Bury the lede!

One of the many ways the Internet has turned media on its head (or hed) is that it buries the lead (or lede).

We'll get back to that in a moment, but first this:

For those who have never worked in editing -- good thinking! But also -- terms like "head" and "lead" are traditionally misspelled in the biz, because when marking editorial changes on proofs, it was important that instructions not be mistaken for text to be inserted. For example, say I was editing a big fat important newspaper. I look at the first pass of the front page, put together by the compositor, and I see that the headline has an error. The story is about a murder at a rival paper, and the header should say PEN IS IDENTIFIED AS MURDER WEAPON, but the typesetter left out the space after PEN. Whoopsie! So I write "Headline should have no space after pen." When it comes back it now says HEADLINE SHOULD HAVE NO SPACE AFTER PENIS IDENTIFIED AS MURDER WEAPON, because my compositor is a moron. Had I written "# on hed" or the like indicating where the space goes, my misspelled and abbreviated writing would not have been mistaken for text to be added. 

Okay, now: Burying the lede. We've all heard that news writing uses the so-called inverted pyramid, in which all the important information is put at the top, with less important info being filled in below, in rough order of importance. This was crucial in the heyday of newspapers, because stories were filed, edited, pasted, and ran within hours, and the news stories had to fit somewhere in the layout. If a story was running long, information of lesser importance could be snipped off without editing. So the lead paragraph (or lede) should have an outline of everything readers needed to know. In my hypothetical case it would be:

• A follow-up on the murder of [victim]
• Featuring our dirty loser rivals
• Police announced the victim died after being perforated with an actual pen
• Any suspects announced or arrests made

The "pen is mightier than the sword" joke can wait for the editorial page. 

If possible the headline and sub-headline would themselves convey crucial information, because that would interest readers and entice them to buy the paper to get the whole story. 

Now, though, it's all about the clicks. So the writers do their best not to give you any information in the header or even the first paragraph if they can avoid it. In fact, the longer they can keep you hunting for information, the longer you'll stay on the page and be exposed to the crappy ads from Temu et al. Take this one -- please:

The headline in the New York Post for this same news was "Jimmy Buffett, legendary ‘Margaritaville’ singer, dead at 76." Right there, you have the name, what happened, what he did, what he was best known for, and how old he was, in eight words. In the online story above you get no name except the news-magnet governor of Florida, "secret" to make it sound mysterious, and first of all "Billionaire," because flies love honey. But if you didn't know whom they were talking about, you'd have to dig around for a while in the story to find out. 

Maybe there's nothing wrong with it -- we all know that the Internet is all clickbait, all the time. It's the only way to make money. If that means resisting reporting the news rather than rushing out to report the news, well, that's our brave new dumb world. 

But it is yet another way the world has been turned upside down. News stories don't report, crazy people get the most attention, idiots are treated as geniuses, illegal immigrants get care while citizens get hosed, tobacco is bad but illicit drugs are A-OK, all official sources are liars, and nothing works well -- if it works at all. 

My grandparents would have thought aliens had taken over or something. Maybe they have! You wouldn't find out from the news sites.

Homeworkinator.

The Guardian (because we have to go outside New York for important news about New York) reports that New York City has banned students from using artificial intelligence for schoolwork:

New York City schools have banned ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot that generates human-like writing including essays, amid fears that students could use it to cheat.

According to the city’s education department, the tool will be forbidden across all devices and networks in New York’s public schools. Jenna Lyle, a department spokesperson, said the decision stems from “concerns about negative impacts on student learning, and concerns regarding the safety and accuracy of contents”.

The first indication that artificial intelligence was being used was that some actual intelligence was being shown by the students. 

Meanwhile, in artificial intelligence news reported by the New York Post, a group using AI to make dirty pictures has been booted from Kickstarter and Patreon. This was interesting to me, because I thought Kickstarter and Patreon only booted fund-raisers from conservatives. 

But getting back to the school situation. This has gone much differently from what I was expecting as a kid. Take, for example, the kids' book Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine, from the series of science fiction books by Raymond Abrashkin and Jay Williams. This 1958 book was still in the library when I was a kid, and it was ahead of its time in a lot of ways. The hero, Danny, and his pals are given access to a new supercomputer, which they proceed to use to write their homework for them. But (spoiler alert!) in the end they find that since they had to enter the data for the computer themselves, they wound up learning anyway. Darn you, computer! Making us learn!

