Updates, Revisions, and Reconsiderations

Today, we’re re-visiting and updating a few stories Curmie has posted this calendar year.  The First Felon’s antics are too predictably heinous to bother to mention, but his minions are still fair game.

Pete Hegseth.  Back in January, Curmie wrote that “The reason not to confirm Hegseth is that he is spectacularly unqualified for the job.  It’s not all the negatives; it’s the utter absence of any positives.”  Curmie stands by that statement; certainly any competent President, even one stupid enough to have appointed him to begin with, would have fired his ass after the Enola Gay kerfuffle and especially that Signal chat business.  Still, the fact that he remains the perfect storm of arrogance and stupidity seems pretty relevant, too.

The Cortland Standard.  Back in March, Curmie mourned the demise of the daily newspaper in the small city where he went to high school.  A couple months later, on Curmie’s anniversary, as it happens, came the story that the paper had been bought out of bankruptcy and would be back in business on a Tuesday through Saturday schedule, effective May 17.  This matters little to the overwhelming majority of readers of this blog, but it may portend a trend… we can hope.

Sarah Inama.  March was also when Curmie wrote about Ms. Inama, an Idaho middle school teacher who ran afoul of racist morons school administrators for a poster that proclaimed “Everyone is welcome here.”  Yes, really.  She is now in a new district, where administrators rejected the “guidance” of the state Censor in Chief Attorney General, who asserted the poster was political and therefore prohibited; instead, they declared in a memo sent to all staff that “‘Everyone is Welcome Here’ is the law.  It is not a political statement.”  We’ll see how this all plays out.

Melissa Calhoun.  Ms. Calhoun is believed to be the first Florida teacher fired for referring to a student by their preferred name without explicit parental permission.  Curmie described her case, up to that point, in April.  She was, indeed, de facto fired for the offense of having some respect for a student.  She claims she knew the student before the stupid law went into effect and used the offending appellation out of habit, “an unfortunate oversight.”  This may or may not be true, of course.  Over the summer, there seemed to have been a settlement by which Calhoun could keep her teaching credentials for a year of probation, but the district won’t rehire her or even allow her to volunteer for this academic year.  Calhoun is apparently looking for work outside education, and there is speculation that a lawsuit may be forthcoming.

Kilmar Abrego-Garcia.  It’s unlikely we’ll ever get to the truth about what crimes KA-G may or may not have committed years ago.  As Curmie wrote in April, the first round of this ever-evolving brouhaha was about due process, period, the end.  The feds didn’t have a case, but they sent him off to a Salvadorean gulag, anyway.  The Trump administration then dawdled when SCOTUS unanimously demanded his return.  He did eventually arrive back in the US, but was almost immediately under investigation related to that traffic stop in Tennessee in 2022. 

We’re now hearing the feds claim that he was smuggling illegal aliens because he was in MS-13.  Previous attempts to show such gang membership have been laughably inept, but now there are “co-conspirators” ready to testify against him… in exchange for something, no doubt.  Anyway, now the government wants to send him off to Liberia, of all places.  And right now.  Don’t ask why, Gentle Reader, you probably don’t want to try to track the tortured logic.  The chances are pretty good that literally everyone involved in this case on either side has told at least one egregious lie.  But once again, due process is the issue. 

Boy My Greatness.  Back in September, Curmie wrote about the suppression of a student-directed production of Zoe Senese-Grossberg’s play at the University of Central Oklahoma.  The university decided to blame the utterly unwarranted censorship on the theatre department.  Curmie commented, “Gentle Reader, if you believe the decision was de facto made by the theatre department, Curmie has some ocean-front property in Kansas he’s willing to sell to you for cheap.”  No, this level of stupidity could only be perpetrated by administrators. 

UCO juniors Maggie Lawson and Liberty Welch might have been a little staggered by the abrupt (and stupid) cancellation of their play on campus, but it didn’t take them long to recover.  They told their cast that they had the option to leave because trying to produce it on their own was going to be more complicated than a production at school.  Curmie, with decades of experience in such matters, knew exactly what the response would be: “rock on, we want to do it.”

The company started a GoFundMe, hoping for $2000 but expecting “like, $200 and, like, a high five. Like, ‘you go girls!’”  They brought in just short of $10,000.  And they found a venue.  And they opened their show on October 23, two weeks after they were originally scheduled to go up at OCU.  Word is, it went well.  Of course it did.  Those extra barriers just added another layer of incentive.  Curmie is proud of those students, even if he does hope they’ll get the hell out of Oklahoma so they won’t need to go through this crap every time they want to do something more controversial than Harvey or You Can’t Take It with You.

Scams and Things That Smell Like Scams.  Curmie wrote in particular about the barrage of letters pretending to be from an insurance company with which Curmie was already affiliated (they weren’t, of course), and an ad for the UpSide app with an absurdly exaggerated claim.  Well, Curmie heard that same UpSide ad just a couple of days ago, and yes, they’re still making shit up.  He also got another scammy letter about his car insurance… and last week one about his homeowner’s insurance.  At least they’re branching out?

But the commercials for various gambling apps and “you must act now” crap aimed at folks on Medicare are getting annoyingly ubiquitous.  Back in the days when there was a functioning Consumer Protection Bureau, there’d be a chance to get the objectively false claims off the air.  The Trump administration is taking notes for their own next scam.

The Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.  The good news is that none of the nine universities contacted by the DOE signed on to that absurd document.  Seven, including Curmie’s undergraduate alma mater, rejected it outright; the other two supplied comments but didn’t agree to the terms.  Another trio of universities, including Curmie’s doctoral alma mater, were contacted after the first nine schools had made their decisions.  Exactly how specific things got is unclear—university officials say they were not asked to sign the document, but made it clear they wouldn’t do so, anyway.  It remains to be seen if the Trump administration is willing to listen to what university leaders are saying or if they’ll keep up the blustering and bullying tactics.

The Short-Lived Truce in Palestine.  Last month, Curmie credited Donald Trump for his efforts in bringing about a ceasefire and prisoner exchange in the Mideast.  He did warn that “There is too much animosity, too much destruction, too much history, to be overly optimistic.”  Sometimes Curmie hates being right.  The peace lasted less than a week, and there doesn’t seem to be a lot of optimism for the future, although we can but hope that Trump and others will keep trying.  At least the hostages on both sides were released…

New topic next time!

R.I.P., Cortland Standard

An instantly recognized building if you grew up where Curmie did.

Curmie doesn’t know if everyone who has lived in multiple places thinks this way, but when asked where he’s “from,” he generally responds with the city where he went to high school: in his case, Cortland, New York.  There are five (yes, five!) other towns or cities where he’s spent more time than he did in Cortland, and the number of days he’s spent there in the last thirty years or so is in single digits, but it still remains, in his mind, at least, his hometown.

At the risk of sounding like a MAGA, Curmie confesses that the fact that an average of two local newspapers shut down every week in this country hadn’t really made an impression on him until… you know… it directly affected him.  Today is the last day of publication for the Cortland Standard, which has filed for bankruptcy after over 157 years of operation.

We had the paper delivered to our doorstep every day for the time I lived in Cortland.  Virtually everyone referred to it as the “Substandard,” but actually it was quite a good paper, or at least it was a half-century ago.  There was national and international news from agencies like the AP and UPI, as well as coverage of what was happening in Albany.  But mostly, there was local news.

Yes, a lot of the stories were rather quaint.  Curmie’s name (and often, photo) appeared in the Standard’s pages on several occasions for such relatively inconsequential accomplishments as going on a field trip or appearing in the high school play.  But the paper did serve to bring the community together.  Getting your name in the paper was kind of a big deal for adolescents.  (Perhaps it still is?)  It sounds kind of squishy to say that it made us feel like we mattered, but it was true. 

Moreover, in the pre-internet days, the local newspaper was our primary local news source.  The television stations in Syracuse to the north or Binghamton to the south didn’t cover our area unless something really important had happened, and if they did, it would likely be a 90-second segment, offering about as much information as a six column-inch article.

We’d check the Standard to see how the high school basketball team did in that road game.  We’d be looking for something else altogether but come across a story about someone we knew—or the parent, sibling, or child of someone we knew.  It was a big enough city, with a population of about 20,000, that the “everybody knows everybody” line wasn’t literally true, but seldom did a day go by without my knowing personally someone whose name appeared in those pages.

And that doesn’t even count the coverage of local sports.  (Obviously, Curmie knew a lot of the athletes at his high school.)  Predictably, there was a lot more of that than anything else, but actually that makes sense.  There are generally two or three sports going on at the same time of year, and between the high schools and the college, there were local results to report virtually every day.  It wasn’t that the high school choir concert wasn’t covered; but there were fewer such concerts in a year than there were basketball games in a fortnight.

There are, of course, manifold reasons why small-town newspapers are folding.  In their farewell statement (linked above), the paper’s staff identifies the obvious: declining readership and increasing cost.  The former is certainly understandable: the internet and social media certainly lead to a sense of isolation, even as they pretend to do the opposite.  There are more and more texts and IMs and fewer phone calls… and even fewer “let’s go get coffee” moments.

We also come to concentrate on our Facebook friends or those who follow us X or whatever, at the expense of keeping up with those who don’t have as much of an internet presence.  Curmie is as guilty of this anyone else, by the way.  He’s pretty much lost touch with many of his closest high school friends.  Of course, this is not at all intended to suggest that he doesn’t value those who may indeed come to read these words.

The access to free news content on the internet also contributes to the demise of smaller outlets, even if they also operate a website, especially if it’s behind a paywall.  Why pay for national and international news if you can get the same story at no cost?  And now the question becomes: is the local news, about people I’m less and less likely to know or care about, sufficient to warrant the price of a subscription?  (Curmie hasn’t subscribed to the local paper here in Texas for twenty years or thereabouts.)  And, if I’m a businessperson, why should I pay to advertise in a medium with declining reach, particularly, as is likely, if the remaining readers aren’t in my target demographic?

But Curmie also calls your attention, Gentle Reader, to the one specific factor highlighted in the paper’s closing editorial: “increasing costs, including an expected 25% tariff on newsprint.”  Translation: they get their newsprint from Canada, and the Tangerine Toddler is threatening escalating tariffs.  The reasonable rationale for the US to impose tariffs is to protect American businesses from unfair competition.  In the hands of a reckless buffoon, however, the result is pushing at least one business over the edge into bankruptcy.  Such is life in Trumpistan.

This essay isn’t about pointing the finger, however.  It’s just an old man’s reminiscence of a time when communities mattered, when Big Tech didn’t dominate the information landscape, and when the local newspaper was a cherished part of small-town life.

R.I.P., Cortland Standard.  You had a great run, and you will be missed by many, even by those of us who haven’t read you in hard-copy in decades.