Not only did these guys play one of the rockingest shows I caught at CMJ this year, but they have one hell of an album too.  Good stuff if you’re into The Strokes or Black Crowes.

New York Times’s Richard Rubin on Frank Buckles, the last surviving American fighting veteran of World War I: 

BY any conceivable measure, Frank Buckles has led an extraordinary life. Born on a farm in Missouri in February 1901, he saw his first automobile in his hometown in 1905, and his first airplane at the Illinois State Fair in 1907. At 15 he moved on his own to Oklahoma and went to work in a bank; in the 1940s, he spent more than three years as a Japanese prisoner of war. When he returned to the United States, he married, had a daughter and bought a farm near Charles Town, W. Va., where he lives to this day. He drove a tractor until he was 104.

But even more significant than the remarkable details of Mr. Buckles’s life is what he represents: Of the two million soldiers the United States sent to France in World War I, he is the only one left.

Many look at the Korean War as the forgotten war, but World War I is one that has really been overlooked.  As Rubin points out, America seemed to aim to forget about the war as soon as the armistice was signed.  The question of purpose, of historical significance or even success has tainted the war for some.  The historical study of WWI in a college environment is surprising limited, with so much focus being placed on the Civil War, World War II or Vietnam when looking at American wars.

The impact of WWI not only on the American people but on America’s place on the international stage is immeasurable.  Yet those that fought in it, those that Veterans Day was original created to honor (originally as Armistice Day), have been largely forgotten, overshadowed by “The Greatest Generation” and our national guilt over the treatment of Vietnam veterans.  Even Richmond’s own World War I memorial, The Carillion, isn’t as well known for its significance as it should be.

In our national obsession with other wars, we’ve lost some opportunities to really study and get to know those that fought the Great War.  As Rubin closes:

It’s hard for anyone, I imagine, to say for certain what it is that we will lose when Frank Buckles dies. It’s not that World War I will then become history; it’s been history for a long time now. But it will become a different kind of history, the kind we can’t quite touch anymore, the kind that will, from that point on, always be just beyond our grasp somehow. We can’t stop that from happening. But we should, at least, take notice of it.

So I broke down and bought myself a Zune about a month back when Woothad them for $100 (I bought a brown one which they marked down to $80 a week later, but I have $20 credit, yay).  So far I’ve dug.  A 30gig player for $100 isn’t half bad.  I don’t like the whole wed-to-Zune’s-software thing, but iPods are married to iTunes so I can’t complain too much.  Though my Sansaacted as a flashdrive and I could just drag and drop music, which was pretty sweet.

Anyway, the point of this post is I’ve upgraded to Zune’s new 2.2 software today and so far it’s pretty slick.  I’ve even joined the Zune Social site (check out my profile here).  I haven’t really played with everything so I can’t give a full review (I suck at reviews anyway) and I haven’t even been able to find someone else with a Zune to try out this sharing thing, but as I discover neat new things I’ll try and let anyone interested know.  Which is all of you.  Because, clearly, if you’re reading this you care about everything in my life.

Rita Flórez writes at GOOD Magazine about how zines continue to florish, even in the face of easier and cheaper means of reaching a wider audience with the Internet.  One part stands out to me:

To Pagan Kennedy, creator of Pagan’s Head and author of ’Zine, blogs and sites like MySpace are just the natural extension of zine culture. “In many ways, the zine world is very much like the internet,” she says. “It’s just that zines happened through the mail, so it happened slowly. Even the conventions of the zine world—the personal zine, where you tell your life story—are very much like blogs and MySpace.”

Still, for avid zine readers like Rowe and Frederick, there’s a distinction between blogs and zines. “I don’t think MySpace has the zine spirit,” says Rowe. “The motivation behind a zine is [personal], but you don’t care about getting noticed. Print gives you many more options. If you publish it online, it’s limited by the coding.”

Emphasis mine.

Websites, zine or otherwise, are only limited by their coding in as much as their author’s knowledge of coding is limited.  As someone who has written online in assorted forms for the last ten years, I can tell you that presentation is very important, not just in blogging but in presenting any content on any site, especially when trying to present something like fiction or a journal.

While the web presents the author with a wider audience, it also presents the audience with a wider pool of things to get their attention.  The author’s job then becomes not only to provide solid content but to figure out a creative way to present that content and make it stand out.  If you were aiming to publish a zine online, to stick to a blog format of just pictures and text is to set yourself up to be lost in the crowd.  With so many tools available, as basic as Photoshop or an understanding of CSS and DHTML or as advanced as Flash and beyond, there are many ways to take text and make it so much more.  It just takes time and commitment, just about as much as you’d have to put into making a solid print zine.  But if you care about your material and getting it into other eyes, you should be willing to do that legwork.

(Via Kottke.)