College radio stations in NEPA

I had the weak and dying battery in my car - a battery which is rated for five years of use and is anywhere from five years old (assuming it was installed shortly before we bought the car in February 2014) to nine years old (assuming it is original to the car, a 2009 Camry) - replaced today. This means that I lost all the radio stations I had programmed in and needed to reset them. Most were easy to remember, but the frequencies for the college radio stations (the best source for alternative and new music) sometimes sometimes slip my mind. So here they are, in order of distance from my house:

Luzerne County Community College - WSFX
https://www.luzerne.edu/studentlife/wsfx/
89.1
105.5

Wilkes University - WCLH
https://beta.wclh.org/
90.7

King's College - WRKC
https://wrkc.kings.edu/
88.5

College Misericordia- Cougar Radio (online only)
http://www.cougarradio.net/

University of Scranton - WUSR
http://www.scranton.edu/academics/cas/communication/wusr/index.shtml
99.5

Marywood University - VMFM
http://demo1.marywood.edu/
91.7

Updates...

Let's see. The big cow on Route 309 known as Three-O-Nina got a fresh coat of paint this weekend. I applied a little myself. I've got plenty of photos that I need to sort through, resize, and post. I've also got a lot of great Three-O-Nina links and information, including a news segment from last year that covered a lot of its history.

Yesterday there was an earthquake in this area. It was centered in a little place called Mineral, Virginia, but its effects were felt north to Canada and south to the Carolinas. While most in this area are treating the event as a joke, folks living closer to the epicenter experienced some actual damage. And Californians may sneer at the East Coast overreacting to a little 5.8-magnitude quake, but, as anyone who has read about the New Madrid Fault knows, seismic waves propagate differently through the "old and cold" geology on this side of the Mississippi. If everybody west of the Rockies were to feel rumbles from every earthquake that happens out there, I doubt anyone would actually stick around very long.

Looks like NEPA Blogs may be breaking into the world of "old media": thanks to the efforts of Michelle Davies we may have a weekly 90-second segment on PA Live!, an upcoming local show that's been scheduled for Oprah's old slot, and we'll almost definitely be doing a weekly half-hour show on WFTE-FM, a local community radio station with an admittedly limited broadcast coverage range - unless you count the internet simulcast! I just blocked out a sample program and sent it to Michelle for her input. Our first show might be this Sunday! Next: a weekly newspaper column. Hey, why not?

Numbers stations

I heard two interesting things on All Things Considered yesterday on the way to work. One just angries up the blood, so I think I'll put off dealing with it until later.* But the other concerned something that has fascinated me for a while: numbers stations.

Numbers Stations: Mystery Over The Airwaves : NPR

Numbers stations are these mysterious yet fairly well-known broadcasts on shortwave radio that consist of voices - now electronically generated or at least pre-recorded voices - reading off clusters of numbers. These numbers make use of an uncrackable encryption technique known as a "One-Time Pad" to communicate - well, something. You can't actually know what is being communicated without the key, which is the point.

Numbers station - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Four and a half years ago I stumbled across what appeared to be "numbers blogs" during a random walk using Blogger's "Next Blog" button.** These were blogs that consisted of nothing but clusters of numbers updated every minute or so. According to the NPR piece, these blogs would be inherently more traceable than the shortwave broadcasts. I don't know if they're still out there - I didn't bother to save any of the addresses (which, if I recall correctly, consisted of random character strings) and I don't know if I could just stumble across them again.



*Do the Republicans actually want to see the economy in general and unemployment in particular improve as long as Barack Obama is in office and/or there is a Democratic majority in Congress? Wouldn't such a thing be perceived as a victory for Barack Obama and/or Congressional Democrats? This will be discussed later, when I'm more prepared to deal with the inevitable troll attacks.

**The "Next Blog" button has since been modified so it directs you to a blog similar to the blog you are currently on, which pretty much defeats the ability to do a random walk.

Over and over

My five-day vacation is over. Tomorrow I resume a regular four-days-on, four-days-off schedule - which can be complicated by overtime, lack-of-work layoffs, and the fact that the first wave of permanent layoffs is scheduled for August. (I'm scheduled to be permanently laid off in the second wave in December.)

Unfortunately, I accomplished precious little on these days off. I suppose I could enumerate all the mundane little tasks I've accomplished here and there, but I feel like I've done very little, and far less than I had planned. I blame the heat: a stretch of days over ninety degrees (that's temperatures in the 30's, for you furriners) has the same enervating effect as the loss of sunlight intensity in the wintertime. And, damn, it's been hot.*

So, naturally, as I am heading back to work, the weather is supposed to finally break, with temperatures sliding back into something more tolerable for living beings.

