tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-300173732024-03-07T21:36:21.567-05:00Nellie BlogMikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16807727819590358834noreply@blogger.comBlogger453125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30017373.post-71223186735772906532014-10-09T08:11:00.002-04:002014-10-09T08:11:34.574-04:00Freshening up<a class="asset-img-link" href="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b01b7c6f032c4970b-popup" onclick="window.open( this.href, '_blank', 'width=640,height=480,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0' ); return false" style="display: inline;"><img alt="BAC2014-mccloud-cover" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a0105369e6edf970b01b7c6f032c4970b img-responsive" src="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b01b7c6f032c4970b-800wi" style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="BAC2014-mccloud-cover" /></a><a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Best-American-Comics-2014/dp/0544106008/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1412847966&sr=8-1&keywords=best+american+comics+2014" target="_blank"><br />The 2014 edition of "Best American Comics"</a> has just been released. I'd seen some pre-release chatter but had somewhat discounted it, because this year's edition is edited by Scott McCloud and he's well-connected enough in the comics community that whatever he does is going to be considered news.<br />
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<a class="asset-img-link" href="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b01b8d07a2804970c-popup" onclick="window.open( this.href, '_blank', 'width=640,height=480,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0' ); return false" style="display: inline;"><img alt="Tmbss141009" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a0105369e6edf970b01b8d07a2804970c img-responsive" src="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b01b8d07a2804970c-800wi" style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="Tmbss141009" /></a><br />But today's Bliss struck me in a particular way that set me up for <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/comic-riffs/wp/2014/10/07/best-american-comics-2014-guest-editor-scott-mccloud-illuminates-the-range-of-modern-brilliance-in-new-must-read-qa/" target="_blank">Michael Cavna's interview with McCloud</a>, and particularly for this:<br />
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<i>I think as we age, it’s very easy for us to settle into a particular set of aesthetic criteria that allow us to just shrug off anything genuinely new. Like with music. In college, your roommate is blasting it; they’re playing it in the coffee shops and what not. You can’t get away from that stuff. But then you get control over your own musical environment. And the truth is that with any song or comic that you’re going to learn to love — it takes a few listens or views to power up. On the first viewing, on the first listen, you don’t necessarily get the breadth of what’s going on there. You’ve got to come back and come back. So I try to be diligent. and dive back in again.</i></div>
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Thing is, I have been flailing a bit since Kenosha, which, while I continued to blog and was certainly engaged in the world of cartoons the whole time, still created a break in the action after which I came home to a sort of same-old same-old feeling that, even with the number and variety of comics I go through each morning, I wasn't seeing anything new.<br />
<br />
Harry Bliss's gag made me feel that it was okay to be out of the loop on stuff I genuinely don't care about but can't seem to avoid, like "Fashion Week" or who's competing in "Dancing with the Stars" or the latest dumbass Facebook quiz.<br />
<br />
Someone posted a quiz the other day that promised to tell you what your "old person name" was, and I replied, "I've already got one."<br />
<br />
And there are types of comics that I will never like, not because I'm an old fart but because they are things I have looked at and considered and digested and don't like.<br />
<br />
F'rinstance:<br />
<br />
1. Comics that are high on art and low on storytelling and insight. I'll admit I can be temporarily dazzled, but, goddammit, I want a story to go with all that draftsmanship. Wandering around being sad is not a story and wandering around being sad in a graphically rich environment is still just wandering around being sad.<br />
<br />
Russian author Ivan Goncharov struck gold in 1859 with his novel "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Oblomov-Penguin-Classics-Ivan-Goncharov/dp/0140449876/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1412850591&sr=8-1&keywords=oblomov" target="_blank">Oblomov</a>," the story of a directionless man so lacking in ambition that he stays in bed for much of the story. The novel not only sparked a national discussion but created a term, "<i>oblomovshchina</i>" for this indolence and the harm it was doing to Russia.<br />
<br />
But Goncharov was not embracing <i>oblomovshchina</i> or declaring it inevitable: He provided his antihero with a dynamic friend and a wonderfully energetic girlfriend who worked to rouse Oblomov from his torpor, as well as a lazy servant who failed to serve and estate managers who openly cheated him, knowing he hadn't the energy to challenge their thievery.<br />
<br />
Depicting someone who feels life has no meaning requires that you believe it does. Otherwise, you're just producing graphic emo.<br />
<br />
2. In the early days of our adulthood, we all have annoying roommates and romantic problems. The trick is to make it universal and somehow significant. That's a damn hard trick.<br />
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Try taking them all to a bullfight in Pamplona, only not that because not only has it been done already, but it requires most of your characters -- and certainly you -- to be veterans of a horrific war that wiped out half a generation and more than half of their dreams and illusions.<br />
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Otherwise, speaking of things that have been done already ...<br />
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<a class="asset-img-link" href="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b01b7c6f037f9970b-popup" onclick="window.open( this.href, '_blank', 'width=640,height=480,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0' ); return false" style="display: inline;"><img alt="Central Perk scene" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a0105369e6edf970b01b7c6f037f9970b img-responsive" src="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b01b7c6f037f9970b-320wi" style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="Central Perk scene" /></a><br />
3. I don't like being fooled into attending lectures that have been disguised as comics. I like documentary comics, and even pointed to <a href="http://www.cartoonmovement.com/icomic/65" target="_blank">Victor Ndula's piece</a> on the Kakuma refugee camp just yesterday. I also really like "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/War-Boring-Bored-Scared-Worlds/dp/0451230116/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1412856337&sr=8-1&keywords=war+is+boring" target="_blank">War is Boring</a>," a collaboration of Matt Bors and David Axe, and I greatly admire the work of Joe Sacco.<br />
<br />
That's not the same thing as drawing pictures of someone delivering a lecture, and there are some emerging non-fiction books out there that are to comics as "Sunrise Semester" was to television.<br />
<br />
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<i><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/5_Q-Mw6qH9k?rel=0" width="420"></iframe><br />(How far can you get? At least it won't cost you $25 to find out)</i></div>
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So I just ordered "Best American Comics" and, while I don't expect to like everything in it, I do expect to find a lot to freshen my perspectives.<br />
<br />
I can't completely recommend it until I have actually seen it, but I can recommend you keep your powder dry and your perspective up to date. I'd be a little surprised if this volume didn't help you do that.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i><b>Yes, it's a niche, but it's a really good niche</b></i></span><br />
<a class="asset-img-link" href="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b01b8d07a2e6b970c-popup" onclick="window.open( this.href, '_blank', 'width=640,height=480,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0' ); return false" style="display: inline;"><img alt="Alex" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a0105369e6edf970b01b8d07a2e6b970c image-full img-responsive" src="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b01b8d07a2e6b970c-800wi" title="Alex" /></a><br />Today's <a href="http://www.alexcartoon.com/" target="_blank">Alex</a> made me laugh, but maybe it's only funny if you've spent a lot of time at conventions. Alex is squarely aimed at the business class in a way that Dilbert and On the Fastrack are not.<br />
<br />
Those strips are really intended for "people with bad bosses" and get their most intense following from a spot fairly low in the food chain. That's a perfectly acceptable and profitable demographic, but the middle-management crowd Alex targets is one that newspapers in this country would do well to consider.<br />
<br />
We talk a lot about how only "old people" buy newspapers, but I can't tell you how many 30- and 40-something people in suits have said to me, "It's getting to be a really fast read," of a paper that would rather run yet more wire copy about the latest Brittany/Miley interchangeable pop-tart than a story about a local economic issue.<br />
<br />
Anyway, Alex nailed this one: Most of my memories of attending conventions are of conversations in the hospitality suite after hours or in the vendor alley between sessions. Certainly, 99 percent of the business I ever generated at a convention happened when I wasn't at a breakout session, and sometimes because I had purposely skipped one to talk about something that mattered instead.<br />
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And the people who laughed at this have advertising money to spend. Just sayin'<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i><b>Thanks, Dan! </b></i></span><br />
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<i> <a class="asset-img-link" href="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b01b7c6f03b96970b-popup" onclick="window.open( this.href, '_blank', 'width=640,height=480,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0' ); return false" style="display: inline;"><img alt="Bizarro" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a0105369e6edf970b01b7c6f03b96970b image-full img-responsive" src="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b01b7c6f03b96970b-800wi" title="Bizarro" /></a><br />(<a href="http://bizarrocomics.com/" target="_blank">Bizarro</a>)</i></div>
If you're going to plant an earworm, make it a good one.<br />
<br />
(<i>Oh, yeah, and the gag was funny, too.</i>)<br />
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Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16807727819590358834noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30017373.post-4476669024204548372014-06-08T11:01:00.000-04:002014-06-08T11:04:10.309-04:00Oh, THAT Bill Watterson<a class="asset-img-link" href="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b01a73dd49bf9970d-popup" onclick="window.open( this.href, '_blank', 'width=640,height=480,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0' ); return false" style="float: left;"></a><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b01a73dd49bf9970d-popup" onclick="window.open( this.href, '_blank', 'width=640,height=480,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0' ); return false" style="float: left;"><img alt="Lead_large" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a0105369e6edf970b01a73dd49bf9970d img-responsive" src="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b01a73dd49bf9970d-320wi" style="margin: 0px 5px 5px 0px;" title="Lead_large" /></a>I was a bit coy yesterday about the whole Bill Watterson/Stephan Pastis thing because, at the pre-dawn hour when I was cobbling it together, the story still seemed confined to the insider sites and I didn't want to spoil the surprise for people who had missed the reveal.<br />
<br />
About 30 seconds later, it was all over the intertubes and trending on Facebook and there was nothing to spoil.<br />
<br />
Well, timing is everything.<br />
<br />
But there's still plenty to talk about, because Watterson didn't just step out of the shadows on a lark, and it really isn't much of a surprise to learn that the crossover was actually done in support of Team Cul de Sac, the group of Richard Thompson's friends and fans that has been raising money for Parkinson's research virtually since Thompson was diagnosed.<br />
<a class="asset-img-link" href="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b01a3fd19da39970b-popup" onclick="window.open( this.href, '_blank', 'width=640,height=480,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0' ); return false" style="float: right;"><img alt="Watterson" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a0105369e6edf970b01a3fd19da39970b img-responsive" src="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b01a3fd19da39970b-320wi" style="margin: 0px 0px 5px 5px;" title="Watterson" /></a><br />
<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/comic-riffs/wp/2014/06/06/exclusive-calvin-and-hobbes-creator-bill-watterson-returns-to-the-comics-page-to-offer-a-few-pearls-gems/" target="_blank">Here's Michael Cavna's report on it</a>, and <a href="http://teamculdesac.blogspot.com/2014/06/watterson-and-pastis-join-forces-for.html" target="_blank">here's the Team Cul de Sac explanation</a>.<br />
<br />
The bottom line is that Watterson, who has been a Cul de Sac fan from the start, provided the strips as material to be auctioned off in support of Team Cul de Sac, where I'm sure they will raise a pretty penny.<br />
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You can go see the original strips, as well as some other pretty snazzy auction-bound comic art, at the <a href="http://www.heroesonline.com/heroescon/" target="_blank">HeroesCon, June 20-22, in Charlotte, NC</a>. I'll post more about the auction itself when it happens.<br />
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As a struggling freelancer, I'm always a little bit surprised at what other people can afford to do, but I daresay the Watterson works will go for something in the range of jaw-dropping.<br />
<br />
<a class="asset-img-link" href="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b01a511c952d7970c-popup" onclick="window.open( this.href, '_blank', 'width=640,height=480,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0' ); return false" style="float: left;"></a><a class="asset-img-link" href="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b01a511c952d7970c-popup" onclick="window.open( this.href, '_blank', 'width=640,height=480,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0' ); return false" style="float: left;"><img alt="Petey" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a0105369e6edf970b01a511c952d7970c img-responsive" src="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b01a511c952d7970c-200wi" style="margin: 0px 5px 5px 0px; width: 175px;" title="Petey" /></a>However, in the first Team Cul de Sac auction, there was a very pleasant mix of jaw-dropping and affordable items, so don't assume you won't be able to walk away with something delightful.<br />
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<a href="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/comic_strip_of_the_daycom/2012/06/you-cant-look-at-this-its-mine.html" target="_blank">This link to my report on that event is worth the click</a>, but the bottom line is that, while Watterson's piece went for over $13,000, the average price of original cartoon art was under $250.<br />
<a class="asset-img-link" href="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b01a511c9545c970c-popup" onclick="window.open( this.href, '_blank', 'width=640,height=480,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0' ); return false" style="display: inline;"><img alt="Pastis piece" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a0105369e6edf970b01a511c9545c970c image-full img-responsive" src="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b01a511c9545c970c-800wi" height="206" title="Pastis piece" width="640" /></a><br />
Oh, and the second-highest total was for a piece of art by <a href="http://teamculdesac.blogspot.com/2011/04/stephan-pastis-repost-from-his-blog-and.html" target="_blank">some fellow named Stephan Pastis</a>.<br />
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I got to see some of the original art from that auction in Boston during the 2011 NCS Convention there, because Chris Sparks, who headed up the effort, had the contributions with him at an off-site public event.<br />
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At the time, it was kind of going from a well-intentioned dream to something that was by-gawd really happening and the growing excitement was fun to be around.<br />
<a class="asset-img-link" href="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b01a511c953e0970c-popup" onclick="window.open( this.href, '_blank', 'width=640,height=480,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0' ); return false" style="float: right;"><img alt="Cover" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a0105369e6edf970b01a511c953e0970c img-responsive" src="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b01a511c953e0970c-200wi" style="margin: 0px 0px 5px 5px; width: 200px;" title="Cover" /></a><br />
And so was Richard, with whom I had corresponded for some time but whom I had never met in three dimensions. <a href="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/comic_strip_of_the_daycom/2012/08/this-gold-watch-was-awarded-way-too-soon.html" target="_blank">Here's where I go all fanboy about his strip and him and that day and so forth and so on.</a><br />
The book in which all that art is gathered, together with the artists' thoughts about Cul de Sac and Richard Thompson, <a href="http://teamculdesac.blogspot.com/p/buy-our-stuff-to-support-mjff.html" target="_blank">remains available and is still a fundraiser</a> for the effort.<br />
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And that's their link, not my usual self-serving one, so even more cha-ching goes in the right direction.<br />
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><i><b>So about the kid and the tiger</b></i></span><br />
<a class="asset-img-link" href="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b01a3fd19dd2c970b-popup" onclick="window.open( this.href, '_blank', 'width=640,height=480,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0' ); return false" style="display: inline;"><img alt="ChHadToGo" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a0105369e6edf970b01a3fd19dd2c970b image-full img-responsive" src="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b01a3fd19dd2c970b-800wi" title="ChHadToGo" /></a><br />
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I don't post a lot of repeats here except when I do a "classics" discursion, which usually means I'm on the road and wanted something I could advance, or times when a contemporary strip reminds me of an earlier piece.<br />
<br />
I guess this is more in line with the latter, because the Watterson/Pastis crossover raised an interesting discussion on a third artist's Facebook feed about what other strips stand in the same circle with Calvin & Hobbes.<br />
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It was interesting in part because some people didn't get it (<i>which is why I'm not linking to it</i>) and simply named their favorite comic strips. The fact that they missed the point <i>was</i> the point, because what made C&H such a juggernaut was that you didn't necessarily have to get it all.<br />
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So, Peanuts, yes. But other clever, well-drawn strips like Pogo made demands of the reader that shut out the pie-in-the-face fans, while pie-in-the-face strips don't attract fans of more heady gag work.<br />
<br />
There simply haven't been a lot of strips that can walk the tightrope Watterson and Schulz were able to navigate, which is why their work exploded on the market as it did.<br />
<br />
Here's what I mean:<br />
<br />
<a class="asset-img-link" href="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b01a511c95613970c-popup" onclick="window.open( this.href, '_blank', 'width=640,height=480,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0' ); return false" style="display: inline;"><img alt="CalvinBus" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a0105369e6edf970b01a511c95613970c image-full img-responsive" src="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b01a511c95613970c-800wi" height="250" title="CalvinBus" width="640" /></a><br />
I had this panel over my desk through one of the most grueling, soul-crushing work experiences I ever endured.<br />
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Corporate was pressuring our paper to cut everything but the profits. My supportive publisher had taken early retirement and my equally supportive boss had demanded and taken a buy-out because he didn't want to do the required throat-slashing.<br />
<br />
During the six months it took me to find another job,the new beancounting management team took away all the fun parts of my actual duties and ground me down with new, low-skill taskwork in an attempt to get me to quit so they wouldn't have to pay me unemployment and could replace me with a part-timer.<br />
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Calvin said it all for me, and with a sense of existential dread and futility that is also contained in the other strip: I had to go. Bad.<br />
<br />
But there's actually a second panel to the bus stop strip in which Watterson very uncharacteristically steps on his gag with a throwaway punchline I have since forgotten, something along the lines of "I hate Mondays."<br />
<br />
You can read and laugh about Calvin being excused to go to the bathroom and heading home instead without recognizing the level at which he can't be in that classroom for one more minute, and you can laugh at the bus stop gag along the lines of "Yeah, going to work is a drag" without being fully dragged down into the world of Sartre, Camus and Beckett.<br />
<br />
<a class="asset-img-link" href="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b01a511c95752970c-popup" onclick="window.open( this.href, '_blank', 'width=640,height=480,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0' ); return false" style="float: right;"><img alt="Seinfeld" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a0105369e6edf970b01a511c95752970c img-responsive" src="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b01a511c95752970c-200wi" style="margin: 0px 0px 5px 5px; width: 200px;" title="Seinfeld" /></a>Which makes it different than the last episode of Seinfeld, which fans hated because the writers went over their heads.<br />
<br />
You couldn't enjoy and appreciate the wrap up unless, first of all, you recognized that the characters had always been written as unlikeable, self-obsessed assholes, and, second, you caught the Sartre reference and realized that they had died in the plane crash and what followed was the Last Judgement in which they were condemned to the hell of each other's company.<br />
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They needed more muffin tops and sponges and other catch-phrases to throw around at the water cooler the next morning.<br />
<br />
Calvin provided the gag, not simply to soften the point but to offer almost a second joke.<br />
<br />
<a class="asset-img-link" href="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b01a511c9579c970c-popup" onclick="window.open( this.href, '_blank', 'width=640,height=480,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0' ); return false" style="display: inline;"><img alt="Ch130723" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a0105369e6edf970b01a511c9579c970c image-full img-responsive" src="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b01a511c9579c970c-800wi" title="Ch130723" /></a><br />
There were times when Watterson had a point to make that may have whizzed over a lot of heads.<br />
<br />
<a class="asset-img-link" href="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b01a73dd4a26a970d-popup" onclick="window.open( this.href, '_blank', 'width=640,height=480,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0' ); return false" style="display: inline;"><img alt="Ch071110" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a0105369e6edf970b01a73dd4a26a970d image-full img-responsive" src="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b01a73dd4a26a970d-800wi" title="Ch071110" /></a><br />
But you don't need a formal grounding in surrealism to get a laugh out of this one.<br />
<br />
<a class="asset-img-link" href="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b01a3fd19dfd8970b-popup" onclick="window.open( this.href, '_blank', 'width=640,height=480,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0' ); return false" style="display: inline;"><img alt="Ch130128" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a0105369e6edf970b01a3fd19dfd8970b image-full img-responsive" src="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b01a3fd19dfd8970b-800wi" title="Ch130128" /></a><br />
And Calvin added catch-phrases to the language well before Seinfeld and gang started doing it.<br />
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<a class="asset-img-link" href="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b01a73dd4a2c0970d-popup" onclick="window.open( this.href, '_blank', 'width=640,height=480,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0' ); return false" style="display: inline;"><img alt="Hamsterhuey" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a0105369e6edf970b01a73dd4a2c0970d image-full img-responsive" src="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b01a73dd4a2c0970d-800wi" title="Hamsterhuey" /></a><br />
And the interplay between Calvin and his parents, and Calvin and his teachers, was something you could identify with. It was always intelligent humor, but most often was also completely accessible.<br />
<br />
<a class="asset-img-link" href="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b01a511c95892970c-popup" onclick="window.open( this.href, '_blank', 'width=640,height=480,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0' ); return false" style="display: inline;"><img alt="Ch140528" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a0105369e6edf970b01a511c95892970c image-full img-responsive" src="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b01a511c95892970c-800wi" height="201" title="Ch140528" width="640" /></a><br />
Sometimes the insights were deep, but they remained accessible.<br />
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<a class="asset-img-link" href="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b01a511c958cb970c-popup" onclick="window.open( this.href, '_blank', 'width=640,height=480,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0' ); return false" style="display: inline;"><img alt="Calvinandhobbesswiftkick" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a0105369e6edf970b01a511c958cb970c image-full img-responsive" src="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b01a511c958cb970c-800wi" height="212" title="Calvinandhobbesswiftkick" width="640" /></a><br />
And Hobbes was available as a Greek chorus to keep readers aware of the hero's tragic flaws.<br />
Enough. I'm over the TLDNR limit. If you're on Netflix, go watch this movie.<br />
<br />Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16807727819590358834noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30017373.post-59182832510679378032014-05-25T15:58:00.000-04:002014-05-25T16:49:42.497-04:00Pleased to meet you, Jacob<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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One of the oddities of telecommuting is that, even going into six years of living here, my local roots are still pretty shallow and, for instance, I don't run into a lot of people I know at the grocery store or post office.<br />
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I know a few of the neighbors along the walk that Vaska and I take when it's time to stretch his legs and shake the computer cobwebs from my eyes, but, mostly, I just know their houses and have a sense of who fusses over the garden, who likes to work on the car, who has a dog that yaps through a window as we go by.<br />
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And the same applies to my neighbors here, whose homes we walk past on a cinder track that's wide enough for cars but limited to pedestrian traffic. (<i>It's also wider than the leash is long, so we both pass by with reverence.</i>)<br />
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The cemetery goes back to the town's founding in 1761, and so some of the people there hearken back to colonial days. And, just as I can only speculate on my above-ground neighbors' predilections by looking at their houses and cars, so, too, I can only, for the most part, guess at who these neighbors were in their hour upon the stage.<br />
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Sometimes, their stories come from comparing the dates within a family group, seeing the children who predeceased their parents and, while saddened at an infant's death, I'm usually more curious at the death of a 15-year-old: Was she sickly her whole life, or was this one of those tragic pre-antibiotic deaths in which a healthy person is taken sick and then dead within a day or two?<br />
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And, while all of it is all vain speculation, I can't, for instance, help but think that, while the life of Submit Porter, wife of Arnold, who died in 1849 at the age of 65, may have been happy enough, it was almost certainly not a barrel of laughs.<br />
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On the other hand, there are a large number of women, mostly later in the 19th century, buried under their maiden names, as "wife of" though certainly they took his name in marriage. A curious custom I hadn't heard of and certainly a boon to genealogists.<br />
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But the center of intrigue on this walk has always been the lonely grave at the right angle under the trees in the map above.<br />
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On the outside of the path, by the fence, an area so narrow that there is but one other grave, a child's tiny headstone, I would pause at the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Army_of_the_Republic" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">GAR</a> medallion that was its only marker.<br />
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He wasn't forgotten, clearly, for they came by each year and marked his lonely veteran's grave.<br />
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But was he just a name on the cemetery records? If he had family, wouldn't he be in a family plot, and wouldn't someone, sometime have put a headstone over his grave?<br />
