P.S. A Column On Things

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.

Jon Carroll Cat Columns

Long-time readers will recall that, prior to his retirement from column-writing in 2012, I frequently praised Jon Carroll of the San Francisco Chronicle as America’s greatest personal column writer. My favorites were his (roughly) monthly cat columns. As I could not find an index of them I’ve created Jon Carroll Cat Columns. If you know of any others, let me know.

The Internet Blows It Again: The Night Cronkite Stood Up

Today, all television network news anchors stand up to deliver the news to the small handful of old people still watching them. But in the 1970s, anchors sat behind a desk. Except this once.

OK, it isn’t fair to say the Internet is bad on history; it covers most of the big stuff. But, whereas every minute detail of every event in the 21^st century is preserved in detail (admittedly, some of it only in the Internet Archive), I was astounded to find an epochal event, involving the Most Trusted Man in America, is, as far as Google knows, completely undocumented. So, it’s up to me.

Here’s how CBS describes the event: “CBS News presented a two-part, 22 minute, overview of the Watergate scandal in October 1972. The first segment was 14 minutes, the second was eight.”

No mention of the fact that Nixon persuaded CBS Chairman William Paley to cut the second segment down.  More importantly, the press release makes no mention of the broadcasting first that took place that night.

I remember it well. I was in Edwin Diamond’s Eastgate apartment with my then-fiancé  Sherry Grobstein. We were using the large, primitive videotape technology of the time to record the CBS Evening News for the MIT Network News Study Group (back in the days before you could just order a copy of network news shows from Vanderbilt).

We were news junkies in my childhood home; I had been watching NBC and CBS news since 1960. So, I gasped with surprise when Cronkite began the first Watergate segment. He stood up and walked across the studio to gesture at graphics. “Unprecedented,” I shouted. Edwin wasn’t there, so I tried to raise him on the phone. Sherry, not so much a news junkie, was unimpressed.

“What’s the big deal,” she asked? Many commentators then and now will say the big deal was that Cronkite devoted more than half of the program (the show was 22 minutes after commercials) to Watergate.

But to me, then and now, the big deal was that he took the never-before-seen step of standing to deliver the story, as if to say, “This is so important I’m going to do something I’ve never done, so you’ll sit up and notice.” No one, not Douglas Edwards, nor John Cameron Swayze nor Huntley nor Brinkley nor Harry Reasoner had ever come out from behind their desk on the air.

I am surprised and baffled that this move, much commented on at the time, is nowhere to be found on the open Internet. I assume it’s behind a paywall somewhere in a news organization’s expensive archives, but I’ve now laid it out for the researchers and essay-writing journalism students of the future; if they Google Cronkite and Watergate, and scroll down to the third or fourth page of results, they will end up here.

Right Column Redux: Paul Schindler on TV

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.

• Paul Schindler on TV
  Starting with an appearance on a WBZ public access program in 1972, I've been on local and national TV numerous times, mostly as a game show contestant (I appeared on the game shows Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy, Scrabble , Win Ben Stein's Money and Merv Griffin's Crosswords) and as an author. I was also on the Computer Chronicles for years. Pictures of my game show appearances Here are my journal entries for three of my game show appearances: Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy, Merv Griffin's Crosswords

Porn in Parliament

I was looking up British journalist and columnist Carol Midgley, when I ran across the article that appears first under her name on Google. It is behind a paywall, but I managed to scrape out the first two grafs. It sounds like a hoot.

Carol Midgley: How do men get any work done when they watch this much porn? (Times of London)

Good news — at last — from the Houses of Parliament. Only 24,473 attempts have been made to access porn via computers and devices connected to the parliamentary network since the general election. That is a mere 160 times a day. Rejoice, rejoice, rejoice

Wait, you don’t think this is good news, do you? You think that’s quite a lot. On the contrary, this is progress. In 2016 the parliamentary filtering system had to block 113,208 attempts to download pornography, a fall from 213,020 the previous year. And no, the rapid decline last year was not due to Damian Green resigning. Shame on you for even thinking that.

Hunter Thompson on Writing

In Songs of the Doomed, Hunter S. Thompson wrote: “I found out then that writing is a kind of therapy. One of the few ways I can almost be certain I'll understand something is by sitting down and writing about it. Because by forcing yourself to write about it and putting it down in words, you can't avoid having to come to grips with it. You might be wrong, but you have to think about it very intensely to write about it. So I use writing as a learning tool.”

I’d just add: me too. My slightly different formulation: since the age of 12, “I don’t know what I think about something until I write it out.”

Women in Journalism Redux

Daniel Dern apparently followed the link in Right Column Redux last week to Women in Journalism Movies, and had this to add:

On the recent/recent-ish TV side, there's:Aaron Sorkin's The Newsroom series, with many women reporters (and management); The Expanse (particularly in the last several seasons) had an intrepid (woman) journalist. Over in comic-book-based land, off-hand, Lois Lane in the current Superman & Lois show; Iris West over on The Flash. (Both on The CW.)

On (PBS) Endeavor (prequel to Inspector Morse), there's a recurring woman journalist who's clearly doing serious investigation etc. (Likely lots more on other mysterial/detective/crime shows, but none come to mind immediately.)

Writerly Advice

This was brought to my attention in my UPI chat group.

“Don’t let the terror of the white page shrink-wrap your mind. The excuse that you have writer’s block is far too easy. You have to show up for work. You have to sit in the chair and fight the blankness. Don’t leave your desk. Don’t abandon the room. Don’t check the sports pages. Don’t open the mail. Don’t distract yourself in any way until you feel you have fought and tried.

“A writer is not someone who thinks obsessively about writing, or talks about it, or plans it, or dissects it, or even reveres it: a writer is the one who puts his arse in the chair when the last thing he wants to do is have his arse in the chair.”

—Colum McCann, novelist, “So you want to be a writer? Essential tips for aspiring novelists,” The Guardian, May 13, 2017.

MIT in Popular Culture

 

(While researching what I’d written about being a diversity admit to MIT, I ran across this item from July 18, 2005, which I thought was worth repeating. And, I might add, Dilbert and Doonesbury’s daughter are both MIT grads as well))

I was watching the Fantastic Four when I realized that Reed Richards, Susan Storm and Victor Von Doom are all depicted as MIT graduates. Earlier in the week, Dan Grobstein had sent me to a page on the Internet about "who's Jewish." I think I shall start such a page with regard to MIT (although Wikipedia has an excellent start on this subject). Here are my first few entries; please feel free to submit yours, and I'll print them in the column and eventually post a separate page.

MIT Faculty and Students in fiction

Crichton, Michael. State of Fear. Richard John Kenner, a scientist who heads the fictional MIT Center for Risk Analysis.

Good Will Hunting (1997 ) Will Hunting (Matt Damon) and Professor Gerald Lambeau (played by Stellan Skarsgård)

Heinlein, Robert. Have Space Suit, Will Travel. Kip Russell is admitted to MIT at the end of the novel (I believe this may be why I applied to MIT)

Right Column Redux: Paul Pans The Mac

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.

Yes, I am the Paul Schindler who predicted, in 1985, on the Computer Chronicles television show, when the Macintosh was a year old, that it wouldn't be a success in business. I stand by that opinion. You can see Paul Schindler Pans Mac