The halloumi staycation

This summer The London Free Press is running a little series called "Staycations." With the economy in the grip of a recessionary bear, many Londoners are passing on expensive out-of-province vacations. Staycations has tips for these stay-at-homes on how to have fun while learning about the immediate area — drive no more than two hours from London and often much less.

Retired, staycations are especially appealing to me. My personal boom has past and I am now in a permanent bust cycle. My cheap, old geezer addition to the staycation idea involves only a trip to Angelos Italian Bakery, Cafe and Deli, some visiting friends and a bit of Internet cruising.

I'm making a quick visit to Cyprus thanks to Bill, a visiting friend. I took Bill to the Angelos on Wonderland Road near Southdale Road. Bill loves food; he is quite the cook; and, he loves Angelos. The fresh baked olive bread or the sun-dried tomato loaf are both worth a visit.

Angelos carries a large selection of cheeses. It was there Bill discovered the halloumi from Pittas Dairy of Cyprus. If you are like me, you are asking, "Halloumi? What's halloumi?" You may even be asking, "Where's Cyprus?"

Halloumi is the national cheese of Cyprus. Pittas Dairy is a well known, decades old island dairy — and Bill, a well travelled chap, knew all of this. He lived for some time in the Mediterranean island country, found on a map to the east of Greece and south of Turkey. I mention both Greece and Turkey as the two have had dibs on the island for centuries and have had an open dispute over its control for decades.

I checked Loblaws for halloumi but found a Canadian made PC copy instead called Halloom. It may be a good cheese but it is not staycation cheese. Why the name change? Halloumi is registered as a protected Cypriot product in the U.S. and there are moves to protect the name worldwide. Loblaws wants to make cheese not waves.

More about Pittas Dairy, halloumi and even Cyrian politics later. For now, let's cut to the chase. What do we do with the stuff?

According to Bill, put a tablespoon or two of good olive oil in a frying pan and heat until a drop of water sizzles and dances on the surface. Add the halloumi, sliced about 3/8-inch thick, and fry. Grind a little fresh Telicherry pepper on the frying cheese, if you like. After a couple of minutes carefully flip the slices and lightly brown the other side. A squeeze of lemon juice is a traditional finish.

Halloumi, unlike most cheese, has a very high melting point. Traditionally made from sheep and goat's milk, the international product often contains a lot of cow's milk. If done right, the halloumi retains its resistance to melting despite this change.

That's the first part of our staycation — fried halloumi, a little bit of Cyprus right in our kitchen. Thanks to the Internet we can enrich this experience.

With a bit of googling we learn that Cyprus, with its location in the Mediterranean Sea, enjoys a combination of climate and vegetation making it ideal for raising sheep and goats. It's no surprise that over generations Cypriot cheese makers have fused different Mediterranean cultures and blended the result with their own ideas, developing a rich cheese producer tradition and world famous cheeses like halloumi.

Finding recipes is easy but to serve my halloumi I made up my own recipe inspired by what I had read. I lightly grilled buttered slices of Angelos garlic baguette, placed the fried cheese on the grilled bread and then topped each serving with a grilled slice of lightly salted beefsteak tomato.

The cheese, as promised, had not softened from the heat but it did have a squeaky quality reminiscent of fresh cheese curds. It was delicious.

Check out these recipes. The BBC offers 12 ways to serve halloumi. Delia Online had an interesting recipe for halloumi with lime and caper vinaigrette.

Pittas Dairy offers not only its own recipes but links to recipes on the Net. The 20 Pittas recipes are presented as a PDF booklet with lots of information about the dairy and the cheese. I downloaded it for future reference.

Bill had mentioned serving halloumi with eggs and bacon for breakfast. The Pittas booklet has just such a recipe.

Enjoy.

Oh, about the politics of Cyprus. You are on your own on this. I'm too busy enjoying the food to concern myself with the politics. Hey, I'm on vacation!

