Life was happy in the Big Woods, if uneventful. Being a tree, Piney had no use for calendars, but if you spoke Tree, he would be happy to tell you how the woods grew lush and green from March through August, at which point many of the trees would change colors and then lose their leaves as the weather grew colder and the nights grew longer, only to grow them back in the Spring. The pine trees wore their evergreen status as a badge of pride and would sometimes tease the maples and oaks as their leaves fell to the ground in an enormous gold and crimson carpet. See you next year! they would say, their boughs rustling with arboreal laughter. Have a nice fall! Trees have many fine qualities, but they are not known for their sophisticated sense of humor.

One winter’s day, Piney heard the familiar tramp tromp tramp of a Person hiking through the woods. He shuddered: Piney did not like the Persons. About a year ago, he had witnessed the bloodthirsty murder of his friend Bucko, a local deer, at the hands of a Person. Right as Bucko was in the middle of sharing some great gossip involving Mr. Squirrel and an angry bluejay, Piney heard an enormous BANG. Blood spattered all over his trunk, and Bucko went down, shrieking in confused agony. Within seconds, a Person raced out of the bush, pointed a strange-looking stick at Bucko’s head, and with another enormous BANG finished the job, and then proceeded to disembowel Piney’s friend right in front of him. It was a horrifying experience.

For that matter, Piney didn’t care for the Children either. They would always yell and scream while walking through the woods, scaring the trees’ animal friends. The Children would carve their names into the bark of the trees, climb up their branches, leaving broken twigs and torn leaves in their wake. The People were simply horrible in Piney’s opinion, and most of the other trees and forest creatures agreed.

Anyway, there was Piney, listening to the footsteps of the approaching Person, and hoping that whoever it was, the Person would just go away and do whatever it is People do in the Village. But the Person stepped right up to Piney, circled him a few times, and said “Yup. This one will be great!”

Great for what? Piney wondered, as the Person set down a large bag that was on his back, and produced a stick with a rectangular shaped piece of metal on one end. I wonder what THAT thing is cal- AAAUUUUGH OH MY GOD OH SWEET JESUS AUUUUUUUGHHHHHH Piney screamed as the Person took aim, and plunged what Piney now knew was an axe into his side. Piney’s sap began to leak down his bark as the axe slammed again and again into his ruptured trunk.

Why? Why are you doing this to me? Piney asked, but the Person could not hear him. AAAAUUUUGHHHH!! IT HURTS IT HURTS IT HURTS! SOMEONE HELP ME, HELP ME! OH SWEET MOTHER OF MERCY STOP IT STOP IT! Piney screamed, but it was no use. The other trees called out to him, telling him to drop pine cones on the Person or to wiggle his branches as hard as he could, but nothing could stop the massive blows of the axe, which sent chips of Piney flying everywhere. Over and over again, the axe hacked away at Piney’s body, until finally he toppled over, helpless and half-insane from the wrenching pain. Then, to his horror, Piney watched as the Person turned to approach the rest of the pines in the stand, a cruel and psychotic grin slashing across its idiot face. Within an hour or so most of Piney’s brothers lay next to him, barely conscious, and catatonic from the brutal attacks. Their screams of agony would echo through his mind until he drew his final breath.

It was at this point that the Person produced a long coil of rope, and wrapped it around each individual tree. Poor Piney: the ropes dug into his branches, stripping off his precious needles and inhibiting his movement in the most unpleasant way. The bottom of his trunk, now exposed to the air, throbbed in excruciating, blinding pain, like a hockey player’s shattered incisors meeting a puck. The Person pulled the ropes tighter and tighter, until Piney felt like a tree in a straitjacket. Then the trees were dragged along the forest floor and dumped unceremoniously into the back of a large pickup truck, which went bumping along the road to the big city. One of the trees, a friendly young blue spruce named Sappy, actually fell out the back, and went rolling down the highway. Piney heard Sappy snap in two as the great tree was sucked under an enormous 18-wheeler.

Once they arrived in the city, Piney and his friends were propped up along a wall, displayed like big game trophies for what seemed like hundreds of Persons walking by. Occasionally, one of the Persons would grope at Piney (or sometimes Sprucey, Cedary, Coney, or one of the other evergreens), before walking on. At other times, after molesting the helpless trees, a Person would hand some green paper to the Person who had so cruelly assaulted and kidnapped Piney and his friends, stuff one of the trees into the back of a car, and drive away. That was how Piney lost his mother. He was very lonely, and began to cry. So did the other trees. Bitter sap tears ran down their trunks as the trees stood there, captive, waiting for Persons unknown to take them away to God-only-knows what.

One day, as Piney stood against the wall a Person took special interest in him. “This one’s just the right size,” said the Person to the Child next to him. “What do you think?”

“It IS the right size!” the child replied. “It’ll fit right in the front room by the fireplace where Santa will see it!” Fireplace? thought Piney, and he shivered. I don’t like the sound of that. But it was too late: the green paper was exchanged, Piney was jammed into the back of a car, and off he went to wherever it was he was going.

About a half-hour later, Piney was dragged from the back of the car and laid across two saw-horses. The Person brought out what Piney, had he been a person, would have recognized as a drill, and began boring a small hole into the bottom of Piney’s trunk. It was the worst thing Piney ever felt, worse than the axe attack. At least with the axe, the pain was everywhere. The drill bit was sheer torture, whining as it bored deep into Piney’s vascular system much like a catheter bores into a human beings urethra.

Luckily it was over quickly, but not before Piney was positioned over a large tray with a spike in the middle of it: this spike was driven deep into the hole made by the drill, like a dental probe into a cavity, and just slightly less pleasant. Then, four bolts were screwed slowly into Piney’s trunk: really, it was a bit much. the one bit of relief was when the ropes restraining his branches were cut. Piney could finally stretch, and he made a point of sticking one of his needles in the Person’s eye. Take THAT, Piney thought with no small measure of satisfaction.

