Londonderry News

I’m heading out for more gas soon. Gas is like beer – Archie Bunker said you can’t buy beer, just rent it. The generator is the gas digester. It puts out hot exhaust and it seems a shame that the warmth blows out ten feet or further from the house. You start wondering how to build a generator exhaust heat exchanger, but no. This can’t go on long enough to make something like that worthwhile.

But the six-gallon gas can in empty. Time to go refill it. Except, you wonder whether the lights would be on when you get back with the gas – by the time you find an open station, wait on line, fill the can, and come home, it could be hours. And you’re living every minute hoping it might be the last before the lights come back on.

And the heat. And the water. There’s a stream along one edge of our property, and it provides water to run the – well, the “conveniences.” We got the generator when that tropical storm was heading this way, and we planned to get it wired in through a transfer switch before winter came. Who knew that a snow storm would come before winter actually did. So now we’re planning to get it done as soon as the power comes back on and things get a bit closer to normal….

But then you wonder why. What are the chances there will be two multi-day blackouts in a single year? Probably about the same as the chance that the lights will still be out when I get back with the next can of gas, which I ought to get soon. But then my hands will smell of gasoline again, and I don’t want to waste store-bought drinking water on washing it away. It’s odd how gasoline can smell good at NASCAR races and so damned bad on your hands when the generator is running thirsty but not running the plumbing.

Generators should come with a warning label: “the buyer is cautioned that he or she is condemning himself to a life of tending this machine. Before you leave the store, you should buy as many five-gallon gas cans as you can fit into the back of your pickup truck. If you don’t have a pickup truck, you should buy one of them too before you use your generator, otherwise your passenger car will smell of gasoline for multiple months following each power failure, and the smell alone will make you feel cold. But don’t store all those cans full of gas in or near your house because petroleum products tend to burn.”

Anyway, it’s time to get more gas. You try to find the right balance between gas on hand and gas that needs storage. You try to build a trip around the gas safari that somehow includes a place to wash the smell off your hands. You wonder how long you can make the trip last – cars warm up fast, even if they smell of gasoline, and they can take you to a lot of warm places. And you wonder how you can be grateful to see that gas still costs only $3.35 a gallon – most places, you’d figure, the price would have skyrocketed with supply and demand and gouging.

Then home again. The little army of plastic gas cans stands guard around the generator. You hear that sometimes, generators vanish from driveways and yards during times like these. You think about Y2K survivalists and their plans to live off the grid in their bunkers with their stockpile of food and water and fuel and ammo. Then you think of the Y1.8K pioneers who spent whole winters in far less climatically-friendly places than southern New Hampshire, in homes and hovels that didn’t have central heating or indoor plumbing on glass windows or wifi to start with, and wonder if you would have ever made it on the plains of Colorado or the Dakotas. Without a generator. Without gasoline. Without a transfer switch to pump the water to wash the gasoline off your hands.

It’s time to get more gasoline. See you in the fuel line – if not this time, then in a few hours, when it’s time to get more gas again.

The Londonderry schools will be closed on Tuesday. The decision to remain closed was made because of the slow pace of power restoration through the town. Parts of Londonderry are facing several more days without power, and issues linger in some of the school facilities as well. We’re hoping to open schools on Wednesday. A decision about that will be made on Tuesday.

The Londonderry Police have announced that trick-or-treating will be moved until NEXT SUNDAY. The hours that day will be 4-7PM. Please DON’T go trick-or-treating today, it’s just not safe. This will also let the schools reschedule their Halloween parties and parades for Friday.

School officials expect to decide by late afternoon regarding whether school will be open tomorrow.

The shelter is open for warming, showering, charging your phone, and all that. There’s no indication when it might close. ALERT is planning to staff it for several days.

Dear Parents and Guardians,

Irene is gone and our schools weathered the storm with a minimum of issues. Thus, I am pleased to inform you that we will have school tomorrow August 30, 2011. All first day of school schedules, activities, programs and lunch menus will be in effect.

