I Think I'm Being Mocked by Adsense

I did a post on helping out kids with cancer who have lost their hair and now my blog is getting adsense ads for hair loss.

Just what are they trying to tell me?

Great Line from a Movie

I Tivo'd the classic movie The Sisters with Bette Davis and Errol Flynn. Errol has just met her at a dance, gets her alone and has this great bit of dialog:

Errol: Do you want to hear the story of my life?
Bette: No.
Errol: No?!? But it's exciting! It hasn't got a point, but it might serve as a warning to you.

I love it.

Thursday 13, Blog Goals Edition

Today I list 13 things I want to do with this blog.

Every organization can use a mission statement that answers the question, “Why do we exist?” Today’s Thursday 13 thrashes around with that question for this blog. It doesn’t answer it, but it lays out a set of thoughts about why I’m doing this. I’m not quite sure where this will lead, but the exercise itself will help clarify the matter.

1. Learn from others about life. Jake Silver, Lawman, Arizona Cheesehead and Angel lead lives very different from mine. They have expanded my horizons tremendously. I vicariously live tiny parts of their lives through their blogs.

2. Teach my children about communicating. When you are trying to make a point, what’s the best way to do it?

3. Learn about charitable organizations first hand. Because I blog, I can advertise myself as a citizen-journalist and get access to their events.

4. Publicize acts of kindness. The world is not what you see on TV nor hear on the radio. All the shouting and reading from police blotters warps our perception of the world as a dangerous place filled with evil. It simply isn’t reality.

5. Attempt to prove that kindness is profitable. The best salespeople become their customers’ teammates. Who ever heard of a good teammate who was unkind to you?

6. Encourage calm conversations. Rage and vitriol can be exciting in the short run, but of limited long term value. Anger is appropriate when dealing with nihilistic maniacs like Zarqawi, but hardly fitting when discussing George Bush or Hillary Clinton.

7. Keep current with technology. Once upon a time I was a scientist and an engineer. Now I’m a marketer. Blogging helps me keep up to date.

8. Improve my business case analysis skills. I learn best by doing things. I’m trying to use this blog to examine the world through the lens of a businessman.

9. Improve my marketing skills. Getting people to read your blog is an act of marketing. What do readers want and how can I deliver it?

10. Make social connections through the blogosphere. For all practical purposes, the connections across the blogosphere are infinite. Who can I reach today?

11. Improve my writing skills. Tighter, cleaner, crisper. I find that I have to go back two and three times over my posts to remove excess words.

12. Make readers smile. Hopefully I can blog with humor.

13. Hear what you have to say.

That’s all for this week. Please visit my weekly World of Good posts if you get a chance. Links to those are always gratefully accepted!

Other Thursday 13 Sites

Pupski
Cheryl
Jackie
Eve
Mandy
Mar

Get the Thursday Thirteen code here!

The purpose of the meme is to get to know everyone who participates a little bit better every Thursday. Visiting fellow Thirteeners is encouraged! If you participate, leave the link to your Thirteen in others comments. It’s easy, and fun! Be sure to update your Thirteen with links that are left for you, as well! I will link to everyone who participates and leaves a link to their 13 things. Trackbacks, pings, comment links accepted!

View More Thursday Thirteen Participants

World of Good Blogburst, Hats for Cancer Style

This one’s for you, Tyler.

This week’s World of Good (WOG) post is kind of whimsical. It’s about haircuts and hats. A friend of my son’s who was recently diagnosed with childhood leukemia inspired it. Fortunately, his prognosis is good, although the treatment will be long and painful.

One of the side effects everyone recognizes about cancer treatments is hair loss. In the process of killing off cancer cells that are reproducing quickly, other bodily cells that reproduce quickly are killed, too. This includes hair. While adults can rationalize the hair loss, it can be hard for children. Being bald is no fun when you’re 8. There’s something you can do to help.

There’s an organization in the Midwest called Hats Off for Cancer that provides hats and hair for children with cancer. Can you help? You bet! Just send them a hat! I'll wait here while you go check them out.

Did you go and do it? Excellent. Now how hard was that?

