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."

"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.

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.

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.

news stories copyright 1991, the Press-Republican, Plattsburgh, NY

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.

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.” 

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.

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:

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.

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...")

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.