The Messages from the Media

Political Reporting Is As Bad As the Candidate’s Promises

The following meaningful story in Italics (quoted verbatim) was reported on the morning of the important New Hampshire primary in the Los Angeles Times.

By Michael A. Memoli, January 9, 2012, 9:11 p.m. Reporting from Manchester, N.H.—

The first votes in the nation's first presidential primary have been cast in Dixville Notch, N.H., resulting in a tie between Jon Huntsman Jr. and Mitt Romney in the Republican race. 

Each received two votes apiece, with one vote each for Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul.

President Obama won all three votes cast in the Democratic primary.

There are a total of nine registered voters in the tiny North Country village, and just three who are registered Republicans. Four more undeclared voters were eligible to vote in either the Republican or Democratic primary. There were two registered Democrats.

Aren’t you glad that you had the opportunity to truly learn something about the electoral process from this intrepid reporter and his newspaper? 
 Or would you rather watch the movie Groundhog Day all day, every day? Is there a difference?

On-the-Street Reporting, An Important “D” Rated Tale

To protect the alleged perpetrators, only their first names are listed.

The San Jose Mercury News reported that a private album-release party ended in a 15-person street brawl at 1:10 a.m. in Walnut Creek, California. Davon who resisted arrest attacked one of the many police officers called in. He was then joined in the struggle for justice and liberty by other members of his vaunted D-Team including Dante, Davonte and Devon. When she became incensed at the lack of civility at the scene, Desirae tried to punch a police officer and was also arrested. A delightful ending.

Television’s Bright Lites

On the Charlie Rose Show on PBS, just prior to the New Hampshire GOP Primary, Charlie was interviewing some distinguished pundits regarding Mitt and the Gang of Five’s attacks. Fortunately, two of them were forearmed with some transportation clichés —one if by land, and one if by sea—and neither of them saw how frail their points were.

Norah O’Donnell of CBS (or was See BS), seemed to be on a time machine as she moved backward into the twentieth or nineteenth century when speaking of the “retirement” of Bill Daley from Obama’s staff. She repeatedly said, “Bill Daley was brought in to keep the trains running on time.” Norah, trains are so passé, and you could have evoked something with a more twenty-first century feel—you know Norah, those things that go up in the air. Perhaps something like, “Obama’s campaign plane is taking off and Daley has been left at the departure gate.”

The next bit of transportation clichés were in the hands of Judd Gregg whose credentials include being a former governor and senator from New Hampshire, and an unabashed Romney supporter. He sounded like a Mississippi gambler with his paeans of Mitt beginning with, “He’s got the cards and will be playing a strong hand in South Carolina.” Now you can’t be gambling on the river without some transportation mechanism, and Judd kept repeating, “People are getting on Mitt’s boat.” You may have to be a bit wary of any former senator or governor who has two of the same letters side-by-side at the end of both their first and last name.

Ah the primaries, a sink or swim proposition, and that’s why all of the GOP candidates are trying to get their ducks in line.

If the Media Has You shrayn “Oy Vey”

Don’t just sit there and be fretting

All the narishkeyt, try rejecting.

The answer to this type of qualm?

Just go to www.theoyway.com.

shrayn = shouting

narishkeyt = nonsense

When the End Is the End

This week I received a phone call from Detroit that Wallace Sheldon Shanbrom had passed away. I knew him as “Wolf,” his Hebrew name, and we kept a friendship going over a fifty-five year period, and at times, thousands of miles apart. We shared an apartment on Prentis in Detroit in the late 1950s, spent a short time together in California in the early 1960s, acted together and separately a few years later at the UnStabled Theatre in Detroit, drove cross country together in 1981 after my parents died, davening as we went. He house sat for me in Santa Cruz and welcomed me into his home in Detroit.

He was an intelligent, articulate and zany individual with writing to match. I can attest to the latter when I look at the hundreds of letters I have saved where the writing goes up, down, sideways and backwards, yet the thoughts were always meaningful.

