I've got a new blog (that you can't see!)

I've been involved with the Northeastern Pennsylvania Writers' Collective for over a year now. I've written numerous poems, short stories, and fragments for the group, and I have quite a bit of writing that was done before I met them. Most of these stories and poems are scattered in files throughout my hard drive and printouts here and there.

Two immediate concerns come to mind when it comes to writing: how do I make sure I can't lose it, and how can I find it when I need it? I've had an answer to both of these questions for a while, and I've been offering it as a suggestion to other people: Put all your stories and poems in a blog created just for your writing.  This way, even if you lose your home computer, laptop, or story discs, your writing is still safely stored in the cloud. (Well, not exactly safely, but we'll get to that shortly.) And you don't need to lug your writing anywhere as long as you can access your blog. Index it properly, and you'll be able to find your stories and poems quickly!

One problem comes to mind: What if you don't want to share your writing just yet? Or at all? What if these are stories you'd like to submit for publication someday, and don't want to see floating around the internet? That's easily fixed: lots of blogging platforms offer a wide array of privacy options, from a blog opened to invited readers only to a blog only accessible by the blog author. For now, that's the setting I have on my new blog.

Which presents another problem: backing up. Most blogging platforms have some mechanism built in to allow the blog author to back up the blog, and most blogs are automatically archived in one way or another. But not if the blog is set to private, with only the blog author able to see the posts, then the author must back up manually.

That's an inconvenience I'm willing to accept, for the moment. I'll gradually be posting all of my poems, stories, and fragments to this new blog, one which only I can see. In the future, I may add some readers.But for now, it will just be me!

Scranton playwright K.K. Gordon to have play performed in New York City

Scranton poet and playwright K.K. Gordon has had one of his plays selected to be performed in a competition at the American Globe Theatre in New York City. "Real Friends Help You Move" will be presented on Wednesday, April 24.

Read all the details here:

Northeast Pennsylvania Writers' Collective: K.K. Gordon's "Real Friends Help You Move" to be performed at the American Globe Theatre in New York

Unauthentic Irish Stew

I made this the other day, and I liked it. My mom didn't like the rosemary, though. The rosemary is what makes it unauthentic; you can use parsley instead, or nothing at all.

I don't measure anything, so all measurements are rough guesses.

1 lb lamb tenderloins, cubed
1/4 cup of flour
2 tbs. olive oil
1 cup water (plus more water)
Salt
Pepper
Garlic salt
Onion salt
Rosemary
5-6 large potatoes
Carrots (equal in volume to potatoes)
Onion

1. Peel and dice the potatoes (or leave the skins on for extra fiber) and carrots.
2. Coarsely chop onion.
3. Cube lamb. I used tenderloins because that's what I pulled out of the back of the freezer.
4. Put flour in plastic bag. Add salt, pepper, garlic salt, onion salt, and rosemary.
5. Add cubed lamb and shake until thoroughly covered.
6. In large stew pot with heavy bottom, heat olive oil at medium-high heat.
7. Add half of onions and saute briefly.
8. Add cubed lamb. Saute several minutes until browned on all sides, stirring constantly.
9. After lamb has thoroughly browned and flour is beginning to stick to bottom of pot, slowly add water until all lamb is covered.
10. Add potatoes, carrots, and rest of onion.
11. Add more rosemary, and other spices as desired.
12. Add water to cover all vegetables.
13. Simmer at medium for at least one hour.
14. Refrigerate leftovers. Flavors will continue to combine in leftovers, and Rosemary may become more pronounced.

Updates and upcoming

1. The Northeastern Pennsylvania Writers' Collective will be holding its Poetry Night on Thursday, February 21 at The Vintage in Scranton, 326 Spruce Street, starting at 8:30 PM. Details can be found here.

2. The next NEPA BlogFest will be held Friday, April 19 at Rooney's in Pittston, starting at 6:00. Details can be found here.

3. Germany has a much higher rate of solar power production than the United States, and FOX News reveals the shocking reason why: Germany gets more sunlight than the U.S.! ...Wait, it doesn't? Well, FOX has never let facts get in the way before. See my post on NEPA Solar for more information.

I just wrote a long short story called "Canaan" for my writing group. I have the rest of the week to do rewrites before I present it. I'm very happy with it. It's pseudo-hard science fiction, so we'll see how it plays...

Meanwhile, I have some actual blog posts planned for here. With all the stuff I've been doing on various other blogs, I've been ignoring this one for too long. I'm hoping to end that soon.

UGI's safety record: "downright alarming" and "patently unacceptable"

UGI is Pennsylvania's largest gas utility. After Hurricane Irene knocked out electric service to tens of thousands of residents of Northeastern Pennsylvania in August 2011, the slow response and lack of preparedness by UGI's electric division meant that UGI's electricity customers found themselves without power long after customers of other utilities had rejoined the modern world.

UGI was featured in two articles in the Wilkes-Barre Citizens' Voice this past Friday, January 25. The first appeared on page 10, and had to do with UGI deciding to go ahead with plans to construct a pipeline, despite a denial of a "special exception" that would allow them to construct a gas compressor station that would be tied in to the pipeline.


UGI pushes ahead with pipeline plans
BY ELIZABETH SKRAPITS (STAFF WRITER)
Published: January 25, 2013

Although plans for a natural gas compressor station in West Wyoming are temporarily on hold, UGI Energy Services still plans to construct a pipeline that will provide UGI Penn Natural Gas customers with gas from Northeastern Pennsylvania's Marcellus Shale.

"We're moving forward with the pipeline regardless," said Kevin Kelleher, manager of producer services for UGI Energy Services Inc. in Wyomissing.

