Here is some text for you to enjoy.

The blog finally looks like a blog. I've got the deep-sounding-because-it's-incoherent-and-out-of-context title, and that list of links to the right. Further, I'd like to point out to you that I am not using any sort of blog engine, as other blog manufacturers do. No---this is all hand-crafted HTML, giving you that added value that only a human touch can give. And after today's entry, it'll have the first overdigressing rant.

So on the subject of the links at right, I feel that the Something Awful link deserves some explanation. It's exceptionally puerile stuff, seemingly written by people who are in the late high school to early college phase. So what do I like about it?

There's the ongoing debate as to whether literacy is in decline, with every single generation since Plato's complaining that we're worse off than we used to be, and that kids are dumber. I'm generally bothered by the lack of perspective in urgent claims that people have been making for the last thousand years. E.g., the environmental crisis, wherein we've gone too far this time and we really will all suffocate on our own pollution in the next few decades; the overpopulation crisis, wherein we're going to run out of land and food any day now; the violence crisis, wherein the people out there today are infinitely more hostile than people, say, during the crusades. You'd think we'd have learned since Malthus. I class the decline in education in there among crises humans have been facing since the origin of the word crisis (circa 1540).

Having given all that blather, I'm going to talk about how people read less now than they used to, focusing on two fields: advertising and humor. On the advertising front, just open any magazine from the 1970s or earlier. The advertisements, for booze, records, whatever, were filled with lengthy blocks of text. Those blocks are gone for good, it seems. The only blocks of text we see in modern ads are those that are federally mandated. Maybe some day even the Surgeon General's warning will just be replaced by a little `no smoking' sign.

I'm not entirely sure what this says about modern consumers. If it's true that advertisers who know their public succeed and those who don't fail, then this seems to imply that modern consumers just require less information (or solely pictographic information) to make consumption choices, that consumers of today deal with text in a fundamentally different manner. Don't know if this is true. It could just be that printing full-color pictures is cheaper now, or maybe it's just that text takes up space on the page where you could be putting boobs.

On the humor side, flash back to National Lampoon, from before we were born (early 70s). It was mostly text. You had articles in which the authors would take on some character or describe some funny situation. It included photos and cartoons, but not a great proportion. [Just as Al Franken's latest book, which is all text save for one comic section, is still a book of essays.]

Puttering around the Net, you find that it's all comics, or splashy multimedia. E.g., Suck, or Modern Humorist. The funnies in the newspaper are of course all pictoral, save for maybe Dave Barry. So Something Awful stands out as one of the few sources of daily humor in written form. Im not going to say silly things about how written humor is superior to pictoral, just that I think it's neat that even with all the bit-throwing ability we have now, people can still make us laugh by just talking.

Of course, SA does have incidental photos, some of which clearly and strikingly outdo the text. E.g., have a look at the Russian Brides pictured in this one.

`But Ben,' you protest, `what about SA's content! it's frequently completely puerile.' Well, depending on your scale. I mean, it sure beats Howard Stern. And both Mr. Stern and Something Awful beat National Lampoon by a mile on the insultingness front. I mean, we're a long way from when you could write about spics and coons in prose, serious or not, and still get respect. For this I am grateful. Sure, there are lots of ways to take political correctness too far, but the movement has made some real progress, even if most of us don't perceive it, and that progress is embodied first and foremost in humor.

Oh, and Something Awful also talks about video games a lot, which the reader may or may not be able to relate to (but compare with this page, which is friggin' hilarious whether you play video games or not). However, they have the absolutely brilliant strategy of only reviewing bad stuff (thus the name, I guess). You know how movie reviews are useful whether the movie is good or bad, but are funny only when the movie is crap. [The Filthy Critic did an all-around great job of being funny regardless of the material. Sigh.] So why not just ditch the reviews of good stuff and stick to crap? This is a strategy which many folks have come upon, but only Something Awful had the bravery to live up to.