Broad
In my blog, I ruminate over a variety of subjects. I might post a book review, or opine on the process and business of authoring, or comment on interesting, humorous, or exasperating events in my life. I also discuss socio-political issues.
Over a period of decades as a newspaperman, I reported the activities of politicians, including the coverage of election campaigns, and social upheaval.
I found excitement in such events as trying to chase down Vice President Spiro Agnew at a hotel in Chicago.
My reporting on social phenomena such as race riots in Joliet and Chicago, and rioting by the Students for a Democratic Society in the Windy City, stimulated adrenaline rushes.
But nothing was as much fun as attending a meeting of the Kissimmee (Florida) Chamber of Commerce while then-U.S. Rep. Louis (Skip) Bafalis, who was running for re-election, and his aide listened with feigned, intent interest as members of the peanut and popcorn committees reported on proceeds collected at school athletic events. It was a trenchant lesson in basic politics. As they say, all politics is local.
In Tampa, I dived into an investigation of a home-owner’s complaint that a construction company was eroding the banks of a creek where a building project was under way. Soil was spilling into the stream, narrowing it in front of her residence. Obtaining the site plan, I called the construction superintendent and asked him a few questions. Then I drove to the man’s office next to the creek and pointed out how he had contradicted himself. Rocking on his heels, he looked at me and said, “Oh, you tricked me, huh?” Divining that he was about to shove me through the glass door, I mumbled something about needing to get back to the office, and made a hasty retreat – opening the door first. At a county commission meeting two months later, the subject of the construction project and its superintendent arose. The commission chairman dismissed the issue, saying, “He died.” I suspected the superintendent’s bosses were involved in organized crime, which proliferated in Tampa at the time, and were unhappy with the negative publicity the project was engendering.
As editor of an underfunded and short-lived magazine in Palm Beach County called The Insider, I regularly wrote a political commentary column.
You are invited to read my blog. If you are itching to vent your own opinions and feelings, feel free to leave a comment. It might be something that would interest other readers.
The Grammar Grouch
Always a good writer and grammarian, earning top grades in English throughout my school years, I became even more punctilious while serving as copy chief for the group of magazines in Palm Beach Media Group. Soon after my arrival, other staff members recognized me as the go-to guy for all writing issues.
A newspaper review by an acclaimed editor who was a longtime professor of English literature and creative writing praised my writing for its “polish and grace” in my first novel, Breaking Out, and observed, “His sentences and paragraphs are well turned.” That opinion bolsters my authenticity, I think, to expound on a vexing subject: the breakdown of standards in English grammar and usage.
I must say that the sentences and paragraphs in public communication these days are often turned inside out, upside down, topsy-turvy – anything but straightforward and clear. Spelling is careless and punctuation just plain ragged, or almost absent.
What about the broadcast media? As Mark Antony requested at Julius Caesar’s funeral, please “lend me your ears” so we can bury blasphemies of pronunciation and resurrect proper accents. I’ve lent TV and radio my ears, and repeatedly heard national talk show hosts place the accent on the second syllable in “formidable,” i.e., “forMIDable.” It’s “FORmidable.” Take that, Rachel Maddow and President Obama.
I rarely hear “schism” pronounced correctly. Broadcasters say SKISM or SHISM, both wrong. It’s SISM. Of course, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate allows the first two as options, but if that dictionary were a parent, said parent’s permissiveness would result in incorrigible kids.
Some TV show hosts have pet phrases. The brilliant Chris Hayes surely holds the record for most frequent use of “sort of” on a television network, namely, MSNBC. I once decided to count during a conversation he had with a guest. After he used it four times in about one minute, I switched to CNBC, where watching my stocks fall was less painful. Lately, he has mostly avoided that tic.
Even more grating to the ear is TV’s omnipresent “if you will.” Close behind in frequency is “literally.”
So it goes – and I must strive to be more forgiving.
Alternative Health Care
During my 35 years as a newspaper and magazine journalist, I wrote a considerable number of stories on medical and health issues.
In the mid-1970s, an assistant city editor assigned me to interview a local alternative-health activist who propounded the idea that vitamin C was effective against cancer. Though I was no big fan of mainstream medicine even then, this idea seemed to me far-fetched at best and preposterous at worst. Since then, a lively discussion has erupted over the possibility that vitamin C might indeed be beneficial in preventing, or even treating, some forms of cancer.
An editor once assigned me to the distasteful task of delineating the surgical procedure known as colostomy (if you’re not familiar with it, I’ll spare you the details).
A six-part series that I wrote on traditional and alternative cancer treatments elicited 250 phone calls to the Palm Beach Post, many of them from persons desperate for cures of their terminal cancer. Traveling with a photographer to the clinic and calling patients all over the United States who had been successfully treated, I wrote a story about the brilliant research scientist from New York City who developed an anticancer serum and protocol, and opened the clinic offshore because he couldn’t financially afford the FDA requirements for approval and found some of them nonsensical.
A Palm Beach Illustrated story on the heart benefits of walking won me an award from the American Heart Association.
In the last couple of decades, I became a student of alternative medicine and nutrition, believing that the traditional treatments of “cut, burn and poison” were often less than salutary, and frequently deleterious.
Be sure to check out my postings on alternative health practices and positions versus mainstream, establishmentarian treatments such as the pervasive statin drugs, regarded by leading alternative doctors as dangerous and, for the most part, useless – except for making their manufacturers unconscionable profits.