Author Archives: bpriddy

One Race, Four Drivers Left

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(NASCAR)—-Four losers at Martinsville this weekend will race for the biggest win in NASCAR at  Phoenix next weekend.

Alex Bowman bumped Denny Hamlin out of the lead in with six laps (about three miles) left in the race and beat Kyle Busch and Brad Keselowski to the line for the win.  Busch and Keselowski had to win to make the championship four.

Hamlin, who has never won the Cup championship, still makes the final four. So does defending champion Chase Elliott, Martin Truex Jr., the 2017 champion, and Kyle Larson, who has more wins this year than any other driver.

Bowman’s win at Martinsville is his fourth this year. Ryan Blaney and Joey Logano join Busch and Keselowski as the four semi-finalists who didn’t make it to the last round.

Racing on the half-mile track crowded with 38 stock cars always produces some raw nerve, even when seven drivers are not competing for the three remaining slots in the championship race—Larson was guaranteed one of the final four positions because of wins in the two previous races.

Hamlin did not take the incident with Bowman well, calling him “a hack,” although Bowman has twice as many wins this year as Hamlin, and “just terrible.”  Bowman says the incident was accidental, caused by too much speed going into the corner, forcing his car up the rack slightly to hit Hamlin.

(INDYCAR)—Plenty of action on the track, but competition.  INDYCAR teams have been testing various car-driver combinations but no significant signings have been reported for several days.  The new season starts February 27 on the streets of St. Petersburg, Florida, the earliest season-start for INDYCAR in several years.

FORMULA 1)—Four races will decide the winner of one of the tightest championship races in recent memory.  The Mexico Grand Prix will be run next weekend.

 

Sell Sell Sell

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(Selling encyclopedias one summer in college was not profitable enough to encourage a career in sales. But knocking on strangers’ doors in strange towns and convincing four in ten to let me in to give a presentation—making a sale to one of the four—did teach about selling myself, especially selling myself to people I did not know and who had no reason to want to know me.  Dr. Frank Crane offers his thoughts on—–)

SALESMANSHIP

Every young man should some time in his life have experience in salesmanship.

Selling goods is the best known cure for those elements in a man that tend to make him a failure.

The art of success consists in making people change their minds. It is this power that makes the efficient lawyer, grocer, politician, or preacher.

There are two classes of men. One seeks employment in a position where he merely obeys the rules and carries out the desires of his employer. There is little or no opportunity for advancement in this work. You get to a certain point and there you stick.

Such posts are a clerkship in a bank, a government job, such as letter-carrier, a place in the police force, or any other routine employment requiring no initiative. These kinds of work are entirely honorable and necessary. The difficulty is, they are cramping, limiting.

Some day you may have to take a position of this sort, but first try your hand at selling things.

Be a book-agent, peddle washing-machines, sell life-insurance, automobiles, agricultural implements, or peanuts.

You shrink from it because it is hard, it goes against the grain, as you are not a pushing sort of fellow. And that is the very reason you need it.

Salesmanship is strong medicine. You have to go out and wrestle with a cold and hostile world. You are confronted with indifference, often contempt. You are considered a nuisance. That is the time for you to buck up, take off your coat, and go in and win.

A young lawyer will gain more useful knowledge of men and affairs by selling real estate or fire-insurance than by law-school…

Get out and sell goods. Hustle. Fight. Don’t get fastened in one hole. Take chances. Come up smiling. So the best and biggest prizes in America are open to you.

Selling things, commercialism, business, is not a low affair; it is a great, big, bully game. It is a thoroughly American game, and the most sterling qualities of Americanism are developed by it, when it is carried on fairly and humanely.

There is incitement in it for all your best self, for your honesty, perseverance, optimism, courage, loyalty, and religion…

I mean to cast no slurs upon faithful occupants of posts of routine. They have their reward.

But…don’t look for a “safe” place. Don’t depend upon an organization to hold your job for you. Don’t scheme and wire-pull for influence and help and privilege.

Get out and peddle maps. Make people buy your chickens or your essays. Get in the game. It beats football.

The power of a cat 

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We have two special members of our family.  Minnie Mayhem and her brother, Max (Maximus Meridius Decatimus, named for a movie character who among other things was a General of the Felix Legion, which had a lion as its symbol. And who can say “Felix” without thinking of the famous cat?).

