Monthly Archives: August 2023

Top 17 Best Songs (With Parentheses in the Titles)

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What, indeed, IS so funny ’bout it?

I was trying to clean out my email a few days ago, but got distracted by this fun item the NYT was promoting. (Seems like the Times is just going out of its way to tempt me away from actual work these days, huh? First Wordle, then Spelling Bee, then this thing I had written about the same day I saw this…)

The Times called it “13 (great) songs with parenthetical titles.” Of course, it’s a rather silly category. One song with parentheses has nothing in common with other songs with parentheses, aside from that punctuational quirk. All it tells you is that the songwriter was engaging in an affectation, trying to say, Look, I’m deep. This song is written on multiple levels — including parenthetical!

Of course, I had to step in and correct it — narrowing the list to those that are actually good, if not necessarily great, and then expanding it to bring in equally good songs that the NYT left out. The proper thing to do then, of course, would have been to whittle the result down to a true Top Five list, but I didn’t want to spend days on the silly thing.

So here’s my Top 16 Best Songs (With Parentheses in the Titles). They aren’t in order with the best at the top, or anything. The first six are from the NYT list, the other 10 are ones I added. You may offer whatever suggestions occur to you:

  1. “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay” — I agree to include this with mixed feelings. I love the song — it’s one that truly does rise to “great” — and let always feel kind of ignorant and out of it because for many years, this somewhat uncharacteristic number was all I knew about Otis Redding, the man who really knew HOW to express a lack of Satisfaction. I am wiser now.
  2. “I Would Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That)” — I agreed on this one, if only to give a nod to the late Meat Loaf, to make up for the fact that this is one of only two songs of his (the other being…) I can recall. And it really is a pretty decent song.
  3. “(You Make Me Feel Like) a Natural Woman” — The NYT was confused, citing the Aretha Franklin version. But I’m not as big a fan of Aretha as lots of other folks are, and so I prefer Otis Reading’s version of “R.E.S.P.E.C.T.” And on this, I have to give the credit to the woman who actually wrote the song, Carole King.
  4. “It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll (But I Like It)” — This is far — very, very far — from bring among the Rolling Stones’ greatest songs, but it meets the criterion, and they’re the greatest rock and roll band in the world, so let’s include it.
  5. “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” — Not only the best R.E.M. song, but probably the best use of parentheses on the NYT list.
  6. “I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)” — A weaker use of parentheses than, say, R.E.M.’s, but a nice song, and it’s nice to contemplate something from when that lovely young woman was so full of promise, before her life started falling apart.
  7. “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” — This is a slight correction to the NYT list, which mistakenly chose “I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Have Never Met).” To its credit, that list also mention this one, and “One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later).” That third one — the one from Blonde on Blonde (What? You don’t have Blonde on Blonde?), is the best song of the three. But “It’s Alright, Ma” is the one with the punchiest use of parentheses.
  8. “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding” — My fave of all of these. It’s an enigma: How can it sound like the quintessential Elvis Costello song when Nick Lowe wrote it? And how could the NYT have left it out?
  9. “December, 1963 (Oh, What a Night)” —  Yeah, what you thought was the title is completely contained in the parentheses. This is Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons being… I don’t know what.
  10. “Double Shot (Of My Baby’s Love)” — Another of mine, as a way of getting a South Carolina band on the list. I lived in New Orleans when this was first big, and it was years before I knew that it and I were born in the same place.
  11. “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” — Of course, we need to hear it through the SNL skit.
  12. “Mr. President (Have Pity on the Working Man)” I threw in this one because it is my considered opinion that Randy Newman doesn’t get enough attention. He would probably agree. And it comes from a truly great album that you will never heard fully played on the radio because, you know. It’s a shame “Louisiana 1927” didn’t have some parentheses.
  13. “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)” — Maybe the person who compiled the NYT list isn’t old enough to remember Kenny Rogers & the First Edition playing it on a variety show, back when those existed.
  14. “She Got the Goldmine (I Got the Shaft)” — You have to be in a certain sort of mood, I suppose, to enjoy Jerry Reed. I include this in case you’ve feeling that way. I’m not…
  15. “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ On Your Mind)” — This Loretta Lynn number is probably the one item on this list that is truly a classic.
  16. “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” — You thought I was going to forget the Fab Four? Perish the thought.

I miss the whited sepulchers

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Of course, ol’ St, Jerome would be unhappy that we’re not using his Latin version…

You know, I appreciate the efforts of various people to make Holy Scripture accessible to modern people. I do; it’s a noble motivation.

But sometimes it just leaves me flat, and I regret the poetry that has been lost.

Here is the opening of today’s Gospel reading, in the Catholic Church’s official New American Bible:

Jesus said,
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites.
You are like whitewashed tombs, which appear beautiful on the outside,
but inside are full of dead men’s bones and every kind of filth.
Even so, on the outside you appear righteous,
but inside you are filled with hypocrisy and evildoing….

I’m not trying to make any theological point, much less a political one. In fact, as I suggested above, I suppose the correct theological point is to make the Word more accessible.

But it does bother me a little to imagine future generations missing out on the old wording. It survived to be a secular cliche because it had a certain power to it. You call somebody a “whited sepulcher,” and most people with even a modicum of cultural education will get it.

So for fun, and to gratify the esthetic part of the soul, here’s the old King James version (you know, the Protestant version):

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness.

Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity…

Meanwhile, I’ll sit here and worry about the editors of the next edition of the NAB deciding to ditch “Woe to you…” because it “sounds like Yoda or something…”

I mean, they already got rid of the “unto”…

 

Open Thread for Tuesday, August 29, 2023

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What the…?

A few things I’ve run across…

  1. The universe poses a question — Have you heard about the question mark in space? Since it’s oriented so as to be readable on our planet, I sort of expect it won’t be long before a “WTF” appears to the left of it. News of how messed up we are has apparently spread across the galaxy. In case you can’t read the NYT version I linked to, try the NPR version.
  2. Record 14-foot monster alligator caught in Mississippi — In case you thought you were wrestling with some messy problems… This sucker weighed 802.5 pounds. Lately, we’ve been reading a good bit about “Proud Boys.” Well, I suppose you could say this is a picture of some proud boys of the generic kind…
  3. Sorry to hear the news about Tough Guy Bob Barker — I held back from posting the first thing that occurred to me when I got the news — his famous scene in “Happy Gilmore.” But then after that, The Washington Post did a whole story just about that — which I very much enjoyed. It told how Bob insisted on doing his own stunts, because his neighbor Chuck Norris had been coaching him. Much later, he supposedly told Rob Schneider, “I moved to Hollywood to be an actor, and the only person who ever let me do it was Adam Sandler!” Well, he took his shot, and scored. Watch the full fight scene here.
  4. Idalia expected to dump half-foot of rain on us — Yeah, like we needed that. And oh yes, it’s now a hurricane. I need to find us some good news…
  5. Watch ‘Breaking Away’ for free! — And here it is! This is to make up for all the things I link to that require subscriptions. I just discovered that YouTube is showing it for free! If you’ve never seen it, go watch it right now — subito! (As the protagonist would say — I think.) I already gave Scott Hogan a heads-up via twitter. He was our campaign manager back in 2018, and he’s from Bloomington, making him the only actual Cutter I know.
  6. Joe moves to cut some drug prices — Even better news. You go, Joe! I need to tell my wife he’s going after Eliquis, which she’s had to take since her mini-strokes, and the price on it is absurd. The link above is to The Guardian, which is free to read. Let’s see if they managed to write about it without a tone of disbelief at the problems we have over here paying for basic medical care…

 

Hey, this is Civility Month. Who could tell, huh?

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Check out those dates. We’ve been discussing this for awhile, eh?

Hey, did ya know this was National Civility Month? Here it is almost over, and I didn’t know until this morning. Here’s what it’s about:

People being civil to other people is what makes the world a whole lot better and is the key focus of National Civility Month, which is held in August each year. This holiday was founded to help the world remember to treat others the way we wish to be treated ourselves — with kindness, empathy, and respect. This month follows a common theme like other similar awareness months centered around civility, including National Win With Civility Month, International Civility Awareness Month, and more.

It appears to have escaped the attention of some of my readers as well. I just looked at the latest 10 comments awaiting moderation, and only approved one of them. I think maybe that’s a record. Just not one worth celebrating.

Of course, it “helped” that four of them were from our old friend SDII, using his latest pseudonym (I think — I’m not going to take the trouble to try to trace it back). He knows I’m not going to approve his comments, so they’ve gotten increasingly gross and obscene. Which doesn’t matter, since I trash them as soon as I see them, but he’s been unusually active lately.

The rest were from folks I’ve recently tried for about the thousandth time to engage regarding what this month was supposed to be about, explaining why I had not approved previous comments of theirs. Their responses essentially amounted to a middle finger raised high, so I guess I only succeeded in irritating them.

