“The Unbearable Lightness of Funny Bitterness”

"Good news, everyone!"

Yes, we all knew the bloodbath was coming, but who knew that it would be so… bloody?

Now, I'm no media expert, but I am pretty sure that changing the name of the newspaper(s) to make them more appealing to all parts of the geographic spectrum probably ensures that you will endear them to no one. After all, I live in the East Bay, but do I think of myself as an East Bay-ite –oid –ian? No, I think of myself as an Oaklander. Preferably, I would like to get my news from a paper that identifies itself as Oakland-based. Even though I frequently avail myself of the stories in the San Francisco Comical, I do so with the knowledge that they are out-of-towners who care little for me other than my subscription dollars. Unless Oakland burns to the ground, I suspect that the Comical will lead its paper with some event that transpired on the streets of the Baghdad by the Bay.

Meanwhile the East Bay Tribune… I'm sorry, I just threw up in my mouth typing those words. The E.B. Tribune will emphasize the news of the… East Bay?

If you are a Bay Area resident, you are aware that the East Bay is a huge geographical area, comprising the cities of Oakland, Berkeley, Alameda, Piedmont, San Leandro, Hayward, Castro Valley, Pleasanton, Sunol, Union City, Fremont, Newark, El Cerrito, El Sobrante, Richmond, Kensington, Albany, Hercules, Orinda, Lafayette, Moraga, Walnut Creek, Concord, San Ramon, Danville, Alamo, Livermore and Dublin, just to name the ones closest to the San Francisco Bay. The residents of Martinez, Rodeo, Benicia, Vallejo, Clayton, Blackhawk, Brentwood, Discovery Bay, Rio Vista and (especially) Mountainhouse, having the read the previous sentence, are incensed at having been forgotten. This is a perfect illustration of why the E.B. Tribune concept is doomed to failure.

The Oakland Tribune has a proud history, dating from its start more than 137 years ago, including two Pulitzer Prizes for photography. It's hard to believe that we will abandon that pedigree simply to make the paper nominally more appealing to the readers who are, according to management, apparently afraid that Oakland moniker will... I dunno – break into their homes and steal their big screen TVs? "Oh, dear God! It's the Oakland Tribune! Somebody stop it before our property values go down!"

Meanwhile, the name change is the least of our worries – it's the accompanying 120 layoffs that are what really keep me up at night. Can I really survive another round of layoffs? What is this, my 18^th since arriving here in 1990? How can there be anyone left to eliminate and yet still have personnel with which to publish a paper? Are we using Chinese prison labor?

Well, if I start writing a blog entry every day after October 28, you'll know that my luck – and, if you actually deign to read this drivel, yours – has run out.

Until then… savor your Oakland Tribune.

P.S.: Thanks to the lovely and talented AP staff photographer Marcio Jose Sanchez for the inspired title of today's entry.

The Pride of Pequannock

Derek Jeter in 1996

Some of you may have noticed – and I assume that most of those of whom I'm speaking here are, in fact, inmates at a prison for the criminally insane – that Derek Jeter, shortstop for the New York Chubbywallets and erstwhile All-Star, slipped a couple of balls past the Tampa Bay Slurpee™ Drinkers' laconic defense yesterday and thus became the 27th Major Leaguer to accumulate 3,000 or more hits.

Lest you wonder how it is that I came to be aware of this revolting development, please remember that I do pretend to cover the news; also, I have four [reputed] family members who follow the Chubbywallets in a less-than-casual fashion. Their untoward caterwauling at the moment Mr. Jeter achieved this milestone was unavoidable, even from 3,000 miles away.

Let's be frank: Mr. Jeter is a fine ballplayer; certainly, as Scott Ostler of the San Francisco Comical wrote today, a first-ballot Hall of Famer. But, as Mr. Ostler also wrote, the idea that Mr. Jeter could have won all those championships – or, indeed, even had the opportunity to achieve the 3,000-hit plateau – without the complement of the very expensive machine that is the Chubbywallets' perennially star-studded roster is far-fetched, to say the least. The supporting cast at Chubbywallet Stadium, either the old or the new version, is such that many a player has seemed just that much better as a result. Unlimited resources will do that for a team.

