Do the Yak

Not physically, more's the pity, but in the sense of being my father's child again. The reason? I'm planning his 80th birthday party (catered at my house) so of course I'm starting to get wound up with wanting everything to be perfect to impress his friends. Not to mention the ordinary stress of event planning (invitations, caterers, where-the-hell-will-people-park, etc.). Fortunately he;s not the kind of person who actually expects an oh-so-perfect glitzy event with the fish forks placed just so on the table linens and whatnot. If my mother were still alive, I'd be a lot more worried about throwing a party for her as far as perfectionism goes. I'm trying to be smart: getting Ben's help (he's very good at this sort of thing), and concentraing on the fun stuff like putting together a PowerPoint of pictures and remarks that are amusing without being downright embarrassing. For some reason I find that task a lot easier to contemplate than negotiating with c...

Saturday: Excellent family party at home of friend who just turned 50. Pizza and basement play for kids, beer and tasty noshes for the grownups. Sunday: dinner at father's house. Fun quotient compromised by taking two antihistamines with Sudafed instead of just one. My thinking was that two are twice as good as one (duh!) and the antihistamine part won't make me sleepy because Sudafed is a stimulant. Result: my heart rate went up and my hands were shaking a wee bit from the Sudafed but I was also SO sleeeeeeepy. Got lots of sleep last night but still have that letdown Monday feeling. I hate Mondays and I'm not even sure why. Amusement of the past week: The Mr. T Coloring Book on Sweet Juniper. I recommend downloading the PDF rather than reading it online as it loads slowly. My biggest question after seeing it was: what in the world was the subject of the original unsullied version, if not gay teenage gymnasts? It's a head-scratcher for sure.

I discovered "Sweet Juniper" only recently, so I haven't figured out this guy's general mojo, but he had two very different posts that I liked a lot: one having to do with the criminal waste at an abandoned public school in Detroit, and another with re-captioned raisins . In the humorous vein, today he points out some truly staggering Nixon-era children's books : And I thought such titles were merely takeoffs in words or in Photoshop .

More bad news for newspapers: the Journal Register company declares bankruptcy (no surprise there). And since the, the Rocky Mountain News (the oldest paper in Colorado, just shy of 150) and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer have stopped printing, going to online-only operation. Time magazine has a piece on the 10 most endangered newspapers in America -- and by "newspapers" it means large, household-name dailies. And the list doesn't even include the Denver and Seattle papers. it does, however, include the Boston Globe. This trend seem inexorable -- newspapers, liek everyone else, embraced the web and put content on it that they didn't charge for. Meanwhile the print versions were obviously losing tons of circulation. The question remains whether a WWNO (written-word news outlet -- I can't use the word "paper" any more) can sustain itself as a web-only business through online ads and whatever else they can think of. Will online ads generate enough reven...