Let's stop apostrophe abuse!

Lorraine Collins offers her Black Hills Pioneer column to us every two weeks or so, and we always enjoy them. We trust you do, too.

The big black headline in the newspaper said, "Resident's brace for storm." I wondered who this resident was and what his brace looked like. I don't know why the headline writer was so determined to add an apostrophe between the t and the s, but maybe it results from what seems to be a widespread paranoia about the apostrophe. People seem to be afraid of it, and they aren't sure just what to do with it, so every now and then they shut their eyes and fling it onto the page, hoping it lands in the right place.

On the theory that knowledge overcomes fear, as a public service I thought I might spend a moment or two today helping folks get acquainted with the apostrophe so they can learn to live with it or, sometimes, without it. I presume the headline writer meant to indicate more than one resident was bracing for a storm. Actually, the plural of "resident" is simply "residents" with no apostrophe required. Apostrophes are used in the English language for only two reasons: to indicate a letter has been left out, as in "don't" for "do not" or to indicate possession, as in "the resident's snow shovel."

It may seem odd that I'm so concerned about the apostrophe when so much other damage is being done to the English language as we used to know it. We used to worry about the degradation of language by using the lingo common to e mail, but now we have Twitter and texting syntax to worry about. Some believe these are going to be the ruination of eloquence and poetry if the trend keeps up. Can you imagine Romeo texting to Juliet, "LU! UR 6Y!"

Although I may be fighting a rearguard action in a lost war, I believe the apostrophe is the single most abused and misused punctuation mark in the English language. Some aficionados of the apostrophe have become so concerned that they formed the Apostrophe Protection Society. I'm not an official member of the society, but want to do my bit to protect the apostrophe anyway. So this is my lecture on why the apostrophe exists and what we should do with it. Please pay attention as I do not want to go through this again.

One problem folks have occurs when they want to indicate that more than one person possesses something, such as a house, so we see signs such as "The Smith's" by a front door.

Actually, this means that a single person named Smith lives there, and maybe his or her first name is "The." If the Smiths want to indicate that more than one Smith possesses the house, they should put the apostrophe after the letter s. A sign saying The Smiths' indicates the reality of the situation. But people seem even more troubled by the apostrophe in these cases.

So my solution is to simply have the sign saying "The Smiths" with no apostrophe whatever, indicating that The Smiths live here and never mind who owns the house. Another solution would be to just have a sign that says "Bob and Betty Smith". No apostrophe required and it offers more information anyway, to the guy who comes to the door wanting to sell a vacuum cleaner. He can say, "Hello, Betty, may I show you a nice vacuum cleaner?"

One last word: of all the trouble dealing with apostrophes, the worst seems to be deciding between "it's" and "its". The thing to do is to think of "its" as being just like other words indicating possession, such as his, her, our, your, or my, none of which has an apostrophe. So one can say his glove, her coat, its dog house. To put an apostrophe in the word indicates that a letter has been left out, as in "It's a really cold day" or "If that woman doesn't shut up about the apostrophe, it's going to drive me mad."

Lorraine Collins is a writer who lives in Spearfish. She can be reached at collins1@rushmore.com.

America's "Voice"

Despite intense jamming by the Soviet Union and China during the Cold War, and unabashed political assaults within the U.S. government over the years, the Voice of America has survived.

Alas, while the broadcasting service is a mere shadow of its former self, VOA continues to span the globe in 45 languages, reaching an audience that they estimate at about 130 million people every week. To serve that audience, VOA uses shortwave, FM, medium wave AM broadcasts, the Internet, and television.

Long-time international broadcaster Alan Heil, Jr., who toiled in the vineyards of VOA from 1962 until 1998, has written Voice of America – A History, and it’s a masterful history of an important American institution. While little known within U.S. borders because of the Smith-Mundt Act (yep, that’s South Dakota’s own Karl Mundt), the Voice of American has been a beacon of information and hope for millions of people around the world since it was created in 1942.

The Heil book introduces us to VOA by providing a fascinating narrative about its role in providing news and information to some 60 million Chinese during the tumultuous 1989 uprising in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. The VOA delivered news that the Chinese citizens couldn’t get from their own government. It’s a compelling story that hooks the reader right away.

Then Heil escorts readers back to the origin of the VOA in 1942, when its first broadcasts in German pledged to listeners in Europe, “We bring you voices from America. Today, and daily from now on, we shall speak to you about America and the war. The news may be good for us. The news may be bad. But we shall tell you the truth.”

