Culture Gap Wars

Uh-oh. Truly insipid story in Monday morning's Pee-Eye headlined "College freshmen, profs often befuddled by culture gap." Example: today's 18-year-old freshmen don't know about Apartheid, haven't seen the Godfather movies; their profs have to give mini-history lectures and take in Superbad to learn what the kids are talking about.

Within minutes, three dozen or so thoughtful comments, most of them asking WTF.

Cornichon goes in search of answers. Not the reporter's fault, surely. She's just following orders. So who assigned this drivel? We send an email to reporter Christine Frey, which bounces back as follows:

I am no longer working for the Seattle P-I. If this is regarding a higher education story, please contact education editor Scott Sunde at scottsunde@seattlepi.com or (206) 448-8331.

We send email query and leave voicemail with education editor Sunde seeking clarification. Email reply in due course:

I don't know what story you're talking about. She gave notice several weeks ago and is going to graduate school

Meantime, an early version of this post appears over at Seattlest.com, where it begins to draw comments of its own, including this:

Geez, Ronald, have you ever written a complimentary thing in your sad little life? Everybody else is beneath your vast intellect, every story written doesn't measure up to your highly polished writing skills, and all but a few restaurants don't even approach your gastronomic standards.

Meanwhile, you've obviously reached the pinnacle of the profession, writing for this sad little blog that gets almost no reaction to anything that appears in it.

Hey, I never said I deserved a Pulitzer. OTOH, thanks for the comment about intellect, writing skills and gastronomic standards. Thank goodness I'm not reduced to writing about dead gnats, like that defrocked freelance blogger Leslie Kelly.

Seattlest responds by considering a proposal to ban anonymous guest comments, but then we'd never know what our anonymous guest readers were thinking, would we?