The Arbitrary ChuckJerry

Whether your view is that it actually runs "all the news that's fit to print" or that it's got a tradition of slanting and omitting just enough to let out its liberal bias, I assume you have at least a modicum of respect for the New York Times as a respectable newspaper. And when taken in conjunction with the more conservative leaning papers, say the Wall Street Journal, you can essentially get an informed view of the world. So let's take that as a given. Here are a couple of reflections I have on the New York Times after having at least leafed through it every day for a couple years now.

The first and strangest thing about the New York Times is that they will always, and I mean always, opt to put the absolute most depressing picture possible on the front cover. Recently they've had pictures from Iraq and such with things being blown up or some sort of terror happening. If at all possible they will print a photo of an Arab looking guy hovering over one or more dead bodies after some type of insurgency or other attack. This is disturbing to me. If they have no other choice then they'll just put some other type of picture. Just this week, for example, they ran a photo of Dubya giving the state of the union address with Big Time Cheney and Madame Speaker behind him. But the day before that and the day after, depression.

The second thing is that the crossword gets inordinately hard starting with Thursday. I can usually finish Monday through Wednesday with little trouble and then on Thursday I can't even get it started. From time to time on Thursday I'll get a couple of the clues and actually get through a good portion of it, but Friday Saturday Sunday I don't even attempt. I feel like in order to be able to get good at the later in the week puzzles you have to look at the solution the next day and get familiar with the clues and the answers. That's just way more work than I'm willing to put in. Also sometimes they have gimmick puzzles where you have to put several letters in one square and I never get those.

The sports section is very biased to the Yankees. They almost always put a picture of the Yankee game on the front page instead of the Mets. And a lot of times the lead article will be about the Mets, but the picture in the inset is from the Yankee game. It's mad weird.

Maureen Dowd is no longer clever, she's just really self aware. And as Sara Silverman said in this weeks New York Times Magazine, "deconstruction is a comedy killer."

The Science Times rules.