More Death to Newspapers!

Now I can get AP Mobile News on my iPod touch, even the Virginia AP feed as a separate channel.

The one nice thing Bush did for me was send me an incentive check for $1,200. Okay, half of it was for my husband, but I saw the deposit hit the checking account first. I hustled down to the Apple store in Short Pump and incentived myself, upgrading my white beach ball of an eMac machine into a new flat panel iMac. But wait! It was back-to-college shopping season and they offered me a free (as in FREE) iPod touch and an all-in-one printer for buying the iMac. I will take them free things.

My husband forgot all about being cheated out of his share of the incentive check when I gave him the iPod Touch and then watched for the next year as he...just like in the commercials...had awesome fun with it. He was the hit of all parties with his flash light application, beer pouring application, and Magic 8-Ball. Would you like to play my little piano? If he had been single, he would have picked up chicks with this thing. Hmm, must get back iPod Touch. But how?

Well, buy him one for Christmas. Then the old one becomes mine! Mine! (And I bought the new one at Target, which offered me FREE a $25 gift certificate. (Hmmm, laundry sorting basket on wheels or Legos Batman? What to do, what to do?)

P.S. I suck at Super Monkey Ball. And although Urban Spoon app recommends Franco's Ristarante as the best upscale Italian restaurant in the West End, only 64 percent of voters thought it was any good. Urban Spoon app, you are giving me mixed messages.

Mad Santa

I am not a fan of Christmas.

1. Shopping in cold weather is not fun.
   
   
2. Having to do regular errands, like buying mailing envelopes, dishwashing liquid, and return a malfunctioning storage drive means no place to park and long lines no matter where I go to do it this week.
   
   
3. No one in my family has small children, so Christmas is adult-oriented. Adult presents cost more than children's presents, and you're shopping for people who already have everything they want. When money is tight, the person who ends up not getting a gift is my husband. That doesn't seem right.
   
   
4. Did I mention neither of us got a raise this year? Well, neither of us was laid off, either, so I guess I shouldn't complain.
   
   
5. I have a double set of in-laws, since my husband's parents are divorced and remarried. That means double in-law presents. Double road trips over the river and through the woods...
   
   
6. I have never been able to establish any family Christmas traditions of my own because I've never been able to have a Christmas at home with just my immediate family. I have been on the road for 29 years, a visitor to other people's traditions, except for a six year break between husbands when my Christmas tradition was happily home alone with my own turkey and dressing, and three movies, Coal Miner's Daughter, Manhattan, and When Harry Met Sally. I was never sad to be alone.
   
   
7. Sometimes I just want to cry. And then the bills come in January and I really want to cry. (When I worked at the Times-Dispatch, back in the newspaper prosperity days, they used to give you a Christmas bonus of a week's salary. That was very helpful. I'm pretty sure they don't do that anymore.)
   
   
8. I don't put the tree up because then I would have to take it down. Or I could be like some of the people in the Fan District who leave their Christmas lights up all year.
   
   
9. Aren't I pathetic. Grinch has nothing on me.
   
   
10. My favorite holiday is Martin Luther King Day. I get a three-day weekend and I'm not expected to do anything, not even have a dream.

Why is Ukrop's Being So Benevolent?

What is it with this milk of human kindness coming from my local seller of milk, Ukrop's? Yesterday I filled up my gas tank when it was light-on empty and it cost me $8 and change. When I bought this car new in '02, it cost $15 to fill the tank. At the height of the gas prices, I was paying between $45-50 to fill up.

True, gas is $1.50 a gallon at my local Exxon right now, but I had 80 cents a gallon off in Ukrop's fuel perks. Ever since they started that program, at the height of the crazy costing gas, it has resulted in helpful savings to me.

What are they gaining from it? Are they seducing people away from Kroger's and Food Lion? But I seldom shop there. Except when I lived in Highland Springs and had to go to the A&P on Williamsburg Road (A&P! Imagine!), Ukrop's has always been the geographically closest store. Sundays, of course, you experiment with the competition. Ukrop's and Chick-fil-a still believe in Sundays.

Even if I am paying more, I tend to gravitate to Ukrop's. The aisles are clean. The baked goods look real, not peculiarly plastic-coated like at the other stores. The deli seems cleaner. The no-tip robotic baggers go with you back to the car (always appreciated in the dark of night). And now, for however long it lasts, Fuel Perks!

Google-Blocked from Mr. Christmas

You can't get to Mr. Christmas with Google maps.

