If you harbour any interest at all in doing freelance non-fiction radio work, especially if it involves storytelling, then I strongly recommend –

– no, actually: I command –

– that you hie thee over to Tod Maffin’s upcoming “How to Be a Radio Storyteller” seminar, coming to Toronto and Vancouver:

I’m thrilled to announce that I will be conducting two seminars (one in Toronto and one in Vancouver) aimed at independent producers, freelancers, writers, and people who want to get into radio — specifically non-fiction radio storytelling. This will be a full-day, in-depth seminar covering: Storytelling, narrative structure, how to pitch (and how NOT to pitch!), how to voicetrack at home, what microphone you should use, field recording, how to interview someone, and much much more.

You will also receive a free copy of my e-book, “From Idea to Air: A Freelancer’s Field Guide to Selling to CBC Radio.”

And most importantly, this session will be admission by donation.

(The donations, by the way, will go to Tod’s campaign to raise $5,000 for the Canadian M.S. society.)

Why am I so insistent? Because I took a similar seminar with Tod a few years ago, and it was absolutely marvellous. And I learned more about telling a good story (let alone a good radio story) than I got out of the Robert McKee seminar, several dozen screenwriting books and that Jam This Thing Into a Socket in The Back of Your Head and It Will Download Everything You Need to Know about Storywriting Straight Into Your Brain gizmo I bought on eBay.

Combined.

Seriously, this is a steal. And I’m guessing it’s good for podcasters, too. So go. Learn more here.

Just taking a break from a project, and headed over to the best break-taking place on the planet: Fafblog.

A. Well if you want, the president can stop the illegal wiretapping just for you.
Q. Really? Well thanks, that’d be great!
A. And then the terrorists can come and eat you.
Q. Wait! What?
A. Cause without the wiretaps there’s nothin to stop the terrorists from eatin you, yknow. The terrorists and their army of bees.
Q. Oh no! I’m allergic to terrorists AND bees!
A. Oh that’s too bad, cause now the president hasta stop the illegal wiretaps and let alllll those terrorist bees eat you.
Q. Quick! Put the wiretaps back, put the wiretaps back!
A. No no, you just said you wanna get eaten. Eaten by terrorist bees.
Q. I change my mind! Please let the president wiretap me, pleeeease.
A. I dunno…
Q. Please, I can change! I DO believe in terror, I DO believe in terror!
A. Oh, alright. But just this once!
Q. It’s a Nine-Elevenmas miracle!

From The Register:

Cingular, the United States’ largest mobile phone network this week applied to patent emoticons, better known as smileys.

The application refers to selecting emoticons on mobile phones or handheld devices over a wireless, and makes 35 claims in all. Although it uses the word ‘emoticon’, the application doesn’t acknowledge that mutant punctuation has been livening up online communications since at least 1961.

Actually, The Register is overstating the case. (I’ll give you a moment to recover from your shock… there we go.) Cingular’s application is for the idea of having a button on your phone that can be used to insert a smiley. Here’s the passage from their patent application:

A user of a device, such as a mobile phone, is provided with a dedicated key or shared dedicated key option that the user may select to insert an emoticon onto a display or other medium. The selection of the key or shared dedicated key may result in the insertion of the emoticon, or may also result in the display of a collection of emoticons that the user may then select from using, for example, a key mapping or navigation technique.

Now, as to whether dedicating a button on your phone’s keypad to a particular function is such a revolutionary idea that it deserves patent protection… that’s another issue. But at least for now, the smiley is safe.

More’s the pity.

You can spend a lot of time memorizing the rules of public relations. (“#15. Don’t say your target audience will blow money intended for their kids on beer and popcorn.”) But nothing drives the lesson home quite like the odious example of what happens when people break those rules.

Enter the Bad Pitch Blog. It’s a form of vengeance against clueless PR practitioners who send godawful pitches to reporters, columnists and editors, but it’s also a great way to learn the tricks of the trade through a series of cautionary tales. PR pros Richard Laermer and Kevin Dugan walk you through each pitch, dissecting it and pointing out exactly where things went so horribly wrong.

It’s entertaining as all get-out. And if you’re still hungry for bad pitches after reading it, head over to Query Letters I Love, where you’ll find pitches for some of the worst movies (n)ever made.

Google’s recent decision to comply with Chinese government demands that it restrict search results in that country sounds troubling at an abstract level. But it isn’t until you see the actual, practical results that you really understand what’s on the line.

Have a look at this comparison of Google searches about Falun Gong: one conducted using Google’s uncensored service, and the other adhering to Chinese law.

John Bowman’s Blog Report at CBC.ca:

Some blogs – like this one, I guess – have a limited lifespan and will be shutting down soon.

That’s a shame. Not to go crazy with claims about the influence or reach of Canadian blogging, but it’s a nice, deep well of opinion and (every once in a while) insight from policy wonks, partisans and even ordinary, non-aligned people who just want to get something off their chest. I hope the CBC can find a way of making something like John’s blog a regular part of their online offerings.

Remember that CBC story about Paul Weyrich, the American who calls Canada “liberal and hedonistic” and uses the term “cultural Marxism”? You may recall the reporter offers this mild corrective:

A U.S. right-wing strategist says Canadians are “so liberal and hedonistic” that Stephen Harper can’t hope to change their philosophy of “cultural Marxism” right away.

Given time, however, the Conservative prime minister-designate may straighten them out, Paul Weyrich writes.

…The pessimistic view was that Harper, lacking a parliamentary majority, can do little to make Canadians “adopt a more reasonable view of the United States” and abandon Marxist principles “such as same-sex marriage and abortion on demand,” Weyrich says.

He does not say how these things are linked in his mind to Marxism, a doctrine better known for concepts of class warfare.

Well, his colleague and ally, William Lind, is happy to spell it out, and has been for years. Political correctness, he argues, isn’t just overzealousness; it’s part of a concerted, deliberate attempt to bring about the end of western culture as we know it.

Feminism, lesbian and gay activism, environmentalism – they’re part of a left-wing ideological network aimed at critiquing capitalism and the society it supports without offering an alternative. And it all started in the 1930s, he says, with a group of Jews known as the Frankfurt School:

How does all of this stuff flood in here? How does it flood into our universities, and indeed into our lives today? The members of the Frankfurt School are Marxist, they are also, to a man, Jewish. In 1933 the Nazis came to power in Germany, and not surprisingly they shut down the Institute for Social Research. And its members fled. They fled to New York City, and the Institute was reestablished there in 1933 with help from Columbia University. And the members of the Institute, gradually through the 1930s, though many of them remained writing in German, shift their focus from Critical Theory about German society, destructive criticism about every aspect of that society, to Critical Theory directed toward American society.

While that excerpt comes from a speech he has given to various Accuracy in Academia conferences, Lind made the same claim – with the same link to Jews – in a speech to a holocaust denial conference.

Racially-charged politics are no stranger to Lind, who is a senior official at Weyrich’s Free Congress Foundation. He had earlier published an article claiming that the U.S. would be better off if the South had won the Civil War:

The real damage to race relations in the south came not from slavery, but from Reconstruction, which would not have occurred if the South had won. And since the North would have been a separate nation, the vast black migration to northern cities that took place during World War II might not have happened.

A little context about what “cultural Marxism” is all about would, and should, have put Weyrich’s comments into ugly perspective.

I haven’t cared about the show since Sorkin left, but the best response to the cancellation of The West Wing can be found at The Onion:

The Democrats are even out of fake power?