Not every post needs to contain a detailed story. Sometimes, the content pretty much speaks for itself, as is the case with this posting from Internet Archive. It contains a collection of TV commercials which aired on ABC television between January and May 1977. Some, such as those with Bill Cosby's voice-overs for Del Monte corn speak more to the particular point in time than they do any lack of oversight of Mr. Cosby's pre-#MeToo behavior.
Here's the complete list of what's included with approximate times:
0:00 Oscar Mayer Bologna
0:32 Oscar Mayer Hot Dogs
1:02 ABC Bumper
1:07 Del Monte Corn (Bill Cosby narration)
1:37 Mounds/Almond Joy Candy Bars #1
2:08 The Six Million Dollar Man promo (episode: Danny's Inferno)
2:29 The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries promo
3:00 Triscuits Crackers (with Betty Buckley)
3:30 Campbell's Noodle-O's Soup
4:00 The Captain and Tennille Show promo
4:24 Golden Grahams Cereal
4:54 The Kodak Instant Camera with a Twist
5:25 AT&T Super-Switcher
6:24 Happy Days/Fonzie Loves Pinkie promo
6:55 McDonalds Fish
7:25 Purina Cat Chow
7:56 Nescafe Coffees
8:27 Carefree Sugarless Gum (with Dena Deitrich)
8:56 Kentucky Fried Chicken
9:28 Eight is Enough promo #1
9:50 Gaines-burgers Dog Food
10:20 Singer Sewing Machines (with Debbie Reynolds, George Dzundza and Michael Tucci)
Some, such as the promotional promo from "Captain and Tennille Show" (at 4:00) are worth revisiting since the Captain Darryl Dragon passed away just a few weeks ago, on January 2, 2019 at age 76, although as I noted in my post on the duo in April 2017, Toni Tennille was bitten by the celebrity bug, and it was more a showcase for her, with Mr. Dragon being mostly a musical backdrop for her. Another clip, this one for retailer Kinney Shoes starting at 23:20 featured actor and dancer Ken Berry, perhaps best known for his starring role as Vinton Harper on the seventies-to-eighties sitcom "Mama's Family" (catch my post on that http://hgm.sstrumello.com/2017/02/mamas-family-from-network-tv-also-ran.html for details) who passed away at age 85 on December 1, 2018.
Of course, I'm partial to the two commercials for Peter Paul Mounds/Almond Joy Candy Bars #1 which appears at 1:37 and another Peter Paul Mounds/Almond Joy Candy Bars #2 spot which appears at 13:16 because at the time, the company was still based in Connecticut where I grew up (long before being acquired by Cadbury, whose U.S. operations were later sold to Hershey). When I was growing up, class trips to the factory were always a favorite among grade school kids of that era.
Anyway, since these commercials were broadcast prior to the Copyright Act that took effect on January 1, 1978, the archivist presumes these commercials are all in public domain (most of them, at least) but he says he's certainly no copyright expert. These were included on DVD's of "The Brady Bunch Variety Hour" duped from tapes of the original broadcasts made by producers Sid & Marty Krofft which I obtained from a collector. They are broken into clips and shared them on various sites like RetroJunk over the years, but when he posted them as a complete collection on YouTube in 2013, the video quickly began averaging 1,000 hits a day. Due to the high-quality, extreme rarity and overwhelming popularity, it seemed like a no-brainer to make them available for download on The Internet Archive in full DVD quality.
On October 5, 2016, the main cast of the 1980's sitcom "Who's the Boss" reunited 25 years after the show ended in 1992. The reunion video appears on Time's (relatively) new streaming video service (which launched in September 2016) called the People/Entertainment Weekly Network. A link to the news can be seen at http://ew.com/article/2016/09/30/whos-boss-ew-reunion/ and the video (and link to it) can be seen below. The re-united cast dished on one of their show's most iconic episodes, "Samantha's Growing Up". The basic synopsis of that episode was Samantha was growing up fast, only Tony was reluctant to admit it. Reality set in when he had to buy her first bra. When Samantha was upset over his purchase, Tony asked Angela for her help with shopping for Samantha's first bra.
