It’s always SOMETHING
November 5, 2011
Some days, I wonder why any of us bother to get up in the morning.
It’s not as though we don’t have enough to worry about, what with the economy in a shambles in just about every place that has an economy. And of course there’s politics, speaking of shambles, with a president on one side whose opinion polls put him somewhere in the neighborhood of a fart in church, and the opposition party offering up a field of candidates who come off as a bad hybrid of Keystone Cops and extras from Night of the Living Dead.
With all this in the air, I go online to read some nature news, thinking that will get me out of the mind-set that the world as we know it is coming to an end.
Big Mistake.
On one website, I learn that a piece of ice twice the size of Philadelphia is cracking off from the Antarctic ice shelf. The crack so far is about 20 miles long and up to 200 feet deep, and growing at a rate of nearly seven feet per day.
And it’s not even caused by “global warming.” I forget just now what the scientific term for the effect is, but it basically means “s**t happens.”
The whole thing is supposed to break off and start drifting around in the open sea later this year or early next year. Earth on the rocks, shaken, not stirred.
Nobody seems all that concerned. Maybe I shouldn’t be either. On the other hand, having a chunk of ice the size of a small South American nation bobbing around in the ocean just doesn’t sound like good news. Twice the size of Philly? At least it will be cleaner.
And then there’s the asteroid.
The news outlets describe it as an “aircraft carrier-sized asteroid, a little over four football fields in diameter.” It will pass by our little old home planet, closer to us than the moon.
And the moon is only about 250,000 miles away.
That sounds like a far piece, but in astronomic terms, that’s like having a bullet pass by your head close enough that you can hear it buzz.
It’s supposed to pass us by this coming Tuesday. Just so you know.
NASA, known for calling the catastrophic explosion of a Delta 2 rocket as “an anomaly,” has classified the asteroid as a “potentially hazardous object.”
There was a time when if NASA said it would be a near miss, I’d relax. But not too long ago, the space agency aimed a satellite at Mars and missed the whole freaking planet, so, yeah, I’m gonna chew my nails just a little bit.
If this asteroid hits, it won’t be the end of the world, but it will bust things up pretty well. It would make a 4,000 megaton blast, (nearly 20,000 times the force of the bomb that fried Nagasaki), a magnitude 7.0 earthquake. If it hits the ocean, it could cause a tsunami 70 feet high. The tsunamis that hit Japan earlier this year were no more than a third that high.
One of the wire service stories said “Encounters of objects this large this close to our planet won’t happen again until the year 2028…” That one will be a wee bit closer than this one. Wonderful.
I closed the laptop and turned on CNN, only to see some goon in a suit dodging questions on his candidacy. I flipped over to the USA Network to an NCIS re-run. Give me over-the-top violence and improbable stunts any day. It beats watching a planet on the rocks and under fire, and anyway, I’d rather see the bad guys get blown away than elected.
Is America out of ideas?
February 7, 2011
(An earlier version of this column ran on RockTheCapital.com)
A week ago, more or less, President Barack Obama blew in to the Penn State campus in State College and blew right out again.
He was there to ballyhoo the work being led by the institution’s researchers at the Energy Innovation Hub in Philly.
We can count our lucky stars that his rapid passage didn’t blow out all the kerosene lamps.
Back to the lamps in a moment.
The EIH project, according to the Huffington Post, will receive more than $129 million in federal funds over the next five years. You will remember that Obama talked a lot in his Jan. 25 State of the Union address about the importance of clean energy technology for creating jobs and protecting the planet.
I’ll give you a moment to catch your breath.
Simply put, Obama planned to use his visit to Happy Valley to lay out his administration’s vision for “winning the future,” a phrase that I predict will wear exceedingly thin by the time it is discarded.
One of the means by which We The People will win that future is by “investing in innovative, clean energy technologies and doubling the share of electricity from clean energy sources by 2035.”
In his own response to the President’s State of the Union speech, specifically the lofty goal of doubling clean energy resources by that date, Alexander Cockburn pointed out that 2035 is five presidential terms after Obama’s last conceivable day in office, in 2016. Certainly Cockburn is correct in guessing that any president’s hold on policy is likely to be a bit tenuous after the passage of nearly a quarter century.