...hmmm. The weather is supposed to break with mighty thunderstorms, and I currently have the windows in my car rolled down more than a crack, and I should stay in bed late tomorrow as I make the transition from daywalking to night shift. Maybe I should roll those windows up before I turn in for the evening.

BONUS: This song caught my ear on Tuesday, and it's been getting played in heavy rotation on the best alternative station in the area, Marywood University's VMFM 91.7. The band is The National, and the song is "Bloodbuzz Ohio."



*It's been so hot that the grass in the yard has gone dormant, so I was able to get away without mowing this week. Unfortunately, it's been so hot that I'm starting to worry that my tomatoes will be stunted.

Steve Corbett and gas drilling awareness

Local talk jock Steve Corbett has a daily radio show on WILK in which he goes on about whatever issue is near and dear to his heart at any given moment. Right now, he's decided that he cares about Marcellus Shale drilling. Not only that he cares - but, from what I'm hearing, that he is the first person who has ever cared about it, the only person who has ever taken a stand on it, and the only person whose position can be trusted.

Gort42: You can't trust bloggers
Circumlocution for Dummies: Drill the Huntsville dam baby, drill!

Now, I have a lot of respect for the Old Media, I really do. I subscribe to both the Citizens' Voice and the Times Leader. I get Newsweek in the mail every week, though I have found it less useful since it went to the "essay contest" format last year, ceding the provision of "news" to online sources. I listen to NPR's All Things Considered on my way in to work, and Morning Edition on the way home. I even watch CNN once in a while to see if they have any news.

There's a lot of good stuff coming out of these formats. Elizabeth Skrapits, for example, has been writing a series of excellent articles on gas drilling for the Citizens' Voice. And the strength of message delivery for each of these old, traditional formats is multiplied by having a web presence. While it may be true that nothing is real until it appears in print, it may even be more true that nothing is forever until it makes its way onto the Internet.

Sadly, a lot of stuff said on local radio isn't archived. It's just words spoken on the aether that fade in intensity according to the inverse-square law. What was said yesterday is forgotten tomorrow.

Maybe WILK archives Steve Corbett's show somewhere. If so, it's not anyplace I can easily find. Rummaging around the WILK site under the "Corbett" tab reveals a series of blog-like posts that may or may not be related to his shows.

In the post from yesterday Corbett seems to strike a more humble tone than the arrogant and dismissive one reported by Gort and Mark:

I’ve recently enlisted in the people’s army that faces off against the warlords of the massive international gas drilling companies that are already firmly entrenched in Northeastern Pennsylvania and elsewhere in what is known as Marcellus Shale country.

Well. In that case - Welcome aboard, Steve! I'm kinda new to this army myself. Let me introduce you to some of the people who have been in the front lines since before either of us knew Marcellus Shale from Marsellus Wallace.

Over at Circumlocution for Dummies, you'll find Mark Cour. He's been writing about this stuff for years. Seriously. And before that, he's been relentlessly fighting for a better Wilkes-Barre. He's a guy who won't back down in a tussle. Plus, he does his homework, and knows his stuff. Ask any reporter who's used his site as an unattributed source for an "exclusive" story. Oh, and he's been in this "blogging" game since before there was a word for it. Impressive.

And over at the Susquehanna River Sentinel we have Don Williams. Now, you might say that Don is Mark's guru in this stuff. Don is what I like to call a "clean water enthusiast" - though Mark calls him "Kayak Dude." Don wants to see to it that Pennsylvanians get to exercise their rights as spelled out in Article 1, Section 27 of the Pennsylvania Constitution:

The people have a right to clean air, pure water, and to the preservation of the
natural, scenic, historic and esthetic values of the environment. Pennsylvania's
public natural resources are the common property of all the people, including
generations yet to come. As trustee of these resources, the Commonwealth shall
conserve and maintain them for the benefit of all the people.

Don's been at this a long time, too.

Truth be told, Steve, there are a lot of people in this army who have been fighting the fight for quite a while. And more than a few of them are bloggers.

So, show some respect. Tone down the anti-blogger rhetoric, dude. It hurts the cause.

But you're a newbie. We'll cut you some slack.

It's All in the Game

The number of #1 pop hits co-written by Vice-Presidents of the United States is currently exactly one.



From Wikipedia:

"It's All in the Game" was a 1958 hit for Tommy Edwards. Carl Sigman composed the lyrics in 1951 to a wordless 1911 composition entitled "Melody in A Major," written by Charles Dawes, later Vice President of the United States under Calvin Coolidge.

In addition to scoring a popular hit - something he never lived to see, though the melody was a popular violin piece in his day, which eventually came to annoy him greatly - Charles Dawes also was a co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Al Gore has some catching up to do.

In researching this, I also found that Tommy Edwards was responsible for popularising a song my grandmother was fond of singing:



I know my grandmother was canny enough to get the meaning of "I Really Don't Want to Know," which could be politely retitled "I Know You're a Floozy, but Let's Pretend You're Not."

When I was a kid I always liked this Tommy Edwards song, which was frequently played on WNAK:

Leonard Cohen: Suzanne

I took my mom grocery shopping this past Tuesday, as is our custom on Tuesdays that I am not working. Tuesday is Senior Citizen Day at the local grocery store, so she is able to get a 5% discount on all her purchases. (Well, my purchases, since I'm the one who foots the bill at the checkout.)

Tuesdays are busy days at the grocery store. Nanticoke has lots of senior citizens, and everybody wants their 5% discount. Shopping can be quite a prolonged event as my mom stops to talk to friends and neighbors and people she hasn't seen in years. It was while she was having a conversation with someone from the neighborhood that I heard a song come over the sound system in the store, a song with a hauntingly soft guitar and a hauntingly soft male voice singing words that hovered just on the edge of hearability.

Try as I might, I couldn't pluck out any single lyric that I could wrap my ears around. But I did hear one phrase repeated over and over: "And you want to..." Was this some odd, slow, acoustic version of "Tales of Brave Ulysses"?

I forgot about the song for a while after we got back. But eventually I remembered it, and decided to try my luck with Google. I typed "and you want to" into my search box and was immediately given a list of options for completing the phase - including "and you want to travel with her and you want to travel blind". Yes! That sounded right! I clicked through to see that these were words to the song "Suzanne" by Leonard Cohen.



After posting this on Facebook, I learned many fascinating things about the song from my friends there. The song was first recorded and made famous by Judy Collins in 1966 - Leonard Cohen's version of his own song didn't come out until a year later. It broke the top 40 (or 50, according to the singer) in a version by Noel Harrison, son of Rex Harrison of My Fair Lady and Doctor Dolittle fame. To date, there have been thirty-five versions of this song recorded.

I seem to recall hearing someone once say that Leonard Cohen is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.* Well, maybe not happy, as such. Maybe spiritually enlightened. Maybe...well, whatever you feel after hearing Leonard Cohen is what you feel after hearing Leonard Cohen.

Leonard Cohen was interviewed on Fresh Air a few years ago. If you haven't heard that interview yet, or even if you have, it's definitely worth a listen.

Leonard Cohen's 'Book of Longing' : NPR

More of Leonard Cohen on NPR can be found here.

And, of course, there's this.


*You may think that this is a paraphrase of something Ben Franklin said about beer, but in fact he said no such thing. His actual quote was more complicated and expressed wonderment that rain falls from the sky and causes grapes to grow and their juice, in turn, becomes wine.

On Trust: Semi-random stuff from the radio

I heard an amusing piece on Morning Edition on the way home yesterday. Not for what's said, exactly - the tone is quite neutral, with no attempt to make the subjects look ridiculous, and yet there are tidbits strewn here and there. For example, who would have expected that what energizes "Young Conservatives" is actually a frustrated sense of entitlement? Somebody didn't do his Ayn Rand reading assignment.*

Here it is. It clocks in at just over four and a half minutes.

Rising Distrust Is Wind In Conservatives' Sails : NPR


And while we're on the subject of trust - this is a great story from yesterday's All Things Considered. Need to increase donations during the Public Radio pledge drive? Just give listeners a snootful of oxytocin,** and they'll start handing over their money quite generously:

When The 'Trust Hormone' Is Out Of Balance : NPR



*Full disclosure: I've never read Ayn Rand, either.
**Not to be confused with oxycodone or oxycontin.

Harry Potter and the Brief Readership Spike

A few weeks ago - March 1, 2010, to be exact - the band OK Go! released the "Rube Goldberg machine" version of the video for their song "This Too Shall Pass." It's a remarkable piece of video, and instantly went viral. Half a dozen of my Facebook friends immediately posted it, one with the comment "WATCHITWATCHITWATCHITWATCHIT". (I have learned to trust her musical tastes, so I did.) Within hours, almost everyone was watching it. Within days, almost everyone had watched it. And within a week, anyone who brought it up was essentially told, "Oh, that's so last week."

