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falmerian

Listed below are comments made by falmerian between Friday, 20th February 2009 and Thursday, 24th September 2009.

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How Carolinians see the race row 04:21am on 24 Sep 2009 You wrote "it must be me, then, because most people here are pretty camera-shy or monosyllabic" but their unwillingness to talk might be related to the particular history behind Piggie Park. Or to call it by its full name, Maurice Bessinger's Piggie Park. That's because its owner, Maurice Bessinger, has had a high-profile past in Southern race relations, as a segregationist. Take a look, for example, at the 1967 case Newman v. Piggie Park Enterprises (377 F2d 433), part of Bessinger's challenge to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. If I remember correctly, Bessinger's was also the South Carolina chairman of Governor Wallace's third-party campaign for the presidency.

The confederate flag you saw flying is actually a response to a more recent event. After the confederate flag was removed from the South Carolina State House in 2000, Bessinger started flying it at all of his restaurants, then wrote and published a book called "Defending My Heritage." Look up the product description of his book on amazon.com and you'll see how he mixes together ideas from his overt segregationist past with some of the ideas of the modern Republican party.

The point is, when you chose Piggie Park as one of the places to go, you ended up somewhere where it was going to be hard to get people to do much talking.
Blog me up, blog me down 01:56am on 23 May 2009 Have you seen "Colin" yet, the zombie film by first-time British director Marc Price that cost £45 [sic] to make? According to CNN, the horror magazine SCARS predicts it will "revolutionize zombie cinema." If you had been at Cannes, you could have seen it, at the Marche des Films. Simon Crerar of the Times saw it (or at least wrote about it), saying that it "puts an unusual slant on the zombie genre, telling the story from the point of view of a zombie trying to understand what has happened to him, rather than a human trying to escape and survive."
BBC launches Virtual College of Journalism 4:58pm on 21 Apr 2009 I am looking forward to this. As someone who reads, listens to, and watches news-related and other interviews originating from both sides of the Atlantic, I have witnessed many cases where I thought the BBC interviewers did a better job with a subject than those from other organizations. On average they are better at keeping their subjects on topic, they are better at getting past the "sound bites" that more superficial interviewers put up with, they are willing to interrupt an interviewee who isn't answering the question, and in longer interviews, they structure and guide their subjects, reducing repetition and making better use of the audience's time. I'll be curious to discover if any of these advantages are highlighted in the BBC's Virtual College of Journalism. If so, perhaps we can use twitter, blogs, etc. to prod the less skilled professionals from other news organizations to educate themselves on what constitutes a good interview.
Ethical Man is reborn 08:44am on 20 Feb 2009 If you have flexibility in what cities you visit, consider giving priority to those with light rail systems. According to this list from Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_light_rail_systems_by_ridership

the cities with the most light rail route miles are San Francisco, Trenton/Camden (NJ), Philadelphia (PA), Los Angeles, San Diego, St. Louis, Dallas, Portland (OR), San Jose, and Sacramento.

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