My search for the right church for me seems to have ended on a positive note. For the past couple of months, I have been attending the same church. From the beginning, I was impressed with things that probably would have scared me off years ago.

For one thing, I liked the style of the contemporary service, and the congregation seemed to welcome everyone. The church building is a converted basketball gymnasium. The backdrops on the stage are abstract white fabric shapes backlit by gelled yellow and red lighting to give a dynamic look. The service begins with upbeat Christian music, played on piano/keyboard, drums, electric and acoustical guitars, and even a bass and violin on some pieces.

The congregation dresses anywhere from coat and tie to business casual to shorts and t-shirts. There are a few motorcycle enthusiasts who show up in leather jackets and ‘do-rags. I suppose it’s hard for members of a congregation to be “holier than thou” when everyone dresses differently.

You might remember that one of my earliest religion-related posts was about the concept of “Casual Sundays.” I made the point that I wasn’t sure about this practice, because it seemed to be an excuse to be lazy in church. I was brought up to dress “appropriately” for church because you were visiting God’s House.

Over the years, I’ve thought a good bit about that and have come to a somewhat different conclusion. If you consider yourself a lowly employee and God as the “Chairman of the Board,” then you’d certainly want to dress formally. If you consider God as more your friend, as I do, then you might think twice about the need for such formality.

As I was exploring church websites, I found some pretty “out there” ideas. So when I had the chance to ask questions of this one, I took advantage and asked about certain controversial ideas that churches like to argue about.

The pastor gave an example of a member who complained about an outdoor smoking area. When asked, the member suggested that smoking is a sin because the body is supposed to be a temple. The pastor reminded her that they set up the outdoor smoking section to keep those who smoke from doing so inside the church. That didn’t seem to make a difference with her. But the pastor pointed out, kindly, of course, that if he was to shut down the smoking area because of the “sin” of smoking, he first wanted to follow the complaining member home, see what she ate, see how much she exercised, and what she was doing regularly to take care of her body.

The point of this was that as Christians, we tend to obsess about one simple concept and allow other problems, some just as big, others even bigger, to slip by the wayside while we wage war on this one little thing.

I can respect that kind of reasoning.

Brett Battles posted a T-shirt he found at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books:

I’d wear it proudly!

To say that it has been a long time coming would be the understatement of the year! I was beginning to think I would never break the 240 mark! Yesterday, I weighed 241. This morning, it was 239, which means I have now lost 51 pounds!

This weekend, I’m being a lot more strict than normal, admittedly, but I wanted to definitely be below 240 by Monday, when I am supposed to stop by MUSC for my next weigh-in.

I also have to schedule my second blood work this week, which means that I get to go back to their lab and have them take a sample. I hate that. I’m both eager and a little hesitant to see the results in terms of the cholesterol and blood sugar.

Weigh-in: 239.0
Total Lost: 51.0
Lost on MUSC Plan: 41.0
Left to Go: 40.0
Days Until Deadline: 211
Most Recent Blood Pressure: 119/67
Waist Sizes Down: 2 (Approching 3)

There are lots of photoblogs out there. Some of the most talented photographers find inspiration for their photo excursions from the Round Robin Photo Challenges blog run by Carly, Karen and Steven. The blog is celebrating its second anniversary, and if you’ve never seen it, you should drop by and have a look around.

The way it works is simple: they post a topic, like “Friendship,” (the most recent one), or “Red” or “Spring.” Then people try to take a shot with their cameras that somehow applies to that general topic. With that information, you are ready for this week’s question!

But first, Otowi of “Otowi” was first to play last week. Congratulations!

On to this week’s question!

THIS WEEK’S QUESTION:
Name seven photo topics you would suggest for future editions of the Round Robin (or any other) photo challenge! (It doesn’t matter if it’s a topic that has been used before: just pick seven you’d like to see.)

Either answer the question in a comment or answer it in your journal and include the link in a comment. (To be considered “first to play,” a link must be to the specific entry in which you answered the question.)

My answers:
1. Blue
2. Sparkle
3. Fountain
4. Window
5. Antique
6. Time
7. Hands

“Now what kind of an attitude is that? ‘These things happen!’ They only happen because the whole country is full of people who, when ‘these things happen,’ they just say, ‘these things happen’ and that’s why they happen!”

– Mrs. Marcus
It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World

There was one more annoyance this weekend and it happened early on Saturday morning…the worst possible time for any annoyance to occur.

I’ve been having some minor issues with the cocker spaniel. He’s a good little dog for the most part, very sweet, very amusing, very loyal and very smart. Sometimes, he’s a little too smart for his own good, but he’s usually entertaining enough that I can let the craftiness slide.

