Stroud Courier

Issue date: 9/23/04 Section: Opinion

photo byJulian Gautier

Among the rare things in life, there are blue moons, four leaf clovers, and all those other crappy marshmallows in the Lucky Charms. There is the occasional mud slide and dust bowl every three quarters of a century. But none of them ever hold a light to the rarest occurrence of them all: a full staff Stroud Courier meeting (in which we managed sobriety and good manners).

The Stroud Courier (motto: we are still better than Calliope) is not known for putting together organized meetings, although it seems to be not known for holding meetings at all from time to time. Everyone was assigned something to do, be it write an article, take a photograph, or serve as our news editor's sparring mate.

Unfortunately, putting together the newspaper itself is not sweet and sugary like Lucky Charms, the general consensus being that the staff would sooner mutineer our editor-in-chief to partake in something dangerous like parenthood as opposed to laying out the pages on the newspaper.

The common dummy (i.e. whoever does not read our fine paper) will assume that the words magically fall into place .I have tried to do everything to make it that easy; from taping the articles to the computer screen to eating Wheaties before undergoing this difficult mission. However, Wheaties does not yet power the journalist because we are still waiting for Dan Rather to appear on the box, although recent events suggest we will see Saddam on the box before Mr. Rather.

To get the layout done, we decided to gather seven intelligent minds. When that did not work out, we settled for our section editors instead. Then began the process of learning to use the computer's layout program, Adobe In Design, which is as user friendly as the control panel of an airplane.

We voted unanimously that it would have been a lot easier if we had Oompa Loompas to do the work for us, but Willy Wonka got a hold of them before we could.We often tire of getting work done, which leads into various forms of child play, a phrase we define as "drink a lot of beer so computers cease their existence."

There is the possibility we could make some sort of effort to learn how to better use In Design, but that requires educating us. When it comes to education and computers, we are a lazy, belligerent people who solve our problems often by smashing things with large clubs. Hell, we have to threaten people with violence and long lectures just to get them to read our newspaper.

Continued...

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