Ten a.m. passed without incident — no Phone Call of Doom to report.
More than a dozen of my colleagues presumably did get The Call, though, so I’m not exactly dancing in the streets at this turn of events.
I’m off to work, where the office will no doubt compare favorably to a funeral parlor.
Our union and the paper have reached a tentative agreement on a new contract, with the company cutting its layoff number by more than half. The threat of layoffs was designed to extract concessions from the Guild, which appears to have succeeded. The company had a list of draconian concessions that it eventually abandoned in the interest of getting us to agree to take on more of the cost of our health insurance premiums.
I won’t breathe totally easily till 10 a.m. tomorrow but the statistical odds of me being among those shown the door have been reduced.
Ed, my stepdad in the Peoria area (downstate from Chicago) and my mom have a place in the country with a nice paved driveway. He even has one of those mini-bulldozers to plow his drive. But when the big snows come, the county snowplows leave a ridge of frozen, filthy snow that has the folks locked on their land for now.
The tracks in the snow here are as far as the ol’ Jeep Grand Cherokee could make it, apparently.
Times are tough in the newspaper biz these days, and perhaps none tougher than at the good ol’ Mercury News, which has nevertheless seen fit to overlook my many character flaws and keep me on staff for seven-plus years because I can crank out headlines quickly and alertly redirect misplaced commas to their proper homes.
Come Tuesday the newspaper will have its chance to rectify this oversight. A couple months back the paper’s execs told us that about 15 percent of the newsroom staff will be given their walking papers in December. Tuesday’s the day of reckoning. Our instructions are to sit by the phone between 8 and 10 a.m. and if the phone call doesn’t come, we should report to work as scheduled. If it does come, we’re free at last to pursue intriguing careers in fast food and long-haul trucking.
I’d very much like to stay on at the ol’ Mercury News, and not only because keeping this job is so much easier than finding another one. I’ve worked with excellent people, helped cover important stories, learned a lot about the Bay Area by being in a news room when big news breaks. I’ve seen people respond with incredible calm and professionalism in the midst of computer system meltdowns. I’ve seen people keep their sense of humor when it seems like the world’s going down the drain. (In our biz, that’s pretty much every edition. World not going down the drain is not news, you understand.)
So that’s where I stand now. If I have time on Tuesday I’ll post an update (though you must understand what it means to have time to update one’s blog when one should be leaving for the office).
I spent the predawn hours hiking to the top of Mission Peak with Dan Mitchell, in the photo above; Tom Clifton, who took this picture; John Fedak, who joined me at Mount Shasta in October; and a hiker named Randy who reads my hiking blog.
Details of the hike posted at Two-Heel Drive.
I looked out the window of the house tonight and saw this; ran back to fetch the camera before it went away. Arrived just in time.
Americans cannot stand a unified government, and there’s at least a scrap of evidence that unified government doesn’t like America. To wit:
1960s: Democrats run everything. Result: Calamity in Vietnam.
2000s: Republicans run everything: Result: Calamity in Iraq.
The saying goes that power corrupts and ultimate power corrupts ultimately. Think of all the small-government Republicans who stormed into office in the past 12 years with the earnest intention of cutting the size and expense of government. They had the comfort of standing by their principles with the comfort of knowing they wouldn’t survive a Clinton veto.
Bush comes to office, veto threat disappears and suddenly they discover the vastness of American power right there in their hot little hands, and so what do they do? Abandon their small-government principles faster than poop through a goose.
In the ’80s the country prospered with a Republican president and a Democratic Congress. In the ’90s it prospered with a Republican congress and a Democratic president. In this decade the economy did OK but the overseas adventure cost the country dearly on the international stage.
Power in the United States is divided roughly five ways: Courts, Legislature, Executive, Wall Street, and the Media. With the current election the Democrats control the Legislature with friends in the media, while the Republicans control the executive and the courts with friends on Wall Street. This still gives the Republicans a 3-2 advantage, so they don’t really have all that much to complain about.
Checks and balances seem been bred into the DNA of Americans. For 30 years, conservative operatives did everything in their power to discredit their opposition and place themselves at the power pinnacle but when they got there, they choked. Maybe it’s because they’re Americans, too, and have no concept of what to do with unchecked power.
Maybe a bit of sanity can return now that we’ve gotten through this bad patch.
… of the day I came squawling into this world (and haven’t stop complaining since).
To all who’ve sent birthday greetings: Thanks a bunch. To all who’ve failed to send me the riches and fame I so justly deserve: what are you waiting for? I’m not getting any younger.
Ten years ago, in the autumn of 1996 — back in that halcyon era before Bill stained Monica’s dress — I posted my first Web page. Since then I can’t imagine how many pages, how many paragraphs, how many words, how many links I’ve posted. Most of the stuff on my first page is out of date, The cats have passed on; we’ve moved 2,000 miles to California. I’m still newspapering, and my siblings are married to the same people, that much is still true.
Back in the day I posted a page called “Toxic Emissions” in which I stated things I considered inerrant. An example:
Tom On Politics: It’s the natural state of
existence for a Republican to be an enemy of the common people and a
Democrat to be an enemy of common sense. (12,327 Brownie points to
the person who tells me the wit who said this first. It sounds so
familiar I could not have invented it on my own.)Criminal Element Corollary: A man who will not steal you
blind and swear it is for your own good has no right to call himself
a politician.
I stand by these remarks.
My accomplishments of these past 45 years have not been remarkable, but these pages of mine have given me one thing which belongs to nobody else: The first “Tom Mangan” listing in Google. Every other personage on this planet who shares my name is in line behind me. An obscure honor, for sure, but still nice to have. If only one of those other Tom Mangans would get busy so I could enjoy the pleasure of being mistaken for somebody who is rich and famous.
They’re not only in the Dakota country. As of last night they were barely more
than a hundred yards from our front porch.
About 250 acres burned in the brushfire; no homes were lost but there were
some traffic jams getting past the firefighting equipment last night. One of
the neighbors has one of these nifty plastic picket fences; now it’s melted
in places.
Bit of a scare but we’re thankful that so much of the available fuel has now
been burned, making it less likely that another blaze will make it to our place.
Went camping at Mount Shasta with a bunch of folks I met via Two-Heel Drive, my hiking blog. Check out the details here. There are pictures, but you have to scroll down a ways to find them.
