James Rising

Aggregate Saturday:

Odd dream last night – An old record rep who I haven’t seen or even thought of in years was in a nursing home. The years had not been kind. Eyes all milky. Skin hanging loose on his face. White hair, very sparse. An old, old man. Odd dream.
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Tree down in yard after a big storm. This happens fairly often so I have a chain saw. I am not good with it. I am scared of it. I always get it stuck. Yesterday I got it stuck and had to use a hand saw to cut it out. Tree is still there. Chain saw is bound up and I can not get it loose. Needs a new chain, anyway.
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Got the key and key fob for long-suffering wife’s car. Took a while and cost $115. That was with a discount because the service manager put the name and the voice together. It’s been 3 years since I was on the radio. 10 years since I was on a station of any consequence. Yet people remember. Weird.
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I am out of fake chemicals for my coffee. Use milk, LSW says. It doesn’t taste the same.
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NASCAR boys are on a time zone swing not to my liking that involves late starts and late finishes. I prefer ET, DST, please.
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The automatic chlorine dispenser for the pool is hyper-active this year. Test yesterday showed dark red. Yellow is preferred. Dark red is kill on contact level. I left the pump off for 24. Will run it for a few hours today. Get the color right. Wouldn’t life be great if you could measure all things by color?
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I am working my way through the “Sopranos” for the umpteeth time. It never gets old. I have all but the last season on DVD and will summon that via NETFLIX when time comes. The episode with Hesh Rabkin, the Jewish record producer, and the black record mogul Massive “G” called “A Hit is a Hit” is one of my all time favorites for so many scenes.
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Pain. Lots of it. As you get older it becomes a constant companion. Pain, both physical, mental and spiritual. It’s one of the ways we know we are alive.

So, so you think you can tell Heaven from Hell, blue skies from pain.
Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail? A smile from a veil?
Do you think you can tell?

-Pink Floyd “Wish you were here”
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I saw a blinding light the other day. I saw a machine that makes hurricanes. I saw technology go out of date before my eyes. Next week we will illuminate these and more.

Thanks for reading.

The Rant D’Jour involves a spray can of blue paint. The color is key.

Things that make me go Hmmm. A vandal in Nanticoke with a can of blue spray paint. The police blotter…more

Things that make me go Hmmm.

A vandal in Nanticoke with a can of blue spray paint. The police blotter the other day in the Times leader reports three separate incidents of someone spray painting various property with nasty words in blue. As near as I can tell from the account in the newspaper this all happened on broad daylight, about 1pm and the three incidents were within blocks of each other. A Church, a funeral home and someone’s rental property were all defaced.

Now I don’t claim to be a detective. But I have seen lots of episodes of Cops on the TV and I read a lot of mystery novels. Maybe I can help here.

The whole deal raises loads of questions in my mind. First of all, why blue? Is there a significance to the color that we don’t get? Was the idiot who did this a Penn state fan. A possible clue for the cops. Look for someone with a Penn State sticker on his car and blue paint on his hands.

Second question for my inquiring mind. Was the choice of a funeral home and a church a random act? Or was there a message here. Some loved one of the blue paint vandal died recently and the Mass said in the church? Maybe they lived at the rental property that was defaced. I am just trying to give the detectives in Nanticoke a little help here.

And thirdly and I have to be very careful here due to recent FCC rules. The message the vandal painted. It was a Anglo Saxon term for lovemaking and the word you. So maybe the vandal was trying in his or her own peculiar way to spread a message of peace, love and understanding. Like the hippies in the 60’s Make love, not war. Love make yourself.

It may not be the biggest mystery in our area. But since Hugo won’t be on trial again for a long time it maybe the most interesting.

ED NOTE: Censorship reference in last graph. Forget not I was delivering many of this stuff on the radio.

I have posted more than once about my total ineptitude with all things mechanical. A repairman once told me that it was OK to be as bad at doing “Manly” repair stuff as I was. he rationalized it thusly for me:

“Some people are good at this shit, some aren’t. You can write and I can fix plumbing without burning down the house,” was how he put it.

Of course my inability to fix, well, just about anything, means he gets money from me. So it is to his advantage to make me feel OK about shirking my manly duty to try, screw things up almost beyond repair, and call in the cavalry.

But even a blind acorn finds a pig. Or something like that.

This is what greeted me the other day when I got in the old family truckster:

That would be the rear view mirror, which was swinging merrily from the wire which connects it to whatever sensors tell it which way I am headed and how hot it is there. It had fallen off overnight.

