February 2004 Archives

By Vincent Safuto staff writer

February 28, 2004

The ongoing war against food rages unabated, and the latest volley has been the war against these things called carbohydrates, also known as "carbs."

When I was a kid, a carb was something that lived under the hood of a car. It was the place where the transubstantiation of physics turned fuel and air into a mixture that could be squirted into a cylinder in a car engine. A spark plug would ignite the mixture, and my father would drive me somewhere.

Today, though, consuming carbs, apparently, is the equivalent of consuming raw plutonium with a side order of uranium-toasted garlic bread, and we are supposed to "fight back" against these evil things, or at least not consume so much of them.

Indeed, when I look at the on-screen cable TV guide — mixed with the ads for credit repair and the latest celebrity profiles — I see a woman dressed as a boxer, and she's delivering a right hook. The words encourage us to fight back against carbs.

Most nutrition talk sounds like astrology to me. And, apparently, it didn't do low-carb diet guru Dr. Robert Atkins much good; he was reported to be overweight when he died (though those reports, like his high-protein regimen, are hotly disputed).

While much of what's said about carbs actually seems to make some sense, there are other things being said that are offensive to my sensibilities.

It's when the food types start taking on pizza that it's time to call in Tony Soprano.

Yes, lurking within the dough upon which human hands place cheese and tomato sauce are those dreaded carbs, and some people want them to go away.

So pizza parlor owners are trying to find low-carb dough, or some way to provide the cheese and sauce and pepperoni without the bread.

To me, this is going too far. For Italians, pizza isn't just a food, it's a religion. I believe that the time has come to stand up and fight to keep pizza pizza.

When I talk about pizza, I don't mean that thin-crusted stuff that they deliver with all sorts of strange objects atop it. I mean pizza as it's made at thousands of little storefronts in the city called New York.

From infancy, the Italian in New York learns how to consume a slice without getting most of it all over himself, though, even into adulthood, it's hard to avoid making an unholy mess when eating really good New York pizza. By that, I mean pizza as it's made by guys named Guido or Giovanni or Luigi in one of those places where there's a photo of the Pope on the wall and framed dollar bills proudly marking the first money the store made.

Seeing pizza succumb to the low-carb craze makes me want to cry, rather than become violent. But I know that most New York pizza places will keep the faith, carbs be darned.

Let the tree-bark chewers have their pizza without the dough. As for me, I'm sticking with the good stuff.

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

February 21, 2004

Early in my journalistic career, when I worked at the Boca Raton News, I came up with what I thought were two brilliant inspirations.

My first was that we should make the state bird the sentinel chicken. My reasoning was that this was a sign of interspecies cooperation and a good example for all of us.

Sentinel chickens detect the presence of encephalitis-carrying mosquitoes. The chickens have a tough job because they do nothing but stand around and eat and get bitten, and I was ready to march on Tallahassee, bug spray and calamine lotion in hand, and demand that the governor take action on this vital issue.

My other proposed campaign was for the old-style water-guzzling toilets. My reasoning was that the troops spent that awful winter at Valley Forge for many reasons, one of which was so that we could flush our toilets not with a wimpy three-gallon trickle of water but a full-fledged six-gallon torrent.

I suggested marching to Tallahassee with a toilet seat on my shoulders, and some readers suggested I go and not return.

But lightning has struck three times, and I was visited by a revelation while sitting in my mother's place in New York and tapping on my laptop at the kitchen table.

It's this: Someone is making a gigantic fortune renting out orange construction cones to county governments for the many road construction projects going on all over Florida.

Here's my proposal. In return for the giant handover of tax dollars to the Scripps Research Institute (not affiliated with Scripps Treasure Coast Newspapers or E.W. Scripps, the good folks who support my cats and me), its first project ought to be to develop a plant that is orange and shaped like a traffic cone.

I further propose that this plant then be made the state flower.

Now with all the stuff that's going on with genetic engineering today, I can't believe that this would be impossible. Look, if they can make hair grow back — except on my head — and clone animals, I'm sure they can breed in a few generations a plant that could serve as a perfectly good substitute for those plastic cones.

Think of it: Plastic cones are made of petroleum, which we get from the Middle East, which makes us dependent on foreign oil, which hurts our trade balance, which means we have to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which is bad all around.

But with some genetic tinkering, we could have a growth industry right here in Indian River County in orange traffic cones. Imagine the motto possibilities: "Indian River County: We grow our own." Cones, that is.

To get this going, I am willing to march to Tallahassee with an orange traffic cone on my head, and I'm hoping other "cone"-heads will join me in my quest.

