I try to keep up, but I am struggling with the lingo in snowboarding and journalism.
I am not going to gripe that my first skis were solid wood, that “bumps” used to be moguls or that “halfpipe” makes me think of “Don’t Bogart that joint.”
But I am having trouble this Winter Olympics with excited snowboarding announcers using terms such as “off-axis backside rodeo,” “method air,” “front side Alley Oop” and “air-to-fakie.” I think I get “verticality,” but am still stumped by “heavy widers.” 
Nor will I dwell on my newspaper career starting when “journalism” was a word more often associated with “school” than putting out a daily paper. I was still tending bar when my crusty first editor finally softened on my periodic employment requests and asked, “You still interested in the newspaper business?”
Practitioners in my early days smoked, cursed and criticized co-workers and competition alike. The wilder ones showed their regard for readers and co-workers by throwing telephone receivers into trash cans, sticking them in their crotches during particularly annoying calls and heaving an occasional typewriter. I’ve heard tell of newsmen in Santa Fe setting a self-important “colleague’s” copy on fire while still in his teletype. But all this is nothing compared to autocratic editors impaling your polished prose on a treacherous device known as a “spike.” Spike was both a noun and a verb, but it meant DOA in either form.
A story was a story and a brief was a brief. With deadlines looming and backshops waiting, you were told to write in numbers of words or “takes” to the length of the “hole.” There were “brights,” “features,” “Sunday stories.” I was assigned in my second year as a young reporter to do a “writing job” on a Bicentennial event without further instruction. With time and space often at issue, the appropriate form might be determined by an unsentimental editors wielding a thick pencils, giant scissors and sloppy glue pots.
I am not particularly proud of this history, but I still do a double take when I hear newspaper people utter words such as “colleague,” “longform” and “nuance.”
And I will tune in to the Olympics again tonight to see if Shaun White can pull off another “giant backside double McTwist.”
Fortunately, stepping on the beaver-squirrel in the dark was not my only experience this morning, although my wakening epiphany — involving dubious dietary choices — was just as mundane.
But does anyone read “Black Beauty” or Homer Price anymore? Nephew Will was deep into Harry Potter the last time he was here. I think niece Nancy may already reading in French. I’m sure nephew Tom has long outgrown my recollections of his toy-train interests.
dream ranch 