Category Archives: Personal

A bloody triumph at the convention center

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

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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

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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…

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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

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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)

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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?

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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

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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)

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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…

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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

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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

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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..."

Yeah, that was me on the radio again

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The last couple of days, I’ve been getting compliments about my performance on Michael Feldman’s “Whad’Ya Know?” over the weekend — two or three people at Rotary yesterday mentioned it, and I just got a Facebook message from Bill Day in Memphis.

Thing is, that was a rerun — from April 2009. This is the third time they’ve run it, and I haven’t heard it on the radio yet (although I have listened to parts of it online).

That would be sort of interesting to hear again. I might go back and listen online sometime. That was in the first weeks after I was laid off, during the period that Mark Sanford was trying to deny South Carolina the stimulus money we would all be eventually paying for (and before he went to Argentina), and as I recall we talked about those things. I imagine that now it would sound kind of like a time capsule.

Anyway, I had a good time doing it.

Sad news about the dog I told you about earlier

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Remember this pooch from the other day? One of you (Doug) was even interested in adopting him. Unfortunately, I got sad news about him this morning, from one of the people who found him:

Hi Brad,

Hudson

Thank you for following up with Doug and even more so for taking the time to help find a home for this dog. The kindness and generosity of the many people in Columbia who have tried to help has overwhelmed me.

Unfortunately I have sad news about Hudson. I took him to the vet yesterday for a follow-up appointment and they found that he is in the advanced stages of cancer. The vet expects that he may have about a month left so I have decided to keep him as comfortable and happy as possible for the next few weeks. Thank you so much again for your help.

Emily

Guy

This sort of hits home because over the weekend we found what looked like a tumor of some sort on the back of our dog’s leg. The vet biopsied it yesterday, and there were some bad cells. He’s going to take it off next week and see if it has clear margins…

Guy, our dog, is almost 11. We lost a dog earlier to cancer. I wrote about her back here. Guy still misses her, I think.

How much would be enough? (A billion, or would $10 million do you?)

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This Tweet earlier today got me to thinking:

@wis10WIS News 10

Sunday dinner interrupted by $100,000 lottery win http://bit.ly/dYkFUg

This fits firmly into the category of what I think of as lame non-news. I mean, who cares, really? I remember thinking it was pretty cool back in the 60s that time that my grandmother won $300 and they put her picture in the Marlboro Herald Advocate, but the main appeal of the item resulted from the facts that 1) It was my grandmother; 2) The prize was in the form of cash, and they had formed the bills into a sort of lei and hung them around her neck, and 3) I was a kid, and that seemed like a lot of money. Back then, you could get a comic book and a soda and some candy for a quarter, and maybe even have change.

And yes, I think it would be cool if I or someone in my family won a hundred Gs, free and clear. I’d like it. But as news for other people? I don’t see it. Because I put myself in the position of the person winning the 100k, and think, what would I do with it? I could do ONE, but not more, of the following:

Pay off our mortgage. It’s down to below that amount, and that would be helpful. I couldn’t really change my lifestyle or anything, and I’d have to keep working at least as hard as I do now, but it would be nice to have that off my plate.

Take a year off from working. Fine, but I just sort of did that, and it wasn’t fun. And you know that when the year was over, you’d have to go back to work. And you’d find that after a year of not working, you’d have trouble getting back into the kind of work you want to do at your previous rate of pay. Believe me, I’ve been there. Not worth it. And yes, you could live for more than a year on 100k, but I would not be tempted to quit working, for any period of time, for less. Anything less, and I’d just add it to the rest of the income I manage to pull in, and keep plugging.

Go to England or somewhere again, and buy a bunch of toys such as accessories for my new iPhone. Which, let’s face it, Mamanem’s not going to let me do if someone interrupts Sunday dinner to give us $100k.

All pretty cool stuff, but not dramatically life-changing. It wouldn’t have enough effect on ME and MY life for other people to find it interesting. So… I’m not interested in the effect on someone else’s life. Certainly not Tweet-me-the-headline interest.

Which raises the question: How much WOULD be enough? How much money would I have to get to think it newsworthy? For that matter, forget newsworthy. I’d just as soon other people didn’t know I had all that money. How much is my fantasy amount that would make me achieve my lifelong goal of never, ever thinking about money again? (Because I really, truly hate thinking about it, on any level.)