In the reunion, Tony Danza (Tony Micelli), Judith Light (Angela Robinson Bower), and Alyssa Milano (Samantha "Sam" Micelli) shared how they could only say the word "bra" on broadcast television once at that time because the network censors were still very actively controlling what could (and could not) be said on the show. Although all of the cast is present, the conversation was dominated by Tony Danza, Judith Light and Alyssa Milano, whereas Danny Pintauro (Jonathan Bower) and Katherine Helmond (Mona Robinson) are a bit quieter, although we don't really know how much was edited out of the final reunion video. The video clip can be found below, or by visiting https://youtu.be/dTcTYKJy2Zc .
About Who's the Boss?
The title of the show refers to the clear role reversal of the two lead actors, where a woman was the breadwinner and a man (although he was not her husband) stayed at home and took care of the house. It challenged then-contemporary stereotypes of Italian-American young men as macho and boorish, but wholly ignorant of life outside of urban working-class neighborhoods like Brooklyn where the character Tony was from, whereas Tony was depicted as sensitive, intelligent and domestic with an interest in intellectual pursuits.
The premise of the show was that former major-league baseball player (he was reportedly a second baseman for the St. Louis Cardinals) Tony Micelli, who was forced to retire due to a shoulder injury, along with his young daughter Samantha, takes a job as live-in housekeeper at the suburban Fairfield, Connecticut household of advertising exec Angela Bower. Angela was uptight and obsessed with her work. But Tony was eager to move his daughter out of crowded Brooklyn, New York, so the gig in Connecticut seemed like a perfect place to raise his daughter. Tony and Sam had to adjust to their new lives with the Bowers -- Angela, her son Jonathan, and her mother, Mona. Mona Robinson was Angela's feisty, sexually progressive mother, and Mona dated all kinds of men, from college age to silver-haired CEOs. That portrayal of an "older woman" with an active social and sex life was also unusual for TV at the time.
In terms of sitcoms, Who's the Boss premiered at a time when broadcast TV was still king (1984), which was just before cable (and later, streaming) commanded a growing share of public attention and ratings (and therefore ad dollars), or industry creativity and awards. As a result, it was somewhat unique because it shares something with true television classics like I Love Lucy which came from an era where TV was only broadcast over the airwaves and was still a relatively new technology. While Who's the Boss? got mixed reviews from critics, it was a ratings success for ABC, and continued for an impressive eight seasons.
Cast of Who's the Boss?
The cast was also an interesting ensemble.
Tony Danza was a TV sitcom veteran (in addition to being a former professional boxer in real-life), having previously starred in the ABC sitcom Taxi roughly a decade earlier. Judith Light was a veteran of the stage and of TV soap operas, having been a popular and longstanding cast member (playing character Karen Wolek) on ABC's One Life to Live for a number of years before stepping into primetime TV. Katherine Helmond was another sitcom vet, having starred on the sitcom Soap among others.
Both of the children in the cast pretty much got their start on "Who's the Boss". While Alyssa Milano (age 44 as of 2017) continued to work periodically in entertainment, as did Judith Light (age 68 and as of 2017, she regularly appears on Amazon's series Transparent), and Katherine Helmond played recurring characters on both the sitcom Coach and Everybody Loves Raymond, Helmond has since largely retired (she's now age 87), and Tony Danza (age 65) has also unofficially retired, while Danny Pintauro has basically left show business.
Life After Who's The Boss?
A year earlier, former child actor Danny Pintauro announced that he was HIV positive and had been living that way for over 15 years (see http://usat.ly/1KFryBK for more), making him one of a few celebrities along with Charlie Sheen and Magic Johnson to do so. He broke the news when he told told talk show host Oprah Winfrey that at the advice of his former Who's the Boss? co-star Judith Light, he shared the story with the celebrity tabloid the National Enquirer, which threatened to out him, but instead, he said he felt that the Enquirer's coverage of his news was fair and balanced rather than salacious, and that was mainly because he was forthcoming with his story. Catch his interview with Oprah for the OWN cable network on YouTube at https://youtu.be/GUCJgQndgGQ for more.
Because Pintauro's diagnosis took place a number of years after medications were developed to effectively treat the HIV virus, his story was quite different from earlier celebrities diagnosed in the late 1970's or early 1980's (think of people like Rock Hudson as the most notable example), and he's now a happily-married gay man, rather than a tragedy. But he's also avoided staying in show business, preferring to live his adult life outside of the Hollywood spotlight, making him an anomaly among former child stars, which has a sordid history of leaving child-stars-turned-adults devastated with drug/alcohol addiction and ruin, or religious cult membership to give a few examples.
