What's with the oddities lately with the Buffalo News editorialists?

For about three weeks, Charity Vogel was on the cover of the paper nearly every day, and her sometimes insightful and sometimes confusing essays were often fodder for people in the Everybody's Column section.

Then Mary Kunz Goldman mysteriously disappeared for a few weeks and was replaced (it seems) with a "person on the street" "answer our silly question and you can get your picture in the paper" kind of column. Then she came back. Then she disappeared again. (BTW, I don't think MKG is a bad person. I'm actually defending her, kind of. Her glib little writings were not harmful. She was just a victim of her own goofiness. I think she meant well.)

And the other News writers are being as swirlingly goofy as usual.

Are they playing stool pigeons or red herrings? Is Margaret Sullivan goading the writers on to purposely make fools of themselves to sell more papers or to bring in some kind of attention, good or bad? Or are they playing red herrings in that they are putting silly stuff in the paper to distract from the true nuttiness of what's going on in Buffalo?

What goes on over there in the Buffalo News building?

I kind of picture all of them as the cast of Laugh In.

Seriously.

I'll bet that Charity Vogel runs around wearing a feather boa and doing a go go dance all the time. (She is no doubt the Goldie Hawn of the group.) Mary Kunz Goldman has got to the the staff Ruth Buzzi, with her cryptic silliness. Jeff Miers is probably the dude who hangs out backstage doin' his hipster thing and saying, "Isn't it cool, man? (If Jeff Miers were a Muppet, he'd be a member of Dr. Teeth's band. [That's a compliment, Jeff ]). Donn Esmonde would be the older guy who used to sit on the park bench and talk really slow, the one who Ruth Buzzi would beat with her purse.

To continue this conceit:

--Janice Okun would be popping through the top of the little cardboard windows on the wall behind the stage, but she would only show the top of her head.
--Rod Watson would show up in a striped suit and make political jokes.
--Bruce Andriatch would be the Rowan AND the Martin of the show, playing the smooth yet unintentionally caustic host of the show.