My Evening with Pat Sajak



If you think everyone who has lived in L.A. has encountered a celebrity or two, you're probably right.  This is one of my stories.

When I was growing up I wanted to be a TV weatherman.  My friends had the usual childhood ambitions of doctor, lawyer, teacher, cop, fireman, astronaut and athlete.  I wanted to wear nice suits and get paid to talk.  And as comedian Lewis Black put it: the job of TV weatherman in a place like San Diego is the easiest job in the world. 

"What's the forecast, Lou?"

"It's gonna be nice." 

I also figured doing the weather at 5, 6 and 11 meant you got to sleep in every morning. 

I felt the calling after watching Dr. George Fischbeck, an avuncular  former  schoolteacher  who broke into television as host of an afternoon science show for kids on PBS.  His studio set resembled a home garage and each week he tackled the science questions every parent of a precocious child has heard.  Why is the sky blue?  How do airplanes stay up?  How does a tree know to grow an apple?  Dr. George gave the answers with cool chemistry experiments, homemade weather instruments, and common household objects.  In the days before computer graphics the man could hold children's attention with just cardboard and scissors.  His TV weather forecasts were no less compelling and his career at KABC 7 in Los Angeles spanned from 1972 to 1990.  He was the king of cumulonimbus.

Across town, the main weekday weatherman at KNBC 4 was Pat Sajak.  Before racking up 30+ years as host of Wheel of Fortune, Pat delivered the forecast with a boyish mug and the same wisecracking asides that have been one of the game show's hallmarks.  I have to guess that between them Pat and Dr. George dominated the ratings.  The CBS affiliate and four independent stations had their own weather anchors and I can't recall the names or faces of any of them.

I knew I needed a connection in this nepotic industry.  So when I got a college journalism assignment to write a biographical sketch, I set out to interview someone doing TV weather in Los Angeles and find out how to crack this nut.  KABC said Dr. George was on vacation.  Pat Sajak promptly took my call.  I told him about the assignment and my dream job of TV weatherman.  Having landed in the nation's #2 media market by the age of 30, he could probably tell that this nervous college freshman asking to job shadow was no threat to his career and agreed to meet.

The Burbank studio he worked in is a heady environment.  The station's newsroom at one time or another has seen the likes of Tom Brokaw, Tom Snyder, Bryant Gumbal, and Nick Clooney (George's dad).  Pat's co-workers included consumer advocate David Horowitz, who had a syndicated TV show; Harvey Levin, who'd go on to create TMZ; and sports anchor Stu Nahan, later seen as the ringside announcer in the early Rocky movies.  The studio was also the television home of Tonight Show host Johnny Carson.

It was 8:30 at night and Pat had just returned from a dinner break.  We sat in a small office where he studied weather wire copy and typed notes for his 11 o'clock report.  In between bursts at the typewriter, he recounted how he landed in L.A.: raised in Chicago, marriage to a college sweetheart, a lead in college to his first overnight gig at an AM radio station, a stint on Armed Forces Radio, and the advances through small markets before catching a break in Nashville as a disc jockey and weatherman.  Then KNBC called.  I was living at home my first year in college and started asking myself if that nomadic lifestyle was really for me.

After a stint in makeup, Pat was on with the weather halfway through the 11:00 news.  His notes crawled on the teleprompter and he pretty much ad libbed the segment.  After sports and during a commercial break, he returned to the set to fill his chair while anchorman John Schubeck wrapped up with a feature story and said goodnight.  The closing theme grew over his final words, the stage lights dimmed to silhouette the set and everyone in the studio fell silent as the camera shot faded and the station cut to commericals ahead of the Tonight Show.  I watched this production and considered the perks of the job: nice clothes, good money, low stress, famous colleagues, a two-hour dinner break, and spending part of each day at work in a hushed temperature-controlled TV studio.  OK, maybe I could deal with relocating now and again.

We filed out of the studio and walked toward the guard station at the entrance to the building.  Pat said he loved his job and was grateful for it every day.  But TV news in any market has no job security.  "Someday," he said knowingly, "this is going to end."  What then?  He said he'd like to host some kind of TV show.

I turned in my guest pass.  It was 11:45 p.m. and I had one more question.

"How late do you sleep in?"

"I get up around nine or ten."

I wondered if I could get hired to do the weather in Modesto after college.

Goodbye, Laramie

We've sold our home.  It's a seller's market and we got an offer the first day we listed it.  As we head toward closing, I'm feeling nostalgic and having flashbacks like the final episode of a great sitcom.

