But things are still a bit wobbly as I figure things out on my new host site. For instance, I’ve tried several times, and can’t seem to make my blogroll appear to the right where it should be.
I’ll keep working on it.
Meanwhile, if you spot any problems — with basic functionality, with posting comments, whatever — let my know by writing to brad@bradwarthen.com.
And so, we continue the mission…
Stan Dubinsky shared this item about the first message to travel over the ARPANET, which would become the Internet — 40 years ago yesterday.
It was two letters: “lo.” It was supposed to “login,” but the system crashed after two letters. Oh, what a familiar feeling.
Do y’all realize that two weeks after this massive foul-up with Outlook, I still can’t send e-mail through that application? In fact, I can’t even call up my calendar or contacts on my laptop without being driven nuts by a dialogue box that pops up every few seconds asking me to log in to the server again.
This is very bad, because I depend on Outlook — particularly the interactivity between the e-mail and my contacts — to help me keep in contact with prospective employers and other nice people. I can send via Webmail, but by comparison that’s like trying to type from across the room with a 10-foot pole.
My usual technical adviser tried to help me but finally threw up his hands. I’ve tried uninstalling and reinstalling Outlook several times. No dice; the bug is still there. And has been, ever since that ill-fated mass mailing I attempted.
So while we’ve come a long way in 40 years (and thank you, Al Gore, for inventing it), in some ways it feels like we’re right back where we sta….
It’s been a long day and I’ve got to go get me some dinner (at 9:21 p.m.), but before I do I thought I’d give y’all a place to celebrate some good news, it’s been so long since we’ve had any here in SC:
Boeing Co. said Wednesday it will open a second assembly line for its long-delayed 787 jetliner in South Carolina, expanding beyond its longtime manufacturing base in Washington state.
The Chicago-based airplane maker said it chose North Charleston over Everett, Wash., because the location worked best as the company boosts production of the mid-size jet, designed to carry up to 250 passengers.
Boeing already operates a factory in North Charleston that makes 787 parts and owns a 50-percent stake in another plant there that also makes sections of the plane…
So, yea us!
Whoa. I had thought the plant we were trying to bring to South Carolina (a prospect which is looking better, given Boeing’s union troubles elsewhere) was for building airplanes.
But you know what this photo looks like to me? Yep, the Stargate, from the movie of that name starring Kurt Russell.
Now, that would certainly give South Carolina a leg up into high-tech manufacturing…
And yes, I realize it’s a cross-section of the fuselage of the 787. I’m just talking about what it looks like…
Something Burl wrote in a comment reminded me of this story the other day:
WASHINGTON — In the chaos of an early morning assault on a remote U.S. outpost in eastern Afghanistan, Staff Sgt. Erich Phillips’ M4 carbine quit firing as militant forces surrounded the base. The machine gun he grabbed after tossing the rifle aside didn’t work either.
When the battle in the small village of Wanat ended, nine U.S. soldiers lay dead and 27 more were wounded. A detailed study of the attack by a military historian found that weapons failed repeatedly at a “critical moment” during the firefight on July 13, 2008, putting the outnumbered American troops at risk of being overrun by nearly 200 insurgents.
Which raises the question: Eight years into the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, do U.S. armed forces have the best guns money can buy?…
I’ve sort of wondered for years why this country couldn’t simply produce a weapon as simple, as effective, as cheap, and most of all as RELIABLE as the AK-47.
I read part of the recent book by Larry Kahaner about that remarkable weapon (one of the many books I’ve read “part of” while drinking coffee but not buying anything at Barnes & Noble, my favorite leisuretime activity), and it reads like pretty much an indictment of the free enterprise system. The way it developed was this: A soldier in the Red Army, dissatisfied with what guys like him had to rely on in battle, decided to design a multi-purpose infantry weapon that would get the job done, and always work. So he did, the Soviets mass-produced it, and it became the number-one weapon in the world, the favorite of rebels, terrorists, thugs, and child soldiers everywhere.
It’s cheap; it’s ubiquitous. It puts a LOT of high-impact bullets on a target in a big hurry, so you definitely don’t want to go up against one if you can help it. It’s simple, and easy to maintain. It requires so little skill — and upper-body strength — to operate that it makes a child soldier into a particularly dangerous person.
In other words, it’s pretty horrible. But it’s a way better weapon, in lots of ways, than anything we’ve mass-produced.