As of this writing, there are still some road closures. If the closures effect your child’s bus stop, you will be contacted by your child’s school as to the location of the alternative bus stop.

Wishing one and all a great school year.

Sincerely,
Nathan S. Greenberg
Superintendent of Schools

I nearly had to buy a new car last week, and it was no fun at all. The whole premise of car ownership that’s sold by the car makers, car renters, car insurers, and car gasser-uppers, is that owning a car is a ticket to fun, and buying a car is darned near a carnival with popcorn and hot dogs and banners. You “come on down” for a great time and a great deal in a car that’s better equipped than your average family theatre, with satellite radios and built in phones and controls that you talk to and they talk back and seating surfaces that you’d never let your dog on in your family room but you coax her onto after a morning to tromping around the mud in the Musquash, then play her a DVD of Spongebob cartoons as you tool home down High Range Road, eight hemispheric cylinders humming to propel your four-wheel drive high-stepper along the bone-dry pavement, your chrome sparkling in the sun.

And that’s all fine with me if you like it. In fact, is absolutely great with me, if you’re into it. Cars should be fun. They should reflect who you are, if you want them to. They should make you comfortable, provide a sense of adventure if you want it, and make you look good driving up in them. And if you have the money to spend on them, I have no personal problem with you buying the most elaborate, fully-equipped, premium-priced vehicle that your heart desires – ideally (to me) one made in the United States out of domestically-sourced parts, but I don’t object if it’s not a traditional American brand.

So there I was, on the cusp of engaging in an automotive transaction, watching all the commercials about countdowns to Memorial Day savings and Just 4 no 3 no 2 Days Left to Get This Year’s Best Deals, and it was all a little depressing. It’s not their fault – although it’s pretty easy to heap fault on American car manufacturers, foreign car importers, and petroleum power in general – it’s mine.

I’m just not a car guy.

That’s a serious handicap in an American male of a certain (read: any) age. In high school, my sister drove a Mustang with tuned pipes. The coolest teacher at school had a Porsche. People at my first job were Camaro fanatics, unless they were driving Preludes. I once worked for a company whose founder took it public, and the next day bought himself something exotic from Italy. Later I worked at a company that gave out Boxsters to its senior executives and offered everyone else a chance to win one for a month. And in each case, it was socially imperative to buy into the culture of admiration and desire, and talk over lunch about how sweet those particular cars looked or sounded or handled, and how envious they made us.

And I simply never got it. I never believed the right car would help me get jobs or girls or in front of all the traffic or out of traffic tickets, I never cared enough about sound to want it to seem just a little clearer or a whole lot louder, and I never wanted to spend so much time in a car that Corinthian leather made a difference to me. I just never felt a car was anything more than a way to get where you needed to go, something you pay to insure and operate and maintain, and watch diminish in value. It just doesn’t click for me like other things do – sailboats for example.

But the difference is, it’s totally easy to pass in society while not caring about sailboats. You can even deprecate them as hoity-toity “yachts” and indulgences of the pseudo-aristocratic elite, and frame everyone who owns one as an ascot-wearing wiener. But that’s a little harder in the American “car culture,” in which the “culture” is framed by two-acre lots and the need for a car to get from your bedroom community to your workplace. (Cue to the Woodmont-obsessed: sick’em!)  The problem is, you pretty much need a car to participate in the world from here, even if you do manage to make most of your living on a computer from your loveseat.

So not caring about cars is a social affliction, and I have it.  I may be entitled to compensation, certainly government-funded assistance.  Maybe there’s someone I can sue. I’m prevented from participating fully in President’s Day car sales, Memorial Day car sales, Toyotathons, and the Chevrolet Year-End Clearance Event.  I can’t even make myself actively want any particular car model on the market, not even last week when I nearly needed one.

