Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for June 26, 2010

Got it on the first try, Zonk.

Ooh! Ooh! Make a boat too, Zonker! (It’s almost the same.)

So why not abandon the paper and just go with the website?

There’s something about the physicality of a newspaper that just doesn’t come through on a website. Admittedly, the newspapers of today are a mere shadow of the ones back in the last century. You want a good example, look at the Sunday comics pages. Back in the day you had a full page of Prince Valiant beautifully drawn in incredible color; now we get reduced images forced many to the page to save the cost of paper.

@ dataweaver. I don’t bring my laptop to the John. The newspaper on the other hand comes in handy for multiple reasons.

The paper is also good for lining the bottom of bird cages…we’re classy around here though, we use the Wall Street Journal…my wife gets it at work…

And you can’t swat a fly with an iPad. Or use it to clean windows. Nor can it keep you warm at night. Or shade your face during a nap. Or…

Silly Putty won’t work on your iPad.

Things a newspaper and a computer can do: You can both save comics and articles.

With the newspaper, you can store them in the trunk and store the trunk in the attic.

With the computer, you can store comics and articles on your hard drive and store them on your disks.

I agree with everyone but must add, I love my paper and coffee before the world has arisen. Also, when I made myself a hat at a jazz concert, I soon had a dozen little ones who wanted one. Of course my local rag had shrunk too much to accommodate them all.

SHEIK Sunday when I opened the comic and there were no inner pages, I wanted to scream of the injustice.

Don’t forget the fireplace, how else are you going to get a wood fire started without newspaper?

I use a lot of newspaper for packing material in shipping. I tried stuffing ipads and iphones in the box, but they just don’t have the impact absorption coefficient of balled up newsprint. Reduce - Reuse - Recycle!!!

On-line newspapers are nature’s sane response to the pollution and waste of her resources.

Millions of trees must be celebrating every morning

“Hey honey..You done with the porn section?” I guess there are some things that the paper can’t offer that the internet can…

Maybe it is a matter of age (I’m 61) but our local newspaper website is a mess. It has lots and lots of blogs and trying to find a real straightforward new story is a chore. I spend about ten minutes on their site and then just give up in frustration.

Zonker gets it where the paper is organized into clearly defined topical sections and you can easily find and read about the topics of interest to you. I’ll take the paper over an internet newspaper any day.

That being said, I must admit I do visit the big national news sites such a ABC, CNN, and others. They are well organized and I can usually find items of interest. Still, nothing has the length, depth, or unbiased reporting of 100 years ago. Sad but our attention span can no longer grasp a story longer than maybe six to eight paragraphs.

Way to go Zonk…as Michael Moore might say, ”Hey dude where’s my newspaper?”

In re yesterday’s comments:

Stebon, it appears that you have spent too much time in your drug attic.

Chikuku, evidence of the “anti-Israel bias”, please. American news, in all its forms, leans strongly pro-Israel.

Re: Thursday’s “permutations”:

Lewreader and BrianCook discuss a (hypothetical?) set of persons who are both “pro-abortion” and opposed to the death penalty. I assume they’re referring to the very large plurality of Americans who are both pro-choice and anti-death penalty.

Another very large plurality is pro-life (anti-abortion) and in favor of keeping the option of capital punishment.

Here’s my question: how many pro-choicers do you know who believe that the death penalty may sometimes be appropriate? And how may pro-lifers have you seen demonstrating against capital punishment?

The fact that most (75% of us?) Americans divide into those two large pluralities implies that neither permutation represents a combination of views that is likely to prevail in our civic polity.

I disagree with both permutations and prefer a third–that of the tiny minority who are both pro-choice and in favor of capital punishment. Does anyone else in the forum adopt this minority combination of views?

Yesterdays media - today’s hat!

I take it Zonker is technically challenged and doesn’t even use a computer. For Sam, “online” is where the action is and the “offline” world of Zonker–and of personal relations–is predictable and unexciting, to someone at her stage of growth.

My father(91 now) continues to read the newspaper, I(60 now) am much more prone to the NET. It is sometimes harder to find a full article on the net and my computer or laptop are not as portable as the newspaper. Perhaps someday not too far in the future we will have a device that is very much like having a newspaper(or magazine) AND it will be connected to the internet. I assume that very few people under 30 actually read a newspaper these days. Hopefully they can read full articles on the net and understand there meaning.

