Because I am ever Donny on The Spot, in front of new trends and breaking news and since last week was National Newspaper Week (ahem), I thought I should bring up the rear with some titillating insights and spot-on commentary (if I do says so myself, and I do I am on-fleek).
On weekends I like to buy both the Saturday editions of The Detroit News and The Detroit Free Press. I find it enjoyable to belly up to a counter, order a pop (Coke or Pepsi whatever is served), eat a hamburger and read the papers. I wasn’t sure why I enjoyed reading newspapers — or never put any energy into pondering why I enjoy reading newspapers. But, this past Saturday, a bell went off between my ears. Harmonic angels flittered about me as fireworks exploded somewhere in the distance.
In an inky glory, it came to me!
I read the front page of The News, about Hurricane Matthew, about Trump’s vulgar remarks, fall color tours . . . but it wasn’t until I read the inside pages of the A Section, that ideas formed, and dots started to connect themselves. I read of the two 18-year-old girls who were being jailed with $10,000 bond because they donned clown masked, jumped out of a car screaming and chasing two 14-year-old girls. Roseville cop’pers called the clown-faced lasses “morons” and “idiots.”
I read about former pro-boxer Oscar De La Hoya reading his book to a bunch of students in Detroit; about seven fired teachers awarded $106,000 for being wrongfully terminated; about scientists x-raying the limbs of a T-rex to see how those dinosaurs used their forelimbs.
I read and thought interesting a story with this headline, “More in U.S. were in search for work” and this subhead, “Sept. jobs report from gov’t pains picture of resilient economy.” What I thought was interesting, is how both the Republican and Democrat running for United States President, played up the report. The same report was awesome to one candidate and showed how bad things were to the other.
Without thinking, I whipped out my handy-dandy ink pen and started marking up the newspaper and writing notes. I put a box around the lead paragraph on this story, “Sanders and Morley Candy makers are closing their Birmingham Sanders store because of a lack of nearby parking, among other concerns. . .” Wrote I in the margin, “Clarkston? How many businesses will be forced to close because city refused to believe there was a parking issue in town?”
This headline caught my eye, “Ford touts a driverless sea change.” The story went on about new Federal guidelines for driverless cars and how Ford says, “it will have a fully driverless care by 2021.”
A new trend I read about caused me to write “NO!” across the headline, “Asian animal cafes are a bit wild . . . Cafe customers sip lattes while petting snakes and raccoons.” Why my “no”, read on: “ . . . visitors pay about $11 for a cup of coffee and a reptile to wind around their arm; a plate of curry bread snacks or a really big snake costs extra . . .”
But the story that really caused my pen to go wild on the newsprint and my imagination to spark was this, “Boy born in uterus passed from mother to daughter thriving.” What? Science is awesome. Science is not science fiction anymore as illustrated by this story of a Swedish family. The uterus from a woman was transplanted in her daughter, who then was able to conceive a baby — who is now two years old. Amazing!
And, it caused me to think and blurt out loud to a waitress passing by, “I would have never have read about this story reading news on-line. My days of googling wombs is over.” This of course caused the young lady’s eye brows to arch in confusion. With a figurative intellectual backstroke maneuver, I explained the gist of the story, adding, “When I was a younger man, and helping making babies I tried to learn as much as I could about a woman’s body and the babies and womb . . .”
I think it was a futile effort and just like Donald Trump, I should learn to keep my mouth closed. “Whenever I see your face,” the waitress said, “you will now be ‘The Womb Googler.’”
So, I got that going for me.
The whole point of this column is this: In today’s society, with gobs and gobs of information and news available to us via the internet, I think we are becoming intellectually un-diverse and vanilla.
Our internet newsfeeds are set to just the things we are interested in — we only read one-sided information, the side we like. We are not as well-rounded as we pretend to be.
What I stumble across while reading a newspaper, in print with a finite amount of space, are stories I would not normally lookup on my own. And, by reading these other stories, my mind is expanded and my curiosity grows. Reading all sorts of stuff adds complexity, color and texture to our lives.
So, don’t be intellectually lazy. Read newspapers!