Anyone who has ever owned a cocker spaniel knows that at times, they can be a little stubborn. Sometimes, he enters into a condition that those of us in the South might describe as “getting too big for his britches.” Those more familiar with South Park might describe it as “failing to respect my ‘authoritay.’”

I have consulted a few doggie discipline sites, after attempting a trick that an animal trainer in Richmond suggested that seemed to have no real effect. I’ve been making a good bit of progress with him lately, in a way that doesn’t feel like I’m playing some kind of cruel mind game with him. Still, I decided to have a local animal trainer stop by and give me some suggestions. This trainer seemed nice enough, and suggested Saturday morning at 10:00am for an appointment.

There are two things you should know about me (if you don’t already) that I should mention at this point. The first is that I am a major packrat. My house is never uncluttered. Never. My parents’ home is this same way, and it was how I was brought up. Not intentionally, of course; no one wants to teach someone to be a packrat. But they did without meaning to and so I am. I fight it whenever I can, but I usually am not entirely successful. As you might guess, this means that when company is coming over, it requires a great deal of cleaning, straightening and…gasp!…throwing things away! I envy those of you who, as a general rule, keep your homes spic and span all the time.

The second thing is that I often don’t sleep all that well. Some of you get your eight hours a night. You amaze me by being able to accomplish this single feat. There are some nights that I’m lucky — no, really…lucky!! — to get four. Saturday mornings, therefore, are my catch-up time. If I sleep until eleven or so, I feel much better for the rest of the weekend and the start of the new workweek.

All of that is to say that Saturday morning at 10:00am might not have been the ideal time for me. But I agreed to it. And I put the “finishing touches” on the living room Friday night.

The trainer had said she’d call me the day before just to confirm. I didn’t think that this was unusual at all, especially since we set this time up about two weeks in advance. Reminders are cool with me. It didn’t occur to me until about 8:45 on Saturday morning, when I got up, that this reminder call hadn’t happened. Well, she got busy, I thought. No biggie. Obviously, I remembered.

I guess she did, too. After I walked the dogs, had my shower, and was preparing breakfast, my cell phone caught my eye. I picked it up and saw that it registered a missed call and a voicemail. I leave my cell phone on vibrate, because most of the time someone would call me, I’m at work and potentially in some meeting where a ringing cell phone would be considered rude. I don’t always answer the phone if it starts shaking during a meeting, but at least I know to check it to see who called when the meeting is over.

When I listened to the voicemail, it was from the trainer. She said that her schedule had changed and she wouldn’t be able to keep our appointment. She said this sort of things sometimes happens and apologized in what I considered to be a fairly casual tone. The call had come in at 9:11 am.

Normally, if I cancel a doctor or veterinary appointment with less than 24 hours’ notice, I can expect to be billed, anyway. I can’t imagine trying to cancel an appointment 49 minutes before I am due there without them having something to say about it.

I was talking to a friend of mine, who said that I shouldn’t let the non-urgent tone of her voice on the message make me think that there wasn’t some legitimate emergency. My friend joked that he could remain perfectly calm on the way to the hospital if his hand had been cut off. I don’t have that talent, so it’s a little difficult to relate to that.

In the voicemail, the trainer invited me to call her back and set up a make-up appointment. I didn’t. I don’t think I’m interested in working with her, anymore. I would expect her to be the one to call me to find out what works for me. Anyway, if this kind of situation isn’t particularly out of the ordinary, it could just as easily happen again. And for me, once is enough.

I don’t know, maybe I’m being unreasonable. But I resent the fact that there was no real reason given for the sudden change of plans. Not that it was necessarily any of my business, but I gave up other plans and sleep to make myself available at a time she requested. I feel I was owed something in the way of explanation better than “these things happen.”

I made a visit recently to Magnolia Plantation in the West Ashley area of Charleston. The site was founded by the Drayton family way back in 1676. It’s actually the oldest public gardens in America.

Everywhere you look, you see azaleas, magnolias, camillas, irises and countless other blossoms. Walking down the paths, you’re met with some of the sweetest fragrances you’ll ever encounter.

I saw this gazebo across a pond as I was chasing an egret for a photo. The egret wasn’t in a cooperative mood, but the gazebo sat perfectly still.

I’ve been having trouble with my work-in-progress. Not the end-of-the-world problems I’ve experienced in the past, but some annoyances with plot holes that have had me spinning my writing wheels, waiting for a perfect solution to drop magically out of the sky and into my laptop. Or onto my legal pad among all my scribbling.

Naturally, it didn’t happen quite that way.

