Inflame or inform? That is the question.

The lead on a recent story from the Philadelphia Inquirer caught my eye on Facebook and so I went to the story to read it in full. Here’s the lead:

In a quick hearing in a crowded federal courtroom, Colleen "JihadJane" LaRose of Pennsburg pleaded not guilty yesterday to terrorism charges.

I had been only marginally following this story, but I knew enough to know who “JihadJane” was. What raised my eyebrow was the use of her nickname in the lead. I wonder if it was necessary. If you read the entire story, you will come across this five paragraphs after the lead:

LaRose, who called herself "JihadJane" and "Fatima LaRose" in scores of online postings avowing hatred for U.S. policies toward Muslims, is accused of stealing an ex-boyfriend's passport and aiding the plot of a group of Islamic dissidents in Europe to kill Lars Vilks, who depicted Muhammad with the body of a dog in 2007.

I do think it’s legitimate to provide that information, but I’m troubled that it’s part of the lead. In the lead, it’s inflammatory, not informative. In paragraph five, it’s informative.

Consider the New York Times’ lead:

The Pennsylvania woman accused of recruiting men on the Internet to wage jihad in southern Asia and Europe pleaded not guilty Thursday to all counts in federal court in Philadelphia.

That lead informs rather than inflames. The second paragraph of the story also informs:

The authorities say the woman, Colleen R. LaRose, is a terrorist sympathizer known by her Internet name, “JihadJane,” and had expressed a desire to become a martyr for an Islamist cause.

I did a quick Internet search and found other news organizations publishing leads that were more along the lines of the Inquirer’s. I’m disappointed, but not surprised. I don’t know what others want, but I want more information and less inflammation in my news. That’s what news should be and I hope the story in the Inquirer is the exception, not the rule, for that news outlet and many others.

O, Toyota

If someone is walking or driving behind me when I back out of a parking space, my car starts to beep and a red light on my dashboard blinks. When I pulled into the space and maybe got too close to the opposing car, the same thing happened, only the sound was different so I could distinguish where the problem was.

On the open highway, of which there are many in New Mexico, I’m quick to set the cruise control for the maximum speed limit. The cruise control in my car is ideal because it will slow me down when I get too close to the car in front of me and it will even sound an alarm if I get real close.

It does have a tendency when I pull into the passing lane in such situations to go into a quick acceleration mode that exceeds the set speed limit, but then it settles back to the right speed and I continue on my way.

It’s a comfortable car that despite its youth of six years we’ve already put more than 100,000 miles on. It’s good for road trips.

The only problem with our car is that it’s a Toyota, a 2004 Sienna XLE, complete with a DVD player for the grandchildren, heated front seats and lots of room to stow luggage, folding chairs and tripods. We’ve hauled queen-size mattresses, a wine cooler, futons and day beds in it. It has had great value for us.

But I have to wonder what value it has given Toyota’s current problems.

We’ve debated whether or not we want to trade it in. When we’ve mentioned that in the past, some people have said, Oh, it’s a Toyota, you can get 200,000 miles or 300,000 miles on it.

We were not sure we wanted to wait that long. So we laid down a marker for when we would get a new car—when we put 135,000 on this one. That was before Toyota’s current problems, none of which we’ve experienced, by the way. Our car has been all but recall free. You have to wonder what went wrong a Toyota since 2004.

Suddenly a trade isn’t looking too good. Despite its quality, our Toyota has lost value beyond the Blue Book’s numbers (between $7400 and $9000). I would imagine I could trade for another Toyota and get better than average on the Blue Book, but what if Toyota hasn’t solved its problems or what if Toyota doesn’t even exist anymore? I am not a risk taker.

So we’ve decided that as long as it runs well, we’re going to keep it until it has no value at all. Just when we thought we had a good car. Well, at least we don’t have car payments. Maybe that’s our car’s value.

Saving Diane Denish

It’s presumptuous of me, a lifelong Republican, to offer advice to the Democrats, but I’m also a bit of a non-partisan politician junkie and enjoy good analysis regardless of affiliation. So this is my good analysis.

They may not want to admit it, but the Democrats in New Mexico have some problems. Republicans not only smell blood; they can taste it. All they have to say is ethics, and voters pay attention. Everyone knows which party is rife with ethical problems (for now).

