PR TIP # 3,671

From www.publicityhound.com

Too bad that TV talk show host Ellen Degeneres and the dog rescue group Moms and Mutts didn't have Publicity Hound Joni Hubred-Golden by their side last week to help avert a PR disaster.

Ellen, you may have heard, adopted a terrier mix dog named Iggy from the nonprofit dog rescue group Moms and Mutts. When the dog didn't get along with her cats, she gave it away to her
hairdresser--in direct violation of the organization's rules.

The dog rescue group ridiculed Ellen publicly. Ellen cried on her show. The animal rights people went nuts. And the bloggers threw gasoline on the fire. Even radio talk show hosts chastised Moms and Mutts for yanking the dog out of the hands of the hairdresser's two little girls who had bonded with it.

Joni, of Farmington, Michigan, reads this newsletter and offered what would have been a terrific solution:

"Moms and Mutts really missed a GREAT opportunity to get some national PR. They could have said, 'OK, you broke the contract, but let's talk. We'll come on your show and discuss how important it is to place dogs in the right homes, and why we have this contract provision that you can't just give the dog away--and we'll do our due diligence with your hairdresser to make sure this is a good home for the dog, and everybody will be happy.' Ellen gets great ratings, and this group wouldn't be seen negatively by her loyal fans.

"These women need a good publicist!"

Indeed, Joni.

TV talk shows love controversy. An on-air love-fest between Ellen and the moms, complete with a few mutts on the set, would have made for great TV and fabulous publicity.

If you aren't afraid of controversy (and no Publicity Hound should be), the TV talk shows will want to hear your pitch. Book publicist Lissa Warren has regularly placed dozens of her clients
on shows like "Good Morning America" and the "Today" show. She explains how she does it, and how you can too, on "How to Get Booked on the Morning TV Talk Shows."

Labels: Ellen and PR

It's Taco Tuesday. Because there was a steal during the World Series, Taco Bell is giving away free tacos today between 2pm and 5pm (local time).

Labels: Free food

Editor’s Note: The article is a portion of the cover story for issue 29 of RELEVANT. To subscribe to RELEVANT, you can go here. For my book The Year of Living Biblically, I spent 12 months following the rules of the Old Testament. All of them. Hundreds of them. I followed the famous ones, such as the Ten Commandments and ‘Love thy neighbor.’ But I also followed the often-ignored ones, such as don’t wear clothes of mixed fibers, don’t shave your beard and, yes, stone adulterers. It was an amazing, enlightening and life-changing year. It was a spiritual journey that moved from irreverence to reverence. You see, I grew up in a totally secular home. No religion at all. I’m officially Jewish, but I’m Jewish in the way the Olive Garden is Italian. Which is to say, not very. But in recent years, I decided I needed to see what I was missing. Was I neglecting something crucial to being human, like someone who goes through life without ever hearing Beethoven or falling in love? I dived into the Bible headfirst. And lo, it was awesome. I was surprised by how relevant much of the Bible’s ancient wisdom was to my 21st-century life. I was surprised by how baffled I was by other passages. I was surprised by how a lifelong agnostic like I am could find solace in prayer. I was surprised by how the Bible revealed my flaws and challenged me to be a better person. Since I’m officially Jewish, I spent most of my year studying and following the Old Testament (though I did devote the last four months to the New Testament). I know that most Christians don’t follow a lot of Old Testament laws. And in fact, neither do Jews. Jews may avoid shellfish, as Leviticus says, but they don’t stone adulterers or sacrifice animals. Those were abandoned after the Romans destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem. But I wanted to try everything. As naive or misguided as it may have been, I wanted to get into the mind and sandals of my ancestors. And I’m glad I did. Because even the rules that seemed bizarre at first glance were thought-provoking and revealed important insights about faith, God and the Bible. THE FIVE MOST UNEXPECTEDLY WISE & LIFE-ENHANCING RULES Keep the Sabbath. I’m a workaholic (I check my emails in the restroom, in the middle of movies, anywhere). But the Sabbath taught me the beauty of an enforced pause in the week. No cell phones, no messages, no thinking about deadlines. It was a bizarre and glorious feeling. As one famous rabbi said, the Sabbath is a “sanctuary in time.” Give thanks. The Bible says to thank the Lord before our meals. I did that. But then I got carried away. I gave thanks for everything—for the subway arriving on time, for the comfortable cushions on my couch, for my high-speed DSL connection, etc. It was a strange but great experience. Never have I been so aware of the thousands of little things that go right in our lives. “Let Your Garments Be Always White” (Ecclesiastes 9:8). I chose to follow this literally—I wore white pants, a white shirt and a white jacket. This was one of the best things I did all year. I felt lighter, happier, purer. Clothes make the man: You can’t be in a bad mood when you’re dressed like you’re about to play the semifinals at Wimbledon or go to P. Diddy’s party. Don’t Gossip. When you try to go on a gossip diet, you realize just how much of our conversations involve negative speech about others. But holding your tongue is like the verbal equivalent of wearing white. I felt cleaner and untainted. Do Not Curse. I used to curse a lot. In fact, my computer password was, at one time, a particularly adolescent bodily function. During my year, I tried to scrub up my vocabulary. My new curse words were: Fudge, sugar and shoot. Whenever I said them, my wife would respond by whistling the Andy Griffith theme song. She can mock me, but the weird thing is, I think my G-rated language made me a less angry person. Because here’s the way it works: I’d get to the subway platform just as the downtown train was pulling away, and I’d start to say the F-word. I’d remember to censor myself. So I’d turn it into “Fudge” at the last second. When I heard myself say “Fudge" out loud, it sounded so folksy, so Jimmy Stewart-ish and amusingly dorky, that I couldn’t help but smile. My anger receded. Behavior shaped emotions. THREE RULES THAT I SUCCESSFULLY KEPT THE ENTIRE YEAR WITHOUT EVEN VIOLATING ONCE You shall not plant your field with two kinds of seed (Leviticus 19:19). My attempt at agriculture—some cucumber plants in flowerpots—wasn’t too successful. The cucumbers got to be the size of Good and Plenty candies and mysteriously stopped growing. But, I made sure the seeds were purely cucumber, not mixed. Do not sacrifice your children to Molech (Leviticus 20:5). In fact, I didn’t sacrifice my children to any pagan god whatsoever. You shall not take on your wife’s sister as your second wife. Well, it does help that my wife doesn’t have a sister. To see more about AJ Jacobs biblical year and the lessons he learned through Old Testament rules and New Testament principles (including his experience “stoning” an adulterer), check out the latest issue of RELEVANT.

