I was very impressed by how lucid and straightforward Patrick Fitzgerald’s press conference was today. My eyes have insta-glazed for two years now whenever I’ve encountered the words “Valerie Plame.” He managed to lay it all out in a way that makes me feel I actually understand what just happened. Of course, he can probably do that better than anyone since he’s apparently the only person in the world who actually knows what happened, but still. Good show.

Alan Ball’s next HBO project sounds like my new favorite thing:

Project is set in a world where vampires and humans co-exist after the development of synthetic blood. First book, “Dead Until Dark,” revolves around a waitress in rural Louisiana who meets the man of her dreams only to find out he’s a vampire with a bad reputation.

After seeing the brilliant heights Joss Whedon reached with these tropes in Buffy, I’m thrilled to see Alan Ball take it on. Via Towleroad.

Am I reading this article correctly? Did WaPo editor Len Downie actually suggest that the biggest reason the Post’s daily news coverage couldn’t be cut by a third is that there wouldn’t be enough stuff to put ads on? Read for yourself and get back to me.

The relevant sentence: “He (Downie) says (business editor Steven) Pearlstein ‘hasn’t really thought through carefully’ the impact of a one-third reduction, which would leave less room for advertising.”

If you’re one of the subscribers to the RSS feed I scraped together with Wotzwot for Romenesko’s sidebar, you might have noticed that the feed had stopped working properly. Here’s an updated version; here’s hoping it stays intact.

Has anyone else heard of Freeconference.com?

“FreeConference.com offers a terrific value to consumers

Tee-hee (via):

Wha be tha blake prevy lawe

That bene wantoun too alle tha feres?

SHAFT!

Ya damne righte!

After hearing about Google’s BigTable data-organizing scheme the other day, posters at Google Blogoscoped started musing about the possibility of a Google database where anyone could list and organize oceans of content. Then Tony Ruscoe discovered that Google had recently added the subdomain base.google.com. Then the site went live. Briefly. Long enough for folks to capture some screenshots and an official description:

Post your items on Google.

Google Base is Google

Although I’m kind of against floor ads (because 1) do you really want people walking all over your brand name? and 2) what will we do when we have no more surfaces left to advertise on?), I’ve gotta admit this is hella clever. (Via AltText.)

Stephen Dubner has posted a previously unpublished interview with August Wilson on his Freakonomics blog, in which the playwright talks about the men he admired growing up. It’s funny — so many of the men Wilson identified with were fighters — Sonny Liston, Charley Burley, Malcolm X — but so much of this interview is about acceptance.

MeFi-ed again. (Fourth time around, yo!) The natives are pretty much calling for our heads by this point. Oh, but backlash can be ugly.