Sam tells us what we like about the internet: its content is new and is interlinked. Zonker should tell her that we turn to a printed text for narratives and opinions that have been “perfected” (in the root sense of “perfecta,” finished by being made self-contained).

Material on the internet is constantly changing but can never be “perfected” because the internet has no final or definite shape. Lacking a single author, the net as an ongoing project will always be imperfect–never self-contained like a “perfected” essay or report (whether in newsprint or online print).

When I was in basic training, the drill sergeants gave us old newspapers to clean the windows with. We all thought they were nuts. It worked great though!

palin drome Genius said, about 3 hours ago

Re: Thursday’s “permutations”: Does anyone else in the forum adopt this minority combination of views?

Yes - I am both pro-choice and in favor of appropriate capital punishment.

TinyTim.odf

Pirate hats, papier mache, draining the fat off fried chicken, paper chains…nope, can’t do that with a PC, either.

jtp: Was that in Tigerland? Did the drill sergeant compliment you on your clean windows? (A “lol”, here)

Useful for training puppies and small children.

palin drome.

I’m with you. They’re both pro-choice actually. Capital punishment is needed for morons that make very wrong choices.

I feel taking a human life is wrong – I am also pro-choice as I do not view an unborn fetus, (blastocyst, zygote, embryo) to be a human life until it can live on it’s own outside the mother’s body – any more than I consider an egg or sperm to be a human life.

Save your arguments, I have heard them all millions of times before and they have done nothing to change my mind since I was 15 years old. They are merely attempts to take away a woman’s right to determine her own reproduction.

palin drome

I hate the IDEA of abortion and I am completely pro-choice. Abortion for me is always a sad choice, but must always be the choice of the woman. (I am male and 61)

safe-legal-rare.

A certain part of me would be pro-capital punishment for the really terrible cases of vicious intentional murder and multiple murder except………..

Enough of me does not trust the certainty of trials. Enough of me sees equal violence in the punishment. Enough of me just doesn’t know enough about human nature and what drives people to do the things they do.

A side issue is the present method of using a “cocktail” to kill. Evidence suggests that the first injection paralyzes the “subject” and the second injection kills very painfully.

Why don’t states adopt one injection, an overdose of anesthesia?

The part of me that is pro-capital punishment is at a gut level. It want the hurter to hurt, period. And perhaps fear is hurt enough.

But I can’t join you in this minority position.

FWIW, I’ve heard of studies that suggest reading off a screen (especially reading something long-form, like a four-page investigative report) is much more difficult than reading it off paper. Even if you ingnore the automatically generated links that cause random words to turn blue and underlined (and which usually have nothing to do with the story), screen-reading is said to demand more effort and attention from eye and brain (among other things, there’s the constant scrolling, as most people prefer to read stuff near the top of the screen), and of course the characters are simpler and less subtle. Add in the many distractions (do you tend to resize your window to try to hide the animated ads that accompany many online news stories), and you’ve probably suffered about a 20-40 percent reduction in the brainpower you can bring to understanding the story. Not a big deal for “Celebrity Gossip,” but maybe important in an analysis of whether offshore drilling can be made safe enough to continue…

most important - READ either one.

No Ushindi, I was not in Tigerland. But my company area was one block north of it (that block was empty and we did P.T. and had formations in it.) We were in south fort (Fort Polk). I’ve heard other references on the internet that Tigerland was initially in north fort, but it was definitely in the south fort by 1969. Maybe it was because a lot of the training areas, like the ranges, were south. We always had to march to the ranges and it was quite a hike in late May through early July. We frequently saw trainees from north fort being trucked because it would take too long for them to march there. (We heard that they usually put the scrawny trainees in companies located in the north fort for that reason.)

And yes, my company commander congratulated me personally on what a bang up job I did on the windows. He said that he never saw a better job in all his years of service. All of the platoon drill sergeants gave me a standing ovation and all shook my hand and slapped me on the back. I’ll never forget it!

jtp: Once again, you’ve brought tears to my old eyes. How proud you must have been! Congratulations, soldier!

Gary you got it again..hey dude where’s my paper? Say this every time my NY Times isn’t delivered…JW2049