The logo also rises

It’s a-comin’

A major consequence of working on the mechanics of this weblog - toiling under the hood - is that it uses time and interest that would normally go into the writing of actual blog entries. That’s a drawback and no mistake. If I had any skill whatsoever at web coding or design…well, no point in idle wishing, eh?

Fortunately, the situation described above is a temporary one. The next iteration of Waveflux - the real deal, baby, not this reddish, generic imposter - is on the way. Thanks for your patience.

Addendum: I forgot to mention that Bettie will also be returning to these pages in some form or fashion. Which is as it should be.

Malcolm Middleton wishes you a Merry Christmas

My wife told me something yesterday that I hadn’t realized: there really is a traditional Christmas-time contest in the UK for the number-one music single, just like in Love Actually (but without Bill Nighy, sadly). Cor blimey!

M was amused to see that the current top contender is a bleaty little tune from wholly fictional, cloven-hoofed Shaun the Sheep of Aardman (that’s Wallace and Gromit to you, Yank) fame. We’ll have to wait and see if that entry can hold out against the slightly more dour offering from Malcolm Middleton - “We’re All Going to Die“:

Key lyric: “You’re gonna die, you’re gonna die, you’re gonna die alone. All alone.”

Er…cheers, mate!

Is our Forbes reporters learning?

Forbes.com may be the “home page for the world’s business leaders,” but let’s hope those leaders don’t take the magazine’s advice on raising children. A slideshow accompanying the commentary “Where to Educate Your Children” lists St. Louis as the 9th best place in the country - out of 20 - to have your kids schooled:

No. 9: St. Louis, Mo.

Public School Support: A

Private School Options: A+

Library Popularity: C+

College Town: B+

College Options: A+

The St. Louis Arch isn’t the only draw to the Gateway of the West–another, it seems, is its excellent education system. More than half a million K-12 students populate the city’s 158 school districts, 16% of which choose to attend private schools.

That sound you hear is the citizenry of Gatewayville laughing aloud…or perhaps sobbing. They know what Forbes doesn’t:

That there is only one public school district in St. Louis - called, oddly enough, the St. Louis Public School District

That these other school districts are scattered about the 91 surrounding municipalities in the St. Louis metro area

That the St. Louis Public School District is in such disarray that it was stripped of its accreditation by the state in March, with authority over the district being handed over to a transitional board

Apart from all that, the Forbes piece gets an A-freakin’-plus.

(Via rev_matt at STLbloggers.)

The Lumiere Place-Dispatch

Visitors to the web analogue of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch had best put their Ray-Bans on first, lest their retinas be scorched by the garish Lumiere Place advertising that serves as wallpaper today:

Subtle!

The P-D must have decided it could make additional cash by renting out the space formerly occupied by its non-revenue-producing (and fairly unattractive) original background imagery:

An improvement? Sure, if it’s money that matters, which seems to be the subtext here. While it’s likely that the wallpaper will disappear once we get past this opening day for the new Laclede’s Landing casino, it’s possible that this is just the start of a new and visually intrusive ad arrangement at the website.

This development becomes more interesting in light of the recent change made to the layout of the forums at STLtoday.com. The number of topics displayed on a given forum page has been reduced to a measly eight. The intent behind the change was announced - in response to irate comments in the forums - by Bob Rose, deputy managing editor for online and presentation:

Those who have called us out on this as a way to increase page views are right on the money. That was our immediate goal.

Page views are one of the ways we pay our freight around here. We don’t charge you a subscription, but we want to continually invest more and more into stltoday.

That this is a frankly artificial way of inflating page views - forcing readers to click more often and spend more time hunting for topics - is so obvious that it’s almost not worth mentioning, but it’s no less insulting for all that. The casual mention of the option of going to subscription mode shouldn’t go unremarked: that ship has sailed. The New York Times has dropped its TimesSelect subscription wall, and even that bastion of capitalism, the Wall Street Journal, is headed for free access online. If those publications can’t make people pay online for their product, then subscriptions are hardly a realistic option for the P-D, and it’s…unhelpful, let’s say…to even bring it up as a possibility.

Times are tough for newspapers, without a doubt. Their websites will naturally undergo evolution as publishers try to maximize profits and attract readership, but the kinds of changes we’re seeing at STLtoday.com - which already suffers from a crowded, clunky design - don’t help. One can only wonder what other changes are in store for a newspaper website that is already a less than inviting experience for readers.

The head hobbit returns

There and (wait for it) back again

It probably shouldn’t please me as much as it does that Peter Jackson and New Line Cinema have resolved their legal differences and that the director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy will return to Middle-Earth as executive producer of The Hobbit …but I am indeed pleased. Very much.

So all that litigation-fueled nastiness…

A litigator for New Line, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he is working on this lawsuit, said the money paid to Mr. Jackson so far is in line with the contract he signed.

“Peter Jackson is an incredible filmmaker who did the impossible on ‘Lord of the Rings,’ ” this lawyer said. “But there’s a certain piggishness involved here. New Line already gave him enough money to rebuild Baghdad, but it’s still not enough for him.”

…and those intimations of extortion…

Jackson accused New Line of trying to resolve the lawsuit by tying it into his participation in “The Hobbit,” a deal that Jackson admitted would probably make him “much more money” but which was, in his opinion, “the worst reason in the world to agree to make a film.”

