EXPUNGING THE EXPUNGER

SIMPLE PLEASURES
As an old coot I find myself getting joy in small ways - a magnificent sunset, the smiles of the beautiful children in my neighborhood and the way my heart pounds when my wife comes home from work each night. These kinds of pleasures bring as much joy as would winning the lottery - although I'd like to test that theory one of these days, just to be sure.

DAILY PILOT MAKES ME SMILE
Today another event occurred that brought a big smile to my face. A loyal reader pointed out that the Daily Pilot - our newspaper of record for a century - deleted the CM Press from it's roster of community blogs. I'm sorry, but I just can't stop smiling.

STRAINED RELATIONS
For years the relationship between the author of the CM Press, Mr. U. Know-Who, and the management of the Daily Pilot have been strained - to say the very least. For years he would submit commentaries, some of which would be published and some would not. He never failed to express his displeasure when one of his "Mensa meanderings" didn't make the editorial cut and has threatened legal action when he disagreed with characterizations in the Pilot.

THE ODD COUPLE
There was a time when, I'm sure to provoke controversy, the editors would publish letters from Old Grumpy and me side-by-side. I thought it was fun. Old Grumpy was ticked off to have his "stellar" work appear beside the feeble efforts of a guy who spends his days living in a cave, wearing a tin foil hat - according to him. That made it even more fun.

EVER THE CRITIC
Recently Mr. U. Know-Who - who apparently views himself as Jimmy Olson because he played a reporter (badly) in a terrible movie 35 years ago - has decided he knows all there is to know about publishing a local newspaper, so he's begun using his pathetic blog to instruct the editors of the Pilot on what they need to do to save the paper. I'm sure those comments endeared him to them.

SHARP STICK TO THE EYE
For a guy who tells us he's very smart, he sure doesn't act that way. I mean, does he really think he's going to get a receptive ear from the editors of the Daily Pilot when he perpetually pokes them in the eye with a sharp stick? Not likely.

VILE ASSOCIATIONS?
Or, maybe the editors decided to de-link his blog because they didn't think their community newspaper serves it's readers well by linking to a notorious right-wing extremist who uses the esteem in which he is held by KKK poster boy David Duke as a tool with which to market his pathetic books. That seems like a good reason to me.

HOW DO YOU LIKE IT, GRUMPY?
So, Mr. U. Know-Who has been expunged from the roster of community bloggers on the Daily Pilot pages and I find myself wondering how he likes it. After all, he's been trying to expunge the Latinos from our city for most of this decade. I wonder how it feels for him to be the "expungee" instead of the "expunger"? In my humble opinion, it's long over due.