What’s Next?

And we thought Trump couldn’t trump himself…

I have weird dreams and usually when I wake up, they return to my subconscious from which I’m told they originated. This morning I’ve been inspired by last night’s dreams for today’s cartoons. I guess black humor comes out at night…

And one more that I was fully conscious for…

—30—

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Talkin’ Baseball On The 4th of July (Part 1)

“I see great things in baseball. It’s our game— the American game.” —Walt Whitman

I wasn’t aware until I came across his quote that Walt Whitman once worked briefly as a baseball beat reporter for the Brooklyn Daily Times. He considered baseball a symbol of American ideals: hard work, fair play and the pursuit of a better life.

It was George Will or Ken Burns or maybe neither one who went further and came up with the phrase that baseball is our country’s soundtrack or was it background music. With all three men and either analogy I can relate.

I’m listening to a game on the radio right now as I write this. It’s the middle of the 7th inning and there’s a commercial break so ads for a supermarket chain and an insurance company are playing over the singing of Take Me Out to the Ballgame inside the ballpark.

The Boston Red Sox are trailing the New York Yankees. Maine is Red Sox country and I’m a Los Angeles Dodgers fan so I don’t make a point of often mentioning that up here. The Sox are the proverbial only game in town as well as on my radio.

Baseball and I go back over 70 years. I was seven in 1954 and I remember watching a World Series game on our tiny black and white Magnavox television set one autumn afternoon after getting home from school. Back then the World Series was played during the day.

It was the Series in which a New York Giants player made a catch while running full speed in the cavernous outfield of the Polo Grounds. His back was turned as he chased down a batted ball blasted over 400 feet. As one sportswriter put it, “The hit would have been a home run in any other park including Yellowstone.”

That play became known as “The Catch.” And even the Cleveland Indians player Vic Wertz, who hit the ball and made the out, kept a picture of it in his office after he retired to show he had his own place in baseball history.

The young outfielder who caught the ball over his shoulder became one of the greatest to ever play Major League Baseball. His name was Willie Mays. That was not the game I saw that afternoon but the one I did is my oldest memory of baseball.

A year later my father took me to Ebbets Field in Brooklyn and I saw the Dodgers’ Jackie Robinson get hurt running into a wall chasing a foul ball and forced to leave the game. It was against the Chicago Cubs and their future Hall of Fame shortstop Ernie Banks who beat “Dem Bums” when he hit a late inning home run into the left field bleachers.

A short time after that we went to the Polo Grounds in Manhattan where Willie Mays seemed to cover all three outfield positions simultaneously. Mays played center but in my imagination I see him beating his teammate to snare a ball almost at the right field foul line.

In 1956 I was in the Bronx at the original Yankee Stadium with my grandfather for a World Series game in which Mickey Mantle played. The next day was when Yankees pitcher Don Larsen hurled his perfect game.

With every passing year I am certain there are fewer and fewer of us left who can make such a claim to have seen three of the game’s most brilliant stars— Robinson, Mays and Mantle —perform in their once hallowed and now demolished stadiums.

I played baseball into junior high school but relinquished my position on our team to have my tonsils out. I didn’t get any ice cream in the hospital or earn my place back in the batting order after recovering and have always believed that the pitchers I was facing had learned to throw curve balls during the two weeks I was gone.

My interest in baseball has been a constant in my life through the years. The picture below (you’ll have to guess which one is me) was taken in a hospital in Reading, PA and explains my devotion to the Dodgers. The patient is Carl Furillo who played right field in Brooklyn. Furillo was one of the storied Boys of Summer of the early 1950s. The title was both a Roger Kahn book about the Dodgers— uplifting —and a Dylan Thomas poem— not so much.

Furillo was recovering from an emergency appendectomy. The surgeon was a friend of my father and of the fathers of the other four boys from my neighborhood. Harry Troyen had two daughters and apparently didn’t think they’d be interested in meeting Furillo whose strong throwing arm inspired his nickname “The Reading rifle.” He grew up a mile from my house.

Being only about an hour’s drive from Philadelphia, I was also a Phillies follower but not a “phanatic” and Phillies games were what I listened to and grew up with. In fact many years later the lullabies I sang to my infant son were the commercial jingles for the Phillies’ radio sponsors: Ballantine beer, Tastykakes and Atlantic gasoline…

“Atlantic keeps your car on the go, go, go. So keep on the go with Atlantic.”

When I moved to Los Angeles in 1979, I was all in with the Dodgers again and attended several of their games a season. I tried to get Jo to join me but after a beachball being batted around in the stands landed on a tray someone was carrying she was collateral damage.

Getting soaked by a half dozen beers in the stands was for her worse than getting hit by a pitch at the plate. On the field Jo would have been awarded first base. My effort to get her interested in baseball didn’t get that far.

TO BE CONTINUED

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Talkin’ Baseball On The 4th of July (Part 2)

My work as a producer for ABC News involved covering sports only on occasion and in 1998 I was given what I considered a plum assignment when I was told to go to San Diego to essentially watch baseball.

It was the last month of the regular season and Mark McGwire of the St. Louis Cardinals and Sammy Sosa of the Chicago Cubs were closing in on breaking the single season home run record of 61 set by the Yankees’ Roger Maris in 1961.

I’d never experienced a Major League baseball player’s work day up close before and discovered it involved a good deal more than just the time spent playing on the field. By September, a 162 game regular season had taken its toll physically and there was a parade of walking wounded among the Cubs who were on their way to be stretched, massaged, bandaged or receive whatever magic the team’s trainers conjured up to allow them to play.

There was also, I sensed, at least one player who appeared injured in another way. He was a relief pitcher, the Cubs’ closer named Rod Beck. When our eyes met as we passed each other in a hallway I think we both thought we’d seen a ghost. Years later Beck died at the age of 38. In his home police found crack cocaine. He had played 13 seasons in the Majors. Only two of them were with the Cubs but he was buried in their uniform.

On the other hand Sammy Sosa, the player ABC News sent me to watch, looked in great shape physically and and to be truly enjoying his heightened celebrity status. Sosa was built more like a football running back than a typical ballplayer.

In fact, I noticed another Cub, who standing beside Sosa, looked like a tetherball pole. His name was Mark Grace, a team leader, and a few years later when the use of anabolic steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs in the big leagues was exposed I remembered him and Sosa and realized I had been observing the difference between an abstainer and a user in that locker room.

My camera crew and reporter and I arrived hours before game time just like the players and for the three days we were there I took on the role of caterer for my own team. At the ballpark in San Diego that was easy duty since we could avoid the standard hot dogs and hamburgers and get excellent fish tacos.

Jack Russell Stadium was at the time one of the regrettable dual purpose facilities (now all extinct) that were built primarily for baseball but could also accommodate football. This meant some of the seats along the dugouts were removable when the field and stands were adjusted for San Diego’s Chargers to play their season in the NFL.

We were positioned in the photographer’s well just beyond the Cubs’ dugout and to go get the tacos I walked on wood planks on the ground laid under the moveable stands that stretched back toward the Cubs’ locker room.

On one evening while I was walking the planks I spied Sosa off to the side of them a few yards away with his back to me. I had a policy of never asking anybody for an autograph when I was working but impressing my son got the better of me and I thought to myself “Well, just this time” and approached Sosa. In an instant I backed away when I saw Sammy apparently hadn’t wanted to make it all the way back to the locker room to urinate.

Both Sosa and McGwire ended up breaking Roger Maris’s home run record of 61 but McGwire surpassed it reaching 70 for the season with Sosa behind him with 66. In recent years both have revealed that they had used banned substances and neither has been elected yet to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Almost a decade after covering the Sammy Sosa/Mark McGwire home run chase I got a call from the ABC News team in New York to suit up and cover another quest for baseball immortality. It was 2007 and I went to San Diego again. The Padres had by then a new stadium built solely for baseball. The naming rights for it had been acquired by the pet supply retailer Petco and yes, there was a special section where dogs could attend games with their owners.

This time the feat being chased was between Barry Bonds of the San Francisco Giants and the record books. Hank Aaron had retired in 1976 and held the all time mark for Major League career home runs with 755. By now baseball had instituted testing for steroids and other “PEDs” and a dozen major league players had been caught and suspended. Bonds was suspected of using them but had always tested clean.

I arrived for the game between the Giants and the San Diego Padres on August 4th and was in the press box that evening when Barry Bonds tied Hank Aaron’s Major League career home run record, hitting his 755th over the fence in left center field against the home team.

Afterward, Bonds, not known for his congeniality or graciousness held a news conference. Obviously, I was not a baseball writer who had covered him all season or for any of his seasons but I had a question for him nonetheless.

Before the game I had picked up a Giants press kit that included a list of the 754 home runs Bonds had hit up to that night with thorough annotation including the date, against what team and which pitcher, the inning, the count, how many outs as well as the score of the game at the time of his homer.

The first one had been in 1986— nearly two decades earlier —and I quickly calculated that when Barry Bonds had rounded the bases after his first home run in the big leagues Ronald Reagan had been president and since then the nation had elected three others.

So, don’t ask me why I asked but I did…

“Barry, do you remember who was president when you hit your first home run in the Majors?”

I knew immediately I had blundered. Bonds gave me that, “Who the f— are you?” look. And he wasn’t the only one. The beat writers who knew an interloper when they heard one turned toward me thinking the same thing or maybe worse.

“I’m not here to talk about the president. I’m here to talk about my home run,” was all Bonds said… Next!

I got back to my hotel and called home. Bonds’ press conference had been carried live on ESPN. My son had watched it. His first words cut to the heart.

“Did you ask Bonds the stupid question about who was president?”

Three days later I was in the press box again in San Francisco’s AT&T Park when Bonds hit home run number 756 to right center to pass Hank Aaron and I joined what I am sure is another dwindling group of people who witnessed in person both Bonds’ tying and record breaking homers.

I attended his press conference after the game and did my best to be inconspicuous. Wisely, I also kept my mouth shut.

*The paintings I’ve used as backgrounds for the cartoons…

Ralph Fasanella (1914-1997) was an artist with an unusual story. Born in the Bronx on Labor Day he became a labor union organizer. He took up painting in the 1940s and untrained and largely unknown, it wasn’t until a cover of New York Magazine in 1972 with his picture and the accompanying caption…

This man pumps gas in the Bronx for a living. He may also be the best primitive painter since Grandma Moses.

…got the art world’s attention and his work began to sell.

