Hillary Clinton in Scranton, March 10 2008

I hadn't made my mind up to see Hillary Clinton in Scranton this past Monday until I was practically there. Arriving on Providence Avenue, I did a typical Left-Right mixup and headed the wrong way, only too late noticing the crowd of people behind me. I reoriented myself and drove past the crowd into a nearby complex and parked on some muddy grass. (HELPFUL HINT: If you have a front-wheel-drive car, and you have the option of parking part of your car on pavement and part on muddy grass, put the rear wheels on the muddy grass and the front wheels on the pavement. It will help when you decide to leave.)

The line was already very long when I got to the location at about 4:50. Doors had opened at 4:30, and people had probably started gathering a few hours before that. The gym where Hillary would be speaking could hold 3500 people. The line was moving in fits and starts and we made progress very very slowly.
The point where the line wrapped around itself. There were over 3500 people ahead of me.

Free Enterprise thrived along the line. Button vendors and T-shirt hawkers sold their ware up and down the line to a captive audience eager to buy.

It was at about this point that I noticed several rather...fancily dressed women walking towards the end of the line. Ever since Sex and the City hit the air, there has been considerable overlap between the worlds of high fashion and dressing like a prostitute. Earlier I had noticed a woman dressed like a Dominatrix on the way to meet a client: thigh-high leather boots, short skirt, black coat with the collar pulled up, sunglasses. But the women who approached us were dressed somewhat more...as they approached I noticed some things: The breadth of their shoulders. Their tallness. The huskiness of their voices.

Transvestites! I thought. (Or, as I would later learn they called themselves, "Homos for Hillary.") I turned to the guy behind me, who had also noticed them. "You usually have to go to Wal-Mart after 9:00 on a Saturday night to see that," I quipped. He laughed. (I wasn't joking. I was apparently at the Wal-Mart in Wilkes-Barre late one Saturday night - I forget why - during Transvestite Shopping Hours. The place seemed full of them, though it may have been just two.) I regret not getting a photo of them.

A lone Republican crying out in the wilderness. He's opposed to Universal Health Care, apparently. Stupid babies and old people, why should they get a break?
The Obamanites, a small but vocal group of Obama supporters who chose not to join the other pro-Obama individuals who were going in to hear what Hillary had to say. Barack Obama has not yet announced any plans to visit Northeastern Pennsylvania.

There was another group of protesters across the street from the line. At one point they had a bedsheet with the word "GOOGLE" followed by a good half a dozen terms, apparently a string that you're supposed to type in to go to proof positive that Hillary eats aborted babies for lunch or something like that. Actually, I have no idea what the sign said. By the time I got into position to snap a picture - the only way I could get the entire message - they had apparently gotten tired and dropped the banner. Honest, whatever they were pushing couldn't have been that popular or they wouldn't have needed so many terms. (Lately, instead of giving people my blog address, I just tell them to Google "headless rabbit." Another Monkey, the world's #1 source of news and information on headless rabbits!)

Later one of the protesters walked over to Obama Island carrying a small sign. "Does that say 'War 1955'?" the guy behind me asked. "What war would that be? Korea?"

The sign actually said "H.R. 1955". (I had to explain to him that "H.R." stands for "House Resolution".) This is also known as the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007. Now I'm wondering who these people were. Ron Paul is mentioned in the linked article. Could they have been Ron Paul supporters?

Six o'clock came and went and we were still well outside of the gym - closer, but outside. We were all very cold, and as the sun set behind Scranton High School I noted that we were all about to get a lot colder.

6:15 and Hillary had not yet taken the stage. This was a good thing. But around 6:30 a police officer came and told us that the gym was now full, and they were re-routing people to the school auditorium, where at best people would be able to watch Hillary on a TV. A trickle of people were now heading from the front of the gym to the auditorium.

A few seconds later the crowd began to buzz, and then break up. Either everyone was beginning to disperse, or...

Mad dash! Everyone was suddenly racing up a muddy hillside to the auditorium. The line had dissolved, and it was first-come, first served at the doors.

The auditorium filled up pretty quickly, with people of every race and gender identification. (I learned yesterday that the transvestites were there with us!) But, as we quickly learned, there was no TV screen there to watch Hillary's speech. At best we would hear it, over two Public Address speakers mounted above the stage.

And hear it we did. The audio was lousy, the introductions droned on, and no one outside the auditorium could see or hear us. But that didn't stop the crowd from cheering or clapping at appropriate times. One of the most popular items in both Hillary and Chelsea's speeches was a vow to end "the Unfunded Mandate known as 'No Child Left Behind'," one of the most far-reaching of the Bush Administration's many failures.

People eased out of their seats throughout the speech, which went on for a good while. Hillary opened with a good 10 minutes of local name-dropping ("I remember going to Tunkhannock for ice cream at the Shadowbrook! I just had white pizza in Old Forge!"), but in her case it was legit - she does in fact have family ties to this area (her father is buried in Scranton) and did in fact spend portions of her childhood here. Then she launched into a stump speech that was fairly light on specifics, save for a pledge to begin withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq within 60 days of taking office. But for the most part, it was just cheerleading to an enthusiastic crowd - two crowds, if you counted us in the auditorium.

Towards the end of the speech, after many people had left, a teenage boy in a crumpled gray suit slipped onstage, made a pressing-down ("stay here") motion with his hands, and said something that only people at the front right of the audience could hear. One of them turned and shouted to the murmuring throng. "Stay here!" she yelled. "She's coming! Hillary's coming here!"

Suddenly the auditorium was alive again as people swarmed to fill the positions toward the front. The speech ended, and we waited.

And waited.

People came and went onstage. A microphone was set up. Several people who appeared to be aides, and probably not local - nobody wears long, dangly scarves around here - appeared onstage and seemed to take in the crowd. Several people entered the auditorium from the back and set up a "velvet rope" to define a do-not-cross zone.

At one point the boy in the gray suit peeked around the curtain, and the audience burst into applause and cheers. This became a running joke: every time he appeared the crowd erupted in cheers. Finally he walked across the stage and removed the microphone, stand and all. Huh?

And suddenly, she was there. Hillary Clinton herself. She didn't have to do this, of course. She had just spoken to a screaming, enthusiastic crowd of 3500 in the gym, and we had heard her. What did she have to gain by spending some extra time with a few hundred folks who weren't able to get in to the main show?