One need look no further than the cast of the 1970's sitcom Diff'rent Strokes as an example, where Dana Plato went from TV star to robbing convenience stores before her untimely death in 1999 at the age of 34. She wasn't alone. Her co-star Todd Bridges battled a crack cocaine addiction in his twenties, and the other child co-star Gary Coleman, struggled financially later in life. In 1989, he successfully sued his parents and business adviser over misappropriation of his assets, only to declare bankruptcy a decade later. Unfortunately, Gary Coleman died in 2010 at age 42. But Coleman was also parodied in the Broadway show Avenue Q, which won the 2004 Tony Award for Best Musical, and a character presented as Gary Coleman in the show works as the superintendent of the apartment complex where the musical takes place. In the song "It Sucks to Be Me", he laments his fate. Initially, the producers intended for Coleman to play himself, but he never showed up to the meeting with them, and subsequently threatened to sue them, although the lawsuit never materialized. Given the track record of child-stars-gone-bad personified by the cast of Diff'rent Strokes, the fact that Danny Pintauro left show business should be viewed positively.
As for the others in the cast, former child castmate and on-screen pseudo-sister Alyssa Milano is, perhaps due to her age, been one of the more active cast members still working on-screen (aside from Judith Light), but her work has also been more limited by comparison, consisting of a number of made-for-television movies, guest-star appearances, occasional TV celebrity game-show and daytime talk-show appearances, as well as a few television commercials.
As already noted, Judith Light has likely had the most active acting career after her work on Who’s the Boss? Having really begun her acting career on Broadway, Judith Light has continued to return to working on the stage, having received several Tony nominations and winning two Tony's (one in 2012 and another in 2013). She's also played in a variety of different television roles since starring on Who's the Boss, including recurring roles on both the NBC's Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and on ABC's Ugly Betty (for which she was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award in 2007), and on the short-lived TNT reboot series Dallas. Most recently, she's been starring as Shelly Pfefferman on Amazon's successful series Transparent, for which she received noms for the Golden Globe, Primetime Emmy, and Critics' Choice Television Award.
Although Tony Danza continued to work on television immediately following the conclusion of Who's the Boss?, mostly in made-for-television movies, and he briefly had his own syndicated daytime talk show known as The Tony Danza Show which ran from 1997-1998, as well as various standalone appearances, his work has been considerably less frequent in the past decade, and the consensus is that he is now semi-officially retired now (he may still work in entertainment occasionally, most likely when his agent brings something of interest to his attention).
As for the sitcom Who's the Boss, I think the reunion episode was cute (there had been previous reunions, but the timing seemed right this time around) and the length was right for an environment where short clips seem all the American attention-span can accommodate. Whether the People/Entertainment Weekly Network releases any others remains to be seen.
It's hard to believe nearly 30 years have passed since the first "National Lampoon's Vacation" movie premiered. I watched that film over and over as a kid, and I think it struck a chord with many kids of that era, with the family road trip being a common occurrence for many American families (at least those who weren't separated due to divorce). That, combined with endless reruns on cable made the original film an enduring piece of American pop culture.
I think of Lindsey Buckingham's "Holiday Road" song whenever I get in the car to go on vacation myself. You can listen to that classic song below, or by visiting https://youtu.be/KsYqIJqlPNc:
I first saw Beverly D'Angelo in the 1979 movie "Hair" (I watched it as one of the perpetual movie reruns on cable), but was the place I first saw her so when she appeared as Ellen Griswold on "Vacation", I already knew her. Indeed, she had a major role in "Hair". But as I already noted, Beverly D'Angelo is perhaps best known for her role as Ellen Griswold in the National Lampoon's "Vacation" franchise and has been acting (steadily) for decades. She began on stage, appearing on Broadway in 1976 in "Rockabye Hamlet", which was a musical rendition of Shakespeare's Hamlet. Needless to say, it wasn't a Tony Award-winner, but it was a good place to start working as an actress.