Author: AJ Jacobs AJ Jacobs is the author of The Year of Living Biblically (Simon and Schuster).

Labels: Losing My Religion

Blood, Robes And Tears: A Rangoon Diary

You should get closer," says the young Burmese woman in the crowd behind me. "If foreigners are there they won't shoot." She is terribly wrong.

It's about 1 p.m. on Sept. 27, and I am wedged among thousands of pro-democracy protesters near the golden-domed Sule Pagoda in downtown Rangoon. Facing us are hundreds of soldiers and riot police, who look on edge as they finger their assault rifles. The protesters, mostly ordinary Burmese clad in sarongs and sandals, appear undaunted, even jubilant. Defiantly, they chant a Buddhist mantra whose melody will haunt me for days:

Let everyone be free from harm.
Let everyone be free from anger.
Let everyone be free from hardship.

The Buddhist monks first sang this mantra. For a week now, they had been marching, calling peacefully for change in a country ruled for almost half a century by a corrupt and barbaric junta. Burma's monkhood and military are roughly the same size — both have between 300,000 and 400,000 men — but the similarities end there. With the monks preaching tolerance and peace, and the military demanding obedience at gunpoint, these protests pitted Burma's most beloved institution against its most reviled.

"Get closer," the young woman urges, but a hundred yards away feels close enough. Last night, soldiers like these had raided monasteries, beating and arresting hundreds of monks. Soldiers like these had also snuffed out Burma's last great pro-democracy uprising in 1988 by killing and injuring thousands. I know they will not hesitate to shoot.

Sure enough, seconds later, they open fire. But until that moment — until the moment this jubilant crowd scatters in anger and fear — millions of Burmese had glimpsed what life was like without their hated rulers. That glimpse might yet undo a junta, which today faces unprecedented pressure from its long-suffering people, from other nations, and perhaps even from within its own military ranks. Are the protests that took place over 10 days in late September over, or merely dormant?

I am a Briton who first fell in love with Burma a decade ago, bewitched by its rich culture, breathtaking landscapes and hospitable people. Despite their isolation and the ever-present fear of arrest, I found Burmese to be worldly and eager to talk; I quickly formed lasting friendships, and Burma became the subject of my second book, The Trouser People. I returned perhaps a dozen times, witnessing changes that were usually for the worse. People grew poorer, stalked by disease and malnutrition. Inflation lurched ever upwards. Schools and hospitals crumbled with neglect. Insurgencies raged along the rugged borders. The brightest Burmese sought lives abroad. The only real constant was the junta, which had seized power in 1962 and run a promising nation into the ground.

But there were positive changes, too. The 2004 purge of military intelligence chief Khin Nyunt dealt a blow to a once fearsome spy network. Then, one year later, the regime moved to its remote new capital at Naypyidaw. Suddenly, people in Rangoon seemed to talk a little more freely. Mobile phones and the Internet arrived and, despite being costly and state-controlled, were embraced by thousands. Student activists jailed after the 1988 protests were released and regrouping as an alternative to the National League for Democracy (NLD), the beleaguered party of Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, who has spent 12 of the past 18 years under house arrest.

