Hello! Raise your hand if you’re ready to read the news while you can because print media is a dying industry! ...Um, hello? You ready? Okay, I don’t actually know what you’re doing, because this is a newspaper and I’m not watching you read it (OR AM I?), so I’m going to assume you’re all enthusiastically flailing your arms around like that one Kermit gif and that you desperately want to read about current-ish events that has been spiced up with my peppery commentary. Please, by all means, do allow me to throw down:
I Like Baseball Now!
I know everybody already knows about Trump getting booed at game five of the World Series last week, but I want to talk about it more because it was beautiful. Motherfucker got BOOED! Because everybody HATES! HIM! LOL. The DC home team, the Nationals, went on the win the World Series. I know baseball fans are notoriously superstitious so I can only assume that Nationals fans will now ceremoniously boo Trump ahead of every game from here on out. Forget your stupid popcorn and peanuts, this might be the tradition that gets me into baseball.
The Internet: Bad, Really Bad, and the Worst
Twitter and Facebook have been locked in a terrible game to see which can do the most harm to our mental health and national conscience, but last week Twitter moved into the least-bad position. First, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress about the harm Facebook unleashes on democracy and got his ass 100 percent handed all the way back to him by many members of Congress, including millennial socialist superstar Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who pretty much got Zuck to admit that he’s gonna keep cashing all the checks—misinformation and malice be damned. Meanwhile, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced (in a tweet! Predictable.) that Twitter would not be running any political ads whatsoever anymore because they recognized it was too hard for users to differentiate between content they want and paid content that’s getting forcibly mashed into their brains. Twitter’s CFO went on to say “This decision was based on principle, not money.” Principles over money? On the internet? Sounds very fake news, but okay.
In another corner of the internet, principles lost handily to money: Gawker descendent sports-adjacent blog Deadspin was bought out by some tech bros a few months ago, who promptly missed the whole point of the site by demanding that writers “stick to sports” and then wantonly demolished staff morale to the point that every single writer and editor resigned en masse last week. Some of the best and smartest and silliest writers came from the Gawker universe; Deadspin was a holdout from a 2009-era internet that meant so much to so many of us, and it was destroyed because the jocks can’t stand that the nerds got cool. I really pity any writer who’s about to be looking for a job when so many of those extremely talented writers are pounding the same pavement! (This will be funny when you get to the end; keep going.)
In Local News
Oregon’s only GOP congressman, Greg Walden, announced that he will not seek reelection next year. He said he will be “seeking new challenges,” which is politician-speak for “becoming a lobbyist and getting richer than God [evil laugh].” I’m from Hood River, where Walden lives, and hereby call upon my former classmates who still live there to mercilessly bully him at Rosauers or the Ranch or wherever else he shows his face because he was one of the chief hacks of trying to overturn Obamacare and stood grinning like a cartoon villain behind Paul Ryan and Donald Trump, and the NRA loves him so we don’t like him. Bye, Greg! Enjoy being retired! (I.e. being harassed! [EVIL LAUGH.])
Locally, but also in big cities like New York, city leaders have a real bee in their bonnets about folks not paying their fare to use mass transit, and instead of just making it free, they’re spending buttloads of money to put up cameras, hire fare inspectors, and turn trains and buses into mobile police states. All this for God’s green TWO DOLLARS AND FIFTY CENTS! So what? Who cares?! Here in Portland, TriMet announced that it’s hiring nine new fare inspectors. Allow me to flex some elementary school-level math: Let’s say each of those inspectors is making a low-ish starting wage for a government-adjacent employee of $45,000. Multiply that by nine and it’s $405,000 for one year. TriMet could have bought full, unlimited passes for 12 whole months for 1,205 low-income residents instead of paying nine narcs to harass people of color and anyone who looks poor. Now I will make this about me: I live on one end of one bus route from my office, but it’s somehow cheaper for me to gas, insure, and drive my Honda to and from work than it would be to take the bus, which I’d rather do. And if the city would prefer that I play my Sudoku while operating a motor vehicle rather than sitting on a bus, rubbing shoulders with friends I haven’t met yet, that’s on them.
Celebrity Skin
Did you know I’ve written this column for over one year and I’ve never once mentioned a Kardashian or Kanye? It’s true! I wanted to see if I could do it, and I can. A person can only yell about so many things with their time on earth, and plenty of people are already yelling about them, so I opted to focus my energy elsewhere. Not to suggest they’re not newsworthy, or that I don’t know what’s on their social media feeds most hours of most days, but some people are only firmly lodged in our national interest because we keep letting them stay there, and I wanted to make one little space that didn’t add to that. Just wanted to be sure you noticed. Which brings us to....
The LAST Last Word
I’m always sad when a column comes to an end, but I’m especially sad this time because this is my last column. :( I’ve had such a wonderful time sharing my 100 percent correct opinions with all of you and challenging myself to explain things with real words where in normal life I’d just use a series of chirps and emojis. Thank you, all of you (even the jerk who said I was about as funny as Gallagher, who is a SUCCESSFUL AND TIMELESS COMEDIAN so THANKS FOR THE COMPLIMENT, JERK) for reading, and if you want to stay in touch, I’m still grinding on Twitter @elinorjoneser and on the ’gram @elinorjo. Okay, smell ya later! <3 Joneser: OUT.