The scampering thumps of little feet adds merriment to our lives.  Removing them from the tops of things keeps us moving, too.  It would help if they acknowledged their names when we tell them to “get down,” but we suspect they plot to make sure we don’t get too comfortable in our chairs. Or at our computer desks (the moving cursor seems to be interesting). And Nancy wished they weren’t so interested in helping her get our tax information together on the dining room table.

More than once, we have again been reminded that cats never say, “Oops!”

Nor do they ever apologize.  They think that all will be forgiven if they hop up in your lap, lick  your forehad, and purr a little bit (that’s Minnie’s modus operandi anyway)

Cat lovers might think that the most peaceful part of their existence is when they’re stretched out in their recliner under an afghan with a cat on top on a chilly day. Sometimes they’ll pet their favorite lap friend and cause static electricity to snap and pop and the fur stand on end. The cat is not usually amused.

Seldom does anyone think of their cat as a power source.  But they can be, apparently, as shown by this article we recently came across in the Columbia Daily Statesman of September 16, 1879.

The most remarkable invention in this or any other age is duly chronicled in the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch. It is based upon the electrical properties of the fur of cats. 

With a battery of 128 cats the inventor succeeded in generating a current so strong that it instantly polarized all the lightning-arresters and demagnetized all the switch-boards on the way to Omaha.  The operators all along the line were terror stricken, and rushed from their offices.  Eighteen hundred and nine glass insulators were broken and as many poles shattered as if by lightning.  A great deal more damage would doubtless have resulted if the copper rod over which the battery was suspended had not suddenly become red hot and burned the tails off the cats and let them drop.

When only a moderately strong current of electricity is desired, it is obtained by densely populating the small floor of the cage, which is made of sheet copper, that being the best conductor.  The electricity thus generated charges the copper floor of the cage, and as it can not pass off to the ground through the glass insulators it seeks its exit over the wires that are connected by soldering to each end of the coper plate.

For generating a powerful current, the cats are carefully and securely tied tail to tail in pairs, and by the lop thus formed they are suspended from a heavy insulated copper rod that passes longitudinally through the cage, to the ends of which are attached the telegraph or telephone lines.

Please do not try to replicate this experiment at home.  Do not try to enter it in a school science fair. Better sources of electricity have been developed.  However—-

One month later, give or take a few days, after the article was published, Thomas Edison made a workable electric light.

We’re not sure where Edison got his electricity.  We have found no historical record that there were cats in his laboratory.

Sometimes as we hear Max and Minnie tearing through our house, we wonder how many watts they’re generating. And how can we use them in the next power outage.

 

Racing: Emotional numbers at Kansas: 5, 17, 20

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By Bob Priddy, Missourinet Contributing Editor

(NASCAR)  Kyle Larson’s ninth win of the NASCAR Cup season was far more than just another trophy in his growing collection as he hurtles into the final three races of the year, the favorite to win the championship. It was a tribute win.

Before the race, car owner Rick Hendrick telephoned Larson to mention that the race was being run on the 17th anniversary of the death of his son, Ricky Hendrick IV, in a plane crash on the way to a race. Ricky had a brief career in the truck series, where he won his first race at the Kansas Speedway twenty years ago this year, and in the then-Busch Series—NASCAR’s second-tier series.

 

Larson’s number and the design of his car’s paint job (seen here at Indianapolis in August) has been a tribute to Ricky Hendrick for most of the season.  He started from the pole at Kansas, led 130 of the 267 laps in the race, and finished 3.6 seconds ahead of teammate Chase Elliott.  It’s his third straight win and the second time this year he has won three in a row. Two three-race winning streaks in a single season has not happened in NASCAR since Dale Earnhardt, Sr., did it 34 years ago.

The race was a struggle for the eight driver in this semi-final round, leaving the determination of who will be the final four running for the Cup to be decided at the shortest track on the schedule. Martinsville is a .526-mile track, the only track still used by NASCAR since its beginning in 1948.  It’s the only track with a concrete surface on the turns (banked at only twelve degrees) and asphalt on the straights.

Five of the eight drivers had issues that juggled the points and point to a possible wild scramble at Martinsville.