But a solution did appear, and I had one of my rewriting phases where I had to go back and work on earlier chapters when what I really wanted to do was to keep moving forward with newer chapters. And just when it looked like I was going to have to add a chapter in between the second and third chapters, which would have thrown off a lot of my file numbering and made my few OCD tendencies go off the deep end, I found a way to accomplish everything an extra chapter would have accomplished with the addition of only a few sentences to my newly-rewritten second chapter.

So now I am ready to move forward again, with a foundation of loose ends that will be far easier to tie up as I approach the proper time for that. The writing process, for me, is both pleasing and painful. I write a page or two, decide that it’s not going anywhere near where I want it to go, or that it’s forcing me in a different direction I hadn’t planned for, which then makes me want to stop and re-plot a few details.

It’s a lot easier, when I’m in the overly-critical mood, to just not write. But no one ever got published that way, did they?

My biggest weakness as a novelist — an as-yet unpublished novelist, thank you — is not being able to easily overcome the desire to stop writing when I hit a road block in my plot. There are other writers, some successful, some not, who are able to just keep writing with the confidence that they will be able to easily remedy whatever ails their manuscript when they get to “The End.” Maybe I could do the same thing…but I don’t think so. Once I know I’m headed for a plot hole, if I try to keep on plodding away, I tend to overcompensate, creating a situation that makes the manuscript worse; when I do eventually solve the problem, I have to go back and rewrite everything past the original roadblock, anyway. So I figure that I’m no worse off putting the writing on hold to rethink a problem, and I actually think I’m sometimes better off by not trying to pretend the problem wasn’t there.

There are those writers — ones who, in my opinion, come off as “snobs” at times — who might suggest that if I can’t just sit down at the keyboard and pound out a first draft without stopping, or if I can’t complete a novel within a fixed amount of time, (and that length of time varies from person to person) I will never be a success at writing.

As I get older, I worry less and less about those opinions. I respect them, because that mentality has apparently worked for them. But all writers are different. And until I find myself on some publisher’s deadline, I find that I produce a better effort when I don’t force myself to stick to a deadline of my own design.

Maybe they’re right: maybe I’ll never get published that way. But if I get more enjoyment out of writing at a slower pace, solving problems as I go rather than after I have compiled such a heap of crap that I have to end up rewriting from the beginning, I think that’s a pretty good trade-off.

Sorry to be so late posting this week’s edition. I’m still on the diet, so maybe you’ll forgive me if I have food on the brain!

But first, it was Jude of “My Way” who was first to play last week’s edition. Congratulations, Jude!

Here are this week’s “Saturday Six” questions. Either answer the questions in a comment here, or put the answers in an entry on your journal…but either way, leave a link to your journal so that everyone else can visit! To be counted as “first to play,” you must be the first player to either answer the questions in a comment or to provide a complete link to the specific entry in your journal in which you answer the questions. A link to your journal in general cannot count. Enjoy!

If you have a Reader’s Choice question you’d like to see asked (and answered), send me an email! I’d love to be able to include it in a future edition of the Saturday Six.

MY ANSWERS:
Coming shortly!

I visited an online forum for sufferers of agoraphobia, panic attacks, and related conditions. I don’t have agoraphobia, the fear of going out in public, but I do have social anxiety, the fear of being in crowds of people. And I’ve definitely experienced my share of panic attacks; they’re never fun.

Anyway, one of the posters complained about a recent episode of a reality series in which a “viewer tips” segment answered a question about someone’s fear of leaving the house. When the writer asked what he should do, the response was that he should put a box over his head before leaving the house. I get the joke: if the person has the box over his head, he won’t realize that he’s out of the house. Of course, he won’t realize when he walks into traffic, either, so it doesn’t strike me as a particularly funny joke.

It struck the person who posted the mention of it even worse:

“I was offended by it! It’s like they were making fun of people like myself that can’t leave the house, I wonder if the person who wrote in actually is agoraphobic, I doubt, someone would want to be made fun of like that though! Anyway just wondering other peoples thoughts…..”

My first thought was that she used far too many periods in her ellipsis. There should only be three. If they end the sentence, there should be four. Never five. But that doesn’t answer her question, so I neglected to mention it.

I did read the four responses that were posted before mine. All of them unanimously supported her offense to the comment. Some feigned equal amounts of outrage over the insensitivity of the joke. Two of them threw in the point that I would make: that anyone who would make such a joke clearly doesn’t understand what it is like to experience such anxiety.

Here’s a portion of what I wrote in response:

“Am I offended? No. Not at all. I suspect that someone probably made up the question and the answer to go along with it. Or, if it was a genuine question, whoever answered it has obviously never gone through a panic attack.

