One of my favorite literary activities is to buy the Sunday paper and look through the best of what the editors have been holding onto, working at, and editing for an entire week. The UT is the San Diego Union-Tribune, which formerly boasted 1,000,000 readers weekly, but has since toned that retoric down. Their current slogan is simply "The World's Greatest Country and America's Finest City".
Here are my favorites from today's U-T:
1. Nelvin C. Cepeda has really captured a timeless image that could very well be titled, "Youthful Bliss". The front page of the UT has this great photo of 2 boys shagging fly balls in the outfield of Petco Park to go with a recap in the sports page of San Diego Padres fan fest. What makes this image for me is that the boys are framed perfectly against a section of the scoreboard that has the Padres logo of an interlocking "SD" and the words "Fan Fest". It's particularly great because I think back to my youth and how I would misjudge fly balls to badly that it was rare to have a picture including myself, my glove, and the ball all in the same image. More common was an image of me running with my back to home plate, both arms spread in the air like I was signifying a touchdown had occurred and the ball at least 30 yards away from me.
2. In the Local section, on page B1, Matt Clark reports on library theft in, "Libraries Let Down Guard; Theft Up". Remarkably, when the libraries turned off their security sensors, theft increased, especially of new DVDs. Go figure! It's interesting that the low volume activity reported by the library accounts for a dollar figure that it would take me 10 years to earn. What I found interesting is that the libraries seemed to be throwing their arms up in the air. You see, according to Clark's article, the reason they turned off the sensors is because they were disturbing patrons when they went off, sometimes erroneously. Now that they're off, it's like open season on theft. With this being primarily DVDs, I would think that a program of putting the boxes out, but the actual DVD behind the counter might be prudent. It's costing tax payers a lot of money to supply the libraries with current titles and to see them walk out the door with no action seems to be irresponsible at best. I applaud volunteer Elizabeth Monroe who protested the move to turn off the sensors. Hopefully, Clark's article will bring some attention to this issue and we won't be talking about an average of over 14,000 items being stolen a year any longer.
3. If you love charts and graphs, then the Business section is going to grab your interest. For anyone looking to buy or sell a home, this is great information. "Homebuyers Chase Value", by Lily Leung is the lead story of the UT's "In Depth" series. It's a recap of the Housing year where you can find a map of San Diego county broken out by zip code. Each zip code is assigned a color, which reflects the change in median-price by ZIP code for single-family homes. What a valuable resource this is! At a glance, you can see which parts of town are trending up (which is not many), which are stable, and the parts of town that are down trending. According to the map, this is a great time to be a home buyer in the county, with values dropping almost 5% over the previous year. Leung does a terrific, albeit brief, job of breaking out the different segments of the county and reporting the facts as they pertain to home values. This full page spread is a must read for anyone looking to relocate within the county, as well as in or out of San Diego county. Lot's of great information here!
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