November 2003 Archives

By Vincent Safuto staff writer

November 29, 2003

It's the holiday season, that time of packed shopping malls, kids on Santa's lap and the endless drumbeat on the dangers of holiday dinner.

A recent article in the Press Journal on how to eat healthy for Thanksgiving made me thankful for one thing: that my mother never saw such drivel before making our holiday meals. We would have had very lonely Thanksgivings and Christmases.

Back in the 1970s, there was a guy named Euell Gibbons who touted this "healthy eating" stuff. His patter was fodder for late-night TV jokes about eating tree bark and other apparently indigestible and unappetizing items. He plugged a brand of cereal that actually was quite good, I thought, though in the eyes of the "health-food" crowd, I sealed my fate by putting sugar on it.

At the holiday dinner table, we'd "attack" (as they say in the Marines) while guffawing over Gibbons' latest pronouncements, then retreat to the living room for football and shout rude things at his TV commercials.

Today's version of Gibbons parade around as "registered dietitians," and while I have no doubt that they are nice people who drive the speed limit and have good jobs that pay well and offer benefits, I'm glad that what goes into my stomach is what I feel like having that day and not on some index card in one of their files.

They manage to get themselves quoted in newspapers and spread all sorts of good cheer about how everything we eat can make us fat or kill us, along with suggestions about what kind of snacks to lay out before the meal, if at all. Me, I like potato chips and dip before digging in, but they prefer such wonders as hummus and raw nuts.

The best way to avoid the gastronomic wonders of such a person is to stay out of a hospital, nursing home, assisted-living facility, prison or anyplace else where there's institutional dining.

With such a captive audience, I bet they get special glee out of turning the traditional holiday meal into an unholy glop for the victims, er, I mean, residents. Meanwhile, at home, I bet they're cooking a 20-pound "bird" and stuffing it to bursting with the good stuff that makes stuffing stuffing, not mashed cardboard flavored with bee honey and berries from the tree out back.

All that "nature eating" didn't do much for Gibbons' longevity, by the way. He died at age 64 in late 1975 of a heart attack.

Reducing one's holiday meal to chemical analysis, calorie counting, substituting the good stuff with salt-free and sugar-free things, and calculating how clogged your arteries are getting from the gravy somehow takes all the magic out of the holiday season.

Personally, I take dietitians' advice with a grain of salt. Real salt, not some health-food-store substitute that tastes like wood shavings.

CHESS BLINDNESS: I goofed in last week's column about chess notation. A reader pointed out that Black's third move, in algebraic notation, should be a6. Sorry for the error.

Vincent F. Safuto is a copy editor for the Press Journal. Reach him at ( Vincent.Safuto@scripps.com).


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By Vincent Safuto staff writer

November 22, 2003

My interest in chess dates back to 1972, when Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky's world championship match — with its Cold War overtones — introduced chess to a TV audience.

New York's public television station, WNET, garnered high ratings for a game that some might describe as being about as exciting as watching cement harden. But boys like me rushed out to learn the rules and soon sat glued to the set for hours as the two chess greats dueled in Reykjavik, Iceland.

I had become bored with checkers. It seemed to be a waste of a perfectly good board since only half the squares were used. Chess had all these fascinating pieces with different powers, and used the entire board.

There was a lot to learn: Not only the pieces and how they moved, but also the language in which chess games are transmitted. It might seem logical to write a book of chess games and have every move written out (Move white's king pawn two squares forward), but it's clunky. "P-K4" is better.

Thus, the opening of a game could be written as:

White Black

1. P-K4 P-K4

2. N-KB3 N-QB3

3. B-N5 P-QR3

That's how I learned chess notation. The above is known as "descriptive notation," and I have a collection of chess books dating back to my teenage years that use that notation.

But I found several years ago when I got back into chess that "algebraic notation," which existed back in 1972 but was not in general use, is now favored.

Thus, the above moves are now rendered this way:

White Black

1. e4 e5

2. Nf3 Nc6

3. Bb5 a3

I'm sorry, but to me this makes little sense. I cannot even visualize a position from the algebraic notation. And today's chess books are all in either algebraic or — even worse — "pictorial notation."

