Tuesday, dreary Tuesday

The sky is gray and groaning a pissy rain today as I walk along ripped-up Battery Place toward Amish Market to pick up some lunch fixings. Amid the confusion of jackhammers, dump trucks and rerouted traffic, I spot a female cop bawling out a helmeted and visibly embarrassed construction worker standing by his rig.

“Did ya see my vest, or what? I’m wearin’ a lime-green vest, you’re comin’ right at me, and still ya don’t see me…”

On the way home I stop at the Starbuck’s on Broad. Business is brisk; a line of office workers in trench coats extends almost to the door. Scattered about the place, IT wizards bask in the glow of their laptop screens. The tight-faced woman, clad in her usual camouflage bandana and camouflage jumpsuit, sits at her spot overlooking Beaver Street, pages of The New York Times spread out on the table like blueprints.

I order a Sumatra Grande and ask the young, black server to leave some room for milk. On the sound system Dean Martin sings, “Ain’t That a Kick in the Head.” A minute later another server turns from the coffee maker, paper cup in hand, and calls out, “Grande with room…Grande with room!”

Back at my home office, business remains frustratingly inconsistent. On the whole, January wasn’t a bad month; one more job would have made the difference. But right now it’s deader than a month-old guitar string: no work, no phone calls, empty inboxes; nothing but the ever-maddening whine of garbage trucks crushing debris from the ongoing building renovation across Exchange Place.

It could be worse. I could be James Frey. I know, I know. I gave him a rhetorical bashing myself in my post, “Truth and consequences.” But I thought Oprah was a tad over the top in the way she handled him during her interview last Thursday. Her dramatics may have been the damage control she needed to save the Oprah brand. I just hope someone checks in on Frey to see that he hasn’t relapsed.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the advance word on tonight’s State of the Union address is that, in addition to Iraq and the war on terror, “health care, energy, competitiveness and controlled government spending” are all on President Bush’s agenda. Sounds like a State of the Union not nearly as radical as last year's. And, as usual, not a peep about climate change, the bane of most Republicans.

At least Democrats are beginning to catch on. Former President Bill Clinton, in comments to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last Saturday, said, “I worry about climate change. It's the only thing that I believe has the power to fundamentally end the march of civilization as we know it, and make a lot of the other efforts that we're making irrelevant and impossible."

The Republican Party’s continued refusal to 1) acknowledge that climate change is real and 2) propose initiatives to address the phenomenon, will only add to their problems as the 2006 elections approach. Especially if we get hit with another Katrina-like hurricane this summer. Or widespread drought. And more freaky weather that's fast becoming the norm. Virtually every independent scientific organization studying the issue says we've got a problem, largely of our doing, that requires urgent attention.

Climate change is like the cop in the lime-green vest, standing in the middle of the road. And still Republicans don't see it.

My brother Lou weighs in on "Another Me"

Today I received an e-mail from my older brother Lou about my post on Frank Loesser (see "Another Me"). It seems this tendency toward sentimentality is a trait not entirely unknown to the men in our family as we age. Great. So in addition to arthritic knees, GERD and thinning hair, I've got spontaneous blubbering to worry about as I get older. Somebody just shoot me.

Anyway, here's what my bro' has to say:

Hey Joe,

I've really enjoyed reading your blog. I particularly liked your post on the Frank Loesser retrospective. You started it with the observation that "sometimes you just don't know where it comes from." Well I think I do. It seems that as the men in our family age, they become more and more sentimental. Mom noticed it about Dad; and Grampa [our father's father, who lived to be 92] exhibited the trait to such an extent that he was known to break into tears at the slighest provocation. Such behavior, Mom noted wryly, earned him the nickname "Onions" in his later years.

Your use of the word "sophisticated" is also telling. If we remember that the root of the word is from the Greek "sophia," meaning "wisdom." it provides a little clue, because that root also appears in "sophist" and "sophomoric." Regarding "sophist," Plato had a lifelong battle with the Sophist philosophy, which he regarded as nothing more than an empty show of knowledge with no claim to wisdom. It seems that sometimes that's just what sophistication is also. In the sublime simplicity, perhaps even sentimentality, of "The Inchworm," I'm guessing Loesser understood that also.

