Rising's Rant

Not here anymore

2010-10-16T15:49:00.002-04:00

Moved.

The NEW site which will contain all new material is at:

http://jamesrising.com/

thanks for all the fish.

Anthropomorphism

2010-09-27T10:53:00.001-04:00

There is word for assigning animals, objects or even plants human characteristics.
Anthropomorphism.
Egg-headed scientists scoff at this idea. The learned men in the white lab coats will tell you it is foolish to endow a dumb animal with anything like emotion. But anyone who ever owned a doggy or a kitty will tell you the pet had a soul.
I take it a bit further. I am certain that many of the inanimate objects that we deal with on a day-to-day basis also have souls or can feel. I also think they have wicked timing, and a sense of humor.
Explain to me why else the light bulb in the bathroom will pick the first thing in the morning to blow out? Getting moving in the grey dawn is hard enough without the onerous task of changing the bulb in a fixture you can reach only by standing on a chair and stretching like you are doing yoga. Making you do this when half-awake has to give the bulb some sort of perverse pleasure. Doing this in the middle of the day is dangerous. Doing it before morning coffee, prior to brushing your teeth is asking for a trip to the E.R. Or at the very least to the hardware store to buy a replacement fixture for the one you tear from the ceiling in your sleepy clumsiness.
Computers don’t have ears. Why then do we talk to them? Or more properly put in my case at least, why do I swear at them? For me it’s because the evil things refuse to cooperate at the worst possible time. Anyone who doesn’t think computers have a mind of their own has never had an important work or school assignment due when the hard drive crashes. No one when faced with such a crisis has not addressed the machine with various spells and incantations mostly revolving around the chant “not now you worthless piece of feces.”
Cars know when you will be most inconvenienced by refusing to start. Flashlight batteries that work perfectly in broad daylight plot against you on dark and stormy power failure nights. Cell phones know exactly when to drop a call, right before the boss on the other end gives you the crucial instruction and you have to make him repeat himself. Two or three times. Bosses love repeating themselves. I swear I can hear the cellphone chuckle.
The tiny rational part of my mind knows this is silly. The rest of my mind knows it’s true.
Best advice my Dad ever gave me? Never let anything mechanical or electrical know you are in a hurry. They can smell it on you and will punish you.

See you in the funnies

2010-09-27T10:46:00.000-04:00

I read newspapers. I love to tell people that. I harrumph, (newspaper readers are big on harrumphing) adjust my glasses and give out my best serious look. “I read several newspapers a day” I tell anyone who will listen, which oddly enough is fewer and fewer each day. “I read real newspapers too,” I tell them. None of this fancy internet stuff for me. I love getting ink on my fingers and elbows. Newspaper readers will understand about the elbows.
I think it makes me look intelligent. Thoughtful. Erudite. The reality is not as glamorous.
I read newspapers every day, but I read the funnies first. Always have, always will. Oh sure, I’ll glance at the front page. But first things first. I have to have my dose of comic art.
Sometimes when the headlines in the other sections of the paper are particularly bleak, that is almost all I read. I stopped watching the nightly TV news for the same reason. It was interfering with my boundless optimism and my rosy world view. Cartoons on TV are great in their own way but can’t compare with the three to four panels inked in color every day.
Newspaper comics are great. I admit I don’t read all of them. The Phantom does little for me. Something about a dog and a guy in a costume. I have read all the Peanuts over the years and I am sometimes amazed to still see Charles Schultz’s (he’s been gone 9 years now) name in print. Our local papers don’t carry Mary Worth and I am fine with that.
But I faithfully read several strips, as we comic lovers call them, on a daily basis. A day without “Dilbert” and his pointy haired boss? It’s unthinkable. “Get Fuzzy” can make me laugh so hard that cereal milk shoots out my nose. And “Crankshaft” is good on so many levels, from amazing art to the uncanny way it nails people as they really are.
My refrigerator’s actual color is difficult to discern. It’s covered with clipped out strips. Sometimes just one panel, but that one small square can be a work of art all by itself. A good example: a “Crankshaft” panel shows the old man and his adult daughter on a porch swing. He says “Somehow, I always thought life took longer than this.” Nailed it, for me at least.
One time the paper forgot to print the funnies. They just plain forgot to run the funnies and printed a full page of car ads instead. I went through the seven stages of grief. I missed a whole day in the life of “Frazz.” You never get over something like that.

Amerika

2010-09-27T10:31:00.001-04:00

A possible projection of the future, had calmer (and smarter) heads not prevailed:
FORTY FORT, Pa - September 18, 2020 – To no one’s surprise the northeastern PA. borough of Forty Fort officially seceded from the United States today. Standing by the gate in the 50 foot high fence surrounding the community, the mayor proclaimed the day a proud one for the 100 remaining residents.
“The first thing we did 10 years ago was get rid of all them pesky forms with two languages on them. If you can’t read American you can’t live here so go away.” said the Mayor.
More recently phone service, landline and cellular, was terminated.
“People were dialing out and getting these menus in English and Spanish. It was just wrong.” A Council member said. “We didn’t want our kids to grow up thinking English was a second language.” he continued. Access to the internet has been eliminated as well.
The newly formed Forty Fort culinary police were busy eradicating the ethnic food sections of local grocery stores. Two Chinese takeout restaurants have been shuttered and the fast food restaurant chains have changed the popular potato dish’s name to Fort Fries.
Bourough council was also happy to report that the bonfire burning all foreign language textbooks was a great success.
“They won’t be teaching that Hinky-Dinky, Parlez Vous in our schools” the school board president said. When a reporter pointed out that the remaining families with school age children had moved out of the borough he shrugged and replied “Ah who needs ‘em. Probably a bunch of foreigners anyway. Hey, you look sort of foreign yourself.”
Access to Forty Fort has been restricted to the single gate in the tall fence surrounding the community. Vehicles manufactured in countries other than the United States are denied entry.
“We don’t need any of them foreign crap boxes in our town!” said the Mayor.
When a reporter pointed out that many cars with American marques were manufactured on foreign soil the Mayor replied “What are you, some sort of smart aleck? And what does marque mean anyway? Is that a Jap car you drove here in? You better get going.” The Mayor brandished a weapon.
When a reporter pointed out that the weapon was an AK-47 of Russian origin he was escorted by the Mayor out of the sovereign nation of Forty Fort at rifle point.
“America for Americans.” He said, locking the gate.

9/11 Redux

2010-09-11T07:04:00.007-04:00

I was furious.
I drove like a maniac to the radio station, braked hard to a four wheel skid, jumped from my car, straight armed the doors and slammed into the lobby.
I was pissed off.
My anger was directed at the morning duo, just hired, for the radio station I programmed. The pair, Kimberly and Beck, had been doing a bit about a plane crashing into the World Trade center. At least I thought it was a bit.
I didn’t find it at all funny. I raced towards the studio intent on giving the errant DJ’s a piece of my mind.
As I passed by the news room I glanced at the small TV mounted on the wall and skidded to halt, digging my heels in the carpet.
My jaw dropped.
The world slowed down.
I said “Oh. My. God.”
In the news room a small group had gathered, looking at the TV. The cute sales assistant who was always bright and bubbly, looked at me. Her face was ashen.
As I looked from her to the TV the second tower was hit. The cute sales assistant burst into tears.
Bud Brown, the crusty, seasoned news veteran who had covered it all was frozen in place. It was clear he couldn’t handle the images on the TV any better than the rest of us.
I had just seen a documentary on the terrorist threat and I said “that Osama guy did this.” No one said a word.
The news about the Pentagon came.
The broadcaster in us kicked in.
The people, our audiences, had to know.
In times like that necessity is the mother of invention. Only one of the five radio stations under our control that day was news oriented. The others were music intensive and didn’t even have a network affiliation.
The engineers ran wires down the hallways and struggled to make connections so we could get radio network news on the air. DJ’s, used to cracking jokes and introducing records were tongue tied.
It was taking too long.
Each studio had a TV. In desperation I ordered the DJ’s in each station to turn the volume up and hold a microphone to the speakers. The image of those announcers stretching their arms to get the microphones near the TV’s mounted high on the walls stays with me.
I have many memories of the moment and the horrible moments following. Like all Americans the images of those planes slamming into the Two Towers were seared into my mind’s eye. But what I remember most clearly was seeing the second plane hit and then the tears in The cute sales assistant's eyes.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“What’s going to happen?”
To this day I don’t have an answer.

Does a Bear...

2010-09-02T08:10:00.001-04:00

I don’t watch a great deal of commercial television. Oh I sit in front of the TV and enjoy movies on DVD and streamed Via Netflix but my viewing of network TV with commercials in between content is not up to statistical norms. According to the A.C. Nielsen Co., the average American watches more than 4 hours of TV each day. I am sure I watch less than half an hour. This has less to do with the content than the commercials. I find reality shows contrived and prefer to watch any shows without commercials. Newton Minow once called TV “A vast wasteland.” He said this back in 1960, when there were the big three networks and no cable networks at all. Newton baby, you had no idea!
So it is I am out of the loop when it comes to the state of the art in TV commercials. I do see enough so that it takes a lot to shock/piss off/anger me. I mean after we have waded through all the ads for feminine hygiene (why do they use BLUE liquid?) and heard for the thousandth time that you should see a doctor if the erection lasts more than four hours what’s to be shocked/pissed off/angered about?
But I must have missed the recent series of ads for Charmin toilet paper or as they call it, “Bath Tissue”. Charmin has been promoting their brand of butt wipe for some reason for the last ten years with bears. Some advertising agency guy must have heard the phrase about a bear pooping in the woods and ran with it. I’ve actually seen a bear do that and let me tell you they don’t use Charmin. But that’s not what caught my eye.
The more recent ads-and they have apparently been running for a year or more- feature a bear cub with a problem. Variously called dingleberries, cling-ons , hangers-on, the bear cub (Billy according to the Charmin website) is shown with white specks of TP clinging to its ass. Momma bear (Molly) chases it around with a broom and dust pan until Charmin “Ultra Strong” comes to rescue to eliminate what the ad calls “leftovers.”
In a word, yuck.
For more than 20 years Charmin promoted the softness of their product with a nice actor named Dick Wilson. Dick played Mr. Whipple who exhorted people not to squeeze the Charmin. I am sure Dick Wilson would have thrown up if he was asked to promote Charmin’s ability to reduce dingleberries. Dick passed on to great grocery store in the sky back in 2007. If there is any justice in life he never got to see the bear’s asses doing his job.

I Still Believe (Great Design)

2010-08-22T07:18:00.002-04:00

I am of that age where more and more often someone I knew of passes away. I know, as the “Dead” would say, Death has no mercy but when you start to count the ones who you knew or whose name you knew as those numbered among the angels it is a little bit sad. Sometimes a whole lot sad.
A boss of mine noticed when I was mourning the passing of Dale Earnhardt Sr. years back and made a big deal about it. He thought it stupid. How could I waste any emotion over someone I had never met? Save my tears for family members or pets, but not race car drivers who you had never been close to. For whatever reason this boss didn’t get it.
A close personal friend of mine passed away the other day. A close personal friend that I consider myself lucky to have known very well, even though we only met once. We spent hours together. As an adult American male the code is that you don’t cry or share feelings but boy did we share. He made me laugh and feel great and yes I spilled buckets of tears with him, for him and because of him.
He could make me smile on the worst of days, when I had lost my job, my dog died or the checks all bounced. And he could make me feel hope when deep in the dark corners of my soul I knew there was none. When I only had a spark to light my way, he was that spark. He and I came through some pretty heavy stuff. I made it. He didn’t.
Heart attack is what they speculate. He was 60, after all, and lived a rock star’s life. It takes a toll. At the time of his death he was working for his son in the profession that he loved. He was a musician. No that’s not strong enough. He was an Artist.
His music lives on and I guess that is quite a legacy. 10 albums with songs so strong that they could knock down walls. And the walls did come down when Michael Been played. And sang. Boy could he sing.
The Call were one of those late 80’s 90’s bands that should have been big but weren’t. Record companies are like any other business. Politics, greed and horseshit pile up so fast that it’s a wonder any Artist ever gets their due. Many, like The Call and Michael Been don’t.
I met him in a grip and grin at Lackawanna County Multipurpose stadium when it was called that. Moments before he had been on stage, his arms spread wide and gave me a message I remember clear as a bell to this day.
“I still believe
Through the shame
And through the grief
Through the heartache
Through the tears
Through the waiting
Through the years

For people like us
In places like this
We need all the hope
That we can get
Oh, I still believe
R.I.P. Michael Been. 1950-2010

Inspection? We don't need no Inspection

2010-06-01T11:46:00.000-04:00

Did you notice that your Pennsylvania state inspection and emission stickers are peeling off from your car windshield? Did you think it was your fault? Maybe you ran the defroster too much, or possibly the garage guy didn’t scrape all the old one off before putting on the new one? Is that what you thought, bunkie? Well guess what? It was none of the above. While they won’t come right out and say it, Penn Dot found cheaper glue and now the stickers are sliding off the windshields. But you would think that since you are required by law in Pa to display those stickers that if they are falling off due to a change made by Penn Dot or whoever actually takes care of stickers they would man up and fix the problem. I understand it may be the Department of General Services-DGS or DGS, Department of General Screwups. Is that what's troubling ya, friend? Well relax. The state of Pa is no more likely to take credit for the screw-up any more than they will solve the problem of the slippery stickers. If your sticker (or you) come completely unglued you can opt for a replacement. According to published reports (does this column count as a “published report?”) the replacements cost no more than $4 for an inspection sticker and $4.40 for an emissions sticker. Now this is wrong on so many levels that it makes my head spin like Linda Blair on speed. I have to pay for Penn Dots screw up? Instead of forcing the manufacturer of the stickers to pay for the cost of replacement stickers, they want the public to pay for shoddy workmanship and sub standard materials. The horror! The outrage! And why does it cost “no more” than $4? Can I get it cheaper? Can I shop around? And why does the emissions sticker cost 40 cents more? A variety of solutions have been proposed for DYI fix it’s from tape to clear nail polish. I shudder to think how hard it’s gonna be to remove super glue from thousands of windshields in that hard to reach lower left hand corner. Now I am not really a conspiracy theorist but I know that the State Police will stop you if you are missing a sticker or even if the sticker looks suspicious. Could this be a plan to give the State a reason to stop you? I know it’s being unreasonably paranoid to think that Penn Dot and the Law Enforcement agencies are working together to thin the herd. I know this just as sure as I know that…wait. Is that ANOTHER black helicopter circling my house? I could be wrong.

(This place is) FINE FOR LITTER

2010-05-30T11:46:00.000-04:00

I don’t understand the mindset that allows you to throw stuff out of your car. Or maybe I do. Maybe it’s that Freud thing. You know, the anal expulsive character. Where it’s ok to poo all over the world. It’s either that or people are just plain creeps. Choose one. Or both. The other day while waiting for the long suffering wife to run wild crazy and free from her workplace so I could take her home I engaged in my usual time killing exercise. Across from her workplace there is an intersection with stop signs. Both directions and both almost universally ignored. So I count the scofflaws. One day in a ten minute period I counted thirty five cars that either just slowed a little or outright blew past the signs. One was a police car! On this day a young man rolled to what I have heard called a “California stop”, lowered his window and ejected a large red plastic cup. The kind you serve beer in at keg parties. I was appalled. But it’s not the strangest thing I have seen thrown out of car windows. Of course it’s normal to see cigarettes butts come flying out but a tampon cylinder? Makes you go hmmmm. A walk along any roadside here in NEPA will show you that the world is some folk’s garbage dump. Fast food bags, half eaten food, used condoms (ugh) and empty soda and beer cans of every brand known to man. I guess it’s tough to enforce but the law is clear. PA Vehicle Code, Title 75, Chapter 37 - litter and waste dropped, thrown or deposited from a vehicle onto a road right-of-way. Penalties: considered a summary offense, imposes a fine of not more than $900, depending on where the dumping occurs, and/or picking up and removing litter from public or private property. I like the sound of that picking up and removing litter from public or private property idea. Seems like a good old “eye for an eye” punishment. Strangest thing I have found? By my mailbox. On my country road. Two hypodermic needles. Right next to them a bag from a fast food joint. My immediate thought was a diabetic. Over dosed on junk food they had to shoot up with insulin. The long suffering wife said junkies. She was probably right. In hospitals and doctors’ offices they have special containers for “Sharps.” I wore gloves and wrapped them in the fast food bags. Dropped them in what the fast food junkies have evidently never seen. My garbage can. So I cleaned up after you. Would you do the same for me? Somehow I doubt it. I could be wrong.

Customer Diservice

2010-05-25T11:45:00.000-04:00

Whatever happened to good old customer service? You know, that old fashioned concept of the customer always being right? I guess in today’s marketplace there are so many customers with so much money that it doesn’t matter if you piss off some or most of them, right? Wrong. In today’s marketplace it’s more important than ever before to please the few customers who walk in than ever before. If I was selling something at retail I would make my customer happy in hopes that they might come in again or more importantly tell an acquaintance about the wonderful service they got at my store. Case in point. I walked the corridors of a local mall the other weekday. I realize that mid day, mid week might not be the busiest time to visit a mall. But this place was so empty it was spooky. You could have shot a cannon in any direction and not killed or even wounded a soul. Even the annoying people who try to smear hand cream on you were awol. It was beyond dead. It was in full rigor mortis. So it was with some bemusement that I waited five minutes before being waited on at my destination. My mission? To return a defective DVD. I purchased “Avatar” and halfway through at the part where the blue girl was about to put the moves on the blue guy the picture began to smear and tear and then just froze. Nothing I tried worked. So there I am with my receipt in hand and the guy at the store finally finishes his cell phone call and listens to my story. “No” he said. “We just gotta email about this. You gotta update your firmwear on your player.”
“My player is only a few months old and I just did that update.” I replied.
And here is where the disconnect really begins. He said: “Are you sure?”
I opened my mouth to reply then shut it with an audible snap. This guy was questioning me? My honesty? Over a return/replacement transaction? Like it was money out of HIS pocket? I just stood and looked at him.
Let’s see. I drove ten miles to the store, was going to drive ten miles back to make “sure” I had done the update then lather rinse and repeat? So round trip of forty miles plus the two hours out of life. Why?
I held out the DVD and the receipt and kept my big mouth shut. He apparently got the message albeit with a bit more grumbling. I got my replacement which works fine. Put bamboo slivers under my fingernails and set them on fire and I won’t ever return there.

Flea Markets Redux

2010-05-18T11:44:00.000-04:00

I love flea markets. I have mentioned this before in this space. Winter sucks for many reasons but the dearth of flea markets ranks right up there with shoveling and paying the plow guy. So it was with no little sense of elation that we did the rounds of the local flea markets for the first time last weekend. We hit the Garden Drive-in at Hunlock Creek before the birds were up. Flea markets are great for people watching. In fact I enjoy a stroll around the grounds seeing the various examples of Gods handy work almost more than I do bargain priced items. This weekend past was no exception. There was the girl who stooped in front of me to tie her shoe. Honest, I tried not to look but her Technicolor tramp stamp drew my eye like a moth to flame. She was accompanied by a dog slightly larger than a robin. Good thing this little terror was on a leash. It barked a frenzy at a Bull Mastiff the size of a locomotive like it would tear its throat out if it could just get at it. The large dog just eyed the tiny thing. Then there was wardrobe malfunction girl, who had bright red hair streaked with green, an unfortunate choice of glasses that resembled Woody Allen’s to go with her belly shirt that did little to hide her big belly, her jeans that were ripped but not in a fashionable way and her sneakers with the fluorescent orange soles. I am sure her house has no mirrors as they most likely exploded. And the conversations you over hear. Now that we have a large percentage of good folks who speak other than English here in NEPA I have noticed exchanges in those languages are all done at TOP VOLUME. I have no idea what they are saying but I sure can hear it. But back to the bargains. A row of brightly colored banners that were proudly displayed with a large sign claiming they were “Falgs.” Swing and a miss. A stack of cages with roosters, bunnies, peahens and ducks. 3 for $15 dollars, your choice, mix and match. A display of odds and ends that looked like it was moved intact from somebody’s attic. Cardboard boxes full of stuff that defies description. And so we shopped and strolled and bought on a perfect Sunday morning. My purchases? Hot sauce for my eggs, expired in 2009 – A previously viewed CD of the HBO series “Carnivale” asking price $40-paid $20 – Granola bars, also expired in 2009 – and to wash them down with, a bottle of 1985 Dom Perignon (!) $30. Only at the flea market.

Gothic Kittens Redux

2010-05-10T11:41:00.000-04:00

The Gothic kittens’ case was disposed of the other day. When this first came to light I was outraged and wrote in this space about what I thought should happen to the person who committed this act on the kitties. It’s the only time I remember the editor of this publication suggesting I tone it down. That what I offered as punishment for this animal mutilator was, well, a bit extreme. We don’t need to go there. It was over the top. But I have followed this case and the surrounding controversies with more than a little interest. People brought up the point that if it’s ok to pierce baby girls ears than why the outrage over doing the same to a dumb animal. My question-who says it’s ok to pierce baby’s ears? I am in contact with many individuals who have all sorts of body decorations. Some so many that it looks as though they got into a fight with a nail gun and lost. I am certain that if we held down these pierce devotees and forced them to be ventilated that we would be swiftly arrested if not worse. My point is that it’s all about choice. The kitties and babies don’t have one when somebody handy with a needle comes at them. That makes it wrong. The woman who stabbed the kitties said at her sentencing hearing “I had no idea what I was doing was a crime. It was wrong, and I’ll never do it again.”
So she says now, while confessing she was only trying to “beautify” the kittens. She just does not get it. She also claims she really really loves animals.
Her sentence? Six months house arrest, some further time on double secret probation and she can’t operate her pet grooming business while being punished.
I wish I was a judge. Not because I want a big boat in Florida and a jet of my own. But because I could come up with a better sentence with one bribe held behind my back.
First thing that popped into my head is that since she really really loves animals that she should never ever be allowed within 100 yards of any. Like a child molester.
But then I had a second thought. This woman who put rings on kitty’s tails to make them drop off should be made to have more contact with animals. I say make her work, for free, in an animal shelter. Cleaning cages. Shoveling poo. Closely supervised of course. And I want her to watch every single instance where a puppy or kitty is euthanized. It might harden her heart you say? I think not. I could be wrong.

Home Unhandyman

2010-05-01T11:40:00.000-04:00

Did you ever have one of those perfect days? You get out of bed in a good mood. You shave yourself without opening a vein. The breakfast is made without setting the house on fire or dropping it on the floor. On the way out the door the birds are singing a merry tune, the sun is warm on your face and the car starts on the first try. It’s the perfect day. Yesterday was the anti-day of that for me. 180 degrees reversed, like the creepy episode of Star Trek where everyone had an evil twin. Sometimes you have days where you can do anything. Yesterday was the day that I once and for all decided that I can do almost nothing. It’s another home handyman disaster story, folks. It started last fall where I decided to shut down my studio above the garage for the winter. Too much other work on the other jobs. So I drained the toilet, opened the faucets and shut the water off. Turned the heater off and forgot all about it. Yesterday I decided to turn it back on. I carefully (heh) looked over the plumbing. Then turned the water back on. The shut off is in my basement. Studio is a minutes’ walk away. Took my time. Was greeted at the door of the studio by “Agnes” the remake. Sprinted to the house. Fell partway there and knocked the wind and what little sense I had out of me. I shut off the water and returned to the scene of the crime. Expensive microphones were floating around. A pipe that was perfect when I checked it now was clearly not. So I went to the hardware store and they sold me a plastic fitting to fix it. Would probably have worked if I didn’t snap it in half. Now comes the real bad idea. I got the propane torch out, blew the cobwebs off it. The little bastard would only stay lit if I held the barbeque lighter to it. Awkward. Burned myself. Set the plastic drain pipe for the sink on fire. Threw everything into the trash. I was scared to call the plumber. The last time he charged me the 401 k and a quart of blood. A colleague “knew a guy” and he actually showed up, did the fix and charged less than the travel time of the last bandit. I remarked to him about how inept I was. His comment? “Some people are good at some things, and not others.” I thanked him for his well meant condescension and decided then and there that I would stick to what I know how to do well. Naps. Lunch. Dialing 911.

