Approaching the Bench

I had always been able to dodge this bullet. The summons to jury duty would come, and I’d call in to find out if I had to report. For years, I had been able to obtain an excuse, or I simply wasn’t needed, but this time I knew my number was up.

The military draft is a thing of the past, but jury duty, which is one of the last vestiges of an American call to service, is still with us. It has been softened to the point where the least amount of hardship earns you an excuse: pre-paid family plane tickets to a vacation spot are often enough. So the jury pools have to be large in order to allow prosecution and defense in criminal cases, or plaintiff and defendant in civil cases, to seat an acceptable jury.

The selection process is arduous, with the judge and the attorneys for both sides questioning each candidate to determine suitability. Our pool in my part of California included top tech executives and talented medical professionals as well as common laborers and stay-at-home moms.

This “voir dire,” as it is called always turns up the drama in people’s lives. Our case was one involving driving under the influence. A surprising number of people had very strong views on even the least amount of alcohol consumption. A fair number had a child, a sibling or a close friend injured or killed by drunken drivers. Others had family members in law enforcement, which the defense usually hates. Those who had significant prior jury experience are also undesirable to the lawyers, though you would think experience would make “professional jurors” good choices. Each side gets a certain number of peremptory challenges – they can bounce you off the jury for no stated reason. Finally, there are those who have hearing problems, those who can’t understand English, those who insist that they can’t be fair -- and those who are faking these things to get excused. But once I was seated, the lawyers kept me, telling me after the trial that since I am a former journalist, they thought I would be fair. I responded that it’s only because jury duty pays almost as much as journalism (LOL).

How does a DUI case even merit a jury trial to start with? Ours was somewhat complicated. Police officers got a call about a car being improperly parked on a residential street in a local city. The caller suggested that the car might be a traffic obstruction. Responding officers found a young man sitting in the driver’s seat. He was obviously drunk – a later breath test showed his blood-alcohol level to be 0.26 – more than three times the legal limit for driving. He actually admitted to the officer that he had driven there from a party and that he had been in the process of driving home to a nearby city. Apparently, he had decided he couldn’t make it and called his mother to come get him. But the cops arrested him on suspicion of driving under the influence.

The legal problem for the prosecution was that nobody actually witnessed this young man driving the car. His admission of having done so wasn’t good enough for conviction. According to the legal instruction given to the jury, there had to be additional pieces of evidence – in this case, circumstantial -- to prove that he had driven the car. The vehicle was badly parked, but not egregiously so. It had front-end damage, but the young man’s mother testified she had driven into a loading-dock railing where she works a week or so earlier (the family couldn’t afford – or didn’t believe in – body work). Their version of events was that the young man had walked to his parked car from the party site – though he couldn’t seem to tell anyone the address of the house where the party had taken place, hosted by his friend Scott.

The legal deck is stacked in the defendant’s favor, perhaps properly so. Juries have to accept an alternate explanation of events, if it’s reasonable. In fact, the defense doesn’t have to put on a case at all. It’s up to the prosecution to prove its own version beyond a reasonable doubt, in a manner which makes alternate explanations implausible.

This jury leaned overwhelmingly toward not guilty. I voted that way reluctantly, believing that the young man had indeed driven the car, but deciding the evidence beyond his admission wasn’t quite there. The prosecutor, a young woman, tried her best to connect the dots – there just weren’t enough dots. The defense attorney, also a young woman, portrayed her client as a kid who had done the right thing. He had decided he was too drunk to drive and called for help.

The final vote was 11 to 1 for not guilty. But a unanimous result is required for a verdict in a criminal matter. One of the women on the panel -- a newly minted graphic designer and mother of three – would not be shaken from her vote for conviction, even when one of the other jurors got particularly hostile toward her during deliberations. Since there was no hope of full agreement, the judge declared a mistrial. He wasn't happy with us.

I too was upset with the “score,” but I reminded myself later that this isn’t a football game or a boxing match. An individual’s livelihood is also at stake. Apparently, the 25-year-old defendant had had a fight with his girlfriend over the mysterious Scott, who hosted the party. The young man was upset about the love triangle and took to drinking vodka. I believe that he got in his car and drove away, but determined that he was so drunk he couldn’t continue, and pulled over on a residential street to call his family. Had a passerby not felt the parked car was a traffic hazard and called the police, the defendant might have slept in his car all night and nobody would have been the wiser.

I felt kind of sorry for him. I think it was actually fortunate that he over-imbibed to the point where his blood-alcohol reading was 0.26 a full five hours after the party Had he consumed just a little less, he might have felt confident enough to continue driving, and possibly cause an accident. Before we judge him too harshly, are there very many of us who drink socially, who have never tried to drive a car when perhaps we shouldn’t have, even only once?

The wheels of justice grind VERY slowly. There is no concession to the dramatic timing we might see in movies or on TV. It’s tedious. Our judge tried to lighten things up with stories about British common law, San Francisco history, college campuses, etc., but his gravelly voice was soporific. The young prosecutor had charts, graphs, exhibits and a PowerPoint presentation, but just couldn’t put her case over the line, and I felt kind of sorry for her, too, it being her first one. I told her I was grateful it wasn’t a double-murder; she would have needed four moving vans to introduce all her stuff. Fortunately, she has a sense of humor, or I would have been slapped with a writ or something. 

The defendant in our case might not have gotten off completely Scott-free, so to speak, as the prosecution can decide to retry, but that seems unlikely here.

Many believe that military service makes a better American citizen. Following my experience, I think jury service, at least once, does the same. Perhaps going against the negative grain left by the O.J. Simpson trial (officially 20 years old this year), I believe that court cases open to the public should be televised or available by live stream. The court system is something about which most of us labor under a woeful level of ignorance.

This is a long read, so if you’ve gotten this far, I thank you for your service, and my gavel is coming down to declare this post closed.

Hard Sell

Today I walked a couple of miles down to the local ice cream/candy shop. Covering the distance isn’t good enough – I always need a pleasurable destination. Anyway, they have a new offering: Chocolate Coma (double Dutch ice ream, fudge, shaved dark chocolate and cocoa nuts). Hang on a minute: Chocolate COMA? Really? Couldn’t they have stopped at paralysis or something?

So you thought you lived in a liberated country that had pulled up its Puritan roots. Think again. Apparently, the association with depravity and hellfire (Decadence or Devil’s Food) isn’t working anymore to discourage us from chocolate. Now it’s severe physical disability or death (yes, I have seen Chocolate Suicide Cake).

