Category: Media

Newly published tapes of a long-lost interview with Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams reveal that he didn't even like listening to most of the episodes of his original six-part radio series.

As traditional news media struggles to define its role in a world of blogs, online video and social networking sites, a new survey reveals what Americans think about why good news isn't reported very often. By an almost two to one margin, Americans believe it's simply the nature of the news business to cover bad things.

Author Daniel Pinchbeck has just debuted Prophet Motive, a new exclusive monthly column for the Conscious Enlightenment Publishing family of magazines, which includes Conscious Choice, Whole Life Times, Common Ground, Seattle's Conscious Choice and www.ConsciousChoice.com.

They called it "the Fat one, from Gilroy."

Gilroy, California that is, a little town on the northern edge of the Salinas Valley in John Steinbeck country. I don't know how it is these days, but in the late 70s and early 80s, when I was hanging out and making a fool of myself on the Monterey Peninsula, about the only thing that Gilroy had going for it was the dubious distinction of being “the garlic capitol of the world.” They even had an annual Garlic Festival, where the locals tried to attract tourist dollars by offering such delicacies as garlic flavored ice cream.

Like many others, over the last couple of years I've found myself being entertained in the wee hours of the morning by Miss Cleo's infomercials for Tarot readings, despite the fact that it was obvious that she was a fraud. Being a professional Tarot reader myself, I often found myself wondering how the heck she came to her conclusions from the cards she turned over on camera, even while being highly entertained by her larger-than-life persona, the cool mystical trappings on the set, her gypsy costuming and her thick and phony but oh-so-endearing Jamaican accent.

It was in 1973 that Ms. magazine begin showing up in the various ashrams and communes at Toronto’s Rochdale College, where I lived at the time. I couldn’t help but notice it lying around, for here was a publication that was very different from the other mags designed for female readers. While all of the other women’s periodicals of the day were publishing recipes, giving home decorating advice or pushing the latest fads in clothes and cosmetics, Ms. was talking about stuff that really mattered, and expressing ideas that hadn’t even occurred to many of it’s mostly young readership. Reading Ms. in those days was fun, an adventure into the thrill of discovery.