Last night I watched A Charlie Brown Christmas, which I had captured with my DVR. This animated Christmas television classic was first broadcast in 1965. However, I had never seen it before.
The theme of the program, for those of you who have never seen it, is the overcommercialism of Christmas and Charlie's attempt to restore the true meaning of the holiday. Yet the way in which it was presented by ABC served to underscore just how commercial our entire society has become, and not just at Christmastime.
Case in point: The program was shown in a one-hour time block. Therefore I assumed that I was watching a one-hour program. Wrong. I used the 30-second skip-ahead button on my remote control to move through the commercials, as I always do, so I wasn't paying any attention to the amount of time taken up by the commercials. Much to my surprise, about 35 minutes into the program, I saw the end credits. The rest of the time period was taken up by another animated feature in which I had no interest.
What happened here is that the running time of the original program was edited to fit the time frame required by the major networks in 1965. For a half-hour program, this would have allowed about 26 minutes for the program and four minutes for commercials and station breaks. Today, however, it seems that the format for a half-hour program allows only about 20 minutes for the program and 10 minutes for commercials and station breaks--when and if station breaks are even used. Hence the program "ran over" the half-hour mark by six minutes. Thankfully, ABC didn't cut it to fit today's 30-minute time slot.
The situation is no better with full-hour programs. In the 1960s, a full-hour program had about 54 minutes of actual program content. Examples include the television specials done by Frank Sinatry and Barbra Streisand in the 1960s. Over the years, the running time gradually came down--to 50 minutes, 48 minutes, 45 minutes (on my DVDs for Quantum Leap, a program that went on the air in 1989), and 42 minutes (as in the early seasons of NCIS). Today the running time seems to be about 40 minutes.
In the 1960s and 1970s, we didn't have video cassettes, DVDs, or set-top boxes with built-in DVRs, but it was no big deal to have to sit through six minutes, or even 10 minutes, of commercials every hour. Now the broadcast networks and advertising-supported cable networks are expecting us to waste 20 minutes out of every hour watching commercials, most of which are repeated several times during the program and many of which are stupid and insult my intelligence. Some commercial breaks run as long as four minutes. I won't even get into the question of program quality (or more often, the lack of quality), but it is any wonder that these networks have lost their audiences?
There are some programs that I watch regularly, such as NCIS, NCIS Los Angeles, Hawaii 5-0 (all on CBS), and Nikita. However, I'll be darned if I'm going to waste 20 minutes out of every hour watching their commercials. I capture them on my DVR first, then watch them later, skipping over their commercials. The advertisers who have spent money to reach me with their message have wasted their money. In fact, the only programs that I will watch in real time are some sporting and news events. I'm a baseball fan, and the commercial breaks during baseball broadcasts aren't very offensive because they are limited to about two minutes between each half-inning.
My point is this: The advertising-supported broadcast networks, and many of the cable networks as well, in their efforts to get every advertising dollar possible, have gone too far. They have a right to make a fair profit, of course. What they don't have a right to do is ask me to waste 20 minutes out of every hour watching their stupid commercials. They put a value on their advertising minutes, but I also put a value on my time.
We viewers must fight back by refusing to let them waste our time. If you regularly watch advertising-supported television and you don't already have a Tivo or a set-top box with a DVR, I encourage you to get one. Just think what you could do with that extra 20 minutes every hour.
Sunday, December 19, 2010
Saturday, December 11, 2010
These Christians: See how they club one another
Through all of my life, I have held to the belief that most people are basically good and just want a fair chance at a decent life for themselves and their families. I believe in trusting a person until they give me a reason not to trust them. I have worked for people who were paranoid and did not share this trust in others, but I've chosen not to live that way.
Every once in a while, however, an event occurs that shakes my belief in the basic decency of others. One such event was the decision of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, to picket the funeral of Elizabeth Edwards, who died of cancer earlier this week.
To me--and to many others as well, I'm sure--Elizabeth Edwards was a role model. In everything that she did, she showed class and dignity.
She and her husband, John, a candidate for President in 2008, overcame the death of their 16-year-old son, Wade, in 1996 and turned it into a life-changing event for themselves. She was an exemplary political wife in both 2004, when John ran for Vice President and she first became aware of her cancer, and 2008, when her cancer recurred. Even then, she stood by John and continued to campaign for him.
After John withdrew his presidential candidacy and she learned that her cancer was terminal, she became a staunch and vocal advocate of women who suffer from cancer. When she learned of his infidelities, she somehow managed to carry on. Elizabeth Edwards remained an example and role model right up to the end.
Thus it shocked me to learn of the plans of members of the Westboro Baptist Church to picket her funeral. They preach Christianity but they don't practice it. I'm reminded of a comment made by a classmate many years ago, when I was a seminarian studying for the Catholic priesthood: "These Christians. See how they club one another."
What disgusts me even more are the reasons that these so-called Christians have given for their protest. I will not dignify their ugliness and lies by repeating any of them here, but they are so cruel and hurtful that they make the Crusades look like a misson of mercy and the Spanish Inquisition look like an exchange of text messages between best friends.
Some of you may remember Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin, a demagogue of the 1950s who ruined many lives by preying on the fear of Communism that was prevalent at the time and persecuting many innocent Government employees by falsely charging them with being Communists (at a time when the American Communist Party was still legal in this country, if I'm not mistaken). McCarthy was finally stopped by a landmark broadcast by Edward R. Murrow, the great pioneer television journalist, and ultimately by his own actions at the Army-McCarthy hearings, where he claimed the U.S. Army was knowingly harboring Communists.
As the hearings began to come apart when McCarthy's hypocrisy and cruelty became clear, Joseph Welch, the attorney for the Army, put McCarthy in his place with some memorable words. I would say those same words to the pastor and parishioners of Westboro Baptist Church:
"Until this moment, I think I never gauged your cruelty or recklessness....If it were in my power to forgive you for your reckless cruelty, I would do so. I like to think I am a gentleman, but your forgiveness will have to come from someone other than me....Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?....If there is a God in heaven, it will do neither you nor your cause any good."
Every once in a while, however, an event occurs that shakes my belief in the basic decency of others. One such event was the decision of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, to picket the funeral of Elizabeth Edwards, who died of cancer earlier this week.
To me--and to many others as well, I'm sure--Elizabeth Edwards was a role model. In everything that she did, she showed class and dignity.
She and her husband, John, a candidate for President in 2008, overcame the death of their 16-year-old son, Wade, in 1996 and turned it into a life-changing event for themselves. She was an exemplary political wife in both 2004, when John ran for Vice President and she first became aware of her cancer, and 2008, when her cancer recurred. Even then, she stood by John and continued to campaign for him.
After John withdrew his presidential candidacy and she learned that her cancer was terminal, she became a staunch and vocal advocate of women who suffer from cancer. When she learned of his infidelities, she somehow managed to carry on. Elizabeth Edwards remained an example and role model right up to the end.
Thus it shocked me to learn of the plans of members of the Westboro Baptist Church to picket her funeral. They preach Christianity but they don't practice it. I'm reminded of a comment made by a classmate many years ago, when I was a seminarian studying for the Catholic priesthood: "These Christians. See how they club one another."
What disgusts me even more are the reasons that these so-called Christians have given for their protest. I will not dignify their ugliness and lies by repeating any of them here, but they are so cruel and hurtful that they make the Crusades look like a misson of mercy and the Spanish Inquisition look like an exchange of text messages between best friends.
Some of you may remember Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin, a demagogue of the 1950s who ruined many lives by preying on the fear of Communism that was prevalent at the time and persecuting many innocent Government employees by falsely charging them with being Communists (at a time when the American Communist Party was still legal in this country, if I'm not mistaken). McCarthy was finally stopped by a landmark broadcast by Edward R. Murrow, the great pioneer television journalist, and ultimately by his own actions at the Army-McCarthy hearings, where he claimed the U.S. Army was knowingly harboring Communists.
As the hearings began to come apart when McCarthy's hypocrisy and cruelty became clear, Joseph Welch, the attorney for the Army, put McCarthy in his place with some memorable words. I would say those same words to the pastor and parishioners of Westboro Baptist Church:
"Until this moment, I think I never gauged your cruelty or recklessness....If it were in my power to forgive you for your reckless cruelty, I would do so. I like to think I am a gentleman, but your forgiveness will have to come from someone other than me....Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?....If there is a God in heaven, it will do neither you nor your cause any good."
Sunday, November 28, 2010
Book Review: The Great LIFE Photographers
The Great LIFE Photographers, by the editors of LIFE. Little, Brown and Company. 608 pages. $24.95.
Have you ever walked through a bookstore and been drawn to a book like a magnet? This happened to me a few weeks ago.
I was at the end of the book aisle at Costco, where they display the glitzy coffee-table books during the holiday season. Sitting on top of a stack, all by itself, was a copy of The Great LIFE Photographers, in a new trade paperback edition. Apparently it had been abandoned there by a previous shopper, and it appeared to be the only copy left in the store. I took a look at the front and back covers and almost before I knew it, the book was in my shopping cart.
I would recommend this book to anyone who cares about photography in general and photojournalism in particular. During its existence as a regular publication, from 1936 to 1972, LIFE magazine virtually defined photojournalism, and many of the great photographers of the middle years of the 20th Century were on its staff at one time or another.
This marvelous, 608-page book contains the best work of all 92 staff photographers as well as several others who were closely associated with the magazine. These are not just the best photographs to have appeared in the magazine. In many cases, they are among the greatest photographs of all time.
The founding editors of the magazine understood the power of a great photograph. In his introduction, John Loengard, one of the later LIFE photographers, showns a photograph of Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propagandist and close ally of Adolph Hitler, taken by Alfred Eisenstadt in 1933. Eistenstadt became the dean of the LIFE photographers and his photograph helped to shape the direction that the magazine would take. In public, Goebbels always tried to project a positive, benevolent image of himself, but this photo, which captures him in an unguarded moment with a malevolent sneer on his face, tells you all that you need to know about the evil man.
The editors who worked on the book devoted at least two pages to each photographer, including a portrait of the photographer and a short biographical note, and the best ones get as many as 10 pages. (There are two exceptions, Stedman Jones and Boris Paschkoff, each of whom joined the magazine in Paris in 1940 and left when France surrendered to Germany on June 28 of that year. Nothing more is known about them, and each is represented by one photo.)
Open the book to any page and you'll see at least one great photograph. In many cases, I was familiar with the photo but didn't know the photographer. Now I know.
The print quality is outstanding. The paper is a high-quality coated stock and the photos are printed at a high resolution. Costco has it for $14.95 and Amazon for a few dollars more. It's a bargain.
By way of background information, my own interest in photography goes back to the early 1960s, when I got my first single-lens-reflex camera. My first job after college, in 1965, was as a newspaper reporter and photographer. In the 1970s, I got to know Phil Douglis, a leading proponent of the use of photography in organizational communications, and learned much about photojournalism from his workshops, writings, and critiques of my own publications. I even managed to win some local and national awards for my work.
In addition, my then-wife was a photographer and artist, and when we were married she brought her collection of photography and art books with her. (They also left with her when we were divorced.) I spent a good deal of time admiring the work of great photojournalists such as W. Eugene Smith (my favorite), Robert Capa, and Margaret Bourke-White, all of whom worked for LIFE at one time or another, as well as Ansel Adams, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and many other great photographers.
It's important for my younger readers to understand that in the time of LIFE magazine, there was no such thing as a digital camera and none of the automated features that we have come to take for granted, such as autofocus, automatic exposure control, or rapid multiple exposures. All cameras used film, and the film stocks of the time were very slow to respond to light.
The photographer had to do everything manually: Focus the camera, judge the amount of light on the subject, and select the best combination of aperture opening and shutter speed, depending on that light and the speed of the film. There wasn't much latitude for error. You either got it right or you didn't get the picture. Eventually, light meters became available, but the early ones weren't very accurate and could only give you an approximation of the proper setting. The great photographers didn't take photographs, they made them.
Most of the photographs that appeared in LIFE were black-and-white rather than color. The photographers who worked in black-and-white had to become expert in the effect of light in their photos. Turn to page 525 in the book and look at Gene Smith's photo of the Japanese woman bathing her deformed daughter, a victim of mercury poisoning. It's a masterpiece in the use of light, and as powerful as any painting that I have ever seen. It has been called photojournalism's Pieta.
Perhaps the most important quality that a photojournalist had to develop was knowing the instant when to trip the shutter--what Cartier-Bresson called "The Decisive Moment." Shutters were virtually instantaneous in those days but the shutter release button often had a fair amount of "travel" before it hit the release point, and every camera was different. You learned to depress the shutter button halfway, just short of the release point, and hold it there until your instinct told you to trip the shutter.
Later, the photographer or a darkroom technician had to load the film into a developing container in total darkness, process and dry the film, and make prints of the best frames after the film had dried. It took several hours for the film to dry, and if you tried to force-dry the film, you could damage it. Both developing the film and developing the prints involved the use of three chemicals--developer, stop bath, and fixer. The timing of the developer stage, in particular, was critical.
Things could go wrong at any step of the way, from exposing the film to pulling the print from the dryer. Robert Capa was one of the greatest combat photographers of all time. Most of his photos of the D-Day landing in France were lost because of a mistake made by a photographic technician. Based on the few frames that were salvaged, it was a great loss.
Let us also not forget that even the great photographs that we do have are not permanent. Negatives and slides deteriorate and prints fade over time. Today you can go to http://www.life.com/ and buy prints of many of the photos in this book. However, unless the negatives are properly preserved (which LIFE appears to be doing), our children and grandchildren may not be able to do so.
Have you ever walked through a bookstore and been drawn to a book like a magnet? This happened to me a few weeks ago.
I was at the end of the book aisle at Costco, where they display the glitzy coffee-table books during the holiday season. Sitting on top of a stack, all by itself, was a copy of The Great LIFE Photographers, in a new trade paperback edition. Apparently it had been abandoned there by a previous shopper, and it appeared to be the only copy left in the store. I took a look at the front and back covers and almost before I knew it, the book was in my shopping cart.
