The Fading Power of the Fourth Estate (Shoo-bee-doo-bee-doo Division)

SACRAMENTO, Ca.--It is not exactly, well, news that falling revenues and flagging readership continue to send the newspaper industry yet deeper into its current merciless tailspin.
   The decline has propelled newspaper executives to experiment with wide-ranging strategies to retain readers, including... well, lots of things, all of which we are simply too lazy to look up. 
   One paper evidently has decided to take an aggressively avant-garde approach: at the Sacramento Bee, reporters now write in Esperanto. 
   At least that's the conclusion to be drawn from reading the lede of a Dec. 24 Bee story reporting heavy snowfall in the Lake Tahoe area: 
   "Bing Crosby should come to Lake Tahoe. With a fresh heap of snow blanketing the landscape, the classic 'White Christmas' crooner couldn't have dreamed it any better. Nor could the area's tourist industry." 

   It would be cruel to unmask the miscreant who wrote this. It is the holiday season; we are determined to look kindly upon our brethren and sistern. For the sake of conversation let us call the Bee reporter by a randomly chosen name, one unassuming in the extreme, a name like, oh, we don't know, maybe something such as, let's say, Ed Fletcher (efletcher@sacbee.com).
   Mr. Fletcher may go unmasked; his lede shall not. It should be placed, like a severed head, atop a tall stick and paraded from town to village to burgh and back as a perfect example of exactly what not to do should you one day find yourself in the unenviable position of having to top a snow-related story with a catchy opening paragraph. 
   First off: Bing Crosby? Really? That rustling you hear is the sound of tens of thousands of Americans, ages sixteen to fortyish, scratching their heads as they murmur, "Bing who?" (Answer: the third most popular movie actor of all time, by box office numbers. Nevertheless...)

   But of course Mr. Fletcher name-checked Mr. Crosby. Recent studies have shown that the average age of newspaper readers is a hundred and sixty-five; the average age of reporters is roughly double that. 
   In recognition of these alarming facts, newspaper bigwigs have employed all kinds of tactics in the past decade to get those laptoppatizin', Tweetereezin', Facebookatatin', text-sendin' young folks to visit the ink-stained horse 'n buggy barn. Just last month, with an eye to creating an staff-wide understanding of the "youth demographic," New York Times editor Andrew Rosenthal ordered employees to be dosed with psilocybin and forced to wave glow sticks, suck on pacifiers and dance without respite for sixteen hours to drum 'n bass hits of the nineties. 

   But try as these media leaders might to hip things up, the Ed Fletchers of the world continue to fire bullets into their desperately dancing feet. When dreaming of a captivating snow-story lede, the best Ed Fletcher can do is to conjure Bing ("Who?") Crosby, a performer popular two and one-half centuries ago and best known for his mellifluous voice and his penchant--no offense to Crosby friends, family and fans across the globe--for beating his children.

   For an Ed Fletcher lede, however, a Bing Crosby reference is a mere warmup. What follows seems, on the face of it, a rather pleasant suggestion: that Mr. Crosby "should come to Lake Tahoe." Mr. Crosby used to live in the San Francisco Bay Area; no doubt he enjoyed many Tahoe trips. It is not difficult to believe that he would be game for another were it not for the fact that he is, in truth, entirely dead. 
   Crosbyesque Tahoe trips are therefore out of the question even were Mr. Crosby willing to strap skis to the maggot-chewed bones of his feet. 
   Mr. Fletcher, alas, soldiers on. Why should Mr. Crosby, dead or alive, come to Lake Tahoe? "With a fresh heap of snow blanketing the landscape, the classic 'White Christmas' crooner couldn't have dreamed it any better." 
   The way that sentence is constructed, if that sentence can be said to have been "constructed" (it cannot), suggests that Mr. Crosby himself has a fresh heap of snow blanketing some... landscape. The word "landscape" occasionally is used euphemistically to refer to, for example, parts of the body that would best be left unmentioned in polite society were there still such a thing as polite society. It immediately strikes First of All that there are most definitely "landscapes" of Mr. Crosby's badly decomposed body that we simply do not wish to picture (e.g., the anus). 
   Ahem, ahem. All right, children, gather round. Uncle First of All is now going to decode, phrase by phrase, the rest of that sentence for you:


   *"...the classic..." In addition to being a famous movie star, Mr. Crosby was an extremely popular singer. But when Mr. Fletcher writes that Mr. Crosby was a "classic" singer, he is not, kids, referring to what you think of as classic; that is to say classic rock, the music of the sixties that all but killed the careers of the Mr. Crosbys of the land. No, Mr. Fletcher means "classic" in a way that would make sense only to your average newspaper reader, age one hundred and sixty-five.

