This Week's Song

This is third track of Bob Dylan's iconic Highway 61 Revisited (1965), "It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry."

Happy Birthday, Bob!

And then there's the Seventieth Birthday Playlist.

I'm Not Going Nowhere

Today the New York Times reports that blogs written by children are waning because young people have gravitated to Twitter and Facebook. It neglects to note that many of those blogs, especially those written by junior high schoolers, weren't anything you would ever want to read on a regular basis. There are exceptions: if the blogger were your own kid, and you wanted to know what s/he was up to, a service well provided now by Facebook and Twitter, you might find the blog interesting. Or at least telling. This has something to do with the evolution of the Internet.

Writes the Gray Lady:

Blogs were once the outlet of choice for people who wanted to express themselves online. But with the rise of sites like Facebook and Twitter, they are losing their allure for many people — particularly the younger generation.

The Internet and American Life Project at the Pew Research Center found that from 2006 to 2009, blogging among children ages 12 to 17 fell by half; now 14 percent of children those ages who use the Internet have blogs. Among 18-to-33-year-olds, the project said in a report last year, blogging dropped two percentage points in 2010 from two years earlier.

Former bloggers said they were too busy to write lengthy posts and were uninspired by a lack of readers. Others said they had no interest in creating a blog because social networking did a good enough job keeping them in touch with friends and family.

Yeah, ok. Does that mean that blogs are waning, as the headline pronounces ("Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter")? Well, only sort of. It means that people select the service or platform that serves their needs.

There's not much of a story here. In the beginning, before blogs, there were Listservs. They're still around. They put an email in your box about something you're interested in. Nothing more, nothing less. Nothing mysterious. You could send the same email to a thousand people, all of whom were willing to receive it. In the beginning, the Listserv was all there was, so it had to do everything.

Then there were blogs. And blog-like things, Livejournal and MySpace. These bloggy-like things, I think, are now pretty much fossils. Real blogs? Not at all.

Initially, a lot of what got put up on blogs was awful to read, but that didn't matter because again that was all there was. Heaven knows how many abandoned blogs there are. Blogs with one entry, "Oh, so now I can blog, see?" Blogs that haven't had an entry in 5 years. Blogs that nobody ever read. The list goes on. The extinction level was and is enormous. Blogs require writing and a certain level of persistence. If I returned to a blog and saw that nothing had been posted for 90 days, I knew it was most likely dead. That happened frequently. Still does.

Then along came Facebook and Twitter. Facebook is great to keep in touch with people. You can return to what was posted last week or last month if you want to. Twitter on the other hand is much quicker, but doesn't leave much of a trail. If you have a lot of people you're following, it scrolls fast and is always on to the next thing as fast as you can refresh.

All of this depends entirely on what you want. And because people probably will want something that these outlets don't yet provide (I don't know what that is), there will probably be the next new something launched right after I post this.

People who use the Internet find the services that let them do what they want. I use Twitter (@thedavidseth), I use Facebook (my real, 3 word name). I have a couple of Listservs I use (e.g., this one about the death penalty) that I've kept going since 2002. The idea, and it's a very modest one, is that various platforms are good for some things and not so good for others. When there were few options, everything got used for, well, everything. Now there are enough options that people can gravitate to what seems works for them, and they do.

This particular blog, The Dream Antilles, serves me excellently to do what I want it to do: it provides analysis and opinion, and it has particular subjects that it is about. I spare you a list. If you're reading this, you know what the focus is (or can easily find out) because there are more than 950 posts. And you no doubt know (and hopefully forgive) the idiosyncrasies and extremes of your humble bloguer@.

So this blog is not waning. No, it's continuing. Here's Dylan:

Idiot Wind

The WaPo editorial for today calls out McSame for yet another "vile smear:

WITH THE presidential campaign clock ticking down, Sen. John McCain has suddenly discovered a new boogeyman to link to Sen. Barack Obama: a sometimes controversial but widely respected Middle East scholar named Rashid Khalidi. In the past couple of days, Mr. McCain and his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin, have likened Mr. Khalidi, the director of a Middle East institute at Columbia University, to neo-Nazis; called him "a PLO spokesman"; and suggested that the Los Angeles Times is hiding something sinister by refusing to release a videotape of a 2003 dinner in honor of Mr. Khalidi at which Mr. Obama spoke. Mr. McCain even threw former Weatherman Bill Ayers into the mix, suggesting that the tape might reveal that Mr. Ayers -- a terrorist-turned-professor who also has been an Obama acquaintance -- was at the dinner.

For the record, Mr. Khalidi is an American born in New York who graduated from Yale a couple of years after George W. Bush. For much of his long academic career, he taught at the University of Chicago, where he and his wife became friends with Barack and Michelle Obama. In the early 1990s, he worked as an adviser to the Palestinian delegation at peace talks in Madrid and Washington sponsored by the first Bush administration. We don't agree with a lot of what Mr. Khalidi has had to say about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the years, and Mr. Obama has made clear that he doesn't, either. But to compare the professor to neo-Nazis -- or even to Mr. Ayers -- is a vile smear.

For his part, Mr. Khalidi, an academic of the first degree, squashes McSame like a bloated cockroach and even throws the clammering, allusion-hungry masses (that would be us) a bone:

Which reminds us: We did ask Mr. Khalidi whether he wanted to respond to the campaign charges against him. He answered, via e-mail, that "I will stick to my policy of letting this idiot wind blow over." That's good advice for anyone still listening to the McCain campaign's increasingly reckless ad hominem attacks. Sadly, that wind is likely to keep blowing for four more days.

"Idiot Wind"? Definitely. That's a 1974 Bob Dylan tune:

Someone's got it in for me, they're planting stories in the press
Whoever it is I wish they'd cut it out but when they will I can only guess.
They say I shot a man named Gray and took his wife to Italy,
She inherited a million bucks and when she died it came to me.
I can't help it if I'm lucky.

People see me all the time and they just can't remember how to act
Their minds are filled with big ideas, images and distorted facts.
Even you, yesterday you had to ask me where it was at,
I couldn't believe after all these years, you didn't know me better than that
Sweet lady.

Idiot wind, blowing every time you move your mouth,
Blowing down the backroads headin' south.
Idiot wind, blowing every time you move your teeth,
You're an idiot, babe.
It's a wonder that you still know how to breathe.

Yes, as the song concludes, it's a wonder we can even feed ourselves. There are 4 audio versions of this wonderful song here (click on left margin), and, of course, a beautiful video from 1976:



And so, on October 31, 2008, with 3 full days before election day, McSame brings us yet another boogeyperson and demonstrates yet again that his campaign is nothing more than "idiot wind." And you thought that he had already emptied his clown car of all of the evil creatures and boogeypersons. Wrong. Doesn't he realize that we're already on fear and loathing overload, and have been for 8 long years, and that we're now averting our eyes from his parade of cardboard horrors, that we're saying, "Sorry, McSame", we're moving on? I guess not.

Bob Dylan's 66th Birthday

May 24, 2007 is the birthday of the man who in 1963 wrote and sang on The Freewheelin Bob Dylan Masters of War:

Come you masters of war
You that build all the guns
You that build the death planes
You that build the big bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks

You that never done nothin'
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it's your little toy
You put a gun in my hand
And you hide from my eyes
And you turn and run farther
When the fast bullets fly

Like Judas of old
You lie and deceive
A world war can be won
You want me to believe
But I see through your eyes
And I see through your brain
Like I see through the water
That runs down my drain...

All these years later, 44 to be precise, it still holds up tragically well.