Literally the very first thing I did when I came home from losing my job was to sign up for Google mail. I had always relied on my former employer for e-mail services, so I needed to get set up immediately, and Gmail did the trick. I really enjoy Gmail - especially its chat functions, and the fact that I basically never have to worry about deleting anything because it has more space than I'll ever need.
Of course, because I receive this service for free, Google does place a few text-only ads in a column next to my incoming messages, but considering my entire income for the past 25 years has come from advertising, I have no problem with this. HOWEVER - there is something REALLY creepy about Gmail that I have not been able to get used to. It reads my e-mail even before I do! If I'm chatting with a friend about "Lost", I get text ads about other ABC TV programs. If I'm sending a resume out to a prospective employer, I see ads for Careerbuilder.com. Every e-mail I receive is customized to the content of the letter. It can be kinda creepy.
Of course, Google does make mistakes... I received a note last night from my friend, Loretta Cooper, and the ads offered to sell me cars - Mini-Coopers, of course. I'm wondering if I ever wrote a doctor about hemmorroids if I'd get Preparation H ads... And God forbid if I ever hear the bad news about someone dying - will I get a great deal on a casket?
(everybody sing!) ... if it's the last thing we ever do!
I'm speaking of course, about living in Montgomery County, Maryland - a jurisdiction that I have called home for my entire life... a county whose elected leaders have never seen a tax they didn't like!
At a time when inflation is up, home values are down and recession is looming, the County Executive and County Council are bickering over how deeply to stick it to homeowners. Now, I've been covering these kind of squabbles for years, so none of this comes as a surprise - but I can't help but wonder what geniuses approved what amounts to an 8 percent pay increase for most county employees. I've been reading in the paper about how county workers are the "most precious resource" the county has. I have no beef with the services I receive, but somehow I think county TAXPAYERS - the people who foot the bill - are somewhat more precious than employees. What world do these people live in where they think an 8 percent pay hike is normal, even in GOOD economic times?
Like I said, none of this is surprising to me in the Peoples' Republic of Montgomery County, but what's really burning my britches today is the fact that as much as the county likes to increase spending, it balks at efforts to generate any new revenue that does not come straight from my pocket! County Executive Ike Leggett has shot down a proposal to open county liquor stores on Sundays - a simple step that could put another million dollars a year in the county's coffers. Leggett has shot down the idea, saying the potential social ills could outweigh any financial benefit.
Ike - I don't know about you, but whether the liquor stores are open on Sunday or not, the rising cost of living here is enough to drive me to drink!
I have always found myself on a bit of the defensive because I am a dedicated consumer of reality television. In fact, I've avoided discussing it on this blog so far out of worry it might forever stain me as some sort of cultural idiot. The fact IS that television is entertainment... and whatever floats your boat is OK by me. My wife has her own TiVo filled to the brim with every cop show on the air... Never mind the fact that THOSE shows are about as far from REALITY as you can get - that's what she enjoys.
What really sticks in my craw are the people who insist on dismissing any program that is placed in the "reality TV" category out of hand. My brother-in-law, Todd, is one of these people. He won't tolerate 10 minutes of "Dancing With The Stars", but he'll watch every single Yankees game! Can you really tell me that three hours of baseball on TV is either more exciting or more entertaining than one hour of celebrity ballroom dancing? Again - whatever floats your boat.
Now - just a couple of quick riffs on current and future reality TV programs...
We're down to the final three on "Dancing With The Stars", now that Marissa Jaret Winokur has been shown the door. I was a big fan of the Tony-winning actress ... Like me, she is loud and fat... but she didn't let that get in the way, and she obviously enjoyed every minute that she was on the show. The great thing about Marissa is that she knew she probably should have been gone several weeks ago, and she appreciated that America kept her around as long as it did. As for the remaining stars, if Kristy Yamaguchi doesn't win, it will be a crime!
I've never been a big fan of American Idol... To me, it's always taken too long to go from early auditions to the finals, and there's something about all three judges that bug me. Having said that, I have dipped in and out of Idol this season... and I believe it's David Cook's competition to win.