But she did. She spoke to us, just us, for a good ten minutes. That impressed me. Then she came down off the stage and into the crowd - I think she was on the other side of the rope - and shook hands and met with people for another good long while.

I found her surprisingly charismatic. While neither as eloquent nor as charming as her daughter, she was still much more pleasant than the monster she is being made out to be by her opponent's fervent followers. And she did stir up quite a bit of enthusiasm in the crowd, quite the opposite of the effect that I am hearing being described in other sources.

Finally it was over and the crowd dispersed. Everyone left and cheerfully trudged to their cars, glad to have seen Hillary Clinton in her first official campaign stop in Pennsylvania.

And yesterday I saw Chelsea. (Call me, kiddo.)

Now I'm looking forward to seeing Barack Obama. If he ever decides to visit Northeastern Pennsylvania.

Chelsea & Me

Chelsea Clinton and a local crackpot blogger

Well, I was going to do a post on my experience of waiting in a long line to hear Hillary Clinton speak at a high school in Scranton yesterday. I was going to mention the transvestites (or, as they called themselves, "HOMOS FOR HILLARY!"), and the T-shirt and button hawkers, and the Obama supporters, and the lone Republican with a sign that said "VOTE REPUBLICAN NOT SOCIALIST", and the two hours spent waiting in line, and the way the Gym filled up completely when I was still about 500 people away, and how the orderly re-routing of people to the auditorium (where we could hear her over a P.A. system, but not see her) turned into a mad scramble, and how after her speech to 3500 screaming fans in the auditorium gymnasium she actually came to the auditorium to see and speak with and meet with the several hundred of us in the overflow crowd.

I was going to do a post on all that. But I'm too tired to get into any of that right now.

See, I'm tired because I learned this morning that Chelsea Clinton would be coming to the grand opening of her mom's Scranton campaign headquarters at 5:30 this afternoon. Well, shucks, I thought, I could do that. So after work today I headed over to the parkade near Tink's where I always used to park back in those days and hiked the two blocks to the headquarters.

Unlike yesterday, when I headed for the event without a coat or hat because a) I figured it would be very hot in the auditorium and b) I figured the less I wore, the less of a hassle security would be, this time I decided to wear both hat and coat in anticipation of a brief and chilly outdoor event. So, naturally, I cooked for nearly three hours inside the crowded, stuffy, one-room headquarters.

But I got to see Chelsea! See her, hear her (she's an excellent speaker!), talk with her, shake hands with her, get her autograph, and - thanks to a very nice lady and her very nice daughter - get my picture with her. (Thank you very much! So sorry to hear about your cannibalistic hamster.)

We have not seen the last of her. She will be speaking tomorrow morning at Wilkes College, and she told us she will be in the area for the next two weeks - will she be with her mom at the Scranton St. Patrick's Day Parade this Saturday? (If you thought traffic was bad normally on Parade Day in Scranton, you ain't seen nothin' yet.) And she promised that we will be seeing lots of Clintons over the next few weeks. I wouldn't mind seeing her again, or her mother. But after them, who else is left?

Now, I wonder when Barack will be coming around here?

Hillary and Leonard

I saw Hillary Clinton in Scranton today. She was much more personable than I expected, and was able to stir the crowd even when she wasn't in the same room with them. A full report will be delivered forthwith. Well, not exactly forthwith. Maybe tomorrow.

Leonard Cohen was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame today. You may recall that I posted a YouTube video - lifted from Gort - of John Cale (of the Velvet Underground) performing Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah." This is, I think, the most stirring and beautiful version of this song. This essay (sent to me last week by Gort) states that the late Jeff Buckley's version is considered to be "definitive", though I find his version too melodramatically emo and lacking in the beauty and grace of Cale's. (My first experience of this song was probably a slightly edited version of the John Cale version in, of all places, the movie Shrek. Buckley's version has found considerable play in the current crop of teen TV melodramas, as noted in the linked essay.)

But this is Leonard Cohen's day, so it would be good to give a listen to a version by the man who started it all.

And on the other end of history, here is a much more recent version sung, in turn, by four Norwegian singers.

To learn more about Leonard Cohen, give a listen to this Fresh Air interview from May 2006.

GoodReads

Here's a change of pace after that last post. Ashley from Ink on Paper has persuaded me to sign up on the GoodReads network, and then has further persuaded me to actually participate! GoodReads is a site that lets you easily list books that you have read, are reading, or would like to read, and lets you rate them and post reviews, too.

I am a man who has been known to have a few books lying around. As of this writing I have only listed 10 on GoodReads. I intend to write a review for every one I list, so that will tend to limit the number of books I list there. I've installed a GoodReads widget at the top of my sidebar (since Blogger is currently buggy and is keeping me from seeing the bottom of my sidebar in Layout mode!), so you can click on there to go to my profile, or just click here.* Now, why don't you sign up, too, and start letting the world know what you've read?


*Don't be confused by the name, or the picture. That's me. Unless I seriously screwed up and managed to link to someone else's profile.

Find this murderer

These are two images released by the Chapel Hill (North Carolina) Police Department of a "person of interest" in the murder of Eve Carson.
This "person of interest" was using Eve Carson's ATM card and, it appears, Eve Carson's SUV.

Something about this case has touched a nerve with me, more than all the other random murders that take place every day. By all accounts, Eve Carson was a person of "unlimited promise" - one of those rare and special people who have the potential to change the world completely. Her biography shows someone who had accomplished more in her twenty-two years than most of us will accomplish in our lifetimes. And she was just getting started.

This is the same sort of hat seen in the images. The killer wore a hat like this over a very large afro, all tucked under a hood. (According to this site, this is a Houston Astros 1965-style hat, though that style may have been used since then.)

And now she is dead. Killed because someone had a gun, and a bullet, and was willing to use it to snuff out the life of a random girl - for what? Some money? A car? Just for fun?

Photo manipulation: Remove hat, extend hair across head (assuming consistent length), fill in eyebrow, duplicate eye. Is this the face of Eve Carson's killer?

Somebody knows who this guy is. Somebody has seen him, has talked to him. He went to school somewhere, bought cigarettes somewhere, bought beer somewhere, got his hair cut somewhere, took a piss somewhere, hung out somewhere. He's somebody's son, maybe somebody's brother, somebody's friend.