The Name Game

2010-04-20T11:43:00.000-04:00

Back when I was toiling in the gardens of frequency modulation I worked for a General Manager who was a great guy, a fair manager and was totally clueless about the music we played. His favorite group? Dicky Doo and the Don’ts. Google it if you don’t believe me. Hint: They had a Pittston connection. The song was “Click, Clack”. Of course this GM, who we will call “Lumpy” because that was what we called him, also referred to “the kids” playing their “transistor radios” and this was during the 90’s. It got me thinking about group names, specifically groups who play in our local small bars. A quick glance at the publication you hold in your hands provides more than a few. My point here is that all these bands took the time to come up with a name. Only a few came up with a name that you could reasonably infer what sort of music they might offer on a given night out. Just sayin’ that it might help their draw. I make no judgment on the quality of the music. In most cases I would not know the groups in question if I fell over them. Groups I could figure out on my own without any help from description or pictures: Long Strange Trip. Random Rock. (Classic Rock) Runners-up in this category are Iron Cowboy (Country) and Bad Hair Day (80’s), but they had pictures so no fair. Groups that I can sort of guess at but I might be wildly off: Catacomb Creeps. Dirty Vultures. The Dependable Felons. Necessary Noise. Pave the way. (Heavy Metal). Now we veer off into uncharted territory. Johnny Unit. Tribes. Gone Crazy. Faded Fortune. Jerry’s Finger. ( I think it should be Smell Jerry’s Finger, but that’s just me). Ends Of The Earth. Sucker Punch. Dam Shannon. Bare Knuckle. (No clue). Groups with “N” in the middle: Rock N Horse. Skin N Bones. I81 N 151 (As clueless as Lumpy). And the ever popular misspelled names: Hat Tryk. Kartune. Black Orkid. (Really no idea at all). Now I am sure these are all great bands. Hard working bands. Bands with talent and oodles of creativity. After all they came up with these cool names, Right? Or maybe not. Maybe they just put random words together. Long Random Catacomb. Dirty Dependable Noise. Jerry’s Knuckle Sucker. Johnny Gone Faded. Hmmm. I might have something here. Of course I have yet to mention the most popular band of all time, judging from the number of appearances. It seems to me that the group that week in and week out has the most gigs is Penny ‘til U Pee. (Golden Shower Oldies). I could be wrong.

Write Something Stupid

2010-04-15T11:42:00.000-04:00

Write something stupid. What a great phrase. You see, if you could hear me say those three words out loud I could give them at least two different meanings. It’s either for me to write something that IS stupid. Or I could be calling MYSELF stupid. In either case that is exactly what we have here today. A stupid writer writing something stupid. Stupid is as stupid does, Forrest. We all know that groups are sometimes named. A murder of crows, a pride of elephants and so on. When I worked for big radio I would refer to a group of salespeople as a stupid of salespeople. This probably explains why I no longer work in radio. And why salespeople don’t send me Christmas cards. I commit stupid on average at least five times a day. But my brother in law took the stupid crown away from me for a while the other day. We will call him Mickey because that is his name. He lives with the long suffering wife’s sister who should be a saint by now. Mickey is the most generous person I know. The guy would literally give you the proverbial shirt off his back. So when his wife, due for immediate canonization upon her passing, mentioned she was about to call a relative, Mickey leaped to the portable phone and quickly dialed the number for her. I told you he was a helpful guy. Except in this case it didn’t work out so well. Recently Mickey bought new cordless phones. In his haste and unfamiliarity with the technology Mickey dialed 911. Then, when they answered Mickey committed his second stupid of the moment. He hung up without saying a word. You have to admire the diligence of 911. They called back immediately. Of course Mickey wanted nothing to do with the phone at this time. His wife (you are now seeing why she is a candidate for sainthood) was left to answer. The dispatcher informed her that the Pennsylvania State police were on the way. She assured them that all was well and explained what her well meaning but technologically challenged husband had done. The dispatcher was not entirely convinced and suggested that it would be best if the Staties came over and had a look see. Using a tool known best to wives the world round she made her case to the dispatcher. “STUPID, STUPID, STUPID” she roared at Mickey. “Now the State Police are coming.” I can envision the 911 dispatcher trying not to wet themselves. The promised visit from the long arm of the law was called off. It’s now been strongly suggested that Mickey refrain from dialing. I could be wrong.

Dead. Your dead?

2010-04-10T08:00:00.000-04:00

Having attended many St. Patrick’s day parades in Scranton in my day, I have seen my fair share of the inexplicable behavior that results from the consumption of too much alcohol. Hell I’ve seen that sort of behavior at office Christmas parties and backyard barbeques for that matter. There is nothing like a shot or two of Ye Olde Stumpblower to set the inhibitions aside and get to the real feelings inside.
A songwriter name of James McMurty said it quite nicely in a song called Too long in the wasteland. “Whiskey don’t make liars, it just makes fools.”
Of course history has long chronicled the rich, powerful and successful who had a close and personal association with John Barleycorn. Winston Churchill (his friends called him “Winny.” No wonder he drank) has been chronicled as being pickled from the moment he got up in the morning until he staggered into bed. But he never shamed the British Empire by trying to blow a dead opossum.
There is a school yard insult about having oral sex with a dead dog but in polite society one never does that sort of thing.
Opossum are generally disgusting even while living. I trapped one once in an effort to catch a squirrel that was trying to make his home in our home, something which infuriated the long suffering wife. The havahart® live trap snared the critter instead, which smelled like it was dead, made hissing noises at me with bared teeth when I tried to free it and was not a happy experience overall for either of us.
So knowing how unpleasant contact of any kind with a living opossum while sober is, I have to just admire the level of intoxication that Donald Wolfe displayed when he allegedly tried to resuscitate a dead opossum with the breath of life.
The story, which was widely reported, had Donny being observed giving mouth-to-mouth to a long dead opossum which was road killed on the side of a highway in Punxsutawney Pa. Witnesses including a State Trooper saw him conducting a “séance” with the dead critter and the law enforcement officer is quoted as saying “He did have his mouth in the area of the animal's mouth...I guess." I think it was a noble attempt on the part of the trooper to save a shred of dignity for Don that he “guessed.”
It may be just coincidence that this occurred in the home of the most famous groundhog in the world. Sure. That’s it. Coincidence.
“Phill….is dat youse, buddy. Oh Phillll…what de hell happened to you? Oh my gawd. Phillll! C’mere little buddy. I’ll (hic) save youse. Phil!. Breath for me pal!!”
I could be wrong.

I'm Dickens, He's Fenster

2010-04-10T07:59:00.000-04:00

Snow Job

2010-03-27T07:52:00.001-04:00

Some random thoughts about the recent snow. The weather forecasting business must suck. When they are wrong and they are wrong more than they are right, they get kidded unmercifully about getting paid to be wrong. When they are right they are the messenger you want to shoot. After a couple of swings and misses over the past winter they nailed it last week and we got crushed. It seemed on Thursday that they had missed again but by Friday when it had snowed constantly for 48 hours we were in deep do-do. In fact the do-do was so deep that the U.S. P. S. said “Uncle” instead of "Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these courageous couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” To be fair that is not even their motto. Some Greek guy coined it. Probably doesn’t even snow in Greece. So schools were called off both Thursday and Friday and cruising the blogosphere I see people hating the “snow school” announcements on the TV and the radio. I was in radio for more years than I choose to mention and trust me, reading school closings is worse than listening to someone read school closings. In this day and age with you kids and your fancy email and texts it does seem as useful as mammary glands on a bull. But the one year we eschewed the tedious reading and asked anxious kids and parents to go to the web site, the ratings went down. And back on the air the closings went. Other rantings on the internet were hating on the plow guys. In some posts that I read violence was suggested after the plow went through and buried the freshly shoveled driveway or sidewalk. I myself wondered at the timing when I unburied my mail box for the third time (a futile effort – see above) to return to the warm and cozy house only to see my work undone by the big yellow truck. Two things to remember here. First: The road must be cleared. The mailman might come! And secondly it’s basic physics. The snow on the road when pushed off the road must go somewhere. Chances are it’s going on the side adjacent from whence it came. Physics don’t know it’s your driveway/sidewalk/mailbox. Physics does what physics does. Get over it. Suggestion: Wait it out. Shovel once – later. Lastly a shot across the bow of the annoying neighbors kid who spent this summer noisily clearing a hillside yards from my at home office to make a snowboarding area. I work from home. I’ve not seen it used. Once. What a waste. I could be wrong.

Change the channel, please

2010-03-27T07:51:00.000-04:00

Watching local TV has always been a guilty pleasure of mine. I guess it began when I was a young sprout growing up in the granite fields of Vermont when television was something of a novelty. Our first set was a converted oscilloscope that had a green circular screen the size of a tea cup saucer. I may be exaggerating. I think it was smaller. The first TV newscast I saw originated from Poland Springs Maine. You may have enjoyed the water. Channel 8 WMTW got the “MTW” because at the time they had their transmitter site on top of Mount Washington where one of the highest winds on earth ever was measured. The guys who ran the gear lived on the mountain for most of the winter as the way up or down was pretty much impassable. One of them gave a weather forecast from the mountain. Wore a bow tie, a white shirt with a pocket protector full of pens and pencils. He looked into the one black and white camera and with a strong down east accent talked about the wind and snow on the mountain. Thinking about it today it makes backyard weather forecasting seem pale by comparison. It was crude at best but it was innovative for the time. Now we have Doppler this and weather map that but I miss the geeky engineer from on top of the mountain. He is, I am sure long gone to the engineers home in the sky and a few years ago WMTW’s transmitter site burned to the ground and they moved to a less inhospitable place. Like all media, local TV is being pummeled by the World Wide Web. ABC news recently announced cutbacks of 1,400 and the ones left will not only report the news but will be camera operators (think flip video cams) soundmen, editors and producers. The local TV news operations will no doubt follow suit. When a good percentage of video is being shot by ordinary people (how much skill does it take to point the phone cam at a house fire?) the days of a three person crew doing it are numbered. I hope it doesn’t stop them from showing “local color.” The best thing about a live shot on the news is the people waving and grinning like ninnies at the camera. The stand-up reporter could be talking about a bus wreck that killed 40 and idiots in the background will be waving at Ma. Second best thing: the eyewitless interview. Where do they find these people? With both eyes on one side of their head and occasional teeth they are clearly not of this earth. I could be wrong.

Big Brother is NOT watchting

2010-03-27T07:50:00.000-04:00

One of the cheap thrills in my life is checking the police blotter in the newspaper. There is always an interesting story or three like the guy who was asking women to sign his member and I don’t mean jacket but that’s not what I am curious about here.
More than a month ago a big hairy deal was made about the multitude of surveillance cameras installed in and around downtown Wilkes-Barre. $2 million worth of gear. Over 50 cameras and a 24 hour a day, seven day a week staff of people including some law enforcement types are watching them. One of the tools is a huge five foot by five foot monitor that will enable the view of Public Square to be in 3-D, just like the movie Avatar. No doubt there are quite a few blue creatures on the square along with other assorted monsters. That actually sounds like kind of a fun job, spying on people for living. The job description: Voyeurs wanted. Must bring own 3-D glasses.
The system, while only partially complete now, will eventually control 150 cameras. A smug statement said that while some will be extremely visible, some will be hidden so as to not alert the evil doers of their presence. Hidden surveillance cameras, what a concept.
Here’s my question. These 50 snooping cameras and the attendant voyeurs have been on the job for a month and a half. Why hasn’t any crime been stopped? The list of cars being broken into and purse snatchings goes on unabated in the police blotter. Wouldn’t it make sense that at least ONE crime in that time frame may have been seen? One perpetrator brought to justice? None that I have seen and I have been looking at least as hard as the ones who are tasked with the job.
Possibly the “powers that be” do not want the success of the $2 million dollar toy that gobbles up $232,000 a year in staffing charges to be publicized. Yeah, that’s it. Politicians don’t want to blow their own horn. And this breaking news: a dark planet will crash into the sun in 3…2…1..Hmmm. Never gonna happen.
Or maybe (black helicopter theory warning) all the cameras are just decoys, like the state trooper car that used to sit on I-81 near Scranton with a dummy in the driver’s seat. You could buy a lot of decoys for a few thousand bucks, right? Rig up the press demo with the rented big screens . Then what happens to the rest of the dough?
Am I suggesting that Luzerne County Politically connected might do something….what’s the word? WRONG? Perish the thought. Big brother is watching. Maybe.

Sense-us

2010-03-27T07:49:00.000-04:00

I haven’t gotten my census form yet. This really worries me for a number of reasons. First of all a lot of people I know (Well one actually) have gotten theirs. Why have I been left out? I don’t mean to go all existential here, but if I am not counted by the U.S. Gumm-mint, do I really exist? If I fall in the woods and no one hears, do I make a sound? So there is that problem. The other thing nagging me is that if I do not get it in the mail which costs the U.S. Gumm-mint 49 cents, then I will no doubt be visited by a census taker which costs $47. So please mail me one soon? Save money and possibly a census taker. You see if you do dispatch a census worker to my neck of the woods you have to beware. Not from me, you understand. Even though the Rising compound is far back in the woods and we no longer get visited by Jehovah’s witnesses after the “Incident” we mean no one any harm. Pay no attention to the killer attacking Red Squirrels, their bite is worse than their bark. Not the case for my demented neighbor. We know that he is stupid and mean but I am also 100% certain he is armed. You will recognize his driveway by the animal skulls (Cue ”Dueling Banjos” from the movie Deliverance) scattered there. That and the “Kill ‘em all, let God sort them out” bumper sticker on his pick-up truck. Good luck.

I peeked at the census form on-line. Most of the 10 questions seem to make sense. Some of them do not. Some seem just downright nosy. And some, like my neighbor, are just plain dumb as rocks stoo-pit.

The Gum-mint needs to know if I own my home or not? Nosy.

They need my name? They are supposed to count heads. Period. Nosy.

Why does the Gumm-mint need my phone number? Nosy

Questions eight and nine have to do with race. Number eight asks if you are “Hispanic, Latino or Spanish.” Question nine wants to know what you are with a long list of possibilities from “White” to “Samoan”. First of all should those questions be combined? And secondly what if I claim to be “American?” (Thanks to Rush Limbaugh). Dumb

But the capper-question seven wants my age on April 1, 2010 and then asks for my birth date including year. Now I am no rocket scientist but…if you know how old I am on 4/1/2010 a quick calculation can give you my birth year. And why does the Gumm-mint what my Birth date? Are they gonna send me a card?

Bet you'll love the wings

2010-02-21T08:00:00.001-05:00

I just don’t understand. Now I know that I am not that smart. I am aware that my intellectual acumen resembles that of a four slice toaster. If I didn’t know this I get it pointed out to me. Usually daily. At home the question is often posed, “How can you be so stupid?” On the highways of NEPA I often hear “Get out of the way, you idiot!” So I must come to the conclusion that I am as dumb as a box of rocks. So perhaps some kind soul can explain to me this gambling deal to me. I walk into the grocery store and there is a machine twice the size of my refrigerator dispensing scratch off lottery tickets by the thousands. Some of them cost $20. Over at the pharmacy you can get your prescription filled and buy lottery tickets. Go down the street and the church is running a bingo game. Head “up the line” as they say and you can step into the casino filled with “one armed bandits” which vacuum money from your wallet or purse faster that you can say “Indian tribe.” Google “Gamble” and the return is: Results 1 - 10 of about 8,770,000 for on line gambling. (0.30 seconds). So it’s pretty clear that even though the bible tells us the wages of sin is death that there is plenty of availability to throw our dough down the drain. It would also appear to be legal. So why is it that a local bar and restaurant owner will lose his and his children’s livelihood because of gambling? This entrepreneur evidently set up a web site (one of 8,770,00 it would seem) that allowed bettors to place wagers of sin on sporting events. Then the losers or winners would go to his joint, have a few drinks, eat a nice dinner (I am told the chicken wings are to die for) and pay off or get paid off. This 71 year old man not only faces jail after being caught in a sting by the FBI but the cheerful Wilkes-Barre U.S Attorney’s office wants his Sports Bar. Now I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck. I know that it’s the money, honey. The Sports Bar guy wasn’t playing nice and sharing the dough. But if that’s the case why incarcerate him and take the bar? Why not make him write a check? Because all I know is that if and when the U.S. Attorney’s office gets possession of the Sports Bar, what was once a thriving, taxpaying business will sink faster than the Titanic. Because who wants to eat wings made by the government? I could be wrong.

Diesel fit her

2010-02-14T08:37:00.002-05:00

I now know more about diesel fuel than I want to. This began exactly a week before Christmas Eve. Thursday. With the extreme cold weather here in NEPA I check the trusty heating oil tanks often. This year in spite of the human flesh freezing chill the gauge wasn’t moving. Hurrah! Our conservation efforts and triple layers were working. Until I tapped the gauge and it went from half full to mostly empty in a heartbeat. Uh oh. My friendly neighborhood fuel guys deliver on Thursday so I thought I was in luck. No soap. They would be happy to come…Christmas Eve. “But”, I cleverly protested. “I’m going to run out.”

“No problem” said she. “Just fill it up with diesel fuel.”

“That’ll work?” I said incredulously.

“Would I steer you wrong?”

I should have known better right then. As it turns out she was right. Diesel fuel and heating oil are basically the same. The dye color (red here in the US) indicates the difference and has more do with how it’s taxed then how or what it burns in.

Now here is where the stupidity comes in. I did it. Instead of picking up the phone and calling one of the 40 other fuel guys who no doubt would be only too happy to take my money, I fell for it. Hook line and yellow plastic five gallon container which cost me $9.99. Diesel fuel is more expensive than fuel oil. I did manage to find a gas station that had dyed diesel but it was still pricey.

And it was a pain in the ass. The burner in the basement was thirsty. To the tune of five gallons per day. So every stinking day out of some misguided sense of loyalty to the friendly neighborhood fuel guys I went through the process. And I do mean stinky. Diesel smells. Bad. And the fancy specially marked yellow fuel can? Well let’s just say someone improved the spout technology to the point where I never got more of the smelly stuff in the tank then I got on me or on the ground.

But Christmas Eve was coming. The long suffering wife said “You really think they will come?”

“Of course,” I replied. “They promised.”

Of course you know they didn’t. And so it was that on Christmas Day I was back at the gas station whose clerk knew me on sight. And smell. I noticed a bunch of fuel oil trucks parked near this gas station. A phone call the next day produced a same day delivery. I wish I could say my original friendly neighborhood fuel guys got a cheery message from me. I would be wrong.

Who are you?

2010-02-14T08:37:00.001-05:00

In all the hoopla surrounding the upset come from behind win for the New Orleans Saints in the Super Bowl there is something that seems to have been over looked. The glaring omission? The horrible tragedy that occurred at half-time. All I can think is that it was SO upsetting that people are just ignoring it, pretending it never happened. Maybe it will just go away. Well I have news for you. It really happened, I saw it with my own eyes and it made me sick. In fact I went to bed with an upset stomach and didn’t even get to see the rest of the game. I refer of course to the alleged performance by 50 percent of what used to be “The Who.”

It wasn’t Who are you? But what are you that was the question as Pete Townshend and Roger Daltry murdered half a dozen of the band’s classics. Out of key, out of time and looking every moment like they were wishing they were elsewhere counting the paycheck - it was embarrassing. I felt like shouting out from my generation to the younger generation, ”Don’t listen. Run. Cover your ears. They were better than this. Loads better.”

Frankly I always thought that “The Who” should have had the same dignity that Led Zeppelin showed when they threw in the towel after John “Bonzo” Bonham passed away. Drummer Keith Moon was such a big part of the sound of the group. But they soldiered on. But to continue after John “The Ox” Entwistle died was just in poor taste. And yet there they were.

Without dissecting everything that went wrong last night two things stood out like Janet Jackson’s mammary glands. Roger Daltry looked like he was being moved by a puppeteer. For a look at what Roger really looks like reference the Woodstock performance of the finale ofTommy. Sunday he looked like he was heavily medicated or had recently undergone shock therapy. Now I know he is 66 but Mick Jagger is 67 and he moves around like a chicken on methamphetamine.

And speaking about Janet Jackson and her famous wardrobe malfunction, what was up with Pete’s shirt? Do we really want to see his lily white belly hanging over his guitar while he tried to do his trademark windmills?

45 years ago (hardly seems possible but it’s true) Roger belted out the lyrics to what would become if not one of The Who’s biggest certainly it’s most recognizable hits. I am glad they did NOT attempt to do a version of “My Generation.” Seeing the feeble Daltry rasp out “I hope I die before I get old” would have been too much to bear.

Busy Signal

2010-02-14T08:36:00.001-05:00

We have not one but two land line phone numbers at the Rising ranch. I know that seems positively anachronistic in this age of cell phones and voice over internet protocol but there is a reason. Sort of. The main house phone is used by a family member who prefers it. The second line was installed for my “business” and was also a fax line. Remember faxes? I keep it because it’s in the yellow pages and two or three times a month I get a call from that. I also keep it for a sadistic form of entertainment. I have a vice. I like to torture telemarketers. I know it’s bad. They are just trying to do a job. When I die and go to whatever circle of hell I am doomed for, the guy with the horns and pitchfork will have me making phone calls to complete strangers at dinnertime. It’s only fair.

The house phone is do not call protected. Works like a charm. The business line is not. I get on average five calls a day. So I can do things like repeat every word they say back to them.

Or pretend that I know them.

“Karem, my old friend! You rascal you. How’s the harem?”

Or I can do the old call and response:

Me: Hello - ANNOYING TELEMARKETING COMPANY: Hello, this is ANNOYING TELEMARKETING COMPANY - Me: Is this A. T. C.? - A. T. C.: Yes, this is A. T. C - Me:- This is A. T. C.? -A. T. C.: Yes This is A. T. C -Me: Is this A. T. C.? - A. T. C.: YES! This is A. T. C., may I speak to Mr. Rising please? - Me: May I ask who is calling? - A. T. C. This is A. T. C… (Repeat until they hang up.)

Or I just keep repeating, “I knew you were going to say that…”

But now in the age of computers you can get high tech. There exist “Soundboards” on the interwebs that can give you short sound clips of almost any famous person , categorized by replies, insults, questions, exclamations, sounds. Well you get the drift. With a few of these open and a speaker phone you can really do some psychic damage to a telemarketer. Think Stewie Griffin. “What the deuce?” Or Robert De Niro. “You talkin’ to me?”

Funny as all this is I do try to remember that telemarketers aren't actually the spawn of Satan, that they are real people just doing a job and being cruel to them isn't right. So afterwards I tell them "Please put me on your Do Not Call list.” I could be lying.

A trip to the DMV

2010-01-31T08:12:00.001-05:00

It is the great equalizer. Everyone has to submit. Birth, death, taxes and…the visit to the DMV every four years to get your mug shot taken and pasted in a new license. As I sat at the Pa. Department of Motor Vehicles in the Hanover industrial park the other day I wondered a lot of things. First of all I wondered why it was taking so long. I could feel brain cells withering while the minutes passed like molasses on a sub freezing January day. The ticket produced by the grimy machine promised a 17 minute wait. Hemingway, Faulkner and Dickens couldn’t write better fiction. Our elapsed time from doorway to doorway was just under an hour. Oh and about that grimy machine that produces your number in line. It’s the first thing you see as you enter the facility. It has clear instructions. It’s not brain science. And yet as we waited a human gestation period I observed many who followed us just did not quite get how to or what to do. My thought? If you can’t figure that part out then how do you operate a motor vehicle? Of course having also observed the so called driving skills of NEPA my question is answered. Another wondering in my dwindling brain cells was how the hell you could get out of this. I peeked at the statutes and found that indeed you could get a license with no photo if A: you were going to be absent from PA for up to 90 days around your license renewal time (a temporary reprieve to be sure) or B: if your religious beliefs (think Amish or Mennonites) prohibit having your photo taken. It raises the question why would the Amish who drive horse and buggy vehicles would need a license in the first place but that’s another line of inquiry. So basically everyone has to do the long wait at the DMV. Which would explain why the uncomfortable chairs were filled with an assortment of humanity that more resembled the Cantina scene in the “Star Wars” movie. A bald guy sporting a Z.Z. Top style beard. A woman with nearly as much facial hair. A guy with a large gold medallion on a long chain swinging near his belt. A guy wearing a turban. Would they make him take it off? I had plenty of time to observe and think about such things in my wait. I wondered if the governor has to do this. The president? What about movie stars or other famous people? I have trouble picturing Donald Trump or Steve Jobs at the DMV. Of course they probably don’t drive anyway, right? I could be wrong.