The book's authors could not foresee an Internet, a place with so much information so easily within reach. There is still a catch -- a kid who used a computer to retrieve data from the Internet and write his papers would find that his papers contained a lot of garbage information. However, considering its probable nature and the positions of teachers ("January 6 was worse than the Civil War! Herbal supplements can cure cancer! Men can menstruate!"), the kid would probably still get good grades. 

I guess if kids want to get through school and be as ignorant on the other end as they were going in, that's becoming more likely, and for a variety of reasons. I would have warned against that in the past, but as Tommy Grey once wrote, “Where ignorance is bliss, Tis folly to be wise.” Good ol' Tommy, always making with the epigrams. 

Screeeeech....

I don't want to startle people, but we're all gonna die.

Plus, we're going to have an enormous economic crash.

How do I know this? It's not that I have any great economic knowledge; I just know what everyone ought to know. 

I was reminded recently, though, that not everyone does have such knowledge. A highly intelligent friend, an accomplished young man for whom I have tremendous respect and whose company I enjoy, said that he couldn't blame Trump for anything good or bad on the economy, and similarly Biden shouldn't get blame for inflation or gas prices. Presidents can't control that stuff. 

He is, of course, a Trump hater and is a liberal Democrat. So I was faced with the choice of explaining how inflation works when money is not tied to anything hard -- that every dollar printed is borrowed by the government, and makes every other dollar worth a little bit less, and how supply and demand affect fuel prices, especially when the government adopts anti-supply policies, and how fuel prices raise the price of everything else -- or enjoy dinner. So for a change I kept my mouth shut. (Trump was a spendthrift in office too, of course, so he didn't help in that regard either, even if he was not at anything like Biden levels.)

Thus even smart people don't understand why the current picture is as bad as it is, and fated to get worse. But that only matters tertiarily to my prediction of economic doom. And no, my prediction is not based on the fact that the Phillies are in position to win the World Series, and the Wall Street Journal claims that every time a team from the City of Brotherly Love wins a championship, the nation goes into a recession.

My prediction is based on my observation that so many things around look like the Internet boom of the 90's, only without the concurrent economic flourishing. What I mean by that is, there is an absolute torrent of software startups out there -- all founded by "disrupters" and "innovators," of course -- who are based in expensive cities and whose main success so far lies in getting rounds of funding. As in the 90's, half of them can't explain what they actually do in 5,000 words or less. 

What I'm not seeing, unlike the 90's, is everyone rushing straight to the stock market for an IPO. A bunch of worthless stocks from startups like TwoGuysAndAParrot.Com (not real) helped cause an avalanche of losses spread widely among investors. If companies are flush with cash from funding rounds A through Triple H, only the big-money guys are on the hook if these startups go under. 

However, that's still a problem. For one reason, your savings may be linked to funds that invest in these companies, looking to strike gold. For another, the big-money guys can go on a profit-taking spree to make up for investment losses, which could easily lead to a big fun selloff pile-on that further squishes your 401(k), which is already losing value faster than a herd of cattle diagnosed with Mad Cow Disease. 

What to do? Well, naturally, I recommend putting all your cash into Fredcoin, the Favorite Cryptocurrency of Guys Who Live in My House!

Its value is still solid!
1 Fredcoin = 1 Fredcoin!

Buy now and use your Fredcoin to help fund your new backyard fallout shelter. Call today and our pals at Stiiv's Friendly Bunkers will schedule you for an estimate. 

Act fast! That "market correction" could be here any day now!

Dog reviews.

SynaMutt™ Synthetic Leash
Unbreakable Security for You, Comfort for Your Dog - $10.95

0☆  tastes bad too tuff no g ood don't buy

DogGog™ Liver Flavored Wood Stick Chew Toy

Looks Like a Stick, Tastes Like Liver! -  $6.00

1★ look like stikk mmm yum wait livr what ? flavr good but am confus

Yumpossible™ Doggie Chicken Treats

Delicious Treats for Your Best Friend! 100% Organic! - $21.00

2★★ tayst lik butts 

Securomutt™ Dog Gate

Keep Your Pup Out of Dangerous or Unwanted Places, Guaranteed! - $35.00

0☆  no gud cant get in bad bad bad gate bork bork bork BORK BORK

Sleepi Poopsi™ Dog Bed

A Soft But Supportive Bed for Your Canine Pal - $25.00

3★★★ is gud for naps but still goin on the bed wit you

Manolo Blahnik™ Ibrimu Silver Nappa Leather Open Toe Mules 

Silver Nappa Leather Open-Toe Mules - $965.00

5★★★★★ delish! o so gud chew chew chew an you get 2 at a time oh so tasti

Is it that obvious?

