Odds and ends, 10/14/08

Pregnant women really are brain damaged, but they more than make up for it later, according to this research.

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Sarah Palin stopped at the Gallipolis, Ohio, Wal-Mart yesterday to buy some stuff for her youngest. The Gallipolis Daily Tribune had the story and the photo. I wish I had been there. She looks like she's having trouble holding on to Trig. I would have offered to hold him for her, but a couple of Secret Service agents probably would have had me on the ground before I could finish the sentence.

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The Cincinnati Bengals lost again yesterday, and they have the fate-smiles-on-them Pittsburgh Steelers coming to Paul Brown Stadium this coming Sunday. I'm so glad I don't base my self-worth on how my favorite teams are doing. The Bengals are so bad this year, they're too hard to watch. In the past, when you knew they were bad, they were entertainingly bad. But if you're bad when you're supposed to be good, it's not fun, you know?

I say all that because my thoughts wandered this weekend to how I used to hear people talk as though going to Marshall football games was your civic duty. If you didn't wear green and support the team, you were a bad person. But I don't hear that so much anymore. And I'm not complaining.

Speaking of which, my favorite sports season is spring training. Winter is over and the baseball teams play a month's worth of games that really don't mean anything. It doesn't matter who wins or loses. People play to get in some time and that's about it. Kind of like the basketball games the kids in my old neighborhood used to play at the community hoop. We didn't have uniforms or teams or refs or anything like that. We played. We settled our differences amongst ourselves, and each game was forgotten as soon as it ended.

Except that one game where you're one-on-one, go to 20 and win by four. I lost one of those 58-54, and I still remember it.

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The stock market is back up today. I'm thinking about waiting until it reaches a certain level, getting my retirement money as far away from stocks and such as I can and retiring to a single-wide trailer on a small piece of flat land along the Ohio River. I'll have everything paid for, I'll pay cash for everything, grow my own food and live the way my parents raised me.

It's going to be hard moving into that trailer. My mattress will be full of my retirement money -- in quarters.

The road to $3 (downhill version)

A month or so ago, the Hurricane Ike spike sent gasoline prices in Huntinton upward, from a pre-hurricane price of $3.699 to a high of about $4.099.

Today on the way in to work, I saw one station selling gas for $3.299. It can be had in the high $2.80s in Columbus.

Crude prices are falling. Before the Wall Street meltdown, there was talk that investors were getting out of crude oil commodities trading, which was driving the price up.

One more pic before the weekend

I stood on the lower end of the lock wall at old Lock and Dam 27. Darkness would be falling soon, and the Delta Queen was a little ways upriver.

I looked up toward where the DQ would appear, and I saw this heron standing toward the opposite end of the concrete wall, which must be 1,000 feet long. I walked slowly, trying to not scare the bird. It watched me for a while. It walked away from me, but it didn't fly away until I got this picture.

I like it. Technically, it's not so good. But considering the conditions and the content, I like it anyway.

Gone and scattered

Tiger Stadium in Detroit has been demolished. Its remains are scattered to the wind in a good way, according to the AP.

More than 94 percent of the demolished part of the stadium is being recycled. That includes over 11.4 million pounds of steel and almost 17.4 million pounds of concrete and other debris.

Some of it won’t go far — crushed structural concrete from the ballpark will likely be used in southeastern Michigan as fill material under roads, parking lots and foundations. Some of the metal, like steel from the stadium’s blue structural beams, could end up in anything from new cars to kitchen appliances. ...

With scrap prices sky-high — the price of scrap steel has increased 251 percent in the last five years — aggressive recycling has become more profitable. A recent survey by the National Demolition Association, an industry group, found about 75 percent of demolition material is typically reused or recycled.

The city of Detroit, which owned the old stadium, didn’t have to pay any money out of pocket for the demolition, which started in June. Instead, the joint venture doing the work, Farrow Group Inc. of Detroit and MCM Management Corp. of Bloomfield Hills, looked to turn a profit by selling the ballpark off as scrap.

“This project lent itself well to recycling,” said Michael Brehse, MCM’s vice president, who supervised the demolition. “There’s not a whole lot here ... that can’t be reused.” ...

