I know kids, especially young boys, love toy guns. It’s probably a toy gun, except in the U.S. it would have an florescent orange plastic nose piece. But why does the boy, probably 5 years old, with the Red Army Uniform, trumpet and gun unnerve me?
It makes me wonder. American kids do Thanksgiving pageants. Holiday plays. But, and maybe this is because I don’t have school age kids now, I don’t recall being in an auditorium with Kindergarten kids dressed as Civil war soldiers holding muzzle-loaders.
Just showing my ugly, xenophobic, American side, I guess.
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The Rant D’Jour is about video production sent out of town. A recent news story in the paper was headlined “World to see W-B via videos.†I am all for the world more
A recent news story in the paper was headlined “World to see W-B via videos.†I am all for the world seeing us. If it brings dollars to NEPA whether from new business or a tourist bring ‘em on I say. But I am troubled by this deal. The idea is that there will be video feed on the city’s website highlighting aspects of the city to entice people to come see for themselves. My problem? The videos are being produced by a firm called CGI Communications. CGI is from Rochester N.Y. I checked out their web site. They look like the real deal and have done this sort of thing across the country. The product looks very professional. Everyone is happy.
Except me.
Now an important point is that no taxpayer dollars will be used for this project. Local business leaders will make it happen with donations. So what is my beef? Here it is in a nutshell. Why do we farm out something like this to Rochester N.Y.? Is it because we don’t have the expertise here in the “Valley†to do it? Now I am not a video guy, audio is more my field. But I have to guess that with firms like Pepperjam and Solid Cactus here who employ hundreds doing web stuff that somebody in town could do this important job. I just finished working with producers of a documentary on the life of Francis Slocum. My part was to record narration and music. The quality of this video is terrific. And it was done right here in good old NEPA.
Now I am not saying that they guys and gals at CGI wouldn’t do a great job. They probably will. And I am not carping that the money is going out of town, although that is a shame. The problem is that no one knows us like we do. I have lived here for 27 years and I barely understand this area. It is in a word, unique. To expect someone from out of town to show us to the world is a lot to ask. It will take a lot of local involvement. Someone who knows and loves the area will have to be involved. I have seen many locally written blogs and some of them contain video of the area. Some of them are quite good. If amateurs can do this, why can’t we find LOCAL professionals to do the job? Or maybe the amateur efforts really are better. In any case we need to show the world what we have known all along. That this is a pretty good place to live, work and play.
Announcers at any radio station have additional duties that they perform as part of their day. It’s nice to think that the time on the air is all we do but it’s far from the case, especially now in the age of voice tracking. But that is many years from our point in time.
The main other duty I had at WJNC was “productionâ€, which meant the recording of commercials. I had done some of this at WKNE and a little at WSNO so I knew what was expected. What I wasn’t expecting was the VOLUME. WJNC/WRCM may not have had a lot of things but it had a sales staff. And the WRCM spots were selling for “A dollar a holler†literally. $1 per instance of the commercial playing on the rotten station.
So needless to say my first few days at WJNC after my airshift were somewhat of a culture shock. I was shown the production room, a tiny equipment-filled closet- like space in the basement. The first day the copywriter delivered a stack of scripts, maybe five or so, along with background material, music or sound effects either on an LP or a tape, possibly another cart. The mission was to record the scripts, add the backgrounds and transfer to carts for use on WJNC or WRCM.
Of course the same spot often ran on both stations so you had to make two carts. The engineers had come through and provided two recording cart machines that started simultaneously. It was a novelty at first but soon it became apparent to me that it was an outright necessity. Too bad one machine was often on the fritz.
Attached to the scripts was a needlessly complex “production order†that you filled out after finishing the job. The carts needed labels but in some quirk of how things were done at WJNC those were already on the order, you just had to peel and stick.
I took immense pride in my production work back in those days. Still do. Pride to me meant doing the job well, and trying my best. So I paced myself on those five commercials, double checking pronunciations, making sure I gave the spots a good read and that technically they were perfect, carted up correctly and with no overmodulation and that they were exactly :30 or :60 seconds as called for. It took me three hours to do the five spots, which I considered a pretty good clip and brought me to 6pm, the end of an eight hour day.
