James Rising

Ed Note: Osama Bin Laden was still alive when this was written.

You have to love good old American ingenuity.

When Osama and his band of demented henchmen drove airplanes into American Icons they changed our lives forever. But try as they might, the evil that exists in the world is not as strong as we are.

Take the humble Zippo lighter. Now I no longer smoke and when I did I didn’t use a Zippo lighter except as a young teen. The whole flint and fluid deal was too much of a hassle. But the Zippo Company can do without my business as they sell 14 million of the flip top creations every year. Since the company was founded in 1932 they have turned out about 425 million. To the folks who make Zippo lighters in Bradford Pennsylvania, all 780 of them, it was devastating blow after 911 to have the Government flatly deny anyone permission to carry one of the lighters on any plane whether or not they had any fuel in them. About 40% of Zippos never see any spark and are bought as souvenirs. Zippo was in imminent danger of flaming out forever.

So the Zippo heads went to Washington and won their case. You can now carry unfueled Zippos on a plane.

But here’s where the American entrepreneurial spirit kicked in. The folks at Zippo wanted some way to allow their fully fueled lighters to be packed in checked luggage. They knew their Zippos would never be allowed in the cabins of aircraft but couldn’t they be packed safely in your luggage?

As you might have guessed the answer is yes, Zippo found a company that makes a vapor tight case strong enough to drive a truck over to pack the lighters loaded with fuel into. The Transportation security administration signed off on it and the net result-Zippo saved 30% of their workforce from being laid off.

The case costs 12.95 while a regular Zippo costs just $10 so you really have to want to do this. But it proves the point. In this country, if you really want to, you can probably find a way.

Take that Osama.

Tuesday Review:

The Rite
2011 PG-13 112 minutes

Silence of the Lambs this is not.

As may have said the most compelling horror films are those that leave the worst to our imagination. Understated, they only show the monster or the result of meeting up with the monster in brief glimpses. “The Rite” follows this formula but it still doesn’t help. The film just stinks. Even Anthony Hopkins as the exorcist doesn’t help.

The movie suffers most from a lack of chills and a very slow pace. The director, Mikael Håfström (Shanghai
2010, 1408, 2007) gets that suspense should build. Unfortunate that he doesn’t get that “payoff” idea.

If you want to rent the movie just to see Anthony Hopkins in action by all means go ahead. He is outstanding and gets loads of screen time but in the end just can’t overcome the boring nature of this “true” story. One has to wonder if the people who actually went thru the experience actually died of boredom.

Sometimes I wonder if the burdens we carry don’t end up carrying us…more

Sometimes I wonder if the burdens we carry don’t end up carrying us.

My family has undergone some emotional experiences this summer. Without going into great detail here let’s just say that to every time there is a season, unto death.

Everybody deals with moments of intense emotion, life changing events differently. I read somewhere once where a person only experiences true emotion for about twenty minutes. The rest is just the aftermath.

It seems to me that every experience we have that truly matters shapes us and maybe even prepares us for the next one.
This can be a good thing but it can also be the path to some destruction. Years back an experience sent me into a tailspin that took literally years to come all the way back from. The burden I carried for those years contributed to some interesting life choices and certainly altered the course of my life and those unlucky enough to have been around me.

All of us go through these life changing events. None of us escapes and even though we might outwardly minimize the effects we all must in some way deal with the consequences.

The counseling I have had over the years all seems to point in the same direction. You are, after all is said and done the only person who can heal yourself, just as you are the only person who can break yourself in the first place. The blame game that we all subscribed to in the touchy feely eighties was all pretty much crap. As Don Henley said-I’d like to find you inner child and kick its little ass. Get over it!

What strikes me now is the fact that at any given time someone near you is going through some sort of personal turmoil. You can not know it, you may never find out what it is but as sure as death and taxes we are all in this together.

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they might have been. An English writer said that, two centuries ago, and it rings true today.

ED NOTE: Written originally in 2005

That's a wrap

Monday July 18,2011

Rant D’Jour Did you Boscov Today?