I used to have a figure in mind. As I wrote in a column several years ago, “Buddy, can you spare half a billion? And be quick about it?” As I wrote, I had this fantasy in mind in which I saved Bill Gates’ life somehow or other, and he offered to halve his kingdom, and I told him nah, that half a billion would do. Or a round billion, if he didn’t have change.

But that was back in 2006, when my newspaper was up for sale, and I had a particular use for the money in mind. I wanted to buy the paper from the ruins of Knight Ridder. I had a detailed plan for what I wanted to do with it. I had this idea that buying the paper, since it was one of the few really profitable papers KR had, could cost me as much as $400 million. That was probably WAY too much to pay even then, but the paper had been bought by KR in the mid-80s for $300 million, and I didn’t want to be chintzy.

I would have used the rest for capital improvements, and perhaps to allow me to run the company at a loss for a few years while I searched for the right business model. And that’s the thing. The demand for news, particularly political news, is as great as ever (and we’re talking the written word, here). The problem is that the business model has collapsed. I figure a few hundred million extra would allow for almost unlimited experimentation with financial models. And we — and the readers — could have a lot of fun in the meantime. (By the way, some people were displeased by that column at the time. Sort of surprising it took them three more years to can me, huh?)

Now… I don’t know. If I had unlimited funds — or what would do for unlimited funds — would I buy The State? Things have changed. It’s no longer about trying to save “my newspaper.” I’m not sure whether the value of the brand would be worth what I’d have to pay for it. I wonder whether I should just start something from scratch (that might be the best way to start a new business model, assuming I could figure out what sort to go with). I’m pretty sure I could get it for a LOT less than I was guessing in 06. Back then, I bought McClatchy at $39. Today, it’s $3.33. (Yeah, I know. I’m a financial genius.) How that affects individual newspapers’ value I don’t know. Even assuming they were willing to sell.

And there’s always the possibility of traveling the globe and hanging with my grandchildren. I could grow tomatoes, and chase the kids around in the garden… but no, I’ve still got stuff I want to say. And South Carolina NEEDS some good journalism, just as it always did. Dick Harpootlian was mentioning that today. He was mentioning it in a partisan context, but he was on point.

A certain amount of money could pay for some good journalism. AND achieve my lifelong goal of never having to think about money again.

So how much would that be? I tend to look at it in powers of 10:

$100k — I’ve already explained why that won’t do.
$1 million — Much better, but one could neither buy a newspaper of any size nor launch a new operation nor permanently retire on that, even if one were as cheap as Mark Sanford. An awkward amount (not that I’d turn it down, mind you; I’d find something to do with it).
$10 million — Now we’re talking. THIS a guy could retire on, and not feel the need to work to make more. And you might be able to launch an experimental publication of some sort. But you’d have to bet it all, and if the first business model you tried failed, that would be it, and you’d be broke. Or so I’m thinking.
$100 million — This would most likely provide it all — buy a business, revamp it, try a lot of stuff, and never worry about money again. Grow a lot of tomatoes when you felt like it. But you’d have to be careful you don’t blow it all, still. You want to leave something to the kids. I mean, as long as we’re fantasizing here, why don’t we go a bit further…
$1 billion — Done deal. Do it all, make a lot of mistakes along the way, and still be able to install a diving board in your cash vault, like Scrooge McDuck. So for me, this is the ultimate fantasy amount. TWO billion would also be nice — maybe I could get one of those miniature giraffes — but let’s not get greedy.

So, it looks like I’ll be working for a while.

There you have it. A twist on the “Office Space” question of “What would you do if you had a million dollars?”

What’s your answer? How much would it take for you to feel like you had it all?

Filling young minds with wisdom (lots and lots and lots of it…)

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Busy day — speaking this morning, speaking tonight. Yakkety-yak. In fact, if you’re the last-minute type, you might want to attend the Politics and Media Conference at The Riley Institute at Furman tonight. I’m on a panel with some media types, followed by another panel with Bob Inglis and Vincent Sheheen. In fact, I’d better run if I’m going to get up there (no Virtual Front Page today, I’m afraid). They’ll feed me if I get there in time. But before I go, about this morning’s appearance…

Kelly Payne, the former state superintendent of education candidate who teaches a “Current Issues” class at Dutch Fork High School, is one of those… intense kinds of teachers you may remember from your own schooldays. A teacher with certain expectations. I remember them, because slackers like me tended to run afoul of them sometimes.