Christmas and Diesel Fuel

2010-01-31T08:10:00.000-05:00

I now know more about diesel fuel than I want to. This began exactly a week before Christmas Eve. Thursday. With the extreme cold weather here in NEPA I check the trusty heating oil tanks often. This year in spite of the human flesh freezing chill the gauge wasn’t moving. Hurrah! Our conservation efforts and triple layers were working. Until I tapped the gauge and it went from half full to mostly empty in a heartbeat. Uh oh. My friendly neighborhood fuel guys deliver on Thursday so I thought I was in luck. No soap. They would be happy to come…Christmas Eve. “But”, I cleverly protested. “I’m going to run out.”
“No problem” said she. “Just fill it up with diesel fuel.”
“That’ll work?” I said incredulously.
“Would I steer you wrong?”
I should have known better right then. As it turns out she was right. Diesel fuel and heating oil are basically the same. The dye color (red here in the US) indicates the difference and has more do with how it’s taxed then how or what it burns in.
Now here is where the stupidity comes in. I did it. Instead of picking up the phone and calling one of the 40 other fuel guys who no doubt would be only too happy to take my money, I fell for it. Hook line and yellow plastic five gallon container which cost me $9.99. Diesel fuel is more expensive than fuel oil. I did manage to find a gas station that had dyed diesel but it was still pricey.
And it was a pain in the ass. The burner in the basement was thirsty. To the tune of five gallons per day. So every stinking day out of some misguided sense of loyalty to the friendly neighborhood fuel guys I went through the process. And I do mean stinky. Diesel smells. Bad. And the fancy specially marked yellow fuel can? Well let’s just say someone improved the spout technology to the point where I never got more of the smelly stuff in the tank then I got on me or on the ground.
But Christmas Eve was coming. The long suffering wife said “You really think they will come?”
“Of course,” I replied. “They promised.”
Of course you know they didn’t. And so it was that on Christmas Day I was back at the gas station whose clerk knew me on sight. And smell. I noticed a bunch of fuel oil trucks parked near this gas station. A phone call the next day produced a same day delivery. I wish I could say my original friendly neighborhood fuel guys got a cheery message from me. I would be wrong.

Cold Enough For You?

2010-01-16T07:51:00.001-05:00

Think about the phrase “dead of winter.” There is no phrase like that for summer, fall or spring that I know of. That’s because winter can kill you dead, while those other sissy seasons can’t even maim you. Oh I know what you are probably saying. Heat can kill too, right. Well maybe in some places but not here in NEPA. We get, what, maybe a week of really HOT weather in the summer? A few days of 90 degrees? But here is the difference between hot times in the city in NEPA and cold times. You are trapped outside in the heat. You find shade. You drink a refreshing cold drink. You fan yourself. You live. Trapped outside when it’s below freezing? You die. There you have it. My thoughts stray this way because as I write this the thermometer is displaying “1” degree. 1 is not a number for a temperature. 1 is a number for a combo meal, or, 1 is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do. But there it is in all its liquid crystal display glory. 1 single stinking solitary degree. Everything is hard in weather like this, no pun intended. Car doors refuse to open. Once you get them open cars doors refuse to stay shut. Cars refuse to start. Once you get them started and moving they refuse to stop. If they were horses the landscape would be littered with dead ones. Things break in the cold. I have a collection of ice scrapers that have shattered rather than make a windshield see through. Your flesh sticks to anything metal (See: “A Christmas Story”) and anything that hurts in normal temperatures is agony in 1 degree. Scrape your knuckles attaching jumper cables in the summer and it hurts. Same thing in 1 degree and it feels like your knuckles have been dipped in sulfuric acid. And just to make things fun when it’s this cold we also get the thrilling prospect of snow. It’s like a double whammy. It’s so cold that the milk of human kindness freezes solid upon exposure and you have to go out into the world with a snow shovel and work. The other day someone asked me (this was a person whose thermometer has never heard of 1 degree) why we live here. I had no answer. No one ever asks you “Cold enough for you?” on a 1 degree day. And I haven’t even mentioned the wind chill. In summer we have something called the heat index. I see it and think, “yeah it’s hot.” When I see the wind chill temperature I want to move to any place on the equator. I could be wrong.

Let's all go to the movies

2010-01-09T13:44:00.001-05:00

I am not pretending to be a film critic although I have seen one or two on TV. I don’t have the background in film to be able to give thumbs up or down but I know what I like.
I saw a film recently that I liked. More on that later. First let me say that I hate going to the theater to see a movie. Almost every thing about the experience grates on my few remaining nerves. Just the fact that I have no control over when it starts and there is no pause button is enough to put me in a bad mood. Ticket prices? A $7.75 EARLY BIRD special? It’s to laugh. Small popcorn and drink $10? Wowser. But the biggest drawback is the other people. Now I know I am sounding like a misanthrope but people in general are a pain in the ass. In a movie theater they are even worse. Coughing, farting blowing their noses and talking talking talking. If I had a rocket launcher. But this week the long suffering wife and I chose the early show and there were, count them, twelve others in the theater. So we settled in and snacked on our solid gold popcorn and drank our more expensive than Dom Pérignon soda and waited out the ads and previews. As you may have guessed the entertainment today was “Avatar” presented in what the newspaper ad called “READ D 3-D” (It’s actually “Real D” but let them go). It was, in word, epic. (WARNING: Semi Spoiler alert. Don’t read on if you haven’t seen it.) Now I can certainly agree with all the bashers of this film about some things. It’s a recycled “Pocahontas.” Yup, sort of. It’s anti-military and pro science. Ok. It’s really just boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back. It’s a horse opera with blue skinned creatures with bows and arrows playing the Indians. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don’t care. I laughed, I cried and when the hero walks I got a lump in my throat the size of Plymouth.
And the REAL D 3-D was nothing short of breathtaking. We also saw the Disney “A Christmas Carol” in 3-D and it too was great. The difference between Disney’s and James Cameron’s use of the technology is this: Disney pokes you in the eye with an icicle. “Avatar” used 3-D to immerse you in the story and then make you feel like you are in the movie. It’s really quite spectacular. The Real D website says: “In the future, 3D will expand to…the home.” Fantastic! No Annoying Humans! Till then I suggest the early show. Oh, and bring lots of money.

Was it my Best Buy? IDK

2010-01-06T07:33:00.001-05:00

I betray my advanced years here. When I was first in a position to start buying stereo and video stuff (in other words as soon as I had a paying job) I studied my options carefully and thoroughly educated myself before I dared to step into the “Hi-Fi” shop. A few words about “Hi-Fi” shop. Back in those days, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and birds had big leather wings and could carry collies away for dinner there were indeed stand alone stores which specialized in stereo equipment. It seems quaint but it’s true. Loving music and wanting the best I could afford I subscribed to magazines like Stereo Review and High Fidelity so I could make intelligent choices. The salesmen at these “Hi-Fi” shops were scholars of the art. Often wearing tweed jackets with leather elbow patches and smoking pipes they would pontificate at length and really help you make a purchase. Compare and contrast my recent experience at a store which we will call “Next Guy.” First of all a visit to this type of store raises my blood pressure and gives me a headache. It’s loud. And bright. And busy. I was wanting to buy a Blu-Ray DVD player that connects to the Wi-Fi in my house so I could watch on-line movies. I was educated and knew what I wanted. The first person I talked to wearing the store shirt was “from another department” and couldn’t help me. Judging by the fact that he looked like he had been kissing a nail gun with piercings covering most of his epidermis I think he may have been from another dimension. The next two guys gave me a brush off with “IDK” (I don’t know) like I was speaking Martian. The fourth guy wanted to help. I could tell. But when he tried to sell me a $70 dollar accessory which was already included in the unit I was considering I hardly knew what to say. In the middle of this discussion “Next Guy” number five joined us. This guy was sporting a soul patch that dangled several inches below his chin and had been braided with colorful beads. I found it hard to not look at it. But he chased the guy away who was trying to sell me the unnecessary stuff. Then he proceeded to diss every player in the store except the ones that exceeded my budget by several hundred bucks. He lost interest in me as a customer when I told him what I was willing to spend. On my own I found what I wanted and vowed next time to buy on-line. I wonder why retail stores go out of business?

And so a decade ends

2009-12-24T08:41:00.000-05:00

With the end of the year looming large in my sights and on the sites of the interwebs I am going to take the semi-obligatory look back upon the year that that was. Only with a twist. Herewith find the low hanging fruit that I found I couldn’t write about. Oh I could, but I did not. In other words here are some whines of 2009. Hey! It rhymes. These are the big stories that were on everyone’s minds and lips all year long. The ones that could not fail to bring a response from friends you know and anyone you meet. The ones that make me yawn.
The Luzerne County corruption polka. (To the tune of the hokey pokey) “You put your left hand in, you pull the money out, you put your right hand in, you pull more money out. You do the courthouse shakedown, you turn states evidence, that’s what it’s all about.” Honestly what more is to be said about a county so corrupt that even the prison barber was on the take. Hey folks, get over it. Corruption and government have been as close as white on rice since God was a boy. Check please.
It’s the economy, stupid. Yes it’s sucking worse than 10 thousand ORECK vacuum cleaners running all at the same time. Yes it is horrible to not have a job and run out of unemployment. Yes there are PHD’s flipping burgers and writers cleaning toilets. But this too shall pass. Sure the landscape will be littered with some hard cold places turned into smoke and ash, but we will survive.
Obama is a big disappointment. Many people thought “Yes we can” meant “Yes we will.” If will was all it took to fix the fix this country is in, then under every pile of horseshit would be a nest of ponies. Look on the bright side. This country survived Nixon for five years. Two times we elected him before it all came crashing down. We will survive.
Away with the manger or: How I learned to love the Crèche. I’d love to see what the Kings College student who brought the wrath of the ACLU upon the holiday decorations on the courthouse lawn has up in his dorm room. Or see him try to remove the flying Jesus from the Kings College building on River Street. Or didn’t he notice that? Honestly, on both sides of this issue, don’t we all have bigger three eyed fish from the Susquehanna to fry?

And finally…
Newswatch 16 is coming to WNEP 2. Even the News anchors and anchorettes are gritting their teeth when promoting this. Shoot me now!
I could be wrong.

It's hard to digest, but true

2009-12-23T07:17:00.001-05:00

I wanted to write something heartwarming for Christmas. Instead this is what came out. There is nothing even remotely funny about this. No redeeming characteristics’ that I can discern for the persons that have now been found guilty. This has to be the one of the most disgusting crimes I have ever heard of or even imagined. In fact I can’t for the life of me imagine how you put yourself in a mindset that would allow you do this. What makes this all the worse is that the crime was perpetrated on a person who had faith and trust but not much in the way of recognizing harm done to them. When you feed feces and urine to a care-dependent person you are lower than low. You are lower than the crap and pee you doled out, calling it pudding and lemonade. Two Tunkhannock women did this to a mentally challenged person entrusted to their care. They pleaded guilty to this. They admitted that they gathered shit and put it in a bowl and called it pudding. They pissed in a glass and gave the pale yellow liquid to this poor unfortunate victim. How could you? Why would you? Please consider the fact that these misanthropes walk among us. Share our air. It boggles my mind. For their crimes the two low-life scum are awaiting sentencing. They could get a maximum of five years in prison and a $10,000 fine. Knowing the state of our justice system it won’t surprise me at all if they get a lighter sentence. I have a sentence in mind and I am not trying to make light of the situation but I feel the proper sentence is contained in this little parable: This guy dies and goes to Hell. The Devil meets him at the gates and says "There are 3 rooms here and you can choose which one you want to spend eternity in".
The Devil takes him to the first room where there were people hanging from the walls by their wrists in agony.
The Devil takes him to the second room where the people are being whipped with metal chains.
The Devil then opens the third door, and the man looks inside and sees loads of people sitting around, up to their waists in shit, drinking cups of tea.
The man decides instantly which room he is going to spend the rest of eternity in and chooses the last room. He goes into the third room, picks up his cup of tea and the Devil walks back in saying "Ok, guys, tea break's over, back on your heads.

I hope the tea is warm piss.

Merry Christmas Northeast Pennsylvania.

Sleigh Bells Ring!

2009-12-23T07:16:00.001-05:00

The week of the Christmas frenzy. The last minute whirlwind that clogs the roads like Orson Welles arteries and makes every trip outside of the Rising Ranch a slow motion ballet. For most of the year I rarely venture from these four walls after nightfall. There are as many good reasons for this as there are stars in the evening sky. However for reasons we will leave unsaid I was on the roads last Friday. It will put things into crystal clear perspective if you recall that Saturday there was to be a huge snowstorm. As soon as I turned from my driveway I was behind a huge yellow highway department truck. It was traveling along at a sedate 25 miles per hour, spraying anti-skid on the road surface. It preceded me at this turtle pace until it turned off, five minutes from my destination. At least the roads would be safe on the chance that it actually snowed. Now at the store I was faced with the prospect of finding an item in this retail behemoth the size of the town I grew up in. Three different answers from three different harassed store employees led me on a merry chase around the entire establishment. Eventually I stumbled upon the item. The last one in the store, evidently, because after waiting a dogs age to get to the checkout person she looked doubtfully at “it” and used ten minutes of my life to find a price, a process which involved the three previous employees who had put me on my magical mystery tour. At last back in my car, nose pointed home. But it wasn’t in the stars that night. Holiday time brings out people, like me, who rarely drive, let alone travel at night. I got behind one of these road hazards. It was a Pontiac Bonneville from the 1970’s, about the size and shape of a railroad switch engine. I know the make model and year because I was behind it for a human gestation period. For some reason the operator of this monument to automotive excess was stopping dead every other block. In the middle of the road. I had no way to get around as the other lane was filled with jet powered SUV’s with the afterburners on. After five of these mystery stops the traffic behind me was backed up like a constipated boa constrictor that had recently dined on a cow. Then the car behind me began leaning on his horn. And the one behind that. And the one behind that, until an unlovely cacophony ensued. You know the rest. Of course “it”, the purpose of the trip, was wrong. But then again so was I.

I NEVER post this stuff. Never say never.

2009-12-06T08:14:00.002-05:00

The Return from Iraq - Return from Iraq

Next it will be the "After" Christmas ones

2009-12-06T08:01:00.000-05:00

It’ll stop soon. I know it will. The first wave came in early November. Just a light one at the time. No real problem, we could pretty much just sweep it up. Towards the middle of the month it started to get serious. It seemed that it was steady every day. Then we went away over Thanksgiving and when we got back it was a deluge. Now every visit to the mailbox requires a wheelbarrow and several trips back and forth just to get the plethora of catalogues in the door. Yes it’s the time of the season for companies far and wide to break the mailman’s back and fill my garbage cans with shiny four color expensive profferings for pricey crap I will never buy. And you thought buying gifts was now done mostly on line? It’s to laugh judging by my stack from every vendor from Abercrombe & Fitch to Wine Enthusiast. It’s no secret how they get to me. I made a purchase with a credit card sometime, somewhere. That pretty much sealed my fate. My home address became the happy hunting ground for direct mailers of catalogs and it’s almost impossible to stop. Our address changed from an RR nearly ten years ago but I still get a catalog or two dozen sent to me that way. Let’s look at the Wine Enthusiast Holiday 2009 catalog. 65 pages of stuff. Oh look-something called a EuroCave wine cellar. STARTING at $6995. Just the thing for the cardboard box of wine I buy now and then. Abercrombe & Fitch? The largest size men’s jeans will fit ½ of me. They are “destroyed” and cost just $150. The “undestroyed” are only $90. I don’t get that at all and won’t get either. Here’s one that really threw me. In Bed Bath & Beyond’s offering (Motto: Beyond any store of its kind) they have two pages of kid’s toys. I guess that’s the beyond. One of the toys is a Kid ATM machine. I am not making this up. Features automatic bill feeder and coin counter-keeps a running total of savings and withdrawals and includes ATM Card. Only $19.99. That’s such a colossally stupid idea on so many levels it just blows my main circuit board to think about it. The caption about says it all: “Make your kid feel all grown up and in control of their money.” The slippery road to hell just got another coating of grease, I fear. One good thing about catalog season. Should we run out of oil for our furnace we can always make a bonfire in the yard with them. Kindling? L.L. Bean has a box of “Fatwood.” 10lbs for $39.95.

H2O2

2009-11-30T09:12:00.000-05:00

I have become somewhat germ-phobic. Part of this of course is the relentless media messaging about the swine flu. I am by no means obsessive compulsive about this ( I knew someone who was-his hands were the color of a cooked lobster’s shell and the texture of roofing shingles.) but I have become acutely aware of the dancing microbes among us. Most places I go I don't touch anybody or anything except what I absolutely have to. If I use the men’s room I use a paper towel on everything from the handles on the sink to the doorknob. I will even use my elbows to open doors if I can. This is because of an old joke. Did you hear about the constipated mathematician? He worked it out with a pencil. My version is-did you hear about the constipated finger painter? I need go no further. I don’t partake of buffets because I am not too sure about the personal hygiene of those in close proximity with my chow. But modern science has found a solution-or have they? By now just about everywhere I go there is a squirt bottle of hand sanitizer. Hand sanitizers-how did we ever get along without the ubiquitous little bottles everywhere? A quick pump and a splash in my hand and I am safe, right? But I have a sneaking suspicion that they actually make the spread of infectious disease worse. Let's think about this for a minute. How many others have touched that same little spigot, some with far worse than just DIRTY fingers? And to make things worse research shows that hand sanitizers do not significantly reduce the number of bacteria on the hand and in some cases may potentially increase it. Even the Food and Drug Administration recommends that hand sanitizers not be used in place of good old fashioned soap and water. By the way, the ingredients in hand sanitizer include water, isopropyl alcohol, glycerin, carbomer, fragrance, aminomethyl propinol, propylene glycol, isopropylmyristate, and tocotheryl acetate. Holy smokes! But of course I have a simple, cheap and effective solution. Literally. Hydrogen peroxide. Chemical formula H2O2. Right. One little molecule different than water. Comes in a brown bottle and costs half as much as hand sanitizer. This stuff has been used since the 1800’s for everything from mouthwash to disinfecting cuts and wounds. It can be used to treat acne and bleach hair (peroxide blonde). It’s only ingredients are hydrogen and oxygen. Get a small, cheap spray bottle and fill it up with the stuff and just spritz yourself when you feel less than fresh and it will actually do some good. And it makes a dandy rocket fuel. I could be wrong.

Must be Santa

2009-11-30T09:10:00.002-05:00

I am not a particularly religious person. In the last few decades the times I have been in a church have involved either one person lying down or two standing up. Sometimes I not sure which one had the happier ending. I have faith of a sort that there must be a greater power than I, either hairy thunderer, or cosmic muffin. But the idea of organized religion and all its attendant quirks and foibles (See: Catholic Priests and child molestation) for me-not so much. So knowing this you may find this little screed somewhat odd-a little out of place. But nonetheless I will let you in on something that I find very distasteful if not downright obscene. And that is the replacement of Christ in Christmas with an “X”. If there is a judgment day, and I do believe there will be, the people who put up signs and place ads in the newspapers eschewing the Christ for the X will be, in my humble opinion, hauled around by the short hairs and end up in the place run by the fellow with horns and a long tail. I can see St. Peter at the Pearly Gates quizzing them.
“You did what?”
“I wrote ad copy.”
“And at Christmas you used an X instead of the Bossman’s name?”
“Well, it took up less space.”
“You go to hell!”
But less space truly can’t be the sole reason why these heretics truncate the Hap Hap Happiest time of the year, can it? Think about it. C H R I S T M A S. Nine letters. T H A N K S G I V I N G. Twelve letters. You don’t see people writing Xgiving. Or Xster for Easter. Or Xanukkah for Hanukkah for that matter even if that wouldn’t exactly save any space. In point of fact the highest arbitrator of written style that I can think of, none other than the Gray Lady herself, the New York Times, is said to forbid the abbreviation. But a WIKI entry (And we can TRUST Wikipedia, right?) states: “Xmas comes to us from the Greek Xristos.-Christ. The X is standard usage in church symbology.” It goes on to state that X as an abbreviation for Christ has been in use since AD 1021. Well shut my mouth and call me Xim I still don’t like it, nor do I see the need. To me even the fact that John and Yoko wrote a song entitled “Happy Xmas (War is Over)” doesn’t give any one permission to be a copy cat. John Winston and Ms. Ono SANG Christmas in its entirety. I suspect the evil record company edited the title. I could be wrong.

Bad Timing

2009-11-30T09:10:00.001-05:00

They say “timing is everything” and if they (whoever they are) mean bad timing I go to the head of the class. I have been cursed for my entire life with being just a minute too late, arriving right after the good part or worse yet, being right on time for the bad part. Mostly the latter. Let me give you some examples. I am driving along, making good time, digging on the radio and loving life. I hit a stop light. I am the first person at the light. Now comes the bad timing part. Turning onto the highway in front of me just as the light changes is a WIDE LOAD. It looks like a bulldozer with a gland problem on a flatbed truck the size of the Market Street Bridge. It is moving fast, for a glacier. There is no chance of passing. I am stuck behind this behemoth for the foreseeable future. But wait. It’s turning! It runs a red light but makes a turn off the highway. I am free, free at last. But no. To my richest horror an even larger WIDE LOAD turns onto the highway and I am once more traveling at a snails pace. If I didn’t think I would be found terminally paranoid (you know, you aren’t paranoid if people are REALLY out to get you) I would say that the operators of this heavy equipment slow motion parade are in cahoots with each other. That they communicate with each other to make sure they are in MY way. Nah. Couldn’t be. Right? But back to my bad timing. How about the time I asked for a raise and my boss just looked at me and said, “I’ll have an answer for you tomorrow.” Of course that would be the day I got fired. Or the many times I choose the shortest line at the bank only to have the person in front of me do a transaction that would confuse Einstein. Slowly. Or when I am grocery shopping and the item I want is behind a sumo wrestler sized person who apparently is really into reading labels. Slowly. If there are two waitresses in a crowded restaurant one will be Mother Teresa. I will get the other one. The one who is manic depressive, off her meds and hates men. Fortune cookies? You pick one and I will get the one that says: “You will inherit a large sum of money at the moment of your death” or worse. Late for work? That’s when the battery goes dead. If it wasn’t for bad timing, I wouldn’t have any timing at all. I could be wrong.

Clint Had It Right!

2009-11-15T07:56:00.001-05:00

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?

2009-11-07T07:59:00.000-05:00

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

2009-11-01T07:39:00.003-05:00

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!

2009-11-01T07:39:00.001-05:00

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!

2009-10-24T12:36:00.001-04:00

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

2009-10-16T22:22:00.001-04:00

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

2009-10-10T07:02:00.003-04:00

“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.

Bugged!

2009-10-04T12:49:00.002-04:00

They are pretty scary looking. Sort of a cross between a spider and a cockroach. Way too many legs for me and the little bastards can even fly. Plus they have a self defense mechanism that gives them their name. I refer of course to the Halyomorpha halys better known to you and me as the Brown Marmorated Stink Bug. Now we here at the Rising Ranch have had a few of these obnoxious critters over the years. The rule seems to be you see one, you see another, they travel in pairs. Not this year. We are infested with the bugs that stink. If you have never run into one of these useless insects that you cannot imagine the smell they give off when you bother them. It’s enough to gag a maggot. And it’s the kind of smell that, like a dead deer in the hot summer sun, just lingers in the back of your throat. I did a little googling on the nuisances. First of all homeland security must have been asleep the day they arrived from China, Japan, Korea or Taiwan we aren’t sure. They are not natives and are most certainly terrorists. They eat and spoil fruit crops. They also munch on flowers. They love to hang around houses because they seek shelter and warmth and will set up camp inside for the winter. For reasons unknown to entomologists they are increasing in numbers especially here in NEPA. Even though they are scary looking they are pretty stupid and it’s not a hard task to catch them in a tissue. If you are gentle they don’t release the stink and can be sent to oblivion via the commode. But if you aren’t careful they will gas you and you will wish you were never born. Speaking of gas there is very little in the way of pesticides that discourage these menacing little bugs. It seems all you can do is try to prevent them from entering your house. As I sit here I count four on my window screen. They sort of remind me of another pest that has taken up residence and is thriving in NEPA. These other bugs are different in that when you squeeze them they don’t stink. They squeal and cash drops out of them. I refer of course to the Luzerne County Judgeus Corruptus and their close relative the County Employeeus Theifter. Known also as the Handsinthetillus. From what I see in the news these also seem to be increasing in numbers. I wish we could flush them down the toilet, but they would probably thrive in cesspools. Not so different then what they are used to, if you ask me.