So, it would appear that the path to wisdom requires a passage through sophistication, and a return to a sophisticated sentimentality. See also John Irving's essay, "In Defense of Sentimentality." It goes a long way toward explaining what we both find so attractive about Alistair Sim's portrayal of Scrooge, and for me particularly, why so many "sophisticated" disparagers of Frank Capra's work miss the point entirley. Pass me the"Capracorn" any day. And don't forget a healthy side of "onions."

Louie

Now and then

This year’s unusual weather and unfolding events around the world have got me thinking about the winter of 1965-1966, way back when I was 8 years old.

I'm struck by the similarities between what happened then and what’s happening now. Christmas 1965 was one of the warmest ever on Long Island. The temperature must have climbed into the 60s. I remember my older brother and I, minus coats, test riding brand-new skate- boards on our driveway; several days later I wondered where all the snow was as I watched the Beatles in the film Help!, skiing in the Swiss Alps to the bluesy “Ticket to Ride.”

This winter the music on the charts flat out sucks, but the weather has been unseasonably warm and skateboards are still around; weekends on Exchange Place I see kids pulling off stunts on their boards I wouldn’t have dreamed of trying back in ‘65.

Many things competed for my attention at that time: My older brother and his buddies and their intense fascination with cars, go-karts and pretty much anything else that had an engine and made noise. Stacks of Mad magazines and baseball cards. AM radio. Soupy Sales doing “the mouse” (Hey, do the mouse yeah Hey, you can do it in your house yeah). Sting-Ray bicycles with butterfly handlebars. Tervo’s Hobby Shop and everything it had to offer—“Rat Fink” model kits, Lionel train sets, Slip ‘n Slides and dead frogs in formaldehyde, ready for dissection. Root-beer “foamies” at Whelan’s drug store, costing a dime each by the mug.

I don’t know any 8-year-olds these days so I’m not sure what’s occupying their free time, but I’ll bet it’s almost none of the above and it’s almost always virtual. Xboxes, anyone?

I was curious about girls, especially one blonde, blue-eyed mischief-maker named Elizabeth Roos. In her plaid, pleated skirt, Elizabeth drove the prepubescent me crazy at Catholic school. Yeah, she was a looker, and she loved to get my goat by stealing my pencil box. I'd act irritated but I actually loved the attention: Elizabeth Roos, swiping my pencil box!

Nowadays I'm sure similar games between the sexes continue in grammar school. I hope they’re as innocent.

Back in the winter of '65-'66 I viewed the wider world with more than a little fear and uncertainty. I didn’t yet grasp the Cold War. I do, however, remember one afternoon running into the house and screaming for my mother after seeing the Goodyear blimp, low in the sky, and thinking it was an atom bomb on its way to devastate the neighborhood. To my mind the Vietnam War, still supported then by most Americans, was but a continuation of World War II, what with the black-and-white images of battle on the nightly news resembling the black-and-white footage of World War II documentaries and TV shows like "Combat." Back then I equated war more with romance and heroics—perhaps because of my father’s medals and my Sgt. Rock comic books—and less with gore, severed limbs and death—things that undoubtedly silenced my dad when it came to his own experiences in the ETO. Someone got it right when he said that you can always tell the veterans who saw a lot of action because they’ll never talk about it.

Today progress is steady but slow in Iraq. We’ve got our hands full with Ahmadinejad and his quest to go nuclear in Iran. The Palestinians have rightly given the boot to the ultra-corrupt and ineffective Fatah party, but will Hamas hold on to its guns and its terrorist ideology as it moves to form a new government? Meanwhile, Kim Jong Il is still around, and Bin Laden says he’s just about ready to strike us again. All of this is happening, and yet we’ve got more and more Americans speaking out against our troops.