She used that experience to move into film acting. Technically, she was featured in a minor role in "Annie Hall" in 1977 (which I never saw), but she appeared in a string of hits in the late 1970's, including "Every Which Way But Loose", "Hair", as well as "Coal Miner's Daughter", which earned her a Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her performance as Patsy Cline, as well as a Country Music Association award for Album of the Year. Without a doubt, her best-known role was as wife to Clark W. Griswold in 1983's "National Lampoon's Vacation", a role she would reprise in several sequels.
Her "Vacation" co-star, Chevy Chase, began on NBC's "Saturday Night Live" during it's formative years (along with John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Jane Curtin and others). Like other SNL castmembers of the era, many moved into Hollywood films and/or TV shows, with 1980's "Caddyshack" seen as his breakout film. Like Beverly D'Angelo, Mr. Chase has kept working steadily even as many of his SNL cast members have slowed down.
To be sure, the Beverly D'Angelo and Chevy Chase are perhaps the only castmembers which have remained consistent for the films' entire run, although Randy Quaid played Cousin Eddie in most (excluding "European Vacation") of the others. However, the children have been different in each film.
For example, the original Rusty Griswold was played by John Hughes' film alumni Anthony Michael Hall, who would later move away from acting to film producing instead (although he did return to the screen portraying Bill Gates in the 1999 television film "Pirates of Silicon Valley". He was age 13 when "Vacation" filmed. Other notable actors to play that same role include Johnny Galecki (who played Rusty in "Christmas Vacation"), perhaps best known for his role on "Roseanne" and more recently, on "Big Bang Theory". Other notable guests from the original film include "30 Rock" star Jane Krakowski, who played Cousin Vicki (the slutty girl who admitted that her father said she French-kissed the best).
There have also been a few cast members that have died, most notably was the actress who played Audrey Griswold in "European Vacation", played by a well-known child actress during the 1970s-1980s named Dana Hill. She passed away from a stroke at age 32 in 1996. The other was legendary comedic actress from screen and TV Imogene Coca who played Aunt Edna in the original movie. She died in 2001. Many Baby Boomers and Gen Xers may recall Imogene Coca from her memorable guest appearances on TV sitcoms including two appearances on "Bewitched" as Mary the Tooth Fairy, as well as on "The Brady Bunch" playing Aunt Jenny, whom Jan worried she would grow up to look like based on a childhood photo of Aunt Jenny.
Regardless, reuniting the original cast of "Vacation" was something that seemed destined to happen at some point. Although the "Vacation" movies air quite frequently, getting the original cast together was never really a priority for the film series' producers, but during the holidays of 2012, D'Angelo and Chase appeared in some TV commercials for Old Navy. The spots were cute, and seemed to target Gen Xers sense of nostalgia. Those clips can be viewed on YouTube at http://youtu.be/CBmvluvhNG8, http://youtu.be/IJszrRIBbpQ and http://youtu.be/nEBGC62pjwA.
I'm glad EW organized this cast reunion, but I have to admit that seeing the full cast together again doesn't stir the same kind of memories that some of the reunions I've featured have for me. I think it's because "Vacation" has been on the air perpetually and Beverly and Chevy remain like a virtual husband and wife. However, seeing everyone 30 years later is interesting. Chevy Chase's hair (what's left of it) is decidedly greyer. Beverly D'Angelo, thanks to the Hollywood youth-perpetuation machine, has aged pretty well. The kids look kind of like many Gen Xers do ... middle-aged.
I have to wonder how family vacations have changed since then ... are road trips as big as they once were, or has flying the family down to Orlando for a week during winter become standard operating procedure for Americans outside the sunbelt?
Author P.S., September 16, 2014: While Americans have seen a number of National Lampoon's "Vacation" movies, including sequels including "European Vacation", "Christmas Vacation" and "Vegas Vacation" among others, and more recently some of the cast have done TV advertisements for retailer Old Navy, but there was news recently that a reboot of the original "Vacation" movie from New Line Cinemas is in the works (see http://bit.ly/XcmP5M and http://bit.ly/XQIwcQ). It will be focused on son Rusty taking his own children on a family vaction, and reportedly the reboot has already been cast including Ed Helms as Rusty, and Christina Applegate has signed up to play Rusty's wife. Parents Clark Griswold (played by Chevy Chase) and Ellen (Beverly D'Angelo) are slated to reprise their roles in brief cameos in the movie.