A second extrapolation, using a skightly different technique and applying a different assumption about the eyebrows and eyes. This version looks somewhat older than the first version.

And he is Eve Carson's murderer.

Somebody needs to find him.

Set the Ray to Mayonaise

I am keeping a close eye on the thin line of water along the edge of the basement wall. It's raining again. It's supposed to rain all night tonight, and into tomorrow. Better take those countermeasures I failed to take Tuesday night.

YouTube Weekend time again! This time it's two fan-made videos for songs by the Smashing Pumpkins.

The first is for a hauntingly beautiful song with an extremely bizarre title. "Set the Ray to Jerry" is subtle and simple: the bass line is a six-second long repeated pattern, the guitars are ethereal, and the drums...well, it reminds me of how Douglas Adams described watching a two-ton Northern White Rhinoceros (now probably extinct in the wild) nibbling on grass in his book Last Chance to See: "It was like watching a JCB excavator quietly getting on with a little weeding." Jimmy Chamberlain's drumming is subtle and complex. Like "Stand Inside Your Love", this is from the Judas O rarities and B-sides album. It's the B-side of "1979."


The other fan-made video is for an old favorite from Siamese Dream. I always thought "Mayonaise" (spelled with one "n" for some reason) would make an excellent first-dance song at a wedding. Just need to have pyrotechnics ready to go off at the 53 second mark.


Enjoy!

March 24, 2008: Deadline to Register to Vote in PA Primary!

NOTE ADDED SEPTEMBER 8, 2008: The information below was about the 2008 PRIMARY Election. For information on the deadline to register to vote for the PRESIDENTIAL Election in Pennsylvania in 2008, go here.

As long as I've been registered to vote I've been a registered Independent. I blame this as much on J.A. Panuska, S.J. , the President of the University of Scranton during my days there, as on anything else. In an interview published in the weekly campus paper, The Aquinas, Fr. Panuska revealed that he had been a lifetime registered Indepedent, so that he would never be beholden to any political party, any more than they could presume his automatic support. It seemed like a good, principled stand to take on a fairly basic issue, so I decided to adopt it for myself.

Besides, I live in Pennsylvania. Just about the only thing being registered for a particular party means (for non-politicians, or those not seeking political favors) is that you get to vote in that party's Primary election to decide who runs in the General election. For the most part I simply trusted my fellow Pennsylvanians to decide for themselves who would best represent their party in the General election. The only election that I seriously cared deeply and passionately about was the Presidential election. And since Pennsylvania's Primary comes so late in the season, it pretty much never made a difference. The candidates were already selected long before Pennsylvania, one of the largest and most diverse states in the Union, ever got a chance to give its opinion.

2008 is different. In 2008 Pennsylvania's vote matters in the Primary race, on the Democratic side at least.

And here I am, a registered Independent. Unable to cast my vote.

Or so I thought.

As I pulled up to my house this afternoon to check for storm-related damage (there is none! HOORAY!) I heard a brief news clip that said that the deadline to register to vote in the Primary is March 24.

Huh? I had always thought it was sometime last November.

I can has chance to vote in Prezdenchal Primerry? Excellent!

I called the Luzerne County Courthouse, intending to run up directly to change my party affiliation. And they told me that, yes, I could run up and fill out the form right away...or I could log on to the series of tubes known as the Internet, go to the county's site, print out the form, send it in, and be all done!

So that's what I did. Here's the link:

http://www.luzernecounty.org/county/departments_agencies/bureau_of_elections/register_to_vote

Of course, this is only good for those of us who live in Luzerne County. If you live in another county, you will have to go to your specific county's website, or fill out the form however it is filled out where you live.

In 2008, Pennsylvania has a chance to determine who will be the Democratic candidate for the President. Don't miss out on your opportunity to be a part of that. But hurry - deadline for registration is March 24, 2008!

A day at the beach

...err, "Reach." I didn't realize that sign didn't say "Beach" until I was getting this photo ready to post.

As I mentioned yesterday, I scheduled today off so I could take my mom for a follow-up to her cataract surgery. Her last appointment took a while, during which time I did a fairly good impression of some homeless bum dozing in the waiting room of an eye clinic, so this time I resolved to spend the time out and about getting photos in the general vicinity.
My first stop was a sad one. I had planned on visiting the Tudor Book Shop one last time today, but I got an e-mail over the weekend telling me that this past Tuesday would be their last day. So it turns out my last visit was the Saturday before last, when I stopped in while killing time before picking up my friend to go see RENT. I didn't even buy anything that day. Now they're gone.

After that I headed for the Susquehanna River, which forms the border between Kingston and Wilkes-Barre. I parked on Pierce Street on the Kingston side and walked across the bridge to get some pictures of the swollen river. Here are some trees that are usually well above the river's edge.

Here's a shot along the Pierce Street Bridge looking South towards the Luzerne County Courthouse.
Here's another view of the Courthouse and the other buildings along the riverfront. To the left of center you can just make out a statue - I think it's Christ the King (though it may be the nearly-identical Christ the Redeemer) atop the Administration Building at King's College.
Turning further to the West, here is the Market Street Bridge. (Compare this to the third image on the linked post, which was a shot of the Pierce Street Bridge from the Market Street Bridge!)
Finally, as I headed back to the car something else caught my eye and I grabbed one last image. To the East, dimly visible, are the local windmills - err, the wind-driven electrical generators, or "wind generators" for short. Here are three of them (I think out of a total of eleven) lurking behind a Martian Tripod cleverly disguised as a water tower.
Blown-up version:

The windmills are currently turned off - perhaps as a precaution because of yesterday's storms, or perhaps because of the presence of migrating birds in the area, birds whose presence was made obvious by the enormous quantity of droppings that now coated the car. Someday when the air is drier (and there are fewer large migratory birds in the area fueling up for the last leg of their journey North!) I will have to go back and try to recreate this shot.

Pumping and mopping

I hate taking days off from work. I value my vacation days and hoard them for things like vacations, when I take them.

My mom had cataract surgery on her second eye today. My brother had the day off, so he agreed to take her to and from surgery. I scheduled tomorrow off to take her for her follow-up surgery.

It turned out I had to take today off, too.

