1090 Freedom of News

What’s all this generosity on the part of the paywall newspapers?  Some news has always been free.  At least it was if you were in the right place at the right time.  You picked up the News or the Post on the train or subway when someone left it behind.

So the great public servants at the Times and the Wall Street Journal have taken down their pay-per-view toll booth and in a stunning show of home town spirit are giving away their storm coverage.   

This could start a trend.  Two trends, actually.

Trend one:  a big story is free.  Trend two:  People stop reading the details of stories and just look at the headlines.

There’s something to be said for that second one.   We are overwhelmed with data.  (This space makes an old fashioned distinction between data and information.)

Could cable and satellite TV be far behind?  CNN could give you the first five minutes of each hour for free and then put up a screen with other stories from its website.  Then for the rest of the hour, it could run ads for sleazy accident lawyers, the companies that buy your long term settlements, class action drug lawsuits and the occasional medicine that will cure your moderate to heavy plaque psoriasis but leave you bald, impotent and with bad kidneys.  Unless, of course, you pay.

There is, of course, something to be said for just looking at the headlines and first paragraphs.  To discourage this freeloading, many websites have taken drastic steps.  They make sure the headlines are sufficiently misleading and then write the first paragraph to say nothing of newsworthiness.

There’s just enough in print or on air to make you want a little bit more, for which, of course, you have to pay.  Free news homepages are a gateway drug for news junkies.

What the websites need is a better class of advertiser.


Shrapnel:

--The forecasters apparently got Sandy’s number right.  Predictions by meteorologists often fall apart because while you can’t fool mother nature, mother nature can fool you.  The storm was horrific on the immediate coast and nothing to shrug off inland.  But it looks like early warnings and sane preparedness lessened the damage.

--Do you really want a guy for President who is ready to close FEMA and give its functions to a bunch of doofuses in the states?  The states can’t seem to get much of anything right.  So why would this be any different?

--Post #1089, an imaginary letter from a corporate CEO to employees about why they should vote for Romney (or you’ll lose your health insurance, your retirement and probably your job,) was a parody.  At the time of writing, pointing that out that would seem to have been unnecessary.  But response from at least one reader indicates it would have been wise and so the post has been slightly revised.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com
© WJR 2012

1089 A Letter from the Boss

1089  A Letter from the Boss

PLEASE NOTE: THIS IS A PARODY.

Dear Associates,

I want to take this opportunity to speak to all 230,000 of you about the importance of the election coming up in a few days.  And thanks to the Supreme Court and its Citizens United decision, I am able to communicate with you all at the same time.

As you know, there is a lot at stake for those of us in banking business, especially among those of us who are considered too big to fail, a terrible misnomer.  

While we were happy to have a little hand up from the Obama and Bush administrations in the recent past, we feel that the President is preparing to take away some of our personal and corporate freedoms.

For example, there’s legislation prepared, that if passed would force us to choose between investment banking and securities sales and retail banking.  If we were to choose retail, we would be cut off from one of our most lucrative product groups and have to reduce payroll by as many as 100,000 associates.

If we chose investment banking, our ability to contribute to life in the communities we serve in 28 states would be eliminated overnight and we would have to reduce our workforce by about 130,000.

You have a right to job security, and we job creators think you should continue to have that right.  But we can’t support it if we have to close half of our business.

As it is, we are forced to prepare alternatives to our group medical coverage that will be too costly to continue should the incumbent win another term. Do you really want those death panels making your decisions for you?

Further, we believe that the Obama administration is preparing to raise our corporate tax rate in order to pay for its ever-growing welfare state.

Please don’t take this as pressure.  I cannot control your vote and wouldn’t wish to.  But let me remind you that another four years of a black Kenyan Muslim socialist who supports homosexual “marriage,” and the murder of unborn babies can’t benefit anyone but the lazy moochers and panhandlers who sit around in their trailers and on the steps of their public housing projects, smoking dope, drinking booze and increasing the population so their handouts will grow while thousands of you work to support them at your own expense.

So please think carefully when you step into the voting booth next month.  And please remember, you have a friend in the chairman’s office.  And we know where you live.

Sincerely,

Whitcolm Blain Vanderviscose III
Chairman and CEO
Stately Bank and Trust

Shrapnel:

--Looks like Craig’s List has paced even Wikipedia in the unreliability department.  More scams than legit ads, at least in the help wanted section.  That wouldn’t be so bad if jobs weren’t as scarce as they are these days.