I would recommend this book to anyone who cares about photography in general and photojournalism in particular. During its existence as a regular publication, from 1936 to 1972, LIFE magazine virtually defined photojournalism, and many of the great photographers of the middle years of the 20th Century were on its staff at one time or another.
This marvelous, 608-page book contains the best work of all 92 staff photographers as well as several others who were closely associated with the magazine. These are not just the best photographs to have appeared in the magazine. In many cases, they are among the greatest photographs of all time.
The founding editors of the magazine understood the power of a great photograph. In his introduction, John Loengard, one of the later LIFE photographers, showns a photograph of Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propagandist and close ally of Adolph Hitler, taken by Alfred Eisenstadt in 1933. Eistenstadt became the dean of the LIFE photographers and his photograph helped to shape the direction that the magazine would take. In public, Goebbels always tried to project a positive, benevolent image of himself, but this photo, which captures him in an unguarded moment with a malevolent sneer on his face, tells you all that you need to know about the evil man.
The editors who worked on the book devoted at least two pages to each photographer, including a portrait of the photographer and a short biographical note, and the best ones get as many as 10 pages. (There are two exceptions, Stedman Jones and Boris Paschkoff, each of whom joined the magazine in Paris in 1940 and left when France surrendered to Germany on June 28 of that year. Nothing more is known about them, and each is represented by one photo.)
Open the book to any page and you'll see at least one great photograph. In many cases, I was familiar with the photo but didn't know the photographer. Now I know.
The print quality is outstanding. The paper is a high-quality coated stock and the photos are printed at a high resolution. Costco has it for $14.95 and Amazon for a few dollars more. It's a bargain.
By way of background information, my own interest in photography goes back to the early 1960s, when I got my first single-lens-reflex camera. My first job after college, in 1965, was as a newspaper reporter and photographer. In the 1970s, I got to know Phil Douglis, a leading proponent of the use of photography in organizational communications, and learned much about photojournalism from his workshops, writings, and critiques of my own publications. I even managed to win some local and national awards for my work.
In addition, my then-wife was a photographer and artist, and when we were married she brought her collection of photography and art books with her. (They also left with her when we were divorced.) I spent a good deal of time admiring the work of great photojournalists such as W. Eugene Smith (my favorite), Robert Capa, and Margaret Bourke-White, all of whom worked for LIFE at one time or another, as well as Ansel Adams, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and many other great photographers.
It's important for my younger readers to understand that in the time of LIFE magazine, there was no such thing as a digital camera and none of the automated features that we have come to take for granted, such as autofocus, automatic exposure control, or rapid multiple exposures. All cameras used film, and the film stocks of the time were very slow to respond to light.
The photographer had to do everything manually: Focus the camera, judge the amount of light on the subject, and select the best combination of aperture opening and shutter speed, depending on that light and the speed of the film. There wasn't much latitude for error. You either got it right or you didn't get the picture. Eventually, light meters became available, but the early ones weren't very accurate and could only give you an approximation of the proper setting. The great photographers didn't take photographs, they made them.
Most of the photographs that appeared in LIFE were black-and-white rather than color. The photographers who worked in black-and-white had to become expert in the effect of light in their photos. Turn to page 525 in the book and look at Gene Smith's photo of the Japanese woman bathing her deformed daughter, a victim of mercury poisoning. It's a masterpiece in the use of light, and as powerful as any painting that I have ever seen. It has been called photojournalism's Pieta.
Perhaps the most important quality that a photojournalist had to develop was knowing the instant when to trip the shutter--what Cartier-Bresson called "The Decisive Moment." Shutters were virtually instantaneous in those days but the shutter release button often had a fair amount of "travel" before it hit the release point, and every camera was different. You learned to depress the shutter button halfway, just short of the release point, and hold it there until your instinct told you to trip the shutter.
Later, the photographer or a darkroom technician had to load the film into a developing container in total darkness, process and dry the film, and make prints of the best frames after the film had dried. It took several hours for the film to dry, and if you tried to force-dry the film, you could damage it. Both developing the film and developing the prints involved the use of three chemicals--developer, stop bath, and fixer. The timing of the developer stage, in particular, was critical.
Things could go wrong at any step of the way, from exposing the film to pulling the print from the dryer. Robert Capa was one of the greatest combat photographers of all time. Most of his photos of the D-Day landing in France were lost because of a mistake made by a photographic technician. Based on the few frames that were salvaged, it was a great loss.
Let us also not forget that even the great photographs that we do have are not permanent. Negatives and slides deteriorate and prints fade over time. Today you can go to http://www.life.com/ and buy prints of many of the photos in this book. However, unless the negatives are properly preserved (which LIFE appears to be doing), our children and grandchildren may not be able to do so.
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Dumb Deficit Reduction Proposals
The deficit reduction proposals recently suggested by the leaders of President Obama's deficit reduction commission, among other groups, once again show how out of touch the administration and its advisors are with reality. Some of these ideas are just plain dumb. Let's take a look at a few that have been floated:
Taxing High-End Health Insurance Plans
Some people want to tax companies that offer high-end health insurance benefits to their employees. I thought that the idea was to make it easier for everyone to get health insurance. Companies large and small have been struggling with the rising cost of health insurance plans for about 20 years now, and many of them have shifted an increasing amount of the burden of paying for health insurance to their employees or simply dropped their health insurance benefits altogether.
I was forced to enroll in an HMO at one point because my employer switched to it and didn't offer any alternatives. I've been in three of them since the early 1970s and all of them were worthless. This one was so bad that the employees insisted on going back to a preferred-provider plan the following year.
Taxing those few companies that still offer high-end plans will only cause them to drop those plans. What are the people who advocate this tax thinking?
It's the insurance companies that should be taxed, particularly those that are taking obscene profits. Supposedly, they adjust their rates each year based on usage by the participants, but the adjustments are always upward. Have you ever heard of an insurance company lowering its rates?
Most businesses would be happy to see a profit of 10 percent or so. Insurance companies should be forced to plow back some of their obscene profits into either reducing their rates or improving their coverage at no additional charge. In other words, give something back to the overcharged subscribers who enabled them to earn these obscene profits in the first place.
There could be something like the level-payment plan that I have with Dominion Power, my electric company. I have an all-electric town house so I watch my electric bills very closely. Every six months, Dominion reviews my use of power for the previous six months, as well as my anticipated usage for the next six months, and adjusts my monthly payment accordingly. Sometimes it goes up and just as often it goes down. The final bill for the six-month period is usually a make-up bill that is lower than the previous bills.
That's a fair system. If I use more electricity than before, the bill goes up. If I use less, the bill goes down. Why can't the health insurance companies do something similar?
Added on November 23, 2010:
Yesterday's edition of Capital Business, published by the Washington Post, reported that employer health benefit costs have increased an average of 6.9 percent nationally, according to a survey of 2,800 employers conducted by the Mercer consulting firm. The average cost for employers with 10 or more employees was $10,100 per employee. (See the Money Matters column, Volume 1, Issue 32, page 9.) I rest my case.
Eliminating the Mortgage Interest Deduction
I'm a member of AARP and I normally agree with most of its positions on issues, but Jim Toedtman, editor of the AARP Bulletin, made a really stupid statement in the current issue (November 2010). Perhaps I've misinterpreted it; I certainly hope so. He wrote:
"Should we address the mortgage interest deduction, which contributed to the explosion of household debt and the housing bubble we still haven't escaped?"
Huh? The mortage interest deduction has been around ever since I can remember, and I bought my first house in 1971. One of the purposes of the deduction, of course, was to encourage home ownership. Married couples, both homeowners and renters, lost many deductions when the tax code was revised in the 1980s. The mortgage interest deduction was one of the few decent deductions left.
Often, when a couple buys a home, they go through a nesting period, when they invest money into fixing up the house. If they are first-time homeowners in particular, they may also spend money buying furniture and other household items. In other words, new homeowners put a lot of money back into the economy. The mortgage interest deduction helps them. Furthermore, many people pay more taxes than they need to, then take their refund to buy major items for the house.
The mortgage interest deduction may have contributed to the current foreclosure problem, but only because unqualified home buyers, just like qualified buyers, wanted to take advantage of it. But many of these unqualified buyers who took on toxic, subprime mortgages have already lost their homes and are no longer benefiting from it.
Now there's a second wave of people who are losing their homes. These people have conventional mortgages which they could afford at the time that they took them out, and often have been in their homes for many years but are in danger of losing them because they've lost their job. Taking away their mortgage interest deduction will only make things more difficult for these people. Isn't the government supposedly trying to keep these people in their homes?
Eliminating Early Retirement from Social Security
The suggestion that we remove the early-retirement option from Social Security retirement benefits really strikes home with me. Most people who can afford to wait until they reach full retirement age--a constantly-moving target, to be sure--are not likely to exercise the early-retirement option. I strongly suspect that many people who exercise the option are much like I was when I reached 62 years of age. I desperately needed the money. In fact, I was about an inch from bankruptcy at the time, and if I had not been able to exercise the option, I would have had to file for bankruptcy.
Social Security may be a safety net but it is also an entitlement. I paid into Social Security (and soon, Medicare as well) as soon as I started to work full-time in 1965. The way that I see it, the money that I receive from Social Security is my money. I lent it to the Federal Government for many years, and now I need it. It's not a handout; it's the Federal Government paying me back the money that I lent to it. I have a right to that money, and if I need it when I turn 62 instead of being able to wait until full retirement age, I should be able to take it. I signed on with that understanding when I first started working and the Federal Government has to honor its part of the deal.
You know what? The next time the Federal Government needs advice on matters that affect the lives of average citizens, it ought to form a committee of average citizens. We'll give it to the government straight.
In case you're wondering, I'm a liberal Democrat, not a member of the Tea Party, and I voted for Barack Obama in the hope that he could turn his rhetoric into action. However, by and large, he's failed to do this, at least in my opinion, and I'm sick and tired of this country being run by people who are out of touch with the realities that our average citizens face every day of their lives.
Taxing High-End Health Insurance Plans
Some people want to tax companies that offer high-end health insurance benefits to their employees. I thought that the idea was to make it easier for everyone to get health insurance. Companies large and small have been struggling with the rising cost of health insurance plans for about 20 years now, and many of them have shifted an increasing amount of the burden of paying for health insurance to their employees or simply dropped their health insurance benefits altogether.
I was forced to enroll in an HMO at one point because my employer switched to it and didn't offer any alternatives. I've been in three of them since the early 1970s and all of them were worthless. This one was so bad that the employees insisted on going back to a preferred-provider plan the following year.
Taxing those few companies that still offer high-end plans will only cause them to drop those plans. What are the people who advocate this tax thinking?
It's the insurance companies that should be taxed, particularly those that are taking obscene profits. Supposedly, they adjust their rates each year based on usage by the participants, but the adjustments are always upward. Have you ever heard of an insurance company lowering its rates?
Most businesses would be happy to see a profit of 10 percent or so. Insurance companies should be forced to plow back some of their obscene profits into either reducing their rates or improving their coverage at no additional charge. In other words, give something back to the overcharged subscribers who enabled them to earn these obscene profits in the first place.
There could be something like the level-payment plan that I have with Dominion Power, my electric company. I have an all-electric town house so I watch my electric bills very closely. Every six months, Dominion reviews my use of power for the previous six months, as well as my anticipated usage for the next six months, and adjusts my monthly payment accordingly. Sometimes it goes up and just as often it goes down. The final bill for the six-month period is usually a make-up bill that is lower than the previous bills.
That's a fair system. If I use more electricity than before, the bill goes up. If I use less, the bill goes down. Why can't the health insurance companies do something similar?
Added on November 23, 2010:
Yesterday's edition of Capital Business, published by the Washington Post, reported that employer health benefit costs have increased an average of 6.9 percent nationally, according to a survey of 2,800 employers conducted by the Mercer consulting firm. The average cost for employers with 10 or more employees was $10,100 per employee. (See the Money Matters column, Volume 1, Issue 32, page 9.) I rest my case.
Eliminating the Mortgage Interest Deduction
I'm a member of AARP and I normally agree with most of its positions on issues, but Jim Toedtman, editor of the AARP Bulletin, made a really stupid statement in the current issue (November 2010). Perhaps I've misinterpreted it; I certainly hope so. He wrote:
"Should we address the mortgage interest deduction, which contributed to the explosion of household debt and the housing bubble we still haven't escaped?"
Huh? The mortage interest deduction has been around ever since I can remember, and I bought my first house in 1971. One of the purposes of the deduction, of course, was to encourage home ownership. Married couples, both homeowners and renters, lost many deductions when the tax code was revised in the 1980s. The mortgage interest deduction was one of the few decent deductions left.
Often, when a couple buys a home, they go through a nesting period, when they invest money into fixing up the house. If they are first-time homeowners in particular, they may also spend money buying furniture and other household items. In other words, new homeowners put a lot of money back into the economy. The mortgage interest deduction helps them. Furthermore, many people pay more taxes than they need to, then take their refund to buy major items for the house.
The mortgage interest deduction may have contributed to the current foreclosure problem, but only because unqualified home buyers, just like qualified buyers, wanted to take advantage of it. But many of these unqualified buyers who took on toxic, subprime mortgages have already lost their homes and are no longer benefiting from it.
Now there's a second wave of people who are losing their homes. These people have conventional mortgages which they could afford at the time that they took them out, and often have been in their homes for many years but are in danger of losing them because they've lost their job. Taking away their mortgage interest deduction will only make things more difficult for these people. Isn't the government supposedly trying to keep these people in their homes?
Eliminating Early Retirement from Social Security
The suggestion that we remove the early-retirement option from Social Security retirement benefits really strikes home with me. Most people who can afford to wait until they reach full retirement age--a constantly-moving target, to be sure--are not likely to exercise the early-retirement option. I strongly suspect that many people who exercise the option are much like I was when I reached 62 years of age. I desperately needed the money. In fact, I was about an inch from bankruptcy at the time, and if I had not been able to exercise the option, I would have had to file for bankruptcy.
Social Security may be a safety net but it is also an entitlement. I paid into Social Security (and soon, Medicare as well) as soon as I started to work full-time in 1965. The way that I see it, the money that I receive from Social Security is my money. I lent it to the Federal Government for many years, and now I need it. It's not a handout; it's the Federal Government paying me back the money that I lent to it. I have a right to that money, and if I need it when I turn 62 instead of being able to wait until full retirement age, I should be able to take it. I signed on with that understanding when I first started working and the Federal Government has to honor its part of the deal.
