The Elder Statesman

By BILL DUNCAN
The Elderstatesman

This past Fourth of July I had visits from my two youngest sons, both professionals and I listened intently as they talked in a language admittedly I did not understand. It was techno talk and at that moment I realized that even though as an editor decades ago, I had ushered in computer typesetting for newspapers that I had been left behind in this new era.

I even recalled making the understatement to a colleague that computer typesetting would never succeed in the newspaper business. I made that statement after an IBM engineer who designed the typesetting program to which I was introduced had used quote marks as a coding device for the new system and when as editors we explained that wouldn’t work, his reply was:

“You have to teach your reporters not to quote anyone.”

That is past history and today we’ve got the lead out of newspapers and this newspaper and others like it, are all produced on computers – only today the software allows us to use quote marks in a proper context. But what really interested me while listening to the tower of babble between my two sons was that the software engineer was telling his sibling how to de-stress by playing a video game called Plants vs Zombies. He claimed it frees your mind as you fight off the Zombies coming to devour your plants. I marveled at his description since my method of de-stressing is a good book and a quiet corner.

Since I find such comfort in the pages of a book, I remembered some years ago reading Sharon Heller’s enlightening book “Too Loud, Too Bright, Too Fast, Too Tight,” in which she said technology has created today’s hyper-stimulated world where up to 15 percent of adults suffer from some form of sensory defensiveness. “We deal with an amazing internal commotion of competing, disembodied voices. The Center for Disease Control says unequivocally that 80 percent of medical expenditures are stress related.” Heller is a developmental psychologist who has made a lifetime study of people suffering from sensory defensiveness.

In my opinion, it is information overload. I watched as my two sons each dragged out an i-Phone in a case smaller than what a cigarette case looked like in my day and searched for data as they talked. On that tiny instrument, were stored photos, appointment calendars, a complete website and Lord knows what else.

More new information has been produced in the last 30 years than in the past 5,000 years. This overstressed world has too many websites, too many reports, too many bits of information, too many e-mails and too much extraneous data. You need a machete to hack your way through the jungle of communication. A weekday edition of The New York Times, for example, contains more information than the average person was likely to come across in a lifetime in 17th Century England.

“Civilization has run on ahead of the soul of many and producing faster than we can think or give thanks,” G.K. Chesterton wrote in 1902, as a if a prophecy of the coming communication glut of voice mail, e-mail and websites. Google currently indexes 3,307,998,701 WebPages and that number has probably leaped another million since I collected that bit of trivia. It is said the number of WebPages triple every 18 months.

Little wonder someone described the web as an online Savant.

There is a project called “How Much Information” at the University of California Berkeley that studies the amount of information produced each year and released these findings:

“The world’s yearly total of print, film, optical and magnetic content would require roughly 1.5 billion gigabytes of storage. This is the equivalent of 250 megabytes for each man, woman and child on earth. One gigabyte could hold the contents of about ten yards of books on a shelf.”

I like the comment of Juliet Schor, a professor of Sociology at Boston College, who summed up this information tsunami, this way:

“Technology reduces the amount of time it takes to do any one task but also leads to the expansion of tasks that people are expected to do.”

I think I will go read a book.

(Bill Duncan can be reached at bduncan@nrtoday.com or by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470.)

By BILL DUNCAN
The Elderstatesman

In my early newspaper days in Los Angeles, I was given an unusual assignment to read the Associated Press, United Press and all the wire services for which my newspaper subscribed in search of oddities in the news. I would compile for a front-page column. It was my editor’s way of lightening up the serious news of the day.

It was a delightful assignment because it had such a strong readership. The habit of searching for those oddball stories has never left me.

I still do that search daily on an online site I have for Associated Press and would you believe I found one last Friday that would have made my front page column. It happened to Oscar, a 2 ½-year-old cat owned by Kate and Mike Nolan in the British Channel Isles. Oscar was sunning himself on the Nolan’s farm when his two rear paws were amputated by the farm’s combine harvester.

The Nolans took to him a local veterinarian, who in turn sent Oscar to Dr. Noel Fitzpatrick, a neuro-orthopedic surgeon in Eashing, England. Fitzpatrick, working with biomedical engineers, fitted Oscar with two prosthetic implants. The biomedical engineers designed the artificial paws so they could be fused to bone and skin.

