To and Fro – I have the Proof

To and Fro – I have the Proof was Originally Posted on July 30, 2010 by lavarock

I don’t take much time to proofread my blogs, mainly due to the fat that I have many unfinished projects here. I usually give them a read, however I could and would spend a half hour on each one just making sure punctuation and tense are all correct. I just don’t as I like them to be a bit conversational.

Beginning in college I worked for a local radio station in Jenkins Kentucky (at the time it was WREM). I lived two lives, being on the air and living in a college dorm. My formal training a a DJ or as I call it, an “air personality” was just being me. Conversational chit chat to keep the commercials from bumping against each other. Sometimes I would just make up stories to fill the time, or because I wanted to. It was similar to blogging, but to a local audience AND I had a censor!

The FCC dictated certain things like when you must announce the station call letters and what times you could and could not have the station on the air. Unlike George Carlin’s skit, I know of no “official” list of words you could not say on the air. You were “graded” so to speak by your listners. If they complained to the FCC then the FCC would evaluate if you were operating in the “public interest”. That is how people like Howard Stern could get away with his trash talk; people who objected to what he talked about just turned the dial.

Although we had no list per se, we did have a guide as to what we could get away with. I cannot remember any time in the years I was at the mike, where I uttered a profanity. With that said, I often wrote notes about what I wanted to say and consistantly thought and evaluated every word I was to utter. I didn’t worry much about the nuances of the differences betwen “nude” and “naked” the latter sounding a bit more harsh and sexual than the artsy word “nude”. I WAS careful to use the word “shoot” instead of a profanity of somewhat similar phrase.

When writing these blogs I usually start with an idea (although not always) and start typing. Soon I am almost done and it comes to me how the original idea morphed into something completely different. It is also not unheard of for me to go back a few months or years and not remember writing certain blogs. One time I was searching the internet and saw my name in a document. I finally realized that I have formatted the document back in the 80’s and had forgotten it completely.

Sometimes when I’m at Sandras (the owner of the pigs feet), we will be talking about dogs and I’ll be thinking way ahead and not concentrating on what I am saying. I’ll talk about Koa and say “she” or O`lena and say “he”. I get corrected, but you know, I DO know the difference, I just am not thinking about what I am saying. In Koa’s case, I used to have a half Golden Retreiver and half Collie miix. Her name was Goldie and she was my dog for something like 14 years or more. When I talked about my dog, it was always “she”. Then I get a male and kept thinking about the differences between them and the old “she” expression keeps coming forward.

So with that all said and done, I decided the title of the blog this time had to be “To and Fro – I have the Proof”. The proof refers to proofreading, which I often don’t do here. The “fro” part is what got me to write this particular blog to begin with.

I never learned to type. I hunt and peck with two hands and generally use my forfingers and thumbs to type and can actually type fairly quickly with few mistakes. Lately I found that either the keyboard has problems or I am not being as careful as I used to be. When I look back at my work I find that I have often typed “fro” fo the word “for”. The line “to the store” will come out “t othe store”. It appears I have problems with the letter “O”. I think I am just way ahead of my typing with my thoughts and not being carefull.

So in the above example you see “to” and “fro” giving me problems. Not so much as say, 75 pounds of pigs feet