WRAPPING UP MARCH

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WRAPPING UP MARCH

 

Listening, sort of, to the WVPR fundraising marathon, I learned that the Inn at Essex has added a spa, and is now calling itself The Essex. Does this mean it’s now head of a Highland Scottish clan, like being The Donald? Anyway, it seems like nothing exceeds like Essex. The spa is offering “pampering” to some lucky contributor. What if you prefer Depends?

 

 

People wonder how Madoff managed to fool so many people, to the tune of billions of dollars. It’s simple: he made off with the money.

 

 

When you’re young, you want to be a grown up. At 61, I’ve realized that as you go on, the spelling changes. I’m fully groan, the morning after doing a lot of physical work.

 

 

One of the nationally syndicated programs that Vermont Public Radio carries took note of the fact that dentists are reporting more broken teeth, apparently thanks to the recession. People are so worried that they grind their teeth during the night, sometimes to ill effect. I suppose this could have been called a sound bite, except it’s an unsound bite.

 

 

We’re headed for another postal rate increase, so my wife, noticing that I had used a “forever” stamp on an envelope, gave me some of her 42 centers to use them up while they were still enough for first class mail. They were commemoratives, flags of the 50 states. Something went off in my mind: this was completely backwards. The “forever” stamps should be something patriotic that informs users about other parts of the country. Why not make the state flag stamps into “forever” stamps, since the printing is already set up and would require no further expense except to delete the 42 cent part? We’d begin to recognize the other flags, then get curious about the symbols chosen for them, and end by learning something about our fellow Americans.

       Another Crazy Ed Barna Idea. Well, I tried.

 

 

I’m working on getting a list of all the things that married people can do that people in civil unions can’t do, and once I have it, I’ll put it here. Remember that Herald editorial back in the late 1980’s, back when some people said gay people should be put in camps to keep them from infecting the rest of the population with AIDS, that said letting gays marry would be one way of reducing the threat by offering an alternative to promiscuity? I wrote that, and I’m damned proud of having done it.

       I’m sending this in March 31, because April 1 might get crazy with the malware that has apparently infected a lot of the Internet. I’m planning to stay off line as much as I can. See you when the dust settles.

THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

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THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

My wife and I hadn’t been to the movies for a while, and we want to support our downtown businesses, and we’d heard so much about “Slumdog Millionaire,” and she’d had a lunchtime fill-in for her job who lived in Mumbai (the setting for “Slumdog”), so there we were in about the tenth row center, getting a perfect view of the screen. So we got the full impact of the movie’s stunning brutalities—not contrived action-adventure violence, but the sort that we Westerners would prefer to ignore.

       But my wife was unable to follow the plot line because the sound was on so loud. Having been in this predicament before, I had brought earplugs for both of us, not to block out the sound but to limit it, filter it, make it bearable. That wasn’t enough, so I went back and asked the management to turn down the sound, which they did. It still wasn’t enough; she spent a substantial part of the evening with her fingers in her ears, and afterward swore she would never come to that movie theater again. Truly it was brutal.

       So there goes another adult customer, and the movies take one more step to becoming adolescent entertainment. The only thing I can figure is that so many of the young crowd have damaged their hearing by cranking up their headphones and earbuds that what seems like an excessive level to us is just right for them. I wish I had a decibel meter to take to the movies, but even more I wish some sort of health inspector would do the same. The health of our hearing counts, too.

 

 

Be Kind to Your Web-footed Friends

Note: if you would like to be on an email list alerting people when "Out and About" has a new essay, list, reminiscence, review, group of pictures, or advice from a native Vermont guide, please send an email to that effect to me, Ed Barna, at [email protected]  .

 

Be Kind to Your Web-footed Friends

 oon the warm weather will arrive, and with it will come the patriotic days: Memorial Day, Flag Day, Independence Day, Bennington Battle Day, With them will come America’s favorite march, The Stars and Stripes Forever, by John Philip Sousa. In case you have forgotten, this is so much a part of our heritage that we have words for the music. In case you have forgotten, the original goes something like this (there are variants, as with any folk music:

 Be kind to your web-footed friends,

For a duck may be somebody’s mother.

They live all alone in the swamp,

Where it’s cool and damp.

Well, you may think that this is the end,

But it’s not, for there is another chorus:

Be kind to all the creatures of the swamp,

Where it’s cool and damp.

      

There’s a joke version where you sing “Well, you may think that this is the end. Well, it is.” More people have come to know this than the original, but if you don’t ever sing the original, what’s the point of the joke?

I’m thinking of all this and emergency food shelves. Right now, Vermont Public Radio is having one of its fund drives. My wife has already made us sustaining members, and now she’s thinking of increasing her basic contribution to WAMC in New York (they started at Albany Medical College but now have stations that cover eastern New York and northern Massachusetts and parts of Vermont) just because she supports public radio. I suggested that she spend the money on food for the local emergency food shelf instead—our version of the Depression-era bread lines and soup kitchens.

But I have a contribution myself that I think could bring in more emergency food than just handing over some money. When I go to the grocery store (you see I’m identifying myself as an oldster here) again and again I come to the food shelf bin on the other side of the cash registers and I think “Oh, no, I’ve done it again. Forgot completely—and now it’s time to lug all this stuff home.”

