People Who Need People

She said she didn't need a relationship. Hadn't had one for nearly 10 years. Oh, she has friends, they get together and party and drink and play dress-up, but a committed relationship with a man? Not for her.

She was finishing her second martini. Early fifties, big laugh, flashy silver jewelry, neither attractive nor unattractive.

She's had relationships, just never managed to make one last more than a couple of years, and she's sure that she could never have a lifetime relationship, even at this stage of life. “I'm too high maintenance, I know what I want and I know how I want it done.”

She worked her way down the row of olives on a long cocktail skewer. “I've had a same-sex relationship once or twice. But they were just sex, you know, friendships but not really relationships.”

“Don't get me wrong, I'd love to have somebody come along and take care of me. I've always had to get my own car fixed and figure out the taxes and pay the bills. When I had my son I was a single parent, so I had to do everything – buy his clothes, get him to school, get him to the doctor – everything.”

She finished her martini and motioned for another.

“I had a relationship that could have worked,” she said. Her eyes began to glisten in the dim light. “He was younger – nearly ten years younger than I was, but it was good. It could have lasted, but then my son died – he was just 18 and I went someplace else, I just went into another mode.”

Her voice quavered and she took a quick sip of her fresh drink and composed herself. “He said he could handle it, but he couldn't. I don't blame him; I couldn't handle it. It's not the way life's supposed to work.”
She touched a cocktail napkin to her nose and smiled, fighting a losing battle with her tears.

“Anyway, I just don't make myself available for relationships right now. Men can sense that I wouldn't be receptive, so they don't even try.” She shook her head and took a big drink. Her mouth came away from her glass smiling.

“But I'm okay, I have lots of women friends, and I have family. I like being near family. My mother's going to come stay with me awhile – she's 75 and we still get along great. She got divorced when I was young and hasn't been in a relationship since then. My father was abusive and she didn't put up with that. She divorced him."

"I used to ask her why she didn't go out, go down to the bowling alley like the other mothers did, but she said she had enough foolishness taking care of us. But she used to sit up late reading. She'd read those romance novels, she loved romances.”

Her eyes were shiny again. “I've got to go smoke a cigarette,” she said. She picked up her coat and her purse and told the bartender to keep her tab open, she'd be back after awhile.

Then she looked at me and said, “Maybe you'll be here when I come back, maybe you won't.”

I wasn't.

Bad Noir - Where Leftover Metaphors Go to Die Slow, Excruciating Deaths

The Country Cave was a greasy dive off old highway 66 where rednecks came when they wanted cheap booze, a plate of jerked pork and maybe, a choked chicken. Parked out front, next to all of the mud-covered pick-ups and rusty Toyotas, Harry Gold's shiny black SUV looked like it had wandered away from a motorcade.

Harry had his butt glued to a bar stool and it looked like he was trying to undress the chanteuse on the stage with his eyeballs.  He was three martinis into the struggle and still trying to figure out the catch on the back of her gown. Harry fancied himself a promoter, but in a business dominated by early birds, most often Harry was the early worm.

The songbird, Marla Mackie, was his latest ticket outta here. He'd told me she had Trisha Yearwood's voice, Shania Twain's cheekbones and Dolly Partin's boobs. He'd promised her Nashville, Hollywood and New York, but right now she was singing love songs to hillbilly horndogs in a half-empty hellhole in suburban Rat Snatch, PA. Harry meant well, but if the road to hell is paved with good intentions, nobody needed a GPS to figure out where he was headed.

Harry lit up like a gas plume when he saw me walk in.

“C.J., you look amazing!” he shouted, “Have you lost weight?”

“Yeah, I had to have my jaw wired shut for a while and the pounds just melted away. You should try it.”

“No can do, you know God gave me the gift of gab, can't interfere with it.”

I told the bartender I wanted whiskey, neat and she slopped three fingers worth out of a Rebel Yell bottle with a label that looked older than the juice inside.

Harry nodded toward the bird on the stage. “That's the horse I'm riding to the big time.  Is she great or what?”

I opened my eyes and ears. She was easy on both. She was as hot as advertised, dressed in low-cut black silk with a skirt slit up the side to show a right leg that could create chaos in a cardiac ward. Her bluesy voice grabbed hold of something in my chest and squeezed it. I looked back at Harry. “She's good. What's she doing with you?”