Addendum:

I still had some halloumi remaining and so the next day I grilled a sliced garlic baguette, spread a small amount of basil pesto on the grilled bread, grated just a little Parmesan onto the pesto, laid down the grilled halloumi and finally placed halved olives on top of all.

Delicious.

Cheers,
Rokinon

Babies and where to have 'em_Part Two

This blog updated and expanded Friday, September 4, 2009
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She's here. A beautiful baby girl. Such a joy. Such a wonder. A miracle. And no small miracle at that, despite her diminutive size: 19-inches, six and a half pounds.

It is almost midnight but we got home around five. It has been family, food, talk and wine every since. Well, maybe wine, family, food and talk to be more accurate.

If you read yesterday's blog, my wife and I arrived at the hospital around eight thirty this morning. It is an old hospital with some wings dating back to the early years of the last century and some sections may be even older. There are recent additions and some not so recent additions but the overall look on arrival is one of a vibrant, aging well, facility. I dropped off my wife and went to park our car.

The parking garage is just across the street and after parking the car I hiked down the five flights of stairs. I had heart surgery some years ago and so I like to do everything to squeeze a little exercise out of life. No elevators for me.

The birthing suite was on the third floor of the hospital and I again took the stairs. The balusters, handrails, etc. were wood with the finish chipped and worn from decades of use. "Ancient," I thought.

On reaching the third floor, I had a long corridor stretching out in both directions. I thought the birthing rooms were in the east end of the building and turned left. I noticed lots of stored stuff lining the walls. When I walked past a row of portable cribs for newborns, I knew I was getting close. The hospital had been built before a lot of this stuff lining the walls had been invented, or even imagined, and I thought that storage space must be at a premium in such a building. (Also, there is a lot of construction going on and the congestion in the halls could well be partially a result of the construction.)

I came to an intersection of corridors and I was lost. The information and sign-in office was empty. A sign next to a wall phone said to call for assistance. A very pregnant woman entered the office, picked up the phone and called. Watching this I felt that the hospital might be a little understaffed but within moments a woman appeared to assist the caller.

I felt a tap on my shoulder, it was my son-in-law. He guided me to the birthing room wing, which was down two of halls and through a couple of sets of fire doors.

Entering our daughter's room I heard a heart beat — a loud, strong heart beat. It was the heart beat of my still unborn granddaughter. A sensor on her tummy was both recording and broadcasting the unborn infant's heart beat.

At first the sound was loud and clear and then it weakened. I must have looked panicked as my son-in-law stepped over and explained that the sensor was on his wife's belly and so, as the infant moved, the strength of the signal changed.

My wife was already in the room. She took the elevator. It was more direct and there were signs pointing the way. The world is designed for wusses. I'll teach my granddaughter to be an adventurer, a risk taker, an urban explorer and take stairs.

Beside the bed sat my daughter's nurse. Her nurse? Yes, expectant mothers are assigned their own nurse upon arrival. This woman would stay with my daughter throughout the day. She would monitor both mom's progress and the progress of the baby. There was some high tech equipment beside the bed and the nurse was checking a printout.

The monitoring equipment was connected to the main nursing station and the nurses on duty were also monitoring our daughter and soon-to-be-born child.

By 9:00 a.m. our daughter had dilated to 5 cm (about 2-inches). I believe the goal was 10 cm. The nurse told our daughter the first five is the difficult five. Our daughter smiled, leaned back and with a casual wave of her hand replied, "It was nothing."

Well, the first five may be the hardest but the last five were the longest. she was not dilated to a full 10 cm until early afternoon. And then, as they say, the hard part began. I wasn't there. My wife was there; her husband was there; and an increasing number of nurses and doctors were there.

By the time my granddaughter was born, there were five nurses in the room and two doctors. Both mom and child were being checked and both were looking good!

Later, sometime after the excitement had subsided, Dr. John Stoffman stopped by the room. Stoffman was the pediatrician conducting rounds at the hospital that day. Coincidentally he was the pediatrician who cared for both our daughters when they were both young. He remembered our daughter as having been once his patient and he will be the doctor doing the follow-up on our granddaughter. We all hope he will be able to be our granddaughter's doctor.

