I really enjoy the newspaper. As long as I can remember Tricia and I have had a subscription. Before we had kids we'd spend every Saturday and Sunday morning in bed reading the St. Louis Post Dispatch. Being the only paper in a relatively large city, the Post Dispatch was a beefy paper. The front page was regularly fourteen to sixteen pages long and there were a wide variety of sections from which to choose.
We now live in a smaller city and have found it somewhat difficult to adjust to a smaller paper. The State has three daily sections: Front page, Metro, and Sports. And that's on a good day. Monday's paper often combines Sports and Metro so that there are only two sections. Two very thin sections.
World news is largely omitted - seemingly to make as much space as possible for football articles. Though the college football season is only five months long it dominates the paper year-round. Today when I opened up the paper I wasn't surprised to see that there was a large picture of a Gamecock football on the front page that took up half of the top fold. My class and I studied this once and found that more days than not the top fold is dominated by college football headlines.
Yet I still love reading the paper. Each morning I eat a bowl of Mini-Wheats, drink a tall glass of orange juice, and browse the headlines for something of interest. Today there were a number of things that I thought were, for better or worse, interesting...
Crystal "Shy" Roberts climbed the roughly 10-foot pole at the Penthouse Club, gripping it's metallic surface with her thighs as it swayed a foot in both directions.
Early on a Friday night in April, Roberts played to mostly small groups of men seated in low-slung chairs around small cocktail tables at the Horry County club. Many of the men wore polo shirts and baseball caps and smoked cigars as dancers moved from lap to lap through the room.
This was from an article titled "Golfers Flock to Strip Clubs." I thought at first I was reading a Carl Hiaasen novel. I'm sure, though, Carl Hiassen would be greatly insulted to be credited with such artistic phrases as "gripping it's metallic surface with her thighs."
Though it starts quite steamy the article turns away from stripper poles and lap dances, talking instead about revenue, tourism, zoning, and the migration of North Carolina strippers. Much like a visit to a strip club, I can only imagine, I finished the article feeling dirty and unfulfilled.
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Page two of the front page was surprisingly about the recent Royal Wedding between Prince William and Kate Middleton. I was careful to skip right past this one. I'm on a quest to be the one and only American with access to television who knows absolutely nothing about this wedding. It's a challenge, to be sure, but worth the effort.
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I found that modesty is not something our governor is afflicted with. When grading herself after her first 100 days, Nikki Haley responded "Effort, absolutely A+++. I sleep and breathe this every day. I want everything done yesterday. For accomplishments, I'd honestly give myself and A. We are so excited for what we've done in 100 days. We really, really are."
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The classifieds, as always, were a bit strange. There was an ad that read:
Dental Internship
for enthusiastic fast learner considering becoming a dentist. College degree required.
Don't you HAVE to have a degree to be a dentist? Wouldn't an internship be part of that previous degree? Wouldn't the earned degree demonstrate that you have already moved past "considering becoming a dentist"? Is the degree in something all together different - like English or Art History? Can these people learn to become dentists with no more than an internship? Maybe we should all look a little more carefully at those framed degrees in the dentist office.
There were a lot of dogs for sale. Some came with papers that demanded a $500 price tag, or more. Others were mutts. I felt bad for the ones named Pinky, Prissy (who they think is a Border Collie) and Tinkerbelle (who not so surprisingly is a Chihuahua who "likes to sit on your lap all day"). Who'd want a dog with stupid names like those? There was another dog named Zeus. Be honest, which would you rather have your neighbors hearing you call from the back door, Prissy or Zeus?
Others didn't have names but were identified as being pure-bloods from breeds that I can only assume they made up. What exactly is a Golden Doodle or a Maltipoo?
Some guy had the nerve, in the $100 and Under section, to advertise...
Firewood free, you cut XXX-3499 from tree that fell in storm
Talk about nerve. This guy had a tree toppled by a storm and rather than clean it up, or even pay someone to come out and do it for him, he's advertising it as though he's doing everyone else a favor. If this works just imagine the possibilities. Both Tom Sawyer and Mark Twain would be proud.
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A bunch of women are getting married. I presume there's a groom but he's not in any of the pictures. Instead, there are a number of women in wedding dresses leaning against trees, standing in formal living rooms, or enjoying a day at the fountain. I can't help but wonder if other people look at these same pictures and sort them into two groups:" really pretty" and "good for you."
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You probably won't be surprised to know that more people died yesterday. Quite a few of them really. Some were young but most were old. Sometimes they try to trick you by running a photo of an old person from when they were younger. I'm not sure why they do this but it seems kind of depressing, even for the Obituary page. What really bothers me though is when they don't tell you how they died. When I die I want them to skip all the formulaic "was born...," "received a BS in Education from...," and "survived by..." nonsense and get right down to business. No details will be too sensitive. And if I have the gall to die peacefully in my sleep I hope someone takes the artistic license to spice it up a bit. Make it worth the readers' time.
I wish there was more but as I said earlier it's a thin paper and I don't care all that much about football.
Ah, a blog post about reading the paper. Nice one. Now when I do one I'll have to credit you. My paper growing up was the Gary Post Tribune. It was twice the paper The State is. On Sundays we would get the Chicago Tribune. That is an awesome paper. When we moved to Cola in '86 there were two papers, The State and The Record. The Record was a pretty good morning paper. The State was late afternoon. All the news was fresh. Sadly, the paper will soon become extinct and homegrown journalism will become the news.
ReplyDeleteI'd love to write your fake obit in case you die before me in your sleep. Not much chance of that though.
Christopher Hass, beloved husband, son and father of four wonderful children died today as he fell from an airplane. Born in St. Louis, Hass led a textbook "spartan lifestyle". Chris, who often boasted of having very few pairs of shoes and only two pairs of pants, said that he probably had "one pair of pants too many". While flying over his beloved Appalachian Trail in an open, antique, bi-wing airplane was reaching out for a bag of pistachios which had flown from his hands. Apparently there was a single pistachio left in the bag, one that was not split and was extremely hard to open. The pilot, his old friend and housemate, Tim, said that Chris' last words that he could hear as he fell to his death were, "Got it!" and that his last actions were getting that stubborn pistachio out of its shell and swallowing it before he hit the ground. He will be missed. He is survived by...
That was the first one that came to my mind, but if I could do better if I had the time.
I was on the newspaper staff in high school and found out fast how ridiculously ridiculous the State was, as a model for a good paper. For really good models, we had to go out of state.
ReplyDeleteI remember one year that we did a "where are they now" spread about a bunch of the famous alumni of the school. One girl had achieved greatness in her field and ended up in Playboy magazine. We mentioned it in addition to all of her modeling exploits and put a small photo of the cover of that issue in the newspaper. The cover itself was not scandalous, but I can understand how the mention of making the cover of Playboy as an achievement was not necessarily the best use of judgement on our part. Our advisor was not shy or afraid of contention. We learned what we learned by trying stuff out and seeing how it worked. So much controversy that year!
We then got to cover all the annoyed people complaining about how we were stomping on the morals that parents had so carefully built around their kids. If I am remembering correctly, Rush Limbaugh even got his paws on a copy, and we were talked about on his radio show. Pretty awesome.
There are times when I want to start a newspaper with kids. Lots of groups of kids in my classes each year start their own short lived papers, but I think one day I want to start a school-wide paper where we cover the news using different big idea lenses (power, injustice, perspectives...).