But actually, these designations attract us, not scare us away. If it sends us to the hospital, the grave, and maybe eternal damnation, it must be pleasurable, right? Or intended to be. What’s the most common word you find in porn film titles? Do you think maybe it’s “sin," or variations thereof? I am not an expert in this area, of course, but I think it’s a safe bet.

Does pleasure always have to come with a correspondent unpleasant price? You would think so. And the higher the price, it naturally follows that the greater is the pleasure. So we pay the price, even if the experience threatens to leave us comatose. We were raised that way.

You’ve got to give the related industries credit for trying. How many studies have there been telling us that chocolate is good for you, or that you will live longer by drinking more red wine? But are these any match for about 15-plus centuries of Western-culture guilt trips, most of which now seem to be related to food? You be the judge.

At my current consumption rate, I should live for quite a while yet. But I think I know where I’m going in the end. Oops.

Apples, Oranges and Other Fruit

You’ve already heard me join the chorus of those who think CNN has spent too much time on the story of the missing Malaysian airliner. But I want to be clear: it doesn’t mean it’s not a big – and fascinating -- story. I’m only questioning the time spent on it with no new significant facts.

I wonder if there are really “better” stories than others. You can complain all you want about why more time hasn’t been spent on the Washington mudslide or Russia’s ambitions in Ukraine, or for that matter, the ongoing war in Syria, with hundreds of thousands dead and millions displaced all over the Middle East, which some are calling the great tragedy of this century. It definitely qualifies as that so far.

But can we really compare all these things? Journalism involves the editorial judgment of human beings, who are never going to agree completely on what is most important. It’s also about timing. There was a moderate earthquake in L.A. last night, and for several hours, it was the top story for millions in that area, and made national headlines.

The missing airplane story fascinates on many levels, in addition to being a tragic story of families’ loss. We do love a good mystery -- though there are those who would say that the mystery is getting better billing than what’s happening in the lives of those surviving families.

But solving the first part of the mystery – the whereabouts of the presumably downed plane -- is actually the question those families need answered the most right now. They can hardly be blamed, after three weeks of not having that question answered, for coming up with the conclusion that they’re being lied to or that there’s some sort of conspiracy.

We have also heard the term “disaster porn,” for those of us (I’m pleading guilty) who are drawn to those kinds of stories. Am I getting my cheap adrenaline rushes on the shoulders of others’ losses? Perhaps, but the time will certainly come when the shoes will be on my own feet. And separating “disaster porn” coverage from legitimate concern about victims is not as easy as one would think – though most discerning news consumers know that kind of “porn” when they see it.

As for the missing plane, that first answer those families have been seeking may only be hours away. But exactly what happened to Flight 370 will be a mystery for a long time to come. It’s the story that will keep on giving. There will be books and movies.

It seems like no coincidence that there have been Amelia Earhart specials on other channels this week.

Good Grief

While watching the unfolding drama of the missing, and now officially presumed lost, Malaysian airliner, I was a little put off to see so many pictures of grieving family members shown by the news media. What actually constitutes good taste in such coverage?

As a news reporter, I was often called upon to cover the aftermath of tragedy – fatal traffic accidents, house fires and the like. The last thing I ever wanted to do was approach a distraught surviving family member and try to get a comment – but I took it to be part of the job. A lot of the time, as perhaps you’d expect, the answer was, “No thanks,” – and usually more forceful expressions thereof.

But I began to notice a distinct difference in the responses I got from different groups of people. If the survivors were white, they usually wanted nothing to do with the news media. They made us feel like vultures (easy in my case). But Latino survivors seemed to have little compunction about talking. It almost seemed as if the survivor wanted to talk about the departed. What was unpleasant to one was therapeutic for the other.

Now this is an impression – I don’t really have the standing to draw some well-researched ethnic or cultural conclusion. But am I completely wrong in my suspicion that attitudes toward response to death may differ accordingly?

Memorial services in some cultures aren’t subdued events, what some of us would judge as quiet and respectful. People make noise! In some cases, people attending such events are actually hired to make it. You don’t get any points for a stiff upper lip.

In our ultra-connected world, the trend seems to be shifting toward the public end of the spectrum and away from the private. When someone dies accidentally, it’s the norm now to see candles and flowers pile up at the site of the tragedy, depending on the esteem in which the deceased was held, and even see crowds of mourners gather, who are happy to let their grief show. More and more, it seems to be a shared experience -- and media consumers expect it to be.

I am one of those people who don’t do death very well. I am not good at words of comfort and tend to be very careful when dealing with anyone who has suffered a loss. Usually, if I try to say anything profound, it sounds silly and blows up in my face. The worst was trying to get that comment out of that survivor and be “sensitive” at the same time. Nobody was ever fooled about what I was doing.

But it’s like any exercise in human relations: you have to let the other person guide you. And when it cones to grief, there are indeed different strokes for different folks.

Selfie Consciousness

I did my first selfie a couple of weeks ago. I was in a hair salon, and since my regular stylist was off (isn’t this beginning to sound a little much already?), I let an apprentice stylist, who had only recently acquired her cosmetology license, take care of me. While this was happening, I thought a picture of me in the salon chair with her working on me might be fun for Facebook posting, so I tried to take a picture in the salon mirror while I was sitting in the chair. It didn’t work. But the 20-something woman was thrilled to be in the photo with me, and showed me how to put the smartphone camera in reverse mode. Done! So I posted it, and the selfie was well-received – in fact, the highest-grossing post in my FB experience so far. Already, I’m using Hollywood expressions like “grossing,” although that could be taken another way entirely.

So what exactly has happened to me? Do I need therapy?

Look, I am not a kid. I was born in one of the Truman administrations. There was no easy technology for selfies – consequently, the word did not exist – and even if there were, how many of us would have been doing it then? Unless we were headed for a movie or modeling career, we just weren’t raised to think that way.

I still feel a little strange when having to pose for photos, usually during holiday seasons. Most of the time, I don’t feel like smiling in photos, but force myself to do it anyway. Do you know why the people in all those Victorian-era photos never smiled? I used to think, well, it was the Victorian era, what exactly was there to smile about? Of course, it wasn’t because all our forebears were sourpusses. Smiling for photographs simply hadn’t been invented yet.

