Len'sLens

What to be thankful for

2009-11-24T18:47:00.005-05:00

Happy Thanksgiving week.

If you were looking for the weekly rant Monday morning, I'm sorry I missed. I've been a little sick. Nothing much, as it turns out, just a cold.

So, what do we have to be thankful for this Thanksgiving?

First of all, health, family, love, belonging, working, not being dependent on others.

The good sense to leave Gannett four years ago and not having to go through the horrible situation those left at that wretched company have to go through. The company's bottom line is getting better, the stock is going up a bit and these yakkers on television say it's because advertising is coming back. Baloney. The bottom line is rising because the company has fired half the staff.

The ones who are left are those who got the company into the horrible shape it was in in the first place.

But I digress. Things to be thankful for.

Personally, it's a wife who puts up with me, kids who have are really good people and those who are married have married really good people and are raising children who are really good people. So what if two of the boys are hellions.

I also have been able to support myself and my family with my labor and still am in no danger of needing anyone else's help. Sure, the savings has diminished, but it's coming back.

I'm thankful that the University of Connecticut football team was able to get itself together to be Notre Dame, one of the great programs in the nation. Yes, the Fighting Irish are not having a great year, but UConn also is suffering after losing one of its stars to a horrible and unnecessary murder. But this was a great win and everyone in Connecticut should be proud.

Things to be thankful for. Share yours, if you wish.

Black Friday

There is something to be said for racial memory, that memory with which we are all imbued depending on one's background.

For example, Jews talking about the Holocaust are sharing a set of thoughts that need not be expressed verbally. It's a base that every Jew, from Orthodox to secular to converted away, still shares.

Christians have that about Christmas. There is a set of values and beliefs that go without saying, that are buried in your consciousness. It's like instinct.

So, never having been a Christian, I don't get it when it comes to Christmas. I've gotten into trouble because of it. Once, when I was in charge of the Monday paper in Westchester, there was a fire. Nobody was hurt, although a few people were left homeless. Nobody died, nobody was injured, so I put a photo on the front page and ran the story and photos big on the local section front. The photos were good, but not prize-winners.

On Monday when I came into work, I was pilloried for not using the story on the front page. How could I? What was the big deal? Nobody was hurt. But, I was informed, the fire destroyed several families' Christmas presents. The children might have to face Christmas with no presents. Why didn't I blow out the front page with the story and start a collection to buy Christmas presents for these children?

I still don't get it. That's me. No racial memory of Christmas. To me, the whole thing about Christmas is a story about a certain guy who was the basis of a worldwide belief system. Giving gifts seems secondary, but that's all you hear about.

I still don't get why every last radio station has to play nothing but Christmas carols on the eve and the day, why every television station has to run sappy movies.

And I don't get Black Friday.

Last year, some poor guy was killed trying to stem the tide of manic people trying to buy Christmas presents. People show up at 4 in the morning, 5 in the morning. Still, in spite of that horrible tragedy. Stores are trying to mitigate the danger, but won't halt the practice.

I guess I'm not the only one.

From now, actually for about a month now, people are running around buying Christmas gifts for people they don't even like. And each person gets multiple gifts.

When I was much, much younger, I had the opportunity to spend Christmas with the family of a girl I knew. I was shocked. I brought one gift. These people, who were not in the best economic circumstance by any means, must have showered each other with a dozen gifts each.

To be completely truthful, friend wife and I once stood on line at midnight at the late and much lamented Comp USA. The line was long but moved quickly. We got a portable hard drive and a couple of thumb drives. It wasn't too bad. But other people were just starting their day, talking about going from place to place starting at 4 in the morning.

Sorry. I just don't get it.

But in any case, have a great Thanksgiving.

Until next time...

The pause that refreshes in so many ways

2009-11-15T17:35:00.003-05:00

Happy Monday.

In the past week, we've (my wife and I, not the royal we) have been fortunate to see all seven of our grandchildren -- and their parents, of course.

That's truly a pause that refreshes.

The little ones, in our case ranging from less than six months to eight years, have such a joy of living, such an optimism, such a positive slant on things -- whatever the problem, mommy and daddy can fix it.

Their problems can all be fixed. Yes, we've been fortunate. Even in our little one, who was undergoing surgery at the age of one week, is gaining by leaps and bounds, his chipmunk cheeks and round tummy showing the effects of parental love, good food and the best in medical care.

I know we've been fortunate, after seeing what happens to neglected, unwanted children or those born with medical conditions that are beyond the scope of science and medicine.

So, with all the complaining I do, both in writing here and verbally to friends and family, I really do know how blessed I am in so many ways.

They say the children will lead them. Let's say the children inspire us to make sure we act in a way that will keep them headed on the path to much health, happiness and success.

Number, please

That doesn't mean I'm going to stop bitching. Heaven forbid.

Ask me what I was doing for hours today. Let me tell you.

I was programming the phone books on two phone systems, one home and the other cells. Why? Because we now have to dial an area code for all phone calls, even to people who live next door. So, one has to sit here and put 203 in front of all my presets.

Connecticut is getting two more area codes, I guess they are needed because of the proliferation of cell phones and other devices.

Google is getting into the act with the Droid, a version of the iPhone that works on Verizon. AT&T has the iPhone sewn up, at least for now. Once that gets going, along with other phone systems, including the one that has pigs eating pork in its ads, the numbers will sell out like tickets to UConn women's basketball.

I'm sorry the iPhone isn't available on Verizon. I'd buy it in a heartbeat. The people who have it are having way too much fun.

But, I've heard horror stories of AT&T's lack of coverage. A woman who works at Yale in downtown New Haven says since she switched from Verizon to AT&T, she can't make or receive calls. A person with whom I used to work was shocked one day a few years ago when she called her husband in Bethel, a town in Connecticut near Danbury, to open the garage so she wouldn't have to go out in the snow. You guessed it: No service.

Well, I'm going to wait a while before even looking at the Droid. I want something that will work internationally, and something that will work well. Even the IPhone had problems (I'm not sure if you can change your own battery even now), so let someone else beta-test it.

I'll stick to my years-old Samsung that I got for nothing or next to nothing. It makes calls, received them and in a pinch, I can text with it. And it never, or almost never, loses calls.

How dumb is this?

The Hampshire Gazette is the daily paper in the Amherst, Mass., area, named after the county, not the college.

It contained a story that is hard to believe, but I am assured is true.

The good people of Amherst, Mass., in Representative Town Meeting assembled, have issued an invitation for two residents of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to live among them. No, not the Cubans, the guests of the government. In other words, suspected terrorists.

They say that those who move to Amherst should not be convicted of terroristic acts against the United States of America. One of those is a former Russian soldier who said he didn't get a fair shake in the Russian Army because he was a Muslim. He could not get Halal food (that's the Muslim version of kosher -- no pork), and was not allowed to pray.

So, how did he come to the attention of the U.S. at Gitmo? According to him, he ran away to Afghanistan. The Russians were on his tail, so he made up a story that he had been in training in an al-Qaida camp so the Americans would arrest him, not the Russians.

So, off to Gitmo he went. But there, instead of being patted on the back, he got locked up.

So on the force of this tale, which has my BS meter working overtime, the good people of Amherst invited him and a buddy to come live among them.

This guy is either dangerous, or a complete idiot. So are the naive people of Amherst who don't seem to think things through.

I'm told that the invitation will only take force if the State Department goes along with the gag. That make me confident beyond measure.

God bless fools and do-gooders.

Until next time...

Things ain't what they used to be

2009-11-08T18:36:00.004-05:00

Happy Monday

OK, here's the old codger ranting again about how things are not what they used to be.

Well, yeah. This week, things seemed to be not so good- all along the spectrum. There was nothing earth-shaking like my computer blowing up or other catastrophe.

It was the little things, like commercials. There were these two pigs eating a ham steak. That's so wrong for so many reasons, none of which had to do with my not eating meat in general and pig meat in particular. For the life of me, I can't remember what the spot was trying to sell, but that image was just so bad, so wrong.

Last week, we went into a store, one that is heavily advertised as a place that one remembers from childhood. Children, believe me when I say there was a time when department stores actually had people who helped you find what you wanted and knew their products.

I shave with an electric shaver. I don't really like it, but Jewish law says you can't use a blade so I do it. My wife bought this shaver for me and it's probably the best around. It came with a device that charges and cleans the shaver. To do the cleaning, it uses a fluid, an expensive fluid. So, off we go to this store.

Now, you will probably notice I haven't used the name. That's on purpose. I'm not really afraid of libel because I'm telling the truth, which is an absolute defense, but because it's not worse than other stores.

So, I went to this store because I had bought this fluid in this place when the store had another name. That store could trace its roots back to G. Fox & Co., a store that once had a policy that a customer was to be greeted with a minute of entering a department. Really.

So we went to this store last week to seek out the fluid. They didn't have it. They had the shavers, but not the fluid. I asked the children whom the store paid, probably at minimum wage, to be in this department. Now I could say that these kids were dumb, which probably is not the case. I could say they could care less about the customer, but were just interested in this conversation they were having. That would be true.

I asked this pair if they knew who sold the fluid, and of course they didn't. That didn't bother me as much as the attitude. Why are you asking us? Why are you bothering us?

Fortunately, another customer said he had had the same problem and had found the fluid at Wal-Mart, where I refuse to shop, and Bed, Bath and Beyond, where I found it.

Since I'm on this kick, here's a few other things that crawled under my skin this week.

Newspapers. Here's a cute monograph on what happened to newspapers. I don't agree with everything he says, but on most points. And, by the way,

Elections. Last week in New Haven, we had an election for mayor and the Board of Aldermen, which is the city's legislature. About 18 percent of the people voted. That was a joke, as was the ticket. There was no organized opposition to the longtime mayor. It's not that the mayor is doing a bad job. He's not. It's that there was a lot of time and money wasted on the election. There are 30 seats on the board, and there were real contests for two of them.

Bosses. Craig Dubow, the head of Gannett, my former employer, has a 20 percent approval rating among his employees, the few that are left. That probably has a lot to do with his dismal rating.

The fun part of this is that he is only the 21st most reviled boss in the nation, according to Glassdoor.com. The guy who runs LexisNexis has an 8 percent approval rating. As Maurice Chevalier sang in Gigi, "Oh, I'm so glad that I'm not young anymore."

Veterans Day

I hope some of the young, blond and banal are reading this. That's what I call what passes for television news anchors these days.

So, here it is again. This is Veterans Day. It used to be called Armistice Day, that day when The Great War ended. This is not the day we honor just dead veterans. That's in May.

So, please don't get it wrong again. Wednesday is the day when we honor all veterans, even those who are still alive -- especially those who are still alive. If you want to honor just dead vets, you have to wait until spring. Got it? Probably not.

Health care

I can't figure out why doctors, of all people, are against the health-care bill passed this past weekend by the House. The American Medical Association is for the bill, but doctors I know are against it. They also say the AMA doesn't represent them. Strange.

A couple of things. The bill is thousands of pages long, and most of that is gobbledygook that doesn't mean much to many people. It doesn't mean much to me.

There are two points I want to make, and then you all can have a tea party on my lawn if you want.

Point One: The administrative cost of private insurance is about 35 percent. The administrative cost of Medicare is 3 percent. So much for an expensive public option.

Point Two. It's not that uninsured people are getting no medical care. That's not true. They are not getting preventive care, which means when they do get medical care, it's usually drastic and costs lots of money. People who have no medical insurance come into the emergency room for everything from hangnails to heart attacks.

The problem is that those with hangnails are taking up time and space that could be used for real emergencies. You know, that's why it's called the emergency room.

So, instead of them paying say $75 for the hangnail in the doctor's office, we pay $500 in the emergency room. Notice I said we pay, not the patient pays. We, those lucky or old enough to have insurance, pay with higher premiums because insurance companies pay higher rates that include write offs of those charges rung up by those without insurance.

Making insurance possible for people who cannot afford insurance now spreads the cost out a little more. It makes sense. Do you hear that, Senator Lieberman.

Now, don't get me started on that guy.

Until next time...

2009-11-01T11:35:00.002-05:00

Happy Monday. Hey, I don't think anyone will be reading this on Sunday, so why not get the wishes out a day early.

Welcome to Eastern Standard Time. One would think that with an extra hour of sleep, one would be bright eyed and bushy tailed. Not so. Even though we avoided the usual lets-see-how-late-we-could-stay-up-because-there-is-an-extra-hour stupidity, Sunday was a lazy, lazy day.

It's November, the month of Thanksgiving. The family of five turkeys that had spent much of their mornings in our backyard has disappeared. Smart. Even though we wouldn't harm them, for many reasons, some of our neighbors might see them as an escape from having to pay two or three bucks a pound at the supermarket.

Silly season

Usually, the silly season is defined as the few weeks leading up to an election. Not so in New Haven. There is voting on Tuesday, Nov. 3, 2009, but it's not really an election. There are two or three wards, out of 30, in which there is a real contest. The race for mayor is a joke, with three independent, ill-financed, undefined candidates vying for second place against a longtime mayor running a professional, well-financed campaign.

