This is an important notice to readers: You may not be able to comment on AlbertaPolitics.ca posts this weekend. If you encounter that difficulty, it’s not you, and it’s not personal. Your ability to comment will return. 

Change comes to us all, and this blog must change to a new online host, a “migration,” as the tech boffins say, that needs to happen this weekend. 

“What could possibly go wrong?” asks a commenter on the previous post. Plenty, probably. Beats me. I’m not the techno guy. When I started in the newspaper business, news stories were written on manual typewriters on little sheets of newsprint called “takes,” and prepared for the presses on giant linotype machines that looked like the ones in the photo above. 

I’m not kidding. The only difference from the ones at the old unhyphenated Victoria Daily Times where I was first paid to write news stories was that the guys operating them really did wear armbands and visors, I kid you not. The room in which they worked smelled of metal filings, and probably wasn’t all that healthy a place to breathe all day. I was also as noisy as Bedlam, and I don’t recall the gentlemen who worked there wearing earplugs, either. 

But who says computers are good for you? They certainly weren’t good for the quality of newswriting. The reason, it is said here, is that nobody learns how to improve their writing if they don’t have to stand still and pay attention while an ancient copy editor with bad breath and fingers stained yellow by nicotine instructs them rudely on how to write a coherent story.

This could be humiliating, but it concentrated the mind somewhat, if not quite as wonderfully as a hanging in a fortnight. Electronic filing ended that, and journalistic prose has suffered as a result. But I digress.

What is going to go wrong – only for a few hours, it is profoundly to be hoped – is that readers won’t be able to comment for a spell. Please be patient if you encounter this difficulty. It will be temporary, and our commitment to printing a wide range of comments – every single one of them moderated by human eyes, viz., mine – remains firm. 

Thank you for your attention to this matter!