Google told me that there is a solution, specially a solution of glue:

It’s readily available at most auto parts stores so A chugged on over to

and picked up this: for under $4.00 including tax.

The helpful guy behind the counter showed the best way was to remove the mounting deal, called a button in the instructions on the glue, and affix that, then slide the mirror down on that. Easy. Except that this required a hex screwdriver which I have not. But helpful guy behind the counter loaned me his.

The process is to prepare the surface with this wipe, like a face washing nap you get at the KFC, let that dry for 2 minutes, then put one drop (!) of the glue on the button. Press, hold for two minutes and then let set for 15.

I did this all in the A&A stores parking lot. The one I chose was in downtown Wilkes-Barre, across from the main post office and in the section of town where I lived in 1980 when we first put WKRZ on the air. It was an interesting place then, and is even more so today. Suffice to say I people watched with my doors shut, locked.

But amazingly it all turned out. I gave the helpful guy behind the counter his tool back. The mirror is still in it’s right palce today as I write, several days later. Mission Accomplished!

Here is the good news. I did not glue myself or anything other than the mirror. I did not spill the glue. I put the button for the mirror on the right way. Upside down would have been No fun. In fact the instructions on the Rear View Mirror Adhesive kit strongly suggest that removing a button is next to impossible and your best fix if you are that stupid (well it doesn’t say stupid) is to mount another button on the other one.

I can see me with a stack of buttons a foot thick.

But this did not happen.

Even more important I have discovered a very cheap and really strong glue that might work for me in some way in the future. If I ever need to affix something to something pretty permanently.

How about a statue to the goofy neighbors mailbox?

Just kidding. That would be…wrong. Funny. But wrong.

The Rant D’Jour is about the ubiquitous coffee chain, Starbucks.

Sooner or later it had to happen. My town is getting a Starbucks. I…more

Sooner or later it had to happen. My town is getting a Starbucks.

I will admit here and now that I have only had one cup of Starbucks coffee in my life. I was at a business meeting in Chicago which promised to be a long and probably pretty boring affair. Two of my fellow business-meeting-goers suggested a quick run to Starbucks to fuel up on expensive caffeine. Not knowing how or what to order I let the other guys order for me.

When I was handed the cup I took the top off and put my usual three packets of artificial sweetener in it. The other guys just looked on with shock and informed me that the coffee was already plenty sweet. So I had a really really sweet cup of Starbucks coffee. It sucked. But that was my fault, not Starbucks.

Starbucks must have something going for it. The Chain, which has been around since 1971, has 12,000 locations in at least 30 countries and has over 117,000 people on the payroll. Some say a town isn’t truly considered to be completely civilized until you have at least one Starbucks. So now Dallas will be completely civilized. Why is it then that I think it would be equally important to have a bookstore too?

ED NOTE: This, written in 2006, outlived the Starbucks which closed in 2008 is now an AT&T wireless store.

Radio DaZe:

The job in North Carolina doesn’t appear on my resume.

First off, I don’t recall being there for more than 6 months. I took the job when I learned my then wife was carrying James II, although technology being what it was in those days (1973) we surely did not know “he” was a “he” until “he” came out.

Previous sentence written mostly so I could enjoy putting “he, he, he” in.

Second reason why it does not appear my resume is it would not do me any good. It was the first job I would be fired from (not the last as it turns out) but there is more to the omission.

The owner and the managers of WJNC, Jacksonville N.C. at the time were complete and utter imbeciles. To be sure I have worked for my fair share of dummies but these guys took it to a fine art.

I didn’t help my case down there much. Jacksonville N.C. is where Camp Lejeune (Pronounced “lajerne” – rhyme with tern) is. Camp Lejeune is the home of the First Marine Expeditionary Force. At the time I was negotiating for the job at WJNC the letter head of the station proclaimed “Proud home of US Marine Corp Base Camp Lejeune – the largest amphibious Marine base in the world.” I should have taken that as an omen.

But it was a job that would pay me $50 more dollars weekly, which was a fortune at the time and seemed to make sense to a father to be.

It was NOT a good place for a Damn Yankee long-hair fresh out of college, never out of New England.

The disconnect became apparent after my two day drive down with U-Haul trailer in tow behind the first wife’s hulking 60’s Dodge something or other. The Program Director was to meet me at the station to give me the keys and directions to the apartment the station had secured for me.