If you’re really in the mood to give and you’ve decided to change your hairstyle dramatically, consider donating your hair. It's used to make wigs for the kids. Confidentially, I tried to donate mine by collecting all my shedding in one big bag, but they didn’t have any need for cat hair. It made them sneeze. If you want to donate your hair and don't live near Hats Off, contact Locks of Love.

Here’s some photos of hair donors to inspire you.



A local girl scout troop got into the act, hand-made some blankets and donated them to the cause. Too cool! Here’s the story about that donation.

One troop provided HO4C some great hand made blankets for the kids with cancer. They knew that hospitals are always cooler and the children's treatments make them always cold.

If you look closely, you'll see that a feline figures prominently in the blanket. Very appropriate, I'd say.


While you’re in the mood, go vote for your favorite donated hat.

The WOGFather himself, Joe over at A Tic in the Mind’s Eye, has his WOG post up. Check it out! Bloggers who link to our WOG posts get to join the WOG Squad. Membership in the WOG Squad has many mysterious benefits, including cures for baldness and the ability to transfer millions of dollars of Nigerian money into your bank account! We also offer attractive blog link incentives. Feel free to drop us an email if you'd like to join. Operators are standing by!

Photos used without permission.

Previous WOGs at The Scratching Post:

WOG, Navy Style
WOG, Aussie Style
WOG, Katrina Style
WOG, Hospice Style
WOG, Boy Scout Style
WOG, MS Style
WOG, Amy Hawkins Style
WOG, Chiapas Style
WOG, Special Olympics Style

Coming Late to the Party

The MSM continues to live up to its dinosaur reputation. Like the mighty sauropods whose nervous systems were so primitive that it took several minutes for them to realize that they had died, the Washington Post is just now realizing that the left is overwhelmed with hate. They published a Richard Cohen column that is so staggeringly out of date that it makes you wonder if he wrote it two years ago and they just sat on it until now. He wrote a column vaguely dismissive of someone from the left I’ve never even heard of and his email inbox promptly filled with digital sewage from infuriated lefties. Here are key sections of his column.

It seemed that most of my correspondents had been egged on to write me by various blogs. In response, they smartly assembled into a digital lynch mob and went roaring after me…But the message in this case truly is the medium. The e-mails pulse in my queue, emanating raw hatred…I know it's only words now appearing on my computer screen, but the words are so angry, so roiled with rage, that they are the functional equivalent of rocks once so furiously hurled during antiwar demonstrations.

Well, duh. I did two posts on the Special Olympics and I got hateful comments from some moonbat still enraged that I said that one of their standard bearers, Patriot Boy, was a hate-filled hack unworthy of their time. Criticizing hate got me…hate.

Now I have support from the MSM. Riding to the rescue is none other than the mighty Richard Cohen. Boy, do I feel relieved. Of course, he pulls up short in his column when at the end he says he understands the source of their hate. Thanks for nothing, Ricky.

There’s no excuse for the hate. Period.

The Moussaoui Scoreboard Roadshow

So our dear friend Moussaoui didn’t get the chair or the syringe or the firing squad or a grand piano dropped on him, cartoon-style, from the top of a ten-story building. Instead he got life in prison. The Alliance has asked us to recommend an alternate punishment for him. I’ve got one. I call it The Zacarias Moussaoui Scoreboard Roadshow.

Jim Rome listeners will recognize the shorthand term scoreboard.

Zac is a loser. His attack on the US set in motion of chain of events that has his buddies on the run all across the globe. They’ve lost two countries, Afghanistan and Iraq, and have managed to tick off other Moslems the world over by blowing up innocent civilians. I know it’s un-American, but we need to be poor winners here. We need to rub Zackie’s face in it.

First, let’s remove his vocal cords. Moose-man isn’t a doer, he’s a talker. He didn’t actually fly the planes; he just talked others into doing it for him. “I’d love to go with you boys, but I’ve got these library books to return and you know how those fines add up!” Without the gift of gab, old ZM is totally unarmed.

Next, I suggest we give him a multimedia road trip to show him what winners look like. We start with a tour of Southern Baptist Churches. There are few things more enjoyable in life than a good Southern Baptist Sunday service. Scoreboard, Zackster. Who looks like they’re having more fun?



