Saturday AM notes

My age-twin Meredith wrote to say she’s quit her job at AMD.

I liked this song on WXYC this AM: Rza and MF Doom Biochemical Equation Think Differently Music: Wu-Tang Meets the Indie Culture.

We’ve been playing a lot of Canasta at home, a game I last played when I was 10 or 11 with the Tewson family.

Friday, Team Blogads went to eat another superb BBQ at Allen and Sons. Stopped back for a chat with the owner: learned he charges just $12 per plate when catering whereever… Maine, Texas, DC or Durham — plus expenses for getting there and back. (“Doing it this way means I can sleep at night.”) He’s booked six months in advance for graduation weekends. Details gleaned from past visits: starts out with 800 pounds of pork at 3AM. Regulates temperature with doors acting as baffles. Done right, he ends up with 600 pounds of BBQ, done wrong, 500 pounds or in the worst case ashes. (Pork is $1 a pound, so the $100 difference can be the difference between profit and loss.) In the half hour between lighting the fire and moving the coals over to the barbecue pit, he bakes cakes and pies, restocking.)

This week a bunch of us drove over to Durham and sat in on a talk that Cliff Sloan, publisher of Wpost online, gave at the Duke Law School. Some interesting stuff he said:

1) “The internet disaggregates everything that used to be aggregated and aggregates everything that used to be disaggregated.”

2) Wapo.com does 200 million page impressions a month and Slate.com does 50 million impressions a month. (Add those together, and you’ve got the same page impressions as 900 bloggers spread across the country (disaggregated) and cooperating (aggregated) through Blogads.com.)

3) Sloan also noted that a “significant” portion of traffic to Wapo’s sites comes from links on blogs. But he declined to say how much.

The umbrella is turning inside out — the old edges are the new hubs and vice versa. No amount of glue or good will or philosophical gloss will save the old hubs, the newspaper businesses whose economics and infrastructure are premised on exploiting the now-useless monopolies on printing presses and distribution channels.