Let us mourn a great newspaper

A grand old newspaper has died.

I’ve never been to Denver but have known that it was one of the last two-newspaper cities in our nation. The Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News were two papers I once considered joining, but now I’m kind of glad I didn’t.

It must be wrenching for the residents of Denver and surrounding areas to lose one of their newspapers with the demise of the Rocky Mountain News. Consider this, San Francisco is facing the loss of its only large paper, the Chronicle. After that, it’s bloggers and Web sites for news for the city by the bay.

Some might say good riddance to the Rocky, as it was called. Another lefty-liberal voice silenced, and about time, they would say. Those who lost their jobs, some might say, deserve their fate for working for a mouthpiece for the evil ones in our society.

Hogwash. Newspaper people’s views span the political spectrum. I’ve worked with conservatives and enjoyed having their views expressed in the newspaper and discussing the issues, knowing they offered a much-needed balance to the discussions of the day. The news business needs a lot more conservatives in the newsroom. If nothing else, it can make for lively chats over lunch.

And remember, it’s not just the paper’s employees who are affected. It’s their wives, children, grandchildren and the society as a whole. It puts a lot of people into the job market at a time when jobs are scarce and paychecks are shrinking. And it silences a lot of editorial voices.

Tough, some might say, but it’s easy to say that when one still has a job.

I grieve with my colleagues. I was once part of the Scripps family of newspapers, and we always saw the “Rocky” as the height of our professional possibilities in journalism.

There is no bright side to this, but at least the staff will be paid through April 28, according to the Rocky’s competitor, The Denver Post. I presume there will be severance, too, and that will lighten the blow a very tiny bit, but it’s no substitute obviously for a lost job, lost benefits and the possible end of a career.

Looking at the Web site for the Rocky, there were the stories about the closing and the goodbye columns, but there was also news of events in Colorado, obituaries, business news, and more. Newspaper people are adept at bemoaning their fate, but I’m proud that they kept to it to the end.

When the lights go out at the Rocky and the last desk is cleaned out, maybe all that pride will have been for naught, but I try to look at the bright side. We live in a free country, with a press whose members don’t have to worry about the government censoring the paper to keep bad news out and arrest those who dare challenge the power.

RIP, the Rocky Mountain News.

Backyard astronomy — in the backyard

I took out my trusty Celestron C8 telescope last night and did some backyard astronomy, but unlike on most nights, I observed from a new site: the backyard of my house.

Usually, I put the telescope in my driveway and offer views to others, but it’s a pain for several reasons, not the least of which is the streetlight across the street.

Even more than a full moon, amateur astronomers despise streetlights. They turn every night sky into a washed-out mess and radiate light uselessly into the sky. When I lived in Vero Beach, in a new subdivision, the realization shortly after I moved in that I was going to have a streetlight right next to my driveway was a huge disappointment.

But at my house in Ellenton, Fla., I benefit from a backyard that looks out on somewhat wooded open spaces, and there are no streetlights in sight. Even the sky to the west, where my hated streetlight is, is not a total loss, and my north, east and south views are awesome.

Setting up involved bringing the telescope’s parts and my table and folding seat through the house, around the cats, onto the back porch, out the side door of the porch and into the grassy yard. I walked the already-assembled tripod and mount around the side of the house and found a good spot for it in the yard.

As the sun went down, I assembled everything and then brought my laptop out because I was going to use a sky program to try to find some objects using setting circles.

The only fly in the ointment was that someone a couple of blocks away was mowing a lawn with the loudest lawnmower I’ve ever heard, but he eventually ran out of grass to mow and stopped.

It got dark, and I did the most accurate polar alignment I could. Some people, me included, usually just line up on Polaris and start observing, but I tried to align to the North Celestial Pole, which is near Polaris, using the polar alignment scope in the mount. I was successful and started with the planet Venus.

The clock drive was balky but I managed to get some good views, and then it was dark enough to try some deep-sky objects. Until I get a new telescope (after I find a new job that pays and offers benefits), this is the way to go for me.

