From TPM:

Hackers broke into the email account of the George Mason University provost in Virginia, early this morning and sent out the following email:

Subject: Election Day Update To the Mason Community:

Please note that election day has been moved to November 5th. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you.

Peter N. Stearns
Provost

According to Dan Walsh, a spokesman for the university, the hoax message went to the entire student body — more than 30,000 students — and about 5000 faculty and staff.

Stearns himself quickly sent out a followup message assuring recipients that it was a hoax, which was being investigated.

Walsh said the university had contacted campus police, who are working with outside law enforcement to look into the hoax.

(via Maud Newton)

As one of City Paper’s Maryland staffers, much of the political noise broadcast on my TV set and left hanging on the front doorknob of my house involves Question 2—the referendum about whether slots should be permitted in Maryland. It’s as divisive an issue as any in this election: The Washington Post has come down against slots, while the Baltimore Sun has come down for slots.

That is, after being against them. Confusion! How to decide? An assortment of ads and footage on the referendum, compiled after the jump, should help. Or not.

Read the rest of this entry »

Studs Terkel, radio host, oral historian, indefatigable promoter of Labor Day, and author of one of the best books ever written about American life, died today. He was 96. A brief obituary in the Chicago Sun-Times has this nice summation:

“He had a very full, eventful and sometimes tempestuous life ,” said his son Dan. “It was very satisfactory.”

The Post’s very excellent comics blog, Comic Riffs, has the scoop on Garry Trudeau filing a strip for next Wednesday assuming an Obama win. He has a replacement strip ready just in case, but whatever:

Trudeau tells Comic Riffs today: “If I didn’t call the election, I’d have no premise for the week and be forced to write about something else. I didn’t want to write about something else. This is history.”

Did Trudeau then create the strip with complete and utter confidence that Obama will win? “Nope, more like rational risk assessment,” Trudeau explains. “Nate Silver at Fivethirtyeight.com is now giving McCain a 3.7% chance of winning — pretty comfortable odds. … Here’s the way I look at it: If Obama wins, I’m in the flow and commenting on a phenomenon. If he loses, it’ll be a massive upset, and the goofy misprediction of a comic strip will be pretty much lost in the uproar. I figure I can survive a little egg on my face.”

In the quest for better understanding between the West and the Middle East, a film like Captain Abu Raed, which shows during Filmfest DC’s “Arabian Sights” series this weekend, proves that if nothing else America doesn’t have a monopoly on feel-good fare. Amin Matalqa’s film stars Nadim Sawalha as Abu Raed, an introverted, aging man sweeping floors at the airport in Amman, Jordan. When he discovers a captain’s hat dumped in a garbage can, he soon parks it on his head and fancies himself a storyteller, charming the neighborhood kids with finely spun tales about his travels around the world. Add in Nour (Rana Sultan), an honest-to-goodness pilot who builds a platonic friendship with Abu Raed while rolling her eyes at the wealthy suitors her dad sets her up with, and there’s little to distinguish what follows from a Disney film about following your dreams, looking beyond class, etc. (The film’s international ambitions are clear; it’s Jordan’s entry for next year’s Oscars.) Though it mostly goes down smoothly—and to be fair, there are plenty of gorgeous shots of Amman’s neighborhoods and skyline—a subplot involving an abusive husband living within Abu Raed’s earshot restores some balance and realism to the proceedings. You wish Ghandi Saber had more screen time, even though his every appearance translates into more damage to his wife and kids. Matalqa and producer David Pritchard will attend the screenings.

Captain Abu Raed screens at 6 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 1, and 5 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 2, at Goethe-Institut Washington, 812 7th St. NW. $10. (202) 724-5613. See Filmfest DC’s Web site for a complete schedule of films in the series showing this weekend.

It’s been a thoroughgoingly crappy year for local booksellers—first Karibu, then Olsson’s. Now Vertigo Books, which moved from Dupont Circle to College Park in 2001 2000, has posted a plea for help to its customers:

Why are we struggling? It may be a perfect storm:

* Market forces have not been kind to independent businesses and competition from internet and chain booksellers is keen.
* DC area residents use the internet more than many areas.
* An entire generation has grown up believing that Barnes & Noble, Borders and Amazon are the only places to buy books and this matters in a college town.
* The area lacks a coherent Buy Local effort that makes consumers aware of the real cost of chains.

Sales in 2008 are down substantially over last year. Vertigo Books simply cannot survive only on good wishes and fond thoughts.

Update: Vertigo co-owner Bridget Warren explains that 2008 has generally been a down year for the store (which moved to College Park in 2000, not 2001 as I previously wrote). The numbers for July, for instance, were below those for July 2007, but “last summer was Harry Potter. Everybody’s numbers were off for July.” But though she declines to state a specific figure, Warren says that the falloff in revenues for the store in the past month have been much more precipitous, tracking with the general decline of the economy. That’s a worry for Warren given the store’s College Park clientele. “Students and families are going to be more recession-sensitive,” she says.

As far as cost savings, Warren says, “anything we can cut has pretty much been cut.” So she and co-owner Todd Stewart will look to see how the Christmas sales season pans out. And though she doesn’t anticipate Vertigo closing its doors, the store’s blog post was intended to deal clearly with people about how dire the stakes are.

“There was a sense of disappointment and dismay at the way Karibu and Olsson’s closed down,” she says. “I wanted people to be on alert.”