I’ll stop doing that, going forward. From this moment on, I’m just going to approve comments that add to the blog without dissing others here. Beyond that, things that don’t create a drip, drip, drip of negativity that makes the comments section a drag for others to read.

And what sorts of comments meet that standard? Well, here are some people I’ve never had reason to disapprove (Or rather, almost never. Occasionally, they’ve been dragged into scuffles with other folks, and I’ve just trashed the whole conversation.) The first few who come to mind, in alphabetical order:

  1. Phillip Bush
  2. Bryan Caskey
  3. Dave Crockett
  4. James Edward Cross
  5. Paul DeMarco
  6. Ralph Hightower
  7. Sally Huguley
  8. Norm Ivey
  9. Mark Stewart
  10. Clark Surratt
  11. Lynn Teague

OK, now: I hope those 12 won’t mind being named. If anyone does, I’ll remove you from the list. And no one who isn’t on the list should resent it. I was just choosing among people who’ve made civil contributions in the recent past, and have done so regularly over the years, and have used their full names.

For instance, I was delighted to hear from “Scout” recently. It had been awhile, and I hope she resumes regular participation. But I didn’t include her, since she uses a pseudonym. Of course, there are quite a few people who identify themselves fully and accurately, but haven’t commented lately. I’m afraid some of those were run off by the finger-flipping folk. People get tired of reading that stuff, very quickly.

Why provide a list at all? Well, I thought it better to celebrate the good than pick on those who fall short. Also, the finger-flippers who insist on believing that the standard is “you have to agree with that stupid jerk Brad” will be able to see that’s not true. Actually, I’m almost certain (after all this time) that they won’t see it, but they will have the opportunity.

Note that I provided a link to one comment from each of those folks. There’s nothing particularly special about those comments — it’s not a “greatest hits” list. I just looked for something reasonably, thoughtful (some agreeing with me or someone else, others not) and particularly ones that added something that wouldn’t have been here otherwise. And I did it very quickly.

And now, on to other things.

America finally has its long-awaited mug shot

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From the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office

Well, here it is.

Note that after the NYT reported that his cohorts were smiling brightly in theirs, Trump rejected that sissy notion, opting to go full surly thug. By comparison, Al Capone was Mr. Sunshine.

No orange jumpsuit, but a mug shot.

See what I meant about Trump knowing how to upstage a dumb ol’ debate?

Thoughts on the ‘debate’ last night?

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Actually, the first thing I’d like to know is how many of you watched it.

I didn’t. Well, I tried — about a half-hour into it — and I couldn’t. I mean, technically couldn’t get it on my TV. You see, this wasn’t an event for the American people; it was an event for Fox News. It was only available if you had cable, which I don’t. It certainly wasn’t on WACH-Fox 57, which I can get. Oh, I watched for a few minutes by a path that looked like a workaround, but it only offered me 10 free minutes, and at least half of that was commercials.

Of course, I’ve read various accounts of it, and listened to the “The Daily” podcast this morning, which was devoted entirely to it. So I have some thoughts. Those of you who watched the whole sorry spectacle (and I feel for you) may have a great deal of, um, enlightenment to add. If you’re not in a coma or something.

Here’s what I have:

What passes for a ‘profile in courage’ in the GOP — It’s been many, many years since we’ve seen anything we could call an actual presidential debate — you know, something that sheds light on the degree to which the candidates possess qualities that it would be useful for a POTUS to have — instead of a circus contest to see how many clowns can crowd onto a stage, while trying to goad each other into gaffes. It’s about as dignified as the Three Stooges. We reached a new low last night (really, in the parts I heard, Quemoy and Matsu weren’t mentioned even once), and possibly the lowest point was when the participants were asked whether they’d support Trump if he were both convicted of a crime, and nominated. The three hands on the right shot up, with Vivek Ramaswamy succeeding in his mission to convey the greatest enthusiasm. DeSantis, in the middle, looked to both his left and right before deciding he’d better put his up his, too. Then Pence did. Christie started to raise his, then shook his head, pointing his finger downward and twitching it back and forth. Asked to clarify his gestures (I think it was a form of New Jersey Sign Language), he hemmed and hawed and said “someone’s got to stop normalizing this conduct,” and overall gave the impression he’d never given the question a moment’s thought, and was trying to think what to say as he said it. And yet this was the closest anyone came to answering negatively, making his performance a Republican Profile in Courage, 2023 edition. How do I know all this, since I didn’t watch? Here’s the video.

Calling the kettle black — Nikki Haley was exactly right when she said to Ramaswamy, “You have no foreign policy experience and it shows.” And the rest of us were right when we said that about her when Donald Trump named her to be ambassador to the U.N. And if you think he did that because he thought she had such experience, you’re as wrong as you can be. He did it to make his buddy Henry McMaster governor. You know, the first statewide elected official in the country to ditch Reaganism and support the abasement of the country.

That said, did Nikki have a big night? Lots of observers think so. — Of course, it depends on how you’re scoring it. A number of people made the observation that she was the one person up there who was campaigning for the general election instead of the primaries. That means speaking in terms that are less objectionable to rational human beings. And she was rewarded with a lot of praise for that modest achievement — she was the consensus star of the evening, for instance, among NYT opinion writers. And David Brooks out-and-out said, “Nikki Haley Is the Best Trump Alternative.” That’s pretty clear. He adds, “She seems to be one of the few candidates who understands that to run against Trump you have to run against Trump.” Maybe so. As a big Brooks fan, I’m listening…

Trump showed them all up, and stole the spotlight — He did this by traveling to Atlanta this evening and turning himself in at the jail. America eagerly awaits the mug shot. But wait, you know what? I remember hearing before all this that he was supposed to be doing something with Tucker Carlson. Did that happen?

That’s probably enough to get us started. Thoughts?

“No, I was doin’ dis…”

Did y’all get this in the mail, too?

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My reaction of course is, Well, let’s certainly hope it would be my man Joe’s “ticket to another four years.”

Of course, I fervently hope we’ll have the same result even if any of these jokers — the ones having a “debate” tonight — turns out to be the nominee.

Obviously, that’s not what Americans for Prosperity — that’s the Koch brothers’ group — is hoping. They want one of those other Republicans to be nominated, and then beat Joe! (Shudder.)

I’m just curious about who got it, and who didn’t. I probably got it because, living in Lexington County — where the GOP nominee always gets elected — I’ve voted in quite a few GOP primaries. Or maybe it’s just that this is Lexington County. Or maybe, with all that Koch money to spend, everybody got it.

So… who got it, and who didn’t?

 

The accelerating acceleration of time…

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So Rip Van Winkle took a nap? Big deal…

Rip Van Winkle fell asleep for 20 years? Big deal. I take a lot of naps myself, since my stroke.

Also, I’m older than Rip was when he woke up, near as I can figure. And this gives a very, very different conception of what constitutes a “long time.” This was on display in a response I gave to a Doug Ross comment earlier this week. But let’s not talk about that. The exchange was about one of the least interesting subjects in the known universe — interest rates. (He was impressed by a 21-year high. I was not.)

And I want to talk about time.

You may think this a subject that’s been done to death, too, and you’d be right, up to a point. I mean, we all know that time speeds up as we get older. I knew full well when I was 40 that a year went by a LOT faster than it did when I was, say, 10. You’ve all experienced it, even you youngsters.

But after that, time accelerates at an accelerating pace. And now that I’m a very few weeks away from turning 70, I can tell you that I’m experiencing something like Ludicrous Speed, and I’m in a new dimension, or something.

