Dear Water Tower Readers:

Published January 22, 2008

Alex Townsend regrets to inform you that she (yes, she’s a girl) will not be writing anything for your amusement at this time, in a show of solidarity with the Writers’ Guild of America (WGA) and their current strike. She also expresses her regret that she must show her solidarity at this particular time because she had wonderful ideas planned for all the articles she would have been writing, several of them involving the relationships between dentists and fresh-water trout.

Sadly, no one shall be able to read these articles now, including the members of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), to whom Miss Townsend would like to be quoted as saying, “Neener, neener, neener.”

We assume that many current readers are already aware of the WGA strike, but we also recognize that some readers may be unnatural creatures who don’t keep up with news about television and movies for some strange reason.

Essentially, the major issue is that many television shows are now being shown on the internet, giving networks a whole new chunk of profits. But the writers of these shows do not get to see a share of this chunk. They are chunk-less and thus now on strike. The AMPTP justifies this chunk-hording by saying that profits from the internet are still too hard to gauge. The internet is new and shiny and, like Leave it to Beaver, who knows what it will do next?

This argument makes it clear to us generic letter writers exactly how badly the AMPTP is being hit by the strike. Without their writers they are obviously a desert of creativity, since this “too new and shiny” argument is the same one they made when the writers went on strike in 1988 over VHS sales. Back then the writers bought it and wound up with a weird formula that got them around $.04 a video.

Apparently, that’s not a very good deal.

Perhaps, since our current strike seems to be a rerun from the 80s, we should send our condolences to the AMPTP. Clearly, for some no doubt tragic reason they seem to think that writers have no memories. Personally, we blame too much reality television. That’s pretty much all there is to watch these days.

So, to get back to our point, Miss Townsend supports the writers in their strike and will not write for you, thus showing her solidarity. She asks that you ignore any poetry you might read in this same issue by a “Alejandro Townsendo” She assures us that the name is entirely coincidental.

Thank you for your time.

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