Thursday, April 21, 2005

Belly laugh of the day

Dr Suarez has read of DAS SNOW BOOT: What will those nastily clever narco-traffickers be able to purchase next? Sure saves laundering money through lots and lots of little business fronts. The money quote:

"When you think about it, cocaine is really a pretty brilliant option for sub-mariners. Instead of sharing beds, they wouldn't fucking need them! Any smooth, horizontal surfaces would be kept impeccably clean. The preponderance of mirrors would encourage good hygene. The crew would avoid catching colds, given that one errant sneeze could cost them $1,500 on the open market."

But of course, here in li'l ol' NZ, home of the 6 Herky-bird Air Force (2 serviceable at any given time) and the proud frigate Canterbury to patrol the high seas - whoops, no, sorry, they are just about to sink that one somwhere in Cook Strait to provide Equitable Housing Outcomes for a bunch of green-lipped mussels - a drug cartel with a submarine would be detected........just how again?

Sigh.

The future of dead-tree publishing

Power Line, in a piece entitled: Robert Burns, call your office, has quoted what I think is the best-put, most succinct (always a desirable quality) yet forceful argument for the ascendancy of electronic publishing. MSM, with their ludicrous blend of rigidity, now-obvious bias, a pervasive animus to things Webby, and most embarrassingly, a rather visible lack of intellectual horsepower compared to their on-line nemeses, are in the cross hairs.

From my own reading patterns over the last three years or so, future media will concentrate on things very local; the penetrating and real-time analysis will be Web-based; thoughtful pieces in quality journals such as Atlantic Monthly will live on; and there will continue to be niche magazines, in fact ever nicher.

But as the Powerline piece notes, trying to cover all bases, as the dead-tree newspapers and general purpose magazines (like our own funny little Listeria, ht NZPundit) is a recipe for irrelevance.