March 16

A phenomenon of mixed benefit and harm that the Internet has helped spur on is what I call "hobbification." Many endeavors that used to take the form of careers that generated income now take the form of hobbies that generate little or none. Criticism is now largely a hobby; journalism is fast becoming one. The creation of "content" of all kinds is being hobbified. The writing of encyclopedias is now a hobby! College teaching from the standpoint of adjunct professors might as well be a hobby, it pays so little in relation to their debts. As hundreds of thousands of K-12 teachers are laid off this year due to state and local budget crunches, we will eventually see a move to hire some of them back on a part-time basis without benefits, and thus start to hobbify that profession as a well. Even politics is a hobby, that at many levels can only be pursued by the well-to-do. All this hobbification has its democratizing aspect, obviously, yet it also means a loss of sheer expertise and, very importantly, of life opportunities. Because what are we all supposed to do to earn a living while we pursue our hobbies? The variety of free content on the Internet is great, yet none of us providing it can live on air, either.

T.R. Donoghue at The Faster Times looks at the problem as it relates to the journalistic profession:

http://thefastertimes.com/topstories/2010/03/15/latest-pew-report-details-the-death-spiral-of-american-journalism/

There’s been a decade long search for a new revenue model that will allow our best journalists to continue their vital work....

Well, if everyone has been looking for a decade and no one has come up with the model, it can't be an obvious one; I don't think it exists. The same PEW Research Center report that Donoghue cites also says that most people simply won't pay for online news (beyond what they already pay for online access).

Getting people to pay for news online at this point would be "like trying to force butterflies back into their cocoons"....

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/03/15/business/main6299919.shtml

It's not only jobs that are disappearing in this country, it's whole categories of work, and hobbification can only increase the number of those categories.

Limitless Cinema is smitten, as I am, with Pierre Schoendoerffer's magnificent 1977 film Le Crabe-Tambour, and offers some great images from it:

http://celinejulie.blogspot.com/2010/03/le-crabe-tambour-1977-pierre.html

One of the more intriguing of the lost and apocryphal Shakespeare plays has been his late collaboration with John Fletcher, Cardenio, which we know was performed in 1613. There has long been a controversy over whether Lewis Theobald's 1727 publication Double Falsehood, which Theobald said was an editing of an unpublished Shakespeare manuscript and which clearly uses the "Cardenio" plot (originating in Don Quixote), represents (even altered) Shakespeare's and Fletcher's text. More scholars are weighing in with a "Yea" (hat tip to Moby Lives):

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/8569101.stm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardenio

I've mentioned "free form radio" before at PMD, and here is an interview with Ken Freedman of New Jersey's WFMU, one of the last great free form stations:

I think that's one of the great things about WFMU. It's more than a radio station about music; there really is an appreciation and an awareness of the history of radio and the art of radio. It's something people take very, very seriously: what we're doing as radio, as opposed to just coming on and spinning tunes.

http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/03/taking-radio-beyond-radio-avoiding-identity-politics-and-turning-off-ones-own-station-colin-marshall.html

Since I've been reading and viewing a lot about space exploration lately, partly because I taught a unit on it in my American History class this past fall, naturally I've run across material about the animals that have been sent into space, as a warm-up for humans or for other experimental reasons. Curious Pages has found a 1962 "Easy Reader" called The Monkey in the Rocket:

http://curiouspages.blogspot.com/2010/03/monkey-in-rocket.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animals_in_space

Some of those animals died -- I feel bad for Laika, the first dog in orbit, who was sent up with the scientists knowing they could not retrieve him. What you may not know is that animals (not just leaping lemmings, which is largely a myth anyway) can commit suicide:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35798594/ns/technology_and_science-science/

(Hat tip to 3quarksdaily.)

The State Historical Museum in Moscow is presenting an exhibition of Vasily Vereshchagin's historical paintings of "The Year 1812":

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=36558

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Vereshchagin

To safely cross high-speed train tracks, you need a stylish pedestrian bridge:

http://www.designscene.net/2010/03/la-roche-sur-yon-bridge.html

Among notables born on this date are President James Madison, politician Daniel Patrick Moynahan, film directors Bernardo Bertolucci, Jerry Lewis, Robert Rossen, and Bruno Barreto (Brazil), mezzo-soprano Christa Ludwig, singer/songwriter Fred Neil, poets Sully Prudhomme (France), Rene Daumal (France), and Cesar Vallejo (Peru), painter Rosa Bonheur, zoologist Marlin Perkins, children's writer Sid Fleischman, novelists Don Carpenter and Francisco Ayala (Spain), and actors Leo McKern, Mercedes McCambridge, Kate Nelligan, Victor Garber, and Isabelle Huppert. I grew up watching Marlin Perkins and Jim Fowler on Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom during its network glory years from 1963 to 1971. The show was very formative in developing my love of animals, and in fact I wish I had paid even better attention to it; if I had everything to do over again, I would train to be a zoo communications director. I am delighted to discover that whole classic episodes of Wild Kingdom are being officially posted to YouTube, and although they are not embeddable, I urge you to watch this example from the premiere year of 1963, which has got otters, foxes, pikas, chinchillas, and prairie chickens:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lngWL3mOnzU

UPDATE: Wikipedia lists Marlin Perkins's birthday on its March 16 page and on its March 28 page; the latter is apparently correct, though.