“Ken got a call from the co-president of New Line Cinema, Michael Lynne, who in essence told [him] that the way to settle the lawsuit was to get a commitment from us to make ‘The Hobbit,’ because ‘that’s how these things are done,’ ” Jackson wrote. “In our minds this is not the right reason to make a film and if a film of ‘The Hobbit’ went ahead on this basis, it would be doomed.”

…can now go the way of Morgoth. Time to celebrate over a pint at The Green Dragon.

Note: It would be unseemly to suggest that the relative disappointment, box-office-wise, of The Golden Compass had anything to do with this reconciliation between New Line and Jackson. But that doesn’t mean that others haven’t wondered aloud.

Will New Line survive after this? Who knows? Assuming they have any cash left some good could come of “The Great Golden Compass Implosion” of 2007. Maybe, just maybe, New Line might pay what it owes Peter Jackson and pals for The Lord of the Rings and then hand over every remaining dime to Jackson so he can get The Hobbit made in time to save the studio. That’s me being optimistic. Very optimistic.

Sometimes optimism is justified, eh?

Roid rage

For me, the most interesting aspect of Mitchell Day was the overblown “team coverage” given the story by local NBC affiliate KSDK. This is what happens when a station tries to take ownership of a story. Similarly hysterical is the war font treatment employed by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Why, it’s the biggest story since the invasion of Iraq, or so you’d believe. (Great image juxtaposition of Mitchell and Selig, though.) Pretty shrill for a report that is rather underwhelming in depth and in scope.

After spending all day yesterday on the topic, Will Leitch of Deadspin provides the appropriately jaded viewpoint:

This is what MLB paid $20 million for? This took nearly two years? Essentially, Sen. Mitchell has two sources, a bunch of media reports, Jose Canseco’s book and every player in baseball (save two) ignoring his requests to talk. The only reason Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte are in here is because they were unfortunate enough to have acquaintances who had no choice but to talk. The report has brought us no closer, because nothing possibly could. We don’t think this is going to bring us any closure, because the report is so obviously not comprehensive.

Everyone wants us to move on. That’s fine with us; we’ve been wanting to do that for a while anyway. But the people in this document are guilty scapegoats; they’re the unlucky folks who got caught. (Kind of.) Is that enough to discontinue suspicion of everyone? They hope so. We highly doubt it.

Yawn, indeed. You should be neither shocked, nor awed, nor impressed by coming claims that we have entered the “post-war steroid era.”

Open sourcery

You can hear the call echo across the blogosphere: Movable Type is now open source. But let’s get down to brass tacks, shall we? What does this development mean to me?

Directly: Not a thing, really. Examining code makes me feel like I’m trying to read goat entrails. I have no desire to download nightly builds. I have a paid license for Six Apart support, which works (except on those unfortunate occasions, rare though they are, when it doesn’t).

Indirectly: It means a great deal. Even after the whole MT 3.0 licensing kerfluffle, a core of dedicated MT fans and experts stayed with the platform. These are people who actually like the feel of goat entrails. Their plugins and workarounds and advice and direct contributions to MT have been of great help to people like me who eschew hosted blogging solutions in favor of more extensible options, but whose knowledge and ability when it comes to coding is limited. That community will be reinvigorated by MT’s move to open source, and that can only rebound to my benefit.

Which is what counts, after all.

So you MT demigods, you hackers and consultants: the source is open. Get busy with it! I’ll be asking you for favors very soon.

Comment is not free

Commenting is rather catch-as-catch-can here at the blog, and I have no idea why. Thought I might have remedied it last night. Thought wrong.

Working on it.

There are no stupid questions…

…but there are plenty of embarrassingly revealing ones, as demonstrated in this Mike Huckabee moment:

I asked Huckabee, who describes himself as the only Republican candidate with a degree in theology, if he considered Mormonism a cult or a religion. ‘‘I think it’s a religion,’’ he said. ‘‘I really don’t know much about it.’’

I was about to jot down this piece of boilerplate when Huckabee surprised me with a question of his own: ‘‘Don’t Mormons,’’ he asked in an innocent voice, ‘‘believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?’’

This is Mitt Romney’s fault, naturally, and not for simply being a Mormon with the temerity to run for president. If only Romney had more forthrightly and courageously explained the tenets of his faith to the populace when he had the chance, Huckabee could have taken copious notes and so avoided sounding like…well, like most of us in this country. That is, non-Mormon Americans who know little of the religion outside of what they learned from the latest episode of Big Love.

I’m kidding about Romney here (a little). Though he did pass up a rare opportunity to address the aspect of his candidacy that seems to concern many voters, each person owns his or her own ignorance and is alone responsible for remedying it. The take-home point is simple: Huckabee, an ordained Baptist minister, doesn’t even know what he doesn’t know about other people’s faiths, and that makes touting the superiority of one’s own faith a dangerous practice.

Actually, that’s a lesson to be heeded even by people not running for president.

Cold consolation

Well, the critical weekend in fantasy football has come and gone, and my tenuous scheme to sneak into fourth place overall in Oliver Willis‘ league - and so enter the championship playoff bracket - went all gang aft a-gley. Eighth place (out of twenty) is where I wound up. Bah!

So it’s the consolation bracket for me. I should count myself fortunate; I could easily have slipped to ninth place and wound up on the fantasy sidelines altogether. As it is, I am now fighting to finish the season in fifth place.

Time to dispatch Guess Who’s Back to the land of the losers!

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