Issue 2 of The Town Crier, my micro-newspaper/newsletter, is out in the world. Like the inaugural issue, I printed 100 issues and distributed them throughout our little town.
Believe it or not, the public schools started back on 21 July 2026. Yes, you read that correctly—students were back the third Tuesday in July. That seems borderline criminal to yours portly. That means teachers have been back even longer.
Most of the schools in South Carolina are transitioning to a quasi-/semi-year-round calendar. There are certainly perks, such as defeating the dreaded “summer slump,” and students get breaks at the end of every quarter, avoiding the long Labor Day-to-Thanksgiving slog of the first semester (and the seemingly endless April and May death march in the second semester). But there’s something about darkening the door of a schoolhouse in July that sends shivers up my spine. July is sacred—and hot! Nobody wants to learn anything when it’s 100-degrees out, the humidity is somehow above 100%, and bookbags make youngsters resemble tiny Quasimodos.
But I digress. Naturally, I touched upon the return to school in a far hokier manner in The Town Crier. The point of The Town Crier is to recapture something of the cheesy, blandly inoffensive, yet still charming little local newsletters of my youth. These would be sitting in tiny mom and pop diners and local eateries; you’d grab one and read some fun trivia while you waited for your meal. These were even more fun when traveling, as they offered a little glimpse into the local world.
I also continued to experiment with the formatting and layout in this second issue. A guy on a Discord chat recommended adding the shadowing to the masthead, which really does add more weight and heft to the title. I also added in some “fun facts” and a Bible verse. I took that experimentation even further with Issue 3, wherein I introduce some graphics to the masthead and throughout the paper, and reduced the crossword “solution” grid so it’s not so easy to glance at it mistakenly (more on that next week).
While this micro-newspaper is meant for the Marlboro County, South Carolina region, please feel free to print and distribute your own copies, or to read the current issue here:
I also extended my distribution network this time around, spreading my 100 issues across more locations in the hopes of reaching more folks in more diverse settings. Here’s what I did, and some observations from the second distribution.
Yours portly has long been interested in the world of guerrilla publishing—zines, independent newspapers, pamphlets, leaflets, newsletters, and the like. Blogging scratches some of that itch and captures some of that energy, but there’s something cool about finding a little bit of printed material out in the wild.
Back in college, a buddy of mine put together a fake newspaper called The Heartland-Crier Gazette. It was meant to mimic the style of eighteenth-century pamphlets, with different fonts for each piece (and even one using the letter “f” in place of “s,” like some manuscripts from that time). We published a couple of issues and put them around campus, but it never went anywhere. More successful was the website my friends and I ran, The Swain Site (I think it was at http://www.keepingitswain.tk, back when .tk extensions were a thing). I wrote a lengthy weekly piece called “Uncle Tybarb’s Corner,” which was essentially a proto-blog.
I was scrolling through Instagram a few nights ago and came upon the latest creation from artist Obvious Plant. Obvious Plant makes fake products and catalogues that look like the kinds of things you’d find in dusty discount stores. They are just on the edge of reality enough that their absurdism seems tangible, like something a factory owner in China would make thinking it would appeal to Americans.
His latest item is a sales paper for a fictitious discount store called Cheep’s. It had me laughing harder than I have in awhile. What was particularly fun is that OP placed about 100 of the sales papers in an empty newspaper/advert box, and the idea of someone coming along and grabbing one made the whole concept even funnier.
It also got me thinking: why couldn’t I do something similar, but less absurd than Cheep’s or the truly absurdist Heartland-Crier Gazette? I have this sweet new printer that can print hundreds of black-and-white pages on a single drum of toner. What if I created a small micro-newspaper?
So Thursday morning I set to work devising a little newspaper that could fit on one-quarter of a sheet of 8.5″x11″ printer/copier paper. I relied heavily on CoPilot to help me get the formatting right in Microsoft Word, which was the hardest part (that and creating a crossword puzzle). I had to make some tweaks and figure out some clever workarounds, as Word is famously limited when it comes to moving stuff around freely, but after about two or three hours I had a draft of the first issue.
