Monty Python

.
Details, details . . .

“The words are all there, J.J., we just have to get them in the right order.”

—from a Monty Python skit

• Editorial Comment: I have to invoke my hero Tom Stoppard here: “Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you can get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” Aye, that’s the trick, laddie.


New from our award-winning student news site, The Hard News Café:
• Mendon’s volunteer firefighters: ‘Our pay really is helping people’
• Images of Ethiopia: Rick Egan’s photos from the Horn of Africa
• Review: Dream Theater wows enthusiastic crowd during rare SLC stop
• Paradise Town Council election canceled

• HELP WANTED:
PR FACULTY: The JCOM Department at Utah State University has opened a national search for a tenure-track professor of public relations and corporate communication. Start date: August 2012. See USU HR link here for full posting and details. Email ted.pease@usu.edu for more information.

• PeezPix cards & prints
. . . Catalog here.



.

Ostriches Wanted

.
No Airheads

“What [is needed] is a revolutionary look at what a newspaper is and the role it plays. It must accept that it is no longer a mass medium. It is a cross-cultural medium for all people who are serious about being involved. It is not for airheads, intellectual peasants, or for people who put their heads in the sand.”

—James E. Shelledy, former editor, The Salt Lake Tribune, 2009

• Editorial Comment: EXTRA!! Ignore the news at The Ostriche Times!

• Visit our award-winning student news site, The Hard News Café.
New from HNC:
• Cache school board ponders online options for students
• Images of Ethiopia: Rick Egan’s photos from the Horn of Africa
• Review: Dream Theater wows enthusiastic crowd during rare SLC stop

• HELP WANTED:
PR FACULTY: The JCOM Department at Utah State University has opened a national search for a tenure-track professor of public relations and corporate communication. Start date: August 2012. See USU HR link here for full posting and details. Email ted.pease@usu.edu for more information.

• PeezPix cards & prints
. . . Catalog here.







.
.

Drones

.
Press Threats

“(AP) WASHINGTON — Republican presidential contender Ron Paul on Wednesday suggested that the United States could assassinate journalists the same way it targeted Americans with ties to al Qaeda.

“The Texas congressman again criticized President Barack Obama for approving last week’s drone strikes in Yemen against a U.S. citizen who was tracked and executed based on secret intelligence that linked him to two failed terrorist attacks against the U.S. . . . Escalating his criticism, Paul told a National Press Club luncheon that if citizens do not protest the deaths, the country will start adding reporters to its list of threats that must be taken out.

“‘Can you imagine being put on a list because you’re a threat? What’s going to happen when they come to the media? What if the media becomes a threat? ... This is the way this works. It’s incrementalism,’ Paul said. ‘It’s slipping and sliding, let me tell you.’”

—Philip Elliot, AP reporter, “Ron Paul: U.S. Could Target Journalists For Killing” URL (Thanks to alert WORDster Brenda Cooper)

• Editorial Comment: News Item: “Press ignoring Paul candidacy.” Why isn’t this guy doing better in the polls?


• Visit our award-winning student news site, The Hard News Café.
New from HNC:
• ‘Mingi’—journalists bring the story of Ethiopian infanticide to USU
• Images of Ethiopia: Rick Egan’s photos from the Horn of Africa
• 5k run planned to support returning troops in ‘Wounded Warriors’ event

• HELP WANTED:
PR FACULTY: The JCOM Department at Utah State University has opened a national search for a tenure-track professor of public relations and corporate communication. Start date: August 2012. See USU HR link here for full posting and details. Email ted.pease@usu.edu for more information.

• PeezPix cards & prints








.

Game-Changer

.
Steve Jobs, 1955-2011

“Part of the narrative that made Apple what it is today goes out with Steve Jobs. I came out to honor the fact that one man with vision, courage and unwavering dedication can still change the world. The way that I communicate and the way that I interact with the world is through things that Steve Jobs has created.”

—Christopher Smith, 40, a former business development manager at vigil for Steve Jobs outside Apple HQ at 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, Calif. The Apple visionary died yesterday of pancreatic cancer. URL

• Bites from Steve Jobs:
• “How to Live Before You Die.” Stanford University commencement address, 1995.
• “It’s better to be a pirate than to join the Navy.”
• “Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected.”
• “Quality is more important than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles.”
• “Insanely Great!”

