The Horseshoe

U of I sends alert for shooter who doesn’t exist, social media backlash follows.

2011-03-25T11:43:00.000-07:00

About 87,000 emails and cell phones received a startling message around 10:40 CST, when the minders of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign emergency alert system mistakenly sent the following message:

“Active shooter at BUILDING NAME/INTERSECTION. Escape area if safe to do so or shield/secure your location.”

Almost immediately, students began texting and updating their online social networks to gather information.

Until this, the campus was at a lull -- most students had migrated home for spring break. But the previous day, U of I police sent out alerts about a large fire which destroyed a longstanding gyros eatery on Green Street, a popular destination for students. Some thought it was a poor use of resource meant to keep students abreast of life-endangering emergencies, not to be abused by broadcasting contained situations.

Then, about 11 minutes later, U of I police send this message:

“The previous message was sent in error. For details, please read forthcoming MassMail.”

Then, six hours later, the mass email arrived:

“To the campus community: This morning at 10:40, an Illini-Alert message was sent to 87,000 email addresses and cellphones indicating there was an active shooter or threat of an active shooter on the Urbana campus. The message was sent accidentally while pre-scripted templates used in the Illini-Alert system were being updated. The updates were being made in response to user feedback in order to enhance information provided in the alerts.”

The message continued, “The Chief of Police has charged the campus emergency planning office with reviewing and documenting todays incident. We are reviewing comments we are receiving as a result of the incident and will implement all reasonable and appropriate ideas or suggestions.”

But the incident had already reached national attention. The Chicago Tribune, Huffington Post, the Associated Press, Time and Gawker Media.

Even Funkmaster Flex, hiphop DJ on New York’s Hot 97 radio station, tweeted and wrote about it.

This is a Streamgraph of messages containing “U of I” on twitter. Tweets made on Wednesday, March 23 with “U of I” frequently mentioned Zorba, the name of the restaurant that was destroyed in a fire that day. “Tuition” was another big topic -- as U of I trustees were preparing to vote Thursday on a 6.9 percent tuition increase for incoming freshman.

After the erroneous alert, though, the most common words in tweets containing “U of I” were “sent,” “alert,” “talk” and “shooter.” The dramatically increasing slope of the line at about 12:00 shows a flurry of activity on twitter relating to the false alarm.

This is a similar chart, but specifically looks at tweets that had both “U of I” and “shooter” in the message. The chart doesn’t go back far enough to show 10:40 a.m., when the first alert was sent out, but the height at the beginning of the chart suggests a great deal of activity around that time.

The activity then tapers off at around 11:41, but then has an echo -- possibly relating to one or more major news outlets breaking news online -- which subsides at 12:38 p.m. There’s silence, then another bubble at 3:04 p.m., again possibly relating to a news update.

The next bubble comes at 4:53 p.m., which correlates to the time when U of I police sent out their long-awaited mass email on the situation, at which point the chart ends.

Shortly after the mass email about the mistake went out, I emailed Chicago Tribune reporters Liam Ford and Gerry Smith. At the time, Smith was using Twitter to locate students who were on campus during the false alert for a news story. Smith received my email, called, and asked about the climate around Champaign and Urbana (some of my response can be read in the Tribune story, in the final graphs).

The Trib reporter was most interested in the student response, which I told them was varied. Some students like myself read the “BUILDING NAME/INTERSECTION” and knew it must have been an error, because the all-caps phrase seemed like a generic placeholder in a computer program that would have been replaced with a real building or intersection in the event of a real emergency. However, given the severity of the message, many students chose to err on the side of caution and treat the warning as credible. Their fears were evident in Twitter and SMS messages.

But the larger point, I told the Trib reporter, was the use (or abuse) of emergency alert messages at the U of I.

A team of 41 U of I students, myself included, created CampusCrime.net to gauge if alerts adequately reflected the status of crime on campus. We found that the alert system contributed to a climate of fear that did not reflect a minor uptick in crime on campus. Just one alert was distributed in 2006, while 34 were sent in 2010.

More than just a misconception about the volume of crimes occurring, the alerts also created misunderstandings about the source of crime and contributed to racial tension.

CampusCrime.net contributors were recently notified that they’d won a Region 5 “Mark of Excellence” award from the Society of Professional Journalists.

As I told the Trib reporter, the recent error was “totally unacceptable,” and was just the most recent demonstration that authorities need to better understand how mass-alerts can impact the campus, and perhaps should re-evaluate their use of the technology.

Nebraska Has The Most Fire-Prone Nuclear Plant in the U.S.

2011-03-21T17:48:00.000-07:00

While the international community focuses on Japan and its Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, the safety of which was seriously compromised following a massive earthquake, the United States has a renewed interest in the safety of nuclear power at home.

A probe into the safety of US nuclear plants, using data from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and data visualization software, suggests that America's plants are relatively safe overall, but that some power plants are more prone to incidents than others.

(Click the link to interact with the data on nuclear plant fires in the US on the IBM ManyEyes website)

The Cooper Nuclear Power Plant, near Brownville, Neb., has the worst record in the country when it comes to fire safety. From 1999 to 2009, it reported six significant fires to the NRC. The plant reported two other significant fires in 1996.

The plant makes Nebraska, which only has two nuclear plants (the other being Fort Calhoun, in Washington County), the state with the most nuclear plant fires in the past decade.

Additional NRC fire inspection reports show that the plant had 14 violations between 2000 and 2009. One of those violations included a "white" violation, "an issue with low to moderate increased importance to safety," where plant operators had improper procedures to safely shut down the plant in the event of a fire.

[Download the full spreadsheet of NRC fire inspections for this and all U.S. nuclear plants here]

"Between 1997 and June, 2007, the licensee failed to ensure that two emergency operating procedures which controlled activities affecting quality were appropriate to the circumstances," regulators reported. "Additionally, the licensee failed to properly verify and validate procedure steps to ensure that they would work to accomplish the necessary actions."

Other fire inspection violations included:

2006: Failures to Properly Control Combustibles in the Plant.

2004: Failure to ensure redundant safe shutdown systems located in the same fire area are free of fire damage.

2002: Failure to follow procedure resulting in a fire.

2001: Failure to install fire detectors in accordance with federal regulations.

In one 2009 inspection, NRC regulators made several findings about the safety of the plant, and noted an event where a maintenance tech tried to replace a leaky O-ring in a control valve hydraulic fitting, but used a wrong-sized part. This caused a leak at the plant, forcing operators to take the turbine off-line and shut down the reactor.

"The finding is more than minor because it adversely affected the configuration control attribute of the initiating events cornerstone, and adversely affected the cornerstone objective to limit the likelihood of those events that upset plant stability and challenge critical safety functions during shutdown as well as power operations, in that this finding resulted in a condition that prompted a plant
shutdown from 70 percent power," regulators wrote.

Meanwhile, the Nebraska Public Power District (NPPD), which owns the Cooper plant, was among 16 nuclear energy providers who sued the Department of Energy (DOE) to stop collection of a nuclear waste fee.

According to the Lincoln, Neb. Journal Star, the DOE currently charges the providers 0.1 cents-per-kilowat to dispose of nuclear waste. But the plaintiffs argue that the DOE hasn't been complying with the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, and shouldn't have to pay the fee.

The Journal Star reported that NPPD built a $80 million storage facility at the Cooper plant to store spent fuel rods.

The suit was filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on March 8. The 9.0-magnitude Japan earthquake happened three days later. The Christian Science Monitor wrote that reports are emerging from international regulatory agencies about lax oversight of the Fukushima plant.

NPPD officials are confident about the plant's ability to withstand natural disasters. A recent Associated Press story quoted the NPPD spokesperson as saying the Cooper plant can withstand 300 mph winds, a 6.0-magnitude quake and a 1 million-year flood.

NOT QUITE DEAD YET: THE RETURN OF THE HORSESHOE BLOG

2010-11-12T14:58:00.000-08:00

NOT QUITE DEAD YET: THE RETURN OF THE HORSESHOE BLOG

One of the things I love about being a journalist is the randomness. One day, you’re working in rural Missouri, talking to a rancher about the time his bison went AWOL and tied up traffic on Highway 47. Another day, you’re wading through smoke of an illegal origin in a college student commune in Austin, Texas, getting your tympanic membranes abused by South by Southwest bands.

It’s not all amusing and weird, though. Sometimes you’re in a newsroom when a well-respected member of the community cuts his battle with cancer short by going into his back yard, kneeling on a tarp, and pulling the trigger on a shotgun aimed at his chest. Or when a state trooper, who is texting, talking on a cell phone, and using a laptop computer while clipping along at 120 mph, crosses the interstate median and kills two young sisters on their way to have family photos taken for Thanksgiving. (The trooper later plead guilty to reckless homicide and was given 30 days probation)

Lately, randomness means being a graduate student of journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and instructing young, aspiring journalists on the craft (or perhaps some students who just need the English credits, but it’s all good, as they say).

Graduate school also entails doing some work for the community news and social networking site CU-CitizenAccess.org. It’s a project funded in part by the John S. Knight and James L. Knight Foundation, and we collaborate with the local paper, the News-Gazette, to publish content.

I came to CU-CitizenAcces.org with the goal of understanding the poverty situation in the twin cities of Champaign-Urbana, and reporting on the success or lack thereof of programs that aim to uproot people from that poverty (a.k.a., “upward mobility”). According to the 2000 census, the poverty level in Champaign has a poverty rate of 22.1 percent, and Urbana has a poverty rate of 27.3 percent. For comparison, Chicago has a poverty rate of 19.6 percent.

Originally, I conceived this blog as a straight-news site. No commentary. Just the facts. But as my role as a journalist, and now educator, have changed, so too has my vision for this outlet.

What I envision this site becoming is a digital reporter’s notebook. I hope to repost clippings here, so you can get background information. But I hope to add extra content (or “value-added,” if you’re hip to web 2.0 pitch-speak), including commentary and notes that go beyond what I’ve done in the field, hoping to give people more perspective on the issues I write about.

And that’s partly because digital journalism and convergence journalism are changing the way we do our work. Journalists are coming to the realization that we, too, are human, and we can’t keep hiding behind the false promise of objectivity. We need to bleed a little for our cause, and show that blood to the public, if only to regain their trust. We’re not the Neutral People. That’s not why we’re here.

Be seeing you.

TILTING AT WINDMILLS: A FEUD OVER GREEN ENERGY IN THE MIDWEST

2010-02-22T20:43:00.000-08:00

[A computer render of the potential Meridian Wind Farm in western Sangamon County, Illinois, courtesy of American Wind Energy Management]

Green energy is marketed by politicians as a solution to an economy in shambles. But when it comes to making those jobs a reality, this national initiative takes a back seat to local politics.

On February 4, the Illinois Times published a story I wrote about a feud between those who want to bring wind energy to Sangamon County, Illinois, and those who don’t want to live next to wind mills. The locals claimed many worries:

Concerned that a potential wind farm would reduce property values, create noise pollution or present a fire hazard, homeowners showed up to three informational meetings held in January.

“We’re not opposed to wind energy, but we’re concerned about the proximity to homes as it relates to property values, health issues and everything else,” said Cindy Bomke at a Jan. 25 meeting in New Berlin. Bomke, cousin of state Sen. Larry Bomke, collected about 450 signatures last year in a petition for more setbacks.

Steve Frank, New Berlin village president, witnessed growth spurts in the towns of Chatham, Rochester and Sherman, and worries that a wind farm could restrict New Berlin’s own progress. “We’re in the growing mode here, and I don’t want to be landlocked if a wind farm comes in within half a mile,” Frank said at the meeting.

Wind farm proponents also had concerns. The contingency of citizens opposed to wind farms were petitioning the Sangamon County Public Health, Safety and Zoning board to increase the setback requirements for turbines. This, green energy advocates feared, could squeeze green energy out of Sangamon County.

Will Reynolds, who is on the board of the local Sierra club and is part of Sierra’s coal campaign, said in an interview in early February, “These are going to be built somewhere, so it’s a matter of whether we want some of those turbines and the jobs to go with it in our county or whether we’re going to watch them go to other counties and other states.”

Reynolds had sharp criticism for the members of the zoning board, writing in his blog that the county gave International Coal Group nearly $1 million in tax abatements to expand a mine in Sangamon county, but offered no such incentives to wind developers.

“Going back to coal mine, had they done any hearings around the county, about the health and safety violations of the coal mine? Did they talk about that, when they consider giving hundreds of thousands of dollars of subsidies to promote a very small number of new jobs,” Reynolds said in the interview.

When Tim Moore, the chairman of the Health, Safety and Zoning Board was asked about this in late January, his answer was that ICG requested a subsidy, and the wind developer, American Wind Energy Management, made no such request.

“I don’t recall what the incentive was for the coal company, other than it was a very competitive coal environment. We probably want [ICG] to stay here in the county… You don’t have to give someone a subsidy who is coming in and saying ‘we want to give this much money to that property owner for that project and we’re going to pay all of these taxes.’ And they’re not asking, and we’re not offering,” he said.

After approving the ICG’s abatements in January, the county zoning board told the State Journal-Register the mine expansion would yield 12 to 18 new jobs. AWEG’s Meridian wind farm could potentially create 20 permanent, full-time jobs, with many additional jobs supported in the initial construction phase (calculated from the company’s plans to install 200 turbines and job estimates from Matt Aldeman, a technical assistant at the Center for Renewable Energy).

Reynolds also noted in his blog that the ICG Sangamon county mine, the Viper mine, had numerous safety violations. He referred to a statement from Illinois senator Dick Durbin, who mentioned the Viper mine had 124 safety violations from 2005-2006.

Regarding the stock photo of a wind farm used for the IT story, American Wind Energy Management sent me a graphic of how the Meridian wind farm might look. AWEM wrote that because of the current ordinances, wind farms “would average one machine per 100-200 acres.” (Click AWEM's image at the top of the post to see it at full-resolution)

The zoning board has not yet convened to discuss the ordinance amendment that could extend wind farm setbacks to 1 mile from non-participating homeowners (the current setback being 1,200 feet). The board was due to discuss the amendment in February, but scheduling conflicts killed the meeting before it took place. The amendment may be discussed in the board’s March 18 meeting.

Springfield Spared from Hate; “Laramie” A Devastating Reflection

2009-11-13T19:57:00.000-08:00

[This image, posted by Twitter blogger @inkedgiff, shows the counter-protest at the Hoogland Center for the Arts]

About 300 people from Springfield and surrounding areas came to the doorstep of the Hoogland Center for the Arts Friday for what they anticipated would be an intense evening protest. The Springfield Police Department thought the same, and brought at least five officers for crowd control and a paddywagon in case things got dicey.

All were awaiting the arrival of the Westboro Baptist Church (WBC), an anti-gay hate group based in Topeka Kansas, founded by Fred Phelps, a disbarred lawyer who once campaigned to be governor of that state. The church operates the web site GodHatesFags.com, and protested t numerous funerals of American soldiers, because, according to the Web site, the soldiers “voluntarily joined a fag-infested army to fight for a fag-run country now utterly and finally forsaken by God who Himself is fighting against that country.”

Inside the Hoogland, the Springfield Theater Centre production of “The Laramie Project,” was beginning its final weekend. The play retraces the 1998 death of Matthew Shepard, who was savagely beaten and left for dead at the outskirts of Laramie, Wyoming, because he was gay. After the 21-year old college student succumbed to his injuries and the trial of his killers began, the WBC gained national notoriety for picketed the highly-publicized trial. And now, more than a decade later, they protest the production that revisits Shepard’s death.

Among the WBC’s many targets included an Albany, New York high school that held “Laramie,” and a college at Basingstoke, Hampshire, in the United Kingdom who also held a “Laramie” production.

[Springfield blogger and tweeter @bishoponair took this photo from across the Hoogland center]

On both sides of sixth street, the would-be counter protesters held signs that read “FREE,” and “God Loves Fags.” One young man held a cardboard sign that had the word “Fag” inside a pink heart. There were two American flags and at least one rainbow flag. Bypassing cars honked in solidarity, and the crowd responded with cheers and hollers. A woman took signatures on a petition for equal marriage rights.

Anticipation for WBC’s arrival was building since at least “Laramie’s” premier the week before. Tuesday, Nov. 10, local radio personality Jim Leach, an STC board member, sparred with Shirley Phelps-Roper, a WBC leader.

“I would absolutely gag if anyone in this nation turns from their rebellion because the time for your destruction is IMMINENT! It’s not going to happen. Christ said it’s going to look like Sodom when I come back,” Phelps-Roper said.

“Can you narrow that down a little bit when you say 'Imminent'? Because it's been imminent for a lot of years with you people and I was just wondering if you can narrow it down?”

Leach's guest then repeatedly shouted “No,” insisting her church has only been insisting imminence for a couple of months.