And the only way I can measure the change is to compare it to the ways I perceived time in the past — which seem, well, ludicrous to me now. Examples:

  1. I’m jealous of my children and grandchildren because they learned about the Second World War, the event that loomed over my childhood, in history class. I had to read up on it myself. I was born eight years after 1945, and when I was a kid, I figured that had been plenty of time to document it fully in the textbooks. And it DID appear, as a sort of epilogue, in some of my books. But my teachers never got that far by the end of the term. I was an adult before I understood that it was so recent that it was hard for adults to wrap their heads around the idea that it was history. They saw it as current events. How could we not know all about it? Anyway, I felt really left out, because my world was full of indications that this monumental thing had happened just before I was born, and my elders knew all about it, but they weren’t sharing. I spent a lot of time, whenever I was in the school library, looking at those LIFE magazine coffee-table books full of pictures from that period. By high school, I was devouring adult novels set in the period, and then got into the actual history books…
  2. In my senior year of high school, I wrote a research paper for my civics class (a course with one of those faddish names like “Problems in American Democracy”) about Robert F. Kennedy — not the one who’s running quixotically for president now, but his Dad, who was not crazy, and was a contender if not the favorite back in ’68. Of course, I didn’t write the paper until the night before it was due — an all-nighter, since I had to type it after writing it longhand (I lacked skills I later took for granted). But I had been reading up on him for some time — at least one book covering his whole life, and a bunch of magazine articles. I really, truly had a strong sense that I was writing about a figure from way back in history; I remember this clearly. I had known next to nothing about him when he was alive, so I was learning about the distant past. But he had been assassinated only three years before! Had he survived, and won the 1968 election, he would still have been in his first term when I was writing it! It was like — the 2020 election, looked back upon now.
  3. That one reminds of an incident illustrating how clueless I still was well into my 30s. When I was the news editor of The Wichita Eagle-Beacon, from 1985-87, I was asked to help with the screening of a candidate for assistant metro editor. Before meeting her, I read through her clips from her reporting days, and was deeply impressed by one of her stories: It was about the spontaneous speech RFK gave to a crowd in Indianapolis upon learning of the assassination of Martin Luther King. It was a profoundly great speech, and if you’ve never heard it, go listen. This was two months before he himself was killed. It was an amazing story, and she did a good job with it. But what I remember thinking was, She was there? She was an actual working journalist way back in history like that? I wasn’t used to dealing with anyone that old. And when I met her, she actually had gray hair! (Mind you, it was only as far back as… well, this blog is older than that.) But ancient as she was, we hired her, and I really liked her. Old people can be interesting.
  4. Just one more, and this is the one that really gets my head spinning. As I said, as a kid, WWII was history, even though by an adult perspective, it had just happened. The 1930s — the days of Prohibition and Al Capone and the Great Depression — that was way back when my parents were little kids, and they were antediluvian, right? In the Roaring ’20s, my mom hadn’t even been born. The First World War? I didn’t know anybody who had served in that, although I heard legends about an uncle who had been gassed, and always had poor health, and died long before I came along. To me, it was like hearing about Henry V at Agincourt.

Let’s break down that last bullet, from an adult perspective. Let’s compare perceptions of time in 1963 — the year I turned 10 — to today:

  • In 1963, the end of the war was no more distant than 2005 is now. You know, the year I started this blog. Which just happened, right?
  • Al Capone had gone to prison for tax evasion in 1932. That was the same distance back as 1992. According to Wikipedia, some of the top movies of that year were “Lethal Weapon 3” (not 1 or 2), “A Few Good Men” (yay, Aaron Sorkin), “Sister Act,” and “Wayne’s World.” If you think those are old films, you and I might have trouble communicating.
  • This month in 1927, President Coolidge proposed federal funding for the planned sculptures on Mount Rushmore. And my Dad wasn’t born yet. That same distance back from now, I became the governmental affairs editor of The State, after having been a supervising editor at other newspapers for seven years.
  • Now it really gets creepy. In 1963, the start of the Great War, the War to End All Wars — which would lead to the ends of the Russian, Hapsburg and Ottoman empires — was 49 years back. But I have realized that this wasn’t the same as Agincourt. My wife and I celebrated our 49th anniversary on Friday.

Never mind stuff I can still remember. These books I’ve often mentioned recently expanding the notion of “history” to way before the dawn of writing have expanded my concept of time to what most Americans who know who the Kardashians would consider… ludicrous.

I’m reminded of a conversation I overheard on the USC campus back when I worked in an office, and took long daily walks around the campus and downtown area. These two boys were walking behind me, and one of them was bitching about having to take a course in stupid history — as if anybody cared about that.

His friend, however, protested that learning history was important to understanding our world, and he got the first kid to agree, reluctantly. I almost applauded, but in keeping with my lifelong habit of hanging back and observing, I didn’t (anyway, they may have found that a bit… condescending).

But then I heard the first kid say, “Yeah, OK. But this was, like, 500 years back! Who needs to know about that?”

The friend felt compelled to walk back his position: “Well, maybe not 500 years! Let’s not be ridiculous…”

I just kept walking.

Five hundred years ago, what we call the Modern Era had already begun. The Roman Empire, which kinda got Western civilization all going and organized, had collapsed more than a thousand years earlier.

As old as I may look, boys, I don’t personally remember those things. But come on…

Ferdinand and Isabella? That was, like, 500 years ago! Who cares?

Now HERE’S a proper quiz — NYT’s Flashback!

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And really, I’m only partly saying that because I got a perfect score — whereas I usually bomb out on the NYT’s weekly news quiz. And I mean “bomb” as in “Oppenheimer.”

That’s because this quiz plays to my own particular sort of intelligence — to the extent that I possess any, and we can argue about that later. It’s about the Big Picture. It’s not absurdly specific esoterica like, “Which left-handed chess player with a limp won a big competition last week while whistling a show tune from the 1930s?” It’s not designed to trip you up if you were paying attention to more important events. It’s about whether you grok the overall flow and thrust of history. The forest rather than the trees.

So I like it. I only hesitated on two of them, but I was pretty sure, and I got it right. So, yay for my team.

I hope you can play it. Let me know. I don’t know what people who don’t subscribe can and can’t do…

How could we create a local news app that really works?

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The challenge: How do you create one of THESE for relevant local news?

One of the greatest challenges I’ve faced on this blog is trying to get interesting, constructive discussions going about local news.

Back when I started this platform, I used to try really hard on that front, but it was so frustrating that I confess I’ve slacked off in recent years.

But this used to be my life’s mission, you see. In a world in which the great national newspapers and wire services had national and international news covered more than adequately, our role was obviously to keep democracy working by informing readers about local matters. This is why, when I was editorial page editor, our editorials and columns were focused about 80-90 percent on state and local matters.

And back when newspapers had some resources, the newsroom did a pretty fair job of covering the proverbial local waterfront. That was a challenge, though, particularly here in South Carolina. As a result of a bunch of complicating factors — weak local governments, barriers to municipal annexation, the Legislature’s dominance of government on all levels, a web of 500 or so local “governments” providing services that should be provided by cities and counties, more than twice as many school districts as there were counties — it was hard to present ONE front page, one newspaper, that was completely relevant to most of the circulation area.

A good illustration of this is what I have frequently mentioned as my greatest frustration on the editorial page. You know how I value candidate endorsements. They are a great way of shedding light on the strengths and weaknesses of candidates, taking voters far beyond the embarrassing “name recognition” level and the shameful party-identification level. A properly written endorsement lays a template for really thinking about your vote. Whether you agree with the endorsement or not, by reading and thinking about it, you give your vote more thought than far too many voters ever do.

This was particularly true on the local level, where the local newspaper was often your only source of any kind of information about the candidates. It was even more true with school boards. I was convinced that school board endorsements would have helped voters have at least some basis for a decision in the booth, and could be the most important ones we did. But I could never figure out how to get it done. With seven school districts just here in Richland and Lexington counties, that would have meant as many interviews as for governor, statewide offices, state representatives and senators, city and county councils, sheriff and other county officials combined. And it was a huge challenge to get through those, even when I had a full staff. Four or five interviews a day for weeks preceding elections, on top of our regular work producing the daily pages.

Back to the news area… in the ’80s, metro newspapers across the country jumped on a bandwagon that was widely touted as the future of journalism — hyper-localism. That took the form of the Neighbors sections you may remember. Separate staffs of reporters and editors produced special weekly sections aimed at this or that portion of the metropolitan area.

But those all went away some time ago, their staffs disbanding well before almost all the regular core newsroom jobs vanished.

Which brings us to what I wanted to write about. The above was all just to set it up.

I had an interesting experience several days ago…

While I was making coffee, my wife read me essentially the ledes of four local news stories that gave us a minute or two each of interesting discussion, in some cases because they were about people we knew, or things someone in our family was involved with. There was:

The few minutes of kicking these stories around there in the kitchen were the most interesting that I’ve spent with local news in some time. It was engaging in a way that the front page — of The State, or The Washington Post, or what have you — almost never is. (I think one of these stories was on the front, the others scattered inside. And not in the print edition, but one of the paper’s supplementary e-paper products.)

It would be great if there was a way to reliably duplicate this experience, and maybe help pull people at least temporarily away from yelling at each other about Trump and Biden, and tie them closer to their communities.

And no, I don’t think my wife has time to go out and read a personalized report to each of you. I suppose I could ask her. No, I’m no dummy — you ask her…

Mind you, I frequently decry the whole personalization of news thing. I think one of the biggest causes of the fragmentation and bitter division in our society today is the fact that digitized media enable people to craft their own “news reports” to tell them only things that they want to hear. We need to all be seeing the same, holistic picture of the world, so that at least we can agree on the facts before we starting arguing our opinions.

But for the reasons I’ve mentioned above, covering the hyper-local stuff in a way that’s relevant to people offers a challenge that’s different from the national, state and even citywide news and issues.

But how do we do this? How do we provide targeted local news briefings as useful and interesting as the ones my NPR One and NYT Audio apps give me on the national and international levels?