Wolf firmly believed in what he was doing, regardless of how far removed it was from mainstream thinking. He was, in fact, his own man, a distinction many have failed to achieve.

He never really “published” his writing, saying he didn’t want to go through a publisher’s editing process that might diminish what he fervently believed in and wanted to say. At times, those are my thoughts, too. He would duplicate his writings and hand them to others and me when we traveled, and asked us to drop them off at libraries and universities.

The Detroit Public Library’s Burton Historical Collection contains boxes of his work that he had placed there himself, as well as artifacts of his life. I was amazed when I went through them a few years ago.

Wolf said that he was “mechanic-nisht,” and didn’t understand the electronic world, nor cared to try and do so. He was truly a Luddite, anti-computer individual, but when I went on line and checked “Wallace Wolf Shanbrom” on Google, I found some of his writings listed there at: http://newsynthesisalawolfshanbrom.blogspot.com/2009/01/new-synthesis-2-09-ce.html and at http://newsynthesisalawolfshanbrom.blogspot.com/

His life is not solely represented by what those boxes contain. It is impossible for anyone to select exactly what it is that they have experienced and accomplished as a true representation of their short time on this side of the earth.

It is not for a Rabbi, a Priest, an Imam or atheist to close out our time here with a eulogy, using recently garnered data from family members and friends. What we do is best remembered in the hearts and minds of those we touched along the way.

However, I plan to have a videotaped eulogy written by, edited by and delivered by myself, and let others do their own editing and revising of my life story afterwards.

People of the Book

Today is December 31, 2011, and I plan to finish writing the final pages of my book, The Oy Way. You can gib a kuk at its web site at www.theoyway.com to find out its exact publication date and how to purchase copies. I have already spent countless amounts of monies, and easily spent more than four-hundred hours working on it; researching, writing, editing, going on photo shoots, attending conferences, and the end is near. So is my patience in working on its creation.

Next comes the arduous task of selling the book and have already been inundated by people offering me sage advice as to what I should do. Some friends are upset that I am selling it through Amazon and among other reasons, because they don’t like the fact that Amazon doesn’t pay needed sales tax here in California. My bookstore owning and working friends would rather have it on their shelves, and I will bring them copies on consignment when I speak there. One person has demanded that I offer the book at “a substantial discount” if I speak to his group,

Perhaps I should have named the book oy vey.

Wired and Weird

There are at least sixty people, some of which I don’t even know, want me to join them on LinkedIn. The same goes for others enraptured with Facebook.

With my book The Oy Way —www.theoyway.com — on the way, some wired in friends and family members are pushing me to use Facebook, saying that it is safe and no one could possibly hack into my account unless I let them. But I am wary of the security problems that could occur and today’s business section story about Facebook’s leader headlined “Zuck’s private photos slip out.” The subhead read, “CEO, girlfriend in G-rated shots, but security issues arise.” Look, if a crook can get Zuck, I, too, can get “tooked.”

Shoppers at Lucky markets in Northern California got “tooked” when some scam artists fixed the self-service line, and debit card numbers along with their personal IDs were captured, and their bank accounts tampered with.

Some of my wired in friends and family are very excited about having electronic communication devices that allow them to send emails, surf the net and find visual images of their houses online. This is all well and good, but if they don’t know where they are living without this enhancement, they are in real trouble.

My computer and the Internet are valuable for I am able to go online and do research, get forms for copyrighting my book, send out emails to family and friends here, there, and everywhere.

However, I use my iMac primarily as a writing instrument, and have spent an inordinately large amount of time in front of its screen lately as I try to finish the book. I also used it to write this blog entry and pieces for the Huffington Post, like the one just published on meaningful post-season football games. www.huffingtonpost.com/harvey-gotliffe-phd/obama-vs-newt-or-mitt-can_b_1130317.html.

