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The Future of Music Coalition--well worth a look if you're not already familiar--has a public letter to FCC chairman Michael Powell. The FCC is reviewing the broadcast ownership rules that limit the consolidation of broadcast media into a tiny number of immense corporations.

As musicians, recording artists, citizens and small business owners we are uniquely qualified to comment on the increased consolidation of the radio dial since the passage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act. We write to you today to emphasize that this period of consolidation has had far-reaching negative repercussions on our ability to gain access to the public airwaves and to make a living.

We are therefore rightfully cautious and extremely concerned as American citizens that increased concentration of media ownership will have a negative impact on access to diverse viewpoints and will impede the functioning of our democracy.

You can go read the rest. They're looking for co-signers, so if you care about this, join the fun.

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Oh yeah, and happy Loyalty Day, fellow Oceanians.

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Harry Shearer's idea for the music industry, as an alternative to suing college students for billions of dollars: "stop seeking as your customers the people most likely to steal from you."

festivities continue

And charkes points out that it's also the National Day of Prayer here in the Republic of Gilead. Although I'm not a praying man myself, something in me responds to the president's observation that "it's a good time to be praying."

sunday obits

Finally got around to Sunday's Times, and was captivated by two of the obituaries:

Karen Morley, a movie star whose breakthrough role was in Howard Hawks's Scarface and whose career essentially ended when she pled the fifth before HUAC. From a different obituary:

"I was what you'd call a 'pillow red,' " she told the San Francisco Weekly in 1999. "I became a communist because I fell in love with a man who was a red and entered the Army to take care of the fascists, and I knew it would please him if I became one."

And Ray Hicks, who, speaking "in a dialect scholars describe as Elizabethan, even Chaucerian," told "stories older than America" that "had been passed seemingly intact through eight generations of his family, among the first white people in their nook of Appalachia."

Sometimes time takes my breath away.