But I would argue that it is a bit unfair to lay the entire burden on Obama. The best ideas in the world cannot catch fire if they don’t land in the proper tinder.
A media hand-out Wednesday stated that Obama wants to improve energy efficiency in commercial buildings, which suck up about 20 percent of all the energy in the country’s economy.
“Improving energy efficiency in our buildings can create jobs, save money, reduce our dependence on foreign oil, and make our air cleaner,” the hand-out read. The goals listed included: “Achieve a 20 percent improvement in energy efficiency by 2020; Reduce companies’ and business owners’ energy bills by about $40 billion per year; and saving energy by reforming outdated incentives and challenging the private sector to act.”
Oops. What was that? “Challenging the private sector to act?”
Now, back to the kerosene lamps.
I would be willing to bet that when the “private sector” was confronted with the incandescent light bulb after Thomas Edison invented the thing in the 1870s, quite a lot of them dragged their heels, complaining about the imposition of making the switch to electricity and all that the modernization entailed. Some of them, doubtless, sat squinting in the smoky light, muttering. An ad seen on TV lately shows a woman griping about the government telling her what she can and can’t buy in the grocery store, or what light bulbs to buy. We’re going to hear a lot more grousing about it, because in September, G.E., the last manufacturer of incandescent bulbs in the U.S. shut down, putting something like 200 people out of work.
That happened in part because of an energy conservation measure passed by Congress in 2007 – during the administration of George W. Bush, by the by – that essentially banned regular old-fashioned incandescent bulbs by 2014. The idea was that the ban would spur the development of new, low-energy, low-waste light bulbs that would save a bunch of energy and greenhouse-gas emissions
Enter the new compact fluorescent, or CFLs, which were developed by American engineers way back in the 1970s. But no American manufacturer makes them, because the CFLs with their twisty glass shapes require more hand labor, so most of them get built in China. The CFL bulbs were deemed by the executives at GE and every other bulb-maker in the US to be too expensive because American workers make too much money. I’m not even going to bother digging up the compensation packages for GE executives who, I would point out, make nothing, if you take my point.
So, the fate of light bulbs in the US of A is partly a fault of the free-market system that allows top management to be given – I won’t say “earned” – huge incomes while it ships jobs overseas. But that’s only part of the problem. Look at it this way: Edison patented the first commercially feasible incandescent light bulb in 1879. The bulbs that are only just now beginning to fade away have not changed significantly in their design since then. And now, there is a new design, one that uses less power, meaning it produces fewer pollutants in creating the power for it, and produces less heat. And, like the Edison bulb, was developed here, by Americans.
But we can’t crank up enough brain power to figure out a way to keep those jobs here, and instead whine that maybe we can just keep the old bulbs? It seems that the “Can Do” attitude of Americans has turned into “Done Enough.”
That’s the real slope Obama’s dream has to climb.
The technology, I suspect, is relatively easy. Getting enough of us off our duffs to do something about it will be the real challenge.
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© 2011 Marsh Creek Media, Gettysburg, Pa.
Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.
Check out the two “Burger to Go” blogsites:
Lost
January 4, 2011
My brother left his home in Georgia the day after Christmas, planning to make the 600-plus-mile trip to our aunt’s house in western Pennsylvania for a belated family Christmas.
It was our first family gathering since our mother’s funeral in September.
There are not a lot of us left. Me, David, our Aunt Shirley, a few cousins scattered around. It used to be that a holiday dinner would fill Shirley’s downstairs with people.
This year, all of us who could show up fit around a regular dining room table.
Sue and I left Baltimore, figuring we would get to Shirley’s roughly the same time David did.
We got there at 9:30 p.m., ate, drank some coffee, and waited for David.
And waited.
I sat for a couple of hours in a chair where I could see the street. Finally, at 1 a.m., we all turned in. Which is not to say any of us slept well. Shirley slept hardly at all. Sue and I awoke, I think, at every passing car, or sudden noise.
We were not especially close as children, David and I. We were not estranged. That word implies a rending. For whatever reason, we never got particularly close.
Until our mother’s final illness, that is.
First, I have to say that he was always sort of a hero to me. He always did things his way, even if doing so made his life harder.
