squirrels

by Kimberly A. Cook           (Twitter@ WarriorTales)

Girding myself for the big change coming to my life next month; the daily newspaper goes to Wednesday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. While this may not seem like a big deal to digital natives who popped out of the womb with a laptop, for us vintage folk it’s a major life change.

It is part of my morning routine to fetch the newspaper. One letter writer to the paper wanted to know how he was going to explain it to his dog who gets a treat when he brings in the newspaper. I’m thinking that guy is going to have to become Santa paperboy and place a dummy one outside on the porch each night.

Wondering how all this switch to the web was going to actually affect the reporters, the Sunday edition offered up this explanation of how the reporters would send in “Twitter-bits” of news, I’m going to call them, then the “curators” (formerly called editors) will try to muck all these bits together, grab a visual and throw it on the web. Okay, he said it better, but that’s what I’m thinking it sounds like.

Read the article here: http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2013/09/peter_bhatia_digital_focus_mea.html

SO, it seems speed wins in this new era of digital journalism, but I thought that traffic safety ad said speed kills. We shall see. But even more fun for me was the serendipity I will miss of the daily paper where I found a huge squirrel article on the flip side of the editorial article. Titled, “Zapped by Squirrel Power,” in our paper, it is a reprint written by Jon Mooallem with the New York Times News Service.

Fascinating article about why the power grid goes down when squirrel’s  fry themselves by making a “bad connection.” I love squirrels. But this writer has been tracking how many squirrels are causing power outage havoc. Talks about how the power grid folks are trying to prevent squirrels from coming to bad endings.

Which made we wonder if the squirrel scientists are talking to the power grid engineers or if we can’t get some behavior squirrel modification training programs going. Those thoughts confirm I need to get off knitting sabbatical and get back to writing because my muse is running rampant with scissors.

So when I went to find the link to the original squirrel article, imagine my surprise when it ranked as one of the top New York Times articles right now. Squirrels are big nationwide. Who knew?

So what do power squirrels and my daily newspaper going to a four-day publication schedule have in common? I’m hoping they both don’t toast themselves in the process. Because the feature articles I used to write for the newspaper and my blog posts now are both longer than a “twitter-bit,” and they take some time to write; and that’s not a bad thing.

(Squirrel article here. You know you want to read it.) http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/01/opinion/sunday/squirrel-power.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0