VX78 SFO to IAD

Lovely flying weather on this end!

Extreme mammals

At the CalAcademy of Science

New Edward II B&B artwork

King Henry the Cat

VX 067. IAD to SFO

At the gate with plenty of time, but still in the middle seat. Off to find some coffe.

Weasels ripped my atom heart, mother

Random thought after a 90 minute meeting about social media and before the board meeting and after staying toooooooo long on the Blue Line and ending up in Arlington Cemetery.

Weasels Ripped My Flesh ... Atom Heart Mother.

I said they were random thoughts ... for the past nearly 30 years, I've had some strange congruence of Pink Floyd's Atom Heart Mother and Frank Zappa's Weasels Ripped My Flesh in my head. It pops up from now and then. Like the dream about stealing the broken stone from the Parthenon. Just a strange powerful thought: "Weasels Ripped my flesh atom heart mother!"

Apropos of nothing. Signifying? Monkeys? (bonus points to the person who can pinpoint THAT allusion! - without the help of Google!).

I miss Frank. Syd lives.

Artomatic 2009

This year's Artomatic took place near the Navy Yard and new National's Stadium in South East DC. I'd only been in the neighborhood a few times, and it was a lovely day - bit cloudy and humid, but not all that hot.

Artomatic itself is an amazing thing. For a few weeks, hundreds of artists have their work on display. Some is fabulous, some just ok, and some, terrible (as you would expect). But with so much to choose from, there's something for every taste.

As an added bonus this year, the finalists in the Washington Post's Peep Diorama contest were on display. Is it art? You decide.

Here's a slide show of some of the pictures I took.

Self portrait ar Artomatic

Kindle DX: WPost and NYTimes snatch a fail from a potential victory!

So, Amazon comes out with the Kindle DX, a larger format, and maybe, just the thing to read a newspaper ... hmmm ... maybe. Actually no, maybe for some, but well, looks like NYT and WPO were able to pull a #fail out of a potential victory.

So, The New York Times (and it's sad little gutted step-child, the Boston Globe) and Washington Post jump on the bandwagon. This is it, some real action from their gray eminences, Newspaper 2.0. What an interesting idea, offer a Kindle DX to online subscribers to the papers. Start transitioning the deadtree/newsprint portion of your audience who are not tech savvy enough to use another mobile device to the digital future while at the same time, locking them into a subscription to your journalistic expertise. Lock in an audience and a key demographic. Brilliant stroke!

Except, of course, that it's newspaper industry doing this. So what do the brilliant business folk at NYT and WPO give their customers? Well, the deal isn't available to subscribers in the home markets of the papers - the very audience that's bleeding from the subscription rolls like watery ink through newsprint.

Now, of course the Times and Post are nationwide papers, but their hometown readers are, well, generally an influential group. As I noted in an earlier posting, the Washington Metro is increasingly "Kindle-ized". But, WPO is doing nothing to leverage their Kindle investment to take advantage of that.

Here's Rob Pegoraro writing in The Washington Post (here's the link for those of you in the DC area who might be getting the Kindle DX/Post package - 'cause you won't be able to read it on your Kindle!):

With the DX, Amazon is also exploring cheaper ways to bring this device to readers. Three newspapers -- The Washington Post, the New York Times and the Boston Globe -- will offer the DX at a discount to readers who subscribe to their Kindle editions. ... Those deals get around the relatively high cost of a Kindle, but few readers can benefit from them. The newspaper discounts, for example, only cover readers living outside of each paper's circulation area -- an arbitrary restriction that will probably prove to be self-defeating.

The Amazon press release even highlights the WPO and NYT fail feature in it's lead:

The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and The Washington Post to Launch Trials Offering Kindle DX to Subscribers Who Live in Areas Where Home Delivery is Not Available

How much longer will journalism tie itself to a business model that can't see the digital forest for the dead trees?

Quote of the Day: "In spite of all the astronomers say, Ptolemy was perfectly right: ..."

2009-04-06-IMG_1312
Originally uploaded by martin_kalfatovic

"In spite of all the astronomers say, Ptolemy was perfectly right: the center of the universe is here, not there. Gandhi might be dead; but across the desk in his office ... Bob Briggs was concerned to talk only about himself"

Aldous Huxley. Ape and Essence (1948). Cited from the 1962 edition: Bantam Books, New York, p. 1.