The Aerie
Well, they got her.
We periodically (ha! I kill myself!) get phone calls from the Star Tribune, that bastion of left-wing ideology that publishes James "Screedblog" Lileks and Katherine "If I Had My Way I'd Be Chattel, Barefoot and Pregnant" Kirsten. Knowing how liberal we are, they must have figured we'd be an easy mark. "Bring 'em into the fold!" (ha! I kill myself!)
Unfortunately despite everyone who whines that they are Left, they were right.
It's not that I don't like the paper. Heaven's no, I enjoy reading it. What I don't like is... the paper.
Traditionally we have received only the Sunday paper. There's nothing more pleasant than sitting down on Sunday morning with a toasted bagel, a cup of coffee, and the Sunday paper. Of course, I'm only after the entertainment, so I start with the Funnies, then I read the Opinions section, and I round that off with Variety.
I used to start off with Opinions, but then I had kids. If I want to read the Funnies now, I have to camp on the front stoop and catch the paper as it is hurled towards the house. Then I have about fifteen seconds to skim "Dilbert" (Ha! That Wally, he doesn't do a lick of work!) before the children descend upon me, and I'm left holding that colorful strip of advertising that they have added to the right side of the front of the comics section. (Apparently I'm more likely to buy a product if I read about it while tearing in half the end frames from six differnet comic strips... who knew annoyance could so drive purchases?)
Unfortunately, for every word I read in the Sunday paper, there are at least 100 I don't. The paper (when it hits me in the face Sunday mornings) weighs about 70 lbs, 60 of which are classified ads and glossy perfumed inserts.
I like classified ads. They're great. They go very well with this thing called a Search Engine. But DELIVERING the printed classified ads to me every day makes about as much sense as printing everybody's phone number in a billion big thick books and sending it around to everyone's house every year. Imagine how stupid THAT would be?
The glossy inserts, of course, are terribly necessary. Why, would I have gone to Office Max today except for the glossy inserts? Of course not! Because one glossy insert makes it about 10% likely I'll visit the store... therefore SEVEN identical glossy inserts must make it 70% likely I'll visit the store! That's the logic that must exist behind the fact that I usually get about seven identical glossy inserts from at least one of the merchants.
Finally, there's Sports. I have a problem with Sports. See, when I was a kid, I was that nerdy guy with the glasses, the one who got punched out in gym all the time? I have a bone-chip in my spine as a memento of the day I was beaten unconscious for catching a fly to right... that the first baseman missed. The first baseman of my own tenth-grade gym team beat me unconscious for catching, not missing, the ball. Right field nerds shouldn't upstage first-basemen, even if it's just in gym.
So for some reason, I don't read sports. Yeah, yeah, I know, "Get over it!" But I have plenty of stuff to get over, and I've decided to put "Learning to Appreciate the Beauty of Doped-up Spoonfed Multimillionaires as They Screw Me Out of my Tax Money" down on the bottom, right after "How to Stop Having Nixon-era flashbacks and Learn to Love the Neocons." So maybe I'll learn to love sports enough to read that section of the paper someday... but not soon.
Out of a 70 lb paper, therefore, I read about 5 lbs of it. Maybe 2.
Now, I just checked the calendar, and it's 2005. When I was a kid, I was promised Moon Cities, Flying Cars, and Girls in Spray-On Clothing by the year 2000, and what I've got instead is Mars Robots, Hummers, and the Return of Peasant Blouses. Only one of the three even show up on my Nerd Radar of Cool, and it's NOT the Hummers.
But by 2005, one thing that I would think would have happened by now would be Customized Newspaper Delivery. You can complain all you want about the dire state of the Fourth Estate, but I think it would boost circulation greatly if I received ONLY THE SECTIONS I WANT with my paper. I also think it would be nice if I could get a $5 refund every year and not receive a printed phone book, but that's another story.
What benefit can there be in sending me all this excess paper? Oh, sure, if the nation were overrun with Evil Pine Trees, I'd be all for receiving all this printed crap. "Ha! Encroach on MY sunlight, will you damned trees? How do you like being ground up and soaked with soy ink, hm?" But the nation is NOT overrun with Evil Pine Trees - despite what the Bush Administration will suggest in next year's environmental initiative entitled, "Save the Forests" and written by the timber industry. In fact there are shortfalls at both the fore and aft - a dearth of trees, and a dearth of landfills in which to store them.
So why do I need all this excess paper? Wouldn't EVERYONE benefit if I could receive a very slim, efficient paper: World News and Opinion, Metro News, Comics. That's it! That's all I need! One sapling could provide me all the paper I require in order to mosey through a cup of coffee and a bagel in the morning.
But no... with each delivery an entire grove is dumped on my doorstep, most of which clutters the kitchen for two weeks and then gets recycled.
And now, into our already chaotic, hilariously messy household, we have QUADRUPLED the number of deliveries. Apparently my spouse could not resist the offer - quadruple the number of deliveries... for just FIVE CENTS.
Okay, you people at the Star Tribune gotta be kidding me. Five cents? Come on, you're not making any money off of this, just drop the price to Zero Cents and face the facts. All you're trying to do is boost circulation numbers so that you can charge the advertisers in those daily editions a bit more money. It's true, come on, I can tell by the look on your face! So just skip the whole "Five Cents" thing, and send us the papers for free.
So for five more cents a week, we're now neck-deep in newsprint. Today I tried to read the Sunday paper, and I couldn't find my Opinions section. Why? Because the Sunday paper had somehow gotten entangled with the Saturday paper, and the OpEx section, as it's called, is undoubtedly buried in the Perfume Scented Inserts, or swallowed up whole by three hundred classifieds advertising the availability of Only Slightly Pee-Stained Mattresses (204), Kittens I'd Rather Not Drown (315), and Cars That Might Work (407).
Or, as I think likely, it was stolen by those bullies in the Sports section. Not satisfied with incalculable wealth and unwarranted fame, they've fallen back into their old habits of picking on the nerds. And I learned back in high school not to respond to such provocations. I really don't need another bone chip in my neck.
No, I'll let them have my copy of the OpEx section. I'll get another tomorrow anyway, and meanwhile, I'll just read it on line...
Posted by Albatross at June 12, 2005 10:56 AM