Isn't it About... Time?

Call me old fashioned, but I love to read the newspaper.

Sure, it makes your hands all black and inky. It smells funny, and after a couple weeks, it starts to multiply itself and suddenly you're buried in a sea of ads, comics, and old news.

But I love it all the same. All the memories I have of a regular weekday evening at home involve my dad hiding behind one. (No, we weren't that badly behaved.) He just liked to be informed. And maybe he liked to look too busy to do the dishes... Or that could have been just me.

Reading the newspaper made me feel grown up and well-read. (Of course, I only read the comics and the movie listings, but trust me - reading the wisdom of Calvin & Hobbes on a daily basis can make one feel very mature!)

Anyway, now that the only free T.V. is the pixelated mess they call "digital", and not actually really free (with the cost of converter boxes, antennas, or new HDTV's), the newspaper is not just a sweet tradition or past-time; it's my window to the world! Everything I know about politics, movies, news, etc. I owe to my daily paper. I thought one day I might even owe my career to it.

One of my many aspirations was to be a movie critic for the newspaper. But then I found out you had to watch the crappy movies as well as the good. So I changed my mind. I figured even better, I could become one of those journalists who got to write about anything or nothing. How cool would that be?! But then I heard it's a pretty cutthroat biz, writing about nothing. Who knew?

So I ended up being a blogger who writes about the movies I choose and anything or nothing else I want to write about! Dream come true!! .... Except I don't get paid. Bummer. What was I blogging about anyway? Oh yeah. Newspapers.

Specifically The Deseret News. They just started an online tool called the "Family Media Guide". It's still in the testing stage, but users can rate movies based on how they thought they should be rated - BRILLIANT!, how good they were, and the bottom line - if they were really worth your time.

Because even though you may have left a movie thinking, "What a waste of 8 (or 10 or 12) bucks! I want my money back!", isn't it even worse to have left a movie thinking, "What a waste of my life! I want my two hours back!"??

After all, we can always earn more money. But we live on only borrowed time.