Back from breakfast now, the sky overcast and cloudy, the temperature therefor just fine for someone who comes from Scandinavian stock. You'd think when it started to get cold around here, not that it ever really starts to get cold around here, I'd be in pig heaven, but I have this hunch there's some Mediterranean influences that got into the family dna, some visit in the night generations ago the family has never been willing to talk about, that makes the cold no more welcome than the heat. Hi, ho. Life is complicated, is it not?

I was reading an article in The Chronicle that the weekly Opus comic strip by Berkeley Breathed would be no more come Sunday, Breathed deciding to devote his energy to creating children's books. Evidently the 13 - 30 age group, his core audience, no longer reads newspapers and, these days when he visits a college campus, none of the students have every heard of Opus. Not fewer of them are reading newspapers, none of them are reading newspapers.

I have mixed feelings about newspapers failing, more for the fact I'm not sure it's something that can be fixed, than anything else. From that which is dying comes that which is being born or some crap like that, but I will miss Opus. Breathed believes that mass market comic strips known to one and all are basically dead. Bloom County, Breathed's strip, was in 2500 newspapers in its heyday; Opus, now after three years of life, is in 200, the last comic strip to have found universal acceptance being Calvin & Hobbs.

Maybe a little wake on the Day of the Dead?

No, no. Maybe Kindle when it reaches generation 10 will save the newspaper's day. My own interest is more in the written word and I don't much read anymore. Figure that.