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There are, after all, besides the many intact markers, shattered stones throughout the old cemetery, stumps, if nothing more, to show where once the mourners had gathered, and where, on Decoration Day, flowers might have been laid.<br />
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Some stones tell the soldier's story, if he were from a family that could afford such things. Captain James B. Perry fell at Fredericksburg, his headstone says, and <a href="http://ourwarmikepride.blogspot.com/2013/03/faces-from-fighting-fifth-one-more-time.html" target="_blank">a little bit of work on Google fills in more</a>, so that now I even have a picture of him and I know something about the highly decorated, deeply devastated unit in which he served.<br />
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And then there is the obilesk that marks the graves of the Lathrop family. On one side, <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=m7JmR5bEyM4C&pg=PA173&lpg=PA173&dq=%22Sluman+Lathrop%22+Lebanon&source=bl&ots=3UNUXnkwpc&sig=L51cid_DNPYKur0T0b9T-R2oXdM&hl=en&sa=X&ei=RjiCU5K0JsTKsQSKvILQAg&ved=0CEMQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=%22Sluman%20Lathrop%22%20Lebanon&f=false" target="_blank">Sluman Lathrop</a>, the paterfamilias and a founder of the town, is remembered not with a GAR medallion but one with the image of a Minuteman, marking his service in the Revolution.<br />
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<i>(This is a factor not to be underplayed, given that it was at a reunion of New Hampshire's rebels that the cranky but inspiring old Yankee <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cincinnatus" target="_blank">Cincinnatus</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stark" target="_blank">General John Stark</a>, said, "Live free or die, boys. Death is not the worst of evils.")</i> <br />
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On the other side, marked with a medallion of the Grand Army of the Republic, lies his son, Major Solon Lathrop, who served in the war, only, the carving tells us, to die of yellow fever in 1867 while stationed in Texas.<br />
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But without a marker, that lonely veteran down in the far corner didn't even have a name by which to be remembered, and, though I walked past his GAR Medallion nearly every day, I never passed by without wondering about him, and thinking that, of all sad tales in that neighborhood of the dead, his was perhaps the saddest.<br />
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And then a few weeks ago, I saw a stake with a bit of plastic ribbon in the ground at his grave, and, looking around, I saw a few others.<br />
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As I got up to his grave, I saw, on the stake in Magic Marker, the name "Jackson." And then, when we came by the next day, I saw that <a href="http://www.feustel.us/genealogy/LebanonNH/soldiers.needing%20stones.pdf" target="_blank">his brothers-in-arms in the American Legion had, indeed, not forgotten him</a>.<br />
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At last, not only <a href="http://www.feustel.us/genealogy/LebanonNH/Civil%20War%20Soldiers.pdf" target="_blank">a name</a>, but more: The 16th Massachusetts, which a little searching <a href="http://www.gettysburg.stonesentinels.com/MA/16Ma-OR.php" target="_blank">places at Gettysburg</a>, and which a little more research places, well, <a href="http://www.civilwarintheeast.com/USA/MA/MA16.php" target="_blank">damn near everywhere</a>.<br />
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No details, however, and now I'm left to wonder, why did Jacob Jackson die, seven years after the war ended, at only 29?<br />
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Maybe there was no connection between his service and his death: You could die of nearly anything back then. <br />
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But he died young, even by the standards of those days, and he was buried alone, moreso than we all, of course, must be.<br />
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Still, he didn't die forgotten after all, and that makes me smile.<br />
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Now when we walk past his place, I can finally greet him by name.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<i><span style="font-size: small;">I have spoken of some of the men who were near
to me among others very near and dear, not because their lives
have become historic, but because their lives are the type of
what every soldier has known and seen in his own company. In the
great democracy of self-devotion private and general stand side
by side. Unmarshalled save by their own deeds, the army of the
dead sweep before us, "wearing their wounds like
stars." It is not because the men I have mentioned were my
friends that I have spoken of them, but, I repeat, because they
are types. I speak of those whom I have seen. But you all have
known such; you, too, remember!</span> <a href="http://people.virginia.edu/~mmd5f/memorial.htm" target="_blank">-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Memorial Day 1884</a></i></div>
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<br />Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16807727819590358834noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30017373.post-49406053110633746342014-05-19T09:05:00.002-04:002014-05-19T09:27:42.358-04:00Collaborations<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I'm just on the point (<i>fingers crossed/wood knocked upon</i>) of having a client sign off on a project that has been a lot of fun, a 14-chapter children's historical fiction serial about a young fellow going off from Lachine, Quebec, into the high country as a voyageur in 1800.<br />
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Collaborating artist for the project has been <a href="http://www.dylanmeconis.com/" target="_blank">Dylan Meconis</a>, whom, had I not, a few years ago, signed her to a project about six weeks before she graduated from college, I wouldn't have had the brass to approach at this stage of her career.<br />
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As I was sorting through the endgame portion of the project, it occurred to me that most of the artists I've worked with have been cartoonists and that, in any case, you, Gentle Reader, might find some reflections on artist/writer collaboration of interest.<br />
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And let's start with the cartoonist part: I like working with web cartoonists because I can check up on them before the conversation even starts.<br />
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For all the (<i>valid, IMHO</i>) warnings about putting too many selfies of you with a Solo cup on Facebook, there is a distinct benefit of having a potential client/collaborator/partner Google you and find a cartoon that is of consistent quality and is updated regularly.<br />
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It's not that I'm insensitive to health issues, missing cats and family reunions, but I'm very sensitive to deadlines and pleasing the client. Never mind a resume: What you post <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><i>is</i></span> your resume, and the reward is being picked up by someone who believes in hiring the right person and then getting out of the way.<br />
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Which is today's topic.<br />
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Dylan, as said, was not even a starving artist yet when we did <a href="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/teachup/2014/02/tales-of-the-ancient-world.html" target="_blank">our first project</a>, but rather a recommendation from my most frequent partner, <a href="http://baldwinpage.com/" target="_blank">Christopher Baldwin</a>.<br />
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I had an artist drop out of a project late enough that I didn't have time to fiddle around finding a replacement. Chris was too busy, but gave me a couple of leads, high among which was a talented woman who already knew the subject area of mythology.<br />
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I don't know what Dylan's final grades were, considering that she squeezed this work in around finals, but she got high honors from me, because I didn't have to explain each story in the series. She already knew them well enough to add nuances that I wouldn't have requested.<br />
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I really only had to let her know, for instance, at what points I was breaking the story of Proserpina into separate parts and she would come up with one illustration showing the young girl being lured off into the hands of Pluto, and then another of her grieving mother, Ceres, wandering the world in the guise of an old woman and so forth.<br />
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It's not that I don't provide input or feedback. For the current project, Dylan sent me a preliminary sketch of our young man, but the client and I felt he looked too old for the role.<br />
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Back he came, younger but still well-muscled as required (voyageurs regularly hauled 90-pound packs on portage, two at a time), but softer, and now carrying the paddle of a <i><a href="https://www.facebook.com/HistoricDunvegan/posts/502551619808387" target="_blank">milieux</a></i> rather than a <i><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=JxQLxf6oMmMC&pg=PT123&lpg=PT123&dq=le+gouvernail+voyageur&source=bl&ots=dkP0_WG9u1&sig=wnWQ4lVnKKVhyUTCzbbgmYzKZps&hl=en&sa=X&ei=z-15U8yZOoHKsQTHzYCgDw&ved=0CHUQ6AEwCQ#v=onepage&q=le%20gouvernail%20voyageur&f=false" target="_blank">gouvernail</a></i>. <br />
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But I'm hesitant to interfere with more global choices and, unless asked, my practice is to send the chapter and let the artist decide what the illustration should be.<br />
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In this illustration, the brigade of voyageurs has, though incompetent leadership of a new boss, smashed one of their three canoes, lost two men and seriously injured a third.<br />
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As they sit on shore waiting for their boss to decide how to unravel the mess, a hunting part of <a href="http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/57791/Beaver" target="_blank">Beaver</a> comes upon them. This is my favorite illustration in the story, perhaps because, when she submitted the sketches, Dylan warned me not to try to get more of the damaged canoe or unhappy voyageurs into the foreground, and she was, of course, absolutely right.<br />
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There was, in the text, a suggestion of puzzled bemusement, but the variation of appearance, pose and reaction among these four hunters is exactly and precisely why the writer needs to shut up, back off and let the artist do what she was brought in to do.<br />
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Similarly, when I worked with <a href="https://www.facebook.com/rinacat" target="_blank">Marina "Rinacat" Tay</a> on "<a href="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/teachup/2014/02/ariadne-and-the-magic-thread.html" target="_blank">Ariadne and the Magic Thread</a>," she pulled from the chapter this moment, when the imprisoned Theseus begins to con Ariadne into betraying her country in order to aid his quest.<br />
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I generally send reference pictures to the artists, and had mentioned to Rina that, while Minoan women went topless under their vests, that wouldn't fly in American classrooms, so she added the blouse.<br />
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The reason I gave Rina that additional guidance is that she's from Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia, and while she's pretty well immersed in western pop culture, there were a few gaps from time to time.<br />
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Most notably, I kind of assumed everyone was familiar with Greek ships, but she wasn't, and needed reference pics for those.<br />
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But the funny part came when Ariadne, marooned on the Greek island of Naxos by the heartless manipulator, Theseus, finds herself alone except for the gifts a friend leaves her of a jug of drinking water, a jar of ointment and a loaf of bread.<br />
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Apparently, islands in the Indian Ocean have a lot more beach grass than the ones in the Mediterranean, but that wasn't what cracked me up in the preliminary sketch she sent me: It was what looked like an unsliced loaf of Wonder bread.<br />
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Of course! Why would she not think that's what a loaf of bread is supposed to look like to an American audience? As you see, the grass was mowed and the bread made more authentic and life went on, even for a stranded princess.<br />
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However, when we did "Fables and Folk Tales," Rina's expertise in manga/anime came to the fore, because the stories featured animals and fairyfolk, right in her roundhouse, and this illustration for <a href="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/teachup_samples/2010/09/sparrow-and-woodpecker-japan.html" target="_blank">the Japanese story of the Sparrow and the Woodpecker</a> could not be finer.<br />
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The other artists benefit, I think, from my initial work with Chris, which began over a dozen years ago with this re-telling of <a href="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/teachup/2014/02/the-legend-of-perseus.html" target="_blank">the Legend of Perseus</a>.<br />
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Again, the fact that he'd updated Bruno so consistently and faithfully for so many years led me to approach him for the venture, and he's never missed a deadline.<br />
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He also brings a perfectionism to the work that I appreciate. He immediately decided to consult Grecian urns for a line and style, as seen in this first chapter illustration, as the imprisoned Danae attempts to hide the child, Perseus, from her cruel father.<br />
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While I love the line itself, and the shadow of the keys as well as the flicker of the oil lamp, what particularly pleased me was his decision to make Danae look, well ... Greek. I think he's the first artist to draw this Greek woman as a Greek since, I dunno, maybe the fall of Troy.<br />
<a class="asset-img-link" href="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b01a73dc6e1bc970d-popup" onclick="window.open( this.href, '_blank', 'width=640,height=480,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0' ); return false" style="float: right;"></a> <br />
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I really learned to trust the artist, to back off and, if an illo didn't come out as I had expected, to go back to the text and see if the discrepancy was there. I've been known to change text rather than ask for a change in a picture.<br />
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However, we did go back and forth in a legendary exchange over this one, in which Perseus descends into the Garden of the Hesperides, over the technical question of how a man being held aloft by the magic sandals of Hermes would hold his legs upon descent.<br />
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I don't recall every detail of the exchange, but it involved a bit of stubborness on both sides until I think the fact began to emerge that a man being held aloft by wings on his heels would have enough problems remaining upright that his attitude upon landing was ... up to the artist.<br />
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Which is how it should be. And, from time to time, through our exchanges ever since, the issue of Perseus's legs has been brought forward as a reminder to shut up and let the artist do what you brought the artist in to do.<br />
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Final case in point: When <a href="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/teachup/2014/02/woman-of-the-world-the-story-of-nellie-bly.html" target="_blank">Nellie Bly</a> made her famous dash around the world, she stopped in France to visit Jules Verne, whose best selling novel of some 20 years earlier had sparked the challenge.<br />
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In the course of their dinner and conversation, he showed her the map on his wall that had been his reference for the voyage of Phileas Fogg, and, with a pencil, traced upon it her own itinerary as a comparison.<br />
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That's the map. Christopher found it and reproduced it. I kid you not.<br />
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He did need to whiten Verne's hair, since the picture he'd found was from an earlier time, but mox nix in the grand scheme of things. <br />
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Writers, write. Let the artist be the artist. Your work will be better and you'll both live longer.Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16807727819590358834noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30017373.post-79657710633880578342014-04-30T07:50:00.002-04:002014-04-30T08:20:27.109-04:00Race and sex, but no explosions<br />
The brouhaha over San Diego Clippers owner Donald Sterling took <a href="http://bangordailynews.com/2014/04/29/sports/nba-to-act-on-clippers-owner-tied-to-racial-comments/" target="_blank">a bad turn for cartoonists yesterday</a> when NBA Commissioner Adam Sterling hit him with a $2.5 million fine (<i>the maximum allowed</i>) and a lifetime ban from the league, meaning that, while they couldn't actually force him to sell the team, they could forbid him to have any interaction with it.<br />
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That crisp rustling sound you heard was of hundreds of cartoons being wadded up and tossed into the <a href="http://www.amazon.com/DoxieBall-Basketball-Trash-Can-Game/dp/B00A10MICM/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1398857543&sr=8-1&keywords=doxieball" target="_blank">wastebasket</a>.<br />
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Yes, it <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><i>would</i></span> be ironic if they hit the rim and bounced out.<br />
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It's impossible to know how many cartoons were drawn before Silver's announcement, but enough made it into syndication that it's reasonable to assume others didn't.<br />
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There were a couple of post-ruling fails as well, IMNSHO, from those who were upset that the league didn't do more, apparently not realizing that "<a href="http://www.nelsonsnavy.co.uk/broadside8.html" target="_blank">flogging around the fleet</a>" is no longer permitted, or disappointed that the commissioner, who has been in office since February 1, hadn't acted several years before gaining the position.<br />
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The best commentary came, as it happens, neither from cartoonist nor columnist but from Kareem Abdul Jabbar, <a href="http://time.com/79590/donald-sterling-kareem-abdul-jabbar-racism/" target="_blank">who has the standing to address the topic and both the insight and the wit to make his opinion well worth reading</a>. (<i>That may be the most rewarding link you click on all week.</i>)<br />
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However, not every cartoonist failed. A few didn't get beyond a somewhat tepid "Gee, he and Cliven Bundy could be friends!" level, but there were some who, like Kareem, took a longer view of things.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCreO0ze50iEhjF6VjRi3flL5Lip09wyP5yHNrY1KBkbMwtOP_DpvJIEODtSOuT5xihZk6LWs55e4Jhde8SJ4bqhdiV5-JJy4AP3ALrI3a2xUHAFkECs7t5oJr_KCk_BDYph_I/s1600/cwjmo140430.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCreO0ze50iEhjF6VjRi3flL5Lip09wyP5yHNrY1KBkbMwtOP_DpvJIEODtSOuT5xihZk6LWs55e4Jhde8SJ4bqhdiV5-JJy4AP3ALrI3a2xUHAFkECs7t5oJr_KCk_BDYph_I/s1600/cwjmo140430.gif" height="267" width="400" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.gocomics.com/jimmorin" target="_blank">Jim Morin</a>, for instance.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1BqA8tIw_3CqwDfvvi0GBr-BKvFZE3kBnOXozKiRT6vG0N-Va8eOctasn1BbXdNklTHUVW9vcDbRqdfO31k6KDdnHZam06blGdtsOz8KuSirMHjj2vUGDdn5PlBI-iVUSCTmJ/s1600/wpswi140430.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1BqA8tIw_3CqwDfvvi0GBr-BKvFZE3kBnOXozKiRT6vG0N-Va8eOctasn1BbXdNklTHUVW9vcDbRqdfO31k6KDdnHZam06blGdtsOz8KuSirMHjj2vUGDdn5PlBI-iVUSCTmJ/s1600/wpswi140430.gif" height="241" width="400" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
And <a href="http://www.gocomics.com/signewilkinson" target="_blank">Signe Wilkinson</a>.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMK42Z0TCIQXRFtidn3rS72pZOIqMzYcjqX8RHYqgR1Yusk1iY8oAmDqagQFkdxhBLEjBbBcK5pHhCExIOYpgcPF2sKUZQH4i0cgjRX3MD0Bko8bSK2GwFON_RNtSvJI-bHrlu/s1600/slow140429.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMK42Z0TCIQXRFtidn3rS72pZOIqMzYcjqX8RHYqgR1Yusk1iY8oAmDqagQFkdxhBLEjBbBcK5pHhCExIOYpgcPF2sKUZQH4i0cgjRX3MD0Bko8bSK2GwFON_RNtSvJI-bHrlu/s1600/slow140429.gif" height="400" width="395" /></a></div>
And <a href="http://jensorensen.com/" target="_blank">Jen Sorensen</a>, whose commentary is not only spot-on in addressing the larger issue of emerging racism, but gives me an excuse to announce that <a href="http://www.herbblockfoundation.org/herblock-prize" target="_blank">she's won yet another award</a>.<br />
<br />
Now, on the one hand, someone giving Jen Sorensen an award is starting to not feel like news anymore. I commented elsewhere that I suspect she's building herself a house made entirely of Lucite plaques.<br />
<br />
But the Herblock Prize is not chopped liver, and you can <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/comic-riffs/wp/2014/04/29/herblock-prize-sorensen-woodward-and-a-night-to-celebrate-cartoon-journalism/" target="_blank">read all about it on Michael Cavna's blog</a>, where he also links to a profile of Sorensen elsewhere in WashPo.<br />
<br />
My only quibble being that I really don't care that she's the first woman to ever win the Herblock. On a purely pragmatic level, she's only <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herblock_Prize" target="_blank">the 11th cartoonist to win the thing</a> at all, and, given current male/female ratios in the trade, I don't know that a woman laureate was particularly overdue, and both she and <a href="http://www.anntelnaes.com/" target="_blank">Ann Telnaes</a> have been the runner-up in prior years.<br />
<br />
Though I didn't sit in on the judging, I highly doubt anyone voted for her in order to honor a woman. I cannot tell you how many times I have mentioned her here and then received a note from some well-regarded cartoonist saying that she's the best in the business, and I don't often get those for mentioning anyone else.<br />
<br />
And not one of them ever added "best woman" or "best for a woman" or "despite being a woman."<br />
<br />
What I like about her work is that she takes advantage of the extra edge permitted to those who labor in the alternative-press universe, but doesn't then waste it by showing off how far she can push things or by chasing off after little niche gripes.<br />
<br />
By the latter, I mean that, for instance, her well-known, Lucite-recognized discussions of health care (<i><a href="http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/cartoons/2012/june/open-letter-to-supreme-court-cartoon.aspx" target="_blank">here</a> and then <a href="http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Cartoons/2014/March/My-Experience-With-Obamacare.aspx" target="_blank">here</a></i>) were not a millenial whine-tasting festival, but instead examined and illuminated the reality of the uninsured in terms that showed how the system affected one person, excluded from the system for economic reasons, in terms that derived their power by their universality, which you don't get with a "poor pitiful me" or even a "poor pitiful us" depiction.<br />
<br />
That's not the result of a smart political decision. That's the result of a wise storytelling choice.<br />
<br />
Storytellers, regardless of medium, begin with a fundamental choice: Either you go the Tom Clancy route, with a story so dramatic and overblown that technique becomes secondary to explosions, or you go for the John Updike approach and use technique to describe normal life in such a way that your character's experience becomes universal.<br />
<br />
Yes, there are gradations and places to be in the middle. But those are the endpoints, and she's a lot closer to the end with the empathy than the one with the bombs.<br />
<br />
And lest you think I'm too cynical about recognition, I'm very happy that she's been getting the kind of Lucite recently that comes with a check. (<i>If you didn't realize that, Jen, I hope you haven't thrown out the boxes yet.</i>) <br />
<br />
<h3>
Meanwhile, back at the funny pages</h3>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiL1AGmWd4z8mgMMV9wodduQy-jZOUW-En0IkPV3ILda1FJfdWuT6k52pyBGAjiBHCbBeG-fawIPmSUnbg69kzQTbwUUBLyg9Wwm-0sICgA7gyzEp5iHswlrCv_DwdhUfQJ_pd4/s1600/ad140429.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiL1AGmWd4z8mgMMV9wodduQy-jZOUW-En0IkPV3ILda1FJfdWuT6k52pyBGAjiBHCbBeG-fawIPmSUnbg69kzQTbwUUBLyg9Wwm-0sICgA7gyzEp5iHswlrCv_DwdhUfQJ_pd4/s1600/ad140429.gif" height="123" width="400" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimLKkvOUlxCKSWKyEUS7HwdCeewCsMLCynjg20wpAVkV0f4UPSwMhFz60bRhBv-R2_-zaxi2zW2Dgp7sGG6esqPrCt3gDKSwv57nPTeMYqDDPIEV38dsmNTAklMoSNMKMX8DbF/s1600/ad140430.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimLKkvOUlxCKSWKyEUS7HwdCeewCsMLCynjg20wpAVkV0f4UPSwMhFz60bRhBv-R2_-zaxi2zW2Dgp7sGG6esqPrCt3gDKSwv57nPTeMYqDDPIEV38dsmNTAklMoSNMKMX8DbF/s1600/ad140430.gif" height="123" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
I don't know where this <a href="http://www.gocomics.com/adamathome" target="_blank">Adam@home</a> arc is going, but yesterday's kick-off was so meta that I almost fell out of my chair, given that Rob Harrell (<i>whose work I greatly admire</i>) inherited the strip five years ago from the original creator, Brian Basset (<i><a href="http://www.gocomics.com/redandrover" target="_blank">whose work</a> I greatly admire</i>).<br />
<br />
And one of my favorite on-line reruns is "<a href="http://www.gocomics.com/bigtop" target="_blank">Big Top</a>," which features animals. I'm not sure the distinction between a circus and a carnival, but I'm damn sure that "Big Top" was created by Rob Harrell. And that it ... um ... it's over.<br />
<br />
Yeah, this is an arc to watch.<br />
<br />
<h3>
And also</h3>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhf7SRqFWVpyQEevegmwLi2Wvp4vgiuxQqGbxoHz6-uNdgZR8BN6WnLz01lURrBfP4BtlVyotxARw7Ocjx0uU0-ShkzitUaQxIj9vwRLrkMQ7v_tfpjp1v_FTZRaQWS3_nM_Fa7/s1600/lss140430.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhf7SRqFWVpyQEevegmwLi2Wvp4vgiuxQqGbxoHz6-uNdgZR8BN6WnLz01lURrBfP4BtlVyotxARw7Ocjx0uU0-ShkzitUaQxIj9vwRLrkMQ7v_tfpjp1v_FTZRaQWS3_nM_Fa7/s1600/lss140430.jpg" height="400" width="332" /></a></div>
<br />
After a significant hiatus, <a href="http://www.gocomics.com/lostsideofsuburbia" target="_blank">Lost Side of Suburbia</a> has kicked off another graphic novel.<br />
<br />
One of the nice things about never getting around to editing my GoComics page is that some moribund choice will suddenly spring to life, and none more welcome than this. And I bring it to your attention because these stories go on for quite a while and can become quite involved, so you'll want to get in soon. <br />
<br />
<br />Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16807727819590358834noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30017373.post-56392338404411205872014-04-23T07:54:00.002-04:002014-04-23T08:30:23.383-04:00The cartoon normally shown at this time will not be seen ...<h3>
<b>... so that we may bring you this message about taste and sensitivity:</b></h3>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEje8Ldpjt831iswpIUbYDZkh0hq4sYQKj_ra6mvYpXTXmJPgpdkbyHeIP1vuX_E3UlmMGNtsCEmzOliOt43exHg5K0BUqXZT3pkbwk4EM26tzDLnpdy-WzUjaGOQPhabMTWKKcT/s1600/summit.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEje8Ldpjt831iswpIUbYDZkh0hq4sYQKj_ra6mvYpXTXmJPgpdkbyHeIP1vuX_E3UlmMGNtsCEmzOliOt43exHg5K0BUqXZT3pkbwk4EM26tzDLnpdy-WzUjaGOQPhabMTWKKcT/s1600/summit.JPG" height="240" width="320" /></a></div>
About six years ago, I interviewed a fellow in Rangeley, Maine, who had climbed Kilimanjaro, a feat that involves significant conditioning but no technical climbing and is popular among those who can afford to do it. He had sold his pharmacy to Rite Aid and so he could climb Kilimanjaro.<br />
<br />
He was a very pleasant fellow, but when I said something about ecotourism and its impact on local economies, he reported that, yes, a lot of men showed up hoping to be hired as bearers, and added that many of them did not have the cold-weather gear required for the job, so that the American tourists often let them borrow clothing.<br />
<br />
And then he blandly added that two of the bearers on his climb had died along the way and went back to telling me about his great adventure.<br />
<br />
I was literally taken aback -- a phrase that comes from the wind shifting in such a way that the ship stops dead in the water and loses both progress and steering.<br />
<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2TQ0Yl9G6xKbow3Z2HN5SrTzHUZkT2H3bnMmBRXCFr5IGTzKzaev7rDBKAAnW-X0aofMeyFfOCNGRmWKqj4LemCFDCCIFyFlQwc9QGeq235oJEANEURGY9rlQ60rj9iopz-TU/s1600/APTOPIX_Nepal_Everest_Avalanche-00c5e.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2TQ0Yl9G6xKbow3Z2HN5SrTzHUZkT2H3bnMmBRXCFr5IGTzKzaev7rDBKAAnW-X0aofMeyFfOCNGRmWKqj4LemCFDCCIFyFlQwc9QGeq235oJEANEURGY9rlQ60rj9iopz-TU/s1600/APTOPIX_Nepal_Everest_Avalanche-00c5e.jpg" height="137" width="200" /></a></div>
I thought of that when the Sherpas of Nepal spoke of cancelling the climbing season in the wake of the avalanche that killed several of them on Everest last week.<br />
<br />
Nobody thought that 16 dead Sherpas was funny, or , at least, nobody made cartoons about it. Perhaps, like that fellow in Rangeley, they didn't find it particularly significant.<br />
<br />
But I thought of it again this week when the story of a stowaway in the wheel well of an airliner provoked a raft of cartoons about how cramped airline seating is and how you can't bring a bottle of shampoo on the plane.<br />
<br />
While I realize he was not a third-world refugee, the overall topic is still unamusing. It's like making a joke about a kid driving drunk down the wrong lane of the expressway because, gosh, it's better than being stuck in traffic.<br />
<br />
That aside from the air of what they all "First World Problems."<br />
<br />
In lieu of running one of those cartoons, let me make up to the families of those unmourned African men who died on Kilimanjaro, and show some sympathy with the Sherpas, by citing <a href="http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/news/2014/04/22/hawaii-stowaway-not-first-to-survive-flight-in-wheel-well/" target="_blank">something about desperate people</a> attempting to better their situation:<br />
<br />
<i>"Worldwide, there have been 105 known people who stowed away since
1947, according to data kept by the Federal Aviation Administration.
