Any
time I see the name Tupac in print, I mispronounce it in my head.
Any
time I hear the word quesadilla, in my head it sounds like
case of deeya.
NOV.
27, 2017 You can read 300 words in a minute. But if it's a particularly informative or poetic passage, you may go back and read it again. You might be reading it over and over all your life. A lecturer can speak 150 words in a minute. But even at that lower rate, his listeners may need to lightly apply the brakes. Perhaps they can take notes for later consideration. The urge to slow down a speaker can also apply to podcasts. Both Ken Levine on this podcast, and Eric D. Snider and Jeff Bayer on this one about movies, often discuss different topics in chunks of about nine minutes each. The chunks are separated by a jingle or by I give it an eight out of ten. That's usually my signal to stop the player for several minutes to savor and digest what I've just heard, lest my mind mix up the plot points of Thor: Ragnarok and A Bad Moms Christmas.
NOV.
24, 2017
NOV.
21, 2007 Do you remember when Billy Joel sang this song?
You probably don't, because he didn't keep using the same word. What he actually sang was this:
In writing, why do we avoid using a word several times in succession? Why do we replace it with synonyms wherever possible? Dean Cochran raised this question in my high school English class. We decided that it's because an oft-repeated word goes stale and loses its impact. But I don't think that applies to the first version of the lyrics above. "Crazy, crazy, crazy" would have even more force, wouldn't it? Now I've come to believe it's more a matter of style. We prefer to pepper our English with synonyms because we can. We have more words to choose from than any other language. In The Story of English, Robert MacNeil and friends noted that after 1066 and the Norman Conquest, there were three tongues spoken in England, and all three found their way into the modern English dictionary.
And now writers using this language can alternate among several words for each concept, thus adding texture to their style.
NOV.
18, 2017
Putting her Thanksgiving turkey in the oven, that's Elizabeth Montgomery as Samantha. I think this episode of the TV series Bewitched aired in November of 1970. Notice that she doesn't have to bend down to reach the oven. But what's the deal with the levitating door? I recognize this as a Flair built-in electric range from Frigidaire, which until 1979 was a division of General Motors.
When I arrived in Western Pennsylvania in 1974, the steel industry was slowly shutting down. Manufacturers were cutting labor costs, and unions were no longer winning lucrative new contracts. As I watched the local news, I thought there should be four desks in the studio: News, Weather, Sports, and Strikes. Every night there were several stories about labor unrest: deadlines being set, no progress being reported, talks breaking off, walkouts entering their seventh month. Unions are less powerful nowadays. Many public employees can't strike at all. When the air traffic controllers tried it, President Reagan fired and replaced them. Why should public employees be allowed to withhold their services? They're not working for some evil corporation; they're working for we the people, and we're the good guys, aren't we?
Pennsylvania is one of 13 states where public school teachers do have the right to strike. But it's a farce. State law says they can walk out for a few weeks, provided that the students still get their mandated 180 days of instruction by the end of the school year in June. So if the teachers do walk, as they did in the Seneca Valley school district October 15, the first thing that's done is to calculate when they must return. The authorities determine the latest possible date to achieve 180 days, assuming that all vacations are cancelled and all holidays are cancelled except Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Day, New Year's Day, and Memorial Day. In the case of the Seneca Valley district, that date is tomorrow. Then everyone sits back and merely waits for the month-long strike to expire. The teachers and the school board make a few negotiating noises, accusing each other of not bargaining in good faith, but neither side has any leverage. The teachers aren't shutting down the education factory; they're only rescheduling their vacations. They'll take their time off this month instead of during the Christmas and Easter seasons. They'll still get paid for 180 days, so they're not losing anything. Meanwhile, the administrators will still meet their production goals by the end of the year, so they're not losing anything either. Who does lose? The citizens. Families must reschedule activities that they had planned for what they thought would be school vacations. Students run into additional problems; for example, high school seniors miss deadlines for college applications. What does the strike accomplish? The teachers get to vent their frustration at failing to negotiate a favorable contract. But the accusations they make against the school board, and the complaints that the board makes against them, turn community opinion against everyone connected with the school system. There must be a better way for teachers' unions to exert pressure on their employers. Unfortunately, I don't know what it is.
