link AOL and Huffington Post sued by unpaid bloggers | Reuters.
You knew this was coming, it was just a matter of time. A few months back, America Online decided that the best way to spend their cash horde was to buy the far left wing graffiti, er I mean blog site, The Huffington Post for $315 million dollars.
Kudos to Arianna Huffington for being shrewd enough to create and promote her website as the repository for deranged ideologues. The Post became the place to be seen for written opinions of the lefty persuasion and included scribblings from noted entertainment personalities which served to even more embellish the Post’s reputation. For many bloggers who contributed to the opinions, having Huffington Post credentials conferred, to them at least, legitimacy, as if it were some kind of literary achievement. In reality, most of the content could be found spray painted on the side of buildings as nonsensical diatribe. The Post however gave voice and a stage to the raving ideologues.
Now that Arianna has gone mainstream, those same bloggers are clamoring for their share of the loot from AOL. Good luck. If their logic held any water, Hugh Hefner would have to share his profits with all the girls who had ever graced the pages of Playboy, since it can be argued it was their contributions that really drove the magazine. These prototypical geeks writing pieces in their mother’s basement in their underwear may feel betrayed by Arianna, since they were supposed to be united against ‘the man’, ie the ‘establishment’. Now it turns out, she is one of them. So much for ideology and comrades in arms.
Bloggers write and pontificate on all sorts of things. In general, nobody really cares unless you happen to have some previous notoriety from real life. Then, you can spit out all kinds of flotsam and people will drink in your every word. Think Charlie Sheen. In America, it’s what sells, not what’s neccessarily good. So the bottom line is, these shut out bloggers had better start writing something legitimate because their graffiti wall is gone. Maybe it’s back to the spray can for most of them.
link Yoga practitioners breathing and stretching way to productivity.
A radical but growing group of people are at the forefront of a new movement at workplaces everywhere. The new chic is to do something over the lunch hour that has fallen out of favour over the past few years
Eat lunch.
Due to subtle pressure from social inputs of all kinds, people have been guilted to be striving for all sorts of ambitious goals during the noon hour. In particular, the uber ambitious who claim to be multi-tasking from the time they get out of bed, are lauded for their drive to climb the grouse grind, a near vertical path at a local ski hill, or run 5k, or perform Yoga during the time allotted for the day’s lunch break. The really ambitious of course pursue extreme activities, whatever that means. It generally means anything taken to ridiculous measures, which for some reason is supposed to invite admiration from those not as keen. We are supposed to believe this contributes to enhanced productivity and better well being. As if.
Personally for me, during the lunch hour, the only thing that should be pursued is extreme eating. Life gives you enough to grapple with and the lunch hour should be a time for enjoying what I consider to be 3 of the top 5 things to do in your life. Namely, eating, eating and then eating. What I mean by that is not cramming down a baloney sandwich, but of genuinely enjoying the eating experience. Let’s bring back the 2 martini lunches. Let’s have some intelligent conversation while appreciating some culinary excellence. Animals in the wild may run around and climb trees, but humans should be more evolved. If people are running around at all during the lunch hour, it should be because they’re hurrying to get into a hot new food place. Heck, we should have 2 hour lunches to fully absorb the experience. At the lunch period, people should be enjoying the experience of just being. Not running around city streets in jogging gear; not in a hot Yoga room; not perched on a fake indoor climbing wall.
Not eating lunch at the lunch hour makes us less civilized, not more. Who cares if someone ran 5k on their lunch hour? We’d rather hear about the quality of their cobb salad or the bouillabaisse. People should be able to sit outdoors and take in some music or other culture. That way, their working days won’t feel like mandatory prison sentences. Enough of the keeners and uber/extreme multitasking pc weenies. Let’s just eat.