A forty-year-old Royal typewriter sits three-feet away to my right, www.santacruzsentinel.com/ci_17315030, and each day I longingly look at it and think of all of the pre-computer writing I did on it. I even bought two small bottles of White Out Correction Fluid, just in case my yearning gets strong to move further into what seemed to be a simpler past.

Before that happens, I am going to go outside and try and find my house.

NOTE: If you have any problems opening up any of the sites, copy them into your address bar at the top of the page, and click them there.

Things That Make Me Wonder On a Thanksgiving Morning

For more than a year, when I arose at 430 in the morning, I was thankful that there was a pale green plastic bag on my doorstep containing the San Jose Mercury News (the Merc) to help me began my day. About two months ago, it started arriving after 7, and I wondered why. When it did arrive I also wondered why it sometimes landed on the lawn or in the bushes.

At 455 on this Thanksgiving Day morning when I opened my front door there was the familiar pale green plastic bag but it looked far larger than any I had seen before. I lugged the hefty bag to the dining room table and unfurled its contents. There were two separate, rubber band encased sections; the first had nineteen separate items and the second had a mere fourteen. I meticulously searched through each and every item and to my dismay I couldn’t find the newspaper, only advertising inserts proclaiming the virtues of shopping early for fabulous Black Friday sales.

The earliest beat Black Friday opening was for three of what we used to call drug stores who were open all Thanksgiving day. I wondered why Walmart held off ruining Thanksgiving for its employees by waiting until 10 on Thanksgiving night when other more benevolent retailers waited until 4 AM Friday for their own “door buster” or “early bird” specials. By that time, it will be too late to rescue any of 43 million birds that will be devoured today across our great land.

The bulging insert don’t wait winners were jcpenney with one seventy-two page entry, tied with Macy’s with two inserts of 56 and 16 pages, Sears totaled 68 pages in two inserts, and Kohl’s added a 60-page one. As usual, all of Kohl’s models were wearing their forced smiles as they leaned to the left or the right. None was able to stand up straight and I wondered why. I also wondered why there wasn’t any model who was within fifty years of my age.

Since it definitely would not be me doing the shopping, I wondered who would be one of the estimated 152 million people hurrying off with inserts in hand in the middle of the night. These perhaps guilt-laden individuals would be in the forefront of the masses participating in the annual frenzy known as holiday shopping. The National Retail Federation is hoping that they at least spend the predicted $465.6 billion during the season to help retailers feel jolly.

At 755 AM, I saw the newspaper person pull up again in his beige Jeep and I met Dan and wondered why the paper started coming so late. At first he had to learn his new route with 500 customers who subscribe to either my hometown paper the Santa Cruz Sentinel, which I never read, or the Merc or to both.

Both newspapers are part of the same media group and the Merc is delivered from their plant about 40 miles to the north. When the Sentinel was acquired, the group disposed of all of their printing presses here. It is now printed by another of the group’s newspapers in Monterey, some 40 miles to the south and it is delivered to Dan nearly two hours later than before.

I don’t envy Dan and his early morning work but it’s better than not having any source of income. I doubt if he will be occupying anything in the early morning other than his Jeep early every day for as long as he can.

Wonder Who Is In Charge?

Along with advertising inserts, every Thursday the Merc has a section called “eye” which is labeled as their Entertainment Guide. In today’s 32-page “eye” dated November 24, 2011 there are advertisements for everything from musical shows, concerts, plays and movies coming up during the holiday season. A one-third page one that caught my eye was for a grill promoting several different events. On November 11 2011 they were presenting Rhythm District, the next day, November 12, there was wine tasting on the afternoon and a concert that night for Southern Rock with the Beach Cowboys, followed by Vegas Nights on November 19, 2011.

It is obvious that this advertisement ran much earlier this month and you might wonder was it someone at the grill or at the newspaper who forgot to withdraw the advertisement after the events were over.

The I’s Have Id

I doubt if it is the same person or persons who proofread an advertisement that once ran (or ran once) in national magazines in the 1970s with a headline that proclaimed that Chevrolet was the car for “Amerca.”

