"The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times. Sometimes one forgets which it is." —Sir James Matthew Barrie
Welcome, I suppose, to the new Stranger. Some would call the changes an improvement; I say a floozy in a prom dress is a floozy still. The paper may look different, but what matters is whether it reads different, and it's here that no manner of fresh paint can help. With names like Dan Savage, Josh Feit, Erica C. Barnett, and Charles Mudede still blighting the masthead, a redesign amounts to little more than shooting rubber bands at a Sherman tank.
Indeed, a quick gander through this week's pages reveals business as inept and offensive as usual. Mudede waxes incomprehensible about area drownings; Savage disinters that old standby the foot fetish, and proceeds to pontificate on its merits; Annie Wagner pummels you with her well-thumbed thesaurus in a film review crafted to call attention to her education, not the film in question. Everything you've come to expect from this miserable publication remains. And while dependability and consistency are virtues, being dependably and consistently awful are not.
Besides a shiny new veneer (complete with cutesy icons and navigational tools—evidently the paper's designers have concluded that its readers are as simple-minded as its authors), there is also, distressingly, some new content. The Stranger has seen fit to employ a "public intern" to "serve the public interest"—presumably as some sort of tool for sexual deviancy. The countdown to litigation starts now. As for further additions, they run the gutter-infested gamut from pornography reviews to a new column named after a sex act favored by those with oral fixations and unresolved "daddy issues." This new low/new column is, Mr. Savage explained to me in an e-mail, the one scrap of Stranger real estate wholly devoted to kind words. That speaks volumes: The Stranger's writers, it seems, can only muster words of encouragement with penises in their mouths.
The lone bright spot of this redesign debacle is that it allows more space for critiques by yours truly; no longer handcuffed by the previous design (which allowed me to comment only on news and features), I am free to draw your attention to editorial shortcomings all over "the book," as they say in "the trades." Though this will no doubt come as a relief to those souls routinely published in the front pages, those miserable scribblers who have been hiding in the paper's arts sections lo these past few years should brace themselves for much scrutiny. The public editor is here to serve the public—a public that deserves so much better from its "only newspaper." (When, oh when, will that tired "gag" be retired?) Now The Stranger's army of grammar-challenged editors and fact-challenged writers has no place to hide. You have been warned. 