 

Blurry.

I had bad night of sleep, lots of work, and a long drive out and back, and I was ready for a nap. Once I knew the dogs would nap for a while too, I silenced my phone and crashed on the couch, face to the bolsters. I didn't move for almost two hours. 

When I got up, the vision in my right eye was blurry. Like, really blurry. Like, twelve martinis blurry. 

It wasn't hard to guess that I had smushed (to use a medical term) my eyeball by falling into a coma on it. I even had a red pillow mark like an angry villain scar running from my forehead diagonally over the eye. It persisted, however, making it difficult to do the editorial work that helps pay the bills. Could it be just smushing that caused this?

To the Internet! Which, of course, was a mistake.

In no time I found out that waking up with blurry vision in one eye meant that I had suffered:

👀 Glaucoma 

👀 Eye tumor

👀 Stroke

👀 Cataract

👀 Migraine

👀 Eye infection

👀 Tear-duct trauma

👀 Concussion

👀 Diabetes

👀 Macular degeneration (wet or dry)

But I didn't see anything about eyeball smushing. Of course, I didn't see anything clearly with my right eye at all. 

Well, it was a good excuse to knock off for the day, which I did. And I'm glad to report that this morning all is normal. I guess my eyeball reasserted its usual shape, or else I got over my glaucoma, tumor, stroke, etc. 

Remember the kid in Kindergarten Cop who immediately diagnosed Arnold with a brain tumor?

I'm convinced that kid grew up to create WebMD.  

Do NOT try this at home or anywhere.

Today's blog entry is a public service announcement, trying to help a YouTube star get the message to all home craftsmen and artists. 

It may come as a shock to you that things you see on the Internet are not always trustworthy -- although I doubt it, since you show the intelligence and good taste to visit this site (ahem). But what will come as a shock to you or me or anyone else, a shock of the fatal variety, is if we try this stunt.

Ann Reardon is a food scientist and baker from the Land of Oz, maybe best known for her incredible miniature bakes on her "How to Cook That" channel. She also makes terrific videos that review silly kitchen implements and debunk food hacks. But this debunking isn't about food; it's about a project using electricity to burn patterns in wood. At the time she made the video there were 34 known deaths in the United States reported due to this project, and who knows how many more in other places or just not reported in the newspapers. So of course YouTube moved this important video to the top of their viewing for everyone, right?

Nah, they banned it. 

After making this protest video with the important parts of the original and posting it, Ann had shamed YouTube into reposting the original. But I wanted to do my little bit to keep this going, because I know a lot of crafters and you probably do too, and let's not do this craft together, shall we? 

Here's the problem in a nutshell, which she explains far better than I can: While normal household electricity is usually not instantly fatal to an adult human, this project calls for taking the transformer out of a microwave oven and using jumper cables to burn patterns in wood. An average dingdong like myself might think that's just a means of getting the juice to the cables, so it's no more dangerous than sticking a paper clip in an outlet. There might be a pop, and I'd get a shock and maybe a burn, but it's not going to kill me, right? And when these things happen, the circuit breaker will instantly shut off anyway.

And I would be wrong, oh so wrong, because the transformer lifts the voltage coming out to about 2,000 volts, enough to stop my heart before I even hit the floor. The circuit breaker has no connection to the transformer's output, so it doesn't even know this is happening, so the juice won't shut off. Even brushing against the wood while doing this craft can impart a fatal shot of Reddy Kilowatt. 

So bear this in mind if you should know anyone who likes to try woodcrafts, or is known to fall for the various "life hacks" promised on Internet videos. Beauty and art may be worth dying for, but foolishness is not.  

The Internet of Annoying Things.

NB: Gag inspired by yesterday's Bleat on the Great Lileks's site.
 

The truth is out there.

 

Gab grab bag.

Parler is fighting for its life now after being cut off at the knees by Google, Apple, and Amazon, fearing that the president of the United States (for two more days) will flee to that platform. So I've established a profile with my handsome Vitamin Fred icon on Gab's site now. 

As I wrote when I joined Parler back in October, "I always entertain hopes that my blog might entertain others, and maybe even entice them to try one of my novels," and I thought that the site might help me do that without enduring the firehose of horror that is Twitter.  