Counting the California teen, 25 made it alive, for a survival rate of
about 1 in 4.</i><br />
<br />
<i>
</i><i>But the FAA notes that the rate may be lower because people could
have stowed away and fallen out of the wheel well without anyone ever
knowing."</i><br />
<br />
Sorry about the cramped seating and that discarded three-dollar bottle of Head-and-Shoulders, pal.<br />
<br />
<br />
<h3>
<b>And speaking of insensitivity:</b></h3>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDCix1u1lVb5gb1rcvhGNpb7QciLfE-DMrvEmoMJ2Re6NfgPWm2Futm-GN42QoabV-5509uVWzHf9OvWEn2XMWVJ3ne2khrYSWBNI94UI3eE5kEd0yjnrBl9UhKRgSFDp6mt2P/s1600/140423_Affirmative_Action_t618.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDCix1u1lVb5gb1rcvhGNpb7QciLfE-DMrvEmoMJ2Re6NfgPWm2Futm-GN42QoabV-5509uVWzHf9OvWEn2XMWVJ3ne2khrYSWBNI94UI3eE5kEd0yjnrBl9UhKRgSFDp6mt2P/s1600/140423_Affirmative_Action_t618.jpg" height="267" width="400" /></a></div>
There used to be a saying in the black community that there are no rearview mirrors in Cadillacs. I don't know if anyone still says that, but I like <a href="http://www.timesfreepress.com/news/opinion/cartoons/" target="_blank">Clay Bennett</a>'s commentary on yesterday's Supreme Court decision.<br />
<br />
I will admit I have not read the decisions, so I can't comment on whether the ruling is a wedge against civil rights, though the executive summary of the Scalia/Thomas response is disquieting. <a href="http://www.scotusblog.com/2014/04/divided-court-upholds-michigans-ban-on-affirmative-action-in-plain-english/#more-208883" target="_blank">But the SCOTUSblog summary suggests more reasoned and limited views were dominant.</a><br />
<br />
Still, I would have to see specifically what the Michigan statute allowed, because, for example, I know that there are provisions back in my part of the world that give students from rural areas some kind of help in adjusting to college and while, in rural Mississippi, which might apply to a largely black group, but, in northern New York, does not.<br />
<br />
And yet that is, in fact, "affirmative action" -- contending that some people who are capable of succeeding are not well-prepared to jump right in. <br />
<br />
I heard <a href="http://www.npr.org/2014/04/21/305509473/for-comic-hari-kondabolu-explaining-the-joke-is-the-joke" target="_blank">Hari Kondabalu interviewed on Fresh Air</a> Monday, and one of the clips they played from his new album, "Waiting for 2024," included a dig at the fact that white people don't see "white" as a very specific thing, but describe their heritage as “I’m 1/3 German, and a 1/4 Irish…and 1/40th Native American for college applications…”<br />
<br />
But he also spoke of his respect for what his immigrant parents went through:<br />
<br />
<i>And the thing
is, a lot of my parents' friends in India are retired now. My parents
can't retire, like they have to keep going. So it's funny because I
think because I talk about class a lot, I think there's the assumption
that I'm a working class kid and that I struggled a ton and that's a lot
of what informs my perspective. And the truth is that I was a
middle-class kid - an upwardly mobile middle-class kid - and I got what I
wanted and I went to rich kid's school and I was informed by that
education. And it's not, you know, which is the truth. It doesn't mean I
don't have a conscience and I don't talk about things that affect me,
but that is also the truth. Sometimes I get bitter, like how come my
parents are hogging all the struggle? (<u>Laughter</u>)
Rich kids get a trust fund, they get money, they get legacy and they
get to go to these nice colleges. Why isn't there a struggle trust fund?
Why can't I take some of their struggle to give myself some legitimacy?</i><br />
<br />
The notion that the struggle is over is as wrong now as it was 50 years ago when the Civil Rights Act was passed, and as wrong as it was when the 14th Amendment was passed. Maybe the struggle never ends, but it surely is not over now. <br />
<br />
I've heard a lot recently, for instance, from Neal Degrasse Tyson, but also from a woman scientist on another NPR show which I've forgotten, about how people assume black people need more than "a leg up" but are, in fact, unqualified, and how the requirement to keep proving you belong there never ends.<br />
<br />
But, while it may explain the bitterness of some people, it does not justify ripping the rearview mirror out of your Cadillac, and, if Clarence Thomas whined about an "electronic lynching" during his confirmation hearings, it was Sotomayer who drew fire for suggesting that perhaps a few different perspectives might improve things.<br />
<br />
And it is Sotomayer who remains grateful for the help she got and doesn't feel self-conscious about what she made of the chance.<br />
<br />
And who checks the rearview mirror regularly.<br />
<br />
Oh, and, whether Michigan's statute was all about race, the question of fresh perspective on the Supreme Court is not. Check out this exchange, as the justices ponder the future of on-line video streaming in <a href="http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/american-broadcasting-companies-inc-v-aereo-inc/" target="_blank">American Broadcasting Company vs Aereo</a>:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>
<i>JUSTICE SCALIA: Mr. Frederick, your – your client is -- is just using this for local signals - </i><br />
<i>MR. FREDERICK: Yes. </i><br />
<i>JUSTICE SCALIA: – right now. But if we approve that, is there any reason it couldn't be used for distant signals as well? </i><br />
<i>MR. FREDERICK: Possibly. </i><br />
<i>JUSTICE SCALIA: Possibly what? There is possibly a reason or it could possibly be used? </i><br />
<i>MR. FREDERICK: It can’t be used for distance, but it implicates –</i><br />
<i>JUSTICE SCALIA: What would the difference be.
I mean, you could take HBO, right?
You could –you could carry that without – without performing. </i><br />
<i>MR. FREDERICK: No, because HBO is not done over the airwaves. It's done through a private service. </i></blockquote>
In other words, <a href="http://jimromenesko.com/2014/04/22/somebody-please-explain-to-justice-scalia-how-television-works/" target="_blank">Antonin Scalia does not know that HBO is not broadcast over the air</a>. He doesn't know the difference between cable and broadcast, and yet he's sitting in judgment ...<br />
<br />
Never mind the rearview mirror. Dude can't even see through the windshield.<br />
<br />
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<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>(<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-NQ-hJKQc4#t=212" target="_blank">Posted because of the first half, but you may apply it to the second if you like</a>)</i></div>
Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16807727819590358834noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30017373.post-20450330615901597662014-04-22T07:42:00.001-04:002014-04-22T08:06:27.004-04:00The only good cow is a kow kow<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZpAKQHD1kQoiaB4FhqDZG2uGPcoUl6BCU5uWsGyMd7-atRmVXYDC_xUHtjVJrZjO2o1VHma8AsIgtE79ipER9F3-AVPh81nWgl0IKkTl0Jb8NgeYaPwfFyYYX22ftITBggd8x/s1600/crsbe140418.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZpAKQHD1kQoiaB4FhqDZG2uGPcoUl6BCU5uWsGyMd7-atRmVXYDC_xUHtjVJrZjO2o1VHma8AsIgtE79ipER9F3-AVPh81nWgl0IKkTl0Jb8NgeYaPwfFyYYX22ftITBggd8x/s1600/crsbe140418.jpg" height="303" width="400" /></a></div>
Maybe we're making too much of this thing, but it's worth noting that the majority of conservative commentators seem to be either ignoring or mocking Clive Bundy.<br />
<br />
Granted, <a href="http://www.gocomics.com/stevebenson/2014/04/18" target="_blank">Steve Benson</a> is hardly a conservative, but if this the only style of cartooning on the topic that seems to be out there, then ol' Clive hasn't got one leg -- never mind four -- to stand on.<br />
<br />
Well, wait. He has one, and a fairly predictable one.<br />
<br />
The whole matter would be better off ignored, as the ridiculous non-event of <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2013/10/trucker-protest-beltway-98194.html" target="_blank">the Million Trucker March</a> was, except that dangerous anarchist screwballs with guns did actually show up for this and apparently <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/22/jon-stewart-rips-hannity_n_5189684.html" target="_blank">Sean Hannity was promoting it as something admirable or something</a>.<br />
<br />
I say "apparently" because I rely on second-hand reports about the activities of people like Miley Cyrus and Sean Hannity.<br />
<br />
But other people do not ignore Hannity, which means that Clive Bundy has the ability to become our next <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_the_Plumber" target="_blank">Joe the Plumber</a>, only with dangerous armed wackos in his corner rather than just shameful, fact-resistant propagandists. <br />
<br />
That is, Joe the Plumber told the president-to-be that he ran his own plumbing company that had a net income in excess of a quarter million dollars, but it turned out his name wasn't Joe, he was not actually a licensed plumber, he didn't own his own business and his income was not only less than a quarter-million net, or even a quarter-million gross, but he was, in fact, not making enough to be able to be current on his child support.<br />
<br />
So now we've got Clive Bundy, who says his family has been grazing their cattle on that land in Nevada since 1877, only it turns out that, not only are his views of <a href="http://www.thewildlifenews.com/2014/04/14/cliven-bundy-has-no-claim-to-federal-land-and-grazing/" target="_blank">grazing rights</a> and <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/04/the-irony-of-cliven-bundys-unconstitutional-stand/360587/" target="_blank">states' rights</a> completely flawed, but <a href="http://www.8newsnow.com/story/25301551/bundys-ancestral-rights-come-under-scrutiny" target="_blank">he wasn't even born on the property, given that his family moved to Nevada when he was two</a>, well after the whole matter of grazing rights on federal land had been established.<br />
<br />
As they say, "that ol' dog won't hunt."<br />
<br />
But once the armed crazies show up, facts and logic have to give way to other considerations. As Samuel Johnson noted,<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"> “If a madman were to come into this
room with a stick in his hand, no doubt we should pity the state of his
mind; but our primary consideration would be to take care of ourselves.
We should knock him down first, and pity him afterwards.”</span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">The madmen are here and they have sticks. But there appears to be very little appetite for knocking them down and even less for pitying the state of their minds.</span></span></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjep_uWfti36PI9r_aneq7D4JWj9CfZ-QDHsM7M1c6bJDNk4JHyYH4GB0RiGv4naqcIOfjJ2vf491Irk6a5olf5u4boyWteK8oG4Xl5GV_pYRVeSMeRgfcaTu9w6tCuSSXPQEmj/s1600/TMW2014-04-23color.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjep_uWfti36PI9r_aneq7D4JWj9CfZ-QDHsM7M1c6bJDNk4JHyYH4GB0RiGv4naqcIOfjJ2vf491Irk6a5olf5u4boyWteK8oG4Xl5GV_pYRVeSMeRgfcaTu9w6tCuSSXPQEmj/s1600/TMW2014-04-23color.png" height="371" width="400" /></a></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><a href="http://www.dailykos.com/blog/Comics#" target="_blank">Tom Tomorrow</a> suggests we apply a combination of logic and ridicule, and I'm all in favor of that.</span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">But we should also demand a little bit of history. I heard some clown on the air the other day noting that it was the anniversary of both the Waco standoff and the Oklahoma City bombing, as if that were a coincidence.</span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Whether or not you feel <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/04/16/napolitano-apologizes-offending-veterans-dhs-eyes-rightwing-extremism/" target="_blank">armed, right-wing anarchists are a threat</a>, you should at least know enough basic history to understand why McVeigh chose that particular day to exercise his First Amendment rights to free speech and mass murder.</span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">If you're going to play the fool, "play" it in the sense of knowing you aren't passing along facts. At least Joe the Plumber and Cliven the Bundy have obvious motivations to say things that don't check out (<i>whether or not they believe the things they say being a separate issue</i>). </span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">And Sean Hannity has obvious motivations to uncritically repeat the things they say. But if Roger Ailes isn't signing your paycheck, you don't have that excuse.</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></span></span>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Though taking money does excuse promoting reprehensible movements. There used to be a joke the punchline of which was, "We've established what you are -- Now we're just haggling over the price."</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></span></span>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><a href="http://gawker.com/thatz-not-okay-can-my-friend-draw-racist-cartoons-for-1565603039" target="_blank">Apparently, that's no longer an issue, as long as you hold your nose while cashing the check.</a></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<h3>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><i><span style="font-size: large;">Well, misery seeks its own company ...</span></i></span></span></span></h3>
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<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><i> ... Kow Kow had heard it said</i></span></span></span></div>
Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16807727819590358834noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30017373.post-65748161138889671722014-04-21T07:09:00.003-04:002014-04-21T07:09:25.192-04:00Monday Short Takes<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsBYIsI0GghWYujREd5e4rmtvSPkK_-_XYduUdRvnSv7nzjoY20_kYuSG1Qs_68iDNiXMPSVw48NMudLCqO9r7m5ooqkB3zutzaLit_oDWvbX_JABZ-wJAdSCnqf6iaxvLPjSP/s1600/3wuSW.St.84.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsBYIsI0GghWYujREd5e4rmtvSPkK_-_XYduUdRvnSv7nzjoY20_kYuSG1Qs_68iDNiXMPSVw48NMudLCqO9r7m5ooqkB3zutzaLit_oDWvbX_JABZ-wJAdSCnqf6iaxvLPjSP/s1600/3wuSW.St.84.jpg" height="246" width="320" /></a></div>
Let's start with this <a href="http://www.garrinchatoonz.com/English/home.html" target="_blank">Garrincha</a> cartoon. I've said before that I'm more attuned to the story-telling American style of political cartooning rather than the more metaphorical international style, but this is a situation in which the two blend rather seamlessly.<br />
<br />
Moreover, I like the cartoon for what Gustavo Rodriguez is and what his cartoon isn't. Garrincha is a Cuban exile living in Miami, which doesn't exactly define him as a liberal, then, does it?<br />
<br />
But the other night, someone asked Jeff Danziger and Tom Tomorrow why there seem to be more good liberal than conservative cartoonists, and Danziger offered Michael Ramirez as an exemplar of a good conservative in the trade.<br />
<br />
However, he seemed to be speaking technically rather than in term of commentary, since Ramirez is not noted for bucking the party line, and, when Scott Stantis was offered as an example as a thoughtful voice from the right, they both agreed and, as it always does, the name of the late Jeff MacNelly was raised.<br />
<br />
That was when they invoked the old truism that liberals punch up and conservatives punch down, and that satire should consist of mocking the powerful, not the homeless.<br />
<br />
Which is simply a variant of the basic rule that knocking a rich man's top hat off with a snowball is funny, but snowballing a beggar is not.<br />
<br />
However, I suppose the exception is that, while the Cuban exile community tends to be very conservative in terms of US politics, they are also staunchly anticommunist and, by extension, not huge fans of the oligarchs who now control the former USSR (<i>and, by the way, always did, but that's a topic for another day</i>).<br />
<br />
In any case, it's nice to see a conservative who is not either swooning over Putin's "leadership" or prodding Obama to please kill a few thousand more of someone else's American kids so that we'll look big and tough.<br />
<br />
<h3>
<b>And on a much less portentous insider cartoonist topic</b></h3>
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So here's a funny, insider cartoon with a funny, insider origin, and you'll have two places to go read the rest of it.<br />
<br />
The story is that New England cartoonist <a href="http://mikelynchcartoons.blogspot.com/2014/04/walt-kelly-lives.html" target="_blank">Mike Lynch noted</a> that his local Hannaford grocery store has a Walt Kelly quote on the wall, "Food for thought is no substitute for the real thing," and then kvetched that nobody working there had any idea who Walt Kelly was.<br />
<br />
Being a New Englander who shops at my local Hannaford, which also has that quote on the wall, I chuckled, but, on the other side of the nation, Brian Fies got enough of a laugh that he made an extended comment, which Mike then turned into this cartoon.<br />
<br />
Which you can read <a href="http://mikelynchcartoons.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">on Mike's site</a>, or <a href="http://brianfies.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">on Brian's</a>. Either will make you laff, both are good places to know about anyway. Mike's is a little more insider oriented, Brian's is more personal, both a good places for comic fans to get some insight into how it all works.<br />
<br />
You could actually read it on Mike's site, set a bookmark, and then go read it on Brian's and also set a bookmark. You'll laff both times.<br />
<br />
<h3>
Don't look too closely</h3>
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<a href="http://www.grahamsale.com/" target="_blank">Graham Sale</a>'s Easter panel cracked me up mostly for the way it fits into a current Internet theme that combines people with agendas and people with no freaking idea of how life works.<br />
<br />
And when I say "life," I mean in the corporeal sense, but the more philosophical as well.<br />
<br />
It is indeed possible to make anything sound sinister and disgusting if you describe it the right way. It's a minor but effective building block of humor in cartooning and a major part of political propaganda, both of which can benefit from simple-minded scare tactics.<br />
<br />
F'rinstance, I've seen a piece floating around lately in which they list the beers you shouldn't drink because they contain certain trace chemicals that could potentially harm you. The piece does not mention that not only is alcohol present in beer in much more than trace amounts but is also a toxin or else what would be the point of consuming it?<br />
<br />
It's like warning someone not to jump out of an airplane without good insoles in their boots but failing to mention parachutes.<br />
<br />
And I'm also annoyed by people who are bright enough to know that anti-vaxers and creationists are scientifically ignorant but who become apoplectic over GMOs without acknowledging that there is, in fact, <a href="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://cspinet.org/new/pdf/biotech-faq.pdf&sa=U&ei=GvpUU6aZFei_sQTOyYFI&ved=0CAUQFjAA&client=internal-uds-cse&usg=AFQjCNEgRTdMTo1buj0ZwHZy7m0h3L87uw" target="_blank">no scientific basis for fear beyond general unhappiness with food inspections and approval</a>.<br />
<br />
Well, there is one, but "fear of the new" belongs in the field of psychology, not biology or chemistry.<br />
<br />
The latest thing is less political and more just plain weird, which is a shot of a dust mite under extreme magnification and a sonorous warning that these critters are crawling all over you.<br />
<br />
Which they are. Which they have always been. Which is part of the circle of life and how things work in the world and nothing to worry about.<br />
<br />
But the more urbanized and mechanized and technocentric we become, the less we have any sense of how life works. I'm encouraged by the number of people who realize that<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/17/teens-pee-in-portland-water_n_5163976.html" target="_blank"> the city of Portland was moronic to drain 38 million gallons of water</a> because a kid pissed into the reservoir, but it's a small bit of sanity in an otherwise disconnected-from-reality world.<br />
<br />
Back when I was selling vacuum cleaners, we used to use fear of dust mites to persuade people to spend several hundred dollars on a tricked-out vacuum they could have had for a third the price or less if it were on a store shelf instead of being brought to their livingroom.<br />
<br />
We thought of them as marks, and they were.<br />
<br />
<h3>
Which is a segue to this:</h3>
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Today's <a href="http://www.gocomics.com/closetohome" target="_blank">Close to Home</a> has a funny gag that reminds me of how we used to find those marks to whose houses we'd bring our over-priced rugsuckers. We'd put up a vacuum cleaner in a mall as the prize in a purported drawing and suckers would write their contact information on pieces of paper and put it in the box.<br />
<br />
Then they'd win me on their doorstep and a set of steak knives. <br />
<br />
At the end of the month, we'd have what my boss called "an educated draw," which meant we'd pick a name completely at random and it would be some young, attractive woman with small children and no more hope of affording one of our units than of flying to the moon.<br />
<br />
Now, instead of setting up in the mall, the sharpies simply sucker one of your Facebook friends into visiting their website on the promise of a free iPad or something or other, and unintentionally sharing it with all their friends.<br />
<br />
One more wrinkle on a very old tradition within "The Circle of Life" in which the less fir are culled from the herd. <br />
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<br />Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16807727819590358834noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30017373.post-33983497282038229862014-04-20T10:41:00.000-04:002014-04-20T11:03:01.928-04:00You're not getting older, you're ... oh, wait ...For a season, and a day, dedicated to rebirth, there sure were plenty of "boy am I old" cartoons today.<br />
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<br />
We'll ease into this with <a href="http://betweenfriendscomics.com/" target="_blank">Between Friends</a>, which is a fairly gentle <i>parent-child-tech</i> gag.<br />
<br />
(<i>It also, I think, fits today's topic as a subtle shift in age for Emma. Sandra Bell Lundy periodically nudges her characters forward in time, and this is the first time I've taken notice of Susan's daughter as a real teen and not an adolescent. Her pal is like a blonde Maeve!</i>)<br />
<br />
I'm a generation off from Sandra, because I'd actually be more in the <i>grandparent-grandchild-tech</i> zone, which is to say that I'm only vaguely puzzled by the things my kids know that I don't.<br />
<br />
They're not quite digital natives, but I'll admit they did ease me through the first stages of future shock back when we got our first computer in 1983. (Remember that date: We'll be back.)<br />
<br />
However, the grandkids and I are from different planets and, specific to today's strip, I still fumble with and hate texting, while it's second nature to their demographic.<br />
<br />
Four of the five are, at the moment thank-god, too young for this to be an issue, but the eldest will text me and then, while I'm fumbling out some kind of two-word reply, will pop in with a full-length follow-up.<br />
<br />
Of course, if I didn't hate texting, I'd have gotten better at it. But my texting mostly consists of two phrases: "Are you awake?" and "Call me," because, in my world, a text is a polite way of contacting someone without waking them up or interrupting something more critical.<br />
<br />
And they don't always answer the phone, 'cause I guess that's a thing now.<br />
<br />
Consarn it.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><i><b>This is all I ask ...</b></i></span><br />
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<br />
I haven't quite encountered the overt flirting that the old coot my age in <a href="http://www.gocomics.com/freshlysqueezed" target="_blank">Freshly Squeezed</a> is talking about, but I'm well-established in the "safe zone," which is actually a pretty pleasant place once you get over the initial confusion.<br />
<br />
The safe zone is that place where young women loosen up in your presence because they know there's no way you are going to hit on them. Which can come across as "flirtatious," but, in fact, is more about how they're not behaving than how they are. If they thought there was any chance in hell, they'd be more guarded.<br />
<br />
Which can be very pleasant, as long as you make two adjustments:<br />
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<i>1. Get over the idea that they are flirting. They're comfortable in your presence because you remind them of their grandfathers. </i><br />
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<i>2. Get over the fact that you remind them of their grandfathers.</i><br />
<br />
'Cause one of these guys is just enjoying the company and the other is a pathetic ass. And if you have to ask, well, that tells us which one you are.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><i><b>But let's be objective about this</b></i></span><br />
<br />
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<a href="http://www.theblabbingbaboon.com/" target="_blank">Richard Marcej blogs his life unadorned in his daily strip</a>, and today's continues our theme of "boy am I old" on a completely objective level. And, as he notes, ratchets it up to "very old."<br />
<br />
I looked it up. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_Squad!" target="_blank">Police Squad</a> aired in 1982. That, by simple process of mathematics, proves to be 32 years ago.<br />
<br />
Or, in less specific terms, "yesterday."<br />
<br />
Or, in more specific terms, when I was 32.<br />
<br />
Or, in terms somewhat in the middle, half a lifetime ago.<br />
<br />
Like I said, it was just yesterday.<br />
<br />
And, by the way, for anyone tempted to criticize today's young people for a poor attention span, it should be noted that <a href="http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=VuEhAAAAIBAJ&sjid=9l4EAAAAIBAJ&pg=6972%2C221691" target="_blank">the reason "Police Squad" failed was that it relied heavily on sight gags and had no laugh track</a>.<br />
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<br />
<br />
Which is to say, the TV audience needed to actually watch, listen, pay attention and think.<br />
<br />
Worst part? I was, at the time, in no position to dismiss their entire generation without indicting myself.<br />
<br />
Ah well. I'm gonna go walk the dog. He's a chick magnet, you know, and Easter is all about chicks.<br />
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Slow-walking chicks, thank you.</div>
Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16807727819590358834noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30017373.post-14188951168446676582013-08-03T17:17:00.000-04:002013-08-03T17:23:37.778-04:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<h2 style="text-align: center;">
What does it take to get on Jeopardy?</h2>
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>(This piece ran June 7, 1989, in the Press-Republican, Plattsburgh, NY. Perhaps obviously, the people named in the opening paragraphs were on the news team at WPTZ, which was our chief rival in the market as well as the station on which Jeopardy aired.)</i></span><br />
<br />
PLATTSBURGH - Let's be honest: If I had a personality, would I be working in print? If I had a personality, and a little more hair, I could be Dave Huntress. I could be Stuart Ledbetter. I could even be Rob Michalak.<br />
<br />
Okay, maybe not Rob Michalak. But I could be on "Jeopardy!"<br />
<br />
There were 77 of us, Tuesday morning, lined up at the Howard Johnson's, preparing to participate in the "Jeopardy!" contestant search. First thing I found out was that, since I know so many people at WPTZ, I was probably going to be ineligible anyway. They had a blank on the registration form that asked if you knew anyone at the production company, one of the networks or any of their affiliates.<br />
<br />
Then there was a blank asking who you knew and how you knew them. There wasn't any blank asking whether you liked them, but they did ask where you worked and what you did, which should answer the question.<br />
<br />
Newspaper people are not traditionally fond of broadcast people. We're jealous of their personalities.<br />
<br />
There were a few familiar faces in the line, like Bob Shimko.<br />
<br />
Shimko is finance director for the Municipal Lighting Department, which might have been an edge, except that WPTZ moved out of the city some years ago.<br />
<br />
Shimko couldn't threaten to pull the plug on them: He was going to have to make it on brains and personality, like the rest of us.<br />
<br />
Sue Cook was up from Ticonderoga. She has made it into the finals of the Press-Republican Cook-Off for the past two years, but there was only one question about cooking on the written quiz.<br />
<br />
Oh well, she said, it was a nice shopping trip anyway.<br />
<br />
The written quiz is the first hurdle — 50 questions, read by Alex Trebek on videotape while the traditional slide was shown on the monitors. We had 10 seconds to answer each question, and we didn't have to phrase our answers in the form of a question.<br />
<br />
Answering 50 questions in a little over eight minutes was quite enough, thanks.<br />
<br />
While we waited for our tests to be graded, they showed us an old episode of "Jeopardy!' This was not a room for those people who stumble, whimper and alibi their way through Trivial Pursuit.<br />
<br />
The crowd of would-be contestants was calling out the questions before Alex had the third word of the answer out of his mouth.<br />
<br />
"Double Jeopardy!" was about half over when Susanne Thurber and Ingrid Hirstin-Woodson, the contestant team, came back with the corrected tests and sent 69 people home.<br />
<br />