I suffer from an intense lack of imagination, so I go for the easy stuff, like M42 in Orion. I observed the nebula through different eyepieces, then decided to try for two Messier objects in Auriga, M36 and M37. I found them using the right-angle sweep method (here’s the list of objects), and was ready for a new challenge: using setting circles to find an object.

I was running my laptop on battery power, but had neglected to lower the screen brightness. The laptop suddenly went dark, then shut down. The battery had run too low.

I hadn’t recorded the right ascension and declination of the star I wanted to point at or the object I wanted to try to find, so I was stuck. I could have run an extension cord to the laptop, but decided not to. As luck would have it, the sky began to cloud over. I took a last look at M37, then started shutting it all down.

As luck would have it, after I moved everything back in, the skies cleared again. Drat, foiled again.

I’m thinking I may do the backyard thing a couple of nights a week when I’m home. It’s definitely a fun way to observe without having that supernova of a streetlight ruining the views.

I’d start buying again, if …

Every so often, I take out my telescope, a Celestron C8 I bought in early 1986, and wonder if it’s time to buy a new mount.

The telescope itself is fine and has much more great service to give me, but fiddling with the Super Polaris mount and the balky clock drive has me wondering if it’s time for a change.

Back when the telescope first arrived, the idea of a computer pointing your telescope was something for the huge observatories. Today, you can get a mount that’s set up to use an easy-to-configure handheld system with the positions of stars, planets and deep-sky objects in memory.

On a recent night, someone I met at a public astronomy event came to the house and I helped him with his system, and learned a lot myself. And yet again, I wondered if maybe it was time for me to get a new mount so I could join the modern amateur astronomy world.

The trouble is, without a job I am rightly reluctant to spend any money right now on things that aren’t totally essential to life.

Sure, I have some freelance writing and a temporary job coming up in April at the Census Bureau, but I am worried about my economic future. That’s what being unemployed in a declining economy will do to you.

I suppose that makes me part of the problem since many other Americans have stopped spending out of fear that they’ll be next to get that call into the HR office for a meeting. I can’t say banks are totally to blame for the credit freeze since many people are deciding not to borrow right now, fearing they won’t be able to pay their debts and will see their credit destroyed.

It’s a vicious cycle as people avoid buying new cars and other items.

There are signs of hope, though. The unemployment check increase doesn’t sound like much, but it’s extra money, and there’s another extension to benefits that I am grateful for. In Florida, the Republican governor, Charlie Crist, has decided that President Barack Obama is on the right track and is supporting the latter’s plans, which will help many people in Florida. Things will get better over time, and maybe in a few months I’ll feel secure enough to buy that new mount for my telescope.

In the meantime, I’ll just keep on looking for a job.

A job, and this time it’s real

A while back, I posted a triumphant notice that I had finally landed a job. It was with the Census Bureau and temporary, but it was something.

Anyway, the next day the offer was rescinded because the job had been offered to someone before me and the call to me was a mistake.

Well, I got the call today for a job, not the same level or pay as the previous offer, but almost as good. There are some positive aspects: the training is much closer and I won’t be a leader but a worker. Still, I am eager to get back to work and earning money. Maybe it’ll lead to something better.

The training starts in early April, and the work begins after that and lasts for 10 to 12 weeks.

See, all we need are jobs that pay decently and respect us, and the mood gets better.

GM’s plans for Saturn are a sad end

I seem to be a killer of automobile brands. I owned a Plymouth Reliant, and Plymouth is now gone. I owned an Oldsmobile Alero, and Oldsmobile is now gone. I owned a Pontiac Firebird, and now Pontiac is on the chopping block. I owned a Toyota Camry Solara, and Toyota canceled its two-door version of the Camry for 2009.

And I owned a Saturn, and GM is planning to put an end to Saturn. Based on my current car ownership, maybe now’s the time to get a Ford Mustang, before Ford puts its pony car out to pasture. Of course, I doubt that would happen, but if I’m the killer of brands it may be prudent.

