Writing a newspaper column is something of a slog. Often it involves literally hours of sitting at your computer, skimming the information compiled by people with “hustle”—which is a euphemism for “laughably low salaries”—who actually make their living by leaving their offices and scribbling down the things that other people say and do, then breezily stringing this information together under the auspice of a “thesis” that you pretend to believe in because you’re already 500 words in and it’s too late to turn back now. But this is actually the easy part. The hard part is giving it what those of us the industry call a “hook,” a flashy call-out to current events and trends that gives it that extra pop—the journalistic “jazz hands,” if you will—and engages readers who might otherwise find themselves confused about why you’re wasting their time talking about something that is not “with it,” and who will then click over to Entertainment Weekly to see what exclusive production stills have been released from New Moon today.
See how that works? Through a simple call-out to something that has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with what we’re talking about but is nevertheless current, we've just snared the unwitting 18-25 demographic and forced them to pay attention to what we're saying. Yes, we’ve trapped them as easily as Jack The Wolfboy snares Belle in his, uh, wolf trap, in that scene before ArkPatz and Styles get back from the van detailing shop and… Well, sometimes it’s better to read up on these things ahead of time, but you get the idea. You know who else gets it? OC Register columnist Mark Whicker, who dropped his own Timbaland-sized hook in his Tuesday column, collecting an odds-and-ends assortment of sports trivia from the last 20 years and stringing it together as a tongue-in-cheek “primer” for Jaycee Dugard—you know, the girl who spent the last 18 years imprisoned in a shed getting repeatedly raped and twice-impregnated by Phillip Garrido. And if you think that’s bad, Whicker elucidates, she also missed out on Tiger Woods!
It doesn't sound as if Jaycee Dugard got to see a sports page.
Box scores were not available to her from June 10, 1991 until Aug. 31 of this year.
She never saw a highlight. Never got to the ballpark for Beach Towel Night. Probably hasn't high-fived in a while.
She was not allowed to spike a volleyball. Or pitch a softball. Or smack a forehand down the line. Or run in a 5-footer for double bogey.
Now, that's deprivation.
Totally. Also, you know, she was entirely cut off from the outside world for nearly 20 years, hidden under “tarps and sheds,” and deprived from the sort of life where she was not repeatedly raped and impregnated—but yeah, what about Beach Towel night? And really, no box scores? Just imagine what that must have done to her fantasy baseball league—you know, the one she fantasized about to distract her while she was being repeatedly raped and impregnated? But hey, lest you presume Whicker is one of those myopic sorts who can only view things through the prism of his own self-serving interests, he has plenty of empathy for her situation beyond lamenting the fact that she missed a few hundred helluva ballgames:
How long before she fully digests the world she re-enters? How difficult to adjust to such cataclysmic change?