CSotD: Monday Short Takes
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The best part of the 2018 World Cup is that the US team didn't make it, so we haven't had a lot of coverage and, thus, we haven't had a lot of handwringing by Old Fartstm who feel compelled to hate the world's most popular sport.
It also means that I accidentally watched a really good game the other day without realizing it had been played two days earlier. No coverage, no spoilers. Better than back in the Nagano Olympics when I assiduously avoided the Gold Medal Women's Hockey Game so I could watch it when I got home, only to have those bastards at AOL post the final score on their splash page.
Dav Andrew is South African and therefore knows that the world's foremost sports tournament is on, but is somewhat over 4,000 miles from the nearest qualifying nation, so, like Americans, had to just pick a country or two or three and pretend.
My niece, whose mother is from Spain, stayed engaged until yesterday, while I was able to hang in for another two or three hours on the basis of my 25% Danish stock, but she's only at 12.5% of that and her kids only pan out at 6.25%, so it would have mattered about that much to them if the Danish keeper had stoned the Croatian PKs.
At the end, I would add, of what may have been the least beautiful example of the Beautiful Game I've ever watched that involved anyone older than 11.
At least the Spain/Russia match was well-played.
Ah well, it's like going fishing and not catching anything.
That's not why you went, or, at least, it shouldn't have been.
Which is equally impossible to explain to people who don't already get it.
The Return of the Native
This May, after six years of exile in LA, David Horsey returned to Seattle where he had grown up.
I'm lying in this subhed for the sake of the allusion, because he's not a native: Wikipedia reports that he was three when his family moved there, but given the boom nature of the Pacific Northwest, I suspect his roots are a lot deeper than those of most of his neighbors.
And he's just produced this short, insightful animation about the changes since he left, which you should go watch.
Having had a few Rip Van Winkle moments in the times I've gone back to Colorado, I can identify with his sense of wonder.
I'm glad he has landed in a place he loves, because he's a good guy with a lot of talent, but that's only a portion of why I'm sharing this.
I've also recently stumbled across Chan Lowe's new home in Western Massachusetts, where he became editorial page editor a few months ago, and I happen to know that intersection, but I certainly wouldn't if I hadn't gone to summer camp for several years, about eight miles away.
The point being that this is a cartoon for people who know that intersection and that old landmark inn, because the Berkshire Eagle does not expect, or particularly try, to sell a lot of papers or get a lot of hits in Wisconsin or Nevada except perhaps to homesick natives.
Lowe still does nationally syndicated cartoons, but this local stuff is priceless, exactly what local papers should be doing but which very few have done since they were mostly bought out by dimwitted Wall Street turds, a descriptor I only use in the interest of accuracy.
Like David Horsey, the Berkshire Eagle was gone briefly, a family-owned paper sold to a chain in 1995 but re-purchased by local investors in 2016 and turned back into a local paper.
Which brings up the difference between newspaper style and magazine style that I discussed in yesterday's posting: Newspaper "style" is mechanical, a matter of capitalization and spelling, while magazine "style" is the sound and feel of the stories, a much more subjective and creative factor.
Here's the reason: Newspapers are a utility, while magazines are a commercial product.
A properly-run newspaper is like the water works or the electric company or the highway department. It's the Local Information Department that tells you what city hall is doing about the budget, when the fireworks display at the park will begin Wednesday, who died, and when the traffic light will be installed at that troublesome intersection.
And it has some funnies and an advice column and a few other fun things to amuse you while you're soaking in all that local information.
The newspaper might not matter to you if you're just renting while you go to school, but, when you settle in and buy a house, you'll get the water and electricity and gas put in your name and you'll subscribe to the local paper.
Or, at least, you would back when local papers were run by people who knew how local papers operate.
Back then, the publisher often owned the paper and was a long-standing pillar of the community. He might be an autocrat who sledgehammered his vision of the community or a kindly elder who reflected its tone, but what he was not was the interchangeable button-down drone of a far-distant corporate leech.
The publisher understood the community and the editor understood the publisher.
The publisher set the tone of the publication while the critical job of the editor was to avoid having the paper make a goddam fool of itself with pointless errors and inaccurate reporting.
However, these Wall Street nincompoops have installed automatons in the publishers' seats, shifting them around so that they never get to know a community but are simply there to impose cookie-cutter creative concepts from HQ so that every paper in the chain looks exactly alike.
Which means that their papers fail to serve as local utilities, but, unlike magazines, neither do they distinguish themselves as more desirable than other publications in their category.
They have made themselves neither necessary nor attractive.
That's a poor strategy.
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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