In 1993, I was the proud owner of a 1987 Pontiac Firebird. It had GM’s 2.8-liter V6, a four-speed automatic transmission and was a bright red, though the paint was starting to fade on the hood. Still, I liked the car and had paid it off about a year earlier. With 75,000 miles on the odometer, it was feeling its age, though. The driver’s seat was worn, the turn signal stalk’s white lettering was mostly gone and the pop-up headlight on the left side didn’t pop up without manual intervention. Oh, and the emergency brake didn’t work.

I had paid $13,300 for the car in 1987. Mechanical glitches were becoming a problem, and the water pump had been the latest expense. I was kind of in the mood for a new car and, like many others I had watched the advent of Saturn with a sort of wonder. Could GM really make cars as good as the Japanese? The Korean carmaker Hyundai had attracted a lot of attention, but (like the first cars the Japanese sold in the U.S.) had not impressed a lot of people.

One day when my cousin Angelo had picked me up at the Pontiac dealer after dropping the ‘bird off for the water pump job, I said, “Let’s check out Saturn.”

So we drove to the Saturn store in West Palm Beach, where there were only a couple of cars on the lot. There had been a long strike at a GM brake parts plant, and Saturn had stopped production. Demand was very high for Saturns and you could just walk on the lot, look around, read the brochures and displays, and no salesperson would walk over and “claim” you.

In any case, the salespeople were all too busy with customers, so me and Angelo walked around and looked at everything. We took a ride in a Saturn that day when a salesman finally got to me, and I was impressed. Still, I had reservations since the Firebird was paid off and being repaired. I could wait.

I lived near the Boynton Beach Mall in Boynton Beach, Fla., and one of the mall stores had been made into a mini-showroom. I picked up a brochure for the 1993 Saturns and decided what I wanted: a 1993 Saturn SC2 with a five-speed manual transmission and a couple of option packages. The total sticker price was $16,600. Since there was no negotiation, that plus tax, title, etc., was the price.

I thought about it, thought about it, and finally drove to Saturn of Delray Beach to see if I could find the exact car I wanted.

A very patient salesman took me on a test drive in a car with a 5-speed stick, and it was quite a ride. At the end, and despite my inept clutch and stick technique, I decided to take the plunge and buy a Saturn SC2 when it arrived.

So I signed the papers and left. That afternoon, the salesman called to say the car had arrived after I left the dealer. A couple of days later (and after a lesson from a co-worker at the post office in the art of driving a stick shift), I showed up at the dealer, finished the deal and drove off in my beautiful, blue green, 1993 Saturn SC2.

I guess I was like a lot of Saturn owners in that I really liked the car. It ran well, the stick was easy to use and it could carry me and my stuff where I needed to go. The years clicked by, I paid off the car and continued to enjoy it. Problems that came up included a battery cable that went bad and a muffler that needed to be replaced. Other than a body repair (after a guy parked a standard shift pickup truck on a gas station parking lot and it rolled off, hitting my baby!) that’s all I remember about work that needed to be done.

In 1999, I had more than 100,000 miles on my Saturn but the mileage was starting to show in the interior. The “A” pillar trim on the driver’s side was working loose (I Scotch-taped it back into place); the driver’s side sun visor was coming loose; the faux-leather trim around the shifter was loose; and the driver’s side window crank could not engage fully. My baby Saturn was getting on in years, but still I held on.

Yet I was becoming unfaithful and eyeing new models. In addition to having money saved up, I had about $3,500 in cash I could use from The GM Card (a credit card) toward a new GM car (but not a Saturn). Looking in a parking lot one day, I saw an Oldsmobile Alero and looked it up online. Now that was an interesting car.

The Alero I wanted was a sporty two-door car with some interesting option packages (but no five-speed stick). I had my heart set on a 2000 Alero but the dealers still had 1999s, so I waited and saved my money.

Finally, I visited Schumacher Oldsmobile in West Palm Beach and talked to a salesman (I remember that his last name was Schofield). He was a good guy and we made a deal on a 2000 Alero with the Sport and Performance packages, which included a 3.4-liter V6 and a four-speed automatic transmission.

It was a sad end, though, for my beloved Saturn. With 102,000 miles, I traded it in and got a pittance ($2,000), hardly a just reward for years of reliable and appreciated service.