“I found her pulling pints for lumberjacks in a bucket shop in Roseburg, swear-to-God.” He swore to God a lot. I doubt the Almighty appreciated it.

He turned toward the stage and caught Marla's eye and shouted, “This is C.J.”

She made eye contact and gave me a smile that made me feel light-headed, like all the blood in my brain had rushed to my crotch.

A minute later she wrapped up her set with an elegant bow and the boys with the tattoos and spit cans went wild, but the place went dead as soon as she started to walk off. She may have been the embodiment of grace standing behind the microphone, but when she walked, the painful-looking hitch in her get-along made her look like poultry in motion.

I shot Harry a look. He shrugged, “Her boyfriend chainsawed her right leg to keep her from running around. He got out of prison this week. Five years early-- budget cuts. That's why I called.”

“You think he wants another piece of her?”

“Marla got the call last night – he's on his way.”

He looked over my shoulder and I saw Marla limping up to the bar. She ordered club soda with a twist and slapped an eyelock on me.

“Harry said you're supposed to be tough,” she said. 

“You believe everything Harry says?” I asked.

“I believe he has a car and enough gas money to get us to the East Coast.” I waited while she took a sip of her fizzy water and looked me up and down. I've had less intrusive body cavity searches.

“Tell me about your boyfriend,” I said.

“Ex-boyfriend, I decided to stop seeing him shortly after he cut off my leg and fed it to his dogs.”

“You're not a dog person?”

“I was really attached to that leg.” She didn't smile and didn't blink.

“You're a tough kid, ” I said.

“How tough are you?”

I shrugged. “I'm a professional thug, pain amuses me.”

The expression on her face said she couldn't tell if I was kidding. That made two of us.

“Josef – that's his name, like Stalin, - he likes pain too. You two ought to get along.”

On stage, her smile was infectious. Up close she looked like other parts of her probably were as well.

“Maybe Josef has learned his lesson.”

“My sister saw him yesterday. He said he was going to spatchcock me like a Thanksgiving turkey.” She put up a brave front, and the plunging neckline of her gown showed a lot of it.

Harry stepped between us. “Let's not get all emotional over this thing, the man's psycho, but C.J. can handle him – you've handled a lot worse haven't you C.J.?”

“Seriously, he threatened to spatchcock you?”

“Yeah, he saw Martha Stewart do a turkey on TV while he was in the joint.”

Harry jumped in, “Martha's show does huge numbers at Statesville, even though the demographics are skewed. A couple of years ago they tried to stick her in a time slot opposite re-runs of Pee Wee's Playhouse and they had a riot on their hands.”

“Stop fooling around Harry, what do you want me to do, kill him? Scare him off?”

He went pale and developed a twitch. The way he squirmed around without talking, I started to worry that  he was turning into a mime. 

Finally, Marla goosed him and he blurted it out. “Marla wants you to bring her his left leg.”

I turned and gave her a full frontal glare. Most people start to beg forgiveness when I do that. She looked as happy as a clown in hell.

“Mid-thigh all right?” I asked.

“Right about here,” she said, pulling her skirt aside and revealing the prosthesis attached to what was left of her own left leg. It hadn't been a smooth cut. The saw had gnawed and shredded its way through flesh and bone about four inches above the knee.

“Bring me his leg, cowboy, and I'll do for something you." She paused and looked me up and down again. She stopped about halfway down and said, “Ever been stumped, cowboy, I mean really stumped?

Before I could answer I heard a something unexpected behind me, like the sound of a third shoe hitting the floor.

On Thanksgiving - My Favorite Things

How many things do I have to give thanks for? Too many to list, but these are the first 58 that came to mind on Thanksgiving morning:

1. My father, who considered being a parent a serious responsibility.
2. My mother, who made my Halloween costumes, fed me, and was proud of me.
3. A high school football coach who taught me the difference between a pain and an injury.
4. Mary T. who let me touch her bare breast when I was 17.
5. 25 years in journalism, where deadlines were absolute and every tomorrow was a clean slate.
6. My first big city news director for setting standards that did not bend and for scaring me so much that I never thought twice about confronting mobsters, alligators, cobras and pissed off cops.
7. The chance to meet some of the great heroes and villains of our time.
8. Mark Knofler's guitar solos in Sultans of Swing
9. A beautiful and creative daughter with a wicked sense of humor and a remarkable son-in-law who collaborated on the production of the most beautiful granddaughter in the world.
10. A granddaughter who walks with me in the woods and whispers to the big trees.
11. The winds of fate that have blown me from city to city and career to career.
12. Being married to a woman who is strong enough to take care of herself, confident enough to have her own interests and loving enough to stay up all night with me, burning candles, drinking brandy, solving the worlds problems, and laughing.
13. The bartender at the Elephant and Castle who wouldn't serve me a Budweiser before I'd tasted the microbrews.
14. People who show honest emotions.
15. People who can argue about politics without getting angry.
16. Public Radio News, whose dedication to fairness seems to some, almost quaint
17. Leonard Cohen, Kathy Mattea, K.D. Lang and Emmy Lou Harris
18. People who have a desire to do good things, and an ego big enough to get them done.
19. The English language, which never ceases to surprise me with its wit and beauty.
20. The Oregon Writers Colony whose workshops have taught me as much about myself as they have about writing.
21. A life that has forced me to do things that frighten me.
22. Libré Office
23. People who know how to hug a friend.
24. Good stories.
25. Freshly baked bread
26. Sincere and graceful apologies
27. The Internet.
28. Café mochas on cold mornings
29. People who accept responsibility
30. The dark, salty chill of winter mornings on San Juan Island
31. Home grown spinach and onions
32. People who laugh easily, but not too easily.
33. Strangers who smile when we make eye contact on the street.
34. The smell of peppers and onions simmering in butter.
35. Smart people with southern accents.
36. Diana Krall
37. People who don't confuse facts with opinions or opinions with principles.
38. Sharing a smile with the only other person in a room who gets the joke.
39. Knowing that the thing that embarrasses me today, will be the story I will enjoy telling tomorrow.
40. People who know the difference between playing notes and making music.
41. Willie Nelson
42. A good audience
43. People who respect a good audience
44. Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward in Tremors
45. Good smile lines.
46. People who give you their best game, even if you aren't very good.
47. The warm, magical moment before sleep erases the world.
48. A life that has let me start fresh – over and over again.
49. Metaphors
50. My new running shoes that make me feel like I can fly.
51. Star lit runs on our country road.
52. The Godlike pleasure of catching a hummingbird that has flown into the house, then releasing it in the garden.
53. Inanimate objects that glow with the emotion and love that went into their creation.
54. Nutrisystems for bringing me back to my own size.
55. Living six decades without having more people discover that I've been faking it all along. 
56. A big black dog who is happy to see me, no matter what.  
57. The chance to live in one of the most beautiful places on earth in a home filled with art and books.
58. The freedom that comes with realization that life's final destination is death, so all that matters is the journey.

The Top Ten Reasons Why I Hate Numbered Lists

I'm afraid that, as a society, we are in danger of enumerating the well-written article out of existence.

Here's a sample of headlines from newsletters I've received in the last couple of weeks:

• The 7 Rules of Picking Names for Fictional Characters
• The 3 Worst Mistakes You Can Make When Remodeling Your Kitchen
• 5 Tips for Writing Historical Fiction
• The Top 3 Tools for Securing Your Business Network
• 6 Attacks That Can Bring Your Website to Its Knees

At the turn of the 21^st Century, when lists of facts were needed, bullet points were the norm and no one bothered to count them. The boss would just call and say, “Give me a few bullets on re-organizing purchasing.” But in the last couple of years, writers seem to have ran out of bullets and started slamming numbers into the breach.

10 Hidden Gifts of Rejection Letters

I've always been a sucker for top 10 lists – best selling movies, books, songs, cars, best dressed, best restaurants, richest people, even for the worst best and worst opening lines (for a book or a singles bar).

7 Unknown Risks and Your Corporate Policy

But in our nothing-succeeds-like-excess world, enumerations are running amok. The explosion of enumerated list may seem like a harmless fad, but I fear it may be a symptom of the spread of social Darwinism. Bullet points are unordered lists. Though they read top to bottom, they are basically a collection of equals. Putting a number in front of a list item implies ranking – winners and losers; and selectivity – only the top X items made the list, the rest don't even get a participation ribbon.

When I saw the headline: “7 Ways Splunk Improves Visibility in Virtual Environments” (I'm not making that up), I started wondering how the author settled on a list of seven. It's an unusual number to stop on. Three, five, ten or twelve items seem normal. My suspicion is that the eighth thing Splunk did was too embarrassing to include – like maybe the eighth way Splunk calls attention to your virtual environment is by unleashing a loud, malodorous fart when someone gets near it.

