Road Trip Report, Part 1

This voter, politically,
has been all over the map

First day on the road and it didn’t take long to find an oddity – a guy named Steve whose claim to Real Muck fame is having voted for both Barack Obama and John McCain.

By way of introduction, we met Steve at our first overnight stop – Bonnie didn’t want to plan ahead, but to head off in the way we used to, without any idea where we’d land.

So we were off on a sunny afternoon drive west to Antietam National Battlefield (where just as we arrived, clouds moved in and blocked most of the rays, so only a few photos were taken), then along the old Harpers Ferry Road.

We found lodging in a hostel on the Maryland side of the Potomac – first hostel we’d stayed in since a drive through Holland nearly two decades ago – and met Steve, whose resume likely will list his job here as “plant manager.” He was very happy with the job he’d just finished fixing up the compost pile out back.

Steve’s an independent, and a traveler. He noted having voted for McCain eight years ago in the North Carolina presidential primary (mostly out of principle against George W. Bush), and to put Obama in the U.S. Senate four years ago in Illinois, where he went back home to help care for his folks.

Now he’s registered to vote in West Virginia, and Obama’s getting his nod this year. Steve allowed as how he wouldn’t vote again for Ralph Nader for president (yup, he even voted once for Nader!), and wonders what would happen if “none of the above” appeared on the ballots across the nation – and won.

Conservative byways

Most of the political signs along our drive were McCain/Palin, which was not surprising given the conservative bent of this stretch of the Sixth congressional district. I kind of love the Sixth, if only for its bizarre political history.

You can be a Democrat here and win a seat in Congress – but don’t be too liberal. Goodloe Byron (whose parents both had also represented the district) was seeking his fifth term in the 1978 elections, a Western Maryland hometown favorite who wasn't too liberal and seemed so unbeatable that no Republican even bothered to seek the nomination.

None, that is, save a semi-homeless, mentally unstable but very opportunistic Baltimore bum named Melvin Clifton Perkins. He didn’t even live in the district, not that anyone would know where (or if) he hung his hat most nights. Perkins ended up unopposed in the Republican congressional primary, and thus was on the general election ballot running against Goodloe Byron.

Imagine the shock when, less than a month before the election, Byron dropped dead of heart attack – if I recall, it came while he was jogging along the C&O Canal trail. Ten days before the election, the party named his widow, Beverly, to replace him on the ballot.

We used to have a traditional election night “ghoul pool” in the Baltimore Sun newsroom, and I was its keeper and creator. That November, the tie-breaker question was the number of votes that homeless bum Melvin Perkins would garner in the Sixth District contest.

For the record, it was close to 14,000 people who didn’t care whom they voted for – as long as it was a Republican. Perkins then claimed that Bev had been illegally put on the ballot, and filed a protest – and even took a seat on the floor of the House of Representatives until the matter was settled in Byron’s favor. Finally Melvin was given what he deserved: the bum’s rush by the Sergeant-at-Arms.

The district these days is securely in the hands of a conservative Republican named Roscoe Bartlett – and he’s probably the only Roscoe on Capitol Hill. Bartlett, who is in his eighth term, lists on his congressional Web site this resume: professor, research scientist and inventor, small business owner, and farmer.

He’s also 82 years old, and there’s no indication that his hobbies include jogging.

Mail Call!

Letters? I don’t get
no stinking letters!

Actually, I’ve been getting emails – from folks I know who are reading this blog but apparently had difficulty posting comments. So they emailed them, and I figured they deserve some attention here.

We’ll start with my former very good neighbor Ed, who is still very good – but has moved to a condo and sold his house to a Republican.

(The new guy, whose name is Dave, put up a McCain/Palin sign on his lawn last week, leaving me no alternative but to beg the Obama campaign’s Baltimore office for help. Now I’ve got two Obama/Biden signs on my lawn, and a political arms race is likely to ensue.)

