For the first time (I think) in over a year, I missed a daily post. I have no excuse. My excuse is I was distracted by some stuff today, and also inhaled too much secondhand cigarette smoke, which clouded my mind. And the kitten. The kitten.
Working on two Brilliant Ideas right now. One I've kicked around for a few years: record the stories and rants of the guy whose house I was over today and post them to YouTube. I figure we'd get several million hits, easy. I proposed an 80/20 split (in my favor) of all the advertising revenue with him. He said he was expecting something more along the lines of 90/10.
The other...well, it's an idea that's crystallizing that makes sense when I review the last quarter-century of my life. A special skill I have that is actually in demand - maybe more in demand during tough times. And it doesn't necessarily involve anything illegal, unethical, or immoral, though the last one would be available upon request. W'll see where this goes.
Well, the kitten has just emerged from her hiding spot and is trying to help me type. So I gess it's time to put her in her crib and head to bed. Maybe I'll make things up by writing another post later today!
There's something about life that favors the daring, the risk-takers. It's something that's been built into humanity and other species by selective breeding down through the ages. It's certainly not the only mating strategy driver out there, but it is something that comes into play in both individual relationships and society as a whole. Timidity has its place, and sometimes even its own rewards, but a willingness to take a risk is much more often celebrated and admired.
I've written before about a personal theory of the role luck plays in evolution, and the way evolution selects for luck: there are certain apparently vestigial organs that seem to serve no other purpose in humans than to kill us if they become diseased (like the appendix) or damaged (like the spleen). In both cases there appears to be some evolutionary value involved: if susceptibility to diseases that affect organs like the appendix is the sort of thing that is likely to be passed on to offspring, deaths from conditions like appendicitis will tend to reduce the passage of these genes on to future offspring. Similarly, if an organ like the spleen can be damaged by dangerous and excessive risk-taking, then deaths due to damaged spleens eliminate those individuals likely to engage in patterns of behavior that result in damaged spleens, reducing the likelihood that they will pass on any such genetic or behavioral proclivities to their offspring.
I believe these theories fall into the category known by respectable scientists as "crackpot." But maybe not.
Someone removed himself from the gene pool this weekend. A 19-year-old was skateboarding in a parking lot at a school about 500 feet from where I'm sitting, a parking lot with "NO TRESPASSING" and "NO SKATEBOARDING" signs. There were not, however, any "NO HOLDING ONTO THE BACK OF A CAR WHILE RIDING ON A SKATEBOARD WITHOUT ANY SAFETY EQUIPMENT" signs, but if there were he would have ignored those, too, since that is what he was doing when he sustained a traumatic head injury last Friday afternoon. Heroic efforts were made on his behalf. A LifeFlight helicopter made the all-too-frequent hop from the airport in Avoca to the Nanticoke baseball field. But he died anyway.
I want to be snarky. I want to say "Well, he'll never do that again." But people knew this guy, and cared about him. And he's dead now. I guess that's always the case. Well, almost always.
Life rewards risk-takers. Women swoon over daring, adventurous males. TV shows earn huge revenue showing people doing stupid, dangerous things.
And every once in a while, somebody rolls snake eyes and comes up a loser.
Am I the only person in America who remembers when RONALD REAGAN REMOVED THE SOLAR PANELS FROM THE WHITE HOUSE ROOF??? Yes, children, once upon a time this country ENCOURAGED the idea of alternative energy thru tax credits for installing solar panels, etc. Reagan, demi-god of the Republicans, is responsible for DISCOURAGING that sort of wacky idea. His administration was the period when this country took a serious wrong turn, and his Administrations lack of foresight is why we are now beholden to other countries for our energy. Just think how cheap alternative energy sources would be right now, had we continued down the path of developing them 20 yrs ago.
I just did a search for "Reagan removes solar panels from White House" to be sure I hadn't just imagined Reagan's treachery. "A bright vision of solar power emerged in the 1970's, as a patriotic response to the oil embargo. Jimmy Carter's energy plan included a goal of powering 20% of the nation with renewables by the year 2000. The president even put solar panels on the White House. The threat of solar tightened chests in the oil companies, as any free, clean, unlimited fuel source can be sure to do. At this point the oil and gas companies were ready to play hardball. They formed political action committees that contributed almost 3 million dollars to House and Senate candidates with "strong pro-industry voting." In California, Pacific Gas and Electric/Southern California Edison fought hard against the publics rights to own and use solar water heaters. By the late 70's Exxon, Mobil, Arco, Amoco and other oil companies had bought out many of the solar companies and the PV cell patents. Then, none other than former spokesperson for General Electric, Ronald Reagan, was elected president. The Carter solar tax credits ended, the $684 million investment Carter had requested was cut to $83 million, budgets were cut, studies squashed, and researchers fired. Then, adding insult to injury, Reagan removed the solar panels from the White House roof. Denis Hayes, organizer of the first Earth Day and former Department of Energy staffer from the Reagan era says, "It was a clear, calculated campaign by the DOE in the years of the Reagan administration to crush the solar energy program of the federal government, driving many of the most talented people out of the field". Our current president, former oil company executive George W. Bush, supports drilling the Arctic National Wildlife Preserve, supports development of nuclear power, and opposes the Kyoto Protocol." (snipped from http://towardfreedom.com/home/content/view/886/69/)
I mourn for the loss of "The Future" we COULD be living in now, had the nation stuck to its environmentally-friendly energy goals.
