I got to sleep early last night. I awoke at 2 AM, and the screen announced "Breaking News" while David Shuster was talking about the late Senator Kennedy.

He hadn't made it to Eunice's funeral. At the time, I mentioned that to Blondie and said, "You know what that means," and she nodded. Chris Matthews was on the Colbert Report last Thursday announcing that he'd produced a show about the Kennedy brothers, to be broadcast at 7 PM this Thursday. ("Pre-empting yourself, huh?" Colbert commented, and Matthews almost choked in laughter.)

Matthews had announced on Hardball that he was going to be on the Colbert Report, pointing out to viewers that Colbert was "c-o-l-b-e-r-silent t" and completely missing that running joke: Colbert calls his show the Colbert Report, r-e-p-o-r-silent t. Matthews pronounced it re-PORT instead of ruh-POOR, but then, Matthews never pays much attention to what others say, so that's no surprise.

TV News Wallows Well

It's hard to think of anything that TV news does nearly as well as wallowing. When Jack Kennedy was assassinated, there was genuine concern about the possibility that this was the first step in global thermonuclear war, but they seemed to miss that point. Perhaps that was a good idea. It might have started panic and riots in the street if they'd have pointed it out. But they got some really nifty shots of Jackie trying to shove the gray matter back into Jack's skull, and of her at the hospital with blood on her dress, and some pretty elegant shots of a casket being pulled on a caisson, and an extremely memorable picture of John saluting his father's casket, as if a boy that age would have any idea what was going on. Who was the manipulative son of a bitch that told that poor little boy to do that, anyway?

And there was a replay of the wallowing when Bobbie was killed, and when the Challenger blew up, and when the World Trade Center collapsed, and when Michael Jackson died. The news channel ratings all shoot up, and all the other channels try to get in on the act. The Biography channel shows the relevant shows, and the movie channels show movies that are related, and the music channels play appropriate music videos. If the executives at the Travel Channel had their wits about them, they'd have a show about the beaches near Hyannisport, and they'd visit the bridge where Mary Jo Kopechne died, and the Food Channel would have Ina Garten preparing food for a funeral wake.

And The Flags

According to MANBC's Dylan Ratigan, federal buildings will be flying their flags at half-mast. I suppose we ought not be too hard on him; as a former newspaper editor, I can assure you that Mr. Ratigan is actually more intelligent than most news people. In fact, only the Navy will will be flying their flags at half-mast, unless there is widespread flooding that I have heard nothing about. Ships have masts. Land-based flagpoles are staffs. Federal buildings will be flying their flags at half-staff.

And if you're paying attention, you'll surely find other news critters making this mistake. There's a lot of criticism about professional news organizations, that do fact-checking, losing ground to amateurs with blogs, but in fact, the bloggers seem to be getting it right about as often as the mainstream media. Faux News is particularly bad, but CNN is a laughable shell these days, and MSNBC is trying hard to be as opinionated as FNC. Nobody seems to give a damn about doing news right these days. After I stopped editing newspapers, I sometimes would get frustrated with the errors I found, and I'd send back the front page with a dozen or more errors in fact, spelling, or grammar circled and annotated in blue pencil, but how do I blue-pencil television news?

You'd think that they could hook up a spell-checker to the chyrons, at least. When Scotland released a prisoner, one of the news channels put at the bottom of the screen that the plane was headed to "Lybia". Hmmm. Do you suppose that is somewhere near Libya?

The UN-Late Steve Winwood

According to Eric Clapton, Steve Winwood teaches his kids that if they're not early, they're late. There's no in-between. Which, I suppose, if you're talking about the Kennedy brothers, is true. None of them, Joe, Jack, Bobbie, Teddy, is early any more; they're all late. But I don't think that's what Winwood is talking about. It makes me feel sorry for the Winwood kids. A kid needs some stress in his life in order to mature, and showing respect for others' time is common courtesy - but obsessive behavior isn't desirable.

I've never been one to be particularly timely, and I've been made to feel ashamed of that all my life. At one time, I had a long discussion about that with a therapist. He claimed that it was because I was a perfectionist, and he wanted me to feel shame about that, as well. I didn't have the sense to tell him to go fuck himself. I think that's what he hoped I would do.

I suppose I am a perfectionist, I said, because if I get everything perfect, then nobody will have just cause for finding fault with what I do. So, how's that working out, he asked. I said I didn't know; that I hadn't quite achieved perfection yet. I hadn't yet learned Rick Nelson's Garden Party Law: You can't please everyone, so ya got to please yourself.