What did I do to deserve this, Piney wondered as he was moved into the house. Why won’t they just let me die? Indeed, to his horror, it became apparent that the Persons meant to keep Piney alive indefinitely, as they added water to the tray in which Piney stood. It was his first drink of water in days, even if it didn’t taste anywhere near as good as the rain back in the Big Woods.

As Piney slaked his thirst, he watched as the Persons brought several boxes into the room. One wrapped Piney with a cord covered with tiny glowing lights. Another hung glass balls from his branches, including several hung by a clumsy child that snapped off some of Piney’s tenderest twigs. Another indignity. A housecat began to sniff around the base of Piney’s trunk. Get away! Piney warned, as the cat began to try to climb Piney. Stop it! Leave me alone!, Piney grumbled, but the cat ignored him and continued its exploring.

Once Piney had been thoroughly decorated, the Persons shut off the lights and left him alone. The housecat wandered into the room again.

Excuse me said Piney to the cat, But can you tell me where I am and what this is all about?

They do this every year around this time, the cat replied. They’ll keep you well-supplied with water, and sometime in the next few days, they’ll put a pile of boxes underneath you. A few days later, the Children will open those boxes. You’ll hang around for a few weeks, but after that I have no idea what happens.

Sure enough, the cat was right. Piney’s water was refilled every few days, and one evening the Persons piled brightly-wrapped boxes around his trunk. In the morning, the Children opened the boxes, smiling and laughing at the assortment of plastic trinkets that were inside. Other Persons that Piney had never seen passed through the room over the course of the day, many of who commented on what nice tree Piney was. Easy for you to say, Piney muttered to himself. You didn’t have your roots hacked off, or a hole drilled in you trunk, or four screws boring MORE holes in your bark.

After the Day With All the Boxes and Other Persons, life for Piney (such as it was) grew dull(er) to the point of madness. The Persons never bothered to turn on the lights they’d draped him with. The only creature that paid attention to him was the cat, who used Piney as a jungle gym, a scratching post, and a water bowl when the tray was full, which was far less frequent now.

And so it went for about three weeks, when one day the Persons packed away all the glass balls and strings of lights. Once again, Piney was tipped over: this time the spike and the screws were removed. Unfortunately, there was no more water for Piney: instead, the Person who kidnapped him dragged him out of the house upside down to the sidewalk. Piney’s needles were shedding everywhere, but to be honest, he hardly noticed now. He had been alone and in pain for so long, he barely knew himself anymore. He didn’t even have enough sap left in him to weep one final tear as he sat out in the cold leaning on a pile of garbage.

And when the trashmen, with their rough and uncaring hands, picked Piney up and threw his body into the back of their truck, he knew instinctively that it was the end. As the packer blade descended, rolling Piney into the hopper, he saw his companions: dozens, perhaps hundreds, of battered, broken, and dying trees.

Frozen with terror, realizing the end was near, Piney was barely able to choke out the question that had been nagging at him since the day he’d been ripped from his home in the Big Woods. What is happening to us? he asked. Why is this happening to us?

From the back of the hopper, he heard a familiar voice from the pile of garbage and tree carcasses. Piney? Piney is that you? It was Sprucey.

yes, yes, it’s me, Piney! shouted the tree. Sprucey, do you know why this is happening?

Killing trees is how the Persons celebrate life, Sprucey yelled back. It dates back to their roots, if you will pardon the pun. These impatient and superstitious creatures were once so stupid that they not only believed that the sun revolved around the world, but that the sun might never return again! So when the days began to grow longer, they celebrated the return of the sun by decorating us evergreen trees that never lose our leaves. And even though their tiny minds have advanced a ladybug step or two, they still cling to their old primitive practices. That is why they still murder us, and bring us into their homes to die alone, terrified, separated from our families.

Piney was stunned. He could not believe the selfishness and the casual cruelty of the Persons.

Piney, cried Sprucey, his voice quavering weakly. Piney, they aren’t even going to use us as firewood like their ancestors did. We’re on the way to a landfill, the place where the Persons throw all their unwanted things.

It was too much for Piney to take. The torture, the kidnapping, the capitivity… it had all been for nothing more than an empty ritual. And now he was headed for a dumping ground, never to see his beloved Big Woods again. He thought of his friends: the other trees, the squirrels and birds, the deer. He thought one last time of the way the wind sang through his branches, and of the delicious taste of a spring rain. He thought about the crisp snow and the icicles that would hang from his branches, and with a ear-shattering CRACK, his big wooden heart finally broke, unable to bear the vast meaningless absurdity of it all.

By the time the garbage men threw Piney into the compacter, by the time his trunk splintered into too many pieces to ever put back together, by the time they dumped what was left of him into a landfill, he was already dead.

Me, January 25, 2010:

I have a proposal to save the rotting hulk of the United States.

No, no, I don’t mean the country. I mean the S.S. United States, that glorious liner that’s decaying slowly on Pier 82 off Columbus Boulevard, where it’s been dry-docked for over a decade. It was the fastest ocean liner ever built, and although it was never used for military purposes, it was capable of transporting 14,000 troops per trip and traveling up to 10,000 miles non-stop. The ship’s history is Pennsylvania’s history, made of steel from Coatesville, designed by Philadelphia native Francis Gibbs, and included on the Pennsylvania Register of Historic Places. Nothing has been done to restore this national treasure, though and it may be sold for scrap.

Butit looks like the state is determined to shove casinos down our throats, and I say make lemonade from lemons. Sell the ship to Foxwoods and open it as a casino!