So much for being tired of media scrutiny. (Click the image to expand it.)

That’s according to an Army intelligence report, which says that terrorists are using the microblogging service to communicate with each another.

Fox 5 News has announced that it’s working on a story about this. Via Twitter.

As we’ve noted before here, the folks at examiner.com, an online company owned the same folks who drop the Examiner on doorstops without asking in D.C. and a few other cities, recently launched a program where folks like you can blog for (a little) pay. A tipster passed along a story in which one of the writers had a rough time getting a post to go live on the site. The writer e-mailed the post to an e-mail list for fellow “examiners”:

Hey, I have a question:
I keep trying to post a comment on my site and I’m getting a red-letter warning telling me that the comment is disallowed for “inappropriate language”: can you tell me what I’m doing wrong?!

Another responded:

My guess is its “snigger” …just replace it with snicker.

Which turned out to do the trick. “It’s a simple blogging software filtering, filtering out dirty words,” says Kyle du Ford, the Arts and Entertainment Channel Manager for Examiner.com, who explained that the software scans for letter combinations, not specific words. Which means it’ll be difficult to find “examiners” for titmice, Charles Dickens, and the University of South Carolina Gamecocks.

Filmfest DC’s “Arabian Sights” festival, which kicks off tonight with 33 Days, continues through the weekend at Goethe-Institut Washington and the E Street Cinema. Closing out the Sunday schedule is Slingshot Hip-Hop, a documentary about Palestinian rappers. Jackie Shalloum spends time with a host of MCs but mainly centers on DAM, a trio living and performing in the Israeli city of Lod. Their perspective on the genre is woefully out of date by American standards, which is partly a function of how hard it is to get access to the music. (One rapper describes being thrilled at finally getting hold of an Eminem cassette from Canada.) But it’s hard not to be drawn in by DAM’s connection of Tupac’s “Holla if Ya Hear Me” and the second Intafada, and the excitement of Shalloum’s film is in watching a scene build itself from the ground up. There are more than a few headaches involved on that front—power outages, absurdly long waits at checkpoints, sexism, and racism, for starters. The fellow-feeling between DAM and an upstart trio from Gaza, PR, is so strong and inspiring that you can easily ignore the pride with which one member sports his Troy Aikman jersey.

Shalloum, DAM, and female Palestinian MC Abeer will attend the screening on Sunday, Oct. 26, at 5 p.m. at E Street Cinema, 555 11th St. NW, followed by a performance by DAM at the Hard Rock Cafe, 999 E St. NW. Tickets are $15 for the film and concert, $10 for the concert only.

This weekend marks the opening of Filmfest DC’s “Arabian Sights” series, which features a raft of new films from the Middle East. The opening-night film, 33 Days, is a documentary about the violent flare-up of tensions between Israel and Lebanon in the summer of 2006, stoked by Hezbollah’s capture of two Israeli soldiers. Director Mai Masri isn’t especially interested in detailing the nuts and bolts of the politics involved, deciding instead to tell a more ground-level story about life in Beirut during the 33-day war. Three locals get special attention: Sharif Abdunnur, a theater director who’s trying to corral and engage with the many kids who’ve wound up on his doorstep after escaping the bombing; Fadia Bazzi, a journalist; and Mariam Al-Bassam, a TV news director trying to keep the station running amid constant threats that it’s a target. Much of the bombing during the 33 days occurred in Beirut’s southern suburbs, and Masri includes plenty of footage of rubble, pancaked apartment buildings, and bloodied bodies hurriedly carried away on stretchers. The emphasis, though, is on the Beirut citizens living away from the bloodshed but still angry and frustrated at how it’s reshaped their lives. After listening to the sounds of distant bombing, a woman in a Beirut square looks in the camera and asks, “What’s more terrorist than this?” Masri doesn’t engage with anybody who might answer, “Hezbollah,” but her film is a valuable portrait of life during wartime. The film shows Friday, Oct. 24, at 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. at Goethe-Institut Washington, 812 7th St. NW. $10. (202) 724-5613. Masri will attend the screenings.

“Arabian Sights” runs through Nov. 2.

(via)

Last weekend I made my first trip to the Newseum, a shiny new museum dedicated to—well, I’m still trying to figure that out. On its second floor there’s an interactive exhibit in which you can play reporter by responding to battery of ethical questions. This’ll be easy, I figured, knowing that the game was designed for kids. I can totally kick the asses of a bunch of five-year-olds at Tee Ball, so I was sure I could clean up at a journalism ethics game designed for high schoolers. Bring it, Newseum! Read the rest of this entry »

When he’s not busy being the favorite target of desperate, confused GOP apparatchiks grasping for any non-issue that might help their candidate win a presidential election, Bill Ayers is a Chicago-based professor of education theory. If you’d like to talk to him about that—and presumably other stuff he’s been involved with—you can see him in person at Busboys & Poets on November 17 at 6:30 p.m. He’ll be plugging a new book which he co-edited, City Kids, City Schools.

Please leave semi-coherent, rambling accusations about the relationship between Ayers and Barack Obama in the comments.

Blog Action Day, an annual event where bloggers collectively weigh in on some matter of import, happened yesterday. Last year the event failed to do something about the environment—if some game-changing idea about climate change or alternative energy or whatever got blogged about that day, I must have missed it. (Did one of the presidential candidates say something about it? John McCain’s blinking hypnotized me, so I only half paid attention.) Read the rest of this entry »