I read the news today . . .

I hope whichever one of you that has pulled the short straw and is reading this this week will forgive me. There are a couple things I feel like ranting about, and my wife isn't in the mood this year to listen to me carry on about trivial stuff.


Rant the First:

I grew up in southeast Michigan about sixty miles west of Detroit. We subscribed to two newspapers. The weekly (there was a joke about it couldn't get any weaker) Tecumseh Herald, and (since my parents were Democrats) the Detroit Free Press. (If you were Republican you got the Detroit News.) The Herald doesn't figure in this since it usually only had one or two sections filled mostly with articles about someone's sister's niece's friend visiting from Windblown, North Dakota and expected to stay until Sunday afternoon; but the Free Press, like most major papers, had several sections. It was put in the tube on our mailbox post every morning in a neatly rolled bundle, and when you unrolled it (and here's the important part) it was in order. Starting with the front section of national, international and important local news; then the editorial section; then local news; followed by lifestyle and then the want ads; and finally sports with the comics taking up the last three pages. And if there were inserts they were placed in the inner fold of the paper so that when you opened it you could remove them easily. No muss, no fuss. If you wanted to read a particular section you knew just where to go.

Now I live in Scottsdale, Arizona, and we subscribe to the Arizona Republic because it's pretty much the only choice. Every morning, or at least most mornings, it is thrown into an area within about thirty feet from our door. Since our front yard has desert landscaping it can be very uncomfortable walking across the stones in bare feet, or even slippers, if for some reason it didn't land within reach of the sidewalk.

Then, when you get it inside you never know what you're going to find. The only thing you can be sure of is that eventually you will find most of what you want to read. Maybe. The local section (called the Scottsdale Republic here—I don't know if there's a Mesa Republic or Glendale Republic or whatever—I'm sure our current president thinks they are political parties) is printed, for variety's sake I guess, tabloid fashion; and folded inside it you are apt to find various inserts or perhaps the Living section. It will be jammed inside a twenty page car parts advertisement where you can only find it if you happen to drop the paper and it spills out. The other sections are assembled in random order with advertising inserts weaving in and out of them with enough abandon to make you wonder if there's a tree left standing in Oregon.

It takes a good five minutes to sort out the stuff that's important enough or interesting enough to read from the intellectual outpourings of several marketing departments, in other words crap. Then you are left with one very small pile of useful material, and one very large pile of wasted ink. Sunday's are even worse, which leads me to:

Rant the Second:

When my wife and I were first together our incomes were less than substantial, and in an effort to make our food budget go a bit further I would dutifully cut out all the grocery coupons I could find. Every couple weeks one of the television stations would broadcast a story about some housewife who would buy six full shopping carts of stuff for $6.31 by craftily using her coupons, and I was determined to cash in on this gold mine. The best I ever did was to reduce our bill by about $3.50.

Eventually it dawned on me that I would never reap the fantastic rewards those TV segments promised because my wife and I insisted on eating real food. I also wasn't going to waste time and gas driving to seven different supermarkets to take advantage of loss leaders of dubious value. The siren song of canned fatback for 20¢ at Store A, and hamster diapers—twenty for a dollar—at Store B never captured my soul. The truth, as I see it, is: almost all coupons are for things that a sound diet just doesn't include or for cleaning supplies so full of perfumes as to be unusable. That woman with her six carts usually bought tons of stuff like Sugar High Flakes, powdered Almost Coffee, lemon/asparagus scented detergent, and I Can't Believe It's Not Toxic. Sometimes they would make a big deal about how she also got the meat her family would eat that week, but it seemed to lean heavily toward the 60/40 ground beef and the fattiest (and therefore cheapest) pork cutlets.

