So how is it? For obvious reasons, Im unable to enjoy it atm.
Early Morning Open Thread: Soiled-Dove-Grey Lady
Once again, the rumors are getting louder about the New York Times going (back) behind a paywall. It probably says a lot about my personal biases that I found Foster Kamer’s Gawker article the most interesting — not least because of the comments engendered by it. You don’t get nearly such a range of… creativity… in the “Letters to Ye Editors”.
I would actually be willing to pay some kind of subscription to keep a high-quality “paper of record” online, because I’ve reduced a 30-year daily newspaper addiction down to a Sunday-only over-the-counter purchase for the ad inserts and leisurely browsing when screenreading isn’t convenient. And as a comparatively old person with an established pressed-pulpwood addiction, I should be a prime target. But I bitterly resent the idea of giving so much as a thin dime to the godsdamned New York Times, because they’re the Gordon-Gekko-besotted bandits who eviscerated my dependable Boston Globe and sabotaged its various delivery services in a (vain) attempt to “convince” Bostonians of a better-than-fourth-grade reading ability to switch to the NYTimes. As it turns out, Sulzberger’s People could wean me off buying the Globe, but they couldn’t force me to buy the Times, and I can only assume I’ve got plenty of company out here in the wilds beyond the Hudson. Suggestions as to alternative options gratefully accepted.
But it gladdened my shriveled heart to read that The Moustache of Understanding is no longer sanguine about the free exchange of ideas in the global marketplace…
Hanging over the deliberations is the fact that the Times’ last experience with pay walls, TimesSelect, was deeply unsatisfying and exposed a rift between Sulzberger and his roster of A-list columnists, particularly Tom Friedman and Maureen Dowd, who grew frustrated at their dramatic fall-off in online readership. Not long before the Times ultimately pulled the plug on TimesSelect, Friedman wrote Sulzberger a long memo explaining that, while he was initially supportive of TimesSelect, he’d been alarmed that he had lost most of his readers in India and China and the Middle East.
“As we got into it, it was clear to me I was getting cut off from a lot of my readers in India and China where 50 dollars per year would be equal to a quarter of college tuition,” Friedman recently told me by phone. “What was coming to me anecdotally from my travels was the five worst words that as a columnist you ever want to hear: ‘I used to read you before you went behind the wall.’”
Friedman is now “pro some kind of pay model,” he says. “My own feeling is, we have to do anything we can to raise money,” he told me. “At some point we gotta charge for our product.”
I asked Friedman whether any of the technologists he meets during his globe-trotting had presented any groundbreaking ideas for how to save the Times and journalism. While he’s optimistic about the coming crop of tablets and e-readers, the answer is no. “We’re in a megatransition. It hasn’t ever felt like anyone has the answer,” he said. “My macro feeling is that I’m glad I had this job at this time. It was great working at the paper when it was on dead trees and could pay for itself.”
Such are the harsh judgements that must be made when a Very Serious Person’s family fortunes are cruelly reduced from a decently prosperous $3-billion-plus to a mere handful of millions. Perhaps the NYT’s last paywall-free front page can headline a five-page article chronicling the sad plight of its most illustrious pundits, reduced to scrabbling for speaking fees and book contracts with the unwashed hoi polloi from Fox News and the wingnuttier outposts of Heartland America(tm).
Early Morning Open Thread: Soiled-Dove-Grey LadyPost + Comments (189)
Early Morning Open Thread
Looks like there will be no pictures from the impromptu San Francisco BJ meet-up until DougJ has a chance to recover from the hangover get back to his desktop. And there was no Thursday Night Menu this week, because Bad Horse’s Filly has been too busy to put one together. So you’re stuck with my pawky sense of humor, and this entertained me, because I found it more catchy than any of the original songs…
John, I hope you’re feeling better… okay, Day Two, settle for “feeling less than completely horrible and hurting in places you didn’t even know you had”. And that Lily has managed to express her gratitude for your chivalry without trying to climb onto the sling supporting your poor shattered shoulder… more than once.
And while we’re counting our blessings, however meagre, let us include the fact that we are not the daughter of Bible Spice. People joke about being “raised by wolves”, but wolves at least show a consistent bias towards their offsprings’ best interests. Gods know I did some amazingly stupid and mock-worthy things when I was 19, but fortunately for me that was post-Roe and pre-cell-cameras, and none of the surviving witnesses have a financial interest in discussing what little they might remember.
KFC- It’s What for Dinner
I heard this the other day and thought it was really funny:
Christmas isn’t a national holiday in Japan but many Japanese celebrate the 25th with a special meal: fried chicken – specifically, Kentucky Fried Chicken. Colonel Sander’s chicken is considered a Christmas tradition there. The fast-food chain is so popular long lines form outside Japanese stores.
You can listen to the whole piece at the link- apparently KFC dinners are so popular in Japan that they take reservations for months ahead of time.
Open Thread: Sunday Morning Cartoons Edition
Jeesh, seems like everybody’s still cranky from a long, bad week.
