Use typewriters to (BAM!) write (ka-POW!) to your (kee-WHACK!) congressman

I just dropped a line to Sen. Mike Lee and used my typewriter to do it.

It felt good.

I'd read the story about his talk yesterday in Ogden in the Standard-Examiner (click) and was feeling a bit miffed, not at what he said, but at what he didn't say, which was considerable. He wants to defund the ACA, he claims he doesn't want to shut down the government while doing so, and yet it's clear he represents the far right wing of Congress that is just itching for another show-down, shut-down, run down of the government to get what they want.

He mentioned that he has an alternative to the ACA (sometimes called Obamacare) but his detailed description of that was apparently too complex to get put into the newspaper. I went to his web site to read it but he seems to have neglected to post it there, too.

Plenty of opportunities to say I don't like ACA. Not a hint of his alternative.

But what the heck, he says letters make a difference, I felt like writing him, so I got out the Olympia, fed it some dead squashed tree and banged away. Didn't even have to stop and start over -- when you type the words have to be formulated ahead of time, your whole thoughts organized, an old trick you learn as a journalist (so you can dictate a story, no kidding, over the phone) so the words flowed.

And, as I said, it felt good. Typing this on my computer, the keys are mushy, they go (...pip!...) every time I hit one, taking no force whatsoever, no energy, no anger, no nothing.

(...pip!...)

Meh!

But with a typewriter, you burn calories!  You use force! You let the world know you're pissed!

Dear (BAM!) Senator Lee (Ke-WHACK!)

About your talk last night (Ka-POW!)

Sort of feels like the old Batman TV Show, eh? (click)

Great fun and, Sen. Lee promised to read it!  Maybe, with that kind of force, he'll get the (Ka-WAM!!) point.

His snailmail address is 316 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20510.  Be sure to use proper postage.
Here's my letter. Click to see larger image:

Three Reasons I love dogs, hate people

There's a very true saying that "the more I learn about people, the more I like dogs."

I really love dogs. I really miss mine. And after reading this morning's news I really, REALLY miss him. Why?

-- This story (click) out of San Francisco that the State of Nevada has been dumping mental patients in San Francisco. Hundreds were given one-way tickets and told to dial 911 when they got there or simply told "good bye!"

Nevada authorities are harumping, saying this certainly isn't their POLICY, but the numbers argue otherwise.

-- This story (click) that three teens in Oklahoma were bored, so they decided to kill someone. A baseball player, an Australian kid here on a scholarship, was jogging by so one said "There's our target," and they got in their car and shot him. He's dead, the teens are in custody.

Words fail.

-- As predicted, Iraq (click) is returning to its sectarian civil war style, with waves of car bombings, neighborhoods walling up, strife intensifying and so on and so forth, precisely as a lot of us predicted. Hell, there were those of us who predicted it would end up this way before the invasion -- Sunni, Shia and Kurds, all hate each other, all forced to be in one country together, all held together only by brutal dictators or equally brutal military occupation. And we go in and try to spread democracy and happiness, with no plan at all how to do it.

What could go wrong? And yet you know there are folks who are going to say "Obama is at fault, he pulled us too soon."

Cripes.

-- While Hill Air Force Base employees are moaning about their flight line cafe being closed due to sequestration, 57,000 children across the nation, including 100 in Weber County, are being booted from Head Start.

This means 57,000 chances for kids to grow up in poverty, alone at home, while their parents struggle to get by on minimum wages jobs -- working poor are Head Start's target clients -- that will never pay them a living wage because there are folks in this country who actually think the minimum wage should be lower, not higher.

The kids will grow up somehow, right? Of course with minimal instruction and guidance early on, they could also end up the kind of kids who sit around, getting bored, and actually think that shooting some passing jogger for fun is a good idea.

But what the heck, if they live in Nevada maybe someone will give them a free ride to 'Frisco.

Here Rover! Time for a walk!

Blood on the loading dock: The UP delivers another trunk murder

One could be forgiven for thinking that Ogden's Union Station was, in the past, a particularly brutal place.

