Clint Had It Right!

Sometimes I think I am developing “Clint Eastwood” Disease. More on that in a moment. It’s not that I mind kids. In fact I adore my grandchild. But he’s mine and in any case when he gets cranky and needs a retread I hand him to my son. Some kind of poetic justice there. But other peoples kids in public. Now that’s a different kettle of tantrums. Because that’s what they have. These little rug rats are having loud disagreements in grocery stores, parking lots and even restaurants with their keepers. And it’s spilling over onto me. I just want to do my thing and go home to the relative peace and quiet at the Rising ranch (quiet except for the goofy neighbor and his band of idiots but that is for another time) but these little ankle biters will have none of it. They scream they want this, or don’t want to do that. They tumble to the floor and kick and howl like they were being eviscerated, which doesn’t seem like too bad an idea. Now I understand the underlying psychology here. I remember enough of my Sigmund Freud to know that the insufferable brats are merely asserting their independence from their parents. Well here’s a news flash for you. Siggy was on COCAINE when he figured this stuff out. So how much stock can we put in what a 18th century blow snorting, cigar puffing named Schlomo (His middle name. Look it up.) had to say? Was Sigmund ever trying to buy a shirt at K-Mart with a small child screaming at the sound level of an AC/DC concert? I think not. Did Freud have to contend with a three year old throwing food at a restaurant like he was Tug Mcgraw? And where are the parents? They seem blissfully unaware, except that occasionally they will swat little Janey or Johnny and pump up the volume even more. Obviously they are so used to it that they probably don’t even hear it. Or they are just plain dumb. Choose one. “Clint Eastwood” syndrome? No not “Make my day.” I refer to Clint’s excellent flick “Grand Torino” where he tells the world but mostly kids to “GET OFF MY LAWN!” in his trademark menacing growl. I feel the same way about my personal space. As far as I am concerned we all have a bubble area around us that is ours. Don’t come into mine and I won’t get in yours. But these future generational misfits don’t know this and their useless parents don’t seem to be teaching it. What we need is an island for all kids between 2 and, oh I don’t know…22? I could be wrong.

What Happened To Summer?

It was early in the morning one day last week. I fumbled and stumbled from bed, did the bare necessary things to make myself presentable in only the most fundamental sense of that word and headed for the torture chamber some call the gym. As I was on my hind legs and not crawling on all fours as sometimes happens on these early morning outings I stopped to give the long suffering wife a kiss on my way out the door. A brief digression. In these doses of breathless prose and in my book “But Then Again I Could Be Wrong: The Book of Rants” (humorous tales from Scranton Wilkes-Barre Pennsylvania writer for The Weekender) available for $9.95 at amazon.com makes a great Christmas gift buy several for friends and family- I refer to her in that fashion. Some reviewers question just what exactly she suffers from. The answer is Me. Anyone who knows Me knows why. End of digression. As I weaved down the path I noticed some spots on the wooden steps. A few more on the stone path. And as I waited for the garage door to creak its way up I saw a few more on the driveway. What the…my finely tuned mind thought. Birds? Fungus? Then it hit me. WHERE DID SUMMER GO? This was the summer that never was. The pool developed a motor problem that prevented its opening till late July. It never did get the cover removed. The window air conditioner never budged from the attic storage space. The little convertible car’s odometer barely turned any digits. The bottles of sunscreen are still tamper proof sealed. The swimsuits never got moist. Hell I never even broke a sweat. In other words the few brief moments that spell s u m m e r in NEPA have gone by the boards and I missed it. Maybe summer happened for you, but from my perspective yesterday was June and now it’s-how could it possibly be-November? The World Series- over? The leaves - down? Thanksgiving? Christmas stuff in stores? Storm windows are up? The furnace is burning dollar bills at a furious rate? Who hit the fast forward button? I don’t even think we had Indian Summer, whatever that is. And as I pondered all this stuff it began to dawn on my semi-conscious brain. The little spots were not bird droppings. The fungus among us that I suspected was no more than the first little hard pellets of the winter to come. Soon enough the shovel and plow. Soon enough the salt and cinders on the road. Soon enough the four wheel adventures on the icy streets. I kicked the first snow and thought dark thoughts.

