Writing Boots

Friday Happy Hour Video: "A Little Less Converation," by Elvis Presley

Apropos of our big talk about small talk, earlier this week ...

Hat tip to my friend Jens Kjeldsen, from Norway, where they don't "do" small talk.

Bit of Carly Fiorina's belly-button lint "obtained by New York Times"

When you find yourself reading a worthless article in a major publication and wondering why, look for the word "obtained" in the copy.

Yesterday I was searching in vain for the beef in a New York Times article titled, "Carly Fiorina's Speaking Dos and Don'ts Detailed in Company Document." No insight in the lead, phony innuendo in the second graph. Utter inanity all the way down, about Fiorina's public speaking preferences when she was a CEO 15 years ago. We learn that Fiorina showed videos sometimes, and liked to read her speeches in 14 pt. Arial double-space. 

I run a professional speechwriters association and I was bored reading this. Why was it in the paper?

Paragraph four gave it away, noting the source of all this trivia: a document "obtained by The New York Times from a former H.P. employee."

Ah yes, "obtained": It's the humble-brag of every reporter, who hopes the reader silently marvels at what shoe-leather must have been spent, what nerve required, what wile it took to weedle this damning document from a bristling fortress of institutional power.

Except, not every document that's obtained by The New York Times is the Pentagon Papers. Most are banal memos like this, containing non-information that, if it could not be claimed to have been "obtained" through derring-do, wouldn't be in the paper, or anywhere near it.

"Badass," RIP

Good for President Obama, good for women's sports ... but yesterday's World Cup ceremony at the White House meant death for "badass" as an irreverent expression of admiration.

Yo, FitBitchez: Walk the talk, but don't talk the walk

For most people who use the FitBit, there really ought to be a separate LipBit, wrapped around your face, that tracks how much you talk about how many steps you have done or intend to do. Every FitBit should also come with a third device, that straps around your friends' faces and records how many times they robotically reply, "good for you." Let's call this device the Pretend-to-Give-a-Shit-Bit.

Or, we could avoid this proliferation of bodily bean-counting accoutrements and pointless one-stepsmanship, and you could exercise regularly, eat healthily and sleep well. And then you could wait for the rest of us to say your skin looks good, ask whether you've lost weight and remark that you seem so happy these days. And then, if it turns out we are too involved in our own self-improvement efforts to notice—it won't bother you, because you will be so happy by then, that you won't need constant approval and pats on the back!

Look, I understand. I run. And when I'm training for a race, everyone knows it. Make it a Miller Lite because I'm in training! I ran 25 miles this week! My feet are sore! Running is a lot of work, and I want credit for it. Finding time for it is also a preoccupation, and so if you want to know what's on my mind—well, that's part of what's on my mind.

But I try to restrain myself, because though I may think I'm lengthening my life and improving my mental outlook with all this working out, everyone else's life is as short as it ever was, and it's quite possible my mindless fitness blather is distracting them from more important concerns and more substantive thoughts.

What I'm saying is that I don't need a FitBit to be a FitNitwit like you. My fitness is important to me, just as yours is important to you. But just as we don't bore our friends with hourly tallies of our checking accounts, our rates of crapping, napping or ass-slapping, we should keep our fitness details, stoically, to ourselves. 

To ourselves, and for ourselves. Because as healthy as regular exercise is, that really is what it's all about: our selves.

Politicians say the darnedest things

"I firmly believe leadership is about listening," British Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn told the Labour Party Conference last month, about a sixth of the way into a 12,316-word speech.

Friday Happy Hour Video: Already looking forward to "A Very Murray Christmas"

A man used to waiting til next year, will wait til next year again

Jerry Pritikin was getting excited last week, for the first time in a long time.

You see, in 1945, when the Cubs were in the World Series, Pritikin was eight years old. He wanted to go to a game. His father said he was too young, but promised to take him the next time the Cubs won the pennant.

Pritikin has made something of a career out of the ensuing seven consecutive decades of frustration, becoming the Bleacher Preacher who I profiled in the Chicago Reader 13 years ago.

Jerry has a million stories, like the other one about his father, who hated Cubs slugger Dave Kingman, who struck out too frequently and made too much money. The old man was in a coma for the last 30 days of his life. He came out of the coma only once and spoke only one sentence before slipping back for good: "We gotta get rid of Kingman."

The only thing Jerry likes more than sad stories about the Cubs is publicity for himself and for the photographs he took that captured street life in San Francisco in the 1970s. Jerry always wants me to write about him, and but how much can a guy write about a guy, you know?

Jerry understands.

"How about doing something with me now?" he chirped last week over email, attaching a few pictures of himself in his Bleacher Preacher get-up, mugging for the camera after the Cubs playoff victory against the Cardinals.