The veterinarians then inserted the peg-like implants by drilling them into Oscar’s ankle bones in his rear legs. The metal implants are attached to the bone where Oscar lost his paws and were coated with a substance that helps bone cells grow drectly over them. The cat’s own skin then grew over the end of the peg forming a natural seal that prevents infections.

The cat was on all four feet in less than four months after rehabilitation training that taught Oscar how to walk again. Oscar’s owners said they hoped his new paws would also further the technology for developing artificial limbs for humans.

“This is a pretty lucky cat,” said Dr. Mark Johnston, a veterinarian and spokesman for the British Small Animal Veterinary Association. “Giving a cat artificial limbs is a very novel solution.” Johnston said that while there are many “perfectly happy” three-legged cats and dogs, animals that lose two legs do not usually fare as well.

Dogs might cope better with some sort of animal-wheelchair for their back legs, but cats don’t usually adapt to that because of their freer lifestyle, he said. “If a cat has two legs that are damaged beyond repair, it’s very hard to keep him going,” he said. “We would generally euthanize a cat in that situation.”

Johnston said the next six months to a year would be critical for Oscar. He said veterinarians would have to closely monitor the feline to make sure no infections, sores or other movement problems crop up.

He doubted the technique would be widely available due to the cost and said it was still relatively rare for animals to lose two legs at once. Gordon Blunn, head of biomedical engineering at University College in London, who led the effort to make Oscar’s fake paws, said they cost about $2,996 to make, not including the cost for the operation itself.

Fitzpatrick had already made a name for himself in the animal prosthetic field when in 2008, he developed an artificial knee for a cat named Missy who was struck by a hit and run driver.

You might say, he is building a bionic mouse trap.

(Bill Duncan can be reached at bduncan@nrtoday.com or by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470.)

By BILL DUNCAN
The Elderstatesman

It seems of late I have spent more time in a hospital bed waiting for the hours to creep across the face of the clock. For a person as active as I am, the worst part of this ordeal is not the bland hospital menus, not even all the poking around by nurses, but it is the hours of boredom.

My latest hospital encounter was in the mega-hospital in Springfield. I was there for heart related issues, therefore I was assigned a bed in the cardiac ward. Stamped right on the menu selection in all capital letters was “NO CAFFEINE per MD.” Understandable in the cardiac ward where the effects of caffeine are known to aggravate several factors detrimental to heart health, including elevating blood pressure, cholesterol levels that can cause the heart to pump faster and breathing to quicken.

With my heart condition, I have learned to substitute the leaded variety of coffee for decaffeinated, so when I saw the bold warning that no caffeine would be on the daily menu, I inquired about decaf for more morning coffee. I was instructed just to write on the menu a request for decaf coffee.

Thus began a series of love letters to and from the kitchen beginning with a red ink rubber stamp across my handwritten request for decaf that repeated the “No Caffeine per MD.” I sent back a message explaining the meaning of the prefix “de” as in decaffeinated.

I pulled out all stops, explaining the word depopulation meant an area where people have left. Dehumidify meant to take away the humidity. Declaw meant to remove an animal’s claws. Delouse meant to take the lice away.

The list was endless, but the nomenclature, when it came to decaffeinated coffee, only got me a “Dear Patient” pink sticker saying: “It was necessary to change your selections in order to meet the diet prescription. Signed Dietary Dept.” Hey, folks, I wasn’t asking for eggs over easy and steak, just a cup of decaf coffee. The end results was that a patient advocate came to my bedside to explain that despite the term, not all caffeine is removed by the process, although she admitted the reason I was in the hospital wouldn’t necessarily preclude having a cup of morning decaf.

But what she said about decaf coffee not being really decaffeinated caused me to do some investigation. She was right. Not all caffeine is removed in the complicated process the lowly coffee bean goes through to give up its caffeine. Almost every process for decaffeination consists of soaking the beans in water to dissolve the caffeine, extracting the caffeine with either a solvent or activated carbon, then re-soaking the beans in decaffeinated water to reabsorb the flavor lost in the extraction.

There are three basic methods of decaffeinating coffee. The Swiss Water Process calls for green coffee beans to be soaked in hot water the remove the caffeine. The first batch of coffee beans is discarded while the caffeine in a new batch of coffee beans is stripped from the solution by means of activated carbon filter. The CO2 process calls for soaking the beans in highly compressed CO2, which extracts the caffeine and then processed using activated carbon filters. The sparkling water decaffeination process is similar to the CO2 method, but instead of removing the caffeine with activated carbon filters, the caffeine is washed from the CO2 with sparkling water in a second tank, then recyled to extract more caffeine.