Not fair at all

2009-09-27T13:34:00.000-04:00

It looked like we would miss the Bloomsburg Fair for the first time in several dog ages. It’s a bookend of the year for us and I was kind of bummed out by the prospect of not eating my way into oblivion around the 234 acres and 20 buildings. But then a narrow window opened up in my schedule. Sunday morning I could spare a few hours if we arrived at gates open time, which we were sure was seven AM.
The long suffering wife had childhood memories of arriving that early and being greeted by a bustling, busy and more importantly, cooking fair. So we skipped breakfast and made tracks west.
We arrived just before 7am. Bonus number one for early birds – Free Parking. We headed for the ticket booth and got bonus number two – free admission before 7am! This is something I am sure the fair would rather not advertise but there you go. It seemed too good to be true. And like most things in life that seem that way, there was a catch. The Bloomsburg Fair at 7am on Sunday resembles nothing so much as a refugee camp. Lots of tents, many booths shuttered with colorful canvas and no signs of life. We walked all of the 234 acres and only found a handful of food vendors open. None of them the horrible for you greasy cholesterol infused ones I wanted. Wait what’s this? A stand opens and advertises Jambalaya, my idea of fair food. The lady behind the counter just looked at me and said “Try back at eleven.” We heard that a lot. After an hour of this it began to rain. Not hard rain, just the kind that makes you miserable walking around 234 acres. Walking around hungry. Did I mention we had no breakfast? We ended up eating bean soup at a sit down joint. Bean soup? It was good but it wasn’t greasy in the least. Finally around nine the place began to act like it was open. The buildings with the thousand pound squashes and guys selling wonder mops gave us brief but welcome shelter. A few food vendors that had actual unhealthy junk got our business. But too soon it was time to go. The list of things we didn’t get to force down our throats includes too many items to mention here. I never got my jambalaya, not to mention we had to rush through the agricultural exhibits so fast that I didn’t get to truly appreciate the rows of jewel-like glass jars with preserved everything in them. I love the Bloomsburg Fair, but like fine greasy wine, it takes time to savor it. Or then again…

Thank you Aldous Huxley

2009-09-20T14:46:00.000-04:00

It’s a brave new world, folks. Every day we are breaking new ground, discovering new things, learning more about the universe and in general improving the human condition. I am told that soon we will have the internet wired directly to our toenails. Yeah, it’s grand time to be alive. And it’s especially good to be alive in the good old US of A. This is after all the greatest country in the world. A country so great that you can stand up and call the President a liar, offer to shove a tennis ball down a referee’s throat and interrupt an acceptance speech on national TV to act like a spoiled child that didn’t get his way. Whew! And that was just last week. I am of course referring in order to the shout out of “You lie!” to President Obama. by Rep. Joe Wilson R-(SC), the threat by Serena Williams "I'm going to shove this ball down your f------ throat", and the rapper Kanye West storming the stage at the VMA’s grabbing the mic from Taylor Swift and protesting in support of Beyoncé. Rep. Joe Wilson was of course only using our right to freedom of speech, albeit in a somewhat crude fashion. He had every right but he is lucky he lives here in the US. He should think about Muntadhar al-Zaidi’s fate. Muntadhar al-Zaidi is the Iraqi broadcast journalist who threw his shoes at George W. Bush during a Baghdad press conference. Al-Zaidi was sentenced to three years of prison for assaulting a foreign leader. He served nine months and said he was tortured in prison. But of course Joe didn’t throw anything but insults. He was punished by getting a "resolution of disapproval." Oooooh. Slap my wrist. Serena on the other hand had a tennis ball and racquet in her hand. In her possession those are deadly weapons. Serena Williams has been known to hit the ball around 129mph. She probably should have been arrested for a terroristic threat because if you saw her interaction with the referee you could clearly see she had murder on her mind. She got a fine and lost the game. But Kanyne West, after ruining the night of Taylor Swift and generally behaving like he was raised by wolves, Kanye got to go on Jay Leno’s new show. He made a pathetic attempt at an apology and then mumbled something about how he was going to “take some time off and just analyze how I'm going to make it through the rest of this life, how I'm going to improve.” Good idea. Take a long vacation. May I suggest an Iraqi resort? Or then again I could be wrong.

Howard Stern?

2009-09-14T09:04:00.000-04:00

The woman probably was just having a senior moment. I have many myself. I walk into a room and for the life of me I can not remember why. Or things that should not go into the refrigerator end up in there. So far not my shoes but occasionally the car keys. But I digress. Also a part of that whole deal, digressing. In any case she looked at my t-shirt and said “Who is that on your shirt?”

I had to think about what I had on. Summer uniform for me is t-shirts and shorts and I have a lot of shirts. I am particularly fond of my Dale Earnhardt shirts, Junior and Senior so I thought maybe she was not a NASCAR fan. But on this day I had another shirt on. While I was looking down to see whose face was on my chest the woman said “I know! It’s Howard Stern. Right?” Um… well no. The lady had confused the famous photo of John Lennon wearing a New York City t-shirt for “How Weird.” Now I have nothing against Howard Stern. I would certainly enjoy sharing the numbers on his paycheck. But mistaking John Lennon for him? Just not right. The Beatles have been around since 1963. That’s 46 years if my weak math skills don’t fail me. Certainly enough time to know and recognize John Winston on sight. Lately the Beatles have been pushed back up the top of public consciousness. First of all the CD’s that were horribly made 20 years ago have finally been remastered. They sound so good that there is every good chance that the Beatles will top the sales charts again. At Amazon.com during the release day the entire top-10 list of bestselling music was Beatles albums. I think it’s great. I never thought that Beatles ever sounded as good as they did on my record player. Now I know it’s not just nostalgia. The other big Beatle news is that they have now released the Fab Four as a Rock Band title. I don’t know how to feel about that. I have never played Rock Band. I am not sure that if I ever do the first thing I would choose to fumble around with would be one of their songs. I still don’t particularly like it when someone covers a Beatles tune. Seeing a ten year old take on “I am the Walrus” just seems inappropriate. Goo goo gajoob ga goo goo ga joob indeed. But I guess if it turns another generation on to the magical mystery tour that is the Beatles collected work, then maybe it’s alright after all. Am I wrong?

Tears of rage

2009-09-04T20:05:00.000-04:00

It will be eight years this Friday. Eight years since the thousands perished, some in an instant, some that lived to die in unspeakable agony. Two thousand nine hundred and twenty two days if you want to count it, and that includes a couple of leap years that have passed. Almost a day for each life lost.
Remember what that day felt like? Do you? Do you really? It still brings a lump to my throat when I see a picture of the towers enveloped in smoke. It still pisses me off. I can’t help it. I just get consumed with rage when I think about. So I do what I guess most people do. I don’t think about it much. But this week I have to pick at that scab of a memory for a just a bit. There is a school of thought about the grieving process. Perhaps you have heard of this? Elisabeth Kübler-Ross wrote about it in a book called On Death and Dying. Without going into great detail it involves five stages: #1. Denial ,# 2. Anger, # 3. Bargaining, #4. Depression and # 5. Acceptance. Some people have said that you don’t go though all the stages. There is also the possibility that you can get stuck in one stage or go back and forth between stages. I’ll tell you this about me. I have gotten past denial. I was deep into that for a while but a visit the New York City and a look at ground zero fixed that up for me. As far as bargaining and acceptance that isn’t in the cards for me. I will never be able to accept what happened that day. NEVER. Now the last two. Depression. Yeah, that’s for sure. I think in some ways the whole country has been depressed since that day. The basic feeling for me is one of shame, helplessness, the sick feeling that we haven’t learned our lesson and that we will never be safe again from madmen with evil intent. And then there is anger. Forgive me if I say that every time I hear Toby Keith sing “Courtesy Of The Red, White, And Blue (The Angry American)” when he gets to the part that says “we'll put a boot in your ass
It's the American way” I end up pounding the air with my fist.
Impotent rage.
Another person once told me that time heals all wounds. I guess in a way that is true. I don’t think about September 11th 2001 every day. But I know I will take a few minutes
This Friday at 8:46 to think about it. I can’t help but not.

Drugstores?

2009-08-28T20:30:00.001-04:00

I have been in a sort of funk lately. It just seems like things are not going so well. Oh not for me personally. Actually things in my life are pretty much ok. Sure I haven’t hit the lottery yet (Lottery: A tax on the stupid) and I still have to work. But without work I wouldn’t know when I was on vacation so it all evens out. Sort of. But what has me worried is that the good old US of A seems to be slipping. At least if you pay any attention to the news. I keep hearing about how we are no longer a world leader. That our health care system is all messed up. That we are so deep in debt as a nation that it will be they year 2525 before we figure out just how much in debt we are. That our bridges and roads are falling apart. That our judges and other leaders are as crooked as…well pretty crooked. That last part seems to be true. But the other day while I was mulling over all this stuff I was on a tour of local drug stores. The long suffering wife was on some sort of a scavenger hunt. I was bored. So I looked around. I guess they aren’t called drug stores anymore. It’s no wonder. Of the ones we visited less than 20% is devoted to pharmacy. The rest is an almost indescribable collection of everything you can imagine. It’s almost quicker to list what you can’t buy at a drug store these days. Beer, at least in PA. Tires. That’s about it. Forget something at the grocery store? It’s there. Neglect to buy what you needed at Radio Shack? Everything from cell phones to multi USB hubs. Motor oil? Check. Lawn Furniture? In assorted colors. Refrigerator? Well, small ones but still…there they are. Need plastic skulls and foam gravestones for Halloween? Stacks of them. So much back to school stuff that you could equip several schools grades 1-6 with plenty left over for Junior High. Tools? Yup. Reading material? So many different magazines that you furnish every doctors waiting room in NEPA and never duplicate a title. By the way did you know that MAD Magazine is still published? Figures. Now that I can buy it without my parents yelling at me I don’t want to. But my point? In just my little town you can’t throw a rock without breaking a window at one of these mutant department stores with a Pharmacy counter. It just seems to me that a lot has to be going right for us to have such freedom of choice. But then again…

Progress?

2009-08-24T17:39:00.001-04:00

I haven’t been to the Mall at Steamtown in probably ten years. I think I have been in Scranton about twice in that time frame. Make no mistake; I have nothing against the “Electric City.” I worked there for about seven years and it has some great memories for me. It’s just that I have everything I want or need south of the Lackawanna county line. I guess I am becoming like so many in NEPA-never venturing outside of their community.

In any case I worked in Scranton well before the Mall at Steamtown was constructed. I have been watching with interest recent news reports that things are not going so great there. The recent closing of the Ground Round, the low occupancy level and the fact that the food court could be used for cannon practice without any injury all seem to me to be somewhat telling.

Down the street a joint named Molly Ringwalds or Branigans or something like that also closed up. The new mall and all the “urban renewal” associated with it were heralded as a renaissance for downtown Scranton. Looks like it’s not quite worked out that way. Before they imploded the area to make room for the mall there was a bar about where the Ground Round now stands shuttered. I don’t think it had a sign out front. It was known to everyone as “Bordi’s” because the owner was a gentleman named Pete Bordi. Bordi’s was not a fancy place. It did have some things that made it an “experience”, chief among them the restroom which was well…horrifying. But, in spite of the fact that it was a pretty big place (the circular bar could hold 75 seated) it was packed every day and every hour it was open, and it opened at 7am. It was a safe place for two reasons. One because every other bar stool might have an off duty police officer or fireman enjoying a beverage. But the real reason was if you caused any trouble you were banned and for life if you really got out of hand. And that was the worst imaginable fate because at Pete’s the beer was 15 cents a glass. Of course the catch was you had to buy two at a time. The glasses were six ounces so for 12 ounces of golden bubbly refreshment you paid 30 cents. A five dollar bill would leave you in need of a designated driver, Pete Bordi made a nice living, had a nice house and vacationed in Florida. Grown men wept when his doors closed forever. My suspicions are that if Bordi’s was still there, it would still be thriving. But then again…

Bap bap bap bap bap bap bapuh. Beep beep beep beeeeeep

2009-08-13T09:34:00.001-04:00

Bap bap bap bap bap bap bapuh. Beep beep beep beeeeeep. For the last two months the reasonably quiet Rising ranch has been a cacophony of construction sounds. Normally it’s pretty quiet here. Oh sure the goof that lives on the hill next to my property runs his chain saw while riding his ATV around with a loud portable radio strapped on his back. All at the same time. But not all the time. And usually not all day long. Its quiet enough on a good day that I can hear the hummingbirds arrive at the feeder, sounding like a very large bumblebee.
But not lately. Bap bap bap bap bap bap bapuh. Beep beep beep beeeeeep. For the last month they have been installing big yellow pipes on the side of the road. Gas will run through them I am told. This process apparently involves a machine that sounds like a jack hammer (Bap bap bap bap bap bap bapuh) and a construction vehicle backing up for hours at a time (Beep beep beep beeeeeep.) It also involves traffic on the roadway to be stopped for long periods of time on the street in front of my house so I get to enjoy the motorists tastes in listening pleasure. I have also noticed a large increase in the quantity and variety of trash being ejected from said vehicles. So it’s all good. Like living in a cement mixer filled with marbles. Very relaxing. Not at all designed to make me crazy as a rat in a coffee can.
Soon they will be directly across from my house. Since I work mostly from home there really is no escape. Bap bap bap bap bap bap bapuh. Beep beep beep beeeeeep. I notice all the construction workers are wearing ear protection. I am not so lucky.
But I said in the first part of this that it’s been going on for two months. But the gas pipeline guys have been at it only a month. So what about the month before? Well the road crew from the township was busy patching the many potholes and fixing up the road. They did a great job too. The pothole right by my driveway that I watched an SUV drive into and I am not sure ever came out is now smooth as a baby’s posterior. They did this all up and down the same road that the gas pipeline guys are now digging up. Somehow, somewhere this makes sense. I am guessing when the gas guys go the pavers will be back. Bap bap bap bap bap bap bapuh. Beep beep beep beeeeeep. Or then again I could be wrong.

Clunkers

2009-08-09T08:22:00.002-04:00

It just seems wrong to me. I know all the environmentalists will probably come after me with a thousand green reasons why I am way off base. I know that economically it probably makes sense. But it doesn’t help me understand. Or like it. There is song by John Hiatt called “Perfectly Good Guitar” which talks about how heartbreaking it is to see rock stars smash their instruments. I feel the same way when I see the destruction of engines in the so called “cash for clunkers’ deal. As a person who has owned some clunkers in my time I can remember vividly what it takes to keep one running and on the road. Blood, sweat and tears along with Valvoline. Sometimes by the case. It seems to me as an American male (hell as an American, let me not be accused of being sexist) that to own and keep running a POS car is a rite of passage. How else do you learn to take care of a good car except by the experience gleaned from breakdowns of your crappy old car at the most inopportune times? I drove an old ex-military jeep while I was in high school. It ran fine, if slow but about every tenth time you tried to start it all you would get was a click. The solution? You had to roll it down hill to jump start it by putting it in gear and letting the clutch out when it was going good. Try that with your Prius! My point is not so much that you could do it, it’s the fact that there was a solution that didn’t involve calling Triple A. Environmentally sound because no gas guzzling tow truck had to be dispatched. Economically sound because I didn’t have to shell bucks out for previously mentioned tow. Personally sound because I was no doubt off-campus and needed to get back pronto! Win, win, win as far as I can see. There were hundreds of lessons taught by owning a clunker, both of a mechanical nature and of the life-lesson variety. Even when gas was far less than a buck a gallon you had to be smart about your travel in a gas guzzling clunker. You learned the value of a buck and how to ask the question “Is this trip necessary?” Now the clunkers that could have been someone’s first car or a car for someone who really couldn’t afford a better one are all destined for the scrap yard. I guess in some universe it makes perfect sense; crush perfectly good drivable cars in order to stimulate the economy to sell new ones. But then again I could be wrong.

Home Sweet Home

2009-08-02T08:14:00.002-04:00

Everyone needs to recharge their batteries now and then. Last week was my time. While it may not sound like a vacation to some, the long suffering wife and I journeyed over 1,200 miles in less than a week, mostly poking around the New England states. A few days of it spent visiting family were fun but the real fun was a lack of agenda later on in the week on the seashore. Something there is about being next to a large body of salty water that makes me, anyway, dissolve into relaxation mode better than any other place on earth. It became a routine of eat, drive around, eat, drink, sleep, lather, rinse, repeat. I could get used to it. But you need pain to know pleasure, or so I am told, so we headed back from bliss. You see a lot of drivers in 1,200 miles. Amazingly enough in nearly 1,100 of those miles I didn’t run across any highway rage, stupidity, or just plain rude driving. We drove alongside visitors from up Canada way, eh? Notorious bad drivers, Canadians. The rumor is that in Québec the driver exam consists of learning how to fill out the accident report. But we had no problem. In fact until we re-entered the Commonwealth of PA upon our return our journey on the highways was unremarkable.

But, as soon as we crossed the border…well our first clue should have been the rain. Not just rain. This was like driving through Niagara Falls sideways. It was unrelenting. And no one even slowed down. I was cowering on the extreme right hand side of the road trying not to hydroplane, going well under the speed limit while trucks the size of houses hurtled past me, throwing geysers of water up. Wipers were useless. It was like Stevie Wonder driving Ray Charles. The only time we slowed was for the accident. We knew that’s what it was because there was a man with a large, worn, wooden sign that in hand painted letters said “ACCEDENT” standing by the side of the road. Sure enough a few miles up the road there was an “accedent.” Some poor unfortunate with the right side of their car mangled beyond recognition on the left side of the highway. The final miles were on the Cross Valley Expressway. People take that “expressway” thing serious. Especially the guy who waited until I tried to pass him before he pulled over in my lane with no turn signal. I just about rolled my car over to avoid him and what was his plan? He went almost ½ mile before once more changing lanes without signaling to immediately exit. There is no place like Home!

Farmers Market

2009-07-27T08:21:00.002-04:00

The folks at my grocery store gave me a calendar. It says something about food for all seasons and sure enough there are loads of pictures of scrumptious looking foods. Of course I know the real reason for the largesse on the part of my food vendor. The thing is stuffed full of coupons, dated so I have to visit often to take advantage of the big savings. That’s ok. I would have stopped in anyway. But the calendar is really a work of art. The pictures are somewhat coordinated with the seasons. Back in January it was soup being pictured. February it was a big bowl of chili. I must admit I paged ahead to look at the perfect golden brown turkey on the November page. But right now there is fruit being pictured. In June there were plump juicy looking peaches and July features watermelon. Nothing against my local supermarket. They do a great job and now even have beer for sale, if you can stand the price. And the fact that you can only buy 12 cans at a time. But honestly, one of the true joys of living here during our short span of summer (94 days from June 21st to September 22nd if I counted right) is eating stuff that is pulled out of the ground near where I live. Now I don’t care to get into a discussion with anyone from Pittston about tomatoes. I am sure they are great there but I don’t really know. That’s because I go to the farm stands close to my house in Dallas. I also visit the farmers market that appears this time of year in the parking lot of the Back Mt. library. The tomatoes there are just perfect for me. If there is a better meal than homemade bread, salt and a big ripe local tomato I have yet to find it. In the middle of deep and dark December I dream about baby yellow squash, dark sweet cherries and blueberries bursting with juice. And now it’s here, but it’s like the days are in fast forward mode. Blink and no more good stuff from the dirt. Soon enough it’ll be apples and pumpkins and then it’s back to eating tomatoes that taste like the packing material they came in. I think the local stuff costs a little more. I am not too sure because, well I really don’t care. If I pay a little more to keep my supplier

(read: farmer) in business so he can grow vegetables that taste like they should, then I am fine with that. I saw a bumper sticker that said; don’t curse the farmer with your mouth full. Works for me.

Not with a bang but a fizzle

2009-07-27T08:19:00.001-04:00

It was sort of almost anti-American. The very thought of it smacks of the days when missiles were pointed at us from just across the ocean in Cuba, when Khrushchev pounded his shoe on the table at the UN and shouted “we will bury you.” When we lived in fear of the big one and were taught to hug our knees under our desks in the event the Russians put the hammer down. Except in this case we have done it to ourselves. Or more importantly we haven’t done it. But let me explain what has me all lathered up this week. Last year at this time on the Fourth of July a good friend took me and the long suffering wife out to PNC field to see the Yankees of local repute play and lose and then the oh and aw of the fireworks show. We had a great time on a perfect warm summer’s night. Entertainment that wasn’t overly stimulating but still pleasant. Food in quantities sufficient to stuff a Palomino. A feeling that we were part of something that was clean and wholesome and fun. As American as apple pie, hot dogs and baseball. We didn’t go this year. And I am pretty sure we would have, if we could. The day was perfect. Not a cloud in the sky on the fourth of July when the corn was as high as an elephant’s eye. But no one two three strikes and you’re out for us at the old ball game. Mighty PNC field had struck out. It seems that when the Yankees came to town they wanted, no demanded, to play America’s pastime on blades of real grass, not some plastic compound cooked up in a scientists laboratory. And sort of like the homeowner who opts for the new roof over the old shingles they got grass, planted, so I understand, on top of the plastic turf. And this year the athletic cup overflowed and turned the outfield into a swamp but with poorer drainage. Waterfront property on the first base line. And so the long string of great Fourth of July celebrations with baseball and fireworks at the once named Lackawanna County Multi-Purpose Stadium came to end, not with a bang or even a fizzle but with dead silence. And I have to wonder if we will ever see one again. For now that all the cracks and leaks and soggy outfields of the 20 year old facility have come to light, it won’t surprise me if the Yanks, yank out like the Phillies fled before them and leave us with a decaying field of dreams. And not much more. But then again, I could be wrong.

Yard Sales Redux

2009-07-27T08:17:00.000-04:00

It’s been a while since I have written about flea markets and yard sales. But it isn’t because I haven’t been visiting them. Far from it. The long suffering wife has the plans mapped out for weekend scrums like a field general. And this year I have noticed more than an uptick in other folks trying to do the same thing. Find something that you need and they don’t for less money than you would normally pay for it. Bargaining comes into play on the paying less for it part. I have perfected the art of picking up an item and looking perplexed. This will bring on a price that will cause me to take in a breath like I am suffering a myocardial infarction and I will put the item down like it was burning. I’ll pretend to walk away and then, Columbo style, turn back at the last moment and say those words that every seller hates to hear. “Would you take less for it?” On a good day I can bring in the deal for at least one third off, more often half. And you find an often bewildering array of stuff, much of it in still sealed brand new condition. Piles and piles of stuff. But as a public service to flea market and yard sale operators everywhere I have a list of things that I always see that are never gonna sell. First and foremost 8 track tapes. I don’t care if they are sealed. I don’t care if it’s 10$ for a box of a hundred. You’ll be keeping them. Along that line-Cassette tapes and VHS tapes. Magnetic tape as a storage medium was an iffy proposition when it was new technology. And it was new technology when Bing Crosby was on the charts. About 60 years if you are counting. Tape deteriorates. It stretches and breaks. And cassettes were hissy. Take them to the landfill. And take the cassette machines and old VCR’s with them. It’s buggy whip technology. Because you have a DVD player do you think I want your old VCR? They make fine boat anchors I am told. And last but not least. Readers Digest Condensed Books. If I had a penny for every teetering stack of those badly edited albatrosses of literary shame I have walked by I would not be searching flea markets for bargains. Oh yes, I almost forgot. Encyclopedias. Folks, there is this new thing out called the internet. As Homer Simpson says, they have it on computers now. I looked at an encyclopedia the other day. No matter what I did it wouldn’t boot up and let me search Google. But then again I could be wrong.

"¡Yo quiero Taco Bell!"

