Category Archives: Personal

Tell Navin I’m not “somebody” any more

Somebody tell Navin Johnson I just fell off the grid. I’m guessing I’m not a real person any more, because I no longer have a landline.

On Saturday, we called AT&T and dropped our home phone service AND more than 90 percent of our cable TV. We had just recently signed up for Uverse, and it included three months free HBO and several other services, and I was watching a LOT of HDTV. Too much.

I won’t be doing that anymore. Now, we have the local broadcast channels (which I almost never watch), and a few random junk channels. There’s no HD (and I can hardly bear to watch standard def anymore), no 24-hour news channels, and no sports. The latter two aren’t much of a loss for me. I recently discovered I will watch sports in HD, when I didn’t before, just for the spectacle — about as clear a case of the medium being the message as one is likely to find. And y’all know how I hate 24/7 TV “news.”

What does get to me is losing all the movie channels. The things I tended to watch the most were American Movie Classics (“Mad Men!” — which I won’t get to see at all now!), Turner Classic Movies, TBS and TNT — along with FX and a few others. And the HBO selections were pretty dazzling. Since we signed up for AT&T last month (after dropping Time Warner), I had spent a LOT of time on HBO. When I wasn’t watching a movie, I was recording one, or two, or three, on the DVR.

But part of the point here was that I was spending too much time on TV, period. I’ve got shelves of books I want to read and haven’t touched. I need to get to them. What has worried me lately is that I didn’t even want to get to them, as much as I should. Sure sign of brain rot.

What else did we give up? The phone number we’ve had since moving to Columbia in 1987. The one our kids had growing up. The one that was the reference point for so many different kinds of accounts all over town. I’m bracing myself for the first situation in which someone is calling up my account and says “What’s your home phone number?” And I have to say I don’t have one. (I also worry that someone might NEED to reach me, and has no way of finding me other than through published listings.) Now, I realize that’s not any kind of deal to my kids or their contemporaries. None of them live at home, and not one of them has a land line. But a land line — as irritating as it was, since nothing came in on it but telemarketers — was one of those things that said you were a grownup, you were rooted, you were established. I think that’s why so many people who HATE answering their land lines on the rare occasions when they ring still pay that monthly bill. Not doing so would make them feel — insubstantial, ethereal, not really there.

But NOT paying a bill for something I wasn’t using just didn’t seem a smart option anymore, so we pulled the trigger on the service.

There were a number of factors in the decision:

Too much TV. The temptation to watch it was too great. I was losing sleep staying up watching it — that happens when what you’re into is movies.
I was paying for Netflix, and wasn’t watching it at all any more. And didn’t want to give that up. And since I still have the Internet, I can still stream that, and that provides more TV than I’ll ever need.
The upcoming deadline for dropping the AT&T service without penalty. We had 30 days since we signed up, and about a week left of that. So a decision needed to be made.
The S&P downgrade of the U.S. credit rating. OK, that’s an oversimplification, but that was sort of the last straw. It was really a) our failure really to recover from the 2008 crash; b) my getting laid off in 2009; c) the fact that, after a reasonably encouraging start, it seems harder to sell ads on my blog, which beyond the way it hurts my bank account, is indicative to me of people being tighter and tighter with their money; d) the political failure to come to grips with debt last week, and knowing that even if we had, it would have meant cutting more spending and raising taxes, which both tend to cool the economy; e) the turmoil in markets Thursday and Friday, which to me reflected less the usual fact that traders are feckless, fearful jitterbugs, and more the larger situation; f) the debt crisis in Europe and its long-term implications; and g) the downgrading of the credit rating. I didn’t figure any of us was going to be making any more money anytime soon, so spending all this on HD movies (as cool as they are) and telemarketing calls was ridiculous.

As you can see, it takes a lot to make me give up my HD.

I got up Saturday morning thinking that if we were going to move before the AT&T deadline, we had to move soon. And then, right after writing this post about the S&P thing, I told my wife I thought we needed to do it. She got on the phone immediately, because as far as she was concerned, we just had all that stuff for me, anyway.

Here’s the really bad news in all this: You know how much I saved? About $64 a month. That’s all. Which is why so few people actually take this step. Our bundle — high-speed Internet, phone, TV — was $150 a month. You would think you could get Internet service and the local broadcast channels (which is probably about 5 percent of what I was getting) pretty cheap, right? But the new total is $86. My wife — who writes the checks at our house — is pleased with that. I am not. I feel like I’ve given up so much, they should probably be paying ME for the loss.

But I guess that’s not realistic.

What it cost me to go to college in 1973-74

23 Replies

I’m going through some old boxes of stuff, and ran across a wallet I carried in my college days. I scanned for you three of the items I found in it.

The first, above, shows what I paid for a semester at Memphis State University on Jan. 14, 1974. As you can see, the total cost for 16 credit hours — as usual, crammed with journalism classes I had to take, history and English classes I didn’t have to take but wanted to, and some PE to force me to get some exercise — was $174.00.

That’s one HUNDRED — not even thousand — and seventy-four dollars.

Me, at about that time.