I know the word “anime” acts upon certain hip individuals as an emetic, but for those of you who enjoyed Spirited Away and/or Howl’s Moving Castle, I want to recommend the short (16 episodes, 4 DVDs) series Kamichu!. It’s the tale of a middle-school girl from a backwater town who wakes up one morning and discovers she’s a god… just another one of the thousands of insignificant local godlings “of whom there are as many as there are created things”… while still having all the problems inherent to being a 13-year-old girl in 1980s Japan. There are no giant robots, or mecha, or even panty shots; it’s just a gentle, droll little slice of life-plus-slightly-more, and the most Miyazaki-esque anime series I’ve seen.
In this clip, our heroine Yurie has been forced to transfer to a strange school for a month (dreadful enough for a middle schooler) so that she can attend the annual Business Convention of the Gods:
(Only in Japan would the gods not only have an annual conference, but a conference where getting your attendance card stamped at a sufficient number of educational seminars entitles one to a door prize!)
Open Thread: Sunday Morning Cartoons EditionPost + Comments (81)
Open Thread: Terry Pratchett’s New Book
Pratchett released Unseen Academicals six weeks ago. If you’re a Pratchett fan, have you read it yet? And if so, what do you think of it?
I liked it, more than I had feared, especially since all I know about Foot-The-Ball I learned from TBoggs and translations of the Japanese manga Whistle. It’s not one of the top five Discworld novels, but it’s still miles ahead of, say, the first two books in the series. The plot construction wasn’t as sinewy and water-tight as we have come to expect. A better acquaintance with British football (Comrade Scrutinizer, for instance, connects the UA to Manchester’s AU, Arsenal United) would certainly improve one’s enjoyment of the usual Prachettian in-jokes and satires. Lord Vetinari talked too much, but then he was supposed to have imbibed at least a dozen strong ales before doing so.
I think Mr. Nutt, Glenda Sugarbean, and especially Pepe are all worthy additions to the Discworld Canon. Your thoughts?
Open Thread: Terry Pratchett’s New BookPost + Comments (107)
Contra Kim Stanley Robinson
Quoted in I09*:
Anyone can do a dystopia these days just by making a collage of newspaper headlines, but utopias are hard, and important, because we need to imagine what it might be like if we did things well enough to say to our kids, we did our best, this is about as good as it was when it was handed to us, take care of it and do better. Some kind of narrative vision of what we’re trying for as a civilization.
It’s a slim tradition since [Sir Thomas] More invented the word, but a very interesting one, and at certain points important: the Bellamy clubs after Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward had a big impact on the Progressive movement in American politics, and H.G. Wells’s stubborn persistence in writing utopias over about fifty years (not his big sellers) conveyed the vision that got turned into the postwar order of social security and some kind of government-by-meritocracy.
So utopias have had effects in the real world. More recently I think Ecotopia by [Ernest] Callenbach had a big impact on how the hippie generation tried to live in the years after, building families and communities.
The general theme here, that we would benefit more from utopian fiction than from the other kind, is not just off base but dangerously wrong.
It lets off utopianism far too easy to say that it works less well than dystopian thinking to make society better. Without exaggerating, I could fairly say that utopian thinking sparked some of the worst things that humans have ever done. It is not even a debatable point. Communism started as a utopian ideal. Gated cults that commit mass suicide (or worse) nearly always stem from a utopian vision. In general the concept of utopia is one of the most efficient means ever found to get well-intentioned people to do awful things.
Fictional dreaming of dystopia is not just less dangerous, it has the polar opposite effect.
Think of the most influential fiction of the twentieth century. Can you remember one utopian work? 1984 and Animal Farm weave so deep in the western psyche that almost every criticism of government that doesn’t go straight to Hitler (that is to say, the effective ones) references Orwell instead. Ditto Lord of the Flies for group psychology. Brave New World looms over every discussion of science ethics since the year it was published. Maybe hippies cared about Ecotopia, but environmentalism has Silent Spring to thank. I read it part way through an ecology degree at an extremely liberal school, in 1998, and the book still punched me in the gut. Has the kook right attacked Edward Abbey lately? I doubt it. They love him just like they love Earth First! and the ELF and any other group that follows Callenbach’s utopian line of thought. If you want to know why the pollution lobby and their GOP pets still throw hate at a marine biologist who died in 1964, read her book. Fifty years later and it still changes minds.
Obviously this doesn’t mean that writers must shelve whatever book project or the world will end. On an average year the United States prints over 150,000 books. The UK prints over 100k more. Throw in the hundreds of thousands printed everywhere else and you have almost a million, save four or five, that people a century from now will never know existed.
It doesn’t bother me that Kim Robinson doesn’t roll with the dystopian cool kids. Admit it, zombies and Atwoodian parables and world-ending Emmerich movies are getting stale. The prob here is that Robinson took it one step further and justified his artistic (or commercial, whatever) decision with an academic argument that could not be more wrong if he took the truth and made a photographic negative.
(*) Although our current version of WP hides it for some reason, this is a link.