My College Mentor

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Hello Reader,

Got mentor?

Got meetings at work that function, or meetings that people hate?

Introduction

I had the most inspiring mentor back in college, and I’d like to tell you about him… because I have just done the required “mentor speech”  last week at Toastmasters (TM) International, a worldwide organization of weekly public speaking clubs. Who was my mentor, and what was his lasting effect?

First, about mentoring: Some years ago, well back into the previous century, finding your individual mentor became a self-help term in the business world, as people sought help, sought to “have an edge” for their corporate climb. I take that idea with a grain of salt. Meanwhile, at work, my Chief Executive Officer mentors all of us at once with her often-expressed belief in personal growth and how “you have to hear a new thing six times before you learn it.”

Every month Toastmasters magazine (subtitled The magazine for Communicators and Leaders) includes an article on mentoring, with equal focus on the “mentor” and the “protege,” with the hope that mentoring within TM will really take off. The problem? People only want a mentor if they feel a need. A boy who pulls a sword out of a stone, and must become king at a very young age, will surely feel the need to have “advice, direction and support” from a mentor. Hence King Author had Merlin the magician. The rest of us? In Toastmasters? Not so much. So instead of speaking before my club about my toastmaster mentor, I told of when my world was young and I had a community college teacher.

My College Mentor

Gerry Bruce mentored all of us at once as he instructed us in something like “how to lead a meeting.” (Too bad college courses don’t have titles, only numbers) This class was a part of my career program in recreation, as the thinking went that someday, in a small town meeting about, say, building an arena, we might have to chair the meeting, with the townsfolk assuming that we graduates knew more than the average farmer about Robert’s Rules of Order, if only from our campus club meetings and student government. Gerry Bruce made sure we would be up to the challenge. (Meanwhile, some campus clubs—but not mine—never need Robert’s Rules as they never do anything more controversial than hold a wine and cheese party every semester)

Bruce once remarked that he didn’t need to prepare a lesson plan as we would make lots of mistakes and provide lots of “teachable moments.” He could say this only because, as our kids say, he “knew his stuff.” 

I am sure Bruce could have walked into class talking, and then kept on talking right up to the bell; walked in again next class and totally talk-talk-talked all class. But he didn’t. He had us doing practical exercises, holding meetings. Now, I’m a university graduate, and I can appreciate lots of data. Head knowledge. But what Bruce knew was what Plato said in Greece thousands of years ago: “The purpose of education is action.” What Plato didn’t need to add was: “You won’t learn a new thing, not well enough to take action, until you hear it six times.” What Bruce did was decide, before the term started, what few things he would keep repeating all semester, things for us to internalize. Forget loads of data: He knew people don’t drink from a fire hose.

“You can be competent, or you can be incompetent,” Bruce often said. This concept needed to be repeated because my classmates were, many of them, “post high school,” meaning: still flaky, still irresponsible, still a liability in a student group project. At the time I was in my twenties, fresh from the army base across the road, where keeping your word was taken for granted. I was aghast when the program secretary complimented me for always returning my “overnight” materials the next morning. Turns out half the class was being irresponsible to the point where the secretary was considering a black list. You might assume, “Oh well, everybody finally shapes up when they graduate to the working world.” Then again, you might assume graduates with a business degree know how to be responsible in a workplace meeting.

Certainly Bruce was competent. He had once been a small town recreation worker, but now he owned a fixed wing aircraft and made his living across the time zone as a “municipal consultant.” Surely he had taken responsibility to become competent before he started his business. 

We learned abstract things such as what to do if a group became stuck—Right now, over in Britain, a big group called “parliament” is stuck over trying to take action to decide on Brexit. They claim they are “gridlocked—” We learned practical things such as how to run a debate or a panel, and precisely why to have one in the first place. We practised standing up to speak, just like in real life: The college default, as it happens, is for students to timidly speak from their seats, which is easier, but not done in real life, not for a town hall meeting.

One morning we began the class by writing a midterm. Open book, since we would have our books in real life. After the test was over, we resumed learning.  We had a low stage at one end of the room, and it was here that some of us, after the test, had to go up and role model having a meeting. I remember one of us was to be a member of the Royal Canadian Legion, as the legion is a traditional funding source for children’s sports. Others were similarly from the community. The goal of the meeting? To start up a summer camp. I forget who I was to be, I only remember I was on stage too, but not as the chairman, thank God: Our meeting got stuck.

