Fletcher checks in/exciting news

Hi Kids, I've been offline for a couple of days...I see you've been busy. I was in Santa Barbara playing in a golf tournament... yesterday, I played a golf course called Sandpiper that is situated along the Pacific Ocean...it was crystal bright blue day -- big blue skies, clear and fresh, and the wide expanse of the Pacific. Beautiful, and fun.

I heard today on NPR that the Opening Ceremonies of the Olympic Games is expected to draw a television audience of over 4 billion people. I wonder what the advertising costs? It's going to be a huge amount for a 30-second piece of airspace, or for some surface that the cameras will catch, but for some companies, it is a smart media buy. If you watch the opening ceremonies tonight, use one eye to be entertained and swept up in the Olympic hoopla, and use the other eye to look at the advertising, the marketing, the ways that the games are packaged for a media audience --

GUESS WHAT? I have some very exciting news -- I'm very excited, anyway. Tomorrow, August 9th, on the 70th anniversary of the first entry, George Orwell's diaries are going to be published, day by day, as a blog. That's right: you can blog with George Orwell, who's been dead since 1950. The first diary starts in 1938, as the world was on the brink of a second world war. Orwell, who was going to become one of the most penetrating and astute political writers of the 20th century, uses the diary to both observe the world and to develop as a writer. I'm bookmarking it...I look forward to learning more about Orwell in this way. It is unlikely that I would ever sit down and read his diary until I retire, but to follow it as a daily blog? Manageable. And that he was one of the earliest commentators on the way media shapes society, I find this whole proposition of following him on a blog both ironic and delightful.

It will be online for several years. Start now, and by the time you get to college, you are going to know quite a lot about George Orwell...and you know what they say: "it never hurts to know a little something." Knowledge is good.