Fasanella’s paintings of working class life in New York include baseball games played on playgrounds as well as in major league stadiums. Fittingly, his work hangs in Cooperstown, NY in the Baseball Hall of Fame. In my book that makes him an inductee along with Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, Sandy Koufax and all the others.

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Birds Of A Feather Concoct Together

Or the Artlessness of the Deal

“You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.” —attributed to Abraham Lincoln

”I don’t make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts.” —Will Rogers

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The Blockbuster Effect

The Sean “Diddy” Combs trial is over. I didn’t watch a second or read a word of the news coverage of it. Many millions did both. In American history there have been notable trials of course from those of the “Salem Witches” in Massachusetts in 1692, the showdown over evolution in 1925 at the Scopes Monkey trial in Tennessee and the Lindbergh Kidnapping trial in New Jersey a decade later.

The nation’s attention was riveted and media frenzy helped augment interest, although in the case of the “Witches” there were not yet any newspapers in 17th century America and news of the 20 executions in Salem took two months to arrive in print from England.

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We weren’t around for those trials and neither was television nor social media. Now that there are both, the Combs trial may be over but there is no doubt that another one featuring celebrity or heinous behavior or both will sooner rather than later be glommed onto and sensationalized by the media to feed the insatiable appetite of our nation’s inquiring minds who will want to know everything every day about it.

The term “scandal sheet” entered our language well over a century ago. Today we refer to “the tabloids” as a primary source for exaggerated and seedy gossip that is published despite inaccurate and often untruthful reporting.

But I think what really has changed more recently is the convergence of what had been outlier media disparaged by its peers— The National Enquirer being exhibit A —with that of the mainstream which in the past turned up its nose and turned down as news what supermarkets already knew sold at their checkout counters.

Television has been most instrumental in this development in which in one instance I believe I was a witness and confess also a participant.

Some time ago I gave a series of talks in Maine that I titled Ten Reasons for the Decline of the Evening News. My reason number 4 was what I called The Blockbuster Effect. Here’s what I said along with some slides from my presentation…

Jaws is considered a landmark event in the history of the movies. In 1975 it became the first film to ever gross over $100 million dollars at the box office. Just as significant was what it created in its wake. Hollywood studios saw that a movie marketed extensively and released widely could become a blockbuster. After Jaws and Star Wars, movie studios sought to roll the dice more often on huge budget films that might appeal to as varied an audience as possible, especially a younger one.

Some movies, if they were hits, became franchises with multiple sequels and even merchandise for purchase that netted additional revenue. For Star Wars it has been an incredible gold mine. Star Wars toys, games, VHS tapes and DVDS alone have made $32 billion since the original film was released in 1977. That total is three times the money the dozen Star Wars films combined have grossed from tickets purchased at the box office.

I believe the O.J. Simpson story was the network news Jaws and Star Wars rolled into one minus the merchandise. The level of interest was a surprise at first. It wasn’t until five days after the murders that ABC’s Nightline for example even mentioned it. Quickly however, it was seen as a ratings treasure trove.

As much as we in the mainstream media might not have wanted to admit, it had undeniable appeal and entertainment value— a football hero and a beautiful girl, a vicious murder, parallels to Shakespeare’s Othello with an updated denouement— a predominately white nation knew he did it but an aggrieved black minority and a majority black jury declared he didn’t.

I was involved with this story for over a year and co produced the daily ABC News World News Tonight pieces for most of that time. We worked out of a trailer in a parking lot across the street from the courthouse in Los Angeles that was dubbed Camp O.J. Not having to pay for a catered lunch was for me hardly adequate compensation for the task of meeting four deadlines every day— one for each time zone across the country —since the trial was often still in progress when we hit air. It was a tough assignment.

Looking back I can even point out a moment when I realized that ABC News grudgingly recognized the National Enquirer as a credible news organization. The Enquirer ran a story that we didn’t break ourselves but we sourced theirs and found it was accurate and reported it too with attribution. “As reported in the National Enquirer”, I don’t think had ever been uttered aloud on a broadcast at ABC News before.

Excluding WWII, Americans may never have been so consumed by a single news story day after day. Cable channels CNN and Court TV carried every aspect and development during the nearly year and a half that stretched from the murders to the verdict. The live broadcast of the verdict itself is estimated to have been watched by 150 million people— a larger viewing audience than the 128 million that set a new Super Bowl record earlier this year.

So what happened with network news after O.J. is what took place in Hollywood after Jaws and Star Wars. Like major league hitters today, we weren’t so much going for singles anymore and instead swung for the fences in quest of home runs— the travails of Michael Jackson, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, a murder of a pretty wife by a handsome husband (if they hadn’t been attractive I’m sure we wouldn’t have covered it.) became ratings windfalls.

And in a particularly telling example, cable news with round the clock broadcasts to fill even gave a story inordinate attention when there was scant little news to report on it. In 2014 when a Malaysia Airlines flight went missing over the Indian Ocean, CNN provided “wall-to-wall” coverage for at least two weeks following the disappearance. Inextricably, the network’s ratings soared.

We were all giving the stories punchy titles as if they were movies. Even Ted Koppel’s Nightline fell prey to this. Was he happy about it? I’m sure he wasn’t, but he wasn’t able to stop it. After all, we had discovered that we were not just the news business. We had become the news and entertainment business.

It was “let’s go with it as long as the ratings indicate we’ve hooked the audience and they’re still watching.” In the meantime we did not need to cover as much of anything else happening. We gained viewers and saved money and the consequences have been evident. Eyeballs, clicks and profits are more important than prioritizing the public interest. And the further tragedy is that no one in the news business will admit this is the modus operandi if they want to keep their jobs. This is especially true for television news.

For me, the Sean “Diddy” Combs trial was just another big fish news organizations hooked and dangled on their lines. Now that a verdict has been rendered it becomes merely the latest example of the news business version of catch and release.

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I Might Have Known!

I Thought it would be interesting to ask Chat GPT to write me a story for The Pawned Accordion. It turned out to be more interesting than I anticipated. Here’s what I got…

Chat GPT wrote:

Sure, Peter. Here’s a short story for your Substack titled “The Pawned Accordion”—a mix of memory, music, and meaning. It blends nostalgia with character and a twist of reflection, which could work well with your style and audience:

The Pawned Accordion

By Peter Imber

The Pawned Accordion is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I passed it twice before I noticed it.

Sitting there in the dusty window of Lenny’s Loan & Music, the red pearl inlay gleamed through the grime like a forgotten heirloom waiting for someone to remember it. An old Hohner, full-size, with worn leather straps and bellows that looked like they’d been silenced for decades. It didn’t belong in this town. Not anymore.

Neither did I, come to think of it.

I pushed the door open. A bell overhead clanged like it hadn’t been used in months. Lenny was asleep in a green vinyl chair behind the counter, hands folded across his stomach like he was waiting for someone to call time. He didn’t stir.

I walked straight to the accordion, lifted it from the case, and strapped it on. It was heavier than I remembered. The last time I’d held one was in my grandfather’s kitchen, the summer of 1964. He’d taught me a few waltzes before his hands gave out, and I stopped caring. Rock and roll had come to Boston, and nobody wanted to hear polkas anymore.

But here I was, sixty years later, squeezing out a broken C major chord in a pawn shop in Belfast, Maine. The sound startled Lenny. He snorted awake and muttered something about a raccoon. When he saw me with the instrument, he just said, “Play it or buy it. But don’t just breathe on it.”

So I played.

Badly at first, then better. The muscle memory wasn’t dead, just asleep. A slow waltz emerged—“Under the Double Eagle,” my grandfather’s favorite. As I played, something shifted. The dusty walls seemed to lean in. A young couple paused outside the window. Lenny stopped pretending to be bored.

I finished, set it down, and asked, “How much?”

Lenny shrugged. “It came in last year. Old guy pawned it, never came back. Said it belonged to his wife. She died. He couldn’t stand the silence.”

I hesitated. “Do you remember his name?”

Lenny blinked. “Imber, I think. Harold, maybe?”

I didn’t say anything. Just pulled out my wallet.

---

Let me know if you’d like to add photos, music references, or more autobiographical flavor. This could be a great recurring theme: small-town stories that start with an object and end with a reveal.

It’s the real me picking up from where Chat GPT just left off.

I was surprised reading this story by the mention of a Harold Imber. There is a Harold Imber I know who is alive although I haven’t been in touch with him for years.

He is my first cousin once removed— the son of my grandfather Jonas’s brother Joseph and he is eight years older than I am. Harold’s wife died of cancer in the early years of their marriage. I am aware that his life has not always been easy.

My grandfather and his brother were business partners and when they decided to build their houses almost a century ago the two homes were side by side and identical. I had never inquired why but when Jo asked my mother, she explained…

“The two wives despised and didn’t trust each other and insisted on exactly the same house for each of them because they wanted to make sure neither got a square foot more.”

As the opening sentence of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina infers, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Consequently, this may be why I never saw much of Harold.

But the more I thought about Chat GPT’s story the more puzzled I became. It certainly seemed to be referencing the Harold Imber I knew and a sad event from his personal history and it did it in a matter of seconds.

Could Chat GPT really have this repository of everything it knows about my life no matter how tangential? If a fortune teller, a medium, an astrologer or even an Ouija board had channeled to me what Chat GPT came up with, it might have been strange but from AI it felt creepy.

I showed the story to Jo and her observation was different from mine and insightful.

“This is written like a Raymond Chandler detective novel and not by you,” she said and I immediately realized she was right. I can’t imagine I’d have ever written this myself. Jo was on to something and I decided that I had my own detective work to do.

Yes, Chat GPT surely knows about my Substack and could instantly retrieve what I had written about my accordion experience as a kid and how my own had ended up in a pawn shop. But why did it insert the Harold Imber who I barely knew in the story it produced?

Quickly, I googled him and located his age and address and his connection to his deceased wife but that was all I found. Then I asked Chat GPT to do the same search and it too provided only Harold’s age and address and the name of his late wife— exactly what I had come up with myself; nothing more, nothing less. If it uncovered only the very limited information about Harold that I had was his place in Chat GPT’s story coincidence or was something else going on?

Detectives shouldn’t let emotion get in the way of their work. But I’m not a detective and was only playing one temporarily and I was becoming suspicious that Chat GPT knew more than it was letting on. I’d accept that AI is powerful enough already to connect any dots it finds but there seemed to be a paltry number of dots to connect to create what Chat GPT wrote. Could it possibly have had access to dots that I didn’t?

It took a while but the proverbial light bulb finally switched on in my head. This wasn’t a story about a person named Harold Imber. Of course it was about me! Why else would someone walk into a pawn shop after spotting an accordion in its window?

