Spotty Posting This Week

What better way to celebrate a year of blogging than go dark for a week? Well, maybe not dark but dim.

Kid Z is in her out-of-school-but-not-yet-in-camp week. Kid T is still in preschool, but getting her out of the house with Z bopping around is a challenge. Meanwhile, piles of housework, volunteer work and work work scream for attention. I'll try to hit something substantive at least once a day, but no promises.

A Year in the Life

Today is the First Blogiversary of Pho's Akron Pages. One year ago today I decided, without much thought of where it would lead, to jump into this blogging thing. Unlike Jill, this wasn’t an adjunct to a vocation. Unlike Scott, I wasn’t inspired by a specific event.

More than anything else, it was a way to exercise my brain after two years of full-time child care punctuated by occasional volunteer work. More than one stay-at-home dad has gone this way before. One famously catalogued every bottle and diaper change. Consider yourselves lucky; this could have been so much worse.

I can be as grandiose as the next guy, but I never expected this blog to be where it is. People – and by that I mean people with jobs and responsibilities and, in some cases, really great blogs – meet me and tell me how good this is. One thing that hasn’t changed over a year’s time; I still have to restrain myself from answering, “Really?”

So, a year ago I wrote a post (edited in deference to recent events) introducing nonexistent readers to something called “Pho’s Norka Pages.” For a while no one in my real life even knew about the blog. For a long while after that, the readership was literally a half-dozen people from SCPD and my brother. Then this happened which led to that and pretty soon a steady stream of people come by to see what I – unemployed lawyer/full-time dad/armchair kvetch that I am – have to say.

I’ve taken time off for some family vacations, a minor surgery (minor, right!) and a couple of bouts with the flu. Still, you keep coming back.

I have ideas as to where it may go, but rather than make bold promises, I’d prefer to blog after things happen. For now, this is mostly about thanks. Thanks to the first bloggers who noticed – particularly George and Bill. Thanks to everyone who was doing this before me and helped give this blog its shape. Thanks to everyone now doing this blogging thing for your dedication -- and your links. Thanks to the MTB crew, to the burgeoning Akron blogosphere. Thanks to Redhorse and keng and MaryBad – bloggers who are also in my real life on a regular basis.

Thanks to the candidates, party officials and media folks who kept an open mind, talked to bloggers and gave us something to write about. Thanks to the other candidates, party officials and media folks who act like they might get a progressive rash from coming too close and give us even more to write about.

And thanks mostly to my readers. Thanks for putting up with the occasionally spotty posting. Thanks for trudging through windy posts about policy arcana. Thanks for your comments and your emails. Thanks for the ideas, arguments, criticisms, complements. You keep me going and keep me sharp.

It’s been a hell of a year. Let's do the numbers.

Posts: 413
Most Posts in One Day: 6 (November 11)
Longest period without posting: 10 days (Dec. 23 to Jan 2)
Hits (as of midnight and since October 10, 2005): 28,215
Page Views (ditto): 47,363
Most hits in a day: 447 (May 3, 2006)
First Comment: July 6, 2005 (netroots doyen Tim Tagaris, no less)
Most Comments on a post: 48 (a kick-the-hornet’s-nest post-Hackett post)
Current Technorati Rank: 36,231
Current TTLB Ecosystem Rank: 8805
MSM Mentions: 4 (one LMJ, 3 ABJ)

Non-Random Ten

Paste Magazine, the latest attempt at a high-quality indy music mag, this month is running its list of the 100 greatest living songwriters. The living songwriter thing is kind of arbitrary – Jeff Buckley and Kurt Cobain have more enduring influence than a lot of the people on the list. Nonetheless, it’s a fun exercise.

Only a few selections are truly questionable. Chuck Berry? He wrote one song, then changed the lyrics 100 times. Unless he’s in for “My Dingaling.”) And I probably will never come around to Patty Griffin.

On the other hand, the list is full of people I’ve never heard of or who are at best vaguely familiar. Lots of late 90s/early 00s. So it goes with lists like this. In 1986, no doubt Jules Shear and Joe Jackson would be there. If it was 1996, we would have seen and the Screaming Trees and Clint Black.

While I can’t find many to knock off the list, a number of my favorites aren’t on. This week’s R10 is dedicated to them. My favorite songwriters not on the list, each paired with one of my favorite songs. In the order they occurred to me:

1. “Readin, Writin’ Rt. 23,” Dwight Yoakum
2. “You Left Me Standing in the Rain,” Bob Mould (perf. by Husker Du)
3. “Telegraph Road,” Mark Knofler (perf. by Dire Straights)
4. “Teen-Age Riot,” Sonic Youth
5. “Woody and Dutch on the Slow Train to Peking,” Ricky Lee Jones
6. “Forces at Work,” The Feelies
7. “Me, Myself and I,” De La Soul
8. “Sunflowers,” Art Alexakis (perf. by Everclear)
9. “I Don’t Want to Love You, But I Do,” Paul Kennerly (perf. by Kelly Willis)
10. “Divorce Song,” Liz Phair

Notes: In addition to being one of two songwriters in Husker Du and performing solo, Bob Mould also fronted Sugar.