The day before yesterday I noticed a spike in the readership of my blog, Another Monkey. I expected this would be another Cathy Baker spike, or another mass outbreak of headless rabbit discoveries, or another group of people desperately seeking the solution to Facebook's js3250.dll bug. But it wasn't any of these things. Instead the entry that was attracting all the attention was this one:

Another Monkey: Harry Potter and the Schizotypal Personality Disorder

I looked it up and anxiously began re-reading it to see what kind of dumbassed comments I had made in that post. And what I found was...pretty good. Well-researched, occasionally even beyond the Wikipedia level. Pretty well written, too. Well, this was during those months when I was laid off; I really didn't have any excuse for not writing, and for not writing well.

But who were these people? My SiteMeter told me that the traffic was coming from Facebook, but that was where the information ended. Was this a Facebook group for Harry Potter fans? A Facebook Schizotypal Personality Disorder support group? A Facebook group for Psychologists? I had no idea. A single anonymous comment didn't help. Looking deeper into SiteMeter showed that someone had originally discovered the post while Googling "harry potter and personality disorders" or something like that - the exact wording is now lost to the aether. Soon there was another search engine hit for a slightly different wording of the same search. And then the flood of Facebook hits started coming.

It has subsided.

Maybe I'll never know who these people were or who directed them to my post. Maybe a few of them liked what they saw and decided to stick around or come back for more. Maybe one of them will read this post and fill me in. I don't know.

I don't know how OK Go! is doing. I had heard a Morning Edition report on them a few weeks before the video came out, about conflicts they had had with their record company (EMI) over allowing fans to embed the video of "Here It Goes Again" - the "treadmills" video that came to be a prime example of the "viral video." Another report released shortly after the "This Too Shall Pass" video hit the Internet indicated that the band had broken with their label and started one of their own - a risky venture in the best of times. I suppose I could glean some information from the band's website.

But going viral isn't what it used to be. What used to happen over the span of weeks or months has now been reduced to days or hours. Any fame is fleeting. Like the song says, "This Too Shall Pass."

April 19, 2010 is the deadline to register to vote in Pennsylvania

Thanks to David Yonki for bringing this to my attention: The deadline to register to vote in the May Primaries in Pennsylvania is April 19, 2010.

VotesPA.com, The Pennsylvania Department of State's online voting information and resource center: Register to Vote

This didn't really loom large in my mind, for two reasons:

1. Primary elections never really meant much to me, because until the 2008 Presidential Primaries I was a registered Independent and therefore ineligible to vote in the Pennsylvania Democratic or Republican primaries. At best I could vote on "Questions."

2. I figured pretty much everyone in the country who was interested at all in participating in the political process registered to vote prior to the 2008 Presidential election.

Karl Rove, in what little I was able to bear of his Fresh Air interview last month, maintained that his true genius lay not in his mastery of the politics of divisiveness (in which he denies he participates) but in his ability to target segments of the population who have traditionally not participated in the political sphere and bring them over to the side of the politician he is promoting.

Even after 2008, there are certainly still people whose political power goes unused because they have self-disenfranchised by failing to register to vote, thereby rendering themselves ineligible to participate in elections. I wonder if there were voter registration tables set up at the April 15 Tea Party rallies? If not, it was certainly a missed opportunity.

If you haven't registered to vote yet, April 19 is your deadline if you'd like to participate in the Pennsylvania primary elections.

Fear of a Blue Sky

(Blogging note: Two days! TWO WHOLE DAYS! I missed TWO CONSECUTIVE DAYS OF BLOGGING! That hasn't happened in a long time, possibly since I was in Ireland in 2006. But I've been busy, and my routine was disrupted this weekend, so I haven't actually been on the computer since Saturday morning. Here's a post that would have run Sunday, if I had gotten a chance to write it!)

My work is physically tiring, mainly because I'm on my feet and moving for most of a twelve-hour period from 6:00 PM to 6:00 AM. Add in a 45-minute commute each way and it makes for a long day. Or, to be more accurate, night.

I don't have a problem with my drive home most of the time. I take my "lunch" late, usually after 4:00 in the morning, so there aren't any issues with blood sugar dips. (I'm not a diabetic, but these things affect everyone.) I've managed to sprain my circadian rhythms so the ordinary fatigue that kicks in at that time doesn't affect me much. Plus I eat grapes and drink diet cola on the ride home, so I've got that keeping me awake.

I also listen to the radio. Monday through Friday I'm listening to Morning Edition on NPR to get the news of the night and the previous day. Saturdays I surf around a bit but often land on the college radio stations (like VMFM) that play alternative stuff on Saturday mornings.

Sundays are more problematic. From the time I leave work until 6:30 I can listen to Euranet's oddly fatuous weekly summary show on VMFM. (I don't know if they play any of the daily programs on weekdays - I've never come across one.) But after that comes The Lutheran Hour ("Bringing Christ...to the NATIONS!") which, while amusingly and surprisingly strident, only holds my interest for about fifteen seconds or so. So I find myself surfing around a bit, stumbling through the odd mix of programming (particularly public service and interview shows) that fills the airwaves on Sunday mornings when nobody is listening. Consequently my mind starts to wander a bit.