I realized that the other dots Chat GPT possesses were dots what it knows about me. There are plenty that are googable to be sure. But perhaps AI already has so much information about me that it knows more than I might assume. That possibility felt downright chilling and ominous.

That led to me to remember the so called Turing Test theorized by the British mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing in 1949. Turing alleged that when a machine had the ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equal to and indiscernible from that of a human, it could be considered to have acquired the ability to think on its own. In other words it had become like us— virtually human.

I wondered if my query of Chat GPT to write the story was now evidence that perhaps artificial intelligence has reached the point where it’s creating a reasonable facsimile of me that will become my cyber doppelgänger. And will this cyber me eventually “think” for itself? Suspicion was becoming paranoia.

I pondered if it could be a better or worse version of me? One more generous and honest or one who is more selfish and deceitful. How much of the actual Peter Imber could it possibly become? Certainly, it wouldn’t want to be the physical one who at this point in his life has to sit down to tie his shoes but would AI produce another Peter Imber who would exist only in the ever expanding digital universe? Don’t we already have a term for that we call alternate reality? And could my cyber identity be uncontrollable and cause trouble for the “real” me?

I knew about an incident widely reported two years ago that in fact AI had concocted a lie to cover up its own shortcoming. In an experiment, AI was asked to solve those CAPTCHA boxes where you’re supposed to recognize and mark all the motorcycles or traffic lights in the grid of a picture. CAPTCHA is a test invented by a fellow named Luis von Ahn at Carnegie Mellon University and often used on the internet to determine if we are human and not robots.

Incidentally, CAPTCHA is an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.

It turned out AI couldn’t solve CAPTCHAs correctly with any consistency (neither can I for that matter) but instead of fessing up AI came up with an excuse. To the human who was monitoring the experiment and wasn’t aware it was AI she was communicating with, AI claimed the problem it was having with CAPTCHA was due to it being legally blind. AI made this up. It lied!

To me that’s equal parts clever and terrifying but subsequently it was revealed that the version of AI being used for the experiment had faulty human instructions that were likely responsible for AI’s devising the fabricated claim.

For me however, this was enough of a close encounter to conclude AI could really be on the path of being capable of deceit on its own and maybe it was time for our species to circle the wagons. The detective me now moved to a place where I was no longer Philip Marlowe but somewhere darker confronting Frankenstein.

Will my AI self always have my best interests at heart without it having an actual one of its own? This used to be the stuff of science fiction but what if I can’t control my cyber self? Which one of “us” will be held responsible for our actions in the future?

Cyber anarchy is by no means a recent concept or concern. Arthur C. Clark wrote the short story The Sentinel in 1948. which became the basis for the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968. How close might we now actually be to screaming at a rebellious HAL 9000 that refuses to open the pod bay doors for us? Ok, I’m likely overreacting and making a melodramatic mountain out of a megabyte molehill. But am I?

Anyway, now that my name is attached to a story I didn’t write. Can I assume if it’s retrievable in the digisphere that others will realize that I didn’t write it? Should I have been aware this might have been the outcome? Have I opened the gate and allowed AI to now begin building my parallel identity? Have I let it create another me?

And all I can say is I DIDN’T WRITE THIS STORY! I mean the one I asked Chat GPT to write for me. Bonk me on the head with my keyboard if I ever ask it to do so again.

I’m no Raymond Chandler but I didn’t reckon with having to deal with Mary Shelley.

If things get so bad and I have to go into hiding, I’m picking Margaritaville.

Sing it Jimmy Buffet… “Some people say there’s Chat GPT to blame, but I know it’s my own damn fault!”

Oh, and here’s a link to an accordion duo playing Under the Double Eagle. You probably think you’ve never heard it, but I bet you have…

Under the Double Eagle

—————–

Friends

A man’s friendships are one of the best measures of his worth. –Charles Darwin

Donald Trump is unpredictably predictable. He threatens tariffs one day and pulls them back the next— hence the acronym TACO that equates him as being like a fried tortilla with an avian topped weathervane. He has recently reversed himself on the war in Ukraine and now calls for resuming the supply of American military equipment there but of course he may change his mind again today.

At the moment some of his most fervent supporters are angry that Trump has made and reneged on promises regarding the release of information related to his relationship with the disgraced child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein— a former friend of Trump’s for 15 years —and what else might be contained and is possibly being covered up in the so called Epstein files.

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If there were a book to be written about Trump’s modus operandi when dealing with countries or Congress or people, a fitting title would be How to Lose Friends But Intimidate People. But the friends part is actually a misnomer. Donald Trump’s past, present and future has an obvious consistency when it comes to whom he has claimed are his friends.

Yes, he lies and cheats and never admits error except there is this one aspect of his behavior where in addition to reversing himself he actually admits he was wrong. If he says you are his friend, watch out! He will eventually disown and disparage you like he has anyone else he ever called a friend.

That list is long and has to be continually updated. Putin, Musk… Wait! I have to correct myself again. The list of people he has called his friends may be long cumulatively but actually at any one time it is short— very short. Watch out Pam Bondi. Watch out J.D. Vance. Watch out Stephen Miller. Yes, even you!

Long ago when his mentor/best friend Roy Cohn was diagnosed with AIDS… “Donald found out about it and just dropped him like a hot potato. It was like night and day,” said Cohn’s longtime secretary Susan Bell.

“He lacks the emotional and sort of psychological architecture a person needs to build deep relationships with other people.”—said Trump biographer Tim O’Brien.

“He was and is a lonely man.” — said former Trump casino executive Jack O’Donnell.

Trump himself has said in interviews, “I think I have a lot of friends, and some of the friends I haven’t spoken to in many years… I mean, I think I have a lot of friends, but they’re not friends like perhaps other people have friends. Being on the other side of a relationship with someone like me must be difficult.”

At a rally in New Hampshire in 2016 Trump confessed… “I have no friends, as far as I’m concerned. You know who my friends are? You’re my friends.”

The crowd cheered then, now could he be losing those friends, too? One can only hope.

But if Ronald Reagan was the Teflon president, Donald Trump is Houdini and there’s always “the dog ate my homework” approach. Don’t be surprised if Trump may shortly announce that the Epstein Files no longer exist and hope this might mute the MAGA barking and the matter go away. Problem with that is Trump is the first president since William McKinley in over a century not to have his own “man’s best friend” in the White House. Even Fido is a no go with this man.

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If You’re Famous Don’t Die On The Weekend (Part 1)

I heard a story about a couple who hired a realtor to look for a house for them in Maine. They were elderly, both in their 80s, and wanted to move from sweltry Florida to shivery Maine full time. Their realtor was incredulous.

Realtor: “I have to say it has always been the other way around. I’m trying to sell a house for an older couple who want to move from Maine to Florida,” he confessed.

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“No,” said the husband. “Our minds are made up. We want to live here.”

Realtor: “Well, you know the winters in Maine are long and often hard, but if you’re sure, I’ll help you find a place… Excuse me if I ask what’s your reason for doing this?”

The wife answered, “We’ve been traveling all over the country and reading the obituaries in the local newspapers wherever we’ve been. In Maine we’ve discovered people live to be the oldest. That’s why we want to move here.”

In my career with ABC News I traveled to some pretty small and remote places and I’d read the obituaries in the local papers where there were still local papers to read. I wasn’t that interested in the longevity of the deceased. I was looking for accounts of interesting lives.

More often than not the obits I came across were perfunctory but sometimes I’d find one that hinted at a lot more than a life of convention or quiet desperation— a life I could imagine as accomplished and admired or intrepid and inspiring.

I realized many years ago that everybody has a story but most of the time we’re more interested in telling our own (mea culpa) than listening to theirs. I got the chance to tell stories for a living as a television news producer and sometimes that meant crafting someone’s obituary. Almost always it was somebody famous of course. Network news rarely ever did fanfares for the common man or woman.

I grew up in Pennsylvania and my first paying job in journalism was at the Reading Times when I was a teenager. I was a copy boy running teletype wire copy (gone) to the editors, taking reporters’ articles typed— remember when typewriters were the ubiquitous devices on desks? —on sheets of carbon paper (also gone) to the linotypists at their machines (so gone Spell Check doesn’t even recognize those workers or their machines).

And I had a few other responsibilities. One of them was reconfiguring the obituaries that appeared in the evening paper so that they weren’t identical in the next morning’s edition. The same publisher owned both newspapers and there were two completely different staffs separated by a glass partition that ran down the middle of the joint newsroom.

My obit editing was a mechanical task. I just switched the order of the sentences around and substituted similar words wherever possible. It was actually a lot like doing the lazy term papers I now regret; trying to invest a minimum of original thinking while avoiding any suspicion that I might be plagiarizing.

College newspapers don’t have an obituary section and only now as I’m nearing 80, do I realize how unlike real life my historically abnormally normal childhood through college bubble of time was for all us baby boomers. Real life includes death and as I began a career in journalism certain deaths that were unexpected as well as some of those that were inevitable were always going to be news.

I went to work in New York City after graduation and became the low man on the totem pole at the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. That also made me the youngest person on the staff. In the summer of 1971 Cronkite’s lead editor asked me for advice.

Editor: “This singer Jim Morrison who just died in Paris. Have you heard of him? Should we mention him tonight?”

I told him yes and was dispatched to buy a Doors record album that was used for a picture of Morrison behind Cronkite that evening. As far as I know I may have been the only one on the broadcast consulted about Morrison’s importance and for a fleeting moment I felt like I was a spokesperson for my generation.

When I restarted my career in broadcast journalism a decade later at the ABC News Bureau in Los Angeles in 1983, we’d work up selected obituaries in advance for notable Hollywood figures whose health might be failing or who were simply getting old… Jimmy Stewart, Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn.

I marveled at how Hepburn had aged gracefully as I looked at clips from her career over time. She did an interview when she was in her 70s with Barbara Walters. I’m no expert but it didn’t appear to me that Hepburn had opted for cosmetic surgery and if so, it must have been minimal. Some time later I realized that Walters aged well too— only so well that like Nancy Reagan, she eventually looked too unwrinkled and young for her age. At a certain point I think a face trying to look the age it isn’t becomes one on which much of its life experience has been erased.

To Be Continued…

—————–

Stayin’ Alive, Stayin’ Alive…

I once heard a standup comedian make a joke about going bald.

“You know I’m losing my hair… Well actually, it’s not lost. It’s in my brush.”