The most costly mishap was Austin Dillon’s collision with Ryan Blaney that sent Blaney into the wall with 44 laps left.  Blaney had been a solid second in the point standings going into the race. But the crash ended his day and he goes to Martinsville fifth, one point below the cutline.

He is one point behind Kyle Busch who hit the wall twice and blowing a tire late. He was still running at the end, six laps down, but picked up enough stage points to hold fourth place, one up on Blaney.

Brad Keselowski and Martin Truex, Jr., went into Kansas 7th and 6th, respectively in the points but got together and both had to pit with flat tires shortly after.  The two have swapped position in the points with Truex three points out of fourth and Keselowski six points back.

Joey Logano wen to Kansas 40 points below the cutline, managed to keep the fenders on the car and gained 14 points. But he still needs to win at Martinsville to make the final four.

Larson, Elliott, and Denny Hamlin go to Martinsville with solid margins above the cutline. But the “paper clip,” as the track is called leads to a lot of bumping and rubbing seven drivers trying to fill the last three slots for the season finale.

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Our adopted Missourian, Clint Bowyer, will be climbing back into his fire suit and helmet later today to run some test laps in NASCAR’s Next Gen car.  He and Dale Earnhardt, Jr., will test the car at the quarter-mile Bowman Gray Stadium in Salem, North Carolina.

The track is the same length as the special asphalt track that will be laid down around the football field inside the Los Angeles Coliseum—where the Rose Bowl is played and where the 1984 Summer Olympic Games were held. NASCAR plans to run its pre-season Clash there on February 6, the first time the event will have been held away from the Daytona International Speedway since NASCAR created the race in 1979. The event will be the first competitive event for the Next Gen car.

Bowyer, a native of Emporia, Kansas who often raced on Missouri tracks as he built the career that put him at NASCAR’s top level for sixteen years, is part of the FOX broadcasting team that will do the first half of the 2022 season and Earnhardt is part of the NBC broadcasting team that will cover the second half of the season.

(FORMULA 1)—Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton went into the United States Grand Prix at the Circuit of the Americas in Texas just three points apart and the season dwindling down.  They leave with Verstappen up by a dozen.

Hamilton, starting from pole, edged Verstappen going into the first turn but gave up the lead in the first round of pit stops and came out nine seconds back. He closed to within a second of Verstappen but could get no closer and finished 1.3-seconds back.

Verstappen’s eighth win of the year ends a five-race win streak for Hamilton at the Circuit of the Americas and makes his run to a record eighth F1 title an uphill fight in the five remaining races of 2021.

(INDYCAR)—Another European driver on track to move up to Formula 1 will race, instead, in INDYCAR.  Rahal-Letterman-Lanigan Tacing has signed Danish driver Christian Lundgaard to a multi-year contract.  Lundgaard is the FIA Formula 2 champion. He was impressive in the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course in his first INDYCAR start in August.  He qualified fourth with limited experience on the course and finished twelfth despite dealing with a bout of food poisoning. He will run both road and oval races.

He’s 20 and has come up through a Renault program designed to train young drivers to compete in Formula One. He’ll join Graham Rahal and Jack Harvey on the three-car team.

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Arrow McLaren SP is considering adding a third car to its lineup for 2022 and has given another European driver a little seat time.  Nico Hulkenberg, who has 179 F1 starts and a LeMans overall victory to his credit, was scheduled to turn laps yesterday at the Barber Motorsports Park in Alabama.  Hulkenberg, who is 34, says he has no “current plans” to move to INDYCAR but he was “pleased to try out an Indy car and see what it’s all about.”

AMSP says it’s focusing on its two car setup for now with Pato O’Ward and Felix Rosenqvist but it will continue evaluating adding a third car in the future.

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(Photo credits: Racing Reference.com; Bob Priddy)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Leaving the Pulpit

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(I bought my first computer from a former priest who was married to a former nun. Dr. Frank Crane, who we feature each Monday, left the Methodist pulpit to become a newspaper columnist.  He explained, “I began to find out that I did not fit as a denominational leader…I was not interested in denominational aims…There never was any clash over doctrines. I believed, and still believed, in the great fundamentals the church stands for. But the machinery repelled me. I could not throw myself into the great and fascinating business of propagandizing the essentials because I had to work too hard at the nonessentials…My whole aim and enthusiasm is for the individual, not for the corporate body.” A century after he wrote those words, mainline churches are pondering what to do—not with ministers who leave the pulpit, but young people who don’t come through the doors.  Dr. Crane left the formal ministry voluntarily; he was not DEfrocked, but he became one of—-)

THE UNFROCKED

There was a curious banquet held at Paris not long ago. There met a  hundred and fifty former priests and former preachers who did not blush either for their past or for their present.

