Month: April 2011

Cage Match! Late to his Own Funeral!

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So today’s my day in the Blog Tour De Force Cage, and I overslept! Oy! What a way to start one’s mixed martial arts career! So, without further ado, here’s a big hello and best wishes to my esteemed opponent Kimberly Kinrade and her poignant story, poem, dream collection about a love gone violently off the rails, Bits of You & Pieces of Me.

Blog Tour de Force Cage Match

Hope I don't get my lights punched out

Representing me in the ring is my Acts of the Apostles, a nanopunk biopunk cypberpunk thriller in the “Neal Stephenson meets Flannery O’Connor and Michael Crichton and Joseph Conrad” tradition, or as Hemos said on Sashdot oh so many years ago, “What Tom Clancy would write if he were smart”.

I’ll update this post as the day goes on, after coffee, but I think I’ had better get this up on my site soon, lest I lose this match by default!

Everybody who comments here today gets a free ebook version of Acts. Be sure to leave me an email addy. One lucky reader gets ebook versions of all three of my books, and a signed, printed copy of any one of my titles. More anon! Let the pummeling commence resume.

UPDATE 4/21: My day in the cage is over. I’m grateful for all the love in the comments. It was quite a showing of support. Alas, I did get my ass pretty roundly & soundly kicked by new Champeen Kimberly, but all in all I’m happy with the turnout. I’ll be sending out coupons today to people who posted yesterday. You can redeem them for a free ebook version of Acts of the Apostles from Smashwords.com in the ebook format of your choice. Free ebook giveaway is now over; if you missed out feel free to buy a copy. They’re cheap!

How the NAACP Saved America

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Cover of the book "Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement"

Read this book

Patricia Sullivan’s history of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is a book every American should read. My review below the fold.

I was born in 1952. I grew up on a small farm in New Jersey. My parents and three brothers and three sisters and I resided on the second floor of a small farmhouse; my paternal grandfather, an immigrant from Finland, and grandmother, an immigrant from Ireland, lived on the first floor.

One night in 1964 I was watching television with my grandfather, and as I recall — the details are a bit foggy — we stayed up until way past midnight, watching the debate and vote on the floor of the Senate about the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

My grandfather’s invitation, in his heavy Finnish accent, went something like this. “You stay up and watch this, Yonny. Now we gonna see if the United States is full of beans or not.” When the bill passed, he said something like, “Well, OK. I guess not full of beans.”

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He wakes up, only to jump into deadly cage!

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Blog Tour de Force Cage Match

Hope I don't get my lights punched out

For a bunch of reasons, most of them bogus, I haven’t been around this here blog too much lately–as all 7 of my regular readers know.  Please expect some more posting soon, but meanwhile, just wanted to give you a heads up about a so-called cage match that I’ll be jousting in next week.

It’s a simple contest: on each of  five days in a row starting Monday, a pair of authors will put up blog posts on their own sites about the cage match. Whichever of the two authors gets the most comments on their blog wins that day’s match. On the sixth day, the two highest vote getters go against each other in a championship. Every visitor who makes a relevant comment wins a free ebook from that site. One grand prize winner will get a Kindle preloaded with 12 ebooks.

My match with be on Wednesday, April 20th, where I’ll be going against Kimberly Kinrade, whose debut work of fiction, “Bits of You & Pieces of Me“, is a kaleidoscopic collection of stories, poems and fragments informed by a deep emotional melange of loss, betrayal and hope. Anybody with a heart will relate to it.

Most of the other writers taking part in this promotion are using an amped-up Mohamad Ali -type patter talking about how they’re going to win their competition. That’s fun enough, but not really my style. I do hope you’ll stop by Tuesday Wednesday and leave a comment; I’d appreciate it. If you comment you’ll get a coupon for a free ebook, and some lucky person will get one of my signed (paper) books & copies of all three of my ebooks. Check out the BlogTourdeForce website for more on the other books and authors. Hope to see you Wednesday.

UPDATE: in an earlier draft I said my cage match bout on April 20th would be on Tuesday. But it’s Wednesday. One of these days I’m going to learn to read a calendar. Really.

White House Makes Intelligent Case For Incentive Auctions.

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Yesterday I attended the White House event on incentive auctions. It was probably the most sensible public event on the pro-incentive auction side I’ve attended to date. I have had several discussions with Federal Communications Commission (FCC) staff that persuade me that, if Congress gave the FCC generic authority to do voluntary incentive auctions (subject to limitations to protect broadcasters – including low-power broadcasters – that want to stay in the broadcasting business), they could design a pretty good auction that would get more spectrum out for both licensed and unlicensed broadband access. Unfortunately, just about every public discussion on incentive auctions tends to focus on either a few simplistic talking points (more spectrum=good!) or, worse, has been about trying to persuade members of Congress that spectrum auctions are magical money trees that let you solve the deficit problem without raising taxes (just look at how the 2008 700 MHz auction completely eliminated the federal deficit).

So a pro-incentive auction event that does not make me grit my teeth or put me to sleep is worth celebrating.

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Here In Boston for National Conference on Media Reform

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Once again, I am out at Free Press’ amazing and movement changing National Conference on Media Reform (hashtag #NCMR11). You can check out the program here. For those interested, I am on a panel on spectrum (what else) on Friday at 9 a.m., and a panel on Phone Justice (where I will talk about USF, among other things) on Saturday at 9 a.m. (how did I get tagged as a ‘morning person’?) In addition, check out the Public Knowledge table for info on what my employer is doing and our projects (in the intellectual property area as well as in the media/telecom area).

For those who can’t make it, I will try to blog from time to time. I’ll also be tweeting from harold.feld.

But hopefully, I’ll see a lot of you there.
Stay tuned . . . .