cloudsoup

Oliver Kamm had a widely-read blog, which he moved to The Times. Then The Times put up a wall.

It’s a piece of bad news: that when its paywall goes up, the Times will be putting behind that wall, not only its regular journalism, but also its blogs. This means that Oliver’s blog, which I’ve been reading daily since it began, will no longer be freely accessible … it is regrettable in any case if one of the most formidable bloggers in the ‘sphere is now lost to a proportion of his readership

This is also confirmation – here of an unwelcome kind – of a point I’ve made before about the distinction between the free blogosphere and the blog-space that is merely an extension of the mainstream media. It’s a distinction to the advantage of the former.

Norman Geras Paywall Blogging.

We didn’t get quite as far as Billings, Montana last year, when we visited Yellowstone last year. I had no idea tornadoes got up that far north.

The stupider of our two cats, Donna, went missing on Monday.

I came home Tuesday night expecting her to have returned: nothing.  I supposed she’d jump onto the bed in the middle on the night…but she didn’t. We called from the garden, from the back bedroom window out across to the bowling green where she would go to watch pensioners play bowls matches on summer afternoons. We walked around the streets, shouting for her. Nothing.

We found her on Thursday night, miaowing from behind the locked doors of the garage of a house in a cul-de-sac just around the corner from us. Once we’d found the owner and had the garage opened up Donna appeared from a dark corner, very grubby and big-eyed. Back home she gulped down two portions of catfood, spent five minutes lapping water, waltzed out into the garden for a look around and then came back inside and fell asleep.

The only drawback was for her sister, Althea, who’d seemed to enjoy Donna’s absence and the extra attention she’d received. They’ve resumed hissing at each other and squabbling over the best places to lie in the sun.