Maybe it’s me. I like photography, but don’ t feel compelled to take pictures of people. On a trip once, I wanted to take a picture of an iconic Northern California bridge near Big Sur. An attractive young woman was sitting on a rock overlooking the scene. When she saw I was about to take a picture, she turned around and put on her best 10,000-watt smile. I told her to turn back around again and look at the bridge. I just needed her for perspective. Talk about sourpusses.

But getting back to selfies.  The older generations may castigate the younger ones for being too self-absorbed and believing that everyone else cares about the trivialities of their lives, starting with pictures of themselves in every conceivable setting – or function. But motive is important. Is it about making an impression, or is it about genuine sharing? It’s probably a mixture.

A lot of it has to do with a sense of the audience. If you’re beautiful, it’s easy, nobody is going to complain, as long as you have the material to selfie with – selfie away! Most of us, though, don’t have it that easy – we have to think about the interest/entertainment value of what it is we’re posting. If it’s boring, the poster will be accused of self-absorption, but if it’s done with grace and style, the poster will be asked for more, even develop a following.

When all is said and done, I think the “sharing” world of social media is a good thing. It’s teaching us we have a lot more in common than what separates us – we’re just not as unique as we think we are. But it’s also teaching us what to share, when to share it, and how often. Yes, we all have to learn a little showbiz.

Babbling On

The disappearance of the Malaysian Airlines flight, with 239 souls (as they say in aviation) aboard, will constitute one of the most fascinating stories of 2014 – maybe even the decade. But it’s an unusual journalistic challenge for the cable news channels: when to cover it, and when to put it on the shelf temporarily and talk about something else – anything else!

There seems to be no shortage of ex-pilots, aviation experts and others willing to share their theories. We’re learning an awful lot about how the Boeing 777 works, even how to reprogram the plane’s flight computer – I think there are some 8-year-olds out there who could do it. And there are all the fancy interactive maps, etc.

And then an actual “fact” advancing the story swims by, and all the channels leap on it. More often than not, the “fact” contradicts yesterday’s “fact” and prompts a whole new round of appearances for the experts. And sometimes they disagree. I heard one of them complaining that there were too many wild theories out there about conspiracies, etc. in the plane’s disappearance. Another expert countered that he actually believed at least one of these was credible, and that no door should be closed on anything. Who would have thought that Al Qaida folks would train as pilots and fly planes into the World Trade Center towers? Good point.

But at this writing, we still don’t know much of anything, and we may not know much more for a long time. It took two years for searchers to find what was left of the French airliner that fell into the Atlantic east of Brazil. This story is not like an earthquake, a court case, or a terrorist incident like the Boston Marathon bombing, which affect a large number of people and come with multiple witnesses, and facts that are flowing almost too fast to digest.

To my mind, a cardinal principle of broadcasting is, the longer you spend time live on-air talking about something for which you have no additional facts, the more likely you’re going to say something controversial, insensitive, or just plain stupid. I speak from experience!

The other night, a news anchor, introducing an aviation expert of Irish descent, first wished him a happy St. Patrick’s Day. As if the obligatory bow to this fellow’s ancestry was going to squeeze more information out of him. And remember, the story involves the disappearance or loss of 239 human beings, so wasn’t that greeting a little odd? A mystery, I guess, is more compelling than a tragedy.

Let’s face it. There are other stories going on in the world that aren’t necessarily more important to an audience (that’s an editorial judgment), but at least supply us with new information as they unfold. Ukraine. Venezuela. Syria. Auto recalls. Would we have more – or less – respect for a news outlet that cuts back on coverage of a fascinating mystery like this missing airliner until there’s a substantial break in the story? Or at least just report a new fact and spare us the babble unless it's worth massaging?

This is one of those cases, it seems to me, where you can’t go wall-to-wall without quite knowing where the other wall is.

The Ties That Bind

Today is the 25^th anniversary of the World Wide Web, and it actually has someone credited with inventing it: Sir Tim Bemers-Lee, who is also credited with creating the first software to browse it with. I swear, I thought the Web was older than that (and I know there’s a difference of some kind between the WWW and the Internet, but don’t ask me to explain it). And where exactly does Al Gore fit in?

I had always been of the opinion, perhaps since childhood, that human beings have this irresistible drive to be connected, and that wireless communication made life dramatically easier. Via amateur radio, I was able to talk to folks all over the world, but there were so many low-level practical uses. Example: two hams could agree to meet for coffee. If one were late, he could let the other know by radio; if he got lost, the other could “talk him in.” Decades before cell phones.

For journalists, Web connectedness is, of course, indispensable. It wasn’t all that long ago that when there was an earthquake in Southern California, where I lived, I had the devil of a time getting a magnitude and location on it. I had to rush to the newsroom and call Cal Tech and hope there was somebody there who could read the meters and talk to me – and if it were early in the morning, the on-duty seismology tech usually wasn’t in an accommodating mood. Eventually, our local emergency manager got a pager that would display the Richter scale reading and the location automatically. I wanted one. He told me it cost $25,000. These days, I get alerted to big earthquakes all over the world, by email, for free (beyond the cost of the Internet connection).

A retired newsman I know recently visited Myanmar (Burma), and was able to send those of us on his friend list real-time photos of that beautiful country. He reminded me that it wasn’t all that long ago that war correspondents in Southeast Asia risked their necks just to get a few feet of battle film transported to a place where the major TV networks had access to it.

We all know how social media have changed relationships. There’s the old joke about two Facebook friends meeting for lunch and being bored to death -- so up-to-date on each others’ lives that they had nothing to say.

Perhaps that shows how this lovely connectedness has an invisible price. We can add all the wires, towers, satellites and bandwidth we want to make connections more and more real, but in the end, we have to accept that it’s all artificial tethering, and while incredibly useful, is only a substitute for real human contact.

Maybe it’s like this: Did you ever visit a place of great beauty with your camera, and were so concerned about getting pictures of it that you neglected to actually experience it? I’ve often thought that sometimes, you have to go back to the place  – without your camera -- just to soak it in.

But look, I’m not talking about unplugging here, not by a long shot, just recognizing that we have a constant challenge before us: putting all this electronic interaction in its place, and remembering that it’s part of life, not a substitute for it.

Hey Kids, What Time Is It?

“…asks Buffalo Bob, turning over in his grave (if you know who that is, you know how much time has passed!). Not nearly as simple a question as it sounds.