While I was only half-joking, that article got a LOT of positive comments. Apparently, someone took it seriously, because the Philadelphia Inquirer reported today, November 22, 2010:

Drawn by repeated distress signals from the Foxwoods Casino project, the preservation group at the helm of a historic ghost ship, the SS United States, is offering to sail upriver with a novel alternative.

The proposal: Move the derelict cruise liner about three-quarters of a mile north from its resting place at Pier 82 in South Philadelphia and place it next to a new 10-story garage with two floors of gaming.

Cut a dock into the 16-acre site and slip the bow in, facing Columbus Avenue. Renovate and refit the 58-year-old vessel – an estimated $150 million to $200 million job – with gaming floors, restaurants, event space, a museum, and, possibly, a boutique hotel.

“We can place the SS United States into the Foxwoods property in a way that showcases a national treasure and makes it a tourist draw,” said Ken Smukler, an adviser to the SS United States Conservancy.
[...]
The conservancy has approached Harrah’s and the local Foxwoods investors about making the ship the centerpiece of the casino plan, according to Smukler. But by Friday, he said, neither the Las Vegas gaming giant nor the locals – Philadelphia Entertainment and Development Partners (PEDP) – had responded.
[...]
However, Mayor Nutter, briefed on the proposal in recent weeks, described it Friday as “certainly one of the most unique, dynamic, and exciting plans for a casino anywhere in the United States of America.”

Although long a critic of using waterfront land for big-box casinos, he noted a prestige factor in “having a casino in one of the largest ocean liners ever built.”

As my buddy Scott joked, I should be getting a 1% finder’s fee, and due credit in the local fishwrapper newspaper.

Now, how to save the equally ironically decrepit SS Olympia: the steel cruiser which helped give birth to the United States as an empire is now, much like the United States, rotting away from years of neglect and misplaced priorities.

A NATIONAL PORN conglomerate based in Center City was raided by the FBI, the IRS and local authorities early yesterday, but federal officials remain tight-lipped about what exactly they were seeking.

The feds, carrying search warrants, descended on the corporate offices of National A-1 Advertising, on 7th Street near Chestnut, about 9 a.m., reported AVN.com, an adult-entertainment trade magazine.

FBI agents refused to show the search warrants to managers on site and detained about 120 employees, said James Cybert, director of marketing for Hotmovies. com, a subsidiary of National A-1, according to AVN.com. Almost all of the employees left shortly before noon, but they were unaware why the agents had entered their second-floor offices, Cybert said.

Porn-center offices raided in Center City

1998 was a crazy, transformational year for me: my girlfriend/fiancee of however many years broke up with me, right about when Jim Krewson and Jennie Benford moved to town and I moved in with them, taking up the bass duties for what was to become Jim and Jennie and the Pinetops. And since my life was changing so quickly, when I came home one day in November from my first real job (working in a real office, writing ad copy!) and Jim told me the band was moving to Philadelphia, it shouldn’t be a surprise that I said yes without a moment’s hesitation.

Brad, our banjo player, already lived in the City and graciously allowed me to crash on his couch for a month, so I was able to put off the apartment search. I also had some help from our fiddle player, Chris, who introduced me to a friend who would also be looking for digs in January, when the band was expected to arrive in Philly. On the other hand, I was determined to have a job waiting for me, and put a lot of energy into the search.

This was about the time that my pickup truck died. The thing had been in bad shape for a long time: on two different occasions, a small piece of metal called the clutch arm had snapped, costing me $400 to repair it each time. Almost as soon as I’d moved to the oh-so-safe- Pioneer Valley, someone broke into the cab and stole my radio, destroying the heating system in the process: in a place like Western Massachusetts, which gets about 10 months of snow, this was a real problem because the defroster no longer worked, forcing me to drive with the windows open while scraping my frozen breath off the windshield. The wipers were practically dead. The final straw was when the long-neglected brake job turned out to cost more than the Blue Book value of the damn truck, so I unloaded it on some local redneck, and used the proceeds to buy an old Dodge Caravan, itself in pretty crappy shape. How crappy? Well, let’s just say the emissions and inspection stickers weren’t real and go from there.

Even though I was getting pretty proficient with the Internets (this is back in the bad old days of dial-up), I had no idea what craigslist was and wound up limiting my search to Philadelphia-area newspapers with an online presence, which I am pleased to report were as lousy and worthless then as they are now. Most of the jobs were crappy food-service or manufacturing jobs, ad agencies that wanted me to work 60+ hours a week (and that were hostile to the notion of touring anyway), or sleazy work-at-home marketing schemes. About the only thing that seemed to meet my goal of obtaining a job that covered my ass for the transitional moving-in period was at a little ad agency called National A-1 Advertising that needed someone to write copy for their ebay-style auction site. So I sent them my resume and cover letter via email, and was delighted when they responded within an hour or so. Would I be willing to travel for an interview? Yes, yes I would.

So I told a preposterous lie to my employers (I hadn’t yet gotten the nerve to tell them I was moving), took Tuesday off from work, and started off on my six-hour drive to Philly.

I made it about as far as Hamden Connecticut when I heard a distinct crunching noise, followed by scraping: the muffler had fallen off, and was dragging on the blacktop. FUCK. So I pulled off the highway, and luckily there was a Meineke right there (how different things were for me, even in the late 1990s: I didn’t own a cellphone and would have been shit out of luck). I called down to National A-1, and told them what had happened, and that I’d be an hour or so late. My $150.00 round trip was now looking closer to $350 or more, shit shit shit.

Anyway, the muffler was soon replaced and I set off again, noticing an ominous burping from the engine that will probably come up again later, because that van is the subject of several hilarious disasters. For the rest of this trip, however, the van ran reasonably well and I arrived in Philadelphia a little earlier than i’d expected considering the breakdown.

