“You got to know the right people,” indeed. Starting with a good copy editor. Or at least one who isn’t on drucks.
I lay low for April Fool’s Day. It’s gotten to be kind of like the St. Patrick’s Day or New Year’s Eve of comedy — not for serious funnymen. Funnypersons? Persons of funny?
My favorite April Fool’s gag may be the time the Gazette caught the Greeley Tribune napping. It was in the late Seventies, and some wisenheimers on staff faked up a photo of an El Paso County pickle farmer inspecting a bumper crop (reporter Don Branning in a planter’s hat, examining a plump dill tied to a tree across the street from the newspaper).
We ran it on the Metro front, then put it on The Associated Press wire just for giggles. To our astonishment, the Tribune picked it up and ran the shot on its Farm page despite the photo credit, which read something like, “GT photo by Aprylle Foole.”
The desk jockey who made that call clearly was not a local boy with shitcaked bootheels. The Tribune is in Weld County, one of the richest agricultural counties east of the Rockies, the state’s top producer of grain, sugar beets and cattle.
Not pickles, though. El Paso County had all the pickle farms in Colorado.
Here in New Mexico the ash and juniper are providing all the comedy, if your idea of a good laugh involves watching some poor sod’s nose run like an irrigation ditch with a busted headgate.
I pretended to be a runner yesterday afternoon and came home with an enraged snotlocker, a condition that persists this morning. Snot funny, man.
When Lean Dean says you’ve gone too far, you’ve gone too far.
Dean Singleton, who once mused about consolidating, outsourcing and perhaps off-shoring the various MediaNews copy desks, says the owners of The Denver Post have “cut the heart out” of the once-mighty newspaper.
Undeterred by bad press, senior staff departures, and even the resignation of Lean Dean, the hyenas at Alden Global Capital continue gnawing away, taking comfort in the knowledge that there are plenty of toothsome tidbits left on the stinking carcass.
I know, I know — it’s a new world, information wants to be free, adapt or die, etc., et al., and so on and so forth. Doesn’t mean it’s pretty to watch.
The news biz is a tough racket. Yeah, I know, “stop the presses.”
Up in Colorado, The Denver Post is in a bad way, thanks to the vulture capitalists who have been treating it like an ATM at a Vegas casino. They may be wiping their overfed asses with your local daily, too.
And now The Pueblo Chieftain is said to be in the midst of a sale to … well, someone. Some thing.
I worked at The Chieftain for a spell back in the early Eighties. It’s where I met my man Hal Walter, who helped me get off the cigarettes and back onto the bike — at that point, a $320 fire-engine-red Centurion Le Mans 12.
As I wrote in my journal in 1983 — you remember journals, a sort of analog blog with a readership of one — “I can’t wait to get it and start riding all over fucking town. I may take it with me during my vacation so’s I can get some exercise between drinks.”
Yeah, I still had a ways to go. But still, baby steps, amirite?
Anyway, Hal has penned a recollection of the glory days — and some observations about The Chieftain‘s future — for Colorado Central magazine. He makes mention of Your Humble Narrator, and yes, my lawyers have been informed, so you’ll want to read the piece before HBO makes a documentary of the entire sordid mess and we’re strolling along the red carpet at Cannes giving the finger to Tarantino, the Coen brothers and del Toro.
I see T.J. Miller playing me, or perhaps Rory McCann, and probably Justin Timberlake as Hal, whom we used to call “Teen Angel,” for reasons that should be obvious. I mean, just look at that fucking picture, f’chrissakes.
Sometimes I get the impression the fake news thinks we rubes never leave our flyover-country shacks.
Of course hotels aren’t secure. Nothing is.
Look at the pile of luggage I dragged into the Luxor for Interbike last month. I could’ve had a crazed midget with a sawed-off shotgun inside that rolling suitcase, a MAC-10 and a couple dozen extra magazines in the messenger bag, a few bricks of C4 in the backpack, a couple of Glocks with spare mags’ in the camera bag, and the boiled head of Sean Spicer in the cooler.
Nobody batted an eyelash when I hustled all this crap from the self-park up to my room. Not even The New York Times.
Mad Blog Media 