Anyway, Kelly asked me to come out today for a second time to speak to her class, so I guess it went OK the first time. I wanted to go straight to questions and answers, knowing the kids would have questions (I prefer that as a speaker; I don’t have to think as hard), but she asked me to talk for a few minutes first about “SC Politics,” so I started speaking nonstop about why we’re so different, why people say “there’s the South, there’s the Deep South, and there’s South Carolina,” starting with Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper and John Locke and the colonial period an The War and what followed, generally explaining to them in FAR more detail than they want to know why we have some of the problems we have, and why we are SO resistant to changing that fact, and…

… once they were good and glassy-eyed, I asked them to throw their questions at me. Because I knew they had some. In most high school classes I’ve spoken to (admittedly, I don’t do it often; I generally shy away from anything earlier than post-grad, because there’s only so much of that bored-kids look you can take), you can wait awhile for a question.

But not Kelly Payne’s class — because of what I said about intensity, and expectations and such.

I knew there were questions because they were printed out on the lectern in front of me, pages of them, with kids’ names attached. They were to ask them in order. So we got started. Unfortunately, the 90-minute class was over before we could get to all of them. In fact, we only got to the first eight. I like to give thorough answers. Anyway, here are ALL the questions, since they bothered to compile them:

Hailey

1. Explain the difficulties you’ve experienced in transitioning from being a full-time journalist to your current activities.

Horace

2. Since you were last here the media hasn’t made much progress in gaining the public trust. What will it take for it to improve at doing so?

Venisha

3. When you were an editor at the paper, did you have other editors to check your grammar and spelling to keep you from making mistakes?

Hannah Jane

4. How significant a factor are your feelings about a topic when you write a story? If you’re really angry or really happy about a topic do those emotions impair your objectivity?

Jaquarius

5. How can social media be an effective tool in reporting? What social media platforms do you use (e.g., texting, Twitter, Facebook) to deliver news content?

Ruby

6. What do you miss most about your old job at the paper?

Eric

7. Do blogs really move public opinion or do they just provide “some fun” for people in the Echo Chamber to take anonymous shots? Is there any way to assure a little more fairness in blogs?

Taylor

8. What do you think about requiring public officials who hire bloggers to shill for them to disclose those relationships in order to improve transparency and increase public trust?

Katherine

9. If elected officials make blog comments hiding behind assumed names, wouldn’t the publics’ interest in transparency and its desire for more civil conversation be better met by calling on those public officials to “man-up,” take ownership of their comments, and stop hiding behind assumed names?

Kelsi

10. How do you rationalize disagreements between your religious convictions and

your political beliefs? (i.e., gay rights)

Marshall

11. What should the response of the United States be to Gadahfi’s suppression of his own people?

Taylor

12. You’ve criticized the Governor for her appointment on the USC Board of Trustees. Please explain why you don’t believe that election outcomes matter.

Katherine

13. You seem very focused on the need for the Governor and her team to guard against “gender politics” yet your profession admonishes society on the need to be “gender sensitive.” Please explain this dichotomy.

Kelsi

14. Eleanor Kitzman recently spoke to our class and we loved her. Why do you criticize her for defending the Governor’s honor and performance given the Governor selected her for that position?

Lexie

15. Why do you think being loyal to the Governor makes Eleanor Kitzman disloyal to the other four Budget & Control Board members?

Shaun

16. The Governor has talked about more transparency with legislative votes and the Treasurer has talked about “calendar transparency.” Which of these ideas do you think is the most sophomoric?

Christian

17. Given that Senator Sheheen and the Governor are about the same age, why is he more appealing to young people?

Kenneth

18. What do you think should be done to keep deep pockets from having an excessive influence on election outcomes? (i.e., Bloomberg, Schumer, candidates supported by Howard Rich, etc.)

Christie

19. How soon do you think it will be before we see meaningful restructuring in state government?

Ben

20. Which of our Constitutional Officers would it make more sense to appoint? Explain your reasons.

Hailey

21. What’s your opinion of eliminating the Budget & Control Board and replacing it with a Department of Administration reporting to the Governor?