If you’re like me, your big city experiences are probably more New York City than Philadelphia. They’re both laid out in grids, but that’s about where the similarity ends: New York is an uptown/downtown city on a north/south axis. Philadelphia starts at a central square and branches out in all four directions, based on an east/west axis. If you’re new to the city, it can be extremely disorienting, and I almost got lost.

I eventually found the business address on the second floor and they buzzed me up. An effeminate man, think Tony Randall as Felix Unger, introduced himself to me: i’d like to say confidently that his name was James Cybert, but it was more than 10 years ago and I honestly don’t remember. Anyway, we began our interview. The job was unremarkable enough: essentially, National A-1 Advertising was an ebay clone that dealt with antiques. I’d be responsible for writing copy describing the items and posting those descriptions on the company website.

That’s when my interviewer asked me, “Sensitive question for you. Are you comfortable with… explicit sexual imagery and adult material?” I wasn’t exactly sure how to respond, but slowly and warily answered, “yes…?”

And that’s when he explained the “other half” of the business to me. National A-1 Advertising was in the business of Internet porn. “What we do,” the interviewer told me, “is excerpt scenes from adult movies, which visitors to our site can watch. We’ll train you in digital editing, so you could choose what you identify as the best clips. Then, you’d describe briefly what the customer is going to see, just a few keywords really, and publish the clip on our site. You’d work with a small team, and be responsible for a wide variety: straight and gay, fetish videos, all sorts of stuff. It’s actually pretty easy.”

He sat back in his chair, glanced at his watch and added, “I think we’re ready to wrap this up. Do you have any questions?”

i thought for a moment. “I’m comfortable looking at the material,” I said, “But I think my first question… well, it’s not exactly a question. how to put it… I’m straight, OK? I’m not homophobic or anything like that, but I’m not sure I can be the best judge of which scenes are the best in your gay selection. I don’t really respond to it the way I do to male/female porn.”

“That’s not a problem,” the interviewer said. “Like I said, you’ll be part of a team, and if a certain project isn’t working out for you, you can always hand it off to someone else.” I liked the way he called porno movies “projects”, the same way my boss at the ad agency in Northampton referred to campaigns to get people to patronize a local bank.

“The other question I have has more to do with how this job impacts me as a person,” I said. “I’ll be honest with you, I have no problem at all looking at pornos, but I’m wondering if looking at it for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week is going to numb my basic sexual responses or something. Have your employees ever mentioned anything like that?”

“Honestly, I don’t know,” he replied. “I think that’s something you’ll have to determine for yourself. What I can tell you is that you get used to it pretty quickly: some of our employees go through dozens and dozens of clips in a single day. It can actually get a little dull.

“Anyway,” he continued, “it was great meeting you, and thanks for making the drive all the way to Philadelphia. Here’s my card: feel free to call us if you have any questions.”

And with that, we shook hands, I left the building, threw the ticket on my van into the garbage, and began the trip back to Northampton. In the end, I decided not to take the job: $21,000 was not enough money for me to critically watch pornos five days a week. On top of that, I wasn’t sure how people would react when I told them “my job is to watch people fucking all day long.” And frankly, I was worried that I’d lose interest in looking at smut for recreational purposes (not that I would ever in a million-billion years do anything like that, and by the way are you interested in buying a lovely bridge in New York?).

I had forgotten all about that interview, my introduction to Philadelphia really, until yesterday when I saw the article quoted above. Turns out (if you believe our local CBS affiliate), it was “one of the biggest internet and phone sex companies in the country”, and I passed up my opportunity to get in on the ground floor.

As Barack Obama appeared on television Tuesday to declare the end of the U.S. combat role in Iraq, were viewers happiest in Baghdad, Washington, D.C., or Tehran?
The obvious answer would seem to be Washington or Baghdad. In fact, some analysts believe the real winner of the war in Iraq is neither the Iraqis, nor Americans, but the Iranians…

The spring’s election and its aftermath, Bazzi said, underscored how effective Iranian influence has been, especially with maneuvering between Iraq’s Shiite factions. “I’d argue that Iran started filling the political void that the U.S. has left in Iraq years ago, and now it becomes even easier with fewer U.S. troops,” he said, noting that the 50,000 U.S. troops that will remain on the ground concern the Iranians. “On a political level, Iranians have played politics in Iraq much more effectively than the U.S. Part of that is that all the Iraqi factions recognized that Iran is not going anywhere, but the U.S. was going to leave, but the Iraqis are stuck with their neighbors.” The Iranians, he said, are “getting a little concerned about the political stalemate in Iraq.”
Iranians, Bazzi said, are “keen on playing this role of the political broker.” To that end, they called almost the entire Iraqi leadership to Tehran right after elections. “The Iranians view their strategic interest in Iraq on several levels. Immediate, of maintaining a friendly government in Baghdad, because they don’t want to go back to the days of Saddam where there was an extremely adversarial threat next door. The Iranians will want a friendly, Shiite-led government in Baghdad, and they see that as the new reality.”
A weak Iraq is also in Iran’s interest, Bazzi explained. “If Iraq is not as dominate as it once was, if it is friendly and compliant, then it enables Iran to maintain regional dominance in the Persian Gulf.” Finally, he said, Iraq has become a “bargaining chip and a proxy in their conflict with the United States.”

You wanna know how many times people like me pointed this out this likely outcome? More fucking times than I can count. And you know, I’m not some kind of foreign policy genius. I’m not a diplomat or a career employee of the state department or an ambassador. I wasn’t educated at some ivy league school. I’m a common, run-of-the-mill idjit.

