Carolina Magic

Countdown to my retirement!

2012-02-02T00:18:00.000-05:00

Farewell to my Dad

2012-02-01T17:23:00.009-05:00

Dad would have been 91 tomorrow. Easy to remember his birthday because he was born on Groundhog's Day in 1921.

We lost him last week. He just could not recover from a massive stroke he suffered in September.

He hadn't been able to talk or walk for months, and very recently he could no longer swallow.

Dad made it emphatically clear that he didn't want to be kept alive with a tube or technology.

My Mom, sister and I honored his wishes.

At his graveside service on Saturday in Elizabethton, Tenn., David Siebenaler, minister of Valley Forge Christian Church, captured him perfectly:

"As a journalist and an author, Lawrence Timbs knew that every good story has to have a beginning and an ending, and in the story of his life--as in all our lives--the beginning and the ending is determined by God, the Author of Life. What happens between the starting point and when we cross the finish line is largely up to us...

"I believe we all would agree that Lawrence Timbs made very good use of the time that God gave him. The story of his life includes humble beginnings and a lifelong sense of appreciation for his upbringing in a large family that was rich in love and faith. Growing up in the Fish Springs community instilled him with enduring values that served him well and blessed those whose lives he touched and influenced. He learned the importance of hard work, duty, and honor; he gained an appreciation for even the smallest of life's blessings; he cultivated a serious mind and love for learning; and he developed a friendly, cheerful spirit toward his fellow man that would serve him well throughout his life.

"...Not only did Lawrence Timbs make good use of the nine decades that God gave him; he also shared freely the gifts of a friendly nature, an inquisitive mind, and a Christlike spirit. . . And Lawrence always had that cheerful little smile that contained just a hint of mischief. I don't know that he ever met a stranger, and his face always lit up whether he was meeting you for the first time or he had known you for years and years."

As the minister spoke, we focused on Dad's casket, about to be lowered into the cold, but receptive Tennessee ground. The tent we huddled under flapped ferociously in the wind. An honor guard fired three shots. An old soldier played taps. Then a young man sang "Amazing Grace." A woman from Dad's church strummed a harp softly. An aircraft passed by--a few hundred feet above us in the winter sky. (My brother would later remark that we had a flyover.)

We shivered and prayed and held hands and some of us cried a few more last good-bye tears and we laid my Dad to rest.

Subaru has gone to the dogs

2012-01-25T13:26:00.006-05:00

Have you seen this series of Subaru commercials--all of them "dog tested and dog approved"?

Descent into dogness

2012-01-20T11:31:00.003-05:00

Been a while since I've posted, so here's a quick update on what I'm reading (for pleasure and fun, not for work or school).

I'm only a few pages into Alexandra Horowitz' "Inside of a Dog." Found this book on the N.Y. Times bestseller's list, and its title intrigued.

Especially since I'm living with and trying to understand "dogness" every day and every night.

Joe, my sheltie, amuses, confuses, befuddles, aggravates, plays, romps, chews, eats and drinks, does his business (thankfully, outdoors) and just generally keeps me on my toes.

I'm learning a lot about him through Horowitz' excellent book. But one, as the book cautions, must be careful not to generalize too broadly when it comes to understanding dog cognition, perception and behavior.

One dog does not represent an entire canine population or even one breed for that matter.

Will let you know more as I get a bit deeper into reading about "dogness."

Meanwhile, here's a short video clip of Horowitz talking about her book:

Asking for help and guidance...

2012-01-09T14:24:00.003-05:00

Think of the canooist paddling on a gentle, smooth lake.

Then think of that same canooist as he's plunging down a roaring, hydraulic-churning waterfall.

Who has the best chance of getting help in time to avoid big trouble?

When is the best time to ask for help?

Think about it.

Post retirement plans

2011-12-19T13:14:00.005-05:00

Lots of folks ask me what I plan to do when I retire (less than five months away...)

One thing I might do, based on my many years of teaching writing classes, marking up student writing (and evaluating portfolios) at Winthrop, is to teach/lead "Correct Usage of Comma" workshops.

Winthrop students, by and large, have only the vaguest understanding of when to use and when not to use commas. Many of them, for example, still do not have one iota of understanding of what constitutes a "comma splice" or run-on sentence.

I will of course come up with a sexier name for my workshops.

But this is my thinking at this point.

I have only a few spaces left, so if you're interested in my "Correct Usage of Comma" workshops, get in touch with me.

My fee is yet to be determined, but it will be commensurate with instruction received and results/improvement achieved (on a pre-workshop and post-workshop test of comma usage.) Ability/resources to pay will also be taken into account.

Quick test of your comma knowledge:

Which one of the following is correct punctuation usage? (Got this little teaser challenge from my friend Judy Longshaw.)

A. Eat up, grandmother.

B. Eat up grandmother.

Sign says it all

2011-12-06T16:13:00.005-05:00

Knowing I have a soft spot in my heart for dogs, Leah Walker, a student in one of my Media Writing classes, sent me this little sign.

I love it!

Thanks, Leah.

Special day at the Winthrop Stonehouse

2011-11-15T08:49:00.003-05:00

What if they gave you a retirement reception and you couldn't make it?

Happened to me last Saturday.

But thanks to good friend Jamie Low, who captured it on video, I still could enjoy it.

I appreciated all the kind words from colleagues and students.

Thanks again, Jamie, for the video clips!

(Double click on the center of the video to fill up your entire computer screen; gives you a better view.)

Human brains decaying?

2011-11-08T11:13:00.006-05:00

If you're like me, you're "wired" for many of your waking hours.

You check your email every now and then (way too often) via your iPad, iPod, cell phone or laptop.

You Facebook or blog or Tweet (again, probably way too often.)

I say "too often" because all this time indoors or outdoors on our electronic toys takes away from time we could spend exercising, walking our dogs or enjoying fresh air and sunlight.

All the time we're online also tends to make us overly sedentary and socially isolated.

Yes, notwithstanding Facebook and email, the Internet, TV and other manifestations of "synthetic entertainment" are affecting us badly.

All this is according to Dr. Andrew Weil, M.D., who wrote in the Nov. 7 & 14, 2011, edition of Newsweek that our fascination with the Internet runs counter to what we were made for--that being for most of human history we thrived in natural environments and bonded with one another (in person) as hunter-gatherers. We once lived close to nature, and that kept our brains and nervous systems in good working order, according to Weil. Such an approach to life also gave us spiritual sustenance.

Not today with all the time and energy we spend on the Internet.

As a result, even with all our resources (our computers, our electronic savvy, our money, our cushiony in-door enviroments), we're less healthy, and many of us are becoming OUTRIGHT DEPRESSED.

Weil calls it a "disease of affluence."

Here's what he writes in that Newsweek article: (That's his mugshot, by the way, with this blog post.)

"People who live in poorer countries have a lower risk of depression than those in industrialized nations. In general, countries with lifestyles that are furthest removed from modern standards have the lowest rates of depression.

"Within the U.S., the rate of depression of members of the Old Order Amish--a religious sect that shuns modernity in favor of lifestyles roughly emulating those of rural Americans a century ago--is as low as one 10th that of other Americans.

"...Putting this together, there seems to be something about modern life that creates fertile soil for depression."

Our reduced physical activity and limited real or actual human contact (as well as our disconnection from nature and sunlight and the outdoors) is something we were never wired for, according to Weil.

So what can we do today to avoid sinking into depression or social detachment?

Here are a few ideas:

1. Live in the present. Staying mindful is how we used to live. We didn't worry about the future or stress about the past because we were focused on survival (the here and now) and that's what our brains are used to.

2. Be conscious of your sleep cycle. Humans were made to sleep when it's dark and be awake when it's light. Strive to sleep in complete darkness (get some dark curtains!) and go outside (or be near windows) during the day to catch the natural light.

3. Interact socially (in person, not just online). Humans, like most animals, crave social interaction and it's crucial to make interacting with others a priority for your happiness.

4. Cultivate silence. Many of the noises in today's world disturb and startle us, which is why it's a good idea to surround our selves with silence (or at least sounds of nature) whenever we can.

5. Limit time spent with computers and other technology. (Yes, give up your iPhone, iPad or iPod--at least for a few hours every day.) Go outside and play, I used to tell my kids. (Now I should take my own words to heart!)

We needn't convert to the Amish, but we can learn quite a bit from their lifestyles!

(Here, by the way, is a video interview with Dr. Andrew Weil):

Cool mountain ride

2011-10-31T22:36:00.002-04:00

The full majesty of what I saw and felt Sunday afternoon driving back to South Carolina from East Tennessee and through the N.C. mountains can't really be captured on video or in pictures.

I can still see those magnificent autumn colors and feel the crisp mountain air. The images are from Highway 181 between Jonas Ridge, N.C., and Morganton, N.C.

Nude photograph by Winthrop professor gets acclaim

2011-10-18T11:30:00.003-04:00

Mark Hamilton, a Winthrop University associate professor (and colleague of mine) recently made the news for having one of his photographs selected for inclusion in a prestigious national exhibit in Oregon.

A brief news blurb (about Mark and his photograph) appeared a few days ago in Rock Hill's daily newspaper, The Herald. It's interesting that The Herald would not publish the actual photo, explaining to readers that the picture featured "adult content."

It will be interesting to see how the Winthrop University public relations machine publicizes Mark's recent photography recognition.

I've always wondered who makes the call at Winthrop on such potentially earthshaking decisions?

Is it a committee of Ph.Ds? (Dreadful thought to imagine such!!)

Is it a nameless and faceless censorship guru of some sort?

Incidentally, I blogged on Feb. 17, 2009, about Mark Hamilton and one of his photographs. At the time, Winthrop took the position that it would post a news release about Mark's photo achievement but would NOT run or publish or publicize the actual photograph in question. (The old blogster went ahead and posted it on his blog anyway.)

Will our hyper-image sensitive "Live, Learn and Lead" Winthrop publish or distribute Mark's photo this time?

(Mark Hamilton's mugshot appears with this blog post by the way.) You can access his photo that I blogged about in Feb. 2009 by clicking here.)

And, in case you missed it, here's that recent story in The Herald:

Winthrop teacher's nude photograph in Ore. Exhibit

From staff reports - The (Rock Hill) Herald, Oct. 15, 2011
ROCK HILL -- A photograph taken by a Winthrop University professor has been selected for a national exhibit.

Mark Hamilton, an associate professor of fine arts, is one of 20 photographers to be included in the Re:Nude Exhibition: The 21st Century Nude in Photography exhibition at Black Box Gallery in Portland, Ore.

He produced the image this summer as a result of a Faculty Research Grant for a series of images in a project titled "Yearning."

Photographers were asked to show "a body in question, in transition, peril."

The juror for the exhibition is T.J. Norris, a multidisciplinary artist, independent curator and writer living in the Northwest. He has curated original exhibitions for the Smithsonian, among others; studied with international photographers and had his work included in public and private collections; and written for art magazines.

Hamilton joined Winthrop full time in 1999 and in addition to teaching, works on fine arts projects, collaborative projects with photographer Jennifer Hamilton and commercial projects for select clientele.

Earlier this year, his "Introspection" photograph won one of the Renaissance Photography prizes in London and was also on display at the Center for Fine Art Photography in Fort Collins, Colo.

Note: Hamilton's photograph includes adult content and cannot be featured at Heraldonline.com.

Dirt track field trip for Winthrop class...

2011-10-11T10:10:00.002-04:00

Winthrop students accompanied yours truly to a dirt track last Friday night just outside of Gastonia, N.C.

It was a memorable, fun, ear-blasting evening.

Hope you enjoy my slideshow:

Steve Jobs was one lucky human being

2011-10-06T22:50:00.003-04:00

He found what he loved in life and stuck with it--even when he got fired and had to start over.

And starting over--freshly anew--when someone has pulled the rug out from under your feet can be a good thing.

It can actually be liberating and give you a chance to spread your wings like you've never done before.

Steve Jobs exhorted us to "stay hungry and foolish."

Don't know what that means?

The man who co-founded Apple, and who died yesterday at age 56, put it well in his commencement address to the graduates of Stanford University in 2005.

Here's what he told those graduates:

Would Nikki Haley have been elected if she were heavy?

2011-10-05T23:08:00.008-04:00

Can a fat woman get elected to high public office in America today?

Not likely, if Ruth Marcus is right.

Marcus wrote a column--published in today's Charlotte Observer (and copied below)--that says obese women don't cut it in American politics.

If the obese but very popular and well respected N.J. Gov. Chris Christie were a woman, he wouldn't be where he is today, let alone be mentioned as a potential candidate for the presidency of the U.S.

That's again according to Ruth Marcus' take on women and men running for office in the U.S.

She's probably right.

Consider, for example, the attractiveness of South Carolina's female governor--Nikki Haley. She's for sure nothing to sneeze at. Some would call her a head-turner.

Nor is Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann lacking in the looks department. (The woman is an idiot but quite fetching physically.)

Even Hillary (I stood by my man even though he was a dog in heat) Clinton is a catch. I've always thought her husband Bill must have been brainless in pursuing Monica L.

Sarah Palin?

Well, okay, she doesn't read newspapers but she's Alaska cute. That's an indisputable fact.

So why is it that Americans have such a low opinion of fat women vis-a-vis fat men?

You tell me.

Meanwhile, here's Marcus' column:

Obese female pols seeking presidency? Forget it

Ruth Marcus
National Columnist
Posted: Wednesday, Oct. 05, 201

WASHINGTON On the subject of Chris Christie's weight: if he were a woman, we wouldn't be talking about it.

You might think that's because it would be too dangerous to go there, mentioning a female politician's weight. No, although that's true too.

Rather, we wouldn't be having this discussion because corpulent Christine Christie, if you can imagine her, probably wouldn't have been elected governor of New Jersey in the first place. Party leaders and wealthy donors certainly wouldn't be beseeching her to run for president.

Appearance matters in politics, for male and female candidates. But it is an inescapable fact of political life that for female candidates, appearance matters more. Successful female politicians needn't be model-thin, but cringe-at-the-thought-of-sitting-next-to-them-on-an-airplane levels of obesity are rare among women in politics. In a potential presidential candidate, being as heavy as Christie would be unthinkable for a woman.

It is no accident - although bad political manners to mention it - that the two most prominent women in the Republican Party today, Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, are trim and attractive.

Christie's weight is no doubt unwanted political baggage. After all, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee lost more than 100 pounds before his presidential race. Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, when he was, sorry, weighing a presidential campaign, joked that people would know he was running if he lost 40 pounds.

But those examples also demonstrate a certain comfort level among male politicians with their extra poundage. There is an Everyman aspect to a pudgy male pol. He can lament his weight without being humiliated by it.

Christie's obesity offers a regular-guy contrast to Mitt Romney's chiseled chin and perfect hair. "I weigh too much because I eat too much," he confessed after being treated for an asthma attack this summer. "And I eat some bad things too." Who can't identify with that?

Realities of gender politics

It is hard to imagine a female politician talking about her weight with that degree of equanimity. When Vogue interviewed Kirsten Gillibrand after the New York senator lost weight, she initially demurred about saying exactly how much. "Can I tell you off the record?" she asked the Vogue writer, before eventually allowing that she had dropped 40 pounds.

Gillibrand's Missouri colleague, Sen. Claire McCaskill, bravely took to Twitter to embarrass herself into losing weight. "I'm tired of looking and feeling fat," she tweeted in May. "Maybe talking about it publicly will keep me on track as I try to be more disciplined."

And then-Sen. Hillary Clinton, at a forum on faith during the 2008 presidential campaign, told how she sometimes sought divine intervention. "Sometimes I say, 'Oh Lord, why can't you help me lose weight?'" Clinton confided.

None of these women are close to Christie-esque proportions.

Sure, Christie's weight would have been a topic if he had run. If he were a woman, though, it would have been the end of the discussion. That's not a complaint, just a simple observation of reality when it comes to gender politics.

Ruth Marcus is a columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group. Reach her at ruthmarcus@washpost.com.