It was members of this self-styled '88 generation who hit the streets in August to protest the government's fuel-price rises. The protests were quickly snuffed out, or so it seemed. Three weeks later, I arrived to witness what now seems like a dream: a first vision of the marching monks.

SUNDAY, SEPT. 23
They pour south from the Shwedagon, the immense golden pagoda that is Burma's most revered Buddhist monument, in an unbroken, mile-long column — barefoot, chanting, clutching pictures of Buddha, their robes drenched with the late-monsoon rains. They walk briskly — if you stick to the city's crumbling pavements it is almost impossible to keep pace with them — but when they reach Sule Pagoda they stop awhile to pray. Soon they're off again, coursing through the city streets in a solid stream of red and orange, like blood vessels giving life to an oxygen-starved body.

Their effect on Rangoon's residents is electrifying. At first, only a few applaud. Others clasp their hands together in respectful prayer, or quietly weep. One man, watching the procession without apparent emotion, abruptly folds away his umbrella so that his hands are free to applaud, and the falling rain obscures his tears. I ask another onlooker, an elderly teacher, how he feels. Overcome, he presses a clenched fist to his heart and croaks, "Happy." The monks will soon be joined by tens of thousands of Burmese, some chanting their own mantra, in English: "Democracy! Democracy!"

MONDAY, SEPT. 24
A Burmese reporter takes me to meet some monks at a pagoda in the Shwedagon's shadow, a rallying point for the daily marches. It must be under government surveillance. So, surely, is the tall figure in a white shirt and dark sarong who greets me — the poet Aung Way, another '88 stalwart, jailed three times for his political views. He presses a poem into my hand, which I nervously shove into my pocket and forget about.

Some monks chew betel-nut, which makes their mouths froth alarmingly with blood-red saliva. The oldest monk, who is 49 and from near Mandalay, is holding a Burmese translation of Francis Fukuyama's The Great Disruption. He is articulate and resolute. "We have three demands," he tells me. "Release Aung San Suu Kyi and all other political prisoners. Begin a process of national reconciliation. Lower the prices of daily commodities." China and Russia must withdraw their support for the junta, he continues, while the U.N. Security Council must discourage it from using violence.

Yet violence is what they expect. "Next they will use tear gas and water cannon," predicts another monk. "Then they will beat and arrest people. We are not afraid." A third monk, 23 years old, comes from Natmauk, the birthplace of Aung San, the father of Suu Kyi, a man whose obstinate sense of purpose won Burma's independence from Britain. "We mustn't retreat," the monk says. "If we retreat now, we fail."

In the evening Brigadier General Thura Myint Maung, Minister of Religious Affairs, appears on state television and threatens unspecified "action" against the monks. Within hours, trucks with loudspeakers are cruising Rangoon's dimly lit streets, announcing a curfew and threatening to arrest anyone who marches with the monks. The junta is making its move.

TUESDAY, SEPT. 25
So it begins. Many democracy figures are arrested overnight. The poet Aung Way is in hiding. Guiltily, I pull his poem from my pocket and read it for the first time. "We want freedom," it reads in part. "We want friendship between our army and our people." The army isn't interested. The New Light of Myanmar, the junta's barely literate newspaper, blames the violence on "hot-blooded monks" who are "jealous of national development and stability."

Still they march. The demonstrations are now so large that downtown Rangoon has a carnival atmosphere. Applause rains down from balconies overlooking the route. One monk holds aloft an upturned alms bowl, symbolizing his refusal to accept offerings from military families, a potent gesture in a devoutly Buddhist country. Students join the march, waving red flags bearing a fighting peacock — once an anticolonial emblem, but since 1962 an anti-junta one. At the rear of the column, the chants shift up a few octaves — it's a group of shaven-headed Buddhist nuns in their bubble-gum-pink robes.

WEDNESDAY, SEPT. 26
The eastern gate of the Shwedagon is where thousands of monks usually exit to start their march into downtown Rangoon. But today the gate is locked and guarded by soldiers and riot police. They are confronted by hundreds of angry monks and students. It is a little after noon, and the battle for Shwedagon is about to begin.

There are explosions — smoke bombs, meant to shock and disorient — and the riot police charge, striking the protesters with canes. The monks and students fight back, and soon there is the unmistakable crackle of live ammunition — the soldiers are shooting above our heads. The monks dress their wounds and begin their march downtown. Trucks full of soldiers pursue them, watched from the pavement by eerily silent crowds. Near Sule Pagoda, trucks are jeered and pelted with rocks, and the soldiers again open fire over the protesters' heads. But as dusk approaches, the crowds disperse. The shops have been shuttered all afternoon, and the pavement teashops for which Rangoon is famous vanish. Nobody wants to be out on the streets after dark.