I'm more impressed by players like Tony Gwynn or Carl Yastrzemski – players who excelled despite the relative weakness of their respective teams. Let's see Derek get his 3,000 hits playing for Pittsburgh, shall we? He probably wouldn't even have 3,000 plate appearances yet.

Still, because I'm not a hater (so far as you know, that is), I extend my congratulations to Mr. Jeter, and remind him that he still has to get another 181 hits to catch Cal Ripken, Jr.

The Dream of the Blue Umbrellas

Henlopen Acres Beach Club on a perfect summer day

Not that I don't love California, but…

 I can hardly wait to get back to Rehoboth Beach and sprawl on the warm sands by the Atlantic.

The countdown has started.

“Celebrate the Birth of Your Nation By Blowing Up a Small Part of It!”

The Rockets' Red Glare over Oakland, 2009

Now we know what it's like to live in Baghdad.

After spending the last two nights listening to the soundtrack of a war movie, all I can say is, how could so many people be so unclear on the concept of "illegal fireworks?" Aside from the constant assault on the eardrums, the danger of maiming and dismemberment, and even the possibility of starting a fire that could destroy one's neighborhood, why do some Oaklanders think it's okay to keep the rest of us awake into the wee hours of the morning with their M-320s?

I confess that, in my younger days, I thought it was fun to set off a few firecrackers and light some sparklers on the Fourth of July. Why, we were even known to set off the occasional Roman candle.

But all of that pales in comparison to the artillery barrage we have witnessed this past weekend in Oakland – and one can only guess what it would have been like if the city's police and fire departments were not supposedly enforcing a "zero tolerance" policy. Mixed with what could only have been occasional bursts of automatic gunfire, there were non-stop explosions audible last night until well after one a.m. Some of the blasts sounded like dynamite charges. What's next, C-4?

Perhaps this is what we get for not having any "official" fireworks display in the city this year – the traditional Jack London Square show having fallen victim to the budget axe. But then again, these imbeciles would probably have their own fireworks show even if the city's display was in their living room. (Which might not be a bad idea, incidentally…)

Lest you think I'm some kind of Independence Day killjoy, I will tell you that I went to my usual spot in the Oakland hills last night to watch and photograph the San Francisco fireworks, which were mercifully only obscured by smog this year, rather than fog. It's just that I feel that 25 minutes of fireworks are sufficient, thank you.

If You’d Like to Make a Call…

Dark days ahead at [The Big Newspaper], no question about it.

The e-mail came this morning, out of the blue: Head Honcho and Head Honcho #2, are now, uh, Headless. Their last day? You're lookin' at it, buddy.

Further consolidation had been talked about for months, and now, on the final day of the fiscal year, here it was, in all of its please-show-yourself-out-the-side-door-immediately glory.

But in the meantime… conference calls! Except that, for some reason, we can't even do that right. Reporters and editors all gathered in the conference room, poised by the speakerphone, awaiting the "big news" from our new Supreme Leader, only to discover that he was apparently addressing us from the bottom of a missile silo somewhere, and it was nigh impossible to make out his words, much less the message. Interspersed with his echo-y, static-filled droning came the endless musical doorbell chimes of other employees trying to join the call from around the chain. At times, the cacophony from the speaker more closely resembled the soundtrack of an old pinball machine than a discussion of the future of the newspapers.

I lasted about 5 minutes before giving up and going back to my desk.

Those hardy souls who stayed for the rest of the hour(!) informed me that it was all downhill from there. We're not, he said, producing the kinds of news that make readers want to buy the product, and subsequently make advertisers want to hawk their wares in our pages. Which means, I guess, that we don't have enough celebrity gossip, but I could be oversimplifying here.

Apparently, the Patch.com model of hyperlocal journalism is failing miserably. Readers don't care what's going on in their neighborhoods – or, at least, not enough to fork over 75 cents to read about it. The only answer, of course, is to go in the opposite direction and produce all regional, over-arching stories with which everybody can identify.

"The world spun on its axis today, causing dozens of people to die at various points on the globe. President Obama held a conference call with members of the G8 to address the issue."

That regional enough for ya? No. What about our extraterrestrial readers?

