Happy Birthday, Michael

You would have been 40 today. Undoubtedly, i’d have had lots of fun teasing you about it… and hosted one hell of a party in your honor.

Instead, it is the 17th time i’ve celebrated your birthday without you… missing you like hell.

Happy birthday, love.

From Bob Dylan’s Shelter From The Storm:

Suddenly I turned around and she was standin there
With silver bracelets on her wrists and flowers in her hair.
She walked up to me so gracefully and took my crown of thorns.
Come in, she said,
Ill give you shelter from the storm.

Now theres a wall between us, somethin theres been lost
I took too much for granted, got my signals crossed.
Just to think that it all began on a long-forgotten morn.
Come in, she said,
Ill give you shelter from the storm.

Jarheads

i don’t watch horror films. The last one i saw was Silence of the Lambs, which fulfilled my life quota (God-willing) of psycho shit. i haven’t bothered to watch another one since.

That said, i am fascinated by war movies. They reinforce the knowledge that war is a severely outdated method to conflict resolution. Yet what i find most compelling is the soldier’s experience.

i just saw the end of the movie, Jarheads. i hadn’t sought it out. i was just waking my teen who had fallen asleep on the couch… and found it on the television. The moment i saw the Marines — just actors playing Marines, i sat down, immediately sucked in.

As much as i hate war, i have an incredible respect for the Marines. i always have.

Charlie Company, First Marine Battalion, Eighth Regiment, Fallujah, December 2004. Photograph by Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times.

my sticker collection

Leak found in pipe at Indian Point

By BRIAN J. HOWARD
THE JOURNAL NEWS

September 7, 2007

BUCHANAN – Workers have discovered a pinhole-sized leak in a conduit used to transfer spent fuel from the reactor to the containment pool at Indian Point 2.

The leak was found Wednesday during testing for groundwater contamination from leaks of radioactive tritium and strontium 90 that were first discovered in 2005.

“It appears that there is a potential pinhole leak in the fuel transfer canal, which we believe could be a contributing source to the groundwater contamination that we’ve been talking about,” said Jim Steets, a spokesman for Entergy Nuclear Northeast, the plant’s owner.

A vacuum test like the one that turned up the leak, as well as an ultrasonic test, will be performed to confirm the size and scope of the leak, Steets said. That will take a few more days. Repairs would follow, but would not require a reactor shutdown.

Plant officials say the leak has not contributed significantly to the groundwater contamination. The origin of the leak remains unclear.

“We’ll know better about what might have caused it when we complete the testing that we’re doing,” Steets said. “You hate to speculate.”

READ THE FULL ARTICLE >

Nip & Tuck

Thank you, Tim Newcomb. And thank you, Lawrence, for sending it along!

For those unfamiliar with another great warrior in the anti-nuclear movement, point your browser to http://www.evacuationplans.org/. Special thanks to Vermont Yankee for the latest mishap which kept Lawrence out of retirement… and evacuationplans.org in his capable hands. That said, I’d be more thankful if Entergy would simply to do the right thing and begin the decommissioning process NOW. In the meanwhile, I am grateful to the great warriors for the insight, inspiration and motivation they provide.

Fighting the good fight

There are warriors amongst us… fighting the good fight:

http://www.newenglandcoalition.org/

 

The plants are getting old. It’s really time to wake up.

I must say that after many years of reading the Brattleboro Reformer, I was never especially proud to call it my hometown paper. In fact, it isn’t even my hometown paper anymore. With my move to the big/little city four years ago, I traded the Reformer for what should have been the improved, edgy, urban version of a hometown paper. Unfortunately, it was the Cambridge Chronicle… which provided my first reason for gaining a certain level of respect for Brattleboro’s daily rag.

Not to digress too much, suffice it to say that in my 38 years on the planet, i have never come across a local weekly newspaper who seems to go so far out of its way to scandalize any city news it can get its manipulative hands on, with particular dramatics applied to any news related to the city’s public school system, as I have in the Cambridge Chronicle.

Having the opportunity to work within the walls of the city’s only public high school, I can say that all of the amazing and positive things that I see happening every single day are largely ignored by the Chronicle so that they can bolster their campaign to erroneously prove that there is little more than crime and corruption blanketing the school. The most poignant example was on the high school’s graduation day in the first year that I lived here. While every other paper in the United States published photos of caps in the air amidst stories focused on the unlimited potential of their graduates, the Chronicle headlined something about the 70-odd kids who failed to pass the state’s MCAS exam who wouldn’t be joining their classmates at the ceremony that day,

The Chronicle failed to mention the number of students who spoke one of the sixty or so non-English languages amongst their nearly 2,000 graduates… or when these non-graduating students began their education within the city. That was my first experience of disgust with a local newspaper… and the first time, in reflection, that I gained any measure of respect for the Reformer.

Since the spring of 2006, my friend (and partner in crime) and I have been submitting periodic press releases to the Reformer regarding the anti-nuclear photography project we’ve created (http://www.ChernobylVermont.com/). Not a single one was ever printed. Recently, a Letter to the Editor was published that said friend, John, had written in response to a previously published letter attempting to debunk the Chernobyl-Vernon connection with claims of superior technology and oversight in the Vermont Yankee plant. Due to its well-researched and highly technical nature, John’s response was printed in the paper… completely destroying all arguments made in the initial letter.

Due to a random stroke of luck, today I read the paper’s editorial of September 1st entitled, “Who’s Minding the Plant?” (http://www.reformer.com/editorials/ci_6778053) And today, I have recognized that, once in a while, even a small, local newspaper is capable of the courage necessary to let the truth override the politics of corporate contributions to the community and speak out about untenable situations that are otherwise being diminished or simply ignored by the larger media outlets.

Dear Brattleboro Reformer, you have gained my respect today. While your coverage of the plant has been mildly critical up to this point, I think you’ve finally managed to see the value of the contribution that you can make in terms of challenging the status quo of silence with regard to the impact that the nuclear plant has on the overall well-being of a wonderful and unique community. I applaud you for your decision to print this editorial, and welcome you to an elite group of intelligent individuals who recognize the NO-WIN situation regarding the extended licensing and increased output of an aging nuke plant that should, indeed, be moving towards decommissioning rather than these risky propositions.

You’ve made me miss Vermont all the more… a nuclear-free Vermont, that is. 

When John returned from the Ukraine with photos of the city surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear plant, it was immediately obvious that there were many similarities between that community (Pripyat) prior to the disaster and our own, beloved southern Vermont region. Upon seeing hundreds of images of the impact that the nuclear disaster had on the region surrounding the Chernobyl plant, I saw how urgent the need was to educate those who would be impacted most should the Vermont Yankee plant face a similar fate.