THURSDAY, SEPT. 27
During last night's curfew, troops surge into monasteries across the city, beating and arresting monks. At Ngwe Kyar Yan, a monastery famed for its leadership role in the 1988 uprising, the floors are puddled with blood and the thin dormitory walls perforated with what Burmese call "rubber bullets." They are actually ball-bearings with a thin rubber coating, shot from a 40-mm cartridge. A direct hit at close range can take out eyes, crack skulls, stop hearts.

The raids enrage the people. The lives of Burmese Buddhists are intertwined with the lives of the monks. Monks preside over marriages, chant over the dead; they shelter orphans, care for the sick; and they rely upon the people for food, medicine, clothes and shelter. "A devout Buddhist will not even step on the shadow of a monk," says a Rangoon resident. "When a monk approaches, we move aside to let him pass." And so, with soldiers and police still inside Ngwe Kyar Yan, hundreds of local people surround it. "We had no weapons and knew we couldn't compete with the military," a neighbor tells me. "Everyone just wanted to protect the monks." Eventually, with night approaching, the security forces fight their way out with live rounds, killing two people.

"You should get closer." And so I find myself in a crowd near the Sule Pagoda, facing soldiers and riot police. Only a handful of monks have escaped the junta's dragnet to join this protest. When more trucks pull up at the intersection, and the troops inside noisily cock their rifles, the crowd tenses as one. Seconds later, there are explosions — more smoke bombs — and we are running for our lives.

We run along the pavements, keeping low, chased by the sound of gunfire and more explosions. The nearest escape route is 33rd Street, narrow like so many in the downtown area, and it is a seething bottleneck of people — sitting ducks — so I run on and dart up 34th Street. Are they firing over our heads? Not all the time. Not far from where I had been standing lies the body of Japanese cameraman Kenji Nagai, shot dead by a soldier at point-blank range.

People say the troops used tear gas. They didn't, because I never feel its sting in my eyes. But there are tears, nonetheless. I meet an old man, a retired engineer, choked with emotion. I asked him if he had joined the protests. "No," he replies. "I am too old now to run from bullets." At that moment, more military trucks race past; one soldier trains his rifle on the crowds, and scowls. "Quick, we must go," says the old man. "They are going to start shooting us."

Riot police are marching north up Sule Pagoda Road, banging their truncheons against their shields. An even more menacing sight is behind: hundreds of troops, marching in formation, sealing off downtown Rangoon. Between the riot police and the troops are trucks with loudspeakers making announcements to clear the streets. For more than a week — for most of their lifetimes — Burmese have called peacefully for dialogue. This is the closest the junta gets to it: screaming at its people through loudspeakers from a truck surrounded by men with guns.

I can still hear gunfire at 5 p.m. — continuous, loud, high caliber, some of it very close, most of it caroming through the streets from the east. I phone a Burmese friend who lives in the area. He is holed up in his house with his wife and three children. "What's happening?" I ask. He replies: "They are hunting us."

FRIDAY, SEPT. 28
The New Light of Myanmar gives its version of yesterday's events. "Groups of demonstrators in Yangon mobbed the security forces, throwing stones and sticks at them, using catapults and swords," it reads. "The security forces had to fire warning shots." The official toll is 10 dead, including Nagai. But everyone believes the real death toll is much higher. A U.N. official tells me 40 were killed and 3,000 arrested, including 1,000 monks. Another diplomat hazards "hundreds" of deaths.

The crackdown — the killings and beatings, the thousands of arrests — seems to have worked. The protests today are small and sporadic; one in the downtown area is defused by troops firing more "rubber bullets" down Anawratha Street. There are no more marches: their rallying points, the Shwedagon and Sule pagodas, are locked and guarded. A hundred or so people are jeering at soldiers on Pansodan Street. I watch the soldiers strike a youth over the head, before pushing him into a truck. "A schoolboy," remarks another onlooker angrily.

The 2007 democracy uprising feels over. Even the monsoon rains — such a feature of these once joyous protests, with the monks marching shin-deep through flooded streets — have petered out. The sun returns and a cheerless rainbow arcs across the skyline. "Peace and stability restored, traveling and marketing back to normal in Yangon," trumpets the New Light of Myanmar.

But the junta's victory could prove Pyrrhic. Buddhism matters in Burma. The regime has spent years cultivating its image as the religion's protector. That image is now shattered. The generals' assault on a revered institution might yet cause cracks in the army's ranks. "Soldiers are humans," says a Burmese analyst in Rangoon with close ties to the military. "They have families. They have monks among their relatives." And, like Burmese everywhere, they are listening to horror stories. One teenager was stripped, beaten and interrogated by troops in a windowless building, where the floor doubled as a latrine. "Some monks told the soldiers they would go to hell one day," he told AFP. "The soldiers cried, because they knew this was true."