“You've been telling us it's been imminent for a long time,” Leach said, to which Phelps-Roper shouts "WRONG,” and calling Leach a liar before explaining that she had to learn to “speak and spell” the word just recently.

The church never did show up in Springfield. At about 8 p.m., the paddywagon left Hoogland, and the counter-protesters went their separate ways.

Some of the Twitter chatter that evening:

“The Laramie Project,” which opened Nov. 6, gives an impression of the town that wasn’t broadcast in 1998. Instead, it is an account of Tectonic Theater Project members who visited Laramie six times over a year and a half and collected interviews and insights from the townspeople.

The resulting production is a stark juxtaposition between the serenity of the landscape and the depth of human brutality. It is carried out by 21 cast members who take turns playing 40 different Wyomingites, each having a unique identity, but each indivisible from the landscape of Laramie. The sheer number of characters would be confounding, if it weren’t that each of them exemplify

There are the playful busybodies Alison Mears and Marge Murray, who speak their minds and have plenty to say about the social structure of Laramie. There’s the town’s sergeant, who insists it’s a good place to live. In a town like Laramie, as one townie says to the theater project, everyone is pretty much once-removed. Everyone is a part of the great, blue sky, endless earth, and all stand in funeral-like silence as the accused are lead to the courtroom.

That’s not to say “The Laramie Project” shirks its journalistic pretense and flinches when hate is uncovered. There are cold truths when one of the murderers, Aaron McKinney, explains how he beat Shepard with a pistol, or when townspeople say murder is wrong, and in the next breath admit reservations about gay people. Hate just doesn’t bloom under Laramie’s insular clique, it is trucked into town in cable news vans, threatening emails and agenda-driven preachers.

But there also are moments where light floods in, where Laramie grieves and rallies and protests around the part of them that they lost. The only rule here, it seems, is what the town’s catholic Father warns the theater company: “Just say it right. I think you have a responsibility to do that.”

For those who are unprepared, it is a devastating experience. There are moments when testimony drops jaws and sucks the air from the room, if to be re-inflated and crushed when the humanity of Laramie is revealed.

Making a Stand for MAP: Triumph & Uncertainty in the Fight for Higher-Ed in Illinois

2009-10-26T18:02:00.000-07:00

[A student from Southern Illinois University readies a lapel microphone before being recorded for a newscast. He was joined by nearly 1,000 other students Oct. 15 for a rally to restore financial aid grants in the state.]

It was quickly apparent what they meant. Throngs were crossing the street, chanting, whistling, air-horning, taking long, purposeful strides to the white tent at 100 East Edwards, next to the Capitol, where the others were. People were at the threshold of the sidewalk, some were beyond it, waving at cars and beckoning attention to homemade signs.

The audience under the tent was dense, impenetrable, so the reporters and cameras milled about the perimeter and picked students off where they could. Not all of the picking was spontaneous. As these events go, media are given the names of particular people who are the most affected. My contact at the University of Illinois Springfield, Derek Schnapp, director of public relations, did the same for me, but ultimately I thought it would be a better to poll the audience randomly.

“I don’t know… if there’s any way to know, to estimate the number of students who will be coming state-wide,” Schnapp phoned in the day before the rally. “I’ve heard rumblings of a thousand or more.”

I’m not a bean counter, but the turnout seemed close. I was suspicious of his assessment at first, having made a wrong turn that took me on a journey to the wrong side of the capitol building, where there was only the empty chartered busses, clinging to the side of the road like abandoned cocoons. I wrapped my coat tighter and sped up my pace. It was a couple more blocks before my climate-bred surliness morphed into a blushing contrition that perhaps I didn’t adequately know the geography of my hometown.

Outside the tent, a young man with a square jaw and short, styled hair clipped a lapel microphone to his black peacoat, while a camera man issued directions. The name tag announced the subject was from Southern Illinois University, and he squinted into the camera and announced his name, its proper spelling, and his student government position at the university. His brow lightened and shoulders eased as he explained how, due to a series of medical circumstances and other financial obligations, his pursuit of higher education wouldn’t be possible without financial aid.

“I don’t know if I could get student loans. My credit isn’t so good,” he said. The camera caught a wisp of his nervous laughter as he ended his sentence.

His education, along with the education of many students at the rally, hinged on something called the Monetary Award Program, or MAP grant. It’s a need-based program that aids nearly 137,000 college students, including those who enroll directly from high school and independent adults continuing their education in order to sustain some kind of a middle-class lifestyle.

The maximum each student can obtain from the program is $2,500 per semester. That covers a quarter of the tuition and fees at a public university, or 35 percent of the education at a community college. Due to a combination of forces, both economic and societal, demand for the program ballooned 25 percent this year, according to Saveillinoismapgrants.org (established by the Illinois Student Assistant Commission).

At the July armistice that ended 2009 state budget crisis (or merely postponed it, depending on your politics), Governor Patrick Quinn signed a budget that gave the MAP program $220 million, about half of the money it needed to meet its demand for the 2009-2010 school year. He didn’t tap into the $1.6 billion in discretionary funds the budget set aside - opting instead to maintain social services. Something else Quinn didn’t do was spread that money over both college semesters, thus sparing the fall 2009 semester and leaving the spring 2010 semester twisting in the wind.

In late September, just ahead of the veto sessions that could provide a correction of the budget snafu, Quinn launched a campaign to reinstate MAP funding, speaking to students at the University of Illinois Chicago, where 6,000 receive a total of $20,000 in assistance. His tour would roll through the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Bradley University, Black Hawk College, John Wood Community College and Southern Illinois University Edwardsville before it was over, all the while proposing to tax cigarettes more heavily and raising the income tax. “When it comes to this important education funding issue, we will not accept a grade of incomplete from the Legislature,” an AP reporter quoted Quinn as saying.

Skeptical minds never let rest the fact that Quinn was the executive whose signature made the state’s inadequate budget a law, a budget which he reportedly had “no reservation” in signing off. “To me, at least, it’s beyond obvious what the governor is doing here,” concluded Rich Miller, blogger for The Capital Fax Blog, in his Illinois Times column. “Quinn got himself in big trouble and now he’s lashing out at somebody else to draw attention away from him.”

Those weren’t the concerns of the college students at the Oct. 15 rally. From inside the rally’s tent came a voice that, although encumbered by the lack of a public address system, resonated with the listeners who could barely hear it. “People united cannot be defeated!” the man said. Shouting and applause answered the proclamation.

Without amplification, it was difficult to identify the speaker, but the deliberate cadence that marched like an army of words in some victory parade, the rising grumble that coalesced into a brusque dénouement, gave the voice away as that of Governor Quinn. His phrase, which he often wielded as a battle cry in similar populist demonstrations, also identified him. From behind, two people mused how it could have been Southern Illinois University President Glenn Poshard talking (a former democratic gubernatorial candidate), but I knew this couldn’t be. The speaker’s forceful turn-of-phrase didn’t fit Poshard’s mellifluous M.O.

“I can’t hear anything. Can you hear anything?” a woman said.
“No, I can’t hear anything,” a man answered. “It’s for the press, anyway. These things are always for the press.”

[People at the rally jammed a tent across the street from the Capitol, listening to speeches by students, college officials and the Governor before taking the protest to the rotunda.]

The easiest way to get through a mass of tightly-packed followers of a political rally, besides plowing your way through with a liberal application of impolite force, is to follow closely behind someone else who is already weaving through the crowd. I stopped at a point that was closer to the tent, but even raising my cell phone above the crowd to snap a picture didn’t result in a better understanding of the of the rally’s locus. Instead, I asked a Blackburn coed to show off her sign for a quick snap. A mother of three began to speak from the tent’s podium, but I ducked out early, overhearing the fact that this was the last speaker, and the rally would be marching to the rotunda of the Capitol.

Shuffling up the Capitol steps and finding the end of the entrance line, five people from Trinity Christian College in Palos Heights quickly followed and arranged themselves in the queue. I spoke with Ryan Zantingh, a tall, slender man with a slightly dimpled chin and short, scruffy hair. His business card told me he was a financial aid coordinator, so I asked him what the cut to student funding would be, and what that might do to the population at TCC.

“We would lose about $1.5 million in funding,” he said. “There are a lot of students who would have to withdraw.”

One of the TCC contingency gripped a rolled-up poster, and I asked him to unfurl it for my camera phone. Zantingh and the other students helped unroll the poster, nearly ten feet long, revealing dozens of signatures recorded in black Sharpie. “FROM THE STUDENTS AT TRINITY CHRISTIAN COLLEGE / WITHOUT A MAP STUDENTS STRUGGLE TO FIND A WAY.” The poster caught the attention of others waiting in line, inspiring them to shout “Save Map Now, Save Map Now” and hold up signs of their own.

I took the shot as the line began carrying me off to the doors. “Save MAP Now, Save MAP Now” was played on repeat, at volume which no other conversation could be deciphered, to which air horns trumpeted in compliment, successfully blocking out any immediate thought save “Save MAP Now, Save MAP Now.” The assembly, despite not having entered the rotunda yet, had all the sincerity and fervor of a homecoming pep rally, although it was for a game where the consequences were much direr.

[A contingency from Trinity Christian College show a poster which students signed in support of the effort to restore MAP grants.]

When the uproar subsided and conversation again was possible, I was next to Dr. Malinda Carlson, the dean of students for Illinois College in Jacksonville.

“Where is it that you are from?” she asked
“I’m from Springfield, but I’m not a student here.” I said, picking out a crisp business card to hand her. “I’m a writer, you see. I thought I’d come to blog about all this.”
“I see.”
“So, how many students use the MAP grant at Illinois College?” I asked.
“About one-third.”
“And how much funding does that equate to?”
“About one million,” she said above the din of students joining in the latest round of chanting.
“And if MAP funding isn’t restored for the next semester, what do you think will happen to the student population?”
“Many of them would have to drop out. We’re really concerned about that.”

I could hear the conversation between two college students in the background. “How would they feel if we took $40,000 from their budget?” one said. Another said, “They look kind of angry.” Carlson turned to an IC student behind her.

“Is there a story you might be able to tell?” She asked the student.
“I don’t know if I’d be able to come back next semester without the MAP grant,” the student answered. “My grandmother has lung cancer, and I have to spend a lot of time with her. The treatment is really expensive, I don’t know if I could afford college if I didn’t have the grant.”
“And what are you now? Sophomore, junior, senior?” I asked.
“I’m a senior,” she said. “I have one semester to go.”
“You’re so close.”
“Yes, very close.”

Carlson turned again to the student. “I’m really sorry to hear that.”

“What is your name?” I asked.
“Andrea.” She said.
“Andrea, I’m sorry to hear about that.”

[A view of the line to the metal detectors inside the Illinois Capitol building. Air horns and other noisemakers were confiscated here.]

Nearing the metal detectors, another burst of chanting and air horns sounded. Knowing the system, I worked on unbuckling my belt and coiling it into a tight package. Two guards were shuttling trays of belongings through the X-ray’s conveyor. Another man was waving a wand over someone who caused the metal detector to burp a noise. A young man produced a silver multi-function pocketknife with a pronounced corkscrew. The device, which the tending guard indicated was not too big a size to allow, was about the width of a good-sized adult palm. I worked on putting my belongings into a basket and moved forward, crossed the threshold of the detector, and was relieved to find the alarm had not sounded.

There was a podium inside the rotunda that the young protesters used to re-launch the chant, “Save MAP Now, Save MAP Now.” The Trinity Christian College contingency stepped on the podium and stretched out their signature-adorned sign. Beside the podium was a guest book, where students lined up to record their name, address and purpose. A Capitol guide tried to politely make her way through the pack, repeating “excuse me, excuse me, excuse me,” clutching to her breast what appeared to be a bundle of maps. Eyes, pairs belonging young students and weathered lawmakers alike, watched from the railings on the second and third stories. The protesters below silenced their chants and coagulated on the rotunda floor around a single figure.

Centered in the orbit of multicolored neon placards doused in black Sharpie ink, young black and white and male and female and blue jeans and thick eyeliner and puffy coats and sweaters with college names in block font, and earpiece-wearing sentinels draped in weighty trench coats and fat neckties, was Governor Quinn, each arm corralling a student, his face locked in a grinning pose reserved for the fleeting, exceptional occasions that cameras were made for, but due to his avocation seemed to be perpetual and immutable, leaving one to ponder if it were actually ingenuous and not a pose at all. The students he was being captured with were from Bradley in Peoria.

[Light from a news camera washed out the face of Illinois Governor Patrick Quinn as he meets with students and answered questions from the press.]

What ensued was loosely-choreographed waltz. The students would approach, deliver a compliment, a response was given, they would shake, assume the stance for the camera, strain their eyes at the flash, and Quinn would pivot 90 or 180 degrees to address the next person. I watched this with a student reporter from a small, private college.

“Do you know if anyone is going to give a speech here?” he asked.

“Uh, no, probably not. I don’t think so,” I said. “You see, during the summer when there was all the budget turmoil, they actually had a rally here in the rotunda, and Quinn spoke at that podium over there. But it had microphones, and there was a speaker system and everything. They don’t have it set up like that, so I don’t think that’s going to happen today. Were you planning on asking Quinn a question?”

The reporter, who wore a black pea coat like mine and squared glasses like mine, shuffled a camera phone, a black voice recorder and several reporter’s notebooks in his hands.

“I was just going to ask him if he had any words for the students back at the college,” he said.

I kept silent my thoughts that it were a bit of a softball question, perhaps thinking that I didn’t have so many hardball questions myself, and said only “Sometimes, you just have to strong-arm your way in there.”

After observing Quinn’s waltz for nearly ten minutes, scouting for an opening, I found a route to the sanctum of the Governor/Student waltz and readied my silver Olympus WS-311M Digital Voice Recorder.

“How are you going to do it, Quinn? How are you going to pull it off?”

His brown eyes registered a response, but his face was locked for the camera, and he waited until the photo was taken. When that was accomplished, he gave an answer.

“Interfund borrowing is going to be one of our strategies,” Governor Quinn said, before pivoting to address the next person.

But nothing about cigarette or income tax. The last time interfund borrowing was practiced in Illinois was when the state transferred half a billion dollars from the retirement system into the hospital provider fund (Medicaid). Quinn signed that bill, The Interfund Borrowing Act of 2009 (which began life as HB1027), into law February 27. A week earlier, The Illinois AFL-CIO flagged it as a “shell bill,” or something that has no real legal content until it is replaced by a later version, sometimes just before committee. It’s a tactic used to shuttle legislation under the radar, or pulled as a trump card when things go badly late in session.

[Quinn poses for a photo with a troupe of Bradley students.]

Unbeknownst to the students chanting in the rotunda, senators boosted MAP funding to $425 million while the rally was going on. Nobody in the House said “nay,” and the only senator to vote against the bill was Mike Jacobs, a Democrat from Moline.

Beneath the widespread consent about the need for the funding boost, a bitter divide amongst lawmakers remained. A Murphysboro Republican told the State Journal-Register “Is this like writing a check when there is no money in the account? This doesn’t put any more money into our budget, and we are broke. It does give the governor cover to say ‘I have done something.’”

Democracy happened. Citizens were heard, and the lawmakers were pressured. Quinn’s signature would complete the legislative circle of life three days later. SaveIllinoisMapGrants.org site changed to encourage thank-you notes to legislators, notifying visitors that “even with the passage of Senate Bill 1180 and subsequent signing into law, approximately 130,000 eligible applicants were still denied aid, as the state’s means was far less than the demand for the program.”

“Additionally, a funding source for the appropriation has yet to be identified.”

[Eyes closely watched the rally from the second and third stories.]

Before he left the rally, Quinn joined the TCC contingency on the podium for a last few frames of public interaction. Zantingh and his cadre beamed for the camera. Those associated with the rally began to make way for the exits, a process preempted by news crews who had deadlines to meet. I followed, but became transfixed by an enigmatic young man who began to chant “No MAP?” To that, the sign-wielding students around him answered “No Future.”

“No MAP?”
“No Future!”
“No MAP?”
“No Future!”

Time seemed to melt around this happening, at least until interest waned and the young man, for all his energy and character, struggled to keep the chant going. In a matter of hours on that brisk October day, the sanguine chant of “Save MAP Now” changed into a diffident mumbling of “Now What?”

On the Verge of a Musical Breakthrough - a Moment with Band of Skulls

2009-09-02T11:51:00.000-07:00

It began like a finale - an eruption of fuzz from guitar, bass and drum, occupying the ears of the crowd long after the cut off, like the sun burnt into a bloodshot retina. Singer/guitarist Russell Marsden wringed the strings on his Fender Stratocaster, torturing the guitar to cry out to his vocals. “I want to see you in the morning.”