Today the wider world must still be pretty scary to young boys. My advice to them: hang in there, and keep your eyes on that girl sitting behind you in math class. She just might be after your Xbox.

Red-faced but honored

A big shout out to the 92nd Street Y for linking the Dispatch on their blog. Wouldn't you know, the one post I'm somewhat embarrassed about gets attention on the Web. Thanks a bunch, guys. Here's right back at ya.

I must have done something very bad in another life.

Another me

Sometimes you just don’t know where it comes from.

Last night I attended a Frank Loesser musical retrospective at the 92nd Street Y. As both a lyricist and solo songwriter, Loesser contributed many tunes to the Great American Songbook during a career that spanned four decades (1930s to 1960s). His first big hit was the World War II era rouser, “Praise the Lord, and Pass the Ammunition.” Other popular songs bearing his trademark wit and wordplay include “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve” and the country-and-western ditty, “Jingle, Jangle, Jingle.”

The evening’s host, Ted Sperling, said that Loesser alternated his time between Hollywood, working as a contract songwriter for films, and New York, where he composed the hugely successful Broadway shows Guys and Dolls and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Loesser was a cool and sophisticated cat, a decent singer and pianist himself, and when he wanted to he could swing like nobody’s business.

Never in a million years would I have guessed that the same guy behind “Luck Be a Lady Tonight” and “I Wish I Didn’t Love You So” was also responsible for the 1952 big-screen musical, Hans Christian Andersen. The film starred Brooklyn-born David Kominski, or “Danny Kaye,” as the Danish author of19th-century fairy tales. Sperling noted that, upon hearing Loesser was selected to write the songs, Kaye’s wife, Sylvia Fine, jokingly referred to the project as “Hans Jewish Andersen.”

I remember seeing Hans Christian Andersen on TV when I was 5 or 6, and Ioving the songs. “Thumbelina” and “The Ugly Duckling” are tunes kids in their single digits would enjoy even today. The sublime beauty of “The Inchworm” impressed me as a tot, though I could hardly say I got what the lyrics were about. I guess I was a sucker for a haunting melody in three-quarter time.

As I said, I had no idea Loesser wrote the music for that film. And so the last thing I expected to hear last night was David Yazbek and Julia Murney’s fine, unadorned rendition of “The Inchworm.”

Murney began with the chorus:

Two and two are four
Four and four are eight
Eight and eight are sixteen
Sixteen and sixteen are thirty-two

At this point a very odd thing happened. I felt a tear on my face. What’s up with that, I thought.

Yazbek then sang the first verse:

Inchworm, inchworm
Measuring the marigolds
You and your arithmetic
You'll probably go far

Now the tears were running freely. I had everything to do to hide this display from the friends I was with. What the frig was going on? Fortunately the house lights were down.

Yazbek sang the second, and last, verse with Murney this time accompanying on the chorus:

Inchworm, inchworm
Measuring the marigolds
Seems to me you'd stop and see
How beautiful they are

Now some of you reading this may do an online search to get a taste of the song or refresh your memory. And hearing it you’ll probably think to yourself, what a sap. But the thing is, I’m really not sentimental. Like most other adults, time and experience have pretty well beaten that out of me. I can’t tell you why I cried, or where those tears came from. Maybe it was another me, reminding this jaded and middle-aged “sophisticate” that I was once a kid who was a sucker for haunting melodies in three-quarter time. I guess this time around, the lyrics sunk in.

Truth and consequences

New York’s schizophrenic winter continues. Today it topped out at 61 degrees. It was so warm that I decided to wear only a sweatshirt and sweatpants over my workout clothes on the subway ride to the gym. Big mistake. By the time I left the gym at 8 pm, the temperature had dropped about 20 degrees and the wind was kicking up a fuss. Result: one frozen Joe Bones.

As I thaw out I have to confess I’m feeling a bit ornery tonight. I’ve got more things on my mind than I invited. I’ll try to unburden myself somewhat here.

