Today, Chronicle metro/state editorialist and gossip columnist Rick Casey gives us one of his occasional LiveJournal accounts:
With two patients ahead of me I walked out on the dermatologist after waiting 30 minutes.
This time it was, again, a dermatologist. I over-exposed my Irish skin to the South Texas sun in the years before sunblock was invented, when Coppertone had us broiling our skin in oil.
So I periodically get spot-sprayed with liquid nitrogen to remove lesions darkly identified as precancerous carcinoma.
But this time, to my chagrin, I lasted a full 90 minutes before marching out.
Who cares?
Is this really the stuff of a good metro/state column?
It is preferable to Casey’s prior column, which followed up on an earlier gossip column on a discussion group at an area community center with this fine bit of work:
At least one member of the group, however, had a historical reason to feel fear.
“This incident really had me very depressed and somewhat frightened,” wrote Lindmuth Fuller in an e-mail. “You have to understand that I was born in Germany, lived as a child during the Nazi area, then afterwards under Communism in East Berlin. It is amazing how past events have imprinted on your mind and come back to the forefront at certain times.”
One of America’s strengths is that our “past events” encourage us to stand up to our officials, not fear them.
Yes, in case you missed it the first time (we read Casey, because somebody should!), that was the Chronicle‘s metro/state editorialist and gossip columnist using an e-mail to compare Steve Radack and certain county employees to Nazi and Communist totalitarians.
Amazing!
Sedosi Alhambra sums it up well:
It’s a cheap shot that doesn’t have ANY place in a major metropolitan newspaper, I don’t care which side of the aisle you are on.
Alhambra’s right.
Casey’s work really detracts from a metro/state page that has seen improvement in its metro coverage. Perhaps he should be moved to the mediocre editorial page, which is a better fit substantively and stylistically.
