i have the new york times delivered to my door on friday saturday and sunday...the friday and saturday papers have a $3 cover price and the sunday $6...it costs me an additional $2 for the delivery for each edition so the sunday paper i just perused actually cost $8...i went to the home improvement store this morning ( where people entering without a mask were directed to the service counter to purchase one...i had one ) and acquired four bags of composted manure for my garden work at $1.99 a bag and, after having digested the paper, i am inclined to think the compost was a far better investment...i subscribe mostly because the times is the "paper of record" and despite its claims to the contrary is a mouthpiece for elite viewpoints ( they are not reaching out to the working class with advertisements for condominiums whose cost runs into the millions of dollars...and that wine club is for wine snobs...or wanna be ones anyway ) and, at times, unintentionally profoundly entertaining...mostly it is a barometer of what the 1% and their acolytes are thinking...the business section is always worth a read...the sunday magazine you can keep around for the crosswords...the "in depth" journalism is mostly a yawn...there are the occasional articles of interest...however the real treat is the "style" magazine which is a distillation of the times daily presentation on how we should be living our lives...they are chock full of ideas on how we should rearrange our closets...
what we need to know...
what we should be watching...
how we should be living... and the op-ed page is full of ideas on how we should think...a wonderful package...all of human life is here...except it is elitist conceptualization from a corporate entity that is in business to make a profit and not necessarily disseminate fact...no different than fox news or msnbc...it has, of late. been brimming over with articles about how to cope with isolation...the city is genuinely suffering...no gainsaying that...they have an inordinate number of deaths and that is tragic...i am not trying to engage in covid-19 denying or disrespecting the grief people are enduring...what it does highlight is plagues are anti-urban events...everyone who could left london in 1665 and i am fairly sure wealth has departed the city in numbers...it is the poor who are left with the disease and i have to wonder how many of new york's underclasses pay attention to the times...few i imagine...fortunately, while i have been mostly home for the past nearly seven weeks, i have a suburban back yard with beds of winter rye and wheat ...and ramps..and asparagus i can escape to when i weary of my room...there are suburban advantage the "new urbanists" are completely ignorant of ...willfully or not...and i wonder how many of them are in the city...basically i am weary of the urban perspective...today's "at home" section of the times had a "how-yo" article on making a "printer's hat" out of a sheet of the newspaper...
finally found a reasonable use for the opinion pages.
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