To Air Is Human

It’s A Lock

On November 17, the captain of a Delta flight to New York City accidentally locked himself in the bathroom. A passenger with an accent tried to alert the co-pilot in the cockpit, and the co-pilot panicked and radioed, “The captain has disappeared in the back, and I have someone in a thick foreign accent trying to access the cabin right now, and I’ve got to deal with this situation.” There are two ways to avoid such terrifying situations in the future. Pilots and co-pilots should be trained in how to avoid profiling people as potentially troublesome solely by their accents, unless the accents emanate from either New Yawkers or Texans. The airlines could also have port-a-potties installed in larger cockpits and have bedpans available in the cockpits of commuter planes. Then the word “cockpit” would be a more befitting name.

Fare Enough

Hundreds of passengers on a flight from India to Great Britain were stranded for six hours in Vienna when their charter service ran out of money and needed $31,000 to pay for the rest of the flight to Birmingham, England. A cabin crew member told them “We need some money to pay the fuel, to pay the airport to pay everything we need if you want get to Birmingham.” A collection was started and passengers who were cash-strapped hurried to the airport’s ATM machines. The flight continued after enough money was collected. This may be the beginning of an exciting new method of fund raising during a sour economy.

There's No Place Like It

With the holidays approaching and you might mull over these apropos lyrics found in John Howard Payne’s 1823 song “Home! Sweet Home.” The second significant line reads, “be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.”

A VW Convertible, an MGB Convertible, Sterling Hayden and I

At the end of our last entry, you were promised that in our next one we would tell you the story of what happened in 1964 when two red convertibles ended up parked side-by-side in a restaurant’s parking lot on the Connecticut Turnpike.

That year I went back to Newport, Rhode Island where I had worked the year before and I drove there in my 1964 red MGB roadster. When you travel alone and are open to whatever comes your way, you may encounter the unexpected whether that may be an unexpected occurrence or individual that for a short while makes the journey well worthwhile.

I stopped at a Howard Johnson-like restaurant on the Connecticut Turnpike for lunch, and when I was done, as I headed down the elongated steps to the parking lot, I saw a red VW convertible park next to my car and watched a familiar face get out and start walking up the stairs.

It was Sterling Hayden; sailor, actor, activist and author. His autobiography Wanderer had been published the year before, and his latest film was released in January 1964. His role was General Jack D. Ripper and the film’s complete title was also captivating to the imagination: “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.”

He now stood one step down from me, and at 6’5” to my 5’10” we were almost on the same level when I greeted him with “Mr. Hayden, read the Wanderer and sorry that I didn’t arrive in the Bay Area until 1960. Would have loved to have sailed with you.” In 1959 he “kidnapped” his children and sailed off to Tahiti from Sausalito on the Wanderer.

Since I knew something about him from the book, we talked about his life as an adventurer and as an actor. I had seen “Dr. Strangelove” and we talked a bit about the absurdity of the then current and frigid Cold War situation where a mad man could accidentally set off an atomic bomb.

We talked about life and living and what a great adventure life was, and after thirty minutes I had to move on and so did he. He offered me his huge hand and we shook and I said, “It’s been a pleasure speaking with you, Mr. Hayden.”

Before he let go he asked, “And what is your name, young man?” I answered “Harvey Gotliffe.” We shook once more and he held on as he said, “It’s been a pleasure speaking with you, too, Mr. Gotliffe,” and we parted. He headed up to the restaurant and I down to the parking lot where his red VW convertible sat next to my red MGB roadster.

Andy Rooney Was Our First Paid Ho-Ho-Kus Cogitator Subscriber

Just after I launched the Ho-Ho-Kus Cogitator in October 2004, I mailed out the 16-page Volume 1, Number 1 to relatives, friends, acquaintances and to people of consequence in the media. I had hoped that among those in the latter category, there might be some who would write about my latest venture and in doing so might help publicize and promote the publication.