Bottom line is that not all the caffeine is removed from the coffee, nor are all the flavor compounds returned or left in the decaffeinated coffee. It is still a good placebo for a coffee drinker, sending love notes to the kitchen staff as a diversion to the boredom of a hospital room. On my final day in the hospital, the kitchen still didn’t honor my written request for decaf coffee, but scribbled across my handwriting was the word “sorry.”

I was served with a cup of steaming decaf coffee on my last day of confinement on the order of my cardiologist.

(Bill Duncan can be reached at bduncan@nrtoday.com or by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470.)

By BILL DUNCAN
The Elderstatesman

I am a great fan of the cartoon, Frank & Earnest. The antics of Frank & Earnest are more true to life than perhaps we’d like to admit. However, I think I enjoy the word play in the cartoon more than anything else about these two unlikely characters.

Frank & Earnest, if you seriously study them, depict every walk of life. Their very names are a play on words, Frank meaning outspoken and Earnest, a homophone for the word earnest, which is a synonym for serious. The duo can appear in any setting, past, present or future and anywhere in the universe. Sometimes, a bolt of lightning comes down from above to give the two characters a message from on high.

I like the cartoon where Frank is a spokesman for the U.S. Post Office stamp design department and says to Earnest: “The Department decided to have a religious message on our next stamp.” Earnest’s quick comeback is, “How about, ‘Lord, deliver us?’”

Another one of my favorites is a library setting and Frank says to the librarian: “You’re the only one lending right now.”

Like many readers, I have clipped certain favorites to share with others, mostly because of the superior play on words, such as the one where Frank has just fashioned a new wig for the king and instructs Earnest to “run it over to the castle.” Earnest quips: “Ah, the hair to the throne.”

Today, the cartoon is drawn by Tom Thaves, who had worked many years with his father, Bob Thaves who created the strip. Bob, who died Aug. 1, 2006, first created the two characters for individual cartoons that appeared in True magazine, a publication no longer in print. The daily newspaper strip began on Nov. 6, 1972 and went to the Sunday funnies April 1, 1973. The daily is done as a single panel. On Sunday it is a full blown comic strip.

It is interesting to study the two characters. Frank is the taller of the two and the one doing most of the talking. In the early strips, Frank was the only one with a speaking role. Earnest, on the other hand, is more of a straight man, but occasionally gets off his own zingers.

If you are a true follower of these two punsters, you know neither of them are pretentious and both are skeptical of people and institutions that make the world what it is. That is why we often find ourselves in those comic situations.

Thaves, the senior, was an innovator and brought new technology to the comic strip world and won many prizes for his work. The strip today is carried by 1,200 newspapers worldwide and is read by 25 million people daily. In the late 1990s, Bob Thaves went into semi-retirement and turned the strip over to his son, Tom, who continues the strip today.

My nephew, William Duncan McQuagge, who lives in Florida is as outspoken as Frank on any subject you can name. Recently he shared a Frank & Earnest comeuppance he received from his mother, my sister, Marjorie, after he had spent the night before expounding on the state of the world. She clipped a Frank & Earnest cartoon and left it on his desk.

It said it all, he said in sharing the humbling moment on his blog, The Contrary Scotsman. The Frank & Earnest cartoon caption said:

“One guy in a million understands what’s going on nowadays, yet I wind up sitting next to him every time!”

Touché, nephew William.

(Bill Duncan can be reached at bduncan@nrtoday.com or by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470.)

By BILL DUNCAN
The Elderstatesman

If e-mails, letters and personal phone calls are any indication, I am not alone as a dinosaur roaming the jungles of cell phones. To my surprise many others feel as I do that no telephone call is so important it can’t wait.

One of the shocking revelations came from a reader who researched the cellphone and electronic marvels phenomenon and sent me these mind-boggling statistics:

• There are 4.1 billion text messages sent every day in the United States alone.
• There are 140 million cellphones in the United States.
• Fifty-seven percent of teenagers see their cellphones as the key to their social life.
•Facebook has more than 200 million active users, with more than 100 million logging on at least once a day.
• Twitter has 18 million users and is most popular among those 45 to 54.

