Why I still read the local newspaper

It's certainly not for the police blotter with all the stabbings, beatings and murders. Not for the melancholy of the dozens of pedestrians killed on the roads including 2 year old toddlers. Not for the tiresome right wing diatribes. No, it's for the comic strips, especially one called “Frank & Ernest”. They misuse the language in a delightful way, including “Malaprop Man” who is a caped klutz who mangles his words and syntax. This week Frank instructs Ernie that the longest waterway in the Ukraine is the Dneiper, not the Crimea River (see my last blog and listen to Julie London) and at the F&E bakery Frank questions a seasonal promotion titled “April is the crullerest month” (TS Eliot's Wasteland). I also like Hagar the Horrible but he is in the category that Marshall McLuhan liked least: the berated husband nagged by Maggie on Jiggs, Dagwood's boss Dithers and the sarcasm of Hagar's wife Helga. But hey, I like to laugh at something in the paper. I mean besides Senator Ted Cruz.