The Offline Report

The LATimes just hired a hot sports columnist who will write about sports, and its influence on fashion culture and politics . The columnist, named LA Granderson, first got the idea to become a writer by sifting through waste in search of words assembled just so: Granderson has nothing against traditional sports columns. Growing up in Michigan and sifting through garbage cans as a kid to find copies of the Detroit Free Press to read the legendary Mitch Albom, Granderson always wanted to be a sports columnist for a newspaper. But his career has carried him — quite successfully, it should be noted — to other things: television (mostly on ESPN), some newspaper work, radio, websites and even a little acting. Paper news is now expensive. Friends in L.A. who get the Sunday paper, please litter benevolently! The rich who can afford it should take care to not dispose of it all into the recycling bin. Leave gems on public transit seats. In laundromats, on dentist coffee tables. Make it terr

Friday Aug 3, 2019 NYC Subway Officials Move to Crush Last Vestige Of Newspaper Distribution:    ibtimes.com The Reading Brain in the Digital Age:    scientificamerican.com Thursday Aug 1, 2019 "I attended the hearing alongside Max Schrems, an Austrian lawyer and privacy advocate. Six years ago, Schrems filed a complaint against Facebook Ireland for transferring his data to the United States, given the scope of U.S. government surveillance."    justsecurity.org Richard Clarke says CEOs pay ransomware, and we shouldn't deny mayors that option.&Nbsp;   usatoday.com Wednesday July 31, 2019 That the capitalist-celebrating Wired magazine published a bromide on disruption that opens with what-some-called-a-commie folk singer Pete Seger is a sign of something massive.    wired.com New Laws on Data Privacy and Security Are Coming. Is Your Company Ready?:     hbr.org "Debra Donovan, who has rented in Sedona for 19 years, said that she fears the owner

News may be a hellscape but the humans who assemble "an issue" hide pockets of relief within. To wit, the erudite Harper's, August issue, under the auspicious title 'Flight Log': ( From the cockpit transcript of a Navy training flight near Seattle, in 2017. The exchange was released in May, following an investigation. Excerpts from the transcript were first published by the Navy Times. ) ELECTRONIC WARFARE OFFICER: Draw a giant penis. That would be awesome. PILOT: “What’d you do on your flight?” “Oh, we turned dinosaurs into sky penises.” E.W.O.: They would be like, “What the fu?” PILOT: I could basically draw a figure eight, and turn around and come back. I’m gonna go down, grab some speed, and hopefully get out of the contrail layer, so they are not connected to each other. That would be so funny, airliners coming back on their way into Seattle. Just this big fu--- Do they get it done? Relieve your curiosity at Harpers.org . People expend effort with you

Sunday July 21, 2019 ICE used Oakland Airport to deport thousands of detainees:     mercurynews.com This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

Friday July 19, 2019 "A few weeks ago, we hosted a discussion thread in which we asked writers what features they’d like to see in Substack. We got hundreds of responses, asking for everything from image captions to a mobile app."    on.substack.com "Today, the reality is much different for my sons, who will grow up on a web where rampant privacy violations seem to happen on a weekly basis."    edition.cnn.com "This sometimes causes customers behind in line to roll their eyes. The family also forgoes the plastic bags offered in the bulk section of Sprouts, where they load up on rice, coffee, pancake mix and flour. Instead, they grab paper wine bags from the store’s liquor department. Isla and James always make a beeline to the bulk cookie and pastry section."    latimes.com "Here’s the thing: adtech looks like advertising, and gets called advertising; but it’s actually a form of direct marketing, better known in the old days as direct mail,

I've blown through two laptops playing my few music CDs on the computer. A dedicated unhived music player could bring more music into the home. These players are surprisingly hard to find. I want a player - as sleek-looking -- as beautiful -- as a Tivoli standing radio, of which I've owned four . (One Tivoli Model One and three Tivoli standing PAL radios. All sound sublime.) - that ships with repair instructions in case either the tape playing or the CD playing function breaks down. - with an aux port (auxillary port) - with a rechargeable battery or wall plug, like the Tivoli PAL radio. Please Tivoli, make a cassette player. ---------------------- Further Reading: "The PAL has also brought me some of the most transcendent aural moments of my life, alone, outside, with nothing but the stars to accompany a killer Fleetwood Mac session on the FM classic rock station, or a UFO-chasing tale with the late king of after-hours AM weirdness, Art Bell."    theverge.co

What would happen if it stayed down?? This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

A rotating carousel of items fed from a living source such as weather updates could coda an abandoned blog with more panache than is the current practice. That is all. Now watch and listen through Ronaldo Neto's solo; your eyes and ears will thank you: This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

Friday July 5, 2019 The ICO, the UK's Data Protection Authority, published a report saying the ad tech business is not "engaging" and putting forth a solution on "compliance" with the GDPR's strict processing prohibition. This is alarming - no processing of data is allowed anymore? Are the big techs simply ignoring the directive?    jdsupra.com "Andrew Sullivan, legendary gay rights pioneer & journalist, explains why he is being driven out of the movement by extreme trans activists 50 years after Stonewall."    itunes.apple.com    femsplainers.com "There are many more ways in which finance delivered by technology is different, but we will soon stop calling it disruptive, innovative or FinTech. It will just be a new world of finance that has been digitally transformed."    thefinanser.com At Chinese border, tourists forced to install text-stealing piece of malware.   vice.com "On the other side are those who believe th