Bassist Emma Richardson and drummer Matt Hayward tag-teamed the final two beats, meshing the Strat with a blast of snare drum and a humming bass. Then, a pause for effect. The guitar groaned, and cried out again. “I want to see you when the breaking day is dawning,” Marsden sang through the straight, bleached hair masking his face. The strands whipped out with his exhale.

“You gotta go, you gotta go, it’s alright… I want to see you in the- see you in the- light of the morning! Hey!”

It was on - the crowd was seduced into a mob of nodding heads and swaying hips. Band of Skulls ripped through at 10 songs off their first and only album “Baby Darling Doll Face Honey” at St. Louis’ Fubar. Richardson’s boots stomped to a rhythm rife with a bluesy, down-and-dirty ethic. Marsden wrestled the tremolo arm of the Strat, juicing his instrument for every last drop of 70s-psychadelia with a consummate deftness. Hayward drove the band forward with a solid, unflinching beat, evoking the 90s garage movement.

It’s easy deciphering the influences of this power trio. Perhaps the band’s strongest asset is that while its sound was done before (as recently as Kings of Leon and any number of Jack White bands), the catchy lyrics and undeniable energy forces one to accept it on its own terms. As one reviewer explained: “The history of popular music might very well lie within this promising band from England. But its’ the future they ought to be concerned about...because it’s going to be a bright one.”

By some standards, the band’s rise could be considered meteoric. Having formed in January, by March they cut and released a full-length album of 11 songs. The next month, ‘I Know What I am’ was the iTunes single of the week. In August, they were featured on Lollapalooza’s BMI stage, although it was a lightly-attended show before noon on the Saturday of the festival. Also that month, Band of Skulls provided HBO’s popular series “True Blood” with background music in a scene. That wonderfully appropriate song, ‘Blood,’ may have reached up to 5.2 million viewers.

Perhaps the band’s biggest boost will come in October 13, when the highly anticipated teen-centric vampire flick “New Moon” releases its soundtrack, where Band of Skulls will take a spot on a track listing alongside monstrously famous acts such as Radiohead and Muse. November 20, the same track will be played for tens of millions of theatergoers.

(This writer’s best guess is that the track will be the same as featured on HBO’s “True Blood,” although a recent Tweet indicated the band recently spent time in its LA studio, and so may just have created the track. Or, perhaps some completely unrelated new music.)

None of this was apparent at the St. Louis gig. Only 23 showed up on that Monday night. It was an uneventful evening for the band, who enjoyed a bite at a nearby outdoor café in near anonymity. Shortly before the show at the venue, when a fan did approach at the bar, the band looked stunned.

“I was wondering if you could sign this,” the fan said sheepishly, holding a copy of the band’s vinyl record.

“Of course!” Richardson said in a proper British accent, taking the album and dispatching its plastic wrapping with haste. “The cover is a bit slippery to sign.” She opened the album and took out the complementary poster.

“I don’t like what they did with the artwork,” she said, explaining that the record company took her original painting, cropped and mirrored it for the album cover. She passed the poster and a sharpie to the nearest band mate.

“We wanted to catch you before you get so big that we’ll have to pay $80 for a ticket to a stadium show,” the fan said as the guitarist, Marsden, made an autograph.

“That would be great,” Marsden said. “Not that you have to pay $80, but that we would have lots of people come to see us.”

Band of Skulls went on to make their performance, and ended in a massive crescendo. With Richardson and Hayward playing loud and hard, Marsden struck a chord on his Strat and laid the guitar on the stage. Bass and drums continuing to blast, Marsden cranked his effects pedals for maximum reverb, with the chord ringing and ringing and ringing. To the sound of a Strat blasting a hypnotic cacophony of fuzz and whatever happy noises a crowd of 23 could muster, the musicians left their instruments and headed to the adjacent bar.

I sat with my colleague, Joe, the one who approached the band before the concert, and watched as fans struck up conversations with the trio. This was a rare, strange moment, we considered.

“My son really likes your music,” one man, who appeared to be in his early 40s, said. “Would you mind signing this for him?”

Joe and I were at a neighboring booth while Richardson hovered nearby, cigarette burning between her fingers like a post-coital habit.

“Could you sign this poster for my co-worker?” Joe asked.

“Sure, what’s her name?” She said.

“Beth,” he said. “I got her turned on to you guys. She likes the band ‘Heart,’ and you really sound like the band, ‘Heart.’”

“Who’s that?”

“You don’t know who ‘Heart’ is?”

“No, how do you spell it? Just H-E-A-R-T?”

Joe nodded as she scribbled her name, the name of the classic Seattle rock band from the 70s featuring Ann and Nancy Wilson, and how she didn’t know who they were, but was confident that they rocked.

“How can you not know who ‘Heart’ is?” Joe said. “Your vocals sound just like theirs.”

Richardson, the member of the band with a collection of 20,000 records, looked at Joe, puzzled. I felt nervous and turned to Joe, murmuring, “Come on, man…”

“You better keep that Sharpie,” I said to Richardson, changing subjects suddenly. Joe and I scoured a six-block radius in my car, looking for a single felt-tipped marker, in preparation to score pre-concert autographs.

“You’d think a fan should have manners enough to bring their own pen to a concert,” I added.

“Yeah, really!” she said, pointing the end of the marker in the air, and resting her free hand on her hip. “Who do they think we are? Michael Jackson?”

Richardson turned to acknowledge a group of three girls. Emma’s black tank top, and hip-hugging jeans clashed with the suburban-mall-party-girl-esque outfits of the girls.

“We really like your music and think you’re going to get real big someday,” one of the fangirls said, holding out a poster to be signed. Emma nodded approvingly and left her mark on the memorabilia.

The audience, satisfied with autographs and posters and CDs, filed out of the bar, leaving the joint near empty. While the band spoke to punk-rock looking girls who stayed after, Joe and I nursed our beers and debated what next to do. Before long, I decided to embark on a buzzed journey to relieve the burden of my newfound, Mexican friend, Sol Beer. Joe left to the adjacent table.

“You know, Emma says she doesn’t know who ‘Heart’ is,” he said to Hayward.

Hayward turned to Richardson, astonished. “What?! You’ve never heard of ‘Heart’!?”

I returned shortly after to find the band table sans-Richardson. I was informed that everyone at the table gave Richardson grief about not knowing who ‘Heart’ was, to the point where she left the table in mild frustration.

Hayward wrote on Beth’s poster “Beth!! You like Heart!? I like Heart! Let’s get together!”

We shook hands with Hayward on the way out the door. The band would finish its American tour August 30, before knocking out 11 shows in Canada and returning to the UK for another 19 appearances, all before September. Next stop, the unknown.

“I’m busy booking our next tour,” Hayward said as we made our exit. “Just keep checking our MySpace, it will be on there.”

Set List, 8/24/09:

“Light of the Morning”
“I Know What I Am”
“Diamonds and Pearls”
“Patterns”
“Fires”
“Cold Fame”
“Bomb”
“Holywood Bowl”
“Blood”
“Impossible”

Tweetups, Good Times, and the End of the World

2009-08-06T18:03:00.000-07:00

There is something you should know up-front. Full disclosure; this former reporter is shy to the point of absurdity at times. Anyone with this affliction can tell you it gets worse when confronted with a large group of people you have never met. Given that fact, it would seem the odds were against me when I met such a group July 23 at the Brewhaus in Springfield. However, I did have something working for me: all of us were Tweeple.

Of course, such details seemed irrelevant when I entered and knocked a table, spilling a fellow blogger’s beer. Foam of Morland Old Spekled Hen oozed over the tablecloth and spattered the blogger’s khakis. If only had such panache at all social functions.

Thankfully, he was a good and generous Twitterer, and brushed it off as we conversed about the hoppyness of the libation I spilled everywhere. I found all the Tweeple to be just as accommodating. Conversation flowed, and followers became friends. Between the occasional burst of laughter and the warmth of smiles, something became unhinged. It was as if a problem was solved; a resolution reached.

Any instance where you have a group of bloggers in a social setting, you have a bit of a conundrum. When looking at the individual blogger, you’re referring to an individual who spends a great deal of time stewing in front of a screen, expounding personal philosophy in a dearth of social interaction. After all, bloggers are a species of writer, who partake in one of the most solitary and introverted activities a human can commit to. Somehow, in spite of this, face time resulted.

Twitter is a case study of this conundrum. That’s the “microblogging” service whereby participants commit 140-character messages (“tweets”) to a place on the Web, and where other participants can elect to receive those transmissions (“following”). It’s been described as both “worthy of being considered for the Nobel Peace Prize” (Former US security adviser Mark Pfeifle), and “a big waste of time” (Late Show host David Letterman). The act of following is extroverted in the sense of expanding social connections, yet posting remains an introverted enterprise.

The “tweetup” provides resolution. It’s an event where people who use Twitter (“Tweeple,” or “Twitteratti,” depending on the number of followers) meet in person. To facilitate the process of breaking the Web barrier, this Tweetup sometimes occurs in the proximity of alcohol. Thus, it’s common for Tweetups to take place in a local pub.

Chris “Shoo” Scheufele, IT pro, local blogger and founder of the blog aggregator Spfldbloggers.com tweeted July 9. Word spread amongst Springfield tweeple, and support for a Springfield tweetup gained critical mass to break the Web barrier. All came together July 23, when about 15 tweeple and associated bloggers met at the Brewhaus.

“We each had something to add to the conversation,” local blogger and photographer Matt Penning later wrote. “The discussions varied wide as well as local. Putting a face to what online is a sometimes anonymous, and at other times more revealing than ‘real’ life.”

Penning, like many of the bloggers there, came with some hesitancy. This writer must admit the same feelings, especially after he so elegantly bumped a table and spilled beer. The collective interest in blogging, however, provided a convenient talking point, which helped.
To be sure, the July 23 event wasn’t the first ever Tweetup in Springfield. That honor most likely goes to the Elgin Day lobby, who organized a get-together February 25. The Elgin Day Lobby, organized to promote issues surrounding “manufacturing, healthcare, education and community sustainability” in Elgin, IL, promoted the tweetup ahead of a meeting with members of the Illinois General Assembly.

Despite some Springfield Tweeple in attendance (@gotshoo and @mochamomma, to name a few), the PR-centric motives of the event and the lobby that organized it forces the question of authenticity. There was a Tweetup in Springfield, but was it truly a Springfield Tweetup? The answer depends on perspective.

Rewinding to the idea of Tweetup as a resolution, I think of a freelance writer in Seattle, Washington, who lives near the center of the information revolution. Lisa Albers, a transplant from the Midwest, is a former reporter for the now-defunct Seattle Post-Intelligencer. She writes in her blog how the social culture of Seattle, coupled with advances in communication technology, grows a scary, new kind of alienation.

“… the tech culture has made it so that everyone here is wired, but few are really connecting. We all have at least 50 Facebook friends, a hundred Twitter followers, and a few hundred LinkedIn connections; we’re texting and e-mailing and posting status updates and commenting on and sharing articles online with our peeps all day and night long. We go to art gallery openings and house parties and concerts to see a zillion of our closest friends, but even when we’re there, in the flesh having a face-to-face with a human being, we have an iPhone in hand; we’re texting and checking our messages and going online to find out where the next event is.” Albers says. “This is happening to social culture the world over, true, but like grunge, it seems to have originated here. When it comes to human relationships, we’re all multi-tasking.”

Most revolutions in technology and society can be traced back to ideas that writers penned eons ago, especially science fiction writers. In many cases, these writers use their imaginations to explore the potential dangers hidden in scientific advancement. Take, for example, E.M. Forster’s vision of a world where life is as easy as pressing a button. There’s a button for music, a button for clothing. There’s a button for a hot bath, and a button for literature. There’s a button to open the door and summon transportation, too, but it’s rarely used. Travel in this era is considered superfluous, because all places on earth now look alike.

Also, people of this future speak mainly through tubes:

“The clumsy system of public gatherings had been long since abandoned; neither Vashti nor her audience stirred from their rooms. Seated in her armchair she spoke, while they in their armchairs heard her, fairly well, and saw her, fairly well.”

Face-to-face communication withers. The narrative continues, and people devolve further into an informationless, inhuman abyss. They become scared of firsthand experiences:

“And even the lecturers acquiesced when they found that a lecture on the sea was none the less stimulating when compiled out of other lectures that had already been delivered on the same subject. “Beware of first-hand ideas!” exclaimed one of the most advanced of them. “First-hand ideas do not really exist. They are but the physical impressions produced by live and fear, and on this gross foundation who could erect a philosophy? Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element--direct observation. Do not learn anything about this subject of mine--the French Revolution. Learn instead what I think that Enicharmon thought Urizen thought Gutch thought Ho-Yung thought Chi-Bo-Sing thought LafcadioHearn thought Carlyle thought Mirabeau said about the French Revolution.”

As the regression continues, people become more distant, and less information is exchanged. Gradually, it is forgotten how to fix the machine which the society revolves around. The people are helpless when their world crashes down on them.

Are Tweetups a solution to a societal death-spiral of social awkwardness? I posed the question to a trusted friend, who doesn’t Tweet, and wasn’t that impressed. Even though I met up with a group of people from the same geographic location, he insisted, it couldn’t have happened without Twitter. Without the tool, and without the initiative to meet total strangers, I wouldn’t have known of these people. In other words, the social experience was dependant on the tool, not the other way around.

Do we come out ahead? Break even? A social experience happened. A circle of friends was expanded. But perhaps, behind the scenes, had dollars been traded for pennies?

Harassed, Accused by Centrum Café

2009-07-27T14:49:00.000-07:00

[Updated 7:05 PM, July 28: Added results of a virus scan of the laptop.]

Centrum Café in Springfield was winding down. It was 8:35 P.M. on Sunday, July 26. A young woman dressed in black swept up crumbs in the café, while two other women made final preparations in the kitchen.

It was about 15 minutes since she said “thank you for coming” to the last customer, and it didn’t appear any others would come before closing time at 9. Before that, the place was dense with screech of children and the exchanges of the middle-aged and elderly. I briefly considered sending a Tweet about the children running wild, but resisted, deciding not to be a curmudgeon. “Frozen custard on Sunday,” I thought, and shook the idea off.

My laptop glowed in the dim cafe with the text of E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops.” Next to it was the remains of an Italian soda and a picked-at brownie. The brownie was a mixture of chocolate, nuts and coconut. It wasn’t very healthy, and wasn’t very tasty, but I chipped it away as not to be wasteful. I wasn’t going to finish it - I was near ready to leave and let the employees finish cleaning in peace.

A man with salt-and-peppered hair and moustache approached me. I recognized him from before; he sometimes wore what appeared to be a chef’s uniform when he was in the kitchen.

“Are you Matthew?”

I was surprised, but it felt like the good kind of surprise. Maybe he knew my writing. Maybe I had a fan. I didn’t know how he knew me, but became cheery in an instant.

“Yeah, that’s me! Matthew [last name].”

“I’ve seen your computer on our system. You’ve been downloading music and stealing financial records.”

“What?”

“I have sensors all over this café, and they’ve been showing that you’ve been hacking into our computers and stealing financial records.”

“I… I don’t know what you’re talking about, I’ve just been reading here.”

He wasn’t an instrument of the law, and he didn’t have a search warrant, but I felt compelled to show this man who accused me of very serious things that what I was doing in his restaurant. I turned my laptop in his direction to show him the E.M. Forster story. It wasn’t the smartest thing to do. Perhaps it made him feel he had the right to look. Whatever the case, it only made him more curious.

“Were you on 90?”

“Was I on what?”

“Were you on 90?”

“I don’t know what that is. I’m using ‘Centrum Café.’ I just opened my laptop and it works.”

“Show me your network connections.”

My nerves were beginning to cave. I dabbed the pad on the black IBM Lenovo laptop, and my finger began to shake. My face was turning red. Was this guy about to call the police over something I didn’t do? Would they seize my laptop and scour through my personal data to conjure up some imaginary motive for a crime I didn’t commit? What did this guy want from me?

Fumbling through a few Windows Vista screens, I found the networks he was talking about. He asked me to connect to one of them, and I tried. The computer thought for a moment before giving up. I clicked on another one, and it prompted a security code, which for obvious reasons, I didn’t have. I shrugged as the screen asked for the code, and cancelled out. He didn’t back off.

“What are your hours?”

“Hours? Just… whenever?”

“What do you do?”

“What do I do? I’m… I’m unemployed. I’m a writer… I just come in here to read and write. That’s all.”

I grabbed the copy of Raymond Carver’s “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please,” and Hunter S. Thompson’s “The Rum Diaries,” in an effort to convince him that I was the reading and writing type, not the hacking and stealing type. I half expected him to want to look at my books, too, but he turned and began walking to the kitchen.

“Do it again, and I’ll bar you from the café,” he said over his shoulder.