Now it's become more than that, though. For years I desired to keep this blog free from political content beyond some light satire. I never intended to write fiction for political purposes, hoping to entertain any reader. I would prefer to write funny stuff about food and dogs and middle-class life and post goofy cartoons every day. But I was raised by libertarians and conservatives and liberals to love free speech, even when I don't like the content, and the cancel culture that's gripping the West is an abomination to everything for which our nation stands. Books are being forced out of publisher's lists or literally out of stores; persons are not only attacked but their families and livelihoods threatened. The only law these victims have broken is the law in some dillweed's imagination that says YOU CAN'T SAY THAT, although everything in our culture and history is meant to say we can. Meanwhile, our totalitarian enemies around the world smile.

The weird thing is, the Left used to garb all kinds of things as political speech -- comedy, obscene music, getting naked in public -- as political speech to prevent its being banned. Now the very speech they most seek to ban is political speech, and of course everything is political when you look at it through blood-colored glasses. The kind of speech that conservatives are apt to censor is very narrowly defined -- obscenity, threats, slander and libel (especially of private citizens) -- but if you remove all that I think half of the world's Tweets would disappear.

This all makes it sound like I'm using Gab for firebrand purposes, but no -- I just want to help support a free-speech centered company that believes in the user's privacy and doesn't support the Leftist mobs. A lot of people feel that way, and the Gab servers are being somewhat overwhelmed as I write this. I'm sure it will all settle down soon, and when Gab becomes popular enough to pose a threat to Facebook, the tech oligarchs will come after it as well.

Meanwhile, should you decide to join up, look for your friendly Fred Key on the site and let's have a gabfest. Hey, talk is not only cheap -- it's free.

Fred's Book Club: Pet and 'Net.

Welcome, friends, to another episode in the Humpback Writers series, which runs every week on Wednesday, or Hump Day. Are there actually humps, or camels, or anything like that connected to these books? Beats me. Humps be damned! Sometimes these things are only even books by a stretch of the imagination. 

That applies today, as we have a look at the sad remains of what once, briefly, was a titan of the Internet bubble, now almost entirely forgotten. I am referring to the "author" of a novelty book produced during that wild era, a book featuring a character that was for a short time one of the most popular advertising mascots in the world. And this is that book:

Those of us over age 23 or so will probably remember the brief renown of the commercials for Pets.com. This was a pet supply site founded in 1998 for that World Wide Web thingy, which was advertised by a wacky sock puppet in the shape of a dog, voiced by actor Michael Ian Black. This is that dog, and this is the short book that featured some of his signature humor. 

These are three spreads from the book, and there's not a whole lot more; as it promises on the back cover, "as much as I could fit on a roll of 35mm film." That's about all there is to it. It's short and funny, meant to cash in on the popularity of the commercials. Unfortunately that was about the only thing Pets.com did cash in on. 

In these days of streaming TV I wonder if we'll ever have such an advertising phenomenon again. The puppet was interviewed on network television -- it even was a float in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. So naturally branded sock puppet products like this book would follow.

This was an era when bales of funding went to any old startup online, after which the entrepreneurs would reveal that they didn't know what they were doing, didn't have any idea how to get a customer base that would support the massive spending used to get things going, were only interested in blowing money on pool tables and employee backrubs and high salaries and nothing else, or some other combination of incompetence and malfeasance. As noted in Wikipedia's necropsy of the site, "Although sales rose dramatically due to the attention [of the sock puppet], the company lost money on most of its sales through mismanagement. Its high public profile during its brief existence made it one of the more notable victims of the dot-com bubble in the 2000s." I'd heard that Petco bought much of the remains of the property, but now the URL Pets.com leads you to the PetSmart site.

Running a pet supply site can be tricky. Pet food in any bulk, canned or bagged, is quite heavy and expensive to ship. Pet owners who know that regulation of pet products is nothing compared to that for human products are often wary of buying online, or at least they were in 2000. Amazon started a pet site called Wag (after losing its own stake in Pets.com), but has pretty much folded it into the regular site now. The real breakout in the field was Chewy.com, which we at Key Casa have found to be an amazing and dedicated site for pet owners. Unfortunately it was bought by PetSmart, whose own site was so-so, but so far Chewy has remained very good and we are regular customers.

As for the sock puppet -- well, you may remember that for a while he was doing ads for auto loans, saying "everyone deserves a second chance." But the ads were not funny, just sad; someone else was doing his distinctive voice, and it was not quite right. It all came to an end soon enough. Sic transit gloria puppi, and all that. 

