"When I was a kid, we only had one phone. It was a heavy black club on a short cord that could hobble you if you dropped it on your toe. The phone was used for emergencies only or permission had to granted. If you were on the phone longer than a minute, you were advised, 'Don't be on the phone long, we're not made of money.'"
And I suppose that you also walked to school in the snow each day, and it was uphill both ways, and you had to hop on one foot because you didn't have two shoes, and you had to keep your pen in your underwear so it wasn't too frozen to write with when you got to class.
Complain, complain, complain. Mr. Noel must have been out of the work force, or productive life for that matter, for quite a while now. People become more productive using today's faster methods of communication, giving them time to do more and to see more, thereby increasing the size of your world and mine, instead of "shrinking it to the size of a computer chip."
It might play in Peoria, my friend, but not around here.
Oh, and as for your SUV bashing, Ford does not make the Suburban, Chevrolet does.
Paul Guerra(No address given)
Public records law needs some teeth
I have just read the results of a survey of newspaper editors' experiences with the California Public Records Act. One of the key findings I found enlightening was that editors favored by a margin of 61-3 a possible ballot initiative that would amend the state Constitution to strengthen the public's right of access to government records. The editors' 92.5 percent support compares to the general public's 70.2 percent backing for a similarly described initiative.
If editors from large newspapers with clout are encountering difficulties obtaining access to public information, one can readily see how the "lowly" citizen and small newspapers can be worn out by officials skirting around their requests because they know that the present Public Records Act has no teeth and that they face no penalties for noncompliance.
A number of Sunnyvale citizens and I have encountered nothing but stonewalling and being told that the public records we are requesting are not available.
Frances Rowe
Former Sunnyvale mayor and council member