Nellie Blog

2011-12-25T17:07:00.005-05:00

Christmas on the Air

I've worked a few Christmases, mostly during my years in the newsroom, but the most memorable was 30 years ago tonight.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

And then he hung up.

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.

And then he hung up again.

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.

And who, I knew, had a sister who had taken her own life.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

God bless us, every one!

2011-12-19T17:31:00.003-05:00

Tales from the backshop

(This column originally ran in the Press-Republican, Plattsburgh, NY, March 24, 1996)

Today, the term "boilerplate" is usually associated with lawyers: It's those required blocks of verbiage that never change from one contract to another.

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.

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."

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.

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:

"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."

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:

"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?'"

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:

"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."

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.

"Who done it? ... Was it Cock Robin? Or the Official Papster? Or the Bucksaw Editor? Alibis are in order...."

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.

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?"

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.

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.

Or maybe we've become too thin-skinned to risk having the tables turned.

(The media still decline to criticize each other with much in the way of élan, 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 I would direct you to this remembrance of a funny, funny ink-stained wretch.)

2011-11-11T18:27:00.009-05:00

Court on child molesters: Don't ask, don't tell

The Press-Republican, Plattsburgh, NY c. June 28, 1998

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.

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.

The case concerned a girl molested by a teacher beginning when she was 13, a situation which advanced to sexual relations within a year.

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.

This is a lively issue in sexual harassment.

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.

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.

Here are the facts, as laid out in the decision:

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.

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.

3. The teacher had repeated sex with the student, apparently leaving school with her during what were supposed to be regularly scheduled classes.

Here is what the court ruled:

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.

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.

C. Since only suggestive remarks were reported, the complaint "was plainly insufficient to alert the principal to the possibility that (the teacher) was involved in a sexual relationship with a student."

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.

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.

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.

Whatever the legal logic of the court's ruling, it is asinine.

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.

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.

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.

These administrators did not want to know what was going on in their school, and that willful, hard-won ignorance has saved them.

There is a ray of hope in this otherwise horrific ruling.

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.

Congress must now break the conspiracy of ignorance that aids and abets child molesters.

Joining in the majority opinion in '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.

2011-11-02T19:31:00.004-04:00

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I cannot imagine.

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.

And since I couldn't imagine, I didn't know what we were going to encounter.

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.

I'm sure this is not her first association with that bridge.

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.

Bad yellow jackets. Great glasses. Someone had glassed in the porch in the half-century since.

Someone had done a fair amount in that half-century, but, then again, not so much in recent years.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We both left satisfied that our memories were in good hands.

ADDENDUM: Here's a link to a piece about the history of the storm as well as the accident itself. 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.

2011-10-01T21:33:00.006-04:00

Vaska's First Birthday

October 2 is Vaska's first birthday, and he's become a fine young man.

He began life as a puppy in Florida.

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.

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.

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.

He quickly adjusted to the new climate ...

... as well as the rigorous pace of his new home.

He immediately set about the task of making friends.

And by spring, he had some real pull within his social circle.

and had made quite a social splash.

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.

However, it will take more than a minor surgical procedure to wipe the smile from his face.

Happy birthday to my constant companion and this man's best friend.

"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

2011-09-04T16:19:00.014-04:00

A Minor Event of the (very) Late War

(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 Lieutenant FitzGibbon 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.)

2011-08-01T20:55:00.010-04:00

Aquadog at 10 months

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

All this playfulness and non-ridgeback-style comfort with water, however, hasn't undermined the courageous lion-hunter's natural instinct for confronting danger.

I should have named him "Leiningen."

2011-07-25T11:02:00.008-04:00

You have a good day, too, Uncle Duke!

(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. That abusive, obscene rejection letter, which is framed over my desk, is being reprinted at "Letters of Note," 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.)

ACT 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 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.)

ACT II

(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.)

BOY: (handing the joint to the girl) Oh wow. Did you see what the cat just did?
GIRL: Is that what that was, a cat?
BOY: Yeah. What did you think it was?
GIRL: I don't know, man, but I didn't know it was a cat. If I had …
BOY: If you had what?
GIRL: If I had known … that that was a cat.
BOY: Well, what if you had known that it was a cat?
GIRL: Yeah, what if?
BOY: Say, what are you doing tomorrow?
GIRL: I have to go home. I forgot my deodorant.
BOY: You can use mine.
GIRL: Thanks, but I'd rather have my own. I feel more secure.
BOY: What’s wrong with my deodorant?
GIRL: Nothing. I just like having my own deodorant. Makes me feel, you know, more independent. Liberated.
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.
GIRL: Did you see that cat a minute ago?
BOY: Is that what that was, a cat?
GIRL: What did you think it was?
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.
GIRL: Did it stop shedding?
BOY: Oh yeah, immediately. But there were some side-effects.
GIRL: Such as?
BOY: I think that was one of them. Do we have any more lizards in the medicine cabinet?

ACT III

                                                              i wish that i could
                                                                        talk to e.e. cummings.
                                                                                         I would say
           e.e., do you                        realize
                             the effect
                                        the influence
                                                    of your p
                                                               o
                                                             e
                                                             t
                                                             r
                                                 eht no y                                           yrteop
                                 eht no
                     fo selyts
      p etaigelloc
      o
      e
      t
      s
      ?
                     he would
                      probably nod and
                                he
                                   might
                                             a
                                                  p
                                                o
                                                             l
                                                   o
                                                                 g
                                                                   i
                                                                     z
                                                                       e.

ACT IV

(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 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.)

INTERMISSION

(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.)

ACT V

(We switch back to the cabin, where the young couple is snorting a lizard preparatory to making love.)
BOY: Oh wow. I can hardly wait to finish this.
GIRL: Me neither. It will be such fun.
BOY: I hate my parents. That is why I am going to make love to you.
GIRL: I hate the establishment. That is why I am snorting this lizard.
BOY: I hate cops and teachers and all civic authorities.
GIRL: I hate motherhood and the flag and apple pie.
BOY: I hate circuses and hot dogs and baseball games.
GIRL: I hate church and the Girl Scouts.
BOY: I hate TV dinners and the Boy Scouts.
GIRL: I like straight people.
BOY: I like … wait a minute. What did you just say?
GIRL: I like straight people.
BOY: You're not supposed to like straight people.
GIRL: I don't like all straight people. But some straight people are pretty nice.
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.
GIRL: I wouldn't want her to, either.
BOY: I got nothing against straight people. I just wouldn't want my sister to marry one.
GIRL: God, no. I hate marriage.
BOY: I hate pigeons and squirrels and cotton candy.
GIRL: I hate Johnny Carson and my parish priest.
BOY: I hate Glen Campbell and Arthur Godfrey.
GIRL: I hate the boy next door and color TV.
BOY: I hate breakfast and beer.

ACT VI

(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.)

ACT VII

(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.)

ACT VIII

(Two sentries at Elsinore: Thodwick and Benvenuto)
Thodwick: What time is it'?
Benvenuto: The clock has but struck.
Thodwick: T'is a nipping and eager air.
Benvenuto: Sure is. Where the hell is Horatio?
Thodwick: Hold your tongue. I hear something.
GHOST: Hamlet, Prince of Denmark!
Thodwick: Hark ye! He calls the Prince!
GHOST: I am the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come!
Thodwick: You're lost, man. This Is Denmark.
GHOST: I know, I know.
Benvenuto: What happened to the other guy?
GHOST: You mean Hamlet's father?
Benvenuto: Yeah.
GHOST: Bad earache, man, couldn't make it.
Benvenuto: Well, what do you want?
GHOST: Another lizard, please. And make it a long one.

ACT THE NINTH

(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.)

DIXIEME PARTIE

(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.)

CHAPTER ELEVEN

    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.
    "Who was that masked man?” the porter asked.
    "Which masked man?" Eve answered. "There have been so many, I may have forgotten one or two."
    “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."
    "I don’t know," whispered Eve, gazing at the rising moon, "but I wanted to thank him.”

CANTO XII

249 I clattered over mountain trail                                   249. The Song
        To help the elk to quell the quail.                                      of Oedicox
        I clashed on moss and tripped on vines,
        I bit the fork to mesh the tines.
        I stripped the truth and fed the lies
        On bigot blood and apple pies.
255 I helped to stop the wild oat seed
        With a massive dose of LSD
        Which nurtured minds as smooth as silk
        And turned their brains to curdled milk,
        Then skimmed the curds, and sold the whey
        To other souls who thought it fey.

261   Oh woe to thee, oh wicked knight,                             261.   Oedicox
        Who dragged the dragon's corpse to light,                           lays a
        And brought upon the land a blight.                                      heavy
        A curse upon thee, wicket king,                                             curse on
265 Who sought the fairies dancing ring,                                      the house
        And smote the griffon on the wing.                                        of Nadir
        Fie upon thee, maiden fair,
        With silver cowbells in your hair;
        A wealth of changelings shalt thou bear

270. But love go with thee, kith and kin,                          270. Love song
        For thou hath saved my fiscal skin,                                   of
        and caused the GNP to grin,                                            Oedicox
        And all the dreams contained therein,
275. Shall live to praise your deadly sin,
        And they shall kill you, raise a din,
        And mount a motto on a pin;
        “[ Your name here] has Never Been!”

ACT THIRTEEN

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.

__________________________________________

(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.)

UPON FURTHER REVIEW:

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 “Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson” as something he provided the magazine as a prepackaged rejection letter.

Here is the passage, from page 138, one of a series of anecdotes from former RS staffers, this from Charles Perry:

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,

(full text of letter follows, including the reference to South Bend)

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?’”

Here's my analysis:

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.

2. My copy is hand-typed, with the impressions and punch-through periods of a typewriter, as well as impressions of an actual "signature."

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.

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.

And, for the record, I did appreciate it, once I got to the P.S. and stopped hyperventilating.

2011-07-17T13:44:00.003-04:00

A Classic Case of Boredom

(Children's author and middle-school ELA teacher Kate Messner has written a brilliant column on summer reading lists that is a must-read, and inspired me to dig up this column, written for the Press-Republican of February 3, 1989 and copyrighted by them.)

Nobody reads the classics anymore, and I'm not surprised. Nobody ever did.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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. "An' for all 'is dirty ide, 'E was white, clear white, inside," the poet marvels, in that impenetrable dialect, that made Kipling's doggerel so popular among those who only heard real dialect from their servants.

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.

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."

Every other famous scene, you will find the first time you sit down with the book, because there is never a second time.

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.

For example:

My copy of "Oliver Twist" is 428 pages long. Oliver says, "Please, sir, I want some more," on page 13.

"Don Quixote," in the Penguin edition, is 940 pages long. He tilts with the windmills on page 68.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Why not give them some quality books that someone might really want to read, like "the Chronicles of Narnia" or the Little House books?

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.

If you want kids to read, read to them when they are young and then make books available to them.

But don't shove a "great" book down a kid's throat just because somebody shoved it down yours.

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.

2011-06-15T21:33:00.003-04:00

Vaska at 0.667 Years Old

So Vaska has turned eight months old and is closing in on nine. He's training up real well and without a lot of need for specific training sessions: He knows what is expected of him and does his best, with the understanding that he is a hound.

Which means, for instance, that the car is not going to be scratched because, as much as he wants to go for a ride, he will stand on the top step of the porch and look at me while I order him into the car. He'll come in his own good time, or, more likely, after I walk back to the porch and take his collar, at which point he'll placidly walk to the car door and get in.

Or take this morning: We have two main places we go to play, the Dog Park, where it is enclosed and he wrestles and runs with the other dogs, or the Wilder Dam, a wide-open strip of riverside park where there is open park play but also a lot more running-through-the-brush involved.

This morning, we went down to the Dog Park, but there was nobody there, so, after a short stay, we went out to get back in the car and go see what was happening at Wilder. But Vaska did not go from the park gate to the car.

Instead, he ignored my calling and trotted away around a bit of woods and down a short path to check the banks of the White River, where people often take their dogs for a quick dip. Once he saw that nobody was there, he came right to the car and got in. Just checking, Dad.

Here he is with his friends Bogey, a chocolate Lab, and Amos, a small Munsterlander, having some good clean fun on the shores of the Connecticut River, at the Wilder Dam park. By the way, this was taken a few weeks ago, and Vaska is now about two or three inches taller than the other two. We're not sure they've noticed.

Bogey is his best friend, and the two of them are apt to start rassling as soon as they meet, with virtually no greeting. Either that or they will begin a game of keep-away. A few weeks ago, I noticed that Vaska was developing a short of leopard-skin tone under his throat, which I thought at first was simply an unusual color pattern.

But I also found myself petting him at night and thinking I had found a tick on his neck, only to realize it was a small scab. Turns out Bogey also has these small puncture wounds all over his throat. Now, it is a rule of dog judging that "scars of honor" do not count against a dog who is being shown, but the rules are silent on the topic of "scars of idiocy."

What I like about the rassling matches that Vaska gets into with Bogey and also his good friend Tanner, who is a pit bull mix of some sort, is that they readily switch positions during the game. The three share an endearing generosity of spirit and have no need to be "top dog." They have a wonderful time just beating the living bejabbers out of each other and we don't have to intervene. In fact, you'll hear in the background of this vicious dogfight a discussion of yard sales. The kids are playing, the moms are talking, life is good.

And Vaska is still a puppy in many ways. Here he is running towards me, and you can see that he still has the rocking-horse gait of a puppy, and a tendency to "pounce" that is also the mark of a puppy.

But our little boy is growing up. He has started taking an interest in checking the p-mail on lampposts and trees as we walk, though he's a few weeks away from thinking to add his own comments. More to the point, the other day we arrived at the Dog Park to find Buster there, a pit/lab mix who is something of a bully. Buster was in the process of picking on some of the other dogs, playing way too rough, like the sort of obnoxious jock who throws elbows in a game of playground hoops.

He grabbed Vaska by the back of his neck and threw him down, which is fair play, but then held him and wouldn't let him up. A few weeks ago, the puppy would have squealed for help, but Vaska got himself free and then made it quite clear that he didn't expect, under any circumstances, for any reason, to be treated like that again. It was a little scary, but it was simply a quick moment of strong assertion. The message was delivered without physical contact and then, the moment having passed, the group went on to play, with Buster behaving himself.

After Buster and his owner had left, other owners were pleased, chuckling about it, calling him the "Dog Park Police" and telling me they appreciated him doing what the other dogs weren't able to. And that may be where it stays: He's such a good-spirited, friendly, outgoing fellow that he may simply grow to be the big guy with a sense of propriety and self-control.

I hope that's the case, and my experience with ridgebacks suggests that there's a good chance it will work out that way. But the next six to eight months will be an interesting time, because my preference is to let Vaska remain intact until he is about 14 to 16 months old, for reasons mostly having to do with skeletal development. However, if he begins to show signs of throwing his weight around in an unacceptable manner, the snip will come sooner.

In any case, my little boy is about to enter puberty, and the process with dogs is not terribly different than with kids. There will be some testing and a little rebellion. And it has already become a source of amusement: Vaska is very vocal when he plays, and, lately, he has begun to bark like a deep-throated, frightening timber wolf, but there are still times when his adolescent voice breaks into a shrill puppy yip and everyone falls over laughing.

Bottom line: This is one hell of a good dog and we're having a lot of fun together.

2011-05-24T17:24:00.017-04:00

I have officially become an old crank

Maybe I've just spent too much time hunched over a keyboard with my friends consisting of disembodied names and messages from every part of the globe except this one.

But I have become an old crank.

I don't yell at kids to get off my lawn. In fact, some of the neighborhood kids were over playing with the dog a few days ago and I'd welcome them back (as would he).

No, I've become one of those loveable, tiresome old cranks who writes letters to editors complaining about mistakes in grammar.

Let me correct that: Complaining about one mistake in grammar.

I don't deny that it is a personal thing, that this particular error drives me up the wall and I am simply indulging in self-therapy by complaining. Nor do I deny that I'm being a pain in the ass.

But let me just share the letter I have been sending out, which will explain it perfectly well, I hope. I have this letter in a file on my desktop and, when I feel the need, I simply cut-and-paste it into an email, add the particulars in two places to make it specific to the case at hand, and send it off.

It reads:

As a former reporter and editor, I used to hate people who would seemingly reduce a story to a grammatical error they had spotted, but this is one that is becoming an epidemic and that changes the meaning of a sentence. It is also, of course, a pet peeve of mine or I wouldn't bother. (Letters like this are why you make the big bucks.)

(Insert paragraph citing incorrect usage in case at hand, which is invariably "may have" in place of "might have.")

Most writers and editors realize that, in speculating against fact, you use "were" rather than "was" -- If I were in your shoes, If I were a rich man -- and that "if I was" implies uncertainty -- "If I was there, I don't remember it."

But "may have" and "might have" carry the same requirement, and the difference in meaning can be genuinely confusing.

Where it becomes an issue is in sentences like "The criminal may have escaped" versus "The criminal might have escaped."

If he might have escaped, well, thank goodness he didn't. If he may have escaped, somebody should go have a look in his jail cell and find out.

Again, a bit of a pet peeve, but, perfection aside, it's an error that makes the reporter look stupid: "Police said wearing a seat belt may have saved his life" is a foolish sentence if the lede was "John Smith died in a car accident."

(Insert paragraph pointing out that meaning and usage in case at hand were obviously in conflict. Add polite closing.)

I get polite responses. So did Lazlo Toth.

Well, whatever. I feel better about it because I'm not sitting there thinking "Idiots! Idiots!"

Instead, I'm sitting there thinking, "Your children are going to have to have you locked up."

2011-05-15T09:07:00.010-04:00

"How long will it be before 'Forrest Gump' technology becomes the standard tool for spicing up news coverage?"

This is the latest bogus video to hit the Internets, and the latest to be produced as a commercial -- this one for Gillette -- and then "leaked" to create a stir. (An earlier example, a Gatorade spot purporting to show a ball girl making an impossible leaping grab, can be seen here.)

This piece appeared on the Huffington Post which -- once it had lured readers into clicking and adding to the statistics they show their advertisers -- admitted that it knew the piece was phony all along. While I guess we should be grateful they owned up to the fraud, it's not like they discovered the video was fake and decided not to post it. I was reminded of a column I wrote back in July, 1994, to which I would only add that, having since begun toning photos for print, I'm more forgiving of the TIME Magazine cover of OJ (who had only been arrested a few weeks before this column ran).

Oh, and I would also add, "I told you so."

Technological media tricks feed public paranoia

The Press-Republican, Plattsburgh NY, July 17, 1994

If I believed in synchronicity, I'd be convinced that the convergence of the O.J. Simpson trial, the release of "Forrest Gump"and the 25th anniversary of the first moon landing was intended as a cosmic warning to the media.

Following the moon landing in 1969, feature stories began to appear about people who believed the government had faked the whole thing.

In 1978, Hollywood capitalized on that paranoid disbelief with a movie about a phony Mars landing staged on a desert soundstage to fool the American public.

One of the stars of that movie, "Capricorn One," was former football star O.J. Simpson. Today, we have feature stories showing that a significant number of people do not believe Simpson guilty of murder.

Some of these people may simply insist on calling him innocent until proven guilty, but there are clearly a large number who believe Simpson is being framed by "them."

Until there is a vaccine for paranoia, some people will insist, despite all evidence, upon the existence of government conspiracies, UFO abductions and underwater cryptosaurian critters. But there are others who teeter between irrational disbelief and healthy skepticism, and they may still be coaxed to the truth with sufficient evidence.

This is where "Forrest Gump" enters the picture.

I have long been uncomfortable with bogus archival footage, those phony black-and-white television ads that either show fake "strait-laced experts" or bogus "company founders," as if what you are seeing was shot several decades ago.

"Forest Gump" ups the ante. Instead of phony actors in bogus settings, we now have real dead folks in extremely convincing footage, doing and saying things they never did or said.

