it’s snowing… i totally forgot to make a run on the grocery store for bread and milk… how am i going to survive a southern blizzard?
Author: coffeehousejunkie
// watched high fidelity the other night… i want to be a record store owner… do record stores still exist?
CARIBOU vs. STARBUCKS
discuss.
My flavorite coffee den is Firestorm Cafe (but it’s not open in the mornings… and there’s no Caribou coffee in the area… … there’s Izzy’s, but it’s not on the bus route to the office and if I hiked over there for me daily brew I’d late for work… The Drip in actually on the bus route to the office, but if i stopped for coffee i’d have to wait 30 minutes for the next bus which would make me late to work… and there’s City Bakery, but that presents the same dilemma as The Drip… leaving me with Starbucks and the bad taste in my mouth that Asheville’s public transit is not as good as it could be.). So, ugh (I can’t believe it!)… I concede… Starbucks (at least for me morning dose of caffeine).
// somedays i fantasize that i’m a reviewer for the new york review of books… all day long i read engaging books and write elaborate book reviews… and then i wake up and realize most people don’t read engaging books… nor literary criticism… i’m such an anachronism.
A lot of good links, but it might cause you to use your old bean to read and digest the discussion.
Blogs survive as scavengers
News-gathering is expensive. (Read previous posts on this theme here (The (read) sky (between) is (the) falling (lines)) and here (Pornographers don’t sell pornography).) That’s why I present this from Simon Dumenco for AdAge.com:
“unlike Salon, which… pays for its content, HuffPo [HuffingtonPost] has an ethically questionable content-generation scheme: It doesn’t pay most of its bloggers at all. Worse, it sometimes even lifts content wholesale from other sites that do pay for their own content…” (http://adage.com/mediaworks/article?article_id=133541)
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browsing through a copy of The American Poetry Review and Poetry (both arrived yesterday) while drinking a big cup coffee.
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just finished watching a couple episodes of Marty Stouffer’s Wild America with the kidlingers
Book blogs are the enemy of reading
Book blogs are the enemy of reading. I discovered several such fascinating blogs this year and spent hours enamored of reading, listing the books I wanted to read, and reading others’ lists. Imagine my surprise when I realized that I had frittered away precious reading time staring at a computer screen. Apparently I was getting all the warm, fuzzy, readerly feelings without the commitment of turning pages. Sad. (via brilynne)1
NOTES:
1) brilynne, “Reading 2008,” December 31, 2008, briary.blogspot.com, accessed January 1, 2009, https://briary.blogspot.com/2008/12/reading-2008.html
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listening to the wind pull the barn door off its hinges.
Good grief! If newspapers stop printing, what will I use to wrap all the Christmas gifts?
I’m embarrassed to say that since college… I’ve been so busy speechwriting for Kerry and then Barack that I haven’t been reading all the good literary stuff I used to read…
~Jon Favreau
NOTES:
1) Mark Warren, “What Obama’s 27-Year-Old Speechwriter Learned From George W. Bush,” Esquire, accessed December 20, 2008, https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a5339/barack-obamas-speech-writer-1208/
Seth on the death of the personal blog
From BlogAsheville:
Many local bloggers have neglected their blogs recently, with varying reasons/excuses.
So, do bloggers need a bailout too? No. Read Seth’s take on the personal blog demise:
There’s a difference between a blog about YOU… and a blog about the reader. Guy Kawasaki’s blog, and my blog for that matter, are not about us, about what we ate yesterday or how great we are. They are about you, the reader.
I guess there’s an easy analogy:
Your blog could be like a newspaper (written by a staff)
or it could be like a book (written by an author)
So, enough about me. How about you?
The point is not to show up on a list, the point is to start a conversation that spreads, to share ideas and to chronicle your thinking.
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i know, i know. my inbox is filling up. i left a book at a clients office. press proofs were delivered. and, yes, i will call you.
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kidlinger calls and says, ‘when you coming home… i’m making chocolate chip pancakes.’ AWRsome! who needs to work when thar’s pancakes?
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isn’t there something larger than a venti?
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i think i saw every hour of the night. oh, insomnia, thy name is kidlings.
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crazy, i can’t sleep, though it’s been a busy day. i’ll try reading a philosophy book on the topic of tradition which i just acquired.
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you know you’re from wisconsin when you walk outside, it’s 29 degrees, and you tell those inside; “yeah, it’s a bit chilly this morning.”
GPOYW
(courtesy Adobe Illustrator Live Trace feature).
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nothing better than a 2 mile hike in 20 degree weather to make me feel at home.
The (read) sky (between) is (the) falling (lines)
AdAge.com opens an article with these dismal facts:
Newspaper ad revenue fell almost $2 billion in the third quarter for a record 18.1% decline, according to new statistics from the Newspaper Association of America. What’s worse, newspapers’ online ad revenue fell for the second quarter in a row.
In another, companion article titled “Huffington Post More Valuable Than Some Newspaper Cos.,” AdAge.com offers this regarding blog value versus newspaper value:
The [$100 million] funding means Arianna Huffington’s news blog is now considered more valuable by its backers than quite a few publicly traded newspaper companies…
The irony is that The Huffington Post “rarely provide original content” (to quote myself) but “select and repackage… information.”
In a CJR piece by Robert Kuttner with an urgent deck that reads “Newspapers have a bright future as print-digital hybrids after all — but they’d better hurry,” he writes of an interview with a 21-year old colleague. In their conversation he attempts to establish an argument in defense of the printed newspaper. Mr. Kuttner writes:
By now I was feeling very last century. And then Ezra… handed me a trump. You have one thing right, he volunteered. The best material on the Internet consistently comes from Web sites run by print organizations.
My take away is this:
- Newspapers that don’t adapt to the print-digital hybrid should go the way of the buffalo.
- Newspapers that embrace the print-digital hybrid should do so quickly and reorganize as a news organization using the full depth of the new media platform. After all, newspapers are content providers who have been relying on a single (print) platform too long.
- The Huffington Post is funded. In a little known interview, the publisher of World magazine made the following statement:
As public companies that do most of the news-gathering cut back on their investments… We see an opportunity to increase news resources in the non-profit world. We may be looking at a paradigm shift in this industry from for-profit news-gathering to non-profit news-gathering.
Is the “broken windows theory” of social behavior correct?
Jason Kottke, “Does the broken windows theory hold online?” Dec 1, 2008, kottke.org, accessed Apr 29, 2026, https://kottke.org/08/12/does-the-broken-windows-theory-hold-online
Coffeehouse Junkie 