P.S. A Column On Things

Adam Osborne Face-Hiding Picture

This is the famous photo of Adam Osborne leaving his office the day his eponymous computer company went bankrupt in 1983, shot by Sam Forencich for the Palo Alto Times Tribune, but distributed widely. I knew it was iconic the first time I saw it in the newspaper: Osborne was holding his briefcase over his face, trying (unsuccessfully, given his height and his taste in clothes) to keep from being recognized/photographed. Don’t know why I thought of it, but was surprised how hard it was to find on the Internet―like everything else that happened before 1995.

The photographer told me the story of the shot: The Osborne photo was a weird one. The city editor sent me to Osborne headquarters on deadline to get a shot of the building for the story on it's demise. It was a nice day with only a handful of cars in the parking lot. A security guard approached and I thought he would ask me to leave, but instead he pointed to Osborne's car and told me he was in the building. I didn't think too much of it and continued to size up a good angle to shoot the building. Just a few moments later Osborne marches out the door right in front of me. It was just me and him. As I raised my camera he raised his briefcase, like some awkward dance. I got off one frame and returned to the office on deadline. Took maybe a half an hour door to door. I thought the photo needed too much context to compete in a general photojournalism contest, so I never entered it - though it did run in a few national publications, including Newsweek.

Journalists as Magpies

Unfox My Box

 

True Fact from Unfox My Box: You are almost certainly underwriting a viper’s nest of treasonous insurrectionists, as surely as if you were donating to Ted Cruz or Josh Hawley: “Pay for cable or satellite TV? You’re subsidizing Fox News whether you watch it or not. Your cable or satellite TV provider pays a subscriber fee to carry Fox News. That cost is passed directly on to YOU. Every network charges cable and satellite providers a small fee per subscriber; the one for Fox News is extraordinarily high. A typical household pays Fox News almost $2 per month—about $20 per year— via their cable or satellite provider, regardless of whether they actually watch the channel.”

After years of succumbing to the ease of a cable package, I used the site to write to Comcast: offer me a Fox News-free package, or I will cut off my cable subscription. I advise you to do the same, ASAP, before another $2 of yours underwrites treason.

I also signed a MoveOn petition. I suggest all patriotic Americans do the same.

Copyeditors

I ran an item about copyediting last week; Harrison Klein reminded me of another ode in praise of copyeditors that I probably read 42 years ago in New West, a magazine I consumed avidly at the time. Here’s what happens when copyediting fails

This and That

Attention Pilots
Joe Kashi, re last week’s This and That item addressed to Joe Biden on the subject of the aging brain:

“Might I suggest that ‘aging’ is not so much getting old as giving up. It's like an older aircraft ₋ as long as you keep flying it, the plane remains in good shape minus the ordinary wear and tear, but when it sits on the ground, not flying for a long time, it starts going wrong.”
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The Somewhat Ironically Satisfying Thought of the Day
Kevin Sullivan notes: “There is one member of the Electoral College from New York who might enjoy casting her upcoming vote for Joe Biden even more than most.....Hillary Clinton.”
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Sound Relationship Advice
From American agony aunt/advice columnist Ask Amy (formerly Ann Landers): “When a relationship is really clicking, it feels like a happily-ever-after, not like a messy first draft.”
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ICYMI: Doonesbury at 50
Thank you, Daniel Dern. Gary Trudeau picks his 10 most important strips from a half-century of Doonesbury. I have been reading his strip avidly since his Yale Days. The Tech dropped Peanuts for the Yale version; the syndicate said we were the first paper ever to drop Peanuts.

A Journalism Fetish

Newspapers and wire services make it almost a fetish to always use people’s middle initials, the theory being it reduced the chances of mistaken identity. Some stylebooks  say not to use the middle initial if it seems ridiculous, but ridiculous is in the eye of the beholder.

My wife asked, "What's Jeffrey Epstein's middle initial." Turns out it is E, and if you Google it, MIT and Harvard used his middle initial in their Mea Culpas, most newspapers did not. Alas, there are at least four unrelated Jeffrey E. Epsteins on the first page of search results. My heart goes out to them. Middle initials do not always disambiguate.

While I was down the Google hole, I ran across this slate article:
Why Do So Many Assassins Have Three Names?

Pieces of String

I don’t know where I heard the phrase “pieces of string” used to describe the detritus a columnist stores up for a three-dot column. I read Herb Caen starting when I was 12 and had to buy the Sunday Chronicle out at the Portland Airport, continuing until the day he died, so I suspect I got it from him.