There will also be sister Audrey in the film and her husband. Its unclear what kind of audience the reboot will attract, or how successful it will be. While they've already managed to recruit a pretty good cast, and the story provides enough to work with, its unclear whether the appeal of the original will be usurped. But its an interesting idea for a reboot!
Television is a huge part of American pop culture. Those of us in Generation X grew up in a time when we shared far more of pop culture than future generations are likely to experience. Indeed, I think it's safe to say we're probably the last generation to have that collective experience. As authors Gael Fashingbauer Cooper and Brian Bellmont wrote in their introduction to the book "Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops: The Lost Toys, Tastes, and Trends of the 70s and 80s" (see my post HERE for more on that book) eloquently observed:
"For a supposedly fractured generation, we kids of the 1970s and 1980s share a far more universal past than kids today. We all watched the same five channels, shopped at the same few chain stores, hummed the same commercial jingles."
Today's post looks at the topic of television and whether we'll ever watch TV together again.
It's courtesy of my local NPR affiliate, WNYC and ran on May 25, 2012. They interview two different media guys, specifically David Carr, New York Times media reporter and Matt Zoller Seitz, TV critic at New York magazine. Have a listen below, or you can visit the affiliate's website at http://www.wnyc.org/story/212463-future-tvs-community/:
Now, in that conversation, New York Times media reporter David Carr makes the following (scary) observation:
"Dish Network announced a technology right before the Upfronts, 'Hey, we can give you a product that's gonna vaporize all the commercials.' My concern as a consumer is that when the business model goes away, all this yummy programming that Matt [Zoller Seitz, TV critic at New York magazine] and I really enjoy might go away."
We may have an expectation as far as TV is concerned that could potentially disappear as we know it.
I don't think anyone is claiming that television is going away... yet.
Far from it.
But the content we've come to enjoy on TV has come at the expense of others (specifically, advertisers) and that business model is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain. It's not inconceivable to imagine a future where television entertainment becomes primarily a subscriber medium, and those who can afford to pay for it will have the benefit of watching TV from, say their nursing homes, while those who can't will need to live out their golden years in search of something else to fill their days (and nights, for that matter). Combine that with newspapers and magazines struggling to survive, and it really makes me wonder.
That may be a very pessimistic outlook, although it is a possibility. I certainly hope it doesn't come to that.
My readers may recall that I recently shared an April 30, 2012 NPR interview with Warren Littlefield (interviewed by Audie Cornish), who was the former President of NBC. I covered that in a recent post that can be viewed HERE.
Mr. Littlefield defends the current model to some extent, noting that "What audiences want and need are shared viewing experience. And what Must See TV was all about was one network, one night for one decade. And a third of the country would come and watch Must See TV. And you didn't dare go to work the next day because if you hadn't watched, you would be left out of the conversation, that water cooler conversation, that connection."
However, Ms. Cornish does ask "At the same time, you know, if you look at the numbers this quarter for the networks, ABC lost 21% of its average viewing audience. I mean, this is in the last four weeks. NBC also lost percentage. Fox lost 20%. It just seems as though with the shift, where the eyeballs are going - people watching it on their own - I'm wondering how you still have that same creative process in development if there's this kind of fleeting paycheck."
Mr. Littlefield responded that Must See TV is not doable again, at least not that size and not that magnitude, but he does suggest that it is still feasible to draw a fairly large, widespread audience, such as with a hit like "Modern Family" (ABC) which appeals to adults and kids, audiences of all ages. He says that's still, at nearly 20 million people a week, a pretty broad-based hit that really far exceeds what's being watched on cable. But unlike, say HBO, which is subscription-based, networks can't really do big-budget productions without massive audiences.
The key, at least from my perspective, is that works as long as advertisers are willing to sponsor it. Let's hope that continues to reach enough people to remain a viable advertising channel.
Luckily I have a pretty substantial DVD collection, much of which is "classic" television that doesn't even get rerun in syndication very much anymore. But I'd still like to watch TV when I get old without having to pay for the privilege!
In the early 1970s, a Madison Avenue ad exec named David McCall was frustrated by the fact that his then 11 year-old son was having trouble memorizing his multiplication tables, yet happened to know all the words to almost every rock song on the radio. To McCall, the solution seemed obvious: why not combine pop music with the info. kids needed to learn?
The rest, as they say, is TV — and educational — history.