Achieving Perfection

That's all nonsense, anyway. People gripe if you screw up. People gripe even more if you get things perfect. That's reasonable to see; it makes them feel inadequate, and that certainly is a hostile thing to do. When Mama was helping me on my first newspaper, she created a header for the "Errata" block that preceded notes of mistakes in prior issues: "We try to have something for everybody, and some people are always looking for mistakes. Here are some from our last issue:"

Mama once visited a cousin of hers, who was out in the garden, wielding a hoe as she talked to Mom, when the phone started ringing. "Is John going to get the phone?" she asked, and her cousin indicated that her hubby was on the back 40, harrowing. "Then why aren't you answering the phone?" Mama asked. "Because I paid to put that phone in for my convenience." Cousin Kate understood Rick Nelson's Garden Party Law.

Growing up on a farm, we didn't pay too much attention to the clock on the wall. You got up when the cows wanted to be milked. You started work in the fields when the dew was off the crops, and you kept working at night until you couldn't see any longer. You went to sleep when you were tired, and you got up again when the cows needed attention.

Life On TiVO Time

That's pretty much how I've tried to live my life. TiVO helps, because I watch TV shows when it's convenient for me, not when it's convenient for the television network. I went back to sleep last night at 5 AM, and woke up this afternoon at 2 PM. It's now 8 PM, and I'm thinking about eating lunch. Supper may arrive at 4 AM.

When I've had jobs working for someone else, and they wanted me to work from 8 to 5, with an hour for lunch from 12 to 1. I'd wake up in the morning, and show up whenever I got there, whether it was 7 or 9. I'd work on a project until the project was complete, and if that meant I didn't eat until 3 PM, well, that's when I'd eat. Some days, I'd eat in 15 minutes, and rush back to get to work on something urgent, and some days, I'd take 90 minutes, because I was mentally exhausted from what I'd been doing all morning. And I was in no hurry to rush home at night, either. I'd rarely leave at 5. Sometimes, it'd be 8 or 9 before I'd get out of there, because I was in the middle of something.

Some bosses were OK with that. I never shorted my employer of manhours. Other bosses, it'd drive them up the wall. Admittedly, the laws regarding wage/hour compensation aren't written by someone with a farmer's sensibility towards time. Instead, they're designed for the shopkeeper, who has hours posted for the convenience of customers, or the factory worker, who repeats the same action every 12.3 seconds, and can start or stop any time without disrupting anything.

One of my bosses sent around a newspaper clipping shortly after I started, showing a scientific study indicated that for knowledge workers, if you were interrupted by even the shortest phone call, it would take you 20 minutes to get "back in the groove" again. He suggested that we keep our office doors closed, and that we instruct our wives to leave a message with the secretary when they wanted a callback, instead of having them call us directly. He said marriages require a lot of talk - but a 15 minute call that doesn't interrupt is a lot better than a 60-second call that does.

Boy, I said to myself, I'm going to like this boss. A couple of months later, I found myself "in the groove" in a programming session. I worked straight through from 8 AM Tuesday to 10 PM Wednesday - yep, 38 hours straight - and I was really productive during those hours, getting as much done as would ordinarily have taken me two weeks. I was really exhausted, and didn't show up on Thursday until about 2 PM. On Friday morning, my boss came in to see me, and told me that his boss was upset that I seemed to be goofing off on Thursday. Things were never the same again on that job.

What Are Your Goals?

Every so often, I run across a "motivational speaker" or writer that tells me that I need to have lofty goals, and visualize them in order to achieve anything of note. For decades, I bought into that spiel.

They're wrong, though. People confuse dreams with goals. For a goal to be workable, it has to be a measure of what you are going to do, not a measure of what you are going to get. Putting a picture of a $150,000 sports car on your refrigerator doesn't make it any more likely that one will end up in your driveway.

But even if you set yourself a goal of what you are going to do, that doesn't work, either. Salesmen at Combined Insurance are told to set themselves a goal of making 20 sales pitches per day. That's a reasonable goal. The idea behind making 20 sales pitches a day is that you keep moving. If you can't convince someone to buy within 7 minutes, they figure, you should move on. If you keep pounding on people, you'll waste too much time and actually make fewer sales - and you'll build an undesirable reputation of being pushy. It's a simple product, and people quickly can figure out whether they want to buy.

It's A Daily Goal - Or Hourly

The Combined goal of 20 a day isn't a goal of 100 a week. If you fail to meet your goal one day, you start fresh the next day. The whole point is time management and maintaining a focus on what you're doing. No battle plan survives contact with the enemy. If you have a customer with a problem, you can't ignore that customer's needs. You have to take care of that customer, and if it takes four hours to do that right, you spend four hours to do it right. That leaves you four hours left, and you try to make 10 sales pitches that afternoon, and you do it guilt-free.

