Tag: Money

BEAR CATASTROPHE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 5 Comments

Dover City Council voted, 7-1, Wednesday to accept a $240,000 grant to purchase the police department a BearCat.

This ‘cat, by the way, is not the least bit fuzzy – in fact, the name is an acronym for (get this with a straight face, if you can – its pomposity says everything) a Ballistic Engineered Armored Response Counter Attack Truck. That is, an armored vehicle for a city of 30,000 mostly average Americans.

More galling is the fact that the grant comes from the federal Homeland Security department. Are they trying to tell us international terrorists have put us in the bull’s-eye?

It’s really ridiculous.

A hearing Tuesday, with very little advance notice or public input, paved the way for Wednesday’s abrupt vote.

This is not how democracy’s supposed to work, especially at the local level. Some of us are feeling steamrollered by that truck. And steamed up, as well.

FAREWELL TO THE SWITCHBOARD

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

At the office, we had the farewell to the switchboard operator who’d been replaced by the new phone system – someone who had been there when I arrived two decades earlier.

Oh, the weird calls we’d get, the ones she usually screened yet some still managed to slip past her.

The woman from California, “Can you tell me what state New Hampshire’s in?” and I wanted to reply, “How the hell did you get this number?”

All of the ones wanting to know my opinion, as if it mattered.

Or the drunks or the individuals convinced of this conspiracy or that. Especially late at night.

As the publisher told one, “What do you think this is, a call-in radio show?”

Listen. We’ve got work to do, rather than yap. Piles and piles of work.

~*~

Oh, my, the telephones! They become a chorus of their own in my novel, Hometown News.

Hometown News

YOU CAN’T LOSE IF YOU DON’T PLAY

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

One of the ways Quakers have stood apart from the larger society is in our opposition to gambling. Across America, though, the tension has grown in recent years, as governments (led by New Hampshire’s example) and Native American tribes have engaged in lotteries and casinos. Even causes we support commonly turn to raffles as fundraisers.

Still, we can witness to the fact that a lottery is an inefficient way to raise money for education or other socially valued causes. If you want something, you should be willing to pay for it directly, rather than expect someone else to foot the bill. As for gaming, the odds are vastly against winning, and I long found myself working far too hard to enjoy throwing hundreds of dollars down the drain. Even a weekly Megabucks ticket adds up. As one of my coworkers insisted, “Lotteries are a tax on stupidity.” He might have added, “a tax on despair,” as well, especially for lower- and middle-class families whose purchasing power keeps shrinking in the current economic climate. If anything, the glamour of gaming masks this reality. Maybe, just maybe, the hope goes, I’ll escape my condition. Friends have warned against the inclination to expect something for nothing or at someone else’s expense. I’m just as concerned about the quest for “fun” replacing a work ethic, or the way the entertainment media are shaping the everyday theology of the masses. Look closer, then, at the Foxwoods or Tri-State Lottery Commission commercials. Fantasy and reality diverge sharply.

Yes, it’s tempting. As in “temptation.” Even so, we believe in speaking Truth to Power. Need I say more?

AN ALL-STAR CAST

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

When I was working with the newspaper syndicate, I got to meet a lot of impressive talent. (That’s how we referred to them, too, as “the talent.”)

The other day I was thinking of a few of them – Mike Peters (Mother Goose and Grimm), Jeff MacNally (Shoe), Dick Locher (Dick Tracy), Doug Marlette (Kudzu) – all of them excellent editorial page cartoonists as well – plus Joe Martin (Mr. Boffo) and Kevin Pope.

For the most part, they were a serious lot. I remember one’s reverential mention of another, “He’s the only cartoonist who makes me laugh out loud” – only to hear, months later, the comment returned without prompting. Like, admiring like, with a twist.

I remember, too, one looking at the work of another and commenting, “This is really funny” – without breaking into the slightest evidence of even a smile.

As I said, a serious lot.

What I also found was that their work was much funnier than what turned up among the others who were more boisterous and comical in person.

~*~

MacNally and Locher were both employed by the Chicago Tribune and enjoyed a warm rapport. MacNally’s studio wrapped around the elevator shaft on the 35th floor of newspaper’s iconic tower and had large windows peering out across the city and into the infinite blue of Lake Michigan as it blended into the sky. How he could ever work in such a suite was beyond me. (The top floor, just above his, was filled with electronic gear. Microwaves and the like.)

