New S-T website, Werth, organizing Dylan

What I'm thinking about this morning:

1. New Chicago Sun-Times website: My old newspaper is one of the first newspapers I've seen of its ilk — financially strapped (or, if you prefer, cheap) with a tendency to follow innovations rather than innovate itself, like the New York Times — to take a significant step in the right direction with the a redesign of its website. Whereas as many newspapers' websites like the dreadfully unreadable DenverPost.com (without Twitter and alerts, I would never bother going there because it takes so long to stop loading ads that the headlines I want to click on keep moving) that cram more and more story lists, advertising, photo galleries, video players, widgets, widgets and more widgets onto the page that is barely loadable let alone readable, the S-T website has a nice simple structure that's easy to follow. Still stuff rough spots like an <h3> tag that's too big and has no variation from the <h2> and a big grey bullet that's just too obvious an attempt to be stylish, but they have space between elements and the page properly segregated into news in the left two columns and links and widgets in the right sidebar.

2. Jayson Werth signing: Count me among those who don't hate the Washington Nationals' signing of outfielder Jayson Werth. They gave him too much money and too many years, but the team had to do something to avoid being the team agents use to drive up the price of their players for other bidders. If I'm a Nats fan — and thankfully, I'm not — I'm happy the team finally landed one of their free agent targets and will start chanting over everyone who says the team is going to regret this by the time Werth is 35 and still has three seasons left on his contract. Of course they will, but the team needed to make this sort of move to make sure that by the time Werth is 35, the team isn't still a joke. Notably, the people griping most about the deal are other teams' GMs who would prefer to be able to pay their players less to wipe the floor with the Nats and national media who find it troubling when someone disturbs the ongoing Red Sox vs. Yankees storyline.

3. How to organize Bob Dylan: Six years and 3,000 songs after first going digital with my music and more or less forgoing my CD collection, I'm in the process of going through my entire music library alphabetically and listening to everything no matter how big a mystery it is that I ever found the music tolerable (Big Head Todd? Clearly I wasn't as smart in college as I thought I was.) In the process, I'm rebuilding all my playlists. While my Beatles collection nicely fits into a single playlist — the music evolves, but is still distinctly Beatles whether it's from Please Please Me or Abbey Road — Bob Dylan is just all over the place, making me appreciate the movie I'm Not There even more. My initial inclination is that he would break down easy to pre-electric, post-electric and the more recent bluesy Dylan of Time out of Mind and Modern Times. But that isn't working because even the electric side of Bringing It All Back Home seems to fit more in spirit with his earlier stuff than, say, Blonde on Blonde or Blood on the Tracks. I'm starting to wonder if the voice he sings with is the identifying the characteristic: the high-pitched talkative folksy Dylan, the more sonorous but still distinctly nasal Dylan of Tangled Up in Blue and the gravelly Dylan of the later years. Not sure how it's going to work.