The New York Times reports on the first recorded instance of a rider being saved by Honda's airbag-equipped Goldwing (which I blogged about here):

Returning to the office from lunch on his 2007 Honda Gold Wing motorcycle one day this spring, Lou O’Connell got a glimpse into the future, if only by two seconds or so. A car pulled out of a shopping center in Weston, Fla., near Fort Lauderdale, and into his path. He could see that he was going to hit the car.

Mr. O’Connell said that although he did not expect to be killed in the impending crash — becoming one of the 5,000 or so motorcycle riders who will die on American roads this year if recent trends continue — he knew that at the very least he was about to go flying over the handlebars.

But then there was a bang and a cloud of powder in front of him. Though the front of his bike had slammed the passenger side of a black Nissan 350Z, Mr. O’Connell found himself nearly uninjured — intact enough to lay down the bike and stride over with some well-chosen words for the car’s driver.

That's good news. But the Times spends the rest of the article wondering what could possibly be causing a rise in fatal motorcycle crashes:

Riding a motorcycle is becoming riskier. Deaths last year increased by 5.4 percent over 2005, according to preliminary estimates of the federal Fatality Analysis Reporting System, and are up for the ninth consecutive year. Deaths have increased 125 percent over 10 years, a period in which registrations rose more than 50 percent.

Even when adjusted for more bikes covering more miles, the picture is grim. While the death rate for people in vehicles fell by about 17 percent for each mile traveled over that period, the rate for motorcycle riders more than doubled, according to the report.

That timeline coincides with factors including a rising average age of riders, more powerful engines and the repeal of state laws requiring universal helmet use, in part a result of pressure applied by lobby groups that persuaded legislators to “let the rider decide.”

So, what is causing all these crashes? Older riders? More powerful bikes? Helmet law repeals? I suspect the answer is "none of the above." Look at the very example that leads off the Times article itself: A car pulled out of a shopping center in Weston, Fla., near Fort Lauderdale, and into his path. Maybe, just maybe, the increasing number of bike crashes is due to the increasing number of careless, unskilled, and distracted car drivers on America's roads.

From the NYT review of Paul Verhoeven's "Black Book":

Having first earned international attention with crudely effective Dutch entertainments like “Soldier of Orange,” Mr. Verhoeven went Hollywood, starting in the late 1980s, with increasingly slicker, steadily less effective entertainments like “Basic Instinct” and “Showgirls.”

In the movie Idiocracy, Mike Judge predicted (at 1:27 into the clip) that Fox News would use this kind of mangled English after 500 years of Americans becoming increasingly stupid. But the Times is using it today.

That's right, you heard me. I'm Time magazine's person of the year. And so are you. Via LGF, Drudge reports:

**EXCLUSIVE** 7:38 PM ET... IT’S YOU! YOU were named TIME magazine ‘Person of the Year’ Saturday for the explosive growth and influence of user-generated Internet content such as ‘blogs’, video-file sharing site YouTube and social network MySpace... You — YES, YOU — beat out candidates including Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, China’s President Hu Jintao, North Korean leader Kim Jong-il and Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi... YOU, YOU, YOU....

Don't worry; I won't let it go to my head.

FOLLOW-UP:
Here's an Associated Press article on Time's choice, linked by Drudge.

ANOTHER FOLLOW-UP:
Wow, this guy is good. (Via Michelle Malkin)

I recently noted that officials in Guangzhou, China are banning motorcycles. And now, sadly, Nigeria's capital city of Abuja is following Guangzhou's lead. The New York Times reports:

“They don’t want to see the common man, the poor man,” said Comrade Daniel, a motorcycle taxi driver, standing in the rubble of his neighborhood. He lost first his home and then his livelihood to a recent campaign to rid this stately capital of the blemishes of poverty. “They only care for themselves,” he said.

Mr. Daniel and others who live on the unruly edge of this tidy city in the mossy hills of central Nigeria say that Abuja has declared war on its poorest citizens.

In the interest of cultivating an image as a world-class city, comparable to London, Paris, New York or Hong Kong, the government has been razing unauthorized and unsightly slums, clearing out street hawkers and banishing popular and cheap motorcycle taxis, all in the name of spiffing up the city.

Nigeria, of course, is one of the international community's true basket cases, where corrupt rulers exploit a severely impoverished citizenry and human rights are a cruel joke. I'm starting to think that the fairness and justness of a government can be determined by its attitude toward motorcycles.

