Of course, this news is completely unrelated:

http://www.fivefeetoffury.com/:entry:fivefeet-2009-08-18-0005/

I'll be the first to admit I don't get it. Is it an inside joke?

It was a series of articles in Reader's Digest where Joe's body parts talk about themselves.

Isn't Readers Digest going into Chapter 11 in the USA.

Should have read the link first. I used to get RD for years, and of course never won any of their contest. All 11 g/kids got me to subscribe when they were in grade 5 and selling mags. So, it has been 8 yrs since I bought it, and really haven't read it since. Until, that is, I found one in my doctors office and was shocked at the size of it. Same price for half the size.
20 yrs ago, my son had some pics of nature published in RD. Every magazine seems to have lost half its pages. Even the daily papers have lost pages. What happened.

I used to get RD at home a couple years ago, but the constant harassment of spam, telemarketing calls, & junk mail that comes with every subscription was just too much to take.

Loved the uplifting stories and the stupid jokes. A great magazine to take on a camping trip as everyone had something they could read in the digest. Don't know about the American version but the Canadian version used to show works of art on the back cover.

One of the things I've noticed over the years is that journalists can be divided into two classes: (a) those who spend their time reading publishing-industry trade journals, trying to spot new trends, and (b) good journalists.

hmm, some want to manufacture a news and others want to report it.

Should also add, I scored a couple of boxes of RD's in 2006 and sent them off to my stepson in Afghanistan...

There were RD's spread over 3 FOB's in the Panjiwa LOL

"I'll be the first to admit I don't get it. Is it an inside joke?
Posted by: eljay at August 18, 2009 2:31 PM "

Read and/or watch Fight Club. I'd recommend reading it first but then again most people forget it was a book at all.

Duffman, K. Stricker was right, it was an allusion to the old series of RD articles on body parts and what they did. Palahniuk was riffing on that in Fight Club, yes, but my comment was straight outta RD, yo.

I remember reading RD of my grandfathers collection back in the late '50s and was just wowed by the information. I loved reading because I knew my grandpa had read everyone cover to cover and we could discuss articles in the mags and the fact that my dad never took the time to read them.
Later in life I signed up for about 2 years, got fed up and cancelled-that is a process in itself.
My dear Mother in law decided I needed that for a Christmas present about 5 years ago, and it took me 2 years to convince her not to to do that anymore.
They are decidely left on virtally everything, along with AGW and green the daylights out of everything.

Reading other comments in the McCain thread, I found the following quote, attributed to the ultra-liberal Susan Sontag of all people, far more interesting:

"Imagine, if you will, someone who read only Reader's Digest between 1950 and 1970, and someone in the same period who read only The Nation or The New Statesman. Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of Communism? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right?"

One more dead media dinosaur killed by the meteorite media hit that is the internet. The change in the global consumer choice climate has so altered the media ecosystem that the high density energy sources - the captive audiences with nowhere else to put their information dollars - have all dissipated away.

Sure ossified, unevolved editorial practices sped the demise of RD et al, but they most assuredly were goners regardless. RD was only 86 years old. people got there news in other ways before its birth and they clearly have nearly infinite pathways to do so now that it is dead.

Romanticising about one's own experiences and perhaps that of a few other generations of people is fine as long as one realizes that the cloistered existence that begat those memories was a bad thing, not a good one - just as being dirt poor makes you close to your neighbours you should not wish to remain so. Celebrate the fact that you and I and millions of others now have the means to share those memories and to now - unlike then - be able to truly shape what is considered news and fact in the public consciousness.

Decades ago we lived under the illusion that 30 digest articles in 30 days would keep us well abreast of happenings and new ideas in the world around us, today we know what folly that was and we are far better off because of it.

This person's passing however will be very difficult to replace indeed.

http://blogs.suntimes.com/sweet/2009/08/robert_novak_chicago_sun-times.html

I read his autobiography and it confirmed what I thought - that this guy was arguably the most improtant columnist of his era - although I wouldn't argue - I think he was the very best.

Decades ago we lived under the illusion that 30 digest articles in 30 days would keep us well abreast of happenings and new ideas in the world around us, today we know what folly that was and we are far better off because of it.

Posted by: Gord Tulk at August 18, 2009 6:21 PM
Gord, I would take issue with that simply because having lived through those time-30 years ago I was in my 20's, I believe the reporting, the digests and the general dissemination of news was much less biased then what we are seeing today.
Having said that, with the advent of the internet (thanks al gore), we can keep abreast of things without having to deal with quasi-journalists that have lost the ability to actually report the news and now offer their version of what they feel the news should be.
rant off and I do like your posts.

jim:

I actually a while back read some Time magazines issues from the Nixon era. The bias back then may arguably have been worse than it is today, but it was less us/them in its tone.

As for 30 in 30, none other than Ronald Reagan felt that that was a good way to stay informed.

This discussion upsets me; does it mean that Humpty Dumpty Magazine and Children’s Digest Magazine were leftie ploys intended to control my mind?

Glasnost:

Perhaps. My kids were given a subscription to a kids nature magazine (I forget the name). Elizabeth may would be proud of it's publisher.

50 years of reading the Digest ..... pretty much all of it while waiting for a doctor ... dentist .... car service ....

No loss.

ommag

how much did it cost you to read those:-))))

I found readers digest at the top of the hypocritical scale.

they would have an article on the perils of smoking and in the same edition, feature ads for liquor or whatnot other vice.

very homogenized sanitized stuff.

in a related article, I put a 2 day ad in the local rag back in december for $42; priced the same 2 days word limit this week: > 60 bucks. geez louise. where did all the inflation come from? summon the asteroids !!

MSM is really hurting big time. this aint the usual 'shake the tree and cull the herd' where inefficient enterprises fall by the wayside in the face of economic conditions; this is an entire sector falling by the wayside. looks good on them.

In tangentially related news, on tonight's Daily Show, Jon Leibowitz noted that Fox News, with 2.2 million viewers on average, is miles ahead of CNN's 700,000+ viewers.

But, to quote Whoopi Goldberg from her appearance on South Park "I hate Republicans. Republicans are so stupid."

I submitted a "life's like that" story to Readers Digest..."at a busy restaurant we were waiting for food and a crying baby was really really upset. I remarked that the baby wasn't happy and my 4 yr old piped up and said to me "you can't have any more babies 'cause you're boobs are tied" For the uninitiated...she meant tubes

I grew up with RD and always read it cover to cover including the articles about Castro's Cuba. I had given up on the magazine assumming that its tilt to the left was a Canadian thing. I didn't realize that its US parent had done the same thing.