Rolling Stone Dumbs Down Ringo

There's this thing called a magazine.

You might not know it from looking at Rolling Stone, which is so thin, if you rolled it up to swat a fly, you'd miss every time.

There are so few pages in it, one of 'em tells you to visit their WEBSITE instead.

A tease to visit: an interview with RINGO.

It turns out, it's in some kind of VIDEO-MORON format. While a dull, generic rock instrumental plays in the background (probably snatched from one of the recent Ringo albums), questions and answers slowwwwly appear on the screen.

You not only have to read them at grade school speed, the white lettering oozes into red lettering, apparently to help you keep pace.

Attention spans being what they are, you get exactly THREE questions, and you're done in less than 2 minutes.

What could've been a quick glance on a portion of a magazine page, has taken a tedious amount of time to go on the Internet to find, click, and then read.

Another tease, on a separate web page, was Ringo recalling the time The Beatles and Ali posed for a photo. Ah. What would he say about that, and how long before the sentence or two was revealed?

Er, an eternity.

WHERE was the quote from Ringo??

A lot of SNOW WHITE on the page.

OK, Time Wasters, is it YOU or is it ME?

I hadn't downloaded the latest version of Adobe Flash yet today, and I usually do that at least seventeen times every day, so maybe that was the problem.

Or had I downloaded it, gotten an ERROR, and was told to go to some forum or other to get advice?

Or had I forgotten to stop everything for five or ten minutes, turn off the computer, and then turn it back on?

I opened a different brand of browser, one that would take me on SAFARI.

There was a time when there was this thing called a magazine.

No "read along" to Flash videos and background music. No silly graphics. No time wasting.

And it had so many pages, you didn't NEED to go on the Internet to find what they left out.