Carter criticizes Bush on economy

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Former President Jimmy Carter said on Friday the "atrocious economic policies" of the Bush administration had caused the worst global financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. ...

"I think it's because of the atrocious economic policies of the Bush administration," said the 84-year-old Democrat, who served in the White House from 1977-1981 during a period of high inflation and energy crisis.

Full story is here.

Carter criticizing anyone over their economic record is like . . . well, you figure it out.

Oil prices and the stock market

Oil prices continue to fall. They're close to levels they were late last year.

Hooray.

The Dow Jones continues to fall. The market closes in 10 minutes. The last I checked, it was at 8615, down 643 points on the day, or about 7 percent.

I'm in my early 50s. Retirement is 30 (yes, 30) years off, so I have time to recover.

Obama campaign prefers talking to country DJs to news folks

A couple DJs at a Huntington radio station got to interview Barack Obama this morning.

HUNTINGTON — Rocky and Rod, morning show hosts with Rocky ‘n’ Rod’s Radio Ranch on WDGG-FM, 93.7 The Dawg, had a special visitor at 9 as Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama called in to the morning show.

So now I know where The Herald-Dispatch ranks in the world of politics.

Here's why I say that.

A month ago, I published a little item on the editorial page advising candidates that if they wanted to express an opinion in something longer than a letter to the editor, that they needed to get it in by a certain date. But the pieces had to be no longer than 500 words.

So right before the deadline, the Barack Obama campaign for central and southeast Ohio called and asked if we would consider a submission from their candidate. I told then to send it in and I would look at it. It was a piece on health care, and it was something like 750 words.

Fast forward to the past seven days. We get an advisory that Obama would be in Portsmouth, Ohio, today. I figured I would ask if we could get some access. Here is what I wrote to the campaign for central and southeast Ohio:

I see where Senator Obama will be in Portsmouth, Ohio, on Thursday. That’s about one hour west of us. Any chance we could get some availability for our editorial board? In person is preferable. We can do it by phone if need be.

This week I get a call from Obama's West Virginia campaign saying the candidate is not doing interviews.

And this morning I learn he was on local radio.

So I write the Obama campaign pointing out the fact that Obama apparently does not have time to talk to a newspaper that circulates in southern Ohio, but he does have time to talk with a country music radio station.

The campaign replied that I could talk with Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland or Sen. Sherrod Brown or West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin, but not Obama.

I did not reply. I might have said something I would regret, considering this newspaper has endorsed every Democratic presidential candidate since I can remember, including both Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale over Ronald Reagan.

But now I know where we in the press rate compared to country music DJs.

105 percent voter registration? That's nothing.

Some people are shocked, horrified and astounded that Indianapolis might have more registered voters than residents of voting age.

It seems that Indianapolis/Marion County have 105 percent voter registration among people of voting age.

Amateurs.

I've been tracking this in southern West Virginia for years, particularly in Lincoln County.

2004: 106.4 percent voter registration.

2006: 107 percent.

2008 primary: 112.4 percent.

From an editorial on May 6: That sounds like an invitation to vote fraud. But consider this: 13 other West Virginia counties have voter registration rates of 90 percent or more. Those counties are Boone, Logan, Mingo, Wetzel, Jackson, Marion, Tucker, Wyoming, Ohio, Wirt, Hancock, Mason and Calhoun.

I don't know about you, but 90-plus percent voter registration sounds too civic-minded for my taste.

Agricultural infrastructure

The AP regularly moves editorials appearing in newspapers throughout the United States and some from foreign nations. Here is one that moved on the AP wire this week, and it touches a local matter that comes in and out of my mind every now and then:

Federal legislation prompted by a spate of food safety scares, some of them deadly, took effect recently. ... It will require labels identifying the country of origin of fresh fruit, vegetables, nuts, meats and frozen produce. Seafood origin has been labeled since 2005. ...

While this law is a good beginning, more can be done.Food and other goods from some countries have been the source of so many incidents that the mere mention of the country's name can cause alarm, as in the case of China.

While the country-of-origin label might unfairly taint some harmless goods, consumers have a right to know where food was produced and then decide for themselves. ...

Given a choice between apples grown in China, which produces 35 percent of the world's supply, and those grown in upstate New York, many consumers might prefer the latter, even if they have to pay more for them.

The labeling law is not perfect, and it doesn't cover everything. ...

Ultimately, the goal must be to improve food safety worldwide. Education, tighter food handling rules and other precautions are needed to prevent food-borne illnesses. ... To do so would require expanding the role of the Food and Drug Administration, which often finds itself reacting to deadly outbreaks instead of having the tools to prevent them. ...

— The Star-Ledger, Newark, N.J.

Years ago, we had a lot more full-time and part-time farmers in this area. Their numbers dwindled, and the business infrastructure that supported them disappeared.

The number of slaughterhouses has gone down, I'm sure. The Huntington Pride in Tobacco market left town about a decade ago.

If I wanted to start a commercial apple orchard in this area, or if I had a couple thousand acres of bottomland along the Ohio River and I wanted to grow tomatoes to sell to big-time wholesalers, could I?

I see fewer dairy farms in operation, so I can't tell you if there are enough buyers of raw milk to make that business viable locally.

I don't know. I don't have the land or the equipment for either, so I'm not about to make inquiries. But it would seem to make sense that if we want to encourage people to go into small business, agriculture would be a good place to start if we have access to the economic infrastructure small farmers would need.

More big-city newspaper layoffs

You have legacy airlines, legacy steelmakers and legacy media. Some of those aren't doing so hot:

CLEVELAND (AP) — The Plain Dealer, Ohio’s largest newspaper, plans to cut 16 percent of its unionized newsroom jobs by the end of the year.

The cut of 38 jobs will further shrink a staff that has been reduced by buyouts. The paper reported the new cuts Tuesday on its Web site.President and Publisher Terry Egger has blamed the cuts on worse than expected advertising revenue and a struggling newspaper industry.

The newspaper will begin layoffs if 38 employees do not volunteer to leave.There are 299 employees in the newsroom, 238 of them represented by the Northeast Ohio Newspaper Guild.

The Plain Dealer is owned by Advance Publications Inc. and has a daily circulation of about 345,000.

You hear about job cuts at the big papers. You don't hear so much about job cuts at smaller papers such as The Herald-Dispatch. But one thing I was told long ago: Never say never.

So long, Delta Queen

After 40-some years of having cameras, from a Kodak Instamatic to a digital SLR, this could be the final photo I take of the Delta Queen on the Ohio River:

It was taken at old Lock and Dam 27 in Lawrence County.

As I stood on the old lockwall watching the boat go by, before walking up the hill and snapping this shot, I got to thinking about John Hartford.

I just want to hear steam.

And I want to feel wind.

And see the Pitman arm come around again.

That muddy water

Never quite runs clear

When I try to give a reason

Why I want to be here.

Ain't you got no family,

No place to be?

Out on the river

On Christmas Eve.

(The Pitman arm is the big thing that turns the sternwheel, by the way).

The above photo was taken after sunset. I was losing light, and I knew there was no reason to head down to the next place where I could shoot.

Earlier, I was up on County Road 9 between Miller and Crown City and got this shot.

And I got this one from the boat ramp at Athalia.

As I crossed the East End bridge heading home, I saw the Delta Queen coming down the river. By coincidence, my CD player was playing this tune from the first "Lord of the Rings" movie:

When the seas and mountains fall

And we come, to end of days

In the dark I hear a call

Calling me there,

I will go there

And back again

Maybe the Delta Queen will be back.

If so, I'll probably be there.

Now what do I do?

Headline in this morning's paper: Retirement accounts have lost $2T

And half of that $2,000,000,000,000 was mine. At least it seems that way to me.

So what do I do now? Is it too late to do anything? Do I take everything out of stocks and mutual funds and put it in insured CDs? Do I buy gold coins? Do I put it under my mattress? Use the same cattle futures trader that Hillary Clinton did, if he's taking new clients? Get drunk and not worry about it? Move to the Alaskan wilderness and live off the land?

This is what I feared would happen when Bush talked about replacing part of Social Security with individual accounts. People like me don't have inside information. We don't see what's coming tomorrow. We can't afford the fees that come with investing and moving money around. We're sitting ducks for investment "advisors."

So if anyone has any ideas what I should do with the remaining trillion or so in my retirement accounts, please let me know.

And no, I won't hold you legally responsible if you give bad advice and I take it.

Worse elsewhere

When you think Huntington's budget situation is bad, you can be thankful this city doesn't have the problems of Columbus or Dayton.

A few facts, via the AP:

-- Columbus Auditor Hugh J. Dorrian said city investments in Treasury bonds and certificates of deposit have brought in almost $6.3 million less this year than last. And because of rising unemployment rates, the city collected $1.4 million less in income taxes. Finance Director Joel Taylor said Columbus is facing a “much, much more severe scenario” than he and Mayor Michael Coleman laid out late last year when they issued the 2008 budget with warnings of what lay beyond.

-- Dayton City Manager Rashad Young has approached that city’s four bargaining units and asked them to give up 2009 pay raises of 3 percent to head off a projected $13 million budget deficit.

-- Cuyahoga County officials are offering a buyout plan that offers full retirement to more than 1,700 workers who are within three years of being eligible for maximum benefits. The plant would cost the county $101 million, but it would allow the county to avoid paying $259 million in salaries and benefits.

Huntington's financial problems led to a worsening of the crime situation here. If the same fate befalls Columbus and Dayton, you can expect some of their crime problems to spill over into other parts of Ohio and possibly into this part of West Virginia. The last I heard, Columbus drug dealers already operate in Portsmouth. Huntington's problems are spilling over into unincorporated areas within an hour of here.

But don't expect Ohio state government to bail out its cities, and for sure don't expect West Virginia state government to bail out Huntington.

Low water at the Guyandotte boat ramp

The river was a little low up at the Guyandotte boat ramp today. Sometimes I go up there on my lunch hour just to look around and enjoy the river. It's become one of my favorite places along the river.

With the river being low, some of the ripples in the sand near the shoreline are now exposed. Meaning I had to snap a few shots before I had to head back to work.

These aren't great photos or works of art. They're just pics of a subject that interests me. For months, I've worked on ways of shooting Ohio River mud. This was one of my first successes. So let me enjoy it while I can.

Oh, and with the river down, some of these guys are exposed to air again.

Five-year gap coming in space race

Who'd a thunk it?

From the New York Times:

The gap is coming: from 2010, when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration shuts down the space shuttle program, to 2015, when the next generation of American spacecraft is scheduled to arrive, NASA expects to have no human flight capacity and will depend on Russia to get to the $100 billion station, buying seats on Soyuz craft as space tourists do.

In the past, I had some correspondence with "Rocket Boys" author Homer Hickam. He maintains the space shuttle is seriously flawed. People should be above the fuel tank, not right beside it, he says. Given what happened to Challenger and Columbia, it's hard to argue his point.

But five years with no American manned launches?

You would think that's unthinkable. But apparently not.

I remember where I was when Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon. At the time I was distracted buying a Milky Way bar and a bottle of Coca-Cola. But I remember where I was. And I remember liftoff of the last Apollo mission to the moon.

Before those years, I had memorized the names of astronauts on every Mercury and Gemini mission. At home I still have the Life magazine and the book my mother bought me.

And it's about to be over.

Who would have seen it coming?

As NASA celebrates its 50th anniversary this month, the time lag in the Bush administration’s plan to retire the nation’s three space shuttles and work on a return to the Moon has thrust the United States space program squarely into national politics and geopolitical controversy.

Senators John McCain and Barack Obama have denounced the gap and promoted their commitment to the space program while on trips to Florida, where thousands of workers will lose their jobs when the shuttle program ends. And antagonism between the United States and Russia, over the conflict in Georgia and other issues, is clouding the future of a 15-year partnership in space, precisely when NASA will be more reliant on Russia than ever before.

Meanwhile, China is launching its own astronauts.

“In a rational world, we would have been allowed to pick a shuttle retirement date to be consistent with Ares/Orion availability,” Dr. Griffin wrote. Within the administration, he wrote, “retiring the shuttle is a jihad rather than an engineering and program management decision.”

Delta Queen's last trip could be tomorrow

The Delta Queen makes its last scheduled trip as an overnight passenger boat past Huntington sometime tomorrow. The Delta Queen will be at the Point Pleasant, W.Va., riverfront park from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. I asked the company today if we could get a reporter and a photographer on board, but they turned us down. They said Homeland Security regulations require 48 hours clearance.

It's a 40-mile trip from Point Pleasant to Huntington. Assuming the Delta Queen leaves Point Pleasant on time at 1 p.m. and travels at 5 mph, it's an eight-hour trip, meaning the boat won't get here until 10 p.m. Assuming it travels 10 mph and there is no delay at the Gallipolis Locks and Dam, that's a four-hour trip, putting its ETA at Huntington at 5 p.m.

The last time I chased the boat downriver, it moved closer to 6 mph, if that. It moved really slow. It didn't go under the 6th Street bridge until a while after sunset, and I barely got off some shots of it passing Harris Riverfront Park before I lost my light.

If I get off work early enough tomorrow, I'll probably chase it downriver again. If you see a middle-aged man with a gray beard sitting on a guardrail along Route 2, intently staring upriver, it's probably me.

Gasoline prices still falling

CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) — West Virginia motorists are paying less for gasoline than they did three months ago.

According to AAA’s Daily Fuel Gauge Report, the average price of a gallon of regular gasoline in West Virginia has fallen by 54 cents, from $4.12 in July to $3.58 Monday.

Experts attribute the decline to falling oil prices. The price of oil has dropped by nearly 40 percent since July.

The Daily Fuel Gauge Report says Monday’s average price of a gallon of regular gasoline was $3.64 in Charleston, $3.66 in Huntington, $3.41 in Parkersburg and Weirton and $3.50 in Wheeling.

The national average price was $3.50.

My mother-in-law reports that she was in Columbus this past weekend and saw a posted price of $3.139, or something like that.

Meanwhile, in Chillicothe, it's around $3.429, making it 20 cents cheaper than this morning's price in Huntington. In Lexington, Ky., you could buy it as low as $3.209, although most stations were selling it for a dime more.

Things are getting back to normal.

Meanwhile, we haven't heard anything from West Virginia Attorney General Darrell McGraw about his latest investigation into price gouging during the Ike spike.

UPDATE 1: Prices in Huntington are going down this afternoon. Some places are $3.399, some are still in the lower $3.60s.

Fall pics that have nothing to do with trees

Some things you see in the fall have nothing to do with leaves changing color. They have to do with early sunsets and the like. Here are a couple.

A power line tower on a country road.

The thing is, I never intended to get a photo of the tower. I was there to get a shot of a tree that's across the road. The tree is in a cow pasture, and it's gorgeous in evening light, but I got there too late. Part of it was in the shadow of the embankment this tower sits on, so I turned around and got a dozen shots of the tower, and one happened to work. I still plan on shooting the tree soon.

And here's a damselfly out at Beech Fork on Sunday afternoon.

I could have gotten a better shot if I had a better lens. Maybe I'll buy one after I buy my kids new bikes, after my boys outgrow their wardrobes next week, after I have some repairs done to the house, etc.

A LifeNet helicopter flying overhead. At ground level, the sun was down and everything was in shadow, but you can see reflection of the setting sun on the chopper. Too bad I couldn't get it in focus.

Fall colors arriving

Leaves are starting to turn. The peak is yet to come, but enough are turning that the woods are looking a little different.

Yesterday, my older son and I went out to Beech Fork to see how things were changing.

And closer to home:

More to come in a day or so.

Deer are grazing closer to the road now, and they pay less attention to passing cars. And it's been a week or so since I've seen any turkeys, although some family members have.

Ike Spike spiked

The Ike Spike -- the runup in retail gasoline prices that came just before Hurricane Ike slammed into the Houston area a couple of weeks ago -- is over. If you know where to look in the Huntington area, you can find gasoline at $3.659 a gallon. That's less than what it was before Ike.

Now if I can get a good interest rate on a home improvement loan . . .