We have just gone through the semi-annual ritual of adjusting our clocks between Standard Time and Daylight Savings, with the usual casualties today. Church congregations were likely smaller, as at least some of the faithful weren’t so, in failing to set clocks ahead for DST, thereby missing the service, or at least the sermon. Darn.

The fist fights over the time changes are usually more intense in the spring, since being early (the consequences of failing to “fall back”) are usually less severe than being late, from failing to Spring Forward. Today, the newspaper in the city where I once worked apparently posted the wrong clock graphic and had to issue a correction, sheepishly admitting that it should have asked readers if they had remembered to push their clocks forward, presumably instead of the other way. Whoops.

Even the mnemonic devices are suspect, since Congress fussed with the start and finish of Daylight Saving, and now we actually Spring Forward before spring itself has sprung. Many of my electronic devices had time change codes built in before the extensions were approved by our esteemed representatives. And then there are Arizona and Hawaii, that don’t recognize DST. Sounds like a hot mess to me.

Trusting legislatures with standard-setting is a dicey proposition anyway. There is, of course, the famous story of how the Indiana legislature almost established the value of “pi” as 3.2, rather than the 3.1417… we all grew up with. A few irate math professors were able to talk them out of it at the last minute back in 1897. So what else is new? You would think most human female functions are relatively standard, but a surprising number of male legislators haven’t read the manual.

Look, I love DST, since as a child I was able to go outside and play for a couple of hours after dinner, then see the fireflies arrive before I went to bed.

But enough sentimental nonsense, right? There are many things in life that shouldn’t be standardized, but there are many things that should. Like time, which happens to all of us. If the legislatures want something to do, how about requiring us to use a 24-hour clock and Greenwich Mean Time for official purposes. Of course, if you were calling someone in a distant place, you’d have to know what time of day sun-wise it was so as not to wake them up (but don’t we sort of have to do that anyway?).

OK, well that’s my opinion, and I’m stickin’ to it. And my opinions, as my dear readers in this space know, are worth their weight in bitcoin.

Free Associations

I listened with great appreciation to Bette Midler singing “Wind Beneath My Wings” at the Oscars Sunday night. I’m a little embarrassed at exposing my schlocky sentimental taste in music, but there you go – I think it’s one of the most beautiful songs out there. But I see many of you heading for the exits. Why?

Aside from some not sharing my taste in schlock, this song has been co-opted by funerals. When you get to a certain age, you go to more funerals than weddings, and there’s a much-better-than-even chance you will hear this song at a funeral service. Especially in the UK, where it’s said to be among the top five most-requested songs at memorial events. The usage was likely prompted by the movie “Beaches,” where it was the background at a cemetery scene.

Oddly enough, the word “death” doesn’t appear in the lyrics, and there’s really nothing about the words that would suggest it’s intended for funerals, but most of you are sick of this song because you’ve heard it too often, and, in this case, not on pleasant occasions.

I’d like to complain about this, except most songs seem to have associations with events. The associations can be personal or collective. War seems to have an especially collective associative quality, even when the lyrics don’t actually talk about war. “I’ll be seeing you in all the old familiar places,” sang Vera Lynn. It’s the quintessential World War II ditty, but there’s nothing military about the words. The Vietnam War seemed to have a lot of these. Jim Morrison and the Doors lit our fire. Even the Gulf War – which we won, as I recall – seemed to have its own song, “From a Distance,” also sung by Ms. Midler -- though the lyrics of this one did concern war and peace. Curiously, Iraq and Afghanistan don’t seem to have signature songs, or am I missing something?

Individual associations, of course, vary widely. A friend who is a major Frank Sinatra fan could not stand Mr. S’s version of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” because it was played over the jarring scene in “The Execution of Private Slovik,” where Martin Sheen is felled by a firing squad. In a personal example, as a child I knew “Swan Lake” as the theme music to the 1931 version of the movie “Dracula” before I knew it was Tchaikovsky’s ballet classic. OK, well I was depraved on accounta I was deprived, as the delinquent teen says in “West Side Story.”

Most married couples have “their song,” but the most cheerful music can sometimes be ruined by a tragic association, like a fatal traffic accident or a devastating storm. That’s how we’re wired. It only takes a few bars, or the first notes from a particular voice, to transport us instantly back to our ”big events.”

Getting back to the starting point here, though, I wish there could be a moratorium on the funeral usage of “Wind Beneath My Wings.” Some of you might actually get to like it again.

The Envelope, Please

We’re at it again! We only just got through with the Olympics. Here come the Oscars.

Last night, I did a Facebook post about how I’d seen both “12 Years a Slave” and “Gravity,” and allowed as how after all was said and done, I liked “Gravity” better. I will leave it to you to decide if I’m a cold fish or not. Maybe I just wasn’t in the mood for “Slave” when I saw it, but there you go.

Tonight we go to an Oscar party, and part of the annual routine is, we turn in our ballots ahead of time with our Oscar picks in every category, including the obscure ones. The individual who gets the most right wins a prize and a small money pot.

One thing you learn really early in this game is that if you go with what you like, you lose. This is more like picking stocks. If you want to win, you don’t fall in love with anything. Some in this party group watch all the preliminary awards shows and read all the critics’ picks before making their choices. There are those who just can’t play games. They’re always in it to win it.

When you think about it, taking two or more disparate works of art and having to decide which one “wins” is a little silly. I liked one movie better than the other, maybe because I was in the mood for one and not for the other. Are Academy politics – which is now what the Oscars are about – any loftier as criteria?

The Oscars have spawned all kinds of wannabe awards ceremonies. I myself attended banquets as a broadcaster and won quite a few trophies for my work in that field. The first year I won, everyone had to give speeches, and the small-market awards were at the end, so my speech was after midnight, and most people had gone home, There were so few left in the audience that I offered to take them all out for breakfast.

But name me an industry, club, school, or even pastime that doesn’t have an awards show. I once had to cover a luncheon of a professional organization in the town where I was working, and I’m sure that everyone attending got an award. In fact, at one point the emcee/presenter had to leave the podium and sit down so someone else could give HIM an award.

It’s a privilege to be alive. We don’t necessarily need a trophy or a badge to validate it.

But not watch the Oscars? Are you kidding?

The Invasion: B-day, 2.9.64

Naturally, the first I ever heard of the Beatles was from a wannabe girlfriend in 1963. As you may have figured, I was the “wannabe” in this relationship – she was incredibly beautiful, and no doubt still is, wherever she lives. But if she said, “I love the Beatles,” I had to pay attention.