A huge locomotive of precipitation rolled diagonally through much of the Northeast yesterday. Upstate New York got some of the ugliest of it in the form of snow and ice, but Northeastern Pennsylvania was treated to heavy and nearly continuous rain. It lightened up a bit yesterday afternoon and evening, and when I went to bed our basement was still dry. I hoped for the best and failed to prepare for the worst.

I woke up this morning at 4:30 and put my sleep-sensitized hearing to work. No tell-tale bubbling of water seeping through concrete anywhere. I switched on the TV and watched the weather for a bit. I got up and out of bed at 5:00 and headed for the bathroom. As usual, my cat Nicky raced ahead of me, wanting to get into the bathroom before me.

He made it two feet into the bathroom and stopped. I didn't need to switch on the light to know why.

The "unfinished" part of the basement was full of water. Just a thin film in most spots, about three-quarters of an inch at its deepest in the corners. The bathroom had water that had seeped in from the bordering section of the basement - again, just a thin film.

Dammit.

I could have set up some towels on the floor in preparation - wet towels serve as fairly effective barriers to water flow, for a little while anyway. I could have gotten up at 2:00 or 3:00 and checked to see if I needed to set up the pumps. I could have done a few things. But I hadn't.

I got out my pumps and extended the hoses out through the garage door. I fired them up and started pumping. I grabbed some junk towels, and some beach towels that have only seen the beach once in the past four years, and started sopping up the standing water. I noticed that the water levels were rising, and that the water in the bathroom had now flowed out the bathroom door.

Fine. I would have to call off.

Six hours later I'm still pumping. We had one final burst of rain around 7:00 this morning, but now it's done, and it was downright sunny not too long ago. The first towels have already been in and out of the washer and dryer and are about to be pressed into service again; towels in the dryer wait to replace them, and towels in the washer are waiting for their turn in the dryer.

This isn't as bad as past floods, and it's the first flood we've had since we - and a helpful Nanticoke city official - convinced our neighbor to stop directing all of his downspouts onto our property. (Now he is merely directing most of his downspouts onto our property.) I had hoped we would get away without basement flooding this time, but I guess that was just unrealistic.

Soon the pumps will go dry, and the towels will have absorbed as much remaining water as they can, and it will be time to break out the mops and buckets and disinfectant again. I wonder if I'll have to just use bleach again? Hooboy...


UPDATE, 7:20 PM: All done. That only took me...all day.

Well, most of the time I wasn't actually doing anything. Set up pumps, let run. Throw down towels, sop up water, wash towels, dry towels, repeat. Mop floor, let dry, repeat, repeat, repeat.

Damage was minimal. Well, nothing actually got damaged, though there's always the chance of mold and mildew down the road, despite my use of bleach as a disinfectant. (I finally got to use those stupid white sweatpants that look ridiculous whenever I'm doing anything that doesn't involve mops and bleach!) You learn a few things after going through this drill a dozen or so times. If you haven't learned from hard experience, Ashley from Ink On Paper wrote an excellent article for Associated Content called "What to Do about Basement Flooding." It's a must-read for anyone who has ever had to deal with this problem, or anyone who may be dealing with it in the future.

Gary Gygax is dead

I forgot to get gas on the way home today.

I was in a hurry to get to my house to see if the heavy rains we're experiencing today had managed to flood my kitchen by way of the water leak which has almost-inexplicably appeared in my stove. (Melting snow dripping down the chimney and snaking through the stovepipe into the inside of the oven and gathering in the bottom of the body of the stove, which eventually sprung a leak...what, do you have a better idea?) There was no flood when I got there, so I took a leisurely inspection tour of the house, stopping in the bedroom to take my Garmin GPS thingamajig out of the suitcase I keep up there. (Garmin GPS thingamajigs are easy to lose or misplace; suitcases are not.) I was planning to use the data stored in there as the basis for today's post, after I stopped downtown to fill up.

As I rolled down the hill to the older of Nanticoke's two traffic lights a story came on NPR's All Things Considered about Margaret Jones' Love and Consequences, the latest fake memoir scandal to hit the publishing world. This one sounded semi-interesting; as opposed to James Frey's A Million Little Pieces - which, when presented as fiction, attracted very little interest from publishers, but which became a bestseller when recast as a memoir - this new book was apparently an elaborate hoax from the word go.

I left the radio on while I was pumping gas. (Don't worry; that won't blow up your car any more than using a cell phone while pumping gas will. Leaving your car running or getting in and out of it while pumping gas will put you and anyone around you in some danger, though.) I only heard bits and pieces of the report, but as I was finishing up I heard these ominous words on the radio:

"E. Gary Gygax, co-creator of the fantasy role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons..."

Oh, crap. They're probably not introducing him for an interview. Did he die?

Yes. Yes he did.

I first heard about Dungeons & Dragons from a Parade Magazine article back in 1980 or so. It gave some descriptions of a game in progress, some background, the requisite "college student found wandering in the sewers last year" warning. I thought it was interesting. I decided I wanted to see what it was about.

That Christmas (well, a day or two after) , I took a bus into Wilkes-Barre with my brother and sister. We were 16, 13, and 12 at the time - back then such things were not inconceivable - and our pockets were stuffed full of Christmas loot to buy the things that Santa forgot to get us. I forget what my brother and sister got, but I picked up the boxed edition of what was called "Basic Dungeons & Dragons" (a.k.a. the "Blue Book" version - according to the current revision of the Wikipedia article, this would have made this 1981.)*

The contents of the box were...interesting. A blue book of rules and information something like a thick magazine, an introductory adventure ("The Keep on the Borderlands"), and an array of numbered squares (or "chits") printed on glossy cardboard. These "chits" were designed to serve as random number generators, and came with a little treatise on normal distributions and whatnot. I believe there was also a coupon included which allowed you to order "polyhedral dice" for the princely sum of $2. (I think the game had cost me $9. I had originally paid $12 for it in one store, but returned that one when I realized I could save 25% by buying at another nearby store.)