The mayor has spent money sending flyers and four-color printed post cards many times. I guess he has money and many good reasons to spend it, mostly because legally he has to. (By the way, keeping with the usual practice of commenting on issues on which I report for the New Haven Independent, there will be no endorsements for political office.)

The silly season around here has to do with driving, walking, biking and other forms of locomotion.

Last Friday, I was stuck behind a left-turning car at a light on a major city road. The car turned just as the yellow light appeared, so I decided to sit and wait for the next green light. Count five seconds or so, a car goes through the light, now red. Count five or six more seconds, and another car goes through the intersection, followed closely by another. By the way, I shouldn't say car -- two of the three were SUVs.

For reasons passing understanding, once the weather starts to turn and the Thanksgiving - to - New Year's season is upon us, people start driving as if the other cars on the road were apparitions placed there for their amusement.

People act crazy. I'll bet that if you could see into their cars, you would see them, eyes glazed and teeth clenched. I don't get it. This is supposed to be the season for good will toward all people, not get out your will, you'll need it.

Pleasant memory

Friend wife and I took a couple of days off last week and traveled to Old Cape Cod. We have loved the cape since before we were married, nearly 38 years ago, but mostly go to the Outer Cape -- Eastham and north.

This time, we went to Falmouth, a picturesque town on the upper cape, which means the southern part of the cape.

There is a beautiful, 10-plus mile bike trail called the Shining Sea Trail that goes from Woods Hole, a one-industry (marine research) village to North Falmouth. It's flat, paved, off-road and a joy to ride. Last Monday was a perfect day for bike riding -- cool, a bit of a breeze, clear but not severe clear.

We chatted with a few fellow riders, some of whom were our age or older. There seemed to be a more relaxed atmosphere than on the Cape Cod Rail Trail, the 26-mile plus trail that leads from Dennis into Wellfleet. I don't know if it's the season, the place or just dumb luck, but we had a ball riding and chatting.

Falmouth is a more concentrated place than say, Eastham, which really doesn't have a downtown. It's an easy-walking town, although the tourist-agency maps tell you to stay off the main streets if you are biking. Good idea.

While we were walking along, past a large and well-maintained school and library complex, we came upon a lake. It was an hour before sunset, the light was perfect, and we stopped to take some photos of the lake. We saw this duck couple, one male and one female, having dinner.

They didn't seem to mind that we were taping their dinner feeding, so enjoy.

I think it mirrors people -- it doesn't matter how many times you have to go in circles, the objects is to get that morsel for which you are vying. Take that any way you wish.

Have a great week. And even if it is a ridiculously uncontested election, get out and vote. It'll keep you in the habit for when it does count.

Until next time...

C'mon, Connecticut Magazine. Get real

2009-10-23T15:40:00.003-04:00

Happy Friday.

I know it's a lot to ask for, but wouldn't it be great if the Filthy Swine, otherwise known as the New York Yankees, were to repeat the Chokes on Us, the worst choke in the history of sport, this year and lose to the L.A. Angels in the American League payoffs.

I saw the look on some of the Yankees who were on that fateful team, that "no, not again" look, as the Angels clawed back after the Yanks clawed back, and then went on to win, sending the Yanks back home to the new stadium and the virgin lawn. That's the lawn that other teams had not danced on. The Red Sox, in 2004, had danced on the old stadium lawn.

Maybe now, it's the Angels' turn. Wouldn't it be nice...

Page 2

I know it's hogwash, but the Connecticut Magazine ranking of the state's cities has gotten my goat.

The magazine, in its November issue, ranked many of the state's cities and towns on the following categories: education, economy, cost of living, crime, leisure/culture.

I think New Haven got a bum rap. Here's why.

OK, New Haven, like all cities, has crime. Some of it is fun to report, like the guy who robbed a downtown bank, got covered in red dye when the pack went off (notice, please, that I didn't say he got caught red-handed) and got caught while waiting to pay for a soda.

Most crime, however, is hurtful to the victims and the general community. But reading the statistics doesn't give you the whole picture. I think the city deserves more than a next-to-last rating for the work the chief and his officers are doing trying to contain it.

For education, the magazine used mastery tests and other scores, you know, like No Child Left Behind did. Wrong. How about the moves the city is making to bolster its education. All my kids went to New Haven schools during most of their elementary and secondary school careers. Two of them went to Russia on exchange programs, another went to Eastern Europe on a program. All went to college and two earned masters degrees. Not so bad. Don't blame the education system for the lack of parent involvement. Having Yale here doesn't hurt. Many high school kids take courses at Yale and Southern Connecticut. Not so shabby.

Cost of living, no problem. Leisure drew a first-place award, as it should. New Haven has as many cultural opportunities as any city its size -- and many a lot bigger -- in the nation.

The one that really gets my goat is Economy. The survey gave New Haven 14 out of 17, with the highest number being the worst. This is really stupid. What's the criteria? A score issued by the state that rates population, per-capita income, equalized grand list per capita, unemployment rate, mill rate and per-capita aid for children.

New Haven has a lot of nontaxable buildings, the highest in the state, between Yale, Southern Connecticut, other colleges, hospitals, and the like. It said adjusted equalized grand list that might take some of that into account. It should say so.

But, Charlie and friends at Connecticut Magazine, get out of Trumbull and take a drive to New Haven. You could have stopped by coming back from that eating junket you all took to the casinos.

The place is a forest of cranes. The new cancer center, the Gateway college project, the 360 State Street project, the buildings along Route 34 corridor including all the research buildings, the new research building that will start construction as soon as the state gets off its butt and turns over the Lee Connector to the city. Come on. Is there a place in the state as busy? I don't think so.

So, Charley, I think you know better. So, like the Dodger fan of yore, I'll wait until next year.

Page 3

Our friends at Gannett, my former employer, saw profits tumble 53 percent, but results still beat raised expectations, helped by cost cuts. The company's operating expenses fell 14 percent in the third quarter, according to a published version of the company's release.

Well, it didn't hurt that, at the Journal News, which forced all staffers to reapply for their old jobs, 22 said the hell with it and refused to reapply. In this economy, that is saying something.

So, if you think you have it bad, think of having it so bad you would walk away from your job. Or, as someone told me years ago, consider starvation as a viable alternative to working there.

That guy was wrong when he said it in 1991, but he'd sure be right now.

Page 4

It's Friday. It's supposed to be weepy, but who cares. It's the weekend. Gave a great one and, for our friends in the Tribe, have a great Shabbos.

Until next time...

The U.N. proves its uselessness

2009-10-16T16:45:00.003-04:00

Happy Friday.

My father, may he rest in peace, used to say Americans were at a great disadvantage on the world stage because we thought as Americans. We had our own way of thinking and felt that everyone else in the world thinks as we do or, if they don't, they should. Just ask George W. Bush.

I guess this is spread to South Africa, where a well-meaning but naive judge named Richard Goldstone, hired by the United Nations Human Rights Council to look at last year's fighting in Gaza, where Israel stepped in to stop the scores and hundreds of rockets that had been hurled at Israeli cities and towns from Gaza.

The council, which American Jewish Committee chief David Harris rightfully called the U.N. Human Wrongs Council, voted to condemn Israel and the Palestinian Authority is trying to get the Security Council to condemn Israel yet again.

Or did they. Let's see..they've flip flopped so often on this that one doesn't know what their policy is today. Yesterday, it was to get Israel condemned, along with Hamas, which has beaten the PA in elections and has taken over Gaza by force after Israel unilaterally left that sad territory in 2005.

Their are some truths here. The first one is that out of the nearly 200 countries in the U.N., including East Hatrack, West Oblivion, South Nowhere and others with populations the size of Utah and economies the size of a teen's weekly allowance, only one nation is ineligible for membership in the Security Council's governing body. Guess which one.

The second truth is that Israel's Gaza plan worked. Only a few, very few, rockets have been thrown at Israel since the fighting ended. It's like the separation barrier: Say what you want, but it worked.

Goldstone and the bleeding hearts led by Jimmy Carter and others in the Arabs' pockets have condemned the casualty rate and how not enough Israelis were killed. It wasn't fair. The Israelis were much better armed, better led and, it must be said, didn't present themselves as targets as much as they did in fighting , so fewer Jews died.

Tough.

If you go after the big dog, expect to get your ass bitten off. If you keep attacking Israel, which is still the best led, best equipped, best armed force in the region, then you have to take your lumps. The Arabs know this. They understand force. Sorry if this seems to be racist, or militarist or any other kind of ist you can think of. It's not politically correct, but it's true and the Israelis know it. Bibi Netanyahu knows it; Arik Sharon knew it.

It's not political but true. And the Israelis got sick and tired of picking rockets out of schools and hospitals so they went in with the message the Arabs understood loud and clear.

My father knew, and now you know.

End of the week.

I have to go...need to pick up something for friend wife and Shabbos is coming fast. Have a great weekend. Mazel Tov to Rhoda Zahler and her fiance, who will be called to the Torah Shabbos at BEKI. New York Yankees should lose if they get to play at all because of the weather, and for those in the Tribe, have a great Shabbos.

Until next time...

This time, they danced on our lawn

2009-10-12T17:39:00.003-04:00

I'd like to say happy Monday, but I can't.

There's no joy in Beantown. The mighty Red Sox have struck out.

OK, so that's not entirely correct, but they did lose three games to the Angels of Los Angeles, and they lost the last one at home, at the Fens. They danced on our lawn.

That comes from the wonderful 2005 film, "Reverse the Curse of the Bambino," in which long-suffering Sox fans celebrated the first World Series win in 86 years. "We danced on their lawn," participants said of the Sox dancing at Yankee Stadium after beating the Yanks after the New York Filthy Swine committed the worst choke in the history of professional sport.

Now, it's the turn of the Halos to dance on the Fenway Park lawn. They deserved it. They shut down one of the most potent offenses in baseball and beat a top pitching staff. Jonathan Papelbon, long celebrated as the best closer in baseball, faltered not once, not twice, but three times to let the Halos beat the Sox after being behind by a few runs.

It was no The Chokes on Us, but it was bad enough.

Enough said. As Sox fans have said many a time, just wait until next year.

Thanks, Rev

I heard from the Rev a few days ago. As those who follow this posting know, the Rev. is the exquisite editor and fine human being Jeff Canning, late of the Journal-News desk. He was smart enough to get out of that sad place while the getting was good.he

The Rev also is a careful, talented historian and one of the real experts about the history of the Lower Hudson Valley, most notably The Tarrytowns, now Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow.

He also took a guest shot at teaching journalism at this alma mater, Manhattan College, and for reasons beyond understanding, he recommended this blog as one to read. Thanks, Rev., although I'm not sure this one is updated often enough to capture attention.

And, though nobody asked me, if one of you admin types at Manhattan College is reading this, you could do a whole lot worse than have the Rev on your faculty teaching journalism.

It's over

I don't know whether to be happy, sad or just relieved, but the Jewish High Holy Season has finally come to an end. We just took down the sukkah today and put it away for another year.

Choke on it, Bloomberg

I paid my traffic ticket to New York City today. I hope they choke on it. I was going to appeal my conviction, all done via email, but lawyers whom I trust say I won't win. Although I have a moral case, I don't have a legal one.

In July, a few days after my grandson was born and during the time he was hospitalized for surgery, I double-parked in front of my daughter and son-in-law's apartment house for no more than five minutes. Now, in New York City, or at least in the Washington Heights neighborhood, they clean the streets twice a week. So, everyone goes out and moves the cars twice a week. How do they do it? They double park for an hour and a half.

Twice a week, every week except during those times when there is no street cleaning, they double park for 90 minutes. I double parked for five minutes. They don't get tickets. I got one.

How was I different? I have Connecticut plates on my car. So, I got hit. And after writing an appeal to fairness and, of course, losing, I paid up.

As I said, from Mayor Bloomberg down to the guy who gave me the ticket, I hope you choke on it. And, of course, I hope the Yankees lose. Badly. I don't even care if it's the Dodgers who beat them. I can forgive the Dodgers for leaving Brooklyn faster than I can forgive the Yankees for being in the same town that would give a guy a ticket for double-parking to bring some food and other needed supplies to a family that just had a sick baby.

Yes, I told them all that. The answer from an automaton of a judge: It's not a legal defense. So, Mike Bloomberg, choke on it.

Until next time...

If you don't have a good idea, steal someone's bad one

2009-10-05T17:59:00.003-04:00

Happy Monday.

The headline has to do with the next item, not this one.

The Jewish holidays go on and on. Now that Yom Kippur is over, there is another week of holiday season with the holidays of Succos, Sh'mini Azeres and Simchas Torah.

The little huts, or some not so little, that sprung up near Jewish homes mark the holiday of Succos, when Jews eat meals in these succahs. The idea is to show how fragile our lives are and how we can live along with that. Some people sleep in the succahs, and most eat at least some meals in them.

In the first two days, observant Jews must at least say some prayers in the huts, which are not anywhere near waterproof. So, it was see how fast you can get through the ceremonies as the rain came down in buckets. But Sunday was glorious.