Could the country's leading retailer lead us to where Jimmy Carter once tried to get us, on a path Ronald Reagan took us off and no President since has chosen to put us back on?
I have no great love for Wal-Mart. Frankly, I don't even like to shop there, though I find myself doing so more and more often as the contracting economy causes me to value prices over principles. But like it or not, they are the leading retailer in the United States, and they sell a lot of merchandise. And they have a hell of a lot of stores. A hell of a lot of big, flat, boxy stores.
In "Fields of Light" I suggested a future where every big-box store in the nation might feature a roof (and a parking lot) covered in photovoltaic cells*, converting the vast quantities of wasted sunlight that fall onto the roofs (and parking lots) of these buildings into electricity. Now, I'll be the first to admit that that's a tall order. Risky. Expensive. Aside from an eventual return on the investment in the form of lower energy bills - possibly even revenue from the sale of excess generated electricity to the utility companies - what benefit would a retailer stand to get out of this?
Well, goodwill**, for one. Retailers have a certain amount of goodwill from the communities where they locate: they provide jobs, they provide goods and services, they give people places to shop. And people like to shop. But they also compete with existing retailers, and sometimes drive them out of business with lower prices that smaller, locally-based retailers cannot match. Wal-Mart is notorious for this.
Many companies are actively trying to revise their images to appear to be more environmentally friendly. Sometimes this is more than simply image-polishing. Sometimes retailers are trying to make a real change - for sound business reasons in addition to the image angle. I believe that, at least as of a few years ago, Wal-Mart is one of those companies. So a company that is actually doing something that is good for the environment, and is doing it in an obvious way, will score points with consumers in a way that other businesses will not.
Secondly, any retailer who covers the roofs of their stores with solar panels will be leading by example. And if this is spun properly, they will not only be leading other companies, but they can also be leading consumers who will say "Well, geez, if they can make their electric meters spin backwards, maybe I can too!" Wal-Mart primarily sells household goods, not building supplies. But they can branch out, or sell through their Sam's Club warehouse stores.
But solar panels are expensive! And bulky! Well, this is where Wal-Mart gets to use their powers for good instead of evil.
A lot of people think Wal-Mart is evil because of the way it displaces existing retail jobs and replaces them with lower-paying ones at their stores. And that's true, as far as I know. But their real evil comes from what they do to suppliers. Wal-Mart drives its suppliers to supply their products at the price Wal-Mart dictates. Meet that price or your products don't go on the shelves, don't get sold by Wal-Mart. Fair enough. But often, that price is well below what a manufacturer spends to actually produce the product...domestically. So the only way to meet Wal-Mart's price point is to outsource to overseas manufacturers, where manufacturing costs are much lower - resulting in the loss of American manufacturing jobs. (And a consequent reduction in the number of consumers who can afford to buy goods at anything more than the absolute lowest prices.) And sometimes even that isn't enough. And then manufacturers have to cut corners to trim costs wherever they can - often resulting in a reduction in quality. And then the competition - other retailers, other manufacturers - has to follow suit, slashing prices, and costs, and expenses, wherever and whenever they can. Or they go out of business.
Evil. Or business as usual. Depends on your point of view. In a different time, a different place, no one retailer had that amount of control over the price points of goods that it sold. Things have changed. Wal-Mart is big. If you're not selling your product there, you'd better be comfortable with wherever you are selling it. And you can bet that eventually Wal-Mart will offer a cheaper alternative.
Wal-Mart can harness this incredible power to drive down the cost of photovoltaic cells.
Think about it. If Wal-Mart were to decide to cover the roof of every one of its retail stores with photovoltaic cells, how many solar panels would that be? My back-of-the-envelope calculation, starting out with an unknown number of retail stores ('cause I'm too lazy to look it up), an unknown number of square feet on each roof (ditto), unknown electrical demands for a typical Wal-Mart (again, lazy) and unknown electrical generation capacity for each solar panel (lazy lazy), comes up with an answer of "a lot."
Would Wal-Mart pay a lot for those photovoltaic panels? Hell, no. They would use their buying power and their considerable leverage to twist photovoltaic manufacturers to produce panels that are as inexpensive over the long term as possible. The carrot on this stick: whoever could manufacture the panels that would go on the roofs of Wal-Mart stores would get to manufacture the panels that would be sold to consumers through Wal-Mart. (Until a better deal came along, that is.)
But could Wal-Mart manufacture a demand where none exists? Well, yes. That's what marketing does. But this might be getting a boost in the near future anyway, as electrical rate deregulation will quickly cause consumer prices for electricity to spiral to stratospheric heights. And suddenly photovoltaics, which at this point produce electricity that, per unit, is more expensive than other sources, will look like a very good deal.
In summary, Wal-Mart is ideally suited to lead the way toward a revolution in consumer photovoltaic usage.
It is a leading retailer. Where it goes, other retailers may follow, and what products they utilize, consumers may more readily accept.
It has the power to drive down prices of photovoltaic cells and have versions made for both their own use and consumer use.
With its large number of retail stores, it has the footprint to make a real difference.
