My adopted hometown of Rutland, VT, has a reputation, well-earned, for having a problem with petty crime caused mainly by abusers of recreational drugs, largely prescription but also pot, heroin, coke and the rest of America’s drug cabinet. Given that Granville shares the same white-trash underbelly, I expected the town/schools to be run pretty much the same … badly, on the whole, with honest, well-meaning efforts to overcome the miasma. It was, only worse. Much, much worse. Mostly because of the “honest” part.

As I move on, here are some observations from a passerby:

Dear Petty Official:

Stop lying so much. You’re not fooling anybody.

First off, you need some new material. I might believe you when you say my reporter never even asked you a question, except the entire editorial staff of the Sentinel shares one slightly oversized cubicle, and I listened to them ask it. Hell, I made them ask it. Here’s a hint: When a reporter calls back the day after the initial interview to verify a quote, that means a) the editor likely made them and b) yes, it’s going to appear in print. If you wish to beg for leniency from your own stupidity, that’s the right time, not wait until the paper comes out, then claim you never said it.

I also understand you are going to claim you never said it at Rotary. If they choose to believe you because they want to believe the word of the person responsible for teaching their kids or maintaining law and order in their community, that’s their willful suspension of disbelief. Some people like to think Liberace was straight, too, because the idea he might have been gay completely destroys their world view. I can’t help that and have given up trying.

But don’t bother trying to lie to me to get my reporter in trouble, because it just further discredits every single thing you say from then on. Remember, I’m the guy who told the reporter, “We can’t make Chief Wiggums/Principal Skinner/Mayor Quimby look like an idiot without at least giving the poor sap a second chance to clarify what he meant.” Not my fault you didn’t take it; not the reporter’s.

And when you do go to Rotary and tell them I got a whole story wrong when I was doing a little reporting myself, you might at least have the decency to call me back and tell me what was supposedly inaccurate instead of hiding behind your secretary.

Here’s another hint: When you tell the club over breakfast that I got everything wrong, then write a letter to the editor repeating the story pretty much verbatim except for the addition of the spin that you’re right and the teacher’s union is wrong, I’m going to run it. And not just because it kind of makes it obvious to everybody that the original story wasn’t so much “wrong” as “blatant, self-serving propaganda for the school district.” K? Thanks.

The consensus is that the Sox’ .500-ish season is the fault of the pitching staff. In the words of NESN, the Sox’ obsequious broadcasters, “It’s really only the pitching staff that hasn’t carried its weight.” Now I’m not particularly picking on NESN; it’s just an example. It is dogma that the problem with the Sox this year is pitching, particularly Josh Beckett and Jon Lester, except for a small heretical sect that blames Bobby Valentine.

And the stats seem to back that up: The Sox are third in runs scored, behind Texas and the Yankees, having scored 591 runs in 121 games, or 4.9 runs/game. The pitchers have given up 554 runs or 4.6/game, sixth-worst in the majors (516 earned runs for a 4.30 ERA, still in the bottom third). The offense is fine, right?

But about a millenium ago in dog years, back when Bill James (now a Red Sox staff member) was putting out Baseball Abstracts on heavy stock newsprint in cardboard covers, he suggested that the biggest problem with the Sox, historically speaking, was that generations of front office types had underestimated the effect of playing in a tiny little ballpark, so undervaluing pitchers and overvaluing hitters (particularly left-handed opposite-field doubles hitters who play wall-ball and right-handers with big uppercut swings to loft pitching wedges over the Green Monster). Come on down, Wade Boggs and Jim Rice, respectively. DVR forward thirty years, and you might think this wisdom would have trickled down a little bit. Naaaaaah.

In the words of Kai Ryssdal, let’s do the numbers:

The Sox have scored 342 of their runs in 63 games at home, or 5.4 runs/game. But the park factor for Fenway this year is a whopping 1.278, meaning that teams playing there will score about one and a quarter times as many runs as the same team playing in a neutral park. A little long division (342 divided by 1.278) shows that the same team, playing at the same level but in a park that doesn’t coddle hitters and punish pitchers, would have created 268 runs, not 342. Sound like a lot? It’s the difference between that glossy 5.4 runs/game and 4.25 runs/game. The league average is 272 runs in 60 home games or 4.5 runs/game, so that means the Sox offense at home has actually been below average, once you account for the park.

