I Re-discover a National Treasure

Gene Weingarten has been described as a ‘national treasure’. I agree – he’s the funniest, insightful writer alive that I know of. Better even than the great Mark Twain, or the hilarious Dave Barry, or any of the exceedingly funny stand-up comedians I’ve seen. Too bad we don’t have George Carlin or Lenny Bruce around any more.

After the Washington Post canceled Weingarten, and also the Style Invitational weekly word joke contest, and their monthly “Skywatch” feature on astronomy, I despaired.

I seriously thought of canceling my subscription to WapPo. But as a former newsman myself, many decades ago, and and having delivered the Washington Daily News every weekday afternoon all through junior high, I want daily newspapers to continue. Plus, the paper itself gets plenty of use for avoiding messes when doing projects of any sort. So I didn’t, but I also really missed reading GW.

Today was my lucky day: I was reminded by something, somewhere, that GW is available in something called ‘substack’, which I had avoided investigating until now. I finally decided to look up “Gene Weingarten Blog” and found it. He is still funny, but if you want to read it regularly then you have to pay an additional $5 per month. Fooey. It was certainly cheaper for me to have it be part of my monthly WaPo subscription (even though that cost has risen dramatically, with the almost complete collapse of advertising. Look at a microfilm image of any newspaper or magazine of 50 years ago with their counterparts today, and you will see an amazing difference. I would estimate that the majority of the actual printed space on the pages of most newspapers or magazinwere *mostly* consisted of advertising. And the advertisers have mostly jumped on-line, so entities like Facebook or Google mostly are advertisers)

A treat awaits you if you go there: a cleverly-edited clip of Tucker Carlson seeming to apologize for all those lies. Here is the

link. I hope it works for you. Let me know in the comments if it doesn’t work.

https://geneweingarten.substack.com/p/atucker-punch

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