Time does not change us. It just unfolds us. – Max Frisch
And so the time has come for another change in the way I do things. This one is not so much an alteration as an unfolding; it’s a continuation of a process which has been going on practically since the beginning of this blog. When I first realized that there were far too many news items to possibly write full essays about, I instituted update and miscellanea columns; within a few months these were appearing once per month each, and contained anywhere from three to a half-dozen items each. But time marched on and my news-gathering procedures improved, and soon both the miscellanea and the updates were multi-part affairs; clearly a change was needed, so I started publishing the news weekly, and “That Was the Week That Was” was born. The feature has continued for three years now, but it’s beginning to show signs of strain, and is therefore in need of refurbishment. For one thing, each installment carries so many items (often over 20) that I find readers are beginning to miss some of them; for another, my greatly-expanded travel schedule has made it quite difficult to get the columns done on time while I’m on the road (#447 was finally done a mere 45 minutes before it was scheduled to post). And so, the unfolding process must continue; as the news went from a monthly feature to a several-times-monthly feature to a weekly feature to a huge weekly feature with several supplemental ones per year, so now it must become a semi-weekly feature. As of the beginning of the new year, there will be two news columns per week, Wednesday and Saturday; the current Wednesday feature, reader questions, will now appear on Thursday instead. This new arrangement has several advantages: it will make the columns shorter, causing less information overload for readers; it will allow me to feature breaking items in a more timely fashion; it will save me time, since the work that once created one column will now create two; and it will make it much easier for me to get the columns done on time, since their lengths will be more flexible. Obviously, I can’t call a twice-weekly feature “That Was the Week That Was” any more, so from here on out it will be named “In the News”; the numbering system will continue, because with four columns pre-empted by holidays per year that gives me exactly 100 columns per year. Some of you may not like the new system (with its concomitant loss of 48 full-length essays a year), but I think most of you will. And less work for me means both more time for extra-blog writing and activism, plus more time for myself and my loved ones; given that some of you have been nagging me about that subject for years, I think you’ll agree it’s a good thing.
May your new kind of life be as amazing as it always was.
This is a good change … in fact, I’ve never really seen the need for you to even write a daily article – or even update the blog every day. At this point – everyone who’s anyone in the country knows you … you are all over Twitter and you are touring and speaking. You have hundreds, if not thousands of allies and I just don’t really see why you should absorb yourself so totally in THIS media when you are branching out the way you are so well.
I really, really, would like to see you on broadcast media more and maybe one day do that O’Reilly show (since they invited you once but you declined).
Can I be honest here? Somewhere I found a video of you being interviewed … maybe it was REASON that did it? Anyway … I kind of “braced” myself before I hit the “play” button. I didn’t think you would come off too well – and that was based totally on your writings. Because sometimes your writings can come across a bit “Che-ish”. Don’t take that as an insult – this is a one dimensional medium and no one can see your facial expressions or body language as you type these articles.
BUT … I was pleasantly STUNNED at how you did in that interview.
You took it right down the middle of the line. You didn’t scoff at the questions … you pondered them seriously and then stepped through the logical elements of your answers. You completely demolished the prohibitionist arguments that the interviewer was asking you to address. I found myself amazed that you could RETAIN that much information in your head … AND deliver it a manner that, quite frankly I can’t see anyone disagreeing with.
I know you don’t “like” your voice on tape (or video) … but it’s really not bad at all and everything else is fucking perfect. You were very “captivating” in that interview and I’m not talking about in a sexual way here. I was very proud to see someone articulating the precise things that I believe in a manner I never could … in a manner that I don’t think anyone could impeach.
You have the ability to sway hearts and minds and I hope you keep heading down that road.
Thank you for this, Krulac; I do plan to keep heading this way. Lots more public appearances, lots more interviews, and in another couple of years lots more TV, if my current plans work out.
What Krulac said. 🙂
Very nice, and I still have those Playboy links that reveal an unflattering picture: http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/what-the-playboy-butler-saw-000111-v20n9/page/0
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1342643/Hugh-Hefners-Playboy-mansion-like-squalid-prison-say-Playmates.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/what-the-butler-saw-unpublished-interview-with-hugh-hefners-frustrated-former-butler-claims-to-reveal-all-about-life-inside-the-playboy-mansion-8836999.html
I still thought that these were worthy of tomorrow’s column.
No offense, but wouldn’t you consider this kind of a derail? And if you’ve been reading for a while you already know I don’t present years-old items as though they were news.
Well, your “TWTWTW” columns have seemed for a while now to consist of just a few new items and lots of archive stuff, and it was a while before I figured out how to tell the two apart.
Oh, no, that’s all new every week. It’s the Links columns that have archival links at the bottom.