Luckily, the flagship of [The Big Newspaper] – which, coincidentally, is where the new Supreme Leader has held sway up until this morning – has been producing the kinds of stories that readers and advertisers do like, and with many fewer resources than the slacker, do-nothing losers who populate its sniveling, pus-filled satellite publications. Elitist snobbery being my stock in trade, I like the way Supreme Leader thinks.

And I feel 100% certain that when the layoffs come – and they will – my job is so safe you could invest your 401(k) in it.

The Never-Ending Story

So, being hopelessly anal retentive, I've been working on sleeving, archiving, scanning, captioning and otherwise organizing my old film negatives – all 42 years worth of them – and I've come to the conclusion that this is a job that will never be done. It's a daunting task, and that could be one of my larger understatements. Naturally, it's not enough to simply sleeve the negatives; I also insist on properly dating the sleeves, labeling them completely (it's not just the "Coliseum," you know – it's the "Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum; Oakland, Calif."), and putting them in labeled binders in chronological order.

Mind you, I've been a professional photojournalist pretty much since college, when I spent my last two years photographing everything that moved on the campus of Ithaca College for the Cayugan yearbook. So there's a lot of negatives – hundreds of thousands of them – and a lot of events. Some of them deserve to be saved (think Game 7 of the 2002 World Series or President Ronald Reagan visiting Whippany, N.J. in October 1987), and some, well, not so much (think Rodney P. Frelinghuysen election headquarters in November 1987 or the Denville, N.J. street fair in June 1986), but I'm treating them all equally.

The floor of my office is slowly disappearing under an ever-growing sea of 1000-sheet three-ring binders, and it could be worse: there's a two-year window in there, when I was working for The (Easton, Pa.) Express, from which I have almost no film – it was filed at the time, and now is rotting in a landfill somewhere in Bucks County (or was that Berks County? I can't keep them straight). Thus, my trip to Jim Thorpe, Pa. remains woefully undocumented. That's a shame, don't ya think?

Further, this is just the sleeving and labeling portion of the program – next comes the actual scanning and captioning. Thank God for Baseball Reference.com, without which captioning all those baseball games would be impossible. I'm hoping that, by the time I turn 60, I might actually be close to finishing.

Then I can start on the color slides…

The Bonfire of the Vagaries

Leave it to the combination of Facebook and Father's Day to leave me feeling all weepy and mortal.

Seriously, all these Father's Day wishes, and old photographs of fathers long dead (or only wishing they were) have got me thinking about the basic, irrefutable unfairness of life. I mean, how did my father – a God-fearing, exercise-crazy, all-around nice guy (at least with these rose-colored, 20-20 hindsight bifocals I'm currently wearing) – end up dead when most people his age were just getting around to picking out their next Cadillac? He didn't smoke. He barely touched alcohol. Not a caf-fiend. He was in better shape at 60 than I was at 45. I go out and photograph centenarians who tell me that the secret of a long life is smoking a stogie every morning and then jaywalking on Interstate 80. How did the Grim Reaper get my dad's name and address?

I want an answer! And, "It's a mystery!" is not gonna cut it.

Father's Day also leaves me wondering – in a speculative, road-not-travelled kinda way – about my own decision not to be a father. Which was not so much a decision as I was just so terrified by the prospect of taking care of (read: paying for) raising a child. As I've grown older, and watched my nieces and nephew grow up, I think, "Hmmm… that doesn't look that hard…" Of course, none of their parents are living on subsistence wages…

In my previous life, when I was co-habiting with the Bird Whisperer, we scoffed at the notion of children, and the result was that we ended up having none. In my present life, there's been no scoffing, but a distinct lack of fecundity. That's what we call "getting old."

Not that I spend a lot of time on it, but every so often, when I see some parent savoring a moment of childish innocence, I think to myself, "That'll never be me." And it makes me wistful, not to say sad.

Of course, it would make me sadder when I had to send them off to an Oakland public school…

Don't worry, I'm recovered, but look for something similar to this tear-jerker next Father's Day. Or right after It's A Wonderful Life airs at Christmas. Please don't suggest that I adopt – I am so not interested in raising somebody else's kid.