The personalization of this hypothetical device would require readers to submit to impossibly long and intrusive questionnaires about every detail of the listeners life and interests, making subjective and intuitive leaps that I’m pretty sure is beyond the current capabilities of AI. That’s asking a great deal more from readers, or listeners, than in the old days when they simply had to cough up a dime.

And when I say “impossibly,” I’m saying, how do you get down to a level that anticipates the kinds of connections I felt to these stories? Asking “What’s your favorite hobby?” ain’t gonna cut it.

I’d be glad to take a crack at drafting the questions if anyone wants to write the coding for this app that will revolutionize the local business (and make us both rich). But I’m telling you, it will take some time…

ANOTHER witch in the family! Allegedly, I mean…

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“We have a witch in the family. Isn’t it wonderful?”
— Aunt Petunia

I’ve told you before about my wife’s ancestress, Elspeth Craich — one of many, many characters I’ve found who make building a family tree fascinating (to me, anyway). She lived in Scotland from 1631 to at least 1656.

And she was a witch. Allegedly — although she confessed for reasons unknown. I very much hope the reason wasn’t that it was tortured out of her. I like to think she was being crafty. And the record says she “voluntarlie confesst” (for what that’s worth).

This isn’t family legend, by the way. I found documentation, here and here. As it happens, she was fortunate enough to be charged during a time in which Cromwell (Oliver, not Thomas) had banned the execution of witches. (Actually, other sources I glanced at were vague on this, but he was no fan of witch-hunting. He seems not to have believed in witches.)

This put the local authorities in a fix. They had her locked up, but didn’t know what to do with her. Finally, they had to just let her go. Why? Well, she apparently was eating too much. The record complains of “the great trouble that hath been susteaned be the inhabitants of this burgh in watching of Eppie Craich, witch, within thaire tolbuthe this quarter of this year bygane, and the great expens that this burgh is at for the present in susteanyng and interteanyng her in bread and drink and vther necessaris, and finding it to be expedient to dismis hir.”

You’ll notice they kept her in the “tolbuthe,” which is to say, toll booth. Made me think the town, Culross, had an inadequate tax base. They couldn’t afford to feed Elspeth, they couldn’t afford to send her to Edinburgh and let them deal with her, and they couldn’t even afford a jail. (But seriously, folks, that’s what they called a jail in those days. It was apparently a sort of multipurpose public building, like Andy Taylor’s courthouse, where Otis would sleep.)

Anyway, I’ve told you about her before.

Over the weekend, we discovered another such family “scandal.” And this time, it’s on my side of the family.

My grandchildren take varying levels of interest in the family tree, but one of them is into it enough to enjoy sitting by me as I rummage through our thousands of forebears. With her watching, I was poking around in the branch occupied by my great-great-great grandmother Isabella Telford. I actually have a photo of her — which is unusual with people back that far, which is why I went to that part of the tree to show it to my granddaughter. But I knew little about her, beyond the fact that she lived in New York state, making her one of very few ancestors I have who hailed from the North. I had her, and maybe a generation or two of her Telford antecedents.

I saw I had some “hints” from Ancestry on those people, so I decided to show my granddaughter how to add someone to the tree. I was looking through the hints for Isabella’s grandmother (and my 5th-great grandmother) Margaret McCaulay (who married a Tilford, a variant spelling). Ancestry had more than a dozen such clues to offer with regard to Margaret, who for some reason was nicknamed “Betty.” I was skimming down to see if she had a Findagrave page, as those are almost always helpful, when my granddaughter made me stop and go back to another hint I had skipped. “It said ‘witch’!” she told me.

So, you know, here we go again.

I went back and grabbed that document, and resumed searching. A moment later, I saw she did have a Findagrave page, and in place of the customary obituary, it displayed… the story of the witchcraft charge.

Mind you, this wasn’t in far-off Culross, Scotland, in the benighted 1600s. This was more than a century later, in the land of the free, during the American Revolution. And it happened in Salem! No, not Massachusetts — it was Salem, NY.

“It began when Archy Livingston’s cows began producing cream that couldn’t be churned into butter.” Ol’ Arch, a neighbor of the Tilfords, or Telfords, figured he needed some expert advice. Lacking a university-based agricultural extension service, he went to see a shady character named Joel Dibble, who “told people’s fortunes by cutting cards.” Wouldn’t you, under the circumstances?

Dibble worked his magic with the cards, and then broke the bad news to Archy — either the milk or the cows were bewitched. And being the oracle that he was, he could describe the witch: “a short, thick, black-haired woman who had a red-haired daughter.”

This described Margaret Telford to a T. Archy promptly shared the shocking news with everyone he knew, and the community was in an uproar. They were all like “We’re in the middle of a war, and now this!”

Archy’s father-in-law stuck up for the Telfords, and apparently gave Arch a piece of his mind for listening to a “malevolent designing scoundrel” like Dibble. But not everyone agreed:

However, others began to shun the Telfords. Some parents forbade their children to associate with the Telford children. The local magistrate refused to get involved. Or perhaps he was not asked — the Presbyterians might have thought that would have violated the separation of church and state. Because both families were members of Dr. Clark’s church, they agreed that the church was the proper authority to decide the matter.

The Presbyterian pastor initiated a formal investigation, and witnesses were called. Fellow church members testified that Margaret “was an upstanding Christian woman and her moral character was exemplary.” Nevertheless, Rev. Clark called expert witness Dibble:

During the examination, Dibble said he had learned his art in French Canada, and had paid good money for his lessons. He defended the art of cutting of cards on the grounds that, like any other art or trade, it had rules. He said he wasn’t naming any names. He just followed the rules of the cards and, through them, learned indications. With that, Clark cut off the examination, saying there was “nothing tangible here for the church to take hold of.” In Robert Blake’s account, he indicates simply that “the matter was still before the Church and undecided when Dr. Clark moved away.”

The matter was never resolved, and as one chronicler said, over the course of four or five years, “the subject was prudently dropped.”

I’d like to end the narrative on that encouraging note. But sadly,

Even after “the excitement died away,” Margaret continued to suffer from having been accused of being a witch. Many neighbors made life difficult for the family. The young Telford folks were shunned from many parties and merry-makings. When George and Margaret ‘s son John became engaged to Sarah Rowan, many of her friends and relatives opposed the match.

Nevertheless, Margaret and her husband George stuck it out in that community, and soldiered on, and from what I can tell, folks generally respected them for that. And in the end:

George and Margaret are buried in the “Old Cemetery” in Salem, so they must have remained members in good standing of the church that the Rev. Dr. Clark founded.

Of course, it might have helped if the minister had stood up and loudly denounced the nonsense, but I guess he felt he was in over his head. Or something. Sorry I don’t have a totally happy ending there for you (and for that portion of my family I’d never heard of before building my tree). But I think you can see what I mean about family history being interesting.

If you want to know what actually caused the problem with Archy’s cows, don’t look at me. We Telfords had nothing to do with it…

DeMarco: Pop Quiz! For Whom Did They Vote?

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Hawkeye and Trapper John would have had trouble with that riddle, too. So would Hot Lips, for that matter…

The Op-Ed Page

By Paul V. DeMarco
Guest Columnist

Guess how the two friends I’m about to describe voted in the 2020 presidential election.

The first is an older white male. One of his vehicles is a 1999 Ford F-150 pick-up whose radio is tuned to a country station. His gun safe contains a 12-gauge shotgun, a 20-gauge shotgun, and a pistol. He attends church almost every week and believes Jesus Christ is his Savior. He has the Fox News app on his phone. He favors robust border security. He thinks it unfair for transgender women to compete in collegiate and professional sports against cis-gender women.

The second is also an older white male, roughly the same age as the first. He drives a Ford Escape in which he generally listens to podcasts like NPRs “Fresh Air.” He has the Washington Post app on his phone. He believes in reasonable gun regulation, including registration of firearms with state governments. He comes from a family of immigrants – his grandfather emigrated from Sicily after World War I. He supports diversity, equity, and inclusion in all phases of society.

If you guessed the first voted for Trump and the second voted for Biden, you would be… wrong. Those two paragraphs both describe me. I drive the Escape most days but have the pick-up, a gift from my father-in-law, for hauling. Like most of America, I have nuanced views on guns, immigration, the transgender community, and the role of faith. I listen to many different types of music and get my news from multiple sites.

As to whom I voted for – it’s Biden. Trump is an inveterate liar and a danger to the country.

But the subject of this column is not Trump or Biden. It’s our tendency to pigeonhole. Let’s try another example in the form of a decades-old riddle I first heard in medical school: A father and son have a car accident and are both badly hurt. They are both taken to separate hospitals where they are immediately prepped for surgery. When the boy is wheeled into the OR, the surgeon looks down at him and says, “I can’t operate on him. This is my son.” How is this possible?