“The point is, it’s clear that whoever made the remark just didn’t know what he was talking about. It’s not worth getting yourself so stressed out about. After all, stress only leads to more anxiety. Don’t let their uninformed words raise your blood pressure. Really, there are more important things to worry about. Just chalk this up to someone not thinking before they spoke.”

It seemed like a reasonable response to me. But maybe the original poster didn’t take it that way. Here’s what she had to say:

“I am not getting stressed out about it and I have the right to be offended by what was said, I just wanted to hear other people’s opinions! I don’t think the question was genuine, because the whole [segment] is meant to be stupid and a joke! But it’s not very funny to make fun of something like that and they shouldn’t of put that on TV!”

The right to be offended? Is that a right? I’ll have to check the Constitution on that one, but I don’t recall anything about Freedom of Hurt Feelings in the Bill of Rights.

I could have left it alone, but I decided not to. Besides questioning her on her assertion about having the “right” to be offended, I said this:

“I agree with you that it isn’t funny. I don’t see any humor in it at all. But there are people who laugh at things I think are just plain stupid, so sometimes I wonder whether I’m the one with no sense of humor.

Sure, you have a right to your opinion, and no one — myself included — said otherwise. You also asked for other people’s opinions. I gave you mine. You said you wanted other people’s opinions, yet you seem to be arguing with me as if I’m wrong and you’re right.

The point is, while I agree with you that it wasn’t funny, I don’t know why I’d waste my time being offended. It was stupid, it was a dumb joke. But not all jokes are funny to all people. With all due respect, I don’t know why you would let yourself get so offended that you’re still willing to argue the point with someone who doesn’t see it as being as big a deal as you do. I just don’t see what that accomplishes.

To me — and you said you wanted to hear what others thought — I have a long list of things I worry about and get upset about on a daily basis. I don’t need a one-time joke on some television show to add to that list: I have quite enough to get anxious about as it is.

That’s my opinion.”

It seems to me that what offends us is really up to us. The first step in becoming offended by something is allowing yourself to be offended by whatever it is.

There are some people who seem to want to offend as many others as possible. I’m not one of them. Still, in the more than three years of blogging, I’ve managed to offend a few people here and there when it wasn’t my intention to do so.

Don Imus said something stupid, incredibly stupid, on the radio. It’s probably a safe bet that those who are most likely to have been offended by Imus’s style probably weren’t listening the day that he called that girls’ basketball team a bunch of “nappy-headed hos.” I wonder whether any of the same people would have been offended if they had heard comedian Chris Rock joke that there is “nothing a white man with a penny hates more than a n—– with a nickel.”

Is one funny and the other insulting? Or vice versa? If it depends solely on who is saying it, then it’s not the words that you really have a problem with. Offensive should be offensive; a comment that is inappropriate should be inappropriate no matter what the color, or mental condition or size of the speaker. When you reduce it to the written word, that equalizes things a bit: you have to look at the words themselves, not the speaker.

But even so, you have to decide whether you are “offended” or not by those words.

I’m a fat guy. True, I’ve managed to lose about 48 pounds or so on this diet program I’m on, but I know I’m still fat. When I lose another 45 or so, to get under 200, which is my goal, I’ll probably still be overweight. I can choose to be sensitive to every fat joke there is, or I can check to see whether the person who makes the fat joke is fat or skinny and then decide.

I’ve battled depression and anxiety for years. I can either be insulted by any joke that in some way makes light of mental illness, or I can wait to see whether or not the person making the joke happens to battle the same conditions I do, and then wear the appropriate amount of insult and hurt feelings like some sort of badge of honor.

Or, I can learn to loosen up a bit and stop wasting a lot of time with all that “processing” for every comment I hear. We either value free speech or we don’t.

On the most recent Patrick’s Place Poll, I asked about a double standard with regard to potentially-offensive language in the entertainment industry. The results were somewhat interesting:

Should black entertainers who use racially-charged language be held accountable the way “shock jock” Don Imus was?

48% - Yes. They are at least as responsible as people like Imus, because they are perpetuating the stereotypes that others feed on.

16% - Yes. They’re more guilty of contributing to prejudice than people like Imus.

12% - No. They’re just trying to “reclaim” words.

12% - Yes. They’re part of the same problem.

8% - No. It’s the same as what Imus did, but he shouldn’t have been punished so harshly.

4% - No. If you have ever been a victim of prejudice, you should have an extra excuse to say whatever you want and not be held accountable.

It is somewhat disturbing to see that there is still that tired old “reclaiming words” argument. Let’s face reality: blacks have been using such words for years in an effort to “reclaim” them. If it was going to work, it would have by now and no one would even raise an eyebrow when someone uses such words.