On the road, the offense has scored 249 runs in 58 games, a pace of 4.3 runs/game, again just behind the league average of 4.4 (although in fairness to the Sox hitters, none of their road games are in Fenway). The two closest teams in terms of production away from home are KC and Oakland.

They strike out a little more than average, walk a little less (take away from their World Series teams patient hitters like Johnny Damon, Kevin Youkilis, and Manny Ramirez and add strikeout machines Jacoby Ellsbury, Will Middlebrooks, Jarrod Saltalamacchia and Cody Ross) and they still don’t run well. Without delving too deep into the math (there is a formula for adjusting for both home and road park effects, but it’s complicated), let’s say that the offense has been a little below average at best.

For the pitchers, the effect is just the opposite. On the road, the team has a combined ERA of 3.80, ninth-best in the majors, but at home it’s 4.74, third worst. For comparison, Colorado has a home ERA of just over 6.00; the AL averages 3.93 at home and 4.26 on the road.

Overall, the Sox pitchers have an ERA of 4.30, a little worse than the league average of 4.09, but considering more than half their games so far have been in Fenway, they’re performing as a somewhat above-average staff, despite Beckett and to a lesser extent Lester.

Slightly above-average pitching, slightly below-average hitting, add a little clubhouse turmoil and it all adds up to 59-62. Now if we can just get the media and fans to stop babbling on about how the pitching is the problem …

It was a nice ceremony. The speech from Judge William Sessions was heartfelt, but it rather missed the point for me and most of my fellow emigres, or at least the ones to whom I spoke. He was talking about us now having an opportunity in the United States, but that’s rather an old-fashioned idea fit for the huddled masses on Ellis Island.

The modern reality of immigration is that it’s almost impossible to get citizenship from outside the country. Instead, you come here, apply for a green card and work between three and 10 years before even being eligible. So legal immigrants are here and settled, not yearning to be free. The only thing I’m free of that I wasn’t free of last week is the threat of an arbitrary decision by Immigration ending in my deportation …

Having said that, I will add that the immigration experience is the single most frightening, arbitrary and dehumanizing experience I’ve ever been through, and that’s coming from somebody who was once stuck up at gunpoint by three Russian cops.

On the bright side, after the ceremony, we decided to celebrate in the most American way we could think of: Binge eating.

We went to Ben and Jerry’s for the factory tour in Waterbury, where four adults and four boys between 4 and 8 years old finished off a Vermonster: 20 scoops of ice cream, four ladles each of caramel and chocolate sauce, four bananas (Hey, bananas! It must be good for you!), three chocolate chip cookies, a fudge brownie, walnuts, whipped cream and your choice of four toppings. We passed on the walnuts and two of the four toppings (just rainbow sprinkles and Reese’s Pieces, please).

The funny part is that the boys all had a couple of little dishes, decided they were full and quit eating … it was the adults who really pigged out. We got close enough to being finished that we got pins to celebrate the feat and my sister-in-law took the bucket home as a souvenir. Is great country, this America, yes?

Help!  I am Allah, God of The Religions, am now here on Earth, and asking the Press to help Me locate an organization, community or nation to receive Me.  Here is all you have to do on behalf of your company, community or nation:  send an email to god @llah.mobi (no spaces) or SMS/VM 707-925-2488 and say something such as “On behalf of, (your company, community, or nation) We want to welcome you, God Allah.”  Be sure to include your email, SMS text number (if you have one), name and phone number.  Then I will contact you back through email with more information about how this applies to your company, community, or nation.  If you want to learn more of God Allah (or God the Father, Christianity) see a church or mosque near you for more information.  Please be advised this is a very, serious emergency for many people around the world so you were advised to communicate with Me immediately.  Also, due to the nature of this emergency, it is possible there could be spiritual repercussions for your failure to comply.  Thanks.

