Fahrenheit 99.5 - live from last night

Every so often, my wife gives me the opportunity to take a picture of her that shows the world why I love her. This is the latest one.

Printed Blogs: Wave of... the Future?

"I think it would be fun to run a newspaper." - Charles Foster Kane

So I just read that apparently someone is starting to print blogs on newsprint.

OK, let's all say it together: isn't that what a newspaper is?

Well, yes and no. Which sums up how I feel about this idea in a nutshell.

On one hand, I get it. It's not really a newspaper, in the traditional sense of the word, calling to mind a time when journalistic integrity wasn't an oxymoron. A printed blog would come off as more of a zine (God, that's bringing me back to the mid-late 90s!) than a proper paper. Or perhaps a collection of op-ed pieces. Assuming, of course, that the editors of the printed blog have certain themes or arcs in mind and aren't just printing blogs where people just talk about the minutiae of their children's thoroughly uneventful lives... unless that's their arc.

And I can certainly appreciate the idea of reading something on anything but a computer screen. I mean, I don't know why I ever expect anyone to read my blog because I have a difficult time reading on a monitor. For the most part, when my eyes hit a screen, they tend to wander and I have to make a serious effort to concentrate on the text. The printed page presents no such problem for me. This is why I can't imagine that I will ever throw over books in favor of a Kindle or one of those other electronic readers. That's also to say nothing about the fact that, in a paperless society, all it would take would be a strategically placed EMP to wipe out the works of Shakespeare, Dickens, and Stephen King once and for all. I don't ever want to live in a world where the prevalence of human history relies precariously upon technology working properly, and I don't imagine that anyone who has ever seen Terry Gilliam's Brazil would either.

However, it makes no sense to print blogs on paper, especially when most people are getting their information from the web? It's wasted paper. The one great thing about the internet is that you don't have to waste any paper in order to get information. Also, wouldn't the target market for such a printed blog have no use for print? I have no data in front of me but I'll bet my left nut that it's not unfair to say that the majority of the internet generation (or "millennials" or whatever the fuck they're being called now) doesn't pick up a newspaper on a regular basis. The eradication of newspapers may very well end up dying out with my generation, if not sooner, but if there is a way to save it, this certainly isn't it. It's more important to get people to seek out the news, not cater printed information to a contingent that doesn't seek it out. The news industry is already said to suffer from exactly that; this is only going to blur the line between fact and opinion further.

So really, the only good this printed blog can do by design is make it more comfortable to read what's on the internet. As much as I would like certain things not to get crushed in the wake of our rapidly advancing society (shooting films on celluloid, for example), it's just going to happen with some things. Like reading the paper. Putting the internet on paper is only bringing the internet to people who don't like the internet, which is backward thinking, in my opinion. I look at it like doing a radio play of The Matrix or The Dark Knight. Some things just aren't going to work.

(New) Morning in America

"Here on the pulse of this new day
You may have the grace to look up and out
And into your sister's eyes, into
Your brother's face, your country
And say simply
Very simply
With hope
Good morning."
- Maya Angelou, "On the Pulse of Morning" (the 1993 Inaugural Poem)


"Suddenly, all your history's ablaze
Try to breathe, as the world disintegrates
Just like autumn leaves, we're in for change
Holding tenderly to what remains."
- TV on the Radio


"The establishment of democracy on the American continent was scarcely as radical a break with the past as was the necessity, which Americans faced, of broadening this concept to include black men."
- James Baldwin


"You can't hold down what can't be held down
New formulas callin' you to move around."
- Roni Size/Reprazent


"America! Fuck Yeah!"
- DVDA



Ladies and gentlemen, the 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama.

Yes We Can (Make Pastries?) - live from East Meadow

My mother-in-law made brownies today. "In honor of our brown president," she says. The mystery of my wife unravels a little bit every time I'm over at her parents' house.