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Sleep. Take a staggering variety of cold/flu medications. Sleep. Refrain from eating, in whole or in part. Consume bag after bag of store-brand cough drops. Listen to people tell me everybody’s been getting this debilitating bug, whatever it is. Make bad puns about the bird flu (“Of course it did; it didn’t walk!”). Cough up substances you don’t want me to describe, in mass quantities. Skip out on about half a dozen meetups, parties, Belltown Messenger interviews, etc. Sleep. Briefly attend a Drinking Liberally meeting at which I hear King County Executive Ron Sims talk informally about tying in any KeyArena rebuild with a larger Seattle Center makeover (he gave no specific suggestions as to what he’d like to add or delete from the complex). Sleep.
While the world was passing me by, an odd li’l Stranger essay suggested we might as well go ahead and let the Seattle Post-Intelligencer die. I, of course, utterly disagree. Ideally, I’d like the P-I to come out of its joint operating agreement with the SeaTimes as a viable, fully-independent, full-size daily. If that can’t be achieved, there are other options for keeping Seattle a two-daily town:
As I’ve written a few times before, the prospect of a post-JOA P-I allows all of us news fans to imagine a new type of paper for a new century. Let’s keep the imagining going. If the P-I doesn’t morph into our brave new paper, let’s start it up ourselves.
The new narrower P-I arrived at my doorstep this morning. The new narrower Seattle Times is in the vending box outside my building.
As promimsed/threatened over the previous week, the papers are an inch narrower than they were before, as are many other papers around the country these days. (The narrower size has become the de facto standard for national full-page newspaper ads.)
I still don’t see how the narrower page saves paper. In order to fit the same amount of square-inchage of editorial and ad space, a paper would have to add pages. The smaller page size means the ratio of ink area to trim area is smaller, so more paper is unprinted-upon, not less.
No, the only way this scheme can save paper is if (1) advertisers are charged the same amount of money for less space, and (2) the news hole is similarly cramped. But those measures could be accomplished on the old page size. So the expensive retooling of massive printing presses is all for show, for telling fickle stockholders that we’re really doing something to keep those unreasonable promises of 20 percent profit margins.
And as for the excising of approximately one-eighth of the papers’ news holes, I’ve always been a brevity fan. There’s no need for any paper that’s not the NY Times to try to write like the NY Times. Heck, even the Times of London writes short-n’-sweet.
NOW LISTENING TO Music Out of Century 21, a Seattle World’s Fair tie-in LP that even I hadn’t known about until last week, when it was offered online at the out-of-print music site The Collector. (It’s since “scrolled off” from that site, alas; scroll down this link to read about the disc).
It turns out to have been the product of Atello Mineo, creator of the even more wacked-out World’s Fair disc Man in Space With Sounds, and his wife Toni. (The credited “artist” on Music Out of Century 21 is big-band conductor Vincent Lopez.) This one’s not as far-out as Man in Space (pun intended, as always). But it’s still a smash, a dozen tracks of lushy lounge sounds that snap in a beat from syrupy strings to badass brass to swooning choristers. The listening experience is only enhanced by the fact that I’m watching the Space Needle out my window whilst listening to the tuneage, in the century that evoked such high hopes way back then.
Check out the juxtaposition of image and headline on Wednesday’s P-I front page. I’m talkng about the blurbs directly beneath the “Intelligencer,” above the main headline.
If you still don’t get it, come to my housewarming/birthday/site-anniversary shindig tonite to have it all explained to you. Email and RSVP for address and other pertinent info.
…to an email list that originally purported to be about the any-day-now triumph of “content” as an online business stretegy, but which devolved into simply re-ussuing all the top stories from the NY Times. Soon, such tactics might spread as a form of what the lawyers would call “intellectual property theft.” The paper’s about to charge annual subscriptions for its op-ed columnists, adding early access to the Sunday Book Review and other features into the deal.
Despite what the P-I‘s Bill Virgin sez, I don’t think such deals are going to work out. Of course, I could be wrong. And as a “content originator” searching for a new income stream, I might like it if I was wrong.
JUST WHEN I THOUGHT I’d never find an intelligent Bush defender, none other than print Misc contributor Doug Anderson shows up to assume the role. He has a blog called “Democrats for Bush,” and contributed an op-ed essay in the P-I last week.
Anderson’s essay takes the familiar neo-conservative tack of attributing all manner of illogical mania to unquoted, unnamed left-wingers (in particular, comparing Republicans to Nazis), implying that Bush’s opponents as a whole share such traits. I happen to disagree with just about everything in it after the first three paragraphs. But it’s well paced, well drafted, and even well argued—qualities I have seldom seen in any pro-Bush material.
I personally see Bush as an inept figurehead (that is, inept at the job of figurehead) for the neocon political machine. The neocon machine has several important cultural differences from the old National Socialist machine, but also several tactical similarities (particularly in invoking the politics of fear and bigotry, a kitsch aesthetic, and a highly authoritarian “populism”).
