The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

As you infrequent readers well know, I’m not the kind of person who complains or whines or throws himself on the ground in fits of rage over some insignificant slight.  Okay, sometimes I do.  And all right, maybe that’s basically my M.O.  Take this latest outrage and you tell me if I’m overwrought to what essentially is another of those small indignities that make everyday life a smidgeon smaller and a tad harder to take.

I’m talking about my two daily newspapers, morning papers, the ones I read quietly guzzling coffee before undertaking chores and work and the daily grind — those papers, delivered by 6:15 a.m. by some poor schmuck paid by the mile and by the paper, using his or her own car, the one with the failing muffler and the terrible mpg’s, but usually on time.  But gee, the publishers of those two papers evidently can’t round up delivery folks to get up at 3 a.m., hit the distribution sites, then motor down to this end of the island at the end of the world, so their solution: mail the day’s edition, already old news in a digital age of instantaneous information, via the U.S. Postal Service, the one the last Administration made far less efficient, hoping to undercut our faith in a system going back to old Ben Franklin.

So that now we get our morning paper late afternoon.  You tell me what universe, economic or journalistic, this makes sense in?  It is, after all, called a NEWspaper, not a history essay.  And yeah, I KNOW I can substitute the New York Times online or I can listen to NPR mornings, repeated every two hours, or I can watch daytime TV and catch the headlines on local news channels … but dammit, I’m an old codger and I want my, not MTV, my newspaper to read quietly in the morning WITH coffee.

Needless to say, sorry to whine, but now I read Yesterday’s news in the morning.  I know it’s pathetic and possibly intolerable over the long run.  But for now that’s my solution and I’m not happy about it.  Just thought you needed to know.

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