The Lubricants of Democracy

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Greasing the Skids

“Ambiguity and apathy are the lubricants of democracy. They keep the machinery running smoothly. Most of us become politically active only when we can clearly see that the benefit would be worth the cost in time and effort.” 

—Phil Meyer, journalism professor-emeritus, scholar and author, USA Today, 2000.

• Editorial Comment: I don’t know which candidate to support, and I don’t care.


PeezPix by Ted Pease

Snail No. 9








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Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard
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Tesla’s Ravings

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Crazy Predictions

“When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do his will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket. 

“We shall be able to witness and hear events—the inauguration of a President, the playing of a world series game, the havoc of an earthquake or the terror of a battle—just as though we were present.”

—Nikola Tesla (1856-1943), engineer and inventor, “When Woman Is Boss,” Collier’s, 1926  

• Editorial Comment: What a load of piffle.


PeezPix by Ted Pease

Battery Point Lighthouse, Crescent City, California








Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 or so misguided subscribers around the planet. If you have recovered from whatever led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard
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Schoolboy Dreams

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The Jolly Editor

“The editor is one of the happiest individuals in the world. He can go to the circus in the afternoon and evening without paying a nickel; also to inquests and hangings. He has free tickets to the theatres, gets wedding cake sent to him, and sometimes gets a licking, but not often, for he can take things back in the next issue, which he generally does. While other folks have to go to bed early, the editor can sit up late every night and see all that is going on. When I am a man I mean to be an editor, so that I can stay out late at nights. Then that will be jolly.”

 

—Commentary from The Elko (Nevada) Free Press, April 1887. (Thanks to alert WORDster Tom McGuire)

• Editorial Comment: All those jolly recovering editors at the sanitarium couldn’t agree more.

PeezPix by Ted Pease

Open Road, outside Monticello, Nevada







Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 or so misguided subscribers around the planet. If you have recovered from whatever led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard
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Wag the Dog

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. . . er, the Fox

“The conservative media has [sic] hog-tied the Republican Party and taken it hostage . . . . 

“That’s the message delivered by a new 20,000-word Shorenstein Center paper by New York Times reporter Jackie Calmes. This finding — that the conservative media tail wags the Republican dog — will appeal to every liberal who ever shrieked in fright after accidentally tuning in to Fox News or who has yet to recover from involuntarily exposure to Rush Limbaugh’s radio program during a taxi ride.”

—Jack Shafer, “Fox News Doesn’t Control the GOP: No matter how much liberals think it does,” Politico.com, August 2015 

• Editorial Comment: Tell it to Donald Trump. Is that him shrieking, or Roger Ailes?






PeezPix by Ted Pease

If you're traveling to the North Country Fair . . . Arcata, California







Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 or so misguided subscribers around the planet. If you have recovered from whatever led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard
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Who’s in Charge Here?

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Graphing Shakespeare

“But there’s a reason we recognize Hamlet as a masterpiece: it’s that Shakespeare told us the truth, and people so rarely tell us the truth in this rise and fall here [indicates blackboard]. The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is. And if I die — God forbid — I would like to go to heaven to ask somebody in charge up there, ‘Hey, what was the good news and what was the bad news?’”

—Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007), writer and student of storytelling, in Ana Swanson, “Kurt Vonnegut graphed the world’s most popular stories,” The Washington Post, Feb. 9, 2015 

• Editorial Comment: And the guy will answer, “Kurt, There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”


PeezPix by Ted Pease

Wave Patterns








Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 or so misguided subscribers around the planet. If you have recovered from whatever led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard
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Toni’s Texts

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Living Language

“Language changes — and should — because it is as alive as its speakers and writers. It is stifling or bad only when unclear, mediocre, false or wholly devoid of creative imagination. That may apply to some texting and e-mail, but not all.”

  —Toni Morrison, poet and author and national conscience, 2008 (Thanks to alert WORDster Steve Marston)

• Editorial Comment: The literature of texting. Maybe if Toni Morrison’s doing it.


PeezPix by Ted Pease

In the Woods











Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 or so misguided subscribers around the planet. If you have recovered from whatever led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard
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A Good Book

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Bedfellows

“When I’m near the end of a good book, I need to sleep in the same room with it.”

—Joan Didion, writer and book-lover

• Editorial Comment: Except for those books that will keep you awake.