He took care of Mom for years, though sometimes you would think they hated one another, as much as they fought. As she sank into dementia and physical disabilities, he had a lot to deal with. It was hard on all of us, but him most of all. Dealt with it, god knows how.
We talked more during that time, I think, than we had in the previous several decades.
Back at Shirley’s the phone rang at 6 a.m. on Monday.
In a stupor, I tried to get the call on my cell, though it was coming in on Shirley’s land-line. By the time I figured that out, the message had gone to the machine.
“I’ve had some trouble. I should be there in a couple of hours,” David said. That was it.
More than “a couple of hours” later, close to lunchtime, I got on the phone. I looked up the phone number David had called from – he refuses to carry a cell phone – and discovered it to be in a little town in the middle of nowhere in the Pennsylvania mountains, far from any major roads.
Did some quick estimating. He really should have arrived some hours before.
I did some quick checking on the computer and called the several state police barracks between Shirley’s home and David’s last position. No wrecks reported involving any cars of the kind David drives.
That was a relief, but 25 years working as a newspaper reporter gave me plenty of mental images to fuel my worry. Out of gas on some back road, or some other car trouble. Off in a ditch or ravine in some remote area. And on and on.
I laid on the floor for awhile and tried to think about anything else but what might be wrong. Sue had been looking out of the window as often I had been.
I could hear Shirley praying quietly as she busied herself in the kitchen.
I fell asleep, but my dreams were dark.
In the early afternoon, I awoke to find my oldest cousin and his wife walking into the house. I’m afraid my welcome was a little distracted.
Maybe half an hour later, David pulled up in the driveway. He walked into the kitchen, looking a little chagrined. Just in time for our post-Christmas feast.
I didn’t know whether to hug him or hit him.
I went for the hug. Life is too short, and we’re both on the shady side of it.
But I confess that I’m a little frustrated that he won’t say what happened. On the other hand, maybe that’s a good thing. I can imagine all SORTS of adventures for him.
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© 2011 Marsh Creek Media, Gettysburg, Pa.
Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.
Check out the two “Burger to Go” blogsites:
http://burger2go.wordpress.com/
http://burger2goclassics.wordpress.com/
Burger to Go 2010 in review
January 2, 2011
Thank’s to all of you, 2010 was a good one for B2G, though I hadn’t posted near as many pieces as I would have liked. I really appreciate your support. TWB
The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:
The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is on fire!.
Crunchy numbers
A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 3,700 times in 2010. That’s about 9 full 747s.
In 2010, there were 21 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 120 posts. There were 4 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 1mb.
The busiest day of the year was October 11th with 109 views. The most popular post that day was Pumpkins, Ahoy!.
Where did they come from?
The top referring sites in 2010 were facebook.com, twitter.com, connect.pennlive.com, dailykos.com, and google.com.
Some visitors came searching, mostly for gliding lizard, world’s biggest pumpkin, burger to go, gliding lizards, and hold my beer and watch this.
Attractions in 2010
These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.
Pumpkins, Ahoy! October 2009
3 comments
The Gliding Lizard and the Deity in the Loud Print Shirt December 2009
Hold My Beer and Watch This September 2008
1 comment
Hi, My Name is Pickles, and IYQ. April 2007
7 comments
Bunny, or, Words at a Memorial. September 2010
4 comments
Just Deal With It
December 12, 2010
Well, here we go again.
Where I live, in south-central Pennsylvania, we’ve had our first dusting of snow for the season. It was perhaps an inch and all the grocery stores took hits in the bread, milk, egg and toilet paper departments.
The snow came as a punctuation to about a week of temps hereabouts that stayed on the shady side of freezing, with daily highs averaging about 10 degrees below normal, which put a couple of inches of ice across the top of the creek, and an inch of snow across that.
You do what you have to do.
I spent the afternoon cleaning out the garage, by which I mean re-stacking junk from one place to another – I can’t remember the last time I could actually get my car in there – and moving the lawnmowers into the back of the storage shed and making a space for the snowblower. I got the machine fueled and ran it for awhile to make sure everything was kosher, then parked it in its new space, ready to carve its way out to clear things up when we get our first real snow.
A friend in Fairhope, Alabama reported on Facebook just a couple of days ago that they were having snow, which did give me pause. Snow on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico is a notable event. Farmers in Florida are taking emergency steps to protect their fruit crops, and the wire services are full of photos showing fountains frozen in Atlanta and dazed Georgians staggering around in what must feel like everything they own, trying to keep warm.