I'm not concerned that future generations will view "Forrest Gump" as a documentary, and I respect the creators' right to be creative. Still, I worry how we in the media can convince anyone of the truth of anything while we so cheerfully demonstrate our uncanny ability to fake reality.

At least "Forrest Gump" is presented as fiction.

Supermarket tabloids have been using cut-and-paste photo composites of two-headed housewives and bat-children from the moon for years, and passing off this nonsense as the real thing. Now, technology has made it possible to create fraudulent pictures without the redeeming veneer of goofiness the supermarket tabloids have always possessed: Real photos and phony photos have become virtually indistinguishable.

Sadly, real newspapers and supermarket tabloids are likewise becoming a little hard to tell apart.

Most newspapers, including the Press-Republican, have rules against using this commonly available technology to create misleading photographs, but it is an ability that has not gone unused at some allegedly respectable places.
In addition to the recent TIME Magazine cover doctored to make Simpson look more sinister, Newsday drew flak during the Winter Olympics for faking a picture in which Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding were shown apparently skating together.

It's ironic that an industry so eager to pounce upon the ethical shortcomings of others is willing to barter away its own credibility for the sake of a brief flash of graphic excitement. As was pointed out in a discussion on WCFE's "The Editors," the days of "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus" are now past, those innocent days when a father could tell his child that, if you read it in the newspaper, it must be true.

You may argue whether the purpose of a free press is to provide the nation with an informed citizenry or to maximize profits by pandering to the public lust for cheap thrills, but for TIME or Newsday to stoop to the level of a supermarket tabloid is more than an insult to readers. When one of the most influential newsmagazines and a leading daily newspaper both make an editorial decision to begin manufacturing images, how long will it be before "Forrest Gump" technology becomes the standard tool for spicing up news coverage?

I remain convinced that the majority of people who believe the unbelievable do so out of ignorance, but I am finding it harder to believe that we are winning the war against that ignorance.

The barbarians are not only at the gate, but they are gaining an alarming degree of control over the means of communication.

Humanity has survived some astonishing plunges into ignorance, and I do not think that the world will end because of a debasing of the mainstream media. On the other hand, I have no particular desire to live through the next Dark Age myself, and events in Bosnia, Rwanda and elsewhere demonstrate clearly that we have not outgrown our penchant for rotten behavior. I can't help but be discouraged at anything that feeds the forces of ignorance, prejudice and fear.

The answer, as always, lies in our children.

The media and educators have a societal responsibility not to teach young people to accept the word of authority figures, but to teach them how to judge the validity of what they are told by any source.

Toward that end, I applaud the growing movement among educators to reduce their reliance upon textbooks and to send students out to conduct independent research on topics of interest.

Students must learn the difference between primary and secondary sources, and how to evaluate each.

They must learn to distinguish error and lies, and to recognize truth.

Meanwhile, the media is going to have to do some serious soul-searching and decide how to handle the amazing technology available to it.

Having demonstrated our ability to produce fake photographs and videotape, and a willingness to do so, we have a grave responsibility to demonstrate some visible and credible restraint in the future.

I know that "Forrest Gump" is fiction. Let's make sure we're all clear on what isn't.

2011-05-10T20:51:00.001-04:00

Jack steals the king's sheep

(a Cornish folktale)

When Jack learned that the king was seeking a husband for his daughter, he was sure that he was just the man the king wanted. So he came to the castle and presented himself at the throne, declaring that he was willing to marry the princess and bring honor to the royal family.

The king looked down from his throne at the young man, who looked nothing like any prince he had ever seen. "What honor do you bring?" he asked.

"I am the most clever thief in all the realm," Jack stated. "I could steal your own sheep from under your nose."

"My sheep are well taken care of," the king said, but Jack laughed.

"Yet I could steal them," he said.

"How many do you think you could make off with?" the king asked. "After all, I lose one or two every so often to wolves or misadventure. It is nothing to me for someone to steal a few sheep. I don't even miss them. So, how many will you steal?"

"The flock," Jack said. "I will steal the whole flock."

Now the king laughed. "If you can do that, you are the world's greatest thief!"

"And worthy of your daughter?"

The king laughed even harder. "Indeed. Steal the whole flock and you will have my daughter as well!"

Jack left the castle and went directly to the shoemaker. There, he purchased a fine pair of shoes, made of soft, shining leather.

Then he went out to the highway where the king's sheep would be driven from their summer pasture to the town. He placed one of the lovely new shoes in the middle of the road, squatted over it and filled it with shit.

Jack then walked down the highway for another mile and a half, placed the other shoe in the middle of the road, hid in the woods by the roadside and went to sleep.

An hour later, the king's shepherds began to take the flock from their summer pasture into town. The two men walked down the highway with the flock of sheep, slowly working their way towards the town where the flock would be sold for a great profit.

They had walked only a short distance when they came to a shoe in the middle of the road. It was a well-made shoe of fine leather, and newly made. But someone had taken a shit in the shoe, and the two shepherds stood over it, staring and scratching their heads.

"Who would do such a thing?" one of them asked. "This is a very fine shoe! Who would ruin it like this?"

"It's disgusting," the other shepherd declared. "What sort of person would do such a thing?"

They kicked the shoe into the ditch and continued down the highway. leading their sheep to town, until, after another mile and a half, they came upon the second shoe.

This one was perfectly clean, and the two shepherds looked it over carefully. "This is a fine shoe," the first shepherd said.

"Indeed it is," the second said, and then they looked over their shoulders and down the road.

"Stay here," the first shepherd said. "I'm going to go back and get that shoe. I can clean it up and have a great new pair of shoes!"

"Why should you have the shoes?" the second shepherd said. "You kicked the first shoe into the ditch! You didn't want it!"

"You called it 'disgusting'!" the first shepherd said, and they began to argue, until suddenly the second shepherd grabbed the shoe from the road and began to run down the highway, with the first shepherd hard on his heels, shouting at him that the shoes belonged to him!

As soon as they were gone, Jack stepped out of the forest, refreshed from his nap, and led the king's sheep the rest of the way into town so he could claim his reward.

2011-05-03T19:52:00.006-04:00

Covering Breaking News: Watching the network news tonight, the second day after bin Laden's death, they spoke about how "the story is changing." So what? When you cover breaking news, the story always changes. The first reports come from scribbled notes and from people at HQ who haven't sat down with the people who were out in the field. Once everyone settles down, the story takes clearer shape, but, by then, the news has already been reported.

Here's a breaking-news story I reported in 1991, and then the follow-up story that ran the next day, once things had settled down. Note that the incident happened at 11 a.m., about nine hours before first deadlines. This doesn't change the fact that not all the information was in, but it did allow me time to check in with the people in Philadelphia. Had it happened six hours later, the first report would have been extremely sketchy. (I actually filed the story at about 6 p.m.)

Sorry the photo isn't clearer, but it's scanned from a photocopy of the article. The editor said he was disappointed I wasn't able to get a shot of the body. I asked, "Would you have run a picture of the body?" He admitted that they wouldn't have. I love editors.

Then I had to add the paragraph about the "witnesses" who had appeared on TV saying the police had fired on the car. Note, in the second story, how much effort and space is spent disputing their version of events. If only they had had computer access, they could have been "citizen journalists." I love them, too.

You'll note that things have tightened up at the border a bit in the intervening 20 years.

Oh, and one more thing: Editors write the headlines. I know that shotguns shoot shot.

Staff photo/Mike Peterson

State Police investigators remove a shotgun from the scene of a roadblock in West Plattsburgh that ended in death for a fugitive from Pennsylvania and Connecticut. Police had chased him from the border at Rouses Point after he had fled questioning there.

Fugitive dies in police chase

Unclear how fatal bullet was fired into out-of-state gunman

By Mike Peterson

Staff Writer

PLATTSBURGH - Blasts from Wade Rollins's shotgun ended two chases in three days.

The first was fired at Pennsylvania State Police Cpl. King Lee, as he attempted to stop Rollins's rented 1991 Toyota Tercel in Northeast Philadelphia, in the early hours of Saturday.

The second was fired into Rollin’s chest, as New York State Troopers and Customs officers approached his then disabled Toyota in West Plattsburgh late Monday morning.

Rollins, 29, of Bristol. Conn., was pronounced dead at CVPH Medical Center at 11:04 a.m.. It was not clear from police reports whether the wound was intentional or the result of a mishap.

According to Supervising Special Agent Paul Graveline of the Office of Enforcement of the U.S. Customs Service, Rollins attempted to enter the United States at the Rouses Point Port of Entry. The immigration inspector on duty identified the fugitive, notified the inspector inside and sent Rollins into the building on the pretext of a secondary customs inspection.

Rollins left his car and went into the customs shed, but, when the inspector began to question him, bolted back outside and headed for his car.

The inspector chased Rollins, catching up with him as he was closing the door of his car, but was unable to stop him.

Rollins sped away from the Port of Entry and drove through Rouses Point, with two special agents from the port on his tail. Two other Customs vehicles followed a short time later, and were soon joined by State Police and Border Patrol officers.

The chase eventually led to Interstate 87 and south toward Plattsburgh, then through the city and onto Route 3 toward West Plattsburgh.

Customs and State Police officers set up a roadblock on Route 3, just beyond the intersection with the Rand Hill Road.

WPTZ-TV interviewed witnesses to the ensuing confrontation who said police fired into the vehicle as it approached the roadblock at high speed, but police responded on camera with a flat denial that any police or customs officers fired their guns.

According to State Police, Rollins attempted to crash the roadblock, which damaged the blockading vehicles but also disabled the Toyota. As officers approached the vehicle, the shotgun discharged.

Rollins was pulled from the front seat of his car and placed on the ground. First aid was applied by the Morrisonville Rescue Squad and he was transported to the CVPH Emergency Room, where he was pronounced dead.

State Police said four of their cars and a Customs vehicle were damaged in the pursuit and roadblock.

According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Rollins’s odyssey began just after 2 a.m. Saturday morning, when he was stopped in Horsham Township, Pa., for erratic driving.

As the township police officer was arresting Rollins for failing a sobriety test, he discovered a knife in Rollins’s back pocket. He took the knife and attempted to handcuff Rollins, hut Rollins fought back and managed to get to his car and escape.

He then led local and state police on a 12-mile chase into Philadelphia. Cpl. Lee picked up the chase and pursued Rollins down the Pennsylvania Turnpike, through a set of tollbooths and into the city.

Rollins pulled around a corner, stopped the car and got out, and. as Lee's cruiser turned the corner, pointed the shotgun at the officer Lee stopped his car and dove across the seat as the blast shattered his windshield, showering him with glass fragments.

Lee emerged and returned fire with his .357 magnum revolver as Rollins, who was already sought by New Haven. Conn. authorities for firearms violations, fled.
Pennsylvania authorities put his name and description out on a national network of police agencies, which led to his identification when he attempted to cross the border.

Plattsburgh and Chazy State Police BCI investigators are attempting to trace the route that brought Rollins from eastern Pennsylvania to the Canadian border.

Death at roadblock following chase ruled a suicide

By Mike Peterson

Staff Writer

PLATTSBURGH - A day after Wade Rollins died at a police roadblock in West Plattsburgh, killed in the front seat of a rented car by his own shotgun in what the coroner has now ruled a suicide, there was still little known about where the 29-year-old Connecticut man spent the last two days of his life.

However, some discrepancies had begun to clear up by Tuesday:

One witness, who had earlier told WPTZ that police had fired on the car as it approached their barricade, told police investigators that she had heard only one shot, apparently the shot that killed Rollins. The second of Channel 5’s witnesses, Steve Mason, said he had spoken with police and would have no further comment. "It's a small town. I've got to live here. I'm just going to keep my mouth shut, OK?" he said.

Denies police fired

New York State Police Senior Investigator Steve Pendergast insisted no shots were fired by police or customs officers, and a superficial examination of the dead man's rented car at the scene of the confrontation suggested it had not been hit by gunfire. Pendergast said police have spoken with Mason, and he has now told them he only heard one gunshot.

The windshield of the white Toyota Tercel showed a small impact fracture, but there was no damage to the windows on the three sides of the vehicle approachable during the investigation, while the only apparent body damage appeared to have come from impact with police and Customs vehicles. There were no apparent punctures of the body metal that could have been bullet holes.

By contrast, when Rollins fired his shotgun through the windshield of a Pennsylvania state trooper's car Saturday morning, the windshield was reportedly destroyed. Corporal King Lee, who had ducked out of the line of fire, was showered with and cut by bits of glass as he lay across the front seat of the vehicle.

Travels a mystery

It was not clear why Rollins was in the Philadelphia area.

The Philadelphia Inquirer had reported Sunday that Rollins was sought by New Haven. Conn., authorities for firearms violations, but detectives in New Haven told the Press-Republican they had no information on him.

A reporter with Rollins’s hometown paper in Bristol, Conn., however, said that, while Bristol police records showed no arrests for Rollins in the past two years, he was wanted there on various charges relating to family violence. According to Mark Anderson of the Bristol Press, Rollins’s wife, Arline, had sworn out a complaint for a Feb. 26 incident in which she alleged that Rollins had beaten her, their four-year-old daughter and their two-year-old son.

The complaint charged that Rollins had beaten her throughout their 10-year marriage, and that the children had also been beaten before the date of the complaint.

Rented from Hertz

Pendergast said Rollins rented the Toyota from a Hertz counter at Bradley International Airport in Hartford, Conn., Feb. 20, nearly a week before the date of the alleged episode of family violence for which he was sought.

But, while the car was overdue, there was apparently no active effort being made to recover it.

Rollins’s whereabouts in the 55 hours between the confrontation with Pennsylvania authorities and his appearance at Rouses Point remain unknown. Trooper Roger Hoffman of the Pennsylvania State Police said there had been an unconfirmed sighting of the Toyota in Philadelphia Saturday night, but no other indications of where he might have been.

Ironically, Rollins appeared at the U.S. border, apparently coming from Canada, on the day Canada announced it was experimenting with express lanes at its border with the United States. While Rollins would not have qualified for express-lane treatment, Canadian authorities would not have any record of his entry unless he attracted attention in some way, such as by declaring purchases.

Alert issued

Pennsylvania authorities had issued a nationwide alert for Rollins, which resulted in his identification at Rouses Point when an immigration official entered his license number into a computer. But Canadian border stations are not equipped with computers, and border authorities are only furnished with information on cars that are expected to attempt to cross into Canada, according to a Canadian official.

"These kinds of cases happen,” admitted Patricia Birkett, manager for Canadian Immigration at La Colle. Quebec. "The question is, do we stop every person? Do we have every license plate number on a computer? We don't have the facilities for that. That's the way it is between our two countries: We have an open border, and, most of the time, it works."

May have turned back

Pendergast said it was possible that Rollins never entered Canada, that he approached the crossing from the Rouses Point side, realized he would have to clear Canadian Customs, and turned back, only to discover he now had to go through the US port of entry.

Pendergast said Rollins had enough funds at the time of his death to suggest he would not leave a trail of credit card slips. None of the cash, he said, was Canadian.

2011-04-26T15:35:00.007-04:00

Now We Are Six (Months)

Vaska turned six months old a couple of weeks ago and I thought I'd document the little fellow's progress.

He seems to be through the most outrageous growth period, but he still surprises anyone who hasn't seen him for a couple of weeks. He weighs about 70 pounds; I'm guessing he'll be around 110 when he's through, but I wouldn't be surprised if he differed by 10 pounds either direction. Right now, he's rangy and his feet and his leg joints are still outsized, so he'll add a bit more height and considerable weight before he's through.

He's like a gangly 13-year-old and sometimes can run with the pack at the park and then suddenly, particularly on a turn, will lose his footing and will at least go into a slide if he doesn't wipe out completely. This morning, he had a couple of times when he tried to rocket up the steep river bank and had to take a second shot at it.

He really is at a "tweener" stage, where he'll wrestle and run with the big dogs, but then, at the last moment, give a funny little puppy pounce, because he still is just a baby. Similarly, he has become a real dog companion to me, and I can see the adult dog he's going to be, but then, suddenly, he's a puppy again -- often at night, when it's time to go to sleep and he suddenly decides it's time for a tickle-fight and starts biting my hands. As with all good tickle-fights, the initial annoyance quickly dissolves into fits of giggling and the chances of going to sleep all but disappear.

Here he is with two of his best buddies, Tanner the Pit Bull and Bogey the Chocolate Lab, all having a tug at a foot-long chunk of knotted rope. He and Bogey will go long distances, each holding an end of the rope or stick, trotting along as if they were yoked like oxen, as Bogey's owner and I walk the length of the dam site park, which is where we all get together while the dog park is closed for mud season.

With Tanner, the game is more apt to be wrestling, though they enjoy a good tug, and actually, all three dogs really enjoy keepaway more than actual tugging. But Vaska's ability to learn has been very evident in his wrestling, and Tanner's owner and I have watched him pick up moves and then pull them off himself in the next round. Tanner is a little over a year old and they first met when Vaska was still a wee pup. Tanner was very gracious in scaling down to the puppy's abilities then, but all that is over now as they merrily fling each other around.

What is particularly interesting with these three is how generous they are about alternating who is dominant and who is submissive at any point in the game. They never lose their tempers with each other and are quite happy on top or bottom, just so long as the game is fast and loud.

Here are Vaska and Bogey sharing a duck retrieving dummy which floated down the Connecticut River from god-knows-where and was around the park for more than a week, providing lots of good fetching and fighting over. One advantage of the dog park -- which opens again this coming weekend -- is that dog toys stay there until they begin to fall apart, while, in an open, unfenced park like this one, well-meaning people think they're seeing litter or abandoned objects and pick them up. Alas, the duck disappeared well before it had been completely dismantled.

In 25 years of owning them, I've never had a ridgeback that I thought was particularly clever. They're not stupid dogs, but they are hounds and no hound has ever won a Nobel Prize for innovative thinking. However, Vaska not only learns wrestling holds but can think his way around things, and I am not used to that. The back porch is covered but open, and I had a cable slung around one of the pillars so he could go out in the unfenced yard, enjoy the sun and gnaw on a bone. But I realized he was losing more than a foot of freedom by virtue of that pillar, so I tied a length of rope around the pillar and clipped the cable to that.

And we promptly had our first jailbreak, as the little dickens figured out that, if he gnawed through the rope, he'd be free, albeit "free" trailing 20 feet of cable behind him. Fortunately, he didn't go far, but he continued to ponder the matter and, the next time we went to the post office, by golly, didn't I come back out to find him attempting to gnaw through the leash that was tied to a lamppost there?

He now has a chain lead and I've hidden the bolt cutters.

His life is extremely harsh. I get up between four and five in the morning and spend the next two or three hours working on ComicStripoftheDay.com. However, if you picture my faithful hound sleeping at my feet, you are deluding yourself, because that would require the faithful hound to get out of bed and walk into the next room, which is far too much effort for that time of day. He gets up around seven, usually when I've filed the blog and am starting to rattle pans in the kitchen.

He has some breakfast while I catch up on the rest of my on-line reading for the morning and then we head down to the park for an hour or more of walking and playing with whoever has turned up. And there's a second session in the late afternoon before dinner and an early bed time around 8:30 or 9. So, of the roughly 13 hours he's out of bed, three or four of them are spent at the park, which is a pretty good ratio.

However, last week, we were recruited to doggy sit for Cousin Puck while Jed and family went down to NYC for a couple of days. During that sojourn, he and Puck managed to stretch the keepaway/tugofwar time to something more in the nature of seven hours a day.

That worked well because, while the property is not fenced, there is an Invisible Fence and Puck has the collar that keeps him inside it. So both dogs stayed on the property. Until we went back for Easter dinner and Vaska decided to test a theory he had apparently been pondering, which is that only Puck has to worry about the Invisible Fence. However, the neighbor was very nice and brought him back, since she didn't need help putting in her garden after all.