The answer is that the surgeon is the boy’s mother. Don’t worry if you missed it. I did too when I first heard it almost forty years ago. Over the past couple months, I have been retelling it to groups of young people to see if their answers are any more astute than mine was. I have queried a group of nurses, a group of medical students, and a group of teenagers, perhaps fifty young people in all. All the groups were primarily female and the vast majority were stumped. I was surprised that our collective mental image of a surgeon is still so strongly masculine, even among young women, some of whom are destined to become surgeons themselves.

Eventually, I hope, no one will be fooled by this riddle, as the idea of a female surgeon will be top of mind. Indeed, the way that women are outpacing men in many academic fields, including medicine, we may eventually reach the point where we can tell the riddle in reverse about a mother and a son.

But when it comes to politics, rather than harmful stereotypes being slowly eroded, our media environment depends on shoring them up and exaggerating them in a relentless drive for clicks. Each side reduces the other to a humiliating caricature, shown in the worst possible light. Because social media’s hyperpartisan atmosphere vastly overstates the extremism of both the right and the left, our worldview becomes more and more skewed.

This is why I write. I know better than anyone that there are more knowledgeable and more skilled columnists out there. But because so few of them speak to the middle ground, I feel obligated to plant a flag there. My big advantage is that I write for free, so I have no incentive to overstate to stoke anger.

I’ll end with the words of Martin Buber, who unsurprisingly, is rarely invoked in today’s political commentary. Buber was a Jewish philosopher who framed relationships as “I-Thou,” in which a person opens himself fully to another to achieve a connection, or “I-It,” in which a person encounters another as an object or instrument to be used and discarded. Almost without exception, when we meet people different from ourselves, we adopt an I-It posture.

Buber encourages us to instead choose the I-Thou posture, which he believed could occur instantaneously, in any circumstance, even between strangers. One easy place to practice is the grocery store. As you wait in line, imagine the cashier as a complete human being, who has a home, family, hopes and anxieties just like you. Try it with as many people as you can, especially those with whom you disagree.

This can be hard with a vicious somebody on social media. A couple of remedies are available. First, spend less time on social media. Second, wish your antagonist well and move on. There are too many thoughtful, interesting people out there to waste your time with someone who treats you like an “It” rather than a “Thou.”

A version of this column appeared in the August 8th edition of the Florence Morning News.

Open Thread for Friday, August 18, 2023

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Just a few quick ones, since I have actual work to do today:

  1. Troop Deaths and Injuries in Ukraine War Near 500,000, U.S. Officials Say. Horrific. Yes, folks, this is a real war going on. Further, it’s not just the Russians suffering horrendous casualties. And there’s no end in sight…
  2. Awkward Americans see themselves in Ron DeSantis — I thought that was an interesting way of approaching this guy’s problem. I sense that the Post is onto something here. He strikes me as a guy you really wouldn’t want at your party. But then, it seems I’ve read about him having a very engaging wife. How did that happen?
  3. American democracy is cracking. These forces help explain why. — I appreciate the Post attempting this analysis, but it falls short. Two quick comments: First, I’m glad they realize that a major cause of the problem is gerrymandering, but they take too long to get to it. Second, there’s a lot of drivel here about problems with our form of government. But don’t blame Hamilton, Madison, et al. The problem lies in the electorate: Our population has become incapable of functioning under any system you might name. Worse, the least sane voters are to a great extent driving elections. Why? Because of my first observation.
  4. Former Richland councilwoman used taxpayer money for groceries, commission says. My reaction to this? I tweeted, “Well, there’s a shock…” That’s because we’re talking about Gwen Kennedy here. Here’s a post where I wrote about her awhile back. I’m sorry that the videos on that post are no longer working (I think I made the mistake of entrusting them to a feature The State had set up, and it no longer exists). But you can get the idea fully by reading. Oh, and you’ll see that the P&C missed the full picture saying she “served on the council from 2008 to 2012 and 2016 to 2020.” My post tells you about when she “served” in the ’90s, and took a trip to Hawaii on the public’s dime, bringing back nothing of value to the people of Richland County.
  5. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tests longshot 2024 campaign in SC, Joe Biden’s savior state — This was in Charleston. Better there than here. He can test the Lowcountry’s famed affinity for eccentricity…

Earworm of the Day: Never mind. I thought I had a new one, but the thing that was stuck was just a different part of “Reflections of My Life,” which I wrote about Tuesday, under the heading, “Something I thought I knew, but I was wrong.”

Earworm of the Day 2: But wait! I thought about that so much that suddenly it turned into a whole other song, and I realized why I had thought “Reflections of My Life” was a Bee Gees tune! It was “How Can You Mend A Broken Heart?” Which is a Bee Gees song! Seriously, the two tunes kind of bled together in a way I can’t explain, because I don’t understand music well enough — and I don’t want to bother Phillip again with my stupid questions, the way I do too often. Anyway, I thought about it enough that that got stuck, and it is now today’s official earworm. But I’m hearing more the Al Green version, because we can’t get enough of the Rev. Al. I can’t anyway…

So what do we call THIS era?

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I’d always liked Sargent’s “El Jaleo,” and was greatly surprised to find it suddenly before me in Boston last year…

You can only know so much about history. Life is short, and in truth one can never have total knowledge and understanding even of the periods we focus in upon most obsessively.

And in my life, I’ve bounced around from one intense interest to another. When I was a kid, it was the Second World War. It was the thing that loomed over the world in which I grew up, and made that world I knew seem uninteresting in comparison. After I started taking Latin in high school, I got into ancient Rome — or at least, the end of the republic and the first few emperors. When I was in college, I was riveted by the early days of our own republic — not so much the Revolution, but what came after: The Constitutional Convention, leading through the administrations of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe and Quincy Adams (before the standard dropped so sharply with Old Hickory). I used to go around saying I would love to go back and live in that time of brilliant ideas, if only they’d had more indoor plumbing — yes, an undergraduate’s notion of wit.

Lately, though, I find myself living vicariously in the Gilded Age, bleeding over a bit into the Progressive Era.

This is a period I had mostly ignored in the past — it was after The Recent Unpleasantness, and before the more relatable politics of the 20th, both of which had always seemed more interesting. I just saw it as a time of boring prosperity in the North, and postwar trauma in the South (the rise and fall of Reconstruction, Tillmanism, rich Yankees coming down and buying up plantations as hunting estates, etc.). It was always kind of a blur.

But lately, over the last year or so, I’ve found myself drawn back to it over and over. My recent reading has included:

  • Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President, by Candice Millard. My elder son gave me this last year — he had assigned himself the task of going through one book about each president in our history, in chronological order, and this had been his favorite. It was about James Garfield, about whom I knew pretty much nothing, which was shameful on my part. It painted a picture of an extraordinary man who was like a dream POTUS — a brilliant self-made scholar and war hero who turned to politics. When he showed up at the Republican national convention to nominate another man in 1880, he ended up being nominated himself, unanimously, but against his own wishes. He then won the election, but his administration had hardly begun when a lunatic (a nobody who outlandishly imagined that Garfield should have named him ambassador to France) shot him. He would have survived, except for the stunningly, inexcusably bad medical care he received. Along the way, the story encompassed other major figures of the period (including Alexander Graham Bell, playing an important role in trying to save Garfield), painting amid the tragedy a bright picture of a country on its way up.
  • Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill. Also by Candice Millard, because I’d liked the Garfield book so much. This was also very enjoyable and enlightening, although not quite as much so, since I had recently seen the 1972 film “Young Winston,” which for a movie did a pretty good job of covering the same portion of Churchill’s life. It’s available on Prime if you want to watch it. But I still definitely recommend the book.
  • Artists of the period. Our trip to Boston last year — specifically, our visit to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum — intensified an already-growing interest in such artists as Isabella’s friend John Singer Sargent, and similar painters such as Anders Zorn — who painted an arresting portrait of Isabella, which I initially mistook for the work of Sargent. Both of them were definitely chroniclers of the Gilded Age, painting famous portraits of heiresses (here’s my favorite, which I like even better than Madame X.) From them, I’ve started branching out to other, similar artists such as George William Joy, whose painting of omnibus passengers I liked better than Zorn’s. It reminded me of the kinds of photos I sneak of fellow passengers on subways — the pictures one of my granddaughters insisted I stop taking. She’s right, but I find the habit hard to shake.
  • Theodore Rex — Still making my way — my slow and steady way — through this, the second book in Edmund Morris’ trilogy about Teddy. It’s pretty awesome. He breaks down Roosevelt’s time as president almost day by day, and in rich detail, and it never gets dull or tiresome (TR wouldn’t have allowed that). Extra bonus: The portrait on the cover is, of course, by John Singer Sargent. I’ve mentioned it a couple of times lately, and will no doubt mention it even more as I proceed. It’s great nourishment for the mind to see issues of actual importance discussed with an intelligence that should make us all envious as we are bombarded by the Kulturkampf of left and right in our own day. And then see them acted upon effectively. We were a nation of such promise then, with a political system that worked.