My caller had the most unimaginative, been-there, done-that photo assignment this week for a local publication, to get photos of people enjoying over-the-top Christmas displays. I consulted the T-D's list and emailed him a few addresses in his neighborhood, then told him to come get me and I'd drive him to a few places in my area of town. I knew the streets, I thought, and it'd go quick with me behind the wheel. He refused. (I guess it has something to do with not wanting to be seen with your mother, or something.)

Instead, I had to provide directions over the phone. The first place went okay, then I provided directions to the famous house of Mr. Christmas on 2300 Wistar Court. Since he was coming from the highly decorated houses of Pine Grove Drive, I instructed him via Broad Street. Right turn off Broad onto Wistar Street, four blocks down, left on Wistar Court. I am looking right at Google maps.

He calls back and says the street dead ends on Biscayne. That's not what the map says, I tell him. I'm right here, he says. Well, I can't tell what your situation is because I'm not there and the map says....and then he shouts at me that I purposely misdirected him because I wanted to go. But the map says....

Next night, as I'm getting ready to go to the boring office Christmas party, I see the Crazy Lights show on TLC and there's Mr. Christmas. I know it's an old show because they interview Cynthia McMullen in her messy little Times-Dispatch cubicle, and she's gone, but surely Mr. Christmas is still there. His street wouldn't have disappeared like Brigadoon. All I can think of at the boring Christmas office party is leaving early and finding out what happened on Biscayne Road.

We get there, and sure enough, Wistar Street dead ends at someone's driveway, which has a street sign on it that says Wistar Street. (Who ever saw a street sign at the end of a driveway?) We turn the brights on and can see Wistar Street continues right on the other side of this driveway, but there's a metal barricade keeping you from driving on the driveway, over a little stretch of this house's lawn, and back onto Wistar Street. We go up and down Biscayne but cannot find another street that will hook us back up to Wistar.

Back at home, I Google-map it again, ask for directions, and Google Maps innocently draws me a route right through this person's yard. On the map, Wistar Street goes right through to the end from Broad. In reality, you can't get to the end of it with the Wistar Court and Wistar Place cul-de-sacs unless you enter from Skipwith. And here in this conundrum is where Mr. Christmas abides, ever elusive to those of us Wise Men coming from the North. That just ain't right.

The Information Business

The New Yorker's "Financial Page" this week was on "News You Can Lose" and the demise of newspapers. Some highlights:

Many traditional advertisers, like big department stores, are struggling, and the bursting of the housing bubble has devastated real-estate advertising.

(One of my first jobs out of college was in the advertising department of Thalhimers where I manually constructed, with type and glue, the many full page ads we ran in the two daily newspapers. There were several of us who did that, as well as a row of cubicles full of copywriters and artists. Imagine the payroll for that staff, not to mention we then paid the Times-Dispatch and News Leader to run all these ads. The A section was full of them every day. If there were no cell phone industry, I think the paper would have hit the skids even sooner. Cell phone ads still fill the pages.)

Papers' attempts to deal with the new environment by cutting costs haven't helped: trimming staff and reducing coverage make newspapers less appealing to readers and advertisers.

Newspapers have about half as many subscribers as they did four decades ago--but the Internet helped turn that slow puncture into a blowout. Papers now seen to be the equivalent of the railroads at the start of the 20th century--a once-great business eclipsed by a new technology....Had the bosses realized they were in the transportation business, rather than the railroad business, they could have moved into trucking and air transport, rather than letting other companies dominate...if newspapers had understood they were in the information business, rather than the print business, they would have adapted more quickly and more successfully to the Net.

Local papers could have been more aggressive in leveraging their brand names to dominate the market for online classifieds, instead of letting Craigslist usurp that market.

None of the important aggregation sites, to say nothing of Google News, are run by a paper. Even now, papers often display a "not invented here" mentality, treating their sites as walled gardens, devoid of links to other news outlets.

The real problem for newspapers, in other words, isn't the Internet; it's us. We want access to everything, we want it now, and we want it for free. That's a consumer's dream, but eventually it's going to collide with reality: if newspapers' profits vanish, so will their product.

There are many possible futures one can imagine for them, from becoming foundation-run nonprofits to relying on reader donations to that old standby, the deep-pocketed patron.

For a while now, readers have had the best of both worlds: all the benefits of the old, high-profit regime--intensive reporting, experienced editors, and so on--and the low costs of the new one. But that situation can't last. Soon enough, we're going to start getting what we pay for, and we may find out just how little that is.