And from the Facebook page of friend and colleague Dan Thomas:

No mass transit in New York past 7pm. So all the hospital staff, electrical workers, building custodians, journalists, pharmacists, 911 operators, food delivery personnel, hotel staff, and thousands of others on whom we depend in an emergency have no way to get to work. Well ... they can drive in. Yes that's it... thousands of additional cars on the flooded roads. Of course the parking garage attendants can't get to work either, so where you gonna park? On the plus side... at least we won't get fat drinking large soft drinks.

Posted Sunday afternoon 10/28/12

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com.
© WJR 2012

1088 Go Islanders!

1088 Go Islanders!

Nassau County, New York has always been the poster child for inept.  And multimillionaire Charles Wang is more Boris Badinov than Dudley Do-Right.  Put these things together in a room and what do you get?  Nothing.

Wang has owned the hapless New York Islanders of the National Hockey League since 2000.  And for most of that time, he has been trying to (a) restore the team to its serial Stanley Cup glory days and (b) fix or replace its home, the shabby and deteriorating Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum.  Nothing.

Wang proposed a mammoth building project on the former Mitchel Air Force Base, now home to part of Hofstra University, Nassau Community College and said Coliseum.  This got knocked down by officials of the county and its dominant internal Town of Hempstead.  Next came a proposed bond issue for an updated Coliseum.   The voters rightly handed what passes for leadership a strong message: “we’re already pedal to the metal on the highway to bankruptcy -- forget about it.”  

As the brilliant minds of Nassau and Hempstead rested to get ready for their next screwup, Wang took his puck and went to Brooklyn.  So the Isles will play in the new Barclay’s Center starting with the 2015-16 season, joining the New York-then-New Jersey-now Brooklyn Nets of the NBA in a small but snazzy venue.

How much revenue is this going to cost cash-strapped Nassau?  Estimates run as high as $250 million a year.  Plus a loss of jobs.  Plenty of jobs.

And assuming that the NHL doesn’t go out of business, which is not impossible, the Islanders may be getting the shot in the arm they need to remember the long-forgotten first rule of hockey:  Get that funny-looking, round black thing on the ice into that great big net.  It’s not that complicated, boys.

Shrapnel:

--Chinese lesson:  The “a” in “Wang” is pronounced like the “a” in “what,” but sounds like “Wong” to most American ears.  The “o” in “Wong” is pronounced like the “o” in “Wong,” but the sound comes from farther back on the hard palate, giving it a slightly different tone for which there is no English notation.

--The original Islanders were formed from a core of players from the Long Island Ducks of the Eastern Hockey League, which played in the corrugated sheet metal ice box called the Long Island Arena in Commack.  Guys like Brophy and Actimachuck used to hang out at Kelly’s Saloon on Vets Highway.  The Ducks were fun.  And generous.

--The Brooklyn Nets of the NBA had been the New Jersey Nets and before that the New York Nets of the ABA and played in a quonset hut in West Hempstead. They were no fancier than the Ducks but for the presence of one Julius Erving.  And no one froze at a Nets game, then or ever after.


I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com
© WJR 2012

1087 Another Magazine Bites the Dust

1087  Another Magazine Bites the Dust


Tina Brown is a wrecking ball and her aim is excellent. Now that she’s had at it at Vanity Fair, the New Yorker and Talk Magazine, she’s taken a swing at Newsweek which will end print publication as of 12/31/12.  

The death of Newsweek is not entirely her fault.   But she’s the one tethered to a crane smacking the thing at high speed and making sure the lights were turned out first.

The weekly news magazines have become irrelevant.  US News & World Report went digital-only a long time ago.   And a long time after its then- president John Sweet made the commercial in which he said US News “...spares our readers unimportant news and spares our advertisers unimportant readers.”

US News, all digital now except occasionally, has found its niche, reporting on the best colleges, and other best these and thats.

Time Magazine still limps along, straw thin and with an emphysematous cough.

But Newsweek, as part of the Daily Beast website is soon to be but a memory and the left over slick paper doesn’t even make for good fish wrapping.

Tina’s Big Contribution to the New Yorker was to shed everything about it that made it the New Yorker.  Talk magazine served no purpose.  Her Big Contribution to Newsweek was odd covers that didn’t “sell the book” to use magazine industry jargon.

Blame it on the internet?  Blame it on the impending death of ink and paper?  No.  Sorry.  Not this time.  Other magazines (“The Week,” “The Economist” and some others are flourishing.)  Content.  That’s what readers want.  Not weird covers and stupidly screaming headlines.

Newsweek has become a magazine with nothing to say and an unattractive way of not saying it.

Where are the Jonathan Alters and Alan Sloans and Peter Boyers?  And who replaced them?  No one, really.  But some of the abandoned slots they occupied have been filled with... who? (Alter went to Bloomberg View, Sloan has been with Fortune for a long time, Boyer is at Fox News.)