It was while my mind was wandering a bit that I noticed the light in the sky out of my peripheral vision.

Sunday morning was a relatively clear day. Most mornings the past week or so have featured high-altitude fog that does really amazing things to the light pollution that becomes more problematic in the Winter. This is because lights that are properly shielded and directed downward and don't add much to skyglow through the rest of the year are now reflecting off of snow-covered surfaces and salt-whitened parking lots illuminating the sky and moisture-laden air directly above. But Sunday morning wasn't like that, at least not most of the way, or at least not on the part of the trip when I noticed the brightening in the sky.

It was behind me, and over my left shoulder. I was driving along interstate 81 from Olyphant to Nanticoke, which put me on an east-by-southeast* west-by-southwest course. (81 is technically a north-south highway, but it parallels the mountains between Scranton and Wilkes-Barre thanks to the efforts of Congressman Dan Flood, who saw the value in having this major highway connect two of Northeastern Pennsylvania's largest population centers rather than just cutting through mountain passes to continue on its way.) The sky was lit up with an icy blue-white light. Oh, it's the Moon, I thought. Then I remembered that there had just been a solar eclipse visible in the South Pacific this past Friday. Solar eclipses can only happen when the Moon is "New" - well, in the "No Moon" stage of Newness. And after that, the Moon slips into the evening sky to become a slim crescent on the West. Not a big glowy thing that lights up the sky ice-blue in the East in the morning.

Whatever was making the sky light up was out of my direct vision, so I couldn't see the source. What else could be doing this? A plane? No, that would have moved on, at this was holding steady. A light on a tower? Maybe. I've seen flashing beacons illuminate the entire sky under the right conditions of humidity, but this wasn't flashing, and there were no towers that I had ever noticed in this particular area before.

Ohmygodohmygodohmygod, I thought. Could it be a supernova? A star in the sky exploding so tremendously that it outshines everything else, even the Moon? But anything bright enough to make the sky turn icy blue-white would have to be really bright, really big, really powerful - and might be dosing us with enough radiation to fry the atmosphere, destroy the ozone layer, and leave us wide open to the radiation that our atmosphere usually protects us from.

No. No. Phil Plait wrote in Death From the Skies! that there are no stars within range to go supernova in the immediate future, not close enough or bright enough to light up the sky like this.

My mind raced. So what else could be doing this? What else could be causing the Eastern sky to light up like this in the early morning hours?

And then I remembered something I haven't seen in a while, at least not on my ride home. Something that is usually a bit more colorful in its early stages, but that can be washed-out and icy blue-white.

Something called a "sunrise."

Oh. That. Yeah, that would explain it.


*And with that standard left-right confusion typo, this story officially makes NO SENSE WHATSOEVER.

Title reference: "Fear of a Black Hat", a funny movie from 1994 something like a hip-hop version of "This Is Spinal Tap." The title of the movie was itself a reference to Public Enemy's album Fear of a Black Planet.

Mission of Burma: That's When I Reach For My Revolver

I heard this song on the radio on the way home from work this morning on VMFM, Marywood University's radio station. VMFM has a huge and diverse catalog of music, and they have provided interesting surprises in the past. But this time I recognized the song, even though I wasn't sure what it was or who it was by. When I got home I Googled the phrase "That's when I reach for my revolver" and found that the song (the title of which is in fact this phrase) was by Mission of Burma - an amazing band that was decades ahead of its time. Their initial run was from 1979 through 1983, but their sound is nothing like anything else you will hear from that era. Here is a video of the band performing "That's When I Reach For My Revolver" live.



I had the privilege of working on a Mission of Burma DVD project years back, and that was when I was first exposed to this remarkable band - and this song.

Rush Limbaugh is scum

For several years now I have owned a house that I don't live in. There are reasons for this, good reasons. I won't get into that now.

I do my best to make the house look lived-in. Different decorations go up throughout the year. Lights come on in various rooms, some on a fairly regular schedule, some on semi-random patterns. And, if you happen to be very close to the house at certain times of day, you will hear voices coming from it.

I have clock radios set up throughout the house. Several are tuned to NPR and will play Morning Edition or All Things Considered or, on weekends, A Prairie Home Companion. But I needed voices for the midday, and for that I turned to reliable source of chatter: talk radio.

I'm rarely at the house at midday, and if I am it's usually to do yard work. But there are times that I get to hear the members of the chattering class who fill my empty house with their voices. And among their number is...Rush Limbaugh.

