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A Bipartisan List of the Five Worst Things About the Election, With Zero Statistics or Polls

November 4, 2012

This cartoon is republished from an earlier post.

That’s right, you heard it here. I’m going negative – slinging some mud and I don’t care who it sticks to. Instead of updating my status on Facebook about how fatigued I am by politics I wasted an entire evening in developing this blog post.

1) There is a not a scrap of credence left anywhere for anything that subverts most Americans’ preconceived beliefs.

When Hurricane Sandy smashed us last week (what a night), and President Obama made uplifting public statements about managing the crisis, many conservative commentators complained that he shouldn’t have shown his face. In a Fox News interview, Charles Krauthammer said that since the White House really has no role to play in disaster relief, besides releasing funds, Obama was “playing the president, playing the commander-in-chief” in a disingenuous grab for voters’ sympathies. When he should have…what? Unplugged the phone and gone to bed? God forbid the President “play the president” when disaster strikes.

On the other hand, that rotund Republican ruffian, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, let himself be photographed touring devastated Brigantine Island with Obama. When he made the rounds on TV and social media, he applauded the President’s support and snapped that he doesn’t care about the hurricane’s impact on the election.

(He’s since been excommunicated by Republican pundits for this “treason.”)

“Today I’m touring NJ with President Obama,” Christie tweeted on October 31^st. “Yes, he’s a Democrat, and I’m a Republican. We’re also adults, and this is how adults behave.”

“Especially adults who want a shot at the 2016 Presidential election…” a liberal friend of mine added when he shared this tweet on Facebook. He’s hardly alone in expressing the sentiment that Christie is playing nice not to do his job as an elected official when a record-breaking storm devastates thousands of his constituents, but to feed his own ambition.

So it officially does not matter what the hell anyone does. Elected officials doing their jobs with appropriate concern, resources and cooperation are pilloried for doing so simply because their political opponents can’t stand to see them sucking up one gram of positive media oxygen.

2) Ungodly gobs of greenbacks

If we took all the money that’s been poured into the Presidential election and applied it to our country, instead of the question of who gets the power in our country, we probably could have wrapped up this recession two or three years ago. We’d probably all be in flying cars on our way to our $250k+ full-time jobs, while our kids skipped off to the world’s best schools, where meningitis, the flu and the common cold have been completely eradicated.

I get pretty steamed watching any political candidate talk about how American families are hurting…in ads that cost millions of dollars to produce and air.

How many hurting families could be set for life with the budget of one primetime ad for the Presidential race?

And the inaugural balls will top it all off. If you wish the incoming administration would take the cost of the string of glittering shindigs they’ll plan to celebrate the inauguration, and apply those dollars to homes lost in hurricanes, people dying for lack of health insurance, crime-ridden towns whose police forces and social programs have been slashed, or programs to keep families in their homes rather than in foreclosure, or ANYTHING else worthwhile, please share this blog post.

3) Both mainstream Presidential candidates would have us believe that a single person can “fix” all our economic problems.

My Grampa’s bumper sticker reads “$1.83: Price of gas when Obama took office.” The idea is that Obama’s to blame for the price of gas, and that if we elect Romney, he’ll magically shave two bucks off of every gallon. But no head of state can control all of the global and domestic issues that affect gas prices.

Romney claims he’ll usher in a golden age of jobs for all. Really, Romney? How about you resurrect the newspaper industry while you’re at it, so I can have a salaried job and benefits as a print journalist?

Not so simple, is it? And that’s just one field.

Both candidates want me to think that economic solutions are in their hands, as if any single person can shepherd the whole United States, from hedge fund managers to freelance writers to the homeless, to fiscal success.

4) Election-year rhetoric would have me believe that the United States President holds the solution to violent, complex international disputes.

The debating candidates faced questions on Iran, Libya, Egypt, Pakistan, and Afghanistan as if their policies will determine the course of history in those countries.

Please excuse me while I bang my head against the wall.

It has become sacrilege in American politics – for Republicans and Democrats – to utter the simple truth that the United States of America is just one country in the world. Why do Americans think that our foreign policy holds responsibility for peace and democracy in the Middle East, or anywhere else, or that America is the “greatest country in the world” and therefore has a special role to play in the government of every other country?

Greatest country in the world by what measure? Happy people? Economic stability? Health? Beautiful scenery? Life expectancy? Academic scores? Pollution levels? Gender and racial equality? Volunteerism? Military size? Crime rates? Popularity abroad? Tax rates? Birth rates? Cuisine?

It’s a subjective business, to say the least.

How would we feel if other democracies held debates on how their heads of state should manage America? You know, our frequent mass shootings, gridlocked political system, ballooning deficit, white supremacist groups, troubled education system, overstuffed prisons, devastating hurricanes and nuclear capabilities?

Longtime readers of this blog already know that I’m no American exceptionalist. We may have the power to do a lot of good, but we’re not at the wheel of the whole entire world. I think a lot of our discourse on foreign affairs – including our demands that our President take responsibility or blame for foreign events – is nothing short of delusional.

So electing either Mitt Romney or Barack Obama is going to solve the Syrian civil war, calm Al Qaeda and keep everyone safe from Iranian nukes, huh?

Give me a break.

5) Oh and this e-mail from a political advocacy group

I got on this mailing list awhile ago, probably when I signed some petition.

Now they e-mail me every few hours, like this one from November 1^st, begging me to donate money to them to get out the vote for [candidate redacted].

“Seriously – this is it. If [the candidate] pulls ahead in the polls later this week and you start to panic, it will simply be too late for us to change our plans in any meaningful way.”

Hm.

“If you really truly can’t afford to give at this point—we understand,” it goes on. “But if you can chip in $5 today and you don’t, and then [candidate] barely wins…you won’t be able to live with yourself.”

You don’t say.

I consume bipartisan news sources and think carefully about what they say. I’ve often reflected on social, political and economic issues on this blog and elsewhere in my published work. And I will get up at the crack of dawn to make sure I have time to vote on Tuesday before I have to be at the office. (Yes, I may complain about what’s wrong with politics, but I won’t refuse to participate in my small way.)

I think I can safely say that I’m a well-engaged citizen.

So I hate the base, desperate fear-mongering of messages like this on the eve of an election. I won’t be able to live with myself if I don’t give your organization five dollars to funnel into a political campaign?

We’ll see about that.

Tags:2012 election, Barack Obama, domestic policy, foreign policy, humor, Mitt Romney, political campaign, polls
Posted in Feelin' Grumpy | 3 Comments »

Overnight at Eastern State Penitentiary: true stories from my years on the ghost hunt (Part 3)

November 1, 2012

The wall is toppling backward from this cell in Block 14, leaving the old room open to the elements.

It was an important moment, and I wasn’t quite sure what to do. I had just seen a brief but unmistakable interruption of the moonlight filtering through the third-floor cell block’s narrow windows.

In honor of Halloween, the following is the third and final post in a special series about my nighttime experiences while on-staff at Eastern State Penitentiary. The photographs are the work of Baltimore-based photographer Patricia Leeb, and are used by permission of the artist. (Missed installments one and two? Catch up here and here.)

“Did anybody see that?” I said.

“We were looking at the green light,” Rosemary answered, referring to the digital recorder her ghost-hunters had placed at the end of the cell block.

“I saw something pass in front of the windows,” I said. Since no-one else had been prepared to flout Rosemary and her interest in the green light, I had no corroborators. However, no-one voiced the slightest doubt that I had witnessed a shadow figure. In fact, they were disappointingly blasé.

“Ghosthunters sees that all the time,” Rosemary informed me as I led the group back down the stairs.

As I began to get used to working until 2:00 or 3:00 AM about once a week in the spring and summer, I had ample time to think about my sighting. Was it a resident of another realm?

Or did a large bird fly past the windows just as I was looking? The prison was home to an army of pigeons, a few surly crows, and one hawk notable for once beheading a pigeon outside of Cell Block 8. He often surveyed the facility from the topmost point of the center tower.

As time went on, the prison that grips its TV viewers with terror became my friend. The noises that electrified paranormal investigators were a familiar soundtrack to me. I knew the sticky locks, the doors that always escaped their stoppers in the wind, and where the beautiful breezes were.

On oppressive summer nights when the prison was unbearably humid, I would whisper to the ghost hunters’ leader that earlier in the day, a self-professed psychic had told me she’d sensed a presence in a particular area. The area I mentioned always happened to be in a comfortable outdoor spot where I preferred to sit. I tried to sound nervous and reluctant to return to the site.

This was not a total pack of lies. In any given day on the job, someone was bound to tell me that he or she sensed a presence somewhere. The only real lie was the implication that I feared the site in question – it was just a personal flourish designed to make sure everyone got what they wanted: the investigators got to creep around the old greenhouse for an hour calling out “is that you, Margaret? Why are you still here?” and I got to sit on an empty bench in a delicious summer evening breeze and read a book with my little flashlight.

Once the ghost hunters were happily occupied, my nights inside the walls, far from being scary, actually were some of the most peaceful times I’ve ever had while on the clock, punctuated with many enjoyable moments.

Some hard-core ghost hunters brought curious family members along. These loved ones, though they would never admit it, were usually terrified, and I enjoyed escorting them to the bathrooms without letting on that I knew they had invited me to walk with them because they were scared to go alone.

At least one ghost-hunter was visibly pregnant, and others brought their kids. I spent one hilarious night listening to a ten-year-old boy ruin his family’s EVP recordings by belching in the cell blocks (until a pigeon pooped on his head).

Some family members were clearly disenchanted with the whole process, including one man who lay down full-length on the rotunda’s stone floor and slept there for the duration of the investigation.

Once, as I sat a few feet away from a particularly silent and intense circle in Cell Block 4, my stomach growled.

“Did you hear that?” they whispered. “What was that?”

A view of Eastern State’s central observation tower, built in the 1950′s.

Ultimately, my favorite thing about the ghost groups was meeting the characters who came from all over the country.

Mikael extended a rotund, tattooed forearm to shake my hand as Susan (my fellow tour-guide) and I unlocked the front gate. We helped Mikael, Kelly, Ryan and Dan carry their gear to the rotunda: computers, cameras, miles of extension cords and a banquet of Wawa iced tea quarts, Pringles, and Danish.

Mikael sounded almost tearful as he began to unroll electric cord toward Cell Block Twelve. “I never thought….I never thought that at this point in my life, I’d be here…really here at Eastern State.”

He rooted through a pile of equipment and held out a small taser.

(I had quickly learned to expect anything in the way of ghost-hunting devices – everything from infrared cameras to divining rods. You know those flashlights that turn on and off when you twist their heads? One group twisted it until it almost turned off, stood it on its end on the floor, and yelled questions into the dark. If the light flickered, they assumed the spirits were answering them. Other groups brought playing cards, cigarettes and porn to lay out for the ghosts.)

While Dan leaned against a window sill, swigging a plastic jug of iced tea, Mikael explained to me that the spirits would use the electric energy from the taser to manifest themselves.

The potential risks of the taser blossomed in my mind. “Is there, uh, a safety risk there?” I asked.

“Oh, no, no,” said Mikael. “I won’t use it on anyone. Except maybe Ryan. Where you going with my good flashlight, Ryan?”

“I told you – Cell Block 2, then 12.”

“Well, that’s my flashlight.”

“How do you know?”

“Because all the nice, new working stuff is mine and the crappy, non-working stuff is yours.”

Mikael addressed me again while he hooked up a large laptop. “I’ve actually had that taser for way longer than I’ve been hunting ghosts,” he confided. “In college we used to tape the ‘on’ button down and play Hot P’taser.”

Later, I led Mikael and Kelly up the stairs to CB 12. They got right down to business, creeping back and forth along the dark cell block, waving EVP recorders. Feeling sociable, I trailed in their wake.

“Is there anyone with us tonight?” Mikael whispered. “We’re not here to hurt you – we want to talk to you. What is your name?”

Silence.

“I’m holding a special recorder,” Mikael explained to the ghost[s]. “If you speak, we may not hear you now, but when I play back the tape, we will be able to hear your voice. Is there anything special you’d like to say, to a loved one?” He swung the recorder in a gentle arc.

“Why are you still here – if you’re here,” asked Kelly. “Is there anyone here with us?” He looked at me. “You must have heard this a thousand times, huh?” He sounded sheepish in the dark.

“Who knows – you could find the big evidence,” I said.

“Did you hear the tone of her voice?” Kelly suddenly bellowed. “She doesn’t believe in you guys! Why don’t you come out, right here, right now, and prove to Alaina that you’re here! She works here all the time, day and night, and she doesn’t even believe you’re there!”

My lungs tightened uncomfortably. Maybe ghosts exist and maybe they don’t, but I was there to do my job, not commune with the dead.

“Can’t you prove Alaina wrong and show her that you’re really here?” Kelly pleaded. I kept quiet. I felt a gentle touch on my shoulder. Kelly loomed close out of the dark. “Do you mind language?” he asked.

“It’s your investigation,” I said.

“Fucking wimps! Why won’t you show yourselves?” he shouted with a sudden reedy bravado.

In ghost-hunting parlance, this is known as “provoking.” The scientific theory is that a quiet ghost will manifest if you can just offend him enough.

“Whoa!” cried Mikael.

“Huh? What, what?”

“Kelly – right down there – down there on the second floor!” Mikael was hanging over the central railing. “A shadow, just – just literally jumped from there to there, like, ‘whoosh!’ from there to there!”

“Come on, gentlemen, up and at ‘em!” Kelly yelled with fresh inspiration. “Come on gents, move! Roll out!”

“Yeah, yeah, that’s good, Kel,” said Mikael.

“Come on ladies, let’s go, last warning you ladies, step on out!” The orders died away into eerie silence.

“Hey Kel, did you hear that?” Mikael burst out.

I strained my ears.

“Uh, yeah, yeah, I think I did!”

“I thought it sounded like a man’s…no! Wait! Hold on, Kelly, don’t tell me what you heard, you tell Alaina what you heard, and then I’ll tell her what I heard, and then we’ll see if they match!”

“Ok,” replied Kelly. He turned to me. “I heard a man’s voice-”

“No, Kelly! Not so I can hear you!”

“Oh. Right. Sorry.”

“Never mind, you ruined it now.”

“But I did hear a man’s voice!”

“Me too! Sort of…over there…I don’t really know what it said, but it was definitely… a sentence, definitely I heard a sentence.”

“Me too! I heard a sentence too!”

Contrary to many facilities of its day and even now, Eastern State had its own fully-equipped hospital that was built into one of its oldest cell blocks in the early 20th century – a hospital best known as the place Al Capone had his tonsils removed.

Much later, in Cell Block 10, Mikael and Ryan decided it was time for the taser – Mikael raised it above his head like a light saber. A blinding light flashed in the cell and the sound razzed in my ear like a panicked cicada. But no spirit availed itself of the electronic surge.

Ryan lost interest and I escorted him back to the empty rotunda. As we entered from CB 2, something small and brown streaked across the doorway to Cell Block Six, opposite us.

“Did you see that?” Ryan gasped.

“It was a bat,” I opined. When I had been working from 9:30am to 2:00am, sometimes my usual customer-service policies slipped ever so slightly.

“But are you sure? How could a bat have flown in right there? Quick, find out where the others are.”

I hoisted my radio up from my belt. “Alaina to Susan.”

“Susan here.”

“What’s your twenty?”

“Cell Block 4. Why?”

“Uh, we had a…potential phenomena…in center.”

“Mmm, copy that.”

An apoplectic Mikael reappeared in time to hear this.

“What was it? Did you get it on film? This is what I was telling you, Ryan – we should have set up cameras in center!”

“I’m about 99% percent sure that was a bat,” I offered. (There was a one percent chance it was a very large bug.)

“How could a bat have gotten there?” Ryan demanded.

Just then, a little brown bat flapped in one of the yawning doorways and made a single lap of the rotunda.

We watched it solemnly until it fluttered back outside.

“Ok, it was a bat,” Ryan conceded with good grace. “But you have to admit: for about four seconds, you didn’t say anything. So for four seconds, you weren’t sure if it was a bat or not.”

“I didn’t say anything because I was so sure it was a bat I didn’t think there was any point in saying it was a bat,” I replied.

After seven and a half hours, the men finally began to pack up their equipment. They did the math, and declared that between their many cameras, they had fifty-five hours of video footage to scrutinize for shadow figures when they got home. No fast-forwarding allowed.

“You have the coolest job in the world,” Mikael told me before he left.

Indeed, one might wonder why someone would leave a job like the one I had. The truth is that I may have worked one too many ghost groups. After I had been at the penitentiary for almost three years and was beginning to fill in for my managers, I was fired quite suddenly. I’d had no complaints or warnings, so it was hard to accept. My manager told me I was a good tour guide, but that I had a negative attitude about paranormal investigators.

That meeting was the start of my full-time writing career, so I have no regrets.

A typical pane of glass at Eastern State. I don’t know what broke this particular window in the years the prison was abandoned, but some places in the prison still bear the scars of a massive 1961 riot.

My feelings about the paranormal investigators were certainly mixed, but I approached each night committed to letting my charges have the best experience possible for their money. I listened to their stories, looked at their photos, answered their questions, and kept them safe in the old buildings.

And the ghosts?

Working in such an ancient, sprawling, atmospheric setting affords you plenty of chances for double-takes and ears tipped curiously toward strange sounds. But there is only one incident that I really can’t explain.

I was supervising a crew whose names never made my notes. We had just ventured outside Cell Block 2 in the wake of a midsummer storm, and the receding clouds reflected the last bit of sunlight over the southeast corner of the wall.

One of the hunters pointed his digital camera down the prison’s empty east side to capture the rapidly fading sunset.

“Hey! Hey, look at this!” he said when he glanced at the picture on his screen.

It’s amazing how many shadows, reflections, floating dust flecks and tricks of the lens are mistaken for what’s known as “orbs” in ghost-hunting speak.

But they all seemed so excited that I strolled to their group and looked at the image.

There was a perfect, life-sized, transparent silhouette of a person in what had definitely been a deserted frame. I could see the outline of a head, neck, shoulders and torso as if someone were standing a few feet from the camera. The scenery the photographer had wanted to capture was visible through the body.

If you have an explanation for this image (other than declaring that I’m stark raving mad), by all means, let us know in the comments. I have been trying to mentally debunk this for years.

But I wasn’t the least bit scared. The group decided to investigate the end of CB 10, but I preferred to stay outside. I dragged my chair so that I could keep an eye on them, down the block, and slipped off my shoes so I could enjoy a fresh puddle of rainwater. If I was alone in the dark with the ghost, I didn’t care. In fact, by that time, I was ready to see any specter hanging around Eastern State as a long-suffering pal.

So I guess the only other thing I can tell you is the same thing I told every tour group who asked me if there really are ghosts at Eastern State.

If the prison is haunted, it should be a reminder that real people lived and died here, I’d say. So whether or not we believe in ghosts, let’s honor that history.

Special thanks to Patricia Leeb for providing some great images to accompany these posts! You can reach her at tripod_chronicles@yahoo.com

This series is a special event that, unlike my other posts, will be live for a limited time.

Tags:Eastern State Penitentiary, ghost stories, ghost-hunting, hauntings, history, humor, jobs, paranormal investigation, polls, prisons
Posted in Holidays | 4 Comments »

Overnight at Eastern State Penitentiary: true stories from my years on the ghost-hunt

October 29, 2012

A view through the gate of Eastern State Penitentiary.

You’ve probably seen it on TV, but as the dusk in the cell blocks deepened to a humid, cavernous black, bats began to swoop in and out of the yawning doorways, and the dark turned crumbling plaster into whispers and dripping water into footsteps, I often wondered what strange twist of fate left me in charge of one of the world’s most notorious haunted places when the paranormal investigators arrived.

In honor of Halloween, the following is the first post in a special three-part series about my nighttime experiences while on-staff at Eastern State Penitentiary. The photographs, unless otherwise noted, are the work of Baltimore-based photographer Patricia Leeb, and are used by permission of the artist.

The original wood-and-iron doors (the ones that are left from the early 1800’s, anyway) were permanently rolled back. Many of the cells still had bed-frames and wooden stools, and these empty spaces tugged constantly at the corner of your eyes as you walked down the old cell blocks. One cell block that was closed to the public still had prisoners’ shoes, magazines and even decades-old toilet paper.

A view of one of Eastern State’s oldest cells.

I worked as a tour guide at Philadelphia’s historic Eastern State Penitentiary for almost three years, between 2008 and 2010.

“Where’s the haunted section?” was often the first thing visitors asked me. I began to consider greeting ticket-buyers like a restaurant hostess in the days before cigarette bans: “Welcome to Eastern State, haunted or non?”

The problem with that (besides any potential handbook violation) was that most visitors would’ve refused to believe there was any such thing as a non-haunted section of Eastern State. “What’s the freakiest thing that you ever saw here?” was another common question, as if I’d seen so many terrifying apparitions that it’d be hard to pick just one.

Dozens of sensational TV shows filmed at Eastern State – from reality TV episodes to documentaries – have left viewers with one impression over all others. That place is haunted: if ghosts exist, they have to be at Eastern State.

I tried to see ghosts as a good gateway drug – people who came to search for the specter of Al Capone (imprisoned there for eight months in 1929-1930) might end up appreciating an extraordinary piece of American history with powerful ties to modern criminal justice issues.

It’s interesting to consider that though we take the use of incarceration for granted today, this method of punishment, deterrence and rehabilitation is a new idea, relatively speaking. Across Europe and the early United States, wrong-doers might face the stocks, whipping or the gallows. Til then, jails often housed offenders all in one room, including men, women and children.

Look carefully at the word “penitentiary,” and you can see the intentions of the Quakers who developed the philosophy of inmates’ treatment at Eastern State. Forbidding as the penitentiary looks today, with its massive, castle-like gatehouse and thirty-foot stone walls, it was designed make its inmates penitent: to rehabilitate them.

For almost a hundred years, Eastern State’s policy called for solitary confinement of all its inmates. Its founders believed that lonely, silent reflection was a humane and effective way to reform its residents. Instead of the horrific landmark it seems to be today, the penitentiary was actually conceived as a radical social experiment that, for good or ill, would revolutionize our methods of coping with crime.

Early in the 20^th century, the solitary confinement principle that had faltered due to overcrowding from the very start was officially abolished. The original seven cell blocks, designed around a single rotunda in a wagon-wheel shape that was copied in prisons all over the world, would see eight additional blocks (one of them designed by an inmate) squeezed onto the 11-acre property.

An image of Eastern State’s original design, as completed in the 1830s.

Upon learning that Cell Block 15 (built in the 1950’s) was known as Death Row, tourists would seek me out with a morbid gleam in their eyes. “How many people died here, altogether?” they asked. “Where’s the room where they killed them?” “The hospital – is that where the electric chair was?”

They were invariably disappointed to hear that while Death Row inmates did live there, these men were transferred to another state facility for their executions.

Of course, much to the relief of America’s ghost-hunters, this doesn’t mean that no-one ever died inside the prison. How many died, exactly? No-one knows for sure. But for almost 150 years, violence, riots, illness, suicide, old age, and (in at least one probable case) torture took inmates’ lives.

Eastern State didn’t stop operating until 1971. Inmates working and exercising could hear the children at the school next door, and more than one escape attempt – including ladders and, in the 1940’s, a spectacular tunnel – resulted in inmates scattering into the neighborhood.

For about twenty years, the penitentiary was left to rot, inhabited by nobody but a pride of stray cats. But in the 1990s, the museum was born, and now people can tour the old penitentiary, now a “stabilized ruin,” to learn about its history. (Each autumn, a top-rated haunted house built right into the old cell blocks, Terror Behind the Walls, provides the majority of the funding to support the historic site).

True to the penitentiary’s reputation as a hotbed of paranormal experiences, a few of my Eastern State co-workers admitted strange experiences. One used to tell a story about seeing all the iron doors on the empty third floor of Cell Block Twelve closed, and then, just a moment later, returning to see them all open. There were a few tour guides who were afraid to stay in the prison after dark – it may have had something to do with picking up noises that couldn’t be un-heard on a ghost-hunting radio device we called the “squawk-box.”

Others reported hearing weird noises and jiggling door-handles after-hours that drove them to abandon their paperwork til daylight returned. Another claimed that he ran out after hearing voices while working alone one night, unable to locate the voices’ source after multiple searches of the apparently deserted facility.

One of the nineteenth-century cell blocks on the penitentiary’s west side, as seen from the rotunda.

“Make sure to bring your Proton Pack,” my co-worker Bryan said in the staff-room before our first nighttime shift. We all fantasized about greeting paranormal investigators shoulder to shoulder in full Ghostbusters regalia. Who would be Egon and who would be Dr. Venkman was a hot topic of conversation.

“Don’t laugh, guys.” The Site Manager looked up from his lunch. “You wait – tour guides have been seriously creeped out working these things. You’ll see, when they start with that radio to the dead.”

Some tour guides, like a young man named Jesse whom I often worked with, toyed shamelessly with visitors.

“Sometimes, down in Cell Block Seven,” he’d whisper to wide-eyed tourists, “you can hear babies crying.”

When a TV show host with a loose grip on the truth declared that inmates had been tortured in this particular seat, this old barber-chair was known forever after as “the torture chair” to tourists with an over-developed sense of the macabre.

There was one person associated with Eastern State who avidly claimed that he’d met a ghost.

Gary the Locksmith, known to all concerned only as Gary the Locksmith, was known to possess a sort of extra-sensory perception that led him onsite precisely when any of the prison’s ancient locks went awry. The Site Manager claimed that he did not even have Gary the Locksmith’s phone number, but that the man magically appeared with the correct equipment to finesse any offending lock.

Over the years, the length of the Locksmith’s ghostly tale (shared repeatedly not just with ESP staff and guests but also various TV networks) increased until it took the better part of an hour to hear it all.

The short version is that once, while working alone on a lock in the last cell on the right in Cell Block Four, Gary the Locksmith was suddenly gripped by acute physical discomfort and anxiety, as if someone grabbed him around the chest.

Some actively debunk this experience as a minor heart attack, but learning that an inmate once murdered a guard close to that very cell does not dampen anyone’s enthusiasm for the Locksmith’s story – especially since the TV show Ghosthunters filmed an episode at the prison, and one of the hosts, startled by some unseen presence in CB 4, screamed “dude, run!” and fled the block in terror.

Years later, vacationing families visit the prison so that they can film themselves running down the block yelling, “dude, run!” In fact, over time, CB 4 ceased to be called CB 4 by a majority of the public, and simply became known as “Dude Run,” as in, “Hey, you work here? Where’s Dude Run?”

My own relationship with Dude Run was more complicated than I cared to admit. It was a corridor tour guides often passed through in the course of their duties, and I never got over a desire to hurry when I walked through it at night.

Early one July evening, as I entered the empty CB 4 from the rotunda and began walking down to make sure all guests were clear before closing, I saw something strange down at the end of the block, between the open door to the outside and the last cell on the right.

It looked like a heat mirage – a large, shimmering upright blob that was moving slowly to the right. I stopped to watch it. In about five seconds, the blob seemed to disappear into the last cell.

I resumed my walk and peered in there when I got to the end, but saw nothing out of the ordinary.

You should know that this is about the time in my life that I began to get migraines, which sometimes manifested as flashing blobs in my peripheral vision. I don’t recall any other migraine symptoms on that particular evening, but doesn’t a migraine make more sense than the idea that I glimpsed a ghost?

Make of it what you will.

After I began working at Eastern State, I didn’t wait long to sign up for what we called a “ghost group.”

At about 9pm on that summer Saturday, a minor setback occurred as tour guides Gage, Susan, Bryan and I discovered that every battery in every staff flashlight was dead. We clocked in and surveyed a group of about forty people. It was hard to make out their faces in the evening gloom, but they were saddled and ready, bristling with digital cameras, electro-magnetic frequency (EMF) detectors, electronic voice phenomenon (EVP) recorders, blinding flashlights mounted like coal-miners’ helmets, and the squawk-box.

They were ready. We led them inside.

To be continued…

Photographer Patricia Leeb can be reached at tripod_chronicles@yahoo.com

Click here for part 2.

Tags:Eastern State Penitentiary, ghost-hunting, Ghosthunters, ghosts, Halloween, humor, photography, polls, prisons, Terror Behind the Walls
Posted in Holidays | 10 Comments »

Literary Lies: The Five Things You Really Mean When You Say “It’s On My List”

October 24, 2012

As a person whose apartment would probably draw casting agents if anyone ever develops a TV show about book hoarding, I never thought I’d feel this way.

I’ve probably said it hundreds of times in my adult life, and heard it just as many times from friends (especially since I added a whole new layer of awkwardness to my social life by publishing a book that only a few people have actually read).

Sure, you could look at the phrase “it’s on my reading list!” as a harmless way to deal with the author in your high school class. It works great on anyone who loved the latest treatise on epidemiology, genetics, or the future of cloud computing, and you can also keep it on hand for folks obsessed with the newest dystopian young adult novel, guide to spirituality, or food-based memoir.

But face it. The one thing “it’s on my reading list” almost never means is “I intend to read that book.” Never before did one little phrase incorporate such an interesting array of self-serving lies.

Here are five things I believe we really mean when we say “it’s on my reading list.”

1) “I have zero interest in that book, but to avoid offending you, I’m going to pretend otherwise.”

It’s just a book, for God’s sake. And if someone’s going to give you the cold shoulder for not promising to read some book he or she recommended, remind me why you’re friends?

2) “That book does not appeal to me, but I’d rather not admit my real interests.”

Implying that you’re just about to download that particular title onto your Kindle can be an attempt to make other people think you care about things that you really don’t give a hoot about – but who made them the boss of your professed interests?

3) “I’ve never even heard of that book, but I don’t want you to think I’m a huge ignoramus who doesn’t read the New York Times Book Review or listen to Terry Gross.”

Sure, what someone’s wearing or eating can give us clues to who they are, but glimpsing what someone else is reading is probably the closest we can get to peeking right inside a stranger’s mind without saying a word, and we’d all probably rather be heard raving about Steven Pinker than Stephenie Meyer. Making all sorts of wild claims about what’s on our reading list is one way to build ourselves up in the eyes of others, because when it comes to symbols of intellect – or lack thereof – it’s hard to beat a book (or a mention of your “reading list”).

4) “Funny you should mention that famous, famous book – I’m so embarrassed that I haven’t read it.”

This is one that I’m guilty of. I have read hundreds of books. But I’ve never read The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (read The Hobbit and that was enough), any Dickens except for A Christmas Carol and part of David Copperfield (I couldn’t take all the weeping), Little Women, Don Quixote, The Grapes of Wrath, Silent Spring or The Kite Runner and I have only the merest smattering of Dostoyevsky and absolutely no Jonathan Franzen, Michiko Kakutani, or David Foster Wallace. I may read some of them one day. I may not. But I’m going to quit claiming they’re “on my list” any time somebody brings them up.

5) “Of course I have top-flight literary tastes, but I’m too busy and important to have any time for reading.”

Sometimes, pleading the “reading list” isn’t just an attempt to placate someone else, hide your true self or alert the world to your intellect. It’s also a heavy clue about your high-powered lifestyle to anyone who asks (or doesn’t). Here, I must give credit to Tim Kreider’s excellent New York Times essay, “The Busy Trap,” which skewers our self-imposed human hamster wheels and explains why we actually love complaining that we’re busy. Somehow, grousing about our packed schedules has become more fun than reading.

But the book-suggesting masses aren’t going anywhere (and I say this as a person who probably devotes an hour a week to convincing friends, family and co-workers that they’ve got to read whatever book I just finished). How do we cope? I have a few suggestions.

You can always give someone else the impression of a sparkling conversation without saying anything at all about yourself or your intentions. It’s called asking questions. If the other person enjoyed the book, just ask him about it. There is no need to guide the conversation with announcements about reading the book yourself.

Stand up for what you really like. If you’d rather not read books about forestry, politics or sexuality, but you love wizards, parenting tips or naval history, say so (politely). It’s not a crime to have your own interests.

Be nice without actually implying anything about what you’re going to do. Just trade “it’s on my reading list” for “thanks for the recommendation.” It’s friendly and it’s not a lie.
Forget the reading list altogether. Reading doesn’t need to be regimented and curated by you or anyone else. Just read a book. When it’s done, find another one that looks groovy. Repeat.
If someone recommends a book you don’t think you’d like, why not expand your horizons? Don’t tell the person that the book is “on your list.” Borrow it and read it. (I tried this at the office recently and am now reading a book with a picture of a horse running through the ocean surf on the cover. The Untethered Soul is actually pretty interesting.)

Enjoying a book is a bit like letting someone else inhabit your mind for awhile – or vice versa. Our taste in books is an intimate part of who we are and what we love. Since our library reveals so much about ourselves, maybe that’s why we tread so carefully when talking about books – and why a statement as innocuous as “it’s on my reading list” can be so many things, from a way to keep the peace to a subtle dispatch on your own importance.

I admit that at heart, the “it’s on my list” syndrome is probably just a harmlessly polite affirmation to dole out to others without inconveniencing yourself.

But I’ve decided to quit saying it, unless the title is truly on my shelf or on my wish-list. And I absolve everyone else of the need to say it to me, even if I wrote the book in question (read it if you want to, or don’t, but don’t feel obligated to bring it up). I won’t hold it against you if you and I have different tastes in books, and I won’t conceal my true interests or feign fascination with yours, so let’s get down to a real conversation about books or anything else that brings some honesty to our social and intellectual world.

Tags:advice, books, humor, literature, polls, reading, reading lists, The Busy Trap, Tim Kreider
Posted in Expounding On Literature, Language, Pompous Philosophizing | 11 Comments »

Don’t Bind the Blame to Romney – He’s Not Alone.

October 17, 2012

Courtesy of Bindersfullofwomen.tumblr.com

When my husband and I watched the second Presidential debate this week, and Republican candidate Mitt Romney described his effort to include women in his former Massachusetts Governor’s cabinet as receiving “binders full of women,” my husband immediately turned to give me a wildly bemused look.

“What the heck is he talking about, ‘binders full of women’?”

Honestly, I’m not entirely convinced that I watched the debate to gain any substantive facts on the candidates’ policies. Rather, I wanted to be in at the ground floor of whatever inevitable internet sensation took off as soon as the words left the candidates’ lips. As I left the office on Tuesday, I dwelt happily on the fact that there were only a few more hours to go before a fresh campaign meme torched my online feeds. It was pleasant to wonder what it would be, and to know that all I had to do to be in on the joke with all the other cool kids was put on my pajama pants and watch ninety minutes of political blather.

The meme was born when the candidates took a question about ensuring women’s equal pay for equal work, since a significant pay gap still exists between male and female workers in the US.

Obama pointed to the first new bill he signed upon assuming office in 2009, which amended the 1964 Civil Rights Act to say that those who have experienced discrimination in the form of reduced wages can file a lawsuit up to 180 days after the receipt of any paycheck that shows the unfair pay rate, rather than 180 days after the initial payment decision is made by the hiring manager – basically, making it easier for women to address gender-based paycheck discrepancies in court.

(The recently departed Senator Arlen Specter was one of very few Republicans to support the bill; Romney’s running-mate voted against it).

Romney had a tougher time with his answer, which devolved into a curious narrative on searching out women for his Governor’s cabinet – women he claimed were totally absent from the apparent crop of potential candidates. As Romney told it, he was perturbed by the lack of female applicants, had no idea where to find any, and asked his staff what could be done.

“And so we took a concerted effort to go out and find women who had backgrounds that could be qualified to become members of our cabinet. I went to a number of women’s groups and said, ‘can you help us find folks,’ and they brought us whole binders full of women.”

Romney wrapped up by urging employers to provide more flexible working hours for women, so that they can still be home to make dinner for the kids, and explained that he’s going to bring about such a strong economy that employers will be clamoring to hire women.

Fortunately, because the internet can spot a fruitful meme faster than Republican politicians can come up with new classifications of rape, my husband and I ignored the post-debate pundits to guffaw over the Binders Full of Women tumblr that was crackling even before the debate’s final question.

Memes Photoshopped at the speed of light borrowed enthusiastically from Beyonce (put three rings on it), Lord of the Rings, Dirty Dancing, Trapper Keepers and much more, and, of course, quickly cannibalized other, older memes.

(The red-hot tumblr was apparently started by a 23-year-old woman who had been laid off from her social media manager job that very day. She’s reportedly considering several new offers.)

The internet is already awash in articles.

Some writers immediately bridled at the implication that a male partner couldn’t make dinner, or that women are second-rate employees who can expect to be considered only during boom times.

Others complained that the “binders full of women” moment shows Romney’s dismissive and condescending attitude toward women in general.

Political writer David S. Bernstein of The Phoenix pointed out that Romney’s version of events isn’t even true – a bipartisan coalition of Massachusetts women’s groups, troubled by the lack of women in government in both political parties, assembled the fateful Qualified-Lady Binders themselves, without being asked, and presented them to Romney when he assumed office – a version of events that doesn’t exactly jibe with the former Governor’s contention that he anxiously asked the women’s groups for help in boosting the cabinet’s estrogen levels (especially as Bernstein points out that the overall percentage of female appointees actually declined during Romney’s tenure).

But I like Bernstein’s last line best.

“Note that in Romney’s story as he tells it, this man who had led and consulted for businesses for 25 years didn’t know any qualified women, or know where to find any qualified women. So what does that say?”

I have to say, in the four and a half seconds that elapsed between Romney’s saying the words and – like a delayed sonic boom – the birth of the meme, I felt a flash of sympathy for the Governor.

As a journalist, I, too, have been faced with the problem of locating qualified women.

This year, one of my editors assigned me a series of articles on entrepreneurship in Pennsylvania with several different angles, including “green” business, socially responsible ventures, and MBA graduates who launched start-ups (you can read some of them here, here and here).

Because I wanted to feature a diverse range of business-people, I discovered that my early research and networking for interviews fell into two waves: one which returned an all-male batch of interview candidates, and a second in which I scrambled to find women to include in the articles.

I could have used those binders.

I followed up with several of my leads to inquire about female founders/executives. They shrugged. One prominent male faculty member of Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business told me he couldn’t think of a single woman who would qualify for inclusion in my story.

Fortunately, I followed up with one of his female colleagues, who had many suggestions, despite admitting that women do indeed make up a very small percentage of entrepreneurs in our state.

As I pursued these articles throughout the year and grew my network in the field, I found out a surefire way to discover the female executives.

Ask other female executives. (Perhaps we just subconsciously prefer to refer the press to members of our own gender?)

So my sympathy for Romney was short-lived, especially when I learned that he hadn’t commissioned those binders at all, and that they did not, in fact, lead to better female representation in his administration.

If one little journalist with zero business experience (outside of managing my own career) and a tiny business network can track down several articles’ worth of noteworthy female executives to interview, with nothing but the internet and her cell phone, I refuse to believe that a career businessman and politician couldn’t figure out how to get some ladies on board without the help of his staff and a state-wide coalition of concerned women’s groups.

However, even though I’ve personally discovered that finding qualified professional women is just a matter of some earnest networking, don’t be too hard on Romney – not because his ideas are ok, but because he shouldn’t be singled out as the only one entrenched in them.

The words of that Carnegie Mellon professor, and other prominent businessmen who told me that they didn’t know a single woman who would fit into my articles, are still too fresh in my mind for me to put all the blame on Romney. So I hope the binder meme can be more than a hilarious flash-in-the-pan, and become a chance to consider the fact that not only are women underrepresented in business and politics, but that many people don’t even realize they’re there at all.

Tags:Barack Obama, binders full of women, debate memes, election 2012, fair pay, humor, Journalism, Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, Mitt Romney, polls, Presidential debate, women in business
Posted in Challenges of the Modern World | 1 Comment »

Fish of the One Percent? An Interview with Trailblazing Vet Dr. Greg Lewbart

September 18, 2012

How much would you spend to cure your pet fish? (Photo from PBS.org.)

No, this blog is not ordinarily about fish, but this conversation with a pioneering vet was just too good to pass up! A must-read for anyone who loves their aquarium fish a little bit more than they’d like to admit.

Dr. Greg Lewbart, a North Carolina State University professor of aquatic, wildlife, and zoologic medicine, is a South Jersey Native, alumnus of the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine, author, and faculty advisor of the NCSU-CVM Turtle Rescue Team. As you can see in this short NOVA video, Dr. Lewbart has helped to invent the science of surgery on pet fish. I caught up with this James Herriot of the seas by phone in August, just after he’d returned from catching 115 pounds of halibut fillets on an Alaskan fishing vacation. Here are excerpts of our conversation.

Dr. Greg Lewbart (courtesy of Greglewbart.com)

Alaina Mabaso: The first question is: do you see the irony of being a veterinarian for fish, and then going on a fishing trip for your vacation?

Dr. Lewbart: Exactly! I know, interesting, huh? Here’s the way I paint the picture. If you bring me your goldfish and it has a lump on it, our standard protocol would be to anesthetize the fish, probably apply a local anesthetic like Lidocaine, then take the biopsy, and then depending on our assessment of how much trauma was involved, we’d probably give the fish a post-operative [painkiller]. And then we’d send the fish home and have the owner monitor it.

The fish I’m catching, they’re not getting any pain medication…[and] there’s no doubt in my mind that these hooks are inflicting discomfort on the animal, despite some fishermen’s self-serving opinion that fish don’t feel pain. That’s crazy. And it’s ignorant. I’m a fisherman, and I’d love it if someone told me, not only does the fish not feel pain, but the hook [causes] some kind of an endorphin release. I don’t believe it…If I put a needle into a fish to take a blood sample, it flops…So whether it’s pain like when we stub our toe or burn our finger, I don’t know. But it’s certainly a noxious stimulus. It’s something they don’t like.

AM: How did you get into your career? Have you always been interested in aquatic animals?

Dr. L: I wanted to be a vet since I was a little boy. I grew up in South Jersey, went to college at Gettysburg College of Pennsylvania, and I struggled a bit…especially with the sciences. But I survived, and senior year I had this wonderful course called Invertebrate Zoology, and it really kind of changed my life. I loved the subject matter (a lot of it was marine-biology related), and I found myself doing really well for the first time in my college career. We went to Bermuda for a marine biology class my senior year, and that sealed it for me that, wow, I still wanted to be a vet, but could I be a vet for these animals that live in the ocean?

I applied to a graduate program at Northeastern University in Boston and did a Master’s in Biology, with an emphasis in marine biology.

I finally did get into vet school…and 98% of what you learn in vet school is dogs, cats, horses, cows, sheep, goats, pigs and chickens…So I took a job in a pet store in West Philly when I was a second-year vet student, so I could learn about fish, because I saw fish as being aquatic animals that I could get my hands on. I could go the pet store and get a sick guppy and bring it back to the vet school, and look at it under the microscope. You couldn’t do that with Shamu or Flipper.

And then the wholesaler of tropical fish that supplied the pet store found out there was vet student that was interested in diagnostics. He offered me a job my senior year of vet school…I was in the trenches, cutting up fish and looking through books. And when North Carolina State was looking for a fish clinician twenty years ago, I got the offer for the position, and I’ve been there ever since.

AM: So talk about some of the advances you’ve developed in those 20 years.

Dr. L: I think what I’ve done more than anything is to be a facilitator. I work with a lot of really talented, smart people…Like in the Nova video: there we are, we’ve got a fish under anesthesia, and I’ve got a colleague, who’s a [horse] surgeon, doing laser surgery on a fish. If I wasn’t there to introduce him to fish and get him involved, he probably wouldn’t have done fish surgery. What he can do is bring expertise and techniques to animals that I’m familiar with.

At North Carolina State, we really did pioneer surgery for pet fish. We published [what is probably] the first abdominal [pet fish] surgery: we opened up a fish, took something out of it, closed it up, and it lived. We’ve done a lot of work studying what sutures work for fish, anesthetic protocols, and pain management in fish. We’re not the only people doing it – people around the world are doing it – but I think we’re recognized as a leader in that area.

AM: Especially to lay people, the thing that’s so fascinating is looking at the video and seeing the contraption that has the tube going into the fish’s mouth that has the water and the anesthetic that keeps it alive and asleep. Talk a bit about developing that.

Dr. L: It’s a pump that pumps water and re-circulates it. I’m looking out my back window at a birdbath, and it’s the same system. So how did we apply something like that to a fish? Well, I gave a talk in February of 1993 to an aquarium society in Raleigh, just general fish medicine. And I had done some anesthesia with fish, but not a re-circulating system: maybe a turkey baster or a syringe, just to keep that anesthetic over the gills. So this [fish] owner came to me and said, “I have this fish, I’m really attached to him, and it’s got a buoyancy problem. Can you help?”

So we worked it up, and it looked like it had a swim bladder that was too big, and needed to be operated on. We needed a machine to do that, so I concocted this thing with the help of people at the vet school, with a pump and a couple tanks and a platform. It was cumbersome, but it worked, and the fish lived.

My students then devised a much more sophisticated machine with bells and whistles and knobs and valves and all that. [After a few more generations and collaborations to make the device more affordable, compact and portable], we called it the FAD: the fish anesthesia delivery system.

AM: I heard that your burgeoning specialty is cancer in fish.

Dr. L: We actually have an oncologist who gave chemo to a goldfish many years ago. I’m board-certified in zoo medicine with an emphasis in aquatics. But a lot of the surgery we do is cancer-related.

AM: So cancer is a common thing for fish?

Dr. L: I would say it’s fairly common for older fish, especially goldfish and koi. They live long enough and they seem to get tumors – some of them are malignant and some of them aren’t. A lot of fish, to step away from pet fish, are exposed to pollution and other environmental contaminants, and end up with tumors. That’s well-established in the literature.

AM: So does diagnosing and treating cancer in fish have the possibility of new knowledge that could be applied to other species or even us?

Dr. L: Absolutely…There’s a lot of work being done in tumors and cancer of fish that could be applicable to humans, and other animals too. Oncology in veterinary medicine is a big field.

AM: What’s the attitude toward your specialty from the veterinary field at large? Do they see what you’re doing as the inevitable way of the future, or are most people confused by that specialization with aquatic animals and fish?

Dr. L: I think it’s a mixed bag. I think that there was a time where we were sort of looked at as quirky: oh wow, a fish vet? And colleagues and friends still say, why do surgery on a fish? But that’s trickling away now, and aquatic general medicine is an accepted and respected discipline in veterinary medicine.

[Veterinary medicine] has changed in interesting ways over hundreds of years. It started out as an equine profession to support military horses in the 1700s and 1800s, and that morphed over to food animal work in the early part of the 20^th century, when the automobiles took over.

One hundred years ago, it was hard to learn about dogs in vet school. Now it’s a profession that’s about 70% small animals, 20% large animals, and 10% everything else.

AM: So in these days of the rabid 99% in America, I can hear what some people might say about this: for God’s sake why would you pay for surgery on a fish when you could just buy a new one for fifty cents?

Fish of the One Percent.

Dr. L: I would say that many people’s cats and dogs, they got for free. I found my dog in the median about nine years ago. He was a wreck: he weighed 44 pounds (now he weighs 65), he had a dislocated hip, a fractured hip, heartworms, and ground-down teeth. I don’t know what happened to him. Even veterinarians still have to pay veterinary bills: he had surgery to fix his hip, he had heartworm treatment, he had a root canal, and over the years we’ve spent thousands of dollars on him. [We got him for] free – while someone spends a dollar on a goldfish.

I’m not trying to compare a goldfish to a dog, although I have clients that are really, sincerely, passionately, emotionally attached to their fish. Especially goldfish! And they will spend hundreds of dollars or whatever it takes. So here’s my answer. I don’t judge my clients by the species or the origin of the animal. If they say, “my pet is sick,” I say, “let’s see how we can help.” That’s people’s prerogative. If they want to spend money on their pet, whatever pet it is, then they should be able to.

AM: I read a statistic once about aquarium keeping in the US, and it said that 90% of all fish destined for home aquariums end up dying – not a natural death, but that they get ill and die.

Dr. L: I would say yes, that’s true, [though] it’s a really hard thing to study. I heard an estimate once that only 25% of fish live [past] 30 days in a home aquarium. People ask, “how long does a koi live?” And I say, [if you average the lives of all the koi that are purchased], “about six months.”

Picture from Koiacres.com

I know of some thirty-five-year-old koi. I’ve treated fish in their 20s, [but] it’s rare. Bad stuff happens to good fish…Even when professionals take care of an aquarium, stuff happens and they’re very vulnerable. Unlike air-breathing animals, [fish] have nowhere to go. In twenty years in North Carolina, I’ve seen three hurricanes, a tornado, ice storms and power outages [which can prove fatal to aquarium fish]…It’s horrible, but something like that is going to happen.

We know some fish species in the wild can live a hundred years: rockfish, sturgeon. I saw a tarpon at the Shedd Aquarium that was seventy. So they can live that long, it’s just that they’re very susceptible to environmental changes that are out of [aquarium keepers’] control.

AM: I’ve had my goldfish for seven or eight years, and people are like, what? I didn’t know goldfish could live that long.

Dr. L: Well, they can live 30 or 40 years.

AM: So it’s quite a commitment, if you care for them properly. It seems like maybe you’re doing something important in that you’re helping us view all animals as worthy of our care and attention, even if they’re not the animals that we most easily relate to.

Dr. L: I agree!

AM: So is there anything that writers never ask you, but that you think is really important for people to know?

Dr. L: The number-one problem I see is that people go to the pet store, they see a fish they like, they buy it, it looks healthy, they put it in their aquarium, and then their other fish get sick. The best thing you can do is isolate new fish, observe them for a month, and make sure they’re not bringing anything home from the pet store.

Number two would be don’t release any exotic animal into the wild. And don’t impulsively buy or obtain animals that you might not be able to care for down the line.

There may not be a fish vet in your town or county, but one thing we do is help find fish veterinarians for people all over the country, so they’re out there. Most states have them. And we’ll consult with veterinarians who aren’t as fish-experienced, so we can work together on a project. Veterinary medicine is here to support all animals. It goes beyond dogs and cats.

AM: Thanks so much for taking all this time to talk with us.

Dr. L: No problem! It’s been great talking to you.

Tags:aquarium advice, aquatic medicine, Dr. Greg Lewbart, fish surgery, fish-keeping, goldfish, interviews, North Carolina State University, polls, the 1%, the 99%, veterinary medicine
Posted in Animals, Interviews | 4 Comments »

Thoughts on Babysitting Which I May Sorely Regret Making Public

August 30, 2012

Back in the days when I needed a babysitter.

It seems that not everyone who gives birth to a child actually wants to spend all of her time with said child. Thank God for other people’s children, at least the teenaged ones. Need an evening out? Dial up a babysitter.

I began with mother’s helper kind of stuff when I was eleven or twelve, and babysat on a regular basis for several families in my town until I was 17 or so.

Enter a diabolically hyper four-year-old loose in a three-story house. I managed to dress the child in one leg of his red flannel footie jammies before the bedtime ignition. I stalked him up and down the stairs, on and off the beds, trying to stuff in another appendage each time the kid came to earth.

Some of my own babysitters had left strong impressions: stumbling to the couch to nap, feeding my brother and me as much ice cream as we could eat (or, on one memorable occasion, spoonfuls of icy, sticky-sweet orange juice concentrate right from the can), or telling my brother that vampires would come out of the woods to feed on his jugular if he did not go to sleep. I took my responsibilities seriously. I read stories, invented games, engineered blanket forts, went on walks and contrived experiments.

But while I was fond of all my charges, I never loved babysitting: the baths, the bucket full of bullfrog and pond water hitting the clean wood floor, the hurtling, half-jammied bodies. The children at one house, though they denied it, snatched raw cookie dough from the pan with the speed and accuracy of striking vipers. Meanwhile, the family dog had breath which could have been developed as a biological weapon of terror, the full blast of which he released on me after the kids tumbled, complaining of tummy ache, into their beds.

As I rediscovered recently in a Facebook thread from a friend soliciting advice on how much she should pay a local teen to babysit for her little boy, bedtime is an important consideration when calculating babysitters’ pay.

Part of the reason the discussion caught my eye was that though I haven’t babysat anyone for well over a decade, the pay mothers were suggesting last week was quite similar to what I used to get paid. According to the majority of comments, a 14-year-old girl babysitting a one-year-old for an evening was entitled to $5-$10 an hour.

I put the question out to my own peers – how much had they earned for teenaged jobs? About thirty people replied, describing employment from cleaning to filing to yard work, stable chores, data entry and bagging groceries. Most people reported earning minimum wage up through $10, $12 or $15 an hour for this work. But the babysitters, while a few of them said they made $10 or $12 per hour, generally made do with much less.

A couple twenty-somethings said they had typically made $5 per hour. Another said she had made as little as $2.50 per hour. And another said she was paid $3.50 per hour to babysit four kids, and $3.75 or $4.00 per hour for five kids. But for me, the kicker was that this girl also did office work for $6.00 an hour, and yard work for $8.00.

Why are babysitters paid so little? It’s something that has irked me since I was a teenager myself. People will pay you more to mow their lawn than they’ll pay you to watch their kids.

As my mom so wisely said as we discussed our respective babysitting days, “trying to rationalize pay scales in relation to jobs is really impossible.”

But in the case of your kids’ safety versus the state of your grass, it seems to me that it shouldn’t be that difficult to prioritize. I’m not saying we should pay the yard-work kids less. Rather, let’s pay the babysitter at least as much as we pay the kid mowing the lawn.

But it seems that for the last fifteen years at least, teenage girls (I am assuming that the vast majority of babysitters are girls) are used to accepting $5-$7 per hour, and sometimes less, for what is probably the biggest responsibility the average person of that age will shoulder.

Maybe it’s because I don’t have a natural affinity for children, but babysitting seemed like hard work to me. It was physically tiring, especially when there were multiple kids, and mentally demanding. The responsibility weighed on me: I remember sudden high fevers and at least one epic nosebleed. I got a book on first aid for children and studied it frequently, and took a babysitters’ safety course at the local library. I was certified in CPR.

This is why I’m not on board with the women who suggested to my friend that since her little boy is well-behaved, she could pay a babysitter a lower rate. Again, it’s hard to objectively rationalize pay scales, and yes, some kids are harder to supervise than others, but I don’t like this method of determining the babysitters’ pay.

Even the most seemingly well-behaved kid could throw a tantrum – or unwittingly make a huge mess – once Mom is out the door. But more importantly, whether the kid is an angel or a hellion, the babysitter’s responsibility for the kid’s health and safety is the same. Parents should not justify paying a sitter less because they think their kids are well-behaved. If the child chokes or hits her head or reacts badly to a bee-sting, that sitter’s knowledge and presence of mind could mean life or death. Is that really worth only $5-$10 an hour to modern parents?

Some parents believe that having the sitter there after the kids are in bed should correspond to a lower pay rate.

My advice-seeking friend decided that she could settle on a rate lower than the general $10/ hour consensus (even though she says she thinks that babysitters are generally underpaid) because the sitter “only has him for two hours awake…and then about five hours watching TV.”

A friend backs her up on the lower pay rate: “she’ll be paid for watching TV pretty much.”

Worse, another friend weighs in with a different solution: “I have a friend who pays one rate when the kids are awake and another while they are sleeping.”

Excuse me, but what the hell kind of parental cheapskate thinks that the teenager watching over their children alone late at night deserves a lower rate because the kids are sleeping? Surely any parent knows that sudden illnesses can strike just as easily at night as they can during the day. Not to mention kids who might need comfort after a nightmare or become upset and disoriented to wake up without their parents near.

Do you want your babysitter to feel that her responsibility level is reduced after-hours, just because the kids are sleeping? When I have kids (yep, that’s right, I’ve written this treatise on hiring babysitters when I have no kids of my own), I will certainly hope that my babysitter is just as alert in the evening as she would be during the day, and I’ll pay her accordingly.

And what’s this attitude that assumes teens are looking forward to an evening staying up late alone in your living room? Sure, I remember lots of peaceful nights from my own teen years. I’d get the kids to bed uneventfully and pop in a VHS, read a book, or do homework, checking periodically on the bedroom, until the parents came home.

But there were other times that after-hours babysitting was far from fun. Sometimes (especially troublesome in the days before cell phones) parents came home much later than they’d said they would and I’d be struggling to stay awake, wishing I was home in bed, while my own parents surely were listening for me to return. On one memorable occasion babysitting at a very isolated house on a totally black night, a sudden loud banging at the back door terrified me (and the dog). Of course everything was locked up. I peered out the doors and windows to see if someone was out there. All I could see was the frosty, silent yard, with the woods on one side and a deep grassy field on the other.

When the parents came home, they said that maybe a skunk had come out of the woods and made the noise.

Sure it did. (To this day I wonder why they settled on a skunk.)

I’m not a fearful person by nature (one day I’ll tell you about my many nights at Eastern State Penitentiary with all the lights turned off). But anyone can get unnerved alone at night in a strange setting. Don’t assume your teenaged sitter is having a great time just because she can sit and watch TV.

So that’s why I’m sad that parents are still willing to pay teens $6, $7 or $8 per hour to take care of the kids, while implying that the job is low-key or easy if the kids are sleeping or well-behaved. Part of me wonders whether we’d have such persistent problems with the disparity between men’s and women’s pay in the US if teenage girls felt as if they could ask for a fair wage for babysitting, while the boy mowing the lawn earns twice as much. Maybe that’s far-fetched, but as I explained in a post earlier this year, I think your work experience as a teenager can have a lasting effect on your career. Who’s to say that the youthful habit of accepting $5 per hour (or less) to care for someone’s kids doesn’t affect a woman’s future ability to demand fair pay on the job?

I wish teen babysitters could be paid at least $15-$20 an hour, as a token of how important their responsibility is.

But I can hear the apoplectic parents now. How could they possibly afford to pay $40, $60 or even $80 just for babysitting every time they go out? I know a lot of families are strapped for cash. But I bet many of them have smart-phones and multiple TVs and two cars and iPads and a premium NetFlix subscription. I doubt many middle-class women balk at occasionally paying $40 or so for a nice blouse or sweater. Isn’t your kids’ wellbeing worth at least as much as a new outfit?

Maybe earning those few dollars for toting someone else’s kids around is an important rite of passage that teaches our teenagers a little hustle. If minimum wage is $7.25 per hour, maybe there’s nothing wrong with paying our babysitters a similar rate.

But it still seems to me that the low pay for babysitters is a legitimate part of a troubling tradition in our country: underpaying our teachers and child-care workers, while hedge fund managers and sports stars and advertisers and politicians are rich beyond most people’s imagining. Our treatment of the people who care for our children is a telling indication of our country’s true priorities.

Even as I write this essay, I’m afraid that I’ll desperately want to eat my words as soon as my husband and I decide to reproduce. A trustworthy teenager willing to watch our tot for a pittance will probably seem like the salvation of our marriage, sanity and bank account all at once. So maybe I’ll wish I’d never written this, once I can actually relate to what it’s like to try to plan a night out when you have a young family.

But I still hope that when it comes time for me to hand my baby over to a high-schooler, I can pay her a rate that will signify how much I value the work she’s doing, and how important it is that she stay alert.

Parents, what is your experience? Babysitters, does what I say ring true?

Tags:babysitting, childcare, children, family, humor, kids, parenting, polls, teenagers, work
Posted in Follies and Excrescences Involving Children, The Joys of Marriage | 2 Comments »

When Dogs Lie.

August 15, 2012

Java and Dexter, my aunt and uncle’s dogs, an excitable cocker spaniel/poodle mix and a trembling, devoted Jack Russell Terrier, trained their gaze on my uncle with the focus of weapons guidance systems.

He was making himself a bowl of sliced strawberries.

“I wonder why they think they want strawberries,” I said.

“Now, see, the problem right there is that you’re assuming they think at all,” my uncle replied. Though he loves his dogs, he apparently doesn’t set a great store by canine intelligence.

But my uncle is wrong.

Of course I’m not the first person to allege that dogs can think. One of my favorite books as a kid was a paperback about dog heroes: dogs defended their families from poisonous snakes, woke up sleeping parents in the face of fire, and dragged their injured humans from freezing lakes and gravel pits.

Or take the story circulating the internet this week: a mother dog pulls her 10-day-old puppies from a house-fire, and piles them right into a nearby fire-truck.

Are these not the actions of a clever species? This is not to mention the work of service dogs, military dogs, cancer and bomb and drug-sniffing dogs, dogs that herd your livestock and dogs that comfort you when you cry.

Currently occupying the admittedly subjective title of smartest dog of all time is Cuda, my mom’s buff-colored 11-year-old cocker spaniel/miniature poodle mix.

Here is a dog who knows how to have fun. (Photo credit Johanna Austin.)

He showed his smarts early on by learning to leap onto the back of the couch and touch his nose to my dad’s buck trophy on the living room wall when someone asks “where’s the deer?”

There it is!!

Later, he expanded his repertoire to running to the goldfish tank when someone asks “where’s the fishies?”

But one night he blew it all out of the water.

My mom was home alone late at night, and Cuda began to bark frantically at the front door. Mom peeked out the windows and could see nothing, but Cuda wouldn’t calm down. Finally, unbidden, he leapt to touch the deer trophy.

What was he trying to say?

Mom looked outside again, and on her second try, she discovered a herd of deer crossing the driveway.

To Mom, the episode settled a long-running dispute we’ve had about the depth of Cuda’s smarts – I maintained that he has no idea what a “deer” is and had merely responded over time to positive reinforcement when he approached the trophy. Now, Mom can claim that Cuda’s mental abilities extend to the communication of fully-formed abstract reasoning.

Deer are trespassing outside. Mommy doesn’t know they’re there. There is a deer right there on the wall. Since I am unable to alert her to the presence of deer outside through noisemaking alone, I will point to the inside deer to represent the deer that are outside.

Occasionally I take up my case again to assert that Cuda’s running to the deer was not a demonstration of his vocabulary, but a reflex: excited by the encroaching animals, he spontaneously performed a behavior that he does at other times of high excitement – i.e., when humans are looking at him and talking to him in enthusiastic voices.

My own childhood dog, while devoted to me, was not renowned for her smarts. This golden retriever spent one hectic snow-day afternoon barking in terror at the snowman my brother and I built in the front yard. On another notable occasion, in one go, Sandy managed to poop on every one of the fourteen carpeted steps between the first and second floor.

A malamute my parents owned when I was a toddler had a propensity for eating copious amounts of sand, resulting in an explosive trip to the vet that has become the kind of family lore polite mothers hate.

But the truth is that I know dogs are smart. Very smart. And the proof isn’t the stuff of heartwarming tales.

It’s the lies.

We often point out the ways dogs mirror our best human qualities – their apparent empathy and loyalty – while forgetting that we can also discern the worst of us in our canine companions. To me, their wily, sneaking lies are the strongest proof of their intelligence.

My former boss had a little dog that disliked going outside. Every time my boss shooed her out onto the grass, she took to relieving herself very quickly.

Or did she?

After awhile, my boss realized that her dog was not, in fact, relieving herself outside. As long as her human was watching, the little dog discovered that she did not have to urinate before running back inside. She just had to squat long enough to fool the human.

My boss watched weeks of these crafty dry squats before realizing what was going on.

My own snowman-hating Sandy was not as smart as Kallie, the Labrador retriever who preceded her.

My parents rarely argue. But I remember one frustrating week when I was in grade school. Each night, Mom would ask Dad to PLEASE remember to shut the door all the way when he left for work early in the morning. Dad would counter that of course he was shutting the door. Mom would point out that for the last few days, she had discovered the front door slightly ajar and Kallie out flouting the county leash laws.

What my parents failed to take into account was the recent installation of a new doorknob.

They had replaced this kind of doorknob:

With this:

Kallie had realized that if she waited until after Dad left but before the rest of the family was up, she could open the front door with her paw.

So, near as I can tell, the dog

1) Observed the mechanical function of the door.

2) Mastered that function herself.

3) Realized the function must only be performed in secret.

But it was the Rhodesian Ridgeback, Briggs, the family dog in my teens, who forever sealed my confidence in dogs’ intelligence.

Briggs was the kind of dog who was difficult to train not because he couldn’t understand our commands. If you said sit, he was the kind of dog who would look at you and think

Why?

He was known for knocking the lid of his dog food storage bucket off to enjoy illicit snacks in the kitchen throughout the day. Once, when I was home alone and the house was particularly quiet, I heard the crunching from my seat in the living room and got up to banish him from the kitchen.

A long period of silence followed. Too much silence.

I snuck to the kitchen and peered around the corner unobserved.

Briggs was indeed back in the food bin. But this time, he took a mouthful of food and walked into the adjacent bathroom. From my hiding place, I discerned a faint crunching. I watched, astonished, as he returned for another mouthful and took it into the bathroom.

Dog-lovers buy pillows embroidered with the phrase, “My goal in life is to be the kind of person my dog thinks I am.”

Newsflash. Here’s what your dog really thinks of you: you’re eminently fallible and totally gullible. And he’s right.

Before I caught Briggs in the bathroom that day, I assumed his thought process, upon being discovered with his nose in the bucket, was (albeit not in linguistic terms) something along the lines of

I’m not allowed to eat out of the bucket.

In reality, he was thinking

It was the crunching that tipped her off.

In light of all this, who knows why my canine cousins took time from their busy schedule of licking, barking, and couch encroachments to stare pointedly at a man slicing strawberries. But I do know one thing.

Oh yes. Dogs think.

For more proof, you can check out this video of Cuda in which he miraculously picks his own Christmas stocking out of the full family line-up.

Has a dog ever surprised you with its smarts? Or its lies?

Tags:animal intelligence, animals, cockapoo, dog cartoons, dogs, family, Golden Retriever, humor, Lab, lying, Malamute, pets, polls, Rhodesian Ridgeback
Posted in Animals | 4 Comments »

Fox News on Gabby Douglas: If Only Americans Were More Like the Chinese

August 8, 2012

On coming to the US for the first time over a decade ago, my husband quickly noticed something about Americans.

Our flag is everywhere.

Not only does it hang at many offices and businesses – many homes have their own small flagpole on the porch. Decor and clothing emblazoned with the stars and stripes are a common sight year-round.

This is not something that every country does.

But we’ve been slacking of late, according to US conservative media giant Fox News.

Under the screen banner of “New Concerns About American Patriotism at Olympics“, Fox News commentators Alisyn Camerota and David Webb congratulate history-making gymnast Gabby Douglas (cherubic nemesis of stone-faced Russian silver and bronze winners) while questioning her devotion to her home country.

“Gabby had that great moment, everyone was so excited,” Camerota says of Gabby’s win in the women’s all-around gymnastics final, “and she’s in hot pink.”

Photo from UsMagazine.com.

What should Gabby have been wearing? Three colors. I’ll let you guess which ones.

“We’re not as vociferous as we once were about shouting ‘USA’ and draping ourselves in the flag,” Camerota mourns. Why couldn’t Gabby have shown her love of America by performing in a star-spangled suit?

The two commentators tut sorrowfully over Gabby’s lack of nationalistic pride.

“What we’re seeing is this kind of soft anti-American feeling that Americans can’t show our exceptionalism,” Webb says.

Camerota wonders if Americans have become wary of appearing too vain in the eyes of the world.

She wonders if Americans like Gabby are saying, “we know we’re great, but let’s be great quietly.” If so, shame on them.

Camerota and Webb applaud the Chinese gymnasts for wearing red – how patriotic of them. If only the American Olympians could have followed that example.

“I never won any athletic trophies,” Camerota chuckles in the segment. But she and Gabby do have something in common. While Camerota laments Americans’ modern failure to “drape themselves in the flag”, it’s clear that she doesn’t see wearing red, white and blue as a primary responsibility of conservative news anchors – Camerota wears a pink dress in the segment.

I wrote a story recently about a Philadelphia youth soccer team that traveled to Sweden for an international tournament including 70 countries. When they arrived, the US boys got special recognition not because they wrapped themselves in the flag and set about declaring their nationalist pride in America as the best country in the world, but because of all the teams in the tournament, the US team was the most diverse. It included not only players whose families were from North and South America, but Europe and Africa as well.

When it comes to the Olympics, let’s harp less on the fact that not every athlete turns herself into a US flag burrito, and perhaps celebrate the fact that few other nations bring a team so full of athletes of every color.

Speaking of all our lovely colors, Camerota is white and Webb is black. But there’s still something a bit fishy about how they criticize Gabby for wearing pink.

Not only is Camerota herself in pink. As Bleacherreport.com points out, 2008 US gymnastics gold medalist Nastia Liukin won in pink as well.

Any whaddaya know, here’s the gold-medal-winning Rebecca Soni, Captain of the 2012 US Women’s Olympic Swim Team:

Image from OpenWaterSwimming.com

Did those Fox pundits give a peep about Liukin or Soni? No.

I wonder why?

Rock on, Gabby!

For more on my feelings about American exceptionalism, check out my poem, “The United States’ Ultimate Crushing Doom, Upon Us in the Year 2011“.

Tags:American Exceptionalism, Fox News, Gabby Douglas, gymnastics, humor, Olympics 2012, patriotism, polls, racism, US flag
Posted in Pompous Philosophizing | 3 Comments »

The Anti-Bridezilla

June 28, 2012

If you’re in your twenties, April, May and June could be combined into one 91-day month and renamed “Wedding Blitz”. If it’s not your own or your friends’ weddings, your friends are giddily departing for bridal-party weekends. There’s hardly any room left for the smug and bubbly “my hubby is the best in the world!” anniversary posts from the girls who had their wedding a few years ago.

As every advice-column reader knows, weddings are ripe territory for everything that is wrong with humanity. The bride senses any disappointment that could tarnish Her Special Day faster than the Hubble Telescope can spot the moon. The wedding party is secretly smoldering about the amount of time and money they were forced to invest in useless satiny get-ups and shoes that will never, ever match any other outfit. And that’s not even counting all the people who aren’t even there, but who are offended because they weren’t invited. Finally, all the happy guests are waiting for the interval after which they may begin to feel resentful for the delayed, insufficient or non-existent thanks that accompanied their wedding gift.

I felt a lot of pressure on this point. I had two bridal showers, one a surprise. The day after the wedding, my husband and I sat down and opened wedding gifts for about two hours straight. I was exhausted before I even began the thank-you notes.

My worst thank-you note moment occurred the first time I used a gorgeous, expensive blender we’d received on our wedding day and it struck me that I didn’t remember thanking anyone for it. I got out my master list of gifts and givers and desperately scanned it. There was no blender on it. I searched the box the blender came in for a note or a tag but came up empty.

Please, please, if the giver of this blender reads my blog, identify yourself and I will dispatch a thank-you note, five years late.

But what I really want to share with you today, friends, is proof that wedding mania hasn’t pushed the human race to the brink of hell. Sometimes, a thank-you note is not a source of stress, errors and resentment.

Observe.

In April, my husband and I attended the out-of-town wedding of one of my former co-workers who has remained a friend.

I was feeling guilty, because after I paid for our accommodations, our budget was so tight that month that I didn’t have money left over for a decent wedding gift. So I wrote a nice message in a card for the bride and groom. There wasn’t even a gift card in the envelope. Just my well-wishes.

But several weeks later, this is the note I got in the mail:

Take note, brides.

I’m sharing it as an antidote to everything that’s wrong with the world. Despite last week’s controversial interview, I haven’t given up on marriage. But my friend just restored my faith in weddings, too.

Tags:brides, bridezilla, humor, marriage, polls, summer, thank-you notes, weddings
Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments »

Alaina Mabaso's Blog

Posts Tagged ‘polls’

A Bipartisan List of the Five Worst Things About the Election, With Zero Statistics or Polls

Overnight at Eastern State Penitentiary: true stories from my years on the ghost hunt (Part 3)

Overnight at Eastern State Penitentiary: true stories from my years on the ghost-hunt

Literary Lies: The Five Things You Really Mean When You Say “It’s On My List”

Don’t Bind the Blame to Romney – He’s Not Alone.

Fish of the One Percent? An Interview with Trailblazing Vet Dr. Greg Lewbart

Thoughts on Babysitting Which I May Sorely Regret Making Public

When Dogs Lie.

Fox News on Gabby Douglas: If Only Americans Were More Like the Chinese

The Anti-Bridezilla

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