Riveting articles like “How Many Facebook Friends Do You Need?” and “Full Figured Models” isn’t exactly stuff that sells magazines.

Sure, the media world is changing.  And fast.  Magazines are expensive to produce and often out of date by the time they leave the printing plant.  But there’s still room for the printed word as recent startups and some old favorites are proving.

So here’s a question:  If Newsweek continued to print and nobody read it, would it still exist?  

Tina would do us all a favor if she would assume responsibility for the preposterous direction in which she’s taken Newsweek.  And she should go back to writing books.  There’s still an audience for stuff like “Life as a Party” and the “Diana Chronicles,” especially for those who reflexively consider anything British as “reading up.”  

Meantime, if you need something demolished... you know who to call.

Shrapnel:

--The third debate: Romney reminded me of my 1959 Rambler, built by his father’s company, AMC.  It lurched and sputtered and coughed and parts fell off, including the drive shaft and the trunk lid.  Note to the picky... I posted this on facebook before posting it here.

--RIP Jerome Karpf, Jr., aka Jerry Carr, former program director of WHLI radio,   Hempstead, who passed away recently at the age of 93.  A second generation newspaperman turned broadcaster, a herder of cats and a man who oozed competence, stability and natural culture and who commanded respect without trying.  Only a  few months ago, Jerry’s lights were as bright as ever, and he was engaged, aware and sharp in 2012 as he was in 1960.


I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Please address comments and invitations to celebrity parties in London to wesrichards@gmail.com.
© WJR 2012

1086 E-Prayers

1086 E-Prayers


We all know how busy God is, especially in the age of phone texts and the internet.  Chat rooms abound.   Instant messages.  Tablets (not the kind Moses had.)  

So, technically, while God is off on Mondays and Tuesdays, except for early Mass, Jewish morning prayers where he’s often the tenth guy in the minyan, and the five-a-day Muslim rites, he still puts in some time.   Wednesdays are occupied with after-dinner hour Bible classes.  These run into Thursday because of time zones.  Friday, Muslims and Jews.  Saturday Jews and 7th Day Adventists.  Sunday, a gazillion Christian churches.

Busy, busy.

So, Monday and Tuesday, he’d play 18 holes in the morning and then start answering -- or not answering -- prayers.

At some point, the volume got so, well, voluminous, that he had to put on extra help.  Changed his email address, gave the old one to the heavenly filter-ers and addressed only the issues that they thought he would want to and passed along.

That didn’t work out because even his most experienced assistants sometimes put through wrong ones or failed to put through right ones.  Plus a lot of them started to confuse themselves with him and started playing God.

But with volume at its present level and everyone agitating for face time, he has to spend at least a couple of hours between gigs on the computer.

Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobil and Sprint are all busy erecting cell towers in heaven.  Good idea because there’s an awful lot of phone traffic with earth now.  The new 4-G system  (that’s “For God”) is due to be ready for use by the spring 2014... barring failure to win regulatory approval and if the installers don’t strike when their contract is up next year.

And that’s going to make things even tougher, what with texting exploding into the next world instead of dribbling in as now.  

There’s not too much you can do about God’s personal clutter.  But if your e-prayers aren’t being answered now, there are steps you can take to raise your profile.

If God doesn’t have you in his e-mail address book, your prayers go straight to his spam folder, where they have but a 30 day lifespan.  So add him to your contacts.  That’ll improve your chances of being heard.

Shrapnel:

--Michael Savage returns to the air tomorrow, 10/23/12, re-starting the program he ended abruptly by suing his former syndicator and -- at least temporarily -- with far fewer stations.  Savage is the craziest of the crazy right wing talkers, but always entertaining if only to see whether there will be a “Dan Rather Moment,” where he really goes off the deep end and implodes.  A reminder of the times when we sat around grandma’s huge dining table in the Bronx and listened to the uncles try to kill and outshout one another with the same regional accent that Savage has never been able to lose or wanted to.

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com
© WJR 2012

1085 A Tale of Three Brothels

1085  A Tale of Three Brothels

First, fellas and gals, let’s get something straight between us.  There is no such thing as a free roll in the hay, any more than there is a free lunch.

Got that?

No?

Okay, there’s always a price even though it’s not always in money.

So there’s a long tradition of trading favors.

In Kennebunk, which could be called KenneBush, they’ve arrested 29 year old Zumba instructor Alexis Wright for running a house of ill repute in her studio.  She denies it.  But if you put her name in a search block, you’ll find videos, pictures and news items that kind of wilt that denial.