2009-07-27T08:06:00.002-04:00

I just never took to her. Oh I mean she was cute and all. But as an endorser for something I was supposed to eat, no it didn’t make sense to me. And don’t get me wrong. I love to eat. In particular I love the type of food that the cute little 15 year old was hawking. It’s just that because she could speak the language didn’t mean she was going to convince me to try her brand. There were those who claimed that she was nothing more than a thinly veiled cultural stereotype. They were in my opinion way off base. And she had, as they say in the ad business, legs. She was able to last almost four years in a field where sometimes a job could last a week. Remember Herb? Sales for Burger King didn't just stagnate during the Herb campaign, sales went down. But Gidget, the real name of The Taco Bell Chihuahua, not only had longevity but her ads coined a few catch phrases which outlive her. "¡Yo quiero Taco Bell!" ("I want Taco Bell!" or "I love Taco Bell!"). "Drop the chalupa!" “Viva Gorditas!," meaning "Long live Gorditas!" and who can forget "Here, lizard lizard lizard...?" Of course the dog was voiced by a voice actor named Carlos Alazraqui who was also Mr. Weed on Family Guy. But as I said before I just have a problem with a dog endorsing something to eat. I have owned a few dogs. Dogs eat, well dog food. They also will eat almost anything. My dog ate, and I am not making this up, a skunk. Dogs also lick themselves in places that just can’t taste good. And they lick other dogs there too after they have a sniff or two. So having a dog suggest what’s for dinner is just not something that I ever bought into. I would even buy into that creepy Burger King guy before letting a dog lead me into a fast food restaurant. Gidget was by all accounts a pretty mellow dog, preferring to sleep. She ended up costing Taco bell 42 million dollars in the end when the fast food purveyor was sued by the alleged originators of the Taco Bell Chihuahua concept and lost. 42 million is a whole lot of burritos, don’t you think? But Gidget lived a long doggy life. 15 years in dog years is 105 human years, right? That’s even older than Manny Gordon, may he rest in piece with his catch phrase intact as well. It’s not a bad legacy to leave I guess. A catch phrase. “Enjoy, enjoy!” "¡Yo quiero Taco Bell!" And “…but then again I could be wrong.”
Here Lizard, Lizard, Lizard

2009-05-02T20:34:00.009-04:00

I was kind of sad to read the news about the Chrysler bankruptcy. While I never owned a Chrysler branded car per se I have several Plymouths in my past. Remember Plymouth? They went out of business in 2001. Beat the curve so to speak. I have a long history of making poor choices when buying cars. I inherited this tendency to buy P.O.S. cars. When I was a kid my Dad bought a Corvair.

This is how we learn. My first real big boy car when I got out of college was a Plymouth Fury III. It was approximately the size of a railroad switch engine and came with two men to walk in front of you as you traveled with red lights and loud bells to warn people of your arrival. It had the turning radius of an aircraft carrier.

Later on I became the proud owner of Plymouth Volare’ station wagon with real wood grain decals on the side. Very classy.

Still not having learned my lesson I bought a Plymouth Trailduster SUV. It was so big it wouldn’t fit in my garage. I think it got 1 mile per gallon. If you turned on the air conditioner you could watch gas gauge move down.

But my crowning achievement in unwise car purchases was a Plymouth Horizon TC3. I bought it new in 1981. They only made three of these cars and two blew up in the factory before they could ship them. I got the third. Even though it was front wheel drive it was so low to the ground that it would get stuck if the forecast called for snow. It was great on gas because it had a top speed of crawl. With a tailwind. I left it parked in front of my workplace while I was on vacation. With the keys in it. Mercifully an alcoholic co-worker borrowed it and totaled it. He called me to break the news and I am sure he thought I would freak out on him. I couldn’t thank him enough.

But back to Chrysler going wheels up. The funniest thing I read was that President Obama said “Chrysler’s warranties would now be backed by the United States government. If you are considering buying a car, I hope it will be an American car… buy a Chrysler, your warranty will be safe.” The leader of the free world is now a car salesman? The second funniest thing I read is that Chrysler will make what has been characterized as “a lifesaving alliance with the Italian automaker Fiat.” Or maybe that was the funniest. Fiat, in case you don’t know is said to stand for “Fix it again Tony.” Ask any Fiat owner.

Welcome to Warmland

2009-04-21T06:25:00.002-04:00

We first met some 30 years ago. I was a youngster just getting my feet wet in my chosen profession. Every morning while I headed into work we would spend the drive together. I learned a lot. The things I was taught just by listening lasted me a lifetime. I was a country boy in the wilds of Vermont. This was a big city powerhouse that just reeked of professionalism. This was my first job right out of college. If I recall correctly I was paid the princely sum of $85 a week. I know that I worked far more than 40 hours back then so my hourly rate was probably well under $2. But my new friend made me sure that better times could be at hand. I thought to myself as I listened and learned that someday, maybe someday I would be good enough to be on the air at WARM.
Because, you see, WARM was legendary in those days. Hundreds of miles and several states away I heard the booming signal of 590 in my crappy car as I headed to my crappy low paying on air gig. I am going to use a radio term. WARM came into Springfield Vermont like a “Local.” It was one of those huge flamethrower radio signals that blanketed the country. For various reasons we will never see it’s like again. But more than just a huge coverage area WARM was, for a radio guy, the ultimate in professionalism. Listening in the small farm community in Vermont I learned what big time slick radio sounded like. It seemed that WARM did everything right. The news was crisp and authoritative. The music was spot on. The disc jockeys sounded, well, they sounded warm. Friendly and funny and like you had a friend in your car. It was something to aspire to.
A few years later I moved to this place. I would like to say it was to work at the legend. Instead it was my mission to put the legend out to pasture. The station I put on the air in 1980 knocked WARM out of first place in very short order but truth be told the wheels had already started to come off. FM was eating AM’s lunch. I was just in the right place at the right time. Not that it wasn’t heady stuff at the time. WARM was on life support by the end of the 80’s and if it was a horse it would have been shot by the new millennium. And now it’s gone. Not worth fixing say the fat cat owners who pulled the plug. Another radio term. WARM is now “dark.” Kind of says it all.

Hurry Spring!

2009-03-29T06:52:00.005-04:00

There it sits. In a shaded corner of the yard, in a spot where I have to walk by it every time we go out.
It’s a small thing, maybe three feet long and a foot or so wide. And yet it has a power over me that goes way beyond its small stature. I hate looking at it. I want to do it in and yet I am unable to make a move at it. This place that the sun refuses to shine on has the last patch of snow in my yard. It’s decrepit and foul looking snow. A crust of black obscuring the white that once was. It crouches there on the dead grass and mocks me for thinking that winter has finally succumbed to the power of the calendar and we can enjoy the brief season of temperate weather that we get here in NEPA.
I should go out right now and kick it, spread it out so it just melts away like the memories of the long hours on the wrong end of the shovel so recently passed. But I am scared. I fear that if I do it will retaliate with an early spring storm and call its snow buddies back for one more round. It is, after all, just barely April and cruel month that it is here in NEPA it isn’t unknown for us to get clobbered by a huge nor’easter that will eradicate thoughts of crocus and daffodil in a big hurry.. Watching the weather the other day on WNEP-Ch16 I saw that Montage Mountain still has snow on the ski trails. It made me sad. My older brother lives in East Overshoe Vermont. He told me on the phone the other day that close by his house there are still 6 foot snow drifts. And the folks in the Dakotas where it snowed more than half a foot last week can assure the rest of us that while old man winter is bent and bowed he still has his teeth. I am more than ready for April showers that bring the flowers that bloom in May. It’s the season of “taint.” It “taint” winter and yet it ”taint” spring yet either. It’s the limbo of seasons and my little patch of snow just sits there. Biding it’s time. Thinking its snowy thoughts of the glories of storms long ago. The snow shovel is still within easy reach. The storm windows are still down. And I still have that dark feeling that just over the horizon something lurks that will once more call the snow plow to my driveway. And without a doubt I hope I am wrong.

Quiet you!

2009-03-24T07:01:00.002-04:00

My hearing is not as acute as it once was. I have gone to literally thousands of loud concerts. One time, at a Ted Nugent show somebody threw an M-80 (for those of you who don’t know, an M-80 is a firecracker with the explosive power of a ¼ stick of dynamite) next to me. I felt it but never heard it. While living at home I got tired of my parents yelling at me to turn the GD music down so I bought headphones. Several pairs, because I would melt the elements out of them. But in spite of this aural damage I have done to myself I can still hear pretty well. Hear enough that the amount of sound rudeness I hear everyday gets on my auditory as well as other nerves. First of all, modern cell phones have very sensitive microphones. Why is it then that people in cell phone conversations in public places feel they have to SHOUT? This usually takes place in a crowded restaurant where the noise level already exceeds that of a 747 taking off. Oh and about conversation. Sometimes in grocery stores I learn more than I really care to about the lives of others. Does anybody remember the difference between indoor voices and outdoor voices? But the biggest offenders in the noise sweepstakes are motor vehicles. I live next a road that is busy during the day but less so at night. With the windows open we can hear deer moving in the woods surrounding our home. That is we can when there is not a car going by with the steady LOUD bass thrum from an overly loud stereo. Hey, as I mentioned, I like loud music too, but not at 3am. Oh and then there is the newspaper delivery guys muffler. It wakes me up every morning. For the past five years. Any chance you could visit Midas there, pal? But by far the worst offense to my battered ear drums is when I am walking in a parking lot, minding my own business and someone locks the car. When I’m not expecting it, and I never am, the loud chirps of the alert mechanism or horn can make me jump three feet in the air and drop the groceries. When you lock or unlock the car with the little remote the lights flash, the horn blows and generally everyone in a three block radius knows about it. There is a setting that allows you to silence it. The lights flashing will confirm the action and anyway you can hear the loud click of the locks going down. How about it? I think you can hear what I am saying. Or then again…

Oh Deer!

2009-03-15T07:21:00.000-04:00

I guess that I am a country boy at heart. I have always loved being out doors. Given the choice I would probably sleep outside in weather that permits it. Just being out in the wind and hearing the sounds of birds, squirrels and other wild-life would put me to sleep better than any lullaby or a double shot of Old Grand Dad. Of course here in NEPA we have not had that kind of weather in recently, but now as the air gets warmer we can once more journey into Mother Nature. It seems somehow proper and fitting that on the second day of spring I got to enjoy something in the woods that I have never seen before. Just about a mile as the crow flies from the Rising ranch I watched in absolute wonder as a piebald deer materialized before my eyes. And I hadn’t had any Old Grand Dad. Yet. You may never have heard of this type of deer but I am told it’s more common than an albino one or even an all black one. Still they are almost unbelievably rare with this genetic condition typically present in less than one percent of white-tailed deer. At first glance it looked like a dog or a baby cow but it was in the company of several other normally pigmented deer. Its buddies didn’t seem to take notice that something was very different about this deer. Piebald deer are colored white and brown similar to a pinto pony. I have seen a lot of deer in my life. When I was young and even dumber than I am now I used to chase them with a rifle or a bow and arrow in my hands. I bet the deer found this very amusing as I was not much of a threat to them. Of course living here in NEPA you see more deer than you can shake an antler at, usually trying to run into your car. But I have never seen a deer colored like a Holstein cow. As I stood there frantically trying to snap its picture with my crappy camera phone I thought how lucky this particular deer must have been to make it this far in life. It seemed fully grown but how it ever escaped some hunter is a mystery to me. As the other deer blended into the woods this one might as well have been wearing a flashing neon sign saying “Shoot Me! Shoot Me Now!” But there it was and I like to think that in some way it’s a testament of a sort to individuality. But then I thought…deer don’t use mirrors. Or then again I could be wrong.

Rubbish!

2009-03-12T07:11:00.000-04:00

I just finished a 2000 mile plus road trip. Driving anyplace that long a distance is a trial but the fact that I had to do some of it over the worst roads in civilization made it even more of a trial. I went south and my trip included roads in Delaware, West Virginia, Virginia and Tennessee. Those roads in those states were fine. It was the several hundred miles of pot hole filled, litter fouled, almost impassable miserable excuses for roads in Pennsylvania that were tough. I live and therefore mostly drive here in NEPA. Because of this I must have become immune to what passes for infrastructure in the Keystone state. Once I noticed that my car was no longer vibrating like a jackhammer, my teeth were no longer so on edge and I didn’t have to swerve every ten feet to avoid road kill or worse I knew that I was in another state. It was almost eerie to ride along and not see dead things along the side of the road. Mile after mile we logged and no rotting deer with entrails stretched yards on the highway did we see. Nary a skunk to assault our eyes and make us swoon with stink. And clean? You couldn’t find so much as a tissue on the shoulder never mind the discarded piano cases and the like you see around here. And the road surface? Driving while tired and sleepy in NEPA is no problem. You are kept awake by the constant explosions of your tires hitting potholes big enough to house families. And where there are no potholes there are patches for those holes that are so poorly executed that you feel like your car is trying out for Olympic ski jump competitions. Why bother with alignment? Your steering will be out of true before you can say “bent rims.” Many excuses are made why the roads are so bad in Pa. The money is not there to fix them. The amount of truck traffic chews them up. The dog ate our road crews. All I know is that in Tennessee, a state where as near as I could tell there are more cows than teeth, the roads were clean, smooth and a pleasure to drive on. In fact I found the roads in the “Volunteer” state to be the most hazardous on my journey. Why? Because they were so good I had a very hard time staying awake while traversing them. And about that roadside litter. Swarms of men wearing orange vests that stated “Correctional Department” scoured the roadsides . A nice concept. Free labor and a day in the sun for the convicts. But then again I could be wrong.

Written in Murfreesboro Tenn

2009-03-11T09:00:00.003-04:00

I am one thousand miles away as the crow flies and a million miles away in my head on a road trip as I write this. I have left the 13 degrees and piles of ice and snow in my driveway in NEPA and headed south for reasons that will be explained towards the end of this. Today it’s 40 degrees warmer where I am. It’s spring here. The grass is green and the flowers are in bloom. The pansies nod their colorful heads in the soft breeze. The silly daffodils bend and bow and brighten up the landscape with their improbable yellow. I write this not to make you jealous for the spring that I am in and you are not. I write to give you hope that soon you too will be walking around again in a t-shirt instead of layers of sweaters and coats. You will be able to grasp objects made of metal out of doors without gloves. Your feet will be in flip flops instead of clod hops. And you can drive with your window down and your elbow out. Heck I even ran the air conditioner for a few minutes just for the feeling of it. It’s nice down here and the only problem is I know that soon enough we will be headed back the land of ice and snow and courthouse woes.
I am near Nashville Tennessee in a town called Murfreesboro. It’s 13 hours by car from my driveway in NEPA and took me two days to get here. It was well worth the trip. Not just for the break in routine that I needed after a long cold hard winter. Not for the fried okra and other southern cooked delicacies that seem as foreign to us as haluskie would to these slow talking southerners. And not just for the rebirth that my soul felt when I stepped out into this sunny southern weather although that surely is one of the trips pleasures. No, I am here for a birth of another sort. Late at night last week or I guess I should say early in the morning my oldest son and his wife brought a new Rising into the world and though some may question if another one was necessary or even wise I myself am over the moon with joy. He is a tiny thing, just under 6 pounds and about 18 inches from toes to dark haired head but so full of life and bringing all around him so much happiness that he might as well be six foot three. So go ahead. Call me Grampa. Haven James Rising and I don’t mind a bit. And keep a shovel warm for me.

More TV Tales

2009-02-01T09:24:00.002-05:00

More to the previous post….
The solutions to the problem of the in-laws wanting to see Channel 7 (analog) but using digital converter are:

1. Cable. Father in law (FIL) just says no. Won’t let me pay for it. End of discussion.
2. An “A-B switch to interrupt the antenna feed and bring it to the box or the TV.
3. A Digital box with analog pass thru.
4. A new Digital ready TV. See #1.

Current TV is a 1990’s vintage CONSOLE Zenith.

Here’s what happened.

Revisit the in-laws. I love them but…..two times in one week in the severely overheated house is a bit much. Plus the Father in-law is, well…a little hard to explain the finer points of new technology to. It’s partly a communication problem and partly my lack of patience in testing for understanding. When I used my cell phone there the other day he wanted to know if I could hear his landline. Also what was the range?

The box in question bought with the Government coupon is a Magnavox TB100MW9. It cost, if I remember right, about $10 with the coupon. It works fine but:
The remote control is the biggest POS I have ever seen and I have looked in an open cesspool before. It’s tiny. About the size of a deck of cards. Offers NO universal capabilities. And the most important buttons, THE ONES THAT CHANGE THE CHANNEL are, no exaggeration, not only the SMALLEST buttons on the unit but they are the size of grains of rice.
Come on! Who is the genius that designed that? The market for these converters has to be mainly people who can’t afford or don’t want cable. They probably live rural. They are probably OLD. So why build something they can’t see to operate with and make it tough to use with old arthritic hands. Bastards!

How would I know this when I bought the damn thing? And how did I know there would still be an analog channel that the In-Laws want to see?

I read the manual until it fell apart but I could not find any mention of analog pass through. With unit powered down no joy.
A 1 800 call to tech support got the usual foreign accent.
“Does this unit have an analog pass through?”
“No we are not having analog pass through.”
“Is there a universal remote control available for the unit?”
“No we are not having…”
“Put a supervisor on, please.”
“This is Akmal. How can I be helping you?”
“Akmal, I know this is not your fault but your unit sucks. It’s designed badly, has no analog pass through and is in general a piece of….”
At this point I am getting daggers looked at me from the long suffering wife so I give up and hang up on Akmal.

It should be said here that I have limited amounts of patience when dealing with tech support. I am getting pissed off and my usual method of decompressing is to shout and swear at the top of my lungs. This will NOT go over big in the In-Laws house with the Blessed Virgin Mary statue (near life size) next to the TV. I am a pressure cooker.

First of all I am ENRAGED that our government has made such a mess of this. And I am burning with shame that I can’t make it work for my In-Laws.

I am ready to kill. Plus I am tired and hungry.

So now we go to Radio Shack.

I am angry and beyond rage with this whole situation. My finely tuned brain is seething. I am hungry Did I mention I am on a diet? I can’t for the life of me figure out the signal path standing in the aisle.
The antenna lead must go to the box. And the TV. The box must feed the TV. Ow! Ow! Ow! My head hurts.
I finally decide on a small “A-B” switch. $5.98.
Previously I have found some cables and a splitter at the house.
Just out of curiosity ask the kid behind the counter if they have a box.
Yup they do. An Access HD DTA 1080 U-and it has the words “Analog pass through” in bright red on the side. It’s footprint is one third the size of the POS Magnavox.

It also has a Universal Remote Control. It lists a code number for Zenith.

It costs $69.

We have no coupon.

This really sucks.

Can we return it if it doesn’t work? Yes He guesses so.

We do have a discount coupon for $10.

He can’t figure out to use it. This takes half an hour with phone calls to store manager before we get out.

We are now out $64.80. Plus the ten for the Magnavox box. $74.68 if you are keeping score at home.

I am ravenous now. Did I mention I am on a diet? When am I not? Breakfast was at 5am and was….small. It’s now 1:30pm.

Lunch sucked. We went to this cutesy little place that had vase centerpieces filled with candy hearts. I love soup. The only soup was Clam Chowder. I don’t eat fish. No soup for you! Chicken Caesar, hold the Caesar. Literally one cup of greens, one teaspoon of Asiago cheese and about 2 oz of chicken sliced paper thin. $7.98. I could have had a seven course meal for that price. A foot long hoagie. And a six pack.

I am not in a good mood.

Back to the In-laws. While we were gone FIL had stoked the plutonium reactor in the basement so it was now 100 degrees in the house. It’s cold out so I have a heavy shirt under a sweatshirt. I am sweating as soon as I come in the door.
Good news…FIL is taking a nap. Bad news. I am not.

New box fires up and seeks stations. Five minutes later it has all available. Better picture than POS Magnavox. Plus on channel change it doesn’t have to search each time like POS. Channels come right up.

The remote control programs for the Zenith and works the volume, on off and the function menu flawlessly. The menu is important because FIL wants the brightness turned down when he watches at night. Something about burglars. You can see my problem communicating here? He also loves the color set to green. See?
It does not change TV channel. Only the Box channel no matter what mode you are in. Hmmm.
Shut box off and tune TV to Channel 7. Success.
But you have to tune TV with old remote control. The whole point of Universal remote was to 86 one control.
Work with Mother in law (MIL) to explain new control. You have to switch modes to control the TV or the Box. She can get the TV on and switch to the box mode (labeled STB the RC) but the unit will not power for her. I try and it only powers up every third try and in fact locks up so you have to pull the plug to get it to work again.

I am not having a good day.

The acronym is “Halt”

Hungry, Angry Lonely and Tired.

I am angry, tired and hungry. The only thing I am not is lonely.

This box will not cooperate. It locks up and no matter what I try will not change channels on the TV.

It is no good. I call 1 800 and am told via recording that they don’t work weekends. I have only one option. Cue shark theme from Jaws.”

Back to the POS.

Now I have to figure out how to make the A-B switch work.

After long thought I come up with it.

Here is how you do it. The antenna goes into a splitter. One lead goes to the “A-B” switch. One lead goes to the box. The output of the box goes to the other side of the “A-B” switch then the switch feeds the TV.

My brain is squirming like a toad.

I am short one cable. The Access HD DTA 1080 U has one. I need it. Now I can’t return it.

I make it work. It’s an ugly snarl of cables. The long suffering wife asks “Do you need all those wires?” I don’t know how to answer that.

I write out instructions in large block letters.

The A-B switch I set so to see Channel 7 is “A”. Channel 7 as mentioned below is Catholic TV. I explain that “A” will be for Angels. MIL has trouble with switch. It’s stiff and new and unfamiliar. Eventually she gets it and can navigate the changeover flawlessly.

I decide to tidy up the wires. This is a near fatal mistake.

The cable from the A-B switch to the TV is the shortest one so I replace it with a longer one to get the switch closer to the front of the TV. Then I wrap the cables and secure them with ties to keep down the snarl and avoid the Long Suffering wife’s question about so many cables. In the process the box gets moved around.

I try the deal out one more time before we leave. The box WILL NOT POWER ON. But it was working fine just a minute ago.

NOTHING WORKS.

I try changing out the power. I try new batteries in the RC.

My blood pressure is now 300 over 300. I am so close to stomping my feet and screaming that I am literally lightheaded. I can contain my anger no longer.

I pick up the POS box to throw it on the floor so I can stomp it to death and notice….there is a rocker switch on the side. Why would they do that? You turn it on with the RC and they go to the added expense of adding a master power switch? Huh? It must have gotten shut off when I was frigging around with the wires.

Breathe. Breathe deep.

It was all working when I left. I went to the website for the Access HD DTA 1080 U and searched to no avail for the answer to the channel changing dilemma. Wrote them an email because I still want to believe it’s a better unit and can do what I want. Plus I so want to take the POS Magnavox and hit it with a hammer until it’s mostly black residue and mail it back to those sons a bitches.

More updates to come, I am sure.

2009-01-31T06:17:00.001-05:00

This is a story about religion, technology and governmental bungling. And Greed. On Tuesday February 17th television as we have known it for 81 years will change forever and not necessarily for the better. You may have seen the crawls on your TV screen or the commercial featuring Bob Barker touting the big switch to digital TV. What it means is the old analog transmitters are now scrap and will be turned off forever. For most it will make no difference. If you get your TV from a cable or a satellite connection you are all set. But if Wheel of Fortune comes to you via antenna or rabbit ears you have to get a converter box. My in-laws needed this so I took care of it. It works fine but it adds an unwelcome layer of technology to their lives and another remote control. And now that they are digitized they can’t see the Catholic Mass anymore. Why? Because Catholic TV produced by Catholic Television, Diocese of Scranton, is a Low Power TV Broadcast Station using Channel Seven in analog. If you are using a digital box you don’t get analog so my in-laws are bereft. I spoke to the Manager of Catholic Television, James Brennan about this. No plans to go digital, he said but unlike other outlets they can keep the trusty analog running. He also remarked that my query was not the first he had received. His suggestion? Cable. Or a switch to bypass the new-fangled digital box so my in-laws can see the miracle of transubstantiation in the comfort of the front parlor. Just what they don’t need. Another switch. Why this big switch anyway? Is it progress marching on? Or is it the 20 BILLION your government raised selling off the old analog spectrum to the highest bidders? Mostly cell phone companies and wireless internet providers. Add to this the fact that the program to provide coupons to help defray the cost of buying the converter boxes RAN OUT OF MONEY and the whole thing is beginning to sound like it’s being run by Luzerne County judges. It’s so screwed up that President Obama tried to push it off till summer. No dice said the House of Representatives. Recently radio went digital but left the old analog method alone. TV could have been handled the same way. But not when you dangle billions in front of they guys in power down in Washington.
It’s somehow fitting that Bob Barker is the guy the government picked to tell you about this. It’s not a big jump from “having your pet spayed or neutered” to castrating TV as we know it. Or then again I could be wrong.