On the recent television coverage of the match between Gary Kasparov and X3D Fritz, the chess masters hosting the coverage droned on about "the d pawn" and "the attack along the h file."

Chess, to me, has always had a language of imagination and cleverness, and I longed for someone to slip and mention "the Queen pawn" or "the attack along the King Rook file."

Maybe I'm just becoming old and cranky, but a whole generation is being deprived of wonderfully descriptive terms.

I don't care what the arbiters of chess usage say, though. To me, the Queen Bishop Pawn will always be the Queen Bishop Pawn, and even under torture I would refuse to call it the "c pawn."

CORRECTION: In last Saturday's column about people in the military going absent without leave, also known as AWOL, I mistakenly stated that the term is not used in the military.

A reader pointed out that while unauthorized absence, or UA, is used to describe being absent from duty in the Navy and Marine Corps, AWOL is commonly used in the other services, and is used in the Uniform Code of Military Justice. I apologize for the error.

Vincent F. Safuto is a copy editor for the Press Journal. Reach him at ( Vincent.Safuto@scripps.com).


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By Vincent Safuto staff writer

November 15, 2003

A consequence of the recent military action has been that a few soldiers sent home on two-week leaves from Iraq have not returned.

For civilians, the term often used is AWOL, which means absent without leave. If you've been in the military, you know that the actual phrase is UA, meaning unauthorized absence.

During my post-boot camp electronics training, which seemed to be a critical time when some guys considered leaving without being discharged from the service, the Marines tried all sorts of methods to convince us that going UA was not the best career move we could make.

I was watching a CNN story recently about a woman who went UA and refused to go to Iraq because of a family matter, and have seen other stories of people in the service who have engaged in activities that are prohibited, and I wonder what they were thinking when they joined the military, Reserve or National Guard.

Maybe it's because advertising for military service emphasized the money you can make and the training you can get, but people have to realize that being in the military is more than that. When you sign on the line, you are basically handing over much of the control over your life to military commanders.

You have limited or no control over when and where you live, sleep, eat, work, and with whom. In the civilian world, if my boss attempted to enter my home, checked to see if I cleaned behind the toilets and tried to initiate disciplinary action if there was mold back there, I'd have him arrested for trespassing.

When Uncle Sam is your landlord, though, you have to keep your living place clean or face consequences that go beyond having ants in the latrine.

As a civilian, you can have a relationship with whomever you want, change jobs at will or disobey your boss, and all that will happen in the latter case is you'll be terminated. In the military, there are limitations on fraternization between ranks, you can't work somewhere else without authorization and disobeying your boss could lead to you joining the "brig babies."

This isn't a criticism of the military or its system, by the way. Our armed forces have a job to do and need a means to organize and direct their people to carry out missions. I lived under the military system for four years and found it sometimes frustrating, but realized from day one that compliance was the best route.

Those who decide after the fact that the military is intruding on their lives should realize that they do themselves and their cause no good by trying to publicly humiliate the military and go UA.

The military restricts a lot of behaviors, rightly or wrongly, and it's not like there's a draft and people have no choice. I have little sympathy for those who have joined the military, decide to defy its dictates and then go crying to the news media that it's not what they expected. All I can say is no one forced them to join.

Vincent F. Safuto is a copy editor for the Press Journal. Reach him at ( Vincent.Safuto@scripps.com).


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By Vincent Safuto staff writer

November 8, 2003

One night before my recent vacation, a coworker here at the paper ended a discussion about airline travel with the statement, "I don't even know what kind of airplane it is. I just fly in it."

I guess you have to be a real airplane aficionado to not only enjoy flying in this day and age, but also to care about the machine that's conveying you from Point A to Point B.

My recent trip to New York was aboard an Airbus A320 flown by an airline whose name includes a color (blue) and features DirecTV for each passenger. That was a wonderful convenience, and lessened the feeling of being cut off from the world. We cruised at about 39,000 feet and were able to keep up with what was happening with the Dow Jones industrial average, as well as our progress on the flight.

The History Channel that day had programs on jet engines and runways, which was nice, too. I could have done without the scenes of airline runway accidents, though.