You know, what we here would call our fall wardrobe.
There will be some making wisecracks like “So, where’s your Global Warming now?” and similar remarks. I wish the folks who named the phenomenon had called it Climate Change, which is what it really is. In any case, a cold spell in December is not proof that the climate is or is not changing. The fact that the polar ice caps have retreated further than they have since they formed a kabillion years ago, is.
But, despite snow on the Alabama beaches and fountains frozen in the Peach state, it is, as a climatologist said on CNN recently, only winter, meaning that we should just all get over it and deal.
So, OK, this cold snap might mean nothing, or it might mean we’re in for the worst winter since, well, whenever the last bad one you can remember was.
Button up your house; drag out the sweaters and long underwear, and stop acting like it never happened before. Give some money and clothes to your local shelters so the unlucky don’t freeze to death, and maybe have a little more to eat this winter.
As for me, I’m going to hunker down and wait for the first real sign of spring….the arrival of the seed catalogs sometime in February.
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© 2010 Marsh Creek Media, Gettysburg, Pa.
Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.
Check out the two “Burger to Go” blogsites:
Kicking Back
October 5, 2010
A new fire crackles in the Franklin stove, armor against the growing chill.
The writing-for-money stuff has been put away for the day. Time to relax.
This little working harbor with its tiny fleet of lobster boats and a few pleasure craft lie quiet under an overcast sky. The bell buoy at the harbor mouth tolls over and over, promising an unquiet night for those on the open water.
Out in the Gulf of Maine the sea tosses, never easy, and waves smash on the boney coast.
From here, it sounds like breathing.
It has been a vacation of small adventures. Nothing hair-raising. Nothing that would make the papers. Saturday night our friend and neighbor Bob brought over a blueberry pie he had made that afternoon. We dug out the vanilla ice-cream, and an evening of dietary mayhem and great conversation ensued.
Yesterday, we spent an hour or so up in Waldoboro with Nate Nickoll, an artist of endless imagination who has populated his property with dancing figures, dragons, giant ants and frogs and mermaids, even a yellow submarine, all made from scrap metal. Sometimes he sells his creations, if he can bear to part with them.
This morning, I created my first breakfast involving scallops. It was a big hit. There’s no telling what might happen next.
And, no, this column doesn’t have a point, not as it would if I was tackling economics, or man’s inhumanity to man, or my personal glee at the demise of the Hummer. It’s just me taking time to disengage, knock it into neutral, and just be.
You should try it.
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© 2010 Marsh Creek Media, Gettysburg, Pa.
Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.
Check out the two “Burger to Go” blogsites:
Passage and gauges
August 16, 2010
This weekend I helped a young man of my acquaintance begin his instruction in the dying art of driving a stick shift.
I took my old Dodge truck, a well-worn workhorse nearly 30 years old. It has a five-speed that’s a little cranky at times, but good for the instruction of a 14-year-old – we’ll call him T – whose experience with driving has mostly been via computer games which, unlike real life, have a reset button.
His dad had first honors, of course. A boy’s first experiences behind the wheel should be with his dad, if he’s lucky enough to have one around.
Part of the experience, of course, is to be reassured that sudden stalls, jackrabbit starts, and slung gravel have all been done before and are nothing to be ashamed of. The reassurances come, of course, with the recounting of a few examples from our own youth. They also come with the proviso that we will tell everybody about the more extravagant errors committed by our student, but we will end with comments about how much better, after all, he did than we did.
It’s just part of the tradition. Everybody in my high school, for example, knew how I had gotten the drivers’ education car, an enormous burgundy ’65 Chevy Belair with a manual tranny, up on two wheels in a parking lot.
I had a lump on the back of my head for a week from where the coach’s UGA class ring whacked me after that one.
T. talked about different kinds of vehicles all day. How he wants to have a 4×4 pickup truck for hauling stuff, a sports car for going fast, a motorcycle, and an ATV. I think he also mentioned a jet-ski.
Yeah, me, too.