And that has been a guiding light for VOA for nearly seven decades.

Heil sorts out the continuing struggle to “get it straight” during the early journalistic years of VOA. He provides insightful stories of correspondents doing their jobs from Cairo and Beijing to Munich and Moscow. He adds some touching stories about the many talented immigrants who escaped from dire political and economic circumstances to find a home at the Voice of America. There’s an inside look at the abiding struggle for a VOA charter and independence – a firewall from political influence.

While the bulk of the book focuses upon news and information services at VOA, Heil also pays tribute to the value of music and cultural programs. He acknowledges the plight of many VOA broadcasters: they are well known around the world, but unknown at home. The late Willis Conover (at right), long-time producer and host of “Music USA” jazz programs was a real celebrity around the globe, but virtually unknown in the United States.

Alan Heil's book takes the reader right up to the turn of the century (it was published in 2003). It’s extremely well documented, but it reads every bit as easily as a good novel. Alas, its final chapter, “Conclusion,” leaves the reader with some anxiety about the future of VOA.

And rightfully so.

By 2010, we find a complicated menagerie of bureaucracies – each pitted against the other – fighting for missions and funding from the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG). It’s the 9-member BBG that tries to oversee not only the Voice of America, but a group of so-called “surrogate” broadcasters – also funded by U.S. taxpayers. English and many foreign language broadcasts have been chopped from the VOA schedule. Some of those foreign broadcasts, like Arabic, were moved to the surrogate agencies: Radio Free Asia, Middle East Broadcasting Networks, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), and Radio and TV Marti broadcasts to Cuba in Spanish.

As nearly as we can tell, the BBG has allowed itself to be mired in day-to-day operations, rather than focusing upon policy and planning. Some of the services seem bent on luring only a young audience, thus we find a real dominance of music and youth-oriented programming – at the expense of news and information programming.

We were taken by a quotation Heil offered by our former public broadcasting colleague and one-time VOA Director, Mary Bitterman, who said, “It is not the organizational structure which permits creativity and integrity, but the character of the people involved in oversight.”

Alan Heil’s book offers a rare glimpse of both the organizational structures – and the people – who have shaped the Voice of America.

The grass roots league

Our neighbor Lorraine Collins always has an interesting perspective on a wide range of topics. This time she writes about journalism -- specifically, well-known columnist Ellen Goodman. It's a piece that might catch your interest -- and perhaps spur a comment or two. Lorraine's commentaries appear regularly in the Black Hills Pioneer, and this is her most recent offering. She graciously allows us to share it with on-line readers here.

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A very fine columnist for the Boston Globe, syndicated in many newspapers including some in South Dakota, retired this month. Her name is Ellen Goodman and I met her a couple of times more than 30 years ago. Just as she was retiring, she was interviewed on the Public Radio show, "Talk of the Nation." She sounded great, laughing when asked why she was retiring. Her answer was, "My editor asked me that, too, and I said, 'Why not?'" She had been a journalist for 41 years.

She still is a journalist, of course, just no longer regularly employed . I'd say we're in the same boat, except she's been on an ocean liner and my craft has been more like a canoe. I was interested to hear her say that she once worked for Newsweek Magazine in New York. A few years earlier I had a similar job at Time Magazine. We were both "editorial researchers", all of whom were women, gathering data, contacting correspondents, interviewing people, getting whatever the writer needed, handing him the file. All writers were men. After the men writers had written their articles, we would have to check those for facts. If the guy said "This is the longest bridge in Venezuela" we had to find out whether it really was.

Ellen Goodman said that people she has talked to in the intervening years were not surprised that she was discriminated against for being a woman, but they were surprised that it was legal. This was before the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Ellen Goodman's career has been much more straightforward than has mine. She left New York, as I did, but she went home to Massachusetts and continued to be a journalist for the Boston Globe. Eventually she won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary. Well, I went home to South Dakota and eventually was named The South Dakota Presswomen' s Woman of the Year, but it's hardly the same. I first met Ellen in Mitchell in 1977 when this was the site of the South Dakota International Women's Year Conference. She was our Keynote Speaker and I was co-chair of this event.

Later that year, at the National IWY event in Houston, Ellen was there covering the conference and interviewed me. This long ago event, now buried in the detritus of history, was very controversial at the time. Betty Friedan was on one side, and Gloria Steinem was on the other. Should we be concerned about Gay Rights, or just Women's Rights? I sided with Friedan, thinking that the only issue we had was that gay women should have the same rights as gay men, just as straight women should have the same rights as straight men. Our side lost and the huge arena erupted with celebrations of pink and blue balloons up in the gallery. It was some experience, I tell you.

