Eight Feet Deep

I found out an answer to questions I had the other day concerning my area’s air quality. I mentioned how it was curious that Beaumont, Texas, seemed to have a bit better air quality than the national average, according to Money magazine’s calculations. And I also said how the air did seem to be much better now than when I first moved here more than 25 years ago.

It turns out the air quality has improved here. I e-mailed my question to Neil Carman, a former Texas air quality inspector who now heads the air program for the state’s Sierra Club chapter based in Austin. I’ve talked with Neil a number of times for stories that I wrote and found he really knows his air.

“Yes, overall there has been lots of improvement in the (Beaumont-Port Arthur) region’s air quality from the 80s to 90s to 2005,” said Neil “But there are still local hotspots around certain plants in Port Arthur, Port Neches, Beaumont, etc., where problems have continued, although it’s probably nothing like it used to be in the 70s-80s and early 90s.”

He said the improvements show that state and federal air pollution regulations do work over time. That is even though some deadlines have been blown on reducing pollutants in the area.

“No, it’s not the weather. Cleaner air is for real!” Neil said.

I do remember when the air was quite stinky in the area and that has surely improved. Now if only something could be done that would keep at bay the occasional stink from the paper mill about 20 miles northeast of here we’d be in bidness.

Lest the petrochemical industry, the government and ourselves all slap each other on the butts and give each other high fives for the improvement we all can do much better.

It has been somewhat alarming in recent years to hear calls for scrapping a lot of environmental protections because of what is perceived as “junk science.” Some of these same people questioning the science also do not believe global warming is taking place. President Bush does believe global warming is happening although he doesn’t seem too concerned about it. But whether you believe in global warming or you do not, you don’t want crappy air. Unless you are some kind of nut job you wouldn’t want to live in a house that is full of a thick, toxic, stinking cloud. So why would you settle for that outdoors?

We each have a hand in the destiny of our environment as well. I know it’s hard to remember some of the things you can do. But if you just do something to help reduce the Earth’s pollution that’s better than nothing. Okay, I’m boring my soapbox to splinters and the neighborhood woodpecker has fallen asleep, so I will just leave it at that. Well, no I won’t. Okay. Now I will.

Barney Bush won’t talk about Karl Rove either

Scott McClellan has not had a very good time of it the last couple of days. Besieged with questions from the White House press corps over revelations that Karl Rove outed a CIA agent, McClellan has had to reach deep into his soul to find different ways not to say anything of substance. For instance today:

Q Scott, you know what, to make a general observation here, in a previous administration, if a press secretary had given the sort of answers you’ve just given in referring to the fact that everybody who works here enjoys the confidence of the President, Republicans would have hammered them as having a kind of legalistic and sleazy defense. I mean, the reality is that you’re parsing words, and you’ve been doing it for a few days now. So does the President think Karl Rove did something wrong, or doesn’t he?

MR. McCLELLAN: No, David, I’m not at all. I told you and the President told you earlier today that we don’t want to prejudge the outcome of an ongoing investigation. And I think we’ve been round and round on this for two days now.

Q Even if it wasn’t a crime? You know, there are those who believe that even if Karl Rove was trying to debunk bogus information, as (Republican National Committee chairman)Ken Mehlman suggested yesterday — perhaps speaking on behalf of the White House — that when you’re dealing with a covert operative, that a senior official of the government should be darn well sure that that person is not undercover, is not covert, before speaking about them in any way, shape, or form. Does the President agree with that or not?

MR. McCLELLAN: Again, we’ve been round and round on this for a couple of days now. I don’t have anything to add to what I’ve said the previous two days.

Q That’s a different question, and it’s not round and round —

MR. McCLELLAN: You heard from the President earlier.

That’s the way it went for poor Scotty today and the last couple of days. Sometimes it doesn’t pay to get out of bed does it?

Now I am sure all of those whose sympathies lie with President Bush and/or who don’t like the media see all the peppering by the White House press of questions as a disgrace or traitorous or whatever. You might even think of the White House press corps as sharks smelling blood in the water (can sharks smell?). I feel a little differently.

First of all, yes they are smelling blood in the water but it was only after Newsweek published a story that revealed an e-mail Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper sent to his editor saying that Rove had told him that Ambassador Joe Wilson’s wife was a CIA agent. In other words, they only started asking questions after being hit in the head with this information. Where were all the questions from the press corps during the run-up to the war in Iraq, when the president said we were going in because Saddam had weapons of mass destruction?

If the press had done some digging back then we might not be at the point we are today. Joe Wilson might not have wrote his Op-Ed piece in The New York Times criticizing the Bush administration over WMD. Karl Rove wouldn’t have outed Wilson’s wife. Overzealous special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald would still be back in Chicago. Times reporter Judith Miller would not be sitting in federal prison for not naming a source. And just perhaps we would not have 1,750 U.S. men and women dead from the war in Iraq.

But no, I don’t think the White House press corps has been disgracefully picking on poor Scotty, or Turd Blossom, as the president calls Rove. They have just been doing their job. Finally.

You may or may not notice the tiny site counter I have stuck in the right-hand sidebar. It is from StatCounter (click it and it will take you there but wait until you read what I’ve got to say first since I have you here).

If the statistics from StatCounter are to believed it could be a pretty useful three or four minutes of my time that I spent setting it up. If the data is faulty, who cares, right? The numbers listed on the blog are those page impressions made since I first signed up for StatCounter on July 8. The counter folks provide a personal site that goes into detail about visits to my blog. As of 1:40 p.m. CDT, according to StatCounter:

I’ve had 170 page loads since 7/8/05
I’ve had 56 unique visitors
I’ve had 24 first-time visitors
I’ve had 32 returning visitors.

