Publicity photograph of Woody Allen in the early 1970s (photograph by Jerry Kupcinet, extracted from a larger image, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)
Reading the Insight section of today’s San Francisco Chronicle, I found it difficult to avoid recalling my favorite Woody Allen joke. This is the one that he told in his “narrator” role in the movie Annie Hall. Rather than the usual one-liner, this is a two-line joke about an exchange between two old women at a resort in the Catskills:
- The food here is terrible.
- Yes, and the portions are so small!
This joke may be familiar to those reading this site about seven years ago, when I took to task a Hyperion Records album of Camille Saint-Saëns’ Opus 78 (the third symphony in C minor, best known as the “Organ” symphony.
In today’s situation, the “small portions” refer to the text content. The Insight section consists of only four pages (a single sheet of newsprint); but there are barely two pages of text. Mind you, the most impact comes from Jack Ohman’s political cartoon, which fills a little more than a third of the second page; but these days I have come to expect that such cartoons deliver more content than much (most) of the text sources.
To be fair, I have come to accept the hard truth that readers of “print journalism” are a dying breed. There are now a generous number of television channels committed to news and/or opinion. The downside, of course, is that viewers tend to tune in to the opinions they want to hear, reminding me of the line from the old “Dally News” song: “Don’t try to confuse my mind with facts!” Perhaps, like just about everything in the “physical world,” rationality is subject to entropy (the transition from order to disorder), which, as the laws of thermodynamics tell us, is irreversible!
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