Next we send the creep up to New York to visit the offices of the Wall Street Journal. While there he can get a lecture on the comparative performance of the economies in the Grand Caliphate to those of the Coalition.

Per capita incomes of the Caliphate

Iran - $8100
Sudan - $2100
Gaza - $600

Per capita incomes of the Coalition

US - $41,000
England - $30,900
Australia - $32,000

Scoreboard, baby.

Finally, the ultimate torture. He gets to spend a day with the Puppy Blender himself, Instapundit. After sharing Schnauzer Shakes, Glenn can lecture the Zack-man about the spread of information. How the lights are going on all over the world. He would learn how it is getting harder and harder for people who rule through autocratic control of the media (this includes you, MSM) to keep things under control.

That would end our roadshow. He’d have had his face rubbed in defeat over and over and over again. Utterly humiliated, unable to respond, he’d be crushed.

After that we’d take him out behind a barn and shoot him like we would a mad dog.

You didn’t think we’d ever let him live, did you?

Time to Talk with Iran?

Where does the Washington Post uncover these fossils? Robert Hunter has a column in the WaPo today with the following idiocy.

American and Iranian leaders are talking a great deal about each other -- when they should be devoting far more attention to talking to each other. Both sides are throwing sharp verbal punches with increasing frequency...

How erudite! How enlightened! How nuanced! We should just sit down and talk. We'll find out just how much we have in common. We'll find that we can come up with a win-win, synergistic scenario over coffee at Starbucks.

Perhaps we can start with blotting Israel out of existance. That's where the Iranians want to start. They said so. In so many words. After that we can all just drop dead. That seems to be Iran's second wish. With these as a starting point, I'm sure we can craft a compromise. Like maybe if we just kill half the Jews and enslave the rest. For #2 on their hit parade, maybe we could just convert to Islam. All of us. Including Mr. Hunter.

How about if we don't.

Not having smoked crack, I can't seem to make much sense out of Mr. Hunter's article. You're dealing with an intractable, sworn enemy who is bent on obtaining nuclear weapons and then using them on Israel and then on you. I do not inhabit the same reality as Mr. Hunter. We asked the Europeans to talk with the Iranians for the last few years. The result was more mania from Iran and closer nuclear war.

My favorite part of his post is how he considers the US and Iran equivalent. It's implicit, but it's there. If that's true, then it should be just as safe for him to wear a yarmulke and speak Hebrew in Tehran as it is in San Diego. Let's try it, shall we?

You first, Mr. Hunter.

Ramses the Cat, Come on Down!

Here's some great photography from a friend of mine and his neighborhood cat, Ramses coming down from hunting birds on the roof.

This Week in the Theocracy

Hi, everyone! It's me, Jacob the Syrian Hamster, loyal beadle of the Feline Theocracy here with another edition of This Week in the Theocracy.


We've worked hard all week on our new template and we hope you like it. Please let us know. One of the advantages of the new template is that we've now listed all the members of the Theocracy in a group on the right hand side bar.

Without further ado, here's our favorite posts of the week from the members of the Theocracy.

Feline Empress and Mother Superior of the Holy Order of Ocea Whitefish, Kukka-Maria, has a post by her blog-mate, Brach, that is a great rundown of the birds at her bird feeder. I loved the last photo in particular. Our human said it reminded him of when he lived in Virginia.

Our Knight-Protector and Defender of Yarn Balls, Lawman, has a typically insightful take on the latest developments at Duke.

Carl Morgan, Internet Marketing Novice and Grand Almoner of England, has a book review and a new blog.

RomeoCat, the Abbess of the Priory of Small Princesses, gives a cool video with some amazing urban gymnastics.

Sister Jane of Perpetual Purring has a post near and dear to this beach bum hamster's heart. If you haven't heard about the Mt. Soledad cross yet, read about it here.

Ogre, the Monsignor of the Breweries, has a story I had not heard until he posted it. Wow.

Peggy Noonan, our Most Holy Ambassador to the Court of the Mainstream Media, has a column on the Moussaoui trial.

Our Court Artist, Justin, presents us with a conundrum.

Heidi, whose name has been placed on the Protected List, has an excellent post on the immigration debate.

