In my lifetime, I’ve seen a number of car nameplates go off to the auto graveyard. Studebaker. Rambler (and its successor, American Motors). Plymouth. Oldsmobile. Even the infamous Edsel came and went when I was a toddler. Pontiac is about to join them. Seeing these go never meant as much to me as the news on Wednesday that Saturn is also going to be driven to the scrap heap.

I owned an early Saturn, and I loved that car. I bought a brand-new, 1993 Saturn SC2 in red from the old Saturn of Wickliffe. I was intrigued by all the planning that GM put into the Saturn. It was designed from scratch. It was built at a plant in a little town in Tennessee that made nothing but Saturns.

When I bought my car, Saturns were still so new, dealers couldn’t keep them on the lot. I had to wait a month for my car. While I was waiting, the dealership sent me a bouquet of balloons at work, and a card with a nice message thanking me for my patience. When it came in, we had an unveiling ceremony for my new car. I got to pull the cover off the car and unveil it to see it for the first time.



I owned that car for ten years. I drove it into the ground. I used it to cover news stories. I used it for errands. I drove it all over. I put over 140,000 miles on that car.  Here's proof.

 

My Saturn and I became one. Saturn’s corporate leaders tried to instill a pride in owners. They even invited owners to the plant in Tennessee each summer for “Homecoming.” They had entertainment. You were offered tours of the plant. Your car was going back home to where it was made. Yes, Saturn made you feel as if you had more than a car.

It was a sad day when I basically realized that I had worn the car out, and it wasn’t worth putting any more money into it, so I donated it to charity for the tax deduction.

My Saturn had some rust around the headlight doors, but not much anywhere else, because the door panels and the rear panel were all molded out of plastic. No rust, no dents. It was a fun car to drive, and fun to own, but it was time to move on.



Six years ago, my Saturn was towed off to the auto auction. Now, Saturn itself is being towed away. Rest in peace, Saturn. You tried to revitalize the auto industry with a few changes. Some of them stuck, but the day that GM decided to integrate Saturn design and production with other makes was the day Saturn became just another GM car. That wasn’t the Saturn I bought into.

Something about one of the “Yes on Issue 3” TV ads caught my eye. It’s the ad in which a bunch of senior citizens board a bus bound for Michigan to head to a casino there.



You see the bus cross the Michigan line. It’s just under that “Welcome to Michigan” sign you see a green and white sign marking the distances to Camden, Reading and Litchfield. 



All three are indeed towns in Michigan; I know, I grew up there. Those three towns are along M-49, a two-lane road in the middle of nowhere.



I got a chuckle out of the fact that they shot this scene along a rural road that leads nowhere near the casinos (I assume shooting along I-75, the way you’d get to Detroit, would have created too many challenges). Could be that subliminal message of this ad is, if you board a bus for a Michigan casino, the driver is likely to get lost on the way, and you’ll wind up in Hillsdale or Albion!

As long as I’m giving a jab to the folks from The Jobs and Growth For Ohio Committee (pro-Issue 3), I might as well scratch my head over one of the messages from TruthPac (anti-Issue 3). Their biggest argument is that if Issue 3 passes, there’s no requirement to hire Ohioans for the casinos. As their proof, they point to classified ads appearing in newspapers in Las Vegas and Atlantic City.



(Sorry, this is just a screen shot.  If you want to see the spot, go to link to the TruthPac spot in the paragraph above.  Couldn't get a link to it.)

Problem is, who’d be looking for employees for casinos that don’t even exist. In fact, Ixtapa Gaming, the company named in the ads, has no connection whatsoever with anyone who has help bankrolled either campaign. Something’s fishy here, and it’s not the filet of sole at the casino buffet.

Here’s my two cents worth. Ohio will eventually have legalized casinos. It’s inevitable, because casino operators want to expand, and they’re willing to spend the money and find the people to help them do it (such as Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert). Only a small percentage of actually go to casinos, but eventually, the rest of us will get sick and tired of hearing all the messages about our money headed to other states, and we’ll just give in. Of all the casino proposals I have seen in my 22 years of living in Ohio, I think Issue 3 has the best chance of passage, because it’s the first time there have been concrete plans to spread it all over the state. Alan Spitzer’s casino plan didn’t pass, because why would someone from Cincinnati come to a casino in Lorain. Likewise, last year’s proposal for a casino in Clinton County got a big “ho hum” from folks in Cleveland and Akron (Detroit’s much closer than a spot near Cincinnati). If I know one thing for sure, there’ll be plenty of money spent over the next few weeks by supporters and opponents of Issue 3.

