False titles run amok

One of the enduring irritations of clumsy journalese and one we are seeing more often these days is the "false title," a loose string of adjectives preceding a proper name. As in:

"Boston University College of Communication graduate student and aspiring photojournalist Christopher Weigl was killed Thursday when his bicycle collided with a tractor-trailer."

That's a ten-worder, not a world record for a false title but not far from one, either. It is from, of all places, the Jim Romenesko journalism blog, popular with newsies everywhere. He should have known better.

A real title is an official one, such as "Army Pvt. Joe Smith," or "Sen. Dick Durbin." False titles (known by grammarians as an "anarthrous nominal premodifier") are just bogus strings of adjectives, and when they're piled on, as in the foregoing example, the result is decidedly inelegant.

It is much better to begin with the name of the person, then add the descriptive phrase or phrases. As in:

"Christopher Weigl, a Boston University College of Communication graduate student and aspiring photojournalist, was killed . . ."

Better. But there's still a bit of clumsy false-title construction in the improved sentence. Let's try:

"Christopher Weigl, a graduate student in the College of Communication at Boston University and an aspiring photojournalist, was killed . . ."

Much more polished, wouldn't you say?

The false title does have its defenders among journalists. They say it saves space and is OK in newspapers although not in more elevated prose one finds in magazines and novels. That may be so, but a couple of commas don't add much fat to a sentence.

Am I turning into "hateful old grammar Nazi Henry Kisor" in my geezerhood? Not really. I've been one for 47 years, beginning with an apprenticeship on the nightside copy desk at the old Chicago Daily News. There we would get whacked with steel pica poles if we let howlers slide through.

I would not, however, berate uneducated folks for grammatical bloopers. They don't know no better and couldn't hardly care less. They're not professional writers and editors who must serve sophisticated readers. Why insult ordinary Joes with linguistic loftiness?

But if professionals commit such solecisms, they deserve to be steamrollered by a blitzkrieg of contempt. And those who deliver the contumely always should merit the Grammarian's Iron Cross with Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds.

Helen Frankenthaler meets Dick Cheney

When the great abstract artist Helen Frankenthaler died last week, I was taken back to 1979 and an interview in the Manhattan home of Bernard Malamud, who had just published his comic novel Dubin's Lives. As Malamud busied himself making tea in the kitchen, a pair of paintings in his foyer caught my eye.

"Helen Frankenthaler originals," said Miriam Berkley, the free-lance literary photographer who had accompanied me to the interview. Miriam, who had modeled for the painter Raphael Soyer, knew something about art.

After the interview I made it my business to learn about Frankenthaler's work—simply possessing it said a great deal about Malamud—even though I was embarrassed to admit I'd never heard of her. One has to start somewhere, after all.

Yesterday I read, in Joseph Epstein's splendid new book Gossip: The Untrivial Pursuit, an anecdote that made me feel a bit less self-conscious about my enormous ignorance.

One night in 1991, Epstein writes, he and Frankenthaler were at dinner in Washington with Irving Kristol, the neoconservative thinker, and his wife Bea, also known as Gertrude Himmelfarb, the renowned Victorian historian. Later in the evening Dick and Lynne Cheney joined the company for dessert. Lynne Cheney, then chair of the National Endowment of the Arts, wanted to know what Epstein and Frankenthaler, both members of the NEA's council, thought about its operation.

According to Epstein, Dick Cheney was "self-effacing and modest," choosing to remain in the background while his wife did the conversational heavy lifting. "Perhaps it was a relief to be silent after crowded days at the Pentagon and after appearing so frequently on television . . . with Colin Powell at his side, to answer questions on how the war [Gulf War I] was going."

After the Cheneys left the restaurant, Epstein continues, "I found myself much impressed with them. So, too, did Helen Frankenthaler, who said: 'She is a very bright woman. Her questions were genuinely penetrating. Very impressive. Really smart, Lynne Cheney. But tell me, her husband, what does he do?"

"Bea, Irving, and I looked at one another.

"'Actually,' I said, 'he's secretary of defense.'"

Somehow that delicious bit of gossip makes me feel better about all the holes in my knowledge.

In bed with the enemy

Years ago I had a good friend and colleague, one quite a bit higher up the editorial ladder from my modest rung, who refused to attend social events involving politicians or public servants of any kind. As we went out the door to hoist one with a local alderman or cop, he'd shake his head and hang back.