And now for the WOG Squad. First, let me thank Georgette of The Chronicles of a Meandering Traveller for her suggestion of the name WOG Squad. I love it! I just realized it works even better because we really have a Julie and we have lots of Links! :-)

Actually his name on the show was Linc, but what the heck.

The Anchoress has been under the weather lately and hasn't posted a WOG link in quite a while, poor thing. Send her some get well wishes when you get a chance.

Mark Shea, Holy Scholar, has a link post with a great title.

The aforementioned Georgette, another Holy Scholar, whups up on that anti-Catholic piece of trash, The Da Vinci Code.

Eric Scheske, Holy Scholar, has a post about the mind-boggling decision by the Mexican government to legalize drugs. Build the fence now!

Finally, Happy Julie, the Happy Catholic and Happy Holy Scholar, gives us a review of the excellent movie, Monsoon Wedding.

That's it for this week. We're looking forward to another great week of blogging in the Theocracy.

All the best,
Jacob the Syrian Hamster

E J Dionne - Still in Wonderland

I hope Alice is bringing Mr. Dionne some pills to make him big again. I made the mistake of stopping by the Washington Post editorial section today and read his article on Republicans rebranding themselves. Included in his article were these howlers about Republicans porking out at the government trough.

It's also a response to the failure of conservative policies and to the declining appeal of conservative rhetoric. Conservatives are trying to save themselves by offering progressive-sounding criticisms of the status quo, much as liberals offered ersatz conservative critiques two decades ago.

What on Earth is he talking about? Has he seen the federal budget lately? Spending on poverty is absolutely colossal. It hasn't gone down, it's gone up, up, up. Smaller government? I don't think so. Here's a great quote from Rick Santorum who is petulant because his supporters expected him to behave like an adult with their money instead of going on a six year bender.

Poverty is a big deal to him, Santorum explained, because "if you want me to be honest, I'm a Catholic." He added: "How many times did the nuns beat into your brains: the poor, the poor, the poor, the poor?"

Santorum has got his hand in the cookie jar all the way to the elbow. Entitlement spending has gone up 4.7% and domestic spending has gone up 7.1% per year after inflation for the last six years. Dionne knows this. Santorum knows this.

Santorum is frantically buying votes with our money and Dionne is just flat out lying.

Warning: Cat and Hamster at Work!

There will be changes made to the blog template this weekend. I'm moving to a three-column template with fixed width side columns. Please leave me a comment if things aren't working or don't look right.

Thanks,
K T Cat and Jacob the Syrian Hamster

A Volunteer

There's a house I know with an all volunteer front yard. Miraculously, one of the volunteers is this one.


Beauty amidst the weeds.

Thursday 13, Special Olympics Edition

Last Saturday I went to a local Special Olympics event. I blogged about it here. Here are 13 things I learned from going.

1. The athletes are of all ages. One of the first things that I saw was middle aged participants. On TV you always see young adults and kids, but there were participants in their 60s.

2. The athletes are really into the events. I watched a pair of them diagnose their performances with each other.

3. For the most part, the volunteers were unrelated to the athletes. There were lots of students from the university that hosted the events and plenty of folks from local Kiwanis clubs.

4. The recurring theme from the volunteers was "God has been so good to me, I want to give some of that back."

5. Point Loma Nazarene University was the host. The students certainly lived up to their Christian principles.

6. Everyone had fun. Here's a typical photo from the event.


7. The athletes had been practicing for the events. The shotput contestants had great form. Here's a picture of one.


8. Whatever you think of race relations in the US, this event certainly said good things about how we get along. Disabilities are rare enough to make it nearly impossible to have a race-based Special Olympics. For example, a hispanics-only Special Olympics would be too small to be interesting. The volunteers and participants cared only for each other. Here's one of my favorite shots.


Click on the photo for a larger version. It was a murky day so there wasn't enough light to get the coach's features in a small jpg. A larger one shows them better.

9. If you went some distance from the event and looked back you saw America. All races and creeds working together to help each other.

10. I need to work on my photography. In every single shot I cut off the people's feet. I center the photo on the head when I should probably be aiming at the chest.

11. The event was very well organized. I didn't realize it until long afterwards, but the whole thing went very smoothly.

