James Rising

WEEKENDER Column: They come in trees.

Into every crevice, every weak spot, the inquisitive snout went. Seeking any foothold it roamed and moaned its unstoppable power around. Catching a bit of tin here, a full grown, decades old tree there, it nibbled, wrestled, shoved and ultimately triumphed. Not humble in victory it shrieked in delight with the voice of thousand of years of domination over the land and sea. Don’t tell me it doesn’t know. It knows. It’s as alive as we are and just waits.

People say it sounds like a freight train. That’s pale. Add together a freight train, hundreds of jet engines spooling up to full power, the closest, most hair-raising crack of thunder and every Fourth of July finale you have ever witnessed. Multiply that by fear. You have only an inkling of the sound.

Helpless, held in its thrall, you see trees bend more than they should, leaves carpet the ground inches thick, loosened limbs fly like projectiles into the ground. The rain is not falling, it is being fired at you like stinging bullets, non-stop.

And the aftermath? We were lucky in the sense that we lived. We had no livestock to be grabbed and flung, no automobiles to replace. We came through better than some and worse than others. The roof is the blue of plastic tarp. The apple and pear trees, older than me by far, are buffets for the deer who can reach the succulent fruit on the very tippy top of the 100 footer without straining their necks. Enjoy, brother and sister for it will be a long time if ever that fruit comes from our backyard. The power back on we could see to throw out spoiled TV dinners and suspicious smelling milk.

They say it comes in threes. If so, this track goes, earthquake, Irene and Lee. The earthquake rocked me in my easy chair. We felt the wrath of Irene. We shudder to think of the future of those who get to speak the words, inundated by Lee.

It’s hard to process right now. We reel from circumstance to catastrophe and spend much of it too numbed to take it all in. We move and walk and think like zombies, overstressed, over informed, overwhelmed. Then in the midst of a thought, “let’s pick that up at K-Mart”, or, “want to go to the Garden Drive-in flea market?”, reality sets in again.

Dan Rather said once, “Courage.” It’s as good a message as any.

Clean up in aisle four.

I do the grocery shopping now. Have been for almost the past year. I don’t mind and actually kind of enjoy it. The other day I had filled my basket with my order and headed to the check-out to cash out and be on my way.
The long suffering wife has taught me to look over the checkers very carefully. You need one who looks like they won’t put up too much of a fight over coupons you are using. You also have to balance that need with the size of the person/persons order in front of you.

I chose carefully this day, The girl behind the register was very cute, blond, well put together and there were only two others in front of me. An older gent who was nearly done, or so it appeared and a 20 something guy with just a few items, one of which was a small bouquet of flowers. Aww, something to give his girl, or his Mom. The old guy was having a real problem. Something to do with writing his check. The cute checkout girl was very solicitous to him. I had picked right! Pretty and nice. A combo that doesn’t happen very often. The younger guy in front of me was getting impatient. You could tell.

Finally the senior citizen cleared out and as I began to load my order on the belt the young guy struck up a conversation with the checker. I didn’t hear all of it but I did catch the end. “These are for you” he said, proffering the small bouquet of flowers. “Wow” I thought, what a cheesy pick-up technique.

The cute check out girl looked at them like they were a dead rat and said “Oh I can’t take those. My boyfriend will have a fit.” I didn’t hear the pick up artists reply but the checker said “Do you still want them?” Pick up boy said “Yes” and scurried out.

I turned to the cute checker and asked “Do you often get flowers?” She looked at me and I could tell she was sizing me up. She decided I was old and no threat (when did this happen to me?) so she said “That’s the third time he’s done that. Can’t take a hint. And I don’t even HAVE a boyfriend.”

I already had more information than Mr. Pick up and I wasn’t even in the game! Being a pretty woman in a public place is hard sometimes I suspect.

I bet this sort of thing goes on all the time probably not three times in a row like our bouquet bearer but often enough. “He might be a stalker,” I said.

Her eyes flew wide open and she said “You think?” I don’t know why I did it, but as I started to walk away I said to her “I just saw him put the flowers on your car.” Just another day at the grocery store.

Tuesday Review: The Adjustment Bureau

The Adjustment Bureau 2011 PG-13 106 minutes

First a little background. I love Science Fiction. In my formative years I cleaned out the library and read everything by authors from Isaac Asimov to Roger Zelazny. I still read a boat load of the genre although my taste runs more towards what they call speculative fiction.