You know what? The next time the Federal Government needs advice on matters that affect the lives of average citizens, it ought to form a committee of average citizens. We'll give it to the government straight.
In case you're wondering, I'm a liberal Democrat, not a member of the Tea Party, and I voted for Barack Obama in the hope that he could turn his rhetoric into action. However, by and large, he's failed to do this, at least in my opinion, and I'm sick and tired of this country being run by people who are out of touch with the realities that our average citizens face every day of their lives.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Figure Skating: Worth Watching Again
I never thought that it would happen this quickly, but the artistry has returned to figure skating. Those of you who follow the sport know that the artistry that great skaters such as Michelle Kwan and the ice dancing team of Torvill and Dean brought to the sport had been largely lost under the new scoring system that was introduced five or six years ago. If you've given up on the sport because of this, as I almost did, come back to it. You'll love what you'll see today.
I have been a casual fan of figure skating since 1964, when I happened to be a student in Innsbruck, Austria, during the 1964 Olympics, and a serious fan since 2002. Around the time of the 2002 Olympics, I collected every video cassette and DVD that I could find, and a few books as well. I managed to obtain every Olympic highlight video from 1992 on, plus everything that I could find that showed great skaters from the past. I also began recording every important televised skating event and creating my own highlight cassettes and discs.
The reason for my growing interest in the sport could be summed up in two words: Michelle Kwan. I am a very emotional person, and I'm easily moved to tears by certain films and pieces of music. Michelle Kwan was the first skater that I had seen whose performances were so beautiful that they often moved me to tears. I also fell in love with the performances of the great ice dancers, Jane Torvill and Christopher Dean, who for me will always be the gold standard in ice dancing.
Unfortunately in many ways, the sport began to change dramatically in the early years of this century, as it went to a new scoring system that encouraged rapid accumulation of points. Instead of leaving room for artistry in their performances, skaters were focusing on jumps and other technical, or athletic, elements. There was no longer any room for artistic skaters such as Michelle Kwan or Torvill and Dean. The artistic side of figure skating, now called presentation elements, had definitely taken a back seat to the athletic side.
By the time of the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino, Italy, I felt that the beauty and artistry had left the sport completely. The judges were not giving the presentation marks the weight that they should have and the skaters were totally focused on racking up points. Figure skating had become little more than a jumping competition. When I wanted to remember how it used to be, I played Michelle Kwan's free skate from the 2004 U.S. Nationals on the Skating Through Time set and the video of Torvill and Dean's "Face the Music" tour from 1995.
I had concluded that the only way that beauty and artistry would return to figure skating would be if the skaters themselves decided that they needed to bring back the artistry, if only to satisfy their own need for creativity. The International Skating Union (ISU), which sets the rules, would eventually have to go along with them and give proper weight to presentation quality.
Amazingly, this seems to be exactly what has happened. Truly great skaters such as Evan Lysacek found a way to incorporate artistry into their programs. By the 2010 Olympics, artistry was back.
Now, as I watch the Grand Prix series of the 2010-2011 season--the sport's "regular season"--I'm happy to see that this trend is continuing. The number of required elements has been reduced, giving the skaters time to breathe, as it were. I'm not happy with the higher score now given to quadruple jumps (four rotations in the air), because it's forcing virtually all male singles skaters to add the quad to their repertoires. But by and large, I believe that the changes have been positive.
Looking back on it, the 2006 competition in Torino was probably the worst that I've ever seen. Typically, in each of the four disciplines, out of the final six skaters or teams, three skate below their best level, two skate competently, and one rises to the occasion. In a good event, two of them rise to the occasion, as happened in 1994 with Nancy Kerrigan and Oksana Baiul. The worst is when no one rises to the occasion. I call this a "last man standing" competition. Evgeni Plushenko won the men's event in Torino not because he skated well, but because he skated less poorly than the others.
On the other hand, the figure skating competition in Vancouver this year was without a doubt the greatest that I have ever seen. I feel that I was privileged to see it.
There were so many great stories. Yao Bin had dedicated hs life to creating and building the pairs figure skating program in China. In a great pairs competition, his life's work was vindicated when Shen Xue and Zhao Hongbo won the gold and Pang and Tong won the silver. You just had to be happy for the man, as well as for the skaters.
The ice dancing competition was a revelation. Davis and White of the United States had make remarkable progress over the past two years and showed themselves to be worthy successors to Belbin and Agosto. Virtue and Mohr of Canada performed the most beautiful free dance that I have seen since the days of Torvill and Dean, and in fact Virtue and Mohr reminded me of the earlier team.
I couldn't believe the results of the men's short program. Three world-class skaters, each with scores of more than 90, led the pack. As I recall, Daisuke Takahashi fell behind in the long program, but Plushenko was up to par and Lysacek gave the performance of his life. Needless to say, I was disappointed in Plushenko's lack of sportsmanship. The video clearly shows that Lysacek beat Plushenko at his own game--the jumps--and left Plushenko in the dust when it came to presentation quality. Finally, Frank Carroll, perhaps the greatest figure skating coach that the United States has ever produced, had his Olympic gold medalist.
As good as these competitions were, absolutely nothing prepared me for the ladies' free skate, which surely must go down as one of the greatest single competitions in the history of the sport. All six of the skaters performed at their highest level, and several of them skated the performances of their lives.
Kim Yu-Na's performance brought me to tears. In my opinion, it was the greatest ladies free skate that I have ever seen at an Olympics and the equal of Michelle Kwan's performance at the 2004 U.S. Nationals. And how wonderful it was to see her coach, Brian Orser, who had lost out to Brian Boitano of the United States in the great men's competition of 1988, vindicated through his skater.
But it didn't stop there. I have always liked the Canadian skater, Joannie Rochette, but until this occasion she always seemed to choke in the free skate. Every Olympics has its story of triumph over adversity. Joannie's mother had come to Vancouver several days earlier and suddenly died of a heart attack. The entire country got behind Joannie as she decided to go forward with her competition. She fought back the tears and the tragedy of losing her mother to skate the performance of her life and win the bronze.
Somehow, all of these fantastic performances didn't faze the American skater, Mirai Nagasu, who closed the competition with the best performance of her young life. I have never seen a skating competition this good and I don't ever expect to see one again.
I have been a casual fan of figure skating since 1964, when I happened to be a student in Innsbruck, Austria, during the 1964 Olympics, and a serious fan since 2002. Around the time of the 2002 Olympics, I collected every video cassette and DVD that I could find, and a few books as well. I managed to obtain every Olympic highlight video from 1992 on, plus everything that I could find that showed great skaters from the past. I also began recording every important televised skating event and creating my own highlight cassettes and discs.
The reason for my growing interest in the sport could be summed up in two words: Michelle Kwan. I am a very emotional person, and I'm easily moved to tears by certain films and pieces of music. Michelle Kwan was the first skater that I had seen whose performances were so beautiful that they often moved me to tears. I also fell in love with the performances of the great ice dancers, Jane Torvill and Christopher Dean, who for me will always be the gold standard in ice dancing.
Unfortunately in many ways, the sport began to change dramatically in the early years of this century, as it went to a new scoring system that encouraged rapid accumulation of points. Instead of leaving room for artistry in their performances, skaters were focusing on jumps and other technical, or athletic, elements. There was no longer any room for artistic skaters such as Michelle Kwan or Torvill and Dean. The artistic side of figure skating, now called presentation elements, had definitely taken a back seat to the athletic side.
By the time of the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino, Italy, I felt that the beauty and artistry had left the sport completely. The judges were not giving the presentation marks the weight that they should have and the skaters were totally focused on racking up points. Figure skating had become little more than a jumping competition. When I wanted to remember how it used to be, I played Michelle Kwan's free skate from the 2004 U.S. Nationals on the Skating Through Time set and the video of Torvill and Dean's "Face the Music" tour from 1995.
I had concluded that the only way that beauty and artistry would return to figure skating would be if the skaters themselves decided that they needed to bring back the artistry, if only to satisfy their own need for creativity. The International Skating Union (ISU), which sets the rules, would eventually have to go along with them and give proper weight to presentation quality.
Amazingly, this seems to be exactly what has happened. Truly great skaters such as Evan Lysacek found a way to incorporate artistry into their programs. By the 2010 Olympics, artistry was back.
Now, as I watch the Grand Prix series of the 2010-2011 season--the sport's "regular season"--I'm happy to see that this trend is continuing. The number of required elements has been reduced, giving the skaters time to breathe, as it were. I'm not happy with the higher score now given to quadruple jumps (four rotations in the air), because it's forcing virtually all male singles skaters to add the quad to their repertoires. But by and large, I believe that the changes have been positive.
Looking back on it, the 2006 competition in Torino was probably the worst that I've ever seen. Typically, in each of the four disciplines, out of the final six skaters or teams, three skate below their best level, two skate competently, and one rises to the occasion. In a good event, two of them rise to the occasion, as happened in 1994 with Nancy Kerrigan and Oksana Baiul. The worst is when no one rises to the occasion. I call this a "last man standing" competition. Evgeni Plushenko won the men's event in Torino not because he skated well, but because he skated less poorly than the others.
On the other hand, the figure skating competition in Vancouver this year was without a doubt the greatest that I have ever seen. I feel that I was privileged to see it.
There were so many great stories. Yao Bin had dedicated hs life to creating and building the pairs figure skating program in China. In a great pairs competition, his life's work was vindicated when Shen Xue and Zhao Hongbo won the gold and Pang and Tong won the silver. You just had to be happy for the man, as well as for the skaters.
The ice dancing competition was a revelation. Davis and White of the United States had make remarkable progress over the past two years and showed themselves to be worthy successors to Belbin and Agosto. Virtue and Mohr of Canada performed the most beautiful free dance that I have seen since the days of Torvill and Dean, and in fact Virtue and Mohr reminded me of the earlier team.
I couldn't believe the results of the men's short program. Three world-class skaters, each with scores of more than 90, led the pack. As I recall, Daisuke Takahashi fell behind in the long program, but Plushenko was up to par and Lysacek gave the performance of his life. Needless to say, I was disappointed in Plushenko's lack of sportsmanship. The video clearly shows that Lysacek beat Plushenko at his own game--the jumps--and left Plushenko in the dust when it came to presentation quality. Finally, Frank Carroll, perhaps the greatest figure skating coach that the United States has ever produced, had his Olympic gold medalist.
As good as these competitions were, absolutely nothing prepared me for the ladies' free skate, which surely must go down as one of the greatest single competitions in the history of the sport. All six of the skaters performed at their highest level, and several of them skated the performances of their lives.
Kim Yu-Na's performance brought me to tears. In my opinion, it was the greatest ladies free skate that I have ever seen at an Olympics and the equal of Michelle Kwan's performance at the 2004 U.S. Nationals. And how wonderful it was to see her coach, Brian Orser, who had lost out to Brian Boitano of the United States in the great men's competition of 1988, vindicated through his skater.
But it didn't stop there. I have always liked the Canadian skater, Joannie Rochette, but until this occasion she always seemed to choke in the free skate. Every Olympics has its story of triumph over adversity. Joannie's mother had come to Vancouver several days earlier and suddenly died of a heart attack. The entire country got behind Joannie as she decided to go forward with her competition. She fought back the tears and the tragedy of losing her mother to skate the performance of her life and win the bronze.
Somehow, all of these fantastic performances didn't faze the American skater, Mirai Nagasu, who closed the competition with the best performance of her young life. I have never seen a skating competition this good and I don't ever expect to see one again.
Monday, November 8, 2010
My Third Son, Stripes
Officially, I have two sons and a male cat. But as any cat lover will understand, in reality I have three sons--Joe, John, and Stripes.
Stripes has been part of my family for more than 12 years now. I adopted him and his brother (okay, his littermate), Tubbu, in the summer of 1998. (Tubbu developed a tumor when he was nine years old and had to be euthanized.)
At that time I was going through a separation and eventual divorce. As part of the agreement, my ex-wife got our three cats. It was a very difficult time for me, and I really needed a pet for companionship. At the time I had no idea that my relationship with Stripes would deepen and strengthen to the point where I now consider him to be an adopted son and not just a pet. Tubbu had a mean streak and I never bonded with him the way that I have bonded with Stripes.
When I was married, we lived at the end of a cul-de-sac. From time to time, one of our cats would get out. We would rush into the kitchen, grab a can of cat food, run outside, pop the can, and hope that the cat would hear it. If John or Joe were around, we'd recruit them to catch the cat.
Shortly after I adopted Stripes, I moved to a town house with a front door that faces the main drive in our community. Moreover, I was in no shape to go running after cats. I realized that I had to train Tubbu and Stripes to respond to my voice commands and hand gestures. In an emergency situation, I might not have time to run and grab a can of cat food. I also realized that I couldn't always grab a bag of cat treats every time that they responded the way that I wanted, so I had to find another way of rewarding them.
Finally--and this was the key to my success--I realized that I didn't know what it meant to be a cat, but I did know what it meant to be a young child, and I saw many characteristics of young children in both cats. So I began to think of them not just as cats, but also as young children who happened to be feline rather than human, and I began to treat them that way. You don't reward a young child by popping a piece of candy in their mouth every time that they obey you. Instead, you reward them with love, affection, and reinforcement, such as hugging them and telling them that they are a good boy or girl.
Much to my amazement, I found that this worked with both Tubbu and Stripes. Both had low-keyed, even-tempered personalities, didn't jump on anything taller than a dresser, stayed off the kitchen counter and stove, and didn't climb the curtains, so I only needed to train them to a few commands.For example, I trained them to go to their spot whenever I came through the door ("Tubbu, Stripes, go to your spot and stay"). Stripes would go half-way up the stairs. Tubbu would park himself in the hallway in front of the entrances to the bathroom and kitchen--right where I needed to go, of course, but hey, you can't have everything.