   *"...'White Christmas'..." A reference to a song, written by Irving Berlin in 1942, the lyrics of which set a nostalgic, elegiac tone: "I'm dreaming of a white Christmas/Just like the ones I used to know." Mr. Crosby sang the song in the movie musical Holiday Inn. (Executives at Paramount Pictures nixed his plan to perform it in blackface. They felt that audiences would simply be baffled by the sight of an African-American Bing Crosby singing, "And may all your Christmases be white.") The World War II-era song became a hit with soldiers overseas and their families at home. Mr. Crosby's version was so popular that a movie of the same name was made in 1954. It starred Mr. Crosby, Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney and a dancing gorilla. No, wait: that gorilla part is wrong. It was a dancing dwarf. 
   *"...crooner..." The nineteen forties and fifties singing style known as "crooning" was practiced by velvet-voiced male singers (Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Jack Jones, et cetera) whose job was to: a.) seduce chicks; x.) cut a compelling, if compellingly bland, fashion figure; and 12.) create music that was the aural equivalent of Valium--just the ticket for a generation rattled by World War II and by the thunder in the distance that would come to be known as rock 'n' roll. 
   *"...couldn't have dreamed it any better." See "White Christmas" lyrics, above. 


   Well. We have now spent roughly eleven hundred words dissecting--flaying?--poor Mr. Fletcher's no doubt rush-written lede. We can hardly be said to be carrying the Christmas spirit, white or otherwise. So we will leave well enough--and bad enough--alone, and wish you all a happy holiday season. May your  snow always arrive in fresh heaps and your landscapes always be, uh... well-showered?

---------------------------------
PS: We are painfully aware that our little blackface joke was in poor taste. We apologize. 
   Thank God Mr. Crosby habitually displayed more discernment than we do. He would never have stooped so low even as to joke about blackface, much less appear in it, because... 
   Wait a minute. 
   In the 1943 film Dixie, Mr. Crosby played a young Kentucky songwriter who tries to bust into the big time first in New Orleans and then in New York. At some point during this cinematic tale, Mr. Crosby appeared thus (ha-ha, ho-ho, we win): 

   
   
   
   
   

Queer Notes From all Over (Equal Rights for All Excepting Bisexuals, But They Don't Count Division)