Here is two minutes and forty seconds of the aforementioned seven hours, shot during our dogsitting gig.

2011-04-13T15:48:00.006-04:00

Why I am not horrified by the TSA search

(We've now had more that 24 hours of delighted, hour-topping broadcast outrage over a little girl getting a secondary pat-down in an airport. Perhaps if these drama school drop-outs had spent a little time in the trenches before they became anchorpeople, they'd have covered a few stories like this one. In which, I would note in hindsight, it appears that the chief investigator and I were having a contest to see who could be more dry.)

Press-Republican, Plattsburgh NY

Wednesday, March 18, 1992

By Mike Peterson

Staff Writer

ROUSES POINT - An arrest at Champlain last week led to the disruption of a smuggling ring that encompassed three continents and a half-dozen countries, as U.S. Customs inspectors and the New York State Police combined to foil the importation of a shipment of nearly pure heroin.

The initial arrest came March 11, when Alex Afful, 34, a citizen of Ghana living in Montreal, attempted to cross the border at Champlain with his three-year-old daughter According to Customs Service Special Agent in Charge John O’Hara, a routine computer check turned up Afful's name as a possible drug smuggler, and he was brought over to the customs shed for a secondary inspection

There, a customs inspector discovered a stuffed toy dinosaur that had been re-sewed on one seam, which he then inspected more closely and finally opened, revealing heroin in the form of 89 hard-packed, tape-wrapped cylinders the thickness of a thumb, which had been put into condoms and tied off with dental floss. A search of the child turned up 10 more condoms of heroin, secreted in her snow boots.

When the drugs were found on his daughter, Afful confessed that he was bringing the heroin into the country, and that he had previously carried the drug into Canada from Ghana by ingesting 101 condoms of the drug, which had originated in Thailand.

By the time it arrived in Montreal, the drug had passed through Afful’s system and he was reluctant to re-swallow the condoms for the trip to New York City He was reluctant to do so, drug investigators said, because he had been sick the first time and the prospect was less appetizing on this leg of the journey.

Accordingly, he devised the alternate stratagem of using the toy and the child's boots.

Customs officers and troopers, realizing they had only 99 of Afful's reported 101 condoms of the drug, took him to CVPH Medical Center, where he was inspected by physicians who found no solid indication of more condoms. However, after enemas, Afful passed an additional condom.

After further observation, it was decided that no more remained, and he was taken from the hospital.

Afful’s daughter was returned to the custody of her mother in Montreal.

Faced with the realities of his situation. Afful was persuaded to cooperate with authorities and called his contact in New York City, offering a police-provided false explanation for the delay of several days in his scheduled arrival. He was told to drive to Albany, where he met with Toure Daboya, 20, and Lakazo Ouro-Adohi, 22, citizens of Togo living in the Bronx. The two Togoans were arrested and. in turn, led officials to Judith Adarikor, a citizen of Ghana living in Yonkers, who was described as a central figure in the West African drug-smuggling ring.

A search of Adarikor's residence turned up more drugs, as well as between $15,000 and $20,000 in cash She was arrested Monday night.

All four face federal charges of possession of heroin, O'Hara said State charges may also be brought, he said, unless the strength and severity of the federal charges suggest that state prosecution would be superfluous.

O'Hara described the border arrest as a combination of good investigative work and good fortune, since it would have been extremely difficult to intercept Afful once he cleared the border and reached New York City, his original destination

Officials set the value of the heroin, which would have been diluted eight to 10 times to reach the appropriate potency for street use, at $1 million. Afful was paid $5,000 when he picked up the drug in London and was to have been paid an additional $5,000 upon delivery. A good monthly wage in Ghana is $50, O’Hara said.

While Afful faces up to 40 years in prison, his arrest and subsequent trip to CVPH may have saved his life.

"When they removed that last condom from him, it had started to rupture," O'Hara said. "The dental floss was gone and the condom was starting to go."

Had that happened even at the hospital, chances of saving the man were slim, O'Hara said. "We estimate this stuff is about 90-percent pure; he probably wouldn't have lasted more than a minute," O'Hara said. "Apparently, he didn't know the danger of it, or didn't think it was that significant. We were concerned about his health, but then again, too, we wouldn't have been able to make the convoy (to Albany) if he were dead.”

2011-04-13T08:05:00.000-04:00

747 Cockpit of NASA SOFIA plane. in California

I've just started getting weekly pics from 360Cities.net and have thought about passing them on. There are some spectacular landscapes as well as oddities like the interior of a classic library, which is the piece that Richard Thompson passed along on Facebook and that got me playing with this.

The controls make me feel like a gunner in a ball turret, but they are controllable. And I suspect this particular view will delight a few of the people I know are checking in. But do explore the rest of what's available, because you can also, for example, use the site to visit the Royal Gorge.

2011-04-07T23:49:00.005-04:00

Lecture with music, or vice versa

One of the benefits of living in a small community with an Ivy League college is that, if you keep your ear to the ground, you can stumble across some pretty interesting events.

South African musician and activist Johnny Clegg came to Dartmouth this week, delivering some classroom lectures on Wednesday and then delivering a kickass concert Thursday night. It wasn't terribly well promoted, but I spotted some posters while I was walking Vaska and I managed to make both his public lecture at the end of the day Wednesday and his concert. That picture is from the lecture part, and most Johnny Clegg fans wouldn't recognize it, since he's generally more colorful, but they would recognize it in that his concerts are a sort of confessional in which he talks about himself and his life and his country's culture and then slams you with some fantastic music and spectacle.

The lecture was more restrained than that.

I've been a fan since sometime in the late 80s when he came to Montreal and, in addition to giving a concert, appeared on local TV. I didn't make the concert -- probably a combination of a job that was often more than 9-to-5 and being a single dad. But I was blown away by his interview and one song on the TV show and went out and got a couple of his CDs.

Clegg was born in England but lived in Zimbabwe (his mother was Rhodesian) as well as Zambia and Israel before settling in South Africa, where, at 15, he saw a man on the street playing Zulu guitar, an instrument that uses different string placements and tunings to convert a European instrument for African music. The player was a maintenance man, but in his off hours, he gave the young white boy lessons on the instrument, and Clegg began to hang around the hostels where the migrant workers lived.

These, he recounts, were large residences, where a couple of thousand workers might live, and, because "home districts" are critical to Zulu identity, it was not uncommon for entire floors of hostels, or even whole hostels themselves, to be taken over by men from the same or allied districts. They worked during the week, but, on weekends, you could find them selling various native things or vending traditional food and beer, while dance teams practiced or competed against each other in the streets.

"When I first saw the war dances, I was smitten," Clegg said. "I'd done karate, which comes from centuries of Japanese tradition, and when I saw the war dances, I saw some of the same thing." The way the Zulu men moved in the dance not only reflected their daily lives and culture, but "carried certain messages about masculinity, certain messages, values and concepts." He applied himself to learning those as well as the music, and became accepted as, he admits, "something of a mascot" to one of the dance teams.

In the mid-1960s, hanging around the hostels was a little dubious, but what was plainly illegal was when he visited his Zulu friends in their districts. But the dance team was headed up country, to visit a district with a powerful chief who had 35 wives and 160 kids, and the now-16-year-old Clegg went with them.

"I had certain romantic ideas of Zulus from seeing them living in the city," he says, but seeing them at home changed his perspective. "It was a wild place for me," he says, and the difference in seeing them there rather than in the urban environment was that he now saw how they incorporated a world of animals -- both the animals they hunted and the cattle they raised -- into basic aspects of their culture, especially in the ways the men expressed their identity in dance and in stick-fighting, a form of martial arts that defined their place in a very strongly structured pecking order and that informed the form of their dancing.

And on the third day, he was arrested by the security forces for being in an area forbidden to whites. He was threatened with deportation and his friends were charged with bringing him into a tribal area, and were only spared by a technicality -- the signs barring whites from the area without permits had not been erected.

But he continued to sneak into the tribal area to be with his friends and to learn more about their language, lives and culture, and at this point in his lecture, Clegg went into a discursion on cattle and, specifically, bulls.

A Zulu man is inextricably linked to the bull of his herd, he explained, and there are certain rites that must be observed, including that the man must rise in the morning before the bull and must take his morning piss before the bull takes his. It is a matter of pecking order. The bull is his "little brother" and must keep his place, but, of course, for that to happen, it's more a matter of the man asserting his status than expecting the bull to defer.

If the bull is sick, the man is sick, and, if the bull seems likely to die, it is critical that the man slaughter and replace it before that happens. For the bull to simply die would be a disaster for the man.

When two men have a serious rivalry, it was common to settle it by having their bulls fight, and Clegg managed to get video of one of these events, which are becoming rare. The two men shouted encouragement and "praise words" to their bulls, and supplied trash talk while the bulls, excited by the attention and atmosphere, began to paw the ground and go at each other. (I would point out that, at least in this particular instance, they didn't seem to inflict much damage, but rather did some pushing, shoving and clashing until one yielded, to the immense delight of its owner's human rival.)

Clegg noted that a bull has one horn with which he deflects blows and that he initiates his attack with the other horn. Similarly, in stick-fighting, the boy has a small shield -- very much smaller than a goalie's blocking pad -- on one hand and a stick with which to attack in the other. You could not only see the similarity to the bull's attack and defense in the video, but (and Clegg did not mention this) it was also apparent how this system of stick-fighting would translate very directly into use of the cowhide shield and the short spear, the assegai. I was also struck by the fact that Shaka, who invented the shorter form of the assegai around the turn of the 19th century, also devised an attack strategy that involved a double-flanking move and that was known as the "buffalo horns" formation.

Clegg's interest being musical, he noted that the bond between man and bull is such that there are "bull poems" recited that record the bull's history -- where it was bought, how it fought, etc. And the dance team is referred to as "oxen" when they do a group dance, and they are "plowing the dance" with a dance leader who carries a stick.

A man who seeks the "ugly heart" of the bull can become the type who constantly starts fights, but that "ugly heart" is also part of the paradox of masculinity, Clegg said: A man must work well with others, as one of the neutered oxen, but he must also be prepared to take life when that moment comes, as the fertile and intact bull.

"There's a lot of pecking order in their culture," Clegg said, "and, when a man walks into a room, it can be very funny seeing how he gets sorted out into his place."

I was fascinated by his lecture because I had never contemplated the nature of a warrior culture that raises cattle. Many of our own native people have a deep, rich warrior culture, but they don't have a strong identification with animal husbandry. After the coming of the whites, they did have horses, but only the Nez Perce are strongly associated with purposeful breeding of stock, and, while the coming of horses transformed many native cultures, this basic identity that Clegg spoke of simply doesn't exist within those cultures: American Indians have a strong identification with the animals they hunted, but that's an entirely different relationship.

The buffalo dance is simply not the same as the bull-influenced dances of the Zulu because no Lakota or Blackfoot ever felt compelled to drag himself out of bed in the morning so he could be sure to piss before the buffalo had pissed. It's a different relationship because the relationship with the buffalo is impersonal -- it is not "that" buffalo, but buffalo in general. The Zulu knows the specific bull with which he is linked the way he knows his wife or his child and he has a daily, working relationship with that bull.

So I walked around pondering all that new information for a day, and then went to Johnny's concert and got to see some of what he had spoken about. He had two young men who danced, and I have to say that, while everyone cheered and whistled, I sat there and thought to myself that I was seeing only a very small moment of something that, if I wanted to know what I was looking at, I should have started thinking about it when I was 15, and I should have been living in Johannesburg and I should have been willing to go over to the hostel to take guitar lessons, and to listen, and to learn.

Or I could have done it the simple way and be born into the Zulu culture. But I don't think there's another road to follow. And I think only Johnny Clegg can be Johnny Clegg.

Here he is in action. "Asimbonanga" translates as "we have not seen him" and refers to Mandela, as do the lyrics about looking across the water, since Mandela was being held in an island prison.

Of course, things have changed since the days when Johnny Clegg's integrated band couldn't be promoted (but sold thousands of albums anyway). Now, it looks more like this:

2011-03-27T09:50:00.002-04:00

Me and Gerry, messin' with the media

The news of Geraldine Ferraro's death should leave a sense of loss for her position as a "first," and, though I don't much care for groundbreaker stories, I certainly talked to her about that one in this story from August, 1990. There are some other things we discussed, too, and I think this was a pretty good story. If you're curious, clicking on the illustration could make it large enough to read; if not, right clicking and saving it to your desktop would give you a legible copy.

But what I remember her for, what makes me chuckle every time, isn't in this article.

Working in Plattsburgh meant working in a competitive media market. It could have been very competitive, given the proximity to a major city, but the international border meant that, rather than being a suburb of Montreal, we were a nearby irrelevance. And, for print purposes, the combination of a state border and Lake Champlain made us of no interest to the Burlington Free Press.

But we did have three radio stations with commitments to local news (two of them commercial, which tells you how long ago this was), and, most of all, there was WPTZ, Channel 5, the NBC affiliate in the Burlington/Plattsburgh market. Although they served both sides of the lake, they were headquartered on the New York side and took their commitment to Plattsburgh seriously.

They were also, I will admit, pretty good at what they did, and one reporter in particular knew the market and went after things with a vengeance. If Carol Monroe was on the story, we'd better be, too, because people would see her reports at 6 and 11 and expect to see something as good, or better, in the Press-Republican the next morning. There were times she had something at 6 that would send us scrambling to keep up, and then there were the times she'd have something only at 11, by which time it was too late for us to make deadline. She'd have us.

The advantage we had was that they had to be visual and we really didn't. So at a news conference, rather than three minutes of talking heads, they would start shooting "reporters watch talking head" video to jazz things up a little, in which they would pan over us as we were writing in our notebooks. And I would write "Hi, Mom!" in my notebook and turn it to the camera to photobomb their shot. It wasn't like we were live, but it would mean a little more time in the editing booth.

In August, 1990, Geraldine Ferraro came to the area and spoke at a gathering in the late morning, then toured a factory or two and headed out on Lake Champlain with some local politicians and some people from the Department of Environmental Conservation. And one reporter, since I had cleared my decks and was dedicating the day to following her around.

There is always a lot of hurry-up-and-wait in these events, as well as transit time, and, when you're the only "Boy on the Bus," you get some substantial facetime. By the time we got into the middle of the afternoon, and into an open boat headed for Crab Island, there were maybe eight of us. I already knew the local pols, and so, by then, we were just a bunch of people going to look around at stuff, and it had become pretty chatty and casual.

As we returned to shore, it was about four in the afternoon, and we'd seen Crab Island and we'd talked about colleges (there was one visible on the hill) and lamprey (I hope you can read the sidebar on that article) and Pat Schroeder's kids (I used to live in Colorado) and now we're coming back to the long dock at the Peru Boat Launch, and, perched on the hill at the top of the long wooden steps, we can see the Channel 5 van, a tripod and a two-person reporter/video team.

They were there to get a few words with Geraldine Ferraro, having missed out on the first six hours of her visit. And I probably made some smartass remark about the necessary establishing shot of Geraldine Ferraro getting out of the boat and then walking up the dock and mounting the steps to the parkinglot. And she must have laughed. I do not remember the exact conversation that took place. Or who contributed what to what followed.

But the result was that Carol's necessary establishing shot turned out to be Geraldine Ferraro stepping out of the open boat onto the dock, then turning around and extending her hand to the reporter from the Press-Republican to help him up onto the dock, and then the two of us walking up that long dock and those long stairs, laughing, talking and all but arm-in-arm.

The only story that the necessary establishing shot could have been used for was "Geraldine Ferraro Comes To The North Country To Hang Out With Her Very Closest Friend, Mike Peterson."

This was not the story Carol had been hoping to file for a newscast that began in less than two hours.

"I'm going to kill you, Peterson," she hissed, as we passed. Her report that evening consisted of shots of her talking to Ferraro in the parking lot, asking a question and getting an answer and moving the handheld mic back and forth.

I still chuckle to myself when I think of it, not so much because of what I did to Carol so much as because I still can't believe a public figure of Geraldine Ferraro's stature would so cheerfully join in pranking the media.

Got a nice note from her a few days later, in which she enclosed Pat Schroeder's Christmas card from the year before, to resolve the issue of how old Schroeder's children were. (She was, of course, right.)

Fun, funny lady. If every day in the newsroom had been like that, I'd still be a reporter.

2011-03-23T07:24:00.003-04:00

Update on a quiet friend

Awhile ago, I republished here a column I'd written in 1994 about barbershops and, specifically, about Bob Noody, who used to cut my hair, drive my school bus and usher in my church, and who, it turned out, had also been a member of the 101st Airborne and had dropped into Normandy on D-Day. That's him on June 5, 1944, looking at the camera over the pile of gear he was about to jump with.

I mentioned in the piece that he hadn't planned to go back for the 50th anniversary D-Day reunion, but just got a comment on the blog from his niece that he has gone back since, a couple of times, and is worth Googling. And, indeed, a search for him gets a lot of hits, including this one and this one. In both cases, once you get to the page, you need to scroll down a bit. It's worth it.

Turns out this kind, gentle man who helped me understand the world did a lot more than parachute into Normandy and get wounded. Reading about his record is kind of jaw-dropping, in fact, because he not only was in the thick of things, but he kept going back for more. And learning about what he did reinforces the lesson I originally took away from him: It's not a simple as "some people talk and some people do," but it certainly is that there are people who do great things without letting that moment forever define them.

It reminds me of the time I tracked down Cpl. Rupert Trimingham, the black GI who wrote to Yank magazine during the war about being forced to go to the backdoor of a Jim Crow cafe at a Texas train station while German POWs ate at the counter.

By the time I found him, he was gone, but I spoke with his daughter, who said she had never read the letter and didn't know much about it, just that they used to say he wrote a letter that got published. Yes, and provoked a storm of hundreds of angry letters from black and white GIs around the world who were infuriated with the treatment he and his buddies had received while wearing the uniform of their country, and was turned into a radio program on Mercury Theater and was the basis of a short story in the New Yorker and has been stolen several times since for every story of black GIs in World War II. It was transformative, but he never thought to talk about it, apparently.

There are heroes among us whom we do not know. But here's the real lesson: I already knew that Bob was a good guy, and I'm always happy to see him. I'm hoping to go back to Star Lake for a weekend this summer, and I hope I see him then. And I'd feel that way about him without knowing he'd ever served in the army at all. But I do think that what he did under the circumstances in which he found himself was reflective of the things in his personality and character that make me like him so much.

There are probably people in Detroit who knew Rupert Trimingham and liked him, too, without ever knowing that he wrote that letter. Good people do good things, and the example they set is in their character, not in their deeds.

(Even when their deeds make you say "...wow...")

2011-03-19T22:15:00.010-04:00

March 20, 1971

"After all, any given moment has its value; it can be questioned in the light of after events ... but the moment of beauty was there." -- F. Scott Fitzgerald

This is where I was, 40 years ago, and it was a good place to be. A warm, sunny day in Denver, the first day of spring and it felt like the end of a winter. It was John and Yoko's second anniversary, but we weren't aiming for that. It was simply a Saturday that worked for everyone, but it was a simply beautiful Saturday.

We'd thought about getting married on a mountaintop, specifically, the top of Mount Evans, because that was fashionable, at least in theory, and perhaps practical for marriages that neither family was going to attend anyway. But after driving up there and falling in love with the view, we realized that, given that our families did intend to show up, it would be asking a whole lot of our grandparents and several un-acclimated flatlanders to drag them up to a spot over 14,000 feet above sea level.

Instead, my soon-to-be brother-in-law set us up with a nice Episcopal Church in Denver where the father of his roommate at CU was not only rector, but enough of a social activist and mensch that he was willing to let us use the church and the parish hall, and to even sign the marriage license although the actual marriage was being performed by an ex-priest who had, as I understand it, left the Catholic clergy in a quarrel over his active support of the farmworkers.