We’ve heard about the troubles with the M16 since Vietnam, and the M4 is its descendant. The M16 fires a lower-weight slug at a high velocity, so it rips up whatever it enters — although it doesn’t have much knockdown power. (In Black Hawk Down — the book, not the film — a Delta team member gripes about the M16 because when he shoots somebody who’s shooting at him, he wants to see the guy go down.)
Meanwhile, nothing ever seems to go wrong with Kalashnikovs, no matter what you do to them. The story Burl told matches one I’ve heard before:
A friend (now deceased) who was part of the Army test team for the M-16 told me this anecdote.
He thought the M-16 was delicate and undependable, told the Army so, he was told to shut up and buy stock in Colt.
A few years later, he’s in command of a firebase in Vietnam, and they’re clearing a kill zone. The bulldozer uncovers a dead Viet cong who has buried for a year or so, along with his AK-47. Dave jumped down in the hole, said “now here’s a REAL weapon,” and cocked the muddy, rusty AK, pointed it at the sky and pulled the trigger.
It fired.
So — are our soldiers taking unnecessary risks because of inadequate weapons? I’d be interested in particular to hear from Capt. James Smith and others who have actually taken the M4 into battle (that’s him below getting his ACOG zeroed in on arriving in Afghanistan — at least, I think that’s an M4).
Well, it happened again.
I tried to send out an e-mail to several dozen people — former blog readers, people I’d like to BECOME blog readers — telling them about the new comments policy and urging them to give it a try.
And it happened again — some people have received the message 12, 15, even more times. This is from Kathleen Parker:
ad, thanks for including me. I’ve received this email about 20 times now. 🙁
I think she’s kinda ticked at me. Do you think she’s ticked? I think she’s ticked. I’m going by the frowny-face thing at the end… Which I’ve got to say, I REALLY regret. If she ever mentions me in her column again (something which seems increasingly doubtful right now), I don’t even want to think what she might say…
The GOOD news is, I think I’ve stopped it from sending… but now I can’t send e-mail at all, except via Blackberry. And it’s pretty tedious to send that many apologies via e-mail. I’m doing it anyway, but I know there are people out there who won’t even SEE the redundant messages until hours from now, and just in case they come to the blog to see what sort of idiot would do something like that, here’s an apology for them.
This is just so maddening…
The upside is that the guys I’ve banned from the blog under the new policy have gotta be loving my discomfiture over this. So I don’t have to feel bad for them, anyway.
Well, with the new blog rules, I’ve had some folks trying to comment for the first time, or the first time in a while, and they’re having trouble either registering, or logging in once they’re registered.
I don’t understand what the problem is, but I’ve raised the question with someone who might be able to help me — just probably not tonight.
So for the moment, I’ve turned off the requirement that “Users must be registered and logged in to comment.” However, I left on “Comment author must fill out name and e-mail.”
This might help temporarily. We’ll see…
In light of the changes on the blog, I’ve got some first-timers trying to log in and leave comments, and having trouble. I’m hearing from them via e-mail.
Problem is, I don’t know how to figure out how to tell THEM how to log in, because when I try to do it for them, my browser insists upon recognizing me, and I don’t find any way to log in as someone else — or indeed, to create a new log-in. In other words, I can’t see what they’re seeing. (And yeah, I feel really stupid; good thing for me I’ve just banned insults and catcalls, huh?)
Since some of y’all have done this more recently than I have, would you mind posting instructions. Of course, with the new rules, they won’t post until I approve them.
Complicated, ain’t it?
OK, I really don’t know how many “New Blog Orders” there have been; I just thought “Mark IV” sounded good.
Anyway, here’s the new deal, for now: Comments won’t appear unless I approve them. (And yes, we’ve been here before, in a previous regime change. The video above of me explaining this very same approach was shot during a family gathering at my house in July 2007. See how unhappy I was with having to take this approach? That’s the way I look now, only without the grubby beginning of a beard. Sort of amazing, isn’t it, that as fed up as I was then, I’m still trying? I’m nothing if not persistent.)