The prospect of eternal damnation is not the army's only problem. It is crippled by low recruitment and high desertion rates. "It's under strength," says the Burmese military analyst. "Most regiments have fewer than 200 men. Nobody wants to join the army anymore." I saw many troops in Rangoon ill-equipped with rusting rifles. The soldier who killed Nagai was wearing flip-flops.

The economic misery that sparked the protests, moreover, remains unaddressed. "People have been successfully intimidated into keeping their heads down — maybe," says Shari Villarosa, chargé d'affaires at the U.S. embassy in Rangoon. "But it's still a struggle for them to survive. So there could be another eruption. I wouldn't be surprised."

If that happens, what can the world do? There is already intense international pressure, although its impact on this xenophobic regime is questionable. Over four days in Burma, U.N. special envoy Ibrahim Gambari met both Suu Kyi (twice) and junta chief Than Shwe, but his efforts look unlikely to kick-start a dialogue between the two. Similarly, China's influence over Burma — and its willingness to use it — is probably exaggerated. A Western diplomat in Rangoon says Beijing would like to see Burma make a "managed transition" — not to democracy, but to "something with a more stable base of popular support." But China's U.N. ambassador, Wang Guangya, recently characterized Burma's troubles as "basically internal."

For millions of people worldwide — from college students to America's First Lady — Burma is more than a country. It is a heartfelt cause. So far, however, it is a failed one, mired in a well-intentioned but self-defeating obsession with sanctions that barely dent the finances of the generals. Meanwhile, Burma has a grave and worsening humanitarian crisis: half of all Asia's malaria deaths occur here; a third of children under 5 years old are malnourished; most of its people live on less than a dollar a day. Yet Burma receives less humanitarian aid than almost every other poor country.

The U.S. government is calling for "meaningful dialogue" with all the democratic groups in Burma. So are the usually quiescent members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Will any of this make a difference? "In 1988, Burma wasn't part of ASEAN, it wasn't in the international spotlight, and the effects of globalization weren't so obvious," says the military analyst. "Maybe I'm too optimistic, but I feel this time the generals have to address the situation in some way."

Burma is often described as an isolated country. Yet it's not the people who are isolated — witness, for example, how skillfully they used the Internet to globalize their protests — but the generals. The world's challenge is finding ways to break that isolation and convince Burma's rulers to listen to its people. Before leaving Rangoon I met a former political prisoner who was delighted to see so many young students in the recent protests. "Some were carrying fighting peacock flags, just like in '88," he said. "The message has clearly got through to the next generation." The junta's troubles aren't finished yet. Nor are Burma's irrepressible democrats.

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Labels: Asia

Too much cannabis 'worsens pain'

Smoking large amounts of cannabis for therapeutic reasons may increase rather than reduce pain, a US study suggests.
The pain-relieving qualities of cannabis have long been hailed, and several countries have made it available for medicinal purposes.

But quantity is key, according to the study in the journal Anesthesiology.

University of California researchers found moderate use had the greatest impact on pain in 15 volunteers, while large doses actually made pain worse.

The team recruited 15 healthy volunteers, in whom pain was induced by injecting capsaicin - the "hot" chemical found in chilli peppers - under their skin.

They were then given cannabis to smoke. The strength of the dose was determined by the tetrahydrocannabinol content, which is the main active chemical in cannabis.

Some of the volunteers were given a placebo.

High, but in pain

Five minutes after smoking the drug, none of the doses had any effect on the pain felt.

But 45 minutes later, those who had smoked the moderate dose said their pain was much better, while those who consumed high doses said it had got worse.

They did, however, feel "higher" than counterparts who had taken moderate doses.

Dr Mark Wallace, the lead researcher, said the findings could have implications for the way medicinal cannabis was offered, both in pure and drug form.

Some experts are concerned that results on healthy volunteers could not be translated into how cannabis works in the bodies of those with cancer or multiple sclerosis, for whom the drug is increasingly seen as a potential form of pain relief.

Dr Laura Bell, of the MS Society, said: "Many people with MS report benefits to symptoms such as pain from taking cannabis, however studies to date on the effects of cannabis on pain are small and difficult to draw firm conclusions from.

"We would be interested to see the results from larger scale studies focused on people with MS."

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/health/7058193.stm

Published: 2007/10/24 04:01:39 GMT

© BBC MMVII

Labels: Smokin'

Ray Lewis means nothing to me, as far as his comments or anything else that he says. I love him like a brother.

Adalius Thomas, on former Baltimore Ravens teammate Ray Lewis, after verbal sparing began with quotes taken from an interview in Sports Illustrated.

Labels: Quote Time

An interesting thought and recipe... Foodies, enjoy...

post-trib.com

Try pomegranate pumpkin pie to warm up cold autumn nights

The pomegranate is the original apple, or the "Indian apple" as it is commonly known, that spans a diverse worldwide popularity back to biblical days.

