Will It Pay?

            It may seem incredibly obvious but I will fess up in public anyway. I am no technophile.  I am not on Facebook.  I do not Tweet.  I have accepted a couple of friends’ invitations to join their networks on Linked In but I don’t know what I can contribute.  I am basically technologically illiterate.  However, as a former broadcast and print journalist, I am very aware of how difficult it is for many members of the media, particularly the print media, such as newspapers, magazines and various blogs, to achieve financial success.  To do my part I am considering, merely considering, erecting a “pay wall” between you dear reader and my blog.  To do your part I need you dear reader to feedback suggestions, ideas, and approaches for me to make this happen.  Unless you think it’s a bad idea.

            As recently reported in the New York Times a study has found that consumers have been willing to spend for information on the Internet, although the sums spent are relatively low.

Nearly two-thirds of users have paid for content online, according to a telephone survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Of those, roughly half have spent money on music and half on software, the two most popular types of material bought. But the amount spent was typically only about $10 a month, Pew said.  My writing is more entertaining, scintillating and valuable than music and software so I would expect support for my idea of establishing a pay wall. Not that I would contemplate making it a very high wall.  But as I said, I need your feedback on whether or not I should begin construction of the pay wall. Of course if you want to send me a lump sum payment of consequence I will forgo any further thought of a pay wall.

Here are a couple of samples of what you might miss if my writing takes refuge behind a pay wall.

Cable TV’s Travel Channel airs a regular feature called Food Paradise in which the cameras travel across America searching out the best places to indulge in various categories such as big breakfasts, pig-out buffets and so forth.  Recently the show featured two wonderful, if unhealthy, themes, Bacon Paradise and Crispy Fried Food Paradise. Each tasty segment was punctuated by commercials for Nutrisystems new diet menus.

A TV Commercial for Dr. Pepper, done well before the NFL season got rolling, has Michael Strahan putting a butt-whipping tackle on Donovan McNabb to whom he’s just handed a delivery pizza in the foyer of Donovan’s home.  Donovan goes flying, into furniture, and winds up flat on his back, kind of the way he wound up at the end of this season with the Washington Redskins. Bad news for Donovan but very good news, I think, for whoever conceived the commercial.

My Father was born and grew up on Eldridge Street on the Lower East Side of New York City's Manhattan and now...as noted in the New York Times,

"At Sheng Wang on Eldridge Street, the Fujianese chef JinSheng Zhu makes dao xiao mian, “knife-peeled” noodles with ruffled edges that he rapidly slices off a dough block with a steel blade the size of his fist. Huacan Chen is an aspiring entrepreneur from Fuzhou in southern China, with a skill that happens to be seriously marketable in New York at the moment: he knows how to spin out endless skeins of la mian, smooth, springy hand-stretched noodles, using nothing but a countertop and his hands."

In the great Sergio Leone movie Once Upon A Time in America, set on the Lower East Side, Robert DeNiro plays a character named Noodles. 

It goes around.  It comes around. 

"Nigger Jim" is now "Slave Jim"

There’s much controversy over a new edition of "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" that replaces the word "nigger" with "slave."  I wholeheartedly agree that the change does the original Twain novel a major disservice.  The language police are everywhere.

            I recall several contacts I had with the language police during my years spent in broadcast and print journalism.  Several years ago when I was writing the weekly Auctions and Antiques column in the Philadelphia Daily News. I would preview various auctions on tap for the coming weekend.  One of them featured a piece of furniture known commonly as a “Mammy Bench,” like the type and style found in plantation mansions during and after the Civil War.  It was sat upon by female slaves nursing the offspring of their owners.  The description “Mammy Bench” has over the years come to describe that type and style of bench with no other particular meaning attached. The description apparently emotionally irked, or upset or worse, a female African-American Daily News Editor who directed that the description be deleted or changed.  I told her that it was the name of that particular piece of furniture and that calling it something else would not adequately describe what it looked like. She was unmoved and the description was changed.  So much for accuracy.  

            Years earlier toiling as a news reporter and producer at KYW-TV I submitted a story idea to a newsroom executive about an art exhibition at a Philadelphia museum that included a controversial work depicting breast-feeding.  “We’re not going to cover that crap,” declared the news exec. who to this day chirps loudly and proudly about his wonderful contributions to news coverage in the Philadelphia-Metro market. 

            I also recall an incident not entirely related but one which left an indelible stain on my mind.  I was part of a group of reporters touring a Philadelphia elementary school which had been touted as a “progressive” one in which test scores were improving.  We stopped in a classroom where third or fourth graders were drawing trees.  One girl had sketched a skinny tree with almost bare branches, a drawing she appeared proud of.  A teacher leaned over her shoulder and told the little girl “Oh that’s not how we draw a tree.  A tree has full, leafy branches,” and proceeded to draw over the girl’s drawing.  The girl appeared crestfallen, her creativity stifled.  So much for correcting what didn’t need correcting in the first place, kind of like "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn."