It’s noon Saturday, and tickets to the E Street Band’s Summer/Fall tour are imminently going on sale. I’m sitting in bed, laptop propped up, Ticketmaster loaded, mouse finger twitching, waiting for the stroke of 12. My wife, Olivia, brings in the twins (who turned seven months today) to play on the bed. M is still slithering, but J is undoubtedly crawling. And curious.

The clock ticks over to noon, and I’m reloading pages. Instead of the 25 shows that Springsteen played in the New York Area last time, he’s doing just two, so feel a degree of urgency. Against the odds, the Ticketmaster ordering page loads. I quickly punch in the information it wants, and click Order Tickets. I’m going to Jersey, I think, when, the computer beeps and the previous page loads.

Whaaa? J has crawled over and in an excess of enthusiams for mimicing his Dad, stumbled on the key combination for Back. I gently (really!) shoo him away, and reload. The Order Ticket pages comes up again, and I’m about to click Order when this time the screen goes black. J has somehow put the laptop into sleep mode — a neat trick because I myself don’t know the key combination to do that.

I know when I’m beat.

 

From Ananova, but too good to not quote in its entirety.

An Italian professor says it takes 15 minutes of oral sex to burn off the calories consumed in a long sip of wine.

Dietician Bruno Fabbri has been looking into the exercise value of sexual activities.

He found a 26-minute sex session which ends with an orgasm gets rid of half a pizza.

French-kissing for 53 minutes can help you lose the fat found in a burger and chips meal.

News2000 website reports that even undoing a bra can help you lose fat.

He said: “That’s not of course if you unclasp the bra with two hands, which will cost you just eight calories, but unclasping it with only one hand statistically takes the count to 18.

“Trying to unclasp a bra with one’s mouth instead takes an average 87 calories.”

 

Peggy reads Good Housekeeping, bless her.

If you can believe it, Good Housekeeping has some cutting edge content in the current August 2002 issue. Of course, it’s all in the ads, but what a shift it reflects:

……

So what do we have here? Pages that advertise the internet embedded in your main kitchen appliance, credit card protection for online shopping, and the new mini-Discover Card that you can carry around on your keychain. They’re all selling modern convenience the same way they sell dishwasher detergent and diapers. I did a double-take when I saw the ad for the LG refrigerator because it’s the first time I’ve seen it mentioned in a mainstream magazine aimed at women, implying that it’s actually ready for prime-time and available for sale.

I think it would be interesting to go back and trace the evolution of ads for internet-based products, along with the curve for adding URLs to general ads. I think the first one I ever saw with a URL was a TV commercial for a car company, and I did a double-take then, too. Now we’ve got the internet refrigerator ad in Good Housekeeping. They don’t have to sell the internet anymore – they can sell the convenience it offers because we’ve accepted its ubiquitous nature.

Exactly right. The Net isn’t an application, it’s a platform, and it’s a platform that’s approaching what may be indistinguishible from ubiquity.
A bunch of years ago, Yahoo ran its first TV ads. I was very proud until I noticed that they did not include a URL. Unbeliveable.

Big fire at the Quad/Graphics printing plant in Lomira, Wisconsin.

Quad, if you don’t know, is one of the world’s largest printers. The Lomira plant is the biggest printing complex in the Western Hemisphere; this story says the 46-acre campus employs 2000 people and includes an apartment complex. From CNN:

The area where the fire broke out was a new part of the printing plant that had only been in operation for a month, Feiereisen said. The 10-story building was used for paper storage and contained 25,000 palettes of paper with 1 ton of paper on each palette, he said.

[Later: Here’s the report from the local newspaper, the Fond du Lac Reporter.]

 

From the NYTimes:

Outlook Improves for Magazines Ads. The decline in advertising pages in magazines slowed in June, falling by the smallest amount for any month so far this year, according to data released yesterday by the Publishers Information Bureau.

Slim comfort, but comfort nonetheless, when the best you can say about your industry is that a calamatous decline is slowing. You want to help? Go out and buy a page in your favorite magazine. If you can’t think of which one, let’s talk — I’ll be glad to build one to your specifications.

 

Blog Panic. Atlas Says “Goodbye World, Hello Tequila!”

“Today I’m accepting something important.

I cannot cope.

I am now subscribed to 37 news sources.  I add about one new source a week.  Each of these is easily capable of delivering at least one or two items each day that are really interesting to me.  That I want to talk about.  But I cannot absorb this quanitity of new information even on a good day.  There is no time to reflect, to mull, to doze on it.

So I have resolved that I don’t care.

I won’t cope.

I’ll let good stuff go by the wayside.

Other people will find it.

Google will keep track of it.

It’s all their when the time comes.

I’m not Atlas to the internet.

Even to my own small chunk of it.

There.

I feel better now.” [Curiouser and curiouser!]

This is a difficult thing to accept, especially when you have an aggregator that pulls everything in for you. I hit this stage a few months ago, but it’s especially daunting when you go out of town (or injure your back!).

And that’s what it is – a stage. I think there are stages to blogging. Excitement, Fun, Overwhelmed, Panicked, Acceptance, and then the cycle starts anew. Are there “12 steps of blogging?”

 

From CNET:

Are Mac users smarter?. A new study compares Mac-using Web surfers with their PC-wielding counterparts. If you’re reading this on Windows, feel free to take your time on the big words.

I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that this study comes out the week before MacWorld Expo. But what do I know? I use Windows.

 

More on the Denver kid hauled into court over an overdue library book.

“Marisa is scared to check out books,” Norma Gohr said. “This whole situation is ridiculous.”

 

From  the excellent Privacy Digest via the also excellent The Shifted Librarian:

Last week the Berkman Center held their second annual Internet Law Program, an intensive course in (surprise) internet law and developments. You probably didn’t spend the time/money to attend, but the topics covered are interesting enough (to me anyway) to check it out even second-hand. Dan Gillmor attended and posted his notes: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5 part 1 and Day 5 part 2. Donna Wentworth was there, trying to record the seminar in real-time; hopefully she’s learned her lesson. There is tons of interesting stuff in there – it’s worth your time to read through if you have any interest in the subject matter at all.”

Tons of interesting stuff indeed. I spent most of the week being depressed that I wasn’t there. What a great thing that must have been….

 

The blue dot over by the Blogrolling table is an experiment in randomization. Go ahead. Click it. You’ll be tossed through the rabbithole of the Internet to some other weblog. I have no idea where, and it’ll be different everytime you click on it.

The only thing the other weblogs have in common is that they all carry the blue dot, a project of Joe Jennett’s Best of the Cool.

Let me know where you land.