Nonetheless, having the TV beat the other airlines' in-flight entertainment, which usually is some specially made show highlighting this week's celebrity-on-a-wagon, the disease of the week and endless ads for all sorts of products.

When the TV bored me, I had my laptop with bridge and chess, as well as my trusty word processing software, to keep me busy.

For all that, the coolest part of the flight happened before we even took off.

Passengers board airliners today through the "jetway," an antiseptic, climate-controlled chute that makes you feel like you're entering an operating room. Only on commuter airlines do you get to walk out onto the tarmac, past idle jet engines and propellers, with the whine of auxiliary power units in the air, and climb stairs to get on an aircraft.

But this airline, it its quest for efficiency and rapid turnaround of aircraft, allows passengers at Palm Beach International Airport who are sitting in the back of the plane to go outside, down the stairs and walk along a marked path to the tail of the plane.

You then climb the stairs and enter through the rear door. I'll tell you, that made the experience worth the price of admission.

The fun-factor in airline flying has been mostly eliminated. In the pages of newspapers and magazines, regular fliers whine about all the inconveniences: The security, the need to take off your shoes, the need to have your carry-on baggage, and perhaps your person, closely inspected before entering the gate area. TV news always runs that file footage of grim-faced travelers tramping through an airport to provide some moving pictures and show you how horrible air travel is today.

Lighten up, I say. If you are fortunate enough to be able to afford to fly nowadays, any inconvenience related to flying is minor, in my view.

In fact, you can call it part of the overall flying experience. It might not be that much fun, but it helps you get to your destination if not on time, then in one piece.

Vincent F. Safuto is a copy editor for the Press Journal. Reach him at ( Vincent.Safuto@scripps.com).


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By Vincent Safuto staff writer

November 1, 2003

Once a year, I try to make an excursion to New York City to see the family and relatives I left behind when I decided to make Florida my home.

On my latest visit, something amazing happened. It snowed.

Granted, I wasn't in New York City, but up in the Catskill Mountains to see my youngest brother get married, but it was quite a thrill the day after the wedding to see a snowfall.

The day hadn't so much dawned as the night got less dark. Our inn on the mountain was in the middle of a cloud, and someone reported that it was raining outside.

Several minutes later, someone else said, "Look. It's snowing."

White stuff was falling, and soon it started to "stick." Eventually cars, railings and other items had a dusting of wet slushy snow. For someone who hadn't seen snow in 16 years, though, the details didn't matter. What was falling was white, flaky and sticking to the ground. It was snow.

When you've been in Florida for several years, you miss the snow. If only, you wonder, we could have more than a few random flakes every couple of years.

Sure, a snow machine could make snow for kids to play in, but wouldn't real snow be better? As always, though, there's a catch. In order to have snow instead of dreary drizzles and gray skies, you need not only conditions right for precipitation but also cold air.

The trouble is that there's a great chasm of difference between the Northerner's and the Southerner's definition of warm and cold when it comes to outside air temperature. Get up on a morning in Vero Beach when the temperature is in the 50s, and you're racing for the thermostat to turn on the heat and howling that you're freezing.

A Northerner, meanwhile, is stripping off clothes and opening windows, and glorying in a "warm" day.

It's true. When Northerners visit us they think it's great when we have days in the 50s and 60s, while the low 70s causes us to break out the cold-weather gear and anything below 70 has us bundled up in winter coats and wishing it would get "warm" — at least our definition of warm — again.

Visitors from Northern climes find our summers to be unbearably hot, though, and what is a normal summer day for us is a heat wave for them.

Likewise, their "brisk" fall days can be so cold, you think your skin will freeze and your ears will break off. And that's the price I had to pay for experiencing snow. Years of Florida have thinned out my New York blood and I know that if I were to experience real snow, I'd need to be in a space suit to avoid freezing to death.

Still, snow is snow, and maybe next time I'll go on vacation somewhere where it falls regularly, pack the long johns and maybe even try skiing. Anything to see the white stuff hit the ground again, and stick.

Vincent F. Safuto is a copy editor for the Press Journal. Reach him at ( Vincent.Safuto@scripps.com).


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