Blog Post Picture This: A huge gas drilling rig in YOUR backyard.

Tuesday: July 19,2011

Rant D’Jour is about a speech by Wilkes-Barre Mayor that I found inspiration from.

Blog Post The Tuesday Review is of the remake of “True Grit”

Wednesday: July 20,2011

Rant D’Jour The music you hear as you walk in to a concert is a programmed science.

Blog Post WEEKENDER Column – No Mas NASA This is the weekly piece as published in dead tree land-this weeks about a lost relationship.

Thursday: July 21,2011

Rant D’Jour Tigger and Piglet R.I.P.

Blog Post Is the Radio DaZe installment for the week. This one gets me fired, shows a budding career in programming Classical music (not) and heads our little band of radio adventurers North.

Friday: 7/22/11

Rant D’Jour Is about Fast Food orders gone wrong.

Blog Post Is a “Picture This” posting that should piss some off.

Saturday 7/23/11

Rant D’Jour is about the heat. It’s an oldie but still stands true today.

Blog Post Aggregate Saturday. Potpourri of things, this one mostly about an adventure in climate control.

ED Note: From 2005, and it won’t be long before it is fair season. Cool.

The following is an unpaid advertisement for the Bloomsburg fair.

I guess that there is a certain segment of the population that goes to the Bloomsburg fair for the exhibits. Lord knows there are enough of them. Farm implements, offers to refinish your tub and loads of folks hopeful to sell siding.
I know that the rides attract many. Swirling and dipping and spinning with brightly colored lights and loud loud loud head banging music.

The Display buildings are a draw too. 4 h projects and yards of sparkling canned fruits and veggies and one building that feels like a walk through and infomercial with wonder mops and wonder juicers and wonder knives being demonstrated by aggressive folks with headset mikes and tinny sounding P.A.’s.

I know that those are some of the reasons to go to the Bloomsburg Fair. Maybe even the side show oddities, the world’s smallest horse, the world’s biggest alligator or the five legged calf.

But it’s not why I drive to Bloomsburg and fight the crowds.

It is of course the food stands. Top of the beef with the nuclear horseradish. Sammy’s cheese steaks where it seems you always compete with hornets for your sandwich. Gross French fries which are not gross at all but great. Jambalaya from Phil’s’ Cajun kitchen, potato pancakes, Carmel apples, blueberry muffins the size of cantaloupes. And all washed down with gallons of Coors. Not beer but orange drink.

I fight with my diets all year long with varying degrees of success. I am reasonably careful about my type two diabetes. But tomorrow I will be a waddling advertisement for an early bypass operation.

And I wouldn’t miss it for the world.

Aggregate Saturday:

Hot? OMG, hot doesn’t even begin to describe it.
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Spent a very hot few hours trying to install a window air conditioning unit into the long-suffering wife’s parents living room. They are resistant to change to put it mildly. The new flat screen TV sits on top of the old console model. The window is behind this arrangement. The worry was it would “bother the TV” so we had to wait until the temps are in the 90’s to play this game.

It actually was pretty straightforward. The first time. I unplugged the TV amid a chorus of disapproval and set it carefully on the couch. Heaved the unit into the window, got it fired up and the LSW packs the edges with towels to keep the critters with wings out. It’s done.

Sort of.

This unit, an experimental model from Edison’s original lab, blew what felt like 1 BTU. It was conditioning the air but only in the vaguest sense of that word. As we drove away I told the LSW this was not good enough. We went shopping for a new unit. Heh.The LSW had seen a news item on the TV. NO AC’s for love or money. Off we went anyway.

Lowes had lots of 16,000 BTU behemoth units. Monsters that would tip over the in-laws house and certainly would not fit in any window. K-Mart had fans. Lots of fans. K-Mart was where the LSW and I became angry at each other. We lost track of each other for 1/2 hour. It wasn’t pretty.

We sailed home and took an old unit from the attic. It’s a pretty good one. Probably 8,000 BTU. We took it out of service two years ago because new ones that have all sorts of features, like they weigh less than the Queen Mary, were on sale.