I was living in New York at the time. No, I wasn’t in the studio on Feb. 9, 1964, when the Beatles debuted on the Ed Sullivan Show. But in those days, just being in NYC was enough. It was in the air, and stayed there. Local legendary DJ Murray the K on WINS used to be the first in the country to play new Beatles releases – they were phoned in to him and his audience – literally, before being released on record in the U.S.

I was privileged to be in London in 1966 for a couple of weeks during a summer between my junior and senior years in college. The British who weren’t in the first wave of the invasion were planning their assault. I was accosted on the street by the “Get Rich Group,” who, upon hearing that I worked at a college radio station in the U.S., played their wannabe hit single for me right in the street.

I used that status of college radio DJ to finagle my way onto one of the pirate radio ships off the U.K. coast. These ships were the only real source of current music for Britain, programmed exactly like American radio stations. I traveled to the ship aboard a skiff out of the British port of Felixstowe. How I survived this experience, I don’t know.

I stayed at a small hotel in London W1, recommended by the radio station personnel. The price I paid was rooming with an Irish dishwasher who insisted on playing a portable record player with failing batteries, so the music was all off-speed. But the band called the Troggs (“Wild Thing”) practiced in the hotel’s basement!

I did visit a local record store. They used to let you sit in booths and listen to records before you bought them. I bought a Beatles Parlophone EP (4 tracks, two on each side). They sounded MUCH better than the Capitol Records releases in the U.S., which seemed somewhat distorted. An audio engineer explained to me that recording standards in the UK were different then.

The Beatles sort of lost me after “Rubber Soul,” but I wasn’t a hippie. Maybe I liked to shower daily too much, don’t know.

But the Beatles were a precious phenomenon: a collective American experience (actually, a worldwide one). That appearance on the Ed Sullivan show was important for many reasons, not the least of which was that it was the first such experience – a joyous one -- after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Believe me, the Fab Four were there when we needed them.

Falling Dominoes

It’s nice when you only have to worry about your legacy and not re-election. President Obama said he was going to make use of executive action, and he has. Attorney General Holder announced that the federal government was extending full rights and benefits – or as much as current law would permit – to same-sex married couples. These rights will apply where federal issues are involved, even in the states (still in the majority) where such marriages are not yet legal.

So it appears Mr. Obama’s “evolution” is now complete in this area – and it begs the question, what’s next? Legalized pot, most of us will probably say. Will the federal government do the same, at least agreeing not to prosecute in states where marijuana use is OK?

It may seem that dominoes fall with great speed and in rapid succession. Of course, they don’t. The actual fall takes no time at all, but the fall is only made possible by very slow but inexorable underground tectonic forces at work long before plain old gravity takes over. Mr. Holder’s announcement was preceded by Stonewall in NYC a half-century or so ago. It’s been more than a half-century since the release of “Reefer Madness.” The abolition of slavery took decades before proclamations were made and laws were signed, and way more than that for full acceptance, which some would argue hasn’t happened yet.

I have my own answers to the “what’s next” questions. For instance, I think the smoking of tobacco will be illegal in 10 to 25 years. Smoking is a pretty big no-no already. Cigarettes are prohibitively expensive. There are fewer and fewer places where one can indulge this habit. When all medical benefits are denied to smokers by the federal government and insurance companies, that will just about be the end. I am old enough to remember smoking. I actually enjoyed it – when “it” included things like the glow of cigarette-ends in the dark during an intimate late-night discussion with a friend.

How about the consumption of red meat? I probably won’t be alive when that’s outlawed, but I have no doubt that it will happen. There will be laws regarding the raising and treatment of cattle. Beef will become prohibitively expensive (if it isn’t already), and eating it will be thought of as barbaric. Personally, I still like the stuff and will be perfectly happy to be outta here when it all comes to pass.

The simple rule is, you stick around on Earth long enough, and what was anathema 50 years ago may now be cool, and what was cool 50 years ago may now be anathema. Some of this is enlightenment, and some may be mostly fickleness – but it takes more time than we think. That’s what history is all about.

Anniversary Waltz

B’day greetings to Facebook, 10 years old today. And no, I don’t want to give it a gift, but it does have a place in my life.

I was first invited to FB by a former colleague who accidentally hit the button to invite all her contacts. In those days, I was worried about the now-quaint concept called privacy, so I didn’t bite. Then I was invited by a former boss, who probably hit the same button. Curiously, to this day, he almost never posts anything, while I, always needing to perform, am whaling away at it.

Addicted? Not quite yet, but a “user” nonetheless. Working alone from home now, I realize how great it was to have actual co-workers, even though I didn’t always like the job. FB allows me to keep in touch with former colleagues. Since most of them are about half my age, they keep me in touch with the world. The real world? That’s another discussion.

There are people in my life whom I never thought would still be in it – and maybe a couple who don’t belong in it – because of this invention, created so that male college students could evaluate females. I could look down my nose at that, but if I were that age and a college student in 2004, I’m sure I would have been a major player.

Now I’m at a certain age where I seem to keep reminding myself that Facebook is an artificial tether. There are those whose lives I wouldn’t be participating in – even those on other continents – were it not for FB. But hang on a minute. Didn’t people of a certain age say that at the arrival of the telegraph, telephone, radio, TV, or Skype -- how all these would alter human interaction forever?

They were right! None of these is a substitute for flesh-and-blood contact. But the healthy among us (not necessarily including me) have managed to make room for these devices in our lives, putting them where they belong.

My dear FB friends, some of you are boring (not many). But some of you are enlightening, some are entertaining, some pierce my soul, and most of you do all these things at one time or another. I just hope I’m holding up my end of the bargain.

Side Effects

By now, many of us have heard the story of the execution of a murderer in Ohio who seemed to refuse to die after he was injected with lethal drugs. Instead of passing on quickly and painlessly as expected, he appeared to struggle for at least 10 minutes, at one point clenching his fist.

Apparently, authorities in Ohio had to use a new combination of drugs, because the European pharmaceutical companies that make what Ohio had previously employed to kill bad guys didn’t want their products used for executions anymore. Ohio was running out of its supply of the Europeans' stuff, so it came up with its own, previously untried "cocktail."

Please forgive me when I say there’s a faint Final Solution-y echo to this discussion. The difference being, of course, that the Nazis weren’t worried about whether their victims died in pain – their concern was efficiency and cost – pfennigs and Deutschmarks.