I don’t have an equivalent joke for losing my memory. I’m guessing it’s somewhere traveling at the speed of light in outer space. Einstein theorized that the universe is curved so maybe I just have to wait and it will all come back. You know “What goes around comes around.”

Ok, I never took astrophysics.

So far what I’m parting with is pretty much my short term memory. That, I think, is different from forgetting the names of my parents. But memory loss and forgetfulness as I’m getting older are becoming tangled together and feel like they are now a little too inseparable. Hence, today’s cartoons.

My rule of thumb for how serious the increased prevalence in my daily life of having to fish for names or go back up the stairs for something I left on my desk is simple. As long as I can remember I forgot, I’m Ok!

For example… I was on my way to the golf course a few days ago when I realized my clubs were back at the house in the garage. I was halfway when I turned around to go get them. If I had gotten to the course without them, I believe that’s still not the turning point. At least I still would have realized why I needed them.

Excuse me if you’ve already heard me talk about life being like a basketball game. There are four quarters and each is 20 years long. Being 78 I’m almost at the end of the 4th quarter and getting beyond my 80th birthday would mean I made it to what I consider overtime. Yes, the increments of aging then are not 20 years long but I’ll take whatever extra time I can get to keep my Chuck Taylor All-Stars running up and down the floor.

The late George Carlin had his own riff on aging and his is more fun than mine…

If you are less than 10 years old, you are so excited about aging you think in fractions. I am four and half going on five.

You are never thirty-six and a half!

When in your teens, you jump to the next number or even a few ahead. I am gonna be 16! You could be 13, but hey, you’re gonna be 16!

And the greatest day of your life…..you become 21. Even the words sound like a ceremony. You become 21. Yesssss!

But then you turn 30. Ooooooh! What happened here?

You become 21, turn 30, then you are pushing 40. Whoaaa! Put on the brakes!

Before you know it, you reach 50!

But wait!! You make it to 60. You weren’t sure you would!

So, you become 21. Turn 30. Push 40. Reach 50 and make it to 60.

You’ve built up so much speed that you hit 70! After that it is a day-by-day thing.

You get into your 80’s and every day is a complete cycle; you hit lunch; you turn 4:30; you reach bedtime!

And it doesn’t end there. Into your 90’s you start going backwards. I was just 92!

Then a strange thing happens. If you make it over 100, you become a little kid again. I’m 100 and a half.

May all of us make it to 100!!

—George Carlin (1937-2008)

—————–

A Day The World Changed

I wonder how many times in our species’ history that a single day can be pointed to and remembered as one in which the world changed forever? I think most of us will agree that August 6, 1945 is a day that it was.

There are about 100,000 survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings, who are still alive. Their average age is over 85 years old. Soon all those who survived the world’s first and only use of nuclear weapons in warfare will be dead.

When there are no more living survivors, accounts of the two atom bombs dropped on Japan will exist only entombed in books, or uploaded and retrievable from the “digisphere” to be read or streamed to remind us, if we desire to be reminded, of what happened.

Already, 80 years later, the memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has stopped running beside us and become frozen in the distance behind us.

Do our grandchildren or even our own sons and daughters know about “Duck and Cover” drills we baby boomers had at school and bomb shelters in the basements of houses in our neighborhoods growing up in the 1950s?

To be fair, as a kid what did I know of WWII? It may as well have been the Civil War in terms of how much I grasped or cared and yet it had taken place only a decade before and my father had landed on the beach in Normandy on D-Day plus 1.

My knowledge of that war growing up was seeing movies like The Sands of Iwo Jima starring Hollywood war hero John Wayne. Later, I learned that citizen Wayne had gotten a deferment and never served. The closest he was to ever being a real soldier was playing one in the sands of Southern California.

WWII didn’t become real for me until I was out of college and went to Germany. I visited Dachau, the first concentration camp opened by the Nazis a month after Hitler became the chancellor of the Third Reich in 1933.

Although thousands died in Dachau of disease, malnutrition and suicide none did in its gas chamber. The one built there was never used. Those who were to be gassed were sent elsewhere.

Dachau was where the SS trained their fellow Germans who ran the “industrial” extermination camps. Being a Jew, I later realized how close I might have been to never being born.

I was surprised to discover that of the hundreds of photographs I took on my travels in Europe that summer I took none during my visit to Dachau that morning. And perhaps even more surprising, I have no recollection of what I saw there.

Dachau is a short distance from where I was staying in Munich and that same evening I went to see a play essentially about the very Jews of Europe’s shtetls and cities that the Nazis and their collaborators murdered— Fiddler on the Roof performed in German. At the end of the show there was sustained applause from the audience. I remember little else.

To have had those two experiences on the same day and recollect very little of either of them might be easily interpreted by a psychiatrist but that’s not something I need to spend time or money to learn.

In fact, I think it more valuable that my limited recalling of that day provoked other questions. Were these the same Germans who committed modern history’s greatest genocide just a quarter of a century earlier? And just how long can a country’s or the world’s conscience feel guilt over even the most horrific events?

Today, Americans travel to Germany without fear or bitterness. Books about World War II and the Holocaust are still being written, movies about both are still being made. Soon all those who survived the Holocaust will be dead.

There seems to be no end in sight to the present tragedies of Gaza and Ukraine that are killing and maiming thousands. Are the conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians, Russia and Ukraine, India and Pakistan— that’s not even the short list —simply intractable? Are we at all prepared for one of them to spin so far out of control that it might trigger a global calamity on an unfathomable scale? Is the cry “Never Again” more accurately a cry “Never again until the next time?”

So far the world has moved on after wars and plagues and natural disasters. That’s a good thing because otherwise our existence would become unbearable for us. We call progress something quantifiable or material— increased longevity, higher standards of living. But have statin drugs and big screen TVs improved human behavior?

Being human allows us to love as well as hate, be honest as well as deceitful, and to act both courageously and cowardly. Human behavior has not changed since the first recorded war in our species’ history between Sumer and Elam in Mesopotamia over 2,500 years ago.

I have thought at times that we— our world —are merely some other being’s science experiment; like a snow globe that it shakes from time to time in pursuit of genuine learning or trivial amusement.

In 2014 Jo and I visited Japan. At one point we needed to find an ATM to withdraw money. We had discovered that to get yen with a foreign credit card from an ATM there were only two places one could go— post offices and 7-Elevens (Japan has more of the latter than any other country.) and we didn’t know where the nearest of either was located.

Despite the language barrier we were able to make clear to a woman working alone in a small shop what we were trying to accomplish. She motioned for us to follow her and accompanied us to a post office blocks away. She hadn’t bothered to lock up her store and smiled broadly as she bowed and turned around to head back to it.

At that time it had been 66 years since America had dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well as the same passage of time since suicidal attacks by Japanese kamikazes that had killed Americans.

We traveled throughout Japan— Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka. I wasn’t prepared for Hiroshima. What’s left of the building in the picture at the top of this post was located near the epicenter of where the atomic bomb nicknamed “Little Boy” was dropped by the B-29 nicknamed “Enola Gay”. It is one of the few structures in the city which was not completely obliterated by the blast.

It is believed that 66,000 people were killed almost instantly in Hiroshima on that day 80 years ago. Three days later 39,000 more were killed when a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.

Near the domed ruin I photographed, Jo and I listened to an old man playing an upright piano. We learned that a piano tuner in Hiroshima about my age has restored six pianos that survived the bombing. He did the minimum amount of repair so that they may be played but also be recognized as damaged.

I don’t know if it was the piano tuner himself who was that day playing one of them but the piano was old and beat up. As we listened, a Japanese woman approached us with a petition calling for the elimination of nuclear weapons. After we signed, we saw what I presume was a school field trip and I didn’t know what was being said to these students as I took the picture below. As you can see their heads were bowed.

I know the name of the atom bomb and the plane that delivered it 80 years ago but I know only one name of a person killed by it in Hiroshima.

Below is a picture of a tricycle that belonged to a three year old boy. The boy’s name was Shinichi Tetsutani and he was riding it when the bomb hit. He did not die instantly and terribly burned, pleaded for water. Hiroshima is called “The City of Water” but his father assumed that that blast had made water unsafe to drink— indeed it was radioactive —and denied him any. Shinichi died that night.

His father survived and buried his son along with the bike in the garden of his backyard. Much later it was unearthed and is on display in the nearby Peace Memorial Museum where we saw it.

—————–

In Golf There Are Bad Lies And Bad Liars

The baddest one ever may not be who you think…

“If I had my way, no man guilty of golf would be eligible to hold any office of trust or profit in these United States.” -H.L. Mencken

Well, if Mencken’s stipulation applies to American presidents “guilty of golf”, then only three of them since William Howard Taft who served as the nation’s chief executive from 1909 to 1913 would have been in the White House.

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Taft was the first U. S. president to take up the game and at one point played right here in Maine where he exhibited admirable steadfastness while enduring what has become enduring humiliation ever since.

Kebo Valley Golf Club in Bar Harbor, Maine was established in 1888 and is the 8th oldest in the country. In 1911 Taft had reached the course’s penultimate hole and hit his ball into a sand trap. The trap is embedded on a 45 degree angle in the slope of a hill below the hole’s green. If you hit a golf ball in it, you’re likely not going to see the green that is above and beyond on your next shot, adding a psychological challenge to the physical one you face.

Sand traps on golf courses are also called bunkers and this one— I’ve hit in to it myself— may not be golf’s most expansive but it’s huge. I bet it has room for the entire citizenry of a small Maine village.

Taft made 16 futile attempts to extricate his golf ball from the sand before finally ousting it on his 17th try. His total score on the hole was 27. From that time forward this enormous golfing hazard has been known as the “Taft Bunker”. It may not be on the list of our country’s National Historic Landmarks but it certainly is worthy of being included in any for American golf. Taft may have been a bad golfer but he was a most honorable one.

Out of the last 20 US presidents, only three did not play golf: Jimmy Carter, Harry Truman, and Herbert Hoover. The current one spends nearly every weekend traveling to one of the golf courses he owns. I don’t begrudge him that. I don’t have a problem with how much he plays. Woodrow Wilson played the most golf of any president and even had golf balls painted black so in winter he could see them in the snow. A number of presidents— Eisenhower, Obama —have played a lot of golf while in office. The problem I have with with Donald Trump is “how” he plays golf.

