Month: December 2001

newspaper names

Great newspaper names, past and present, via email: the Anniston (Ala.) Star and Hot Blast (now just the Star); the Playground Daily News (Fort Walton Beach, Fla.); the Herald-Telephone (Bloomington, Ind.); the South Fork (Colo.) Tines (not a typo); the Waterford (Mich.) Spinal Column; the Clinton (Wis.) Topper; the Mount Vernon (Texas) Herald-Optic; The East Greenwich (R.I.) Pendulum; the (Lexington, Ky.) Cat’s Pause; the (Larned, Kan.) Tiller and Toiler; the Lawrence (Neb.) Locomotive; the Santa Fe (N.M.) Gringo and Greaser; the Murdo (S.D.) Coyote; the Alpine (Texas) Avalanche; the Basin (Wyo.) Republican-Rustler.

summer camp for the retarded

Says Alice: “I’d totally forgotten about the time my parents accidentally sent me to a summer camp. For mentally retarded children. I wish there was more to that story, but I was so young, about all I remember is the sound of my mom’s voice: ‘So that’s why it was so cheap.’ I think what happened was, one of the counselors approached her and started talking about how ‘bright’ and ‘quick’ I was, which naturally aroused my mom’s suspicions, which led to a Three’s Company-esque resolution of tenuous comedic merit. How long was I there before anybody realized the mistake? I’m afraid to ask.”

keillor on paul harvey

Speaking of Paul Harvey, that link below has a great excerpt from a Garrison Keillor story some years back. Seems Keillor met Harvey at some formal dinner somewhere:
“When the salad plates were whisked away and the entree brought in, he leaned over toward me and said, ‘Page … 2,’ just like he does on the radio. In fact, Mr. Harvey was exactly as he is on the radio. He read me a number of stories from a script in his pocket, most of them about ordinary Americans and their struggle to deregulate industry and give large corporations the freedom to do good in the world, and during all of this, he sold me a tin of liver pills and a utensil that dices, slices, chops, minces and prunes.”

triple organ transplant

When I was in high school and college, I had a reflexive distrust of people who planned to become a doctor. It seemed to me to be the first refuge of anyone who wanted to make lots of money and be guaranteed a prominent place in society. A lot of them didn’t really want to be doctors; their parents had just pressured them into it as a prestigious, reliable career. Part of me still feels that way. (Exceptions are made for people who want to go rid Africa of ebola or do some such good work. So stop typing that email right now, Fiona!)
Anyway, every once in a while something comes along to counterbalance that bias. I just got off the phone with the father of a 37-year-old woman with a hole in her heart, and the surgeon who just completed a triple-organ-transplant to give her a new heart and new lungs. After years of fainting, oxygen tanks, and life forever on the edge of physical collapse, she’s going to be able to live a normal life. The doc said how odd it is to do one of these heart-lung transplants — once they take out the old organs, there’s just an empty cavity where they used to be. I can’t imagine what that must look like. <Paul Harvey voice> For the rest of the story, </Paul Harvey voice> look in tomorrow’s paper, probably deep inside the metro section.