Tubbu never got out of the house, and Stripes has only done it once, even though I have left the sliding door to my backyard patio open by mistake a couple of times. One night, I went onto the patio to put out the trash and Stripes followed me out. I was worried because my new, motion-sensing patio light wasn't coming on. He walked along the bottom of the fixed part of the sliding door, decided that this was not where he wanted to be, turned around, and went back inside.
Every time that Tubbu or Stripes did something that I asked them to do, I would pet them and tell them that they were a good boy. Stripes has come to expect this as his reward. For example, when I am ready to go to bed, I find him and tell him "Bedtime. Time to come to bed with Daddy." More often than not, he will follow me to the staircase and start climbing the steps with me. Sometimes he stops and asks to make sure that we really are going to bed. I pet him and tell him to move on. When we get to the top of the stairs, I pet him, tell him that he's a good boy, and thank him for coming up with me. He has come to expect this and he waits for it.
Sometimes, of course, I have to indicate my displeasure, as when Stripes gets up on the dining room table and tries to eat my dinner. He has his end of the table and I have mine. I don't mind him being on the table while I am eating. In fact, I enjoy his company. But when he starts sniffing out my food, I hiss at him and tell him to go to his spot and stay. When a mother cat is training her kittens and they do something wrong, she hisses at them, so hissing is a good way of expressing your displeasure without hurting the cat.
There was one time when I did hurt Stripes, and I will never forget his reaction. It was about a year ago. By this time, we had become very close. I had purchased a new flea collar. The supermarket didn't have the usual cheap Hartz collar that I normally use, so I wound up buying a more-expensive one. There was no size marking on the package so I assumed that it was the same length as the cheaper one.
Well, it was an inch or two shorter. In fact, it was too short to fit around Stripes' neck easily, but I was so angry with Hartz that I kept trying. At one point, Stripes started to choke. I finally came to my senses and stopped, but Stripes immediately walked away and headed down the stairs. At every step, he stopped, shrugged his shoulders, and wimpered. I had never seen him do this before and I hope that I never see it again. If he were human, I would say that he was crying. It was as if he was saying to me "How could you do this to me?" He trusted me and I had violated that trust. It took a couple of days before he would come to bed with me again.
I've also come to understand that we can communicate with cats telepathically, and I believe that they communicate with us in the same way. My ex-wife had this ability. When I was getting new windows the next day, as Stripes sat next to me on the bed that night, I explained to him that people were coming tomorrow to replace the windows and that he should hide in one of his usual places if he got scared. I also drew mental pictures of the men changing the windows.
As I was doing this, I told myself that this was silly and wondered if there was any way that Stripes understood what I was saying. I felt stupid.
That night, instead of sleeping on the bed with me, he went under the bed (and probably into the box spring as well). This is one of his hiding places. The next morning, at dawn, he came out and went over to the floor-length window in my bedroom to see what was going on outside. I realized that he had understood everything that I had said except for the fact that it was going to happen in the future rather than immediately. (Cats don't understand the concept of future.)
I once worked with an animal communicator who told me to think of Stripes not as a one-year-old child, which I had been doing, but rather, as a twelve-year-old child. He understood a lot of things within his own frame of reference, she told me.
At that point, I started working even harder at understanding him. I try to understand his vocabulary. There are words that he says that indicate he is asking me a question. I ask myself what a twelve-year-old might be asking me. Generally it comes down to "What are you going to do now?" or "What are you going to do next?" I tell him and also pet him if I can. This seems to satisfy him.
Then there's his "I'm scared. Where are you?" cry. Generally I hear this when he is waking from a deep sleep or when I have gone to bed and he hasn't followed me up the stairs. I tell him where I am and draw a mental picture of something in the room. Usually he shows up a minute or two later.
Four years ago, following my triple coronary artery bypass, I was retaining fluid at a dangerous level. I had to go back into the hospital for several days and I didn't take the time to tell Stripes and Tubbu that I was going to be away. The night that I got back, I was in the bathroom. The door was open. Stripes came to the doorway and gave me a dressing-down that went on for a good two or three minutes. He used every word in his vocabulary plus a few that I didn't even know he had. His message came through to me loud and clear: How could I go off like that and leave them alone without telling him first?
Was I being unrealistic and reading too much into it? Perhaps, but I don't think so. I've come to the conclusion that if that's what came through to me, that's probably what he was saying.
After Tubbu died, Stripes and I grew even closer than before. We grieved together for several days, and he began to fill in the void that Tubbu had left in my life. Tubbu was a huge alpha cat who used to intimidate Stripes, and Stripes was very happy to be an only child. In the intervening years, Stripes and I have become so close that I can't imagine life without him.
Finally, I'd like to explain why I think of Stripes as my son. To begin with, I don't like the term "pet owner." A pet isn't something that you can put out with the trash when you don't want it anymore. Cats and dogs--and no doubt other animals as well--are living beings with intelligence and often a tremendous capacity for giving love. In fairness, because it's just me and Stripes, I have a lot more time to spend with him than people with families to raise, but the rewards of having a pet can be very rich if you are willing to work at it.
I don't even like the term "pet guardian." I think of myself as a pet adopter, or if you will, an adoptive parent. Having adopted a human child, I understand what that means. When you adopt a pet, you take on many of the same obligations that you do when you adopt a human child. (At least you don't have to put a cat through college!) If your adopted child is, shall we say, less than perfect, you don't send them back to the adoption agency. Instead, you do whatever you can to address the problem and help the child, just as you would with a biological child. If they get sick, you take care of them.
That's the way that it is with me and Stripes. He has a bad habit that I won't go into but that has cost me a fair amount of aggravation and money. When it first became a problem about seven years ago, some of my close friends and even one of my sons advised me to get rid of him. "You'll get another cat," they told me, "and it will be just as affectionate as Stripes." What they didn't undestand was that it wouldn't be Stripes.
Nevertheless I thought about it--perhaps giving him to someone with a farmette, where he could be an outdoor cat and his habit wouldn't matter--but because Stripes was also diabetic and required injections twice a day, I realized that this was not an option and that he would probably have to be euthanized.
Every morning he sits next to me on my bed while I put on my shoes and we adore each other. I couldn't look him in the eye and tell him that this was his last day on earth. Finally, I also realized one day that the thought of losing him was tearing me up 10 times as badly as his bad habit. That day, I decided to just accept and live with the problem.
Here we are, seven years later, and as I'm writing this, Stripes is stretched out in a chair next to me. He's been with me almost all day.
We've been thrugh some tough times together. This time last year, he sprained his hip and became ill at the same time. He couldn't hold down any food no matter what we tried. I was just about broke. There were two likely diagnoses--inflammatory bowel syndrome, which is treatable, and stomach cancer, which is ultimately fatal. I don't think that I could have afforded cancer treatments, but I managed to find the money to pay for an ultrasound test. Fortumately, it turned out to be inflammtory bowel syndrome, and by treating him for it, he's been able to have a good life.
I believed that I owed Stripes a chance to have whatever good years were still in store for him. You have no idea how glad I am that I made that decision. Just thinking about losing him makes me cry, and I'm crying right now as I write this.
In the musical Cats, there is a scene where the ancient cat goes to the other side of the heavyside mountain. I know that one day I will have to let Stripes go there, but please God, let that day be a long way off. I can't bear the thought of losing any of my sons.
Copyright 2010 Robert E. Simanski. All Rights Reserved.
At that time I was going through a separation and eventual divorce. As part of the agreement, my ex-wife got our three cats. It was a very difficult time for me, and I really needed a pet for companionship. At the time I had no idea that my relationship with Stripes would deepen and strengthen to the point where I now consider him to be an adopted son and not just a pet. Tubbu had a mean streak and I never bonded with him the way that I have bonded with Stripes.
When I was married, we lived at the end of a cul-de-sac. From time to time, one of our cats would get out. We would rush into the kitchen, grab a can of cat food, run outside, pop the can, and hope that the cat would hear it. If John or Joe were around, we'd recruit them to catch the cat.
Shortly after I adopted Stripes, I moved to a town house with a front door that faces the main drive in our community. Moreover, I was in no shape to go running after cats. I realized that I had to train Tubbu and Stripes to respond to my voice commands and hand gestures. In an emergency situation, I might not have time to run and grab a can of cat food. I also realized that I couldn't always grab a bag of cat treats every time that they responded the way that I wanted, so I had to find another way of rewarding them.
Finally--and this was the key to my success--I realized that I didn't know what it meant to be a cat, but I did know what it meant to be a young child, and I saw many characteristics of young children in both cats. So I began to think of them not just as cats, but also as young children who happened to be feline rather than human, and I began to treat them that way. You don't reward a young child by popping a piece of candy in their mouth every time that they obey you. Instead, you reward them with love, affection, and reinforcement, such as hugging them and telling them that they are a good boy or girl.
Much to my amazement, I found that this worked with both Tubbu and Stripes. Both had low-keyed, even-tempered personalities, didn't jump on anything taller than a dresser, stayed off the kitchen counter and stove, and didn't climb the curtains, so I only needed to train them to a few commands.For example, I trained them to go to their spot whenever I came through the door ("Tubbu, Stripes, go to your spot and stay"). Stripes would go half-way up the stairs. Tubbu would park himself in the hallway in front of the entrances to the bathroom and kitchen--right where I needed to go, of course, but hey, you can't have everything.
Tubbu never got out of the house, and Stripes has only done it once, even though I have left the sliding door to my backyard patio open by mistake a couple of times. One night, I went onto the patio to put out the trash and Stripes followed me out. I was worried because my new, motion-sensing patio light wasn't coming on. He walked along the bottom of the fixed part of the sliding door, decided that this was not where he wanted to be, turned around, and went back inside.
Every time that Tubbu or Stripes did something that I asked them to do, I would pet them and tell them that they were a good boy. Stripes has come to expect this as his reward. For example, when I am ready to go to bed, I find him and tell him "Bedtime. Time to come to bed with Daddy." More often than not, he will follow me to the staircase and start climbing the steps with me. Sometimes he stops and asks to make sure that we really are going to bed. I pet him and tell him to move on. When we get to the top of the stairs, I pet him, tell him that he's a good boy, and thank him for coming up with me. He has come to expect this and he waits for it.
Sometimes, of course, I have to indicate my displeasure, as when Stripes gets up on the dining room table and tries to eat my dinner. He has his end of the table and I have mine. I don't mind him being on the table while I am eating. In fact, I enjoy his company. But when he starts sniffing out my food, I hiss at him and tell him to go to his spot and stay. When a mother cat is training her kittens and they do something wrong, she hisses at them, so hissing is a good way of expressing your displeasure without hurting the cat.
There was one time when I did hurt Stripes, and I will never forget his reaction. It was about a year ago. By this time, we had become very close. I had purchased a new flea collar. The supermarket didn't have the usual cheap Hartz collar that I normally use, so I wound up buying a more-expensive one. There was no size marking on the package so I assumed that it was the same length as the cheaper one.
Well, it was an inch or two shorter. In fact, it was too short to fit around Stripes' neck easily, but I was so angry with Hartz that I kept trying. At one point, Stripes started to choke. I finally came to my senses and stopped, but Stripes immediately walked away and headed down the stairs. At every step, he stopped, shrugged his shoulders, and wimpered. I had never seen him do this before and I hope that I never see it again. If he were human, I would say that he was crying. It was as if he was saying to me "How could you do this to me?" He trusted me and I had violated that trust. It took a couple of days before he would come to bed with me again.
I've also come to understand that we can communicate with cats telepathically, and I believe that they communicate with us in the same way. My ex-wife had this ability. When I was getting new windows the next day, as Stripes sat next to me on the bed that night, I explained to him that people were coming tomorrow to replace the windows and that he should hide in one of his usual places if he got scared. I also drew mental pictures of the men changing the windows.
As I was doing this, I told myself that this was silly and wondered if there was any way that Stripes understood what I was saying. I felt stupid.
That night, instead of sleeping on the bed with me, he went under the bed (and probably into the box spring as well). This is one of his hiding places. The next morning, at dawn, he came out and went over to the floor-length window in my bedroom to see what was going on outside. I realized that he had understood everything that I had said except for the fact that it was going to happen in the future rather than immediately. (Cats don't understand the concept of future.)
I once worked with an animal communicator who told me to think of Stripes not as a one-year-old child, which I had been doing, but rather, as a twelve-year-old child. He understood a lot of things within his own frame of reference, she told me.
At that point, I started working even harder at understanding him. I try to understand his vocabulary. There are words that he says that indicate he is asking me a question. I ask myself what a twelve-year-old might be asking me. Generally it comes down to "What are you going to do now?" or "What are you going to do next?" I tell him and also pet him if I can. This seems to satisfy him.
Then there's his "I'm scared. Where are you?" cry. Generally I hear this when he is waking from a deep sleep or when I have gone to bed and he hasn't followed me up the stairs. I tell him where I am and draw a mental picture of something in the room. Usually he shows up a minute or two later.
Four years ago, following my triple coronary artery bypass, I was retaining fluid at a dangerous level. I had to go back into the hospital for several days and I didn't take the time to tell Stripes and Tubbu that I was going to be away. The night that I got back, I was in the bathroom. The door was open. Stripes came to the doorway and gave me a dressing-down that went on for a good two or three minutes. He used every word in his vocabulary plus a few that I didn't even know he had. His message came through to me loud and clear: How could I go off like that and leave them alone without telling him first?
Was I being unrealistic and reading too much into it? Perhaps, but I don't think so. I've come to the conclusion that if that's what came through to me, that's probably what he was saying.
After Tubbu died, Stripes and I grew even closer than before. We grieved together for several days, and he began to fill in the void that Tubbu had left in my life. Tubbu was a huge alpha cat who used to intimidate Stripes, and Stripes was very happy to be an only child. In the intervening years, Stripes and I have become so close that I can't imagine life without him.
Finally, I'd like to explain why I think of Stripes as my son. To begin with, I don't like the term "pet owner." A pet isn't something that you can put out with the trash when you don't want it anymore. Cats and dogs--and no doubt other animals as well--are living beings with intelligence and often a tremendous capacity for giving love. In fairness, because it's just me and Stripes, I have a lot more time to spend with him than people with families to raise, but the rewards of having a pet can be very rich if you are willing to work at it.