This bozo had hired me on the basis of my audition tape, sight unseen. I had long hair, a full beard and was road hypnotized from an 800 mile trip. In the car waited the first wife with son in belly and my friend Jeff Goldfield who had hitched a ride down with us to get to Myrtle Beach.

He was clearly taken aback by buyer’s remorse when he met me. He looked around to see if it was a ventriloquist’s trick, that I wasn’t what he had hired.

Then he explained that I was to start THE NEXT MORNING (Sunday) at 6am and he was there to train me.

WJNC was one thousand watts on 1240. It was no problem. I knew how to run all associated equipment and once shown the control room and where the transmitter readings were taken I was good to go.

WRCM-FM was a different kettle of fish. FM was not an issue in 1973. Few cars had it standard (you could add an FM tuner- which will figure in my eventual demise at WJNC) and mostly it was a vast wasteland of “Beautiful Music” and Classical. WRCM-FM was an automated country format.

Automation systems were quite common on FM at the time. Later on in my career I would move the automation system on WAQY (Wacky 102!) to an AM station, WTYM and get a write up in Billboard for being the first to do so.

The system I had worked with on WKNE-FM in NH was like the one pictured below.

It was designed and built by the Schafer Automation Company. It had the music on the reel-to-reel machines and commercials and other elements on the circular devices, called “Carousels.” Each slot held a “cart” which could hold up to five minutes of material on a looped tape system similar to an 8-track.

It was NOT a computer. Far from it. It was a “Sequential Electronic Memory” device. Really just a big switching arrangement. You programmed using small switches to play an event, one after another. Because you had to identify the station with call letters and city of license once an hour within two minutes before or after the top of the hour, it had a clock that reset the elements to beginning which was the “ID” unit.

It worked OK at WKNE-FM, which was a “Beautiful Music” station with no announcement of selections names or artists and long periods of segued instrumentals by Andre Kostelanetz, Percy Faith, Mantovani, the 101 Strings, Billy Vaughn, The Living Strings, Frank Chacksfield and so on. It was terribly boring to a 20 year old just out of college who wanted to play the Rock.

The system at WRCM-FM was a little different. Either they were too cheap (most likely) to buy a real system or the engineer decided he could do it better, but this was a hodgepodge of mismatched gear and never worked right. Plus it was a nightmare to program as the brain trust at the station wanted “Personality” on their automated country station, so the announcer carts had to synch up with the music, something it did once or twice while I worked there. The rest of the time it would cheerfully tell you that the song playing was by Eddie Arnold and you would hear the latest Lynn Anderson hit. It was awful.

So there I was, road weary, dirty and only wanting to move into my new apartment and this guy was looking at me like I was a bug and laboring to explain this system, which as it turned out, he knew little about.

It was not an auspicious beginning and it did not get better.

NEXT: The first, and very nearly my last day at WJNC.

The Rant D’Jour is about a deer, a doe, a female deer.

It was a strange Sunday morning and it just kept getting weirder. As we walked into the supermarket…more

It was a strange Sunday morning and it just kept getting weirder. As we walked into the supermarket some guy was backing out of a space and his car was making a horrendous grinding noise. The long-suffering wife and I turned to see if he was dragging an old lady or something and saw a flood of white liquid cascading out from underneath the car. Now I know my car fluids, having seen enough of them on the floor of my garage from sick autos and none of them are white. As the guy drove away nonchalant we saw the crushed plastic gallon of milk that he had hit and run. I guess I would have run too.

We entered the store with no idea what awaited us.

Thomas’s market on the Memorial highway is in a strip mall and is one of our smaller supermarkets. It used to be an ACME when my son was a bag boy. That son is 32 now. Whew! Time flies when you are having fun. Anyway, that section of Shavertown is real busy, with a Burger King and McDonalds nearby, a gas station, several car dealers and lots of homes. Urban sprawl, Northeast Pa. style. The highway is busy with traffic even on a Sunday morning.

Our mission was to pick up the Sunday Papers and a few other small items and get out of there. As we were nearly ready to check out I heard the announcement over the p.a. It was no trick to hear the panic in the girl’s voice as she said “Bill to the Checkouts ASAP!” I was close enough to hear her tell Bill the problem. It seems a deer had somehow made its way into the store. Sure enough a young doe, according to an eyewitness I overheard later, had navigated the highway and the parking lot and ended up at the automatic door. When it stepped on the activator pad the door swung open and the deer ran inside.

