P.S. A Column On Things

Start of October 3 Column

Recital Preview

As per my note last week, here’s video of my Love Song Recital: Part 1 and Part 2. There will be a better edit soon, but in the meantime this is the raw footage.

Amusing-Amazing Act of Fandom

Who knew I had fans? While I was searching for myself on YouTube, I discovered that someone has made a supercut of my hokey openings to Computer Chronicles software reviews between 1985 and 1995.

Time Machine: My Mom as Grandmother

This column stretches back to 1998, (or 1970, depending on how you count) and has, I think, included some interesting items I will draw your attention to.

My Mom On Being A Grandmother (April 3, 2000)

Both of my sons, Paul and his younger brother Steve, came through and gave us what I had been looking forward to for so many years, grandchildren. (Actually, the main reason I wanted children of my own was so that I could be a grandmother. I had the greatest grandmother in the world, and wanted to be what she was, and have the kind of love I gave her - and joy of joys! it worked out that way).

Right Column Redux: My Favorite Movies

The column to the right on this blog contains permanent content, most of which has appeared at one time or another in the main body. I’ve decided to include a reminder.

My favorite Journalism movies (Deadline USA, The Paper, Citizen Kane, Etc)

Don't Just Do Something

I know I have mentioned this advice before: “Don’t just do something, stand there.” I heard an Oprah Winfrey quote: “When you don’t know what to do, do nothing.”

I have commented before on the fact that as quotations enter general circulation, they are honed to their essence and are rarely a precise match for the original; the folk version is usually pithier, yet has the same message.

The masses may be asses, but when it comes to the game of Telephone that is the oral tradition, they seem to be pretty good editors. Actually many editors I’ve known were asses…

The actual quotation begins (and then goes on), “When you don’t know what to do, my best advice is to do nothing until clarity comes. Getting still, being able to hear your own voice and not the voices of the world, quickens clarity. Once you decide what you want, you make a commitment to that decision.”

This and That

Your Face
“When you are young, you have the face your parents gave you. After you are forty, you have the face you deserve.”
―It’s not clear who first said this.
…
Threat Category
“Stochastic Terrorism,” as in when Lindsey Graham says, “It would be a shame if something happened to…” his nemesis of the day.
…

Not to be Missed Video
Thank you Robert Malchman: “I recommend this video highly, but be sure to watch all the way to the end, where there is a bit of a twist. It's’"what Trump supporters see in him, explained to anti-Trumpers.’”
…
Woody Allen Quote
Woody Allen once said something about liking fiction because it meant he could control how things turned out, only more eloquent. . Annie Hall or Manhattan? I can’t find it. Do you know the quote or whence it came?

Lousy Inverted Pyramid

Headline in the SF Chronicle: “Electric Cars Should Be Charged in Daytime.” Why on earth did I have to read to the 5^th paragraph to find out the reason for the advice: because excess solar panel energy, currently wasted during the day, could do the job with less stress on the electric network than charging at night.

The lede was:

A new study from Stanford researchers suggests that electric-car drivers who plug in while they’re snoozing at night should eventually alter their charging behavior to protect California’s electrical grid.

It should have been: Electric-car drivers who plug in at night should charge during the day so California’s electrical grid can make better use of solar power, according to a Stanford study.

My lede is shorter and actually follows the standard of an inverted pyramid: most important information first, then less important information. Not to mention that a lede should include Who, What, When, Where and How, and sometimes Why.

End of October 3 Column (No. 845)

Start of September 26 Column

My Recital

Greatest birthday ever.

Two days after my 70th birthday I sang love songs to my wife for a half hour. I enjoyed it, she enjoyed it, and so did my daughters and their husbands.

I found a talented accompanist, Nathan Joseph, who could both lead and follow me. He played his electric piano as I sung transposed charts suitable for my baritone.

Regular readers will remember the previous steps; I started writing love poems to Vicki, then paid a Welsh freelancer to set them to music and sing them. I don’t sing as well as he does, but I like to think there was more heart in my version. I will be posting links to the video (kindly shot by one of my sons in law) as soon as it’s available.

I love to perform in public, so I considered this recital a gift from them to me. There were only five people in the audience, not counting my grandchildren who weren’t all that interested. I suspect that’s as many people as were listening to me 55 years ago when I first broadcast on KBPS. But it was more people then watched the Pauli Schindler show which I put it on with my brother Steve at age 10. The microphone was a string tied to a spoon, and the camera was a broom.

Don’t Bleed on the Copy

“Don’t bleed on the copy” started out as literal advice when I was in college. We printed out stories on an IBM MT/ST typesetting system, then glued it to boards which were turned into plates for offset printing. We used Exacto Knives to cut up the copy; careless people like me would cut themselves, bleed on the copy, and slow things down by requiring reprints. My first managing editor, Bill Roberts, coined the phrase, I think.

In any case, after college, it became a metaphor; ‘Don’t bleed on the copy” was short for “don’t fight so hard to publish every word you’ve written. They’re not all that good. Do you really want to die on this hill?” I carried the metaphor with me to several journalistic organizations, where it had a brief currency.

I was put in mind of it last week as I prepared to sing my love songs, in a home recital, to my wife and family. Ten songs, three minutes each, a half hour. Right?

Well, no. You have to breathe, drink water, and make a few comments between songs. What to cut? I bled all over the set list, and managed to cut two songs and one verse so far. We’ll see. In any case, I thought of bloody copy from a half-century ago when I made those decisions.

Right Column Redux: Groundhog Day the Movie

The column to the right on this blog contains permanent content, most of which has appeared at one time or another in the main body. I’ve decided to include a reminder.

My all-time favorite movie: Groundhog Day. I have created a fan site that is universally acknowledged to be the best on the Internet dedicated to this work of art.

Internet Blows It Again: Defending Your Life/Testimony Of Light

This is the third in what is apparently becoming a series. I have previously complained about the lack of information on the open internet about the night Cronkite stood up, and Patty/Kathy from the Patty Duke Show being quaternary cousins. And now, I complain that no one has pointed out the startling similarity between Testimony of Light: An Extraordinary Message of Life After Death by Helen Greaves (1969) and Defending Your Life written/directed Albert Brooks.(1991).

If you haven’t seen the film, stop here. If you have, ask yourself if the premise of the film doesn’t sound a lot like this scene from the book (condensed for space reasons):

Suddenly [there appeared] a cinema or television screen. Pictures began to emerge on it. They showed moments of stress, moments of triumph, moments of failure in the earth life of Doctor X. We saw patients; we watched him in his diagnoses; we followed him to the theater and witnessed his operations…

The pictures on the “screen” went on and on.

We were taken into the homes, lives, families of those on whom the Doctor had performed his successful operations. We saw the benefit to humanity, the healings, the resumption of happy, useful lives which were the results of this man’s skill.

To be fair, I wrote to Albert Brooks, and his assistant responded he’d never seen the book. And, I find that “life review” is a widely discussed topic, usually in the context of “my life flashed before my eyes” at the moment of death. But it is sufficiently out there that Brooks may simply have absorbed it and repeated it, something which may also have happened to Greaves.

Action

I believe this picture is worth a thousand words.