And let’s be honest, the unindicted albatross in the Democratic party is the governor, Bill Richardson. We all know that the Republicans are going to run against Richardson-Denish just as the Democrats ran against Bush-McCain.

Wasn’t fair to McCain; isn’t fair to Denish.

But all’s fair in politics (sadly), and so I’m going to offer my advice to the Democrats, advice that might let them keep the governor’s office for another four years. James Carville would charge you a million dollars for this. I’m giving it to Democrats for free.

Bill Richardson must resign immediately.

That would make Lieutenant Governor Denish the governor. She would be completely divorced from Richardson; she would be her own woman. No more albatross. With Richardson gone, she could make policies that would clearly be hers and would clearly separate her from Richardson.

Richardson has nothing to gain by completing his term. He’s the George Bush of New Mexico and I don’t see what he can do to reverse that in the little time remaining.
But in the little time remaining, Denish could lay down her own markers and mute—or at least mitigate—Republican campaign rhetoric about her ethics.

Let the games begin.

Continental Beer Wars

I’m sure that many people reading this piece will be shocked to learn that when I was growing up in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, I always associated Yuengling with ice cream,* not with beer. In fact, when I took up drinking beer after joining the fire company, my favorite beer was Bavarian, brewed in Mount Carbon near Pottsville, home to Yuengling.

So you can imagine my surprise when a colleague at Penn State offered me a beer one day and handed me a Yuengling. As I advanced in age and the quality of beer began to decline across the country, I finally started drinking Yuengling’s Lord Chesterfield Ale. (When I drink beer now, it’s usually Santa Fe Pale Ale.)

So it was with great interest that I listened when some news announcer said that President Obama had wagered a case of Yuengling to a case of Molson in the U.S.-Canada hockey championship in the Olympics.

The Games in Vancouver may be over, the Yuengling-Molson wager was just one more round in a series that is older than most of us.

You see, Yuengling bills itself as “America’s Oldest Brewery.” Molson, founded in 1786 to Yuengling’s 1829, once took exception to that claim. Molson argued that “America” doesn’t mean the United States, but, in fact, the continent that encompasses Canada, the United States, Mexico and maybe even more points south than I can name off the top of my head.

Not so, argued Yuengling before a U.S. trademark court in 1998. Everyone knows America means the United States.

Well, yes and no.

As an editor, I learned a long time ago from the Associated Press that the use of the word American should not be limited “to citizens or residents of the United States,” that the word can refer to any resident from Iqaluit on Baffin Island to Tierra del Fuego in Patagonia. In one of my editing texts I show a misuse of the word America:

Keep in mind, too, that America is two continents and several islands large and is not confined to the United States. The wire service reporter who wrote that "Cuban president Fidel Castro came to America today …" probably flunked geography. After all, Cuba is part of America and, as the sentence concludes, Castro knew where he was--"I'm glad to be in the United States."

But when I was teaching in China in 1994, the foreign experts from Canada called themselves “Canadians,” not Americans, and those of us carrying U.S. passports were called “Americans,” even by the Canadians. My friends in Australia refer to us as Americans, although I’ve heard the occasional “Yanks,” said more in sarcasm than respect.

And in 1998 the U.S. (not American) trademark court sided with Yuengling and agreed that its claim to be America’s Oldest Brewery was not continental, but country specific.

I doubt that anyone cares which brewery is the oldest or even whether the breweries are both American. I drink the beer I drink because I like it. I don’t even know if my favorite microbrewer advertises. If it does, I don’t recall the ads.

So there you have it. The U.S. team lost to the Canadian team and the prime minister of Canada won a case of Yuengling.

From where I sit, he got the better beer, regardless of age or national origin.

*During Prohibition, Yuengling made ice cream. That business was closed in 1981.

On the Death of a Poker Buddy

A poker buddy from long ago has died and that naturally starts me reminiscing.

In this case, the deceased was also a colleague of mine in the College of Communications at Penn State and a kindred spirit in distance education. His name was Marlowe Froke and he died Feb. 23. He was 82.


Marlowe had many virtues, but one of his strongest was his humility and unassuming manner. He was never loud. He seldom raised his voice when angry, although I did a couple of sharp e-mails from him when he didn’t like something I wrote. But he never mentioned those things at poker.