I don't even like the term "pet guardian." I think of myself as a pet adopter, or if you will, an adoptive parent. Having adopted a human child, I understand what that means. When you adopt a pet, you take on many of the same obligations that you do when you adopt a human child. (At least you don't have to put a cat through college!) If your adopted child is, shall we say, less than perfect, you don't send them back to the adoption agency. Instead, you do whatever you can to address the problem and help the child, just as you would with a biological child. If they get sick, you take care of them.
That's the way that it is with me and Stripes. He has a bad habit that I won't go into but that has cost me a fair amount of aggravation and money. When it first became a problem about seven years ago, some of my close friends and even one of my sons advised me to get rid of him. "You'll get another cat," they told me, "and it will be just as affectionate as Stripes." What they didn't undestand was that it wouldn't be Stripes.
Nevertheless I thought about it--perhaps giving him to someone with a farmette, where he could be an outdoor cat and his habit wouldn't matter--but because Stripes was also diabetic and required injections twice a day, I realized that this was not an option and that he would probably have to be euthanized.
Every morning he sits next to me on my bed while I put on my shoes and we adore each other. I couldn't look him in the eye and tell him that this was his last day on earth. Finally, I also realized one day that the thought of losing him was tearing me up 10 times as badly as his bad habit. That day, I decided to just accept and live with the problem.
Here we are, seven years later, and as I'm writing this, Stripes is stretched out in a chair next to me. He's been with me almost all day.
We've been thrugh some tough times together. This time last year, he sprained his hip and became ill at the same time. He couldn't hold down any food no matter what we tried. I was just about broke. There were two likely diagnoses--inflammatory bowel syndrome, which is treatable, and stomach cancer, which is ultimately fatal. I don't think that I could have afforded cancer treatments, but I managed to find the money to pay for an ultrasound test. Fortumately, it turned out to be inflammtory bowel syndrome, and by treating him for it, he's been able to have a good life.
I believed that I owed Stripes a chance to have whatever good years were still in store for him. You have no idea how glad I am that I made that decision. Just thinking about losing him makes me cry, and I'm crying right now as I write this.
In the musical Cats, there is a scene where the ancient cat goes to the other side of the heavyside mountain. I know that one day I will have to let Stripes go there, but please God, let that day be a long way off. I can't bear the thought of losing any of my sons.
Copyright 2010 Robert E. Simanski. All Rights Reserved.
Friday, October 15, 2010
"Is That All There Is?"
In 1969, Peggy Lee had a hit song called "Is That All There Is?" The song, written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, was a meditation on life. Some of you may remember the chorus:
Is that all there is, is that all there is
If that's all there is my friends, then let's keep dancing
Let's break out the booze and have a ball
If that's all there is
It seems to say to me that "if that's all there is" to life, then why bother trying to do good? Just look out for yourself, have as much fun as you can, make as much money as you can, and the heck with everything and everyone else. I see this view as related to atheism.
I'm a lukewarm fan of Bill Maher's HBO series, Real Time With Bill Maher. Lukewarm, in that I don't entirely agree with his attacks on religion or his admitted atheism, which also implies that there is no afterlife.
I was raised Catholic, and although I'm no longer a churchgoer, I still believe in the teachings of Christ, I still try to follow them, and I still pray every day. I suppose that there's a certain fallacy in that statement, because Christ founded the Church, and therefore I should still be a churchgoer, but I have a real problem with what the institutional Catholic Church has become. In my opinion, it has failed to follow Christ's example and become irrelevant. As such, it has nothing left to teach me.
To me, the kind of life that most of us experience and live on this earth makes no sense unless there is an afterlife that either rewards or punishes us for the life that we live now. If this is all that there is, then why do so many of us try to do good with our lives? Why do so many of us do unselfish things that help others but bring no earthly rewards to ourselves? Why do we show love and affection to our family members? Why not just live for the moment and accumulate all the wealth that we can, no matter whom we have to hurt in the process? Why do most societies condemn acts such as murder, stealing, and adultery? "If that's all there is," then stealing and adultery, at least, should be considered perfectly natural.
The answer is that if we all lived as if "that's all there is," life on earth would be totally chaotic and unbearable. Life can be hard enough as it is, but being kind to our fellow human beings can at least make it tolerable.
I firmly believe that this is not "all there is." I believe that there is a God and that there is an afterlife. Partly because of my Catholic upbringing, I believe in heaven, hell, and purgatory. However, I believe that there are very few souls in hell and that most souls go to heaven.
As for purgatory, the traditional Catholic teaching has been that it's just as bad as hell but there is an end point where those in purgatory will eventually enter heaven. I don't buy into that belief entirely. I believe that most of us suffer our purgatory here on earth.
I don't know of anyone over the age of 50, including myself, who hasn't suffered greatly, in such a way that is out of proportion to whatever sins they may have committed. I believe that this suffering is a test of our faith, our belief in God, and if we pass the test, we will go straight to heaven when we die. This suffering that almost all of us go through makes no sense unless there is a heaven or some other form of afterlife where we will be rewarded for our suffering.
As I understand it, Buddhists believe that we will be reincarnated. I do not disbelieve this possibility, and hence my use of the term "afterlife." There are those, also, who believe that animals are reincarnated, and if they live a good life, they will be reincarnated in a higher form. If that's the case, my cat, Stripes, should be reincarnated as a wealthy person who devotes his life and wealth to helping others.
I prefer to believe that animals go to heaven. I have read theologians who have rejected this idea because, they say, animals never reach the age of reason where they can decide between right and wrong. None of my pets have ever done anything particularly evil, but I have seen them do good things that they didn't have to do countless times.
For example, our cocker spaniel, Buffy, would always protect the smallest living being in the house, whether it was a child or a kitten. My sons learned to walk by pulling themselves up on him. I'm sure that they must have pulled his fur many times, but he never hurt a child. He seemed to understand that they were children and were not a threat to him. I'm convinced that Buffy is standing next to Saint Peter, licking his ear.
I certainly hope that we are reunited with our pets in heaven. People who have had near-death experiences have described loved ones who have predeceased them reaching out to them and trying to draw them into heaven. Frankly, I'd rather spend my time in heaven with my pets than with most of my relatives.
FYI, if you want to see a marvelous film about souls who are making the transition, check out the Japanese film After Life, released in 1999 and directed by Hirokazu Kore-Eda. Of all the films that I've seen about heaven and the afterlife, this is the best.
Is that all there is, is that all there is
If that's all there is my friends, then let's keep dancing
Let's break out the booze and have a ball
If that's all there is
It seems to say to me that "if that's all there is" to life, then why bother trying to do good? Just look out for yourself, have as much fun as you can, make as much money as you can, and the heck with everything and everyone else. I see this view as related to atheism.
I'm a lukewarm fan of Bill Maher's HBO series, Real Time With Bill Maher. Lukewarm, in that I don't entirely agree with his attacks on religion or his admitted atheism, which also implies that there is no afterlife.
I was raised Catholic, and although I'm no longer a churchgoer, I still believe in the teachings of Christ, I still try to follow them, and I still pray every day. I suppose that there's a certain fallacy in that statement, because Christ founded the Church, and therefore I should still be a churchgoer, but I have a real problem with what the institutional Catholic Church has become. In my opinion, it has failed to follow Christ's example and become irrelevant. As such, it has nothing left to teach me.
To me, the kind of life that most of us experience and live on this earth makes no sense unless there is an afterlife that either rewards or punishes us for the life that we live now. If this is all that there is, then why do so many of us try to do good with our lives? Why do so many of us do unselfish things that help others but bring no earthly rewards to ourselves? Why do we show love and affection to our family members? Why not just live for the moment and accumulate all the wealth that we can, no matter whom we have to hurt in the process? Why do most societies condemn acts such as murder, stealing, and adultery? "If that's all there is," then stealing and adultery, at least, should be considered perfectly natural.
The answer is that if we all lived as if "that's all there is," life on earth would be totally chaotic and unbearable. Life can be hard enough as it is, but being kind to our fellow human beings can at least make it tolerable.
I firmly believe that this is not "all there is." I believe that there is a God and that there is an afterlife. Partly because of my Catholic upbringing, I believe in heaven, hell, and purgatory. However, I believe that there are very few souls in hell and that most souls go to heaven.
As for purgatory, the traditional Catholic teaching has been that it's just as bad as hell but there is an end point where those in purgatory will eventually enter heaven. I don't buy into that belief entirely. I believe that most of us suffer our purgatory here on earth.
I don't know of anyone over the age of 50, including myself, who hasn't suffered greatly, in such a way that is out of proportion to whatever sins they may have committed. I believe that this suffering is a test of our faith, our belief in God, and if we pass the test, we will go straight to heaven when we die. This suffering that almost all of us go through makes no sense unless there is a heaven or some other form of afterlife where we will be rewarded for our suffering.
As I understand it, Buddhists believe that we will be reincarnated. I do not disbelieve this possibility, and hence my use of the term "afterlife." There are those, also, who believe that animals are reincarnated, and if they live a good life, they will be reincarnated in a higher form. If that's the case, my cat, Stripes, should be reincarnated as a wealthy person who devotes his life and wealth to helping others.
I prefer to believe that animals go to heaven. I have read theologians who have rejected this idea because, they say, animals never reach the age of reason where they can decide between right and wrong. None of my pets have ever done anything particularly evil, but I have seen them do good things that they didn't have to do countless times.
For example, our cocker spaniel, Buffy, would always protect the smallest living being in the house, whether it was a child or a kitten. My sons learned to walk by pulling themselves up on him. I'm sure that they must have pulled his fur many times, but he never hurt a child. He seemed to understand that they were children and were not a threat to him. I'm convinced that Buffy is standing next to Saint Peter, licking his ear.
I certainly hope that we are reunited with our pets in heaven. People who have had near-death experiences have described loved ones who have predeceased them reaching out to them and trying to draw them into heaven. Frankly, I'd rather spend my time in heaven with my pets than with most of my relatives.
FYI, if you want to see a marvelous film about souls who are making the transition, check out the Japanese film After Life, released in 1999 and directed by Hirokazu Kore-Eda. Of all the films that I've seen about heaven and the afterlife, this is the best.
Sunday, October 10, 2010
It's the Film, Not the Story, That Matters
The year-long (and then some) drought of worthwhile movies from Hollywood seems to be over, at least for now. It's been that long since there's been anything at either my local multiplex or the art-house cinema about 20 miles from here that has compelled me to part withe the price of a ticket. The last ones were The Hurt Locker and Up. Admittedly, I did buy a ticket to Inception earlier this year, but that one was a total disappointment, in my opinion.
Today, I saw two excellent films--Secretariat and The Social Network, which I will discuss in later posts. There are two or three others out now that I plan to see as time and my wallet permit, and hopefully more are on the way between now and the end of the year.
As I write this, I'm saying to myself that there are scores of good film critics who have reviewed these two films. Who is going to care about what I write about these same films? Then it dawned on me that every good critic will see the same film in a different way, depending on their background and life experiences.
Often Roger Ebert, my favorite critic, sees things differently than other well-respected critics, and I think I know why. It's his Catholic educational background. He and I are roughly the same age and got the same type of education, and I can see it coming through in his writing. At that time, Catholic education was heavily influenced by the Jesuits. They taught us to think in a certain way, to analyze, to question, and to look beyond the obvious.
One thing that I have come to understand lately is that there is a difference between what a film's story is about and what the film itself is about. The story is only one of the components that make up a film. Take The Hurt Locker, for example. The first time that I saw it last year, I looked upon it as an ordinary war or action-adventure film and I came away somewhat disappointed. Later that night, as I was eating dinner, I thought about the film again and realized that I had completely missed the point and had to see the film a second time.
The story was about how Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner) and his squad go about defusing bombs in Iraq, always in very dangerous situations. The film, however, was about what motivates him to do this life-threatening job, about his relationships with his squad mates and his family, and most interestingly, about his genuinely-positive feelings toward Iraqi people in general and an adolescent boy who sells him pirated DVDs and games in particular. There's also a compelling scene near the end where he tries valiantly to save the life of an innocent Iraqi man who has been forced to wear a suicide bomb. These things took it beyond the bounds of the typical war or action-adventure film. When I saw the film a second time a month or so later, everything fell into place and I realized that it was one of the best films of the year.
I have found that most great films are about character, not plot, although there are notable exceptions, such as the best work of Alfred Hitchcock. The characters drive the story, not the other way around. The events that happen in the film happen because of who they are and the decisions that they make.
I like films that make me think and expand my understanding and point of view. That doesn't mean that I don't also like a good comedy or action-adventure film. I accept them for what they are and if they deliver on their promise, then for me they are a good film.
What I'm saying here is that when you are watching a film that attempts to go beyond these genres and be taken seriously, try to look beyond the story and see the underlying film. Hopefully you'll find substance there that you hadn't expected and that enhances your enjoyment of the film.
Today, I saw two excellent films--Secretariat and The Social Network, which I will discuss in later posts. There are two or three others out now that I plan to see as time and my wallet permit, and hopefully more are on the way between now and the end of the year.
As I write this, I'm saying to myself that there are scores of good film critics who have reviewed these two films. Who is going to care about what I write about these same films? Then it dawned on me that every good critic will see the same film in a different way, depending on their background and life experiences.
Often Roger Ebert, my favorite critic, sees things differently than other well-respected critics, and I think I know why. It's his Catholic educational background. He and I are roughly the same age and got the same type of education, and I can see it coming through in his writing. At that time, Catholic education was heavily influenced by the Jesuits. They taught us to think in a certain way, to analyze, to question, and to look beyond the obvious.
One thing that I have come to understand lately is that there is a difference between what a film's story is about and what the film itself is about. The story is only one of the components that make up a film. Take The Hurt Locker, for example. The first time that I saw it last year, I looked upon it as an ordinary war or action-adventure film and I came away somewhat disappointed. Later that night, as I was eating dinner, I thought about the film again and realized that I had completely missed the point and had to see the film a second time.