And it’s like this for everything: the economy’s not picking up steam? Well maybe the stimulus shouldn’t have been weighted so much in favor of tax cuts. People are pissed about the shitty health insurance reforms we got instead of the health care reforms we were promised? Ya don’t say: maybe you should have had that public option that 66% of the country favored. The Democrats are perceived as weak? Well gee, maybe it has something to do with letting the Republicans steamroll you without fighting back.

You watch these institutions makes predictably bad decisions over and over again, and you don’t care to write about it anymore. The fact that people like Tom Friedman and William Kristol still have jobs says all I need to about the state of our discourse and our national conversation.

In short, it’s one driven by dishonest hacks who may be smart but don’t seem to know anything about anything, abetted by a media that’s more interested in spinning stories and ginning up opinion debates than in reporting actual facts.

And that’s why it’s getting difficult to keep up a steady stream of bloggery: every post boils down to “duh gee, no shit, sherlock.”

Apologies to my readers for the general lack of posting lately. As I’ve mentioned a few times, work has gotten busy and hectic (like everyone else in the PA non-profit world, we are under the gun as Dominic Pileggi’s pissinbg contest continues. But it’s more than that. It’s really hard to get excited about politics these days. How do you sustain excitement about, say health care, when your purported allies turn out to be nothing but frauds?

meanwhile, it’s also summertime, and sitting around the house hammering away at the keyboard when the sun is shining and the weather’s beautiful isn’t as much of an option.

Finally, I’m struggling with the two demons of depression (I miss my son, and my old life, pretty badly, and that tends to suck the energy out of everything) and the insecurity of possibly changing careers (I haven’t made a secret of the fact that I’d like to go back to college, with the goal of gettiing certified to teach middle or high school, but now I’m also considering teaching on the college level, maybe).

All of this is to say that my mind and body are often otherwsie occupied, and this has led to reduced posting here on the blog. Now, here’s more Kenn Kweder.

I’m hoping to get back on my A game pretty soon: the health care debate hits the streets this week, and there’s going to be quite a bit of insurance watchdogging over the next 30 days.

Meanwhile, I still have to make my arrangements for Montreal: I’m making the 8-10 hour drive at the end of the month, Sunday August 30 to be exact, so I can be there for Sam’s first day of school, on Monday the 31st.

Then I turn around and come right back home: 16 hours drive for an important time that lasts maybe an hour tops. YIPES!

Enjoy!

The irony that drives me crazy is that the Daily News has survived — when many No. 2 papers in metro markets, especially tabloids, have failed — because years ago we became the kind of news organization that many newsrooms wish they were today. When other newspapers squandered millions on overseas bureaus and first-class air travel, we made a decision to focus most of our fire on the streets of Philadelphia, with front pages and an upfront section that was 80 percent (my own guesstimate) local. And we crusaded for local causes that no one else would touch, from putting lights on a major bridge to raising awareness about one of the nation’s most deadly roads, Roosevelt Boulevard, to fighting for lower wage taxes. We became the kind of paper that working people –firefighters and teachers and overtaxed moms — could read, and wanted to read. We became, and still are, the metro newpaper with the highest percentage of African-American readers in the nation, serving urban readers of the kind who’ve been ignored in other cities by news execs chasing after suburban ad dollars….

But the “close the Daily News” chicken littles — be they pundits or bankers — are showing the same lack of imagination that’s killing the business in the first place. Why take a sledgehammer to a problem that requires a scalpel? And why break the unusual bond that the Daily News has with its readers when so many newsrooms elsewhere are desperately trying now to create exactly what we already have?

Go read the rest.

The fact is that, on any given day, most people I know would rather read the Daily News than the Stinqy. As Bunch articulates so compellingly, the DN serves the people who live here in the city, reporting local news. Is it perfect? No. Like most tabloids, there can be a tendency to the frivolous. Some of the columnists, like Christine “Kill them all” Flowers, are as irresponsible as they are reprehensible.

But unlike the Inquirer, which tries to be all things to all readers and fails spectacularly, the Daily News is actually successful in filling its mission. I may have strong disagreements with writers like Michael Smerconish and the aforementioned Christine Flowers, but at least there are other writers like Elmer Smith and Ronnie Polaneczy to balance them out. not so at the Stinquirer, which boats a stable of tired, predictable, boring, and obsolete writers like Rick Santorum, Jonathan Last, and certifiable idiot Kevin Ferris (who once irritably told an unemployed Brendan not to bother trying to enter the journalism business).

Daniel U-A at YPP amply echoes Bunch’s column, sounding what can only be described as a clarion call:

There is no way that we will ever, ever, ever be able to survive without good local reporting. And, while the Inquirer has a solid City Hall Bureau, without the Daily News, we instantly lose a huge chunk of focus on our City. There is no way that something like YPP will replace it. None…

But, if we lose the Daily News, and we no longer have Bob Warner, Dave Davies, Catherine Lucey, Chris Brennan, and company writing about the City, things we should know about will simply go unreported. Instead, life will be spent trying to decipher a bunch of press releases. And it will matter a whole lot less that City Council may be violating the Sunshine Act, because there is a good chance no one will be around in the first place to report on it.

If the Daily News dies, so do we.

Daniel is right. I don’t know who you should contact (the parent company might be a good place to start), but the message has to get through: the Philadelphia Daily News has value. It’s a vital resource for Philadelphians. It reports news that matters to the people who live here, not the people who live in the surrounding burbs.

I think one thing that the industry needs to accept, and which must be integrated and institutionalized in newspaper publishers’ and owners’ bottom line is that profit margins for newspapers cannot, and should not, be expected to be similar to those of retailers, banks, and entertainment sources. This is not news: Neil Hickey, contributing editor at Columbia Journalism review, said as much more than a decade ago.