We stayed stuck, right there in front of our classmates, as our chairman did the usual chairman things such as having only one person speak a time, on a maybe-not-so-clear topic, but stuck we were, spinning our wheels ever deeper into the sand, and stuck we stayed. Until our teacher had mercy on us, and released us to slink back to our seats. 

Then our mentor raised his voice, not from hatred, not from anger, but for emphasis. “What the heck happened? You were stuck!…” We all shrank. “How could that be? You just wrote the mid term! Silence. “What should you have done?” …I’m pleased to say that I was the first person to timidly come up with something from our textbook. “Uh…”  “YES!” Once I had broken the logjam, Bruce knew we would all rush to consult the textbook and our notes, our bag of tricks… So he could immediately drop the topic. But not before giving us a final concept.

Bruce stormed, “You all reverted to old behaviour patterns!” Some things, I guess, you have to hear more than six times if you are to change. As it happened, I had just learned that community organizer Saul Alinsky—later, after President Obama was in the White House, known as “Barak Obama’s mentor”—had discovered the same frustrating limitation in trying to teach his people. I put up my hand and I said so, adding, “Now I’m feeling sorry for myself, because how the heck am I supposed to ever learn to change?” Our mentor replied that we students can learn the same way he did: By keeping an open mind.

What Was My Mentor’s Lasting Effect?

In my small-picture personal life, I have served as chairman of the board of directors of an evolving for-profit company: The other directors were eager action-oriented extroverts: As I kept them in check, yet moving forward against their realistic fears, I’m sure my classroom and textbook learning showed. 

For my big-picture citizen life, I have been able to see the world all the clearer… such as, during the past year, the British parliament, and the scandals of American social media. If two heads are better than one, and if their meetings were functional, then maybe Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg would not now be cravenly dodging a summons to speak in London before parliament. He knows “he done wrong.” 

And maybe Google would not have been found guilty and fined so heavily by the court of the European Union, not if at a Google meeting, someone had reminded the group of their former corporate vision of “Don’t be evil.” But if social media leaders—I’m looking at you, Zuckerberg—have bad character? Then it takes not a meeting but a miracle to save them. (On a computer nerd’s blog a commenter from Google exposed the ethical gap of his company: It was not pretty)

At the agency where I work, I once went around to each senior executive and I asked. Answer? I learned we do indeed have functional meetings, both at the senior executive level, which I don’t see, and at lower levels, which I do see. The sad thing is that I will read/hear/view on the internet, again and again, that businesspeople hate their workplace meetings. Why?

I don’t know why, but I will say this: I have read several sources about “how to be a facilitator.” It seems that if you are a consultant, called into a business to facilitate a meeting or workshop, for a half day or a couple days or more, then the usual procedure is to start with a flip chart or white board and ask the seasoned, serious, work-ethic, mature businesspeople to generate a list of behaviours, “the role of the member,” for having a functional meeting. What does this list, for all to see, show? 

It shows that folks in the working world, years removed from their flakey days as college students, know what to do—but they just can’t do it. Hence they need the prominent list to remind each other. For the remainder of the year, sans facilitator, they hate their meetings. Why? 

Besides prominent human nature reasons… perhaps they revert to old behaviour patterns. I suppose functional groups start with a functional management. While I see no excuse for incompetent meetings, I try to be charitable towards groups and executives, as I know human nature is very prevalent.

In my current life the closest I get to facilitating is being the chairman of Friday Free Fall, a voluntary weekly group of talkative, artistic, individualistic writers. Can you spell wild horses? A no-nonsense lady there commented I was a good chairman because I have both kindness and toughness, adding she couldn’t chair because she lacked the kindness.

And now I lean back from my keyboard, look into space, and then bend over to tap these kind words: 

Dear reader, I hope you may be willing to have personal growth… from hearing something six times, with an open mind… and then avoid reverting to old behaviours.

As Tiny Tim says, “God bless us, everyone.”

Sean Crawford

January

(Wow, how did it get to be)

2019 (so fast?)

On the Great Plains

Footnotes:

~If you want me to quietly observe your meeting, then contact me here. (I hold a Master of Facilitation through Mount Royal University Continuing Education)

~Based on Gerry’s teaching, as shown in my essay, if you do a speech at toastmasters, then you don’t have to talk all through, for the full allotted time: Less is more. Use pauses. Repeat things as needed.

