“under a pile of soggy rubbish”

God help us, Susan Paynter was back in the P-I again yesterday, waxing egocentric about her stolen car and the “nearly” 100 responses she had — “including [from] hardened cops” (though it’s not clear how she knew how hard the cops in question were) — asking about her loss of a child-made ceramic heart in the car theft she’s been obsessing over for more than a week now.

She reports on the odd accounting practices of a man with an unlikely name:

These are people such as Rainier Burgdorfer, who calculates the cost of thievery like this:

“I don’t know how much money you make,” he wrote me. “I can save about $100 per week. So, when the ass(bleep) stole my car, it took me about 15 weeks to make enough money to buy a new ski rack, tire chains, seat covers, music, first-aid kit, fire extinguisher, all-season tires and the rest of the stuff … my insurance didn’t cover.”

The way he sees it, the thief robbed him of 15 weeks of his life.

Come on now, does this really add up to “15 weeks of his life” being stolen? Because he decided he had to apply his savings to things like a “new ski rack”? Sure, something was stolen from him — but jeez, did he really have $1500 worth of “stuff” like seat covers? And is using 15 weeks of savings to buy new stuff really amount to being “robbed” of 15 weeks of your “life”? It’s a shame Enron isn’t hiring accountants anymore.

You know an article is going down a particularly rocky road when vague anti-union suggestions get thrown in there, such as:

“Who would be against stronger penalties?” asked Jack Miller. “The Amalgamated Brotherhood of Crack Heads and Speed Freaks International?”

P-I editors: no, I don’t want a family car to be stolen either. But neither do I want to hear a columnist obsess over it along with others. Yes, it sucks that her car was stolen. But should you really let your legislative agenda be dictated by a personal grievance like this? Come on now.

The article ends on a somewhat revealing note:

Almost every e-mail and phone call brought a bonus of support and sympathy. “I really hope you get the ceramic heart back that was made by your son,” wrote Lonnie McCarron, an auto-theft detective from the Colorado Springs Police Department.

I bet that’s our “hardened cop” right there! From Colorado Springs! And they work in auto-theft themselves.

Then, appropriately enough, this horrifyingly self-involved piece ends with a schmaltzy use of the metaphor of a lost heart.

I did, Detective, and thanks for asking. Even if the mechanical prognosis for my hospitalized Prelude turns out to be bleak, at least my heart is back where it belongs.

Jeezus.

A Vanity Publisher?

Has the Hearst media conglomerate transformed the Seattle P-I into a vanity press?

What else are we to conclude from Susan Paynter’s column in the paper today, where she talk at length about how sad it is that her car was stolen. Oddly, she says that the police are doing a good job, as is the city attorney, as is the county prosecutor’s office. Thefts are going down, she reports. But the Legislature needs to take action, she says — because, I guess, *her* car was stolen.

But what action does she want? That, she doesn’t say. No room, I guess, after all the details about how much she liked her poor old car, and how serious a problem car theft is, because, well, her car was just stolen, so it must be very serious indeed.

In Paynter’s defense, she does describe herself as being “like a plaintive holiday caroler” — but remind me again which holiday carols are “plaintive”? I thought they were pretty much all happily describing the birth of Jesus. Oh wait, it’s not the *carols* that are plaintive, it’s the *carolers*. And the carolers are probably plaintive because they got their cars stolen!

What’s next from the vanity-press department of the P-I? Will Joel Connelly eat a moldy strawberry and call for legislative action? Or will Paynter blow all her money on an ebay fraud and beg for the Governor to solve this serious problem? I can hardly wait.