FOLLOW-UP:
Interestingly, the Times itself can't quite seem to decide how it feels about Abuja's motorcycle taxis. First it describes them as "popular and cheap", but later on in the same article, we find the following:

Abuja is a planned city, originally designed by a group of American firms in the 1970s.

...But the city’s master plan was ignored for years by corrupt officials who allowed illegal neighborhoods to blossom, unauthorized street markets to spread and torpedo-like motorcycle taxis, called okada, often driven by illiterate young men, to choke the streets.

So, are motorcycle taxis a good thing, or a bad thing? It depends. If you want to show how the wealthy elite of Abuja are hurting the masses, they're popular and cheap. But if you want to point out how a plan devised by American firms has failed, they're torpedo-like street chokers.

Via Digg, check out this unintentionally hilarious news report about Leet — which, you may not have realized, is a "potentially dangerous code".

This week's contest showed Reuters' new news bureau in the Second Life virtual world:


FIRST PLACE: Gridlock

The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set one's teen on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one's neck. The Hate had started...

SECOND PLACE: RFTR (blog)

"Fake, but accurate."

HONORABLE MENTION: Steven Den Beste (blog)

You know, if they keep working on it pretty soon Reuters reporters will look just like virtual people!

WHAT I CAME UP WITH:

Now that's what I call hack journalism.

"...And in other virtual news today, extremist orcs from a splinter guild of the Horde continued their rampage across the heart of Kalimdor. Details at eleven."

The MSM's virtual news bureaus had been well-received at first, but they were steadily losing ground to the increasingly popular Second Blogosphere.

And that's your caption contest news for today. Remember, for the latest word on new contests, check Riding Sun every Tuesday.

This week's contest looks at the MSM:

An undated handout image of Reuters' Second Life bureau. Reuters Group Plc is opening a news bureau in the simulation game Second Life... joining a race by corporate name brands to take part in the hottest virtual world on the Internet. (Handout/Reuters)

File your best caption before the results go to press Friday.

On September 1, Time Warner shut down Office Pirates, the painfully lame humor site I reviewed here. The officepirates.com URL now redirects to Sports Illustated.

I guess no one noticed, because no one was reading it.

Time magazine has named YouTube its "Invention of the Year" for 2006, while emphasizing that old-line content and media companies should see it as a revenue opportunity, not a threat:

...YouTube has to start conducting itself with a little more legal and financial gravitas. That means making money — mostly through advertising — and convincing the TV, movie and music executives who find copyrighted material on YouTube that it's a revenue opportunity and not grounds for litigation. The learning curve is still steep. "The people marketing content see it as a great new platform, but the legal side of the business doesn't know how to react," Hurley says. "We have instances where someone within the company uploaded something, and the other side's asking you to take it down."

But YouTube isn't Napster. It already has partnerships with NBC, CBS, Universal Music, Sony BMG and Warner Music. And come on — it's the one place on the Net where people willingly, knowingly click on ads, like Nike's legendary clip of sharpshooting soccer star Ronaldinho. If you can't find money on YouTube, you're in the wrong economy, buddy.

That's right, media companies: YouTube users will voluntarily watch your ads — if they're compelling enough. It's a point I've made before. But the Time piece is also a great review of how significantly, and how quickly, YouTube has transformed media and Internet culture. Read the whole thing.

Via LGF, of all places, comes an update on Japanese movie, TV, and record companies' paranoid, knee-jerk reactions to YouTube. Reuters reports:

Google Inc.'s YouTube.com removed 29,549 video files from its popular Web site after receiving a demand from a group of Japanese media companies over copyright infringement, an industry group said on Friday.

The television, music and movie clips had been posted without the permission of copyright holders, the Tokyo-based Japan Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers said in a statement.

The group, which represents 23 media companies including TV networks and movie distributors, said it would ask YouTube to set up screening and other measures to block postings of unauthorized files. It also called on Internet users not to post video clips in violation of copyright laws.

Good luck with that, guys. I first blogged about Japanese content companies' irrational fear of YouTube here. YouTube is basically paying out of its own pocket to host and stream up to 10-minute-long clips of these companies' shows, commercials, music videos, and what have you. Moreover, YouTube doesn't offer the ability to download and save video clips, so the average user (i.e., one who doesn't turn to hacks and work-arounds) isn't saving these clips to his hard drive or video iPod and swapping them with friends. I don't call that piracy; I call it free advertising.