A subscription solicitation box on the back cover offered the next four issues for $12 for “regular middle-class individuals in the U.S.” It would cost $16 for “companies and more affluent individuals in the U.S.,” and issues would be “free for those with limited income.” I received more requests for the latter “subscription,“ primarily from relatives, friends and acquaintances.

Soon after I received a business envelope with a CBS logo and address in the upper left-hand corner dated October 28, 2004 by U.S. Postage Meter #7112220. The cost then was 37¢. I knew that this could be a “lucky letter” since the meter contained the numbers “122” which was both my birth date (January 22) and the number I used when I raced sports cars in the 1960s.

My eye drifted back to the CBS corner and there in a steady pen and ink writing I saw the words “Andrew A. Rooney.” When I opened the envelope there was a two-paragraph letter, typed by Andrew himself and began “Dear Mr Gotliffe,” with no period after my designated title, and this was the letter that followed:

“I came close to pitching out your envelope containing The Ho-Ho-Kus Cogitator without looking at it. I get a ton of junk. I did look at it though, in part because The Practical Cogitator by Ferris Greenslet and Charles Curtis is my favorite book. You got me for half an hour – which is pretty good, considering my attention span. Where have you gone wrong in life – including leaving The Village (Ho-Ho-Kus) for Santa Cruz?

Although I don’t have confidence there will be four issues, am sending my Unlimited Income subscriber’s check for $16. Please dont (sic) send me a funny letter.

Regards,

Andrew A. Rooney”

His hurried signature appeared to be “Andy Rooney” but I couldn’t say for sure.

To tell you the truth (as my wife prefaces some pronouncements), at the time I didn’t know if there would be four more issues either, however the latest issue was Volume 5, Number 1, the eighteenth.

Andrew A. Rooney was sent his four paid-for issues, and with each issue I duplicated his original letter and wrote a brief note while being extremely careful to respect his wishes and I refrained from writing anything funny on any of them. When his four-issue subscription expired, I solicited a renewal explaining, “according to my records this is the final one of the four in your subscription that you doubted would ever be published. I guarantee you four more with your subscription renewal.”

Andrew never responded to this one nor did I ever receive any more correspondence from him. That didn’t stop me from sending him every subsequent issue along with his original letter, and each contained a benign note written on it.

Among my verbal missiles through the years was one in September 2005 where I complimented him on a piece he did on Peter Jennings who had just died. When I sent him Volume 2, Number 4 in April 2008. I wrote “Ah ye of little faith, you have now received 8 ½ issues for the price of four. A funny letter would be acceptable.” In August 2009, along with Volume 4, Number 1, I wrote in green ink on his original letter “Issue Fourteen is enclosed, Andrew A. Rooney. Binders will soon be available to hold all issues. As you see on p. 12 — you are receiving it free — Best to you always.” The latter referred to the word “Free” on the back page that I had checked off for him in the subscription box.

On January 12, 2011, Volume 4, Number 4 was published and I sent it to him two days later along with what would be my last correspondence to him. “HAPPY 92 – Mr. Andrew A. Rooney. Consider your $16 sent more than six years ago a lifetime subscription, and here’s the seventeenth issue. Hope you will be receiving many more issues; after all I only turn 75 this month. Best to you.”

I never had the opportunity to send him the most recent printed issue and although he never responded to any mailings other than the first one, I would like to think that he read parts of some of them. I will always consider him my first and only lifetime subscriber. However, subscribers like subscriptions, have an expiration date and Andrew’s was November 4, 2011.

For free copies of the online version of The Ho-Ho-Kus Cogitator, please send an email to hohokuscogitator@att.net. If you are the first to reply, we will send you the next issue of Andy’s lifetime printed version that “is published regularly on an irregular basis.”

A VW Convertible, an MGB Roadster, Sterling Hayden and I

We would like to tell you the story of two red convertibles parked side-by-side at a rest stop on the Connecticut Turnpike in 1964 and the chance meeting with actor Sterling Hayden. But that’s next time.