THE ROLLING STONE FIRE-TWEET TALK NOT ENOUGH & WALT DISNEY LIVES

SOME THINGS ARE MORE COMPLICATED   

Courtesy of Rolling Stone & Huffington Post 

    Mainstream and social media are afire with comment about Rolling Stone putting the alleged Boston Marathon bomber on the cover.  

  "Making him a star" some cluck. Phooey! As more than one respondent said, it's good journalism to probe as the sub title says, "How a popular, promising student was failed by his friends, family, fell into radical Islam and became a monster." I want to know and more than a few of my friends have asked the same thing, in some wonderment.

   And to those cluckers and tsk tskkers, the same photo has played front and center in a lot of other media since April.

   I love Twitter and it's almost instant presentation of events.  As I've written, it's like the new version of the old wire machines that filled the radio and TV newsrooms of my youth-a constant stream.  But, where the AP and UPI and Reuters wires were detailed and in depth, social media is brief and in the case of the Rolling Stone cover, the trend is fueled by personal comment, often snarky and usually always too brief on which to base logic or argument. 

    And Rolling Stone has published a few other "controversial" covers.

Courtesy of Rolling Stone & Huffington Post 

  In fact the Huff Post found a few other historic covers that generated talk, and sales!

Courtesy of New Yorker and Huffington Post 

Courtesy of New Yorker and Huffington Post 

Courtesy of Huffington Post and Texas Monthly 

Courtesy of Esquire and Huffington Post

THE WORLD CHANGED ON THIS DAY

     Sunny southern California was the site in 1955 when Walt Disney gained a kind of immortality, at least in part.

        DISNEYLAND opened on this day back then.  The Disneyland legacy is profound, more than just the amusement and wonder of the parks and entertainment complex. A virtual science of crowd management, logistics, marketing, concept development and much more has followed.  You know there is something magic about being the happiest place on earth.  Still works.

ANOTHER HAPPY PLACE

     See you down the trail.

THE WEEKENDER :)

DIFFERENT STREAMS OF TIME

We are constantly reminded of the almost

schizophrenic tone of our age of communication.

We rely on satellites in more ways that most of us know

yet we can not be sure when or where they may fall.

We love the convenience of social media

but must worry about the implications.

Here's a clip from Reader Supported News

What Facebook Really Wants

Nicholas Thompson, The New Yorker 
Nicholas Thompson writes: "The more our online lives take place on Facebook, the more we depend on the choices of the people who run the company - what they think about privacy, how they think we should be able to organize our friends, what they tell advertisers (and governments) about what we do and what we buy. We'll rely on whom they choose as partners to give us news and music. Real issues are at stake, in other words - not just the size of photos and whether you can poke."
READ MORE

And there is another good weekend read here

in this link to a thoughtful and provocative article by Nat Hentoff.  What freedoms have we lost or are

in danger of loosing when our desire for safety,

security and technology combine?

BUT THEN-

there is the technological reach into the past

that was not imaginable in our youth

when things were more simple.

Or were they?

Thanks to Moto, my "mad archivist" for 

finding this ditty.

Enjoy

See you down the trail.

THE OTHER WEST COAST & THOUGHTS OF A DEBT CEILING

SUMMER FUN

California friends said "Florida in July?!"

We told them we'll survive just fine.

A visit with our eldest and a family wedding 

brings us to the other west coast, along

the beautiful Gulf of Mexico.

This is where summer fun means the beach.

The gulf also provides a canvass of relaxing scenes.

And as you can note, changing cloudscapes.

A tropical summer offers a vast change from

the central coast.  Stay tuned.


AS THE DEBT CEILING DEBATE CONTINUES

Here's an interesting perspective from
James Surowiecki in the New Yorker
The truth is that the United States doesn’t need, and shouldn’t have, a debt ceiling. Every other democratic country, with the exception of Denmark, does fine without one. There’s no debt limit in the Constitution. And, if Congress really wants to hold down government debt, it already has a way to do so that doesn’t risk economic chaos—namely, the annual budgeting process. The only reason we need to lift the debt ceiling, after all, is to pay for spending that Congress has already authorized. If the debt ceiling isn’t raised, we’ll face an absurd scenario in which Congress will have ordered the President to execute two laws that are flatly at odds with each other. If he obeys the debt ceiling, he cannot spend the money that Congress has told him to spend, which is why most government functions will be shut down. Yet if he spends the money as Congress has authorized him to he’ll end up violating the debt ceiling.
Interesting eh?
You can read more of an illuminating article
in the August 2 New Yorker.
 See you down the trail.