Yearly Archives: 2005

DASH for Health

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My doctor has encouraged me to try the DASH Diet. I don’t need to lose any weight, he just thinks it’s a good healthy, diet. I went back to their website and entered my data: 57 year old male, 155 pounds, moderate activity. Here’s what the DASH program recommends that I eat each day.

Man, that’s lot of fruit and vegetables. If you figure I’m not gonna have spinach for breakfast, that means I have to have three veggies at lunch and three at the evening meal. Tough. Most of the rest seems doable… but who in the hell eats 11 slices of bread a day? I guess I can do two at breakfast and two more at lunch and a couple for the evening meal. But that still leaves 5 slices! I’m sure I’m reading this incorrectly so I have to do a little more research. Stay tuned.

Reading List: 2005

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The Fool’s Run – John Sandford (September)
What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer – John Markoff (September)
The Hot Kid – Elmore Leonard (August)
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince – J. K. Rowling (August)
The Historian – Elizabeth Kostova (July)
The System of the World – Neal Stephenson (June)
The Twelfth Card – Jeffery Deaver (May)
All the Flowers Are Dying – Lawrence Block (February)
The Broker – John Grisham (February)
State of Fear – Michael Crichton (February)

Good Night, and Good Luck

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“Good Night, And Good Luck.” takes place during the early days of broadcast journalism in 1950’s America. It chronicles the real-life conflict between television newsman Edward R. Murrow and Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee. With a desire to report the facts and enlighten the public, Murrow, and his dedicated staff – headed by his producer Fred Friendly and Joe Wershba in the CBS newsroom – defy corporate and sponsorship pressures to examine the lies and scaremongering tactics perpetrated by McCarthy during his communist ‘witch-hunts’. A very public feud develops when the Senator responds by accusing the anchor of being a communist. In this climate of fear and reprisal, the CBS crew carries on and their tenacity will prove historic and monumental.

Produced by George Clooney, GN&GL opens in October. Won’t be a dry eye in the newsroom.

LAPD Blue

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NYPD Blue co-creator Steven Bochco is developing another cop show, this time for the WB. Variety.com describes it as “a young-skewing hourlong cop/mystery show revolving around two Hollywood homicide detectives at the LAPD.” Bochco says the untitled project will be “a little lighter in tone. It’s not heavy-duty or long on procedural. It owes more to ‘Columbo’ than ‘CSI.’ “

Bochco wrote a pretty fair Hollywood mystery novel a couple of years ago (Death by Hollywood) but I’m wondering if what I liked most about NYPD Blue came from the (then) tortured mind of David Milch.

Link clean-up complete. Sort of.

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I just finished checking every post from February, 2002…through July, 2005. My goal was to find and fix any broken link to an earlier post or website I controlled. I found and fixed –or just deleted– a handful of links to other websites but there are just too many to repair them all.

One of the (many) features I like about Typepad is TypeLists. No more tweaking html (Blogger). I brought back my Favorite Posts list, and added one I labeled Great Lines. This goes back to one of the reasons I started blogging. I’d read or see a great line from a book or movie and forget it 10 minutes later. I started writing them down here. My list is far from complete but I’ll find them all eventually.

Typepad also offers the option of assigning each post to a category. I might try to go back and assign some posts to categories but that will have to wait for another day. But it’s a great feature I’ll use going forward.

Smoker’s Math

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While I’m on the subject. One of my co-workers is trying to quit smoking. She proudly reported that she’s down from a pack-a-day, to just five cigarettes. She seems to really want to stop and I hope she makes it. But the math kept nagging at me.

Let’s say she starts smoking when she gets up at 7:00 a.m and has her last one before retiring at, say, 11:00 p.m. So she consumes 20 smokes over a 16 hour day. On average, that works out to a cigarette every 48 minutes. And if it takes 5 minutes to smoke one, every 40 minutes she’s reaching for the Virginia Slims. That can’t be right, how would she ever get anything done? So I went back and asked.

