Logging off

I'm struck -- but not surprised -- that PC Magazine, the venerable technology periodical, is dropping its print product. I'm a longtime reader and subscriber and have noticed that the magazine is not the phonebook-sized thing it was in the 1990s. I also noticed when it dropped back to a monthly, not all that long ago.

I was reminiscing just the other day about PC Magazine in connection with one of my first post-college jobs, at a Chicago software firm 15 years ago. Like the entry-level employees who came before and after me, I had the task of maintaining the company's library of computer periodicals, including PC Magazine. Something tells me they no longer keep that library.

It makes sense that a technology magazine would be among the first to go all-Web. But as an editor with a general-readership periodical, the Madison, Wis. alt-weekly newspaper Isthmus, I gotta say that the change is unsettling.

Paging Thomas Wolfe

I'm happy to announce that I Grew Up in Donelson, Tenn., a Facebook group I started, is going great guns with 52 members and counting. Yes, I am That Guy, and I started one of Those Groups. It pleases me that from this group Facebook points members to other, possibly related groups, like I Took Dance at Miss Hill's and Still Know the Spaghetti Rag.

I liked growing up in Donelson. So far we have reminisced about Western Auto, Western Sizzlin and Coiffures Hair Design. Oh yes, and the Lad and Dad.

Critics' choice

As a weekly writer of entertainment blurbs myself, I must say these three- and four- and six-word television blurbs in a 1983 New York Times are paragons of the form. Sheer poetry, and I do mean haiku.

Titans blurbed then. "Not bad. Try it."