“I’m just here to read,” I said, stuffing Carver, Thompson and my laptop into my bag.

I headed for the door, concerned that my haste might give the wrong impression. But I didn’t feel safe there any longer, so I didn’t hang around.

“Thank you for coming!” the girl said as the door shut behind me.

Update on 7:05 PM, July 28

Some readers, rightly so, have wondered about the security of the laptop that was used in the cafe. It is not out of possibility that a virus could, without the operator's knowledge, infiltrate a network and cause all sorts of issues. I consider myself a fairly safe user, reasonably aware of the symptoms of these viruses and the ways in which a computer can become infected. For one, I always use a firewall, and this Lenovo did come with a copy of Norton, which I used periodically. But to resolve this question with more certainty, I purchased from Best Buy a new, 2009 copy of Norton Internet Security, updated it after installing, restarted, and ran a full system scan. This is the result:

The Norton scan concluded that no viruses were found, with the only possible issues being some 48 tracking cookies.

Given this result, it being the first virus scan since the incident, I'm fairly confident that there were no viruses on this computer, and it presented no security threats to Centrum Cafe, or anyone else on that network.

What Higher Ed in IL Stands to Gain From Capital Plan

2009-07-13T17:46:00.000-07:00

With hope dwindling for an armistice on the Illinois budget, let alone a weapon to pay down debt and finance essential services, one whopping piece of spending did make it out of Springfield alive.

Monday, July 13, Illinois Governor Pat Quinn signed into law SB1221, the first Capital construction plan since 1999.

The “Illinois Jobs Now!” Web site says that $31 billion will be spent in the next six years building or restoring roads and bridges, bolstering public transit, developing high-speed rail, funding economic and community development, and investing in the state’s K-12 and higher education system.

For some perspective, the budget Quinn proposed for FY2010 totaled $53 billion. If the $31 billion Capital construction plan was doled out in six equal, annual payments, the payment in 2010 would be less than 10 percent of that year’s budget.

The “Illinois Jobs Now!” Web site says that projects will be funded via motor vehicle title fees, license plate fees, drivers' license fees, video gaming terminals ($300 million), and new taxes on sweets, sweetened tea, coffee, grooming and hygiene products and alcohol. Those taxes actually will go to pay down the $13 billion in 20-year bonds the state will issue.

The site says federal and local-matching funds will bridge the gap to $31 billion.

Included in the construction plan is $1.5 billion for higher education, going to 32 institutions.

Illinois State University President Al Bowman in a statement Monday said the passage of the bill was "encouraging" for ISU, but cautioned "it may be quite some time before any capital funds are actually released for use," due to the economy.

Bowman added "We must also remember that a fiscal year 2010 operating budget is still not in place, and that the Governor’s current proposal calls for more than $1 billion in cuts, thousands of state employee layoffs and furlough days for employees of some state agencies."

$54 million will be going to rehabilitate ISU's Fine Arts Complex, which would be used to demolish antiquated buildings and replace them with facilities having modern mechanical and electrical systems, thus consolidating nine buildings into one.

Below are those institutions and the projects that will be funded, in alphabetical order. Click “Read on…” to go to the page, and hit Ctrl+F to access your browser’s search function, if you wish to find a particular institution.

Chicago State University
$40 million to Chicago State University for a west side campus

City College of Chicago
$31 million to City College of Chicago - Olive Harvey College to construct academic building

College of Du Page
$25 million to College of DuPage - Glen Ellyn to replace temporary facilities

College of Lake County
$36 million to College of Lake County to construct the student services building

Eastern Illinois University
$4.8 million to EIU to upgrade HVAC/plumbing systems in Coleman Hall and the Life Sciences Building

Harper College
$41 million to Harper College to construct one stop admissions and campus/student center

Illinois Central College
$2.6 million to Illinois Central College to renovate/expand Dirksen Hall

Illinois Eastern Community Colleges Wabash Valley
$4 million to IECC - Wabash Valley to construct a student center

Illinois Math and Science Academy
$6.3 million to the Illinois Math and Science Academy to renovate residence halls

Illinois State University
$54.3 million to Illinois State University to renovate the Visual Arts Center Complex

Illinois Valley Community College
$22.8 million to Illinois Valley Community College to construct a community technology center

Kaskaskia College
$5.6 million to Kaskaskia College for infrastructure improvements at the Vandalia Campus

Lake Land College
$9.9 million to Lake Land College to construct a workforce relocation center
$7.5 million to Lake Land College to construct a rural development technology center

Lewis and Clark Community College
$16.3 million to Lewis and Clark Community College for construction/infrastructure improvements - National Great Rivers Research and Educational Center

Lincoln Land Community College
$3 million to Lincoln Land Community College to renovate Logan and Mason Halls

McHenry County College
$672,000 to McHenry County College to construct a greenhouse

Northeastern Illinois University
$73 million to Northeastern Illinois University to construct an education building

Northern Illinois University
$22.5 million to Northern Illinois University to expand/renovate the Stevens Building
$8 million to Northern Illinois University to renovate Cole Hall

Parkland College
$15.4 million to Parkland College to construct a student services addition

Rend Lake College
$451,000 to Rend Lake College to construct art program addition

Richland Community College
$3.5 million to Richland Community College to Renovate/Expand Student Success Center

Rock Valley College
$26.7 million to Rock Valley College to construct an Arts Instructional Center

Southern Illinois University Carbondale
$56.7 million to SIU – Carbondale to construct a transportation education center
$4.3 million to Southern Illinois University – Carbondale for a communication center

Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
$78.9 million to SIU Edwardsville to construct/renovate the Science Laboratory

Southwestern Illinois Community College
$19 million to Southwestern Illinois Community College for campus improvements

Spoon River College
$4 million to Spoon River College to construct a multi-purpose building

University of Illinois Chicago
$21 million to UIC for upgrades to campus infrastructure and renovate campus buildings

University of Illinois College of Medicine at Rockford
$14.8 million to University of Illinois – Rockford to construct the National Rural Health Center

University of Illinois Springfield
$4 million to the University of Illinois – Springfield to Renovate/Construct a Public Safety Building

University of Illinois Urbana Champaign
$57.3 million to U of I - Urbana/Champaign to renovate Lincoln Hall
$44.5 million to U of I - Urbana/Champaign for an electrical and computer engineering building

Western Illinois University Macomb
$67.8 million to WIU – Macomb to Construct a Performing Arts Center
$3.2 million for capital renewal at WIU-Macomb

Western Illinois University Moline
$15.8 million to WIU – Moline to renovate and construct Riverfront Campus - Phase I
$42 million to WIU – Moline to renovate and construct Riverfront Campus - Phase II

Photos and Footage - July 4 in Springfield

2009-07-05T00:33:00.000-07:00

Springfield, Illinois' July 4 fireworks display went on as planned, despite low cloud cover and high probability of precipitation.

This year's display cost about $20,000, according to the State Journal-Register.

Crowd reaction was much stronger and more positive than last year's event - a "low-level" display which was encumbered by foliage and buildings, leaving many spectators disappointed.

In other news, The Horseshoe now has a YouTube channel, which features video taken of the display. You can take a look at the clip here, in this post, or by visiting the YouTube channel.

Transcript of Governor Quinn's Speech to Social Workers

2009-06-23T14:44:00.000-07:00

Transcript of Governor Quinn's speech to social workers in the capitol rotunda, June 23, 2009:

"The people's house in the land of Lincoln in the city of Abraham Lincoln, who believed in a government of the people, by the people and for the people, we are the people. Always remember that people united cannot be defeated and we will not be defeated. This is a moment in history and we the people must seize and go forward on behalf of the common good to make sure our state has a balanced budget, a budget where the revenue equals the expenditures, a budget that makes sure that human services are provided to the good, hardworking, loyal people of the state of Illinois...

The people of Illinois are good and decent, they understand the value of a good samaritan, that when your neighbor looses his job, or has a problem, all of us band together to help our neighbors. That's what the tradition is in Illinois, that's what the tradition is in America. We understand when it's very tough, in economic hard times, we aren't going to throw anyone overboard, the Land of Lincoln, we make sure that we all go together and make sure where we get to where we've got to go, a better place for the people of Illinois, are taking good care of each other. that's what I believe in, and I know that's what you believe in.

On March 18 in this very Building, the state capitol, I proposed an income tax increase... a temporary income tax increase that would make sure that we have enough revenue for human services, public safety, health and educaion, helping our veterans, the men and women who are the front lines for our democracy. When they come home, we want to make that sure we take good care of their health needs, their job needs, their education needs and everyone else's education needs, and everyone else's education needs. We believe in everybody in and nobody left out in the land of Lincoln.

There's something wrong if there are political people in our state who think you can leave people behind and cut the budget in a mean-spirited way, where we don't have enough revenue for child care, for senior care, for healthy people to have a chance. For all of those who are involved in serving others, I want to thank everyone here because I know... all the people who work in human services, you don't do it for the money, there's not a lot of money in this, you do it because you have the service heart.

There's a saying that I think all of us take to heart that service to others is the rent we pay for our place on God's earth. The people in this hall, in this building, have more than paid their rent in their service to others. Dr. Martain Luther King Jr. once said everyone can be great because everyone can serve. And we want to serve the people of Illinois in the best way possible. We've got to to make sure we have top notch human services during this tough recession. We have to make sure we have good mental health services in every community. There's something wrong in a recession when the politicians want to cut back on community mental health, that won't happen as long as I'm governor.

The great thing about America, the great thing about Illinois is that you adults are willing to sacrifice part of our present in order to help our children's future. We believe in our early childhood education we believe in health care... [cut off by audience's chanting of "no more cuts."]

We have a message. On March 18, I proposed a budget for our state, a decent budget, that didn't have severe cuts to social services... we have to get the revenue for that... As governor of Illinois, it's a great honor and priviledge to be a governor... But I call for temporarily raising the income tax from three and to four and a half percent, so we can have a decent budget, we can help people who have been laid off... we can help everyone in Illinois who is needing a helping hand. We can do that. What we have to do from now until next tuesday, the 30th of June, the end of this fiscal year, is use the power of democracy. What we have here is simple, the power of everyday, ordinary people, banding together, not for profit, for a cause we believe in. We believe in the people of Illinois, all 30 million people. Everybody's in, nobody is left out. We want to make sure our legislature can have a revenue bill so I can sign it, and we can make the will of the people the law of the land."

In Search of Budget, Governor Quinn takes to Populism in Capitol Rally

2009-06-23T13:31:00.000-07:00

With words of solidarity and praise, Gov. Pat Quinn let nearly 5,000 social workers gathered at the Illinois capitol know where he stood Tuesday afternoon.

“There’s something wrong if there are political people in our state who think you can leave people behind, and cut the budget in a mean-spirited way, where we don’t have enough revenue for child care, for senior care, for healthy people to have a chance,” the governor said before a mass of protesters that filled the rotunda.

In the midst of a $9.2 rift in the state budget, a crisis made direr by the faltering economy, the Governor is counting on the unity of populism to save services and balance the budget. His proposal of temporarily increasing the personal income tax from 3 to 4.5 percent for two years to bridge the gap has met intense opposition.

“We understand when it’s very tough, in economic hard times, we aren’t going to throw anyone overboard, the Land of Lincoln, we make sure that we all go together and make sure where we get to where we’ve got to go, a better place for the people of Illinois, are taking good care of each other,” he said.

Quinn told protesters at the rally, meant to coincide with the beginning of the special budget session, that citizens would have to organize and use the “power of democracy” to before the end of the fiscal year, Tuesday, June 30, to avoid cuts to services.

Quinn’s excited tone at the rally was a stark difference from the somber “doomsday budget” rhetoric observed in interviews. Members of the punditocracy have commented that this was a tactic employed by Quinn’s predecessor, Rod Blagojevich, and as such may harm Quinn’s ambitions and image as governor.

As with much of the politics in Illinois, the success of any given campaign (or budget) can change by the minute, often drastically. With a call to populism, especially in times of a great socioeconomic schism, the fate of the budget may even be out of the hands of the governor, placed squarely in the possession of the people’s voices.

Demonstrators packed the rotunda, displaying a variety of signs, many of which declared "JUST FIX IT." This was also a slogan chanted throughout the rally.

Social service workers, representing all branches of service, lined up to enter the rotunda where Quinn and others spoke. The heat was oppressive, but did not seem to have an effect on those lobbying. Many were left out by security personnel at some point before Gov. Quinn's speech.

Demonstrators line up to enter the rotunda to lobby. The message at the rally was completely unified around the message of salvaging essential services.

Members of New Mexico-based SWOP, the SouthWest Organizing Project, were among organizers at the rally. Chartered buses surrounded the capitol building, as organizers filed out in multicolor shirts representing their respective causes.

Another picture of Gov. Quinn's speech to social workers in the rotunda.

Putting Lincoln On The Couch, with Dr. Burlingame

2009-06-12T12:53:00.000-07:00

Dr. Burlingame, Renowned Historian and New UIS Lincoln Studies Chair, Tries to Crack Abe’s Noggin.

In 1997, Michael Burlingame boldly declared that experts “have yet to analyze fully the psychological origins of Lincoln’s hatred of slavery, his aversion to women, his anger and cruelty, his role as a father figure,” among other quirks.

He proposed in that first book, “The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln,” that the solution was a healthy dose of psychohistory.

“It’s an attempt to address some questions about the past that otherwise would be very difficult to answer, unless you pay attention to unconscious forces,” Burlingame, 67, says.

A psychohistorian, Burlingame intends to bring a unique look at history when he takes the post of the Naomi B. Lynn Distinguished Chair in Lincoln Studies at the University of Illinois at Springfield this fall.

He’ll be tapping into Carl Jung and Freud to pick apart history, while teaching a handful of UIS students a course in psychohistory and the American presidency at the historic Iles House in Springfield.

“We will be looking at people like Jefferson and Lyndon Johnson, really studying how their personal experiences affected their ideology and their behaviors,” Burlingame says.

Burlingame was hooked on Lincoln as an undergraduate at Princeton, under the auspice of noted historian David Herbert Donald. He would go on to earn his doctorate from the same historian from John Hopkins University in 1971.

Since then, he’s written three books on Lincoln, the most recent being 2008’s “Abraham Lincoln: A Life,” a two-volume series which garnered critical praise. He’s also racked up an extensive list of accolades, and retired from Connecticut College after a 30-year career there.

The 16th president earns a special place on the Burlingame psychologist couch.

For example, one enigma Burlingame finds is abhorrence to slavery, at a time when the average Illinoisan may not be inclined to abolition. Lincoln would not likely harbor those views from his native, slave state of Kentucky, either.

Given that history, what provoked Lincoln to protest a state proclamation against abolitionist groups in 1837 and write that slavery was “founded on both injustice and bad policy” (while only one other lawmaker signed his protest)? Or inspired him to argue in 1854 in Peoria against the Kansas-Nebraska Act with a lengthy speech about the moral ills of slavery, and re-enter the public arena? Burlingame recounts how Lincoln’s relationship with his father may have fostered abolitionist feelings.

“His father treated him like a slave. He rented him out to neighbors, so Lincoln as an adolescent would go out and spend days on end performing really back breaking farm chores like chopping down trees, picking up stumps, building fences and all that kind of hard work,” he says.

It wasn’t uncommon for Lincoln to be pulled from his lessons to work on a chore for a neighbor. Those earnings became the property of the parent, and Lincoln’s father didn’t hesitate to use his son’s labor. For a boy who loved to learn, Burlingame says, this was a trigger.

“Unconsciously he identified himself with the slaves and identified his father with slave holders, otherwise it’s hard to understand why Lincoln despised slavery from early on,” he says.

Lincoln hated working a hard day’s work without honest pay, and that became the stinging point for his antislavery rhetoric. He didn’t use an angle of civil liberties, freedom of speech, press or assembly when trying to argue abolition. “Instead, he talks about how it’s an outrage that somebody goes out and works in the hot sun all day, and somebody else derives the profits,” Burlingame says.

That Lincoln suffered from clinical depression and lost a great love in his earlier years (Ann Rutledge), was considered bunk until recently. James G. Randall, the distinguished Lincoln historian and professor at the University of Illinois two generations ago, discredited a large portion of William Herndon’s personal notes, silencing a wealth of the evidence in the process.

“That set Lincoln Scholarship back about 50 years and the Herndon treasure trove seem like a nuclear waste dump,” Burlingame says.

It was later revealed that much of this was influenced by Randall’s wife, who had a very high opinion of Mary Todd Lincoln and sought to purge Ann Rutledge from history books. In the process of making “The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln,” Burlingame, whose mentor at Princeton was a protégé of Randall, approached the archives of the president’s law partner with caution.

“I thought I should look at it, to say I just took a glance at it, and I found it quite persuasive,” he says. “There were so many people who testified and they all sounded reasonable to me.”