For all that, I didn’t seek this stuff out on purpose in a deliberate effort to study the period. I just wandered from one to another, and only realized quite recently how wrapped up I had become in this time.

We’ve had a number of prominently named historical periods since the Progressive, such as:

And now, finally, I get to my point, which is that after the heady days of the ’90s, things got kind of fuzzy.

I mean, what do we call THESE times? And does it involve words that can be used on a blog that observes the conventions of what we used to call a “family newspaper”?

For that matter, with the atomization of society due to the profusion of media, is it even possible to make any sort of coherent, widely acceptable generalization about a world that is divided into so many camps that see the world so differently?

I’ll offer one possibility: The Schizophrenic Era. I’m not making a clinical diagnosis here, so don’t correct me with a bunch of quotes from the DSM. I’m thinking in terms of the Greek etymology of the term, meaning “splitting of the mind”… because that fragmentation explains our period as much as any.

I’m not going to suggest any other terms right now, because mainly, I’m curious as to what y’all would call it…

James Garfield, a potentially great president, was shot by one idiot and treated by another…

NOW I will start reading my Boston Globe every day

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Recently, I’ve been meaning to write a post about how sad I was to have dropped my subscription to The Boston Globe.

I started the subscription in the easiest possible way. When we were in Boston last summer, I wanted access to local news, particularly to what the Red Sox were doing, since we were going to go see them play the Yankees (and beat them!) one night while we were there.

When the algorithm saw that I was perusing the Globe‘s website, it made me an offer I could not refuse: A subscription lasting six months, for one dollar. I jumped at it. Actually, I did pause for a moment, knowing how bad I am at remembering to cancel “free trial” subscriptions before they start costing me. For a moment. Then I jumped at it.

And I found that I enjoyed it beyond all expectation. I enjoyed it for the Red Sox coverage, to be sure, but it went far beyond that. And it’s a bit hard to explain to you why, unless you have my newspaper background. I saw it with the eyes of one who has spent several decades, decades of days filled with long hours agonizing over every word, and over every aspect of putting those words together with other elements and presenting them thoughtfully to the public. I appreciated:

  • The news judgment. Remember that post I wrote when I launched my Virtual Front Pages? I talked about how hard we thought, back when I was the front-page editor in Wichita, about how to present news in a way that quickly provided readers, in overview and depth, the information that was most important for citizens to possess and ingest. That was already fading as an art back in the ’80s when I was immersed in it. In the unlamented 21st century, I only saw it at The New York Times and a few other elite papers across the country. And I immediately saw that the Globe was definitely one of those papers.
  • The esthetics. What good is it to provide good content if people don’t want to look at it? And this paper was beautiful, in a number of ways more so than the NYT, which remains more firmly wedded to tradition. Of course, there are things I prefer about the NYT — the Globe, for instance, makes too much use of white space, unlike the blessed Gray Lady. But there is no doubt it looks good, each page being a pleasure to my eyes even before I start reading. Consequently, when I open the app, I immediately click on the “print edition” option — otherwise I’d be missing out on a thing made the paper enjoyable.
  • All sorts of other, minor things. Sports, for instance. I’ve mentioned this before. About how this is a paper that understands that “sports” means far more than football, and most of all that it gives proper due to the national pastime. Rare is the day that the Red Sox aren’t given prominence, even out of season — but prominence within a context that clearly recognizes there are more important things in the world than sports. There are other small things, such as the comics. Most comics pages across the country are just embarrassing, they are so lacking in wit. There’s nothing they can do to bring back the glory days of “Calvin and Hobbes” and “The Far Side,” but the Globe‘s editors take the trouble to offer a better selection from among the slim pickings that remain. (OK, it’s only a little better — there’s not much to work with these days. But it’s better.)

Basically, everything shows the work of an ample crowd of very talented people who work hard to present readers with the best paper possible. In a world in which most of the remaining newspapers across the country lie in ruins, very dim shadows of what they were, it means a lot to me to take a deep, refreshing drink at this well. Of course, we’re talking about a full-sized grownup major city, with everything from subways to professional teams in all major sports — so you’d expect them to have more to work with. But the Globe doesn’t take those resources for granted. It makes the most of them.

But then, my $1 deal ran out. And by the time it did, my Boston trip was well behind me. Worse, I wasn’t looking through the paper more than once a week or so. Not that I didn’t enjoy it when I did, but there were just too many other papers I was subscribing to — the NYT, The Washington Post, The Post and Courier, The State — and as a South Carolinian and a blogger, I felt obliged to read those first. Plus such magazines as The New Yorker and America. And there’s only so much time in a day.

And when the deal ran out, I started getting charged more than I was paying for any other paper. I still kept the subscription for awhile, figuring I sort of owed it to the folks up there, after that amazingly generous trial deal. And a paper this good deserved financial support. But when my wife pointed out this summer what a drain it was, I admitted it was time to drop it.

I wasn’t happy about it, though. And I still got multiple emails a day telling me about good stories I was missing.

Then, yesterday, I got a phone call. As my device rang, I saw the words BOSTON GLOBE under the unfamiliar number. So I answered — I figured I still sort of owed these folks that much. I knew what the call was about, and I was prepared to explain that yes, I love your paper, but I just can’t afford it.

I didn’t get that far.

I found myself listening not to an artificial voice, and not to someone named “Steve” from an overworked Indian call center. Instead, I was having an actual conversation with a very pleasant young woman with no sort of accent (to an American ear) at all. (Actually, I would have liked it better if she’d had a Boston accent, but you can’t have everything.) She was nice. She cared. And she was offering me another deal.

She was offering 26 weeks for a total of $12. Uneasily glancing toward my dear wife in the next room, I jumped at it. Then, when the call ended, I confessed what I had done, and my bride grimaced a bit. But she didn’t make me cancel it.

Then the phone rang again. It was my new friend, telling me that she hadn’t been able to charge the $12 to my debit card. Oh, yeah… That’s because my old card is expiring this month, and the credit union sent me a new one and I activated it, so the old one didn’t work. So I told her that my new one had the same number, and here was the new expiration date and secret code from the back, so run it again.

But she didn’t have the old number — just the last four digits. And at this critical moment, I did what I have so many times advised my mother (and my father, in his last years) not to do: I gave her the whole number.

My wife overheard, and when the call was over, expressed shall we say incredulity at what I had just done. I expressed my firm intuitive belief that in this case, I was not dealing with a scam. I said this as confidently as I could. But I immediately called up my account online, and was hugely relieved to see that I had just paid $12 to The Boston Globe.

And this morning, I was able to read the print edition on my iPad app. And it was beautiful…

Open Thread for Tuesday, August 15, 2023

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I took this back in 2019, when I still worked downtown, and would walk here when weather was too hot or too wet.

Here’s another one. We’ve had some interesting news lately:

  1. Trump Indicted in Georgia. Here we go again, eh? Bunch of things I could say about this. Here’s one: You know how people keep saying how amazing it is for this unprecedented thing — a former president to be indicted — to keep happening? To me, it kind of feels like… normalcy returning. Instead of having this lunatic running around, flouting every convention with no consequences, we’re seeing… the system working, and saying, no, you can’t do this stuff. These are criminal charges he’s facing. Now, if only the half of the electorate that believes he’s a persecuted hero would wake up and recognize reality, America would be sane again. Or at least well on its way. Apparently, Lindsey Graham hasn’t recovered yet — but he had a longer way to go than most people. (Which reminds me: First thing I did when this broke was to peruse the list of those charged, looking for Lindsey’s name — because, you know. Let the record show that it was not there.) To people who knew you couldn’t do this stuff, it may seem like this took forever, but this is kinda the way the law works, when you’re dealing with something this huge. You have to build a case. It just seems like a long time because in the age of Twitter, we expect everything to happen now.
  2. Conservative Case Emerges to Disqualify Trump for Role on Jan. 6. I read this several days ago before the Georgia indictment, and forgot to post about it, but now I’m reminded. The lede: “Two prominent conservative law professors have concluded that Donald J. Trump is ineligible to be president under a provision of the Constitution that bars people who have engaged in an insurrection from holding government office. The professors are active members of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group, and proponents of originalism, the method of interpretation that seeks to determine the Constitution’s original meaning.” It has to do with Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. The professors are William Baude of the University of Chicago and Michael Stokes Paulsen of the University of St. Thomas.
  3. Punishing men who can no longer remember their crimes. This is another from those emails I get from the NYT. You probably knew that we incarcerate more of our population than almost any country in the world (573 out of every 100,000 Americans). We’re also an aging society. Put those together, and you get increasing numbers of prisoners who are over 90, in diapers, and suffering from dementia. I think of memory units, where dementia is treated, as a feature of high-end retirement communities. We have them in prisons, too. Why are we locking people up this long?
  4. The malls are all closing! The malls are all closing! Sure, it’s been coming on for a long time and we’ve talked about it before, but up to now these former shopping meccas seemed merely moribund. Now, in just a few days, we’ve had Belk and Barnes & Noble shutting down at Richland Mall (but fortunately, B&N will reopen elsewhere), and now a church is buying Dutch Square. My main concern there is “What will happen to the multiplex?” Maybe I read the story too fast, but if it told me that, I missed it.
  5. Interest rate hike just a sticking plaster for Russia’s war-fuelled economic woes. This is from The Guardian, and let me confess I didn’t read it. I just loved the headline. Y’all know what an Anglophile I am, and I really got a kick out of seeing this paper actually use “sticking plaster” to evoke the “Band-Aid” metaphor.
  6. Kansas newspaper says it investigated local police chief prior to newsroom raid. A newspaper does its job, the cops come raid the place. Maybe not everything is back to normal in America quite yet. Because, this kind of thing doesn’t happen in normal America.