Not that Craig had a lot to do. We had not only written our vows and chosen our readings, but we had written the ceremony itself, and Craig was more of an emcee than a celebrant. But, since he was a friend of Kathy's family, he was able to say some nice things about marriage and drop in a few relevant specifics in his monologue, or preface or whatever it was. As I recall, in the write-up for the ceremony, it just said, "Craig" at that point, which left him a fair amount of latitude.

We wanted something that would express who we were, and that would reflect the culture of Boulder in which we had met, but we wanted something that looked like a wedding, too, and it did.

Our readings were from Psalms -- I think 128 -- and Kahlil Gibran, and we included a poem that was familiar to all our Boulder friends but new to everyone else, and then we were horrified a few months later when it was set to music, recorded by Les Crane and released in the Top 40, where it became one of the great cringe-inducing cliches of the era. Well, it was fresh when we served it.

We were at the church well before anyone else. Kathy actually got there quite a bit before I did, setting up the reception in the parish hall with her aunt, while I was meeting the band in Boulder and leading them down to Denver and the church. "Magic Music" was a CSN-type group who lived in a pair of school buses up over Ward, which is at about 9,450 feet. I had made the original deal with them at one of their gigs in Boulder but then had to go find them to finalize it, and that involved a lot of driving around and asking people. But it was worth it; they were one of the area's, and the era's, great treasures.

Then, before the wedding, we went out front and greeted people. We all stood and talked until we decided it was time to shoo people in so we could make our entrance and get things rolling. Oh, and while everyone was socializing, we ducked inside with Craig, my older brother Rick, who was my best man, and our ushers, our roommate Dean, and Kathy's little brother Bill, and Kathy's maid of honor, Marcie, so we could have a quick rehearsal. Then my little sisters Lois and Martha handed everyone a carnation as they entered and we got married.

The wedding reception had only the necessary formalities -- the cutting of the cake and the tossing of the bouquet. The rest of the time, people stood around and talked, and it was a great, amicable mingling of people who would have never met in real life. The pictures here, by the way, were a wedding gift by a friend of Kathy's from the Colorado Springs Sun, where she had done two internships and had made friends, and most of what happened that day, except for the band, the cake and the wine, was a gift. That's also how things were, there and then.

It was a beautiful day, and one that went off with no visible hitches, that itself being a tribute to the era, because we all assumed it would work out and we didn't sweat the details.

We had hidden our car a few blocks away, and Dean gave us a ride over there, whence we left for a one-night honeymoon before returning to Boulder and home.

The rest of the story? Well, we made it for 13 years and we produced a pair of really good kids, and we still get along just fine when fate and family obligations throw us together.

And we had a great wedding on a beautiful day, 40 years ago. The moment of beauty was there, for sure.

2011-03-12T08:10:00.005-05:00

I coulda been a contender

Yesterday, Daryl Cagle posted this cartoon, by the Spanish cartoonist KAP on Facebook calling it a "terrific cartoon about the terrible earthquake and #tsunami that hit Japan this morning."

I did not feel it was particularly terrific, and, within moments, thought of a cartoon that was equally silly and could rise equally as quickly to the status of "instant regrettable pointless cliche."

Timing of posts on Facebook after a certain point are by whole hours, so I don't know how many minutes it took to hunt up this artwork and add the haunting bit of glurge to turn it into a really stupid political cartoon. But it was less than an hour and I'd say likely more like 20 minutes, tops. I posted it as a sarcastic commentary on crappy cartooning.

This morning, as I go through the political cartoons of the past 24 hours, I spy this from professional, paid-to-do-this cartoonist Chan Lowe, who, I should note, is not a Facebook friend and would not have seen my rendering. He came up with this on his own.

And I'm sure it took more than 20 minutes to complete, because, in addition to the 30 seconds spent thinking of it, he had to redraw the whole thing, not just add a tear.

Sigh.

I have missed my calling.

2011-02-27T08:32:00.003-05:00

All's well that ends well

This news clip, about a Georgia town where a police officer halted sidewalk sales of Girl Scout cookies at a strip mall because they didn't have a peddler's permit, showed up over at HuffPost with the usual "Stormtroopers Crack Down" headlines and the predictable "shame on those officers" comments from the readers who didn't take the occasion to slam the Girl Scouts or Michelle Obama.

Pardon me if I find the clip loaded with good news nearly all around.

First, there was a misunderstanding between the police officer and the Scout leaders, and we don't know how it actually unfolded. There isn't much direct indication that the officer was hostile or confrontational, though, and it's sad that one little girl thought the adults were all going to jail. But kids that age have pretty active imaginations and you can't always lay the blame for how their minds work on anything specific they've been told.

That aside, it looks like this was handled well. The police did a nice job of explaining their point of view, how the law is intended to act and what may have gone wrong. They apologized to the kids, let them go on with only one day's interruption in their sale and made a good attempt to repair whatever misconceptions those kids may have had over the role of police in the community.

And the TV news didn't insist that the first impression was going to be what was reported. The reporter appears to have gone out and gathered the facts before she decided how to report what happened. She didn't feel compelled to stick with the "storm troopers" angle and then add "but others say" in order to downgrade the information that didn't fit her predetermined narrative.

This shouldn't be rare enough to merit comment, but that's the fact, jack. And, as evidence of how rare it is, a look at Google News shows that the rest of the media seem to have all picked up the story as a chance to flog the big bad brutal cops, even though none appear to have seen anything more than the clip above.

I thought the police chief did an excellent, articulate job of explaining not only what happened but why the new law exists in the first place, and now we get into my own personal take on this sort of thing:

I haven't seen Girl Scouts out selling cookies to passing cars and I doubt I would. But I have long argued that "boot drives" and other in-traffic fundraisers not only provide the kids with bad adult input on overall safety but are an incredibly sad and expensive lawsuit waiting to shut down the organizations that use them and the towns that allow them.

Which brings us to a very early strip in Bill Hinds' late lamented strip about youth sports, "Cleats," which you can still read in reruns here.

2011-02-15T08:46:00.003-05:00

For Esme - With Love and Milk Bones

Vaska's "aunt" Esme, seen above beating the living bejabbers out of him shortly before he left Florida to come live here, had rather a good day at Westminster Monday:

61 GCH Kengalis Spirits R Zoomin' Fm JC
Breed: Rhodesian Ridgeback
Sex: Bitch
AKC: HP 30888105
Date of Birth: July 14, 2008
Breeder: Frank Murphy & Rhanda Glenn & Kathryn Vande Logt
Sire: Ch Adili's American Idol
Dam: Ch Wall St Zoom Zoom Zoom Of FM
Owner: Ginny Merchant & George Brown

There were far too many ridgebacks entered for my comfort -- 56, far and away the most numerous breed at the show. I have had ridgebacks since 1986 and used to have to explain them to nearly everyone we met. Now it's rare that people don't recognize them straight off. I hate seeing any breed become popular for fear that it will go into cookie-cutter sameness at one end of the breeding continuum and genetic chaos at the other end.

But it's nice to know that other people think Esme is a pretty girl. There were only five merit awards handed out, so it is significant, and she is listed first.

At the time that top picture was taken, Ginny told me that Esme had to regularly be shooed out of the whelping box because she was so fascinated with the puppies that she wanted to be with them all the time. This is a good thing, since she will have a chance now to create some of her own.

And they will all be lovely examples of the breed, though none of them will be nearly as cute as her former kennel mate who, you may note, is no longer living in Florida.

This is rather a long video, but if you skip to the end, Esme and Ginny appear at the one-minute (remaining) mark.

2011-02-11T12:40:00.002-05:00

Arlo Guthrie, Colorado Springs, Nov. 1980

This interview appeared in the Colorado Springs Sun, Nov. 21, 1980. The photos are by Scott Wright. I interviewed Arlo by phone the morning before the concert, then went to hear Tom Hayden speak on campus at Colorado College. Before the talk began, Arlo walked in and sat down behind me and we ended up talking for another 20 minutes or so. He's really a what-you-see-is-what-you-get kind of guy. A few weeks after it appeared, I got a nice letter from Arlo's mother, Marjorie, which I thought was very cool.

Arlo Guthrie is a genuinely nice man.

After at least three other interviews and an energetic, substantial concert in the evening, he is standing backstage undergoing yet another cross-examination, this time by an earnest young student who wants to know if he thinks there will be an American war in the Persian Gulf.

He smiles his Arlo smile and takes a sip of beer, then begins an Arlo spiel in that same funny Arlo cadence so familiar from ''Alice's Restaurant" and "Reuben Clamzo." Is he serious? Does he really believe that we're contemplating a military annexation of Mexico to solve the energy crisis and the illegal alien problem in one fell swoop? The interviewer isn't certain, and jokes a little, but not too much ....

Twelve hours before, the cadence wasn't there. Maybe it only comes on after concerts. But when he was talking about his father and the hard-hitting biography, "Woody Guthrie: A Life," that has just hit the bookstores, his voice was lower, his tone serious, without the "ain'ts" and the "gonnas" that sprinkle his language in lighter moments. He has read Joe Klein's no-punches-pulled work.

"That's a really good book," he enthused with an almost salesman-like exuberance.

But wasn't it painful for the family?

Woody Guthrie's bout with Huntington's chorea is detailed without gloss or euphemism, from the sudden outbursts of violence to the daily continuing examples of behavior so bizarre that friends deserted him and rumors spread of alcoholism and advanced venereal disease, even after the nature of his illness was known. It must be very difficult to read about your father in this manner, when to most of the world he is still the happy, guitar-slinging little hobo.

"Well, one of the nice things about the book is that it makes up for that joke of a movie and some of the other things like that." In Arlo's world, it's better to be reminded of painful truth by Joe Klein than to endure the lies in David Carradine's fairytale," "Bound For Glory."

Both the title of Carradine's movie and the glorification of Woody Guthrie bring back a song in which Phil Ochs said of Woody;

Now they sing out his praises on every distant shore,
But so few remember what he was fighting for.
Why sing the songs and forget about the aim?
He wrote them for a reason; why not sing them for the same?"

Ochs and the elder Guthrie had a kinship of their own: Both were topical singers in troubled times.

Woody Guthrie sang for the communist groups who were the organizers of labor unions in the '30s. His famous "This Land is Your Land" was written as a working man's version of "God Bless America," a version that would express love for the country without pretending that everyone in it had a good job and enough to eat.

Phil Ochs wrote civil rights and anti-war songs in the '60s and, together with Arlo Guthrie, was called as a witness at the trial of the Chicago Eight, though neither was allowed to testify.

The most chilling similarity, however, is that both balladeers became increasingly unstable towards the ends of their lives and lost most of their friends. Ochs committed suicide; Guthrie died in a hospital.

Arlo brought out an important point about Woody, however: "Phil was so interested, so driven to be attached to the anti-war movement, to the civil rights movement, that when it became less faddish, he was left without an identity. My old.man always retained his identity and brought it with him to the groups he was involved with, and it was who he was and what he thought of himself that was always getting him into trouble with them.
"It wasn't a case at all of trying to gain an identity by fitting in with a group. My father never fit into organized movements, he never fit in really with the communists."

Perhaps the communists' were too humorless, took too utilitarian an attitude towards life?

"Not the people he was with," Arlo is quick to correct. "In fact, the only real criticism that has emerged about the book from my father's contemporaries is that Joe Klein was too hard on the Old Left, primarily because he was writing from a vantage point of 20 years of hindsight. He exaggerates somewhat and leaves the impression that they were really naive dupes.
"It's not that they had such a feel for communism so much as the personal involvement in those particular goals of social justice and so forth. Everything he says is true, every fact in there is right, but the facts he recites aren't counterbalanced by a feeling for the powerful personalities of the people involved. For them, it was a personal ideology, a desire to see a world where the rich guy wasn't always hitting the little guy over the head all the time."

So that whole group, so hard hit by the McCarthy hearings, weren't really communists after all?

"Well, to this day, if you ask Pete Seeger about his communist days, he invariably says, 'Well, you know, the American Indians are communist.” You can call it communism, but it's a lot more than simply a matter of the system in which the state relates to the individual. It's a way of life, no matter what you call yourself.
"All those people, you have to ask yourself, would they fit into a Communist system as it exists, say, in Russia? And you have to answer certainly not. Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Leadbelly, those guys would be just as rebellious over there as they were over here. Which wouldn't work out for them.
"So when Phil Ochs and those people came along in the '60s, they realized this, but they didn't know what they should call themselves. They decided on 'New Left,' so you had the New Left and the Old Left, who were just as committed to the same things they'd been doing all along."

Arlo Guthrie is less dogmatically political in his art than either his father or more recent "topical" singers; but isn't afraid to sing from a soapbox on occasion, as he did last Thursday night: He assailed nuclear energy with a song that shares its tune with a multitude of old songs including one that was a campaign song for Harrison and Tyler in 1840. A traditional tune, certainly, but hardly a traditional topic.

"I consider myself a traditionalist with a small ‘t,’" he explained. “I have a big of disagreement with the capital 'T' Traditionalists who are only interested in ‘Traditional' music. I think good music becomes traditional, that it does come out of the air to isolated people, moving them, almost like the wind, you know, the wind that has always inspired people to write and sing. It's that common experience that a song may have with another song that is actually called Traditional.
"I'm not afraid to call 'Coming into Los Angeles' traditional, or something by the Beatles or the Rolling Stones, because some of those songs become classics, like 'Yesterday.' A fellow came up to me after my last concert and said, 'How come you didn't do enough political songs? I thought you were going to come out here and get really angry at everybody. What happened to all those songs?'"

He paused to chuckle.

"Well, you know, what social value does 'Old Joe Clark' have? What was its social value at the time it was written? 'Old Joe Clark' was the disco of the 17th, 18th century. There's nothing anti-folk/traditional about doing fun songs.
"Folk music comes from all kinds of places for all kinds of reasons, and some of it is funny and some of it is irrelevant and some, on the other hand, is deeply moving and really relevant.
"You can't get much deep meaning out of the words of 'Old Joe Clark,' but then, you can't dance to 'A Hard Rain's A-gonna Fall,' either. I just try to incorporate what I think is real, incorporate that into the music I perform at a particular time."

Later that night, listening to a long-ago tale about Officer Obie and the eight-by-10 color glossy photos with the circles and arrows, you realize you are, indeed, listening to a traditional song, whether you call it that or not, because you're enjoying it and it's reminding you of things beyond just the song itself. What Arlo said in the morning, he proved on stage at night: That it doesn't matter what-you call a song, or a person. It's the underlying qualities which reveal its identity.

I came across this interview while I was looking for something else, but then this morning, I visited the outstanding folk music blog of a college coffeehouse colleague, Jim Moran, and thought maybe I should go ahead and scan this in. And now that you've read what I have to say, go see what he has to say. Yeah, and he plays better, too.

2011-02-08T08:14:00.002-05:00

Why isn't this a more common sight?

These aren't starving African children at an aid station, eating donated rice. They aren't sick, they aren't covered with flies, they aren't malnourished.

These are healthy, happy African children in a desert climate, cheerfully eating African food from their families' gardens, good, nutritious, native food that doesn't require irrigation and that doesn't fail completely when the rains don't come.

It is not a difficult concept: There would be no people in those areas, if it were not possible for the land to support them. Starvation and famine are the result of encouraging people to plant non-native cash crops that will not thrive.

I've blogged about the Eden Foundation before, which I discovered through a website I was alerted to not because of the good work they are doing, but because Esther Garvi, whose family founded the program and who grew up in rural Niger, has a Rhodesian ridgeback whose pictures she posts on her own blog.

Now my cyberfriend and fellow ridgeback owner has started a new blog that is inspiring, informative and an absolute delight: www.edengardens.org

There you can see delightful pictures of her neighbors and read short accounts of their lives. The Eden approach is a way of thinking about, and of respecting, native people that needs to spread. As stated in the "About" section of the blog, "From the very beginning, Eden’s purpose has never been to tell people how to live their lives, but to supply them with options that will enable them to achieve a sustainable life, independent of external assistance."

In the past year, there were news reports that the rains had not come, the millet crop had failed and the poor people of Niger were reduced to eating leaves.

It sounded so dire, but, knowing the work of the Eden Foundation, I wondered. After all, I eat leaves regularly: Lettuce, cabbage, artichokes, spinach ... Could I be starving and not even know it?

Esther addressed the topic in a post and identified these particular leaves as malahiya, which she notes is not only delicious itself but can be sold at a good price in the city.

I try not to be too cynical, but when I contrast the approach of setting up aid stations (pulling people off their land instead of encouraging them to farm efficiently) with the Eden approach of helping people to learn to be self-supporting, it's hard not to look upon calls for international assistance with a wary eye.

Perhaps there are places where the Eden approach cannot work, but, again, I would have to ask, how did people live there for thousands of years, before there were trucks and airplanes and large bags of grain to be distributed?

In any case, Stories from Edenland is going on my daily bookmark list because I like to read about things that work and to see pictures of smiling children.

2011-01-30T20:18:00.002-05:00

While hair was cut, male generations were joined

(This column originally ran in the Press-Republican, Plattsburgh, NY, June 12, 1994, 50 years after D-Day)

"The next generation is coming, and they need to know what happened," D-Day Veteran John Bacon told the Press-Republican. "Guys like me won't be around for the next 50 years to tell about it."

Of all the hundreds of thousands of words about D-Day over the past few weeks, none were more important than those: The next generation needs to know what happened, and there is only so much time left to gather the stories.

My grandfather was old enough to remember the first automobile in Ironwood, Mich., and lived long enough to see mankind walk on the moon, but he didn't tell many stories. He felt only old men did that, old men who bored their children with endless reminiscences of the Good Old Days.

My father has left more behind him, in the form of letters and a journal. And I will, no doubt, leave my children a haystack of published and unpublished memoirs to deal with when I'm gone.

But passing on stories from father to son, or grandfather to grandson, is not the same as passing on a cultural legacy from generation to generation.

For that, you need a marketplace, somewhere for the generations to meet.

Much of what I know about being a man, I learned at the barbershop. Women talk about the stories and lore that were passed on when women quilted, and there is even a play called "Quilters."

Maybe we need a play about men, called "Haircut."

There were two barbers in Star Lake, too many, really, for such a little place, and you had to choose to give your trade to Bob or to Charley, both of whom you knew, both of whom you would see at church, both of whom had children in school with you. Both of them were even school bus drivers.

You had to call them "Mr. Noody" and "Mr. Henry," but you thought of them as Bob and Charley, because that's what all the men at the barbershop called them.

When I was little, we went to Bob Noody, because it was handier for our dad to pick us up on his way home from work. The three of us took the bus there after school, got our hair cut and then sat and waited for our ride, while we looked at Sports Afield and listened to the men talking.

Bob had a picture on his wall of dogs playing poker, and another humorous picture depicting some hunting trip disaster. There were placards of combs and butch wax you could buy, and his barber college certificate hung on the wall. There wasn't much girlie stuff around; Bob's shop was attached to his home, and, anyway, he had more class than to have a lot of junk around the place, what with all of us kids coming in to get our hair cut.

I'm sure the jokes and stories were different when we weren't around, of course, because there were times someone would start to say something and Bob would cough and cock an eyebrow in our direction and then everyone would chuckle and pass on to another topic.

The men talked about hunting and fishing, about baseball and hockey, and about politics. And they talked about the war.

There was more than one war, of course. I was a middle child in my family, so my dad went to World War II. Some of my friends were the oldest in their families; their dads had been in Korea. Some of the older men had been in World War I.

One time, they got to talking about World War II, and Bob stopped cutting hair for a moment to pull up his trouser leg. He had a couple of round scars on his legs, about the size of quarters, from where he got shot while he was parachuting. Later, my dad told me Bob was a Ranger, and that the other guys in the army all knew the Rangers were the toughest guys around. I remember the tone of respect, almost awe, with which he spoke.