The Adjustment Bureau is the latest in a long line of Phillip K Dick’s short stories to be made into a film. It says a lot about the talent of Mr. Dick that his stories have spawned Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly, Minority Report, Paycheck, Next, Screamers and now The Adjustment Bureau. Dick is an amazing writer and his life Phillip K Dick is even more amazing.

Book to screen is often disappointing to me, especially when it comes to Sci-fi. Directors often have a heavy hand and you see a plethora of Bug Eyed Monsters and not a lot of heart. Alien Versus Predator. The Fifth Element. Signs. I could go on but I won’t.

George Nolfi. Producer, Writer, Director whose credits include: The Bourne Ultimatum (screenplay) 2006 The Sentinel (screenplay) 2004 Ocean’s Twelve (written by) 2003 Timeline (screenplay) 2006 The Sentinel (co-producer) gets it. He has produced a faithful adaptation to the original story and fleshed it out on the screen with finesse.

The actual story is a romance and it follows the rules. Boy meets, loses, gets, loses and ultimately gets the girl.
The hook is why he keeps losing her. Powerful forces are intervening in his life and forcing his hand. Who are these guys in the The Adjustment Bureau? Angels? Devils? Aliens?

Phillip K Dick himself once wrote of these stories. “In my writing I even question the universe; I wonder out loud if it is real, and I wonder out loud if all of us are real.”

The prevailing theme you walk away with is that our lives do have a plan, do have a purpose. It’s just not our choice.

Matt Damon plays David Norris, a failure as a politician because he is too young, too wild and too truthful. He meets Emily Blunt playing Elise Sellas in a mens’ bathroom (!) and they fall in love. Then The Adjustment Bureau steps in and the action unfolds.

The first sequence where Damon’s character interacts with, among many, James Carville, Mary Matalin, Jon Stewart, Chuck Scarborough all playing themselves is priceless and amazingly true to form.

Anthony Mackie (The Hurt Locker, We Are Marshall, Notorious) plays Harry Mitchell who is the “case worker” assigned to Norris. He is note perfect and immensely likeable in the role.

Drugstores?

I have been in a sort of funk lately. It just seems like things are not going so well. Oh not for me personally. Actually things in my life are pretty much ok. Sure I haven’t hit the lottery yet (Lottery: A tax on the stupid) and I still have to work. But without work I wouldn’t know when I was on vacation so it all evens out. Sort of.

But what has me worried is that the good old US of A seems to be slipping. At least if you pay any attention to the news. I keep hearing about how we are no longer a world leader. That our health care system is all messed up. That we are so deep in debt as a nation that it will be they year 2525 before we figure out just how much in debt we are. That our bridges and roads are falling apart. That our judges and other leaders are as crooked as…well pretty crooked. That last part seems to be true.

But the other day while I was mulling over all this stuff I was on a tour of local drug stores. The long suffering wife was on some sort of a scavenger hunt. I was bored. So I looked around. I guess they aren’t called drug stores anymore. It’s no wonder. Of the ones we visited less than 20% is devoted to pharmacy. The rest is an almost indescribable collection of everything you can imagine. It’s almost quicker to list what you can’t buy at a drug store these days.

Beer, at least in PA. Tires. That’s about it. Forget something at the grocery store? It’s there. Neglect to buy what you needed at Radio Shack? Everything from cell phones to multi USB hubs. Motor oil? Check. Lawn Furniture? In assorted colors. Refrigerator? Well, small ones but still…there they are. Need plastic skulls and foam gravestones for Halloween? Stacks of them. So much back to school stuff that you could equip several schools grades 1-6 with plenty left over for Junior High. Tools? Yup.

Reading material? So many different magazines that you furnish every doctors waiting room in NEPA and never duplicate a title. By the way did you know that MAD Magazine is still published? Figures. Now that I can buy it without my parents yelling at me I don’t want to. But my point? In just my little town you can’t throw a rock without breaking a window at one of these mutant department stores with a Pharmacy counter. It just seems to me that a lot has to be going right for us to have such freedom of choice.