Anyway, Ed disagrees strongly with my views on Obama, and my journalistic instinct toward fairness requires that his views be heard:

I read “Dreams from my Father” by Obama from cover to cover and found it to be a very revealing look into his psyche, I suggest that everyone should read it. I started reading “The Audacity of Hope,” but in the introduction when he said that perhaps he had been too honest in his first book I figured now that he's become a politician and perfected his lying techniques I would be wasting my time. It's so good of you to invite us independents to participate in your blog. I'm thinking we're all feeling impaled, but not by Sarah, but by the far left supporters of the Carter administration that lobbied for the CRA, the Clinton administration and the community organizers with the backing of the government that coerced the lending institutions into making loans to people that they knew would default. Throw in ACORN, Barney Frank, Chris Dodd and Chris Cox and the other dingbats we pay to govern our country to top it off. So now we should elect the fox to guard the hen house.

And from longtime friend Steve comes this response to a movie review here:

I hope to see "Religulous" either in the theater or on DVD one of these days.

For one thing, hard as it may be to believe, I've never seen Bill Mahler, having successfully weaned myself off most tv (except for the escapist junk, of course...)

For another thing, I think the experience of viewing it will be a form of psychological revenge for me: My own religious convictions run to non-literal and liberal, but, from what I can see in the world today, it seems that it's the right wing fundamentalists who are the tail that wags the dogs of their religions and governments. And they haven't been making the world a better place...

In our own country I've had a lifetime of seeing the religious right have their Neanderthal way (Whoop! Maybe wrong metaphor!) with concepts and ideals I hold dear. In Israel small Orthodox parties have a stranglehold on that largely secular country, again insuring that right wing policies will prevail.

And as for Islam, I'm currently reading my third biography of Muhammad -- as with the previous two, my hair stands on end.

So it will be a catharsis of sorts to see these schmucks get a pie in the face for a change....


Worries, we got worries...

OK, so the stock market has plunged and plopped like a bad toilet, and I’m scared to death to so much as peek at my 401K account. My bank is getting swallowed up by another bank. The bathtub tiles are coming loose. Some of the wood below the back porch is rotting. The birds ate all my strawberries. Something is making ring grooves around the tops of the tomatoes that the deer didn’t eat.

So what to do?

I’ll take inspiration from this bit of dialog featured in the movie ‘Animal House’ and lifted from WikiQuote:

Boon: Jesus. What's going on?
Hoover: They confiscated everything, even the stuff we didn't steal.
Bluto: They took the bar! The whole fucking bar!
[Otter grabs a bottle of whiskey and throws it to Bluto, who chugs it all]
Bluto: Thanks. I needed that.
Hoover: Christ. This is ridiculous. What are we going to do?
Otter & Boon: Road trip.

Road trip!

So look for occasional blog entries as we drive toward the southwest in search of autumn scenery, wacky politics, and tales of the unexpected. Replies to emails (if you didn't know it: david.ettlin@comcast.net) will be a little less prompt, but sometimes ya just gotta get outta here.

By the time we get home, the Dow will be back around 12,300, Obama will have a 12-point lead in the polls, and gasoline – as I always suspected would happen as Election Day nears – will have dropped below $3 a gallon. (This gasoline drop was a Republican conspiracy, of course, but one that didn’t count on everything else in America getting so screwed up that even it wouldn't save the Grand Old Party.

See, there it is – the middle name of the Republican Party: Old.

I’m out the door!

Catch This Play

All blog and no play?
Well, that’s easy to remedy

It was, in the words of Voltaire, “the best of all possible worlds.”

My wife Bonnie wanted a visit to the theater – which was embarrassingly lacking in our entertainment of late – and I needed a little catharsis, having not yet come to grips with the sad ending of the local baseball season.

I took her request to “take me out” to a play... any play... as literally as possible. Bought the tickets, but didn’t tell her what play we were seeing until we got to Baltimore’s Fells Point Corner Theatre Friday night.

The title: “Take Me Out.”

The subject: Baseball, sort of and sort of not.

