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My newspaper has been sold.  Sort of.  Knight Ridder, the owner of the Akron Beacon Journal and 31 others, was bought by the McClatchy company.  McClatchy has limited appetites.  It only wants  20 new papers so it is selling 12 of the KR papers.  The Beacon Journal is one of them. 

The Akron Beacon Journal isn't just any Knight Ridder paper.  It is John S. Knight's original paper.  It has won 4 Pulitzers.  The paper had the good taste to encase his typewriter in glass, rather than Mr. Knight himself, here in the building. The Knight empire included the Miami Herald, Philadelphia Inquirer, and Detroit Free Press. The company had a reputation for hiring good people and letting them do their thing.  I liked working for Knight Ridder.  I figured it meant I must be O.K.

All the Knight Ridder papers are profitable.  Newspapers are a good deal (McClatchy thinks so too).  The Beacon Journal costs 35 cents.
That's way less than a cup of coffee. 

Why are you people so cheap? I don't suppose the fact that you're getting it here for free has anything to do with it.

Times are tough in the main steam.  Media analyst, Dave Barry, had this to say: Newspapers are Dead.  He also feels newspapers are now grasping at anything, like blogs.  Hmmm.

Go crazy.  Run out and buy a coffee and a newspaper right now.

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A local clinic, Perkins Square Health Clinic, complained that the smoking ban will ruin its bingo operation.

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The new Summit County Smoking Ban creates an unfair competitive advantage by leaving some businesses exempt.

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The pay is high and the living is cheap here.  Summit County Executive James B McCarthy, appointed 23 year-old college dropout, Christined Congrove, head of Summit Animal Control at a salary of $61,000.  She has law enforcement training. She's also the daughter of Ward 6 County Councilman Dan Congrove.

I feel a few awards are in order.

The Optic Nerve Award goes to jnie for a 3/6 comment on my India cartoon.  She noted the appearance of suitcases next to President Bush that were not present when she saw the the same cartoon published in the Chicago Tribune. It's true. I've taken to updating text and cartoons on the blog.  Now I can obsess 24/7.

Each day I do an old fashioned pen and ink drawing, scan it, and add color on the computer.  That version appears  in the Akron Beacon Journal the next morning.  Since most newspapers use black and white I have to create another version for the syndicate.  I convert the color layers to grayscale and convert the grayscale to bitmap.  That gives me the little dots  you see in newspaper pictures.  Then I lay the original solid line drawing down on top of that. The last thing I do is convert the color cartoon to a low resolution version for the web.  By that time the deadline pressure is off and sometimes I notice things that could be improved.  I thought the suitcases made the image of Bush physically traveling to the world's biggest call center a little stronger.

The It's Not Polite to Correct Other People's Grammar Award goes to Menken who scolded me for using the non-word, "uncurious", instead of "incurious" in the 3/10 post Too Big for His Breaches. 

How  incouth.

Menken also took Augie to task when he asked if people who read my cartoons are "uniformed" when he meant uninformed.  I like to imagine they are indeed uniformed.  Apparently, Menken does too because he suggested I draw a Bok Brigade uniform.  I'm considering it.  As for Augie, I say a steady diet of cartoons beats New York Times editorials any day.

By the way, I'm updating uncurious.

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Research In Motion, maker of the Blackberry, has had a patent infringement suit hanging over it for a long time.  Last Friday RIM avoided a court ordered shut down of its service by settling the suit with NTP for $612 million.

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I think Bush is taking a bigger hit than he deserves over Katrina.   

An AP video showed Incurious George being warned that the levees could overflow.  The Chicago Tribune says, "That yielded a gotcha! moment for Bush bashers. They trotted out his later remark–"I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees"–to argue that, indeed, he'd been warned."  The Tribune goes on to say, "But not so fast. Late last week, the AP, which obtained the video and described the Aug. 28 briefing, issued a clarification. It said a federal disaster official had warned Bush of an overrunning of the levees, not a breach. The difference is not mere semantics. A breach, as the AP noted, is a hole. It's not the same as water overrunning the levees. "

Maybe he was surprised by the breach.  Anyway, his response to the criticism was pedestrian.  He took another walk on the Gulf Coast.  His 10th since Katrina hit, according to U.S. News.com.   And for good measure he asked congress for $4.2 billion to rebuild and relocate New Orleans.

I hope he's curious about breaches caused by the great federal spending flood.  According to Bloomberg.com, it's up 33% since Bush took office. Twice as much as under Clinton.  He's asked for a line item veto as a finger in the dike.  So far Bush is behind 133-0 at backing up his regular veto threats. On March 20 he'll move into second place behind Jefferson as the president going the longest without using a veto.  Son of a Breach.

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The Supreme court upheld the Solomon Amendment, which allows the federal government to withold federal funding to universities if they don't permit military recruiters on campus.
A coalition of 36 law schools had sued claiming the legislation harmed free speech.   They were also offended by the military's don't ask don't tell policy.

Speaking of free speech, one of the coalition schools, Yale, recently admitted a former spokesman for the Taliban. 

The court ruling was unanimous.  Should make for interesting case studies at the law schools.

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Hollywood floated out of the mainstream this year and gave its Best Picture award to a movie about racism, edging out films about gay sheep herders, a gay writer, the McCarthy era, and revenge for terror attacks. 

Mainstream issues such as alienated primates with growth hormone problems were ignored. The combined budgets of the nominated movies were less than King Kong's supersized $200 million.

This cartoon is autobiographical.  I didn't see any of these movies. But I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express.