticky and swampy and greeny, at least in late May.
* Way too many bars close before 2 a.m.
* Race relations there just freak me out.
* I saw at least two rats dart out in front of me on the sidewalks. None of my companions seemed to notice.
* People sure seem to like to talk about politics! Which reminds me of a great conversation snippet:

Nick Gillespie, whilst on the handsome yacht of a Famous Media Personality: "So, why are you a Democrat?"
Moneybags trial lawyer, and big fundraiser for John Kerry: "It's all those damned corporate names on stadiums!"

Recent Ivy League grad who works for a fancy magazine: "Dude, 'Jane Says' [then playing in the bar] is the best song ever!!!"
Grad's various young pals: "Damn straight, etc.!"
Welch, feeling old and cranky (I saw J.A. before these fuckers could talk): "That's not the best song ever. For instance, it only has two chords."
Pubescent-looking Ivy League grad who works for a fancier magazine: "No it doesn't! It has seven chords. I've got the tabs at home to prove it!"

* Nobody in America even knew where Kosovo was when Clinton decided to make a war about it.
* The editors at his magazine like to laugh and laugh about how pathetic & desperate freelancers are.
* It's so much fun to take advantage of your work benefits! Just go to the dentist all the damned time!
* Washington sure is a lot better than the Ivy League school, cuz at the Ivy League school there were some people from the Lower East Side -- which is like Greenwich Village -- and sometimes they would have tattoos and dyed black hair, and they would seem really cool & look down at the boring button-down people, and since there's nobody like these art-rocker types in D.C., Washington is lots more comfortable and "real."

So, to sum up: Interesting place to visit, and it's good to be back. At least I didn't get mugged.

05/23/2004 08:50 PM  |  Comment (16)

Stryker Over Kondracke: Some people like this column, by Mort Kondracke, warning that the media "is in danger of talking the United States into defeat in Iraq," in part by being "obsessed with the Abu Ghraib prison scandal." I much prefer this post, by Sgt. Stryker, which makes (among other salient points) this sensible man-bites-dog observation: "People don't expect Americans to do the sort of things depicted in the Abu Ghraib photos."

05/23/2004 12:29 AM  |  Comment (6)

What? Oh, 'Allo, Then! Was in D.C. for five days, and am behind on a hundred things, among them sleep, and wiping out pernicious comments-spam. I have many warmed-over clichés to type here about Our Nation's Capitol, but they, not unlike my editors, will have to wait. In the meantime, get a load of my Buzznet site!

05/21/2004 12:12 AM  |  Comment (4)

Hi! What are you doing down here?