That made me look at Bob a little differently. He was kind and he always had a twinkle in his eye when he said hello to you, and he always had something special to say to you, on the bus or in church or whenever he saw you away from the barber shop. He always let you know that he was your friend, and that you were his friend, too. I think he was as pleased as I was, the day I was finally tall enough that I didn't need him to put the padded board across the arms of the barber chair.

I thought guys who jumped out of airplanes and shot people were mean and tough, but Bob wasn't mean at all. But, if he was a Ranger, that meant he was tough. It made me stop and think that maybe being tough isn't the same thing as being mean.

I don't know if there is anything more important for a boy to know than that.

I talked to my mom the other day, and she said Bob saw some of his friends on television, the guys from the 101st Airborne who were going to jump again on D-Day. Bob didn't go back to Normandy, but I'm sure he gave it more than a brief thought.

My dad didn't get to Europe until sometime after D-Day, and his stories from the war had less to do with combat than with hungry, frightened people left in the wake of the Nazi defeat. But I knew something of D-Day because of Bob, and being at Bob's barbershop.

It's ironic that, when my generation's war came along, we stopped going to barbershops. It wasn't a political decision; it was a question of fashion. We had our girlfriends cut our hair, because they knew more about dealing with long hair than the barbers did, back then.

Today, the barbershops are nearly gone. I don't know that either of my boys have ever been in a real barbershop, "real" in the sense of having Sports Afield on the table and pictures on the walls of dogs playing poker. "Real" in the sense that your mother might drop you off, but she wouldn't come in.

"Real" in the sense that a boy got a lot more at a barbershop than just a haircut.

Bob Noody in 2004

2011-01-21T18:19:00.001-05:00

Another friend from home

When I wrote about my friend Bill, I mentioned one of the last times we spoke. "It was a fine conversation, with Bill and our friend Crandall, whose story is worth a whole other post."

This is that post. That's Crandall, #44, next to Bill. A genuinely good man, but someone who, as a kid, had a steep hill to climb, not because of his own situation, but because of a situation he found himself in. He had strong character, good parents and solid values. But he had the wrong last name.

Here's a column I wrote in 1995 for the Press-Republican of Plattsburgh, NY:

When my buddy came to school each September, the teacher always had a welcoming speech ready: "Sit down and shut up. I don't want any trouble from you."

You see, he had the misfortune to be on the Faculty Mafia's hit-list.

The Faculty Mafia is a lot like the real thing: If you ask, everyone tells you it doesn't exist. It's a myth. There's no such thing.

And that's correct, to this extent: There is no formal organization, there is no recorded hit list, there is no way to trace anything. But the fact remains that every school has a core of teachers who, if you get on the wrong side of one, whether you are a kid, an untenured teacher or even an administrator with a delicate constitution, you might just as well pack up your books and move on down the road.

My friend had cousins and uncles who raised hell, and that was enough. When the family name turned up on the class roster, the old hands would roll their eyes and groan about the awful things to be expected from him, and declare that the only thing to do was to jump right on him before things got out of control.

My dad was constantly confused, because he was both my dad and a school board member, which meant he'd meet my friends in real life and get to know them, and then he'd hear about them at school board meetings and wonder how they had suddenly turned into such monsters.

In this case, he remembered my buddy from Cub Scouts, and from altar boys, and he couldn't understand why the teachers had so much trouble with him. What was confusing him, of course, was that he still thought of my friends as nice kids, so he treated them like nice kids, and so they behaved toward him like nice kids.

Most folks are like that.

Anyway, I remember sitting with my buddy in a diner late one afternoon. He was telling me that he had decided to drop out and take a job in Rochester that, I kept trying to tell him, was never going to get him anywhere.

But the only place he wanted to get was out of town, and I was hard-pressed to explain why he should stay in school. He'd flunked two years and was now only a sophomore to my senior. For me, staying in school meant a few more months; for him it was another two and half years, more if they nailed him again.

And you have to know how that time would be spent: If I were out in the hall without a pass, I'd get yelled at. He'd be put on detention at the very least. It had been that way for years, and I couldn't advise him to stick around where he clearly wasn't wanted.

So he left for Rochester and I finished school and went on to college, and we didn't see each other again for quite a while.

Then I came home for vacation and there he was, in the bar where we all hung out. He limped over, cane in hand, and we embraced in the middle of the floor, two 20-year-olds with a friendship that went back a decade-and-a-half.

We bought each other several beers, and he told me about Vietnam, and about his time rehabbing in stateside hospitals and how he was hopeful of being 100 percent before too much time had gone by.

He wasn't at all bitter. In fact, while he hadn't enjoyed being blown up, he'd had a pretty decent time since he left town, all things considered.

In the space between his words, I heard his story.

Basic training strips you of your identity, and you're only a number to the military.

Well, maybe that's bad, if you've gotten special privileges because of your name.

But he must have found a wonderful liberation at Parris Island, when those screaming, bullying drill instructors saw the name tag on his clothes and didn't even bother to read it.

They treated him like garbage, but he was used to that. What he wasn't used to was that they treated everyone like garbage. Not only that, but it seems his physical strength and mental toughness were seen as positive attributes, not the warning signs of a low-bred, hillbilly troublemaker.

In other words, he started on exactly the same footing as everyone else, and then was judged solely on his own actions and abilities, and he responded by becoming a good Marine.

It's a nice story, but those days are past. With cuts in defense, high-school dropouts can't get into the service anymore, and the only way today's kids could have that experience would be for us to declare war on somebody.

Might I suggest the Faculty Mafia?

Of course, since then we have gotten back into a war, which opens the doors of opportunity once more. I would still prefer that there be other ways for a young person of good character to succeed.

2010-12-28T18:40:00.005-05:00

Bill

Pardon me if this is not as well constructed, as coherent, as my regular posts.

Begin here: Bill's was the house where I didn't have to knock. And, if he wasn't home, I'd come in, sit at the kitchen table and talk to his mother instead. At some point, I started calling his folks "Mom" and "Dad" as a joke, because I was over there so often, but, after awhile, I just called them that because it felt comfortable and right. He did the same with my folks. Bill was family.

My dad was the assistant manager at the mine. Bill's dad worked on the trains that moved the ore. Now, on one level, this meant that my dad was an MIT graduate and I'm not sure his dad finished high school, but that had no real significance. None of us ever thought like that, and shame on us if we had.

No, the significance of that was that his dad was a shift worker and mine worked 8-to-5, which, in turn, meant that his family ate dinner at 5 o'clock and mine ate at 6:30.

For a pair of hollow-legged junior high kids, that meant, if we played our cards right, we could eat at Bill's house and then walk over to my house and have dinner again. It worked pretty well until our mothers began comparing notes.

Bill and I were best friends, but we weren't inseparable. It wasn't that kind of friendship. It was more than that.

Looking back, I'm not sure what we had in common except that we liked each other. I think that's what made our friendship so solid. There were no reasons why we were so close. We simply wanted to be friends. There was never anyone in my life I liked as much as I liked Bill, and there was never anyone who had my back the way he did. He was Sundance to my Butch.

Bill was in chorus, he played trumpet in the band and, after I'd graduated and left town, he played in a rock band with my little brother. I was a guitarslinger in college and played in an Irish band later, but it was all for show. Music never rose to the level of importance in my life that it did in Bill's.

But I enjoyed singing and Bill and I sang, mostly walking home from town in the dark, from streetlamp to streetlamp under the overhanging maples. We sang Irish folk songs like "Courting in the Kitchen" and especially "The Rocky Road to Dublin," since each verse of the latter can be done in one breath if you are very careful and walk at the right pace. And we sang, "When I Woke Up This Morning (You Were On My Mind)" and other pop tunes.

People along our route knew when we were going by, but they didn't seem to mind. I guess we didn't sound so bad.

Bill wasn't into the bar scene and very rarely came to the bar in town, despite the fact that it was the only place open after six o'clock and was a hangout even for those under the 18 drinking age. I was down there a lot, but not with Bill. I never nagged him about it. It wasn't his deal. I don't think we ever got drunk together, either. And that was okay. Bill wasn't into it.

When we first started hanging out together, we'd go out in the woods and shoot BB guns, but we outgrew that soon enough and began to center our lives around the pool table in my basement. I don't know how many games of pool we shot -- eight ball and rotation and Kelly and straight pool and such -- but we got pretty good at it. We also got pretty good at hashing out the world's problems as we shot.

At his house, we listened to the stereo. We knew all of Bill Cosby's routines by heart, and spun Herb Alpert's records until they nearly wore out. Bill's older sister ignored us, which is what older sisters do, and I think his younger sister had a crush on me for about an hour and a half. Long enough to accidentally bounce a rock off my head and embarrass herself to pieces. She was awfully cute, but also awfully young, and eventually married the little brother of a friend. Nice pair of kids and I think they're still together. Hope so.

Bill's dad lay on the couch after dinner and we left him alone. He worked hard and deserved his own time, and he wasn't much of a conversationalist to begin with. Didn't effect the way I felt about him, or the way he felt about me, as it turned out.

Once there was a forest fire along the railroad tracks, caused by a broken spark arrestor that had spewed sparks into the woods for a couple of miles. I was just 16, but Bill wasn't, yet, so I got to leave school to go help fight the fire. We filled our Indian tanks and climbed up on the locomotive to be taken from the crossroads down to the scene of the fire, and Bill's dad was on the crew that took us there. He didn't say anything to me, but he gave me a quick wink and a grin. He was proud of me for being there, and I was proud of his approval.

A couple of years later, I was home for Easter and walked over to Bill's house. He wasn't there, but his mother told me he'd gone downtown to find his little sister. I was walking in that direction when the forest ranger swung by in his pickup and said, "Peterson! Get in!" There was a fire, and he was empowered to impress anyone over 16 to help put it out.

I climbed in the back and we drove another half mile before we came across Bill, his little sister and her boyfriend. "Gebo! Get in!" the Ranger barked at Bill, then looked at the boyfriend. "Iaquinta, how old are you?" But he wasn't old enough to be impressed, and was left behind. I shouted to Mary Faith to call my folks and let them know where I was headed.

Bill and I spent about six hours on that fire and it was a great benefit. We weren't all that useful as firefighters, but it gave us an opportunity to be together and talk.

A year or so later, I saw him again. He was a pallbearer at my little brother's funeral. He was incredibly uncomfortable, so deep in his own pain that he could barely deal with the notion of having to play a public role in a very difficult moment for our entire town. I have nothing to say about that, except that there are debts that cannot be repaid.I already respected him. I already loved him. This just reminded me of why.

My next substantial time with Bill, after Tony's death, was at a bar in town with him, and my then-wife, and the Kyer sisters and a husband and a boyfriend of theirs. It was one of the best nights of drinking and talking I've ever experienced. Cathy and Cheryl were girls that every guy in high school had a crush on, but this was 10 years later and we could relax. For one thing, besides being incredibly cute, they were our buddies. For another, they'd chosen really good guys.It was a terrific night of nostalgia and philosophy and good vibes. If you asked me to freeze my life in a 12-hour period to be relived endlessly, that might well be the moment.

What I remember was that we began to talk about Tony, and about another departed friend, Jim Terry, a classmate of mine. We talked about Tony and Jim for a few minutes, and then one of the Kyer sisters stopped us. I don't remember which of them it was. "I can't talk about this anymore," she said. We were such close friends that there were things we all understood that were too painful to pursue.And yet we were such close friends that we could talk until we reached that critical point. And, at this moment, that was where we were.

I saw Bill again at a kind of homecoming that we have, given that our community is too small to try to rally individual classes for reunions. It was a fine conversation, with Bill and our friend Crandall, whose story is worth a whole other post. At that moment, we were three friends and it was worth anything in the world to be there then.

Shortly thereafter, my mother admitted that maintaining a large house designed for nine people was ineffective for one person and finally sold out. I went up to help with clearing out the old family home, after half a century.

It was my last moment in Star Lake as a resident, and so, as was only right, when we were done, I went to see Bill. I gave him the eight-ball from that pool table over which we'd spent so many hours. We misted up, we hugged. We sat and talked for awhile.

But we knew that I was leaving town. This was it.I gave him one last hug and then drove out of town.

That was five years ago. This year, on Christmas day, Bill had a stroke. And then he died.

I love Bill Gebo. I always will. He is the best friend I have ever had, and there is nothing more to be said.

I know what it means to lose a brother, and Bill was as close to Tony as I was.

And so it is appropriate for me to say that I have now, once more, lost a brother.

2010-12-25T07:06:00.000-05:00

Christmas 1952

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by His Old Man

(see below)

2010-12-20T08:14:00.001-05:00

So long, Sid and Alma

(This column originally ran in the Press-Republican of Plattsburgh, NY, in December, 1988)

I guess I won't be hearing from Alma and Sid this year.

They've sent a card every Christmas since 1974, usually early in the season. Alma doesn't procrastinate. Their card was always one of the first to arrive.

It was never a fancy card, never sentimental or religious, usually one of those whimsical cards with Santa sunbathing by a swimming pool or the reindeer pulling his golf cart or something of the sort.

And there was never a message, just their names, in what I assumed was Alma's handwriting. For years, it was "Sid and Alma and the kids," then it was "Sid and Alma." The last couple of years, it was "Alma and Sid." A little palace revolution, perhaps.

If you're waiting for some tearjerking tale about two lonely recluses with terminal diseases, spending their last pittances to mail out holiday greetings, forget it. And I don't have a fascinating, touching story to tell of how Sid and Alma acted as parents to me at a time when I really needed an anchor in this ol' world.

Fact is, I haven't got the faintest idea of who these people are.

All I know is that, a few weeks after we moved to Colorado Springs in 1974, we got the first card, postmarked Livonia, Mich. We racked our brains, trying to think of old business contacts, friends of our parents, parents of our friends.

The only guy I knew with that last name had done time in Joliet and was wanted by the Army for desertion, and I didn't think he'd be dumb enough to change his first name and then let everyone know where he was living. Anyway, if he sent whimsical cards, it would be Santa stealing a Mercedes or something, not sunning himself by the pool.

We asked a guy with my name if they were maybe friends of his, but he didn't know any Sid and Alma, either. We let it drop.

The next year, we got another card, and we wondered if maybe we should send them a note and let them know that they apparently had the wrong Petersons and might want to check on their friends. But, we figured, the right Petersons would probably send them a card or give them a call or drop them a line sometime and then they would know.

Apparently not. The cards kept coming.

We continued to think that maybe we ought to set them straight, but by then the thing had begun to take on a bizarre fascination. How long would they continue to pump out the Christmas cards without any response?

Indefinitely, I guess. Last Christmas, my mail was still eligible for forwarding from Colorado Springs, since I had been here just a shade under six months. Sure enough, Alma and Sid's card came through, with a notation from the Postal Service suggesting I advise my correspondents of my correct address.

I didn't, of course. We had decided a long time ago that it would be cheating to encourage them in their spendthrift ways.

But I would like to be a fly on the wall in Livonia, Mich., when this year's card comes back to them, and Sid asks Alma, "Who the heck are the Petersons, anyway?"

2010-12-13T18:21:00.000-05:00

The Speaker and the Demagogue
Were walking near the reef;
They wept like anything to see
So many on relief:
"If they would only go away,"
They said, "t’would cure our grief!"

"If tax breaks for the upper class
Could last beyond this year,
Do you suppose," the Speaker said,
"These poor would disappear?"
"I’m certain," said the Demagogue,
And shed a bitter tear.

"It seems a shame," the Speaker said,
"To play them such a trick,
After we've led them on so far,
With promises so slick!"
The Demagogue said nothing but
"Their health care makes me sick!"

"I weep for them," the Speaker said:
"I deeply sympathize."
With sobs and tears he sorted out
Those of the largest size,
Holding his pocket-handkerchief
Before his streaming eyes.

"O Listeners," said the Demagogue,
"You've had a pleasant run!
Shall you be tuning in again?'
But answer came there none--
And this was scarcely odd, because
They'd eaten every one.

2010-12-11T22:29:00.001-05:00

Vaska has arrived

From left, Vasily Vasilievich Orlov-Denisov, Vasily Dmitrich Denisov and Denis Vasilievich Davydov

Tolstoy is acknowledged to have used Davydov, the romantic partisan cavalryman and poet, as a model for the character of Nicholai Rostov's brother-in-arms Vaska Denisov, but it's obvious he took at least part of the name from the Cossack cavalry commander Orlov-Denisov, who was both more prominent and more conventional than Davydov.

The fellow on the left was a Don Cossack, the one on the right, though he rode with Cossacks, was apparently not ethnically one himself. The one in the middle is proving to be a perfect little Tatar, and that's what I was hoping for. The character in "War and Peace" for whom he is named is a sidekick in the got-your-back sense of the Sundance Kid rather than in the whatever-you-say-boss sense of Sancho Panza.

Vaska flew into Burlington Thursday night, just in time for a holiday photo promotion Saturday to support the dog park that he won't be allowed to visit until after his next round of puppy shots on the 28th. Meanwhile, we're taking walks at another, less potentially infectious, park to try to work off some of the energy of this little fellow.

The first night, he slept fairly well, but that was apparently the result of a long day of airplanes and airports coming up from Orlando. Friday night, he regaled the house all night long with rousing choruses of the dog folksong, "I Do Not Wish To Be In This Crate." And the house next door as well, apparently, since on Saturday the neighbor commented, across the fence and two driveways that separate us, that he had figured I had a new puppy after hearing the commotion the night before. Yes, in winter with all windows closed.

And Saturday's holiday shoot was a pretty good demonstration of why we should all be happy that human babies are not terribly mobile, because a nine-week-old puppy is very much a baby and we ended up with a great many out-of-focus shots of a 19-pound puppy running around pulling up the fluffy cotton floor spread, attacking the decorative stuffed animals and attempting to undecorate the tree, before we finally got a few of him sitting still without a restraining hand in the shot.

On the other hand, he is wonderfully social and was pleased to greet everyone at the store, and I have no doubt that he will be very nice to walk down the street with.

Assuming he eventually comes to realize the difference between a leashed dog and a roped calf.

2010-11-30T17:22:00.008-05:00

Waiting for the vacuum cleaner, or someone like him

I had two granddaughters over for dinner and a movie the other night. After they left, I had to pick up a few pieces of popcorn from the floor.

It really made me feel put upon: I haven't had to pick up food from the floor in a very long time. I think it was 1997 when my dog O'Malley had a heart attack, and I had to wait three or four weeks for Destry to be old enough to leave his mother and come live with me.

Before that, it was another three- or four-week stint between giving up Creamcheese, a dog I had been keeping for an ex-girlfriend who finally moved off-campus, and joining up with Taylor, a little mix who provided laughs, mostly at his own expense, for the next 14 years. That was in September, 1970.

So Vaska arrives Friday, and popcorn isn't the only thing I'm getting up off the floor between now and then, because popcorn isn't the only thing that he's going to decide belongs in his mouth. It's been a long time since I've had to puppy-proof a home and I am not running out of things to do while I wait for the vacuum cleaner.

UPDATE: The vacuum cleaner will not arrive until Monday, possibly Tuesday. He had a bit of minor surgery -- the sort of thing that is absolutely necessary but not major -- and apparently got a couple of his stitches yanked while he was playing with the Big Dogs. So there's some swelling that needs to come down and he'll be along shortly. And I just won't make popcorn until then.

2010-11-24T11:41:00.006-05:00

I don't know why you say good-bye, I say hello

Zee, that lovely, gentle girl, is suddenly gone, and there's not much to be said about it. She had been having some pain and mobility issues all summer and at first they responded to a combination of rest or exercise depending on what she had been up to the day before. And then about a month ago, she started a real decline. One night, she shifted on the couch and was suddenly ki-yi-ing in agony. I brought her to the vet and he thought he had found the answer.