Below, I include a receipt for my room and board for the previous semester — $235. This was not for a regular dorm. This was for a room in a private dorm, right on the edge of campus. Few people actually stayed on campus at Memphis State; it was a huge commuter school (a lot of people called it “Tiger High” because people just continued on there from high school without leaving their parents’ homes). Housing was such a low priority there that there were a lot of us who couldn’t find official campus dorm space at all, but who were willing to pay private rates (that is to say, my parents were willing to pay) for the experience of staying there.

Central Towers was two 10-story towers with the boys on one side and girls on the other, although the procedures were keeping us apart were not what you would call stringent. Making this an even more fun community was the fact that the dorm would periodically throw FREE beer busts with no limit. Enough said about that.

And all of that, including pretty decent food, cost $235 a semester.

Just for fun, I’ve included a ticket stub, also from that wallet, from when my then-fiancee and I went to see Elvis — Presley, not Costello — on March 16, 1974. It was one of seven shows in a row he did at the Mid-South Coliseum. It was originally going to be fewer than that, but the hometown demand was so great they kept adding shows. It was the first time he had performed publicly in Memphis since 1961, and almost the last time ever.

I don’t know how much it cost, but in those days it was almost certainly less than $10. The usual price I remember paying for concerts then (Bob Dylan with The Band, Leon Russell, Joe Cocker, Joan Baez and the like) was $5.

If that was a highlight, what were the lowlights?

6 Replies

Just looked at the weekly newsletter from the Columbia Rotary Club, and it included the above among the “highlights” from last week’s meeting, with the caption, “Brad Warthen delivers the Health and Happiness Report.”

I’m pretty sure I know what’s happening in that picture. I’m saying, “What’s the matter with you people? This stuff is funny!“

Well, at least Rusty liked it

8 Replies

I saw Rusty DePass yesterday, and he stopped me to tell me that while my Health and Happiness routine at Rotary on Monday didn’t get what I would call big laughs, he thought it was hilarious.

I appreciated that. I don’t know what was wrong Monday. I mean, I got some laughs, but it was very low-key. The biggest laugh I got was after one of the lines I got from Herb Brasher, I said, “Come on! That was funny!” I said it with such vehemence and frustration, that it really cracked them up.

Maybe it was because a lot of people were missing, this being mid-summer, and we just didn’t have critical mass. I don’t know. I looked in that direction once and saw Kathryn Fenner laughing. At least, she looked like she was laughing, but I couldn’t hear it. It was like a mime laugh.

See, now? THAT was funny… Maybe I should have used it.

Anyway, running into Rusty and getting his kind feedback reminded me that I didn’t thank y’all for your input — particularly that of Herb (and his friend Larry) and Doug Ross, who returned from the wilderness just in time to give me the “Famously Hot” idea. (Which actually got one of my better laughs, although it was slightly delayed. Maybe it would have been bigger if I had paused longer after the punch line.)

Here are my prepared remarks:

Been looking through the news for some humor. It’s tough finding anything funny. I see Michele Bachmann is almost leading the GOP polls for president of the United States. Of course, she’s still a distant second to Mitt Romney. You know, he’s the guy whose most notable accomplishment was starting a health care system in Massachusetts that he can’t talk about in front of Republicans…

See? The topical stuff isn’t funny. So I’m going to intersperse it with some words of wisdom that my friend Herb – Kathryn knows Herb — said he got from HIS friend Larry:

I asked God for a bike, but I know God doesn’t work that way. So I stole a bike and asked for forgiveness.

Do not argue with an idiot. He will drag you down to his level and beat you with experience.

The last thing I want to do is hurt you. But it’s still on the list.

If I agreed with you, we’d both be wrong.

Back to the topical…

As you know, I work over at ADCO with Lanier Jones. ADCO is the agency that came up with “Famously Hot.” The last few days, one of the readers on my blog – that’s bradwarthen.com – has suggested that we change that slogan. He just wants to change the first word. It would still start with the same letter.

I see that China, which holds all that U.S. debt, is now watching what’s happening in Washington and thinking WE have a really fouled-up political system. The bad news is, they’re right.

By the way, in case I’m not being clear enough, I refer to those children in Washington, a.k.a. our nation’s leaders, playing games with the full faith and credit of the United States of America.

And no, I wasn’t even trying to be funny about that…

More from Larry:

We never really grow up, we only learn how to act in public.

Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit; wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.

Whenever I fill out an application, in the part that says, “In an emergency, notify:” I always put, “DOCTOR.”

Back to the news:

South Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Dick Harpootlian – by the way, try fitting “South Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Dick Harpootlian” into a headline sometime, and you’ll see why the press will miss Ken Ard when he’s gone…

Where was I? Oh, yeah… South Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Dick Harpootlian said something that puzzled me the other day. He was criticizing Nikki Haley for saying, when she signed the voter ID bill, that if anyone had trouble getting a photo ID, she would personally drive them to the DMV. I don’t see any problem with that. I mean, it would be nice, right? It’s not like she’s Andre Bauer.

Oh, and for my Republican friends here today:

Look, I wanted to make some jokes about Democrats in office, but hey, gimme a break: This is South Carolina. I couldn’t find any.

OK, some more from Larry:

I didn’t say it was your fault; I said I was blaming you.

A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory.

Always borrow money from a pessimist. He won’t expect it back.

Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

I ad-libbed a few times. Such as, when I saw Boyd Summers laughing about the no-Democrats-in-office gag (although he, too, may have been doing a mime laugh), I said, “See? Boyd Summers gets it. Ladies and gentlemen, Boyd Summers — chairman of the Richland County Democratic Party. Boyd, you need to work a little harder…”

Thanks again for your help, folks! Your material was good. Maybe it was the delivery.

Bow before me: I’m one of the Twitterati!

3 Replies

A couple of years back… actually, to be precise, it ran on the very day before I got laid off from the paper (which really made the part where I reflected on a politician declaring the death of news media, um, interesting)… I wrote a column in which I blasted the very idea of Twitter:

… But so far I haven’t figured out what Twitter adds to modern life that we didn’t already have with e-mail and blogs and text-messaging and, well, the 24/7 TV “news.” Remember how I complained in a recent column about how disorienting and unhelpful I find Facebook to be? Well, this was worse. I felt like I was trying to get nutrition from a bowl of Lucky Charms mixed with Cracker Jack topped with Pop Rocks, stirred with a Slim Jim…

Then, a few months later, Tim Kelly persuaded me that I could promote my blog using Twitter. So I tried it. And I got hooked on the form, sort of a cross between headline writing and haiku. And Tim was prophetic. My blog gets 3 or 4 times the traffic that my old blog did when I was at the paper — something close to 200,000 page views a month, and sometimes well over that.

And now, I’m one of the top Tweeters in Columbia, one of the “Twitterati,” according to the Free Times:

The former editorial page editor of The State tweets a lot and has 1,200 followers. He’s often re-tweeted, tweeted at, and he becomes involved in Twitter debates. Sometimes he’ll even play mediator in said debates.

In any case, it’s obvious that while Warthen has been out of the newspaper game for a few years now he still has some pull at the paper. On May 31, he tweeted, “What in the world are these UFO-looking things all along I-26?” Days later, The State ran a story answering this life-altering question under this headline: “What Are Those Green Things?” — Corey Hutchins

So, you just never know what’s going to happen, do you?

Congratulations to Bud on the new granddaughter! (And the son in the Navy!)

9 Replies

Got some great news from our regular Bud (a.k.a. William Bloom). He’s a grandpa — again.

Above you see his second granddaughter, who was literally born yesterday, weighing in at 6 lbs., 11 oz.

He’s also got a son graduating from U.S. Navy training up at Great Lakes, and he is beside himself:

I’ve got a real dilemma. My son graduates from navy boot camp Friday in Chicago and my new granddaughter is in Brooklyn. Can’t be in 2 places. Since the Chicago trip is already planed I guess that’s where I’ll be. Hopefully in a couple of weeks I can go to Brooklyn. My head is still spinning over all this excitement.

That is all so wonderful, Bud. We’re thrilled for you. Have a wonderful trip to Great Lakes — and to Brooklyn as well.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Trailer

5 Replies

Just thought I’d share this, so that if there’s anyone among you who is as big a George Smiley fan as I, you, too, can start being frustrated waiting for this movie to come out in November. (Why does it take so long? If they’ve got it edited enough to put out a trailer…)

I was putting off posting this, after Mike Fitts brought it to my attention, until I could write a longer post I’ve been meaning to write ever since January, about my own successful Quest for Smiley (yes, Circus fans, that is an allusion to the Quest for Karla). But until I do that, here’s a picture of me standing in front of George’s actual house in London. Sort of a blog trailer, if you will. I think the picture captures a Le Carre kind of feel, doesn’t it? It was taken at dusk in winter, which is appropriate. Very Cold War.

Remember I said, in a post sent from the airport in Detroit, that I was going to look for signs of Smiley in London? Well, I did. More about that later…

A bloody triumph at the convention center

3 Replies

Well, once again, I forgot to tell you about a blood drive beforehand so you could participate.

But this time, it didn’t matter. I am happy to report that the American Red Cross’ Famously Hot Blood Drive at the Columbia Metropolitan Convention Center today was hugely successful.

The goal was 100 donors. Red Cross Donor Recruitment Representative Kelly Moore told me late this afternoon that when it was all over, 160 had given.

You’ll note the row of seated Columbians above waiting their turn. There was another full row behind them, and it was like that much of the day.

Of course, I did my bit (come on, you knew that you wouldn’t get all the way through this post without a little self-aggrandizement from your humble correspondent). I gave double-red cells, because I’m just that sort of overachiever. Also, I think it’s cool the way they take the blood out, remove red cells and put it back (quite literally cool, because it’s not as warm as it was when it went out, having been mixed with a bit of saline to replace volume). I was a little worried that I couldn’t. You know how I occasionally fall short on the iron standard. Well, my ruse of buying some iron pills and taking a double-dose last night, and that much again this morning, worked — I scored a 14 on the test. Yes! Aced it, by cramming.

Anyway, I’ll try to remember to tell y’all ahead of time next time. But this time it worked out great anyway. Congratulations, and thanks, to Red Cross Blood Services, to the Columbia Rotary Club (quite a few members showed up), and to all those other folks who showed up to give.

Coming soon: The Alvin Green graphic novel

6 Replies

OK, now I’m feeling bad about an idea I let slide awhile back.