Other than the formatting, the crossword puzzle was the most difficult part, as well as creating the “solution” grid and flipping it over. CoPilot was super helpful with creating the grid itself, but when I asked it to create a crossword for me, it failed utterly. The answers didn’t match the clues, and it would use vastly different letters between the “Across” and “Down” clues, to the point that there often weren’t any letters in common between words that were supposed to intersect. I finally told it that it was really bad at creating crosswords (sometimes the robots need reminding that they’re inferior to us), so it recommended Eclipse Crossword, a downloadable program that creates crossword puzzles for you based on user-created word banks. I then took the grid it created and reformatted it into the grid CoPilot helped me created in Word.
The solution grid required filling out the grid in Word; taking a screenshot with “Print Screen”; pasting it into MS Paint Classic; copying the proper selection (Word copies a large margin to the left of the grid, so it has to be trimmed in Paint); then using “Paste Special” in Word to paste the image as a “Picture – Enhanced Metafile” in order for Word to allow me to rotate (it just occurred to me that it would be much easier to flip the image in Paint—d’oh!).
Once all of that was done, I had a beautiful little micro-newspaper:
The beauty of this format is that I can create 100 copies of an issue on just twenty-five sheets of copier paper. A sheet is around $0.014, so it’s about 35 cents worth of paper. The toner itself is abundant—I can print 700 pages on the current toner drum—and there are third-party toners that are very inexpensive, so I figure I’m spending around 50 cents to $1 to produce an issue.
I then had to cut every issue. I’m going to invest in one of those cutting boards like offices have—you know, those things that look like you could cut someone’s head off with them, but they only cut through about four sheets of paper before they mess up—but for the first issue, I used scissors. Even though everything looked perfectly symmetrical in Word, printing through the top of the front page off slightly from the top of the back page, so the finished product is a little rougher.
Here are some pictures of the first issue, as well as a couple of the second issue:
I made a few little mistakes on the first few copies of the first issue; for example, I forgot to put “DOWN” before the down clues on the crossword puzzle. I also had some rough cuts, as I’m not master with scissors. Overall, though, the initial run of 100 issues came out looking quite nice, and I’m learning more how to make my own crossword puzzles in tighter spaces.
With the first issue formatted, written, printed, and cut, I needed to get it into the hands of readers. My plan was straightforward: visit several local businesses—with an emphasis on coffee shops, breakfast and lunch places, and some other local stores—and ask to leave copies on their counters. After Dr. Wife was off to work and the morning dishes and laundry were squared away, I set off to do just that.
I’m chaperoning a trip to Washington, D.C. for my school’s ninth and tenth graders, and we’ve been going nonstop since about 5 AM on Wednesday, 29 March 2023. Indeed, I’m writing this blog post on the bus to our nation’s capital. The bus is equipped with WiFi, which is one of the more decadent instances of modern travel amenities I’ve enjoyed.
After the madness (and awesomeness) of my school’s annual Spring Concert (more on that tomorrow), it’s good to hit the road for a few days. I was not looking forward to slogging through the rest of the week after the high of the concert. That’s not to mention the burn of it: according to my fitness app, I burned over 1900 calories and walked a little over seven miles throughout the course of the day.
There’s been a great deal of walking on this trip, so the burn keeps going. I haven’t been able to get in my morning run, but the perambulation to historic sites has made up the difference in terms of caloric burn.
I’ll have more details soon. The other big event is the Lamar Egg Scramble, which kicks off this afternoon, the bulk of which is tomorrow. I have some big (for me) news in regards to the ol’ Scramble.
Note—when I first scheduled this post, I was still scheduled to go to Florida. Due to The Virus afflicting one of my girlfriend’s sisters, we’ve postponed that trip. So, instead, we’re going to do a little road-tripping around South Carolina this weekend. We’ll be getting down to Florida in December, though, so while my return to Florida is delayed, I’m looking forward to visiting down there later this year. Just pray for my sweet girlfriend—while we will have fun this weekend, I know she is heartbroken that she won’t get to see her family as planned. —TPP
Tomorrow after school I’ll be riding down with my girlfriend to visit with her family in Florida. After The Year of Universal Studios back in 2020, I haven’t made it back down that way in awhile, and I’m looking forward to a few days over Labor Day weekend in sunny central Florida.
We’ll be taking the Interstate Highway System most of the way, and I doubt there’ll be many backroads, but I’ve always enjoyed cruising the less-traveled pathways to see what little bits of Americana are out there, waiting to be discovered. There’s still plenty of what John Derbyshire calls the “old, weird America” out there, and I love finding it (and, perhaps, living in it!).
