11.30.2005
A Stink At PU?
Drugs! Theft! Ostracism!
So what’s really going on at Plattsburgh University? Since the college boasts both an award-winning student newspaper and an active journalism program, one would think the answer would be easy to find.
The story on the street – not necessarily the best way to get your news – is that the last issue of the student newspaper, the one published before the Thanksgiving break, was stolen. Every last copy. Why? Censorship or cover-up, take your pick. That issue supposedly had content unfavorable to the Student Association and so persons unknown decided that no one should read it.
This all leads back to an incident involving someone in the SA who reported that a few of his peers were allegedly taking illegal substances while they were attending an inter-campus meeting downstate. This student stirred up a ruckus, being labeled as either a hero or a snitch. He’s experienced criticism and rejection by some students and certain faculty members, even though he thought he was doing the right thing.
This dust-up was front page news for the student newspaper, but we only learned about it by chance, not directly from the paper. The trouble is, despite being an award-winning publication, for the last couple of years the student newspaper hasn’t been delivered to any locations downtown. At one time you could drop by the bookstore or the pizza place and grab a copy. Now the paper is only distributed on campus, even though non-students do read it – if it is available to them.
We wanted to gather some facts but we’re not going all the way into the campus to pick up a copy – especially if copies are not available due to theft.
Of course, since PU touts its journalism major, we expected that information would be available at the student newspaper website. Guess what. Between Googling and searching the PU site, we couldn’t find any viable online presence. The closest results at the PU site were pages devoted to PR puff pieces bragging how the student newspaper won another “All American” award from the Associated Collegiate Press. A couple of other sites had listings of college papers online, including a link to PU’s. But after clicking on that link, the inevitable “HTTP 404 – Not Found” would pop up. (Don’t accuse us of not doing our research.)
So it seems at one time there was an online presence. What happened? Did someone hijack the site’s content? And, more important, why isn’t the site back up? Even cheap penny saver weeklies maintain their sites.
One wonders what PU is teaching its journalism majors. Maybe the budding journalists are studying in meticulous detail how Guttenberg cranked out a bible centuries ago instead of learning how to update an actual website or blog. Maybe students are trained to regard their newspaper as a cultic house organ, avoiding any distribution off campus in either cyber- or meat- space.
In the meantime, we’re forced to get PU-related news from the street. We might luck out and meet an award-winning “All American” rumormonger.
11.23.2005
Just As Good As a Cheap French Door Handle
By Stan Spire 
The French door handles. I had almost forgotten about them. Long gone, lost in the memory hole for most people.
I was walking around downtown Plattsburgh, taking an informal survey of the empty storefronts. I noticed one spot on a corner that used to house a thriving magazine and tobacco shop. Someone had stripped out all the fixtures inside and now it sits there, waiting for someone else to make it into a small goldmine.
The storefront hasn’t been repainted; it’s still trimmed with an off-green shade, something that was probably called Pea Soup Medium Ultra. Years ago the city spent money to renovate a number of storefronts with an uniform scheme, using the same green paint and adding fancy French door handles.
If you’re unfamiliar with that type of handle, imagine a “S” lying on its side and then flattened down enough to form a long curvy shape. While the green paint remained – at least with this one storefront - the fancy door handles are long gone. There were a few of them downtown at different locations and it seemed that within a year of their installation they were all broken, replaced with real door handles.
I wasn’t surprised that the French handles didn’t last. If you have a business with many people coming and going, you need a good quality handle that can stand up to relentless use. The ones selected by the downtown renovation project looked like they were found in the K-Mart bargain bin.
But that’s how the city wastes money. It’ll either take a half-step, not spending a bit more for quality, or it just invests a bundle in a guaranteed doomed-to-failure project.
More recently the city spent lots of $ in planting antique streetlights downtown, flooding the area with piss-yellow glare. On one block, with a period of a year or so, three of these cheap knock-offs have broken. A truck jumps bumps into one and it snaps like a matchstick. I looked inside a couple of these busted posts. I didn’t expect each post to be solid, but at the same time it was surprising to see how hollow it was. The casting is thin for such a tall structure, around a quarter inch or so. And the metal itself looks like it was made from recycled tin cans. I’ve seen better casting with a hollow chocolate Easter bunny.
