Yep, I’m a Deputy Commish. Licensed to solemnize!

Thanks in no small part to a wee bit of Perl coding by Majordojo, I have at long last launched a new comments system here. All old comments have been carried over, and hundreds and hundreds of spam comments have been removed. Let’s see how this goes.

The Telegraph Avenue location of Cody’s Books closes today. It’s big news. People are sad. I was feeling the same way until I read these latest words from owner Andy Ross:

“Students today, they use the Internet. They read their textbooks,” Ross said. “In the ’70s, they had wide-ranging intellect.”

This is not the first time Ross has blamed his clientele (and elsewhere, the city of Berkeley) for the fact that he failed to adequately respond to changes in his own industry and in his business’s immediate environment. Your bookshop is not shutting down today because 21st-century students suck and don’t read books, Mr. Ross. Your bookshop is shutting down in part because your mindset shaped your business, and that mindset has become a lot more friendly to the yuppies who inhabit your store on Fourth Street than it has to the university students of today, plenty of whom have wide-ranging intellects and might have kept your store alive had you not been so dismissive and scornful of them.

[image stolen from telegraphshop.com]