But in this era where sock puppets are so often in the news, sometimes serving as our politicians, let's pause for a moment to remember a really popular sock puppet, who had a day in the sun that was so brilliant, it was doomed to burn out quickly.

Devaluing books.

I have noticed that on PBS's Antiques Roadshow, two things that people often think will be valuable but aren't are old toys and old books. Even when a toy (in the original box!) is valued well, a revisit to an old episode with updated pricing usually shows a drop. For a book to be valuable it needs to be a first edition, of some historical interest, in perfect condition, with dust jacket (if applicable), and so on and so forth, and maybe it's a couple of hundred dollars.  

My concern isn't for the monetary value of books at the moment, though, but of their value in our culture.

Old Joke: How do you break a nerd's finger? Slam his book on his nose.

Before computers took over the world, books had a place of honor in the culture, a value that is lost now. I don't think those of us old enough to remember the pre-Internet days appreciate that. Before computer storage was common, books were the cheapest means of storing any kind of data. And before photography and phonography, putting things down on paper or the like was the only means of storing data. Printing was the only means of reproducing it for distribution.

For centuries books represented the depository of all human knowledge and wisdom. They commanded a respect that I think young people can only imagine. True, people who lived their lives in books, for research, writing, library science, and whatnot, could be teased as bookish or bookworms, but the respect engendered by books and what they meant usually rendered the teasing light.

All of a sudden, slowly when computer data storage began, then suddenly as the Internet blossomed into businesses and homes, books lost their place as the repository of all human knowledge. It happened so fast that we still haven't recovered from the cultural whiplash. 

In a historical trice, a whole category of books was wiped out. Print encyclopedias, trivia books, the full-length Guinness Book of World Records, sports data books, map books, all sorts of general knowledge books vanished or became shadows of their former selves. The Internet was faster, free, and with the smartphone, could fit in your pocket. Sites were never out of date because they could be updated to the current minute. Even if the information was wrong, it was good enough for most readers. And it's not like the old books were always 100% on the money, either. 

Books still have place in our culture anymore; it's just that their prestige has mostly gone. When everything is data, books are just more files to download. 

I think the main loss at this point is historical. Book lovers for the most part had a good sense of history and the continuity of human nature, because the minds of those in the past were still alive in their books. Today, dusty old books have as much respect from those who grew up the Internet as do dusty old Web sites. The Internet has led them to live in the eternal now. The idea of browsing in a used-book store for old forgotten treasures makes as much sense to them as buying old food. Most of those shops are long gone now, anyway.

No wonder these idiots rampage in the streets. Why would they have respect for our culture, our history? Nothing matters or even exists but this current second.

As always, I thank the fine folks at Gutenberg, such as our friend Mongo, for helping to keep the fires of civilization lit. How long we can hope to do that, who knows? The Internet is a wonderful genie, but once it's free from the bottle, you can't control what it does.

Thank you, 2020, may I have another?

Beautiful evening Monday, out in the back with small disobedient beast Nipper, thinking that maybe things will start to get a little more norm--

WHAT THE HOLY HELL IS THIS NOW?

At first I thought it was a beetle, but closer examination showed wasp-like wings. But I've never seen an orange-striped wasp. So? To the Internet!

Deedle deedle deedle deedle deedle deedle deee!

So far I have found:

Stizoides renicinctus, but that lives on Antelope Island in Utah and doesn't look like this.

Abispa ephippium, but that lives in Australia and doesn't look like this.

Vespa mandarinia japonica, but that lives in Japan and is tremendous.

Vespa crabro, but that doesn't look like this.

Maybe it's not a wasp? Well, it's not a boxelder, spittlebug, Mydas fly, milkweed bug, fire bug, or any other damn bug I can determine. The only thing I can guess is, the way this year is going, it would probably sting the hell out of me and I would be allergic to it and die. 

So I throw it to you, o entomologists of the Internet -- can any of you identify this suspect from my blurry photo? 

Worst holiday ever?

June 30 is supposedly World Social Media Day, one of those stupid fake holidays, this one created by stupid fake news media site Mashable in 2010, according to National Today. Mashable does all it can to make the Internet hostile to those upon whom its favor does not rest, so I can't imagine what they would know about anything social. World Hostile Media Day would have been more appropriate.

Ten suggested activities on World Social Media Day are:

1) Post crap.

2) Try new platforms, but not Parler because that must be white supremicist because it's dedicated to free speech.