I saw the poor unfortunate critter at the end of the dairy aisle. It was having a real hard time on the shiny linoleum floor, its hooves being designed for the woods and not grocery shopping. It was flying around like Bambi on the ice for the first time. It would have been funny except that it wasn’t. The meat manager, Bill and two stock boys were trying not to get a face full of sharp black hooves and were herding the doomed deer back into the stock room.
As we left I heard the same girl on the phone trying to get the Game commission.

The jokes would be very easy to write. But it’s no joke, this event. I know it ended badly for the lost deer. And I know as we take more and more of the woods where Bambi should live and make them into grocery stores and fast food joints that this sort of outcome is going to occur more often. Soon it will be as common as road kill.

I had occasion to visit Towanda Pa. the other day. Towanda was this bucolic, sleepy little town, about an hour Northwest of Wilkes-Barre. I say was, on purpose.

There is a scene in the “Blues Brothers” movie where Jake and Elwood Blues (John Belushi and Dan Akroyd) are in Elwood’s tiny one room apartment. The elevated train passes right outside the window, shaking the room violently. This exchange ensues:

Jake: How often does the train go by?
Elwood: So often that you won’t even notice it.

That is the feeling I got, spending a few hours sitting on the side of Rt. 6 where it passes through Towanda. The area is at the epicenter of Marcellus Shale natural gas drilling in Bradford County and looks, smells and sounds like the ninth circle of hell. A map of the area showing active wells looks like terminal measles in progress.

The huge, oddly shaped trucks carrying the mystery fluids shoved under incredibly high pressure into the ground are ubiquitous and scary. I counted several hundred in less than a morning. Most every other vehicle is support for the drilling. Large vehicles carrying large things to do large damage to the earth. The roads are a congested, ruined, mess.

A quick tour of the surrounding area with a local resident brought gasps from the native. A huge encampment of construction trailers, mountains of pipes, dozens of vehicles and men, spreading for acres across what was once a farmer’s field. “That wasn’t there two days ago,” our guide said.

Great gashes in the land, hundreds of feet wide cut into the trees and the hillsides ruin the look of the terrain. They are so numerous that the eye stops registering them. The local throws her hands up in the air. “Some landowners get rich. A few. The rest of us pay the price,” she said.

The frackers came to Dallas, where I live. They poked holes into the ground, sniffed deeply and left under cover of the night. Not enough gas to be worth it for them. Yet.

For, you see, ten or fifteen years ago Towanda wouldn’t have been worth it either. The price of gas and the technology caught up. Ten, twenty years from now expect to see them again, the frackers. This isn’t over yet by a long shot.

Take a ride along a peaceful country road in Lehman Township. Now. While you can.

The Rant D’Jour makes no sense to me.

Lanny Barnes made it to 46 years of age before he succumbed to the demons inside his…more

Lanny Barnes made it to 46 years of age before he succumbed to the demons inside his skull. A lot of folks don’t make it that far. Some do themselves in before they get a chance to do harm to any others. In the case of 2 year old Avery Nicole King things didn’t turn out that way.

How does your day begin when you know you are going to commit an act so unspeakably horrible that you will probably be put to death for it?

Do you shave? Have breakfast? Kiss your Mom Goodbye?

By all accounts Lanny Barnes had a long history of depression apparently beginning with his fathers death some 20 years ago.

But how his Father’s death and the insane act he committed last week add up is something for much smarter people to divine.

Lanny, according to many witnesses drove his car into a McDonald’s restaurant in Covington Georgia and in the process ran over 5 people, 2 adults and three toddlers. Then he backed up and did it again. 2 year old Avery Nicole King was unlucky enough to be one of those hit by Barnes and she died a day or so later.

Covington appears to be a typical small Georgia town. It’s about 40 miles outside of Atlanta and has four McDonald’s inside the city limits. So your odds that Tuesday were 1 in four.

Covington is 45 % black and about 50% white. Lanny was black, his victims all white. Comments I read in local newspapers and in blogs are making this out to be a hate crime. Suggestions ranging from building a gallows and “stringing him up” to staking him to the ground and running him over till he dies are being made. Think the civil war solved anything? Not in Covington Georgia where feelings run deep.

Probably the most disturbing thing about this terribly sad incident is something that no authority will conform but that several eye wittiness’s swear is true. If this is indeed the case the chances of Lanny Barnes living too long in protective custody are slim and none and slim left town.

More than one person claims that Lanny was smiling broadly and laughing gleefully as he drove his car over and over his victims.