When I was running a newspaper, I'd head over to the northwest part of the county, and make sales calls on potential advertisers there. While I was there, I kept an eye open for potential news stories. Sometimes, I came back with a lot of news, and not much advertising. Sometimes, I made a lot of sales calls, and came home with no news and no advertising at all. Sooner or later, it all averages out. Trying to sell advertising in January and February is terrible. The farmers aren't in the fields, so the seed and fertilizer and tractor parts dealers don't have much business, and with icy roads, nobody's hauling grain to the elevator, so everybody's pockets are empty. Mine were, too.

August was always lush, though, with mothers buying to send kids back to school, farmers busy in the fields, lots of carnivals and fairs, and everybody spending money. If I had 36 hours a day, I could have used them. Sooner or later, it all averages out. When you read too many motivational books or go to too many motivational seminars, you end up beating your head against the wall in January, and working yourself to death in August.

The New Guy

There'a a story about a guy who, fresh out of college, takes a sales job. The company is holding its annual convention for salesmen, and his new boss thinks this is a great time to get the kid off to a good start. He sits down next to his new boss in the auditorium, and Earl Nightingale comes out and gives a talk. The kid is really excited.

Next, out comes the company president, who talks about the great heritage of the company, and how they are the only company making a worthwhile product in their particular industry, and how all of these salesmen are blessed to have such an opportunity. The kid starts bouncing up and down in his seat, and the boss is pleased to have gotten himself such a go-getter.

Finally, they end the day with a speech by Zig Ziglar. That's a guy who could excite the dead. They pass phony credit cards that say "Major" on them to everybody, and Zig tells everybody that when someone asks them if they have a Major credit card for identification, they can answer yes. And he says sometimes the clerk will not be satisfied with that, and will ask if they have another credit card, so they start passing around more phony credit cards, that say "Another" on them. Then he has them pass around circular pieces of cardboard, that say "TUIT" on them, and Zig says if you were planning something as soon as you got around to it, you now have a "round tuit".

At this point, everyone in the auditorium is laughing riotously, and the kid jumps up and starts racing out. The boss is concerned, and dashes after him. When he catches the kid, he asks the kid what's going on. Oh, he says, I'm just so excited, I just have to go make some sales, so I'm headed out to the field. He then looked puzzled, and looks at his boss. "Where's the field?"

Motivation Is Fun

There's an ad on television where a mother is addressing an arena full of Best Buy people, saying that she wants to buy her daughter a laptop computer, so she can succeed in college. One of the clerks recommends a laptop. It's not something that's totally lame, is it? No, the clerk says, and it's loaded with software, so she doesn't have to do anything. "That's great. She's good at that," the mother says.

Motivational books and motivational seminars are like pornography, in that they're great fun, but if you spend all your time reading and watching, you don't have any time for doing. You don't need to put a picture of a baby on your refrigerator if you want a baby, and you don't need to put a picture of a fancy sports car on your refrigerator if you want such a car in your garage. You just need to figure out what need to be done and then do it. You don't want to be a clock-watcher, and you don't need to be perfect so that you avoid criticism.

Working The Numbers

There are 300 million people in the US. Of those, about 120 million are mentally competent adults. About 60 million of those are of the opposite sex. About 15 million of those are unmarried, or are unhappy about their marriage. Start asking some of those people out. What's the worst that can happen? They'll say no? I can guarantee you, MANY of them will say no - but you only need one of them to say "yes" to go out tonight.

And if you date someone every night, you'll soon find someone you like. I can guarantee you that MANY of them will not like you nearly as well - but you only need one of them to like you enough. Wilt Chamberlain claims that he had sex with 20,000 women. Do you think he accomplished that without inviting thousands of women to partake of friendly friction? He knows something that most men never have thought about. If you ask twenty women to have sex, and nineteen say no, you get laid. If you don't talk to any women at all, you don't.

But you don't need to put a picture of Paris Hilton on your refrigerator. Just figure out what needs to be done to achieve your goal - and then, work methodically towards that goal. Like the folks at Nike say, just do it.

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
Best Buy - Chris Matthews - chyron - clock-watching - Combined Insurance - David Shuster - Eric Clapton - Eunice Shriver - half-staff - Ina Garten - Jack Kennedy - Michael Jackson - Stephen Colbert - Steve Winwood - Ted Kennedy - W. Clement Stone - World Trade Center - Zig Ziglar