Now that his schedule of bicentennial speeches and book touring is winding down, he anticipates settling into his UIS post and getting down to a new book. Tentatively titled “Words of Lincoln reported by Contemporary Newspapers,” he hopes to collect reporter’s stories on the president.

“Sometimes it’s a direct quotation and sometimes it’s an indirect quotation, but those are valuable contributions to the stock of information about Lincoln,” Burlingame says.

He also intends to hunt down nearly 200 anonymous letters written to the Sangamon Journal, which he believes Lincoln wrote, along with primary source material from White House secretaries. Some of the data won’t be to be tremendously difficult to find, considering his living arrangements across the street from the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, in an 1856 building where Lincoln may have been at some point.

“I’ve spent a lot of time in Springfield doing research, and people have been extremely kind and hospitable,” he says. “I have a pretty big circle of friends, and I’m looking forward to spending a lot of time with them.”

Challenge from Hell: Profile of a Hell's Kitchen Winner

2009-05-28T09:25:00.000-07:00

She doesn’t live by the rules of any one mantra.

“My mantra changes every day, like my favorite food,” says Christina Machamer, better known as Chef Christina, the winning culinary combatant from season four of Hell’s Kitchen.

Due to her grueling schedule at the London West Hollywood restaurant, where Michelin-starred chef Gordon Ramsay reigns, lately her mantra has been “eat well and be well.” Foods that give energy are a must, given her 14-hour work days. “Working the hours I do, it’s very difficult to balance my health and strength.”

Earning her one-year tenure at Ramsay’s restaurant required more than just good eats. To face up to the Hell’s Kitchen challenge and compete against 14 other chefs, many who had more experience than the 25-year-old, Machamer had to draw from hard-won lessons in the trenches of the restaurant business.

Machamer started in the industry at the age of 16 at a Red Lobster restaurant. “It wasn’t really because I wanted to be a chef. It paid above the minimum wage, and they had free biscuits.”

Right from the start, the gauntlet was thrown down. “I started on a Saturday night during Lent, when we had 400 people a night.” The experience left her exhausted. “I went into the bathroom and started vomiting.”

Despite the challenges of a working in a corporate restaurant, she kept at it, even as a full-time pre-law student in Massachusetts, far from her native St. Louis. And while she can’t remember the name of every restaurant she’s worked at, she recalls working for at least 30 restaurants, often two at a time. When she learned everything about one role, she’d change positions. When she learned everything about a restaurant, she’d move to another one. “If I liked a restaurant, I’d stay there about a year and a half. They teach you everything you need to know.”

She returned to Missouri, and eventually had a falling-out with her aspirations of becoming a lawyer, and found a home in culinary arts. “The more I pursued [law], the less interested I was. The chances that I would ever be able to pursue constitutional law were limited. I couldn’t just graduate law school and change the world.” Still, she does not regret the change, finding herself much happier working with food and treating the world to her creations. “Maybe it’s not as important as politics, but I can see it does make an impact.”

Reaching out for new experiences was a habit instilled in Machamer early on. “That’s one thing I’ve been encouraged to do since I was young.” It’s a habit that dates back to games she used to play with her brother, when the two would try to settle who was most adventurous. “We tried to gross each other out and see who would eat fish eyes, bones, tails. You have to experience all those different things.”

While watching the third season of Hell’s Kitchen with her peers at the Culinary Institute of America in New York, the Harvard of culinary schools, she decided to give the show a shot and showed up for casting calls.

Despite having left the college life far behind, the background she had as a “dorm mother” proved to be a useful asset. When she was accepted and the contest began, she found herself living in close quarters with other chefs and grappled with the constant politicking that came with it. “It made it a lot easier to deal with. I was used to dealing with a lot of stress and things changing, and those stresses can really get in the way.”

In the kitchen, her and other hopefuls had to invent and perfect a menu in a matter of hours, where in the field, it would normally take days. And that’s not mentioning operating under the insult-frothing, entrée-lobbing auspice of Gordon Ramsay. But the ordeal was a proper introduction into the executive sous chef position that Machamer won. “I was surprised how similar the experience was [to being executive sous chef]. It’s not quite to the same degree, but the hours are long and the demand is the same.”

That’s not to say that Gordon Ramsay is always on his worst behavior. On the contrary, Machamer says her professional relationship is nothing like the reality show would suggest. He’s “just Gordon” to her at the restaurant.

“I got over that intimidation working in Hell’s Kitchen. One of the things he told me after the show as was ‘I’m so proud of you.’ Once you get over the fact that he’s this Michelin stared chef, he’s a real person. In the restaurant, he’ll ask about my boyfriend and mother. It’s a different relationship, it’s much better now.”

With her tenure at the restaurant nearly half complete, she’s plotting future adventures. She recently launched bcbcblends.com, also known as “Brown Chicken Brown Cow.” The business, which she runs with her chef boyfriend Cory Lemieux, offers up micro-batched specialty spices and recipes that put them to use. There’s also a cookbook in the works, and Machamer is considering starting her own restaurant. She sees no limits that adventurism can’t conquer. “The opportunities are endless.”

Note: Season six of Hell's Kitchen will premier at 8 p.m. ET, Tuesday, July 21 on the Fox network.

MASK: Swine Flu Expressed Through Face Masks

2009-05-14T16:59:00.000-07:00

MASK: Swine Flu Expressed Through Face Masks

FROM THE FIRST fevered days of breathless newscasts warning of a fast-moving contagion - images of masked soldiers brandishing automatic rifles at airports and questions of isolationism whizzing by - to the silence that now pervades, the mass media obsession with Swine flu has run its course.

This might be an indicator that the public also has stopped noticing, especially if one analyzes Twitter trends, which shows the flu-related chatter at a lull. Perhaps that’s the trade off from the intensity - and absurdity - of the coverage in late April.

Mask I : "If I'm Still Alive" : My intentions with the masks are to communicate the issues surrounding the swine flu outbreak of 2009, and express it in a way representative of the outbreak. It struck me at the time that face masks were a powerful symbol of this and many other outbreaks, embodying a silent, but potent, fear of the unknown. It also occurred to me that the face mask can double as a fairly interesting canvas for whatever the artist wishes to communicate. My artistic skills were limited, but I felt the act of expression was more important than the competency of the artwork. So this was one of my first masks, it features lyrics by one of my favorite artists, the Canadian band Metric. The song is titled "Help, I'm Alive," and it reflects the feelings of isolation that the writer, Emily Haines, felt when she uprooted her life to find an artistic sanctuary in Buenos Aires. In the same way, the mask separates us so that it can save us. But that always complicates matters.

The flu may be a fad, unless you happen to live in Illinois, which the Center for Disease Control now says is the most infected state. As of 12 p.m. CST April 14, the CDC said that Illinois had 620 reported cases of swine flu. That’s more than New York’s 224, or Texas’ 439 or even California’s 473. The closest competitor to the Land of Lincoln is one of its neighbors, Wisconsin, with its 510 reported cases.

Most of Illinois’ cases were reported in Chicago and surrounding areas (274 in Chicago, 179 in suburban Cook county). Meanwhile, here in Sangamon county, one person tested positive so far. That woman, according to the county’s department of public health, and reported by the Springfield State-Journal Register, “never needed to be hospitalized and has returned to work.”

In Springfield, before the confirmed case, there had been a run on face masks at local stores. When I asked a Wal-Mart employee where a person could find a facemask, I was told “anywhere where they are the most expensive.”

There’s a stark contrast, a sort of disconnect, between the potency of the flu and the media bonanza that hyped it up. Nancy Cox, flu chief for the CDC, told Associated Press reporters on May 1 that the virus lacked the traits of more dangerous strains, such as the recent avian flu. A researcher from Mount Sinai Medical School also told reporters that “there is no real reason to believe this is a more serious strain” than a garden-variety seasonal flu.

Almost entirely absent from the public discussion is the link between the virus and factory farming, yet the scientific community has known this for some time. The alarm was first sounded by scientists in March 2003, in a report from science writer Bernice Wuethrich in the magazine Science.

Biologists had been trying to make sense of a wave of new swine flu viruses that had been gaining momentum since 1998 in North American factory farms. “It seems that after years of stability, the North American swine flu virus has jumped onto an evolutionary fast track, churning out variants every year,” Wuethrich reported.

Mask II : "Dead Piggies Never Squeal" : The inspiration for this mask came from the frustration I felt from mainstream media, notably 24-hour cable news networks, health officials and representatives of the pork industry. Firstly, my critique of the 24-hour news networks has several points: that they hyped the novelty of the virus rather than explain its potency, and also that they were complicit in renaming the virus to H1N1 despite the link to swine. For health officials, it was that they also did not brief the public on the possibility that the virus was no more potent than the seasonal flu, and also capitulating to the pork producers' will, at the expense of public awareness. And lastly, it's a statement to the pork producers for misleading the public about the potential for viruses to come out of breeding plants. Dead piggies never squeal, but they're not so good at stopping viruses.

What was the source of these changes, according to experts? Pigs, as nature would have it, are ideal vessels for strains of swine, avian and human influenza viruses to swap genetic information and breed more virulent strains. There are environmental factors that can contribute to a killer flu as well.

“In the past decade, big swine producers have gotten bigger, and many small producers have gone out of business,” Wuethrich noted, saying that from 1993 to 2003 the number of large North American farms grew from less than 1/5 of all farms to more than 1/2. Accompanied by that increase in the number of hogs is the ability for those hogs to serve as Petri dishes for the mixing and proliferation of ever more dangerous strains of flu.

Other factory farming habits only increase the likelihood of a potent flu being bred, most notably the widespread use of vaccines. Experts say while this practice decreases the odds of an interspecies transmission, it also may favor new viral types coming into being.

The looming threat of the swine flu, however, was eclipsed by the avian flu “global health emergency somewhat eclipsed the ability of the article to have a significant impact,” Bernice Wuethrich said in an interview with The Real News Network.

Indeed, sandwiched between the pages of the swine flu story was another one of her stories, titled “An Avian Flu Jumps to People.” There, she reported that cases of avian flu infecting humans in Hong Kong “sounded an even more urgent alarm.”

Swine flu always is an issue for the factory farm and for biologists. But what really gets the attention of the science and health communities is when a swine flu makes a critical jump in evolution and infects a person. The record so far suggests that for this swine flu, that critical moment came in early April, in La Gloria, in the state of Veracruz, Mexico.

Residents there urged that the government investigate a nearby pig farm operated by Granjas Carroll, a subsidiary of Smithfield (NYSE:SFD). At the time of the citizen’s press conference, a mysterious new respiratory infection had infected a large percentage of the town’s population, according to local news reports . Some of the children also developed bronchial pneumonia.

Mask III : "Enjoy Smithflu" : Smithfield's press releases about the state of affairs at Granjas Carroll have done little to satisfy critics, especially since they have asserted their innocence on information that may not exist. Until CDC or FDA officials investigate GC, and a thorough, independent investigation follows, the record will still show a strong link between Smithfield and the swine flu. This strong link begs the question of culpability. Will a company, proven to be the origin of an illness which kills, maims and cost millions to quell, not take responsibility? Will restitution not be due to families affected? And will governments not regulate the industry to prevent such happenings in the future? The "Enjoy Smithflu" mask begs these questions.

Veratect, a Seattle biosurveillance startup, reported April 6 on the strange illness. Health officials in La Gloria found nearly 60 percent of the population affected by the outbreak. Citizens pointed to
fetid lagoons of swine feces as the source of the illness, and flies as a possible vector. Health officials concurred.

James Wilson, an operational biosurveillance professional for Veratect and the writer behind the Biosurveillance blog, added the disclaimer that “And to be crystal clear, the way we used this information was to simply flag an event as worthy of closer scrutiny and higher awareness, as there was absolutely no proof of true involvement of this company in the outbreak- a proper epidemiological investigation is required to prove such links.” Veratect’s Twitter feed, @veratect, continues to document the progress of the swine flu.

Pending some kind of conclusive evidence of where this flu came from, bloggers and commentators called the virus “Smithflu.” Meanwhile, on April 30, the World Health Organization stopped calling the flu a swine flu, and now officially refers to it as influenza A(H1N1), to try to alter the negative perception of the pork industry.

Mask IV : "American Pig" : Americans consume five times as much as Mexicans. Ten times as much as a Chinese person. Thirty times as much as a person from India. I find it a pointed critique of American culture to make a mask such as "American Pig." The irony of the name and nature of the swine flu only adds to the power of the critique.

Smithfield’s official stance is that it had nothing to do with the swine flu. “Based on available recent information, Smithfield has no reason to believe that the virus is in any way connected to its operations in Mexico,” it said in an April 26 press release. At the same time, it stated that it is part of investigations and is submitting “samples from its swine herds to The University of Mexico for testing.” That same release also says that Smith Field does vaccinate its animals for swine flu.

In the latest developments on the Smithfield front, the company made a press release May 14 saying that “testing process conducted by the Mexican government have confirmed that no virus, including the human strain of A(H1N1) influenza, is present in the pig herd at Granjas Carroll.”

Mask V : "Hello Kitty Mask" : The face mask seems like such an alien item in the United States. If you were to wear the item in the streets, you would doubtless get many confused looks. Even so, when I learn about other parts of the globe, I am taken aback that for so many people living in industrialized nations (especially China), it is a part of the daily routine. I pondered what kind of massive event would require us in the U.S. to alter our daily habits to include the face mask.

Obviously, like in China, the flu or environmental hazards would be enough to cause these shifts. And yet, despite such shifts, much of what we consider American habits would continue almost unfazed. Children would have to be brought up with the knowledge of these modified habits. This was something that came to mind when I learned about other masks, such as Bill Barminski's 2001 "IBM Blue Mickey" gas mask, or the Walt-Disney approved 1942 Mickey masks. It was with this in mind that I painted "Hello Kitty" on the mask. Note that the "Hello Kitty" also is wearing a mask, as if to be a proper role model for children in an era where the concepts of sterility and quarantine are essential.

The underlying question, which I find most fascinating, is the selection process of habits. Which parts of our daily lives are we willing to change, so that other habits may continue to be practiced?

At the time, there have been no independent or government reports that confirm the assertions, or an acknowledgement or explanation of the illness that struck the population of La Gloria.

Yesterday I looked absolutely stupid.

2009-05-05T11:30:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I looked absolutely stupid.

I didn’t learn this from the glares of the Mercedes and BMWs as they passed; drivers looking at me without looking at me.

How thoughtless of their country club not to have some kind of sidewalk around it for short, angry-looking joggers with the matching blue Nike Sphere Running shirt and New Balance shoes, MP3 ear buds whipping rhythmically.

Why do people do these things? This is totally unreasonable. I have a perfectly good car and service it regularly. Like every decent, law-abiding schmuck, I bought an expensive square of paper that says I’m insured. Yeah, there’s the whole health thing. Being impaled by a Mercedes hood ornament also is a compelling argument. I kept pace with the music, figuring I’d figure it out in the next 30 minutes or so.

A sign on the mansion to the left had the silhouette of a dog, surrounded by the text “I CAN MAKE IT TO THE FENCE IN 2.8 SECONDS, CAN YOU?” I pondered the reasoning behind flaunting wealth through an 8-bedroom, 4-bath palace with granite counter tops, when it requires the paranoid vigilance of a conspiracy theorist.

It took four blocks to get to the park, where I was greeted by a rusty water fountain. Swine flu, cholera and dysentery flashed through my mind. I recalled how in the Apple II version of Oregon Trail, I couldn’t ever keep my westward-bound settlers from dying horrible, painful deaths. I didn’t care anymore. I drank. Then I began jogging.

It’s easier when you’re actually in the park. You tend to blend in with the others. There’s a point where you’re not just a jogger, but a member of a race of people dedicated to the practice of running in circles. For a moment you consider launching into a conversation with another jogger, about jogging and other jogging-related things. Do we have jobs? Or just really long lunch breaks? I don’t know. We just jog.

I remember the time my dad and I were lost. It was a country road not far out of town, and the only other person was a lone jogger. We pulled aside and asked him for directions. The guy stared straight ahead and muttered something about not being able to stop. That guy was an asshole.

The pace continues. You get tired. You get thirsty. You get pissy. It gets worse.

After a while, it’s too hard to think of more than two things. One of those things is the word “FUCK.” Sometimes, that alternates with the word “SHIT.” The other is the body-wide throbbing. People unfamiliar with the sensation liken it to dying. I’m one of those people.

At that moment you realize an enormous black hole in your head. It’s a hole where your shitty job used to be, where your bills used to live, where fear and pain and death called home. But you don’t think about it for too long because you can’t. The throbbing doesn’t allow it.

