News in print vs online

Each day more and more people get their news from the internet.  Most of these people no longer read newspapers, except perhaps online.

They are missing something.

When you read things online, you tend to see the headlines and big stories, easily missing the smaller news pieces.  I came to this realization while reading an actual newspaper, printed with ink on paper.  Of course, the main news stories were on the front page, but it’s the smaller items on the inside that are the most interesting.  Those smaller stories, sometimes no more than a paragraph, are scattered throughout the newspaper.  If they are even on the paper’s website, they are not easy to find.

When you open a fullsize newspaper, sometimes you are faced with a huge ad for some product, store or company.  Many times, on the same page, there are small news items with headlines that catch your eye.  One recent one concerned the mystery of the gravestone next to Lee Harvey Oswald’s cemetery plot.  The gravestone read “Nick Beef” and until recently, no one knew who this person was.  The article identified the owner of the plot, who is alive and thus was not buried there, and explained why he purchased the cemetery plot.  The article was interesting but I can’t imagine anyone having seen it while reading a newspaper online.

Another advantage of an actual newspaper is that you can pick it up at any time, read it for a minute or two, put it down and pick it up again later at the point you left off.  How often is that done with electronic news?

So, too, you can clip an article and save it.  Has anyone ever been found with an electronic news article folded in his wallet?

Of course, internet news is delivered much faster than a one day old newspaper. 

But sometimes it’s nice to slow down and smell the newsprint.

A silver lining

Today something happened to me that has not happened for nearly 50 years: I received a silver coin in change at the grocery store. 1964 was the last year US coins were made of 90% silver. Since then, coins have been made of an alloy of metals with basically no intrinsic value. Since the last silver coins were minted, the price of silver has risen, making the value of pre-1965 coins higher than their face value. People routinely sell these silver coins for many times their face value. The buyers usually melt the coins to retrieve the silver. Today’s spot price is about $1.50 for the dime in question. The coin was a well worn 1943-S Mercury dime. The S mint mark indicates it was minted 3,000 miles away in San Francisco. Mercury dimes were last minted in 1945 when they were replaced by the current Roosevelt dime. They have virtually disappeared from circulation since 1965. The supermarket clerk who gave me the coin was an older woman. She either didn’t know the value of the coin or didn’t notice it as she counted out my change. I spotted it immediately because I used to collect coins as a hobby. I guess the moral of this story is: Keep your eyes open when dealing with money.

Recycling?

Scene: Waiting at a bus stop on a late spring afternoon. Action: A young woman comes to wait for the bus. She begins to eat pistachio nuts, tossing the empty shells onto the grass. One final unopened nut falls into to the roadbed and, unbelievably, she stoops to retrieve it, dodging traffic in the process. She then removes the pistachio nut and makes a final toss of the empty shell halves onto the grass. My first reaction was that this was littering, but as I looked down, I saw several cigarette butts and that tempered my reaction somewhat. After all, the nut shells were at least biodegradable, weren’t they? Still, the wonton act of tossing what amounted to garbage onto the beautiful green grass upset my sensibilities. Is there ever an excuse for tossing things you no longer want or need? Who raises people to do this? Certainly not my parents. I hold onto trash until I find a proper receptacle. I suppose that makes me a rebel by today’s standards.

References

It occurred to me that there are a number of references in my last post that a younger audience may not understand. Terms like “Amway,” “God’s waiting room,” “grammar school,” “baby-boomers,” and even “jumping the shark.” One of the sad things about getting older is that many people you speak with do not understand the references you make. I’ll continue to make them in the hopes that someone will understand them. Even if it’s only me. For the rest of you, there’s always Google. --

Jumping the shark

I’ve been on Facebook since January 8, 2009, originally joining so I could “friend” my younger daughter in order to see the pictures she posted. Neither my wife nor older daughter are on Facebook, but almost everyone else I know is. As a result of the recent 50th anniversary of my graduation from grammar school (yes, I am an older American), several of my classmates from those early days have connected with me on Facebook. Some post pictures of food, their travels, the games they play or their hobbies. We ‘baby boomers” don’t all retire to “God’s waiting room.” Indeed, one of my female former classmates moved back from Florida to New Jersey to be closer to her grandchildren. It’s that woman who has convinced me that Facebook has jumped the shark. She recently started a business selling jewelry and now her Facebook posts are nothing more than ads for her business. It’s one thing for advertisers to bombard you with requests to buy their products; it’s quite another when your friends do so, too. A number of years ago, when one of my daughters became friendly with one of her grade school classmates, we invited that child’s parents to our home for a summer barbecue. To my dismay, those parents used the occasion to push an Amway agenda on us. That was the last time we socialized with that family. Now it may be time to “de-friend” my grammar school classmate who is using Facebook to sell jewelry. And I probably won’t wait until Jimmy Kimmel’s National De-Friend Day in November to do it.

The pursuit was trivial

It finally happened. Notwithstanding the vast amount of knowledge I’ve accumulated over the years, albeit mostly trivial in nature, I’ve hit the wall I saw coming. I predicted that soon many quiz show questions would be about Harry Potter or those Lord of the Ring/Hobbit characters. Since I know absolutely nothing about these fictional people, and do not care enough to learn about them, I knew I would be at a disadvantage. I thought they would show up on Jeopardy first, and maybe a few questions have. But, to my dismay, these topics have made it into my local crossword puzzle. Recently, two of the first three “across” clues were: Head of Slytherin House, in Potter books (five letters) and “The Hobbit” dragon (also five letters). If this trend continues, I will be reduced to a trivia relic.

Back to the Blog

By accident, I came across a blog someone wrote with only four entries, all on the same date in 2009. I started a blog on October 25, 2007 and have 86 entries to date, but none since February 7, 2012. Lest any reader think something happened to me, I thought it was time to blog again. In truth, I never stopped writing, just publishing. Now I will do both. I’ll start with an observation about the shrinking size of products. I remember when a Hershey bar cost five cents. Then, instead of raising the price, they reduced the size of the bar. I don’t know if that was the first instance of shrinkage, but the trend seems to have accelerated in recent years. I bought a box of Kleenex tissues the other day. The price was right – just a dollar. But the number of tissues in the box seemed low – just 100 (no, I did no count them). It occurred to me that every time I used a tissue, whether to blow my nose or squash a bug, it cost me one cent. By the way, I refrain from using the word “penny” because as a numismatist, I know that the penny used to be a coin in England, whereas the coin we commonly refer to as a penny is actually a one cent piece. The government says it costs more than one cent to make one cent, even though they haven’t used copper since 1982. Anyway, this got me to thinking about how much these shrunken items really cost per unit. Four chicken McNuggets for a dollar comes to about 12 ½ cents a bite. A $3.00 slice of pizza is about fifty cents a bite. Rising costs and shrinking products, coupled with the state of the economy, makes one wonder how close we are to making even the dollar bill worth hardly anything. Newspapers have recently gone from 50 cents to a dollar, while at the same time, cutting content. Even the Sunday comics, a staple of my youth, have been cut down to fewer than a dozen. It was easy to purchase a 50 cent newspaper when you received two quarters back. It’s more difficult to say goodbye to a whole dollar bill. They say as you age, you shrink. So I guess I’m right in tune with what’s happening.