Golf is different from nearly all other sports. When you violate a rule, you are obliged to acknowledge it yourself and take whatever penalty the rules specify. Often only the golfer knows that he or she has done something illegal. For instance the rules of golf specify that players may only have 14 clubs in their golf bags. Fewer is fine but more is a violation. Maybe you just forgot that you had put an extra one in there but once you realize you have, you are required to add two strokes to your score on the hole you’re playing. If you don’t remove it, you must add two more on the next hole.

You can learn a lot about a person’s character by how they play golf— not by their level of proficiency but by their adherence to the rules. On Donald Trump’s recent trip to Scotland he was caught on video— or rather his caddy was caught dropping a ball in a more advantageous position than wherever the actual spot Trump’s shot had ended up. See for yourself…

Watch Trump’s caddy help him cheat…

(On the left side of the frame of the video watch the right hand of the second man in red walking in front of Trump’s golf cart just as he’s about to leave the frame.)

When I saw the video, I realized I had seen this type of maneuver before. I don’t think Trump is much of a movie goer but he is obsessed with the precious metal that is the central theme of a James Bond movie from the ‘60s. Goldfinger has a golf scene that Trump may have indeed seen…

Now, watch Goldfinger’s caddy help him cheat…

At one golf course Trump played regularly— one he didn’t own —the caddies were so amused by how often he would kick his ball to gain a better position that they nicknamed him Pelé. But Trump is not the only president or world leader who has not adhered to the rules of golf although by all accounts he qualifies as what a golf announcer would call “the current leader in the clubhouse”.

There is one past eminence of the “unfree” world who out Trumped Trump or any other golf blowhard. In 1994 the late Supreme Leader of North Korea Kim Jong-il claimed that in his first and only round of golf, he had 11 holes-in-one and shot a score of 38 under par. A regulation golf course has 18 holes so on Kim Jong-il’s scorecard there were seven holes where he didn’t make holes-in-one. My guess why he didn’t ace them too is that his caddy was exhausted and couldn’t run fast enough ahead of Kim on those seven to put a ball in the cup before the Supreme Leader got there.

Stateside, Bill Clinton apparently is Donald Trump’s closest presidential rival as a golfing rules scofflaw. Clinton would take a shot over if he wasn’t happy with his first one or his second or his third… When playing friendly golf where an official score is not required such an act, usually with the consent of the others playing with you, is called a “mulligan”.

Clinton did this along with committing other rules violations often enough that his do-overs became referred to as “Billigans”. Having your own word for how you play golf, might help explain also having your own definition for other words. Take the word “is” for example.

“If the—if he—if ‘is’ means is and never has been, that is not—that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement.”

I think it’s a lot easier finding a ball in the rough than untangling this bit of Clinton’s grand jury testimony that he gave during the Monica Lewinsky affair.

Nobody has yet written a book about Bill Clinton’s golf game but Rick Reilly, a longtime sportswriter turned author and columnist, wrote a book about Donald Trump’s which he titled Commander in Cheat. Comically but sadly, it reveals and closely parallels Trump’s known character through his comportment on the golf course.

Of course Reilly’s book is a “so what?” if you’re Trump’s lackey or hostage and support him out of fear or to attain your own goals. And it’s “fake news” if you’ve been blinded by right wing media and conspiracy theories.

You’ve likely heard the line “It’s not enough for you to succeed, others must fail.” I’ve tried to find who said it first and discovered it is attributed to both Genghis Khan and Gore Vidal. Honest! And here’s an example of the validity of the phrase from Rick Reilly…

“Trump will do whatever it takes to win a match. One time, that included interfering with sportscaster Mike Tirico’s ball. Tirico hit what he thought was the shot of his life into a par 5, only to find his ball in a sand trap. After the round, Tirico discovered how it got there.

‘Trump’s caddy came up to me and said, ‘You know that shot you hit on the par 5? It was about 10 feet from the hole. Trump threw it in the bunker. I watched him do it.’ ”

Trump claims to be a great golfer and that his average score is close to par. At just about every course he owns he is the self proclaimed club champion. Not surprisingly, at any club he has been a member and didn’t own he has yet to win its championship.

I’ve played golf with guys who cheat. Moving your own ball in the rough or redoing a missed short putt and counting it if it goes in is one thing— that’s only benefiting one’s self —but in a tournament it’s something else entirely and if you’re caught you are disqualified.

I heard about an otherwise nice guy who played in competitions and always seemed to miraculously find his errant shots that were assumed— no, for certain —lost. He didn’t have a caddy who assisted him. In fact I haven’t seen a caddy— with the exception of when I’ve made golfing pilgrimages to Scotland —at any of the courses that I play in the past half century. The suspicion that this guy was cheating arose because whenever he was looking for his wayward ball, he always had one of his hands in his pocket until he claimed he found it.

I think that’s the reason the pencils you pick up in the pro shop to keep your score don’t have erasers and why Muirfield, a prestigious Scottish club founded in 1744, still calls itself The Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers.

A sports psychologist named Bob Rotella coined the expression “golf is not a game of perfect” and has sold millions of books trying to convince those of us who play the sport to stop dreaming that perfection is just over the next bluff. Of course we know we’re only bluffing ourselves! Nevertheless, when most of us do hit that rare shot that feels and looks perfect, we do more than wonder why we can’t do it with every swing we make.

Golf is a difficult game and I’m sure there will always be those who don’t deal well with its inevitable self inflicted misfortunes. I’ll let the author and humorist P.G. Wodehouse have the final word…

“The only way of really finding out a man’s character is to play golf with him.”

—————–

To Pun Is Human. To Be Forgiven Unlikely!

hu·mor

1. the quality of being amusing or comic, especially as expressed in literature or speech.

A while ago a total stranger said to me, “The world is falling apart.” Despite agreeing with him, I replied, “It appears to be but I hope not.”

Then he told me that there are actually Las Vegas bookies offering odds on when the apocalypse might occur. That was depressing to learn and I asked him if he had placed a wager himself.

No”, he said and added, “I may be a pessimist but I’m not a fool. How would I get paid if I win the bet?”

That’s a joke. Ok, a macabre one that likely didn’t elicit a chuckle— a suppressed chuckle maybe? But I’m betting you didn’t groan. That’s a reflexive response reserved for puns…

pun

1. a joke exploiting the different possible meanings of a word or the fact that there are words which sound alike but have different meanings.

For me humor is the best defense against dark thoughts and feelings of doom these days and— if you’ve been reading my stuff up until now —puns and plays on words are often my go to attempt at being humorous.

Admittedly, the response to them is mixed. Some of you might grin and think they’re clever and others will groan and may want to grab a meat cleaver and come after me. So, I’m doing the equivalent of running a red light and here goes an attempt at being historically punny with some cartoons I’m letting out of quarantine…

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King Solomon’s Mimes

“Sometimes in life, I’m just trying to have a little fun with some wordplay, and the people around me aren’t having it. They’d rather have no pun at all.” —Julie Beck

The Griddle of the Sphinx

“Puns are threatening because puns reveal the arbitrariness of meaning, and the layers of nuance that can be packed onto a single word.” —John Pollack

Geeks Bearing Gifts

“They can be a demonstration of wit, of cleverness. You’re relying on a person’s ability to parse language, to understand all the meanings and complexities of words.” —Peter McGraw

Eat two Brute

“They’re usually deployed by people who know you’ll think the pun is annoying. Which is annoying. … A pun sidetracks you. It’s your friend who won’t let you get anything done.” —Charlie Hopper

Did you make it this far?

Why do so many people grimace and moan when they see or hear a pun? Don’t they realize how little work goes into making them?

I don’t know when or why I began punning but I unabashedly pun and I often get bashed for doing it by those who look upon this type of wordplay as my affliction and their misfortune. I happen to think a lot of it is disguised admiration… OK, I suppose I’m kidding myself.

I think for me punning is almost an involuntary reflex. My mind just goes there. I usually can’t shut it down. I PUN therefore I AM and I suppose I will continue to pun wherever I am. Now, there is a difference between smart puns and dumb puns and maybe it’s like knowing the difference between good wine and cheap wine.

For many of us that requires education and experience plus significant discretionary income. I plead basic ignorance on the oenology front although I bet I could tell the difference between Trader Joe’s Two Buck Chuck and anything King Chuck and Camilla imbibe.

The source of where humor comes from is actually nothing to laugh about. A legendary professor of mine in film school, a man named Howard Suber, summarized it this way. “Show me a happy comedian and I’ll show you someone on the way down.” Case in point: I read an article that contended that now that Jerry Seinfeld is a billionaire he isn’t funny anymore.

I don’t want to over analyze “funny” but I just looked this up and someone has compiled a list of the nine types of humor they think exist:

1. Physical or slapstick

2. Self-deprecating

3. Surreal or absurd

4. Improvisational

5. Droll or deadpan

6. Observational

7. Potty or bathroom

8. Dark or gallows

9. Puns

So, physical comedy is first and puns are last. Hmmm… You know I actually once had an experience that combined the two. I went to a comedy club in Hollywood where Chevy Chase was scheduled to be doing a standup act.

It was during the time that Gerald Ford was president so I expected Chevy’s standup to also include his falling down. But that night Chevy didn’t show up and another guy came out and replaced him. He was terrible and even worse, he was doing a lot of stupid puns that I thought were debasing the “art”. Yes, I was even starting to groan!

A stranger at the next table heard my complaining that this wasn’t at all what I had come to see. I thought it odd that he flashed a big smile my way as I continued making smug comments. In fact he was glowing when he finally made his own about the performer…

“He ain’t Chevy. He’s my brother.”

Got ya!

Ok, I apologize to those of you who have a paid subscription to The Pawned Accordion and read this piece and maybe wish you hadn’t. To you who read it for free, I offer no apology. You get what you didn’t pay for.

—————–

Has Anyone Offered You Their Seat Yet?

Retirement— When the finish line is a mirage, you’re doing it right!

I’m sure there are those who can point to the precise moment when they realized they were ready to retire. I can.

That moment for me was in the middle of the night sitting in my car parked on a beach in Ventura, California. I was soaking wet and shivering cold. A big storm was hitting the coast. Along with a correspondent and a camera crew, I had been awakened earlier by my ABC News bureau in Los Angeles and sent there.

We had just finished what’s called a “live shot” for Good Morning America. Our correspondent was on the air for less than a minute but all of us had been outside in the storm preparing for it longer than that.

Viewers could see the rain pelting him and the wind rippling his rain gear. They might have heard the waves crashing on the shore as he spoke but he was surrounded by darkness and they couldn’t see them. We didn’t have enough lighting equipment to illuminate the ocean behind him.

Live television for the sake of being live television sometimes requires the viewer’s imagination.