Locher’s studio was one floor down, with small diamond windows and a rather Gothic feel. I joked that it was like dwelling in a gargoyle, and he agreed.

As we sat in that space, a coworker noticed two framed certificates and remarked, “That’s all a Pulitzer is? A piece of paper?”

And without missing a beat, MacNally, who had just won his third, chortled. “Yup,” he said quietly. “That’s about it.”

A CONSERVATIVES’ PARADOX

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

Let me admit to being perplexed by those deep-pocket conservatives who bankroll candidates who squeeze public services in communities throughout the state but, for themselves, choose to live in the most liberal districts – the ones with the highest taxes and top-flight public services. The ones with effete artsy prominence. All the stuff their lackeys publicly deride.

I wish they’d instead practice what they preach. Enjoy the misery they engender or deem fitting for the common folk – beginning with schools, libraries, parks, and health services. The things that make a place civilized and pleasant for all.

Yes, let them practice what they preach. Stay in the stingiest, most self-centered enclaves. Or be exposed and shamed for their duplicity.

REMEMBERING A PRINCE OF PUNS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Long a staple of the Friday-night Public Broadcasting lineup, Wall $treet Week’s Louis Rukeyser was noted as a master of puns. Or should that be groanster? Or even monster?

So in his presence for lunch one day, I piped up. “You know there are no good puns, only bad ones and worse. So who do you look down to for inspiration?”

He took it in good stride, knowing the sneer puns often earn, and replied calmly that when he was growing up, one of his father’s best friends was Random House cofounder Bennett Cerf – and young Louis gobbled up all of the literary publisher’s pun-filled volumes. I think he said he memorized 14 books in all. Not a bad foundation, for starters, and probably better than the jokes at the end of each month’s issue of Boys’ Life magazine.

Toward the end of his career, Rukeyser increasingly resembled the man on America’s one-dollar bills, an image he no doubt curried with a bit of tongue-in-cheek. Get a shtick in life, you might as well run with it. And how!

He was also an early example of the multimedia celebrity, something I detested in my role as a newspaper editor. I saw enough examples of television or radio personalities who tried their hand at simultaneously writing regular columns for print media, and our side of the equation was obviously the one being slighted. Let’s be frank. Anybody in the spotlight has only so much first-rate material to go around.

(That makes me recall a second-rate Boston newspaper columnist who took on TV features too, and pretty soon you couldn’t understand his content unless you’d seen the show he was amplifying. And then he was unmasked as a disgrace.)

Still, Rukeyser was candid about what we now call a “platform.” His career started as a reporter the Baltimore Sun, and he maintained a newspaper column throughout his run. “It established my credibility,” he said, back in the days when print carried clout.

The TV series, he added, gave him exposure and fame.

But the money came largely from his in-person appearances as a convention speaker. Everybody, after all, knew who he was – and that he could make the “dismal science” of economics and finance a lively, even humorous, topic.

Not every editor, I should note, bought into the argument that his fame as a public television celebrity would translate into newspaper readership. I still share their conclusion.

And then we had Andy Rooney.

ROADSIDE RECIPE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

Originally it was three lines, but this is what I read:

Now hiring fried clam strips chicken tenders.

(Well, I always wondered about their scallops. But now we know who tenders those chickens. Or is it strips those clams?)

Yes, this definitely puts chicken tenders in a new category.

THE FREEZER IN THE BARN

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

In one of our discussions of feasts and fasting as spiritual practices, a Friend mentioned purchasing a used freezer and how much he and his wife have saved over the years – by purchasing in quantity when supermarkets have sales, especially. It tipped the balance in our own decision to buy one, which we fit into the barn.

My wife’s no slouch in the grocery specials department, but its bigger value has been in preserving our own produce. How wonderful in January to pull out our own peas, or our own strawberries in February, or our own tomato sauce in March (if there’s any left!). Often, while she’s digging around in its drawers, she comes across surprises. Eggplant, anyone, already sauteed? And we never go wrong with a roast chicken bought on sale or, while it lasted, something from the half-pig we met at the farm.

In fact, we wound up buying a second freezer at a yard sale — and both are packed with goodies.