Unfortunately, he had not. I've always said that I'd spend any amount of money for something that worked but not a penny on something that would only make me feel better and not help the dog. This suddenly went from one of the former to one of the latter. When he did a secondary exam before the scheduled operation, things didn't add up and some additional testing showed deterioration of the spinal chord, a condition that made the test itself too much for the girl. There was no point in even waking her up, since she would have been in agony and would likely not have even made it home.

As it was, her last conscious time was fairly pleasant. Some painkillers were helping and she was able to go to the dogpark and see her friends, human and canine. And that was that. A fun, terrific dog and the house is brutally empty at the moment.

I knew I couldn't be like that very long and began to make some contacts. I expected, at best, to find a new litter somewhere that might be ready in six weeks or a month. But by sheer happenstance, when I contacted a ridgeback breeder in Florida who had been a classmate of my brother in high school, she had a rambunctious male puppy nearly ready to go out the door. He will arrive a week from Friday, and it happens to be a week that I have off, so we can have plenty of time for bonding and going for walks and suchlike.

That is a picture of Vaska and his brothers above. "Vaska" is short for Vasili Dmitreivich Denisov, whom Tolstoy fans will remember as the brave, tender-hearted, fearless, romantic leader of Cossack partisan cavalry. Brother-in-arms to Nicholai Rostov, he's one of the great "buddies" in all of literature.

And I'd say he has big shoes to fill, but, then again, look at those feet.

2010-11-17T18:59:00.003-05:00

Liars, damned liars and Fox News

Fox News has outdone themselves, decrying Barack Obama's children's book because it included Sitting Bull as one of the great Americans profiled. "Obama Praises Indian Chief Who Killed U.S. General," the headline read.

Now, first of all, Custer, though named a brevet general during the Civil War, had resumed his rank of colonel at the time of his death, with "Gen. Custer" being only a honorary title. More to the point, while Sitting Bull was in the Indian camp at the time of Custer's attack, he had no military role whatsoever, even as a footsoldier. The defense of the combined force was lead by Crazy Horse and Gall.

So there was no general present, and Sitting Bull didn't participate in the battle.

Not only is Fox News completely inaccurate, but they aren't even terribly original in their bigotry and lies. Luther Standing Bear was a young Lakota at the Carlisle School in the late 19th century, and worked at Wanamaker's Department Store in Philadelphia. He tells this story in his autobiography, "My People the Sioux."

Hucksters, liars and cheats haven't changed much.

********

One evening while going home from work, I bought a paper, and read that Sitting Bull, the great Sioux medicine man, was to appear at one of the Philadelphia theaters.

The paper stated that he was the Indian who killed General Custer! The chief and his people had been held prisoners of war, and now here they were to appear in a Philadelphia theater. So I determined to go and see what he had to say, and what he was really in the East for.

I had to pay fifty cents for a ticket. The theater was decorated with many Indian trappings such as were used by the Sioux tribe of which I was a member.

On the stage sat four Indian men, one of whom was Sitting Bull. There were two women and two children with them.

A white man came on the stage and introduced Sitting Bull as the man who had killed General Custer (which, of course, was absolutely false).

Sitting Bull arose and addressed the audience in the Sioux tongue, as he did not speak nor understand English. He said, 'My friends, white people, we Indians are on our way to Washington to see the Grandfather, or President of the United States. I see so many white people and what they are doing, that it makes me glad to know that some day my children will be educated also. There is no use fighting any longer. The buffalo are all gone, as well as the rest of the game. Now I am going to shake the hand of the Great Father at Washington, and I am going to tell him all these things.'

Then Sitting Bull sat down. He never even mentioned General Custer's name.

Then the white man who had introduced Sitting Bull arose again and said he would interpret what the chief had said. He then started in telling the audience all about the battle of the Little Big Horn, generally spoken of as the 'Custer massacre.' He mentioned how the Sioux were all prepared for battle, and how they had swooped down on Custer and wiped his soldiers all out. He told so many lies that I had to smile.

One of the women on the stage observed me and said something to the other woman, then both of them kept looking at me.

Then the white man said that all those who wished to shake hands with Sitting Bull would please line up if they cared to meet the man who had killed Custer. The whole audience got in line, as they really believed what the white man had told them.

It made me wonder what sort of people the whites were, anyway. Perhaps they were glad to have Custer killed, and were really pleased to shake hands with the man who had killed him!

I lined up with the others and started for the stage, not intending to say a word. But the woman who had first noticed me smiling from my seat, watched me all the closer as I came toward them. She grabbed me by the hand, not knowing exactly what to say and not knowing if I were really an Indian boy.

Finally she spoke in Sioux as follows: 'Niye osni tona leci,' which meant, 'How many colds (or winters) are you here?' I replied in Sioux, 'In winter we have so many cold days here that I do not know really how many colds I have been here.'

That sort of broke the ice, and she laughed, then the other Indians laughed. Then she asked me who my father was. I replied, 'Standing Bear of Rosebud is my father.'

‘Why,' she exclaimed, 'then you are my nephew.' Then she called her brother, who was Sitting Bull. 'See who is here.' He was pleased to see me again.

Of course this caused some excitement among the crowd of white people. I had been working in the store so long that I had become lighter in complexion. All the Indians then crowded about me, forgetting all about shaking hands with the crowd of white people, who could not understand it.

The white man who had spoken on the stage now came up to see what was the matter and why the Indians had suddenly left off shaking hands with the others. Sitting Bull beckoned him to come up, then he turned to me and said, 'Tell this white man we want you to go to our hotel with us to eat.'

So I interpreted what Sitting Bull requested, and the man said, 'Why, yes, you can come with them.' Then the Indians packed up their things which decorated the hall and were very anxious to get back to the hotel where they could have a talk with someone who understood them.

When we reached the hotel, Sitting Bull said to me that he was on his way to Washington to shake hands with the President, and that he wanted his children educated in the white man's way, because there was nothing left for the Indian.

He then asked me how far it was to Washington, and in what direction it was. I told him that it was toward the sunset, and that he was now in Philadelphia, a long way east of Washington. Sitting Bull expressed much surprise, saying, 'Why, we must have passed the place.' Then I told him he certainly had.

Then the white man entered the room, and Sitting Bull said to me again, 'Ask this white man when we are going to see the President, and when we are going home.' The man said to tell him, 'You are soon going home, and on the way you may see the President.' As the man remained in the room, I did not get a chance to tell Sitting Bull how the white man had lied about him on the stage.

And that was the last time I ever saw Sitting Bull alive.

As I sit and think about that incident, I wonder who that crooked white man was, and what sort of Indian agent it could have been who would let these Indians leave the reservation without even an interpreter, giving them the idea they were going to Washington, and then cart them around to different Eastern cities to make money off them by advertising that Sitting Bull was the Indian who slew General Custer!

Of course at that time I was too young to realize the seriousness of it all.

(About 10 years ago, I was working on a project that included material about the Lakota, and came across "My People the Sioux." I called the tribal historian at Standing Rock to verify that Luther Standing Bear was considered a reliable source and was assured that he and his books are.)

2010-11-09T18:24:00.008-05:00

Si mi quieres escribir, ya sabes mi paradero

Actually, what I meant to say was not "If you want to write to me, you know where to find me," but, rather, if you are wondering why I don't update nellieblogs more often, it's because a lot of my energy is being expended over at Comic Strip of the Day.com, where my latest posting is about the New England Webcomics Weekend.

This particular entry might be a bit too much inside-baseball for non-comics fans, but there's a lot of talk about web vs. print and how all this online stuff works in the real world, and I don't think you have to know much about webcomics to get something out of it.

In any case, that's where you'll find me. Most days, the favored comic is basically a prompt for whatever is on my mind. Come have a look.

And I'll be back here regularly, too. But the beast is over there, where I have set myself up in a position where I must post every day before 6:45 a.m.

I think I'm often coherent at that hour, but you be the judge.

And if you wonder at the headline, it is the title of a classic song from the Spanish Civil War. "If you want to write to me, you know where to find me: On the front at Gandesa, in the first line of fire."

Not all that relevant to this post - in fact, it's not in the least bit relevant - but, damn, it's one helluva great old tune:

2010-10-29T18:24:00.005-04:00

Al Jazeera analyzes the Wikileaks files

Okay, this is just under an hour long. Hardly the sort of thing you click on as part of your morning web routine. But it's a very good analysis of the leaked files, covering a great number of topics. I had a few quibbles over questions I wish they had asked or points I wish they had insisted on forcing someone to clarify, but this is, overall, an excellent job, both of taking apart the actual information and of putting into context.

A source or two are partisan, but you need that perspective. The interviewer doesn't call names, but he certainly lets those couple of people hang themselves. (Notably the fellow who thinks the Americans are supporting Iran's interference. The interviewer doesn't press him to prove it, but, then, why should he? The statement speaks for itself, and adds critical context to his other remarks.) And I don't follow the Wikileaks founder down the line, but he makes some good points.

The section on Blackwater is absolutely appalling, as one would expect, but much of the rest is sad and tragic and often infuriating, yet couched in the context of a sad, tragic and infuriating war where, indeed, sh*t happens.

Not that you aren't permitted to break out a shovel when it does.

So here it is, and I think it matters. When you find that the alternative is "Dancing with the Stars" or something about real housewives, pretend it's just a TV show rather than something on the computer and give it a watch. (You will want to click on it to go to YouTube and then make it full screen.)

It's an hour well-spent.

UPDATE: Al Jazeera has lost its press privileges in Morocco and its Rabat bureau has been shut down. From the story:
"It's a very surprising decision from the government, especially because there was no legal background. It's just a very administrative and political decision," Vincent Brossel of Reporters without Borders told Al Jazeera from Paris.
He said that RSF "suspect that this decision is linked to the way your channel has been covering different issues, especially the Western Sahara, and I think it's mainly because you open your microphone to all sides, and not only the government's side".

2010-10-22T18:16:00.001-04:00

In which Juan escapes the NPR Sweatshop

First of all, the volume of feigned outrage and deliberately false information being voiced over the Juan Williams firing is appalling and contemptible. The talking heads and politicians are most certainly lying, because they could not possibly be unaware of the policies and issues surrounding the event. And his own whining and playing of the victim card is contemptible. We know the man is not stupid; is he blinded by his own arrogance? Speculation is pointless.

However, I'm seeing a lot of sincere concern from people outside the industry who genuinely don't understand what happened and how Williams' actions made his termination both understandable and remarkable only for his apparent unwillingness to avoid it.

There's no point in debating the liars, but I'm perfectly happy to try to help other people understand what appears, from this distance, to have happened.

Let's start with some basics:

Nobody took away his rights to free speech. He sold them. Journalists routinely agree to certain restrictions on personal expression when they accept the job. It's generally part of the intake process: You sign up for health insurance, you fill out your IRS form, you offer proof of citizenship, you sign off on the conflict-of-interest and ethics policies. There is absolutely nothing remarkable about it.

That doesn't mean it doesn't come up for discussion. Part of standard journalistic ethics is that you put your politics in your back pocket. John Chancellor famously refused to vote because he felt the process of deciding who to vote for would prejudice him, but I'm not the only person who thought that was kind of silly. However, it is understood that you do not wear political buttons, you don't put partisan bumperstickers on your car, you don't put political signs on your lawn. While it's not required, most journalists register as independents rather than as members of a political party. And, in parts of New England, you don't participate in the discussion or the voice votes at Town Meeting, though you can drop a ballot into a box when it comes to that, because no-one will know how you voted.

Town Meeting does get talked about, as, I would assume, would Caucus participation. The hotter topic, however, is attending political rallies for causes. It's generally accepted that you can't go to candidate rallies, and it's clear that you can march to find a cure for cancer,but it becomes cloudy in the middle, when the march is pro-life or pro-choice, for example. It ain't partisan, but it's sure as hell political.

At some places, you are not supposed to attend rallies or go on marches. At others, you may attend but may not take a visible role: you can't speak, you can't be one of the organizers, you can't be one of the people holding up the big banner as you march down the street. But you can be there. I don't know which of these two policies is more prevalent, but, while it may be a relief to find that a potential employer has the more permissive policy, it's not shocking to find that a media outlet follows the stricter rule. It's like whether or not the dress code requires you to wear a tie in the newsroom.

NPR does take the strict approach, and raised some concerns last week when they sent out an all-hands memo on the subject of the upcoming Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert gatherings, apparently to clarify whether these were comedy shows or political rallies. NPR declared them political and reminded staff to abide by the company's policy against attending same. Both right- and left-wing media outlets squawked about freedom, but the majority of journalists shrugged.

Why do such policies exist? Nobody expects journalists not to have opinions. But there is a kind of don't-ask-don't-tell policy on this, and I think it's well-reasoned. Of course you have opinions, but, in order to be a fair reporter of fact, you have to have the ability to set those opinions aside. If you feel so passionately about an issue that you can't bear not wearing the button or displaying the bumpersticker, it suggests that you won't be able to write about someone who stands in opposition to that issue.

And there is another matter here. It is not enough for Caesar's wife to be virtuous. She must be above suspicion. Similarly, it is not enough for a reporter to write fairly. He must appear not to be overtly partisan. We have seen throughout the past few years and certainly in this campaign season, that a great many people judge "truth" and "fairness" by whether it agrees with their existing opinions. They search for reasons to distrust media, and, if they spotted a reporter, even off-duty, at a partisan rally, they'd assume prejudicial reporting no matter how fair-minded that journalist might be.

Is that fair? A story here: When I was freelancing in Colorado in the 1980s, I interviewed Hal Kennedy, who had been the anchor at the local CBS affiliate practically since it first went on the air. Hal enjoyed being known, but he said it imposed a strange burden: Suppose, he said, I'm down in my basement working on my hot water heater, and I realize I need a washer. I can't just wipe the grime off my hands and jump in the car. I have to shower and change, because, if I go to the hardware store in grubby clothes, with dirt and grease on my face, somebody will say, "I saw Hal Kennedy in the middle of the day, and he'd been drinking."

Several years later, when I had been a reporter for a few years in Plattsburgh, I had just begun dating a woman and we needed to go get something at the grocery store. I insisted on changing, and told her the Hal Kennedy story. She laughed it off as my ego, but, a few weeks later, she said, "Boy, you weren't kidding. Everybody knows who you are!"

The notion that Juan Williams was "off the clock" when he appeared on Fox simply won't hold water. To begin with, salaried people are never on or off the clock. Not only is there no such thing as "overtime" when you aren't paid by the hour, but, at that level of responsibility, you can get called into work at any hour of the day.

More to the point, just as Hal Kennedy was always Hal Kennedy, Juan Williams is always Juan Williams. Part of what he has to offer an employer is recognizability. In the modern parlance, it's branding. If he wants to be anonymous, let him stack cartons in a warehouse. But Mel Gibson screaming at a cop at 3 a.m. is still Mel Gibson the movie actor. Ben Rothlisberger taking advantage of a drunken coed at a bar in Mississippi is still the quarterback of the Pittsburgh Steelers. You can't profit from your image and also expect to turn off that identity at will.

An employer who pays large sums of money for that established identity has every right to protect that investment. Aside from code-of-conduct agreements to avoid scandal, it's reasonable, for instance, for a sports team to insist that an athlete not go skydiving or even play pick-up basketball for fear of injury. After all, they are purchasing the physical prowess and fitness of the athlete.

The employer of a journalist is buying credibility, and they are specifically paying for that person's ability to speak into a microphone and tell people things that those people will rely on and believe. In the case of Juan Williams, he was being paid as an analyst, as distinct from a commentator. His ability to deliver credible analysis of the news was dependent on his being seen as a fair person without strong prejudices. Not a person without opinions -- that would be foolish. But as a person who keeps his opinions in his back pocket. By seeking to trade on those opinions, by selling his commentary in the street, he undermined his value to NPR.

None of this dropped out of the sky. To begin with, Williams was bound by a clearly stated, well-publicized code of ethics. There was no surprise here: You couldn't work at NPR without knowing it. Nor did his firing "just happen." As stated by his superior, it came after numerous discussions with him about the limits of his outside activities and the violations of his contract that he was committing. To say that they should have warned him is quite right -- They should have, and they did. He continued to defy them and they finally had enough.

And now we come to the whine of the kid who has been kicked out of class: "All I did was ..." There is much talk of what he said the other night and whether it merited firing. Machs nix. "All I did was toss a paperwad," but it was the last straw, and the last straw doesn't have to weigh a ton to break the camel's back. You didn't get kicked out of class for the paper wad. You got kicked out for the paper wad and all that came before it.

Finally, I have heard the argument that, because NPR receives federal funding, their employees should have the freedom to express their opinions whenever and however they like.

All I can say to that is that, if this theory becomes law, it is really going to change things down at Parris Island.

2010-10-12T16:51:00.002-04:00

Ay Caramba!

I haven't watched the Simpsons in years, but here's the opening from last Sunday's show, which was created by an English artist known for tweaking noses.

I found it at The Daily Cartoonist, who referenced this site for a full explanation.

Were the show's creators trying to draw attention to the unethical business practices an animated series must engage in to remain competitive? Are viewers meant to draw conclusions about our own complicity as we consumers indirectly fund companies that enslave people overseas? Or was the sequence merely a stunt calculated to bring attention — negative or not — on an aging, fading series?

Um, I dunno. But, like, wow.

2010-10-09T16:12:00.002-04:00

Have a little sample under the counter

I've just posted the first three chapters of my new serial, "Hooch," at www.teachup.com, together with Christopher Baldwin's illustrations. The story is set in Northern New York, somewhat to the east of where I grew up but exactly where I lived from 1987 to '93 and where my own boys went to high school. It's about a young boy in the days of Prohibition when the border, and the tangle of small, local roads below it, invited locals to become involved in rumrunning and people like Legs Diamond occasionally came up for a visit.

The story will be carried in newspapers throughout New York state this spring as part of their outreach to schools. I'm currently working on the teaching guide, and there will be an essay contest. This is the sixth year the New York Newspaper Publishers Association has sponsored the program and the third time I've written the serial.

Fun stuff to write, and even more fun when I start hearing from the kids. Come have a look!

2010-09-29T20:22:00.002-04:00

Too little, too late?

I worry that my speech today is too little, too late. I worry that many Americans have already formed their opinion about the Recovery Act, based on the inaccuracies they hear from beltway pundits or from their elected officials.

Al Franken may be right -- after all, they say a lie is halfway around the world before the truth has put on its shoes. And this speech was given to an empty Senate Chamber.

But it's worth a look, as he talks about the success of the Recovery Act, and refutes the lies and distortions that are already out there.

The speech is the fastest half hour you'll spend this week, and perhaps the most valuable, but it is 27 minutes. For those who don't have that kind of time, here's the transcript.

And here are a few excerpts:

My friends on the other side of the aisle often imply that tax cuts would have been more effective than the Recovery Act. But perhaps they've forgotten that over one-third of the Recovery Act was comprised of tax cuts.

Unfortunately, the tax cuts were designed in a way so that many Americans didn't notice they were getting them. An extra twenty bucks on your paycheck adds up for you and the economy over time, but people don't notice like they do a big lump-sum refund. But here's the thing about lump-sum refunds-people like to save them, or pay off debts with them. When you get an extra twenty bucks in a paycheck, you're likely to spend it-giving the economy a boost.

This explains one unfortunate paradox of the Recovery Act-because the tax cut was well-designed, it helped boost consumer spending. . . but nobody noticed it. But that's not a failure of the Recovery Act policy, that's a failure of getting the message to American taxpayers.

