The hammering you hear backstage is the result of continuing hard work as the Waveflux redesign continues.

It has been quite the adventure thus far.

Current outlook: Guardedly positive.

Current timeframe: Days, not weeks. I think.

• Program note
• Time to face the strange changes: New look for STLtoday.com
• The eternal yard sign struggle
• Open mouth, insert ad: Bush gaffe becomes Kerry selling point
• Upgrade fever, kind of

Look for actual content in this department in the days to come.

• Is this subject really necessary?
• This is not a post either
• A word cloudy day
• Light posting today
• The very image of business blogging

One of the very best things the Missouri electorate ever did was to usher conservative water boy Jim Talent out of the Senate and into the unemployment line. You’d think that the humiliation of losing to Claire McCaskill might have taught Talent the folly of pandering to homophobia in exchange for votes…and you’d be wrong. Think Progress reports that as part of Mitt Romney’s chorus, “One-note-Jimmy” is singing the only tune he knows: “Teh gay, teh gay, beware teh gay…”

[Romney's] always had the same position as to regards to the gay agenda. Look, he wants to know people to know he values gay people as people, okay? But he doesn’t want the militant gays to be able to change the cultural institutions of the country.

One good reason for Romney to go down: One less coattail for the whining, wheedling likes of Talent to cling to.

Also noted at Pam’s House Blend.

• Jim Talent: Gay basher for Romney
• Jim Talent, not-so-proud Republican
• The spy novelist who wants us to come in from the cold
• Memo to Senator Obama
• Jim Talent thinks the Constitution is inconvenient

The local gas stations will probably be selling regular for five dollars a gallon after today:

Oil prices, after taking an initial dip on a weekly government report on inventory levels, crossed the $100 threshold Thursday and continued a six-year, five-fold spike driven by surging demand and limited supply.

U.S. light crude for February delivery crossed $100 a barrel around 11:30 ET on the New York Mercantile Exchange before slipping a few cents. Oil had traded down 63 cents just prior to the report’s release.

Yeah, I know, five bucks per is overstating the possibility. Here in St. Louis, anything over $3/gallon is a headline story. It’s coming, though. Sooner or later.

• This is why we filled up the tank this morning
• That Toyota Prius is looking better and better
• Toolin’ up in the kitchen
• Difficult to keep up
• Gassed

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!

• Malcolm Middleton wishes you a Merry Christmas
• Best election analysis I’ve seen all year
• California steps up, strikes down gay marriage ban
• Hastert the hack
• As others see us

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.)

• Is our Forbes reporters learning?
• Lesson number one from Creg Williams: Focus
• Prom season gives way to bomb threat season
• Unity under pressure
• Off to a standing start?

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 Lumiere Place-Dispatch
• More ad subtlety at STLtoday
• Time to face the strange changes: New look for STLtoday.com
• St. Louis Post-Dispatch noted for front page design
• Another reason to thank me, Post-Dispatch readers

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?

• The head hobbit returns
• Kirsten Dunst, the sequel
• Globular
• Book meme
• GOP tactics at work in Ohio

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.”

• Roid rage
• ChoicePoint: An insufficient remedy
• Dr. Pangloss on Iraq
• Friggin’ unlikely season continues for Cardinals
• Take that, steroid-addled freak

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.

• Open sourcery
• Electoral votes: What projection’s in your wallet?
• Had I known this, I wouldn’t have bothered
• Blogspot blogs: Missing in action?
• If (lastStraw) then (WordPress)