Hallpass

Gaaaggggagahhh

2005-06-13T03:45:00.000-04:00

I hate bats. Fucking hate em.

Sitting here looking for jobs. Something flits through my peripheral vision. I thinks, "That wuz an awfully large moth."

Two hours of Elmer Fudd-, though more profane, style hunting, and the fucker's out the door. He left with his life. I sustained a bent curtain rod, knocked a picture off the kitchen wall and broke the roller extension pole I've been using to paint the hallway.

This is bat number five or six since we've moved into this house, and the most destructive eviction so far. April swears its because I leave the basement or attic doors open, but they've been closed all day. Doesn't make me feel any better.

First bat experience here: Home from the bar with a friend late one night, sitting shooting the shit, listening to a new CD. The bat appears in the living room, April dives under the sofa, friend begins swiping wildly with a sofa cushion. The sound track to all this was "Flim"cq by The Bad Plus. Wonderfully fitting. Try it some time. I dare you.

Two lessons:

2005-05-24T01:50:00.000-04:00

When Firefox has been telling you since October that your version "suffer(s) from a flaw in downloading which could lead to lost data," believe them;
And don't bother writing long schmaltzy posts anyway, because no one thinks they're funny.

So here's the gist:

Party

Music

Hooters

To explain, Brendan "B-dog" Jeral's 27th birthday party happened Friday. We saw The Burning Sensations on Saturday. And we spent part of Sunday afternoon on the Delaware River waterfront watching Nick Silva and his dad wrestle with a ferry boat. Direct all questions to the guy at the top.

Late... and really late

2005-02-21T23:33:00.000-05:00

Digital photography was supposed to revolutionize the way we share pictures, right? Well, instead of taking a month to develop my film, I now wait a month to plug the camera into the computer.

So here, on Presidents' Day, I give you pictures from the Laffayette Hill Bar Crawl, which was Super Bowl weekend.

Now for the riduclous part. Back when I was using film, I decided to enter the digital age and have my shots just burned directly to a CD. Not only was this ridiculously expensive, but it was kind of hard to show people the pictures. So with great chagrin, I present some of the never before seen high points of 2002.

Drama Inflation

2005-01-26T01:56:00.000-05:00

Every once in a while in the newspaper reporting business you nail it. You write the best read of the day or nail down kleptocracy with irrefutable proof. The next day, you get pats on the back and tell the gripping tale of your journalistic victory several times over, all the while basking in the satisfaction of a job well done.

My photo above ran in the paper Sunday, the day after the "blizzard of ought-five" whipped across the region. It prompted the outpouring of congratulations and even suggestions that I save a copy for next year's clip contests. But I felt like I'd fibbed just a little. As people on the street would see it in our honor boxes, Without any other context you might guess that this poor old fellow on the litter was pulled from the sunken wreckage of an airplane on a remote and treacherous coast. In fact, the context is this.

I'm not saying that it wasn't a life and death situation. We just withheld context to give the impression that a snow storm had caused serious chaos, when in fact it hadn't. I don't know how I feel about that.

Let the shame out

2005-01-26T01:39:00.000-05:00

A friend who I won't name told me a secret once. It was something he wasn't very proud of. It was essentially the secret on the card above, which I found here. I found this blog especially interesting, since I have no secrets.

This is what I'm saying

2004-12-06T11:51:00.000-05:00

Rodney Anonymous feels my pain (re: the post below).

And The Burning Sensations had their first show while I was away.

Back to the word mine

2004-12-06T10:12:00.000-05:00

I'm back in Easton after 1,500 miles to Vermont and Boston.

Already the blissful empty minded vacation feeling is already slipping away. I've got to go to the office in about two hours and figure out which fires to put out first. The main source of my anxiety is the huge package on the Charles Cullen case that's due in a week and exists now only as basic research.

Driving back from Boston yesterday, I realized I need to find something to do for a living that doesn't feel like work. Something that will make me fabulously wealthy but let me look back and say, "That was fun." I guess visiting the Ben & Jerry's plant and the Sam Adams brewery put me in that frame of mind. Both of those businesses were started by guys that got sick of what they were doing and took a risk.

More photos

2004-12-06T09:59:00.000-05:00

More photos at Smugmug.

