In the News...

Lately I’ve been off the media. Cold Turkey. Just haven’t been watching, reading, or paying attention in any way. It’s quite refreshing, but I have to admit to this twinge of guilt that I don’t really know what’s going on. Or at least, not knowing what "they" tell me is going on. Maybe I should get back on track… maybe I shouldn’t… any thoughts?

Anyway, that was all just to say that the other day I was leafing through one of the Pakistani papers, which I guess kind of makes the first paragraph kind of redundant. But I wasn’t really reading the paper, I was just skimming the headlines because I can usually get a chuckle or two. It’s not quite like the Ugandan papers that would make me laugh out loud with their outrageous headlines. I remember one article on how parents were shocked to find sexual goings on in boarding schools which was titled "Homos Storm Schools" and one on how women in border villages shouldn’t be trading their wares outside the country called, "Poverty Blamed on Women" or even just the self-explanatory "Man kills wife with hoe in front of family."

But here it’s not the headlines themselves that make me chuckle, it depends on who writes the story. Generally, it seems that any smaller stories or brief news items are attributed with the line "By Our Staff Reporter." But what gets me is that it’s centred directly under the headline and the font size isn’t too much smaller. So if you read it all in one go you get things like:
"Three Killed in Hit in Run by our staff reporter."

Or

"Woman Assaulted in Attempted Robbery by our staff reporter."

Even misdemeanors like,

"Streets Littered with Garbage by our staff reporter."

Somebody better lock this guy up! He’s a menace! And to think, he even has the gall to write about it afterwards.