Most of the time I switch off the radio whenever he comes on. Sometimes I can't, because I'm busy doing something like mixing concrete or sharpening mower blades or repotting plants, stuff that I can't just stop doing. And on those days I am subjected to the wit and wisdom of this bloated drug-addicted jackass.

I've heard him take credit for the creation of "Alternative Media", suggesting that all bloggers owe him a debt of gratitude for his invention. I've heard him refer to soldiers who would dare to criticize the policies of George W. Bush "phony soldiers" - and then play an edited recording of his statements the next day and refer to it repeatedly as an "exact transcript." (Apparently when you're a drug-addled multi-millionaire media mogul, you can't afford certain things...like a dictionary.) I've heard him defend golden parachutes for the robber barons who collapsed the U.S. economy, suggesting that to try to deny them would be as uncharitable as, according to an old story he recounted, wishing your neighbor's goat was dead because you didn't have one yourself. I've heard him attack the "media elite" when he is the prime example of that class.

Limbaugh has an enormous network of stations. He has vast legions of listeners, both casual and the devoted "dittoheads" who agree with everything he says. He has a lot of influence on the airwaves.

In the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake - in the aftermath of any major disaster - he has the potential to have tremendous influence for good.

Instead, he has chosen to do the opposite.

Limbaugh: 'We've Already Donated To Haiti, It's Called US Income Tax' (VIDEO)

I don't have time to recount the stupidity in its entirety here. It's being covered extensively elsewhere. But movie critic and social commentator, among many others, has called Limbaugh out on his comments. See here what he has to say:

A Letter to Rush Limbaugh :: rogerebert.com :: Opinion

Note that in the excerpt included, Limbaugh actually states very little - instead he asks a leading question, and then concurs with the proffered response. "Plausible deniability", anyone?


Dear Rush Limbaugh: It's not too late. You have an opportunity to redeem yourself. Will you choose to take it?

Race to the bottom

I've worked in the manufacturing sector in one capacity of another for most of the last twenty years. I've seen fads in management come and go, along with their proponents. I've seen consultants wade in and get paid big bucks to make huge changes that leave everyone other than the consultants in a worse position as a result.

I've seen stuff. Scary stuff.

But I've also seen manufacturers surviving. I've seen companies make cuts to the bone and beyond. I've seen employees accept a whittling-away of their wages and benefits because in this economy they realistically have nowhere else to go, and because they have a shred of hope that maybe someday things will get better, or at least back to somewhere closer to where they were before everything went to hell.

There's a lot of stuff driving this. My industry is fairly unique in that it manufactures a range of products that many consumers would rather steal than buy, and that they steal without the slightest trace of remorse - indeed, with a sense of self-righteously sticking it to the man.

But another thing that drives the downward death spiral across many industries is the unhealthy lose-lose relationship between retailers and manufacturers. Listen to this article from NPR's All Things Considered to get a sense of the scope of the problem:

Costco-Coke Spat Highlights Retailers' Strength - All Things Considered, December 14, 2009

Pay special attention to what is said between 1:10 and 1:40 - and realize that this does not only apply to "Chinese and Asian manufacturers."

This is not just a situation in which retailers and manufacturers are locked in a deadly embrace. Consumers are demanding lower prices, and have fewer dollars to spend in the first place. In some cases manufacturers are pinched between retailers and the clients for whom they are manufacturing the product. And like consumers, clients demand ever-lower prices for the same product, even as raw materials and other associated manufacturing costs actually increase, to the point that some manufacturers are looking at the possibility of manufacturing at a loss just to hold onto market share.

And what is the end result?

Imported Chinese drywall that poisons people and corrodes metal. Imported toys that are soft and pliable and bright and shiny thanks to the addition of toxic lead. Imported ingredients for pet food that have had their apparent protein content inflated by the addition of melamine, which has the side effect of sickening and killing the pets who eat it. Stores filled with goods that are pale, cheap imitations of items sold in decades past.* Items that have been manufactured in a half-assed, low-quality way because that's all the effort the manufacturer can afford to put into them.

Manufacturers know that if they can't keep up, the clients will try to find someone who can do the job at their price point. Consumers drive the system by valuing price over quality. Everybody plays a part, and everybody shares in the blame.

Is there a way out? I have no idea. I fear that we are heading for a future filled with cheap, useless dollar-store trinkets in place of the useful and functional things we want and need, a future where America's last remaining manufacturers have been driven from these shores, resulting in an economy where no one actually makes anything.

And all we'll be able to do then is look around and ask: How the hell did we get here?



*Do you have any old box fans around, maybe twenty or so years old? Go buy a new one and compare the quality and workmanship. Even just the size and heft and the tip resistance.