According to Hirstin-Woodson, you need to answer approximately 70 percent of the questions on the written test correctly to make it to the next plateau.<br />
<br />
The next plateau was the simulated game, where they would see who among us was fast on the bell, verbally adept under pressure and had a personality.<br />
<br />
Susanne and Ingrid told us to pretend we were on the air, show a little energy and to speak up, but not to feel compelled to jump up and down and burble. This isn't "Let's Make A Deal" or "Win, Lose or Draw," after all.<br />
<br />
No danger of burbling. It was hard enough just ringing in on time. The trick is, you can't ring in until the entire answer has been read. Then, the first person in gets to ask the question, score the points, be on television, win prizes, become famous and escape for one shining moment the tedious obscurity of his own wretched existence.<br />
<br />
Pressure? Not a bit of it.<br />
<br />
I got one question right, but Ingrid cautioned me to show more energy. I showed more energy on the next one I rang in on.<br />
<br />
Good energy, bad information.<br />
<br />
So it goes.<br />
<br />
Dan Milkman and Bruce Daitz had the right combination of brains, dexterity and personality. With any luck, they will be appearing on television sometime next season, together with Lisa Guay, Laurie Kunkel and Joseph Laboda, who qualified from a field of 72 in the afternoon session, and whoever Susanne and Ingrid turn up in Burlington and Montreal this week.<br />
<br />
The team processes 15,000 contest hopefuls every season, both in talent searches around the country and at the Los Angeles production offices, looking for about 475 contestants.<br />
<br />
It helps if you have a pleasing personality.Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16807727819590358834noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30017373.post-46680522567845386892013-04-15T16:50:00.001-04:002013-04-15T17:31:22.125-04:00The Man Who Could Have Bought Donahue<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>(I'm not sure when I wrote this, but likely sometime around 1980, well before my own divorce but at a time when our friends' marriages were beginning to go through the process. I'm not particula<span style="font-size: x-small;">r</span>ly satisfied with it -- <span style="font-size: x-small;">and</span> it's at best only a second draft -- but, as the young curate said, "Parts of it are excellent.")</i></span></div>
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<br />
"Six years ... seven." He squinted slightly as he thought about the question. "Seven, the beginning of September. We moved in the beginning of the academic year, right after I got my PhD.” <br />
<br />
"Very nice.” His guest, or, rather, his wife's guest's husband, looked around once more at the yard, the split rail fence against which they were leaning, the apple trees, the neat gray house with the fieldstone chimney. "Out west, you know, everything' s either tract houses or sort of Mexican, stucco and that. Whenever I come out to the Midwest or the East Coast, I see these houses and think, well, that's more what I thought I'd end up with, you know?" <br />
<br />
"It's you TV guys that did it," his wife's hostess's husband chuckled. “Beaver and Wally, Bud and Betty and Kathy, they all lived in houses like this. But I grew up expecting it, too. When I saw this house, yeah, it looked to me like the kind of house you'd raise a family in. We didn't have any kids yet, of course, but when Brad was born, I started pruning that tree over there so it would have the right-shaped branches to hold a tree house. See, up there? Maybe next summer, when he's six, we’ll get out here and put it up.” <br />
<br />
"You're lucky to have your summers free. Your kids are lucky." <br />
<br />
"Well, that thing about summers being free is kind of deceptive. People think that, but it's really the only time you have to do any kind of serious research, writing and so forth. And I’ve taught summer school every year I've been on the faculty." <br />
<br />
“Still, you've got some time to call your own. I wish I could take off when we started reruns. Take the summer off and do the things that really mattered to me. Even if it's work, you know, it's still your choice. This is my first real vacation in five years, and if it weren't for the affiliate's meeting, I doubt we’d have left the state. And next week, I've got to be back getting set up with the new season, you know, parties and hoopla and all that.” <br />
<br />
"I guess you don't spend your vacation time sitting around watching TV like most people." <br />
<br />
"I can’t. I can’t watch it for fun at all. I sit there, even here where I'm fifteen hundred miles from the station, and I go, 'Oops, missed your ID' or 'They've got a cart jammed' or 'What's the matter with the network feed?' Or I watch your local news and start looking at the set or wondering why we can't find someone like that gal that does your noon news show. I have to just turn it off and get out of the house." <br />
<br />
They stood for a few minutes, looking around at the yard and smelling the warm, moist air, listening to a cardinal calling from the top of a power line three backyards away. <br />
<br />
Finally, the visitor broke their silence almost plaintively: <br />
<br />
"I couldn't have bought Donahue. It wasn't my decision." <br />
<br />
"What?" <br />
<br />
"Last night, at dinner. Trish and Barbara were talking about joint custody of divorced kids, or, I mean, kids whose parents are divorced, you know?” <br />
<br />
“Yeah.” <br />
<br />
"And Barbara said she saw a show about it on Donahue. Trish said that I could have bought Donahue and didn't and the independent station in our market snapped it up. I think I've told her about forty times that it wasn’t my decision whether or not we picked it up. At that time, I wasn't program director yet, and, even if I had been, you know, you don’t function with that kind of, whatever, authority or independence, to just pick out shows like they were cans in the supermarket. All that happened was that I was assistant to the program director and he asked me what I thought about Donahue, and I said something about the phone calls. You know, the calls he takes during the show?" <br />
<br />
"I'm afraid I don't watch it very often. I’ve seen it a couple of times, but I didn't pay that much attention. Even Barbara doesn't watch it more than a couple of times a month. Not even once a week.” <br />
<br />
"I'm glad somebody doesn't watch it. Anyway, he takes phone calls from viewers with questions, but the shows are taped, so I just said that I thought he was a little tied into his own market too much, that people watching the show might get frustrated that they couldn't call in. The thing is, though, he didn't want to take the show, he was over budget anyway, they were asking quite a bit for it, and he sort of wanted me to tell him not to pick it up. When you've worked with a guy for three years, you know when he's trying to get you to tell him to do something and when he's trying to get you to tell him not to, you know what I mean? You must run into that sort of thing." <br />
<br />
"Sure, all the time." <br />
<br />
"Sure, everybody does. Part of my job was to make him feel good about his decisions. But the bottom line was that we turned it down and the independent picked it up and it's this monster hit, you know? Trish thinks the guy can walk on water, and she isn't the only one. So I get to be program director and I bought John Davidson, you know, the show that replaced Mike Douglas when that went under. Seemed like some of the same sort of thing, and I mentioned to Trish that, you know, something about not getting Donahue but picking up Davidson. And ever since then, she's been on my case about not buying Donahue when I had the chance. Which I never had. And she's really been on me about it since I told her I thought Donahue was kind of a dork anyway." <br />
<br />
"I guess if she’s a big fan, that wasn’t the right thing to say.” <br />
<br />
"Tell me about it. She thinks he walks on water. I'm not kidding." He leaned over and picked up a twig, then began snapping off inch-long pieces and flicking them into the air with his thumbnail. “But, anyway, it bothers me when she says that to people who don't know me that well and might not understand or something. When she makes it sound like I don't know how to do my job.” <br />
<br />
"Well, I can understand that you wouldn't want to have people think that.” Ray smiled, mostly to himself. "If it makes you feel any better, Marty, I wasn't paying too much attention to the conversation anyway.” <br />
<br />
"When you think about it, I'm being pretty stupid, I guess. I mean, you're just a name on a Christmas card, you know? If I had any sense, I wouldn't give a damn what you thought. Trish is the one who's known you guys for a million years. But still ... " <br />
<br />
"You've got your professional pride. I can understand that.” <br />
<br />
“lt's silly, though. We've been married for eight years, and I've seen you guys, what, three times? Let's be honest, Ray. The girls have this big thing about being college roommates and all that, and you dated Barbara then, so you’re in on it, but I don't have any connection with you guys at all." <br />
<br />
Ray chuckled. "Maybe we should be self-conscious instead of you. We must sound pretty dumb when we start talking about the Olden Days." <br />
<br />
"No, not at all, because we're here, you know, this big four day visit, highlight of the summer, and the stuff you guys did in college is the only thing that holds it together. If you didn't sit around and tell stories about what happened when you were at Magdalen, what would we talk about? What would we be doing here?" <br />
<br />
"We're still friends. The fact that the three of us met in college isn't that important. It just happens to be that we spent that time together, so that's what we have to talk about. I know you must feel kind of left out. Actually, I thought you might like to come out here and let them carry on about it without us for awhile. To tell you the truth, I don't know half the people they talk about, either. I didn't meet Barbara until junior year, and, even then, I wasn’t living in the dorm with them.” <br />
<br />
"Yeah, but at least when your name comes up, it's about you, you know? Last night, I think Trish said my name three times over dinner. Once was when she said we ran into that guy you all knew, the one with hair down to here and beads and bells and all, and now he's so clean-cut that Trish didn't know who he was when he came up to her on the street. Only I wasn't part of that story. I didn't know him before, and I don't know him now. We talked for five minutes on the street and they were going to get in touch, but of course they never did. End of story, and for my part, well, if she'd been walking the dog, she'd have said his name instead of mine. The second time she said my name was to say I ran over the neighbor’s kid’s bike, which is true. I backed over the bike. But she doesn't say I spent the weekend fixing it and that I felt really bad about it or anything. And that it wasn't that bad anyway, just the back wheel. And then she told you I screwed up and didn't buy Donahue, which doesn't happen to be true. I mean, I just don't know sometimes, Ray.” <br />
<br />
"Barbara can be pretty hard on me, too, sometimes. It's just a thing married couples do. I tell stories where she doesn't come out looking too good, either. But it doesn't really mean anything. Might get a dirty look or a kick under the table once in awhile, but that kind of thing just happens. You shouldn't take it so seriously." <br />
<br />
"It's different. I really envy you, Ray. You and Barbara are something special. How long have you been married, ten years?” <br />
<br />
"Eleven." <br />
<br />
"Right. But, I mean, I don't know how you do it, but you don't seem like you've been married for a long time. Sure, she told us about how you cut the lawn a different way each time and then rake it up a different direction, you know? But she made it sound kind of cute or something. She made it sound like a little quirk, but the kind of quirk that makes her love you more. Do you know what I'm trying to say? <br />
<br />
"I thought she made me sound a little eccentric, but the thing is, she doesn't tell funny stories very well. She'd have made it sound a lot funnier if she was a better storyteller. Trish is a terrific storyteller. She's really a very funny person, and Barbara just isn't." <br />
<br />
"Yeah, she's a scream. It's like being married to Joan Rivers." He reached the end of the twig and began to peel the bark from the remaining inch and a half. "Look, I'm sorry to be laying all this on you, Ray. It's just something I’ve been thinking about a lot. I don’t mean to sound like ..." <br />
<br />
He dropped the twig and let the sentence fall with it. <br />
<br />
"You want to talk, talk. I can listen. Not that I'm going to come up with any great advice, Marty. I'm an English prof, not a psychologist. But we're friends. Go ahead." <br />
<br />
"No, I shouldn't be saying all this stupid stuff. This is supposed to be a nice visit to my wife's old roomie. It’s just, I don't know, maybe we should have come out before the meeting, when I was fresh and maybe I'd have been in a better mood. I'm not very good company, I'm afraid, and I'm sorry." <br />
<br />
“Now you're being silly, Marty. I like having you around. I think everything's going just fine.” <br />
<br />
"Yeah, yeah. Last night, when we were going to bed, Trish got all over me about being a wet blanket, bringing everyone down by just sulking around. But what am I supposed to do! Am I supposed to get into some discussion about something that happened in Milligan Hall?" <br />
<br />
“Minihan.” <br />
<br />
“See, I don't even know the names." <br />
<br />
"You do so. You did that on purpose. After all these years, you can't tell me you don't know Minihan Hall." <br />
<br />
"I thought you said you weren't a psychologist?" Marty laughed softly. “But you know what I mean. I figure if I sit there quietly, I’m doing about all I can do, right? Because all they ever talk about is college. And, when you think about it, what else could they talk about? What do they have in common besides that? Fifteen years ago they lived in the same room. Big deal. What is it about women, anyway?" <br />
<br />
"Big question, Marty." <br />
<br />
“Sure is. But look at us. What do I know? Local television and football. I don’t get the impression you care a whole lot about either of those things. What do you know? Literature and, I don't know, classical music or something. I don’t know anything about that stuff, but so what? We don't have much in common, but who cares? Our wives want to get together, it isn't going to kill us to sit around and talk for awhile, but four days? Four days? Thing I can't figure is, what can they talk about for four days? I mean, here's Barbara, tall and cool and smart as a whip, pretty, athletic, sings like a bird and she's got a professional job, right? Trish isn't any of those things. They didn't take the same classes, Barbara was a straight-A student while Trish barely scraped through, Barbara did all this activity business, choir and plays and politics and all. I don’t even know what Trish did with her spare time. Probably don't want to, either. But they shared a room in the dormitory. That's it. What the hell is the attraction? Why did we just come fifteen hundred miles? Does it make any sense to you?" <br />
<br />
"They like each other. They’re friends. You don’t need an excuse to be friends, do you?" <br />
<br />
"Sure you do. Guys do. Lookit, you say Barbara hardly ever watches Donahue, right? Trish never misses it. She makes dental appointments, does her shopping, schedules everything so she can be in front of the tube when Donahue comes on. Donahue gets up there with his innocent baby act day after day and she never catches on that he's either an idiot or a phony to listen to all those freako guests he books without becoming more tuned in to what's going on. Would Barbara let a phony dork like that bamboozle her? Trish thinks Donahue is a genius. She thinks he's this really brilliant guy. You know what? If somebody gets on Carson’s show and says ‘Horses are really smart', Johnny says, ‘Oh yeah? I'll bet they're not as smart as pigs. Pigs are really smart animals.' If somebody said that on Donahue, you know what he’d say? He’d say, “Wait, wait, wait a minute. What's a horse?' No lie, listen to him sometime.” <br />
<br />
Ray laughed. “Come on, Marty, give the guy a break. It's just a difference in interviewing techniques." <br />
<br />
"I know. But Carson assumes his audience knows what a horse is, and what a pig is, and maybe would like to hear something a little more interesting in the way of conversation. Donahue comes in with the assumption that his viewers are morons, so he acts stupid himself. And it is an act, because the guy makes millions. He really is a genius, but you can only tell that by looking at his ratings, not by listening to his interviews." <br />
<br />
"Well, a lot of guys act like Farrah Fawcett Majors was the greatest actress since Sarah Bernhardt.” <br />
<br />
"That I bought: Reruns of Charley's Angels. I ought to put it up against Donahue. We’d have murders in half the households in the market, fighting over the TV. <br />
<br />
“The thing is, Trish watches a lot of television and Barbara doesn't. Is that such a big deal?" <br />
<br />
“That’s not the point. It’s like women have to go to the bathroom together, you know? Why? What is all that stuff they do? You know, the singing business, where they pretend they're the Supremes or the Ronettes or whoever, and lip synch the music and work out these dance routines like they're on stage? I mean, come on, Ray! I didn't go to a college with dorms, I just drove in to class and then drove to my job, but did you and your roommate and your friends stand out in the halls pretending to be the Four Tops? Did you have stuffed animals on your beds? Did you put on your pajamas and go make fudge together? I don’t know what went on in those women's dorms, but it's like if everybody isn't your best friend, the whole damn world is going to come to an end! Tell me the men's dorms were like that!” <br />
<br />
“There was some pretty silly stuff that went on." <br />
<br />
“But who was doing it? The cool guys? Or the jerks? Did the guys you really respected, looked up to, you know, the student leaders, were they doing the silly stuff?” <br />
<br />
"I guess not." <br />
<br />
"Where’s your freshman roommate now? What’s he doing?” <br />
<br />
"I haven’t got the slightest idea,” Ray admitted with a smile. <br />
<br />
“Well, if he and his wife popped up for four days, what would you talk about with him? You’d be walking around whispering to Barbara, trying to figure out what they were doing here and when they were leaving." <br />
<br />
"Listen, Marty, I enjoy having you guys here. Trish and Barbara are having a terrific time and that alone is enough to give me pleasure. And like you say, you and I get along. No, we don’t have much in common, but we get along. To tell you the truth, you're like a lot of neighbors I’ve had down the years. Talk about the rain, the crabgrass, and you don’t really care about it, but it's conversation. It's kind of nice. I’ll tell you something, Marty, I’d rather have you here than some of my relatives. No kidding.'" <br />
<br />
"I appreciate that, Ray. I appreciate your saying that. But what you said about neighbors, that's the same thing. Everybody on our street has to be our friends. The women have decided that living on the same street makes you friends. We have parties at least once a month at somebody’s house, and nobody has anything in common except, uh, the same mailman or something. He doesn't get invited, either, because he doesn't live on our block. The guys all end up standing around with their drinks wishing they were anywhere else in the world, making polite conversation about crabgrass and football or some other garbage that nobody cares about, while the wives are all in the next room going at it like, well, you know, at least they don't dance and sing together, but it's that same ‘Aren’t we all having a marvelous time?' kind of thing. And then they come in to get a drink or refill a nutbowl or something, and it's 'Oh, all you guys do is talk about football, how horrible!' What are we supposed to be talking about, world hunger? And what are they doing that's so much better? Why do they put us through all that? What's the point?” <br />
<br />
"Beats me. With us, it's a little different because we end up at faculty parties, and we all have the college in common. Most of the people around here are connected to the college somehow, so we do have something in common when we get together.” <br />
<br />
"You're lucky. You're lucky in a lot of ways, Ray. The thing is, Trish gets so much pleasure out of making me look like an idiot, you know, with her funny stories and her snide remarks. If we get into an intelligent conversation at one of these things, she'll break in to tell me I say ‘you know' too much. Doesn't matter what else I might have been saying. I could say the greatest, most intelligent thing anyone’s said since Moses came down from the mountain, and all she’d pick up on is that I said 'you know' in the middle of it. Or stuff around the house. I fix things around the house all the time, but she doesn't notice the ninety-nine things that get fixed and work fine. The one thing, that one hundredth thing I can't get to work, oh, boy, that's big humor for the next six months. And it's not like she tells how I can usually fix things, but I screwed up this thing and it was funny. I could laugh at that. But she makes it sound like I can't fix things, like I mess up everything I touch. Or errands. I hate running errands for her. I tell her, ‘Look, just go yourself so you can get exactly what you want.’ But she sends me, and then it's the wrong size, or it has a little tiny dent or chip out of it, or I paid too much or it's the wrong brand or something. Next party, I can hear her in the next room talking about how I can't run a simple errand. And getting big laughs. I hear them laughing in the next room, I don't have to eavesdrop. I know what's happening, and that isn't paranoia, either. It's experience." <br />
<br />
"Her sense of humor does have kind of a bite to it,” Ray allowed. "But everybody knows that, who knows her. I don't think people take those stories that seriously. They know she's clowning around, exaggerating." <br />
<br />
“It's not that, Ray. For that matter, what do I care what some jerk down the street thinks? It does bother me, but ... " <br />
<br />
He bent over to pick up another twig and began breaking it up as he had the other. “Here's the thing, Ray: She hangs around with all these people that she doesn't have anything in common with, except they lived together or down the block or whatever. Barbara is her best friend, and all they have in common is sharing a room in college. Well, I mean, I'm her husband. We've been married for eight years, two kids, dog, house. But we live together, too. Do you know what I’m saying, Ray? We live together. Is that it? Am I just her new roommate? She doesn't seem to care who her friends are. She just makes friends with whoever she gets thrown in with. So where does that leave me?" <br />
<br />
“Hey, Trish loves you. I've known Trish a long time, and she does love you, Marty.” <br />
<br />
“Really? Is making babies at night any different to her than making fudge with the girls in the dorm? What do we have in common?" <br />
<br />
Ray shrugged. "I don't even know what Barbara and I have in common, Marty, I sure couldn't try to say what you and Trish have in common. All I know is that my relationship with Barbara works, and works well. But I don't try to analyze it objectively. Love doesn't work that way." <br />
<br />
Marty nodded and flicked away another section of twig. <br />
<br />
"Funny thing is, if I’d told him to buy it, we'd still be living in an apartment. I mean, if he had gone ahead and done it on my say-so. That's the laugh. I told him what he wanted to hear and it turned out to be bad advice. So he got canned and I got his job. Big promotion, big raise, we bought a nice house. If I weren’t program director, we wouldn't have made this trip and we wouldn't be having this conversation at all. And she still gets to watch the damn program, you know, on the other station. It's not like she doesn't get to see it. But that's all I hear is that I didn’t buy Donahue. I've tried to tell her what my job really consists of, but she doesn't listen. I've tried to tell her it wasn’t my decision and how you can't just program your personal favorites and all that, but she doesn't want to understand it. It would ruin the joke. She wouldn't be able to ride me about it if she took the time to understand what really happened with that whole deal.” <br />
<br />
“I hope you don't mind that I don't have anything very helpful to offer in the way of advice." <br />
<br />
"I wouldn't expect you to. You're married to Barbara. She's not like that." <br />
<br />
“She hits a nerve once in awhile. But when she does, I let her know about it. She doesn't mean to do it. Have you told Trish what you've been telling me?" <br />
<br />
"I've tried. I told her one time that she hurt my feelings, but she acted like I was some kind of big baby about it. Couldn't take a joke, a little kidding. It was my fault, you know? I wasn't even looking for an apology from her, or some kind of, you know, whatever. She came down on me for it, though, and I didn't expect that. I don't think Barbara would do that to you.” <br />
<br />
"I guess not. But Barbara, well, I’m pretty lucky." <br />
<br />
"You can say that again. You know something, Ray, when I first met you guys, when I first met Barbara, the weekend we got married? It really scared me. I thought, ‘Wow, what am I getting myself into?' Because I'd never met anyone from Trish's college days, from Magdalen. And Barbara was just so pretty and classy and everything, that I started thinking maybe Trish was too good for me." <br />
<br />
"I’ve always thought Barbara was too good for me,” Ray admitted. "I think you're supposed to feel that way." <br />
<br />
"But not scared. I always thought Trish was kind of cute and smart and everything, and I was flattered that she liked me, and I knew her folks had a lot more money than my folks did. But when I met Barbara and the other girls who came out for the wedding, the ones from Magdalen, I started thinking she really was too good for me, in the scary sense of that. I mean, really too good for me. It's like, well, I know you don't watch too much TV, but do you ever see the old Bob Newhart shows?" <br />
<br />
"Not too often. I’ve seen a couple. I know the basics, I guess." <br />
<br />
“Well, on the show, there's this girl, Carol, and she marries this guy who's a real washout, just a total loser. Nobody can stand the guy. But everybody is nice to him because they like Carol and he’s her husband. They put up with this dork, and they're even nice to him, but only because they like his wife. That's what I started thinking was going to happen with Trish and me." <br />
<br />
“Now, Marty, that just isn't the way it is. Forget it, man. It just isn't true.” <br />
<br />
"It's true I felt that way, though. I don't anymore. I’ve got a good job where I get to make decisions, I have a staff under me, not much of one, but I do a little hiring and firing and motivating and all that. I make more money than my old man ever did and we live pretty well. And another thing is, people think I've got this wonderful job in an exciting industry. It’s great. I meet people from outside the industry and they think I have lunch with Harry Reasoner twice a week or something, you know? It's not really true, of course. Local TV, well, it might as well be a shoestore for all the romance. I’m just the guy who decides whether we should put ‘My Favorite Martian’ or ‘the Beverly Hillbillies’ on at four in the morning. But when I meet people, they think it’s really interesting, they're really impressed that I work in television. But if I'm with Trish, in about two minutes they hear this hilarious story about how I blew it on the Donahue thing. She gets her laugh and I look like an idiot all of a sudden.” <br />
<br />
“I really think you ought to tell her all this," Ray insisted. "I don't think she's consciously trying to make you look like an idiot. She really does love you, Marty." <br />
<br />
"I don't think she's trying to do it. She just does it. And that doesn't make a whole lot of difference, does it? Anyway, what I'm saying is this: If she just hung around with you and Barbara, I'd tell myself she had good taste and I'd be really flattered that she married me. But she hangs around with all these crazy neighbors of ours, you know? Her friendship with Barbara isn’t a question of her taste. It's just some clerk at Magdalen that put her name and Barbara's together on a room number. She had nothing to do with it. Her dad was a Maggie and he had the money to send his daughter to his old alma mater, that's all. She walks into her room the first day and there’s Barbara. I wish there was more to it than that, but there it is. And here we are leaning on your fence. You know what I'm saying?" <br />
<br />
"I know what you're saying. I think you're wrong, Marty, but I can tell I'm not going to be able to convince you of that, and I feel stupid just telling you one more time to talk to Trish about it. But that's about the only thing I can think of to tell you." <br />
<br />
"I wish it would do some good. I really do. I tell you, Ray, I’d do anything if I thought I could end up feeling like something other than just another one of her roommates. Anything. I might talk to her, you know, I might. If just once, she would just lay off long enough to let me say some of those things, maybe I could do it.” <br />
<br />
He flicked away the last of the twig. "Anyway, here they come. Must be just about time to go in for dinner.” <br />
<br />
Their wives were crossing the lawn, holding a glass in each hand. “We thought you might like to have your drinks out here," Barbara called out as they came near. “We'll even promise to stop talking about school if you'll let us join you." <br />
<br />
"Actually, Ray, we thought we’d better get out here and rescue you," Trish laughed as she handed him a drink. "Marty has never understood that there are people in the world who don't want to be cornered for hours listening to his expert analysis of the last San Diego-Oakland game. I warned him before we got here that you're not much of a football fan. He hasn't bored you too much, has he?” <br />
