The weekly Pagosa Springs SUN published a decently-sized Thanksgiving edition on Wednesday — 60 pages of news and advertisements, when you include the ‘Preview’ section. Not bad for a small-town newspaper.
I also have a (digital) subscription to the Los Angeles Times, and I note that their Thanksgiving Day edition amounted to only 40 pages. This, in a metropolitan area of 18 million people. Today, famously known as Black Friday, the Los Angeles Times published a 34-page edition.
So we might consider 60 pages of Pagosa news and ads as somewhat remarkable.
Many of the ads in Wednesday’s SUN mentioned thankfulness and gratitude, as we might expect. A few of the advertisements mentioned Christmas, including a full-color ad inviting kids to write a letter to Santa, in care of the Pagosa Springs SUN. Presumably, those letters will be forwarded to the North Pole? (Some letters will be shared in a future edition of the SUN, we are told.)
A dozen of the articles or advertisements mentioned ‘Black Friday’ specifically. (Which is today.)
The word ‘Black’ also occurred, in a different context, in an article by SUN staff writer Randi Pierce, about the Pagosa Springs Medical Center, noting that elective surgeries have been suspended for two weeks.
Pagosa Springs Medical Center (PSMC) reported late Thursday afternoon, Nov. 18, that its surge capacity had been updated from red to black, indicating a lack of hospital bed availability locally and around the state. It also means the medical center is suspending elective surgery for two weeks.
According to an email from PSMC CEO Dr. Rhonda Webb, “Surge Capacity Black has many elements, and we met the following:
1) No inpatient beds available
2) Other hospitals were unable to accept transfers (critical care transfers were taking more than 4 hours)
3) Hospital departments are understaffed by 2 or more staff members.
Webb noted the surge capacity level can go between red, the next lower level, and black sometimes more than once a day. PSMC is also moving to surge staffing, Webb states.
Ms. Pierce’s article goes on to mention vaccinations for children ages 5 and up. I don’t know, at this point, if children, generally, are looking forward to getting a vaccination. I have heard that many parents and grandparents are pleased to finally get their children (or grandchildren) injected with a COVID vaccine.
Some of those same parents and grandparents might also be wishing that the children could sit on Santa’s lap, and tell him what they want for Christmas. That’s not happening this year, for obvious reasons. So maybe a letter to Santa will have to suffice.
Teaching children to lust after plastic toys and cheap (or expensive) electronics — that is, training them, at an early age, to be devoted consumers — is not a recent development here in America. Even back in the early 1950s, my parents encouraged me, from a very young age, to share my Christmas desires with a nice man pretending to be Santa Claus at a downtown department store. I distinctly remember the experience as unpleasant… as something my mother wanted me to do, against my better judgement. Like getting vaccinated, almost.
I also remember that Santa did not generally bring me the particular (rather expensive) toy I was lusting after that year, as advertised on TV. (A shiny red bicycle, in 1958, was the exception to that rule.)
One thing is different about toys and gifts in 2021, however. An ever-increasing number of toys and household items now connect themselves to your WiFi, and send data — recorded audio, recorded video, user data — to some distant data storage facility.
This is completely innocent, of course. The product manufacturers are only trying to make their devices as useful as possible; they would never think of selling personal data or using it for their own marketing purposes.
And I would never think of making sarcastic remarks.
From the Los Angeles Times:
So before you give your [auntie] a Roku stick to connect her TV to a wealth of programming online, consider that Roku has declared itself to be a targeted advertising company, not just a device maker. It collects detailed records of what its customers watch and do on their TVs, then sells that information to marketers so they can target their pitches more precisely — potentially showing you [auntie] different come-ons from the ones they show you.
From open-source software collective, Mozilla, “a global non-profit dedicated to putting people in control of their online experience and shaping the future of the web for the public good”:
Roku is like the nosy, gossipy neighbor of connected devices. They track just about everything they can. And then they share that data with lots of people. According to Roku’s privacy policy, they share your personal data with advertisers to show you targeted ads and create profiles about you over time and across different services and devices.
To learn more about the products Mozilla finds especially ‘creepy’, click here.
Thanks in part to the electronics industry, Christmas is not what it used to be.
From NBC News, in an article by Alex Johnson, January 2018.
The maker of an internet-connected sex toy was accused in a federal lawsuit Wednesday of secretly gathering detailed data about its customers’ use of the product, including when and how long they use it.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, alleges that Lovense, a division of Hytto Ltd., based in Hong Kong, collects and records “highly intimate and sensitive data regarding consumers’ personal use” of Lush. Lush is a vibrator that users… control through a Bluetooth-enabled iPhone and Android phone using an app called Body Chat…
Here’s hoping our Daily Post readers stay safe on Black Friday, and know how to protect their privacy.
Bill Hudson began sharing his opinions in the Pagosa Daily Post in 2004 and can’t seem to break the habit. He claims that, in Pagosa Springs, opinions are like pickup trucks: everybody has one.