Babel Fish

A couple weeks ago one of the biggest changes to how the World Wide Web is used was made and not many took notice. The guys who make such lofty decisions, the “Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers” (ICANN) have decided for us that starting this Monday, November 16th, domain names will be available using non Latin characters. In layman’s terms what this means is that the part of an internet address that is after the dot has up until this point been limited to the letters A-Z. Now the 100,000 characters of the languages of the world will be available online for domain names. I don’t know if this is a good idea or not. First of all I don’t know about you but I get more than enough spam that is in characters other than A-Z already. A page full of something in the Cyrillic alphabet does nothing for me. I am fairly certain that I am being informed that I have won the Russian lottery or that I could share in a ten million dollar bank account if I will just provide my bank account number to deposit the loot into. But now, according to Rod Beckstrom, ICANN's President and CEO, this move could bring billions of more people online - people who have never used Roman characters in their daily lives. Great. Billions MORE filling the bandwidth of what I call the “World Wide Wait.” Here is the real issue. Short of buying a Farsi to English dictionary and a keyboard that has Farsi characters ($19.99 at http://ikbs-usa.com) how in the world will I communicate with these billion new users? I can’t even surf their websites because I don’t have the Hindi keyboard. I’ll never know if my Google search returns one of these non Latin sites if it’s germane ( Or even German, heh) to my search. In the bible book of Genesis there is a reference to a city and a tower built to reach heaven. The tower was miles high and was efficiently built because everyone spoke the same language. This evidently pissed off God who “confound (sic) their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.” The construction of the tower which most know as the “Tower of Babel” was halted because the builders were no longer speaking the same language. The parallel to the change just made to the World Wide Web to me is obvious. And the president of ICANN, Rod rhymes with God. I rest my case.

450 words!

Many people ask me how I get the ideas for these alleged columns. The other question I sometimes get is how I manage to write one every week. At the risk of exposing how the sausage is made I will give you a peek into the exciting world of big time tabloid newspaper column writing. This week, like so many weeks, I have no firm idea of what I am going to do until I sit down at the computer. I will bang out a few sentences to get warmed up. Then I will check the most important device in column writing. The word count. One hundred and five. Goal is four hundred and fifty. Hmmm…what now? Beverage break. Now with a cup steaming beside me ideas will surely come, right? Nope. I know. I’ll surf the internet for inspiration. Why do we call it surfing, anyway? I’ll google that. Back in a minute. Well the short answer seems to be that someone called changing the TV channels with a remote “Channel Surfing” and the term was sort of borrowed for the internet. I found ten people who take credit for this. One hundred ninety five words in case you are wondering. This week is the one where we set the clocks back an hour. I could write something about that. Nah. Been there done that. Bitch about having to rake my leaves? Well, truth be told I haven’t raked them this year. The excuse being that I am waiting for all of them to leave the tree. Waiting for the leaves to leave. Get it? Heh. I love the English language. I mean how you can use a word to mean different things. I am not a mean man but the end justifies the means. And the mean count is three hundred and four. Home stretch. Speaking of home stretch I could write about the World Series. I suggested as much to the long suffering wife. “Shouldn’t you wait until it’s over next week?” she asked. But I could write it like I did for the election, where I was so vague that either side could have been the winner. I got the patent pending “look.” No sale. Sometimes I just sit and think. Other times I just sit. Sometimes the columns just write themselves. Then there are times like this where they have to be dragged kicking and screaming out of wherever they come from. Four hundred and thirty nine. If I was a horse I could smell the barn. Sprint for the finish line. Last lap. Checkered flag. Victory lane. Four hundred and thirty eight. Close enough for government work. But then again… I could be wrong.

Frack You!

What I know about geology and mining could be carved on the head of a pin with a dull butter knife. I am pretty sure that I was probably taught something about it in school. If I was it didn’t stick. I do however know when I am being fracked. And I think I am. Well not me personally. But I think our area is being bent over. Whether you spell it with an “a’ or a “u” I think the end result is the same. Something is inserted, fluid is deposited and then a withdrawal is made. The mess is left for the penetrated to clean up. In case you have no idea what the frack I am talking about, here is my limited understanding. Very similar to the discovery that you could burn coal and that there was a lot of it in the ground of NEPA the folks that know about such things have discovered another rock in our dirt here that they think can make them money.
Marcellus Shale. Trapped inside these rocks is more natural gas than you would encounter at the Plymouth Kielbasa festival. Obviously the big natural gas guys want it.
What is being done is directional drilling underground to reach the rocks and then water is pumped into the rock under high pressure in a process known as hydraulic fracturing or fracking to release the gas. It’s sort of a one cheek sneak done to Mother Nature. More than a few things bother me about this. First-this area was without a doubt screwed by the extraction of coal from the ground. Ugly piles of culm, pollution and a generation of men with Black Lung are the results I see. Would you not be a little suspicious of strangers from out of town who want to do basically the same thing? Secondly-they are offering to make people, landowners, rich. All you have to do is let them drill and pump and everything will be fine. Strangers who want to make me rich make me go hmmmm. And thirdly-I don’t think that it’s an accident that the process involved is one or so letters away from words I can’t use in this column. I have seen lots of press about this. Little of it is positive. Already there was a spill of fracking fluid. Fish died. A creek was polluted. The Frackers said “ooops.” And yet landowners are signing up and big trucks with lots of pipes are barreling down our highways. The gas guys say “Trust us.” I dunno about you but when someone says “trust me” I tend to hear we will “Frack you.” Or words to that effect. I could be wrong. Hope so.

