Blood pressure time

We’ve not been getting out to Sunday brunch as much over the last few months. Nothing sinister about it, it’s just we’ve been out of town, or our Sunday morning schedule has been, in some other fashion, disrupted. More normalcy to come, I hope.

The tradition for Sunday brunch is that, after church, we go to Le Peep. We bring in selected bits of the newspaper and, depending on who got to sleep in Sunday morning, that person gets to sit next to Katherine and make sure she doesn’t smear syrup in her hair.

Regardless of Katherine duty, we usually both get some newspaper reading in. Margie grabs the front section. I grab the opinion section.

Margie keeps joking that she’s going to forbid me from reading the opinion section, sooner or later. It seems I spend much of the time reading it with bits of steam whisping from my ears, blood popping out of the pores on my forehead, and wadding up forks into neat, tidy little balls. Dealing with Katherine actually reduces the stress of reading the editorials, op-eds, and letters to the editor.

I do it anyway, because it can be a great distilled source of news. I don’t read about everything going on during the week, after all. One day, when I’m retired, I’ll sit and read the paper from one end to the other, every day. Assuming we still have papers. But for now, it’s headlines only, so the opinion section lets me find out what else I missed.

Still, it’s such an exercise in general dunderheadedness, it defies belief. Ill-informed venting on stuff no blogger would ever say with a straight face, no matter how extreme to either wing s/he was. Old canards and new ones, oversimplistic analyses, buzz words instead of sound discourse, ignorance sprayed in all direction in pursuit of winning rhetorical points — and those are just the op-eds … the letters to the editor are really bad.

Lileks has a fine piece this morning about just such an article in his local paper. Maybe one day when I’m retired, I’ll have time to fisk every idiotic commentary in my local paper. Probably not.

One phenominon he notes in op-eds is the YWP, defined as follows:

Anyone who writes opinion pieces should consider whether their piece contains a YWP, or “Yeah, Whatever” Point. The YWP is the moment where half your audience automatically stops reading because they know exactly where this is going, and they’ve been there a thousand times before. Sometimes the YWP is triggered by a phrase, but it’s usually a statement of fact that betrays a certain breathless hysteria in the author. In most cases the YWP is triggered by the assertion that we have gone far beyond the standard push-me-pull-you of politics, and have entered a dangerous age in which all we hold dear shall be snatched from our hands, torn to pieces and washed away in a torrent of tears. Sometimes it’s the UN and the Contrail pilots who are responsible. Sometimes it’s the undead Halliburton Zombie Army. Either side is perfectly capable of generating a YWP, and on any given day either side usually does.

Margie will be glad to know that I’ve learned to stop reading after reaching those YWPs. That’s helped my blood pressure some. It also means I’m a lot more likely to get to the end of the section before brunch is over.

(Lileks also, in the same daily post, has some nice words for Pirates of the Caribbean, and some not-so-nice for Chevy’s restaurants. I can’t vouch for the former, but he’s spot-on with the latter.)