It is disappointing to see that Vanity Fair's Hollywood Class of 2010 contains not a single actress of color. Astounding, really. The Annie Leibovitz-shot cover ranges in "diversity" from brunette to blond, and from 19 to 27-years old. It is not as if there are no up-and-coming Asian, Latina and African-American actresses out there, or actresses older than 27, or actresses with disabilities, or, well, you get the picture.

Gabourey Sidibe, for example, was nominated for an Oscar on Tuesday morning for Best Actress, yet she was not deemed worthy enough to make the cover of Vanity Fair. It boggles the imagination how Freida Pinto could be overlooked. And Kerry Washington, who is coming off tremendous Sundance buzz and rave stage reviews for Race seems, to this blogger, a no-brainer for an up-and-coming Hollywood actress photo shoot. And the editorial staff at that Condé Nast monthly did not find Dania Ramirez cover-worthy? For shame!

For decades, role-playing games have been an outlet for kids and young adults who for whatever reason crave an alternate reality, in which their acne or their social awkwardness won't prevent them from conquering monsters, courting princesses, or battling a well-matched enemy with mallets and cannonballs.

Such fantasies are harmless, though some have argued that they can blur the line between reality and fantasy to the point where players might actually hurt themselves, not just their avatars. Throughout the 1970s and 80s, anxiety ran high over the rising popularity of role playing games, namely Dungeons & Dragons.

That game is now the subject of a dispute in a Wisconsin prison, where an inmate and lifelong D&D enthusiast has been denied access to the game on the grounds that it might inspire escape fantasies.

I've never been incarcerated, but I have been in plenty of places that I don't want to be, and I have never needed any help in fantasizing about escape. That's what people do when they're stuck someplace they desperately want to get out of. Whether or not they follow through is another matter, but I have a very hard time understanding how limiting a prisoner's gaming privileges will curb their desire to get out of prison.

You can imprison a person's body, but their mind is theirs alone. Unless, that is, prisons impose control on a person's psychic reality as well as their physical one, which measures like this threaten to do.

What's next? Banning books, pens, card games, and anything else that might provide a brief mental reprieve from the drudgery of prison life?

Anthony Burgess's novel about a dystopian future and its draconian prison system, A Clockwork Orange, predicted precisely such control over inmates' minds when it was written almost 50 years ago. Somehow I doubt that Burgess would be proud of his prescience.

[Image: Chicago Sun Times]

It seems to me that one of the most interesting and relevant free speech issues is whether or not satellite radio flourishes. Everything, at present, conspires against its continued success. The auto industry -- a cash center for satellite radios -- is in deep turmoil. And paying for radio in this Great Recession economy is a luxury that not too many can afford. Still, satellite radio is a marvelous medium in which nearly anything goes. You'll remember, of course, that shock jock Howard Stern jackrabbited there from the now moribund terrestrial radio medium after Viacom's Sumner Redstone failed to defend him from the slings and arrows of the overly censorious FCC at the height of the Bush administration.

But that was then, this is now. Currently, satellite radio's biggest draw -- whether you love or hate his potty mouth -- is the libertine libertarian Howard Stern. But Stern's contract expires at the end of 2010, which has led to a lot of speculation among the chattering classes. Whatever decision Howard Stern reaches, he would probably not be getting $80 million a year. From Bloomberg's BusinessWeek:

Sirius XM, which averted bankruptcy last year after John Malone's Liberty Media Corp. bought a 40% stake in exchange for $530 million in loans, may not be able to afford to renew the radio talk-show host's existing contract, worth $500 million, said Tuna Amobi, an analyst at Standard & Poor's. "Even if (a new contract) were half of what it was before, it would still be a major financial burden for Sirius," Amobi says. "It's a totally different game."

For realsies! Stern is now in the early stages of contract negotiations. I do not envy Sirius-XM CEO Mel Karmazin, who is going to have one hell of a time navigating Stern's impending free agent status. Howard doesn't strike me as the type of guy who relishes a pay cut. There has already been some high profile courting from terrestrial radio, to which he might return. "We would be the most logical company for him to optimize his exposure and financial return," Clear Channel CEO John Hogan told Bloomberg's BusinessWeek. "We clearly have both the willingness and the financial wherewithal to consider high-profile talent."

