Argh.

I wonder how many magazines folded as a result of the Great Depression. I wonder how many folded in past recessions? I wonder how much more magazine-attrition we are going to see.

Already two of the magazines I subscribe to have died - first, Mary Engelbreit's Home Companion (and I JUST RESUBSCRIBED. And my subscription is being filled out by the less-satisfactory Martha Stewart Living (a/k/a Martha Stewart STILL Wants to Take Over the World).

And now it's CRAFT. And while I always had mixed emotions about CRAFT - I could have done with less of the in-your-face activism, and I could have done with less of the "We're going to throw tradition out the window, whee! Because ugly is the new pretty!" there still were some good articles and ideas in there. (Supposedly we will get e-mails telling us how to reclaim the money we had left in our subscriptions. I have not received one yet).

This is a bit upsetting. Magazines are one of my joys and one of my escapes and now I'm worrying - I haven't had a "Victoria" in a while...could Better Homes and Gardens be going down a bad path? Will the knitmags survive?

And online is NOT the same. Not at all. I cannot comfortably curl up in bed with an online version. I cannot fold it open next to me while I eat. I can't half-look at it, half-knit while I sit on the couch. (And NO, I am not lusting after one of the new Kindles; they leave me cold).

This just stinks.

(Bad path of BH and G: I praised them a month or so ago for not taking the route of far too many women's magazines, where 1/3 of the magazine is devoted to delicious looking recipes, and another 1/3 to scary medical stories and nannying diet articles that basically tell you that as an adult woman, you should NEVER enjoy any of the delicious food featured in the magazine. Make it four your husband, for your children (there's that assumption again!) but don't eat it yourself.

Then last month they trumpet that they're starting a new "Health" feature. The focus? Mediterranean diet. But the subtext? We're all too fat.

They actually said - and this very nearly made me throw the issue across the room in disgust - in one of those little "text boxes" - that "eating alone could be as dangerous to your health as drinking alone."

I'm sorry, but: the Hell? I LIVE ALONE. What am I supposed to do? Never eat? Go knocking on neighbor's doors looking for someone with whom to sup (hi Lynn!)? Line up at the Government Feeding Centers that surely will open soon so that I can have rationed out to me the amount and type of food some faceless bureaucrat has deemed is "best" for me?

Oh, I understand the whole disordered-eating thing. But telling people not to eat alone because perhaps 4% of the entire populace can't handle it - it's ridiculous! It's untenable! It fails to understand on a very basic level how some of us live, and some of the problems we face. And it makes me alternately sad and angry. I'm d-----d, as they say in the Victorian novels, if I will be dragging my sorry backside around town to find someone to share my meal with just because an idiot writing in a magazine says it's "unhealthy" for some people to eat alone.)

But anyway. Bad news in an already not fun week.