The night before I traded the car in, in October 1999, a hurricane had swept up the middle of Florida, dumping a lot of rain on the Lake Worth area. The water had come partway up the driveway but the car hadn’t been affected. The next morning, I drove to the Olds dealer and the damage there was very minimal. The car, which they got from a dealer in North Florida, had been stored in the service department building and was prepped and ready for me to take delivery. They got the computers up and running, and I was soon out of there with my wonderful new Alero.

It was kind of sad to drive off and see my former Saturn sitting on the lot. I’m sure it’s no longer a car, and was sold for scrap long ago.

And now Saturn is going away. GM denied the make good products and people lost interest. By 2013, Saturn will be just a memory, joining Plymouth, Oldsmobile and other badges in the ranks of those that have been retired.

It’s sad, but maybe necessary. Still, I think Saturn could have survived and thrived, possibly as a brand for GM’s hybrid and electric cars. But it’s not to be.

Still, I have the old photos, the memories and the knowledge that, for 102,000 miles, there was a seat for me in a Saturn.

Questioning my life

In my early 20s, I made a decision that changed my life.

Sure, I had served in the Marine Corps from 17 to 21, and had a lot of chances to make a mess of it as others had done, but I’d navigated that minefield and avoided the bad choices that I saw others make.

Now, as a civilian again and looking to make my way in the world, I faced another choice.

A friend from my high school years had just offered me cocaine. Like a lot of people, I had smoked marijuana and didn’t think its use was the awesome crime others believed it was, but cocaine; well, that was different.

I realized that this was not the life I wanted. I turned down the offer, began to find my way and soon found a job, then another, then moved to Florida and so on.

It was the right decision, but lately I’ve been wondering. Being unemployed, you have a lot of time to wonder.

Working – and taking jobs that were mostly nights and weekends – meant no social life. Women I met through dating services – since I couldn’t meet women any other way – quickly turned me away when they found out that I’d be on the job on Friday and Saturday nights. I can’t say I blame them; they wanted a man and to go places and do things, but my schedule made that impossible.

But I kept on working and at a few points even got “weekends-off” positions but still ended up working nights. It sucked, but I felt that making a living took precedence. My closest opportunity for a girlfriend I felt was someone I met in the late 1980s who was on the verge of making a commitment to me, but backed off and chose someone else because, while he was not the most compassionate man, he worked days. I was not only working nights but also attending college during the day, and working nights was key to my school schedule.

I sometimes wonder if maybe I should have chosen the wrong path. I wouldn’t have a nice house, an interesting career, a clean record and nothing in my past to explain away, but maybe I’d have love and companionship, and the feeling that a better future was ahead of me, not behind me.

It’s weird, I know. But it gnaws at me sometimes. I was reading in the newspaper today about a program that helps ex-convicts find jobs. All the ex-cons are so self-righteous, and talk on and on about their challenges in finding a job. All I can say is, try being 48 years old, college educated and experienced, and even Wal-Mart won’t hire you to push shopping carts.

It’s tempting to say that I walked the straight and narrow for 30 years and have little to show for it right now. I sometimes even envy people who have walked on the wrong side because they can use their bad past to show others they are “making progress,” and society grades on rate of improvement, not past achievement.

I guess I’m feeling kind of down. I’ve been sending out resumes and cover letters like crazy, there have been no responses, and my bank account is shrinking slowly but surely. I feel almost like I threw my life away being a good person, and that had I taken that hit of cocaine, things might have eventually turned out better.

That’s crazy thinking, of course, but it makes you wonder.

Speak out, and dodge the flood of spam

I probably shouldn’t have written anything.

My recent advisory post about those e-mails that come out of nowhere offering you a job seems to have struck a nerve in the community of those who send out such e-mails.

I got hit with a flood of “scamployment” offers for all sorts of pseudo-jobs. It really isn’t that big a deal since I just delete them all and add their domains to my rejected list, but they’re clever, and the names just keep on changing.

I’m not sorry, though. If someone becomes more skeptical because of my writing and does not get scammed, that’s a hearty “mission accomplished” for me.

