Also crosswords since I refuse to do them on-line

One thing I will miss about good newspapers, once they fade away, is the amazing writing about otherwise mundane topics. This selection from a NY Times review of the DVD release of "Thirtysomething" is typical:

"The show was never watched as much as it was debated, worshiped, maligned and endlessly dusted over for markers of social and psychological relevance. (In 2007 it became the subject of a short book aspiring to academic pretension: “Thirtysomething: Television, Women, Men, and Work.”) Broadcast on ABC, it never made it into the Nielsen Top 20. The show achieved its highest rating during the first 15 minutes of the premiere."

In three sentences, you get the encapsulation of the review (unsurprisingly entitled "A Series Shows Its Age") and a killer last line. I don't really care about "Thirtysomething" or the review, and I'll never buy the DVDs. But I do like the writing.

Too often for my taste, blogs and the like (Salon, etc.) operate on a throw-it-out-and-see-what-sticks philosophy. When you post twenty or a hundred times a month, all it takes is one funny/interesting entry to make people hang around for another five or ten entries. (Reality television shows also work on this principle.) The problem is that in the other entries, too often the writing isn't good enough to save the remainder. So, while I can still say with honesty that I "read the NY Times" today and mean the whole thing, I doubt I'll ever be able to say that about Salon.