Virtual halls of fame for storm chasing, podcasting and craft beer making

Name a passion, pursuit or profession and there’s going to be a hall of fame for it. In the internet age, these halls of fame can be virtual.
What follows is the latest bunch of virtual halls of fame that I’ve come across.

Storm Chaser Hall of Fame

The National Storm Chasing Hall of Fame (NSCHoF) is a program designed to honor individuals whose work has had a positive and lasting impact on storm chasing.
An inductee to the NSCHoF should have a minimum of 20 years of field experience “unless extenuating circumstances (injury or death) prevail,” the website says.
The inaugural class of the Storm Chaser Hall of Fame was honored during the National Storm Chaser Summit on Feb. 15 in Overland Park, Kansas.

Podcast Hall of Fame

The Podcast Hall of Fame celebrates podcasters who have had mainstream popularity and/or are considered a great podcaster or contributor to the industry by their peers.
Inductees include Adam Carolla, Adam Curry, Marc Maron and more. The first class of inductees was honored in 2015.

American Craft Beer Hall of Fame

The American Craft Beer Hall of Fame inducted its inaugural class on Feb. 15. The inductees came from several facets of the industry – brewery owners, brewers, writers and educators – each having contributed greatly to the growth and development of craft beer.
(See article by Craft Brewing Business.)

Swine Hall of Fame

The Swine Hall of Fame is an annual tradition to celebrate and recognize distinguished leaders in the pork production industry. The inaugural class was inducted in 2023.

Wisconsin Meat Industry Hall of Fame

The Wisconsin Meat Industry Hall of Fame was established to recognize the contributions of individuals who have had a significant impact on the meat industry of Wisconsin.
The Wisconsin Meat Industry Hall of Fame resides at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Meat Science Laboratory.

Government Hall of Fame

Government Executive magazine and website created the Government Hall of Fame to honor individuals who have profoundly shaped the federal government for the betterment of the American people.
Government Executive has been inducting individuals into the Government Hall of Fame since 2019, the publication said.

Geospatial Intelligence Hall of Fame

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) honors persons in its industry with its Geospatial Intelligence Hall of Fame.
The NGA is currently reviewing nominations for its 2025 GEOINT Hall of Fame class, according to a news release.

American Baseball Coaches Association (ABCA) Hall of Fame

The American Baseball Coaches Association has been inducting coaches into its ABCA Hall of Fame since 1966. Since then, more than 350 individuals have been inducted.

U.S. Basketball Writers Association Hall of Fame

The U.S. Basketball Writers Association was founded in 1956 to serve the interests of journalists who cover college basketball. The USBWA Hall of Fame honors members who have made outstanding contributions.
The 2025 class of the U.S. Basketball Writers Association Hall of Fame honored seven reporters and columnists who have covered men’s and women’s basketball, according to a news release.

Country Radio Hall of Fame

Country Radio Broadcasters (CRB), an organization that stages the annual Country Radio Seminar educational event, has been inducting individuals into its Country Radio Hall of Fame since 1975.
It announced its 2025 class of inductees on Feb. 19.

People’s Music Hall of Fame

The Sound Support Foundation and Adam Reader – aka the Professor of Rock, who has built a rock and pop music history channel on YouTube with over 1.2 million subscribers – launched the People’s Music Hall of Fame in February.
The People’s Music Hall of Fame honors musicians who have shaped music throughout the generations and haven’t been recognized yet by the likes of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. The first inductee was Huey Lewis.
(See articles by the Park Record and KSL News Radio.)

WWE Hall of Fame

Professional wrestling entertainment company WWE has been inducting industry greats into the WWE Hall of Fame since 1993.
The 2025 class will be inducted in a ceremony on April 18, 2025, in Las Vegas.

CES 2025 was packed this year. Audit proves it.

If you attended CES 2025 in Las Vegas in early January, then you already know that the annual technology conference was crazy crowded. Now, an independent audit proves it.
The show ran Jan. 7 to 10 after two days of preshow events for journalists. The conference drew 142,465 participants from across the globe, show owner Consumer Technology Association announced Thursday in a press release.
That’s an increase of 2.7% from last year’s CES. But it’s down from the show’s peak of 184,279 in 2017.
CES has been steadily climbing in attendance since the Covid pandemic canceled the 2021 in-person show and shortened the 2022 show.
The Consumer Technology Association is focused on the quality of the show attendees, not the quantity. It noted increases in attendance from senior-level executives, investors and media.
CES 2025 included more than 4,500 exhibitors, up from 4,312 last year. The show floor covered 2.5 million net square of exhibit space, on par with the 2024 show.
CES 2025 also drew 6,582 members of the news media. That’s back above pre-pandemic levels.
CES will return to Las Vegas Jan. 6-9, 2026. The conference is still referred to by many as the Consumer Electronics Show, even though it dropped that name more than 20 years ago. (I can’t find the exact year. Even those vaunted AI chatbots couldn’t help. The show organizer changed its name to the Consumer Technology Association from the Consumer Electronics Association later, in 2015, though.)

