My Local Paper Let Me Down

I think this letter, which I sent to my local paper, speaks for itself.

***

Customers of the Spring-Benner-Walker Joint Authority need to be alerted to the fact that the authority is not well managed and board oversight is lax.

When my wife and I sold our house in Benner Township in October, the authority demanded to make an inspection and found that the HVAC system illegally drained into the sewer system. We had less than two weeks to fix the problem or we would not be able to close on the sale.

But what came out during this fiasco was the fact that when we bought the house two years earlier the not-so-diligent sewer authority had not inspected the connection despite claiming that inspection was required for every sale. We bought the house not knowing that it had an illegal connection to the sewer system.

It seemed to me that the authority had failed to follow its own inspection rules when we bought the house and so I asked the authority to reimburse me the $590 a plumber charged me to fix the problem.

Oh, no, said the authority board and its solicitor. Legally, not our problem.

How about morally?

Then I realized I was dealing with a sewer authority. Enough said.

R Thomas Berner

State College

***

I didn’t hear back from the editorial page editor so after a week, I asked her if she had gotten my letter. This is what she said:

Unfortunately, I think we're going to pass on it because we generally don't publish personal grievances against businesses and utilities.

Best,

Alison

***

I do understand that policy, but I think the editor misunderstands what a sewer authority is. It may have a utility-type function but it is an agent of the government and my letter is pointing that an agent of the government is not well managed and that the oversight is lacking. It seems to me that this is the kind of information the public should know.

I’ve already scaled back my subscription to the paper and after this fiasco, I may not renew my subscription when it runs out. Clearly, the paper is not edited for the public.

***

A weekly newspaper, the Centre County Gazette, came to the rescue and published the letter. Nice to see that we have one government watchdog in the county. 

Shortening Lifespans in China

The Beijing sky during an earlier visit.

There’s a story in the New York Times about urban Chinese fleeing to the countryside to escape pollution. I can relate.

I lived in China in 2005 as a Fulbright lecturer at Tsinghua University. I remember the day I had planned to walk to Beijing University and then on to a five-story building of nothing but bookstores. Well, the pollution was so great I stayed inside instead.

I used to wonder if the Chinese knew what they were doing to themselves. That wonderment was dispelled when I visited Dalian to give a few lectures and was shown about by the university’s foreign officer (who got the job because she spoke English). She told me that a week before her grandmother had died at age 95.

Wow, I said, think of the history she saw.

I then said that because of genes she’d probably live a long time. It took us a couple of minutes to work through jeans and genes but when I finally made myself clear, she firmly replied: No. Pollution.

The government was able to clean up Beijing for the Olympics but the city has since gone backwards. That foreign officer in Dalian isn’t the only one who will have a short life.

Many Beijingers will, too. 

He Also Made the Ultimate Sacrifice

When we think of veterans who died while serving our country, we usually think of the men and women who were killed in action. Let me tell you about a sailor who died on duty and was probably promptly forgotten by most other than his immediate family.

I know this story because I was a radioman on a commodore’s staff, meaning I got to see a lot of the radio traffic not just for the flagship, but for the squadron.

It was 1967, my last year in the Navy. We were on a Mediterranean cruise and enjoying liberty, probably in Italy. A petty officer from another ship while on shore patrol was helping bring a belligerent (read: drunk) sailor back to the ship. The sailor was in such shape that he had to be transported strapped to a stretcher. Since we were anchored in the bay rather than pulled up to a pier, this also meant the belligerent sailor had to be returned to the ship via a liberty boat. (We were in an amphibious squadron so our liberty boats were the kind of landing craft you see in movies and photos of the invasion of Europe on D-Day.)

The sailors had managed to get the stretcher off the boat and were ready to haul it up the ladder (really more like steps). The petty officer I’m writing about was at the foot of the stretcher and as the sailors readied to lift the stretcher, the sailor on the stretcher gave a hard kick to the petty officer's chest.

He died of a heart attack.

When I first saw the radio message about the incident, I figured the kicking sailor would be hauled up on manslaughter charges and be sentenced to brig time.

But the court of inquiry that was convened ruled that there was no way to prove if the kick triggered the heart attack that killed the petty officer. The court opined that the petty officer could have just as easily had a heart attack had he been walking around the ship.

Medically and legally, the court was probably right, but I always felt it was an injustice to the petty officer who was just doing his duty. I know he was a career man and had a family waiting for him and depending on him in Virginia. With one swift kick the family lost its breadwinner.

This is my belated memorial to a sailor whose name I’ve forgotten who was killed in the line of duty somewhere in a foreign land 46 years ago. He also served and he also gave his life. 

The Radon Racket

There’s nothing like selling your house to find out how many rackets there are.

Take the radon racket. 

I know what you’re going to say. Radon kills. It seems that the number is 20,000 a year. Statistically insignificant (unless it’s me).  

We have not required radon mitigation when we bought a house and I actually refused to do it once when I sold a house, something I wouldn’t get away with today. But as I said at the time, the couple we bought the house from nearly a decade before were still alive and well in a retirement community and she did all of the laundry in the basement. What's to fear?

The people buying our current house wanted radon mitigation and even though we have a walkout basement with windows, what could I say? 

My real estate agent pointed out that the house was already piped for mitigation so not to worry.

The radon mitigator shows up and he’s making a mess. I ask him how it’s going and he reveals that he must replace all of the piping because the original piping is cheap and won’t do. 

I don’t know if that’s going to increase my cost but I’m now kicking myself for standing on my principle and not demanding a radon check from the previous owner. He bought the house brand new so he wouldn’t have had a radon check done.

And our next house is being built as we speak. Maybe I should do a radon check.

(Next: The illegal connection to the sewer line)

I'm Confused

Margo Martindale in The Americans

We watched The Millers the other night and greeted it with several belly laughs. I am doubtful that it will survive, but that’s just my gut thinking out loud. (Talk about a mixed metaphor!)

What confused me was the starring role of Margo Martindale. There she was providing laugh after laugh after laugh. We first became aware of her in the Gifted Man where she defined a serious role as the doctor’s administrative assistant and sometime conscience. 

Then she showed up in the Americans as the handler of two Soviet sleeper agents, a role that seemed destine for a long run. There she was not only testing the loyalty of the sleepers but murdering an American agent who had killed her one-time lover back in the Soviet Union. 

I did some research and learned that she had also had a role in Justified, which I watch but don’t remember her.

What has me confused is that she seems to be in more than one show, which was not the norm a few years ago. You were tied to a show and did not appear in another. 

Yet here she is the mother in a comedic series and a killer in a spy thriller on another channel. I hope I can remember which is which. I wondered to my wife if the fact that she’s in a new series means she was probably killed off in the other series. 

From what I read, she will be back on the Americans but we won’t find out how frequently until January when the Americans returns for another season. I did some superficial research but there was no mention of her roles for 2014. However, I did learn that she’ll be in an episode of Masters of Sex this year. 

Now I’m really confused.

All the News That's Fit to Correct

I have from time to time advised the New York Times about a mistake in one of its stories. Mind you, I don’t fret about minor things. It’s major fact errors that I like corrected.

For example, the Times once said that the governor of New Mexico had balanced the state’s budget, one of the few states that could make that claim. Wrong! All states have constitutional or statutory mandates to have balanced budgets. 

Never corrected.

More recently the Times published a story about the Las Vegas Sun, a newspaper I know something about because it was started by the International Typographical Union in reaction to the Taft-Hartley Act and it was named the Free Press. I wrote an extensive academic article about the ITU’s publishing venture.

The Times’ story included this sentence: Hank Greenspun started the paper with his wife, Barbara, after working as a publicist for the gangster Bugsy Siegel.

I sent the Times a correction and included a copy of the paper I had written about the ITU. Nothing happened and I figured the correction people must be swamped with far more important corrections than mine.

And then I saw this correction:

Because of an editing error, a correction in this space on Thursday for an article about a slump in India’s housing market misspelled, in some copies, the surname of a former governor of the Reserve Bank of India who served from 1997 to 2003. He is Bimal Jalan, not Jaland.

A correction to a correction!

I posted something sarcastic on Facebook, noting that my corrections have been ignored over the years. However, one of my FB friends works at the Times and he directed me to a senior editor. I re-sent the correction and the documentation, figuring that I would see a real correction soonest.

Instead, I got this:

Mr. Berner,

Thanks for your note about our story on The Las Vegas Sun. The writer did know that Hank Greenspun had purchased an existing paper and remade it into the Sun. Unfortunately, we had a long interesting story but a limited amount of space to tell it. Given that the crusading paper most people know as the Sun really came into being in 1950, we believed it was accurate to date its founding then.

Best,

Bruce Headlam

Media Editor

As they like to say in the newsroom, never let the facts get in the way of a good story.

My Experience with Jiffy Lube

We were in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in the middle of a 5000-mile road trip and I had just finished giving a talk to a group of journalists when I noticed that my “maintenance required” light had gone on in my 2008 Toyota FJ Cruiser. I looked at the odometer and then the sticker from my last oil change and with quick math deduced that it was time for a 5000-mile oil change.

Alas, it was Saturday afternoon and my options for then and the rest of the trip were limited. But I knew there was a Jiffy Lube nearby, one I had used once before when I lived in Santa Fe and so I immediately drove there.

After I pulled my car into the bay and went to the office, I was informed that the car needed more than an oil change. Among other things, the man behind the desk said, the cabin filter was a mess. He showed it to me. I saw what he said were the remnants of hazelnuts and also what he said were mice droppings. 

“You don’t want to be breathing that,” he said. 

And so in addition to the oil change, I got a new cabin filter. The man behind the desk also said I needed new wiper blades and I concurred with that. 

Satisfied that I had done my due diligence and kept my car on its routine maintenance schedule, I paid the $127.45 bill and moved on. We headed for Albuquerque and hadn’t gone far when I turned on the air conditioner. 

Well, the noise coming out of the AC was louder than a jackhammer and vibrated just as much.

We returned to Jiffy Lube immediately. After some consultation, the man behind the desk said that there was nothing they could do about it. He said that when the mechanic pulled the filter, some of the shell fragments fell into the AC and JL lacked the equipment to get them out. 

Our best bet was an authorized Toyota dealer but the one at our next stop (Elko, Nevada) couldn’t see me for a week. So we soldiered on. It turned out that at high car speeds and low AC speeds, you couldn’t hear the shells rattling around in the AC that much, and if you could, you could always turn on the radio. 

We could have endured that until we got home, but then we encountered three other problems. One was greasy fingerprints on the driver’s door. They really popped out on the yellow door. 

Later, as we were headed east my wife tried to open the glove box. The latch release was jammed. The box would not open. When I tried I managed to pull it out completely and there, behind it, was the cabin filter. So now we knew why the latch was jammed.

Much later we encountered major rain storms and in Nebraska or Iowa and one of the new wiper blades came loose. (Fortunately, it did not fly off.) I had to turn off the wipers and quickly pull over to fix the problem. 

Back home, my Toyota dealer fixed the noisy AC by removing the blower motor and cleaning out the heater box. It cost me $82.68. He did not charge to fix the latch release.

When I called Jake at Jiffy Lube in Santa Fe, he refused to reimburse me. He said, in effect, it was my fault that the filter was in the condition it was in (sounds to me as though it was doing its job) and that higher ups had told him the problem was mine, not Jiffy Lube’s. 

Lesson learned.