Roy Blount, Jr.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Roy Alton Blount, Jr. (born October 4, 1941; IPA: blʌnt) is an American writer. Best known as a humorist, Blount is also a reporter, actor, and musician with the Rock Bottom Remainders, a rock band composed entirely of writers. He is also president of the Authors Guild.
Blount was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, and graduated from Decatur High School in Decatur, Georgia, where he was editor of the school newspaper, The Scribbler, and Vanderbilt University. Recently he narrated The Main Stream, a PBS documentary about the Mississippi River. As of 2009 he is featured regularly as a panelist on the NPR news/comedy quiz show, Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me. On the show, Blount is known for outrageous dead-pan comments which frequently reduce the panel to tears of laughter, such as his discussion of "E.J. Junior Senior Junior High School".
On 24 February 2009 Blount wrote an op-ed article for The New York Times[1] explaining the Authors Guild's position demanding extra royalties from the text-to-speech functionality of the Amazon Kindle 2. To criticism from the American National Federation of the Blind he replied that free audio availability of copyright works to the blind is provided for automatically by American copyright laws. To the criticism that the Kindle's functionality is equivalent to parents reading aloud to their children, he said that "if parents want to send their children off to bed with the voice of Kindle 2 [that is] another matter" noting that such reading is a non-commercial performance which may not be the case for the Kindle.
[edit] Notes
- ^ Blount, Roy (February 24, 2009). "The Kindle Swindle?". New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/25/opinion/25blount.html. Retrieved on February 24, 2009.
[edit] External links
 |
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Roy Blount, Jr. |
 |
This article about a United States journalist born in the 1940s is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
