Not that I even own a TV (or have time to watch with all my jobs), but when I do have some spare time, I am all about C-SPAN.org. You can watch archived programs and stream all three channels live 24/7.

Who needs canned/framed news when you can watch the rawness of politicos in action? Who needs grad school when you can watch the hip-hop summit and Bill Moyers delivering the keynote address at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Annual Convention? I eat this stuff up! The exchange of information is awesome — back in May I watched a discussion between TNR’s Jon Cohn and the Cato Institute’s Michael Cannon, both of whom authored books earlier this year on health-care reform (I got a little story out of that, too.)

When I got word that C-SPAN’s Book TV Bus was coming to the St. Pete Times’ Festival of Reading, I was so there. I sent off an e-mail to the general info address and a week later got a call from a C-SPANner. Sweet Jesus, it was like speaking to God/Brian Lamb.

So I spent a few hours in front of the bus handing out tote bags and informing St. Petersburgers on the joys of C-SPAN Book TV. Surprisingly (or not), people under 53 have no idea what the heck C-SPAN is. I was happy to fill them in on its wonders. One passerby, a woman, 30-ish like me, had her hubby and two small children in tow. She took one of each of the brochures and signed up on all the mailing lists. I could see in her my sister-in-C-SPAN-obsession. I asked her to explain her love and she couldn’t, but I understood – there just aren’t enough words. Her husband rolled his eyes and continued pushing the baby carriage along as she and I winked our goodbyes.

Afterward, I headed home to pack. This is my last week at CL. I’m moving up north in search of ways to get paid for my public radio and TV fanaticism. Tampa Bay has been so good to me — I leave with an awesome resume, empty pockets and much love.

Eat, drink and be merry.

Blackwater has half-learned Ben Franklin’s saying, “In this world, nothing is certain but death and taxes.”

With the whole global warming crisis thing, Floridians will need to eat their broccoli now more than ever before.

Ever feel like whacking a big, fat media conglomerate?

Edwards tells Bill Maher how “way not romantic” life is on the campaign trail and sends a love letter to Bill O’Reilly.

Who says you can’t have a partial birth, um, adoption in Missouri?

Remember that study a while back that said old people still get it on? They could have just asked the 84-year-old woman who was shtupping the 24 year old dude…

Michael Mendolusky with dancing baby Olivia and Nikki Ferraro (d’Visitors lead singer) come to see Jay Giroux beautify an old CL box.

The locale, however, was less than ideal. On Saturday night Channelside was the eye of a meat market hurricane — frat boys and hot chicks swirled about as funky models and out-of-place creative types descended on the downtown Tampa nightspot. It was hard to tell if people were there for the arts, or because Channelside was their usual game. Auditorium frontman (and fellow Creative Loafer) Joran Oppelt, a self-proclaimed “jaded, bitter musician,” played late in the evening and couldn’t argue with the good attendance numbers. “At least there were people there,” he said. “[It was] smarter than doing it at a theatre and no one showing up.” But if the bodies aren’t paying attention, is art really being saved?

After watching the fashion show by Aleka Phoenix, Ivanka Ska, and (2007 Best of the Bay’s best designer) Ben Chmura, I literally had to run to Tampa Theatre (well, you know, park then run) to catch the screening of Itty Bitty Titty Committee at the second-to-last night of the Tampa International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival (just renamed the Clip Film Festival, by the way; their new logo will be unveiled early next year). The screening brought out between 700-800 people, mostly women.

Itty Bitty Titty Committee (directed by Jamie Babbit) is the first production of Power Up, a professional organization that promotes the visibility and integration of gay women in entertainment, the arts and all forms of media. The film, which proved a good counterpoint to StA’s skinny-thigh-dominated fashion show, follows the CIA (Clits in Action) as they tag L.A. plastic surgery clinics with slogans such as, “Women come in all shapes.” Interesting, since in this Hollywood-produced film most of the leads are as bite-sized as their mainstream counterparts. The character’s MO is “reclaiming public space for women,” even if many of them are vaguely (or completely) unaware of the effects of the societal demands on women’s lives. But it’s the thought that counts … right?

Pass the celery stalks, please.

After I parked and was exiting my vehicle, I faced a moral dilemma. Upon spotting an empty Tupperware container on the passenger seat, I thought I could bring it in with me instead of getting the Styrofoam take out container. But the part of me that occasionally abides by the mores of society overruled that thought, and it was left in the car.

When asked by the pretty cashier with the Jamaican accent if I wanted a bag for the box, however, my inner environmentalist saw an opportune time to out herself. I declined the bag and she asked why, a little astonished.

I explained I thought the bag was unnecessary — it wasn’t as if I was taking out anything spillable. I read just this morning that it takes 1,000 years for a plastic bag to break down in a landfill and that earlier this year the entire city of San Francisco banned plastic bags altogether.