These aren't necessarily new, but stuff I took with Nick's camera earlier this year that he only just got around to giving me.

Also, I've been selling people pretty hard on Smugmug. If you decide to sign up, use this code: ou8GK9TTGibKU. You'll get a discount, and I get money for referring you.

On the road again

2004-11-15T14:22:00.000-05:00

Since I started my new beat covering Northampton County, it seems like I haven't left Easton. I drive to work, about half a mile and then to the courthouse, which is just slightly too far from the office to walk, especially if I need to get there in a hurry. Aside from the worry about what this is doing to my car, I feel as if I've been in the same place for a month. Compare this to my last beat, where I ran up 800 miles a month in mileage.

So this weekend I took a trip, more or less for the sake of it. Nick and I went to move the boat for the winter. I saw my family for a bit and got together with a group of friends that hasn't been together since I don't know when. I also picked up The Burning Sensations disc, which is everything I hoped it would be. All in all a successful weekend, and I've got today off to boot.
==================================

In other news, McNarney seems to be updating his site again, so I'll add him to the links even though everything on his site is about Iowa.

R.I.P. Zorak

2004-11-08T13:52:00.000-05:00

For the last couple of weeks we've had a praying mantis hanging out by our back door. He'd come and go but more often than not he'd be clinging to the railing or sitting on the steps watching the world go by. I came to think of him as Zorak, after the character on The Brak Show and previously Space Ghost Coast to Coast. He had a personality like the TV Zorak too. Kinda abrasive. If I got too close, he'd spread out his wings, curl his body and raise one of his front arms.

Yesterday I went out into the yard through the back door. When I came back, I saw Zorak's hindquarters sticking out from between the screen door and its frame. He was really pissed when I opened the door and he fell to the ground. It was understandable, seeing as he was crimped in the middle of his thorax.

I picked him up on a couple of sticks and put him on top of the thyme plants. Today he had expired.

Sorry buddy.

The trouble with blogs

2004-11-08T13:41:00.000-05:00

Shortly after I announced this blog to the world, my brother thanked me for "effectively linking mom and dad to (his) band's website." Why this is a problem, I'm not sure, other than the copious use of the word "fuck" in one section of it. I'm not sure that's as big an issue as he think it is. Mark may have his own reasons for the 'rents not knowing about it, but I'm not sure what they are because he hasn't been around when I've called.

Shortly after the exchange with Mark, I told April, and she said "Well, you've linked your parents to my blog too." Again, so what?

The problem I see is the only reason to keep a personal blog is to write about what's going on in your life. And the only people who care about that, it seems, are your friends and family. And the people who serve as the catalysts for what goes on in your life are your friends and family. So, if you write honestly, you're sure to offend someone eventually.

Which brings me to the problem with Democracy:

April and I had a heated discussion about my last entry, specifically the reference to NASCAR watchers and Wal-Mart shoppers. April said that was simply a case of name calling and symptomatic of the attitude that has caused the Democrats to be labeled the party of the liberal elite. I'll appolgize and explain myself.

First let me say, I'm not a Democrat. I simply voted for them because as a rule they espouse ideals that fit my opinion of where the country needs to go. In local elections, like last year's mayoral race in Easton, I'll often vote for a Republican. My reasoning is, at the local level, ideology takes a back seat to competence. In the national arena, a candidate is going to toe the party line no matter how qualified and likable he or she is.

Nor do I watch NASCAR. I don't see the value in spending four hours watching 200 mph billboards for products you can buy at Wal-Mart, a store that has refined the practice of killing local economies to a science.

Please forgive me for that cheap dig against conservatives.

That said, I'm disappointed in the 59 million people who voted for Bush. I know that they're good people. I know a number of them. They're hardworking people trying to get along in the world and raise families. Many of them are like me, which is why I don't understand why the voted the way they did.

My best guess is that many people were distracted by the war and the threat of terrorism. That was the red herring in this campaign.