And while I have you reading, check out this story in the Vero Beach Press Journal, one of my former newspapers, which corrects some misinformation I put out in my comments on the stadium game.

I goofed when I said that the Dodgers had to pay back the bond issue that was made when Indian River County, Fla., bought the Dodgertown complex from the Dodgers. The team had threatened to leave unless the deal, dubbed by some letter writers to the paper “the DDD: Dumb Dodger Deal,” went through.

They signed a long-term deal after the county ponied up the dough, but decided to split to Arizona for spring training, leaving the county holding the complex, and the bag, not to mention the cost of keeping the complex in good shape in case they can steal a team from another Florida city.

As my ex-colleague Elliott Jones notes in the story from Feb. 13, 2009:

For now, though, the county is left paying $102,000 a month to keep up Dodgertown, according to county budget figures.

And the county and city, which co-own Dodgertown, still are left with paying off a $17 million bond issue approved in 2001 to keep the World Series-winning team here.

The county paid the Dodgers $10 million for the facility, then leased it back to the organization for $1 a year to operate at the baseball organization’s expense.

The local government spent $7 million of the bond issue on building new facilities, including a new administration building.

When the Dodgers announced the team was leaving, “It was tough,” said Vero Beach City Manager Jim Gabbard. Before becoming city manager, he was a member of the Save the Dodgers Committee, a local group that advocated the $17 million bond issue.

Under the county’s contract with the Dodgers, it could have required the Dodgers to pay off the bond issue and pay fair market value for the property. But Baird said that could have risked dismantling Dodgertown, if the Dodgers paid the county back by selling the complex to developers.

Gabbard said Dodgertown’s highest value depends on keeping it a tourist-oriented baseball facility.

Currently, $13.4 million of the bond debt principal still has to be paid off. Ultimately the bond issue will cost $27.9 million, including interest. The county’s share will be paid off in 2021; the state’s in 2031, said county Budget Director Jason Brown.

The state is locked into paying off the bond issue, county officials said.

Annual bond payments now total $1.26 million, all of which is being paid with local tourist and sales taxes, along with $500,000 a year authorized by the state Legislature. A county half-cent sales tax pays $390,000 a year. The local tourist tax share is $375,000.

“There is no one more than Joe Baird who wants this (costs) off our backs,” said Baird, the county administrator who has been deeply involved in negotiations to try to bring another baseball organization to the community.

In addition to the bond issue, the city of Vero Beach alone spent $10 million buying the former nine-hole, 37.6-acre Dodgertown Golf Course site. The purchase from private developers, said Gabbard, was done in part to ensure the vacant land remains available for use in conjunction with a spring training site.

Also, city and county officials set aside $2 million for future repairs and improvements at Dodgertown.

Florida politicians tend to lose all sense of perspective when it comes to sports, and thus would rather “invest” money in spring training stadiums that get six weeks of usage (more if the team has a Florida State League team) than “waste” it on roads, infrastructure, etc.

Jones also writes that the end result of all this love for the Dodgers was repaid the way any city that’s ever coughed up dough for a team has been repaid:

In the end, the Dodgers moved its spring training to new publicly paid for facilities in Arizona, more than half a continent closer to its home base in Los Angeles.

Like we expected a different outcome.

Beware of ‘out-of-the-blue’ e-mails

You’re checking your e-mail one day, and you see a message from someone who’s looking to hire. At a time when many companies are firing people and perhaps you have been one of them, your defenses may be down. “Someone wants me,” you think. Well, think again. I’ve been doing a lot of that lately.

Much to the dismay of a lot of people trying to “hire” me for jobs, I’ve become a lot more skeptical of late.

It’s an essential survival mechanism when you are down on your luck, and finding a job – any job – is becoming a cutthroat competition between you and hundreds or thousands of other people.

When you’re vulnerable and desperately in need, it’s tempting to reach for opportunities that sound good. That’s human nature. We want at least part of our old life back. Unless you’re a member of the economic elite, you’ll probably never earn as much money working as you did before, and you may be thrown into permanent poverty with your credit score ruined for life. Believe me, you’ll have a lot of company there.