I wished aloud that Tampa would do the same, seeing as with almost everything else, we’re at least 10 years behind the rest of the country. Again, she had a look of astonishment and said she had no idea about all this stuff, adding that I should be the person to get the ball rolling.

Hmm…but how to educate and make others listen, care, etc.?

Some things I’ve already noticed in this vein: Pinellas County has dog-walking stations around town with biodegradable poo bags. Why not pay a few pennies more for non-plastic grocery bags that we use once that won’t hang out for the next millennium? And am I the only one who sees the pointlessness in buying plastic garbage bags? It’s literally throwing one’s money away.

Ideas? Suggestions?

If funky mutts aren’t for you, many rescue organizations specialize in certain breeds, like Greyhounds and Dalmatians. Dachshunds will be invading David Island this Saturday from 11 a.m.-3 p.m. Michael Vick-types need not apply.

The most obvious question to me was the way celebrities adopt causes like Angelina Jolie adopts babies. I had to ask which celeb was a flip flopper on animal rights. To my surprise, he only had one.
“Naomi Campbell. She thought we were the coolest thing to come along, but when her career faltered, she went back on her word. She’s a glaring example of someone greedy.”

Otherwise supermodels and actors have stuck by PETA and were a stepping stone into the world of fashion. Mathews, a former model himself, explained that engaging designers behind the scenes was more important than the passing era of supermodels. The designers were the ones after all making the decisions about whether or not to include fur in their collections. “PETA’s about keeping an eye on what people are paying attention to,” Mathews says. “Like fashion.”

Just last week Mathews was invited by the Liz Claiborne Company, which sells a high quantity of leather shoes and bags, to do a presentation to the staff. He says it was “a great sign of things to come. 15 years ago the only way to get attention was to take over their office. Now we get invited in. Most of the time.”

Committed spills the details of Mathews’ numerous times behind bars, among them for protesting without a permit in Harvard Square in his drawers for a “fur-out, love-in” in a mock bed with four other activists.

“Part of the point of the book is that you can devote your life to a cause without becoming a total bore. You can do serious work and still have a good time,” says Mathews. He’s learned that people want entertainment, not education. An energetic, mostly in-house team comes up with PETA’s campaigns with creativity that rivals any Madison Avenue advertising execs. They know they have to compete for attention with cable TV, celebrity headlines and myriad other distractions to get people to pay attention.

Which is why Mathews and PETA are so successful at reaching out to youth around the world. PETA2.com has a few hundred thousand street-teamers. At PETATV.com, pop star Pink narrates a video on wool. Mathews says of the video: “Most people don’t want to watch a sheep being mutilated. But her loyal fanbase will.”

Mathews is ever optimistic and only let defeat creep into conversation once. He says PETA focuses primarily on reaching the younger generations because breaking habits of someone who’s eaten a steak a week for the last 50 years is nearly impossible. “I ask the kids to look at how unhealthy their grandparents are and if they want to end up like that,” he says.

Dan Mathews will do a book reading and signing Tuesday night at 7 p. m. at Barnes & Noble, 11802 N. Dale Mabry, in Tampa at 7:00 PM.

This caused me to put the paper down, look over to several co-workers, three males and one female in their 20’s and early 30’s, and ask if they think referring to a female adult as a ‘girl’ is as inappropriate as I do.

The other woman in the conversation said it didn’t bother her. The three men in the conversation didn’t get my side at all.

“You mean, if I went up to you at a party and said, ‘Hey girl!’ you’d be offended?” one male coworker asked.

Would you if I called you a boy? What about our 21-year old male intern?

“No way! That’s an insult.”

Why the difference? The men offered it’s because there’s no female equivalent to the term ‘guy.’ I argued guy could be male or female, but still, what did that have to do with calling a woman a girl?

I also argue that this is not about my being offended or my female coworker being indifferent, rather it’s about society being so unaware of this inequality that ‘girl’ is a mainstay in our acceptable language.

Dictionary.com defines girl as: 1. a female child from birth to full growth and 2. a young, immature woman, esp. formerly, an unmarried one.

For years, I have been a one-woman force trying to even things out. I’ve always used the term ‘boy’ when referring to any man I’m romantically involved with who pisses me off, as in “Boys are dumb.”

Conversely, I also use ‘boy’ as a term of endearment for guys I like, as in, “Wow, that George Clooney. He’s the cutest boy ever.” That no doubt stems from growing up on Sassy’s Cute Boy Alert.

The deal is, I’ll grow out of my immature teenage ways of referring to men as boys when society grows out of calling women girls.

The crowd paid $25 apiece to attend the lecture series, which was held theater-in-the-round style.

