Polite Notice - To Health & Safety Fascists

To Health & Safety Fascists:
We've met your kind before—
The 'Peace At Any Price' brigade
When Hitler threatened war;

As snitches in the playground,
Uriah Heeps in suits,
Who'd stand and watch a kiddie drown
In case you wet your boots;

Who puff-up in your uniforms
And counterfeit the bold,
Then bleat and whine to hide the shame:
"I did as I was told!"

Who love to fuss and meddle,
And tell us what we know,
The poodle pimps of clerks and claims
With bureaucrats in tow;

Who chop down healthy street trees:
"We simply must, you see,
In case you slip... on fallen leaves...
And then where would we be?"

We'd be just fine... impaling
Your donkey heads on poles,
You piffling, pointless, jobsworth toads—
Now get back in your holes!

I just stepped out ...

Where am I? Oh, I just stepped out,
No need to make a fuss, or shout,
No need to comb the nearest wood
Or roam about the neighbourhood.

Call off the dog she'll find no scent,
Please don't worry where I went,
And do not climb the garden tree,
My dear, you'll catch no glimpse of me.

The attic steps will pinch your thumb,
The cellar will be dark and dumb,
Yet should you search your heart with care,
Though I am gone, you'll find me there.

June, 2007

While Leven models as both Elizabeth and Jessica on the SVH covers, you'll remember that on All My Children she plays both the autistic Lily Montgomery and her older half-sister, Ava. It's this sort of thing that will get you nominated for a Daytime Emmy!

When Sheen delivered that line, the Journal actually had plenty of verve and variety, appreciated by loyal readers. But much variety, at least, has been lost over the past ten years, stripped away under the Bancrofts and then Murdoch.

An early casualty was the orphan, a small square in the lower right corner of the Marketplace section that usually carried a very brief, very quirky story.

Then went the topical Column 5, second from the right on the front page, that each day hosted roundups like Washington Wire and Capital (the columns got relocated).

Then the gloriously wide paper narrowed, to five columns from six.

When Murdoch's News Corp. acquired the Journal, Murdoch made clear his intention to make the front page even newsier. Story lengths were trimmed. There has even been talk about diluting or eliminating the storied "A-Hed" feature column in the center of the front page.

With each change, the Journal became more like Pearson's Financial Times, and also more like the television and internet outlets it once set itself apart from with smart "second day" stories.

Meanwhile Murdoch seems intent on preserving the one part of the paper in need of serious reform, the editorial page.

[Via The Big Lead]

WABC, New York 1986 (ABC)

WNBC New York 1986 (NBC)

WNET New York 1984 (PBS)

WCBS New York 1964 (CBS)

KCET Los Angeles 1984 (PBS)

WTAF Philadelphia 1986 (Fox)

WPVI, Philadelphia 1986 (ABC)

KCRA Sacramento 1986 (NBC)

KDLT Sioux Falls 1993 (NBC)

WMVS Milwaukee 1999 (PBS)

Shattered Glass (2003)

Zodiac (2007)

The Year Of Living Dangerously (1982)

Up Close And Personal (1993)

The Pelican Brief (1993)

The Insider (1999)

Almost Famous (2000)

Ace In The Hole (1942)

Live From Baghdad (2002)

The Parallax View (1974)

The People Vs. Larry Flynt (1996)

The Quiet American (2002)

Citizen Kane (1941)

The Paper (1994)

All the President's Men(1976)

Broadcast News (1987)

Good Night And Good Luck (2005)

His Girl Friday (1940)

Network (1976)

Foreign Correspondent (1940)

Sweet Smell Of Success (1957)

* "There were, however, 50-plus-gallon trash bins for all the waste paper/crumpled up "copy paper," paper that has since vanished from the earth, think fey manila. The trash bins stood four feet high and everyone smoked and if you tossed a cigarette into the trash bin you could readily start a four-alarmer that would wipe out the city room. I was trying out for a job on the Bergen Record, making up a story—see, they did make them up—on a two-alarm fire in Hackensack, when a copy editor tossed a cigar into one of those trash bins and started a nice little copy-paper barbeque. I was offered the job but didn't take it. Even little bits of hilarity like that didn't make it worth working in Hackensack."

Manhattan's famous Park Row, once home to (l-r) Joseph Pulitzer's World, as well as the Tribune, the Press, the Times, and the New York Sun, is no more. The reincarnated Sun attempted to house itself in the paper's original Newspaper Row building without luck—not enough T1 lines or something—and had to settle for a spot down the street.

• "The elderly S.I. Newhouse once tried to heave a manual typewriter at me in a fit of anger. Unable to move it very far, he followed up with a glass ashtry." -Truculent
• "I worked for a managing editor known for his drunken incomprehensible rages, which I had never seen. My second day at the newspaper I came in to find a young woman, a job applicant, waiting for this ME, who was as usual late. When he staggered in and found her, she smiled and introduced herself, and he said, "You cunts are all alike," and threw up on the floor. I didn't doubt the stories after that. This was the same ME who kept pictures of attractive women in his desk, and liked to show them off. One day my fellow reporter was in there talking and he pulled out a pretty blond and was clucking and kissing and making the usual comments about her, and my friend got out of there as fast as he could, because the blonde, of course, was his wife." -R.L.
• "My copy editor was a million year old WWII Navy vet with one leg and blurry arm tats. About my third week, I wrote that John Wayne was in a film, only, he wasn't. The editor called me up and said, at the top of his two-packs-of-Camels-a-day-seared lungs: 'If you fucking write Empire State Building, stick your fucking head out the window and MAKE SURE IT'S STILL THERE!'" -D.M.
• "Back in the somewhat-realish altweekly days (before New Times bought it all up) we did a piece on how easy it would be to buy crack in certain neighborhoods, timing each one (I think 12 minutes was the fastest for a nerdy-looking white kid). To prove that we had indeed secured real crack, we had to test it in the newsroom. This was also a newsroom where our editor, 6'3", 250-plus, would take us out and demand that we do multiple shots of Jim Beam with him, calling us "fucking pussies" if we started to slump after six or seven. We even had to figure out how to expense it. Accounting sent it back several times." -M.B.

For instance! Once upon a time in a faraway dead place called Life magazine in the 1940s, edit meetings were, well, much the way they are now. Dull meandering affairs where not a damn thing got done. One day, a young journalist named Scott Levitt, trapped in such a time-sucking summit, spoke up from the end of the table. "I have a report to make," he said. Then he pulled out a pistol and shot it into the ceiling. Corny, but effective, and of course, this being The Way It Was, everyone laughed.

At the risk of reinforcing the average j-schooler's distorted image of his future, we're inviting your own Old School Odes, which we'll post each Friday, because that is the day when we find ourselves wishing we were working next to Cary Grant instead of our server room, plucky though it is. We await your nostalgia.