I mean, what's up with all the dead bodies in trunks? People were shipping them in.

As we saw in  a previous blog post (link) one showed up in 1913. That involved a mother who had killed her daughter in Salt Lake, shipped her to Ogden when she came to this city with her former husband, and then was discovered by train personnel who noticed hair poking out of the trunk and a bad odor.

One ought to be anyone's ration, but in 1924 it happened again.

On the morning of March 15, 1924, baggage handlers at Union Station were moving a trunk from the UP train out of Denver to its designated connection on the  Southern Pacific. 

They noticed blood on the hinges of the trunk and called the depot security agent, who notified two Ogden City detectives.

They opened the trunk, "and the interior presented a ghastly sight. The blood stained body was found, the knees against the chin and tied tightly with twine. Rugs were wrapped around the head and body."

It was the body of Mrs. Fred Janssen, wife of a former church janitor in Denver. The body was taken to Larkin Funeral home, located conveniently just up the street at 24th and Adams. There further examination was made.

"Several deep gashes, apparently cut with a sharp instrument, were found on the back of the head," the evening "Standard" reported that same day. "The other wounds made by a blunt instrument, were also found upon the head. Three deep cuts were upon the forehead and the arms and breast were bruised."

One clue was a linen handkerchief (men used those back then) containing the initial "F" that was found "thrust tightly into the woman's throat."

The trunk had been shipped to Weed, California, before being intercepted in Ogden. Officials wired to Denver for the shipping declarations and paperwork of the trunk. 

Police in Denver started tracing the trunk's history and discovered expressmen who had helped haul it to the station and checked it in. The man checking it in had given the name "John Smith," but the expressmen said they picked the trunk up at an apartment owned by Fred Janssen. In the apartment police found blood on the carpet, and the hunt was on.

Janssen was captured two days later in Pueblo, Colorado, and told a story of hiring a Mexican to kill his wife, saying he feared she was about to try to kill him.

Police weren't buying it, though, and questioned him for three hours in what sounds, from the newspaper account, like one of those "hot seat" interviews you see in old police movies. One suspect the Miranda warning was not employed, or even cared for.

As Tuesday's story said, "at the end of the three hours Janssen in tears finally declared ' Yes, I have not been telling the truth. I killed my wife and placed her body in the trunk and shipped it to California."

Janssen speculated that his wife was still alive when he put her body into the trunk, but Ogden medical officials "saw nothing to indicate the woman lived after she was placed in the trunk," and said the blow to her head with a hammer was enough to kill her.

Here's something that would never happen today: After his wife's body was moved to Denver, the still-in-custody Janssen was taken to the funeral home to look at her body.

He'd been sitting in his jail cell saying "Don't let them hang me, I  don't want to die like that. If I've got to die for killing Bella, I wish they would let me kill myself."

At the funeral home he admitted to killing her for her life insurance and savings. Then, the news story says, 'the last threads of the mystery were gathered up last night after Janssen demonstrated over his wife's casket how he had wielded the hammer over her last Thursday night in there home here while she knelt in prayer."

"As the lid of Mrs. Janssen's casket was slowly opened, he bag to sob. Then while police watched he showed them how he killed her.

"I hit her three--four times," he said. 'like this … '

He also bent down and kissed her, the news reports said. 

The stories in the Denver press said his attorney planned to plead insanity. 

Special thanks to Sally Tasker, who donated the above shown newspaper to the Union Station archive, and to Sock Monkying Around antique shop for its invaluable help.

Of cheap cameras, expensive digits, and the twain that never meets.

I've got a little pt and sht digital, of course. Piece of crap. One of the Panasonics that are rebadged as Leicas, but I didn't buy the Leica and saved $400. OK camera but it has a spec of internal dust that, these cameras, essentially being pinhole cameras, shows up on the image at times, especially when I zoom.

OK, I can deal with that...never zoom. It's mostly a grandkid shooter, and travel notebook, so what the heck, keep saying I should get a good one, keep delaying, even the $80 a small digi on a blister pack feels like too much.