It’s also a little disturbing to see that the option suggesting that anyone who has been a victim of discrimination should be able to have extra license to say whatever they want. I think the Rutgers team targeted by Imus showed considerable grace and strength of character by not attacking Imus in similar fashion. I hope those ladies sent a message to that four percent.

I think that if we’re going to go on some kind of moral witch hunt, then everyone — no matter who they are — who is guilty of the same “offense” should get the same punishment. Prejudice is prejudice, no matter who commits it. But more importantly, I think we as a society need to learn that sometimes, rather than trying to dictate what we can or cannot say, we need to learn to get over ourselves and stop wasting so much time being offended by what others say out of ignorance.

We know who we are. We know what we are capable of. We should stop trying to define ourselves by what others think we are. How would they really know what’s on the inside of anyone but themselves? How would any of us?

Apparently, it was just me. Thanks to everyone who left me a comment letting me know that this blog was displaying properly for everyone…except me!

I made some tweaks to the template, especially to the sidebar, hoping to get it to show correctly on my Firefox browser, which I use the most when I am blogging. Nothing worked. So I ended up switching the template. Now I have a template that displays correctly, but I don’t like this more simplified design as much as I liked the previous one. I might end up switching back, assuming that I can get everything back to the way it was.

I’ll work on it more tonight. At the moment, I have to go straighten up my apartment, because I came home from a dinner with a co-worker last night to find a note on my door — a note, incidentally that had not been there when I came home for a late afternoon lunch after 2:00pm — telling me that there was going to be some kind of inspection starting at 10:00am this morning!

I hate it when they give me less than 24 hours notice that they need to come in. I thought that was against the law, or at least the lease. I’ll have to look into that. Unquestionably, it is against the code of common courtesy, especially for someone like me, who happened to have been raised by a pair of packrats. Yes, I have clutter. Lots of it. Care for some?

I think I’m going to have to give the management office a piece of my mind over this one. And I have blogging technical difficulties in my recent past to further make me cranky.

Woe be unto them.

I need a favor, gang. Please let me know what web browser you’re viewing this blog on, and whether or not the sidebar appears on the side or at the bottom below the last post.

All of a sudden, Firefox isn’t displaying the blog correctly, though Safari seems to have no problem. Even crappy Internet Explorer for Mac, which completely screws up the display fonts for the entire blog, puts the sidebar where it belongs.

How does it look from your monitor?

At yesterday’s weigh-in, I had only lost eight-tenths of a pound. The previous week, I had only lost six-tenths of a pound. Both weeks, my weight has varied wildly, going up or down three pounds or more. While MUSC wants me to go there once a week for the “official” weigh-ins, they do want me to weigh each morning and graph my progress, just so I have a daily check-up. They do suggest that I not obsess over the number itself, but sometimes that’s hard not to do.

They warned me that this might happen: the re-introduction of “all food” often causes people to gain a couple of pounds week to week, so they are quick to remind me that I should be proud that I have lost anything at all.

Then Josh, the behavioral specialist, made an interesting suggestion: rather than worrying about counting up the servings of meat, fat, startch, etc., he wanted me to focus on actual calories. Maybe if some foods had higher calorie counts, they could be affecting my weight loss while still “appearing” to fall within the diet’s definition of a “serving.”

Sure enough, when I tallied up last night’s dinner, what I would have classified as a day of food that still fell short by one fruit and one fat serving, ended up totalling 1410 calories. They want me to stay under 1200! So maybe that is the problem I have been having since I’ve been let loose on all food. Not that I miss the shakes and snack bars, mind you, but I’m not quite ready to see the weight loss stop!

So I will give the calorie-counting approach a try and see how that goes.

Also, I realized that in the last two posts I had written about the diet, I had misquoted my own weight by ten pounds. That is why the amount I was showing as having lost in the little button at the top of the blog was so far off from what was listed in the post. Those two, and this one, are now correct.

Early next week, I’ll get blood drawn again for a follow-up lipid profile to see how I have progressed in terms of lowering blood sugar and cholesterol. (And hopefully raising the good cholesterol.) I’m hoping for significant improvement in at least a couple of those numbers.

Weigh-in: 242.5
Total Lost: 47.5
Lost on MUSC Plan: 34.5
Left to Go: 42.5
Days Until Deadline: 214
Most Recent Blood Pressure: 119/67
Waist Sizes Down: 2

So here’s a question for all my fellow blogging friends:

If you were invited to attend a get-together of local bloggers from your area, would you show up?

I was invited to attend a gathering of local bloggers who are listed on The Post and Courier’s Lowcountry BLOGS. We met up in a German restaurant that’s only about five minutes from my place, had a nice dinner and interesting conversation.