I’m going to do that for a few days at least, and then I hope to go to something less stringent, not that there are a lot of options. I see, for instance, that WordPress provides the option of “Comment author must have a previously approved comment,” which sounds nice, but what good is it really? I prefer to judge a comment by its own merits, not by who posted it. Lee, for instance (and Lee really resents being picked on, and he’ll probably see this as being picked on, but let’s face it; his name is the one my readers most frequently bring up as an irritant), sometimes posts perfectly fine comments that add to the conversation. I’m not saying it happens every day, but it happens. So, going by my own preferred standards, I would approve that one good comment — and under the “Comment author must have a previously approved comment,” he would then have carte blanche to return to his habitual ways.
Ultimately, the place where I think I’ll end up is that I’ll open the gates back up, but I’ll make a point of checking comments several times a day, and just delete anything that doesn’t contribute to this being a place that encourages thoughtful people who want to engage in good-faith dialogue.
And I know those people are out there. Just this morning, I was meeting with a prominent local attorney — a public-spirited guy who is a great public speaker and has a lot to say — mentioned to me that there was NO WAY he was going to spend any of his life wrestling in the mud with a bunch of trolls on a blog. And the bad thing about that is, he is just the kind of person I wish would join in with our dialogues here — I want lots of people like him, from across the political spectrum (and those of you on the left or right who think there are no thoughtful people with something worthwhile to say on the opposite end of the spectrum; well, you’re part of the problem).
So in this latest effort to foster the kind of place that he and other like him would consider worthy of his time, I’m going with a standard that goes beyond the mere absence of incivility. I’m going to look for posts that actually contribute something. I’m going for positive attributes, rather than just the absence of negative ones. Because serious people (or for that matter, people who like to have a little fun, just not at other people’s expense) deserve a blog that answers that description.
At this point, some of you are furiously writing to me to say, “You just want comments that agree with you!” which is ridiculous. That’s a ploy to get me to back down on enforcing standards, and post something that calls me and people who agree with me names just to prove how “fair” I am. Well, you know what? I’m not falling for that. I’ve heard it too many thousands of times from people who just can’t be bothered to disagree in a civilized manner.
I know that I’ve always given precedence to people who disagree with me. And anyone who’s followed my career and is not seriously challenged in the reading comprehension department knows that about me. But from now on, you’re going to disagree in a way that it doesn’t run off well-behaved people. You’re going to disagree in a way that makes people think, “Maybe he’s got a point” instead of “What a jerk!” I realize this is going to be a challenge for some, but I hope the rest of you will appreciate it.
And if you don’t, or if you just can’t bring yourself to meet the new standard, you are completely free to go start your own blog. This one’s mine, and I’m not going to waste time with it unless I think it’s getting better, and providing a worthwhile forum.
I’ve got two pieces of bad news. First, Mark Sanford appeared before my Rotary Club today and did not resign. But no shock there, right?
The second is that my reliable Canon PowerShot A95 digital camera, which has served me so well — all my still photos and short video clips of Barack Obama, John McCain, Joe Biden, Lindsey Graham, Thomas Ravenel, Grady Patterson, Stephen Colbert, Fred Thompson (and Jeri Thompson!), Hillary Clinton, Mike Huckabee, Joe Wilson, Ted Sorensen, South Carolina Nazis and unnumbered others — appears to be on its last legs.
I think I’ve about worn it out. Not only is the picture dim, but I get these unwanted stray bands of color across the top of the frame. It comes and goes, but today I just couldn’t get it to go away.
I’ve posted here an unedited three-minute clip to give you a slice from Sanford’s presentation today (the sound still works pretty well), and to show you how bad the camera problem is.
It was pretty much all the stuff he’s been saying. The apology, the pitch to ask the audience to help him make his last 14 months more productive than the past 6.5 years by getting some of his agenda enacted, etc.
I’m really down about my camera… Even if I had the money, they don’t sell ’em like this any more… The great thing about it was that I could use it so unobtrusively. The photo below, which you see as a header on individual posts here on the blog, is perhaps the only photo I have of my camera in use. Note that I could hold it down on the table with my left hand while taking notes with my right. I could hold it in this position — rather than up between the subject and me, thereby disconcerting the subject and making normal conversation difficult — because it has one of those little screens that flips out and rotates in several directions, like the ones you usually find on video cameras. Yes, they still make some still cameras that do this, but they tend to be much larger and more cumbersome than this model. Sigh. All Things Must Pass, the man said…
Some of you (about 50 people, I’m guessing) have received the following message from me about 14 times:
If you’re receiving this, you probably also received one of about 65 messages that just went out from my computer and which may have seemed strangely off-topic.That’s because I first tried to send it to you days or even weeks ago, but somehow it got hung up in my Outbox until just a few minutes ago.Sorry about that.-Brad
I am so sorry. I mean, you have no idea how sorry, since I think some of the people I sent it to were prospective employers.