This unit is beyond heavy. It fires up on the kitchen floor and I hear the compressor kick on. It works. After cleaning all the seeds out that the squirrels hid in it we truck it down to the in-laws.

This installation, not so smooth. Father in law wants to help and I want him not to. I am terrified he will get hurt. A trip to the E.R. is not in my plans for the night. It gets a bit tense.

My fears are: This unit will be too big for the windows of their house, built before windows were invented. Lucky for me it fits.

Now, will it blow a fuse? And yes, the in-laws house uses fuses. Not breakers. Not even the “new style” fuses, the cylinders. These are the ones that you could sub a quarter for in a pinch.

I let it run on high for 15 minutes. It worked, the fuses stayed intact. Mission accomplished.

Today the temp on my car mirror said 105. I went to check on the in-laws, un-announced.

They were in the darkened living room, no ac, no fan, door open.

I surrender.
The Rant D’Jour is about the heat, not the humidity.

It’s not the heat. It’s the idiots who talk about it.

ED NOTE: From 2005. Timeless.

It’s not the heat. It’s the idiots who talk about it.

How many times have you heard “Hot enough for ya” this summer?
Yeah it’s hot all right-So far in August the lowest temp we have had during the day here in Northeast Pa land is 82. 6 days out of ten have been above ninety. Last Thursday was a thermometer melting 97. And let’s not even talk about last month.

In June the National weather service called our average temperature much above normal. In New York State it called June record warmest.

So this summer I have been very thankful that I have a swimming pool. It’s only marginally spoiled by the fact that I have a neighbor on one side who thinks its ok to burn garbage any time night or day, laying down a stink that reminds me of trips to the dump. Oh and one of my other neighbors has fixation with running his chain saw for hours at a time and running heavy equipment. I think he thinks he is Bob the builder. I wish he would run out of gas. Permanently, if you know what I mean.

Maybe the heat makes these things seem worse than they are.

But for the time I spend at the deep end of the pool, 5 or six feet under water I can’t hear or smell any annoyances. And it’s cool bliss.

It’s gonna be a hot one again today and the weekend looks like it too.

Looking for me? I’ll be at the bottom of the pool. The guy with the big grin on his face.

Picture This:

Not something we here in the USA hope to ever see. Three pick-up trucks filled with coffins. So many coffins that they had to be loaded standing upright in the trucks.

Pretty dramatic sight.

Some suicide bomber set off a device that killed at least 70 at a military training center in this shithole of a country. Northern Pakistan. It was graduation day the center. Most of the dead were paramilitary soldiers. Read that as: Kids in uniforms. Dead kids, now.

The Pakistani authorities (can you actually read that and not laugh?) say it was probably in retaliation for our little adventure with the turd with beard, Oh scumah. Of course it was. Isn’t everything?

At what point do you look at your country and think, well this is really screwed up?

How about when you see pick-up trucks loaded with coffins? A good place to start, I think.

Allāhu Akbar, indeed.

I am not really that hard to please.

At least I don’t think I am.

But I can not understand for the life of me why the fast food order window always gets it wrong.

Now don’t get me wrong. I make mistakes in my job. Lots of them. The other day I thought I erased an entire data base. It turns out I was wrong which proves I can make a mistake, right?

Back to the fast food order window. I order the same lunch every day. A chicken sandwich, hold the sauce. A small salad, no dressing. An ice tea, with fake sweetener and no lemon.

They always ask if I want lemon. I always say no. I almost always get lemon in my tea. I have my own dressing. They always ask. I always decline. I always get a packet. I always specify I want none of the horrid sauce. About every other time I get gobs of the yucky stuff. Oh and with that iced tea? First of all the size without asking can be wildly different. The other day, much to my surprise I got what looked like a bucket with a straw in it. One time I got a cup that held..well about a cups worth. And can they spare the sweetener? Either I get none (usually) or one or two. Try sweetening a bucket of ice tea with two of those packets.

Now I realize in the great scheme of the universe that my problem is very small. But think of this. I get this experience every time. Multiply my wrong order by the billions and billions of wrong orders there must be. It’s gotta cost someone something somewhere don’t you think. Never mind the cost in anger and spoiled salad dressing.