I am a dinosaur, not only do I not own a cellphone, but I don’t text, have a fairly decent social life without instant communication, don’t have the foggiest idea of how to get my face on Facebook and even though I am a mere 30 years older than those baby boomers on Twitter, I had much rather write a long, personal letter than twitter some nonsense.

I was also shocked when the reader said there are more than 500,000 dead cellphones waiting for disposal and gave some statistics that are even more frightening. Many of these older, obsolete phones have batteries containing cadmium.

The battery from a single old phone could seriously contaminate 600,000 gallons of water, enough to fill a third of an Olympic-sized swimming pool. Cadmium, however is no longer being used in new cellphone batteries.

Cellphones, even new ones, use lead to solder components to the printed wiring boards. Lead affects the immune, endocrine and central nervous systems. Those wiring boards also contain brominated flame retardants, which have been associated with cancer, liver damage and problems with neurological, immune and endocrine systems.

Cellphone users will call all this hype, trying to scare people. It scared the hell out of me and I don’t even own a cellphone.

I was so naïve, I thought people only walked around talking to themselves on these things, but each day I learn some new shocking event related to cellphones. The latest is some states are trying to get laws passed to criminalize sextexting, an unbelievable act, at least for this shy guy, of teens doing strip teases before the cellphone camera and sending the images out for the whole world to see.

Some district attorneys consider this child pornography and have arrested the strip teasers.

I will admit teenagers are a strange bunch, but when I look back and only had to handle long hair rebellion of my male teenagers, I pity this generation of parents. Solving the sexting problem is a little more difficult than finding Playboy and Hustler under the mattress.

Sextexting is so widespread that a British charity called Beatbulling surveyed 2,094 teenagers between 11 and 18 and discovered that 38 percent claimed they had received sexual images by electronic means with 55 percent stating the images were sent by cellphone.

As a parent, I made the mistake years ago when my son, John, came of age and moved out on his own. He came by the house one day, and all this old Marine could see was that he had joined the grow long hair trend. Like a Marine DI, I barked: “Get a haircut, John.”

He left. Weeks later I discovered he had come by the house to tell me there was a burglary at his apartment and his stereo set, his Martin guitar and other items had been stolen. When I asked why he hadn’t told me that before, he replied, “I tried to Dad and you told me to get a haircut.”

At that moment, I overcame and never mentioned the hair issue again. The same attitude should prevail in this latest texting crisis. Let’s not brand these teenagers as child pornographers, but only as adventurous teenagers with raging hormones. Let’s deal with it like adults using common sense.

(Bill Duncan can be reached at bduncan@nrtoday.com or by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470)

By BILL DUNCAN
The Elderstatesman

I have a confession to make. I do not own a cell phone.

There are a few of us dinosaurs roaming the earth including, I discovered Edward Grinnan, editor of Guideposts magazine, who made a similar confession in May to his readers. Like, Grinnan, I am not opposed to technology. In fact, I use it every day.

This very column is being written using the most modern of communication tools and it will be transported magically through cyberspace to reach its destination at a newspaper.

This does not mean I am willing to embrace being a microsecond away from intrusion on my personal world. I need solitude to think and be alone from the madden world swirling around me.

Like Mark Twain, who once said he sent Christmas greetings to everyone except the inventor of the telephone, I have a love-hate relationship with that annoying instrument even though I am still tied to a landline. That probably stems from my early newspaper reporting days when the telephone was a lifeline.

The telephone number of the first newspaper for which I reported was simply 22, but we never had to dial the number. In fact, there was no dial on the telephone a black instrument with a speaker mouthpiece and a receiver you lifted off a holder. An operator’s voice asked “number please.”

I learned the importance of this magic machine early on when I was assigned to cover a murder with an old timer named Bob Geivet. My editor told me to do everything he said, but not to get in his way. The body was discovered buried in an orange grove in remote Trabuco Canyon, located in the foothills of the Santa Ana Mountains in eastern Orange County, California.

Other news media had gathered at the law enforcement roadblock leading to the place where the shallow grave was found. Geivet instructed me to go back to a country store about a mile away, to get on the telephone and call our newspaper office, Under no circumstances he said, was I to surrender the telephone. As soon as the Orange County sheriff’s office began releasing details, reporters from other newspapers started coming into the country store, demanding I get off the phone so they could call in their stories. I took some verbal insults, but held fast to that one telephone within miles of the murder scene until Geivet arrived with his story.

