I was in San Francisco last week, visiting my son, and we took in a matinee of Hanna (which I thought was all that, for the record: Fun for the whole family, Truffaut’s Wild Child run though a blender with Heidi and the Bourne Identity). Leaving the mall we passed a Border’s bookstore in the final two days of its everything-must-go bankruptcy sale.

I can’t resist a sale, especially when everything is marked down by 80%, but the vultures had been past many times before us. Though I did manage to get four of James Lee Burke’s Dave Robichaux mysteries for seven dollars (talk about value for money!) most of what remained was the dregs of the dregs, lone copies of sports biographies and books by Sarah Palin. They were even selling the bookshelves. I’m sure with the right offer I could have taken one of the employees home with me.

The one glaring exception I saw was a whole shelf packed with Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Writers and Artists Who Made the National Lampoon Insanely Great. This best-of collection, culled from the magazine’s glory years (the seventies) may have been poorly packaged — the cover is all text where the Nat Lamp at its zenith excelled at graphic covers as memorable as great print ads (“If You Don’t Buy This Magazine We’ll Kill This Dog,” et al) but I think humor as topical, and of the time, as theirs was doesn’t stand the test of time.

I smiled flipping through the pages, more at the memories invoked (drunk, stoned etc.) but it meant as little to me as the Spy collection did a few years ago — and absolutely nothing to my son, who lives for college-style comedy. (And shows no sign of ever leaving college.) Like old episodes of SNL, they’re just not as funny as they were then, when we were drunk stoned etc. and the apocalypse was upon us daily.

Today’s youth have Jon Stewart and Colbert, who can make successful comedy of the sort of economic freefall that presaged a Borders bankruptcy. Their books were long gone from the shelves.

It’s a tough time for NPR. First they fired Juan Williams in a sloppy and public fashion, and then CEO Vivian Schiller up and resigned after James O’Keefe (the man who played a pimp in the ACORN offices) taped a high-level NPR fund-raiser disparaging the Tea Party. If you can imagine.

Okay, the exec in question, Ronald Schiller (no relation to Vivian) made a point of saying he was stating his own opinion when he told O’Keefe’s actors (masquerading emissaries from a pro-Muslim group looking to give the network a million dollars) that the Tea Party had hijacked the Republican party and they were racist. The second point seems demonstrably true, but certainly defensible as opinion, while the first just seems slightly inaccurate. If the GOP has been hijacked it’s been a rather willing hijacking (think of the kidnapping in The Big Lebowski) from a pummeled party looking for some mojo.

All of this comes as some of those same GOP members are looking hard at the amount of money the federal government gives public broadcasting, PBS and NPR, annually $420M last year. And the irony is that, as a regular NPR listener (and subscriber) I think they actually try harder to be fair and balanced in their news coverage than almost any news organization out there, the New York Times included. Seldom do I hear a  report of anything political that does not strive to give equal weight and time to the conservative position, and never do I hear the reporters (not guests or commentators mind you) betray a bias. For that you go to Fox or MSNBC.

Which is exactly why NPR is so necessary and so in need of support (including yours, if you haven’t coughed up lately). As much as my personal political beliefs skews to the left, I get tired of the MSNBC way very quickly, and was kind of relieved when Olbermann finally left. He was like that crazy uncle of your friend’s in high school, who you dreaded being in the car with  because of how he drove when he was yelling at you about Cambodia or whatever. And with the leg-twitching and eye-popping, he started to seem like a truly crazy uncle…

The slightly smug I-went-to-a-better-school-than-you voices of NPR’s announcers notwithstanding, their news coverage trends toward topics beyond the beltway and the bicoastal regions — and has been, for instance, refreshingly Charlie Sheen free in recent weeks. It would be a shame if they lost the federal money due to this — but it’s about two percent of their budget and frankly could do a lot for fundraising efforts. Why I can hear the pitch right now…

Let’s assume US Rep. Peter King means well by calling hearings on the dangers posed by Muslim extremists in the US. (Okay, given King’s track record you can’t assume that but bear with me.) Doesn’t this seem like the job of the behemoth-sized Dept. of Homeland Security and all the internal agencies monitoring such activities? When did this become a matter of congressional oversight, and what good could even a well-meaning committee do?

The answer of course is a) it is b) it’s not and c) none whatsoever. But King, largely on the defensive now (as Russell Simmons announced to a rain-soaked crowd of protestors in Times Square yesterday, “We’re bigger than Charlie Sheen — we are the number one trending topic on Twitter!”) started accusing unnamed members of New York’s Muslim community of not playing ball with the FBI when they were investigating evil-doers planning evil in area mosques. It’s up to him to fix it, I reckon. That’s why he’s the King.

