Columbia muckety-mucks have chosen to waive the residency requirement on my behalf, which clears the way for me to apply the Georgetown credits to my graduation in August. I was also informed by the journalism department’s internship coordinator that I’d get five credits for wherever I wind up getting placed in D.C. So that would give me 125, one more than I need to graduate. Woo-hoo! Anybody going to be in D.C. this summer? Let’s get together.

I will miss Karen, though. Hopefully, we can get most of the wedding planning done before I leave in June. Considering that we met online and maintained an online relationship for a year and a half before she moved to Chicago, I’m not too worried about our ability to stay in touch. One nice thing interning in D.C. (as opposed to Shelby, N.C.)is that it will be much easier to make a quick trip to visit her in Chicago or vice versa.

Plus, I’ll be so busy — between two classes and 36 hours of internship work a week — that the time will probably fly. Should be fun. It won’t be easy, but it may be fun. It could be fun. It will be fun. It might be fun. I’ll have trouble predicting the future.

I should mention that former Columbia Journalism Department Chair Carolyn Hulse had some good things to say about the Institute on Political Journalism program. She said it’s excellent and that it has a very good reputation in D.C. That’s encouraging. I just hope they place me somewhere better than, say, Hog Farmer Quarterly.

Interesting story by Jeff Prince in the Fort Worth Weekly about the sometimes uneasy relationship between alternative weekly newspapers and the adult entertainment ads that often appear in the back. How alternative weeklies balance their desire for increased respectability in towns where they are often the only alternative to a monopoly daily with their fondness for the easy green adult entertainment ads bring in is certainly a fascinating topic, but Prince reaches for a trend.

He writes:

The alternative news industry is in the midst of change — an evolution rather than a revolution. In some cities, papers are cutting back on raunchy ads. In other places, publishers continue to enlarge their red-light sections.

OK, so red-light advertising is either increasing or decreasing, depending on the paper. Talk about a news flash!

Here’s the real scoop:

The Internet offers advertisers near-boundless freedom and accessibility, an advantage that more sex workers are discovering each week. Add it all up, and the future of dirty ads in alternative newsweeklies appears less rosy than most of the cheeks that appear in these pages.

I think that’s right. Whether it’s sex chat, exotic dancing or prostitution, anyone can advertise in a much more explicit and uncensored fashion on the Web and at a much cheaper cost. The only hard part might be whether your site can be found amid all the sex-related material online.

But as alt-weeklies look to provide a more serious option for news consumers frustrated by one-horse towns, they will probably look to either tame or trim the amount of sex advertising they carry in a bid for respectability. And the truth is, we may be reaching that elusive tipping point where many sex workers decide, “Hey, I don’t need this paper to make money.”

That said, when a medium for such otherwise difficult-to-find advertising is established, the
people who use it will seek it out repeatedly and thus make advertising in that space worthwhile on the margin.

My team of advisers informs me that an internship in D.C. and academic credit from Georgetown would probably be more impressive to future employers than clips from a small paper in a small town.

But there’s a wrinkle. Columbia requires that my last 12 credits be completed at Columbia. While I’ll probably get six or more credits from Columbia for the internship, the other six would be transfer credits from the Georgetown work. So I need to get special permission from the college to let me graduate using those credits.

I hope it all gets worked out. I really would like to be able to do this thing. Living in D.C. for the summer certainly would be more fun than Shelby, N.C. The D.C. program also covers housing and I wouldn’t have to worry about having access to a car, either. No final decision yet, though. Stay tuned.

Oh, by the way, in addition to not landing The Vindicator copy-editing internship in Youngstown, Ohio, I was also passed over the href=”http://www.reason.com/”>Reason magazine Burton C. Gray Memorial Internship. As was my friend Julian Sanchez. The winner? Jeremy Lott, a former colleague of mine at Spintech magazine.

I have been offered an internship at the Shelby Star in Shelby, N.C., as part of the Institute for Humane Studies’ journalism internship program. The Star has a circulation of 18,000 and is owned by Freedom Communications, which has a proud history of concern for individual liberty.

Shelby is located in the southwestern corner of North Carolina, near the border with South Carolina and about 50 miles away from Charlotte. As of 1997, 19,953 people lived in Shelby, and 90,650 people lived in Cleveland County (which encompasses Shelby). I’d get a $1,500 stipend and a housing allowance.

I don’t know yet when they want a decision, but I would like to find out first if I will be offered Reason magazine’s Burton C. Gray Memorial Internship, to be done in Reason’s Los Angeles offices. Editor-in-chief Nick Gillespie said he’d get back to the finalists some time this week.

I’ve already been offered an unpaid proofreading/editorial assistant internship at Chicago’s Heartland Institute , as well as a writing/PR internship at the Reason Public Policy Institute. For the latter, the stipend would be about $1,500 and I would telecommute from Chicago.

