Saturday, February 12, 2011

Blog poft in ye olde ftyle

On my way home last night, I was accosted by a phalanx of machine-vended newspapers, all of them sporting variations on the by-then ludicrously out-of-date headline "Mubarak Refuses To Step Down"; whereupon I reflected that such an assault would have been impossible in the days of the multi-edition daily paper Zeitung--i.e., ca. 1870-1980--and in turn that the most significant technological expediter of intelligence to date had been intercontinental telegraphy, by comparison with which all subsequent innovations had been mere gravy (the more rarefied strains of which tended to travel more slowly than molasses nowadays).