Natural Disasters: The Lighter Side

A few final notes on Tuesday's Chino Hills earthquake.

Meg at M-M-M-My Pomona has a neighbor who was kind enough to share a part of his earthquake kit with her. The neighbor calls it a "Lincoln Park":

Lincoln Park
orange sherbet
Grand Marnier
tequila
a spritz of lemon juice
a few ice cubes.

Combine in the proportion that suits your level of bibulousness, whiz in the blender until frothy, and serve in an Old Fashioned glass. A toast to our fair city is mandatory, not optional.

* * *

Watching the some of the coverage on the local TV stations, we could not help but feel guilty at not having written sooner about all those cut backs at the LA Times, the Riverside Press-Enterprise, and the William Dean Singleton-owned LA News Group papers. One wonders how much the ongoing deaths of a thousand cuts in newsrooms affect the ability of print media to cover the local news well.

Gary Scott, who once worked for the Claremont Courier and who is now a producer at KCRW 89.9FM, has been covering print journalism's death-spiral at hands of dedicated citizen-tycoons such as Singleton with the Daily Bulletin, the San Bernardino Sun, the San Gabriel Valley Tribune, or the Daily News, to name a few of his papers. Or Sam Zell at the LA Times and the Tribune Co., for that matter.

Then there's Ed Padgett's Los Angeles Times Pressmen's blog, which captures the pain of the industry's transition/transformation from within.

Professionalism seems increasingly out the window as journalists face the pressure to produce for upper management types who don't always have the background to understand what exactly it is they're managing.

Television news long ago gave up much of its ethical and professional pretensions. It's entertainment, after all, and disasters make for good pictures. For the discriminating news consumer, there's really not much you can do except chill out and toss back another Lincoln Park.

The scary thing is that the line between satire and reality has become awfully blurred:


Breaking News: Series Of Concentric Circles Emanating From Glowing Red Dot