The domain-name server change is going a lot more slowly than I’d hoped. Darn.

Remember when we told you about The Impossible Project, the Dutch-based effort to re-invent film for vintage Polaroid instant cameras? One of the companies that’s licensed the Polaroid name is so enthused, it’s going to make the cameras again!

With all the aborted/infanticided girl babies in China these days (despite heavy-handed government efforts there to stop those practices), where will that nation’s rising population of surplus males find mates? Would you believe, Tanzania? (From the (London) Times.)

Playboy, like a lot of oldline media outfits, is in fiscal trouble. Earlier this year, according to industry rumor, its management offered up the company for potential sale. The asking price was apparently far above the firm’s estimated market value. That’s because the 83-year-old Hugh Hefner wanted to make sure he maintained his ultra-hedonist lifestyle (and he didn’t really want to sell anyway).

Still, at least two potential buyers emerged. They’re private equity firms, companies that exist only to buy and sell other companies (like the one that briefly owned Chrysler).

One of these would-be bunny buyers, according to Marlow Harris, also currently owns the Century 21 and Coldwell Banker real-estate brands.

Make up your own puns about “development,” “view lands,” or “treating women like property” here.

Just off most of the Washington and Oregon coast, there’s an oceanic “dead zone.” In the summer months, the water there just doesn’t have enough oxygen to support much marine life. What’s worse, Oregon State U. scientists tell the LA Times that, due to climate-change trends, this dead zone might come back every summer, no matter what humans do.

You know I adore vintage advertisements. There’s now a site chock full of lovely ’50s-’70s TV commercials, in great prints. They were donated by an ad agency to Duke University. This means you open them in the “iTunes U” section of your iTunes app.

This site is still going strong, but still at the interim URL.

I wanted to re-establish it at the server provider I’ve used lo these past 14 years. It turns out that to host a WordPress-powered site over there, I need access to a SQL database. For that, they want me to pay them more.

I did that.

I then tried to launch a WP site there. It seemed to work initially. But it wouldn’t import my interim site’s posts. I only got an error message saying I didn’t have permission to create a new content directory.

Tech support suggested I change the config.php file to note a different directory path for new files and directories to go into. That doesn’t seem to work either.

I might have to delete whatever files WP has already created in my SQL database. To do that, I may need to configure and upload something else called “PhpMyAdmin.” Like WordPress itself, this isn’t an application but a stack of database scripts. The instructions for uploading and starting PhpMyAdmin are written in total unforgiving geekspeak. I have no idea what to do to make it work.

Alternately, I could try to move my domain name and associated files to this server.

No, I STILL don’t have this new site moved back to my old domain name. Every time I try to figure out a tech issue, three more spring up, and I’m just not a code guy.

I’m not the only one who’s noticed that local news is but a small piece of those fiscally endangered local newspapers.

Alex Jones, author of the book Losing the News: The Future of the News that Feeds Democracy, calls original local news content the “iron core” of a newspaper’s info-wares. To use an ’80s ad metaphor, that’s “The Beef;” with sports, comics, wire copy, opinions, and all other non-ad material as the “Big Bun.”

Clay Shirky uses this concept to conclude his old hometown paper in Columbia, MO has, at most, a dozen employees providing the really essential reportage. Therefore, Shirky continues, any nonprofit news entity for a Columbia-sized metro area (in print and/or online) need only subsidize that dozen people’s work. The rest of a newspaper’s product (including local commentary, local arts, and local sports) could be left to live or die by the whim of the free market or the passion of unpaid bloggers.

I, as you might expect, disagree.

As a reader and a scholar of journalism, I believe in the full meal deal. We need the protein of objective reportage, but we also need the fiber of larger cultural/community coverage. We need the starches of punditry and the greens of the arts. And, yes, we need the dessert of humor and entertainment.

(from KIRO-TV): “The pastor of Fircrest’s Liberty Baptist Church pleaded guilty to repeatedly making obscene phone calls to female baristas at a coffee stand near his church. The father of four girls, 41-year-old Randy Brock, entered the plea on Sept. 30.”