Links:
• HuffPo: IPad, IPhone, Apple II: The 10 Most Iconic Products From Steve Jobs’s Career

• Editorial Comment: Please, Apple-shift-Z?

• Visit our award-winning student news site, The Hard News Café.
New from HNC:
• USU-Eastern head basketball coach, 31, found dead in apartment
• Local merchants sell out of ‘weapons’ in USU Human-Zombie conflict
• Goat-milk soap, an all-natural attraction at Logan farmers’ market

• HELP WANTED:
PR FACULTY: The JCOM Department at Utah State University has opened a national search for a tenure-track professor of public relations and corporate communication. Start date: August 2012. See USU HR link here for full posting and details. Email ted.pease@usu.edu for more information.

• PeezPix cards & prints








.

Lunatics

.
Crazy People

“Many people hear voices when no one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stare at the walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing.”

—Margaret Chittenden, author of 100+ romance and mystery novels.

• Editorial Comment: Sometimes you feel like a nut . . .

• Visit our award-winning student news site, The Hard News Café.
New from HNC:
• Zombies on campus: Police deny reports of zombie attacks at USU
• Interview: 26 years later, James LaBrie & Dream Theater still evolving
• USU-Eastern athletics budget lowest in state, SWAC conference


• HELP WANTED:
PR FACULTY: The JCOM Department at Utah State University has opened a national search for a tenure-track professor of public relations and corporate communication. Start date: August 2012. See USU HR link here for full posting and details. Email ted.pease@usu.edu for more information.

• PeezPix cards & prints








.

Job Security

.
More Adventures in Punctuation

“I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.”

—Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) writer

• Editorial Comment: The Wilde Life: And then, the next day . . .






Image thanks to alert WORDster and paper-grader Evan Pease. Related: Insert appropriate punctuation in the following: “Let’s eat Grandma.”


• TODAY!!! The Children of Ethiopia: From the Cradle to the Grave
Matthew LaPlante, former national security reporter for The Salt Lake Tribune (now an assistant journalism professor at USU), and Tribune photojournalist Rick Egan went to Ethiopia last summer. What they saw: Tuesday, Oct. 4, 1:30-2:45 p.m., TSC Auditorium, Utah State University.

• Visit our award-winning student news site, The Hard News Café.
New from HNC:
• Drill team practice pays off for Mountain Crest’s high-kicking Caprielles
• Logan biologist running for presidency of famine-ravaged Somalia
• USU-Eastern athletics budget lowest in state, SWAC conference


• HELP WANTED:
PR FACULTY: The JCOM Department at Utah State University has opened a national search for a tenure-track professor of public relations and corporate communication. Start date: August 2012. See USU HR link here for full posting and details. Email ted.pease@usu.edu for more information.

• PeezPix cards & prints

Curmudgeon

.
Sign-Off

“I’m wondering why Andy Rooney is leaving his weekly post? We need writers now more than ever, especially cranky ones who use typewriters.”

—Andrea Mitchell, NBC News, Tweeting on the retirement of longtime resident “60 Minutes” curmudgeon Andy Rooney at 92,
Oct. 2, 2011

Watch the “60 Minutes” farewell to the “Grampa Moses of broadcasting” here

• Editorial Comment: Did you ever wonder why we watch him every week?

• Rooney classic: “There’s no doubt about it that dogs are nicer than people.”

• COMING TOMORROW: The Children of Ethiopia: From the Cradle to the Grave
Matthew LaPlante, former national security reporter for The Salt Lake Tribune (now an assistant journalism professor at USU), and Tribune photojournalist Rick Egan went to Ethiopia last summer. What they saw: Tuesday, Oct. 4, 1:30-2:45 p.m., TSC Auditorium, Utah State University.

• Visit our award-winning student news site, The Hard News Café.
New from HNC:
• Logan biologist running for presidency of famine-ravaged Somalia
• Opinion: Global economic meltdown worse in many ways than Cold War
• USU-Eastern athletics budget lowest in state, SWAC conference


• HELP WANTED:
PR FACULTY: The JCOM Department at Utah State University has opened a national search for a tenure-track professor of public relations and corporate communication. Start date: August 2012. See USU HR link here for full posting and details. Email ted.pease@usu.edu for more information.