At poker his unassuming manner served him well. He could play, unassumingly, for hours and lose most of the hands. Sometimes he even raised outrageously—or as outrageously as our nickel-dime-quarter-fifty-cent game allowed—only to show a losing hand, a hand he should have folded sooner.

Then sometime around an hour before closing, he’d do it again and everyone stayed because they knew they had him beat.

Only they didn’t.

He had a great hand and it was, as we like to say, well hidden. That is, you couldn’t tell from the four up cards what his three hole cards were. So he might show two 5s, an 8 and a Jack or two hearts, a club and a spade and then turn over three aces or three hearts for a full boat or a flush. We were all thinking our measly two pair would easily beat him.

And when he won, he just raked in the pot. He didn’t brag. And when we all kept saying “Nice hand, Marlowe,” he would nod and say thank you and almost act embarrassed that he had taken our money and try to change the subject.
As you might imagine, we told a lot of jokes at our games. In fact, we tried to remember the jokes we heard during the month so we could repeat them at the next poker game. Some of us were better joke tellers than others.

Marlowe was unique.

He didn’t tell many jokes, so when he started to tell one we listened.

He would get to about the second line of the joke and start laughing.

By the fourth line he was laughing louder and louder and start to tear up.

By the sixth line, the tears were rolling down his cheeks and we were all laughing.

I don’t remember any of the punch lines from Marlowe’s jokes, but I’ll never forget the way he told them.

It was vintage Marlowe.

Is La Paz About to Bloom?

In The Log from the Sea of Cortez, John Steinbeck said that La Paz had a “home” feeling to it, but he was concerned because a new hotel being built on the water’s edge would mean more tourists and soon the capital of Baja California Sur would “bloom with a Floridian ugliness.” 

That was 1940. If Steinbeck had been with us on a recent one-week vacation with friends, he might have realized his prediction seemed to be on the verge of coming true 70 years later. 

We had gone to La Paz with friends who traded their time share in Cabo San Lucas for one in La Paz. Our research indicated we would be visiting an authentic Mexican town, more like San Miguel Allende than Cabo San Lucas—real people, not tourists.

In that regard, we were not disappointed. We endured friendly natives, uneven sidewalks, potholed streets, unmarked one-way streets, blaring music from stores, sidewalk vendors who served locals, and shops closed during the afternoon for siesta. But we were also concerned by the number of condominiums and resort-marinas being built on the way to the beaches north of town. Homes advertised as selling in the low 400s and an elaborate gated community cut into the hillside overlooking the bay. We saw a Gary Player golf course under construction. Real estate guides are ubiquitous as the seagulls. The big-box stores familiar to anyone in the United States are clustered at the end of town toward the airport. Our tour guide told us that Americans (Canada and United States) and Germans were the dominant expatriates living there.

It wasn’t hard to see what attracts expatriates to La Paz, a city of 200,000, and why it is starting to bloom. In addition to friendly people, the food is excellent and the streets are safe. La Paz is on the eastern side of the Baja Peninsula, but situated along the Bay of La Paz in such a way that we could watch sunsets from an outdoor restaurant while sipping margaritas and beer. The weather when we were there was mild (50 to 78 degrees) and I wore short-sleeve T-shirts day and night and switched from blue jeans to my lightweight travel trousers upon arrival.

Across from our favorite watering hole was the 3.5-mile boardwalk or malecón (recently extended to the condo development north of the city). It is a favorite of the locals, who walk, jog, bike, rollerblade and exercise their dogs there, sometimes not cleaning up after their dogs. The orientation leader at our timeshare described the malecón as “an enjoyment place for everybody.” The street along the malecón is very busy and needs to be carefully negotiated by pedestrians. Jaywalking is not advised. At night, unfortunately, the street is the scene of cruising (and sometimes speeding) cars with loud radios blaring late into the evening, disruptive to those trying to sleep just a block or two in from the boardwalk.

Driving in La Paz took some getting used to because of the number of unmarked one-way streets and four-way stop signs that were suggestions, not absolutes, and ignored at intersections with lighter traffic. Our city tour guide, a native Mexican who once lived in Los Angeles, said the rule was: “You go first—after me.” Drivers would approach an intersection, slow down, and if they calculated that they had arrived first, speed up through the intersection. I saw it as a game of Mexican chicken.