When she saw the title and the historic baseball photos decorating the small lobby of the theater’s converted firehouse, Bonnie was prepared for the worst – but instead got what she really wanted in seeing a fine play, terrific acting performances, and... male nudity.

The setting of Richard Greenberg’s play is the locker room of a fictional Major League team, the Empires, whose $100 million star centerfielder Darren Lemming has made a startling revelation: He’s gay.

How his teammates and best friend react is the plot in a three-act tale that mixes drama and comedy, and illustrates the depth of baseball as life metaphor and sexual double-entendre.

It’s not all about strikes and balls, although the latter – well, they hung out quite noticeably. I asked Bonnie when she had seen so many penises all at once, and she noted that there were no more than three visible at any one time on stage. So what can I say? She knew the count.

See, it’s those baseball double-entendres again, rearing their ugly heads.

Well, maybe not ugly. That’s just a little high and inside hyperbole on my part.

In fact, nudity is integral to the story, given the way of the locker room and a gradual stripping away of the layers of protection behind which people hide their true feelings about life and each other.

The local production directed by Terry J. Long stars Maboud Ebrahimzadeh (http://maboudebrahimzadeh.com/) as a remarkably believable Lemming, heading up an effective nine-man stage lineup that also features Tony Viglione as his well-meaning teammate and wannabe friend Kippy Sunderstrom, and Sean Mullin as late season call-up pitching closer and homophobic, ignorant racist wacko Shane Mungitt. (For baseball fans, magnify John Rocker twentyfold or better.)

For a guy who later acknowledged not knowing any Japanese, Gary Deleon adds a colorful supporting performance as star pitcher Takeshi Kawabatta, who supposedly knows no English, and Edward Zarkowski positively and comically flames as gay accountant Mason Marzac, who is assigned the financial adviser job to post-closet Lemming.

Most of the audience was male, gay, and enthusiastic, and that really added to the ambiance of the evening.

It also provided a novelty for Bonnie: It was the women’s room that had no line at intermission.

If you’re anywhere near Baltimore, “Take Me Out” runs only through Oct. 19 at the theater at 251 South Ann St., three days before the real-life World Series is scheduled to begin at Boston or Tampa Bay. Play tickets and information: http://www.fpct.org/.

R.I.P. ‘Uncle’ Albert

I was reading the death notices in Saturday's paper and found a beloved newspaper colleague listed among the departed, Albert Sehlstedt Jr.

I affectionately called him “Uncle Albert.” He was long an inspiration and friend during my career at The Baltimore Sun, where he had been over the course of nearly 40 years the newspaper’s congressional reporter and carved out a beat in aviation and aerospace.

Though a lay person himself, Al explained difficult science in a way that most readers could understand. I asked him once how he managed to do that, and Al modestly credited the scientists who gave their time to patiently answer his many questions.

He covered the American space program from its inception, through the moon landings and Challenger disaster. Not about to overwrite his prose, Al crafted this lede to his Houston-datelined story on the event of July 20, 1969, that electrified and for a shining moment united this planet:

Men from earth stepped onto the surface of the moon tonight.

Two American astronauts realized a dream of centuries by treading on the powdery lunar surface nearly seven hours after making a “very smooth” landing in the moon’s Sea of Tranquility.

Neil A. Armstrong, 38, of Wapakonela. Ohio, made the first historic step at 10:56 P.M., descending a ladder of nine rungs on one of four legs of the lunar landing craft. He was followed by Col. Edwin E. Aldrin, Jr., 39, USAF, of Montclair, N.J., at 11:14 P.M. As Mr. Armstrong put his first foot on the surface, he said: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Al was, inevitably, among the huge media throng when the shuttle Challenger exploded in the beautiful January sky off Cape Canaveral, Fla., in 1986. His terse lede:

The space shuttle Challenger exploded 74 seconds after liftoff yesterday, killing all seven astronauts, including New Hampshire high school teacher Christa McAuliffe.

Two orange balls of fire shot from either side of the shuttle’s normal white trail of engine smoke before the entire craft disappeared into an enormous fireball eight miles east of the launching site as Challenger climbed toward orbit in an often delayed 25th shuttle mission.

