DISMANTLE WHARF

THIS ARTICLE IS ABOUT NOTHING AT ALL. I'm happy Robert Bitzer got his picture in the paper though. He deserves it.

He writes this column regularly but this is the weirdest one yet!

“Staples...that’s a store also”

“His stories are based on his own memory with no research” is an amazing thing to print in a newspaper.

another banger from Robert Bitzer in today's Recorder:

AAAAAAAAHH!!! TIMES PAST!

“I think the store sold radios”?!

I wish all journalism was like this

I keep wondering, is posterity going to be glad that this man recorded what he might remember about local appliance stores? Will some young researcher uncover this microfiche and be like, "the missing piece of my puzzle! My research is complete!"? Maybe!

I love oral history! Is that what this is?

Probably only a tiny fraction of you are aware of/even mildly interested in my #hotscoops posts but I quit instagram and it is very hard when Lew Lachance writes a letter to the editor because I really feel like his letters should be shared with the whole world. So for anyone who has been missing him, I here present today's #LaChance banger, perhaps the greatest one of all time. As always, I encourage you to read it out loud, slowly, and with emotional emphasis where appropriate:

Good gravy, I almost forgot pizza. !!!!!!!

Have you ever met this man in person? I feel like we all have a lot to learn.

No, I would love to. I can't even imagine what he looks like. For awhile it seemed like he lived in Florida but still subscribed to his hometown paper, but now I think he's actually here in town, because he writes obsessively about very specific aspects of traffic and roadways downtown. In fact this is an unusual LaChance letter in that it doesn't ever get around to obeying traffic laws!

I like the hotscoops posts and encourage their continuance for whatever that is worth.

There is a local paper in Marin County, CA called the Point Reyes Light that has a well known “police blotter” column that is kind of like tweet length versions of this...”Multiple reports of cow wandering onto neighbors field remain uncofirmed” kind of thing.

Yes we used to have that too! It was amazing, but they hardly ever run it anymore.
One was a lady who called in because some neighborhood louts had tied helium balloons to a dead raccoon and it was "floating" in her yard (floating was in quotes)

dang I wonder why they stopped doing it

"Wait, we must mention Spring."

Ooooh I love these Hot Scoops please keep them coming forever!

Well I do have to say the police blotter was always a guilty pleasure for me--my dad is a newspaperman and strongly did not believe in running such a thing in his papers; he said it was unethical and unneighborly, particularly how in the blotter they print the FULL NAME AND ADDRESS of anyone who gets arrested for any reason--just the arrest! Not even waiting until a trial/conviction, which would be bad enough! Can you believe that's legal?--so then it's in the paper that your neighbor got a DUI or something, it's very fucked up. You could also argue that it serves as propaganda--look at all our good officers doing good work, and often getting into charming hijinks! etc. Still, it's hard to imagine that either of these concerns would be why they stopped running it. Maybe whoever edited it quit and nobody else wanted to take it on?

I do miss them though, despite it all. The good ones were so good. They were often such a window into the quirky life of a small town in a way I loved. Floating raccoons; menacing roosters refusing to leave porches; home invasions that turn out to just be the person's cat "being verbal"; kids running away from home to go meet the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles; all manner of arcane decades-long rural neighborly disputes bubbling up in bizarre ways (one of them involved dynamite); a "screaming male" who was singing and spring cleaning his apartment and had multiple people call the cops because they thought someone was being murdered

I miss/love/need hot scoops. Also, paper and test comments! Miss those.

"but is it wrong to enjoy it?"

Love these, please don't ever stop scoopin'

Frivolity feels wrong right now, but at the same time, I feel like maybe you need this as much as I didn't realize I did.

I'm determined to keep this forum updated on the avian menace that continues to threaten the prairies

https://edmonton.ctvnews.ca/canada-gees ... -1.4972032

EDMONTON -- A pair of feathered friends have been making their presence known in downtown Edmonton this week.

Two Canada geese seem to have taken a liking to the corner of Jasper Ave. and 102 Street.

“It’s different,” said Cst. Troy Forester of the Edmonton Police Service, whose beat takes him to the area regularly.


“Probably has to do with the COVID,” he said. “They made a home here when there was nobody on the streets and the wildlife kind of took over and now they’re established.”

But Forester’s theory seems to be one of many.

“I think over the years they realized that nobody would harm them,” said Mat McIntyre, whose been working in the area as a courier for over 10 years. “You know, if you walk by nobody will scare them, you know, and they get used to that.”

“My office overlooks the top of Manulife and there were a couple of geese there that had babies there last spring, so it might be the same ones,” said Carol Chovanec.

“Maybe they’re just used to people and not scared of them,” said Duncan Lee before walking past the geese.

The couple has been making the rounds on social media, creating all kinds of comedic opportunity.

One reddit-poster writing: “Those geese quite literally had to fight off the gang that usually runs that area.”

Another commented: “I for one welcome our new goose overlords.”

Regardless of where they came from, how long they’re staying and where they’ll go next, for now, no-one seems to mind that they’re there.

“It’s a bit of a morale boost for the troubling times that we’re in right now,” said Cst. Forester.

in related news: https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/en/2020/10/08 ... orld-news/