Spent some time this morning with an actual, in-my-hands, newspaper — having sequestered myself yesterday from the Internets meaning I hadn’t actually read what was in today’s newspaper yesterday. If you haven’t done it in a while, it’s fun. It’ll take you back to the old days of cassingles and Blockbuster rentals, when we were all hopped up on disco music and amyl nitrates.

No one likes being told what to read — that’s the empowerment and appeal of online news. (That, and the fact the news isn’t two days old by the time it’s printed on paper.)

But there is something to be said for having a paper in hand. Not in the old fart “coffee and newsprint on my hands” line you get. No, I mean the eye’s point interface is quicker than even the fastest broadband, meaning you might actually read a story or two you’d skip clicking on. And you might start seeing connections or ironies you’d miss in the course of self-selecting headlines that catch your eye.

Read about Kim Jong Il tapping his 26-year-old son to run Arkham Asylum North Korea. Done a lot of research on North Korea for a fiction project, so I chuckled at the absurdity of the way the North Koreans allow a self-selected elite in government to act as their neo-feudalist masters. Ha ha. Silly serfs. Two pages later I read about how a U.S. federal judge who is serving time in jail is putting off his resignation til next year, and how if he’d resigned for depression he could have drawn a full $174,000 a year salary and benefits for the rest of his life, without lifting another finger. Or rather, lifting the one. (Serf’s up.)

Read a brief headlined “No evidence found of flying object” — wherein that headline got earned because Liberty County, Texas’ Roscoe and Enos didn’t find a landing sight after a professional commercial pilot saw a UFO. Like we don’t see through this one. (And ironically, while looking for the link…)

I read some life benchwarmer at TXDOT refers to the new digitally created, poll chosen plates as “The People’s Plates.” Of course, given that not having one on your car can ultimately result in you being taken by the state and sentenced to — a la Chinese slave labor — make these same plates, maybe that’s not such a bad nickname after all.

Then I got bored by the usual lousy business writing. Seriously — assuming j-schools of the future don’t follow my advice and become simply 90-day vocational programs, can we at least add a few business and economics courses to the requirements for a BS in journalism?

Bonus of the day? From the story about that godawful murder, scalping, horror show in Collin County, we find Sideshow Bob’s twin.