I’m actually quite good with technology, normally.
What happened here is that I finally managed (with a friend’s help) to dislodge a bunch of messages in my Outbox, some of which had been sitting there for weeks.
So, quite naturally, I felt the need to explain to all of those people why they had suddenly received an anachronistic message. So I sent the above message…
… and IT got stuck in my Outbox. So ever since yesterday, I was trying and trying to send it — changing settings, restarting Outlook, clicking send/receive over and over. And now, it seems it has send the message out again for each time I clicked on the button.
And I can’t seem to stop it. And I hesitate to send out ANOTHER apology to all those same people.
I finally managed to delete if from my Outbox, so maybe it will stop now. I hope I hope I hope…
Folks, if you just received an e-mail from me, within the last hour, that seems to have come straight from the Twilight Zone, it’s not just my usual weirdness.
I just discovered that I had about 65 outgoing messages from the last few weeks that never went out. They were stuck in my Outbox in Microsoft Outlook.
Some of them will seem pretty weird to be getting now, but I didn’t have a way to weed through them — it was send them all out, or none.
So sorry about that.
By the way, one reason I’m explaining here is that some of the recipients — KP, Doug Ross, Kathryn and Lee — are blog regulars. Anyway, now you know what happened. Or about as much as I know, anyway…
Yesterday, I realized that all those folks who have told me in recent days that they never got my e-mails actually never got my e-mails. So I apologize for thinking y’all were technically incompetent or something when it was me all along.
In fact, I’m such a klutz that I haven’t figured out what’s wrong yet, and I’ve got 65 outgoing e-mails just hanging there in limbo in my Outbox in Outlook. Some of them were pretty important messages, too, like the resume I sent out Monday right after talking to someone about an exciting job opportunity. I had sent it out immediately to display my high interest, only to realize last night that it never went out. Like I need this on top of everything else.
I’ve got someone trying to talk me through a solution, and I hope to arrive at one soon. But then I’ll have a new worry — if they all suddenly go out, some of them are really going to confuse people because of subsequent conversations with those people that have rendered the original message superfluous. They’re going to think I’m nuts — Why is he sending me this now?
All I can do right now is post this generic apology to everyone with whom I correspond. Once the e-mail’s back up, I’ll try to follow up with specific explanations to all the affected people. Dang. What a headache. Maybe I should just stick to playing solitaire on computers; I at least understand that…
Joe Wilson’s hip, y’all. He does Twitter and everything.
Trouble is, he’s having a little trouble spitting out his message on that medium. Here are his last four:
Wilson gets warm welcome at Hilton Head GOP picnic: U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson told members of the Hilton Head Island.. http://bit.ly/Wzwqx
Okra struts its stuff in rain: Midway through Irmo’s 36th annual Okra Strut parade, a misty rain began to.. http://bit.ly/tNLWw
Wilson rallies in Aiken: U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., got an enthusiastic welcome from about 250 supporters in.. http://bit.ly/19tDr6
U.S. Rep Joe Wilson said he wanted to make it clear Saturday that Republic.. http://bit.ly/2dgmb9
Odd, isn’t it, that Joe would have a problem with brevity, given that the one thing for which is is nationally known consisted of only eight characters, if you count the exclamation point.
Actually, I’m not sure why he’s getting cut off like that, since those messages (especially the last one) seem to be under the character limit. Maybe it’s intentional. Maybe it’s to get us begging for more so we’ll follow the link. Maybe Joe’s on the edge of the new wave…
Just in case I didn’t have enough reasons to feel inadequate… I found out today about this site that lists everybody in South Carolina on Twitter. And when I called it up, it had the list ordered according to most “followers.” And I discovered, for instance, that Gerri L. Elder of the “Absolutely True” Web site (of which I had never heard before) has 31,359 followers on Twitter.
As I type this, I have … let me go check… 310 followers on Twitter.
Now, I can comfort myself in various ways. I can say I haven’t been on Twitter long. I can note that I still have almost twice as many “followers” as people I myself follow, whereas Gerri Elder is following more than 31,000.
