Written in my off hours whilst working from home during the COVID-19 zombie apocalypse.
My name is Hans, and I’m a newsaholic.
Actor William Conrad during his radio days, circa 1952. I’ll write more about the baroness’ interaction with him when she appeared on his TV show “Cannon.”
Decades ago I got my first transistor AM radio. Sometimes I’d listen to music, but mostly I kept it tuned to Los Angeles news radio station KNX 1070. On Sunday evenings, KNX broadcast old radio shows such as The Shadow; Fibber McGee & Molly; Gunsmoke (the baroness has a story about working with William Conrad, the star of that show); Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar; and more, introducing me to pre-television entertainment my parents and grandparents listened to. That red and white brick of a radio fired my imagination. It was the news that hooked me. A few years later, I bought a radio that had shortwave frequencies beyond AM and FM.
My dad, an aerospace engineer, worked on the Saturn V engine, and later on the F-14 Tomcat. When I was in elementary school, the rockets were tested five miles away, rattling the earth and sending a huge plume of fire deflected into the sky.
My mom was a local newspaper reporter and my first writing mentor. We had a small library with a bookmobile in our Southern California town, and she encouraged my siblings and I to get library cards. I still have my embossed, original card, which the baroness thinks is just more packrat junk, like my Eastern Airlines salt and pepper packets in commemoration of the first time I flew on an airliner from Los Angeles to Army basic training at Fort Lost in the Woods, MO. I read a handful of comic books, especially Marvel, when Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were introducing many of the characters of what young’uns know today as the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I didn’t get much of my aerospace engineer dad’s math and mechanical capability, a story for another time about growing up with the Saturn V engine.
For online reading, I surf Google News for the daily headlines; some of them I subscribe to or otherwise financially support; I read The Guardian, BBC, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. I like the Washington Post most for political reporting. I also read ThinkPress, Salon, Quartz, For blogs, I’m a big fan of Tengrain’s humorous take on the news at Mock, Paper, Scissors; I know more about baby goats from reading his copy than I ever did, and his palate cleansers are a salve for concentrated news intake. Crooks and Liars is a site I contribute ameros to when John Amato asks for donations, and I particularly admire the writing of Karoli Kuns. I was an early fan of News Hounds because I cannot abide by Fox (and now that upstart rightwing nutjob sycophant OAN) propaganda, but I don’t know how Ellen and her team endure that incessant toxic waste.
I’ll read the New York Times despite its own style. The formality of its style is quaint to the point of distraction. I use the AP Stylebook for work.
I used to regularly read The Huffington Post, but scaled way back a couple of years ago when they got into a side-boob fetish. There’s no shortage of websites with that kind of content. I was just looking for news. These days, I’ll read news links to HP, but I don’t go directly to the site anymore.
For TV news, I watch mostly CNN International at my office (currently my dining room table as I work from home) and avoid other departments’ televisions with Fox or OAN blaring. CNN International has very repetitive vignettes and commercials between segments (the commercials for African telecommunications company Glo are the best, using a mix of humor and examples of Wakanda-esque tech to pitch its products), so I’ll switch over to the BBC. Being overseas, our English language programming is limited, but we do get channels from New York, Chicago and Miami. No California or Hawaii channels, sad to say.
“Adventure Time, c’mon, grab your friends. We’re going to very distant lands with Jake the Dog and Finn the Human. The fun never ends; it’s Adventure Time!”
If I oversaturate on news, there’s another NYC channel for older views where I get my “Sanford and Son” fix, plus staying up way too late, too often, to watch “Adventure Time” on the Cartoon Network (thanks a lot, Netflix, for only having the first six seasons, minus season four, and making me wait until 0:45 a.m. for what you don’t offer overseas).
I follow wire services, too. I read Associated Press, Reuters and similar sources.
Alec Baldwin is Putin us on with his Russian maggot hat.
During the Covid-19 time, I’ve avoided writing about politics and instead tell other stories such as this one and the ones about Baroness Alba vonBeavis. Tengrain, Karoli and others already do a good job for political wonks, and don’t have the time to write a daily blog with my work writing. I compare writing about what I wish versus my job to Nathanial Hawthorne’s The Custom House observation about creativity withering if writers don’t write. I’ll close with a paragraph from Hawthorne.
“Meanwhile, there I was, a Surveyor of the Revenue and, so far as I have been able to understand, as good a Surveyor as need be. A man of thought, fancy, and sensibility (had he ten times the Surveyor’s proportion of those qualities), may, at any time, be a man of affairs, if he will only choose to give himself the trouble. My fellow-officers, and the merchants and sea-captains with whom my official duties brought me into any manner of connection, viewed me in no other light, and probably knew me in no other character. None of them, I presume, had ever read a page of my inditing, or would have cared a fig the more for me if they had read them all; nor would it have mended the matter, in the least, had those same unprofitable pages been written with a pen like that of Burns or of Chaucer, each of whom was a Custom-House officer in his day, as well as I. It is a good lesson–though it may often be a hard one–for a man who has dreamed of literary fame, and of making for himself a rank among the world’s dignitaries by such means, to step aside out of the narrow circle in which his claims are recognized and to find how utterly devoid of significance, beyond that circle, is all that he achieves, and all he aims at. I know not that I especially needed the lesson, either in the way of warning or rebuke; but at any rate, I learned it thoroughly: nor, it gives me pleasure to reflect, did the truth, as it came home to my perception, ever cost me a pang, or require to be thrown off in a sigh. In the way of literary talk, it is true, the Naval Officer–an excellent fellow, who came into the office with me, and went out only a little later–would often engage me in a discussion about one or the other of his favourite topics, Napoleon or Shakespeare. The Collector’s junior clerk, too a young gentleman who, it was whispered occasionally covered a sheet of Uncle Sam’s letter paper with what (at the distance of a few yards) looked very much like poetry–used now and then to speak to me of books, as matters with which I might possibly be conversant. This was my all of lettered intercourse; and it was quite sufficient for my necessities.”
The Adventures of Baron vonBeavis 