12. It's a tough, unending job being a parent of a disabled person. This event seemed to be a welcome, fun respite for them.

13. This was enormous fun. I'm coming up with all kinds of other groups to visit and blog about.

Other Thursday 13 Sites

Eve lists the 13 video games she likes to play.

When Caryn gets bored, here are 13 things she choses from.

Cheeky gives us 13 alternatives to swearing.

Annie lists 13 springtime flowers she likes.

Robin gives us 13 lessons from college.

Yellow Roses has 13 things she can't live without.

Get the Thursday Thirteen code here!

The purpose of the meme is to get to know everyone who participates a little bit better every Thursday. Visiting fellow Thirteeners is encouraged! If you participate, leave the link to your Thirteen in others comments. It’s easy, and fun! Be sure to update your Thirteen with links that are left for you, as well! I will link to everyone who participates and leaves a link to their 13 things. Trackbacks, pings, comment links accepted!

View More Thursday Thirteen Participants

World of Good Blogburst, Special Olympics Style

Welcome to this week’s World of Good (WOG) post here at The Scratching Post. Today we celebrate the Special Olympics. The purpose of the WOG is to highlight and honor acts of kindness and charity because good deeds are contagious.

On Saturday I went to the San Diego Special Olympics event at Point Loma Nazarene University (PLNU). It was one of the most surprising and enjoyable things I’ve ever done. I heartily recommend working with them in your town.

I've taken a couple of runs at writing this post and I've decided to let the pictures tell the story. I took over 100 photos and had a hard time culling them. This is going to be a long post. You can click on all of the pictures to get bigger versions of them. Do it, it's worth it.

The first thing I noticed about it was that the majority of the volunteers were not related to the athletes. They were people from all walks of life who came to help out. First, there were the students of PLNU. PLNU is a Christian university affiliated with the Church of the Nazarene.

Here, some of the students run the registration table. The student who organized the event told me she started working on it a month in advance and put a couple of days a week into it. That's no small task when you're a full time student!


Another group were the local Kiwanis clubs. They provided a large number of volunteers as well.


An army travels on it's stomach. So do athletes! You can see what a gray and murky day it was. I chose not to use the flash on my camera because I wanted candid shots. Many of them came out a bit dark, but if you click on them and look at the larger versions, the details come out better.


The athletes began the event with a parade around the track while the Olympic anthem was played on loudspeakers. They were organized into teams based on where they live. Another thing that struck me was how happy and enthusiastic the athletes were. Their joy was infectious.



After the national anthem was played, one of the athletes recited the Special Olympics Oath. "Let me win. But if I cannot win, let me brave in the attempt."


Finally, there was a torch ceremony where the Olympic torch was carried around the track by various athletes.




The Olympics featured several different kinds of events. One of my favorite sequences of photos came from the standing jump. Here, the woman "calls her shot". I think she was telling everyone how far she was going to go.


1-2-3 and...


airborne!


The team coaches came from all over. Many of them were high school PE coaches. Here, a runner gets some last minute tips before his race. Did they help?


You bet!


His mom was really proud.


The PLNU students acted as chaperones, counselors, cheerleaders and support staff. There must have been almost a hundred of them. It was a beautiful thing to see.

Time for a pep talk.


One athlete gets a massage.


I went to college. I don't think I was ever this cool, though.


An olympian and student ham it up for the camera.


The athletes were really into the competition. While I was walking between events, one of them told me how hard she had been practicing. I got some candid shots of the athletes comparing their performances and discussing what they could have done better.


This guy was totally focused on the shotput competition.



The shotput competitors were impressive. Dig these two.



I want to close with one last photo that captures the spirit of the event. A PLNU student who could have been studying or socializing, but this weekend was giving her time and affection to a determined athlete instead. Words fail me.


I have to admit that there were a couple of times I got choked up during the event. I stopped and tried to take it all in and it dawned on me that this was America. People pitching in and helping each other, making it a great day for some very special Olympians. Thanks to all of you for memories that I will always treasure.

Thanks also to the WOG Squad for their links and support. Check in on The Scratching Post this weekend to see their blogs highlighted with our weekly This Week in the Theocracy post. If you want to participate in the weekly WOG with stories or links or just want to be notified when they are posted, please send me an email at ktcat -at- san.rr.com.

