Tag: ashland daily tidings

Windsday’s Theme Music

Mood: springtimistic

Welcome to Windsday, December 11, 2024. We’re calling it Windsday here in Ashlandia as the wind is calling the moves and has the trees square-dancing under a white slab of sky. Currently, the thermometer sits at 42 F and the thermostat rests at 68 F. Today’s high will see the measuring one stab at the low fifties.

We descended on friends’ house for their birthday party last night. The couple have been married 45 years and share the same birthday. So, per their wishes, we arrived with pizza from their favorite place, a salad my wife provided, and a few pints of Talenti ice cream. Intelligent and engaging people a few clicks older than us, a good time was had. They have two young cats who are not permitted to be outside except in their backyard on a harness or in their catio. For some reason, the wife gave me two containers of Applaws sardine and mackarel catfood. I fed our floofs one of these this morning. Man, they licked the bowls clean and stumbled away, grinnin’ and lickin’. I think they liked it.

Our late purveyor of news, Ashland Daily Tidings, had a Frankenstein moment. The newspaper name and their old website were used to provide fake news to the world. Yes, because the world has a fake-news shortage, I suppose. No, whoever did it is just sucky people doing sucky things. I suppose the bottom line is that their life sucks and they want to spread the suck. Thus, I suspect that they are rightwingers. Modern rightwingers aren’t happy unless everyone conforms to their sucky version of being. Now that they’ve elected a sucky guy who will be a sucky prez, and is assembling a sucky administration, the suckiness will commence in January.

But, The Neurons said. The Neurons have “The Rose” playing in the morning mental music stream (Trademark sucky). “The Rose” was a 1979 hit for Bette Midler out of the movie called The Rose. The Neurons are riding the lines that go, “Just remember in the winter, beneath the bitter snow, lies the seed that with the sun’s love in the spring becomes the rose.” Good idea to rally around: with this sucky prezzidency falling over us, we’re going into winter. But we just must nurture those seeds of freedom, democracy, equality, and sanity, and help them bloom when the sucky winter is over.

Lean toward the sun. Be pos. Coffee and I have begun a new day of collaboration. Here’s the music. Cheers

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Sunday’s Theme Music

Mood: Fallsundayandcoffee

Sunday, October 20, 2024 has slotted in. It’s 61 F outside and we expect a mid seventies high amid a surfeit of autumn furnishings and clouds.

We’re off to see a Halloween concert this afternoon. Rogue Valley Symphonic Band. Several friends play in the band so we go and support them. They’re usually inventive fun, although they have a new musical director, so we’re not sure what we’ll get. We’re mildly agitated that it’s so many days before Halloween. Few are in a Halloween spirit yet.

We’re also vexed that this was scheduled at the same time as Ashland’s celebration for being 150 years old. Here’s the thing about that latter; we didn’t hear any or see any advertisement for that until last week. Holy cow, an event like this, and they kept it under wraps. We asked our friends and all said, “Nope. Didn’t hear about it.” Many weren’t aware of it until we asked. My wife blames the advertising gap on the lack of a local physical newspaper. She’s been mourning the demise of the Ashland Daily Tidings since it went under. After it failed, so did the Medford Mail Tribune, causing an even larger local news gap. It’s a sigh inducing product of the modern world and electronic information age.

I’m basically over my COVab (COVID-19 vaccination shot, or jab). Jab point is still singing, “Ow. Ow. Owww.” And that arm/shoulder remains stiff as dried leather. But my energy has jumped back up and my thinking has cleared, and my appetite, which was mildly cut yesterday, has had a resurgence. In fact, I think that giving myself permission to sleep because I wasn’t feel well was beneficial overall.

My wife suggested we go east to Pittsburgh, PA, December to visit with family for the holidays. That brought a grimace to my soul. I’ve traveled during that time of year, and the ugh moments just pile up. Congestion, crowds, coughing and sneezing, weather delays. Oy. But Mom keeps aging, keeps adding on health issues, and has a new crises every several months, and time keeps on ticking. Probably a good idea. I just worry about the execution.