But given the chasm between her numbers and mine, that comfort is cold, indeed. I mean, I’m in the initial stages of looking into making this a paying proposition, with ads and all, but how can I compete in a world where somebody I never heard of before today has more than 100 times the number of followers I do?
And why does she have so many? I mean, I looked at her latest post (which is unfair; God help us all if we are judged at a given moment by our latest post), which consisted mainly of a bunch of really sickly looking pictures of bacon. Not nice, crisp bacon, but massive amounts of undercooked, floppy bacon, in phone photos that exaggerate their queasy color. It made me think about the bacon I ate this morning in a way that was NOT appetizing…
I mean, I got pictures of THIS, and she’s got pictures of THAT, but she has way more followers than I do? Where is the justice in this? The marketplace is a cruel mistress indeed.
Only once did I ever work in an office with another “Brad.” At the time, I joked that he would have to go, because it was too confusing, and eventually, he did. That was over 20 years ago.
I’ve never met a person named Warthen to whom I was not related. Oh, I’ll occasionally run into the name attached to a stranger in a phone book. And there was that ballplayer Dan Warthen, who used to get his name in the paper a lot when he played for the Memphis minor league team. And that town, Warthen, Ga. — apparently derived from a branch of the family, which originally came into this country through Maryland in the 1630s.
I was as sure as you could be of anything like that that among the 6 billion or so people on the planet, I was the only “Brad Warthen.”
But Facebook changes things. There are so many people there that your sense of uniqueness may have to undergo an adjustment. Some time recently I discovered that there was another Brad Warthen. I couldn’t find out anything about him; I just saw that he was a young guy with red hair. I left it at that.
Then tonight, I got an e-mail:
Brad Warthen sent you a message on Facebook…
Subject: dude
“dude we have the same name so i know ur a bad ass”
I wrote back to him, “Obviously.” I mean, what else could I say? I didn’t want to let him down.
The WordPress problems seem to have gone away. Or else my technical adviser Dave went in and fixed it for me when I wasn’t looking.
Anyway, I think it’s safe to come back. I’ve got my fingers crossed. Which really complicates typing…
This morning I went to check what comments there might be on yesterday’s posts, and I couldn’t call them up. Thought it was a Blackberry problem, but can’t get them on the laptop, either.
Right now, I’m just hoping it goes away soon. If it doesn’t, I’ll start the process of figuring out how to get support on WordPress.
I’m sorry for the inconvenience, if you’re having the same problem.
If any of you have a solution to the problem, please e-mail me at brad@bradwarthen.com.
As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been hanging out at an ad agency recently, which means I’ve been dwelling in the world of Mac. That’s all they’ve got around here. I’m writing this on one.
So as I got ready to get a laptop — I had decided it was a necessity, with the freelance work I’m doing and all — I had a number of people around me telling me I must convert to Apple, for all the usual reasons and more. You’ve heard them: More solid, more reliable, better designed, better software, far better for graphics, cooler, etc. In particular, they said, a Mac would be better for video production, something I’ve wanted to do more of for the blog.
So, of course, I went out and got a Dell. First, it’s about a fourth of the price (my daughter the graphic designer is buying a Mac laptop, and it retails at $2,600 with the software she needs). Second… to paraphrase Billy Jack, I’ve tried; I’ve really tried. When Jean and the kids at the school tell me to practice nonviolence and use a Mac, I really try. But when I’m doing something that would normally call for a right-button mouse click, and my fingers fumble with that one massive button on a Mac… I just go berserk!
Bottom line, I’ve been using PCs too long. The ways of navigating through Windows are built into my body’s muscle memory, and it’s too much work to change.
So I got a Dell. Specifically, this model Dell Studio. Last week, when they were on sale for $80 less than the price on that link. An Intel Core 2 Duo processor T6500, 4GB RAM, 320 Gig hard drive, plus the usual bells and whistles that have become standard — DVD burner, multi-format card reader, Webcam and so forth.
It not only had what I needed on it, but I liked the look and feel of it. It looked and felt solid and well-built. Compared to the Inspiron, it was like a Volvo versus a Trabi. The Inspiron seemed chintzy by comparison. It had little features that don’t mean much, I guess, but which I liked — for instance, it had a slot for CDs and DVDs instead of that flimsy tray that pops out, and which always makes me afraid I’m going to break it pressing the disc in. That seemed clean and smart, better design.
