KEN LAYNE

This is an actual news article:

Published March 5, 2007
[ From LSJ.com ]
Single paintball hits mark on U.S. 127
Midday update

By Kathleen Lavey
Lansing State Journal

DELHI TWP. - A truck driver was left wondering where a paintball that hit his rig came from late Sunday.

The truck was traveling northbound on U.S. 127 near the Harper Road overpass at about 10:45 p.m. when it was struck by a single paintball, according to the Ingham County Sheriff's Office.

There was no damage to the truck and the paint was washed off. There were no injuries.

Sheriff's deputies have no suspects.

I had a little thing in the Los Angeles Times today -- a harmless little "newspaper humor" column of the "Hey, those lawn sprinklers got me all wet" school. Sadly, nobody read it and I forgot all about it until tonight. I guess I should walk around and look for a newspaper rack on Sunset or something. Maybe when I take the dog out for his goodnight walk. Or not.

Here's some scientific research evidence based on my very occasional newspaper work: Nobody ever reads anything in a newspaper, or on a newspaper website. It's like writing for the English-language paper in Guam or wherever. Very strange, because there are thousands of people working at a paper like the LA Times and (supposedly) hundreds of thousands of subscribers. Do they really exist, these subscribers?

I've written "op-ed" things for at least a few big and semi-big U.S. dailies -- the Los Angeles Daily News, San Francisco Chronicle, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, San Diego Union-Tribune, North County Times, etc. -- and a lot of foreign papers. Nobody reads the things. If I could get it published in a paper, I could claim the Pope was a Nazi Robot White-Supremacist Jew who committed 9/11 to stop the Duck Satanists from revealing the UFO plan to the Night Muslims, and exactly nobody would see it. Maybe if you write for the NYT or the Washington Post, you can cause a ruckus by writing that Hillary Clinton killed Barack Obama's father ... maybe. Probably not.

It is journalism's proudest moment.

This clearly means America is "back on track." Also, I made this helpful instructional graphic so nobody could fuck up:

After a very long battle with the Cancer, my Silver Lake comrade Cathy Seipp has passed on.

I loved Cathy's brutal columns long before I met her. She suffered through five long years of the Cancer. She will be missed.

Before it happened, the 2003 Invasion of Iraq was not getting a good review from Mike Davis.

The Oprah-esque teevee performance by John Edwards and his horrifically tragically horribly ill wife was a cheap vulgar exercise in converting personal tragedy to a political bonanza. For the first time in months, political people were paying attention to John Kerry's nearly forgotten running mate of 2004. For hours on March 22, the cable-news channels were an All Edwards Zone. The previous night, the Edwards' campaign had hinted that Johnny Boy would drop out due to his wife's cancer.

That, too, was a scam.

Then, over the weekend, Edwards reportedly went from table to table at a fancy Hollywood Democrats fundraiser and told all these rich contributors that Bill & Hillary didn't care about poor cancer-stricken Elizabeth Edwards. All the other Democrats -- like that popular Obama, who maybe possibly might let Edwards be the veep candidate -- had phoned in good wishes and maybe even sent pretty flowers. But those monstrous Clintons hadn't called at all!

Officials in the Hillary Campaign lamely answered that they were trying to call, but had lost the phone number or some such bullshit.

He sells his wife's disease so he can climb a rung up the nomination ladder, and the idiot mouth-breathing response by teevee news and the political bloggers and the supermarket celebrity magazines (ELIZABETH'S TRAGIC/BRAVE CANCER BATTLE) proves he's ... right.

When you've got negative equity in your house, you are screwed. When millions of home "owners" have negative equity, the entire country is screwed.

The Economist says 6.9% of mortgage holders have Less Than Zero equity. They're paying far more than it costs to rent, plus property taxes and insurance, for a house they can't dump because it will cost them money -- possibly tens of thousands of dollars -- to escape. It's even worse with recent borrowers: 18% of them are in negative equity and one in three new subprime mortgages are now expected to end in default.

With 1.3 million houses in foreclosure right now, default rates doubling by the year, double-digit property value declines in most formerly "hot" markets, millions of vacant houses and an expected 10% average drop in home value this year, America will go into a recession and possibly a Depression that will permanently drop the lower middle class to the ranks of the poor.

Oh, and 34% of mortgage holders don't even have any idea what kind of loan they have, so who knows how many additional millions of homes will be repossessed when these brainless creatures finally notice their mortgage payments have doubled and they can't afford it?

It's horrifying -- that's 25 million homes, or a third of the country's 75 million owner-occupied housing units. How many of these people did a Countrywide equity loan or re-fi and have no memory of doing it? We're talking about 70 million Americans who can't remember or never knew what kind of mortgage they've got.