(Case in point, very few blogs offer unbiased reporting. More common is the editorializing model, and even more common is the navel-gazing model, the blogs as life trivia diaries, of interest to only the writer. You have to spend time pouring through all the headlines and opening paragraphs, trying to separate the three models. It would be great if the local aggregation websites would do that sorting for you.)

Rethinking Richmond Magazine

I am actually thinking of subscribing to the magazine I once scorned, and it seems an appropriate gift for a step mother-in-law who has everything. They've got this two-fer deal card tucked in the current issue. I always thought of Richmond Magazine as being advertiser-driven as far as most of its content with its suspect best doctors, dentists, real estate agents, etc. type features. Then they started making fun of the City government, which was more entertaining.

And now they have two writers who I enjoy, Bill Farrar and Anne Thomas Soffee, contributing regularly.

I don't like this Richmond Inside Out blog. It looks like a bunch of advertising blurbs posted by unusually happy people, prompted by the site's leading questions that can only be answered with unbridled enthusiasm. Being a grinch, I'd rather read grousing and warnings. It always seems more genuine.

Every section of the Times-Dispatch's website seems like it was designed by someone else in an entirely different style.

Out with the Old on Channel 12

I was shopping in Target when my cell phone went off and it was my son in a state of alarm because Ben Hamlin had been cut from channel 12. “He’s been on TV since I was little.” I did the math in my head, and my son was 9 when Ben Hamlin went on the air here. I guess so.

Later on, the office speculation was Hamlin had probably taken an early retirement buyout because 28 years is 28 years. Wow, that’s a long time in local television. Most of the time, it seems to be a revolving door with youngsters passing through to bigger markets, kids that have no idea what the history of Richmond is when they frame their stories. Without the old journalists, we are without “context.” It’s a risk the print media is taking, too.

Channel 12, in my memory, is even creakier, as the team I recall was Charles Fishburne, Sailor Bob, and Jim Granger. Sailor Bob was a holdover from a local children’s show, back when the local stations actually did their own programs (cooking, public affairs, kid shows). Channel 6 had their own Bozo show, and I have this memory that just won’t fade of driving down Thompson Street and here comes a VW bug with Bozo at the wheel, in full makeup and costume, going to work at channel 6.

Sailor Bob was replaced by Spencer Christian, who went on to national exposure on “Good Morning, America.” Charles Fishburne hung in for a long time, his hair going higher and higher in an atomic mushroom shape, held in place with industrial strength hairspray. He should still be doing the news at 12. He was as smooth and Richmondy as Tim Timberlake was on WRVA, the calm morning voice of radio, (trained by Alden Aaroe as heir apparent).

When Clear Channel took over WRVA, that was another unceremonious and unnecessary housecleaning of all the familiar voices, and for years we had to endure a cacophony of loud, abrasive Northerners, although they finally have an afternoon drive guy who is not a loudmouth idiot, and I’ve gotten used to the morning guy. Lou Dean is now the voice of Henrico County’s telephone system.

I’ve finally been in Richmond long enough now to adapt to the culture of not appreciating change for change’s sake. How many Richmonders does it take to change a lightbulb?

The Santa Lie

It all starts with the first great lie, Santa Claus.

We have lost faith. We do not know whom to believe. We do not know whom to trust. Our parents, our ministers, our teachers, our politicians, our lovers, our car dealers, our anchorman--who among us is worthy of our trust?

And it's all because of Santa Claus.

Who can't remember when they first realized there was no Santa Claus?

For me, it was when I discovered a secret cache of gifts in a closet. I carefully unwrapped the end flaps on one, read the lettering on the side of the box and re-taped the package. On Christmas morning the card on this same box said it was from Santa Claus. How could Santa have brought this from the North Pole just hours earlier? And if there was no Santa, who was devising this elaborate hoax, who was drinking the milk and eating the carrots I left out for the reindeer? Who was leaving me thank you notes written in a feathery Santa hand?

My parents? My own parents were doing this to me? The same people who had selected my religion, mandated my moral values and set our standard of ethics?

Herein lies the crux. In our formative years, two similar controlling factors are presented to us, God and Claus. They both see you when you're sleeping, know when you're awake, know if you've been bad or good, so be good for goodness' sake. They both reward you for faith and sterling behavior, and punish you for lack of both, one with fire, brimstone and eternal damnation and the other with a mini-version of the same thing, a lump of coal. When Claus is revealed as a fraud, can God be far behind?