I had forgotten how important all that is when a boy is that age, before he gets his first real taste of freedom with his own drivers’ license and, if he’s really lucky, his own car. I bought my own, and they were real junkers. There’s no better way to learn about the operation of a vehicle than to own one that needs a lot of tinkering to keep it operating.
Back then, in the 1960s, I could tell you the make and model of everything on both sides of the road. Today, I can still do that, as long as whatever is on either side of the road was build in the 1960s or before. Almost everything else looks equally indistinguishable.
There was something else I had forgotten about being 14 or so. Something that occupies most of a young fella’s attention at that age.
On the way to see a blood-and-guts action movie (lots of muscle, car chases, explosions, and gun-fire…a perfect guy pic) T asked me if I had ever noticed that the clear plastic covers on the instrument panel, conical with black plastic tips, looked just like breasts.
I had never noticed. I had always been looking at the gauges.
“No, I never noticed that,” I told him. “However, I promise you that I will never be able to look at those gauges the same way, ever again.”
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© 2010 Marsh Creek Media, Gettysburg, Pa.
Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.
Check out the two “Burger to Go” blogsites:
MRI or, My Brief Life as a Cork
June 20, 2010
I got there early, somehow, and got all the paperwork done.
A chipper nurse named Missy escorted me to a waiting room and supervised the emptying of my pockets, removal of my wristwatch, and the loss of my suspenders and glasses. Then she slid a needle into my right arm and fitted it with a port so they could run some kind of tracing fluid into my veins once they had me inserted into the MRI. I don’t know what it was, but it’s designed to make the veins and arteries in my brain visible.
Because I’ve had a variety of work experiences and have worked around metal grinding and welding equipment and because I once had a bristle from a wire brush stuck in my eye, I had to get my eyes x-rayed before they would give me the MRI. Turns out the magnets in the MRI are so strong, any steel screws, staples or assorted scrap metal anywhere near the magnets gets pulled right out. They said that would hurt. A lot.
A quick note of explanation. I’m not dying, at least, not any faster than anybody else. Without getting into the matter any further, my doc and I figured it might be a good time to check under the hood.
After finishing her plumbing duties, Missy led me down the hallways, she toting a clipboard with my charts and me trying to keep my pants up, down the hallway to a room. She was a little irritated because I had to take an important work-related call and send a quick email before I surrendered my cell phone to the storage locker.
One last turn in the maze and Missy opened a big, thick door.
There it was.
It looked like a gray plastic mausoleum, the burial chamber of somebody important named GE. I looked at the opening with misgivings. It looked like a modernized version of a groundhog’s burrow. Or something very Freudian…the militarized version.
Missy and another woman got me situated on the slab of steel and plastic and fastened something like a cage around my head and jammed foam plugs into my ears. Missy put a rubber bulb in my left hand and said I should squeeze it if I felt like I needed to come out.
“Comfortable?” Missy asked. Except, with the plugs in my ears, it sounded like “cumferubble?”
“What?” I said, as the slab began to slide smoothly into the bore of the MRI machine.
I felt like a shell being shoved down the throat of a cannon.
“You might want to squinch your shoulders in a little,” shouted Missy so I could hear her through the plugs. “It looks like a tight fit.”
I’m a big guy. Too big, to be honest. More than six feet, and a tad over 300. A big tad.
I scrunched. I slid. My nose rested a fraction of an inch from the inside of the tube. My shoulders rolled forward to up around my ears. My considerable gut smooshed up tightly around about three-quarters of the surface, cutting off all the light from that end me. The other end of the tube was open, but I couldn’t see. All I could see was the white plastic two inches from my nose.
I realized suddenly that I would spend the next half hour tucked like a cork in a bottle while loud mechanical noises crunched and crashed all around me and powerful magnetic waves would wash over my poor addled brain cells. Half an hour. A not inconsiderable slice of eternity, from that perspective.
I think I busted the little rubber bulb.
“We haven’t started yet, Mr. Burger,” Missy said.
My reply was perhaps a little brusque.
“Hang on….” She said, as the slab began to slide back the way it had come. I will swear on a stack of bibles that I made a popping sound when my midsection cleared the rim.
I was soaking wet. They had asked me in one of the questionnaire’s if I was claustrophobic. I wasn’t. Not when I was filling out the form, anyway.
NOW I’m claustrophobic.