A visible commitment to the environment will generate vast quantities of goodwill and attendant opportunities for increased sales and strategic partnerships.
Finally, Wal-Mart would be modeling a product that it would also be selling to consumers. So not only would Wal-Mart be reaping the benefits of solar-generated electricity, it would also be reaping profits from the sales of photovoltaic systems to consumers.
Maybe.
I just spent the day hanging clothes on the clothesline to dry, transplanting strawberry plants to my house across town, and mowing my mom's lawn with a manual (reel) mower. And all the while I watched a steady parade of gas (or diesel)-guzzling pickup trucks and SUVs drive by. Just how high does the price of gas (and diesel) have to get to convince these drivers to park these behemoths? I'm thinking, much higher than it is now.
Three decades ago Jimmy Carter declared a goal at least as ambitious as Kennedy's goal of having a man on the Moon by the end of the 1960s: to have 20% of the nation powered with renewables by the end of the millennium. Twenty-two years ago Ronald Reagan drove a stake into the heart of that plan. Since then we have continued along a stupid path of increasing dependency on fossil fuels, an addiction that is driving the current occupant of the White House to move to open up wildlife refuges to oil drilling in an effort to wring out some fraction of the oil our nation demands. The solar panels came off the roof of the White House in 1986. We turned away from the path that led towards increased utilization of renewable sources of energy. No one has put us back on that path yet.
Can Wal-Mart do it?
*I'm focusing primarily on photovoltaics, because I have more experience with them. I have little knowledge of the use of solar panels for directly heating water. Both kinds of solar panels were used on the roof of the White House.
**I am using this term in the colloquial sense, not necessarily in line with the technical definition used by Economists.
Well, so much for the Pennsylvania Primary. It's been fun being the center of national attention for a while for something that didn't involve disaster or tragedy. And now the candidates and their entourages and the press corps and the camp followers will move on from Pennsylvania to focus on the next series of primaries: Guam, Indiana, North Carolina, West Virginia . . . I wonder how much attention is being lavished on Guam? See here for the full list.
*I won't say unforeseen emergencies, because there's a very easily foreseeable emergency heading this way, though I probably won't be writing about it directly until it all comes down.
Big box stores at the Arena Hub Plaza in Wilkes-Barre Township, built on the former site of culm banks. Imagine this scene covered in solar panels.
When I was at the University of Scranton I would sometimes take lunch with my friends in the second-floor cafeteria at the the Gunster Center, also known as the Student Center. The North wall of the cafeteria was all windows, and it overlooked the campus's tennis courts. In Winter the courts would go unused, and after a heavy snowfall they would present themselves as a field of gleaming white snow - until, inevitably, someone got around to creating rude graffiti with footprints. But I digress.
One day I was having lunch - or maybe it was dinner - with some friends near these windows, and I looked out at the snow-covered tennis courts. I looked out at the dazzlingly bright scene, amazed at how much sunlight was being reflected. How much solar energy is falling on that area? I wondered. And who knows, maybe I did some paper napkin calculations. But I got to thinking about the photoelectric effect, and what went into manufacturing solar cells*, and I realized that while this is a magnificent and amazing way of taking sunlight and converting it into a usable form of energy - in this case, electricity - nature had been doing the same thing for a very long time through the amazing process of photosynthesis. What if, I wondered, we could find a way of getting plants to convert sunlight directly into fuel material? Well, plants do that already; you can burn most plants and release energy stored in their tissues. Or you can ferment some plants and, through a series of chemical and biological steps, create alcohol. But other plants create oils, or oil-bearing seeds and nuts from which the oil could be extracted. What if we could breed a plant that could use energy from sunlight to produce oils with characteristics suited to our fuel needs?
That was probably when I noticed that the footprints in the snow on the tennis courts spelled a rude word in 20-foot-high letters, and pointed it out to my friends.
*****************
The tennis courts ceased to exist years ago, replaced by a multi-story library. The Student Center was demolished earlier this year after a new one was built to take its place.
The need to find new sources of energy is greater now than it was during my lunchtime reverie in the mid-80's.
Northeastern Pennsylvania, like many places, is gradually becoming a land of big white boxes. I work in one, and others cover the mountainsides like huge, flat snowbanks. Several major highways run through NEPA (I-80, the great East-West corridor; I-81, a North-South corridor second perhaps only to I-95; and the Pennsylvania Turnpike), we are in close proximity to New England, New York, New Jersey, and Philadelphia; and real estate prices are very reasonable (up slightly from "cheap.") These factors have combined to make us an ideal location for warehouses and distribution centers. In addition, we have the usual suspects when it comes to malls and big-box stores.
This is less of an environmental disaster than you might think. This is coal country, and coal mines produced enormous quantities of waste rock - slate mixed with coal that could not be separated out economically.** And these were piled up in great artificial hills called culm banks. Culm banks, some covered with groves of trees, some large enough to alter regional wind patterns, were a major feature of this area until a few years ago. Now many of the culm banks are gone, hauled off to be reprocessed for any usable coal, the remnant used as fill...somewhere. Replacing a culm bank with a revenue-generating mall or warehouse or big box store is not necessarily a bad thing.
