April 2009 Archives
Here is why. Where else is there this kind of selection where you can find a treasure like this (which I actually only photographed.) It was Easter, too rainy to go to the zoo as planned, and even the local Mall was closed. We headed to the Fremont/Seattle Flea Market and it was like a trip back in time! I found a delightful framed photograph from Firenze, Italy with real gold leaf - $8. World's Fair posters, an August Macke print, a great metal Chinese Checker set with real marbles (not plastic), postcard sets of Mississippi River Boats and Redwood Forest trees with one-cent postage, and best of all - an original date copy of "The Autobiography of Malcolm X," which I read when I was 13 years old!
If you've been in any chain bookstore, you've seen them: massive piles of hardbacks by Stephanie Meyer with glossy black covers and simple titles (New Moon, Twilight, Eclipse, Breaking Dawn)that give no indication of what might be inside.
I've been ignoring this phenomenon for a while, but I was stopped short by an item in USA TODAY:
"Vampires rule:Twilight author Stephenie Meyer continues to dominate USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list. Sales of her novels accounted for about 16% of all book sales tracked by the list in the first quarter of 2009. That's about one in seven books."
Whoa! One in seven?
Newspapers are dying left and right, but vampires are flying off the shelves. Is there something about the late-Bush/post-Bush era that makes vampires so popular? Or is that blood-sucking sound coming from Wall Streeters downing $700 billion (and counting) of our tax dollars for a bailout so murky we don't even know where the money went?
Any Meyer readers out there? What do you think is happening? What country are we living in, anyway?
(Tip of the hat to Media Bistro)
I don't know if any of you caught the recent Newsweek article titled "Paper Money: Newspapers aren't assets to be stripped, leveraged and flipped." But, unfortunately I have. And I had a feeling, before I ever even read it, I was about to read an article that was completely full of shit. And Newsweek did not disappoint my expectation of a total load of crap.
In the article, they discussed the 'flipping' of newspapers, and the sometimes 'criminal' acts of bad management. And basically declared the 'business model" of all these 'newspapers' was ultimately 'unviable'. Oh man, how they did try to avoid the truth of it all, and in doing so, they perfectly demonstrated why organizations like theirs are 'failing'. Not once in the entire article did they address the fact that newspapers and the MSM as a whole are failing, because no one actually expects them to report the truth anymore.
I have to confess that I rarely have the stomach to watch Limbaugh, Beck, Fox News, etc. For those of you who want to know what Rush is up to without having to sit through the show, Media Matters has started the Limbaugh Wire, an hour-by-hour critique of Rush's latest.
And then there is Glen Beck. Thanks to the comic genius of Stephen Colbert, I feel like I know everything I will ever want to know about Beck--Colbert leaves Beck's corpse on the floor. While I agree that the mainstream media often present a very distorted picture of the world, it is gratifying to know that there are popular shows on TV that can be funny and play smash-mouth politics at the same time.
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