5-4-2006 Count me in


I have to make this somewhat quick tonight. My little brother (big mo’fu>ker) is on his way over and I don’t get to spend near as much time as I’d like with him. If this guy is not the New York Football Giants biggest supporter, then I demand a frickin’ recount. Or some such thing.

From the e-mail inbox You found it easy to lash out at the dam supporters but you left somebody out. Tom Leighton spoke in support of it and you made no mention of it on your site. Why would that be?

Gad zooks, man! Mayor Tom Leighton was not quoted in either of our two newspapers. And since I didn’t make it to the big public hearing in person, I have no clue as to what his pro-dam sentiments might have been. But, having some clue as to what makes him tick on most days, I think he honestly believes that damming our river will benefit Wilkes-Barre. And believe it or not, the guy wants only to push this community forward until the bad days in Wilkes-Barre are but a rapidly-fading memory.

For whatever reasons totally unbeknownst to me, he supports the dam. I do not.

There it is.

From the e-mail inbox Hi Mark -

It has been a while since I had time to visit your site and catch up. When I pulled the site up I saw the footage of the theater project. What great footage! Did you put all that together or someone else? I am wondering if that is because you no longer have dial up!!!!!

LM

Well, the pictures involved, 81 in all, are all my doing except for five of them. As for how I delivered the photos, it would not have been possible as presented without Rock You.com. If you want to put a slideshow on your site, this is the place to visit.

All told, I have hundreds of pictures of that job site from every angle possible short of trespassing where I didn’t have access to. I felt all along that I was personally witnessing the construction of what would eventually prove to be the catalyst of Wilkes-Barre’s rebirth. So I just kept taking pictures, but having no real clue as to why, or what I might do with them. The very first pictures presented were taken in October of 2004, while the latter are obviously dated as being taken during April ‘06.

I somehow managed to gain an audience with our mayor earlier today by way of a cell phone, and I’ll be taking a tour of the theater’s interior real soon and the pictures will be posted here almost immediately.

As far as escaping the drudgery of dial-up is concerned, I understand how limited dial-up is while surfing the internet on my own part, so there were things I never even bothered to try knowing full well even my access to them would be limited, or that they wouldn’t present themselves as I had originally hoped they would. Basically, in this increasingly tech-savvy world of ours, if you’re still doing dial-up, you are to the internet experience what the Taliban are to anything past the 5th century. Dump it fast.

Anyways, I had some help, but the theater slideshow was my creation. Despite the weather or what have you, I ground the bicycle to a screeching halt for seemingly countless months on end and did what I had to do without knowing why I was doing it.

But after putting that slideshow together and seeing the finished product, I was way more than pleased that I did what no other resident of Wilkes-Barre saw fit to do--document the construction of the most exciting goings-on in Wilkes-Barre since the post-flood days.

I’m glad that you liked it. And know this, you are the first person that commented on it other than one city employee who happens to sit very high on the political food chain. All I know is, I’m happy with it. And on most days, that’ll do.

I’ll see ya at the big Wilkes-Barre premiere of Alien V.

Stay in touch.

Check this out. No, this was not posted on the internet by someone prone to staging Sara Brightman karaoke duels to the death by those who adore horse racing.

The 10th annual get together of the Saturday OT Committee and Operatic Society to watch the Kentucky Derby is scheduled for this Saturday at Marks Pub 1287 N Washington St, Wilkes-Barre (map it). Pope George Ringo has extended an invitation to all bloggers, commenters and readers to join us.

This is actually an invite to all local bloggers and their not-so-devoted groupies to get together at a local bar and do whatever it is that strangers do when they get together and chug enough fermented weeds to kill every horse entered in this year’s installment of the Kentucky Derby.

It’s a somewhat weird undertaking, but count me in. If Gort is any example of what the bloggers that hail from NEPA are like, this might be a good time.

We’ll cure prostrate cancer in a half hour, eliminate the national debt by way of a malfunctioning poker machine, agree that I’m an eccentric asshole or something, and then agree to disagree on just about everything else. And all of that without even throwing a barstool through a window.

Count me in.

Gort 42

This is interesting. I awoke to the following e-mail:

From the e-mail inbox ...how quickly the CV yanked that "community divided" article.

Don

Huh?

So I went and checked. Far, far less than 24 hours after I blasted the Citizens’ Voice for trying to mislead the public with their misguided ‘community divided’ slop whereas the anti-dam bloodletting at the public hearing for the inflatable dam was concerned, their intentionally misleading story all but vanished from the internet.

What do they call that? Ink-on-paper? Or is it, hog’s swill-on-paper journalism?

Grab your Tandy calculators, kiddies. Let’s see, here. 21 people speaking out against the proposed dam divided by 26 total speakers equals 80.7%. In other words, at last night’s hearing, the dam got an 81% thumbs down from the populace, while it received a 19% approval rating from a mayor, a councilman, a chamber member, Uncle Paul Kanjo’s personal assistant and a self-serving college rowing team. And if you exclude the elected and the appointed from the decidedly one-sided mix--you get an approval rating hovering right around where a thermometer would when frost forms in one’s mustache.

Our community is divided over the debatable dam? Yeah! And Times-Shamrock can kiss my skinny white ass if that’s what they consider accurate reporting. They couldn’t bring themselves to print the truth of the matter if it’d embarrass the good congressman-for-life in a traditionally one-party county.

The requested article is not available.

So? So what? You might ask. Well, when you consider that you can do a Google search and call up Voice stories now a decade old, it makes you wonder why they’d abruptly deny us access to a story they posted…yesterday.

Want proof as to the curious nature of their deletion of their most recent story?

I fired up www.Google.com and typed in “Citizens’ Voice” & “McGroarty.” And what did my four eyes find neatly displayed before me? A ‘not available’ screen? Hardly. What I found was pages upon pages of archived articles from the Citizens’ Voice.

Call Center owner's money problems well known

So let’s get this straight, shall we? We can’t revisit their purposefully misleading article from May 3, 2006, but we can read what they felt was publishable during the summer of ‘02, and worthy of being archived ‘til the much-needed Rapture blows all of this convoluted mucky muck we deem to be so important all to hell?

Now, I can sit here and make the beyond weak claim that my internet rant caused that mysterious and extremely suspicious deletion, but if I didn’t cause it, what did? You tell me.

If you ask me, The Citizens’ Voice is anything but what it‘s name suggests it is. In actuality, the Citizens’ Voice is the one newspaper in Wilkes-Barre that we could all do without.

And if it keeps on keeping on with keeping the people dumb, we’ll be in keeping with the abject misery that the keepers of the unsaid truth totally in cahoots with a decades-old oligarchy have perpetrated upon us.

Buy the Citizens’ Voice. Why should we have to keep dealing with reality, when obfuscation will do so nicely?

The requested article is not available?

Yeah, but it was readily-available when some nameless curmudgeons thought that they could distort the truth and have an effect on public opinion.

If the Times Leader suddenly goes away due to some corporate gibberish, we will end up dumber than we already are.

Sez me.

XXXX

Later