And now for all you appendectomy patients out there, here’s Mantovani playing the all-violin version of “Twist and Shout.” “The music helps reduce patients’ anxiety,” says Swedish Covenant Hospital chaplain Ruthanne Werner (in SCH’s Care Letter, Summer) of the hospital’s program offering headsets to patients before and during surgery. “Originally, we created a selection of in-house tapes of easy listening music. But we found that patients preferred to choose their own favorite radio stations.”
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Who needs local sources when you’re a major national paper? Chicago’s Coalition for New Priorities, on its preprimary contacts last spring with the two dailies on its referendum to slash military spending: “The week before the elections, we called the political editors of the two major dailies….The Sun-Times editor told us that she had been looking for our press release to get our number for the reporter, but we got the impression from the Tribune that if we had not called them, they would have written the story without ever even talking to us. Their story was biased, but would have been much worse without the quotes they used from us” (Handbook for Organizing a Referendum on New Priorities).
Vice president for lip service. Dan Quayle to newspaper executives in 1989: “I have often said that too much government information is classified….An educated and informed public is the foundation of a sound democracy.” Peter Montgomery, writing in Common Cause (July/August): “But when Harper’s magazine asked the vice president’s office how many college graduations Quayle had been invited to speak at this spring, his office first said there were too many to count and then withheld the number, claiming security needs.”
I think they’re trying to tell us something. Waterfront World magazine recently observed its tenth anniversary by listing “the top ten waterfront places of all time.” The Chicago Lakefront Plan of 1909 was ranked fourth (after Venice, the Brooklyn Bridge, and San Antonio’s Paseo del Rio). But no actual Chicago waterfront made the list.