I would go on to learn more from this mentor than I did in all my years in a classroom. Once again the two of us were on assignment miles from the nearest telephone when Geivet spotted a telephone linesman atop of pole using a telephone. Geivet climbed the pole and dictated his story to the newspaper from the top the pole.

When Geivet retired, he visited me in Roseburg. He was enthralled with the town of Myrtle Creek and its newspaper, then called The Myrtle Creek Mail. He wanted me to buy The Mail and hire him as a reporter. The town would have never been the same.

I don’t know if Geivet would have embraced the cell phone or not, but it if helped him get the story to the newspaper in a timely fashion, he probably would have.

Actually, we think of this new communications as a recent phenomenon, but it is actually ancient art dating back to 1886 when Reginald Fessenden, a Canadian inventor who had worked with Thomas Edison, developed a two-way radio telephone. World War II greatly improved communication, including that antiquated stick telephone I started using on my first newspaper job. The first handheld mobile phone was developed in 1973 by Motorola and looked much like the World War II Walkie-Talkie. Now that huge instrument is so tiny it can fit in one’s ear.

For me, that is going too far in this “reach out and touch somebody” society.

(Bill Duncan can be reached at bduncan@nrtoday.com or by writing to P.0. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 94770,)

Muffins & Mayhem
Recipes for a Happy, if disorderly, life
By SUZANNE BEECHER
A Touchstone Book
A division of Simon & Shuster
Hardbound $24.99

By BILL DUNCAN
The News-Review

Readers of The Senior Times section enfolded in the daily News-Review each first Monday of the month are familiar with the wit and wisdom of Suzanne Beecher. Those who subscribe to her on-line book club through the Douglas County Library get a daily dose of Suzanne Monday through Friday.

They are among 350,000 readers from 3,000 libraries in the U.S. and Canada who get their daily fix of Suzanne’s slices of life. Today, her Dear Reader.com has multiple genres, but when she started in 1999, she provided only two genres. One week was fiction, the next week was non-fiction. Also in the beginning her column was about books. Slowly that changed and she began sharing personal life experiences with her readers. That was an instant hit.

Like the column she wrote about the UPS man who delivers boxes of books to her door in Sarasota, Fla. It was one of her typical columns about ordinary people and how important they are to every day life. Surprisingly, she received an e-mail from 2nd Lt. Paul Guzman, serving in Mosul, Iraq, whose big brother is that UPS man.

She would also often share a favorite recipe and the feedback from readers was tremendous. The recipes detailed everything from how to boil the perfect egg to family secret recipes. Thus, at the urging of many readers. Suzanne decided to write a book, naturally it had to include recipes.

Thus came “Muffins & Mayhem, Recipes for a Happy (if disorderly) Life,” her first book.

Coming up with that title was the hardest part, she said, and several working titles were left on the cutting room floor. It was Stacy Creamer, the now publisher at Touchstone, that found the words muffins and mayhem deep inside the manuscript.

“Writing is an ongoing part of my life,” she said. “I carry a notepad and pen with me wherever I go.” But writing the book was harder than she had anticipated because it required a different discipline. Writing her columns usually occurred in the mornings so she devoted afternoons to her book.

“Once I was into a chapter, it was such a high that when the writing was flowing I would stay with it until the wee hours of the morning,” she said. “At times it was insane but when I finally embraced the finished, hardbound book, I knew it was worth every torturous moment.”

“Muffins and Mayhem” is a delightful story on how to live a happy, if disorderly life from one who lives it daily. When she takes time out, and goes on vacation once a year, Suzanne has a contest among readers to write her column during her absence. This year will be somewhat different. To celebrate her newly published book, Suzanne is seeking columns based on the reader’s own favorite recipe. To learn more about the contest go to suzanne@dearreader.com.

In addition to Dear Reader. Com, Suzanne does specialty book clubs for St. Martin’s Press, Zondervan and Penguin Classics. She also provides Author Buzz and Kids Buzz, in which readers are given the chance to meet authors and win books.

While she doesn’t have international clubs, Suzanne often gets e-mails from people around the world that have found Dear Reader.com on the internet.