The company plans to run approximately 28 miles of 24-inch diameter pipeline from an existing facility in Washington Township, Wyoming County, to connect to a UGI utility line and the Transco interstate pipeline in West Wyoming.

UGI is obtaining required state permits, including from the Department of Environmental Protection. The company hopes to begin clearing the right-of-way in the spring, with the bulk of pipeline construction to take place during summer and early fall, Kelleher said.


...The route, as drawn up by Quad3 Group, starts at UGI's Washington Township facility and runs through Eaton and Northmoreland townships in Wyoming County.

In Luzerne County, the route goes through Franklin Township, under Cummings, Brace, Village, Sutton and Ridge roads, then crosses West Eighth Street and Coon Road. It then goes into Kingston Township beneath Mount Olivet Road, skirts Frances Slocum State Park and goes under Carverton Road and then into West Wyoming.

(full article)

Meanwhile, three pages later, we see this article from the AP about what people living in the vicinity of this pipeline can expect in the future:


Pa. fines utility $500K over blast that killed 5
By PETER JACKSON, Associated Press

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Utility regulators voted on Thursday to fine Pennsylvania's largest gas utility $500,000 for a 2011 natural gas explosion that killed five people in Allentown and called the company's safety record "downright alarming."

The Public Utility Commission unanimously approved modifications to a settlement with UGI Corp. that boosted the civil fine from $386,000 to the maximum allowed by law at the time of the explosion.

The settlement also requires the Reading, Pa.-based company to replace all its cast iron pipelines within 14 years and to expand and enhance its testing and monitoring programs.

The thunderous blast, which was traced to a crack in a cast iron gas main, killed five people, flattened a pair of rowhouses and set fire to a block of homes late one night in February 2011. Utility workers toiled for five hours to punch through ice, asphalt and concrete and seal the 12-inch main with foam to stop the flow of gas.

In their joint motion to modify the settlement, PUC Chairman Robert Powelson and Vice Chairman John Coleman said UGI's record of safety compliance is "patently unacceptable."

"This is the eighth time in slightly more than four years that this commission has adjudicated a matter containing allegations of gas safety violations by a UGI-owned gas distribution utility," they said. "This goes beyond cause for concern; it is downright alarming."


(full article)

Do you think anyone living near this new pipeline has any cause for concern? Living here in coal country, we know firsthand how concerned utilities are about cleaning up their messes after the boom goes bust. Will the gas industry be any different from the coal industry?

Pecha Kucha Night January 26 at the Vintage

Another event at the Vintage in Scranton! Read all about it here! I will be presenting "A Brief History of NEPA Blogs"! Michelle Hryvnak Davies and several other NEPA bloggers will also be presenting!

http://nepablogs.blogspot.com/2013/01/pecha-kucha-returns-to-vintage-in.html

Poetry Night Thursday, January 17 at The Vintage in Scranton

The Northeastern Pennsylvania Writers Collective will be hosting its monthly Open Mic Poetry Night at The Vintage, 326 Spruce Street in Scranton, on Thursday, January 17. Go here for more details.

NEPA Blogs maintenance

Longtime readers - or new readers who casually glance at my sidebar - may be aware that this isn't my only blog. I've got several others, but one of the most significant is NEPA Blogs, a blog dedicated to blogs and blogging in Northeastern Pennsylvania. I've recounted the history of that site numerous times, so I won't do it again now - though I am planning to do it in a few weeks when I do a Pecha Kucha presentation on the history of NEPA Blogs. Which means I have to gather up twenty images, and be prepared to speak about each for twenty seconds. Ohboy.

NEPA Blogs is still running on a Blogger/Blogspot platform. This is mainly due to my inertia: I know Blogger, I don't know Wordpress, which is a platform that a lot of people are insisting we need to move it to. I'm not really ready to learn a whole new system at the moment, and I imagine transferring over every previous post, every link, and every comment would be an enormous undertaking. On top of that, it seems like every Wordpress blog I know of has gotten hacked or infected at one time or another. In fact, an alert just went out that many Wordpress blogs are vulnerable to data theft because of a security flaw in a popular plug-in. Fun.

But Blogger has some limitations. Google (the owner of Blogger) has taken a standard approach to complaints about issues: provide a forum for users to complain about issues, state that the issues are being dealt with, delete all the complaints, and redesign the complaint forum. Maybe the issue will be dealt with, maybe not.

One of those limitations wouldn't even be an issue for most bloggers, but it is for NEPA Blogs. Blogger allows you to have "live links" on your sidebar that link to both the primary page of the linked site and the latest post as presented by the site's RSS feed. A nice feature of this is that the links will arrange themselves so the most recently updated sites appear at the top. We use this as a way of displaying all the blogs linked by NEPA Blogs, with the most recently-updated blogs appearing at the top of the list. This provides an incentive of sorts for bloggers to frequently update their sites: the most recently-updated sites bubble to the top of the list, while the sites that haven't updated lately sink to the bottom.

We discovered some time ago that there's a limit on how many blogs could be on one of these lists. After that limit is exceeded, adding a new blog would cause another blog to drop to the bottom of the list with no link to a current post. We were never quite clear on what this limit was - it may be somewhere around 120 blogs.

At first we dealt with this by arbitrarily assigning new blogs to a second list. But this meant that the most recently updated blogs on the second list would appear below the oldest blogs on the first list. It wasn't fair to the new blogs, which would never have the exposure of any blogs on list 1.