On Saturday night, Jews celebrate Simchas Torah, which is rejoicing in the Torah. Most Orthodox congregations read the Torah, the five books of Moses, in one year. Some Conservative and Reform congregations take three years. Anyway, the end of the Torah is read and immediately, the first verses are read, leading to the full circle of the yearly tradition.

Maybe that's where the Lion King writers got the circle of life. It's nice to think so.

The celebration is cool, with people dancing around and, of course, a little liquid refreshment is served to lubricate the revelers.

And after that, that's it until December.

This is what the headline is all about

You will remember the Journal-Register bankruptcy. If you live in New Haven or in other cities served by Journal-Register newspapers, you will remember it.

One of the nastiest parts of the whole thing was the successful attempt to pay some executives bonuses for firing a bunch of people and closing some newspapers. The bonuses added up to about a million and a half dollars. In Connecticut and Pennsylvania, the attorneys general tried to get the firing bonuses cut out of the final deal, but to no avail.

So it was interesting to read to today that Tribune Co. executives are in line for the same type of payments, even though hundreds of employees had been fired and newspapers closed or sold. This is taking place in the Delaware courts and it looks as if the judge will go along with this idea, just as the judge had in New York with JRC.

It always has been a function of bonuses to reward past performance, as well as to get those who didn't get bonuses to work a little harder in order to qualify for the reward. I have nothing against bonuses. I certainly took those awarded to me and felt they were well-earned.

But when hundreds if not thousands in Tribune, JRC and other newspaper companies are losing their jobs more due to management errors and omissions than anything the news people have done, perhaps it's not such a good idea. It's unseemly.

But I'm confident that the judge will allow this miscarriage and others will follow suit.

It's blood money. It's wrong. But that won't stop Sam Zell's people at Tribune and others from following JRC's bad example. After all, it's a long tradition to tip the executioner.

I've got a baseball question

I've wondered about something in baseball. If Mike reads this, or if Mat does, maybe one of them or another baseball expert can enlighten me.

This is my quandary. A batter steps up to the plate. The pitcher has trouble finding the plate. He throws ball after ball. In fact, one can say he couldn't find the plate with a map or a GPS unit. It would seem to me that the thing for the batter to do is put the bat on his shoulder and leave it there. Four pitches and you are awarded a walk.

But no!! The batter watches one of two balls go wide or high or hit the dirt a foot in front of the plate.

And then he goes hacking. He swings at pitch after pitch. He can't hit the ball. The bat isn't that long. But he stands there hacking and like as not, strikes out.

Why? Why does he do that? Does he think that something will snap in the pitcher's head and suddenly all pitches are right down Main Street? Right in the batter's preferred space instead of being so far off that the man in the on-deck circle is more likely to hit the ball than the batter.

Maybe someone can tell me. And then go tell Boston Red Sox Manager Terry Francona. Tell Tito to tell the batter to watch as the ball goes so far from the plate he may need a telescope to see it.

Mark, I think you've got it.

Congratulations to Mark Shiffrin. He and Avi Silberschatz had an op-ed letter published in the New York Times that says, in essence, that it is useless to try to get people to stop texting or talking on cell phones while behind the wheels and instead build cars that make the practice impossible.

Mark is a smart lawyer, the former state commissioner of Consumer Protection and a died-in-the-wool Republican. Still, I think he's hit on the only way to protect idiots from themselves.

Gee, why didn't Dick Roy think of that instead of trying for years to get this prohibition through the Connecticut General Assembly? Roy, a Milford Democrat and former newspaper editor, tilted against this windmill and ended up with the most disobeyed law on the books, perhaps even more broken than adultery or stealing grocery carts.

When walking, I try to count the cars that go by with the driver NOT talking on the cell phone. It's easier than the other way around because there a far fewer not talking than talking. Also, those who are wandering across busy streets far away from crosswalks also have a cell phone screwed into their ears. Are they lonely without somebody jabbering in their ears? Or are they listening to music because heaven forbid they be without entertainment for a few minutes.

What do I do? I've got this very uncomfortable Bluetooth device that screws into my ear, or at least seems to. But I use it because with the lack of skill and smarts evidenced by drivers in New Haven, it is advisable, nay necessary, to keep both eyes on the road.

Anyway, congratulations, Mark. I think you've hit it. The only way to keep people from doing stupid things is to keep them from doing stupid things.

And here come the Libertarians.

Until next time...

Blood money

2009-09-30T18:30:00.002-04:00

Good Wednesday. I hope all who celebrated had a meaningful Yom Kippur and an easy fast. It's a 25-hour fast, really more than that because you have to say the evening service, then wait for the food to be prepared.

It's physically and spiritually cleansing, however.

At the same time, my wife and I have been to funerals on succeeding Tuesdays. It's something we hope doesn't continue.

And now on to the subject of the day, corporations, media corporations, which make money by slaughtering (financially, that is) people who have given heart and soul to the place.

No, I'm not talking about the Journal-Register, which seems to have kept the word of its interim chairman not to lay off any more people in New Haven, at least.

This time, it's my former employer, the Gannett Corp.

An item on the WSJ wire:

"Gannett Co., publisher of USA Today, said it expects to report third-quarter profit that far exceeds forecasts on Wall Street, adding to hopes that the worst of the downturn may be over for traditional media outlets such as publishers and broadcasters.

"Gannett also announced plans to sell $400 million in five- and eight-year notes as it joins the raft of companies raising fresh capital to pay off other debt.

Following the announcement, shares of Gannett rose about 17% to $11.69 in Tuesday morning trading on the New York Stock Exchange, extending a strong summer rally in the stock."

Well, whoopdy doo. It doesn't say how Gannett is going to accomplish this. It's selling bonds to pay off previous bondholders so it doesn't have to declare bankruptcy in 2011, as rumored.

Gannett is the nation's largest newspaper chain and publisher of The Journal News, a shadow of its former self, in Westchester.

A friend inside the paper, who is still employed, says that the latest bloodletting in August carried away some of the most talented people, especially photographers and photo editors. I won't mention the name of this friend because I want the friend to continue to be employed.

I couldn't believe who was let go. Three photographers who had won just about every photo award short of the Pulitzer Prize were let go. One had passed on the early retirement package that I took because that person needed the medical benefit and the income to take care of a sick relative. There is no mercy in Gannettland.

Two talented photographers who had been there for at least 20 years and two photo editors, including one who had been there for at least a dozen years.

The business editor and the financial editor, both gone. A great New York Giants beat writer, gone. A copy editor who had moved up from the South to learn Yankee ways, gone. The Yankees beat writer hit the road to Boston.

The place is a mess. But there are still managing editors, deputy managing editors, all kinds of middle managers. Glad to see the back of it. I wish those who are left much patience.

It slices; it dices

Are you as sick of stacked ads on television as I am? Sue and I counted 11 stacked ads between program segments on either USA or TNT or both.

One that gets my goat is the "free credit report." What a rip. Yes, if you sign up for the credit watch program, you can get a credit report. But you need to sign up for the service before you get the credit report, so how is it free?

In addition, on some of those that you get as a "service" through your credit card, you may get a report, but with some of them, if you want your credit score, you need to fork over $12.

And to top it all off, there are three credit-rating agencies from which you should get reports. You want the other two? Fork over another $30 or so.

So, you pirate guy, shut up.

And speaking of shut up, how about the WCBS sportscaster who is always talking about refinancing his house through this mortgage banker and not dealing with "my bank."

Well, Gary Stanley, if your bank is so horrible, why is it still your bank? Change banks and shut up. Please.

Bye, bye Bambi

In the lede of this posting, I talked about attending funerals on two succeeding Tuesdays.

This last one was for Bambi Bixon. Bambi's given name was Beatrice, but nobody called her that.

Bambi was one of the stalwart group that meets once a week to study the Hebrew Bible, hoping to get to all 24 books of it . Bambi was one of that group.

She was born in Brooklyn, married, had one son.

Bambi was a woman of sublime intellect, razor-sharp inquisitiveness, wonderful sense of humor and asked and gave no quarter. She had a difficult life, but found sublime satisfaction with her relationship with friends in Iceland. She went there every summer.

She loved things Norse, and I hope when she gets to heaven, as she surely will, it appears to her as the Hall of the Valkyrie.

She was a tough lady, a feminist to the end, and we will all miss her. She would rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints, and if there is any justice, she will get to laugh with the saints, because she certainly belongs there.

Her funeral was a traditional Jewish affair that she helped plan as her final illness progressed as she knew it would. But in my heart of hearts, I would have loved to see her on a Viking ship, sailing slowly into the sunset as the flaming arrows set it afire.

Fare well, Bambi.

Until next time...

Happy Tuesday and here we go again

2009-09-22T14:31:00.003-04:00

Hello. Thanks for looking in.

As I said last week, it's been a long time, about a month, since there was something written in this space. A lot has happened, and some of that has to do with why it's been a long time since something had been written in this space.

So, let's get right to it.

First of all, thanks to all of you who have checked back from time to time, even though the same old, same old was here.

In fact, since this blog began in December, 2006, there have been more than 10,000 hits on it. Now, some places get that many hits in a minute or less, but this is one guy's blog with nothing to sell or no ax to grind. So, not bad.

Thank you all.

Speaking of that, I just got an e-mail asking me if, for money, I wanted to review others' blogs and products. No, thanks. It's not that I'm too precious, it's just that I want to be able to say what I want to say, when I want to say it.

The only criteria to which I want to adhere is that it's really my opinion, it's hadn't been bought and paid for, and (hopefully) the logic makes some kind of sense. That's the goal.

So, let's start out with the second 10,000. By the way, the counter doesn't count me. I have a way of making that happen. Isn't software wonderful...when it works?

So where ya been?

Many of you know I free-lance for the New Haven Independent, a Web-only news site that covers New Haven. I had a few stories to cover. More about that later. My daughter also had a boy. I talked about Aaron and his b'ris in a previous posting.

Well, when that was written, it looked as if he was headed to a full recovery. No so, at least not

then. He was taken back to the hospital, and, of course, we had to be there to help. He seems to be on the right path now, thank God.

Add a bit of personal illness, some other concerns, a bit of plain laziness and that's where the time went.

The Annie Le caper

As I said, I work for the New Haven Independent on a part-time basis. Those guys did a great, wonderful, marvelous job of covering the Annie Le tragedy, breaking lots of stories and angles but not giving out the name of the suspect until he was arrested.

Some news organizations could only say they were the first to give out the suspect's name when he was little more than a twinkle in the cops' eyes. Others messed up the coverage altogether. And then there are the cable channels, the headline channels, with their "experts," shrinks who knew little about the case but said the motive for the slaying of the Yale graduate student, must be unrequited love, class jealousy and a dozen other things on the part of the young man who has been charged in her slaying.

By the way, the crime has been called murder. It's not until a jury says it is. It's a homicide. The prosecution says it was murder, but haven't said which kind, whether murder, capital felony, or felony murder. It couldn't be arson murder.

If the defense can convince the jury that there was extreme emotional disturbance, then the verdict could be manslaughter. Unlike Law & Order, in Connecticut, extreme indifference to human life is manslaughter in the first degree, not Jack McKoy's ubiquitous murder in the second degree. So, for now, it's a homicide. You want to know more? Look it up.

By the way, I had little to do with the coverage. It wasn't planned that way...it just worked out that way. My old boss at the Journal-Courier of New Haven, Bob Granger, used to say that even the biggest story is still only one story out of many. I covered some of the rest. Some were pretty exciting, others routine.

Therefore, I feel I can comment about the coverage without patting myself on the back. Just so you know.

Marcia Chambers, who runs the Branford Eagle, which is part of the Independent family, broke the story about the suspect's former girlfriend telling the cops he made her have sex.

The story was well-documented and sourced. But the next day, it became "Yale hell-raiser's sex shocker" in the New York Post, complete with photo of the suspect dressed as the devil taking up Page One of the tabloid.

The latest is that paper's story saying that the victim's bones were crushed to get her into the utility space where her body was found. No basis in fact, the cops said.

The definition of a newspaper story I've always used is: The best possible version of the truth.

Getting it on the street first is good; getting it right first is better, getting it first and right is best.

That's what the Independent folks did. First and right. I'm as proud to be associated with these folks as any I've dealt with in my long practice of the craft of journalism.

That's saying something.

Apologies to New Jersey, New York and Maryland

Often in the past, l have excoriated drivers from New Jersey, New York and Maryland for being selfish, unskilled, witless -- you get the idea. I feel I have to apologize.

They have nothing on New Haven drivers. I'm not sure if they always have been this way and I hadn't noticed, or if some spore from the planet Stupidity has come to Earth and infected drivers around New Haven.

The light turns red. Traffic stops, but only after four cars have flown through the intersection. The light turns green. You had better count to five slowly before proceeding. Cell phones...sorry, Dick Roy, but yours is the least obeyed law in the state, including that against adultery. Dick Roy, by the way, is a Milford state legislator and former newspaperman who campaigned for years to get the cell phone ban enacted.

Stand at any corner. If the number of drivers not talking on cell phones exceeds the number gabbing while driving, you are witnessing a rare event. Phone in one hand, sandwich in the other. Wheel being grasped by two fingers, or perhaps one. Or that one is reserved for other drivers.

State law says pedestrians have the right of way at crosswalks. Ha!

