The Embarrassment of Minnesota

No, I am not referring to the Minnesota Vikings. The title belongs to the state's "leading" broadsheet, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, which constantly goes out of its way to demonstrate its parochialism and its condescending foolishness. Tomorrow's education in Strib madness comes from this article -- if you can call it that -- from Bill McAuliffe, a "rap" retrospective of 2003. In this case, "rap" replaces the more accurate "atrociously bad poetry", as even a quick read demonstrates:

Prince Roger Nelson's in the Rock Hall of Fame.

Purple is his color and music's his game.

And the orchestra's one hundred, it's a real grand dame.

With a brand new conductor, Osmo Vanska by name!

Jesse Ventura got his portrait on the wall.

Got a chokehold on "The Thinker" and he's lookin' real bald.

He's smoking a stogie, lookin' like he's got it all.

So why'd they have to put him in the downstairs hall?

I'm no great poet, but this is a featured article in a newspaper that pretends to take itself seriously (and when I say featured, I mean it is given a prominent ten-line display box on the Strib's main web page, with bold oversized headline). It's awful; it's not even a passable rip-off of rap, which I don't prefer but can be written well by people who know what they're doing. This reads more like a "rap" in a movie that gets performed by the clueless idiot who wants to fake people into thinking he's cool. In other words, it's an embarrassment, and any editorial staff that decides this rises to the level of a featured article either admits that they have nothing of substance to offer their readers, or holds their readers and community in such contempt that they don't care what dreck they serve up.

And if you think the written version is horrid, you should listen to the audio version that the 'newspaper' provides. It's the kind of rap you imagine your grandfather trying at the local karaoke bar; it's absent of any insight, and is so monotone and dispassionate that you could swear the singer performed it while sleepwalking. Un-freakin'-believable -- you have to experience it to comprehend its worthlessness. The Strib manages to "rap" up 2003 by proving beyond any doubt that they are the laughingstock of journalism.

Now that you have read this post, read the most recent entries at the new Captain's Quarters at http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/!