I've thought, sometimes, about Ellen Goodman and me, our similarities and differences. She continued to be a very good journalist and commentator in a very good venue, sophisticated, metropolitan, East Coast. I came back here to the hinterlands, which seems to be a place I like. Although apparently her life has been devoted only to journalism, I've been active in politics and public office, have ventured into writing fiction, which I love doing. I think well, she's been in the big leagues, and I've been in the minor leagues, but I'm comfortable with that.

I think of the Rapid City Rush hockey players, the minor league baseball players, the golfers who never quite make it to the PGA tour. Life is pretty good out here in the minor leagues, and sometimes I think I can still make a difference in some small way in how this community, this state, this nation runs its affairs. I call this the Grass Roots League.

Lorraine Collins is a writer who lives in Spearfish. She can be reached at collins1@rushmore.com.

Veteran broadcaster gone

One of the legends of South Dakota television has passed away. Veteran broadcaster Dave Deadrick died Friday, January 22nd in Sioux Falls.

While we had met Dave in the 1980s when he was still going strong at KELO-TV, we didn’t know him well. But his visage was well known for decades throughout east river – and later west river, when KELO expanded its television operation to Rapid City.

A long-time weatherman for KELO-TV Channel 11 in Sioux Falls, he was perhaps even better known as Captain 11, host of the longest-running children’s program in the country. It was a job he loved for 41 years.

He reportedly was the first voice broadcast by KELO-TV when it went on the air in May of 1953 and landed the job as Captain 11 by winning a coin toss! Dave was inducted into the South Dakota Broadcasters Hall of Fame in 1997 and the South Dakota Hall of Fame in 1999.

Dave Deadrick was 81 years old. Read Dave's full obituary.

A new decade, a new word

Our neighbor Lorraine Collins always has an interesting perspective on a wide range of topics. Here's another that should catch your interest -- and perhaps spur a comment or two. Her commentaries appear regularly in the Black Hills Pioneer, and this one helped launch us into the 21st century. She graciously allows us to share it with on-line readers here.

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I was one of those who thought that the first decade of the 21st Century wouldn't be completed until the end of 2010. When we start counting, we begin with the number one, after all, and when sorting things by tens, whether years or pennies, we end with the number 10. So why was everyone insisting that 2009 ended a decade? I suppose it was because we started with zero, or three of them, in 2000. So by 2009 we'd lived through ten years, and thus a decade, but it still didn't seem right to me.

A decahedron has ten faces, a decagon has ten angles and ten sides, and the Ten Commandments are a Decalogue. Knowing all this, it's just hard for me to accept that the number 9 ended a decade. I'll have to get used to it, I know. Just as I've had to accept the fact that when people talk about an event that "decimated" a town, they really mean it devastated the town, not that only 10% was ruined. Originally, I believe the word decimate meant that a conqueror would line up the defeated troops and count off, selecting every tenth one to be killed. In this case, only those unlucky fellows would be decimated and the other 9 in the group were spared.

At the end of one decade and the beginning of another, pundits and prognosticators have a tendency to recall momentous events of the previous ten years and try to predict what the next ten years will bring. I read and heard quite a few of these the first week of January. There was some hope for peace and prosperity, for the end of the wars, the flourishing of science and art, the building of a stable economy. Of course others predicted even more armed conflicts, natural disasters and the disintegration of civilization as we know it. Given the violent attack on our homeland, economic collapse, and the misguided adventure of invading Iraq, we can see why Apocalyptic predictions do have a certain appeal. Enough bad things happened in the last decade to make us fear what might happen in this one.

So, are we getting better and better every day, or are we just waiting for the next catastrophe to show up as a distant blip on our radar screens, moving inexorably and ominously closer? In a delightful book titled "Archie and Mehitabel" written by Don Marquis early in the 20th Century, he wrote that "An optimist is a guy that has never had much experience." By now I've had a lot of experience, but I'm going to be optimistic anyway. I'm going to be optimistic because I think maybe we are actually going to start paying attention to something called accountability.

I tend to think that citizens in the United States and several other countries are fed up with lame excuses and such non-accountable explanations as "mistakes were made." We've heard too much of that over the last decade. We're fed up with people, whether on Wall Street or Washington or in state government or in business not being held accountable, not accepting personal responsibilities for their actions. This gives me some reason for optimism, if not "irrational exuberance."

