This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
People don’t really want to watch or read news that does the right thing. The McNeil-Lehrer Newshour was a great example of this. Quality news, mostly information, and no one watched it. It was dry as toast in a diner at breakfast on Saturday morning. Is there any way to fix this? No.
On the Internet, news is consumed a la carte. If someone shows up on the main page of a website and doesn't see anything of interest, they leave. This negatively impacts ad revenues. The solution on the Internet is to pack news websites full of things that will draw people in, regardless of whether they are news or not.
If I see anything remotely like a telcom-run faster internet that you have to pay more to get preferential traffic on, I'm out folks. I've seen this story before, I ran an ISP back in the late 90s.
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ESPN has this problem with sports, it's impossible to fill 24 hours with sports programming so they have to resort to things like poker and arm wrestling tournaments.
Few things are impossible in themselves; and it is for want of application, rather than of means, that men fail to succeed.
As great minds have the faculty of saying a great deal in a few words, so lesser minds have a talent of talking much, and saying nothing.
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Jewels! It's my belief that when woman was made, jewels were invented only to make her the more mischievous.
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Most people I’ve talked to are convinced that they’re not getting valuable information from news media anymore. I’m not talking about tinfoil-hatters either, these are intelligent people who believe their news media has failed them.
As it is the characteristic of great wits to say much in few words, so it is of small wits to talk much and say nothing.
Media Fearmongering stories tend to always cover somewhat unlikely events. Recently I read of an initiative to require car manufacturers to install sensors that alert drivers when they leave a baby in the backseat accidentally. Along those same lines, there is an off switch for the passenger-side airbag in my car, a device that has caused only 30-40 deaths ever. By comparison, more people die every year from drinking too much water. Should Congress legislate safety shutoff valves for faucets? Should they regulate our water to keep us from drinking too much?
Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams
There is a particular disdain with which Siamese cats regard you. Anyone who has walked in on the Queen cleaning her teeth will be familiar with the feeling.
Few people know death, we only endure it, usually from determination, and even from stupidity and custom; and most men only die because they know not how to prevent dying.
Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams
The Ultimate Answer to Life, The Universe and Everything is...42!
Impression | People | Truth |
Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams
They wouldn’t even lift a finger to save their own grandmothers from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal without orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters.
Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams
When the girl sitting at the next table looked away from a moment, Dirk leaned over and took her coffee. He knew that he was perfectly safe doing this because she would simply not be able to believe that this had happened.
If bird flu had killed 1.7 million people last year, everyone would panic. We’d have 72-point-font headlines screaming about the end of the world, riots in the streets, and general societal collapse if Mass Media is to be believed, given its dire bird flu predictions. It turns out that 1.7 million happens to be the number of people killed by tuberculosis in 2004. Three million people would be even worse, right? That’s how many people died from AIDS worldwide in 2004. Nobody is panicking.
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Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams
To Trin Tragula's horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.
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