Then I hope Scripps goes to work on a cure for baldness.

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


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By Vincent Safuto staff writer

February 14, 2004

I tend to do what the information technology folks here at the paper advise when it comes to the computer on my desk. This is because I want to keep my job, and also because it's the company's computer, not my own, so I can't just install Elf Bowling if I feel like it.

Recently, we got a missive detailing possible ways to deal with the spam that is flooding our inboxes at work. The advice was good, and I moved quickly to follow the step-by-step instructions that would, it was claimed, help decrease the torrent of junk e-mail that demands my attention every day.

By the way, in addition to the ubiquitous "pills and porn" that are the mainstays of spam, there are the "patches" now being offered that will enhance important body parts. And let's not forget the "prescriptions" ads, with their promises of Canadian "meds." I bet we'll be dodging millions of ads for "legal ephedra" in the coming months when the federal ban takes effect.

Like I said, I went to work trying to limit the junk e-mail I had to deal with on the job.

I added domain names to the lists, right-clicked on messages to add them to the junk and adult senders lists, created a list of words in the subject line that would cause the automatic deletion of an e-mail, excluded domains from which political e-mail emanated since I'm working that beat and made sure that e-mail from serious presidential candidates was not deleted.

The result? Well, when I come to work in the afternoon, there's usually about 20 messages that have been deleted automatically and about 150 that have not. Of those 150, maybe 15 are important and the rest are spam.

Every few days, I go through the above process again, modifying and updating my lists, and still I spend 10 minutes every day — longer after a weekend off, and even longer after a vacation — pruning my inbox to get rid of the spam.

I'm not alone, I know. Writing in "The Weekly Standard" magazine on June 16, 2003, senior editor Christopher Caldwell said his mailbox was 98 percent spam, and described what was then "a 15-minute discard operation at the beginning of every working day."

In the course of an eight-hour workday, I probably dump about 50 spams that arrive while I'm on the job.

I've reached the point where it seems pointless to even complain about spam or continue to maintain and update the software on my desk to try to stop it. Spammers change domains, misspell words and practice all sorts of technological gimmickry to get around the filters.

Most days after I arrive at work, I sit at my desk and assume a casual posture, head cocked to one side and resting on my left hand, as my right index finger clicks the delete button for ad after ad.

Maybe it's time to just surrender, and say, "The war's over, and they won."

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

February 7, 2004

In the past few weeks, there have been several well-publicized crashes of small aircraft in South Florida, and some people might make the assumption that small airplanes are inherently unsafe.

A plane was found near St. Lucie County Airport recently after a nighttime flight ended in a fatal crash. A small twin-engine plane crashed trying to return to Lantana Airport in Palm Beach County after an engine failed. A helicopter was found to have crashed at Vero Beach Municipal Airport one day.

It's odd, because if you spend enough time in the newsroom listening to the police radio, automobile accidents are far more common. To be fair, there are a lot more cars on the road than planes in the air, but the rarity of airplane accidents, even if a string of them occurs, speaks to the relative safety of small aircraft.

Still, the fears are there. If you have a mechanical failure in a car and the engine dies, you just pull over. Small aircraft can glide, but pilots prefer long, smooth, straight strips of concrete for emergency landings, and those are not always available.

An integral part of flight training, even for the lowest level of pilot's license, is learning how to spot a location where one can land a plane and walk away.

I can remember one time when I was living on Long Island and flying small planes out of Republic Airport in Farmingdale, and I offered my mother's brother, my favorite uncle, a ride. He accepted, but later began to worry about whether he should call the whole thing off. Indeed, his wife told me after the flight that he had been reading his life insurance policy to see if it would pay if he lost his life in a small-plane crash.

We went up that day in a Piper Warrior, one of my favorite small planes, and despite his worries, my uncle climbed aboard. Except for a sneezing fit just before takeoff, all went smoothly and we had a great time flying over Long Island Sound.

When it came to safety in a small plane, I liked to stack the deck in my favor. If the weather report wasn't encouraging, I didn't fly. I didn't overload the plane, or forget to check the fuel in the gas tanks and oil in the engine.

If the engine didn't sound right, I didn't take off. In fact, though, problems were rare and I never had an engine failure or any other incident in flight.

Part of being a pilot is being aware of the responsibility for the lives of your passengers, whether you're in "Big Iron" with hundreds aboard, plowing the LaGuardia to Palm Beach International route, or taking a friend or two in a "puddle jumper" for a quick flight to see the sights.

Are small airplanes unsafe? Not if the rules are followed and care is taken to fly safely.

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


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