Corey Hutchins of the Free Times brings this to my attention:

Current and former Columbia Free Timeswriters are teaming up to produce a black-and-white graphic novel on the bizarre rise and fall of South Carolina’s Alvin Greene.

Last year the unemployed Greene unexpectedly won the South Carolina Democratic Primary for the U.S. Senate, giving him the chance to face off against — and eventually lose to — incumbent Tea Partier Jim DeMint. Greene’s primary victory came despite the fact that he didn’t campaign, didn’t have a website, and was virtually unknown to the voting public.

“What happened in the summer of 2010 was the strangest American political story in modern times,” says Free Times staff writer Corey Hutchins, who gained national attention by exposing Greene. “It’s no wonder that it came out of South Carolina, the state that James Petigru famously called ‘too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum’ more than 100 years ago.”

Hutchins is teaming up with former Free Times staff writer David Axe and artist Ryan Alexander-Tanner to serialize the comic online beginning in early 2012, following with a print edition in the spring.

In order to secure funding for the project, they’re using the crowd-funding site Kickstarter to attract backers. As of this writing, the team is halfway towards reaching their goal of $1,000.

That’s pretty cool. Cool enough that it make me feel bad I never followed through on my own idea.

You know, I wanted to do a graphic novel about Mark Sanford back in 2009. I even had a couple of exchanges with someone with publishing contacts in New York. But when I didn’t find an artist who was interested right away (I felt like it had to be done immediately for readers to be interested), I dropped it. I was really busy job-hunting and stuff at the time. The images were key, and while I could have written the whole thing without them, I think it would have been an inspiration to see some sketches as I went along.

I had this one really vivid image in my mind as I tried to picture the visual style of the book. It was NOT of Mark Sanford, actually. It was black-and-white. It would have been an extreme closeup, taking about half a page, of Jake Knotts as he began the process of spreading the report that Sanford was missing, in his big bid to bring down his nemesis…

The image was inspired by images of The Kingpin in Spiderman (see this or this or this or this) … Only darker…

Anyway… I actually wrote a sort of treatment for my New York contact. I was really riffing on it at the time. I wanted it all to be told by a seedy, self-hating ex-journalist narrator, sort of based on Jack Burden from All the King’s Men. The narrator would be all conflicted and guilt-ridden, because he felt responsible for having created the central character. This would give his narration a certain bitterly ironic tone. (This character would of course in no way be based on any living former editors who maybe sorta kinda endorsed Mark Sanford in 2002.)

It had levels. It had edge. It had irony. Sort of Gatsby meets Robert Penn Warren meets “Citizen Kane” meets, I don’t know, “Fight Club.”

But now I can’t even find the blasted treatment. I think I lost it in that major Outlook meltdown of my e-mail.

But it would have been good.

I got stabbed in the back today — literally — so I’m temporarily out of action

16 Replies

I’m sure you can see the problem right away…

It’s OK — I asked them to do it. It was done with a needle.

I had my reasons. It all started about 40 years ago…

Recently, I had this old problem with neck and shoulder pain — and numbness, all down the right arm, which is the most disturbing part — crop back up for the first time in about a decade. It started when I was on the high school wrestling team in my senior year (1970-71). Burl was there (not on the wrestling team, but at the school), but he didn’t really know me yet.

We used to do these drills that would probably get a coach fired today (let’s hope so), designed to “strengthen” our neck muscles, but which caused an injury to mine that caused me to quit the team after my right hand started going numb and I had trouble holding a pen in class. My favorite: We’d pair off and one guy would stand on his head on the mat and the other guy would hold his legs and bounce him repeatedly on the mat — the illegal piledriver, essentially. Oh, but that wasn’t all. We had this other drill — also done in pairs — where one guy would stand with his legs a bit apart, and you would come up behind him, bend double, stick your head between his legs, and pick him up, using your neck to lift his full weight, until you were fully standing with him sitting on your shoulders. (You have to be pretty strong to be a wrestler — and stupid.) Then, finally, we’d get in a bridge — you know what a “bridge” is? Here’s what it looks like (but it’s not a FULL bridge until you roll back so that your weight is on your forehead). And while we were in a bridge, the coach, walking around amongst us, would suddenly and without warning drop down onto our chests with his knees, his full weight from the knees up testing the strength of the bridge — a position in which the main stress is on your unnaturally bent-back neck. Fortunately, he was a little guy, smaller than most of us. Probably didn’t weigh 125 pounds. Which is probably why I can still walk.

The coach’s picture is on this page of the Virtual Yearbook Burl created years ago. I’m not going to point him out, though — although you may be able to pick him out because he looks the part, the little fascist. No, really, he’s all old and decrepit if he’s still alive, and probably sorry for all he’s done, and no point picking on him now. Hey, I’m feeling kind of old and decrepit — thanks to him…

Anyway, I recovered the feeling on my right side and sort of forgot about it mostly until 1993. I was in pretty good shape just before I had emergency major abdominal surgery that year, which kept me from working out for a couple of months. The first day I started back, the very first shoulder press I did made something go crunch, very painfully, amid the cervical vertebra.