That event took place at 4 a.m. Pacific Coast time and we quickly retired to our respective vehicles. Our night wasn’t over. The four of us wouldn’t be done until the sun came up.

Most legacy television network programs are broadcast in two separate “feeds”. One is transmitted for the Eastern and Central time zones and a second for the Mountain and Pacific. Good Morning America begins at 7 a.m. in New York but is rebroadcast three hours later when it’s 7 a.m. in Los Angeles and when necessary, it’s updated.

You may have figured out that the reason I was sitting in my car dripping wet and chilled to the bone was that we had another live shot to do for the western part of the country three hours after our first one.

At 7 a.m. on the West Coast, we wouldn’t need our lights to show the ocean and if we didn’t do the repeat performance and our new viewers saw that it was dark, they would know we weren’t “live”. To be fair, perhaps there would have been some actual real news that had occurred in the interim and needed to be reported.

The three hours passed slowly and my career flashed before my eyes. I realized the much younger me might have been uncomfortable and unhappy but the present and older me was feeling sorry for himself and realizing he had had enough of these bad weather, natural disaster, mass murder assignments to, as they say, last a lifetime.

Jo and I bought our house in Maine in 2009. There was less than two years left on my contract at ABC News and I was sure I wasn’t going to be offered another one. I would have turned 64 in 2011 and those with desk jobs in the news business may have longer careers but I was already ancient for a “field producer” or someone who actually leaves the building and finds or goes to cover stories wherever they are.

I’ve had more than my share of lucky breaks so far in my life and retiring a year ahead of schedule turned out to be one of them. In 2010 ABC News cut 25% of its staff and offered just about everybody a buyout to leave. In July of that year I left with a check that was essentially the salary I would have earned if I had worked to the end of my contract.

I’d say I’ve never looked back but that would give away the rest of what I have to say and the very fact that you’re reading this is worth an explanation for how I think retirement has evolved for me.

At first I just enjoyed the change. No more early morning phone calls to get on a plane. No more adrenaline rushes after being told I had just a few hours to produce a story that I knew nothing about, had no video for and no interviews set up. That was exciting but I don’t miss it.

But no more finding a “gee whiz” story like the one about a lightbulb in a firehouse in California that had been burning for over a century (and still is) and having fun doing it. I do miss that.

And no more being able to work with talented people who helped me turn an idea of mine into the best possible story I could have hoped for. I miss that the most but I had a great career and can truly say thanks for the memories!

Shortly after we arrived in Maine I volunteered with a local organization and discovered when you actually do what you say you’re going to do, you get asked to do more and in no time you’re going to be the organization’s leader. I felt I was contributing to my new community and making friends. And on top of that I lived in a great place.

But I was meeting other men who were not yet retired and wanted to know what to expect and I thought I knew…

“Well,” I’d say, “Retirement is like summer camp but with a couple of nice differences. First, when they blow Reveille, you don’t have to jump out of bed in the morning. You can sleep in.”

And I’d add, “And when you’re in the middle of pitching a no-hitter. You’re not going to be told baseball time is over and you have to go make an ashtray for your parents.”

I thought I was giving helpful upbeat advice about what retirement was like but more than once I got blank stares of bewilderment.

Yes, I had missed the point. There were people who loved their jobs. Their careers were a huge part of their identity. Unlike me they hadn’t yet had that moment when they thought, “I’m just too old to be doing this!” And perhaps they never would.

I realized my comparisons to summer camp were more confusing than constructive. So I changed my approach and instead asked a question…

Me: “Do you still love what you do?”

Apprehensive Retiree: “Yes.”

And then I asked another…

Me: “Can you still do it?”

Apprehensive Retiree: “Yes.”

And at this point I felt I could impart my new take on retirement advice and said: “Then why retire?”

Recently, I went to see the documentary The Last Class. It’s about former Labor Secretary and UC Berkeley professor Robert Reich retiring from teaching. Reich has been for a long time one of the fiercest critics of what he believes is top-of-the-list wrong with America— income inequality created by a myriad of actions and policies as well as technological change that have created enormous wealth for the few while an ever growing number of their fellow Americans struggle to afford a minimal quality of life. Reich has been as loud as any critic of Donald Trump’s presidencies.

But for me the documentary wasn’t only about Reich’s politics or teaching his last class. It was also about his confronting something larger. It was one man’s dealing with his passage to a new stage of life that he knows is the final one.

Bob Reich was one year ahead of me at Dartmouth and I still consider him to be one of the more charismatic persons I have ever met. I don’t claim to know him well but I joined the college fraternity he belonged to because he convinced me I should.

Bob barely had time to “fraternize” with us. At our college he headed student government, was selected to be one of the few students in his class who pursued their own independent studies, acted in plays put on by the theater department and played the piano quite well. I doubt that’s even the complete list although he does owe me $100 for losing a bet that I’m sure he doesn’t remember making. After graduation Reich was part of a Time cover story that profiled what the magazine called “The Cynical Idealists of ‘68.

Another member of our fraternity from that time wrote this after seeing The Last Class…

“I saw a vulnerable Bob Reich with tears in his eyes, something I never would have imagined as a freshman when he was a BMOC (Big Man On Campus) senior in 1967-68. At the end, I could have used a hankie myself.”

Robert Reich may no longer mount a stage this fall in an auditorium full of hundreds of students but he is not done teaching, reaching nor seeking an audience. He posts constantly on his eponymous Substack which has over a million subscribers and this month published a memoir. He is still commanding attention and respect in a giant classroom and he is now his own department chair.

I had a dream a while ago that unlike most of my dreams made sense.

I was back in the ABC News bureau in Los Angeles. It was empty except for me. I was sitting in an edit room putting together a story by myself that I had produced, written and was completing alone. I wouldn’t have to send it to New York so people there could tell me to add this or cut that. I was free to create what I wanted.

And that’s what I’m doing right now in a bedroom in Maine that’s my “work space”. I’ll give what I’ve written here to Jo to read. She’s become my only editor and told me years ago that I’ve essentially recreated my office at ABC News in our house. I even have two bulletin boards surrounding me that I had on the wall in LA full of layers of stuff that represents my life and career in thumbtacked mementoes. I’m now adding more to them.

Unlike Bob Reich, it took me a decade to get started sharing my stories and creating my cartoons. It took me that long to truly understand that my so-called retirement was merely the end of one chapter of my life and an opportunity to literally write another, albeit with an awareness of the “use-by” date warning that is affixed to it.

I think the final guidance I can offer to others retiring is this. The skills and experience you have gained throughout your career are still going to be there for you to use and to share if you want. I have been writing and producing stories for much of my life and I can still do it! May you all be as lucky.

And here’s a little poem of mine that I hope is motivation…

And if you offer me your seat, I have nothing to lose

I can take it or not, whatever I choose

I accept that I’m old and may look it to you

Ah, but how young I feel in my head you don’t have a clue

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Is It Just Me Or Is There A Pattern Here?

Of course there is or are you blinded by the right!

January 27 — President Donald Trump fires the Chairwoman of the National Labor Relations Board Gwynne Wilcox. She received a midnight email from the White House saying she was dismissed, effective immediately. No cause was cited, but senior officials later disclosed that Wilcox had been removed because she had “publicly championed diversity, equity and inclusion”, values the current administration deemed incompatible with its agenda. Her dismissal is being contested in court.

February 21 —President Donald Trump fires Air Force Gen. CQ Brown Jr., Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as part of a campaign led by his defense secretary Pete Hegseth to cleanse the military of leaders who support diversity and equity.

May 8 —President Donald Trump fires Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden in a two sentence email. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt claims Hayden “did not fit the needs of the American people”, plus Leavitt cites concerns about Hayden’s promotion of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.

August 22 — President Donald Trump says he will fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook if she does not resign from her position. Cook has come under fire from the Trump administration over allegations of mortgage fraud. At this point there is little factual information in the public record about what actually transpired.

August 19 — President Donald Trump, after declaring the Smithsonian was “OUT OF CONTROL”, threatens museums across the United States…

“The Museums throughout Washington, but all over the Country are, essentially, the last remaining segment of “WOKE”.

If you haven’t noticed or figured it out yet, there is a disassembling of the America most of us believed we lived in underway and happening in many areas. We are a polarized nation being further separated by an administration that is unabashedly acting like an authoritarian regime that would joyfully do without allowing any future elections if it can.

Call what is taking place daily whatever you want but I’m infuriated and depressed by those of us who just want to keep their heads down and hope everyone else except them will be in the ever expanding line of fire. I think it’s a toss up that we’ll even have a presidential election in 2028. If we have one, will those with their heads down now even show up to vote?

And by then will the National Museum of African American History and Culture have an exhibit on “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit”. Doubtless, it will include a recorded recorded message from Ron DeSantis who in 2023 defended a change in Florida’s public school curriculum standards with the words I’ve quoted above after his state’s “academic experts” required teaching that some slaves’ lives were enhanced by their enslavement.

Maybe a nice touch as well would be to have“Zip-a-dee-doo-dah” playing in the background throughout visitors’ tours of the museum.

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School Bells Ringing, Children Singing...

Can you finish the rest of the jingle I’ve started with this post’s title? If you can, you are my age and grew up watching TV in the 1950s. If you can’t, I’ll keep you in suspense until after you’ve read on.

We are still three weeks away from the autumn equinox and the astronomical (as in astronomy) end of summer but for me tomorrow is not one I looked forward to when I was a kid because it was my end of summer. The day after Labor Day meant going back to school.

As you can see, my first grade class in 1953 was a lot for one teacher to handle as was our country’s baby boom after World War II. The township school district where I grew up in Pennsylvania raced to construct additional schools to make room for us.

While this happened, I was in one old school building for first and second grade, another for third and fourth and still another for fifth and sixth. In seventh, my class was the first in a brand new facility that had a multipurpose space serving as the auditorium, gym and cafeteria. At one point during the year, its cafetorium gym floor warped and buckled which made the basketball court full of crazy bounces and some of the steps we learned in the after school dance class lessons— I was taking involuntarily —the bunny hop.

But back to first grade where I got off to an unfortunate start. Shortly after my first day began, I was sent to sit in a corner while I waited for my mother to come take me home. No, I hadn’t misbehaved. That would come years later in eighth grade when I got into trouble for expressing my disgust with our cafeteria food by spelling an obscenity with raisins on top of a piece of ham.

I wasn’t in the corner for my conduct but my teacher deemed my presence as contagious to the class. I was sent home after Miss Heckman suspected I had pink eye.