"You don't socialize with the people you cover," he'd say when pressed.

Some of us thought he was being needlessly priggish, perhaps just covering for an innate shyness, an inability to relate to others outside the office. It's important, we journos told ourselves, to know our subjects fully, and to do so we need to experience their company in friendly and relaxed surroundings. We need to see them when they let their hair down.

On the other hand, every time I read about Washington journalists hanging out after hours with Capitol Hill pols and federal government functionaries, even to throwing huge parties for them, I've wondered about that wisdom. How honest and objective can a journalist be if he's drinking buddies with the people he's writing about? Can he throw a chum under the bus for the sake of truth and enlightenment if it should come to that?

Over the last few days, as revelation after revelation has burst in London of News Corporation writers and editors partying with Scotland Yard honchos and members of Parliament (even at their country houses) during the years in which a titanic phone hacking scandal struggled to emerge from a massive cover-up, I kept thinking of my old colleague.

Maybe he wasn't so shy and stiff-necked, after all. Maybe he was smarter than the rest of us. Surely he was prescient.

The dark side of keyword searching

Not so long ago, when intelligent and educated readers still kept newspapers alive, copy editors delighted in writing witty, pun-soaked headlines to go atop lighter stories. The editor who could consistently come up with a zinger of a "hed" 30 seconds before the presses started rolling was highly valued by his bosses and sometimes made $10 a week more than his compatriots on the copy desk.

An example was a headline over a Chicago Daily News review of a book about the irritation-plagued life of the humorist James Thurber: "Great Jokes from Little Achings Grow." That was not mine but written by my boss, Bill Newman, big brother of Edwin Newman, the celebrated NBC pundit. (Pun intended.)

But now the witty headline is a fast disappearing art. As newspapers latch onto the online teat, search engines need to lock on important keywords in headlines so that readers can find the stories. Puns would turn Googling into paroxysms of bada-Bing.

Of necessity that Thurber headline would have to read: "James Thurber Led Troubled Life, Book Says."

It does tell the story -- but oh, so lamely.

True, a talent for witty headlines could sometimes get out of hand. Over a one-paragraph Daily News short about Asian villagers succumbing to an invasion of poisonous tree frogs, an editor wrote: "Croak."

Unhappily, the slot man let it through and the story made it onto the bottom of Page One. Just for one edition, but the damage was done.

Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post opined on the subject yesterday in a funny but acerbic column.

P.S. This post was intended to be online two days ago, but Google trashed its own software while taking Blogger down for what was supposed to be an hour of maintenance and it was dark for 48 hours.

Coming up for air

The rumors of my demise are exaggerated, although it is true that with every passing year I slide further into decrepitude.

I have not posted on either blog for nearly two weeks because:

1. I've been very busy working to get my books' rights back from the publishers so I can republish them as e-books. (It takes the lawyers forever, and more than a few lunches, to get things done.) I've got big plans for one of them, but don't want to get ahead of events here.

2. The Lady Friend has press-ganged me into donating my labor (chiefly installing new Macs and printing labels) to her favorite cause, the Evanston Public Library Friends' new "Mighty Twig" branchette. For that matter, it has become my favorite cause, too.

3. I've been preparing lessons for my half of a Train Travel Writers and Photographers Workshop to be held October 15-21, 2011, at the Depot Inn & Suites in La Plata, Missouri. (I'm doing the writing half.) More about this later.

4. I just haven't had much to opine about lately. The goings-on in the world (Libya and Wisconsin to mention only two of them) have got me utterly befuddled. Do you need still another blogger to comment on the obvious -- that the world is going to hell in a handbasket?

Book review

Having made a living for 33 years reviewing books, I do not do that any more. I made a clean break from that profession in 2006, when I retired from the Chicago Sun-Times.

But there are exceptions, especially if the book in question is about train travel. Now that I am an official and certified (complete with press credentials) reporter for TrainWeb/RailNet, the nation's largest railroad-oriented web site, it's part of the job for me to assess and report upon new choo-choo books.

Which I did today here.

Now you know.

Al-Jazeera

One of the beneficiaries of the Egyptian revolution -- in the United States, at least -- seems to be the Arabic broadcast network Al-Jazeera.