Let's do lunch

2009-01-28T07:40:00.000-05:00

I know that times are tough. I see it in the news. Unemployment at its highest rate ever. Big companies like Microsoft laying off 5,000. Stores closing. But I am having a little trouble here understanding a couple of things. First of all those store closings. Two big ones for me lately. Walden books in the Wyoming Valley Mall and Circuit City not far away. I visited both last week. They were so packed it made black Friday look like a ghost town. I am always sad to see a book store close. When the Tudor Book shop on the Ave. shuttered its doors I felt like I was losing a friend. Now Walden’s? But the three lines to the registers were 20 deep! People were climbing over each other to buy books. Now I know everyone loves a bargain but this was impressive. And the shelves were nearly bare. It was more than a little sad. I also will miss Circuit City. Being a gadget techno geek sort of guy it was always a fun place for me. I hate to think of all the dollars I left there. But like hordes of locusts the crowds of bargain hunters were busy picking the carcass clean. I went with the idea of picking up a cheap monitor. One had a price tag of $120 but there was a sign saying that because of the closing it might not be correct. Great, I thought. It’ll be cheaper. I asked a harried clerk about it and he checked the price. No it was really $180. Huh? That’s when it dawned on me. After checking a few more prices it was obvious there were not any bargains there that day. But that didn’t stop the line to the checkout from taking 45 minutes from end to end. So let me get this straight. These two stores couldn’t sell enough stuff to stay in business. But put a sign up that says liquidation and stand back. Where were all these people who were buying those huge LCD TV’s before the going out of business signs went up? And the other small observation? We like to lunch on Saturday. We tried three of our favorite spots. Twigs in Tunkhannock, The Olde House Bistro and J&J deli in Dallas had not a single empty spot. At Twigs you couldn’t even get in the door. So even with the economy in tatters, people not working and gas prices inching back up the Saturday lunch bunch is still more than healthy. Am I missing something here or what? Evidently the key to making it in this brave new economic world? Go out of business or sell lunch. Or then again I could be wrong.

For Audio Geeks Only!

2009-01-26T09:19:00.001-05:00

So I have longed to upgrade to Pro Tools at Huntsville Sound for a while now. At LCCC I teach Basic Music Recording which does not include Pro Tools (have to leave something for Advanced Music Recording!) but I want to be able to answer questions about it and gosh darn it I want to learn it just…just because. So I began looking for a Digi Design 001 on EBAY a while ago. My goal was to get one that:

A: Had all the parts, cards, interface, cable, doc’s and software for a PC install.
B: Was around $100.

It took a while but I finally landed one for $120 plus $17 shipping that met all the criteria. Plus e-mail’s back and forth prior to the sale convinced me that the seller was a good guy.
I have been using a Layla 3g for about a year now. Before that a Layla 24 for about a century. The 24 shit the bed but had worked flawlessly for a long long time. Used Cool Edit Pro then Adobe Audition and made hours and hours of music, voice overs and other projects. Very happy with this arrangement.
But now I am going to rock the boat. Is this wise?
The unit came as we had the worst ice storm in years. Studio is second floor, outside stairs. Not worth visit to the ER to play with the new toy.
Read the manual and got real confused. I am the sort of person who needs to read and do, not read so I put it aside.
When the WX improved I put the Sound card in and ran into my first snag. The cable to the interface is about four feet long. I need about 6’ to get to my rack. Bummer! So as you can see the interface is laying next to the monitors until I get a longer cable or figure out something else.
Powered it up and went thru the install. Password wouldn’t work for anything.
Tried other numbers the seller had written in the docs, no joy.
Took it back out and tried again and for whatever reason it installed and the password took. Whew!
Learned enough to start a session ( see Pro-tools for dummies in front of the console? Amazon for $4.) and recorded a portion of a CD through the Mackie.
It works!
I pulled up a new session with 8 tracks and fed all 8 from the CD. It worked fine. Played around with the effects and got them to work but with some lag.
I know the more ram the better. The Layla had worked fine on my bottom of the line E-machine with 512mb but I knew I could go up to 2gb. Or I thought I could.
Found a deal on EBAY for 19$ a GB-shipping $5 so went for it. Bought 2 GB.
Meanwhile I played with the rig and learned a little about editing. It is to me a very clunky way to do it but then again I have been using Adobe Audition for a very long time.
Memory came in and was installed.
Worked fine for five minutes and then the machine shut down and rebooted.
Uh Oh. Did this about five times. Hmmm…
Put the old 512mb back in everything ok.
Put one of the 1GB sticks in worked ok. Swapped and put the other in worked ok.
Hmmm. Both sticks work.
Put the 512MB in with a 1GB works ok. So I guess it’s meant to run 1512MB or 1.5GB. The seller will take the other stick back.
Ran a CD and recorded on eight tracks for almost 45 minutes. Played back great. Saved session and opened it up several times no problem.
Put the Layla card back in with the Digi and Adobe locked up real fast. So I guess I run one or the other.
Here is the bottom line. I can hear the difference in the Pro Tools. It sounds…quiet. Not that the Layla was noisy but the Pro Tools is like a needle running through velvet.
The learning curve on Pro Tools is very steep. It works nothing like Adobe in most functions and there seems to be about a hundred different ways to do anything. I will need lots of practice. Since I start teaching again this week I really don’t know when that will occur.
Pro tools lacks the ability to rip a CD. Bummer.
Pro tools (at least this version, LE) has no MP3 capability but you can buy it for who knows how much. If they even support it in this version.
My seller recommends Switch Sound File Converter but brings us to next problem. I have never had this machine on the web. So to download I will have to make a connection. I have in the past put stuff on a thumb drive and sneaker networked it but I wanted to see if my Linksys upstairs in the house would bounce a usable signal to the studio, maybe 100 yards away.
I have a wireless 2.4 GHZ on my Tivo so I got the driver on my thumb drive and installed and got a surprise. My home laptop has been configured for so long that it doesn’t look for other connections but I found two neighbors with unsecured connections! Wonder if they know I am here too? Wonder if I should secure mine? Bear in mind I live in the woods. These neighbors are along ways off, out of line of sight. WIFI has long legs!
I haven’t dl’d the mp3 converter yet. And to be honest if I get any session work I will for now put the Layla back in as I don’t want to experiment with a paid gig.
Just by the way I bought a LINKSYS WIRELESS-B NETWORK ADAPTER 2.4 GHZ USB 802.11b for the studio. It was cheap, just $9 plus $5 shipping (EBAY, where else?) It works fine but did it stink of cigarette smoke. I wrote the seller back and nicely suggested that he be aware that some people are sensitive to this. He took it well. It’s in the studio now and will probably air out after a while.

Inaugural thoughts

2009-01-25T07:13:00.002-05:00

I wasn’t able to watch the inauguration of the 44^th president last week. I did get to hear it all on the radio. Hearing but not seeing was interesting. A couple of things stick in my mind about this history making event. First of all Aretha Franklin had a bad day. The Queen of Soul has lost a lot of her range but give her a break. It was cold and all. But her phrasing of the song “My Country ‘tis of thee” in the first line was a tad bit unfortunate. Check the video. Just not the right place to pause there, ‘reatha.

Then the fact that Chief Justice John Roberts got in a muddle as he swore in Barack Obama with the 35-word oath of office - and the new president repeated the mistake.

The oath includes the phrase "I will faithfully execute the office of president" but Roberts put the word "faithfully" at the end. Mr Obama stopped reciting the words, realizing they were out of order. Roberts then said the phrase correctly. But Mr Obama then repeated the incorrect version. It was such a cluster of errors that later on that day they did a do-over in the map room of the White House. Is it just me or is sort of not a good sign? If they can’t nail 35 words to install the leader of the free world in office what else will they mess up on?

Obama’s speech was flat. Sorry but it was. Having no video I listened hard for the passion and fire of his campaign speeches. It was gone. A very much more serous and restrained man, this one who had just messed up his oath of office. I have a theory about this. When a man is elected President of the United States of America he is briefed by the FBI the CIA and tons of other alphabet soup agencies. Generals and Admirals sit down with him. He is privy to all the secret stuff that is carefully kept under wraps.

I think that Obama learned the truth about UFO’s and the aliens who live among us. It was information that made Jimmy Carter cry once. Seriously.

One such incident occurred during one of Jimmy Carter’s book signing sessions after he was no longer in office. A man pressed the UFO issue after arriving at the table with his book. He made eye-to-eye contact with Carter and said, "President Carter, you promised to tell the American people, when you were campaigning, that you would find out about UFOs. What happened?" The man reported that Carter stopped cold, and tears formed in his eyes. For a religious man like Carter who promised to help, and to tell the truth, the UFO secret had to be a hard one keep.

So after hearing that kind of truth who wouldn’t be a little more sober?

But for me the real show stopper was the benediction by Joseph Echols Lowrey a minister in the United Methodist Church and leader in the American civil rights movement.

Lowrey is no stranger to being a lighting rod for civil rights. His home was seized by the State of Alabama in a Libel suit that was reversed by the United States Supreme Court. Joseph Lowery was among the first five African Americans to get arrested at the South African Embassy in Washington D.C. during the Free South Africa movement. In 2006, at Coretta Scott King's funeral, Dr. Lowery received a standing ovation when he remarked before four U.S. Presidents in attendance:

“ We know now there were no weapons of mass destruction over there. But Coretta knew and we know that there are weapons of misdirection right down here. Millions without health insurance. Poverty abounds. For war billions more but no more for the poor!”

Conservative observers claimed his comments were inappropriate in a setting meant to honor the life of Mrs. King, especially considering Mr. Bush was present at the ceremony.

But his work at the Obama inauguration has to be his finest hour.

The speech was a stirring one. Check the video. But here are some highlights.

“Help us then, now, Lord, to work for that day when nation shall not lift up sword against nation, when tanks will be beaten into tractors, when every man and every woman shall sit under his or her own vine and fig tree, and none shall be afraid; when justice will roll down like waters and righteousness as a mighty stream.”

“Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get back, when brown can stick around -- (laughter) -- when yellow will be mellow -- (laughter) -- when the red man can get ahead, man -- (laughter) -- and when white will embrace what is right.”

“Let all those who do justice and love mercy say amen.

AUDIENCE: Amen!

REV. LOWERY: Say amen --

AUDIENCE: Amen!

REV. LOWERY: -- and amen.

AUDIENCE: Amen! (Cheers, applause.)”

Ok so last things first. I will go on record here that I thought the call and response at the end was a first for a presidential inauguration. It sounded like a gospel church service.

Secondly I really liked the lines about beating tanks into tractors and fig trees and all that. Well said.

But that bit of rhyming? And especially where he said when white will embrace what is right? How was that not racist?

I did a little research on that little verse.

It may have come from Zora Neale Hurston's story “In Harlem Slang: Jelly’s tale” The passage in question is this:

one pimp says to another: Man, I don't

deal in no coal. Know what I tell 'em? If they's white, they's right! If

they's yellow, they's mellow! If they's brown, they can stick around. But if

they come black, they better git way back!

Or it may have been lifted by Lowrey from the Song “Black, Brown and White” by Chicago Bluesman Big Bill Broonzy which includes the lyrics”

“This little song that I'm singin' about,

people, you know that it's true

If you're black and gotta work for livin',

now, this is what they will say to you,

They says, "If you was white, you'd be alright,

if you was brown, stick around,

but if you're black, oh, brother, get back, get back, get back"

So I just find it interesting that once more Obama has been associated with a man who is not afraid to be a little bit racist.

Remember this guy?

Hmmm.

Chinese curse. “May you live in interesting times.”

The New Cell Phone

2009-01-24T09:16:00.001-05:00

So I bought a new cell phone yesterday. I have written before about new cell phones. I had a very bad experience with a model called the “Treo” which among other things would randomly dial people in my address book. Bad phone! So for about the last seven years I have used a Blackberry 7520. It has a big QWERTY keyboard, a good clear speakerphone and I knew its features like the back of my hand. But it was on the Nextel network and it was web browsing capable but only in the sense that if you like to watch glaciers move then it’s perfect for you. So I have for the past few months been looking around, asking and generally moving in the direction of upgrading.

My first instinct was to stay with a Blackberry. After all I know it and I am comfortable with it. Only now you can’t get a Blackberry with a track wheel. So if I was going to have to learn a new interface why not open up my options? I knew I wanted to wait till post Christmas as I was sure stuff would be on sale. So while in the mall yesterday (we visited the closing Walden bookstore. So sad. A subject for another day.) I stopped at the Sprint kiosk.

The lone service rep (Alex) was busy with a family of three upgrading all of their phones to unlimited service and new phones because in Mom’s words “These goddamn text bills are killing me!” More on this family later. But Alex stopped long enough to take a display Blackberry “Curve” out of the cabinet. I played with it for a while. The keyboard seemed small and how much can you tell from a dummy model anyway? In another break from the action I showed Alex my 7520 and his eye’s opened wide. “A brick” he said. I asked about web surfing and he told me Nextel’s network was not so good, but that I could switch over to Sprint-no harm no foul and no extra charge. He pulled his own “Curve” out an invited me to play with it. The web came right up and I was able to sign into EBAY and check my auctions in less than a minute, something I was never able to do on my7520. Ok, I guess I am sold. But when Alex was able to give me his full attention I asked to look at the Samsung “Instinct.” My boss at the college has one and raved about it and he is a techno geek like me. Long and short I bought it. List price was $499 but it cost me $99. It is on sale, last week it was $150. I was right about the post Christmas. Alex had me set up and running in very short order. The only things he couldn’t do were transfer the contacts from my 7520 but the store down the street could, no charge. He also was unable to get my email up and running and thought I needed to use my computer at home to load the software to do so.

So we went down the street and guess who was at the other store? Yup. The family of three was getting all their data transferred. Only one person at the counter and she was trying to answer phones, questions and transfer the data all at once. I learned a lot more about this family than I need to: “Do these jeans show my butt crack?” and lost half an hour of my life that I will never get back. But the very nice, overworked girl took only five minutes to get mine done. She looked at me and said “These are usually tricky.” But it sure beats typing in all that data!

Got it home and worked on setting it up and learning the interface. It’s a touch screen and takes a little getting used to. I still am not very good at typing and often get a “P” instead of an “O” but I am getting the hang of it.

Voicemail set up was screwy. Followed the instructions carefully but couldn’t get it to work. So my first call to tech support. I got the usual New Delhi accent but he was helpful in the extreme. The phone wasn’t ported to Sprint yet and once he took care of that VM setup was a snap. Now to set up my email. Alex back at the Sprint store had mentioned he was having trouble getting a second email account on his Curve. I wanted to have my EPIX Pop 3 and my Hotmail on the Instinct something I knew was doable because my College boss had done it. Downloaded the software and got the EPIX working. Sort of. The configuration I set up was activated through my lap top. It shadows the machines Outlook. So in other words if your laptop is down or off you get no email. That’s no good for rock and roll!

After further investigation I found out how to add a Pop3 account. Got it working and was able to do the same for my Hotmail. I sent messages back and forth for a while testing it out. Then the Pop 3 (Epix) just stopped working. Another call to tech support. This time I landed in Oklahoma and got Rob on the phone. I was so stunned to hear a non foreign accent that I was speechless for a bit. I said as much, just that way to Rob and he chuckled. Had me delete and re-input the parameters for the Pop 3 and today as I write this its working fine.

I need to mention here that the first time I set up my 7520 for email I was employed by a large corporation with an enterprise server. The protocol for setting up email was to fill out a form (of course) fax it to the IT department head and wait for a call. Being a little higher in the food chain in that company (I was an operations manager) I bypassed the fax form and got the IT head on the phone. As I recall it took a few hours.

When I left that company I kept the phone but needed to get my Pop 3 on the 7520. This took, and I am not exaggerating, three days of on and off tech support calls, averaging about two to three hours each.

So getting this “Instinct” up and running in what amounted to about an hour seems like a miracle to me.

It’s still very foreign to me. Last night it notified me of every email with a soft then not so soft ring tone. So today I figure out how to get it keep it to itself at night. I managed to get the music player working and I know how to use the camera. Here is a picture, taken by “Instinct” of my old 7520. Bye bye old friend.

Baby it's....

2009-01-21T08:34:00.000-05:00

So yeah. It’s cold outside as I write this. My little indoor outdoor thermometer says ten. There is a small minus sign on it. The long suffering wife looks at it and shaking her head says “No.” But yes it’s true. The old fashioned analog model on the porch confirms it. It’s ten freaking below!
As I headed out in sub zero weather the other day I stepped on the wooden steps leading to the garage. They made a noise like rifle shots. The garage door was very slow to open. It struggled for a while and finally groaned up complaining loudly all the way.
My windshield washer reservoir needed to be filled. The half full bottle from warmer days was now a block of blue ice. I find this out when I turn it upside down to pour it in and it makes a “clunk” sound. Didn’t know that stuff could freeze. So glad I found it out with a dirty windshield, an empty washer and minus ten.
The first person through the door at work said “I think my dashboard thermometer gauge is broken.” “Why?” I asked. “Because it says minus thirteen.”
Welcome to the winter of our discontent.
How cold was it? So cold I had to pry a dog off a fire hydrant. Rim shot please. How cold was it? If Flick from the “Christmas story” had planted his tongue on the flagpole today it would have never come off. It would be there until spring, a pink flag reminding us of the darkest days of winter.
At this temperature the milk of human kindness freezes solid in seconds. If I am outside for more than 30 seconds I want to kill. Not anyone in particular. Just everybody in general. Get out of my way, I’m cold!
The expensive oil in the tanks downstairs is evaporating like a cold beer on a hot summer’s day after cutting the grass. How I wish I was cutting the grass on a hot summer day. I look at the gauge on the oil tanks and envision the marks on the side in terms of 100 dollar bills. Look it just went down another $50! Our drafty old house is not energy efficient. At this time of year it’s energy deficient. I do know that it could be worse. I have family in Vermont.
25 below there. The other night my sister called. Seemed she had left a bottle of wine on the porch. Frozen so solid that the cork was forced halfway out.
I made a joke about ice wine but her concern was not drinking but would it explode if brought in the house? 58 days till spring. But then again I could be wrong.

Boulevard of broken dreams

2009-01-19T09:32:00.000-05:00

Read the news today Oh Boy.

I often scan the classifieds. Looking for misspelled words and sometimes a bargain or two. But just noticed something that points to economic distress more than anything I can imagine. Counted 13 Harley's for sale.

That’s a lot of broken dreams, don’t you think?

The race is on.

2009-01-18T08:30:00.002-05:00

I used to drive fast. Very fast. I was the type of guy who had the latest radar detector and knew how to use it. Along with consistently exceeding posted limits I was an extremely careless driver. I had a friend ride with me once and when he got out he characterized my driving skills as comparable to “Mr. Toads Wild Ride.” And not in a good way. Everyone thinks they are good at two things. Driving and sex. I have empirical evidence that I am not good at one. I used to crash. I got enough moving violation fines to buy a Ferrari. I speak of all of this in the past tense because now the radar detector has been replaced with a GPS unit. I am more interested in getting where I want to go then how fast I get there. What changed? Possibly years of reading stories in the newspaper and seeing mangled cars on TV. Probably the real turning point was when my son twisted up a car, tore it all to pieces as Brooks and Dunn would say, and how he managed to live for sure God only knows.
So now I go slow. Sometimes slower than the posted limits. This drives
drivers behind me into red faced, eye popping, frothing, spitting paroxysms of road rage. I couldn’t give a bowel movement less. Here is some news, speedracers. If you go 75 miles per hour in a 65 mile per hour zone you save just over a minute every ten miles. 75 in a 55? About 3:00 minutes. Let’s look at this another way. Most NEPA commutes average 10 minutes. Most side roads are posted 35 miles per hour If you drive 35 you will get there in 15 minutes. Go 55 MPH and you will get there in 11 minutes. Do you think the four minutes is really worth it? The moving violation for 55 in a 35 is around $135. That’s 33 bucks per minute. Setting the alarm clock a little earlier sounding good? But the real cost? I point to the newspaper the other day. In three pages there were stories of a horrific hit and run leaving a body so badly mangled it was hard to ID it. A 16 year old hit a tree and died. An 18 year hit an old lady and killed her. And someone hit a school crossing guard who ended up in the hospital. Now I am not saying speed factored into these accidents. I am not trying to blame anyone as I am not privy to all the circumstances. But I can say without any fear of retribution that speed kills.
I don’t think I am wrong.

Happy New Year

2009-01-07T05:23:00.001-05:00

If you started your New Year with resolutions you are today on day seven.
I started my program of self improvement for 2009 on Monday so I am three days in.
It sucks.
According to several sources these are the most popular New Years resolutions. Most popular? There is nothing popular about any of these ideas but none the less here they are in more or less order of “popularity”:
#1 Lose weight-Yup that’s me. And 63% of the rest of the country. Have a salad!
#2 Gain weight-Nearly 50 million of us need to. I am not sure if they count Paris Hilton but you get the idea. It’s as hard for those who need to as # 1 is for the rest of us.
#3 Get out of debt-First, kill all the credit cards.
#4 Save money-See above
#5 Get a better job-Better is relevant. And a better job often has less to do with more money than you might think.
#6 Get fit-Me again. I need to “fit” back in some pants. There’s a goal!
#7 Eat right-See the first resolution
#8 Get a better education-This may sound trite but I have learned more by teaching others than I ever would have on my own.
#9 Drink less alcohol-That glass of red wine a day? Downsize it a bit? Like my doctor once told me. A glass….not a bucket.
#10 Quit smoking-Ding Ding Ding! We have a winner! Did that. Hardest thing ever, by the way.
#11 Reduce stress-Nice work if you can get it. Remember you don’t have to become the problem. Only solve it.
#12 Take a trip-Instantly I think of airplanes and bags and large hotel bills. But you could just go to a park. If they open any this year.
#13 Volunteer to help others-Donating time to a worthy cause makes you feel worthy. Give it a try.
#14 Be Less grumpy-Me? Grumpy? I’m not “Grumpy” I’m…I’m… independent!
#15 Be more independent-See, I told you.
#16 Watch less violence-No city council meetings for you!
#17 Learn something new-Sort of ties in with #8 but I think it can also be a skill. If I can achieve #’s 1, 3 and 4 I want to learn how to fly an ultra light plane. Since I am far from ultra light myself this may take some time. See # 1.
I had a boss once who said “measurement improves performance.” He was right and I think about it this way. To have a goal of “losing weight” is not as good or as doable as “lose a pound or two a week.” I can do that. Or then again, I could be wrong.

Happy New Year!

2009-01-02T14:24:00.003-05:00

Before I hear “Auld Lang Syne” tonight I wanted to take this time to think about the past year and give some thanks. Yeah, it’s been a tough year. Many many bad things have happened this year but I can’t help but feel that in most ways the equation of bad to good still falls down on the positive side.
#10 on my list of things to be thankful for in “09” “
I don’t work at one job I can get laid off from, downsized from, fired from or lose in anyway. I work at bunch of different things instead. It’s interesting and rarely boring.
#9. In spite of # 10 I have made it through the year basically debt free. When the phone rings it’s someone I want to talk to, not a collection agency.
#8. The cars start. They take us where we want to go and don’t leave us stranded. And they are paid for.
#7. The roof doesn’t leak. Well a little in my office.
#6. The oil tanks are full. The man who brings the oil is paid.
#5. There is always more food than we can eat. Lot’s more.
#4. I have enough money in my pocket that I can put some in every kettle I pass. A side note-to those who stole from the Salvation Army in Pittston. I hope that the money burns you in some way. And I have to wonder, why didn’t you ask for help instead of robbing the poor?
#3. I am healthy enough to shovel snow for four hours and not end up in the emergency room. Of course I feel like I have gone ten rounds with a twenty year old and not in a good way.

#2. My oldest son gifted me with the news that the Rising line will continue. Due date is March 2009. I always thought being a grandpa would make me feel old. It doesn’t. Those are my grandsons' feet to the right. His name will be "Haven" after a dear Uncle.

#1. The long suffering wife has once again stood by me in a year that could have been much worse than it was. That alone has made all the difference.
When I was in my salad days the song and the feeling “Give peace a chance” were both very popular. We were mired in war that was un-winnable and there was a great divide in the nation between the people in power and the powerless. Funny how things in 1969 and 2009 seem to be the same. The people spoke last year with a loud roar and the message was clear. Change.
So if there is a mantra for 2009 maybe it could be “give change a chance.” I hope I am not wrong. Happy New Year, and thanks for reading.

Merry Christmas!