So we came up with a new approach: list 1 would contain all of the blogs that had updated within a certain time frame. List 2 would contain blogs that had not updated within that limit. Some trial and error determined that two months was a good cutoff. Active blogs had generally updated within two months. Blogs that had not updated in the past two months were likely not being updated anytime soon. Some more trial and error led us to create a third list of blogs that hadn't been updated in over a year. Blogs that haven't been updated in two months sometimes come back, but blogs that haven't been updated in a year rarely come back.

This has turned out to be a pretty good system. Every month or so I need to move a few blogs from List 1 to List 2, and a few from List 2 back to List 1. Every few months I need to move a few blogs from List 2 to List 3, and very, very rarely I need to move a blog from List 3 back to List 1.

I haven't done this in a few months. Since October, maybe.

Today I had to move thirty-two blogs from List 1 to List 2.

That wasn't the end of it. I also had to move about seven blogs from List 2 - and one from List 3! - back to List 1. So the net effect is that List 1 has moved about twenty-four slots away from being completely full. We have lots of blogs still to be added, mostly from the NEPA BlogCon that co-administrator Michelle and the rest of the Fearsome Foursome ran so effectively back in September.  While every blog starts off on List 1, many of these blogs haven't been updated in two months or more, so they will be moved to List 2 at the earliest opportunity.

Meanwhile, we're faced with the issue of presenting a new "Blog of the Week" on WBRE's PA Live! every Tuesday. We've been doing this almost every week for the past sixteen months. With over sixty blogs showcased so far, we've already picked most of the low-hanging fruit. Some of the remaining blogs will not be showcased due to content - featuring nudity or obscenity on your front page is a pretty sure way to not have your blog shown on TV. We probably won't showcase others that are almost certain to offend the PA Live! viewing audience, or blogs that haven't been updated in a long time, or simply don't have much general appeal. At some point I worry that we will be presenting fashion blogs, week after week. (At least those that don't have any nudity on the front page!)

Blogging isn't dead, as far as I can tell, though a lot of the bloggers I met online back in 2004 when I first got started have dropped out of blogging in the past few years. I truly intend to start paying more attention to Another Monkey, but I will continue to put some effort into NEPA Blogs as well.

A warning to Pinterest users: Redbook may steal your ideas

(UPDATE, 1/1/13: According to Jen, Redbook is promising to make things right, and according to Michelle, I got some things wrong. UPDATE UPDATE: And Jen got something wrong, too! See updates at bottom.)

The first time I ever saw anything from Pinterest I had no idea what the site was about. It was a photo of cakes baked in mugs. Ohh, I see, it's a place where people creatively use mugs - pint mugs? - to...ummm...make cakes? Which I suppose made as much sense as it being a place for people to discuss the works of Harold Pinter, which I also considered a possibility.

Michelle Hryvnak Davies, co-administrator at NEPA Blogs and Queen of All Media, Social or Otherwise, tried to drag me into the world of Pinterest last year when she added a Pinterest component to the NEPA Blogs media empire. Which I still didn't understand; by this point I had determined that Pinterest was some sort of image posting site (though there were already, like, a billion of those at the time) merged with a social network, all of which for some reason appealed overwhelmingly to those of the female persuasion. It also now was coming across as some sort of creative-works outlet, which seemed like an odd fit for a blog about blogging in Northeastern Pennsylvania, but whatever. Even when Michelle and local blogger Karla Porter went on Blue Ridge Communication's ComputerWise TV to do a full hour-long program on Pinterest I still didn't understand - though it didn't help that I fell asleep early on and woke up right at the end. I was exhausted from work. (See updates below.)

So gradually I've worked out that Pinterest is an image posting and sharing site merged with a social network, designed to allow people to share and showcase their creativity and see the creativity of others. Unlike, say, Flickr or DeviantArt these aren't just photos or artistic creations; these are, for the most part, creative projects that can inspire others to their own projects, or even be recreated by other people. Like, say, cakes baked in mugs. It's not just that, so NEPA Blogs can post our blog headers and whatnot and still not be tossed off the site, but it's mostly creative works, being posted and "pinned" and "repinned." Sometimes with attribution, more often - like photos on Tumblr - without.

There are a lot of creative people out there. A lot of people who invest a lot of effort into their creativity. A lot of people who deserve credit for their creativity.

And there are some people out there who want to skim off the best ideas, repost them, and claim them as their own.

Redbook magazine has just done that to one of the biggest names in blogging.

Jen Yates is the blogger behind the wildly popular Cake Wrecks site and the author of two books based on that blog. She also has a spinoff blog, EPBOT, that provides an outlet for her non-cake-related stuff. On this site she also features some creative projects and tutorials, the sort of stuff that finds its way to her Pinterest site. As with her blog, her Pinterest posts tend to have broad general appeal and are enormously popular.

In a recent article, Redbook magazine copied some of the most popular Pinterest posts, created  artwork from the posted photos in an apparent attempt to avoid copyright issues, and presented them without attribution.

EPBOT: Shame On You, Redbook Magazine

Now, this is a dickish maneuver to begin with. But what makes it entirely douchey - perhaps unintentionally douchey, but douchey nonetheless - is the fact that the project of Jen's that Redbook stole and reprinted without attribution was one that was scheduled to be presented with attribution in an upcoming edition of Better Homes & Gardens Good Housekeeping.