OK ...  so this weekend I was out at Bonneville Salt Flats shooting with that thing and my Leica CL, -- a small rangefinder camera made by those lovely German folk back in the 70s, although this particular one was actually built by Minolta to Leica quality specs -- shooting fine grain black and white Ilford Pan F film in the Leica, but as I was shooting I noticed that at the end of a roll, or near it, I'd wind and the camera would feel funny and make a brrrrr type sound and feel rough and I went

"Hmmmm?"

So I got home and took the film out and looked and, silly thing, the drive gear, that toothy thingy that pushes the film along, is broken. Unlike every other Leica on the planet, in which that thing is machined out of solid brass, this one is metal core with the teeth put on around it like a tire, made of plastic, and on one of the two toothy thingies (is there a name for those?) the tire had broken, there's a small little gap there, so the tire is not gripping the hub, and if you push it moves.

Hmmmmm.

So I pondered -- this is my favorite travel camera, it is also my first Leica. Get it serviced?

Wow. $200 for starters, plus parts, can you imagine what the part would cost? I can: A lot. Plus this camera has had 38 years of hard labor -- lots of wear, a coupla bumps, the odd ding, the usual.

So I looked at KEH camera brokers, an on-line dealer in Atlanta, good reputation, which had one in Exc condition on their ebay store (also on their listings, I suspect) for $430, shipping included.

Pondered for a whole five minutes and hit "buy."

So I guess what this says is I'd rather drop $430 on a real camera that will probably last another 38 years, than even 1/4th that much on a digital camera that will turn to crap overnight, practically.

I like to think this says good things about me.

Here's an image from the CL. Still works, but it's overlapping pics when it slips. Not good.

And one showing the slip--actually a kinda cool double exposure:

It's also worth noting that $430 will barely buy me a halfway decent Digital SLR -- while it also buys a classic film camera capable, as just proven, of lasting, by actual demonstration, 38 years.

Saw a drunk? Welcome to a city

One of the facts of life is that cities have people you don't necessarily want to meet.

Some are drunk, some are homeless, some are rude or smell funny or say bad things.

Some are (c) all of the above.  Some are just plain funny and even qualify as tourist attractions.

Seattle street scene

Ogden residents, some of them anyway, seem to be hypersensitive to these folks. It's as if they can't let the city's past go. They have to say "See, still a problem!" every time they see anything at all.

During the debate on the vote about Weber County Library's bond I had one person complain that she had been in the parking lot of the main library and was accosted by a homeless person. She was not injured, not even yelled at, just asked for money.

"Why should I vote for funds for a library if this sort of thing is going to happen?" was the essence of her comment.

A number of years ago it became fashionable to run down Ogden's 25th Street area. The mayor's chief administrative assistant wrote a column in the Standard-Examiner excoriating the area because homeless people took baths in the fountain at Union Station and there was public urination, homeless people and so forth.

Not saying it never happens, but I personally have never seen anyone take a bath in Union Station's fountain. I imagine some little kid gets into it at times, and I can imagine some radical water fights, but the idea that public bathing is a common thing down there is ludicrous.

As I recall, after that person's column ran I walked down the entire street, Washington to Wall. I saw no drunks, no beer bottles, no toilet activities. Nothing but shopkeepers trying to make a living.

Today I saw a facebook post from someone noting that they were on 25th Street last night. This poster mentioned that the street "used" to be wild and wooly, and then mentioned a couple of drunken activities she saw, some police activity, and so on.

She wasn't attacked or hurt, however, but the implication was that she thought the street was cleaned up, what's the story?

The story is "Welcome to the city. The situations all sound as if they were dealt with."

That's my point. Ogden is a city. ALL cities have folks that don't behave as if they are in church. ALL cities have public activities by folks doing stuff we don't approve of. This is the way things will be, as long as we don't live in a police state.

Doesn't mean the city is bad. Doesn't mean you should stay away.

Quite the opposite. If a city has life, and fun, and activities, it is going to have some spill-over.

That's what the cops are for. And since troublemakers don't like witnesses, by being downtown, by taking part in your city's activities, you actually help the cops keep that stuff away.