 The Top 5 Reasons to Refinance Your Mortgage Now

The numbered list has become a sorry, tired cliché. Please, editors, give it up. Try commissioning a few articles with an inverted pyramid structure, smooth transitions and arguments that build on each other.

5 Tips to Speed Up Your Writing and Skyrocket Your Quality

Like all Crocs and Beanie Babies, this fad will fade away eventually. I think I may have seen a harbinger of its decline this week when I received an emailed newsletter from Writers Digest bearing the unselfconsciously ironic subject line “12 Clichés all Writers Should Avoid.”

I'm hoping that the number one item on that list is: “Avoid numbered lists like the plague.”

Born to Run - Overheard on the Anacortes/Friday Harbor Ferry

Please, no running!

Why?

You might hurt yourself.

No I won't. Is it because you can't run?

I used to run when I was your age.

Did you hurt yourself?

Yes, I did.

I won't hurt myself.

Don't run or I will have to spank your bottom.

Is that how you got hurt, you ran and your daddy spanked you?

No. I fell down.

If I promise not to fall down, can I run?

You can't promise that.

Yes I can, I promise.

Why do you want to run so much?

Because it's fun. Didn't you think it was fun when you were a little kid?

Yes.

But you fell down and hurt yourself.

Yes.

Do you ever wish you could run now?

Yes.

Are you crying?

No.

Yes you are. Why are you crying?

Because I want to run.

Slicing and Dicing

Mitt Romney is the President of white male America.

-- Maureen Dowd, New York Times Columnist

Amid the post-Presidential election head shaking, while analysts are slicing the electorate into statistical racial, ethnic and economic slivers to try to determine why Americans voted the way they did . . . I noted the passing of a man who incited a major and discomfiting political debate over the real differences between racial and ethnic groups. 

Arthur Jensen died just a few days before the 2012 Presidential election at the age of 89. He was the University of California, Berkeley, psychology professor best known for his efforts to prove that the average member of some ethnic groups come into the world equipped with less “general intelligence” than the members of other ethnic groups, including whites.
In his book, Straight Talk about Mental Tests he enumerated two of his tenets:

(1) In human populations there is a well-recognized trait that can be called general mental ability or intelligence, in which differences among persons can be measured with a fair degree of accuracy by appropriate tests (often called IQ tests);

(2) Observed differences among persons in this trait are largely attributable to genetic inheritance.

He did not include in the enumeration another of his conclusions, but neither did he back away from it: Because the average IQ scores of some minority groups – including African Americans and Hispanics – are measurably lower than whites and Asians, most members of those ethnic groups are born with less mental ability than whites and Asians.

In 1980, I spent an uncomfortable 15 minutes on live television interviewing Professor Jensen after the publication of his most ambitious book, Bias in Mental Testing. In the book, Jensen phrased his conclusions carefully and narrowly, wrapping them in 786 of pages of statistical analysis and complex calculations that were virtually incomprehensible to the average reader. But a good portion of the popular press and some groups with questionable agendas grabbed hold of Jensen's conclusions and ran with them. Period. Too bad. Deal with it minority people, you can't fight science.

Jensen's argument was seductive in its mathematical complexity. There is no debate about his statement that African-Americans and Hispanics consistently have lower average scores on certain sections of standardized tests than other groups, including people with Northern European and Asian ancestors. But he set off fireworks by resurrecting a theory and terminology created by psychologist Charles Spearman in 1905, concluding that the statistical clusters of test scores within ethnic groups are an accurate measure of the group's hereditary mental capacity.

In our televised interview, Jensen spent much time emphasizing the dangers of reading too much into his conclusions. Unfortunately, too much time was spent parsing words, and I'm afraid the interview generated very little heat or light. But on paper, though the mathematics strewn throughout his book is intimidating, Jensen's conclusions are comfortably simple and intuitive.

The outcome of an IQ test is straightforward – a single number that is meant to represent a person's innate mental capacity. It's a number that can and has been used to compare one person's mental worth to others. The best schools, the best opportunities are often made available to those with the highest numbers.

The use of numbers to quantify intelligence is hardly new. Even before the development of standardized tests, intelligence researchers devised formulas that ranked innate mental capacity based on the physical size of the brain. Looking at those numbers, researchers deduced that women could never be expected to function at the same intellectual level as men.

