originally quoted by Vance Wood:
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I have been kind of sitting on the sidelines during most of this exchange but it dawned on me that people are complaining about something being not good enough, or as good as it used to be, or something else it now is or never was. Good grief. When I started growing bonsai there was no Bonsai Today, no Bonsai Europe, no BCI, no ABS, no MABA, no International Bonsai, and no INTERNET. There was no Warehouser collection, no National Arboretum, and no bonsai nurseries. We did not know what Akadama was, Yamadori, Kanuma, Shimpaku Junipers, none of it. It was a waste land like right after the earth cooled. We struggled with making up soil mixes, improvising tools, looking for pots and trying to fish our ways through all the Bovine Scatology that passed as Bonsai literature--one or two books
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If this paragraph was supposed to be an argument in your favor, you did a poor job of making your point. In fact you have written exactly what I wish to see Bonsai Today distance itself from...
the past. You bitch about not having books 50 years ago and fishing through the bovine scatology, yet you seem to condemn me for wanting Bonsai Today to step up to the plate. What if the publishers of all the great books we have today were in the same shape Bonsai Today is in. What if they still printed all that bovine scatology? Hell no, they have moved on, they have improved, they have done research or better, they have published what they knew in a changing bonsai community. Those that miss the bus are destined to repeat the past. That is what I think you are trying to say, and with that I agree.
My take on what you are saying above is that I am somehow supposed to be grateful that I have a magazine about bonsai six times a year, and be happy that I get it. I should be grateful for the fact that the magazine was more than it is today, but because you had no magazines 50 years ago, I should except the fact that the magazine I pay 10.00 bucks for has reprints from the same magazine 10 years ago. How is that moving forward.
I submitt: Wayne make use of the tremendous back log of terriffic articles through the years from Bonsai Today. I think he should offer the Best of Bonsai Today as a freebie bonus issue at the end of the year. Free to subscribers and available for purchase from your local nursery. For the next ten years Wayne could offer the BoBT from each of the first ten years. A bonus magazine highlighting the best article from each of the issues of that year. He could then offer this for the next ten years. Then 10 years from now he could offer issues 11 through 20, etc. etc.
This would solve two issues.
1. It would give the readership a bonus, always nice.
2. It would keep the reprints out of the bi-monthly magazine and in a bonus issue where they belong. Reserving the magazine for new content rather than reprints, re-edited or not.
I'm not even going to comment on the shimpaku junipers in your reply. I'm just going to chalk that up to typing fast and not believing you could actually type that fast and therefore just didn't actually read what you were typing.
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If in our collective wisdom we judge that those things mentioned above are inferior and without offering a viable alternate solution we are inevitably doomed to returning to the good old days where men were men, and real men made there own soil, and bonsai was pronounced banzai. We ought to be thankful we have what we have and if we think it could and should be better then we should contribute to making it so. Anybody can sit on the sidelines and bitch.
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I got news for you, men are still men, we all still make our own soil, and most never pronounced it banzai. You might be content with mediocrity but I'm not settleing for it. There is much more out there, much more. Someone with a whole lot more business sense than me will be able to bring it to us. Bonsai Europe is starting to gain a foothold in America. I surmise that within 4 or 5 years readership of that magazine will far outweigh Bonsai Today in America. That is if you are looking to advance in bonsai, If your comfortable with the past and dream about the good ole days, then have a nice day.
Cheers, ak