RICHMOND, Virginia, March 11 - The governor of the great state of Virginia has shown that, when it comes to equal rights for gays, lesbians and transgendered people, he is, well, all for equal rights for gays, lesbians and transgendered people. 
   There was no mention made of bisexuals, who, as usual, got the short end of the stick, but who, being attracted to persons of both genders, have twice the chance of getting a date on Saturday night, according to filmmaker and former comic Woody Allen, who made that joke, like, seven hundred years ago.
   Gov. Bob McDonnell yesterday directed state agencies of all sizes, stripes and orientations not to discriminate against gays and lesbians, the Associated Press reported today. 
   State Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli, who, not that this matters, is a Republican, sent a letter last week to state colleges saying they lack authority to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation, and ordered them to rescind any anti-discrimination that include protections for gays and lesbians. 
   It is admirable that Atty. Gen. Cuccinelli sent a letter. Letter-writing is, alas, a lost art, what with emails, texting, Twitter and the general decline of literacy in America, not to mention the fact that the U.S. postal service is considering stopping Saturday service as a cost-cutting measure. 
   That said, it is the content of the letter with which we must concern ourselves, and that content is, in a word, stupid. 
   Apparently, Gov. McDonnell agreed, in essence if not in word, and that is why he issued his directive. His directive trumped that of the Atty. Gen., because he - the Gov. - has much more power. 
   Before the Gov.'s directive reached far and wide into the psyches of Virginians everywhere, the Atty. Gen.'s letter had occasioned no little amount of agitation among, predictably, gay rights groups and, predictably, Democrats. 
   College students - who, by dint of their youth, vitality and idealism, are the Hope for the Future - rallied, but in a very modern, by which one means troublingly virtual, way. 
   The Washington Post, quoted in the Associated Press report, which was run on the Huffington Post news site - one apologizes, but one is simply too tired, at the moment, to track down original sources - reported that 3,000 people joined a Facebook page titled, "WE DON'T WANT DISCRIMINATION IN OUR STATE UNIVERSITIES AND COLLEGES!" 
   While that sentiment is to be applauded, the use of all capital letters and an exclamation point is not. 
   The Post further reported, according to the AP by way of the Huffington Post, that one protest was organized by a group at William and Mary College, in Williamsburg, Va., the second oldest college in America, the motto of which is: "We're different, and we like it that way."
   The group, called Queer & Allied Activism, launched a social media campaign, the Post wrote, "urging students to protest on Cuccinelli's Facebook and Twitter pages, and to sign a petition organized by the group Equality Virginia." 
   The group's acronym - QAA - has no meaning, and therefore cannot be called, even by a stretch, clever, but its use of an ampersand is alluring. 
   One certainly applauds the students' efforts, but one is alarmed to hear that students are now protesting from the safety of their laptops while, perhaps, sitting around their dorms or frat houses in their pajamas. One is all for lounging in sleepwear, but one also remembers the days when students actually ventured out of doors to protest injustices. 
   Alas, it is a new day. The thought occurs that maybe the weather was bad. Protesting in the snow, while offering the opportunities, during dull moments, to create snowmen, or even snow penises, can be trying.           
   But recent weather reports, you see, say temperatures have been in the high fifties and low sixties. 
   That's practically balmy for Virginia winters, or seems like it should be. One doesn't know; one has never been to Virginia in the winter or even in the spring, summer or fall, if memory serves, which it generally does not. 
                       --30--

Crime of the Century (There's No Art Like Snow Art Division)

   Snow art, it is plain, simply is not appreciated by the keepers of society's mores, be they bluenoses or bluecoats. 
   First there was the snow-penis kerfuffle. Now comes a high-art contretemps. 
   Elisa Gonzalez, obviously a creative, well-rounded individual, recently took it upon herself to carve, on the front lawn of her Rahway, New Jersey home, a snow replica of the Venus de Milo, according to a March 4 Associated Press story. 
   This, really, is so much more inspired than is making, for example, a snowman (although these, at this point in history, can be considered "classics"), or a snow statue that resembles, say, Rush Limbaugh. 
   Quite frankly, you're better off making a scarecrow that resembles Rush Limbaugh. The similarities are eerie: a scarecrow is a straw man; Rush Limbaugh sets up straw-man arguments. A scarecrow scares birds; Rush Limbaugh scares all sentient beings, as well as some of your more concentrated collections of star dust. A scarecrow is brainless; Rush Limbaugh... well, point made. 
   The Venus de Milo (photo, left), an ancient Greek sculpture, is credited to an artist named Alexandros of Antioch. At least so says Wikipedia, the resource of dubiously-sourced information for researchers too lazy to visit all links but the first in any Google search.
   The statue's subject is Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love and beauty. (The Romans called her Venus; contrary folk that they were, they simply felt compelled to invent their own name for her. This was sort of a goddess-appellation version of how dogs make fire hydrants their very own.) 
   Beauty, sadly, has its comeuppances; time is not always kind to it. Somewhere along the way, the Venus de Milo's arms were severed at the biceps (right) and shoulder (left). Her statuesque (sorry) breasts, however, all the more wondrous for not having been surgically enhanced in her lifetime or any other, have remained on dazzling display all throughout history. 
   And so they did on Ms. Gonzalez's snow statue. In other ways, however, the appropriately armless snow version veered slightly from the original. For example, it had no head. Comparing the two, the AP helpfully noted, "The original Venus de Milo, which is housed in Paris' Louvre museum... is also without arms, although her head is intact."  
   Disparities aside, Ms. Gonzalez, who is forty-four, was rightly pleased with her artwork. 
   "It looked very beautiful," she told the AP. "We got a lot of attention from people in the neighborhood. Some of them got out and took pictures and spoke to us."
   You see? Art not only soothes the savage, ugly, heinous, destructive, wanton, debauched, decadent, lying, manipulative, Machiavellian and porcine inner beast (the, as it were, inner Rush Limbaugh), but it also creates instant community. Just ask anyone trying to hook up with an art-lover at a museum. It's like harpooning whales in a barrel. 
   Alas, not everyone agrees. The idea of "art," especially when it includes a naked snow rack, is in the sometimes bedeviled eye of the beholder. A Gonzalez neighbor, shocked, absolutely shocked by the statue, alerted the local gendarmerie. They, in turn, gave Ms. Gonzalez the choice of knocking it down or concealing the lovely parts. 
   "We didn't want to have any problem with the police, so we covered it up," Ms. G. quite sensibly said. The photo below shows that Ms. G. ingeniously covered the Venus de Milo's historic breasts with a bikini top, cleverly turning her into an ancient Greek, and headless, beach bunny. 

