By CHRIS PACKHAM
This week's layoffs at The Kansas City Star have left the paper lighter, leaner and more streamlined — like a shark!
Now it's pointed directly at the future, as though the future were driving its motorcade past the book depository and The Star were poised like a streamlined shark with a rifle — look out, future! After the jump, some more offensive similes, coming up fast on your bumper like the paparazzi in the Pont de l'Alma road tunnel in Paris. Goodbye, English rose. Click here, or on this photo of Sir Elton John's performance at Princess Diana's funeral in 1997:
Ed Anger is pig-biting mad: There's no single cause for the embarrassing emo-style malaise settling across the whole newspaper industry — with one last gasping breath, the Star would apologize for bleeding on your "OVER THE HILL AND OFF THE PILL" T-shirt. Newsprint costs are rising, and meanwhile, the Internet is totally free if you leech your wi-fi from the neighbors. While Craigslist was busy ripping all the value out of classified advertising, the morbidly obese newspaper industry rolled over, pulled back its distended stomach so it could scratch its crotch, and then sank back into its hydrocodone-and-vodka-induced haze.
Adapting to changing realities, the Star has fired a bunch of people and also adopted the economical "volunteer fire department" model of content production with, among other things, its Midwest Voices blog. In a possibly willful display of uninformed ombudsmanship, Midwest Voices blogger Ross Balano lazily gums the hand that doesn't actually feed him, positing this theory about the state of the industry: Newspapers are too partisan. Specifically ruling out widely acknowledged business realities, he writes, "The stories in the papers are largely anti-Bush, anti-conservative and pro liberal slanted" — apparently working on the assumption that "partisanship" is a one-way street that ends at the abortion clinic and a Che Guevera T-shirt distributorship. He also poses this irresistible challenge: "I wonder how long it will take before someone will blame the decline of America’s newspapers on George Bush." Wait no longer, Ross Balano, because it only took long enough for me to read your blog all the way through: After burning down some orphanages, foreclosing on some family farms and crucifying our Lord and savior, L. Ron Hubbard, George W. Bush personally destroyed the newspaper industry and is probably also responsible for your high PSA levels.
Olds outraged: Easily shocked KCTV Channel 5 discovered that the Brass Buckle in Leawood was selling flip-flops with hidden beverage flasks and did what any responsible ladies' temperance league would do when confronted with either public dancing or empty containers that could be filled with liquid! — it sent in an undercover teen to attempt to buy a pair. Notwithstanding the station's limp-dick attempted sting operation, for some reason it's totally legal for retailers to sell empty containers to children of all ages. Filling your flip-flops with Sunny-D — or even "the purple stuff" — and sneaking it into class might be against school rules, but the only people who would be mortified to hear about it drive PT Cruisers and answer to the name "Your Grandma."
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I'm actually kind of a giant fan of Ross Balano -- I must check that blog three or four times a day to see if he's posted anything. I should just add their feed.
The Kansas City Star is liberal the way Ross Balano is sad, lonely, wearing hand-me-down Dockers, and typing his received opinions with fingers greasy from a long night of brat and hotdog eating.
By this I mean that, like Ross Balano, I presume that what I wish were true actually is true.
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