Wind Power

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American Idol VI

Which one will be crowned "American Idol" tonight? Jordin Sparks or Blake Lewis? I like them both and they have totally different styles of singing.

Since Jordin is the better singer, has been hyped continuously by the judges and "the coronation song" was definitely more in her style than Blake - I predict she will win the sixth "American Idol" crown.

New Internet?

A government contractor that played a key role in the Internet's birth will oversee efforts to redesign the network from scratch.

The National Science Foundation announced Monday that BBN Technologies Inc. will get up to $10 million over four years to oversee the planning and design of the Global Environment for Network Innovations, or GENI.

Many researchers want to rethink the Internet's underlying architecture, saying a "clean-slate" approach is the only way to truly address security, mobility and other challenges that have cropped up since the Internet's birth in 1969.

Construction on GENI could start about 2010 and cost $350 million. ..Read more here...

Radio Surfing With Cerphe

Four years after he fell in love with rock-and-roll while watching the Beatles on "The Ed Sullivan Show," Don Cerphe Colwell packed up his guitar and followed a girlfriend from suburban Boston down to American University.

"The girl lasted a semester," says Colwell, but within weeks, the freshman met another AU student who invited him to work part time at a radio station that was experimenting with a new kind of music programming.

By day, WHFS was a middle-of-the-road FM station, the kind that played Sinatra, Mantovani and Tom Jones. But at night, beginning in 1968, the station, then based in Bethesda, sold time to young rockers who desperately craved a place on the dial where they could play the album cuts and underground sounds that AM Top 40 radio would not spin.

Cerphe Colwell, who landed a part-time gig on WHFS and kept at it throughout college, joined the station full time in 1972. This month, he marks his 35th anniversary on the air in Washington, a rare feat of continuity in rock radio -- a career in which he became the first DJ in the region to play the music of Bruce Springsteen, watched as radio pulled away from its role in shaping listeners' tastes, and somehow survived a blizzard of ownership and format changes.

Cerphe, as he's known on the air (pronounced "surf"), looks the part of the aging but committed rocker. In black leather jacket, fashionably unshaven face and shaggy haircut, the 55-year-old DJ runs the afternoon shift at 94.7 the Globe (WTGB-FM), the formerly classic rock station that switched formats in February to try a blend of '60s and '70s rock standards and contemporary artists who fit in with the classic hits: Coldplay, Dave Matthews Band, KT Tunstall, Norah Jones.

The idea is to add younger listeners to the aging classic-rock audience while expanding the playlist to counter the widespread belief that broadcast radio is a place to hear established hits, but not necessarily the best way to discover new sounds.

Introducing listeners to the new was the heart of Cerphe's early years in the business. At WHFS in the '70s, "the idea of thinking about the ratings was foreign to us," he says. "It was extremely hippie radio. We did a ride board and lost cat reports: 'Bill has lost a Burmese in Bethesda.' It was self-indulgent -- if I bought a car, I would bore the hell out of people with four or five hours of car songs. But we turned people on to a tremendous amount of new music."

He would sign on in those years like this: "This is Cerphe -- we're sending out some tunes tonight for the truckers, the mad hatters, the ships at sea and especially, the ladies of the night." The music that followed was whatever the DJ wanted to play. In Cerphe's case, the tunes came from big wooden crates full of records that he hauled in from his enormous vinyl collection at home. (Only about 5,000 albums remain in Cerphe's Reston home from that legendary assemblage; he recently sold 40,000 records to a collector, and has now switched primarily to CDs and downloads.) ...Read more here...

18,000 Mexicans Get Naked

MEXICO CITY - A record 18,000 people took off their clothes to pose for U.S. photographic artist Spencer Tunick on Sunday in Mexico City's Zocalo square, the heart of the ancient Aztec empire.

Tunick, who has raised eyebrows by staging mass nude photo shoots in cities from Dusseldorf, Germany, to Caracas, smashed his previous record of 7,000 volunteers set in 2003 in Barcelona, Spain.

Directing with a megaphone, Tunick shot a series of pictures with his Mexican models simultaneously raising their arms, then lying on their backs in the square as well as another scene on a side street with volunteers arranged in the shape of an arrow...Read more here...

Before "American Bandstand"

..."The Milt Grant Show," the teen-oriented dance program aired six evenings a week on WTTG (Channel 5), from the top floor of the Harrington Hotel (no relation) at the time...I was a little too young to appreciate some of the special guests -- Chuck Berry, Jimmy Clanton, Fabian, Chubby Checker, Bobby Darin, the Everly Brothers -- I instinctively knew this was something special. Later I learned just how special: All the stars of the day made it a point to stop by "The Milt Grant Show," which predated Dick Clark's nationally syndicated "American Bandstand" by a year.

In Washington, Milt Grant was king. He created and hosted Washington's most popular program, which was especially a favorite among the youngsters who either rushed home after school to tune in, or who aspired to become regulars on a show that began like class:

"Hi, kids!"

"Hi, Milt!" (in loud unison).

And like many popular DJs in that era, Grant also hosted record hops, including regular summertime Miss Teen Queen contests at Glen Echo Park.

Another of Grant's dances produced a rock-and-roll classic. In 1958, the show's occasional house band, the Wraymen, played at a "Milt Grant Record Hop" in Fredericksburg. The Wraymen were backing the Diamonds when Grant asked them to play a stroll ("The Stroll" being one of the Diamonds' biggest hits at the time). Guitarist Link Wray insisted he didn't know how, then improvised after his brother Doug started playing a stroll beat on the drums...When Wray finally recorded it, he called it "Rumble."

"American Bandstand" began its long run in 1957; by 1961, "The Milt Grant Show" was off the air, replaced by "Robin Hood" reruns. The station's new owner, Metromedia, did not approve of rock-and-roll...Milt Grant passed away this past week at 85. ...Read article here...