I was a little excited by this, as the "polyhedral dice" came in the shapes of the Platonic Solids that Carl Sagan discussed in one of the appendices to Cosmos. The tetrahedon, or four-sided pyramid; the cube; the eight-sided octahedron; the twenty-sided icosahedron; and, most precious of all, the dodecahedron, the twelve-sided die whose faces were pentagons. (All of the other dice, except for the cube, had triangular sides.) In D&D terms, this set was made up of a d4, d6, d8, d12, and d20. No d10 for us, baby! Back in my day, sonny, the d20 was numbered 0 to 9 twice, and you had to color one set of the faces to designate it as "plus ten". But this die could also serve as a ten-sider, and if you rolled it twice, or if you were rich and had two of them, you could use it as "percentile dice" to randomly generate numbers from 0 - 99 (or 1 -100, if you counted "00" as 100.) But a d20 was the essential die for "saving throws", those little chances that maybe you got lucky and managed to avoid getting hit by the point-blank shot, or happened to be immune to the poison, or didn't get fooled by someone's persuasive words.

And that was it.

Basic rules. Some funny-looking dice. Pencil and paper. Some friends. And lots of imagination.

Remember, this was a long time ago. The Atari 2600 and Commodore Vic-20 (with its super-fast cassette tape drive) were state-of-the-art back in the early 1980's. Video games were primitive things.

Fantasy role-playing games like D&D presented kids with the opportunity to flex their imaginations and their creative skills. At its most basic sense, the game was a form of collective storytelling. One person - the "Dungeon Master", in D&D terminology - would set the stage and provide the backdrop and plot twists; the other players would decide how the story would play out through their characters' actions. Some people played without dice. Some people played without rules. Some people played without pencil and paper. The game was flexible like that.

People who played D&D were looked down upon as freaks and weirdos, geeks and social outcasts. And maybe this was true, to an extent. Maybe the level of imagination and creativity required by the game set players apart from most kids their age. But at its heart, D&D was a social event, even if the people you were socializing with were not generally accepted by a lot of society.

The game spun off. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons came out a little while later, with more complicated rules and more expensive books. The game was revised several times, and the "rules" evolved from flexible "guidelines" to hard and fast "rules" that ensured portability of play. It waxed and waned in popularity. Ownership passed from Gary Gygax's TSR to Wizards of the Coast, the people who made the Magic: The Gathering card game. In 2000 it was revised again as part of the d20 System, a codification of rules that aimed for uniformity of rule structure across role-playing game formats and platforms.

This past weekend a friend mentioned Mazes & Monsters to me. This is an ancient Tom Hanks TV-movie, a cautionary tale which, I think, involves college kids going nuts playing role-playing games and winding up wandering in the sewers. It's laughably bad, I have heard, and is watched mainly for entertainment value. My friend said that coming across this movie on the TV listings made him think of Dungeons & Dragons. He hadn't thought of it in years, since a bunch of us would get together and play it at my mom's house. I was the Dungeon Master...

Maybe I'll dust off the old books and bring out the dice sometime. I'll draw up an adventure, and a few of us will get together and pull an all-nighter, just like in the old days. Maybe even introduce a few members of the younger generation to a "game" that doesn't require an X-Box or PS3. Just some rules, some dice, some friends, and some pencil and paper. And lots of imagination and creativity.

Thanks, Gary Gygax.


*My own introductory experiences parallel those of "Unseelie" on this discussion board. I wonder where in Pennsylvania Unseelie lived?

Tomorrow, tomorrow...

Tomorrow is the big day. What happens in Texas and Ohio will almost certainly determine whether or not Pennsylvania's primary will be relevant to determining who will be the Democratic nominee.

Tomorrow is also the day that work begins on some bridges on I-81 between Moosic and Avoca. Just some maintenance work, safety stuff, some traffic tie-ups and delays. Should be done in...about two years. I kid you not.

Yes, it's a pain in the butt. But we all remember what happened in Minnesota last August, don't we? No, we probably don't. It took me a minute to remember just which state the bridge was in. Well, this work is to make sure images like this one, of I-81 just North of Avoca...
...remain just amusing glitches on Google Earth that result when the program tries to display non-terrain features in 3-D mode. That's a big drop, and I drive over those bridges twice a day - and all the other ones they'll be working on, too.

So I already set my alarm a half-hour earlier, to 4:30 AM. I'll bump it back even earlier if need be. I'd rather do that than plummet to my doom in some scenic gully or mountain pass in Northeastern Pennsylvania!

UPDATE: Thanks to Michelle, I now know that these repairs have been put off until next...Sunday??? From WNEP.com:

Major I-81 Bridge Project Delayed
Last Updated: March 3, 2008 08:06 AM EST

The start of a $7 million bridge project on Interstate 81 has been postponed until March 9. Four interstate bridges, two northbound and two southbound between Avoca and Moosic will be under construction. For the first week, expect night-time southbound lane restrictions. After the first week, expect possible on-and-off lane restrictions southbound and no lane restrictions northbound. On-ramps from Moosic to Interstate 81 southbound will be controlled by a stop sign. Crossovers are being built in the median but they probably won't be ready until late this year or spring of 2009.

Super.

YouTube Weekend: The Meme

A lot of people have the wrong idea of what a "meme" is. Somehow the definition has gotten distorted and corrupted to mean "a thing that gets passed around on the Internet that requires you to perform some function and then pass it on to somebody else." But that's pretty far from what the word was coined to refer to.

Richard Dawkins originally used the term in his book The Selfish Gene to refer to a unit of information that is capable of reproducing itself. Memes are concepts, ideas, ways of doing things that are copied and replicate and spread from individual to individual. As he writes in Chapter 11 of his book:

Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passed it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. As my colleague N.K. Humphrey neatly summed up an earlier draft of this chapter: `... memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically.(3) When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn't just a way of talking -- the meme for, say, "belief in life after death" is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual men the world over.'

It's rare that you witness a meme at its birth. But I think I have. Marc from Wilkes-Barre Online has made me realize that with this post.

I don't know how long Gort at Gort42 has been doing his "YouTube Weekend" posts, but it might possibly have been since before my friend John built me a computer that was capable of playing YouTube videos. It may go back to this post, which doesn't actually contain an embedded video, or it may have started even earlier.

The idea is pretty simple, as contained in this post:

It will be another light and lazy weekend. I'll just surf YouTube and share what I find just like last weekend.

(Oddly enough, the YouTube videos Gort had posted the previous weekend were a clip of the Zapruder film of John F. Kennedy being shot in the head, and "Seconds" - a song/video that incorporates bits about JFK's final hours - by the Human League. Not exactly the fun stuff I've come to associate with Gort's YouTube Weekends.)