Just stop for a pedestrian at a crosswalk. You're lucky if all you get is a klaxon blast from the car in back of you. And, of course, the dolt trying to cross the street takes his or her sweet time talking -- you guessed it -- on a cell phone.

Drive along Whalley Avenue east of Westville Village. Crossing of the street is done everywhere EXCEPT at the crosswalk. Walk a few feet along the sidewalk to the corner, dear pedestrian, and YOU have the right of way. Cross in the middle of the block, and you don't. Laziness or stupidity. Or both.

Speaking of stupid

We have been entertained in the past few weeks by a flock of wild turkeys in our yard.

Five turkeys live nearby and spend a couple mornings a week in our garden.

Today was especially entertaining. Two of the turkeys -- I think they are all hens -- got into our garden and couldn't figure a way to get out. They strutted down one length of fence, maybe 10 feet, and when they hit the corner, they reversed course, oblivious to the opening in the fence perhaps five steps away.

I thought I'd have some fun, so I got my wife's duck call (used in office pranks, not hunting) and sounded off. Now they really got nervous and they bumped into each other, walked along the fence opposite to the opening. My wife finally want out onto the deck and pointed to the opening.

No sale. But two others came along and must have said something like, "Hey, did you forget you could fly?" One flew over the chicken wire fence, which is all of three feet high. The other paced for another minute, then flew off.

The flock was last seen heading for another yard.

I guess they come to our yard because the word is out we don't cook or eat meat at home (or anywhere else if we have a choice) and they know we're not eyeing them for Thanksgiving.

Or maybe they just don't want to take a chance cross the street. After all, this is New Haven.

Until next time, soon...

Guest blog; I'll be back soon

2009-09-17T16:32:00.002-04:00

This guest column is by Susan R.A. Honeyman

I'm saddened by the death of Mary Travers. We saw her group earlier this year in Waterbury -- one of her last performances was a benefit for public radio. She was hooked up to an oxygen tank and so weak the she would often gesture for the audience to sing her part while she rested. Her singing no longer mattered, though. Instead her voice was the honesty and conviction in how she lived her life. The audience was so appreciative of the courage of this valiant woman. Instead of concert, we were just 2,000 friends singing together for a better world.
When the gracious depart, the world is diminished.

This is the Lens back again.

It's been a month since this blog appeared, and yet some of you have come back from time to time to see if that guy has anything worthwhile to say.

Thank you. Keep it up.

There were a number of things that demanded my time. I'm not to kind who can dash off a column in 15 minutes and have it make sense. So, if you can't say anything well, don't say anything.

One hopes that some of these demands on my time will end soon. Then again, i hope that other demands on my time never end.

I'll explain further when I come back -- soon. I promise.

In the meantime, to those in the Tribe, a wonderful new year, 5770. May you be inscribed and sealed for a good, happy, healthy and satisfying year.

And by the way, if you have been following the Annie Le case in any other place except the New Haven Independent, you are missing out. Find it here.

Until next time...

This one is hard to Digest

2009-08-18T16:31:00.003-04:00

There are a lot of magazines in the nation, some big, some small.

The biggest used to be the Readers' Digest. No more. Now, it's about to meet all its old friends in Bankruptcy Court.

For someone of my generation, that's hard to fathom.

Let me be perfectly clear here. I never liked it.

The Digest always had a right-wing approach, and the articles often were shadows. Writers were not able to develop plots or themes with the precis they were required to submit. But the Digest always paid well, either for the silly Humor in Uniform slices or Americana, many of which I suspect were fabrications wrapped around nuggets of truth.

But the articles were about the right length for bathroom reading. Don't get me wrong: I never subscribed, but my parents and in-laws did. But the Digest always was highest in circulation of any magazine with the possible exception of TV Guide.

The Digest also had Condensed Books, in which rewrite people turned novels into Pablum for those without the attention span to read the real things. There also were record collections, some of which also were condensed.

The Digest was printed in many languages, with the same condensed version of life.

I think the bankruptcy will be prepackaged, like the one from which the Journal Register just emerged.

Let's see -- The Readers' Digest Condensed Bankruptcy. It fits, doesn't it?

Page 2

Robert Novak died Tuesday of brain cancer. He was 78.

Like the Reader's Digest, I never liked him, either.

His politics was just a bit to the right of Attila the Hun and he wasn't a nice man.

How do I know? Let me tell you a story.

Back in 1970, I was a neophyte in the news business, first a reporter then managing editor of the Wethersfield Post weekly newspaper in Connecticut. I had been working in news about a year when I was invited to a luncheon in Hartford.

Thomas J. Dodd, the sitting Democratic U.S. Senator from Connecticut, was up for re-election and he was in trouble. He had been accused of using campaign funds for his own purposes and censured by the Senate. The accusations, by columnists Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson, had all but ruined his chances for re-election, but he decided to fight on.

The luncheon to which I had been invited was a last-gasp effort by Dodd, father of current U.S. Senator Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, to retain his seat.

I was seated at a table near the back and found myself sitting next to Bob Novak, part of the famous columnist team of Rowland Evans and Robert Novak. He dutifully ignored me and everyone else at the table.

After the meal, Dodd rose to speak, tearfully all but begging for his seat. It was painful to see. But even more painful was the reaction of Novak. He stood, made rude noises, catcalls, everything but the Bronx cheer. It was disgusting.

I said something like, "Look, Mr. Novak, you are this famous columnist and I am working for a weekly paper in Connecticut, but don't you thing that after eating his food, you owe Dodd the courtesy to listen to what he has to say?"

He told me to shut up and mind my own business, or words to that effect. I was mortified.

That was the only time I met Novak in person, but as far as I was concerned, he was a rude person who didn't deserve the success he enjoyed.

And now he's dead. And so is Tom Dodd, who died the next year. And his son is having ethics problems tied to a mortgage he got for one of his homes.

And the world goes round and round.

Page 3

I am concerned with the thinking process, of lack thereof, of some of my fellow citizens.

I was listening to public radio, when the host was airing some comments from listeners about the health-care debate.

One would think that listeners to public radio are a bit more intelligent and informed than watchers of Fox News and listeners to the radio crazies like Rush Limbaugh. But based on today's performance, you might not be correct.

For example, one fellow from Tennessee was saying that he was dead set against any government role in the reformed health-care package. Dead set against.

He did say, however, that he was for making the insurance companies cover people with pre-existing conditions and making them cover people who now have no insurance coverage. He also did say he wants the premiums to be set low enough so poor people can afford them.

But no government interference. How can capitalism function if we keep fooling around with it?

I have a question. Who is it that is going to assure that the insurance companies cover the people they don't cover now, for less money than they charge now? Who if not the government?

Others say they don't want government bureaucrats deciding who gets coverage? Who, then? Would you rather have insurance company functionaries whose marching orders include saving the company money in any way possible? That's what he have now, which is why you have stupidity like no pre-existing conditions and sick people kept out of the system.

And, please, let's leave the Death Squad silliness to people like Sarah Palin, whose rhetoric shows what happens to the brain if one uses too much hairspray for too long of a time.

I have modified Medicare. I love it. Bring on government single-payer system.

Page 4

Thanks be to God and some great doctors, we had a bris for my grandson on Sunday, Aug. 16. And I can now introduce you to him by name: Aaron. He's named after my grandfather, Aaron Honeyman, who used the name Harry in his working life but was called Aaron.

The affair went perfectly. For those who are unfamiliar with Jewish practice, a bris, or more correctly Bris Milah, is a ceremony in which he is circumcised and he is officially welcomed into the Jewish people. In Genesis, God tells Abraham to circumcise himself and his sons as a perpetual mark of the covenant between God and the Jewish people. The bris is a continuation of that covenant. If you don't know what circumcision is, look it up.

It's an occasion of great joy, except perhaps for the guest of honor, who cries for a few minutes and then is just fine.

Aaron was born on the Sabbath, which ordinarily would have meant his bris would have been on the following Sabbath. Although the bris includes actions usually forbidden on the Sabbath, it is considered so important that for this one ceremony, these actions are not only allowed by mandated.

But Aaron's first few days of life were not ordinary. He was diagnosed with a condition that required surgery. You cannot give a Bris Milah to a sick child.

Aaron recovered, however, and last week, the doctors and the mohel, the person who performs the bris, all said he was healthy enough. So, with great joy, I can now report that Aaron, son of daughter Malka and son-in-law Josh, is officially welcomed as a member of the Covenant of Abraham. Mazel Tov!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

For a video of the ceremony.

Until next time...

Dark, dark days for former colleagues

2009-08-13T14:42:00.002-04:00

Happy Thursday.

There was some vexing news in the New York Times this morning.

The Journal News, the Gannett paper from which I retired a few years ago, is slicing, no make that gutting its newsroom.

According to the story, everybody in the newsroom and advertising departments is out of a job. They will have to apply for their jobs, many of which have been reconfigured so their own mothers wouldn't recognize them.

When all is said and done, there will be 50 fewer newsroom jobs and 20 fewer advertising jobs. Last week, 57 jobs in information technology, production and finance. That makes a lot of sense in an outfit that is heavy on information technology and the Web.

This from a newspaper that has already sent advertising layout jobs off to India.

Those who follow this blog will remember that in July, Gannett cut some 1,400 jobs across the 80-plus daily newspapers it still owns, with USA Today not sharing the hit At the time, it said The Journal News, which circulates in Westchester, Rockland and Putnam counties would have to wait until August to find out its bad news.

It's August, and they found out the bad news this week.

The word out is that Gannett, in spite of slightly increasing advertising sales, may have to declare bankruptcy in 2011 because it won't be able to satisfy its obligations to its bondholders.

Gannett is the nation's largest newspaper chain. USA Today alone circulates more than 2 million copies a day, although many of them are either given away or sold for a pittance to hotels and airlines.

Back to the Journal News. According to the story, 25 percent of the newsroom jobs will be eliminated. Usually, one figures that a lot of open jobs will just go unfilled and that could be counted as part of the layoffs. But here, where they are taking all the the jobs and reshuffling them, I'm afraid that 50 newsroom people will be forced out the door.

The fact that 50 workers will lose their jobs is bad enough. But these are journalists, and this is a newspaper. People count on the newspaper to bring them the news, not necessarily the public relations releases that the government and business interests want them to read.

Good journalism shines a light on goings-on that some want to take place in the dark. Fewer journalists means fewer lights. There's also the BBI, the boring but important stuff, like, for example, if your garbage is going to be picked up this week. That's important, too.

I'm sick about this stuff. So many of the greats have already taken buyouts or early retirement offers, people like Dan Murray, who make sure the news got in the paper and Jeff Canning, who made sure it was accurate. People like Geoff Giordano, who put together the Twin Towers coverage and made it impactful but still full of facts. Folks like Mike Taylor, who knew everybody and everybody knew him. He knew stuff.

They're gone, and folks like Mike von Steenburg and Toni Maconi and Gary McGriff and Dan Donovan and Yaron Steinbuch and Reisman and Baird and Nancy Cutler have to work double duty to make sure readers have what they need. Yeah, I know I left out dozens of good and great reporters, editors and photographers and graphic artists and layout people and copy editors. The problem is there won't be titles like that. Who knows that there will be.

What there will be is 50 fewer people to assure that the reader gets his or her news.

Page 2

The crazy season is well along.

I remember when WTIC radio and WELI radio actually had news. Now it's the crazy screamers saying that the president of the United States intends to set into motion a strategy that could lead to the elderly being euthanized.

Think about that. It doesn't make any sense. Yes, people die because insurance companies and doctors and other professional screw up. But to schedule a meeting with life of death on the agenda? Please.

The screamers are ranting about government-run health insurance. The government will decide whether you get your surgery or your physical therapy or your wheelchair or whatever.

So, now an insurance company bureaucrat, supervised by a nurse, decides those things.

Look, I am under a government single-payer system. It's great. When I paid more in premium for a private insurer, I had a higher copay, higher fees and worse treatment. I have never been turned down for anything.

I remember, vaguely, the McCarthy era. A communist under every ashtray. Good people's lives ruined by hysteria. Here we go again. And who is in back of this stuff: insurance companies and others who have a vested interest in keeping the status quo.

People, citizens, screamers: You are being used and you are too scared or dumb or whatever to realize it. Wake up. Think. Ask yourself: Why would they do this? Conspiracy theories are fun, but not if they cost people's lives and health. Think, damn it.

Until next time...

A long time between posts, but a lot going on

2009-08-09T13:44:00.003-04:00

Well, hello again.

It's been about a month since I've written in this blog, but what a month it's been.

First of all, thanks to all of you who have looked in from time to time. Thanks for your interest and patience. I'll try to be a bit more consistent.

Things have been happening around here and that's the main reason I haven't had time for this blog. Let's start with the most important thing.

About a week after the last time I wrote here, daughter Melanie gave birth to an 8-pound baby boy, her fourth and our seventh grandchild. Here he is with grandpa.

It occurred the same way many of the births in our family have -- timing unexpected. She went to the midwife that Friday and was assured that she had plenty of time before the baby was to be born. We had a fine Sabbath eve dinner and went to bed.