In fact, Adam and Eve were said to have taken a bite of this Asian-born fruit growing in the Garden of Eden, and not the European variety we so kindly identify as being the object used for man's first mortal sin.

So does that mean that Adam and Eve were also the first to bake an "apple" pie for Cain and Abel's school bake sales? It might, but instead of toting along the same pie that we know, the wayward couple would more likely have brought a pomegranate pastry.

The pomegranate has always been a winter fruit, its long life and practical rind making it the perfect stocking stuffer for whimsical holiday gifts. But now, the popularity of the pomegranate is growing.

Its sweet, unique taste and welcoming health benefits make it one of the most sought-after ingredients for winter recipes in the past two years.

Its sweet flavor, if captured, would certainly make a delicious dessert, but the big problem with the pomegranate is in its spindly flesh. It's hard to turn the watery yet seedy pulp into any sort of dessert, let alone a pie filling. So the easiest way to get all the flavor out of this fickle fruit, minus the mess, is to pair it up with something else.

The pomegranate pumpkin pie is a tasty duo of two of the autumn and winter seasons' favorite fruits.

Unlike your ordinary pumpkin pie, this filling is sweetened with the distinctive flavor of pomegranate juice, creating a lovely berry-like or grape-like essence that complements the rustic pumpkin spice flavor so well.

The pumpkin filling is a typical pumpkin custard filling, but strong with the flavor of pomegranate. Yet the crowning stroke of this pie is within its cream topping -- a sweet whipped cream fragrant with vanilla and laced with the tiniest bit of sweet pomegranate pulp, giving the cream a lovely rose color and just a hint of texture.

As the flavors of fall seep into your kitchen and cause the need for an apple pie, it would be a sin to give in to the temptation of the common apple. Choose the other fruit of the season, the pomegranate.

It's a new-fangled approach to a worn-out habit.

Pomegranate Pumpkin Pie

Servings: 1 9-inch pie

Pie

-- Juice from 2 large pomegranates (see Cook's note), or 1⁄2 cup POM Wonderful 100 percent Pomegranate Juice

-- 1 9-inch prepared pie crust

-- 3 large eggs

-- 11⁄2 cups pumpkin (14.5-oz. can)

-- 1⁄2 cup granulated sugar

-- 1⁄2 teaspoon salt

-- 1 teaspoon cinnamon

-- 1⁄2 teaspoon nutmeg

-- 1⁄2 teaspoon ginger

-- 1 cup heavy cream

To make pie: Prepare fresh pomegranate juice. Preheat oven to 425 degrees.

Beat eggs with a whisk in a medium-sized bowl. Add pumpkin and whisk to combine. Mix in granulated sugar, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg and ginger. Stir in pomegranate juice and heavy cream. Pour into prepared pie crust. Bake 15 minutes.

Reduce oven heat to 375 degrees and bake 35 to 45 minutes, or until knife inserted comes out clean. Allow pie to cool two to three hours before cutting. Serve with whipped cream and arils if desired.

Cook's note: For a cup of juice, cut 2 to 3 large POM Wonderful Pomegranates in half and juice them with a citrus reamer or juicer. Pour the mixture through a cheesecloth-lined strainer or sieve. Set the juice aside.

Whipped Cream

-- 1⁄4 cup arils from 1 large pomegranate

-- 1 cup very cold heavy cream

-- 2 tablespoons powdered sugar

-- 2 teaspoons vanilla

-- 1⁄4 teaspoon cinnamon

To make whipped cream: Score one fresh pomegranate and place in a bowl of water. Break open pomegranate under water to free arils (seed sacs). Arils will sink to bottom of bowl and membrane will float to top. Sieve and put arils in a separate bowl. Reserve one cup arils from fruit and set aside. (Refrigerate or freeze remaining arils for another use.)

In a medium-sized bowl, beat heavy cream with a wire whisk or electric mixer until slightly thickened. Add powdered sugar, vanilla and cinnamon, and whip until mixture doubles in volume and soft peaks form. Gently fold in arils. Serve immediately.

-- Source: POM Wonderful, www.pomwonderful.com

Labels: Food

Radiohead in America

It doesn't matter where the digital revolution takes us, it is always nice to find a home for an album...

Radiohead Say Goodbye to EMI, Hello to ATO?

10/23/07, 11:36 am EST

After weighing offers from major leaguers like former longtime label EMI, Warner Bros. and Starbucks’ Hear Music, it seems Radiohead may have found a smaller home for the CD release of their free legally/illegally downloaded new album In Rainbows. ATO Records, a.k.a. the label that Dave Matthews built, is now the frontrunner to secure the rights to release In Rainbows domestically. XL Recordings, which distributed Thom Yorke’s solo album The Eraser, remains the favorite to issue the album internationally. If ATO Records does win the bidding war, it would serve as a significant victory for independent labels, and provide yet another blow to the struggling major labels.

