Orbitcast reports that SIRIUS Satellite Radio has inked a deal with Mark Cuban. Starting this summer, Mark Cuban’s Radio Maverick will appear on SIRIUS Stars, Sundays from 12pm - 2pm ET.

Other SIRIUS Stars include Sue Johanson, Bill Bradley, Vincent “Big Pussy” Pastore, Richard Simmons, Adam Curry and Judith Regan, to name a few.

Cuban sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo! back in the dot com glory days for $5.7 billion - keeping $1.9 billion for himself. In 2000, he bought the Dallas Mavericks for $280 million, which at the time was the highest price ever paid for a basketball team. More recently, Cuban co-founded HDNet, a high-def TV network.

His personal site, Blog Maverick, is part of the Weblogs, Inc. empire, now owned by AOL.

According to USA TODAY, a group of uber geeks have created a computer model that will allow for a private jet business unlike any other to launch later this year.

The company will focus on regional routes between smaller cities ill-served by scheduled airlines. Customers will be able to go on DayJet’s website and order a three-seater jet to pick them up. The cost: about $3 or $4 a mile.

As customers put in their requests, the system continually crunches all the departure and arrival requests, plane availability, weather patterns and so on, coming up with a new best answer for schedules and prices every five seconds, always trying — as the DayJet folks say — to get the solution “within 2% of optimality.”

You have to appreciate how remarkable that is. When you’re making everyday, multi-faceted decisions — What should I make for dinner? Should I finish this report or see my kid’s soccer game? — it’s pretty unlikely you ever get within 2% of optimality.

Christian Science Monitor has an article on Gastón Acurio, the Cordon Bleu-trained owner of Lima, Peru’s hip La Mar cevichería. The man wants to bring fresh fish, perfectly “cooked” in citrus to a strip mall near you.

Move over, sushi. Make room, pizza. Step aside, tacos. There’s a new fish on the block. Ceviche: raw fish (or shellfish) diced in cubes and marinated in lime juice, coriander, and hot peppers, served with raw onions, sweet potatoes, and corn. It’s Peru’s flagship dish, the epitome of the cultural and geographic fusion that defines this society, and has come to define its food: Inca hot peppers, potatoes from the Andes, Spanish onions, limes from the coastal valleys, Chinese spices, and a Japanese approach to preparing the fish, fresh out of the Pacific Ocean.

La Mar opened a year ago. Tradition is served here with a twist: A dash of olive oil. A pinch of mild chili. A drizzle of coconut milk. But, similar to Lima’s thousands of old-fashioned cevicherías, La Mar has a thatched roof, is open only for lunch, has reasonable prices, and never takes reservations. The atmosphere is loud and fun. Meals take hours.

In three months, a second La Mar is scheduled to open in Lima. Then Mexico, where four franchises have already been bought. Panama and Brazil are next. And by 2007, San Francisco and London will have their own La Mars.

“It’s going to happen, it’s happening. Cevicherías are going mainstream,” says Acurio. “Sushi bars have nothing on us.”

According to S.I., White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf time traveled back to 1969 earlier this week. What else could possibly explain asking a player as good as Joe Crede to cut his hair? The guy is currently hitting .341—if you’re going to cut something, cut him some slack.

Maciej (pronouned “MAH-tchay”) Ceg?owsk is a Polish-born, American-raised oil painter who lives in Buenos Aires at the moment. On his blog Idle Words, Maciej provides expert gastronomic advise for visitors to Argentina.

The classic beginner’s mistake in Argentina is to neglect the first steak of the day. You will be tempted to just peck at it or even skip it altogether, rationalizing that you need to save yourself for the much larger steak later that night. But this is a false economy, like refusing to drink water in the early parts of a marathon. That first steak has to get you through the afternoon and half the night, until the restaurants begin to open at ten; the first steak is what primes your system to digest large quantities of animal protein, and it’s the first steak that buffers the sudden sugar rush of your afternoon ice cream cone. The midnight second steak might be more the glamorous one, standing as it does a good three inches off the plate, but all it has to do is get you up and out of the restaurant and into bed (for the love of God, don’t forget to drink water).

The afternoon steak is the workhorse steak, the backbone of the day. It’s the steak that gets you around the city, ensures a successful nap, steers you into the bar and (most importantly) gives you the mental clarity to choose the right cut of meat in the restaurant that night. Misorder the first steak and you will either find yourself losing steam by eight o’clock, when no restaurant is open, or scampering to find an awkward third bridge steak, to tide you over until dinner.

