The Offline Report

In 1988 then-unknown Sheryl Crow, after striking out getting signed on her own with the big record labels, auditioned for and was hired to be a backup singer on Michael Jackson's "Bad" concert tour. She described in 2013 the tour to the New York Times' Jon Perales in a TimesTalk as "an amazing training ground." She said she witnessed there the coinciding traits of high-octane performances, like those given by Jackson on the tour, and "fragility." She calls the quality that performers who clear that threshold, the quality those performers embody, she described as their "divinity." She was careful to say pain and divinity are not the same thing. "You can go on youtube you can see the greatest artists in the world Eric Clapton playing um George Harrison you can go back and see old films of Ella and um Billy Holiday, and you can see these people in their pain in their divinity um not that the two are the same. It's that fragile sp...

Paper books are seen in greater frequency on public transit these days. I have to write more about this another time, but the Washington Post ran a story on a conglomerate's plans to find $250 to $300 million in savings by cutting "duplicate" jobs such as local sportswriters . Cutting a local sportswriter is not cutting the fat out of a news operation, instead cutting a local sportswriter is cutting the bone and removing part of the heart. Another way they plan to save money is to cut into the print costs. Yikes. It turns out, according to one commenter , a newspaper chain in Arkansas is handing iPads out to customers so they can eliminate their paper editions: "Here’s another approach that’s being pursued by a family-owned newspaper, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazzette. The paper has been shutting down its print editions across the state and is giving all its subscribers a free iPad so they can use a digital subscription. If they don't know how to use an iPad the p...

For at least ten years I've taken every day either Adrenal Complex or Licorice Root Extract capsules for sufficient strength. In direct and less direct ways I'm boosting my adrenal system with unregulated steroids, and this worries me. It's possible I will never be able to quit these things. I've tried to taper back and currently take just a half capsule of one or the other every day. At one time I was taking two capsules per day and exercising A LOT. (I looked quite "hot" for a finite interval. It was unintentionally a reverse experiment of those performed by famous models and starlets, when they don fat suits and report back what life is like for other people.) After the honeymoon phase resulting from unregulated health food store capsules boosting my strength, a strange "locking" in the digestive tract occurs especially on days when I take just the Licorice Root Extract. By "locking" I mean digestion gets stuck, "oxidation" h...