oh happy happy day.

Yesterday once again the world disappeared!

Hallelujah!

When I first arrived here to this grand and beautiful state, the birth state of two of my daughters, I immediately subscribed to the Atlanta Journal Constitution, which is a very fine newspaper recently ranked in the top-20 newspapers of the nation.

Newspapers are lots of things, but with the rise of the Internet their purpose has changed some for me. Whereas once upon a time reading the local paper was the easiest way to get the news, nowadays you can learn of the news almost in real time from a variety of sources. My fave is the online version of the Washington Post.

What a local paper can do uniquely well, however, is to let you know of the happenings around town--the small festivals and local meetings of alcoholic anonymous and birthdays of small children and aging grandparents and so on. It still conveys the news, but its charm is in how it connects the people of a community by giving us stuff to talk about and--as will eventually happen to everyone in due time--to get you into the newspaper yourself. And for happy reasons, not the usual big city reasons. You wake up in the morning, shuffle your way in the dark to the driveway, pick up the cold newspaper, come back to the house, grab your coffee, open the pages, and--presto!--there's a glorious picture of your lovely children at last night's production of "The Grinch."

It's sweet.

Sweet but not very newsy.

So we decided to cancel our subscription to the AJC and start subscribing to our local paper. Not a week goes by without mention of someone I know personally--in fact, most days mention or quote somoene I know.

I'm not presumptuous enough to know how to evaluate my paper compared to other small city newspapers. It is forever telling us that it is winning one journalism award after another, and I have no reason to doubt them. I'm sure the fact that the awards are sponsored by the paper itself in no way diminishes the honor they bestow. (Okay, that was a gentle little tease.) But the point is that I am not trying to make fun of the paper any more than I would want them making fun of my college for not being the University of Michigan.

A place for everything, right?

One of the more surprisingly delightful feature of our paper is that several days a week the world disappears.

I mean, not a single article about international news.

I don't mean "only a few."

I mean none. Zero. Nada. Nichts.

And to us good provincial Americans who are chronically troubled by that messy and uncooperative mass of humanity who speak funny and live in cities with unpronounceable names, this is such a sweet relief. Who wants to ruin a perfectly good egg and cup of coffee with stories of people who, unlike us, can't get their act together, huh?

Ahhh....the world has disappeared, and with it all their inconvenient and annoying troubles have disappeared with it.

Ahhh...coffee and an announcement of a new bakery in town--what a nice way to start the day!

Yesterday was one of those days. Not a single mention of the world. No international news story at all.

But we did receive this bit of news: The Council for Community and Economic Research's survey of 322 urban areas concluded that my hometown can boast the cheapest Parmesan cheese prices in the nation!

Take that, you big fancy cities!

So think of that. No nasty world to trouble us and the cheapest Parmesan cheese in the land. Serve me up a trouble-free world with extra Parmesan cheese sprinkled on top, please.

Oh happy happy day!

Just don't ask where the Parmesan originated--you'll ruin the whole thing.