What does this mean? Beats me. I’ve read how counters are notoriously unreliable and it really doesn’t mean a whole lot to me at this stage. After all, I’m just doing this blog to amuse myself, my friends and whomever wants to join in the fun. If I started getting serious numbers of visitors I probably would have to find a way to make money doing this and work is such an unattractive concept, at least while it is still summer. Just kidding. Sort of.

Statistics can be fun as long as they work for you and not against you. Counting how many page impressions I have on my blog is just something to do. Tomorrow the counter might be gone. Or tomorrow I might be in a witness relocation program. You just don’t know everything that might happen. What fun would it be if you did?

Money’s got my goat

Money magazine has published its list of top 100 cities in which to live in the United States. It isn’t surprising that Beaumont, Texas, where I live, is not on that list.

I say that not because Beaumont is a bad place to live. I voluntarily chose to live here — three times now — so obviously it has certain attributes that I find attractive — goats for instance.

Down the well-traveled Phelan Boulevard amid businesses and homes is a rather good-sized piece of shady pasture holding an undetermined (at least by me) number of goats. It seems so out of place and that is why I think it is pretty cool. For one thing, goats aren’t really big in this area. What farming goes on in the surrounding vicinity is largely restricted to cattle and rice. Plus, the area in which the little goat farm is located is a relatively busy area of commerce. So the goats wouldn’t seem like they belong there but they do belong as far as I am concerned.

I just like goats because they look comical. Goats appear most times like they stumbled into the marijuana patch and had to eat their way out.

No Texas cities were in the top 10 on Money’s list and only a few were in the top 100. The criteria for the rankings ranged from median household income (Money average $68,160 — Beaumont average $38,480 — eight feet deep average — a couple of bucks) to the number of restaurants within 15 miles (Money average 3,431, Beaumont average 702). If my math is right, which it certainly might not be, the national average for restaurants would mean a restaurant for a little more than 33 people each in Beaumont. Only a little waiting for a table and probably horrific tips.

One thing I found either encouraging or else the comparisons this list made were just totally out of whack was that Beaumont fared better than average on air pollution by quite a bit. Beaumont and surrounding cities are home to a large collection of petrochemical plants. And the pollution has certainly visibly decreased, at least, quite a lot since the first time I lived here 27 years ago. I also know it is better than when I last lived here seven years ago when the words “Ozone Action Day” were a regular part of the vocabulary. So I don’t know if the state (who regulates air emissions for the U.S. EPA) and the chemical industry have made some headway since this became a pollution non-attainment area or whether the weather has just been such that ozone hasn’t been a factor. I guess that’s something I will look into.

Meanwhile, we got goats.

(Disclosure: The goat photo comes courtesy of the U.S. Agriculture Research Center Image Gallery . The goat in the photo is not part of the herd I write about. I don’t want to have to fire myself for plagiarism.)

An Associated Press story has made the rounds recently about how blogging can have dire consequences on one’s personal and professional life. The article said blogs are resulting in:

” … a growing trend in which frank outpourings online are causing personal and public dramas, often taking on a life they wouldn’t have if the web had not come along and turned individuals into publishers.”

Noted in the story was how prospective employers might type your name into Google and find your deepest, darkest secrets and fantasies or rants or whatever. The article also quoted a study from Pew Research Center saying almost 80 percent of younger people said they need to be more careful in giving out personal information on the Web.

All of which is to say some important points are to be made. First of all, don’t put anything anywhere on the Web that you don’t want someone else to see. This includes mistakes. I remember a stupid mistake I made on a story I wrote a year or so ago. While its correction was in the paper the next day, it is nowhere to be found on the Web, so forever more that error is there for the duration.

And you have to be mindful of consequences that your writing might have on your future. If you are a 20-year-old prelaw student and you write that the First Amendment should be abolished, don’t think you are going to get a very easy time in confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court 30 years later. You also may be writing about your love interest at the time, or allude to certain amorous activity, only to have this cause you a limitless amount of bitching and nagging and whining from future wives or husbands down the road.

With that said I think the article and others like it I have seen strikes a defensive tone with respect to blogs. Blogging is becoming a force in journalism and is getting no small amount of press. For instance the current Texas Monthly features Nathan Nance, with whom I worked at a certain newspaper we won’t name, and whose blog CommonSense is on my blogroll. Sorry, the link only gives a portion of the story. If you want to read the entire story you’ll just have to fork over the cash like I did.

But I think some in the news media are quite put out at blogging. I’m not saying the person who wrote the AP story had any particular bias but it does, to me at least, reflect the tone some in the news business have. Having recently come from working at a newspaper, I think I know in part why that is.

First, blogs have limited quality control. The readers are really it. At my last newspaper I had my copy go through as many as four editors before it got published. (And I can still see that stupid error on the Web today, yes I know.)Also the level of accountability is different between mainstream media and blogging. I mean, you really can say about anything you want to about anything on a blog. It may be wrong. It may be libelous. It may be incredibly stupid. And, with certain exceptions, there might just be nothing that anyone can do about it except stop reading it.

I think these same reasons also reflect a jealousy on the part of some in the media. I know I was jealous of bloggers being able to spew forth their opinions while I had to remain tight-lipped. I still have to watch my pees and kews because I don’t know who I might be freelancing for down the road.

But at the present time I am enjoying the freedom to pontificate, or be silly or weird or whatever I want to be. It is the ability to express yourself in many, many ways that attracted me to writing years ago and I feel fortunate to have made a living off it for almost two decades. Blogging is just another tool for self-expression. The only difference is practically anyone can see it.

So, yeah, watch out for the man. But say what you want to say and have fun.