Why My New Hometown Paper Is Better than the Times

I got a call this morning from Lisa, who works in the circulation department (or actually may be the department) at the Register-Star, Hudson's local paper, whose weekend edition I recently subscribed to during a promotion at the Shoprite, where I also entered a raffle and got $10 off on my groceries.  Lisa called to find out if I had gotten my first issue. I told her I hadn't checked the mail yet because of the rain, and she pointed out that the postman isn't allowed to put newspapers into a mailbox. (An unexpected bit of upstate knowledge.)  She was worried it might have gotten lost and asked if I'd call her back. The mailman had kindly put my paper in a plastic bag and hung it from the mailbox.  I called Lisa back to reassure her.  What's not to like about this place? 

So, I went inside, out of the rain, poured a cup of coffee and tucked into my first R-S weekend edition.  In addition to its fabulous customer service, here is what's great about the paper itself.

The front-page headliner:  Last Tuesday, a "Hudson man", Austin Suarez, whose nickname is Porky, was arrested, escaped in his car, and while doing so ran over a cop's foot (who is ok).  The police chased him across the river into Catskill but he eluded local forces on both sides of the Hudson and went home, where they managed to nab him later on after "a struggle".  The charge: having small amounts of hydrocodone and a needle. 

Second lead story:  A tractor-trailer truck driver after being stopped by the police took off and led them on an 8-mile chase down one of our local highways until he was finally caught. His crime: using his cell-phone non-hands-free

Front-page image: Someone at a cultural workshop for kids at the local primary school demonstrating a coat? Muskrat? Sting-ray?

Other front-page stories:

•        Treated discharge from a local toxic landfill was dumped into the local kill (old Dutch word for creek). Apparently the stuff is ok but we're encouraged to sign a petition to keep it clean. I'll do that.
•        Columbia county officials held a meeting on either privatizing a nursing home, keeping it, or building a new one, none of which was clear since the reporter didn't give any background or describe the roles of the people he quoted.
•        The town may set up a conservation advisory council to protect the Hudson River from rising sea levels.  If only every town would do that.  Or country for that matter.

Second section:  Less important news about Obama visiting the Pope, the missing plane, the health care deadline, the federal budget.

Columns:

•        The Clutterbusting writer just published part 3 on organizing your things before you move.  Exactly what I need. I went online and found her column but it didn't have parts 1 and 2. Or maybe it did but the articles weren't arranged chronologically so I couldn't find them.
•       ,The writer for the food column has been to Venice and likes to punctuate her recipes with Italian words for food, but otherwise she writes without pretension and warns me to get to the local farmer's market by 10:00 or I won't get any greens. I'm going to try her frittata spumosa, which she folds over into a "loaf" and, although not on the ingredient list, adds a "blob" of goat cheese to the top. Fresh basil is listed as an ingredient, but she doesn't have any because it's still cold and uses dried oregano instead.

Culture Section. Its cover sports a raft of heart-breakingly enthusiastic teeners who are performing in the Germantown Central School's production of the Wizard of Oz. Glinda still has braces. Aunt Em is both shorter and younger looking than Dorothy, who is taller than everyone except for a pretty girl next to her in a black outfit, which could be the costume for either the scarecrow or the witch.  (The witch might also be a young person in the back row wearing aviator glasses.). A small boy in a baseball cap and jeans, squatting in the front row, is probably the lion because he's making his hands look like claws, or he's just goofing around. (I was once one of them.  Best part of my youth.  I got a little weepy.)

Columbia and Northern Duchess County are riddled with culture at a more advanced (but not necessarily more fun) level, which the R-S promotes and reviews in the weekend edition. Dancers, actors, musicians, performance artists, poets, writers, and other talent at every proficiency either live around here or take the train from New York to amuse the natives at Bard, Kaatsbann, Hudson Opera Center, Ghent Playhouse, Club Helsinki, Basilica, TSL, and various welcoming churches, book stores, and other venues.

Tonight we go to Helsinki to see Reed Waring, my friend's former handyman who has a band, Two Gun Man, which we saw a few weeks ago and became fans. Reed is a terrific singer/songwriter of "sometimes mellow and heartbreaking, sometimes boisterous and joyful" music (from this today's Register-Star.)