Who benefits? The media. Cha-ching for Clear Channel Radio!

Note from Tom: if there are any punctuation errors in this blog update, please be kind when letting me know. After all, I am only human, and it is my birthday.

I just found out that today, my birthday, is also National Punctuation Day. If my birthday could be any day listed in Chase’s Calendar of Events, it might as well be a day to honor something about which I am passionate.



Example of bad punctuation.  Hint:  Check by Greta's name.

If you have read this blog before, you are aware that I am a fanatic about punctuation. As an example, I wrote about how a local car dealer’s front window actually spelled says as say’s. I drove by that dealership the other day. They finally removed the apostrophe from the window, so it now reads: “(Dealer name) says drive home happy.” I don’t know if they read my blog, or if a customer said something.

In that same blog entry, I noted that a typical blunder – at least until it was re-named – was for people to refer to Jacobs Field as Jacob’s Field. That lead to a friend – a former newspaper editor – to keep proclaiming every time she saw it in copy, “who is Jacob?”

It's quite simple.  An apostrophe denotes possession, pure and simple.  It does not automatically preceede the letter S when S is the final letter in a word.  Anyone who believes it should, deserves to be smacked upside the head with a punctuation book.

If you want a book about punctuation, read “Eats, Shoots and Leaves” by Lynne Truss. She refers to the book as “The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.” Truss is, like me, one of those people who will scratch out incorrectly-placed apostrophes on signs and such.   She also has a very wicked sense of humor.  A new edition of her book is coming out soon. I thoroughly recommend it, if you are one of those people who still tries to write the way he/she learned in school, and don’t write entirely in the shorthand we have all turned to thanks to e-mails and text messages.

By the way, here is the joke that inspired the book’s title:

A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and proceeds to fire it at the other patrons.

“Why?” asks the confused, surviving waiter amidst the carnage, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

“I'm a panda,” he says, at the door. “Look it up.”

The waiter turns to the relevant entry in the manual and, sure enough, finds an explanation. 'Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.'

If you don’t get the joke, please e-mail me at tommoore@wtam.com. I'll be happy to explain.



I love this sign.  It has three mis-used apostrophes!

Before you go, please check out these examples of apostrophe abuse. And, if you really don’t get it after this, there’s always remedial education.

Thank you for indulging me as I climb on my soapbox.

News Item: Honolulu City Council decides against making it a crime to ride a city bus if you have excessive body odor.

I can see where the civil rights people are coming from, but what about MY rights?

For me, it’s not so much the people with body odor, but the people who put on so much cologne, perfume or after-shave that the scent lingers long after they have left the room. I’m talking about the people for whom a bottled or sprayed-on fragrance is a substitute for bathing. I’m talking about the people whose sense of smell is so dulled that they don’t realize they’re bathing in this stuff.



I hate to say, but my sinuses fill up and I get headaches whenever I take a big whiff of one of these faux floral fragrances. Honolulu, home to some of the most beautiful and fragrant flowers in the world, probably didn’t take this into consideration.

We celebrate Christmas by going to church to celebrate the birth of Christ.

We celebrate Independence Day by showing our patriotism.

We celebrate Memorial Day by remembering those who went before us.

We celebrate Thanksgiving by giving thanks.

Then, why do we celebrate Labor Day by staying home from work?

I just took another week off work, except it turned out to not be a whole week. Two days off, one day on, two days off. Darren Toms, who was handling my shift, had to be called away on Wednesday, so you had “Tom Moore filling in for Darren Toms, filling in for Tom Moore” (there’ll be a test later).  Going in to work on Wednesday, I already knew what my lead story would be, as the news broke overnight that Teddy Kennedy had died.

If there's one person in Cleveland who could talk eloquently about Kennedy, it was Cuyahoga County Commissioner Tim Hagan, personal friend of the senator.  Hagan is a fairly regular guest on WMJI's "Lanigan and Malone."  When Jimmy Malone stopped in the newsroom to pick up copies of that day's Plain Dealer, I asked him if he'd let me know if they spoke with Hagan.  He said he wasn't sure if they'd talk to Hagan or not, but he'd see.     Two hours later, I walk out of the booth after delivering the 6:00 a.m. news.  What do I find in the newsroom?   Sports Director Mike Snyder talking with Tim Hagan.  Hagan told me that he just decided to come up to "Radio Ranch" on his own, and that he'd been asked by the folks at WMJI to come down the hall to WTAM.  And that's how I had sound bytes with Tim Hagan so early in the morning.


