I just got home from the local polling place. Ah, the things you hear folks say – “wow, his name doesn’t even SOUND American!”… really? You think all “American” surnames originated on this continent? Didn’t do well in history, did you, buddy?
Anyway, I would love to tell you that I voted with my head, my heart and my conscience, but I have to come clean on this… … Read more
You work for us.
Here’s the thing: with a lot of the public, your chances of re-election are only as good as the last thing you do to honk everyone off before the next election.
Some of us are watching a bit more closely. Your chances of re-election are only as good as what you do that erodes our freedom. We’re the ones who call and write (and can gauge, from the responses to those contacts, whether or not what we’re saying is being taken on board).
Some of you aren’t even the people I voted in to office. But I nevertheless recognize you as the rightfully elected representative of the majority, and deal with you politely and professionally as such. I’ve got a lot of time on my hands, so I’ve become a bit of a lobbyist with no budget and no portfolio. (By the way, that’s the only kind of lobbyist there should be.) Perhaps naively, I never completely give up faith that I can make a cohesive and persuasive argument and chance your mind, thus contributing in my own small way toward changing your votes.
But hey, while we’re on the subject of votes, here’s the thing. You can be voted out of office. I’m keeping a running tally on how you’re voting on stuff. I’m making sure other people know about it. I have about an even chance of casting my own vote in a few months and replacing you with someone I do want in office.
I also have about an even chance of being outvoted too. That’s the great thing about how this country works.
But I have no chance of being voted out myself. I’ll still be here, whether you’re in office or not. Whether it’s someone who I feel is more in line with my values and concerns, or whether it’s you, I’ll still be in touch. I won’t shut up. I’m your constituent, term limit: [not applicable].
I strongly recommend you listen to what I, and others who take the time to be actively involved in the process, have to say. Ignore us at your political peril.… Read more
As I sit here, secure in my stay-at-home-dad-hood, “decolorizing” and repurposing scans of arcade marquees I once owned so Little E can have coloring pages with Dig Dug characters on them, and continuing to send out applications for gigs that would allow me to bring in some money without sacrificing the stuff I do for my family by staying at home. No problem, right? It’s more of a tightrope walk than you think, since I’m currently the guy who does the dishes, laundry, cleaning, cooking, lawn work, homeschooling, and fighting like hell to make sure no one handling my son’s therapy is slacking off on their end of things. Throw even a part-time gig into the middle of that pond, and it’s going to make the kind of splash that washes me up on the shores of the living room sofa around bedtime. … Read more
How you been doin’? Here’s a quick rundown of the things I’ve done today:
Sat back, obeyed the rules and did nothing as Mrs. G and Little E fished in the mon & son fishing tournament at Carol Ann Cross Park. No fish were caught by this family on this day. Man, I wanted to jump in there and help… but the rules specifically forbade it. I just had to sit back and shut up. Now I’m jonesing to go fish rainbow trout on the White River. Just me, a boat, a rod, a reel, some bait, some lures, a hat big enough to keep the sun out of my eyes, some tunes, absolutely no cell phone signal whatsoever, no wi-fi, no nothing. If you don’t hear from me in a few days, I’m probably sleeping with the fishes. In a good way.
As if that wasn’t enough to draw a crowd, among the crowd were two big, friendly stray pit bulls roaming around in front of the library. I stopped and petted them for a bit until they moved on, mainly to keep them from freaking folks out. Since Xena and Gabby were crashed when we all left at the crack of dawn, these two were the friendliest dogs I saw all morning. They had very obvious dogfighting injuries, and yet they were all over me, stinky-breath dog kisses and all.
Pit bulls aren’t bad dogs. Some pit bull owners, on the other hand, like whoever’s obviously keeping two injured fighting dogs around and letting mange eat them alive, are real pieces of shit. If not for the likely conflict of personalities with the existing canine security staff at my place, I might’ve taken them home. Great dogs. Didn’t ask for whatever’s happened to them. I couldn’t get them to stay long enough for animal control to show up. Good luck, pups. I want to find your ex-owner and keep him from ever breeding again (whether you read that to mean breeding dogs to fight or breeding more people like himself, you didn’t land too far from the truth). But I’ll settle for you two love-starved mutts finding a loving home.
Sadly, the BS myth about pit bulls being four-legged killing machines across the board will probably prevent this from happening.
Got soaked in pit bull slobber right before walking in for the library book sale. Also, next stop after the book sale was my niece’s birthday party at Fuji Steakhouse. Woohoo! Uncle Earl showed up smelling like pit bull slobber! Happy birthday! 😆 Little E got a book about doggies at the book sale; I was sorely tempted by the big box of old Star Trek novels, but I passed. Perused the LPs and tapes to see if there were any out-of-print, not-released-on-anything-but-vinyl movie soundtracks (library and estate sales are awesome for finds like that). No dice, or someone got there before me. (You know, the one other soundtrack nut who lives in this area, if indeed there is one other.)
Next week is the “mostly non-fiction sale.” As the former governor of California once said, “I’ll be back.” Hangin’ with my dawgs, no doubt.… Read more
When I was going into high school, there were two shows that had my full and undivided attention: Max Headroom and Star Trek: The Next Generation. Not necessarily in that order. Trek was more escapist, and I was more than happy to lose myself in it. Max Headroom, of course, was escapism of another kind, with a day-glo facade of more gritty down-to-Earth reality. Edison Carter always got the Big Story, and always Caught The Bad Guys In The Act. For a kid who was on the journalism track that everyone expected him to be, you couldn’t ask for a better hero. Little did I know that I’d later find myself identifying much more with Blank Reg. Played by the instantly-familiar-and-yet-nobody-remembers-his-name W. Morgan Sheppard, who has had a guest starring role in everything (seriously: check IMDb to see if there’s ever been a show called “Everything.” I bet he’s been in it…), Reg voluntarily lived on the outskirts of society, a kind of hi-tech gypsy running his own pirate TV station from an impossibly spacious VW minibus, refusing to buy into society – or to sell out to it. (Seriously, that minibus was bigger on the inside than the outside – it’s only fitting that he finally got a chance to guest star in Doctor Who not so long ago.) Now that I’m closer to 40 than to 20, I realize Blank Reg was the real hero of the show.
