Fish and Whistle an Octave Higher

I suppose it could be tied to global warming or the flouride in the water or letting that zany whackadoodle Jenny McCarthy sit in on The View (did you know plaid polyester pantsuits can cause blindness? Bet she does), but things are starting to get awfully crowded and very warm in this hand basket we call Mother Earth. 

But rather than be a strident alarmist let me also point out with the various incarnations of converging connectivity or connective convergence ('every dollar of it') it may be we think there's more alarming and disquieting news in our world these days because we have so many different sources for that news. 

You can watch basically the same event on Fox and on MSNBC and think we have live on two different planets (I'm so proud of myself for not smacking Hannity or O'Reilly; okay, until just then). 

In markets with more than one daily newspaper, such as the District of Columbia, the contrast between the Washington Times and the Washington Post is very clearly demarcated (and now the Post has a smile on the side of its masthead). 

 In New York City, where the Grey Lady, the New York Times, has chatterboxes like the Daily News and the New York Post sharing news stands, the tabloids tend to go from zero to nuckin' futz in an eyeblink or less. Add in Newsday and aside from another argument to not live on Long Island, I don't know what you have. 

That's why between Zombie Apocalypses (if it started in Jamaica, would we call it Zombie Apocalypso?) and objects in space being WAY larger than they appear while hurtling towards us at catastrophic speeds, news releases like Diet Dr. Pepper tasting more like regular Dr. Pepper get lost in the churn. 

 Actually, I still wish Dr. Pepper would get lost in the churn. My fault, really; childhood trauma I guess. When we lived on Bloomfield Avenue in Franklin Township, New Jersey (I was in 3rd grade), our next door neighbors the Giffins, were from Texas. 

They drank Dr. Pepper by the gallon it seemed in short, clear glass bottles with a drawing of a white clock face with only three numbers on it, 10, 2 and 6. I never grasped the correlation between the drawing on the bottle and the odd-tasting soda inside of it. To this day every time I hear Chicago, I think about Dr. Pepper. 

So I'd encourage you while reading this news story, to remember Francois La Varenne as well as John Prine both of whom went to different high schools together and had this fella for lunch in the cafeteria on Fridays during Lent.
-bill kenny