My Saturday morning breakfast ritual is to turn to the Free for All page in the back of the A section of the Washington Post and fill up on righteous indignation along with my English muffins. Free for All is an entire newspaper page devoted to letters to the editor, almost all of them ranting about the many failures of the daily paper. I call it the Grumpy Old Man page, though women are equally represented among the aggrieved.
As a grumpy old man, my name has appeared on the Free For All page with sad regularity. I rose to defend the honor of Alfred E Neuman, nit-picked sloppy illustration for a design story in the Local Living section, and complained about bicycle regulations, among other vitally important issues. That level of pedantry is not out of place on Free for All. Basically, the editors are damned if they do and damned if they don’t on any and every topic.
Thus, I am something of an expert at spotting what will get a rise out of Post readers. One of the most common types of Free for All letter is the complaint about what does or doesn’t appear on A1. In this inaugural post for the series, I will predict next week’s Free for All. You will surely be reading something along the lines of this:
Dear Editor,
What possessed you to waste precious space on the front page of the newspaper with what is for all intents and purposes an advertisement for a Hollywood movie? [“For real-life Alexander, the days are pretty good,” A1, Oct. 11.] Even to the point of using not one but two stills from the film as illustration!
How very nice for Alexander Viorst that his mother wrote a book about him (Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day), and that it has now been turned into a big-budget Steve Carell movie. But such stories, if they must appear at all, should be relegated to the Style section and not the front page of what used to be a great national newspaper.
Grumpy Old Man, Silver Spring
P.S.: You also misspelled the name of the movie’s co-star. It is Jennifer Garner, not Gardner. She is the wife of Ben Affleck, Mrs. Batman, for heaven’s sake!