Among the topics discussed were the weekend crash of a Blue Angels plane at a Beaufort air show, John McCain’s moronic joke about bombing Iran, the Virginia Tech tragedy, local media coverage, and laws like smoking bans designed to turn the government into “parents.” I agreed with some of the opinions, disagreed with others, but was almost always able to understand both sides of the issues.

Among those in attendance were Heather (who organized it), Mike, Jared, Eugene, Kevin, Rose, Vera, J.J., Dave, Kaytee & Jimmy, Kit and Jeane.

If you were one of those in attendance, it was nice to meet you. If I don’t have you listed, yet, please drop me a line and let me know which blog is yours so I can give you a mention. I look forward to the next meet-up.

If you live elsewhere, would you attend a meeting of local bloggers where you live? Or would you rather prefer to keep a lower profile by letting your blog speak for you?

Harriet, the blogger of The Post and Courier’s blog, Good Morning Lowcountry left a very nice comment in response to my last post, in which I questioned a portion of her post criticizing reporters on the scene of the Virginia Tech shooting.

To fair, I wanted to run her comment in a follow-up post, rather than leaving it only as a comment to the original post. She makes some excellent points about the intrusiveness of the news media on events like this, as well as the differences between broadcast and print, which I do not deny. Here’s her reply in full, followed by a few follow-up thoughts of my own:

“I in no way excuse print media from being intrusively nosy at a time like this, or in any news event. I submit, however, for the purposes of the story at VT, that the impact of a one-on-one interview by a reporter (and that includes wire reporters) for print just doesn’t have the same level of intrusion as displaying a parent’s or loved one’s grief on television, especially day after day after day.

“The 24-hour TV news cycle has changed the message. The medium IS the message, and the message is repetition — relentlessly repeated images of a psychotic’s violent rant. Apparently no one is listening to the psychologists, also being interviewed, who say the content in the rantings of a paranoid psychotic doesn’t matter, that it’s not supposed to make sense.

“Newspapers print the story once, twice, a few times in the week that it happens and try to report as much depth as possible, then move on, following up as necessary.

“TV has made 24-7 wallpaper of the killer’s video ‘manifesto.’ To call these images ‘disturbing’ is an understatement and it doesn’t only affect those who lost somebody. Thousands of viewers are upset and angry at NBC, etc.

“I had nothing to do with the decision to run a still picture of the shooter in our paper, but I don’t criticize its use. It appeared once in a newspaper 400 miles away from the events, distributed to 100,000 people in the Lowcountry. Those television viewers who are upset are not upset at The Post and Courier.

“As for this question: ‘And please forgive a blunt question, but how, exactly, did you phrase your email to the Post and Courier’s webmaster demanding that he REMOVE from their site any links to AP Video stories shot by some of the very electronic news crews on that campus that you seem so eager to badmouth? You DID make such a demand, didn’t you?’

“No, I didn’t send any such e-mail to the Web master and I have no idea what you’re talking about. I wouldn’t presume. I’m just a columnist here … GMLc, 7 days a week. Who did send such an e-mail? Our Webmaster would not be amenable to such a demand anyway.

“I find now that I read your comment again that you weren’t being sarcastic. But frankly, I wasn’t aware today whether we had links to the videos or not until I asked somebody after reading your comment.

“I would much rather have seen NBC post the video on its Web site, rather than air it and repeat it endlessly on MSNBC.

“We did have links attached to the AP package up for a couple of days but today, they are redundant, says Paul Crawford our Internet chief. Plus, he said, people go to charleston.net for local news, not national news. Other Web outlets do national news better than we do and while we’ll leave the links wires put into national stories, we won’t leave them there forever. People know where else to get that information. (Paul, by the way, did find interviews about Cho being bullied in high school interesting, and found the video newsworthy. He said it answered some questions about the story for him.)

“I’ve been in this business almost 25 years and having studied my profession first in graduate J-school and constantly on the job after that, I reserve the right to criticize media … all of us. I’ve certainly asked my share of nosy questions. I asked Jihan Sadat, wife of assasinated Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, if she missed her husband. What could she do but tear up and say yes? I’m not proud of that, but I was young and green then. Fortunately for me, it wasn’t on TV.

“You seem to think this sort of media criticism is a form of self-hatred or hatred of others in the profession. Not at all. We’re not a club that has to stick together. It’s a part of the job. We criticize each other all the time, and criticize (second-guess, Monday morning- quarterback, whatever) ourselves at the newspaper DAILY. All daily newspapers do. It makes us better. It’s a necessary part of the profession. We are a glass house, hopefully, in our transparency. That’s why we run corrections.”