When we moved in five years ago, the house needed love.  It was suitable for keeping pit bulls, which the former occupant did.  It was not designed for comfort.  There was no carpeting, no grass and no shade except at the darkened doorstep behind a fortress-like front wall that blotted out the sun and the sky and provided privacy for whatever shenanigans were going on inside.  The double front doors were fake; one was really the outer wall of the kitchen.  The hard tile flooring withstood any abuse you could throw at it and was unforgiving to the occasional ceramic mug or wine glass dropped upon it.  The neighbor's yard was lush from his landscaping business, but ours was mostly cement and had three barren rings of stone.   A roving Google camera took this picture just after we moved in and had started the upgrades with new windows.



A work in progress

Fortunately, Marilyn has a talent for improving everything in her life.  I'm living proof.  She gave the home curb appeal and she knows a great handyman, Clint Cable.  She ordered carpet, carriage lights, front patio furniture, a new garage opener, crown molding, faucets, mirrors, shelves, windows and coverings and the sliding door to the patio.  Clint recommended and installed the new air conditioning, new insulation, new ducts, new registers, a patio cover in the backyard  and a beautiful oak front door.  His subcontractor cut out a portion of the front wall to expose the kitchen and front porch to natural light and a great view looking west down the street.  Two stone rings were demolished and Marilyn converted the third into a vegetable garden.  She planted roses, designed a water feature, picked out a birdbath, and had native plants put in.  One hot summer morning we cleared out the dead brush from all the flower beds.  Slowly but surely, the house became a home. 

We sure had some good times.  We threw a party when my article was published in Toastmaster magazine and had our 50th birthday parties catered.   We took advantage of the location -- the house sits on a hill just east of Mission Valley -- and hosted three annual "Flashlight Hike and Fireworks Night" fests in late-September featuring a walk up a trail to a lookout with a spectacular view of  radio KGB's Skyshow.  That spot seemed to be San Diego's best kept secret.  I don't know why it didn't become more popular over the years.  Another night we trapped a wild rabbit in our backyard.  For bait we used sliced apples and carrots suspended in pantyhose in a wire cage.  (Thanks, eHow.)  Then we drove the scared critter to Mission Trails and released it near the visitors center.

It was a slice of country in the city.  And just as safe.  Any night, you could leave a Mac book and your wallet on the front seat of your car parked unlocked with your keys in the ignition and there's a 99.99% chance both the car and the valuables would be there in the morning.  The biggest crime ever at our house occurred the night someone drove by the curb and knocked over one of our trash cans, breaking one of the lid hinges and forcing us to buy a new receptacle from the city.  In five years, I've seen police on our street only twice.  The neighbors are the greatest; watchful retirees living among working stiffs like me.  

I'm going to miss the kitchen and our small dog's trick of turning the kitchen lights on and off.  There's a  switch on the side of the counter and for Pepperidge Farm goldfish crackers she caught on pretty quick.

Now is the right time to go.  Marilyn loves the house and would happily live here the rest of her life or until we're escorted to assisted living.  But she indulged my wishes to live in a walkable neighborhood closer to our friends and our weekend activities.  I suspect her motives aren't entirely altruistic; she'll have a walk-in closet all to herself.  The new owner on Laramie lives around the corner and wants the house for her daughter and four-year-old granddaughter.  That girl will have great family support growing up and probably befriend the next-door landscaper's twin six-year-old girls.  Note to our buyer: if you have a dog, teach it to turn on the lights in the kitchen.  It's a cool trick especially when come home at night.  And don't worry if you occasionally forget to lock the front door.

So long, Laramie.

The Invisible Gorilla

In court, witness perceptions often vary.  Did a car run a red light or was the light turning red?  Was a man's shirt black or deep blue?  Who threw the first punch?  What time did Mr. Smith leave the bar?  Two people will give different answers and swear they are right.  Sometimes the difference is over a major detail.  For example, in describing what they saw at the scene of a robbery,  one witness might say he's certain he saw a chrome-plated gun, the perpetrator was black, and his companion wore a white dress shirt.  Another witness may say with equal conviction there was no gun, the robber was Hispanic, and his accomplice wore a light jacket.  These differences can be ascribed to variables such as lighting conditions, stress, bias, motivation to lie, time's effect on memory, or merely the opportunity one had to observe.

How well can you recall a short event?  Would you and your friends remember the same thing?  This video is a good demonstration.  Sit back, relax, and test your powers of observation.