S.C. Gov. Nikki Haley visits our campus

2011-10-03T21:53:00.007-04:00

Nikki Haley, the governor of South Carolina--and maybe its best looking governor ever--is quick on her feet, handles herself well in a town hall meeting and seems to really like being chief executive of the Palmetto State.

Even if our state is reeling from 11 percent unemployment and seems--if you take all the headlines seriously--to be perilously close to staying mired in a recession.

The message from Gov. Haley tonight at Winthrop, where she spoke to and fielded questions from about 250 students, faculty, staff and others, was that yes, South Carolina has been through hard times, but things are getting better.

Since January 2011, she said her administration has had the pleasure and honor of announcing 13,000 new jobs in South Carolina.

And $2.6 billion has been invested in South Carolina by companies since that same month, she said.

"So things are looking good," the 39-year-old governor with shoulder-length dark hair reassured the Winthrop audience.

She pledged that her administration's number one priority is "Jobs, jobs, jobs!"

Haley, born in Bamberg, S.C., seemed unfazed by some of the criticism and sarcasm she's heard about her recent directive that S.C. state government employees answer their office phone with: "It's a great day in South Carolina. How may I help you?"

That because she said it IS a great day in our state, and those same employees are only reminding folks (and themselves) that they work for the taxpayers of South Carolina.

She said her directive is meant as a means to help change the culture of state government.

Several folks asked Haley, the daughter of Indian immigrants, about what state government's role should be in funding the arts in South Carolina. Haley responded that while she and her family love the arts and theatre and such, her priority right now is getting jobs for South Carolineans. The arts community in our state should lean on the business community for financial support, just like other charities and nonprofits do.

For retirees in the audience--or soon-to-be state government retirees--she offered a bit of a damper, saying that a S.C. state employee wanting full retirement benefits will soon have to work 30 years instead of the current 28 years of required service. (Ouch, this old blogger will get his 28 years of state government service in, effective May 15, 2012, when he plans to start living the more relaxed life of a retiree.) "We have to do this. We have to bite the bullet for the good of state employees," Haley said.

But please don't make that 30-year mark apply to yours truly! 28 years is long enough for me!

Overall, I think Haley did a commendable job handling herself and those who shot questions at her tonight. She's at ease and confident and seems sincere about devoting a lot of her energy to getting more jobs for South Carolineans.

She wasn't on time--taking the stage at the DiGiorgio Student Center about 25 minutes AFTER she had been advertised to start. But when she did speak, she was poised, smoothe and intent on winning over her audience with her message of jobs and optimism for the future of our state.

Our state's first female governor ever reminded us that just because someone is a politician doesn't make him or her a bad person, although "you do have to hold legislators' hands to the fire...It's a tough job they have in Columbia, but when they do something good, we should praise them."

The graduate of Clemson University and the youngest current governor of any state in the U.S. spoke and answered questions for about 45 minutes. I managed to get fairly close to her with my camcorder. Here are a few frames of video from immediately after she spoke tonight.

A dog and a guy

2011-09-28T16:04:00.003-04:00

Who can understand the love and affection between a dog and a man?

The dog makes messes, chews up furniture and barks crazily and annoyingly during thunderstorms.

The dog is never satisfied. He always wants to romp and run and chase and play. With a herding instinct bred into him, he's never met or seen a moving vehicle that he doesn't like to pursue.

His owner, the man, tires easily in this, his 63rd year of life. His heart is out of rhythm and he breathes laboriously when he has to run after the dog and coax him back to safety.

And yet, the connection between the man and his sheltie dog--Little Joe--remains tight. The dog seems to live to be petted. His tail wags happily and his big slobbery tongue flops about freely when life is good.

Little Joe and me.

Me and Little Joe.

Who can understand or make sense of it?

(Photo courtesy of Jonathan McFadden, senior mass communication major at Winthrop University)

Another Monday night

2011-09-26T22:29:00.005-04:00

What defines America?

Is it some politician or leader in Washington, D.C.?

Is it the Declaration of Independence or the U.S. Constitution?

Is it our country's great cities or even it's remote hamlets?

Is it our language or buildings or monuments or food?

Our stunningly beautiful national parks, blue, teeming-with-life, come-play-in-me and rollick-on-my-sandy-beaches oceans? Our towering snow-capped, majestic mountains?

Well, maybe it's a combination of all these things, but it's also something that happens at night once a week throughout the fall and winter.

We call it "Monday Night Football" and it's unique, I believe, to the USA.

Its anthem is sung with gusto by Hank Williams Jr. If you're an American, you've tuned in many times. Hank's song says it all. And his pulsating rendition has transformed Monday evening in America into a night of energy, excitement and entertainment.

I love Monday Night Football.

Sing it, Hank!

Made in America (or NOT?)

2011-09-24T12:14:00.006-04:00

ABC News has been covering the deal that hundreds of colleges and universities in the USA have made with a catalog company that has very, very few items that are made in America. (Hundreds of thousands of college students shop from this catalog and are unknowingly damaging our already-hemorraging economy.)

Likewise, the ABC news coverage has touched on the number of items in college bookstores that are NOT made in America.

This might make a very good and interesting story for The Johnsonian, our campus newspaper, to localize to Winthrop.

Has Winthrop cut such a deal with this same catalog company?

Also, what's the status of goods that are for sale at our university's bookstore?

I took a casual stroll through there yesterday and saw some apparel that was "Made in Honduras."

Reason this is an important story is that hundreds of thousands of American jobs could be saved or restored if USA colleges and universities were more "Made in America" conscious.

Winthrop talks over and over about being globally conscious.

All well and fine, folks, but let's not forget to buy American whenever it's possible.

Here's the ABC News video (worth watching for sure):

video platform video management video solutions video player

Yours truly 60 years ago...

2011-09-21T14:16:00.003-04:00

Oh how the years slip by so quickly.

Here I am (in photo accompanying this blog post) in 1951.

I'm with my first cousin, Marcella Rowe.

Can you see the resemblance between then and now?

This blog's for Little Joe...

2011-09-15T14:43:00.002-04:00

I have a sheltie. His name is Little Joe. And he's 34 pounds of love, playfulness and rambunctiousness. He's my best friend and partner.

And wow, can he ever run!!

He relishes a wide open space to go at full speed--like a furry bullet.

When I saw this video, I thought of Little Joe; the video (of another sheltie) captures his spirit.

10-year anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001

2011-09-15T11:26:00.005-04:00

I meant to blog about this last week, after students and I played these tapes (of conversations between those on board the hijacked jets on Sept. 11, 2001, and persons in air traffic control).

Turn up your sound and click here for powerful, unforgettable reminders of the chaos and drama of that fateful day 10 years ago.

Student shares this song with me

2011-09-08T12:14:00.005-04:00

I was working in the Mac lab today next to a student (Kendria Houseworth) who was listening to this beautiful song by Kenny G

Really soothing.

Turn up your sound and have a listen:

QR codes back in the news

2011-09-08T08:26:00.005-04:00

I blogged about QR codes back on April 29, 2011.

Knew they were here to say and we'd be confronting more and more of them.

Now comes this news, from the S.C. Press Associaton eBulletin, about who really scans those codes:

"A demographic analysis of those who scanned a QR code with their mobile phone in June revealed an audience that was more likely to be male, young to middle-age and upper income. More than half of all QR code scanners were between the ages of 18-34. Those between the age of 25-34 were twice as likely as the average mobile user to engage in this behavior, while 18-24 year olds were 36% more likely than average to scan. More than 1 of every 3 QR code scanners had a household income of at least $100,000, representing both the largest and most over-represented income segment among the scanning audience. The most popular source of a scanned QR code was a printed magazine or newspaper, with nearly half scanning QR codes from this source. Product packaging was the source of QR code scanning for 35.3% of the audience, while 27.4% scanned a code from a website on a PC and 23.5% scanned codes from a poster/flyer/kiosk."

Don't know anything about QR codes? (That's a QR code that accompanies this blog post.)

Best you Google them now and get in the loop if you're serious about digital communication.

I continue to wish I had a "smart phone" so I could start scanning them.

Maybe soon.

Aretha Franklin can brighten up any Monday

2011-08-29T16:52:00.003-04:00

Who can sing any better?

She has a voice from heaven.

Take it away, Aretha!

Here she is with one of my all-time favorite songs:

Days left in our M/W MCOM 333 (Fall 2011) course

2011-08-25T12:45:00.001-04:00

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Days left in our M/W MCOM 241(Fall 2011) course

2011-08-25T12:38:00.001-04:00

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Days left in our T/R MCOM 241 (Fall 2011) course

2011-08-25T10:53:00.002-04:00

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Let the countdown begin...

2011-08-25T10:36:00.016-04:00

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Convocation keynote speaker writeup is puzzling

2011-08-23T21:17:00.003-04:00

I marched in our university's annual Convocation ceremony yesterday.

Lots of pomp and circumstance and high praise for all the good, positive things that have happened at Winthrop University over the past 125 years. Faculty strutted like proud (colorful) peacocks into and out of historic Byrnes Auditorium.

However, in the "Convocation 2011" printed program that accompanied this yearly ritual I noticed this puzzling sentence about the keynote speaker:

"He was honored by the university as the 2008 Outstanding Young Alumni" for his dedication to the campus and his community."

Question: How could he be more than one person?

Get it?

Another topic: I'm glad that "Freedom of Speech" is part of Winthrop University's "Dedication For Excellence"--read verbatim and with spirit by hundreds of people at Convocation yesterday.

"I will recognize," thousands of us in the audience intoned aloud, "that I can exercise the full range of my freedom of speech and will respect the rights of others to express themselves as guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States."

Valuable, lofty thing this ideal we call "Freedom of Speech" at Winthrop University.

So fragile in some respects, but nevertheless enduring and monumentally important.

Because if we don't have and don't genuinely practice freedom of speech, then what's the point of any of us being here?

Farewell to Nick Ashford

2011-08-23T16:43:00.005-04:00

Legendary Motown songwriter Nick Ashford died yesterday at the age of 70.

Kick back and enjoy "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," one of my Nick Ashford favorites, by clicking here.

Beautiful family pictures--from the Midwest

2011-08-15T10:09:00.003-04:00

I forget that I have the most beautiful family in the world. Some of them are pictured here at a recent weekend visit to the zoo in St. Louis, Mo.

In one photo is granddaughter Lucy and daughter Elizabeth.

In the other photo are, from left, son-in-law Patrick, Lucy, daughter Dorothy and granddaughter Clare.

Love and hugs to you all!

Intriguing animal story (and photos)

2011-08-10T11:48:00.007-04:00

Larry Walsh, my first cousin, emailed me the photos of these wayward juvenile Sitka black-tailed deer.

Seems the deer swam directly toward Tom Satre's 62-foot charter vessel in the icy waters of Stephen's Passage, Alaska.

Once the deer reached the boat they began to circle, looking directly at the humans on board. Clearly, the bucks were distressed. With help from those on board the vessel, the typically skittish wild animals came willingly into the boat.

The deer then collapsed with exhaustion, shivering.

All four deer were transported to Taku Harbour. Once the group reached the dock, the first buck that had been pulled from the water hopped onto the dock, looked back,then jumped into the harbour, swam to shore and disappeared into the forest.

After a bit of prodding and assistance from the humans, two others followed suit...but one straggler needed more help. (He's the one being moved in the wheelbarrow.)

Folks at the scene did not know how long the deer had been in the icy waters or if there had been others who did not survive.

The good Samaritan humans describe their experience as 'one of those defining moments in life.'

Bet the deer, if they could talk, would agree.

Escaping life's ruts

2011-08-07T10:56:00.006-04:00

Tommy Tomlinson, a columnist/story teller for the Charlotte Observer, recently wrote that too many of us find ourselves in ruts that tend to keep our lives on hold or kill our spirit.

Maybe part of our ruts are rooted in comfort zones (those places that we settle into and don't want to leave lest someone drags us out kicking and screaming.)

Are you in a comfort zone rut?

Here are Tomlinson's thoughts:

"Some days inertia feels like the most powerful force in the world, stronger than gravity or anger or love.

"How many of our problems would vanish if we just quit doing the same stupid things we do every day? Or started doing the things we keep putting off?

"I read "The Family Circus" every morning on the comics page. A lot of people love "The Family Circus" - we find that out at the paper every time we try to get rid of it. In all the years I've read it, I don't think it's ever given me an honest laugh. But it just takes three seconds. Maybe this time Jeffy will be funny. OK, maybe next time.

"Routines become habits, and habits become ruts that run so deep it's hard to see out. When inertia kicks in, your mind clicks over to autopilot. You could live your life blindfolded. You know exactly where to go.

"That's why one of the best ways to get out of a funk is to change your routine. It can be as simple as driving a different route to work, or turning left instead of right on your morning walk, or sitting on the couch instead of in the easy chair. Those little changes alert your brain that something new is going on. It makes you more aware. You see the world instead of just passing through."

Thank you, Tommy Tomlinson.

Now to dedicate myself to breaking out of my funk.

Some will kick and scream when I do that, but so be it.

A funky, rutty life is not what we were put here to live.

Plant-based diet newest twist in my lifestyle

2011-07-27T13:50:00.002-04:00

I'm trying to enjoy life (well at least, to live life) on a plant-based diet. I watched this video of Bill Clinton and figured I had nothing to lose and potentially a longer life to gain.

What's a plant-based diet? Well, for starters, you eat absolutely no meat and no dairy products (no cheese or milk). What you do eat is lots of fruits and vegetables and nuts and certain kinds of bread--rye bread for example.

Giving this plant-based eating a try--not just to lose weight but to rid my body of toxins, chief among them cholesterol.

Playful pups

2011-07-13T15:23:00.001-04:00

Here are two very playful (to say the least) dogs. They can't get enough of each other:

Does your church have "it"?

2011-06-30T20:19:00.005-04:00

Mike Lowery, pastor of Impact Community Church in Rock Hill, had a stirring message last Sunday.

Mike, who says the church ought to be in the business of serving and trying to get closer to God, noted that some houses of worship have all the makings or trappings of what they should be about--saving souls for eternity--but they fall short because they don't have "it".

You might wonder what "it" is.

It's tough to define this elusive, increasingly rare characteristic of churches. But we know, according to Lowery, that some churches have "it," and others don't.

The seven qualities of "it," he says, are:

•Vision. Churches with "it" know that their vision comes from God, not from man.

•Divine focus. A church with "it" does not try to do a million things. It only tries to accomplish a few things and ends up doing these very well.

•Unmistakable comraderie. Churches with "it" enjoy togetherness or connectedness with other churches or even with folks outside their congregations.

•Innovative minds. An "it" church is a creative church.

•Willingness to fall short. A church with "it" isn't afraid to make mistakes. It fails forward and learns from its errors.

•Focused outward instead of inward. (Nuff said!)

•Kingdom mindedness. In a a church with "it," it's not what the church can do for me; instead it's what can I do for my church?

Does your church or place of worship have "it"? Or is it "itless"?

Graduation at Winthrop University

2011-06-13T16:11:00.003-04:00

Yes, I know May 8, 2011, was just another in countless graduations I've marched in or attended or otherwise participated in during my lifetime.

But graduation at Winthrop University is truly a special day.

Turn up your sound and click here to get a bit of the ambience and magic of the place where I'm honored to work.

(Thanks to Judy Longshaw for sending me this video.)

Hats off to Marshal Dillon

2011-06-07T15:33:00.004-04:00

His name was James Arness, but most of us baby boomers (and our parents) knew him as the larger-than-life Marshal Matt Dillon of the long-running TV western "Gunsmoke."

The 6-foot-7 inch Arness died a few days ago at the age of 88, but his legacy of no nonsense toughness will last for many years. Scan the channels and you'll probably find a re-run of "Gunsmoke."

The show had a strong following for 20 years (an eternity on TV), finally signing off in 1975.