To one class of men society seems peculiarly unjust: to the unfrocked.  The man who leaves the ministry, no matter how conscientious and sincere his motives, is always look up askance. We persist in regarding him as if were tainted with the flavor of desertion and disloyalty.

Why? Is it not more honorable to leave holy orders, when one no longer believes the articles of faith, or when one is convinced of the inutility of the institution, when the  development of one’s mind and heart has led him honestly to these convictions, than to remain and be insincere?

Does not the church itself believe that an honest layman, no matter  what his views, is better than a dishonest clergyman?

For all that, the rupture between the parson and his organization is  always painful. Laymen hardly welcome him. By a strange illogicality we are usually cold to the men who enter our ranks for conscience’s sake. We mistrust them; we put pressure upon them to conceal their past as something of which to be ashamed; as a rule, they have a hard time making a living.

Among the former clergymen at the banquet mentioned we may note three lawyers, two police magistrates, two farmers, a physician, two artists, two capitalists, one mayor, besides commercial travelers, university professors, accountants, and public school teachers.

They have formed a union which proposes, according to its bylaws,  never to proselyte or in any way attempt to induce men to leave the ministry, but to extend a helping hand to those who, on their own initiative, have severed their ecclesiastical ties, and to help them in their endeavors to gain an honest livelihood.

It will do no harm to the church—it can only do good—to make the way as easy as possible for those who have ceased to be in harmony with its faith or its methods to get out.

In most instances men enter the ministry when young. When they arrive at maturity their convictions may in all honor have undergone a change. It should not be taken as a matter of course that their reluctance to continue in the ministry means a loss of religion or of personal integrity. The minister may discover that, while his religious sentiment is as profound as ever, he is not adapted by nature or gifts to be a clergyman.

His retirement from church office may be as heroic and worthy of praise as his entrance into it.

The Unanswered Question

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There is an unanswered question that we did not address in Monday’s observation in this space about the governor’s accusation that a newspaper had “hacked” a state education department website.

It is unfortunate that Governor Parson refused to take questions after last week’s press conference in which he said he wants St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Josh Renaud criminally charged for notifying the state he had found personal information about thousands of school teachers easily obtainable from a Department of Education website.

Someone should have asked—and we are confident WOULD have asked—“Did the story tell the truth?”

That has been the critical question for 300 years whenever a United States political figure does not like what a reporter has written about him or her—since 1734 when New York’s Royal Governor, William Cosby, jailed newspaper publisher John Peter Zenger for eight months on a charge of libel.  Cosby proclaimed Zenger’s criticisms of his actions amounted to “divers scandalous, virulent, false and seditious reflections,” an 18th Century equivalent, perhaps, to Governor Parson’s complaint that the Post-Dispatch and Renaud were involved in a “political game” intended to “embarrass the state and sell headlines for their news outlet.”

The jury in the Zenger trial was out for only ten minutes before finding him not guilty. His  attorney had argued that a statement cannot be libelous if it is true regardless of the discomfort it causes someone, in this case the Royal Governor. More than fifty years later, Freedom of the Press became part of the nation’s constitution.

More than a century ago, a Missouri Capitol reporter was jailed for reporting the truth. Robert Holloway of the long-defunct St. Louis Republic was jailed after reporting in 1917 that a Cole County Grand Jury had indicted a top state official for selling coal from the state’s coal supply.  The official was John W. Scott, the former Commissioner of the Permanent Seat of Government.  Holloway also reported the grand jury was investigating whether Penitentiary Warden D. C. McClung improperly used state property. Grand jury proceedings, even today, are supposed to be secret.

His story ran before any indictments had been made public, leading the judge who had convened the grand jury to haul Holloway before him to tell where he had gotten his information. When Holloway refused to reveal his source, the judge jailed him until he talked, or until that grand jury’s term ran out. The Missouri Supreme Court upheld the order.