 

MORE GREETINGS FROM THE PAST

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

As I wrote to a long-lost friend at the time …

Maybe it was the James Tayler concert broadcast from Tanglewood at the end of August, as I sat in the newly accessible and lighted loft of my barn and sorted through some files that had been long packed away. Maybe it was the martini that accompanied it. Or maybe it was simply an aspect of a larger interest these days, of simply trying to figure out how I wound up here after what’s often seemed a zig-zag journey through some rather disparate circles across the continent – a route that’s included divorce, a broken engagement, and finally a second marriage approaching 10 years now.

What I felt was a keen appreciation for you, especially, and Maggie and Ise, wondering how your life has prospered and, hopefully, deepened. Glenn got in touch with me a few years back, when he and Mary moved to a cabin in the New Jersey woods … and she didn’t drive. Am not sure she does yet, either.

At any rate, thanks to the Internet, I find two versions of your name both at the same address – can’t be too many who earned their law degrees where you did or started practice in that year. So here’s hoping.

If nothing else, I ought to thank you for introducing me to The River. Or should I say the ritual of repeated returning to The River for periods of introspection and, pardon the pun, reflection? That year of the Susquehanna; later, the irrigation canal bank in the desert orchards of Washington State and then three years along the Merrimack here in New Hampshire. Or the Cocheco, with its waterfalls that drop down just before passing through a stone arch in the big brick mill in downtown Dover. These days, it’s also the Atlantic, especially when my older one’s managing the seaside motel. This has been my summer for discovering the night ocean in all of its moodiness and mystery.

And now, revisiting my journals (which didn’t even start out to be journals, as I discover) as well as letters from the period has been eye-opening, and often delightful. What I remembered as being an essentially depressed period for me was filled with a lot of wonderful encounters and growth. To say nothing of humor, especially Maggie’s. And there’s so much I had forgotten, or that turns out to be different from my memory. More than ever, I think our Hawley Street (and subsequent apartments) would have made a better sitcom than Friends. Nor could anyone have played you better than you. Maybe Cosmo Cramer would have portrayed me. As for Glenn?

Life these days is, I must admit, even fuller, but that’s a long story. My wife’s an incredible woman who’s off seeing an architect at the moment about moving a charter school to the ground floor of one of our old mills, a lovely space overlooking the bend in the river where ships used to dock. (Right now the school’s on the fifth floor next door, with some amazing views of the town.) It’s just one of her (unpaid) jobs as chairman of the board. … Such as it is.

I’m hanging on, glad to have a union card, and wondering how much longer the entire industry can continue to give away the product online. Professionally, it’s been grim all over. Without planning to do so, about 24 years ago I made the decision not to continue in the management ladder but return to the ranks – something that’s allowed me to focus instead on my own writing, Quaker practice and leadership, and a personal life, including New England contradancing and choral singing, on occasion. And homebrewing, at least until we redid the kitchen. Etc.

Well, that’s a sketch from this end. I hope you’re in good health, feeling accomplished and fulfilled, and maybe even content. I would love to hear from you, however briefly – and maybe even give my wife an independent account of our by-now ancient history.

Best regards …

ALL THE EXTRA TOUCHES ADDED UP

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Another of the nation’s once-remarkable papers was the Des Moines Register. It assumed a thoroughly statewide focus, with locator maps pointing out where many of the communities were and an amazing ability to note where anyone mentioned in a national story had ever lived anywhere in Iowa. The front page had an old-fashioned, authoritative appearance with a prominent, staff-produced editorial cartoon and block-letter capital-letter banner headline. I appreciated the frequency of national and international stories that carried the byline, “Combined Wire Services,” meaning a copy editor had spent several hours comparing Associated Press, United Press International, New York Times, and other dispatches to glean details to rewrite into a more comprehensive report. All of that, of course, cost money.

Statewide newspapers began cutting back as the costs of distribution soared, combined with a recognition that nearly all of the advertisers – the principal source of revenue – were aiming at only the major metropolitan area.

It wasn’t just statewide coverage, either, that has been curtailed. Most of the biggest papers have since shuttered their foreign offices and cut back on national reporting, as well.

You can as easily say they’ve cheapened the product, but that’s a longer term issue.

~*~

For a surreal, playful, and often gallows-humor trip within one young and ambitious newsroom, pick up my novel, Hometown News.

Hometown News