March 19, 2011
Newspapers are dying and I blame comic strips like this:
Put yourself in the position of anyone age 8 to 28 reading that strip. An average person’s thought process may go something like this:
1- Why is that kid wearing a sailboat on his head?
2- What the heck does “have your hat blocked” mean? Is it calling him a blockhead?
3- Why does he end up with a paper bag on his head?
Look in the second panel. You can clearly see the 2011 copywrite. And even if it is a classic strip, that wouldn’t matter since it was just reprinted this week. If even the comics page can’t keep up with the times, what hope is there for the rest of the paper? You can make the argument that the average age of the newspaper reader has gone up as youth has abandoned it. That would explain old fossils like Henry and Rex Morgan hanging around, and even Spider-Man is written by an 88 year-old Stan Lee.
I am not sure if newspapers are dying so much as they are committing suicide. They should replace Rex Morgan M.D. with Dr. Kevorkian.
Mr. Blog's Tepid Ride 
Absolutely agreed, although, oddly, hat blocking/creation appears to be on the rise in certain geek & hipster communities.
(ie. http://www.sfhat.com/blog
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Hmm. I’ve seen the rise of hipster-doofus hat-wearing but they all seem like off the rack Taget or Wal-Mart hats to me. Much as I like a good hat the kind they wear are like Bing Crosby road trip style, not the good old-fashioned detective fedoras or The Shadow slouches I prefer.
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