If Reality TV is uncool, "Survivor" must be downright frigid. Just a few years ago, the granddaddy of reality programs was standard watercooler conversation in the office, but I knew almost no one at WMAL who would admit to watching it in recent years. The TV ratings are starting to bear that out. The finale of the latest season, "Fans vs. Faves", failed to finish in the top 10 programs for the week. That's a shame, because for those of you who snuffed the torch on Survivor years ago, I can tell you that this season - number SIXTEEN! - was one of the most entertaining seasons ever, including a four-week streak of tribal council blindsiding that has never been matched in the show's history! Again - I'm a big football fan - but you can't tell me that some of these shows are not just as competitive as TV sports!
Finally - I'm happy to hear that the Mole is making a comeback on ABC this summer. "The Mole" is almost as old as "Survivor", but it never achieved the same kind of ratings success. The original series was hosted by Anderson Cooper, who at the time was an overnight news anchor on ABC, and not yet a CNN megastar. The show itself is kind of hard to describe. There are about a dozen contestants who are given missions to perform... However, one of the contestants is a mole... someone whose job it is to spoil the missions without being detected. The winner of the program is the person who survives the longest, and who can identify the Mole. This show, more than others, was an acquired taste, but I highly recommend it. The new version will be out next month, but you can catch a marathon of the original series this Sunday on Game Show Network! Here's a promo for the original series:
By the way - a big shout out to my friend Ann Wog, who produces the Grandy and Andy Morning show on WMAL - She is my one and only true reality confidant! If it's reality TV, it's on Ann's TiVo!
I'm finding that you need to develop coping skills pretty quickly when you're looking for work... You need to cope when you're waiting for an e-mail or for the phone to ring. You need to cope when you've looked through every job search engine you can think of and can't find any more jobs you want to apply for. You need to cope with feeling like you are doing nothing productive... My answer for that dilemma was starting this blog, which I find simulates productivity extremely well. In fact, I'm simulating being productive as I write this because it helps me avoid the fact that I have reached a plateau in my job search.
For the first two months, I was able to find something to apply for nearly every day, or work on my resume, or work on my website, or fix up my blog and rationize that I was creating "writing samples". Now I've reached the point where I pretty much know what's out there, and hitting up careerbuilder.com and monster.com and journalismjobs.com and mediabistro.com several times a day is yielding little more than boredom.
I hate like hell to take a break from looking, because every time I stop, the little demon inside me that tells me I'll never find a job again grows a little stronger, and the clock on the wall ticks a little louder, reminding me that my time on the beach, by necessity, will soon have to come to an end.
But sometimes in life, benching your cleanup hitter because he's batting 1 for 20 is the best thing you can do to kick him in the ass and get him to start hitting homers again. Maybe I'm striking out with the job search because all of the jobs are starting to look the same, and the thought of settling for something I don't really want is starting to overshadow the excitement of moving on to the next chapter in my life. So I think I'm going to take a couple of days off to let the search engines fill up with some more exciting opportunities... recharge my batteries and get set for life AFTER the plateau!
I won't give up the blogging though... I have to find some way to cope!
Friends - Some people are supporting Barack Obama in the election because they want to prove that racism is no longer a big factor in American society. The following article from the Financial Times seems to confirm just the opposite. Obama's pending nomination is bringing out the racism in America! The piece speaks volumes about West Virginia, and makes me wonder if Hillary Clinton's expected huge primary election victory there will really be much of a victory after all. The article shows us all just how redneck that state still is, making the crackers from the film "Deliverance" seem almost like effete snobs!
Like most people in Mingo County, West Virginia, Leonard Simpson is a lifelong Democrat. But given a choice between Barack Obama and John McCain in November, the 67-year-old retired coalminer would vote Republican.
“I heard that Obama is a Muslim and his wife’s an atheist,” said Mr Simpson, drawing on a cigarette outside the fire station in Williamson, a coalmining town of 3,400 people surrounded by lush wooded hillsides.
Mr Simpson’s remarks help explain why Mr Obama is trailing Hillary Clinton, his Democratic rival, by 40 percentage points ahead of Tuesday’s primary election in the heavily white and rural state, according to recent opinion polls. A landslide victory for Mrs Clinton in West Virginia will do little to improve her fading hopes of winning the Democratic nomination, because Mr Obama has an almost insurmountable lead in the overall race. But Tuesday’s contest is likely to reinforce Mrs Clinton’s argument that she would be the stronger opponent for Mr McCain in November, and raise fresh doubts about whether the US is ready to elect its first black president.
Occupying a swathe of the Appalachian Mountains on the threshold between the Bible Belt and the Rust Belt, West Virginia is a swing state that voted twice for George W. Bush but backed Democrats in six of the eight prior presidential elections. No Democrat has been elected to the White House without carrying West Virginia since 1916, yet Mr Obama appears to have little chance of winning there in November. Recent opinion polls indicate that Mrs Clinton would narrowly beat Mr McCain in the state but Mr Obama would lose by nearly 20 percentage points.
West Virginia is hostile territory for Mr Obama because it has few of the African-Americans and affluent, college-educated whites who provide his strongest support. The state has the lowest college graduation rate in the US, the second lowest median household income, and one of the highest proportions of white residents, at 96 per cent.
A visit to Mingo County, a Democratic stronghold in the heart of the Appalachian coalfields, reveals the scale of Mr Obama’s challenge – not only in West Virginia but in white, working-class communities across the US. With a gun shop on its main street and churches dotted throughout the town, Williamson is the kind of community evoked by Mr Obama’s controversial comments last month about “bitter” small-town voters who “cling to guns or religion”. “If he is the nominee, the Democrats have no chance of winning West Virginia,” said Missy Endicott, a 40- year-old school administrator. “He doesn’t understand ordinary Americans.”
There is much more to this article, and you can read the entire thing here. There is a similar story about the rednecks of my mother's home state of Indiana in today's Washington Post.
This is a fish tale that is not about "the one that got away", but about ALL the ones that got away! Some of my WBAL buddies took me out to the Chesapeake Bay over the weekend for a little sport fishing... The way they figured it, we'd get on the boat by 6 am Saturday, motor on out into the bay, fill our bellies with beer, fill the cooler with fish, and be back on shore by 11 am.
Well, for the first time since college, I WAS sipping a Corona by 6 am, but pretty much nothing else went according to plan. We had 17 lines cast to catch fish, and two hours into the trip, we finally had some action. Larry Roberts reeled in a 35-inch Rockfish - it was promising to be one hell of a day. The actual fish-catching interrupted our breakfast, so we were soon back to our sandwiches and beer. It turns out we didn't have to hurry to finish our food, because that would turn out to be the ONLY fish we'd catch all day!
Our captain felt bad about the lack of action, so he continued to drive in large sweeping circles for another SEVEN hours. We did not get back to the dock until 3 pm, which was exactly one hour AFTER the start of a wedding that one of our party was supposed to be attending.
The host for this whole shindig was Dan, a really nice financial planner for one America's leading brokerage firms, who would like to make me a client, despite the fact that I currently have no discernable source of income. All I can say (with a smile) is that I surely hope Dan draws a better yield on his client's money than he does with fish!
On a somewhat more successful note, one of my fellow non-fishermen was John Patti, who DID deliver a digital copy of that nearly 30-year-old vinyl record of my college choir that I discussed a few weeks back. Now, for the first time in decades, I can once again hear myself singing as a young man! Check out this rockin version of Joshua Fit The Battle of Jericho, performed by Syracuse University's Hendricks Chapel Choir at Washington's National Cathedral in May of 1981. I'm in the back row, fifth guy from the left in the picture below...
It all started at a 5,000 watt AM station in the nation's capital, where I filed away Steve and Eydie albums for Bill Trumbull. 25 years later, after making the transition to news - first as a street reporter and later as News Director - my position was eliminated. The dance card has plenty of vacancies now... Anyone wanna tango?
