The Monkey King's Used Primate Emporium and Book Reviews

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Lemony Snicket, �The Vile Village�

Started Sept 20 � Finished Sept 21, 2006; 260 pages. Posted 09 January 2007

�So, how�s the new job?�

As should be expected, particularly during a dead time moment between two people sitting in a bar, this question has come up a lot. But this time it came up when I wasn�t working behind the bar, and thus I had a chance to give an honest answer.

Of course and as also should be expected, since I was on the receiving end of the bar I was willing and ready to expound on all the indignities and affronts that one would expect from a newspaper editor. Of which there are many, let me tell you. First you have the crazies, the ones who will write a four page letter to the editor � in crayon � and then photocopy same said letter so that the message can be sent to every single publication in the country. It�s a time saving device, certainly, and yet you have to wonder why they decided to use full-color copies. Apparently, one will only fully understand the complexities of how the Reagan administration was never legally removed from power, and Ed Meese�s head still dictates foreign policy from amidst a bowl of rice noodles in Wisconsin, if said message is written in raw umber.

Then there are the artists. Holy fuckfire. First of all, allow me to say if you call yourself an artist, you�re an asshole. Second... fucking get over yourselves, you assholes. Sorry, I meant artists. No wait, I meant assholes. Just because you paint penises onto the foreheads of Botticelli-style children, it doesn�t make you groundbreaking. Hell, it doesn�t even make you shocking. And while it�s nice to know that you think you would make a fascinating feature (or cover story, especially as you�ve been ignored and even blackballed by the mainstream art community � and yes, that�s an actual quote), I don�t need daily reminders on your brilliance.

Speaking of press releases, and since I�m out of indignant sounding opening statements, let me just say fucking chocolate covered messiah with a chewy nougat center dressed up in a merry widow with lace garters, YOUR CAT�S BIRTHDAY IS NOT NEWSWORTHY!

Think I�m joking? Two page press release. Three photos in full color, ready for reproduction.

As for writing, I still get to do that. Matter of fact, I�ve been remiss in putting links. Not everything I write ends up on the Web site, but most of the bar reviews are there. If somebody states they want to see them in the comment section, I�ll put some links in the same section. Just to let you know, one of the places I reviewed was a Hooters.

But I am the Calendar Editor, meaning I�m mostly concentrating on liver entertainment, bar culture, and the occasional buzz event. It�s not a lot of hard news, and being a weekly paper, there isn�t a whole lot of news that we cover anyway. The majority of my job, however, deals with slugging through hundreds of spam e-mails trying to find an event that doesn�t involve enlarging your penis. Then I have to take said e-mail (or letter, or fax � and by the way, when the vegetarian society sends me three letters through the mail complete with envelope and four faxes all promoting the same event, don�t they get the irony? You know, the whole devastation of the forest thing?) and condense the three pages of superfluous material into a two sentence blurb. I then repeat the same action seven hundred million times.

Then there�s the fact that this is Hawaii, which means you have a shitload of tacky ukulele sporting tourist hooking performers who play the same club four nights a week at the same time they�ve played for the last fifteen years, all hoping they can rake in Don Ho kind of money. When you enter these types of bands in the database, you need to enter two dates � one for when you want the entry to appear in the paper, and a second one for when you want it to stop. The importance of this will become clear in a minute.

See, you don�t want to put the final end date too far in the future. Hotels close, venues switch their formats and musicians overdose. But you get tired of entering the same band playing the same club at the same time, so you switch from entering the information once a week, then extending the entry for the entire month, then six months and in some cases, you let the entry last for the year.

Of course, these entries still need to end sometime, and if you�re getting sick of the job and all the data entry, then you�ll probably start extending the cut-off date for the majority of things that you imput. But you still need an end-date. So you might as well have them end at the end of the year, right?

Right. It�s my belief there�s a reason the old calendar editor�s last day was the December 15.

This part might be a little hard to explain, but I�ll try. There are two types of publications for newspapers � Broadsheet and Tabloid. That refers to the size. Broadsheet is The New York Times. Tabloid is The New York Post. My paper is Tabloid size, and thus, the entertainment calendar has five rows of columns for each page, filled with inane press releases about your cat�s birthday.

On average, the calendar section needs 18 to 20 columns of material. I can�t give you the actual numbers, but I�ll fill in this information when I go to work tomorrow. As a rough estimate, 225 different entries are placed in the paper each week, and after they�re placed you have to edit down to make the material fit the space allotted. Then, just a week after I took over the position, I had a hard time filling 14 and a half columns. Why? Because all the entries expired with the passing of 2006 and there was suddenly nothing left in the database. Y2K+6, if you will. Hell, even if you won�t.

Then of course, Christmas is a federally mandated holiday. Christmas this year fell on a Monday. Normally, my section should be completed by Monday at noon. However since there happened to be a holiday my deadline became the Friday before.

I was informed of this on the Wednesday prior. On my first week of fully assuming the position.