I brought the spots to the copywriter, a serious alcoholic named Jesse who was less than pleased with me. I had cut into his “happy hour†and I found out later you didn’t do that.
“What in hells name took you so long?†were Jesse’s words to me when I arrived. I was taken completely off guard but put on bravado.
“I wanted to do a good job,†I said.
“Well, you are gonna have to learn do a good, goddamn faster job ‘round here,†was Jesse’s surly reply.
I found out what he meant the next day when he doubled my spot load to ten. When he slammed them down on the counter in the production room he looked at me and said “This is a start, there’ll be more.â€
Sure enough the regular production load at WJNC was about 15 to 20 spots daily. On Fridays it was double to account for the weekend. And I had best get them done in time for Jesse’s gin soaked appointment after work. Do the math. If the spots took five minutes each, which was blazing fast, I was pretty much maxed out. I resented it at first but then rose to the challenge. Looking back at it I probably owe Jesse and his slave-driver tendencies a debt. I became an expert at working fast, cutting corners and getting Jesse to his barstool on time, even on Fridays.
It soon became evident to me that the $150 a week I was bringing home was not going to cut it. As I found out often in my career there was never enough money. We bought a washer and dryer on time, which we were so proud of that we took pictures of my then wife standing next to them, beaming. The car needed gas and oil and repairs, the ex-wife needed doctors’ visits and I had to buy a bike to get to work. We had the Italian financial disease, “Fundzalow.†Being tied to the radio station all day limited my options. At WKNE I had tried sales but that was a dead end for me. The PD was not living up to the remote broadcast part of the deal. So I consulted the night guy. He suggested I do mobile DJing, what used to be called “Sock hops.†The morning guy, Mike Shaheed was making money hand over fist doing this, he said. Talk to him, he suggested.
Mike and I were not real close. Shaheed was mostly interested in Shaheed and things that concerned Shaheed. A fair announcer, he was a trak – star when it came to vacating the premises at ten AM. The door never hit his ass on the way out. Mike didn’t get much production which probably explained why I got so much.
I arrived early one day for my shift and asked Mike about the hops and my possibility of getting to do one or more. As it turned out Mike was double booked that Friday night. He was glad to let me do this one in Beulaville if I would pay him a $25 finder’s fee.
It was a disaster.
Beulaville was 30 miles from anywhere. I scurried through my production and got on the road and promptly got real lost. You have never been lost until you are lost on back roads in rural North Carolina. GPS? This was 1973. I finally found a farmer who laughed me at when I told him where I wanted to go. “You are going to Beulaville and you are here?†was what he said. Turns out I had gone miles in the other direction. The dance was to start at 7pm. It was past 6:30. I was screwed already and I wasn’t even close.
Somehow I got to the school, only twenty minutes late.
The engineer had helped me out by cobbling together a crude P.A. System. It consisted of two speakers, an amplifier, fed by a Shure Microphone mixer and a turntable. One turntable. The night guy gave me a stack of ‘45s and I was on my way. I think the gig was to pay $75 in cash; I would get $50 which at the time was an unthinkable fortune. I saw dollar signs. I didn’t notice that the high school I was at was 100% black. Not right away, anyway.
So I tossed the gear together and got a record rolling. The idea was that you played a song, and then did some announcing while you changed records. Two turntables would have helped but that was not in the cards at this stage. Of course there was no way to cue a record so you just needle dropped and vamped until it came up.
A little smaller than a lunch box.
But I had forgotten a key component. I had a microphone, but no cable. I found that I could plug the mic right into the back of the mixer and if I held it up I could speak over the P.A. but what I couldn’t do was change records, and hold up the mixer (which must have looked like I was using a giant harmonica) at the same time. It was awkward and embarrassing. I was already soaked in flop sweat and it was just getting worse.