But there is something inherently wrong with this new landscape of flat buildings and flat parking lots. When seen from above it resembles a lifeless desert, with a few trees and grassy areas thrown in for traffic control purposes. Sunlight rains down and is absorbed by the asphalt of the parking lot and the tarpaper (or whatever the coating is) of the flat roofs. Cars heat up, buildings need to be cooled. Energy is wasted in the form of both incoming sunlight and electricity used to run cooling systems.
What if we were to cover everything in solar panels?
Solar panels have some drawbacks. They are expensive. They are heavy. They are relatively inefficient. The electricity they generate costs more , for the moment, than electricity generated by remote sources. All these things can change.
There are other practical problems. Big box roofs are not designed to handle the weight of several hundred solar panels covering every square inch of available space, especially not when these panels are laden after a heavy snowfall. A parking lot roofed by solar cells would present new hazards to drivers, many of whom (as I have noted before) should not even be allowed to drive a shopping cart. And there is always the hazard of making a big, long-term investment in a technology that is superseded in its lifetime by something vastly better.***
Could there be financial advantages to investing in photovoltaic electrical generation on surfaces that are otherwise just solar heat sinks? Absolutely - if the surface is going to be around long enough to recoup the investment. What is the life expectancy of a big-box store? A mall? A parking lot? What is on the horizon in photovoltaic technology? How will photovoltaic-generated electricity costs compare to, say, coal-fired power plant-generated electricity, particularly as deregulation of the cost of electricity takes effect?
In the meantime the photons rain down from the Sun and fall on the roofs of the malls, and the roofs of the warehouses, and the roofs of the big boxes, and the surfaces of the parking lots, and the interiors of the cars parked on them. How much longer can we afford to let this energy go to waste?
*I only knew this theoretically; it would still be several years before I was working for a solar cell manufacturer in Delaware after a brief but humiliating run in grad school.
**Often the task of separation was carried out by children, called "Breaker Boys." This practice ended well before the Knox Mine Disaster ended coal mining in NEPA on January 22, 1959.
***I wonder how smart the folks who invested in big-screen TVs back in the mid-90's, when they cost so much that some people were having them built into their walls so they could have them rolled into their mortgages, feel today.
I bought a camcorder in 1997. It was a crappy oversized VHS-C job that always got wobbly on sound after the midpoint of each cassette and set me back about $500. I bought it for one reason: I was heading down to Florida to see a Space Shuttle launch and I wanted to get it on video. This was to be a night launch, so it promised to be even more spectacular.
It worked out well. I got the launch, which was an amazing thing to see, and hear, and smell. I was lucky with that, because the two other times I went to see a launch, I believe one was postponed by a day, and the other by a week or more. So I only got to see one other launch, and that was a daytime launch - which, while spectacular, is less spectacular than a night launch.
So there I was with a camcorder whose purpose had been served. What to do with it now? I turned it on other things: my pets, my family, my friends. The audio issue was pretty annoying, and effectively limited me to about 15 minutes worth of good audio and video per VHS-C cassette.
I got lots of video of my dog Kitty. She died in the Summer of 1997.
My grandmother - who was in her late eighties and had had at least one stroke - had a fall at her nursing home later that year. As with all accidents, it was the result of either an unsafe act, an unsafe condition, or both. In this case she had been left unattended in a shower on a shower chair. She fell and bruised her arm and her face, and looked like she had been mugged.
I took my camcorder with me when I went to see her that weekend. I had had an idea brewing, but now it was cast aside. I wanted to get evidence. I was furious.
"You look like they beat you and left you for dead!" I said as I set up my gear. I wanted to get a video of her, showing close-ups of the damage, and record in her own words what had happened.
Finally I was ready. I switched on the camera and said to her, "Tell me what happened. How did you get that black eye?"
"They beat me and left me for dead," she responded.
I had to turn the camera off, 'cause I was laughing so hard.
* * * * * * * *
My idea was one that I had kicked around for years. The memories of the elderly provide a largely untapped storehouse of oral history - stories, songs, poems, and memories that have never been written down anywhere. They have been passed on to children, grandchildren, friends, strangers - but how many people really bother to listen to these stories when they are told? Eventually there comes a time when these stories are gone, and the person who knows them is no longer able to tell them, due to death, encroaching memory loss, or the loss of the ability to communicate.
So my idea was to set up a project to capture these stories. Videotaped interviews would probably be the best way to go. Videocameras were everywhere back then. It seemed like it would be no big deal to have thousands of people with thousands of camcorders go out and capture the memories of tens or hundreds of thousands of old people, before those stories were gone forever.
I got a few from my grandmother. Her stroke and her Alzheimer's progression had limited what she could say, though. I remember other stories, and other songs, and I'm doing my best to preserve those. She died in December 1998.
Many if not most of the members of her generation are gone now. People who were children during the Great War, who entered their twenties during the Great Depression, who started families of their own just before the outbreak of a second World War. Perhaps someone has captured some of their stories, some of their memories. But so many more stories and memories have been taken to the grave to feed the worms.
Now another generation is in its late 80's and early 90's. Their memories are different: they were born in the aftermath of the Great War, grew up in the Great Depression, and were just the right age to be shipped off to fight in the Second World War. And after them are the children who grew up during that war, members of my parents' generation. And then those who were born in the hopeful but terrifying years following WWII, born to McCarthyism and the Cold War.