So why don’t the stores put up signs at the ends of a few of the aisles saying, “Don’t forget to buy something for the Emergency Food Shelf.” It wouldn’t have to take up a lot of space, it wouldn’t hurt sales, and I’ll bet you’d see a spike in donations after the signs went up.

I’m going to pursue this with some store managers. My batting average in this regard isn’t impressive: I worked on Price Chopper for years to put a waste basket in their otherwise excellent men’s room that didn’t have a hinged flap. What sense did it make to wash your hands, wipe them with a paper towel, then push against the filthiest thing in the store to dispose of the towel? Price Chopper, probably due to someone other than myself, finally got it. The others probably wonder why so many people toss their used paper towels at the container rather than in it. Well, now you know why—and knowledge is power.

And never forget (all together now), “Be kind to your web-footed friends…”

 

Wrapping Up February

Wrapping Up February

 

A few final thoughts as the longest month ends:

 

--It’s been said that the human race would never be able to replenish itself were it not for maternal amnesia about the pain of childbirth. Not that living through February is that difficult, but winter giving birth to spring isn’t easy. Come summer, Mother Earth and Father Sky will be at it again, and we’ll have it all to do over again next February. Is there such a thing as fore-amnesia, so I don’t have to think about that?

 

--Here’s a beaut that my national colleagues in journalism failed to pick up: a few days before the New York Post drew national criticism for publishing a Sean Delonas cartoon showing a chimpanzee being shot for writing a sloppy economic stimulus bill, the paper put out a cover that was nearly as bad. It featured what another generation called “a bathing beauty,” only this piece of eye candy had on a bathing suit that went well beyond its bikini size to suggest, by its codpiece-like placement of fabric, what lay beneath, so to speak. Above it was the title: “Finally, A Real Stimulus Package.” The Post’s reply concerned the cartoon was that it “has been taken as something else - as a depiction of President Obama, as a thinly veiled expression of racism. This most certainly was not its intent; to those who were offended by the image, we apologize. However, there are some in the media and in public life who have had differences with The Post in the past - and they see the incident as an opportunity for payback. To them, no apology is due.” I would suggest that an apology is due to about half the planet, political preferences aside.

 

--Yesterday, my wife and I had the privilege of hearing a natural phenomenon so amazing that (we agreed) it ought to have been on National Public Radio’s series of listener-recorded sounds. I had stopped at a flooded then frozen cornfield near the Middlebury River to take pictures of the many ice formations there, and while focusing on something hear a loud “FLOP.” Then a bit later another “FLOP…..FLOP.” Was some agricultural task I didn’t know about taking place around the bend in the road, after it crossed the river? Then I realized: the sound wasn’t up ahead, it was all around me. With the north wind blowing and temperatures heading from near-freezing in the day to near zero that night, any water in the field was expanding as it froze, and any ice was shrinking as it got colder. The result was a symphony of muted cracking—the main action was probably taking place under the ice—that grew more intense as night fell. I went back home, invited Irene, and she came, being like me a connoisseur of natural micro-epiphenomena. We stood and listened in amazement, until someone who lived in the neighborhood stopped his pickup truck on the way to town and asked if we needed help. Did I say this took place in Vermont?

 

--Speaking of the stimulus and the recession (spring trying to break through winter again): everybody with the power to do anything is pussyfooting around the issue that has really frozen consumer credit in this country: credit card interest rates, which have soared to as much as 30 percent annually since the usury laws were taken off the books. No one seems to be seriously exploring why people couldn’t meet their mortgage payments, except to blame deceptive “adjustable” bait-and-switch mortgage deals. I can’t speak for foreclosure cases, but look at the details of personal bankruptcy cases (which I have done at the Rutland court as a business reporter) and you’ll see evidence of people trying desperately to hold on by using plastic, the one source of credit available to them. The word “toxic” should be applied to credit cards, and the change in the Bush era bankruptcy “reform” (written of, by and for the credit card industry) that prevented many filers from discharging those debts to get a fresh start  should be yanked at the same time that bankruptcy judges are given the ability to reduce the claimed value of real estate (the Bill is on the Hill) when it’s based on past assessments rather than real market conditions.

 

--Back in the 19^th century, taking care of the colored races was called “The White Man’s Burden.” In the 20^th century, when black dominance in American boxing became evident, a top white boxer would sometimes be called “The Great White Hope.” Both of these were Great White Hype. What is true is that for people of all colors, snow is the Great White Burden.

 

--The news media finally began reporting on the shrinking of American grocery sizes: yogurt from eight ounces to six, ice cream from 32 ounces to 28, and so on. Now at least one area grocery chain is downsizing its paper bags, apparently afraid to charge its customers the extra cents that ought to be assessed for choosing that alternative. When you hear talk about Depression and getting by on less, don’t forget that other typical part of living in that era (which in a sense I did, growing up lower-middle-class with two parents whose mindset was shaped by those privations): keeping up appearances. Some families suffered terribly because they didn’t want to admit they were poor, too. If Obama’s call for responsibility means anything, it should mean an end to all this folderol of falsification, and a rethinking of what it means to be poor. It’s possible to be honestly and decently poor, or at least, with national health care, it would and should be. Or at least that’s What Jesus Would Say, IMHO.