About this time I took notice of the crowd. They were hard to ignore because they were crowding around me and demanding songs I didn’t know and certainly didn’t have. Later on in my career I would learn how to deal with teenagers at high school dances. At this stage of the game I was like raw meat tossed to sharks. It turns out that Shaheed had done me no real favors and played a colossal joke by handing me, lily white northern boy, this gig in an all-black school in backwoods North Carolina.
It was a long night. The ONLY song I had that the increasingly unhappy crowd wanted to hear was “Jungle Boogie†by Kool and the Gang, so I pretty much played that all night long, in between holding up the mixer to my mouth, trying to not to unplug everything in the process.
Playing “Jungle Boogie†probably would get you mugged now. I find it offensive on several levels. The young kids in Beulaville High ate it up.
By the end of the night, probably 10 PM or so, I just wanted to flee. I didn’t care if I got paid or not. I just wanted to get away with my life. The principal, the only other white person I had seen all night, came over and told me to pull the plug. Without another word he handed me a bag, filled with dollar bills and change. I loaded up the car and counted the loot. The fact that I had made $50 took some of the sting out of the evening.
NEXT: We discover how bad a newsreader I am, My days at WJNC end and interviews in the South go South.
I used to drive fast. Very fast. I was the type of guy who had the latest radar detector and knew how to use it. Along with consistently exceeding posted limits I was an extremely careless driver. I had a friend ride with me once and when he got out he characterized my driving skills as comparable to “Mr. Toads Wild Ride.†And not in a good way.
Everyone thinks they are good at two things. Driving and sex. I have empirical evidence that I am not good at one. I used to crash. I got enough moving violation fines to buy a Ferrari.
I speak of all of this in the past tense because now the radar detector has been replaced with a GPS unit. I am more interested in getting where I want to go then how fast I get there. What changed? Possibly years of reading stories in the newspaper and seeing mangled cars on TV. Probably the real turning point was when my son twisted up a car, tore it all to pieces as Brooks and Dunn would say, and how he managed to live for sure God only knows.
So now I go slow. Sometimes slower than the posted limits. This drives drivers behind me into red faced, eye popping, frothing, spitting paroxysms of road rage. I couldn’t give a bowel movement less. Here is some news, speedracers. If you go 75 miles per hour in a 65 mile per hour zone you save just over a minute every ten miles. 75 in a 55? About 3:00 minutes.
Let’s look at this another way. Most NEPA commutes average 10 minutes. Most side roads are posted 35 miles per hour If you drive 35 you will get there in 15 minutes. Go 55 MPH and you will get there in 11 minutes. Do you think the four minutes is really worth it? The moving violation for 55 in a 35 is around $135. That’s 33 bucks per minute. Setting the alarm clock a little earlier sounding good?
But the real cost? I point to the newspaper the other day. In three pages there were stories of a horrific hit and run leaving a body so badly mangled it was hard to ID it. A 16 year old hit a tree and died. An 18 year hit an old lady and killed her. And someone hit a school crossing guard who ended up in the hospital. Now I am not saying speed factored into these accidents. I am not trying to blame anyone as I am not privy to all the circumstances. But I can say without any fear of retribution that speed kills.
We go every year to the Back Mt. Library auction. It’s one of those bookend events of our lives, along with the Bloomsburg Fair and the other various annual events that make living in a community pleasurable.
Oddly enough, even though in another life I was once called upon to be an auctioneer, we don’t bid. But we surely do buy. Bags and boxes of books and other things. And we stuff our faces with the various delectables on sale, from halušky to Hillside Farms ice cream.
We watch Sue Hand, a very nice lady and talented artist, paint her yearly contribution in the crowd. Sue’s paintings sell for a very pretty penny. I should have taken up a paint brush instead of a pencil. The Sue Hand in my kitchen was a yard sale find. I won’t embarrass her by revealing what I paid, but it wouldn’t buy her much paint.
It’s a nice event. Placid. Orderly. Friendly. So I have to wonder why the need for an armed Sherriff prowling the grounds. Of course I often wonder why men with high powered sidearms are needed to enforce the law at High School basketball games and book sales. Many countries, England for instance, don’t arm the police. They have lower crime rates than we do.