In 1903, statistical researcher Léonce Manouvrier described the effect those numbers had on the debate about women's place in society:“Women displayed their talents and their diplomas. They also invoked philosophical authorities. But they were opposed by numbers. . . . These numbers fell upon poor women like a sledge hammer . . . Theologians had once asked if women had a soul. Several centuries later some scientists were ready to refuse them a human intelligence.”

In first four decades of the 20^th century, American developers of “I.Q.” tests had an overt political agenda. Their test results were used in a successful campaign to get the U.S. Congress to tighten immigration quotas to keep the country's gene pool from being polluted by ethnic and racial groups with a hereditary lack of intelligence. Among those excluded because of their limited intelligence, as demonstrated by I.Q. tests, were Jews and Asians. That policy had tragic implications for many Jews seeking refuge from the Holocaust during World War II. There is bitter irony in the fact that Jews and Asians are among the groups with the highest average “general intelligence” scores on today's standardized tests.

Until I began preparing for the interview with Professor Jensen, I had never given serious thought to the question Jensen's research and writings brought to the forefront: Can we rely on modern intelligence tests to tell us something useful about a group of people? Professor Jensen, in claiming the thing standardized tests measure to be innate “general intelligence” implies the answer is yes.

But can it be used at a group level to predict performance or success in school, work, or life in general?

In a report sponsored by the Ralph Nader's organization, author Allan Nairn produced data showing that the results of standardized Scholastic Aptitude Tests (the “SAT”) had a higher correlation with the household income of a test-taker's parents than with future academic success. In fact, parental income turned out to be a better predictor of how well an individual will do on standardized tests than ethnicity.

In a 2009 paper entitled, “Reflections on a Century of College Admission Tests*,” former University of California President Richard Atkinson and Saul Geiser of UC-Berkley's Center for Studies in Higher Education concluded simply, “High-school grades are the best indicator of student readiness for college, and standardized tests are useful primarily as a supplement to the high school record.”

Still, psychologists and social scientists are uncomfortable dealing with criteria where they can't control all of the variables. Some schools have higher standards than others, some schools offer more activities, and some teachers pack their grade books with A's, others with C's and D's.

In theory, a person making hiring or college admission decisions based on standardized test scores should be bias-free because the decision-maker's mind is uncluttered with biases about whether the owner of an individual score is black, white, Asian or Latino; rich or poor, short or tall, attractive or homely. The flaw in that theory is, the test itself seems to have a good general idea about which groups a test-taker belongs to.

In their paper Atkinson and Geiser cited a study of admission applications for the University of California that found when UC applicants were ranked by SAT scores, only half as many Latino, African-American and American Indian students appeared in the top third of the applicant pool as when the same students were arranged by high school grades. Whatever their other virtues, standardized tests appear to put some racial and ethnic groups at a competitive disadvantage not supported by other criteria.

In The Mismeasure of Man, Harvard biologist Stephen Jay Gould observed that, historically, efforts to rank intelligence by group “invariably find that oppressed and disadvantaged groups – races, classes, or sexes-- are innately inferior and deserve their status.”

If Jensen had called his statistical clusters something like “ethnic\racial testing differential” his work would likely have been largely ignored outside of the testing community because it would have been considered a characteristic of the test. But calling it “general intelligence” assigns the characteristic to an entire, identifiable group of people, providing a reason to regard that group as qualitatively different from the norm.

Leaping back to the subject of electoral politics, remember the 47 percent of all Americans who were characterized as “takers”? Pundits have spent much of their post-Presidential election energy defining individual ethnic groups by how they voted. Certainly, common attitudes within an ethnic group is a valid thing to study, but I would suggest that we not allow ourselves to become distracted from looking at the most obvious characteristic that defined the largest group of voters in the 2012 general election: They favored a politically moderate President and rejected candidates who were on the extreme fringe of the political spectrum.

As analysts and statisticians sort individuals into narrower and narrower groups, I like to keep in mind one characteristic we all share. When things go wrong and it's fight or flight time, we instinctively divide the people around us into just two groups: Us and them.

This year, Republican strategist Karl Rove discovered how costly it can be to use the wrong criteria to define us.