The “tabloidization” of TV newsmagazines is strictly geared to ratings and profits. “A major tragedy of the moment,” Cronkite maintains, is the use TV newsmagazines are making of the valuable prime time they occupy. “Instead of offering tough documentaries and background on the issues that so deeply affect all of us, they’re turning those programs into television copies of Photoplay magazine.” News executives know better, Cronkite says, and are “uncomfortable” with what they’re doing. “But they are helpless when top management demands an increase in ratings to protect profits.”

News chiefs themselves perceive that the press is perilously compromising quality in pursuit of gain. Nearly half the nation’s editorial and business-side executives surveyed in a January Editor & Publisher poll think press coverage in general is shallow and inadequate, and fully two-thirds say newspapers concentrate more on personalities than important issues. J. Stewart Bryan III, c.e.o. of Media General, Inc., and publisher of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, told E&P that serious news is being sacrificed to profits as papers reduce news holes and produce softer stories. Said he: “I don’t think we can put the bottom line ahead of our commitment to quality.”

As the race for profits heated up, the quality of the news went down, losing readers who don’t want to part with their hard-earned money to read about Tila Tequila’s tits. Some time, somehow, the notion that every endeavor must profit the maximum extent possible, must be put to rest. Newspapers are expensive to run, with costs ranging from paper and heavy machinery to providing salaries that attract and retain good reporters. By setting profit margins to an impossible height, owners actually end up hurting their papers by making it impossible to afford the kind of staff necessary to publish a good papers, instead relying on cheaper wire services and syndicated cookie-cutter columnists.

i hate to make a blanket statement, but it seems to me if publishers and owners would be a little less greedy and a little more willing to live a little lower on the hog, setting realistic margins that allow them to live comfortably if not extravagantly, then maybe the papers they own wouldn’t be in SUCH dire straits.

But I guess it’s just easier to blame Craigslist. let’s take the harder road: kill the Inquirer is you must, but save the Philadelphia Daily News.

I really haven’t written very much about the adventure I had getting Sam into the US for Christmas.

Dad and I left for Montreal around 6:30 PM on December 23rd, and got on the road about a half hour later due to a stop for gas and a visit to my brother’s place to drop off my keys so my family could come by early and start work on the cooking that I was supposed to be doing.

The drive wasn’t that bad, just really really long. I’d been fighting a low-level virus: no coughing or sneezing, just deep aches and pains in my muscles that cause extreme fatigue, forcing me to eat Advil with breakfast and again at lunch to get through the day. I tossed back two or three of the little orange pills before we hit the road. But I was running on pure adrenalin: I had barely slept at all Sunday night because of the flu, and managed about 5 hours on Monday night.

Thanks to years of touring and regional travel, I’ve learned which fast food restaurants are places you’d actually want to eat at, and which are selling food poisoning on a bun. McDonalds is typically bland, but at least you won’t spend the next week shitting your pants every time you pass gas. Wendy’s makes a decent, if dry, burger. Roy Rogers is vile except for the fries. And Burger King… well, the less said about them the better: the food looks really good, but will leave you with such a bad case of the Hershey Squirts, you’ll feel like a milkshake machine. Unfortunately, that’s all there was on the Garden State Parkway at 7:30 PM, and we weren’t due to stop driving until about 1:00 AM. The ensuing farts were ghastly: they all smelled of the fake grill flavor Burger King injects into its food, and as they beefed out my ass, they were as warm as the burgers had been going down. So hey, fuck you, King.

I’d also like to add a word about my dad. A lot of you have read about our infamous arguments that go on and on for years (literally) without resolution, but that’s only one side of the guy. My dad volunteered to accompany me on a very difficult and long emergency excursion, and took over some of the driving as well. He’s a good navigator, and a great shotgun partner who can talk at length and with authority on just about any topic. Anyone who’s ever had to do an all-night drive knows how useful it is to have someone in the passenger seat keeping your mind awake with conversation.

As for our fights, we talked about that as well over the course of the trip. “I don’t think Christina or your mom understand,” dad said. “The refusal to give up isn’t about pride or stubbornness. I can’t speak for you, but I have to guess you feel the way I do: that with enough thought and debate, you actually CAN arrive at the truth, or at least something LIKE the truth.”

“Oh yeah, totally,” I agreed.

“For me,” Dad continued, “the best part of an argument isn’t winning, it’s being proved wrong. Because when you’ve been proved wrong, you’ve learned something you didn’t know before. You’ve been enlightened. It’s the best thing one person can do for another.” Hard to argue with that…

We arrived in Plattsburgh around 1:30 AM. Even though I was exhausted, I did most of the driving on the trip up. My dad’s 66 years old and was already stressing his body by jumping in a car for what would be nearly 17 hours of driving, and stuffing his system with fast food, hardly the diet for a man chomping low-cholesterol meds. By this time the snow was pouring down heavily. Plattsburgh’s at the tippy-top of the Adirondack Northway, which winds through the mountains and along the Schroon River. Because it’s a protected area, the state tries to prevent light pollution by cutting way back on the streetlamps along the highway: when the snow is falling that fast, conditions get dangerous quickly. You have to use your low-beams, because the high beams pick up every single flake, making it impossible to see the road.

Somewhere along the highway, my dad came up with a good idea: instead of both of us rising before daybreak, making for two dangerously tired drivers, I should wake up first and get Sam on my own. That would allow my dad to sleep in, so he could be better prepared to drive a few miles while I recuperated with a nap in the passenger seat. Because of their work schedules, the only way we could arrange an early pickup that was even remotely close to the US border was to schedule it for 7:00 AM. So it was that 4 hours later, I pulled my carcass from my sleeping bag (I always sleep on the floor in hotels), stumbled into my clothes and out the Super 8 Motel door into a raging blizzard.