The story was about how Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner) and his squad go about defusing bombs in Iraq, always in very dangerous situations. The film, however, was about what motivates him to do this life-threatening job, about his relationships with his squad mates and his family, and most interestingly, about his genuinely-positive feelings toward Iraqi people in general and an adolescent boy who sells him pirated DVDs and games in particular. There's also a compelling scene near the end where he tries valiantly to save the life of an innocent Iraqi man who has been forced to wear a suicide bomb. These things took it beyond the bounds of the typical war or action-adventure film. When I saw the film a second time a month or so later, everything fell into place and I realized that it was one of the best films of the year.
I have found that most great films are about character, not plot, although there are notable exceptions, such as the best work of Alfred Hitchcock. The characters drive the story, not the other way around. The events that happen in the film happen because of who they are and the decisions that they make.
I like films that make me think and expand my understanding and point of view. That doesn't mean that I don't also like a good comedy or action-adventure film. I accept them for what they are and if they deliver on their promise, then for me they are a good film.
What I'm saying here is that when you are watching a film that attempts to go beyond these genres and be taken seriously, try to look beyond the story and see the underlying film. Hopefully you'll find substance there that you hadn't expected and that enhances your enjoyment of the film.
Sunday, October 3, 2010
The Washington Nationals: Now What?
In the spring, a young man's fancy turns to...making it to the playoffs, at least if you're a professional baseball player.
For "one brief, shining moment"* this spring, it looked as the Washington Nationals might actually accomplish that goal, or at least have a winning season with, let's say, about 85 wins. There was only one slight problem: They had to make it through the summer and early fall. Summer was cruel to the Nationals. Early fall brought a ray or two of hope, but for next year, not 2010. As a result, the Nationals reverted to form. Instead of 85 wins they ended the season with only 69. At least this was 10 more than last year.
So what do the Nats have to do to turn things around next year? Here's how I see it:
1--Set a goal of having a winning season. An improvement of, let's say, 15 wins would be a huge accomplishment. However, their fans have waited long enough, and if they don't come away with a winning season, they'll lose whatever remaining fan base they still have left.
2--Sign Adam Dunn, and do it now, not later. Sure, he's a defensive liability at first base, but he's coming off a typically-solid year offensively (second in home runs in the National League) and he's young enough to have four or five more good years left. In addition, he's a well-liked, positive force in the clubhouse, and in my opinion, this has to weigh in his favor. The team needs him to help maintain its morale.
3--Send Dunn to the Ripkin Brothers' baseball academy to learn how to play first base. I'm kidding, of course, but Adam must commit himself to improving his fielding skills. Anyone who's built like Paul Bunyan is never going to be agile and fast on his feet, but Adam has plenty of room for improvement in his ability to catch throws on the bounce or slightly off-line. The other three infielders need to feel confident that if they get the ball anywhere in his vicinity, he'll make the play 99 times out of 100, not three out of four or whatever it is now.
4--Sign the best starting pitcher that they can get in the free-agent market. For most of the 2010 season, their starting rotation consisted of Livan Hernandez--a legitimate starting pitcher--and a parade of wannabes, has-beens, and never-weres. Jason Marquis proved to be a major disappointment. Stephen Strasburg brought a flame of hope that was quickly extinguished, at least for the next year.
Jordan Zimmermann has shown great promise in the last month or so. Strasburg will hopefully come back better than ever. Next year, Marquis will get another chance to prove he was worth what the Nats paid for him. Maya pitched far better this year than his record indicates. The rest of this year's starting rotation should be traded or shipped back to the minors. A starting rotation of Hernandez, Zimmermann, Maya, a Marquis who has returned to form, and late in the year, Strasburg, would have promise, and adding a quality starter from this winter's free-agent market would make it quite respectable.
The bullpen has done a remarkable job considering the absurd number of innings that it has had to absorb. Improve the starting rotation and you will also improve the bullpen, which should be left alone.
4--Make Danny Espinoza the starting second baseman. He's earned it. Hopefully Ian Desmond has gotten his rookie mistakes out of his system and will start to realize his full potential. A left side of the infield consisting of Ryan Zimmerman, Ian Desmond, and Danny Espinoza could develop into one of the best in the majors and could be together for a long time.
5--Trade Nyjer Morgan and put Roger Bernadina in center and Mike Morse in right. Roger and Mike have both earned the right to be everyday players. As for Morgan, he may still have great potential, but despite his speed, his baserunning is a liability and his emotional maturity is that of a two-year-old spoiled brat. He's not a young kid anymore. He's pushing 30 and has been in the majors for several years. If he hasn't grown up by now, he never will. No major league team can afford to have that type of loose cannon on its roster.
6--Use the second year of Pudge Rodriquez's contract to develop the promising catchers that the Nats have, so that at least one of them will be ready to play full-time in 2012. In the meantime, make sure that they learn everything that they can from Pudge.
7--If they can't resign Adam Dunn for whatever reason, they absolutely must sign free-agent Derrek Lee. He would replace Dunn's power and be a major upgrade defensively.
There you have it--my advice to the Nationals, based on my experience as a baseball fan of 60 years. But what do I know? I'm just a fan, not a baseball professional.
* From the title song of the musical Camelot, by Lerner and Loewe.
For "one brief, shining moment"* this spring, it looked as the Washington Nationals might actually accomplish that goal, or at least have a winning season with, let's say, about 85 wins. There was only one slight problem: They had to make it through the summer and early fall. Summer was cruel to the Nationals. Early fall brought a ray or two of hope, but for next year, not 2010. As a result, the Nationals reverted to form. Instead of 85 wins they ended the season with only 69. At least this was 10 more than last year.
So what do the Nats have to do to turn things around next year? Here's how I see it:
1--Set a goal of having a winning season. An improvement of, let's say, 15 wins would be a huge accomplishment. However, their fans have waited long enough, and if they don't come away with a winning season, they'll lose whatever remaining fan base they still have left.
2--Sign Adam Dunn, and do it now, not later. Sure, he's a defensive liability at first base, but he's coming off a typically-solid year offensively (second in home runs in the National League) and he's young enough to have four or five more good years left. In addition, he's a well-liked, positive force in the clubhouse, and in my opinion, this has to weigh in his favor. The team needs him to help maintain its morale.
3--Send Dunn to the Ripkin Brothers' baseball academy to learn how to play first base. I'm kidding, of course, but Adam must commit himself to improving his fielding skills. Anyone who's built like Paul Bunyan is never going to be agile and fast on his feet, but Adam has plenty of room for improvement in his ability to catch throws on the bounce or slightly off-line. The other three infielders need to feel confident that if they get the ball anywhere in his vicinity, he'll make the play 99 times out of 100, not three out of four or whatever it is now.
4--Sign the best starting pitcher that they can get in the free-agent market. For most of the 2010 season, their starting rotation consisted of Livan Hernandez--a legitimate starting pitcher--and a parade of wannabes, has-beens, and never-weres. Jason Marquis proved to be a major disappointment. Stephen Strasburg brought a flame of hope that was quickly extinguished, at least for the next year.
Jordan Zimmermann has shown great promise in the last month or so. Strasburg will hopefully come back better than ever. Next year, Marquis will get another chance to prove he was worth what the Nats paid for him. Maya pitched far better this year than his record indicates. The rest of this year's starting rotation should be traded or shipped back to the minors. A starting rotation of Hernandez, Zimmermann, Maya, a Marquis who has returned to form, and late in the year, Strasburg, would have promise, and adding a quality starter from this winter's free-agent market would make it quite respectable.
The bullpen has done a remarkable job considering the absurd number of innings that it has had to absorb. Improve the starting rotation and you will also improve the bullpen, which should be left alone.
4--Make Danny Espinoza the starting second baseman. He's earned it. Hopefully Ian Desmond has gotten his rookie mistakes out of his system and will start to realize his full potential. A left side of the infield consisting of Ryan Zimmerman, Ian Desmond, and Danny Espinoza could develop into one of the best in the majors and could be together for a long time.
5--Trade Nyjer Morgan and put Roger Bernadina in center and Mike Morse in right. Roger and Mike have both earned the right to be everyday players. As for Morgan, he may still have great potential, but despite his speed, his baserunning is a liability and his emotional maturity is that of a two-year-old spoiled brat. He's not a young kid anymore. He's pushing 30 and has been in the majors for several years. If he hasn't grown up by now, he never will. No major league team can afford to have that type of loose cannon on its roster.
6--Use the second year of Pudge Rodriquez's contract to develop the promising catchers that the Nats have, so that at least one of them will be ready to play full-time in 2012. In the meantime, make sure that they learn everything that they can from Pudge.
7--If they can't resign Adam Dunn for whatever reason, they absolutely must sign free-agent Derrek Lee. He would replace Dunn's power and be a major upgrade defensively.
There you have it--my advice to the Nationals, based on my experience as a baseball fan of 60 years. But what do I know? I'm just a fan, not a baseball professional.
* From the title song of the musical Camelot, by Lerner and Loewe.
Friday, October 1, 2010
HBO: The New Tiffany Network
CBS, in its heyday from the 1950s to the 1970s, used to be called the Tiffany Network because of the quality of its programming. This was a time when the networks dominated television and there was no competition from cable networks or video rentals. People used to stay home on Saturday evenings to watch the prime-time lineup of M*A*S*H*, All in the Family, Mary Tyler Moore, Bob Newhart, and Carol Burnett, probably the greatest lineup of sitcoms and variety shows in the history of television.
Sadly, no one would call CBS, or any other broadcast network, a Tiffany network today. However, in my opinion, there is a new Tiffany network, namely Home Box Office, or HBO.
Historically, once or twice a year HBO has come up with a program or series that has made having a cable service and paying a premium to subscribe to HBO worthwhile. In the past, HBO has givn us such gems as the following:
From Earth to the Moon, the story of how the United States put a man on the moon in the 1960s. The theatrical film The Right Stuff also told this story very well, but in my opinion the HBO series, because it could take the time to tell the story in great detail, was even better. The series was executive-produced by Tom Hanks, who has had a hand in several other high-profile HBO projects.
Band of Brothers, the true story of a company of paratroopers in World War II, co-executive-produced by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg.
The Wire, David Simon's gritty series on various types of crime in Baltimore, where he had been a newspaper reporter. This excellent series went on for five seasons.
The Gathering Storm, an adaptation of the first volume of Winston Churchill's World War II memoirs, starring Albert Finney as Churchill. Finney was incredible in the role. I'm old enough to remember seeing news clips of Churchill. In his first scene, Finney steps out of a car to view the countryside. My first reaction was, "My God--he is Churchill."
This was followed by an adaptation of the second volume of Churchill's memoirs, the name of which escapes me, starring Brendan Fraser. This was also an excellent program, although perhaps not quite as good as the earlier one.
The list goes on:
Wit, starring Emma Thompson
Angels in America, starring Emma Thompson and Al Pacino
Last year, HBO gave us Taking Chance, starring Kevin Bacon in a true story about a Marine who accompanies the remains of another Marine from Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to the home of the deceased Marine's parents. The real story is in the people he meets along the way and the lengths that they went to to show respect to the dead Marine. If you despair of the ugliness that seems to characterize some American citizens today, this film will help to restore your faith in this country.
This year, however, HBO has outdone itself.
First came The Pacific, an outstanding series that followed several Marines as they fought in the South Pacific during World War II. Also co-executive-produced by Hanks and Spielberg, the series spared no expense in showing the horrors of the battles in the Pacific and what these men had to go through.
This was followed by Treme, David Simon's series on the difficulties faced by the African-American residents of the Treme district in New Orleans, one year after Hurricane Katrina. Although not as good as Simon's The Wire, in my opinion, it was rich with performances by today's best New Orleans musicians. I'm hoping that it returns for a second season.
Treme was followed by the biopic about Jack Kevorkian, starring Al Pacino. I haven't seen it so I can't comment on it.
Now we have Boardwalk Empire, a fictionalized account of the corruption in Atlantic City, New Jersey, during the Prohibition era. It was executive-produced by Martin Scorsese, who directed the first episode. That episode wasn't exactly vintage Scorsese, in my opinion, but to my knowledge it is the only television program that Scorsese has ever directed, unless he did some TV work in his early days that I don't know about. Nevertheless, the series is well worth watching.
HBO quality doesn't stop with its big productions. It has many highly-regarded regular series, which I won't comment on because I haven't seen them, and gives regular exposure to many documentaries. For years, it's been home to the country's best stand-up comedians, and its boxing coverage is excellent. Finally, many good movies wind up on HBO after the pay-per-view stage.
It's easy to lament the quality of television programming today, especially at the broadcast network level. But it's also nice to know that there is still a network that cares about quality and is willing to take risks and give its projects decent budgets, production values, and support.
Leonard Maltin's annual movie guide has many listings labelled "Made for cable." That label generally implies a film that isn't as good as a theatrical release and is just above "Made for television" in quality. In the case of HBO, however, this is simply not the case. In my opinion, there's nothing shameful about making a film for HBO. Its best efforts can hold their own with any theatrical film. I think that Leonard Maltin needs a new label, "Made for HBO."
My hat is off to HBO.
Sadly, no one would call CBS, or any other broadcast network, a Tiffany network today. However, in my opinion, there is a new Tiffany network, namely Home Box Office, or HBO.
Historically, once or twice a year HBO has come up with a program or series that has made having a cable service and paying a premium to subscribe to HBO worthwhile. In the past, HBO has givn us such gems as the following:
From Earth to the Moon, the story of how the United States put a man on the moon in the 1960s. The theatrical film The Right Stuff also told this story very well, but in my opinion the HBO series, because it could take the time to tell the story in great detail, was even better. The series was executive-produced by Tom Hanks, who has had a hand in several other high-profile HBO projects.
Band of Brothers, the true story of a company of paratroopers in World War II, co-executive-produced by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg.
The Wire, David Simon's gritty series on various types of crime in Baltimore, where he had been a newspaper reporter. This excellent series went on for five seasons.
The Gathering Storm, an adaptation of the first volume of Winston Churchill's World War II memoirs, starring Albert Finney as Churchill. Finney was incredible in the role. I'm old enough to remember seeing news clips of Churchill. In his first scene, Finney steps out of a car to view the countryside. My first reaction was, "My God--he is Churchill."
This was followed by an adaptation of the second volume of Churchill's memoirs, the name of which escapes me, starring Brendan Fraser. This was also an excellent program, although perhaps not quite as good as the earlier one.