Chandrasekaran’s book, “Imperial Life in the Emerald City” writes of the heavily protected Green Zone, the place where non-military government administrators stay while in Iraq. He called the Zone a bit of “D.C. on the Tigris” and a “bubble” where civilians make decisions for the U.S. military, often without communicating with them.

In early 2004, for example, American administrators signed a decree against Muqtada Al Sadr, a popular cleric supported by the majority of Iraqis in Sadr City, a Baghdad slum home to 2.5 million people. They shut down Sadr’s newspaper, prompting massive protests. To that point, only one American had died in Sadr City in the previous 12 months. After the decree, guerrilla warfare broke out. One night in March 2004, an American armored vehicle was pinned down in an alley in Sadr City, and the 1st Calvary, in open trucks, was sent in to make the rescue. 8 men died and 70 were wounded in that operation.

Both Chandrasekaran and Raddatz — unknown to each other when they were writing their books — examine this same pivotal event in explaining how the Iraq War turned out of control.

Chandrasekaran said he wanted to write the book to understand “why these civilians sitting in the relative safety of the Green Zone decided to confront Sadr without properly communicating to the military, and without having a military contingency plan, without letting the 1st Cav know that in their area of operation there could be a potentially violent blow-back to a decree signed by the American administrator sitting in his air conditioned office across the Tigris River.”

Raddatz calls that attack the beginning of the insurgency and the turning point in the war. Her book focuses on the soldiers of the 1st Calvary, who had arrived in Iraq just four days earlier from Fort Hood, Texas. Raddatz portrays how the administration’s policy of multiple deployments — with some soldiers being sent back to Iraq as many as nine times – takes a toll on the soldiers and their families.

Raddatz believes the 1st Cav would have been able to gauge the changing tension level in Sadr City had they been there for 2 weeks instead of 4 days and agrees that the battle could have been prevented if there had been better communication between the civilian administrators in Iraq and the military.

The conversation included five panelists and continued for more than two hours as the audience posed questions, ranging from ‘how did we get in this mess?’; ‘how do we get out?’; the role of contractors; and the balance between reporting unfavorable news and yet still try to keep your seat in the White House pressroom or on flights with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. (Raddatz said that last point wasn’t a problem for her; Rumsfeld never liked her.)

There was a discussion of safety, as well. Panelist Susan Taylor Martin of the St. Petersburg Times went to Iraq six times before the SPT deemed the country too unsafe for its reporters in 2004, letting the war reporting fall to “our fine, national newspapers.”

Raddatz and Chandrasekaran had plenty of close calls; Chandrasekaran recalled letting a vehicle go before him over a narrow bridge only to see the vehicle get hit. Raddatz, the mother of two, is not required by her job to go to Iraq. In fact, she fights with ABC to go back every 5-6 months. Despite her colleague Bob Woodruff being hit with shrapnel last year, Raddatz will go back for her 14th trip in a few weeks.

More info on Poynter’s upcoming Community Conversations and other speaker’s events, can be found at poynter.org.

On This Earth, tomorrow night at Ruth Eckerd Hall, will feature Bracewell, her cute wife Lexi Pierson, Rebekah Pulley and Geri X.

Pulley was a guest on my early Monday morning radio show on WMNF, which can be streamed until this Monday morning. My guest host for 7/30 is Flashpoint-er Brendan McLaughlin. (Yes, it’s already been recorded and no, Wayne Garcia was not allowed in the studio.)

Speaking of PoHo, he’ll be on Rob Lorei’s Florida This Week on WEDU tonight at 8:30 along with Patrick Manteiga, Mary Anne Stiles and Andrew Skerritt.

And if that’s not enough reporters in one room for you, stop by St. Pete’s Poynter Institute Saturday afternoon from 1-3 for a conversation with ABC News correspondent Martha Raddatz and Washington Post assistant managing editor Rajiv Chandrasekaran. Both have recently written books on the war in Iraq.

Who cares if it’s safe? “It still sells,” said an employee of the biggest child-care car seat manufacturer in the U.S.

According to Oprah, “doctors found that men who stopped smoking experienced a rise in sperm count of up to 800%!” Conversely, guys who stopped drinking stopped knocking up ugly Betties 2000%.

Also for those trying to get preggie, a study says many home cleansers are linked to fertility problems, especially because the mood kinda gets lost when watching ones’ spouse on bended knee scrubbing the toilet.

This underdog is barely back from a brief retirement – and is not only already in trouble — but ready to upset the champ.

That’s so gay! Almost. Well, depending how you look at it. OK, uh, maybe not.

Steven Spielberg wrote a letter to Chinese president Hu Jintao to put the smack down in Darfur, reasoning that the Sudanese oil that fuels China’s economy is like “pocket change compared to what you’ve made off of pirated DVD copies of E.T and Indiana Jones.” (I paraphrased there just a bit.)

The headline: Republicans Like Giuliani’s Electability. The story: They hate him for everything else.