The good news in these sad show trials the GOP is mounting in the House (look for Darrell Issa to start subpoenaing every one in the White House who has ever done anything soon) is that they smack of desperation on the party’s part. It’s as if they collectively said, “Well, what about Joe McCarthy move? He ruled the airwaves for a while in the fifties!” And with right wing intellectuals like Ann Coulter defending the dead witch hunter, maybe they think they’re onto something. How many Muslims does your average Americans know?

The fear card may not play this time, though. First of all, the growth and disapora of Muslim Americans has made it harder to stereotype anyone in a burka. (During the floods in KY last year, a woman in labor was rescued by a Muslim man who helped get her the help she needed. I read about it in Reader’s Digest!)

Secondly, if this is their build-up to next year’s election, I don’t think most Americans, worrying about their jobs (or lack of), their towns going bankrupt, their schools closing etc. are going to blame the Paki next door. Islamophobia will grow if unchecked, but this is one of those cases where I think people are actually smarter than the pols who would push the buttons. King, thou art a knave.

Things have been moving way too fast and I’ve been way too busy to say anything intelligent about the events in Egypt — it’s like commenting on fireworks as they are going off. Though Twitter and Facebook have proved more than mere tools of commentary for those in the actual revolution. They have provided tools for the revolution itself, probably not what Mark Zuckerberg had in mind.

The arguments of Malcolm Gladwell and the Net Delusion’s Evgeny Morozov — that the very social-network tools that were credited for spreading dissent in Iran and China have or will become tools of repression and worse in some of those same places — seem a little beside the point now. Behind such skepticism, as healthy as it is, seems to be a kind of deep human cynicism — all the more surprising in Gladwell who has made a fortune promoting the idea of tipping points and connectors. I guess it’s okay if they’re his tipping points and connectors...

This is one those cases where the medium really is the message — or at least a value-neutral component of the message. Complaining about its use or potential misuse seems almost silly, like blaming the hammer after it’s been used in a fight instead of for building (or vice versa). The suspicion about the role the internet has and will play in the pursuit of freedom strikes me as no better than the suspicion any number of people grousing the wake of Mubarak’s overthrow (from the Tea Party paranoids to the Israelis to the right-wing think tankers) have about democracy.

Democracy is one of those open-source platforms — not owned by us, or the French, or the ancient Greeks — that needs to be used to be improved. If we don’t like the outcome of what a true democratic movement brings (and yes, I am well aware of the potential for the military barring any real reform in Egypt), we don’t really like democracy. It’s not about  our interests, stupid. And the fact that we try and make it so explains why we, as a nation, are so hated in many parts of the world.

As a co-worker of mine said, watching the angry demonstrators torch the Egyptian flag the night Mubarak at first refused to step down, “Isn’t it nice to see them burn somebody else’s flag for a change?”

So a local cafe went out of business, the Marquet on Fulton at South Portland. I heard about it from a friend, figured it had something to do with the fact that there are now about 18 cafes in a three block radius (the changing face of Fort Greene!) and that they insisted on closing promptly every day at 5 pm, despite the fact that no one was back from work that early in the week and no one was up that early on the weekends (despite all the caffeine). No great loss, though they had some nice pastries.

So I’m across the street this morning at Provisions, getting a cappuccino and pain au chocolat when I ask the barrista there if he knows if the other Marquets (there is one in Cobble Hill, at least another in the Village) are open. No idea. I can see a sign in the window of the now shuttered Marquet and determine, after I get my morning beverage, to walk over there and see what it  says. But the light is changing when I get outside and the street is icy and it would take an extra maybe five minutes to cross Fulton and read the sign…

So I don’t. And the moral of the story? Well, if you work in digital publishing, like me, and you’re using a new technology (or two) like we are, you are haunted by the idea that if people have even the slightest technical difficulty getting to what you are offering, they won’t. They just won’t cross that proverbial street to get that information. And worse yet (this is what really makes for the insomnia) they won’t tell you they didn’t. They won’t fill out a little customer satisfaction form and say, “Your site sucks.” As Steve Krug put it in his usability bible Don’t Make Me Think (quoting his wife), “If something is hard to use, I don’t use it as much.”

Or maybe at all.

It’s all relative to the desire for the information, of course. I spent a long time yesterday trying to log on to Al Jazeera English‘s live stream. I had competition and couldn’t connect to their server, I reckon. Sometimes a lot of people want the same content, especially when things are blowing up.