Sunday, January 15, 2012

Sunday morning

I love Sunday mornings. The L.A. Times, the Sunday Guardian and Observer, a leisurely breakfast, brooding about what to do the rest of the day, today quite a few class and other mental chores.

I'm a breakfast kind of guy. You can mess with my lunch and my dinner, tell me I take a pill for each, but don't mess with my breakfast. Breakfast has several incarnations:

  • Standard #1: oatmeal, with or without a slice of scrapple under it, with or without an egg on top.
  • Standard #2: scrapple and eggs, with or without potatoes.
  • Standard #3: sausage and eggs, with or without potatoes.
  • Standard #4: comfort breakfast, toast dampened with milk, with or without a slice of scrapple on top, with an egg on top,
  • Occasional #1: going out for breakfast, usually to a regular spot (Chinese restaurant, Nobby's, Fat City, McDonald's (!)), sometimes adventurous. (I like McD's sausage muffin, sorry ha ha).
  • Occasional #2: something different at home, like hotcakes or scrambled eggs.
  • Adventure #1: something new at home, like the recent wonderful hash brown quiche.
My favorite teacher Bob Trevor was a breakfast man, as I learned when I visited him in Honolulu after he retired. A wonderful trip! Especially since I got to visit with him before he died shortly thereafter. I fell in love with Hawaii, being taken to non-touristy spots, discovering it was no more expensive to live there than in Portland. I could easily live in Honolulu. At any rate, Bob had his breakfast routine, the same restaurant, the same booth, the same waitress, usually the same order -- my kind of man! I envied his retirement routine, as a matter of fact. I'm also a routine kind of guy.

Today is more busy than I like a Sunday to be but that's life. There's a sprinkling of snow outside and I haven't heard if more is coming or what. I'll find out. It's a holiday Monday so if it comes, let it come then so I don't get a class canceled. My syllabus is so tight, missing a class upsets me.

The Sunday Guardian and Observer costs 75 cents and is over-whelming, with over 50 stories on the arts. Over 50! Obviously I don't read them all but I skim the headlines and read many. 

In the 1960s the Oregonian's Northwest Magazine was like that to a lesser scale, a supplement full of great stories that you kept around to read all week -- this is when it was printed on newsprint with Joe Bianco as editor. It later got slick, began to deteriorate, and then disappeared.

It is astounding to me that more newspapers, including the Big O, don't produce a really, really first rate electronic model for online, Kindle, iPhone, iPad and other device reading. The production costs are negligible now, it's all about design and great writing. The L.A. Times does a great job. The Big O is barely passable. Why? I know the writers are in town, many already working there. Money, I presume.

So some of the town's best writers for the Big O have gone onto projects of their own, like Bob Hicks' Art Scatter and Barry Johnson's Oregon Arts Watch. Each is first rate. Apparently they had to do this on their own.

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