So, here's why I don't miss the NY Times anymore. 

•         Even if it wrote about Porky, it wouldn't give us his nickname,

•        It wouldn't give more coverage to the Wizard of Oz than to Purcell's' Dido and Aeneas (playing at the Kinderhook Church),
•        It doesn't have a police blotter or weekly calendar

•        If it covered a potential toxic event it wouldn't also provide a link to a petition that you can sign

•        It doesn’t use the word "blob" in its recipes,

•        I don't know anyone personally that it's writing about

On the other hand, I hope Reed Waring becomes famous someday and when he does I hope he gets reviewed by the Times.  I'll undoubtedly read it.  In spite of its inferiority to the R-S, it's very hard to give up the Times.

No One Will Read This Particular Blog

I was reviewing a book on Amazon today,  Confessions of a Bad Teacher: The Shocking Truth from the Front Lines of American Public Education by John Owens.  I became so incensed while I was writing the review (not at the book, which I really liked, but by its message) that I thought I'd publish it as my blog this week.  It doesn't really fit my theme, but it does reflects another aspect of my New York past -- the experience of my family with its public school -- and why it gets less difficult to leave my city.

This is a book about the current state of NY public schools.  Sadly, I know that this sentence will prevent almost everyone from reading on, but really, really, it's important for anyone involved with kids, teachers, or humans.  And it's funny.

Owens spent less than a year teaching middle school but his observations echo those of my son, who currently teaches middle school in Brooklyn.  The NY school system has never been anywhere near perfect, but over the years when my kids, now adults, attended public school, it did provide a lively, haphazard, but ultimately good experience for them.  New York public schools had, as they still have, the severe challenges of serving communities that are weighted with low-income, non-English-speaking families.  However, when my kids were growing up, they were packed with engaged, creative teachers who were passionate about serving its city's children. 

Like Owens and my son, they still are, but that energy and creativity may now be fatally subdued by a system patched with a Kafkan bureaucracy, barraged by incessant standardized tests, and drowning in empty clichés that are pumped out of a marketing cesspool to "inspire" and "direct" exhausted teachers.  No real solutions and no effective rules are offered that a burned-out teacher can use to subdue those hormone-riddled chaotic nests called "classrooms".  All that the teachers have to guide them are helpless administrators (see Major Major from Catch 22) and inane sound bites disguised as training guides.  NYC teachers are burdened by the full responsibility of educating kids, who go home each night to vacant homes or adults who can just manage to live, and they are blamed when these students fail. 

Teachers live, like all of us, in a culture that respects only wealth or mindless accomplishments that evaporate when a screen goes dark, that disregards people who chose jobs that serve the most vulnerable rather than the most arrogant.  Right wing attack dogs are out to destroy their only protector, the union. Teachers are accused of having an easy job because they get long vacations, but as Owen writes and as I've observed with my son, new teachers typically leave early in the morning during the week and come back home to work on into the night and most of the weekends grading papers and torturing themselves with lesson plans. During vacations, they often work on the curriculum for the next year and catch up on educational tracts. 

And what my son faces and what Owen faced every school day, hour after hour, are doomed out-of-control children, who are either pampered inappropriately because of politically correct blinders, bludgeoned with incomprehensible tests, handed Ritalin, or left to wander the halls and finally the streets. And even worse, so many teachers, like my son and Owens, love these troubled and troubling kids and are stunned by their inability to help them, until, like their students, they believe they have failed.  Fifty percent of teachers are gone within five years. 

Read this book.  It's engaging and funny, but if you stop laughing with Owens, you will weep.  As a coda, Owens left before the end of his first year.  My son has lasted three years and will be leaving at the end of this year to become a priest.  I'm not surprised. 

Magical Thinking and My Shoulder Pain

I've had this shoulder pain for about 10 years and haven't done anything about it, but it's worsened during this joke of a winter. (God to Global Warming Worriers: "You want winter back?  I'll give you winter back!")  I'm losing function, but, like many people, I avoid doctors.  This is of course a personal irony because I have spent 40 years working with, talking to, and interviewing physicians, and I really like them as a tribe and many as humans. 