As luck would have it, they have another machine that does not make one feel as though they have been imprisoned in a giant condom, and the patient scheduled for that machine was late. We went through the same drill. Inside, my nose was no further from the surface, but the sides were open, which I could just barely see out of the corner of my eye.
It was enough. I spent 45 minutes (evidently that machine takes longer) listening to what sounded like robots on roller skates playing racquetball with several old cars, alternately firing laser cannons. Even with the ear plugs, it was quite a racket.
Oddly, I feel asleep several times, awaking with a start when the noise stopped while the technician did something or the other to reset the machine. Perhaps the robots needed more old cars to slap around.
After it was all over, Missy led me back to the changing room, removed the plumbing from my arm, and told me I could re-load my pockets and person with all my assorted hardware. Still shaky, it took me awhile to sort out my suspenders and get them back in place without any knots.
I don’t know the results of the test yet. I like to think if they found anything interesting – my father’s cameo ring I lost when I was 12, or any of that stuff I memorized in the eighth grade – they would have called. So I’m not too worried.
The next night, I went to dinner with friends. We had wine. When the bottle was empty, I picked up the cork and started to put it back in the bottle for some reason. I stopped, pulled it back out and left it on the table.
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© 2010 Marsh Creek Media, Gettysburg, Pa.
Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.
Check out the two “Burger to Go” blogsites:
Happy New Year!
For those of us of a certain age, writing “2010” is a real adventure.
I write for a newspaper for most of my living, a trade that seems to be fairly precarious these days. I’ve stopped reading articles in the trade journals. They made me feel like a sword-swallower with hand tremors.
So. 2010 is the sort of date we all saw written in science fiction stories when we were kids. Years beginning with the digit 2 were the Years of The Future.
And here we are. Funny, it doesn’t look all that much the way the sci-fi writers thought it would.
I distinctly remember we were supposed to have colonies on the moon, and probably on Mars. Every home would have a car that would fly. People would wear form-fitting clothing that looked like it was made out of spandex.
Energy mostly came from safe nuclear fusion reactors.
Look around.
Obviously, we missed a step, here and there.
The closest thing we have to a space colony – outside of Congress — is the International Space Station. Think of an Airstream trailer with solar panels.
Our cars? Well, except for some hybrid vehicles, the basic technology of the automobile is the same as it was in Henry Ford’s day, with sexier bodywork. Today’s cars don’t go airborne unless something has gone terribly wrong.
Some people wear form-fitting spandex clothing. Few of them look good in it.
Our energy still comes from old-fashioned sources, hydro-electric, coal, and a few generation plants powered by nuclear fission. Fusion reactors cannot maintain a nuclear reaction and so will not melt-down, and produce little or no nuclear waste. No more TMI nonsense.
Naturally, nobody has been able to figure out how to make a fusion reactor yet that didn’t take more energy to run than it produced.
So, we’ve still got poverty, as always, wars everywhere, as always, and a nation that seems to have no sense of adventure, certainly nothing like it had 40 years ago when humans left their first footprints – and their first junk – on the face of the moon.
This is not to say that I’m one of those old crabs who think nothing has turned out right.
Well, not much has turned out right, but I’m not all that crabby about it.
Today is my 25th anniversary as a newspaper reporter. That much time in these trenches teaches you that few things turn out as planned, usually cost more than they were supposed to, and are usually late to boot.
I come from an era of party lines and rotary-dial phones, black-and white TV, from a time when everything in the world was far away and a long distance call was a marvel, even if filled with hisses and odd acoustical events. And it seemed as though everybody read the newspaper.
Earlier this week, I watched a TV program on my iPod.
I regularly check the weather, read and send email, and take photos and video on my cell phone.
Sometimes I even talk on it.
Attending government meetings or court hearings, my colleagues and I often write stories and file them on-line…while the meeting or court business is still going on.
Every news story and most of the contacts I have made in the past quarter century exist as a pattern of electrons on my laptop or an external hard-drive. A few years back, I ditched four file cabinet drawers full of files, because almost everything that was in them is available on-line in less time than it would take me to walk over and find the file.
And, to be honest, I usually read my own paper online in the morning before I make the 50 mile trek to work where I can get my hands on a dead-tree version.