Once it’s absolutely quiet, helplessly dominated by the throbbing, you begin to piece together what’s really been going on. Our entire lives, we listen. We listen to our bosses tell us we’re not good enough. We listen to the debt collectors’ threats of indentured servitude. We listen to the television insulting our intelligence. We listen to the news telling us how we’re all going to die. We listen to everyone except us.

All you have at that point is the throbbing. It’s the throbbing that convinces you that you really are alive.

Yesterday I looked absolutely stupid.
It was magnificent.

This post is somewhat of a departure from the previous content on The Horseshoe Blog. My hopes of this blog always has been more journalistic and less introspective. This was based on philosophy about the importance of journalism and how it relates to healthy free speech and a healthy democracy. I still hope for that, but my attention lately has been drifting father away from actual reporting and more to commentary and analysis of mass media. Soon, I don't know exactly when, I'll unveil a blog for this specific purpose. In the meantime I hope you enjoyed what little content I've posted so far and hope to see you around here again.

P.S., if you're interested in knowing what park I'm referring to in this post, please refer to http://thehorseshoeblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/sundown-washington-park-springfield-il.html

2009-04-12T09:15:00.000-07:00

TAYLORVILLE, ILLINOIS - SUNDAY, APRIL 5, 2009

IN THE Walmart Supercenter, a memorial was fashioned for a coworker who had died. His name was Rodney Williams, and he was 59 or 60 at the time of his death.

I had some second thoughts about taking this picture; that it would be disrespectful to distribute such a private moment (despite it being very public). But I could not help but think about the statement this was making about consumerism, about America. To think that one could live, work, and die in such an environment.

It forces one to manifest questions about the purpose of one's life, one's work. How valuable we are, and how we may devaluate ourselves by adopting artificial systems.

I hope there is no question that I have compassion for Mr. Williams and his family, despite me not knowing him or them.

2009-02-10T14:45:00.000-08:00

SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS - TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2009
Sundown @ Washington Park. The backdrop for weddings, prom photos, couples pics and love in general.

Snapshot Economy: Circuit City + Borders Express

2009-01-18T16:04:00.000-08:00

SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS - SUNDAY, JANUARY 18, 2009
CIRCUIT CITY accomplished something in liquidation that it wasn't able to do on most days: keep the parking lot full and have customers lining up at the registers to buy.

This particular store in Springfield, IL, had never been as successful as the other electronics retail giant in town, Best Buy. So it came as a surprise when this particular was skipped in November 2008, when the company decided to close 155 stores.

Now, all 567 stores are in the process of liquidating stock.

Discounts in the original 155 were not tremendously generous, Cnet reported. Sales among the remaining stores were similar.

The deepest discounts were the music section, with 30 percent off. The more expensive the item, the less the discount. Big-ticket electronics, such as digital cameras and BR players were 10 percent off.

That didn't stop people from buying, at this store and others. In fact, LA Times reported it sparked a "black Saturday."

NOT THE ONLY liquidation in town, the Borders Express book store had discounts of its own. All items were 40 percent off, and people were also buying.

Other recent losses from the mall include Linnens N Things and World Market. A theater (Kerasotes-owned) and a an arcade (a Namco Cybertainment-owned Aladdin's Castle franchise) closed earlier this year. Both had been tenants since the mall opened in 1977.

Little Blue Dots

2008-06-18T16:45:00.000-07:00

“Stay out of Iowa”

DAVENPORT, IOWA - THURSDAY, JUNE 12, 2008 - Nearly every state has blue signs as you cross the border. They’ll sometimes suggest that you stop at a visitor’s center, or turn on some AM radio station for tourist information. At the Iowa boarder, I took the advice.

“What do you think of when you think about the Quad Cities area?” some unnamed guy said to another unnamed guy.
“I think of the Mississippi River. It flows right through the city…” the other man said.
“That’s right… it emboldens the natural beauty of the area…”

Emboldens. I thought it was an interesting choice of words, considering that just 70 miles west, a similar body of water forced 10,000 to abandon their lives. But it wasn’t until later that I figured out the station was an advertisement on repeat, designed to lure tourists to the visitor’s center, not to warn them about 500-year floods.

Even so, I pulled over at the first visitor information hub and was surprised to find actual visitors there, still planning vacations despite all the things they may have heard on the news. In Davenport, the paper seemed to be in denial. “Flood of ’93? No way,” a headline on the paper’s Web site read. Then again, it wasn’t flooding everywhere. Davenport was very much dry, with the Mississippi looking as normal and healthy as it ever has.

“I’m trying to help sandbag in Iowa City. Could I get a map of Iowa, and could you tell me if any roads around Iowa City are shut down?” I asked one of the smiling, white-haired managers.

The lady pointed to Interstate 80 on the map; a section of interstate that was supposed to get me into Iowa City. It was also supposed to get me out.

“Tomorrow there’s talking about closing it near Tipton,” she said politely, and handed me an official map of the state.

Hoping the way in or out of Iowa City wouldn’t get washed out, I said thanks and went on my way. Some 30 miles later, it was easy to tell what could happen to the interstate. On both sides, cloudy water turned Iowa cornfields into Vietnam-esque marshland. The flooding came from the same source that ruined Cedar Rapids -- the Cedar River.

Lights from a work truck flashed orange across the pavement of I-80; a crew was monitoring the progress of the water. It didn’t take a hydrologist to figure out the road probably wouldn’t remain open for much longer.

AM radio chatter kept me company on the trip from Davenport to Iowa City. The state was in mourning over four boy scouts who died in a tornado in far western Iowa the previous night. The nation was captivated how the surviving scouts organized a triage. David Paulison, the head of Federal Emergency Management Agency, was visiting the state.

Most of the news was centered on Cedar Rapids, where 100 city blocks were taken by the Cedar River. Citizens there were aghast -- one woman called in with her evacuation story, which started out coherent and calm, but she began to tear up when she said her home was under military occupation. This was a person who just went through the worst catastrophe in her life.

There was a repeated, overriding message in the day’s broadcast.

“If you have no business here, you should stay out of Iowa,” a male talk show host said, muffled through the AM fuzz. “Don’t go out to sightsee.”

This was troubling. The plan wasn’t to go to Cedar Rapids, not because they didn’t need it, but because the situation seemed severe to the point of impossibility. I was a gringo, and the point of coming was to fill sandbags, not risk emergency crews’ lives to save my Illinois ass. But had the waters, even in Iowa City, become so bad that I’d end up a victim instead of a volunteer?

Gloves and a Shovel

IOWA CITY, IOWA - This all started with a quick Google search: “Iowa sandbagging.” That search led to a newspaper article about volunteer sandbaggers. And that newspaper article led to the number for “Iowa Concern,” a program from the University of Iowa that serves as help hotline and information hub in times of crisis. They suggested joining the sandbagging effort in Coralville, just north of Iowa City. But the exact location of the sandbagging effort was difficult to locate, so more sandbagging opportunities were found from the City of Iowa Web site.

A glance at a map of Iowa City is all it takes to understand the risk. The 300-mile Iowa River slashes through half of the state and begins in southern Minnesota; an important hub for leisurely canoeing. The two branches of the Iowa River meet up in the small town of Belmond, Iowa, population approximately 2,560. From there it heads in a southeasterly direction, with the Cedar River flowing into it near the 1,900-person town of Columbus Junction. The whole mass of water is dumped into the Mississippi at the southeast corner of the state.

But while it’s in Iowa City, the river cuts the city in half as it winds up and around the University of Iowa like an upside down fishhook. Distinguishing aspects of the university include the first law school west of the Mississippi, the alma-matter of 13 Pulitzer Prize writers and 60 All-American football stars, and 1,984 acres of riverfront property. Then it’s a series of bridges before the water comes up to the sewage treatment plant, followed by a slight eastern bend before the river exits the town.

The view from Foster Road, north end of Iowa City

Looking at the same map, it seemed the easiest site to get to was at the North end of town, near a church called Parkview Evangelical. Coming up on the church, it was immediately obvious how bad things were. The first sight coming into town was a barricaded road, once a major thoroughfare, with an instant ocean of gray just behind it. I parked among the other volunteers and got out to take a better look.

Houses were peeking out of the gray. What was once a subdivision, where people slept, raised children and worshiped was now the center of a salvage operation. Trucks weighed down with furniture moved out as sand-filled dump trucks came in. There were no signs of sandbagging here -- just a push to empty Parkview Evangelical of the last bit of wares before the gray took over. And in that moment of desperation, the army of volunteers got slapped in the face, as the rain began to fall.

People started sprinting. I found a woman wearing an orange reflective vest and asked her where I could go to sandbag. She said that there wasn’t any more need for sandbaggers, but items from the church still needed to get moved out. However, it seemed that there were a lot of people were helping the moving process, so I decided to set out and try to find the Coralville Mall sandbagging location, where more immediate help was needed.

Driving north, I came to a bridge over the Iowa River. The waters were strong and high, with little peaks of white dotting the surface of the river as it surged downstream. Two trucks labeled “USGS.GOV” pulled to both sides of the bridge, amber lights flashing; perhaps the crews were trying to figure out whether to close this main artery through town as well. I drove past, but was unable to find the mall, and decided it would be best to turn around and ask the people at the first location where some other places were to sandbag. Returning to Parkview Evangelical, a policewoman directing traffic said I should help out at the south side of town.

To the best of my knowledge, I took a path I thought would get me to the south end of town, following my gut instinct more than my city map. The way took me through the heart of Iowa City, where a bank’s electronic sign urged me on. “Thank you volunteers,” it flashed over and over. I crossed paths with a dump truck full of sand, and thought it would be a good idea to follow. Wherever that sand was going, someone was going to have to bag it up.

Eventually the names on the street signs resembled ones on the map, and I found my way to Stevenson Road on the south side of town. I looked out my window and found a little more than a dozen people shoveling from a large pile of sand and passing green bags in a line. I parked the car and went to the two closest people. They were talking shop; where the bags need to go to protect the tan steel-sided structure. The tinted glass door of the building read “Java House Bakery.”

“You need any help over here?” I asked.
“Sure, do you have any supplies?” he said, with a slightly puzzled look.
“I’ve got gloves and a shovel,” I said, pointing my thumb back to my car.
“Yeah, jump right in!”

Little Blue Dots

“We need another person!” a woman in the conga line of people moving sandbags shouted.

I got in line and began shuttling the bags between two people wearing University of Iowa Hawkeyes shirts. In fact, nearly half of the workers were proudly wearing Iowa shirts of some kind. No doubt this was Hawkeye territory. The line wrapped around the building, out of sight, where the bags were integrated into the wall. It was a slow and painstaking process, but the wall nearly surrounded the building and was being filled in, sandbag by olive-green sandbag.

A while of being in the middle and the movements became automatic. One would shovel, another held open the bag. Four or five scoops and the bag was set aside. One or two would kneel and tie off each bag by its black cord and throw the 25-pound slug on wooden pallet. A forklift lifted and carried pallets to the far side of the building, and would come back to drop off empty pallets. When the pile of sand was whittled down to dust, a dump truck piled on more, and the dance went on.

When the line of sandbag-relaying volunteers was no longer needed, I grabbed my shovel and began filling bags. Brenda, an employee of Iowa University for the past 26 years, held open the bag as I filled it with four scoops. I asked her to tell me if I was scraping her hands with the blade of the shovel, but she told me not to worry, just to keep on shoveling.

“The campus is 25 percent flooded with water,” she said, her pink shirt tinged with sand. “The library is flooding with water.”

She passed the bag behind her and said she’d also done some sandbagging yesterday. She said she was lucky enough to live on high ground and did not have any flooding at home. I asked if she knew the owners of the warehouse, and she told me she didn’t.

“I just found this and decided to come help out,” she said, mentioning that on a normal day, she might be out playing golf.

“I decided I’d do something constructive,” she said.

Meanwhile, two young boys climbed to the top of the sand pile. One dug his shoes into the sand, pulled them out and stared at the hollow space where his foot once was.

“Look, I made a cave!” he said.

As he sat on the pile, he frowned at his once-white tennis shoes.

“Mom, can I have new shoes?” the boy said.
“Yes you can have new shoes. Just as long as they’re brown.” The boy’s mother said as she tied off the bags from Brenda.

One of the men got the boys off the pile and found them a small shovel and a stack of sandbags. The boys began to imitate their older counterparts, shoveling, bagging, tying and even carrying.

“Don’t pick up two at a time, you’ll hurt yourself!” one of the parents said.

The mother’s job had something to do with Verizon Wireless; she said she could move her work anywhere so long as she had internet. But now that the flood took away internet access, nothing could be done. She stopped for a moment to think.

“We’ve been doing this for four days now,” she said, wiping sand off her arms, and exhaling a deep breath. “What day is it?”

She was a friend of Java House owner, and her expression only softened as she spoke about people like Brenda, who came without any clue about the owner’s family or friends. Many people shoveling and bagging knew the owner one way or another, the woman said, giving the slightest of smiles as she spoke compliments about the anonymous people that just showed up.

A tall and slender man in a gray talked with the baggers about flow rates and levees. The mother nodded in his direction.

“You see that guy in the gray?” she said. “That’s an engineer contracted from the city. He’s down here to make sure the wall is built right. He knows all about how much water they are going to let out upstream, how high it’s going to get.”

On both sides of the bakery’s loading bay door were stickers like blue quarters. They could have been just an ordinary sticker, something that a child might randomly stick on to his surroundings willy-nilly in a fit of boredom. From the pavement to the stickers measured approximately four feet.

“He came around earlier and put up blue dots,” she said. “The blue dots show how high it’s going to get.”

Meanwhile, helpers moved bowls, cups, boxes, everything. A group helped wheel out an oven, then an industrial mixer. Some of the last things to go were the bathroom doors. Anything that could be unscrewed, taken apart, lifted or dragged was being taken to higher ground.

A woman finished a conversation and closed up her cell phone.

“The rail cars went down,” she said. “They tried to block part of the [Cedar Rapids] river with some loaded rail cars on the railway. But the whole thing just went down.”

As the pile of sand shrank with every scoop, clouds like gray fists popped out in the sky. The low rumble of thunder muffled the sound of shovels scraping on concrete. Brenda glanced up at the clouds as they flashed lightning.

“I hope it doesn’t rain,” she said.

Downtime

After the last of the pile was scooped up and the volunteers moved on, children stood by and drug shovels over the concrete, gathering small mound of sand from the dust. The sky continued to darken.

With the last sandbag filled, some volunteers swapped flood stories as others made final preparations inside the bakery. Sandbags lined the base of the massive oven; it was décor more suited for an army mess hall than a civilian bakery.

Matt Henderson, an Executive Director of Development for the University of Iowa Foundation, offered me a beer. As I cracked open a cold one, Henderson took me on a tour of the bakery and offices and told me about the business that everyone came together to protect.

“Tara was studying business at the University of Iowa when she came up with her business plan for a coffee shop,” he said.

She was able to turn her idea into a full-fledged enterprise with the help of investors, and the first Java House opened its doors on the second story of a bookstore. That was a year after the great flood, in 1994. Now there were eight Java House coffee shops in the college town, and this structure housed the bakery that supplied the shops with fudge brownies and cinnamon rolls. It was also used for office space.

“It’s become fairly successful?” I asked.
“I would say so,” Henderson said.

One of the final tasks was a crucial one: cutting the gutter downspout and rerouting the gutters over the levee. The rainwater would collect inside the sandbag barrier and flood the bakery from the inside out if the simple task wasn’t completed.

“Hey, get a picture of this,” volunteer Steve Baker said, clad in a white Iowa T-shirt and yellow Iowa sun visor as he sawed through the downspout.

It wasn’t much longer until night came. In came four pizzas, and volunteers took the first real break of the day. Then came the rain, and everything changed.

“We aren’t going to come back here.”

It was on them in an instant, pelting concrete with fat drops. The rain mixed with the remaining dust from the sand pile, making a brown soup on the spot. Volunteers rushed to route the final gutter downspout as rain crashed over the sandbags.

The gray Hawkeyes hooded sweatshirt that Tara’s son wore became stained with every drop of rain. The hoodie became darker and darker as he stood; the boy was unwilling to leave his mother or the other volunteers.

“No,” Tara said, her hands on the boy’s shoulders. She shook her head. “You can’t stay the night here. We aren’t going to come back here.”

She told her son that she’d stay the night watching over the bakery, her livelihood, and would be back in the morning. The boy finally walked away with the volunteers heading for high ground.

It began falling even harder. A volunteer walked from bakery to the end of the property and looked at the neighboring lots.

“It’s already starting to flood the parking lots over there,” he said.

The forklift came out, dropping off pallets of sandbags to fill the final gap. Soaking workers ran between the pallets and the last remaining gap-- the spot in front of the warehouse door. Just as soon as one pallet was empty, another would be lifted in. It became manic, almost animal, as bag after bag was thrown into place, with Baker behind the wall, lining up each bag to keep the pile stable. Nobody said a word, but everyone understood that this was the last stand.

