The Entroporium

Upon its release in 1983, Duck Rock’s distillation of Soweto, South Bronx and proto-electronica sounded like nothing on earth and everything on it at the same time.

Even if it’s staged as a rock concert with an open bar, it’s pretty tough to get musical-goers out of their seats.

Nobody plans to have a combover. They’re insidious. They are the product of years of attrition, denial, compensation and the simple refusal to adapt to new ways – just like the Oakland Raiders.

A recent Clay Shirky post, “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable,” says that the newspaper as a business model is dead, killed by its reliance on industrial printing technology. The future, he tells us, will be based on experiments in journalistic form and not any particular form of media, new or old. Meanwhile, as I talked [...]

In celebration of my birthday today, I’m republishing this article that I previously posted on Facebook about six weeks ago.  Birthdays are always a good time for summing up, thinking about the past and how it got you where you think you may be going – and as my friends know strong opinions about music [...]

As an old print hand, the collapse of the magazine business model has been a sad thing to observe and play a small part in.� The typical big US title � think something you�d pick up at the airport or (tellingly) from a waiting area �has staked its business for decades on printing & distributing [...]

With all the fuss over the empty luxury seats at the new Yankee Stadium, I was mildly surprised to find something similar happening in my own backyard.  At Sunday’s A’s-Rays game at the Oakland Coliseum, all the ingredients for a great day at the ballyard were in place: sunny April weather, last year’s AL champions [...]

We got a little surprise Tuesday night when we let Ruby out back to do her evening business. For those of who have never been lucky enough to feel the full fury of fresh skunk, let me give you some quick wisdom. Fresh skunk does not smell anything like the mildly unpleasant musk you occasionally [...]

Today presents a challenge to my core identity. I’ve been attending Cal games since I was a wee cub of six. That’s thirty-three years (cough) of futility. Not totally futility, mind you — there have been a few bowl games and good years — but thirty-three years without playing in the Rose Bowl or BCS [...]