When people start demanding accountability, not only from those in positions of political and economic power, but from themselves, and how they conduct their lives and the decisions they make, then I do think there's hope for the future. Democracies depend on an informed and literate population, which means people have to think, to be able to distinguish mindless rants from reasoned argument, and to be willing to hold themselves as well as their leaders accountable.

If there's a word I want to hear in this new decade, it's accountability. Let's see how much of that we find in this new year of the new decade. It may tell us how the other nine years will go.

Lorraine Collins is a writer who lives in Spearfish. She can be contacted at collins1@rushmore.com.

Ink for needless art

One of our pet-peeves while working in radio news years ago was the gratuitous use of what we called “actualities” -- small snippets of sound, or comments by newsmakers or observers.

When they really added substance to a story, and they often did, such devices were invaluable. But using an actuality just for the sake of using an actuality was – and is -- sloppy. It adds nothing to the story.

Such is the case with unnecessary “art” for daily newspapers and other print media.

I was reminded of this yesterday (1/26/10) when the Rapid City Journal ran a photograph of Chris Nelson, South Dakota Secretary of State. It was attached to a short story in which Nelson reminded candidates, political parties and others, that the deadline for campaign finance reports is just around the corner. The story was likely a routine press release out of Nelson’s office. Certainly not a big story, but probably worth some ink. But Journal editors could have done without the photograph.

Is it important that I know what this guy looks like? If so, I could take a peek at any of the 100+ photos of him that the Journal has used over the past few years (Okay, okay, I didn't really count them all).

I’ve never met Chris Nelson, but I suspect he’s doing a pretty good job as Secretary of State, based upon what I’ve heard and read.

Oh, yes, did I mention he’s running for Congress? Now that’s the Chris Nelson story that deserved an accompanying photo!

Fighting "...irrational negativity"

This has been an interesting week.

The Denver Post’s parent company has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The New York Times is positioned to start charging for its on-line content. And the Rapid City Journal’s owner – Lee Enterprises – reports revenues for 2009 dropped by 18.2 percent.

In fact, Lee indicated that its yearend report was actually encouraging news. Fourth Quarter revenues were down by 14%. Lee owns the Rapid City Journal, the Bismarck (ND) Tribune, the Casper Star-Tribune, and several Montana papers among its stable of some 53 dailies. They also operate more than 300 “specialty” publications in 23 states.

Lee CEO Mary Junck, in a letter to stockholders, ticked off a wide range of Lee accomplishments, including the refinancing of $1.3 billion of debt and streamlined operations.

“Through intense collaboration, our editors redesigned our pages to a reduced width of 11 inches, gaining approval from readers and advertisers,” Junck wrote. That move helped Lee shave newsprint usage by 31 percent.

Interestingly, Lee has launched a public relations campaign to combat what Junck called the continuing, “irrational negativity” about the future of newspapers. One of the PR steps was producing the "business card" similar to the one shown here for the Rapid City Journal, touting the audience and performance of Lee. Click on the card to see how the Journal and other Lee papers are attacking that negativity. Similar cards were done for all of Lee’s 53 daily newspapers.

Meanwhile, over in Colorado, Denver Post CEO Dean Singleton is promising no layoffs as a result of imminent Chapter 11 bankruptcy for MediaNews Group, a Denver-based organization that owns the Post, Boulder Camera, and 52 other daily newspapers. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that MediaNews has been “teetering for months.” The bankruptcy will reportedly reduce MediaNews debt from $930 million to $165 million, and Singleton suggested employees play up the positive aspects of the Chapter 11 filing.

Perhaps Singleton and Junck – and many newspaper executives have been talking with one another about how to paint a rosier picture.

To be sure, we’re hopeful that newspapers can re-invent themselves into a sustainable product that endures for years to come. Perhaps I’m old fashioned (perhaps??!!) but thumbing through and reading the morning paper is a joy I don’t want to give up.

On-line news just isn’t quite as cathartic. Especially if you have to pay for it, after having enjoyed free access to the New York Times for such a long time. One of the last holdouts offering free access to its on-line version, the Times will likely announce within the next few weeks exactly how it expects to monetize its on-line services.