And the tax cuts in the Recovery Act did their part. According to CBO, tax cuts for those in lower income brackets increased GDP by $1.70 for every dollar spent. But, for those who would argue that the Recovery Act should have been only tax cuts, consider this. While tax cuts for the lower brackets yielded a $1.70 GDP boost, tax cuts for high income earners and companies only raised GDP by 50 cents per dollar spent. And neither of these figures compare to the return on the Recovery Act's public works investments-an impressive $2.50 increase in GDP for every dollar spent.

* * *

Here's another project in Two Harbors, building a water tower. In addition to five crews of workers on the project, the tower tank is made of 723,000 pounds of American steel, and the rebar is another 33,000 pounds of American steel. So additional American workers made that steel. And more American workers mined the taconite. On Minnesota's Iron Range. More jobs.

I visited Two Harbors on September 6th, just a few weeks ago, and personally saw this project in-progress. Now, these folks aren't in suits and ties, shuffling papers. They're building bridges, roads, and water towers.

These projects are going to improve transportation, health, and safety for people in Minnesota. And because of these jobs, made possible by the Recovery Act, they will be able to keep a roof over the heads of their families, put food on the kitchen table, send their kids to college, and, yes, buy stuff.

* * *

Everywhere I go, they thank me for the Recovery Act. They thank me for the teachers and firefighters, for the Workforce Investment Act funds, which they used to train people for jobs. For the highway extension or the wastewater plant or the funds for rural broadband or for weatherization of public buildings.

In fact, Michael Gunwald, writing for Time Magazine, said this: "the Recovery Act is the most ambitious energy legislation in history, converting the Energy Department into the world's largest venture-capital fund. It's pouring $90 billion into clean energy, including unprecedented investments in a smart grid; energy efficiency; electric cars; renewable power from the sun, wind and earth; cleaner coal; advanced biofuels; and factories to manufacture green stuff in the U.S. The act will also triple the number of smart electric meters in our homes, quadruple the number of hybrids in the federal auto fleet and finance far-out energy research through a new government incubator modeled after the Pentagon agency that fathered the Internet."

A few weeks ago I heard a prominent conservative talking head on one of the Sunday news shows describe the Recovery Act this way. He said:
If I pay my neighbor $1,000 to dig a hole in my backyard and fill it up again and he pays me $1,000 to dig a hole in his backyard and fill it up again, according to the national income statistics, that's a $2,000 increment to GDP and two jobs have been created. The American people understand, however, there's no real wealth created in this kind of transfer payment.

How out of touch. How downright offensive. And yet this is why so many Americans believe that the Recovery Act hasn't created any jobs or just created jobs for bureaucrats.

2010-09-23T17:52:00.008-04:00

Larry the Animal

I doubt that Larry the Animal thought twice when he saw the lineup of motorcycles outside the Bonnie Doon, sporting colors. After all, the Undertakers were his friends. They did business together. And he really wanted a milkshake, so he walked on in.

I can't remember when I first met Larry the Animal, but I suppose it was my sophomore year in college. Larry was one of those high school kids who hang around campus because he's too smart for his contemporaries, but he's not quite socially poised enough to realize that he doesn't really fit in with the college kids, either. Larry was bright and funny and harmless enough, and so we took him in and let him hang around like a stray puppy.

And he really was a stray. Larry had been tossed out of his own home, probably for being too stiff-necked to cut his hair and behave the way his parents wanted. And I'm sure -- very sure -- that he mouthed off to his parents. There was no filter between Larry's brain and Larry's mouth and it was a time when there was plenty of positive reinforcement around for shooting off your mouth in defense of freedom. So Larry lived with Laurie, another high school kid. They weren't boyfriend and girlfriend, simply a pair of bright kids, but apparently Laurie's parents were more tolerant than Larry's.

They'd have to be, because Larry would try anyone's tolerance. He was obnoxious. But, at that time, there was a strong tendency towards tolerating people, and so Larry was welcome. After all, in addition to being obnoxious, he was funny and smart and good-natured. I'm sure I got a few passes on the same basis.

I'm not sure how Larry got by in the world, but it appeared to be a combination of Laurie's parents providing room and board and Larry doing some hustling and a fair amount of dealing.

Larry got his nickname, "Larry the Animal," because he could be clean-shaven one day and heavily bearded the next. You could sit and watch his beard grow. To give you a visual, imagine if Benny Hill, rather than Robbie Coltrane, had been chosen to play Hagrid in the Harry Potter movies. Like Benny, Harry wore wire-rimmed specs and had a constant expression of cheerful expectation. Like Hagrid, he was covered with hair.

In fact, Larry the Animal was so hairy and jolly-looking that he was, very briefly, employed as Santa Claus at the department store downtown. Anyone who has done this job knows about the wiseass teenagers who try to goof on ol' Santa, but they got a shock when they'd sit on Santa-the-Animal's lap and ask him for a nickel bag of Panama Red.

"Ho-ho-ho," Santa would say. "I don't know about that, but maybe Santa could hook you up with some Michoacan that the elves just scored, or how about some blonde Lebanese hash?"

However, the career of Larry the Santa Claus ended abruptly when a pair of South Bend police were headed up on an escalator on which he was headed down, and wished him a merry Christmas, to which Santa responded by suggesting an anatomical impossibility, adding a porcine epithet.

Larry didn't consider this in the least a setback. The job hadn't been that much fun, and he really didn't like the police. The fact that the Santa gig had been providing him with pocket money was, well, not a priority.

Larry had good reason to dislike the police. As a kid with long hair, he was hassled on a regular basis. And, as a kid who couldn't keep his big mouth shut, he was hassled more often than other long-haired kids. South Bend wasn't so big a city that anyone who bothered to stand out was lost in the mix.

The South Bend cops were not so good at undercover work -- they tended to the oxfords-and-white-socks fashions. But even a blind pig finds some acorns, and Larry the Animal was eventually busted for possession.

We all heard that Larry had been busted, but there was often a gap between the bust and the result of the bust. Still, it seemed like Larry was out on the street a long time after we'd all heard he had been busted.

And then a pattern seemed to emerge.

Larry the Animal might have stayed out of the clink, but his clients did not.

Had the South Bend police been more polished in their approach, the link might have gone undetected a little longer, but the connection between dealing with Larry and getting busted became pretty clear in a short period of time.

For example, someone bought grass from Larry and, by the time he got home, found police cars in his driveway. It did not take long for people to begin to connect the dots.

But Larry the Animal went on his merry way, believing that his accomodating manner had saved him from a jail sentence and would also go unnoticed in the world.

So when he dropped acid one day and, somehow in the course of his trip decided that a milkshake would be a very nice aesthetically-enhanced experience, he had no hesitation to head down to the Bonnie Doon.

Now, not everyone who trips on acid wants a food experience, but any experience you have on LSD will be greatly enhanced.

Including walking into a roomful of motorcycle bandits who know why you aren't in jail.

2010-09-11T21:35:00.004-04:00

What if people judged gun owners the way

they judge Muslims?

What if all gunowners were judged by the actions

of a crazed, dangerous few?

Imagine how talk shows would respond to these stories,

all of which appeared in a single week:

A man is in critical condition after being shot Saturday morning at a convenience store in southwest Atlanta.

Five bystanders were shot during a wild gun fight that took place last night outside a Long Island bar.

An unidentified man in Kentucky shot and killed five people before turning the gun on himself after a domestic dispute on Saturday, Breathitt County Sheriff Ray Clemons told CNN

Minutes after a woman was suspended from her job at a Kraft Foods Inc. plant and was escorted out, she returned with a handgun and opened fire, killing two people and critically injuring a third before being taken into custody, police said.

Edgar Cooper said he was shocked to learn his 14-year-old daughter had been shot in the forehead while walking home from her first day of high school Tuesday.

A man was shot and seriously wounded last night inside a barbershop on Tremont Street in Roxbury, a relative of the victim and police said.

A 45-year-old woman was shot in a drive-by shooting early Saturday in what police believe was an act of retaliation for a stabbing the night before.

A 16-year-old male was found suffering from gunshot wounds early Saturday morning in the 1100 block of Virginia Ave., according to a news release.

Kansas City police say Montra Johnson of Kansas City was found shot to death at the bus stop Thursday. His identity was released Saturday.

Investigators say 36-year-old Thomas London was found in the parking lot of the Majestic Nightclub on Cusseta Road 2 AM Saturday morning suffering from multiple gunshot wounds.

DeSoto Parish sheriff's deputies say a man who refused to prosecute his father-in-law for a shooting five years ago has allegedly been shot by him again.

Two people were injured in a shooting Thursday afternoon near Hirsch High School on the city's South Side.

Authorities are investigating after one person was shot and killed this afternoon in Beltzhoover.

At the corner of 9th and Monroe streets, responding officers located a 28-year-old Wilmington man suffering from a single gunshot wound to his head. The victim was pronounced dead at the scene where he was then transported to the state's medical examiner's office.

Police detectives are looking for a suspect who they believe shot and killed a 54-year-old man on Friday night.

A home invasion Friday in Richmond left one man with a bullet wound to his leg.

A Crawfordsville man charged in the shooting death of his girlfriend's daughter might have been told to take a gun to the room where she and other kids were playing to scare them.

A Capitol Heights teenager who was shot Tuesday night died Wednesday, authorities said.

An 18-year-old woman was arrested this afternoon after she was accused of shooting a man while they were camping on Mount Lemmon, authorities said.

Two teenagers were shot just outside of Mumford High School in Detroit this afternoon on the first day of school

A 14-year-old boy was shot in the leg Friday evening while walking in the Pullman neighborhood on the South Side.

A Knoxville man is in critical condition after being shot in the neck late last night, city police said.

An Antioch man was shot dead during an argument near an East Oakland taco truck, and investigators are trying to determine whether he was killed with his own gun.

The triggerman behind the drive-by shooting that killed a 14-year-old boy and injured two others outside a Paterson bodega might have been seeking retribution for a fatal shooting earlier this week, police said today.

Authorities have identified the man shot while driving at Oakridge Drive and Mia Avenue on Friday, Sept. 10.

A teenager who was charged with manslaughter and had escaped from a mental health facility while awaiting a final resolution on the case was fatally shot Monday night in Mattapan, officials said yesterday.

Clarksville Police responded Friday night to Lincoln Homes, where a 14-year-old girl had been shot while inside a residence on Ford Street.

A Jackson delivery man who was shot on the job has died. It happened around 3:30 Friday afternoon at the Super Saver convenience store on Medgar Evers Boulevard near Palmyra Street.

A young boy and a 25-year-old man were shot and wounded on the city's West Side Friday night.

Police believe robbery was the motive behind the fatal shooting Tuesday afternoon of the co-owner of a DeKalb strip club.

Eva May Francis died after being shot while her home likely was being robbed, Gwinnett County police said Thursday.

A 25-year-old man was shot in the thigh Friday afternoon in north Stockton, and police were searching for the assailant.

An elderly man and his nephew were found shot dead at a neighborhood in southwest Atlanta, detectives said.

A renowned car racer and auto shop owner was discovered shot to death inside his El Monte business early Wednesday after he failed to return home the night before, investigators said.

A man was fatally shot inside a car in Hartford North End Friday morning, police said.

Atlanta officials said they are investigating a deadly shooting in which a father killed his own son.

Atlantic City police spokeswoman Sgt. Monica McMenamin tells The Press of Atlantic City that a man and woman were shot shortly before 6 p.m. Wednesday while sitting on a porch at the Carver Hall apartment complex on Caspian Avenue.

Officials have released the name of the man who was shot to death Thursday evening while repairing a limousine in south Fort Worth.

Akeem R. Jones, 19, was found bleeding from a gunshot wound after shots were fired Friday inside a north Omaha house.

Witnesses say a woman calmly walked up to Dominic Nicholas Mahone while he was dancing on the floor of an uptown Charlotte club early Friday, pulled out a gun and shot him twice.

A Marion County sheriff's spokesman says a woman was fatally shot Thursday at a northeast Salem mobile home park.

A former University of Tennessee football player was home recovering Friday after being shot outside an East Knoxville apartment complex.

A 14-year old Highwood girl was fatally shot in her chest early Sunday in North Chicago, officials said.

It was a tragic end for a man who was trying to do a good deed. He broke up a fight and was then shot in north Harris County.

A North Carolina man has been shot to death in what police say was a robbery attempt.

Robbery may have been the motive for a fatal shooting in the parking lot of a Walmart Neighborhood Market grocery store on Beechnut.

On Tuesday evening at 1057pm, officers were called to 7007 Longview Road to investigate a shooting. Upon arrival, officers discovered a 29-year-old male dead in the parking lot of the Express Mart.

2010-09-07T14:51:00.005-04:00

Laboring on Labor Day

I had a break this week in my normal duties, as the youth publication I edit for the Denver Post was taken over by the Colorado Foundation for Agriculture, one of the four weeks a year they do that.

So, with nothing to do but catch up on neglected work, I wrote a couple of chapters of the serial I'm working on, and struggled with the last chapter, which is always the hardest.

I also redid the website for those serial stories and would like to invite you to visit and marvel at www.teachup.com

It's not a very sophisticated website, but then I'm not a very sophisticated guy. The last one was a little fancier, harder to navigate and full of broken links. The layout also required some redesign in order to add new stories as they were published, similar to adding stars to the American flag. Worst of all, when I needed it fixed or updated, I had to find someone.

I approach the web like I approach my car -- I know what's wrong, I know I could probably learn to fix it myself, and I don't. Fortunately, there are some shortcuts and plug-and-play site builders that are made for people like me, so I just redid the thing with what I suppose is the digital equivalent of duct tape and paper clips, but it's up, it's up to date and, unless someone finds a busted link I missed, it's working. And, if someone does find that busted link, I can fix it.

The prime audience for the site is the Newspapers-in-Education people who continue to run serial stories. This is a somewhat shrinking group, but that simply means you have to be a little more aggressively available. Broad-side-of-the-barn marketing isn't as effective when the barn has shrunken down to the size of a detached garage. My revenue from this work is about a quarter of what it was four years ago. The good news is, I was splitting with my artists and my newspaper back then. Now I only split with my artists.

Speaking of whom, you'll get a chance to see some nice artwork if you check the samples on that site. I've been fortunate to catch a few people on their way up over the years and they're given me an advantage in that area. Some of my competitors use "talented relatives" to illustrate their work, and the quotation marks are there for a reason. But even those who hire professionals often end up with a kind of generic kid art that I find uncompelling, though kids have been taught that this is what illustrations look like and so it works well enough. I'd rather offer them a little more.

Anyway, come have a look. Now, I've got to run. My break is over and I have to start putting together the next issue. A few weeks ago, we had a new writer, a fifth grader, turn in a story about his baseball team's elimination from the state tournament. He's enthusiastic, loves baseball and enjoys writing, so, when Ken Burns came to town, we sent him out to get the interview.

Getting back to work, when work includes something like that, isn't really so painful.

2010-09-04T22:04:00.000-04:00

Now that he's gone ...

The hurricane having blown past my most northeasterly friend without having done any significant damage, I can now confess that this silly thing has been running through my head for the past week.

2010-08-26T07:07:00.000-04:00

Will someone please explain to this mother that a mosque would be an insult to the victims of 9/11?

(photo by Platon, published on-line by the New Yorker)

2010-08-21T15:08:00.005-04:00

(This column first ran in the Press-Republican in January, 1998.
The cartoon is by John Sherrfius of the Boulder Daily Camera.)

The Myth of the Silent Majority

As noted in last Monday's Lookback, the treaty that removed the last U.S. troops from Vietnam a quarter-century ago coincided with the Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion.

The country had simply exchanged one set of demonstrators for another. And it definitely was a change.

While some individuals went from protesting death in Southeast Asia to protesting death in abortion clinics, the two movements represent fundamentally different sides of the political divide, each going against traditional definitions:

Classical liberalism tries to reach positive social goals by forcing people to do things they might not otherwise do, but the strength of the antiwar protests came from those who believed in individual rights. For all the talk of treaty violations, bombing raids and political self-determination in Vietnam, the reason the streets were full was because a lot of young men objected to being drafted for a distant war in which they felt no personal interest.

And, although classic conservativism strives to free individuals from government control, the crusade against abortion gains its strength from those who want a strong central government to make individuals live according to moral positions they may not accept.

Of course, you don't find political philosophers chanting in the streets. Those who carry the placards tend to be ruled by passion, not logic, and you can't tell the fascists from the anarchists without a scorecard.

For all their differences, however, the protestors have something important in common: The guts to stand up for what they believe in.

By contrast, the majority of people sat on their hands through the American Revolution, they sat on their hands while slavery was debated, they sat on their hands until Pearl Harbor forced us to confront the Axis, they sat on their hands while black people were assaulted by firehoses and police dogs in the struggle for civil rights, and they sat on their hands throughout the Vietnam War just as they are sitting on their hands now, through the abortion debate.

"Which side are you on?" the old union song asked, and the answer, to most Americans, is a shrug of the shoulders. I dunno. Whatever.

This so-called "Silent Majority" is often portrayed as loyal citizens who do not question the status quo, but, in a democracy, to fail to question the government is the fundamental act of disloyalty.

You don't have to disagree, but you do have to question.

Then there are those uninvolved souls who say they question the government, who claim to disagree with it, but then make knee-jerk anti-government jokes and say, "What can you do?", as if they were too worldly and wise to waste energy fighting the inevitable.

Nonsense.

If silence were a sign of intelligence, every doorknob would qualify as a genius.

A thought you do not act upon is no different than a thought you did not have, and I would rather be surrounded by people too stupid to realize what is going on than by people too lazy and apathetic to act upon what they see.

These self-proclaimed free-thinkers who refuse to take action on their beliefs are like a crowd standing on the shore watching a child drown. It would be better if they were not there, than for that child to perish knowing how many people could have done something to help.

And, while it is often said that, in a democracy, people get the government they deserve, the impact of apathy goes well beyond government. A free society is shaped by the opinions and preferences of its people, who, accordingly, not only get the government they deserve, but also get the media they deserve, the automobiles they deserve, the food they deserve, the clothing they deserve, the families they deserve ... in short, they get the lives they deserve.

Yet it takes so little to make a mark, to change your world. In a sea of screaming fanatics, a quiet voice stands out. The new voice, the voice that does not seek to provoke, the voice that speaks up once, is the voice that is heard, and remembered, in the halls of government, in the corporate offices, in the places where power waits for direction.

That core group who write frequent letters to the editor represents a tiny fraction of our readers, and they don't represent every shade of opinion among that readership. But, in a small community where the newspaper has nearly the status of a public utility, those who write letters do a great deal to set the tone of that community, and to select which issues are discussed in that community. That group of letter writers is given real power by the many who don't bother to make their views known.

Of course, the silent ones have the right to sit back and let others set the public agenda. It is their absolute right to count for nothing.

But I wish more people would add their voices to the mix, not by shouting and waving placards in the streets, but by just expressing an opinion and partaking in our society.

Often, someone will call the newsroom, upset with something they've read in the paper or seen around the area, asking us to do a story. Sometimes, it does result in a story.

But not always.

And, when a story isn't likely to result, the editor or reporter will suggest, "Why don't you write a letter to the editor?"

The sad thing is, callers frequently think they’re being told to shut up and go away. In fact, they are being invited to join the process of building our society.

The first step is to get off your hands.

2010-08-14T14:09:00.000-04:00

The anniversary has never gone unmarked.

Nor have our lives.

Please use your seat belts.

2010-08-09T08:23:00.000-04:00

In case you missed it.

2010-07-28T22:34:00.009-04:00

When the road was sometimes longer than the love (Part Two)

I can't remember the name of the truck stop at the intersection of I-80 and I-35, but they laid on the bacon and eggs and homefries and coffee in a manner that was intended to keep you coming back. We needed a good breakfast, after a night of switching off driving in pairs and sleeping in the back of the station wagon in pairs.