Long reviled by right-wing Islamophobes as "anti-American," Al-Jazeera displayed no such bias -- at least that I could see -- in its coverage of the events of the last three weeks in Tunisia and Egypt. Sure, its opinionators displayed points of view that could be called liberal or leftish, but no more so than the pundits of MSNBC or HuffPo.

In its early reporting Al-Jazeera was far ahead of the Western news organizations, all of which were caught flatfooted by the events in North Africa. Like generals and senators, editors and pundits tend to fight the last foreign wars and aren't very good at spotting unfamiliar blips on radar screens.

As American news organizations continue to shrink their foreign coverage, outlets like al-Jazeera are going to become ever more important to our knowledge of what's going on in the world as well as our understanding of the points of view of other cultures.

You can read the English-language reports of Al-Jazeera here, and also see its streaming video here.

Al-Jazeera is now a regular stop on my morning Internet newscrawl, and I hope a cable network will ignore the blinkered and bombastic Bill O'Reillys and start broadcasting the station live in the United States.

FEBRUARY 13: More on this issue here. Note the comments after the piece.

My new conductor's cap

I've just joined the official correspondent's corps of TrainWeb/RailNet, the nation's largest rail buff Internet forum, as a "Field Reporter."

Actually, the job will consist mostly of repackaging, in TrainWeb style, future Reluctant Blogger blogposts on my train travels -- you'll see them here as well as there. But I'll also be going out on the high iron with increased frequency to exercise my press credentials.

I won't be writing merely about life aboard trains, but also will yarn about my adventures during stopovers and at destinations. (My first effort is here.)

Of course there will be photographs, lots of them.

Come along for the ride.

An excellent sentence

"Write with your ear," my literary mentors told me again and again. "Prose that sounds good to the ear reads well to the mind."

Today I came across a snippet of writing that beautifully drives home the point. It is by the novelist and journalist Katie Roiphe in today's New York Times Book Review:

"... the critic has one important function: to write well.

"By this I mean that critics must strive to write stylishly, to concentrate on the excellent sentence."

Now that is in itself a hell of an excellent sentence . (Note the internal triple rhymes of "strive to write stylishly" and "excellent sentence.") It sings.

Bravo, Ms. Roiphe. Lead the way.

Run on, McPhee, run on!

Run-on sentences, those loose shambling assemblages of words that lounge and sprawl and put their feet up on the furniture, generally are to be avoided, because understanding them requires a mental toolbox of levels and straightedges and T-squares to measure and survey and cut into lengths of sense, and are hard to read besides.

Still, in the hands of a master craftsman they can glisten as polished creations of beauty. Here is an example from the nonpareil John McPhee, writing on the 2010 British Open in the Sept. 6 New Yorker:

Wars had shut down the championship, and this was actually the hundred-and-thirty-ninth playing of it, the twenty-eighth at St. Andrews, and there was not a lot of dramatic tension in the 2010 Open unless you found it dramatic that a twenty-seven-year-old who had missed three cuts in recent weeks (including the cut at the U.S. Open in Pebble Beach) and ranked fifty-fourth in the world started off as a flash in the pan and then went on flashing and -- on the third and fourth days, when he was supposed to go dark -- flashed brighter and brighter and finished one stroke short of a record set ten years ago by Tiger Woods.

I stand in utter admiration.

John Lardner

"On a recent big-game hunting expedition in Brooklyn (the biggest I could find was a twenty-cent limit game, with the one-eyed jacks wild) your correspondent heard a powerful humming sound and traced it to its source. It came, naturally, from the brain of Mr. Branch Rickey and indicated a little medium-deep thought. By the time it subsided, Roy Campanella, the best catcher in baseball, had been signed to a contract for 1950."

This opening paragraph, or "lede" as it is called in the journalism business, was written for Newsweek that year by John Lardner (1912-1960), who quietly ruled the press box at a time when ballplayers juiced themselves with nothing stronger than Jack Daniels and sportswriters battered typewriters instead of girl friends.

In these days of chest-thumping anthropoids on ESPN, it does one's heart good to read Lardner (son of Ring) once again and to be reminded that there really was a golden age of sportswriting. Another throwback to that era (albeit more recent than his subject) is John Schulian, a long-ago colleague of mine on the Chicago Sun-Times who later went Hollywood and fetched up with Sports Illustrated and other longhair magazines.

