Friday, October 10, 2008—We interrupt our slothful puttering to spread the word of a catastrophe — a real catastrophe.
We refer not to the loss of some anonymous fat cat’s billions in theoretical profits, nor even to the recent saddling of American taxpayers with a trillion dollar burden designed to “make whole” those many fictitious billions.
No, we’re talking about Cursor.org shutting down. This is a real catastrophe. For as long as we’ve known it, Cursor has been the most useful distillation of the days events available online.
Not to pretend to elevate our own feeble online efforts to their eminent usefulness, but for the record, this calamity occurs as we were preparing a series of pieces outlining our proposal to spawn about 435 independent newspapers across this benighted republic. Cursor was to have been a fundamental part of that plan. We’ll go forward, even if it’s not rescued. But we’ll miss it as we would miss our incisors when addressing a nice steak.
A close search of their records will reveal that to date, we have donated a grand total of zero dollars and zero cents to their survival. This ought to teach us (but may not).
We repent, and pledge $5 a week — a paltry sum, but meaningful to us — into the indefinite future.