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John Palfrey as the mover behind Press Forward will bring the gospel of EZ Pass for News on his "ongoing whistle-stop tour" of local news orgs. JP was my boss/rabbi when I was at Berkman, and is why we got so much done there. He ran air cover for what we did, the BloggerCons, giving RSS a home, podcasting, blogs for everyone, the people and democracy. Now he's doing it for the local news business. #

EZ Pass for News is formula for functional relationships between local news pubs and people in far away places (ie not their locality) who may from time to time want to read an article or a series of articles on their site, and pay per-issue instead of buying a subscription.#

I was chatting with a friend who went to Bronx Science, as I did, and we were talking about Isaac Asimov, and I said I thought he went to Science too. So I fired up ChatGPT and asked if Asimov went to Science, and it said yes. Then I asked where he went to high school and it said Bronx Science. But by then I was pretty sure he didn't, so I went to Google and meta.ai, and neither knew where he went to high school. So I asked on Twitter, Mastodon, Blue Sky and Threads. Not sure why I even care! Oh well. 😄#

I don't have time to write about it now but the end of last night's Knicks game was one of the most dramatic bits of NY sports ever. I would like to thank Kevin Durant for saying the Knicks weren't cool. It's somewhat like the Streisand Effect where the thing KD was trying to hide was that he was no longer cool. Classic projection. Obviously he was not the hot shit he thought he was in 2019. 😄#

The "largest open publishing network in the world" is the web. #

We went three and four afternoons a week, sat on folding chairs in the darkened Quonset hut which served as a theater, and it was there, that summer of 1943 while the hot wind blew outside, that I first saw John Wayne. Saw the walk, heard the voice. Heard him tell the girl in a picture called War of the Wildcats that he would build her a house, “at the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow.”

As it happened I did not grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to that bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where the artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I wait to hear.

JOAN DIDION, "John Wayne: A Love Song," in Slouching Towards Bethlehem

The other day Ruby was watching some show, and the illustration on the show was clearly by Megan. Wow! I thought. Go Megan. Another interesting venue to explore and share her work and style with (probably?) a much larger audience.

I didn’t take note at the time what show it actually was. I assumed it would be easy to find. Megan is on Instagram and Facebook and active on both. Her website is quite well done. 👏. But I wasn’t able to find anything about a show on there. So I used the website to shoot her a quick message through the contact form asking…

… and she wrote back in like 10 minutes.

The show is an animated version of her book The Tagalongs available on some streaming platform I’ve never seen called Vooks. “Storybooks brought to life” — kinda cool. It looks like you can watch it free, but I guess only if you have that URL? There isn’t really a not-logged-in browsing function. Makes sense, they want you to buy a plan. Also she said: “It’s also featured on Storytime Book Read Along on Netflix (during Episode 4 – Animals)”

I was just wildly impressed by the turn around time on that email (email is good). Megan produces an incredible amount of work, has that work in an incredible amount of places in an incredible variety of forms, clearly does commissioned work, and branches out in a variety of interesting ways. To be doing all that and then answering some dorks email is impressive. So many illustrators I know are so damn industrious.