Like Garfield Minus Garfield, this idea has legs: instead of doing a full post for a weekend, just do a quick post that includes a favorite video for the weekend. I've been doing it for a while, inspired in part by Gort, and in part by Michael Plank's Content, which has long featured YouTube videos - though, like Michael Plank, I don't restrict my video postings to weekends, and I often do the video posts in addition to, rather than in place of, my regular posts. (Some of my video posts are wordier than my non-video posts!)

Jen has gotten into the act at Jennifer D. Wade Journal. Marc at Wilkes-Barre Online has put his own spin on the YouTube Weekend with his Video Flapdoodle - see the first two entries here and here. Now even Bill at Bill's Notes has taken to posting YouTube videos with this weekend's posts. Twenty-seven YouTube videos, over the course of seven posts, all posted today. That's...rather a lot.

I'll leave you with a video. This is a home-made video, by a teenage girl in Glasgow, Scotland. It's a video for "When You Sleep" by My Bloody Valentine. "When You Sleep" is possibly MBV's most upbeat song. I've always thought of it as a "Summer Song", the sort of song I could imagine blasting out of a car as it rolls down the street, or out of a boom box while you're washing your car. The video is just her and her friends screwing around, but the style, the blocking, the editing, the matching up of video to audio, the use of in-camera imagery and speed changes to create special effects (check out the trampoline-and-lens-flare starting at 2:08), the everything is just gorgeous. It perfectly captures the feel of the song. If this girl does not go on to pursue a career in this, the world will be the poorer for it.

"When You Sleep" by My Bloody Valentine , video by lithiumkx:

Photos on MySpace

I've just uploaded nearly a dozen additional photos to my MySpace site. (This link should take you directly to the photos, though your life will be vastly enriched and encoolend by hanging out on my main page and listening to all of "It's Bad You Know" by R.L. Burnside.) These photos are, for the most part, nothing that hasn't already been posted on this blog. (And I just realized you might not be able to see them at all unless you have a MySpace account and have signed in. Damn you, Rupert Murdoch!)

One thing hit me while posting them.

Photos like this represent a moment in time captured photographically. This was a Saturday afternoon in November of 2005 - November 12, to be exact. I had just given my 72nd pint of blood and had decided to stop and take advantage of the beautiful Fall weather and the still-bright leaves on the ground while coming back with my traditional post-donation Chinese food. As I was heading back to my car after taking the photos a friend's father stopped by and asked what I was up to. We chatted for a while. Then I went home and almost immediately posted the photo.

My realization today was that anyone can try to recreate this photo, if only they knew where to stand. Using Google Earth, I was able to work out the exact location of the intersection of Washington and Walnut Streets where I took this picture. To within a few yards, the picture was taken at 41° 11' 51.42" N, 75° 59' 48.77" W.

You may notice from the Google Earth image above (rotated to approximately match the photo's orientation) that to get this photo I needed to be standing in the intersection, risking my life for my art and your entertainment*. Should you decide to try to reproduce this photo and venture to this very spot, GPS tracker in one hand and camera in the other, be careful not to get your fool self run over. You have been warned.

*ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?

Gotta launder my karma

Well, no, I don't. At least, I don't think I do.

I think of Michael Plank as an alternate-universe version of me. Not that we've led parallel lives or anything, but we have very similar tastes in music. My first thought on realizing this would normally be, "Well, that's Generation X for you", but other members of our demographically insignificant generation - including Gort, Jen, and Michael Plank's sister-in-law, Anne from Almost Quintessence - sometimes have very different musical tastes from my own.

(Which is not to say my tastes don't overlap with those others. They do, a lot. But more often than not I get even the most obscure musical references Michael Plank throws out.)

This video, which I have lifted from a recent post on Michael Plank's Content, isn't obscure. At least I don't think it is. It used to get heavy airplay on MTV back in the days when MTV etc. etc., you know how that sentence ends. It's a nice, fun little ditty, with a higher-than-average amount of BDSM imagery thrown in, and one naughty adjective cut out. The song is "Battle Flag" by the Lo Fidelity Allstars.


For some reason that song links in my mind to another, very different song. I think it's because I once put them on the same mix disc, one after another. That song is "Porcelain" by Moby.

Note: This is, I believe, an "unofficial" video for this song, though it looks all kinds of professional. I vastly prefer it to the "official" version of the video - I think it captures the feelings of longing, loss, emptiness, and hope in the face of hopelessness perfectly. I was originally planning on bemoaning my dissatisfaction with the "official" video, and was going to note that the beat brought the DNA remix of "Tom's Diner" by Suzanne Vega to mind, and that the imagery from that video seemed to fit the Moby song better than the eyeball-in-space stuff. But this "unofficial" video made such a comment unnecessary. Almost.

Finally, for some reason "Battle Flag" brings another video to mind, from the days of MTV's 120 Minutes and Alternative Nation. It's a brilliant video for an OK song. But it's by Spike Jonze, so would you expect anything less? The band is Wax, the song is "Southern California":


BONUS BONUS BONUS: Because I love this commercial (which I only ever saw once on TV) so much, and because it took me a while to think of searching for "Spike Jonze Y2K" on YouTube, I'm throwing this Nike commercial by Spike Jonze in as a bonus. This commercial was one of the things I thought of whenever I saw commercials for Cloverfield, and it probably helped inspire bits of Shawn of the Dead:

One year ago yesterday...

...I lost my job.

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end

It's been a long, rough year since then. I never imagined that I would someday find myself collecting Unemployment, but in fact I did, for quite a long while. I always somehow thought there were other, comparable jobs in this area that I could step into with relative ease...but there aren't. Things on the outside world are a lot harder and scarier than I would have believed.

It wasn't just me, of course. A lot of people lost their jobs at my company on February 27, 2007. Besides me, four other people from my department (which had had 13 employees, down from a high of about 20 in our heyday in 2001 or thereabouts) also were informed that their services would no longer be needed.

Two of us eventually went back to work at the company in other positions, for considerably less pay. Two others have found jobs outside the company. The fifth, I believe, has decided to take the opportunity to be a full-time grandmother, though I don't know exactly what she is up to right now.