If Ronald Reagan was able to lead the world to an end to the the Cold War, then Justin Timberlake should be able to get us out of this mess. My point is that the CIC is not alone in the Oval Office. His job is not to handle the national defense single handedly, but to take the advice of generals and spymasters and to give them broad goals. The difference between Bush and Kerry in that respect is that W has acted recklessly and in deferrence to the rest of the world. Kerry promised a more pragmatic approach to global issues, beyond that he never really gave us a plan, which I fault him for. But I was willing to give him a chance.

I beleive people who voted for Bush voted largely on "moral issues," which is to say, they voted for the candidate who has promised to impose conservative Christian values on a nation of people with a diverse range of religious beliefs. Stem cells and abortion are thorny issues, but I prefer pragmatism to fundamentalism every time. Lance and Bruce from down the street may disgust you, but does what happens in their bedroom really have any impact on your life? And for that matter, does it really matter a whit whether they can have a family health insurance plan, visit each other in hospital or own property together with the same rights as Jack and Diane next door?

That's all I have time for right now. If you voted for Bush and I've offended you, I'm sorry. I invite you to post a reply or email me and we'll continue the discussion that way.

Go north young man.

2004-11-05T23:10:00.000-05:00

I may be the last person in the blogosphere to write something about the outcome of the election, but frankly it's been too depressing until now to sit down and think about it. That and I've been focusing my energies on the keg left over from our post election party. No one seemed to be in the mood for a party after it became painfully clear that, in the words of Jon Stewart, John Kerry had suffered a public de-pantsing.

I'll spare you the reasons why it depresses me. (Except one: I discovered today that we elected a man who sees fit to give his dog Barney its own Web site at our expense). You know them already and I went through that at about 3:30 the morning after the election with the editor of my paper. The same guy who endorsed Bush. The same guy who forced me to admit I'd pulled the "D" lever when, in my Yuengling addled state, I couldn't remember who I'd voted for in the House race.

What I've been thinking about these last few days is how to negate W's mandate. The "A" word is right out. Carnivore would pick up this blog in second and I'd be off on an extended camping trip in sunny Cuba. In fact, a van marked "Flowers By Irene" just pulled up outside.

Other ideas I've seen have been civil war, a boycott of the red states and simply packing up and moving to Canada. But adapting to the Canadian way of life would be a lot of work.

There's a better idea out there:

Now let me make it clear, I'm not claiming this idea as my own. Someone saved me a lot of time making this map. The editors of the Toronto Sun even like the idea. I discovered they're thinking along the same lines as me as I was writing this.

Let's take a look at the numbers, shall we?

The 20 blue states have a combined population of about 137.4 million. They have a land area of 2.2 million square kilometers. Add them to Canada and suddenly it becomes the largest nation in the world, area wise. Population wise, at a little less than 169.6 million, we'd fall between Brazil and Pakistan, but would be larger than than the flat, dusty region that picked Bush.

From political and cultural standpoints, the benefits are clear. We get to keep all of the good parts of the United States. Canada would take possession of the financial and media capitals of the world and a nice place to vacation. We'd get a moderate government with a progressive social agenda and a smart attitude toward the environment, national health insurance and we'd kick ass at hockey.

Let the NASCAR watchers and Wal-Mart shoppers of middle America carry on with their fundamentalist dogma, war, squander and arrogance until Omaha, Houston and Memphis look like something out of Mad Max.

I'm serious about this. As a heart attack.

Vote early, vote often

2004-11-02T09:46:00.000-05:00

There are about 10 hours to go until the polls close here in Pennsylvania and I already get the distinct feeling that it's going to be an interesting day.

I went to my local polling place around 9:30 this morning and did my thing. It all seemed normal - the blue hairs taking the signatures and ushering people into the booths, the slightly younger stern-looking woman overseeing everything. It was all there and, from outside the booth, indistinguishable from the relatively low-key but historic 2003 election that will long be remembered in the halls of quasi politics when Democrat Norman S. Pfefferkorn scored a come-from-behind victory over incumbent Gary Farquar in a race for sanitation commissioner. But I digress.

As I was checking my choices, I heard a raised voice outside the curtain. The man said "I'm going to vote for my wife too, because she can't come down here." He argued with the poll workers and I hung around for a couple of minutes. Aside from the 40ish mulleted troublemaker, I was the youngest person in the place by about 55 years. I left before he voted, but with that going on, I'll be surprised if someone somewhere in Easton doesn't pull the handle twice.

