And now for something completely different

I realize that I have been teetering on the brink of some form of madness or obsession the last couple days, though I believe it was madness based on reasonable grounds and sound logic. I am not exactly sorry for this. A little madness from time to time can be a very good thing. However, it is almost Easter and it is also almost the weekend, and these are both excellent things for which I am extraordinarily grateful. So, rather than continue in this vein, I suppose I should write about something else perhaps a little less demanding of my sanity or my better nature. For now I will defer to John Allen, whose reporting on this matter is reasoned and nuanced and well worth the read.

Now. For the different.

I was thumbing through a dead-tree magazine the other day when it struck me that the page was green and the text white. There was a large black and white photo on one page. A separate story from the one I was reading was blocked off into another corner of the first page. It was exactly how magazines have always looked, really, and yet it struck me suddenly how different the format was from anything one finds at a website.

One doesn’t flip from one blog post to the next and have the page color change, the font change. One doesn’t find articles interwoven with other articles, or sudden full-spread illustrations or photographs.

I wonder if this would be possible – or if it has been done? Could the online experience be made more colorful and haphazard in a way that some dead-tree magazines are?

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So I am giving up serious reading for a while. I’ve decided that when one has small children one should avoid serious philosophical inquiry and stick to fun books. I am on the fourth Malazan book, House of Chains, and so far it’s a good read. I kept trying to read various tomes on economics and moral philosophy and would simply fall asleep each time I began to read. So it’s fantasy and science fiction for me at least until I reach pre-children levels of sleep.

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Via Jason Kottke, this is pretty neat:

Yes, these are labels you can print out and put on your own cans and bottles to make them look like Dharma Initiative supplies.

Speaking of Lost, it’s been an excellent season and I’ve meant to blog about it, but I just never get around to actually watching the episodes until a week or two later. That makes me a lousy television blogger to say the least.

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Hmmmm. I think I’ve run out of things to write about, though I know that not long ago I had several other things I wanted to ponder. They have slipped away. Must be a sign.

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Happy Easter!