~On my blog “about me” page I said I like the series by David Gerrold of the Chtorr Wars: the U.N. versus an alien nature infestation. Humanity is shown trying to “up their game,” to meet this unprecedented world challenge, through having meetings, both functional and dysfunctional. 

A happy memory: I once sat with a small business owner, on the grass behind her store, because she ran meetings, here in Alberta and over in British Columbia, for (Scott Peck style) “community building.” I read aloud from Gerrold’s third book: A Day for Damnation. The composite cover showed a diseased forest on fire, a man in a flight suit, and a deadly jet fighter. 

My friend, who would never have read that book herself, loved the description of a training meeting where individuals want to “cop out” but the chairman is holding them accountable to reality… (She was the mother of the boy I knew K.I.A. in Afghanistan—lest we forget)

I can’t resist saying more: Halfway through the first book a U.N. science meeting is shown being dysfunctional. Now I understand: It’s partly because a) members don’t know/won’t do their role, and b) the first string leaders, the “A team” have all been killed by a Chtorr plague. (As have all the physicians)

Also, folks are still “in denial,” and the organizers don’t realize how they may fix that denial.

~Remembering that my essay on Assimilation a fortnight ago included aboriginals: 

A mentor can have an “effect” in many ways. Gerry Bruce, who lived in a small town, was quite sympathetic to indigenous, without using the phrase “white racism,” because “they had been hammered on.” Hence I silently said to myself: For our indigenous to achieve self-esteem it would be more energy-efficient, quicker, for them to switch away from trying for assimilation to trying for a “separate but equal” culture. Was I saying they should give up? Wimp out? I was saying they should make an appropriate decision as to where their energy goes. Like blacks did in the U.S. after 1969. (By the way, up here in Canada, blacks are just whites in black skin, in the eyes of indigenous) 

How creative of me: Because this would have been before the new Charter of Rights and Freedoms had officially said indigenous had a separate culture, and before I had heard the idea six times. (Cultural change lags behind government decrees and new technology) 

~My own “mentoring effect,” which surprised me, was a young woman at my university toastmasters club saying she was starting to read because of me. 

(Not all students, with their university level I.Q., are readers; some will not read even after graduation is behind them, when they merely have a straight job, sans course-load) 

It’s possible I had been unconsciously quoting books as I talked to my club, more likely I had made no secret of being an avid reader.

~I like students learning to be competent. For various comments on excellence, and the role of boards of directors, click on my label to the right for Olympics… One of the essays is called Olympics and Boards. You might also like Arete means Excellence, archived February 2014.

~In Gerry’s class, we even had to stand to tell a joke. I remember one day, just before the bell, he was seriously telling us recreation students about how people can escape life in many ways, not just through substances. For example: A man who wouldn’t crawl into the bottle, would instead leave his wife and kids at home to go jogging for miles.

I raised my hand, then stood to say, “That’s what I call, ‘running away from your problems!’”

Listening as An Inside Job

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Hello Reader,

Got inner listening?

Every few years, I come across a slick paged popular magazine article, with a description on “listening,” advising such skills such as nodding your head, or not crossing your arms. I say: “Never mind!” 

And (figuratively) so says Richard Farson, the man who first observed and described all those visible skills, skills now taught to social workers. At the time, he was working with psycho-therapist Carl Rogers. 

What Farson says, specifically, is he wishes he had never published all those “skills.” Because, and I agree with him, it is better just to listen sincerely. (He says this in his great little book Management of the Absurd, with forward by Michael Crichton) I am sure if you are listening hard then your physical actions, if any, will take care of themselves—Better than using your skills to to fake that you are listening! 

Instead of skills, why not follow the advice of Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurly Brown who said, in her famous Mad Men era self help book, Sex and the Single Girl, (in my own words) “when you go on a date, listen really hard.” Isn’t that common sense? I guess not.

Listening “hard and sincerely” leads us into the realm of “focus.” A good word. Unfortunately, the closest the magazine articles ever get to “focus” is this advice: to paraphrase back what the other person just said. But I think “saying back” is mostly meant to make sure you interpreted right, not for helping you to stay focused on hearing what the other person is saying.

Focus means getting beyond your ego. I try. People have long said I am a good listener, which would always surprise me: Doesn’t everyone try hard? But I realize now I’ve been doing more than just trying hard: Having recently read Zen in the Art of Archery, I am aware of things beyond our everyday understanding.