Sunday mornings on the radio

Most mornings after work I drive home listening to Morning Edition on WVIA-FM, the local NPR affiliate. It's a good way of getting a dose of the news, and one of the big advantages over working day shift. On night shift I can listen to All Things Considered on the way in and Morning Edition on the way home. When I was working days my morning commute took place before Morning Edition was on the air, and I didn't get out of work until All Things Considered was over.

On Sunday mornings, like on Saturdays, there is no Morning Edition to be heard, and Weekend Edition doesn't begin until after my commute is over. A few months ago I found myself scanning through my presets on a Sunday morning, looking for something other than the religious programs and local interview shows that dot the radio spectrum at this time of the day on this day of the week. And I found...something.

The website for Euranet, the European Radio Network, describes their mission in this way: "The European radio network, Euranet, keeps you informed about what is happening on the continent from a pan-European perspective. Radio programmes in eight languages link major European broadcasters to create a unique listener community. " Listening to this show, even for just a few minutes, gives you an interesting perspective on what is considered the best of radio news from throughout Europe.

If you're interested, give the show a listen. This week's program is posted on their web site, euranet.eu.

The nurse left work at five o'clock...

NPR is holding a contest called "Three Minute Fiction." In the current version of the contest listeners were challenged to come up with a short story that begins with the words "The nurse left work at five o'clock." The winner will be selected shortly. I submitted a story, one which was based on a theme I suggested some time ago. I'm pretty sure my story isn't in the running, but in any case I'll hold off on presenting it until the winner is announced.

On yesterday's All Things Considered there was a story about "The Exquisite Corpse Adventure, an online serial story written by a posse of children's authors. " I have heard of the Exquisite Corpse collective writing technique, in which a series of writers build upon a previous writer's contribution until a complete story is created, one sentence at a time. I learned about the Exquisite Corpse technique (which started out as a parlor game) a few years ago from the Wikipedia entry while trying to find out more about the journal of the same name. It has occurred to me that this could be an interesting writing exercise to do with the many, many writers I know online. Maybe someday I'll get around to inviting people to join in on this. If you think this sounds interesting, feel free to get the ball rolling yourself!

It's going to take more than just a PSA

I had my doubts when I saw the British texting-while-driving PSA. Too long, I thought. Too mawkish, too theatrical. Overdone and tedious. Will the kids even listen?

Some did, I think. One of my younger Facebook friends posted the PSA to her page, along with her reaction. Her friends chimed in with similar reactions. The PSA had struck a chord with them. Would it do the same with other people in the same age group?

Well, no. Not all of them. Going through the comments to the linked video, it's obvious that some kids have fairly predictable reactions: Those sorts of things happen because people are stupid and don't know how to multi-task. Doesn't apply to me. I'm smart and I'm a good multi-tasker. I can text and drive at the same time. Don't worry about it.

It's scarier to listen to the teen drivers interviewed in this piece from yesterday's All Things Considered.

But the bottom line is -are Americans, especially teens, ready to give up driving distractions? Not these teens.

Ms. BRITTANY LUI: Heck, no.

Ms. PREE TAUTELLI: I would break here right then, heck no. I mean, we would not even go near that. We don't need that.

BRUNDIN: It's two o'clock, school's out and Pree Tautelli and Brittany Lui and friends are piling into a Mini Cooper in Salt Lake City. They didn't like the thought that their parents would have a device in their car to block calls and texts.

Ms. TAUTELLI: I love texting and driving. It's the in thing.

Are these kids the norm? Or just idiots? Or is there perhaps considerable overlap between the two groups?

Texting while driving is enormously dangerous. It involves far more focusing of awareness than most other distractions. Why do kids want to do it, feel the need to do it? Maybe it's the forbidden fruit thing, or it's a way of being rebellious. Maybe it's the thrill of living dangerously, of knowing that you're getting away with doing something that could easily kill you. Maybe it's a sense of having superior skills, being better at doing stuff than the poor dumbasses who can't text and drive at the same time.

I don't know what the solution is here. My kneejerk reaction is to suggest Draconian punishments - say, suspension of license until age 21 for a first offense - but I doubt such a thing would fly. How about giving cell-phone bill-payers the ability to turn selected services on and off at selected times? Most kids probably aren't paying for their own cell phones, but are sponging off their parents. So why not allow parents to decide which services they want their kids to have access to? (There's probably a very big financial "why not" in the minds of the telecoms; kids racking up text messages in excess of their monthly allotments are likely a major source of income for these companies. )

Maybe texting is just a passing fad, something that will be gone with raccoon coats and hula hoops and 23-skiddoo and hunkering and telephone booth stuffing, something that will be supplanted by future technological developments and eventually wind up looking as cool as the programming on a Commodore Vic-20. Maybe not. Maybe it will take something really major to change kids' minds. I don't know.