It doesn’t take much to get one of these posts to shake and shimmy. Just grab one, pull back and forth a few times, and watch it vibrate like a big tuning fork. A prime target for drunken college students bored with bending over street signs.
One day a major windstorm will rip through downtown and most of the cheap antique streetlights will fall down, completely snapping free. Whoever is in power at that time will realize the streetlights aren’t worth replacing and so they’ll be all hauled away to the landfill.
Then, centuries from now, archeologists will be digging through the landfill strata and they will stumble upon the layer with the broken antique lampposts. They shake their heads, upset with the waste of valuable materials. They dig deeper, finding a layer dotted pieces of inferior-quality brass. The archeologists put the pieces together: the parts form cheap French door handles.
At this point their disgust turns into laughter.
(Note: the picture accompanying this article is for only illustrative purposes. The handle shown only looks similar to the type discussed in the article. No quality judgment should be inferred, Mr. Corporation Attorney.)
The French door handles. I had almost forgotten about them. Long gone, lost in the memory hole for most people.
I was walking around downtown Plattsburgh, taking an informal survey of the empty storefronts. I noticed one spot on a corner that used to house a thriving magazine and tobacco shop. Someone had stripped out all the fixtures inside and now it sits there, waiting for someone else to make it into a small goldmine.
The storefront hasn’t been repainted; it’s still trimmed with an off-green shade, something that was probably called Pea Soup Medium Ultra. Years ago the city spent money to renovate a number of storefronts with an uniform scheme, using the same green paint and adding fancy French door handles.
If you’re unfamiliar with that type of handle, imagine a “S” lying on its side and then flattened down enough to form a long curvy shape. While the green paint remained – at least with this one storefront - the fancy door handles are long gone. There were a few of them downtown at different locations and it seemed that within a year of their installation they were all broken, replaced with real door handles.
I wasn’t surprised that the French handles didn’t last. If you have a business with many people coming and going, you need a good quality handle that can stand up to relentless use. The ones selected by the downtown renovation project looked like they were found in the K-Mart bargain bin.
But that’s how the city wastes money. It’ll either take a half-step, not spending a bit more for quality, or it just invests a bundle in a guaranteed doomed-to-failure project.
More recently the city spent lots of $ in planting antique streetlights downtown, flooding the area with piss-yellow glare. On one block, with a period of a year or so, three of these cheap knock-offs have broken. A truck jumps bumps into one and it snaps like a matchstick. I looked inside a couple of these busted posts. I didn’t expect each post to be solid, but at the same time it was surprising to see how hollow it was. The casting is thin for such a tall structure, around a quarter inch or so. And the metal itself looks like it was made from recycled tin cans. I’ve seen better casting with a hollow chocolate Easter bunny.
It doesn’t take much to get one of these posts to shake and shimmy. Just grab one, pull back and forth a few times, and watch it vibrate like a big tuning fork. A prime target for drunken college students bored with bending over street signs.
One day a major windstorm will rip through downtown and most of the cheap antique streetlights will fall down, completely snapping free. Whoever is in power at that time will realize the streetlights aren’t worth replacing and so they’ll be all hauled away to the landfill.
Then, centuries from now, archeologists will be digging through the landfill strata and they will stumble upon the layer with the broken antique lampposts. They shake their heads, upset with the waste of valuable materials. They dig deeper, finding a layer dotted pieces of inferior-quality brass. The archeologists put the pieces together: the parts form cheap French door handles.
At this point their disgust turns into laughter.
(Note: the picture accompanying this article is for only illustrative purposes. The handle shown only looks similar to the type discussed in the article. No quality judgment should be inferred, Mr. Corporation Attorney.)
11.15.2005
Public BS Desperate For Fund$
How low will PBS stoop to grease money out of your wallet?
The local PBS TV stations run ads that would make a crooked televangelist blush. A couple of them are aimed at older viewers. The less offensive one shows Grandma baking cookies in her kitchen, while her grandkids, a cute boy and girl, are watching Sesame Street. In the voice-over she reveals that she is leaving part of her estate to the Public Broadcasting System so that it can provide her grandchildren with quality programming after she is gone.
