Build Date: Thu Feb 12 07:30:13 2026 UTC
I live in a tiny, mysterious third-world country that is very far away and filled with meat golems. It is called 'Colorado'.
-- Tjames Madison
AOL/Time Warner Plans to Fumble Towards World Domination One Misstep at a Time
2001-06-08 09:59:40
Does corporate stupidity know no bounds? Recently, AOL Time-Warner purchased Business 2.0, one of those hype-filled new economy rags, to add to its already overgrown, festering pile of fly-fattening media properties.
O.K. AOL Time Warner buys magazines: it's what its acquisition department is paid to do, I guess. Nothing wrong with world domination, if you're the small-minded weaselly-type actually into that sort of power trip I guess.
Furthermore, AOL seems to be ditching the entire staff of Business 2.0. Apparently the only thing about Business 2.0 worth keeping is its name and subscriber list. This, I can understand too. Sometimes you have to buy an entire wrecked automobile outright just to score a few choice replacement parts for your own ride. So you salvage the carb, the transmission, a tire or two and dump what's left off on some backroad for the government to properly dispose of. Which is in effect what AOL is doing to Business 2.0. And it's displaying a perfectible respectable sense of junkyard logic in doing so.
But here's what gets me: AOL is replacing the Business 2.0 staff with the staff from its own hype-filled new economy rag, eCompany Now, which it is shelving. Now think hard about this for a second: it is buying a magazine that, by its own account, has built up a subscriber list worth purchasing, and replacing the staff of that magazine (who did the work to build up that samesaid readership) with a staff that has failed to produce similarly successful magazine.
So that is the AOL-Time Warner strategy for media monopoly? Buy a successful magazine and replace it with an unsuccesful one???
Yeah, I know that if Business 2.0 were truly successful it wouldn't be sold at spare-part prices to AOL. But it still would have to have had been more successful than eCompany Now, otherwise, the Business 2.0 subscriber list would have been folded into eCompany's, not the other way around. Good thinking!
So what next? Maybe they could buy the rights to Budweiser and have the people who made Zima run operations. Or even better, they could buy the producer of the world's most-used browser and have it run by a bunch of East Coast flunkies who thought the Web would never take off. Oh wait, they did that already.
T O P S T O R I E S
The Crossroads are real and The Blues is a place; The enduring myth of Robert Johnson (More...)
California Glory Hole attracts huge crowds
A glory hole at Napa's Lake Berryessa is drawing huge crowds. According to Chris Lee, the general manager for the Solano County Water Agency, the glory hole hasn't been active since 2019, and only restarted operations on Feb 4. (More...)
Republican State Senator busted after soliciting a teenage girl
Republican State Senator Justin Eichorn of Minnesota was arrested for soliciting a teen girl on Monday just hours after he introduced a bill proposing "Trump derangement syndrome" (TDS) as a form of mental illness. (More...)
Parents claim measles is not that bad after having only one child die
The parents of a Texas girl who died from the measles are defending their decision not to vaccinate their daughter. "She says they would still say 'Don't do the shots,'" an unidentified translator for the parents said. "They think it’s not as bad as the media is making it out to be." (More...)
Delusional rich man tries to fire town staff
"I'm mayor now" said write-in mayoral candidate and founder of Pirate’s Booty Snacks Robert Ehrlich after losing the election for Mayor of Sea Cliff, NY. Then he tried to take over the Village Hall and fire everyone. (More...)
Musk claims Xitter security is staffed by idiots
Earlier this month Xitter experienced a massive outage. In an interview, Musk told Fox Business that he believes the attack came from "IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area." (More...)
C L A S S I C P I G D O G
Songs Of Love And Special Things
Well, dear reader, there's no denying it: Spring has sprung. The air is pungent with the fertile aroma of Romance. And you know what goes with Romance, don't you? That's right, Lover, porn. And not just any porn, but the kind you can sing along to. (More...)
The Ancient and Correct Sake Ceremony
Many Americans have learned to appreciate the delicate, sophisticated flavors of Japanese food and drink, along with the beautifully refined rituals of Japanese dining. San Francisco, as a gateway between East and West, has especially benefited from the flowering of Eastern consciousness in America. It is hardly possible to walk down the street without stepping on somebody's sushi. (More...)
An innocent trip to the Central Market resulted in a severe attack of arachnophobia (and a meal) when a depraved street kid set her vicious pet spider on an unsuspecting shopper. (More...)
The Innocent San Francisco Mule
Flesh and Abby have moved to an isolated rural location in the United States - equipped only with their sense of adventure. Recently they came down off the mountain briefly to file this report? (More...)
A Day in the Life of a Beverotologist
It was starting to look like a very boring Saturday, trapped as I was in the suburban wastelands of the outer Bay Area, so I called my Able Assistant (AA) and proposed that we perform some Spocktail field tests. For some time I've been working on creating the quintessential cinematic beverage and even tho' SMRL does most of its testing during nocturnal hours, this seemed an opportune time to roll up the sleeves of our labcoats and get some science done. While the beverotology creation tested this day (The Neurotoxin) must be deemed a success, this article focuses more the journey of the experimenters, rather then the science of beverotology. (More...)
Paranoid Strippers & Psychotic Crack Dealers (Tales of Christmas Eve)
Christmas day, for the last 17 or so years has bored me. I find that the real fun and excitement always takes place on Christmas Eve. Every other year, it's the excitement of the metaphorical hunt instead of the kill. Otherwise, it's just plain bad craziness. (More...)