   Well, concessions must be made. Perhaps Ms. G. was aware that, just a few years earlier, police in nearby New York had used shovels to pummel a snow-penis into powder. Would any true artist wish to inflict such a heartbreaking fate upon the Venus de Milo? Of course not.
   This, however, must be said: it is a dark day in America when boors incapable even of rudimentary art appreciation take it upon themselves to set community-wide artistic standards. They're better off doing what they do best: finding fault with the joy and creative expression of others, gossiping about those of whom they're paralyzingly envious, and spending their afternoons immersed in the risible chatter of Rush Limbaugh, right wing scarecrow. 

Crime of the Century (Friends with Johnny Law Division)

   Mark E. Blaylock, forty-nine, of Manheim Township, PA (pop. roughly 35,000) had a very busy day Wednesday, and most of it involved interacting with police. 
   At 11 a.m., according to a March 3 Associated Press story, Blaylock was charged with theft of services after bailing on a sixty-nine dollar cab fare. The surprisingly uninformative AP story does not say why Blaylock owed such a large amount of money to a cabbie. Either he was driven many, many, many miles across hill and dale; was driven around in circles for an hour or two; or was provided sexual favors by the driver. A clue might be found in the amount owed.
   A clue also might be found in the fact that, a mere hour later, Mr. Blaylock was found lying drunk on a road near his house. Again, the AP shirks its duty to carry the facts, the facts and nothing but the facts - all of them. 
   Yes, Blaylock was drunk. But is it possible that, as far as the lying-in-the-road business goes,  Blaylock was simply sunbathing? Or, if the weather was inclement, might he have been creating snow angels? We will never know; given the generally devolving fiscal state of journalism these days, it appears the AP has not only cut staff from its masthead but also facts from its stories. 

   (The photo above shows a snow angel enthusiast who is, alas, not Mark E. Blaylock.)
   Police charged Blaylock with public drunkenness. The message was: snow angels or no, you simply do not laze around on a public road, soused to the gills, in Manheim Township. It's just not that kind of place.
   It appears that Mr. Blaylock roused himself, for it was but a scant hour later that, showing a resourcefulness of which taxpayers of all ages should take note, he dialed 911 to request police assistance - to fill a prescription. 
   Police, however, failed to see either the humor in or ingenuity of Blaylock's call. They charged him with reporting a medical emergency without good cause. ("Good cause" would include having, say, a ruptured spleen, a twisted ankle, or a broken heart.) 
   Blaylock faces a misdemeanor charge and a pair of summary offenses. 
   Cementing the dismal reality that, in the case of this report at least, the AP simply seems to have given up the ghost, the story concludes, "A phone number for Blaylock could not immediately be located Wednesday." 
   Even taking into account the kinds of monstrous deadlines AP writers face, not being able to find a number for a man who, plainly, has a phone - he dialed 911 to request police assistance - suggests a sort of institutionalized psychological depression troubling to contemplate for those who, in addition to Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, still believe in the Fourth Estate in all its (fading) glory. 

Crime of the Century (Art for Art's Sake Division)

   Two males, both seventeen, were stopped by Parsippany, N.J. police Thursday at about 11:30pm EST on the front lawn of the Parsippany High School, where the young men, using their shoe soles, were outlining, in the snow, the image of a 25-foot penis. 
  