Oh, ha, fucking ha. Grow up.

But fine. I did it, I got everything finished, and I got it turned in on time. Next week was even worse, since we not only lost one day because of Jesus� Birthday, but because the following Monday was New Year�s Day. Meaning my five-day workweek was now cut to three, and yet was still expected to come up with the same amount of material.

Of course, the entire experience reminded me of my college newspaper days.: woefully understaffed, staying way longer in the office that should be expected, swearing at Steve Jobs and everything Macintosh related and massive piles of marked up papers piled everywhere. The only thing different was at my current job, we didn�t throw entire bundles of newspapers at each other to break the tension and boredom.

Yet.

Anyhoo, in this situation, racing against deadline, you practically have a highlighter welded to your palm, marking up any mistake you can find. Since it�s impractical to edit on a page and on a computer at the same time, you shout across the room for other people to fix whatever mistake you come across. At this night (or rather day, as we had been at the paper for 28 hours straight and it was 2 in the morning) one of the pieces I was editing was my own investigative story involving how the school had unceremoniously fired the entire night custodial staff for alleged improprieties. Part of the story dealt with the evidence presented as reason for their dismissal, which was scant at best and erroneous at worst. The second part was the aftermath of these dismissed workers. Being fired without notice made it nigh impossible for them to find work and the result was telling.

One custodian had severe health problems, even having to make a trip to the hospital. He tried to relate his story to me in broken English, telling me about having a mild heart attack, but the attack was serious enough where they had to use the defibrillator paddles on him to re-start his heart.

Of course, with his limited English, he didn�t know the term �defibrillator paddles.� He tried to explain it to me, holding his fists out and shouting, �Clear!� and then making his arms spasm. There was a translator there, but I think she knew less Spanish than I did, and so she said he was talking about those things to shock the heart into pumping. �They�re not called zapper paddles,� she said, �but that�s what they are.�

�No problem,� I said, �I know what you�re referring to, and I�ll find out the proper term.�

2 a.m. hit, and I yelled over to the only people still working on the paper, two guys I affectionately call Monkeyboy and Mr. Sleepy. �Somebody has to call the hospital,� I said, sounding authoritative in my editor-in-chief roll, �and find out what those zapper paddles are actually called.�

�In a minute,� they both answered, squinting over different sections, trying to find mistakes of their own.

4 a.m. came around, and I looked over the new sheets of revised material. A lot of people don�t realize this, but editing doesn�t simply mean we look for mistakes in grammar and punctuation. We also have to look at every line, making sure every sentence has a period, all while presenting the piece in an aesthetically pleasing format. If the last two words of a paragraph split to the jump page, we have to try and condense the text to make it all fit neatly in the same area. While doing another pass of copyediting, I came across my own story, and �zapper paddles� was still there, segregated by brackets and printed in capital letters to make it stand out as a genuine mistake.

�Goddamn it,� I yelled, chucking a bundle of newspapers over my partition. �Somebody call the fucking hospital and find out what the real term for zapper paddles is!�

�Yeah, yeah, in a minute,� came the response, just shortly before same said bundle came flying back over the partition aimed right for my head.

Six a.m. I looked over the stories. There it was, in black and white: [ZAPPER PADDLES].

�Zapper paddles!� I screamed.

At six we took the final product down to the printer. Six hours later we were back in the office helping unload the newspaper truck. I opened the paper, found my story and went to the jump page.

[ZAPPER PADDLES].

I grabbed two bundles and threw them at Monkeyboy and Mr. Sleepy. From then on, whenever something needed to be fact checked, I would shout �Zapper Paddles!� to motivate the staff to stop what they were doing and fix the mistake.

Funny thing was, for the next week or so, I was stopped by many a faculty member complementing me on the story I did, many commenting on how well it was written.

�Really� I�d say. �Even with Zapper Paddles?�

Nobody knew what I was talking about. I already said in an earlier review that naming a drink after me was the pinnacle of what I could hope to achieve. �Some kids talk about how when they grow up, they want to be a fireman,� I�d tell people. �Or an astronaut, or the president. I just wanted a drink named after me.� But really, having a term I made up come into the general lexicon of the English language seems a lot cooler. So here�s the definition.

Zapper Paddles n. The knowledge that you fucked up, big time, but disguised it enough where the general public failed to notice.

It only needs to be used in three different mainstream media forms to get included in the OED people. Let�s get on it.

So anyway, the point of that whole tangent? There�s been a few Zapper Paddles published in the paper. And I still have my job.

I explained all this to my friend at the bar. Although she is a bartender, she had the night off, and the two of us were just drinking in the corner. But she�s such a good bartender that even then, with her simply listening to me complain, I could picture her with a bar towel, randomly wiping a non-existent spot on the bar as I groused. Finally she spoke.

�And yet, even with all this, it�s what you wanted.�

Zapper paddles.



Rating: Worth Used.

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