Schulian has rescued Lardner from the ash heap of history by editing The John Lardner Reader: A Press Box Legend (University of Nebraska Press, $19.95 paper), also providing an illuminating introduction and recruiting the equally nonpareil Dan Jenkins to do the foreword.

Lardner's prose style could be described as subtle hyperbole, delivered in complete deadpan. He writes of a ball game in which "a subdebutante from Red Hook or Canarsie reached out and touched a baseball lightly on its jowls," resulting in an interference call that drove in a run from third base. Of bench-clearing baseball brawls, Lardner wrote about how "the last time I saw the Dodgers grow hostile, they put on informal fight programs for two days and threw in a ball game each day for the same price."

Like his contemporary Red Smith, Lardner never lost sight of the fact that he was writing about boys' games rather than military invasions. Was his a simpler time? Not necessarily. Maybe it was just less expensive.

Lardner was no mere humorist. He was also a crackerjack reporter, breaking his share of scoops, as they used to be called. He had great range, writing 700-word wind sprints for newspapers and 7,000-word steeplechases for magazines. He wrote for the common reader, too, not for the lit-mag dilettante. You did not need a dictionary when you read him.

Schulian, my friend, you have done us all a service by resurrecting Lardner's most memorable prose. Especially what Red Smith once called "the greatest novel ever written in one sentence," Lardner's lede on a piece about an old prizefighter:

"Stanley Ketchel was twenty-four years old when he was fatally shot in the back by the common-law husband of the lady who was cooking his breakfast."

Sportswriting will never again get as good as that.

Convert your old typewriter to USB

The first new technological idea for veteran (pre-Computer Age) writers to come down the pike in quite a while:

Click here.

Will it fly? Probably not, but I'm tempted to have my old boat-anchor Royal Upright (bought well used in 1962) converted to USB so's I can use it with an iPad, if I ever buy one.

It's either that or gild the typewriter and turn it into a table lamp that goes clickety-clack.

Roger Simon

When the pundit Roger Simon left our alma mater, the Chicago Sun-Times, and took his carpetbag of political wit to the Baltimore Sun, I sorely missed his column. There are very few political commentators I'd miss, but Roger is one. He never takes his profession and its subjects so seriously he can't laugh at them -- and himself. A skewering by Roger Simon always causes its victims to bleed out, usually without noticing.

Late last year Roger dropped off the Beltway radar. Turns out he had one leg and part of a foot amputated owing to a bout with blood poisoning. But he is now back at work at the Politico site, and his re-inaugural column is a doozy.

It's worth reading just for a great quotation he mined from Nathanael West. That not only demonstrates Roger's hard-nosed courage but also the breadth of his acerbic intellect.

What a guy. What a writer.

(Thanks to Alan Solomon for the heads-up.)

Whoops!

During my 41 years in newspapering, I committed many, many errors, some of which came close to being career-enders. (One of them was putting a photo of Dick Cavett on the cover of the Chicago Sun-Times' TV magazine when the subject of the story was David Frost.)

But none of my bloopers rose into the league of that recently made by some unnamed wretch at Penguin Books Australia, whose crime was so egregious that some 7,000 copies of the newly published Pasta Bible had to be destroyed.

The sin? One of the recipes called for "freshly ground black people."

Still, when we complain about the errors that get into print today because all the alert copy editors have been laid off, we should remember that the good old days weren't always so good. There may have been fewer mistakes, but many of them still were humdingers.

Another of mine was to get a little too clever when writing a headline for a Chicago Daily News story that said men who shared the housework were found to be less apt to get their wives unexpectedly pregnant.

The head: "Hubby's Apron an Effective Birth-Curb Aid".

That made it into the paper . . . and into Playboy Magazine, which had the decency not to identify the miscreant.

Resisting iPademonium

Most writers I know seem to be immune to iPad hysteria.

Why? For us the iPad is a toy, not a tool. It's for fun, not for work.

Write on its flat screen keyboard? Are you kidding? We need a tactile keyboard, one that gives us the feedback of a satisfying click when a key is struck accurately.

Most of us need to print out what we've written. You can't do that with an iPad. You have to upload your work to a computer attached to a printer. (Some of us who write on the road carry small portable printers in our briefcases or glove boxes so that we can quickly print out a fresh new passage for editing on paper as well as for secure storage.)

E-mail? We do that with our Blackberrys and Sidekicks.