We support charging for these services. But exactly how such fees are assessed and at what level will be a challenge. We like the “tease” approach being used by the Black Hills Pioneer (a Seaton publication), whereby you can read a paragraph or two – and possibly enjoy a photo – before being prompted to click a link to “…read more.” That’s when readers can subscribe to the full-meal deal and read the entire paper on-line.

On-line journalism is likely to continue to grow. We trust it will also get significantly better. If newspapers can survive and then thrive in a modified form, that would be a good thing, giving us some choices.

For now, we’re entrenched with one foot in the print world and one in the on-line world. We can live with that.

Here we are again already

Our neighbor Lorraine Collins always has an interesting perspective on a wide range of topics. Here's another that should catch your interest -- and perhaps spur a comment or two. Her commentaries appear regularly in the Black Hills Pioneer, and this one appeared in the December 16, 2009 edition. She graciously allows us to share it with on-line readers here.

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Maybe it's because as we get older time seems to go by faster, but it seems to me that it was just yesterday, rather than December a year ago, that Governor Rounds was delivering his 2008 Budget Address and asking Legislators to go home and encourage all their constituents to go out and buy something to help out with sales tax revenue. Apparently this didn't work because last week the governor delivered his 2009 Budget Address and said revenues were "flat" while expenses have been going up. But this time, he didn't ask the Legislators to go home and ask us to spend more money, presumably because he knows many of us can't.

According to his speech, unemployment is the highest since1985 and unemployed people don't buy a lot of stuff. The governor said that the number of people on Medicaid has now reached 110,000, with more people enrolling in the program in the last ten months than in the previous four years. It was pretty clear a year ago that we were going to have what's called a "shortfall" in terms of income versus expenses. That is, the state was in the same trouble many of its citizens are every month. And it still is.

As I listened carefully to the governor's address which largely consisted of a blizzard of statistics, I scribbled down various notes which I now have difficulty reading. But by now, there have been editorial comments, objections, amplifications, and suggested alternatives to the governor's proposed budget and I think I get the gist of it. The governor made a point of saying that 49 cents of every budget dollar goes toward education, from kindergarten to graduate school, and that 36 cents goes toward "taking care of people." So 85% of the state budget goes for education and social services, and one would have to be a Scrooge or a Grinch to object to that.

However, he said he could not increase state aid to education at all, although I thought there was a law that says schools are supposed to get an increase every year amounting to 3% or the rate of inflation, whichever is less. It wouldn't have amounted to much this year, but it would have been something. It will be interesting to see what the Legislature does with that. Every year there are various proposals to increase state aid to education, to revise the formula or change the rules, and every year we seem to go along more or less as we have been.

In talking about a "structural deficit" the governor said the deficit isn't caused "by our spending being out of control." I guess it isn't, since we rank so low in state support to education that it' s embarrassing. However, Representative Bernie Hunhoff of Yankton, minority leader of the House, said that growth of state government has been at twice the rate of inflation and he thought there should be cuts in the bureaucracy. That might be a good idea, but whether that would make any significant difference in making more money available to education is something I tend to doubt.

The fact is, state just doesn't take in enough money to meet current expenses and the only way we've been able to maintain things as well as we have is that the federal government pitches in more money than we do. It was interesting to note that state revenues for the general fund to support the governor's budget amounted to $1.2 billion while federal funds amounted to $1.9 billion. So I don't think we should complain too much about federal interference in our state.

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Governor Rounds closed his speech by remarking "We all believe in the common good." It's a good thing that taxpayers in the other 49 states are helping us out and I hope they continue to believe in our common good, until we can figure out how to come up with more money ourselves.
Lorraine Collins is a writer who lives in Spearfish. She can be reached at collins1@rushmore.com.

Lorraine Collins is a writer who lives in Spearfish. She can be contacted at collins1@rushmore.com.

Looking for transparency

It’s hard to cut through the crap.

Over the past many months, we’ve been bombarded with claims and counter-claims regarding health care reform. It’s likely to continue for the next several weeks with no real resolution in sight for the American people.

From assertions that we have the “best health care system in the world” to protestations that it’s “a broken health care system,” politicians and analysts of all stripes have hashed and re-hashed the topic with much hoopla but little clarity. Most of the dialogue has been in a less than thoughtful context, usually displayed in “point-counterpoint” sound bites with little substance.

We remain skeptical of the hyperbole offered from both sides of this squabble, but each has offered at least some evidence to justify their position – so it’s easy to be confused by the babble surrounding this important issue.