3) Go meet your online friends in person and post pictures of that.

4) Post a picture of your granny and try to remember if or how long she's been dead, complete with teary emoji,

5) Kitties!

6) Share some stupid meme.

7) Arrange to start a riot and burn down businesses owned by African-Americans to show your support for African-Americans. Also tear down statues of famous abolitionists to show you are down with the cause and not some spoiled clueless white brat like everyone thinks you are.

8) Start a knitting club!

9) Show more pictures of whatever stupid thing you want people to think you ate for lunch. Leave the Ding Dongs off to the side.

10) Demand the defunding of the police while you interview private security firms.

Now, of course I am using the editorial "you" here, as I am fortunate enough to think that readers of this blog prefer the merits of peaceful protest, intelligent discourse, free speech, and respect for history. My readership may be small, unlike Mashable's, but it is not moronic.

I understand that social media, as a collective thing, is a tool, and like any tool it may be used for good or not. You can drive nails with a hammer, or drive in skulls of the innocent. I have used social media to stay in contact with local friends and those from my past who would otherwise have been lost to me. Others use social media to protest the tyrannical societies under which they live, as in Hong Kong and Iran.

Here in America, some use it to target people, destroy careers, drive people to despair, and as seen most recently, play-act as freedom fighters while they behave like Nazis. Sometimes I think there are few things in America as anti-social as social media.

Home eck.

Some years ago when I was between jobs, I pitched a story to a friend who was still employed at a national magazine directed to the young homeowner. At the time the economy was thought to be in terrible shape, largely because it suited the desires of politicians and the media to portray it that way, and all the talk was about economizing. (The economy had little to do with my unemployment, as the economy has been poor in publishing since the start of the widespread use of the Internet.)

My story idea was based on the old shilling gas meters that were common in rental housing the UK. The downside was that if you were without a coin when the gas stopped, you would freeze; the upside was that you knew just how much you spent to keep the place warm. It occurred to me that most of the time we spend money without even realizing it, and I'm not even talking about Amazon Prime. In days of yore, families had a rough idea of what things cost; now we may not ever even see the bill, the money being removed easily from our checking accounts after we sign up, until our credit rating suddenly falls like an anvil in a Looney Tune.

They knew home economics back then.

I proposed to calculate the amount of money spent every time one boiled some water, turned up the thermostat, did a load of whites, took a ten-minute shower, ran the dishwasher, microwaved an enchilada, left a light on in a room all night, and several other daily household activities, so that the happy homemaker would start to understand where the money all goes. The money pitch: How much would you economize if you had to insert money for the gas, electric, or water meter each time you wanted to do these things?

I confess that memory of my father contributed to this idea -- he had an undeserved rep in the house as a tightwad, but he did go around turning down the gas and turning off lights, and always worried about money.

Anyway, I never heard back, which means no. The magazine might have gone for it if I'd had a better name as a feature writer, but I doubt it. I think they thought the story would be a total downer. It would make the Nervous Nellies more nervous, it would make the Sammy Skinflints cheaper, and it would be ignored by the people who don't even want to look at the electric bill anymore because it's boring and upsetting. As I've noted elsewhere, magazines, especially those devoted to one gender or the other, have been treating their readers like retarded children for some time. Still, I confess that the magazine I pitched to liked a breezy, upbeat style, and a penny-pinching piece wouldn't have suited them.

As I think about it, hard-facts stories like mine when applied to weight loss or general health are much the same. They are devoured by the true believers who already live the kale-and-Peloton life, but ignored by the mass of people like me who squint when they have to go on the scale. And yet those articles always find a home. Maybe it's true that Americans are just weird about money. As far as I know, coin-op gas meters never really had a market here.

Fred's Book Club: Everything, Useless.

Last week we had my smallest book; this week, the biggest series.

This Wednesday's episode of the Humpback Writers (named for the fact that it runs on Wednesday, not because of the condition kyphosis, "the third basic type of spinal curvature... In its most severe form, kyphosis becomes a sharp angular deformity known as hunchback") features thousands of writers, because of the nature of the book, or really books. Thirty books. Maybe some of the writers did suffer from kyphosis. How should I know?

Here is the set in question:

Yes, fellow kids, it is the thirty-volume set of the Encyclopedia Americana! No, not the one moms bought one volume a week from the A&P; I think that was the World Book (still around) or Funk & Wagnalls (not). I don't wish to put down those encyclopedias, but the Americana (first published in 1829) was a serious general reference set, the kind of thing found in colleges, high schools, libraries, and the offices of educational publishers.