I dealt with pain and numbness from that off and on for years until doing something about it about 10 years back. The MRI then showed one vertebra sort of cockeyed and squeezing bundles of nerves both above and below. I went through all kinds of things to try to fix it — home traction, chiropractic, massage, muscle relaxers — but nothing really worked until a specialist sent me to the hospital for cortisone injections next to the spine. That reduced the inflammation around the area for long enough for me to relax (muscle tension always exacerbated the problem) and heal up.

And I did really well for a decade.

The problem came back suddenly on April 13 — no trauma, it just came on gradually over a couple of hours. Next morning, I called my internist to ask for a prescription of Soma — not the Aldous Huxley kind, but carisoprodol, a muscle relaxer. I’ve taken it pretty much every night to enable me to sleep the last couple of months. More than once, I’ve waked up in the middle of the night and taken another, if it’s been long enough. Along with ibuprofen. Lots and lots of ibuprofen. That eliminated most of the pain. But my whole right arm goes numb in certain routine positions that can’t be avoided in the course of a day, and two of my fingers are numb and itchy ALL the time.

So I went back to the same doc, and today I got another shot of steroid next to my spine — between C6 and C7. It’s not bad enough for surgery — in fact, the neurosurgeon was very encouraged that he didn’t see much deterioration from last time. Just the rather disturbing experience of having a long needle inserted next to my spine and stuff injected into there. Feels really weird.

I was ordered to take it easy. So I sit at home, trying to take it easy with the frickin’ telephone ringing every five minutes. Everything from Mike Huckabee auto-calling me to enlist me in the Kulturkampf (something about atheists and the National Day of Prayer) to my auto-insurance calling NOT to check on my tree-falling claim (I’m already set to take it to the body shop on Monday), but to routinely check all the data on all the cars on my account. Took forever, and made my neck more sore.

Tomorrow I can return to normal routine. Driving and everything. And in 3-4 four days, I’ll know whether it helped.

Anyway, the last few days I’ve blogged less than usual on account of trying to get real work, the kind I get paid for, out of the way to take today off. And today, sitting at the laptop is sort of uncomfortable. We’ll see how it feels tomorrow.And once it’s all better, I’m definitely going to start exercising again, which I think might have prevented this onset. Y’all hold me to that.

Doug Nye, and the things we remember…

23 Replies

A few days ago, I saw on Facebook where a mutual friend had visited Doug Nye, and he wasn’t doing well. And I thought, “I need to check on him,” and now he’s gone. My mom called me last night to say it was announced at the USC baseball game…

It’s funny the things you remember about people. Doug was a great guy to talk to about all sorts of things, and not just westerns. To many people he will be remembered as the Father of the Chicken Curse, in terms of having popularized the concept. There are complex permutations on the Curse beyond what Bill Starr wrote about this morning that I could get into, but that’s not what I remember best about Doug.

Here’s what I remember best, and most fondly: Doug and I had a number of conversations sharing our childhood memories of watching “Spaceship C-8,” a kiddie show on WBTW out of Florence, hosted by the late “Captain Ashby” Ward, who was also the news anchor. I really didn’t have all that many specific memories about the show (Doug, being older, remembered more), despite having spent many an hour watching it during the summers I spent with my grandparents in Bennettsville. (Doug watched it from another end of the coverage area — I want to say Sumter.) But I enjoyed talking about it with Doug on multiple occasions.

It was about way more than one kid’s show; it was about remembering an era, a time before media saturation. A time when WBTW was the only station you could reliably get clearly in B’ville with a home antenna (WIS also came in, depending on the weather). Then, in the late 60s, along came cable to small town America, LONG before it came to cities. That way, you could get all three networks, plus some duplicates from different cities. There was less demand in cities, because they could already get three or four channels.

Consequently, we spent an awful lot of time doing stuff other than watching TV, or engaging any other mass medium. A time that in many ways was about as close as Huck Finn’s fictional existence as it was to what kids experience today.

Odd, I suppose, that the thing I would remember best from knowing the longtime TV writer was talking about days that were practically pre-TV. But that’s what I remember. It won’t really mean anything to you, I suppose, but I’m confident it would make Doug smile.

I remember that, and the fact that, as I said, Doug was a great guy to talk to about anything. Always a ready grin (that’s why I know he’d smile at my trivial remembrance), the kind of naturally affable guy who you took a moment to chat with rather than just rushing past in the course of getting through a day’s deadlines. He stood out among newspapermen that way. Not that newspapermen were so awful; I just mean Doug stood out. Which is why so many will remember him fondly.

How’d YOU make out in the storm? Here’s my car, with the tree on it

41 Replies

It began, at my house, with a fundamental failure of seamanship that would have disgusted Jack Aubrey. Every sailor knows that when a blow comes up, you take your sails in — or most of them — ASAP. I failed to do so.

My wife had already had dinner while I was writing this blog post. Then, as the lights started flickering, I decided I’d best heat mine while I still had use of the microwave. So I sat down to eat a little after 8:30, I think. Then there was a thump from the back wall — sounded like something in the kitchen cabinets.

Odd, I thought — then went to the window, and saw that the iron table on the deck had blown over. Because the umbrella was still attached, and open. As I rushed to deal with it (thinking all the while of old-time sailors taking in a reef in the topsails with a gale tearing at them) and branches and stuff fell all around, the wind almost carried the umbrella, me and the iron table off the deck. But I finally got it down, and into the house.