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13, 2017 Sonny Perdue, once a Democrat, became the Trump administration's Secretary of Agriculture in April. I remember that Sonny was the governor of Georgia in 2007 when the state was suffering a severe drought. Atlanta's main water supply, a reservoir 30 miles north of the city, was at record low levels. Unless the Lord sends the rain, the lakes all dry up and the crops die.
An apple a day keeps the doctor away, Captain Obvious reminds us. But only if you throw it at him. Actually, keeping the doctor away is an outmoded concept that might puzzle the young'uns.
Nowadays, tweets Ellen Carmichael, In a world of Amazon Prime and UberEATS, I'm most surprised that we haven't returned to house calls for doctors. Personally, I dimly remember one house call when I was about seven and had the mumps. I learned my lesson. I've never come down with the mumps again.
NOV.
8, 2017
-iday Inn's banquet room. Ahem. You see, it would require far fewer of those cubes to fill a paper sack. Similarly, compared to a national TV network, our local cable TV channel had far fewer resources. Yet it was that very localness that enabled us to compete for viewers, sort of. In my new article Quoth the Program Director, I explain this madness. A recipe is included.
One of my colleagues tells of the time he found himself playing golf with three strangers. He didn't want to come off as some big shot from the glamorous world of television, because he's not that kind of guy. So he was evasive when one of the strangers asked him what he did for a living. He joked, "Oh, I paint lines on the highway." "Really?" said the stranger. "That's what I do! Do you work for the state highway department or the county?" "Uh, actually," my colleague had to admit, "I'm not a painter. Sorry; I was just trying to be funny. I didn't mean to demean your chosen profession, but it was the most unimportant job I could think of on the spur of the ... of the ... this is not going well."
First picture: Keith Jackson when, for Billy Wilder's 1966 movie The Fortune Cookie, he pretended to be in the pressbox at Cleveland's Municipal Stadium. I myself purchased a similar hat and coat and gloves. Earmuffs even.
Second picture: I still had that outfit when, for a 1981 cable TV commercial, I pretended to be reporting from a high school football playoff game. Yes, this is how we football broadcasters used to go on camera.
Back
in ancient times, more than twenty years ago, the second personal
computer that I owned was a TRS-80 Model 100 from Radio Shack.
This early laptop had an advanced LCD display (eight lines of 32
characters, monochrome of course). It featured software by
Microsoft, some of which was written by Bill Gates himself. Sportswriters found the lightweight Model 100 useful for typing their stories in the pressbox, then feeding them back to the newspaper office over its 300-baud modem. I developed some other uses for mine, as I mentioned in this article. One of them was a program that I wrote in BASIC to add up the segment times during the production of a TV show. That's not a trivial problem. Suppose a half-hour show starts at noon. It has five segments, but only the middle segment will be live. The other four segments are pretaped, and their lengths are 5:09, 2:59, 3:12, and 5:44. If each of the four commercial breaks will be two minutes long, what length should we plan for the live segment? When should it end? My "Avprod" program could give me the answers with a minimum of fuss. (They're 4:56 and 12:17:04 pm, respectively.) And as with a regular spreadsheet, I could change a number and see what effect that had on other numbers.
Just
for fun, I rewrote the program today for a modern computer. If
you want, you can download that Excel spreadsheet here. When we look back on our lives, many of us have a special year that stands out as our favorite. For me, it was the year I turned 21. Historians might say 1968 was a terrible year. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated. The war in Viet Nam continued. Protesters marched and rioted. All around the globe, as Mark Kurlansky wrote in 1968: The Year That Rocked the World, people were rebelling over disparate issues and had in common only ... a sense of alienation from the established order and a profound distaste for authoritarianism in any form.
I didn't keep a diary per se. However, my archives include quite a bit of memorabilia from that time, including letters I sent and received, a collection of WOBC program guides, a lab notebook, and other souvenirs. I can also link to additional details that I've previously posted on this website. There's so much material that I'm actually going to begin a couple of months early, on the occasion of my first date with a young lady who would become my lifelong friend. You can click here for that first installment.
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