I am just pointing out another signpost as we slowly slip our way down the slope toward the warm place.

Tuesday Review

2010 R 115 minutes

Boxer “Irish” Micky Ward has a fighting style. It is slow and painful to watch at first then becomes explosive and riveting. The same is true of the movie based on his life.

Most of my movie viewing is done after work. On the day I watched The Fighter I had put in a full shift. Now, granted, shoveling electrons is not as hard as moving anything with a real shovel for a living, but work is work and I get tired. So an entertainment must first, keep my eyes open. There is nothing more annoying to me than falling asleep during a DVD and having to replay much of it to figure out where I dropped off.

That is the problem with this movie. I nearly hit the “fugahdaboutit” button. But then I got hooked.

Actor mark Wahlberg, who has certainly made his mark since he showed us what he wasn’t made of in Boogie Nights (it was a prosthetic kids, get over it) could have easily just revisited his role as the Boston tough guy he played in The Departed but he didn’t, playing the role of one time world light welterweight champion Ward with rich subtlety and texture. Plus the guy is buff!

Director David O. Russell’s (Three Kings (1999) Flirting with Disaster (1996) and the forthcoming The Silver Linings Playbook also starring Wahlberg) challenges were many on this project. Telling the story of people who are very much alive and looking over your shoulder is tough enough, but doing it on the very same streets and in the houses where the action happened must have been a real eye-opener. His plodding pace turns out to be no more and no less than a realistic telling of the story.

We are not really breaking new ground here. I am sure that you can find many reference points from the Rocky franchise to Cinderella Man to...Raging Bull. The difference in this movie is that the love story is not between the protagonist and the girl. It’s a love story between the Ward brothers and it is handled deftly.

The other star of the film is Lowell, Massachusetts and more specifically the people of Lowell. It’s a tough place, the people are no prisoners taken and the overall feeling of a town struggling to keep afloat after being abandoned by industry is spot on. Having lived most of my life in an area where the principal industry deserted the populace I can attest to the reality of what went up on the screen.

Wahlberg says that he worked out for four years before shooting the movie. He certainly looks the part with six pack abs and huge guns. Christian Bale, who plays his half-brother Dicky, absolutely nails the part of a substance-abuse addled tough guy. Other stand out performances include Melissa Leo, who immerses herself in the role of Alice Ward, the boy’s Mom and Mickey O’Keefe, who remarkably plays Himself, not an easy thing to do.

There is no spoiler here. Guy fights, loses, fights, wins. Lather, repeat and rinse. But the story is told so well that you forget the formula. A word of caution: the fight scenes are particularly visceral and will leave you gasping. Best to put down the drink and the popcorn when the ring girls are on screen.

The Rant D’Jour is about AED’s.

There is a difference between book smart and practical smart. More on that in a…more

There is a difference between book smart and practical smart. More on that in a moment. A few weeks ago I took a day off at my employers request to renew my first aid certificates. Back in 2003 I first took the course that taught me how to give CPR, tend to shock victims and use an automated external defibrillator. In the three years that passed I had zero chance to use those skills and that’s a good thing. I passed the courses both times with flying colors. I can tell you how to care for someone who is not breathing, who is in shock and is having a heart attack. And that is just the point. I can tell you but until I have to I can never be sure if I can actually do it.

I like to think of myself as a calm, self sufficient individual. But if on a late night I came upon a car wreck and was first on the scene how calm would I be? The training I got was excellent, don’t get me wrong. The instructor was way beyond competent; he was one of those guys that if you had an emergency you would want him in charge. He answered every one of our dumb questions with patience and good humor and really taught our small group the course professionally and the proof was everyone passed.

But as we all gloated over that fact I couldn’t help but think about the cynical truism I once heard about what you call the guy who had the lowest grade in Medical school. You call that guy Doctor. So someone who barely passes the first aid course is still certified as a life saver. Comforting? Well. But even though I have my doubts about my ability under pressure at least I do know what do.

My advice to you is this. If you choose to have a problem in my workplace, have a heart attack. We have one of those fancy external automated defibrillators-you know the thing you see on TV where they attach the electrodes to a persons chest and shout, clear! That I am sure I can use. In fact our instructor mentioned that he had taught fourth graders how to use it successfully.

The chances of a person surviving a heart attack if one of those is used are greatly increased. I just did a quick eBay search. A bunch of these brand new units are selling for around $600. At that price I can’t understand why you wouldn’t want one close by.