I get that it’s a different world now. But the Book Sale Sherriff performed only one law enforcement duty while I was there. He ejected a silver haired senior and her beautiful, blonde Cocker Spaniel. I do get that dogs are prohibited. They might fight, bite or worse, poop.
But this dog was so pretty if I wasn’t married I’d have dated her. I seriously doubt this dog poops. It was perfectly groomed, it’s long golden tresses done up with ribbons. It was completely calm. Even when being given the bums rush by a burly man with Glock 17 on his hip. Thanks be that it was well mannered. It would have been ugly to see the Book Sale Sherriff draw down on the pooch. Uglier than it was.
I felt bad for the little old lady and her pet but she was in fact in violation of the rules and the signs posted denying dogs at the auction. She moved on. The dog went quietly. So did a small piece of my heart. And maybe just a bit of our freedom.
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The Rant D’Jour has to do with a close exam of the female anatomy.
There has been a lot of talk and heat and light generated by the opening of a strip club…more
There has been a lot of talk and heat and light generated by the opening of a strip club in the area of the Wachovia arena.(ED NOTE: Written in 2006, before The Mohegan Sun got naming rights) The place doesn’t need my help in the publicity department. They are doing just fine in that regard. But I read the other day that the owners are somewhat disappointed in the number of customers thru the door. Well I think I may have a solution that will be win for all concerned.
We do have lots and lots of homeless and to put it nicely, disadvantaged folks in our downtown areas. Take a walk around downtown Wilkes-Barre someday if you need further information. My idea is a simple tax deduction. Get a small bus or even a few vans and load them up. Drive those guys who would just be taking up space on park benches to the Strip club, pay the nominal entrance fee and give them a few bucks for lap dances.
As I understand it it’s a BYOB club so the question of these guys getting drunk doesn’t come in play unless they have a bottle of Mad Dog or a can of sterno in their coat. Voila! A full club and a tidy little tax deduction for whoever buys into this plan. Think how happy the dancers will be to see they are making the lives of someone a little brighter.
I can see you have your doubts about this plan. Maybe the club owners, who are trying hard to project a “classy†image for the sleaze parlor, will have some problems with the hygiene of my proposed audience you are thinking. No problem! I read that new club has the largest shower stage in the area. A few bars of soap and everybody is happy.
It’s a big club so maybe a few more ideas to get customers in the door are needed. I have lots of ideas so the owners just need to contact me. Here’s another one. Why not have a “bring your wife night� The little woman gets in for half price. Now that’s genius. The place will be packed in no time. Ask me about my plan to get lawyers in the door. It has to do with billable hours and it’s a surefire winner.
Tuesday Review: Pirates of Silicon Valley
1999 NR 97 minutes
This is an odd film to look at from the perspective of 2011. It was made in the late 90’s but tries very hard to project an image of the 80’s, mostly by the dress, speech and music used.
A side note here: I have seen this movie, and you will think I am lying, at least 100 times. Not because I think it’s really good, or that I really like it. I used the movie in my classes on computers, to try and give the students some perspective. It’s not a great film, not a bad film, but it gets the job done.
Over the years (!) that I have used the film in class I also assigned the students to review it. In most cases they wrote pretty straightforward papers, some of which were cut and pasted from the IMDB movie site. I flunked them!
Some students actually took the time to debunk some of the myths that the film brings into play, which was very satisfying to me as a teacher.
In most cases the film deals only superficially with the subject at hand: the exponential growth and development of personal computers and as a side plot the competition between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Because the film is short and because it is really NOT a documentary it paints things in a very sophomoric fashion. Bill Gates is a computer geek, Steve Jobs is a starry-eyed hippie visionary.
The casting is very good, at least in terms of how close they come to looking like the real deal. Bill Gates, (Anthony Michael Hall) looks like he is uncomfortable unless he is in the company of computers and Steve Jobs (Noah Wylie) is out there but also a hard-edged cut-throat asshole. The truth of the matter is they probably both had elements of asshole in them but Gates comes off a little more likeable. Steve Ballmer (John Di Maggio) is a weak link in the movie, played over the top but he does get a great scene where he breaks the “fourth wall” and steps away from the movie to show up a pivotal moment. It’s pretty good film making.