This is not a subject for humor – but because it’s so black it almost begs for it. Some might say, for example, that Big Pharma shouldn’t be relied upon to supply something that would kill quickly – they are much better at killing us slowly….When it comes to execution drugs, should there be a warning label on them saying that one of the unintended side effects may be LIFE?...One of my favorite lines from a prominent comedian, uttered during the first Jerry Brown administration, concerned California’s obsession with green power. “Don’t commit a capital offense here,” said the comic. “Gov. Jerry Brown will put you in a solar-powered electric chair, and it will take you a year to die!” Ba-doom-boom.

I’ve often wondered what method of execution produces the quickest death. It turns out this is all quite a science. I saw that movie about an English expert whose advice was sought before every hanging when the U.K. still used that method. He had to calculate the weight of the bad guy, the length of the drop, etc., which involved a detailed knowledge of both anatomy and physics. The unsavory elements of the electric chair and the gas chamber are well known to us, thanks to Hollywood. Personally, I always thought the French had it right. The guillotine, while messy, seems to get the job done.

In my blackest humor on this topic, I once joked that executions should be publicly available live pay-per-view cable TV events, with the proceeds going to the crime victim’s family. I kept that to myself, thinking it was too crude a thing to say, but somebody eventually came up with the same idea and turned it into a movie.

Ah, but aren’t the victim’s family and friends entitled to just a little revenge? An Ohio judge said there was nothing in the law that guaranteed a pain-free execution.

Wow. I think we need to stop here, take a breath, and play back some of this. Can we really be seriously discussing (with all the appropriate legal head-scratching) the best methods to use for a painless execution? Do we not have a forest-and-trees problem here?

All I can say is, after using any of these, if death is taking more than four hours, contact a physician immediately.

Flesh and Blood

 It’s disheartening to see that the federal budget deal includes a reduction in the cost of living increase for the military pensions of those who are still in uniform – designed to save about $6 billion over 10 years The cut is a drop in the proverbial bucket and affects only 1 percent of the military – but there are numbers, and then there are people.

While disabled veterans were spared this cut – and while benefits for veterans have actually improved in recent years -- it’s distressing to watch the rules being changed for players still on the field.

In civilian life, those wearing uniforms seem to get a much better deal. Retiring cops and firefighters who have put in their time and been judicious with their money can actually leave the job wealthy, and the ability to retire on disability is sometimes misused. Is it because our local heroes are fighting wars here at home – and the ones doing it elsewhere aren’t top-of-mind? As dangerous as police work or fighting fires is, does it compare with being in the middle of a shooting war?

Of course, it’s true that only some of those in the military will ever get close to shooting at the enemy, or being shot at. But they are available to do so, if needed. Similarly, while the potential is always there, cops and firefighters don’t see “action” every day – but they are there because we need them. As they rise in the ranks, they are paid more, while the chance that they will be out facing danger lessens.

In one of my earliest jobs, I had a boss who was always complaining about “overhead” – meaning for him, “Too many people work here, and they are paid too much!” The number of people was in the debatable range, but trust me – we weren’t paid enough, even by our industry standard.

Pentagon bosses who support the military pension cuts say the money going out the door for pensions could be better used tor training and other improvements. But what about the promises made to real human beings? Would such cuts be necessary if the resources available were better managed?

As an aside, I am actually in favor of re-instituting the draft – not because I love war. Quite the opposite, in fact – I wouldn’t want to see people drafted. But just having the system in place would ensure that the general public – and the voters – remain engaged with this subject. Would the President and our legislators have as easy a time involving us in never-ending wars if the public were paying attention? Jeez, both World War II and the Civil War lasted less than five years.

But I digress. I have developed a real distaste for the word “entitlement,” – or rather, the way it’s being used. An entitlement is something that’s owed to people based on a promise in exchange for something. Social Security isn’t a perk – those getting it paid into the system all their working lives. Those in the military serve their country at relatively low rates of pay, but have been promised certain retirement benefits. Some of these folks have fought in our never-ending wars. Don’t they deserve better?

But We Like Him, Don't We?

A lot of us, including me, have enjoyed spending this week whacking away at Chris Christie. Will Fort Lee-gate (or GWB-gate) be his undoing if he tries to run for President? Depends on the American attention span. But look, he wouldn’t be a contender unless there was something about him we liked. Go on, admit it.

He is perceived as a plain speaker who says what’s on his mind when it needs to be said, even if we don’t like what he says sometimes. The scandal will prove his undoing only if he is shown to be an outright liar – or at the least, a very poor administrator who didn’t know what he should have known (the latter isn’t a deal-breaker by any means: Ronald Reagan?).

President Obama is not perceived as a plain speaker, but as someone who seems to talk out of both sides of his mouth when he feels it necessary, or whose opinions “evolve” when it’s politically convenient. That doesn’t mean he is any worse, though, than recent occupants of the office, or than politicians in general.

But remember Herman Cain? He shot to the top of the Republican heap very quickly, because he had mastered the art of plain speaking. His plans were oversimplifications, though, and his problems with women also undid him. Still, that quality was attractive.

Voters found plain speaking attractive in Harry Truman – in spite of the fact that he approved dropping two atomic bombs on Japan.

If Teddy Roosevelt were a zombie, I would vote for him. He is generally thought of as the plainest of speakers, totally unafraid to stand up to special interests. Walking softly, carrying the big stick. Obviously, he wasn’t as simple as all that. Here’s the guy who became the hero of our national park system, who loved the environment – and also enjoyed hunting. But he was perceived as caring about the average citizen. Who’s the last President to have done that – and meant it?  

Maybe we can get Aaron Sorkin to deisgn us a President. The guy Martin Sheen played in The West Wing wasn’t perfect – but would probably work for me.

Android technology still has a ways to go yet, though, so for the time being, we’re stuck with finding someone who can speak to us. But it’s not just plain words. Believe it or not, dumbing down doesn’t work with the majority of voters. It’s about connecting. Can our system produce someone who really connects with us, even if we disagree sometimes -- someone we TRUST? I haven’t given up on it quite yet. But I think we’re all more than ready. We'll know it when we see it -- and listen when we hear it.

In Search of a New Rhythm

At the risk of sounding bah-humbug-ish, I’m glad the holidays are over. They are fun and uplifting in many ways, but they’re also a source of pressure and unrealistic expectations. And, of course, in 11 months or so, they will be back again. Some years, it can seem like next week.