You may get the sense that bloggers - especially successful bloggers - see themselves as New Media hotshots who look down upon the Old Media, especially the "dead trees" media of newspapers, books, and magazines.  But nothing could be further from the truth. Most bloggers I know consider it to be the height of success to get your work presented in published form, on paper. Newspaper and magazine articles are considered incredibly valuable for getting the word out about your blog to new audiences, audiences that might otherwise never hear about your blog. So having the opportunity to get her work featured and credited in Better Homes & Gardens Good Housekeeping was extremely important to Jen. Now that may not happen at all, since Redbook has effectively scooped the article by publishing the details of the project first. Will Better Homes & Gardens Good Housekeeping cancel the article? Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, Redbook claims that it is planning a response to the numerous messages it has received complaining about this situation. Do they plan to make this right? Or will they hunker down and claim that once an idea is published to the Internet it becomes public  domain?

Whatever happens, be warned: if you're posting the fruits of your creative efforts on a site like Pinterest, you might just be making it easier for someone else to come along, steal them, and claim them as their own.


UPDATES:

1. Jen has posted a response from Redbook that promises to make things right:

EPBOT: Redbook Makes It Right

Jen is satisfied with this response, so I guess we can put away the pitchforks and torches. For now.

2. Michelle pointed out that I have mashed together two episodes of ComputerWise TV from the past year: One which Michelle and Karla went on to promote the NEPA BlogCon, and one that featured Michelle by herself talking about Pinterest.

3. Jen misidentified Good Housekeeping, the magazine slated to feature her project, as Better Homes and Gardens in her original post. 

As 2012 draws to a close

It's weird: the Winter Solstice marks the point when days start to get longer, just like the Summer Solstice is the point where days start to get shorter. We're on an upswing now, but it doesn't feel like it.

I haven't been blogging much, at all. Not here, not on NEPA Blogs, not on any of my other blogs. I'd like to say it's because I've been writing, but I haven't been writing much. (One of the short stories that I wrote is being developed into a play by an award-wining playwright, so that's something.) I have been doing some art stuff for NEPA Blogs, creating headers. That used to take a few minutes per header with my old Adobe PhotoDeluxe software that came bundled with my printer. (Or was it my scanner?) But I lost that when I got hit with a virus a few weeks ago. A lot of people suggested I downloaded GIMP, but that has turned out to be a clunky, unintuitive program that tries to do a lot of things but doesn't make any of them simple. (You want to change the transparency of text in GIMP? Just follow these twelve steps, each of which involves learning a new facet of the program. You want to change the transparency in PhotoDeluxe? Just enter the percentage transparency desired in this little box.) So I worked on the next NEPA Blogs header for about four hours last night. It would have taken, at worst, a half hour with PhotoDeluxe, mainly because I wouldn't have had to throw everything away and start over each time I made a mistake.

When I worked at the DVD factory I wasn't blogging much because I would come home physically spent after working twelve hours a night on my feet and running, with nearly an hour in the car on either end. Now I spend eight hours sitting with an easy commute of ten minutes or less, and I come home completely exhausted. On each call we take, whether it's thirty seconds or two hours, we're supposed to "connect" with the customer. Technically we're just supposed to make some small talk regarding their travel and provide some feedback to the customer. In practice this can turn into an emotionally draining exercise. Doing that on call after call for eight hours or more gets to you after a while.

This may be my last post for 2012. I don't know. I'll have limited access to the internet for the next week or so. I'm working two hours tomorrow (it's a long story, and I could have had the whole day off, but I chose not to), I'm off on Christmas, working Wednesday and Thursday, off on Friday and the weekend, and then I'm working 10:30 AM-5:00 PM New Year's Eve and, I think, New Year's Day. (Unless that's a full eight-hour day.) I still have three hours of vacation coming to me.

Resolutions for the New Year? The usual. Being able to say "Oh, I'm a writer, and an award-winning playwright is developing one of my short stories into a play" may help me with one of those resolutions. Plus I will try to blog more, and write more. Blogging isn't dead, so I shouldn't act like it is.

Merry Christmas. Spare a moment to think about all those families that have just buried children they thought would be opening presents on Christmas morning. And in the New Year, why don't we resolve to make sure this thing doesn't happen again?

Funny postponed

I've been slacking off on posting lately. In part I feel like I've said everything I have to say here for the moment - not that I'm done saying, but I'm gathering up my thoughts for later. I continue to find this blog an incredibly valuable reference for reflecting upon the things I've said previously.

I've got some posts in development. One is "Some thoughts on rereading Harlan Ellison." There's a story there in just how I came to be rereading Harlan. I'm not likely to forget that post, and since I'm still rereading the book I'm rereading, it would be premature to write this now.

The other is something genuinely funny, and weird, and uncanny, even. A song that I thought - have thought, since the first time I heard it - was by a band that I didn't really like turns out to be by a musician I really do like. My perception of the song changed when I thought I was hearing a remake of the song by this other artist, and I decided that this version was superior to the original. Then I discovered that this was the original - the only version of the song. So the lame old version by band A and the hip new version by musician B are, in fact, the same song.

But I'm not going to write about it. Not today.

Today, December 14, 2012, eleven days before Christmas, a man with a gun - several guns - killed his father, his mother, several other adults, and numerous children in an elementary school in Newton, Connecticut. Eighteen, last time I checked. (Sorry: It's twenty children out of twenty-six people killed in the school.)

I had another post planned, "In praise of poor quality," noting that the relatively low body count in the December 11 mall shooting in Oregon (two killed, one injured, plus the suicide of the shooter) was for much the same reason as the relatively low body count at the July 20 Aurora theater shooting (twelve dead, fifty-eight injured, out of hundreds of potential victims - sitting ducks in a movie theater): jammed weapons, a common occurrence for the types of weapons used by the shooters in those two cases. But the shooter in the December 14 Newton, Connecticut killings did not have that problem. I'm not going to write that post now.

For now, this is as much as I can write.

Holiday reruns: The Littlest Turkey!