Little Fiona already has an OHIP (Ontario Hospital Insurance Plan) number. Someone has to pay Dr. Stoffman.
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Do all births go so smoothly. No, of course not. Stories like this are interesting but they are not the whole story. Good stories and bad stories are always there to be found. More important are the overall figures.

Let's look at the CIA World Factbook and deaths/1000 live births: Singapore 2.31, Bermuda 2.46, Sweden 2.75 . . . Canada was in about 36th place with 5.04. The much maligned, at least recently in the United States, health care systems of Great Britain (4.95), France (3.33) and others all sported better numbers than Canada.

And the United States, where did it land on the CIA list? Well, the U.S. came in lower than Canada. The United States rated about 45 with 6.26 infant deaths per 1000 live births. This is one notch worse than Cuba.

Americans are being so badly served, not only by their health care system but by their media. It would be so easy to write "fools like Rush Limbaugh, Pat Buchanan, Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly and Lou Dobbs" but they are not fools. Why they don't report with more thoughtful maturity, more journalistic integrity, encouraging more productive discourse, I'll leave up that up to you.

The United States deserves a better health care system. Rating well behind Macau, Andorra, Slovenia and South Korea on the CIA infant mortality rate list is just not acceptable. But, the U.S. also deserves, and desperately needs, a better media. It is impossible to run a successful democracy when so much of the voting populace is being misinformed.

Cheers,
Rockinon.

Babies and where to have 'em

It is 5:22 a.m. and I'm awake and my mind is racing. Our daughter called minutes ago to tell us she and her husband are off for the hospital, for the maternity ward; I'm about to become a grandpa!

One of my first thoughts was, "Oh how glad I am to be living in Canada." Our local hospitals are excellent but for a number of reasons one specializes in babies and births; they're the experts at delivering nine-month-miracles.

My second thought was how dangerous is this? I'm a worrier. (There's the telephone. It's our daughter. She's at the hospital and everyone is relaxed. Man, they're acting like this is an everyday occurrence! Wait. It is!)

Gotta be safe, right?

First hit from Google reads: U.S. has second worst newborn death rate in modern world, report says:

"American babies are three times more likely to die in their first month as children born in Japan, and newborn mortality is 2.5 times higher in the United States than in Finland, Iceland or Norway, Save the Children researchers found.

Only Latvia, with six deaths per 1,000 live births, has a higher death rate for newborns than the United States, which is tied near the bottom of industrialized nations with Hungary, Malta, Poland and Slovakia with five deaths per 1,000 births."

This is not an attack on the U.S. medical system. I'm sure that folk, like those in the American congress, do not have to fear for their newborn children or grandchildren. My guess is that if you calculated the infant mortality rate for those folk, and other well-off American folk, all would be fine. It would not surprise me to learn that those figures are among the best in the world.

What drags down American averages is the folk without proper medical care, at least that is my bet. And what this means is that millions of Americans would be far better off giving birth in Hungary, Malta, Poland and Slovakia.

I'm not rich. I'm not sure where on the American medical pecking order my family and I would fall. It is just so comforting at times like this to be a Canadian.

I'm not suggesting that the U.S. should adopt the Canadian system or any other country's system. I'm suggesting that the U.S. should examine what is being done in other countries and go us all one better. Show us the imagination and the leadership for which the United States is so famous. Watch the following YouTube video, it gives one pause to think.

Cheers,

Rockinon

Miracle heater changes newspaper into huckster

huckster/n. 1. a mercenary person ready to make a profit out of anything. v. 1. tr. to promote or sell (an often questionable product) aggressively.

The newspaper and magazine hucksters are again promoting the purchase of the Amish mantle (sic), a very questionable product - a grossly overpriced, Chinese made, portable electric space heater, contained in a solid wood, and possibly partially particle board, ersatz fireplace, complete with artificial flames flickering from the glow of twin 40-watt light bulbs.