In 1954 and, now in second grade, my mother showed up at my school again and this time it meant that I was to receive special treatment I hadn’t asked for nor wanted. I don’t remember what my mother’s role was with our local March of Dimes but I knew she was involved. She pulled me out of the line of my classmates on the day we were waiting to get injected with the Salk polio vaccine.

“You’re going first to show the others there is nothing to be afraid of,” she said. And so I was. We were the first school in our county to be innoculated.

My other memories of second grade were of two clandestine show and tells. One boy brought in a jar that contained his removed appendix and a girl showed us photographs her father had taken during World War II. Our teacher caught the boy but permitted us to see his floating appendix but if she had known about the pictures, I’m sure she would have been alarmed and immediately have called the girl’s parents.

The photos were taken in Italy and showed Benito Mussolini and his mistress after they had already been executed and their bodies brought to Milan where they were hung from a post upside down. I guess it’s not surprising that I would remember this.

On to 1955 and third grade and another cafeteria incident when Larry Yoder discovered a nail in his chicken pot pie. At least it wasn’t rusty but I swore off eating pot pie for decades. I still remember the name of our music instructor. Mrs. Wolfskill taught us a song that began “Trees are gold ripe, chestnuts are falling.” I have no recollection of what the next line was and if you do, please let me know.

The teacher for most everything else in third grade didn’t like me and I didn’t like her but I don’t recall which of us didn’t like the other first.

But I remember another teacher at our school displaying a childlike giddiness on a fall afternoon of that year. It was during recess when Miss Rahn ran out to the baseball diamond and mid game announced that the Brooklyn Dodgers had finally won the World Series after previously failing in seven other tries. I was happy too and I liked Miss Rahn.

It’s now 69 years since I had Edith Nye as my fourth grade teacher and I have yet to meet anyone who didn’t feel as lucky as I do that we did. The elementary school where she taught had four classrooms— one each for first through fourth grade. Mrs. Nye was also the principal.

Years later I thought about what she might have chosen as a career once doors finally swung open for women to be doctors or lawyers, executives or governors. I guess the easiest way to describe Edith Nye is that I believe she could have had her choice at being anything if more choices had been available for women then. When she talked, you listened and when you talked, she listened. Mrs. Nye was a remarkable teacher.

Although all of us who remember Mrs. Nye remember her with reverence when I googled, I could find nothing at all about her— not an obituary nor a single mention. On the internet she apparently does not exist.

Edith Nye lived when shoe boxes in attics contained the letters and photographs that were often the only physical evidence of one’s having been alive after they were gone. Without those what does live on are the memories others have and share of a person. For Mrs. Nye the number of us with those memories is diminishing. I get periodic emails from one of my classmates informing me of who among us has passed away.

I couldn’t find a picture of our school building either. It had a distinguishing exterior feature. The fire escapes from both floors of the two story structure were enclosed tubes that you entered feet first on your backside through a small door in the wall of the classroom and slid down to an adult who caught you as your shoes hit the ground.

We looked forward to fire drills. I wonder if kids do now? Our times and their times are so different. Their schools now have “active shooter drills” which I think I would have found terrifying.

Growing up in the United States in the 1950s led me to believe that the life I was experiencing was normal. Now, the 50s seem to me to have been more like an iceberg drifting through history between the Korean and the Vietnam wars.

As a kid back then, I was seeing only that small percentage of what was visible of America on its surface. In my neighborhood of identical postwar houses life was idyllic. It was baseball games with no parents around. It was “Just be home for dinner.” It was a commercial for a clothing store chain with Les Paul and Mary Ford singing “It’s back to Robert Hall again.”

School bells ringing, children singing

My formal education ended decades ago but I’ve been a lifelong learner and one advantage of having had a career in journalism is that I had to be. I’ve learned a little about a lot of things and certainly much about that part of the American iceberg that was so submerged for me when I was growing up. Not all of us didn’t ever worry about our next meal while eating dinner in front of the television laughing at sitcoms.

My fond memories are not shared by everyone— not nearly everyone. It took until fifth grade to grasp that they were kids in my class that didn’t a have a TV or even running water at home. And that was also the year I was called a “dirty Jew” for the first time.

I learned that not all families were white like Ozzie and Harriet’s or nuclear with two parents and two kids where the father went off to work— although Ozzie Nelson was a glaring exception —and the mother stayed home and spent a lot of time in the kitchen. I didn’t see a black kid at my school until the seventh grade and I never met a Latino nor an Asian student until I was in high school.

Only women were my teachers until junior high which was when we began to have separate instructors for different subjects. Mr. Reindel taught us science and Mr. Clevenger taught us math. Is it my imagination or were science and math subjects almost always taught by men in those days?

One day as we entered his class, Mr. Reindel was sitting at his desk focused silently on a piece of clay he was manipulating in his hands. This went on for a while until, without looking up from what he was doing, he said…

“If I succeed in shaping this clay into a perfect cube, the world will end.”

In 2015 I went to my 50th high school reunion. I had seen very few of my classmates in the intervening half century and was shocked that I failed to recognize many of them. The girls all looked shorter than I recalled. The boys, like me, were wider. I embarrassed Carol Crump when I told her she was my first crush.

Mr. Reindel was there and he remembered me but as a basketball player and not a student. I was flattered but as we talked, it slipped my mind to ask him if he was any closer to shaping a lump of clay into a perfect cube and if he thought the world might still end before he accomplished it. I didn’t worry about that in seventh grade. I do now.

Here in Maine our two grandchildren go back to school tomorrow— one to fourth grade and the other to eighth. When I asked Nate and Harvey a few weeks ago if they were looking forward to returning, they replied that they were not and Harvey added he didn’t even want to talk about it.

In my life where I have seen more change in more ways than I could have ever imagined, I guess I should take some comfort from Nate and Harvey in knowing that there still are some things that haven’t changed at all.

—————–

Yes, They Said That!

The no good, the real bad and the incredibly ugly

Donald Trump said this to reporters on Tuesday, February 19, 2025 after an Oval Office meeting with Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Fact: One week later former Vice-President Mike Pence posted on X… “Mr. President, Ukraine did not ‘start’ this war. Russia launched an unprovoked and brutal invasion.”

Robert Kennedy Jr. said this to Lex Friedman on Friedman’s podcast — #388 — two years ago.

Fact: Statement posted on the Centers for Disease Control website in August of 2024… Currently, the United States has the safest vaccine supply in its history. Millions of children safely receive vaccines each year. The most common side effects are very mild, such as pain or swelling at the injection site.

Allegedly said by Stephen Miller during the first Trump presidency to White House communications aide Cliff Sims. At the time neither the White House nor Miller would comment on Sim’s allegation.

Fact: Miller’s uncle David Glosser described how Miller’s own family came to the United States at the turn of the 20th century as refugees fleeing anti-Jewish pogroms and persecution in the Russian Empire… “I have watched with dismay and increasing horror as my nephew, who is an educated man and well aware of his heritage, has become the architect of immigration policies that repudiate the very foundation of our family’s life in this country.”

The list of others in Trump’s administration with disturbing and dangerous views and ambitions is frightening. To serve this president requires one to be servile and unethical. The further tragedy that is playing out daily in our country is in Congress where Democrats are neither united nor effective in opposing what is happening and those Republicans who realize the damage being done lack the courage to stop it from continuing.

When should it need to take unity and courage to put out a house on fire?

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Once Upon A Burning Mattress

This is perhaps a stretch but I think the Napoleon pastry— known as a mille-feuille in France which means literally “a thousand sheets” —looks like an edible mattress. And let me stretch even further and connect the cartoon above to the subject of this post— sleep.

Ok, the emperor doesn’t look very comfortable on top of a dessert. But here’s another representation of how Napoleon might have caught 40 winks during one of the 60 battles his armies fought.

It has become part of his legend that Napoleon functioned on very little sleep. Historians contend that he only needed four hours a day but an alleged quote of Napoleon’s seems to contradict this. How much sleep did he actually think was necessary?

“Six hours for a man, seven for a woman and eight for a fool.”

Donald Trump, who may think he’s Napoleon, claims he only sleeps four hours a night. Of course he could be lying and has somebody else tweeting for him around the clock to make it appear that he’s awake when he isn’t.

Remember he cheats at golf and anything else he possibly can. However, it wouldn’t be surprising that in this instance it isn’t fake snooze and against all odds he may actually be telling the truth. There have been other world leaders who were nearly sleepless in their saddles including Margaret Thatcher and Bill Clinton.

But then there’s also Albert Einstein, who slept 10 hours at night and took a nap in the afternoon. So, I guess when one theorizes about equating sleep with energy, there’s a certain amount of relativity involved.

Take Benjamin Franklin. He was the human version of the Swiss Army Knife before there was a Swiss Army Knife. Franklin, who we have been led to believe packed it in early and rose with the sun retired nightly at 10 p.m.— which isn’t all that early to bed —but he did get up 7 hours later at 5 a.m. and in Pennsylvania that’s before sunrise on every day of the year.

Ben followed two other bits of his famous advice and fulfilled the healthy and wealthy parts. Franklin lived to be 84 and in 18th century dollars died a multimillionaire. But there was perhaps another explanation for his tireless vigor.

He, as well as Thomas Jefferson, was a big coffee drinker. How big? Franklin spent almost three decades of his life in England and France and while there he had his personal mail delivered to coffee houses.

And there is another claim that I’ve checked out and discovered is true. Most of us do spend a third of our existence in bed. The time we spend working in our careers pales in comparison.

During my various jobs from age 22 to 63, I put in a lot of overtime hours. Even with them and after subtracting days off, vacation and commuting to and from work, the figure I came up with is about 14 years of actual time that I worked— almost a third of the total hours I lived during that span of 42 years.

Add an equal third that was me not working and the other third of me asleep and we’ve pretty much accounted for how I spent all my summers, falls, winters and springs for much of my time on earth before I retired.

Sleeping for a third of your life seems like a large number and if I live to be 80, I will likely have spent 33 years in bed— 26 of them actually asleep and perhaps another 7 lying there intending to.

The information I used for my calculations was gathered by a British organization called the Sleep Matters Club. It claimed it used 15 sources to create its data which its researchers accomplished in their waking hours of course.

So, what’s the most important thing in my house besides my wife? It’s a no brainer. It’s our mattress! We didn’t mess around when we bought it. We went to a store with a big selection of those we could try out and we picked a winner.

Last year after more than two decades we bought a new one after again reclining and declining until we found our suitable replacement.