It was Macy's

I’ve always disliked it. I can understand why they do it but nonetheless it makes me uneasy to think that the work of genius can be reduced to a technique to shill a product. In general anytime art meets advertising I think it’s a bad idea but especially when its music. Lucky for Picasso and Monet or god forbid Dali their work doesn’t readily lend itself to selling deodorant or feminine hygiene products. The works of the immortal Bard and even Edgar Allen Poe have upon occasion been used to make products more attractive. But music and Madison Avenue have always seemed to go hand in hand. Up until now I have just sort of gritted my teeth and put up with it. Even the Beatles songs haven’t been spared from this aural assault. As long ago as 1985 the first Beatles song was used in a commercial, "Help" (sung by the Beatles themselves) was used in a commercial for Ford. But last night hearing John’s “Come together” as the background music for a department store featuring ninnies cavorting around like they were inflicted by St. Vitus dance syndrome was just too much for me. Now I am sure this is a fine department store. The models dancing looked very stylish. But they should all rot in hell for taking money for prostitution of a song. Is that a law? Could it be? It should be. I know, Beatles songs have been used to pitch everything from diapers to sneakers. But it still bothers me. It bothered the Beatles too.” If it's allowed to happen, every Beatles song ever recorded is going to be advertising women's underwear and sausages. We've got to put a stop to it in order to set a precedent. Otherwise it's going to be a free-for-all. It's one thing when you're dead, but we're still around! They don't have any respect for the fact that we wrote and recorded those songs, and it was our lives." -George Harrison November 1987. Other than decomposing George must be spinning in his grave like a lathe. I am sure there are moments when Paul McCartney must wonder what circle of hell he stumbled into that let Michael Jackson control his songs. I’ve always admired what Jim Morrison did when the Doors were asked to lend “Light My Fire” to a car commercial. Buick proffered $75,000 to hawk a car. As the story goes the other band members agreed while Jim was out of town. He came back and went nuts. He called up Buick and said that if they aired the ad, he'd smash a Buick on television with a sledgehammer. I would have paid to see that. Or then again…

The Casino Blues

“Well, I've never been to England
But I kind of like the Beatles
So I headed for Las Vegas
Only made it out to Lido's” - Hoyt Axton-“I’ve Never been to Spain”

Myself, I’ve never been to England, Las Vegas or Lido’s which I think is in San Jose California. I have been in Plains Township, Luzerne County. In fact I have passed through the home of about 10,000 NEPA souls quite a few times on my way to work. I have even been in the Mohegan Sun at Pocono Downs casino. Twice. As I write this it seems a safe bet (Heh, pun intended) that table games of chance will be approved and up in running in the Mohegan Sun casino soon. Cool. Plains Township will now be just like Las Vegas, right? Well, maybe so, maybe not. Let’s make some quick comparisons. The weather. In January the average day time high in NEPA? Colder than a witches brassiere made of brass. Vegas? 57 Degrees, No snow. Score Vegas. What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas? I guess so, I don’t know what happens there but I have heard rumors. What happens in Luzerne County stays in Luzerne County? Well, Hugo Selinkski’s daring bed sheet escape from prison and our proud tradition of corruption in government have garnered us national if not worldwide attention. Score Vegas. Vegas has Barry Manilow, Bette Midler and Wayne Newton. This month at the Breakers lounge at Mohegan Sun they have “Peat Moss and the Fertilizers.” I kid you not. Score Vegas. In Vegas each casino is next to another that is bigger, better, gaudier and flashier. In Plains Township there is a heavy equipment dealer near to Mohegan Sun. A hot dog stand. And the ASPCA. Score Vegas. Wait a minute here. There must be something Plains Township has that Vegas doesn’t. I mean something positive. Wait, I know. I bet you can’t get a decent peirogi, bowl of haluski or a hunk of kielbasa anywhere in Vegas. I know they have all sorts of famous Chefs like Emeril Lagasse and Wolfgang Puck but they can’t hold a spoon of horse radish to our homegrown ethnic traditions. Why I bet they don’t even have Stegmaier or Yuengling on tap in their fancy casinos. Score Plains. And we have the Susquehanna. No smelly river in Vegas. Score Plains Township . And here is the best part of Luzerne County vs Las Veags. Comedy teams. In Sin City you have the Smothers Brothers and Penn and Teller. Martin and Lewis were a big favorite there. Here we have Ciavarella and Conahan. It just doesn’t get any better than that. Eat your heart out Vegas.