The Steel

2004-10-30T20:43:00.000-04:00

Bethlehem Steel is one of the most awe inspiring things in Pennsylvania. Dubious hyperbole aside, the now defunct steel mill encompases something like 6,000 acres on the south side of Bethlehem. I took a walk around a small part of it today and took some pictures of the blast furnace areas.

I was far from alone. I ran into at least five other people with cameras, all of whom said, "It's a wonderful subject for black and white." Well, maybe. But it's also a cool subject for color photos.

The mill has been closed since the mid 90s, and parts of it closed long before that. The old blast furnaces are slowly returning to nature. Scrub and brush grow high up on the converter towers. Everything that's not exposed to the sun is covered with a coat of algae. And the peeling black paint presents a rainbow sheen when you look at it from the right angle.

It's also pretty stunning to think about the people who worked there and how they lived inside the machine for eight hours a day. Much of the site is being returned to lighter industry and commercial uses but there's also a plan to partner with The Smithsonian on a national industrial history museum.

David F. Gallagher inspired me to try and take some pictures like this. He's a New York Times writer who carries a camera everywhere he goes. Every couple of days he posts a few interesting images of New York. On a strange side note, I knew about his site and then met him at a friend's wedding.

==========================
April and I are off to Halloween festivities now. In a departure from our usual good planning, we didn't have any costumes. So, I threw on my tux, with the red bow tie and cummerbund that came with it (it was a hand me down), dug an old silver Christmas tree skirt out of the attic for a cape and disassembled a Swiffer handle for a wand. Abracadabra! I'm a magician.

April's putting on a Sari she found in the attic. Beyond that I'm waiting to see the finished product.

Another Friday, another week gone.

2004-10-29T02:22:00.001-04:00

I went out to the bar tonight to partake in the "Welcome to Easton" event for our new reporter and left with a heightened sense of frustration at my situation.

The frustration came from two sources largely: Things don't look particularly good for my future in journalism; and my boss's outlook on his career isn't going to help things.

First, our new reporter has been in a Kafkaesque sort of downward spiral that doesn't give me much confidence. She went from Yale to Wall Street to Columbia to two well respected newspapers to the AP and then got laid off. Now she's working in Easton.

Second, my boss told me tonight that he's pretty much waiting out the clock until social security will kick in to supplement his pension from the shoe sales business. Frankly, I've known the guy for four years and worked for him for a month and it's no surprise to me that he doesn't give a shite about his work. For the last two years the most profitable thing he's done is sort silver half dollars out of stacks he gets from the bank. Now that management put the kibosh on that, he spends most of his day playing some Mah Jong derivative on the Web. He sees himself as a first line of defense against run on sentences. Nothing more.

This comes after two years of working with an editor who works intensely with reporters to develop stories, jumps into the fray herself when the shit goes down and is motivated to get out of here herself.

I've recently been given the primo beat here, but my own hesitation in jumping on that and my boss's indiference toward anything beyond grammar have left me without a mentor. The last owner of the Northampton County beat hightailed it out of here to greener pastures in the Chicagoland area. Good for him.

But it leaves me without a clue. And no offfense Agitator, but your filing system is incomprehensible.

Arrgh! But I'll figure it out.

==================

On the other hand, I'm psyched about my smugmug account. It's inspired me to take more photos. There's not a great deal there now, but I'll work on getting more material there soon. Check back for updates.

Catch a borrowed star...

2004-10-25T02:25:00.000-04:00

So this has been bothering me for months. Now I have a blog, so I'll throw it out there.

In June or July, Bush-Cheney put up these billboards in very specific places around our area. I only know of a few, but a couple of things about the design caught my eye. First, the messages were odd in a way that I couldn't put my finger on. Then I realized that it was the use of underlining in the brief tag lines: "One Nation Under God" and "Defending America," and my personal favorite, "John Edwards Is A Jive Ass Turkey."

The other thing was the use of a peculiar little star that seemed remeniscent of something else. I snapped this board in Phillipsburg, N.J.