Now, before I delve into the “zen” of an ego-disciplined mind, let me hasten to observe that some well-meaning people dial down their listening. Why? Because they assume they are “supposed to” be trying to “think as they hear,” meaning: thinking of what they will reply. My response? Don’t do that! Don’t try to do two things at once. Only listen. 

I am convinced it is worthwhile to wait until the other person’s sentence has come to a full stop. Only then boot up your CPU (Central Processing Unit) to think it over, and then, only after that, think of what to say. What seems to take too many seconds? Worth it! For then the person feels heard… 

In this sad world, for too many people, being heard is all too rare: No wonder I get told I am a good listener. I will always show even an impatient “type A personality” that I respect them enough to take time to listen and think. Even an impatient person will respect that. 

And hey, let’s remember, time telescopes when you are being looked at. What seems like a few long seconds? Microseconds! It’s barely a few microseconds.

I am sure there is an inner level of listening many people never achieve. From Book Three of David Gerrold’s War against the Chtorr, told in the first person, is a scene in a children’s refugee orphan camp. Even though the hero wants something from the young camp director, he isn’t truly listening. 

QUOTE 

I made an impatient waving gesture with one hand. “I know all that, Birdie. Let’s just cut to the chase, all right?”

She turned her chair to face me, pulled it close and leaned in close. She said, “What I’m getting at is this: for someone who seen as much and done as much in the past two years as you have, you are one of the most pompous, arrogant, and unlikable bigots it has ever been my misfortune to deal with. I like you, but it doesn’t change the fact that you have the very bad habit of not really listening to people. You’re not really listening now. You’re more concerned with boogey men up in the hills than in dealing with the children you’ve supposedly accepted responsibility for. At the first…

UNQUOTE (page 289)

Key phrase: “You aren’t really listening.”

Ego. Such a strange filter. It is a listener’s weak ego, I am sure, including his “I know more than you do” that makes him assume his own concerns, during a conversation, including his thoughts about the future, are more important than the person “here and now.” Ego can filter out the big world, if we are not willing to humbly release our own little world while we listen.

But there’s another sort of filter used by the weak: Here’s a scenario from an essay by computer millionaire Paul Graham. He runs a company to advise groups of “founders” of “startup” (computer software) companies. Again the place is an office. Graham converses, but do they listen? He describes unsuccessful founders in terms of their listening.

QUOTE Like real world resourcefulness, conversational resourcefulness often means doing things you don't want to. Chasing down all the implications of what's said to you can sometimes lead to uncomfortable conclusions. The best word to describe the failure to do so is probably "denial," though that seems a bit too narrow. A better way to describe the situation would be to say that the unsuccessful founders had the sort of conservatism that comes from weakness. They traversed idea space as gingerly as a very old person traverses the physical world. UNQUOTE

At the office location, Graham’s partner wrote:

QUOTE
My feeling with the bad groups is that coming into office hours, they've already decided what they're going to do and everything I say is being put through an internal process in their heads, which either desperately tries to munge what I've said into something that conforms with their decision or just outright dismisses it and creates a rationalization for doing so. They may not even be conscious of this process but that's what I think is happening when you say something to bad groups and they have that glazed over look. I don't think it's confusion or lack of understanding per se, it's this internal process at work.

With the good groups, you can tell that everything you say is being looked at with fresh eyes and even if it's dismissed, it's because of some logical reason e.g. "we already tried that" or "from speaking to our users that isn't what they'd like," etc. Those groups never have that glazed over look. UNQUOTE

(from the essay A Word to the Resourceful, (link)

Maybe if folks say I’m a good listener then it’s because my eyes don’t glaze over: You might say I keep a zen “beginner’s mind.”

Back to those popular magazines with slick pages for people to carelessly flip through: I think it logically follows that pop writers won’t put in dense paragraphs that require effort: Nothing about such hard-to-describe things as “zen,” or “filters,” or even “focus.”  

I think if the average person won’t set their ego aside, then the average person won’t be a good listener. A wise man said: The average person can’t run a mile; it’s normal to be able to run four miles. 

Dear reader, let us listen normally, from the inside.