Of course, Granny won’t be around when her grandkids become rebellious teens into drugs and all sorts of godawful stuff. PCP, not PBS, will be on their minds.
Another ad has a pleasant shill talking nice to older viewers, asking them to remember PBS in their wills. Some of those viewers are sitting at home, all alone, and here is this person on TeeVee acting as their friend, trying to get some hot cash from their cold bodies. Ghoulish or what?
The latest ad now presents PBS as saving marriages. Yup, by watching public TeeVee you can prevent divorce.
In the spot a married woman talks about a program presented by PBS about John Adams or some other historical fart from the days of early America. The program showed the strong love between Adams and his wife. After the program was over, both husband and wife were moved by the story, sitting there in the dark of their living room, only the streetlight outside providing any illumination.
That special show inspired that couple to mend their differences and become closer together. It made them realize what was important in life.
Gee, I wonder if the PBS science program, NOVA, re-unites couples after it runs a show about the spread of genital herpes?
11.09.2005
Pandering To The Ratings
It must be sweeps week. The local TeeVee news is pushing special stories to make you worried, so worried that you’ll have to tune in.
Sweeps, in case you didn’t know, is a period during the year when the rating services decide to pay extra attention to who is watching what when. (Sounds like they’re making an effort to be at least halfway accurate.) The pressure is on for network and local programs to score good numbers against the competition so that they can charge top dollar to advertisers.
On the local level, the local newscast usually works the fear angle: “Lead Paint In Your Schoolyard!” “How Pedophiles Lure Your Kids!” “They (the frightfully unspecified “they”) Might Live Next Door To You!”
Occasionally the sex angle is used: “High School Girls Are Dressing Like Young Hookers!” (That “hook,” like the other preceding ones, was actually used by the local TeeVee news.) Of course, besides the titillation, a story about girls in scanty clothing provokes fear because parents will be worried about how their daughter is attiring herself while trying to keep her away from lead paint, pedophiles, and “They.”
News With A Plastic Smile
They grin with bright white teeth, wear nice clothes, claim they care about you. They want to be friends with you -- even though it isn’t their job.
Their job is supposed to be report the news in a fair and accurate manner.
The typical TeeVee newscaster probably doesn’t give a rat’s ass about you as a person, but as a number, another digit in the ratings game. Plattsburgh’s TeeVee station is affiliated with the NBC network. The local anchors appear with NBC’s latest meat puppet star, Brian Williams, in a promo aired ad nauseam. This promo seems to appear every ten minutes, 24/7. The two locals sit in a studio with Williams, gushing on about how their regional newscast shares the same goals of NBC news: helping others, providing a valuable service to the community.
Of course, that valuable service is sandwiched between ads by car dealers so desperate to make a sale that they’ll run annoying “humorous” spots devoid of an iota of humor or even get their naïve kids on the screen to shill for them.
Sticking to the script, the local anchors -- He & She, the standard duo -- tell Williams how they care about the community because they live in the community. Left unspoken is the fact that if a better job offer comes along, He or She would leave this Godforsaken tundra outpost in a second.
Alternating with the promo featuring He & She and NBC’s Number One teleprompter reader is an aggravating spot featuring Brian Williams standing on a beach, probably after the Asian tsunami, going on about no shelter, no food, no water, how the poor victims are suffering. Of course, after that show of humanity, Williams flew back home first class and had a nice meal at a tony five-star Manhattan restaurant while those victims were still stuck on the beach, no shelter, no food, no Perrier sparkling water.
When Brain Williams comes on, the channel changes or the TeeVee is snapped off. So much for pseudo-friend overpromotion.
And as for the local anchors, they carry on night after night with their extended family, the grinning, somewhat goofy sportscaster and the grinning, somewhat goofy weatherman. All part of what killed local TeeVee reporting: the “Happy News” format.
But don’t believe what you see on the screen. A cathode ray tube illusion ain’t reality. Remember that when you meet one of these newsreaders out in public and say hello, politely holding a door open while commenting on how you enjoy her work.
Don’t be surprised if that plastic TeeVee personality barely acknowledges your existence, you couch potato peon.