That little star reminded me of this:

What can you make of that? The design is similar enough that it jogged my memory. I spent a summer in college working as a mover, and one of the company's clients was Lockheed Martin. We spent a number of 14 hour days moving a division of the company to its King of Prussia facility, where I wheeled combination safe filing cabinets past clean rooms where satellites were being assembled. The logo was burned into my brain to be sure, and although the similarity between these stars is really only incidental, it bugs me.

Did the nation's largest defense contractor loan its logo to the nation's largest defense client? Is Bush's campaign graphic arts team just lazy? I'm not sure because Karl Rove refuses to return my calls.

On that note, I'll announce my seven days 'til the election contest: Twenty dollar buy in to guess which day, including Election Day, Bush will announce Osama Bin Ladin's capture. Winner takes all and uses it to move to the democratic republic of his or her choice.

You should get that looked at...

2004-10-24T23:53:00.000-04:00

I spoke with my brother Mark tonight and it seems he's fully engrossed in making the band. The Burning Sensations recorded their first single, "Magic Eye," on Thursday. The B side is "Presidents' Day Mattress Sale," and the band, which has been practicing seriously (they have a practice space) for about six months, is planning on playing out somewhere soon. I'll let you know when I have details.

"Magic Eye" was the breakout hit at the Hall homestead around Christmas 2002, followed closely by the title track of Mark's first recording effort "Kapowie Christmas".

"Magic Eye" is the story of a young man struggling to find his identity in a post-industrial world where rampant consumerism has stripped the meaning from life, forcing the subject to search for contentment in the trance-like state that comes from staring at a magic eye poster. Tragically, his fight for enlightenment is quashed by the totalitarian "rent-a-cops". At least that's what I read into it, but then I was always good at bullshitting English papers. To most, it's the story of a guy hanging out in the mall trying to see the picture in one of those posters, you know the ones popular in the early 90s. In fact, a friend of mine said it could be subtitled "I identify with Willam."

Really, the song is brilliant:

"Jet fighters, castles, fla-min-goes/
What I'll see, I don't know/
I squint and blink and relax my eyes/
Soon my mind will cross this fuzzy divide"

The 2002 version of "Magic Eye" has the simplicity of form of the Ramones with vocals that evoke Kurt Cobain. The 2004 version is, "A whole new deal," Mark said. What I could hear over the phone sounded more polished and I'm looking forward to hearing it. Mark's planning on posting mp3s on the new band site as soon as he gets it running. We talked about how to do that tonight.

"HTM... whaa?" he said.

But seriously, when I know where The Burning Sensations are playing, I'll expect you all to be there.

2004-10-15T17:31:00.000-04:00

Soy de Cuba

Dept. of Improbable Phone Messages

2004-10-15T15:52:00.000-04:00

When The Motorcycle Diaries hit theaters a few weeks ago, the hue and cry seemed inescapable. But Rodney Anonymous reminded me of a bizzarre little episode when the supposed idealism surrounding Che Guevara crashed headlong into my own psuedo-bourgeois reality.

Last summer my buddy ole pal Nick and I acquired a 26-foot sail boat for nothing, which was the perfect price. After a bit of shopping around we figured out that it was far cheaper to join a yacht club and rent a mooring there than to pay for a mooring at a public marina. So we put on our best blue blazers, thought of arguments to counter our friends' elitist aspersions and joined up.

One weekend, April and I went sailing. At the end, as I was putting the dinghy away, I found a t-shirt I recognized as Nick's. That evening I left him a message, "Nick, we were down at the boat today, the wind was nice but motor's running like crap, and by the way, you left your Che Guevara t-shirt at the yacht club."

Welcome

2004-10-15T06:12:00.000-04:00

If you're reading this, it means I've decided to share this site with my friends and not simply trash it after the first post. You may wonder why I've decided to set up a blog, and I'm going to tell you: I've been inspired by April's site and a few others out there. I also want to get into the habit of writing more often outside of work. I'm going to try be interesting and amusing and avoid the whole online diary thing. And finally, I miss putting together Web sites, which I used to do a lot of in college. Getting out of school and getting a full-time job that involves zero work on the Web is an effective way to erase HTML and Java from your mind. I see doing this as a good first step toward getting back into that.

So here I sit on the first truly gloomy day of fall putting together a blog. Enjoy, or not.