I told him we'd better wait and see if the Cubs actually made the World Series. Then maybe I could do a piece on how, at 78, Jerry Pritikin was finally old enough to go to a World Series game.

"I agree, but be ready!" he said.

Maybe next year.

As Jerry likes to say, "I could slip on a banana peel in Iceland."

We were somewhere on the downside of journalism when the quotes took hold

It's my general practice to write nothing useful here at Writing Boots, lest readers feel guilty for getting something for nothing, and start resenting me for making them feel that way. So any constructive effects of my criticism are strictly accidental.

But goddamn, journalists do need how to learn how to use quotations in news stories. 

They run quotes that are three paragraphs long. Riddle me this, scribe-o: What are the chances that your blathering source just spewed exactly the 350 consecutive words that advance your story most efficiently? Brother, can you paraphrase?

They open stories with quotations, on the theory that the utterance is so inherently arresting, even out of context, that the reader will be mesmerized into reading on indefinitely. My first boss Mark Ragan told me it was fine with him I started a story with the quote—as long the quote was, "Okay, okay—I killed her!" Anything short of that, and I'd better arrange the stage before bringing on the actors.

They create quotes that "don't need to be quotes." Let's remember the two reasons why quotes were invented in the first place:

1. In an important news story, you use quotes to make it clear that the VIP subject actually said the significant or astonishing thing. Nixon said, "I am not a crook," which is stronger than a reporter writing, "Nixon indicated he was not a criminal."

2. In a feature story, you use quotes to add a dash of sound that gives a sense of the subject's personality or mood. Yet, see how a local CBS station writes up a story about a restaurant that's closing. "Jeff Richey says he used to take his two daughters to Ed's when they were younger. He says he has 'fond memories' of the place. He was hoping to be able to buy something at the auction to 'remember it by.'"

If your source can't give you more colorful quotes than that, find a better source. And if you can't find a better source then Christ almighty, find a better story.

Quotes are mood altering substances, on the moderate use of which noted journalist Hunter S. Thompson had the last word:

“We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers... and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls.
Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.”

Let's get a hold of ourselves.

When the only history you know is World War II, every problem looks like a Nazi conspiracy

Today The New York Times has an op/ed by Republican think tank man Peter Wehner, headlined, "Why Ben Carson's Nazi Analogies Matter."

I groped through Wehner's piece fruitlessly for the more obvious question: "Why Ben Carson Uses Nazi Analogies in the First Place."

He uses them, of course, for the same reason Internet trolls resort to them so frequently: He doesn't know much about the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, or the Sexual Revolution. He doesn't know the Great Potato Famine from the Great Leap Forward. He knows not about Nebuchadnezzar, and little more about ancient Greece, and his idea of ancient Rome is before Mussolini showed up.

But like most Americans, he knows him some World War II history. Like them, eighty percent of his knowledge of all world history is World War II history. And eighty percent of that knowledge is history of the European theater of that war. And eighty percent of that knowledge is about the Nazis, who were fun to study as a kid for the same reason Lex Luthor was fun to study as a kid.

So when Carson is trying to get ignorant Americans alarmed about social catastrophes going on right under their noses, what's he going to compare it to? The 100 Years' War?

People who lean on Nazi references are usually the badly educated attempting to lead the uneducated. 

Just like Hitler!

Proponents of the metric system: If you give them a centimeter, they take a kilometer

Democratic presidential candidate Lincoln Chafee wants the U.S. to adopt the metric system, and after taking his measure at the Democratic debate last week, I think it's because he'd rather claim it's five centimeters long, than two inches. (His nose, you creeps!)

Of course, Chafee's right that the metric system is more intuitive than the English system. I still don't know how many ounces are in a pound, if any; and a half pint is a young Melissa Gilbert.

But there's a downside—a dark side—to switching. And I saw it in a document that my normally coherent sixth-grade daughter left on my computer.

Mr. W then jumped 1,000 millimeters high right on top of Millie. Mr. W was about to eat her right up when Millie’s grandma jumped on top of Mr. W while Millie used her 5 centimeter long blackberry to call 911. Finally the police came marching in and took the wolf to the jail about 10 kilometers away. After that Millie and her grandma remade the 4,000 milligrams of cake that Mr. W ate.

The next day Mr. W was let out of jail. They decided to make 10 kilograms of ice cream and have a party to try to make friends with Mr. W. Millie and grandma set a sign up saying LETS BE FRIENDS that was 3 meters long. When Mr. W came over he brought her a gift. The gift had a volume of 6 cubic centimeters. It was a little box that was a pair of earrings. Don’t worry there were policemen outside just to be safe.

I don't know about you, but this chills my spine to zero centigrade. And I, for one, would rather live in a world of guesstimated reality than precisely described nonsense.