Some hot new wheels hit Two Bit Street

Was pedaling to Union Station this morning when I looked to the right and saw a guy taking snaps of one of the cooler pedal-driven machines I've seen in a long time.

It was Mike McDonald, an owner of Lucky Slice Pizza, at the corner of Lincoln and 25th.  The new wheels are his, to be used to deliver in the central part of town, he said, or just to sit outside and look cool.

The trike was made by the guys at Sid's Speed Shop. Sid was Deyne Stoker, who was killed riding his motorcycle in May, and he was so well known in the community the paper did a big story at the time (click.)

Mike said he talked to the guys at the shop about his dream delivery bike a while back, including tractor seat and other cool stuff like the cow bell and wooden cargo carrier, and the folks in the shop kept working on it. He credits Chad Shepherd and Dallas Casey for seeing the project through.

He took delivery Thursday evening, which is why he was out in front of the shop Friday morning taking snaps. He's just a proud owner of a brand new trike, and as a fellow bicycle owner I know that heady fun feeling and share it with him.

The pizza there is darn good, too.

No Maybe: Your digital memories are toast

Hate to be blunt, but this is why I'm glad to see that the archive library at Union Station collects books, papers, actual hard copies, of as much as it can.

So does Weber State University's Special Collections (click) library.

I keep beating this drum, but have to admit not many pay attention. I can't blame them -- the digital world is so darn easy, so quick, so simple, even I find myself falling into the trap.

Take a digital pic, plug camera into computer, there you are! No chemicals to mix, no negatives to dry, no prints to make. Point, snap, done!

And gone.

Exhibit one: An article in the New York Times today on the cost of storing movies after they are made and shown.  If they shoot the film on -- duh -- film, it can be put into a big can, sent to a salt mine in Kansas and stored away for a bit more than $1,000 a year. Easy.

The digital stuff they're shooting today?  The cost is more than $200,000 a year. Yes, you read that right. Here's the article (click).

The reason is that film technology is pretty solid. You have a physical item, a piece of film, and all you have to do is keep it from getting wet or too hot. Other than that, it just sits there. The technology to view it later is mechanical and very simple to reproduce. A hundred years from now someone who found a movie in a can could, with the aid of some simple mechanical and optical work, look at that film again.

Digital is another matter. The software to view it is constantly changing, so the file has to be constantly changed and migrated to keep up. Every time you do that you lose something.

The physical objects used to store those digital files -- CDs or hard drives or even flash drives -- are subject to corrosion or corruption or simply quitting to work. Much of that $200,000-plus is simply the constant maintenance and monitoring of the whole shebang. This is why NASA can no longer read all the data sent back by the original Viking satellite.

Exhibit Two: I saw this in action Wednesday while dropping some film off for developing at Imaging Depot -- a lady was there with a 3 1/2 inch floppy disk that had text she wanted opened up and printed out. Her computer no longer takes that size of disk, she wasn't even sure what software program was used to write the text, but it's stuff she hopes to keep.

The clerk was calling around, looking for someone with a computer that still had a floppy drive that worked. He found one, but it will cost the woman some money, and time, and she's lucky she did it now. Those computers are no longer made.

Interestingly, shortly after that I saw a computer with a disk drive at the Salvation Army thrift store for $6. Dunno if it works, but it's a start. I have an external USB floppy drive here at home too, but how long will USB drives be around? Like VHS tape players, you better buy one now (click).

My sister, who works as a conservation scientist at the Getty Conservation Institute (click), says the Smithsonian has a study going on to figure out how to get through this digital revolution without losing a whole century of art, writing, images and everything else.

If you want it to last, she says, put it on paper or carve it into stone. Papyrus, she said, is even better.Paper sounds pretty flimsy, but I have newspapers printed in Utah in the 1850s on rag bond paper (trees were scarce then) that look like new.

Which is why the Union Station, WSU and other archives are saving all the paper they can. Paper lasts and, when you consider all the hassle of digital, is much much cheaper to store.