May 15, 2007
We Hate to See You Go, We Hate to See You Go
Readers will recognize the time-honored refrain that begins with the words shown above. The occasion that prompts our breaking into song is the launch of a new blog by the North County News. Designed specifically to attract Croton’s malcontents, this so-called blog caps the North County News’s on-again, off-again campaign against Crotonblog. The single issue? Crotonblog’s sin of accepting anonymous contributions or comments from whistle blowers or others who have reason to want to protect their identity—an almost universal practice in the blogging world.
The North County News is a formerly respectable newspaper that unceremoniously dumped its capable staff last year, engaged an experienced Gannett journalist as managing editor, and acquired a pick-up team of amateurs. It has been desperately striving to get a readership foothold in communities outside its home base, Yorktown Heights. As a community newspaper covering distant communities like Cortlandt, Croton, Ossining and Briarcliff, the North County News is as phony as a three-dollar bill when compared to the knowledgeable reporting of a newspaper like The Gazette.
The newest North County News blog bills itself as “the first civilized and sensible blog for the citizens of Croton.” This phrase is strongly reminiscent of Fox News’s description of itself as “fair and balanced.” The ringmaster of the one-ring circus that is the North County News is one Bruce Apar, peripatetic editor of electronics industry trade magazines, who is in over his depth on a weekly community newspaper. He wears two hats, one as Editor-in-Chief and the other as Publisher. In Crotonblog’s humble opinion only people with two heads should wear two hats—and Cousin Brucie Apar doesn’t seem to have two heads—just one big one.
Croton’s emigrating bloggers should know what they are getting themselves into. The North County News’s record for blog custodial care can hardly be described as enviable. It starts a blog, toys with it briefly and then loses interest, starving it and letting it die on the vine. Consider the North County New’s dismal performance with its other blogs:
High School Confidential: No activity since March 29, 2007.
Bruce the Blog: No activity since February 22, 2007. (This is the Editor-in-Chief’s/Publisher’s own blog!)
NCN Oscarblog: No activity since February 22, 2007.
Danny Lopriore’s Sidelines: No activity since January 2, 2007.
Tom Forde’s The Final Forde: No activity since April 6, 2007.
Jim MacLean’s The Mac Attack: No activity since March 2, 2007.
And, wouldn’t you know, the North County News’s newest blog venture has attracted what Crotonblog likes to describe as “the usual suspects.” Do these names sound familiar? In the order of their appearance in the line-up, they are:
- William B. Rooney
- Maria D. Cudequest
- Thomas G. Faranda
- Mark Aarons
- Richard Pellicci
- Elise Sasso
- Otto Robert Wintermeier
This, of course, is the same crowd that in letters to newspapers repeatedly and mistakenly referred to Crotonblog as a chatroom. Well, they have finally found what they were looking for. Although it calls itself a blog, it is anything but. And even as for being a chatroom, it turns out to be little more than an Internet bulletin board. The grammatical howlers these people generate have to be seen to be believed. For example, in a parting swipe Ms. Sasso vents her spleen on Crotonblog, describing it as “truly bazaar.” Surely she will forgive us for presuming that she also truly looks forward to her church’s annual bizarre.
Always quick to find and point out the errors of others, Robert Wintermeier—apparently unaware that his newly chosen blog already accepts advertising—shows his suggestion that they add advertising to be foolish. He also urges the new blog’s puny readership to boycott merchants who advertise on blogs like Crotonblog. Lots of luck, Mr. Wintermeier. We’re sure that your boycott will make a big dent in Google’s multibillion dollar business.
Because of the name chosen for the blog, Crotonblog likes to call the Croton defectors the “Blog Cabin Republicans.” Lost among this bunch of grumpy old farts is an 18-year-old with the streetname of KWilly, aka Kevin W. Davis. We’d like to refer to him as “fresh-faced,” except one can scarcely see his face. He sports a beard that is either the worst case of five o’clock shadow we’ve ever seen or an attempt to look like a young Horace Greeley. Mr. Davis likes to use African-American expressions like “homey” and “homeboy,” which may explain why he calls the shoe polish-black fright wig atop his head “an Afro.” But can a white boy really call his hairdo an Afro if he or it doesn’t have African roots?
