Thanks to the….let’s just call it the less than impressive performance of the Wild Blue internet provider company and the firms to which it contracts out its customer service – DSI Systems Inc. of Des Moines and Installation Management of Lincoln, Maine, the News Guy still has no Internet connection, and will not until Tuesday at the earliest.

(Memo to all three companies: If you’re not going to show up as scheduled, you could call a guy and tell him you’re not going to show up as scheduled. Delay is excusable. Being inconsiderate is not).

Tuesdays being the News Guys teaching days at the University of Vermont, Wednesday’s post, if there is one, will probably be a brief one. But expect a doozy for Friday.

Before leaving you all today, though, something must be said about that truly bizarre lead story in Saturday’s Burlington Free Press, the one about how more jobs might be created if Vermont, emulating Oregon and New Jersey, banned self-service gas stations. (No time to do the link from here at the Step Back café in downtown metropolitan Barton

).

Not necessarily a bad idea, not only because it would create (as the story reported) more than 5,000 jobs but also because (as the story ignored), gas station owners would have to pay those people, so they’d have to charge more for gas, so people would drive less. (Markets work).

(And maybe for the same reason other goods should be more expensive, such as processed, fatty, sugar, food, either by taxing it or at least by not subsidizing it quite so much).

But bizarre (back to the Freeps story here) because the idea comes from nowhere.

Well, nowhere except the Freeps. The story does not cite any organized (or, for that matter, disorganized) effort to do away with self-service filling stations. There is no anti-self-service-gas station movement in Vermont. No politician’s campaign pushes the issue. No petition drive urges it. No organization calls for it. Yet there it is as the lead story on the front page of the state’s biggest newspaper.

Newspapers, to be sure, should be fonts of new ideas. But these usually come on the editorial pages or in columns. The Page One lead story is news, also known as “what happened yesterday,” or at least what is going on in general these days. Devoting the lead story to this proposal suggests that the idea is something other than the brain-child of somebody at the Free Press. But that’s all it is.

So what happened? The following is just conjecture, and anybody who knows better is invited to submit actual information, but here’s one guess:

Some Freeps bigwig took a vacation in Oregon or went down to New Jersey, found out he/she couldn’t fill up the tank self-service, and began to think….hmmm! Maybe this wouldn’t be bad for Vermont; it would mean jobs.

So the bigwig comes back, sends an email to an editor and/or reporter, who realizes that the bigwig – being a bigwig – can’t be blown off, and gets to work, and as the nonsense flows downhill, a perfectly good reporter, Dan McLean, risks embarrassing himself by having to write this peculiar story to lead the paper.

The News Guy cannot connect to the Internet.

These days that doesn’t quite mean one does not exist.

But close.

Why? Only the ghosts of cyberspace know, especially those familiar with the Wildblue satellite company, which will try to set things right.

Reconnection, however, appears unlikely until (at least) Friday. So the next new posting will not be until Monday.

And how, one might ask, is this being posted sans Internet connection?

From the University of Vermont, to which the News Guy repairs each Tuesday afternoon to corrupt the young. The very offense, the Classics scholars among you will recall, that led to the execution of Socrates.

Could Ancient Athens been even more decadent than modern America?