Here's a holiday tradition that started with the earliest days of this blog: the annual retelling of The Littlest Turkey! Gather the children around the oven as your bird roasts, and tell them the heartwarming story of the turkey who was almost left behind on Thanksgiving!

Another Monkey: The Littlest Turkey

Ethel White at the Hotel Jermyn, August 21, 1947

On Thursday, November 15 I read a poem at the Northeastern Pennsylvania Writers' Collective (NEPWC) Open Mic Night at The Vintage in Scranton, PA. As I took the stage I realized it wasn't just my first time reading at one of our Open Mic Nights, it was also the first time I had read anywhere, period, at least since my high school Speech Team days.  Of course, I have appeared on television each week for 90 seconds at a time presenting the Blog of the Week  for much of the last year, and I took part in the Bloggers Roundtable last year. I've also done some teaching (over twenty years ago!) and my current job is all about talking to strangers. So I wasn't really ill-prepared to speak in front of a group largely composed of people I already knew. 

This poem came from a lot of sources. I first read about the story of Ethel White at the Hotel Jermyn in this article on Brian Fulton's blog Pages from the Past, back when I was doing research for that blog's upcoming feature as Blog of the Week. The blog post reproduces the bizarre, almost-comical photo showing the path of Ethel White's descent, with start and stop points indicated with X's.  The Vintage (then known as The Vintage Theater) had just announced the intention of moving into its new home in the Manhattan Room at the old Hotel Jermyn, so I was fascinated to learn this admittedly horrible bit of history about our new home. I had nearly forgotten about the story until back in October when I heard Greg Russick present a poem about a man watching his life slowly drip by at the bar in the Manhattan Room. I realized the Ethel White story could make a good poem. (Whether or not I produced a "good" poem is, of course, open to discussion.)  I discussed this with Greg and two other members of the NEPWC during a break at their poetry reading at Crave in Jim Thorpe a few days later. The next day I bought a notebook at a junk store and began scribbling out this poem while waiting for my mom to complete her shopping.

I don't want to trivialize the tragedy of what happened here. Suicide is no laughing matter. I also don't want to suggest that Ethel White's death was actually a murder arranged by someone else in the story. If that question even existed, I'm sure it was asked decades ago. But recently we observed the anniversary of the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Very few losses of freighters are well-known, and the memory of this one stays with us in large part thanks to the song by Gordon Lightfoot. If this poem in some way helps to keep the memory of Ethel White alive, I will feel like it has succeeded as a poem.



Ethel White at the Hotel Jermyn, August 21, 1947

She stepped out of the window
and falling, she fell
(Why was she even there? 
Why did her husband bring her
from Albany to Scranton
on their way to Washington, D.C.?
Salesmen stick their feet in doors
and sleep with farmers' daughters
Why did he bring his wife with him?
Was he afraid that, left alone, she might do herself a mischief?
Was she afraid that, left alone, he might stray with some trollop?)
But he brought her with him
from Albany to Scranton
to the seventh floor of the Hotel Jermyn

She stepped out of the window
(or was she pushed?
While her husband was out
visiting some friends in another part of town
did someone, some man, or maybe a woman
come to the seventh floor
to make it look like she had jumped
make it look like suicide, not murder
make it look like on her own 
she stepped out of the window)
and falling, she fell
seven stories to the street below
(Not seven stories straight down
No, not straight down from the window to the street
Six stories straight down
or maybe five and a half
to hit something, some obstruction to her descent
a flagpole, perhaps
or an awning
where she bounced
and was tossed
in a trajectory helpfully illustrated in the paper the next day
in a broken white line outlined in black
showing her descent from the window
to the street below)
where a crowd gathered round
and her husband
returning from visiting some friends
came across the crowd and asked what was the matter
the matter that had gathered them round
the matter which had been a woman
the matter which had been his wife

She stepped out of the window
and falling, she fell
seven stories to the street below
not seven stories straight down
but seven stories nonetheless


Copyright 2012 by Harold Jenkins. All rights reserved.

Going offline for a bit

I've been hit with another virus. It's a Google redirect, but this time it appears to have compromised my Windows firewall and updater. Webroot Personal Security didn't protect me from this virus, nor did it detect it once it was present, so I'm a little peeved. I'll be offline until the Geek Squad at the Wilkes-Barre Best Buy figures out how to fix it. I spent all day with an online agent working on it, and in the end he thought it was fixed, but the redirect is still there. We'll also have to see just what is covered under the warranty.

Be back ASAP.

Now look what you made us do!

We've seen it before. It's become a trope in movies and TV: The evil hostage-taker issues demands and threatens dire consequences if his demands are not met - say, he will start killing his hostages, one an hour, once the deadline has passed, and won't stop until a new, inflated set of demands are met. Depending on the rating of the story, we may even get to see one or two of the hostages get snuffed, usually with a bullet to the back of the head. As he kills the hostages, the hostage-taker turns to the hero, or the hapless middleman who tried but failed to meet his demands, and says "I am not doing this. You are. I am not responsible for this. You are. You made me do it."

Much of our economic strife over the last four years has been artificial, a product of CEOs choosing to sit on huge piles of uninvested money, citing "uncertainty" about the future, when in reality they are concerned that any improvement in the economy would be a feather in the cap of the hated President of the United States, Barack Obama, and might lead to his re-election. So rather than see things get better on his watch, the CEOs  chose to sit tight, bank the money, and wait for a change of administration to someone who would be willing to play ball with them according to the rules to which they had become accustomed during the George W. Bush years.