Well, even if we aren’t hitting many backroads, I’m excited to be out and about on another footloose adventure!
On Saturday I wrote a bit about an arrangement my neighbor and I have regarding my fig trees and grapevines: I grow them, he picks them—and makes them into delicious preserves. He’s also provided me with heirloom broccoli plants, which I shamefully think have largely died (though two stalks have somehow soldiered on through the hot summer months; I’m surprised they survived the heat!), and he grows an impressive garden himself.
So when casting about for this week’s TBT feature, this post about the Bradford watermelon—a variety thought lost to the world—fit neatly with what was already fresh on my mind.
There is so much variety out there compared to what the supermarkets put on offer. We’d probably all be a lot happier and a good bit healthier if we tried some of these old varieties.
As I’ve noted in the past, I’m running low on friends to support. There are still a few bloggers out there that deserve some praise, I’m sure, and I can think of a few that I really enjoy, but who are a bit too spicy to endorse outright (until blogging pays the bills—which is an extremely long way off—even I have to censor myself).
As such, I might be giving Supporting Friends Friday a hiatus starting in July. I started it last June (with a post about real-life buddy Jeremy Miles‘s book of poetry, Hindsight: Poetry in 2020), so it’s had over a year—a good time in which to run its course.
I’m not saying it’s gone forever. I’m just going to give my talented friends more time to churn out excellent work. Supporting Friends Friday has really been beneficial to the blog, especially since honoring Audre Myers with a post on 27 August 2021; that brought over a whole new readership, and has led to more contributions in the comment sections and to the blog itself.
Of course, I could end up changing my mind by next week, so who knows? That said, I thought I’d dedicate this “season finale” edition of Supporting Friends Friday to a publication I’ve come to enjoy and respect over the last year: Backwoods Home Magazine.
Everyone reading this post has noticed their grocery and gas bills shoot up over the past few months. These are not the result of the war in The Ukraine, despite the mewling protestations of the Biden Administration to the contrary. In part, they are the result of extended lockdowns during The Age of The Virus, and the subsequent disruption to the world’s “just-in-time” production model. Shutting everything down immediately probably didn’t do much to stop the spread of The Virus, but it definitely stopped the spread of goods, and the production thereof.
But these shortages seemed largely academic until recently. Sure, you’d hear about them here and there, and it was impossible to buy toilet paper for awhile, but other than a few panic-induced shortages, you could pretty much get what you needed, even if you had to pay double for it.
Now, for the first time since the very early days of The Age of The Virus, I’m getting seriously concerned about looming shortages—and not just a few missing luxury items from store shelves (not that toilet paper is a luxury item, but there are always substitutes for that), but the basic necessities of life.
Shortly over a year ago I wrote a piece about officious bureaucrats shutting down two little girls selling chicken eggs in Texas. The girls were trying to help people out and make a few bucks after the crazy ice storm massively disrupted Texan supply lines.
Since then, I’ve obtained a source to bring farm fresh eggs to my home on an as-needed basis; it’s one of many small blessings for which I am thankful. With food prices even higher than they were a year ago, free eggs is a huge boon.
I ended this post with the admonishment “The time to start growing and raising our own food is now.” But even yours portly has largely ignored his own advice.
The title for this weekend’s Lazy Sunday comes from the breakfast scene in The Cable Guy (1996), in which Jim Carrey’s deranged character opines, “But I made us scrambie eggs!” It was also the weekend of the Lamar Egg Scramble, and a good friend has been bringing me farm fresh eggs, of which I have been scrambling up quite a few on the weekends.
“Egg Scramble Scrambled” – The last Lamar Egg Scramble before yesterday’s event ended in fisticuffs, and law enforcement shut it down early. That was the first time since 1983, so honestly not a bad track record for an event that essentially quadruples the population of the town.
“Lamar’s Sesquicentennial Celebration” – On a brighter note, Lamar is celebrating its sesquicentennial this year, with a ton of celebrations to mark 150 years of being a town.
“SubscribeStar Saturday: The Egg Scramble Returns” – The 2022 Egg Scramble “Over Easy” was a fun event. It was the first Scramble I’ve managed to attend, and I was blown away by the size of crowd. John and I played a few tunes, and it was a fun afternoon.
Believe it or not, it will also be the first time I will actually get to attend the Scramble. Indeed, my buddy John and I will be playing at it later in the day.