Alas, here's the rub:

This is the 1985 edition. I have a thirty-volume library-bound encyclopedia that is thirty-five years old, and thus terribly out of date.

What the heck am I doing with an encyclopedia, let alone one this old? Did Fred's mommy, sensing the genius of her boy, buy it in installments to help his advanced learning? Did she buy it as a Hail Mary to try to get some information through his thick skull? Did I win it on The Price Is Right? Did I shoplift it from Walden Books using unusually large pants?

No -- what happened was, one of my first jobs when I was a little baby editor Fred, was as a clerk/mail reader/Dude Friday/dogsbody/research assistant/flunky/water cooler refiller/occasional proofreader for a publisher of nonfiction books for youths. The Internet was little more than a twinkle in DARPA's eye at the time, so it was helpful to have things like a big, serious, unabridged dictionary and a big, serious encyclopedia. I worked at this place for a year or so, and then we heard that the company had been bought and the office was moving out of the city. So, everything had to go, including us. We had jobs for a while, mainly packing down decades of stuff, resolving author and production contracts, all that kind of thing. And no one wanted the encyclopedia. It was just going to be tossed. So, although it was dated even then, I decided to bring it home to my apartment, one volume at a time. There's a lot of information in 23,000 pages of six-point type. At the time, I don't think it could have all fit on a CD-ROM; Microsoft's Encarta had been around a bit, but was not nearly as extensive an encyclopedia. I didn't have a computer at the time, anyway.

The Americana was useful for a while, especially when I was unemployed and scrambling for publishing work. I didn't get many fact-checking assignments then, but I did have some copyedit jobs, and sometimes you want to look things up to make sure they're right. Well, we still had no Internet, children, although that was coming soon. And then we did, and I stopped using the books.

(Remember, wee tots, the Internet is only a source, and as a whole not a reliable source, of information; we all need to learn how to pick out the good stuff from the mountains of crap and fake news. And just because I've linked to Wikipedia in this article doesn't mean I endorse it; it's free and I'm lazy.)

These last few years, the main use of the volumes has been propping up electric candles in the window for Christmas. And, as I have tons of other books that can be used for that, I have to let them go. They take up a lot of space.

And they are out of date. In these tomes, Burma is still Burma, not Myanmar, and George Herbert Walker Bush is still alive, and is known as the vice president of the United States (Volume 5, BURMA to CATHAY). Not only is Yugoslavia still intact (Volume 29, WILMOT PROVISO to ZYGOTE) but so is the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (Volume 27, TRANCE to VENIAL SIN). Persons who have become awfully important in the decades since, like Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, George Walker Bush, Steve Jobs, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Angela Merkel, Osama Bin Laden, Benjamin Netanyahu, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, all of them were alive in 1985, but none of them rated an entry back then.

You can imagine how antiquated the entries on science and technology are. Just a quick example, about Saturn, quoted from Volume 24 (RUSSIA to SKIMMER): "A total of 21-23 moons are known to be in orbit around Saturn." We now know that Saturn has more moons than any other planet in our Solar System: "A team discovered a haul of 20 new moons orbiting the ringed planet, bringing its total to 82; Jupiter, by contrast, has 79 natural satellites," the BBC reported last October.

It's true that some things don't go out of date like that. The quote on kyphosis at the top of this entry is still accurate, and its brief section on treatment for the condition hasn't aged significantly. But even historic information is liable to change. For example, when these books came out, no one knew where Richard III was buried; his body was located in 2012.

The publisher, Grolier (since become a division of Scholastic), only publishes online editions of its encyclopedias now. I'm sure if you've been in a library in the last decade or so you've seen how much of its information services have been relegated to computers. The last print edition of the Americana was published in 2006. Even the Encyclopedia Britannica no longer makes a hard copy version of its encyclopedia. A full set of a hardcover encyclopedia is pretty rare these days.

And I have to get rid of it.

You can't sell these things. I've seen people try online, but shipping would cost more than you could get. Each book weighs about 3.3 pounds; it's close to 100 pounds altogether. It could go book rate, or what the post office now calls Media Mail, for $2.80 a pound, but who wants it that much, that they'd pay $280 just for the shipping?

