The Bay Guardian comes out on Wednesdays, but this week and for the duration of the newspaper strike, they’re printing on Friday, too. So my biggest problem of life without the dailies — no Friday edition, with all its movie listings and reviews — has been solved.

Yeah, I miss the news in the newspaper too, but I can get news elsewhere. Long as I know where’s the best double feature of the week, that’s “fully-informed.”

Also picked up the first issue of the strike paper, called Free Press, written and assembled and distributed by the striking staff of the Chronicle and Examiner. It’s nice to see Herb Caen’s column again, and Free Press is free, so I shouldn’t complain. If people didn’t complain, though, we’d still be living in caves and eating raw dinosaur gonads, so …

Free Press is too damned detached, that’s my complaint. It has a welcome helping of local news, including coverage of the strike, but it’s written in that all-too-familiar and aloof “objective journalism” style, perfectly up to the Chronicle and Examiner’s standards of dullness.

Objective journalism bites. Report the facts, please, certainly, but if a reporter is angry about the situation — and they’re on strike, so they have some things to be angry about — then that anger is a fair part of the story. Don’t suppress it, tell us about it.

I’ll take fair but angry journalism like the Anderson Valley Advertiser or Bay Guardian over impartial-observer play-acting like you find in the dailies, and now, sadly, in the Free Press. Finally unshackled by the millionaires (maybe billionaires?) who own the Chronicle and Examiner, its workers have delivered something just as bland, but without Calvin & Hobbes.

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Regular readers have heard me grumble about the company I work for, but for any newcomers, here’s the basics:

It’s one of America’s largest retailers, operating hundreds of department stores under several different names. This company has been in Chapter 11 bankruptcy for several years, but they’re now in the process of merging with their top competitor, which ought to be illegal. It will create an international conglomerate of almost 500 stores, operating under fourteen names — regional chains, national chains, and international chains.

Think of it — any time you walk into any department store, more than likely it’ll be one of my employer’s stores. When you think you’re getting shabby treatment at one store, and you vow never to return and take your business elsewhere, harrumph? You’ll probably be taking your business to the same corporation, just with a different sign on the awning.

Dissatisfied with your Pontiac? Buy a Buick next time. That’ll show ’em.

The merger hasn’t cleared anti-trust regulators yet, and won’t be approved by the feds until December at the earliest. That’s just a technicality, though, and technicalities be damned, corporations are more important than laws, so today in our e-mail directories, everything came together. Both corporations, all stores. I can now send an interoffice communication to the flunkies who do what I do in any of those other chains that aren’t really “other chains.”

First thing I noticed, scrolling through a directory twice as big as yesterday, is that there are lots of people doing basically the same work I do, in the other corporation, and in various branches of the monstrous merged entity. Will there be layoffs, then? “Efficiencies” to be sought, people to be pink-slipped?

Why, absolutely not. What a silly question. Someone in New Jersey sent everyone in both companies a memo today, reassuring us that no layoffs are planned.

A memo from New Jersey? Well, I’m certainly reassured.

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Where my latest two missing teeth used to be, there was no pain yesterday, but plenty today, and the two extractions aren’t healing the same way.

One toothless hole has the pink color you’d expect two days after surgery, but the hole on the other side of my mouth has turned white and painful, the pain increasing as the day goes on.

I’ve taken several of Dr Dentist’s marvelous prescription pills, but to be safe I called his office, and explained what’s going on in my mouth. Whoever answered the phone reassured me. “That’s normal,” she said. “It’ll take several days, up to a week or longer to heal.”

I don’t think she heard or understood what I’d said — that the holes are healing differently — and I believe her reassurance that “That’s normal” about as much as I believer my employer saying, “No layoffs.”

Something’s gone wrong in my mouth. Playing with it like I probably shouldn’t, I tongued a gooey oblong black and pink blob out of the tooth gap that’s hurting, and with a little pressure the blob squirted all over. It’s not a remnant from breakfast or lunch, and not the right color or consistency to be congealed blood.

Oh well. Took two more pills, and I’ll call again in the morning.

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Kallie invited me to join her, and several of her flatmates and friends, some night soon, and watch the Stones video she purchased at the concert. I told her I’d check my calendar and get back to her, because simply shouting NO! would’ve been rude.

I like the Stones and enjoyed the concert, but I’m not especially eager for another night of the Rolling Stones right away. And with all of Kallie’s friends and flatmates there, too? It sounds suspiciously like a party.

Kallie is cool, but — a party? No.

I’ve been to so many parties (at least three!) and regretted it every time. Hang out with a bunch of strangers, whose names I’ll forget thirty seconds after shaking their hands? No.

It’s a Kallie event, so there will undoubtedly be marijuana and probably harder drugs. If it was just Kallie and me, the drugs might be a plus, but unlimited drugs in a room with an unknown quantity of strangers? Mama told me not to come, so — No.

Just, 77 kinds of no. I’d rather have more teeth pulled.

♦ ♦ ♦

Silk Stockings at the Paramount Theater was not bad, for fluff. It’s Ninotchka with tunes, and also with Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse, and music and lyrics by Cole Porter. Cold war comedy about good old American romantic know-how that melts a communist woman’s heart. There’s also a peculiar performance by Peter Lorre, as a comical commie who almost sings and almost dances.

It’s pleasant but dated, and the movie’s 1957 vintage turns sour when Charisse sings, “A woman to a man is just a woman, but a man to a woman is her life.” What the hell? Did people really believe that crap, even as lyrics in a silly song?

Charisse and Astaire have an argument a few minutes later, though, and she tells him off in fine almost-feminist fashion.

The original Ninotchka — Billy Wilder! Greta Garbo! — is preferred, and not marred by any songs. Also, the remake would’ve been better if I’d won Dec-O-Win, the spinning wheel game they play on stage before every screening at the Paramount.

One of these nights, odds are, I’ll finally win Dec-O-Win. Tonight was not that night. I was singing songs from Silk Stockings on my BART ride home, though.

Pathetic Life 
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