James Rising

Obvious "Scrooge" image

I love the holiday season. No, not exactly right. I love many things about it. Couldn’t care less about the gift giving in my direction. Love seeing the joy the things we send to the relatives brings, especially the grandchild, Haven. I love the meals, the cookies, the extra rations of grog.

I do not love the rushing around, the shopping and the packing of gifts. It has led to considerable strife between the Long-suffering wife and myself. It cuts into the grog consumption.

I don’t love the hangovers.

I love “Scrooged” the not perfect but still pretty good Bill Murray depiction of the Charles Dickens classic. It’s a regular for me and always makes me weep. Especially if I have exceeded my ration of grog, a likely outcome after a wrapping/packing session with the LSW.

I love my Christmas music selection. I have, over the years, programmed several all Christmas music stations and my personal collection is not what you’ll hear on the radio in large part. “Here comes Santy with his bag of shit” and that sort of tune always make me smile.

But..having said all that I was appalled and then furious when I heard the Pennsylvania Lottery run their “Happy Holidays” for the first time last night. First of all I HATE the Happy Holidays sentiment. Say what you mean and risk offending the Kwanza and Jewish among you. I think that they don’t care as much as you might think. And I know I don’t.

But really, the background music is “The 12 days of CHRISTMAS”. You get it?

I saw this photo about the occupy protest. As a child of the 60’s it struck a note for me. I tried to find a 60’s image with a protester wearing a gas mask but I kept coming back to this iconic image from Kent State.

I lived through the 60’s but not without a certain amount of residual damage. I for certain never was able to trust politicians and point of fact I only voted for the first time in my life in the most recent presidential election.

I still don’t trust authority, especially when it comes to them making the choice over our welfare over their pockets, recent contact with the Marcellus Shale underscoring my point. It just seems to me…

The more things change…

the more they stay the same.

I loved Halloween as a kid. Well, why not? Free candy, and way too much of it? What is not to love.

My trick or treat years were spent in Brattleboro Vermont, mostly. I would have been around 12 when we left to live in Ireland for a year and trick or treating was not an issue in the Emerald Isle. After that it was clear to me that I had passed some sort of line where it was not permitted to dress up and beg for candy. Besides puberty had discovered me and that was something that I could deal with any day of the year…and did.

I never recall my parents setting any particular boundaries about candy collection/consuming. This was the late 50’s and early 60’s and it was a more innocent time, when no one had ever thought about razor blades in apples and that sort of thing, which I believe in my heart never really happened even now.

I do remember the sheer terror and outright defiance when one year it was strongly suggested that I collect for Unicef. What the hell was Unicef anyway? And it never occurred to me that I could collect the dough, keep and spend it on candy myself. I just didn’t want to do it. Period. It might jeopardize the take. Shown below are two kids who were probably bribed with candy to hold those hated orange milk cartons. Neither one was me.

Not me. No sale.

I never recall any organized aspect to the Halloween deal. No parties, bobbing for apples or any of that nonsense. I barely recall an adult intervention at all. Just a sort of Charlie Brown teacher’s “wah wah” in the distant background.

Boy did I get a lot of candy! I could make it last for days, if not weeks before I was down to the stuff that I ate last because, after all, it was candy, of a sort. Sweet tarts. Gum drops. They lasted far longer than Snickers or Milky Ways. Yum.

I also don’t have the memory of the costumes all that well, except that the masks were always a misery in so many ways. Hard to see out of, hard to breathe and the goddamn rubber band either broke or got tangled painfully in my hair. They sucked and at the end of the night they were usually filled with snot and sweat and torn beyond recognition.

The candy bag went under the bed. It was raided at any time, without any thought given to dinner or breakfast. The only rule was no candy went to school. This was not a parental restriction or the law from Green Street elementary school. It was self preservation in that if you took it to school, the big kids would take it away. This only happened once.

One year in a burst of parental interference my mother came up with a concept costume. I may have been 12. It was just before we left for Ireland, they had dumped the house in Brattleboro and we had spent the summer living in a cottage at Spofford Lake NH. We lived in splendor in a place not unlike the one pictured below.

It was one of the best summers of my life. We were within walking distance of the lake and I had a bike and limited parental supervision. I could swim and fish and goof around in boats. It was a fun time.

Some local organization sponsored a Hallowed costume contest. My Mom came up with Snoopy, made me an outrageously grotesque costume, including a big nose stuffed with fiberglass that made me itchy and sneeze a lot. What was it with me and masks? The final touch was a lopsided dog house pulled in my radio flyer. I remember overhearing a kid say “The dog is gonna win” and so the dog did.

Every dog has it’s day.

