Wednesday, December 18, 2019

101 Things #38 - Read All About It, and I Mean All

As I add to my coming-on-nicely now, thank you, anti-bucket list that I cunningly call 101 Things I Refuse To Do Before I Die, I normally cover those topics others might well wish to include on their bucket lists, but which I find odd, or ludicrous, or just not anything I'd want to do. This is not one of those topics. Today we review the proposal found in the Huffington Post website to

Read a newspaper from cover to cover


and quite frankly I'm a bit taken aback. This one fall into the "Uh, run that by me again, dude" category of pointless non-achievements and probably is in line for a podium position.

Read a newspaper from cover to cover? Is that a thing? In the 21st century? Does anybody do that for real? I suppose we need to whip out the old analysis scalpel and peel away at the hidden logic here.

 What is meant by "newspaper" for a start? They are all on-line these days. They don't actually have covers. You have to navigate through menus, and give them permission to install cookies on your computer and click away the annoying pop-up ads, and given that articles from days or weeks before may still all be on-line (if you scroll down enough), you can be there a hell of a long time.

You could choose one of the "local" papers, like the ones we get in this part of London. If you restrict yourself to strictly local affairs you might get through it fairly fast but how many times do you want to read headlines like "Local man speaks out", "Shop to close", "Shop to open", "Local sports team plays another local sports team" or similar?

In the US they probably associate this cover to cover business with those great lumps of main sections, sports sections, arts bits, business stuff, comic section, women's pages, special reports, lifestyle supplements. small ads, house ads, etc etc that comprise the New York Times, the LA Times and similar. Oh, I forgot the pull-out TV supplement. And the "infotainment" sections. [OK, point made: Ed].

Just carrying one of these bricks around burns about 1,000 calories an hour. You don't read through them, you flip through at high speed, picking out the odd headline here or the interesting picture there. Does anyone seriously read through everything? If you did, would you be proud about it afterwards or regard it as an unforgivable waste of time?

In Britain it is not quite so bad but the serious daily press can still comprise plenty of pages, and the Sundays a lot more. Maybe we are intended to select something lighter, like the Daily Star, a paper best examined when you've got to the end of the chips it's been wrapped around. By "best" I mean if you've half an hour to the next bus, your phone battery has died and you've already read the front and back of the credit cards in your wallet, twice. The problem here is that, if you are a regular Star reader, then you will know that nobody actually reads it; they just look at the pictures and make the expected comments to show oneness with the rest of the lads:-  "Cor, she's a talented young lady", that sort of thing. But actually looking at the words, and getting an adult to help you with the longer ones, hardly seems much of an achievement. And if you are not a regular then you will almost certainly have chucked it away the moment you savoured that final chip.

Surely, if you're going to impress your peers, or want something solid to chat about to the angel escorting you upwards on the day your bucket-listing comes to an unexpectedly early end, it has to be one of the big papers, and now we are back to having to wade through acres of adverts and reviews of books you are not going to buy (or read if your aunt gives it to you for Christmas) and accounts of sporting encounters for games that bore you rigid played by teams you have never heard of.

I'm not saying this task cannot be done. By all means slam it on your bucket list . But reading a paper cover to cover is something people (mainly men, I suspect) did in earlier times when there was bugger all else to do (women usually had plenty to do, thanks to all the lazy blokes pretending to be stuck into their newspapers). In the age of the internet and rolling 24 hour TV news it really should not be a thing any more, and even if it is, I am certainly not going to bother.


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