The Luna Park Gazette

There’s a scene in Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol , one my favorite holiday movies, where Magoo, portraying Ebenezer Scrooge, sings as he greedily counts his coins. “Ringle, Ringle, coins when they jingle,” he goes, while Bob Crachit freezes his tuchas off in the next room, “make such a lovely sound.” I’ve recently embarked on a mission to clean up all loose change in my house and I have to say that the sound of all that jingling hasn’t been lovely at all. There are pennies all over the place. They’re in plastic soup containers, glass jars, any kind of canister that can possibly hold pennies…holds pennies. Part of the problem stems from the dark days of coinage, when banks refused to take your change unless you put it all in those awful paper wrappers. Nobody wanted to sit down for hours at a time, counting the pennies, then losing count and having to start all over again. So the pennies piled higher and deeper. I think that’s why pirates buried their treasure. I can't see Long John ...

It’s seems sadly fitting that I learned on the same day that Editor & Publisher was folding and Tom Flannery had died. Tom was a reporter at the Pocono Record in Stroudsburg, Pa., my first daily newspaper job. E&P is—soon to be “was”—the trade magazine for the newspaper industry, which at the time was being printed at a plant in nearby East Stroudsburg. I subscribed to E&P for years and I even worked there briefly in the late 90s before going to work for CNNfn.com. Like a lot reporters, I always went straight to the want ads when the latest issue of E&P arrived because, like a lot of reporters, I hated my current job with a passion and I had to get the hell out before I went berserk. I did get around to reading the articles, but the job listings always came first. E&P was my lifeline to the outside world and each issue offered some hope that maybe this week I’d find my dream job. You had to read the ads carefully, though, because sometimes you’d spot a great job, ...