Usurping the Olympic spirit

I've previously documented my extreme hatred for the Olympic games and the crappy television programming that results.

Just how many interviews with Michael Phelps' mother does anyone really need anyway?

Thankfully, the good people at Animal Planet, the network which brought us the Puppy Bowl, are there to help me through it.

Get ready for the 2008 Puppy Games. The show will air Friday night, opposite the colossal disasterpiece that has become the opening ceremonies.

My television viewing decisions couldn't get any easier than this.

Sundown

Getting thinner is usually a good thing -- but not when you're talking about my daily newspaper.

Last week the Baltimore Sun, my morning subway read, took another in its seemingly endless turns for the worst and completed an additional round of buyouts and layoffs. This cycle witnessed the loss of another 55 people.

Gone are the likes of Gregory Kane, Mike Himowitz, Roch Kubatko, Greg Garland, and John Wostendiek, as well as many behind-the-scenes players who kept the paper going every day.

Gone is a stand-alone business section.

And gone is any confidence a person could have in this once-great paper.

Yes, I'm more than just a casual news reader. I'm a media junkie, or maybe a media snob. But I also have a long history with this newspaper. I've been reading it every day since I learned to read. My very first job was selling subscriptions to The Sun.

And now, when I see an ad running on the front page of a this newspaper, I weep.

Who would have guessed that only a year after its inception, The Baltimore Examiner, the free daily tabloid, would become the big guy in town? And moreover, who would have thought it would happen due to the Sun's own self-cannibalism?

Had The Sun paid any attention to the growing popularity of the Internet, I doubt it would face such a predicament. Instead, it casts off its popular bloggers and scrambles to function with what's left. I really sympathize with the Sun staffers who must truly do more with less. I know some of them, and I know what they're facing.

At what point did it seem like a good idea for The Sun to turn its efforts to b, its youth-focused publication where an in-depth story gets no more than four inches? Every day, I face several b hawkers and I grow angrier and angrier when I think that this is how the Tribune Company views my generation.

Please believe me when I say that I really don't care about someones greatest pet peeve, as submitted by text message in less than 100 characters. I don't need the Cliff Notes version of your newspaper which amounts to little more than borrowed wire briefs and unattributed summaries.

Oh, the poor Baltimore Sun... or poor, as Sam Zell would have you believe. I'll keep reading you everyday like I have since I was in elementary school, but it'll never be the same.