I can only imagine the nasty emails the New York Times received from angry Bronies wanting to clarify which pony is which. Bronies are serious about their passion.

An article on Monday about Jack Robison and Kirsten Lindsmith, two college students with Asperger syndrome who are navigating the perils of an intimate relationship, misidentified the character from the animated children’s TV show “My Little Pony” that Ms. Lindsmith said she visualized to cheer herself up. It is Twilight Sparkle, the nerdy intellectual, not Fluttershy, the kind animal lover.

[NYT]

There has been some discussion [here and here] on The Range about anonymous commenting, so this piece by Kee Hinckeley (which appeared on Google+, of all places) seems worth revisiting.

Here lies the huge irony in this discussion. Persistent pseudonyms aren't ways to hide who you are. They provide a way to be who you are. You can finally talk about what you really believe; your real politics, your real problems, your real sexuality, your real family, your real self. Much of the support for "real names" comes from people who don't want to hear about controversy, but controversy is only a small part of the need for pseudonyms. For most of us, it's simply the desire to be able to talk openly about the things that matter to every one of us who uses the Internet. The desire to be judged—not by our birth, not by our sex, and not by who we work for—but by what we say.

Pseudonyms are not new to the computer age. Authors use them all the time. Our founding fathers used them. Anonymous and pseudonymous speech have been part of democratic society since its beginning. What is new is that more and more strangers, whom we have never seen and never spoken to, know our names. What is new is that a name, with just a few minor pieces of information (birthdate, friends names, employer, industry, town…) can in a few seconds provide thousands of personal details about who you are and where you live.

[...]

I leave you with this question. What if I had posted this under my pseudonym? Why should that have made a difference? I would have written the same words, but ironically, I could have added some more personal and perhaps persuasive arguments which I dare not make under this account. Because I was forced to post this under my real name, I had to weaken my arguments; I had to share less of myself. Have you ever met "Kee Hinckley"? Have you met me under my other name? Does it matter? There is nothing real on the Internet; all you know about me is my words. You can look me up on Google, and still all you will know is my words. One real person wrote this post. It could have been submitted under either name. But one of them is not allowed to. Does that really make sense?

For what it's worth, I don't really have an issue with anonymous commenting and I actually like the online culture of the persistent pseudonym. I just would prefer that people not be jerks, even if I realize the impossibility of that ideal. After all, my name is on everything I write and I'm willing to expose aspects of my life, personality, beliefs, etc. as part of what I do for a living and I hope that's part of what people appreciate about my writing, but it takes about a minute for someone to respond to something I've thought about for a few hours/days/weeks with a curt "this sucks and you suck too" retort. It's sort of funny, because at this point in my online writing career, I'm not really phased by insults - someone beat you to whatever you're going to say, I assure you - but it sucks a little that someone won't assign even the most vaguely defined identity to their criticism. That doesn't suck enough to change the rules of interaction, but it does seem worth challenging people choosing to interact online to do a little bit better, to aim a tiny bit higher.

We should all quit writing right now. It won't ever get any better than this.

[WRTV]

KOLD, owned by Raycom, has decided to go with in-house anchor talent for its produced newscasts for KMSB. Only Gina Trunzo, who handled weather for KMSB's Belo-produced 9 pm newscast, has a position in the new arrangement, according to a KOLD press release.

Trunzo will join Mark Stine and Erin Jordan on FOX 11 Daybreak, which will air from 7-9 am weekdays on KMSB. The scheduled launch date is Feb. 1. Stine also replaces Scott Kilbury on KOLD News 13 This Morning, which airs from 4:30 to 7 am. As a result Kilbury is transferring to the KMSB 9 pm news anchor desk. Aaron Pickering will handle weather responsibilities alongside Kilbury at 9.

KOLD continues to search for reporter, photographer and behind-the-scenes positions, according to news director Michelle Germano in the press release, but the on-air talent announcement does not bode well for long-time KMSB anchor Lou Raguse or sportscasters David Kelly and Kevin Lewis.

Raycom and Belo entered into a shared service arrangement last month. Under the deal, Belo, which owns KMSB and KTTU, will pay Raycom to produce news broadcasts from KOLD's studio facilities near Cortaro and I-10. The move is leading to the dissolution of more than 30 positions at KMSB.

• That worm seems to like the cover art this week.

I'm pretty sure they like the personal ads the most, but a few seem to have migrated straight to the top to check out this week's Get Out of Town cover piece. I found a surprising writhing mass of worms lurking around in Danehy's column as well. I'm not sure what to make of that.

Admittedly, this isn't as strange as the same nation's Burger King ad, and the theme is similar to the brand's ads in the US, but Mickey Rourke is involved in this Russian Snickers commercial, so that's at least a little weird.

