Today is a day to be glad that I am a private citizen who happens to write essays and not a newspaper editor who makes decisions about how to cover the news of the day and what stories should occupy the banner position in a newsletter. It is pretty obvious that the banner article for most news organizations today will be the historic conviction of a former US President who is the presumptive nominee of a national political party to run for president in this fall’s election on 34 felony counts. It is easy to identify the big story. It is difficult to know what to say about it. It is easy to point out that this is something that has never before happened. It is unprecedented in American history. It is difficult to say what it means.

Many years ago, I served as a radio DJ and part of my job was to take the news stories off of the teletype machine in the station office and select the ones to read during a short news program at the top of the hour. I was on the air for three of those newscasts. While our station did receive a direct satellite feed from a national news source and we played a short national news cast at the top of the hour, my job was to pay attention to the news that was going out over our broadcast while sorting through the headlines that came over the wire and choose which stories I would read. My job was to look for local connections to wider news stories. Every time I read the local news, I left some stories behind. I only had a few minutes and we timed our programs to the second, so there was a limit. I can still remember the feeling that I was leaving important stories without coverage.

Later, during a brief stint working for two small town weekly newspapers, I did a similar job of deciding which stories appeared on the front page, which ones were above the fold and which were below. Most of my time in that position the owner and editor was making those decisions, but there was a short time when the owner was sick that I did the job and often I had to make decisions about what would fit onto a particular page because I did page layout for the papers. Again, I worried about there stories that didn’t make the paper. Who was I to decide which news was most important?

Fortunately, I do not have either of those jobs this morning. There is no one who will read this journal entry who doesn’t already know about the historic criminal trial. Everyone who reads it has access to other news sources and the intelligence to interpret the events reported. I am free to speculate about a lot of other topics.

In a way, though no one knew the outcome of the trial before the jury reported to the judge, that story is old news. As you sifted through the stories in you news feed, I hope that you didn’t spend so much time reading about the trail and its outcome that you missed another story. 12-year old Bruhat Soma correctly spelled aposiopesis, caixinha, and sciniph along with other words to win the national spelling bee. As a writer, it is interesting to note that there have been many examples of aposiopesis in the coverage of the historic criminal trial. Feel free to look it up if you want, but essentially the term is the name for deliberately ending a sentence unfinished allowing the hearer (or reader) to supply the ending from their own imagination. My mother used to be a master of aposiopesis: “You kids stop that right now! Don’t make me . . .” She didn’t need to finish the sentence. We knew that whatever came next was something that we didn’t want to have happen.

Caixinha is a box rattle used in Brazilian dance orchestras. I wouldn’t know one if I saw it. I had to look the word up and the spell checker on my word processor doesn’t know the term, either. Sciniph is another term my spell checker doesn’t like, but it is a biblical term. When Moses pleaded with pharaoh to let the people of Israel go free from slavery, the people of Egypt were visited with plagues that eventually led to their release. The third plague was an example of the power of God over the power of the magicians of Egypt. In Exodus 8:16 it says, “Then the Lord said to Moses, “Say to Aaron, ‘Stretch out your staff and strike the dust of the earth, so that it may become sciniph throughout the whole land of Egypt.’ ” The New Revised Standard Version of the Bible translates sciniph as “gnats.” Exodus goes on to say that the Pharaoh’s own magicians recognized this as an act of God. They tried to produce sciniph, but were unable to do so. (Exodus 8:18) Of course, pharaoh remained hard hearted through the third plague and even the fourth, which was flies, which are bigger than sciniph.

We have a 13-year-old grandson who practices his spelling words at our house most Wednesdays. I can say with confidence that he cannot spell aposiopesis, caixinha, or sciniph. He is a year older than Bruhat Soma who spelled them correctly. It seems a bit sad to me that the crimes of a politician should somehow be bigger news than a 12-year-old who has studied the dictionary so much that he was able to spell all kinds of words that I cannot.

I don’t even know if any story, including the unanimous conviction of a candidate for the presidency, is more important than the coverage of the continuing violence in Rafah and the plight of the refugees who are trapped in that perilous city.

It probably is bigger news than the world’s biggest snail-eating festival in the Spanish city of Lleida, though that event drew more than 200,000 visitors. If you missed it, next year’s dates are May 23 - 25. You will be able to feast on barbecued snails even if you don’t want to compete.

It is a good thing that you have other sources of news than my journal. Otherwise you would find it difficult to keep up with conversation with your friends and family.