doing the deer a favor by shooting them. If we ever do take away the AK-47’s from drug dealers, I think we ought to give them to the deer.
I also enjoy editorial columns on the op-ed page. I’m always amazed how angry readers get at columnists. If Carl Rowan or William Safire or Richard Reeves writes an opinion, it’s his prerogative. I might say to myself, “Carl Rowan must have drunk some bad buttermilk when he wrote this,” or “What on earth was William Safire trying to say?” But I don’t ever get mad at them and call down to the paper and threaten to cancel my subscription. Disagreeing with a columnist is a lot of fun. A good columnist will stir debate and reaction.
After the editorial page, I read the feature section of the paper which has names like “Lifestyle” and “People” and “Arts and Leisure.” That section usually has the comics, the TV and movie listings, and a lot of stuff women enjoy reading, like Dear Abby and stories about how women will soon take over the entire world and tell all the men to get up and go cook their own breakfasts and “Don’t let me hear any pots or pans rattling.”
News for and about women is big in those sections. “News you can use” is a new catch phrase in the industry, which means running a lot of stories about why you should eat oat bran and how to make your house safe from radon gas.
I do the Jumble every morning. That’s where you unscramble four words in order to figure out the answer to a puzzle.
Okay, in ten seconds, what is this word: “Tigura”?
Time’s up. “Guitar.” It took me an hour one morning to get that. I only glance at the business section because I don’t understand much about business.
Reading my morning paper is, quite often, the highlight of my day. I’m always a little sad when I finish. To put off finishing the paper as long as I can, I even read stories about art exhibits. If I’m really desperate, I’ll even read Scheinwood on bridge. And I don’t know the first thing about bridge. I just don’t want it to be over.
I fell in love with newspapers when I was eight because they took me to every minor league and major league baseball game. They taught me about Duke Snider and Senor Al Lopez, the manager of the Chicago White Sox. I could sit in Moreland, Georgia, and read about Mantle’s three home runs for the Yankees. There were a lot of people in the rural South who didn’t think there really was a New York City. Nobody knew anybody who had actually been there. But I’d been there, in my sports page box score where the Tigers’ Yankee Killer, Frank Lary, had beaten the Yanks again before 40,000 in Yankee Stadium.
I’d also been to Wrigley Field in Chicago and Tiger Stadium in Detroit and Crosley Field in Cincinnati and Connie Mack Stadium in Philadelphia.
I can go on all day about this, so here are “25 More Reasons I Love Newspapers Besides All the Stuff I’ve Already Talked About”:
1. They ain’t heavy, except on Sunday.
2. The Far Side.
3. Mike Royko’s column out of Chicago.
4. You don’t have to look at the ads if you won’t want to. It’s hard to escape television commercials no matter how fast your remote control finger is.
5. Editorial cartoons.
6. They are brief about the weather: “Today: Cloudy with a high near 75.” Television weather lasts longer than some thunderstorms.
7. Baseball box scores that can tell you exactly what twenty-three guys did in a two-and-a-half-hour period in about three inches of agate type.
8. Peanuts.
9. B.C.
10. Adult movie ads. I once saw one called “Thar She Blows.”
11. Occasionally I have the pleasant surprise of finding humorous writing on the editorial page.
12. The personal ads. They keep me up on what’s kinky.
13. As I read my paper, I often fantasize about owning my own newspaper. Its slogan would be “Born to Raise Hell.”
14. They don’t play any loud rock music.
15. The fact there’s a crossword puzzle in every day in case I ever decide to take up doing the crossword puzzle.
16. If you read a newspaper every day, there will be very few topics you can’t talk about.
17. The Wizard of Id.
18. College football and basketball odds.
19. Those “People” columns where they tell you what’s doing with Prince Charles and Lady Di and Elizabeth Taylor.
20. You can serve your dog leftover steak bones on a newspaper.
21. You can be going through your grandmother’s attic and find a paper from 1939 and have a lot of fun reading it. You will want to say, “Watch out for Hitler.”
22. Newspapers make great starters for fireplace fires.
23. Automobile dealers can’t do their own commercials.
24. Newspapers are the only romance in my life that hasn’t eventually picked up and left me.
25. If you really think about it, newspapers are one of the last great bargains. Most daily newspapers cost a quarter. What else can you get for a quarter that tells you how various wars and famines are going, how much money you lost in the stock market or betting on a ball game, what new thing will kill you according to researchers, how many people got killed in the latest soccer riot, how many people are going to have AIDS by the year 2015, what Congress did, how bad the president is doing, what the weather is going to be like, not to mention informing you of the day and month and year it is?
What really gets me is, after all the service newspapers give people, most people don’t really like newspapers. Perhaps it’s the old messenger-who-brings-the-bad-news thing. A newspaper tells you the ozone layer is going to disappear in twenty years and you’re going to be fried alive, and you get mad at the newspaper.
Readers are always asking, “Why don’t you print more good news?” The answer is simple: There’s not any.
If there were any good news, we’d print it. Let’s say I was interviewing God again, and He said, “Tell everybody we’re going to throw out the Sixth Commandment on Judgment Day.”
You recall the Sixth Commandment. Moses tried to get God to forget it in the first place, but God didn’t know at the time that the Playboy Channel would come along on cable and make everybody want to commit adultery.
So now God realizes “Thou shalt not commit adultery” isn’t really an operative thought anymore, and He tells me He’s going to overlook it for everybody born since 1945, except for Jimmy Swaggart, of course. God would have forgiven him for simply committing adultery, but he couldn’t forgive him for selecting that sweat hog he found in a New Orleans motel room as his adultery-ette.
Anyway, if that story broke, it would indeed be good news and newspapers would carry it, front page, top story.
The New York Daily News would say:
“GOD ON
