How to Read a Newspaper (3)

Sometimes the best stuff's in the back of the newspaper. And in papers you don't read, like the Bakersfield Californian.

This one [1], nine little paragraphs on the last page of yesterday's New York Times, is on the astonishingly neglected story of Fox CEO Rupert Murdoch's bid to take over the Wall Street Journal. "Leading up to the announcement," the New York's attorney general office has noticed, "a surge in volume in Dow Jones's June and September call options, which allow investors to buy shares at a specific price and time, suggested to some analysts that some investors knew an offer was in the works."

Rupert Murdoch cheating in the stock market? Say it ain't so, Joe!!

This one [2], longer but also in the back, is on the mysterious illness spreading across plants that produce the chemical that gives "microwave popcorn its buttery goodness."

Buttery goodness? I guess that's in the tongue of the be-taster. At any rate, there's a bill in California to ban diactyle, the cause of "popcorn lung" in the workers. ("They can't walk a short distance without severe shortness of breath.")

And why, pray tell, is this bill necessary? Says Assemblywoman Sally Lieber, because America' $3.5 billion flavoring industry is largely allowed to regulate itself. "What we've heard is that the flavoring industry has known for years that this is potentially a problem, and they haven't taken action," she said.

The [3] outbreaks: sometimes it's hard to keep track. You'd think you could escape their ravages by moving to a bucolic town way out in the remote California mountains. You'd be wrong. "Lake of the Woods residents are being told not to drink tap water without boiling it first after E. coli bacteria was detected Thursday in the mountain community's water supply." [4]

The water company's office manager: "Never in 28 years has this happened."

And why might it be happening now? The operative theory is that the contamination came from a broken pipe or septic tank.

Did I mention that broken pipes and septic tanks are a national crisis? That the nation's civic engineers have given our wastewater infrastructure a D-minus [5]? That this is what happens in a nation that pretends there is civic virtue in tax cuts?

Grover Norquist, meet Lake of the Woods resident Wade Biery. And avoid confronting him in a back alley. Biery is worried his eight-months-pregnant wife might have ingested some of the poisoned water. "There's part of me that's ready to go down there and lop somebody's head off."