On the ground, a beer can and a pizza crust floated in a brown puddle, exposed by the forklift’s flood lights when it swung around. Two police officers walked up the drive, towards the last remaining volunteers. One was lanky and wore a police hat and long poncho, the other was shorter, stocky and wore just his uniform. The stocky officer went on to talk to Steve, while the lanky officer stood back and chatted with another volunteer. It was some kind of official notice; a voluntary evacuation.

Steve asked the stocky officer if he’d be allowed to come back to fuel up the water pumps, but the officer wasn’t sure.

“We’re trying to evacuate this area,” the lanky officer said. “We’re just going around and telling people that. But we know you’ve got to do what you got to do.”

Leaving Iowa

This portion of the 500-year floodplain map from the City
shows the Stevens area in red -- meaning underwater.

The environment changed. What started out as a relatively dry day, shoveling sand became a frantic struggle, slugging drenched bags in the pouring rain. With the waters rising, possibly creeping in and overtaking the bakery soon, the situation changed. It was the kind of situation that only the essential people should be involved in, a situation where a gringo like me could easily find himself in trouble and make a difficult operation near impossible.

It was dark, and the flood was coming into town. For me, a tourist with the most marginal of maps and no comprehension of Iowa City’s 500-year floodplain, a decision had to be made. As the final pallets were being emptied and filled in the last of the levee, I felt it was necessary to shake hands with Baker and start my personal evacuation.

Getting to I-80 was not terribly difficult. But with water piling up on the window, it was nearly impossible to spot any standing water. In the middle of these flash flood conditions, it occurred to me that this wasn’t anything new. It was the Iowa way of life for many long weeks.

An afterimage happens when a bright light, flashing even for an instant, gets lodged in your retinas, stuck as an optical illusion until it fades. It usually isn’t something to get worked up about. But when a zap of lightning slams into a ditch next to you, sending sparks and flames bursting from the ground, it leaves such an afterimage. And that’s what happened on I-80 that evening, an event that repeated itself with every blink and every bolt that struck in the distance.

When the lightning went away, the fear went away, and the lightning became a strobe light that revealed surroundings little bits at a time. Headed in the direction of Iowa City and Cedar Rapids was a convoy of Iowa National Guard M998 Humvees, some towing supply trailers. I remembered the reason why they called it the “Eisenhower Interstate System;” the president of the same name wanted the roads for national defense. It was an ominous sight to the roads used for its original purpose.

Along this drive I had my worries about I-80 being closed, most of which concerned getting swept away. A detour would only be an inconvenience. So it wasn’t entirely a bad thing when the Iowa State Troopers closed off the interstate at exit 265, forcing a roundabout way to Davenport. After that, all I could do was keep an eye on the taillights in front of me and listen to the sporadic news briefs on AM radio.

“I’m worried, because I don’t think a lot of people are aware of this,” a city engineer said on the radio, the transmission crackling with every lightning strike.

Somewhere, a pumping station that guarded a sewage plant was overtaken by the flood. The woman warned that sewage would start to come out of the system and into people’s homes.

“Even though it’s not recommended you flush your toilets, you should do that and plug the toilet up,” she said. “We didn’t have any towels left, so we stuck a bag of salt in the toilet.”

It wasn’t until 50 miles later that I was able to drive out of the storm’s way, but the waters continued to rise in Iowa City. The slender blue line that separated the two halves of Iowa City on the map truly sliced up the city; most of the bridges crossing the Iowa were closed by the authorities, leaving few ways of getting from one end of the city to another. I later learned that the US Army Corps of Engineers measured the crest 31.5 feet above flood stage on Sunday, June 15. That was a full nine feet above flood stage, and three feet above the 1993 record.

According to the Associated Press, 5,000 Iowa City residents were evacuated the same day, and some 40 homes already had flood damage by then. Sixteen buildings on the University of Iowa campus were flooded, and personnel were advised not to return until June 23. As of June 18, I have not been able to find the condition of Java House, but I have every reason to believe that it didn’t survive.

The trip came to an end, but the ordeal wasn’t over. The story wouldn’t end with Cedar Rapids, or Iowa City. It wouldn’t end with Iowa, or Indiana or Illinois. The story wouldn’t end with the anguish of 38,000 evacuees, ruined crops, ruined businesses and ruined lives. It wouldn’t end comparisons with Katrina’s devastation or large figures about economic impact. I knew as the water continued to flow, the story would run with it. Little blue dots would be cropping up somewhere else soon.

2008-06-11T23:01:00.000-07:00

The headline could have passed for a classified.

Wanted: Ark.

Not exactly an empathetic assessment of a natural disaster, but perhaps it’s just the ironic attitude the citizens of Iowa City, Iowa must be feeling on the worst flood in fifteen years. At least that’s the impression I got from the Iowa City Press-Citizen. Either way, it’s all about a gut feeling.

A gut feeling is what I got after reading about the June 9 flooding in Michigan. Anyone with a gut feeling and knowledge about the Mississippi River knows that it all must come down. In other words, disaster that strikes up north will eventually flow to towns and cities below.

So far, the flooding doesn’t seem to be bursting the Mississippi. According to Quad-City Times in Davenport, Iowa, the flooding is “No Way” like what happened in 1993 (for the geographically impaired, Davenport nearly straddles the Illinois/Indiana border). But they are closest to the Mississippi, where the water doesn’t want to crest as high.

Travel 60 miles West, and the story changes. For towns abutting the Iowa River, the flooding now has a name. “The Floods of 2008.” That’s according to Iowa City, where the damage is expected to surpass the 1993 levels. That’s where I’m headed.

With a shovel, a pair of gloves, a sandwich, two gallons of potable drinking water, and a reporter’s notebook, I’m headed up north to see how many bags of sand I can fill before my toothpick arms give out.

Since this is an honest effort, I don’t know when the next post will come. It may come as soon as I can get some wifi access. Or it might come later Thursday night. The point is, bagging first, blogging second.

With that being said, I’m going to finalize some plans and catch some sleep before the trip. Stay tuned.

For bagging information, refer to the City of Iowa City Web Site, http://www.icgov.org/default/?id=1874

Mudwatching

2008-06-09T23:06:00.000-07:00

Note: The following research on the 2008 mudslide in the small town of Grafton, Illinois was conducted in mid-April. The onslaught of rain that caused the mudslide tapered off eventually, and although the rainfall totals didn’t break any records, it wasn’t an event anyone was likely to forget. Now that the rains have returned, soaking the Midwest and causing flooding in Missouri, Illinois, Central Indiana and Michigan, the mudslide serves as a renewed metaphor for catastrophe.

Perhaps the most troublesome sign yet came June 9, when an embankment around a man-made lake in Wisconsin disintegrated, flushing several homes and a 245-acre body of water into the Wisconsin River. That water is destined to drain into the Mississippi River, where it will undoubtedly have some kind of impact downstream in towns just like Grafton. In hindsight, the events of April can be looked at in foreboding of water and disaster in the months to come.

Birds of prey shared the sky with a setting sun, circling not very high above the rock formations. The sun made shadows out of the birds, making the details indistinguishable and the species unnamable. And yet, at the same time, all the intricate details of the rock formations were bursting, chiseled into being by the sun’s last bit of glow.

This was the theme on Illinois highway 100, also known as the Great River Road. Bursting. Bursting the way the waters did over the levees and sandbags a decade and a half ago. On this east bank of the Mississippi river, that is, the Illinois side of the Missouri/ Illinois border, the earth seemed to burst from the east, as if harboring an urge to be taken again by the water.

Traveling up the River Road, the sign came into view. Grafton. Population 608. The four-lane highway merged into two lanes and the speed dropped from 55 to 40 to 30. The water park was the first thing; Raging Rivers with its two giant bowl-shaped slides. It would be another five weeks until visitors would slide down those bowls and crash into the pool at the bottom, on Memorial Day. After the water park, highway 100 became the main street, with vinyl-sided bungalows, an Amoco sign, weathered taverns, and corner stores.

There were houses on stilts on the river side of the main drag. A birdfeeder in someone’s back yard jutted from the water. The river encroached on the land bit by bit, making marsh out of whatever land it could grab. A few trees… there and there, showed what couldn’t be seen with bare eyes: that there was actually land under there.

At the O-Jan’s Fish Market, there was a line on the outside of the building where the water crested during the great flood of 1993. It marked 38 feet above the river bank. Further along 100, to the north end of town, near the marina, cars slowed down to look. Others, the people that didn’t know what lay ahead, didn’t notice and kept driving. Some stopped and pulled over to get a better look.

“I wanted to see it for myself,” a grey-haired man said, taking a few steps out of his white, late-model Ford sedan.

He looked over at the side of the cliff, where the earth gave way. Trees were caught up in the slide, with roots and limbs poking out from the ground. Cement blocks the size of hay bales were put at the base, not five yards from the road, to block the progress of the slide. A homemade sign read “Free Fill.”

Dirt clods littered the road, the only indication that the dirt had threatened to take over two weeks before. It was April Fool’s Day when the mud came down the 75-foot face, soaked with flooding waters, taking up two house lots’ worth of space and closing the main thoroughfare through the town.

But now the pile was dormant and crusty. It hadn’t rained for a week.

“It looks like more rock and gravel than mud,” the man said. “This stuff didn’t happen in ’93. It just flooded. This is more like California.”

It did have some passing resemblance; there were the newly built houses atop the crags, called Grafton Hills. These were formidable mansions that had large panes of windows so that people could see where the Mississippi and Illinois came together, high above the stilted houses.

A red SUV, license plate “GRAFTN,” was parked on the gravel road that exited the marina. The driver extended his neck to get a better view of the slide, and stared at it like that for some time.

Back closer to the marina, thirty seven-year old Grafton City Police Officer Travis Trinty watched from his squad car.

“I’m just doing what I’m told,” he said. “I’m trying to make sure nobody does anything stupid like trying to climb that thing.”

March had been an extremely wet month, breaking all previous rainfall records. The last record, according to St. Louis meteorologists, was eight-point-twenty-five inches of rainfall, set more than one hundred ten years ago. This year’s March rain brought eight-point-forty inches.

Trinty explained the trickling noise coming from the pile of earth.

“A spring developed there for about three years and quit,” he said. “At the base of that cliff up there, there’s a retaining pond. They think the dam was so saturated, that maybe that retaining pond along with the spring underneath the road… with all that mud coming down…”

He pointed to a house at the base of the slide, a two-story house with dirt wrapped around the base.

“The lady there, she don’t even know if her insurance will cover the damage. She had water and mud in her house, but I don’t think it did any structural damage to it.”

In the Telegraph, Alton’s newspaper, they reported the woman’s name as Joanne Groves of 510 W. Main Street… Highway 100… Great River Road. They also printed that her house had survived the flood of ’93, a fire, and a tractor-trailer hitting her front porch and damaging her roof. But at 9 a.m. on April Fools, her son-in law came in and told her that the bluff surrounding her house had collapsed. She told the paper she heard nothing the night of the slide.

All the papers wanted a picture of her next to it. In Alton’s Telegraph, she was standing on top of the mud as it came into the back of her home, lurching in like a burglar made of earth. St. Louis’ Post Dispatch, she was pictured looking away from the mud slide, with its long trail of rocks and trees creeping towards her from behind.

April 7, at a meeting with city and state officials to discuss what to do about the mud, she reportedly walked away, repeating “I’m sick,” and spent the rest of the day at one of Grafton’s bed and breakfasts that offered her a free room.

April 11, s was treated at the intensive care unit of a hospital in Alton for a perforated stomach ulcer. Following surgery, her blood pressure dropped, triggering kidney failure. Her doctors put her on a ventilator and told her she might die.

“I hope she gets better,” Trinty said. “I know a little bit more but I hate to say it because I don’t know if it’s the truth. I just know it was related to the stress of the house, of course, you know, an ulcer.”

Trinty pointed to the power lines hanging over the crusted pile of earth.

“And that’s the main power line to Grafton,” he said.

“It’s going to cost money to have it done. And you have the city, and the county and the state and whoever’s gotta work it out. When somebody does make a decision, they’re responsible if it doesn’t work out, or if it does come down and destroys her house.”

And then there was the possibility of fender-benders from gawkers paying more attention to the landscape than the road.

“That’s what we’re worried about when the road is open and busy,” he said. “In the summer when it’s busy, it would be backed up from there all the way out to Raging Rivers. Everybody wants to come to Grafton in the summertime.”

Starting Memorial Day weekend, Trinty said, Grafton goes into full-on resort mode. A town of seven hundred becomes a town of three thousand. That’s when the county and state send in reinforcements. Most of the problems, he said, come from the out-of-towners.

“In the summertime, you got shit happening all during the day,” he said. “People getting naked down there on the boats. You watch Cops on Mardi Gras, right? You can’t be dancing around naked when we got kids walking around. We don’t want to tell you not to take your top down any more than the next guy standing there looking at you, but we got a job to do.”

He nodded in the direction of the marina, where the walkways to the floating structure were submerged.

“They’ll do it right here in the marina. In the loading dock, people get ignorant in there and get to drinking. The local people we don’t have any problems with, they take care of their own.”

Another SUV approached the mounds, slowed, and drove off.

Being from Jerseyville, farther inland, Trinty didn’t see much action when the ’93 floods happened. He did faintly recall moving things from the upstairs of his friends’ girlfriends’ parents’ house in a boat. And how, at the fertilizer plant where he worked at the time, they rigged a machine to fill bags with sand instead of fertilizer. And how the waters that the experts said would never come demolished a Victorian-styled farmhouse belonging to his uncle.

“The thing I find interesting was my boss told me that what’s going on right now with the weather and the waters is on the same exact track as what it did in ’93,” he said. “They’re not predicting it could happen. But the river isn’t supposed to drop more than a foot this week. It was supposed to crest at twenty-five-five. They lowered it Saturday morning to twenty-three-five. That’s what we have now. It’s not supposed to drop that much, and with all the rain and the snow melting up north, it may get up higher. When, I don’t know.”

Sometimes when he watches the mud, Trinty said, he plays solitaire on the squad car’s laptop. His other duties for the evening were to check to see if the doors on the local businesses were locked. That included Raging Rivers, where even locals would get drunk and break into.

“One guy they caught a couple of years ago is now dating my sister,” he said. “Like, what are you doing breaking into Raging Rivers after they shut the water off?”

Trinty said he previously studied CAD but couldn’t find any good paying jobs. He was a truck driver until he went into the academy.

“You always hear about that on the TV, with the self-help gurus. They always say you’re not living until you enjoy your job,” he said. “I’m hoping this is what my calling is.”

When his time ran out, he put his squad car in drive. His tires crunched over the gravel as he went out of the marina, down highway 100 to rest and wait for the speeders. The streetlights began to flicker on, but it was still too dark to make out the river that was invisible except for the lights of the barges that proved it was actually there.

Radiohead + St. Louis (5.14.08)

2008-05-18T22:41:00.000-07:00

Before it even got off the ground, it was obvious that the show was to be taken seriously. On the left side of the stage were rows of banks of crates, arranged in store-esque isles. One of these crates bore the spray-stenciled name: RADIOHEAD. An arsenal of 20ish guitars lined one of the isles, ready for battle. Wires stuck out of metal crates like a network of nerves from a Davinchi anatomical sketch. From a light platform suspended above the crowd, rope ladders came down. Three stagehands climbed to the top of the platform and sat in customized seats, manning lights, pointing cameras, setting the trajectory of laser beams and whatever alien technology Radiohead was about to throw at the crowd. Yes, they meant business.

When it came time, the musicians, sans Yorke, came on and took positions in short order. The crowd -- a mix of pimply highschoolers, highbrow college nerds, polo shirt-clad frat boys, girls in towering high heels and dangling dresses, folks with mortgages and kids -- examples of every kind of live, breathing people -- started hollering in a way that couldn’t be one-upped, until Yorke finally came on stage, then it reached a new kind of loud.

Yorke came on, a bit like a nobody and a bit like an alien. He wondered back and forth at first, hands in pockets, occasionally looking at the ground, perhaps waiting for a train at a station. Or maybe he was waiting for the mother ship. He looked a bit tickled as he examined his St. Louis audience, as any average human being looks at another human being doing something odd, or maybe it was the look that an extraterrestrial observer gives when examining the human race.

This was all very strange, yes, but strange for both parties. The crowds didn’t seem to make sense of it either. Here was the band they’ve rocked-out to, toked up to, screwed and had babies to, a band built into a Beowulf-like mythological construct (Did you hear these guys didn’t even charge for the last album? No way! I heard he’s got an actual radio stuck in his head that receives all sorts of interstellar frequencies? Whoa, freaky!). Considering the hype, perhaps it was a band that wasn’t supposed to exist at all. Yet Yorke cometh, and was putzing around on a stage before all. On top of that, you could see his maligned eye from a camera feed as it shone on a display in the back of the stage. And this bassist fellow had an oddly-shaped nose and an eye that looked punched-in. And then there was Jonny Greenwood, with his bony face. What was going on? The crowd went with the flow. Beeps and boops trickled in the background and the evening began with “All I Need.”