The hotel lot was covered with snow. The road to the hotel was covered with snow. The on-ramp to the highway was coated with 2 inches or more of snow, and the highway itself was a blanket of the white stuff. Napierville, a small town in Quebec, is only a half hour away from Plattsburgh. Of course, that’s based on normal weather conditions that permit you to drive 65 mph: in the snow and darkness I was reduced to about 45-50 mph.

I got into Canada without a hitch, explaining the situation to a cute and bemused looking young blonde Canadian border guard with schoolmarm glasses. “I’ll be back in a half-hour or so,” I said, as I waved goodbye and continued up the highway, which was now Canada’s Autoroute 15.

The pickup went off well. Sam hopped in the car, we said our goodbyes, and went our separate ways. As I headed toward the border, I nearly skidded off the highway when someone slammed on their brakes in front of me, but all told the return trip through Quebec was not entirely terrifying.

Until we hit customs.

I’d like to refer to something I wrote back in December:

Passport laws for children are confusing and contradictory. Generally speaking, a minor child accompanied by a passport-holding adult does not need a passport to cross the US/Canada border. However, this is at the discretion of customs, which essentially means “he doesn’t need a passport unless Joe Customs says he does.” Also, and most importantly, this rule does not apply to entering the United States via airplane: to enter the US by air, you need a passport.

When we arrived at the border at about 8:00 AM(?), the guard took one look at me, with big bags under my eyes, disheveled hair, stubble, a little boy in the back seat with no mommy in sight, in a blizzard, and his antenna perked up. As I told my bizarre story, involving a child out-of-wedlock born to a Canadian and a Philadelphian, trips that usually involve Syracuse and Interstate 81, and a missed flight for Christmas, he was clearly getting more and more suspicious by the minute. The guard held up Sam’s battered birth certificate. “Awfully torn up, wouldn’t you say?” he asked me.

“Well yeah,” I answered. “I always take it with me when I go to pick him up, and this has been going on for nearly 5 years.”

“How often do you come to Canada?” he asked.

“As little as possible,” I responded. “Like I said, we usually meet up in Syracuse–”

“Why?”

“Because that’s the midway point between Montreal and Quebec, and there aren’t as many tolls as there are on the Thruway.”

“So why are you here now?”

“Because, like I said, his mom didn’t realize he needed a passport to enter the US by plane, and if we were going to have him for Christmas I’d have to to drive up to get him, which is what I did. I’ve been driving since last night.”

“How long did it take you to get here?”

“Six hours or so to Plattsburgh, we left around 6:30 or so yesterday.”

“Uh huh.” He paused, skeptical. “Roll down your back window please.” I rolled it down.

“Little boy? What’s your name?” the guard asked.

“Sam,” piped Sam from the back.

“And who’s this driving?”

“Daddy,” he replied helpfully.

“And where’s your Mommy?”

“She had to go to work, so we came extra-early!” Sam said. This was all very exciting for him, and terrifying for me. Visions of being dragged away and thrown into a cell while Sam was remanded to a foster home were flashing through my mind.

“Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to turn off the engine and put on your hazard lights,” said the guard. I sighed and did as I was told. It was hard to be angry with the guy: he was obviously trying to do the right thing, and who can blame him? If I had been sitting in that little booth I would have been suspicious too. I took out my cell phone to call Sam’s mom and let her know what was going on, but another guard made a cutting motion across his throat with one hand, while pointing at the “no cell phone use” sign with the other. After a few minutes, we were directed to an area where I parked my car and handed over my keys and identifying documents to another border guard.

We were herded into a windowless building lined with stainless steel seats. The room was filled with Chinese people who had been removed from a bus on suspicion of something or another. There were a few Francophones waiting for service as well. A guard about my age began asking me the same questions the guy in the booth asked me. Then he asked the same questions again, but in different order, adding new topics like “Is that your car? How long have you owned it? Where do you work? Where did you work before that? What do you do? How long were you with his mom?” Then he asked the same questions again, and had me empty my pockets and turn them out. Then he asked me the same questions again. Sam was sitting nervously in one of the stainless steel seats, fidgeting.

Finally, someone came along and handed me a declaration sheet: it seems my story checked out and after the 45 minute ordeal, we were allowed to continue on our way. But one thing was clear: we had to get a passport for Sam, or this was going to happen again and again, and eventually there might be real trouble. So as soon as Christmas was over, we began working out how to get Sam’s citizenship. This was harder than you might expect, As I wrote in January:

[D]ual citizenship for a child born out of wedlock is very difficult. In fact, it is a royal clusterfuck of epic proportions.

This is because the US embassy A) doesn’t publish guidelines for children born out of wedlock in a foreign country because B) the rules keep changing, and C) in order to call the US embassy in Montreal, I have to pay $1.59 (Canadian) per minute. At the very least, that’s a $15.90 call, and given that the conversation with my senator took 20 minutes it’ll probably cost a lot more than that. Oh, and when I call the main number, they tell me they no longer take telephone inquiries. Awesome.

As that next-to-the-last sentence suggests, I just got off the phone with someone from my senator’s constituent services office dealing with immigration issues. He told me he can’t tell me what the rules are even though he knows what they are because they are constantly changing. The whole situation, in his words, is “ridiculous”. “If I was to tell you what the rules currently are, it would be a disservice to you because they won’t stay that way for long,” he said. “And US rules and regulations regarding out-of-wedlock children born abroad are one of the single largest sources of litigation for us. It’s a total mess.”