Paul Kennerly is a Nashville songwriter. While rock has turned its back on songwriting factories like the Brill Building, many country still rely on professional songwriters for their material. Paul Kennerly is one of the most successful and I happen to like his stuff better than Kostas’.

Feel free to check out the list on Paste and drop in your favorite neglected songwriter.

Lobbying for net neutrality and local control.

As mentioned earlier, Bill Callahan has been doing yeoman’s work keeping us up to date on the COPE act and its many implications. I’ve had the Save the Internet banner up for some time. Now is the time to click it.

If passed with all the uglies intact, the COPE act would:

• Strip local communities of the ability to negotiate the terms of local cable franchises


• Set high hurdles for community-based broadband networks


• End net neutrality.

Catch up with Bill, Henry Gomez and Save the Internet if you are new to the debate. The key point today is that the vote on two net neutrality amendments is set for tomorrow. Bill has set up links to contact local members of Congress.

Another key member to lobby is Ted Strickland who wants to be our next governor. Unfortunately, the email system for congress is rigged so you have to enter a 9-digit zip before you can get to anyone. Fortunately, I found a realtor website that gave me a valid address and therefore a valid 9 digit zipcode. Enter 45701-1301 (a lovely modern on a wooded lot listing at $440,000) and you are in. I then entered my actual city and po box as the address, so he knows who is writing to him. It’s not illegal, immoral or fattening. He can pay attention or not, but Ted knows we are watching this vote.

And if you are not yet convinced, consider the following. Proponents of COPE claim that it’s all about customer service, not about controlling content. But ZDNet recently discovered that Cox Cable is blocking Craig’s List in order to protect its classified advertising business. Ultimately this isn’t just about netroots vs. the powers that be, it’s also about preserving an healthy environment for small business formation. That should be appealing to people of most political stripes.

A Local Attorney and Blogger

Again I say, if Akron wants MSM love it will come in the ABJ. Today’s paper runs an editorial about school funding which once again name-checks me. The editorial is pretty much what I would have written. The fun part for the blogosphere comes in the last graph:

Recently, a group of parents (including Scott Piepho, a local attorney and blogger) and school administrators announced a new organization, Next Step for Akron, to help raise public understanding of Ohio's school funding system and support for a school levy [emphasis added].

So now I should expect to wear the “blogger” gloss going forward. Far enough. It’s become a pretty big chunk of my self-identity as well.

Meanwhile, the backchannel of the blogosphere is still buzzing about the PD tagging Tim with his rap sheet. One of the latest threads is about anonymity on the sphere. Anyone who didn’t know my real name before the above has had plenty of routes to run me down. Still, let me reset the Story of Pho here.

When I first started this thing – first blogiversery in three days, BTW – I had no idea what it would be. The original concept was my personal howl at the moon, a place to download the discussion that ran in my head as I pursued my workaday dad chores. No one was supposed to actually read it, but because I am involved with a number of organizations who guard control of their message, it made sense to put a buffer between this blog and my real life. I had been using the username “Pho” on various groups for some time, so it fit.

Now the blog has pretty much been branded, both with Pho and with the avatar my daughter drew. Though at times it seems a little ridiculous, I started as Pho and Pho I shall remain.

The remaining question presented is why my name isn’t frontpaged somewhere. Blame residual paranoia from a former prosecutor. It doesn’t make much sense as easy as it is to track me down, but I still minimize how much the real name is out there. For the same reason, I do all my bar correspondence through a P.O. Box. It would be easy enough for an ex-con with a grudge to find me, but having my name and home address in legal directories just seems excessively loose. Does that make sense to everybody? Probably not, but it’s how I choose to roll.

Finally, if you are interested in the aforementioned school funding advocacy group, here again are the particulars for the next meeting:

Wed. June 14
7:00
Akron Summit Main Library
Meeting Room 1

You can contact me through the blog -- pho187[at]hotmail[dot]com -- for more information.

Almost Heaven, Regulation

Yesterday’s Dispatch carried the lamentable news that Ohio lost out on hosting the first new-generation cleancoal plant – to West Virginia. Reading the subhead and the lede, it sounded like a potential Blackwell campaign issue. The subhead says “AEP expects quicker OK there for clean-coal power station.”

