Hot Type, For the Week of January 12, 2001 -- continued "1853 -- Knoydart is cleared under the direction of the widow of the 16th Chief of Glengarry. More than 400 people are suddenly and forcibly evicted from their homes, including women in labor and the elderly. After the houses were torched, some tenants returned to the ruins and tried to re-build their villages. These ramshackle structures were then also destroyed." "This is probably the most unspoiled part of Europe," Currie says. "But now it's clear to me that I'm sitting in the middle of a remote wilderness that's not remote at all. It's a village in a global village. There are no malls up there, but kids will be kids and will congregate. And now that the European Community is in there" -- importing the fruits and vegetables the crofters long did without -- "they all hang out in front of the supermarket, and they have cellular phones, and a large percentage have computers and are wired into the Internet." The agenda of the West Highland Free Press is narrow, specific, and unwavering. Its slogan is An Tir, an Canan 'sna Daoine -- "The Land, the Language, the People" -- and its Web site asserts, "For the first time in decades there is a newspaper in the Highlands which actively opposes the grotesque maldistribution of land ownership that still characterises the region, and stands up for the rights of local communities and individuals." Shortly before coming home for Christmas, Currie covered a meeting of some 80 crofters who'd gathered at the Sligachan Hotel on Skye to hear a delegation from the Scottish Executive Rural Affairs Department explain a new subsidization system, one based on head of livestock instead of acreage. This scheme, in the Free Press's view, was designed to take money from the crofters' pockets. "There was very little pounding and screaming because the people were totally befuddled as to how the figures worked," Currie E-mailed me. His lead, which called the crofters befuddled, was altered by editors to describe them as "anxious." Currie took the point. "I didn't argue about that, though everyone knows that Skye-men rarely show anxiety," he explained. "I think the reason for the change was probably that 'befuddled' might be interpreted as condescending. Probably true. Sensitivity to the reader -- if not the politicians -- is always of prime concern in such a small community." Another of his front-page stories -- on recent criticism of the member of the Scottish parliament in charge of rural affairs -- was rewritten in order to blast the MP right from the first paragraph. "I didn't argue," Currie acknowledged. "It was a learning experience for me. I just said, 'I will do better next time.'" Currie told me, "They're up there duking it out for the people against the landowners and the politicians who'd encroach on these very stringent laws about tenantship. They're standing at the ramparts, and they don't make any pretense about it. I kind of wish they'd keep the editorials on the editorial page -- but you know what? The paper's not big enough. They have so many rows to hoe they use the whole paper." The Free Press, he's decided, is what "our friend John Milton was referring to when he talked about a free press in a democratic society. I said, 'I'll go out and report this story. Just aim me where you want to aim me. I'll go out and get the facts, and we can look at the facts any way you want to look at the facts.' They're not blatant about it. They just want to protect the interests of the community." Currie returned to Dornie after Christmas to two inches of snow. The locks to his 1986 BMW 320i had frozen, and he broke his only car key trying to open the doors. "I am waiting today for the bus to arrive from Inverness with a key the dealer finally got from Bavaria," said his E-mail. "Meanwhile I've been begging rides and using the company delivery van. The whole community is oriented toward helping each other. It's extraordinary." The big story in the Free Press when he got back concerned two fishermen from Tarskavaig, on Skye's Sleat Peninsula, who'd been out in the Sound of Cuillean in separate skiffs when a blizzard hit. "Both drifted their separate ways and survived miraculously," Currie informed me. "All stories referred to them as lifelong friends. But several people told me later that they are mortal enemies. Wouldn't that be a nice little gossip item in a big-city paper? Not here. There's no way the WHFP could take the heat for revealing such a personal item." News Bites • Next, which is the Sun-Times's new "cutting edge" Sunday supplement, has its moments week by week and deserves a look. Unfortunately, this week's issue, which featured stirring Skrebneski portraits of Steppenwolf members, appeared without a single ad in its 24 pages. Now there's nowhere to go but up. Or out. • Maxim's, which in its day offered the toniest dining experience in Chicago, lies discreetly at the foot of a Near North apartment house on Goethe, virtually invisible from the street. So the Sun-Times found itself at a disadvantage last week when it came to illustrating Fran Spielman's report that the children of Maxim's late owners had turned the establishment over to the city for use as a lecture hall and for consular receptions. But the paper found a way. It ran a file photo of the unrelated Maxim's Restaurant at Clark and Madison. The suspicions of whoever wrote the caption calling Maxim's "the epitome of elegance and fine dining" might have been raised by the short-order eatery's garish awning and the big "HFC Loans" sign over the door. • If you'd enjoy a high-grade conversation on the movies, search around www.slate.com until you find Slate's David Edelstein, the Sun-Times's Roger Ebert, the New York Times's A.O. Scott, and Vogue's Sarah Kerr going at each other on the state of film and film criticism in a virtual roundtable that lasted three days. Their discourse was brought to my attention by the Reader's Jonathan Rosenbaum, who wasn't at all displeased that it was framed in large part by the premises of his own recent book, Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Conspire to Limit What Films We Can See. • The Associated Press reported the other day that former Reader writer Neal Pollack narrowly escaped arrest in a men's room of Philadelphia's famed 30th Street Station. Pollack, who now lives in Philadelphia and has a new book to promote, The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature, chose the venue for a reading. An audience of some 15 men and women had gathered in the toilet to listen when police, who'd been summoned by Amtrak, arrived. Send tips, tirades, and comments to hottype@chicagoreader.com Copyright © 2001 Chicago Reader, Inc. All rights reserved.