At 6 the next morning, there was Mel knocking on our door with the news that she was in full labor and headed for the hospital. It's the Sabbath so there would be no phone calls or other information until after the Sabbath ended, after 9 that night.

Needless to say, it was a tense time.

The phone rang after 9, and it was her husband, Josh, saying it was a boy and Mel and the boy were doing well.

Well, daughter Esther and I went flying down to St. Vincent's hospital near Greenwich Village to see the baby and pick up Josh.

There was, however, a problem. The baby wasn't behaving quite right. But the next day, Mel and Josh talked us into heading out on a planned week away. Josh was home from work, Esther was available at least one day and, frankly, we would have been in the way. Besides, we had promised my step mom, who lives in Maryland, that we would visit and didn't want to worry her by not showing up.

Of course, we kept in touch from the Washington and Philadelphia areas. A diagnosis was arrived at and the news was the baby needed surgery, which was to be performed at the end of the week. We returned to New York and waited.

The surgery went well and the baby is home from the hospital and, as far as we and the doctors can tell, is doing beautifully.

That was some three weeks. We are grateful to, first of all, God, and the doctors and other medical professionals.

A couple of days after being born, the baby was transferred to the Morgan-Stanley Children's Hospital at Columbia Presbyterian. This is one great place. The NICU (Newborn Intensive Care Unit) is designed beautifully and the staff are angels.

One thing we learned, although we knew it before, was why young people have little kids. I don't know how Mel and Josh do it, chasing after two boys, 5 and 2. Tamar, their 7-year-old daughter, is a joy and helps as much as possible.

My job most days was to take the 2-year-old to the playground. There are a number of really great playgrounds in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan. So, Avraham Moshe, the 2-year-old and I go off and swing on swings and play on playscapes and I chase him around, then come home in time for his lunch and nap. It's amazing how fast a 2-year-old's legs can carry him.

Of course, the others have to be taken to camp in the morning and then picked up from camp and taken to all the places kids need to be taken. My pal is Raphi, who is 5. I got to spend a lot of time with him and he's a joy, too. So, that's what I have been doing the past three weeks.

Page 2

Word came Friday that the Journal-Register Co., the parent of the New Haven Register and 18 other dailies in the East and Midwest, had emerged from bankruptcy. What that did was cancel a lot of mistakes the JRC and its predecessor, Ingersoll Corp., had made in buying up a bunch of newspapers for, basically, promises to pay at sometime in the future, and then being unable to pay off those debts.

Much of that choking debt has been canceled and JRC now has financing to the tune of about $225 million, which a lot of experts say it should be able to manage.

The company has promised to pay much of the tax debt it owed to Connecticut. Unfortunately, the judge allowed it to pay a group of executives about $1.3 million for firing workers.

Some of the people who ran JRC before it filed for bankruptcy weren't really nice people. Ralph Ingersoll II, who bought the Register from Stewart Jackson and family, squandered a lot of money on failed schemes such as the St. Louis Sun, which never shone and set very quickly, taking scores of millions of borrowed dollars, and the hopes of a lot of journalists, with it.

I truly hope the new JRC will learn from the mistakes of the past and has the wherewithal to offer its readers the kind of news and other information it hasn't been able to lately.

I have a history with the company. I worked there for 14 years was laid off in 1990, four years after Ingersoll bought the paper, because the finances were in such horrible shape. But that sent me off to other adventures, including stints at some of the nation's largest and most famous newspapers, so I guess they did me a favor.

So I truly do with them the best in their renaissance. The Register has some talented and hard-working journalists who deserve a chance to do their best undeterred by the financial woes caused by past owners.

Page 3

Higher on this page, I mentioned a trip to Maryland and Pennsylvania. In the next few days, if things stay calm on the baby front, I plan to talk about those and some tips on how to get superior hotels for not much money, as well as some other travel hints.

Until next time...

Woe and more woe for print journalists

2009-07-09T14:04:00.004-04:00

"You certainly picked the right time to get out of the newspaper business," a friend said to me last night.

He's right, in a way. I am out of the newspaper business, but not out of the news business. I took a buyout from Gannett a few years ago. But I write and occasionally edit for the New Haven Independent, consult for newspapers and do this blog, which is more commentary, but commentary on the news.

But he's right as far as the newspaper business is concerned. In many ways, we are our own worst enemies.

A few examples. Hearst, which now owns four newspapers in Connecticut (Connecticut Post in Bridgeport, the Stamford Advocate, Greenwich Time and Danbury News-Times), announced that it is laying off 11 newsroom employees around Albany, N.Y., including the reader advocate. That's never a good sign. OK, that paper is located in Colonie, for geographic sticklers like the Rev, but who outside New York's Capital Region knows where that is.

The Journal-Register Co., which this week got permission to emerge from bankruptcy protection, got into trouble by, among other things, buying up newspapers willy-nilly, then having to close them because they could not pay the debt-service tab for having bought them.

I hope Hearst isn't repeating the pattern. I have some friends and acquaintances in some of those papers, and I am hoping they won't lose their jobs. Many have been working, as most journalists do these days, long hours for relatively little pay.

I heard from Tony Doris, a former New Haven Register-Journal-Courier reporter who is grinding it out at the Palm Beach Post in Florida as city hall reporter. He read my story about the Journal-News bankruptcy and wrote to bemoan what's going on in the newspaper business.

In Hartford, the folks at the Hartford Courant-Channel 61 amalgam ended up with egg on their faces over a sex and age discrimination lawsuit filed by veteran Channel 61 political reporter Shelly Sindland. In a story by Connecticut News Junkie editor Christine Stuart, the dirty laundry is hung out. Romenesko comments on the story to say, parenthetically on July 8, that it looks as if the Courant pulled the story.

On July 9, however, there's a complete story by Courant reporter Matthew Kauffman airing the dirty laundry, with comments from Courant execs that the other stories didn't have.

Better late than never. I'm glad that the Courant still has a sense of shame. And good for you, Christine Stuart, for getting this out there so the Courant needed to respond. On the other hand, kudos to the Courant for putting the masthead back on top where it belongs.

But I will be watching to see if the shirts get tighter. That's one of Sindland's complaints, that Channel 61's bosses wanted a younger and more sexy look on camera.

At places such as E News Now, bust lines are falling. I'm not complaining, mind you. You expect that at fluff sites where the "reporters" trumpet their inside sources among the celebrities.

But there is no room for that in the news business. Give me news judgment and institutional memory over exposed mammaries any time.

Things have certainly changed from the time that Channel 61 went on the air, trumpeting its anchor team of Pat Sheehan and Susan Christensen because they said they were better than the competition because of their experience and knowledge of the state and the region.

Page 2

In California, where nothing that goes on should surprise anyone, officials in Los Angeles are turning over rocks, trying to fix blame for the millions it cost taxpayers for Michael Jackson's memorial.

So, if I read the New York Times story correctly, the teary-eyed mourners, many of whom make more money in a day than the average Los Angeles taxpayer earns in a year, won't pony up for the security to keep them far away from their fans.

That's a shame. Not surprising, but a shame. The Jacksons, to whom the city was more than kind, don't feel they need to help pay for this. Somebody did pony up for the Staples Center, where the event took place.

But the charge for the police, the other security providers and the rest, should not be borne by the city taxpayers. We're not talking about a poor family trying to collect enough to ship a loved one back home to be buried. We're talking about a couple of dozen of these pampered ones sticking their hands into their pockets and coming up with what amounts to walking-around money for them.

If that doesn't happen, then the city should make sure the next such event is prepaid.

Page 3

I guess you don't have to be bright to be able to swing a tennis racket.

Ask Anna Kournikova. Enough said.

Until next time...

More of the same old story

2009-07-06T14:03:00.003-04:00

Happy Monday. I hope you all had a good Fourth. Couldn't go out to fireworks Saturday night because the Jewish Sabbath ended about 9:30, a half hour after New Haven's fireworks party started. Ah, well. Next year, it's on a Sunday, so we can have the same fun.

Well, well. About 20 minutes after I posted my blog entry saying Al Franken should be confirmed as the senator-elect from Minnesota, Norm Coleman, the one-term sitting senator who had been appealing the vote count, finally packed it in and conceded.

I didn't realize he read the Lens. (Just kidding...unlike some, I not that conceited.)

More of the same...

My former employer, the Gannett Corp. has announced 1,400 more layoffs from its approximately 42,000 international staff members. Most of the layoffs will come this week, the company has said. Many experts say Gannett will have to file for bankruptcy protection in 2011 because it will not be able to meet its obligations to bondholders,

All the layoffs will come from its Community Newspaper Division, which means that USA Today staffers won't be affected. I guess it helps to be in the same complex as the executives.

The folks at the Journal-News in Westchester, Putnam and Rockland counties of New York will have to wait until August to find out how many of them won't be working there when the buzzards leave Hinckley, Ohio, for the winter.

I've been through this layoff business a few times. It's a horrible time for the employees and their families who get the boot, but also is horrible for those who "survive." It's counterproductive for the company as well, since much of the workers' time is spent either polishing resumes, worrying or talking among themselves about the upcoming event.

It doesn't stop there. After the chosen ones have left, the "survivors" face a period of mourning and know the work is not diminished by the fact that fewer people are left to do it. The bosses' expectations are not lessened--if anything, they are heightened. So people who now are looking over their shoulders and are depressed by those empty desks now have to face larger workloads and more ridiculous demands.

It would be good to pin the need for layoffs on the bubble-headed bosses. After all, they created the situation in which the company finds itself. But you can't blame them for the economy's tanking and advertising, especially classified advertising, heading to the Internet.

They haven't found an answer to Craigslist taking so much of the classified ads, which were the backbone of local advertising revenue, but neither has anyone else.

I don't think I would recognize the place if I went back to Westchester. Much of the advertising design is being done in India. Personnel issues are done somewhere else. There is a television studio in the middle of the newsroom where Web casts are produced most days. I hear that isn't working out that well either, but that's hearsay.

The copy desk, which had designed and edited only news pages, now has to design and edit most of the newspaper's sections, plus weekly magazine-type publications, with fewer people than a couple of years ago when they only had news to worry about.

The top executives are still there in the newsroom. There's still an executive editor and managing editor and executive news editor. Same number of chiefs, just fewer worker-bees.

A few words

I suppose I should say a few words about Michael Jackson. Strange, talented, sick, driven, consumed. That's a few words.

Sarah Palin is another story. She could have had a big influence on the way this nation is run. She also is another one with many issues. Thank heaven the election came out the way it did. Could you imagine: the vice president rushing into John McCain's office, screaming that she is quitting because the press and those pesky Democrats were picking on her.

She didn't have much to say and spent a lot of time saying it. She didn't have any original ideas and spent a lot of time hawking old, in many cases bad, ideas. Her family is a near-perfect personification of dysfunctional. She is anything by a role model.

She's gone from the national stage, or soon will be. I hope the Republican National Committee realizes the bullet they dodged and allow her to sink into the tundra. Alaska is better off without her, as are the rest of us.

Until next time...

A milestone; enough already on Franken

2009-06-30T15:07:00.003-04:00

This is my 250th blog post. I wish it were more monumental, but so it goes.

My wife and I attended a talk last night on Iran and its implications for the Jewish community.

The three panelists, an academic who specializes in anti-Semitism, a woman who runs an agency that collects facts on human rights and a woman who arrived from Iran a decade or so ago and has published reportage, poetry and academic writing on the land of her birth.

We left unsatisfied.

The academic really didn't have much to add to what we already knew. He was out of his element and tried bravely to skew his knowledge to the subject at hand.

The information collector told us about what had happened 30 years ago when the Shah fled the country, with Jimmy Carter's help, and created a power vacuum that the religious fundamentalists who have ruled the country ever since took over.

It was instructive, especially when she said the death squads that had operated at the end of the Iran-Iraq war in the late 1980s were being reassembled. But she didn't connect any of this to what is happening today.

The young woman who fled her homeland painted an optimistic picture, saying that the Iranian opposition had a 30-year head start and that the mullahs were on their way out eventually.

Nobody spoke to the subject at hand: how all this relates to Israel and Jews.

OK, here's my take. I'm not an expert, but I have a theory.

We in the U.S. are used to our government riding over the hill, bugles blowing, flags flying, guns blazing.

What if the present administration is trying to subtly influence what is going on over there.

What if the theory is: Iran is the key to the Middle East.

If we can marginalize the Iranian regime, or even get rid of the mullahs and their beard Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (pun intended), then the rest of the dictatorships will fall in line. Syria, Iraq, Hizbollah, Hamas, Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, all of it, could fall apart.

That could not help but aid Israel. One speaker said the Iranians have been told to support the Palestinian cause, but now, they wonder where the Palestinians were when they need help. They are doing what they always do, bit the hand that feeds them. When Iraqi missiles were heading for Tel Aviv, the Palestinians were on the roofs of their government-provided houses, cheering Saddam Hussein. Nothing has changed. It's gimme, gimme but I don't have to do anything in return.

The panel talked about seeking resolutions in the United Nations condemning the Iranian regime for its murderous stomping on the dissidents in Tehran. Right. Fat lot of good that would do, even if we could get one passed.

