Posted 9:10 PM by Gene

After trying to read 16,000 comments on the Times' Web site praising Tim which caused my computer to freeze I decided to at least temporarily remove my post. Everyone says he had uncommon kindness and decency. Had I known the man I'd have done so too. It's just that I get so cranky when 5 million people say the same thing, and the Times calls him a "towering" figure as though he were John Peter Zenger or Joseph Pulitzer -- or Adolph Ochs, and this is the guy who unelected Hillary, and he was buddy-buddies with Drunken Slob until it got inconvenient, and he was a central part of a news culture that grows ever more dysfunctional, and it's hard for me to find kindness and decency in a system now the definition of unkind and indecent, a system so rank it would perfume the sweetest rose with a skunk smell. And I believe we should cut public figures no slack. Police officers and firefighters and soldiers put their lives on the line for low pay. All the broadcast news hack does is put his mouth on the line for millions, and his foot in his mouth for more, and such is the business's amnesia his cumulative faults vanish even as we're stuck with the ever-aggregating burden of their memory. So all right, Timmy was the salt of the earth, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, but that doesn't mean we forget his business forever pours salt in our psychic wounds. And I hope this is the last I have to write about this.

And yes, I believe Little Jeffy and Jeff Zucks will replace him with the Tantrum Twin because he too has a big booming voice.

P. S. As might be expected The Wiki's Tim bio is far longer than the other preceding greats', a clear sign its Achilles heel is the now, and that will be its downfall.

P. P. S. Sixteen months ago Anna died, and the jernalistic overkill is now just one more chain in the news biz' long line of embarrassed silences. Her Wiki bio is longer than Tim's. Someday the site will resemble the loose-leaf supplements in the Book of Knowledge. The VITAPHONE!