Eight Feet Deep

Speak up
will you?

At some point in my life, I came to despise mimes. Yes, I admit to being a mime-hater. But I am not a mime bigot. I think mimes have the right to do whatever they want and I won’t raise a fuss about them doing it. I also don’t discriminate against mimes. But, well if hate is too deep a word, I will just say that I despise them and have for a long time.

Pantomime can be okay and even funny. Comic Red Skelton used to perform pantomime on his TV show back in the 1960s. But pantomime was certainly not the funniest sketches on Skelton’s show.

Probably I just see mimes as being kind of annoying. It’s like many of them I have seen like to convert you to mimeism, which is probably not a word. The word “mime” does have a number of different interpretations as you can see in Dictionary.com. I certainly don’t know much about the ” … ancient Greek or Roman farce that depended for effect largely upon ludicrous actions and gestures.” I am sure it was something to do back then when there was no television or if you weren’t doing other Greek or Roman things.

I sometimes feel bad about my dislike of mimes. I shouldn’t be so hard on people who like and perform their art forms. But, the feeling usually passes.

One problem does exists in reading biographies. That is, too often I will know the ending.

At some point during this spring I decided to read at least one biography of each U.S. president. The reason for this diversion is that I became interested in presidential biographies reading about President U.S. Grant while sleeping on the beach. Yeah, I know, he doesn’t sound like a “hot” read while hanging at the beach but to each his or her own. I actually got hooked on bios after reading about the life of Mark Twain but that’s another story.

When I say biography, I mean book, not some snapshot such as:

Name: G. Washington
Term of Office: 1789-1797
Nicknames: Father of Wooden Dentures, One Buck
Know for: Lying his ass off

In addition to the Grant bio, I have read bios of Warren G. Harding and James A. Garfield. I am now reading a book about Grover Cleveland. It’s called “Grover Cleveland: And the Walrus was Big Steve.” No, that’s not really the name of it. But Grover’s first name was Stephen and he was called “Big Steve” as a boy. That was probably because he was a big boy.

After investigating the lives of Harding and Cleveland, in particular, I really see from where the old saw about anyone growing up to be president came. I am not being serious here because I think perhaps there is something very unique in one’s makeup for that person to become president of these United States of America. I am not saying every man, so far the only presidents have been men, who held the office was a great man. Cleveland seems like some of the ne’er-do-wells I have known all of my adult life. These are basically smart people who like to drink beer and talk about eclectic topics, then they usually puke on someone’s shoes.

Also during my adult life, I have read a number of books written about certain presidents. Kennedy, or rather Kennedy’s death, has been a particular fascination. I’ve probably read four or five books on Lyndon B. Johnson including all of the Robert Caro books. I think LBJ was pretty much a scoundrel but being a real Texan and not an Ivy League one like some presidents I can think of — no names but one’s initial’s rhymes with “Bub Ma” — Johnson was our scoundrel.

In recent years presidents have had tons of books written about them. If biographies of Bill Clinton were stacked end-to-end they would reach clear to St. Louis — from somewhere.

At the very least after reading these bios, I don’t feel so bad for — so far — not realizing my potential. Just who knows what that potential is may be anyone’s guess. Perhaps it is using hyphens — .

Williams: Let them
eat aspirin.

Southeast Texas media members have found something to lull them out of the summer doldrums.

Summer can be a slow news time because a definite void is left in the news hole due to schools on hiatus. But the big “pill mill” saga is keeping our media friends hopping like a kangaroo on meth.

Earlier this year, concerned citizens and law enforcement in this corner of Texas had friendly pols such as state Sen. Tommy Williams, R-The Woodlands, and Rep. Mike “Tuffy” Hamilton, R-Mauriceville, pushing legislation that would make it harder for cash-only pain management clinics to write scrips for popular prescription analgesics such as Xanax, Lorcet and Soma.

Yesterday, local and state law officers and DEA agents raided a number of pain clinics around the area, seizing records, reportedly to investigate doctors recklessly and overprescribing those prescriptions which end up used for recreational purposes. Local authorities said they have been investigating these clinics for a long time. But all of a sudden they make a big show of raiding and seizing files. I wonder why?

Could it be because of the media hubbub, which included a well-advertised special report on the pill-mill issue by local TV station KFDM-Channel 6 in Beaumont, Texas. Culminating investigations by cops when the media was about writing about the authorities’ targets have been known to happen. An instance which instantly comes to mind is the Branch Davidian raid by the ATF during the time a series about David Koresh and the Davidians was published by the Waco, Texas, newspaper, a paper of which I once had knowledge.

The Channel 6 special, which I believe will be air again this weekend (One can watch the special “Prescription for Abuse” (sigh) on its Web site.), wasn’t bad. It centered around a local woman whose son died of an overdose of prescription pills to which the young man had been addicted.

After seeing the report, I do see that the situation seems kind of dangerous. But I still have heard little about how tighter restriction on lower tier pain medication might ultimately affect patients who suffer from chronic pain. Although I am afflicted by chronic pain, the restrictions would likely not affect me since I have to go to a Department of Veterans Affairs doctor every month for methadone to control pain.

One disconcerning thought from the Channel 6 special came about when the grieving mother of the OD victim said that a tighter leash should be kept on patients who go “doctor-shopping.” For law enforcement officials to effectively do that would most likely involve cops searching an individual’s medical records willy-nilly. For me, that just wouldn’t fly.

Nonetheless, I was happy to see today that the “Beaumont Enterprise” published a story about legitimate pain clinics along with its story on the latest chapter in the Southeast Texas pill mill saga.

Sometimes the entire story of pill mills gone wild in Southeast Texas seems a little too much hype and not enough fiber. But I certainly can’t fault the media, especially after hearing a discussion this morning on Houston talk radio station KTRH .

Callers to this show were up in the air over media coverage on the four teens who met their end early today when the stolen vehicle in which they were riding struck a parked train. Pardon the phrasing of their demise, but I am on a public library computer which censors certain words being transmitted such as the more generic term for an unexpected instance in which one ceases to live.

Some who called this show said the media slanted their story to make it more about the train while others complained that it wasn’t news for teens to be joyriding.

Having worked in the news profession, I still shake my head over how much the general public think they know about news. As I like to point out, one would hardly respect the opinion of a lay person professing to know about brain surgery if they knew the person giving that opinion was only an eighth-grade graduate (I’m not slamming eighth-graders now). Likewise, we rarely don’t tell mechanics or plumbers their business when they are working for us (some people do, I know, I know, already!). The point is there are many people out there who think they know news when in fact they wouldn’t know legitimate news if it fell out of the sky and turned them into a pile of fine dust.

However, people do know what they like. And that is what media managers need to keep in the back of their minds. Is Paris Hilton news? No, but stories over her jailing is what the reading and viewing public wants. And that is quite unfortunate.

At least the president’s watch wasn’t stolen. It was quite the news event that Gee Dubya was given a hero’s greeting in Albania. The people there seem to love him. Perhaps he should move there. Soon.