Microwave Ovens:
Cooking With Your Fingers Crossed

Back in December of 1971, the Electromagnetic Radiation Management Advisory Council — a nine-member panel established by the President's Office of Telecommunications Policy — issued a report on the potential health hazards of radio waves and microwaves. The Council stated that "The electromagnetic radiations emanating from radar, television, communications systems, microwave ovens, industrial heat-treatment systems, medical diathermy units, and many other sources permeate the modern environment, both civilian and military." The Council declared that "This type of man-made radiation exposure has no counterpart in man's evolutionary background," and that "Power levels in and around American cities, airports, military installations and tracking centers, ships and pleasure craft, industry and homes may already be biologically significant." The Council also warned that "the consequences of undervaluing or misjudging the biological effects of long-term, low-level exposure could become a critical problem for the public health, especially if genetic effects are involved."

Lynton Appleberry Linotypist

Scholars may differ but I say that Lynton Appleberry is the inventor of the "Linotypist's Note". In 1970, 1 was the editor of my college paper and Lynton did most of the typesetting for it down at the Yellow Springs News. I falsely prided myself on my grammatical taste and thought I had organized a foolproof system of proofreading. I had vowed there would be no typos in my paper. Early on, my proofreaders brought me galleys to point out that the typesetter was changing the copy. My editorial blood immediately boiled until I studied the galleys. Lynton was improving the copy fixing spelling, chopping out phrases of garbled horror, getting some agreement in number and tense. I swallowed my pride but urged my copydesk to greater vigilance.

Who Owns "Appropriate Technology?"

A recent brief hit of the New York theatre was a short production called The Water Engine. It's a modern morality play of sorts, set largely in a 1930's radio studio, and its theme, in the fashion of morality plays, is simple but loaded: a man invents an engine that runs on water. The industrial powers find out about the device and they dispatch the inventor to his creator, presumably burying his invention along with him.

Like a Raggedy Ann with glitter in her hair, the workaday world of television syndication has a bright new look. Until recently the business of distributing television programs on a station by station basis has been the poor country cousin of network television, accepting its cast off programs when they were threadbare from use and selling them to individual stations to run during the fringe time periods when the networks switch off their cables. If television was a vast wasteland, four-thirty in the afternoon was its geographical epicenter, a cultural time capsule where religious revivals rubbed shoulders with women's roller derby, Grade B movies had their last picture showing and everybody loved Lucy for ever and ever.

OAKLAND, Calif.-The talk over Mexican food in the Fruitvale barrio here is pessimistic, almost wistful for the turbulent '60s. Tony Valladolid, a young lawyer at Centro Legal de La Raza is reminiscing about those days: "The San Diego State administration building had burned down and we had about three or four good riots. But now that the (minority) programs are being cut back the Chicanos don't know what to do. They no longer have the political awareness. They try to go through channels and it is ineffective."