Sean Crawford

In a cabin in the foothills

Calgary

October

2018

Sad Sidebar: 

I wonder: Was Paul Bremer, America’s man in Iraq, in charge of America’s war effort “to instil democracy,” any good at listening? Or—? Question: Did President Bush send a closed-eared ‘control freak’ to Iraq? Given Bremer’s gargantuan, egregious mistakes, mistakes that every single Iraqi taxi driver, barber, translator or Iraqi leader would have advised against, crying “Nooo…!” I guess I don’t have to ask.

In the nonfiction book Imperial Life in the Emerald City (with a foreword by the director of the Matt Damon movie Green Zone) is the chapter The Plan Unravels.

How sad: 

An Arab council to create a government is listening and sharing and consensus building, and has al-l-l-most enough mutual confidence to announce agreement with Bremer’s plan. Rushing to a vote would only result in a glorified opinion poll. Bremer? Not listening. He uses his power, as leader of the American Occupation, to order them to rush.

Across Iraq, disaster ensues.

The chapter ends quoting Adel Abtel-Mahdi, later the finance minister, saying ruefully, “If Bremer had only given us an extra day, none of this would have happened. We would have had the democratic government that the Americans promised us when they went to war.”  

Our grandparents had a folk ballad:

For the want of a nail, a (horse) shoe is lost,

For the want of a shoe, a rider is lost,

For the want of a rider, a battle is lost,

For the want of a battle, a kingdom is lost,

And all for the want of a nail.

Sing it, sister:

“For the want of an ear, 

a country is lost,

For the want of a country,

A war (on terror) is lost, 

and all for the want of an ear.”

That book, by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, is published by Vintage Books, and has won several awards.

Three Footnotes:

~In the second paragraph I mentioned Carl Rogers. I really liked Roger’s brand of therapy, of listening with positive regard and acceptance—just reading Roger’s work was healing for me, back in my youth.

~Women's Liberation (feminism) arose as women met for circles of "consciousness raising" where they would defy society (and what they were "supposed to" think) by listening to each other.

~For Making Conversation, here’s a nice link, where I found that being in a conversation is like being in the world, like looking for a blog topic: Get off, (the couch) Go out, and “Prepare to be amazed.”

Star Trek Silly Season

Hello Reader,

Remember the 1960’s?

It’s “the silly season,” as news reporter call it. Parliament is in recess, nothing’s happening, and journalists are resorting to stories about the Loch Ness monster, and nostalgia for Star Trek. Me too. 

Now, some of my very best writing is not my essays, but my comments on other people’s blogs. That said, not so “best” were the comments of me and others on the blog of Scott Berkun, gentleman and scholar, when he answered a reader’s question by posting Star Trek and the ideas we must reject in order to save our future. (See footnote) He received 22 comments, some of them quite lengthy.

In the spirit of the silly season, here are my comments for Scott’s post.

The first came after a commenter, believe it or not, “dissed” Star Trek! I was shocked, shocked I say! So I commented too:

Call me a computer nerd, but:

Lisa, above, is confusing the later Star Trek universe, made during grim Reagonomics and so forth, with STOS (Star Trek the original series) made during the cresting wave of the age of Aquarius. This original series remains ever a cultural icon.

Remember? Starships could “destroy an entire planet” but didn’t, and phallic weapons were never carried in visible holsters,

(unlike on Wagon Train, the show’s touchstone for having guest stars who had been in the train/crew all along)

but tucked beneath one’s shirt.

The median year for African countries getting independence, (by my count) was 1960, only six years before the show. So the anti-imperialist Prime Directive was a welcome shock.

The Klingons were Bad Guys who, as someone (David Gerrold?) joked, had no bathtubs on their ships, but hey, you would never see one unless you went out into space.

Then I had to correct my “oopsy,” also known as a factual error:

Oops. I should have written “mode year” not “median year.”

Details: Mode means the year (number) repeated the most. Median would be the number in the middle, like a dotted road median. “Mean” would be the number that is conventionally “average.”

Well, it’s been literally decades since I took any statistics. (Strange, at my age, to measure lots of things now in decades instead of years)

We commenters had fun: 

Call me old, but I enjoy my memories:

For Star Trek, I never got used to the velcro thingy, too futuristic-silly for me, because in one of the first episodes to air, Kirk has a leather-looking holster thingy you can see for a second as he pulls his shirt down, getting ready to beam to the planet. It looked yellow, but our TV set was black and white, so I don’t know.

