Who Is Delivering Carson Cistulli’s Newspaper?

Unless you have been without internet access for the last several weeks until this exact moment, or are somehow reading these words from the flickering monitor of a hollowed out office building where you are scavenging supplies while attempting to survive in the post-apocalyptic wasteland, you are no doubt well aware of the website Matthew Carlins described as “the most important blog on the internet today.” I am, of course, talking about the website of NotGraphs’ very own Carson Cistulli, Getting the Paper.

Getting the Paper is a statement of the human condition, reduced to the combination of sunshine, newsprint, weeds, and Craftsman-style porch. It flies in the face of our expectations, hurling paradoxes at our feet and forcing us to re-evaluate the societal norms that have, without our explicit permission, created the foundations of our knowledge. Why does this website exist? the website asks. Why am I viewing it? By viewing it, have I already validated its existence? Have I validated mine? How can we track the location of newspapers when newspapers stopped existing back in 2009?

These are all important questions that I leave to the reader; there is no time to answer them now. Instead I raise a separate but equally vital issue to your attention. None of us exists in a vacuum, Paul Simon notwithstanding; one cannot get a paper unless it is given. We are bound to look up to the heavens and ask, “Who is delivering Carson Cistulli’s newspaper?”

To answer this, we turn to science.

Here is a photograph of Mr. Cistulli’s porch, which may or may not need a new coat of paint. If we assume that the wooden steps are the target area for the periodical, we can set up a strike zone as follows:

And here, after a sample of twenty-two days, is a map of newspaper placement:

Carson’s deliveryperson is someone who lives down in the zone, with only a few mistakes thrown belt-high in the center of the plate. The proliferation of low papers tells us that we’re looking for someone who wields a cut fastball, who’s a little homer prone and doesn’t rack up a huge number of strikeouts. He doesn’t show much of a preference for one side of the plate over the other, which likely rules out a reliance on sliders. Finally, he probably needs to have had some spare time since the beginning of August, and could stand to use a little extra cash.

We threw this information into the NotGraphs Computer, a Texas Instruments TI-83 Plus, and it returned this eerily similar PITCHf/x heat map:

Our riddle is solved. It is incontrovertibly proven that Carson Cistulli has had his newspaper delivered by Jamie Moyer. The man truly is ageless.