Today’s music came after I’d left the boudoir and was in the kitchen. “Well, here we are,” I told myself. “Another day.”

Click. The Neurons delivered the Brothers Gibb singing, “Here we are. In a room full of strangers.” As I recognized the lyrics, “Nights of Broadway” filled the morning mental music stream (Trademark bright). Barry Gibb of the Bee Gees wrote the 1975 disco song and reported that it came to him in a dream. Pretty cool, innit?

Coffee has been invited into my body, where it received a warm reception. Stay positive and remain strong. We’re almost to the election day finish line. Then it’ll all be over except for the screaming and shouting, lawsuits, accusations, commnentary and analysis. Vote blue. Here’s the music.

Cheers

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The Renewal

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: “Be sure to read the fine print.”

I must have heard or read it a hundred thousand times in my lifetime. (Yes, that could be an exaggeration.) It’s often flashed up during television commercials but the five plus lines of tiny print shoot by faster than you can say, “What?” Small print has become a joke in our society. The joke is on the consumer. It certainly was on me and my wife.

We were subscribing to our local newspaper . It’s not as easy to decide as you think. We’re a small town. It’s a small paper. To fill the paper, they publish some news articles from other towns and countries. It’s not greatly valuable to us in this Internet era. Most of our friends don’t take the local daily, the ‘Ashland Daily Tidings’. They take the newspaper from our larger neighbor, Medford. Medford’s paper is ‘The Medford Mail-Tribune’. Editorially, both papers are conservative, and they share owners and publishers.

ADT is published Monday through Saturday, except for the big holidays. You can guess them. For Sunday, we received ‘The Medford Mail-Tribune’.

We liked receiving the paper despite its paucity of local news. So after a brief debate last December, we renewed, paying for a year’s subscription, $124. Cool. Done.

October comes. Notices arrive. Our newspaper subscription is about to expire. My wife pulls out the paperwork. No, they’re wrong: we renewed in December, 2015, for fifty-two weeks. They’re probably just trying to get us to renew early, we reasoned. Periodicals are always following that practice.

But no. Last Sunday came a notice with the delivery: “Your subscription has expired.”

Nah-uh, we answered. Pulling out the paperwork with new fury, my wife re-affirmed her earlier understanding. Then she saw the small print. Here is the actual small print, copied from their website:

“Up to $3 is charged to all subscriptions for each premium edition. Premium editions are not included in the subscription price and your expiration date will be accelerated and adjusted accordingly. There will be no more than 16 premium editions per calendar year.”

What is a ‘premium edition’? It seems to be the normal paper enlarged by extra advertising inserts. That means we’ve paid an extra $48 for our paper for the ‘year’, which, because of the ‘premium editions’, has been truncated to about ten and a half months. And it’s curious, because even if you select online only, to save paper, you still pay $3.00 for each premium edition. You pay for it regardless of your subscription term – year, month, quarter, whatever.

(Paperless, BTW, is another burgeoning joke in our society. We get more paper in our mail than ever before, usually stuff we don’t want but that we must recycle – which we pay to have done. How many ‘special offers’ are received each week by wireless service providers, ISPs, Dish and other satellite providers, followed by insurance, cleaning, and credit cards offers…and let us then begin to talk about the Explanation of Benefits and bills that accompany every doctor appointment and prescription.)

We were floored.

We were angry.

We wondered…does this apply to its sister paper?

You betcha.

We wondered: do our friends know this about this their subscriptions?

No, they didn’t. They were sure we were wrong so we printed out a website screenshot to show them.

They were floored.

But here is the kicker that prompted me to post: yesterday, a plastic bag was delivered to our house from ‘The Medford Mail-Tribune’. There wasn’t any newspaper; just the advertisement inserts. Which, to us, means that we’re subsidizing the newspaper’s advertisement revenue by paying for these circulars to be delivered to non-subscribers.

We could be wrong about that. It was our snap insight, and they’re not always right. Regardless, we’re angry, and we’re not renewing.

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