Who can ever forget the towering Marshal Dillon? The marshal, with his trusted sidekick and stiff-legged deputy Chester Goode (played by Dennis Weaver), maintained peace and order in wild, wicked Dodge City, Kan. Other regulars on the show were Miss Kitty Russell (played by Amanda Blake), who managed the Long Branch Saloon (where the marshal hung out and sipped cool ones), and spunky, wise old Doc Adams (Milburn Stone).

In recent years, Marshal Dillon and Miss Kitty were memorialized in Toby Keith's hit song "I Should've Been A Cowboy."

Here are a few lyrics from that blockbuster tune:

I bet you've never heard ole Marshall Dillion say
Miss Kitty have you ever thought of running away
Settling down will you marry me
If I asked you twice and begged you pretty please
She'd of said Yes in a New York minute
They never tied the knot
His heart wasn't in it
Stole a kiss as he road away
He never hung his hat up at Kitty's place

Want to hear the song and re-live a bit of Marshal Dillon lore?

Turn your sound up and click here.

Navy Seals and Barack Obama bring home the bounty

2011-05-19T18:36:00.003-04:00

The pictures say it all!

Playmates/best friends

2011-05-17T10:26:00.003-04:00

Kelli, my neighbor, shot these two videos of my beloved pup Jackson, romping about with her dog Kaci.

Jackson and Kaci have become best friends over the last few weeks.

If only people could get along as well!

Click here for video number one.

And click here for the second video.

Thanks for this footage, Kelli.

Carolina Girls

2011-05-15T20:24:00.004-04:00

Here are three out of my four favorite Carolina Girls. From left: Lucy, Dorothy and Clare. (two granddaughters and daughter) Absent from picture, but also a favorite: youngest daughter Elizabeth

You go, Carolina Girls!

And click here to hear the song!

QR Codes coming to us quickly

2011-04-29T13:04:00.007-04:00

Look closely at the images accompanying this blog post. These are known as QR (Quick Response) Codes.

Soon, very soon, we're going to be seeing these in lots of ads or in printed text. If you have a smart phone, for example, and your smart phone has the correct scanning software, you can scan a QR code with your phone; then you'll be taken to more information--more text, a website, picture or video.

Read all about QR Codes at this link.

For now, know what they are and get ready for them to become a part of your everyday life in 2011 and beyond.

QR Codes--already big and burgeoning in Asia, but still sort of a curiosity in the U.S. Look for them on business cards, signs, magazines, newspapers, buses--any place where you might need more information. (And we'll inevitably soon begin noticing them on t-shirts.)

Definitely something to keep your eyes on...

Tighten your writing

2011-04-14T10:39:00.004-04:00

The rules about writing say that less is more.

Make it terse.

Keep it simple, stupid.

Omit needless words.

Tighten your writing!

That's what a student of mine, along with yours truly, did today in my Feature Writing course. We took an 822-word published story and, using our editing scalpels (our brains), reduced it by about 50 words. And we did this without loss or distortion of meaning.

Puts me in mind of that great 1968 funk song "Tighten Up" by Archie Bell and the Drells.

Turn your sound up and click here to have a listen.

Anna Douglas and her staff shine brightly

2011-04-12T13:02:00.002-04:00

Congratulations to Johnsonian editor-in-chief Anna Douglas.

Anna, who will receive her degree from Winthrop in a few weeks, was honored Friday by the S.C. Press Association as the "S.C. Collegiate Journalist of the Year."

She and others on her staff appear in the picture with this blog post.

From left: Tiffany Barkley, Anna Douglas, Jonathan McFadden, Connor De Bruler, Paul Ricciardi, David Thackham, Joseph Henderson, Devang Joshi and Amanda Phipps.

Kneeling, from left: Jessica Pickens and Claire Byun.

(Photo by Judy Longshaw of University Relations)

Quote of the week

2011-04-05T12:01:00.003-04:00

It comes from NASCAR's favorite driver, Dale Earnhardt Jr., who, upon finishing a close second a few days ago in a race at Martinsville, Va., wiped the sweat and tears from his eyes and said this:

I ain't won in a long time. I was thinking at the end I was meant to win the damn race.

Ain't it just a shame, Dale Junior. (That's Junior pictured with this blog post.)

I used to think "Ain't" was not a word, but guess what? Google defines it this way:

Ain't is a colloquialism and a contraction originally used for "am not", but also used for "is not", "are not", "has not", or "have not" in the common vernacular. In some dialects it is also used as a contraction of "do not", "does not", and "did not" (e.g. I ain't know that). ...

Tennessee man is "flush" with court victory

2011-04-01T09:23:00.003-04:00

What's that old saying about one person's trash is another's treasure?

Case in point is William Terry of Oak Ridge, Tenn. (That's a photo of Terry with this blog post.)

Seems Terry wanted to grow flowers in an old commode that he had in his front yard. The city powerstructure cited him as violating an ordinance prohibiting from displaying such on his property.

Terry, however, insisted he had a right to grow daffodils in the old commode. He took the city to task (meaning to court.)

Guess who still has an old commode, with flowers growing out of it, in his yard?

Read about it in the following story, posted on Knox.com and sent to me a few minutes ago by friend Jamie Low. (Thanks, Jamie!)

City's citation about potty planter tanks

Judge rules Oak Ridge man may keep using bowl for blooms

By Bob Fowler
Posted March 31, 2011 at 11:43 p.m.
EmailDiscussShare »PrintAAA

OAK RIDGE - William Terry won this bowl contest.

Oak Ridge's municipal judge Thursday dismissed the city's citation against Terry for putting an old toilet bowl in his front yard and using it as a planter.

The city said the commode is rubbish and violated the city's property maintenance code.

Terry argued that it's a flower potty and a good way to recycle something that would otherwise have wound up in a landfill.

City Judge Robert A. McNees III on Thursday ruled the city code definition of rubbish "is so broad it could apply to most containers and thus overbroad for the purpose of including Mr. Terry's commode.''

According to the judge's four-page order, "a city can enact ordinances purely on aesthetic considerations but must do so in a way that its citizens can understand.''

The city's toilet bowl crackdown is part of an ongoing effort to clean up neighborhoods.

McNees' order praises that effort. "The city's actions in trying to enforce its ordinances and clean up its neighborhoods should be applauded and continued,'' the judge opined.

Terry, an Anna Road resident, was flush with victory when told of the judge's decision.

"That is so awesome,'' he said. "I think it's absolutely wonderful for flowerpots everywhere.''

Said Terry of his toilet, centered under his porch and flanked by daffodils: "It is a flowerpot. It had been recycled. Everybody knows that except for the city.''

City officials last winter sent Terry a notice that his toilet, which at that time included its broken reservoir, violated the city's property maintenance code.

"It's all an interpretation of who is right,'' city code enforcement supervisor Denny Boss said Thursday.

Terry ditched the broken reservoir but also appealed the notice, prompting the city to cite him into court.

In court last week, Terry presented pictures he had taken of unsightly planters and other eyesores he'd spotted in the city.

Terry said he was stunned by the publicity the case received.

Next up, he said, "I might get two toilets and put them beside what you could call my driveway.''

Bob Fowler, News Sentinel editor, may be reached at 865-481-3625.

Two of my favorite student editors

2011-03-29T14:36:00.005-04:00

Had a chance the other day to be captured in a photo with two of my favorite student journalists. From left in the photo with this blog post are Anna Douglas, 2010-2011 editor-in-chief of The Johnsonian (student newspaper at Winthrop University); yours truly (the old faculty adviser for The Johnsonian); and Claire Byun, newly selected Johnsonian editor-in-chief (for 2011-12).

You rock, editors!

(Photo sent to me by Heather Andolina at Winthrop University)

iPad2 vs. regular video camera or camcorder

2011-03-25T10:30:00.004-04:00

A colleague of mine sent me this revealing clip about the new video capability of the iPad2.

Seems a journalist shot a story using her regular camcorder.

She then covered that same story with her iPad2.

Compare the two clips.

Who knew that a tablet could be so powerful?

Sticky notes from God

2011-03-23T13:11:00.004-04:00

My first cousin, Larry Walsh, sent me these two sticky notes. They say a lot in just a few words.

Sort of like religious haiku.

Read and remember.

Woman gives her 4-legged friend mouth-to-mouth

2011-03-11T08:58:00.006-05:00

I'm always on the lookout for a good dog story. That being the case, a piece from the Anchorage Daily News, reprinted this morning in The Charlotte Observer, immediately gripped me.

Seems there's a woman in Alaska who may be even more of a dog lover than yours truly.

Loves her sled dog "Miller" so much that she quit the Iditarod (1,150-mile sled dog race across Alaska) to give the suddenly collapsed Miller mouth-to-mouth and mush him back to a checkpoint (through the frozen, snowy wilderness) to a veterinarian.

Bottom line: Zoya DeNure (pictured with this blog post) helped save Miller' life. She didn't complete the Iditarod, but Miller--thanks to Zoya's loving, selfless care, an IV, warm blankets and a doctor's attention--is back on his feet wagging his tail and eager once again to be a sled dog.

Zoya, you da woman!

Miller, you da canine!

(Below is the entire woman saves dog heartwarming story:)

Iditarod turns into race to save stricken dog

By Beth Bragg
Anchorage Daily News

ANCHORAGE, Alaska Reunited with the dog she had feared dead, musher Zoya DeNure said she was done with the Iditarod for a while but not done with sled dog racing.

In fact, she's planning to enter the team - minus a male named Miller - in this weekend's Chatanika 200, a mid-distance race outside Fairbanks.

"You should see them. The dogs want to run. They've been training for the Iditarod. A 200-mile race is not going to faze them," DeNure, of Gakona, Alaska, said Wednesday, the day after she scratched from the Iditarod, which started last weekend, out of concern for one of her dogs.

Miller, a male believed to be 8 years old, collapsed in harness Monday night for reasons still unclear.

DeNure couldn't find a pulse and didn't get a response when she performed mouth-to-snout resuscitation. She put the animal in her sled basket and backtracked to the previous checkpoint at Rainy Pass, her heart in her throat and tears streaming down her face.

As DeNure mushed back to Rainy Pass, her team seemed to sense her urgency.

"Our team speed was really good anyway but it felt like they knew we had to get back to Rainy Pass. They flew. They didn't even hesitate. It was like, 'Yep, Mom, we know.' They knew there was an emergency. They hurried."

Near Rainy Pass, Miller opened his eyes.

Once at the checkpoint, she carried a weak and shaking Miller inside.

"They put an IV in right away," DeNure said, and they covered the dog with blankets. For the rest of the night, Miller was weak - even after 10 hours, he was unable to walk, DeNure said.

At 6 the next morning, DeNure scratched from the race - even though, as some had reminded her, she could have dropped Miller and continued racing.

Tuesday morning, Miller was flown to Big Lake, where DeNure's husband, John Schandelmeier, waited.

"When I got him yesterday morning, he was his normal Miller self," said Schandelmeier. "The vets gave him a 100 percent clean bill of health. He's hydrated and everything's fine."

But the vets didn't advance any theories on what might have happened to Miller.

The mystery of Miller's collapse factored into DeNure's decision to quit. If the dog's problem had been diarrhea or a sore wrist or something else vets could pinpoint, dropping Miller and continuing down the trail would have been an option, she said.

"But it wasn't like that. I didn't know if he was going to make it," said DeNure, who didn't get a flight out of Rainy Pass until Wednesday, a day after Miller was flown out.

DeNure, 34, doesn't regret scratching.

"I made a good decision. I made the best decision for my dog and my dog team," she said. "I'm not going to jeopardize my dog team for a dog race. Miller's got a life, and he's going to live and be with us for a long time.

The woman who never forgets a face or a name

2011-03-02T12:02:00.004-05:00

Ever met such a person?

I have.

Her name is Sheila Solomon.

She's cross media editor at the Chicago Tribune. (That's her picture with this blog post.)

I've gotten to know Sheila over the years as a good friend of the Department of Mass Communication at Winthrop University. She happens to be in town (in Rock Hill at Winthrop this week) in connection with the 22nd edition of Mass Communication Week at our university.

Knew her before Chicago in her capacity a few years ago as a key person in the newsroom at the Daily Press in Newport News, Va.

Once she meets you, she never forgets you.

I, on the other hand, don't have such a keen memory.

What's the old saying?

When you get old, the first three things that go are your hearing, your sight (and I can't remember the last one.)

Sheila, wish I were more like you.

Descent of our language and speech into vagueness

2011-02-24T10:53:00.003-05:00

"Like, professor, I don't see, like, why my grade is a C minus. Like, man, I'm sort of on the edge here, man, with my scholarship and all. And like my parents, won't be able to send me back to college if I lose my scholarship. So, like, I can't stand a grade of C minus, professor. It's ain't like I'm a slacker..."

Okay, I invented the above student complaint, but I'll bet it's heard a lot these days on college campuses throughout America.

Somewhere along the line, vagueness (ignorance?) of expression has infected the way we communicate.

Here's a thought provoking piece by Clark Whelton on this vagueness affliction:

What Happens in Vagueness Stays in Vagueness

The decline and fall of American English, and stuff

I recently watched a television program in which a woman described a baby squirrel that she had found in her yard. “And he was like, you know, ‘Helloooo, what are you looking at?’ and stuff, and I’m like, you know, ‘Can I, like, pick you up?,’ and he goes, like, ‘Brrrp brrrp brrrp,’ and I’m like, you know, ‘Whoa, that is so wow!’ ” She rambled on, speaking in self-quotations, sound effects, and other vocabulary substitutes, punctuating her sentences with facial tics and lateral eye shifts. All the while, however, she never said anything specific about her encounter with the squirrel.

Uh-oh. It was a classic case of Vagueness, the linguistic virus that infected spoken language in the late twentieth century. Squirrel Woman sounded like a high school junior, but she appeared to be in her mid-forties, old enough to have been an early carrier of the contagion. She might even have been a college intern in the days when Vagueness emerged from the shadows of slang and mounted an all-out assault on American English.

My acquaintance with Vagueness began in the 1980s, that distant decade when Edward I. Koch was mayor of New York and I was writing his speeches. The mayor’s speechwriting staff was small, and I welcomed the chance to hire an intern. Applications arrived from NYU, Columbia, Pace, and the senior colleges of the City University of New York. I interviewed four or five candidates and was happily surprised. The students were articulate and well informed on civic affairs. Their writing samples were excellent. The young woman whom I selected was easy to train and a pleasure to work with. Everything went so well that I hired interns at every opportunity.

Then came 1985.

The first applicant was a young man from NYU. During the interview, he spiked his replies so heavily with “like” that I mentioned his frequent use of the word. He seemed confused by my comment and replied, “Well . . . like . . . yeah.” Now, nobody likes a grammar prig. All’s fair in love and language, and the American lingo is in constant motion. “You should,” for example, has been replaced by “you need to.” “No” has faded into “not really.” “I said” is now “I went.” As for “you’re welcome,” that’s long since become “no problem.” Even nasal passages are affected by fashion. Quack-talking, the rasping tones preferred by many young women today, used to be considered a misfortune.

In 1985, I thought of “like” as a trite survivor of the hippie sixties. By itself, a little slang would not have disqualified the junior from NYU. But I was surprised to hear antique argot from a communications major looking for work in a speechwriting office, where job applicants would normally showcase their language skills. I was even more surprised when the next three candidates also laced their conversation with “like.” Most troubling was a puzzling drop in the quality of their writing samples. It took six tries, but eventually I found a student every bit as good as his predecessors. Then came 1986.

As the interviews proceeded, it grew obvious that “like” had strengthened its grip on intern syntax. And something new had been added: “You know” had replaced “Ummm . . .” as the sentence filler of choice. The candidates seemed to be evading the chore of beginning new thoughts. They spoke in run-on sentences, which they padded by adding “and stuff” at the end. Their writing samples were terrible. It took eight tries to find a promising intern. In the spring of 1987 came the all-interrogative interview. I asked a candidate where she went to school.

“Columbia?” she replied. Or asked.

“And you’re majoring in . . .”

“English?”