<br />
"We weren't discussing football," Ray said. “We were just out here, enjoying the weather and having a nice conversation in the fresh air. It really is a beautiful evening, isn't it?" <br />
<br />
"See, Barbara? He's so polite!” Trish laughed, and her laughter tinkled out across the yard as she gave Ray's forearm an affectionate pat of the hand. “You can always count on Ray to be a perfect gentleman.”Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16807727819590358834noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30017373.post-55677931607106863942013-03-15T19:47:00.001-04:002013-03-15T21:01:56.849-04:00Irish in America<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-size: x-large;">Being Irish in Colorado</span></b></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>(The Colorado Springs Sun, March 17, 1985)</i></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i>One of my favorite stories ever. Sean, a kind, wise man who meant a lot to me, played bodhran in our Irish ballad group, The Bogsiders; the women were also from the Irish music scene, of which I was proud to be a part.</i></span></div>
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<i><br /></i></div>
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There's a limit to the history of the Irish in Colorado.<br />
Molly Brown was Irish, which some say explains why Denver society treated her with snubs as chilly as a North Atlantic iceberg. The Irish patriot Maude Gonne was once spirited off from her Denver lecture schedule by Irish miners and treated to a day and a half in Cripple Creek and Victor, a detour she described in her autobiography as "the happiest days of my whole American tour."</div>
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And it's rumored that Irish president Eamon De Valera's Spanish-born father is buried somewhere in Colorado, in an unmarked sheepherder's grave.</div>
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But the fact is, the Irish tended to congregate in urban centers, and despite a handful of hardy pioneers, the Irish one finds in Colorado tend to be fourth and fifth generation Irish-Americans, transplanted here from their families' homes in Boston, New York and Chicago and far removed from their ancestral roots. </div>
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But there are the exceptions. <br />
<br /></div>
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Kate McGuire Browning is only six years removed from Andersonstown, the Catholic inner city neighborhood of Belfast where she spent most of her young life. Married to Steve Browning, an Army helicopter pilot she met in Germany, she is celebrating her third St. Patrick's Day in America. </div>
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Though many who come from the Six Counties would style themselves economic or political refugees, Mrs. Browning is more philosophical about her move. </div>
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"I had a good job, but I just wanted to get away, just wanted to go somewhere different, try something out. It was just always what I wanted to do." </div>
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That good job in Belfast, however, wasn't easy to find. </div>
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"When you fill out an application form, first of all, your name is what gives you away," she says. "If you don't have an Irish name, then they know you're a Protestant. And Andersonstown is Catholic, so your address gives you away. One girl and I were talking together about how hard it had been to get a job. I'd been a year out of school before I got myself a full-time job, working in a telephone exchange. This other girl, she was Catholic, and we were talking about how hard it was, and then this other girl, she belonged to Ian Paisley's church, and she said, 'Oh no, there's no trouble getting jobs, there's all kinds of jobs.' There's supposed to be equal rights and all, but you still can't see it a bit. </div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
"A Catholic person can apply for a job at the shipyard. There isn't much chance he'll get the job, and if he did take the job, he'd be doing it at the risk of his own life. For years and years, it's always been a Protestant firm. It's always been Protestants worked there. Harlan and Wolf is all Protestants working, and a Catholic daren't go look for a job there. It's still not safe. You go to the unemployment office and they've got all kinds of jobs, but the areas they're in, it isn't safe," says Mrs. Browning. </div>
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Growing up in a divided society began to be difficult in the late Sixties, when the nonviolent Catholic civil rights movement was thwarted and militant nationalists utilized the bitterness of that defeat to start up the ancient war for freedom once again. </div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
"Up until I was about nine or ten, I had a Protestant friend, and we couldn't be parted," says Mrs. Browning. "It was around '69 when it started to get real bad, and I got up one morning and all of a sudden my friend wasn't there anymore, her parents had moved out. It was a mixed area where we lived, Protestant and Catholic, and we all lived along just fine. I guess the parents felt it was safer for them to move. It just got to the point where people were split up: Catholics were burnt out of their homes, Protestants were burnt out of their homes." </div>
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Mrs. Browning had lost more than a friend in those difficult days. Seeing the local police stand by and even encourage the violence of the vigilante mobs against Catholic homeowners has left her with firm opinions about the situation. </div>
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"The police over there are the Royal Ulster Constabulary. They're British, and, as far as the law goes, we don't get too much protection from them." </div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
Though the corruption of local police was largely checked by their disarmament and the substitution of the Army to perform their duties after those initial, chaotic days, the damage was done and the Army was no more welcome than the police had been. </div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
"It's not that the Catholic wants the Protestant out," Mrs. Browning insists, "It's not like that. They're all willing to live together. They just say that it's Ireland, that it doesn't belong to Britain, and we're entitled to have our country back. Britain has let go of so many other countries that they have ruled, and why not Northern Ireland? It'll go on until Britain pulls out."</div>
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In this country, Mrs. Browning keeps her Irish heritage alive as she did when she was growing up, through preserving her culture in Irish dancing with the local Irish club. "I started doing solo dancing when I was about five," she says. "That was the normal thing at home, when kids start school, they start Irish dancing classes. I quit doing that when I was about ten or eleven and started playing camogie. You've heard of hurley? Camogie is the ladies' game. Even with the girls playing, it's pretty rough." </div>
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</div>
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Hurley, Ireland's national game, has been described by wags as "lacrosse played with pick handles." </div>
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Ms. Browning also preserves her heritage in the oldest way, through her children, Aoife Fiona, 4, and Sean Padraig, the baby. "Aoife was a name I liked, and I always wanted that name for my first daughter, but I didn't know my first daughter was going to be an American," she admits. "When people see her name, they've got no idea what it is, and I think, 'God, poor kid, going through life.'" </div>
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<br /></div>
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Eilish Rogers Argenzio's eldest son Cormac is 20, old enough to explain his Irish name to the confused, as his mother often has to explain hers. </div>
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"It's a very old Gaelic name," she says. "It's not a diminutive of anything and there's no English translation. Eileen is not a diminutive of it, though people argue about that." </div>
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Like her friend Kate Browning. Mrs. Argenzio came to this country with a military husband, Arthur, since retired from the Air Force. As a Dubliner and as someone who came over before the current round of Troubles started, however, her politics are more muted. </div>
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"If I was in the North of Ireland, living, and was in a bad zone, I know I'd be up there doing something I shouldn't be doing," she admits. "But I'm not there. I'm here. I have never lived that. </div>
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</div>
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"Even down in Dublin, where I lived, the Troubles weren't really bad up in the North then at all. We used to go up there on shopping expeditions. So I've never really come across the bad parts of it. I've never been that closely involved in it. I left in '64." </div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
Still, she's not untouched by the controversy. "I'll tell you what really fires me up, is to hear an Irish person who lives in the North of Ireland, and they say to them, 'You're Irish. why do you feel that way?' and they say, 'I'm not Irish. I'm British.' That just fires me up instantly. If they feel that way, they should be living in Britain. That's Ireland they're living in."</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
Mrs. Argenzio is still an Irish citizen and still very Irish. </div>
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She, too, keeps her heritage alive by dancing, and Irish mementos are scattered through every room of her home. </div>
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Despite the failing economy in what has been described as the northernmost Third World nation, she would go back to Ireland. </div>
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"If Art said. 'Let's go back to Ireland, I'd go. Without my washing machine, without my dishwasher, without all the stuff that I have here that I wouldn't be able to afford at home. Things are so much more expensive over there. I have sisters-in-law there, and they have washers and dryers, but my mother doesn't, still. She does her own washing by hand and hangs it out on the line." </div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
The economic situation still drives the Irish out of their country as it has for hundreds of years. Her brother is in the process of emigrating to the United States. It is a long process. </div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
"He's a jeweler by trade," she explains. "And he had his own business at home, and he said he was making a living, but he just couldn't get ahead, no matter how hard he worked and how long he worked. He was always just making enough to get by, because things just keep going up and up and up. He applied over two years ago for a visa, and he was given a number, which means he was accepted for immigration, but now he has to wait for it to come up. He wrote last year and said they were processing 1981, which he means he hopes to be out here sometime this year, because he applied in 1982. He thinks by summer this year, but I think if he gets here by Christmas, he'll be doing good." </div>
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For Mrs. Argenzio. the hardest part about living in the United States is missing family. Even with a brother in New York and another on the way, she has a mother and aunts who are growing older in Ireland. Though she gets homesick for Ireland, she's found it more economical to invite her mother to visit than to try to save the money to take her own family over there. </div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
She returned to Ireland with her sons, Cormac and David, for a summer in 1977. It was a sentimental journey, to say the least. "I didn't really get homesick for Ireland until I went back, and when I came back here, I had a terrible time settling down. I wanted to be here and I wanted to be there. It was really hard to settle down again, and I'd never been like that until I went back. Everyone said that, 'Wait until you go home, see what it does when you go home.' And I said. 'Oh, that won't happen to me. I'm very happy here, I love it here."</div>
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<br /></div>
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"This is home, right here." Sean Sheehan says, sitting in his Denver house. "People say, 'When you going to go home?' A lot of the Irish say that, 'When you going to go home?' But when you're back there, and you're there two or three weeks, then you're ready to go home. We've lived here twenty-seven years. This is home. We don't have a home in Ireland."<br />
Sheehan and his wife Peggy came to Denver in 1957 from the small village of Ardagh in County Limerick; she was originally from Ballyhigh in County Kerry. Married in 1948, they had moved into the Sheehan home with his mother and father. </div>
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When his parents died, Sean sold the house and all its furnishings and came to Denver, with the original plan to go into business with Peggy's brother, a plasterer. Drywall killed that plan before they arrived, but they came out anyway. </div>
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"We were coming to the country of riches, where you could pick it up off the streets," Mrs. Sheehan laughs. "We found out different." </div>
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The Ireland they grew up in was more the Ireland of postcards and the sentimental songs than the modern world of Eilish Argenzio and Kate Browning, and the rural West of Ireland was and still is very different from the urban centers of Dublin and Belfast, despite the fact that the entire island is only the size of Indiana. It was an enormous island a half century ago for the son of a roof thatcher. </div>
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"There was no television," Sheehan says. "We didn't know what the rest of the world was like when we were growing up. There were radios, but they were few, they were scarce as automobiles. When somebody had a radio. people would gather at the house. That was a big thing, to have radio. That was something like someone having a Rolls Royce now." </div>
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Automobiles were scarce and were often chauffeur-driven hackneys (rental cars) available for weddings or errands. </div>
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"There was one hackney car," Sheehan says. "That was about the only car. I think the doctor had a car. but he had to cover an area that was, from one end to the other, about thirty miles. I could count the cars on one hand that were in our area, up to about 1935 or '36. You had to be very rich to have a car in Ireland." </div>
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"I thought about America, when I was growing up." he explains, "that everybody drove to work in a big car with a suit and a tie. I thought there was no poor people, because very few people went back to Ireland. But when they went back, they'd hire a car or take their own cars back on the boat. And they'd go back and drive around in their fancy cars, and you thought, 'This has to be the place!' They've got TV now; they know what the Americans are like. We didn't have an idea about how American people lived." </div>
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Even when they emigrated twenty years later, those childhood impressions remained strong. They still thought America was the country of riches. </div>
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"Paddy told us we'd have to work very hard," Mrs. Sheehan says of her American brother. "But we couldn't believe that. He was out here (in Denver) eight years, and he had five more kids here and the one he'd brought with him. He went back to Ireland and rented a big house, as well he would with six kids and a husband and wife to live there. He rented the house, and he rented a maid and he rented a car. Well, wouldn't all that give you the impression that America had gold about the streets? And I wouldn't believe otherwise. He told us how you'd have to work hard ..." </div>
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"When we were growing up," says Sheehan. "You'd be lucky if you could go into Limerick for a day, never mind going overseas for a vacation. My father lived in the County Limerick. He was born and lived all his life there, and he was 72 years when he died. He was only out of the county once in his life. Of the county! That was to go to Queenstown, Cobh they call it now, with the Confraternity, the church group, on an excursion on the train. Where we lived, to go to the borders of Cork County was 10 miles, to go to the borders of Kerry was 15. And he was only out of the county one time." <br />
The Sheehans met when his Local Defense Force was sent to Kerry for maneuvers during World War II. Otherwise, they say, they'd never have married someone from a town over fifty miles away. <br />
Now, Ireland has changed, Ireland has joined the twentieth century, and they regret some of those necessary, inevitable changes. </div>
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"They're losing their brogues," Mrs. Sheehan says. "I have more of a brogue. Now, they're going to school and they're meeting so many Europeans and Americans. And the television." </div>
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"They love to meet people and make friends with them," she says. "Whereas you can't do that in America, you can't go down the street and say hello and stand up and talk to them. Well, you can do that in Ireland." </div>
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"But that's going out in Ireland, too," Sheehan says. "I think by the year 2000, it will have changed so much you won't know it. </div>
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"I'll tell you a little story, a joke: This American is driving down this country road, and his watch had stopped. And he saw these couple of men standing by the ditch at the crossroads, and he stopped and he said 'What time is it?' And you know the answer the Irishman made to him? 'Why?' </div>
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"Time didn't mean nothing in Ireland at that time. It does now, because they've got these factories, and they've got time clocks and they've got bills and they've got pressure and they've got everything like any other country has." </div>
Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16807727819590358834noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30017373.post-39901250670887741522012-08-15T22:06:00.005-04:002012-08-15T22:12:02.556-04:00In which Vaska visits one of my favorite placesSo here's my boy Vaska on the path through what used to be an Adirondack Great Camp. Or a pretty good camp. It never quite reached the status of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Topridge" target="_blank">Marjorie Merriweather Post's camp</a>, but it was okay as far as plutocratic retreats go. <br />
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This used to be a wide-open area, and has, in the past quarter century, been taken over by small trees and brush. But let's explain, first:<br />
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We are about 10 miles back from anywhere, in a part of the Adirondacks where even being in the middle of "anywhere' isn't a whole lot.<br />
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Here's where we were:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7ksKnhC8E3c5zYqjlDrnY2KhT2tF2R3oXIPzME1O94VunL_uRjECLtCHo15g_BbnEYT23uDugvYdor5y6guOFDvUoKDThno8hYGGO-bunacyfGm_f0Y5YHjMEF4UyS9eXBVOj/s1600/map+one.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="218" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7ksKnhC8E3c5zYqjlDrnY2KhT2tF2R3oXIPzME1O94VunL_uRjECLtCHo15g_BbnEYT23uDugvYdor5y6guOFDvUoKDThno8hYGGO-bunacyfGm_f0Y5YHjMEF4UyS9eXBVOj/s320/map+one.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
Or, to put it in more global terms:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMVNZ-ko-rJtl1S0Vhjrd3EBJDQFLVxJ8H7lCLg22mHD4834jeHiPDbPCSVRHo2lXkASj0oa_CKvTtOl9l7axk9Go0xcEl2_LONSRw-AUj7lYb4R-Co6mDcwnSJJ0RQFtfqiem/s1600/big+map.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="183" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMVNZ-ko-rJtl1S0Vhjrd3EBJDQFLVxJ8H7lCLg22mHD4834jeHiPDbPCSVRHo2lXkASj0oa_CKvTtOl9l7axk9Go0xcEl2_LONSRw-AUj7lYb4R-Co6mDcwnSJJ0RQFtfqiem/s320/big+map.jpg" width="320" /> </a></div>
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The point being that we started nowhere and then got a little more out of the middle of things.</div>
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But, when I talked about going out there later, everyone was familiar with the place and had a story to tell. Streeter Lake is a place that everyone goes, but in a protective kind of way. We live a quiet life to start with, and Streeter Lake is one of those place we go when we want life to settle down even more.</div>
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Check it out: I'm aware that city folks get a little freaked out by how quiet it is in the country. But here's a video that I shot out at Streeter Lake around noon. Earlier in the morning, the birds were challenging each other -- that is, at about 5 a.m., you hear the "Oh, I love you, baby" birdsong, but by around 10 a.m., the lovemaking is over and it's mostly "Hey! Whachoo doin' on my territory?" singing. </div>
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Still, it's singing. As the sun gets high and the temperatures rise, everybody chills out and here is the result: It's like having noise-cancelling headphones on. The only sound is an occasional breeze and whatever the dog is up to. Crank your speakers to the max and dig it:</div>
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If you know a more peaceful place, feel free to share it, but I felt like I was in heaven. </div>
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And so did the pupster, who was happy to find new things to smell and new place to explore, This is what hounds are bred for, and he was in his element:</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyat5Eq_03_5csBeLwLgOeZf3qbUAUzbjVQt_HxrB34yS-__c2jSdGz-7L6PlQuUPyePmRMQrv3aP1gqIV4fk_rnPa-Oh7gLrE40DiJuR7Cp9WDMTdLGuxhiBP4pqX1rVZCE2F/s1600/IMG_4334a.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyat5Eq_03_5csBeLwLgOeZf3qbUAUzbjVQt_HxrB34yS-__c2jSdGz-7L6PlQuUPyePmRMQrv3aP1gqIV4fk_rnPa-Oh7gLrE40DiJuR7Cp9WDMTdLGuxhiBP4pqX1rVZCE2F/s320/IMG_4334a.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>
The farther we got into the trails, the happier he became.<br />
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We got down to the lake itself, and he took a drink and then shrugged it off. But this is where I camped with my boys, back when they were tiny and we'd hike the six miles from the house to the lake.<br />
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Making that long hike to Streeter, without whining or asking to be carried or otherwise exhibiting evidence of being a baby, was a rite of manhood. And a very entertaining one.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijiAuVQiL9GGCZZIWhtqAk3QWUzvxMAKc6lIlR4NRc8RGdvhP2t4GpkoNTEQPsbzG85R9KbnerqWNlJtfm7l6sO_rXnF-GrpF2tw2jSP5g5lU31vQ3thbbtP-FHiU6TQVHtUho/s1600/jed+streeter.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="230" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijiAuVQiL9GGCZZIWhtqAk3QWUzvxMAKc6lIlR4NRc8RGdvhP2t4GpkoNTEQPsbzG85R9KbnerqWNlJtfm7l6sO_rXnF-GrpF2tw2jSP5g5lU31vQ3thbbtP-FHiU6TQVHtUho/s320/jed+streeter.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
The nine-year-old in that picture will turn 40 in just a few weeks. Meanwhile, despite his desperate clinging to hot chocolate in this picture, he did have the presence of mind to swim out into the lake and beckon his father with "it's warm once you get in," only to laugh and swim to shore, towels and fire once he had lured the Old Man into the chilly water.<br />
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Anyway, three decades plus a little later, here's the same spot, and much the same indeed,except that the dog is not as much into humorous deceit:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuVth3-grLsGVMYICUGlrum2O9Ov1-fFTkHHFofIlHfPYWChN6ZXUkCsSTsNxFDs55-NzFWN_84Mpn4HPWP7o7XGIGJmaIwyEWZYB0T4VpgqMLvz6b6Cec14ZYDDr0aRInDpT8/s1600/IMG_4325.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuVth3-grLsGVMYICUGlrum2O9Ov1-fFTkHHFofIlHfPYWChN6ZXUkCsSTsNxFDs55-NzFWN_84Mpn4HPWP7o7XGIGJmaIwyEWZYB0T4VpgqMLvz6b6Cec14ZYDDr0aRInDpT8/s320/IMG_4325.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
One oddity of the place is that, although it is 10 miles back from any real roads, and far in the midst of the "Forever Wild" Adirondacks, this is a 4,000 acre tract that was once owned by a man who had made a fortune with potato chips.<br />
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The place had been a kind of minor example of the Adirondack Great Camp, and there was a time when there were buildings on the grounds, though they have all disappeared since. The only thing left is a codicil in the will that gave the grounds over to the state, and that is a small area that contains the family mausoleum:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg69z4k983po6ecWq_8ZrBBPpUF-TSQna9gU_sbYPvdRAGVUJyLnGSAx8VT2HKOjhgceTRZZHliIG7A_9nWw-P-G9gK_XrOTEyFghuTv8we2TvUs3wPLnNtUXZJeFjoMXAqbeuf/s1600/IMG_4341.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg69z4k983po6ecWq_8ZrBBPpUF-TSQna9gU_sbYPvdRAGVUJyLnGSAx8VT2HKOjhgceTRZZHliIG7A_9nWw-P-G9gK_XrOTEyFghuTv8we2TvUs3wPLnNtUXZJeFjoMXAqbeuf/s320/IMG_4341.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
Strangely, in the middle of nowhere, you come across this fenced area and these groomed grounds. There is apparently some kind of endowment that keeps it going, because it is absolutely spotless, amid absolute wilderness.<br />
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<i>Tres bizarre</i>, but in a kind of cool way. There was a time when Andy's groundskeepers would run you off the property, but he donated the acreage before his death and it's a great place to go back and just kind of hang out. Even with Andy and his family entombed on the property.<br />
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If nothing else, it makes Streeter Lake an outstanding place, when the sun goes down and there is no light but from the stars and the campfire, to tell Mark Twain's classic ghost story of <a href="http://www.folktale.net/golden_arm.html" target="_blank">the Golden Arm</a>.<br />
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The boys asked for a ghost story and I said I knew one, but then I thought about how incredibly un-right it was to tell the Golden Arm when we were camped on a lake just across from a mausoleum, so I stopped, but they begged and begged, and like a fool, I gave in. Scared the living bejayzus out of them, as well it might. <br />
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Thirty-some years later, I still don't know if that was a really cool moment or a stunning lapse in parental judgment. Oh well, what the hell.<br />
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And nothing scares the dog, so we went over to Crystal Lake, which is next door. Now, Streeter is remote, but, somehow, you always run into one or two people out there. But the deal is, they stay on Streeter and you go over to Crystal and that way, everyone has some peace and quiet.<br />
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So Vaska and I walked over to Crystal Lake, where the water is, as the name suggests, incredibly clean and clear, and also warm.<br />
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We had a lovely swim and I think that next year, when we go back for the next reunion, we'll bring a tent and schedule a night at Crystal Lake.<br />
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I don't think I'll get much opposition to the plan.<br />
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<br />Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16807727819590358834noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30017373.post-46403883040955604582012-06-22T19:09:00.000-04:002012-06-22T19:13:30.379-04:0088 Books You Haven't Read All Of<i>Here are the Library of Congress’s list of 88 “Books That Shaped America,” and I like the fact that they didn't feel compelled to add 12 more or to cut 13 in order to hit a round number.</i><br />
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<i>So how many have you read? And I'd count "read" to include (as in the case of Dr. Spock or the cookbooks), using the book but perhaps not reading it cover to cover, but not (as in the case of "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz"), having seen the movie or (as in the case of "Atlas Shrugged" or "Uncle Tom's Cabin") having heard so much about them that you feel like you might as well have read them. But I'd count a play you've seen ("Streetcar" or "Our Town").</i><br />
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<i>I'd have a higher score if I'd majored in American Lit or even English. And a much higher score if I counted the ones I fully intended to read, including some sitting on my shelf as I write this.</i><br />
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<i>I had 28 (31.8%).</i><br />
<br />“Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” (Mark Twain, 1884)<br />
“Alcoholics Anonymous” (anonymous, 1939)<br />
“American Cookery” (Amelia Simmons, 1796)<br />
“The American Woman’s Home” (Catharine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1869)<br />
“And the Band Played On” (Randy Shilts, 1987)<br />
“Atlas Shrugged” (Ayn Rand, 1957)<br />
“The Autobiography of Malcolm X” (Malcolm X and Alex Haley, 1965)<br />
“Beloved” (Toni Morrison, 1987)<br />
“Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” (Dee Brown, 1970)<br />
