The local alt-weekly has a good piece about the woes of the summer’s major concert tours. They do a good job of laying out all the fees in going to see (say) Kid Rock, concluding:
So let’s say you plan to take a date to go see the Kid. That’s $56 for two tickets, plus $42.15 in fees, of which Ticketmaster takes $18.15 and the Woodlands folks $24. Ring-ring, that’s $98.15, please, all before your first expensive beer or soggy nacho…
The recent discussion of blogs and their democratic characteristics (or lack thereof) prompted by Laura’s comments at Apt 11D in response to critiques of her blog study’s survey instrument has gotten me thinking about the comments option on blogs yet again. It is a question I have pondered numerous times already, probably ever since I started reading blogs and certainly since I decided to start my own.
For me, the question of whether a site that calls itself a blog has comments option turned on is actually quite directly related to what constitutes a blog in the first place. I realize this is a question that is probably impossible to answer in a way that would satisfy everybody, but it is one still worth asking especially if one is to do research on the topic (as I am doing now) where a definition would be helpful.
One of Laura’s concerns is that the blogosphere is not very democratic. That’s true (she mentions some reasons and others have discussed this point at length elsewhere as well). However, blogs can have a democratic component: Comments. Why is it that certain bloggers decide to go without comments? And what makes their Web site a blog in that case? (Clearly I am showing my bias here in that I believe comments are an essential part of a blog. That said, I do realize and accept blogs as blogs even when they do not have comments turned on.. but do so mostly because the community has decided to consider them blogs. You know which ones I mean.)
Talking of transatlantic language differences, I was quite surprised to see this headline in the Washington Post. And I thought Australians took sport too seriously.
Pursuant to a discussion of the recently popular Teachout Cultural Concurrence Index, Will Baude makes the following remarks:
My friend mentioned that she has some trouble with all of those old Bogart films because she finds Bogart so physically repulsive that he detracts from the role. To be sure, H.B. was not Hollywood’s prettiest face, a fact that (unsurpisingly) seems to bother more female viewers of the films than male ones. [Female members of my family voiced a similar complaint about Something’s Got to Give last Christmas.]
This is funny to me for two reasons. First, though Bogart’s no beauty, he’s hardly replusive. Second, Bogart is perfectly cast in one of the great movies of all time, The Maltese Falcon, a movie which is marred by the single most egregious miscasting of all time. (Perhaps it is not the worst in absolute terms, but it is a hideous flaw in an otherwise brilliantly cast movie.) I refer, of course, to the wretched, wretched Mary Astor. She was only 35 when the movie was made, but she looks much older. The character she plays, Brigid O’Shaughnessy, is supposed to be a knockout who can wrap any man around her finger. A sexpot. Men’s eyes are supposed to pop way out on stalks and develop pounding hearts for pupils, while steam shoots out of their ears and they make various foghorn and train-whistle noises. It is difficult to overstate the extent to which Mary Astor falis to plausibly elicit this reaction.
Someone has to make the announcement: Crooked Timber is one year old today!
Bill Clinton did a book-signing in Washington, DC, today. When I got to work this morning, fans were lined up around the block of the 12th St. Barnes & Noble. As they did in “New York”:http://abcnews.go.com/wire/Entertainment/reuters20040622_237.html, hundreds of people camped out the night before. They were under the mistaken impression that it would be hard to get in the next day. At 6:00pm, I walked down the street from where I work to see about all the hoopla. Turns out they were still letting people through the door. I hadn’t bought a copy yet, so I thought I was out of luck. You were supposed to buy one the night before to get in the next day. But five minutes later, and sans book, I was given one those magic wrist-bans, the much-publicized “credential”:http://finance.lycos.com/qc/news/story.aspx?symbols=INDUSTRY:87&story=200406281230_BWR__BW5243 that entitled me to the purchase of one–and only one–book, to have it signed, to a speedy presidential handshake, and to the feeling that I’d just experienced a windfall. I certainly wouldn’t have camped out for a book signed by President Clinton. Unlike this “fan”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A32380-2004Jul6.html, I also wouldn’t have camped out for “Paul McCartney, Dolly Parton, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mother Teresa, Frank Gifford.” Which makes me wonder: is there any signed book worth spending the night on the sidewalk? Yeah, maybe I would have camped out for a signed copy of the first edition of A Theory of Justice. Frank Gifford?
Congratulations to “Unlearned Hand”:http://www.unlearnedhand.com/archives/000807.html. That must have been some July 4th weekend.
Congratulations to “Unlearned Hand”:http://www.unlearnedhand.com/archives/000807.html. That must have been some July 4th weekend.