Radio DaZE:

I became resigned to the fact that I suck at being a newsreader at WJNC. Resigned maybe is not the exact word. It was pointed out to me by PD that the General Manager had heard one of my news broadcasts and that I had the temerity to mispronounce “North Carolininians”. I said it Carol line ians. The old guy apparently got upset, and relayed his feelings to PD.

There was also the day I came across “Tar Heels” in a newscast. I had never seen the phrase, had no clue what it was making reference to. I made a joke about it. Not a good idea. These faux pas got me on the radar of the guy in the big office.

Bob Mendlesome was the owner/GM of the WJNC/WRMC Empire. I don’t know how old he was but he seemed to me to be older than God. He was in ill-health having suffered several heart-attacks and I remember what struck me about the guy was that he had a big leather recliner in his office. Bob had little to do with day to day at the stations. I only saw his office twice, my first day on the job and my last.

In most other ways my days at WJNC were going smoothly. I was able, after about two months, to convince the PD that under his excellent tutelage that I now ‘got’ the format of WJNC and he could trust me to program my own songs. It didn’t take much convincing but he did say “If anyone complains it’s your ass, sonny boy.”

You really had to love a guy like him.

The pregnancy was the primary reason for my good behavior. Even though I was miserable at WJNC I knew I had to stick with it for the sake of my growing little family. Plus, deeply ingrained in me was the sense that failure was not an option. I could do this.

So I plodded through the days, becoming more and more adept at production and programming the evil automation. I even learned a little about country music so that I didn’t sound like a complete moron when I was recording the intros to the songs for the county FM.

I still showed a bit of subversion where I could. I just couldn’t play it completely straight, I had to put my twist on things.

Every day after the noon news we played a bit by John Doremus called “The Passing Parade”. Doremus was this leather-lunged big time Chicago radio personality on WMAQ and his show was this syndicated vignette sort of deal. It was awful, dry and not really all that entertaining. But I suspect that Mendlesome loved it so I tread carefully around it.

Doremus would end his five minute show with what he called a “smoker”, a kicker story to take him out on a high note. I found this hilarious because they invariably fell flat. His last words were always, “So put that in your pipe and smoke it.”
So in my own inimitable fashion I decided that I needed something to end my show with.

I came up with a “Flusher”, and no, I didn’t use a toilet sound effect. I just read some kicker or some pithy saying and ended with “So put that in the hopper and pull the chain.”

Well, I found it funny. Oddly enough no one ever commented on it.

But my days were numbered at WJNC.

The owner’s son, a burn-out acid casualty if I ever saw one, was in charge of the little business the station ran of selling and installing FM convertors. If I recall correctly the price was $19 and he got $5 per installation. The units probably cost $9 in quantity so the station made $5 on the deal.

Installation was a laugh. You plugged the car antenna into the unit, plugged it into the car radio antenna socket and plugged the unit into the cigarette lighter. When you tuned to 1610 on the AM radio you got the thrilling sound of FM (Mono) in your car and you could then tune the adapter unit to the FM station of your choice.

I think they actually sold quite a few of them. I know the kid was always working on a car in the stations parking lot. There were rumors that things disappeared from the customers cars on occasion but they never went very far. Mendlesome was powerfully connected, as I was to find out, and I think he squashed any allegations that his ne’er-do-well son was in any sort of scam.

Sunday nights were excruciating for me. The 12 hours at the station tested my stamina and my patience. I was to discover that when I get tired and angry good things do NOT occur. It was so boring that I became restless so I prowled around the station, trying doors and snooping. The majority of the programming was on tape and ran at least half an hour or a full hour so I had lots of free time.

At about four months into my employment at WJNC I asked PD if there was any sort of chance that I could get a little raise. I thought I was doing pretty good and I really needed some more in my pay envelope. I should have picked up on his reply that I wasn’t long for the WJNC payroll.

“Well, son, I don’t think the timing is quite right for that,” he said.

