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Top Short: NBC News: Prosecutors Cut Off Pecker
(Trump attorneys cut off testimony from National Enquirer parent company  CEO named Pecker).

The length of most syndicated columns is 750 words. It is also the length of the average PSaCOT over the last two months. I decided  I don’t want my weekly output to be tl;dr, so I am shooting for 750.

With the occasional exception of a special issue or an annual column, if a column is more than 750 words long, something will be cut. That will show me. Or maybe not.

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Robert Malchman’s take on the subject:

Did you watch Timeless, which ran from 2016-18. [Ed.note: No]It was kind of like Quantum Leap "trying to put right what once went wrong," but much more morally ambiguous. If you have Amazon Prime and you haven't seen it, I recommend it.

Brett Battles’ Rewinder trilogy belongs to the “step on the butterflies” canon, as the antagonist deliberately sets out to destroy civilization, out of spite for protagonist Denny Younger. The multiple timelines are confusing but engaging.

When I was young, time travelers usually tried to avoid changing the future on purpose. Here, that is the core of the plot. It turns out there are pivotal points in history (one fictional, the rest real) where a single armed person can massively affect the future. And no, nobody shoots Hitler. How about the timeline where the British Empire never lost America? Or the one where Genghis Kahn conquers Europe?

I am right; there are no little things.

More on Rewinder here

There used to be a time when I thought I could watch every new time travel movie or TV show. But then with the simultaneous appearance of Omni Loop (Amazon) the movie and Continuum (Acorn/Amazon) the TV series, I am feeling a bit overwhelmed. Continuum is Canadian, and is straight-up time travel, with one accidental passenger on the trip. Omni Loop, set in Miami, is a time loop film. It plays with the “rules” in a way that confuses. No one ever mentions Groundhog Day in the dialog, which is mandatory in the time loop genre. I guess it just takes itself too seriously. It certainly wound its way to a seriously unsatisfying ending.

Both of these outings explain exactly how the time shift occurs, ignoring the obvious benefit of leaving the cause as a mystery, one of the most brilliant aspects of Groundhog Day (as filmed). Dwelling on the mechanism bogs down the story. Well, since the mechanism IS the story in Omni Loop, I guess I can’t say that.

So, as I say, what’s with all the time travel? Are we all that desperate to get out of our current reality?

Once again, I lucked out by being born a middle-class American in 1952. I came of age at one of the absolute peaks of American journalism. Newspapers were on a downward slide, but the survivors were surviving. Radio news was mandated by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Jobs galore for a man with a great face for radio. (That is, not a blow-dried  news-model).

In 1927, in exchange for the use the public’s broadcast spectrum, radio stations were required to serve  in the “public interest, convenience, or necessity.” The FCC, always a supine regulator, at some point (I can’t find the date on the Internet) stopped requiring regular newscasts on all stations. Oops! Except for a few all-news stations, there went radio news—except for Rip Reed, the staffer who reads the AP Radio Wire out loud. Even those jobs are gone.

To be continued…

There’s change afoot in the Chicago Manual of Style, the bible of academic writing, and the favored styledbook of publishers. Thanks for the link, Robert Malchman.  I have been sour on stylebooks since the NYT gave up and allowed “over” as a synonym for “more than.” Another lost cause: only buses and trains are due. Everything else is "because."

I would have earned a style-book ding in Boston, circa 1975 for this sentence: "The crop loss was due to locusts." "The crop loss was because of locusts" would technically be correct according to the stylebook. Better yet, change it to “Locusts caused the crop loss,” the preferred locution, back in the day when there were still standards.

The local newspaper does manage an occasional good head in the print edition.

East Bay Times

(A reprint of my annual anniversary item, with small adjustments).

As of Oct. 16, it's been 26 years since my online revival of this 53-year-old column. (As published, as a Typepad Entry) Online for 26 years! (with a small six-year gap in the middle). I’ve written almost 1,000 columns, successors to an idea born in MIT’s objectivist student newspaper, ERGO, on September 23, 1970, six days after my 18^th birthday. (see entire first column here)

When I started this column online, "W" was still the second-rate governor of Texas, Sara Palin was busy running Wasila, and John McCain was angry. W is still second rate, Palin isn't running anything, and John McCain is gone.

I was still working for CMP (computer journalism company), and had invented the weekly podcast, back before Ipods (the lack of which definitely cut into our audience). My heart beat by itself and I weighed 270 pounds. In short, things were different.

In 1998, during the Clinton impeachment, I either had to start a column or check into a mental institution. PSACOT gave me a forum in which to express, to an audience (no matter how small) my feelings about that political circus. [As a one-time U.S. history teacher, I am forced to note that Andrew Johnson's impeachment was a rabid partisan witch hunt, as was Clinton's. Only Nixon's near-impeachment was bipartisan–and only Nixon resigned. And only Trump was charged twice for crimes he actually committed.]

The column/blog has since evolved into a combination of diary for my family and me and bulletin board for my clever friends–in short, a personal column. Like, but not as good as, former San Francisco Chronicle columnists Adair Lara or Jon Carroll. Or Doug Baker of the Oregon Journal.  Or, to take a national example, former New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen, considered the mother of the personal column concept (even though Stanton Delaplane and Charles McCabe of the San Francisco Chronicle actually beat her to it–but of course, if it hasn't happened in New York, it hasn't happened).

PSACOT is also a revival of sorts. My MIT readers would remember the original P.S. A Column On Things, which ran in ERGO, MIT's objectivist newspaper from September 1970 to March 1971, and The Tech, MIT's semi-official student newspaper, six times from March 1971 to May 1971. Those were among my happiest days as a journalist. If I had truly understood the fulfillment a personal column gave me, perhaps I would have fought harder to keep it when Bob Fourer killed it, or I would have revived it when I became editor-in-chief two years later, or tried to practice the craft as an adult (and become the father of the personal column).

In any case, I expect to still be doing this next October; I'll meet you here.