Hold the press

Long ago, there was a song called "Cherokee Fiddle," written and sung by Michael Martin Murphey, and others. It was about a Choctaw-Irish fiddler named Dean Kirk, who played for passersby at the train station in Silverton, Colorado.

The song describes Kirk as someone always there to play the fiddle, and how things used to be one way, and then changes came, and...

Now, the Indians are dressing up like cowboys

And the cowboys are putting leathers and turquoise on

And the music is sold by lawyers

And the fools who fiddled in the middle of the station have gone

Change changes everything. The Baltimore SUN, long the main newspaper in our town, was composed, printed, and delivered to homes and newsstands all over town from a huge building on Calvert St for many years. 

But they moved their printing operation to a new building on the Baltimore Peninsula (where South Baltimore meets the Harbor) in 1988, and things were still smooth. They even sold the big building in town and moved their offices and newsrooms to the Peninsula in 2018, and had planned to develop their sixty acres of land into an office park, but that all fell through.

Not that many people buy newspapers, not like they used to, and the SUN gave up printing their own paper in 2022. Now it's printed in Delaware, for crying out loud, and shipped down the road in trucks, which is why it doesn't land in my driveway until the sun is high in the sky. I used to have to take a flashlight outside to find it, but not any more.

The new digital age is upon us. News comes to us on our tablets, phones, and computers in the form of webcasts and blogs and fan pages, and for those of us who still enjoy holding a paper paper to see what Beetle Bailey is up to, too bad. They're raising the price of home delivery as high as that Sun up in the sky, and I think they would be just as happy not to print a paper anymore at all.

Just read it online, that's the trend. But what are we to use for tablecloths at the crab feast?