A friend and his son play the (old): Game of Life: “I take a chance at becoming a Millionare Tycoon and put all my money on 6. I spin. Unbelievable – 6! I win! Alex does not take it well – goes off to his room and makes an angry sketch of me and puts it on his wall.”

Hugh MacLeod writes: “All products are information. The molecules are secondary.”

Shhh! Don’t tell Ken, but he’s sliding back to regular blogging. Just a sip a day.

Today in Jeff Jarvis’ comments, I coined “adparatchik,” meaning an ad industry functionary beholden to the reigning command-and-control mythos and high-margin apparat of TV and print advertising. (Maybe I’m waxing nostalgic for Budapest?) Anyway, Google says there are no prior instances of adparatchik. It gave me a good chuckle, but I won’t hold my breath waiting for the word to get used again.

Finally, an interesting article arguing cow’s milk is linked to diabetes and cancer.

“Twenty, thirty, at the outside forty years from now, we will look back on the print media the way we look back on travel by horse and carriage, or by wind-powered ship,” Dan Okrent, then Editor at Large for Time, Inc. told a bunch of journalism folks at Columbia University three years ago. Today Okrent is helping shake-up the New York Times’ inbred culture as its Public Editor.

Argument number 1, said Okrent: cheap digital substitutes like tablets are coming. Number 2: “last year, Time Inc., spent $1 billion dollars on paper and postage. End of argument. Or, if you’d like, let me put it this way: you may prefer to ride across town in horse-and-carriage, or across a lake in a wind-powered yacht, but no one makes that carriage or that yacht for you anymore, at least not at a reasonable price.”

Finally, “But the real power of the [printless] business model resides in the potential of digital advertising. Except for direct mail, until the Internet came along no advertising medium existed in which the advertiser could be sure his message was received by his targeted audience. We go to the bathroom during commercials, we flip the pages past magazine and newspaper ads, radio and billboards are white noise. But with a truly interactive medium ‘ with say, a question about the advertisement asked next to the button that gives you your thirty cent credit against the cost of reading your Wall Street Journal ‘ the effectiveness of media advertising changes radically. And if you don’t think advertisers influence the direction of American mass media, you ought to talk to Tom Goldstein about the curriculum here at the J-school.”

I like Okrent.

Cruised over to Knoxville to have coffee with Glenn Reynolds. We’ve crossed paths at several blogging conclaves, so it was fun to have an extended rap. Among other things, we covered bears, caffeine addiction, cougar hunting, home-baked video, the civilizing effects of caffeine, webmail, Matt Welch, Moneyball, bandwidth costs, the hidden positives of blogger bias, and help-wanted ads.

You may have noticed new blogads for The New Republic on Atrios, Talkingpointsmemo and PoliticaWire. More to come — roughly a dozen blogs in total.

Clever and effective, TNR’s text and image jibe well with blog content and style.

Update: having recently bashed TNR for its coverage of Dean and suggested “cancel your subscriptions!” Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, proprietor of DailyKos, rejects TNR’s ad submission: “If TNR wants to wage its war against Dean, that’s their perogative. I won’t let them do it around these parts.” Then 140+ DailyKos commenters dissect the ad’s pros and cons.

(For context, here are some past cases of blog advertising reverb. And here’s the original debate about whether Kos should run blog advertising.)