The thing about being in your 20s and finally moving out of your parents’ house is that you’ve got an opportunity, should you wish it, to replace your family with a whole different one, only this time your family’s not related to you by blood. I found that family, if a frequently dysfunctional one, at work. Working in broadcasting in any part of Arkansas that wasn’t Little Rock in the ’90s was an adventure, because you were already budget addled. You either fell into a tight-knit group determined to overcome that, or you found yourself in backstabbing bedlam. I served tours of duty in both situations before achieving escape velocity from the gloomy gravitational pull of the Fort Smith broadcast market and going to Wisconsin. … Read more
When I was going into high school, I was on a journalism track. That’s what I was good at, that’s what I was excelling in, and it was just assumed that I’d go from having been an MVP in journalism in junior high and high school to doing pretty much the same thing in college. There were a few factors that no one really could have predicted, however: starting with my mother’s death in 1987, home became anything but a welcoming place, and more and more I was concentrating on opportunities to work, because work was a bulletproof excuse for escaping the hell that was home. I flamed out as a college student in 1992. I’ve never set foot in a college as a full-time student again. And before that happened, I had surprised everyone by opting out of the journalism track I was on in my freshman year. I had an instructor who was challenging; any other time that would’ve been fine, but I was being subjected to daily doses of full-blast adversarial at home. In my mindset at the time, anyone who was even slightly challenging toward me was reading as adversarial. My failing, not my instructor’s. It was probably a good idea to drop out of school when I did – actually, I still think to this day that my life would’ve turned out very differently if I had spent a couple of years trying to make it in “the workforce” (of which, as a part-time radio DJ, I was barely even a part) and then gone to school. I probably would’ve had a much better idea of how hard it is to eat and keep a roof over my head with no degree, and I probably would’ve worked my ass off for it.
But that only happened to Bizzaro World Earl. I never got a degree. In anything. Now it seems I can’t get a job because of it. Which is how I have all this time to write stuff for you fine folks out there lurking in the blog fog.
So you can imagine my surprise when I later found myself working consistently in a professional field which made use of that truncated journalism training. … Read more
I read extensively from a number of sources before writing any of the piece serialized over the past few days, and double checked these sources while writing it. Flight 901 is a fascinating topic, perhaps because it was a big deal that we just didn’t hear about on this side of the world, perhaps because of the exotic locales (wait, so we’re going to fly from an island nation that has abundant volcanoes to another continent to look at another volcano there?!?), perhaps because I’m a confessed NZ-phile.
When I first began reading about flight 901, I didn’t have a horse in the race. Ultimately, after reading numerous web sites, articles, and the full Chippindale and Mahon reports, I could personally only reach one conclusion: Captain Collins and his crew were screwed by Air New Zealand. Not because someone was out to kill them – not even remotely. But because there were failures in communication up and down the chain that had become institutionalized – these failures were now standard operating procedure. … Read more
Previously on Scribblings… this week I’ve been writing about Air New Zealand flight TE901, an Antarctic passenger sightseeing flight that crashed into Mt. Erebus on November 28, 1979, killing all aboard. We’ve already looked at the institutional mistakes that were made, and the unfolding tragedy that they caused.
The second investigation of flight 901, known as the Mahon Report, investigated not only the flight and the crash, but the conduct of both Air New Zealand and the principal investigator behind the first report, civil aviation investigator Ron Chippindale. Mahon alleged that Air NZ had quickly shredded documents that would have exposed them to increased liability, and that Chippindale had fallen for the okeydoke without digging deeper. … Read more
Previously on Scribblings… this week I’ve been writing about Air New Zealand flight TE901, an Antarctic passenger sightseeing flight that crashed into Mt. Erebus on November 28, 1979, killing all aboard. Yesterday, I looked at the institutional mistakes that were made leading up to the tragic accident. Today, the accident itself.
In the cockpit of flight 901 were Captain Jim Collins, co-pilot Greg Cassin, flight engineers Gordon Brooks and Nick Moloney, and tour guide Peter Mulgrew, a close friend and fellow adventurer of Sir Edmund Hillary himself; Hillary and Mulgrew alternated tour guide duties on the Antarctic flights, and Mulgrew was in fact filling in for Hillary, who had a prior commitment on the day of the flight. … Read more
Previously, on Scribblings… this week I’m writing about Air New Zealand flight TE901, an Auckland-to-Antarctica round trip sightseeing flight that never returned home, only to be found later in the form of wreckage on the slopes of an active volcano, with all hands lost.
In the absence of survivors, and with nothing immediately jumping out as a red flag on the cockpit voice recorder, investigators and the public were left scratching their heads. Theories ranged from mild to wild. Had yet another DC-10 gone to pieces? (Though later established as a safe and reliable aircraft, the still-young DC-10 didn’t have a perfect batting average at the time, with one nightmare-inducing, all-hands-lost crash on the books for 1979 already.) Had the plane gotten too close to Erebus as the volcano erupted? (Erebus is, after all, one of the most consistently active volcanoes on Earth, even if you never hear about that because of where it is.) Had freak weather conditions blinded the crew and/or their instruments? (Surely not.)
The conclusions of the two investigations into the fate of flight 901 couldn’t have been further apart if they’d tried. … Read more