Iran is the key. I hope President Obama is working way behind the scenes to help the people of Iran to toss out the theocracy that they have said time and again they do not want.

Enough already with Franken

The Minnesota Supreme Court has ruled that Al Franken should be certified as the winner of last November's election. Tomorrow is July. Enough already.

The Republican candidate, incumbent GOP Sen. Norm Coleman, has fought in one court after the other to upset the close election which Franken won by a few hundred votes. Now the Republican governor, who has said he would sign the certification, which has to bear the governor's signature, if the court makes him. The court didn't order him to sign, but did say Franken deserved to be the senator.

I know people in Minnesota are patent people. A group of us once waited, on purpose, through three traffic-light cycles to see if anyone would toot their horn at us. Nobody did. They just sat there.

But this is becoming a joke. The people of that state deserve to have two senators serving them. The governor needs to sign the certification and Franken has to be seated as soon as the Senate returns from its Independence Day break.

Enough already in Hartford

I don't know what's ailing Connecticut Gov. M. Jodi Rell, but she cannot believe that offering the citizens of the state a huge drop in services in order to keep the wealthiest of our residents from having to pony up more taxes, is a good deal.

There are many programs she wants dropped that bring in a profit for state coffers. There are others that the weakest of our citizens need to keep living.

Remember, the cuts she is proposing are good for two years, not just one. We may be booming out of the recession, hampered by a budget that keeps the state from investing in its programs and citizens.

She needs to rethink her stand.

Until next time...

What is that bright, yellow thing in the sky?

2009-06-29T12:56:00.004-04:00

OK, so now it's a monthly. I'm going to try to do better. Really.

For the past couple of days, the sun has come out and it really seems as if summer, or at least late spring, has come.

It's pretty sad when one is walking along and the clouds split for a moment, and one realizes that it's hot and takes a few minutes to realize that it's officially summer. The clouds, rain, dreary mist is not what we signed up for.

They never learn

Last week, my wife and I had the signal honor and pleasure of being in attendance at an event honoring Rabbi Henry Okolica. This man has done it all--held together an Orthodox Jewish congregation in New Britain, where the Jewish community is a shadow of its former self; been a chaplain for state and local police, for the New Britain fire departments, for state and federal veterans' hospitals and homes. He was a television pioneer in the 1960s with a television program that lasted decades on WVIT-Channel 30 and its ancestors.

He so inspired students at the yeshiva in Waterbury that they drive twice a week to attend morning services at his synagogue, Cong. Tephereth Israel, located in the inner city of New Britain, to assure there is a minyan, a necessary quorum of 10 men needed to read the Torah.

It was at a fund-raiser for that yeshiva, held at a banquet hall in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, that Rabbi Okolica was honored. Rabbi Judah Harris and his wife, Rona, rode down with us and Rabbi David Avigdor and his wife, Suzanne, and son Yakov, to honor the memory of the Harris' son, Mitchell Elliott, who passed away years ago at a teen-ager, as well as Rabbi Okolica.

Rabbi Okolica was my rabbi in New Britain so many years ago. I told him about my six grandchildren. He told me about his 104 grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

I guess when you live into your 90s, you get to have a lot of grandchildren.

But to paraphrase Arlo Guthrie, I didn't come to talk to you about dinners, I can to talk to you about health care.

One of the people who showed up at this event was Nancy Johnson, who represented Connecticut's sixth and then fifth district in Congress from 1983 to 2007, when she was defeated by Democrat Chris Murphy.

She's now a lobbyist trying to keep President Obama's health-care reform from being any kind of meaningful.

We talked for quite a long time about the subject, and it became clear that her focus was to keep the playing field level, or, if I may extrapolate, to keep any kind of government-run or even government-sponsored element from coming into the health-care plan.

She was worried that insurance companies would be at a disadvantage because they would not keep up their level of profit if they had to compete against the government.

Disclaimer: I am the beneficiary of a government-run, single-payer health care plan, the same as Ms. Johnson when she was in Congress and perhaps even now. Not the same plan, but the same idea. You go to your doctor, Blue Cross does the work and the government sets the guidelines. I love it.

Anyway, it was an interesting conversation. Nancy was a good pothole congresswoman, you know, you have a problem, you go to Nancy and she solves it as best she could. But I don't think she gets it as far as health-care is concerned. Too much money goes into corporate coffers.

Another problem is the high cost of delivery of medical care.

I had a conversation with a friend who happens to be a doctor. I won't identify him more than that.

I told him about my primary-care physician, and an infected cyst I had. My doc drained it, and gave me some antibiotic and sent me on my way.

My friend was shocked. My doctor should have sent me to a surgeon, who should have done an ultra-sound to make sure this was all it was and the rest. I should have been in pain for a couple of extra days before a specialist could see me.

At the same time, my friend was complaining about how insurance companies repay doctors. He gave a for-instance: Let's say a patient has a hurt arm. The patient goes to his doctor, who takes an x-ray and determines the injury is out of his area of expertise and sends the patient to a specialist. The specialist wants his own x-ray, being that a couple of days have probably past before the specialist could fit in the patient.

The rub for doctors is that insurance only will pay for one x-ray, so the specialist must eat the cost of the second x-ray and a radiologist to read it. Nobody should have to work for nothing, my friend says.

He right. But at the same time, you can't have it both ways.

There may be, in I hope there is, a sea change coming in the way medical service is delivered and paid for in this nation. I think Obama is on the right track, as long as he keeps on it. Lobbyists like Johnson are working overtime to be sure their clients' interests are protected.

Johnson said that's the way the system works and it's a good thing. If we keep the same system, she's right. But I don't think we should be keeping the same system.

One think on which Johnson and I are agreed: We have to develop a patient-advocate system. Too often, a patent is confused by dueling diagnoses. The heart specialist says this, the lung specialist says that and the patient, who in most cases does not have an MD, is left to figure things out. That's all kinds of wrong.

A couple of things to end. We don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water. We have a pretty good health-care system here. It's too bloated, too profit-centered, too costly.

But it works most of the time. We know some wealthy Canadians who talk with pride about their health-care system but keep a residence in Florida just in case they need health care.

I remember a bus trip through the Jordanian desert with the guide going on and on about how great their health care is. At the same time, the former king would check into the Mayo Clinic every time he had a hangnail.

We can fix this. We should fix this. It's more important that just about everything.

This passing didn't make the headlines.

This is a tough week for celebrities. The deaths of Billy Mays and Farah Fawcett were eclipsed by Michael Jackson's demise.

But there was a passing that didn't make the headlines. Rebecca Lazarson passed away last Tuesday.

She was a woman in her 80s, 82 to be precise.

Here's what the obit said: devoted wife of nearly 61 years to Eli Lazarson died at Yale-New Haven Hosp. on June 23 2009. Born in New Haven June 2 1927 she was a daughter of the late Nathan & Ida M. Kaplan. Beloved mother of Norman (Audrea) Lazarson of Stevens Pa. Paula (Jose) Pagan-Rosas of Smithtown N.Y. & Loretta (Julius) Rubin of Middletown Ct. Dear sister of Ruth Polek of West Haven Saul Kaplan of Fl. Goldie Cohen of Holbrook N.Y. the late Ned Kaplan & Rose Cohen. Cherished grandmother of Elise Joshua Jason & Eric.

What the obit didn't say was that she was one of the bravest women anyone could ever know.

She suffered badly from the ravages of diabetes, lost a leg to it. She had an artificial leg but didn't allow her disability to keep her from going around. She complained little if at all about the hand she was dealt medically.

She was a synagogue board member who brooked no baloney. You didn't try to put something over on Rebecca.

You knew where you stood with her. No question. She had a lovely laugh that she exercised every time she could. She raised a lovely family, was a pillar of her secular and religious communities.

I guess you can't ask for more than that.

A wish for Bernie

Bernie Madoff got 150 years. The judge threw the book at him.

I have a wish for Bernie, who ruined the lives of millions directly or indirectly.

May you be taken to an old, rotten prison where the heat doesn't work in winter but works in summer.

May your roommate be a man with liberal halitosis and body odor who snores loudly and brooks no interference with his perverted habits. May he be big and brutish enough to make every waking hour, all 23 a day, a living hell.

Until next time...

GQ, you gotta be kidding

2009-06-05T18:27:00.004-04:00

This has been a week of moments. The president delivered a major address to the Muslim world, known as the Arab Street.

I know when I show up in synagogue tomorrow, all the right-wingers will be waiting for me, screaming "I told you so's" at me about Obama's talk. He's throwing Israel under the bus to cozy up to the sheiks. He's siding with dictators against a democracy.

He's soft on Iran, just because he's allowing Iranian diplomats to attend July 4 parties. Actually, I'd like to attend (can't--it's a Saturday) an Embassy bash, just to watch the Iranian diplomats dive under the table the first time someone sets off a firecracker.

I'll have to discuss all this with the "Obama's an Arab" set. By the way, the Arabs who called him "Abu Hussein" were dead wrong, unless he has a love child named Hussein salted away somewhere.

But I don't want to talk about that now.

I want to talk about pizza. I'm neutral about the subject of really great pizza because I can't eat any. Really great pizza isn't kosher. The Edge of the Woods in New Haven makes a pretty good kosher pizza (Sunday and Thursday, call first, no slices, a few toppings.)

But really great pizza isn't kosher. So, here comes the confession. I haven't always eaten kosher. I have eaten really great pizza right here in New Haven many years ago.

But now I can stand on the sidelines and watch the next version of the pizza wars.

GQ has come out with its list of 25 best pizzas in the nation.

They say a place in Chicago has the best pizza in the nation. You know, that thick stuff, I think they call it deep dish. This place doesn't have deep dish, as a reader pointed out, but Chicago is famous for its deep-dish pizza.

The bad news for New Haven is that the city, which calls itself the place where pizza was invented or at least begun in America, didn't even make the top five.

The best we could do is sixth. Sally's was named fifth runner up, sixth best.

Frank Pepe's didn't even make the top 10. It was voted 12th, beaten out by a joint in Port Chester, N.Y., for cripes' sake.

And the Port Chester (a pit if there ever was one--the village, not the pizza joint) place was cited for its clam pizza, something on which Pepe's hangs its apron, so to speak.

You have to fight through five-plus pages of rationale and complaining by correspondent Alan Richman before you get to the list. First is Chicago, then Brooklyn (of course, New York, not Brooklyn, Nova Scotia. Yes, that exists...nice place). San Francisco, Phoenix and Providence (that hurts) are mentioned until we get to New Haven. Then comes Los Angeles, Manhattan, Philadelphia and then the aforementioned Port Chester before we come back to New Haven. I guess there is solace in the fact we get two onto the list, but then again, just about everyone else does, too. Not Port Chester, thank heaven.

Anyway, I must confess I've eaten both Sally's and Pepe's pies (many years ago) and I agree with Richman about Sally's being better. The service at Sally's was better, too, all those years ago. From what people tell me, that hasn't changed, but I'd have to sustain a hearsay objection to that last statement.

But Chicago having the best pizza?Puhhleeze. Many years ago, while attending a Society of Professional Journalists convention in Chicago, I went great-pizza-joint hunting with my convention traveling companion Richard Peck, who has gone on to that great newsroom in the sky where every desk's bottom drawer has a bottle of Blue Label and you can smoke and cuss as much as you want, never get beaten on a story and they always save you a spot above the fold. Never mind, those not in the business. That's newspaper talk.

But we had to get Chicago pizza. I don't remember were he ended up, somewhere where the pizza was supposed to be great and typical Chicago. Fahgettaboutit.

So, Mr. Richman, thanks for starting the next pizza war. But if you ever want to start a fight about hamburgers, see Louie. Not that I've eaten there, either.

Page 2

It's raining as I write this, but tomorrow and Sunday are supposed to be nice, spring days. Enjoy, have a great weekend and, for those in the Tribe, a great shabbos.

Until next time...

It takes more than a few signs

2009-05-31T17:48:00.003-04:00

This blog is following the lead of many publications these days, going from a daily to a weekly to a twice-monthly to....well, whenever I can. Thanks to you who look in from time to time to time.

And now, the complaint of the day. Well, it's not really a complaint. It's a suggestion.

It has to do with street crosswalks.

My daughter lives in Western Massachusetts, where failure to stop for pedestrians at crosswalks is likely to get you hard looks (if you're lucky), a ticket (if you're caught, which is quite likely) or pulled out of your car, beaten, hanged and drawn and quartered (an exaggeration, but not as much as you might think.)

There are raised, lighted crosswalks in downtown Amherst and Northampton, crosswalks every few feet on Route 116 in South Hadley, the home of Mount Holyoke College and a serious, serious mindset about obeying the rule: When a pedestrian presents himself or herself at a crosswalk, traffic stops. That's all she wrote.

Now, this isn't a new phenomenon. In Britain, it's been going on for decades. Some Americans just don't cotton to those things. My friend Harold Snyder used to stick out the white cane he carried (yes, he's blind) at crosswalks in Oxford, England, when he heard a car approaching close to the crosswalk, just to hear the screeching of tires (or tyres, as they spell over there.)

