Wes Phillips

Bagheera opines that you just can't beat the "cute kitty" school of art.

In 2005, journalism professor Michael Skube wrote an uninformed "think" piece about blogs and blog culture, concluding that bloggers didn't do "real" journalism. (He's probably seen this one.) On August 19 this year, he did what hacks do&mdash;he wrote the same piece again, this time for <I>The LA Times</I>.

I don't disagree with the need for contemplative silence, but I find our contemprary society particularly ill-suited to it. Perhaps iPods are the cure to noise pollution rather than the problem itself.

Suhas Sreedhar writes about CD over-compression in <I>IEEE Spectrum</I>. It's a good 'un that goes beyond the usual hand-wringing to the real danger it poses.

I've written before about the Crippen & Landru publication of <I>The Archer Files: The Complete Short Stories of Lew Archer, Private Investigator, Including Newly Discovered Case Notes</I>, edited by Tom Nolan, which has a cover by my buddy <A HREF="http://www.jeffwong.com/caricature.htm">Jeff Wong</A>, who also happens to be an internationally acknowledged expert on Macdonald.

Memory
<BR>
All alone in the moonlight
<BR>
I can smile at 10 minutes ago
<BR>
I was beautiful then
<BR>
I remember the time I knew what happiness was
<BR>
Let the memory live again
<BR>
For 10 whole minutes. . . .

According to an AP poll, one out of every four Americans hasn't read a single book in the last year. Okay, maybe I <I>can</I> believe that, but whenever I read articles like this, they inevitably include some guy (and yes, it is always a guy) who says something like, "I just don't have time for fiction, when I read I want to learn something."