Another Damn Poll

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Our Handicapped Press

“Part of what I find so jarring about the media’s insatiable appetite for polls right now is that it defies our past resolutions to go on a desperately needed diet. For all of my 30 years as a journalist, I’ve listened to reporters, editors and producers bemoan the ‘horse-race coverage’ of campaigns and exhort one another to be better come the next election and concentrate instead on issues, records, biographies, substance.

“Suddenly the apologies and exhortations are gone. We’re worse.”

—Frank Bruni, op-ed columnist, “Our Insane Addiction to Polls,” The New York Times, Jan. 23, 2016

• Editorial Comment: We’ll do better next time. Promise.


PeezPix by Ted Pease

Marsh Morning









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.) #tedsword
 
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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The View From Abroad

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Demoralizing

“Journalism over here is not only an obsession but a drawback that cannot be overrated. Politicians are frightened of the press, and in the same way as bull-fighting has a brutalising effect upon Spain . . . , headlines of murder, rape, and rubbish, excite and demoralise the American public.”

—Margot Asquith (1864-1945), British socialite and author, My Impressions of America, 1922 

(Thanks to alert WORDster Andrew Merton)

• Editorial Comment: Olé!

PeezPix by Ted Pease

The Winter Wellsvilles






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.) #tedsword
 
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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The 90th Birthday of the Idiot Box

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It’ll Never Fly

“For God’s sake, go down to reception and get rid of a lunatic who’s down there. He says he’s got a machine for seeing by wireless!” 

—London Daily Express newspaper editor, when “televisor” inventor John Logie Baird tried to show him the first television, Jan. 26, 1926, “Who invented the television? How people reacted to John Logie Baird's creation 90 years ago,” The Telegraph, Jan. 26, 2016 Image: Ralph Morse, Life, 1949

• Editorial Comment: I’m with that newspaper editor. That cockamamie idea is doomed.

• Related: “LIFE Watches TV: Classic Photos of People and Their Television Sets,” 2016

PeezPix by Ted Pease

Camel Rock to Trinidad 












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.) #tedsword
 
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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Glory Days

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Make the Pie Higher!

I think we all agree, the past is over.
This is still a dangerous world.
It's a world of madmen and uncertainty
and potential mental losses.

Rarely is the question asked
Is our children learning?
Will the highways of the Internet become more few?
How many hands have I shaked?

They misunderestimate me.
I am a pitbull on the pantleg of opportunity.
I know that the human being and the fish can coexist.
Families is where our nation finds hope, where our wings take dream.

Put food on your family!
Knock down the tollbooth!
Vulcanize society!
Make the pie higher! Make the pie higher! 

—A compilation of statements by George W. Bush, the 43rd U.S. president, selected, arranged and fact-checked by Snopes.com, 2002 

• Editorial Comment: Now seems like the glory days of American political discourse.

PeezPix by Ted Pease

Rat Hats












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.) #tedsword
 
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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Coal Mining

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And Other Pastimes

“Writing is hard for every last one of us — straight white men included. Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig. You need to do the same. . . . So write. Not like a girl. Not like a boy. Write like a motherf^%#*r.” 

—Cheryl Strayed, advice columnist and author of Wild, “How to Write Like a Mother#^@%*&,” Creative Nonfiction, 2013

 

• Editorial Comment: Chipping away, slag or words, a ton at a time, gets the job done.


PeezPix by Ted Pease

Larry’s Pond












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.) #tedsword
 
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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Profiles in Courage

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The Discomfort of Thought

“For the great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie — deliberate, contrived, and dishonest — but the myth — persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the clichés of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.” 

—President John F. Kennedy (1917-1963), commencement address, Yale University, 1963 (Thanks to alert WORDster Roger Plothow)

• Editorial Comment: That sounds like truth. In my opinion.


PeezPix by Ted Pease

Pound Puppies










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.) #tedsword
 
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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Wheat and Chaff

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So Much Blather

“There are five billion people on Earth, and I should guess that at any given moment one or two billion of us are speaking. And I should further guess that virtually nothing anyone says is memorable.... 

There are times, however, when someone turns a phrase that seems so clever or so apt or so enlightening or so true, that the statement flies from person to person and gives pleasure at each passage. The statement becomes a ‘quotation.’” 

—Isaac Asimov (1920-1992), science fiction author, Isaac Asimov’s Book of Science and Nature Quotations, 1988

• Editorial Comment: The rest is called “crap.”


PeezPix by Ted Pease

Rainbow












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.) #tedsword
 
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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The Sarah Returns

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No Pussyfooting

“Media heads are spinning,” the former vice presidential candidate said after taking the stage at a Trump rally at Iowa State University. “This is going to be so much fun.”

Palin, the former governor of Alaska and 2008 GOP vice presidential pick, said that, with Trump as president, America would no longer apologize. 

“No more pussyfooting around,” Palin said.

—Jill Colvin, “Sarah Palin: ‘No more pussyfooting around’ if Trump elected,” The Associated Press, Jan. 19, 2016

• Editorial Comment: With Sarah Palin’s vision thing, Trump can see the White House from his penthouse.


PeezPix by Ted Pease

A New Morning in America






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.) #tedsword
 
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
.

Ziggy’s Truth

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Source Material

“I suppose the majority of what I was writing about initially came from news coverage and media events. I’m like everyone else, I know what’s going on in the world basically through television and the newspaper — one for the pictures, the other for the truth.”

—David Bowie (1947-2016), iconic English glam-rocker, 1987

• Editorial Comment: The truth looks very diff-er-ent today.

• Astronomers give David Bowie his own constellation, The Guardian


PeezPix by Ted Pease

Old Soldier









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.) #tedsword
 
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
.