Fiat Gets 35% of Chrysler

Could you have imagined this a year, no six months ago? What interesting times we live in.

Fiat Gets 35% of Chrysler in Exchange for Small Cars
So the hedge fund that owns Chrysler has just sold 35% of Chrysler to Fiat. Not for a big fat check, but simply for access to Fiat’s small car platforms. Chrysler, apparently, sees this as a step on the path toward redemption.

I’d wondered why their extended-range EVs all looked so gigantic this year in Detroit…and now I know, it’s because Chrysler simply doesn’t have the ability to build small cars. Both Ford and GM at least were able to demonstrate that they could build smaller cars, but the shortsightedness of Chrysler is pretty stupefying.

At least Fiat has shown that they think Chrysler is somewhat viable, or else they wouldn’t be dealing with them at all. Let’s hope Chrysler finds a way out of their hole, and that Fiat’s small car platforms are a shining lite for them.
(Via EcoGeek.org)

Speed Merengue

Email received:

Hello, I came across your speed merengue version of ‘Barcelona Nights’ and was intrigued by this new form of merengue. I understand you coined the term. I have seen many people using it recently. Is it a new trend?

I write about music scenes for the Guardian and would like to write about this.

Do you plan to make any more speed merengue?

No, not exactly a new trend. The email is signed John McDonnell, who does appear to write for the Guardian. Barcelona Nights, the Speed-Merengue version was released on the Rumba Collection in 1997. (((click on the link and then the green triangle to hear the song)))

When I discovered this type of very fast Merengue in the Summer of 1996, while playing guitar on Nestor Torres’ album Burning Whispers in Miami, this trend was likely already a few years old. That type of fast Merengue has interesting similarities to Drum ‘n’ Bass… double-time drums + half-time bass.

Journalism

Clay Shirky pontificates
The collapse of daily print journalism will mean many things. For those of us old enough to still care about going out on a Sunday morning for our doorstop edition of The Times, it will mean the end of a certain kind of civilized ritual that has defined most of our adult lives. It will also mean the end of a certain kind of quasi-bohemian urban existence for the thousands of smart middle-class writers, journalists, and public intellectuals who have, until now, lived semi-charmed kinds of lives of the mind. And it will seriously damage the press’s ability to serve as a bulwark of democracy. Internet purists may maintain that the Web will throw up a new pro-am class of citizen journalists to fill the void, but for now, at least, there’s no online substitute for institutions that can marshal years of well-developed sourcing and reporting experience—not to mention the resources to, say, send journalists leapfrogging between Mumbai and Islamabad to decode the complexities of the India-Pakistan conflict.
(Via Beyond the Beyond)