The result was "Schoolhouse Rock" (a.k.a. "SHR") which aired on ABC from late 1973 to 1985. Beyond catchy music, another key to the success was repetition (sometimes annoyingly so), which was (not surprisingly) also the mantra for advertising success at the time. In fact, these three-minute educational vignettes (there were a total of 41 segments in all, at least initially) ran, according to some accounts, as frequently as 7 times every weekend (and, let me add, that "weekends" consisted only of Saturday mornings)!
This series of three-minute educational vignettes combined animation, music, and catchy lyrics to tackle lessons in American history, the rules of grammar, multiplication tables, science, government, and finance. As The Randino wrote (see HERE and HERE):
"Its toe-tapping lyrics entered a generation's lexicon and, four Emmy Awards later, its melodies are still a pop-culture frame of reference common to an astounding number" of Generation Xers.
Disney acquired the rights to the series (although truth be told, the TV exec responsible for producing series was a guy named Michael Eisner, who would later go on to become CEO of The Walt Disney Company, and the company bought the rights to the series under Eisner's leadership) a number of years ago, and has since put the entire series on DVD (as well as streaming video) for a new, digital generation.
SHR For A New, Digital Generation
I bought the DVD series for my niece Sasha a few years ago, and she did watch and even enjoyed the programs. Like most of us did as kids in the '70s, she didn't even realize it was "educational" programming, and the fact that the cartoons were something she wasn't already seeing on TV made them completely novel - and even compelling to watch. The fact that it's animated gives them something of a timeless nature not found in some other television programs, and the commercial-like length (just 3 minutes each) of these things makes them an appropriate length even for kids with short attention spans, because they can watch a clip without investing too much time or commitment.
Now, I will say that the only way I learned the preamble to the U.S. Constitution was via Schoolhouse Rock, although I sometimes wish there was something like another clip covering Amendments to the Constitution (granted, it's a moving target, but memorizing that stuff is terribly boring). Nowadays, kids can simply Google that stuff, but there's something to be said for knowing it.
MadTV's Public Schoolhouse Rock: A Rockin' Parody!
Several years ago, the TV show MadTV did a really funny parody of SHR they called "Public Schoolhouse Rock" which used the same music with lyrics meant to suggest what was going on in U.S. public schools. It was really, really funny IMHO. Have a look and see if you agree! First, the original:
ABC tried to resurrect the series in September 1992, and even commissioned a couple of new Grammar Rock segments as well as 8 new "Money Rock" segments. However, ABC (now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Disney) stopped airing them around 1999. Given that the way the world watches television these days has completely changed (catch my post on that HERE for more background), I think the key to success nowadays might be trying to plug them into something like Boomerang or Cartoon Network, rather than on ABC. After all, today, kids might not even realize that ABC exists (in spite of ABC being owned by Disney), yet Boomerang (which itself is a spinoff from Cartoon Network) is something they might be familiar with. Of course, DVD is even better, and has the added benefit of no commercials.
But Disney has proven to have a pretty short attention span on some of the things in its own massive library anyway, and one need look no further than The Muppets franchise as proof (I'll cover the Muppets in a separate post). Disney did absolutely nothing with that character franchise until actor and Muppet fan Jason Segal was able to help the company (almost single-handedly) resurrect the Muppet franchise. Since the success of that film (and the failure of another film called "John Carter"), Disney has committed to doing another Muppet movie. My guess would be that sometimes, it takes someone to really take ownership of these elements, or the corporate parents are likely let them stay in the Disney Vault permanently!
Disney Educational Productions' YouTube channel has several of the original Schoolhouse Rock videos available online for free, and because Disney is the channel owner, there is little risk of being purged for copyright violation. Visit https://www.youtube.com/user/DisneyEducation to have a look.
Now, if I could just get the damn song for "Interplanet Janet" out of my own mental vault, I might be fine! http://abc.tv/2enLHUu
Author P.S., January 6, 2013: NPR is reporting that "Schoolhouse Rock" just turned 40! Visit that story at http://n.pr/VGdDCO.
Writer, speaker, brother, son, friend, spouse, advocate for people with autoimmune (type 1) diabetes, thinker, dreamer. Reading and writing is becoming a lost art, but we can learn a lot from reading the medical and scientific literature before drawing conclusions. The press publishes abbreviated facts to fit into limited space, I don't mince words or omit facts.
