European Stars and Stripes (Newspaper) - December 23, 1985, Darmstadt, Hesse Page 18 the stars and stripes monday december 23, 1985 column is today s crossword overload is part of Lite by Russell Baker ii gets harder and harder to Avi Terlain Mcnol Over Load. At our House for a minimum of four entertainments in the Short journey from the front door to inc i Khan. Which is in the Back of the House. As you enter you hear the characteristically piercing sound of television in the room to the right where if it is mid morning a group of astonishingly Frank neurotics is usually trying to entertain with embarrassing disclosures about the mechanical aspects of their love lives. If Able to resist this and take the few Steps necessary to get into the room to the left you will hear snatches of Beethoven or one of his fellow longhair issuing from the radio. A few a tips More take you into the dining room where i have just gone to the dining room to make sure this is accurate you will find a newspaper open to the comic strips. Pause to enjoy them and you will hear the Beethoven on he radio to your left and on your right the music of Bruce Springsteen issuing from a radio in the Kitchen. If the to is turned up just a mite too loud it is entirely possible to find yourself staring at Andy Capp while struggling to ignore both the Moonlight sonata and born in the so you can hear a Side splitting anecdote about sex change surgery from the party who experienced it. At our House the entertainment used to be enlivened by the spectacle of daddy purple in the face screaming for somebody to turn Down the entertainment so he could think. You won t Sec that anymore. Daddy went to a specialist who set him straight. Afterwards daddy told us about it. As i understand it he said time is divided Between then and now. Now is Good then is old hat. Thinking is then that is passe outmoded Over the Hill. Entertainment is now which is to say. Hot with it. In Dandy double peachy and inc Only Way of go for people who know where it s at. I know it sounds As if daddy s mind had gone off the scope but it had t. He was just trying to talk the Way the Ordinary thoroughly entertained american talks and of course he was t much Good at it because he had resisted being entertained for too Many years. But he was trying. For example a consulting firm came to the House and said that contrary to daddy s complaint about entertain ment overload we were pathetically . There was talk about us in inc neighbourhood. Not Nice talk either. To show we could fit right in like everybody else we bought a video cassette player to record to shows we missed while out buying radio cassette tape to tape radio shows we missed while out buying Popcorn to Ait while we watched video cassettes of the to shows we had missed while out buying. Well you get the idea. Anyhow that s when we noticed that daddy never appeared for meals anymore. One morning about 3 everybody saw him next morning he did t show up for breakfast. Grandmother said he was probably just exhausted. In deed he had t stayed up with the rest of us until 6 . To watch the videotapes of Bowling for porters plus the two Mancil Lehrer news hour tapes from the summer of 1984. We had fallen so far behind on Mancil Lochrer that we had to watch two per night if we were Ever to have a . Because we d had to watch the Var movie of am Adcus earlier in the evening and then gel through 10 Back issues of people Magazine and a dozen Back issues of the new York times arts and Leisure Section we had to slay up until 6 . To gel in the Bowling for dollars and Macneil la liver cassettes and daddy folded. It was six weeks later before we got our next break in the entertainment. Mama took the Opportunity to ask if any of us had seen daddy since the night we enjoyed ourselves with the video cassette of amadeus All those Back issues of people and the times arts and Leisure Sec Tion and the tapes of Bowling for dollars and the Mac Neil Chr or come to think of him nobody had. A few months later i heard daddy had turned up on a Phil Donahue show whose subject was entertainment Over Load. Apparently he was in the care of an entertainment specialist who had trained him to watch Shirley Temple movies on a to set while wearing headphones wired to play wagnerian opera in one car and rolling stones re cords in the other while simultaneously telephoning a radio Call in show to argue for putting More people in jail. We have All the Phil Donahue shows on tape so if that s where daddy really wound up Well Sec him sooner or later. C new York time a blame West s decline on ballpoint by George will in the silent watches of the night i wonder what development scaled the West s doom the regicide of Charles ii Lenin s arrival at the Finland station the answer i think is the invention of the Ball Point pen. But Here near the White House is a redoubt of Correct thinking Fahrney s pen store Headquarters of the coun Ter revolution in favor of Fountain pens. Fahrney s will sell you a ballpoint but in an austere deprecating manner. The grandeur that was Rome included a Bronze instrument resembling a Fountain pen found in the ruins of Pompeii. But the sack of Rome by the goths looters probably looking for ballpoint put pens in decline until i am simplifying a bit 1884. Then Lewis Waterman an insurance Salesman lost a Large commission when a Leaky pen ruined a contract. Rats he said and invented the Fountain pens As with most things War has been a trans forming Force. Sales of Fountain pens soared during world War i the result of folks writing to the boys Over there. But a surging Sta of barbarism was about to submerge the Spires and battlements of civilization because Back in 11888 a sinister person named John loud had got a Patent for a Ball Point Points did not get rolling until 1935 when a Hun Garian in Argentina perfected a Way of grinding an Ink dispensing Ball. Then War again the British got interested in ballpoint because pilots were having trouble writing at High altitudes. One thing led to another and then to limb los. There on oct. 29, 1945, a Day that will live in infamy 10,000 Ball Point pens were sold at $12.50, serious Money Back then. Twenty seven customers fainted. One would like to think they were overcome with shame. At first manufacturers boasted that ballpoint could write under water. They were just the thing for a Thoreau who wanted to write in rather than about Walden Pond. Later the pitch was refined ballpoint write through butter but who writes sonnets on Toast when 5,000 years ago the Mesopotamia is said hey let s invent writing so we can have More than an Oral they had no idea their Bright idea would be so faint by 1985. Writing May be on the Way out. We arc inundated by non literate forms of communication. People receive most of their information if such it can be called through their ears or through flickering pictures presented to their staring eyes. Non readers Are Mere receptacles passively ingesting sounds and sights avoiding the demands of the Active and complicated skill of Reading. Reading and writing flourish and languish together. One reason letter writing is a dying Art and one reason most people consider any sort of writing a chore is that they have never known the physical pleasure the tactile satisfaction of a smoothly flowing pen. They have spent their lives pushing ballpoint across paper which is like pushing a primitive plow through soggy Loam. A the wait Langton Pott writer s group by Eugene Sheffer across 1 old tire part 5 soak8 " Hor izon"1.2 Disney studio artist 14 fencing sword 15 unobstructed View 16 Zola novel17 of War 18 ignites 20 Sheik s Retreat 23 Stone Chest 24 elevator man25 Black Ca or Gray activist 28 speck 29 indians 30 totem pole 32 caters 34 wine and 35 uncanny a
