I went home with sniffles Wednesday afternoon. On the way home, I picked up Sesame Chicken and a NY Times. Why buy a paper? Partly because I'm already past their twenty article online limit, but also because, when I have the time, I do like reading the paper front to back and having the chance to glance at every article before deciding whether or not to read it. I suspect that a lot of articles that interest me would never make it to the most read or most emailed lists online. That seemed to be true yesterday.

There was Gloom Grips Consumers, in which Rae Ann Crotty says, "I might like to think that I'm middle class, but I'm not. I'm not anymore." A Melodic Emblem Falls Out of Time discussed replacing the cherished, but out of tune, bells of Notre-Dame du Paris. I read Senate Saves the Potato On School Lunch Menus, though it was rather silly. Revealed: The Officer Behind the Skinny Tie, talked about the "hipster cop" who often functioned as liaison between the NYPD and OWS. Commander Who Used Pepper Spray Faces Penalty showed the other side of police-protestor relations.

True To Mailer's Life, a Brawl Over His Brooklyn Apartment contained the basic story in the title, though the details were interesting. Mercedes Fires Its US Chief And Cancels Dealer Meeting offered no reason for the dimissal, but TTAC quoted Handelsblatt in reporting that Herr Lieb had been using M-B's cash to renovate his house and pay for club memberships. The Specialized Art Of the Appraisal caught my eye, of course. "All appraisers are not created equal." And Members of UB40 Declared Bankrupt, had the Birmingham County tax court singing, I Got You Babe.

I always liked buying a Sunday Times or Post or Globe once or twice a month, seeing and having the chance to read every article in every section. I was never much of a subscriber. In the 1980s I got a few architecture and sports magazines, but I moved so often, and there were so many copies lost in the mail that I decided subscription was for more settled people. For a brief time, I had the Washington Post delivered to my suburban apartment, but I got tired of getting up early on weekend mornings before the paper disappeared from my doorstep. Since then I have simply bought the Post or the Times or Fine Homebuilding or Consumer Reports when I had both extra cash and time to read. I still see more than enough of People and Sports Illustrated at the doctor's office.

For the last decade or so we've had all this free content on the internet, and not only am I reading a lot more, I'm interacting and writing about it. And now that I'm firmly in the habit of reading online, more media outlets are starting to hide their content behind paywalls. The latest for me is the Baltimore Sun, which allows me 15 reads a week. That will have to be enough, because I'm not paying to read rewritten smears by Andrew Breitbart.


I've been mulling over a NY Times subscription for several months now. The Grey Lady has enough content in the Sunday paper alone, which includes online access, to justify a subscription. But most Sundays I'm at my house, and they won't deliver to my house because it is in that tiny part of the country between Jersey and Kansas City. I don't want the daily papers because even if they arrive before I leave for work, I know I won't have time to read them, and they'll stack up somewhere. There is an internet-only option, but it seems a shame to pass up the Sunday sections for the same price. So I go round and round.

I have always complained that I pay my cable television provider for hundreds of channels, when only about twenty are worth watching - but that's more or less what I want on the internet. Instead of paying subscriptions to a handful of standalone content providers, I want to continue reading online across a broad range of sources. How do I actually manage that? No idea.

Tonight I'm headed to Occupy Baltimore's general assembly. My wife's at her mother's and I figure it isn't getting any warmer, so now's the time. I stopped off for Mongolian Beef to get warmed up, and the owner's little girl read me jokes, like, "If a hen lays a brown egg and a white egg, what color will the chickens be?" "Hens don't lay brown and white eggs, silly." So I asked her, "When is a door not a door?" "When it's ajar," she said, but she didn't know what ajar meant - so I showed her. A fellow from the back asked asked, "What do you call a deer that can't see?" She shrugged and said: "No Eye Deer."