I haven’t addressed any current events lately, so tonight I’ll weigh in on the hubbub over James Frey and his addiction-and-recovery memoir, “A Million Little Pieces.” The way I see it, James Frey is a fraud, a lying, opportunistic money-grubber and a disgrace to recovering substance abusers everywhere. He fabricated key passages of his book, much the way Hollywood spices up the narrative when turning a true story into a blockbuster movie. Hell, with “A Million Little Pieces,” all the elements of a blockbuster film are already there. Just add Nicolas Cage.

Yet because Oprah Winfrey endorsed this sorry tome and because of its subsequent best-seller status, Frey has received a pass from his publisher, Oprah and a large portion of the reading public. Supporters claim it’s the inspirational message of the book that matters, not that Mr. Frey bended and twisted his “truth” almost beyond recognition.

In a word: bullshit. I was happy and relieved to read Mary Karr’s essay, ”His So-Called Life,” in The New York Times. Karr is a poet and author of “The Liars’ Club,” one of the truly great—and true!— memoirs of the past 50 years.

In these passages from her essay, Ms. Karr nails the crux of the matter:

“Mr. Frey seems to have started with his perceived truth, and then manufactured events to support his vision of himself as a criminal. But how could a memoirist even begin to unearth his life's truths with fake events? At one point, I wrote a goodbye scene to show how my hard-drinking, cowboy daddy had bailed out on me when I hit puberty.

"When I actually searched for the teenage reminiscences to prove this, the facts told a different story: my daddy had continued to pick me up on time and make me breakfast, to invite me on hunting and fishing trips. I was the one who said no. I left him for Mexico and California with a posse of drug dealers, and then for college.

"This was far sadder than the cartoonish self-portrait I'd started out with. If I'd hung on to my assumptions, believing my drama came from obstacles I'd never had to overcome—a portrait of myself as scrappy survivor of unearned cruelties—I wouldn't have learned what really happened. Which is what I mean when I say God is in the truth.”

Amen, sister.

Daniel Henninger, of The Wall Street Journal, views the Frey controversy as but the latest manifestation of a culture that devolves while adhering to the ethos, "whatever works." I'll end this post with the final three paragraphs from his thought-provoking and somewhat depressing piece, "Oprah's Truth Is No Stranger to Fiction."

"What's a fraud now--and what's something else--has become a question worth pondering. We live in a world of reality TV shows, of newspaper photographs and fashion photos routinely 'improved' by the computer program Photoshop, of nightly news that pumps more emotion than fact into its version of public events such as Hurricane Katrina, hyper-real TV commercials manipulated with computers, the rise of 'interpretive' news, fake singers, fake breasts, fake memoirs. Morris Dickstein of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York described this world as 'always at the edge of falsehood' and so people come to tolerate it 'as part of the overall media buzz of their lives.'

"He's right. But there is a political dimension to this, which many of what are no doubt politically liberal writers upset at James Frey and Doubleday ought to consider. Before all this, most people operated from a common personal standard, a broadly held superstructure of right and wrong, integrity and dishonesty, which they probably learned in Sunday school. You can see and hear it in hundreds of old Hollywood movies. 'The Maltese Falcon,' written by Dashiell Hammett, a Communist, is full of this moral tension and resolving clarity.

"We all know those widely shared categories were broken and blurred the past 38 years, leading to terrible political fights between social conservatives and liberal liberators over disintegrating standards of personal behavior. Welcome to what it has wrought: The mass marketers and their accepting publics are skipping past the politics and simply pocketing the value added in the new controlling value--whatever 'works' for us personally, no matter how meretricious. It's hardly James Frey's fault that the culture really is in a million little pieces."

Cell phone blues

Ask him to sit this one out
And while you’re alone
I’ll tell the waiter to tell him
He’s wanted on the telephone
—“Change Partners,” Irving Berlin

That sly proposal, penned by the great Berlin for his 1938 musical, “Carefree,” wouldn’t even rate a lothario’s consideration in 2006. Chances are the guy he was looking to ditch would have a cell phone.

Cell phones. You either can’t live without one or you’re like me and wish they went the way of the Nehru jacket. All together now: “Death to cell phones! Bring back two tin cans attached with a string!”

Cell phones have completely annihilated romance and are fast making an endangered species of mystery. You encounter cell phones virtually everywhere in New York City—on the street, in parks, at shows, in restaurants, at the gym, on lines, even in libraries and at urinals in the men’s room.

What’s worse, these infernal gadgets come equipped with the most obnoxious ring tones you could imagine. It’s as if the biggest thorn in the ass you ever met was hired to program the devices.

And have you ever eavesdropped on a cell phone conversation? (Come to think of it, I shouldn’t call it eavesdropping, as the volume of the cell phone user is usually at a level worthy of arena rock concerts.) We’re not talking important information being communicated here. We’re talking, “Oh, not much.” We’re talking, “I’m on line at the drug store. Can I call you when I get home?” We’re talking, “Ted’s wife says to meet them at six.”

We’re talking banal tripe, stuff that could easily be communicated at home, at work or via a pay phone. We’re talking information that could wait.

But, alas, we’re living in an age when no one wants to wait. The cell phone is the official emblem of a world that knows no patience and can no longer feel comfortable in its own mind. And memory? Who needs that when you have cell phones with digital cameras as standard add-ons?

Full disclosure is in order here. Yes, I have a cell phone. I’ll go so far as to say it comes in handy on days when I have to be away from the office for a while. I can bounce my office phone number to my cell phone and not miss a potentially important call.

But you’ll never catch me with my cell phone after working hours or during weekends. Let ‘em wait, I say. Let ‘em wonder. Let some lothario notice I’m sans cell phone and try to steal my date the way the protagonist proposes in “Change Partners.” It’s the oldest trick in the book, but I’d applaud the effort.

"Chiquito!"

We’ve got the Eastern Bloc cutting hair here in Lower Manhattan. At Karena’s Kuts on South William Street, Olga uses hand-scissors to style an excellent semi-crew cut. But Olga's precision snips and tales of life in Prague—along with the pleasure of resting your feet on the fancy metal footrest of her antique chair—don't exactly come cheap.

If you are like me and don’t have the pockets for regular visits to "K K," Nadia, over at George's Hair Styling on Beaver Street, does a quick-and-neat job of it with the electric shears for ten bucks. She’s just back this week from spending the holidays with her family in Russia, and I have to remember to make an appointment. I’m starting to look a bit like Earl.

As in most places around the five boroughs, the melting pot down in Manhattan’s south end teems with many ethnic seasonings. Young, high-cheekboned and very thin Slavic model types—walking, talking Calvin Klein ads—live in my building. Two doormen are named Safet and Elvir. Indian financiers can be seen walking The Street and talking up other men in black overcoats, undoubtedly planning more outsourced business for the emerging subcontinent. Several Indian families also reside in my building; the women wear traditional saris.

It’s a gas seeing the various cultures interact. For all of our differences it never ceases to impress me how much we’re really all the same. Last winter, before I moved here, an Israeli rental agent showed me around the area and shared a kosher pizza with me for lunch. It tasted almost as good as your standard Italian issue, and less salty.

At the Whitehall Deli last Saturday, the teenaged, baseball-cap- wearing son of the Korean owners whooped it up with the Mexican kitchen help while I was there getting morning coffee. The boy minds the store for mom and pop on weekends, and he was all fired up behind the cash register. The Mexicans couldn’t stop laughing as he repeatedly yelled, “chiquito!” Knowing the minds of young men, having been one once myself, I think I was clued in to the joke, but kept my knowledge concealed inside the visage of the older guy who is oblivious.

Meanwhile, I don’t get any of this Democratic carping about Samuel Alito. The guy’s a nerd, not David Duke. I—and I suspect most Americans—have no problem with a judge who doesn't legislate from the bench. Kennedy, Schumer and company are sounding like tired and whiny old men.

Hey, Dems! Chiquitos! It’s almost sixty degrees as I type these words. New York’s winter has gone AWOL. How about talking about stuff that really matters—and gives you the upper hand over Republicans—for a change?

Recharging the Battery

And Butch joined the army
Yeah that's where he's been
And the jackhammer's diggin'
Up the sidewalks again
In the neighborhood
In the neighborhood
In the neighborhood
—“In the Neighborhood,” Tom Waits

I’ve been posting from Lower Manhattan off and on for 10 months now, and only recently I realized I haven’t described what it’s like living down here.

When I launched this blog from midtown’s Hell’s Kitchen in 2004, I had already been living there 7 years. I knew what that funky little ‘hood was all about. I still miss its gritty 'tude.

I have to admit, it’s taken a while for me to get a handle on life in Lower Manhattan. But now I think I know enough to begin writing about it. So in this post I’ll start with the obvious, and in later posts I’ll discuss the not so obvious.

As soon as you climb out of most any subway station down here, the obvious—construction going on seemingly everywhere—assaults you with the sounds of jackhammers, barked orders and debris tossed into dumpsters.

Streets are being torn up and fiber optic cable laid, wiring Manhattan’s oldest neighborhood into the 21st century. The expansion of the Bowling Green subway station has made a mess of Battery Park’s northeast end. Along the narrow divide of Exchange Place, across from where I live, a onetime office building was gutted by non-union labor. For weeks after I moved here last March, an inflatable rat bigger than me, erected by protesting union workers, stood watch over the site 24/7. Now the rat is gone as electricians, plumbers, welders, carpenters and other tradesmen turn the place into a residential facility.

After 9/11, countless businesses fled Lower Manhattan for the industrial parks of New Jersey and Long Island. Today the plan is to transform the old Financial District into the midtown of the south end, a better-balanced mix of offices and residences. Realtors boast in the media how downtown is the latest boomtown in the Big Town. Don’t believe the hype. It’s nowhere near boomtown yet. But by 2008 or so, it could be.

For now, in addition to the money men and women who like living a short walk from work, people like me live down here, intrepid sorts who decided to stick a fork in Bin Laden’s eye, take advantage of the discounted rents and, in some cases, start a business. Downtown shops and restaurants still struggle 4 years out from 9/11, but the general feeling is that the worst is over. Baby strollers are starting to appear more often. More dog walkers are about. You get the feeling that, slowly, Lower Manhattan is lifting itself off the mat.

Still, for now, most of the local bars and takeout places are only open weekdays, when the area bristles with the pulsating energy of The Street. Commerce still lies at the heart of activity in these parts. Weekends a steady infusion of tourists always makes Saturday interesting, but Sunday the place turns into a ghost town. When I first moved here, I thought I would learn to love the weekend stillness. In fact, the opposite is true. Chalk it up to 13 years of living in Manhattan’s more electric neighborhoods. Or perhaps it’s just that I want to have better things to do than while away my weekends with the security guards and bomb-sniffing dogs of Wall Street.

By and large, New Yorkers have processed 9/11 and been able to put it in a place that’s never far from memory but more removed from pain. In Lower Manhattan, most of us can walk by the tall, barbed-wire fence enclosing that gaping hole in the ground at the World Trade Center site without having it disrupt our thoughts of the moment. New Yorkers are nothing if not forward thinking. And it’s in that spirit of moving on that residents of Lower Manhattan are able to deal with the overt daily nuisances of a neighborhood in transition, slowly metamorphosing into something better.

Blogfly

And you and I climb, crossing the shapes of the morning
And you and I reach over the sun for the river
And you and I climb clearer towards the movement
And you and I called over valleys of endless seas
—“And You and I, IV: Apocalypse,” Jon Anderson

OK, I’ll say it. I have a problem.

I spend way too much time on this blog. Not reading, of course. Writing. Not good. Why?

Because I should just be banging this stuff out. I mean, it’s a blog, not a novel. A blog is maybe a step up from newspapers—no one reads them anymore. Then again, maybe not.

Come to think of it, newspapers and the Web really aren’t all that different. Newspapers are transient things, gone in a day. Websites are transient things that hang around a little longer. The words on my blog set up camp in homepage cyberspace a week or two, then disappear into the archives, never to be seen again. (Except by those who truly have too much time on their hands.)

The upshot of this is, you’ll be reading more of me in 2006. I’m shooting for three times a week, especially after the move to Brooklyn in April. Heck, then I'll have to change the name of our parkng space. Hell's Kitchen Dispatch no more. What next? The Brooklyn Bum? I kinda like the sound of that.

But I won't be spending as much time here as I used to. Writing, anyway. So excuse the occasional typo and clumsily expressed thought. Don’t’ pay it no mind if I occasionally weigh in at under 300 words. This thing here is a work in progress. Know what I’m saying? Of course you do.

Until next time, el cielo es azul. Enjoy. (What did I just say?)

The great—and tragic—switcheroo

ALIVE!

12 trapped miners found in W. Va. Miracle

So read the front page of this morning’s New York Post. I went to bed last night thinking the worst, so needless to say I was surprised to see those headlines as I passed the corner newsstand on my way home from Battery Park with Ilsa the wonder dog. Check that, I was more than surprised. In fact, I was overjoyed, in a “The Mets just won the World Series!” kind of way. Miracles do happen. Sometimes.

In my apartment I put on a bowl of oatmeal and read the Post’s account, written by reporter Cynthia Fagen. Three paragraphs summed up the feelings of the miners’ families upon hearing the news:

“There were hugs and tears among the crowd gathered outside the Sago Baptist church near the mine in Tallmansville, about 100 miles northeast of Charleston.

“A few minutes after word came, the throng, several hundred strong, broke into a chorus of the hymn ‘How Great Thou Art’ in the chilly, night air as church bells pealed triumphantly.

“Kay Weaver, whose brother-in-law, Jack Weaver, was in the mine, said family members learned of the rescue when a man burst into the nearby Baptist church where relatives were waiting, shouting, ‘It’s a miracle. It’s a miracle!’”

Not.

Somebody got it wrong, it turns out. Of the 13 miners trapped in the Sago mine following an explosion Monday, rescuers found only one survivor, 27-year-old Randal McCloy. The others were dead. All but one of the bodies were found huddled behind a makeshift barricade erected by the men to stave off the poisonous fumes that ultimately overcame them.

There would be no joy among cable and digital news audiences today. We could only begin to imagine the grief of the families following such an overwhelming letdown.

Somebody blew it. Big Time. And before the tragic truth of the situation could finally emerge the bogus news had made its way around the world. The misreporting of the fate of the Sago miners ranks as one of the great misfires of the Information Age. It also points out the danger in taking at face value news that is both delivered and competes in real time. In on-the-spot reporting, emotions often all too easily trump reason.

My Italian grandfather had a brother who was killed in a mining accident in Pennsylvania in the early 20th century, shortly after the two had immigrated to America. The exact year this happened was lost with my grandfather when he died of pneumonia at the age of 92 in 1965.

My grandfather, a onetime railroad worker who later delivered ice and ran a fruit stand to see his family through the Depression and World War II, rarely talked about his brother’s death. When he did, it was in a broken English that often only he fully understood.

The news of my granduncle’s death, if reported at all, probably went no further than the local newspaper. Mining deaths at the turn of the century weren’t exactly freak occurrences.

If the local newspaper did run a story on my granduncle’s death, I’ll bet it had the essential truth of the matter correct from the get-go. Minus the competition of several hundred cable channels and even more websites delivering news in real time, newspapers back then could take the time to confirm their stories before running with them. Not anymore. Today, newshounds can’t be so sure of the accuracy of today’s “breaking news.” That’s something we ought to keep in mind as we channel- and Web-surf for the latest goings-on in the global neighborhood.