YES!! LATimes covers National TV-turnoff Week.

Inspired by National TV-Turnoff Week last week, the Chastangs of Eagle Rock boldly went where many parents dream of, but few ever go. They pulled the plug on their household's four television sets, which range from a 6-inch portable to the 25-inch set in their living room. And for good measure, they banned videos, computer games and Internet surfing as well.

"This was wonderful; we are so grateful we did this," Catherine says. "Having the television off stretches you and makes you reach within yourself. We really have to consider if we want to invite that invader back into our house," she says.

I've been living without a TV since last summer and it's been great. I get all the news I need from the radio or the internet and while I plan to eventually get a TV for watching movies, I'm happy with the status quo for the moment.

NYT: The Bears on This Message Board Had Enron Pegged

On April 12, 2001, with the stock at $57.30, one message predicted that Enron would soon be revealed as a house of cards. "The Enron executives have been operating an elaborate con scheme that has fooled even the most sophisticated analysts," the message said. "The first sign of trouble will be an earnings shortfall followed by more warnings. Criminal charges will be brought against ENE executives for their misdeeds. Class action lawsuits will complete the demise of ENE."

But messages posted even earlier also indicated trouble ahead. On March 1, 2000, with the stock at $69, a participant wrote: "Dig deep behind the Enron financials and you'll see a growing mountain of off-balance-sheet debt which will eventually swallow this company. There's a reason they layer so many subsidiaries and affiliates. Be careful."

Kelly Osborne's dating advice...do you really want your young daughters getting their advice from Kelly?

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Slate: Get It Straight

The hypocrisy of blaming gays for sexual abuse by priests.

Now the bishops, the cardinals, and conservative interest groups have a new story. The problem, they say, is homosexuality. If the church gets rid of gay priests, everything will be fine. But the more questions you ask about this story, the more contradictions you find. The cardinals' problem isn't that they can't keep the priesthood straight. The problem is that once again, they can't keep their story straight.

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Salon: Inside the X-Box

"Any of the insidery stuff they [Microsoft] just really didn't want to get out," he said. "The fact that the initial code name was Project Midway -- they don't want the Japanese people to know that because it will hurt their feelings." The Battle of Midway in 1942 was the turning point of the Pacific War. Before the November 2001 launch of the Xbox, all of the players in the console hardware market -- Sony, Nintendo and Sega -- were Japanese firms.

I'm not offended, but I'm not surprised either.

AP Top Photos: Congressional testimony in favor of music education in public schools.

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LAT: A Quiet Broker of the Wild

Then, in a series of transactions beginning in 1998, the organization came up with $35 million in private donations to help the U.S. Department of the Interior acquire a vast checkerboard of desert lands that together are bigger than Orange County. The Land Trust Alliance in Washington, D.C., says it is probably the biggest sale, in terms of acreage, of private land for public conservation in the U.S. The parcels stretch from Barstow to the Arizona border, a raw, khaki landscape of mountains, valleys and washes.

In its brief history, Wildlands Conservancy has demonstrated a talent for coaxing big private donations from a few wealthy benefactors and then using the money to attract public funds for major conservation purchases.

I hope to do something as significant sometime in the future.

Salon: Interview with Robert Young Pelton

The thing that's important to understand is that the American government knows about as much as the American people know about how to prosecute this war, which is nothing. We're learning day by day what works and what doesn't. The thing that's happening is that there are huge military expenditures occurring, which tends to be an animal that needs to feed itself, and that's the part that's bothersome. Like in Vietnam. We started by sending over advisors and helping a regime support itself, and we ended up sending half a million troops over there and really accomplishing nothing.

That's the part that the media has to keep up on -- what are we getting for our money? I mean, have we kicked out the bad guys? Shouldn't we be attacking Pakistan, isn't that where all the bad guys come from? I mean there's this amazing disconnect between common sense and government rhetoric. Most of the people who were killed in Afghanistan were Pakistanis, not Afghans.

AP: Four Japanese companies to combine Internet provider business

Bringing together the Net-services businesses of NEC Corp., Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., KDDI Corp. and Japan Telecom Co. will bring together 10 million subscribers, surpassing Fujitsu's @nifty service with about 5 million subscribers.

"We realized that it takes a great deal of investment to create attractive broadband content," said NEC spokesman Yasuhito Jyochi. "The level of investment required is a huge burden for any one company."

I predict bad things with this venture. See the recent Mizuho bank merger failure due to technology. The bigger these merger projects get, the greater the chance for failure.

I also don't think people want "attractive broadband content" in the model that we currently have (cable TV/satellite, etc.) People use internet technologies interactively, not passively like they do with TVs. I just don't think that creating content is going to drive broadband- it hasn't done so effectively in other areas.

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How lean can Amazon get?

By cutting costs and boosting margins, Amazon says it can pass along some of the savings to consumers. On the day it reported its first profit, Amazon announced it would offer free shipping on orders over $99; it says its margins allow it to provide that offer indefinitely.

