Two Three stories in today’s Times grated on me like fingernails on a whiteboard (updated allusion).
The first chronicles a so-what tale of a two-bit criminal who stole a mean and then whines about spending a day washing dishes. Why the hell should be care? She broke the law. She served a sentence. She barely gives a damn. Go read the story and tell me what is in the least bit newsworthy about this?
The second is Anita Gates’ review of an American Girl movie that tries to make support for World War II look like a politically incorrect subversive attempt to support the Iraq War, one that requires parental instruction:
Then there’s the war. Granted, this is World War II, the one that even protesters in the Vietnam era could see as “the good war,†totally justified and noble. But it may seem to some viewers that Molly’s lessons in the necessity of the ultimate sacrifice are meant to persuade young viewers to see the current war in Iraq as equally noble.Parents can talk to their children about that issue and then safely allow them to enjoy “Molly†for what it mostly is, a heartwarming, dreamlike vision of American small-town life six decades ago, with universal lessons around every corner.
Well, thank you very much for the permission.
And then I just saw Clyde Haberman’s column (behind the barbed wire) trying to tie Christmas shopping, 9/11, and Iraq together in a construction even more contorted than the White House’s.
No day is better for this display of patriotism than Black Friday, so named because retailers pray for ledgers written in ink of that color. Many signs suggest that New Yorkers are ready to do their part.Few of them may have turned out on Nov. 11 to watch the Veterans Day parade in the city. The crowds lining the parade route on Fifth Avenue were sparser than Knicks victories.
But New Yorkers more than held their own a few days later by gathering in vast herds outside stores selling the Sony PlayStation 3.
This may be one time when you should be glad you can’t get behind the TimesSelect wall.
Were the editors all off having turkey yesterday? Apparently so. And the paper got the stuffing.
Was gobsmacked myself over that dine-n-dash-so-do-the-time-and-the-dishes blob. My theory? Charlie LeDuff filed something about a one-armed stripper named Tinkle and the Turkey Day editorial staff were too afraid to run it without permission from Big Boss on Vacation.
I’m from Valparaiso, have eaten in that restaurant, and my family knows the manager — who was made to sound like some kind of evil troll in the story, to boot. Why would he want her in his kitchen at the critical post of dish counter? And she proved him right by, um, feeling faint and having to sit down.
Thanks for pointing out the utter pointlessness of this story, Jeff. And Happy Thanksgiving (belatedly, but hey, i tried to stay away from my email and blogs while all the family was together); mmmmm, turkey salad!
Anyone stupid enough to read the NYT deserves its punishment.
[...] Today’s NY Times gives us a j-school lesson in overcooked feature writing marked by barely hidden agendas and grating condescension (not unlike another story in the same spot in The Times that tried to make us sympathetic with a two-bit thief, which I lamented the other day). Today, Charlie LeDuff visits a Burger King in Dallas to try to urge sympathy for a woman who has a bad job but who also admits, way down in the story, that she “wishes she would have worked harder in school. Not gotten pregnant at 13. Again at 14.” Let’s dissect this one: Off a bleak and empty interchange midway through the Dallas sprawl stands a Burger King. It’s past midnight, the rain sizzles on the parking lot blacktop like frying bacon. A young woman is working the lobster shift at the drive-through window. She is overweight and wears pink lipstick. [...]