The lede goes a little further:

American Electric Power Co. now expects to build its first cleancoal generating plant in West Virginia rather than Ohio because of the regulatory environment, a company spokeswoman said.

The weary reader says “Uh-oh. Here we go again. J. Ken will rail against Ohio’s cumbersome regulation and bad business climate from his pulpit located in some neverland where someone besides Republicans have been in charge for a generation.”

Read on:

Because of a change in utility regulation, Ohio officials and AEP expect that any rate increase to finance the $1.2 billion power station would spark a dispute with industrial customers and companies that generate electricity for sale on the open market.

Ohio deregulated utilities, meaning customers can choose their power company.

"If we get approval in Ohio, it’s likely to be litigated by some of the outside parties," AEP spokeswoman Melissa McHenry said yesterday.

"It’s likely West Virginia will go forward because the process is more straightforward."

We poor shlub residential customers have long known that deregulation turned the fairly straightforward activity of switching on the lights into a gigantic pain in the tuckus. Apparently industrial customers feel the same way.

Utility regulation is it’s own ridiculously complex thing. Generally I go to Callahan to get help but he’s up to his ears in COPE posts. I don’t know if this could be a campaign issue for Strickland – simply put, we lost out on a business opportunity because the Republicans screwed with something. Query whether that has traction, but it sound like we get the bumper sticker version and the Republicans have to do “Well, see, it’s more complicated than that . . .” That’s a nice change.

The point for me is that Republicans have been turning Ohio into a vast laboratory for the unified free market theory of everything and it doesn’t necessarily work. Lately when people have asked about my political leanings I tell them I am a Militant Pragmatist.

Militant Pragmatist doesn’t care about ideology, he cares about making things better.

Militant Pragmatist recognizes that sometimes the best solution is market-based and sometimes it is regulatory and often it’s a blend of the two.

Militant Pragmatist can be left leaning or right leaning, depending on the outcome desired but ignores labels in favor of data sets when considering policy.

Join with me. We are the Militant Pragmatists.

What to we want? SOMETHING THAT WORKS!

When do we want it? AS SOON AS PRACTICABLE!

Beacon Journal Sold

And not to the Plain Dealer. Sound Publishing, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Black Press, Ltd. bought Akron’s paper. Big ups to Ohio.com for having a podcast of Publisher James Crutchfield’s meeting with staff.

The “Sound” in Sound Publishing is Puget Sound. Sound is based in Bainbridge Island, WA and runs a number of weekly and twice-weekly papers in the region. The Black in Black Press is company founder David Black. Black Press is based in Western Canada and runs papers in Alberta, British Columbia and Hawaii.

After Googling the frustratingly generic names and listening to the pod, I wonder if Laura Rich Fine advises Black. Thanks to her I was looking and listening for certain features that she saw as key to a successful newspaper company. Black pretty much runs the table.

• Not a Publicly-Owned company. Check. Black is a family-owned company. The BJ is going back to its roots. In the family-owned sense, not the run from an island off Washington sense.
  
• Focused on local News. Check. Sound Publishing’s website is practically lifted from Fine’s speech:

  Anybody can tell you what's going on in the world--CNN, USA Today, or Yahoo. But where do you turn when you want to know about the new construction site down the street or the latest school board vote?
  
  That's where we come in. Sound Publishing newspapers cover local news,
  high school sports, police activity, weddings and new babies - whatever is going
  on in your community.

• Web Savvy. Check. Black formed a separate company in 1999 to host nationwide web-based classified advertising. Looking at some of the newspaper websites, they have a pretty good balance of content and advertising, easy navigation and reasonably fast downloads.


• Fine’s Dream: A pdf File of the Paper in her Inbox. Even this far-off idea is closer with Black and Sound. Black uses a pdf-based app in its printing facilities.

All that’s missing is the citizen journalism *cough cough.*

The one potential downside is that Sound doesn’t appear to operate any daily newspapers From what I can see Black (or perhaps some other subsidiary of Black) owns the dailies. That probably makes the publishing team in place at the BJ feel better about job security – less likely the new owner will want to put his guys in if he doesn’t really have guys. On the other hand, one wonders about the learning curve.

Finally, I am happy someone beat out Plain Dealer owner Advance Publications. I like Cleveland, but find C-town’s attitude toward Akron a little wearing. Clevelanders talk about “Cleveland” and mean the Cleveland Statistical Metropolitan Area. Fair enough. If I lived in Brooklyn it probably wouldn’t bother me to be lumped in with Cleveland. Clevelanders, however, don’t seem to appreciate that Akron isn’t a suburb of Cleveland.

And yes, I join Redhorse in the irritation that Mark Naymik didn’t interview any bloggers in Akron. And no, that’s not what started it, it’s just the latest manifestation. Nothing against Cleveland, we just need our own stuff here.