At the funeral home Saturday, Al's press badges from the historic Apollo 11 lunar mission and Challenger's ill-fated "Shuttle 51L" mission were pinned in the center of a poster-board display of family photos, along with a full-size souvenir sticker depicting the shuttle mission patch with pictures of the doomed astronauts.

In a commemorative Sun "front page" created by colleagues for his retirement two decades ago and also on display, Al's personal recollections of some events were included – and considering how much for granted we take space flight these days, this seems particularly poignant. He was telling about the launching of the first American into space, Alan Shepard, on May 5, 1961:

In those last 30 seconds of the countdown, all the details, all the briefings and all the other preparations were out of my mind. I must have stood like a statue looking at the Redstone, perhaps two miles away from the press site where the reporters had assembled to watch the lift-off.

There was a lump in my throat the size of an orange and I remember saying to myself, 'There's a man in that rocket.'... I was transfixed.

I also remember that launch. I was in 10th-grade music class at Baltimore City College, and listened to the live radio broadcast over the high school's PA system. For all the hullabaloo, Shepard's suborbital flight lasted just 15 minutes.

After his retirement, Al was contracted by The Sun to craft advance obituaries on notable Marylanders, arranging confidential interviews with most of his subjects just for that purpose.

In a compilation of selected and historic front pages titled “A Century in The Sun,” from which the Apollo 11 and Challenger accounts were obtained, the byline of Albert Sehlstedt Jr. is among the most represented – the last in the edition of Jan. 25, 1993, on the death of Justice Thurgood Marshall.

I’m not sure when Albert’s final byline appeared in the newspaper, but possibly it was in September 2005 on the obituary of Baltimore investment banker and TV-radio broadcast presence Julius Westheimer. I was the night metro editor that evening and, on very short notice, extensively updated and added material to the long-before-written obit. I had the honor of my byline appearing atop the story, next to Uncle Albert’s.

By then, Al was three years into his own decline from Alzheimer's disease, and he died Oct. 9 at the age of 86.

I’ll always treasure him.

History Lesson

Old Republican playbooks
haunt American politics

Question: What do William R. Horton and Spiro T. Agnew have in common?

Answer: Their political ghosts are riding high in the 2008 presidential election campaign.

Horton was serving life without parole in Massachusetts for the 1974 robbery-murder of a 17-year-old gas station attendant when he was given a weekend furlough, and didn’t bother to return. Ten months later, in 1987, he was arrested after the rape of a Maryland woman and attack on her fiancé that got Horton a double-life term. (He’s still behind bars in Maryland, as far as I know.)

Horton’s prison release was possible because of an inmate furlough program being extended to killers by a court decision. The Massachusetts legislature then passed a bill to prohibit furloughs for killers, only to see it vetoed by Gov. Michael Dukakis.

Yup, that guy – Dukakis, who beat Al Gore and Jessie Jackson, among others, to win the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination. (Gary Hart was in that battle, too, until he was caught up in a sex scandal – belatedly prompting a Muckie nod of recognition at the 2008 mess of John Edwards.)

The Republicans and their 1988 nominee, George H.W. Bush, seized on the case, and the specter of “Willie” Horton dominated the campaign. And it didn’t help Dukakis’ chances when he offered a wimpy answer to the famous presidential debate question posed by moderator Bernard Shaw – that if wife Kitty “were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?”

These days, it’s easier to remember Willie Horton than the name of loser Michael Dukakis. Such is the power of a pounding negative campaign theme.

Agnew was the first-term Republican governor of Maryland whose criticism of black leaders during the 1968 King assassination rioting led to his unlikely selection as running mate in the successful presidential campaign of Richard M. Nixon.

As vice president, Agnew became Nixon’s attack dog, a specialist in delivering scripted negative rhetoric that included the famous description of the press as “nattering nabobs of negativism.” (He was also a crook – and avoided prison in 1973 by resigning the vice presidency and pleading no contest to evading income taxes on the bribes he got as governor. Agnew died in 1996.)