State Historical Society Executive Director Gary Kremer, who wrote about the Holloway case for the Jefferson City newspaper several years ago, has a picture of Holloway seated at his typewriter next to a barred jail window as he continued to report, his stories datelined “Cole County Jail.” He finally was released after two months on a promise to appear before a new grand jury if it called him.  It refused to take up the whole issue when it was convened. Those who had been indicted by the earlier grand jury were found not guilty.  Holloway remained a reporter, off and on, for most of the next three decades.

But he remains, as far as we have been able to determine, the only Capitol reporter ever jailed by the state of Missouri for telling the truth.

The governor’s call for Cole County Prosecutor Locke Thompson to take action against the newspaper gives Thompson a lot to think about.  There’s the First Amendment protection of press freedom. The newspaper attorney doubts the state’s law on computer tampering sufficiently applies to this case because the computer code allowing anyone to access the information was readily available through the Department of Education’s website.

There might also be a question of whether the state law on computer tampering is unconstitutional prior restraint on reporting information gained through legal means from a state computer. And proving the newspaper published the information with malicious or criminal intent will be difficult.  To the contrary, the newspaper’s actions to withhold the story until the department fixed the problem the investigation pinpointed is a strong argument against criminal intent.

But the basic question remains.  Did the reporter tell the truth?  There is no acceptable “yes, but” response. Zenger-Holloway-Renaud (or the name of any reporter since 1734) are linked together by that question.

And that is the only question that matters.

Racing: Larson is first of four

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by Bob Priddy  Missourinet Contributing Editor

(NASCAR)—NASCAR’s hottest driver of 2021 has guaranteed himself a shot at the Cup championship.  Kyle Larson held off teammate William Byron through restart after restart to win the last 500-mile race of the year, finishing half a second in front at Texas Speedway. It’s his eighth win of the year and makes him the first driver assured of being one of four drivers to race for the championship at Phoenix November 7.

Larson, who led 256 of the 334 laps could not get Byron out of his rear view mirror in several restarts in the last phase of the race. Although he dominated the race, six restarts in the last race stage—four of them in the last 30 laps—challenged him to get the break ahead of the bunched-up field before the driver in the outside lane, usually Byron, could nose ahead. Christopher Bell, Brad Keselowski, and Kevin Harvick rounded out the top five in the race.  Bell and Harvick dropped out of playoff picture last week.

Three drivers among the eight semi-finalists filled the next three positions at Texas: Ryan Blaney, defending champion Chase Elliott, and Kyle Busch. Denny Hamlin kept his championship hopes alive despite a spin with 21 laps left that dropped him to last among cars on the leader’s lap and a crash with seven laps remaining. His pit crew kept his car operable and he brought it home 11th.  Fifteen cars finished on the lead lap.

The eighth contender, Joey Logano, suffered a rare engine failure and wound up 30th, putting him in a must-win situation in the remaining two races of this playoff stage if he is to contend for the championship.

Larson, Blaney, Hamlin, and Busch hold the top four spots. Elliott is five points below the cut line. Brad Keselowski trails by 15. Martin Truex Jr., who left the race with twenty laps left, is down 22. Logano is eighth.

The playoffs continue at the Kansas Speedway next Sunday.

(INDYCAR)—Alex Palou, the new INDYCAR champion, won his championship on a road course he’d never visited before.  But he had driven the course a lot.

Palou, on Dale Earnhardt Junior’s podcast (IndyCar Champion Alex Palou: “You Get More Into Fights Than Us” – YouTube), explained, “I’d never been there. It’s like the most important race of my life.”   So he want iRacing—driving a computer program that simulated the Long Beach track.  ‘I needed as many laps as possible. I think I did driving, like, 17-18 hours” in one day.

He went into the race with a healthy lead in points and had to finish only eleventh to clinch the trophy. He finished fourth to become the first Spaniard to win an INDYCAR title, the seventh youngest champion and the first driver younger than 25 to win a championship since teammate Scott Dixon got the first of his six eighteen years ago (he’s 24).

Palou has a special diet when he wins a race—a big chicken dinner.  He told USA Today’s “For the Win” podcast that the custom began when he was racing in Japan where “you don’t have the food we normally have…So the only thing that was similar was Spanish food—and it was bad food for you; it’s not salad—it was fried chicken. And I love friend chicken…So it was a perfect fit.”