Ultimately, I pretty much decided that if I simply had to get a new car, it would probably have been a Camaro — not because they’re cool (are they?  I don’t know.) but because they’re so nicely retro.  They look like they used to look on LP record albums by the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean.  So do the Mustangs and the Chargers, and they were my other contenders.  But I was spared by the news that my 11-year-old pickup truck only needed less than $900 in repairs, so I got to keep that instead, and delete all my bookmarks to web sites for cars that I didn’t really crave but could at least imagine driving.  And if you think it strange that one could be pleased to spend only $900 fixing an 11-year-old truck, you haven’t priced new cars lately.  If new cars didn’t cost so much, we might be too quick to buy them, and then where would we be?

Donald Trump announced the other day that he won’t be President of the United States starting in 2013, and the world responded, “what took you so long to figure that out?”

It’s not that the incumbent President is a shoe-in for re-election – I don’t think he is. But running against Donald Trump was probably Barack Obama’s best hope for a cakewalk to a landslide victory.

It turns out that running for president is a lot like filing a lawsuit: anyone can do it, but it’s a lot easier to start than it is to win. I was working at the WLLO radio booth at Old Home Day a few years ago when a candidate for President walked up and asked to be interviewed. Seriously. This guy was walking around in a cheap sports jacket, followed by someone with a sign leaning on his shoulder with the guy’s name and the picture of a cross and a flag, and that was his campaign. I meant to write down the name and see how he did at the polls the next January, but I forgot. For all I know he never even put his name on the ballot

Now it seems likely that someone reading this is nodding sagely at the thought of any Don Quixote (the guy with the sign) or kook (Trump) can run for President in America. “That’s the way the Founders meant it to be,” he or she is saying, To which I reply, “have you ever actually read the Constitution? I mean, the real one?”

I ask this because the Constitution actually puts some pretty high requirements on all those who would be president. For starters, you had to have reached the age of 35, which was something a lot of people didn’t do in the late eighteenth century. Then you had to be male – since women didn’t have voting rights; and then you had to be outside of bondage and not a Native American (as differentiated from native American, for any lingering birthers out there).

Then you could run. Simple, right? Well, no. Even if you met these qualifications, there was still the little matter of getting elected – which was also slightly different, in that the several States could choose their electors however they saw fit, which didn’t necessarily require, say, a “voting day” where the people cast ballots. Nor did it all even happen on one day. Nor was it all that easy for someone from, say, New Jersey to get well enough known in, say, Rhode Island, for whoever picked electors there to make up his (white, mature, male) mind in your favor.

You could make a sound argument that running for the presidency today is actually easier. Instead of needing buddies in the various state legislatures, these days you mostly need money. The news says President Obama means to raise a billion dollars for his re-election campaign, which it will then spend on events and lawn signs and organizing, and in large measure on advertising. It creates an impression that you don’t need intellect, vision, compassion, humility, or people skills to be President of the United States. It creates the impression that all you need is a whole lot of disposable cash.

Well, hello, Mr. Trump, step right up.

I realize that what I’m saying here could cheese off Trump fellow travelers, those poor benighted souls who actually believe a blowhard with a penchant for bankruptcy actually Has the Business Sense and Gumption that America Needs to Beat Back Red China’s Yellow Peril and Stand Up To The Oil Sheiks. To which I reply, don’t trust the person who is reading this to you. They are making it all up. You can only trust the voices in your head that no one else can hear. Take your pills and go back to sleep.

For the rest of us, maybe it’s time we lay down a marker (but not from a Trump casino – those were devalued in Chapter 11) that says we recognize that being the Chief Executive is not a job for just anyone. Credentials like hosting a reality/game show on TV, selling men’s fashions at Macy’s, renting out your name to gaudy real-estate developments that often get sold but never finished, and confusing opulence with tack are not enough for America’s chief representative to the world, unless you actually think what Trump symbolizes is in fact the qualities you wish for America: conceit, vanity, hubris, and an abject inability to understand when you’ve become a caricature of decadence rather than a shining city on the hill.

As for me, bring me my bow of burning gold, not some cheap electroplated knockoff topped with a goofy combover. The challenges we’re facing are too serious to take a bad joke seriously.