He was talked to more than once by the constabulary, but, being an American, he continued to play the game, saying he had no idea the chaos he was causing. Right.

But, I digress. (If you're new to this blog, I do that a lot. It's part of the charm.)

Back to New Haven. The city fathers are starting to take stopping for pedestrians at crosswalks seriously. Or at least, they are spending money on signs, both those on stands that picture a crosswalk coming up, and the white plastic-looking signs by the crosswalks themselves.

Last week, there was a guy acting like a crossing guard at Fountain and West Prospect streets in Westville, standing in the crosswalk with his arms out, staring at cars that approached the crosswalk too quickly (not me!!!).

Fine. The law says people in the crosswalk have the right of way, unless the crossing is protected by a WALK light. Well, really, even then. Pedestrians have the right of way at crosswalks.

So far, so good.

Sorry, but it's not going to work. Just isn't. Take this to the bank.

The last statement is not an absolute. It has a big IF...

So, let's take that again. This is not going to work...

IF people don't stop crossing everywhere they darn well please -- everywhere except the crosswalk.

That means they need to walk to a crosswalk. You can't have people crossing in the middle of a block, a few yards from a crosswalk, a couple of feet from a crosswalk.

People have to stop being so darn lazy and move to a crosswalk.

I've been on this jag for a few weeks (Yalies and people who are on Whalley Avenue seem to be the biggest offenders), so I've been keeping watch.

Folks on Whalley, particularly in the area between Park and West Park (that's about three-quarters of Whalley between Broadway and Westville Village, cross in the middle of the street. They will cross a few feet from the crosswalk.

Yalies, and other people downtown, are really cute. They'll cross 10 feet from the crosswalk, darting out from behind a car or a bus. Oh, did I say darting. I meant walking with all the get up and go of a frozen sloth across the street in the middle of the block.

You get what I mean.

Look, I'm hardly the crossing police. But I don't want to hit anyone. I don't want to hurt anyone. I certainly don't want to listen to some idiot's mother screaming that I hit her kid, and deprived the world of the next Jonas Salk. (Look it up)

So, city fathers, when you trot out this campaign, please trot out the education package with it. Cross at the crosswalk. Every time. Walk the half block or 20 feet, or 2 feet to the crosswalk.

Believe me, I'll be the first guy to stop and let you saunter across the avenue.

Page 2

This afternoon (May 31, 2009), the Jewish Historical Society had a gala lunch or brunch, launching Volume IX of Jews in New Haven. Please read the piece in the New Haven Independent.

Dr. David Fischer, an oncology professor at Yale School of Medicine, writer of medical textbooks, teacher of doctors, healer and nice guy, was the editor and wrote many of the articles. OK, I wrote one, too, but still, buy the book.

It's a wonderful peek into many New Haven institutions and people whose names you will recognize whether you're Jewish or not. It's $25, but mention my name and I'll bet they'll let you have it for $25.

Page 3

Nobody asked me, but some of you know I do some reporting and writing for the New Haven Independent.

I've covered some controversial things, some fun things and some BBI things (that's boring but important).

Don't look for my opinion on those things here. I won't do that.

I'm from the old school where you didn't mix news and opinion. I guess Fox News won't come looking for me, because I really think people are smart enough to decide what they think on any issue for themselves -- without my help. Hear that, Limbaugh?

Until next time...

A pleasant surprise, a sad goodbye and some thoughts

2009-05-18T13:21:00.003-04:00

Happy Monday. It's been a while.

Let's start out with some good stuff.

Congratulations to Jennifer Weber, my niece, daughter of my sister, Paula, and her husband Joe Weber, of Marlborough, Conn., on her graduation from the School of Visual Arts, a prestigious, well respected college in New York. She's a cartoonist, quite a good one, and looking for a job. (hint, hint)

Those running her school, bless their little hearts, decided to have the graduation on a Friday afternoon. No biggie, unless you're an observant Jew. There are a few of those in New York. So, we weren't able to take her out afterwards, or help her move from her dorm to summer quarters in the city.

This is going to be like Arlo's "Alice's Restaurant"...I didn't come to talk about graduations, I came to talk (not about the draft) but about honesty and wanting to do a good job.

There wasn't time to drive back to New Haven after the graduation, so we spent the Sabbath with daughter Malka (many in New Haven know her as Melanie) and family in Washington Heights, Manhattan.

As we emerged from the subway, we meet son-in-law Josh and two grandchildren heading for the park. That's unusual for a Friday afternoon. The first words out of Josh's mouth were, "There is nothing to worry about, he'll be OK, but..."

There are few phrases as heart-freezing as those. Turns out Raphi, 4, had fallen and opened a small gash on the back of his head, and was bleeding a lot. Head wounds do that, but he had his his head hard, so Malka had taken him to the nearest hospital, Columbia Presbyterian, on 168th Street, and was not expected back before the start of the Sabbath.

Suffice it to say Raphi was fine after treatment and Malka showed up about 10 p.m., after having walked back from the hospital. Observant Jews don't ride on the Sabbath, unless it was an emergency. This wasn't, at least not anymore. They don't carry, either. So, a bag holding their cell phone, insurance card, some $40 in cash, hospital checkout forms, identifications, and the like, had to be left behind. Malka had tried to get the emergency room guard and others to take possession of her bag, and finally, in disgust and with a few choice words, she left the bag there and walked home.

Fast-forward to Saturday night. Malka and Josh were about ready to start canceling the cell phone, applying for new IDs and the like when grandpa (me), always the optimist or at least the proponent of never assuming the worst (or anything else for that matter), urged them to call the hospital to see if the bag was recovered.

It turns out that not only was the bag found and turned in, but the security department of the hospital had conducted a thorough inventory of the bag's contents and sealed them in a plastic bag with a copy of the inventory. Nothing was missing, not a cent and the cell phone had not been used. Although the guard on Friday night had seemed uncaring, obviously he either had a change of heart or someone else decided to take charge of the situation.

Let's hear it for Columbia Pres' security staff and a hearty thanks to all concerned.

Page 2

Yesterday, there was a memorial gathering for Rev. Sidney Krauser, who has been a stalwart at Cong. Bikur Cholim Sheveth Achim in Westville. Mr. Krauser had touched many lives in the Jewish and general community for nearly 60 years before moving to Maryland three years ago. He died last month.

His daughter and many leaders of the Orthodox Jewish community talked about Mr. Krauser, but the essence of the many was best captured by a piece in the New Haven Independent by Paul Bass. Mr. Krauser had run the synagogue, making sure there was the minyan, the quorum of 10 men necessary to say certain prayers, especially the Kaddush for the departed that ties one generation to the other, and to read from the Torah.

He also took care of more mundane duties, making sure there was oil for the furnace, that the place was cleaned. During the days when the New Haven Orthodox community was thriving, he was principal of the Hebrew school. He oversaw the cemeteries and knew the location of every grave in the synagogue's cemeteries.

Sue and I met him in 2002, when we joined Bikur Cholim. He so much reminded me of the men in my father's synagogue in New Britain, men with Yiddish accents who followed Jewish law to the letter and had hearts that could melt gold. Usually, they had names like "old Mr. Cohen" or "old Mr. Lifshutz."

Nobody called Mr. Krauser old. Some people called him Sidney. I couldn't. He would stand on the Bimah, the stage from which services were conducted on Sabbaths and holidays and say things like, "Dis veek, ve got a good kiddish (post-services refreshments), no like last veek. Dis veek, it's a good kiddish,."

It seemed to lack tact, until you found out that last week's kiddish was his. This man read from the Torah, but he had it memorized. He also knew the Prophets and writings, from Joshua to Malachi, by heart. He wasn't a rabbi, but he easily could have been.

I'm sorry I didn't know Mr. Krauser a the height of his powers, but maybe it's better that we knew him when he could let down his guard and be himself. I remember sitting transfixed for hours as he told me his story.

They're mostly all gone now. Mr. Krauser and Norman Rubin in New Haven, Max Prager in New Britain. Those who were not rabbis but held their synagogues together.

Now, I guess, it's up to us.

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And another one bites the dust. The Tucson Citizen, which had been publishing for 22 years when the gunfight at the OK Corral occurred in 1881, is printing no more. It's now web-only.

The usual...no idea how many of its 60 employees will be affected, but most probably will lose their jobs.

Of course, one usually knows someone who works or had worked at that paper. Jon Ainsworth, still riding the desk at the Connecticut Post (at least I hope he still is...you never know these days), labored for that publication. It's a Gannett paper, and Gannett has announced that its paper publications, even its star USA Today, will take a back seat to the Web.

Page 4

A couple of quickies....I did a piece in the Independent about the upcoming hearings on the Journal-Register's bankruptcy and its plan to pay $1.7 million to executives, either for closing newspapers and firing people, or just for not leaving the company in its bankruptcy. That's the company that publishes the main print newspaper in the city and the second-largest in the state.

It seems the response was underwhelming. Only two people commented. One said, basically, why would anyone be surprised that people are being paid to destroy something?

That's pretty sad.

Also pretty sad was the fact that the mayor of New Haven (choose one) pitched a fit, threw a nutty, started screaming in public at the electric company for leaving the city.

Nobody has a quibble with his message. The mayor should be upset with the power company. That's his job: to keep business in the city, and the electric company could have cut a deal with the city on parking for its employees. That's the excuse it's using for moving to the site of a former movie theater in Orange.

I've met some really strange people who were heads of government. Probably the strangest was Abe Grossman, mayor of Meriden in the 1970s. He was known to take out his dentures and lay them on the lectern before speaking. He stormed out of meetings, but I never heard of him losing it on the public sidewalk.

Mario Cuomo was famous for screaming at enemies and even at staffers who didn't measure up to his standards. The late Gov. Ella T. Grasso could verbally peel wallpaper off the walls when angered and could teach a sailor to cuss.

But never in public. Not in this country. And certainly not in front of the cameras.

Until next time...

Some good news, a little bad news on newspaper front

2009-05-04T17:10:00.004-04:00

Happy Monday. Rainy days and Mondays...You know.

Some good news on the newspaper front: It looks as if The Boston Globe will live to fight another day.

According to Newspaper&Technology: The Globe's owners, otherwise known as The New York Times Co., announced that it had reached deals with six out of seven unions and would not be issuing a 60-day shutdown notice. It looks as if the six unions gave the paper enough of the the $20 million in cuts and givebacks it said it needed to forestall the shutdown. The Times had threatened to shut down the paper, the largest in New England, unless the concessions were reached.

The Newspaper Guild, which represents 700 editorial, advertising and business office employees, did not reach an agreement with the paper.

"We are very pleased to have reached agreements with six of the seven unions that were involved in recent negotiations," The Globe said in a statement. "As a result of these agreements, which are subject to ratification by union members, we expect to achieve both the workplace flexibility and the financial savings that we sought from these unions."

But all might not be well in Globedom. The Globe said it will now pursue other options with the Guild "to achieve as quickly as possible the workplace flexibility and remaining cost-savings we need to put The Globe on sound financial footing."

Maybe that's a good thing for the workers, or maybe it just puts the sword of Damocles over their heads a little longer. Pursuing other options could mean more layoffs or it could mean finding a way to make money from Web ads. Time will tell.

Now for the bad news. Two other newspaper groups have filed for protection under the Bankruptcy Act.

American Community Newspapers, which publishes more than 80 papers, mostly community weeklies, in Texas, Minnesota, Ohio and Northern Virginia, owes $273,000 to Gannett for printing. That's walking around money for Gannett, which is listed as ACN's largest creditor.

The other company, Vancouver, Wash.-based Columbian Publishing Co., owes $17 million to Bank of America. Columbian borrowed the money to for a building in downtown Vancouver and BofA wants its money. The company filed in order to address credit issues with BofA, it said.

That makes seven newspaper groups, some large, some small, that so far have sought protection under the Bankruptcy Act. Let's see: The other five are Tribune, Tribune Co., Philadelphia Newspapers LLC, the (Minneapolis) Star-Tribune, Journal Register Co. and the Sun-Times Media Group.

Page 2

Here's something you don't see too often: a newspaper announcing that it had filed for bankruptcy protection.

Columbian Editor Lou Broncoccio wrote a column detailing the bankruptcy and what led up to it and his hopes for the future.

That takes guts. Looking at your future hopes and dreams is one thing. Sharing the possible tearing asunder of those hopes and dreams is another.

The Columbian is a paper that covers Clark County, Washington. There were a lot of fires yesterday there: a longtime bowling alley caught fire, a man who had been burned died and another who somehow burned will survive, the paper said.

But the burning issue for Lou and his staff is survival. He said his group was tough and the tough survive.

I hope so, Lou.

Page 3

Hey, weathermen. Get your act together. No, not the most radical members of the Students for a Democratic Society, made famous by Bob Dylan (you don't need a Weatherman to tell you how the wind blows).

I'm talking about Geoff Fox and Brad Field (there's a real name for you) and whoever took over for Hilton at Channel 3. You know, weathermen. Those people who promo the weather at the top of the news show, then give the statistics and show the map halfway through the show, then promo the forecast, and who finally give the forecast five minutes from the end of the show. Those people.

Hey, don't you know it's May. Showers are for April. This is May. Knock it off.