Some of them are my heroes, in fact, for instance George Lundberg,  my ex-boss at Medscape and former editor of JAMA.  George spent a portion of his considerable intelligence and energy in fighting the false promises of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM for short), which he perceives as wracked with inadequate studies and insubstantial evidence. 

As one of his acolytes and having followed the literature on CAM for years, I'm a strong supporter of this view.  The evidence on any benefits for most herbs, CAM procedures (eg. acupuncture. chiropractic), supplements, and other so-called natural substances, is weak at best.  Very few rigorous studies have been conducted on these so-called natural therapies, particularly randomized trials that pit them against placebos or FDA approved treatments.  Some reasons for this:

1. You can't usually patent CAM agents because they're natural, so drug companies have no incentive for spending the big bucks required for conducting clinical trials. 
2. CAM manufacturers sometimes publish their own studies, but these are even more suspect than those run by that popular villain, Big Pharma, whose trials and drugs are FDA reviewed and regulated, which CAM's aren't. (FDA, however, can go after false claims and contamination of natural agents.)
3. CAM has no standards, at least in the US, so let's say you want to study Echinacea purpurea, one of nine cornflower species, to see if it cures the common cold. You throw its leaves in a pot, boil them up, strain them, and bottle the results. You and your sniffling friends swallow a tablespoon or two, and hurrah, it cures your colds (maybe).  You publish the results in a tiny journal. Someone else using roots, a different species, or different dosages, does their own tiny study and says Echinacea is useless for the cold. A cornflower by the same name wouldn't smell just as sweet. 
4. The Fed has a CAM center (NCCAM) that funds research on natural treatments, but because big clinical trials are so expensive, most of its money goes to very small ones, basic research (not human relevant), or analyses of existing published CAM trials. The latter typically can't tell if there are any benefits with the CAM agent in question because the trials analyzed were too weak to support any evidence (Go to point 1 and use this list as an infinite loop

Another point, natural stuff is not always safe.  (In fact, really, think about nature for even a nanosecond -- tooth and f-ing claw).  Some observations on CAM's safety:

• It would follow that CAM treatments powerful enough to be effective would also have side effects and interactions, just as our regulated drugs do. St. John's wort, for instance, actually may relieve some depression, but then it becomes no different from any other approved anti-depressant. It can cause problems. 
• Using CAM as a substitute to tested treatments for serious illnesses can kill you.  Farewell Steve Jobs. 
• Taking too much of anything, even nice natural things, can be bad.  Beta-carotein and smokers -- good example. 
• Regarding traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), the darling of New Ageists, a guy who runs the biggest physician social media company in China told me that by Chinese law TCM isn't allowed to be studied.  Everything in the big fat TCM Book was written about a zillion years ago, so I suppose it would be embarrassing to find out that practices done for centuries might be useless or worse. Furthermore, Chinese doctors are now injecting TCM potions, even though the Great Book only talks about oral remedies, and no one knows whether spurting herbs into the blood stream may be lethal, because THEY CAN'T STUDY THEM.  (We can study them here if we want, but see previous numbered list for why we won't.)

But, given this pious rant, here's the humiliating truth.  I am a CAM junkie. I've taken glucosamine to prevent arthritis for 15 years based on a couple faulty optimistic studies (so far so good).  I'm a major user of probiotics, coenzyme Q10, vitamin D3, and B complex -- all based on inadequate positive studies that I chose to believe over the equally inadequate negative ones.  I house apple cider vinegar and raw honey for cold emergencies, and I have a secret recipe for elderberry syrup that I plan to bottle this summer for curing everything. I meditate every day and I took yoga for ten years, until some power-hungry instructor bellowed me into straining my shoulder during chaturanga.

So, full circle and long story long.  My shoulder was injured practicing some hyperactive version of an Eastern practice, so what did I do this week?  I went to an acupuncturist in Hudson.  A very smart and pleasant young woman, who studied in Seattle and lived in China for a while, pinned me up, electrified me, and gave me hickies on my back with vacuum cups. I lay on my side for an hour and dozed, came home, and slept that night without waking up from shoulder pain for the first time in months. 