All this history brings us to 2008, and a first-term (Alaska) Republican governor and “hockey mom” unexpectedly named as the running mate of John McCain.

Attack dog? As she so famously (and unoriginally) put it, the difference between a hockey mom and a pitbull is lipstick.

So no surprise, it’s Gov. Sarah Palin hammering in speech after speech about the Willie Horton of 2008 – Barack Obama’s supposed “terrorist pal” William Ayers.

So far, she hasn’t renamed him Willie.

What does this teach us? The Republicans are digging deep into old playbooks, looking for tactics to distract voters from the very real and frightening issues of the day – including a divisive war and a collapsing economy.

No matter that William Ayers’ transgressions played out four decades ago, as a founder of the violent Weather Underground – likely the most dangerous of the many protest groups formed to oppose the Vietnam War – or that his relationship with Obama is relatively minimal. It includes their simultaneous service on the board of an anti-poverty organization in Chicago, where Ayers became a college professor and respected member of the community.

McCain, as noted in an earlier Real Muck blog posting, is still hung up about Vietnam and victory as America seems snared in another winless war.

Bill Ayers? He’s the fall guy.

Some will say that Ayers deserves it.

But Obama doesn’t.

Neither does America.

Shopping Spree

Discount sales abound
as stores go belly-up

I went shopping this week, feeding at the trough of a dying economy. As I write, it’s T-minus-3-days for the Boscov’s at Marley Station Mall, about seven miles from home. I felt a bit like a vulture, hunkered over the remaining flesh of a department store I had much preferred to the ubiquitous Macy’s.

Boscov’s, a regional chain, expanded into the Baltimore area after the Hecht Co. chain was absorbed by Blob-like Macy’s but ran into trouble as the economy soured and is playing the bankruptcy gambit. It turned over the contents of its three newest stores – those in the Baltimore area – to a liquidator, and I’d been watching the gradual price reductions waiting to feast.

Liquidation prices, I found, are not always bargains. For starters, tags with former sale prices vanished, so the initial discounts of 10 to 20 percent on “original” prices actually increased prices for much of the store inventory.

I’d bought my younger daughter a $100 set of Wearever cookware at a half-price sale a week before the liquidator took over, and never saw it get so cheap again as I contemplated a set for myself. I have my pride, after all: Why pay more than $50? Well, lots of folks drawn in by the big signs about ever-larger discounts had snapped up those pots and pans before they even got down to $60.

OK, I’m cheap. I have friends who laugh about the fact that I clip coupons.

Anyway, as the stock dwindled to the point it took up only part of the first of Boscov’s three floors, I bought a sport jacket Monday for $50 (original price, a fictional $239), only to see sport jacket prices slightly lower the next day as the discounts reached 80 percent. But I picked up some bargain walking shoes and cold-weather boots for a total of $30, while Bonnie was rooting out what little good clothing remained in her sizes.

Then we bought a service-for-12 set of white china for $35. Real china, too, especially if we’re talking about where it was made. Not that our current dishes are so bad, but that the white ones are not scratched (yet) and their color will lend itself better to Bonnie’s stock photography food pictures. So probably, she’ll make far more from the pictures than the dishes cost. (Anyone have a recipe for tax deduction?)

Then I splurged. Went nuts. Out of control. Cuisinart “Chef’s Classic Stainless Cookware”– a big sautee pan, casserole pan, and multipurpose pot, all with lids, and suitable for stovetop and oven.

Shelled out a hundred bucks for the three pots (total list, nearly $400).

After we unloaded the station wagon, I got around to opening the morning paper and found a front-page story on the demise of yet another area business – discounter C-Mart, age 33. Known for selling furniture and designer goods at rock-bottom prices, C-Mart had new owners and planned to expand – only to run up against a harsh economic reality.

“Unless you’re selling things that people have to have, bread and butter and things like that, it’s hard out there right now,” the Baltimore Sun quoted C-Mart CEO Daniel Shuman as saying.