Some of what is best about La Paz is not in the city, but outside and to the north—the beaches and the opportunities in the bay—snorkeling, kayaking, diving, sailing. Before deciding where to swim among the 10 beaches, we drove to each one. The last was Playa Tecolote, which is a launch point for those who want to go to Isla Espiritu Santo, a nearly 24,000-acre home to a variety of sea and bird life. We had a choice of three tour companies and eventually selected the least expensive after failing to negotiate lower prices with the first two. (The price included the 46-peso federal fee to go to the island, which is a protected site.) The company provided snorkeling equipment, including wet suits, for those who wanted it. 

My wife and I were more interested in photographing the sights and I was afraid we’d end up on some beach bored while the others snorkeled. Instead, we were not on some boring beach, but with a colony of sea lions.  Add to that the various birds and fish and we had so much to photograph that I was actually sorry to leave. I understood why Jacques Cousteau called the Sea of Cortez “the world’s aquarium.” Those who snorkeled reported that some sea lions gently nipped them—one showed us sea lion teeth marks on her flippers.

The tour included lunch at another beach on the island and a close look at other parts of the island, which is an unending and ever-changing cornucopia of rock formations on which I trained my cameras. We didn’t get to see as much as advertised because when we were picked up, our pilot, who had come in from another location, reported having seen a whale in the Bay of La Paz and so we diverted on our way to the island in the hope of seeing it. Unfortunately, no whales surfaced.

As for the beaches in the Bay of La Paz, we settled on one in a cove that did not have any food or bar services. It was too shallow for swimming, but great for wading and even better for photography. Pelicans and rock formations were the subjects of our photography on beach day.

We rented a car for $612 (half of which was insurance) and calculated that it paid for itself. For example, had we paid for the Isla Espiritu Santo tour from our hotel, it would have been $100 per person. We drove to the launch site and paid $40 each plus a $15 tip. A beach tour was advertised at $35 a person; we did it ourselves at our leisure and had the option to get out and explore each site. A tour to Todos Santos, a nearby art community on the Pacific Ocean, was $85 each; we drove ourselves. We did pay $25 a person for the city tour, which was extremely informative and took us to places we would have never gone in our car. The driving tips alone were worth paying for. 

Whether or not La Paz can sustain the growth implied in the construction we saw remains to be seen. Water is a problem and we purchased a 5-gallon bottle for drinking. The sewer system, according to a sign in one store, is so old that it stops up easily, although we received no such warning at our timeshare and had no problems.

We’d like to go back with our grandchildren and hope we can do that before  things change too much.

Think, Sarah, Think

Before watching the science fiction movie District 9 on On Demand the other night, we first watched Sarah Palin’s speech at the Tea Party convention in Nashville. Nothing she said changed my mind about her.

My wife and I were John McCain supporters in the Republican primary, but questioned our decision when he picked Palin as his running mate and we realized that McCain had lost his groove. And as the campaign continued and Palin spoke out more and more, we decided McPalin wasn’t for us.

You can pick your favorite Palin statements, from her claim to having foreign policy experience because she could see Russia from her front porch to her inability to answer a softball question about what periodicals she read. (I had to answer that question for a three-officer review panel when as an enlisted man in the Navy I was applying for a college program, so I could never understand why it flummoxed Palin, who as a candidate for vice president was in a pay grade much higher than mine.)

The most revealing part of Palin’s Nashville performance came not during her speech, but in an interview with Chris Wallace of Fox News, whose Fox News Sunday I watch faithfully, even during football season. Frankly, I had to watch it twice and then read about before I understood what she was really saying.

Turns out, Palin is advocating a war with Iran. When I realized what she was saying, I was stunned. This is a politician who belongs to the party of the president who got us into a war over weapons of mass destruction that have yet to be uncovered, a president who never really went after Osama Bin Laden, but instead mired us in Afghanistan. And now she wants the United States in a third war!

Palin made my old hero Barry Goldwater sound like a pacifist.

Which part of a military stretched thin doesn’t she understand? Which part of an astronomical federal debt doesn’t she understand?

Palin also told Wallace that she’s getting daily e-mail briefings from people in Washington. Instead, she ought to start reading periodicals so she knows what’s really going on in the world.

And then she needs to think, not talk. The more she talks the deeper she digs herself into a hole.

On second thought, talk, Sarah, talk.