2008-12-23T08:46:00.001-05:00

I was going to write a nice warm and fuzzy column for today. After all it is Christmas Eve. I was going to talk about the glories of Christmases long, long ago because it is the most wonderful time of the year. I really wanted to tug at your heartstrings and write about chestnuts and wassailing, what ever that is.
But then I heard about the kitties. And I saw the pictures of the kitties. And I began to wonder if there are indeed any “ better angels of our nature” as Lincoln said 147 years ago.
There isn’t much that shocks me anymore. Reading the paper and watching and listening to the news on a regular basis has thoroughly tamped down my shock mechanism. When you live in a world where a Mommy can put a newborn outside in sub zero weather you begin to get a bit jaded. At least I do.
But the kitties got to me. The pictures set the hook. Little kitties with their ears sagging under the weight of so called “bananabells” is just plain wrong. Ever see pictures of dogs dressed up for Halloween? They all have this expression in their eyes that seems to say “Why are you doing this to me? I feel ridiculous.” Looking at the kitties they seem to be saying “This is wrong. Take this crap off me!”
You see, the kitties had no say in the matter. And that’s what really is wrong.
I know they are just dumb animals. But they do have the ability to learn ( can they think?) and feel pain. And we as their caretakers have a responsibility to do right by them. A responsibility not to make them into “Gothic Kittens.”
I am going to make a ridiculous comparison. In some of the less than civilized parts of the world a practice called Female Genital Mutilation is done to young girls, presumably without their consent. I don’t think I need or want to go into the details. I know, I know, to compare that to the mutilations of kitties is a far stretch even for me. I do think, however you can tell a great deal about a society by the way it treats it’s pets, not to mention it’s young girls. It’s just a quick slide down the slippery slope to hell that lives in my mind to get there. I said it was a ridiculous comparison. But it happens every day.
One of the kitties was advertised as a gothic cat under the name “Snarley Monster” on various on-line sites.
I think we know who the real monsters are. Or then again I could be wrong.

Doggone

2008-12-16T08:41:00.000-05:00

He had been barking all night. I have trouble sleeping sometimes and this was one of those nights. It was the day after the big ice storm. Everything had been covered in a film of black ice. Walking anywhere on the Rising Ranch was next to impossible. A trip from the house to the garage was life threatening. A gymnast would have been envious of my moves as I got my feet above my head twice. Haven’t done that since kindergarten. But this was the next day. I rise early. It could be the name. It could be that I have to be at the gym for 5am. I am the first guy there. I like to arrive a little early. I get up at 4am most days but day after ice storm days I get up at around 3:30. I wasn’t asleep anyway. The dog had kept me up. The ice was mostly gone but now it was raining. Hard. And it was cold. The dog seemed to be barking more frantically now. Dogs can communicate a lot with a bark. This one was saying very plainly, “Help!” It sounded close. Real close.

I grabbed a five cell flashlight. Cops call them emergency nightsticks. Walking was a nightmare. It’s uneven ground and was soaking wet and slippery. Mud tried to suck my boots off. I could see the dog on the other side of our fence thru the privacy slats. Technically it was on the annoying neighbor’s property but it wasn’t his dog. Its eyes shone dull red in the flashlights beam. I had to walk to the end of the fence and back up again. Did I mention the cold hard rain? I got a look at the animal thru the rain from about five feet away. It was a big white dog, could have been an Airedale or a large standard poodle. It was stuck somehow. I got a little closer and it snapped and growled at me. This was above my pay grade.

Back at the house on with 911 they promised to “send” someone.

By the time I had to go no show. After an hour I checked in with the Long Suffering Wife and still no joy. This time the 911 call connected me to the State Police who took the info. And someone came for the dog.

He probably wouldn’t have made it much longer. It was just below freezing and he was in some distress.

Later on I got calls from the ASPCA and the Dog warden. Did I report a lost dog? This was hours later. Glad it wasn’t my dog. Or me. But then again I could be wrong.

A bit of undigested Roast Beef....

2008-12-06T08:37:00.000-05:00

Charles Dickens wrote the following exchange between Ebenezer Scrooge and two charity workers for his Christmas Carol 164 years ago. With apologies to Mr. Dickens I have taken the liberty of updating it somewhat for this festive season that doth approacheth. Wow-that’s a Dickens type word. Easy to fall into his pattern. 16 days till Christmas, gentle readers.

"At this festive season of the year, Mr. Scrooge," said the gentleman, taking up a pen, "it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the poor and destitute, the horseless carriage makers, the lenders and the ninny’s who play the stock market and who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of huge bailouts; hundreds of thousands are in want of big government bucks, air."

"Are there no prisons?"

"Plenty of prisons. But OJ is already going to serve at least nine years. And even as we speak our Great President Bush is busy pardoning many a white collar criminal. The prisons are no place for the rich Mr. Scrooge. The very thought of placing the leaders of the financial free world in prisons. It makes one shudder. Haven’t you ever heard the words of the great bard Dylan?”

“Dylan Thomas?”

“Um no. Bob, not Thomas my good sir. In any case you and Dickens will be long dead before either of them are born. But I speak of the Dylan who sang “Steal a little and they throw you in jail, Steal a lot and they make you king.”

“What shall I put you down for?"

"Nothing!"

"You wish to be anonymous?"

"I wish to be left alone. Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don't make merry myself at Christmas, and I can't afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the prisons and the workhouses, -- they cost enough, -- and those who are badly off must go there. So send the big three horseless carriage makers, Ford CEO Alan Mulally, General Motors CEO Richard Wagoner and Chrysler CEO Robert Nardelli to the end of the unemployment line. "

"Many can't go there; and many would rather die."

"If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."

Of course we all know how the story comes out. Scrooge is confronted by three ghosts and has his attitude readjusted. Unfortunately for us a little attitude adjustment isn’t going to solve our current economic disaster. The Bob Cratchit’s of the current bona-fide recession won’t be helped even if Scrooge buys them the biggest turkey he can find. It’s gonna be a long cold lonely winter. Or then again, I could be wrong.

Gobble, Gobble.

2008-11-26T09:22:00.000-05:00

It’s the day before Thanksgiving and all the through the house….no wait I’m mixing it up with Christmas again. In any case tomorrow starts the free fall headlong rush into the holidays or as I like to put it the “Holidaze”. No work gets done, people get distracted and weight goes back on. It’s a month long combination of a slowdown in some ways but a frantic pace in others. I could take this time to reminisce about the glories of Thanksgivings long ago. Like the one where the turkey landed with a splash in the toilet. I have told that one before though. I could also use this space to talk about my oldest son’s Thanksgiving last year. He has settled in the Deep South and sent me pictures of himself deep frying a turkey. Any enterprise involving cooking, a 55 gallon drum filled with boiling oil and a fire extinguisher just seems like a good time to me. But that’s a story for another time. I could let you in on the Thanksgiving dinner my out of state Daughter cooked. A guest finished her meal and then whipped out the Tupperware and proceeded to pack the leftovers for herself. Not really in the spirit of things but a story best left untold for now. No, today I want to concentrate on letter to the editor I saw a while ago. In Broadheadsville there is a diner called Penelope’s. This year as they have for quite some time they will once again offer a free Thanksgiving Day dinner to the needy. They serve 100 people free of charge. It’s a great thing to do and I applaud it. But the real reason I want to bring some attention to this is the message of the letter. Let me quote you some of the text. “At Thanksgiving, we at Penelope’s pray for the safety of our Men and Women in the military, a cure for Cancer and, especially for God to grant wisdom to our elected officials to guide us to peace and prosperity.”
At the beginning of the letter the writer references a 1,000 meal giveaway done in the spring. And they say “Since that time we’ve not seen an improvement in the financial situation in our community.”
But at Penelope’s they don’t just wring their hands in quiet desperation. They roll up their sleeves and feed the hungry. Sure in the big scheme of things it doesn’t make a difference. But to those hungry and in need tomorrow I can assure you it makes a BIG difference. What we need in this great country of ours right now is lots more Penelope’s diners. Have a safe and happy Thanksgiving.

A time for every season

2008-11-25T09:33:00.002-05:00

It’s Fall. Any number of tell tale signs confirm this. Just a glance at the calendar should be enough. But many other sights, sounds and smells tell me that it’s time to put the shorts away for another year. Smells? Sure. The tang of burning leaves. Of course someone is always burning something near the Rising Ranch but I don’t mind the smell of a pile of leaves smoldering. Smells like…..Fall. Of course to go along with the burning leaves you hear the incessant dull roar of leaf blowers across the landscape. I can put up with it. I myself hate the end of the rake that you have to hold. You know. The side that gives you blisters? So a leaf blower works fine for me. I do understand it is possible to use them during the day and not at 6am or after 9pm but who am I to quibble? Sights? Well for one thing the deer and other animals have begun the annual migration from the left side to the right side of the road. But then again some of them are contrarians and go from right to left. Of course they do this all year long but for some reason during the fall the animal population of Northeastern Pa seems to live on the asphalt. Or more likely, die on the asphalt. Judging by the amount of corpses on and beside the road we have no fear of extinction of skunks, opossums or deer anytime soon. But some are luckier than others. The other day I saw a huge flock of turkeys and I wasn’t at a political rally. Rim shot, please. There must have been 20 or more, all in a line, taking their sweet time to cross the road. I stopped to watch. The tail end Charlie stopped and turned to look back at something. The rest of the flock was well into the woods. Charlie turned and if he was a human you would have heard him say “Woo woo woo.” Like Curly of the Three Stooges. He jumped a few feet in the air, shook his head and ran after the flock with that peculiar turkey trot in high gear. It was a Disney moment. It’s Fall. It’s the last few days of fifty degree temperatures before the deep freezer door is left open to chill us to the bone until Spring. Its bushel baskets of apples, piles of pumpkins that will not be Jack-o-lanterns but may become pies or soup. It’s the planning and thinking and plotting out the Thanksgiving feast. And it’s the first time you hear Christmas carols and see decorations, too soon, always too soon. But then again, I could be wrong.

The taxman cometh.

2008-11-25T09:15:00.003-05:00

All of the nearly 200 have the same words. Reading them all over and over again is a mind numbing exercise but probably not as mind numbing as seeing your own property in the Luzerne County Sheriff’s sale flyer. I can’t imagine what it must be like to see your home or business to be listed in the stilted legal jargon. “Exposed to public sale by vendue or outcry to the highest and best bidders.” I had to look up “Vendue.” It means “a public sale at auction.” Outcry I had no problem with. It’s interesting though that the word cry slips into what looks to me to be a somewhat heartless process. There are, to be exact, 182 sales in this flyer dated Friday November 21st. Its 28 pages long. I am willing to bet that there are more than 182 stories to go along with those listings. You can read between the lines on some of them by looking at the title section. Lots of titles held by husbands and wives with one or the other deceased. Now with the spouse gone the house is too expensive or too big or too something. The kids don’t want it or live out of state or there are no kids. The payments to the taxman are forgotten and the property will soon be up for grabs to the highest or the best bidder. Best bidder? Who gets to decide what is best for what was a home once and is now just another line in the Luzerne County Sherriff’s sale. Some sales I am sure are the product of divorce. Some are just business as usual. Some may even be up for sale because or criminal activity. The cold hard fact is that we have on our hands the perfect storm of economic strife. High gas prices, tumbling stocks, and rampant unemployment. Here in Luzerne County we also face the reassessment that just took place and will take effect next year unless a dark planet crashes into the sun. Many many more of these sales will be taking place. So much so that I fear that the future Luzerne County Sheriff’s sale flyer may be the size of a set of encyclopedias. You may see that one delivered by tractor trailer trucks. It’s not funny, this grim prognosis. People’s lives will change. Whole neighborhoods may be looking like the streets of Centralia before this is done. I am sure that the Sherriff and his department take no joy from all this. To be part of a process that in the legal words involves “seized and taken” can’t be something to look forward to during your workday. But then again, I could be wrong.

Did you Boscov Today?

2008-11-20T09:24:00.000-05:00

Now don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that losing the Boscov store in downtown Wilkes-Barre would be a good thing. But I question some of the statements made recently by the powers that be about the city of Wilkes-Barre loaning 3 million smackers to keep it afloat. Mayor Tom Leighton swears-no wait let me rephrase that because we know Tom Leighton does NOT swear. He wouldn’t say excrement if he had a mouth full of it. It’s not in his vocabulary. Not even if he hits his thumb with a hammer. Hizzoner said “This will have no impact on the taxpayers.” Interesting choice of words. Impact? Does that mean if the loan to a bankrupt store, which after all is what Boscov is right now, is never repaid then that’s ok? Then where did the money come from? “This money does not come out of our general fund” says the Mayor. Then where from does it come? The special fund? The fund to pay for losing lawsuits against private citizens? That fund has been tapped out recently. According to published reports the loans are being financed through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. They have an address in Washington D.C. I checked it on the internet which is now, as Homer Simpson says, on computers. So the money is coming from our country tiz of thee’s Government. Where does the Government get that money? From the big printing press in the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, I know. It’s just down the street. But where does the money really come from? Here’s a hint. You pay taxes, right? And even though the Mayor says all is well a teeny tiny bit of uncertainty exists. Todd Vonderheid, Chief Executive of the Greater Wilkes-Barre chamber of Business and industry said “There’s clearly some risk.” Hmmm. 3 Million dollars is a lot of risk in a city that from all appearances does not have mountains of cash stored in silos. I hope Boscov’s survives. I really do. Because I have this sinking feeling if they don’t that I know who will be paying the bill no matter what the powers that be say. Oh and could they use some of the 3 million to maybe spruce up the joint a tad? Last time I was there the store was showing its age and not well. A little paint, some new carpets and maybe a swipe with a dust mop would be a help. Near the escalator that was broken that day I counted in my line of sight 15 light fixtures with burned out bulbs.
If the lights are out, there isn’t anybody home. Or then again I could be wrong.

God and State.

2008-11-15T09:26:00.000-05:00

I have always been told that two topics you should never discuss are religion and politics. It’s a sure way to get into an argument. Well with recent events I am going to have to respectfully decline that advice. What in the world is going on in the Catholic Church? Have they lost their minds or have they never heard of the concept of separation of church and state? Thomas Jefferson said “legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”. It’s not just an American concept. Back in 1864 Pope Pius IX issued a document that read in part "The Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church.". But it seems that concept has gone the way of the Latin mass.
The Most Reverend Joseph F. Martino, D.D., Hist. E.D. ,The Bishop of Scranton recently ordered that a lengthy homily of his be read in church and placed in the printed bulletins. This was done before the election. It said in part “Our Lord, Jesus Christ, does not..….ask us to take up his Cross only to have us leave it at the voting booth door.” Most of the homily condemns “pro-choice candidates” and although he doesn’t spell it right out the meaning is obvious. Vote Democratic-go to hell!
Now, after the election A South Carolina Roman Catholic priest, The Rev. Jay Scott Newman of St. Mary's Catholic Church in Greenville has told his parishioners that they should refrain from receiving Holy Communion if they voted for Barack Hussein Obama because the Democratic president-elect supports abortion, and supporting him "constitutes material cooperation with intrinsic evil." Nice touch Father Jay, including the middle name “Hussein”. The blogosphere is full of ranting that our next president is a Middle Eastern sleeper cell already and the Hussein reference helps a lot. I am sure that plays well in the Bible belt of which Greenville is the buckle.
And the idea that Obama is the “Anti-Christ” is out there too-but to call the President “Intrinsically evil”? Holy Cow!
Maybe the church should confine itself to it’s plateful of troubles. Shrinking congregations. The lack of funds generated from those shrinking congregations. The lack of new priests. The lack of priests who don’t touch little boys and girls. The millions and millions taken direct from the collection plates to defend those pedophile priests. Here’s one from the blogosphere: The true reason the church is so vehement about pro-choice is because the pedophile priests need a steady supply of new victims. Heresy? Sure. But in its way no worse than calling the leader of the free world whether you like him, love him or hate him, evil. But then again I might be wrong.

"not dead. e's just resting!"

2008-11-02T06:58:00.002-05:00

No one really likes their neighbors. I don’t. On both sides of the Rising Ranch I am surrounded by annoying people. Actually annoying is far too mild a word. These people would try the patience of Gandhi. On one side I have a skinflint who is too cheap to pay for garbage pick-up so he burns his trash. All his trash. At times it smells like I have moved next door to a crematorium. On another side I have a maniac who runs power equipment 24/7/365. Nothing like the sound of a chainsaw in the morning. EVERY MORNING. But my problems pale compared to this poor woman in Dallas. It sounds like something out of a Monty Python sketch. Or maybe the punch line to a bad joke. I refer to the news item the other day about the woman and the parrot. It seems that there is a parrot living on Country Club Road in Dallas. I have been on Country Club Road in Dallas. It sounds far nicer than it really is. It’s named, I would presume, after the Irem Temple Country Club which is indeed on the road in question. You have a love to road that has a 15 foot high fez as a sign on it. The tassel alone will take your breath away! The image of a County Club with tuxedoed men and gowned ladies shipping sherry on the verandah? Not so much at the Irem Country Club. But that has nothing to do with our story. It seems that this parrot that lives on Country Club Road is noisy. Noisy enough that it’s “repetitious screeching and screaming” is keeping the neighbors from taking an afternoon nap. The vocal bird lives about 30 feet away from the bedroom of the anonymous would be napper. It probably sounds like the parrot is on her nightstand trying out for American Idol. The unfortunate woman tried to do the right thing. After speaking to the parrot owners, she appealed to the board of supervisors for help. And got nada. Zip. Bupkis. She was told to get a lawyer. It’s considered a private matter. In case you think the woman is overly sensitive it’s been verified that a parrot screech can exceed 150 decibels. Just for context standing 100 feet from a departing jet airplane rates 130 decibels. A rock concert averages 120 DB. So I think the woman has cause for complaint. In the famous Monty Python Sketch the Norwegian Blue Parrot ends up as an Ex-parrot. I predict a similar ending for the Parrot of Country Club Road if it doesn’t learn to speak softly. But then again I could be wrong.

Vote for me, I'll give you a tree!

2008-11-02T06:55:00.002-05:00

Deadline forced this to be written days before the election was over. Assumptions were made, among them that the election is indeed over and that we have a winner. Some assembly required.

Hear that? Or rather, DON’T hear that? The sound of silence after the deafening roar of two years of campaigns that all spun down last night.
I have never seen or heard such a revolting display of mud slinging, self aggrandizing, unprecedented, bull crap emanating from TV, Radio and the Newspapers and don’t forget I was alive while Nixon was in office. But it’s over and the people have spoken.
Fill in the blank here: ____________has won the highest office in the land.
It was a historic campaign. Many elements were played out for the first time in our nation’s history. First black candidate, oldest candidate, most spending (reportedly $293 Million for McCain, $573 Million for Obama) and so on.
There are a lot of questions facing blank. He has to know that on Tuesday January 20th at noon when he says ''I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.'' the enormous responsibility that passes to him. The economy, the war, and the energy crises- he’s going to have his hands full.
Blank may or may not have been my first choice. It doesn’t matter now. What matters is that the promises of change start happening. If you think back about the past campaign many dire predictions were made if blank won. Questions about his competency, his ability to meet the challenge, his record have all been raised. Will blank die or be assassinated in office is a concern. Is Vice-President blank up to the challenge of stepping in the biggest shoes in the land? Do we want to find out?
President blank has incredible power right now. He would do well to remember the words of a British Lord from 1887:
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
But I have faith in the system. Not necessarily in the people who populate the system, but the system itself with its checks and balances has worked for the past 220 years. But even the framers of the constitution had doubts. That’s why Article II -Section 4. reads:
“The President, Vice President and all Civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”
It’s a safety blanket that I hope we don’t need-But I for one can sleep a little easier knowing it exists.

Change? You mean spare change, right?

2008-10-18T07:01:00.001-04:00

I know less then nothing about high finance. A good day is when I find change on the street. A great day is when it’s silver and not copper. I can watch the carnage that is our nation’s economy from the safe and secure vantage point of not having two nickels to rub together. I don’t play the stock market. Hell in this day and age I don’t think anyone plays the stock market-it’s hardly a game anymore. Images of men throwing themselves from New York City skyscrapers appear before me when I think about how bad things are on Wall Street. How bad is it? The company I used to work for, which is now laying off people faster than political candidates make campaign promises, issued me a bunch of stock options when they liked me. They were worthless then. Stock options seem to me like having sex with a full body condom on. Really what’s the point? I think the option price on the lowest of them was in the 60 dollar range. The stock is trading now at $1.40. The usual jokes about using the stock options as toilet paper come to mind but actually the paper is too rough for that and leaves ink on your behind. Not much good for blowing your nose on either. Not real absorbent. Is there any thing worth less than worthless? I said I don’t play the stock market. But I do have a 401k. The same company that gave me the stock options used to make a contribution to that. I missed out on that when I left their employ but now they have stopped that little gift so I didn’t miss much. My 401k lost so much money so fast even before the stock market began acting like a Hershey park roller coaster that I put it in deep freeze mode. I am sure this is against all the advice any economist would give but not only did it stop the hemorrhaging of dough but I actually, according to my last statement, made a little money. How the hell did that happen, don’t ask me. Ask the economist next to you at the soup kitchen. Another thing I don’t understand is how all the gas stations know it’s almost election time. The closer we get to November 4th the lower the price at the pump goes. I saw a “2” on the front of a gas price the other day. At least I think it was a two. It was very dusty. Of course all the “2’s” will be long gone after we make our choice on that Tuesday in November. Look for bright and shiny “5’s” then. Or then again I could be wrong.

See I told you so

2008-10-12T06:03:00.003-04:00

In 17 days I will do something I have never done before. I wish I could say I will do it with a joyful heart. I wish I could I could say I will do it with the spirit of adventure and excitement that often accompanies first time experience. But sadly I am approaching this milestone in my life as more like a millstone around my neck. For the sad truth is I will exercise my franchise for the first time on November 4th and I wish it was under different circumstances. To be sure I am not proud of this particular track record. But to understand why I have never set foot in a voting booth we must go back to a day 33 years ago. I realize that for some of you, maybe even most of you, that is a long time. But in my mind it seems like yesterday. I became completely disillusioned with politics that day and I have never ever really recovered. From 1968 when he was first elected as president my generation screamed as loud as we could that Richard Nixon was a crook. It seemed that no one believed us, a bunch of overfed, long-haired leaping young people. No one, that is until Tricky Dick hung himself and succumbed to the charges of “High Crimes and Misdemeanors.” Richard Milhous Nixon, the 37th president of the United States became the first president to resign in August of 1974. “See we told you so!” seemed weak at the time. It still does. It turned me off politics so strongly that I vowed never to participate in a system that could elect a person so crooked that he had to be installed into his grave with a power auger. But that was then, this is now. Maybe if I had been more political in the intervening years, maybe if I had found the intestinal fortitude to hold my nose and to vote for some of the lesser scumbags that have run for office maybe just maybe this country wouldn’t be in the awful fix it’s in now. Yeah and maybe pigs can fertilize fields by doing crop-dusting flights. I have no real hope that my lonely little vote will make a difference in this year’s outcome. I watched in smug self satisfaction seven years ago as the election was stolen. But this year I have to vote. If I don’t vote and the wrong person gets the brass ring I will not be able to say “See I told you so.” I just wish that my first time behind the curtain I could vote for someone, not against someone. Or then again, God help us please, I could be wrong.

Butt out!

2008-10-05T05:40:00.004-04:00

“Smoking or non-smoking?” A phrase that will soon be heard as often as “I need a new buggy whip.” Or “Honey the dinosaurs are tearing up the garden again.” I for one am glad to see smoking butted out of most places. It’s true I was a smoker. A pretty good smoker at that. A pack a day on good days (or bad days depending on your point of view) and sometimes quite a bit more than that. So, like most ex-smokers I now hate the smell of tobacco being burned worse than I hate death. Now, if I understand it correctly, the law prohibits smoking at restaurants that serve alcohol if a percentage of their total sales are derived from selling food. So if you don’t sell many eats, patrons can puff away. I have heard some refer to this as the “Dive bar” exemption.
Quite a few questions have been raised as to how this is being regulated. Who checks the receipts to make sure the law is being complied with? In the “dive bars” I have been in (and I have been in a few) there are typically quite a few salty snacks available presumably to increase beverage consumption.

Not to mention pickled pigs feet. I was once at such a bar where a wager was made between a local and an out of towner about the consumption of one of those pink fetus like objects in the big glass jar. If I remember correctly (there were mature beverages being consumed) the figure was $50. Of course the local got the money and the pigs’ foot. (feet?) But my point is would the $50 clams count towards the smoking restriction now a days? Just a thought.

There are still two problems with smoking that need to be cleared up. Smokers are now prohibited in a lot of places from smoking right outside the door. But they have just moved a few feet further. There still is a steel grey cloud to wade through and piles of stinky butts. It’s just in a different place.

And the biggest problem? People still throw burning cigarette butts out of car windows. It’s obnoxious and dangerous. I read a book once where the hero was a guy who was Mr. Environment to the point that he developed this device to punish smokers who discharged from the car. He would pick up the butts, load it in this thing and catch up with the person. He would get them to roll down the window and fire the butt back into the car. Extreme? Yeah, I guess. But many times I wish I had the sack to do just that. But then again I could be wrong.

