The first thing you’ll see if you take out a copy of Thursday, October 19th’s Floridian from the St. Pete Times is a large pumpkin with a palm tree carved into it, and the headline: “Death of a Pumpkin”. This article takes up three-quarters of the page, most of which is, well, pumpkin. The actual text takes up about the same space as your usual front page article, only the text has been set in a font about two or three points larger than normal. It says, to summarize, that between the 19th and Halloween, the Floridian editors are going to place it in the sun... and watch it rot. If that isn’t breaking news, I don’t know what is.
Add this to the fact that the two articles below it are about men who like to look in the mirror and how scary it is that the eighties are starting to come back into fashion, and you’ve got perhaps the most quality section of the Times that I’ve ever seen.
When I first took a look at the St. Pete Times, I compared it to the only other daily newspaper I’ve ever kept up with: the Washington Post. I looked for equivalents to my favorite sections, and found them fairly quickly. The only thing I wasn’t sure of was Floridian, which I could only take as a mixture of the Metro and Style sections, devoted to local news and entertainment news respectively. So far, I’ve been able to stick to that decision fairly well.
Thursday must have been an exceptionally slow day in local entertainment news if we’re reduced to watching a pumpkin rot.
The editors of Floridian seem to be fairly proud of themselves. They have given the pumpkin a special name (“the Withering Palm Tree Pumpkin”), and have declared that “from time to time” they will “report on its firmness, color, smell and level of insect infestation”. Because, after all, what everyone wants to read about over their breakfast cereal after perusing the comics is the bug content of a sagging squash.
Inside this edition, we learn that “linebackers are flashy dressers”, hear about a megalomaniacal “Monopoly master” (yay alliteration!) planning to “take on the world”, and ponder “where, oh where did that missing sock go?” Sounds like your average day in Duck and Cover, only these guys aren’t in it just for the humor. Mind you, they’re not totally serious; the writers are tongue in cheek enough to realize that the material they’re covering is not cutting edge (how many of you knew that out of 508 women surveyed, 80% have lost one sock from a pair, and 31% lose approximately one sock per an average of ten loads? Or that 30%save the other sock indefinitely in hopes of eventually finding the missing one? And you thought you were alone). I suppose these light hearted, non-earthshattering stories give us a break from the heavier topics like the dead Palestinian children or the political debates (though the latter is certainly amusing in and of itself).
So if you need a rotten gourd to alleviate all the worries in your life about the state of the world, Floridian is the place to be. Whoever thought something that gross could be so uplifting?
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