The current issue of the NACLA Report on the Americas is on Latino student movements and includes an article on part of the fight for Mexican American Studies in the Tucson Unified School District. The piece was written by UA assistant professor Nolan Cabrera from the Center for the Study of Higher Education (an ethnic studies graduate from Stanford University), fourth-year UA undergraduate student Elisa Meza (member of UNIDOS), and UA assistant professor Roberto Rodriguez in the Mexican American Studies Department (member of the Mexican American Studies Community Advisory Board).

The North American Congress on Latin America's bi-monthly magazine has been published since 1967, covering "Latin America and its relationship with the United States."

The full story is available online here, but requires a $3 donation. The article is worth it, plus NACLA has a solid editor and covers a variety of important topics on Latin America — topics often overlooked in mainstream press. Ladies, gents and everyone in between, it's worth supporting:

May 3 was a surreal day at the Tucson Unified School District (TUSD). That afternoon, the entire neighborhood surrounding the district’s headquarters was blocked off by Tucson police officers. K-9 units were on the prowl for bombs, snipers were stationed on the building’s roof, a bomb squad patrolled the front of the building, and a helicopter hovered above. Dozens of officers lined the streets, and there were police vehicles as far as the eye could see. Near the entrance stood a makeshift altar set up by local clergy. By 4:30 p.m., two hours before the start of the school board meeting, several hundred people gathered outside, in the 90-degree desert heat. The building was locked down. Why this high level of “security” usually associated with militarized societies?

One week earlier, nine students had chained themselves to chairs at the April 26 TUSD board meeting in an act of civil disobedience in protest of the banning of Mexican American Studies. On December 30, 2010, Arizona State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne declared the school district’s Mexican American Studies program out of compliance with A.R.S. § 15-112 (introduced as HB 2281)—a law enacted in May 2010 that effectively banned the teaching of ethnic studies in Arizona’s K—12 schools and primarily targeted TUSD Mexican American Studies.1 Rather than wait for Horne to destroy the highly successful Mexican American Studies program, the TUSD School Board began dismantling it internally by removing Mexican American Studies classes from core curricula and demoting them to elective status.

KGUN Channel 9 announced to its staff today that Dave Silver is leaving as the station's sports director.

Silver, who has worked with KGUN for 28 years, has accepted a position with the UA Foundation. Silver's final day on the air is slated to be Dec. 23.

Released on the 31st anniversary of John Lennon's death, Narco-Mania is Mexico-based filmmaker, journalist and teacher Greg Berger's latest satire with his brand of Gringoyo sting that keeps shedding light on the War on Drugs and its devastation in Mexico. Actually, what Berger skillfully presents is a declaration of war on the War on Drugs.

Berger is a teacher and associate with Narco News. You can see his work and other Gringoyo videos at Narco News TV.

From Narco News publisher Al Giordano on Narco-Mania:

Greg began working on the idea for this video late last year, and the first scenes were filmed in Mexico City last February. And I have to say, to imagine family members of drug war victims chasing US Drug Enforcement Administration and Embassy agents out of Mexico seems a more hopeful and inspiring message than shouting and chanting slogans about 50,000 dead from their “war on drugs.”

The short film shows how the declarations of war by Mexican President Felipe Calderón in 2011 sound too much like US President Richard Nixon’s discourse 40 years ago, before our filmmaker Greg (affectionately known in Mexico as “Gringoyo”) was even born! Forty years of fighting the drug war the same way — a prohibition policy enforced by police and armies that deploy weapons and prisons and other punishments - without an iota of success. We noticed that so many of today’s leading drug warriors — from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich — were once the very sixties hippies that Nixon targeted with his drug war and look at them now: They’re doing the same things to the next generations, too.

In this video, the US State Department cooks up a plan from their drug-addled brains to break up the Mexican drug “cartels” by fixing up alleged “cartel boss” Chapo Guzmán with Yoko Ono. The “expert analyst” in the film, one Jorge Martín, explains: “We have to remember that the US State Department is led by aging baby boomer Hillary Clinton and lots of other former 1960’s youth. And they all suffer from one traumatic, collective memory: The break-up of the Beatles in 1970.”

Watch as the fab four US agents try every dumbass thing they can think of to play Cupid to Chapo and Yoko (including an Easter “Bed-In for War” on the Mexico City zócalo reminiscent of Beatle John Lennon and Ono’s Christmas “Bed-In for Peace” in 1969) and it may occur to you, as it did to us, that these bizarre tactics are no less absurd than every other hapless way they are waging the so-called “war on drugs” today.

While this ad from an Indiana beeper salesmen is amusing, it really just makes me miss JJ, the King of Beepers, who was unavoidable for a stretch in the 90's before cell phones obliterated the pager market. While the Phoenix New Times ran a feature on the guy during his heyday and there's a Flickr set of images of a store from a former employee, it seems weird how little there is out there about the guy. What's he doing now? Where can I listen to recordings of his old ads? This is Arizona history that needs to be preserved, people.