Everybody has their own unique experiences. Everybody has a story to tell. So many of these stories are going unheard.
There are efforts to capture these oral histories. StoryCorps is one such effort. Their mission, as stated on their website:
Our mission is to honor and celebrate one another’s lives through listening.
Since 2003, almost 30,000 everyday people have shared life stories with family and friends in our StoryBooths. Each conversation is recorded on a free CD to share, and is preserved at the Library of Congress. Millions listen to our broadcasts on public radio and the web. StoryCorps is one of the largest oral history projects of its kind.
Everybody’s story matters. Every life counts. Help us reach out to record our history, hopes, and common humanity—and illuminate the true character of this nation.
I'm thinking I'd like to do something like that locally. Capture the stories of the old folks of Nanticoke, their memories of what things were like seventy or eighty years ago. I would say "Maybe someday", but with each passing day more and more of these voices are silenced forever.
* * * * * * * *
Last summer I dropped by my house one sunny Sunday afternoon to ladle buckets of water out of my rain barrels onto my blueberries and cherry trees. My next-door neighbor, who was ancient in my grandmother's time but was probably really ten years her junior, was out in his yard. We got to talking, not like two people separated by a gulf of fifty years, but like two old neighbors in a Rockwellian vision of America. And he started telling me stories of the Nanticoke he had grown up in, of riding sleds from the highest hills to the creek that once ran parallel to Main Street, of having his own personal coal mine and coal shanty where he sold coal to passers-by, in competition with his brother, who was doing exactly the same thing. Stories of a time long gone, in a place right under our feet.
How much longer does he have to tell those stories? How much longer does his wife have to tell hers? And has anyone been listening?
REM: Try Not to Breathe
...I have seen things you will never see. I want you to remember...
Ashley and Tiffany both live in Michigan and are mighty excited about going to see the farewell tour of RENT in Grand Rapids on March 5. I've never seen RENT, but I've always sorta kinda been RENT-curious. My curiosity was further aroused yesterday while I was making a meatless Ash Wednesday dinner (vegetarian chili, which really came out a lot more like salsa with two types of beans) when a commercial came on during the local 5:30 news about RENT coming to Scranton in a few weeks.
After I got my dirt yesterday I came back home and did some searching on the computer. And, yep, there it was: the last stop on the RENT tour before Grand Rapids, Michigan is the Scranton Cultural Center on February 22 through 24!
So, now comes the big problem. Go it alone, or find someone to go with?
My sister is a big RENT fan, but she doesn't feel like making the 150+ mile trek up here to see it. I can't imagine many of my friends around here would be that interested in going. And the people I know online who I know would be interested in going to see it...well, they live in Michigan, and are going to see it in Grand Rapids.
So here's the deal: if you live in this area and are interested in going to see RENT with me, let me know! Not that I'm gonna buy you tickets or anything, but maybe you can score a ride in my rattling deathtrap 1996 Toyota Tercel with 283,000 "official" miles on it (as of today!) And who knows, play your cards right and you might find yourself having coffee or maybe even dinner with yr. hmbl. blogger himself! Be prepared for fascinating dinner conversation like "Oh, crap, did I just get that all over my sweater?" and "You'd think they'd give you more napkins, for the prices they charge here!" and "So...anyway...what was I saying?"
Yessir, if this works out, maybe I'll work my whole calendar of social activities through my blog. Now that I have a normal working schedule, for the first time in a long time!
If you're interested, you can always contact me at my hotmail address, databoy142. Or just leave a comment!
I'll be travelling today, seeing how my Asset Management skills could be applied in the retail world, and trying my hand at creating a blog for a small business.
The small business blog is for a friend. If it works like I'm hoping it will - and I think it will - it will be another step along the path to doing this for other people, maybe even turning it into some sort of business. A small business is a small business, but a small business blog is something anyone can visit and interact with, anywhere, anytime, creating a relationship with the business and possibly generating more business. We'll see.
I was chatting with a friend today and something went wrong with her modem. Suddenly my IMs were coming back with the message "An unknown failure has occurred." Unknown failure, unknown failure, over and over again...it sounded like the message was scolding me for having not done anything significant with my life. And then I thought: that would be a great title for a blog!
But what could it be about? People who are unhappy with their lot in life? Blogs that get very little traffic, and can use all the publicity they can get? Then I remembered my plan to do spin-off blogs from my main blog, Another Monkey. And since the "unknown failure" was in fact a computer problem, why not use the blog to repost all of my computer problem stories in one place? After all, these are posts that tend to get a good deal of traffic, and people searching for this information may find it convenient to have it all in one place.
I've got an idea. It's a germ of a plan, really. I've already started putting it in motion, but I just did one of the more fundamental things: I started a new blog.
It's just a first step along a path that involves some things I've talked about previously. If it works, it will validate the old chestnut "Do what you love, and the money will follow." I don't know how much money - possibly very little - so I won't stop my job search just yet. Still, if I can combine my love of blogging and my desire to see Nanticoke become something better than it's ever been before, maybe, just maybe...
Please check it out. If you're from Nanticoke and have a web site, or know of any Nanticoke web sites, or would like to see specific things featured, please let me know and I'll be sure to add them!