Tim Hagan

And what did I do on this vacation? Not a heck of a lot, but I did take a day trip with my wife to Pittsburgh. I was most fascinated by our trip up the Duquesne Incline, because we have nothing like it in Cleveland. Of course, we need nothing like it in Cleveland, either, as we don’t have to haul people up a steep hillside. If you go to Pittsburgh, take the trip up the Duquesne Incline. You have a spectacular view of the city from the top, and unlike the nearby Allegheny Incline, you are standing right above the point where the three rivers connect. It’s a beautiful view, but if you’re a Browns fan, just forget the fact that Heinz Field is right smack in the middle of that view.


Ohio River to the left, Allegheny River above, Monongahela River to right.

Another reason for taking the Duquesne Incline is that it’s operated entirely by volunteers, and all the money collected goes for the upkeep of this piece of history. (The Allegheny Incline is just as historic, but it’s operated by the local transit authority.)


Duquesne Incline

On Friday, I drove to Akron to visit Goodyear’s “World of Rubber” exhibit. I never even knew this museum existed on the fourth floor of Goodyear Hall, and neither did a lot of other people. Friday was the final day the museum would be open. The company decided that the museum would not make the move to its future headquarters site. A good thing, as Goodyear basically gave up on the museum back in the 80s. The exhibits feature outdated and discontinued products. Videos are worn films, played in backlit projector boxes. Many of them didn’t even work, buttons covered by a small sign reading “broken.”

What I thought was the most outdated – and the kitschiest – exhibit was the re-creation of Charles Goodyear’s home, where he figured out how to vulcanize rubber, making it possible to use rubber for tires, shoe soles and such. Inside the mockup of Goodyear’s 19th century home was a mannequin. Press the button, and the mannequin appears to come to life. They filmed a close-up shot of an actor speaking the lines. That film was then projected on the mannequin’s white, featureless face, making it seem as if it was talking. It appeared to me to be a low-tech version of where Disney people would have Abe Lincoln come to life, but Disney’s Lincoln (even back in the 60s) was fully electronic and computer-controlled. Charles Goodyear looked to me like when you shine a flashlight up toward your face from under your chin in order to scare little kids while telling ghost stories.


"Charles Goodyear"

The exhibits at the World of Rubber will be given to other institutions, such as Stan Hywet Hall, so they will live on. As for Charles Goodyear’s mannequin, I say, put him on exhibit somewhere, but as an example of how a message was delivered in the pre-digital age.

For years, I have been fascinated with those Mindset Lists compiled by a couple of professors at Beloit College in Wisconsin. It started over 10 years ago as a way for faculty to understand the mindset of incoming freshmen. It’s a way for instructors in their 30s, 40s, even in their 60s, to understand just where their students are coming from. The Mindset List has turned into a way to gauge how society has changed over time, in terms of world evens, pop culture, and ways we communicate. Here’s a link to this year’s mindset list.

The list started in the late 90s. I began to wonder, what if such a list had been around when I was a college freshman? I put myself in the position of some of my old professors, and especially, in the position of my parents. What would be normal to them, but not to me? What would be commonplace to me, but something relatively new to them? Here is my Mindset List, issued for incoming freshmen in 1974:



1. U.S. soldiers have been in Vietnam most of their lives.
2. Everyone has always had TV in their homes.
3. Color TV is no big deal to them.
4. Say “Kangaroo” and they’ll say “Captain”.
5. Network TV news has always been a half-hour at 6:30 each weekday evening.
6. Walter Cronkite has always anchored the news on CBS.
7. They remember JFK had been assassinated, but have only vague memories of the day.
8. They have no idea what “I Like Ike” means.
9. FDR and Stalin have always been dead.
10. World War II is as much ancient history as was World War I was to their parents.
 11. To them, the “British Invasion” had nothing to do with the Revolutionary War.
12. There has nearly always been a black Supreme Court justice.
13. Beer and soda cans have always had pull tabs.
14. Space missions are fairly common occurrences.
15. You’ve always had to put a ZIP code after the city and state when sending mail.
 16. Berlin has always been divided by a wall, and there have always been two Germanys.
17. We’ve always been at odds with Cuba.
18. Pennies have had the Lincoln Memorial on the back nearly their entire lifetime, so it’s a big deal to come across a “wheat penny”.
19. They don’t realize the Army-McCarthy hearings before Congress dominated daytime TV in their day as have the Watergate hearings.
20. DeSoto was an explorer we learned about in history, not the name of a car brand.
21. Cigarette packs have always had warnings about the danger of smoking.
22. There’s always been Major League Baseball in California.
23. Radio has never had drama or comedy programs.
24. There have always been Interstate highways.
25. Why do record players have a 78 speed? All records are 33 and 45 RPM.
26. McDonald’s has been around forever.
27. It’s always cost at least a nickel to mail a letter.
28. It’s always cost a dime to make a phone call.
29. Bob Hope was a movie star? I thought he always did TV specials and USO tours of Vietnam.
30. There was a fuss when Elvis Presley and The Beatles started performing?
31. Long distance phone calls have always been dialed direct.
32. They learned to drive in cars with seat belts and shoulder harnesses.

Applications (or “apps” for those in the know) for the iPhone are being developed all the time. The latest iPhone app to make news is called iBurgh, and it’s proof that Pittsburgh is, I hate to say it, a hipper place than Cleveland.

Let’s say that you’re driving along the ‘Burgh’s Boulevard of the Allies, and you swerve around a pothole. You’re angry, and want to do something about it. You pull over to a safe spot, get out of the car, pull out your trusty iPhone, snap a picture of the pothole, then use the iBurgh app to send that picture, and GPS coordinates of the offending hole to city hall, where presumably, someone will take note, and send out a truck loaded with hotpatch to fill the hole. Problem solved with a minimum of muss and fuss. The folks in Pittsburgh say they’re developing versions of iBurgh for the BlackBerry and other “smart phones”. They also say that iBurgh can be used to report other things, such as weeds that need to be cut, or snow that needs to be plowed.

Does Cleveland or any of its suburbs have something as cool as iBurgh? Not to my knowledge. What do we have? We have parking meter cozies.

Today’s Plain Dealer has a photo of a woman knitting cozies for parking meters in Cleveland Heights.   (This photo is from the web site of Heights Arts, the folks doing this project.)



Wow.

While Pittsburgh comes up with something that gets a lot of buzz, we have people making sure parking meters look pretty.  Maybe they can start turning out cozies for our iPhones.  The ones that we can't use to easily report potholes.

(Tom’s note: the folks at Heights Arts, who came up with the idea for parking meter cozies just wanted to spruce up the Cedar-Lee and Larchmere neighborhoods, and shouldn’t be criticized. It’s just too darn bad that we can’t have something as neat as iBurgh, along with colorful parking meters.  Cleveland, consider this a kick in the pants that we need to be more pro-active, and more 21st century.)

I’m all for saving resources, especially when it keeps my First Energy bill down, and keeps my water bill down. A couple of things made me think.

Over the weekend, my city held its semi-annual waste roundup. This is the time we are to round up all the stuff that we shouldn’t put out for the weekly trash collection, and bring it to a collection site at city hall. Things like old computers, old paint, old phone books, fluorescent lights and such.



Among the things I took up to city hall were some fluorescent light tubes. They burn less electricity than do incandescent light bulbs. I’ll grant that fact. That’s why the move is on to phase out incandescent light bulbs. General Electric is slowly ending production of Thomas Edison’s old light bulbs. Problem is, last time I checked, there was nothing toxic in those old light bulbs. Fluorescent tubes and CFLs contain mercury. Mercury is bad for us. Fluorescent tubes and CFLs can’t be thrown out with the trash. So, aren’t we just exchanging one problem for another?

Here’s an ecological story that Bill Wills mentioned the other morning. It’s a public service campaign in Brazil encouraging people to pee in the shower to save drinking water.  This link takes you to the only subtitled version I could find.

What they're trying to get you to do is to think of all that water you don’t use if you do “number one” while you’re in the shower, instead of flushing.

Okay, this is one of those things that we don’t talk about, but surveys say that we’ve all done at one time or another.  Just remember: do it at home, not in the locker room at the health club (and especially, not in the pool).