Sunday Wrap 10/24/11-10/29/11

Here is look at what I have posted the last week, along with a bonus link to my daily blog about my adventures in juicing. If I don’t type enough text here the Facebook insets all sorts of mysterious code so I am just sort of rambling on here to see if I can get Facebook to not do that. Have a great week and Go Dale Jr. I still evidently need more blather. Maybe I will use some aaaa code to fill in the blanks.

Juiced!

Monday 10/24/11

Blog Post A Pirate looks at 31

Tuesday 10/25/11

Blog Post ‘Na Na Hey Hey (Kiss Him Goodbye)’, Paul Leka R.I.P.

Wednesday 10/26/11

Blog Post WEEKENDER COLUMN: Purposeless, needless and doomed to fail

Thursday 10/27/11

Blog Post Radio DaZe: WSNO

Friday 10/28/11

Blog Post Picture This: Just One Child

Saturday 10/29/11

Blog Post Saturday Morning Aggregate

Saturday Morning Aggregate

Big snow coming here. First storm is big no matter how many inches we get but this one is about 4 to 6″ of the heavy wet stuff. Nothing yet at 6am but it’s coming, so say the weather people. A rare October snow, they say.
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The Weather Channel HD is worthless for a local forecast. The “Local on the eights” covers the whole country, with a stupid graphic and no real information of value. The regular, non-HD channel has the old style one with an actual forecast that concentrates on the local. Great job, guys, improve the look, sacrifice the information. And the best part- I only found this out because I was watching upstairs in my office on a non-HD TV. So there you go.
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We may lose power. Usually we have cable (Internet)even when the power goes out but my UPS will only hold up for an hour or so powering the wireless router for the laptop. I could end up a McDonald’s after a thrilling all wheel drive this PM. I will not be happy and the Long-suffering wife really hates it. But the web never sleeps and doesn’t care about my power or lack thereof.
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I am planning on a good Juiced! entry today including pictures. See it Here.
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I seem to have a regular bunch of readers. More than a handful. Less than I would like. I am grateful to all of you. Thanks for reading!

One morning an elderly man was walking on a nearly deserted beach. He came upon a boy surrounded by thousands and thousands of starfish. As eagerly as he could, the youngster was picking them up and throwing them back into the ocean.

Puzzled, the older man looked at the young boy and asked, “Little boy, what are you doing?”

The youth responded without looking up, “I’m trying to save these starfish, sir.”

The old man chuckled aloud, and queried, “Son, there are thousands of starfish and only one of you. What difference can you make?”

Holding a starfish in his hand, the boy turned to the man and, gently tossing the starfish into the water, said, “It will make a difference to that one!”

Turkish baby rescued

I got the job at WSNO by fabricating a resume. On paper it looked like I had worked with Marconi. Thinking back I know they knew I was green. But they probably needed a warm body and I fit the bill.

The station was at the very top of the highest point in the small town of Barre Vermont where it really does snow. A lot. Al Noyes, the crusty old general manager and his son, Bill ran the place with indifference and economy. It was a perfect training ground for a young wanna-be announcer who owned a four-wheel drive vehicle.

Al Noyes had little or no time for the announcers at his station. We were so far under his radar that we didn’t really register. His time was spent in obscenity laced, red faced, spittle spewing harangues with the salesmen who, as near as I could tell, were worthless and weak.

Bill Noyes was the program director. Even as green as I was, I could tell he had no right to the position beyond birthright. He would focus on some minor formatic infraction and write long, poorly worded memos and hang them on the equipment racks. It became a game among the announcing staff to correct his spelling and grammar, changing our handwriting so he could not recognize who dared to question his authority.

But my first night I wasn’t ready to correct anything. I was so scared that I had trouble swallowing. It’s really difficult to read a newscast in that condition. It’s even harder when it’s your very first newscast.

I had a reasonably good handle on the mechanics of the deal. There was to be 15 minutes of CBS network news followed by me reading ten minutes of local and regional news culled from the clattering Associated Press Teletype machine just down the hallway. All I had to do was close the CBS network connection, open the microphone up and try to read without sounding like it was the first time I had ever done it.

It was going pretty well. I had made my way through a handful of stories without butchering them too much. Then, in my headphones I heard both a high-pitched tone and myself. I tried to ignore it and pressed on. The tone persisted. In fact it seemed to get louder.

I was terrified. Sweat streamed down my face and landed on my copy. Were we under attack? Had I been discovered as a radio fraud and the tone was an alarm sounding?

The tone abruptly stopped. I inwardly breathed a sigh of relief and continued on with the newscast. I was nearing the finish line when a voice appeared.

“Stations, this is CBS news in New York. Please be advised that…”

I suddenly understood. The one thing I had forgotten to do. Close the connection to the CBS radio network. The tone wasn’t an announcer fraud detector or a harbinger of the apocalypse. It was just some engineer sending a signal down the line.