I agree completely that 24-hour cable news has very much changed the way that the general public has grown accustomed to receiving — and thereby, the way that they now expect to receive — information. It is no longer good enough to expect anyone to wait until the 6:00pm local newscast or the next morning’s newspaper. When something happens, they want all of the information right that minute.

We all know that once the public becomes accustomed to something, getting them to give that up, it is nearly impossible. Need proof of that suggestion? You need look no further than your local car lot: we all know that gas prices are going up, that oil is slowly becoming more scarce, that the days of gasoline at 99¢ per gallon or less are long gone. We all know, whether we want to admit that global warming is real or not, that we would benefit by conserving our resources for as long as possible. That is common sense. But look how many people are still buying those oversized sport utility vehicles that get under 15 miles to the gallon. Look at the muscle cars that are lucky to get that much. Our society has gotten used to having power on the roads without environmental responsibility and they don’t want to give that up.

That’s the problem.

But those 24-hour news outlets have been assisted by an alternate form of print: internet news. Every one of those news networks, along with almost every local television station that offers news, and most local newspapers, have internet pages. The internet reaches people during the day more easily than television; many offices have computers with an internet connection, but fewer have television sets…and you can only stare in shock at MSNBC or CNN in the breakroom for so long before your boss angrily taps you on the shoulder.

And while it is television that provides those disturbing images, the internet can provide the same pain-filled quotations from grieving family members. While it may be more compelling to watch them speak through their tears, I cannot discount the power of the written word, either online or in print, to provide as emotional an experience for all of us when we turn voyeur and seek out such information. It’s not the same, but the written word does have its power.

True: the networks rerun the material over and over again. But they know that there are plenty of people who happen not to be news junkies. They’ll watch for fifteen or twenty minutes, then move on. And the whole time some of those viewers are tuning out, new ones who haven’t yet heard the news are tuning in. There has to be repetition to get everyone on that “same page” when there is a breaking news event.

Newspapers do print the information once or twice and move on. But the operative words in that statement is that they print the information. Now that most of the broadcast media have decided, quite properly, to stop or seriously limit running the video that Seung-Hui Cho sent to NBC, one can tune in and avoid seeing any of it. But I can walk into my living room and glance at the coffee table where a newspaper or magazine might have placed a still from one of those videos on its cover. Long after the broadcast is gone, I am still able to see the image, in tangible form.

Sure, I can throw the magazine or newspaper away: no one is forcing me to read it, and no one is forcing me to allow myself to be impacted by the face of an inexplicably-angry young man. But by the same argument, I could also have simply changed the channel to some harmless sitcom when a news broadcast was airing the footage.

Circulation and Access
I also have a hard time with the argument of comparative availability. Why should it matter what the circulation of a local newspaper is versus a national broadcast network’s audience? Look at it this way: some have suggested that Cho was inspired by some ultra-violent movies. If we were to pretend that just watching a movie or two could turn a normal, well-balanced, reasoning person who is otherwise incapable of such extreme action, into a maniacal killer, — and with all respect, I don’t think that can happen — what difference would it make whether that movie was seen by an audience of millions, thousands, hundreds, or just a few? If that one single person who is so vulnerable to suggestion sees it — even if he is in a theater by himself — then that single bit of exposure is still going to get the blame by those who are trying to argue that television is treading on dangerous territory in its broadcast of Cho’s videos.

When talking about the dangers of copycat threats, it would seem to me that the same argument applies. I don’t want to pick on The Post and Courier; let’s use a different newspaper: how about this page from the Kansas City Star’s website. That page takes a still image from the video aired by NBC. It is possible, since the image appears on the newspaper’s site, that the paper itself actually published images from the same video in the print edition.

Should they have done so? Maybe, maybe not. But my point is this: long after the cable news networks, and even local affiliates, have stopped airing those images, I can still go online many print journalism sites and find them. And who’s honestly to say that a copycat type of the future who might have somehow missed this week’s coverage couldn’t find the root of inspiration from looking through an old magazine or newspaper clipping, regardless of how wide a circulation the publication might have had?

As hard — no, impossible — as it is for me to imagine, there are households in this country in which there is no television to be found. There are people who never watch. I’m the first to admit that I am a TV addict. But let us imagine that one of these non-watchers happens to find a newspaper or magazine article on Cho in the future. And then let’s assume that this person was so intrigued with the story that he began researching Cho’s story and found more about him, then became obsessed and eventually killed someone himself, having been inspired by what Cho did. If the root of that inspiration was the print article, are all of the media critics supposed to ignore the newspaper or magazine if its circulation fell below some predetermined number? Can anyone really expect that to happen?