Earworm of the Day. This one’s kind of ordinary, and not a bit surprising: “Thank You,” by Led Zeppelin. No further comment. See below.

Something I thought I knew, but I was wrong. A new feature, which I think I will probably find to replicate on other days. As with the earworm, this one also has to do with pop music. Today, my Pandora started playing “Reflections of My Life,” which I would have bet you money was a Bee Gees song. I saw the name “Marmalade” on the screen and thought, Oh, this Marmalade, whoever that is, is doing a Bee Gees cover. Then, as I listened, I realized, Uh… this is the original. I checked with Wikipedia, and realized, Yup, this is a Marmalade song. Whoever they are. Felt dumb.

Open Thread for Monday, August 14, 2023

14 Replies

Murdered candidate Fernando Villavicencio, from his campaign website.

I meant to post one of these over the weekend, so some of these ideas are a couple of days old. But here you go…

  1. The devastation of Lahaina — This broke after my last Open Thread, and I just thought I’d set up a place where we could discuss it. My mind is quite blown — we’ve gotten sadly accustomed to such news coming out of California, and the Canadian wilderness. But this is Maui. It’s not even the Big Island, with its frequent volcanic eruptions. I’m still sort of overwhelmed by this situation, and it keeps getting worse as we learn more…
  2. The descent of Ecuador into deadly political violence — This is another shock that involves a place that was once my home, and which I fear I would not recognize today. I refer to the assassination of presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio, a former investigative journalist who was outspoken against government corruption in his country. He was shot and killed last week. You know, we had a lot of political instability in Ecuador when I lived there, but it was gentler. When a junta wanted to take over while I was there in 1963, they waited for the duly elected president to get drunk again (they didn’t have to wait long), put him on a plane, and he woke up in Panama. (Or that’s the way we heard it from people who would know.) Today, it’s a country increasingly torn by violence, with the homicide rate rising by 500 percent in recent years. And now this…
  3. Can it be that anyone thinks what is posted on the internet is private? — An email from the NYT today raised the question, which I can’t believe anyone still has in 2023, “Is the internet private? Teens, and the rest of us, aren’t sure.” Wow. It was taking off on an item in the paper headlined, “Teens Don’t Really Understand That the World Can See What They Do Online, but I Do.” Well, the things that kids don’t understand would fill… another Worldwide Web. But it seems kids who have grown up with the internet would understand the utter lack of security online better than their elders. I’ll just repeat my standard advice for anyone, of any age, who is still deluded: If you want something to be private, never, ever put it in writing (or pictures) on a medium that immediately publishes it to the entire planet. If you walk naked down a public street, would you expect not to be seen by anyone? This is like that.
  4. David Brooks joins the Grownup Party — Yeah, I know, here’s something else you can’t read without a subscription. Sorry, but that’s where most of the interesting stuff is. Anyway, this column is about tracing “the decline of the American psyche” to “a set of cultural changes that started directly after World War II and built over the next few decades,” regarding “the emergence of what came to be known as the therapeutic culture.” It’s a good piece, but I can’t really explain what it’s about fully without quoting it practically in full, which might upset the NYT. But on a far more superficial level, I’ll just celebrate the headline: “Hey, America, Grow Up!” If you aren’t familiar with my Grownup Party, here’s the manifesto, from 2008. You can read that for free…
  5. State Sen. John Scott of Richland County dies. He was 69 — That is, he was slightly younger (like, by a couple of weeks) than I am. The story doesn’t list the cause of death. This is someone I’ve known for many a year (when I see headlines referring to “Sen. Scott,” I tend to assume this is who they mean, since I’ve never met Tim), and I’ve had critical things to say about him. After all, he ran with Marguerite Willis against James and Mandy in the 2018 primary (unsuccessfully). But I see him as a guy who tried hard for his constituents, and I generally got along well with him, and I’m really sorry to hear of his loved ones’ loss.
  6. A Woman Was Attacked by a Snake That Fell From the Sky. Then a Hawk Dived In. — That headline is (again) from the NYT, where I read it, but the link is to a CBS story that I hope you can read. When I saw it, my first reaction was “OK, enough with the high-concept movie pitches…” My favorite part of the story was one sentence of startling understatement: “Wendell Jones, her husband, eventually noticed that his wife was screaming, running in a zigzag pattern and flailing her arms.” Observant fellow. What actually happened? It seems a hawk had grabbed a snake and dropped it — and it landed on this lady, and wrapped itself around her arm, and started striking at her face, and leaving apparent venom on her glasses. The hawk, really ticked off that his dinner had been “stolen,” swooped down and launched his own attack, cutting her arm up before he managed to tear the snake loose and fly away with it. And you think you have bad days… Anyway, I’m glad she survived.
  7. I hope Josh doesn’t go out to flyover land and get lost again — I delete a lot of political fund-raising emails, but I held onto this one, because it was from Bradley Whitford. You know, Josh Lyman. (So, it’s not just that I feel an affinity for other people named Bradley W.) Of course, he invoked “The West Wing,” then talked about how in real life he’s a member of the striking SAG-AFTRA, and stepped from there to the need to “elect pro-union representatives at every level of government.” Which, he said, was why he was “asking you to join me in supporting one of the union movement’s strongest allies: Sen. Sherrod Brown.” Well, OK then. But if he goes to Ohio to campaign for Sherrod, I hope he doesn’t get lost the way he, Toby and Donna did that time in Indiana. Anyway, to you people who send out these emails: I think you should be ashamed, thinking Americans will back a candidate just because a celebrity does. But on the other hand, I will read the ones from top officials in the Bartlet administration. I also like the notes I get from Carole King…

The time they got lost in flyover land…

Regarding the cost of college in 2023…

18 Replies

Here you see Villa Jovis, the Capri getaway of Emperor Tiberius. No, wait: It’s Strom’s fitness center.

Doug brought up the subject, and Barry weighed in, and then I started to, but realized I had several different things to say about it, and might as well make it a separate post…

Here’s the relevant part of Doug’s comment:

University of South Carolina has announced a record number of freshman in the upcoming class. I wonder how many are taking student loans to attend? I wonder how many of those know how much their loans are and what the interest rate is? I wonder how many of them are smart enough to attend college but not be able to calculate what their future payments will be? I wonder how many of them are pursuing majors that will not pay a salary sufficient to support their loan payments in the future? I wonder how many of them will cry about how they were tricked into taking such confusing loans and that is “not fair” that they have to pay them back ten years from now and expect the government to cancel the debts they signed up for?

Barry responded by defending efforts by the Biden administration — and others — to relieve the considerable college debt burden out there.

Well, it’s a completely out-of-hand situation, this spiraling cost. I’m not sure where you apply the lever to fix it. But we can at least define the problem. Here’s a simply explanation of how much more college costs now, based only on my own experience. You may have your own examples…

You may recall that back in 2011, I shared with you a receipt for my tuition at Memphis State University for the spring semester of 1974.

It cost $174. OK, you people who are young enough to think of it as a long time ago will say, “But that was almost 50 years ago, ya geezer!” You know, inflation and all that. Well, let me dispense with that. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index calculator, what I paid then translates to $1,141.42 in 2023.

Think you could pay that with a check as I did (the check provided by my parents, of course)? Well, you certainly could if you’re one of those gazillions of kids driving around Columbia with the brand-new SUVs their parents sent them to college in. But suppose you couldn’t, and my guess is that many couldn’t. But they could get loans, and then likely pay those loans off in a very few years of working after graduation. You might gripe about making the payments, but it wouldn’t be an anvil strapped to your back for the rest of your life.

But what are students paying in 2023? Well, I suppose you can calculate it a number of ways, but USC puts out the number $12,688. More than 11 times what Memphis State cost me, adjusted for inflation. Mind you, that’s for South Carolina residents. For those kids driving new SUVs with out-of-state plates, it’s $34,934.