Her clients are said to have been a bunch of prominent citizens in the region.  Police have released the names of the johns, and the local media have printed or broadcast them, showering some bigwigs with shame and probably leading to some high profile divorces.

Problem is, Maine being a pretty close-knit place, there are lots of guys with the same or similar first and last names and the cops and the papers didn’t think of that when they rolled the presses.

So, some men are wrongly thought of as accused.  And that’s causing some red faces in police precincts and newsrooms.


Now, to the other brothels.  These are in Greece, where a top amateur soccer team -- the Voukefalas --  is strapped for cash.  Working girls to the rescue.  In return for wearing jerseys marked “Villa Erotica” and “Soula’s House of History,” the madams are filling in the void left by the Greek financial crisis.

Patriotic prostitution.

Madam Soula, 67, told the Associated Press that she’s doing it only because she loves the game.  Probably, she meant soccer.

But she offered players a “special bonus” at her … um … headquarters if they won while wearing her House of History shirts.  Unfortunately, the V-falas team has lost four in a row.

Brothels are legal and regulated in Greece.  And they should be here, too.  Of course, if they were, we’d never have heard of Heidi Fleiss and Alexis Wright, and Eliot Spitzer would still be governor.



Shrapnel:

--Musical toys:  a Canadian company has begun selling a device that allows your acoustic guitar to sound like it’s in an echo chamber, an effect that many musicians will like.  The gizmo attaches and detaches almost instantly, requires no batteries and has no settings.  In this era, does anything this low tech have a future?

--Windows 8 is upon us.  Microsoft’s new operating system comes with the usual dazzling array of unnecessary new features and gives us ten ways to perform every task, where one or two simple good ones would suffice.  But there’s an upside, too as “8” makes it even easier for everyone to make sure you have to buy new stuff.

--If one more commentator uses the word “crisp” to describe anything but a potato chip, many of us are going to scream.  Crisp comebacks, crisp suits, crisp weather, crisp reminders, crisp performances, crisp reminders.  What’s next, Snap Crackle and Pop?

(A prize of little value is offered to the first reader who supplies the correct number of double entendres in this post.)

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com
© WJR 2012

1084 More Fakery

1084 More Fakery

So, while we’re on the topic of fake stuff, here’s a little something you can do to build up your sense of accomplishment.

This is not as much fun than painting lines for fake bike zones, posting fake street signs and placing fake fire hydrants and parking meters.  But it will make you feel good.

These days everyone has a to-do list.  Well, almost everyone.  Some are kept on phone or tablet “apps,” but most of us stick to the old and original little scraps of paper.

At day’s end you look at the scrap and realize you haven’t done half of what you set out to do, right?  You look at that, you say to yourself, “boy, I’m a mental slob and lazy.”  That’s no good for your already damaged self esteem. So here’s how to make things more satisfying.

When you first prepare your list, leave spaces between the items.  Then, as you go through your day, use those spaces to insert items that you’ve already done.  You know something always comes up, something unplanned.  So put it on the list and immediately cross it out.

At day’s end, you can look with approval and maybe even end with more crossouts than still-undones.

Sense of accomplishment.  Satisfaction.  You have spent your day productively and you’re proud of yourself.  And you should be.  A little self deception never hurt anyone.  Life’s big guys do it all the time.  Why should the 99% be deprived of the same luxury?

If you want to take this to an extreme, get yourself a scrap book.  Each night, Scotch Tape the day’s list in the book.  Scratch the “fake” items out in red.  Soon, you’ll have a scrapbook full of little scraps with lots of red lines.  And then, you’ll feel even prouder of yourself and more accomplished.

But don’t go overboard.  Do not put things on your list like:

✪ Win the Presidential election.
✪ Sign Afghanistan peace treaty.
✪ Win Powerball.
✪ Co-star in a movie with Jennifer LoClass.
✪ Untie the Gordian Knot without a knife.

You can fool some of yourself all of the time, but you can’t fool all of yourself all of the time.

Shrapnel:

--Attention, Kitchen Cabinet!  Production has begun on WestraDamus 2013, scheduled for posting here and on the website in December.  Suggestions for material are welcome at westradamus@gmail.com and this is your chance to be your own nonprophet.

--RIP Arlen Specter (R-PA) who died this week at the age of 82.  Sen. Specter was afflicted with a dread disease, but those in the know are wise to his underlying illness. He had a severe case of The Javits.

--Did you watch the debate?  Both candidates were back on their game.  Obama played the part of President.  And the method-acting Romney played a cross between 14 year old girl with PMS and the president of a used car lot.

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com
© WJR 2012