Yorke talked after the second song, “Jigsaw Falling Into Place,” something about smelling donuts??? And how anybody could eat donuts at a time like this??? And now donut sales would dive??? He was talking about the smell of Elephant Ears stands, but it was barely intelligible through his British accent.

In quick succession, Radiohead played song after song from the catalog (but conspicuously nothing from Pablo Honey and only one from The Bends), not wasting any time in-between. Light effects came into full bloom, with LED tubes that hung from the rafters like neon streamers. One song they’d twinkle like ice crystals, flash like lightning and flow like rain, and the next they’d glow purple and otherworldly. Green washed down the length of the tubes like goo flowing from the sky, all very high-end and hypnotic. This was the backdrop that Yorke spazzed out to, head jerking, mouth moaning, arms and hands snaking along like he was embracing a first-time acid trip. The crowd fell in line and clapped to his beat.

Tricks were en masse. For “You and Whose Army,” Yorke made use of a piano rigged with a camera, which made for an extreme close-up blasted on the massive screen at the back of the stage. In crayola green, the audience witnessed Yorke get closer and closer to the camera, until a massive Yorke eye took up the entire screen. Backing off the camera, his face then became distorted in the screen with a fish-eye effect, before being multiplied over and over.

For “There, There,” he ran around onstage with drumsticks as the crew plopped a small drum set in front of the mike. After sitting down, Yorke said “I wonder what this thing does.”

In his second and final address to the crowd, Yorke told of a song from Amnesiac that was “lost sight of.”

“It seems very pertinent now,” he said, the “P” popping through the sound system, and played “Optimistic.”

A little over an hour of songs rapid-fire and the band rushed off. But the house lights stayed off and stagehands still ran around, preparing for who knows what. It didn’t fool any of the crowd, not for a second, so some went ahead and shouted encouragements while others sat and waited for the inevitable encore, which came in about two minutes. As the band came back, they waved and clapped. Colin Greenwood smiled big, and Yorke looked at the ground and scratched his head. They knew we knew it was all for show. There may have even been a bit of an ashamed blush on Yorke’s cheeks. He thanked the crowd and took up an acoustic, at which point the amphitheater became quiet and attentive, and “Exit Music” flowed through the PA. Little flames began cropping up in the crowd up front, people flicked on lighters. From under the stage covering, the stars couldn’t be seen, but when people in the lawn seats held up lighters, it created an eerie similarity.

When the five-song encore came to an end, Radiohead left as quickly as they did after the first set, but stagehands were still messing around with equipment, so the shenanigans were busted again. It was apparent to the audience that a second encore was inevitable, so with further encouragement, the band came out for another round. Three songs resulted (the double-encore was repeated at other concerts on the same tour), and in one last splurge of energy, going out supernova-style, the band hit the crowd with a green and purple light-strobing, video screen pixilating, uber freakout to “Paranoid Android.”

After that, it was done. Honest.

Setlist:

FIRST SET
------------
All I Need - (In Rainbows)
Jigsaw Falling Into Place - (In Rainbows)
Airbag - (Ok Computer)
15 Step - (In Rainbows)
Nude - (In Rainbows)
Kid A - (Kid A)
Weird Fishes/Arpeggi - (In Rainbows)
The Gloaming - (Hail to the Thief)
You and Whose Army? - (Amnesiac)
Idioteque - (Kid A)
Faust Arp - (In Rainbows)
Videotape - (In Rainbows)
Everything in Its Right Place - (Kid A)
Reckoner - (In Rainbows)
Optimistic - (Kid A)
Bangers + Mash - (In Rainbows)
Bodysnatchers - (In Rainbows)

FIRST ENCORE
-------
Exit Music (for a film) - (OK Computer)
Myxomatosis - (Hail to the Thief)
My Iron Lung - (The Bends)
There There - (Hail to the Thief)
Fake Plastic Trees - (The Bends)

SECOND ENCORE
-------
Pyramid Song - (Amnesiac)
House of Cards - (In Rainbows)
Paranoid Android - (OK Computer)

A Porn Star and a President: When Ron and Bill Came to Town

2008-04-25T15:33:00.000-07:00

ALL GOOD PORN STARS KNOW HOW TO WAIT

It was as if a throng of groupies had descended the back door of a happening concert hall, ravenously expecting a back-door-post-concert cameo, except this was for a show that hadn’t yet begun and for a man who wasn’t a rock star. Yet similar. This was a commons, a gathering in the middle of campus where students would type on laptops and laugh over steaming cups of over-caffeinated beverages from the nearby Starbucks. Tonight, instead of pockets of unexcited students, there was a sizeable line on the perimeter of the scene, and those outside of the line were astonished at how long the line had become. But maybe not. It was no mistake, this was the place.

This had been anticipated for a month. All the major news outlets covered the story. It was on the minds of the student body, alums and townies since it appeared on the event calendar for the moderately-sized Midwestern University. It had since been a frequent topic of conversation between young males on campus, the kind of things they marked on calendars, and that was rare for any campus event. One conversation took place on a bus that carried students to an apartment complex on the outskirts.

“Yeah, I’m a huge Boondock Saints fan,” a chunky one said to a friend with fuzzy, afro-like hair. “I’m bringing a copy of it for him to sign.”

In Boondock Saints, the individual in question played only a minor role – a scene where he appeared as an eager patron of a peep-show booth for about 30 seconds, before being gunned down by the vigilante protagonists. In the movie, the protagonists were a pair of brothers who set out to rid Boston of all things evil, which was fairly ironic considering the victim’s fictional past lives. This was the kind of role the star excelled at in the big-screen-big-budget Hollywood productions; violent and short. This wasn’t the fame he hoped for, but he found stardom through the back door.

Inside the auditorium, a portly sports reporter with the student newspaper had a bushy, red beard and two small cameras at the ready, slung across each shoulder like a tourist about ready to see the highlight of some vacation.

“I want to take a picture of him when he rolls in with his dong hanging out,” he said.

The newspeople could see the cops through a glass door in the green room. The officers roamed in boredom. They had nobody to watch over and chatted idly with the students about the weather outside, which brought to the campus some heavy winds. The airplane, the campus event people said, had been delayed.

The only expectation was the student newspaper would get the one and only interview before the show. Even that expectation had a bit of uncertainty. With a porn star, nothing could be expected. Especially when the porn star is Ron Jeremy.

THE MORNING IS ALSO COLD AND WE ALSO WAIT

Five A.M., same campus, but the commotion is coming from the next building over. This time there are more guards. And they have dogs. Great, big dogs. And badges. Big badges. And firearms. And no smiles or friendly chitchat. White vans deployed dishes skywards that tilted to one side because of the hilly ground. The reporters compared notes; which one had the most impressive laptop, digital camera, recording setup. One newsy asked “you gotta notebook I can use?” while another dictated into a voice recorder:

“Former president Bill Clinton was set to campaign for his wife, Hillary, this morning at [University] before a crowd of college students. Because of some recent remarks about rival Senator Barack Obama, some political pundits question whether he’s helping or hurting the campaign.”

A photographer in the back mounted a camera to the tripod and told the room that “nobody better stand up and block my shot when the president comes in, or they’ll get knocked on the head with a big-ass camera.”

A collective of neatly groomed operatives corralled these journalists to a cramped, roped-off area in the back.

“NO,” one of the female operatives said, as if speaking to a badly behaving two-year old. “Behind the rope.”

Outisde, those standing in the 20-degree air said the reason they were not standing in the warm University commons was because the Hillary campaign dared not hold a meeting in the same venue a porn star visited not twelve hours ago. Another explanation, one more widely accepted, was that the auditorium was less prone to an attack by terrorists.

Asked about it, the University’s PR response was “ask the Clinton campaign.”

The University’s spokesperson was asked what he thought of a porn star and a former president visiting the campus, one right after another. His response was “if you’re looking for a social statement, I don’t have one for you.”

The only two certainties were Bill’s intentions of winning over some of Barack’s much coveted 18-23 demographic, and that Bill’s arrival was quickly arranged with a short burst of activity. It was 48 hours earlier that word got out about Bill’s arrival, sparked by questions as to why bomb-sniffing dogs were roaming the campus.

In the same token, some kind of Illinois event was expected. In six days, the state would be inducted into a special kind of state taking primaries simultaneously, a ritual not philosophically separated from a mass of nude polar plungers taking an annual hypothermic dive. Early in. Early out. So it was planned. And that, in the minds of the legislators that pushed Illinois’ plunge earlier to coincide with Super Tuesday, might somehow get Illinois Senator Barack Obama more delegates.

And so, the Hillary campaign new, Illinois would be a challenge. Pundits long since written off the idea of Hillary gaining favor in Illinois. But the campaign continued to pursue the state because of a diehard group of supporters that remembered her growing up in Chicago. They may also have been counting on a small number of undecided student voters who might be easily swayed.

As the small theater opened and students began to mingle inside, refreshed by the heat, some said they were voting Obama and were just there for the show. One group of students, members of the service fraternity Alpha Phi Omega, had a deep-rooted alliance with Bill, since he joined the coed organization in ’66. They came wearing white-t shirts with the likeness of the president emblazoned in blue.

After being seated by the operatives, the students quickly gobbled up Hillary signs. Tom Petty’s “American Girl” provided the soundtrack as students turned on cameras and barked rabid phone calls.

“… Well it was kinda cold that night/ she stood alone on her balcony/ Yeah, she could hear the cars roll by/ Out on 441 like waves crashin’ on the beach/ And for one desperate moment there/ He crept back in her memory/ God it’s so painful when something that’s so close/ Is still so far out of reach…”

THE GRAND ENTERANCE OF HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS

And there he came. It was quick; there was only enough time to see the door open, to see the man, and then to see the students stunned for a brief moment before he disappeared into the green room with the reporters. Cameras were clicking rapid-fire.

The first thing the reporters noted was just how exact he looked to his pornographic likeness. He was trollish and hairy, black hair, with a caterpillar-mustachioed face, finished off with a pronounced nose. His clothes were spot on: Hawaiian and loose at the top to let loose tufts of chest hair.

Sidestepping the reporters, he immediately became attracted to a piano situated in the room. He lifted the cover for the keys and extended his sausage-liked digits, and began playing a rushed sonata.

“He’s a beast,” the sports reporter said, recording the whole thing. “Now that’s talent.”

Ron stopped.

“Now for my favorite part,” he said, and sat on the keys. “That’s Beethoven’s last movement.”

Ron sat himself in a chair while a young, blushing reporter from the campus newspaper collected herself for a round of questioning.

“Sex – does it ever get boring?”

“No. Next question.”

“What’s your favorite sexual position?”

Ron thinks. A student walks by the glass doors and catches a glimpse of the man, and grins wide. He stands only for a moment and then runs off.

“Missionary. Once you try them all, you go back to the standard bit. I like to see a pretty face, you know?”

“What’s the best place to meet women?”

“A discotheque. It’s the only place where you can break the ice and it’s socially acceptable.”

(“Discotheque” was later misspelled in the campus newspaper as “disco tech,” the word being foreign to much of the news staff.)

As reporters finished up questions and left the back room for Ron to prepare, students began filling the rows. When it was time, a portly moderator addressed the crowd, and informed them that people who wanted to ask questions had to submit the questions to a table in the back. The students answered with a groan. Any deviation from the plan, and the questioner would be “cut off and escorted out of the ballroom.”

At first, the moderator introduced to the crowd the other person in the debate, Michael Leahy, the leader of the anti-pornography group BraveHearts. “PORN is the battle, FREEDOM is the reward,” was the mantra prominently displayed on the BraveHearts Web site. Leahy, the moderator said, had a battle with pornography that cost him a job and a marriage. The audience clapped honestly as the grandfatherly man in black strode to the podium and took a drink of water.

Then the moderator listed the stats as if setting the mood for a heavyweight prize-fighter. One-thousand-five-hundred X-rated films spanning a 27-year career. More than four-thousand conquests.

Glowing dots popped out over the audience as students set their cell phones for photo and video capture. From the back the man came, striding confidently as rows and rows of students jumped and started snapping. He made it to the stage and was greeted by the words of his competitor.

“So, Ron,” Leahy said. “I hear we are opening for Bill Clinton.”

HE TAKES THE PODIUM

The dots swayed as students tried to follow the man, trying to get an image of him as he stepped out of the screen into real life. There he was, the magician making magic before the crowd. Perhaps a little older than most remembered, but nonetheless imposing with a considerable height and shoulder breath, not to mention gravitas.

“Boy, am I glad to see you,” he said with the slightest exasperation and a hint of a southern accent. It was vaguely cartoonish.

Bill launched into the subprime mortgage crisis, explaining Hillary’s tactics for negotiating with lenders and homeowners.

“I know this isn’t your typical ra-ra campaign speech, but it’s important.”

ASTONISHMENT

“I thought this was supposed to be an academic assessment of pornography,” the young audience member said into the microphone. “I don’t understand the point of this.”

The two sides had argued their introductory points just prior, with Leahy saying the adult film industry wasn’t taking responsibility for advertisements reaching underage people, and Ron saying he was being upfront about everything, unlike the mainstream media, who masked sexualized images to sell a product.

“Oh, ok, you want to talk about eroticism?” Ron said. “The difference between eroticism and hardcore is the lighting.”

When asked what impact pornography had on rates of sexual abuse in society, Ron asked the moderator to come to his podium and read an excerpt of a study.

“Can you not read, Ron?” Leahy said. The audience moaned an “oooohhhh….”

“The eyes don’t work so much, but the stick…” Ron said.

The students exploded.

HOPE

“I’m exhibit A,” Bill said. “We are not good at keeping people well. I am tired of being told America can’t solve the healthcare problem.”

The students erupted. Signs waved. Cameras flashed.

Bill discussed how other nations’ healthcare systems could easily be dropped into America. Then it was on to the war on terror.

“I want you to know two things,” Bill said. “We can’t solve terrorism ourselves. From now on, we will cooperate with you.”

Second, he said, “the military option is the absolute last resort.”

BEGINNING TO FLAKE

“I don’t understand what you’re trying to accomplish,” another audience member asked. “What are you looking for?”

“Donations,” Leahy said, suggesting the money should be sent to end sex trafficking.

“We want them to say ‘we see that as a problem and we’re willing to help.’”

Students were shifting more now, talking to each other. They left in twos and threes, seats immediately taken by others who were in the standing-room-only crowd. Cell phones were no longer being used to take pictures, but to message others outside the room.

“Maybe it’s too educational,” a blonde student videographer wondered.

A FINAL MESSAGE

“She will send a very different message,” Bill said.

“We’re back.”

Bill told one last tale of a man he met on a golf course, a caddy, who moonlighted as search and rescue personnel and saw action on 9/11. This person, Bill said, remembered Hillary showing concern over dust particles being blown up in the wake of the towers’ collapse, and ordered an immediate shipment of respirators. He just wanted to let him know he thought mighty highly of the gesture.

“Sometimes you can forget who put you there or why they put you there,” Bill said of flying high in Air Force One or being behind the desk of the Oval Office.

LINES REFORMED

“When we do the autographs, I’m usually nice to Leahy and tell him to look the other way,” Ron said of autographing parts of the female anatomy.

When the questions ended, there was a short break, and a line of students formed to get a close encounter with Ron. Some women held felt markers in anticipation. Others went to the coffee shop and got something to go.

“I mean, it was educational, but I didn’t really understand what Leahy wanted,” a large female student said, sipping a latte on the run. “It was like he was sending mixed messages.”

FINAL GATHERINGS

Bill remained in the theater for ten minutes, shaking the hands of the Chancellor of the school and whoever security let in to see him.

“Oh, Alpha Phi Omega!” he said, and pointed to the shirt of an Alpha Phi Omega. “Get them up here.”

She and other members of her fraternity were frozen while Bill made his mark on their shirts and posed for a quick picture.

“This is a huge deal for me,” she said to reporters.

Outside, another one of the attendees walked briskly towards the student union, carrying a souvenier Hillary sign.

“I thought it was nice,” he said. “But I’m still voting for Obama.”

Later that day a rumor circulated through the press of a reporter that was able to get past the campaign officials and get close enough ask Bill something. The question, as the story went, was if Bill knew of Ron Jeremy coming to campus.

The alleged answer to the question was: “That’s two porn stars in one day.”

This was the rumor that swept the campus news office, and though the student reporters looked rabidly for some shred of evidence to this on blogs and news sites, none was to be found.