RIVER CITY JOURNAL: ADVICE, LISTS IN NEWSPAPERS ARE SURE TO STIR UP READERS

I'm a reader too, and I have some things to say about cats on pills and TV's greatest moment.

Sometimes you read amazing things in newspapers. A lot of them are true.

There are Big Issues when it comes to print journalism. I don't want to trivialize those issues. I will say, however, that the people who put out newspapers try hard to separate facts from opinion. This quickly gets confusing, though, when a story reports -- factually -- what someone said, which is often that person's opinion.

Readers rarely discriminate between the newspaper's role of reporting facts and its role of expressing opinions on the Opinion page.

(If this all sounds a little dry, hang on. There's some good stuff coming.)

In addition to the Big Issues of putting out a newspaper, there are a whole lot of Little Issues too. Sometimes folks -- those who work for newspapers and those who read them while the ink is still drying on the mistakes -- spend an awful lot of time on the little stuff.

Here area couple of examples:

Wasted space

Let's talk first about the things newspapers publish that take up space needlessly. I could make a list, but it would be my list. Your list would be different, so if you want a list, go ahead and write it down.

Each week this newspaper runs an "Ask the vet" column. Veterinarians share their expertise and advice by responding to pet owners' questions. That's OK.

But this week's column had this headline: "Clinics have brochures on giving pills to cats."

What a waste of paper -- not just the paper consumed by printing that column, but also the paper that went down a rat hole to print all those brochures.

I'm not a vet. But I know cats.

I grew up with cats on the farm in Kelo Valley. They were supposed to be useful cats. They were supposed to catch mice around the house and in the barn. Mostly they lolled around the back screen door waiting for leftovers from the kitchen. Occasionally one of the cats would get its head stuck in an empty Miracle Whip jar, which is pretty funny to a young farm boy but probably not a laugh riot to the cat.

(Before you get up in arms, all cats with heads stuck in jars were quickly rescued. None died. I swear.)

If one of those farm cats got sick, it took care of itself. A vet for a farm cat? Vets were for cattle and hogs -- animals that were likely to turn into cash. As far as I know, there's never been a farm cat that turned a profit.

For more than 30 years, my wife and I had cats in our home. That ended a couple of years ago when my wife's allergist said some really nasty things about cats in regard to my wife's longstanding sinus condition.

But in those 30 years, I'd say we took our cats to vets just about as often as we took our sons to doctors and dentists. At one point a vet even recommended dental care for our 19-year-old cat. He said it might extend his life to 20. The cat, which had grown up with our sons, didn't make it to the dentist and wound up buried under the forsythia bush in the back yard.

Here's what I can tell you about giving pills to cats: Don't try. That's what vets are paid to do.

Therefore, the "Ask the Vet" column could have been really, really short, saving a lot of paper. The advice to cat owners everywhere could have simply said: "If your vet prescribes pills for your cat and expects you to get the pills into the cat, buy a dog. They'll eat anything."

See how short that is?

Speaking of lists ...

Whenever newspapers publish lists of things like "10 Sexiest Movie Stars" or "20 Good Reasons to Invest" or "Top 15 News Stories of 1998," there is always trouble.

This goes back to what I said earlier: My list and your list are going to be different, no matter what the topic is.

A while back, the American Film Institute put out its list of the 100 best movies ever made. It was pitiful list. I couldn't even come up with 20 good movies worth putting on a list. If I had it to do over today, I'd certainly add "The Other Sister," currently playing in town, to my list. It's nice to leave a movie theater feeling good about life and the world. I think that's a good way to judge movies. You might have other standards.

This week, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch ran Entertainment Weekly's list of "100 Greatest Moments in Television." Again, I doubt TV has had even 25 great moments, which means about 75 things on the list are dubious at best.

What caught my attention, however, was the fact that the advent of the remote control placed 18th on Entertainment Weekly's list.

Eighteenth!

What are these people thinking?

Everyone knows -- OK, every man in America knows -- that the remote control is the biggest single advance in civilization. Obviously, Entertainment Weekly relied on women to compile this list.

And if that wasn't bad enough, the debut of "Gunsmoke" in 1955 rated No. 47. My guess is the women at Entertainment Weekly who compiled this list weren't even born in 1955.

I don't know if Entertainment Weekly has any age-advantaged men, like myself, on the payroll, but the magazine should have hired some temps from the old-folks home or the homeless shelter to help out on this list.

So here is my list of the greatest TV moments:

1. Remote control

2. "Gunsmoke" debut

That's about enough, don't you think?

And look how much space it saved.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.