Since winning the championship, he’s been making a lot of appearances and “I think I’ve had loads of fried chicken.”

He has also had a chance to see a different kind of racing close-up.  He was at Charlotte earlier this month for the race on the Charlotte Roval, the combination of oval and road course. “There is nothing close to a NASCAR stock car,” he said.  The car is huge. It’s mind-blowing. It’s a really big car.  That is what makes NASCAR so amazing on track—lots of weight, lots of power. It’s difficult for the drivers to handle.”

Would he like to strap in one?  Of course. He’s a racer.  But just for some test laps.  Open-wheel racing is still his thing.

(FORMULA 1)—No wheels turned in competition in F1 this week.  Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton renew their hot rivalry for the championship Sunday at the Circuit of the Americas near Austin, Texas. Verstappen took a six-point lead on Hamilton at the Turkish Grand Prix a week ago.

Formula 1 has six races left this year, including Austin. It finishes up on December 12 in Abu Dhabi.

(picture credits: Bob Priddy and Dirty Mo Media/Youtube).

 

 

 

It’s What We Do

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We are replacing today’s usual reflection on life by Dr. Frank Crane with a reflection on a regrettable reaction by our governor to a good piece of journalism in which the journalist did what journalists are supposed to do journalistically and did what a good citizen should have done ethically.

In all my years of covering Missouri politics I have never heard of any of our top leaders suggest a reporter should be jailed for giving the state a chance to correct a serious problem before a story was published.

Let’s be clear:

There is nothing wrong with testing whether the information about us held by government is safely held.  You would expect a journalist to defend another journalist who was able to prove some private information held by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education wasn’t so private after all.

And I am.

Good journalists test and challenge systems, people, programs, and policies to see if they are what they claim to be.  It’s a responsibility we have.  If I can get information about you that the government claims is protected, how safe are you from those who want that information for malicious purposes?

We were involved in just such an issue many years ago and it exposed a weakness in state government that could have exposed everybody’s most important private information.  This is the story, as I remember it.

Steve Forsythe was the bureau chief for United Press International back then. In those days there were two highly-competitive national wire services.  Steve’s office in the capitol was next door to the Associated Press office in room 200 , which now is carved up into several legislative offices.

One day, Steve called the Department of Revenue because he couldn’t find his previous year’s income tax return, something he needed for the current year’s return.  Could the department send him a copy of his previous year’s return?  Yes, he was told. What’s your address? And a few days later it showed up in his mail box.

Steve was a helluva reporter who instantly realized what had happened.   The Missourinet was a UPI client.  He called me and we talked about what he had learned and we decided on a test.

We lured one of State Auditor Jim Antonio’s employees to call the department and use the same line that Steve had used. The department gladly agreed to mail the previous year’s tax return to her.

—except the return she asked for was that of State Revenue Director Gerald Goldberg.   And the address she gave was mine.

A few days later, a fat envelope arrived in my mailbox.

Steve and I went to the Jefferson Building that afternoon and, as I recall it, stopped Director Goldberg in the lobby as he was returning from lunch.  I handed him the envelope and asked him to open it.  He was stunned to see his personal state income tax return inside it.  There was a brief moment of, I suppose we could say, anger. But as Steve explained to him why we had done what we had done, he calmed down.  On the spot he said he’d immediately look into the situation.  I don’t think he wound up thanking us but we didn’t expect any thanks.

We could have asked for anybody’s tax return, I suppose, even Governor Teasdale’s although that might have been a harder ask.  But this was bad enough.

There naturally was a certain amount of hand-wringing and anguish and probably some hostile thoughts about two reporters who were not known as friendly toward the administration to begin with pulling a stunt like this. But rather quickly, the department recognized that we had not opened that envelope and we had not looked at the director’s return, had not made any beneficial use of the information, had not yet run a story, and that we certainly did not intend anything malicious in our actions.

Antonio was less than enthusiastic that we had used one of his trusted employees as a tool for our investigation, but he also recognized the problem we had pinpointed.

The department almost immediately changed its policies to outlaw accepting telephone requests such as the ones that led to the stories UPI and The Missourinet later ran and instituted a process designed to protect the confidentiality of those returns.