Unfortunately, the headline was referring to an even worse film: Showgirls. I certainly won't argue that it isn't worse than Plan 9 - any movie that features that much gratuitous nudity and gratuitous sex and still ends with a bunch of 17-year-old boys walking out of the theater shaking their heads and saying "That was a bad movie" is definitely a bad movie. But for a moment thoughts of Plan 9 From Outer Space: The Musical danced through my head. Actors dressed as a Dracula-ish vampire and Tor Johnson's enormous zombie could cavort on stage with idiotic aliens, idiotic police officers, and all the other idiots that populated Ed Wood's twisted masterpiece. Having songs pop up at random times in the story wouldn't really disrupt the storyline much, since it was pretty incoherent in the first place. (Who wouldn't want to hear the famous line "You're stupid, stupid, STUPID!" turned into the chorus of a song?)
Maybe someday...after I see my other great musical made. The Fast and The Furious: The Musical would feature actors wearing strap-on cars (in keeping with the spirit of the story, each actor would have to make his or her own car out of a big cardboard box, some paper plates, and a pair of suspenders) who would make Rrrrrrrrrrr and Vrooom! Vroooom! and Skreeeee!!! noises as they move across the stage. So far I've only got a few lines from the opening song (We're Fast, and We're Furious), but trust me, it's gonna be great!
Here's the idea. You put Stan Lee (former head of Marvel Comics), Jason Lee (skateboarder/actor, appeared in many Kevin Smith films, currently in the popular TV series My Name Is Earl) , Spike Lee (angry, edgy director), Ang Lee (director of movies about a not-so-jolly green giant and a couple of overly friendly cowboys), Jason Scott Lee (actor who once portrayed Bruce Lee - no relation) and Geddy Lee (lead singer of Rush) together in a house in need of extensive (but layman-doable) improvement. Armed with home improvement books and a weekly allowance of gift cards at a major home improvement store, each week our gang of Lees must tackle common home improvement tasks - remove and replace a toilet, fix a sink, replace a window,hang a door, install a deadbolt, paint the house - all while trying to deal with their varying levels of home improvement experience, overcome the egos that come from being both a man and a celebrity (or semi-celebrity), and work together as a team.
Now that I'm at the end-stages of the home-buying process I'm being a little more cautious about deleting e-mails that once upon a time I would have automatically dismissed as spam. Whenever I get a response to an e-mail that I've sent to my lawyer's office, the subject line has usually been modified to include tags like "[Norton AntiSpam]" that suggest that my messages are being flagged as spam by their server, probably because they contain magic words like "mortgage" and "application".
Today I received a message with a subject line of "Application approval #" followed by what is probably a spammer's tracking code which I will not reprint here. The message is a jumble of semi-random words and phrases that, as others have observed before me, have a sort of poetic unity. So I've decided to reformat the message with line breaks and present it to you for your interpretation and appreciation.
Application approval # (author unknown)
profit and johns may trail ! mulberry the cyanic or epistemology not alfalfa not duke and balloon on pursue , cowbell ! dryad , flex a boggle may defunct in transferor on coward or potato not whore or rebut the audubon !
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And that's how it ends. "chauncey or?" Is that "or" as in the conjuction*, or "or" as in the term for gold used in heraldry? Is this an unfinished work? Can someone suggest the closing lines? Or does this represent a unified whole, a completeness that encompasses the incompleteness of the human condition vis a vis a universe that is at once knowable and unknowable?
Over the past week or so I've been getting a lot of hits from people wondering whatever became of Sammie's sdfsdf.wox.org from Australia. I was a little worried in the first few days after I came back from Ireland because I couldn't get onto her site - one of the sites I visit daily - and I couldn't find any mention of her site's absence on the sites of any of the other regular commentors on her blog. Fortunately, I was able to get in touch with Sammie herself, and she let me know what was going on. I posted an entry reporting what she had told me. Since that time that information has been passed on to a lot of people who have come to my site while surfing the net trying to find out what has happened to Sammie and her site.
I don't know Sammie personally, so it was a good thing I had tucked away her e-mail address at some point in the past, and a very good thing that she responded to my e-mail. There are a lot of other bloggers out there whose sites I used to visit fairly regularly who seem to have dropped off the net entirely, but I have no way of getting in touch with them to see where they've gotten to.
People stop blogging for a lot of reasons. Sometimes their lives get more complicated and they don't have time for blogging anymore. Sometimes they get fed up and decide to quit. Maybe they have other reasons.
There's a very real possibility that looms more darkly on the Internet than in the real world. Sometimes people die, and nobody knows about it.
Most of us are known here by user names, pen names, pseudonyms. "D.B. Echo" is not my real name - "D.B." stands for "DataBoy". You won't find me in the real world under that name. If something happened to me in the real world, you wouldn't see a headline shouting "D.B. ECHO NIBBLED TO DEATH BY CATS". Unless you knew where to look, you might not ever know what happened to me.
So I'm proposing the Blogger Buddy System. It works like this:
1. Every blogger picks one or more "Blogger Buddies" - people they are in regular contact with in the real world. (This should be direct, frequent contact - a friend, a relative, a co-worker. Virtual contact - telephone, IM, etc. - doesn't count, since it's still possible for something to happen to the blogger without a "virtual buddy" being aware of it for a long time.)
