Sunday, June 21, 2009
The Dinosaur on the Lawn
I am so over the format of newspapers. I still get the Sunday paper for the grocery store coupons and my husband has an addiction to the Best Buy flyer. Truly, that is the only thing he reads. He takes that, the K-Mart, Target, and OfficeMax flyers, and goes downstairs and dreams his little dreams of having all the toys.
This morning he was away on a camping trip, so I was the one at the window looking at the paper rolled up in a plastic bag on the lawn. In this day and age, this is how this product is delivered to me. Rolled up. On the lawn. In a plastic bag. I went out and got it. The paper was rubberbanded in two tight rolls. One part was the ad flyers and sections like Commentary, Flair, the ads, that were obviously printed around Friday, and the other roll was the usual paper, A section, B section, sports, business, which is now called Money?
I took off the plastic bag. A waste of plastic. I took off the rubberbands. A waste of rubberbands. Part of a page ripped off while I was pulling off rubberbands. Then I had to smooth it out on the table. It felt dirty to my hands. It wouldn't lay flat. It kept wanting to curl. I moved the big pile of papers, the ad inserts in one pile, the news in another, various other inserts falling out, to the sofa, but it was too big a pile of paper to comfortably read, not that there was anything I wanted to read anyway. I don't care about a dozen profiles of area fathers. I really don't.
What do I care about this morning?
Well, how's Iran doing?
Has North Korea fired a nuclear missile toward us?
Did Steve Jobs really get a liver transplant and is he going to survive and continue to run the greatest tech company ever?
I scan my iPod's news service aps, read those stories, and I'm done with the news this morning. I have lots of things to do. I can't spend even an hour turning these huge, dirty, newspaper pages, scanning for stories. Later on this evening, I'll scan the headlines on the iPod again and see what's happening. Meanwhile, after 15 minutes, the entire paper has already been put in the recycling. Later today, I'll clip my coupons.
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2 comments:
My 50-something parents have a morning routine with the paper, also. Have for years. Get the paper, pour some coffee, sit at the kitchen table, and separate the sections of importance from the ads/flair/fluff. Dad reads through the one pile while my mother reads through the other. Then they pour another cup of coffee and switch.
The last time I visited, I joined them at the kitchen table and swiped through my iPhone, reading along with them - and updating them on the hours-old stories they were holding in their newsprint-stained hands.
Then I took the Best Buy ad and thumbed through that while mom made me an omelette.
I'm seriously debating whether to renew my subscription since the only reason I even open it up on Sundays is for the Michael's and Joanne ads. The paper is also less expensive than buying training pads for my dog, LOL. There is absolutely little "news" in the Richmond T-D, except lots of local news now and as you stated, it's not news I need to know. Too bad, it's a shell of a newspaper. We truly have seen the impact of the Internet.
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