(Bill Duncan can be reached at bduncan@nrtoday.com or by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470)

By BILL DUNCAN
The Elderstatesman

Here I lie, or is it lay? Confound English. But then who hasn’t confused lie and lay?

The last time I wrote this column from this position was two weeks go and I said I’d be out of the hospital in a couple of days. I lied.

There you go again. This lie means to fib. With so many lays and lies to deal with I turned to my go-to-grammarian, Patricia O’Conner and her grammarphobe’s guide, “Woe is I.”

In simple terms, Patricia explains to lie means to recline, which at the moment I’m doing. Lay, on the other hand, is the place one reclines, which is a bed in a ward at the VA hospital.

I will make no promises on my release. The doctor says not until I’ve recovered from whatever it was that struck me down.

I’m from a generation that went to grammar school from the first grade until the eighth when we matriculated into high school. Grammar lessons didn’t end there, in fact they got harder.

Where was Patricia O’Conner in my school days? “English today isn’t what it was 100 years ago and its not what it will be 100 years from now,” she writes, explaining “we make up rules when we need them and discard them when we don’t.”

Actually English happened 1,500 years ago when the German tribes, Anglos and Saxons, invaded England, a Celtic speaking land already colonized by Latin-speaking Romans. Within a few hundred years of taking a word here and there from other languages English became the rich broth it is today.

This borrowing gave English the largest lexicon of any modern language. Along with that came some screwy rules. Let’s admit it English is a crazy language.

One of my constant struggles is with the words “that” or “which.” O’Conner calls this the “which trials,” but does an excellent job of clearing up the mystery.

“If you can drop the clause and not lose the point of the sentence, use “which.” If you can’t, use “that.” One more thing, she says, “a which clause goes inside commas, a that clause doesn’t.”

She provides a little memory aid: “Commas, which cut the fat, go with which, never with that.”

Every newspaper editor’s challenge is to hammer into the heads of reporters the difference between its (a pronoun) and it’s (a contraction of it is.)

Edwin Newman and myself have long fought a seemingly futile attempt to eliminate the word pretty as in “pretty awful,” “pretty much,” and other phrases not so pretty. KVAL-TV weatherman Seth Wayne can’t seem to give a weathercast without a pretty or two.

One of the chapters in O’Conner’s book is called “death sentences,” a long list of meaningless words and phrases that once were clever figures of speech but over time became the lard of language. The one I see often is a car of a house being totally destroyed. It is either destroyed or it isn’t.

Of course I couldn’t close this column without referring to what has happened to spelling. In the printed word today it seems to be non-existent, in my opinion because we are relying too heavily on the spell-checker.

Watching “Wheel of Fortune” the other night Pat Sajak cheated the contestants by having a misspelled word in the puzzle. The final word should have two words but the puzzle designer misspelled it as one. The word? One of my fingernail-scraping-on-the-blackboard spelling demons – all right. “Wheel of Fortune” spelled it alright.

So here I lay and I don’t lie.

(Bill Duncan can be reached at bduncan@nrtoday.com or by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470)

By BILL DUNCAN
The Elderstatesman

I’ve never been much on titles. Occasionally, I’ll slip up and call myself by the prissy word, journalist, but deep down I’m just a reporter. I’ve been higher up in the newspaper ranks, even once was a publisher. And I have held the title of editor on several daily newspapers.

I am told on judgement day I will not be judged by for my degrees, diplomas, honors and awards, but rather by my scars. Since I have more than my share, I guess I am home free.

I’ve got the degrees, the honors and awards, but they aren’t displayed on any walls in my house. They are stacked inside a closet collecting dust.

I got my comeuppance early in my newspaper career while applying for a job. I tried to impress an old editor named Hank Burmeister with my college degree. He stopped me mid-sentence by saying: “I don’t care if you have a wall filled with sheep skins. Can you write?”

Little did I know that one day I would be confronted by a new reporter over her Master’s degree in journalism from Stanford University. All new reporters, I assigned to pick up the vital statistics from the courthouse – the marriages, divorces, births etc. It was a good testing ground for their accuracy.

That reporter, flaming with her new found feminism, challenged me by saying the assignment was beneath her, that she had been trained to expose Standard Oil.

“Oh, that’s different,” I said. “We only have one Chevron station and it has the dirtiest restrooms in town. Get over there a do an expose.”

