Rules and Speculations
Let’s flip the schedule this week.
Major events loom Wednesday and Thursday in Montpelier, and, weather permitting, your humble agent plans to be there to bring you the straight dope.
So expect a fact-filled, full-fledged post this Friday, and here is the shorter, internal housekeeping message routinely slated for Fridays.
No doubt several readers have noticed that I decided not to accept their invitations to become their Facebook friends.
Do not take it personally. The policy is that I am accepting Facebook friend status from any reader acting solely as an individual. But not if that Facebook setting has some connection to a campaign or a cause or any kind of organization.
Being a reporter, I don’t sign petitions, endorse candidates, or support causes. Accepting one of these Facebook friend offers might be only an indirect endorsement. But that’s close enough.
I want to thank Mark Johnson of WDEV for the informed and thoughtful questions he asked me on his radio show Monday, and also thank the listeners who called in. Apparently, some of Mark’s listeners decided to start reading Vermont Newsguy after hearing the program, and a few of them registered so they could comment. Welcome.
Speaking of comments, I had to reject one this week because it was…well, not to put to fine a point on it, filthy. If you want your comment to appear on the site, keep the language clean.
This is less a matter of propriety than of intellectual rigor. We have the privilege of speaking English, the richest language in all the world, and therefore we have the responsibility not to cheapen it. In English’s plentiful vocabulary, there is always a word that more precisely conveys meaning and/or mood than the one we used to put between ‘hot’ and ‘dog’ at Fort Dix. A writer who cannot make his/her point without resorting to obscenity is either stupid or lazy and will get no exposure here.
Penultimately, let me remind readers that operating this web site does not cost nothing (and that the previous is not an ungrammatical double negative). Donations are accepted. Click over on the right where it says “pages” in boldface if you find the information herein useful and a contribution to the public discussion in the state.
And finally (that comes after ‘penultimately,’ if “penultimately’ is a word; “Penultimate” is, but the adverbial version may have been invented right here), don’t look now but the 2010 campaign for governor has begun.
So early? Actually, it’s not that early. And at some point in the next few days, we’ll examine the situation.