    (This photo does not show the young men's art piece. It shows an effort created by students at the the University of Cincinnati football stadium. It is included here for illustrative purposes, you see.)
   According to the New Jersey Local News Service, Officer Steven Miller (no relation to the aged rock musician or the beer) saw the teenagers creating the snowbound phallus and "caught them soon after they left the school in a vehicle." 
   The NJLNS further reports that one of the artists was made to "erase the imagery as Parsippany Police Officer Robert Appel stood by." 
   This, of course, is an outrage. In an era when funding for public art has all but dried up, these young men were performing a noble civic duty. 
   That authorities saw differently, however, is not altogether shocking. As a rule, police tend to lean toward the anti-snow-penis. 
   In 2005, police in New Windsor, New York (pop. roughly 23,000), used shovels to demolish a six-foot snow penis erected (sorry) by Jessica Sherer, nineteen, on the lawn of her boyfriend's house. 
   There is no recorded indication whether the statue was, indeed, of her boyfriend's penis. If so, and if it was to scale, he obviously received a gift from the gods, as evidenced here: 

   But, because the world is populated with boors, not everyone saw it that way. 
   "We got some calls that people thought it was offensive," New Windsor police Chief Michael Biasotti told the Hudson Valley Times Herald-Record (a newspaper so nice they had to name it thrice). 
   Biasotti did not elaborate on what anyone could possibly find offensive about an artistic rendering of the male penis, the absolute perfection of which is the strongest possible argument for the existence of a God Almighty. 
   What is known is that police, finding no one home, took it upon themselves to shovel-pummel Sherer's snow penis senseless. (The first photo below shows the result.) Was this reaction reasonable or extreme? New Windsor Town Supervisor George Meyers sounded mixed. 
   "We probably weren't 100 percent correct in going on the property and knocking it down," he told the Hudson Valley newspaper of (times) record (herald). "But our intentions were pure. Some people were offended. There are school buses going by there every day."
   Perhaps Meyers was anticipating the possibility that, seeing the snow penis, a school bus driver might laugh so hard that he or she would inadvertently drive the vehicle into a tree. Or, alternately, that forty school kids spotting the snow penis might cause such a ruckus - laughing, screaming, throwing things, etc. - that the non-plussed driver would inadvertently drive the vehicle into a tree. Either way, at least they'd all die laughing, and their last visual on earth would be a snow penis. One is hard-pressed to think of a better final vision.
   For his part, Biasotti, the police chief, expressed concern that, snow-penis-wise, a copycat effect might manifest. 
   "Now we're going to get snow penises popping up all over town," he told the Hudson Valley newspaper. 
   One dasn't touch that one with a ten-inch pole. 
   Sherer, the snow artist, vowed to rebuild a day or so after the contretemps. Whether she did so or not is a mystery left to the ages; there is no followup in the Hudson Valley Times Herald-Record-Trumpet-Chronicle-Post-Examiner-Daily-News. 

Above: The damage done by New Windsor, NY, police to Sherer's work.
Below: More snow penises. They suggest that snow-penis erection - apologies - has become a national past-time on a par with baseball, apple pie, and breast enhancement surgery. Would that we had known that before the Winter Olympics rolled around.
   

Crime of the Century (Footprints in the Snow Division)

   An Ohio man man has been charged with arson, burglary and other crimes after police apprehended him at the scene of a mobile home fire by following tracks in the snow from the home to his car, which had become stuck in the snow when he'd tried to flee. 
   In a Feb. 22 report in the Beaver County (Pennsylvania) Times, reporter Robert Poole writes that Robert Lee Armstrong, thirty-three, of 608 Oak Knoll Ave. Southeast, Warren, Ohio (small-area newspaper stories still give home addresses, in case you want to send Christmas cards or burn down the house of the person who torched your mobile home), had once rented the trailer, at 1035 State Line Road, in North Beaver Township, from Lloyd Bruce Clevenger, forty-eight, of Cameron, N.C. (Plainly, the charmingly named North Beaver Township is urbane enough to draw people from as far away as the Midwest and the South.)
   Armstrong told police he broke into the trailer to claim items he'd left behind when he moved, and found that some were missing. He said that Clevenger, as Poole of the B.C. Times so succinctly puts it, "had lied to him about the location of those items." 
   Distressed, Armstrong set fire to the curtains in the trailer's bedroom. 
   He then walked to his car, leaving footprints in the unplowed snow. Police found him there when they arrived. 
   Neither police nor the B.C. Times identify the "items" Armstrong was trying to claim.