Sunday, October 26, 2008

N.C. citizen journalism project needs your discerning eye

Greetings dear reader, and apologies - I've been away from this blog (and from most other blogs, and from any Nevada County focus whatsoever) - been working on a nonlocal story.

But while researching it I've run across some intriguing Nevada County material in the UCSF Tobacco Documents Archive.
(which is addictive, a wealth of diversions, an impediment to sleep and to unidirectional progress on anything, it's Google as an n-dimensional electron microscope...)

You might think that those in the tobacco industry wouldn't trouble themselves about events in our little county, but they did. And we can see this, because they kept records, which - thanks to the anti-tobacco attorneys - are available, to you, online.

And in those records, you'll see some local names, and, potentially, see what they were doing.

But I can't decipher all the handwriting, and I need to return to my main project - so I'm hoping to enlist your help:

Can you decipher the handwriting in this May 8 1991 memo from "RCM"?
(confidential to RCM: please work on your penmanship, which has been - accurately - labeled 'illegible'.)

Here's what I think I could make out; please submit any additions & corrections in the comments to this post.
"Call to Todd Juvinall, Supervisor
Left ? message, wish to discuss Nev ? ord, ques & suggestions,
as a followup to his ? of 04/04/91. Req'd that he
call us back when in (prob Thursday), and discuss same.
Gave our toll free 800# for return call.

? present ?
2) disc'd NC issue w/ both ? & ?...
They agreed w/pay initial ?
use N/C as a "reasonable" model, a la Colfax

3? D/R to contact Greg Cook @ F/Tucks's disc Nev City ? N/C
? with him.
Then will disc further options, ie - send D/R(?) up to N/C for on-site activities.
-RCM"
Extra credit, if you can guess who D/R might be.

(Note for newcomers to the tobacco PR world - this background article will help you get a feel for the lay of the land;
or if you prefer aquatic metaphors, read Paul Graham's The Submarine to discover how much of your information intake comes from PR; including, for decades, concerted efforts to deny the reality and cloud the urgency of global climate disruption.

"People have simply no idea how serious this issue is. ...[If we don't fix it,] you can give up on civilization as we know it."
)
at

2 comments:

  1. Anna Haynes5/28/2010 3:04 PM

    Correction -
    Upon re-attempting to read this, it looks more like "my initial", not "pay initial". Still hoping someone who's better at deciphering it will take a stab though...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous6/21/2010 6:30 PM

    I looked at it and I think it is P/R as in public relations, not D/R.

    ReplyDelete

Welcome, and thanks for caring enough to donate your time and thoughts toward greater collective wisdom...

Terms of engagement:
* Please be civil.
* * * * Please do not post anonymously * * * (I'd remove this choice if I could, and I may remove your comment if you do) - instead, do this:
Click on the 'Name/URL' radiobutton, then enter your real name (if you're brave) or a pseudonym (if you're not). (You can leave the "URL" field blank.)
Or go ahead and click "Anonymous", but put your name in your comment.

* The Management reserves the right to delete comments (Moderation Certificate can be found here). You can always post it on a blog of your own.

If you run into technical difficulties, please a) accept my apologies, then b) email your comment to aherror2011 at gmail.com with "Comment for [name of this blog]" in the Subject line.

New policy re climate contrarianism comments as of 11/11/2009:
Comments questioning the climate science community's understanding of climate change (97% of active climatologists now believe that the earth is currently warming and that it's human-caused - link) will be deleted unless the commenter:
a) is local
b) uses his real name
c) provides link(s) to substantiate his claim(s)/inference(s)
d) is willing to collaborate on constructing an argument tree, to get us past the usual sterile point-counterpoint-countercounterpoint.
(For people who can't read the above, a summary:
1) Be civil;
2) Don't post w/o giving at least a pseudonym;
3) Don't espouse climate-denial crankery unless you're local and willing to stand behind it.)

Caveats:
1. Comments could be delayed: they are being moderated, and I'm sometimes away from the computer for a day or more.
2. : Perfectly legitimate comments are sometimes miscategorized (by the blogging platform) as spam, & not published. If this happens to yours, please notify me, else I might not notice for a day or two.