The list goes on:
Wit, starring Emma Thompson
Angels in America, starring Emma Thompson and Al Pacino
Last year, HBO gave us Taking Chance, starring Kevin Bacon in a true story about a Marine who accompanies the remains of another Marine from Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to the home of the deceased Marine's parents. The real story is in the people he meets along the way and the lengths that they went to to show respect to the dead Marine. If you despair of the ugliness that seems to characterize some American citizens today, this film will help to restore your faith in this country.
This year, however, HBO has outdone itself.
First came The Pacific, an outstanding series that followed several Marines as they fought in the South Pacific during World War II. Also co-executive-produced by Hanks and Spielberg, the series spared no expense in showing the horrors of the battles in the Pacific and what these men had to go through.
This was followed by Treme, David Simon's series on the difficulties faced by the African-American residents of the Treme district in New Orleans, one year after Hurricane Katrina. Although not as good as Simon's The Wire, in my opinion, it was rich with performances by today's best New Orleans musicians. I'm hoping that it returns for a second season.
Treme was followed by the biopic about Jack Kevorkian, starring Al Pacino. I haven't seen it so I can't comment on it.
Now we have Boardwalk Empire, a fictionalized account of the corruption in Atlantic City, New Jersey, during the Prohibition era. It was executive-produced by Martin Scorsese, who directed the first episode. That episode wasn't exactly vintage Scorsese, in my opinion, but to my knowledge it is the only television program that Scorsese has ever directed, unless he did some TV work in his early days that I don't know about. Nevertheless, the series is well worth watching.
HBO quality doesn't stop with its big productions. It has many highly-regarded regular series, which I won't comment on because I haven't seen them, and gives regular exposure to many documentaries. For years, it's been home to the country's best stand-up comedians, and its boxing coverage is excellent. Finally, many good movies wind up on HBO after the pay-per-view stage.
It's easy to lament the quality of television programming today, especially at the broadcast network level. But it's also nice to know that there is still a network that cares about quality and is willing to take risks and give its projects decent budgets, production values, and support.
Leonard Maltin's annual movie guide has many listings labelled "Made for cable." That label generally implies a film that isn't as good as a theatrical release and is just above "Made for television" in quality. In the case of HBO, however, this is simply not the case. In my opinion, there's nothing shameful about making a film for HBO. Its best efforts can hold their own with any theatrical film. I think that Leonard Maltin needs a new label, "Made for HBO."
My hat is off to HBO.
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Don't Cross This Rubicon
The Rubicon is a river in what is now northern Italy. In Roman times, it was illegal for any Roman general from the outlying areas to cross the Rubicon southward without first disbanding his army. Today, "crossing the Rubicon" has come to mean making an irrevocable decision from which there is no turning back.
I like a good spy story, so when American Movie Classics announced its new series, Rubicon, I decided to check it out. The first episode showed some intriguing possibilities, so after watching it, I decided to "cross the Rubicon" and commit myself to following the series.
The main character, Will Travers, is played by James Badge Dale, who was excellent as Private Robert Leckie in the award-winning HBO series The Pacific earlier this year. Travers works for the American Policy Institute (API), an intelligence analysis group that seems to be a front for the CIA or some other national security organization.
Things happen in that first episode. At the beginning, an older man, Thomas Rhumor (Harris Yulin in an uncredited cameo) finds a four-leaf clover next to some newspaper clippings on his desk and promptly decides to blow his brains out. Later that day, Will's boss, David Hadas (Peter Gerety), who is also Will's father-in-law, finds some disturbing similarities in the crossword puzzles of seven major newspapers. It isn't the first time that this has happened, and bad things usually happen when it occurs.
That night, Hadas unexpectedly gives his prized Norton motorcycle to Will. Earlier, he had given Will a note advising him to leave the area. Will calls Hadas, who promises to explain everything to Will the next morning at a clandestine meeting.
That meeting never happens. The next morning, Hadas is apparently killed in the crash of a subway train. But was it really him? There are clues that he may not have been on the train, so we are not sure. (Anyone who stands at the front of the lead car of a subway train as it enters a station surely must have a death wish, and Hadas didn't appear to be suicidal.) Hadas' boss, Kale Ingram (Arliss Howard), persuades Will to take over David's team.
The first episode presents lots of intriguing possibilities, threads, subplots and no doubt some red herrings, and has the makings of a good spy story. There's only one problem. these ideas aren't carried through very well, at least in the next nine episodes.
Nothing much happens in those episodes. The crossword-puzzle story line is left dangling. We have no more idea of what happened to David Halas than we did at the end of the second episode. Will begins to pick up traces of a conspiracy involving Thomas Rhumor, another man who committed suicide 20 years earlier after finding a four-leaf clover on his desk, and Truxton Spanger (Michael Cristopher), the head of API, but even after 10 episodes, we don't know much about it.
There's a subplot featuring Katherine Rhumor (Miranda Richardson), Thomas Rhumor's widow, who is trying to sort out the mystery of her husband's suicide. It seems that Thomas Rhumor was very secretive about many things in his life, but this fine actress is given far too little screen time in her role.
What we have is a story in which no one trusts anyone else and you don't know who are the "good guys" and who are the "bad guys." That's to be expected in a spy story, of course, but the characters are so thinly drawn that you don't really care. Secretaries spy on their bosses, under orders from higher-ups, then get fired when their bosses find out. Bad guys (at least I assume that they are bad guys) bug the apartments and offices of the good guys, the good guys find the bugs and destroy them, then the bad guys come back and plant new ones. Several of the main characters are being followed all of the time. Ho-hum.
Oh yes, Will and Katherine are threatened with termination in Episode 10, but up to this point, the most exciting thing that's happened is that Tanya MacGaffan (Loren Hodges), on of the members of Will's team, has failed a drug test and been forced into API's rehab program. You know the bit--we take care of our own, even if that sometimes means terminating one of our own.
Poor James Badge Dale. He went from a series in which all hell was breaking loose all of the time to one in which nothing ever seems to break loose ever. He seems as bored with the series as I've been. It must be like digging a foxhole and standing in it, waiting for the Japanese to storm your hill--for nine weeks.
If you want to see a film with a similar story line, watch 1975's Three Days of the Condor, starring Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway in their prime and directed by Sydney Pollack, one of the best directors of his generation. It's a good film and it only takes two hours. And by the way, the villain is played by Max von Sydow, one of the best movie villains of his time. If you're in the mood for a series, try Smiley's People and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, starring Alec Guinness, who is always worth watching.
I like a good spy story, so when American Movie Classics announced its new series, Rubicon, I decided to check it out. The first episode showed some intriguing possibilities, so after watching it, I decided to "cross the Rubicon" and commit myself to following the series.
The main character, Will Travers, is played by James Badge Dale, who was excellent as Private Robert Leckie in the award-winning HBO series The Pacific earlier this year. Travers works for the American Policy Institute (API), an intelligence analysis group that seems to be a front for the CIA or some other national security organization.
Things happen in that first episode. At the beginning, an older man, Thomas Rhumor (Harris Yulin in an uncredited cameo) finds a four-leaf clover next to some newspaper clippings on his desk and promptly decides to blow his brains out. Later that day, Will's boss, David Hadas (Peter Gerety), who is also Will's father-in-law, finds some disturbing similarities in the crossword puzzles of seven major newspapers. It isn't the first time that this has happened, and bad things usually happen when it occurs.
That night, Hadas unexpectedly gives his prized Norton motorcycle to Will. Earlier, he had given Will a note advising him to leave the area. Will calls Hadas, who promises to explain everything to Will the next morning at a clandestine meeting.
That meeting never happens. The next morning, Hadas is apparently killed in the crash of a subway train. But was it really him? There are clues that he may not have been on the train, so we are not sure. (Anyone who stands at the front of the lead car of a subway train as it enters a station surely must have a death wish, and Hadas didn't appear to be suicidal.) Hadas' boss, Kale Ingram (Arliss Howard), persuades Will to take over David's team.
The first episode presents lots of intriguing possibilities, threads, subplots and no doubt some red herrings, and has the makings of a good spy story. There's only one problem. these ideas aren't carried through very well, at least in the next nine episodes.
Nothing much happens in those episodes. The crossword-puzzle story line is left dangling. We have no more idea of what happened to David Halas than we did at the end of the second episode. Will begins to pick up traces of a conspiracy involving Thomas Rhumor, another man who committed suicide 20 years earlier after finding a four-leaf clover on his desk, and Truxton Spanger (Michael Cristopher), the head of API, but even after 10 episodes, we don't know much about it.
There's a subplot featuring Katherine Rhumor (Miranda Richardson), Thomas Rhumor's widow, who is trying to sort out the mystery of her husband's suicide. It seems that Thomas Rhumor was very secretive about many things in his life, but this fine actress is given far too little screen time in her role.
What we have is a story in which no one trusts anyone else and you don't know who are the "good guys" and who are the "bad guys." That's to be expected in a spy story, of course, but the characters are so thinly drawn that you don't really care. Secretaries spy on their bosses, under orders from higher-ups, then get fired when their bosses find out. Bad guys (at least I assume that they are bad guys) bug the apartments and offices of the good guys, the good guys find the bugs and destroy them, then the bad guys come back and plant new ones. Several of the main characters are being followed all of the time. Ho-hum.
Oh yes, Will and Katherine are threatened with termination in Episode 10, but up to this point, the most exciting thing that's happened is that Tanya MacGaffan (Loren Hodges), on of the members of Will's team, has failed a drug test and been forced into API's rehab program. You know the bit--we take care of our own, even if that sometimes means terminating one of our own.
Poor James Badge Dale. He went from a series in which all hell was breaking loose all of the time to one in which nothing ever seems to break loose ever. He seems as bored with the series as I've been. It must be like digging a foxhole and standing in it, waiting for the Japanese to storm your hill--for nine weeks.
If you want to see a film with a similar story line, watch 1975's Three Days of the Condor, starring Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway in their prime and directed by Sydney Pollack, one of the best directors of his generation. It's a good film and it only takes two hours. And by the way, the villain is played by Max von Sydow, one of the best movie villains of his time. If you're in the mood for a series, try Smiley's People and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, starring Alec Guinness, who is always worth watching.
Why I Need to Write This Blog
In my previous entry, I wrote about my first editor, Ed Wall, who was a true role model for me. He is now 85 years old, and despite his serious ailments, he writes a blog that contains shining examples of good writing. Be sure to check it out at http://aepwall.blogspot.com/. He has inspired me to start my own blog.
For the first seven years of my career, I was a newspaper reporter and editor. This was followed by six years as editor of the alumni publication at The Catholic University of America. Those were very happy and successful years for me. I found that I was a good writer and photographer, and writing came very naturally to me. I even won a number of local and national awards for my work, and I got to know some of the best people in my field.
Unfortunately, Catholic University didn't pay very well and my family was growing, so I started to work for a series of research organizations, trade associations, and professional membership societies. These jobs provided very little opportunity for original writing or good photography. Instead, because the publications that I was editing were dependent on members for their content, I spent most of my time editing and attempting to salvage poorly-written content from bad writers.
I found that by being constantly exposed to bad writing, my own writing suffered and no longer came naturally to me. I suffered constantly from writer's block and when I finally managed to write, it was like pulling teeth and the results were very discouraging.
Lately, I have been specializing in proposal management, which does not leave much room for creativity. I do it because the work pays very well--about twice as much as non-technical writing and editing. I need the money badly but I get very little personal satisfaction out of the work. I do get some satisfaction when a proposal that I have managed helps my client to win the contract, but the satisfaction comes from knowing that I have helped to create or protect jobs for my client's employees. I've found that every company has decent, hard-working people who deserve my best effort.
My financial situation is such that I will have to work as long as I am physically able to do so. I have my share of medical problems. To complicate matters, I have suffered from chronic depression for the past 30 years, and there are many mornings when I have a hard time getting out of bed.
I'm writing this blog to protect my sanity and to give myself a reason to get out of bed on those difficult mornings when the depression has taken hold. I need to write about things that I care about, even if nobody reads my posts, and I need to prove to myself that I can still write well. The more that I write, the easier it will become. My physical problems pale in comparison to Ed's, so I've said to myself that if he can still write well and often, then I can too.
Ed, you taught us so much those many years ago at The Catholic Review. I want you to know that as far as this writer is concerned, you're still teaching us.
For the first seven years of my career, I was a newspaper reporter and editor. This was followed by six years as editor of the alumni publication at The Catholic University of America. Those were very happy and successful years for me. I found that I was a good writer and photographer, and writing came very naturally to me. I even won a number of local and national awards for my work, and I got to know some of the best people in my field.
Unfortunately, Catholic University didn't pay very well and my family was growing, so I started to work for a series of research organizations, trade associations, and professional membership societies. These jobs provided very little opportunity for original writing or good photography. Instead, because the publications that I was editing were dependent on members for their content, I spent most of my time editing and attempting to salvage poorly-written content from bad writers.
I found that by being constantly exposed to bad writing, my own writing suffered and no longer came naturally to me. I suffered constantly from writer's block and when I finally managed to write, it was like pulling teeth and the results were very discouraging.
Lately, I have been specializing in proposal management, which does not leave much room for creativity. I do it because the work pays very well--about twice as much as non-technical writing and editing. I need the money badly but I get very little personal satisfaction out of the work. I do get some satisfaction when a proposal that I have managed helps my client to win the contract, but the satisfaction comes from knowing that I have helped to create or protect jobs for my client's employees. I've found that every company has decent, hard-working people who deserve my best effort.
My financial situation is such that I will have to work as long as I am physically able to do so. I have my share of medical problems. To complicate matters, I have suffered from chronic depression for the past 30 years, and there are many mornings when I have a hard time getting out of bed.
I'm writing this blog to protect my sanity and to give myself a reason to get out of bed on those difficult mornings when the depression has taken hold. I need to write about things that I care about, even if nobody reads my posts, and I need to prove to myself that I can still write well. The more that I write, the easier it will become. My physical problems pale in comparison to Ed's, so I've said to myself that if he can still write well and often, then I can too.