I also have a hard time with the argument that it would have been better for Cho’s video to have been placed online versus on the air. Who uses the internet more? Adults or kids? If we’re even remotely worried that young people might see the videos on television and be influenced, how can we advocate putting them online instead, where, arguably, a younger audience that also happens to be more computer-literate than their parents, is waiting?

If the material is too offensive, or too dangerous, or too…whatever…to be broadcast, we should have the same concerns about it being made available online. If the exposure to the broadcast audience presents too much of a risk, why would the exposure to the internet audience be any less risky?

That is why I asked the question about whether Harriet had requested that the P&C’s webmaster remove links to the AP stories containing video of the “distasteful” questions, the photos, and possibly even excerpts from the video. Admittedly, I was being somewhat sarcastic in that part, and I apologize. But if the broadcast networks are to be chastised for that coverage, I would think it is a fair question to ask why the medium that does the criticizing would then willingly post some of the same video they’re complaining about.

The Tough Questions
Yes, reporters are asking victims what was going through their minds when they realized they were trapped. Yes, reporters are asking families of those killed if they would be willing to talk about the situation. It seems tasteless. Yet many of the people who say so will be in front of the television or reading what they had to say in the newspaper or online once the interview is conducted. Reporters, some might be interested in knowing, aren’t wild about asking those kinds of questions. Doctors aren’t wild about telling patients that they have a serious illness. Not that I’m comparing the gravity of one to another…I’m just pointing out that there are things about every job that no one likes.

When Harriet mentioned the question she asked Sadat’s widow, I understood. It is what reporters do…what they do as part of their job…what they do to get the story…what they do while regretting doing it…what they do because they know if they won’t, then someone else will.

I suspect that if we think hard enough about it, we realize that we all ask those kinds of questions of those close to us. The difference, and perhaps what makes it so easy to criticize reporters, is that they’re paid to do it.

But here’s an example: I just learned that the brother-in-law of my best friend’s wife passed away suddenly last week. I talked to them while they were on their way to be with their family. I already knew from her email to me that he had suffered a massive heart attack at age 44. Otherwise, considering how young he was, I’m sure I would have asked what happened to him. Instead, I asked how his wife was doing. As soon as I asked the question, the voice in my head told me what a stupid question it was: how did I think she was doing? But these are questions we ask out of human nature.

We hear of sky divers who jump from the plane and discover too late that something is wrong with their parachute. Somehow, they plummet to the earth and survive. What we want to know, whether we admit it or not, is what they were thinking when they were falling to what most of us would consider a certain death: “How did it feel?” “What was going through your mind….”

I think the main reason we ask those questions is that we’re verbalizing the questions going through our own minds about what we would do. It strikes me as a sort of a self-induced peer pressure: we want to feel like we’re like people who have somehow survived against the odds, the kinds of people we hold up as extraordinary examples of humanity. We’d like to think we would have been able to survive as easily, with as much courage, with as much sanity and level-headedness in place. We want to live vicariously through them, imagine how we would handle the same situation, without putting ourselves in such a situation.

The Toughest Question
Ultimately, we come to this: should the footage of Cho apparently recorded the day of the massacre have aired at all?

Some say that NBC, who received and later released the footage to other sources, has nothing to apologize for because this was “new information” related to a “breaking news” story. Others say that this was “unnecessary” information that gave a killer who wanted to be famous just that status.

I do think that there are some valuable discussions that have been going about warning signs that were missed, and about mistakes made during court proceedings that prevented a gun law that would have stopped him from buying the guns from being able to function as it should have. I think it helps people understand how such a thing could have happened by illustrating how out of order his mental state of mind actually was at the time. And I also think, speaking as someone who has battled mental health issues like depression and anxiety disorder, that it is important that we all learn what mental illness is and what it isn’t.

I do not think, however, that the actual footage from his video files or the photos in which he poses with weapons should have been made public. The networks could have accomplished the passing along of information through sticking with the officially-supplied photos of Cho, which looked to have come from his student ID, and describing in limited detail, the nature of his comments. I would even have been fine with them reading short excerpts of his writing.

I did not need to see him putting on his show. I did not need to hear his words in his voice. No one did. We could have gotten the message without seeing it delivered by Cho himself. And that is how we should have gotten the message.

NBC should never have released the footage. The other media, broadcast and print, should not have aired it. They should have let NBC have this “exclusive” instead. In the rush to get fresh information on the air, they gave Cho exactly what he wanted. And in the race to keep up with the competition, too many other outlets were too quick to air the footage that everyone else was airing.

I understand why it happened. I just wish it hadn’t.