• PeezPix cards & prints



.

Town Crier

.
Community Connections

“While local TV news remains the most popular source for local information in America, adults rely on it primarily for just three subjects — weather, breaking news and to a lesser extent traffic. And for all their problems, newspapers (both print and on the web) are the source Americans turn to most for a wider range of information than any other source. . . .

“Web-only outlets are now primary source of information on key subjects like education, local business and restaurants. And greater disruption seems to lie ahead. For the 79% of Americans who are online, in addition to Americans ages 18-39, the internet ranks as a top source of information for most of the local subjects studied in the survey.”

—Pew Research Center,
“How People Learn About Their Local Community,”
Sept. 26, 2011

• Editorial Comment: 69% also said they wouldn't really miss their local newspaper if it went out of business. P-U

• COMING NEXT WEEK: The Children of Ethiopia: From the Cradle to the Grave
Matthew LaPlante, former national security reporter for The Salt Lake Tribune (now an assistant journalism professor at USU), and Tribune photojournalist Rick Egan went to Ethiopia last summer. What they saw: Tuesday, Oct. 4, 1:30-2:45 p.m., TSC Auditorium, Utah State University.

• Visit our award-winning student news site, The Hard News Café.
New from HNC:
• Hyde Park dog runs must be closer to owners’ homes, council says
• Kennel complaint drives Millville council meeting ‘to the dogs’
• Half-naked and proud—The Undie Run Utahns are not uptight

• HELP WANTED:
PR FACULTY: The JCOM Department at Utah State University has opened a national search for a tenure-track professor of public relations and corporate communication. Start date: August 2012. See USU HR link here for full posting and details. Email ted.pease@usu.edu for more information.

• PeezPix cards & prints





.

I’d Rather Huff

.
Leaving the Times

“For me it’s a chance to write with a point of view. It’s sort of the age of the columnist. With the dysfunctional political system, old conventional notions of fairness make it hard to tell readers directly what’s going on. This is a chance for me to explore solutions in my economic reporting.”

[Peter] Goodman, who spent a decade at The Washington Post before his three years at the Times, says he will still rely on facts and not engage in “ranting.” And while he was happy at the newspaper, he says, he found he was engaged in “almost a process of laundering my own views, through the tried-and-true technique of dinging someone at some think tank to say what you want to tell the reader.”

—Peter Goodman, former national economics reporter,
left The New York Times last year for the Huffington Post
(in Howard Kurtz column, The Washington Post, 2010
(Thanks to alert WORDster Shane Graham)

• Editorial Comment: So this is the new “new journalism”?

• COMING NEXT WEEK: The Children of Ethiopia: From the Cradle to the Grave
Matthew LaPlante, former national security reporter for The Salt Lake Tribune (now an assistant journalism professor at USU), and Tribune photojournalist Rick Egan went to Ethiopia last summer. What they saw: Tuesday, Oct. 4, 1:30-2:45 p.m., TSC Auditorium, Utah State University.

• Visit our award-winning student news site, The Hard News Café.
New from HNC:
• Kennel complaint drives Millville council meeting ‘to the dogs’
• Pioneer museum or party space? River Heights must decide • Everyone bumps into hurdles on road to success, former coach says

• HELP WANTED:
PR FACULTY: The JCOM Department at Utah State University has opened a national search for a tenure-track professor of public relations and corporate communication. Start date: August 2012. See USU HR link here for full posting and details. Email ted.pease@usu.edu for more information.

• PeezPix cards & prints





.

Overexamination

.
Tweet This

“The unexamined life, said Socrates, is not worth living. Today, we seem to be operating under a new and very different dictum: the unrecorded life is not worth living. Thanks to digital technologies, we now have the tools to chronicle our daily actions and thoughts in the minutest detail—and to share the record with the world.

“The desire to bear witness to one's personal experience isn't anything new, of course. Long before words and pictures turned into strings of ones and zeroes, people set down accounts of events in their lives. They painted on cave walls, wrote in diaries, took snapshots and collected keepsakes and souvenirs. What's changed is the scale of the effort. Whereas in the past we tended to record only important events, today we can, and do, record pretty much everything. Nothing we do or think, it seems, is too insignificant to be preserved or broadcast.”

