"None of us is home ..."

"None of us is home until all of us are home."

-- Sister Mary Scullion of Project HOME in Philadelphia, quoted in Parade

A flood myth?

Cumberland Times-News columnist Maude McDaniel recently passed along an anecdote that she acknowledges sounds a lot like an urban legend:

My all-time favorite flood story, which is said to have actually happened although it sounds too good to be true, is about the man who had an old piano he had been trying to get rid of for months. No one wanted it -- it was just a piece of junk -- and when the Flood came along, he saw it as a wonderful opportunity for free trash removal. So he hauled it out onto the front porch and congratulated himself on his cleverness. After the water went down, he went back home, and, lo and behold, there was the piano, still on the front porch. And out on the back porch -- was another piano!

Has anyone heard variations of this, or tracked down an actual documented account of such a thing?

A Cheat Lake mystery

Maryland novelist Gary Clites, a West Virginia University alumnus, tells an interesting story about the inspiration for his new thriller Seneca Wood:

When I was in college, my friends and I spent a lot of time at Cheat Lake, just a few miles outside of town. There was an old disused road there that ran to an old abandoned bridge to an island where a bunch of bikers used to party. One day, the school scuba team went diving in the area and found a dead body. I don't remember what the situation was, whether it was a suicide, an accident, or what, but while the police were investigating, they found a stolen car in the water near the bridge -- then another car. Then they found a bunch of illegal slot machines and other things.

Judging from the rest of the press release, Clites must have been a student in Morgantown, W.Va., circa 1978-82. Anyone else recall the WVU scuba team finding a body in Cheat Lake during that time? I'd be keen to know more about it, if so.

So that's what June was

Did you know that President Obama commemorated the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots by declaring June 2009 Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month? That didn't make the news, here in GOP Maryland.

Added later: Meanwhile, Manifested Glory Ministries in Bridgeport, Conn., celebrated Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month by posting to YouTube a video of church members attempting to exorcise a 16-year-old boy's "homosexual demon."

"To Lift a Nation" -- and the bottom line

"To Lift a Nation," the Sept. 11 monument at the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation in Emmittsburg, Md., was financed by an illegal Ponzi scheme, says the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Now it's for sale. The asking price of $425,000 will go to creditors of the failed Coadum Advisors Inc., which allegedly commissioned the monument in hopes of a big tax writeoff, The Associated Press reports.

I wonder how many monuments and other landmarks that we take at face value today were commissioned for less than honorable reasons or beneath a cloud of financial wrongdoing. If you can think of examples, please let me know.

Sculptor Stanley J. Watts -- who himself had nothing to do with Coadum's finagling -- has an interesting page about "To Lift a Nation," with photos that show just how big it is.

The 40-foot bronze figures are based on George Johnson, Dan McWilliams and Billy Eisengrein, the three flag-raising firefighters in the famous photo by Thomas E. Franklin of The Record in Hackensack, N.J., snapped amid the ruins of the World Trade Center in the late afternoon of Sept. 11, 2001. (Since that day, incidentally, the famous flag has gone missing.) The photo has been reproduced ad infinitum, even on a U.S. postage stamp. Web pages devoted to the photo and its story include this one, at Victoria Mielke's interesting 9/11: Pop Culture & Remembrance site; the Wikipedia entry; and this one, where The Record will sell you a reproduction of the photo for $23.80, not to mention embroidered shirts, leather jackets, laser-engraved ceramic tiles, etc. (Proceeds go to charity.)

Ricky Flores of The Journal News in Westchester, N.Y., took his own photo of the flag-raising, from a different angle. Though equally excellent, Flores' photo is much less well known, partially because it emphasizes neither the men nor the flag but the surreal, spooky landscape of devastation all around.

My people, my people

Here are two June 24 news stories from our corner of Appalachia. In Westernport, several of the passengers in the pickup when its brakes failed "were seated in the bed of the truck in lawn chairs." Meanwhile, the assault weapon in Frostburg, police say, was "a sock that contained rocks."

Savage Mountain 2009

This past week I had the honor of working with young fiction writers at the Savage Mountain Creative Writing Workshop, held each summer at Frostburg State University under the direction of my colleague Gerry LaFemina. The week culminated in a group reading this morning at Main Street Books downtown, where I made all the students hold still long enough for this photo.Left to right: Patrick Camloh, Renee Phillips, Mike Smith, Neil Ralph, Katrina Bost, Katy Dale, Ruth LaCourse and A.J. Carney.

A three-dimensional Marge Simpson

A costumed Betty Love, postmaster of Springfield, W.Va., is the subject of this strangely disturbing photo from today's Cumberland Times-News.

