The World of the Post

I was riding home on metro north today, when I looked to my right and realized three men lining the aisle across from me were all reading the New York Post. I have a very serious love/hate relationship with the Post. The hate side is obvious: the paper is exploitative crap. It's filled with overblown, romanticized stories about killings, sex scandals and celebrities. It is always in the poorest of taste, and the news rarely has any relevance outside itself. It is a true tabloid, but it's reputation is better than that of, say, Star. It's, you know, not embarrassing to read on a train. Now for the love side: the paper is BRILLIANTLY HILARIOUS exploitative crap. I really feel I should be writing the tasteless puns that accompany every story as a headline. Seriously, Post folks, call me up. I'll do it in my spare time. It'll be awesome. They, apparently, don't deem a pun as making light of something (I remember seeing "Oh, God!" as the front page headline for a suicide bombing). Which is tasteless, sure...but I think you can kind of set your own rules that way. If they do it for everything, it's not so bad.

But anyway, what I've realized is that people read the Post. A lot of them. And they're all living in this bizarro world I know nothing about. Now, I'm not as much of a news junkie as some people are, but I, for example, know what case went in front of the Supreme Court today, and I don't know, for example, anything about the guy who killed a police officer this week. But lots of people know tons about this guy, just like lots of people knew tons more about Scott Peterson. I'm not saying these people are wrong for enjoying their Post...everyone who's anyone knows that personal stories are more compelling than tragedies and decisions that affect people on a mass scale. It's just strange that there's a population living in an entirely different world of news, even though they live within a two mile radius of me.

On a lighter (or darker) note, I'm not thrilled with the colors of my site. It's blatantly obvious that black is out and Mac white is in. However, I may just ride out the wave and wait for black to return when apple and google go under and, say, alienware rises to the top. Then I'll be SO in.