And in the case that the hated Barack Obama might get elected to a second term, despite the best efforts of the Koch brothers, Citizens United, the right-wing media establishment...well, heaven forbid. In that case, they might be forced to take some of the hostages and shoot them. And, lets be clear:  in the event that that happened, they would be in no way responsible. Nossir. It would all be Obama's fault. Barack Obama would be to blame for every consequence that came from his election, every vile and horrible thing that CEOs were forced to do because Obama became President again.

It happened. And so, with a heavy heart, CEOs have started taking their workers out and shooting them. Because Barack Obama forced them to.


Coal company to lay off 156 workers in Utah, Ill.

ST. LOUIS (AP) - A coal producer owned by a longtime critic of President Barack Obama's energy policies will lay off nearly 160 workers at Illinois and Utah mines, blaming the freshly re-elected president for a "war on coal."

Ohio-based Murray Energy Corp. said in a statement supplied Friday to The Associated Press that it would give pink slips to 102 workers at its West Ridge Mine in Utah and 54 at its underground mine in the southern Illinois town of Galatia. Both mines are run by Murray Energy subsidiaries.

...The announcement's timing — just days after Obama's victory over Republican Mitt Romney — was anything but coincidental. Robert Murray, the company's chairman, CEO and founder, had backed Romney, who proposed rolling back some restrictions on power-plant emissions and positioned himself as a supporter of the coal industry.

"The American people have made their choice," Murray, a day after the election, told about 50 employees during a prayer, a text of which was provided to the AP by the company. Lamenting the country's direction and insisting "the takers outvoted the producers," Murray asked for God's forgiveness "for the decisions that we are now forced to make to preserve the very existence of any of the enterprises that you have helped us build."

Papa John's CEO John Schnatter Says Company Will Reduce Workers' Hours In Response To Obamacare

Papa John’s CEO John Schnatter said he plans on passing the costs of health care reform to his business onto his workers. Schnatter said he will likely reduce workers’ hours, as a result of President Obama's reelection, the Naples News reports. Schnatter made headlines over the summer when he told shareholders that the cost of a Papa John’s pizza will increase by between 11 and 14 cents due to Obamacare.

...(Schnatter is) not the only one in the chain restaurant industry to admit that workers hours may be reduced, since Obamacare mandates that only employees that work more than 30 hours per week are covered under their employers health insurance plan. For example, Darden restaurants, the parent company of Olive Garden and Red Lobster, has already experimented with reducing workers hours in anticipation of the legislation.

Others have responded to the added costs of Obamacare more harshly, including Applebee's franchisee owner Zane Tankel who said his company won’t hire new workers because of the law. Just this week, a Georgia business owner also claimed he cut employees due to Obamacare and in fact had specifically laid off those who he thought had voted for President Obama.

Companies plan massive layoffs as Obamacare becomes reality (this is just a cut-and-paste of the article Mourning in America - Here's Those Layoffs We Voted For Last Night, which gives a list of companies that plan to reduce staffing or hours, all claimed to be a result of Obama's re-election)


So there you have it. The hostage-takers have begun shooting their hostages in the head, one at a time. And with each death they I reminding us that this is not their fault, this is not something they choose to do. Their hands have been forced by the re-election of Barack Obama.

Election Day

Soon I will go to bed, a little earlier than usual, so that I can wake up a little earlier than usual and go down the street to vote.

There was so much I meant to write and didn't in the lead-up to this election. After tomorrow, unless we see a repeat of 2000, we'll know which way things are going to go.

Mitt Romney would be a terrible, terrible choice as President. If you supported Obama in 2008 and are having second thoughts about supporting him now, you need to ask yourself if Mitt Romney would more closely fit with the reasons you voted for Obama in the first place. And after you've thought about it, haul your ass to your polling place and cast your vote for Barack Obama.

And while you're at it, vote against all the obstructionist bastards in Congress who placed party and politics ahead of the good of the country and have spent the last four years thwarting the President's initiatives at every turn. The bastards who wrecked the national economy rather than see a recovery during the administration of a non-white Democrat. Vote against the blatant lies of Romney and Ryan. Vote against the bloated media moguls who manipulate the truth for the sake of ratings. Vote against hatred and fear. Vote against the people who made Citizens United the standard for corporate control of election funding. Vote against a future where decades of progress will be undone with a few carefully selected Supreme Court appointees. Vote against the promise of deregulation of the fossil fuels industry, an industry already regulated with the lightest of touches. Vote against the destruction of the environment, the looting of our national parks, the continued degradation of the national well-being so that the few may enjoy obscene and unearned profits.

Vote for Barack Obama. I will.

The Hostage Takers

In an Op-Ed piece published on November 1 in the New York Times, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman calls Republicans out for their "Vote Romney Or Else" position that threatens economic chaos if the wrong candidate should win the election.

Paul Krugman: The Blackmail Caucus

I think the problem goes beyond what Krugman get at here. Let's not forget that a major reason for the economy being in the shape its in is that many captains of industry are sitting on huge piles of uninvested money - money that could be turning job-seekers (and those who have stopped actively seeking jobs) into employees, and then into consumers. But this money is being kept tied up due to "uncertainty" - mainly, the uncertainty as to whether or not Romney will become President.

I myself have made the argument that if Romney were to win the election, the economy would likely see an immediate improvement as so much capital investment that has been held back is suddenly injected into it. It is as if the economy of the nation is being held hostage, and the condition of release involves the removal of the current President.

The situation is not unlike what we faced back in 1980: Iran had been holding 52 American hostages since November 1979. In April 1980 President Jimmy Carter had made a bold decision to free the hostages through the use of a military incursion, Operation Eagle Claw. The operation failed disastrously, and blame for the failure was placed squarely on President Carter - a humiliation that likely contributed to his defeat in the Presidential election later that year.* More than that, the attempt to free the hostages by force enraged the Iranians, who resolved - despite ongoing negotiations - that the hostages would not be freed while Jimmy Carter was President.