“But in the meantime,” I told her, “get across the street to the courthouse and bring me those vitals and this afternoon you go to the historic cemetery midtown and copy 30 names off the headstones.”

She turned out to be a good reporter despite her Master’s degree.

Titles just don’t do much for me. I was the manager of the American Red Cross chapter in Douglas County for 15 years. The board chairman trying to impress some dignitary, introduced me as the executive director. I corrected him, by saying executive directors don’t do restrooms.

Probably my greatest accomplishment as a reporter came when I was aboard the Queen Mary for its last voyage. I was fully credentialed as a reporter covering the last voyage. My steward tipped me off after we sailed from the Canary Islands headed for Rio that a stowaway had slipped aboard. Trying to be responsible I ask the ship’s captain about the incident.

His pompous British reply was: “This is a British ship. On British ships were carry passengers not journalists. It is not my habit to discuss ship’s business with passengers.”

My revolutionary reply was to remind him the ship was now owned by an American city and in America we are reporters, not journalists and that within the hour this reporter will have interviewed your stowaway and if he tried to block the radio message reporting the story to my newspaper, he would quickly discover the First Amendment of the Constitution.

I interviewed the stowaway and was back in the radio room filing my story in less than a hour. That’s what a reporter does.

(Bill Duncan can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470)

By BILL DUNCAN
Elderstatesman

I receive too many unwanted forwards on this magic box called a computer. Every now and then one comes through that is a keeper, like the forward called 7% that I got from Charles Becherer, a hospice volunteer with me at the VA in Roseburg. Charlie is the most unassuming individual I think I have ever met. A quiet thinker, but a doer.

The content of 7%, a power print presentation, is a case in point.

Mark Twain once said: “Few sinners are saved after the first 20 minutes of a sermon.” Much truth in that statement because honestly of all the sermons I have heard in 80 plus years the one I remember is when in the celebrant said he wasn’t going to deliver a sermon that steaming August morning in Southern California but would only leave us with a message: “This would be a cold day in hell.” He needed to say no more.

Because of space considerations, I will only highlight some of the one-line sermons in the message from 7%, so named because it says only 7% of the recipients will forward the message to others. But trust me it is powerful.

Since I can’t even begin to describe the wonders of this power point presentation, which has a soothing musical background against exquisite snow scenes somewhere in Scandinavia, I suspect. It is so freely posted on the Internet, I don’t think it is copyrighted, but I checked and could not verify that. It is listed multiple times at this site:

45lesonsinlife-091118003935-phpapp02.pps

It’s worth a peek.

Those 45 Lessons in Life are mini sermons that no eloquent preacher could achieve in such a short recitation. Space considerations prevent me from listing all 45 lessons, but here are the ones that touched me, beginning with number one:

“Life isn’t fair, but it’s still good.”

“Your job won’t take care of you when you are sick. Your family and friends will. Stay in touch.”

“You don’t have to win every argument. Agree to disagree.”

“Cry with someone. It’s more healing than crying alone.”

“It’s all right to let your children see you cry.”

“It’s OK to get angry with God. He can take it.”

“Make peace with your past so it doesn’t screw up your future.”

“If a relationship has to be a secret, you shouldn’t be in it.”

“Everything can change in the blink of an eye. But don’t worry, God never blinks.”

“It is never too late to have a happy childhood. But the second one is up to you and no one else.”

“Be eccentric now. Don’t wait for old age to wear purple.”

“Frame every disaster with these words: ‘In five years, will it matter?’”

“Forgive everyone everything.”

“Believe in miracles.”

“Don’t audit life. Show up and make the most of it.

“If we threw all our problems in a pile and we saw everyone’s else’s, we’d grab ours back.”

“Life isn’t tied with a bow, but it is still a gift.”

“No matter how you feel, get up, get dressed and show up.”

“Life is too short to hate anyone.”

“Envy is a waste of time. You already have all you need.”

“Your children only have one childhood.”

“All that truly matters in the end is that you loved.”

“Growing old beats the alternative – dying young.”

My fumbling words can’t possibly do justice to this beautiful power print presentation. I have put it in my favorites in the storehouse of my computer’s brain and call it to the screen whenever I start feeling sorry for myself. It is a spiritual retreat.

(Bill Duncan can be reached at bduncan@nrtoday.com or by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470.)