Apps? We do that with our iPhones and iPod Touches, too.

E-books? Ditto. (I just finished reading the 14th book on my iTouch, Candice Millard's River of Doubt. What a hair-raising experience that book is.)

News? Ditto.

Video? Ditto.

The iPad, however, does those last five things wondrously well, and is bound be a splendid entertainment machine for a great many people, even though it is larger than a smartphone, is utterly unpocketable, and needs something to be carried in. (It won't be long before you see upscale commuters ostentatiously bearing them in "man purses" from Hermes, Gucci and Ralph Lauren.)

Even I might get an iPad someday. But not for work on the road.

For that I'll carry a Macbook in the car and a Toshiba netbook on planes and trains.

The best April Fool joke of all time

Lane Stewart of Sports Illustrated took this shot of "Sidd Finch," who pitched wearing one high-top hiking boot, to accompany George Plimpton's magnificent hoax in the magazine.

Let us pause to honor Sidd Finch, the rookie pitcher whose fastball clocked 168 mph and who was trying to decide whether to play the French horn professionally or sign with the Mets instead.

George Plimpton's profile of Finch, an elaborate and even scholarly hoax, appeared in Sports Illustrated on April 1, 1985 -- a quarter of a century ago -- and remains the most literate (as well as plausible) April Fool jape in history. Baseball lovers everywhere swallowed it as gospel, despite glaringly obvious hints in the magazine that all was not quite kosher.

Read about it here.

Frank Deford looks back

There is nothing sadder, or more self-serving, than an aging hack sportswriter looking back on a life misspent in print. But when the memoirist is Frank Deford, one of the few diamonds in a rough trade, the result can be both illuminating and enchanting.

Deford, in case you didn't know, was for decades the cleanup man in Sports Illustrated's murderer's row of brilliant writers. He has been a fixture on National Public Radio and is the author of 15 books, including the novel Everybody's All-American (1981).

In this week's Sports Illustrated, he has executed a shapely mini-memoir of his career, and the best way to show you how beautiful it is is to quote three passages:

I always thought that reading Red Smith in the New York Herald Tribune for the first time was like being in Delft around 1660 and stumbling on Vermeers: perfectly framed little portraits with just the right touches of light.

* * *

I've never felt altogether comfortable in a locker room. I always feared I was intruding on someone else's privacy. The point was brought home to me when I did a story on the Boston Celtics' opener the year after John Havlicek retired. He had come to the game as a civilian, and we were standing outside the locker room. As I started to enter, John said, "I'll see you later. I can't go in there. I don't belong there anymore."

Excuse me: John Havlicek didn't belong in the Celtics' locker room, but I did?

* * *

Unfortunately, being a sportswriter is like being Oscar Wilde's picture of Dorian Gray. You age as all around you the players stay forever young. You stick around while your contemporaries grow old in sports years and fade away. "I'm sorry, I'd like to be your friend," Bill Russell told me when he retired, "but friendship takes a lot of effort if it's going to work, and we're going off in different directions in our lives." And so here comes the next cohort, only now they're not your peers. Your portrait ages some more, and now the coaches are of your vintage. As you grow older, in fact, you gravitate toward stories about coaches, not just because they're now your new contemporaries but because they've lived longer, more complicated, lives. They're simply better stories. Coaches are plots. Players are snapshots.

Now there is a writer both humane and literate.

Tyger, tyger, burning bright . . .

. . . on the posteriors of the night? The following video from craigtracy.com, the Web site of a body art painter, captivated me for some strange reason. Maybe I'm deep down a save-the-tigers type.



Thanks to Denise Kowalczyk for the heads-up.

Why didn't we think of this before?

"Europe Slapping Rich with Massive Traffic Fines".

What a wonderful idea! If we in Illinois linked the relative pain of a speeding fine to the miscreant's net worth, we could plug that scheme into half the Republicans in Lake County, arrogant scofflaws with hot BMWs and Jags who habitually do 80 and 90 on Interstate 94.

Before you knew it, we'd have enough in the state coffers to adequately fund our struggling inner-city schools.

Why I love reading small-town weeklies

Here is last week's entire crime report from the Cook County (Minn.) News-Herald. It gives me continued faith in the doughtiness of small-town America as well as offering further evidence that all news is local.

