Going for a bike ride and leaving the phone behind.
Keep the ratings up and don’t forget to roll
the credits when you’re through.
It is days like this that I wish
I had a café lifestyle
and not the sit in front of a computer
life I have today.
The train is running extra slow today.
Not a surprise considering
the rain tends to jack it up.
Gonna be a looong ride home.
This train is moving
a bit slower than I would like.
At this rate we won’t reach basecamp by tea time
And it begins again. I hope the train shows up soon
my cloud cover is breaking up
and it looks to be a hot day ahead
Sitting on the train platform in a warm LA night.
At least the smoke has cleared out…
I’ll be back here tomorrow
The damn couch keeps calling my name.
I’m trying to get something… hell anything, done today
but a nap sounds so very nice
The lines above were compiled from random tweets by Jason Rogers. No words were added or deleted. I did break lines as spirit moved. I hope someone with music in their soul can make this sing.
I’ve recently noticed most popular brands of bar soap are sold in boxes, instead of just the paper wrapper. You don’t have to be a genius to figure this out. It makes it a little less obvious –in the store– to see that they’re giving you less soap for the same prices.
The bar on the top is Dial (4.0 oz). The bar on the bottom is Ivory (4.5 oz). It appears to my untrained eye that they’ve shaved more than half an ounce but Ivory is probably less dense (it floats!).
One of the marketing shills would undoubtedly try to convince me the big dip and rounded corners make it easier to hold some horse shit.
It is my sincere hope –long shot, I know– than in a couple of months I can search Dial Soap and find this post on the first page of Google results.
We’ve been fiddling around with the Internet for about 15 years and tried lots of different ideas. Streaming audio of debate from the state legislature; oral arguments from the state supreme court; online database of accident reports format he state highway patrol; and –as the say– the list goes on. One idea could never get off the ground was Obits Online. This was back in the late ’90’s as I recall.
Funeral homes would log in to our online database and post funeral announcements. The public could search by name, date, city, etc etc. We pitched the funeral home associations in Missouri and Iowa (maybe some other states, I don’t recall).
The idea never got off the ground because most funeral homes were still trying to figure out their fax machines and were convinced the people in their communities were not using computers and were unlikely to do so any time soon.
I bring up this stillborn digital baby after spotting this story (AdAge.com) about a TV station in Michigan that’s running on-air and online obituary ads after three of the region’s four daily newspapers reduced publication to three days a week.
“For $100, the station will run the deceased’s name and photo on-air and publish a full-length obituary on ObitMichigan.com. Full-screen graphics listing names of people who have passed away are broadcast during the local station’s morning and noon shows Monday through Friday, as well as on weekend morning shows. Viewers are pushed to the website for more information about the deceased as well as funeral-services information.
The station’s owner, Meredith Corp., expects to roll the concept out to its other stations and says it is also in licensing discussions with other station groups.
At $100 an obituary, it’s not clear that WNEM or Meredith has really tapped a massive vein of cash. Revenue from obituaries “is a teeny subset” of overall newspaper-classified revenue, said Mort Goldstrom, VP-advertising at the Newspaper Association of America. Fees charged by papers can range from as high as $1,000 for a major metro to a few hundred dollars for a midmarket paper. And many small community and weekly newspapers still run obituaries for free.
WNEM started running obituaries in August at no charge, to get people familiar with the service and to work out any software bugs. Since launching as a paid service in early September, executives said, the station has over 700 obituaries in its system.
The new obituaries are also prompting a change in the way people go about their daily routine, he said. “The biggest issue that we have is the elderly people that don’t have the ability to pay for internet access or don’t have a computer. Now they see it flash on TV and those that don’t have a computer can call the funeral home and ask for information,” Mr. Luczak said.”
Having the TV station to promote and leverage the idea is an important component. I hope they make some money and provide a useful service.
Malcolm Gladwell’s advice to young journalists. From a Q & A with TIME:
“The issue is not writing. It’s what you write about. One of my favorite columnists is Jonathan Weil, who writes for Bloomberg. He broke the Enron story, and he broke it because he’s one of the very few mainstream journalists in America who really knows how to read a balance sheet. That means Jonathan Weil will always have a job, and will always be read, and will always have something interesting to say. He’s unique. Most accountants don’t write articles, and most journalists don’t know anything about accounting. Aspiring journalists should stop going to journalism programs and go to some other kind of grad school. If I was studying today, I would go get a master’s in statistics, and maybe do a bunch of accounting courses and then write from that perspective. I think that’s the way to survive. The role of the generalist is diminishing. Journalism has to get smarter.”
That must be hard to people who went to J-School to hear. Or agree with.
Hailey Johnson’s 1-out, 7th-inning grand slam puts the Lady Tigers (Republic, MO) in the state semifinals. Final score: Republic 4, Southern Boone County. The video below was shot by my friend and co-worker, David, on his iPhone. KSPR (Springfield TV station) had a cameraman there, too .
I think this illustrates two very different but equally valid approaches to covering the event. The TV package is more produced but obviously took longer to get on the air and online. David zapped his clip straight up to YouTube and a hyper-local blog he maintains.
“I believe our reality is a holographic simulation, and you and I are just software running within it. Our creator, or creators, who presumably had bodies like ours, made this simulated universe so they could live forever, in a fashion, because their own reality was about to be annihilated in some sort of cosmic catastrophe. Or maybe we’re someone’s seventh grade science project. The point is that we only think we are real because that’s how we were programmed.”
Excerpted from Mr. Adams’ blog. I happen to subscribe to a marginally more spiritual version of this theory.
I haven’t listened to a song on the radio for a long, long time. Six months? Longer. It’s all iTunes and Pandora these days. I discovered a link to the song above on @fezmonger ‘s Twitter feed. He found by way of @planetnelson.
I really like the video. The girl is almost too cute to look at. The guy seems ecstatic in his joy. I do wonder if the song was really recorded in the bedroom, as it appears. If so, Big Label Music is cold-in-the-ground dead.
PS: Yes, I am aware of how much video I’ve been posting of late. Not sure why. Coincidence, if you believe in such a silly thing.