2. Each blogger posts contact information for their "Blogger Buddies" on their site. They also publicize this information and encourage readers to record it offsite. (Otherwise, if the site goes down it doesn't do much good.)
3. If something happens to a blogger or their site, their Blogger Buddies will post this information on their own sites - salted heavily with keywords that will assist anyone doing a websearch.
4. Now, this plan breaks down a bit in the event of a catastrophe, since it is possible that all of the Blog Buddies in a given region could be affected simultaneously. In that case it might be necessary to rely on a second tier of "virtual buddies" who are in regular but indirect contact with the blogger.
5. It's also possible that a given blogger will not be in direct contact with anyone else who is a blogger - strange as it may sound, there are still some people out there who don't have blogs. In that case they would probably want to set up a list of buddy e-mail addresses.
6. If all else fails, you could do what I did: scour the net for the sites of regular commentors for any mention of the missing blogger, and if that fails hope that you have the missing blogger's e-mail address tucked into your address book - and hope that they respond!
Welcome to Hallowhog 2005/2006! As I explained last year, Hallowhog is the season of holidays stretching from Halloween (October 31st) to Groundhog's Day (February 2nd.)
As Halloween draws to a close, it's time to tear down the Jack-O-Lanterns and sytrofoam tombstones and put them away until next year. Time to start getting ready for the next stops in the Hallowhog chain of holidays. For some that means The Day of the Dead (November 2nd, not November 1st), for others Guy Fawkes Day (November 5th.) For us it means flying the flag on Veterans Day (November 11th) and then getting ready for Thanksgiving (November 24th this year.) Tomorrow also brings big sales on all the leftover Halloween stuff, and the new "unofficial" start of the Christmas shopping season.
My church decided to skip its annual Church Bazaar this past August. This is unfortunate for several reasons. It is an end to a tradition that has always been a part of my life, and has always indicated the "turnover point" for summer - the point where you no longer thought of summer as an escape from school, but rather as a march towards the new school year. Its cancellation was due to the aging of our parish - there just aren't enough able-bodied people willing or able to work the long hours a church bazaar demands. It marked a significant loss of annual income to the parish. And it meant I had to skip my planned blog entry on this year's bazaar.
To make up for this the church has decided to hold a "Mini Fall Festival" on Sunday, November 6th. I still have no clear idea what this is, although I do know it provides me with a truly lame excuse for not going to the Nine Inch Nails concert in Wilkes-Barre that night. (Sorry, Camilla. But I probably wasn't going anyway.) Part of this festival is a "Chinese Auction." If you've never taken part in one of these, here's how it works: Various items are made available for you to win. You purchase tickets - basically raffle tickets - and place your tickets in a container corresponding to the item you would like to "bid" on. Say you have 20 tickets, and there are 10 items up for bid. You can bid two tickets on each item, or all of your tickets on one item, or split them up however you like. At the end of the event there is a drawing for each item. Your odds of winning the drawing for any given item vary based on the number of tickets that have been bid by you for that item, and the number of tickets that have been bid by other people for that item.
Theoretically, a person can bid a single ticket and win the drawing. Also theoretically, a single person can be the only person who bids on every item and can win every prize with just the minimum ticket purchase. The idea is that you can get more if you win than you spent on tickets, and the church will get more in ticket revenue than the actual value of the prizes - or else it would have made more sense to simply donate the cash value of the prize directly to the church.
My cousin and I had the idea for the Get Well Soon basket back in August of 2004. I was sorry that the 2005 bazaar was cancelled and we never got a chance to make it a reality, but the Fall Festival and the call for baskets for the Chinese Auction gave us a second chance. Originally this was going to be a just-for-the-hell-of-it thing, but now we're going to give it in memory of our fathers, both of whom died in the last few months. It's not likely that the church will get more income from ticket purchases on the Get Well Soon basket than it actually cost. The tub (intended as a foot-soaking tub, although the iconic image of a sick person soaking his feet is archaic and has been mostly forgotten) cost $5, as did the (hard-to-see) blanket that lines the tub. (It was $9.99, but purchased at 50% off.) The contents easily come to $30 - $50 - they range from a $1 seek-a-word book from a dollar store to expensive packets of foot soak, bath crystals, and Breathe Easy tea from a health food store. Even the Get Well card was $2.99. (Other contents include instant cocoa, instant chicken soup, a mug, a can of ginger ale, a bottle of Gatorade, cough drops, Horehound candy, hard candies, skin lotion, antibacterial gel, a thermometer, hot/cold packs, slipper socks, and a box of tissues with lotion.)
If you find yourself in Nanticoke on Sunday, November 6, stop by St. Mary's Church (a.k.a. Our Lady of Czestachowah) at 1030 South Hanover Street from 11:00 AM to 5:00 PM. For just the price of some tickets you can take a chance on the Get Well Soon basket!
I'd like to go on the record as having (I believe) coined a new pejorative term for the network of Far-Right bloggers, commentators, and pundits who resonate off each other and take solace in each other's loving embrace, convincing themselves that they know what is Right and True and that all who disagree are Poor Deluded Fools or Enemies of the State.
That term is "Wingnut CircleJerk." Feel free to use it in conversation or print. But, as far as Google can reveal, I said it first!
