The New Market Machines Radio

You would think that transitioning from northern hemisphere fall to southern hemisphere spring woul get easy after the first few times you do it, but it always takes a psychic toll. Since we are out rustling up my Brazilian resident visa today, enjoy a nostalgic musical interlude, in which I recreate my college DJ days with a set of songs that, for me, define the Brooklyn-B-burg-East Village axis of evolution.

On-hold music we would actually like to hear ... a musical interlude. Enjoy.

See if you can tell where I resumed recorded after running up and down four flights of stairs to carry up 30 kg of cat food to keep the beast happy while we're gone.

In this episode:

1. BusinessWeek as podcaster: the good, the bad and the lazy
2. On the scene in Mexico
3. Coke, Pepsi and pesticide: a season in public relations hell
4. The Engines of Our Ingenuity, il miglior fabbro
5. An Army of Davids debated at the Cato Institute: beer, content and the social Gospels
   
6. A Mexico City Mr. Natural solves the problem of democracy and defeats the evil Judge Engaña-Bobos.
7. The International Monetary Fund surrenders without a shot to Raul Seixas and Lampião
   

A special Latin American edition, featuring: Blogging while nervous; a visual guide for the blind to Mexican electoral fraud; exercises in comparative corporate governance; the NMM goes whole hog into the BRIC markets; reporting outside the Green Zone; why there could have been no Elvis without Carmen Miranda;  carnivalesque transpositions of  legitimate and black market machines; Jackson Pollock passed out here; my FBI file;  and more.

Musical interludes and motifs, among others:

1. Martin da Vila, "Pelo Telefone"
2. Os Mutantes, "El Justiciero"
3. Carmen Miranda, "Chica Chica Boom Chic"
4. Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra, "What is this America?"
5. Hermeto Pascoal, "Fica mal com deus"
6. Buzzcocks, "Autonomy"

Featured this week: Sony buys Grouper; quotable snips and snaps from the Syndicate Conference not the "syndication" conference, as our boob of announcer says several times); and how search engine motorists can get the data miners off their tail. Plus my butthead of a neighbor on bongos and the Tasty-Freeze ice cream theme.

Incidental music: Tom Tom Club, Wordy Rappinghood

Musical interlude: Timbalada, U-Maracatú

How fast can I whip out a podcast? If I don't stop to edit out every hem, haw, and lapsus linguae, I'm definitely getting faster.

So you get to hear me breathe heavily, stumble and bumble, and growl at my wife with your news. A bit like watching the raw satellite feeds from the news network.

Breathe from the diaphragm. Project. Stop smoking.

This week in the week in review: Cross-border data privacy; hedge fund regulation; the Journal builds itself a Potemkin Village in Mexico; Senzhen business journalists caught up in a web of corruption; India's Internet filtering program run wild; and other deals, steals, and wheels within wheels.

And some traveling music to get us in the mood for our upcoming airlift to Sao Paulo (at about 20'30'').

1. Luiz Gonzaga, "Xote das Meninas"
2. John Hiatt and Randy Scruggs, "City of New Orleans"

Incidental music: Small Faces, "Wicked Messenger"; Gang of Four, "Contract"

 The title is a corporate communications executive's succinct summary of the risks and opportunities that blogging poses for the business organization in the age of information warfare:  Delivery of the authorized message through authorized channels is no longer effective when so many wicked messengers "are unauthorized, and they can act."
 
First tech rehearsal of a new segment, tentatively titled "Pod People": clips and commentary from the multimedia stream of consciousness, abused with awful punk-rock mixology.

In this maiden 'cast: The BBC's Kafkaesque utopianism; IBM's global director of corporate communications on the risks and opportunities of media democracy, both inside and outside the firewall; a gimlet-eyed CWA organizer on reforming corporate media, from within and from without; DJ Mala Yerba on a public service media campaign from Mexico's elections commission; and election monitors describe the scene in the Zocalo in Mexico City on July 2. Plus the usual mumbling, and Heights-themed shoutout.

Monitoring the struggle of the "netroots" against the "mainstream media" amid Mexico City mobilizations over charges of massive electoral fraud. Key developments, key players, key strategies. Musical interlude at 21:00.

This is basically a terrible case of me mumbling to myself, so remember: This is only a test! In the future, scripted narration, better elocution, audio snippets from the best of the pods to relieve you of my nasal droning.

Skip to 21'00'' for a four-song musical interlude you might enjoy better.

Note a new, proposed permanent audio element: The Small Faces' "Wicked Messenger" as a shorter lead-in to the news briefs. "Wordy Rappinghood" as a lead-in to the "Jargon Watch" feature?

This program under construction.

As usual, I have not bothered to clean up all the outtakes and twists of the tongue, so spare me your derision on that score, if you please.

And yes, it takes 1:41 to get through the intro to the content, which is too long. But I do love TCQ and that jab at Bono.

Contents: A proposed program format; jargon watch: quangos, quaggas, taqueo, saqueo and tamalero; the week in review; "I said get offa yer ass and DA-YUNCE!"

Additional reading:

ACLU v. NSA: District Court Ruling

Music credits:

1. Young Marble Giants, 'Credit in the Straight World'
2. Tribe Called Quest, 'What's the Scenario?'
3. Jon Hassel, 'Caravanesque' (a tribute to Miles Davis)
4. Manu Chao, 'Welcome to Tijuana (Tequila, Sexo, Marijuana)'
5. Toots & The Maytals, 'Funky Kingston'

Here, fresh from the NMM studios in Media City, Dubai, is a special edition of the NMM podcast on the Mexican elections.

It's really embarassing to hear myself pronouncing Spanish names and phrases with a (bad) Brazilian accent. Sendero al Fecal comes out sendeiro ao fecau ...

I'm badly in need of some real voice talent for this little podcast! Really, the whole thing is kind of a wank -- me trying out my sound bites over and over again. I would be better off just translating headlines from the Mexican press on the subject.

Here's another important study from UNAM:

• R. Mansilla, Benford's Law and the July 2 PREP Results (Spanish)

I'm a little peeved at Podomatic, where I have been posting my podcasts: The posting form seems to be screwed up. I'm not over my storage or bandwidth limits. What gives?

Here, at any rate, is NMM Podcast #3, Week in Review: Margin of Terror.

As usual, I was too lazy to edit out the outtakes, so if you listen carefully you can learn my pet name for my wife and hear me hemming and hawing a lot and starting over.