The brand new department store was two miles away (walking right angles) and I remember when the salesmen still couldn’t get the three colour knobs right (Jeanie had green skin) so there would be a wall of televisions with all different colour settings. I went home and reported what color the ST uniforms were.

Star Trek, airing in 1966, just barely caught the change to color TV. Lost in Space, as I know from re-runs, had their first season in black and white.

I have read they didn’t make Spock have green skin, because the make up would look bad on b&w TVs.

As for make up and fashions, on rare occasion I would see signs in the dirt sidewalk that the high school girls had worn high heels. I don’t know if any wore mini skirts. At our elementary school I think one girl did, I forget, (and all the boys in my grade—but not the younger grades—kept their hair short until junior high) but I dimly remember strangers my age from other schools wearing minis. 

I will tell you what a lot of elementary girls wore for our fashion show (fund raiser), which I haven’t seen since: Three piece bathing suits. Truly society was in transition.

Would I want my granddaughter wearing a miniskirt? As Spock would say in the episode with computer warfare: “I said I understand/have memories, I did not say I approve.”

You will recall that the first blogs were intended partly for community, with lots of intra-comments. So we communed:

Hi Scott, Lisa, Tony, everyone:

I guess it was Christmas of 1969 that we (a brother and I) got a model kit for Christmas, complete with room for a battery so (the front nacelles?) would light up. What I’m clear on is the box included a cheap booklet that included advice on how to write in to save the show, advising “don’t put Star Trek on the envelope” or it would be passed on to the actual show, not the network. It said the next season would start with the “never before seen” Turn About Intruder, and then re-runs, so save the show!

Also in the booklet you could send away for Spock’s pendant, brief celluloid film clips, and actual scripts. That was an eye opener, (either then or later) since it was super obvious the third season had all the bad episodes.

When I took Macbeth in high school I counted five episode titles.

Luckily for me, we lost our TV part way through the series, and so for years I could look forward to possibly seeing a new-to-me episode.

Since I left home in mid-1975, it would have been sometime in the first half of the decade that my brother perused the TV guide and pointed out there was an episode showing, on some channel or other, seven days a week. So the show was popular years before Star Wars encouraged a movie release with Star Wars style orchestra music, instead of futuristic space music.

(And hey, the above was probably before cable, let alone satellite) We all got on a roll, even unto non-Star Trek things. Of course you remember The Troubles With Tribbles episode!:

• Call me a fan, but I can’t resist sharing:
• Speaking of the tribbles script by David Gerrold, I put his Chtorr War series in the “about me” section on favorite books in my blog. The series has lots to say about integrity, responsibility and leadership. It’s told first person, like a detective story, as the hero learns about life and the alien Chtorr.
  
• The series starts with exposition about some serious plagues (only 76 congressmen survive) Now the survivors have to “step up to the plate” and not say, “Let George do it.”
  
• Everyone feels like an orphan in mourning, everyone therefore has a golden excuse to escape into alcoholism and drugs, but the good ones carry on. The hero starts out as a spoiled brat, but he learns better.
  
• The army is integrated, to the point where the young hero often forgets to mention the gender of a soldier in the background.
  The feminist in me laughs at how he gets a girl friend (husband and child deceased) who is older, more sexually and relationship-ly experienced, taller, smarter and of higher military rank.
  As you might guess, Gerrold is from wacky Southern California.

I guess we talked of how in the Star Trek future humans were all so affluent. No wonder we had less war in the future.

Lisa: Thank you.

Scott (and everybody): 

Regarding American society and affluence, I just tried a search engine. No luck.

But I’m sure that (probably in a coffee table patriotic picture book) John Steinbeck wrote something years ago which I’m still thinking about:

That Americans, after several generations of trying, had finally achieved affluence … and for the first time were at a loss as to what to do next.

I suppose we meant that United Statesians had lost one of their national dreams.

…Well dear reader, that’s enough silliness. 

For next week’s post, maybe I’ll blog deadly dull, and serious. But don’t worry, it will be posted near labour day, so I don’t suppose you will read it.

Sean Crawford

August

in a loft in Cochrane,

2018

Footnote: 

~Here’s the link to Berkun’s post. I am a fan of his web site.

~For more about TV history, of a more scholarly bent, see my essay Death of Buffy, archived January 2012. 

~For the death of Buffy’s friend, see Anya, Friend of Buffy, archived April 2017, regarding how at last I understand her phobia for bunny rabbits.