All The News that Fits

One of my Met-blogging colleagues recently posted a truly cool retrospective of his one-time job as a newspaper carrier.  Much of the inherent coolness in it was that I had done the same job, for the same paper, within a year of the same time.

It was one of only a few positive experiences I ever had with the newspaper business.

Circulation managers and editors see me coming and react in much the same way that public health authorities did when Mary Mallon presented her Medicare card. Here's a litany of the connections to newspapers I can remember from my entire lifetime.

Earliest years: In my earliest memories, my parents took a paper called the World-Journal-Tribune. It was the survivor of the three legendary 20th century New York papers in its name which died, as independent entities, after the infamous newspaper strikes of the mid-60s. I don't remember much about it other than that it was there, and history records not an awful lot of "there" being there anyway, as the "Widget" folded a mere eight months after its birth.

Early teens: My first daily newspaper gig was helping a friend deliver his route of the Long Island Press. Not as fancy as the other local paper, it had a smaller but devoted following, and its baseball coverage, especially, was excellent. Naturally, it folded in the middle of Dennis's first year on the route.

High school: That other local paper was, and amazingly for my luck still is, Long Island's Newsday. It hasn't folded, although its attempt at a NYC-based edition didn't last more than a few years. This was the rag that I delivered for in later years; they also passed out a high school journalism award to me in my senior year and, in a fit of irony, their article announcing it left an entire line of the text out right after (correctly) spelling my name.

Ithaca/Syracuse years: Even I couldn't break the Cornell Daily Sun, which celebrated its centennial while I worked there and just passed its 125th anniversary last year.  A few of us from the paper did attempt to start up a similarly independent publication for the Sun's off-season, which we cleverly named The Summer Solstice. That lasted all of two issues.  Meanwhile, I got a gig- first as an Ithaca-based stringer, later as that city's part-time regular staffer, for the three newspapers based in Syracuse. The morning paper (the Post-Standard, or as we sometimes called it, the SUB-Standard) still lives on, but the afternoon Journal and separately edited Sunday Herald-American have long bitten the dust.

Buffalo Chapter 1: After a year of law school, I decided I needed to get to know the local community a little better, so I subscribed to the morning paper, the Courier-Express. A month later, it folded.

Rochester: In hopes the afternoon paper would be a better bet, I cast my lot with a subscription to the Times Union. Three guesses what happened to THAT periodical within a few years.

And now we're back here, where the only local paper is owned by gagillionaire Warren Buffett and not likely to fold. I canceled my home subscription a couple of years ago when it seemed the whole thing was accessible online, but I occasionally miss the feel of the newsprint and the messy stacks of the previous days' sections, which I'd often obsessively keep around until I'd read through them all.

One of my all-time favorite parody efforts was done by National Lampoon in the late 70s, where they lovingly aped the entire content of a typical middle-American Sunday newspaper. Set in the fictional town of Dacron, Ohio and named the Republican-Democrat, it made all kinds of fun about the things that made these papers so horrifically bad: the Sunday funnies, the national-insert magazine (theirs was named Pomade), and the advertising circulars (including one for Swillmart- where quality is a slogan!- and another for the local supermarket, Food Clown).

It's falling apart and faded, but I still have every piece of that edition- along with my Not The New York Times and my Off The Wall Street Journal, both parody pieces secretly done by staffers of those papers during prolonged strikes in the early 80s.  The Lampoon spoof, though, is the one I'm still the fondest of, and which I'll occasionally pull a section from if some memory is jogged.

I did just that the other day, and chanced to look at the credits on the outer packaging of the entire paper. I'd remembered all along that the Lampoon at the time, and this parody in particular, had been edited by P.J. O'Rourke, who has gone on to a long career in comedy including as a regular panelist on Wait Wait.

I did not remember seeing the credit right below his, though:

Associate Editor: John Hughes

I stared at it for a second. Nah, couldn't be.

The inventor of the fucking Brat Pack? The guy who gave us Ferris Bueller and spared Molly Ringwald from a life of utter mediocrity? The guy who sent Jay and Silent Bob to Shermer Illinois only to find it didn't exist?

HE COWROTE MY FAVORITE SPOOF?!?

A quick check of IMDB, and, um, yeah: Started out in the '70s as a writer for National Lampoon magazine.

I think I need a Day Off.

Shooting from the hip-o-crit

I'm modifying this ever so slightly from its original presentation, here, by sturgeonslawyer, but he obviously made the point perfectly well to me, at least, or I wouldn't be repeating it, would I?

Consider this scenario:

    * We have credible reports of a substantial threat of _____________.
    * The reports are not confirmed, and cannot be confirmed at this time.
    * Magnitude: if the threat is real and is carried out, the results will be catastrophic.

The only rational response to this situation is to prepare to meet the threat of __________ as if it were real, and to take every step possible to prevent its being carried out, and to blunt its effect if it is carried out.

So why, Dan'l asks and now so do I, are the Bushies so rah-rah about facing the threat dead-on (all too literally, many times) when you fill that blank with "terrorism," but they're in such denial, and so demanding of so-called "proof," when you fill it with "global warming," hmmmmmm?

If anything, you'd think we'd err on the side of caution with the second answer rather than the first. We can reduce carbon emissions, and our dependence on foreign energy sources, without violating our fundamental precepts of government, and even if the threat turns out to be overstated, we haven't hurt anything or anyone.

I know. This is making way too much sense. I'll stop now.