Example: In surfing around on YouTube a while ago, I came across a clip from Disney's "The Hunchback of Notre Dame". I've seen just about all of Disney's modern animated films (e.g., from "The Little Mermaid" onward), but I skipped "Hunchback". Never saw it. I guess when it came out in 1996, I just thought it looked silly, and I wasn't interested. But the YouTube clips — like potato chips, you can't watch just one — showed that the movie had great animation, powerful songs, and a more mature storyline and darker tone than the average Disney film. I mean, just check out this one, for example.

I wanted to see the whole thing, so I hopped over to Amazon.com and ordered the DVD, which is on its way to me as we speak. If I hadn't seen those clips on YouTube, I wouldn't have bought the DVD. It's just that simple.

Some American media companies have recognized YouTube's value as a promotional tool; NBC, CBS, and others already post clips of their shows on the site. I hope their Japanese counterparts come to the same realization soon.

FOLLOW-UP:
Also via the same LGF post, it looks like the tit-for-tat YouTube censorship battle I warned against here is, sadly, in full swing.

ANOTHER FOLLOW-UP:
The BBC reports that a British soccer league is demanding that footage of goals scored in its games be pulled from YouTube, too. Sigh.

Via Fark, check out this brilliant post by lokiloki at DailyKos, showing just how much fluff, gossip, advertising, and other non-news items fills the "above the fold" section of CNN's homepage. There's virtually no actual news on it at all.

Ironically, lokiloki shows, China's state-controlled Xinhua puts much more hard news on its English homepage. Sure, Xinhua's stories may be biased, censored, and selective, but at least they're there.

FOLLOW-UP:
While CNN's news coverage might not be state-controlled and censored like Xinhua's, it would be wrong to imply it's not biased or selective. (via Instapundit)

A few days ago,I noted that the New York Times website had linked to Riding Sun, but that the link came from one of the paper's handful of blogs, not the actual Times itself.

Well, this time it's the real thing:

A Slippery Slope of Censorship at YouTube
By TOM ZELLER Jr.
Published: October 9, 2006

...To be fair, YouTube has to retain the right to boot content to maintain legal control of its servers. Otherwise, chaos would reign.

But as GaijinBiker, an American blogger living in Tokyo (ridingsun.com) — and a fan of Ms. Malkin — noted on Thursday, erasing opposing opinions is nothing to celebrate.

"This is not a positive development," he said on the removal of some anti-Israeli videos from YouTube. "I want these videos to be widely available, so people can see just how deranged and hate-filled Israel’s opponents can be. A tit-for-tat censorship battle only leaves all of us less informed."

It's interesting that Mr. Zeller, who never contacted me, decided to characterize me as a "fan" of Michelle Malkin. I agree with some things she writes, disagree with others, and feel her rhetoric can at times be a bit heavy-handed. "Fan", however, makes it sound like I'm wearing a Michelle Malkin baseball cap and t-shirt while I chant my support during her latest appearance on Fox News.

Rock stars have fans. Athletes have fans. Pundits have people who agree with them. In the context of a serious debate on social issues, branding someone a "fan" of a particular blogger seems rather trivializing.

Still, I do appreciate the link.

The New York Times has linked to Riding Sun.

Well, okay, it's just the NYT's "Screens" blog, by Virginia Hefferman. But still...

St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Tim Townsend knows there's nothing like a little comedy to kick off an article about a religion's most serious and important holiday:

No one knows whether it happens with a satisfying "thump," but at sunset Monday, God will close the Book of Life, according to Jewish tradition, and the fate of every Jew will be sealed for another year.

Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement and most solemn day in the Jewish calendar, begins at sunset Sunday and ends at sunset Monday.

He's here all week, folks.

The recent flap over Newsweek's putting different covers on its international and US editions has leapt from the blogosphere to the MSM. The Associated Press reports:

Newsweek offered different covers overseas and in the U.S. this week, featuring a close look at violence in Afghanistan for international readers called "Losing Afghanistan" while its U.S. edition focused on photographer Annie Leibovitz for a story titled "My Life in Pictures."

And of course, this isn't the first time Newsweek has played this game:

Last year, Newsweek stirred up criticism over a different series of covers. In January 2005, the weekly newsmagazine featured a photo of an American flag in a garbage can in the Japanese-language edition that did not appear on the U.S. or the international editions.