Comments are very welcome!

Previous WOGs at The Scratching Post:

WOG, Navy Style
WOG, Aussie Style
WOG, Katrina Style
WOG, Hospice Style
WOG, Boy Scout Style
WOG, MS Style
WOG, Amy Hawkins Style
WOG, Chiapas Style

Transrodental Meditations - Calm Discourse Edition

Greetings, fellow travellers on the path to enlightenment! It is I, your Swami of Seeds, Jacob the Syrian Hamster to lead you in another in a series of Transrodental Meditations.


First, let me remind you of the basics. In order to achieve Higher Consciousness, you need

Simplicity of Thought,

Purity of Heart and

Buckets of Sunflower Seeds.

Find a quiet place and assume a comfortable position. Clear your mind of active thought and fill your cheeks with pecan pieces. Once you have done this and the winds of clarity have blown the clouds of confusion from your mind, let us contemplate the following mystery:

In an era of plenty, what drives people to excessive, hysterical commentary on blogs?

Captain Ed has an excellent post today about this.

Of course, we have seen a lot of vitriol flung our way by the same people who usually do nothing but fling vitriol anyway. Yesterday we saw some goalpost-moving as the lefty bloggers attempted to equate "chickenhawk" with child molestation

The gentle Captain quotes from the blog A Shot in the Dark, which has further examples.

The Scratching Post itself has seen our Dear Leader assaulted by people who are angry beyond all reason at things smaller than a gnat. One commenter, when asked to stop referring to fellow Americans as Nazis replied,

You're right. I do feel comfortable describing Americans who hate brown people and want to see them marginalized and killed as neo-nazis. You seem to think they don't exist, but they do and can cause real harm here in America. The biggest problem I have with Miss Ego is that she transmits their hateful ideas and rhetoric to the mainstream.

All of this frustration and fury does nothing but clog our mental pathways with negative energies. Let us open those pathways with some gentler images that could not have been found in previous decades.


Release your negative thoughts as you meditate on the people around you applying themselves to advances in medical technology. They cannot have given us this if they had been clouded with hate.

Could this little one have provided comfort to others had his mind been filled with anger and jealousies?

In early September, 5-year old Jack approached his mother with an idea. He wanted to have a sale and use the proceeds to help those in need. With the help of this parents, Jack put up signs in his neighborhood to advertise the sale. Friends and family donated items to be sold, helped to spread the word and helped to run the sale. Strangers stopped by with trunkloads of donations, many customers paid more than their purchases were worth. Many customers enjoyed lemonade and cookies from Jack's lemonade stand as well.

The sale raised over $2,000 in just two days. Jack made a donation not only to Operation Iraqi Children but to many families after Hurricane Katrina.

Others of calm mind are working daily to bring us cleaner air.

Breath deeply and slowly and contemplate the wonders of life around you. How so many of your neighbors efforts make your world a better place. Know you their innermost thoughts? Can you fathom their political views? Can you delight in their inventions all the while cursing their philosophies?

Rage and hate is poorly matched to the world we live in. In general, life grows ever sweeter and longer thanks to the people around us. If life is getting better, then our ancestors lived through worse. If they did not fall upon each other with fire and sword, then we owe it to them to find gentler ways of dealing with our fellow man.

Does Bad News Really Sell?

How valuable is the old Mainstream Media (MSM) saying, "If it bleeds, it leads?" That is, what evidence is there that bad news is more desired by information consumers than good news?

I'm starting to think that bad news isn't a demand-driven product, but a supply-driven one.

This weekend I did some volunteer work for the Special Olympics. I brought along my camera and told everyone I was going to blog about it for my weekly World of Good post. They loved the idea. Everyone wanted to tell their story. It was a huge amount of fun. In the course of the conversations, they all talked about how tired they were of the constant drumbeat of bad news from the MSM.

Either these consumer interviews were wrong, or the MSM is selling an inferior product.

I would argue that bad news is cheaper to come by than good news. Remember that the MSM is out to make a profit and profit is income minus expenses. Compare the cost per story of watching the police blotter and listening to the emergency bands on the radio versus sending a crew out to the Special Olympics. By listening to the police band, you could pick up several stories a day. The Special Olympics takes a whole day and gets you one story.