Given the potential spiritual repercussions, I think I’ll skip the snarky comments about His typos. It was signed:

Emergency Message,
God Allah
Author, Holy Qur’an / Bible
Lord of the Worlds
god @llah.MOBI (subscribe)
god @llah.US (unsubscribe instructions)
P.O. Box 701
San, Mateo CA 94401
+1 (707) 925-2488 SMS/VM
A.LLAH.US
A.LLAH.TEL
LAH.TEL
LAH.TV
In the event of subscribe error, go to https:// ALLAH . zendesk .com

I kind of like the idea that God has an unsubscribe link.

The background, in five points:

1) The EPA tracks haloacetic acid levels in water, among many other potential health risks.

2) Haloacetic acids are created when free chlorine reacts with organic material (think decomposing leaves, deer poop, etc., etc.), and Rutland’s are stubbornly higher than allowed.

3) The city considered two main methods of getting its haloacetic acid levels under EPA-mandated levels: Carbon filtration and chloramine, choosing the latter because it would be orders of magnitude less expensive, based on a study from Otter Creek Engineering.

4) The EPA doesn’t track some byproducts of chloramine reactions in water, including haloacetonitriles, halonitromethanes, haloacetaldehydes and nitrosamines. The link to an article used by the concerned citizens by a scientist name Stuart W. Krasner that discusses the potential dangers of these chemicals (warning: contains science) is here. There are also several articles on the city website, including for the brave of heart, a 447-page statewide study on water systems. Oddly, I can’t find the actual study from Otter Creek anywhere.

5) The Krasner article says the amount and type of byproducts varies by site (makes sense … not every stream has the same naturally occurring organic matter in it). He further states that the order you treat with chloramine, chlorine and filter is important in terms of the number of disinfectant byproducts in the resulting drinking water. You have to read past the abstract to find this information, and I doubt many people on either side have done so.

6) I’m going out on a limb and saying that you won’t get more than half the voters to support a multimillion dollar carbon filter that costs $1.5 million annually to run, in addition to the present sand filter and chlorine treatment when a chloramine system can be set up for $100,000, and I think that’s the consensus of the concerned citizen group, which is trying to find a much cheaper version of the carbon filter system. The problem then becomes how to minimize the creation of the harmful byproducts.

So here’s my open question for the aldermen, Mayor Chris Louras, and Evan Pilachowski:

Did the Otter Creek Engineering study take into account not only using chloramine but testing where in the process to add the chloramine to minimize both the creation of chlorine and chloramine byproducts that are known carcinogens, including testing the various combinations of chloramine, chlorine and the existing sand filter to provide water?

Followup question: If not, why not?

Second followup: If you don’t know the answer to these questions or if the answer to the first question is “no,” should you be voting on a new system?

I think they aren’t getting a full picture of the results of their work. We had a home audit done through them, which suggested half a dozen worthwhile projects, ranging from replacing the windows to sealing the spaces between the joists in our basement where they meet the outer sill to basic gap sealing.

Officially, we get an incomplete on their records, so they can’t chalk us up in the “win” column for their statistics as they report back to their federal grant providers, but in reality, we’ve done a lot of the work they recommended:

They said we should stop the flow of air from basement to attic, first and foremost. So I plugged a bunch of little holes from the basement into two-story wall spaces, and insulated and air-sealed the door to our walk-up attic. It cost about $10.

They said we should seal the cool air return to the furnace, to stop cold air being sucked into the basement from outdoors to feed the heating system (instead of recycling the air from the main floor, which is what you want). So I bought a $7.50 tube of gunk and all the duct seams are now sealed. I also wrapped some of the hot-air ducts in insulation … which seemed to provide a small difference in retained heat, so I’ll wrap the rest this year. That’s about $100 when I’m done.

For the joists, they recommended a $1,500 spray-on product that seals both the air coming in through the sill and the bottom of the wall cavity. I’m sure it’s a great product, but for about $45, I installed a heavy poly film and fiberglass (fiberglass for the insulating properties, the poly as an air-flow barrier, both through the side wall and vertically through the floor into the wall cavity). It’s not as good as the spray-on, I’m sure, but if it’s 80% as good, the return on investment of the remaining $1,455 for a 20% gain on a fix that addresses maybe 5% of my heating bill just doesn’t make sense. (.05*.2=0.01 or 1%, at $3,000 to heat the house = 50 year payback … assuming the spray-on stuff has a 50-year lifespan).