Nebula Awards Showcase 2009

Saturday at Barnes & Noble in Roanoke, Va., I saw my first copies of Nebula Awards Showcase 2009, a Roc paperback edited by Ellen Datlow, which includes my Nebula-nominated Eclipse One story "Unique Chicken Goes in Reverse."

Ed Rollins on his irrelevant party

From this recent CNN.com commentary by Republican strategist Ed Rollins, who was President Reagan's political director:

The battle to be the "de facto leader" of this party is akin to the question of who wants to steer the Titanic after it hit the iceberg. Who represents the party or its values is not relevant when only 26 percent of voters have a positive impression of the party ...

Republicans are not relevant. We just lost two back-to-back elections (2006 and 2008), and obviously, what we are selling, the voters aren't buying. In the midst of the most severe economic crisis in my lifetime, we have a president who is taking the country on a dramatic sea change. This is what he said he would do and he is doing it. And where are Republicans? ...

For the foreseeable future, the Republican Party is in the position of being the minority party. Until it nominates a candidate who can attract new voters and expand the base vote of the party, it will stay there.

The Lovecraftian school-board member of Arkham, Mass.

For those who haven't seen it yet, here's the best Onion article in some time. Among my favorite passages:

"Fools!" said West, his clenched fist striking the lectern before him. "We must prepare today's youth for a world whose terrors are etched upon ancient clay tablets recounting the fever-dreams of the other gods -- not fill their heads with such trivia as math and English. ...

West has served on the school board since 1997, when he defeated 89-year-old incumbent Doris Pesce by promising to enforce dress codes and refer repeat disciplinary cases to the three-lobed burning eye. ...

"Charles sure likes to bang on that madness drum," fellow school board member Danielle Kolker said. "I'm not totally sold on his plan to let gibbering, half-formed creatures dripping with ichor feed off the flesh and fear of our students. But he is always on time to help set up for our spaghetti suppers, and his bake sale goods are among the most popular." ...

West's previous failed proposals include requiring the high school band to perform the tuneless flute songs of the blind idiot god Azathoth and offering art students instruction in the carving of morbid and obscene fetishes from otherworldly media.

The Periodic Table of Typefaces

I admire this without reservation.

Sumer is icumen in

She's not in one of my classes, but I had to brag: Frostburg State University track star Sumer Rohrs just won her third consecutive national championship in the 55-meter high hurdles, setting a national record in the process: 7.97 seconds. Here's the story, with a photo of the champ.

Creating Indiana Jones: the paper trail

At his blog, anonymous Script Magazine contributor Mystery Man on Film has posted a link to a long-buried treasure for Indiana Jones fans: "the 125-page transcript (in the form of a .pdf document) of the original 1978 story conference between [director] Steven Spielberg, [producer] George Lucas, and [writer] Lawrence Kasdan for a little film called Raiders of the Lost Ark."

Anomalies in the news

What caused the two separate booms that rattled Californians in early March? Not weather, an earthquake, a meteor or an aircraft, apparently. Dittto the two booms heard in New York state.

Meanwhile, astrophysicists at Columbia and Brown are photographing the moon every 10 seconds, hoping to solve the 400-year-old mystery of those occasional bright spots on the lunar surface that are not meteor impacts. "About 1,500 of these have been reported," Arlin Crotts tells National Geographic. His theory: pockets of gas exploding, which would mean some vestiges of geologic activity.

Also meanwhile, police say that falling metal object that punched through a Dallas roof was ... a drill bit from a nearby wood chipper (huh?) ... but that's all they're willing to say publicly, other than "case closed."

If Watchmen were a Saturday morning cartoon

Barry Johnson passes along this truly sick and twisted creation, which nevertheless is utterly Safe For Work.

What's not in Columbia anymore

Buddy Moore alerted me to Columbia Closings, one depressing if addictive blog for us natives of the South Carolina Midlands.

I married a senator

Announced today: Sydney is one of 14 faculty members just elected to the Faculty Senate at Frostburg State University. Her term's up in 2011.

She's the only newly elected senator from the English department. Of the others, two are from history, two are from visual arts, and one each is from accounting, biology, economics, educational professions, foreign languages and literature, mass communication, political science, sociology and the library.

A quick quiz

Judging from the faculty-search pages alone, which university would you guess has a College of Engineering?

Frostburg State University, or

North Carolina State University?

"The New Mother" by Lucy Clifford

In this interview with The Toronto Star, Neil Gaiman says Coraline was partially inspired by "The New Mother" by Lucy Clifford (1882), which he calls "haunting like a nightmare is haunting." Indeed it is. Here's the text.