Media Monitor: Is Martha Stewart eyeing Darwin’s twineball?

(Wikipedia)

Twineball’s media moment? Brent Schacherer of the Litchfield Independent Review reports that home-decor diva Martha Stewart is interested in Minnesota’s legendary twine ball. Billed as the world’s largest ball of twine, Darwin’s 17,400-pounder — spun over 39 years, beginning in 1950, by the indefatigable Francis Johson — has sparked interest among Stewart’s producers, who have set up a Wednesday morning call with Roger Werner, curator of the Darwin Twine Ball Museum. No word yet on when or if the ball will be featured on Stewart’s show.

Power Line pilfers: You can’t find Tom Tomorrow’s comic strip at City Pages anymore, but local rightwing blog Power Line is picking up the slack — apparently without permission, credit or remuneration for the artist, according to a tweet by Tomorrow.

Untangling obfuscation: Graphic designers are telling Republicans to tell the truth when presenting infographics related to healthcare reform. A healthcare flowchart created by John Boehner’s office has been met with a graphic retort — in more ways than one. California designer Robert Palmer has created his own chart of healthcare, packaged on Flickr with an open letter to Boehner. In part, he tells Boehner, “By releasing your chart, instead of meaningfully educating the public, you willfully obfuscated an already complicated proposal. There is no simple proposal to solve this problem. You instead chose to shout ’12! 16! 37! 9! 24!’ while we were trying to count something.” The title of his letter and chart: “Do not fuck with graphic designers.” (Via Infosthetics.)

On local online news videos: Taylor Carik, formerly of KARE-11′s Metromix and founder of the blog Mediation, digs into an analysis of video use by online news outfits by University of Minnesota student Vadim Lavrusik. He praises Lavrusik’s college thesis as a starting point, but suggests a deeper look at, among other topics, accepted standards for online video. He writes: “Taken side-by-side, Minnesota’s mainstream media video usage is comparable. KSTP is on-par with MPR. Great. But taken against general video developments online, the group is easily two years behind an acceptable standard of online video usage.”