Ina had not been interested in entertaining any snoopy truck drivers who might pass us by on the highway, but we still hadn't gotten a whole lot of sleep back there. It turned out she wasn't that interested in entertaining me, either, but don't let's get ahead of ourselves here. She was still a very good snuggler and we needed the coffee.

Des Moines is southwest of Waterloo and Independence is about 25 miles northeast of Waterloo and another 40 miles south of Wadena. And, since it was also where Dean's parents lived, Independence was a good place to stop after our all-night drive from Boulder.

His little sister was extremely jealous as we freshened up and made ready to head out to the rock festival. The concert had been all over local media and she was old enough to want to go but not old enough to do it without her parents' permission, which certainly wasn't going to happen.

My memory of driving through the tangle of local roads to Wadena is that the Three Dog Night song "Mama Told Me Not To Come" was in extremely heavy rotation on the local radio stations.What I can't remember is why we didn't throw in a tape; my car was outfitted with a cassette player, which was cutting edge technology in an age when 8-Traks were just getting up to speed. I suppose we were making sure there weren't any warnings about road closures on the local stations.

Traffic wasn't bad at all, and, in fact, we parked quite near the farm where the concert was going on. Ina and I set up a blanket on the hill overlooking the stage, while Dean and Linda pitched a lean-to farther back at the edge of the woods. I don't think we had brought anything other than bedding, and little of that -- we assumed food and drink would be available on site. We assumed wrong, as it turned out, but we had the first 12 hours or so covered in that respect, since we didn't expect to be particularly hungry or sleepy for awhile, but did expect the music to sound extra nice.

And the music was rather good -- mostly B-list, but very high on the B-list. No Doors or Stones or Airplane, but the line-up did include Johnny Winter, Leon Russell, Savoy Brown, Rotary Connection, Little Richard, Poco, the Flying Burrito Brothers, the Everly Brothers, the Sons of Champlin, Joan Baez, REO Speedwagon, Lee Michaels, Ian and Silvia and the Great Speckled Bird, Albert King, Mason Profit, Illinois Speed Press, the Chambers Brothers, the Doobie Brothers and the Siegal-Schwall Band. There are some real memories in those names, though I have to admit we were building memories in random snatches at the moment.

Let me explain something about rivers, rock festivals and nudity. I suspect that Scorsese and the gang did some pretty selective editing at Bethel the summer before, or else East Coast girls are a lot more uninhibited than Midwestern girls. Which I know is not the case. The Volga river -- the one in Iowa, that is -- is shallow and warm and very inviting, but the only naked people in it were 19-year-old boys, which, when you think about it, is hardly surprising. There was one very tripped-out couple walking naked in the river, but they were so odd that they hardly counted. At least when we were down there, the girls were in cutoffs and bikini tops and I would have seen a lot more nudity if I'd stayed home in Boulder.

Being a 20-year-old boy, I was content to sit back and be with the statuesque girl with the auburn braids, headband, bikini top and tan body that everyone else was looking at. Dr. Hook aside, there is something odd about being out with a genuinely beautiful woman, because, on the one hand, you're too cool to consider it a reflection on yourself, and, on the other hand, you're too human not to. Everybody wanted to talk to Ina, but she was with me, man.

Even when some people from Wadena came in to check out the scene, they managed to pick their way through the 30,000 people on the hill and hunker down at our blanket to ask Ina what it was all about, and she was happy to tell them and we had a nice conversation with some farmers who were very amused by the whole thing and were playing up their rube roots to comical effect: "Hey, ain't that one of them Mexican ceeg-arettes?" one of them gasped in mock horror, and there was plenty to be horrified about, if that's what you wanted, but they didn't, particularly. They talked to Ina for awhile, listened to a little music and then scored some weed and went back home to report on the strange goings on.

Meanwhile, as we stretched into the second day, we were finding that the beverages available appeared to be the muddy water of the Volga or else quarts of Boone's Farm Apple Wine, neither of which were what you really wanted for rehydration in the middle of a sunny hayfield. There was some chicken being cooked, or partially cooked, but the lines were long, and I can't really remember what we did once we got to the point where we began to be hungry.

However, the third day took care of itself, because that morning Ina announced that she needed to go home, because her boyfriend was arriving back in Boulder from wherever the hell he had been. Since I didn't know he existed, it is understandable that I also didn't know where the hell he had been. What I did know was that there was considerable music yet to be played and also that I suddenly was hanging out with somebody else's girlfriend, and had been for the past two and a half days, which made a lot more sense than her maidenly protestations about truck drivers and others around us on the hillside and suchlike modest impediments to true love or a reasonable facsimile thereof.

Dean and Linda weren't that pleased to be leaving early, except that the lack of food and drink was starting to have an effect and two days of music is, after all, quite a bit of music. So we gathered up our gear and went back to the car and drove to Dean's parents' house. The car wasn't air-conditioned, but it was plenty cool enough in the front seat where Ina and I were sitting.

I was miffed about the whole undisclosed-boyfriend thing, and she was upset over the whole criticizing-the-beautiful-girl thing. And we were 875 miles from being able to simply walk away from each other.

We got back to Dean's and showered, and Ina came out in a black halter-top cocktail dress and full warpaint. The rest of us, even Linda, were in jeans and T-shirts, and there she was doing a credible impression of what you might get if you crossed Ginger Grant from "Gilligan's Island" with Lisa Douglas from "Green Acres." She looked terrific, but, at that point, all I could do was wonder what kind of dumbass would bring a stupid cocktail dress and all that make-up to a rock festival in the middle of a cornfield?

Dean had decided to let us go on ahead so that he could spend some time with his family, which was a good idea in that it got him out of what was now a very crowded car, but a bad idea in that his father read him the riot act over rock-and-roll and long hair, which led to him leaving the house, putting out his thumb and actually beating us back to Boulder by several hours.

This is probably because his rides didn't run into an abandoned spare tire under a swooping underpass in a driving rain in Omaha on a Sunday night when the garages were all closed and spin out into a ditch whereupon he was told by the pretty girl in the cocktail dress what an idiot he was. I've got to say, it's pretty amazing that Linda didn't get out and start hitching. If it hadn't been my car, I sure wouldn't have stayed for the rest of the ride.

But it was my car, and I got it out of the ditch and we did alright, even though Ina picked up the smelly hitchhiker in the buckskin clothes with the monkey and then, while I was napping, proceeded to take I-80 North towards Cheyenne instead of I-80 South towards Denver. As I recall, the resulting exchange was something to the effect of "Boulder is north of Denver," followed by, "Yes, but it's not in fucking Wyoming."

By the time we got back to the correct state, Ina -- who had joyfully sung along with me on the eastbound trip -- now sharply asked if I had any goddam tapes of songs to which I did not know the goddam lyrics, in response to which I put on Bizet and proceeded to do the "L'Arlesienne Suite" in "bom-bom-BOM-ba-bum-ba-bum-bum-bum" fashion.

I would have played the side of the tape with highlights from "Carmen," but there was a knife in the car and I didn't want either of us to get any ideas.

We got back to Boulder, I dropped her off at her apartment, dropped Linda off at her apartment and then went back to the house where all the people who had previously said, "So, you're taking Ina?" and then smiled, now asked, "So how was your date with Ina?" and began laughing even before they heard the details.

Three months later I took a much nicer girl a much shorter distance and finally got to hear Poco, who had played at Wadena, but only after we had left. When we got home from the concert, we discovered that someone had gone into my apartment and stolen my ... but never mind. It's a long story full of police and airports and construction workers and car chases and it's late.

2010-07-17T19:46:00.013-04:00

When the road was sometimes longer than the love

Creamcheese didn't get to come to the Wadena Rock Festival, 40 years ago. But we had one hell of a great summer anyway.

Creamie belonged to my girlfriend from the summer of 1969. We had broken up in typical 19-year-old fashion: She took up with my roommate, and disregarded the old folk tune, "Tis best to be off with the old love, before you have on with the new."

It was a spectacular break up in which everyone behaved badly, me no better and perhaps worse than some others. As one of the collateral damage people remarked to me, with no little bitterness, "You could have come out of this with everyone's sympathy ... "

But I didn't, because nobody is that self-contained at 19. And a few weeks after the dust had settled, my now very-much-ex called to say that she couldn't keep her dog on campus and her (new) boyfriend couldn't keep him either because he wasn't a real man. She didn't phrase it quite like that.

In any case, I ended up with Creamcheese as a roommate, and he was a great guy. She'd gotten Creamie from the boyfriend before me, down in Clearwater, Florida, which is where he lived. But when they broke up, she demanded, and received, the dog, and so he ended up in South Bend, Indiana, and then he ended up living with me. Creamie was a great dog, in no small part because he had survived being named "Suzie Creamcheese" by college students who weren't sure how to roll a dog over and examine the evidence.

So Creamie lived with me throughout my junior year, and a very good year it was. And so, at the end of the 1969-70 school year, I called my by-then-long-ex several times, to find out when she wanted to accept custody of the dog. And she didn't return my calls, so, when I was ready to pack up and head out to Boulder for the summer, I said to Creamcheese, "Get in." And, behold, he did, and we drove out to Boulder for a writer's conference at the University and had a great summer.

On our way to Boulder, we picked up two guys who were hitching to Oakland, California. One of them had just completed his masters in marine biology diving for brain coral off the coast of Aruba, and the other had just shot Tricia Nixon for a photo layout in Ladies Home Journal. And none of it seemed strange, in that era. If you weren't there, it's impossible to explain. If you were, it's unnecessary. Onward.

So we got out to Boulder and the two hitchers hung around for a few days and then continued their quest to Oakland and I tried to figure out what to do next. I had about 10 days before the writer's conference began and didn't want to spend it sleeping next to the car, so I found a house with a great many very friendly people, because that was how Boulder was.

It was not a commune. Communes had philosophies. What we had was ... well, not a philosophy, except to the extent that having a good time is a philosophy. Which it isn't. Which we knew. So we referred to ourselves as "a house" and not "a commune."

And, behold, it was a blast.

At some point in all this, I went off to the University of Colorado for my writer's workshop, and I was something of a curiosity, but I survived it but spent most of my nights back at the house, because the dorm room at CU was a little strange, with a roommmate who kept calling his wife to tell her how it was going. It was fine, man.

And I went out a few times with Annie, who had lived in the basement apartment at the house before I showed up, and who was gorgeous and militant and under active FBI surveillance, and who insisted on splitting the bill down the middle, though, I have to say, she was willing to let one person pick up the meal and another person pick up the movie.

We did a fundraiser for the striking farmworkers in the San Luis Valley one night, when poet Denise Levertov was doing a reading for the community. Denise, who was a lecturer at the workshop, was very supportive. But we couldn't make love because Annie had "the Revolutionary Clap" which she had gotten from a Black Panther, and which she was taking medication for, but had to abstain from everything for a few weeks.

Later, she joined the Weather Underground and left Boulder with a load of explosives. Some time later, I found out that the fool who gave her the clap was a poseur who was no more a Black Panther than I was.

However.

It became clear that Annie was far more political than I was, and I was far more apolitical than she was. I called her my Maude Gonne while I was poor Willie Yeats, but, in any case. we moved on with genuine regret. And somehow, I met Ina through her. Which is strange, because Ina was hardly in Annie's flow. But that was the Sixties, where friendships overlapped political lines.

So I ended up asking Ina to go with me to the Wadena Rock Festival, which took place between August 1 and 3, 1970.

Ina was stunning. She had auburn -- not red, but auburn -- hair, and was probably 5'8", with broad shoulders and the accoutrements thereof, and high cheekbones with a light scattering of freckles. Ina was a babe and a half. And everyone who heard I was taking Ina to the rock festival was somewhat jealous.

Which is to say, they said, "Oh, you're taking Ina?" and then kind of chuckled and gently backed away. Okay, "jealous" might not be the exact word here.

Let me be clear, however: Ida was gorgeous. Whatever they thought of her, nobody ever disputed that she was gorgeous.

So Dean and Linda, and Ina and I, set off for Wadena, Iowa, leaving Creamcheese to sort out his own world in our absence.

Stay tuned. The story is far from being told.

2010-07-15T20:46:00.001-04:00

A decade on, the bigots triumph

I was on my way to deliver some newspapers to a classroom on September 11, 2001, when I walked through the newsroom and saw everyone focused on the TV reports. At that point, the news was that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. It was, of course, a tragedy, but a plane had hit the Empire State Building in 1945. These things happen.

I was in the car and about to pull out when the second plane hit and it became clear that Something Else was going on. My first thought was to help kids understand what had happened, and my second thought was "Dear God, anyone who wears a turban or hijab in the USA is in some deep shit right now."

We had just introduced a new educational feature, "Around the World with Nellie Bly," with a cartoon dog doing geography-in-the-news. It was normally a mid-sized feature, but I also had a full page feature that ran Mondays. I pulled that full page, and a version of this piece ran on September 17, less than a week after the attacks.

Then I made this version available to papers around the country, and around the world, and a little over a dozen took up the offer. I thought it was important that people realize that Islam is a very widespread and diverse religion. I wanted them to realize that there are Muslims who have never seen a camel, and who read Harry Potter and who drive Hondas.

Alas, nearly a decade later, the bigots and idiots have dominated the discussion. There is a debate over the construction of a mosque in New York City because it is near the WTC site. Fair enough, but the arguments against it are the arguments of morons. These people are idiots, with no understanding of a world beyond "American Idol" and "Dancing with the Stars."

This is a jpg but that's what the blogspot interface allows. If you'd like a higher res PDF, let me know. I'm not sure you can battle against what Aquinas called "Invincible Ignorance," but what choice do we have?

2010-07-08T16:12:00.004-04:00

Another British visitor

(Colorado Springs Sun, June 20, 1982)

(I wrote this piece following a visit to Colorado by Princess Anne, which was the occasion of much excitement, including an article similar to this one which outlined the proper way we provincial cowboys should behave on the off-chance that we found ourselves face-to-face with herself. I thought I'd re-run it now in honor of her mother's visit to the colonies.)

Now that Princess Anne has left, some people think it's time to relax. Hardly!

If she were our princess, if we were still part of the United Kingdom, the hoopla surrounding her visit could now honorably die out. But since she isn't and we aren't, we are left in a bit of a quandary: We must either admit that we have been shamelessly groveling at the feet of someone paid $182,000 a year to represent a monarchy our forefathers died to banish from this soil, or we must extend the same warm welcome to every guest to this area.

Let's get down to the business of welcoming our next tourist:

Alfred George Rowles is a greengrocer from Hertford, Herts., England. He will be arriving at the Colorado Springs Airport, at 3:18 p.m. July 30.

There will be a brief ceremony at the baggage claim area, where Mr. Rowles (that is the form of address traditional in Britain) will present Miss Susan Van Zile with a set of British baggage check stubs. She will then thank him on behalf of the Colorado Springs Airport and he will proceed from the baggage claim area to the sidewalk.

There, Mr. Rowles will board a taxicab for the procession to the Dew Drop Inn motel, where he will be welcomed by reservations clerk James Sandoval and Mr. Sandoval's dog, Rusty. In a brief ceremony at the front desk, Mr. Rowles will sign an agreement formally marking his sojourn at the establishment, following which he will be presented with the key to his room.

Mr. Rowles will then proceed to his room, where he will participate in the hanging of the clothes bag and the airing of the suitcase, following by a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the commode. This symbolic act commemorates the sanitizing of the facilities.

That evening, Mr. Rowles will be present at a dinner to be given at McDonald's at Wahsatch and Bijou. One hundred and seventy-five people are expected to attend.

He will then return to his motel room to rest from his journey and is expected to watch the television and have a small, private cocktail party. No guests from the community have been invited to this gathering.

There are certain rules to follow if you are introduced to Mr. Rowles. Upon meeting him, you should extend your hand for him to shake, or he may extend his first. It is not necessary to bow, bob, genuflect or put his foot upon your neck.

When first introduced, you may address him as "Mr. Rowles." He may respond, "Call me Alf," which then becomes the correct form of address. Only family and close friends are permitted to call Mr. Rowles "Alfie."

One traditional phrase which Americans may utilize in conversing with Mr. Rowles is: "Let's nip around the corner for a pint." Individuals in this case may initiate the conversation with Mr. Rowles, but should bear in mind that the "pint" in Britain consists of beer, ale, porter or stout. It is considered declasse to offer milk after the promise of a pint to Mr. Rowles.

While in Colorado Springs, Mr. Rowles will inspect the Wax Museum, Hall of Presidents and the Cog Railway. Travel arrangements for Mr. Rowles' visit to the area were made in consultation with Mr. Jack Stokes through the auspices of the Pig 'N Whistle public house of Aldershot, England. Mr. Stokes visited the Pikes Peak region three years ago and offered his consulting services to Mr. Rowles following a football match.

Mr. Stokes was unable to accornpany Mr. Rowles, having been declared redundant following the closing of' his place of employment. He is currently in Great Britain, serving a term in government service as a collector of the dole.

Mr. Rowles will not be attending any formal functions while in the Springs, nor will he give any formal speeches.

Greengrocers in Great Britain do not normally grant press interviews, according to a Fleet Street source.

2010-07-01T06:00:00.002-04:00

Thoughts upon watching The Graduate at 60

i was talking to a moth
the other evening
he was trying to break into
an electric light bulb
and fry himself on the wires
why do you fellows
pull this stunt i asked him
because it is the conventional
thing for moths or why
if that had been an uncovered
candle instead of an electric
light bulb you would
now be a small unsightly cinder
have you no sense
plenty of it he answered
but at times we get tired
of using it
we get bored with the routine
and crave beauty
and excitement
fire is beautiful
and we know that if we get
too close it will kill us
but what does that matter
it is better to be happy
for a moment
and be burned up with beauty
than to live a long time
and be bored all the while
so we wad all our life up
into one little roll
and then we shoot the roll
that is what life is for
it is better to be a part of beauty
for one instant and then cease to
exist than to exist forever
and never be a part of beauty
our attitude toward life
is come easy go easy
we are like human beings
used to be before they became
too civilized to enjoy themselves
and before i could argue him
out of his philosophy
he went and immolated himself
on a patent cigar lighter
i do not agree with him
myself i would rather have
half the happiness and twice
the longevity
but at the same time i wish
there was something i wanted
as badly as he wanted to fry himself
archy

(the lesson of the moth, by Don Marquis, 1927)

2010-06-27T13:57:00.002-04:00

Middle-aged pornography

I've just added a friend of a friend at Facebook and discovered a luxurious website. The friend-of-a-friend is Jacoba Budden, who kept saying funny things in response to postings by South African cartoonist Jeremy Nell. With all the excitement over the World Cup, the comments on Jeremy's site became a little more universal, a little less based on local issues, and -- for some reason -- a little more often posted in English instead of Afrikaans, and I became curious about this witty woman.

So I "friended" her and discovered her website, Just Food Now, which is a combination of history, culture and recipes that I find fascinating. I told Jacoba, "Your site is a bit like Playboy for the middle aged -- sumptuous stuff that makes my mouth water even though I know the odds of, for instance, a roast suckling pig ever actually appearing on MY table. The difference being, of course, that your site tells exactly how you get your dishes to look like that, a subject Playboy tends to avoid."

She was amused enough to ask permission to quote me, but there is certainly more than a small ring of truth to it, at least in the sense that, no, I'm not going to make a roast suckling pig, which is the lead recipe in her fascinating roundup on German cuisine. (And wasn't she a genius to know they'd beat England and stay in the tournament even longer?)

On the other hand, it is a defendably intellectual fantasy. I like knowing how you roast a suckling pig, or make spaetzle, even if I'm never going to do it myself. In fact, one of my backburner projects is a story set in 16th century Germany, and so there may actually be a material benefit involved.

But it hardly matters. It's fun to just visit the site and see what she's got going on, or leaf through the archives and find other foods you've heard of but weren't 100 percent clear on.

Yes, I really do read the articles!