Maybe I should be surprised that newspapers are stooping to run ads like these, but I'm not. While I still worked at The London Free Press, the paper ran a double-truck version of the Amish miracle heater ad. The ad, clearly designed to resemble a news page, going so far as to credit the writer, is a disgrace, shaming the publications stooping to carrying it. The word advertisement at the top of the page is in almost the smallest, and in easily the lightest, font on the page.

Offended that this ad was running in The London Free Press, a paper at which I had worked for decades, I walked down to Paul Berton's office - Berton is the editor-in-chief of The London Free Press - I told him what a disgrace it was to be running this ad. Readers deserve better from their community paper. I told him that other papers had run stories in their news pages revealing the truth behind the false claims for the Heat Surge space heater. He listened politely to my rant and brushed me off. In the coming weeks we ran the ad a second time and we never, to the best of my knowledge, printed the truth about this rip-off.

I no longer work at the paper. I took a buyout in January. I no longer have to bite my tongue when it come to the Amish miracle heater. But why is it left to a blogger to tell Londoners the truth? Since I personally talked with Paul about this ad, he cannot claim that he didn't know the ad was highly questionable.

The local paper talks a good line about caring for the community but running an ad like this shows complete disregard for the community - for the readers of the paper and for the local advertisers who are truly the paper's financial backbone.

According to The London Free Press and other papers, I assume that many in the Sun Media chain carried the ad, readers who ordered their miracle heater and Amish mantel within the 48-hour deadline would get the imported hi-tech miracle heater for free. You only had to pay for the mantel, the shipping and handling and tax. Roughly $463 will get you the free heater. There may be importing fees, duty, still to be paid. If you want cherry wood (actually poplar with a cherry finish) plan on spending more than $500 to receive your free heater.

• "Amish man's new miracle idea helps home heat bills hit rock bottom" read the original ad. Now, the ad says, "Amish mantle (sic) and miracle invention help home heat bills hit rock bottom."

The new ad credits an "engineering genius from the China coast" for the miracle heater. ". . . (a heater) is so advanced, you simply plug it into any standard outlet." I guess the Amish haven't heard that we plug all small, electric space heaters into the wall. Canadian Tire has one for $19.99 and it too is most likely from China.

• "Fireless Flames" gives a peaceful flicker without flames, fumes, smells, ashes or mess.

I guess Fireless Flames is what the Amish call twin 40-watt light bulbs. Those Amish may not know a lot about electricity but they certainly are poetic.

• ". . . slash your heating bills . . . "

First, turn down the thermostat. Now, roll your portable heater from room to room. You simply take the heat with you. But, be careful as rumour has it that the Roll-n-Glow has plastic wheels prone to break.

• "It produces up to an amazing 5,119 BTU's on the high setting."

Yes, it pumps that much heat but it is not amazing. This is exactly the same amount of heat as the $19.99, 1500 watt, heater from Canadian Tire. This is the amount of heat all 1500 watt heaters produce.

• ". . . fine real wood Amish made fireplace mantles (sic) . . . "

Reports say that some parts of the mantels are solid wood, like the tops, but other parts are wood veneer over particle board. Quality Amish staples are also used in the construction.

If you think you need a space heater, the cheapest ones have a bad reputation. The fans can be loud and the heaters may not have a thermostat to control the heat - oh, the Amish miracle heater does not have a thermostat. What does that tell you? And it has heater coil construction like the least expensive space heaters.

A New York Times article in January of 2009 reported, "Since 2007, the Better Business Bureau of Canton has received 237 complaints against Heat Surge, many of them related to misleading advertising and customer service issues; the company currently has an F rating from the bureau."

The Providence in Phoenix carried the ad but then in a subsequent story addressed the issue. The deck below the headline read, "In tough times, newspapers get ad money where they can."

According to the Providence:

"When an ad exec at the News & Observer in North Carolina defended an ad the paper published for the "Universal Health Card," calling it clear about "what it is and what it is not," the N&O's public editor disagreed.

