A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

SOMETIMES A LIST IS JUST A LIST: Ah, what to say about Sarah Boxer's "story" in today's Times? I feel compelled to mention it, since it is about blogs and lists (though saying it is really "about" anything might be generous). Daniel does a good job dissecting the story's utter pointlessness here. A decade ago I was working at a print magazine covering the burgeoning Internet and part of our mission (we called it "Spy meets Wired") was to point out the silliness in reporting like this. That was a decade ago (a point, which is painfully clear by looking through the mag's archives, which seem so quaint today).

Is the point of this story to say that lists have invaded the blogosphere, as opposed to say television, magazines, newspapers, books, radio, sports, or politics? With Passover rapidly approaching (the signal is the huge display of matzo at the grocery store, though, and this always bugs me, are you telling me that all of my relatives baked their bread on a daily basis? Not a single one grabbed a loaf or two of the fully leavened stuff they had baked the day before?), maybe Boxer needs to be reminded that God himself, when he isn't busy helping Colorado juries, was a big fan of making lists.

And speaking of the quaint days of the Internet of yore, remember all those ridiculous depictions of computers from the days before google was a verb (think of those huge animations when people sent emails or the combined trip-tracking software/Pac-Man game in Vacation). I was reminded of how far we've come while watching a couple of movies recently. First, in Something's Gotta Give, which my wife somehow got my five.five-year-old-son enmeshed in the other night, older folks like Jack and Diane, who in the past who have been depicted as befuddled by those darn-tootin', new fangled contraptions, IM each other effortlessly using a realistic AIM interface (and presumably their wireless high-speed networks). Compare that to the Denzel Washington 1998 film Fallen that I began watching at the gym yesterday. Denzel, researching a crime in which he can't get any information from the traditional venues because his superiors are stymieing him and the records are sealed, goes on Webcrawler(!), enters a semi-common name, and is instantly taken to an actual page from a newspaper containing the story he needs. He doesn't even have to enter the paper's name, just the name. With those kind of results, it?s a wonder Google was ever to make those Clinton-era search engines obsolete.