As the A-Hed piece seemed to keep disappearing day after day, I wrote letters to Rupert Murdoch, and Robert Thomson, owner and editor for News Service which publishes the WSJ regarding what I thought was wrong-headedness on their part. I even downgraded my print subscription to Saturday/Sunday only, thus depriving them of certifiable weekly readership and some revenue.
No replies. I even gave the recipients the chance to email me. Nothing. No one seems able to reply to a printed and conventionally mailed letter. I used that approach because there were no email addresses, or Twitter handles for the mucky-mucks whose attention I was trying to get.
We already know that years down the road there will be no collection of letters from the famous that will make their way into biographies or collections of those letters. There might be emails if they can be retrieved from electronic accounts, but that approach will likely yield only an incomplete picture of someone's written thoughts. Hemingway's collected correspondence would not be correspondence if it were emails.
I have no idea if my letters had any effect on the powerful, but I was happy to see that the A-Hed did start to reappear on a regular basis. I couldn't have been the only one to have been annoyed at its disappearance. Perhaps it was just easier to start it up again than try and respond to the disgruntled. We'll never know.
But happily, the resumption has given us some gems, none other than the one about the near 18! pound butt-ugly looking potato that was certified to be a gourd rather than a potato. The New Zealand farmer who plucked the ugly out of the ground was keeping it for a Guinness Book of World Record certification, then possibly turning it into designer vodka, a bottle or two.
Alas. Genetic testing revealed it is in the gourd family. But the WSJ can pat them selves on the back for seeing the interest in the story before the NYT later reported on the same behemoth and the genetic results in their Science section.
The "potato" as pictured above looks like some Henry Moore statue that's been toppled for some reason. Depicted slavery? No matter.
The March 17 A-Hed piece wasn't the first piece restored after my letter of March 3, 2022, but it reminded everyone what they were missing when the A-Hed went dark. The lede slyly opens:
"The record-breaking hopes for a contender vying to be the world's heaviest potato were just mashed."
Think of what we would have missed if the A-Hed piece disappeared forever. The "potato," if certified as such, would have shattered the Guinness world record of 10.9 pounds with its earth-shattering weight of 17.4 pounds. Could world-wide TV appearances have been far behind?
The WSJ is not the only source of play-on-words for the "potato". The Zealand farming couple Donna and Craig-Brown who unearthed the organic beast, referred to it as 'Dug the Dominator from Down Under." After the genetic testing revealed gourd roots, Mr. Colin-Brown's eldest son later suggested, "we should call him the 'Gourd That Thought He Could.'" Can a children's book and a Disney movie be far behind?
As the A-Hed absence started in late February and I was no longer getting the weekday print edition, I still looked at the Journal online to the extent I could and was surprised to see A-Hed pieces. I waited until they consistently appeared before I recommitted to expanding my subscription back to include weekday print edition.
The break in A-Hed appearance seems to have started when a piece on Ralph Nader was "designated" as an A-Hed piece, but wasn't so identified when it appeared way out place for an A-Hed, being buried deep inside the paper.
Since the renewal we've been treated to pieces on trombone players, Japanese Anime cartoons, late-night diners, the Queen Mary ocean liner as a scale model, the study of Taylor Swift as N.Y.U. curriculum and other gems.
I like to think I helped get the pieces back where they belong
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