But the “holidays” (a term which almost always should have quotes around it) are just the beginning. After New Year’s Day, what’s next?  Super Bowl Sunday. Valentine’s Day. The Oscars. St. Patrick’s Day. March Madness. Major League Baseball. Easter. Cinco de Mayo. Dads and Grads. July 4^th. (August is pretty much dark.) Labor Day. Back to School. Football. Halloween. Thanksgiving. Black Friday. Christmas/Hanukkah et al….and then we begin again. (Apologize if I left something out).

All of these occasions seem to be reasons for eating, drinking, or spending money. From a commercial point of view, there doesn’t seem to be much “down time” anymore. I guess I’m more tuned into this because I used to work in newsrooms, and in the absence of actual news events, there were always the obligatory stories that seemed to go with some holiday-ish season. Some of these days, like Halloween, might as well be actual holidays, as the observance of each seems to intensify as the years pass.

Now please don’t get me wrong – I have enjoyed many of these  – some, of course, much more than others. But there are times I get that treadmill sensation. I sometimes dream of vacationing in another country where they don’t observe some of these things, just to have a season “off.”

Holidays in other countries can actually be interesting. I flew to New Zealand once, and the plane was packed to the gills. It wasn’t just because New Zealand was that popular. I just happened to be flying there just before Waitangi Day, their national holiday, which happens in February.

But if traveling to such a place isn’t an option, the only other one is to take charge of your life and decide exactly what you’re going to participate in. Yes, it involves a certain amount of swimming against the tide. But since this is the season for resolutions, I am going to try to make 2014 at least a little different.

Tick Tick, Bong Bong

Most of us are probably familiar with the depiction of the New Year as a baby, often brought in by a stork. The idea is that once the clock strikes midnight on Jan. 1, something brand new arrives, along with infinite possibilities. A clean slate.

Really? Of course, we know that the dropping of the ball at Times Square, the chimes of midnight by Big Ben, and, in this case, the change in the final digit of the calendar year don’t really clean much on our slates. Most likely, the same set of circumstances we face at 11:59 p.m. will still largely be there at 12:01 a.m. – the bad along with the good.

To further complicate matters, we all don’t observe this change in digits at the same time. The champagne corks start popping in New Zealand, and the sound works its way around the world to Hawaii. Calendars and clocks are human inventions. It was only fairly recently that the world agreed on which calendar to follow among numerous choices. Clocks only became critical in the 19^th century, triggered by the rise of the railroad. And even now, time is subject to human decision-makers. Arizona doesn’t recognize Daylight Saving Time (nor do some of my older electronic devices, since Congress changed the opening and closing dates for DST).

They say our brains are wired to remember the bad things more vividly than the good, and as the New Year reminds us we’re not getting any younger, we consider some of the less-than-brilliant decisions we’ve made, occasionally at critical times. If we could only go back, we think, and undo that thing we did, or failed to do, life would be much better today. Would it? I don’t necessarily believe in “God’s plan,” but I do believe in chains of events. You can’t pull a link out of the chain and assume that all the links that followed would necessarily have been any better. Different, yes. But we are always forging new ones.

A young friend changed her life in 2013, selling her home in one state and moving to another where housing is cheaper, taxes are lower, and most important for her, the people seem more genuine. There was also a unique set of circumstances that allowed her to do it. That said, you can’t discount her courage in moving to a destination where she knew nobody. I often tell her that while there was wind beneath her wings, she’s the one who did the flying, often through storms.

But even she couldn’t change everything -- and how could she? The slate is never “clean.” At this moment in time, we are all the sum total of our experience. The changes we make ourselves, good or bad, are only possible because of previous events. We are all the product of our past, whether we like it or not.

Are the possibilities before us truly infinite? More so, it would seem, for some than for others. Infinite or not, we can all agree that possibilities are out there for all of us, and there’s something uplifting in that at seasons such as this.

But that’s always the case – not just at midnight on 1/1.

The Solstice Isn't Simple

Here in the West Coast city where I live, the winter solstice is supposed to arrive a little after 9 a.m. tomorrow (Saturday 12/21). The summer solstice is about my favorite time of the year – the time of the longest days. The winter solstice is also a favorite, but only because the nights will finally start to get shorter. But which is exactly the shortest day – and conversely, the longest night? The online charts don’t seem to agree on that issue. If tomorrow is the shortest day does that make tonight (Friday) the longest night of the year? As I write this, it’s too early in the morning to do math. For you solstice celebrators, at least it’s a weekend, so you can begin and end it when you want. Just go easy on the mead if you’re driving, OK?

North of the Arctic Circle, the sun doesn’t rise at all – and won’t until the first week in January. The town of Inuvik in northern Canada actually has a festival every year to mark the return of the sun, which will have been a no-show for about a month.

Scholars seem to agree that it’s tied in with Christmas. December 25 is the traditional day of Jesus Christ’s birth – but was he actually born on that day? The evidence seems to point to the holiday being related to pagan solstice festivals – it may actually have been created as religious competition for those older celebrations. And does our annual orgy of Christmas lighting figure in? At the most basic level, the lights fight the darkness, here in the Northern Hemisphere at least, so there’s a similar principle at work.

However it happens, the behavior of the sun – or more precisely, the Earth wobbling on its axis -- is something we count on. For us, it’s the universal constant in what is otherwise an uncertain existence.

There is no better way to end this discussion than to leave you with one of the most beautiful songs in American musical theater, from “Fiddler on the Roof,” which opened on Broadway in 1964, and later became a movie:

Sunrise, Sunset 

TMI

The first two bullets fired in what could become one of the biggest legal battles in American history have struck a target. A federal judge has ruled that the NSA’s massive collection of phone data on millions of us appears to violate the Constitution, and ordered it to stop doing so on two plaintiffs.

A big section of pavement has been laid on Edward Snowden’s likely road to sainthood. If it weren’t for him, of course, we wouldn’t be having this discussion in the first place. But if it weren’t for the government taking on private contractors to operate this system, there probably wouldn’t be an Edward Snowden, either. How many other private contractors are there, with access to information on us, who just might not be as interested in the greater good?

When a sitting federal judge throws around terms like “Orwellian,” it tends to get your attention. Personally, I have no problem with the use of modern information systems to prevent terrorism. But does this massive NSA program actually work? As critics have pointed out making the haystack bigger only makes it harder to find the needle.  