Then, the top of an internal doorway — the frame part — between the kitchen and the hall — started steadily leaking water onto the floor. After a few moments, it stopped. I haven’t identified the source yet.

After all the banging and crashing stopped, a neighbor came and knocked on the front door to inform me that a tree had fallen across my car. It missed the truck — falling right alongside it — and my daughter’s car, and my wife’s car, but landed square on the hood of mine. And effectively blocked in all the other vehicles, since mine was in back.

That same neighbor helped me move the tree enough to back out my car this morning, and we pulled it around just enough for my wife to get out.

And now, just a moment ago, my wife called to say that she realized that the light fixture that was smashed on the deck last night (oh, didn’t I mention that?) was right over the dog’s water bowl. Which might have broken glass in it. So now I’ve got to run back home.

How did YOU make out last night?

“Again with the negative waves, Moriarty!” (Redux)

7 Replies

Yeah, I used that headline once before. But I’m making the point again.

This morning’s lead headline in The Wall Street Journal was tiresome:

Economic Outlook Darkens

Markets Stumble as Factories, Hiring Slow Down; Biggest Drop in Stocks in a Year

The drumbeat of bad news about the U.S. economy got louder on Wednesday, rattling financial markets and driving stocks to their biggest drop in a year.

The U.S. factory sector, which has been an engine of the recovery, notched its biggest one-month slowdown since 1984 as companies hit the brakes on hiring and production. Another report showed private-sector hiring dropped precipitously in May, prompting economists to ratchet down their expectations for the closely watched nonfarm payrolls report due on Friday.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average tumbled 279.65 points, or 2.2%, to 12290.14, its biggest point decline since June 4 of last year. Investors piled into the safety of Treasury bonds, sending yields on the 10-year note below 3% for the first time this year. Yields move in the opposite direction of price….

Sheesh. I’m not going to go on and on about my own unified field theory of the economy (after all, I couldn’t even get y’all to watch that hilarious Keynes and Hayek rap video), but in a nutshell it is this: All the bad economic indicators result, at some point down the line, from someone having a lousy attitude.

That applies whether you’re talking the stock market, or manufacturing figures, or retail sales, or jobs, what have you. We start tightening up, and things get as bad as we thought they were, or even worse.

So snap out of it, people! I’m a veteran of the front lines of this singularly monotonous war, and have no glory or medals to show for it. Just a lot of PTSD. Don’t need any more, thanks…

Quick survey: Do you like clowns? Did you EVER?

14 Replies

We all have our prejudices. Me, I don’t like clowns. Never did. I was afraid of them when I was a kid. You know the axiom about how bigots tend to dehumanize members of the groups they don’t like? Well, that’s what I did. Sort of. Actually, it was the other way around. It’s not that I didn’t like them, therefore I thought of them as not being human. It’s that I really didn’t get that they were humans, and I didn’t like them.

In fact — and I was right on this point — they didn’t seem like anything natural. They weren’t dogs, or cats, or horses, or cows, or any other species that I found totally nonthreatening. They were like something from another world, and a pretty freaky, inexplicable one, too. (Later, I was to see “Killer Klowns from Outer Space” — or some of it, anyway — and it made a lot of sense to me.)

Funny thing is, I don’t remember being afraid of much as a kid. At least, not of real things. I never had the fear of nuclear war that so many who lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis shared. I do recall having an unreasoning fear of that Snidely Whiplash guy who was on the kiddie show on WIS… when we lived in Shandon back around 1957, I was convinced that that guy lived in the bushes behind the duplex we lived in. Not the one on Heyward Street, the other one we lived in… But I wasn’t afraid of much else. Except clowns.

I have this early memory — this was probably the mid-50s, ’57 at the latest — of being in the Colonial store in Bennettsville (remember Colonial stores, you oldsters?) and there was some sort of promotion going on, and there was a clown giving out popcorn. I remember wanting to check out the popcorn, but not wanting it badly enough to go anywhere near that clown. I did my best to keep at least an aisle between him and me. Or rather, between it and me. This seemed to me a completely rational response. Still does, looked at from a little kid’s perspective.

I don’t know when it was, but I remember that eventually I did finally realize that they were people, only with makeup. I think it took awhile because the premise seemed unlikely. Why would people want to make themselves look so FREAKY?

Anyway, I got to thinking about that again when I read that Ronald McDonald is in trouble:

The 48-year-old, red-haired mascot has come under fire from health-care professionals and consumer groups who, in recent days, have asked the fast-food chain to retire Ronald McDonald. But McDonald’s Chief Executive Officer Jim Skinner staunchly defended the clown at the company’s annual meeting on Thursday, saying, “Ronald McDonald is going nowhere.”

He kept his job, and I’ve got mixed feelings about that. I hate for anybody to lose their job in this economy, but… well, you know… he’s a clown…

Anyway, somewhat more seriously… I’ve always sort of wondered about this concept that clowns are a great way to appeal to kids. Because they certainly weren’t in my case. So I put it to you: Do you like clowns? And more to the point, did you ever like clowns?