Driving down the main road of Pasadena Wednesday afternoon, I saw another economic casualty: A little Philippine market, going under a little less than two years after its opening. I’d occasionally bought fresh produce there, and it carried raw peanuts that my backyard squirrels enjoyed. But there wasn’t enough business, even with its sideline of renting Philippine movies, to keep the place profitable – particularly after a huge international supermarket opened recently a half-mile away.

Empty department stores, vacant storefronts – they’re growing in number, and will be the bones of an economy going very, very south.

What happened? I met a guy at Boscov’s who noted one telltale cause: America doesn’t make stuff anymore. “Not even ball bearings,” he said.

The guy, a semi-retired college professor, gave his name as D. Michael (his parents named him Darling, he said, but he just uses the D), and he works for Cohen Brothers, the liquidation company. From Maine to Florida, D. Michael said, he helps get rid of the inventory of dying businesses.

Then he rang up my last purchase – a handful of tastefully designed blank greeting cards, just perfect for writing a personalized get-well message or sympathy for a death.

They were discounted at 80 percent.

Maybe I should send one to Boscov’s.

McCain-Obama II

John McCain: You need a friend,
but please stop calling on me

Let’s get this out of the way: John McCain is not my friend. I’ve never met the man, and he certainly does not know me.

Neither is Barack Obama my friend. He doesn’t know me, either – but at least does not pretend to be my friend.

I don’t trust people who use the word “friend” over and over again, and sound like a used car dealer trying to unload a clunker on a naive shopper. An old used car dealer, whose slick is wearing thin.

If I had to choose, I’d want Obama as a friend. But I’ll settle for giving him my vote – as the winner of Tuesday night’s debate and for president.

Obama could have done better. There were responses I wanted him to give to some of the questions, and mistakes that made me wince – especially pulling Delaware banking laws out of the political closet as an unfortunate metaphor in addressing a lack of requirements for health insurers in some states.

It might be true, but hey – the Republicans lately had not been going back to allegations of Joe Biden being cozy with Delaware-based bank/credit card companies. That’ll change as Election Day nears.

I enjoyed the spectacle of McCain dropping a line that many in the audience had probably used eBay – this from a candidate who has never even learned to email. So the work of his writers was transparent – it was just a line fed to McCain to make him sound current.

He’s not current. He’s the past. It was apparent from McCain’s repetitive answers that he’s still fighting the Vietnam war. He still thinks the only way out is victory, when there may be no such thing in Iraq any more than there was in Vietnam. Not for America, and not for Iraq after we went in and busted up the place so badly for the sake of regime change.

George W. Bush talked a few months ago about establishing a “time horizon” for getting out. One thing about the horizon – you never get there. And McCain doesn’t even have the horizon in sight.

The Real Weathermen

Stormy politics expected,
but a good chance for Obama

I asked the weathermen for their take on the presidential election – not the “domestic terrorists” that Cari-boo Barbie is trying to link to Barack Obama, but the guys who used to predict the weather at Baltimore-Washington International Airport.

The occasion Monday was the monthly breakfast gathering of a select group of federal retirees – the local National Weather Service forecast team and FAA air-traffic controllers.

They meet up the first Monday at the Glen Burnie IHOP, most ordering off the seniors menu, and discuss important issues of the day – as long as they pertain to sports. Politics and religion are usually not on the agenda.

Enter the invited guest – me. I don’t know the air-traffic guys beyond our meeting over pancakes, but I’d been talking to the weather guys for decades during my former life as a reporter at The Baltimore Sun assigned all too often to blather in print about heat, wind, rain and snow, not necessarily all at the same time.

So I’ll introduce them to you: Ken Shaver, a western Pennsylvania transplant whose perfectly modulated voice delivered weather radio broadcasts on WBAL and WNUV for years; Amet Figueroa, whose New York City accent might not fly for that kind of role here but was always loquacious and unintentionally funny when questioned about the steamy “good old Bermuda high;” and Fred Davis, a native Massachutan and level-headed meteorologist who was their boss as chief of the BWI forecast office.

