07/04/2013

The Flood of July

The little ones ran through the back yard last night with sparklers in their hands, screeching with delight and anxiety.  It’s a rare for their parents to allow them to hold anything on fire.  Monty the Saint Bernard stood among them, panting, somehow seeming in charge of the situation.

The teenaged girl had long since absented herself, heading to the waterfront with 50

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,000 of her closest friends to scream at the teen heart throbs on the Battery Park bandshell.  (“Jake Miller looked at me!  He looked Right At Me!”)

On The Farm, the adults sat on the porch, the big back porch, chosen deliberately in the face of this summer’s incessant rains.  While the southwest dies in flames and heat, we drown and drown and drown.  Our clothes stuck to our skin; our skin stuck to our chairs in the humid evening.

The table was heaped with a last-minute (weather finally permitting) neighborhood cookout – grilled zucchini and peppers and onions, sausage, pasta salad, zucchini, cole slaw, chicken wings, zucchini, roasted potatoes, steak, broccoli and zucchini.
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By floegel | Posted in Civil Liberty, Commentary | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0)
06/27/2013

A Day in the Life

I’m in DC this week.  I hit the streets early Tuesday, before the heat of the day came on.  I stuck in my earbuds and shuffle served up A Day in the Life, one of my favorites Beatles’ songs.  I like it because it strikes me as a wedding of John Lennon’s and Paul McCartney’s writing styles, alternating between the two.  (John and Paul always shared credit for their songs, but like many, I think I can tell who wrote what.)

What I noticed Tuesday – thanks to Beatles fan Steve Jobs – was that John’s voice was singing in my left ear and Paul’s in my right.  Was that intentional?  Was it another of the Beatles’ little tricks embedded in their music?  (Did new technology reveal this or did everyone else notice this years ago?)

I arrived at the office and as I floated about, I see many colleagues adopting the “standing desk model,” which means their computer monitors and often their keyboards are raised to facilitate their upright postures.  As this happened organically – and probably to save money on new standing desks – people have stacked piles of books on their desks and placed their monitors and keyboards on them.  I felt I was witnessing the cleavage point between two eras, where hard-copy, dead-tree information is now being repurposed as furniture.
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By floegel | Posted in Civil Liberty, Commentary, Global Warming | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)
06/20/2013

Vermont’s Military-Industrial-Real Estate Complex

Vermont has an Air National Guard unit based at Burlington International Airport (BTV).  They fly F-16s.  The Air Force intends to eliminate some F-16 bases, keep others and convert some bases for use by the new F-35 warplane.  Burlington is the Air Force’s number one pick to base the F-35.  Why is that?

It’s because Vermont is represented in the Senate by Patrick Leahy (D), the dean of that chamber and thus one of the most powerful people in America.  Anyone who tells you different is stupid, lying, or perhaps both.

The F-16 is a loud aircraft; I can attest to this.  The F-35 is louder.  Of all the bases considered for the F-35, Burlington has the densest population near the airfield.  Many houses in the working class neighborhood near BTV have already been purchased and demolished because the noise from BTV was above tolerable limits.

If the F-35 comes here, nearly 7,000 more residents will reside within the unacceptable noise zone, the Air Force reported a few weeks ago.  This was significant, since the USAF had earlier estimated that slightly less than 4,000 people would be affected.  They had to change their number when opponents of the F-35 pointed out that the initial estimate was based on 13-year-old census numbers.

The Air Force also had to admit it incorrectly stated Vermonters support the F-35 by a margin of 80-20.  Actually

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, Vermonters oppose the F-35 by a margin of 65-35.  Ooops. Continue reading »

By floegel | Posted in Civil Liberty, Commentary, Economy | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (0)
06/13/2013

Civil Liberties, Writ Small (No Spitting!)

Hey folks, why not come on up to Burlington this summer?  We’ve got a lovely waterfront, one festival every other weekend and heck, we do the little things well, things you might not notice, but enhance your tourism experience all the same.

For example, our collection of quaint street people – vagrants and vagabonds, wanderers, hobos, travelers, gutterpunks, junkies, shit birds and dirtbags – are cleaner and better behaved than anywhere else in New England.

Thanks to a murky new ordinance – the legal analysis of which is being kept secret, but which has been called unconstitutional on several grounds by a former city attorney – Burlington can literally throw the bums out.

No

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, not the miscreant politicians that phrase normally refers to, but ne’er-do-wells and idlers who bother tourists along Church Street, our lovely pedestrian shopping venue.  Well, sure, why not?  They’re not all picturesque.  If they don’t mind themselves, if they get crossways with the cops too often, they’re banned from Church Street for a year. Sent into exile.  They can appeal this – to a committee of merchants, also know as The People Who Called the Cops in the First Place.  Good luck with “due process.” Continue reading »

By floegel | Posted in Civil Liberty, Commentary | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (0)
06/06/2013

Reading the Urban Forest

Around my 20th birthday, I realized I could name the make, model and year of every car parked along the street where I lived, but had only a vague idea of the trees.

I knew a maple from a birch from an oak, but had no real concept of a sycamore, beech or elm.  This embarrassed me, more as a wannabe know-it-all, than as a wannabe nature boy.  (I was familiar with the sassafras tree around the corner on Winona Boulevard.  In my teens I’d visit it late at night to strip off leaves and chew them, hoping to mask the odor of alcohol on my breath.)  (Forethought was not my strong suit at the time.)

I learned my street was primarily populated by maples – Norways and silvers with a few sugar maples in front of Brady’s house.  The two small trees at the corner with the orange berries were mountain ash.  Elms were known by their absence, the blank spots along the street where they’d once been in front of Deweese’s, Schippers’s, Burke’s and Brady’s houses (although the Bradys put in the sugar maples and the Burkes some variety of ornamental birch).

I lived then on the north side of the street and the neighbor to the west had a Crimson King, a species of Norway maple, in their yard.  Now I live on the south side of a street and my neighbor to the east has Crimson King in her yard.  Crimson Kings and blue spruces (my old neighbors had one in the back yard) were immensely popular in the northeast and Great Lakes in the post-war years.  My landscape architect friend Pete call them “weeds” and wants to cut them all.
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary | Comments (0)
05/30/2013

May 1970

My dad’s union (UA Local 13) went on strike on May 1, 1970.  He knew it would be long and saw an opportunity.  Whatever the union got him in wages, my dad never had a paid vacation, holiday or sick day, so knowing he’d be out of work for at least a month, he and my mom figured (accurately, as it turned out) it would be their one shot and took my brother and I out of school and off to Europe.

It was years before I realized what a bold thing it was.  The children of immigrants, my folks had any number of aunts, uncles and first cousins in the old countries we could bunk in with.  My mother bought a copy of “Europe on $5 a Day;” we read it like scripture.

She also bought two 25-cent Ring-Master Composition Books, gave one to each of her sons and required us to keep a journal of our travels.  I still have mine.  Only 17 of the hundred pages ever felt the press of a pencil.

This month, for fun (at least my idea of fun), I transcribed the journal entries, poor spelling and all, added what I could remember (significantly more than I recorded at the time) and sent the entries to my folks and brother.

We flew overnight from JFK to Shannon, Ireland, cleared customs and acquired a black rental described as an “English Ford.”  It was early morning, Dad was exhausted

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, so rather than try to remember to drive on the left – on roads barely wide enough for one car – we pulled off and tried to sleep, or at least stay quiet in the back seat, a challenge for me.
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary | Comments (0)
05/23/2013

Seasonal Affective Disorder

I was hiding out in the White Mountains of New Hampshire this week, trying to get my mind right.

It is rainy and cool in New England, third week of May.  It’s Teen Death Season.  Classes are ending, exams starting, proms and end of season sports parties.  Late nights, alcohol, drugs and motor vehicles.

Two high school students died in recent weeks in Northwest Vermont, both in vehicle crashes.  Both deaths tore at communities, also networks.  My daughter knew neither boy who died, but in one case knew someone who knew someone.  The vibration moves along the strands.

The end of school, an annual rite of liberation, a time to test and cross new limits.  Closer to home is the recent arrest of a teacher at Burlington High School, charged with having sex with a student.  That the teacher is female and the student male, I think, adds a layer of confusion for teens just sorting their own sexual roles while caught between small town mores and provocative media, especially social media.

When I was a reporter, if police attended a death I tried to as well.  Teen Death Season was the name we gave these weeks. Those deaths always seemed to involve a ditch, tree or other vehicle.  They always seemed to happen just before dawn or just before dusk.  Before dawn, it was just first responders.  At dusk, there were spectators, which would cause the first responders (and me) to laugh.  No spectators, no laughing, but their presence, knowing we were being watched, heightened the sense –at least for me- that I was participating in an obscenity, so we laughed because overwhelming emotion needed release and laughter was the only means available while we did what we had to.  What I did was watch, taking notes and photos.  It didn’t take long, but I’d stay until it was wrapped up because, well, something might happen and I was there to watch.
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By floegel | Posted in Civil Liberty, Commentary | Comments (0)