Saturday, May 16, 2009

SO — these days it's eat at your own risk. That's comforting, isn't it?

Thursday, May 14, 2009

THE problem, Andrew, is that the man is one of those people who requires a terrible foreign enemy — or a "giant conspiracy" — against which to rail, an enemy that we defeat only by becoming just like that enemy. Some folks once called it McCarthyism, psychologists may call it transference (we transfer to others our own evil intent). Whatever, no people is safe in their hands because their hatred of being human is pathological.

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

A recent mixed media piece (spackling, string, acrylic paint, liquid asphaltum and copper wire) done for the Gary Reef workshop.

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

They are fading now, but the city's dogwoods were unusually beautiful this year. Rain and cool weather may have helped.

Monday, May 11, 2009

FRANK Rich holds forth on the fate of the newspaper industry — and points out we will, in the end, get what we pay for. A quotation:

... opinions, however insightful or provocative and whether expressed online or in print or in prime time, are cheap. Reporting the news can be expensive. Some of it — monitoring the local school board, say — can and is being done by voluntary “citizen journalists” with time on their hands, integrity and a Web site. But we can’t have serious opinions about America’s role in combating the Taliban in Pakistan unless brave and knowledgeable correspondents (with security to protect them) tell us in real time what is actually going on there. We can’t know what is happening behind closed doors at corrupt, hard-to-penetrate institutions in Washington or Wall Street unless teams of reporters armed with the appropriate technical expertise and assiduously developed contacts are digging night and day. Those reporters have to eat and pay rent, whether they work for print, a TV network, a Web operation or some new bottom-up news organism we can’t yet imagine.

It’s immaterial whether we find the fruits of their labors on paper, a laptop screen, a BlackBerry, a Kindle or podcast. But someone — and certainly not the government, with all its conflicted interests — must pay for this content and make every effort to police its fairness and accuracy. If we lose the last major news-gathering operations still standing, there will be no news on Google News unless Google shells out to replace them. It won’t.

MEANWHILE, the absolute arrogance and ignorance of this lying, thieving, murderous traitor to the Constitution of the United States is mind-bloggling. Just how many American lives is it supposed to take to keep content the stockholders of Halliburton et al?