During my seven-year hiatus from this column, the ball of string got quite large. And yet, I am surprised, but shouldn’t be, to see how the maw chews up a big pile at an astounding rate. In my current period of fervid creativity, driven by my muse, I am still staying ahead. But my feelings are well summed up but this quotation, from my journalism quotes page:

“I can tell you what it’s like to work for a newspaper. Imagine a combine, one of those huge threshing machines that eat up a row of wheat like nothing, bearing right down on you. You're running in front of it, all day long, day in and day out, just inches in front of the maw, where steel blades are whirring and clacking and waiting for you to get tired or make one slip. The only way to keep the combine off you is to throw it something else to rip apart and digest. What you feed it is stories. Words and photos. Ten inches on this, fifteen inches on that, a vertical shot here and a horizontal there, scraps of news and film that go into the maw where they are processed and dumped onto some page to fill the spaces around the ads. Each story buys you a little time, barely enough to slap together the next story, and the next and the next. You never get far ahead, you never take a breather, all you do is live on the hustle. Always in a rush, always on deadline, you keep scrambling to feed the combine. That's what it's like. The only way to break free is with a big story, one you can ride for a while and tear off in pieces so big, the combine has to strain to choke them down. That buys you a little time. But sooner or later the combine will come chomping after you again, and you better be read to feed it all over again.”

--Ray Ring

from the novel Arizona Kiss

Sam Patch

Only a small handful of you have ever heard of Sam Patch, The Greatest Story Ever Told So Far, a musical tragedy I wrote in 1971, based on a short story by Michael Wildermuth, with music by him and Clark Smith.

I consider it the peak of my lifetime public creative fictional output—better than Captain Zommarr and the Galaxy Pirates, the New Eugene Oregon Show or Vernon Jones, Super-Scientific Detective (the novel and radio serial, now lost, that gave me carpal tunnel syndrome when I typed it on Mom’s portable computer at age 12). My memoirs are better, but they aren’t public. My poetry is better, but it isn’t fictional.

My wife recently noted, “a half-century is a long time to be obsessed with a radio play.” Well, not if you once believed “Broadway in 75 or die.” It has still never received a real-life performance, or even a staged reading, but if some amateur dramatic company were willing, I have the script, the lyrics, and could obtain a karaoke soundtrack. Royalty-free! In fact, there might be a generous donation involved.

Well, my point here is that, after 50 years, I found a freelancer on the Internet who was willing to “sweeten” the original musical soundtrack—adding horns and percussion to the original instrumentation of accordion, guitar and piano. I’ve always loved the music; now it takes my breath away. It’s fun, whether you’re listening for the first time, or were there at the inception.

My favorites: Why Jump and Pittsburgh, PA. If you can tell me why these things called hope and happiness exist, then you can ask me, why jump.

This and That

Pet Peeve: Journalistic Innumeracy

Please, report health numbers on a per 100,000 basis. Raw numbers are virtually meaningless and of course certainly misleading. (As meaningless as comparing uninflated historic money amounts). Of course California, Texas and Florida have high numbers!!! They are the biggest states.  This is an extension of the general innumeracy of journalists, of which I was proud (as an MIT grad) not to be a part.

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More Trump

Another great Richard Gross column: A Festival of Distortion

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Shoeless in Minneapolis

I told this story to an old friend in an email and then came to the astounding realization I have never shared it in my column. Thanks Dan Janal!

I was in Minneapolis a dozen times at the turn of the century, but then the division was dissolved and that was that. I did discover that many of the skyways (second-floor over-street tunnels interconnecting downtown Minneapolis buildings) close at midnight. I had gone coatless, in stocking feet to a movie three blocks from my hotel, and had to do the return trip, in sub-zero weather, on surface streets. Still, what better place to be a hamster than Minneapolis?

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Remembering HHH

I deeply respected Hubert H. Humphrey, who would have made a much better president than Nixon. Actually, my cat Patrice would have made a better president than Nixon (and his dog Checkers would have made a better president than Trump). In these bleak times, take comfort in the fact that an American presidential candidate once said, “The moral test of government is how government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; those who are in the shadows of life; the sick, the needy and the handicapped.”

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Refuse to Accept Results? Historical Perspective

If Trump refuses to accept defeat in November, the republic will survive intact, as it has 5 out of 6 times in the past

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Stories We Never Told

In a nutshell, Stories We Never Told by Sonja Yoerg, is a taut, brilliant, twisty novel about the inside of human minds. Turns out people are complex, something she’d appreciate, being a psychologist. It has been years since a novel had me literally on the edge of my seat the way this one did. I read the last 1/3 of the book in a straight shot, because Vicki refused to tell me who did what to whom.

In the meantime, I was struck by this aside: “Maybe happiness wasn't durable and portable. maybe it was something you could have in only one place at one time of fixed duration.” It's probably like my observation about projects being on time, done right and under budget: you never get all three.

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Thanks again, David Mamet

Another of his perfect films, Place in the Sun, with Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor, is brilliant. Vicki and I were enthralled. By the way, it is loosely based on a real event.

Fun with Trump

My respect for the New York Daily News is enormous. The New York Post will always have Headless Body in Topless Bar, but this front page is a worthy competitor for the Tabloid Front Page Hall of Fame.

Also, this full page ad in the Times