—Nicholas Carr, author & tech guru,
“The self-recording craze is nothing new—but now we do it digitally,”
The Guardian, June 7, 2007

• Editorial Comment: I tweet, therefore I am.

• Visit our award-winning student news site, The Hard News Café.
New from HNC:
• Everyone bumps into hurdles on road to success, former coach says
• Styx and REO ‘surf the wave of joy’ with Salt Lake City crowd
• Senator-astronaut tells students: Space travel could eliminate war

• HELP WANTED:
PR FACULTY: The JCOM Department at Utah State University has opened a national search for a tenure-track professor of public relations and corporate communication. Start date: August 2012. See USU HR link here for full posting and details. Email ted.pease@usu.edu for more information.

• PeezPix cards & prints





.

Perrypalooza

.
Texas Toast

“The last time a Texas governor ran for president, out-of-state reporters went looking for scandal and controversy about George W. Bush and found mostly glowing accounts in the Texas media of his rapport with Democrats, passion for education reform and success at coming off like a ‘fairly normal’ guy despite his blue blood pedigree—and that positive judgment was more or less echoed by the national media.

“‘Bush could do no wrong,’ recalled Paul Burka, who covered him for Texas Monthly. ‘He just got a clean bill of health from the media, and that included us.’

“But the reporting on [GOP presidential candidate and Texas Gov. Rick] Perry has been far tougher, and has presented national reporters, publishers, TV bookers—and Perry’s opponents—with a ready supply of story lines that in recent weeks have taken at least some of the bloom off his candidacy.”

“. . . R.G. Ratcliffe, a reporter at the Austin American-Statesman who is working on a book about Perry, . . . says he already sees signs that the national media will follow the Texas media in its aggressiveness toward Perry—continuing the stark contrast to Perry’s predecessor.

“‘I get the sense that the national media would just as soon take Perry out as anything,’ he said. ‘The national media, in 2000, wanted George Bush to be president. The reporters all wanted an inside track to the Bush administration. This time around, it’s like, ‘We want to take the guy’s legs out.’”

—Keach Hagley, reporting for Politico, “Texas tales of Perry go national,” Sept. 18

• Editorial Comment: You want grits with that?

• Visit our award-winning student news site, The Hard News Café.
• Fonnesbeck Greenhouse: Hobby is now a 22-year landmark in Mendon
• Styx and REO ‘surf the wave of joy’ with Salt Lake City crowd
• Paradise will install meter to measure water flow from spring


• HELP WANTED:
PR FACULTY: The JCOM Department at Utah State University has opened a national search for a tenure-track professor of public relations and corporate communication. Start date: August 2012. See USU HR link here for full posting and details. Email ted.pease@usu.edu for more information.

• PeezPix cards & prints

Celebrified?

.
Thinking Cap

“I remember telling my reporters, one thing I never want to hear in your reports is, ‘I think.’ We have celebrified the news to the point where we are losing the news, where it is more about what some people think than what they know.”

—Frank Sesno, former CNN White House correspondent and Washington bureau chief, in Dave Marash, Columbia Journalism Review, September/October 2011 URL

• Editorial Comment: I think, therefore I am?


• Visit our award-winning student news site, The Hard News Café.
• Fonnesbeck Greenhouse: Hobby is now a 22-year landmark in Mendon
• North Logan Council can’t update city’s wage scale for lack of quorum
• Paradise will install meter to measure water flow from spring


• HELP WANTED:
PR FACULTY: The JCOM Department at Utah State University has opened a national search for a tenure-track professor of public relations and corporate communication. Start date: August 2012. See USU HR link here for full posting and details. Email ted.pease@usu.edu for more information.

• PeezPix cards & prints



.

Rocking Chair

.
An Argument for Retirement

“One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.”

—Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), important writer

• Editorial Comment: Me, I have an important nap coming up....







• Visit our award-winning student news site, The Hard News Café.
• Off the bus, onto the sidewalks: River Heights kids all walk to school
• Wellsville City Council tables decision on new irrigation water line
• Retired to the rocking chair? Not Louie Leonhardt, Providence gardener



• HELP WANTED:
PR FACULTY: The JCOM Department at Utah State University has opened a national search for a tenure-track professor of public relations and corporate communication. Start date: August 2012. See USU HR link here for full posting and details. Email ted.pease@usu.edu for more information.

