Yesterday’s New York Times had a fascinating excerpt from a forthcoming book by Steven Johnson, Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter which argues persuasively that episodic television like 24 and The Sopranos has increased attention span and cognitive appetite.

You should see it… fluffy snow has covered all of the trees.

It’s funny how, as a child, everything on television looked so old. This was long before anyone cared about quality, and probably still a time when syndicated reruns were distributed on 16mm, not videotape. It was really striking and weird how something less than 10 years old looked like necromancy and today it just looks like yesterday. (It didn’t help that the 1970s were all about decay and denial.) Same with the Marvels: I was always really haunted by the reprints. The 1960s seemed so far away.

I was born in the late 1960s so I had some of it embedded in my subconscious but geographically and interpersonally I might as well have been in the middle of nowhere.

The 1980s were even worse, up until around 1986 anyway.

1. It’s still snowing (in fact, the ground is white—and it was over 80° F a week or so ago)

2. Matt Sobek posted for the first time since December

3. A withdrawn 1995 Adam Ant CD single is currently showing a bid of over £1100 (US $2150) on eBay.

Snow is falling here as we speak.

a/k/a “The New Pope Is A Thinking Man”

The changeover is only interesting in that it evokes the same degree of trepidation I feel whenever any regime changes its head of state, because the organisation is merely a political body, no more and no less, with the same goals of domination (borne out over the last few decades from persecuting Lenny Bruce to instructing their flock to avoid reading The Da Vinci Code).

Robert B. Weide indicates that his documentary Lenny Bruce: Swear To Tell The Truth will get a DVD release later this year.