"To me the ad looks misleading and, from my brief research, promises more than it delivers," the public editor wrote. "I'm concerned not only that it gives information to readers that is at best confusing, but also that it undermines the credibility of the newspaper. The ad caused me to wonder whether the well-publicized revenue declines in the newspaper business have caused the paper to accept advertising that might not appear in flusher times."

The Providence in Phoenix is part of a chain. The reporter, Ian Donnis, contacted Tim Schick, administrator of the Providence Newspaper Guild in Rhode Island. Schick said, "As long as [such advertising] is clearly marked as advertising, we do not have an issue . . ."

Schick added that there's always a risk "that these ads will lure vulnerable individuals, but this is nothing new in the industry. It has been going on for a long time." I cannot argue with Schick there. How long have newspapers been running the 0% car loan ads? I addressed that problem in my blog GM Slight of hand . . . 0% becomes 7.2%.

To the credit of the Heat Surge company their website is far more honest than their newspaper ads. Possibly they could still sell their units without the questionable claims.

David Baker, Heat Surge vice president, told The New York Times, "If someone would come to me and say, 'I need a heater and I want to spend as little as possible,' I would say go to a local big-box store and buy one for $29.99. Our heater represents a fireplace rather than just some space heater."

So take David Baker's advice, if all you want is a space heater save money and buy an excellent space heater right here in London. Support a local company and trusted local advertiser in The Free Press. You will save a pot full of money and be a much better community supporter than the local paper.

Unfortunately, many of the small, space heaters do not have wheels. Oh well, you can buy eight or more for the price of one Amish miracle heater - just don't turn a number of them on at the same time or the miracle will be paying your home hydro bill when it arrives.

Addendum:

Consumer Reports has released a video in which they give their take on the Amish Heater from Heat Surge of Canton, Ohio. It is a very balanced report. Watching it left me wondering why Heat Surge even bothers with the questionable sales gimmicks. It they put their money into upgrading their product, installing a heater equiped with a thermostat for instance, I bet they would sell lots of these Amish mantels.

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The colour photo at the top of this post was found in the National Geographic. It seems just about everyone has carried the Heat Surge ad. This company is clearly selling product as they can afford to spend big bucks on advertising. In looking through the National Geographic I found another questionable ad and one that was completely out of place in a magazine dedicated to protecting the world's heritage. I'll talk about it in detail another day.

Cheers,
Rockinon

I.F. Stone, bloggers and getting out the truth

I.F. Stone, Isidor Feinstein Stone, is one of my heroes. Quoting Wikipedia: "He is best remembered for his self-published newsletter, I. F. Stone's Weekly. At its peak in the 1960s, the Weekly had a circulation of about 70,000, yet it was regarded as very influential."

Stone died 21 years ago in Boston in 1989, yet his influence is still being felt — there is an official I.F. Stone website. This is surprising considering that I.F. Stone's Weekly was accorded the second highest rating of any sustained print journalism effort in the last century.

I'm not going to go into great detail about Izzy Stone, that was the name he went by for much of his public life, Wikipedia covers Izzy Stone quite nicely. What I would like to share with you is an answer that Izzy gave when asked how he scooped the major media outlets when it came to reporting on the war in Vietnam. It seems Izzy got it right; the mainstream media got it wrong.

How did he do it?

It was widely reported that the war in Vietnam was being wound down. The U.S. government said it was so. But Izzy reported that the war was escalating, the U.S. involvement was being quietly ratcheted up, the number of troops stationed in Vietnam was growing not shrinking.

Izzy was asked how he knew. What were his secret sources? It was assumed he had moles buried deep within the government. Izzy smiled at the question. It seems some U.S. papers were using troop movement figures as filler, little snippets of information used to make columns fit the page.

So many troops shipped out today from San Diego, so many troops returned home today from Vietnam. Izzy simply kept track of the reported numbers. Soon, it became clear that more troops were being shipped out than were returning. The MSM was sitting on the story and didn't even know it.