The film shows its age lately, as the technology progresses so fast that there is really very little about that devices the characters are using that translates to our world of smart phones and tablets. Still, it’s not a bad thing to remember history, right?
If you would like to further your education and see how some of the reality played out these films are a good start and not so incidentally are available on Netflix stream.
Revolution OS
2002 NR 86 minutes
Welcome to Macintosh
(Welcome to Macintosh: The Documentary for the Rest of Us)
2008 NR 73 minutes
The Future We Will Create: Inside the World of TED
2007 NR 73 minutes
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The Rant D’Jour is about a possible road rage cure.
I have spoken about road rage here pretty often. Often enough so that some…more
I have spoken about road rage here pretty often. Often enough so that some of my friends suggest that get over it already. That’s why I was so happy to see that not only am I not alone in this feeling of wanting to choke the life out of the moron in the other lane but that someone has actually done something to step up the war against highway stupidity.
Now I don’t personally think this is a good idea. I certainly don’t have the scrotum big enough to use this product. But for those of you so gifted here is the answer you have been seeking. Road Rage Cards. Now this may not be a new invention, as matter of fact I remember seeing something like it years ago. Back then you had a message on some sort of stick and you held it up for the offending driver to see. Road rage cards have brought this to a new level. On 43, 8 by 11 cards that the makers claim you can see from 25 feet away there are nearly 50 different, uhhh, suggestions for nearby motorists. And in a striking bow to technology all the messages are also printed in reverse so you can inform a driver in front of you of your displeasure and he can read it in his rear view mirror.
The messages run the gamut of things you have always wanted to say to other drivers. Get out of the fast lane…learn how to drive, moron, wake up, pay attention, the gas pedal is on the right…gee it seems like they must have taped my conversations. The signs also use certain words to call attention to the messages. You know the words. Rhymes with truck and hit and so on.
A few of the cards are a little over the top. One features a picture of a gun and the words I wish this was real. I think that might be a not so bright one to hold up now a days.
As a matter of fact the makers of road rage cards …19.99 plus shipping suggest strongly on their website roadrage.com
THE “ROAD RAGE CARDS†ARE INTENDED SOLELY FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES AND ARE MEANT MERELY TO BE HUMOROUS. ACTUAL USE OF THE ROAD RAGE CARDS, WHETHER BY POSTING SUCH CARDS ON CAR WINDOWS, REPEATING STATEMENTS IN SUCH CARDS TO OTHERS OR ANY OTHER USE IS AT YOUR SOLE RISK AND IS NOT RECOMMENDED OR ENDORSED BY US OR OUR PROVIDERS. THE ROAD RAGE CARDS MAY BE DEEMED HARMFUL OR OFFENSIVE TO OTHERS AND MAY GIVE RISE TO PHYSICAL OR VERBAL RETALIATION, WHICH MAY RESULT IN INJURY OR EVEN DEATH. USE OF THE ROAD RAGE CARDS WHILE DRIVING MAY DISTRACT USERS OR TARGETS OF SUCH USE, WHICH MAY CAUSE DRIVING ACCIDENTS, WHICH MAY ALSO RESULT IN INJURY OR DEATH.
A trip to the flea markets always yields a “huh?’ moment or two. This was actually shot in a place called Pocono Peddlers Village Antique Mall a tourist trap with high prices in Tannersville, Pa (The Pocono’s).
A little research gave me this:
Salt Pepper and Lard so I am guessing that these sets were a fairly common sight in the 1930-1940’s.
I wonder if this is where the term “lard-ass” came from?
My grandmother on my Father’s side used to make chocolate chip cookies that were unlike any others I have ever had.
They were almost grey in color. But they were worse than crack cocaine. Later on we figured out she used lard instead of butter in the recipe. I’ve never actually tried it, being of the generation that makes chocolate chip cookies from a plastic tube. But I will try it out someday.
