A photo op for taking pictures of the Space Shuttle Endeavor delivered a St. Paul moment to a columnist at the Amalgamated Conspiracy Theory Factory in Berkeley CA.
Due to a work dispute, this column has not been
fact checked.
Would it be worth the blood, sweat, and keystrokes necessary, if an online political pundit wrote a column comparing the passive aggressive tactics of the Republicans in the House and Senate to the autoworkers sit down strikes in the Thirties and then kicked back and waited to see that metaphor "go viral" on the Intenets?
What's the payoff if a writer posts a column online about
Germany's Pirate Party three or four days before the New York Times publishes a
piece about it on the OpEd Page?
After a severe cold interrupted the string of consecutive weekly political punditry columns, the World's Laziest Journalist made a rash decision to go "cold turkey" and spend a week without accessing the Internets and to write the next column about the experience of going a week without a digital "fix."
Don't most Americans love to experience addiction
vicariously? Maybe a week offline would
produce something like "The Lost Weekend Column," "The Man with the Golden Arms
Deal Column," or William Burroughs's lost masterpiece, "The Naked Bunch"
column?
Staying off the Internets for a week would mean delaying the opportunity to inform our audience about an update regarding the California Pirate Party . The California residents have a weekly chat room on Monday nights and the National Pirate Party has a nation wide chat room on Tuesday nights. Maybe we could suggest a mock "Jack Sparrrow for President" movement and if they thought it would bring them publicity from the national mainstream media that suggestion could go viral. If no one else is going to offer them that idea won't the "better late than never" rule apply?
During the "week in the penalty box," we got the bright idea
of sending an e-mail to Norm Goldman alerting him to the idea that we would
write a column comparing Bishop Romney to MacHeath in "The Three Penny
Opera." If Norm liked the possibility of
an opera that portrays beggars as thieves being a variation of Bishop Romney's
political philosophy, then maybe we'd hear a reference to the World's Laziest
Journalist on Goldman's nationwide radio show.
Aren't the chances of that happening just about the same as our chances
of getting an on air mention on the next Wolfman Jack broadcast?
What would happen if we wrote a column that asked the question: "Is the controversial online movie critical of the founder of the Muslim religion being used as a rationale for staging riots that are payback for the killing of Osama bin Laden?"
After buying the book "No man knows my history," by Fawn M.
Brodie (Alfred A. Knopf 1963), the World's Laziest Journalist was intimidated
by the task of reading all that material just to get a thumbnail sketch of the
life of the founder of the Mormon religion; so we went to an encyclopedia in the
Berkeley Public Library and learned that Joe Smith (will there be Mormon riots
in the Middle East if this column is perceived to be disrespectful in its
regard for that religion's founding father?) kept the details of his biography
well obscured and that he co-mingled the concepts of religion and politics with
a political philosophy he called "theodemocracy" and that he left some
investors feeling cheated in the wake of a church-bank experiment. Could Mitt be trying (consciously or
unconsciously) to make the story of his life a duplicate of Joe Smith's
biography?
Many conservative commentators are completely disregarding St. Ronald Reagan's Eleventh Commandment ("Never speak ill of a fellow Republican") and dishing out some severe criticism of Bishop Romney's campaign tactics. Should we pound out a column asking "What up wid dat?" or should we try something more unique such as attempting to find a common thread connecting the Republican Presidential Nominee's political career with those of Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt and America's Senator Paul Wellstone?
With the music group, Puss Riot, getting extensive news
coverage, we noticed that Der Spiegel also reported recently that Honor
Blackman, who played p*ssy Galore in the movie "Goldfinger," has a supporting
role in the new film "Cockneys vs. Zombies."
Didn't a famous newspaper columnist (Herbus Caenus?) in the era of Julius Caesar X once state that all web content falls into one of two categories: either bread or circuses? Hell's bells, it ain't no fun waiting around to become a nationally known pundit.
As the week progressed, we became more and more aware that
getting access to the Internets was often a cure for boredom and that if we
filled the lulls with books, we wouldn't really have much need for going
online.
We were beginning to think that for every perceptive and insightful posting online, there are tens of thousands of inane and asinine entries that praise some acquaintance's effort to post a link to a video of a kitten dancing on a typewriter's keyboard and tapping out a carbon copy of the first page of "Tropic of Cancer."
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