huh?

I went to read my blogs yesterday, and was stunned to see that Bloglines is shutting down on October 1.  Bloglines was the first and only blog aggregator I've ever used, and it's been about three years now.  What stunned me was the reason that Ask.com gave for shuttering Bloglines.  They said that most information is now transmitted through social networking site rather than blogs.  I say, WRONG.

I belong to Facebook, and consider it to be much more on the entertainment side than a serious provider of information.  One of the things I hate most about Facebook is the character limit on posts.  I've tried to post things on Facebook that were "too long", and after trying to edit the post or break it down into two posts, I usually give up and write a blog post instead.  (And don't get me started on Twitter, which I gave up about a week after I joined.)  Facebook has been great to touch base with old friends, but most of the posts are either trivial or political.  There is some decent music and book and event information, but most of it doesn't come from experts.

I subscribe to about 90 blogs at this point.  The music and food blogs are written by experts, and I probably subscribe to about 15 music blogs and 10 food ones.  I subscribe to Dooce and to Scouting NY (written buy a NYC-based movie location scout) and the Mental Floss Lists blog, the No Reservations Crew blog, and a few gossip blogs.  I subscribe to Natalie Dee and XKCD (both cartoon blogs).  I subscribe to Regretsy.  I subscribe to a blog about the West Memphis 3.  I can't imagine trying to collate these sources on Facebook.

I moved my blog subscription to Google Reader.

I do know that Garland Jeffreys is playing the Highline on September 25, and thanks for the tip.  I'm actually Facebook friends with him and got an invite.  I've never seen him play live, but I'm still trying to decide if I want to spend 30 bucks on a standing-room show.  It takes a lot to get me to a standing-room show any more.  I have earned the right to sit.

I have to say that I do have some very cool Facebook "friends," most of whom of course I do not know.  One of the coolest has to be Archie Bell (of Archie Bell & the Drells).  When I was on MySpace, I was MySpace friends with David Strathairn, one of my way favorite actors since 1981, and even got a nice message from him. 

Which reminds me -- Gary Lucas once got an e-mail from Bono, something nice about the Jeff Buckley album that Gary produced, and he got really upset when his laptop crashed and he lost the e-mail.  I feel for him.  I've lost some wonderful e-mail exchanges from crashed hard drives, items on work computers, newsgroups to which I no longer belong, etc. 

I have to pay myself on the back because I was having computer trouble lately, and was smart enough to get an online backup service a week before my hard drive had to be wiped.  So for once, I didn't lose all of my music and pictures and written files.  Three cheers for Mozy. 

There are a few movies I wanted to have my own copies of, largely because they are favorites and I wanted the commentary and all of the other extras.  Yesterday, I got the third one I really had to have (after The Right Stuff and Apollo 13):  Boogie Nights.  Not only do I love the plot and the look, but it's wall-to-wall amazing actors.  Barry is out hearing some music with his friend Felix, so I may just watch it this afternoon.  I even bought a favorite, not-too-harmful snack: wasabi peas.

Had dinner with Lily on Thursday and Robin last night; sometimes it just works out that way.  Lily and I had Indian, but we decided to go with a dinner special, so I didn't get to eat anything very spicy like vindaloo.  But I'm always up for some saag panir (spinach with Indian cheese).  Robin and I went to Spring Street Natural, and I had some vegetable-stuffed lemon sole, which was good but not great.  Their big salads are much better.