h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

edited by anachronisms from the seventies...
and owned by moguls who love numbers.

Discuss or come up with another meaningless generalization that sounds good when you're drunk.

Newspapers rarely contain news!

I wouldn't know. I rarely read them.
I get writer's cramp from circling the grammatical, spleling, historical and historical mistakes and St. Vitus Dance from the frustration at being in the same century with the editors and their distorted focus...

Jimmy and I got endless entertainment on Sunday from laughing at all the flamingo-ups from the new sub-ed on the local Sunday paper. Some of them were unbelievable, and included heading an item about Eminem as if was a (non-existent) item about Wacko Jacko.

I suggest to revitalize the brain cells you deadened while slogging through the mind-deadening crap to find those gems.

Some of the articles in the Sun especially are written as though by rude and mentally subnormal 12 year olds. PIFFLE... utter piffle! Complete and utter poppycock, old horse! Newspapers should not contain piffle, they should contain news, which is why, dear boy, they are called newspapers and not pifflepapers. Because that would just sound silly, wouldn't it? And nobody would buy a pifflepaper when it is quite easy to get oneself sloshed and write ones own, gaining an evening of drunken entertainment in the process.

I'm shocked AND disgusted AND appalled!



Ps. You may be wondering why I'm not going along the "when I was young..." route, but being only 18 years old that's not really an option god dammit!

Write this on the inside of your eyelids:
"At 17, you know everything you really need to know about the way the world works. It just takes you another 17 years to realize it."

I remember being 18 and lamenting that things weren't like they were when I was 15.
I was right. Even at 41, things just aren't the same as they were when I was 15.
I think the world missed a good stopping point.
Of course, you would never have been born, but we wouldn't have ever known that, would we?

Besides, in my experience, pifflepapers have always been crap.
My englisch teacher in Jr. High used to give us credit for bringing in garbled prose from the local rag.

That would have been a good English teacher...
When I were a kid, we lived in a small town, with a small daily newspaper. Then when I got married I went to live in a smaller town, with a newspaper that published 3 days a week. The town I lived in was next to a tiny town with a big stinky sawmill and a weekly newspaper. At least pifflepapers are entertaining, these weren't.
Illiterates and grammatical slobs are a problem, political slanting is a worse one - I gather in the UK, papers announce their bias. Here in NZ they pretend not to have one, which is a whole lot worse.

Here the rag is owned by a woman who was the widow of the founder.
While he was an actual yellow journalist, once upon a time, she leaves the rag in the hands of managers waiting for retirement.
What isn't ripped off the wire service feed is hand crapted by local freelancers or stolen from other local papers by "bureau" people.
One man bureaus. Yeah.

Hand crapted? Interesting typo, or was it?
Our local paper here, is solid Tory, but without admitting it. Sigh...

Not sure this is quite the right place for this conversation (in what way exactly are we talking about the Guide?) but interesting nevertheless...

You might like to have a look at this:
<./>www.framleyexaminer.com</.> - expressly satirising the whole phenomenon. The classified ads are a particular favourite of mine...

Ist no typo. I meant it.

Hey, Number Six, your link is weird. Why does it have an H2G2 prefix on it?

We don't have to talk pacifically about the Guide here.
"Topic Drift" was the one of the names originally suggested for H2G2.

Maybe he put the <./> around them?

www.framleyexaminer.com

That be a possibility. Let's see if this works better.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/collective/A885710

Or this.

Newspapers are GREAT!!!!

GREAT for lining my bird cages....I just pick up old ones from our local store...never read the stuff....

I wish they would stop with the color pages...can't use those in bird cages..

Hey...that rhymes!

The stuff is just not made to actually "read" ya know....look at all the wonderfull uses: floor covering while you paint.....wrapping up smelly garbage....great packing material....

Barb

Comtemplates African Grey refusing to part with a favorite Page Three...

Or perhaps a Norwegian Blue.