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--> Nagoya users get FTTH Internet

The Chubu Electric Power Company has announced that from
this Fall, it will start offering fiber-to-the-home (FTTH)
Internet services to users in Nagoya. Access will be at
100Mbps, for a fee of only JPY10,000/month. CEPCO owns over
20,000km of fiber and intends to expand the network to
40,000km. (Source: TT commentary from Nikkei, Apr 20, 2002)
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NYT: Japan Slow to Accept New Phones

Nearly 60 percent of the Japanese own cellphones, and persuading them to trade in their trusty year-old models for newfangled ones is becoming tougher. The economy is at a standstill, and the number of new mobile-phone subscribers has fallen for seven consecutive months. Carriers are signing up fewer than half a million new customers a month, one-third as many as a year ago. Worse, the 3G handsets, packed with cameras and stereo sound, are twice as expensive as are the older handsets with similar functions. And though the new handsets, with data links of up to 384,000 bits a second, allow users to download video and audio clips and hold videoconferences, the more complex functions also lead to higher connection fees.

NYT: Like 'Dilbert,' but Subversive and Online

Mr. Rees, a graduate of Oberlin College, is a bystander to the rat race and, for all his intended political commentary, the strip is most incisive about the sinkhole of cubicle culture. The office settings are blandly generic; the characters are a few pieces of clip art that Mr. Rees uses over and over. Some of the dialogue comes verbatim from his old temp job as a Maxim magazine fact checker, which ended shortly after Sept. 11.

Get your war on!

David Rees author essay at Random House.

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Salon: The bull in Martha Stewart's china shop

The most successful women in American business -- the three, self-made billionaires Oprah, Meg Whitman of eBay and Martha Stewart -- have made it as entrepreneurs, rather than rising in big companies. Could a Martha Stewart have risen in the executive ranks at a big company?

Well, she couldn't have succeeded at Time Warner. That was impossible. And she recognized that pretty early on. And that's why she got out of there. I worked there for 13 years, and I can tell you from firsthand experience: That's not a place where the gals get ahead. There's a glass ceiling starting at the lobby. It's not an easy place to advance your career if you're a woman. There's not anything representing gender balance in the executive ranks of that company. She said: "Enough of this," and left.

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NYT: How Does AOL Fit in the Grand Plan Now?

On Wall Street and within the media industry, the most provocative thought about AOL Time Warner these days is that the company should admit that the merger that created it Û the biggest merger in United States history Û was all a big mistake and split into two companies again: America Online and Time Warner.

After all, if America Online were independent, AT&T Comcast could not demand $10 billion from the Internet operation for the Time Warner Entertainment stake. In addition, the core Time Warner businesses seem to be doing reasonably well. Perhaps investors would value the Time Warner operations more richly if they were not confused and anxious about America Online.

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NYT: Japan Braces for a 'Designed in China' World

The Japanese have long prided themselves on quality production, relegating Chinese-made goods to discount shops. Now, Japanese manufacturers and consumers say they do not see much qualitative difference between Made in Japan and Made in China.

In a recent survey of 81 Japanese companies operating in China, 62 percent of managers said they saw no difference in the quality of products made in Japan from those made in China. Fifteen percent said the Chinese products were of better quality, according to the poll, which was commissioned by The Nikkei Business Daily, Japan's leading business newspaper, and Japan Management Association Consultants, a private industry group.

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NYT: Young, Single and Dating at Hyperspeed

The reason seems to be the fundamentally different ways that younger and somewhat older Americans view personals. Where traditionally personals in newspapers and magazines were seen as last-ditch attempts by the desperate, Americans younger than 30 are using the online services more casually Û simply to make friends or to date outside their established circles. Some ambitious Û or just manic Û men and women play the services as if they were video games or eBays-for-daters, where the goal is not so much acquiring the goods as simply playing to win.

Wired: Carnivore's New Leash on Life?

The Dartmouth: College 'Net security gets $1.5M

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CNN: Abercrombie pulls 'racist' Asian theme T-shirts

ABERCROMBIE & GLITCH: Asian Americans rip retailer for stereotypes on T-shirts

"We personally thought Asians would love this T-shirt," said Hampton Carney, with Paul Wilmot Communications in New York, the public relations firm where Abercrombie referred a reporter's call.

"I wouldn't know how they could think that," said Austin Chung, 23, of Palo Alto, business manager for the quarterly Asian-focused magazine Monolid. "Abercrombie & Fitch is producing popular culture, and they cater to the views of the majority. You have to ask yourself, who benefits, who gets empowerment, from these kinds of images? It denigrates Asian men."

The shirts in question...

MeFi discussion #1

MeFi discussion #2

Wow.

I don't even know where to begin with this one...very strange, but cool.

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Salon: A pie in the face of the Catholic hierarchy

Still, the fact that Catholic women of today can make valuable contributions doesn't preclude the need for real change. This is something that the Slovak Bakers understand. It's unnatural to exclude half of the community from full participation. Is there any more telling example than that of pedophiles being allowed to continue abusing in parish after parish while the male hierarchy protected them from accountability? Can any of us imagine women in power allowing such abuse to continue?

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AP: Japanese Tourists in Bethlehem

Japanese tourists Yuji Nakano, left, and Mina Takahashi sit in the destroyed town square of Bethlehem's Old City Wednesday April 17, 2002. The two tourists, from Tokyo, say they arrived in Bethlehem on part of their six month travels around the world hoping to visit the Church of the Nativity and were unaware of the on-going standoff between Israeli forces and Palestinain gunmen taking shelter in the Church. (AP Photo/David Guttenfelder)

Is this totally crazy or what?