Andrew

22. Give the best reason to support and the best reason to oppose the Voter ID Bill?

Kenneth

23. Please explain the post you recently wrote on daylight savings time.

Evan

24. What is the legacy you hope to leave?

25. What do you think about paying teachers based on classroom outcomes?

26. Why are the two major political parties so segregated along racial lines?

27. How can South Carolina Republicans be so diverse as to have elected two Republican Senators that are so different in their ideology? (Lindsey Graham, Jim DeMint….earmarks)

28. I’m optimistic about the next generation of public servants — my fellow classmates and me– who will soon by making decisions that impact our daily lives. What advice can you give us as we move in this direction?

Frankly, with that many questions, I could have talked for a month. But it was great. Been pressed for time, I was really antsy this morning about all I had to do, and ran late and got lost (turns out that Kelly Payne doesn’t teach at Dutch Fork Middle School, which I went to first — they have a nice office — even though I’d been to the right place previously), and I was rattled.

But driving away, I felt nice and relaxed. Ninety minutes of high-speed, non-stop, stream-of-consciousness talking does that for me. It probably doesn’t do all that much for the people listening (so it’s nice when they HAVE to sit there and listen, or get a flunking grade), but I find it… calming. Probably why Freud was such a hit back in the day.

If I don’t hit the road, they won’t feed me in Greenville. As Vincent Sheheen’s Uncle Bob always used to say to bring interviews to a sudden stop: Gottagobye.

And yes, that IS a picture of me, speaking to the class last year, in the upper left-hand corner. Kelly's like that. Very thorough.

By the way, I’m available for that Aflac gig

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Don’t think it would have occurred to me to wonder about this at any point in my newspaper life, but now that I’m into the whole marketing/PR/Mad Man thing now, I find myself wondering about stuff like this…

So I hear that Aflac has fired Gilbert Gottfried as the voice of their duck. You know, the one that says “Aflac!” Here’s something about it, although you’ve probably already heard:

He’ll quack for Aflac no more.

Insurance giant Aflac axed comic Gilbert Gottfried as the voice of its iconic duck yesterday after he posted jokes on Twitter about the quake and tsunami in Japan.

“I just split up with my girlfriend, but like the Japanese say, ‘They’ll be another one floating by any minute now,’ ” was among the dozen tweets Gottfried fired off over the weekend….

I first heard about it at breakfast this morning, and didn’t think anything of it (no skin off my beak), then heard it again at ADCO later, and at that point thought, “Wait a minute…”

Why, I wonder, did they turn to Gilbert Gottfried to do the Aflac duck to begin with? I mean, he’s moderately famous, although irritating, and you pay a premium for that. Agents to feed and all. What was the value they got from that?

Because, while I was well aware of the ad campaign — it’s memorable, and sort of clever in an absurd way — I never knew that that was Gilbert Gottfried doing it. Sure, when you hear it, it sounds like Gilbert Gottfried… but it sounds like Gilbert Gottfried when I say “Aflac!” in a nasal quack, too. (Brian from ADCO agreed when he heard me do it at lunch today. I don’t just say these things, people; I check to confirm first. Back off; I’m a professional.)

It really doesn’t take any special talent. And unless they were getting a bounce from people knowing it was Gottfried, why pay him to do it?

So… here’s what I’m thinking. If Aflac is hard up, I’ll do the duck voice for them from now on. I might even do it at a discount from what they were paying Gottfried. And I won’t make horrible jokes about the poor Japanese, or any other suffering people.

I can use the phone to get that new iPhone or HTC Thunderbolt (which I think is coming out Thursday!) or whatever I get to replace my moribund Blackberry, which is definitely on its last legs. So this couldn’t have happened at a better time.

I hope I’m making this offer in time, before they line up someone else… You gotta move fast these days…

Yep, we’ll be staying right here, folks. But you knew that, right?

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I’ve lost count of the number of alarming notices I’ve gotten from Go Daddy over the last few months, telling me over and over that Your Domain Name is About to Expire!

Email, snail mail… about all they haven’t done was send somebody around to knock on my door.

Finally, last week, being told yet again that bradwarthen.com would expire on March 13, I double-checked with Gene to see if I actually needed to do anything. After all, in my account at Go Daddy, it said in black and white that I was set to auto-renew.

So I sat tight. Today, I got this via email:

We just want to let you know we’ve automatically renewed the following items according to our agreement…

Which means they’ve taken the $11.62 cents out of my bank account for another year. “According to our agreement,” the one we’ve had all along…

I really don’t see the need for all the unnecessary anxiety each year. Yeah, they want my money earlier if they can get it (I guess). But is it really worth all that trouble?