So when you get one of those e-mails out of the blue from a company offering you a position, it’s tempting to throw caution to the winds and bet that this is your big break. My luck’s got to change sooner or later, you think, so this has to be “the one.”

Think again.

An outfit from Provo, Utah, sent me an e-mail out of the blue recently. I guess they harvested my resume from a job-search site and used the e-mail address to pitch me a business opportunity. I tend to trust no one who just contacts me “cold” and sounds too eager to hire me, so I perform due diligence on every company and read whatever I can find via Google (pro and con) before making an informed choice.

Indeed, some Web postings report that Utah has a reputation for being a “scam capital.”

According to a February 2006 posting at a site called Pyramid Scheme Alert, “Utah has the highest concentration of multi-level marketing scheme headquarters per capita of any state in America.”

There are those who would accuse me of being too choosy and too skeptical, but I’ve made the right choice every time in rejecting such offers. By setting up standards and holding to them, I am protecting myself and my financial status.

I will probably end up losing a lot if I cannot find a decent-paying job, but I will not compromise my standards or spend my shrinking savings on a bogus “opportunity” that will only benefit a con artist.

A big issue for many people is that they think spreading out and spilling their personal information to several job-hunting sites is the way to go. I have a few sites that I use regularly, but a couple of days ago I decided that Craigslist.org had to be taken off my list.

Lots of folks looking for work have found that the job postings on Craigslist are either fake, are multi-level marketing schemes, or are commissioned sales jobs. I decided I won’t find my future at that site.

The reality is that if someone advertising a job won’t even reveal the name of the company and its location, it’s better to just move on. I’d rather read five ads from legitimate companies that are looking for workers than 50 ads in which 45 are fake and five are real.

These are tough times, and in tough times people are scared and vulnerable. We’re subject to economic forces way beyond our control, and our economic futures are in the hands of people who have no interest in us as human beings. That makes us vulnerable to people who pretend to care but are mainly after what’s left of our financial resources.

The only weapon I have left in my intellectual arsenal is my brain and my skepticism.

Remember, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is too good to be true.

A last visit to Shea Stadium

It was a weird dream. In the last seconds of sleep this morning — before I awoke to fire up the computer and claim my weeks for unemployment — I dreamed of Shea Stadium.

Maybe because I had read in The New York Times about how the stadium is being disassembled, and that some fans were visiting to pay tribute to the place that gave them so much heartache – and joy.

It seemed like I was either there, or watching it on TV. I dimly remember thinking that I was either standing behind or watching Tim McCarver on TV. On the scoreboard was a giant picture of former Mets first-baseman Keith Hernandez, and I thought it must be a shot from the championship season of 1986. In the photo’s background, it was night, the right-field stands were packed and it might have been from Game 6 or 7 of the 1986 World Series.

The field looked so beautiful, so green, with bright lines marking the field like you see just before the first pitch. It looked like the Shea I saw the first time my father took me to a game, emerging from one of the tunnels into the bright sunlight and seeing the field, so green, so ready for baseball.

Then I awoke, and was sad as I realized that the picture in my dream is just a picture in a dream. Shea Stadium is never going to be that way again. Check out this Web site for photos of the demolition of the stadium. They make me want to cry. Only a part of the familiar semicircle remains; the field is a field of debris, not dreams.

Check out this video clip from Jan. 24 of the demolition.

The new Citi Field will be an improvement, but I bet it will be many years before I get to attend a game and see the Mets play (and maybe longer before I see the Mets win) there.

The post that disappeared

For a few hours on Friday, a post appeared on my site celebrating the fact that I had landed a temporary job with the Census Bureau.

Before I left Friday for my job interview at another outfit, I returned it to draft mode. Why?

Well, I got a call as I was preparing to leave for the interview, telling me that there had been a mistake, and that the job I had been offered had already been offered to someone else, and filled.

I was assured that I was the next person in line for the same type of job, which should open up in a few days.

That’s the way it is in the new economic order, I guess. Even the government can pull back an offer.