And sure enough, word that the hostages had been released came through minutes after Ronald Reagan was sworn in as President. It was Reagan, not Carter, who received credit for their release.

So is it the same with the economy? Have the hostage takers who have been intentionally holding back the economy for the past four years resolved not to take any actions to make things better until after Barack Obama is out of office? Are they waiting to provide fuel for the engine of the economy until Willard "Mitt" Romney is President? Are we in a position where we must give in to the demands of hostage takers if we ever want this crisis to end?


*Compare to the military operation that took down Osama bin Laden, the man behind 9/11 and numerous other attacks on the United States. When this operation resulted in victory, various groups argued that President Barack Obama should receive no credit for its success.

The Humming

Yesterday Hurricane Sandy blew through the area. Really, it blew through much of the Mid-Atlantic - it was that big, it covered most of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, Massachusetts, and Connecticut simultaneously - but locally it amounted to a lot of very powerful, sustained wind.

Work let out at 5:00 yesterday - waiting later might have risked having someone get killed by a falling tree on their way home - and I went straight to my house to try to secure the porch furniture. Last year, during Irene, the Adirondack rocker skated across the porch and jammed up against the railing, so I wanted to make sure the rocker and my rocker bench stayed put. (In the end I had to content myself with flipping them over and wedging them against the railing preemptively. It worked.) Upon arriving at my house, I opened my car door, held onto it by the upper door frame as I prepared to exit, and nearly had it torn out of my hand and twisted off its hinges by a powerful wind. I realized that the wind was going to be a problem.

We survived, at least locally. Hundreds of thousands of people nearby are without power due to downed trees taking out electrical lines. An eight year old boy was killed not far from here by a falling tree branch while trying to make sure the family pets were safe. Another person died of carbon monoxide poisoning while using a gas-powered generator inside his garage.

But my hometown is OK. I didn't see much damage on my drives today. Maybe we got away relatively unscathed.

Which is not to say that Northeastern Pennsylvania got through unscathed. This is a map of electrical outages for customers of PPL as of 11:11 last night. Each green dot represents 1-50 customers, each yellow dot represents 51-500, and each red dot is 500+. Nanticoke is on the edge of PPL coverage, so there may be local outages not shown on this map.

Late Monday night, just before flickering lights made me realize I should shut down the computer, I heard a noise I've never heard before. It was a humming sound, like the sound a propeller-driven airplane makes when it flies slowly past. I wondered if perhaps some utility vehicle was idling just outside my house. After some thought I decided that I must be hearing the wind in the trees - specifically, the wind along the river blowing through the few remaining leaves clinging to the trees that line the riverbanks. The sound, I realized, was a lot like the sound you get when you blow through a piece of tissue paper draped over a comb, probably for the same reason. Friends on the other side of the river confirmed that they were hearing it too.

I've never heard a sound like that. I've read about certain hums and sounds that used to be audible when the world was a quieter place - including the almost-subsonic hum created when wind blows over mountains. I've always wondered what it would be like to hear such a sound. Now I have heard something related, and perhaps even rarer - the humming sound of wind blowing through mostly-denuded trees during a late-October hurricane in Northeastern Pennsylvania.

It's not just about the Presidency

Maybe you've heard: there's an election coming up in the United States in just a few weeks. Sometime after that (and I'm not going to say how soon - I remember the election of 2000!) we'll know whether Barack Obama or Willard "Mitt" Romney will be sworn in for a four-year term in November. (Unless, of course, one of the third-party candidates wins. Hey, it could happen. Maybe.)

The Etch-A-Sketch keeps getting shaken, and a nation of ADD sufferers keeps getting distracted by whatever the last thing was that happened or got said. (Joe Biden smirked and laughed at Paul Ryan through the debate! How disrespectful! Who ever heard of such disrespect at this level of politics?) Ultimately the decision as to who will be President will be made by the people who turn out to vote. That includes Romney supporters, Obama supporters, and the critical block of "undecideds" who, somehow, have not yet decided which candidate they support.

But the Presidential race isn't the only position that's being decided. Ultimately, all three branches of government are.

Congress has been incredibly ineffective in the last four years. Less than ineffective - Republicans in Congress, since Obama first took office, have been putting enormous effort into keeping any significant progress from being made. They fought every step of the way on Health Care Reform, forcing revisions and compromises and a continuous whittling away of the core principles that meant so much to Obama's supporters - and then turned around and rejected the end product, and crowed about how much time Obama had just wasted.

At this time we see a Senate with a slim Democratic majority, and the House with a sizable Republican majority. The election of 2010 saw many "Blue Dog" Democrats, Republican-leaning Democrats from Republican-leaning districts, swept away in favor of Tea Party extremists. It is tempting to blame all of the problems with inaction in Congress back to these Freshmen Republican ideologues from 2010, but as we can see with Health Care Reform, the problem predates the Tea Party successes in 2010.

If Romney wins the Presidency, he may not find himself well-served by Tea Party extremists. Perhaps the plan was for these individuals to harass and bedevil the Democrat in the White House, but I sincerely doubt that they got the memo indicating that they should stop in the event of a Republican moving into the Oval Office. Instead, I suspect, they will continue to demand that they get their way, and will engage in tried-and-true obstructionist actions if they don't.

