What in the name of all things holy and profane is going on in that most precious of printed real estate, Maureen Dowd’s column space in the NYT?
There is nothing–no news peg (unless the Christie Brinkley thing is one, but I’m not American-pop-culture with-it enough, halfway around the world, to know), not grander meaning, not even a Hallmark holiday–that indicates why in the world we’d spend July 6 (I’m a week behind, but it’s still the #1-emailed article, apparently) listening to the printed world’s most famous redhead (sorry, Samantha Power) quote a priest who talks to high school kids about who not to marry. Seriously, what’s this doing in the middle of my NYT? It feels kind of like watching a TV show you taped, but someone switched the channel in the middle and didn’t apologize.
The only thing that makes sense to me about the column is the one part she didn’t write:
“Thomas L. Friedman is off today.“
Seems it caused such “interest”, at least with the NYC electronic media elites, that the priest has been interviewed on NBC Today’s Show, and on CNN – who knows where else. I didn’t read Dowd’s article, but I puzzled over it’s coverage on air! He’ll probably be on OPRAH next week, with Brinkley’s divorce lawyer. ugh
That column ran on the Sunday of a major holiday weekend in the US. It’s easy to figure out why there was no news peg. Dowd wrote it far in advance and threw in a little topicality so that she could have a long weekend. Personally, I don’t blame her. It still ended up being one of the top 5 e-mailed stories for the entire week.
I had no idea being a Pulitzer prize winning columnist was so easy! So all I need to do is find someone who is vaguely articulate, construct a couple of grammatically correct sentences and then quote the heck out of aforementioned vaguely articulate person. I am seriously considering a career change now that I’ve got this figured out.
That’s funny – I noticed that too! It was stuck there in the top ten list. And, it sucks. Is it supposed to be interesting because it’s a priest (ha! someone with NO romantic relationship experience must know something we don’t!)?