All her answers sounded like questions. Several other students did the same thing, ending declarative sentences with an interrogative rise. Something odd was happening. Was it guerrilla grammar? Had college kids fallen under the spell of some mad guru of verbal chaos? I began taking notes and mailed a letter to William Safire at the New York Times, urging him to do a column on the devolution of coherent speech. Undergraduates, I said, seemed to be shifting the burden of communication from speaker to listener. Ambiguity, evasion, and body language, such as air quotes—using fingers as quotation marks to indicate clichés—were transforming college English into a coded sign language in which speakers worked hard to avoid saying anything definite. I called it Vagueness.

By autumn 1987, the job interviews revealed that “like” was no longer a mere slang usage. It had mutated from hip preposition into the verbal milfoil that still clogs spoken English today. Vagueness was on the march. Double-clutching (“What I said was, I said . . .”) sprang into the arena. Playbacks, in which a speaker re-creates past events by narrating both sides of a conversation (“So I’m like, ‘Want to, like, see a movie?’ And he goes, ‘No way.’ And I go . . .”), made their entrance. I was baffled by what seemed to be a reversion to the idioms of childhood. And yet intern candidates were not hesitant or uncomfortable about speaking elementary school dialects in a college-level job interview. I engaged them in conversation and gradually realized that they saw Vagueness not as slang but as mainstream English. At long last, it dawned on me: Vagueness was not a campus fad or just another generational raid on proper locution. It was a coup. Linguistic rabble had stormed the grammar palace. The principles of effective speech had gone up in flames.

In 1988, my elder daughter graduated from Vassar. During a commencement reception, I asked one of her professors if he’d noticed any change in Vassar students’ language skills. “The biggest difference,” he replied, “is that by the time today’s students arrive on campus, they’ve been juvenilized. You can hear it in the way they talk. There seems to be a reduced capacity for abstract thought.” He went on to say that immature speech patterns used to be drummed out of kids in ninth grade. “Today, whatever way kids communicate seems to be fine with their high school teachers.” Where, I wonder, did Vagueness begin? It must have originated before the 1980s. “Like” has a long and scruffy pedigree: in the 1970s, it was a mainstay of Valspeak, the frequently ridiculed but highly contagious “Valley Girl” dialect of suburban Los Angeles, and even in 1964, the film Paris When It Sizzles lampooned the word’s overuse. All the way back in 1951, Holden Caulfield spoke proto-Vagueness (“I sort of landed on my side . . . my arm sort of hurt”), complete with double-clutching (“Finally, what I decided I’d do, I decided I’d . . .”) and demonstrative adjectives used as indefinite articles (“I felt sort of hungry so I went in this drugstore . . .”).

Is Vagueness simply an unexplainable descent into nonsense? Did Vagueness begin as an antidote to the demands of political correctness in the classroom, a way of sidestepping the danger of speaking forbidden ideas? Does Vagueness offer an undereducated generation a technique for camouflaging a lack of knowledge?

In 1991, I visited the small town of Bridgton, Maine, on the evening that the residents of Cumberland County gathered to welcome their local National Guard unit home from the Gulf War. It was a stirring moment. Escorted by the lights and sirens of two dozen fire engines from surrounding towns, the soldiers marched down Main Street. I was standing near the end of the parade and looked around expectantly for a platform, podium, or microphone. But there were to be no brief remarks of commendation by a mayor or commanding officer. There was to be no pastoral prayer of thanks for the safe return of the troops. Instead, the soldiers quickly dispersed. The fire engines rumbled away. The crowd went home. A few minutes later, Main Street stood empty.

Apparently there was, like, nothing to say.

Clark Whelton was a speechwriter for New York City mayors Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani.

chest compressions

2011-02-24T10:31:00.001-05:00

My students' slideshows

2011-02-19T07:36:00.003-05:00

Students in two of my courses last semester created multimedia projects. Here are links to three of the better ones. The links are from Christina Wiselthaler, Chelsea Nelson and Anna Douglas. Thanks to all three of these students for letting me post their work on my blog.

Christina's link

Another Christina link

Chelsea's link

Anna's link

The Time of My Life

2011-02-10T21:40:00.004-05:00

74 million views/listens?

Not possible?!!

But it is with the final dance in the movie "Dirty Dancing."

Click here to see what 74 million others (almost) have been enjoying, again and again and again...

Baby and Johnny definitely find the groove out there on the dance floor.

Makes a guy want to move about...

Our student newspaper at Winthrop University

2011-02-10T14:57:00.005-05:00

Here's a note I wrote today to the Dean of Students at Winthrop University; I copied it to Anna Douglas, editor of The Johnsonian (student newspaper at Winthrop) and Tiffany Barkley, managing editor. Posting it here because too often people are quick to criticize student journalism. We don't say enough about the positive side...

It's a great country we live in, folks, and reading The Johnsonian today reminds me of that.

We have the freedom to say and write just about anything (long as we make a good-faith effort to be truthful, responsible, fair and ethical).

We can call President Obama a jerk.

We can say that the Carolina Panthers are a disgrace to the Carolinas.

We can say that we didn't learn a danged thing from that course or instructor in the Department of .....

The lowliest student can have her say about the most powerful and richest (and sometimes most feared) people at our university.

It's all about First Amendment freedoms. As you know, people don't have that kind of freedom in North Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Libya, the People's Republic of China, or Egypt.

In today's Johnsonian, we get a rich diversity, a veritable tapestry if you will, of ideas and information that help signify that students and others at Winthrop are thinking, acting, imagining, dreaming, projecting...

Examples:

--On page 1, we read an excellent piece (by Claire Byun) about WU HIV and AIDS and an engaging story (by Jonathan McFadden) about something called a "carrot bike rack." On that same page, the tireless David Thackham makes sure the women's basketball team gets their due.

--On page 2, in the police blotter, we have the makings of an intriguing novella about drugs and alcohol

--Monica Kreber's story about locals coming to our news campus center hits the mark. (Nice job on this piece, Monica.)

--On page 5, the never-to-be-muzzled Connor de Bruler rants about how American culture/society seems to be hypocrytical about certain drugs or abusive substances. On that same page, we have one of the most powerful testimonials--from the courageous Ms. Schallhorn--that I've ever read. And in the bottom right corner of that page, we have a potentially controversial photo illustration of a parking space (two spaces?).

--Amanda Phipps educates all of us about HIV/AIDS in her informative story on pg. 6.

--More strong human interest comes through on pg. 7 with Jessica Pickens' excellent piece about Haney Howell. (Pickens learned a lot this summer in Shelby, N.C., at her internship. You go, Jessica!)

--The Winthrop As a Movie feature on pg. 8 always draws 'em in!

--We get the lowdown on WU sports from Hannah Schwartz, Jeff Brodeur,, Devonne Good and David Thackham.

--Sarah MacDonald pounds the pavement and brings in the ad revenue. (We love the money, Sarah!)

--Devang Joshi does his thing with our online edition. (No one does it better than Devang.)

--Plodding along, faithfully, behind the scenes as copyeditors are Brittany Guilfoyle and Brantley McCants.

It's a wonderfully free, widely roaming, diverse, rambunctious thing that's created every week by about 10 or so committed students. Anna Douglas keeps the train on the tracks. The multi-skilled Tiffany Barkley is always around just in case, and she's there to help anyone and everyone.

They don't do it for the money. It's about passion and love and freedom.

We call what they do The Johnsonian.

It's our student newspaper.

It's free and rambunctious and diverse.

Always let it be so.

Sincerely,

Larry Timbs
Faculty Adviser
The Johnsonian

Grammar challenge

2011-02-10T13:37:00.008-05:00

Consider the following:

1. A story in today's edition of The (Rock Hill) Herald quoted a woman as saying: "It came with the picture. I didn't write nothing."

Later, in that same story, the same person says: "I've never had nothing on my record."

2. In a separate story, also appearing in today's edition of The Herald, a five-term S.C. state senator from Charleston rants: "I didn't mean to hurt nobody--nobody."

Both stories touch a sensitive nerve. They're both about accusations of racism.

But notwithstanding those accusations, what's wrong with the above quoted sentences? What big grammatical rule is violated?

Respond to this blog post by clicking on the "Comment" link below. Any grammarians out there in the blogosphere?

Michael Jackson

2011-02-10T11:44:00.002-05:00

Jackson, this post's for you.

Thanks for keeping me on my toes.

Thanks for your companionship. You're my very best friend.

I saw a license tag holder on a car at Winthrop yesterday that read: "My Bichon Frise is smarter than your honor student."

You are smart and playful.

You are spoiled.

And you are mine.

Michael Jackson (so named because I got you as an eight-week old pup the day that the King of Pop died), you are the best.

Best singer and voice in history?

2011-02-08T21:57:00.005-05:00

The woman is Celine Dion.

The song is: "My Heart Will Go On" (theme song for the movie "Titanic")

30 million views and listens on You Tube!

Incomparably beautiful and memorable.

Click here and have a listen.

(Move over, Lady Antebellum.)

You're good, but not Celine good.

(If you want to hear/see the movie version of the song, meshed with scenes from "Titanic," click here.)

Lest we forget what happened 50 yrs. ago in Rock Hill, S.C.

2011-01-23T20:56:00.015-05:00

Here’s a story I’ve just completed helping commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Friendship Nine (“Jail/No Bail”) civil rights sit-in at McCrory’s Five & Dime Store in Rock Hill S.C.

Thanks very much to the following people for providing information to me for this piece: Marshall Doswell, David Boone, Melford Wilson, Bessie Moody-Lawrence, and W.T. "Dub" Massey.

It’s a new and exciting era in February 2011 in Rock Hill and York County—one open with all sorts of possibilities and opportunities.

And while things aren’t perfect if you’re a person of color, they could be much worse.

Flash back, for example, 50 years ago to that day in early 1961 when 10 young African-Americans (students from Friendship Junior College in Rock Hill) politely but firmly stood their ground at the then-segregated McCrory’s lunch counter on Main Street. When they refused to budge from that eating place after management would not serve them their orders of sandwiches and soft drinks, police arrested them on charges of breach of peace and trespassing.

The 10 civil rights activists were David Williamson Jr., Willie McCleod, John Gaines, Thomas Gaither, Clarence Graham, W.T "Dub" Massey, James Wells, Mack Workman, Charles Taylor and Robert McCullough. McCullough is deceased.

One of the students, Taylor, paid the $100 fine and returned to school. But the other nine suffered 30 days of hard labor, on the chain gang, at the county jail.

The nine students reasoned that their cause for human rights would draw more attention if they did time in jail.

Let those so-called Christian folks who handcuffed us and hauled us off to the chain gang feel guilty about what they’ve done when they go home to their soft beds and cozy homes.

The students also knew that the white power structure of that era had but so much time and money to deal with those who would challenge the status quo of the Jim Crow South.

How many black people, after all, can your stinkin, filthy jails hold?

Turns out, the young men were right. A movement gained traction. Thousands more brave (but nonviolent) black students joined the cause, sitting in at lunch counters across the South. They went to jail instead of bowing to the status quo of not being served in whites-only eating places.

Historians have said the national news media’s spotlighting of the “jail, no bail” strategy sparked a tipping point in the shaping of American public opinion in favor of the black protestors.

But if you believe all this happened in the blink of an eye in Rock Hill or elsewhere, you’d be mistaken.

The struggle for human rights—for an America where blacks and whites are treated the same and have the same opportunities for a quality life--was long, arduous and sometimes ugly.

And even today in Rock Hill and the rest of the South, some would say the struggle continues.

Yes, America has a black man as president and many African-Americans in key leadership positions in industry, business, education and the military. But in 2011 unemployment and prison incarceration rates and infant mortalities among blacks are much higher than those for whites. (In South Carolina, for example, a state that is about one-third black, 69 percent of the prison population is black. And in black inner-city neighborhoods throughout the U.S., the unemployment rate for blacks is about twice that for whites.) Another dismaying statistic: blacks in the U.S. earn only about 58 percent of what whites get paid, and the percentage of people of color in America living below the poverty line is much higher than that for whites.

On the other hand, if you compare the racial climate in Rock Hill of 2011 to that of 1961, our community has made giant strides.

An old newspaperman reflects on Rock Hill’s rocky past
Marshall Doswell, long-time retired associate editor of the Evening Herald newspaper in Rock Hill, noted how far we’ve come when he spoke in January 2007 at a plaque dedication ceremony honoring the Friendship Nine students.

There were actually two Rock Hills of 50 years ago, according to Doswell, now 89: one for blacks and one for white people.

“Three fourths of the people where white. They ran things,” Doswell recalled at that dedication ceremony. “The city council was white. The city administration was white. The police department was white. The fire department was white. The school board was white. The school administrators where white. The downtown business section was white. . . The Evening Herald where I worked was white, except for the press crew.

“And then there were the black people, the other fourth of the population. They had their own churches and their own neighborhoods. The black children went to all black schools. Their school buildings were not as nice. The jobs available to black people were at the low end of the scale. Black people could be maids, or servants, or janitors, or garbage collectors, or handymen. In the textile mills they could be sweepers or muscle heavy cotton bales. They could not have the better jobs. Because of that, most of them could not afford cars.

“Black people could not eat in white restaurants, or at white lunch counters,” Doswell added. “They could not stay in white hotels or motels. There were separate waiting rooms for whites and blacks in train stations and bus stations and even doctor’s offices. Blacks could not use white water fountains, or white rest rooms. . . On buses, blacks were required to sit in the back seats. They could not sit in front of white people, or beside white people. . . They were not allowed to sit in white churches.”

Doswell went on later in his speech four years ago to describe how positive social and cultural change had come to Rock Hill by 2007. Four years ago, for example, many of our area teachers, coaches, principals and school administrators, including school board members, were black. That trend continues today. (Maybe not a sufficient percentage number of our role models and professionals today are persons of color, but in Rock Hill and York County we’re getting there.) Our current police chief is black, as are many of our police officers and firefighters. And at Winthrop University, where I teach journalism and where for many decades the white flower maidens of the South (and only the white ones, mind you) came to learn the finer points of being homemakers and school teachers, the student body in 2011 is about 27 percent black. In fact, I had a class of about 10 students a few semesters ago, where I was the only white person in the room.

But again, all this progress toward positive social and cultural change for black people in Rock Hill didn’t happen over night.

Not by a long shot.

And to say the struggle, in 2011, for equal opportunity and a quality life for black people is over, is to miss the point completely.

David Boone kept helping folks despite KKK threats
There’s still work to be done, according to Brother David Boone, a member for the past 60 years of The Oratory in Rock Hill, a congregation of priests and brothers who serve the spiritual needs of York Countians.

Boone, 78, was smack dab in the middle of the touch and go civil rights struggle in Rock Hill and York County a half-century ago. In an era of the pinnacle of power of the White Citizens Council and the KKK, he befriended and supported folks in our black community at that time (and still does today), administering sacraments to them, working with them on marriage preparations and assisting with their religious education. Boone also helps out in a local soup kitchen which feeds 80-120 people a day.

“The young blacks of today cannot imagine why the blacks of those days (50 years ago) put up with so much and had so much against them,” he said.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s in Rock Hill, Boone, who had been threatened by the Ku Klux Klan, co-chaired a local effort for voter registration.

He is described in the 2002 book “The Good Town Does Well: Rock Hill, S.C., 1852-2002,” by Lynn Willoughby as “probably more respected by the black community at that time than any other white man.”

The soft-spoken, gentle Boone is self-deprecating when you ask him today about those KKK threats of long ago:

“Luckily, I was protected by a wall (The Oratory) that they couldn’t reach over,” he said. “And I never took phone calls. Someone always took my phone calls for me. Very rarely did I get a taste of their venom.”

Despite the huge strides that black folks have made over the past 50 years in Rock Hill, Boone says that by no means are things perfect. He notes, for example, that today’s unemployment rate for black males is way too high “and the drug trade is very rampant today in the black community because it’s a way of income, and unfortunately with drugs, comes violence…”

As to the local press coverage of half a century ago—namely coverage by the Evening Herald (now The Herald)—Boone gives the paper a grade of “B”:

“I wished they had been more on our side, but I understand. They would have lost their customers (white readers and advertisers) like mad.”

