Lately I am bored with everything I see on the Internet. As more and more people flock to Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, they have less and less to say that is the slightest bit worth paying attention to. Like everything else about our culture, it’s “dumbification” pure and simple.
So, I’m even more glad than usual to discover a couple of blogs I hadn’t seen before and gladder still that some of the ones I’ve been reading for a long time can still come up with great posts.
My two favorite “discoveries” are very different beasts. The first one is a blog by long-time comedy writer Ken Levine. Levine was a regular writer for “M*A*S*H*” and “Cheers” and has been involved in many other fine sitcoms over the years. His blog is like getting a table at lunch with the cool kids and finding out all the stuff you always wanted to know about a world you’ll never be a part of. Levine’s blog came recommended via Mark Evanier’s blog, and Evanier himself needs to be nominated as a National Treasure for his devotion to the history of television. Those of you who share my interest in television and show-business history (and you know who you are) would be similarly captivated by Ken Levine.
The second one came to my attention through Adam Gaffin’s Universal Hub. It’s called “Other People’s Emergencies: Random Thoughts of an Urban Paramedic”. As the title implies, it’s written by a guy who is a paramedic, working in Boston. He’s done that job for more than twenty years, and the posts I’ve read so far really show that depth of experience in the sense of having a very unvarnished view about the situations he encounters, without coming across as jaded or burned out on the real tragedies. This post about a shoplifter playing injured to get away from the cops is a typical example of the realities of the jobs of cops, firemen and paramedics in a large city, while this post with a somewhat apocryphal story about an ER resident too quick to cut open a chest is dark humor at its finest.
My blog-buddy John Tolva isn’t exactly burning up the bandwidth with posts to his blog, but the other day he posted this photograph:
It’s a picture of the corner of North Sheridan Road and W. Dakin Street in Chicago as it looks now, with an enlargement of an old photo of John’s father, grandfather, and uncle standing in the exact same spot about fifty years ago. These sort of “past-present” photos are always interesting, and I thought this was a good example, but it also reminded me of a fantastic post John wrote a couple of months ago that told the story of his great-grandparents immigrating to Chicago at the turn of the 20th century and then interwove the tale with a present-day account of him (John) finding himself at the EXACT spot where his great-grandparents lived.
Lastly, a huge shout out to Alan Taylor, one of the small group of online friends I actually know in “real” life via our mutual friend, Andre Torrez. He is the person behind the amazing photo blog that appears daily at Boston.com, The Big Picture. The Big Picture celebrated its first anniversary last week, and in one short year has managed to garner all sorts of awards, praise and imitators. His idea was really simple: every day the Boston Globe, as well as dozens of other newspapers across the country, receive dozens and dozens of news photographs from the wire services, but very few of them are ever actually used in the newspaper or online. His idea was to take the pictures that aren’t used and feature them in large-format, high-definition size, organized topically. After all, the paper pays to get the images, and some of the most spectacular news photos just end up ignored. Alan isn’t a photographer, a journalist, or an editor, he’s a web developer, and he does “The Big Picture” in between all of his regular daily duties for Boston.com. With the fate of the Boston Globe in question, I certainly hope that the New York Times or some other news organization is able to keep this blog available for a long time to come.
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