I make that a $162.50 investment that has probably already paid for itself (It’s a little over 5% of the annual fuel bill). Throw in the cost of the audit, even at retail (we took advantage of a NeighborWorks subsidy), and I expect we would be ahead of the game financially by this winter. But to “complete” the job would require hiring a contractor, doing the expensive work, then doing another energy audit to verify the work was a success, in order to collect a subsidy for a portion of the cost. It doesn’t make sense, for us.

I would love to do the windows, but they’re about the cost of a new car, and I can’t afford one of those this year, either, even with a subsidy. So I’ll officially be an incomplete, maybe even a failure, on the Heat Squad books, but that doesn’t begin to tell the tale: The subsidy spurred us to get the audit, which in turn spurred us to spend a little money and a few weekends. The end result is that we are burning less fuel than we would otherwise. It’s a great program.

‘Patrice Bergeron and Brooks Laich came set for a faceoff with the clock reading 9.5 seconds left in the third period. The puck was dropped, the Capitals won the draw, the puck went to the corner, then to the right point and then over to the left point for a shot by Johnny Boychuk.

During that entire sequence, the clock didn’t move.

Why? Mike Murphy, NHL Senior Vice President of Hockey Operations, released a statement after the game explaining the huge snafu:

“With 9.5 seconds remaining in the third period, there was a stoppage and resulting face-off in the Washington zone. During the stoppage, the game clock operator and Series Manager determined that 0.9 seconds should have been added to the time remaining in the third period and attempted to contact the on-ice officials to delay the puck drop to accommodate making the necessary clock adjustment to 10.4 seconds remaining.

“The off-ice officials were not able to attract the attention of the referees or linesmen despite sounding the horn, which was not audible due to crowd noise, and the puck was dropped.”‘

I love that last quote: “The horn was not audible due to crowd noise.” That’s a foghorn, folks … right around 100-110 db.

Welcome to playoff hockey.

Why the junk mail is there is as simple as following the money:

• Lake Champlain is getting a buildup of phosphorus pollution, to the point that state entities are legally liable for cleaning it up.
• Much of the phosphorus comes from “waste products,” aka poop: Cow poop, human poop and recycled poop in the form of fertilizer being three main sources.
• Vermont isn’t going to do anything to stop cow poop from reaching Lake Champlain. Why? Well, they’re cows … and it’s Vermont. I blame Woody Jackson. He could have painted a Morgan horse, after all. Instead we got Love Thy Holstein.
• If we can’t fix the cow poop, that means fixing the human/fertilizer waste streams getting into our, errr, streams.
• Many, many, many towns have similar problems to Rutland: While they can control the routine sewage needs of their populace, the systems overflow, literally, in big storms and wash lots of phosphorus (and other pollutants) into the water, which on this side of the Greens means into the lake.
• Too much runoff for too long and the EPA comes around with an order mandating communities build much bigger, much more efficient wastewater systems.
• So those towns (and the state) need to control that outflow to head off the EPA, which means cajoling you, me and the guy down the block into controlling our runoff.

Got it? It’s enlightened self-interest on behalf of the state and local government. So here’s a suggestion: Don’t just send us a little flyer, make it easier to build a rain garden. We followed the money, now show us the money. Here’s how:

Compost is an essential element of a rain garden, which is a glorified ditch, filled with gravel, then dirt and compost mixed together to make a more-easily drained bed. Rainwater runs into the bed, sinks through the dirt and gravel and is filtered into the groundwater instead of running straight into streams and lakes. Build enough of them and the EPA goes away, Lake Champlain cleans up and we get to keep the cow cult, guilt-free.

Rutland has a big old compost pile at the dump. We users either drop off the lawn waste that makes the compost for free during the spring/fall amnesty periods or we pay $5 a pickup load to drop it off during the summer. How about when Rutland County Solid Waste District issues a dump sticker it also issues a permit to pick up a load of compost once or twice a year, same as with dropoffs? Make a big deal out of it: Compost amnesty week! Free the compost, save the lake!

As a way to encourage us to plant those rain gardens, you could call it a grassroots effort.

The emphasis is mine, but in this era of tabloid paparazzi fighting to get shots of models without makeup, such truth in packaging is refreshing — if inadvertent.