The way I see it, if the manufacturer (what an awful word for someone preparing food products) can afford to issue a 25¢ off coupon for their macaroni and orange sludge mix then they should be able to just lower the price a few cents and save all the people they are poisoning a little money. Which leads me to:

Rant the Third:

In a country as rich and well supplied with food as the United States is supposed to be how come so much of our population is forced to eat the garbage mentioned above because they cannot afford fresh, or even frozen, fruits and vegetables, decent meat and fish, and untampered-with staples? Even something as simple as bread! If you are at the lower end of the economic ladder you are forced to buy the soft, nutrition via chemicals stuff that is so airy that a one pound loaf is about sixteen inches long and can be wadded up into something about the size of a tennis ball. Good, nutritious bread made with organic flours and actually having flavor is too expensive to be a part of a poor family's diet. That kind of bread is found at little boutique bakeries that cater to the BMW/Mercedes-Benz crowd. And you can just forget about fresh fruit and vegetables. Except for bananas and potatoes the average working class family can't afford them. And juice? Get real. A sixteen pack of Bud Lite is cheaper than a gallon of fruit juice, and has the added value of helping you forget, or at least become numb to, the hopelessness you feel. Kool-Ade, for those who don't want to take refuge in alcohol, can still give you a good sugar bang for your buck and is as choke full of nutrients as an eggplant. (For those confused by that last statement, eggplants have practically no nutritional value at all. They are almost completely empty calories. Which is why I don't eat them.)

When I was in high school, and even college, many of the farmers around my hometown were being paid not to grow crops. All they had to do was keep their fields free of weeds, and they would be paid about what they would have made if they really grew something. How about we pay them half of what we normally would to maintain fallow fields, and then have them grow nutritious produce that was sold at prices even the poorest families could afford? I know, I know. That would be dangerously close to being a welfare state. We can't go around subsidizing poor people because then they might demand things like adequate health care and decent educations. No, we have to subsidize unproductive farmers who then demand larger subsidies to maintain their lifestyle, but at least they can be counted on to vote against education and health care and all that other sissy liberal stuff.

Rant the Last:

For the last three plus weeks I have had a professional grade case of insomnia. If I am lucky I get about an hour and a half of sleep in the early morning. If I'm not so lucky I don't sleep at all. About once every week or so I get so exhausted I crash for about six hours and then start all over again. I finally got so tired of it (I think there's a pun there, but I'll let you decide) that I went to my doctor today. He gave me some samples that with luck will break this cycle. I'll know in the morning. What really gets to me though, and was the spur to finally get some medical help, is that I am so tired I found myself watching a "reality" show.

I have never watched any of the "Survivor" incarnations, or "American Idol" or any show that involved the weekly "voting off" of one of the contestants, but there I was watching "Who's Going to be the Next Food Network Star," or whatever it's called. I watch the Food Network a lot because I love to cook and its shows usually don't consist of meanness and emotional cruelty like shows like "Everybody Loves Raymond." I have, however, avoided this "Next Food Network Star" show specifically because it makes a big deal out of the weekly removal of one of the players. I knew this because of the dozens of advertisements I had seen.

The basic concept of the show has the potential to make a very entertaining half hour. Bring in half a dozen celebrity chef wanna be's and each week present them with a challenge. After everyone has presented their segment they are evaluated by that weeks judges. So far, so good.

Then there's a five or ten minute build up to the elimination of one of the contestants. Actually, the build up takes place all during the show because they are constantly being reminded that at the end of the episode, "one of you will be going home." After the ax has fallen we get to spend a few minutes watching the ex-contestant deal with the humiliation and disappointment. And that is the whole point of the show.

The "contest" means nothing, or at least very little. What's important is watching the players suffer. (The Romans had a very similar entertainment concept.) Most of the show is devoted to examining the anxiety of the various individuals, and watching as they try to deal with their fear of failure. Then the producers make sure that we get a close up of the devastation caused by the loss of their hopes and dreams. These people want very, very much, for various reasons, to be a cook on television. They are not there for a lark. They are there because this is the fulfillment of everything they have dreamed of, and by God we are going to watch them get every one of their dreams crushed. Up close, and one at a time so we can savor their fall.

Instead of dwelling on the misery why not let them all compete for the entire series, and then at the end revel in the joy of the winner and letting the others deal with their pain, and perhaps anger, in relative private?


物音せしにほのと火が燃えて消えたり
It makes a sound Flares up And goes out.
—Hokuroo