Getting your news online

In recent days Prime Minister Kevin Rudd came out and said his wife and children haven’t read the ink and paper version of a newspaper in a few years now. They do all their news reading online. This intrigued me as I have not taken to online news dissemination, possibly because I still need to get a sense of how ‘big’ a story is physically … how much space it actually took up … and where it appeared within the paper. That’s very old school of me, I know.

Anyhow, I jumped online this week at theage.com.au and was bloody well rewarded for the effort. Two headlines jumped out at me. One was ‘Mouth to meow’ about a firefighter reviving a house cat (a a tiger angora if you’re interested) with the ‘kiss of life’. Come on! I am still laughing about this now. Can it be true? The best of this story was the closing line about how the fireman-to-felines responded when asked what resuscitating pussy tasted like. His answer: “fur!”

The other headline was simply this:

‘Man gets stuck in window - suffocates.'

I mean, that was it. How depressing. Someone’s hideous end, the snuffing out of a life, distilled into five words. The story proves, though, that truth is stranger than fiction. Some bloke in Ohio was found dead, his legs sticking out of one of his apartment windows. He’d locked himself out, tried to break in and, somehow, had his diaphragm crushed in the process and couldn’t breathe. Saddest was that someone had seen him and not reported it because they thought he was a burglar. Someone else finally reported him, a neighbour I believe, when they realised how long it’d been since he moved. Please nominate a more embarrassing, useless way to die than this.

Gotta go … am hooked on online news now!

Photo: A video screen grab of firefighter Al Machado giving a cat mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.