From time to time in later years I wondered if I should see if the department’s policies had slipped back to those days when Steve and I embarrassed it.   But I never did.   Every year, Nancy and I file our state tax returns and assume you can’t have them mailed to you with just a phone call.

I suppose Governor Teasdale could have demanded a criminal investigation of our actions but he didn’t.  His Department of Revenue just fixed the problem.  Steve went on to a long career with UPI, which eventually lost in the competition for wire service clients to the AP and closed its capitol bureau.  I went on to a long career with The Missourinet, which still serves a lot of radio stations in Missouri. We didn’t often care if we ruffled some feathers from time to time as long as we were reporting the truth—and that always was our goal.

Good reporters do what they are called to do—question, investigate, test, and report.  Sometimes those whose skirts that turn out to be dustier than they think they are don’t like the findings.

One big difference between the days when Steve’s tax return and the security of private information turned into a state policy-changing news story and today, when a reporter’s news story about the security of private information has led to threatened criminal charges, is the change in times. We are living in stressful times that not only breed physical and political disease, but tend to breed reactions that are less prudent than necessary.

But that won’t discourage good reporters from doing what they have a calling to do.  And the day it does, all of us are losers, even those who are embarrassed by what reporters find.

 

Food at It’s Best

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“Ignorance and laziness have won,” said retired British journalist John Richards a while ago.

Richards, who turned 96 when he made that observation, started the Apostrophe Protection Society about twenty years ago.  He crusaded for the correct use of the “much abused” apostrophe.  But he has given up.   He told the London Evening Standard late in 2019 there were two reasons for disbanding his organization: “One is that at 96 I am cutting back on my commitments and the second is that fewer organisations and individuals are now caring about the correct use of the apostrophe in the English Language. We, and our many supporters worldwide, have done our best but the ignorance and laziness present in modern times have won.”

His society was a small one.  Depressingly small, it seems.  He told the Standard he started the APS after he saw the “same mistakes over and over again.”  He hoped to find a half-dozen people who felt the same way.  He didn’t find a half-dozen.  Within a month of his announcement of the founding of the society, he said, “I received over 500 letters of support, not only from all corners of the United Kingdom, but also from America, Australia, France, Sweden, Hong Kong and Canada.

But that wasn’t enough (Note the apostrophe).

That sentence is an example of one of the three simple rules Richards has given for proper use of the apostrophe.

  1. They are used to denote a missing letter or letters.
  2. They are used to denote possession.
  3. Apostrophes are never used to denote plurals.

And there’s a corollary.  “It’s” only means “it is.”  The possessive version is “its.”  The cat had its breakfast.

Otherwise, this sign says “Food at it is best.”  The Towne Grill in Jefferson City isn’t (note the proper use of the apostrophe to symbolize the elimination of the letter “o”) going to change its (note proper use of the possessive) sign.  It has become an institution in Missouri’s capital city, a quirky but incorrect use of the apostrophe that is part of the city’s (proper use of the apostrophe to denote the possessive) culture.

The Apostrophe Protection Society seems so English.  The story about it reminded us of Professor Henry Higgins in Lerner & Lowe’s Broadway musical “My Fair Lady,” of a half-century ago.  Professor Higgins decided to teach an untutored London flower girl to speak proper English and lamented:

An Englishman’s way of speaking absolutely classifies him
The moment he talks he makes some other Englishman despise him
One common language I’m afraid we’ll never get
Oh, why can’t the English learn to

Set a good example to people whose
English is painful to your ears?
The Scots and the Irish leave you close to tears
There even are places where English completely disappears

In America, they haven’t used it for years!

To end this on a couple of more serious notes:

First, John Richards died earlier this year—March 30.  He was 97. Mr. Richards’s Washington Post obituary is at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/john-richards-dead/2021/04/25/9c7c1994-a425-11eb-a774-7b47ceb36ee8_story.html.

Second, I had a friend named Ed Bliss who used to write news for Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite at CBS.  Ed, who died several years ago, often conducted newswriting seminars at our conventions of news directors. I can still hear him say, “We have become a nation slovenly with language. The slovenliness in grammar, punctuation, and spelling is all about us.”