Until next time...

Tribune Baltimore layoffs provide a clue to strategy

2009-04-30T11:36:00.002-04:00

There is bad news from Baltimore that may have repercussions closer to home.

The Baltimore Sun, owned by Tribune, is laying off fully a third of its newsroom staff. Closer to home, Tribune owns the soon-to-be-combined Hartford Courant and Channel 61, as well as the New Haven Advocate. More about the connection later.

It's not the number of layoffs, although I have ex-colleagues who work there and am worried about them. It's the jobs that will be eliminated that concerns me about where they are going.

For once, they're keeping the reporters. But they are laying off top editors, news photographers, columnists, sports reporters, copy editors, page designers and graphic artists. (The Sun's designers and artists once were at the top of their field. Other papers sent their designers to learn from them.)

The story says the newsroom was being restructured to fit in all media. It seems as if it is being structured to fit in all media except physical newspapers.

Here's Len'sLens' instant analysis. Let's see how close I come.

Top editors: You want editors who don't have a strong connection to newsprint and you want to get rid of those who believe a good number of readers and the few advertisers who are left want something the reader can hold in his or her hand.

News photographers: Who needs them? Just give your reporters cameras that can shoot still photos and videos. That's what Gannett is doing. Keep a couple of pros around just in case.

Columnists: Who needs them? Just let your reporters opine about their beats. Saves a lot of money. Who needs fair, impartial reportage?

Sports reporters: Keep a few around to follow the major-league and really big college teams. For the rest, get the small-college and high school coaches and members of recreational teams to send in reports and statistics. Besides, most people get their sports from their BlackBerries anyway.

Page designers and graphic artists: Don't need them if there's no page to design and no graphics to create for a newspaper. The artists you want are video designers and Web designers, not people used to working with a physical, 21-inch-long page. See ya!

Copy editors: You'll notice this is out of sequence, keeping the best for last, as it were. It's because this one concerns me. I almost said puzzles me, but it would only puzzle me if I thought the folks running the Sun cared about content.

Copy editors are the unsung heroes of newspapering. Yes, I was one at various times during my career, and still do some editing. That's called the disclaimer.

Cutting out copy editors is like a hockey or soccer team taking away the goalie. The copy editor is the last barrier to libel court, to embarrassment, to, for example, the ever-growing numbers of dumb mistakes that require corrections in the New York Times.

The copy editor should be able to think about the top story, to run it through in his or her head, and then say that this fight in Congress happened in 1858, not 1958.

No matter what format you are using -- paper page, Web page, video, Tweet, you need to have your facts straight. That's why I'm concerned about the copy editors. And the folks who are burning down the Sun should be, too, if they care at all about quality and the peace of mind of their remaining staff.

Believe me, you don't want to pick up a newsroom phone after your publication left out an ingredient in a recipe, or got an important fact wrong in some big shot's obit, or left the "s" out of Johns Hopkins. You get the idea.

Look, I know that editors who used to handle three stories a night now handle 30. But if you are going to blow the whistle on the governor, you damn well had better have it bullet-proof right. That's when you get your best copy editor on the story and give that person all night to parse it. Can't do it if you laid off all or most of your copy editors.

So, what's all this got to do with us? Watch what's going on at the Courant and Channel 61. See if it follows the pattern. See if that piece of paper, even if it looks dumb with the name running down the side, still rules the roost in a year or so.

Or see if Hartford gets a publication that tries to be all things to all people, and ends up being not much to not many.

I hope I'm wrong. Believe me I hope I'm wrong.

Trading in misery

Did you know there was a secondary market in bankruptcy claims?

A secondary market is like the secondary market in mortgages. You get a mortgage and the person who originated it sells it to somebody else. Here, you can sell your bankruptcy claims to someone else. Then they trade them, like pork bellies.

Talk about making money on somebody's else's misery. But then again, didn't thousands upon thousands of mortgage brokers make money on somebody's potential (or damn sure to be) misery? Enough said. Just remember, if you are tempted to make money that way, it really does come around to bite you.

Rant of the day

The word "after." It's used wrong in news reports all the time, and in television talking heads' advice on how to prevent the spread of the swine flu.

"He was injured after his car hit a tree." What happened: Did he come through the accident OK, but then get beaten up by witnesses? No. He was injured when his car hit a tree.

The latest: Cover your mouth and nose with a tissue after you cough and sneeze. So, you sneeze out into the open air, get your snot all over everyone, then cover your mouth and nose. Yes, most people know what they mean, but they need to get it right. They need (drumroll) a good copy editor.

Until next time...

A little niceness to end the week

2009-04-24T12:23:00.003-04:00

Living in New Haven is nothing if not surprising.

Certainly, New Haven is gritty. It's a city with crushing poverty and the threat of crime hangs over certain places.

But it is also a shining place. I just finished going through Charlie Monagan's Connecticut Magazine and its 50 places to eat before you die. Of course, eating kosher, you have a sum total of one -- Claire's Corner Copia's Lithuanian coffee cake.

But for those who don't have that restriction, New Haven offers much more than its share of wonderful gastronomical treats from haute cuisine at the Union League Cafe to the famous pizza on Wooster Street to the burgers at Louis Lunch.

There are world-class museums, great theater experiences. Yes, it's hard to navigate the streets without running into a beggar, but unfortunately, that experience is pandemic, even in smaller or richer towns. There are homeless in Greenwich. Deal with it.

The people also are shiny.

An experience: Westville Village is a triangle about three blocks to a side from the confluence of Whalley Avenue and Fountain Street to Harrison Street near the western end of New Haven. It has more than its share of traffic lights and traffic tends to get sluggish.

Driving west one day last week, I witnessed a rear-end fender-bender. An older econobox rear-ended an SUV. The driver of the SUV motioned for the two to drive to the curb, out of the flow of traffic, to sort things out.

It turns out that the driver of the econobox probably shouldn't have been driving it because instead of pulling over, he took a quick left into the triangle-shaped parking lot at the confluence of the two streets. It has a food shop there now but it used to be a lot of things, most recently a Dunkin' Donuts.

In any case, the driver was looking to escape. I pulled into the parking lot after him, wrote down the license plate, and watched him take a dangerous left through traffic and speed off toward downtown New Haven. I also noticed the hood of the car had been damaged, presumably in this crash.

I then left the parking lot the way I'd entered, pulled to the curb where the SUV driver who'd been rear-ended still was talking to a witness. As I was talking to him, giving him the plate number of the car that hit him, two other cars pulled up, one with a couple and another with a family. They also had pursued the econobox until they got the plate number.

The SUV driver said his car apparently suffered no damage, but he was glad to have the other guy's plate number, just in case.

I drove home buoyed by the knowledge that my neighbors were these kind of people. I'm sure this incident was repeated a million times a year in communities all over the country. I'm just glad it happened in mine.

Page 2

If this is Friday, then there must be another example of the newspaper business down by the bow and sinking fast. This one is from Tribune Co.

That privately held newspaper giant, bought about a year ago by real estate magnate Sam Zell, who now seems to realize that buying a newspaper, something about which he knows nothing, was a mistake.

Now, his lawyers have gone into court to ask that the corporation can pay bonuses to his executives and severance pay to the ever-growing list of laid-off workers. In this area, Tribune owns the soon-to-be-merged Hartford Courant and Channel 61, as well as the New Haven Advocate.

At least, it isn't paying bonuses to executives contingent on the number of people they fire, as the Journal-Register Co. is trying to to.

I hear the next session for JRC in bankruptcy court is May 6. If there is anything of local interest, especially with Connecticut Attorney General Dick Blumenthal's objection to the bonus-for-layoff scheme, watch for it in the New Haven Independent.

Page 3

For those in the New Haven Jewish community, there are a couple of events coming up in the next few days. On Saturday, April 25, a kiddish will be given at Cong. Bikur Cholim Sheveth Achim to mark the first anniversary of Jerry Gross' death.

Jerry's kiddish will be sponsored by his wife, Ruth, and his children Jason and Daniel Gross.

If you want to join the congregation for services, that starts at 9 at the synagogue, 112 Marvel Road at West Elm in New Haven's Westville neighborhood. The kiddish, a post-services get together with good food, usually starts at about 11:30.

For those who read that there would be a kiddish for Sidney Krauser, the longtime shamos of Bikur Cholim, there has been a change of plans. A memorial is being planned for the end of the 30-day period of mourning. Plans will be posted on the synagogue's Web site: www.congbikurcholim.org.

Sorry for any confusion.

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Here it is Friday again. The weekend looks gorgeous, a great time to get outside. It's almost time to dig the garden, but this is April and it could still be wet. Yesterday, weatherman Geoff Fox was yammering about frost. I don't know what he was on about...I just checked the 10-day forecast there wasn't a low forecast below 46 degrees.

In any case, have a great weekend and, for those in the Tribe, a great Shabbos.

Until next time...

Two men die; had little, but much, in common

2009-04-19T18:28:00.003-04:00

This week brought bad news on two fronts to our family, synagogue and that tiny fraternity of print newspaper editors.

On Wednesday, Bill Cotter died after a series of illnesses. He died too young at 62.

Today, April 19, 2009, , word came that the Rev. Sidney Krauser had left the Earth after suffering a series of setbacks. He was in his 90s.

It would be easy to say the two men had never met. After all, Cotter was an Irish Catholic whose roots were in the Lower Naugatuck Valley and Krauser was an observant Jew, an immigrant from Russia who survived the Holocaust. But in fact, they had quite a bit in common. And their gregarious natures made it possible their lives met, if for a brief time.

Cotter was known as Big C, just C, at the old Journal Courier of New Haven. The "big" had to do with his physical size, but also his abilities.. For a while, Big C was majordomo at the J-C, making a lot of things work. He held his boss' hands and worked behind the scenes to help them succeed. He was always a crackerjack editor and mentor. Sometimes it got him in the middle of a family issue.

For example, it fell to Big C to help his boss, Editor Don Sharpe, lose weight. Sharpe's wife, Jane, made C go along with Sharpe on his daily weight-loss walk along the entire Sargent Drive. C didn't tell Jane directly that the highlight of the walk was the stop at a restaurant for an ice cream sundae. But Jane found out and Sharpe did indeed lose weight.

I met C when he was a part-time copy editor. He worked a few days a week, after putting in a long day working for a coffee publication in New York, riding the train both ways. His family needed the income and C came through.

When my family moved to New Haven from East Haddam, C was there, hauling heavy appliances off trucks and up and down stairs. It cost me a couple of beers.

For a while, C drove an Opel reverse convertible -- reverse because can car had a top but the floor was a hint and a hope.

I'll never forget the night we got pulled over in West Haven. We were both pretty well oiled and C was driving me back to the paper. A cop pulled us over. We were both counting change for the one phone call we would be granted after our inevitable arrest.

The cop came back, handed Cotter back his license and registration, and stammered, "I'm sorry, Mr. Cotter. I didn't know it was you, Mr. Cotter." and drove away. We both looked at each other with disbelief and burst out laughing.

The only thing we could think of is that either the cop or his supervisors thought the guy driving the piece of junk Opel was another William Cotter, this one a longtime congressman from the Hartford area.

Cotter knew everybody. He was one of those guys who couldn't walk down the street a block without being greeted five times. That was in New Haven...I can imagine what it was like in his native Valley. He even ran businessman Joel Schiavone's campaign to be state treasurer.

We hadn't been super close, but Bill always had a kind word, a smile. He was good at his craft and good at life.

So was Sidney Krauser. We called him Mr. Krauser. There are no reverends in Judaism, but

he was called the Rev. Krauser as a mark of respect and reverence by Jews and others in all walks of life.

My wife and I met Mr. Krauser at the end of his more than 60-year career at Cong. Bikur Cholim Sheveth Achim, where he was shamos, a kind of majordomo. He helped guide the merger nearly 60 years ao of two dissimilar congregations, one mainstream Orthodox, one Lubavitch Hasidic.

He also helped guide the synagogue from a large congregation in a palatial building at Winthrop and Derby avenues in Edgewood to a smaller one on Marvel Road in Westville. He ran the cemeteries, led services many times during the week, helped with High Holiday and other holiday services and basically ran the day to day activities of the synagogue.

He reached into the secular world to secure funding for the synagogue and to hire tradesmen for the many repairs that an older building needs. He never deviated from strict observance of his faith, no matter how difficult. If he couldn't walk to synagogue, he stayed in the building or secured a bed nearby.

He took my wife and I under his wing. I was the "grayser Levi," the "big Levite" and it fell to me almost every week to raise the Torah scroll after it was read. When I became president of the synagogue, I thought my job would be to sign checks and leave everything else to Mr. Krauser. It didn't work out that way. He had a stroke and required brain surgery from which he never fully recovered.

He moved a couple of years ago to the Washington, D.C., area to be near his daughter. He will be buried there, probably because he wanted it to be easy for his wife and children to visit his grave.

Two brave, good men who lived in their own worlds but traveled in many others.

Bon voyage to both. Bill, I hope the road to heaven rises up to meet you. Mr. Krauser, may you find a seat near the Heavenly Throne. You deserve it.

Until next time...