They Will Rise Again From the Tundra

Simon Read. War of Words: A Tale of Newsprint and Murder. Union Square Press, 2009. 320 pages. ISBN-10: 1402756127

“Journalism [is]… a low trade and a habit worse than heroin, a strange seedy world of misfits and drunkards and failures.” — Hunter S. Thompson

Simon Read begins War of Words: A Tale of Newsprint and Murder with two quotations, the first an excerpt from the Daily Dramatic Chronicle (later the San Francisco Chronicle) comparing the marksmanship of American journalists to that of their French counterparts and the second a fitting quote from Thompson’s indelible The Great Shark Hunt, a landmark collection of essays and articles that chronicle Thompson’s slog through the mid- to late-1960s and 1970s.

It is hard to imagine anything (journalistically, at least) that rivals the depravity Thompson encountered and, in some cases, perpetuated during the Hippie movement, the 1972 presidential campaign, and Richard Nixon with … Read more

Image Attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/paladin27/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

I am forced to sit here and suffer through another long afternoon of pretending to work largely because I have become more efficient as a worker.  I wouldn’t even go as far as to say that I’ve automated everything because, in truth, I haven’t automated anything.  I’ve simply succeeded in cutting down the number of steps it takes to complete certain tasks, eliminated needless components of the job, and don’t have to amass a library of printed pages to do one simple thing on the computer.  Combined with a relatively high level of aptitude for quickly executing brain-wasting computer work, my total output exceeds that of a normal worker  by High Noon.

Mind you, I’m running my own internal statistics, and it is a rare occasion indeed that such numbers should be trusted or taken at face value, but I assure you, any … Read more