If we lack respect for our language in speaking and writing, we limit our abilities as a people to communicate effectively and we damage the trust we can have in one another. Today, we shout more than we speak; we talk but we don’t listen; we tweet more than we write; we dismiss one another with disparaging personal assessments.  In the midst of this noise, this transformation of the grace of our language into crudeness, it is no wonder that a group that upheld something as small as an apostrophe should feel that “ignorance and laziness” have won.

It’s not just the continued improper use of apostrophes that should concern us.  Our language deserves better use than we are making of it. We cannot respect one another if we do not respect the language we use with one another.

 

Racing:  Eight Remain in the Hunt

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By Bob Priddy, Missourinet Contributing Editor

(NASCAR)—-From sixteen to twelve, and now only eight drivers remain in the fight for NASCAR’s 2021 Cup championship.

Adding color to the competition are two guys, one still in the championship hunt and one who knocked himself out of it in the cutdown race at the Charlotte Roval.

Kyle Larson climbed all the way to the winner’s circle after an early race mishap, getting his seventh win of the year.  He has the top seed in the three-race series that will cut the final competitors to four for the last race of the year.

Larson’s alternator lost its belt and his battery started going flat at the end of the second stage of the race. But his pit crew put in a new battery and put on a new alternator belt—without losing a lap. However, he had dropped from 6th to 36th when he got back on the track. But he carved his way through the field and back into the top ten with 31 laps left and was second with eleven laps left. He got past Denny Hamlin for the lead with eight laps left and beat Tyler Reddick to the flag by about eight-tenths of a second.

Hamlin has the second seed for the next round with Martin Truex Jr., Ryan Blaney and Kyle Busch filing the rest of the top five positions.  The remaining three drivers are Chase Elliott, Joey Logano, and Brad Keselowski.

Kevin Harvick took himself out of title contention when he charged too hard into the first turn with eleven laps left, trying to stay ahead of Elliott and Truex, and went straight into the SAFER barrier.  His departure from the race was good news to Elliott with whom he has had a metal-bending feud going since the Bristol race three weeks ago when Harvick accused Elliott of denying him his first win of the year. Earlier in the race, Harvick had bumped Elliot into the turn eight wall, damaging the rear of the defending NASCAR champion’s car and jeopardizing his chances of advancing in the playoffs.

Elliott’s crew taped the pieces together so he could continue and he wound twelfth.  Harvick’s self-elimination put him 33rd for the day and out of the final eight for the first time since NASCAR went to the current playoff system.

Neither driver showed any contrition about their on-track ongoing dispute, which NASCAR noticed.

NASCAR’s senior vice-president for competition, Scott Miller, told SirusXM radio the Harvick-Elliott snit has to come to an end. “We spoke to them after the thing at Bristol…We don’t need that continuing on and we’ll do what we think is necessary to kind of get that one calmed down.”

Harvick was joined by Christopher Bell, Kurt Busch and Tyler Reddick as drivers no longer contending for the championship.

Unlike stick-and-ball sports, NASCAR playoffs are not a win-or-go home proposition. The four eliminated drivers will still be racing wins in the last four races.

(INDYCAR)—More driver lineups are falling into place for the 2022 INDYCAR season.

Jack Harvey will be in the Rahal-Letterman-Lanigan car next year, replacing Santino Ferrucci.  Ferrucci is believed to be in the running for the third RLL seat that had been occupied by Takuma Sato in 2021.  Sato says his chances of a season-long INDYCAR ride next year are only about 50-50 although he is rumored to be under consideration by Dale Coyne and Rick Ware’s team.  Graham Rahal drives the other team car.

Simon Pagenaud has left Penske and has signed with Meyer-Shank Racing, taking the seat Harvey had held in 2021. He’ll team with Helio Castroneves for a full 2022 schedule.

(FORMULA 1)—Frequent F1 bridesmaid Valtteri Bottas inherited pole position for the Turkish Grand Prix when teammate Lewis Hamilton was penalized ten starting positions for an engine change and refused to give up first place afterwards.  He finished almost fifteen seconds ahead of Max Verstappen in a race dogged by rain.

Verstappen reclaimed the Formula 1 points lead over Hamilton, who finished tenth and thought he would have done much better if he had not been called to the pits for new tires with seven laps to go while running third.  He wound up fifth and dropped out of the points lead to now trail by six.

(photo credits: Bob Priddy)