“The Call of the Wild” (Jack London, 1903)<br />
“The Cat in the Hat” (Dr. Seuss, 1957)<br />
“Catch-22” (Joseph Heller, 1961)<br />
“The Catcher in the Rye” (J.D. Salinger, 1951)<br />
“Charlotte’s Web” (E.B. White, 1952)<br />
“Common Sense” (Thomas Paine, 1776)<br />
“The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care” (Benjamin Spock, 1946)<br />
“Cosmos” (Carl Sagan, 1980)<br />
“A Curious Hieroglyphick Bible” (anonymous, 1788)<br />
“The Double Helix” (James D. Watson, 1968)<br />
“The Education of Henry Adams” (Henry Adams, 1907)<br />
“Experiments and Observations on Electricity” (Benjamin Franklin, 1751)<br />
“Fahrenheit 451” (Ray Bradbury, 1953)<br />
“Family Limitation” (Margaret Sanger, 1914)<br />
“The Federalist” (anonymous, 1787)<br />
“The Feminine Mystique” (Betty Friedan, 1963)<br />
“The Fire Next Time” (James Baldwin, 1963)<br />
“For Whom the Bell Tolls” (Ernest Hemingway, 1940)<br />
“Gone With the Wind” (Margaret Mitchell, 1936)<br />
“Goodnight Moon” (Margaret Wise Brown, 1947)<br />
“A Grammatical Institute of the English Language” (Noah Webster, 1783)<br />
“The Grapes of Wrath” (John Steinbeck, 1939)<br />
“The Great Gatsby” (F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925)<br />
“Harriet, the Moses of Her People” (Sarah H. Bradford, 1901)<br />
“The History of Standard Oil” (Ida Tarbell, 1904)<br />
“History of the Expedition Under the Command of the Captains Lewis and Clark” (Meriwether Lewis, 1814)<br />
“How the Other Half Lives” (Jacob Riis, 1890)<br />
“How to Win Friends and Influence People” (Dale Carnegie, 1936)<br />
“Howl” (Allen Ginsberg, 1956)<br />
“The Iceman Cometh” (Eugene O’Neill, 1946)<br />
“Idaho: A Guide in Word and Pictures” (Federal Writers’ Project, 1937)<br />
“In Cold Blood” (Truman Capote, 1966)<br />
“Invisible Man” (Ralph Ellison, 1952)<br />
“Joy of Cooking” (Irma Rombauer, 1931)<br />
“The Jungle” (Upton Sinclair, 1906)<br />
“Leaves of Grass” (Walt Whitman, 1855)<br />
“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (Washington Irving, 1820)<br />
“Little Women, or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy” (Louisa May Alcott, 1868)<br />
“Mark, the Match Boy” (Horatio Alger Jr., 1869)<br />
“McGuffey’s Newly Revised Eclectic Primer” (William Holmes McGuffey, 1836)<br />
“Moby-Dick; or the Whale” (Herman Melville, 1851) <br />
“The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass” (Frederick Douglass, 1845)<br />
“Native Son” (Richard Wright, 1940)<br />
“New England Primer” (anonymous, 1803)<br />
“New Hampshire” (Robert Frost, 1923)<br />
“On the Road” (Jack Kerouac,1957)<br />
“Our Bodies, Ourselves” (Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, 1971)<br />
“Our Town: A Play” (Thornton Wilder, 1938)<br />
“Peter Parley’s Universal History” (Samuel Goodrich, 1837)<br />
“Poems” (Emily Dickinson, 1890)<br />
“Poor Richard Improved and the Way to Wealth” (Benjamin Franklin, 1758)<br />
“Pragmatism” (William James, 1907)<br />
“The Private Life of the Late Benjamin Franklin, LL.D.” (Benjamin Franklin, 1793)<br />
“The Red Badge of Courage” (Stephen Crane, 1895)<br />
“Red Harvest” (Dashiell Hammett, 1929)<br />
“Riders of the Purple Sage” (Zane Grey, 1912)<br />
“The Scarlet Letter” (Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1850)<br />
“Sexual Behavior in the Human Male” (Alfred C. Kinsey, 1948)<br />
“Silent Spring” (Rachel Carson, 1962)<br />
“The Snowy Day” (Ezra Jack Keats, 1962)<br />
“The Souls of Black Folk” (W.E.B. Du Bois, 1903)<br />
“The Sound and the Fury” (William Faulkner, 1929)<br />
“Spring and All” (William Carlos Williams, 1923)<br />
“Stranger in a Strange Land” (Robert E. Heinlein, 1961)<br />
“A Street in Bronzeville” (Gwendolyn Brooks, 1945)<br />
“A Streetcar Named Desire” (Tennessee Williams, 1947)<br />
“A Survey of the Roads of the United States of America” (Christopher Colles, 1789)<br />
“Tarzan of the Apes” (Edgar Rice Burroughs, 1914)<br />
“Their Eyes Were Watching God” (Zora Neale Hurston, 1937)<br />
“To Kill a Mockingbird” (Harper Lee, 1960)<br />
“A Treasury of American Folklore” (Benjamin A. Botkin, 1944)<br />
“A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” (Betty Smith, 1943)<br />
“Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1852)<br />
“Unsafe at Any Speed” (Ralph Nader, 1965)<br />
“Walden, or Life in the Woods” (Henry David Thoreau, 1854)<br />
“The Weary Blues” (Langston Hughes, 1925)<br />
“Where the Wild Things Are” (Maurice Sendak, 1963)<br />
“The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” (L. Frank Baum, 1900)<br />
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Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/06/22/3671641/88-books-that-shaped-america.html#storylink=cpy</div>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16807727819590358834noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30017373.post-79501059114764559012012-06-01T08:05:00.000-04:002012-06-01T08:12:35.839-04:00No looking in the corner for this one<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcZcWNRnwRA7kGFfFw7ZczijzG9DB7wr8LvLOqosqpMIszCDPPVn6mqWENzDZiZYxxdJpeIvzLGYKHx154LF4xRhS8h0GFiJfGzQxJLnbaFdhd7I6lBH_DRn4xchagq5-3qVhq/s1600/amity.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="245" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcZcWNRnwRA7kGFfFw7ZczijzG9DB7wr8LvLOqosqpMIszCDPPVn6mqWENzDZiZYxxdJpeIvzLGYKHx154LF4xRhS8h0GFiJfGzQxJLnbaFdhd7I6lBH_DRn4xchagq5-3qVhq/s320/amity.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>(This column originally appeared August 4, 1989, in the Press-Republican, Plattsburgh, NY)</i></span><br />
<br />
When I was in college, one of the interesting things about our old campus was the strange little bits of sculpture and artwork tucked away in odd corners. <br />
In the Administration Building, there was a set of murals of the life and times of Christopher Columbus.<br />
One painting showed Columbus and these weeping Indians in a cell and was entitled "Bobadilla betrays Columbus."<br />
We didn't know who Bobadilla was, but he must have been a cad.<br />
Near the art building, there was a six-foot sculpture of a man, made of reinforcing rods.<br />
The rods approximated musculature, and the man's head was thrown back in a scream of inarticulate angst, while his hands tore open his stomach. Inside were gears and suchlike, with a little, tiny man in the very center .<br />
Oddest of all, though, was the mural in the Huddle. Wrapped around the end of the booths in the snack bar was a really ugly painting of grotesque football players hitting each other, while referees blew whistles and threw flags. As undergraduate artwork goes, this was really a wonder.<br />
I thought of all this awe-striking artwork the other day when I was over on the Plattsburgh State campus and saw the new giant head that is rising up between the library and the science building. I don't know much about sculpture, mind you. but I know what is big, and this is big. <br />
It isn't a record for macrocephalic sculpture, of course. Mount Rushmore is larger, but that is, strictly speaking, a statue of four giant heads, not four giant sculptures of heads.<br />
The heads of Easter Island are more separate, but still can hardly be classed as individual opera. <br />
But the giant head of Ferdinand Marcos, overlooking a golf course in the Phillipines, is clearly the world-class giant head of all time.<br />
Still, for Plattsburgh, this is one big head, and that is important. Campus art these days has few restrictions, but it is supposed to be really, really big.<br />
Look at those two gingerbread men shaking hands: now. that's big! That's really big, really good campus art.<br />
Giant art is important in the high-pressure world of the modern undergraduate facility.<br />
When we were students, we didn't care about our futures and we weren't under the same pressures to get high grades.<br />
If we wanted to go wandering around campus, hunting up unusual things to look at and ponder, we could take an hour or two and go do it. If the dinky little lifesize heads and bodies we were offered were tucked away in a quiet grotto or down amid the crab apple trees somewhere, we had nothing better to do than go down and have a look anyway.<br />
Today, students need to be able to get at that art quickly. They are busy people and they need to just look across campus and there it is: A giant head. Two men shaking hands. Whatever.<br />
You look, and you see it. No time wasted, no one late to class.<br />
This is very American, you know, this efficient artwork. It started with the Statue of Liberty.<br />
We'd bring in all the wretched refuse yearning to be free, and, as their boats steamed into the harbor, we'd say, "Hey, there's Lady Liberty over there. We made her real big, so you wouldn't have to get off the boat and go have a close-up look. You can see her just fine from here. Now, go get your shots and find a job."<br />
I don't know what this really big head is going to actually look like when it is done. Right now, it looks like a <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/the_rowes321/4185862365/" target="_blank">giant-but-kind-of-flimsy jungle gym</a>, but they wouldn't dare leave it like that unless they are going to really, really crack down on campus drinking.<br />
I haven't talked to the artist about all this.<br />
But my senior year, they decided to renovate the Huddle, and they covered over the grotesque mural of ugly football players that had been there for 15 years, and some enterprising campus reporter thought to call up the guy who painted it and ask him what he thought about having his artistic tribute to Notre Dame football destroyed.<br />
"I hated football,'' he replied. "I thought it was incredibly grotesque."<br />
Which doesn't have much to do with giant heads, except that it was nice to run into a campus artist who didn't have one.<br />
<br />
<i>(Note: This provoked an angry letter from the curator that may have provoked more laughter than the original column.) </i>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16807727819590358834noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30017373.post-26964649212192645242012-03-30T18:49:00.001-04:002012-03-30T18:57:29.332-04:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiv3PsT0KiHTVH5dguwMlGKuJymLGomm7UWhbZE54sxAOjAi1B0wD-7zSpGv1tuzQC6WzGf8RmpaETMcSoPmcdx1XUtFDSIXcln0tv2Ay1MxD_T-4isXFRwXLiX7mPiDUJg1d5m/s1600/nastdeadbeat.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="315" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiv3PsT0KiHTVH5dguwMlGKuJymLGomm7UWhbZE54sxAOjAi1B0wD-7zSpGv1tuzQC6WzGf8RmpaETMcSoPmcdx1XUtFDSIXcln0tv2Ay1MxD_T-4isXFRwXLiX7mPiDUJg1d5m/s320/nastdeadbeat.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><h2 style="text-align: center;"> <b>Being Stupid Can Be Taxing</b></h2><div style="text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">(originally published in the Press-Republican, Plattsburgh, NY, December 6, 1988)</span></i> </div><br />
So here's how it all started: A bunch of the guys in the Caucus were sitting around, trying to figure out how to get up some money.<br />
"Raise the tax on cigarettes, "says O'Malley, and Dutch hits him upside the head with a wadded-up empty pack of Camels.<br />
Dutch smokes two packs a day and figures the only way he'll ever turn a profit on his own taxes is to check into the VA with lung cancer.<br />
"What about a new statewide sales tax?" says Milstein. "Kick it up a penny. Nobody'll notice.'<br />
"The municipalities'll notice," says Callaghan. "Same thing with real estate. The locals'll raise holy Ned if we do any more hunting on their preserves. Nah, we need to tax something new. We need to tax something everybody has, but that they ain't paying any taxes on now."<br />
"The guys in my district are always telling me the next tax will be on the air they breathe," says Dutch. "It's worth a thought."<br />
"Manhattan'd refuse to pay it," says Milstein. "What they got to breathe ain't worth paying for."<br />
"I got something else in mind," says Callaghan. "Something almost as common as air. Something we're surrounded by every day. Something this state already has away too much of."<br />
"What's that?" says Dutch.<br />
Callaghan gets this big smile on his kisser. "Stupidity. Any shortage of that in your district, Dutch?"<br />
"In my district?" he asks. "There ain't no shortage of that in my immediate family! But how you gonna tax stupidity?"<br />
"Yeah," says Milstein. "You think the people downstate would get upset about paying for air which they ain't got, wait'll you try to tax'em for brains which ditto."<br />
"What're you gonna do, Callaghan?" says O'Malley. "Make 'em take a test or something? Who's gonna write the test?"<br />
Dutch whistles. "You think you got trouble with the Regents and the SAT's and all that? How you gonna write up a stupidity test that ain't culturally biased?"<br />
"Don't need a test," Callaghan says, still with the smile. "This is a tax people will pay without a test. They'll volunteer."<br />
"Right," says Milstein. "They'll just send in their money. They'll say, 'Here you go, I'm pretty stupid. Here's fifty bucks.' In a pig's eye. Callaghan! Who's gonna admit to that?"<br />
"They won't have to," Callaghan laughs."That's the beauty. We don't call it a stupidity tax. We call it a 'state lottery.' We tell'em, if they give us their money, we might give them a whole, bunch of money back. The more they give us, the more chance we might give them a couple or 20 million bucks. They'll be lined up out into the streets, fighting to pay their stupidity tax. We won't even be able to collect it ourselves, it'll be coming in so fast. We'll have to farm out the job to convenience stores, groceries, gas stations, every place you can think of. You start taxing stupidity, boys, you're talking about a major windfall, you know."<br />
Dutch shakes his head. "I don't know, Callaghan. You're talking about giving the money back?"<br />
"Bird feed!" Callaghan snorts. "We lay 20, 30, even 50 million bucks on one dumb schmoo in Queens, every other dumb schmoo across the state is gonna think he's next in line. That's the beautiful thing about this: The more stupidity they got, the more they pay! One pathetic jerk wins the money, there'll be 100 million other pathetic jerks lined up to pay us back and then some, the next morning."<br />
"So what are the odds on this thing, this big money?" O'Malley asks.<br />
"14 million-to-one," Callaghan says. "That's what weeds out all the smart people who shouldn't have to pay. I mean, a person with half a brain is automatically exempt from paying the stupidity tax, just by virtue of knowing what a sucker deal it is. You gotta figure, you got more chance of being hit by lightning. Twice. You got more chance of signing with the Knicks. You got more chance of meeting the Pope in an elevator."<br />
"Most of my constituents think they got a chance of being swept up in a UFO," Milstein admits. "14 million-to-one odds don't mean nothing to them. Meet the Pope, nothing. They think they still got a chance to meet Elvis."<br />
"I got to hand it to you, Callaghan," says Dutch. "A stupidity tax. That's really beautiful. It's the one kind of tax nobody's gonna wise up to."Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16807727819590358834noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30017373.post-37585079180079386942011-12-25T17:07:00.005-05:002011-12-25T17:27:03.037-05:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRZDBbiFmhFAygNn5vtLY-rf57u8IYRAiFTljAuWAZhUAbLd9iKYCZvbUzxgXwrE8EmANvTeHrFiejxvhvMBIumaLgojOPT6ZCq2ZcHHgYfrer74stqv6lUoXamwgyrTpfHuc2/s1600/Pete+Shannon.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRZDBbiFmhFAygNn5vtLY-rf57u8IYRAiFTljAuWAZhUAbLd9iKYCZvbUzxgXwrE8EmANvTeHrFiejxvhvMBIumaLgojOPT6ZCq2ZcHHgYfrer74stqv6lUoXamwgyrTpfHuc2/s320/Pete+Shannon.jpg" width="231" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Christmas on the Air</b></span></div><br />
I've worked a few Christmases, mostly during my years in the newsroom, but the most memorable was 30 years ago tonight.<br />
<br />
I had an evening talk show on KVOR-AM in Colorado Springs, which was just switching to a news/talk format. My show had begun that fall, which I remember because my time segment happened to be when the station in years past would have run the baseball playoffs.<br />
<br />
That wouldn't have been a problem except that, for one thing, the station never came through with all the publicity they told me they were going to mount for this new program and, secondly, I had no producer answering phones in the control room, which meant that people were calling in to find out where the baseball game was and their calls were coming straight through to the studio.<br />
<br />
So I'd be talking to an author about the ecological effects of Agent Orange on the people and wildlife in the Mekong Delta and I'd take a call and it would be someone asking when the ball game came on.<br />
<br />
Later, as fall gave way to winter, that changed, so that, in the middle of interviewing someone, I'd get a call asking if Monument Pass was open, which was a reasonable question to ask our newsroom but not always relevant to the topic of the show.<br />
<br />
I also had kids call in who had figured out that there was nobody screening calls and no 7-second delay, but, fortunately, they'd get so excited that they'd scream the F-word instead of just saying it, and all you'd hear on the air was a burst of incoherent noise.<br />
<br />
And I would say to the program director that I really needed a call-screener, but, as with putting my face on the sides of buses, the answer was that, until the show was more established, they didn't have budget for that.<br />
<br />
I'd done enough advertising work by then to know where publicity fits in the timeline of success, and I also knew that the quality of the show was suffering because of idiotic, irrelevant calls coming straight to the studio.<br />
<br />
But I'd also done enough work in the world to know when the boss was going to get his own way regardless of whether or not it made good sense.<br />
<br />
So Christmas comes along, and I get a few days off, because the station has bought a package of pre-recorded tapes of Christmas music and is about to become the community's Yuletide background sound for the week leading up to Christmas. And I had small boys and a wife and a home to go to, so it was fine with me.<br />
<br />
Only the program director approached me a few days before the Christmas thing began and said they had miscalculated on something: The package ended at 6 p.m. Christmas day, the time my show would normally go on the air.<br />
<br />
They could cobble something together, he said, but he wanted to let me know. And I said that I'd be happy to come in, because Christmas would be pretty much over at my house, and anybody who needed talk radio on Christmas Day really needed a familiar voice.<br />
<br />
The problem was, I wasn't going to get any calls and I was going to be hard-pressed to line up a guest for a show that nobody was going to be listening to.<br />
<br />
But the news director was letting his staff off for the night and he said he'd be happy to come be my guest. We'd sit and swap stories through the three hours, and if anyone called in, that would be a bonus.<br />
<br />
So the program started and it was the two of us sitting there in the empty studio talking about the various holidays we'd had as kids and inviting listeners to share their favorite holiday story, and a little old lady called in to say how much she liked Perry Como and we talked to her for awhile and then we talked to each other about Christmas music, and TV specials and suchlike.<br />
<br />
And then we got a call from someone who said, "I don't know what I'm going to do." And then he said it again, and then he said he was going to kill himself.<br />
<br />
And then he hung up.<br />
<br />
The plan for the evening had changed, and I told him he had to call back because it wasn't fair to lay this on me and not give me a chance to do anything about it. And the phone rang, and it was him again, and his voice was unnaturally low, the voice of someone in a deep depression, and he said he didn't want to talk to me because I knew too much about him already.<br />
<br />
And then he hung up again.<br />
<br />
He may have said something else, because, despite the depressed tone, I suddenly knew who it was: Steve, a regular caller who was a Biblical literalist who used to call me to debate Scripture.<br />
<br />
And who, I knew, had a sister who had taken her own life.<br />
<br />
So the show went from "What are your favorite Christmas memories?" to "Call me back, Steve." The news director was a gem -- he let me drive the bus while he just sat back and made calm, neutral comments of support.<br />
<br />
And we went on for about half an hour, blowing off all the commercial breaks, blowing off the five minute Dan Rather commentary, and a young engineer came in, who was supposed to work later than night but had heard what was going on.<br />
<br />
At some point, I said that, if Steve didn't want to talk on the air, I could understand that, so I turned over the on-air component to the news director and the engineer and went back into the control room. And they were champions -- they kept it low key and supportive and they didn't make any leading statements or say anything stupid and they were wonderful.<br />
<br />
I was in the control room hoping Steve would call, but also going through the phone book looking for his church, which had a fairly generic name. I found one minister at home but he wasn't the right guy.<br />
<br />
And then finally, nearly an hour after this whole thing had started, Steve called, and I hit the wrong button and hung up on him. But he called back, and he said he was all right now, and he thanked me for caring. And I made him promise to call me back in the morning and let me know he was really okay.<br />
<br />
Which he did. Apparently, the problem was that he had fallen in love with a Jewish girl, so the people in his house told him he was going to Hell and they threw him out on the street as a sinner who they couldn't associate with anymore.<br />
<br />
But he realized now that it was going to be okay, and he was going to be fine. And he thanked me again for being there.<br />
<br />
Meanwhile, the news director and I had to explain to management why we had blown off all the commercials for over 45 minutes, including Dan Rather's commentary and the news at the top of the hour. And we explained it to them.<br />
<br />
And the next time I went on the air, by golly, they had finally given me someone to screen my calls and hang up on anybody who shouldn't get on the air.<br />
<br />
God bless us, every one!Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16807727819590358834noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30017373.post-26615884831156603872011-12-19T17:31:00.003-05:002011-12-19T17:44:28.657-05:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxmbqDAsZPAEFNdCNevlKdyt2jTfBG07JtuHXjHPrJhejeMeQkEVyJoyCQk1kWNoEXsX6P47WEr0npiftFCyQNLfSSlUxHr4WFIMuAB9T-xqw6kIJK3HH8fosdhESWi9fg3EjJ/s1600/Louis+Gitney%252C+a+young+compositor+earning+%25247_00+a+week+in+a+Sixth+Av_+%2528N_Y_%2529+printing+office+1917.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="281" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxmbqDAsZPAEFNdCNevlKdyt2jTfBG07JtuHXjHPrJhejeMeQkEVyJoyCQk1kWNoEXsX6P47WEr0npiftFCyQNLfSSlUxHr4WFIMuAB9T-xqw6kIJK3HH8fosdhESWi9fg3EjJ/s400/Louis+Gitney%252C+a+young+compositor+earning+%25247_00+a+week+in+a+Sixth+Av_+%2528N_Y_%2529+printing+office+1917.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>Tales from the backshop</b></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">(This column originally ran in the Press-Republican, Plattsburgh, NY, March 24, 1996)</span></i></span></span></div><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Today, the term "boilerplate" is usually associated with lawyers: It's those required blocks of verbiage that never change from one contract to another.</span><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">But boilerplate was a newspaper term in the days before offset printing, and it rose up to bite the Plattsburgh Daily Press a century ago.</span><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">On March 23, 1896, the Press ran a column headlined "Unfathomable Snobbery," about a young army officer harrassed until he resigned his commission by fellow officers and their wives for marrying the daughter of an enlisted man. It was, the story said, "a systematic persecution ... at the hands of the tabbies of both sexes who constitute our snobbish and ridiculous army aristocracy."</span><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">But there was a problem: The story had been revealed as a falsehood several weeks before, by a military writer who reported that the young officer was popular and happy at his post and had resigned for health reasons.</span><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">It was a terrible mistake for a paper in the hometown of Plattsburgh Barracks, and the redfaced Press included the facts of the case the next day in an editorial that contained an odd mix of explanation and self-forgiveness: </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">"The article in question was a product of the syndicate system and did not come to the knowledge of any member of the editorial staff before its appearance," the editorialist wrote. "This explanation will be sufficient to relieve us of any imputation of intention to attack the social usages of the army."</span><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">But it wasn't sufficient in the view of the Plattsburgh Republican, a feisty little weekly ever willing to chortle publicly over such a delicious blunder by its larger rival:</span><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">"This apology ... naturally suggests an inquiry or two," the Republican scoffed: "Since no member of the editorial staff had any knowledge of this article, how then did it get into the Press...? Was it the office cat or the stock 'scapegoat?'"</span><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">The delighted Republican also ran outraged letters to the editor, calling it "scurrilous journalism ... of a character to make Ben Franklin turn in his grave and the shades of Faust and Gutenberg regret that printing was ever discovered," wrote an anonymous "Citizen," warming up for this indignant run-on sentence: </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">"Our citizens feel ashamed of so unworthy an item in their only daily journal, for although that journal itself is an unworthy representative of journalism, printing its news after it is 24 hours old, yet in the absence of any other daily newspaper it has been tolerated, but it was not expected that it would add spite to its other weaknesses."</span><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">The second letter was suspiciously loaded with inside references to the operations of a newspaper: "A pall of mystery hangs over our great freight train-despatch daily," wrote the anonymous critic.</span><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">"Who done it? ... Was it Cock Robin? Or the Official Papster? Or the Bucksaw Editor? Alibis are in order...."</span><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">References to a "freight-train-despatch daily" and the "Bucksaw Editor" were slams at the Press for not including enough local writing. It's likely the article was boilerplate: Part of a long bar of lead print, typeset in New York City and sent to Plattsburgh to be cut to fit whatever holes in the paper needed filling. A feature article like this could be held to run anytime, and, in this case, had apparently been sitting around since before the follow-up story that branded it a lie. Then, when something that length was needed to fill the column, the story had been sawn off and put into place.</span><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">The Republican's editorialist merrily hammered the point home: "By the way, it has generally been understood that the Press's 'news' departments were filled with 'boilerplate' matter, cast in New York, but since when has its editorial pablum been created in the same manner, by a boilerplate 'Editorial Syndicate?' And where does the work of the 'Editorial Staff come in, since, as it appears, a handsaw is all that is needed to get the work of the editorial syndicate into shape for printing?"</span><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Today, the technology has changed: Local media still rely on outside features, though they arrive through satellite dishes instead of trains, and it still happens that, for all the editorial controls in place, something occasionally gets through that oughtn't to have. And it still causes gleeful guffaws among media rivals when it happens.</span><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Today, of course, those rivals are TV and radio stations, but the big difference is that we've all become too mature, professional and responsible to publicly ridicule the mistakes of our competitors.</span><br style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Or maybe we've become too thin-skinned to risk having the tables turned.</span></span><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">(The media still decline to criticize each other with much in the way of </span><span class="hw" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">élan</span></i></span><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">, though there's no reluctance on the part of various web sites. The real trick is finding web sites that understand how these things happen. Recently, we lost one of the greats, Charlie Stough, and<a href="http://apple.copydesk.org/2011/11/23/charles-stough-of-the-burned-out-newspapercreatures-guild-reportedly-passes-away/" target="_blank"> I would direct you to this remembrance of a funny, funny ink-stained wretch</a>.)</span></i></span></div><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span></span> <br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8KOfTZl8n2sQ0KbwiY02wI6kIEdWnwCD5X7Qdg1SnMI3xuQ9IAq5ZTQdwFe9wYeK_5FgnNd2YN4PmUWV5ZKpN3TA0indt6BxLkFzjEpk5_qd__nrwEdjowGTEoiXAMQY_rBwy/s1600/snobbery.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br />