It's hard. The company lost a lot of talent a year ago, and a vast amount of goodwill and employee loyalty. And those of us who have been forced to take jobs that pay less than we were earning back then - 1/3 less, in my case - are facing at the very least financial hardship in the form of greatly reduced discretionary income, the spreading-around money that goes into savings or, as is more often the case, is pumped back into the economy. And when less money is being saved and less money is being spent, the economy as a whole suffers.

(I almost completely forgot about this anniversary until a friend reminded me of it. My current job involves day-after data analysis for our facility, so I tend to be living one day in the past. But, honestly, today I would have remembered it. Besides, another post topic came up yesterday.)


Enough of this glum stuff! Time to jump on the bandwagon for something I've known about for a while. Last Friday, Michelle from mhryvnak.net/blog/ sent me this message:

mhryvnak (6:53:28 PM): i think you'd like this
mhryvnak (6:53:30 PM): http://garfieldminusgarfield.tumblr.com/
mhryvnak (6:53:35 PM): i got it off of a fellow blogger
DataBoy Echo (7:12:55 PM): Oh MY GOD! That's brilliant! Who would've thought that Garfield was the strip's lone anchor to sanity?
mhryvnak (7:16:57 PM): lol
mhryvnak (7:17:06 PM): i knew of all people you'd appreciate it
DataBoy Echo (7:17:49 PM): I have to pass that on to the Comics Curmudgeon crowd! Can I credit you, and post your blog address?
mhryvnak (7:18:06 PM): if you want, but really i grabbed it from loafe.com

So pass it on I did.

Harold, Christian Single und die Rheintöchter says:
February 22nd, 2008 at 7:54 pm
I just got this from a friend, and a Google site search suggests that it hasn’t been mentioned here before…

What do you get when you remove Garfield from Garfield? You get the site Garfield Minus Garfield!

http://garfieldminusgarfield.tumblr.com/

“Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolor disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life?”

It’s a lot scary to think that Garfield is this strip’s main anchor to reality!

This past Tuesday, Josh at The Comics Curmudgeon featured the Garfield Minus Garfield site in a blog post. That same day Francesco Marciuliano, writer of the comic strip Sally Forth, also featured the site on his blog and put his own spin on it: Sally Forth Minus Sally Forth. And today Bill at Bill's Notes posted about the site, which he heard about from here.

This thing, as they say, has legs - a phrase which has nothing to do with walking and everything to do with hard liquor. But that is a post for another time. For now, just kick back and enjoy Garfield Minus Garfield. And thanks for letting me know about it, Michelle!

The Courage of a Priest

This is an open letter to Joseph Martino, Bishop of the Diocese of Scranton, which appeared in today's Citizens' Voice. It was written by Reverend Patrick Sullivan, who, according to the information tagged at the end,"teaches sociology and theology at King’s College with an emphasis on labor issues (and) has written two books and is working on two more." The tag fails to mention that he occasionally fills in to say Mass at congregations where forced retirements are creating an artificial priest shortage, such as at my own. It also fails to mention, for some reason, that one of his sermons once once inspired me to write a blog post ("Shepherds and Sheep", February 3, 2007.) His letter concerns an ongoing dispute between the Bishop and the Catholic teachers of the diocese.

(Note: I do not know if a few apparent typos were in the original, or were perhaps introduced when the letter was reset for publication - perhaps by a dim-witted spellchecking program. I have refrained from correcting them.)

Bishop should allow teachers to belong to a real union
02/27/2008

Editor: The following is a letter I (Reverend Sullivan) wrote to Bishop Joseph Martino, head of the Diocese of Scranton.

Dear Bishop Martino:

I write you publicly with great reluctance, as a priest of more than fifty years and as a teacher, researcher and activist of the Catholic Church’s ministry in labor-management relations for more than thirty years. However, after four efforts – offering assistance to your education staff, a personal letter to you, a letter to the Papal Nuncio, and a telephone request to chat with you, there has been only silence or refusal. I would have preferred to chat with you privately, person-to-person.

Your public statement reveals the handiwork of the management consultant firm hired to establish an “Employee Relations Program,” which is widely recognized simply as a “company union.” The phenomenon appeared in the early 20th century with the so-called “American Plan,” well articulated by oil magnate John D. Rockefeller. Patricia Cayo Sexton’s The War on Labor and the Left said, “Under the labor relations plan advanced by Rockefeller, barriers between employers and employees would dissolve, and the two opposing teams would become one – the company’s. Representing this solidarity would be the company unions.” [p. 209]

I need not rehearse the teaching of Leo XIII, the U.S. Bishops’ 1919 Pastoral, Pius XI and John A. Ryan in support of real unions. However, do recall that the 1971 World Synod of Bishops said those who preach social justice must first be just in their own
eyes, a corollary of which is support of real unions in Catholic institutions. The U.S. Bishops issued a pastoral on health care in the 1970s, which affirmed the right of all hospital workers to form their own union, despite financial challenges to those institutions. When Southeast Bishops (Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia) endorsed the J. P. Stevens Boycott in 1980, they did not support a “company union” but a real union, the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union. In 1981 when Pope John Paul II wrote Laborem Exercens (Human Labor) and said labor unions are indispensable in an industrialized world, he did not mean “company unions.” When the U.S. Catholic Bishops issued their 1986 Pastoral, “Economic Justice for All,” they supported real unions, not “company unions.”

“Company unions” abound in recent experiments in labor-management relations programs with such attractive titles as “Quality Work Circles,” “Human Resource Departments,” etc. Some have been successful when employees have a “bona-fide” grievance procedure, i.e. recourse to independent “outsiders” or to arbitration. Too often, such “company unions” gladly accept employees’ creative ideas but reluctantly their grievances. In your Employee Relations Program not only is the moral right of workers to form their own union taken away, but their moral right as adults to negotiate their wages, benefits, working hours, working conditions, job tenure (hiring and firing) and grievance procedure. Without those rights, the employees’ jobs and livelihood are at stake and they are afraid to speak out, to protest, to strike. Such company unions are referred to as modern day feudalism or worse. This intrinsic human right of workers to organize themselves was derived in no small measure as an antidote to the fear and intimidation which workers suffer in the policies and treatment of unfair, unjust, dictatorial and other oppressive employers.

