Today Dr. Helmut Möller replied to a request from me for information about Paul by saying that he had picked up some of Paul’s things from his apartment and taken them to him at his new location earlier in the day. He commented that Paul’s walking was much improved and that he would be participating in speech therapy from today forward. He promised to let me know just as soon as there is a phone number for Paul. And of course, once I’ve learned that number, I’ll share it with you as well.

On a personal note, let me thank you all for your comments made to Paul on this blog. I do try to convey them to him whenever he and I talk. And also I’d like to thank you for your expressions of appreciation to me for my effort to keep you up to date at this stage. I am only doing what I would hope one of my friends would do for me if I were in Paul’s predicament.

Because Paul has so many of you out there across the globe who care about him, this blog probably provides the best way for me to reach out to that considerable network of people. I encourage you, if you wish to, to talk to each other in the commentary section and discuss your concerns, suggestions, hopes and fears for Paul so that this blog becomes not just a place to hear about Paul, but also a place for you to share your input and thoughts. Maybe together we will stumble over a way to do more than just spectate and instead contribute in some meaningful way to his recovery.

I’ll let you know the crucial details of how to communicate with him as soon as I know them and I can conveniently do so. Of course if he tells us he’s getting too many calls after the phone is installed, we’ll just have to get him one of those 900 numbers and charge an exorbitant fee to talk with him and then we could apply the proceeds to help pay for his care.

Paul’s friend Fred North asked whether I could provide a room number for Paul at the new hospital so that any mail sent to him might arrive without undue delay, and prompted by Fred’s request, I have learned that the address to use is as follows:

Paul Moor
Evangelisches Geriatriezentrum Berlin
Haus 1, Station 1, Room 204
Reinickendorfer Straße 61
13347 Berlin

So nice to discover (in the latest issue of The Nation) this all-out tribute to my own greatest stateside television enthusiasm since I fled the country twelve years ago. I know him only thanks to occasional snippets that come my way via the Internet, but they’ve sufficed to make me an all-out fan; I share Kitman’s admiration for what he calls Olbermann’s passion.

I have no inkling as to what extent Mr. Kitman has become a household word over yonder in my original homeland, so in the event that you know as little about him as I did until an hour or so ago, let me relay this autobiographical snippet:

The Marvin Kitman, to whom this web site is dedicated, is the Famous Marvin Kitman.  TV critic for New York Newsday from 1969 , his column was printed three times a week and was syndicated nationally by the Los Angeles Times Syndicate.  It was seen, if not read, by hundreds of thousands.  The column, in which he modestly listed himself as the “Executive Producer,” was called “The Marvin Kitman Show.”  For 32 years and 6,641 performances, it lasted longer than many other shows he had written about, i.e.  David Frost, Dick Cavett, Merv Griffin and Johnny Carson….

To whet your appetite for his Nation article, let me extract this passage from the body of it:

. . . In short, what CBS (and all the others) need is a new Ed Murrow.  Good news!  There’s already one out there on the launchpad who has demonstrated his qualifications.  I’m talking about Keith Olbermann of MSNBC.  He has the journalistic chops and the mind, heart, instincts and courage.

Olbermann, who anchors a one-hour nightly news show on MSNBC called Countdown With Keith Olbermann, closes his show every night by saying “1,547th [for instance] day since Mission Accomplished in Iraq,” an hommage to Ted Koppel’s “Iran Hostage” coverage, which evolved into Koppel’s late-night ABC news show Nightline (the MSNBC show was originally Countdown: Iraq).  Then Olbermann throws his crumpled script at the camera, which shatters, a simulated digital effect (something Koppel never did).

“Our charge for the immediate future is to stay out of the way of the news,” he explained when the show debuted on March 31, 2003.  “News is news.  We will not be screwing around with it,” a reference to Bill O’Reilly, his rival over at Fox News in the 8 pm time slot.  “It will not be a show in which opinion and facts are juxtaposed so as to appear to be the same.”

Olbermann, who looks more like a high school teacher than a glitzy TV anchor, is the one who cuts and dices the news of the day into five segments, what he and his staff consider the day’s top stories, illustrated with news reports from NBC News correspondents, interviews with newsmakers, whom he treats courteously, interspersed with signature witty interjections (calling 9/11 Rudolph “Giuliani’s red badge of courage”), further interrupted by new ways to look at the news….

You can read The Nation‘s entire article – which I whole-heartedly recommend – by clicking here.

With this inaugural post Paul turns a corner in his life. He has written for many publications throughout his long and distinguished career, but now he begins a phase in which he publishes himself, and finally he has the good fortune of working with an editor with whom he is in complete and absolute agreement — himself.