If Izzy had had the Internet, I think Izzy would have been a blogger and he would have had a far greater following. His reach would have been exponentially larger. As it was, he was a giant.
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Years ago I had the honour of chairing a photo seminar at which Edie Adams was the headline speaker. Adams, famous for his work in Vietnam, sat with us regaling us with stories from his many adventures. One thing Adams made very clear, early on New York news desks did not want negative stories on the war in Vietnam.

According to Adams, reports filed from the field to the Time magazine office stateside often told a sad tale of impending disaster. The stories were warnings that needed to reach the American people. Instead the negativity was edited out, General Westmoreland graced the cover and a positive spin was be put on the growing disaster in Southeast Asia.

I.F. Stone would have listened and he did. I.F. Stone was a journalist. Sadly, the same cannot be said for far too many folk working in the media.

Don't blame the 24-hour news cycle

On the weekend I read an opinion piece examining how the media reported the death of Edward (Ted) Kennedy — the writer claimed to be taking a view "through the lens of North American journalism." After working for almost four decades in the photojournalism business, some of that time with the author of the opinion piece, I can say that I don't know what lens Mr. Cornies is referring to.

The point of his column was that today nothing is out of bounds when it comes to reporting the news. Journalists are no longer discreet. Why? The author sees lots of reasons: "The relentless appetite of the 24-hour news cycle among information-hungry media outlets, the proliferation of social media, the rise of a more shrill and less genteel political discourse, and the rupturing of the once-impenetrable walls of media institutions . . ."

Maybe he's right, maybe not, but I'll tell you one thing: The writer, Larry Cornies, is still genteel. There will be no overt mud slinging from Mr. Cornies. He writes that Joseph Kennedy, the father of John, Robert, and Ted, was "a successful businessperson and ambassador who built a fortune by the age of 30 . . . "

He mentions that old Joe Kennedy "groomed his sons for political life" and that they were "made in their father's image." In the context of Larry's writing, it sounds very positive. Dad was a success and his boys were just like dad.

All may be true but the whole truth, the complete, unvarnished story, is very different. John Kennedy was a womanizer, Robert Kennedy has similar stories tarnishing his memory, and even Larry allows that Ted had the scandal of the Mary Jo Kopechne buried in a very shallow grave in his past. The Kennedy boys followed in their father Joe's footsteps — all were womanizers.

Joseph Kennedy was brazen in his escapades with other women. In 1928 he had an almost public affair with Hollywood's Gloria Swanson. Rose, Joe's wife, handled the humiliating situations by pretending they weren't happening or she blamed the press. In Rose's memoir, written by Robert Coughlin with her approval, she is quoted as saying that gossip and slander were "the price one pays for being in public life."

With no 24-hour news deadlines, no Internet, none of the stuff Larry Cornies lists, the press was apparently reporting Joseph Kennedy's indiscretions to the dismay of his long-suffering wife. Nothing genteel here.

Why did the media give his son, John, a free pass? Why did they refuse to report John Kennedy's wrong doings. I am sure Rose Kennedy would not argue as does Mr. Cornies that it was because of the ". . . self-imposed constraints that had shaped their earlier formality and deference." The look-the-other-way reporting on the JFK White House reveals an endemic media blight. Even the media label for the Kennedy's time in office, Camelot, is tainted by this blight.

After the war in Vietnam ended in defeat, it was not just American legislators whose lies were laid bare. It was also the American press. We now know the Gulf of Tonkin incident was a creation of the U.S. government to give it a reason to go to war. Why did we not know it then? It was because of the media blight was hiding the truth.

President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara claimed the air strikes against the North Vietnamese were “retaliation” for the “unequivocal,” “unprovoked” attack by North Vietnamese torpedo boats on U.S. destroyers “on routine patrol” in “international waters.” As the war in Viet Nam escalated more lies were told but the media remained on side.

How did all these lies escape detection? Time Magazine rewrote some of their correspondents' stories when the stories did not mesh with the government's version of events. Time deferred to the government Time and Time again — issue after issue.