I learned an important lesson this weekend: never attempt to clean the vent ducts on a clothes dryer unless you are prepared to replace the vent ducts on the clothes dryer. I did, I wasn't, and I had to. Don't believe the hype: corrugated flexible aluminum ducts aren't as good as old fashioned 4" galvanized ducts. Every corrugation serves as a lint trap, and eventually the whole thing becomes blocked with lint. Plus, after seven years it becomes too difficult to put the duct back on after you've pulled it off. (Never use plastic flexible duct. It will burn your house down without a second thought. And you should really clean out the ducts every couple of years.) The dryer works a lot better now, drying clothes in much less time than it did before. Which means I'm using less electricity and natural gas, a definite plus when the price of natural gas is expected to go up 40 - 70% this winter compared to last winter. I have always thought that there should be more midget plumbers. (Picture a Very Large Man working on a sink with his head, arms, and shoulders jammed into the cabinet under the sink to understand why.) Now I've decided that people without legs who also weigh about 60 pounds would be perfectly suited to work on clothes dryer maintenance. Most laundry rooms are not set up to hold a washer, a dryer, and me squeezed between them, trying to tighten hose clamps and avoid dropping my tin snips on the gas line.
1. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita will damage our oil-refining capacity - a serious blow, but a temporary one, and one from which we will be able to recover with the help of our dear friends at Halliburton and Bechtel.
2. Fuel prices will spike in the near-term as domestic supplies suddenly contract and increased pressure is placed on an essentially fixed import market.
3. Americans will get fed up with pumping more and more money into their bloated SUV status symbols, and will begin to abandon them in favor of smart and sexy hybrids and alternative-fuel vehicles. Demand for refined petroleum will continue, but at a sharply declining rate.
4. The rest of the world will continue to expand its use of gasoline-powered vehicles, placing a growing demand on oil supplies and putting more and more pressure on foreign suppliers, who will have to increase their output.
5. As prices continue to rise, Americans will gradually wean themselves almost entirely from gasoline and other petroleum products. Alternative raw material sources for products made from petroleum (like, say, plastics) will be developed.
6. Overseas oil fields will begin to pass the point where it is no longer economically viable to extract crude oil. Oil shortages and increasing demand will cause prices to spiral higher. In the meantime, the effect of the rising costs will be blunted in the U.S. by declining demand and increasing use of alternatives.
7. Gulf oil refineries finally come back online, and the money comes pouring in to U.S. refiners from oil-hungry consumers in the rest of the world - until they wise up.
Yeah, right. It'll probably happen in China first.
UPDATE (9/25/2005, 11:21 PM): Where Katrina was nearly a worst-case-scenario storm, Rita was far closer to a best-case-scenario: major population centers were spared (except for New Orleans, which wound up getting flooded again), loss of life was minimal (I have not heard reports of any storm-caused fatalities; most of the deaths I have heard of were actually evacuation-related), and damage to refining capacity was less devastating than expected. So we have been spared - for now - the horror of being forced to switch to alternative fuel sources and reduced consumption of oil.
The thing that sucks so much about oil is that it is such a good fuel source. Oil, like all fossil fuels, represents a concentrated distillation of hundreds of millions of years of solar energy which was processed by photosynthesizing plants which then either directly entered the fossil fuel cycle or were in turn consumed by other plants (as decomposing matter absorbed through roots) or by animals (by being eaten), which in turn either entered the fossil fuel cycle directly or after being consumed by other living things.
I recently read that someone has done a calculation of how much energy we could extract from solar energy incident on our planet's surface. I don't know the particulars; I don't know if the calculation assumed that we would use photosynthesizing plants (which would then have to have the sunbeams extracted from them, in the manner of the character in Gulliver's Travels who had developed a way of doing this for cucumbers) or photovoltaic cells (which are expensive to manufacture and have other technical limitations), or if it simply assumed that we could use x% of the total energy. But the point is, the energy available isn't enough. Not enough now, not enough for the future. If that doesn't scare you, you need to study science and mathematics a bit more. And possibly sociolology, to understand the very limited long-term options available.
Most of us have calendars full of personal holidays - days that have deep significance to ourselves and a few other people, but are unknown to and irrelevant to most of the rest of the world. Birthdays, for example - well, birthdays have some significance in determining when we can and cannot legally smoke, drink, vote, have sex, get married, drive a car, rent a car, and so on. Anniversaries - April 5th has a relevance to me that it doesn't have to most people; September 13th is the polar opposite of September 11th for me. October 12th is both a friend's wedding anniversary and the anniversary of the Bali bombings.
I am terrible at remembering birthdays and anniversaries. And with more and more kids being born to people I know, and more and more of the people I know getting married, the task of remembering them all (and the guilt associated with not remembering them) is overwhelming to my poor little mathematically dyslexic brain.
Death has a way of bringing personal holidays to an end. My uncle died a month before his 33rd wedding anniversary, and a month and a week before his birthday. My father died one month before his birthday, and two months before my parents' 50th wedding anniversary. We still remember my grandmother's birthday, and she died seven years ago.
But without the person being physically present, it is just a commemoration, not a celebration. My father won't be blowing out any candles this year. My cousin's house won't be having a two-month cavalcade of birthday and anniversary cakes. My calendar has gotten a little emptier.
Here's to personal holidays. Celebrate them while you can.
"We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true."
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