</a></div>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16807727819590358834noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30017373.post-30652429969662998782011-11-11T18:27:00.009-05:002011-11-11T18:57:14.312-05:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhi3PeC0AjZDouEdkLO8REy6zGHvQc_j7huMPTGmukbLsD1dQLK_bIIAFpoyBipZxYy7f9aTqm44ndqni7iJT-QmfiI1d7kK2W58PtZLZibbqZj1S-5_vwygbY26tLPSJF_ag2c/s1600/pompeo-batoni-susanna-and-the-elders.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="234" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhi3PeC0AjZDouEdkLO8REy6zGHvQc_j7huMPTGmukbLsD1dQLK_bIIAFpoyBipZxYy7f9aTqm44ndqni7iJT-QmfiI1d7kK2W58PtZLZibbqZj1S-5_vwygbY26tLPSJF_ag2c/s320/pompeo-batoni-susanna-and-the-elders.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"> <span style="font-size: large;"><b>Court on child molesters: Don't ask, don't tell</b></span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>The Press-Republican, Plattsburgh, NY c. June 28, 1998</i></span></span></span></div><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;">Five out of nine Supreme Court justices agree: When it comes to sexual assault on children; what the school doesn't know can't hurt it.<br />
</span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;">Last week, the court ruled that a district can't be sued for damages in a sexual-harassment case, as long as administrators keep their heads firmly jammed into the sand.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"><br />
The case concerned a girl molested by a teacher beginning when she was 13, a situation which advanced to sexual relations within a year.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"><br />
When a police officer caught the teacher in the act, the parents sued the teacher and the district, reasoning that the district was responsible for its teacher's actions.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"><br />
This is a lively issue in sexual harassment.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"><br />
Common law holds that, if you give a person authority, you bear some responsibility for what the person does with that power, but the question is how much responsibility an employer has for unauthorized acts the employer is not aware of.</span></span><br />
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In this case, the court ruled that, unless the right person at the district knew exactly what was going on, the school could wash its hands of all responsibility.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"><br />
Here are the facts, as laid out in the decision:</span></span><br />
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1. The district was required by the Department of Education, as part of its receipt of federal funds, to institute a policy on sexual discrimination (including harassment) and to make that policy known to employees and students. It did not do so.</span></span><br />
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2. While the child did not report the sexual contact, other students' parents had complained to the principal about suggestive and inappropriate remarks in the classroom. The principal met with the parents and the teacher and reported on the meeting to the guidance counselor.</span></span><br />
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3. The teacher had repeated sex with the student, apparently leaving school with her during what were supposed to be regularly scheduled classes.</span></span><br />
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Here is what the court ruled:</span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"><br />
A. Not having the required policy or letting students and teachers know how to report harassment did not mean the district was indifferent to the issue.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"><br />
B. The complaints about suggestive language didn't count, the court said. The parents had spoken to the principal instead of the superintendent, who was the district's Title IX officer, and the principal passed the information to the guidance counselor but not to the Title IX officer. Officially, then, the school did not know there was a problem.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"><br />
C. Since only suggestive remarks were reported, the complaint "was plainly insufficient to alert the principal to the possibility that (<i>the teacher</i>) was involved in a sexual relationship with a student."</span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"><br />
This is like ruling that a report of smoke pouring from a school is insufficient to alert firefighters to the possibility that the building is on fire.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"><br />
To continue the analogy, it is like saying that calling the fire station to report the fire is not good enough, unless the fire chief answers the phone personally.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"><br />
Finally, it is like saying that, if the school is required to put in an alarm system, but fails to do so, it still can't be blamed if children die in the burning building.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"><br />
Whatever the legal logic of the court's ruling, it is asinine.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"><br />
It is beyond outrage that the justices of the highest court in the land should exhibit such abysmal ignorance of the matter before them. It also reveals an appalling set of national priorities when the court brings in tekkies and webheads to explain the Internet so that they can rule wisely on the Communications Decency Act, but blunders ahead in this ruling without the most rudimentary knowledge of child molestation.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"><br />
The court may rule that ice cream is boiling hot, but that will not make it so, nor can the court's absurd ruling in this case change what a school administrator ought to know. Of course the school should have been alerted to a risk, based on those other complaints.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"><br />
Not every dirty talker is a baby raper, but nobody with any training in education could fail to recognize suggestive comments as a strong indicator of a potential hazard. It is impossible for anyone in education or human services to escape this information without a deliberate and concerted effort to do so.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"><br />
These administrators did not want to know what was going on in their school, and that willful, hard-won ignorance has saved them.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"><br />
There is a ray of hope in this otherwise horrific ruling.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"><br />
The court said only that current law permits the "don't ask, don't tell" defense for those who fail to protect our children. It would only require a new law, not a constitutional amendment, to change that.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"><br />
Congress must now break the conspiracy of ignorance that aids and abets child molesters. </span></span><i><span style="color: black;"></span></i><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i></i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i> </i></span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Joining in the majority opinion in </i><i>'Gebser v. Lago Vista Independent School District' were Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy and Clarence Thomas.Dissenting were Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer. </i></span></div>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16807727819590358834noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30017373.post-89835837083064821842011-11-02T19:31:00.004-04:002011-11-03T08:12:40.988-04:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5CYuYJHOw0fABuaV2fn_3a2qnsCzwqG5IESByRN_4C9UmsqWHBBGyEBIQinYu1sscB4MqqxCUSgQFdRRyZhFxrtFfbCAQuU3kjRX46R4w3ymONH7RZVdAmA7uid11OTy5Bpdn/s1600/Mom%2526Pop.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="256" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5CYuYJHOw0fABuaV2fn_3a2qnsCzwqG5IESByRN_4C9UmsqWHBBGyEBIQinYu1sscB4MqqxCUSgQFdRRyZhFxrtFfbCAQuU3kjRX46R4w3ymONH7RZVdAmA7uid11OTy5Bpdn/s400/Mom%2526Pop.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>That's me and my big brother, Rick, and my sister Fran, and Mom holding our little brother, Tony, and Pop, patting their dog, Puddles. I'm not sure exactly when this picture was taken, but, if it wasn't the last time we were together, it was close.<br />
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Mom and Pop were our mother's parents, but we called them "Mom" and "Pop" because that's what our uncle Teddy called them, and he certainly should know. And "Grandma" and "Grandpa" lived in Pennsylvania, not Connecticut.<br />
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Some few months after this picture was taken, a major storm hit Connecticut. Teddy was 13 and old enough to stay home alone while his parents had dinner with some friends, but, when the power went out, he called to let them know and they told him they'd come right home.<br />
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When Teddy called some time later to ask if they were coming, it caused some alarm, because they had left after his first call, and it wasn't that far.<br />
<br />
Meanwhile, the librarian at the Mark Twain Library in Redding had seen odd lights on the ceiling of the apartment over the library and called for help -- they were from the headlights of a car that had been swept off an undermined bridge on the road just under her windows.<br />
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Pop was gone almost immediately, but Mom clung to a tree in the middle of the river for three hours while they tried to get out to help.<br />
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And thus it was that I suddenly found myself with a second older brother, my uncle Ted. My mother was 31 at the time, and I cannot imagine how it rocked her world. When the news came, she was told not to come to Connecticut yet, as the roads were impassable and the bodies had not yet been recovered.<br />
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There was a memorial service in Connecticut, and then a train trip to Chicago and a huge funeral, swelled by the family's connections in the Catholic community, with two nuns and a priest as siblings of the deceased. And then a second train trip back to the East Coast.<br />
<br />
I cannot imagine.<br />
<br />
But I went to visit my mother last week, and we drove up to Redding to have a look at the old homestead, seen in the picture.<br />
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And since I couldn't imagine, I didn't know what we were going to encounter.<br />
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For example, the bridge was a place I remembered because we used to play Pooh Sticks there, each dropping a stick off one side and then racing across to see whose stick would emerge first.<br />
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I'm sure this is not her first association with that bridge.<br />
<br />
But there were many other memories around the place, starting with the many stone walls I saw in the woods well before we got to Mom and Pop's house. I remembered playing in the woods and climbing over many of those old barriers, including the time we were ambushed by a horde of yellow jackets and came screaming down to the screened in porch where Mom and Pop and our parents were sitting drinking from the colored, milled metal glasses that ended up at our house later.<br />
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Bad yellow jackets. Great glasses. Someone had glassed in the porch in the half-century since.<br />
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Someone had done a fair amount in that half-century, but, then again, not so much in recent years.<br />
<br />
There was a swimming pool that was new to us, but looked like it hadn't been used in a couple of years, though the cover was in place and it only needed a good cleaning. And there was much construction material piled up. The garage and guest house, badly deteriorated, were being torn down.<br />
<br />
There was nobody around, but there was a car in the driveway and it seemed logical that perhaps they'd gone to lunch. We walked around a bit, sharing memories, and then were rewarded when a front-end loader came up the drive, one man driving and another clinging on the side.<br />
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We explained ourselves, and they explained themselves. One was a son of the owner of the property, the other an employee, and they were in the process of fixing the old place up. The owner not only had purchased Mom and Pop's house, but the property across the way as well, so that he could preserve the quiet, forested atmosphere.<br />
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And he had done much of the restoration on the house without making many changes. The winding wooden staircase my mother remembered was still there, and the gabled ceiling on the second floor would likely still thump the crown of anyone who jumped on the beds up there.<br />
<br />
We both left satisfied that our memories were in good hands.<br />
<br />
ADDENDUM: <a href="http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/%7Enicklaus/articles/shannon_jon/phoenix_obit.txt" target="_blank">Here's a link to a piece about the history of the storm as well as the accident itself</a>. Note in the comments here that the NYTimes and my mother have a disagreement over the phone call. Having known both the Times and my mother for many decades, I'm going with her version of events.Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16807727819590358834noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30017373.post-71615311295068128282011-10-01T21:33:00.006-04:002011-10-01T21:42:27.478-04:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3Gc-DSNCkAmTMWNjp62-Xhbbl73t8splyYlCCvgFww6ek6y2RxtBFwbzLfAY-ZOk0_13yoD5L5OSUfcfwsQ_iOkFSNflPwNZmHUZc6P-1sykd7CSBZJdgBVVJ3FbVg3rYGL-m/s1600/lakeshoreFB.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="219" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3Gc-DSNCkAmTMWNjp62-Xhbbl73t8splyYlCCvgFww6ek6y2RxtBFwbzLfAY-ZOk0_13yoD5L5OSUfcfwsQ_iOkFSNflPwNZmHUZc6P-1sykd7CSBZJdgBVVJ3FbVg3rYGL-m/s320/lakeshoreFB.jpg" width="320" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitfacoDkVhA3QQXODx2Pub7TXKBvFghavp0_NfQq0Q-zl-roFRCjU6sYI3hLIgDepv9XdBQ9tkK3M4V809I-o1Nod3gzHPqGtPaUKpLtJdbtJXep636-rfjeoi5f8Nsov8Coo1/s1600/1AdirondackRidgeback.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>Vaska's First Birthday</b></span></div><div style="text-align: center;">October 2 is Vaska's first birthday, and he's become a fine young man. </div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3ntuFJIWjiybqzMoO_p4H9nRMPhrs6_e7kdAYkFAKAuflqGegBWxy26lMgaGpK6mCabnqs2OPpoI3Qx2-1geLn6m10aBqOw-4oDEPc82VvGKACdDiLwew8vsZjDlq9X3UTDpw/s1600/Vaska.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="241" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3ntuFJIWjiybqzMoO_p4H9nRMPhrs6_e7kdAYkFAKAuflqGegBWxy26lMgaGpK6mCabnqs2OPpoI3Qx2-1geLn6m10aBqOw-4oDEPc82VvGKACdDiLwew8vsZjDlq9X3UTDpw/s320/Vaska.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;">He began life as a puppy in Florida.</div><br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1d0CybbLpdjHq_RkAX_bZlRUqX3_JcRNawcuaa1wYP_pTTNEt1qgWoy6jTap0IeCfj8pCMdZbDqqDsXrB5RJx4jplsg0-4ZXu-pQ0G6aFVMdwN8yk15oZ4clUgaWTePbNhRHd/s1600/28+Esme+and+Vaska0001.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1d0CybbLpdjHq_RkAX_bZlRUqX3_JcRNawcuaa1wYP_pTTNEt1qgWoy6jTap0IeCfj8pCMdZbDqqDsXrB5RJx4jplsg0-4ZXu-pQ0G6aFVMdwN8yk15oZ4clUgaWTePbNhRHd/s320/28+Esme+and+Vaska0001.JPG" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;">He was raised with the help of his Auntie Esme, a refined southern lady of truly excellent breeding, who taught him the gentle arts of muay thai and ground-and-pound.</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBbCo3iRxT2LALsR9qnDMoVZBeXqkB_6Fix8rqh76QCC5_BrA9ZhFkOeQZhQJyXcBlxp11EZW_Vbw9GSvQLRFvMXCeHAewnT9VLu731kJaaDg_ocgvFUWwVjLSdvNny45HN0am/s1600/snowtrail.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBbCo3iRxT2LALsR9qnDMoVZBeXqkB_6Fix8rqh76QCC5_BrA9ZhFkOeQZhQJyXcBlxp11EZW_Vbw9GSvQLRFvMXCeHAewnT9VLu731kJaaDg_ocgvFUWwVjLSdvNny45HN0am/s320/snowtrail.jpg" width="320" /> </a></div><div style="text-align: center;">At 10 weeks, he boarded a plane in Orlando, got out in Burlington and discovered that, somehow, the world had undergone some real changes in the intervening four hours.</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguIj9OcbyKa5w3lbALFrMirVYmPDc0Po87eJnitlx9-2XVC5ckEOHMaORz68pFCUSu3NLrDJTU9MZNaDe-Xxk1a-c8cECQkqZeZ9FsvJewGWaO0WIKs2qpWmtvk77999EXnTxb/s1600/Peterson+4.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="228" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguIj9OcbyKa5w3lbALFrMirVYmPDc0Po87eJnitlx9-2XVC5ckEOHMaORz68pFCUSu3NLrDJTU9MZNaDe-Xxk1a-c8cECQkqZeZ9FsvJewGWaO0WIKs2qpWmtvk77999EXnTxb/s320/Peterson+4.jpg" width="320" /></a> </div><div style="text-align: center;">He had arrived just in time for the annual Christmas photo shoot, which was taking place at a store next to where he went for his first meeting with his new veterinarian.<br />
<br />
</div><div style="text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidLb3F1Utuhl5bWCR3HHYdLEJXLL7mTP5QXnxajw-Y6B0y2SKJMGzujBQ6EK44BDNu1TRwUFTk60uQpX42FvZaTAUQSj4B3JjUM3IsDAMP6q9ZbYe7BRPh4o4POT-algzpCdPR/s1600/DSC02170.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="214" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidLb3F1Utuhl5bWCR3HHYdLEJXLL7mTP5QXnxajw-Y6B0y2SKJMGzujBQ6EK44BDNu1TRwUFTk60uQpX42FvZaTAUQSj4B3JjUM3IsDAMP6q9ZbYe7BRPh4o4POT-algzpCdPR/s320/DSC02170.JPG" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;">He quickly adjusted to the new climate ...</div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6WeT3JqsWRkEdMaQPClqFxuGNi2sMTRhdK4y4q3HIERn3NuIAD4PvTVvh5RBdOHGxquQ5y99lfC00z5Sdj4Vw1gxHuy4t5rX3X1k9f7_oocO4M4XLLMyJ2jiV4LI8nGk9E670/s1600/IMG_3079.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="286" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6WeT3JqsWRkEdMaQPClqFxuGNi2sMTRhdK4y4q3HIERn3NuIAD4PvTVvh5RBdOHGxquQ5y99lfC00z5Sdj4Vw1gxHuy4t5rX3X1k9f7_oocO4M4XLLMyJ2jiV4LI8nGk9E670/s320/IMG_3079.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;">... as well as the rigorous pace of his new home.</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUZ7LhCwG6UJFCptka0MnNo1yaV2bs0E0x4kcTAG8FCQ4cpnmz87HgiMVfK5MEetcxXnPCSjyYH4puPTzODpSo_a3-DD2hts2r7VGAi1Vtzq4Ozx-M3_tPfccjIdbS0_8wIv5U/s1600/DSC02096.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="214" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUZ7LhCwG6UJFCptka0MnNo1yaV2bs0E0x4kcTAG8FCQ4cpnmz87HgiMVfK5MEetcxXnPCSjyYH4puPTzODpSo_a3-DD2hts2r7VGAi1Vtzq4Ozx-M3_tPfccjIdbS0_8wIv5U/s320/DSC02096.JPG" width="320" /></a> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> He immediately set about the task of making friends.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhc_ykIPsJLJ1LLhDeDKBqBZJw5SrGkSs835TQLFVQaRRA7TInW4F6qoWa9twqFGlAplMR7k4SjnxVZd8d-u2Y6fnaRYMcnnk9Hdhw35hjtx_8DLliv2VALLtZmpMQnXtfP5ldP/s1600/VaskaTrio.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="215" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhc_ykIPsJLJ1LLhDeDKBqBZJw5SrGkSs835TQLFVQaRRA7TInW4F6qoWa9twqFGlAplMR7k4SjnxVZd8d-u2Y6fnaRYMcnnk9Hdhw35hjtx_8DLliv2VALLtZmpMQnXtfP5ldP/s320/VaskaTrio.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;">And by spring, he had some real pull within his social circle.</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlUdf7HkDAAluhpjFnn3tvl8dSqcsb-JP4IsqFEr6zUVQcKDgtv-fpl4W9tI8dE3PVKKVjg2NxlMvIPvgOsxmkzy6oPuPzxz-zpvlx0RXC1R_cTPWUdwNZD-EK9S-hSeC2BApU/s1600/swimmer2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlUdf7HkDAAluhpjFnn3tvl8dSqcsb-JP4IsqFEr6zUVQcKDgtv-fpl4W9tI8dE3PVKKVjg2NxlMvIPvgOsxmkzy6oPuPzxz-zpvlx0RXC1R_cTPWUdwNZD-EK9S-hSeC2BApU/s320/swimmer2.jpg" width="215" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;">and had made quite a social splash.</div><div style="text-align: center;"></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQlLLU0WYAO6PsmPPoJiNNKB-RH9HCGwr4HEAAmFJChRYz5t5jof5T1ofXtX53kVw39zhPX1nde63SX67efyvS8UDOkI_eDmqBAS0jvAtwzMCNShP15Tm7_Hx1UpvKynYMEH4o/s1600/leg+lift.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQlLLU0WYAO6PsmPPoJiNNKB-RH9HCGwr4HEAAmFJChRYz5t5jof5T1ofXtX53kVw39zhPX1nde63SX67efyvS8UDOkI_eDmqBAS0jvAtwzMCNShP15Tm7_Hx1UpvKynYMEH4o/s320/leg+lift.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKb4wUH2lK8QSEmkSDVD_STn6NtafPBhAqk44PLnW6o8CKSZAgwEz3D9Q3eMfyw0yx8sfnsK4T20mAiKx2PM1OEjrXhPxwZDTIOoquLbuV-gJI7NGLuUeo5QPJWKFHpCTxen9U/s1600/VaskaSmile.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a></div>Speaking of splashes, he has recently added a new skill to his repertoire, a signal of what the lad will be experiencing in the first few weeks of 2012. <br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguIj9OcbyKa5w3lbALFrMirVYmPDc0Po87eJnitlx9-2XVC5ckEOHMaORz68pFCUSu3NLrDJTU9MZNaDe-Xxk1a-c8cECQkqZeZ9FsvJewGWaO0WIKs2qpWmtvk77999EXnTxb/s1600/Peterson+4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br />
</a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKb4wUH2lK8QSEmkSDVD_STn6NtafPBhAqk44PLnW6o8CKSZAgwEz3D9Q3eMfyw0yx8sfnsK4T20mAiKx2PM1OEjrXhPxwZDTIOoquLbuV-gJI7NGLuUeo5QPJWKFHpCTxen9U/s1600/VaskaSmile.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="232" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKb4wUH2lK8QSEmkSDVD_STn6NtafPBhAqk44PLnW6o8CKSZAgwEz3D9Q3eMfyw0yx8sfnsK4T20mAiKx2PM1OEjrXhPxwZDTIOoquLbuV-gJI7NGLuUeo5QPJWKFHpCTxen9U/s320/VaskaSmile.jpg" width="320" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUZ7LhCwG6UJFCptka0MnNo1yaV2bs0E0x4kcTAG8FCQ4cpnmz87HgiMVfK5MEetcxXnPCSjyYH4puPTzODpSo_a3-DD2hts2r7VGAi1Vtzq4Ozx-M3_tPfccjIdbS0_8wIv5U/s1600/DSC02096.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a></div><div style="text-align: center;">However, it will take more than a minor surgical procedure to wipe the smile from his face.</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: center;">Happy birthday to my constant companion and this man's best friend.</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>"The great pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool of yourself with him and not only will he not scold you, but he will make a fool of himself, too." -- Samuel Butler</i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitfacoDkVhA3QQXODx2Pub7TXKBvFghavp0_NfQq0Q-zl-roFRCjU6sYI3hLIgDepv9XdBQ9tkK3M4V809I-o1Nod3gzHPqGtPaUKpLtJdbtJXep636-rfjeoi5f8Nsov8Coo1/s1600/1AdirondackRidgeback.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitfacoDkVhA3QQXODx2Pub7TXKBvFghavp0_NfQq0Q-zl-roFRCjU6sYI3hLIgDepv9XdBQ9tkK3M4V809I-o1Nod3gzHPqGtPaUKpLtJdbtJXep636-rfjeoi5f8Nsov8Coo1/s320/1AdirondackRidgeback.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16807727819590358834noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30017373.post-24425460056899569412011-09-04T16:19:00.014-04:002011-09-04T17:25:47.251-04:00<div style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-size: x-large;">A Minor Event of the (very) Late War</span></b></div><i> </i><br />
<i>(Came across these documents while researching my next historical fiction, which is set in the War of 1812. In order to read between the lines, you must realize that dueling was illegal but not unknown. Consequently, the British [Canadian] reports have no qualms about explaining what these fellows were doing rowing out at dawn to an island in the Niagara, between the British and American lines, while the American report is couched in more discreet terms though I doubt the editor was much fooled. I would also suggest that <a href="http://www.biographi.ca/009004-119.01-e.php?&id_nbr=4426">Lieutenant FitzGibbon</a> and his party of Irish misfits were anticipating Lee Marvin's fictional "separate command" by quite a few years and that there may have been a bit of laughter among the troops at the plight of these young gentlemen.)</i><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEip7jMmBUlB5-UHYNvafCvegRhtlrKq3IIuLULUI9c1NhU39TdfDnLuhboE2iNDgegF1q9PNs6leSYF-lV5W0hn7EdB02TMBxw2Z5tYW1e7RiMM36ixsSUBuhAosJWafqHeRg9t/s1600/An+affair+from+the+late+war3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEip7jMmBUlB5-UHYNvafCvegRhtlrKq3IIuLULUI9c1NhU39TdfDnLuhboE2iNDgegF1q9PNs6leSYF-lV5W0hn7EdB02TMBxw2Z5tYW1e7RiMM36ixsSUBuhAosJWafqHeRg9t/s1600/An+affair+from+the+late+war3.jpg" /></a></div><br />
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Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16807727819590358834noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30017373.post-40446970890234425392011-08-01T20:55:00.010-04:002011-08-01T21:20:14.331-04:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5EiR9ntv3G1USVPMMiMX4pAzPJqmyDEjeXzTzfAi8ch4q2ulSTETxBXS6gEoMkR6dIOdjWGhtNc0qQBe3j4PpcMkoSwZIQ471PO68BTPV2sMo7P-RFwNGcNdu_MwmTKXccWR7/s1600/swimmers.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5EiR9ntv3G1USVPMMiMX4pAzPJqmyDEjeXzTzfAi8ch4q2ulSTETxBXS6gEoMkR6dIOdjWGhtNc0qQBe3j4PpcMkoSwZIQ471PO68BTPV2sMo7P-RFwNGcNdu_MwmTKXccWR7/s320/swimmers.jpg" width="215" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>Aquadog at 10 months</b></span></div><br />
I've had ridgebacks for 25 years, and, in that time, I've known some who hated water and some who would go into the water up to their bellies and no further.<br />
<br />
But Vaska has somehow become a swimmer, goaded on by his best friend, Bogey, and his other buddies, all of whom have no problem at all racing into the river after a stick. For a time, Vaska would act like a proper ridgeback, walking out until his feet threatened to leave the ground, and watching until the others came back within reach, then joining in the wrassling match as they came back onto dry land.<br />
<br />
Life is too exciting, however, for such limitations. At the top, he joins in the race for the stick in the Connecticut River, along with Bogey, the chocolate lab in the lead, and Star, the yellow lab in second place. They're built for swimming and he's not, but he refuses to be left behind.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzmJ6rrjOVUlF-xVGDg8dtWaOb5D58zsCacwqR_xZmsGiBoqZ6vnHADYmZOS4YcurLtVs_u-B7F-bVDygKf0YX01fjB8tcBMhFbux3AqwURPqBtZR1rAVmwiD_F3XL_-BQEtF2/s1600/swimmer2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzmJ6rrjOVUlF-xVGDg8dtWaOb5D58zsCacwqR_xZmsGiBoqZ6vnHADYmZOS4YcurLtVs_u-B7F-bVDygKf0YX01fjB8tcBMhFbux3AqwURPqBtZR1rAVmwiD_F3XL_-BQEtF2/s320/swimmer2.jpg" width="215" /></a></div>And here you see that he's certainly willing to join in the tussle over who would bring the stick ashore, and he doesn't wait until everyone is touching bottom to enter the fray.<br />
<br />
But, while it took the excitement of a stick chase to get him in at first, he's now perfectly comfortable in the water under far more relaxed circumstances, as seen in this scene shot in the White River, with Guinness and Guinness's little blonde-haired mistress.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="349" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/H612QqrEyJM" width="425"></iframe><br />
<br />
All this playfulness and non-ridgeback-style comfort with water, however, hasn't undermined the courageous lion-hunter's natural instinct for confronting danger.<br />
<br />
I should have named him "Leiningen."<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="349" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/x2vfGJXaAYw" width="425"></iframe>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16807727819590358834noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30017373.post-88204979694729586872011-07-25T11:02:00.008-04:002011-07-25T14:07:05.706-04:00<div style="text-align: center;"><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>You have a good day, too, Uncle Duke! </b></span><i><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></i></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-size: small;">(This piece was written in November, 1969, and was submitted to the University of Colorado Writers Workshop the following spring, earning me a fellowship and praise from Harlan Ellison, who called it "a Marx Brothers landscape." It was then revised slightly in the fall of 1971 and submitted to The Rolling Stone, where it was memorably rejected by someone I greatly suspect to have been Dr. Hunter Thompson. <a href="http://www.lettersofnote.com/2011/07/jam-this-morbid-drivel-up-your-ass.html" target="_blank">That abusive, obscene rejection letter, which is framed over my desk, is being reprinted at "Letters of Note," </a>and I thought it would be interesting to let readers there see what brought it about. And I think readers here will find that blog worth visiting, too. Even when Uncle Duke isn't [apparently] writing the material.) </span></i><b><br />
</b></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b> <a href="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b0153901fe94a970b-popup" onclick="window.open( this.href, '_blank', 'width=640,height=480,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0' ); return false" style="display: inline;"><img alt="Duke2" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a0105369e6edf970b0153901fe94a970b" src="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b0153901fe94a970b-800wi" title="Duke2" /></a> </b></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><b>ACT I</b></span></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>(The curtain opens on a cross sectional view of a giant human head. The outer rim is bright blue with a red stripe representing the skull. The brain proper is divided into little rooms like the layout of a ship or a science fiction rocket. In the rooms, little tiny men can be seen running to and fro, up and down by means of hatchways and elevators. Some are sitting at desks, typing and answering phones. In one room, there is a scene of a family of four watching television and eating Fritos and drinking Coca Cola. In another room, a woman in leather is flagellating a writhing masochist in ecstasies of pain. In another room, three men in Day-Glo clown costumes are determining the fate of the world. In another room, two people are smoking a water-pipe and listening to Abbey Road. In another room, two people are making love and listening to old Beach Boys albums and laughing an awful lot. In another room, a teacher is explaining the Crito to a roomful of freshmen in glen plaid slacks and penny loafers and <a href="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b015433f3877d970c-popup" onclick="window.open( this.href, '_blank', 'width=640,height=480,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0' ); return false" style="float: left;"><img alt="Beach Blanket" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a0105369e6edf970b015433f3877d970c" src="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b015433f3877d970c-320wi" style="margin: 0px 5px 5px 0px;" title="Beach Blanket" /></a> London Fog jackets who are picking their noses and whispering. In another room, another teacher is picking his nose to a roomful of freshmen who are taking notes. In another room, someone is dying and the priest is preparing Last Rites and trying not to laugh at the family who are in the other room steaming open the will. In another room, Annette Funicello is surfing with Frankie Avalon on an ironing board, clad only in a floor length one piece bathing suit with turtle neck and long sleeves. Frankie Avalon is being titillated. In another room, a young couple is falling in love over a bottle of Lancers and an order of garlic bread. In another room, someone is crying while his friends try not to laugh thinking about their own hang-ups. In another room, two turtledoves are discussing cinema verite. In another room, Eric Clapton is trying to fix his amplifier in time to play before he stops rushing, and cursing an awful lot. In another room, an old maid is sweeping up around a large mahogany desk, and helping herself to a box of cigars. In another, room is being made for another room.)</i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><i><br />