Boone hints that in some ways Rock Hill’s dominant local newspaper—its only local paper of that era (the Evening Herald)—was out of its comfort zone in trying to cover civil rights.

“They (the newspaper) would call us to their office in those days. Why didn’t they come to us in our locale and talk to us? . . . I remember going there two or three times to the newspaper office.

He attributes this distancing of newspaper from its sources to an element of distrust or perhaps uneasiness with the unknown or unfamiliar: “All their writers were white, and it could have been a combination of several things—fear, not knowing the right thing to do and not being sensitive to the people.”

To better understand and appreciate the Evening Herald’s coverage of those tumultuous years in Rock Hill, you have to hearken back to the Chicago native who had bought the paper in 1948. His name was Talbott Patrick, and the Evening Herald (today The Herald) would stay in the Patrick family till 1985 when it was sold to the News & Observer Co. of Raleigh, N.C. (In 1990, the paper was again sold—this time to the McClatchy Co., the second largest newspaper company in the U.S.)

Melford Wilson: Rock Hill’s hometown newspaper owner was one of a kind
Patrick, by all accounts, put out a pretty good community newspaper—one with a reputation for being more moderate and progressive than most newspapers of its size in South Carolina.

He was also a character, a cosmopolitanite, a savvy businessman and schmoozer, rubbing shoulders with bank presidents, wealthy elites and community leaders, but never a racist, according to Melford Wilson, 71, retired vice president for academic affairs at Winthrop University. Wilson, a resident of Rock Hill for 44 years, remembered “old man (Talbott) Patrick” as being “full of stories.”

“He had traveled everywhere and done everything,” said Wilson, who served on the Rock Hill City Council from 1978-1984. “We were two of the few people in Rock Hill who had ever been in Afghanistan. . . We sort of hit it off.

“Talbott Patrick wouldn’t have fit in as far as most places of the South. He was moderate and he was really a man of the world. He had been everywhere. . . He had some a..holes as reporters, and he loved to give the city hell, but he wasn’t racist.”

A similar portrait of Evening Herald owner Patrick, and the direction he set for his newspaper, emerges from a recent interview with his retired associate editor Marshall Doswell, who came on board at the newspaper in 1957 after having worked for the Associated Press in Chicago for seven years. (Doswell, a World War II veteran, would work at the Evening Herald for five and half years before stepping down to take a job at Springs where he stayed for another 25 years.)

At the Evening Herald, Doswell says the owner’s philosophy was to report the news but to do so in a way that did not inflame the public. “You have to stay a half step ahead of them (the public) and try to nudge public opinion along, he would say,” Doswell remembers. “Better to go that direction than to have a frontal assault.”

And so Rock Hill’s only local newspaper, which back then had a circulation of about 14,500 and had 14 people in its newsroom (all of them white), took a careful, measured course throughout those turbulent years of the late 1950s and early 1960s in Rock Hill.

“We did the best we could do to be non-inflammatory,” said Doswell. “We tried to play it straight down the middle. . . And I think we did it about right. Probably if we had it to do over again, I’d want us to take a stronger editorial stance than we did. But the community understood we were on the liberal side of the middle of the road . . . and we were not pushing it. Mr. Patrick said if we pushed too hard, we would wind up with what they had going on in Mississippi and Alabama, and we didn’t want that.”

With all the attention and accolades focused in recent years on the heroics in 1961 of the Friendship Nine, Doswell says folks shouldn’t also forget that many others helped pave the way for the bold actions of the students who sat in at the McCrory’s lunch counter.

He says the racial movement and protests for equality in Rock Hill started in the mid 1950s, for example, and culminated at that McCrory’s lunch counter.

“…the Friendship Nine event was important,” Doswell wrote in a letter to the author of this story. “Those young men had a sense of commitment and the courage to back that up by risking violent reprisal and then by refusal to take the easy way out. They chose jail instead of bail. They deserve a lot of credit for that.

“But I think it’s important to remember that the Friendship Nine event was the culmination of years of demonstrated courage, patience and persistence. There were earlier sit-down events and arrests. There were years of marches from Friendship Junior College to downtown Rock Hill and return.”

Doswell said the protestors would march from the college’s campus down Main Street and then to the Andrew Jackson Hotel. “Then, they’d go back to the campus. They did this day after day. . . It became a fairly common occurrence. Interspersed with that, you would see the KKK in their white regalia and with their burning crosses outside of town.”

He also recalls that there were years of a bus boycott in Rock Hill.

“Hundreds of young blacks and scores of adult black leaders made a contribution to the cause of tenacity, dignity and perseverance,” Doswell wrote. “So a lot of people should be recognized, including the white majority who slowly accepted important social change. They didn’t press for it, but they did accept it and they wanted no part of the violence and ugly slurs of some whites. Most whites understood that it was long past time for change. Their quite acceptance helped make it take place.”

Doswell also remembers that at the height of the sit-ins here, big media companies—the New York Times and the Associated Press—converged on Rock Hill.

“I remember telling a guy from the Times, ‘You ought to pay attention that this is a city of about 30 thousand people. About 300 of them are downtown. The rest of them are at their homes or at work…’”

By the late 1960s and on in to the early 1970s, when Melford Wilson had taken up residence in Rock Hill and began teaching at Winthrop, Rock Hill’s racial climate had improved. That happened in part because of the “excellent black and white leaders in Rock Hill who really put the good of the city above everything else,” said Wilson, who became the first chair of the Rock Hill Economic Development Corporation in the 1980s.

Wilson gives former Winthrop President Charlie Davis credit for making the campus, still all female in the 1960s, more diverse. “He wrote a letter to each one of the black females who were members of the two big honor societies in high school--one was the Beta Club and the other was the National Honor Society—inviting them to apply to Winthrop,” Wilson recalls. “We got outstanding black students. Nobody could say we were lowering standards or anything like that.”

To this day, according to Wilson, who teaches part time at Winthrop, what Davis started has carried over. “We have some of the best black students anywhere,” he said.

When those black students arrived at Winthrop, they found themselves living in a southern community that had already been through some growing pains of integration; the town by then had become gradually accustomed to assimilating people of all races.

Perhaps that accommodation stemmed partly from the fact that Rock Hill had never been the scene of the heated civil rights trauma that beset places like Birmingham or Selma or Philadelphia, Mississippi.

“There was not a hostility in Rock Hill (in the late 50s or early 60s),” Wilson remembers. “I had come here for family funerals and things like that and brought Momma around.

“One of the sayings people always said was: ‘If you want to know who a good man is, it’s somebody who blacks come to his funeral.’”

But why was Rock Hill generally spared the racial violence that rocked other towns in the South?

It might have had something to do with “there never being a strong plantation mentality around here,” Wilson opines. “The blacks who moved to town moved in from the North to work in the mills. . . And I don’t remember people in Rock Hill calling people by any derogatory terms. When I visited friends living in Sumter or Darlington or places like that, it was N this and N that. Here you just didn’t hear that.”

When Wilson served on the Rock Hill City Council, he also saw evidence of the city’s progressive, inclusive attitude. Despite the availability of federal money for public housing, some other towns in South Carolina declined to apply for it, because of the integration required for such housing.

But not Rock Hill.

“I think Rock Hill was forward thinking,” Wilson said. “It really was. If there was government money out there, Rock Hill didn’t let race stop us from applying for it. We applied for every damn penney we could get.”

Bessie Moody-Lawrence: “We need not to forget our history.”
One well-known and respected African-American Rock Hillian who was born in 1941 and grew up in a segregated society in the 1950s is Bessie Moody-Lawrence. She is a former public school teacher and retired education professor at Winthrop who served 16 years in the S.C. General Assembly representing York County District 49 as a Democrat.

Moody-Lawrence, whose daughter Leah is a member of the University of South Carolina Board of Trustees, remembers the separate water fountains for blacks and whites, the separate seating on buses, and going to the back of the line at stores.

And when she headed off from the bus station in Chester to school at S.C. State University, she remembers that she and her big trunk “packed with all my things” had to go to the back of the bus.

She credits groups like the Friendship Nine with changing the social and cultural landscape in America.

“The public accommodations came about because of the sit-ins,” said Moody-Lawrence, only the third black person to serve in S.C. House District 49 in the General Assembly. “Life changed because of that. Children today have to realize that it wasn’t so long ago that we didn’t have access to public accommodations. . . I lived as a child in a segregated society and into integration. But I’m not bitter. I think we need not to forget our history. We need to celebrate our history.”

W.T. "Dub" Massey: “We knew we were doing the right thing.”
And then there’s short (in stature) but big in heart Dub Massey, 68 today but barely 18 when he and his fellow Friendship Junior College students sat themselves down on those bar stools at McCrory’s Five & Dime Store (now the Old Town Bistro) on Rock Hill’s Main Street in February 1961.

Massey, after that historic sit-in and jailing, would be drafted into the U.S. Army. Then he’d earn his bachelor’s degree from Johnson C. Smith University and would pick up a master’s in counseling and education specialty degree in administration from Winthrop.

Married to the former Joyce Goode for the past 43 years, Dub retired as a guidance counselor at York Comprehensive High School in 1995 after 28 years working in S.C. public schools and two years of service in the military.

Today, you’ll find the 2004-heart-attack survivor father of two children still at it (as an instructional assistant) with kids at Hunter Street Elementary School in York.

The double-bypass open-heart surgery survivor keeps busy, too, with his duties as associate minister at Langrum Branch Baptist Church in York.

But flash back briefly to the early 1960s. A passage in Lynn Willoughby’s book “The Good Town Does Well: Rock Hill, S.C., 1852-2002” recounts how Massey seems to have had a close encounter with death—all for the sake of the civil rights struggle:

“…once when Dub Massey led ten people to sit at a lunch counter, the owner exploded in rage,” Willoughby writes. “‘You better get out of my place. This is my livelihood, and you’re destroying my family,’ he yelled at them. Massey replied that they were not there to destroy him, only to give him some business and if he would just serve them, there would not have to be any conflict. The white man grabbed a pistol and held it to Massey’s temple.

“‘If you don’t leave, I’m going to blow your brains out,’ he told him. Massey replied respectfully that they were not leaving, at which time the white man called for somebody to ‘get the cops, get the police. Get ‘em out of here before I kill ‘em all.’”

Massey says today that the event chronicled in Willoughby’s book did indeed happen but not at McCrory’s. He thinks it occurred across the street, either at what was then Smith’s Drugs or Tollison and Neal.

“We did these sit-ins daily. We came down here several times a week,” he said, recalling that the students with him that particular day were all young ladies from Friendship College.

So Massey has a gun to his head. The white racist manager or owner has his finger on the trigger. The man with the gun is angry, fidgety.

Was little Dub Massey afraid?

“I didn’t think about fear,” said Massey, interviewed recently for this story at a booth in the Old Town Bistro (formerly McCrory’s) just a few feet from a bar stool that has his name engraved on the back of it. “I thought about my responsibility as a line leader. I was responsible for them (the young women). My intent was to make him back off. . . We came there to eat. But at a certain point—it might have been in about 15 minutes--I said, ‘Let’s go.’”

The ordained Baptist minster says young blacks of today (2011) aren’t informed about what civil rights struggles occurred in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It’s as if, he says, that youngsters think their rights occurred through osmosis.

“To them, progress would be made racially without anything that we did in the past,” he said. “That’s pretty much their opinion. I say that because I work with them. I know their thinking. . . They know but it really doesn’t matter. . . Whatever will happen will happen. They have no clue about the sacrifices that were made. . . The only things they’re concerned about is, just like my son, his automobile and his mode of transportation. They’re just out of the loop completely.”

Larry Timbs is an associate professor in the Department of Mass Communication at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, S.C.

Recent blog post published in local newspaper

2011-01-16T12:47:00.002-05:00

Got an article published in yesterday's edition of The (Rock Hill) Herald.

Click here to read it.

Barack Obama shows his statesmanship in Tucson

2011-01-13T14:14:00.007-05:00

Okay, full disclosure, folks.

I did not vote for Barack Obama for president.

I went with John McCain.

But right now, I believe America's in good hands because we have Mr. Obama as our leader.

I heard and saw his speech last night that he gave honoring the victims and survivors of the recent tragedy in Tucson, Ariz.

I always knew Barack Obama was a gifted orator, but his remarks last night had the 14,000 people in the live audience at the University of Arizona in tears more than once.

Were I on his staff, I'd walk through fire for the man.

If you missed his speech last night, turn up your sound here and have a listen and look at this link.

Historic, emotional and straight from the heart and intellect of a man who knows, as he put it, that "all our hearts are broken."

Mid-way through his speech, he had this to say about the Arizona congresswoman shot through the head and who is now battling for her life in the intensive care unit of a Tucson hospital:

"I have come from the medical center just a mile from here where our friend fights courageously to recover even as we speak. And I want to tell you: her husband Mark is here and he allows me to share this with you. Right after we went to visit...Gabby opened her eyes for the first time. Gabby opened her eyes for the first time. Gabby opened her eyes. So I can tell you she knows we are here. She knows we love her, and she knows we are rooting for her throughout what undoubtedly is going to be a difficult journey. We are there for her."

Take in President Obama's entire speech at this link.

Encounter with journalistic ethics

2011-01-05T17:01:00.004-05:00

From time to time, I'm asked to share with my students or colleagues situations I've been in that required me to exercise good judgment with regard to the ethics of journalism.

Here's one such situation that came to mind yesterday when I looked back (okay, way, way back) on my early years working professionally in community journalism.

This happened to me in 1979 or 1980. Can’t remember the exact year but one of those, I believe.

I was general manager/editor of a twice-a-week 8K-circulation community newspaper in rural south-central Illinois.

I had heard about a physician in the local community who faithfully and rigorously jogged every day for exercise. He was pretty well known and respected, as I recall, and seemed to be in excellent health. He regularly ran marathons (26+ miles).

What really got my attention as a journalist/editor was when this same physician suddenly had a massive heart attack. In those days, as I recall, it was believed that someone who ran marathons was immune to having a heart attack.

So, again, my journalistic antenna went up when this well-known paragon of fitness physician had to transported by ambulance to St. Louis for life saving heart surgery.

He survived the surgery and returned a few weeks later to his practice in the town where we circulated our newspaper.

I called him and asked if he would consent to being interviewed about what he had been through, and explained to him that my story angle would be that he had proven the exception to the commonly held belief that you-can’t-have-a-heart-attack-if-you-run-a-marathon.

He agreed to talking with me for the record.

After I had written my story and a day or so before we went to press, he called me and asked politely if he could review the story before it was published.

Trying to contain my frustration, I politely explained that we had a firm policy at the paper again pre-publication review and that he had nothing to worry about. I assured him that I would be accurate and ethical and that the story would generally be an upbeat piece about how he had survived a heart attack.

But he still insisted on reviewing my story before it was published.

Again, I resisted, but again he pressed me for giving him the chance to look over what I had written.

“You know, Larry,” I agreed to talk to you when you contacted me. “Seems like you could extend this one courtesy to me,” he said. “If not, I won’t ever have anything to do with your newspaper again.”

I told him I’d consider his request.

You know what?

After a sleepless night, I ended up the next morning inviting him to come to my office to read the story before I submitted it for publication.

The guy came. I handed him the story. He retreated to my office, spent about 15 minutes in there with the story and exited with a smile and a handshake. He thanked me for doing a very good job.

I recall that he changed only one minor word of what I had written.

In retrospect, yes, I had violated our paper’s prohibition against pre-publication review.

But I had also gained.

I had cultivated and maintained a contact with an excellent source of information in our community--one that the newspaper would rely upon many times in the future, as it turned out.

Bottom line: In a small community, you as an editor or journalist should try never to burn a bridge or alienate a valuable source.

Even if it means you have to adjust your ethics.