Libraries don't want 35-year-old reference books. Nobody wants research that will lead them wrong -- well, I guess some of us do, judging by the misinformation online, but they won't bother to haul out the hundred pounds of books just to confirm their biases. No, old encyclopedias are of interest only to historians, and mainly important encyclopedias like the famous 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

You can't recycle hardcover books here (not that our recycling program is anything but a state-law-mandated charade anyway).

I despise sending good books to the trash heap, but I have to start reducing clutter. So, I've started throwing the Americana out, three volumes at a time, six books a week, for an extra ten concentrated pointy-cornered pounds in each load. Surely throwing the very books I'm writing about into the landfill makes this is the saddest entry in the Humpback Writers series.

Also, one reason why I tip the garbage men at Christmas.

Farewell, encyclopedia! Your scholarly words are too good, or just too old, for this world.

Another issue with Amazon.

Suckers!

My wife was lamenting the fact that the lemon drops of her childhood were impossible to find. I looked in the supermarket; I looked in the drugstore. I bought some Lemonheads, by Ferrara, but they were not the ones she wanted. She said the ones she recalled fondly had a dusty sugar coating, but were not too sweet, not too sour, and then I figured it out.

First, a little backup: In the 1970s, there was a big, nostalgic, small-town-values movement in American culture, as people disgusted with huge corporations and corrupt Washington and failing cities and artificial stuff in general wanted to return to the roots of good old-fashioned decency. From this came all sorts of things, shows like The Waltons, songs like "Sweet Home Alabama," foods like Ben & Jerry's, slogans like "Pepperidge Farm Remembers," presidents like Jimmy Carter. (Okay, he was a one-off.) Candy too was given the old-fashioned look, and the kind of lemon drops my wife likes best were the type shown here, not too hard to find right up through the 1980s.

When the 1990s hit, all that went out the window candywise, and we entered the Jolly Rancher era -- strong flavors, sours, crazy colors. Such old-fashioned stuff got harder to find, and remains so.

Claeys has continued to make its old-fashioned candy, as it has since 1919. But I can't find it in the local stores. Fortunately, using the newfangled Internet, I was able to order their lemon drops, and a real old-time fave, horehound candy. (Claeys has its own Web site, but it looks like it was designed in 1919; you can order through Amazon, CandyWarehouse, GroovyCandies, et al.) One taste and my wife said these were just the lemon drops she wanted.

As for the horehound: Horehound is a mint, botanically speaking, but not minty. I'd sometimes seen horehound candy mentioned in old books, and was curious about it. Well, I finally got a bag. You see on the package that, unlike lemon drops, the horehound candy is sold as medicine, "Soothing to the throat." It's quite delicious, almost like the mild-mannered brother of Ricola herb drops. Would it help a sore throat? I'll let you know, if the bag holds out until I get sick again.

So there you have it -- old-fashioned quality candy available for delivery by Internet-age technology. Server farms remember.

Geek no more.

Bad news on the dork step: ThinkGeek is closing down.

Parent company GameStop is shutting down the online store, your #1 stop for geek shopping for the last twenty years. Cruel fate! Where will people who need Star Wars, Star Trek, or Dr. Who merch go now? Or fans of anime, computer and console games, RPGs, cosplay, SF and fantasy, comic books and cartoons? Not to mention those seeking all kinds of weird gizmos, science toys, and whatnot? Especially the whatnot.

This will be tough on my own personal Santa Claus, the lovely and thoughtful Mrs. Key. She's gotten me quite a few presents over the years from ThinkGeek, some of which I've profiled here, like:

World's smallest operational Pac-Man Arcade Game!

Justice League paper clips!

Pac-Man ghost PJ pants that I didn't know glowed
in the dark until I got up in the night to use the
can and almost had a heart attack!

20-sided-die mug!

20-sided-die snack bowl! (Comes apart into two bowls;
one for dip, one for chips)

Medieval weapon pushpins! (Gonna buy a corkboard
just to use them)

Complimentary Timmy the Monkey stickers!

Lawful Good T-shirt!

BATPANTS!!!!!!!

And that doesn't include the 20-sided fuzzy dice for the car, the vanishing fireplace mug, the reusable hand-warmer that eventually could no longer be reused, and other things I couldn't find. All these were great gifts, often stocking stuffers, and all are the kind of gifts that will be harder to find now.

GameStop says they'll have "some" merchandise on the company site, which I assume will be only merchandise related to video games. Okay, I guess they know their business. But I'm no gamer. I'll miss getting ThinkGeek loot.

I sure hope this doesn't mean I have to grow up now. 😱

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