Oh, I guess we really CAN do stuff like that

2 Replies

Channel-surfing over the weekend, I noticed that Wolfgang Petersen’s “Air Force One” was showing. I didn’t stop to watch it. I own it on Blu-Ray — so I can actually hear Gary Oldman saying “smart bomb” in his extreme Russian accent any time.

But it reminded me of something.

Back in the late ’90s, I mentioned that movie in a conversation with then Secretary of Defense William Cohen. I was in Washington on one of those things where senior government officials invite journalists from the boonies to interviews as a way of trying to bypass the Washington press corps and speak straight to the people — or relatively so. The idea being that we’re less cynical, or more gullible, or something.

Anyway, at one point I suppose I confirmed Cohen’s faith in my lack of sophistication — thanks to my own odd sense of humor. There were several of us at the table speaking with the secretary, and someone was talking about some intractable international situation — Saddam Hussein, perhaps, or maybe Moamar Qaddafi — and expressing the American people’s supposed frustration. There was an implication in what this guy was saying that there was some simple solution that the Clinton Administration was simply failing to employ. I couldn’t resist facetiously saying, “Yeah, after all, everyone who has seen the opening of ‘Air Force One’ knows we can just send in a SEAL team and snatch a troublesome foreign leader neatly and cleanly and with no U.S. casualties, right out of his own house, any time we want to.” (To see what I’m talking about, start at about 2:50 on this clip.)

I expected Cohen to get that I was kidding, that I was making fun of Hollywood and the way it can unrealistically shape public expectations, and give me an ironic smile before patiently explaining reality to the other guy. Instead, he looked at me and explained very patiently and without a crack of a smile that it wasn’t that easy in real life.

I was so embarrassed that he thought I was that unsophisticated that I didn’t realize how difficult and rare, even impossible, such a coup de main operation can be. I think I muttered something about, “I was kidding…,” but I don’t think it did any good.

But here’s the wild and ironic thing: Cohen and I were both wrong. The bin Laden raid proved that — conditions being right — we CAN do stuff like that. This thought has occurred to me a number of times since May 1, and I was reminded of it again over the weekend.

Tell you what, though — I still don’t think a man swinging back and forth as he dangles from a parachute can shoot a guard on a roof in the back of the head with one shot, from hundreds of yards away — laser sight or no laser sight…

Great movie scene (which I missed when it first came out)

6 Replies

When it came out in 2004, I had little urge to see the latest Hollywood interpretation of “The Alamo” — the one with Billy Bob Thornton portraying Davy Crockett. Partly because I was almost half a century past my coonskin-cap phase, partly because I had heard that the portrayal of Davy was somewhat… postmodern… which I didn’t really need even if I had put Davy-worship behind me, and partly because I just generally didn’t hear much good about it. On Netflix it only gets about two-and-a-half stars.

That was a mistake on my part. I caught some of it on TV recently, and have now ordered it from Netflix so I can see the first third or so, which I had missed.

The centerpiece is the portrayal of Crockett, which is really awesome. It’s deep, and appealing. And very human. This is the iconoclastic politician who (as confirmed by my favorite-ever historical plaque, on the courthouse square in Jackson, TN) told voters who had refused to re-elect him to Congress, “You can go to hell, but I am going to Texas!” This was one of the nation’s first larger-than-life celebrities.

I don’t know whether the real man was anything like this, but watching this movie I am persuaded by Thornton that he IS Davy Crockett. Even more so than Fess Parker, which means a lot coming from a child of the ’50s.

This scene, in which Davy muses on the price of living up to public expectations, encapsulates the performance well. Check it out. The interplay between Jim Bowie’s taunting cynicism and Davy’s sincere, patient self-awareness is pretty powerful. And in case this violates any copyright — come on, guys, I’m trying to get people to check out your movie!

He jests at scars that never felt a wound…

8 Replies

Some accused me since yesterday of lacking empathy toward the feelings of those whose own sensitivity is based in experiences I cannot share (something that, if you’ll recall, I fully acknowledged in the original post).

I can definitely dig it.

Today, @haireofthedog, in reference to new GOP chair Chad Connelly, made a joke (at least, I THINK it was a joke):

hmm… thinking about a title for a column: Amway Messiah.

And @PhilBaileySC seemed to think it was funny.

Not cool, said I!

Don’t joke. Once, years ago, I was trapped with an Amway salesman in my own home. Or was it Shaklee? Traumatic.

It was truly awful. This guy was a friend of mine — a coworker. He had asked to visit my home, without telling me why, and I had agreed. My wife, perhaps sensing danger, left us alone in the living room. For at least an hour, he spoke of the fact that he had come up with this great new way to make extra money, and my eyes are glazing over, thinking how on Earth it had anything to do with me, because I was totally uninterested, and wondering how much longer it would last, and murmuring vague things along the lines of “How nice for you,” when he FINALLY mentions the outfit he’s working with. Which, of course, if he had mentioned on the front end, I would have politely told him I wasn’t interested before he bothered coming to the house.

Then, he extolled the virtues of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for maybe another hour, while I sat there in a state of helpless, polite shock. I couldn’t believe it was happening. Time I would never, ever get back.