I can't imagine acupuncture will cure whatever is wrong with my shoulder, and I have little faith that the relief will last.  But, what seems to be clear from pretty good evidence is that stress and its sidekick, an over enthusiastic immune system, are making a lot of us sick. And many CAM treatments target these bad friends.  Furthermore, even if the benefits are only a placebo effect, we know from studies that this can be pretty substantial, with placebos sometimes even beating the drugs they're up against.  So, I say, what the hell.  I'll keep going to the very comforting lady with the needles and put off the burly orthopedist with his scary knives as long as I can, and I won't tell Dr. Lundberg.  

I Have Found My Tribe!

I went to a lecture today at the Cornell Cooperative Extension on "Designing with Flora of the East."  I figured I'd learn more about the brave perennial band of brothers that stagger up out of my garden every year to battle for their brief moments in the sun: echinacea, coreopsis, aster, floristan, sedum.  I wouldn't mind learning how I might be a better general for them, but I also hoped to get some ideas for a few different flowers that I could torture and/or neglect this year. 

I came into the room where the Master Gardeners were just finishing up a meeting.  To my surprise and delight, it was filled with my clones: same approximate age, same big teeth -- even the same hair, short, gray, uncluttered.  No one was skinny but no one was obese either, just pleasantly thick, again, like me. Although these gardeners, like me, were in the same genus (WASP) as the basket weavers from a previous blog, they were a different species -- or, more accurately, a different cultivar -- ex-pats rather than upstate natives. And, unlike the basket weavers who met my late arrival with dour suspicion, these women greeted my late arrival with friendly smiles, coffee, and they even found a chair for me to sit in. Coffee was at the ready with a choice of fennel or rosemary cookies.  I was home!!!  I had found my tribe!  Bring on the watercress sandwiches!

The lecture was not what I expected either. It was much better, a very interesting recorded video talk by Carolyn Summers, an expert on indigenous plants.

Here are the facts that I learned:

• Glaciers were around the neighborhood until only 10,000 years ago. (I had thought it was at least a million).
•  Indigenous plants differ from natives because they are specific to a local area (e.g., basket weavers), while natives (e.g., Flora lecture gardeners and me) can include hybrids and thrive in broad areas (e.g.. both Manhattan and Hudson).  Indigenous plants are tougher, however (e.g., basket weavers again, especially my teacher Joyce). They tend to be drought resistant and not require fertilizer, which some actually hate (and probably believe is immoral). 
•  Northern Europe's native plants are much more boring than ours because the glaciers pushed their mountains, the Alps, east to west, so that the livelier Southern seeds remained happily around the Mediterranean.  Our mountains run north to south, so seeds are able to cha cha up from the warmer nations, seducing our innocent northern stock, and, with the resulting miscegenation, produce jolly colorful lascivious offspring that stodgy British gardeners lust after.  
•  Oaks are the very best trees for the ecology, but I didn't write down why.
• Norway maples are not native and they suck.  Their seedlings come out early -- before the fabulous red and sugar maples -- so the bullying Norway maple children beat out the much nicer and younger red maple infants.  Sadly, the despised Norway looms over our barn apartment and is a constant pleasure.  A bird feeder hangs off a high branch outside our kitchen window and amuses me all winter, and, for the rest of the year, waking up to the heavy green rustling leaves outside my bedroom is pure joy.  I feel badly that I have to hate it now.
• The Karner blue butterfly is endangered because it only can lay its eggs on the Eastern lupine.  Unfortunately, it has a sinister twin, the Western Lupine, who managed to make it over the Rockies and trick the poor mother butterflies into believing it's a proper nursery, but instead it releases toxins that kill the eggs. Sibling rivalry?  (Extra fact from Wiki: the Karner blue butterfly was discovered and named by Vladimir Nabokov.).
• If you want an exotic plant, get a sterile male (this sounds like a life lesson)

Although short, the lecture and the brief introduction to my tribe have given me a possible direction here. Since our property includes an aging meadow loaded with indigenous and native plants, important pollinators and breeding grounds for good insets and birds, Michael and I own a palate. Unfortunately, it is quickly dissolving into forest and we're not youngsters. Apparently, however, one can keep a meadow going and the woods at bay just by mowing paths through it, which Michael can do, while I walk behind him picking wild flowers and throwing the occasional milkweed and oak seed onto the ground. A lazy person's garden.  Perfect. And I might take the Master Gardener course in the fall.  I can hardly wait.