A nice off-moment shot from a historic occasion yesterday, one we only have the opportunity to see a couple times a decade; a gathering of all five living US Presidents, former and current. Originally spotted at YesButNoButYes.com.

Below are simple links to other interesting stuff I've come across on the web in the last day or two; they may or may not concern literature or photography, or indeed the arts at all. You can click here to learn more about how I compile this list and what software I use, if you're interested.

300,000 Fictionwise eBooks are about to go bad, due to closing DRM company
Just to break it down again for non-techies: "DRM" is "digital rights management," a nice term for a despicable thing, deliberately inserting poisonous elements to a creative file (song, book, movie) that must be regularly given an "antidote" by the controlling company, or else will literally poison that file so it can no longer be read, viewed, copied, printed, etc, all done in a draconian effort to prevent piracy. The problem? Well, when the DRM provider goes out of business -- like exactly what's happening this month with eBook DRM provider Overdrive -- each and every file that company sold with the DRM is suddenly vulnerable to this software poison -- in this case, all 300,000 Overdrive books now sold to customers of eBook company Fictionwise. And as Fictionwise even says in their official FAQ, "No company lasts forever," which means that every DRM-infected file you've ever purchased is in effect owned only temporarily. That's why people yell and scream about this issue so much.

Chicago Tribune: "We agree, our new redesign sucks"
Have you like me been one of the millions of Chicago citizens horrified by the new hipster design scheme of the venerable Tribune newspaper this winter? You're not alone -- no less than the paper's publisher wrote a special op/ed yesterday, printed on a special cover wrapped around the newspapers themselves, acknowledging the bad mistakes they made in trying to appeal to the youth market through such embarrassing details as Crazy Fonts! and Crooked Headlines! It's one of the saddest things about the entire newspaper industry, I think, easily seen in microcosm form through the Trib and their shamefully pandering sister "youth" publication RedEye; how when these groups first started losing younger readers, at first they thought the solution was to open a smaller daily that removed all the hard news and left in all the fluffy entertainment items, then thought the solution was to change the 160-year-old main paper into a collection of crazy fonts and crooked headlines. Try doing your job well, Trib, and maybe then the young won't abandon you in droves.

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