“Well, I usually had about three cigarettes before I came to work. Maybe three or four during lunch. And the rest after work. Oh, and we usually take a couple of breaks during the day but only long enough to smoke one.” Okay, let’s re-run the numbers:

07:00 – 08:00 — 3
08:00 – 12:00 — 1
12:00 – 01:00 — 4
01:00 – 05:00 — 1
05:00 – 11:00 — 11

That only leaves 6 hours to smoke 11 cigarettes. One every half-hour until bedtime. My mom smoked two packs a day, every day. If she was awake, she had a Winston in her hand or in the nearby ash try. It was hard but satisfying work and she loved it.

Smoker’s Oasis

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The death of Peter Jennings (from lung cancer) last week has lots of folks thinking about smoking. I remember when smoking was allowed on airplanes and ash trays were common desk accessories in the office. Ash tray. A tray for your ashes. Do they still manufacture ash trays? I’m sure they do.

My favorite “ash tray” is The Smoker’s Oasis. The grand daddy of ash trays, The Smoker’s Oasis has sprung up like big, stinking mushrooms outside offices and buildings across America. When we drove our smoking employees outdoors, we had to come up with someplace for them to put their butts.

We had one outside our offices for a while. It was originally located 30 or 40 yards from the back door of our building. The next time I saw it, it was right next to the building, so smokers could get a little shelter from the rain.

I went searching for it to take a picture for this post but it’s gone. When I asked one of my smoker co-workers where it was located, she would only mutter, “It’s gone. I don’t know where it is.”

My current theory is our Smoker’s Oasis has become like Dracula’s coffin. Only smokers know where to find it and you can never spot them going to or from the secret location.

Do our closeted smokers take turns emptying our Smoker’s Oasis? Is there a secret duty roster somewhere, showing who has butt chores this week? And where do they dump the butts? Do they bury them in the woods behind our office, taking care to spread leaves over the shallow grave?

Do they dream of a day when they are once again in the majority and can come in from the cold? Will we have nice, cut glass ash trays on every desk, with the company logo proudly imprinted on the side? Will we see a day when there is no longer a need for the Smoker’s Oasis? We can only hope.

American Democracy: We were lucky

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In an interview with CBS’ Mike Wallace, Russian President Vladimir Putin said “Democracy cannot be exported to some other place. This must be a product of internal domestic development in a society.” Putin went on to say that leaving Iraq without “establishing the grounds for a united country” would (also) be a mistake.

While there’s no reason to take tips on democracy from a former KGB agent, I think Putin is right. My gut tells me that even if we could find and capture every insurgent, and put them on a plane and fly them to say, Mississippi… the good people of Iraq could not or would not cobble together anything you and I would consider Democracy. Never gonna happen.

But in all fairness, I don’t think we could do it again either. Seriously, if we had to start from scratch today, do you think the American people could write a constitution and all the rest? Shiiit. I know I wouldn’t want to live under a government that we’d be capable of forming today. So I thank my lucky stars for our Founding Fathers and hope the government they crafted is strong enough to survive us, their descendants. Like they say, timing is everything.

New Convergence program at MU J-School

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Mike McKean heads up the new Convergence program at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. This fall he begins his 20th year teaching at the J-School. Once upon a time, he was a reporter for The Missourinet, one of the state news networks owned by the company I work for. Mike and I get together every few months to talk about radio and journalism and the Internet and stuff like that.

Today I took my recorder along and asked him about: Teaching journalism in 2005; podcasting; blogs; radio; advertising; newspapers; “citizen journalism” and some other stuff.

AUDIO: Interview with Mike McKean 20 min MP3

Caged bird sings

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Jefferson City prison inmate Irving Berry has written a song for Missouri, entitled “Missouri, Home Sweet Home to Me,” which he calls a gift of honest reconciliation from all of Missouri’s incarcerated sons and daughters. Berry says 90 percent of the inmates he has come into contact with are remorseful. Berry, who has been in prison for nearly 30 years, wrote the song while incarcerated at the Cameron prison. When he was transferred to Jefferson City, he met with fellow inmate Mark Immekus, who wrote the music. They recorded the song with fellow inmates at the Jefferson City Prison. [Missourinet.com]