A Democratic-majority Congress will work better for either candidate. If Obama wins, a Congress dominated by genuine Democrats - not the Blue Dog sorts - would be more cooperative with his goals. But if Romney wins, he might also find it easier to work with Democrats than with extremist Republicans of the Tea Party variety. And Democrats have a well-earned reputation for compromising, for sacrificing party goals in favor of the needs of the nation - something that Republicans will never be accused of, especially after these past four years. Romney might find himself having to fight less to get his agenda through if he is dealing with Democrats instead of Tea Party extremists.

Finally, the Supreme Court is in play. The Supreme Court is in play every Presidential election, but once again we find ourselves in a situation where the moderates on the court are nearing the age of retirement and/or death. Meanwhile, George W. Bush nominated relatively young ideologues like Roberts and Alito to the court and had them rubber-stamped in by his complying Congress - even sweeping Roberts, unexpectedly, into the position of Chief Justice, a position he's likely to hold for decades to come.

A Romney win would allow the makeup of the Supreme court to be shifted so far to the right that it will seem like Citizens United was a Democratic idea. On the other hand, an Obama win, particularly if the makeup of Congress does not change significantly from its current state, would likely mean more moderate appointments like the two he has made - both of whom faced furious opposition from Republicans. (It is, of course, possible that Romney could surprise everyone and make moderate appointments, but this would certainly cost him any support from Tea Party extremists, who would likely try to block any such appointments.)

On Tuesday, November 6, Americans will go to the polls and cast their votes. We need to realize that we are voting for much more than just the President.

NEPA BlogCon postgame

The first-ever NEPA BlogCon took place Saturday, September 29, and it was a smashing success!

To be clear about this: I had nothing to do with the planning or execution of this event. When Karla Porter and I got to talking at the Fall 2011 BlogFest about having some sort of non-political get-together of bloggers - BlogFest was originally conceived as a political mixer, and the founders have made efforts to make it less blog-focused and more politics-focused - Karla began talking about a blog conference of some sort held at one of the many local institutes of higher education, with panels and educational sessions and all the stuff associated with a convention. I immediately backed away from the idea as being too complicated and too burdensome - especially for someone whose top priority at the time was to find full-time employment of some sort.

Six months later, Michelle Hryvnak Davies and Karla Porter connected at the Spring 2012 BlogFest and revived the idea. Michelle was enthusiastic where I was reluctant. They brought on board two other bloggers in attendance at the BlogFest, Mandy Boyle and Leslie Stewart, each of whom, like Michelle and Karla, brought with her extensive blogging experience, technological expertise, and a personal social and online network that partially overlapped with the others. By the next day the four had dubbed themselves the "Fearsome Foursome," and threw themselves at planning the first-ever NEPA BlogCon.

There was a lot to plan, and a lot to arrange, and a lot of decisions to be made. Through an enormous amount of very hard work, the four of them brought in speakers from throughout the blogosphere and the world of online commerce, arranged a location for the event at Luzerne County Community College in Nanticoke, secured sponsors and purchased supplies and brought in dancing girls and...

Well, I didn't really contribute nothing. I did construct a series of image macros to be used for promoting the event:

...but that was pretty much it. I wanted this to be a blogging event where I could take part as a participant, not a planner. And I didn't want to butt into anyone else's plans with my own harebrained idea.

The event itself was astonishing. I was confronted with a sea of unfamiliar faces, which anyone who knows me realizes is nothing new. But in this case it was legitimate: Aside from the Fearsome Foursome, I knew a handful of the presenters. But many of the bloggers were strangers to me.

At the Spring 2012 BlogFest, as a result of a huge promotional campaign and media blitz by Michelle, we had the best-ever turnout of bloggers - perhaps two dozen or so, including the three political bloggers who organize the BlogFests, Michelle, and me. Without the media blitz and promotional drive (out of respect for the founders, who felt that the BlogFest was in danger of losing its political character and becoming too blogger-focused, which is a little confusing in light of the name, but whatever), last week's Fall 2012 BlogFest saw about half that many bloggers - maybe a dozen, all told, including the three organizers, Michelle, me, Karla, Justin Vacula, political bloggers Dan Spak and James O'Meara, and a few others. Maybe not even a dozen.

NEPA BlogCon had something like one hundred bloggers in attendance. (I'm still waiting official totals.)  And they weren't just from NEPA. Some came from as far away as Delaware and New York. Some might have come farther.

The sessions were informative and well received. Some were more basic than others, which was a good thing, because some of the bloggers in attendance were experienced, and some were just starting out.

The Fearsome Foursome passed out surveys at the end of the sessions, asking for feedback on the event and suggestions for sessions at future events. My suggestions were these:

• Blogging and copyright. How do you establish that your work is your own legally-protected intellectual property? The question came up and no one really had a solid answer.
•  In a similar vein, blogging and the law: how to avoid running afoul of laws involving copyright, libel,  slander, trade secrets - even how to avoid getting "dooced," losing your job over something you've blogged about.
• On a more personal note, a piece on blog networking. I think it was a mistake to keep out of the planning of the BlogCon, and to keep NEPA Blogs out of it as well. As the only blog networking organization in Northeastern Pennsylvania, something like BlogCon provided an excellent opportunity to connect with many new bloggers who might not be aware of the size of the local blogging scene. And I blew it. In part I was so caught up with being an attendee I totally shirked my responsibilities as the founder of NEPA Blogs. I did pass out a few blog cards in between sessions and at the after-party, but I could have reached out much more effectively than I did. Next time.

BlogCon was a tremendous success, and the credit goes to everyone who helped make it happen, but especially to the event's four organizers: Michelle Hryvnak Davies, Karla Porter, Mandy Boyle, and Leslie Stewart. I'm already looking forward to the next BlogCon!