In a singing mood tonight

2011-01-04T20:26:00.007-05:00

YouTube video for Haiti uplifts, inspires

2010-12-27T18:35:00.002-05:00

A friend just sent me this video titled "We are the World 25 for Haiti."

It seems to have been created by ordinary people with a song in their soul and humanity in their heart.

This one really moved me.

Turn up your sound and click here to take it all in.

Wirelessness has birds chirping

2010-12-23T21:02:00.004-05:00

This picture, sent to me by my son-in-law, says a lot about the age we find ourselves living in. Click anywhere on the photo to see more clearly what the birds are saying.

So you want to be a journalist?

2010-12-14T19:45:00.002-05:00

Dream of working for the New York Times, reputedly the world's best newspaper?

Turn your sound up and get the real skinny on what it takes to get there. Click on this link.

Sentimentalizing the trough where Jesus was born

2010-12-13T16:55:00.007-05:00

We all know the words to that timeless Christmas song.

It goes something like this.

"Away in a manger, no crib for a bed,

"The little Lord Jesus lay down his sweet head..."

But how many of us have given a second thought, or even a real first thought, to what that manger some 2000+ years ago was really like?

Mike Lowery, pastor of Impact Community Church in Rock Hill, S.C., reminded everyone yesterday in his sermon that we've sentimentalized the trough (where Jesus came screaming and crying into the world) as a manger. (That's Mike's picture with this blog post.)

"Jesus came into this world in the stench of animals. He was born in a trough where animals were fed," Lowery boldly proclaimed.

Next time you hear that classic Christmas song, ask those singing it to define a manger.

Bet they'll be scratching their heads.

But why was the Son of God born in a trough--of all lowly and filthy things?

And why did he come as a baby?

Why not ride into the world on a thunderbolt or announce his grand coming in the clouds or glide down to earth off the arch of a rainbow?

God, incarnate in Jesus Christ, became a tender, helpless baby born in an animal trough, according to Lowery, because he wanted to be like a humble servant. He wanted to get as close as he could to ordinary people. And that meant becoming a human being and living on earth among lowly shepherds.

No thunderbolts or loud booms announcing his arrival in the world.

No singing or rejoicing of angels.

Jesus planned his "debut" this way, and, as it turned out, humility defined his entire 33 years of living.

He was born (in the most unlikely of circumstances) in a smelly animal trough, walked softly and wisely among us for a short time, and died horribly and painfully on an old rugged cross.

"Away in a manger, no crib for a bed, the little Lord Jesus, lay down his sweet head..."

Click here to hear this beautiful song.

Elizabeth Edwards, the Tin Man and yours truly

2010-12-09T15:57:00.004-05:00

What do Elizabeth Edwards, the Tin Man (from the Wizard of Oz) and yours truly have in common?

We've all confronted our own mortality.

Elizabeth with her breast cancer (and sad to say it finally did her in a couple days ago.)

The Tin Man with his hollow chest cavity and long, fervent wish to find a heart.

And me with my weak, out-of-rhythm beating heart.

Let's see: If I only had a healthy heart I could stay young and chipper.

As the Tin Man sang it: "I'd be tender. I'd be gentle. And awful sentimental. . .regarding love and art. I'd be friends with the sparrows and the boy who shoots the arrows, if I only had a heart."

Oh, but to be strong and healthy once again.

If I only had a healthy heart...

You already have one? You're lucky and blessed.

The path to righteousness can take many turns...

2010-11-30T11:55:00.005-05:00

Religion might be the touchiest subject ever.

But that’s what we’ve been wrestling with recently in one of my courses at Winthrop University.

The students in that class—88% of them Christian, 71% of them female, 56% of them black and 87% of them under the age of 26—read and discussed an article titled “Religious Diversity” that asserts, “In our complex world, we cannot affirm conscientiously one particular religious perspective and merely ignore the others.”

Furthermore, according to the article, being a Christian does not mean that you commit yourself to the view that all other religions are completely wrong.

Reminds me of Joe, an old grizzled mountain man I had a brief but memorable conversation with about 10 years ago in east Tennessee.

I can still see Joe in my mind’s eye in that rocking chair one Wednesday evening on the porch of an assisted living home where he lived out his last days.

That particular evening, he wore overalls, a clean collared shirt and a white ball cap emblazoned with bright orange “UT” letters.

Sickly and weak but in good spirits, Joe seemed to be waiting to be picked up.

“Who you waitin’ for tonight, Joe?” I asked him.

“For the church van or car,” Joe said, spitting a chew of ‘baccer.

I asked him which church he’d be visiting that evening.

“It don’t make no difference, Larry,” he responded, not missing a beat. “I’ll just hop on the first van that comes by. We’re all trying to get to the same place.”

The words “We’re all trying to get to the same place” still resonate.

Joe truly understood the notion of religious diversity or the idea that no single religion or faith is THE WAY AND THE ONLY WAY TO SALVATION OR ETERNAL LIFE.

Some people in my own family don’t quite yet buy into that notion.

“Your grandmother would be turning over in her grave if she knew you had jined the Baptists,” one of my parents counseled me when I began attending worship services at a Baptist church in Tennessee.

(And I’m quoting her correctly; she said “jined,” not “joined.”)

Well, I guess old thought patterns and traditions are hard to let go of, especially when it comes to our relationship with God. We are shaped from an early age by our parents, our friends, mentors, the media, the culture…you name it.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean, in my opinion, that one person’s truth or faith is THE ONLY PATH TO RIGHTEOUSNESS AND SUPERNATURAL GRACE.

Tell that to my elderly aunt.

This past summer, I visited a freewill Baptist church near where my parents live in Tennessee.

The service struck me as extraordinary. For one thing, people packed themselves into that sanctuary. Every pew, every seat (and then some) had someone in it. In fact, the pews were overflowing with people—so much so, that they had to cart in extra chairs, which they sat up in the aisles, for people to crowd into.

When the minister spoke, people truly seemed to be listening (and even taking notes.)

He had something to say, and he said it well.

No nodding or dozing off in that church. No doodling or clock watching.

The congregation obviously loved and respected their minister very much, and I could see why.

They guy was and is good. He has them in the palms of his hands. He’s authentic and has a gift for getting the message across so that everyone understands and appreciates it and can apply it do their daily lives.

Later, when I reported at our Sunday lunch at my parents’ home what I had experienced, and how inspired I had been by that minister and his flock, my aunt listened carefully.

Then she said this: “Well, that’s all fine and well, but there’s only one thing wrong.”

“What’s that?” I wondered.

“They’re freewillers!” she blurted.

Her mind is set and that’s just the way it is and will always be.

I suspect my beloved aunt is not alone in that respect.

However, I digress.

Here’s a summary of how students in the above-mentioned college course responded to a survey of their religious beliefs and faiths. (17 students were in class that particular day and completed the survey).

Key findings:

•77% of them said they had already had a religious initiation ceremony such as a baptism, christening, circumcision, confirmation or bar mitzvah.

•88% said that when they died, they expected to have a religious funeral or service.

•53% reported that they attend religious services once a week, while 24% said they rarely or hardly ever attend such services.

•47% said that they, as human beings, had “definitely not” developed from earlier species of animals, while 30% said that they “probably” or “definitely” developed from such species.

•94% said that there is definitely a personal God, while only 6% said there is no such thing.

•71% said that they think it’s essential to have an established church or synagogue to regularly attend or be a member of for them to be walking the right path with God.

•Only 20% reported having read the entire Bible, and almost a quarter of the class (22%) said they rarely or never read the Bible.

The survey also asked them to rank what is more important—our faith, or our actions—when it comes to living a Godly life. 63% said faith; 32% said our actions.

•41% of those responding to the survey said they believed in capital punishment, while 24% gave it a thumbs down, and 35% couldn’t make up their minds.

•Likewise, 50% of those responding to the survey believed in a woman’s right to have an abortion, while 28% said no, and 22% couldn’t make up their minds.

Draw your own conclusions on what all this means or what it says about our millennial generation of college students and what they believe in.

I know one thing.

Religion will always be a ticklish, hypersensitive subject.

Let the conversation continue.

Lady Antebellum

2010-11-22T21:57:00.003-05:00

"It's a quarter after one and I'm a little drunk and I need you now."

(Line from Lady Antebellum's beautiful country and western song.)

Click here to take it in.

Quote of the week

2010-11-19T12:37:00.000-05:00

“One time this guy insisted on small talk while he was drawing me. Doesn’t sound too odd until you remember that I am butt naked, holding poses, and the last thing I want to do is tell you why I chose Mass Communication as a major.”

Source: Student quoted in article (about models at Winthrop getting paid for posing for artists). Article written by Jessica Pickens appeared in The Johnsonian (student newspaper at Winthrop University) on Nov. 18, 2010.

Hint fiction

2010-11-17T22:51:00.008-05:00

A few days ago I heard an intriguing program on NPR about a genre of writing called "hint fiction."

Hint fiction is a story of 25 words or fewer that suggests a larger, more complex story.

Here are a few examples:

1. He had told her it was a treat, yeah, but it was her own damned fault for assuming the gooey middle would be marshmallow.—By Robert Swartwood

2. Before he could say that he had a bad taste in his mouth the poison went straight to his heart. (unknown author)

3. The blood, he later learned, wasn’t so much the issue as was the Band-Aid. (unknown author)

4. All I know about the Borders—the grandmother, the father, mother, Ellie the oldest, Josh and Jack the twins, and Evelyn, the baby—is that one after another they shared their bathwater.—by Randall Brown

5. As he lay there coughing and flush with fever, Jesse thought back to better, more hopeful days—before the outbreak found its way through humankind—and he smiled one last time.--by Steven Seighman

Okay, I'll give it a try:

6. Numbed and aggravated by what he had heard and angry at himself for getting into this situation, he forced himself to remain sitting there in the conference room.

7. Certified blue-blood members of the power structure, they boisterously claimed, as they always did, that they believed in freedom of expression, but when push came to shove it was quite a different story.

8. As he held her head back so that she could vomit more freely and easily--if that's possible--he thought about what it was really like to love, unconditionally, another person.

9. He had trusted and loved her, but she had never, ever believed that in her heart--even when he ravished her and satisfied her completely as no man had ever done with her in bed; instead, she despised him.

10. He looked at the dog, and it stared unflinchingly back at him for the longest time, as if dog and man were locked together in some sort of gauzy dream.

Hint fiction.

Do you dig it? Can you write it?

Michael Jackson gets a car seat

2010-11-17T09:51:00.003-05:00

Never let it be said that a dog can't see the world in style (and safety).

I've blogged about my beloved bichon, Michael Jackson, before.

Here's a recent photo of him in his brand new car seat.

Augmented reality magazines

2010-11-12T11:09:00.002-05:00

They've been out for awhile, but seem to have been lost in the digital mismash of everything new and exciting.

But augmented reality magazines, which reveal all their magic when you put your smart phone over them (and have a free app downloaded to your phone) have a lot to offer.

Click on this link for a look see.

This dog is a curious creature

2010-11-12T10:37:00.006-05:00

A journalist/editor friend of mine in the mountains of N.C. knows I'm always on the lookout for an interesting picture of a dog.

The "meth lab" definitely gets my attention.

My quote of the week...

2010-11-10T17:36:00.000-05:00

“I don’t vote. Here’s my stand on politics-it’s like a steer. A point here, a point there, and a lot of bull in the middle.”

Source: Twenty-four-year-old man in Troy, N.C., who was interviewed on Nov. 2, 2010 (Election Day), by Winthrop University mass communication major Maribea Isles.

For the love of a dog

2010-11-02T16:17:00.004-04:00

These photos, sent to me by my long-time friend and former Winthrop University colleague Zeta Sistare, say a lot about the deep affection (and connection) between humans and dogs.

Thanks for sharing, Zeta.

Oh how Jenny Sanford suffers

2010-10-29T16:03:00.003-04:00

Just in case you can't read the small print, here's the context of Ms. Sanford's quote:

Response from former S.C. first lady Jenny Sanford, when questioned by a journalist about how much she was paid by the University of South Carolina for her 45-minute speech at USC the evening of Oct. 27. Later, the public learned that USC paid her $15,000 for that speech.

Source: “Speech at USC nets Jenny Sanford $15,000,” The (Rock Hill) Herald, Oct. 29, 2010, p. 6A.

Wish I were as good as my dog Roadie was

2010-10-22T10:55:00.007-04:00

Shannon Robinson, my daughter-in-law in Tennessee, sent these nuggets of wisdom to me. They speak to the virtues of being a dog.

Would that people were as good as our four-legged friends!

Roadie, this post's for you. (Roadie, my beloved sheltie, went to dog heaven a few months ago.)

•A dog is the only thing on earth   that loves you more than he loves himself. .  -Josh Billings

•The reason a dog has so many friends is that   he wags his tail instead of his tongue.  -Anonymous       

•There is no psychiatrist in the world  like a puppy licking your face.   -Ben Williams

•The average dog is a nicer person   than the average person.  -Andy Rooney

•Anybody who doesn't know what soap tastes like   never washed a dog.  - Franklin P. Jones

•If your dog is fat,   you aren't getting enough exercise   -Unknown       

•  If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous,   he will not bite you;   that is the principal difference between a dog and a man.  -Mark Twain

•Dogs are not our whole life,   but they make our lives whole.  -Roger Caras

•If you think dogs can't count,  try putting three dog biscuits in your pocket   and then give him only two of them.  -Phil Pastoret   

Free hugs

2010-10-20T23:01:00.003-04:00

Wonder what would happen if a person meandered about our campus holding up a sign that said "Free Hugs"?

Several months ago I blogged about this video, and now I've stumbled upon it again.

When I watched and listened to it, I thought about something I read today--something to the effect that notwithstanding all the technology we now have--that presumably connects us to one another at warp speed--we are the most disconnected human beings in human history.

We don't like to physically touch each other or converse (in person); instead we prefer to chat electronically or on our cell phones. We keep our digital distance.

And to give or offer someone, a total stranger, a free hug?

Preposterous, it would seem, in 2010.

Would make a great Christmas present

2010-10-20T18:27:00.003-04:00

I don't work for Apple, but I sure like the looks of the MacBook Air.

Click on this link for a video of what this powerful little puppy can do.

I have a MacBook, and I love it.

Now if I only had a MacBook Air... (Weighs a bit over 2 pounds; thinnest end of it is about one-tenth of an inch thick; can go for 5 hours without a battery recharge.)

And it oozes with power and speed!

My granddaughter Lucy's first Halloween

2010-10-20T10:30:00.002-04:00

She's now nine months old, is a heavy sack of potatoes and is getting acquainted with her first pumpkins.

Happy Halloween, Lucy!

Another interesting quote

2010-10-13T20:39:00.003-04:00

Call me a collector of quotes, but I thought this one, from today's edition of The Johnsonian (Winthrop's student newspaper), warrants a blog post.

Here's what a member of the Winthrop Cheerleading Squad said:

"There were times when we failed to meet the standards of Winthrop University's fans and students because they said we sucked or the members were overweight. So now that we have smaller women on the team and a more experienced coach, I wonder what they will say this season."

Yep.

Wonder what they'll say.

Quote of the week

2010-10-12T14:39:00.003-04:00

Noticed this crime blotter item from the Oct. 6-12, 2010, edition of Charlotte's Creative Loafing magazine:

An 80-year-old woman called police after being threatened in her apartment complex. She told officers the known suspect approached her and stated:

"I will whoop your old ass."

(You can't make this stuff up.)

Dog and Man/Man and Dog

2010-10-05T09:08:00.005-04:00

A recent article in USA TODAY about the relationship between dogs and their masters seems to be right on target.

The article notes that a dog typically extends the life of its owner and also teaches us (humans) to live in the present and not take ourselves so seriously.

Plus, a person can read another person by looking at his or her dog.

And then this, from Cesar Milan of the Dog Whisperer TV show: "The dog is part of you, and you are part of the dog. . . If you're calm, the dog will be, and then you can do something together."