• PeezPix cards & prints

Reading

.
Footrest

“Ah, lit’rature! There’s nothing like sitting home nights with a fireplace, a dog and a good book at your feet!”

—Jimmy Durante (1893-1980), singer/literary critic, 1947 URL

• Editorial Comment: My dog can read me like a book.

• Rhyme This: Yesterday’s WORD challenged WORDsters to offer Mark Twain limericks. Here is some of the conversation:

Will Pitkin:
There once was a fellow named Twain
Who had a remarkable brain,
He tried every genre,
But being so ornre
He never would write a refrain.

Jim Sparks:
There once was a man named Twain
Who vowed that never again
Would he write any verse
Because it was worse
To readers than having a pain.

Ted Pease: As a deluded English major freshman at UWash in the 1970s, I had a class on DH Lawrence from a wonderful professor named Roger Sales. Annoyed by the usual stupid questions from students about the final paper, he sprayed coffee everywhere and shouted that he didn't give a good goddam what we did! Write limericks, for all I care!!!!! Well, you know the rest of the story. I did: limericks encapsulating each of the 12 or whatever novels we had read and dissected during the quarter. Wish I still had that paper.

But “gen-ree/orn-ree” would never have flown, Perfesser Pitkin. And Sparks is missing a syllable in the first line. Lessee....

A frowsy old writer called Clemens
Received his ideas from the heavens.
“If I call myself ‘twain,’
I’ll make readers insane,
And reviewers can all go suck lemons.”

But Roger Sales would never have accepted that.

Marc Davidson:
There once was a writer named Clemens
Whose poems, he claimed, were all Lemons.
But with nom de plume Twain
His wit hits the brain
Like the cause of delirium tremens.

I bow to anyone who can use “delirium tremens” in a limerick. But all of us need to keep our day jobs.

• COMICS: You choose, Wise Guy! Bunny Honey or Hemp Horseman Sweat? Ted Pease gets bluffed on NPR’s Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me!” Listen here.

• Visit our award-winning student news site, The Hard News Café.
• Jake Garn: Senator-astronaut tells students: Space travel could eliminate war
• Head Case? School board honors Providence teacher, passes concussion policy
• Vege Out: Paradise Market: A profusion of garden veggies, crafts and neighbors


• CLASSIFIED:
PR FACULTY WANTED: The JCOM Department at Utah State University has opened a national search for a tenure-track professor of public relations and corporate communication. Start date: August 2012. See USU HR link here for full posting and details. Email ted.pease@usu.edu for more information.

• PeezPix cards & prints

De Spite

.
Eschew Poetry

“Like Charles Dickens and Tennessee Williams, Twain was a compulsive writer. Throughout his long literary career, he tried his writing hand at almost every style and form possible: novels, travel books, essays, journalism, short stories, humor, criticism, speeches, poetry, plays. He mastered a staggering number of these forms, but not all of them….

“‘I shall not write any poetry,’ he wrote, ‘unless I conceive a spite against the subscribers.’”

—Mark Davidziak,
about Mark Twain (1835-1910), dead poet,
quoted from his Buffalo Express editorial, 1869
(in Mark My Words: Mark Twain on Writing.
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996)

• Editorial Comment: Hmmm. There once was a man named Clemens... But wait! What rhymes with “Twain”?

• COMICS: You choose, Wise Guy! Bunny Honey or Hemp Horseman Sweat? Ted Pease gets bluffed on NPR’s Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me!” Listen here.

• Visit our award-winning student news site, The Hard News Café.
• Jake Garn: Senator-astronaut tells students: Space travel could eliminate war
• Head Case? School board honors Providence teacher, passes concussion policy
• Vege Out: Paradise Market: A profusion of garden veggies, crafts and neighbors


• CLASSIFIED:
PR FACULTY WANTED: The JCOM Department at Utah State University has opened a national search for a tenure-track professor of public relations and corporate communication. Start date: August 2012. See USU HR link here for full posting and details. Email ted.pease@usu.edu for more information.

• PeezPix cards & prints




.