New link on the side to Lenore Skenazy’s great Free Range KIds blog. She’s the woman who let her 9-year-old ride the New York Subway and is wonderful for a sensible approach to kid safety, both against panic and for smart steps. Worth a read.

Ack. A very very short interview with Bill Waterson just makes me miss Calvin and Hobbes so much more. I can still remember when I first discovered it. We were in Chicago visiting my mom’s friend and she suggested I read it. From then on, I was hooked. I can remember, in college, that reading Calvin in the morning newspaper was one of the highlights of the day. We had just entered the golden phase of Calvin, where Watterson threw off all restraints and made comics that were so wonderful and original and different from anything else.

But he owes us nothing. If he wants to spend the rest of his life in seclusion, more power to him.

I was just watching the presentation of the iPad (I want, but I have no money). I’ve been reading for a while about the death of the written book thanks to Kindle and other devices. I think it’s exaggerated for reasons I outlined in my previous post on movie streaming. As long as big business thinks digital copies are licenses, not ownership, people will not give up their hard copies. But I do think we’re going to see a bigger shift toward e-books.

The reason? The advent of the e-book is going to slowly shift an enormous amount of power away from publishers and toward writers. Think about it. If Apple runs their ibook store like they run, say, their iphone aps, the effect will be to shatter the strangehold big publishers have over publication. If a writer can upload his book to ibooks and get $1 per download (as app writers do), it becomes possible to make a living as a writer without having to play pattycake with the big publishing houses.

In the end, I still don’t think the physical book will die. But I see a shift of publishing from the editing/marketing/soliciting business into a straight forward printing directly from e-books — i.e., publishers will become more like Easton Press — selling you any book you want in a beautiful robust edition.

Maybe Cracked’s best article evah.

Is someone really starting an all-white basketball league? Maybe there is someone that stupid (and enough people/players to create the league). But I call bullshit. This is either someone’s idea of a joke or one of the few white supremacists left getting his name in he papers. And now on my blog.

Jesus, what the hell is wrong with us?

A good article on Obama’s “code switching” during speaking. This is hardly unusual in politics or in life. I always used a far more formal speaking manner when I would teach (i.e., sounding a lot less like Jeffrey Lebowski).