Christopher Lydon

Sox ticket inflation knows no bounds
We knew that success in the World Series would increase demand, but as if rising ticket costs straight from the Red Sox aren’t bad enough, things are getting out of hand.
 
The Boston Globe’s Bruce Mohl reported last week: “Red Sox season ticket holders don’t even have their tickets for next year yet, but many are already reselling their seats at astronomical prices . . . A StubHub spokeswoman declined to say how many tickets for the home opener have already been sold on the Web site, but she said the average selling price was $728. She said prices have ranged from $334 for a bleacher seat with a face value of $26 to $2,683 for a field box seat with a face value of $125.” In 2006, I paid about $125 for an opening day bleacher ticket, and it was well worth it. But $334? Are you kidding me?

Royal pals
Let’s say you’re Prince Bandar, a royal in Saudi Arabia — a top-two source for insurgents in Iraq, and a place where a 19-year-old female gang-rape victim gets a sentence of 200 lashes — and that you're facing US Justice Department scrutiny in a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) probe. Who ya gonna call? The New York Times recently reported the answer: “Prince Bandar, a confidant of the Bush family, recently retained the former Federal Bureau of Investigation director Louis J. Freeh, as well as one of the fathers of the F.C.P.A., the retired federal judge Stanley Sporkin, to represent him.”

Lydon lands at Brown
During his time on Boston’s WBUR, Christopher Lydon’s The Connection (a program that had been carried locally by WRNI-AM) had a number of listeners in Rhode Island. Now, as Dan Kennedy reported, Lydon has landed in the Ocean State: “A couple of days ago I was checking my podcast subscriptions on iTunes when I saw that some new content had popped up in ‘Open Source,’ his late, lamented public radio program. I made a mental note to investigate. Then, yesterday, Lydon and his producer, Mary McGrath, sent out an e-mail announcement that began, ‘The summer is over, and so is our hiatus,’ and that explained the program has moved to Brown University. It sounds as though Lydon has given up on radio: ‘Podcasting is the cheap, democratic, speedy, listener-friendly universal means of sharing and archiving original sound files of every kind.’ But that’s fine with me. I’m not sure I ever listened to more than a few minutes of “Open Source” on the radio, but I frequently downloaded programs that sounded interesting. (They were.)”