* The Atkinson/Geiser paper is available online at: http://cshe.berkeley.edu/publications/docs/ROPS-AtkinsonGeiser-Tests-04-15-09.pdf

Metaphorically Speaking

The latest word from sub-atomic physicists is that everything in the universe is made up of tiny strings vibrating in 10 dimensions. 

Actually, that's not what they mean any more than Robert Burns meant his love was “like a red, red, rose” or George Orwell literally thought “advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket” – it's a metaphor.

Physicists create metaphors (they call them models) to describe or predict the behavior of things they can't see. String Theory is just physicists' latest attempt to explain why little bitty stuff seems to behave differently than big stuff. Apparently the math says that if everything is made of dancing strings, it's okay if some things appear to behave erratically and be in more than one place at the same time – how many of us have not observed that very phenomenon on a human scale in a disco?

For politicians, there's an unfortunate danger in using metaphors because it's easy for pundits to take cheap shots by simply pointing out that a metaphorical statement isn't literally true. (If they were literally true, they wouldn't be metaphors.) Political opponents had a field day with former Senator Ted Stevens's characterization of the Internet as “a series of tubes,” even though it was a pretty good way to explain how huge volumes of spam email can cause slowdowns. The techno-cognizati never refer to the Internet as "tubes". They call it a "pipe".

Scientists consider a metaphor valid as long as it predicts behavior, but a dud if anyone can cite properties or behaviors that aren't consistent with the model. The rose metaphor for Robert Burns' love doesn't really work very well. While one would expect it to turn brown and lose its petals in pretty short order, Burns contends that his love will still be going strong when the seas dry up. 

Accepting the wrong model can be, and often has been, disastrous. In the 1600's the Catholic Church's enforced acceptance of the earth-centric model of the universe caused Galileo, one of the greatest scientists in history, to spend the last 10 years of his life under house arrest, forbidden to publish any of his work. 

But the best metaphors can succinctly put things – scientific and social – into context, as Howard Cosell did when he observed: "Sports is the toy department of life." 

 

My father once stopped me cold with a metaphor when I was complaining that I couldn't catch up at my job because I was constantly having to put out (metaphorical) fires. "Perhaps the problem isn't that you are a firefighter," he said. "Perhaps the problem is that you are a pyromaniac.”

Taking a good metaphor a step further than usual can provide both humor and food for thought, as Isaac Asimov did when he observed, “Life is a journey, but don't worry, you'll find a parking spot at the end."

 

What happens when we push the String Theory metaphor a little further to see what it tells us about the nature of our creator? If the universe is made up of tiny, dancing strings, then it appears that God is a cosmic D.J., and scientists spend their lives trying to discover what's on his play list.

That works for me.

Ernest the Frog. A Mostly True Story

I once worked in a television newsroom where the assistant news director was a huge Italian guy named Benny; a stereotype that should only exist in mob films and bad sitcoms. He was the kind of guy who celebrated even the most meaningless success by shouting “Bada-bing Bada-boom!” followed by a string of sexual metaphors describing the various ways we'd humiliated the competition.

So I was surprised to see him walk into my office uncharacteristically subdued one day. He shook his massive head and said, “Doesn't anyone around here have a sense of humor?”

“Whoever gave you that necktie does,” I said. I've never been good at comforting people.
“I was just kidding with Jake – told him I'd can him if he told another Italian joke. Before I could say, badda bing badda boom, he was on the phone and had the shop steward headed down to file a grievance. It was just a joke for God's sake!”

“Ya know,” I said, “It would have been funny if you threatened to fire me because you can't fire me. But it's not funny when you make a threat you can carry out.”
He looked puzzled.

 “It's like that old saying,” I said. “Boys throw stones at frogs in sport, but the frogs die not in sport, but in earnest.”*

Benny pondered that for a moment. “So you're saying Jake's the frog and I'm one of the boys?”

“No, Ernest was the frog, you're a rock.”

“So who's Jake?” he asked.

“Jake's the guy who's filing the grievance.”

I'd love to think that conversation had a long-term effect, but everyone and everything in the world of television news has a short life span. Today's screaming headlines don't even whimper tomorrow; people who were intellectuals last week are caricatures this week, and frogs die in earnest at the top and bottom of each hour.

But the lesson wasn't totally lost. Ever since that day Benny has called himself “Rocky.”

* Attributed to Bion of Borysthenes – 325 B.C.-250 B.C. It appears that the relationship between frogs and boys has changed little over the past 2200 years.