On Campus

with David Larkins

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• Pages from the past

  Monday, Mar. 26, 2012 at 2:10 PM

  As the online coordinator for the Brandon Sun, one of the things I do is keep our Facebook page updated.

  If you like us on Facebook, you'll see that we post links to breaking news throughout the day, but we also give you a daily snapshot of our print edition by posting an image of the front page.

  It's a bit of an art, trying to balance the news that we put out, and yet not end up spamming people with dozens of Brandon Sun links when they log on to their Facebook account.

  (If you have any comments on our Facebook approach, by the way, I'd love to hear them. More stories? Fewer?)

  Today, though, I did a little bit more: I flipped the switch on the Brandon Sun's new "Timeline" format.

  As I'm sure you're aware, Facebook has moved from a wall format to a "timeline" -- allowing people for the first time to go back and add things to the past.

  For an organization like the Brandon Sun, that means we can now include the whole history of the paper on our Facebook page. Of course, I can't hope to match the efforts of, say, the New York Times (which has a really great Facebook Timeline), but I have spent a little bit of time uploading a few historical front pages from the Brandon Sun's archive to our Facebook page.

  Feel free to scroll through the few I've posted so far (click here, and select a date range in the light blue section at right), and I'll continue to post more every week, as I select pages from the past for the Brandon Sun "Weekend" edition.

  But I'm also going to take requests.

  Got a particular date you'd like to see the front page for? Or heck -- an inside page? I'll tackle just about anything from the moon landing* to your own birth announcement. Simply email me -- ghamilton@brandonsun.com -- and if I can track down the page, I'll post it for you.

  Three caveats:

  • First, if I'm swamped by requests, it might take me a while.
  • Second, it's really easy to get pages from about 1960 up to now, but really difficult to get anything before that. We're working on digitizing our earlier histoday, but if you could keep your requests to the last five decades, that'd be best.
  • Third, no, unfortunately I can't send you a pdf or a high-resolution image of the page. But we'd be happy to sell you a copy of it. Email Tyler Stephens at tstephens@brandonsun.com or give him a call at 571-7451 and he'll hook you up.

  I'm also testing, testing 1-2-3 on a new comment system. It should be embedded below.

  ____

  * Oddly, the actual moon landing edition -- plus a couple of days earlier -- is missing from our digital archives. If I had to guess, I'd say that someone swiped the microfilm as a keepsake, and it was missing before we sent it away to be digitized. Have no fear, I just checked and we have another copy of the microfilm here. But there's no way for me to post that to Facebook.

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• International Poetry Day, newspaper edition

  Monday, Mar. 26, 2012 at 2:05 PM

  Apaprently today (March 21) is International Poetry Day.

  I'm not sure who sets up these days — according to Twitter, it's also International Hoodie Day? — but in my opinion, poetry doesn't get enough respect.

  It's all prose these days. And longer prose is better. Just ask anyone trying to publish a book of poems or short stories.

  Oddly, I suspect that a well-crafted poem could actually have more resonance in these days of text messaging, status updates and the aforementioned Twitter.

  A good poem is like a mind worm. It is generally short enough to consume in one sitting, but a good one will get inside your head and burrow around, forever changing the way you think.

  (The very best tweets, you could argue, might be akin to a haiku — achieving transcendence through brevity.)

  So, in honour of International Poetry, here's a little poem by one of my favourite authors, Stephen Crane. It's has a little relevance to where you are reading it, too:

  A newspaper is a collection of half-injustices
  Which, bawled by boys from mile to mile,
  Spreads its curious opinion
  To a million merciful and sneering men,
  While families cuddle the joys of the fireside
  When spurred by tale of dire lone agony.
  A newspaper is a court
  Where every one is kindly and unfairly tried
  By a squalor of honest men.
  A newspaper is a market
  Where wisdom sells its freedom
  And melons are crowned by the crowd.
  A newspaper is a game
  Where his error scores the player victory
  While another's skill wins death.
  A newspaper is a symbol;
  It is feckless life's chronicle,
  A collection of loud tales
  Concentrating eternal stupidities,
  That in remote ages lived unhaltered,
  Roaming through a fenceless world.

  You could do a lot worse than reading more Stephen Crane. He's best known for his Civil War novel, "The Red Badge of Courage," but his poems were ahead of their time as well.

  Like the best of Crane's work, one of the things I like about this particular poem is how it undercuts itself, especially at the end. It seems at first to be highly critical of the news media — a business that Crane, who spent several years as a celebrity reporter, would have known well — but a closer read shows more ambiguity.

  Sure, a newspaper may be "feckless life's chronicle," but that is not the same as "life's feckless chronicle." It's not the newspaper's fault, but life's.

  And is it as bad as all that? Pay attention to the final three lines. A newspaper may collect those "eternal stupidities," but before there were newspapers, those very same stupidities "lived unhaltered / Roaming through a fenceless world."

  In other words, Crane is saying that newspapers may be full of bad news, poorly reported — but you can't blame the messenger.

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• My Vic Toews conspiracy theory

  Monday, Mar. 26, 2012 at 2:05 PM

  I'm going to presume that you are up-to-date on Vic Toews and modern TV culture. If not, *spoilers ahead* because I think I've uncovered a weird coincidence that can't be explained -- except, perhaps, by conspiracy.

  Now, I haven't worked it all out yet, but bear with me:

  • Vic Toews, the MP for Provencher, is currently embroiled in the "@Vikileaks30" kerfuffle.
  • The hit AMC show "Mad Men" is about to start its fifth season.

  What's the connection? There are several:

  • Toews infamously said in Parliament that if you didn't support his internet surveillance bill, then you stood "with the child pornographers." He appeared to be angry at the time. He was definitely angry later, when divorce details began spilling all over the Internet, thanks.
  • You want to talk about angry guys? You mean, "Mad Men"?
     
  • Toews came to Brandon -- specifically to Maple Leaf -- where he announced $4.5 million in federal funding for the hog-processing plants here and in Winnipeg. Political wags may call that a lot of "pork" but it's also going to mean a lot of ham.
  • "Mad Men" features a character, Don Draper, played by actor Jon Hamm.
     
  • It was revealed (although it was kind of an open secret) that Toews divorced his wife after hooking up with his childrens' much-younger babysitter.
  • This is exactly what the Don Draper did in "Man Men"! (Except Draper, if I recall correctly, was polite enough to get the divorce first.)

  So, now what? Well, this is the tricky part of all conspiracy theories.

  I have drawn some of the threads out for you -- perhaps my readers can find even more dastardly connections between the former justice minister and the Emmy-winning show -- but I fear I am too close to the trees to see the forest.

  What does it mean?

   

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