Category: F*** You, You Whining F***

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F*** You, You Whining F***: 8/5/08

Why are newspapers falling to pieces? There’s a perfect storm of reasons, including the destruction of the diurnal newscycle, the obliteration of their local classified ad market by Craiglist and its ilk, and increases in paper and distribution costs.

Then there’s the fact that they publish crappy, irrelevant opinion articles. Case in point: today’s Whining F***, Richard Cohen of the Washington Post. A few weeks ago, Cohen wrote an Andy Rooneyesque rant about kids today and their crazy tattoos. Today? He complains that Amazon is destroying The Book by trying to “digitize everything in sight” and make us all buy Kindles.

See, Amazon is “inadvertently thinking of ways to make the world worse for children and for the grown-ups who love them to pieces” by, um, offering people options for how they buy and read books (and not trying to end world hunger and/or take Rush Limbaugh off the air: seriously). I support independent bookstores over chain stores; I love the serendipity factor of walking among the shelves of a well-stocked used bookstore.

That said, I really love Amazon’s ability to find virtually any book that I’m looking for, and I love the Kindle’s ability to get me a book within moments of my ordering it, like it did last evening after I read a sample of Jimmy Breslin’s new book, The Good Rat.

Here’s my favorite — by which I mean, “most befuddling” — passage from Mr. Cohen’s cranky rant regular column, which was published in one of the largest newspapers in the country:

I used to frequent one in New York — Books and Co., now closed — that recommended certain kinds of books. It led me to Joseph Roth, the great central European writer of the interwar period, and Thomas Bernhard, the eccentric Austrian who so hated his country he wouldn’t permit his plays to be staged there. I read all of Bernhard and all of Roth. What joy — although Bernhard, to tell the truth, was sometimes a bit of a slog.

Can Amazon do anything like that? Does Kessel — “We wake up every day thinking about digital,” he once told the New York Times — even know who Roth was? Roth killed himself in Paris. At least he never knew that one day he might be digitized.

So, while we weren’t looking, Amazon must have updated its store and removed all “you might be interested in” suggestions as well as the reader reviews that offer up just these sorts of associations. Or Richard Cohen is a Whining F***.

Any suggestions for his next column topic?

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F*** You, You Whining F***: 7/21/08

In today’s Wall Street Journal, there’s an article about how customers are asking Starbucks not to close their favorite locations, following the chain’s disclosure of the 600 stores is plans to close. The two complainants in the article come from different worlds, Bloomfield, NM and Manhattan. The person from NM contends that her townspeople won’t miss the store itself, but that its absence may keep other businesses from seeing the town as a good place to set up shop. Since I live in a town that has no Starbucks but does have a Chinese restaurants where, in the words of my wife, “it doesn’t even taste like food,” I can understand that business stigma.

However, the other person they interviewed was priceless:

Ms. Walker is in charge of consolidating 525 people from seven of her company’s New York offices into a new building in January. The Starbucks inside that building, at Madison Avenue and 44th Street, “was something that we were using to psych people up” about the move, she said.

Her hopes were dashed last week when Starbucks released the list of the stores it plans to close. She jumped on the Internet to find a phone number for the company’s main office so she can ask officials to reconsider. “Knowing Starbucks, there’s probably [another] one within a few blocks,” she said. “But that’s probably two blocks too far.”

Two things for Ms. Walker:

  1. go to the Starbucks Store Locator and you’ll see that there’s a Starbucks across the street from your building as well as another one down the block on your side of the street, and
  2. f*** you, you whining f***.

I’m hoping to make this the first installment in a series of smackdowns. If you can think of a better title for this, please send it over.