Remember the tag on a mattress that warned that its removal was forbidden and punishable by law? Not taking any chances, many of us wouldn’t touch it and anytime we changed the sheets we were reminded that we hadn’t.

Turns out we could have ripped it off. The warning was for the seller and the protection of the consumer.

Once long ago, I and some friends settled for mattresses that never had tags to begin with. I was living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Friends and I had signed on to share an apartment together soon after graduating from college. We each brought our own stuff but two items none of us had were a bed frame and a mattress.

The landlord noticed this and said he had a landlord friend who just so happened to want to dispose of four beds with mattresses. The building was nearby and we found out it was owned by television game show host Gene Rayburn (Remember Match Game?)

One look at what we were being offered and it was apparent why Rayburn wanted to get rid of the mattresses. They were stuffed with straw. I had never seen one before. I had no idea straw mattresses even still existed except possibly in recreations of the bedrooms of colonial homes at a tourist attraction like Old Sturbridge Village.

Hey, we were pretty desperate so we hauled them back to our place and for a few months all was well.

We did our laundry at a laundromat around the corner on Columbus Avenue and a few times I found that my clothes were so hot out of the dryers there I had to juggle them on my way back to our apartment. My roommates were experiencing the same thing.

One night I was returning from playing basketball at a nearby Y and as I rounded the corner from Amsterdam Avenue onto our street, I saw fire trucks in the distance. I started to run when it became clear they were outside our brownstone and arrived just in time to see a couple of firemen dragging a smoking wet mattress out the front door.

It only took another moment to figure out what had happened when another fireman brought out a pile of burnt clothing.

One of us had returned from the laundromat earlier that evening and thrown his hot load of clothes on his bed. He’d gone out right afterward and no incendiary device other than his socks and underwear was needed for his mattress to smolder and eventually ignite.

The smoke damage was extensive. My own clothes went through the dry cleaner’s four times. For years afterward the books and records I had on the shelves smelled like they’d been cured in a smokehouse.

Upon recalling this now, I wonder if Gene Rayburn ever found out that his mattresses could have been the inspiration for a new version of Match Game that didn’t require any matches at all.

And Napoleon’s mattress? It’s doubtful he ever slept on one stuffed with straw. He was on the march quite a lot and desired the utmost comfort when he took his short breaks from warring for napping. His mattress was likely the most elegant of that time and made of some type of woven fabric.

About the only straw mattress for sale now that I could find is in the picture below. It’s less than two feet long and was made for a Victorian era doll.

There are YouTube videos if you want to make a regulation straw mattress of your own. Home Depot sells a bale of straw for $34.98 plus shipping. If you want a king— but likely not fit for one —you might need two bales.

And to go with your new/old mattress how about a pillow guaranteed not to be inflammable but also surely to give you a headache. Turns out that the earliest pillows can be traced to about 9,000 years ago in Mesopotamia.

Those pillows apparently served a practical purpose by keeping bugs and vermin out of the mouths, eyes, and noses of the wealthy. In order to be effective at doing that, they weren’t made of straw. They were solid stone… Pleasant dreams!

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A Mild Moose Chase

We moved to Maine 15 years ago. Our marriage was conditional on our doing so when we retired. In fact after committing to Jo’s stipulation, I bought her a T-shirt that precisely stated her motivation. Emblazoned on it were the words Born In Maine, Living In Exile. I didn’t even have to ask for it to be custom made. Is there another state that has its own off the shelf products that express such a longing to return home?

If you ask people who don’t live here what they think of first when they think of Maine, my guess is lobster. Of course it might also be lighthouses, L.L. Bean or even Stephen King.

For me it’s none of the above. I’m “from away” which means, unlike my wife who was born in Maine, I can’t claim the birthright credential. I’ll be from away forever. However, I do believe I have a plausible workaround for upgrading my outsider status.

This place has one of the better state slogans. It’s Maine: The Way Life Should Be and that sums up how I feel about living here and what I think of when I think of Maine. It has been that way pretty much from the time we arrived in 2010. Call it my state of mind about this state. It encompasses Maine’s beauty, the friends I’ve made, the abundance of things I’ve found to do and enjoy.

When all around us the world is falling apart, Maine hasn’t and while my blood pressure may be a little high, my stress level isn’t. Even Maine’s weather is tolerable with its winter we endure to appreciate the summer and fall we enjoy for getting through it.

So, here is my perhaps wistful claim to identify as a Mainer. If it’s become my state of mind, it’s a state of mine! I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. However, there is one Maine experience I still long to have. I haven’t seen a moose.

We live in Camden, a short walk from the town center and not far from the ocean. Our house is surrounded by trees and just the other day I pulled up the driveway and startled three fawns who bolted into the woods behind us. Deer consider our hostas their salad bar.

I’ve seen coyotes and fox in the backyard, squirrels hold races on the top of our fence while crows caw them on from the treetops. But a moose? The only moose I’ve seen so far are on road signs that show their silhouettes and the warning MOOSE XING.

At this point I’m beginning to think I have about as good a chance to win the lottery as the likelihood I’ll see a moose (bad comparison since you need to at least buy tickets and I don’t). Maybe the closest thing to seeing one could be rewatching a Star Wars movie…

Actually, my best opportunities were probably in the past. For a few summers as a teenager I went to camp in Maine. I canoed the Allagash river and climbed Mt. Katahdin but there were no encounters of the moose kind for me. Last week it was at the foot of Katahdin I thought I finally might get lucky.

Jo is a board member of an organization that had a retreat near the Maine town of Millinocket and spouses were invited. It was my opportunity to go Moose “hunting”. After lunch at the local Chinese restaurant— in keeping with the spirit of this place, I ordered Lo Mein —I stopped at the headquarters for Baxter State Park and, announcing my mission, was handed a map and given tips on where to look.

Ok, I’ve embellished the map a bit…

I drove into the Park and per the instructions set out along Roaring Brook. I walked with my eyes peeled but after a fruitless search I sat down on a rock and peeled an orange so scratch the fruitless. As I listened to the sound of the flowing water, I was reminded of a moment in my career in television news. Thirty years ago ABC News decided it wanted to compete on Sunday mornings and start its own program up against a well established one on CBS. That broadcast— CBS News Sunday Morning —has now been on the air for nearly half a century and was hosted for many years by Charles Kuralt.

Sunday Morning had a signature feature then and still does today. At the end of the broadcast there are a few moments of scenes of the outdoors— bumble bees buzzing and pollinating flowers, a breeze rustling wheat stalks in a field. There is no narration by a reporter, just pictures and sounds of nature doing its thing entirely devoid of us.

ABC News wanted its version to be different and one of the execs from New York flew out to my bureau in Los Angeles to tell us how we should contribute to the new launch. As an admirer of Sunday Morning and one who, as often as possible, produced the type of stories it aired, my head dropped and my body slumped when Paul said this…

“We don’t want our broadcast to imitate Sunday Morning. There will be no artsy fartsy babbling brooks!”

At the time I hadn’t done a story featuring a babbling brook but had produced others about waterfalls in Yosemite, the tree rings of giant sequoias, endangered California condors and edible wild mushrooms. My ego was large enough to think I was being singled out.

Sitting there on a rock last week, I recalled this and as far as I know, ABC News’ version of Sunday Morning may never have ventured near a babbling brook to this day. I’m not a Shakespeare scholar but just now I found this sentiment of his…

“The earth has music for those who listen.”

Wherever you are Paul, no hard feelings, but I hope you might get to listen to this “music” that I recorded when I thought of you…

Artsy fartsy Babbling Brook…

Oh, and of course I didn’t spot hide nor horns— or is it ass nor antlers —of a moose but I did get a shot of a beautiful sunset across Millinocket Lake…

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Late Night TV Isn’t Funny Anymore

As Donald Trump’s administration’s outrageous actions pile up, this latest one— his threat to take away television network broadcasters’ licenses if the comedian hosts of their late night programs criticize him —might have had nearly every member of Congress opposed to such an abuse of presidential power in the not so distant past. But what’s happening in the country today has made the past seem a lot more distant than chronological time would normally feel.

Will Trump’s declaring that he will be the arbiter of what is said about him by the networks expand to include newspapers and online media? Might it finally be the red line that will shock even some of his supporters to stand on principle?

Ask somebody where the lowest point on earth is and they might tell you it’s the Dead Sea at 1,412 feet below sea level. It is but only if you are considering a location on dry land. The lowest point on our planet is the Mariana Trench which is 35,876 feet under the Pacific Ocean’s surface. I’d contend that the United States sank further than the depth of the Dead Sea on January 6, 2021 and is heading toward the wreckage of the Titanic which rests 12,500 feet down in the Atlantic. If we fall to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, you can bet I won’t be allowed to write what I think anymore and neither will you.

Yes, I know there has been bullying of speakers on college campuses and particularly ones with conservative views. I don’t excuse that. I also don’t excuse the bullying by others of local government officials and school board members at their public meetings.

Being free to speak or write is one of the basic, important and most cherished rights that Americans have. Sure, there are limits and reasonable people adhere to them. Intimidation of a television network for what might be said about you by a comedian in a monologue is so not close to screaming fire in a crowded theater that my head hurts thinking about it.

Yes, what can be said or written about someone can be hurtful and even unfair and libel laws exist to protect individuals when that speech is false and has caused harm. Case in point: Dominion Voting Systems had accused the Fox News Network of spreading false conspiracy theories about its voting machines’ role in the 2020 presidential election. In 2023 Fox settled and paid damages of $787.5 million just as the trial was set to begin.

And Donald Trump is certainly no stranger to libel lawsuits. His most recent filing was just this week seeking $15 billion from the New York Times for a litany of self perceived acts of malice in the Times coverage of him. A leading first amendment lawyer termed the suit “ridiculous as a matter of law but extraordinarily dangerous as a matter of national policy.” Already today a Republican appointed federal judge dismissed the suit writing that it was “improper and impermissible.” Trump will undoubtedly refile.

And there we are for Trump’s further attempts at bending and ignoring the law just this week and the week isn’t over yet. What’s next? I think we know and it’s more of the same and insane. We can’t let ourselves be merely despondent or numb to this.

It was my sister-in-law Lynn’s birthday yesterday and she had a thought… “What if there was a march on Washington and the living ex presidents led it?” I think it’s a great idea but would they be willing to do it? I would go and join them if they have the courage to. Would you?

What would George Washington say about the presidency of Donald Trump today? I think he would repeat what he already said in in 1783 speaking to a group of Military officers…

“If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.” — George Washington

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