It’s been close to 30 years. But PTSD is long-lasting, they say. It made me permanently shy about EVER hearing about wonderful business opportunities of any kind (which made it easier for me to brush off all those people calling me with “franchising opportunities” after I got laid off). So don’t joke about it.

Brookgreen Gardens 1958

6 Replies

Yes, that headline is mean to evoke “Louisiana 1927,” an awesome song.

I got the photo from our good friend Bud, who wrote:

Here’s a picture of me and my cousins and brother @ Brookgreen Gardens taken in 1958. I’m the one on the right with the sandals.

… and the dark socks. I suspect that Bud was always a fashion iconoclast. Good for him.

Bud sent that after we discovered that he and I both have a long history of connection to Surfside Beach. (I’m having trouble remembering which post that came up on, or I’d link to it.)

Scooped by The State on my own danged story

12 Replies

Our late, lamented AC units, right after the deed was done.

Some of y’all were disparaging The State on a previous post. Well, I’ll say this for them: They just scooped me on my own blasted story.

Of course, I let them. Remember that list of posts I’ve been MEANING to get to, which I wrote about back here? Well, one of them was about copper theft:

Metal fabricator Stanley Bradham delivered two 300-pound concrete slabs to a Pickens Street business Tuesday, then lowered a couple of 2- to 3-ton heating and air-conditioning units on top.

But it is what Bradham did next that theft-weary business and church leaders are hoping will finally slow the alarming rate of vandalism aimed at removing copper wiring – a trend that not only inconveniences victims, but also drives up their insurance rates.

Bradham bolted a lockable, customized, 350-gauge unibody steel cage over each of the units and welded the cages to the cement pads, which are secured by 12-inch anchors in the ground.

“It stops your access to the top of the unit, so you can’t get in,” said Bradham, of the newly formed Carolina Copper Protection company in Hopkins. “For the cost factor, it’s a very visual deterrence.”

That Pickens Street business was ADCO.

This is a story that goes under the heading of the Jerry Ratts dictum, “News is whatever happens to, or interests, an editor.” Or former editor, in this case. Jerry was a bit of a cynic, but he had a point. I mean, you know, this copper theft was a serious problem and all, but it only became dire quite recently, and suddenly…

Several weeks back, copper thieves destroyed both of our AC units to get a few coils of copper. We’re talking $8,000-$10,000 worth of damage for maybe, maybe $400 worth of metal.

Actually, that’s the high estimate. Back right after this happened, when I was in full fury over it, I interviewed Columbia Police Chief Randy Scott about it, and he said it was probably more like between $30 and $100. Which is… mind-boggling to me. I mean, it seems way easier to actually to out and work for that amount of money. I mean, mow a lawn or something — way less risk.

But apparently, it’s not as much trouble as I thought to tear up an AC unit that way. Chief Scott says they’re in and out in 3-5 minutes. Otherwise, he’d catch more of them.

It started with empty or abandoned commercial buildings. Now, he says, they’re hitting everything — churches, law offices, even private homes. Having your unit on a roof is no defense. Thieves destroyed 17 units from the top of the Dream Center at Bible Way Church on Atlas Road. Then, after the units were replaced, they hit again.

In fact, as Roddie Burriss reports:

In 2009, Southern Mutual wrote checks for $365,000 worth of losses due to copper thefts, according to Robert Bates, executive vice president.

In 2010, the company paid $1.2 million in copper theft losses to 174 member churches. Because most of the churches it covers are located in the Palmetto State, 109 of the 174 copper theft claims were in South Carolina, accounting for losses totaling $839,000, Bates said.

Through March 2011, Bates said the company already had paid churches $552,000 in copper loss claims, putting it well on the way to a $2 million payout for the year in these thefts…

I ran into Roddie and photographer Tim Dominick in the alley outside our building yesterday — and realizing they were doing MY story, I lapsed back into editor mode. Let the reporters and photographers do the work, then comment it. It feels natural.

So here’s the commentary part… Obviously, Something Must Be Done about this problem. Back when we were without AC, I had a suggestion, which I posted on Twitter. It was on a particularly warm day last month (I told you I’d been sitting on this for awhile):

Can’t breathe. No air-conditioning all week. Thieves stole copper. We need to bring back flogging. Or keelhauling. Something painful…

Sonny Corleone would say it’s just business, but I was taking it very, very personally. Chief Scott has a more constructive, and constitutional idea than my sweaty rantings: Make it harder to fence the stuff.

He’s backing, and testified in favor of, legislation sponsored by Rep. Todd Rutherford that would stiffen penalties (although, I’m sorry to say, no flogging), and make the businesses that buy scrap metal get legitimate ID from the people who sell them copper. Which would seem sort of like a no-brainer. As the chief said, “When you ride up on a bicycle, and you have two air-conditioning coils, you’re probably not a legitimate air-conditioning repair man.”

Chief Scott, and other law enforcement professionals, have enough problems, what with people coming at them with AK-47s. And yet they are spending more and more of their time fighting this rising tide of copper theft, and it’s pretty overwhelming — and not only to the angry, sweaty victims.

During our interview (which, like so many of my interviews, took place at the Capital City Club), the Chief looked out over the city and said, wondering, “Just LOOK at all those air-conditioners…”

Columbia Police Chief Randy Scott: "Just LOOK at all those air-conditioners..."