The Paper and the Landline Keep Us Going

11/3/2012

Old Reliables. Confession: Taken with cell-phone camera. GV

Got no heat, got no Internet, got minimal cell phone coverage.

But two artifacts from antiquity have helped us stay in touch with reality since the lights went out Monday evening:

The familiar blue wrapper containing The New York Times in the driveway and the stolid landline telephone in our kitchen.

I have been able to read the paper – even without that technological marvel called the Internet that is suddenly not available.

I marvel at the work my friends at the home office in New York and the College Point plant and the drivers and deliverers did to produce this miracle at our house.

They gave up the reassurances of being with family to do their jobs the way “newspaper people” (like my father and my mother and my three children) have been doing for a long time.

Note I said “newspaper people.” It’s still a paper -- the best in the world, as far as I can see – produced by some very smart and dedicated people.

Yes, I love the emerging on-line form – the future, I am sure. I flick through the web package to seek the latest electoral percentages from Nate Silver and am a junkie for breaking news as it hits the web. But for this elder, there is nothing like “the paper.” In my driveway. Thank you, all.

The same goes for the landline phone. We have invested in cordless phones (that wear down much too quickly) but have resisted all those offers to link our phones to our cable package. We kept the landline, sensing that in a time of troubles it might enable us to get calls from the office and family and friends, plus robocalls from local officials who say LIPA may get to us by Thanksgiving or maybe New Year’s.

Our house is intact while some homes took direct hits from trees. My wife has made great meals on our gas stove and we have gas-heated water and the other day our neighbors let us run a cord to their generator, giving us a bit of electricity for a few chores. We are blessed.

Plus, those relics, the paper in the driveway and the landline phone, keep us in touch with the world.

(sent from the local stop-and-shop)

Alan Rubin link

11/3/2012 10:53:07 am

Gorge

Good to hear from you. I love all the new electronic tools, but still cling to the paper. my only grip with the NY Times is that I'm not eligible for free online since I'm not a delivery subscriber. The NY Times does not deliver to my area and proof of forty years of delivery did not sway them. I'm not going to get one day late mail delivery just to get on line. (There are other ways).

We keep an old fashioned non-electric phone to use whenever we have a power outage.

As my mother used to day, "who needs this?"

Hang in there!

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8/17/2013 03:22:17 am

I was wondering how Gritty treated you further if total was well. Delighted to apprehend you are many ok moreover carrying on in nice specters in resentment of the charge plus the dilemmas they are having getting all dorsum up moreover running further.

Altenir Silva

11/3/2012 04:08:11 pm

Hi George,

Very good know that's okay with you and your family.

Have a great time,

Best - Altenir (from Rio de Janeiro)

John McDermott

11/4/2012 12:57:37 am

I was wondering how Sandy treated you and if all was well. Glad to know you are all ok and carrying on in good spirits in spite of the damage and the problems they are having getting everything back up and running again. Nice to see that "the paper", in a time of real crisis, still relies on a wise old head to keep everything in perspective and tell it like it is(or should be!).

Gene Palumbo

11/4/2012 08:07:32 am

Just in case you didn't know: George had a column in Saturday's Times on the decision to call off the marathon: "Wisely Stepping Aside in a Bombarded City,"
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/03/sports/george-vecsey-canceling-the-marathon-was-the-right-thing-to-do.html

Mike C

11/4/2012 08:22:23 am

George,thanks so much for putting this in for us at the Cp plant!Our team is proud of another stellar performance,Sandy couldn't keep us down.
It was an epic week for us "newspaper people".....printing and packaging the news, deliveriing it through all the obstacles and doing it again the next night. Your appreciation is clear.
Thanks to all our colleagues at 8th, reporters and photgraphers out in the trenches for the content and my co-workers at College Point for tackling the challenge and putting the finished product in your hands..

We Played Like a Champion,once again.

Altenir Silva

11/4/2012 10:12:43 am

Dear George,
Good point about Marathon in your text of NYTimes. I admire the strength of the city.
God bless NYC and everybody after Sandy hurricane.
Hugs Altenir (from Rio de Janeiro)

Alan Rubin link

11/4/2012 12:15:27 pm

Altenir--If you see a message in red at the bottom after you submit, don't do it again. It will post if you hit the refresh arrow at the top left of the URL bar.

Altenir Silva

11/4/2012 02:37:53 pm

Sorry for the inconvenience, I got confused.
Thank you very much.
Best - Altenir

Altenir Silva

11/4/2012 10:13:50 am

Dear George,
Good point about Marathon in your text of NYTimes. I admire the strength of the city.
God bless NYC and everybody after Sandy hurricane.
Hugs Altenir (from Rio de Janeiro)

Brian Savin

11/8/2012 12:35:25 pm

The copper telephone landline is extremely dependable, mostly because it comes with its own electricity and it doesn't need so much as to be dependent on all the electric company transformers that are susceptible to falling trees every road. Thus, unless the phone line is severed, it pretty much keeps working. Unfortunately, the political climate has allowed the utilities to become deregulated and the telcos this year are beginning to request that they be relieved of the obligation to maintain this technology. Already, Verizon does not repair copper lines, but converts customers to IP phone service. Here in rural Connecticut we had the old "step by step" switching technology until the late eighties, which meant the phone rang the old codes of the party line days. We were two longs. It was a sight to see it work in the central office. As numbers were dialed, switches would fall into place to connect the signal path of the call. Fascinating stuff. A different standard of dependability.

Alan Rubin link

11/9/2012 10:14:21 am

The infrastructure and deregulation problems are not unique to the telephone lines. The needed push for additional sources of energy, and electricity, is partially offset by the low efficiency (about 50%) of the transmission lines.

Politics aside, the recovery from Sandy should be part of a stimulus plan to upgrade the our countries crumbling infrastructure. After most, if not all, weather related disasters, actions that could have prevented them were either delayed or not even considered.

Creating jobs goes along with rebuilding our infrastructure. Preemptive costs are always less than that of cleaning up and rebuilding, not to mention the economic and personal losses that often cannot be recovered.

As Ben Franklin said, "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure". Today it is called, Cost/Benefit analysis.

George Vecsey

11/9/2012 10:39:01 am

I can remember party lines in Queens in the mid 40's. Heck, I can remember blackouts.
We have a saying in our house: "a penny piece of plastic." We use it whenever some flimsy little part snaps, rendering a $100 tool uesless -- as was intended by the manufacturer.

That's why I celebrate the old landline phone. It got us through 10 days of no juice. GV

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I marvel at the work my friends at the home office in New York and the College Point plant and the drivers and deliverers did to produce this miracle at our house.

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QUOTES

Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online.
The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal….

After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness.

The progress stems mostly from three factors:
First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot.
Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.)
Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year.
“Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.”

That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.”

That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data.

One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines.

Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks.

Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths.

The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.

Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately
Republican and white.

Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.)
***

From the great Maureen Dowd:

As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop.
But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels."

--- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing.
***
"Putting out the paper," we called it.
Much more than nostalgia.
---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html

The Paper and the Landline Keep Us Going

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