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BONG Bull No. 685 final count
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Charles Stough
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Nov 28, 2006 11:50 PST
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The Burned-Out Newspapercreatures Guild's World-Famous Encyclical
BONG Bull
No. 685
Copyright © 2006 by BONG
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For Nov. 28, 2006. Memo to Miami Herald: When guns are outlawed, only
cartoonists will have guns, and even the ones who don't know the
executive offices are empty on holiday weeks can be mildly dangerous.
The problem is that they think victims of violence exude a few stars and
then pop back in the next panel; not even randy TV preachers are that
dumb, says the Burned-Out Newspapercreatures Guild, and this is BONG
Bull No. 685!
ELECTION RETURNS. Rush Limbaugh flops around in imitation of spastic
during the campaign, and then makes his flip-flopping official when he
voices thanks he won't have to lie about THOSE Republicans, the ones who
lost elections, any more. Fox News swivel-chairs through all its
fair-and-balanced "analysts" Newt Gingrich, Ollie North and Mr. Coulter,
and even Laura Ingraham has screeched her carefully timed dismays.
Happiness abides, if not in Republican Rep. Jean Schmidt's 2nd District
of Ohio at least in the real world. The election is over.
Hoo-friggin'-ray.
Now let's get us an agenda.
PAGING KEN STARR. Congress shouldn't have a problem getting up another
$40 million. Let's investigate stuff. Let's see the menu: Oh, Dick
Cheney's energy cabal, that's a good starter (is it too late to get a
fat tax break on a Lincoln Navigator?). The Halliburton is fresh. The
lobbyist selection includes casinos, pharmaceuticals and mock
Christians.
Maybe we can get the House Ethics Committee to entertain with their
innovative new act, with the majority party telling the minority guys
where the meetings are held.
Oh yes, Kenny, we need the Ken Starr style of unbiased,
goes-where-it-may nonpartisan investigation. This Fitzgerald boy and his
spy-outing probe is sincere, but only a Starr probe has as many exciting
leaks from the caravan! Come back from academe, Ken Starr! Oh, you're at
Pepperdine? Well OK, make that come back from the basketball court!
YAHOO, GOOGLE. All right, towel's in the ring, burnouts have lost, pay
off your bar tabs and head for the pasture. Hundreds of newspapers have
plugged in with Yahoo and Google to share "content, search and want
ads." Meanwhile, Romenesko reports newspaper layoffs and buyouts coast
to coast.
Remember those 20-Mule-Team Boraxo pictures? Think 9-mule-teams now.
So be it.
Would it be rude to remind publishers about those silly "local news
is our franchise" speeches? Well, if not, keep the reminder handy and we
can bash them with it again. Remember to include:
-- Any columnist who used the term "my mother" more than twice in a
lifetime cost newspapers thousands of subscribers.
-- The availability of two consecutive pages in the paper doesn't
mean you can fill it with blather about some pol getting a seat on the
turnpike commission, even if it does clear seven pounds of trash out of
a file. Readers who flip past double-truck stories saying "Yeah, yeah,
where's the news?" are not lifelong readers.
-- I recall a late-arriving story about a school bus wreck that said
the glittering glass shards in the street looked like a tropic beach at
dawn. It was late arriving because a committee had been at it all day
and half the night. Luckily, it needed a trim and the tropic beach hit
the crapper. Lacking fact about injuries, traffic citations, repair
costs, driving records and such detritus, the pages of the Dayton Daily
News weren't going to turn kids in ambulances into a postcard on my
watch.
I got yelled at and yelled back, not that it mattered either way. The
"team" on the "project" couldn't be coaxed to follow up with facts, such
was their pique. Oh well. And I left the paper eventually, too soon to
yell again when a similar team exposed unsolved crimes against Peace
Corps volunteers in Africa and South America 20 years ago. It just
tickles committees to forge phony issues out of government-supplied
tapes. Readers wondering about unsolved crimes in Dayton last week
aren't impressed with FOIA make-work computer games.
In Dayton we're the only family on the block who subscribe to the
daily paper. Presumably the remaining crew, after the buyout, will find
their lost readers again in Google searches and Yahoo want ads.