If Stern were to bolt back to terrestrial radio, could satellite radio survive in his absence? Howard brought with him more than seven million listeners/subscribers/hard core fans to the new medium -- how many would stay? How many of those loyalists have been impressed enough with satellite radio that they would pay the subscription fees -- or, possibly, a la carte -- sans Howard Stern. Would enough stay that Sirius-XM could remain not only profitable, but the interesting experiment in the outer limits of free speech that it is right now?

[Image: Wikimedia Commons]

The Australian Prime Minister's recent apology to child migrants in the second half of the twentieth century has led to some riveting accounts of their personal stories in the British press. Uprooted British children have, for years, been reconstructing their early lives. Rudd's apology, however, has opened the doors to telling those stories aloud.

Anthony Chambers' migrational ship was called The Rangitoto, and on it he sailed two oceans without parents to get to his new home in January 1952. Anthony of the Commonwealth is, as he likes to call himself, one of the "Friends of the Lifebuoy." The Friends are a loose mutual bonding of former child migrants and those of us interested in the history. Anthony is a former child migrant sent to New Zealand in the fifties. Australian Prime Minister Paul Rudd recently apologized for the program in which thousands of children across the declining British empire were sent to cash-starved orphanages across the Commonwealth before and after the two world wars. Many of those children were told that their parents had died. Some were as young as three years old; Anthony was nine.

"I was a nine year old English boy," Anthony Chambers emailed in response to my questions of the experience. "My country Britain decided to send me to New Zealand as a Child Migrant, that is without family. I was from a broken home, my single mother had only approached the local welfare to have me fostered for a short time within the country of my birth. They however convinced my birth mother that I would be better off in one of their former Commonwealth type countries." What was it like saying goodbye? Does Anthony remember? "I was very excited, my last good byes to my mother & an uncle that took me into London to be left at a hotel was very low key... Although I was to learn years later that my mother did have second thoughts but, she honestly believed it was only for a period of fostering, education and well being." Anthony was adopted into a kind family.

What was it like once he arrived? "At school I did receive [pommie bashing] a form of verbal abuse towards British children from NZ school children. But not in my new family. I adapted very quickly into a young New Zealander."

Anthony finally returned to England when he was twenty-three. "I received no help to locate my birth family: I had not had contact with my birth mother for the last 10 years. I had to pluck up the courage to do so. By memory alone I located my mother. She was shocked but thrilled to see me standing at the door to the house she was living at."

He remained in England for a year, then returned to New Zealand with his new Spanish wife he had met and married in London. "Many years later we re-settled back in my old town of birth, taking care of my first mother (her nightmare over at last)." Later Mr. Chambers decided shop around his story. "Late last year the independent documentary filmmaker Sejal Deshpande offered to portray my story on film: "Boy in the Lifebuoy."

"I do not seek vindictiveness," Anthony emailed me, "only an understanding communication of past wrongs that now in this future might be laid to rest by telling our pent up untold stories"

I've been fascinated by elephants my whole life, from the time I was a child in Uganda to this present moment. The contrast between their massive size and their intense emotionality is captivating. Who hasn't been moved, for example, by the images of elephants confronting death? They always remind me -- don't ask me why -- of Hamlet. If elephants are conscious of their mortality, then how terrible is it that we have hunted them for sport?

So it was a pleasant surprise to see Bob Simon of "60 Minutes" doing a story on researchers listening to elephant sounds and observing their behavior to compile an elephant dictionary. The American scientist Andrea Turkalo has spent 19 years observing a particular population of elephants in a remote clearing in Central Africa by the Sangha River. After nearly two decades she began noticing patterns in the elephants' vocalizations. Talking to Bob Simon, Turkalo heard some elephants. I'll let the CBSNews.com site pick things up:

When she heard the roar of nearby elephants, Turkalo knew it was the Penelope family. "It's their way of saying hello," she explained.

Turkalo knows it's the Penelope family because she named them and nearly a thousand other elephants. She also recognizes them by their voices, voices researchers are trying to translate into what could someday become an elephant dictionary.

...Turkalo's expertise brought her to the attention of Cornell University. Peter Wrege, a behavioral biologist from Cornell, says the dictionary is still in its early stages.

"We're in kindergarten. We're just learning the very first few words. And Andrea, in a sense, is the person who, I feel, is going to help us put those words together," Wrege explained.

But they can match elephant sounds with behavior they can see, and classify those sounds into distinct categories.

Right now researchers are compiling data and exchanging information in America through the Internet to compile the work. If all goes well, we may soon have an elephant's dictionary. How cool is that?