You insist that the financial status of the Scranton Diocese is so fragile that a real union might bring about the collapse of the entire diocesan educational system. Yes, there is fragility, but why must the teachers have to suffer financially and be denied not only their moral right to unionize, but also their moral right to an adequate living wage – a bedrock of Catholic social teaching? Granted parents have a right to the Catholic education of their children. However, if parents cannot pay more tuition and the wider Catholic population of the diocese is unwilling or unable to contribute more money to the costs of its school system, the teachers still have a right to ample and detailed information, to forego their moral rights to form a union and to receive an adequate living wage. Your action pits the one right of parents against the two rights of the Scranton Diocesan Association of Catholic Teachers (SDACT) members. Furthermore, many teachers are already holding two jobs or living in four or five income families. Thus, a third right is challenged – the practice of Catholic family values.

Consequently, in canon law and justice there is an even greater burden of proof than alleged in the original and subsequent public statements. Records should be available not only to these dedicated teachers seeking a union, but also to the entire community. Otherwise, credibility is at stake. In your original statement you referred to the teachers’ association as selfish (recently revised to “self interested”) and unconcerned about the financial viability of the diocesan educational “ministry” -- the usual “pitch” of management consultants! The proof of such an outlandish charge beggars, unless the records of negotiation sessions and financial details are presented to the public. Otherwise, an unjust accusation is made about the teachers. Thus, what steps has the diocese taken to establish or enhance an endowment for Catholic education, as some dioceses have done? What steps has the diocese taken to enlist the support of interested and competent lay people to contribute and/or elicit donations and to guide diocesan financial and personnel policies, without the bias of a profit-making management consultant firm?

Such statements also reveal the management consultants’ slight-of-hand about unions today as passé, especially in non-profit organizations and/or service industries, such as education and health care. In the early 1970s the U.S. government did not think so when it placed health care under the Wagner Act.

Also, public and non-religious educational institutions are covered by many state laws. The United States Supreme Court decision to exempt religious schools from coverage by the National Labor Relations Board was based not on separation of church and state, but the failure of the Wagner Act to cover religious elementary and secondary education. The court punted! However, immediately after that decision there were weak efforts to seek an amendment to the Wagner Act and to establish diocesan personnel programs which included real unions, not “company unions.” However, such never ensued, because Catholic educational administrators in most dioceses failed to heed the urgings of the U.S. Catholic Conference (USCC) and the National Catholic Education Association (NCEA).

Now is the time for the Scranton Diocese to be creative. Whatever the arguments and differences, the feelings and memories of the past, let there begin again negotiations with mutual respect and cordiality. Add to the admonition that unions in Catholic institutions should be of a higher caliber than in industry or commerce, that so should the employers! If it means conciliation, meditation or arbitration, let the Scranton Diocese take the steps necessary to recognize and negotiate with the Scranton Diocese Association of Catholic Teachers.

An effective response would be to implement the creative “gain sharing” model of the respected former President of Scranton University and Catholic University, the distinguished economist and ethicist of “work and management,” Fr. William Byron, S.J., in Labor-Management Relations: A Catholic Perspective, edited several years ago by the present Cardinal of Detroit, Adam Maida.

Otherwise, the Diocese of Scranton will fail to heed the 1976 warning of the U.S. Catholic Church’s labor-management expert, the late Msgr. George G. Higgins.

Namely, in stalling for time in dealing with collective bargaining Catholic school administrators “will be asking for serious trouble and will do irreparable harm to the reputations of the Catholic school system and of the Church as a whole in the United States.”

One year later in 1977, the United States Catholic Conference, Subcommittee on Teacher Organizations’ conclusion, with the Administrative Board’s approval, was that the concept of the “community of faith” – to teach as Jesus teaches — should persuade school administrators to accept and welcome employee initiatives, to establish their own teacher organizations.

The church has already suffered from too many losses and scandals. May we not add more pain and shame!

(Rev.) Patrick J. Sullivan, C.S.C., Ph.D.

(Rev. Sullivan teaches sociology and theology at King’s College with an emphasis on labor issues. He has written two books and is working on two more.)

My own perception of Bishop Martino is that he is a shutdown manager, in the model of "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap. Dunlap was brought in as a crisis manager to companies in distress, whereupon he would make deep cuts, fire large numbers of people, and often leave the companies in worse shape than they were when he came to them. Martino has come to a diocese undergoing a transitional period, as a large proportion of many congregations...well, is old and dying, to put it bluntly, and the younger parishioners are moving out of the area almost as fast as they are leaving the Catholic Church, for reasons related more to a general crisis in the Church than to anything specifically happening locally (though the national scandal of pedophile priests has also struck home here), and at the same time a large number of immigrants - many of them legal, and from New York City - are placing an added burden on diocesan services.

Martino has responded to these crises by cutting back on services to the sick and elderly, closing parishes - again cutting back on services to those too old or infirm to travel to any parish church other than the one they had been attending - and consolidating Catholic schools throughout the Diocese into a centralized location, requiring miles of bus rides for students from outlying areas. (When it was pointed out that the student capacity of the consolidated school was considerably less than the combined attendance at the schools being consolidated, Martino - or his representative, I don't recall - simply noted that they were counting on a lot of students not staying in the Catholic school system after consolidation.)

On a personal note, I attended my cousin's son's Confirmation last year. It was a combined-parish Confirmation, and it was held at the church with the largest seating capacity in the area. But when these churches were built, having a parking lot with spaces to hold all the cars that would be used by all the people in the church was not a consideration - so people wound up having to park up to several blocks away. Elderly and infirm grandparents had to hobble through the rain just to get to the church - only to find that the church was filled beyond capacity, and was now standing room only. (Church pews do not make it easy for anyone not at the ends to give up their seat to someone whose need is greater.) To add insult to insult, the bishop - Martino himself, deigning to grace the boondocks with His Most Excellent Presence rather than sending an assistant bishop - decided to be fashionably late, strolling into the church a good ten or fifteen minutes after the designated start time for the Mass. He then commented on how wonderful it was to see the church so full of people, apparently not bothering to notice all the old folks forced to stand in the back whom he had just made stand even longer.

One criticizes a member of the Church hierarchy only at grave peril to your own standing as a Catholic - for the Bishops have the right to excommunicate those whom they so choose. Criticism is always welcome as a way of presenting yourself for chastisement - the correction of errors on the part of the flock by the priesthood. For a priest to criticize a bishop in so open a manner is almost unheard-of, and will likely lead to grave consequences. I salute his courage.