Card game columns?

When I was in high school, a bunch of us on the debate team (don't laugh :) played bridge almost every day at lunch, and I got pretty good at it. My folks were always in a bridge club, and I'd sometimes fill in when somebody didn't show, if I didn't have anything else going on.

It's actually a great card game that requires a sense of strategy and a good memory. I'd be willing to wager that anyone who's been caught counting cards playing black jack at casinos started out as a bridge player, because that's one of the skills you need to be good at bridge.

 

Yep. If we don't run the column, readers get unhappy.

It's not in sports, though.

 

We run it too on the Dear Abby/crossword/horoscope page. And, yes, our graphic does have the date on it, so it's easy to check.

The annoying thing about Alder's column is that, most of the time, he'll lead off with a quote from some famous person and he'll make an extremely awkward segue into the meat of his column, and they almost never work. I always joke with my deskmates that he has the Barlett's Quotations book right by his keyboard.

 

Notme was such a punk-ass bitch.

 

Google Earth says this is fucking bullshit.




But this is really funny.

 

FC is the rare long-running feature where the best satires are ALWAYS 10X funnier than the subject creative.

 

A few years ago, I had a great conversation with two nationally syndicated cartoonists (Mike Peters and Tom Armstrong) who lived in our metro area. They and some local B-list standup comics were participating in a local charity golf tournament (Comedy for Cancer, or something like that) and with them was the head of King Features Syndicate, which syndicates their strips as well as Family Circus.

It was a very light-hearted chat after their 18 holes, lots of laughing, and the four of us were sitting in the clubhouse, having a few beverages. A few of the comedians were hovering on the periphery, listening but not participating.

At one point, the King boss mentioned Family Circus. I turned to him and said, "I know why Bil Keane draws his strip in a circle."

The guy from King said, "Oh? Why?"

I moved my hand in a diagonal line and replied, "So people reading at home can draw the international 'no' slash through the middle of it."

He did not laugh.

On the other hand, Peters and Armstrong nearly coughed up their Arnold Palmers, and a few of the eavesdroppers let out small chuckles.

I smiled at the King guy and apologized, saying it was just a small joke. He nodded and smiled, and the conversation resumed.

Just sharing one of the cooler moments in professional life ... making professionally funny people laugh.

 

Our paper also runs Adler's bridge column, on a page with Dear Abby, horoscopes, a Soduku puzzle, and of course ... "Celebrity Cipher" (you know, where my handle would be something like M Vecpwg Zczc)

Also, without giving away too much, my previous shop ran this syndicated poker column once a week in the sports section: http://www.luckydogpoker.com/

Not sure how much we paid Mr. Lucky Dog, but it definitely had regular readers.

 

There's a simple fact of life: If someone has the time in their day to play brigde or work the crossword puzzle, they have more than enough free time to call a newspaper and bitch when it's wrong or gone.

We occasionally intentionally insert a mistake in both. When no one calls, we'll know the last fan has died and we can use the space for something else.

If the switchboard operator ever pisses you off, drop the bridge column or crossword for a day or two and, in its place, run a little blurb that it is available online.

 

We had a syndicated bridge column. We also had a column where we would publish submitted card results from all the various women's institutes and seniors groups. Guess who usually had to try to decipher the hand-written results? Bridge, cribbage, euchre and pepper results out the ying-yang, and I never did find out what the fuck pepper (the card game) is. Please do not consider that an invitation to enlighten me.

One day I blurted out that I intended to scribble down the results from a Go Fish game with my kid and demand that they be published. The threat was not appreciated, so I decided I probably shouldn't follow through with it.

 

2011 is the year of change for us...we have dropped lottery results; the AP stocks computer crashed, so we stopped running that 3-col mess; and we have debated dropping other small things, like bridge, or astrograph.

Basically, we are telling the old folks home down the road to buy a computer!

 

One of the best lines from the movie "Go"

Claire: So, what do you have against The Family Circus?
Todd: Okay. You sit down and read your paper, and you're enjoying your entire two-page comics spread. Right? And then there's the Family fucking Circus, bottom right-hand corner, just waiting to suck.