These days, the weather forecasts come out of a centralized district office at Sterling, Va., and the trio’s been retired since the BWI operation was closed. Ken lives in Southern Maryland, Amet in Columbia and Fred in Pasadena, where he docks a boat named Bonnie Weather that honors both his vocation and his true love.

I polled the entire breakfast gang on who they’d likely vote for Nov 4, and the show of hands was about 7-5 in favor of Obama. (Yes, there are Republican sympathizers among the ranks these days, the FAA air-controllers’ 1981 strike and mass firing by Ronald Reagan notwithstanding.)

More importantly, I asked the weathermen their month-ahead predictions on who would win.

“Obama,” said Amet.

“Obama,” said Ken.

“Obama,” said Fred, with a cautionary look at one front that could put a wrinkle in such guesswork: Whether Americans, and clearly we’re talking about white Americans, will, in the privacy of the voting cubicle, accept the wind of change and choose a young African-American as their leader.

I hope so.

Odds and endings

Fred Davis and I have a little acting in common. Both of us appeared in Episode 6 during the final season of the HBO television drama “The Wire.” I have to unwrap my DVD boxed set and play it back, now that I know to look for Fred pouring tea for needy folks in a scene at the Baltimore soup kitchen Viva House where in real life he volunteers once a week. (In case you missed it, I was playing myself in the newsroom. And I don’t visit the newsroom nearly that often, since Sun retirees are made to feel less welcome than homeless men at a shelter these days.)

Spotted a lovely set of bumper stickers across the back of a Subaru Sunday, most of them with an anti-war sentiment. My favorite read: “What would Jesus bomb?” It was directly under a sticker calling for an end to bear hunting in Maryland. The peace sentiments went hand-in-hand with a ribbon-style sticker to “Support our Troops.” (Getting them out of Iraq would be a good start.)

Baseball news

It’s just as well the Chicago Cubs got swept out of the playoffs, since the team is owned by my former employer Tribune Co. and Sam Zell, whose ordered changes to The Baltimore Sun and other print properties are a journalistic nightmare. I would have loathed to see Zell holding the World Series trophy.

Speaking of baseball, I’ve never met Zell. But at a party honoring the huge Buyout Class of 2008 that shrunk the newsroom staff by about 20 percent, I whacked the celebratory Sam Zell Pinata with a baseball bat. A former colleague’s whack beheaded him like a bad scene at an Iraqi hanging. (Zell was full of it – molten chocolate coins and play money.)

About this blog

If you’re new to my blog, and that’s everyone since it’s just a week old, I’d like to introduce myself – David Ettlin, sunk to this opinion game after 40 objective years as a reporter and editor at The Sun. Since retiring in the Buyout Class of 2007, I’ve written half a dozen pre-season baseball stories for the competing Baltimore Examiner, filled in as an editor at the Baltimore Business Journal and Maryland Daily Record, written the cover story for the inaugural edition of the latter’s free monthly publication Exhibit A, and contemplated getting off my duff and writing a novel.

You can turn me up through a Google search doing a YouTube video about the first real tragedy I covered as a young reporter; telling tales at Stoop Storytelling (in June 2007 as Audience Storyteller No. 2, and as a featured speaker in that December’s annual “Holidays from Hell” spectacular); as a byline on a bunch but nowhere near all of the news stories I’ve written; and in tales of past lives by people who knew me back when.

I’m aiming to produce original material here, rather than (allowing for occasional exceptions) link after link to what others are writing on the Web. I’m hoping to post new material at least three days a week, after my daily-posting pace wears thin. And I hope, if you enjoy it, you message this link to your Internet pals: http://ettlin.blogspot.com/.

Special thanks to folks at sites including http://sideshow.me.uk/ and http://mybaltimore.ws/ who have pointed out the Cyberspace path to some of to my initial postings here.

And thanks for visiting!