P.S. A Column On Things

We Will Survive

I don’t want to get into it, since I fear for my life, and the lives of my family. My mantra: stay in the present. The past is history, the future is a mystery, that’s why they call it the present. We’ve witnessed a statistically unlikely event, maybe we are in for two.

As a former middle-school history teacher, I know we’ve been here before, and our democracy has survived. Yes, I know this is the 21^st century, not the 19^th.

Just as you shouldn’t credit or blame a president for “their” economy—it’s mostly outside their control—you also mostly can’t blame them for the state of the country. We, the people, got together to form a more perfect union: the first country on earth without a national ethnicity or religion.

Among our truly ghastly presidents:

• Millard Fillmore, who proved presidential succession may be a bad idea (a lesson we may someday relearn).
• James Buchanan, who fiddled while the Union burned.
• Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover, who, between them, drove America into the ground. In aviation, it’s called controlled flight into terrain.
• Rutherfraud B. Hayes, (oh wait, did I say that out loud? Rutherford) who won the White House by selling his soul to the devil. He promised, and delivered, a premature end to Reconstruction and sentenced African-Americans to a century of quasi-slavery at the hands of undeterred bigots, and their narrative that they hadn’t really lost the Civil War.
• History has yet to render its judgment on a  couple of recent mediocre presidents. But they are not really  in a class with Fillmore, Coolidge/Hoover and Hayes. Mediocre does not mean ghastly, and their terms were relatively easy to survive (although their damage lives on).

What’s With All The Time Travel?

There used to be a time when I thought I could watch every new time travel movie or TV show. But then with the simultaneous appearance of Omni Loop (Amazon) the movie and Continuum (Acorn/Amazon) the TV series, I am feeling a bit overwhelmed. Continuum is Canadian, and is straight-up time travel, with one accidental passenger on the trip. Omni Loop, set in Miami, is a time loop film. It plays with the “rules” in a way that confuses. No one ever mentions Groundhog Day in the dialog, which is mandatory in the time loop genre. I guess it just takes itself too seriously. It certainly wound its way to a seriously unsatisfying ending.

Both of these outings explain exactly how the time shift occurs, ignoring the obvious benefit of leaving the cause as a mystery, one of the most brilliant aspects of Groundhog Day (as filmed). Dwelling on the mechanism bogs down the story. Well, since the mechanism IS the story in Omni Loop, I guess I can’t say that.

So, as I say, what’s with all the time travel? Are we all that desperate to get out of our current reality?

Meme O’ The Week: Amount of People

We need to hold a memorial service for the lost art of proofreading. This ignorant grammar error does not appear in the online or print stories, just in the teaser head sent out to subscribers. Still, proofreading anyone?

It has been noted that not all readers of this column are language mavens. The headline should be "number of people." Amount refers to things you can't count, like water or sand. Number refers to things you can count, like people.  Similarly, in grocery stores, the sign "10 items or less" should be 10 items or fewer, unless you can't count them the items.

How Tough Was Gay Life in the 60s in Portland

I got to thinking the other day of how dangerous the closet was in the 1960s. My parents had out (well OK, out in a limited sense) gay friends. My grade school best friend and three of my high school besties were gay, but I was either too naïve or too unobservant to realize it.

I feel sure I have told this story before, but I asked my mother why some of the guys at my high school called me a homo (the 1960s slur for gay people). “Your two best friends are homosexual,” she said, to my surprise. “Give them up, or the taunts will continue.” “I’d rather be taunted than give up my friends,” and that was the choice I made.

One of my friends was a Mormon, shunned by his family and church when he came out. He became a House Boy and died, age 30, of AIDS. Another friend disappeared, except for a Social Security entry noting his death at age 28. The third friend became an Episcopal priest, but not without some difficulty about his sexual orientation.

Frankly, I don’t like those odds, and I’ll bet gay people in the 1960s didn’t like them either.

Things no one will ever do again: paid print/radio journalism 1

Once again, I lucked out by being born a middle-class American in 1952. I came of age at one of the absolute peaks of American journalism. Newspapers were on a downward slide, but the survivors were surviving. Radio news was mandated by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Jobs galore for a man with a great face for radio. (That is, not a blow-dried  news-model).

In 1927, in exchange for the use the public’s broadcast spectrum, radio stations were required to serve  in the “public interest, convenience, or necessity.” The FCC, always a supine regulator, at some point (I can’t find the date on the Internet) stopped requiring regular newscasts on all stations. Oops! Except for a few all-news stations, there went radio news—except for Rip Reed, the staffer who reads the AP Radio Wire out loud. Even those jobs are gone.

To be continued…

Correction on Death Certificate

I thought last week’s Death Certificate: Really? item was so funny since it implied you could ask for a copy of your own death certificate. And I thought that by checking to see if there really was a Frederick Smith, Register of deeds, I was authenticating it. Robert Malchman kindly pointed out that the official is real, the page is not.

This and That

(Want more regular This and That items? Send me some)

Watching: Murders in the Building/Hulu
They had me at Steve Martin and Martin Short. A delightful comedy with great cast and great cameos. Plus, for a modern sheen, they (and Selena Gomez) are podcasters.
…
Watching: Grey’s Anatomy/Hulu
Shonda Rhimes’ inaugural offering is still going strong in Season 21. Equal parts soap and medical drama, characters galore and sex everywhere. Meredith is back 70% of the time this season.
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Watching: Continuum/Acorn/Amazon
Some intentional time-travelling terrorists, and an accidental female cop. A very modern trope: a geek who hacks everything. Intentional efforts to change the timeline.
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Watching: Disclaimer/Apple+
I didn’t notice until it was pointed out: Apple+ is 100% original content. An award-winning journalist, a dead son, and the trope, “this novel is non-fiction and describes the crime.”

End of November 11 Column (No. 955)

Start of Nov. 4 Column. More or Less Continuous News Service since 1998

Vote As If Your Life Depended On It

Like the British Navy, the United States is a system designed by geniuses to be run by idiots, so chances are we’ll be OK. Nevertheless, tomorrow, Tuesday, Vote As If Your Life Depended On It, because it probably does. If you haven’t already voted by mail, do so, or get your ass to the polls tomorrow. Nothing else on your calendar is more than the fate of democracy.