I have this creeping suspicion that while our lives are becoming more transparent to government (and Google, Microsoft et al, BTW), government operations are becoming more and more opaque. Is it really all about safety and security? Do you think sometimes, when government power is exercised, it’s just because it’s there and justifies someone’s job?

Of course, these issues are not as black-and-white as the Snowden fans would have us believe. But 9/11 happened in large measure not because the dots weren’t already there, but because nobody connected them, which seems to be a factor in many high-profile man-made tragedies, such as school shootings. Can we have a reasonable discussion about what information the authorities need about us and what they don’t – and what government operations need to be secret and what don’t? The deep end isn’t all that far away, and I’d really hate to see us go off it.

Skin in the Game

We’ve been having a lot of fun – at least I think it’s been fun – about Fox anchor Megyn Kelly’s assertion a while ago that Santa Claus was white – kind of like Jesus. I hope the comedians and satirists out there send her thank-you notes for this great holiday gift. Saves paying writers for it.

Let’s start with the hard one first (or is it the easier one?). Scholars have debated this for a long time, but to my mind, there’s a much better-than-even chance that Jesus was Semitic (BTW, a designation that could apply to other Middle Eastern ethnicities besides Jews). Which means he likely had dark, curly hair and olive skin. Fine. Many classical artists, on the other hand, have depicted him as white. Why? I don’t think they were making political statements – more likely, that’s what they were surrounded by and were used to. It seems doubtful, given the difficulties of travel in his day, that Jesus would have been either white or black. But he didn’t do selfies, and the Shroud of Turin isn’t going to shed any light on this one, either.

Seems artists have had similar problems with the Virgin Mary. Images of her as a white woman seem to predominate in our culture, but unlike Jesus, she’s apparently been “coming back” over the centuries on a semi-regular basis, and doesn’t always look the same. Hispanics in this hemisphere have depicted her as one of them – based, I suppose, on one of her regional appearances.

Santa? Well, he would seem to be a Northern European invention – snow, reindeer, etc., so the depiction of him as white does not seem to cause too much pain, at least for me. As a young man, he may have even been blond before his beard turned white. But hang on a minute: If Santa Claus is actually based on St. Nicholas, who was a real figure, there might be a problem. St. Nicholas was Greek or Turkish. There’s a good chance, then, that he had olive skin and curly hair as well, right? (And while we’re dealing with popular symbols, is Santa, as commonly depicted, sending the wrong message to kids about obesity? Just wondering…)

Even the reindeer have their secrets. From what I heard yesterday, male reindeer shed their antlers in the winter, while females, who also grow them, hang onto theirs until after they give birth in the spring – meaning all of Santa’s reindeer, according to the depictions of the season, have to be girls. So what does that make Rudolph? A “transgen-deer”?

I think the Muslims may have a point. They forbid depictions of Allah. No white guy with a beard sitting on a cloud hurling lightning bolts at them. This has allowed those of that faith to move on to other issues. Shouldn’t we?

Language Barriers

In just a couple of weeks now, 2013 will be history – for some, it will be more historic than for others. It was especially so for a friend who was summing up her life events of the past 12 months. I commented that for her, it was an historic year – unaware that I had just stepped on a verbal land mine.

Not long ago, she and I were part of an industry that required working with words, so for us, stepping on such explosive devices is a more likely occurrence, perhaps, than with most people. Anyway, my use of “an historic” was called into question. What’s the “n” doing in front of a hard “h”? she wanted to know.

OK! Well I have always written it that way out of habit, and as far as I knew, it was still accepted usage – which brought back the equivalent of ,”Oh yeah? Where?” And I was double-dared to Google it – which I did, and found several discussions which led me to believe that the issue wasn’t entirely settled. The most reasonable explanation was that certain English words that were derived from French, in which the “h” was silent, as in “histoire,” could take the “an” in front. While my former colleague was willing to accept the explanation, she still didn’t accept the usage itself. Pet peeve, she said.

Still awake here, folks? In any case, this wasn’t a battle I felt like fighting to the death. I have to admit that she has a point, in the sense that only snots who have read too much English literature (like me) write that way. You can be sure that in writing to her, I won’t go THERE again.

But when it comes to language, we all have things that make our blood boil. A TV anchorwoman in the city where I used to live would end lists of items with “and etcetera.” That makes me almost homicidal.

Fortunately, publishers and media companies have developed style books for both the written and the spoken word. Otherwise, the murder rate in newspaper offices and TV newsrooms would be much higher than it is today. 

But language evolves, and we all have to evolve with it. I still occasionally call the big white (or chrome or brushed stainless) thing you put food in to keep it cold an “icebox”. Didn’t people stop using those most of a century ago? I think it’s an Eastern thing. Or maybe my former colleague is right – I need a good dose of evolution.

 After all is said, written, and done, isn’t the goal just plain old getting your point across? If your usage interferes with that goal, then “…what we have heeahh…” to quote the warden in Cool Hand Luke, “…is a failyuh to communicate.”

Watt's New?

Holiday lighting is cheery…up to a point.

Like everything else in America, it has been turned into an Olympic sport.  A few white lights on the tree outside used to be sufficient. Now, every other house is Disneyland. At the newspaper where I worked, the photographers went out to shoot the most spectacular displays, and we published a different picture or group of pictures for several weeks. Fortunately, we stopped short of awarding prizes.

A few spiders, skeletons and cobwebs got the job done for Halloween. Why do you need 500 lighted reindeer on your front lawn? I’m very glad to know there’s a happy – and well-heeled -- family living in your house, but geez Louise, when does artistic decoration turn into actual light pollution?

Is Dad outside on a ladder stringing these lights along the roofline himself? Of course not, there are companies that do this, and it’s a growing business.

Now I’m not a complete Scrooge. There are homeowners on certain streets who deliberately choose to go all-out and light everything up, publicizing it ahead of time, and welcome parades of cars through the neighborhood. I assume new homebuyers have to be told what’s expected of them if they move in. But if this is the way that street wants to share holiday cheer, have at it.

On the other hand, there are homeowners’ associations that turn into little police states. If you want to put colored lights on your outside tree, that’s a no-no, “We don’t do that here at Snotty Acres, white lights only, please.”

The good thing about this holiday season in the Northern Hemisphere is that thanks to the lights, we can see where we’re going in the dark, which is two-thirds of the day in the dead of winter. Anything that keeps us from slipping on black ice.