Happy August, generally and specifically. May it be pure perfect summer for 31 days. And after that, it's still summer, right? Doesn't technically end until sometime in September.
Hah! No one believes that. Fair ends, it's done.
QUESTION: If you saw a man walking down the street with a little girl, and she seemed to be trying to pull away, would you call the cops? If you were the policeman sent to follow up on the 911 call, how would you respond?
WEB CULTURE This got some flak from Gawker, but what hasn't.
They called it a marriage announcement that makes you want to punch love in the face, or something like that - in a few years, every internet headline will be "so this is a thing," or a clever variant. I'm torn: this rankles, because reasons, as they say on the internet (as in, saying "so this is a thing" is clever because reasons) but . . .
Let me start again. It's a well-done site, and may represent an entirely new art genre: the wedding announcement as design portfolio. On the other hand, their timeline begins with "September 1996 She bought a Smashing Pumpkins album, painted stars on her bedroom ceiling, and felt emotional." They're described by Gawker as "hipsters," so maybe that's meant ironically. I don't know anymore.
Elsewhere on the internet: the Daily iPad-only digital newspaper has shed a third of its staff. Problem: it's not really on the internet. It's online, but not on the web, which is like being on TV but only on a 3D HD channel. I tried it for a while, but it wasn't particularly interesting - too l sketchy, too breezy, too much fluff - there aren't any settings to wall off anything that uses the word Kardashian" - and not enough platform-specific things like 360 panoramic images. They had one from Tahir Square that was quite impressive, and made me think this was the future of news apps; I still think so, but it has to have heft. Ten tons of content you can't get elsewhere. Otherwise people will stick with Flipbook or Zine or an app that scrapes from all your feeds. Did you know AOL has one as well? It's "Editions," and it's quite pretty.
SAD The nation's oldest store has closed. Pshaw: 224 years? There's a pharmacy in Tallinn that says it's been open for seven centuries. Pikers. On the page's "related news," section, UPI suggests I might also enjoy a story about Creeky, the world's oldest clown.