I have yet to read or hear anything in favor of Bush’s re-election that even attempts to appeal to the mindset of those of us who are neither Limbaugh fans nor billionaires. Alas, I didn’t find it in Anderson’s P-I entry either; just more lucid versions of the same old pinko-bashing you’ll find on certain radio stations and cable channels.
What British conservative pundits used to call “the loony left” has nothing to do with the real issues of this campaign. The radicals don’t even like Kerry, and Kerry’s distanced himself from them. Extreme left-wingers would have little or no sway in a Kerry administration. Extreme right-wingers effectively run the Bush administration, and are taking it and the rest of us into the proverbial toilet.
Yes, I believe we live in a dangerous world. I also believe the neocon machine is responsible for at least two thirds of those dangers, and has proven incapable of effectively responding to the rest.
On the happy side, in Anderson I’ve finally found someone with whom I can intelligently debate these topics.
…of the baseball playoffs is over, and the Boston Red Sox and Houston Astros are both still in. This raises the possibility of a World Series matchup of Massachusetts vs. Texas, just days before another such battle.
LIKE A, WELL, YOU KNOW: Most of the pro-Bush arguments I’ve read have left been short on logical reasoning, long on crude insults and appeals to fear and hate.
In his Tuesday column, P-I business writer Bill Virgin at least attempts to make a thinking man’s case for Bush. I commend Virgin for this effort, though I still disagree with his conclusions. Yes, the world’s a more dangerous place now than it was during the Clinton years. But the man Virgin wants us to re-elect is at least two-thirds responsible for making it this dangerous.
And even the normally conscientious Virgin can’t help but make cheap potshots at Bush’s critics, potshots that require the reader to already believe in the Fox News gang’s character-assassination stereotypes.
…was first sold, P-I cartoonist David Horsey depicted a rude businessman walking into a store and asking if there was a “WonderJock.” Well, now there is. (Viewer discretion advised.)
After three days, I’ve decided I sorta like the new-look Seattle Times.
The three-deck headlines on most major articles are a convenient and nearly-poetic throwback to the old days of newspapering. The newly consistent headline style on brief stories makes it easy to find what you might want to read. The new text typeface seems larger, without significantly reducing the amount of verbiage per column-inch. Even the photo reproduction seems higher-res.
No major move in a corporate enterprise takes place out of context. There are reasons for revamps such as that of the Times. The paper’s trying to put its joint-operating-agreement “partner,” the Post-Intelligencer, out of business. It wants the local reading public to believe the Times deserves to be Seattle’s only big daily paper.
From the ’50s through the ’70s, the Times was the fat and unsassy voice of the local business establishment, as dull as dishwater and as awkward as a bad karaoke singer. Redesigns in 1980 and 1992, and the JOA’s launch in 1983, put the paper on the road to higher readability. Now, it’s a real newspaper again. (I still don’t want it to become the only paper in town, though.)
…acknowledges there are as many as 20 Seattle barber shops specializing in “hip-hop” dos. Upon which one does the paper choose to focus? You guessed it: The one that’s in the north end and owned by two white guys.
SAD NEWS IN CULTURELAND: Northwest Bookfest has thrown down its last galley of type, and won’t be back this fall. That just gives us book-lovers the opportunity to start over and launch a brand spankin’ new Lit-O-Rama weekend.
I’d say: Forget about staging it in a funky but remote location such as Sand Point. Use the new library for a scaled-down fair; or bring the neo-modern aesthetic of the new library into the Convention Center, the Trade Center, the Seahawks Exhibition Center, or Key Arena. Make it festive, celebratory. Make it a fun gathering for people who will be spending the winter curled up at home with books.
…to our, and just about everyone’s, fave mondo-movie re-releaser, Mike Vraney of Something Weird Video, on the occasion of his really cute widower-and-son profile in the P-I today.
No fewer than three of the comic strips in today’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer refer to personal-injury lawyers. Perhaps this wouldn’t be a good day to go out.
A KIND READER thought some of the rest of you, particularly out-O-towners, might enjoy this P-I piece about the Mac programmers at Microsoft.
Loved the P-I‘s great ode on Thursday to one of my main here-n’-now heroes, Frank cartoonist Jim Woodring.
I’M COMING TO LOVE the Chicago Cubs’ playoff baseball adventure, particularly the Chicago Tribune’s coverage of the Tribune Co.-owned Cubs. One feature article asks seriously, “Is it OK to pray for the Cubs?” The paper’s website home page also includes a Wrigley Field photolog, including a shot of a guy bearing a banner reading, “CUBS IN OCT. TEMP IN HELL: 32F.”
None of this praise, natch, is meant to slight Wednesday’s other baseball-playoff triumph, the Boston Red Sox’s righteous thrashing of the loathed Yankees.
SOME MORE REASONS TO KEEP THE P-I IN BUSINESS:
