November, 2007 archive

The local rag carries a daily feature on the front page of the local section.

The feature is entitled “A City’s Deadly Toll.” It lists the number of homicides year to date in Philadelphia. There have been more homicides this year than there are days in the year 2007 so far.

And, no doubt, when I open the paper tomorrow, two or three more murders will have happened over night.

Actually, two is not a bad night. Sometimes, it’s three or four or five.

Yeah, I know I live in Delaware, but I worked in Center City Philadelphia for many years.

I used to be a member of a Center City church.

Philadelphia is a great town and I love it.

When I read David Aldridge’s column this morning, I thought it was a powerful piece of writing, but I wondered, just how could I share it with my two or three regular readers?

Then I realized.

It’s a powerful piece of writing. Who cares to whom he directed his column? He speaks to all of us.

For when one life is wasted, all of us are diminished.

From today’s local rag:

A doctor and his wife who face deportation because of a long-ago mistake on their immigration paperwork reported to federal authorities Monday but were allowed to return home while lawyers seek political support for them to remain in the U.S.

Dr. Pedro Servano and his wife, Salvacion, obeyed an order to meet with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials in Philadelphia and were told to report back in 60 days, attorney Gregg Cotler said. No deportation date was set, he said.

“I think that’s very hopeful,” Cotler said.

The Servanos, parents of four U.S. citizens and prominent members of their central Pennsylvania community, could be deported to their native Philippines because of a change in their marital status during their visa-application process more than 20 years ago.

The Servanos were single in 1978 when they applied for U.S. visas. They did not receive them until after they were married, but U.S. officials were not notified of the change in their marital status.

By all indications, they were not aware that they had to amend their applications.

They have served their community well and lived exemplary lives.

And the United States is preparing to throw them away.

This is not right.

Upyernoz sums it up well:

so now the administration is switching tactics entirely. it’s giving up on reconciliation, which means it’s not trying to fulfill any of the benchmarks anymore. which can only mean that the surge was a failure–the benchmarks are the measure set by the administration to measure the surge’s progress and now the administration itself admits that those benchmarks will not be met. the surge simply did not do what it was supposed to do.

Yeah, well, he’s right and you all know that. All the claims of “success” are rationalizations for failure. Some slim gains in calm on the streets of Baghdad and not much of nothing anywhere else. And no political gains at all–and, remember, the idea of the S(pl)urge ™ was to buy time for political consolidation, not to perfect the occupation.

Another Bushie failure.

The war in Iraq–conceived in lies, prosecuted with incompetence, propagated in duplicity.

And this surprises us how?

My brother is an umpire.

I’ve seen him in action. He’s actually pretty damned good, as much as it pains me to say that.

(Full disclosure: I got suckered into umpiring once, first base. Never again. Give me a training class in front of a bunch of hostile railroad conductors who have just come off 90-day disciplinary suspensions any day of the week and twice on Sundays.)

It’s not his day job. He’s one of the persons who umpire Little League and Babe Ruth and High School games, for no or for only token pay, so kids get to play the game. He’s been doing it for almost 30 years.

He doesn’t do it because he enjoys the abuse from coaches and parents and fans. He doesn’t do it because he likes ejecting the occasional obnoxious player or parent or coach from the park (something he doesn’t hesitate to do, with an autocratic streak he didn’t show when I, pulling three years’ rank, was Wild Bill to his Jingles).

He umpires because he loves baseball.

He sent me this link. Welcome to umpiring (oh, yeah, he’s got some great stories about the parents and the coaches and the players, but they are his to tell):

The most common cause of fatalities amongst recreational boaters is getting drunk and falling overboard.

That’s one reason I run an alcohol-free boat. The other is that the water is so much fun, who needs a drink?

The next greatest danger for recreation boaters is fire, not so much for outboards–because everything is pretty much out in the open–but for I/Os and inboards. If there’s a leak or a mistake, gas fumes can build up in the engine compartment and kabloeey!

I was out on the Chesapeake one day and saw a recreational boat burning. It’s a pretty gruesome sight–lots of smoke and the fire doesn’t go out until it reaches the waterline.

Fiberglass burns good.

As a couple found out yesterday.

I feel for the couple and their loss. I once met a couple at Georgetown Yacht Basin who, upon retirement, had purchased a sailboat and pretty much used it as their home as the sailed about North America, much as some persons purchase RVs and cruise KOA.

I wonder whether they had the boat inspected by a marine surveyor when they bought it–buying a boat to sail down the Intracoastal Waterway is a lot bigger investment than buying a little runabout to trailer from here to there.

And, you know, the water is a dangerous place. And what you can see from the boat is only the top of it.