In any event, I think it will take a lot more than a PSA.

Pearl Jam, Girl Scouts, Piracy, and Ironic Incompetence

Pearl Jam has a new album out. Backspacer is available today, semi-exclusively at one major retail outlet and hundreds of independent record shops, including locally in Northeastern PA at the Gallery of Sound.

Backspacer was produced and is being distributed independently of any major music label, as is described in this report from All Things Considered. I appreciate the fight that Pearl Jam is putting up against the music industry, where major corporations routinely exploit, bleed dry, and toss aside musical acts as a matter of everyday business, and I hope that their new album sells as well as it would have if they were still associated with their former label. As soon as I get some time off, Ill pick one up.

I used to work in the music industry. (I used to work in a lot of industries for a lot of different companies, all while staying in the same place. Life is strange.) So I can also appreciate the industry's constant battle against music piracy and illegal downloading. Which is why I was a little surprised this morning when I heard a spot for girlsgotech.org, a project of the Girl Scouts, in which two girls sing a song to the tune of "Miss Mary Mack" in which they sing the praises of technology - especially technology that allows you to download music off of the Internet. Now, I'm not sure if they were talking about the joys of illegal bittorrents or the wonders of Apple's iTunes store, which apparently has allowed people to walk around with $150 iPods loaded with $10,000 worth of songs downloaded a dollar at a time. (How does that work, anyway?)

I wanted to find the actual ad itself so you could hear what I'm talking about. I haven't found it yet, but I did find a page on the girlsgotech.org that has links to all of the ads that are currently running. (Apparently this campaign has been going on for five years now.) Go to that page and try clicking on them.

Go ahead. I'll wait.










...so.

Is it more sad or amusing that the ad links on the Girls Go Tech website don't work? I wonder how much else on that website isn't working. Maybe they need a team of Girl Scouts to swoop in and fix the site?

YouTube Monday: Yacht, "Psychic City"

Well, it's not my weekend, and it's probably not your weekend, but here's a song I first heard on a weekend, on the morning of Saturday, August 15 as I pulled into the parking lot of the Wilkes-Barre Township Walmart. It was on one of the local college radio stations - probably VMFM out of Marywood. The song is "Psychic City", by (as I learned just a little while ago) the duo Yacht.

YACHT - Psychic City (Voodoo City)

Yacht has more information about this song on their website. They also have an entry that links to a video for this song, which you should watch at your own risk.

When I first heard this song I thought it had a very punkish, rough, DIY feel to it that made me think it was an artifact from decades past. (It turns out it is - the precursor song was written in 1987.) Having seen the video I now can't shake the notion that this is hipster art-school Talking Heads-wannabee stuff.

Whatever. It's a strange, catchy song. Give it a listen and see what you think.

Next research obsession: The Threepenny Opera

This is all Alan Moore's fault. And Kevin O'Neill. And Jess Nevins. And Nellie McKay.

It really started with Nellie McKay, who I had never heard of before her appearance on the radio program Fresh Air back on November 21, 2007. If you don't know who she is, do yourself a favor and follow the link. Scroll halfway down the page and click on "Hear the Original 'Fresh Air' Interview and Performance" and be amazed at her remarkable voice, wit, and talent. She played Polly Peachum in the 2006 production of Bertolt Brecht's "The Threepenny Opera", and sang the song "Pirate Jenny" on the show.

This really served as my introduction to the play, which I only knew previously through the song "Mack the Knife". But I had warning well in advance that the next chapter of Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" series, "Century: 1910", would be heavily intertwined with The Threepenny Opera. Last week I picked it up, and did my first read-through in little more than a day.

Anyone familiar with the work of Alan Moore, and the Moore/O'Neill "League" stories in particular, knows that these stories deserve and demand close reading. Jess Nevins has done all the heavy lifting by researching and creating heavily detailed guidebooks for each of the previous Volumes as well as The Black Dossier, and has put one together for Century: 1910 as well. (Note: The comment about the source for "Doctor Van Helsing," page 18 panel 3, is a joke. Jess told me so.)

There are details in the book that Jess hasn't touched on, yet - the noose from which Macheath is to hang, with a metal ring looped around the rope instead of the traditional knots, is of a design I've never seen before. I'm not familiar with the music from The Threepenny Opera, aside from "Pirate Jenny" (which figures significantly in the book) and "Mack the Knife." There's so much more to be extracted from this book, but it will take time, and study. I'm not sure how long it will take to find the time, but I will, somehow.