Man Bites Dog

As I was sorting old Vegas Girl posts from 2008 into categories (known in Blogger-speak as labels), I noticed that the News category was pretty slim last year. In previous years, News would have been as full of posts as Travel, but in 2008 I decided I couldn’t take the daily news anymore.

Last year, I switched to the weekend-only edition of the Las Vegas Review Journal/Sun, and cancelled my subscriptions to USA Today and The New York Times. The old newspaper adage that “If a dog bites a man, that’s no story; but if a man bites a dog, that’s a story,” just wasn’t working for me anymore. I shudder to think what I paid each year for those three newspaper subscriptions, but in my former days as a news junkie, it was well worth it. In 2008, however, as gas prices rose, housing prices fell, unemployment grew, and the stock market tanked, I could no longer tolerate my daily triple dose of death, disaster, destruction, and despair. Let’s not even talk about the election, that incessant stream of maddening commentary on the candidates’ personalities instead of upon their policies.

The weekend edition of the papers is just enough news to keep me in the loop, along with the free community papers (the Sun's Home News, the RJ's View News--in my opinion, they're a good preview of newspapers' future--smaller, more focused, less frequent.), Time Magazine, the occasional "Charlie Rose Show," and Jon Stewart on "The Daily Show." My favorite part of the weekend RJ is Margo Bartlett Pesek's Sunday Travel column, "Trip of the Week," which is a wonderful source of information about the kinds of places I like—unusual, out-of-the-way, and lightly visited.

I do check the news from time to time, just to see if things have changed, and invariably it’s the same message: we’re all gonna die. Either we’re going to be kidnapped and pushed off the deck of a cruise ship, we’re going to fry in the cataclysm of global warming, antibiotic superbugs will slaughter us, or the economy will be the Depression Version 2 and we’ll all die unemployed, uninsured, and broke (as the ice caps melt and the bird flu kills off whoever is lucky enough to find a patch of land).

Looks like the Vegas Girl’s News category may remain a little anorexic in 2009.
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Photo courtesy of Sanja Gjenero at http://www.sxc.hu/photo/953849