It's immediately apparent that bad news is cheaper to get. I've done a cursory search for market research that indicates that people want bad news, but haven't come across anything. As a matter of fact, it seems that focus groups tell you the exact opposite.

What happens when the blogosphere is able to deliver the stories consumers want and the MSM is clinging to it's old way of packaging the news? You get declining ratings and declining stock prices.

Bingo.

Previous business analyses of the MSM can be found here.

Technorati tags: msm business marketing profit

I'm Ready for My Close Up, Mr. DeMille!

I finally found a good way to photograph Jacob. In a previous post I described how difficult it is to get a good picture of the zippy little rodent. I discovered that if I put him on a windowsill, he tends to stay put long enough to get some good shots.

Since he is nocturnal, I did this at night with the room lights dimmed. I turned the flash off on the camera to eliminate the red eye effect. I really liked these to photos. I hope you do, too.

The Future of the News Media, Part 3

Laurence Simon has an outstanding post today on the crew required to produce TV newscasts. It tells you part of the reason that the Mainstream Media (MSM) is a failing business model.

Profits are income minus expenses. Laurence's post tells you how high the expenses are for the MSM. Compare that to your standard blogger, such as those on the MilBlog Wire Service. A digital camera, an internet connection and a computer are all a subject matter expert (SME) needs to become a content provider.

Yesterday I went and took photos and did interviews at a local Special Olympics event for my next World of Good post. Cost to me: 10 miles on my pickup truck and 5 hours of my Saturday. I will provide equal or better coverage of the event than the MSM. There just isn't that much expertise required to cover a Special Olympics.

The Internet gives us access to all kinds of SMEs. We can compose our own newscasts sitting at our PCs any time we want by surfing over to our favorite blogs or message boards. I spent much of yesterday reading the New Orleans Saints boards to learn about the NFL draft. The MSM can't compete.

This tells us that there is no longer a high barrier to entry to become a news content provider. In the past, everyone needed the personnel, gear and expertise Laurence describes in his post. Such a market is called an oligopoly and it gives the providers great discretion over pricing. Another example of this is the oil industry. It takes billions of dollars to set up a refining and distribution system. That's why there are so few oil companies.

Instead, news content providers are quite nearly a perfect free market. There is very little barrier to entry and the consumers have access to a huge selection of providers. Companies built to compete in an oligopoly are doomed in this case. They just can't cut their expenses enough to survive.

I recently cancelled my subscription to the San Diego Union. It had nothing to do with politics or any kind of boycott. I just don't need them any more and I don't want to spend money on them. I will never go back. meanwhile, they still have to run printing presses and pay reporters and editors and a large cast of characters.

There are still a few portions of the MSM that have high barriers to entry and cannot be replaced easily. One would be helicopter video coverage of natural disasters. Anything requiring specialized equipment and knowledge. Other than that, the MSM's decline should not stop for a long, long time.

Previous essays on this are here and here. Random posts on stories the MSM completely screwed up are here and here and here.

I also wonder if bad news really sells.

The Anchoress has a great post discussing the obsolesence of the MSM with respect to the conflict in the Middle East.

Reggie Bush a Saint!

The New Orleans Saints got the best player in the draft today! Totally cool. I didn't expect him to fall to us and had hoped for the Saints to trade down and get some more picks, but this is fantastic.

In the second round the Saints traded for Cleveland's starting center, something we needed and then picked a solid, if unspectacular safety. I would have preferred an offensive or defensive tackle, but I can live with this.

Reggie Bush. Ahhhhhhhhh.

Update

Scott52, a member of the SaintsReport message boards made this bumper sticker. I love it!

Blogging Forecast

A high pressure system is expected to sweep through The Scratching Post today, making blogging much lighter than normal. As this front moves on through, it will take with it all of the bloggers' time and energy. Expect clearing late tonight followed by a sunny and pleasant weekend with lots of posting and commentary, just in time for the NFL draft where the New Orleans Saints pick second and really should take D'Brickashaw Ferguson with their pick, hopefully trading down with the NY Jets to get some more draft choices.