So, both Munger kids have recently gotten into publishing their own stuff on the Web. Nora likes to make comics. Make sure to check out her latest, called, I think rather not ominously enough, Pandas.

Jim has started a blog. I told him if he did a real bang-up job on it, I’d buy him his very own domain for it. He did a nice job, so you can find it at thefixblog.com.

A couple days ago we received our new phone book. Actually, we got four new phone books — and these are just the ones from our local phone provider. An independent publisher in our our area also publishes another three books, for a total of seven books a year.

You know what? I just realized that I hadn’t cracked even one of these books in the past year. If I need a number, I look it up on Google. So I took my four new books, plus the two I bothered to keep from last year’s assortment, and I put them straight into the recycle bin! Fascinating, isn’t it, that just as telephone books have become essentially irrelevant, they have simultaneously exploded into use, with separate regional and local books, with white and yellow pages, even a compact yellow pages for those who can’t be bothered with the big book. I suppose it’s the desperate last gasp of the phone directory business, before it withers into obscurity.

The only paper directory I could imagine wanting anymore was one completely customized to my own needs. If the phone company could give me a listing of all the numbers I dialed in the past, say, five years, with names, addresses, and updates in case any of that information has changed, supported by perhaps 20 pages of advertising for products and services I may be interested in based on my calling tendencies, I just *might* be interested in that.

It could be a handy quick reference, for those rare times when a computer isn’t readily available (suppose, say, Jim is using my laptop to play World of Warcraft, and Greta’s taken hers on a business trip). But that’s it. There’s really no reason anyone with a fast Internet connection would prefer to use four, 1000-page tomes.