And the first few days went great. I was particularly pleased with my first effort with the Webcam.
Then yesterday, it crashed. Yeah, I know, you Mac folk are sneering now that that’s what PCs do; they crash. And yes, they do. It’s something PC users deal with. Rebooting makes for a nice bathroom break, gets us away from work for a moment. Part of life.
But this crash was atypical. I was running Firefox in two or three windows, with maybe two other low-intensity applications up, when everything froze up. I went to Task Manager, and saw that my CPU usage was at 100 percent, which was impossible. I bailed out using the power button, booted back up, and tried running Firefox alone — and it was showing more than 50 percent CPU usage. One of the cores of the duo core was running at capacity, the other hardly running at all.
So I took the Dell back to Best Buy, where an interesting thing happened. The Geek Squad guy, after pronouncing that I had an incurable hardware problem, leveled with me, saying that he wouldn’t buy a Dell. Yes, once they were reliable, but he had seen too many Studios come back. I should get an Asus or an HP instead.
Funny thing was, the sales guy last week had tried, gently to steer me toward an Asus. But I had never heard of Asus. I had used Dells for years, so that’s what I got. Now, I went back to that same sales guy, and he nodded and said yeah, he liked the Asus better but I had been obviously set on a Dell…
So we went to look at the comparable Asus — same processor, same memory, same hard drive size. The battery was longer-lasting. The screen was smaller (although perhaps slightly sharper). It had the flimsy pop-out tray instead of the slot I liked. It cost $30 more than I had paid for the Dell.
And it looked cheap and flimsy compared to the Dell. Sorry, but aesthetically it was not pleasing, and even though these tech guys were all but beating me over the head with the inside knowledge that it was very solid and reliable, it didn’t LOOK solid. Finally, I was unable to call up the Webcam to try it out, because of some quirk of how they had the machine set up in the store.
So, sheepishly, I said I wanted to try another Dell Studio, hoping that this one wouldn’t be a lemon. The sales guy said he understood, that it was like buying a car; you either liked the look and feel or you didn’t. But I could hardly look him in the eye, because I knew he thought I was an idiot, a guy who just doesn’t learn.
And when we got up to the customer service desk — where I was to leave it to get it “optimized” (cleaning off all the marketing junk such as trial software, and installing service packs), which is why I don’t have it yet — and I realized the Geek Squad guy who had warned me was standing right there and had to have noticed what I was doing… I almost went over and apologized to him.
But I figure I’ve got two weeks to try this one out (and longer, if it has a hardware failure), and if it isn’t everything it should be, I can go back and get the Asus, no questions asked. So I can’t lose, right?
By the way, I really hope I’m not getting these guys in trouble telling about how open and honest they were. Frankly, I think they should both get a raise, because they were going out of their way to help a customer. And they were both obviously good at their jobs, very knowledgeable about the product. Bright young men, a credit to their organization. I felt much better about Best Buy for having dealt with them.
It’s just that in this case, the customer was too stupid and stubborn to listen to them. Proof yet again that in the marketplace, consumers do not make rational choices, notwithstanding all the propaganda. At least, this one doesn’t. Neither do most people; I’m just logical enough to understand how fallible I am.
Well, Rolling Stone certainly got my attention when I saw this cover headline in the checkout line at Earth Fare yesterday:
So I immediately resolved to look up the piece and read it when I got to my laptop.
But I couldn’t, because they didn’t post the actual article. Oh, they posted all sorts of teasers and promotional material, such as the 
“story behind the story,” and gallery after gallery of fab pics of the lads back in the day.
But not the actual story.
We can debate from now until the last newspaper closes the relative wisdom of posting one’s precious content online for free. Maybe Rolling Stone’s got it going on teasing us to distraction this way. But I wonder: Which approach sells more magazines — this, or the Vogue approach? No, I didn’t go out and buy a copy of the Vogue with the Jenny Sanford piece; I was satisfied with what I found online. But I’ll bet the fact that bloggers were able to read, and then tout, the contents did lead to at least some people who are more in Vogue‘s demographic to go out and buy the slick dead-tree version.
I don’t know. But I know I’m not shelling out $4.99 to read the piece about the fall of The Beatles. Hey, I lived through the time, and I know why The Beatles broke up — because the ’60s ended. Duh.
Now there was a time when I would have shelled out the money. But not anymore. I guess that shows how old I am. And that the ’60s really are over…