At a newspaper seminar I met a famous-in-the-media journalist, a speaker at the seminar, who had reported from Saigon. He told me that he and others in the field groaned when they saw General Westmoreland gracing the cover of Time. They saw this not as news but as a PR coup for the military. The Saigon-based correspondents and the New York rewrite desk were detailing two different wars, he said.Today we know the reporters in the field had it right and much of what we read at the time had it so very, very wrong.

During that war, now decades past, Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann argued for greater care, greater discrimination in killing. He is quoted as saying to David Halberstam, Saigon correspondent for the New York Times, "The best weapon for killing is the knife . . . the next best is a rifle. The worst is an airplane, and after that the worst is artillery."

Vann went on to argue that pilots and artillery commanders needed easy targets, and small villages were easy targets. Unfortunately, the possibility of hitting a VC stronghold was much less than that of killing innocent peasants.

Fast forward to today, to Afghanistan, where U.S. planes, including a B-52 bomber and an AC-130 helicopter gunship, dropped seven 2,000 lb. bombs killing dozens of Afghan women and children and injuring scores more. Did the story receive strong play in the U.S. media today? Or were these deaths explained away with claims strikingly similar to those used decades ago during the war in Vietnam?

In the words of a colonel from the Viet Nam era, Colonel Daniel Boone Porter, we are still ". . . killing the people we are are here to help."

Curious to know what images from the war in Afghanistan were being withheld from the American people, and Canadian for that matter, I searched the Internet. I soon stopped. The images were heart breaking. I cannot describe the horror I found. War is hell and the images were worse than anything  had every imagined. I now have a small window was causes military people involved in the violence of war to suffer post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

If you want to know the identity of the Argentinian mistress — Maria Belen Chapur — of Governor Mark Sandford, CNN is ready to inform you and inform you again and again and yet again. The death of Michael Jackson is such big news that it pushes everything first to the back burner and then right off the stove. The relentless appetite of the 24-hour news cycle is satisfied with quantity and not quality.

It is not the last shards of constraint, self-censorship and inhibition that are gone, but what we are seeing is media  maturity under attack. I do so wish you had been right, Larry. (See Addendum at bottom of post.)
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A few important additional comments. Larry Cornies was an editor with The London Free Press for years. He is a smart man and a gentleman. When it came time to publish this post I fell back on the expert assistance of an old friend and retired newspaper editor — a man very much like Larry Cornies. My friend caught a number of embarrassing mistakes in my spelling, my word usage, and my grammar. (And I, of course, corrected those and made more.)

It takes a lot of courage to put one's thoughts down on the printed page. You just know that someone, like me, will take a different tack.

The editorial ranks have been thinned at most newspapers. That's sad. Even editors can use an editor. A good editor might have warned Larry Cornies that his take on the history of the media was a view seen through rose coloured glasses.
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Addendum:

Today, Monday, the Huffington Post carried a story saying, "Last week McChrystal (Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan) said troops "must change the way that we think, act and operate" in newly released counterinsurgency guidance. McChrystal hopes to instill a new approach in troops to make the safety of villagers the top priority.

McChrystal said the supply of fighters in the Afghan insurgency is "essentially endless." This is the reason violence continues to rise. He called on troops to think of how they would expect a foreign army to operate in their home country "among your families and your children, and act accordingly."
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In the coming weeks and months I may take a look at some of the myths so prevalent in the media and the buzzwords that accompany these myths.

Cheers,
Rockinon

Exciting news! Tracy Kidder has a new book.

It's the weekend. Got stuff to do. But, if you've stopped by, I've got a link for you.

Strength in What Remains is the title of the new book from Tracy Kidder and The New York Times takes a look at the latest offering from the author who brought us Soul of a New Machine and House.

"That 63-year-old Tracy Kidder may have just written his finest work — indeed, one of the truly stunning books I’ve read this year — is proof that the secret to memorable nonfiction is so often the writer’s readiness to be ­surprised." The lead to the NYT's review. Check out the whole review and then grab a copy. I am certain it will be a fine read.

Cheers,
Rockinon