That criticism started right here on Riding Sun, buddy, in this post. But of course, since this is an MSM report we're talking about here, it doesn't discuss or credit any of its sources.

The AP story does include an illuminating quotation from Newsweek editor Fareed Zakaria about why the American edition goes heavy on celebrity gossip, while concealing or leaving out hard news and criticism:

International editor Fareed Zakaria said the magazines often have different covers because they are tailored to different audiences overseas and in the United States. In the U.S., Newsweek is a mass-circulation magazine with a broad reach, while overseas it "is a somewhat more upmarket magazine for internationally minded people who travel a lot," he said.

In short: Newsweek thinks Americans are a bunch of provincial hicks who aren't that interested in world events — even events taking place in a country where American troops are fighting.

Of course, the American-as-slack-jawed-yokel is a vicious and unfounded stereotype. But Newsweek is trying its hardest to perpetuate it.

Via Fark, ABC News's "The Blotter" blog says that the French report of Osama Bin Laden's death has been dismissed as a mere rumor.

So first, NBC got mad about YouTube showing NBC's "Lazy Sunday" video. Then the two companies forged an alliance, in whicn NBC agreed to show NBC videos on YouTube.

But now, NBC is showing YouTube videos on NBC.

Oh, and I found out about this because, as that previous link demonstrates, NBC put the video of NBC showing YouTube videos on NBC on YouTube. Got it?

The Associated Press reports:

Mexican police stand in front the National Congress to prevent protesters from disrupting the sixth State of the Union address by Mexico's President Vicente Fox on Friday, Sept. 1, 2006. in Mexico City. (AP Photo/Marco Ugarte)

Those are some pretty short cops.

NPR reports (via Kottke.org) on John Sawatsky, ESPN's "interview coach". He teaches ESPN reporters how to do better interviews. And he agrees with me: Mike Wallace is not very good at his job:

In his seminar, Sawatsky points to Mike Wallace of CBS' 60 Minutes and CNN's Larry King as examples to avoid. In Sawatsky's illustrative clips, King favors leading questions that generate curt answers, while Wallace's rapid patter fails to get a subject to speak candidly.

Sawatsky says Wallace and the others are better at theatrics than journalism, and that they often trip up their own interviews — by thinking they should be the focus of attention.

I suppose Wallace and King can be forgiven for thinking they should be the center of attention, since their networks treat them that way.

I just watched Mike Wallace interview Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on 60 Minutes. And while some pundits are accusing Wallace of being "smitten" by Ahmadinejad, in fact, his distaste for the man was evident throughout.

But while Wallace did ask a few tough questions, he didn't get Ahmadinejad to provide specific answers to them. And he didn't follow up with questions that would have exposed the inconsistencies in Ahmadinejad's positions.

For example, Wallace asked why Iran was supplying bombs to insurgents in Iraq. Ahmadinejad answered that Iraq now has a democratic government, and the Americans should leave now that Saddam has been removed from power. A good follow-up from Wallace would have been to ask, "Don't you think the Americans would have left by now if the new Iraqi government wasn't being undermined by the insurgents you're supplying bombs to?"

And when Ahmadinejad claimed that he loved all people, or some such tripe, Wallace might have asked, "How do you feel about Iraqi civillians being killed by the insurgents you've armed?" But he didn't. At one point, he did accuse Ahmadinejad of providing rambling non-answers to his questions, but this just made him look snippy and impatient. And he also didn't ask why, if Ahmadinejad is such a friend of the people, he is limiting his people's free speech rights, shutting down Iranian websites and throwing Iranian bloggers in jail.

I got the feeling that Wallace, now almost 90 years old, lacked the energy to really think on his feet and go after Ahmadinejad in an incisive, not just indignant, way. In the next segment, Morley Safer interviewed Stephen Colbert. I caught myself thinking that Colbert, despite being no friend of the Bush administration, would have done a much better job of interviewing Ahmadinejad. It's time for a new generation to take up the stopwatch.

FOLLOW-UP:
Ahmadinejad may be cracking down on Iranian bloggers, but (via BoingBoing) he has recently launched a blog of his own. No, it's not a joke; here's a Reuters news story about it.

ANOTHER FOLLOW-UP:
Despite the Reuters report, BoingBoing is now wondering whether the Ahmadinejad blog is actually just a hoax after all.