Yeah, the news industry is going through a lot of changes right now. I have no idea what will happen next. That’s scary, especially for those of us on the shady side of 60 with pesky things like mortgage payments to keep up with.
Even so, it’s also exciting. When the dust settles, there will still need to be people who can sort fact from conjecture and rhetoric and tell a good story.
I hope I’m still one of them, partly because I can’t afford to retire in this economy anyway, and because reporting has GOT to be more fun than shuffleboard.
I think of the opening of this new decade the way a novice skydiver looks at the open door of the airplane on his first jump.
Enough talk. Let’s get to it.
AND ANOTHER THING:
This is just something to think about.
On Christmas Day, independent singer-songwriter Vic Chesnutt died in Athens, Ga.
He was 45.
He died from an overdose of muscle-relaxants.
Chesnutt was partially paralyzed from a car crash when he was 18. He got around by wheelchair.
He was facing a lawsuit filed by the local regional hospital following surgeries that left him owing about $70,000.
Chesnutt, who was signed to a Canadian record label, often worked with musicians from there. In an earlier interview with the Athens Banner-Herald, Chesnutt said his band mates were stunned by his situation.
“…It’s something that blows their minds; there’s nowhere else in the world that I’d be facing the situation I’m in right now. They cannot understand what kind of society would inflict that on their population. It’s terrifying…I’ve been nearly suicidal over it,” he said.
In other news, CNN reported just last week that tests performed on conservative talk-show guru Rush Limbaugh after he was admitted to a hospital for chest pains found nothing wrong.
The network reported that Limbaugh praised the work of the medical staff.
“The treatment I received here was the best that the world has to offer….I don’t think there’s one thing wrong with the American health care system. It is working just fine.”
I would like to note two things.
1. The health care debate has not been about the quality of health care available to Americans. If they can pay for it. It has been about who can pay for it. Meaning, who can get, afford, and keep health insurance.
2. In the summer of 2008, Rush Limbaugh signed an eight-year deal to stick with his radio show. The deal is reportedly worth $400 million, with a $100 million signing bonus.
3. Vic Chesnutt may have committed suicide because he was being sued for as much money as Limbaugh makes in about three hours.
Just something to think about.
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© 2010 Marsh Creek Media, Gettysburg, Pa.
Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.
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Pumpkins, Ahoy!
October 18, 2009
I suppose it was inevitable, in a way.
Look. For one thing, coastal Maine was once famous for its tradition of shipbuilding. In fact, it’s only a short drive to one of the nation’s most famous shipyards in Bath.
For another thing, for all the brevity of the growing season, folks in Maine are crazy for gardening. And, as good modern Americans, they are not immune to the outlook that a thing is made better if it gets made bigger.
Given all that, I suppose growing pumpkins the size of compact cars and turning them into boats makes all the sense in the world.
The Damariscotta Pumpkin Regatta has been held on or about Columbus Day for every one of the past five years, though this is only the second year it has been officially blessed by the town’s government.
It all began with Buzz Pinkham, who owns a nursery, Pinkham’s Plantation.
"Admiral" Buzz Pinkham
Buzz, shown here in his latest creation, was trying to think of something to do with a 700-pound pumpkin he had grown to show at a state fair. As he told a local reporter, he decided to try hollowing the pumpkin out, attaching a small outboard, and, putting his trust in gourd, finding out how it would do on the Damariscotta River, which flows into the harbor at Damariscotta.
He wasn’t trying to draw a crowd, he said, “but it’s kind of hard to sneak through town with a 700-pound pumpkin.”
So, a small crowd stood around on the banks of the river while Pinkham noodled around on the river, having a good time.
The next year, a couple of buddies joined Buzz with their own pumpkins, and drew an even bigger crowd.
By the third year, the businesses in town were starting to realize that the informal event was bringing people and those people usually brought their wallets with them, etc., etc.
Just to be clear, we’re not talking about ordinary pumpkins. This lot is a breed apart, hybrid monsters that have been been around, though not so grandly, since the early 1800s. Back then, somebody or some chance intermingled the DNA of a variety of Hubbard squash and a Kabocha pumpkin.
So, for a long time, Cucurbita maxima, to use the monster’s scientific name, were simply an unusually large variety of pumpkin weighing of a couple hundred pounds.
And then came Howard Dill. (A major chord would be appropriate here, if this was a movie.)