Under the proposed deal, label offshoot Side One, in connection with ATO, would license the album for a specified amount of time, while Radiohead would retain the long-term ownership of the recordings. Radiohead would also provide a major facelift for ATO, which initially housed jam bands like Gov’t Mule and the North Mississippi All-Stars, but has since added acts like Ben Kweller and My Morning Jacket to the roster. ATO is also distributed through SonyBMG, but the Radiohead acquisition would probably help spearhead an exile from that company. All that remains now in this grand experiment is finding out how many copies In Rainbows actually sells on CD, months after being made available for free to everyone with Internet connection.

Labels: Radiohead

From The Music Blog

http://www.ruasrealm.com/talk-talk-hey-have-you-heard-of-this-thing-called-the-internet_80275.html

Coverage from the recent CMJ Convention, held yearly in New York City...

Talk Talk: Hey, Have You Heard Of This Thing Called The Internet?

Our intrepid reporter offers up more compelling CMJ panel coverage from the wild, untamed conference rooms of NYU's Kimmel Center. In this installment, he listens in as panelists talk about "the MySpace" and--to finish things off--the world of the almighty blogs.

Catbird CMJ 2007 Totals:
Number of Panels Attended: 8
Number of Bands Seen: 2
Number of Drive Like Jehu "Yank Crime" Sweatshirts Seen: 1
Number of Double-Takes Done After Walking Past A Guy Wearing A Drive Like Jehu "Yank Crime" Sweatshirt: 1

Panel 1 - Friday, October 19. 10:30am
Music Business Primer: Digital Distribution
A session focusing on the online music market, digital music outlets, blogs and other digital distribution options.

Panel 2 - Friday, October 19, 11:45am
DIY or DIE
This panel will discuss independent record label management with artists who have made it on their own, with special focus on whether or not the traditional record label model is still relevant in today's changing music industry.

Panel 3 - Friday, October 19, 1:15pm
Major Label Dilemma
Representatives from major and indie labels confront the inevitable ultimatum facing industry constituents. Should I deal with a major label, an indie or just go for it on my own? This panel explores the major label response to changing technology, pros and cons of working with an independent label and the impact of digital technology on the major vs. indie debate. The discussion will include analysis from varying points of view including that of the artist, the manager, the radio promoter, the label manager, the marketing director and more.

These three panels may have had three discrete topics according to the descriptions, but I tellya--there ended up being a hell of a lot of overlap, to the degree where my morning felt more like one long, contiguous session. And here's the main point that came out:

"PEOPLE, YOU GOTTA TALK TO THE KIDS ON THE MYSPACE."

Music Business Primer: Digital Distribution
In the morning's Digital Distro session (moderated by Tunecore's Jeff Price), the focus of the discussion actually centered on "online marketing" more than "digital distro" per se (which is totally fine, and which had the added bonus of making me feel okay about blowing off the 2:30 "Marketing" panel). The panelists briefly explained their individual services, and though there were two digital distro guys on the panel (in addition to Price, there was Tim Mitchell of IODA), one hardware guy (Keith Washo of SanDisk), and two service/marketing guys (Mike Eldredge of Fuzz, Paul Wright of MediaGuide), the most interesting input came from musician Xander Smith (of the band Run Run Run), as he was able to talk about some of this stuff from a "band's-eye view." I think he actually even said, "Online marketing is everything to my band." What struck me was how, in a time when most people are preaching "sneaky" marketing, forced grass-roots "viral" campaigns, and/or otherwise gaming the system, here was a guy proving that, in the end, the best way to succeed is just to be genuine, be sincere, and put in the work (and yes, it is work) necessary to engage the fans. In other words, "YOU GOTTA TALK TO THE KIDS ON THE MYSPACE."

DIY or DIE
The DIY panel, moderated by IndieHQ.Com/Suburban Home's Virgil Dickerson, featured Tom Gates of Nettwerk, Cortney Harding of Billboard, and Nick Young of the band A.i. (not to be confused with Sasha Frere-Jones' all-black R&B/funk-soul band, Ui). Gates and Harding both had some interesting input (including Harding's assertion--which I totally agree with--that a huge portion of the whole "success equation" is dependent simply on chance and luck), but again, in this panel, it was the musician who offered up the most interesting point of view. In this case, the (pun intended) Young musician was able to detail a long and convoluted story about what his band experienced while being aggressively courted, schmoozed, and signed by a major, only to have their record lost, shuffled, botched and buried once they were "in." Yes, I realize that's not a new or unique story--but that's not my point. My point is that holy cow all this crazy major-label shit is still happening! Insane, I tellya. Utterly insane. Anyway, the kid's band is now going it alone, releasing their new album via Tunecore, and, I would assume, TALKING TO THE KIDS ON THE MYSPACE.