Grammar Mistakes You Can Now Ignore

Monday was National Grammar Day.  I had the day off, woke up at the Doubletree in Dana Point, got a chiropractic adjustment, looked at homes for sale, had a nap, took the dog for a walk and won tabletopics at my Toastmasters club.  But as an internationally published author on grammar, I was sorry to learn I'd missed the annual celebration of torture.

Yahoo celebrated the day with a series of articles.  It turns out grammar is more flexible and forgiving than your English teachers and Schoolhouse Rock! may have lead you to believe.  According to Ben Yagoda, an author and professor of English and journalism at University of Delaware, you actually can start a sentence with a conjunction — and end it with a preposition.  He offers absolution for that and six more grammatical sins.





When it comes to the English language, I'm not an anything-goes kind of guy. If I were, I wouldn't have written a book called How to Not Write Bad: The Most Common Writing Errors and the Best Ways to Avoid Them. It's just that I hate to see people waste their time hunting down so-called mistakes that really aren't mistakes at all. So consider this a public-service announcement in the wake of Monday's National Grammar Day. Here are seven rules you really (really!) don't have to worry about following.

1. Don't split infinitives
The rule against splitting infinitives — that is, putting an adverb between the word to and a verb — was pretty much made up out of whole cloth by early 19-century grammarians, apparently because they felt the proper model for English was Latin, and in Latin, infinitive-splitting is impossible. However, English is not Latin, and infinitives have been profitably split by many great writers, from Hemingway ("But I would come back to where it pleases me to live; to really live") to Gene Rodenberry  ("to boldly go where no man has gone before"). It's okay to boldly do it.

2. Don't end a sentence with a preposition
The idea that it's wrong to end a sentence with a preposition (from, with, etc.) was invented by the English poet John Dryden... in 1672. He probably based his objection on a bogus comparison with — you guessed it — Latin, where such constructions don't exist. In any case, there is no basis to the rule in English grammar, and, once again, great writers have ignored it with no great loss to their prose or reputations. Jane Austen: "Fanny could with difficulty give the smile that was asked for." Robert Frost: "The University is one most people have heard of." James Joyce: "He had enough money to settle down on." Trying to avoid ending with a preposition frequently ties you into the awkward knot of "to whom" and "to which" constructions. On a memo criticizing a document for committing this "error," Winston Churchill allegedly wrote: "This is the type of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put."

It is true that prepositions are a relatively weak part of speech and, all things being equal, it's desirable to end sentences strongly. So sometimes it pays to rewrite such constructions. Thus, "He's the person I gave the money to" isn't as good as "I gave him the money."

3. Don't use "which" as a relative pronoun
The bogus idea here is that only that, never which, should be used to introduce so-called defining or restrictive clauses. For example, "The United States is one of the countries which that failed to ratify the Kyoto Protocol." One again, this is totally made up. Geoffrey Pullum, co-editor of the authoritative Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, has written, "The alleged rule has no basis. Even in edited prose, 75 percent of the instances of relative 'which' introduce 'restrictive' relatives." The culprit here seems to be the great language commentator H.W. Fowler, who popularized the notion in his 1926 book, Modern English Usage. 

In fairness to Fowler, he merely speculated that if writers were to follow this custom (as he acknowledged they currently did not), "there would be much gain both in lucidity & ease." Language sticklers took that and ran with it, and this idea reigned for most of the rest of the century. Even now, it has a lot of adherents. But it still doesn't have any justification. One of the great sticklers, Jacques Barzun, advised in a 1975 book that we ought to avoid such whiches. But as Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage points out, on the very next page Barzun broke his own rule, writing, "Next is a typical situation which a practiced writer corrects 'for style' virtually by reflex action…."

4. Don't start a sentence with a conjunctionExcept possibly in the most formal settings, there is absolutely nothing wrong with starting a sentence with And or But. A funny thing about the supposed rule against doing so is that no one has been able to find a book or authority that has ever endorsed it (with the exception of a single 1868 text turned up by the scholar Dennis Baron). But countless people feel this is unacceptable, possibly because the notion was pounded into their head by some middle school grammar teacher. Get over it!  (It has become popular recently to follow sentence-opening conjunctions with a comma, for example, "But, we got there too late for the early-bird special." That is indeed wrong. No comma.)