Some of us desperately need to believe in something. I dealt with the loss of Claus. But I clung to the big Santa in the sky. When I became a parent, I decided not to tempt my own child with a similar crisis of faith. I would make life easy for him. I would tell him upfront there was no Santa Claus. I explained very carefully, or maybe very vaguely, it was just a Christmas game. I met direct questions about Santa head-on. Is there a Santa Claus? There are lots of Santa Clauses, Santa Clauses in every mall.

Unfortunately, in the end, it didn’t work. Whereas I continued to cling to the Santa in the sky with diamonds, he rejected everything I believed in. Did it all stem from the original loss of Claus, even as careful as I was to prepare him for it?

The Santa Claus conspiracy is the first conundrum we encounter on a lifetime journey of losing faith, and that's the only thing in life you can trust, the true and certain knowledge that you can’t believe in anything.

(I originally wrote a longer version of this about 15 years ago, and ever since, I keep seeing it floating around on the Internet, usually attributed to The City Paper, which never bought it from me, so I hereby lay formal claim to my own essay.)

Mystery of the Missing Portrait

In 1969, a VCU freshman named Janet Johnson, who lived on the 8th floor of Johnson Hall, painted this picture, which amazed us all because she wasn't even an art major, so we took a picture of it.

She dropped out mid-semester because she never went to class. She got her days and nights mixed up and was up all night and slept all day. I think she was originally from Northern Virginia. She was very tall and liked to wear short, fluffy wigs. She also liked to party at Andy's, which was on Grace Street near the Mister Swiss, a few doors down from Lum's.

A few years later, someone told me they saw this painting for sale at Arts in the Park. That was almost 40 years ago. I wonder what happened to it.

Do or do not. There is no try.

Is there any local news left on the T-D website generated by their staff? Most of the breaking news links this morning were from WRIC or the AP. Clicking on the inrich tab took me to an Adolf Jewelers ad and nowhere else. Maybe I misclicked, because the second time it did take me to inrich which is now called inrich.tv and is all videos and ads. Under News Videos, two wheezy editors stumble through what's going to be in the paper tomorrow. Tomorrow? Everything on this page loads very slow. Under Slide Shows, the first choice was a slide show on cranberries (yes, fascinating), and yet it took me to an article on making fresh cranberry sauce from scratch. Where's the slide show? Well, not that I needed to see it anyway.

Mad Dog, wherever on the West Coast he went, would be touched to know his Tacky Lights tour is about the only story holding the T-D together for an entire month each year. That's some legacy.

Looks like I won't be going to the Bass Pro Shop again this weekend to goggle at the fish. The restaurant there got another great review, so it'll be packed again. I gotta see this place.

Perez T-D

I went down to the little Entertainment square of vague headlines on the T-D website and clicked on one and it took me to the Perez Hilton website! T-D sending me to the Perez Hilton website for news!

Oh, this is sad.

The Killer Child Story

This is the dilemma. More often than not, the T-D editors don't agree with me about what I want to read. They make their choices. I make mine. I prefer mine. The story I wanted to read today was about that 8-year-old boy in Arizona who shotgunned his dad and the lodger to death and who calmly told the police a variety of amazing scenarios to explain it away. And when outed, was sad -- not because his dad was dead -- but because he was "going to juvie." How did he even know to call it juvie? How did he know about juvie? This is one amoral prodigy!

(This is why I don't believe in gun ownership. Most of the time, someone in your family is going to use it on you.)

The T-D gave this story three short paragraphs. Okay, it's an Arizona story, not local. But I have to go to the Internet and find an Arizona paper online, to get the details. (Or I can google "boy shoots father" and up comes the worldwide coverage.) The 24-hour news channels have a better grasp of the....wait! I can hear "Inside Edition" doing a story on the boy killer right now!

Wait! Now Inside Edition is doing a story on a business woman who trashed her $3 million dollar home by taking in nearly 200 dogs and cats. (Animal hoarding is another favorite topic of mine since I am an amateur animal hoarder.) Crazy lady lies to the reporter that she acquired all these animals from the side of the road or they wandered onto her property. (Cats are difficult to catch unless they were previously owned. I'm not buying this.) The reporter doesn't question it. The reporter doesn't ask why crazy lady didn't get the animals fixed so they wouldn't keep breeding, either.

So today, Inside Edition was my news source of choice, unfortunately the reporters are models, not journalists.