Patrick takes Charlie Home

Carlton’s choke in the last round wasn’t enough to keep Patrick Cripps from taking the Brownlow Medal for best and fairest player during the 2022 AFL season. Not only did he need the maximum three votes for that game, he needed to get a two game suspension overturned. The Brownlow gala normally kick off Grand Final week on Monday. Due to Queen Elizabeth’s funeral on Monday, the Brownlow was awarded on Sunday evening.

Cats’ milestones and finals

The AFL makes a big deal about milestones games. This week Geelong hosts Brisbane for a Grand Final berth. It is the 150th game for Jed Bews, all at Geelong. Coach Chris Scott will make his 500th appearance playing and coaching, ironically coaching against the team he played for. Joel Selwood will tie Michael Tuck’s record of 39 finals. To be fair, Tuck played during an era with a shorter finals series. His record seven premierships and 11 Grand Finals are in no danger of being broken.

If the Cats can win and Collingwood wins at Sydney, the Grand Final will be a rematch of the opening round.

ame

Breakfast, Coffee, and the Morning Paper

Since the big city papers pulled out of the area, I tried to get the local Saturday papers to at least get the high school football results. Since neither paper available could get the results in, I thought I would go on Tuesday morning when both papers would print their next edition. This would have worked out great since my weekend begins at 7am Tuesday morning.

Unfortunately since my last visit two Saturdays earlier, the convenience store that had the breakfast sandwiches I like sold out to a competitor. The new chain does not sell newspapers. They also don’t make very good breakfast sandwiches either

As margins were cut to the stores, more of them were finding the papers more trouble than they are worth even as loss leaders to get people to buy things like sandwiches and coffee. When I worked for a paper in the early 80s, the store got 16% on our daily and 20% on our Sunday paper and we took back the unsold papers. In the early 2000s the USA Today gave stores 11%. When the Wichita Eagle and Kansas City Star raised the price of their Sunday paper from $1.50 to $2.00, they not only kept the entire price increase they took five cents from the fifteen cents the stores were making previously. Dropping the margin from 10% to 6% was the last straw for some of the stores.

I went to the only store in town that sold newspapers and found that the Reporter had not arrived by 8am. I bought a jelly doughnut and the Sun and left.

Urinalism, NFL edition

The NFL season started last weekend, but you won’t know that if you read the local papers. The dailies may have an article from the Kansas City Star about the Chiefs, but even getting the scores of the other games is not going to happen. This is the first start of a major sports season that I have not been able to get the Tulsa World or USA Today and keep up with major league sports. Both papers pulled out in April because doubling the price, decreasing the number of pages, and not having last night’s news in it decreases sales dramatically.

I am not really into sports all, but having scores and standings used to be the baseline that defined a daily newspaper, daily being traditionally defined as at least five days a week. Our local papers will be doing well if they get Friday’s high school games in tomorrow’s edition.

Saudi scum slam planes into buildings day

On this anniversary, bloggers are posting what they did and where they were on that day. In my case, I was at work in a plant that had no outside contact except when a tanker driver dropped a load. Since their information was third hand at best, nothing made sense, so we kept bottling until the first line shut down for the day just before noon. Until then it was just another day with some weird story.