Glancing at the homepage of thestate.com looking for blog fodder just now, I saw the main focal point of the page was a couple of mugshots with the headline,
Sheriff: Two arrested in record setting meth bust in Kershaw County
Then, immediately below that, I saw:
SC deputies arrest nearly 50 in cockfighting bust
Wow. Not exactly an appealing couple of snapshots of life in the Palmetto State. What is this, the Wild West? Actually, that may not be fair to the Wild West…
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The State’s front page blockbuster article was about T- Rav, coke head felon with posh ancestors and a baby mama less than half his age….no excuse
I’m a little bit disturbed/appalled by The State’s continuing and completely unwarranted coverage of the “Southern Charms” TV series and T-Rav’s crotch-fruit. It’s almost as if Will Folks is running their newsroom.
If you can’t sell papers, you gotta drive clicks. Just wait til they start filling the page with “listicles”.
And you know what I hate the most about listicles? I hate that each of the 10 items in a list of “Top Ten” will be on a separate page, making you click again and exposing you to more ads, or just running up the click count, or whatever.
And that ruins it for me. Because I need to see the whole list at a time to know what I think of it — see how this or that item is placed in relation to the others. Otherwise, it’s just a random bunch of items rather than a proper list…
Here’s a listicle I came up with after attending the excellent Bruce Springsteen concert in Charlotte Saturday night… name your four Mt. Rushmore icons with one each from the categories of: Sports, Music, Literature, Movies/TV.
Here’s mine:
Larry Bird, Bruce Springsteen, John Irving, George Clooney
No, you have to be broader than that, bring in all our history…
Babe Ruth, Elvis, Mark Twain, Clark Gable.
If you need to diversify it, put in Jackie Robinson for the Bambino, and Marilyn Monroe for Clark Gable.
For me, the first three are unquestionably the most iconic. The fourth is most debatable. I picked Gable because if you say “Hollywood” to me, I picture the poster from “Gone With the Wind.” And Vivien Leigh wasn’t American. I mean, I’m assuming you’re limiting this to Americans, right? Being Mt. Rushmore and all…
And of course I meant Presley, not Costello. On account of the nationality thing…
I meant personal Mt, Rushmore, not historical.
Mark Spitz, Neil Peart, James Thurber, Sam J. Jones
Yeah, I saw that Ravenel feature. Didn’t read it, but that doesn’t mean much. I have a long history of not reading centerpiece stories that have a big picture with them. I have a mental block, arising from the fact that I’m a hard news guy, and those stories are usually features. Occasionally — but not often — a story like that will be a serious news story, and I’ll be embarrassed later that I didn’t know about it, and people will say, “It was all over the front page.” And they’re right…
Now that you mention it, I can see how some might be offended that on Easter Sunday, the centerpiece was about he dubious resurrection of Thomas Ravenel’s public life. But that didn’t occur to me when I saw in Sunday.
I was kind of wiped out Sunday morning from reading at the Vigil Mass the night before, which went three-and-a-half hours…
That sounded kind of holier-than-thou, didn’t it? Well, I did a LOT of reading in Masses last week, and since it was a big part of what I was doing all week, I kept looking for a chance to say something about it, but never got around to it. I read in Spanish at the Palm Sunday and Thursday Masses, and then in English Saturday night.
That was the first time I’d read in English in awhile, since the mass I usually attend, noon on Sundays, is completely in Spanish these days. And I was pumped about it because it was a great reading from Isaiah, and it had all those really money lines in it like “Seek the Lord while he may be found,” and “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways.” But then, when my turn to read came, I ended up kind of rushing it, and stumbled a time or two. So it didn’t sound much like the Voice of God.
There’s a vanity problem that I have — I always want to read these really dramatic passages from the Old Testament, and I imagine really nailing the reading in a way that just blows everybody away. Which, of course, is prideful. And I usually blow it, because while I want to do a great job, I feel guilty at the same time because my ego is wrapped up in the performance.
You really have to be self-absorbed to make a whole morality play out of simply getting up and reading a few lines of Scripture, don’t you think?
I had another good Isaiah reading the week before.
I was a little disappointed in the Spanish translation, though. The English version starts, “The Lord GOD has given me a well-trained tongue,/That I might know how to answer the weary…”
Which is way poetic, right?
But the Spanish version essentially said, “The Lord has given me an expert tongue.” Which seemed more prosaic to me.
But then, I don’t know. My Spanish is so bad nowadays that I can’t begin to tell you when a choice of words works on an aesthetic level. I’m doing really well to get the meaning right….
My mother said T-Rav may as well run for Congress (mentioned as a possibility in the article) because he isn’t any crazier than anyone else there but at least he is honest about his issues.
Hey, these headlines are a break from Gamecock sports.
Technically, no…
The “G” is capitalized, indicating a proper noun rather than a generic activity.