PeezPix by Ted Pease

The Float












Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 or so misguided subscribers around the planet. If you have recovered from whatever led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard
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No Glam

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Analog Guy

“Talk about an analog guy in a digital era. And yet Schieffer has always seemed relevant. He embodies that seriousness of purpose that was TV news at its best. Real news. Important news. No gotcha instincts. No trash with flash. No glam.”

—Rem Rieder, “Bob Schieffer, old school at its finest,” USA Today, April 9, 2015

• Editorial Comment: Another old warhorse.











PeezPix by Ted Pease

Greenleaf








Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 or so misguided subscribers around the planet. If you have recovered from whatever led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard
.

A Million Eggs

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Codfish

“A photographer is like a cod, which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity.”

―George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), writer, photographer and cod fisherman (Thanks to alert photographer Tim Wozny)

• Editorial Comment: And a writer is like a salmon, always swimming upstream.


PeezPix by Ted Pease

Noah and Shiloh go fishing








Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 or so misguided subscribers around the planet. If you have recovered from whatever led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard
.

Barack’s Higher Ed Policy

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No Coddling

“I’ve heard some college campuses where they don’t want to have a guest speaker who is too conservative or they don’t want to read a book if it has language that is offensive to African-Americans or somehow sends a demeaning signal towards women. I gotta tell you, I don’t agree with that either. 

“I don’t agree that you, when you become students at colleges, have to be coddled and protected from different points of view. I think you should be able to — anybody who comes to speak to you and you disagree with, you should have an argument with ‘em. 

“But you shouldn’t silence them by saying, ‘You can’t come because I’m too sensitive to hear what you have to say.’ That’s not the way we learn either.”

—President Barack Obama, at Iowa town hall meeting. The Atlantic, 2015

(Thanks to alert WORDster Donald W. Meyers)

• Editorial Comment: I don’t want to hear that.


PeezPix by Ted Pease 

Shelter Kitty. So pissed.











Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 or so misguided subscribers around the planet. If you have recovered from whatever led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard
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Career Development

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Colbert’s IOU

“He should write an eight-figure check to Fox News, because all of our gaffes made that man’s career.”

—Greg Gutfield, a host of The Five on Fox News, about Stephen Colbert’s final show, December 2014 URL

• Editorial Comment: Making fun of Faux “News.” Will that make me rich?


PeezPix by Ted Pease 

Skyscape









Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 or so misguided subscribers around the planet. If you have recovered from whatever led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard
.

Black Hats, Fancy Boots

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Lousy Westerns

“It was making me ill, reading one lousy Western after another. So I wrote a parody in a fit of rage, showed it to the story editor, and he said: ‘This is good, you want to make a novel out of this.’ I crossed out the title, wrote ‘Chapter One,’ and went from there.” 

—E.L. Doctorow (1931-2015), novelist (Ragtime, 1975, Billy Bathgate, 1989), wrote his first book, “Welcome to Hard Times” (1960), after a job reading scripts for a movie company. NPR obit


• Editorial Comment: I’ve gotta write me some more lousy Westerns. “The gunslinger’s steely eyes glinted like obsidian in the slanting afternoon sun. ‘I hope your boots will fit me,’ the black-hatted man said. Dust swirled around those size 16 armadillo boots as the black-eyed, black-hatted, black-socked man whirled . . . .”


PeezPix by Ted Pease 

Sea & Sky




Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 or so misguided subscribers around the planet. If you have recovered from whatever led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard
.

Now What?

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 Job Unfinished, Jon!

“As I wind down my time here, I leave this show knowing that most of the world’s problems have been solved by us, ‘The Daily Show.’ But sadly there are still some dark corners that our broom of justice has not reached yet.” 

—Jon Stewart, former host, “The Daily Show,” August 2015 


• Editorial Comment: More brooms needed.


PeezPix by Ted Pease 

All at Sea. The 5th annual Trinidad Rockfish Wars pitted 90+ kayak fishermen against bottom fish Saturday.








Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 or so misguided subscribers around the planet. If you have recovered from whatever led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard
.
 

Short Subjects

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TV Time

“A marketplace approach simply doesn’t work for children. Children’s television can never be profitable because most of the people who watch it are very short, very young and have very small allowances.”

—Peggy Charren (1928-2015), children’s activist and founder of Action for Children’s Television, 1983

• Editorial Comment: Well, how much does decent kids’ TV cost, anyway?


PeezPix by Ted Pease 

Red Sun at Night











Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 or so misguided subscribers around the planet. If you have recovered from whatever led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard
.