SPEAKING OF CAREER STARTS. Nobel Laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez
describes in his memoir "Living to Tell the Tale" how he, a young law
student in Cartagena, Colombia moonlighting as a newspaper reporter, met
the advance man for a circus in 1948. The man came into the newsroom and
stripped off his shirt, about as usual in Cartagena as it would be in
Kansas City. The startled staff were mesmerized by the many scars, like
concrete, on the man's back. He was the lion tamer.
Garcia Marquez resolved to join that circus, and he would have gone
if the ship bringing it hadn't sunk in the Caribbean. Only the stranded,
heartbroken lion tamer was left alive.
Garcia Marquez stayed a student for a while and a writer for a while
more.
My career started as a copyboy when there still were copyboys, before
the shameful indentured slavery of internships came to delight newsroom
managers. It was a hapless new daily called the Arizona Journal in
Phoenix, 1963. The night staff was me, sometimes two sports guys, a
homosexual couple formerly of the New York Daily News as copy desk, and
a city editor named Bob Temmey.
My pay was $1 an hour, or $31.05 after taxes per week. At shift start
on payday everyone raced to the bank across the street to get the cash
because we never knew when the money would run out.
Temmey drove a heroically trashy '58 Corvette ragtop, with emphasis on
the rag, and one day asked where he should go to get an Arizona driver's
license. "I gotta get it by Monday so they can take it away from me
Tuesday," he said. He was ticketed doing 102 on the freeway, he said,
"but I was going faster than that."
On the day the paper finally went under I didn't see Temmey, but one
of the deskers tucked a typewriter under his arm in lieu of a paycheck
and left. I never him or it again.
Maybe 20 years later I saw Temmey's byline in the National Enquirer
on a short story about seedless watermelons. I called the Enquirer. They
wouldn't admit they knew anything about him but said they would forward
a letter. Yep, that sounded like him all right. I wrote but never heard
back.
I wanted to tell my old boss hello, and I didn't learn a single
useful thing at that paper. But as in every newsroom I ever saw, I knew
I was JUST THIS MUCH CLOSER to the circus, so it was worth it.
Over the years in Dayton I met lots of reporters who went to other
things. Some strutted noisily off to big cities like New York, where
they vanished. Some became college profs. A few rose in Cox management,
another form of vanishing. One or two became flacks. One took a middle
management job at Wal-Mart. One became an airline pilot. He's the only
guy whose motives for leaving the business I understood.
COMIX SECTION. The Further Adventures of Herman "Speed" Graphic, ace
photographer for the Chagrin Falls Commercial Scimitar, and his Faithful
Companion, Typo the Wonder Pig.
PANEL ONE: Speed rides the lonesome prairie on his trusty palomino
F-Stop accompanied by his pal Typo, in the buckboard pulled by his mules
William Randolph and Lord Black, somewhere west of Nag's Head as Typo
opines, "Well of course, Boss, the politicians stumping for family
values are the guys who have had more families, so they should know!"
INTERPANEL SILHOUETTE: Two arrows pierce Speed's fedora, with popout
letters reading THHHWIP! THHHWIP!
PANEL TWO: As the deft duo crouch behind the wagon, Typo counsels,
"Don't worry about F-Stop running off, Boss! He won't get any more lost
than we are! Let me see those arrows!"
PANEL THREE: Typo declares, "Hmm, just as I thought! Look at those
markings! The Fox tribe is off the reservation, Boss! We have to get to
town and warn the settlers! But first, let's get a fire started! And
help me get that sweaty priceless Persian rug off Lord Black's
fleabitten hide! We're cracking those yahoos' password and sending a
dispatch!"
PANEL FOUR: As a band of naked savages scatter frantically over a
distant bluff, Typo calmly reboards the wagon as Speed adjust his
trenchcoat, a deathbed gift from an ancient mystic wire service
executive editor on a fog-shrouded eastern island, and asks, "What did
you say in that smoke signal, Typo?"
PANEL FIVE: Silhouetted in the setting sun, Typo shrugs, "Oh, just
that the O.J. manuscript, Sean Hannity's border town expense claims and
Bill O'Reilly's phone logs have fallen into MTV's hands and they're
calling their new reality show 'Real World Fox News,' is all. And as for
F-Stop, Boss, he's like all junior managers! When we get to town, we'll
find him four beers deep in the Bait Shoppe!"
BONG Bull is the product of Chief Copyboy Charley Stough in Dayton,
Ohio. E-mail bongs-@yahoo.com for any reason. Or what the hell, for
no reason.
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