What was clear was that this was going to be a large effort involving not only phone calls from me, but from Sam’s mom as well, and almost certainly a trip to Montreal, which we began planning immediately. Sam’s mom handled the calls to the consulate, since it was a free call from her side of the border. She got as much information as possible, but there was the sticking point of how to legitimate him. From what Senator Casey’s office had told me, legitimation varied broadly from country to country, and in Canada, from province to province. Sam’s mom had as much luck as me in determining what that was, but since we had to show up in person, we saved our questions for the consulate. Meanwhile, she got all his passport stuff in order, so i could just sign off and send the application in when we arrived.

Since we were making such a big trip, we also decided to schedule visits with his school. Due to some miscommunication and a tight schedule, I had missed the school’s open house, but after a bunch of phone calls to administrators and with Sam’s mom, we decided on one we both felt comfortable with. It was easy to make an appointment to visit.

Finally, to get to the point of this post, Christina and I left on Saturday February 14 for Montreal, arriving around 7:00 PM at the Midtown Holiday Inn. Besides Valentine’s Day, it was President’s Day weekend, which meant that our obligations at the consulate had to wait until Tuesday morning. that left the weekend free to explore and hang out with Sam, and Monday to take care of his Canadian passport.

A day or so before we left, Christina found an article in the New York Times about Sucrerie de la Montagne, a traditional maple sugar shack. Everything the article said was true, and then some.

There are hundreds of cabanes à sucre in Quebec. Usually, a visit is just a day trip, but I was planning to spend the night, and Sucrerie de la Montagne is one of the few that offers accommodations. The rate for my two-story maisonette included dinner — a feast of traditional Québécois food served at rough-hewn tables in a cavernous hall while a fiddle-driven rigodon band played bouncy folkloric music. Because the real reason why you go to a cabane à sucre is to eat and dance.

We picked up Sam from the YMCA, where he takes his swimming lessons (he’s getting prepped up for summer), and drove about a half hour west of the city. Montreal is a lot like Philadelphia, including the shitty highways. And like pennsylvania, the area surrounding montreal gets really rural, really quickly. In no time at all we were listening to classic American country music on the radio (!) and driving down winding roads past farms. The weather was hovering around 4 degrees Celsius: I’m too lazy to convert to Fahrenheit, so let’s just agree that it was cold as a well-digger’s ass.

In the car

The parking lot, if you could call it that, at the Sucrerie was covered with a thick sheet of ice. The air was fairly still, but very chilly. Sam’s nose and cheeks were red. So were Christina’s.

The path to the sucrerie itself was long and covered with snow and ice, but that’s not a problem: an enormous red sleigh, complete with runners, driven by a burly French Quebecois wearing a fur hat (whose name i forget), and hauled by Clydesdales.

This picture is from original article and does not do justice to the sheer size of the driver, who flirted with Christina the entire time. He was like a bear with a French accent

Photo: Yannick Grandmont for The New York Times

After loading up the sleigh with visitors, the driver took of a a quick trot across the ice, deliberately skidding in a gigantic circle that left everyone laughing and dizzy. The tour of the syrup production facility was fun for grown-ups, but perhaps a little much for Sam, whose boredom seemed to be intimately related to the subzero temperature. That all changed when we went into the dining hall. Within a few minutes, we were eating a delicious and hearty bean soup, dipping bocce-ball sized loaves of bread into the broth. After the soup was gone, the main course appeared: bowls of meatballs in gravy, ham, thick slabs of bacon, meat pie, more bread, sausages, preserved onions, beets, and cornichon pickles. I couldn’t even begin to clean my plate.

Not angry, just stuffed to the gills

Even better, an old timey duo was on stage playing traditional Quebecois fiddle tunes. Old timey is old timey wherever you go, and pretty soon the whole room was clapping and stomping, including Sam who loves that stuff.

After a few songs, the band pulled out a bagful of musical spoons and invited the audience to come up and participate. Sam and I headed to the front.

Kids today: when i learned to play the spoons, it was the old-fashioned way, with two soup spoons balanced on my fingers. These wooden things took a lot of the skill out of it, but if it makes a kid happy, so what. Here’s Sam, figuring out how to work them, with a little help from me.

I love his expression in this shot, you can see he’s really banging away.

Around about that time, we learned that Sam could dance. I’m not talking about jumping up and down and waving his hands around: I mean “getting down like a young Michael Jackson. Sam insists he got these moves from a video game. Wherever he learned it, he’s got rhythm and moves. I wish I’d had the sense to have taken a video, because these photos simply don’t do any justice to my boogie down kid. I want to send him a copy of Breakin’ and see if he can learn how to do headspins, backspins, and all that other stuff I never bothered with because I was too busy skateboarding and slamming.

The end of this post is probably going to a be a bit anticlimatic, since this is about where the photos end. That’s because the visit was short, the details about the consulate and his passport are mundane at best, and the remainder of the shots aren’t so great. The trip was 100% successful in that I accomplished everything i set out to do. Sam’s application for a Canadian passport was submitted, and the document should arrive within two weeks. In terms of the consulate, we received all the information we needed, and (thank heaven) a DNA test is NOT required. Sometime in the next two months, I travel back to Montreal where, armed with proof of my identity and citizenship, as well as documentation proving I have been in the US for five years since i was aged 14 and two years before Sam’s birth, and a check for $65.00, I’ll sign an affidavit agreeing to support him until the age of 18, and ba-da-bing! Sam can claim his rightful American citizenship, opening twice as many doors to opportunity than most people. Lucky kid.

In addition, I was able to visit his school, which was great: the library was especially impressive, and the computer lab looked very new. I also learned exactly how French immersion will play out: he’ll learn in English on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and in French on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. I’m thinking of dropping by my library to pick up some “teach-yourself-French” dvds, to see if i can refresh my memory enough to have conversations with Sam. His soon-to-be step-dad and I also both speak spanish, so Sam may well end up trilingual. That’s going to open a few more doors too. Lucky kid, part deux (or dos, as the case may be).

More to come…