I've been spending way too much time reading about politics these days.
And with good reason.
It's like following a dystopian/spy thriller serial. The US government is being taken over by the USSR* and The Powers That Be are trying to do something, anything, to prevent it, or isolate it, or resolve it or something, I'm not going to get into all the politics, but it's there and it's got that whole thriller/scary vibe going on.
And it's a serial.
se·ri·al
ˈsirēəl/
noun
noun: serial; plural noun: serials
1. a story or play appearing in regular installments on television or radio or in a periodical.
"a new three-part drama serial"
This is the problem. We have no clue how this story ends. We won't know until the last chapter drops and chapters are dropping at random. This story is unfolding at the pace of real life, and we're all living at the pace of 24 hr news cycles. At least I am, I don't know about you. I am wasting far too much time sitting here waiting for the next chapter to drop.
The other night I was thinking, what did people do before there was a 24 hour news cycle? What did they do when they were waiting for the next chapter to drop?
In the cities newspapers would routinely publish extras, sometimes three or four editions a day. The Wall Street Journal still does. This picture is a good example.
You might be better off clicking here to follow a link to it.
Starting from the top you see the name of the paper, an add for a story about loafers and about debt bubbles and then a thin line with the date written out. All the way on the right hand side of that line you see stars, two on the one on the left, and four on the one on the right. That means that the one on the left was the second edition published that day, and the one on the right was the fourth, put out later in the day. Back before CNN came online in 1980, that was how quickly people could get news unless you subscribed to a ticker service** and that was only in major cities, unless there was a breaking news crisis when the major networks would "break in" to their broadcasts. If you lived in the country you didn't have that. You had the paper once a day and the news once a day and maybe the ag report in the morning and that was it.
So what the hell did people do with their time?
They did stuff. They made stuff, grew stuff, repaired stuff, raised stuff. They were creative. They kept things clean. They cooked. They read. They listened to the radio, to entertainment not news. They would talk to their neighbors and to their family. They tried to learn things on their own.
I really need to do that. I really want to do that.
I want to do that because serials suck. I hate not knowing the end. I read the end of books first. I prefer to binge watch a TV show after it's over so I have the end on hand. I look up the ends of games before I start to play.
Serials suck and I write them! I should apologize to each and every one of my readers for keeping them hanging for so long!
So as of now I am getting off the serial bandwagon. I will give myself one hour a day for the news. The rest of the time I will do other things. This includes following news sites, news subreddits, and news podcasts. And I'll try to update more than weekly with how it's going under this headline.
In the meantime I hope this serial ends well.
* For anyone about to point out that it's Russia now, Putin is KGB trained and using their playbook. His government is the USSR in spirit if not in actuality.
** My grandfather worked as a groundskeeper for a man named Mr. Johnson, who was deeply into stocks. I remember going over there once when I was very small and being amazed that Mr. Johnson spent all day watching bands of numbers going by on a screen. I had no idea what he was doing. Now I know that he was watching the stock ticker, stock prices updating in real time, and that one of those bands was from Reuters or the AP, keeping up on the news headlines. You used to see it on channel 1, I believe, until cable became a thing. But our area ran heavily to the very wealthy, so it may have just been broadcast in a few places nationwide.
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