Circulation

 I know what you've been wondering. All you regular readers are on pins and needles waiting for my reaction to the latest news. I can say that, at this point in time, I have grown a bit disaffected. I don't have the fervent passion to strain and fuss like I may have once upon a time. It has become clear, over time, that there are certain things that are out of my control.

One of them is my subscription to Entertainment Weekly. Over the past couple of decades, I had made a practice out of the convenience of having a new issue of a compendium of pop culture tidbits arriving every seven days or so in my mailbox. It was part of my morning ritual to sit down over a bowl of granola and a glass of orange juice and flip through chunks of this periodical before I jumped up and got ready to face my day. Reading an article or two each weekday allowed me the weekend to catch up on anything that may have escaped my initial perusal. This was especially true of those Double Issues, the ones that packed all the news about the upcoming Fall TV season, or the Summer Movie Preview. Mostly all this Entertainment digest had the impact of making it loads of fun for me to announce to friends and co-workers about what surprises were coming down the pike, and tasty morsels of "did you know?"

Well, that's all coming to an end. You may remember my tired rant about how ridiculous it was that the publishers of Entertainment Weekly had decided to make their magazine appear just once a month. At the time, we subscribers were offered the convenience of unfettered access to exclusive content on their website. Which had the effect of turning me to a screen first thing in the morning. I could hear my father, the printer, crying somewhere in the past. I let the notion of sparing trees from becoming a weekly sacrifice to the recycling bin buoy me as I left my kitchen table for the office where my day would now begin. Not turning pages but clicking links. 

Of course, once loosed upon Al Gore's Internet it became clear that my morning's information inoculation no longer had to be limited to whatever stories and features the editors of Entertainment Weekly saw fit to put in front of me. I lost track of the format. I lost track of the taste of an Owen Gleiberman review,  and the blur of the last page's Bullseye. What may have been the last issue that will ever be delivered to my home sits on a stack of other magazines, the cover has not been opened. Entertainment Weekly will now only exist in the Phantom Zone of cyberspace. 

Eventually, I will try and navigate the twisting tunnel of the circulation department of the magazine's new owners, trying to salvage whatever money I may have once invested in a subscription, but for now I am content to let it slip into the past. Like those bowls of granola. And the kitchen table. I'll be the guy searching the length and breadth of the virtual world for new things to gripe about here on this blog. Entertainment Weekly is no longer on the list.