P.S. A Column On Things

Sam Patch: How desperate would you have to be?

How desperate would you have to be to download and listen to either the 30-minute sound track of the musical I co-wrote as a freshman, Sam Patch: The Greatest Story Ever Told... So Far -- A Musical Tragedy in Two Acts,   or to the entire 90-minute radio musical? You can download either as a podcast if you are smart enough to paste the link into your webcast player as a podcast URL. Or, you can click on the link and listen to it for 90 minutes (30 for the sound track) while sitting at your computer, depending on how your computer and browser display XML files. It works best in Internet Explorer.

It’s all right here:

https://psacot.typepad.com/ps_a_column_on_things/sam-patch.html

No Footnotes

Appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, this is not a real journalism site. The New York Times led the way in digital journalism, by deciding that any time an article was changed online, there was a note about the change. I am not required to do that. But I did make two changes in the “hand I was dealt” section of my Black Lives Matter post.

I have been blessed by the guidance of women who care for me during my entire life. In this case, a former lover noted I had left “male” off the list of my sources of privilege; she also advised me that, since I wasn’t rich, my Full House was king-high instead of ace-high. My daughter noted that in addition to straight, I should have said cisgender. I resisted her advice to add “abled.”

But in any case, the stealth correction is there, and future readers will not assume I blithely forgot the male source of my privilege, or ignored wealth as a relative factor.

The SF Chronicle on Covid

The Chronicle coverage of Covid has been detailed and first rate. This is much to my surprise, as I always considered the newspaper to be a newsprint comic book. I loved the fact that it was family owned for four generations and feared for its future when Hearst took over. Imagine my surprise when it actually became a better newspaper.

The Mercury News is OK, but I think the Chronicle has been untouchable on Covid, especially Covid in California. Good coverage of the TickTock that anyone can get as well as admirable enterprise coverage.