Ivory carved beautifully:

I saw this on our last vacation in Maine at REED’S
ANTIQUES & COLLECTIBLES

Reed’s is one of our regular stops. Point of fact we have bought very little there but it’s a great place to browse for two reasons:

A: It’s air conditioned. Makes a BIG difference in the August heat that we usually encounter.
B: The background music is usually show-tunes and the guy behind the counter (Frank Reed?) sings along with them. He is quite good and I look forward to it every year.

Couldn’t see the price on this and you can’t tell with my shitty Blackberry camera but the detail on this is quite remarkable even down to the little bumps around the Areola called Montgomery glands. Clearly the artisan studied hard.

All this entertainment and for free.

Yard Sales Redux

It’s been a while since I have written about flea markets and yard sales. But it isn’t because I haven’t been visiting them. Far from it. The long suffering wife has the plans mapped out for weekend scrums like a field general. And this year I have noticed more than an uptick in other folks trying to do the same thing. Find something that you need and they don’t for less money than you would normally pay for it. Bargaining comes into play on the paying less for it part. I have perfected the art of picking up an item and looking perplexed. This will bring on a price that will cause me to take in a breath like I am suffering a myocardial infarction and I will put the item down like it was burning. I’ll pretend to walk away and then, Columbo style, turn back at the last moment and say those words that every seller hates to hear. “Would you take less for it?” On a good day I can bring in the deal for at least one third off, more often half.

And you find an often bewildering array of stuff, much of it in still sealed brand new condition. Piles and piles of stuff. But as a public service to flea market and yard sale operators everywhere I have a list of things that I always see that are never gonna sell.

First and foremost 8 track tapes. I don’t care if they are sealed. I don’t care if it’s 10$ for a box of a hundred. You’ll be keeping them. Along that line-Cassette tapes and VHS tapes. Magnetic tape as a storage medium was an iffy proposition when it was new technology. And it was new technology when Bing Crosby was on the charts. About 60 years if you are counting. Tape deteriorates. It stretches and breaks. And cassettes were hissy. Take them to the landfill.

And take the cassette machines and old VCR’s with them. It’s buggy whip technology. Because you have a DVD player do you think I want your old VCR? They make fine boat anchors I am told. And last but not least. Readers Digest Condensed Books. If I had a penny for every teetering stack of those badly edited albatrosses of literary shame I have walked by I would not be searching flea markets for bargains. Oh yes, I almost forgot. Encyclopedias. Folks, there is this new thing out called the internet. As Homer Simpson says, they have it on computers now. I looked at an encyclopedia the other day. No matter what I did it wouldn’t boot up and let me search Google.

SUNDAY WRAP

That's a wrap

Monday 9/5/11

Rant D’Jour Howard Stern? Really?

Blog Post Hermit? Me?

Tuesday 9/6/11

Rant D’Jour Music sells…out?

Blog Post Tuesday Morning Review – The Lincoln Lawyer

Wednesday 9/7/11

Rant D’Jour Don’t Worry, Be…

Blog Post Be Afraid. Very…

Thursday 9/8/11

Rant D’Jour Farmers Market

Blog Post Radio DaZe: WLNH begins

Friday 9/9/11

Rant D’Jour Email Hurricane Irene

Blog Post Email Tropical Storm Lee and more

Saturday 9/10/11

Rant D’Jour Tears of Rage – 9/11 redux

Blog Post Aggregate Saturday

Aggregate Saturday:

Hardly know where to begin.
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No idea what national TV media have done with the storm story. Two reasons for this. Three local TV operations for various reasons pre-empted all Network to offer live 24/7 coverage. I know this was probably a good choice. But somehow it seems more real when you see Diane Sawyer tramping around in the muck. CNN had some, The Weather Channel too, but I wanted to see how the big boys covered us, if only to hear “Hard scrabble coal country” one more time.
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Speaking of national media the NY Times, just today ran ny-region-in-triage-mode-as-flooding-persists way back in the New York section. We never made the front page. It mentioned Wilkes-Barre but only in passing.
–
We are on high ground and all of ours are as well. I have a close friend who was evacuated but since, at least till now, the levees have held, his place seems safe.
–
The Local TV stations:

WNEP did a slick glossy job utilizing all their considerable resources, putting Marisa Burke up in a chopper (remember when 16 had “SKY CAM 16”?) and even dragged out David DeCosmo to comment. But…the station had limited video and repeated it to the point of nausea. I know that people tune in out but if you were glued to the TV as we were it became very irritating.