Ed, you taught us so much those many years ago at The Catholic Review. I want you to know that as far as this writer is concerned, you're still teaching us.
Ed Wall: Still Teaching Us How to Write
There is a second inspiration for my blog--Ed Wall, my first editor and the best editor that a young reporter could ever hope to have. Most of what I know about good reporting and editing I learned from Ed. I can never repay him for all that he did for me, except to try to help other young people as they are starting out as writers and editors. I've tried to do this all of my life, in honor of Ed.
Arthur Edward Patrick Wall is 85 years old now and suffering from some serious disabilities, and yet he's still not just writing, but writing very well. Good journalistic writing has become a lost art. Just try slogging through the Washington Post on any given day. If you care about good writing, be sure to visit his blog, Wall's Paper, at http://aepwall.blogspot.com/.
Ed came into my life in 1965. I had left the Catholic seminary (two years before I would have been ordained a priest) and been hired as a reporter for The Catholic Review in Baltimore, Maryland. The editor who hired me left three weeks later and Ed replaced him. He left an important position with the Honolulu Advertiser, and those of us on the staff wondered why he would leave Hawaii for Baltimore of all places. It turned out that Ed was a convert to Catholicism and wanted to give something back to the Church.
Most of us on the editorial staff were a bunch of twenty-somethings who were still wet behind the ears. Besides myself, there was Bobby Keller, Dennis Henderson and his brother Gordon, and Gerry Parsigian. Tom Lorsung, our news editor, was a few years older than us, and was married with young children.
Finally there was Eddie Kearns, the city editor. Eddie was about 55 years old and had been with the paper since high school. Eddie edited the back-of-the-paper stuff, such as announcements from the parishes about events such as spaghetti dinners, bull roasts, and crab feasts. How he managed to keep from being bored to tears, I'll never know. I'll also never know what he thought about the changes that Ed Wall brought to the paper because Eddie kept his own counsel about such matters. But we never had to worry about the back of the paper.
This was during the waning days of the hot-type era, when type was cast, one line at a time, on Linotype machines, dropped into a metal form called a chase, and eventually molded into metal pages, which were mounted on a rotary press. The paper was printed on Thursdays, and the entire staff would spend all day at the print shop, proofreading galleys of type, double-checking corrected lines of type as they were inserted into the metal form, and performing a last-minute check when the first papers started coming off the press.
We were all hungry to learn as much as we could from Ed, and he never brushed us off. He also seemed to understand that we were all greeenhorns and would make mistakes from time to time. I never heard him utter a cruel or unkind word to anyone on the staff. He was--and still is--a true gentleman.
We would all go out to lunch at a deli near the print shop and start asking him questions. Later, as we were waiting for the first copies to come off the press, we would ask him even more questions. How did he manage to accomplish a certain goal? What was the direction in which he was trying to take the paper? Why can't we be more like the Delmarva Dialog, a liberal, groundbreaking Catholic paper in nearby Wilmington, Delaware?
In answer to that last question, Ed told us that he intended to move The Catholic Review in that same direction, but that he intended to do so in an orderly way over the next two years. Two years later, The Catholic Review had become one of the most-respected Catholic papers in the United States and the Delmarva Dialog was nearly bankrupt.
In 1968 the editor who had hired me for The Catholic Review took over the Delmarva Dialog and I went there to work for him. Under his editorship, the paper continued to hemorrhage money. After I did a short stint with the News-Journal papers in Wilmington, Ed took me back.
The thing about Ed Wall was that he was not a "Catholic newspaperman" like most of the others at the time, but rather, a newspaperman who happened to edit a Catholic paper. He gave us all good assignments and the opportunity to write about subjects that mattered to us. I wrote about the plight of migrant workers on the Eastern Shore. Dennis Henderson wrote an excellent series of articles on motorcycle safety. Practically no other Catholic newspaper of the time was doing these things.
He was also very competitive--a newspaperman first and foremost. He particularly liked to scoop the Catholic Standard, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Washington--which wasn't very hard to do.
In 1965, the Second Vatican Council, which dragged the Catholic Church into the 20th Century, was in full swing in Rome. Monsignor Joseph Gallagher, the Executive Editor of The Catholic Review, was also the editor of the English-language translations of the council documents and was in Rome while the council was in session.
Ed was determined that The Review would be the first publication in the United States to publish the translations. When they were all completed, Monsignor Gallagher found a friendly airline pilot who flew them overnight into Friendship Airport in Baltimore. Tom Lorsung, our news editor, met the plane at 7:30 the next morning and brought them to Baltimore. The Review published them over a period of time.
When I came back to the paper in 1970, Ed assigned me to cover the Maryland governor's office and General Assembly on a full-time basis, the type of assignment that no other Catholic paper was doing at that time. The state capitol is in Annapolis, which is within the Archdiocese of Washington.
In 1971 there were two major pieces of legislation coming up in which the Archdioceses of Baltimore and Washington had a strong interest--legalization of abortion and state aid to private education. There I was, sitting with reporters from the Sun papers in Baltimore and reporters from Baltimore radio and television stations--but no reporter from the Catholic Standard.
Supporters of the education bill had lobbied the governor, Marvin Mandel, to support the legislation in 1970, which was a gubernatorial election year in Maryland. Mandel, who was Jewish, asked them to hold off until the next year, when he promised to support the bill.
True to his word, when the bill came up before the House of Delegates in 1971, Mandel pulled out all the stops in support of it. People from his office came out of the woodwork to lobby the delegates.
The bill was scheduled to come up for a vote in the House on a Thursday--deadline day for The Catholic Review. The day before, I wrote three stories, each exactly 20 inches long. 1--The bill passes. 2--The bill fails. 3--The vote came too late for our deadline. For the first two, I even got my sources to give me quotes both ways.
This was long before cell phones came on the scene. Somehow or other, we managed to get a landline phone to my seat in Annapolis. Things were moving slowly in the House of Delegates that day, and as the afternoon session started, the bill still hadn't come up for a vote. It seemed that every 15 minutes, Ed would call me on the phone and ask for an update. As it got later in the day, I could hear the tension in his voice building. He could have taken the easy way out and used the "too late for our deadline" story, but it would have killed him to do this. Fortunately, the bill came up for a vote--and passed--just in time to make the paper.
I'm so glad that Ed is writing his blog and showing us some shining examples of good journalism and captivating writing. Ed, to quote from Mr. Spock of Star Trek: May you live long and prosper.
Arthur Edward Patrick Wall is 85 years old now and suffering from some serious disabilities, and yet he's still not just writing, but writing very well. Good journalistic writing has become a lost art. Just try slogging through the Washington Post on any given day. If you care about good writing, be sure to visit his blog, Wall's Paper, at http://aepwall.blogspot.com/.
Ed came into my life in 1965. I had left the Catholic seminary (two years before I would have been ordained a priest) and been hired as a reporter for The Catholic Review in Baltimore, Maryland. The editor who hired me left three weeks later and Ed replaced him. He left an important position with the Honolulu Advertiser, and those of us on the staff wondered why he would leave Hawaii for Baltimore of all places. It turned out that Ed was a convert to Catholicism and wanted to give something back to the Church.
Most of us on the editorial staff were a bunch of twenty-somethings who were still wet behind the ears. Besides myself, there was Bobby Keller, Dennis Henderson and his brother Gordon, and Gerry Parsigian. Tom Lorsung, our news editor, was a few years older than us, and was married with young children.
Finally there was Eddie Kearns, the city editor. Eddie was about 55 years old and had been with the paper since high school. Eddie edited the back-of-the-paper stuff, such as announcements from the parishes about events such as spaghetti dinners, bull roasts, and crab feasts. How he managed to keep from being bored to tears, I'll never know. I'll also never know what he thought about the changes that Ed Wall brought to the paper because Eddie kept his own counsel about such matters. But we never had to worry about the back of the paper.
This was during the waning days of the hot-type era, when type was cast, one line at a time, on Linotype machines, dropped into a metal form called a chase, and eventually molded into metal pages, which were mounted on a rotary press. The paper was printed on Thursdays, and the entire staff would spend all day at the print shop, proofreading galleys of type, double-checking corrected lines of type as they were inserted into the metal form, and performing a last-minute check when the first papers started coming off the press.
We were all hungry to learn as much as we could from Ed, and he never brushed us off. He also seemed to understand that we were all greeenhorns and would make mistakes from time to time. I never heard him utter a cruel or unkind word to anyone on the staff. He was--and still is--a true gentleman.
We would all go out to lunch at a deli near the print shop and start asking him questions. Later, as we were waiting for the first copies to come off the press, we would ask him even more questions. How did he manage to accomplish a certain goal? What was the direction in which he was trying to take the paper? Why can't we be more like the Delmarva Dialog, a liberal, groundbreaking Catholic paper in nearby Wilmington, Delaware?
In answer to that last question, Ed told us that he intended to move The Catholic Review in that same direction, but that he intended to do so in an orderly way over the next two years. Two years later, The Catholic Review had become one of the most-respected Catholic papers in the United States and the Delmarva Dialog was nearly bankrupt.
In 1968 the editor who had hired me for The Catholic Review took over the Delmarva Dialog and I went there to work for him. Under his editorship, the paper continued to hemorrhage money. After I did a short stint with the News-Journal papers in Wilmington, Ed took me back.
The thing about Ed Wall was that he was not a "Catholic newspaperman" like most of the others at the time, but rather, a newspaperman who happened to edit a Catholic paper. He gave us all good assignments and the opportunity to write about subjects that mattered to us. I wrote about the plight of migrant workers on the Eastern Shore. Dennis Henderson wrote an excellent series of articles on motorcycle safety. Practically no other Catholic newspaper of the time was doing these things.
He was also very competitive--a newspaperman first and foremost. He particularly liked to scoop the Catholic Standard, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Washington--which wasn't very hard to do.
In 1965, the Second Vatican Council, which dragged the Catholic Church into the 20th Century, was in full swing in Rome. Monsignor Joseph Gallagher, the Executive Editor of The Catholic Review, was also the editor of the English-language translations of the council documents and was in Rome while the council was in session.
Ed was determined that The Review would be the first publication in the United States to publish the translations. When they were all completed, Monsignor Gallagher found a friendly airline pilot who flew them overnight into Friendship Airport in Baltimore. Tom Lorsung, our news editor, met the plane at 7:30 the next morning and brought them to Baltimore. The Review published them over a period of time.
When I came back to the paper in 1970, Ed assigned me to cover the Maryland governor's office and General Assembly on a full-time basis, the type of assignment that no other Catholic paper was doing at that time. The state capitol is in Annapolis, which is within the Archdiocese of Washington.
In 1971 there were two major pieces of legislation coming up in which the Archdioceses of Baltimore and Washington had a strong interest--legalization of abortion and state aid to private education. There I was, sitting with reporters from the Sun papers in Baltimore and reporters from Baltimore radio and television stations--but no reporter from the Catholic Standard.
Supporters of the education bill had lobbied the governor, Marvin Mandel, to support the legislation in 1970, which was a gubernatorial election year in Maryland. Mandel, who was Jewish, asked them to hold off until the next year, when he promised to support the bill.
True to his word, when the bill came up before the House of Delegates in 1971, Mandel pulled out all the stops in support of it. People from his office came out of the woodwork to lobby the delegates.
The bill was scheduled to come up for a vote in the House on a Thursday--deadline day for The Catholic Review. The day before, I wrote three stories, each exactly 20 inches long. 1--The bill passes. 2--The bill fails. 3--The vote came too late for our deadline. For the first two, I even got my sources to give me quotes both ways.
This was long before cell phones came on the scene. Somehow or other, we managed to get a landline phone to my seat in Annapolis. Things were moving slowly in the House of Delegates that day, and as the afternoon session started, the bill still hadn't come up for a vote. It seemed that every 15 minutes, Ed would call me on the phone and ask for an update. As it got later in the day, I could hear the tension in his voice building. He could have taken the easy way out and used the "too late for our deadline" story, but it would have killed him to do this. Fortunately, the bill came up for a vote--and passed--just in time to make the paper.
I'm so glad that Ed is writing his blog and showing us some shining examples of good journalism and captivating writing. Ed, to quote from Mr. Spock of Star Trek: May you live long and prosper.
Friday, September 24, 2010
In memory of Carol Castronouvo
Early this year, I lost a dear friend, Carol Castronuovo, to cancer. Carol was a wonderful conversationalist and very well-read. We had a common interest in film and music and she would tell me about the books that she was reading. I learned so much from her. We used to talk for hours on end about anything and everything.
So many times since her passing, I have thought about something or seen something, said to myself "I ought to share this with Carol," and started to reach for the phone. Then something brings me up short and I realize that she isn't there for me to call anymore. I never realized how important she was to me and my life.
Carol is the inspiration for this blog. I'm 69 years of age as I start to write it, and I have a long memory and hopefully the wisdom and perspective to go along with it. When I started out as a newspaper reporter in 1965, and was writing news stories and features about subjects that were very important to me, I was enthralled by the fact that my writing was reaching many thousands of people. I really felt that I could make a difference in this world. Unfortunately, many things went wrong in my life, and that dream was shattered.
This is my way of trying to rekindle that spirit of having something worthwhile to say and hopefully reaching a large number of people, at least over time. Carol, this one's for you. I know that you are up there listening, and I hope that someday we will once again be able to share our conversations. I miss you, and so does Stripes.
So many times since her passing, I have thought about something or seen something, said to myself "I ought to share this with Carol," and started to reach for the phone. Then something brings me up short and I realize that she isn't there for me to call anymore. I never realized how important she was to me and my life.
Carol is the inspiration for this blog. I'm 69 years of age as I start to write it, and I have a long memory and hopefully the wisdom and perspective to go along with it. When I started out as a newspaper reporter in 1965, and was writing news stories and features about subjects that were very important to me, I was enthralled by the fact that my writing was reaching many thousands of people. I really felt that I could make a difference in this world. Unfortunately, many things went wrong in my life, and that dream was shattered.
This is my way of trying to rekindle that spirit of having something worthwhile to say and hopefully reaching a large number of people, at least over time. Carol, this one's for you. I know that you are up there listening, and I hope that someday we will once again be able to share our conversations. I miss you, and so does Stripes.
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