Speaking of dogs, I've got a good one. His name is Michael Jackson (got him as a puppy on the day MJ died in summer of 2009).

That's his picture (as a puppy) with this blog post. The other photo is of him today (about 17 months old.)

I call him Jackson.

He calls me, well, whatever.

He's smart, adores children and anyone else who plays with him.

And he's the best companion a guy could ever have.

Jackson, this blog post's for you.

I'm a part of you. You're a part of me.

My quote of the week (from a sad story)

2010-10-01T15:36:00.006-04:00

Here's my quote of the week--from Mary Alcaro, childhood friend of Rutgers University freshman Tyler Clementi, 18, who last week jumped to his death off the George Washington Bridge after a secret video of his sexual encounter with a man was streamed online:

"I'm disillusioned that in a generation that prides itself on acceptance and tolerance, people can still be so closed-minded and downright hateful."

If you haven't read this sad tale, which made the front page of USA TODAY today, here's the link.

Clementi's roommate and his roommate's friend (both of whom are 18 years old) have been charged with invading Clementi's privacy. Prosecutors say those charged used a secretly planted web cam to transmit a live image of Clementi having sex.

It's possible hate crime and civil rights violations charges could be placed against the roommate and his friend, a young woman.

Moral of the story: Be very, very careful about what you stream on the Internet!

(Photo of Tyler Clementi, an accomplished violinist described by recently retired Ridgewood (N.J.) High School music director Ed Schmiedecke as "a terrific musician and a very promising, hardworking young man," accompanies this blog post.)

Timbs chatting with his students in MCOM 377

2010-09-30T13:27:00.004-04:00

Here's a little podcast that I created of me talking and singing (well, sort of singing along with Sheryl Crow). Just exploring the power of the Internet to enhance communication.

Magic and power of the Internet/Dog and man speak

2010-09-29T21:55:00.002-04:00

I'm an old guy. Not used to all this modern technology. But I never cease to be amazed at the power of the Internet.

Tonight, for example, my dog Michael Jackson and I created a video message that I zapped to students enrolled in my course in Community and Civic Journalism. (I just did the talking; Jackson pushed the buttons on my MacBook.)

Have a listen and look by clicking here.

Whaddya think?

The wave of the future (or even of the present) as an effective, quick way for professors to communicate with their students?

Hey bro

2010-09-29T07:36:00.002-04:00

This blog post is for my one and only little brother--Eddie Timbs.

Here's a rare photo of him.

Little brother, can't wait till we get a chance to hit the links again.

I'm slow but I'm happy...

2010-09-22T08:16:00.004-04:00

An interesting article by Judith Graham in yesterday's Charlotte Observer focused on how folks in their "golden years" (which I guess I'm on the front end of) may be slower mentally and physically, and yet more content and happy than ever.

The writer quoted a 68-year-old man from Florida saying this: "I've noticed a distinct change from when I was younger. Then, I was quicker to anger, more defensive, much more anxious. Now, I have a greater sense of inner peace. I don't feel the need to prove anything to anyone."

So why is it that older folks often say they feel happier and more stable and better adapted than at any other time in their lives--even as their cognitive and physical abilities diminish?

An expert on aging explains that as we grow older and understand that our time is short, our priorities shift. Instead of tackling tough new challenges--such as trying to move up the ladder at our job or impress others in our profession--we put our energies and time into those things, places or people that we're closest to.

Food for thought for all of us in our "golden years."

Men who lack adult supervision

2010-09-22T07:45:00.011-04:00

Les Forest, an old USAF buddy of mine, sent me these hilarious photos. If you're a guy, you can relate. And if you're a woman, you probably can see the "guyness" in them. Enjoy.

Google Gravity

2010-09-18T11:21:00.003-04:00

Just learned about Google Gravity from my students. Click here and notice the strange effects.

People from India are smart and politically ambitious

2010-09-14T08:03:00.005-04:00

In mid or late-October, eight students from India will be visiting Winthrop University.

I already knew that Indians are smart, and maybe you did too, but you may not be aware that:

•32.5% of Indian Americans have bachelor's degrees, while only 17.5% of the U.S. population have these degrees

•the median household income of Indian Americans is $90,528, compared to $52,029 for the U.S. population

•nearly 38% of Indian Americans held advanced degrees in 2008, compared with 10.2% for the U.S. population

•6 Indian American candidates are running for the U.S. House of Representatives this year

•Nikki Haley, who was born Nimrata Randhawa, is the Republican nominee for governor of South Carolina. (I didn't know Nikki was of Indian ancestry. Ms. Haley's photo accompanies this blog post.)

•Bobby Jindal, governor of Louisiana, is an Indian American

For more info. about one of our nation's most affluent, educated immigrant groups, read this article in USA TODAY.

Speaking out on behalf of hurting veterans and others

2010-09-09T12:41:00.007-04:00

Here's a speech I wrote and gave at the Mountain Home Veterans Adminstration Medical Center in Johnson City, Tenn., on Sept. 10, 2010.

The occasion was the last day of Suicide Awareness/Prevention Week.

“Savoring Every Minute of the Life You Have Right Now: How To Defeat and Get Beyond Those Forces That Try To Tear You Down”

Life is short. Almost like the blink of an eye, it’s over.

Consider this:

If you live to be 85, that’s 31,025 days.

Or 745,000 hours.

Or 45 million minutes.

So if you’re 44 years old, that means you have roughly 22 million minutes left to be alive—IF you reach the ripe old age of 85.

But, as we know, none of us has the promise of even one more minute.

The past is gone. The future is uncertain. All we have for sure is the here and now.

So how, exactly, to SAVOR every minute of the life you have right now?

Notice how that word SAVOR rhymes with FAVOR?

Because a person who “SAVORS” something quote “derives or receives pleasure from it.”

A person who savors every minute of life enjoys life.

But again, how exactly to savor every minute of the life we have now?

It can be tough.

Because we don’t EVEN REALLY have 45 million minutes to savor.

The average person sleeps about one-third of the day. Or, over the course of a lifetime, for about 15 million minutes.

Well, you might say, that still leaves us 30 million minutes to savor.

Not really.
We have to work about 35 years.

Based on a workday of 8 hours, and factoring in time for vacations weekends off, that comes to about 4 million minutes that we’re slaving away at some job.

That leaves us 26 million free minutes to savor, right?

Nope.

Think about all the unpleasant things that we have to deal with throughout life.

Things like paying bills, or standing in lines, or doing our taxes, or going to the doctor or dentist, or attending funerals, or fussing and arguing with people who drive us crazy, or taking out the trash, or pulling weeds or cleaning up messes or visiting jails or being stranded in traffic.

These things suck our energy and consume millions of minutes of our time. We don’t usually savor doing them. They’re just part of life.

So now, ballpark estimate, subtracting for all the unpleasantness that most of us have to endure in life, we have only about 15 million minutes, if that many, that we can savor.

That means we better make the most of the precious savorable time that we have.

So back to the first part of the title of my address:

“Savoring Every Minute of the Life You Have Right Now”

That’s a big challenge—even for the most fortunate of us.

And if you’re not so fortunate, or if you’re in a shaky situation, imagine what a struggle it can be to try to get pleasure from life.

Wonder what it’s like right now for those 33 miners trapped almost a half mile beneath a desert in Chile?

Rescue workers drilled a borehole extending down to where the miners are stuck, and they’ve been able to send oxygen, food, water, clothing, medicine and letters from loved ones down that hole.

They’re cautioning it’s going to be a long, difficult chore, maybe taking till Christmas, to bore and grind the shaft wide enough so that the trapped miners can get out.

Meanwhile, a half-mile under the surface of the earth, the miners hang on for dear life.

It’s gets hot down there, almost 100 degrees. And it’s desolate and lonely—what could be more awful than being entombed 2,200 feet under ground?

And then there’s the constant threat of another cave-in that could doom the entire rescue operation and kill all 33 of them.

Those poor, beleaguered miners are hanging on by the thinnest of threads. Today, as I speak they’ve been holed up in that deep copper and gold mine shaft for 35 days—without a bathroom, without being able to touch their wives or family members, without seeing or being able to feel the sunshine.

And yet they keep hoping and praying.

No one has ever been stuck for that long, so far beneath the earth. And some naysayers contend that it will be a long shot, at best, to save them.

Still, the trapped men hang on. Incredibly, some just a few days ago were reported laughing and joking and singing with their family members--via a phone connection strung down through that half-mile deep borehole.

It would be a stretch to say that these desperate souls are “savoring every minute” of their lives down in that wretched, stinking, dusty, black hell pit. But they ARE living and making do. So if they’re not exactly right now “savoring every minute of their lives,” I’d say they’re faring the best they can under dire circumstances.

And that’s something.

Savor every minute of the life we have now, folks, even if it’s not a perfectly happy or completely safe and comfortable life full of sunshine and rainbows and hugs. We have to do this to realize our full humanity.

One person who did this at the very end of his fairly short time on earth was 50-year-old Arland D. Williams Jr.

Never heard of Mr. Williams?

Flash back to January 13, 1982, to Washington, D.C.

If you’ve been to D.C. in the winter, you know how brutally cold it can get.

On this particular January day, it was freezing in our nation’s capital. The wind howled and a fierce snowstorm pounded the city.

At the airport, pilots tried to decide whether to take off or stay put.

Passengers had boarded their planes, and many of the big jets were idling or taxiing on the runway.

Meanwhile the snow continued to fall heavily, the wind blew ferociously, cutting to your bones, and the jets started to accumulate ice on their wings.

What to do if you were a pilot that icy, snowy, windy day?

Take off?

Scrub or delay the flight and send your fidgety passengers back to the terminal?

One pilot—of flight Air Florida 90 bound from D.C. to Fort Lauderdale--decided fatefully to gamble with the lives of his 74 passengers and three fellow crewmen.

As the snow, and wind and ice thrashed against Air Florida flight 90, a Boeing 737 jet, the pilot was cleared for takeoff.

Inside that big jet, the 74 passengers, one of whom was Arland D. Williams Jr., buckled up and nervously glanced outside their windows.

But I’m sure many of them figured that soon they’d be out of this nasty weather and bound for sunny, warm Florida.

The pilot of that big jet took off, and yes, it got airborne.

But because it had so much snow and ice on its wings, it stayed in the air only 30 seconds before crashing into the icy Potomac River.

Can you imagine the screams from the terrified passengers as the aircraft roared, left the ground, but then lost lift and plummeted from the sky—nose-first—into that icy river?

I’ll never forget the footage of that jet crash on CNN.

There on the TV screen, it was as if some sort of real life heroic drama were being played out.

I could see part of a plane’s tail section sticking out of the Potomac River. And I also noticed a few passengers bobbing in the icy water--desperately clinging to the twisted wreckage of the jet.

Above them a rescue helicopter hovered.

I kept wondering: How long can those hurting, freezing people last?

The helicopter would lower a life line and one of the people in the water, a balding middle-aged man would grab it and pass it to one of his fellow passengers.

Again and again, the chopper would lower that life line with a flotation collar, and again and again, the balding middle-aged man would snatch the line.

But instead of wrapping it around himself, he’d pass it on to someone else. Then he’d help wrap the line around that person.

I wondered how much longer can any of them could last. Because it was freezing cold and wet and they were hurt badly… And why wasn’t that one guy, who kept getting hold of the lifeline, pulling HIMSELF to safety…?

Finally, the chopper had yanked all but one of the handful of surviving passengers out of the river.

That last guy, the last man treading the icy, cold water, the one who kept refusing the lifeline for himself but who grabbed it and gave it to others—was Arland Williams Jr.
Arland Williams Jr., who had saved so many that awful day in January 1982, perished in the Potomac River. Because when the helicopter made its last return trip to pick him up, he had drowned.

This is what a clergyman said about him:

“His heroism was not rash. Aware that his own strength was fading, he deliberately handed hope to someone else, and he did so repeatedly. On that cold and tragic day, Arland Williams Jr. exemplified one of the best attributes of human nature, specifically that some people are capable of doing anything for total strangers.”

You might be wondering: Why is he telling us this? What does it have to do with savoring every minute of the life you have now?

Well, the story of Arland Williams Jr.’s heroism goes to the heart of my message.

Remember what I said about not being promised another minute and we can only be sure about one thing—the here and now?

Mr. Williams understood that.

He’s freezing in that icy river. His hands and feet are numb and hypothermic blue from the cold. He’s got cuts and he’s bleeding. And he’s barely got enough energy to keep his own head above water.

And yet there he was—up to his last breaths—helping others—in this case total strangers to him.

He made the very most of what he could do in that icy cold, death river that afternoon. And I’m certain, that in his own way, he savored his last few minutes of living.

You know…I’m not trying to sermonize with you today, but I do believe noted preacher and book author Rick Warren said something recently that makes total sense.

Mr. Warren said this:

“Life is a series of problems: Either you’re in one now, you’re just coming out of one, or you’re getting ready to go into another one.

“The reason for this is that God is more interested in your character than your comfort.”

Warren says all of us have to work hard and diligently every day to escape our self-centeredness, our own problems, our own issues, our own pain.

Translation: We have to get outside of ourselves, beyond ourselves, and help others.
Lots of us have daily to-do lists, but if all we’re doing with those lists is helping or serving ourselves, we’re selfish.

Because it’s not about what we do for our selves, it’s what we do for others. That’s the true measure of character.

So in that regard, Arland Williams Jr. had it totally right.

He took the focus completely off himself that horrible day of the jet crash and gave his all to his fellow passengers—making the most of his last few minutes of life.

Sometimes, granted, it’s really hard to get outside of our selves. We get so caught up in the daily grind of JUST BEING that the thought of helping others seems kind of ridiculous.

A few days ago, for example, my heat pump went out at my condo in South Carolina. And not only did it quit working, water from the inside of the heat pump had flooded my living room and hall, soaking my new carpet.

So there, miserably, I was: Another semester had just gotten under way at the university where I teach. That means all kinds of meetings and workshops and students and other beginning-of-the-semester demands. And I’m dealing with a ruined, squishy wet carpet, an expired heat pump, and, worst of all, a swelteringly hot condo.

I frantically started peeling back the carpet to check the water—and it was a big mess!

Then I began moving and scooting and lifting furniture —a task made even harder and sweatier when you’re doing it in 95-degree temperatures.

And while I’m struggling with all this, I’m dreading the idea of having to spend thousands of dollars for a new heat pump.

“Why, God, is all this happening to me?” I wondered. “Why, and especially why at the beginning of a new school year, am I having to deal with all this? Am I being punished?”

I’m sure all of you, too, have been in bad situations —predicaments that have strained you emotionally, physically or mentally--and that make it hard to savor every minute of the life you have now.

But here’s what we have to do, folks, when bad stuff like that happens to us: We just have to suck it up and keep going…

We have to be like Nike: Just do it!

Get past it. And get on with savoring every minute—or at least as many minutes as it’s possible for us to savor—of our lives.

Figuring Out What It Is We’re Supposed To Be Savoring and Doing:

A downside is that many of us never quite figure out what we’re REALLY supposed to be about. We never really fully understand our true self.

Yes, we go about our daily tasks of eating and sleeping and doing laundry and working and talking on our cell phones and buying stuff and checking our email, but we never quite grasp what exactly it is we were put on this earth to do or be.

For sure, we were put here for a specific purpose, and I have to believe that unless we learn what that purpose is, we never can fully savor our life.

Joel Osteen, a popular televangelist, has stressed that all of us are unique children of God, meaning that we each have skills, talents or gifts that no one else in the universe possesses.

Osteen says that we were made to do certain things, and if we want to have a fulfilling life, we should find out what those things are and start doing them.

Sometimes, some of us know what they are, but we shy away from doing them for fear of failure.

How can we hope to even begin savoring every minute of our life if we withdraw or shy away from our purpose?

Yes, we might fail and make mistakes, even at things we are gifted at doing, but life is difficult. I think it was meant to be that way to test our resolve and keep us on our toes.