Lastly, I’ve been accepted to The Fund for American Studies‘ Institute on Political Journalism, which incorporates six credits of course work at Georgetown and a journalism internship in Washington, D.C. A few snags: the cost, whether the credits will be accepted by Columbia for graduation and the quality of the internship I’d actually wind up getting placed in.

Of all these, I don’t have a clear first choice just yet. They each have their advantages and drawbacks. Balancing the quality of the publication, the amount of published writing I’d come away with, the proximity to home, and finances is a tall order. I’ll have to confer with my team of advisers and weigh it all out before deciding.

In the meantime, wish me luck on the Reason internship. If I don’t get it, I hope Julian Sanchez — also a finalist — does.

My … fourth pair of gloves this winter season met their end last week. Out of desperation, I bought those tiny little "magic gloves" that stretch to fit almost any size hand. Not great, but what can be done? The department stores stopped selling winter gloves in February.

So I was pulling my hat out of my pocket and one of my gloves — which apparently was lying right on top of the hat — went flying and landed right smack in the middle of a puddle on the street. And that polyester fabric isn’t going to withstand a puddle very well.

I suppose I could have pulled the glove out of the puddle and washed it at home, but I didn’t feel like carrying a dirty, puddle water-soaked glove with me all day. But, damn, my luck with gloves this winter has been awful, especially since "spring" came around.

Nope, the Times is doing fine. Slate hasn’t put The New Republic out of business. So which old media powerhouse has been slain by its Internet competition? Penthouse magazine. Bye-bye, grease!

Of course, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. The old men’s mags have been hurting for years, Playboy especially. Harder stuff is easily — and perhaps more importantly, anonymously — available online, and magazines like Maxim, Stuff and FHM have given the bunny a run for its money in the "guy" market. Most men would rather see some young sitcom starlet nearly nude than see the "women of Enron" completely nude.

Meanwhile, Playboy’s online revenues increased by 18 percent in the fourth quarter of 2001, and they still lost $4.5 million.

Good story by Saul Hansell in the New York Times examining Google‘s search for a business plan.

"We have pride that we are building a service that is really important to the world and really successful for the long term," says co-founder Larry Page. But as several industry experts note in the story, that’s not enough. We all wish it were, but it’s not.

According to Jupiter Media Metrix, Google users used the site an average of 24.1 minutes a month, 7.9 minutes more than the nearest search competitor, Ask Jeeves. How can Google capitalize on that?

I don’t know what a successful long-term business plan for Google would look like, but I do hope (1) that it is able to develop one fast so it doesn’t disappear and (2) that it doesn’t become so focused on business matters (I’m looking at you, Yahoo!) that it allows its core mission — making the "best search technology on the planet" — to fade from view. Don’t forget what got you where you are, Google.

Do you have your Google toolbar yet?

If you haven’t already, you really should download the Google toolbar. It takes less than half a minute to download and it is fantastic. All the Google options (images, groups, etc.) are right there in a drop-down menu, you can search easily within a site, and the highlight option automatically highlights your search term on the search results page you’re visiting. Go. Now.

It’s not as crazy as it sounds. Well, maybe it is, and we’re just crazier than we think we are. Rev. Jim Rehnberg is the Rent-A-Rev™ (yes, he’s trademarked). Karen and I are meeting with him later this month, and considering that neither of us is part of an organized church, this may make the most sense. He seems very open-minded, jovial and friendly.

This would be the opposite of the kind of "God’s letting you get married because I say so" attitude we want to steer clear of, I think. Also, since he does this for a living, he’s used to dealing with the fact that the people he’s marrying are usually from different faiths, faithless or at least not super observant. Hopefully, this will work out.

I had my first filling put in this morning. The dentist gave me three shots of novocaine before my lip started tingling so he could proceed with matters. I don’t know if those three shots were necessary, or if he was just impatient.

My dentist is always very complimentary about my teeth. He repeatedly describes them as "perfect" and "wonderful" and so on. I suppose he’s talking about them from a dental health point of view, rather than an aesthetic standpoint, considering that I’m gap-toothed (in spite of expensive orthodonture) and a candidate for one of those tooth-whitening toothpastes.

But he’s always complimenting me on my teeth; it’s a little ridiculous. I suppose that dentists are used to carrying the balance of the conversation, considering, so they are bound to ramble. And after the weather and whatnot, what is there left to say? It’s not like my dentist and I are on intimate terms, though I’ve been seeing him for as long as I can remember.

Are there people out there with really low self-esteem about their teeth that their dentists need to be reassuring them all the time? Is this some new mandate on chair-side manner from the ADA? Whatever, it makes me feel especially silly, since I don’t take very good care of my teeth. I brush once a day and rarely floss. I walk away from the dentist feeling I don’t deserve the good dental health I actually have.

What have I done to deserve such "perfect" teeth, I wonder? And meanwhile, there’s some poor schlub who brushes four times a day, flosses, uses Listerine, refrains from sugar and has major dental surgery every other year. He’s just living for one kind word from his dentist, and I’m swimming in undeserved praise. But who said life was fair, right? I know my dentist didn’t.