Before 1981, the world record for the largest pumpkin stood at an anorexic 460 pounds. Then, Dill, of Nova Scotia, set the world, or the portion of the world that cared, on its collective ear by submitting a pumpkin of almost 500 pounds.
Dill patented his seeds as Dill’s Atlantic Giant, and that breed is credited as the progenitor of the giant pumpkins of today, augmented by an orgy of crossing and re-crossing his variety with other types of pumpkins.
Dill died in May of 2008, at the age of 73.
The result of all this mad cross-breeding has been what must be a peculiarly North American phenomenon, even if they are grown now in other countries. Heck, people in other countries drive Hummers, but it was our idea, for better or worse.
This year’s world record holder is Christy Harp’s 1725-pound Atlantic giant pumpkin, which won the Ohio Valley Giant Pumpkin Growers annual weigh-off just this month. Photos of Ms. Harp, like this one that I swiped off the Internet, show her standing behind what appears to be an orange asteroid.
The World's Biggest Pumpkin, 2009 edition
Put that in perspective. That’s about the weight of two Harley-Davidson Electra-Glide motorcycles.
It must be pointed out that these exaggerated pumpkins are, how shall I say it? Unattractive? Butt ugly? I’d love to see one that had been raised in zero gravity. Perhaps it would be, oh, pumpkin-shaped. The really big ones bear an unfortunate resemblance a gargantuan loaf of bread that failed to rise correctly.
My vacation was over couple of days before the actual regatta.
I did manage to hang out for an hour or so at Pinkham’s Plantation while some of the guys were building and carving their squash navy. Buzz wasn’t around, but Bill, Tom Lishness, and one other fellow whose name I did not catch were busily measuring, eyeballing, sawing and scooping.
It is a little alarming how much goop lives inside a 700 pound pumpkin. We’re talking at least a wheelbarrow load or more for each one.
Bill said the little pumpkin he was rigging up for the race weighed in at 860 pounds. He stated, matter-of-factly, that he had actually grown one that weighed more than the 1275-pound state record holder, which loomed a mere 30 feet away, but Bill’s gourd split from its own weight. In the photo, Tom, Bill, and Mr. X, ponder mounting onto an 800-pound-plus pumpkin the transom that will hold the motor.
Pondering the "How-to's"
Lishness, a compact fellow with bright blue eyes and a beard reminiscent of the one on the Travelocity Gnome (one of which was attached to the front of his pumpkin yacht a year or two ago, along with a miniature cannon,) said that in the early days of giant pumpkin contests gourds the size of his and Bill’s would have taken big prizes. Today, if your punkin is smaller than a thousand pounds, nobody remembers your name.
The details of pumpkin nautical architecture would seem simple, on the surface, so to speak. But distinct challenges present themselves.
First, one cannot help but notice that the pumpkin, whatever its dimensions, has not evolved a shape that lends itself to a graceful passage through water. Their roundness makes them prone to a certain vertical indecision, so that any overly enthusiastic motion from the pumpkin operator can result in his immediate demotion to keel.
Tom said the first outboards used on the pumpkins were two- to three-horsepower trolling motors. But, this is America and we all know that means there is no such thing as too much horsepower. From the photo I picked up online, Buzz Pinkham’s pumpkin this year boasted a 25-horsepower Nissan rig.
If I understood Tom correctly, some outfit that sells and repairs snowmobiles and jet-skis is working to develop a pumpkin/jet-ski hybrid. Heady stuff. I hope nobody from Morton-Thiokol, who builds the solid-rocket boosters for the space shuttle, ever gets wind of the regatta.
Of course, there’s no easy way to attach an outboard motor to a pumpkin. The guys figured their way past that by attaching a plywood platform to the top of the pumpkin that gives the motor a little platform, or transom, to hang onto. There’s also a little frame to hold a block of polystyrene for floatation, to counter the weight of the motor. Without it, the pumpkin seems, briefly, to be headed for the sky, and then sinks out of sight.
They sometimes sink out of sight anyway. Tom’s pumpkin betrayed him this year, according to some published accounts.
Better luck next year.
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© 2009 Marsh Creek Media, Gettysburg, Pa.
Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.
Check out the two “Burger to Go” blogsites:
