VENANGOLAND ELECTIONS 07

(News-Herald, November 1)Halloween’s over, so we can move on to something really scary—local elections.

It’s probably a good year to learn about “bullet voting.” Bullet voting depends on one simple fact—you don’t have to use every vote you have.

Imagine a race in which four people are running for two seats: Tom, Dick, Harry, and Some Guy. Three voters go into the booth, each with two votes to use and only one candidate they really like.

So Voter A, a Tom fan, votes for Tom and Some Guy. Voter B votes for Dick and Some Guy. Voter C votes for Harry and Some Guy. And in the end, Some Guy is the big winner while Tom, Dick and Harry tie for last place.

It may seem counter-intuitive to “waste” a vote, but if voters A, B, and C use one vote to vote only for the candidates they really like, Tom, Dick and Harry tie for the lead and Some Guy loses.

Even with four people running for four spots, rationing your vote can still affect the order they come in; in some elected groups, that matters.

It’s a fine year to remember all this, because—well, the school board elections present No Choice At All, and other elections feature those jobs that nobody understands, like County Comptrolling Clerk of Electoral Records Secretary. Then there’s the race for County Commissioner.

I don’t suppose you could get a more disorganized, tragically doomed race if you tied a bunch of squirrels’ feet together, shook them up in a sack, and dropped them at the top of a water slide to go after a couple of acorns strapped to the bottom of the pool. In a thunderstorm.

We have the water muddied with write-in candidates. I suspect that the write-innacy of Horn and Smith is less about ego and more about some Powers That Be looking at the primary results and choking. But a write-in is tough going in Venangoland, and if the electorate has already rejected you once, that’s a pretty clear predictor. I give Smith the edge here—she came close in the primary and her name is easy to type. But while the electorate may be fickle, I doubt that several hundred voters have changed their minds since spring.

That leaves the duly selected candidates, none of whom have ever held elected office. I understand that every politician has to start somewhere; I wish these folks weren’t starting out by running the whole county.

Vance Mays stands out by being a Libertarian, a party that I like in theory. But Mays’s position on economic development seems a bit disingenuous. He says we shouldn’t spend taxpayer dollars on a development agency; it can be done by volunteers. Furthermore, he himself can pick up the phone and have thirty CEO contacts lined up to develop the county. Except that he apparently hasn’t actually done that yet. So I guess his point is that we shouldn’t hire someone to do a job that can be handled by a volunteer, and he will volunteer to do that job as soon as we hire him as commissioner.

The rest of the field is the usual mish-mosh of Republicrats. I remain unimpressed by the assorted posturings re: Two Mile Run Park. At this point we know two things about the park—nobody has a good long-term plan for the place, and it is a miniscule portion of commissioner responsibilities. Electing a commissioner based on a park position is like electing a President based on his plans for the janitorial staff at the Statue of Liberty.

In May, Jan Beichner said that if county government had better communication “you wouldn’t see so many lawsuits.” I’m willing to accept that Beichner is an expert when it comes to lawsuits and the county.

Troy Wood has actually bothered to learn something about county finances. Stan Grzasko has some actual experience with a larger scale union organization. Timothy Brooks is well-educated, but largely invisible during this campaign.

If these were all people who were getting ready to interview for a job, I would guess it was a job they didn’t particularly want. Little campaign material (including no web presence), statements vague to the point of uselessness, and none who appear to have done their homework. Everyone who ever ran for office in this county declared themselves in favor of lower taxes and more well-paid jobs. Big deal. Do any of these people have a clue about how to actually accomplish any of their goals? If they do, perhaps they should share those clues in the next couple of days, because they’re not entitled to our votes just for showing up.

VENANGOLAND ARTS TREATS

(News-Herald, October 25)Here’s some Venangoland entertainment recommendationms.

* I recently picked up a cd by FHS grad Andy Martin, and it’s pretty good stuff. Andy’s tunes present a nice blend of folk and rock and pop (the cd reminded me most immediately of the Three Bens, particularly Kweller).

There’s a lot here about love and travel and on repeated listenings the cd suggests a young man wrestling with finding his place and making mistakes coming to terms with the woman who may or may not be of his dreams. The closing piece, “Piano Song,” finds him singing “take me where you go,” broken and healed, settled into the business of loving enough to give up complete control of his life. Nice that it’s the track that includes a violin contribution by the woman who is now his wife.

It’s a pretty mature album for such a young guy, which is not to suggest that it suffers from the Deadly Earnestness that often afflicts folky music. There’s a lot of fun here, and a nice range from the Dylanesque pieces (“Falling Off”) to solid rockers (“The Valley Waits”). His vocal styling is loose and relaxed; not always vocally precise, but always personal. The production on the cd matches that—solid, but not overly slick. Overall it’s a nice contrast to the plastic over-produced slickness of top 40 without requiring the listener to endure amateurish experiments in odd noisemaking.

I have listened to this cd over and over and would be happy to own it if I had never met Andy in my life. You can get yourself a copy by websurfing your way to www.andybobmartin.com.

* Last Saturday I headed to the Transit Building to catch Croyle Entertainment’s production of Wine, Cheese & Poe. Matt Croyle has created a theatrical setting for three Poe stories, a framework that helps establish an appropriate mood and provides a bit of Poe background for the uninitiated.

The evening is not particularly long, and the readings of the stories are nicely done. Matt actually makes “The Raven” make sense, and Rob Hoover is appropriately creepy as the narrator of “The Black Cat.” The producers even throw in some wine and cheese at intermission. The show will be presented again this Friday and Saturday night. It’s a fine way to kick off Halloween week, and support a fledgling local theater endeavor.

* Sunday afternoon at 3:00, the Venango Chamber Orchestra will celebrate its 15^th anniversary with a concert at the Barrow-Civic Theatre.

Many people tend to be scared of orchestra music. They shouldn’t be. Anyone who watches tv or movies knows how moving and visceral orchestra music can be. But the best movie sound system in the world cannot capture or recreate the sound of a live orchestra. When a full-bodied chorus of strings stretch out on a soft and solid bed of brass and woodwinds, it’s like stumbling upon a full-colored sunrise over the Grand Canyon—it’s impossible not to be moved, impossible not to want to turn to someone and say, “Wow, look at that!”

Every area should have a live orchestra; very few do. It’s just short of miraculous that we have one here in Venangoland, and a testament to the folks involved that it is still thriving after fifteen years. And they play well, too.

What my first three recommendations have in common is a taste of the unfamiliar. When it comes to the arts, many of us tend to fear the strange and new, and sometimes the strange and new require an audience that likes daring stuff out on the edge. But I promise you—none of these treats require you to be edgy and experimental and out on the edge. They’re all easily accessible and thoroughly enjoyable.

* Recommendation four isn’t so unfamiliar. On November 9, 7:30 at the Barrow, there will be a concert headlined by Frank Feroz, who will be backed up by Rae Hanna, Mark DeWalt, Neal Williams and Steve McMurray—as close to a Venangoland Superband as you’re likely to get. I am particularly excited about special guest John Sferra, who was one third of the classic rock trio Glass Harp.

Another third of Glass Harp was Phil Keaggy, probably the best guitarist of his generation. Phil left the mainstream to make some of the greatest Christian rock music ever; Crimson and Blue, arguably one of his best albums, features Sferra as drummer.

Also on the program are the Electracons, about which I know nothing at all, and the River Nymphs. I’ve never actually heard the Nymphs, but I’ve seen pictures and so can vouch for their babe-osity (which is good, because Hanna and McMurray—great musicians, but not so pretty). Advance tickets are $10, and worth every penny.

JAMES BORLAND

(News-Herald, October 2003) In these modern times, there’s a thriving world built around what are known as zines, magazines published, printed and distributed on a personal amateur level. Some of these are very slick and stylish, some very personal, some with exceptionally good content and writing. But zines are not new, exactly.

In the late 1870’s, amateur newspapers were in vogue. Anyone who lay hands on the basic printing equipment could create their own local newspaper. In 1878, seventeen-year-old James Borland and a few friends started The Evening News in Franklin. The first issue was four pages long: “An amateur daily paper published by three boys should be read by all. ‘Spicy and newsy’ is our motto.”

I picked up Borland’s memoir Fifty Years in the Newspaper Game, an interesting record of a man who was an integral part of life in Franklin for decades.

Borland’s father was a doctor; he contributed the occasional article and the boys created the newspaper in a back room of his offices. For James it was apparently the discovery of a passion. He worked on the paper before school, during lunch, and after school. The boys quickly ran out of money and only a timely loan from Joseph Sibley kept the paper afloat; it was the beginning of a lifelong bond between the two.

Borland’s path was still uncertain; a school teacher helped him decide. Stumped by algebra, Borland was confronted by Prof. John W. Cannon, who refused to explain the lessons to young James, instead advising him to give up the newspaper business and study lessons in the evening so he could get them without Cannon’s help. Borland decided that he was learning more from the newspaper business than from school, and quit school to pursue journalism.

Borland found himself a partner for years with General Miller; the picture that emerges in his book of that gentleman is less than flattering. In 1917, the two had a major falling out. Miller opposed Judge Criswell, an active Prohibition man in the county. The Judge had crossed Miller when Miller had attempted to divorce his wife, and Miller wanted the paper to oppose the Judge’s campaign. For Borland, it was a conflict between a wealthy man of power and a working class man of principle; the editor resigned and walked away from the business that he had created.

Borland immediately went to work for the Daily Herald, which two years later merged with his old paper to form the News-Herald. Borland was back at the helm again. In his account of events, Miller, never really interested in the newspaper business, wandered off to other pursuits.

Despite his conflicts with Miller, Borland’s loyalty to Joe Sibley remained undaunted over the years. His book includes numerous accounts of Sibley’s generosity and warmth. Sibley had his share of controversy in his career—an election scandal, charges that he was a tool of Standard Oil, a flap over campaign spending (imagine—people were outraged that he had allegedly spent forty grand on an election campaign). But no criticism of Sibley appears in Borland’s book unless it is accompanied by an exoneration.

Borland saw a lot of history: everything from national conventions featuring the era’s famous names to the beginnings of Conneaut Lake Park. In days when you only saw it if you were there in the flesh, Borland saw a lot.

And yet much of his best writing was in the two decades he wrote a column in the paper that most often focused on birds and wildlife and the sweet pleasure of life out along French Creek. And the biggest events in his life were the ones he helped stage here, most notably the series of Old Home Weeks at the opening of the last century. It is abundantly clear in his book that he took pride in those gatherings of folks to the old home town of which he was such a proud booster.

Old Home Week fans honored Borland for his dedication. Near the sidewalk in front of the county courthouse stands a small birdbath and a bench, nestled in a semi-circle of shrubs. Not as big as the fountain or as majestic as the war monument, but a nice reminder nevertheless of a man who managed to create something lasting out of his love and dedication. For Borland, serve was the operative word:

“The fascination of newspaper publishing is beyond compare. It is life itself—changing, moody, exhilarating, all-conquering, submissive, impulsive, wonderfully interesting. Such experiences are the only reward the true newspaper man receives. Few achieve riches, a handful achieve fame, but the great multitude of newspaper men serve—and serve—and serve!”

A bit hokey, perhaps, but a nice sentiment none the less.

ACTIVITIES FOR THE YOUNG

(News-Herald, October 18)It’s a tough job to steer one’s child through the world of activities. Sports programs, music programs, dance studios, general activity programs—we’re loaded with them in Venangoland, both in and out of schools. The challenge as a parent is to figure out which provide good use of time and money.

Part depends on the goal of involvement. Some people with a talent seek ways to enrich and develop it. Some people simply want to have their wonderfulness confirmed.

Confirmation is easy. Give the young persons constant praise. Always tell them (and their parents) how wonderful they are; never critique or criticize them. Of course, feedback that would interrupt this unending praise is also feedback that would allow them to grow and develop their talents.

There are often perks. There will be a super-special trip to the East Podunk Arts Festival as featured performers, or a spot in the line-up of the Outer Bogwomp Intraleague Playoffs. But all these “exclusive” events require of participants is the ability to write a check that won’t bounce.

These types of programs can be fine. They create some great childhood memories and as an adult, the young person can reminisce about the talent that he never really developed.

For those who do want to grow, there’s another type of balance to strike, and that’s the balance between the needs of the student and the needs of the program.

Drift too far to either end of the scale and things get ugly. There are parents who think, for instance, that schools sports exist only to provide a platform for their Little Johnny to take his next step toward Awesome Sports Success. Other players, the teams, the school, even Little Johnny’s own education—all of that is inconsequential next to Little Johnny’s need to Be the Biggest Star.

This approach is not particularly character-building, and Little Johnny either grows up to be a colossal self-centered jerk, or he finally gets fed up and tells his hard-driving parents to take a flying leap off the top of the Oil City sign.

Neither leads to great success. And the number of great sports legends to come from Venangoland is not something you need a lot of extra hands to count. You can try to get everything possible for your sports prodigy, but if your child doesn’t come out of the program with some character, the rest is meaningless.

An important part of character is the ability to devote time and effort to something larger than yourself. But on the other ugly end of the scale we find coaches and directors who believe that students exist only as fodder for The Program.

There’s no question that in the arts and sports, you ask students to make sacrifices now to pay off down the road. You practice till it hurts because later you’ll be better. You take one for the team because that’s part of being a member of a team.

But if you are always taking one for the team, and the team never takes one for you, something’s wrong. It’s like being a renter instead of an owner—you pay and pay and pay and still the result never belongs to you, but is always the property of the real owner. His band, his team, his show. His pride and success.

Parents whose child is charting this world need to watch out for the best interests of that child, and they have a right, and perhaps an obligation, to walk away from a leader who does not have the best interests of the student in mind.

Yes, these sorts of endeavors require time and effort and sacrifice. But if the student is being asked to give up a sizeable chunk of his life, and the return on that investment is supposed to be the satisfaction of making his Glorious Leader successful, something is out of whack.

No fair answering, “But Janey loves practicing her accordion sixty hours a week” if you’ve taught her since birth that she has to love it or you will be Very Disappointed. If you’ve created an atmosphere at home where your child can’t tell you the truth, you have another problem.

Because in the end, your child is your guide. The average shmoe can tell the team’s winning and still not be sure whether it’s any good. Audiences can take in a performance and not know whether it required virtuoso skills or was so easy that trained chimps could have managed it. They have to take someone’s word for it. But the final measure of the worth of a program is whether it enriches your child’s life, or makes it miserable; whether it helps her grow up or merely makes her wish she could be old enough to quit on her own.

FITNESS, OR SOMETHING LIKE IT

(News-Herald, March 2003) I finally broke down and joined the YMCA this winter. I had the vague notion that it might be helpful for getting in shape. Membership immediately improved my health; now I can’t afford to eat out so often.

Those of you who have known me for years will appreciate how surprised I am to find myself in a gym, working out and getting sweat all over myself. My athleticism is legendary, in the same way that leprechauns are legendary, except that you can probably find more people who will claim to have seen leprechauns than have seen me actively pursue any sport-like activities.

I had one season in my youth as a pitcher in playground league softball. I played for the Franklin Heights playground, where we practiced without benefit of anything remotely resembling a softball field. Third Street had a giant field, Eleventh Street a decent one, and at Fifteenth Street whacking the ball into the cemetery was good for a home run. Third Ward playground, home of the notoriously rough and tough players, didn’t have a field either, but they could use Miller-Sibley where the Cadillacs of fields were available.

At the Heights, we had a sliver of a field. Instead of power, we learned control, because a hit to anywhere except right field put you in the woods or in someone’s kitchen. Smart teams would not have bothered to put anyone out against us except a right fielder.

Though, as I recall, we did have a secret weapon. Somebody on the team knew Bernie Walz, who would occasionally come to play for us. At the plate, even at that relatively tender age, Bernie looked pretty much like a mountain wielding a toothpick. Bernie moved slowly; it looked like it took a half-hour for that toothpick to amble around. But then it would meet the ball—after that the small sphere would whimper, then sizzle, then head off to parts unknown. It would not surprise me to find some of Bernie’s hits embedded in low orbit satellites.

I pitched for the team. The position only required me to have good control of one limb at a time (as opposed to, say, running and throwing simultaneously), though I early learned to duck quickly. There’s nothing quite like the sight of a softball, flattened into a pancake by centrifical force, spinning toward your head like an angry white buzzsaw.

My gift for pitching was spotty. At one point, I led the league in both strikeouts and walks. The next summer I was too old to play playground league; oddly enough, no recruiting bids from other leagues appeared.

My athletic career has been rather limited ever since. I learned racquetball in college (liberal arts education) and was well on my way to being almost above average. Later I impressed my future in-laws at a family picnic by disassembling my entire knee during a game of kickball.

All of which goes to show that I am as mystified as anyone to find me in a gym working out. I don’t know what exactly prompted my entry into the world of exertion in these last few years. It may well be as simple as the belated discovery that running and biking and kayaking and yes, even grunting at oddly shaped machinery is fun, even relaxing.

If I could go back and deliver a message or two to my younger self, I would—well, come to think of it, that’s rather a list. But one item would definitely be to assure him that awkward or not, swift and strong or not, there is enjoyment to be had in putting one’s physical self to work, just as surely as it’s fun to sit down with a good book.

I wish I had known that sooner. But you can sit and read a book and there’s nothing to tell you that you are reading it slower or with less understanding than other smarter, faster readers. Way too much of the world of physical activity seemed geared for competition. Heck, even at the Y there are a zillion opportunities to swim competitively, but swimming just for recreation seems to be an alien art form.

The gym—excuse me, “Fitness Center”—at the Y is pleasantly non-competitive. I have a sense that the folks on the free weight end are a bit more aggressive, but I think you have to be because that part of the gym has the wall-sized mirrors so you can check your form. I don’t know what I look like when I’m exerting myself, but I’m fairly certain that it’s not pretty, and I’d rather leave it a mystery. My end of the gym has a nice picture window overlooking French Creek and a couple of tv’s. People are friendly but focused on what they’re doing. Nobody wears the kind of workout outfits that scream “I Am Way Too Serious About This.” I have not seen anyone kick sand in someone’s face yet.

So I’m not only surprised to be there, but enjoying it as well. All I need now is a barely mediocre racquetball partner.

NCLB & TESTING

(News-Herald, October 11)No Child Left Behind has been lurching toward reauthorization. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings has been parading it like a stuffed dog yanked along on a tight leash. Periodically the poor dead thing tips over, and Spellings praises it for rolling over.

Spellings has been touting test results as proof that NCLB works. Not everyone is convinced. The internet is loaded with scholarly statistic wonk articles accusing Spellings of cooking the books and cherry-picking data. The good numbers reportedly depend on techniques like counting figures from before the actual implementation of NCLB.

But I’m not even going to argue that point. For the sake of argument, let’s pretend that test scores really have improved.

The rhetoric that has surrounded NCLB since its spawning has been masterful. Every child should be educated in a culture or excellence and high expectations. Every child should receive the best education possible. America’s workforce should be well-educated. Who can disagree with any of these?

And I’ll go one further—who can disagree with the idea of accountability for school systems. In the ed biz, we feed at the public trough, and we owe the taxpayers a good accounting of what we’re doing with the system they pay for and entrust us with. The days are gone when schools can get away with saying, “Look, we’re your schools. Just trust us and don’t ask questions.”

Those days should be gone. Today there’s no reason for a school not to operate with a high level of transparency. Folks should be able to get some idea of how well we’re doing our job.

Every one of those goals listed above—every single one—is reasonable and appropriate and worth achieving. But the mystery remains—why would anyone seriously think that the way to pursue and measure any of those goals is by giving a single multiple choice test?

Certainly not actual teachers. Since the seventies, research into best practices has steered teachers away from multiple choice tests because they are such a lousy measure of pretty much anything. What’s required for a multiple choice test is a combination of regurgitation untainted by any actual thinking, plus a small amount of dumb luck.

Even the couple of essay-ish questions inserted as a sop to old-fashioned curmudgeons like me are multiple-choice dumb—if it asks for two reasons, the test scorer is only to count the number of reasons offered, and not to evaluate their quality.

The tests are not completely worthless. They’re like a canary in a coal mine—if nobody in your school is passing, something is terribly wrong. But if the canary is alive and well, that doesn’t mean you’re mining lots of coal. And if half of your crew is busy with the care, feeding and maintenance of the canary, then they’re not busy mining coal, and you’re falling behind.

NCLB could be merely obnoxious, or perhaps a curious hybrid (where else do we find the conservative desire to spank unions so perfectly wedded to the liberal desire to have the federal government take over everything). But the omnipresent testing makes NCLB a giant bloodsucking leech on the body of education. Testing and practice testing and bizarrely obsolete tests that we give just because we always have (yes, MAT, I’m talking to you) have steadily shortened the school year.

So we put the squeeze on history and art and music and just plain using your brain for something other than a sponge. Not to mention NCLB’s disrespect for blue collar jobs—the PSSA does not include questions about welding or carburetors, but it does hit calculus.

And now some batch of geniuses in Harrisburg think that a good next move would be—more tests!! I would love to meet these guys face to face, but I don’t think I can get transportation to whatever planet they live on. I can only assume they’re related to the same folks who think if you keep looking in your wallet, eventually you’ll find more money there. Fine if you’re rich, but if you’re checking your wallet instead of doing your job, it will only get emptier.

Try a simple exercise. Imagine that you are going to select an employee, a nurse for your aging parent, even a spouse. Could you design a multiple choice test that would tell you everything you wanted to know about them? Despite all the political verbiage about raising expectations, NCLB has lowered the bar while making it twice as hard to strive for anything better.

Several business coalitions have announced their support for NCLB, saying they have a real need for the educated workers it will produce. I can only assume that they expect a big wave of openings for multiple choice test takers.

APPLEFEST SURVIVAL TIPS

(News-Herald, October 4)There’s only one thing I could be writing about this week. So now, before the Applefestering begins, let me offer some Applefestifying survival tips.

As always, parking will be an issue. You may want to park somewhere convenient, like a side street in the lower end of town, or the handy outlying shuttle-serviced parking lots, or Cleveland.

The quest for parking is an odd one. Why an able-bodied person would spend an hour driving around in order to avoid a fifteen minute walk is a mystery to me. Of course, I’m not inclined to buy a giant herb-encrusted hand-carved tree trunk; I suppose factoring in cargo transport makes a difference in parking considerations.

But if you’re not planning on heavy shopping, consider some other alternatives. You could take the bike trail into town from Oil City or Fisherman’s Cove or even Emlenton. You get a little exercise, a peaceful ride through nature, and when you get back to the car you’ll be able to grab a bite to eat without waiting in line. (You’ll need a chain to secure your bike to some large object, like a bridge, or one of those people who stops in the middle of the sidewalk and just stays there).

Granted, that means you’ll miss some of the Complete Applefest Experience. But for some folks, the CAE is a bit of sensory overload. For those folks, I’ll also offer the reminder that Riverfront Park (at the bottom of Ninth Street, for you out-of-towners) is just a few blocks away from ground zero and offers benches and green and a lovely, peaceful view of both the river and the creek. It can be a handy place to catch your breath or dangle feet in the water.

Speaking of natural splendor, remember that the predicted warm weather and giant park full o’food will make a big day for yellowjackets. That means women should plan to make do without hair spray. I used to travel with the FHS marching band back in the eighties, the days when young women wore hair so large that it could be viewed from space, said viewing made easier because the five pounds of hairspray per individual hairdo opened holes in the ozone. On a warm evening, the Knightettes, Majorettes and Silks collective hair products would draw a swarm of yellowjackets large enough to carry away a small elephant.

At any rate, skip the hair product. Just wear a hat or a babushka. If you forget, you can always buy one of those crocheted toilet paper roll covers, which look rather like small hats anyway. And don’t forget to keep a thumb over the top of your pop can or bottle.

Of course, food is part of the very essence of Applefestosity. I recommend that you eat nothing at all today to give yourself maximum capacity for the weekend.

I am also happy to announce the newest rule for the Any Excuse Will Do Diet Program. Previously, Applefest diners had to depend on the old rules that both food eaten while standing up and food torn into smaller pieces have fewer calories. But a recent decision ruled that all food eaten at big noisy festivals does not count at all.

In addition to all the booths, I recommend eating at any of Franklin’s fine sit down restaurants because, let’s face it, at some point any excuse to sit down will be welcome. The trick is to head to these restaurants between normal meal times. At least, that was the trick until I just told everyone. It's still worth it to stop in-- you get a chance to check out the new Oskie's menu and, of course, when you can eat at Leonardo's on a Sunday, that's almost as good as Christmas.

The most important survival advice for Applefestery is to give yourself time. Clear your calendar. Leave your watch at home.

Then you can simply relax and enjoy the day. Have fun cheering on the race. Stroll through some booths. Eat something yummy. Swing past the performance spots every so often to check out which special flavor of music is being served. Eat something else. Rinse and repeat.

With a good weather year, I’d guess we’ll have another record-breaking year for the car show on Sunday, so that may make for a day’s worth of browsing all by itself.

But the most important reason for allowing lots of time only applies to locals. Applefest is Franklin’s homecoming, an event that brings home people of every age and station that ever lived here. You will see people that you haven’t seen in ages, and in spite of the sprawling splendid carnivalous varied vast adventure that is Applefest, there isn’t anything better than that.

THE BIG DAMN GAME

(News-Herald, September 27) So it’s time once again for The Big Game. I don’t usually get very worked up about the Great Oil City – Franklin sports rivalry, but if I’m going to watch one of these games, here are things I don’t want to see:

Fake School Spirit: There’s the fair-weather fan, the person who only shows up when the home team is wining. And then there’s the person who doesn’t care about the sport at all—they just like an excuse to start a fight.

Friday night there will be students trolling the stadium and parking lot, completely oblivious to the game while they hunt for an excuse to fight with someone from the opposing school.

The faux school spirit strikes in surprising places some times. Years ago, there was some spectacular breaking, entering and vandalism committed on OCHS by a student who was more or less from Franklin. This was a student who, on any other day, had to be dragged into school with a block and tackle attached to a team of clydesdales. If on football night, you usually just stay home not caring, don’t change your tradition just for The Big Game.

Civic Vandalism: If your child asked to go next door and paint “You stink!” all over the neighbor’s house, I’m guessing most parents would say no. But late tonight, carloads of teenagers will make the trip up and down river to leave their mark on the other’s city. Which is doubly silly considering that most of the students in the two schools live in neither Franklin nor Oil City.

Freakish Loss of Perspective: Look. If you’re in the stands at a high school football game screaming and ranting and busting a blood vessel as if the fate of Western Civilization were riding on that pigskin, you need to take a serious look at your life.

For decades, the two teams have been coached by men from That Other Town. Teachers, staff, parents, alumni and various other bystanders live in one town and work in the other. Graduates of the two schools have been known to meet, date and even marry each other!

These days, the city’s fates are linked more closely than ever; it just seems silly to pretend that some massive point of civic pride rests on this game. A rivalry depends on some long history of offense and grudge, but our history is too intertwined.

Remember the time that one player from Franklin—oh, wait—he married an Oil City girl and works in Cranberry. Well, how about that one Oil City coach—no, wait—his kids grew up playing for Franklin teams.

You can’t have family feuds when there’s only one family. If we need to nurse a grudge, may I suggest Every Team from Erie.

Classless Behavior: Too many years the classiest behavior in the whole stadium is that of the young men on the field, while too many people in the stands (some of them old enough to know better) act like classless jerks.

Class doesn’t mean a lack of pride. There’s plenty of class in saying, “We are proud of who we are, and we will fight harder and longer and stronger than anyone else to uphold our pride.”

There’s no class in saying “You stink and we hate you and we hope you get hurt and die.” It was hokey when your kindergarten teacher told you, but it’s still true—you can’t build yourself up by tearing other people down. And it’s silly—I feel certain that Oil City and Franklin folks smell about the same.

The majority of fans young and old are great, and the sense of occasion that surrounds The Big Game can be kind of exciting. And I do put a lot of stock in school spirit—I think at the very least it’s a way to learn about devoting heart to something bigger than yourself. I’m proud of the school where I teach, the people I teach with, and the students past and present who have come through that building. I hope our team plays with guts and heart and strength and class, and I hope they win.

I guess that’s why I always hope that the Big Game won’t be wrapped up in too much foolishness. It’s ironic, I guess—on the field, no one can appreciate the hard work and blood and sweat and heart and guts that a team devotes to the game better than the other team. And in Franklin and Oil City, we’ll never find a town more like our own than our neighbors at the other end of Route 8.

So go to the game, cheer with noise and pride for our teams, and walk out of the stadium afterwards remembering who and where we are.

VOLUNTEERS

(News-Herald, September 20)I’m a big fan of volunteerism. I think the world is vastly improved when we all give time and effort to things that we value.

In an area like ours, volunteers are essential. The gold standard for Venangoland volunteerism is set by the volunteer fire departments. In a world where churches have to beg, plead, and arm-twist just to get someone to teach a one-hour Sunday school class, here are folks who volunteer to have their lives interrupted at any moment so that they can run off and risk themselves to protect other folks’ life and property.

It’s not that easy to find firefighters who will make those kind of sacrifices for pay; it’s nothing short of miraculous that so many of our small townships can put together full groups of people who do the work as volunteers.

It’s tricky to manage volunteers, particularly (and ironically) in non-fire department situations where the stakes are so much lower. But part of the trick to managing volunteers is remembering one simple principle: everyone, even a volunteer, gets paid. The key to working with volunteers is understanding who pays them, and how.

Now, I’m not talking about money. Volunteers work for all sorts of things—recognition, fellowship, a sense of power, a chance to meet hot chicks, feeling good about serving. None of these things are monetary, but they’re all mighty important to people who want them.

Managers who don’t understand this often shoot themselves in the foot by giving volunteers unintended pay cuts.

If Aunt Ethel always volunteers to knit the silver doilies for the church bazaar because it makes her feel proud to be the keeper of the silver doily tradition—well, that’s her pay, and even if you give her what is, on paper, a promotion to the frozen linguini concession stand, to her it’s a cut in pay, and she will probably not be happy about it.

Maybe Cousin Bruce likes to pain the sign for the annual firehall grilled pig jowls dinner. His pay is having his kids point and say, “Look, Daddy’s sign! How do you paint a pig’s nose like that, Daddy?” Having a professional sign painter work on the sign to “fix it up” cuts Bruce’s pay to zero.

These are obvious examples, but we are surrounded by less obvious ones. Many people who are paid workers on a job also do volunteer work at the same place. Eunice is paid to be an administrative assistant in Accounts Receivable, but she manages the coffee fund as a purely volunteer job. Her payment is a tiny bit more power over her co-workers and a little extra status.

These mixed jobs can create a dangerous situation for both workers and management. The volunteer worker faces the danger of an instant pay cut. At any point, management could grab a job that has been volunteer work and assign it to a paid employee. “The coffee fund should be handled by the accounting secretary,” declares The Boss, and now Eunice has lost her extra pay and her job.

And unlike the usual victim of a firing, Eunice remains there in the office. Not always great for the atmosphere.

Some workplaces depend far too much on volunteers. These are workplaces that would be in deep trouble if all their employees ever started doing only what they’re actually paid to do.

If you’re a manager, the other danger in using too much volunteer labor is that volunteers often do not really work for you.

Say that Chuck Gruntmuscle has been hired by the First United Church of Suburban Scrubgrass to coach their junior woodchuck ragball team. Chuck does it because he loves to see the team members get excited about the game, he enjoys winning, and he even enjoys the regard of the players’ parents.

Even though the church has hired him, Chuck is not paid by them. So in a very real sense, Chuck does not work for them, which is something they may discover when they decide they want Chuck to coach in a particular way and realize they have no leverage over him except to fire him completely.

That’s why so many mostly-volunteer jobs come with a small stipend. The pay scale may work out to something like one-point-oh-two cents an hour, but that’s not the point. The payment formalizes the employer-employee relationship, clarifying for whom the volunteer works.

That’s another part of the beauty of volunteer fire departments. They receive their pay from the communities they serve; it is the perfect relationship, as long as folks in the community don’t try to stiff their firefighters by skimping on support and recognition. It’s easy to take them for granted, but anybody doing valuable work deserves to be paid—in whatever currency they value.

BEARING WITNESS

(News-Herald, September 13) For all the complicated theological concepts that people of faith wrestle with, I think it’s the simple matter of witnessing that makes so many stumble.

The simple approach is that you bear witness to your faith by talking about it. I can remember what seem like hundreds of hours spent in meetings and gatherings and worship marathons with people standing up to tell their story. “This is what God means to me” or “This is why I love Jesus” or “This is how Divine Love changed my life.’

But talking about one’s faith is undoubtedly the least effective witness that any believer can offer.

I suppose I see more of this because I work with so many people who are relatively young in their faith. Students will write about how important faith is, or write about how religion changed their lives. Sometimes students will even talk about it in front of their peers. Then those same students will turn around and mock other students for being fat or wearing the wrong clothes or just being uncool.

Nothing bears witness to your beliefs (religious or otherwise) like the way you treat other people. Some people believe their faith gives them an obligation to treat other human beings well. Some people believe their faith gives them permission to treat other human beings poorly.

If you spend a lot of time in church circles, you’re probably familiar with a type. I call them Softball Christians, because the first place I encountered them was in college in church softball leagues.

In church or group meetings, they speak of God’s abiding love and heavenly grace, often with great warmth and sincerity. But put them on a softball field, and they will pursue secular victory in an earthly game with more hard-bitten ruthlessness than any Godless heathen. The same person who was earlier pointing at the world and saying “We must Save them” will now point at the other team and declare, “No mercy! We must obliterate them.”

Their competitiveness, their willingness to pursue victory even in something as trivial as a game—this is a mighty strong witness to the world.

There are those people of faith whose witness is that God has certified them as being special. And by “special,” they mean “better than the rest of you.”

They know better than to say the words, “I’m perfect.” The witness that comes out of their mouths is, “I’m imperfect, like every other human.” But the witness that comes out of their lives is, “I’m right. My understanding of God is perfect, and my understanding of His rules is perfect, so you had better do as I say. I don’t need to do any searching; I just need to straighten you out.”

We tend to make fun of our Puritan forebears—their funny hats, their dour banning of dance and music, their all-day church services. But give the Puritans their due—to a large degree, they walked the talk, and even a mute Puritan bore witness to his beliefs.

Modern witnesses often run into a consistency problem. Little Janie goes to church on Sunday morning and bears tearful witness to how Jesus has changed her and fills every single moment of her life and being. Then she goes home and logs on to Myspace to brag about how she drank everybody else under the table at Saturday’s party, including that stupid wench Ethel, who she hopes will get an awful disease and die soon. Exactly what sort of witness does she imagine that presents?

Understand, I do not agree with the school of thought that declares that since people of faith turn out to be merely human, that somehow proves that their faith is a crock. It’s seems fairly clear to me that being human means being flawed and limited, which in turn means that human understanding and practice of faith will always be imperfect.

But I have limited patience for the Magic Incantation school of religion, the idea that as long as I say the words, it doesn’t matter what I do or how I live.

It is human to be a mess on contradictory impulses, thoughts and actions. The search for meaning and direction in our lives is a search for something that can help us bring that big tangled mess into line. But the lazy man’s shortcut is finding something that provides an excuse for just indulging himself in whatever he already wanted anyway.

Religion and faith can be used either way, to provide direction or excuses. Most folks can tell which one they’re looking at, whether it’s the witness we intended to provide or not.

Today's post is strictly for showing off. The following link will take you to a piece about female motorcyclists, featuring my Aunt Betsi.

LIES IN ALL THEIR FLAVORS

(News-Herald, September 2003) You can tell a lot about a person from his lies. Not the question of if he lies—I’m not sure anyone can lay claim to a lie-free life—but the question of when he lies. It’s the line we all cross, even though it’s the line we almost all agree shouldn’t be crossed. When we’ll lie says something about what we value more than staying on the right side of that line.

Some folks lie to avoid trouble, the basic traditional Cover Your Butt lie. “Why no, I didn’t eat the last plum. It must have been stolen by fairies.” “I have no idea how that baseball came through the window. The boys and I were all in back discussing international monetary theory and French cuisine.” This kind of lie is easy to understand; there are times when avoiding a big hassle seems more valuable than a small truth.

Its first cousin is the Lie To Save Someone’s Feelings. 99 times out of a hundred this is just the Cover Your Butt lie dressed up in a rented tux to make it look nobler. Yes, there are people who really do want to spare other people’s feelings. But usually the purpose of this lie is to keep you from being upset—because I don’t want to have to deal with you when you’re agitated.

People who will tell these kinds of lies are dangerous. These are the folk who will say, “Sure, I dropped off that rent check just like you asked” without batting an eye. They may not even try to remember if they dropped off the check or not, because they know which answer will keep them from getting in trouble. These are the same people who won’t tell you that they’ve left you for someone new, so that you spend months publicly humiliating yourself by staying in a dead relationship when you could be humiliating yourself by trying to search for a new relationship instead.

Then there’s the Lookin’ Smart lie. Sometimes these lies are tiny; sometimes they’re enormous. But the purpose is simple—I would rather pull a statistic out of the troposphere than say that dreaded phrase, “I don’t know.” And if for some reason you actually know that the Ecuadorian annual rainfall figures that I just spouted are wrong, I’ll make up a source to go with my made-up number.

This type of liar is particularly annoying to work with because he would rather be right than solve the problem. He would rather watch the widget vat blow up so he can say, “I knew that would happen” than avert a disaster by taking someone else’s advice. His own sense of importance is more valuable than the truth.

Also appearing regularly at your place of business is the Manipulating Liar. This is the guy who tells you, “Yeah, bring that up at the next meeting. I’ll back you up.” Then he sits in the meeting and blows holes in your presentation.

This type of liar is particularly problematic because he’s usually your boss, and he’s lying to maintain control. He values power more than the truth. When someone doesn’t have the ability to manage by competence or the integrity to lead by principle, he can always keep people off balance and in line by saying whatever will smooth the waters right now—even if he plans to say or do the opposite an hour from now.

Special note to lying bosses: You aren’t fooling anyone. Your employees know you’re a liar. They don’t say anything to you because you’re the boss, but everything you say to them is filtered through the knowledge that you can’t be trusted. The irony is that you lie to gain power, but by lying you lose it.

Perhaps the most entertaining liar is the No Good Reason liar. This person tells lies that are so transparent or pointless that people are simply dumbfounded. His fiancé throws his ring at him in front of thirty witnesses and he tells everyone that he had to dump her because she was too possessive. She interrupts a conversation to announce that her recovery time from the operation under discussion was the longest on record, despite the fact that the operation in question is a vasectomy.

And in many ways this type is the saddest, because No Good Reason liars often turn out to be Look At Me Please liars, but their constant lying leads people to ignore them. They may change settings (school, workplace, neighborhood) many times, but their behavior always catches up with them.

We give up the truth when we think we can trade it for something more valuable, but we almost always underestimate the real price. We can learn a lot about ourselves by looking in the mirror and asking what it is that we think is worth that enormous price. But we rarely ask the question, either because we value the truth so little, or because we know we wouldn’t like the answer.

PARENTS & SCHOOL GOALS

(News-Herald, September 6)The relationship of parents with their offsprings’ schools is just one of those many parts of parenting most clearly seen in the rear-view mirror. My children are now post-teens, off to school; now that my nest is empty, I have a full wish list of parental do-overs.

You could focus on a whole long list of specific rules to follow when your child is in school, but I think it’s easier to focus on the broad principles. And I think the most important broad principle is to remember the end product.

For instance, most parents would agree that their child should emerge from school more or less ready to function as an independent-ish near-adult. But it’s easy to forget this long-term goal while addressing short-term issues.

The term in the ed biz is “helicopter parent,” the parents who hover over their children at every step. They check over every homework assignment, provide personal individual coaching at every sports event, oversee every aspect of Junior’s school life.

Some of this is the natural parental protectiveness. Childhood is rough; the teen years are particularly brutal. It’s the most natural impulse in the world to step in and protect your child from hurt. Some helicoptering comes from parents who believe that if they can control every aspect of their child’s life, that child out will turn out to be exactly as the parents wish.

Both views are mistakes. Lifting weights hurts, but if Mom lifts your weights for you, you don’t get any stronger. And anyone who thinks that they can engineer a young person to grow to order is doomed to disappointment (and a child who one day announces that they’re getting twelve piercings and moving in with someone named “Barf”).

Both views often feed the short-term approach, which is a mistake.

The school years are filled with things that simply won’t matter in the long run, and many of them are mighty seductive.

It’s easy to pursue grades. Cutting corners is easier than ever, with the cooperation of both your fellow students and the ever-reproductive internet. Parents can get sucked into the grade chase as well; more than a few of my students have turned in writing that included extra parental assistance.

But once students arrive at college or tech school or their job, their high school grades won’t mean a thing. What will matter is what they know and what they can do; school is their chance to load up on those things.

We make it easy to focus on the omnipresent PSSA testing. We do our darndest to convince students that the PSSA test scores are critical to the fate of Civilization As We Know It. But years from now, after they’ve picked up their high school diploma, their PSSA scores won’t mean a thing.

Parents of athletes want their children to win every contest, start every game, never sit the bench. But way too often the pursuit of winning sacrifices the very character that sports are supposed to build. Every record falls sooner or later, but a person’s character lasts a lifetime.

Even the social games of the school years are not forever. Most of us should know better—is there anyone who doesn’t know the story of a Most Popular High Schooler who grew up into a life of disaster and failure, or the social outcast who grew up to a solid life of success and achievement?

We don’t want our children to be left out, not to get invited to parties with the cool kids. When they have a falling out with old friends, we’d love to fix it. We want to see them have the kind of friendships with The Right People seen in every fantasy-filled movie about high school. Though we know there are more important things than the popularity game, we hate to see our children lose at it.

But the shiniest trophies of school are the some of the most empty and worthless. It’s the learning, the growth, the relationships based on something deeper than coolness and convenience that have the life long value.

Parents should absolutely be involved. They should stand up to the schools for their children, and they should stand up to their children for education.

But through all of that, take the long view. Worry a little less about how you hope your child feels this afternoon, and focus a bit more on that day, some years away, when they are high school graduates and you’re about to send them out into the world. When that day comes, you’ll want to know that even without you, they can handle the world; you won’t want to be wishing you could go with them because you’re afraid they can’t.

MORE BIKE TRAIL ADVENTURES

(News-Herald, August 30) One of my goals this summer was experience the full range of available bike trails in Venangoland.

Of course, I’ve trekked the civilization-heavy pedal path from Franklin to Oil City many times. More rustic is the stretch south from Franklin to the Belmar bridge. From there you can head out the Sandycreek trail, complete with several cool old railroad bridges, and a gentle uphill slope that doesn’t intimidate when you’re headed up, but provides gentle encouragement on the way back.

It’s worth crossing the Belmar bridge now because there’s another path spur from Belmar down to Fisherman’s Cove. This allows for a nice round trip bike and kayak biathlon if you’re feeling really ambitious.

But last week I finally completed the big bike aspiration I had for this summer. I pedaled all the way to Emlenton.

I’ve been tempted for a long time. When I head south, I’m always subject to Trail Suck, that powerful force that gets in your head and whispers, “Oh, just a little bit more…” and sucks you farther on down the trail. So I waited for a day when my daughter could come fetch me on the far end, and off I went.

There are plenty of great features on the Emlenton run. Of course, there’s Indian God Rock, a monument to centuries of multi-cultural graffiti. Down below Brandon, the trail stops for a bit—turn left up the hill and follow the dirt road through a village. Eventually you’ll arrive at Kent Road, which wins the award for the most generous interpretation of the word “road” ever. If your dream is to ride all the way to Emlenton without ever getting off your bike, this is where your dream dies.

But once you’re back on the trail the journey just gets better and better. There’s the Kennerdell tunnel, for which you must have some kind of light. Really. Turn off all the lights in your house at midnight, sit in the basement, put three garbage bags over your head and duct tape your eyelids shut. The Kennerdell tunnel is darker than that. It’s like riding a bicycle through the black of space; pedaling can become awkward because you lose the sense of where the ground is. My flashlight was too wimpy; don’t even ask how I carried it.

Once you emerge, there are more miles of forest and river, plenty of opportunity to enjoy being away from Stuff. In the auto age houses and stores and way stations grow up around routes, so that the road gives us continuous civilization, occasionally punctuated by bits of nature, like occasional mini-parks. But railways show a world mostly of undeveloped nature, occasionally interrupted by towns and villages. Train travel must have created a sense of small isolated outposts of humanity in a vast sea of forest, hill, and river.

The second tunnel en route is mercifully short—almost as soon as you’ve entered, a light smudge at the far end becomes comfortably visible.

Your first hint that you’ve arrived in Emlenton is a landscape of ruined foundations. As steeped in Venangoland history as I am, I am woefully undersoaked in Emlentonia; it took research to identify this as oil refinery remains. Pass a parking lot (the nicest one anywhere on the trail network) and you’re on the main drag of Emlenton.

Emlenton isn’t hard to explore, although there is directory signage that only faces one of three entryways to town, and is not really readable from a car, anyway. At one end of the town is the Emlenton Café—it smells really nice and I would have gladly eaten there, but after 27 miles on the bike trail, I was not fit to be anywhere where people were trying to eat. There are lovely riverfront views, convenience stores, and several antiquey places. Parents can shop in some cool places, but the kids can still get nachos and ice cream.

Looming up a block above the main drag is the Crawford Center, a converted school that houses municipal offices, some good historical info, a visitors’ center, a little museum that appears to be open Every So Often, plus a great old auditorium. Once again, the signage for this place is visible only on one route into town.

It’s one of the perennial indicators that Venangoland is not quite ready to be a tourist destination—we still specialize in signs that are only helpful if you already know where everything is.

My daughter and her boyfriend, an excellent navigating team as long as they have a cell phone, arrived to retrieve my rather-sweaty, semi-achy body. I should have gotten them ice cream for their trouble. It’s a fun trip; next time I’ll find a way to take along a clean shirt and a bigger flashlight.

You can find more info about the AVTA trails here

ODDS AND ENDS

(News-Herald, August 23) Whenever I try to research some tidbit of information, I invariably end up side tracked. Here are some of the side tracks that I wandered onto this summer.

*There was once a vocal group named the Venangos. They recorded on Monogram Records, though the only song I can find attributed to them is “My Girl.” I’m dying to know who they were, because as we’ve noted before “Venango” is not a particularly common word. Who were they, and what do they have to do with us?

*You can’t rent a car if you’re under 21. You can barely rent one if you’re under 25. Uncle Sam will let you drive a tank, but Hertz won’t let you drive a Volvo.

*There is a large and vocal community of people out there advocating the geocentric model of the universe (that’s the one where the Earth is stationary and the universe revolves around us). Really. There is, for instance, a website named Galileo Was Wrong, operated by a Catholic Apologist located in State Line, Pennsylvania. He’s written an entire book arguing in favor of what he calls the Biblical view that the Earth does not move.

And he’s not the only one. Geocentric Perspective is a website that also argues that the Bible clearly shows that we live on the immovable center of the universe. Of course, the site also contains pages about how NASA faked the moon landings, Germany didn’t start World War II, and suggests that the Holocaust is probably bogus. There’s also a useful link to a site that explains how dinosaurs and humans lived together.

Not that I mean to suggest that the geocentricity crowd are crackpots. Some of them have big fat college degrees, and there appears to be a fair amount of erudite argument about whether the universe is large or small. And before anyone even starts in on them, they explain that the Bible does not claim the world is flat and therefore they fully accept the theory that the Earth is round.

These folks are just one more example of how aggressive and ambitious people can be when it comes to protecting what they choose to believe from the assault of unpleasant facts and data. The geocentric folks appear to spend lots of time plugging holes in their view and protecting it from a variety of challenges.

A Doctor Thomas Neville Jones has published a paper about geosynchronous satellites. Satellites that orbit around the world at a speed that allows them to match the rotation of the Earth would seem to be a major challenge to the view that the Earth doesn’t move. Doctor Jones unfurls a large number of fancy and/or incomprehensible formulae to explain this apparent loophole, including such skeptical phrases as “If we assume such satellites really do exist…”

*My son and his girlfriend got in an argument about whether it’s worse to call someone a turkey or to throw the word “kiester” at them. So I ended up tracking down the origins of each.

“Kiester” was apparently an English synonym for “satchel” in the nineteenth century; it was not until the 1930’s that it was used to refer to the portion of the anatomy upon which one sits. My sources are mum on what prompted that piece of linguistic creativity, but as a side note to this side note, I discovered there is a Kiester, Minnesota (about 100 miles south of Minneapolis-St.Paul, right by the middle-of-nowhere near the Iowa border). This is useful only for twelve-year-old boys with computer access, who can entertain themselves by locating websites such as “The Best Kiester Schools.”

“Turkey,” as in loser or failure, goes back to burlesque theater where a turkey was a show that stunk, bombed, debaclized or otherwise did poorly. That may go back to “turkey troupes” who were groups of traveling performers wandering hither and yon. That in turn may go back to “turkey” as a name for the bundle in which traveling lumberjacks carried their stuff. In terms of naughtiness, I declare the two words a draw. However, “kiester” is funnier. Even Turkey City, Pennsylvania is not as funny a place name as Kiester, Minnesota.

*There’s such a thing as the American Society of Highway Engineers, and they have a Franklin section. I never cease to be amazed by all the little organizations that exist around us that we know nothing about.

*The law requires that employers release reservists and National Guard members for service, and that their jobs be kept waiting for them. However, Sears actually guarantees its employees called up for military service that it will maintain their full level of civilian pay AND benefits for up to five years. And nobody told them they had to.

BOOK REVIEW-- JOSEPH FINDER'S NEWEST

Through an odd sequence of circumstances, I received an advance reader's edition of Joseph Finder's new novel Power Play to review. Really, having people give me free copies of books to read just so I can talk about them strikes me as a sweet gig.

Finder is a Yale grad whose roommate was Franklinite Joe Teig. He started out specializing in Russki thrillers, then wrote Zero Hour after the first World Trade Towers attack. While history has somewhat overtaken that book, it was pretty much on the mark. He also wrote High Crimes, a military/legal thriller that was made into a movie with Ashley Judd and Morgan Freeman. After a sidetrack into some other writing gigs, Finder resurfaced as a specialist in corporate thrillers, a niche that he pretty much owns and which yields some interesting ideas.

Here's my quick review of his new book, Power Play.

Jake doesn’t want to be there. It’s a corporate retreat, an isolated camp where the corporate heavy hitters go to make their play for power. Jake’s been happy to be a quiet minnow, but now he’s forced to swim with the sharks, and there’s no familiar face in sight except for that of the woman he loved and lost. And things are only going to get worse when a group of armed killers arrive with an agenda of their own.

This is Finder’s best work to date. He has once again perfectly blended the battling and infighting of the boardroom with the action and suspense of a classic thriller.

Jake is by far his most compelling central character. Jake carries the burden of dark secrets and a troubled past—he maintains a low profile at work to conceal that burden, and he let it tear him apart from the love of his life, but now it is the only thing that can save them all. Finder has created a character who is not simply an action hero, but a man caught in a situation where he must deal with his dark past to preserve his life and his love. In Power Play, Finder gives us a man who must deal with the greatest external and internal struggle of his life, all in one weekend.

A work that fans of Robert Ludlum and Lee Child will enjoy, this is highly recommended, the best book from Joseph Finder to date.

RISK ASSESSMENT

(News-Herald, August 16)There are two factors to consider in risk assessment—how likely the risk is, and how great the cost would be.

When something is not likely to happen, and the cost would not be great, risk barely registers. Why do people drive up and down Route 8 at Mach 6? Because they figure that A) odds are against the police being around to catch them and B) a ticket wouldn’t be all that costly.

What makes them slow down? If they see a parked police car poised to pounce, the Likelihood of Being Caught estimate rockets up to nearly %100. If drivers have already collected so many tickets that their collection of points is Much Too High, then the cost of being caught becomes prohibitive. In both cases, they are more likely to slow down.

Many of us are naturally inclined to weigh one risk assessment factor more than the other. In fact, when we see a battle between people over a risky behavior, it’s often between people who are counting different factors.

Mom warns Junior to drive slowly and carefully for the zillionth time because she has a vivid and gut-wrenchingly clear mental picture of what it would be like to have police come to tell her that her child has been killed. Junior laughs at her fretting because he feels certain that, no matter how fast he drives, he’s simply too good to ever have an accident.

These different approaches are probably at the center of many parent-child arguments. Dad is focused on the cost factor, so he tells his daughter to never, ever, ever get in a car driven by a friend who’s been drinking.

Juniorette hears that, and since she assesses risk based on likelihood, she thinks that the heavy-duty warning means that Dad believes it’s likely she’ll ride with a drunk driver, and that he doesn’t trust her to make the right choice. In fact, he trusts her 99 times out of 100, but all he can think is that one time is enough to create unendurable tragedy.

Many household arguments that end with an offspring screaming “You just don’t trust me” start with two different styles of risk assessment.

The same argument takes place in the public sector as well. In the days after 9/11, everybody wanted to build a cage around every important place in the USA. The likelihood of a terrorist attack on the birthplace of Lawrence Welk wasn’t because everyone was gripped by a vivid understanding of how awful a terrorist attack could be.

Or take a whacko grabbing his gun and going on a school grounds rampage. The chances of such an event were the same the day before the Virginia Tech shootings as they were the day after. This fall, the chance of such an attack won’t have decreased a bit, but the memory of the horror will have faded, and with it, our need to be on high alert 24/7.

And, of course, we’ll spend the next month of our national ADD anxiety attack on bridge safety, not because there’s any reason the believe that bridges across the Allegheny are any less stable today than they were yesterday, but because we suddenly can imagine how awful a collapse would be. In a month or two, the comforting fog of denial will roll in again.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. In this world there’s a long list of really horrible things that could happen. The list includes tragedies that aren’t impossible—just improbable. If we were constantly, vividly aware of the potential disasters, we’d lock ourselves in the basement and never do a thing.

Risk assessment is hard. Some folks are too certain they’ll always avoid potential disaster. Others lack the imagination to appreciate how really awful disaster could be. And some people overestimate both and live in a state of eternal fear.

Media often make matters worse, either by making the possible disaster seem extra awful, or by artificially inflating the likelihood that disaster may strike. “Epidemics” like the fabled summer rash of shark attacks a few years ago—these are often complete fabrications with no basis in fact, and yet millions of Americans become convinced that the scary wave is real.

And sometimes the very thing that magnifies the impact of an imagine disaster is our own human hearts. A possible hurt or disappointment suffered by a child becomes massive suffering to the parent who loves that child so much.

Risk is part of the price we pay for being alive. We can’t make it go away by ignoring it, and we can’t escape it by running from every shadow. After all running away also has risks. Our best bet is to try not to do anything stupid, then find and share the strength to deal with what comes.

MERITOCRACY

(News-Herald, August 9) We like to believe that we live in a culture that rewards excellence, that the best way to succeed is to be really good at what you do. Close, but no cigar. Doing an excellent job is not what gets you a reward in our culture. Convincing people that you are doing an excellent job is what gets you a reward.

Now, one way to convince people that you’re doing excellent work is to actually do excellent work. In some fields that’s often good enough. Engineering tends to be that way, though engineers often get in trouble when forced to interface with other fields. Joy’s large success in peak years arguably came because they were an engineer’s company, letting good work speak for itself.

That ethic is even celebrated in our popular culture. House is a current extreme example of a man who cannot play the game, but is so excellent that he’s successful anyway.

This may be a distinctive difference between professional and amateur sports. When high school athletes square off, the team that does the best job usually wins the game. That’s still true in professional sports—except that the team that does the best sales job has more money and that translates into better players and staff.

In most arenas it is necessary to play the game, to sell the product, to convince others that you’re actually done a good job.

There are plenty of people who hate that part of the equation, turn up their noses in disgust at the smell of politics and popularity contests. They will announce that they don’t play the game in a tone that lets you know they consider that a badge of honor. But if they refuse to play the game and wait for their work to speak for itself, they often end up obscure and unknown. Plenty of artists have died hungry through the centuries.

In fact, the role of patrons in the art world is not just to pay bills, but to campaign and play the game for the artist. The artist paints, sculpts, composes or whatever; the patron goes out and shmoozes to convince everyone that the work really is good.

As much as some folks loathe playing the game, in most realms it’s hard to ignore. Remember Eugene Reichenfeld, conductor of the Wilkinsburg Symphony and one of the fathers of the Kennerdell Art and Music Festival? Gene was a fine conductor and musician, and he was a promoter of the first order, nearly shameless in his pursuit of support for the festival. Plenty of people may have ended up feeling as if they’d been hit by a tornado, but in the end, a woodsy gathering to look at pictures and listen to an orchestra became a source of culture and entertainment for folks throughout Western PA.

The Festival could have just set up in the shop in the woods and said, “Well, this is good stuff, so we’ll just wait for people to come be impressed.” And it would have died out decades ago.

There are certainly people who overdo promotion, who always sell hard even if they have nothing to sell but junk. Mass media shoves a variety of wretched garbage at us. Plenty of folks aren’t just willing to be sold to—they depend on others to tell them what’s good, as if they themselves were incapable of telling excellence from junk.

Playing the game doesn’t always work—New Coke was one of the most spectacular and expensive marketing failures ever. But people who refuse to play the game will often be at the mercy of those who do, and will owe their successes to people who were willing to play the game on their behalf.

It is easy to become bitter about playing the game, perhaps because we grow up hearing that excellence is all you need. Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.

In the workplace, a good manager makes a sales job unnecessary, because your best widget polisher may be lousy at playing the game. If you hired him to polish widgets, don’t make him spend time playing the game. A good manager frees employees to concentrate on doing their job without wasting time selling it.

People who play the game well are denigrated as suck-ups, political types who are somehow cheating. But, like it or not, if a tree falls really, really well in the forest and no one hears it, it never makes a sound.

If you’re like me, and not a big fan of playing the game, what can you do? Well, some times you suck it up and sell. And when you see something that is excellent and worth celebrating, make a fuss so that the person who did it doesn’t have to throw his own party. If everyone did that every day, our culture would be almost as much of a meritocracy as we like to imagine it is.

STILL NOT A FAN OF NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND

All right, so I've been harping on No Child Left Behind for years now. Here are some of the problems I saw back in 2003-- nothing that's happened since has changed my mind on the subject.

(News-Herald, August 2003) Folks in Oil City were dismayed this summer to find some of their schools on the state’s Big List of Naughty Schools, and in fact there are several county schools in the same boat.

What are we paying these administrators for anyway, came the cries of protest. Well, if you’re surprised when your school makes it to the failure list, you haven’t been paying attention. Your school, and everybody else’s, is supposed to fail. That’s what the law is for.

Let’s review. No Child Left Behind is a crock. It is a cruel and cynical joke on the American people, designed to dismantle public education and make it easier for the rich to send Chip and Tiffy to private school (where they don’t have to take the PSSA) and still afford that summer in Bimini.

It bears repeating until everybody finally gets it: every single public school in America will eventually be on the failing schools list, because under NCLB, 99% success will be considered failure. It’s not a matter of if your school will be “in trouble”—only when. Districts can postpone it, but not avoid it.

In Pennsylvania, a school can end up on the list for any one of three reasons. 1) Whole or part of the school’s population didn’t meet the year’s testing standard. 2) Fewer than 95% of students took the test. 3) Not enough students attend and/or graduate from the school.

Let’s look at these in reverse order.

Attendance and graduation rates are fairly straightforward measures. Nothing too tough there.

95% of students taking the test. More of a challenge. The government is adamant (to the point of actually putting some money where its mouth is) that it wants class sizes in the 15-18 range. But if a class has 18 students in it, 17 students equal 94%. If Johnny is absent on test day, his school fails.

And the state says that if Johnny’s family has religious objections to taking the test, Johnny doesn’t have to take the test. But he still counts as absent, and the school fails.

The achievement level is the kicker in all this. The state has set a benchmark for each year that each school must meet. In the commonwealth, that’s based on achieving an 80% on the PSSA test of reading and math.

But we aren’t just looking at the whole school population. Any sub-group larger than 40 is counted on its own. So if your school has forty Inuit students, or forty students whose first language is Swahili, or forty students who are blind and deaf, those students are counted separately from the whole school.

For many schools, the significant group will be special needs students. Law requires that these students receive instruction that is adapted, modified to compensate for their particular learning disabilities. The law also requires them to take exactly the same PSSA as everyone else.

So if you have a learning disability that makes it hard for you to do math, the state requires your teacher to slow down your math class so that you can get it. But the state also requires you to achieve an 80% on the math portion of the PSSA (including the sections dealing with algebra and calculus).

But that ‘s not the best part. The results for the sub-groups override all other results. So if too many of the 40 Inuit students in my school fall below the 80% mark, my school goes on the list. Doesn’t matter if the rest of the school tests out 100% at genius level; the forty Inuits decide whether we’re on the list or not.

Franklin and Oil City Middle Schools are perfect examples of this feature in action. They’re on The List because although each school’s overall performance was excellent, each has a subgroup of over forty economically disadvantaged students who took the test and didn’t quite make it up to the cut. (One might think that the logical next step would be to target this group for more intense instruction, except that, by law, no one can know who those economically disadvantaged students are.)

What comes next? Well, Hasson Heights Elementary was on the Very Naughty List for the second year (though the state neglected to tell them that they were on the list the first time) so the law says those parents would have been offered choice. Everybody else has to show the state how they’ll improve.

Oh, but one last wrinkle. All of the state’s information about the school is based on information from the 00-01 and 01-02 school years. That’s means Harrisburg wants to see each district’s plan for improving schools in 02-03 --- the year we just completed.

Harrisburg says that only by aggressively pursuing an audacious plan can we hope to make schools perfect. Right. This from the folks who can’t even pass a budget. Happy new school year, indeed.

I-80 TOLL ROAD

(News-Herald, August 2) I wish I had paid more attention when the idea of an I-80 toll road first popped up, but I thought, frankly, that it was an idea that was so stupid its time would never come. I should have known better than to underestimate the Harrisburg brain trust.

We’ve seen this style of financial planning before. Smilin’ Ed’s school funding “reform” rests on a foundation of trainloads of money that we will collect, someday, from gambling. Probably. In the meantime, this unknown amount of possible future money is already earmarked for piddly property tax relief and some extra subsidizing for the schools in Philadelphia.

And most notably, he’s never tried to sell this plan on its merits, but has tried to put it across with increasingly rough displays of political gamesmanship.

The governor has been peddling variations of this same exercise in full contact crystal ball economics for a while now, but at Smilin’ Ed’s Used Legislation Lot, sales have been slow. Now here comes the I-80 toll proposal.

You would think that something this large, something that will impact one of the major cross-state corridors, would come buttressed with impact studies and thoughtful testimony from many of the people who will be affected. You would think that, but you would be wrong.

Instead, the toll proposal arrived at the last minute, a quickie addition to the spending plan that is the illegitimate child of this year’s Harrisburg-based budget fiasco. (And I don’t need to hear any more political bloviating about which party was to blame for a budget adopted seventeen days after the legally required deadline—in the spirit of bipartisanship, I blame them all.)

I don’t think these pieces of legislative are an unfortunate side-effect of the annual budget battle. I think they’re the purpose of it. The cynic in me suspects that it is now strategy to push the budget until it HAS to be passed, so that eleventh-hour addendums are carried through with no discussion or examination.

So here’s the plan. The state borrows a trainload of money and plans to pay it back later by taxing motorists on I-80. Some cars on the train stop all around the state; many go to Philly and the Burgh. Did you know that Allegheny County and the Greater Philly Area add up to 22% of the commonwealth population? The suits in Harrisburg never forget it.

Winners in this plan? Well, the lawyers and financiers who will get a nice commission putting together the train-sized loan. Mass transit mis-managers in Philly and the Burgh who win another holiday from cleaning up their acts.

Losers? Anybody want to spend $80 to travel across the state? Traffic will be deflected onto “free” roads, which means a route like 322 becomes more crowded, dangerous, and worn (good thing we’ll have all that money available for road repair). Shipping products into the area by truck will get more expensive. I don’t think tolling I-80 will endanger Pennsylvania’s reputation as a business-unfriendly state.

It’s an entertaining twist that Republican Representatives English and Peterson have used federal political muscle to interfere with state government. I’m pretty sure it’s not a standard conservative value to cheer federal power interfering with state functions. That said, I’m perfectly happy they did it.

It’s possible that using I-80 toll to finance debt has many positive aspects. It’s possible that upon hearing some really good reasons, I’ll decide that it’s not a stupid idea.

But it’s not simply that I think the idea is stupid. It’s that I haven’t heard any explanation about it. I haven’t heard what anybody knowledgeable has to say about the impact of such a far-reaching change. And my elected officials owe me that at the very least.

Even now, when the governor could be responding to Reps English and Peterson with a documented, fact-based, well-reasoned presentation about why this is such a good idea, instead of data and charts, we’re getting more political posturing and statements on the order of, “It is TOO a good idea, and these guys are just big doodyheads.” That and a petulant, “Well, then fine, I’ll just pull out that other plan that nobody liked.”

You would think that after the last election the folks in Harrisburg would have learned that Pennsylvanians would prefer to have important decisions made in the daylight, in full view. The Governor wants a toll road? Well, I want an explanation of why it’s good policy to drain more blood from our region to help feed Philly again. I’m waiting.