5. Don't use the passive voiceThe poster child for passive-hating is a quote from President George H.W. Bush. In a 1986 speech about the Iran-Contra scandal, he said, "Clearly, mistakes were made." Just as clearly, the problem is that the grammar fudges a crucial question: Who made the mistakes? Passive construction can indeed propagate such obfuscation, as well as wordiness, and thus should be used judiciously. But there's nothing inherently wrong with it, and when the subject of a clause or sentence isn't known, or isn't as important as the object, passive voice can be just the thing. Tom Wicker's classic New York Times opening sentence of November 23, 1963, would have been ruined if he'd tried to shoehorn it into the active voice. Wicker wrote: "President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was shot and killed by an assassin today."

6. Don't neglect to use singular verbs
Etymologically, data is the plural of the Latin datum. But from the time it first appeared in English, it has been treated as a collective noun (such as water or money), and collective nouns take singular verbs. Every single citation in The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) pairs data with such a verb, starting with, "Inconsistent data sometimes produces a correct result," from an 1820 edition of the Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal. Thus, insisting on the data are… is pretentious and unnecessary. Media, meaning the various means by which information is disseminated in a society, appeared later — 1923, according to the OED. Although it's plural of the Latin medium, it too was treated from the start as a singular. The media are…  is an unfortunate recent affectation.

A similar issue arises when a word such as group or bunch is followed by the word of, then a plural. For example: "A bunch of my friends is/are coming over." Some sticklers insist on is, because group is singular. But this is an area where English grammar is flexible, and are is acceptable as well. My advice is to choose the singular or plural based on whether you're emphasizing the collection or the individuals. In the above example, I would go with are. Saying A bunch of my friends is coming over sounds as stuffy as your nostrils in the middle of a particularly bad cold.

7. Don't use words to mean what they've been widely used to mean for 50 years or more
An instant's glance at the OED confirms that the one thing about words that never changes is that their meanings always change. The process takes time, and to be an early adopter of a new meaning means putting yourself at risk of both incomprehension and abuse. However, at a certain point, clinging to old definitions is a superstitious waste of time and thought. Here's a list of words and expressions whose new meanings, though still scorned by some sticklers, are completely acceptable. (If it puzzles you that there is any objection to some of these, or to find out the original meaning, Google the word or phrase. You will find a lively debate, to say the least.)

It's okay to use...
Decimate to mean "kill or eliminate a large proportion of something"
like to mean "such as"
liable to to mean "likely to"
hopefully to mean "I hope that"    
over to mean "more than"
since to mean "because"
while to mean "although"
momentarily to mean "in a moment"
the lion's share to mean "the majority"
verbal to mean "oral"
I could care less to mean "I couldn't care less"

And if you have a problem with that, I could care less.

………………………………………………………………………………
Ben Yagoda is the author of How to Not Write Bad: The Most Common Writing Errors and the Best Ways to Avoid Them (published last month by Riverhead) and nine other books. He is a Professor of English and Journalism at the University of Delaware. His website is www.benyagoda.com.

Things I Hate



A few days ago I was cut off on the freeway during the morning commute.  That got me thinking about things I hate even more...

...seven-minute commercial blocks on radio.

...the 80's music British invasion.

...TV channels that discourage flipping by running their commercials at the same time.

...TV shows that mistake fast dialogue for clever dialogue.

...TV reporters who ask victims of crime, freakish weather and other misfortune how it made them feel.

...news anchors and reporters who say "we're told (blank)" instead of reporting who said what.

...politicians who don't give direct answers to questions.

...interviewers who let them get away with their evasive answers.

...Piers Morgan

...Andy Dick

...drivers who flick lit cigarette butts on the road.

...traffic lights that turn red when there's no cross-traffic or pedestrian.

...AT&T's frequent rate hikes.

...people who don't return my phone calls.

...sitting in the cheap seats.

...an over-heated office space.

...being in the slowest line at a grocery store

...being last in any line as the line gets shorter

...green peppers

...cumin

...Starbuck's coffee

...hearing the word picture pronounced pitcher

...air freshners used to mask other odors in a hotel room

...a frozen cursor

...hitting a tee shot at the top of the ball and watching it dribble 30 feet.

...that photos and videos disappear from my blog posts.

And finally, a few things I hate when I'm in a restaurant.

...being seated near the bathroom.

...waiters who take our order without writing anything down and get it wrong.

...milk with coffee when I asked for half-and-half.

...when a favorite restaurant jumps the shark.

Thanks for reading.  I actually feel better.  Feel free to post a comment and add what you hate.