Monday, Dec. 28

12:18 a.m., Grand Marais: Report of a man walking along the highway between mile markers 99 and 100, trying to get a ride. A deputy found that his car had broken down, and gave him a ride to his home on County Road 7.

12:59 a.m., Tofte: Fire department cancelled after it was discovered an alarm was set off by a fireplace that backed up, filling the room with smoke.

11:19 a.m., Tofte: Deer struck by a vehicle, causing damage and injuring the deer.

3:05 p.m., Lutsen: Ambulance requested at the ski slope for an 18-year-old man who ran into a tree and lost consciousness.

11:45 p.m., Grand Marais: Deputy requested to help a homeowner get her dog back into the house.

Tuesday, Dec. 29

8:08 a.m., Grand Marais: A deputy spoke with a truck driver whose vehicle was parked in a downtown lot, leaking some type of petroleum product. A pan was put underneath to catch the fluid.

10:45 a.m., Hovland: A tow truck was needed to pull a vehicle out of the snowbank on North Road. No injuries reported.

12:41 p.m., Lutsen: Ambulance called to the ski slope for a 20-year-old man who was unconscious.

2:46 p.m., Grand Marais: Complaint that unsupervised kids were screwing around with a mailbox again. The caller said there was mail on the snowbank and the kids were jumping up and down on the mailbox. A deputy spoke with them, but they weren’t doing anything wrong when he arrived.

7:04 p.m., Grand Marais: Caller requested a welfare check on a man he believed was living in his truck. The truck was plugged into a building.

7:43 p.m., Grand Marais: A local bar reported that a woman came in and started yelling at everyone inside, and they were now afraid to go outside.

Wednesday, Dec. 30

9:54 a.m., Grand Marais: Caller requested assistance in getting back into his house after he got locked out while taking out the garbage.

8:58 p.m., Grand Marais: Multiple power outages at Pine Mountain Trailer Court. REA notified.

Thursday, Dec. 31

3:05 p.m., Tofte: Holiday reported a $35 gas drive-off.

3:43 p.m., Grand Marais: The hospital staff reported that someone hit the dietary door with a vehicle, causing damage to the building. It was not known who or what vehicle did the damage.

Friday, Jan. 1

12:16 a.m., Lutsen: Papa Charlie’s requested a deputy in advance of a possible fight between four guys in the parking lot.

9:21 a.m., Tofte: AmericInn reported that there was someone in a room they were not supposed to be in; they could hear whispering but the people would not answer or come to the door. A deputy found no one in the room.

9:23 a.m., Grand Marais: Two callers reported problems with off-peak heat.

12:28 p.m., Grand Marais: Report of a snowmobile accident with another, a head-on collision with only minor injuries on the state trail south of Devil Track Lake.

7:26 p.m., Grand Portage: Chimney fire reported on East Highway 61. The fire company and ambulance responded. Both were called back to the scene just after midnight when the occupants woke up to clicking and popping, and saw flames from the walls.

Saturday, Jan. 2

8:05 p.m., Grand Marais: Birch Terrace requested a deputy to remove an unwanted intoxicated woman who was causing problems.

Sunday, Jan. 3

1:25 a.m., Grand Marais: Caller said it sounded like someone was stealing wood near the property. It has happened before.

12:20 p.m., Grand Marais: Lino Lakes man, 19, cited for no seat belt.

9:02 p.m., Grand Marais: The PUC was called out to investigate a power outage and arcing lines in the vicinity of the dental office and car wash.

The Record-Herald, by the way, is a deep woods weekly, and therefore devotes some of its column inches to reports from Department of Natural Resources conservation officers. Here's one:

CO Darin Fagerman (Grand Marais) took a snowshoe trip in the BWCA. The CO followed tracks for about four and a half miles before hearing a rifle shot. The CO walked a bit further and saw a man fishing out on the ice. The man explained that he had not caught any fish for a couple of days and that he needed some meat. He proudly held up a red squirrel that he was going to eat for dinner. The CO explained that he was going to have to cut the conversation short because the CO wouldn't make it out of the BWCA before darkness set in and that it was bitterly cold. The man then told the CO that he had an extra sleeping bag and that the CO was welcome to spend the night in his tent. The CO looked at the red squirrel and decided that there wasn’t enough for the both of them and decided to take his chances with the slush and darkness.

With folks like that, the Republic will stand forever.