700 Billion Bailout.

2008-09-28T06:02:00.000-04:00

I am not ever going to be mistaken for an economist. I can, on a good day, give the correct change to the clerk to buy a newspaper but there are days I can’t do even that. Big numbers scare me, especially when I have to write them in the column marked withdrawals in my checkbook. Any thing with more than a zero or two gets entered with handwriting that looks like a chicken had a seizure with a pen strapped to his leg.
But in the interest of keeping current with economic events I present:

Some ways of looking at 700,000,000,000.

Actually let’s start much smaller. 80 years we may get on this planet. 29,200 days, 700,800 hours and 42,048,000 minutes. So if you paid back a dollar a minute it would take 16,647 lifetimes to pay back 700 Billion. Better start counting! Here is another way of slicing this pie:

To count out one Billion nonstop without sleep or eating it would take Thirty-Nine years. To count out 700 Billion would take 27,300 years. That’s a lot of Red Bull. It would be the year 29308 when you finished. Makes the year 2525 seem like it’s just around the corner.

A Billion pennies stacked would reach nearly one thousand miles high.

The image shows a billion pennies.

700 billion would reach 700 thousand miles high.

700 billion worth of pennies would fill about 30 sears towers.

As of 2007, there are about 138 million taxpayers in the United States. If I understand this 700 Billion dollar bailout at all then those taxpayers (Hey, that’s you and me!) are the people who would be paying that 700 billion dollars. That comes out to be nearly $5,100 per tax payer. So for a couple that is over $10,000. The day the government puts $10,000 into the checkbook of this taxpayer would be a very happy day indeed.

But the money is not going to be coming into your checkbook or my checkbook. The Government is going to give it to someone else.
Consider this. Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense has been quoted as saying "According to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions.” In other words the military lost $2.3 trillion.

The picture shows what a stack of a trillion pennies would look like to scale. That's the empire state building.

One Trillion dollars is One Thousand Billion dollars. To count out a Trillion dollars nonstop without sleeping or eating it would take Thirty-Nine Thousand (39,000) years. I am not sure how much Red Bull that would take.

So this government of ours lost more than 300 Billion more than the bailout would cost.
Sen. Everett Dirkson is rumored to have said "A billion here, a billion there..., pretty soon, you're talking real money." So what’s a trillion between friends, right? Or then again I could be wrong.

Bloomsburg Fair 2008

2008-09-19T06:13:00.000-04:00

A trip to the Bloomsburg fair is like a harbinger of the inevitable slide into weather that doesn’t support the wearing of shorts here in NEPA. It’s almost impossible to contemplate that in a few short weeks we will be digging out hats, gloves, boots, sweaters and polar artic fleece undies. But for one all too brief shining week we can pretend it’s still summer. The 154th annual edition of the fair that draws close to half a million people is going on right now. Two things are missing from this years Bloomsburg fair. One important, one personal. More on that in a moment. The fair is nothing if not efficient. You park in one of the immense lots and a tractor pulling trolleys transports you to the gate. A comparison to Disney World was made. Disney it’s not. The trolleys need a shot of WD-40-they squeak and squeal like girls at Jonas Bothers concert. And the operators of the tractors are in the dictionary under “Jackrabbit starts and stops.” The word lurch comes to mind and I don’t mean the Adams family. But a promenade around the grounds, stuffing your face at every corner soon makes up for the ride. Oh, the agriculture and 4H displays are great. But you go to the fair to stuff your face.
And that brings me to the two missing elements from this year’s gluttony fest.
Phil’s Cajun Kitchen has stopped selling Jambalaya. For the unitiated Cajun Jambalya is basically rice and whatever is in the kitchen. Sausage, chicken, oinion, peppers, celery spices and hot sauce. MMM good. But, alas no more. For me this is like finding out there is no Santa and what’s this about the Easter Bunny? A bowl of Phil’s steaming concoction was the perfect breakfast at the fair. It was good for lunch and dinner too. RIP Jambalaya.

But the more important absence at the fair this year is somewhat more ominous. No bees. No nasty yellowjackets. On the surface this is a blessing. The winged univited guests made fair going uncomfortable at times, competing for sweet stuff. In years past a purchase of soda meant the possibilty of getting stung or at least hazed by a squadron of the busy insects. But this year there were few if any buzzing around. Either this means the Bloomsburg fair has figured out a way to charge them and they can’t afford it or…colony collapse disorder, a mysterious disease killing off bees nationwide has hit our area. And that is a very scary thing indeed. Someone said, “No bees, No humans” and that’s about right. Without the pollination of bees, fruits and vegtables could disappear like Phil’s Jambalya.
Or then again I could be wrong.

M O O N that spells moon.

2008-09-17T10:05:00.004-04:00

The last few nights have been a full moon.
One night when it was clear I was up at 3 am and it was bright enough to read a newspaper with. So I grabbed a copy of the Times leader and perused the Police blotter.
The fact that people act crazier and there is more crime during a full moon is under some dispute. In spite of the word lunacy which comes from the Latin for Moon or Luna. Some psychologists say it’s a bunch of hooey. But ask any policeman or emergency room worker.
Back to the police blotter-in the past three days there have been over 60 reports printed. I don’t know if that’s more or less than normal but it seems like a lot.
Domestic disputes, stolen vehicles, vandalism all in incredible variety. A stolen kid’s bike, a ripped off basketball hoop, a license plate taken from a car, holiday decorations stolen from a car (what holiday?) Solar lights ripped off from a front yard. Someone even liberated two air conditioners from a fire hall. Now that takes intestinal fortitude.
And a bunch of people who had more than their share of John Barleycorn. A guy arrested for throwing food and a mattress into the street. A lady who was driving on the sidewalk. A woman who was found drinking a beer in public then gave police a fake name. A 32 year old gal arrested for exposing her breasts to passing motorists. At 9am.
Some things that are just plain sad. Someone broke into a place and stole an undetermined amount of hypodermic needles. You don’t need a psychologist to figure out where those will end up. A 2 year old thrown from a car into the road, then scooped up and put back in the car which drove off. Witnesses said the car was being driven recklessly. And a man who broke into a house was found inside the residence, not his own, cooking.
There are a thousand stories in the naked city under a full moon.
As Warren Zevon put it. Ahhh oooo!

It taint this or that.

2008-09-17T10:05:00.001-04:00

I think we need to add another season to the calendar. This time right now to me is the “Taint” of the seasons. I suppose a little definition is in order here. The word “Taint” is generally used to describe something that isn’t one thing or another. I have heard it used mostly in anatomically oriented references but that’s as far as I will go with that one. Suffice to say the “Taint” is inbetween. I suppose also that you could make a case for there being “Taints” each time the season changes but this time of year is the one I think best fits. It is the time between the best time of the year, Summer; glorious, hot, sticky, sensual Summer and Fall, when things start to head downhill for the Winter. I always find it a little hard to handle the fact that in a couple of months we will have gone from weather that supports the wearing of the most minimal of clothing and no shoes to a time of sweaters, heavy coats, boots, hats and gloves. But that is life in NEPA I guess. But for the next few weeks we are in between. It’s actually been hotter this September after Labor Day (it reached 89 on September 4th) than it was for the entire month of August. So it’s not any surprise that these days in the “Taint” can go from one extreme to another. I can remember going to the Bloomsburg fair some years in shorts and T-shirts and other years bundled up in winter clothes. Bloomsburg fair week, by the way is towards the end of “Taint.” So when exactly does the “Taint” begin and end? The beginning is easy. The day after Labor Day signals the end of summer. This wisdom comes from anyone who has ever been a kid. Pools close, schools open, it’s not Summer anymore. It’s “Taint.” But when does Fall officially start? A Google search on that will make your head spin. There is way too much time on way too many people’s hands on the internet. You can get almost any date you want for the start of Fall. My little moleskin calendar says 9/22 is the first day of Autumn. We will call that the official date for our purposes here, but in the hearts and minds of NEPA I am pretty sure Fall starts when, well, when the leaves begin to fall in sufficient enough quantity that rakes come out of hibernation and the sound of leaf blowers fills the air. That’s not a standard that you can set your watch by, obviously but it feels right to me. But then again I could be wrong.

Clean up in aisle four.

2008-09-16T10:05:00.000-04:00

I do the grocery shopping now. Have been for almost the past year. I don’t mind and actually kind of enjoy it. The other day I had filled my basket with my order and headed to the check-out to cash out and be on my way.
The long suffering wife has taught me to look over the checkers very carefully. You need one who looks like they won’t put up too much of a fight over coupons you are using. You also have to balance that need with the size of the person/persons order in front of you.
I chose carefully this day, The girl behind the register was very cute, blond, well put together and there were only two others in front of me. An older gent who was nearly done, or so it appeared and a 20 something guy with just a few items, one of which was a small bouquet of flowers. Aww, something to give his girl, or his Mom. The old guy was having a real problem. Something to do with writing his check. The cute checkout girl was very solicitous to him. I had picked right! Pretty and nice. A combo that doesn’t happen very often. The younger guy in front of me was getting impatient. You could tell.
Finally the senior citizen cleared out and as I began to load my order on the belt the young guy struck up a conversation with the checker. I didn’t hear all of it but I did catch the end. “These are for you” he said, proffering the small bouquet of flowers. “Wow” I thought, what a cheesy pick-up technique.
The cute check out girl looked at them like they were a dead rat and said “Oh I can’t take those. My boyfriend will have a fit.” I didn’t hear the pick up artists reply but the checker said “Do you still want them?” Pick up boy said “Yes” and scurried out.
I turned to the cute checker and asked “Do you often get flowers?” She looked at me and I could tell she was sizing me up. She decided I was old and no threat (when did this happen to me?) so she said “That’s the third time he’s done that. Can’t take a hint. And I don’t even HAVE a boyfriend.”
I already had more information than Mr. Pick up and I wasn’t even in the game! Being a pretty woman in a public place is hard sometimes I suspect.
I bet this sort of thing goes on all the time probably not three times in a row like our bouquet bearer but often enough. “He might be a stalker” I said.
Her eyes flew wide open and she said “You think?” I don’t know why I did it, but as I started to walk away I said to her “I just saw him put the flowers on your car.” Just another day at the grocery store. Or then again I could be wrong.

Rascal Flatts Review

2008-08-24T10:21:00.001-04:00

With a flash bang that must have been seen and heard in Wilkes-Barre and Scranton the Rascal Flatts “Bob your head” tour touched down at the Toyota Pavilion at Montage Sunday night and brought 16 thousand to their feet in a hurry.
Gary LeVox, Jay Demarcus, and Joe Don Rooney rode down to the super high-tech stage on a futuristic scaffolding from what looked like a hundred feet in the air. Think Mad Max’sd thunderdome meets ET’s Spaceship. The stage set included huge risers for the keyboard, drummer and pedal steel player with immense video screens on two sides. In the center was a semi circle screen that concealed the stairway to the scaffolding. Through most of the nearly two hour show at least five young ladies did the frug and the mash potatoe behind the screen. Just like shindig! Which brings me to the only criticism I can make of the spectacle. Where was the country? Oh sure the five piece back up band included a fiddle player who could play down the devil or Charlie Daniels but try as I might I couldn’t hear the pedal steel.
But I don’t mean to say it’s bad. In fact the show was just short of amazing.
From the opener “Still feels good” from the latest CD it was clear that these guys can sing. The effortless harmony that is their trademark was in full force Sunday night. Launching into “Life is a highway” Gary Levox (Le Vox means the voice, right?) made you forget all about Tom Cochrane. The list of hits that follwed included “Love you out loud”, Everday, a rousing version of “Stand” and the pop sounding “Take me there”. Then after an overly long speech from Joe Don where he thanked the employees of “Dunder Mifflin” for being so doggone nice it seemed like ti was time for the obligiatory acoustic set. Joe Don laid down a nice version of “Movin’ on with just an acoustic guitaur and Jay Demarcus sang a sadly truncated “Skin” while noodling on a keybord. The Medly roared back into the full band behind Gary belting out “Feels like today.”
The Flatts will release their first greatest hits CD shortly and it’s bound to include every song they played Sunday night. After the band was introduced the pace picked up with “Fast cars and freedom, “ Bless the broken road”, “What hurts the most” and the set ended with “Here’s to you.”
The encore brought the trio back out for “Me and my gang” and the night ended predictably but not badly with “Bob that head.”

Beer!

2008-08-20T10:20:00.000-04:00

An article in the Times Leader caught my attention the other day because it mentioned the Weekender.
The story was about the PLCB and its policing efforts to prevent the discriminatory practice of “Ladies nights” at local watering holes. About this I have no opinion. I can’t see the harm but whatever. It’s funny that it’s ok to have nights for people who work in the service industry. Isn’t that discriminatory against those who don’t? But what peaked my interest was the comment from some PLCB honcho that “We always read the weekender to see if bars are running ladies nights” or words to that effect. Really? Well I am not sure if the PLCB ever reads this column but if they do I have a message for them. LET US BUY SIX PACKS IN GROCERY STORES. When I first moved to NEPA (28 years ago) I was astounded to learn the rules of beer buying. I was less astounded than amused when I found out that the purported reason for the rules was to “reduce consumption.” Huh? Let me get this straight. By forcing beer consumers to buy an entire case at a beer distributor rather than a six pack that will reduce consumption? An interesting concept but I am not sure that’s working out so good. Because there are lots of places where you can buy just a six pack. Bars, some convenience stores and a few delis. But in most cases you pay substantially more. And the selection generally sucks,
Whenever I travel back to my home states of Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine I am always amazed when I see beer in the grocery store. It just seems like a dream. You mean I can buy just a six pack and I won’t get charged with a crime? Amazing. And here’s another concept. In some places you can buy a single bottle. Or a mixed six pack. So if you want to try a new brew you don’t have to make the commitment of a whole case.
Now I realize that there are probably many economic reasons that my poor beer addled brain can’t understand about this whole concept. Surely there is a reason beyond “Reducing consumption” for this madness.
But here is my real point. Some grocery stores are allowed to sell wine. Not beer, not hard liquor but wine is ok? Why? And now Wegmans can sell beer. Why can’t the grocery store I go to sell me a six pack? Why can’t they have a big cooler full of all the many brands I want to try? Then I could go the beer distributor and buy a case and everyone is happy. Or then again I could be wrong.

Rectum? I damn near killed him!

2008-08-15T10:08:00.005-04:00

"I have a sad story to tell you
It may hurt your feelings a bit
Last night when I walked into my bathroom
I stepped in a big pile of ...shhhhh . . . aving cream,
be nice and clean. . . .
Shave ev'ry day and you'll always look keen." Benny Bell.

The following is true. Names and places are also true. No one is being protected here. Our story begins, as so many do, at the Pocono race track. A day long adventure, including the ingestion of a multitude of mature beverages, a hoagie the length and circumference of a Clydesdale’s leg and a dump truck full of snacks ranging from peanuts to jalapeño and habanero beef jerky. Hot? Like the hinges of hell in your mouth! Well you name it; it went in the pie hole. We were ready to begin the trek homeward.
It’s not a long drive but that summer’s eve it seemed like the Bataan death march. About 15 minutes into what should have been about an hours drive traffic stopped dead. Then when we did move it was only at a snail’s pace and only fifty feet at a time.
An hour passed. I knew I was in trouble.
I have been acquainted with my bowels for more than five decades. I know almost to the second how much time I left before I have an accident that will put me in a trance as I fill my pants and then have to throw my underwear in the woods. Not that as a self respecting adult male I have ever had to do that. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. I have no idea what happened to that underwear, dear.
We finally got on the open road. My internal bowel gauge was telling me I had about 20 minutes. I frantically searched my memory of our route for places to take a dump. In my discomfort I wondered if I could just knock on someone’s door at random and beg.
Things were getting tense below the belt. I was sweating and cramping. It made driving more than an adventure. I am proud to say my traveling companions knew not of my distress. Of course as passengers they were enjoying even more adult beverages. That may have dulled their senses somewhat.
The cramps intensified. I knew that if I tried to relieve the pressure by opening the gas valve that I would have, how can I put this delicately, shat myself. So I kept the exhaust valve tightly clenched and gripped the wheel until my knuckles turned white.
At last I remembered. There was a convenience mart up ahead a few miles. I checked my bowel gauge and it said maybe. Hurry.
As I pulled into the parking lot in a four wheel skid I threw the door open and told my passengers’ of my mission. “Why don’t you just do it behind the store?” Mickey asked. Right.
My bowel gauge sensed we were close. It registered a two minute warning.
I headed for the store praying they had a restroom. YES! Over there! As I moved towards it (ever try to walk nonchalantly while holding your butt cheeks in a clench?) I noticed the door to the hallway was heavy duty steel. It had huge u shaped metal prongs on either side of it with a two by four leaning on the wall. My mind registered that it must be to secure the door from what ever was on the other side. I really didn’t care. Bowel gauge at 1:30 and counting.
Into the hallway I moved and thanks be to the God who watches over little children and drunks the Men’s room door was unlocked. I flung it open.
Two things struck me at once. It stank. I mean not a bad smell. But an aroma you could cut with a chainsaw if you didn’t mind ruining the blade. And number two. It was filthy. Here is the cover of the Rolling Stones Beggars’ Banquet album that they outlawed. This toilet makes the one I was in look like a surgical operating room.
In the hell hole I had just entered there was a guy using the urinal. The stall was occupied and locked. I must have groaned because the guy at the urinal looked at me and said “Bedonnaminute.” He was so drunk, I noticed that when he turned to look at me he was pissing on his shoes.
My bowels, sensing where I was notified me that the countdown was T-minus 15 seconds and the tanks were filling.
The stall door opened and a small boy darted out and made a bee line for the door. My drunken companion said “Smhellylilshitainah? Which I translated to mean “Smelly little shit, is he not?”
I lunged for the door. And things started to do downhill fast.
First off my bowels began to make the noise that submarines do before they go under water. A klaxon sounded and “DIVE DIVE DIVE” was being shouted.
But the “Smehlly” little kid had not flushed his offering. I tried the handle and all became clear. Toilet broken. No Flushee.
At this point to say I didn’t give a shit would be wrong. I did. And I did right on top of the little kids. What choice did I have?
While this was going on the drunk not two feet away began to yell. ‘Yarnt taking a shit in there ar ya? Holy F(*% how can you do that? Ar ya shitting in there? Hey guys, he’s taking shit in here!”
He went out the door and I continued my duty. “Bang!” the door slammed open and the drunk and several more like him came in to offer me advice. ”Jesus, man-are you really shitting in there? Don’t sit on the seat. I can’t F*&%ing believe that you are F$%^ing shitting in there!” And so on.
It took me what felt like ten years to finish my duty. Again, thanks to the Lord of dirty filthy bathrooms there was toilet paper.
My tormenters eventually tired of yelling at me ( I think it had more to do with the aroma I was producing then anything else) and as I left my pile in the bowl and headed out the door I figured the arrangement out. The bathrooms were a shared affair with a bar next to the convenient mart and the bar was hosting a Hell’s Angels happy hour.
I hurried out of the store but not without knocking over a display of something on my way out. The Indian behind the counter yelled something at me but I was moving at warp nine by then.
I relayed this story to the long suffering wife whose only comment was, “Why didn’t you go before you left?” The kind of advice you give to a potty trained three year old right? But alas I am much older and wiser than that. Right?

8 08 08 lucky?

2008-08-12T08:01:00.002-04:00

I have taken a part-time job. It’s almost not a job at all except for the fact that I have to show up. Before I went on vacation a couple of weeks ago the gym where I work out posted a note on the locker room door. They needed someone to open the joint up at 4:30am Monday, Wednesday and Friday. 3.5 hours a day.
Since I spent more than thirty years as a morning radio announcer getting up that early is an engrained habit. The perks include a free gym membership and a few extra dollars a week to put towards my newly reassessed mansion/estate. I haven’t worked a job where I had to be anywhere on a regular basis for almost a year. I actually kind of like it. So before I went on vacation I told them that if no one wanted it when I returned I would take it. That’s exactly what happened.
The first day, 8 08 08 was a disaster.
I am able to wake up without using an alarm clock. I can tell myself what time I want to wake up and I do. I am also one of those insufferable people who can climb out of bed completely awake and even with a hangover that would kill a lesser man, usually in pretty good mood.
But just to be one the safe side I had the long suffering wife set an alarm clock.
I don’t know what made me turn over and look at the clock. For a few seconds I couldn’t believe it, and then I started swearing. It was 4:55am!
A great way to start a new job! Late the first day.
With hair standing straight up and clothes thrown on I raced out the door and drove like Dale Jr. was on my tail. Thank God there were no cops or deer in my way on my route! I live pretty close so I made it only five minutes late. But still loads of grumbling from the early birds. And I had forgotten all my careful notes about how to do the job so I had to wing it.
The day just got better. I was supposed to review a concert that night for the Weekender. On our way to the show the long suffering wife’s car conked out. Stopped dead in its tracks. Right near the Moosic entrance ramp of I-81. So I called my buddy and he helped me get a tow. I am lucky to have a friend like that. While we waited on the side of I-81 (staying in the car became not an option. Watching huge 18 wheelers bear down on us in the rearview was just too nerve wracking) an SUV pulled up behind our car. Then leaned on the horn like it was in the way. I struggled up the steep bank to see what the hell was going on. The tinted window rolled down and the driver said “Is that your car?” A moment here to describe the driver. She was blonde. Very blonde. Now I am happily married but I am not blind. She had on tube top that was dangerously full. Tribal tattoos on her arm. The car smelled like…well it smelled real good. And she was drop dead gorgeous.
She was in the words of the late Rick James “The kind you don’t take home to mother.” A snap judgment maybe but I stand by it.
“Yes it is.” I managed to stammer.
“Oh crap! My girlfriend has the exact same car and she said she was broken down right here.”
What are the chances? Sure enough as I looked down the highway I saw another car with flashers on about a mile away. It was a twin to my Wife’s car.
The babe in the SUV pulled out and soon after my friend and the tow truck arrived.
I never did make it to the show.

Hummingbird do-do.

2008-08-08T12:06:00.002-04:00

I don’t know if it was poo or pee. More on that in a bit.

I love hummingbirds more than any other bird. They are so cool! No other bird can hover in place like a tiny helicopter. They can go 63 miles per hour in a dive and they sound like a huge bee. Plus they are so little. About the length of your index finger and weighing an astonishing 1/8th of an ounce. Perfect little creatures. They can even fly backwards!
We have always fed the “Hummers” at the Rising ranch. But until this year we never got more than a few. For years I dutifully filled the light bulb shaped feeder with the pricey red stuff that I bought at the feed store. A few of the little guys would come to visit but not many.
This year I followed the advice of the Long suffering wife’s sister and made my own syrup for the feeder. It’s pretty simple. A four to one ratio of sugar and water boiled to dissolve the sugar does the trick.
Within hours of setting up the new food we were overrun with the buzzers.
I was overjoyed! For the first time we had the males fighting over the feeder. Females would tank up like little pigs, eating so much that when they left the feeder they had trouble gaining altitude.
I changing the feed one day I removed the feeder for a few minutes. The hummers were in a blind panic. Where did it go? They hovered where it was supposed to be, flew in circles and generally acted like they were starving.
After seeing a few fights between males I was told that multiple feeders would end the hummer wars.
Of course I went too far and at one point I had four feeders up. Domino’s sugar stock went up.
I have settled on two main feeders on the porch by the bar-b-q cooker and one by the kitchen window.
Our neck of the woods is the exclusive territory of the Ruby-throated hummingbird. The males have the red throat and we seem to get a lot more females at the feeder.
They have absolutely no fear of me and routinely gas up while I am cooking burgers on the grill. With a wing beat rate up to 80 per second they sound like a bee on steroids.
I have not had good luck getting a picture. I have a crappy digital camera (it’s actually a video camera that takes stills) and by the time I get one in the viewfinder they take off at 65mph.

From our kitchen I have a clear view from my place at the table of the two main feeders.
The other day a fine specimen was hovering between the two feeders. As I watched it took a dump. Or maybe a whiz. How could you tell? There was no doubt that it pushed something out of it’s exhaust vent. A little silver colored stream.
I have never heard anyone else say they have seen a Hummingbird go.
Look up Hummingbird shit on Google and you will get some interesting sites, none of which have anything to do with what comes out of the rear of a hummer. Hummingbird Poo gets you a very nice blog from a single Mom in Texas somewhere but she only says “No one ever said watch out for the Hummingbird poo.”
So I feel kinda special.