11.07.2005
Students Finger Mayor
Some parents think Plattsburgh, NY was created to baby-sit their demon spawn.
They send their kids here to college to get them far away from home. Whatever their rude, vandalizing offspring do here is out of sight and ergo should be out of mind -- at least the minds of the parents.
Of course, students can become a little rowdy, but for a few there is no limit to their actions, how far they will go to aggravate, or even hurt, someone else. And when they get away with it, it’s like an invitation for others to join in the “fun.”
For example, years ago a few college-age “young adults” came to town and they ended up causing serious trouble. They weren’t PU students but their actions fell into the same category of “youthful indiscretion.” They were walking right into traffic, endangering themselves and the drivers. At that time there used to be a neighborhood watch patrol, volunteer citizens contacting the police when they spotted trouble. The neighborhood watch patrol tried to get the guys out of the street before someone was hurt. For their good citizenship, a couple of the volunteers were rewarded with beatings. Those who meted out those beatings got off easy in court. (The neighborhood watch no longer patrols. Gee, wonder why?)
This semester the mayor decided to try to control some of the disquiet and damage by notifying parents when their kid had been arrested. One mother was upset with the Burghomeister when she was informed of her overgrown brat’s actions. She said that her son was just young, he would grow out of it, how dare you tell me about his arrest.
The majority of students at Plattsburgh U stay out of trouble. It’s just a troublesome minority of PU students who like to tear down street signs, steal property, smash windows, and screw in the bushes in someone’s front yard. Of course, all of this seems to be not a big deal -- until it happens to you, your property is stolen or destroyed, you find vomit all over your front steps and a passed out stranger in your bed.
In response, a few students have shown displeasure towards the crackdown by a making a particular gesture at the mayor: the middle finger salute. Obviously a sign of maturity.
Wait until these assholes graduate, get jobs, become full-fledged property owners with mounting debt hanging over their heads. They’ll be the first ones to call the cops and complain to the mayor when a few kids perpetrate a bit of mischief like smash the picture window to their new home or key the hell out of their new car. And what will happen to those young vandals? Simple: their Moms and Dads will send them to college way up there in Plattsburgh.
The cycle goes on…
11.05.2005
Plattsburgh Stinks!
“Jack Frost nipping at your nose…”
So goes that nauseating Xmas song. Yesterday in downtown Plattsburgh, Jack Shit was ripping at your nose. The scent of scat in your sinuses. Most likely the water treatment facility -- AKA the sewage plant -- was stinking up the place. The fecal miasma permeated everything.
We don’t think the culprit was the compost plant at the other end of town. As far as we know, they had to shut down that white elephant after two -- count ‘em, two-- fires. It seems the city doesn’t get the message until disaster hits twice. According to the history books, there used to be a dynamite factory right inside the city limits. It was asked to relocate after the second time it blew up. One must ask: Does the city know jackshit?
But the city prides itself on the great progress it’s making. After all, it’s going to have a new hotel built right on the water, a place where everyone can enjoy that fresh lake air.
Guess where the new hotel will sit.
Right near the sewage plant, of course.
Don't Forget The Hyphen!
That's if you want to find your way back here to this particular site. Anti-Press Ezine -- APE -- has been around for a while but we finally decided to start blogging. After some research we decided to go with this service -- mainly because it was free and relatively simple to use. But wouldn't you know it -- someone else got here before us with the title of "antipress." From what we've seen, the other "AP" is a ghost site; nothing posted there since 2003. Well, we can work around that. Remember: we're anti[INSERT HYPHEN]press.blogspot.com.
For the uninitiated: Anti-Press Ezine has been sporadically published from Plattsburgh, NY. Besides our usual rants on life in general, we find that Plattsburgh serves as the perfect microcosmic reflection of the world at large. If you want to find how things get screwed up on a big scale, just look at the smaller scale version in your own backyard.
If you want to find out more about us, check out the back issues at www.disobey.com . At the top of the homepage you'll see a link to the Anti-Press Ezine archives. If that doesn't work, then Google "Anti-Press Ezine" and something is bound to pop up.
OK, it's time to hit the PUBLISH button and see if this stuff sticks to the wall. More later.