Imagine that your life is a moving truck. You’ve got choices:

One: You stay put safely and securely on the side of the road and gaze longingly or curiously at the truck as it speeds by you.

Two: You stand, closed-minded and looking downward, not outward or upward, in the middle of the highway and let the truck run over and crush you.

Three: You take a bold chance and put yourself in the driver’s seat, thereby living your life to the fullest, going wherever you want, when you want, with whoever you want and however you want.

Yes, every now and then you’ll lose control and run off the road. (Sometimes that truck can seem to be driving you instead of the other way around!) You might even get lost or turned around.

But at least, if you’re in the driver’s seat, you’re exploring your options and taking control of your own life, picking up the pieces if you crash and getting back on the road and on your way to your destination.

Yes, it can be messy, ugly and disappointing as you travel that road, trying to do what you were born to do or even just trying to figure out your purpose in life.

But that’s the way a truly savorable, successful life seems often to be—messy, ugly, full of unexpected twists and turns, but ultimately worthwhile and uplifting.

•Albert Einstein, a German-American physicist who gave mankind the theory of relativity, was the leading scientific thinker of the 20th century. But did you know that he once failed an entrance examination to pursue study as an electrical engineer in Switzerland? They said he wasn’t smart enough!

Some folks discover their purpose in life against huge odds.

•Helen Keller became deaf and blind at age 1. But learning to communicate with sign language and by feeling people’s mouths as they spoke, she prevailed in a life of darkness and silence. She wrote 11 books, learned five languages and became an inspirational champion for people with disabilities all over the world.

•Abraham Lincoln was born in a primitive log cabin, and the love of his life, his mother, died when he was only 9 years old. He had less than two years of formal schooling, and the only book he had at home to read as a child was the Bible.

As a man, the tall, thin, gawky-looking Lincoln suffered from what was then called “melancholy” (today known as “clinical depression”). When he became interested in politics, he ran hard—but unsuccessfully—for office several times. But despite all that, Lincoln became our nation’s 16th president. Today, he’s regarded as one of the three greatest presidents in U.S. history.

•You may be too young to have ever heard of him, but Tom Dempsey was born without toes on his right foot. That didn’t stop him from making the most of what he had. He kicked field goals and extra points for the New Orleans Saints. And in 1970, he kicked the longest field goal—a 63-yarder--in the history of the National Football League. That record kick still stands today.

•And lastly, how could I give a talk at a Veterans Hospital in Tennessee without mentioning one of the Volunteer State’s true authentic heroes? His name was Alvin York and he might be the most unlikely of all the heroes I’ve mentioned here today—given his meager beginnings in Fentress County, Tennessee, where he was born in poverty in a two-room cabin. The third of 11 children, Alvin York during his youth was a Bible-believing pacifist—someone opposed to warfare or violence of any kind. He even registered for the draft for World War I as a conscientious objector. Being a fighting soldier was the last thing he wanted.

But Alvin York, who had resisted being involved in any sort of violence and who his mother once feared “would amount to nothing,” answered the call of duty.

He became our nation’s most decorated soldier of World War I, being awarded the Medal of Honor for disabling 32 German machine gunners, killing 28 German soldiers and capturing 132 others.

But who’d a thunk, who’d a dreamed that a poor, troubled, uneducated boy from backwoods Tennessee could have accomplished so much? Could have saved so many of the lives of his fellow soldiers?

Not that this business of finding your true calling and savoring every minute of the life you have now is easy.

Sometimes you do your best to discover your inner self or to figure out your purpose in life. You take classes. You read books. You color inside the lines, just like you’re supposed to. You pick the brains of your friends and family. You take a self-inventory of your talents and skills. You follow all the self-awareness steps and guidelines that seem to work for others.

And still, you’re at square one—just as befuddled as ever about your purpose and self identify.

Reminds me of a cartoon I recently saw depicting a dog stepping out of a shower.

“Dang,” the dog growls. “Three showers and I still smell like a dog!”

So if you search, study, focus, meditate, grapple and pray, and you’re still confused about your purpose, or frustrated about knowing what life change will make you savor being alive, take heart.

This whole searching for purpose, transforming your self and savoring life thing can take a while.

I’m reminded, in this regard, of a conversation between two stuffed animal characters—a rabbit and a skin horse—in the children’s book, “The Velveteen Rabbit.”

If you know that story, you might recall that the skin horse was wise, but old and bedraggled.

“What is REAL,” the rabbit asks the skin horse. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”

Replies the skin horse: “Real isn’t how you are made. It’s a thing that happens to you. . .”

“Does it hurt?” the rabbit asks.

“Sometimes,” the skin horse responds. “But when you are REAL you don’t mind being hurt.”

“Does Real happens all at once, like being wound up, or bit by bit?” the rabbit wonders.

“It doesn’t happen all at once,” the skin horse says. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or who have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby.”

So okay, let’s say somehow, by luck, serendipity, God’s grace and guidance or through your own hard work and introspection, you find your purpose in life and can began savoring every minute of why you’re here.

But then forces or people try to block or defeat you.

How Do You Defeat and Get Beyond Those Forces That Try To Tear You Down?

If you were here and heard me speak last year, you might recall some of my suggestions.

One tip I offered was to attach yourself to upbeat, positive, nurturing people—folks you can talk to or who care about you and will listen to you. And they don’t’ necessarily have to be mental or physical care professionals. Sometimes just a good friend or close, supportive family member can help get you past your depression or funk or whatever “down state” you’re in.

That said, sometimes our closest and most caring friends and family members do all they can for us, but we’re no better. Full disclosure here: With me, about 12 years ago, I had reached the end of my rope. Despite all the encouragement and support I received from friends and family, I still couldn’t shake the miserable, dark forces that crippled my life.

I was, it seemed, doomed to be clinically depressed for the rest of my days.

Those closest to me had wrapped their arms and hearts around me, but I still felt defeated and full of despair and sadness. I couldn’t work, couldn’t think, couldn’t write, couldn’t focus, couldn’t come up with even one reason to keep on living.

And at that point, when I’d just about given up on life, I came here—to Mountain Home VA Medical Center.

They put me in pajamas and therapy and kept me in this safe place and gave me medicine, which they made me take. And the nurses and doctors here and folks like good-hearted Doris Call of the professional mental health social worker staff worked with me to put me back on track.

And gradually, “bit by bit,” to steal a phrase from the Rabbit in the book “The Velveteen Rabbit,” this old downcast Vietnam era veteran got better, stronger, got back to where I could enjoy life again. I regained my confidence and sense of worth and my desire to live life, and for that, I’ll always be hugely indebted to this medical center and its caring professional staff.

Bottom life: I’m an example of a person who almost waited too late to seek professional help. But when I did go after that help, when I got beyond my fear of the stigma of being hospitalized with fellow depressed and hurting veterans, I finally started taking baby steps toward recovery.

Don’t be like me. Don’t wait so long to pursue help—outside your circle of family and friends—if you require it.

Because if you’re not your strongest, most healthy self, there’s no way you can defeat those demons that try to tear you down. And if you can’t defeat the demons, there’s no way you can savor every minute of the life you have now.

Another tip I offered last year, and that I’ll repeat now, is to get yourself a dog.

They’re not called man’s best friend for nothing. All a dog wants is to be petted, loved and wanted. They’re great and loyal listeners, too. They never argue, complain or interrupt.

Is some irritating or negative person or bothersome thing or problem weighing heavily on your mind, preventing you from being at your best? Get your dog and take him for a good long walk and talk it over or THINK it over with him. You’ll both feel better and stronger. He’ll wag his tail and do his business and you’ll feel better for it. Don’t ask me why but you will. Dogs innately infuse us with positivity and happiness. They make us want to wag OUR tails.

And if you don’t have a dog, attach yourself to a close friend or confidante—especially if you’re going through a tough time.

Because we as humans, even when we’re healthy and strong, are not hard wired to be alone. If we’re in a desperate situation, we need even more NOT to isolate.

Maybe you’ve read the novel “Robinson Crusoe” —about a man shipwrecked and stranded on an island. For 25 years, the poor guy’s only companions in that godforsaken place are his parrot, his dog and a tame goat. He battles loneliness and mental illness, giving up all hope of ever seeing or talking to another human being.

But then one day, out of the blue, he notices that he isn’t alone after all. Bloodthirsty cannibals lurk on a nearby beach. They build fires and roast their fellow cannibals and devour them.

Robinson Crusoe, the shipwrecked Englishman stranded there for 25 years, rescues one of the savages just before he’s about to be eaten.

Crusoe names his new cannibal companion “Friday.”

Friday becomes not only Crusoe’s first human companion in a quarter century. He turns into the best friend, helpmate and protector that a man could ever have.

Folks, when our backs are against the wall, when we’re up against big odds, we shouldn’t be going it alone. We need a “Friday” to walk with and boost us, to talk to us and be a good listener.

So dependent are we on human contact and support, particularly when we’re in dire straits, that some people have done just about anything to make sure they’re not going it alone.

Remember the movie “Cast Away”?

It’s about “Chuck,” a Fed Ex employee stranded on an uninhabited island after his plane crashes on a flight over the South Pacific.

With not another soul on the island to interact with, Chuck befriends a blood-splattered Wilson Sporting Goods volleyball.

He names the ball “Wilson” and for four years Chuck has regular conversations and arguments with Wilson—his one and only friend.

When Wilson washes overboard from a raft, Chuck almost goes out of his mind..

Because now he has absolutely no one to talk to.

Ladies and gentlemen, hopefully none of us will get as desperate and lonely as Chuck and befriend a volleyball. And we won’t be like Robinson Crusoe and take up with a cannibal.

But again, we’re hard wired in this world not to be alone. We need regular human contact, even when we’re doing well. And when we’re in a bad way, we require it even more.

Lastly, I know that last year I mentioned exercise as a way to combat depression and help keep us healthy—mentally and physically.

Whenever any forces try to tear us down, exercise can be one big part of a healthier lifestyle and help us think more clearly and correctly.

Two experts on physical fitness have recently written that if we’ll quit eating crap and that if we exercise six days a week—YES, SIX DAYS A WEEK--we’ll optimize our day-to-day living and feel better and stronger.

They refer to it as feeling “functionally younger.”

And while exercise or anything else that we do CANNOT reverse the process of aging, it can limit age-related disease and age-related decline.

Exercise—again six days a week—is a key to overcoming the signal inside your body that says you should be starting to die.

That’s because our bodies want us dead. Our bodies are sinister. They want to start decaying.

Every year, we get a little slower, a little fatter, a little less sexual, and not as quick or sharp in our mind as we used to be. Plus our muscle mass and coordination gradually declines.

Exercise helps slow that process down. It changes our blood chemistry and helps us age better and more gracefully.

Age is not something we can avoid, but decay IS something we can avoid.

No excuse, ladies and gentlemen, for any of us NOT to exercise on a regular basis if we truly want to feel better and act better physically and mentally.

And no procrastination! If we want to work on improving our liveds and defeating the forces that try to tear us down—we need to jump right away into the deep end of the pool or hit the jogging or walking trails or begin stretching our muscles on the treadmill or in the weight room. We need to move our butts, our legs and our arms—SIX DAYS A WEEK. The blood needs to be gushing through our hearts at a good pace.

See you at the gym folks!

Want to avoid rotting? Then don't NOT exercise!

2010-09-06T17:18:00.006-04:00

I've come across a really interesting book titled "Younger Next Year: Live Strong, Fit and Sexy Until You're 80 and Beyond."

The book is by Chris Crowley and Dr. Russ Greenfield--two folks recently interviewed on WFAE 90.7 FM radio station in Charlotte.

To hear the podcast of their interview, click on this link and then scroll down to the "Younger Next Year" show that was rebroadcast on Sept. 2, 2010. Listen to the podcast by clicking on the "Listen" icon in the gray bar.

The authors assert that while exercise cannot guarantee that our life will be extended, it can make the quality of our life radically different.

They stress that if we’ll quit eating crap and that if we exercise six days a week, we’ll optimize our day-to-day living and we’ll feel better and stronger.

They refer to it as feeling “functionally younger.”

And again, while exercise or anything else that we do CANNOT reverse the process of aging, it can limit age-related disease and age-related decline.

Exercise—again SIX DAYS A WEEK—is a key means to overcome the signal inside your body that says you should be starting to die.

That’s because, according to these two authors, our bodies want us dead. Our bodies are sinister. They want to start decaying.

Every year, according to the authors of this book, we get a little slower, a little fatter, a little less sexual, and not as quick or sharp in our mind as we used to be. Plus our muscle mass and coordination declines a little bit every year.

Exercise helps really slow that process down. It changes our blood chemistry and helps us age optimally well.

Age is not something we can avoid, but decay IS something we can avoid.

No excuse, ladies and gentlemen, for any of us NOT to exercise on a regular basis if we truly want to feel better and act better physically and mentally.

I'm on my way to the West (fitness and wellness) Center right now!

Life (and freedom) precious

2010-08-29T20:08:00.003-04:00

Visited one of my former students today who's serving a life sentence in a medium security prison in South Carolina.

At best, it's a dreary, somber, bleak place--what with all the razor wire lining the top of the fences, the stone-faced guards and the long faces of the inmates.

Some of them have been there a long time.

We shook hands, hugged and conversed in a a room about the size of a high school cafeteria. I counted 47 small tables, each with four chairs, set up in that room. Families (wives and parents of inmates) got to spend some precious time with their loved ones.

The former student I visited, who graduated from Winthrop in 1986, has been incarcerated in South Carolina, at first at a maximum security prison in Columbia and now in Kershaw County where he was recently transferred, for 20+ years. He's now 47 years old and is a leader in the prison ministry, I'm told. He's also earned a master's degree while behind bars.

He comes up for parole next year and I am hoping for the best for him.

At Winthrop, I remember him as a hard-working, focused young man.

I send him a Christmas card every year.

Today, however, was my first visit with him.

Life gets complicated and takes dramatic turns--sometimes for the worse.

We make mistakes or incur errors of judgment.

I think this guy has paid his debt to society.

I wish him the best.

And I cherish my freedom.

Little Lucy pays me a visit

2010-08-23T08:31:00.002-04:00

Last week Lucy, my first grandchild, came for a visit in Rock Hill. We had a great time. She's a lively, curious, always moving 18-pound sack of potatoes!

(Her mother, Dorothy, snapped this photo.)

The elephant and the dog

2010-08-19T14:55:00.004-04:00

I'm always looking for a good dog story. My friend and colleague Jamie Low has sent me one--about an odd couple elephant and canine.

This is an amazing piece--about Bella the dog and Taura the elephant. It touches the heart.

Click on the video and enjoy.

(And thanks, much, Jamie!)

All-day retreat at Winthrop University

2010-08-18T10:36:00.004-04:00

Early this week, faculty leaders at Winthrop University convened all day to "re-imagine higher education," among other charges.

We learned that higher education, the business we're in, needs to be more permeable, lighter and more fluid.

Also, an administrator reminded us that the world we're in demands that we change, and we must respond to changes in our world with "guarded flexibility."

But what changes are essential?

That's a key question.

We also, as professors, need to have goals and objectives for our students that are clear, attainable and assessible.

We heard a ton about assessment and accreditation and re-accreditation.

A colleague of mine remarked (quietly) that we are being "assessed to death."

A group of faculty had been charged earlier this year with ascertaining what all Winthrop University graduates should possess. This is what that faculty group came up with after looking at all the academic programs at our university, as well as programs at other universities:

1. Winthrop graduates should have critical thinking skills.
2. Winthrop graduates should value multiple perspectives--the interconnectedness of the world--(in their work and as they search for truth and meaning)
3. Winthrop graduates should be effective communicators
4. Winthrop graduates should be socially responsible.

Twas an enlightening retreat. Some intellectual fire. Some mind-numbing stats. Much discussion on how to do what we do better or more effectively.

And, as always, we had a delicious lunch.

Time to get started with a new school year--the 125th for Winthrop.

Wonder if they had retreats in those first 25 years?