waiting room magazines

TRX
06-10-2010
I took my wife to the doctor yesterday. Normally they have things like two- year-old "Newsweek" or "Modern Maturity" in the waiting room.

Imagine my surprise when I found this month's issue of "Combat Handguns" in the stack!

In a private doctor's office I wouldn't be surprised, but in that particular giant "medical center" I wouldn't be surprised to see a Magazine Selection Committee and a Media Enforcement Group, an Appropriate Materials List, and a whole bureaucratic structure wrapped around them...

Alas, in the years since I quit buying the magazine at the newsstand it has gone the way of most others - ads, press releases reworked into "feature articles", glossy paper so shiny you have to keep tilting the magazine to read around the reflections, thickness is down to about 1/8 inch, and though Massad Ayoob's column was still there, it looked like he was all that was left. On the other hand, every article wasn't just a stub pimping for some ad-infected web site, which puts it well above what many other magazines have become.

I *like* magazines; they're portable, require no power, and don't need to be upgraded. I admit the August 1937 copy of "Popular Science" I was reading in the Throne Room the other day was getting a bit brittle, but it's still just as readable as when it was back in the Roosevelt Administration.