Passage of the Senate health care bill in the wee hours of December 21st was tainted with “compromise.” $100 million for the University Hospital in Senator Chris Dodd’s home state of Connecticut; exemptions from insurance fees for Michigan Blue Cross/Blue Shield; giving Florida a $ 3 billion to $5 billion sweetheart exemption from losing Medicare Advantage benefits; and numerous other deals.

None was more egregious than the $100 million federal payment for new Medicaid coverage in Nebraska – as well as an exemption from an insurance fee for Nebraska Blue Cross/Blue Shield and Mutual of Omaha.

Only days earlier, while visiting the Cornhusker state, we heard local radio stations playing sound bites in which Nebraska’s U.S. Senator Ben Nelson denied allegations that he and Nebraska had been threatened with federal cuts, if he didn’t support the administration’s health bill.

Rather than asking Nelson if he’d been threatened, reporters should have been asking him if he had been approached with bribes….er, “compromises.” Despite proclaiming that his vote “wasn’t for sale,” it was only a matter of hours before Nelson signed on to the health care package, greasing the skids to Nebraska for lots of federal money – at the expense of all other states.

But even these distasteful events weren’t what left us most disheartened.

Rather, it was the assurances offered earlier by President Obama that health care reform discussions would be out in the open and involve a wide range of players. They would even be aired on C-SPAN, he said. This turned out to be not true. There’ve been allegations that few senators even read the 2,100 page bill.

And when it comes time for a conference between the House and Senate versions of health care reform, it seems the president has chosen the West Wing of the White House as the location.

We believe our health care system is in serious need of reform, and we’re unconvinced that Congress is moving in the right direction. The fact that it has been back-room politics as usual, rather than the promised open deliberations, leaves us wondering if the only thing needing more attention than health care might be the Obama administration claim to "openness."

It’s highly unlikely we’ll ever see cameras in the West Wing, but President Obama could go a long way toward regaining citizen support by re-visiting his promise of government transparency and pushing for 11th hour C-SPAN coverage of this enormously important subject. But don't hold your breath.

Real dimension is better

As a 10-year-old kid, I was on the cutting edge of technology. I just didn’t know it.

Scrunched down in row #10 of the Pace Theater in Chadron – bedecked with nifty paper and plastic glasses made for the occasion – I ducked and yowled as a “House of Wax” barker slammed a rubber-ball from the movie screen straight for me and my friends.

The plot of that 1953 Vincent Price movie was a bit thin, but it was enough to satisfy me and my buddies. The highly-touted three-dimensional (3-D) technology was what really grabbed us and left indelible memories imprinted on our youthful minds. But 3-D movies didn’t succeed very well in the marketplace and were gone within a few years.

Fast-forward nearly 70 years and 3-D seems to be making a come-back.

Spurred by the notion of selling lots more new-fangled television sets, giant TV set manufacturers like Samsung, Sony, Vizio, and Panasonic say they’re going to really push 3-D television sales during the coming year. They enjoyed a big surge in the sales of high definition receivers over the past couple of years. They fear sales will soon slump and are looking for something to excite consumers.

Given the enormous strides made in television production technology in recent years, it’ll be fun to see what the set manufacturers can do.

Despite the fact that I worked around television most of my professional live – including the days before even rudimentary “chroma-key” or “green screen” techniques were used – I remain amazed at just how good these new technologies are. I’m still trying to figure out how those innovative rascals manage to show me the “1st and 10” line down on the football field, just like it’s really there….players running over it, obscuring it from sight, as if it were really a part of the field. Wow.

But I’m an early skeptic that 3-D will go far in the television world – at least so long as special eyeglasses are required. Some 3-D units will required battery-powered glasses.

I already have difficulty keeping track of where the various television remote controls are – the TV, the cable box, and the DVD player – so adding another device to the shelf might be a bit tricky. And batteries? Well, Triple-A would be good, since I keep them in stock, but I fear they’ll be using something smaller. Something lighter. Something that’s proprietary. Something costly! Pre-holiday reports indicate that the special glasses will likely cost at least $50.

Of course, making the TV receiver is only one part of the tricky 3-D equation. Local television stations are only now completing their conversion from analog to high definition local programming. Unless there is ample 3-D content available for broadcast, efforts to lure consumers to buy new sets – again -- will be doomed. After all, content is king.

But looking at most television programs these days, I’m not sure the television industry has quite figured that out.

Perhaps we’ll just take a simple stroll outside to enjoy a beautiful sunset – without 3-D glasses.