SFIAAFF, or the San Francisco International Asian-American Film Festival, for short, has quietly been becoming one of the best film festivals of those I regularly attend. This year, happily, looks to be no different.

The festival will run this year between March 13 and 23 here in San Francisco (with different dates in Berkeley and San Jose), and has an interesting lineup again, featuring the latest films from Hou Hsiao-hsien (Café Lumiere) and Nobuhiro Yamashita (of Linda Linda Linda fame). Exciting indeed!

and that includes country music, as unpopular as it seems to be outside the southern and western parts of our country. I don’t own too much (well, any) of it, sadly, aside from the Garth Brooks hits album, but I do like to listen to it on occasion.

A little while ago, I was flipping through the channels and ran across what seemed to be a televised concert with, of all people, Trisha Yearwood and Babyface. I thought it was a rather odd combination at the time (though it worked to spectacular effect), but it turns out that the concert was actually part of a new (well, new to me) series called CMT Crossroads, a concert series pairing country recording artists with those from other musical genres.

After doing a bit more research, it seems the general consensus that Crossroads is by far the best show on CMT. And it features such great non-country artists as Bon Jovi (whose concert with Sugarland is supposed to be one of the best ones in the series), Elvis Costello, John Mayer and Ray Charles, to name a few. Now, most people would agree that live music has a spontaneity and charm that makes it more memorable, and just better, than more premeditated music, so I was naturally intrigued to watch as much of the series as I could get my hands on, but I could find nothing on the Crossroads website about releasing the episodes on CD/DVD, other than an increasingly desperate-sounding collection of forum posts from interested fans.

So I am reduced to recording every episode I can find on my DVR, which really kind of sucks. I’d love to be able to rent these from Netflix. Please, CMT, release these on DVD!

Whoa. Microsoft has made a generous ($44.6B) bid for Yahoo!, in an attempt, no doubt, to fire a shot over Google’s bow. It’ll be interesting to see if Yahoo! accepts this offer, the second Microsoft has made.