Major Label Dilemma
Moderator David Purcell, ESQ, of NYU announced right off the bat that this wouldn't be a panel doing an "indies vs. majors" debate, because that was a debate that had been "done to death." Instead, the focus of this panel was to be "the business of being an artist in today's marketplace." On the panel were Stu Bergen of the Independent Label Group, Jason Fiber of Superfecta, Steve Savoca of Domino, Anders Johansson of Universal Sweden, and "Shane" from imeem. There was a lot of discussion of how label/artist relationships have been structured historically, how they're changing/being done now, and how they'll need to change moving forward. Ultimately, this lead to a question I've been pondering lately: "What exactly is the role of a label anymore?" Time was, a label would scout talent (no longer needed; Internet), advance money/studio time (no longer needed; ProTools), manufacture and distribute physical product (no longer needed; iTunes), and then market and promote (still needed). So my thinking was leading me to conclude that the labels of the future are, for lack of a better term, simply marketing companies. But after this session, I had to reconsider; it's all quite a bit deeper than that. Although an artist can now easily self-record, self-release, and self-promote/manage/book etc. (via contracted services), the labels (well, the good ones, at least) will always be able to offer an artist the benefits of their industry knowledge, experience, and relationships, and for that reason, the concept of "the label" will remain relevant. At the same time, we're losing the concept of the label as a "mark of quality;" we're on the way to a future in which an album's label will matter to the consumer about as much as a movie's production studio does ("Dude. I totally only see movies that are distributed by Lion's Gate. Lion's Gate-distributed movies totally rule."). Oh yeah, and I almost forgot: someone in the audience asked the panel about their thoughts regarding the social networking services, and whether or not artists and labels should focus any efforts there. Know what the response was? Here's a hint: it rhymes with this: "SHMEOPLE, YOU GOTTA SHMALK TO THE SHMIDS ON THE SHMYSPACE."

And so, as my weeklong sojourn in CMJ panel-land began to draw to a close, a gentle rain began to fall, and I settled in for the capstone panel:

Panel 3 - Friday, October 19, 3:45pm
The Almighty Blog
This panel explores the power to make or break artists that increasingly lies in the hands of influential bloggers. This discussion will feature some of the world's most respected bloggers as well as representatives of traditional media outlets hashing it out over the legitimacy of blog-power.

Let me preface by saying that for someone like me, who has been observing this stuff with a nitpicking, micro-level view (yes, sad/pathetic, I know) for quite a long time, this panel didn't get to touch on much more than a fairly general look at the music blogosphere. In the end, that was probably a good thing, because that precludes me from writing some 90-paragraph/Marathonpacks-length rambling dissertation. The panel was moderated by Wired's Eliot Van Buskirk, had blogger representation from FreeIndie/Limewire blogger Mike Frankel, Music For Robots' Mark Willett and "honorary blogger" Anthony Volodkin of Hype Machine, plus Karen Lieberman of Sony BMG, and Jaan Uhelszki of Rhapsody. They discussed music blogs in the following contexts: value(?), integrity(?), social/community aspect, professionalism(?), and monetization. It was interesting. Someone should have live-blogged it.

And then, toward the end, Eliot opened it up for questions, at which point an eloquent young man stood up and graced us with the following:

"Yeah, so, uh, like... um.... I have, like, um, two questions, or, uh, like a two-part question? And you can, ahem, you can, like, just answer, like, one part, or, um, like, both? Or, um... like, I guess, or, um, not answer either part or, um.... whatever. So, like, uh... blogs. Um, like, you know, like, Pitchfork? Like, um, how do blogs, er, I mean, like, um... how does Pitchfork fit into, like, everything? Do you guys, like, um....hate them? Or like, um... do you like them or, uh, hate them, or what? Or, like, whatever? And, um, my, uh.... my second part? So, like, uh, the future? Like is that gonna be, like, uh... podcasts, or video, or whatever? Because my friend like, he has a video, and uh... like, is the future in blogs gonna be like, uh, like podcasts, or like, uh, whatever? Or, um, whatever."

I believe the children are our future, folks. Let us heed this young man's powerful message. Let us look to the future with an eye on tomorrow, but with one foot planted firmly in today. Let us be respectful of those that have come before us, while blazing a new path forward with our music blogs, and our "like, um, podcasts," and our "uhh... videos or whatever." Let us never forget our roots, and let us never forget the value of honest, hard work. Let us build a new nation of music lovers, with a focus on community, and respect, and a drive for greatness. Let us reclaim music as something valuable and meaningful, and worthy of deep-listening, and let us nurture the artists, and cultivate an environment of openness, and innovation, and an eternal reverence for the Art. And people, let us talk to the kids on the MySpace.

Labels: CMJ

Let the first official post begin... Look for daily posts about this wonderful world of ours...

And what is a better topic to start off with than California...

Well, except for the part where the southern part is on fire...

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8SEH5D01&show_article=1