Although young Mr. Davis has posted more than a quarter of the scanty messages on this blog, the rest of the posters seem preoccupied with what can best be described as “taking in each others’ wash.” They pointedly ignore his attacks on them, treating him like an annoyingly boisterous little kid at a grown-ups’ garden party. Despite being spurned, young Mr. Davis soldiers on, bombarding the others with comments, and alternately attacking and defending Crotonblog. Cleverly, he has pulled the rug out from under the unsuspecting newspaper and extracted his revenge by starting and actively feeding red meat to his several blogs in the NCN stable. His colorful, ambitious and irreverent productions, albeit full of atrocious grammar, spelling and punctuation—put NCN’s dreary blogs to shame. North County News should add this young man to their payroll, put him in charge of all their blogs, and let him breathe life into their collective blog corpses.
Finally, Crotonblog wishes to extend our thanks to Cousin Brucie Apar for solving Crotonblog’s disciplinary problems by taking Croton’s Blog Cabin Republicans off our hands. We wish him good luck in keeping them happy. Crotonblog is also happy to say farewell to this demanding collection of misfit troublemakers, now departing as the morose crew of the S.S. Motley. We repeat the refrain with which we led off this piece, reproduced here in full. Everybody please join in.
We hate to see you go,
We hate to see you go,
We hope to hell you never come back,
We hate to see you go!
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Back in business again after being cut off from the outside world by inoperable electrical, phone and Internet service. The brief hiatus only emphasizes how dependent on these services we all have become. It also demonstrates what a bad mix tree-lined streets and outmoded overhead wires make. When is ConEd going to get wise and bury their overhead wires, instead of doing nothing and asking for a 17% rate hike?
Crotonblog’s “We Hate to See Your Go” piece giving the kiss-off to Cudequest & Co. is a classic and a joy to read. You skewered this arriviste newspaper and this perpetually discontented crowd so beautifully and made a gigantic shishkebab of them. Then you slowly broiled them over a fire fueled by scorn and sarcasm. That’ll teach them not to muck around with Crotonblog.
What makes the North County News—a piss-poor excuse for a newspaper if I ever saw one—think it has the right to make itself the final arbiter of blog conduct? And all this in the name of trying to build circulation. The North County News does not even cover the board meetings of the villages they purport to cover. And their “blog,” created solely for use by the disgruntled “Croton Seven,” is nothing more than a cheap stunt that will surely backfire. Wait until that paper gets bombarded with the same rancorous, demeaning letters that used to monopolize the letters pages of The Gazette.
My blessed mother had an expression that fits this crowd and this situation to a T. It was, “Good riddance to bad rubbish.” To which I would add my own catch phrase: “Cudequest & Co. and the North County News—perfect together.”
Well, of course I felt duty bound to check out “the first civilized and sensible blog for the citizens of Croton.” What a joke. I will most certainly feel constrained to go there when I need a good laugh. Perhaps it should be retitled “The CCC1 messsage board” It is no more than a CCC1 mutual admiration society - each writer (except Kevin) thanking the other for their “contributions” to Croton, and the bizarre Elise Sasso sniping away - the women whose pen drips vitriol with every letter to the Gazette. The duplicity of all these people claiming to want civility when they are all a major part of the reason that many posters to this blog do not sign their name - if they do, they are villified at local meetings and in letters to the Gazette.
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Why would any of us “hate to see them go”? Most of us haven’t even known they were there and if we did stumble upon the NCN blog, we looked at it just once and realized it was a set up, pure and simple, for the angry, hateful, and yes, political, small group who bore us to death at village board meetings with their ill-conceived monologues.
Look at the blogger’s names and think partisan politics … Wintermeier, Rooney, Sasso, Pellicci, Cudequest.
There’s long been a truism among children at play - “if I can’t play the game my way, I won’t play at all, and if I do, I’ll cheat.” So please folks. Don’t think you have us fooled even for a minute. Truth and honesty is not a game.