I will hate the Indianapolis Colts till the day I die, or they get a new owner, whichever comes first.  I don’t hate the Colt players.  They weren’t even born when their owner, Robert Irsay, a greedy coward, incurred my undying hatred.  I’m glad Peyton Manning won a Super Bowl.  A player that great deserves a championship.  Here’s why I hate the INDIANAPOLIS Colts:

                Super Bowl Sunday (this week) has become an important secular holiday.  It’s a time for friends and family to gather, either at someone’s home or what beer commercials used to call “your friendly neighborhood tavern.”   There is so much less home hospitality than there was when I was a kid. 

 “The little book” as hundreds of thousands of professional writers know, is “The Elements of Style,” by Wiliam Strunk and E. B. White.  It’s about 85 4x6 pages long, and the first HALF, by Strunk, contains everything anyone needs to know about grammar and punctuation, clearly presented, with easy-to-understand examples.  Writers keep it on their desks for reference, and re-read it occasionally because it is the best example of the clear vigorous writing style it advocates, and the best guide to achieving it, and making it uniquely yours. 

How well can you locate the lantzman

                “Lantzman” is Yiddish for the Italian word “paisan,” or the African American dialect word “homey.”   “Locate the Lantzman” is a tribal game Jews play among themselves, identifying prominent people who are Jewish.  Bill Cosby and Harry Belafonte are honorary lantzmen.  So which people on the following list are Jewish?  (If you’re Jewish, a passing grade is 90 percent; for non-Jews, passing is 40 percent.)

                The Jewish New Year, when summer changes to fall, makes more sense, in a way, than the pagan New Year, which we’re celebrating today.  The change from summer to fall is far more noticeable than the change from winter to winter.  You have to be an astronomer to notice that change.  It will be another month or so before most of us notice that the days have been getting longer for the past month.

Lots of my non-Jewish friends have sore tongues now because they start to wish me Merry Christmas, then stop themselves and switch to Happy Hanukkah.  I don't say anything because I don't want to embarrass people who are trying to be sensitive, and I don't want to start a big discussion about history and anthropology.  This is the conversations I don't want to start when people wish me Happy Hanukkah:

                I found in my newspaper days that great artists and big stars tend to be down to earth, open, and happy to help reporters.  The second-tier stars are the ones who act hoity-toity.   For instance, when Nobel Prize Winner Jorge Luis Borges was writer-in-residence at Phillips Exeter Academy, he was happy to talk to me.  The next year, when I asked writer-in-residence Denise Levertov for an interview, she said, “That would be TOTALLY in appropriate.”  Nobody ever heard of her except other poets and English majors.  Then,  there was the guitar player from Aeroshmith, Joe Something, who physically pushed me away when there was no one else around.

Our state's public mental health system fell from 2^nd best to D-plus in 10 years.  When I went to national conferences in the 90s, everyone wanted to be like us.  In 2006, the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) gave NH a grade of D-plus in a survey of all 50 states.  Our system has gotten much worse since then.   The main reasons are change-averse community mental health center (CMHC) chief executives, and gross underfunding for the past 10-15 years.

People with severe mental illness can get well and stay well.  It’s an idea the “patients” taught the professionals, not the other way around.  At first, the professionals ignored us; then they fought us.  Now, recovery-based mental health services are national policy, and recovery is widely acceptable as an achievable goal by governments, agencies, “consumers” and mental health professionals.

I'll be back very soon after lots of physical illness.

I went into a terrible depression in July when I did not get a grant I had stupidly allowed myself to believe I had a chance to win. When I saw what the six winning jounalists were writing about, it was all. mental health in third world countries, with one or two about alienated minority groups in very isolated parts of this country. The judges were not interested in recovery or consumer rights. I never had a shot.