That’s just tuition and fees, of course. Room and board costs the S.C. resident another $16,324. What did it cost me at the dawn of antiquity? The check I wrote for my dorm and meal plan in fall 1973 was for $235. In the lamentable year of 2023, that would be $1,541.57. What kids will be paying as they arrive on campus over the next couple of weeks is, again, close to 11 times what I paid.

And mind you, this Memphis State dorm wasn’t one of those prison-cell-type arrangements like the Honeycombs, where I lived back in the fall of 1971. It was a private dorm just off campus. It was way, way nicer than most public dorms. It was a lot like Bates House when I was at USC. Bates was new then, and had the features that would become the new standard — the suite arrangement that meant two dorm rooms shared one bathroom, instead of the one barracks-style latrine per floor in the Honeycombs. The decor looked like you were in a Holiday Inn — which isn’t the Taj Mahal, but light years better than the cinder-block walls of the Honeycombs, where my roommate taught me (he was a junior, I a freshman) to dress over the light fixture of the room below ours, which made the cold tile floor slightly warmer to bare feet.

Anyway, back to the astronomical cost of higher education today. And mind you, we’re not talking here about the expensive schools…

What causes it, and what can be done about it?

Well, I suppose part of it is that we live in a more materialistic society these days — or at least, one with greater material expectations. Take my earlier mention of all those cars that make it so hard to drive through that part of town when school is in session. I think I’ve told the anecdote before about my uncle in Bennettsville needing some new bags for his vacuum cleaner when I was at USC. The only place he knew where to get them in those pre-Amazon days was the K-Mart out at the end of Knox Abbott in Cayce — you know, the place that’s now a huge U-Haul facility. I was willing to go get them, but I needed transportation. My roommate John, who knew everybody, knew a guy on our floor who had a car (possibly the only guy who had a car). He set me up and the guy drove me out there, (which seems amazingly generous in retrospect — I suppose I paid for gas). Everywhere else I went, I walked — to the Winn-Dixie that was where Walgreen’s is now in Five Points, to the movies downtown, wherever. I never needed to go anywhere further. When I went to Bennettsville on weekends, I walked to the Greyhound station behind Tapp’s and took a bus.

None of this seemed a hardship then. I infer that those kids tying up traffic downtown today might disagree.

I didn’t have a meal plan, and neither did my friend Perry, who lived in a dorm that made the Honeycombs look palatial. He was in this old former frat house at the corner of Blossom and Sumter. Whenever I went to see him when it had rained recently, I would have to walk around or through puddles that covered much of the hallway. I’d go there every night to pick him up on my way, and we’d walk downtown to the S&S cafeteria, where I would splurge — sometimes, as I recall, my bill was well over $2.

But I digress. My point is that today, people — the kids and their parents — expect more, and their parents are ready to pay for it, sometimes to an astounding degree. Once you’ve looked at their cars, check out those private housing developments scattered all over town, the ones with their own regular buses that bring the residents to the Horseshoe to save them from having to (shudder) walk, or waste all that time trying to find a parking space.

And the university caters to these expectations. Just look around. Or if you don’t have time to roam, just look at the Strom Thurmond Wellness and Fitness Center, and the elevated walkway to it from the student parking lots. You might easily cite your own examples.

Then you could get into salaries, or football ticket prices, or what have you. These places drip money, and kids want to have “the college experience,” which apparently involves a great deal more than learning.

Or to return to a favorite old hobbyhorse of my own, remember how the lottery was supposed to pay for college, but basically served as a huge price-support scheme for ever-higher tuition?

Which students pay, and if Mama and Daddy didn’t have the money handy, they pay off stupendous loans for the rest of their lives.

You know, when I said this was going to be too long for a comment, I wasn’t just thinking about what you see above. I had a couple of other points I was going to get into — such as the fact that it seems we hear more these days about sheer numbers of students in the freshman class, rather than their rising SAT scores, which used to be a treasured goal at USC.

But I’ll get to that another time…

My old roommate John peers out from our room in Snowden, just before the Honeycombs were torn down.

Good for the South Carolina DOT!

8 Replies

Yeah, it’s kind of backlit, but I decided last night to stop waiting for perfect conditions to take the picture…

I am running behind on this. I should have shouted out the good news when I first saw this two or three weeks back — but I wanted a picture, and it was always raining or too dark or there was somebody behind me so I couldn’t just stop the car on the road (which lacks good places to pull over.)

Finally, I got a decent picture yesterday, and I want to praise the DOT for fixing the problem.

As for the problem, I told you about it back in March. It was a sign placed along the road where part of the massive project to fix Malfunction Junction has begun. (And before Bud jumps in to say that’s not the name of the project, here’s the name: Carolina Crossroads Project.)

The sign said… well, look back at the picture. It was along the access road on the east side of I-26, right across from the Lexington Medical Center campus.

And here was my concern, aside from being an obsessive word guy. As glad as I am that DOT decided not to destroy my neighborhood to build this thing, we will still be inconvenienced by the project for years, and we’re all aware that it costs an astronomical amount of money. So my point was, it kind of undermines our confidence in the project when day after day, we see a big dayglo-orange sign with huge black letters that tell us, over and over, that the road-construction experts managing this thing don’t know how to spell “CONSTRUCTION.”

Not a good look, you see. And it was a fairly easy thing to fix, within the context of such a huge project — DOT’s biggest ever, I believe.

And now, finally, they’ve fixed it. And I appreciate it. I don’t know who “they” are in this case (Bud, did you give them a heads-up?), but I wouldn’t flatter myself by assuming I had anything to do with it. Surely, plenty of other people saw this and said something. In any case, the folks in charge did the right thing.

No, it’s not a huge thing. But it got a little bigger, for me, every day that they didn’t fix it. So now that they have, I feel better about the whole thing, for now…

Open Thread for Wednesday, August 9, 2023

27 Replies

The other presidential bookend to what Joe did yesterday…

A few things I’ve focused on in the last day or two:

  1. Biden creates Grand Canyon National Monument — That link is to the speech he gave at the site, because the news stories tend to concentrate on the trivial, such as the electoral ramifications. To me, it’s about things of enduring value. It reminds me I need to get back to reading Theodore Rex, which I mostly set aside at the beach last week. I had stopped just after Teddy visited the Grand Canyon for the first time, and said, “”I don’t exactly know what words to use in describing it. It is beautiful and terrible and unearthly. Leave it as it is. You cannot improve upon it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it — keep it for your children, your children’s children, and for all who come after you.”
  2. Elon Musk’s Starlink — Here’s one of those cases when it’s truly tragic that not everyone subscribes to The New York Times — because if you don’t, I fear that you can’t hear this installment of The Daily, “Elon Musk’s Quest to Own the Stars.” It’s something you need to know about, and the podcast explains why very clearly. Maybe you already knew, but I didn’t. I learned that 4,500 of the 8,000 satellites orbiting the Earth at this moment belong to Musk. The worldwide satellite access network they serve is interesting enough. But you also learn what a critical role it has played in the Ukraine war, and could play in the future of Taiwan — if Taiwan wasn’t leery of Musk’s business arrangements with China. If you can find a way to get access to the podcast, do so.
  3. Why Mark Sanford walked out during Trump’s SC speech — That was the headline on the Post and Courier email drawing me to the story (as I noted a day or two ago, those heds are usually better than the ones in the paper). My response was, “Why was he there in the first place?” Well, we know, don’t we? Because that’s what Republicans do these days — they go to events where Trump might speak. Which is tragic. By the way, walking out isn’t that dramatic a gesture when you’re Mark Sanford. Read about how plain he made his disdain for party gatherings back in 2004, when the GOP was still a normal political party.
  4. Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office. — My response to this headline was simply “Duh.” I later came back and elaborated by suggesting that the only alternative would be to make like Lumberg and say, ““Um, Peter… I’m gonna need you to go back to cubicle hell… yeah…” Of course, an office wouldn’t be enough to get me back. I’ve had offices. I didn’t like any of them as much as my home office.
  5. Happy Nixon Resignation Day! — The night before Aug. 9, 1974, was possibly the highlight of my time as a copy boy at The Commercial Appeal. That was the night Nixon announced his resignation, which would take effect the next day. The managing editor (pictured here) wrote “Nixon Resigns” on a scrap of paper and send me to the composing room (on the next floor) to get the guys up there to set it in type, then put the type on a camera and shoot a picture, and blow it up to whatever size it took for it to spread all the way across the six columns of the front page. Then it would be converted into a metal “cut” like a photo, and placed at the top of the page atop all the lead type below it. Yeah, something you could do with a couple of keystrokes on your computer today. Anyway, this special assignment made me feel like a big shot. I was just a kid…

As I mentioned, news coverage focused on the political trivia, rather than the thing of lasting value.