16 had spotty coverage from the EMA center in Wilkes-Barre, missing several pretty important events. Their coverage was augmented heavily by FACEBOOK photos and videos which calls to question the need for them to be much more than conduits. It’s something to think about

WBRE did a credible job up until they had to evacuate the South Franklin studios for a mystery “other studio” which turned out to be the stations’ remote truck parked outside FOX56. Then it became college TV but not as funny. At one point they had three audio streams on the air at once, someone editing a video, someone shouting instructions and the anchors being mostly drowned out. I know it must have been traumatic. I get that it was thrown together. But it went on for a LONG time. It points out the fact that in this day and age of digital TV with it’s inherent delay no one is watching the on air product.

Having said that: because WBRE had limited…everything…they did a remarkable job. And they had tireless Andy Mahalchik who must have a large stock of high grade stimulants as he seemed to be on all the time, without rest. Mahalchik was in front of the EMA story and WBRE had all the biggies on camera on a regular basis.

And…having said that. It must have been awful for WBRE. It was, at times, very painful to watch, but it was real. They also used a lot of social media but were apparently unable to get as much on the air as 16.

WYOU simlucast WBRE. I wouldn’t watch WVIA if they sent me pledges.
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I heard no radio. I wanted pictures. Sorry former colleagues. A flood needs video.
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Steve Urban may have been tired. Maybe he needs to get laid. Possibly he is not as unpleasant a prick as he came off in every interview he did. Like it’s beneath his dignity to stand and talk to the media and he has to be right. Like all the media people are a waste of his time and just stupid. Well, he was quite often wrong and the final tally of how high the water got showed him to be the big blowhard he is. When he was questioned about the size of the levees being 41 feet high he snapped “They are higher than that.” Oh? I guess we don’t need to know how much higher, huh, Stevie. Andy Mahalchik read a number back wrong to him, transposing the last two decimal places and Urban snarled at him. Urban is the Bob Kadluboski of city government. And not in a good way.
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And about that water. The gauge failed? First of all, I don’t believe it. It’s a coverup and they knew all along the crest was going to be enormous, well above what they told us and so they blamed the gauge. And second of all…there is only ONE gauge? I may be stupid but I am not Steve Urban.
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I hardly know where to end. How about here.

Tears of rage

It will be ten years this Sunday. Ten years since the thousands perished, some in an instant, some that lived to die in unspeakable agony. 3652 if you want to count it, and that includes a couple of leap years that have passed. Almost a day for each life lost.

Remember what that day felt like? Do you? Do you really? It still brings a lump to my throat when I see a picture of the towers enveloped in smoke. It still pisses me off. I can’t help it. I just get consumed with rage when I think about. So I do what I guess most people do. I don’t think about it much. But this week I have to pick at that scab of a memory for a just a bit. There is a school of thought about the grieving process. Perhaps you have heard of this? Elisabeth Kübler-Ross wrote about it in a book called On Death and Dying. Without going into great detail it involves five stages: #1. Denial ,# 2. Anger, # 3. Bargaining, #4. Depression and # 5. Acceptance.

Some people have said that you don’t go though all the stages. There is also the possibility that you can get stuck in one stage or go back and forth between stages. I’ll tell you this about me. I have gotten past denial. I was deep into that for a while but a visit the New York City and a look at ground zero fixed that up for me.

As far as bargaining and acceptance that isn’t in the cards for me. I will never be able to accept what happened that day. NEVER.

Now the last two. Depression. Yeah, that’s for sure. I think in some ways the whole country has been depressed since that day. The basic feeling for me is one of shame, helplessness, the sick feeling that we haven’t learned our lesson and that we will never be safe again from madmen with evil intent. And then there is anger. Forgive me if I say that every time I hear Toby Keith sing “Courtesy Of The Red, White, And Blue (The Angry American)” when he gets to the part that says “we’ll put a boot in your ass It’s the American way” I end up pounding the air with my fist.

Impotent rage.

Another person once told me that time heals all wounds. I guess in a way that is true. I don’t think about September 11th 2001 every day. But I know I will take a few minutes this Sunday at 8:46 to think about it. I can’t help but not.

Tropical Storm Lee Email and more:

This is what the worst flooding event this area has seen since 1972 looked like as an Email in-box.

Here are some of the images and Facebooker comments.

Meshoppen Then and now

What is interesting to me is there were twice as many comments about the groundhog.