</i></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><b>ACT II</b></span></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
<i> <a href="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b0153901feb0e970b-popup" onclick="window.open( this.href, '_blank', 'width=640,height=480,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0' ); return false" style="float: right;"><img alt="Matterhorn" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a0105369e6edf970b0153901feb0e970b" src="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b0153901feb0e970b-320wi" style="margin: 0px 0px 5px 5px;" title="Matterhorn" /></a> (The camera pans over a landscape of snowcapped mountains and pines. It centers on one particularly large mountain, which looks to be the Matterhorn. As we are zoomed into a close up, we begin to see a small log cabin about five hundred yards from the summit. Smoke is pouring from the chimney. We are by now looking through the window, where a cheery fire is burning in the fireplace, and being reflected off the pine paneling of the walls. The cabin appears to be empty, but as we look in front of the hearth, we see a couple sitting naked on a bearskin rug gazing into the flames and passing a joint. They are not touching, nor do they look at each other. A small gray and white cat passes before them and pauses for a second in front of the fire. Then it leaps into the fire, where it turns into a panther, and then bursts into a blue flame and is sucked up the chimney into the air above the cabin. The boy turns to the girl and speaks.) </i><br />
</span></div><div style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;">BOY: (handing the joint to the girl) Oh wow. Did you see what the cat just did? <br />
GIRL: Is that what that was, a cat? <br />
BOY: Yeah. What did you think it was? <br />
GIRL: I don't know, man, but I didn't know it was a cat. If I had … <br />
BOY: If you had what? <br />
GIRL: If I had known … that that was a cat. <br />
BOY: Well, what if you had known that it was a cat? <br />
GIRL: Yeah, what if? <br />
BOY: Say, what are you doing tomorrow? <br />
GIRL: I have to go home. I forgot my deodorant. <br />
BOY: You can use mine. <br />
GIRL: Thanks, but I'd rather have my own. I feel more secure. <br />
BOY: What’s wrong with my deodorant? <br />
GIRL: Nothing. I just like having my own deodorant. Makes me feel, you know, more independent. Liberated. <br />
BOY: Well, I don't know why you use my toothbrush and my mouthwash and even my razor but you can't use my deodorant. <br />
GIRL: Did you see that cat a minute ago? <br />
BOY: Is that what that was, a cat? <br />
GIRL: What did you think it was? <br />
BOY: A cat. I knew it was a cat. It was my cat. Its name was Delilah and it slept next to the stove and ate chicken and hamburger. It was two years old and killed mice and small birds and laid them at my feet. It had four kittens a year ago. It shedded like crazy for a while until I fed it a small lizard. <br />
GIRL: Did it stop shedding? <br />
BOY: Oh yeah, immediately. But there were some side-effects. <br />
GIRL: Such as? <br />
BOY: I think that was one of them. Do we have any more lizards in the medicine cabinet?</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><b>ACT III</b></span></div><span style="font-size: small;"> i wish that i could <br />
talk to e.e. cummings. <br />
I would say <br />
</span> <span style="font-size: small;">e.e., do you </span> <span style="font-size: small;"> </span> <span style="font-size: small;">realize <br />
the effect <br />
the influence <br />
of your p<br />
o<br />
</span> <span style="font-size: small;">e<br />
</span> <span style="font-size: small;">t<br />
</span> <span style="font-size: small;">r<br />
</span> eht no <span style="font-size: small;">y </span> yrteop<span style="font-size: small;"> <br />
eht no <br />
fo selyts <br />
p etaigelloc <br />
o <br />
e <br />
t <br />
s <br />
? <br />
he would <br />
probably nod and<br />
he<br />
might <br />
a <br />
p <br />
o<br />
l<br />
o<br />
g<br />
i<br />
z<br />
e. <br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><b>ACT IV</b></span></div><span style="font-size: small;"><i> <a href="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b014e8a145fdc970d-popup" onclick="window.open( this.href, '_blank', 'width=640,height=480,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0' ); return false" style="float: left;"><img alt="Burros" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a0105369e6edf970b014e8a145fdc970d" src="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b014e8a145fdc970d-120wi" style="margin: 0px 5px 5px 0px;" title="Burros" /></a> (Still here? Did you remember your gloves? Good. The scene opens on the floor of the Grand Canyon. Two burros are attacking a tourist. The Park Ranger is attempting to MACE the burros, who are protected by their long <a href="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b014e8a145b66970d-popup" onclick="window.open( this.href, '_blank', 'width=640,height=480,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0' ); return false" style="float: right;"><img alt="Prairie_dog_2" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a0105369e6edf970b014e8a145b66970d" src="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b014e8a145b66970d-120wi" style="margin: 0px 0px 5px 5px;" title="Prairie_dog_2" /></a> winter coats and their abnormally long eyelashes. The wind shifts and the MACE drifts off into a village of prairie dogs who immediately succumb and fall backwards and head-first into their burrows, where they become wedged in awkward positions.) </i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><i><br />
</i></span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><i><br />
</i><br />
<i><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><b>INTERMISSION</b></span></i></div><i> <a href="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b0153901fffc0970b-popup" onclick="window.open( this.href, '_blank', 'width=640,height=480,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0' ); return false" style="display: inline;"><img alt="Orange drink1" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a0105369e6edf970b0153901fffc0970b" src="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b0153901fffc0970b-120wi" style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="Orange drink1" /></a> <br />
(Orange drink is available in the lobby at the phenomenal price of $15 a carton. The cartons, however, prove to be only half-full! The straws are very narrow and collapse easily. You forget your matches and have to ask a stranger for a light. Your date is mortified at your flirting and general incompetence. You inadvertently burn a hole in the carpet with a stray ash, and several people notice the smoke before you do. There is a general panic which your date resolves by pouring $7.50 worth of orange drink on the spot. The stench is horrendous. Your date fixes you up with one of the ushers and goes home. The usher keeps shining his flashlight on the ceiling.) </i><br />
<i><br />
</i><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><i><br />
</i><br />
<i><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><b>ACT V</b></span></i></div><i> (We switch back to the cabin, where the young couple is snorting a lizard preparatory to making love.) <br />
</i>BOY: Oh wow. I can hardly wait to finish this. <br />
GIRL: Me neither. It will be such fun.<br />
BOY: I hate my parents. That is why I am going to make love to you. <br />
GIRL: I hate the establishment. That is why I am snorting this lizard. <br />
<a href="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b0153902001a3970b-popup" onclick="window.open( this.href, '_blank', 'width=640,height=480,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0' ); return false" style="float: right;"><img alt="Lizard" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a0105369e6edf970b0153902001a3970b" src="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b0153902001a3970b-320wi" style="margin: 0px 0px 5px 5px;" title="Lizard" /></a> BOY: I hate cops and teachers and all civic authorities. <br />
GIRL: I hate motherhood and the flag and apple pie. <br />
BOY: I hate circuses and hot dogs and baseball games. <br />
GIRL: I hate church and the Girl Scouts. <br />
BOY: I hate TV dinners and the Boy Scouts. <br />
GIRL: I like straight people. <br />
BOY: I like … wait a minute. What did you just say? <br />
GIRL: I like straight people. <br />
BOY: You're not supposed to like straight people. <br />
GIRL: I don't like all straight people. But some straight people are pretty nice. <br />
BOY: Yeah, well, some of my best friends are straight people. I got nothing against them. They sure can dance. But I still wouldn't want my sister to marry one. <br />
GIRL: I wouldn't want her to, either. <br />
BOY: I got nothing against straight people. I just wouldn't want my sister to marry one. <br />
GIRL: God, no. I hate marriage. <br />
BOY: I hate pigeons and squirrels and cotton candy. <br />
GIRL: I hate Johnny Carson and my parish priest. <br />
BOY: I hate Glen Campbell and Arthur Godfrey. <br />
GIRL: I hate the boy next door and color TV.<br />
BOY: I hate breakfast and beer.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><i><br />
</i><br />
<i><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><b>ACT VI</b></span></i></div><i> <a href="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b014e8a133e0f970d-popup" onclick="window.open( this.href, '_blank', 'width=640,height=480,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0' ); return false" style="float: left;"><img alt="Chi_Chi" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a0105369e6edf970b014e8a133e0f970d" src="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b014e8a133e0f970d-120wi" style="margin: 0px 5px 5px 0px;" title="Chi_Chi" /></a> (Fourteen pregnant pandas are filing paternity suits against An-an or Chi-chi, as soon as they figure out which is the male. Meanwhile, the Russians are rounding up character witnesses in the event that they discover their bear to be a male. Chi-chi and An-an are trying to remember.) </i><br />
<i><br />
</i><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><i><br />
</i><br />
<i><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><b>ACT VII</b></span></i></div><i> <a href="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b014e8a1340b1970d-popup" onclick="window.open( this.href, '_blank', 'width=640,height=480,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0' ); return false" style="float: right;"><img alt="VW_Bus_T1_in_Hippie_Colors_2" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a0105369e6edf970b014e8a1340b1970d" src="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b014e8a1340b1970d-120wi" style="margin: 0px 0px 5px 5px;" title="VW_Bus_T1_in_Hippie_Colors_2" /></a> (An aerial shot of the Santa Anita freeway, showing a traffic jam consisting entirely of old buses painted in Day-glo paisley containing freaks off to do their own thing.) </i><br />
<i><br />
</i><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><i><br />
</i><br />
<i><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><b>ACT VIII</b></span></i></div><i> <a href="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b015433f38321970c-popup" onclick="window.open( this.href, '_blank', 'width=640,height=480,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0' ); return false" style="display: inline;"><img alt="Sentries" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a0105369e6edf970b015433f38321970c" height="101" src="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b015433f38321970c-120wi" style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="Sentries" width="186" /></a> <br />
(Two sentries at Elsinore: Thodwick and Benvenuto) <br />
</i>Thodwick: What time is it'? <br />
Benvenuto: The clock has but struck. <br />
Thodwick: T'is a nipping and eager air. <br />
Benvenuto: Sure is. Where the hell is Horatio? <br />
Thodwick: Hold your tongue. I hear something. <br />
GHOST: Hamlet, Prince of Denmark! <br />
Thodwick: Hark ye! He calls the Prince! <br />
GHOST: I am the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come! <br />
Thodwick: You're lost, man. This Is Denmark. <br />
GHOST: I know, I know. <br />
Benvenuto: What happened to the other guy? <br />
GHOST: You mean Hamlet's father? <br />
Benvenuto: Yeah. <br />
GHOST: Bad earache, man, couldn't make it. <br />
Benvenuto: Well, what do you want? <br />
GHOST: Another lizard, please. And make it a long one.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><i><br />
</i><br />
<i><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><b> <a href="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b014e8a1344f1970d-popup" onclick="window.open( this.href, '_blank', 'width=640,height=480,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0' ); return false" style="float: right;"><img alt="Centaur" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a0105369e6edf970b014e8a1344f1970d" height="123" src="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b014e8a1344f1970d-120wi" style="margin: 0px 0px 5px 5px;" title="Centaur" width="90" /></a> ACT THE NINTH</b></span></i></div><i> (Amid the splendor of a sylvan glade, three satyrs are mugging a young nymph. A Centaur enters at right, and they run off, leaving the girl behind. She thanks the centaur and gives him a kiss. They ride off into the sunset, to the utter amazement of all, since it is one o'clock in the afternoon.) </i><br />
<i><br />
</i><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><i><br />
</i><br />
<i><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><b>DIXIEME PARTIE</b></span></i></div><i> <a href="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b015390200dd0970b-popup" onclick="window.open( this.href, '_blank', 'width=640,height=480,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0' ); return false" style="float: left;"><img alt="OhCalcutta" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a0105369e6edf970b015390200dd0970b" height="141" src="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b015390200dd0970b-120wi" style="margin: 0px 5px 5px 0px;" title="OhCalcutta" width="193" /></a> (The entire cast ad-libs a completely tasteless, meaningless nude scene, grossing out not only the audience, but each other as well. At the end, they select the best actor by use of a meter indicating how many people walked out on his account. Other actors count as two members of the audience. The winner is given a $25,000 bonus and is beheaded.) </i><br />
<i><br />
</i><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><i><br />
</i><br />
<i><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><b>CHAPTER ELEVEN</b></span></i></div><i> <a href="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b014e8a134aaf970d-popup" onclick="window.open( this.href, '_blank', 'width=640,height=480,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0' ); return false" style="display: inline;"><img alt="NightTrain" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a0105369e6edf970b014e8a134aaf970d" height="109" src="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b014e8a134aaf970d-120wi" style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="NightTrain" width="146" /></a> </i> Charles got off the train without a word to Eve. As the train pulled out, she watched him walk to his car without looking back. <br />
"Who was that masked man?” the porter asked. <br />
"Which masked man?" Eve answered. "There have been so many, I may have forgotten one or two." <br />
“The one who was running up and down the aisle naked but for a pair of argyle socks, making improper suggestions to several of the young ladies present." <br />
"I don’t know," whispered Eve, gazing at the rising moon, "but I wanted to thank him.”<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><i><br />
</i><br />
<i><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><b>CANTO XII</b></span></i></div>249 I clattered over mountain trail <i>249. The Song</i><br />
To help the elk to quell the quail. <i>of Oedicox</i><br />
I clashed on moss and tripped on vines, <br />
<a href="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b014e8a144a12970d-popup" onclick="window.open( this.href, '_blank', 'width=640,height=480,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0' ); return false" style="float: right;"><img alt="Eddietrisha" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a0105369e6edf970b014e8a144a12970d" src="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b014e8a144a12970d-120wi" style="margin: 0px 0px 5px 5px;" title="Eddietrisha" /></a> I bit the fork to mesh the tines.<br />
I stripped the truth and fed the lies <br />
On bigot blood and apple pies.<br />
255 I helped to stop the wild oat seed <br />
With a massive dose of LSD <br />
Which nurtured minds as smooth as silk <br />
And turned their brains to curdled milk, <br />
Then skimmed the curds, and sold the whey <br />
To other souls who thought it fey.<br />
<br />
261 Oh woe to thee, oh wicked knight, <i> 261. Oedicox</i><br />
Who dragged the dragon's corpse to light, <i> lays a </i><br />
And brought upon the land a blight. <i> heavy </i><br />
A curse upon thee, wicket king, <i> curse on </i><br />
265 Who sought the fairies dancing ring, <i> the house</i><br />
And smote the griffon on the wing. <i> of Nadir</i><br />
Fie upon thee, maiden fair, <br />
With silver cowbells in your hair; <br />
A wealth of changelings shalt thou bear <br />
<br />
270. But love go with thee, kith and kin, <i> 270. Love song</i><br />
For thou hath saved my fiscal skin, <i>of</i><br />
and caused the GNP to grin, <i>Oedicox</i><br />
And all the dreams contained therein, <br />
275. Shall live to praise your deadly sin, <br />
And they shall kill you, raise a din, <br />
And mount a motto on a pin; <br />
“[ Your name here] has Never Been!”<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><i><br />
</i><br />
<i><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><b>ACT THIRTEEN</b></span></i></div><i> <a href="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b015390201f0d970b-popup" onclick="window.open( this.href, '_blank', 'width=640,height=480,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0' ); return false" style="float: left;"><img alt="Icefollies" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a0105369e6edf970b015390201f0d970b" height="108" src="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b015390201f0d970b-120wi" style="margin: 0px 5px 5px 0px;" title="Icefollies" width="77" /></a></i> A terrible tragedy will befall anyone who watches, performs or reads this act. You will be chosen to emcee a late night talkshow for the next fifteen years. Your sidekick is Lester Maddox. Your first guests will be Shirley Temple Black, David and Julie Eisenhower, and three members of the Ice Follies.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">__________________________________________</div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>(Footnote: The Doonesbury excerpted above was also posted over my desk for several years as a reminder to quit and go to bed at some point. Here it is, from January 8, 1975.)</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
<a href="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b014e8a136076970d-popup" onclick="window.open( this.href, '_blank', 'width=640,height=480,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0' ); return false" style="display: inline;"><img alt="Db750108" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a0105369e6edf970b014e8a136076970d image-full" src="http://www.weeklystorybook.com/.a/6a0105369e6edf970b014e8a136076970d-800wi" title="Db750108" /></a> </div><div style="text-align: center;"><b><br />
</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>UPON FURTHER REVIEW:</b></div><div class="MsoNormal">A question has arisen about whether the letter is original or a form letter. It has been quoted multiple times on the Internet, and it turns out was cited in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Gonzo-Life-Hunter-S-Thompson/dp/0316005274"><i>“Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson”</i></a> as something he provided the magazine as a prepackaged rejection letter. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Here is the passage, from page 138, one of a series of anecdotes from former RS staffers, this from Charles Perry:</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i>After ‘Fear and Loathing,’ people in Colorado were giving him stuff they’d written, thinking he could get them in ‘Rolling Stone.’ I was the poetry editor, and he sent me a package of poems from other people once, with a note that said, ‘I don’t know about this stuff. If you feel the same way, send it back with to them with this.’ He included a prepackaged rejection letter that said,</i></div><i> </i><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><i>(full text of letter follows, including the reference to South Bend)</i></div><i> </i><br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><i>We actually sent it out to a few people, thinking they would appreciate it. One person took it to a lawyer and asked if he could sue us, and the lawyer said, ‘No, you don’t have a leg to stand on … but could I Xerox it?’”</i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Here's my analysis:</div><div class="MsoNormal">1. My copy predates this. I don't recall the specific date I received the letter, but I do recall reading it while walking from the mailbox to the kitchen door of a house I lived in from May to the end of October, 1971. "Fear and Loathing" was serialized in Rolling Stone the next month, by which time I was living in Mishawaka, (which I mark by knowing that we had Thanksgiving there.) The book version of "Fear and Loathing" was released the following year.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">2. My copy is hand-typed, with the impressions and punch-through periods of a typewriter, as well as impressions of an actual "signature." </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">3. The copy Thompson sent includes the phrase "drab South Bend cocksuckers," and while I will contest the first and last of those descriptors, I was living in South Bend. It seems improbable that he would hand-type a form letter simply for the pleasure of adding a specific town.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">It seems probable that Thompson wrote the letter that hangs on my wall and was so delighted with his handiwork that he made a copy of it, which he then sent to San Francisco, where it became an office legend if not a standard piece of correspondence after all. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And, for the record, I did appreciate it, once I got to the P.S. and stopped hyperventilating.</div>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16807727819590358834noreply@blogger.com19tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30017373.post-41737810635650724232011-07-17T13:44:00.003-04:002011-07-17T15:01:23.206-04:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh91X9aURBLDwNgb4Ko_DBhqYLbVYMIExMq-xJXmikzWqAYEyBulB5g2_garWeFedYi3sTaPmKDTXqu8CI8kJWLkeX6o3J78easvAIm9WjdBls6d5gxHZ4B_deq7cIs8abWewo4/s1600/Scholar.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="298" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh91X9aURBLDwNgb4Ko_DBhqYLbVYMIExMq-xJXmikzWqAYEyBulB5g2_garWeFedYi3sTaPmKDTXqu8CI8kJWLkeX6o3J78easvAIm9WjdBls6d5gxHZ4B_deq7cIs8abWewo4/s320/Scholar.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><strong><span style="font-size: large;">A Classic Case of Boredom</span></strong></div><br />
<em>(Children's author and middle-school ELA teacher Kate Messner has written <a href="http://www.katemessner.com/in-defense-of-summer-reading-freedom/">a brilliant column on summer reading lists that is a must-read</a>, and inspired me to dig up this column, written for the Press-Republican of February 3, 1989 and copyrighted by them.)</em><br />
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Nobody reads the classics anymore, and I'm not surprised. Nobody ever did.<br />
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Oh. they talk a good game, but, when it comes down to genuine cultural literacy, most of those back-to-basics types are blowing a lot of smoke and flashing a lot of mirrors. <br />
<br />
An article in this paper, discussing the Board of Regents's plans to revamp social studies, decried the lack of reading among our young people. <br />
<br />
"Reading books like The Three Musketeers or Kipling's Gunga Din is an easy way to sneak in history lessons," the article concluded, neatly deleting the quotation marks around titles, which are required by our style book. It also neatly deleted the fact that, aside from whether or not we want our children taking Kipling's imperialistic bombast as history, "Gunga Din" isn't a book. It's a poem.<br />
<br />
It's not even a terribly long poem; only 84 lines. That's probably just as well, because it isn't a terribly good poem, either. There's nobody blowing a trumpet on a temple roof with his dying breath. That was Sam Jaffe, saving Cary Grant and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and someone else wonderfully dashing whom I've forgotten. Gary Cooper or somebody. <br />
<br />
Anyway, it isn't in Kipling's poem, which is about an Indian waterbearer who drags a soldier to safety under fire and how amazing it is that non-English people can be heroic, too. <em>"An' for all 'is dirty ide, 'E was white, clear white, inside," </em>the poet marvels, in that impenetrable dialect, that made Kipling's doggerel so popular among those who only heard real dialect from their servants.<br />
<br />
Anyway, "Gunga Din" is a poem, not a book, and we shouldn't chide our children for not reading the things we haven't read either.<br />
<br />
There are a lot of great books nobody has ever really managed to get through. The proof is in the location of their most famous scenes. Every famous scene of every great book occurs in the first few pages, except the death of Achilles in "The Iliad," which doesn't actually occur at all in "The Iliad." <br />
<br />
Every other famous scene, you will find the first time you sit down with the book, because there is never a second time.<br />
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Whatever happens in the final 75 percent of a great book is known only to the author and the author's mother. No one else has ever made it past the beginning.<br />
<br />
For example:<br />
<br />
My copy of "Oliver Twist" is 428 pages long. Oliver says, "Please, sir, I want some more," on page 13.<br />
<br />
"Don Quixote," in the Penguin edition, is 940 pages long. He tilts with the windmills on page 68.<br />
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There are 803 pages in the Everyman's Library edition of Sir Thomas Malory's "Morte D'Arthur." Young Arthur pulls the sword out of the stone on page 11.<br />
<br />
"Uncle Tom's Cabin" is 244 pages long. Eliza races across the river, jumping from ice cake to ice cake, on page 30, and that's pretty much it for Eliza, who is only a minor character in the book.<br />
<br />
But my favorite unread classic is "War and Peace," which, everyone knows, is about Boris and Natasha. We even have a pair of cartoon characters named for Boris and Natasha. <br />
<br />
Well, the Norton Critical Edition of "War and Peace" is 1,351 pages long. Boris and Natasha kiss on page 45. By page 251, she confesses that she can't remember what he looks like and isn't going to bother writing to him after all. What do you expect? She's only 13 years old when the book opens, and won't marry until she is 20.<br />
<br />
Some readers are voracious and will read anything — cereal boxes, Harlequin romances, even the Speak Out column. A few of them have read some of the great books. They read because it is fun, because they enjoy it and because they are compulsive information addicts. But they are, and have always been, a minority.<br />
<br />
Some of the rest might become readers, but the quickest way to stifle a young reader is to throw all those tired old warhorses at him, like "Huckleberry Finn," which was never intended for children anyway or "Treasure Island," which is far too full of chat and too short of action.<br />
<br />
Why not give them some quality books that someone might really want to read, like "the Chronicles of Narnia" or the Little House books? <br />
<br />
I read "Animal Farm" when I was about 9, because I thought it was about animals, and it was, sort of. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it a whole lot more than Treasure-bloody-Island, which I couldn't get through to save my life.<br />
<br />
If you want kids to read, read to them when they are young and then make books available to them. <br />
<br />
But don't shove a "great" book down a kid's throat just because somebody shoved it down yours.<br />
<br />
And, by the way, if you want to appear culturally literate, don't go around letting people know you think that "Gunga Din" is a book.Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16807727819590358834noreply@blogger.com5