Argentine beef really is extraordinary. When the meat is cooked, it is roasted in thick pieces over open coals by obsessive meat chefs who have been cooking meat all their lives, for other people who have been eating meat all their lives, in a country that takes its meat extremely seriously. You are not likely to be disappointed.

Maciej’s writing makes me want to go to Argentina. I know the country has great wine to go with their steaks. As does neighboring Chile, which was just this past weekend recommended to me by a friend who has spent time their on climbing expeditions. He described Chile as a wide open place, like California 100 years ago.

BootsnAll is looking for travel writers.

Got a story you’re itching to tell? Love your town and want to share it with the world? Interested in sending live updates from your upcoming trip?

If so, the BootsnAll community would love to hear about it. Our audience loves independent travel no matter what form it takes, so read through our Writers Guidelines and learn more about how to get your work published on BootsnAll.

This is a great site/business idea. People who love to travel want to share their stories with other travelers. BootsnAll allows that to happen naturally.

LA Weekly has an interesting piece by Alie Ward on two-piece indie rockers.

Were I to saunter up to a podium and announce through the condescending gaze of a monocle that “Two-piece bands are really hot right now!” you might just roll your eyes and leave my lecture hall.

Of course two-piece bands are hot right now. They’ve been hot for a while. This is not late-breaking news rushed to the press from the hands of ecstatic social scientists.

But a recent glance at my personal mountain of music caused the curious nerd in me to query: Could this spike in rock duos be a reflection of Darwinian selection? Survival of the smallest? And can the musical climate sustain a population boom such as this?

The Raveonettes, the Kills, Fame, Jucifer, Mates of State, Quasi, Madison Park, Giant Drag, the Dresden Dolls, I Want a Hovercraft, Death from Above 1979, the Black Keys, Two Gallants, Om, Oppenheimer, Swearing at Motorists, The Fiery Furnaces and White Stripes are all two-piece bands.

According to this LA Times piece, life in the hybrid lane is not all it’s cracked up to be.

When California allowed solo occupants of hybrid cars to use carpool lanes last year, many thought they were merging onto a narrow strip of car culture heaven.

But increasingly, hybrid owners say they feel like the victims of road rage.

Carpoolers accuse them of driving too slowly in order to maximize their fuel efficiency, and of clogging diamond lanes that were once clear.

Hybrid motorists even have a term for the ill will: “Prius backlash.”

“There’s a mentality out there that we’re a bunch of liberal hippies or we’re trying to make some statement on the environment,” said Travis Ruff, a real estate agent from Newbury Park who drives a Toyota Prius. “People are a lot less friendly than when I drove a Mercedes.”

The Prius backlash isn’t confined to California’s carpool lanes. On a recent episode of Comedy Central’s “South Park,” one of the cartoon characters persuades everyone in town to buy a hybrid car. But hybrids end up creating their own air pollution. Not smog. “Smug.”

On the other end of this sliding scale, there’s a group of people who like to capture images of themselves giving the finger to Hummer drivers.

Can’t we all just get along? On LA freeways, the answer is pretty clear—no.

We keep hearing how heirarchies have been flattened, if not steamrolled, by the interweb. It’s nice to have some solid examples to point to. Here’s one:

Sandi Thom, a 24 year old singer-songwriter was signed to a five-record deal by RCA/SonyBMG on Monday April 3rd.

Thom recently garnered huge media exposure after webcasting her ‘living room’ gigs from the basement of her Tooting flat for 21 consecutive nights. News of the gigs spread like wildfire. Her audience on the first night was 70 people. But the audience grew to a peak of 70,000 global listeners by the third week.

It’s the first webcast signing in major record label history.

Thom’s first album, “Smile, It Confuses People,” will be out on June 5th.

Caterina Fake is a smart woman. She’s also a successful entrepreneur, having sold Flickr to Yahoo, where she now works. She’s also currently on the cover of Newsweek. Here’s how she puts the “We” in Web:

9 reasons why people will *love* your web site

1) Because it makes them feel good about themselves

2) Because it solves a problem they’ve had forever

3) Because it gives them a place to express themselves and be creative

4) Because they can get attention, feedback and love

5) Because it makes them money

6) Because it challenges them in a fulfilling way

7) Because it’s super easy

8) Because all their friends are on it

9) Because it’s more exciting than Vegas