Related articles:

CES 2025 news in review: AI, robots, smart glasses, smart rings and more (Jan. 31, 2025)

Celebrities at CES 2025: Anthony Mackie, Karlie Kloss, Sophia Bush, Will.i.am and more (Jan. 25, 2025)

CES 2025: Aye yai yai, AI! (Jan. 25, 2025)

Photo: CES 2025 signage outside the Las Vegas Convention Center. (Patrick Seitz)

Why I unplugged my home landline phone

Every form of electronic communications has been ruined by marketers and scammers.
People today can’t find peace from frequent phone calls, texts and emails from businesses and individuals trying to sell you something or worse, scam you. They interrupt your day, waste your time and annoy you.
This week, I unplugged my home landline phone because of non-stop spam calls.
I looked into blocking the callers from my service, Verizon, but the callers use too many different numbers, probably through spoofing.
Unfortunately the callers are still leaving hang-up voicemails on my service. The voicemails last a couple of seconds before the disconnect. And I have to manually delete them.
My wireless service, AT&T, and my Apple iPhone do a better job of blocking or silencing suspicious unknown callers. But I still get quite a few spam or phishing texts though.
And don’t get me started about email. My two personal email accounts have been clogged with junk email. I have to devote a lot of time to clearing them out occasionally.

Photo: AT&T-branded two-line corded speakerphone. (VTech)

Actresses who have played Snow White in European movies

In my last post, I listed actresses who have played Snow White in U.S. movies and TV series.
Now I’m going to take a look at actresses who have played Snow White in European movies. To a one, they are beautiful women, unlike the recent casting of Rachel Zegler in Disney’s upcoming “Snow White” feature film. (Exhibit 1: See top photo of Italian actress Rossana Podestà in “7 Golden Men” from 1965.) Zegler isn’t ugly, just rather mid.
This list is based on research done by Wikipedia and Internet Movie Database (IMDb).

Actresses who have played Snow White in European movies

• Marianne Simson, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” aka “Schneewittchen und die sieben Zwerge” (Germany, 1939)
• Rossana Podestà, “The Seven Dwarfs to the Rescue,” aka “I sette nani alla riscossa” (Italy, 1951)
• Raili Mäki, “Snow White and the 7 Dudes,” aka “Lumikki ja 7 jätkää” (Finland, 1953)
• Elke Arendt, “Schneewittchen und die sieben Zwerge” (West Germany, 1955)
• Doris Weikow, “Schneewittchen” (East Germany, 1961)
• Marie Liljedahl, “The New Adventures of Snow White,” aka “Grimm’s Fairy Tales for Adults” (West Germany, 1969)
• Zeynep Degirmencioglu, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” aka “Pamuk Prenses ve 7 Cüceler” (Turkey, 1971)
• Natalie Minko, “Schneewittchen und das Geheimnis der Zwerge,” aka “Snow White and the Secret of the Dwarves” (Germany, 1992)
• Cosma Shiva Hagen, “7 Dwarves – Men Alone in the Wood” (Germany, 2004) and its sequel “7 Dwarves: The Forest Is Not Enough” (Germany, 2006)
• Nagisa Shirai, “Blanche Neige” (France, 2009)
• Macarena García, “Blancanieves” (Spain, 2012)
• Lou de Laâge, “White as Snow,” aka “Blanche comme neige” (France, 2019)

Photos:

Marianne Simson

Rossana Podestà

Raili Mäki

Elke Arendt

Doris Weikow

Marie Liljedahl

Zeynep Degirmencioglu

Natalie Minko

Cosma Shiva Hagen

Nagisa Shirai

Macarena García

Lou de Laâge

Rachel Zegler joins long list of actresses who have played Snow White

The casting of Rachel Zegler as Snow White in Walt Disney’s upcoming feature film was controversial in part because that movie would have you believe that she’s more attractive than evil queen Gal Gadot. Clearly the magic mirror on the wall is lying or blind.
Zegler is cute but she’s no statuesque beauty like Gadot.
Some say Zegler was a diversity hire for the part because she’s mixed race, half Latina, and not lily white like the German fairy tale. But I don’t think it would have been an issue if Disney had just cast a knockout beauty as Snow White.
By that measure, the most controversial casting as Snow White should have been Camryn Manheim in “The 10th Kingdom” (2000). She’s definitely not a beauty queen.
Zegler joins a long list of actresses who have played Snow White. I’ve put together a list of actresses who have played the character in U.S. movies and TV shows. There’s also been quite a few European productions. In Germany, her character is called Schneewittchen.

Actresses who have played Snow White in U.S. movies and TV shows

• Marguerite Clark, “Snow White” (1916)
• Carol Heiss, “Snow White and the Three Stooges” (1961)
• Elizabeth McGovern, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” episode (1984) of “Faerie Tale Theatre”
• Sarah Patterson, “Snow White” (1987)
• Monica Keena, “Snow White: A Tale of Terror” (1997)
• Camryn Manheim, “The 10th Kingdom” (2000)
• Kristin Kreuk, “Snow White: The Fairest of Them All” (2001)
• Ginnifer Goodwin, “Once Upon a Time” (2011-2017)
• Kristen Stewart, “Snow White and the Huntsman” (2012)
• Lily Collins, “Mirror Mirror” (2012)
• Eliza Bennett, “Grimm’s Snow White” (2012)
• Shanley Caswell, “Snow White: A Deadly Summer” (2012)
• Stephanie Bennett, “Descendants” (2015)
• Lauren Parkinson, “Avengers Grimm” (2015)
• Jennifer Mischiati, “Snow White’s Christmas Adventure” (2023)
• Rachel Zegler, “Snow White” (2025)

I previously wrote about actresses who have played Snow White back in 2017 and included photos of some of the women. Check out “Actresses who have played Snow White in U.S. movies and TV shows.”

Photos: Rachel Zegler as Snow White (top); poster for Disney’s “Snow White” (2025), scheduled for release on March 21.

Screw ‘netiquette’! Putting weblinks in blog posts is a waste of effort

This weekend, I wasted several hours removing broken weblinks from my articles on Tech-media-tainment. Most of the dead weblinks were originally to news articles. But now they lead to 404 error pages.
It’s always been good netiquette (internet etiquette) to provide links to articles you are discussing. It gives readers additional context and resources to get more information on a subject.
But after my most recent purge of bad weblinks, I’ve decided to limit when I provide them in the future. I’ll provide enough information for readers to do an internet search but not use hypertext coding. That means citing the publication, headline and date of a story, but not a weblink. Over the years too many weblinks become unusable.
Having too many broken links on a website is bad for the user experience and can negatively affect a website’s search ranking. A high number of broken links signals to search engines that your website is not well-maintained, and it can hinder how search engines crawl and index your pages.
My latest search for broken links using BrokenLinkCheck.com flagged 564 bad weblinks.
Some I couldn’t fix because they involved embedded Twitter/X or Instagram posts. A lot of celebrities appear to have deleted their Twitter accounts, for instance.
However, the link checker probably undercounted the number of useless links because many links I manually deleted had automatically redirected to publisher homepages.
The link rot problem was worse on the older blog pages, which makes sense. I’ve been posting to Tech-media-tainment since November 2008.
In some older posts where I had linked to numerous news articles, I had to delete most of the links because they didn’t work anymore.
In some links that did work, the articles were missing media such as photos, slideshows and video.
Some offenders who broke the weblinks on their end included the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), World Health Organization, Creative Commons and the CES trade show.
Repeat offenders among publishers included Bloomberg Businessweek, Entertainment Weekly, Gizmodo, GQ, Mental Floss and The Onion.
Some interesting smaller websites that I had highlighted years ago have been taken over by spam sites or gambling websites. Others just said that their URL was for sale.
I wish the Blogger platform, which Tech-media-tainment uses, would include a built-in broken link checker and a simple way to remove bad weblinks. That sounds like something that artificial intelligence would be great for.
However, as I’ve written previously, Google doesn’t seem interested in investing in Blogger these days.

Related articles:

Online content not safe from deletion (March 4, 2025)

Google has let its Blogger platform wane, but at least it’s still free (March 2, 2025)

Google search algorithm changes hurting small publishers (March 1, 2025)

Content on the internet has an expiration date (Feb. 23, 2025)

The internet is awash in broken links (Oct. 1, 2024)

Photo: ERR 404 license plate in Australia. (Photo via Creative Commons from Flickr user Michael Coghlan.)

Online content not safe from deletion

When I was starting out in the news business and worked at daily newspapers, older articles were available in bound copies of newspaper editions.
Much older articles were saved to microfilm or microfiche. You had to use special machines to read the miniaturized reproductions and to make photocopies.
There was no computer text search so you had to know the date or approximate date of the article or event to find what you needed.
The good news was that there was a permanent record of what had been reported on and written about.
Many journalists, including myself, kept physical “clips” of the articles from the newspapers and print publications that they worked for.
The rise of the internet brought with it the wonders of computer-aided search. All was good until databases like news website archives started going offline. That has led to the scourge of broken weblinks and unavailable information.
Solutions for the problem include archiving organizations such as the venerable Internet Archive. Others include Archive.Today, Archive Team and Webrecorder. But content owners must take advantage of those services.
And those are just Band-Aid fixes to a bigger problem.

Photo: Pew Internet Research chart from Chartr.

Related articles:

How to disappear completely. The internet is forever. But also, it isn’t. What happens to our culture when websites start to vanish at random? (The Verge; Dec. 18, 2024)

The internet is littered with ‘dead links’ (Fast Company; May 28, 2024)

Spotify’s layoffs put an end to a musical encyclopedia, and fans are pissed (TechCrunch; Feb. 12, 2024)

CNET Deletes Thousands of Old Articles to Game Google Search (Gizmodo; Aug. 9, 2023)

Spotify is shutting down Heardle, the Wordle-like music guessing game it bought last year (TechCrunch; April 14, 2023)