When I questioned him about why, he became evasive. This was on a Friday afternoon.

Timing is everything in life, I have found.

That Sunday night I was prowling, looking for anything interesting to make the hours go by a little faster. Once, the alcoholic copywriter, Jesse, left his office door unlocked and I found a huge stash of glossy pornographic magazines in his desk. Those made the night go by quickly!

This particular night I was downstairs by the area where Mendlesome Junior kept the AM/FM convertors. On the air was the “Classical Music hour” which I had decided was going to promote the most Avant-garde music I could find. That particular night I recall the listeners of WJNC were enjoying St. Giles Cripplegate by Jack Nitzsche and the London Symphony Orchestra. It’s music but only in the broadest sense.

The week before I had treated them to Philip Glass at his most atonal. I just couldn’t resist.
As usual I reacted to a situation where I perceived I was being mistreated by acting out.

Walking along the corridor I noticed one of the ceiling tiles was out of place, lifted up slightly. I figured there must be something hidden up there so I grabbed a chair from the production room and proceeded to investigate.
Several things happened at once. I got up on the chair, which was an unfortunate choice because it had wheels and wasn’t very stable. As I stretched to reach the ceiling the chair went one way and I went another. I fell to the floor with a crash and the chair went spinning down the hallway.

Just my luck the chief engineer, with whom I had a few nasty conflicts over broken equipment he never fixed, arrived on the scene. No one had ever been in the station on a Sunday night. Was this great timing or what? I was lying prone on the floor, under the ceiling tile that I had managed to dislodge. He took in the scene and went to get a ladder. Never asked me if I was OK or even looked at me.

I was pretty well out of it as I watched him investigate the ceiling. Hidden up there were several of the AM/FM convertors. To this day I am not sure but I would bet you money that Meddlesome’s errant off-spring had stashed them there and was branching out on his own. The Engineer grabbed the loot and disappeared.

The very next day Charest met me at the door as I arrived at work. He had a little smirk and I should have put it all together.

“Mr. Mendlesome wants to see you,” he said.

“Uh, oh,” I thought.

Sure enough as I was escorted into his office I noticed several items on his immense desk. The AM/FM converters, my headphones and my framed F.C.C. license. I didn’t need to be told, I was being canned.

I of course, denied anything to do with the converters but it was hard to explain what I was doing standing on a chair under them. I was screwed and unemployed and on the street before 10 minutes had passed. No discussion.

WJNC denied my unemployment benefits because I was fired for “cause”. I went to a lawyer to see what could be done. After taking a retainer and a week he called me up and reported that “Bob, his friend” had told him the whole story and I was lucky not to be prosecuted. Kept the retainer too, the son of a bitch. So begins a life-long love affair with lawyers. And an unhealthy hatred for General Managers who lie. It would serve me well.

A few months later I heard the sad news that Bob Mendelsome had passed on to the great recliner in the sky. I sincerely hoped it happened when he opened the latest magazine I had subscribed him to. Ads ripped from the copywriters porno mags for “Big Jug Roundup” and “My Sister and I” provided me with addresses so I could get Bob on some interesting mailing lists, anonymously.

I spent two weeks shopping myself around with resumes printed with almost our last dollar. No one in Jacksonville would even return my phone call. Clearly my reputation preceded me or else Mendelsome had deep sixed me but good. I finally got some interviews in New Bern, about an hour east of Jacksonville but nothing panned out. One manager called me in for a second interview simply to upbraid me for referring to his station as “Small market.” New Bern has population of about 29,000 now-back then in 1974 I am sure it was a really ‘small market’ but so much for that.

I was broke, out of work, out of hope and about to become a father. It was about as low as I would ever get. I rented a U-Haul truck, stuffed our possessions in it, put the wife’s car behind it on a stiff hitch and headed North.
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NEXT: A detour on the way home. Life begins anew and WCFR starts it all.

The Rant D’Jour is from 2005 but is still timely. It’s about the voices in my head.

Maybe it’s coincidence. But in my never ending search for signs of the oncoming apocalypse this ranks right up there…more