Definitely the first time Perez Hilton has ever showed up on this blog.

And that fact (and his post) raise a few questions:

A. Is Perez actually sad about NPR?* Seems like lots of his readers (an impressive percentage of whom, hilariously (and awesomely), represent themselves with pictures involving boobs or shirtless dudes) are not sad.

2. Is NPR really liberal? Is it really offensive to the Perez Hilton community? Or might some of those people just be spitting back anti-intellectual propaganda? Someone sometime somewhere some way convinced them that the elites were out to get them, and they get freaked out by anything that feels in any way academic or theoretical or learned (that how you spell lear ned?)?

d. Huge bummer that NPR is feeling the financial squeeze. I think they create real value. Great news. Great interviews. Great analysis. And, while pledge drives make me crazy, I love the theory behind their voluntary subscription model. They ask people to name their own price, to pay what they can. And that makes so much sense in so many ways. Clearly, it's vulnerable, however. I'll be curious to see if they step up the fundraising efforts in some way.

*Note: Sorry to show my liberal bias with a link to The Huffington Post.  I don't really even like The Huffington Post.  But they post the whole cutbacks memo from the NPR CEO, and I figured that's probably the most useful thing to read at this point.