I closed the connection, finished the newscast and began a career in broadcasting that would always be interesting, but never quite as scary as that first night, high on a hill, in Barre, Vermont.

WEEKENDER COLUMN: Purposeless, needless and doomed to fail

I came to live in Northeast Pa in the fall of 1980. So pretty quickly here, it will be 31 years that I have called this place my home. It’s been a good home but it often makes me very confused.

I came to town to put WKRZ on the air. We knew very little about the area but I had some time before we went on the air to explore a bit.

When I was first here downtown Wilkes-Barre was a lively vibrant place. It had these kind of cool red canopies. Boscov’s was a newish seeming store, with bright displays and it was clean. The hotel Sterling was open and we even looked at it quite seriously as a place to build our new offices. The center of town had little restaurants, a music store and lots of shops. The square had its share of creepy crawlies but it had the fountain, and it worked.

The Station (Market Street Square, later, later still, a revolving, revolting sting of names) was just opened and it was a jewel indeed. Fine dining in unique train cars, great acts in the nightclub (I saw Joe Jackson there among many many others) and was a thriving business.

When did it all go to hell? When exactly did the hotel Sterling become less a place to stay and more a place that we fear to drive by, because it might topple and fall on our heads? When did the Station become a financial disaster needing millions of dollars to save it? Who decided that we needed the train station more than a hotel? When did the mechanics of a working fountain become too hard for us? It didn’t happen overnight. It happened in plain sight, but apparently not plain enough. Just a slow slide into oblivion. The opposite of love is not hate, but indifference.

Talk is that the Station complex will become a “visitors center” similar to the one up at Montage. What a plan that is. Ever visit the center up north? I was there a few times. You could shoot cannons at either end and not hurt a soul. Just what we need, another empty building to decay in the downtown area. Purposeless, needless and doomed to fail. Sounds like a motto to me.

So what solutions do I offer, smart guy? None. I am after all just a guy with a laptop and an axe to grind. Smarter minds than mine will decide the fate of old hotels and derelict train stations. Politicians and officials will fix it all.

Just like before.

I wish they would put the red canopies back. I really liked them.

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Reach Jim at contact@jamesrising.com Even more rants are on his blog, updated every day that ends in “y” at jamesrising.com

This is such a typical story that really illustrates how crazy fickle the world of pop music was, and maybe still is.
While Paul Leka was not a “one hit wonder” per se, (he also wrote “Green Tambourine” for the Lemon Pipers, another one hit wonder),Leka’s best known song was ‘Na Na Hey Hey (Kiss Him Goodbye),’ a b-side (the flip side of a 45 RPM record) that was designed to NOT be a hit. The song had everything going against it, too long, crappy lyrics and being released as a B-side but it became a huge hit nonetheless.

Paul Leka, the writer of 1969 No. 1 hit ‘Na Na Hey Hey (Kiss Him Goodbye),’ has passed away due to lung cancer, the New York Times reports. He was 68. According to the producer/songwriter’s brother George, Leka died on Oct. 12 in hospice care near his home in Sharon, Conn.

Paul Leka Dies at 68

Very shortly here it will be 31 years that I have called this place, this NEPA place, my home. A lot has happened in those three plus decades, that’s for sure.

When I came here I gave the people I worked for an ultimatum. I would be outta here in two years.

Obviously it didn’t take. They left, I stayed.

Of course it’s not been as simple as all that. I left too, several times. I lived in NH (Twice) moved to Scranton (THAT was a disaster) but I have been pretty stable lately. I guess the old idea about putting down roots has some credence after all.

There have times when I thought I hated this place. Couldn’t wait till it was in my rear view mirror. Other times when coming back felt like coming home.

My youngest son was born here. I got divorced here. Married a girl from here. Owned two houses here. Bought and sold cars, took up and discarded lifestyles, habits and jobs. I have a lot of history here. Made enough money to buy…well not Miami, but I did piss it away pretty fast. Worn many a magnetic stripe thin on the credit cards of life.

Possibly it’s the passing of another year, what with my birthday just going by. Maybe it’s just the time of year. It was about this time of the year when I first came here to live. It was a heady time of my life. I put a lot on the line back then, but it all seems like a dream to me now. I don’t really understand how we did all that. Pretty much me and my American Express card ran the show here for quite while. It seemed easy at the time. I could never do it now, it would kill me.

Of course I was 27. I could do a lot of things back then that I couldn’t dream of now, more is the pity.

Wow. 27. Was I really?

Now my mind writes checks that my body can’t cash. And I sit here at the kitchen table, laptop in front of me, long-suffering wife buzzing around getting ready to go to work.

New life, new day. It’s all still an adventure.