And then I wrote...

by Dick Schilling, "Editor Emeritus"

... that I had to smile to myself recently when I looked at the issue of National Geographic that had arrived.

There were several photos of dark-skinned South American native females with bare breasts. It brought to memory the olden days when librarians, school and municipal, felt the need to leaf through issues of the magazine before shelving one, to make sure young boys didn’t see such things. It still happens a few times, as I recall after being a subscriber for many years.

I wonder if that still goes on? Maybe not, since the advent of such magazines as Playboy and Penthouse have provided the opportunity for American boys to see American girls in like mode of undress. Or more. Or less, more accurately.

Speaking of magazines, National Geographic was among those available to students in the periodicals section of the university’s library. I could stop by and read Time, U.S. News and World Report, and Newsweek at my leisure, and as a journalism student, I almost felt compelled to do so.

Now, I get to see Time from time to time in the medical clinic’s waiting room, waiting to be called. I don’t even know if the others still exist. If they do, I suspect they have suffered the same fate as Time, that is, have shrunk from full bodied magazine to many fewer pages, and with stories that follow the lead of USA Today, that is, a headline and a few paragraphs, rather than an in-depth story.

Speaking of reading, I just finished a book, The Terranauts, by T. C. Boyle, published by Harper Collins in 2016.

It is a novel about eight single, well educated young people, four males and four females, who agree to live in a structure devised by Mission Control completely apart from contact with the outside. They have to depend on what is contained in five biomes. The word “biomes” does not appear in my dictionaries, and spell-check doesn’t recognize “Terranauts” either, although earth-bound astronauts is suggested.

As might be expected with eight healthy young adults of both sexes, sex gets in the way, but there are lots of interesting ideas.

This is dated just after Veterans Day, November 11. TV’s Saturday Night Live over the weekend featured a creature who made fun of a candidate for office, a former Navy Seal who lost an eye in combat. The so-called comedian not only admitted he knew the reason for the candidate’s eye patch, he dismissed it with a curt “whatever.”

An answer to the question of “how low can you go.”