What’s good for the goose

Stop the Presses column by Chris Graham

Didn’t anybody in charge of pop culture read the story about the goose that laid the golden egg?

Let me rephrase that - because I’m sure that they did.

OK, I’m sure that they at least looked at the pretty pictures.

(Or, I should say, at most looked at the pretty pictures. I mean, we are talking about TV and movie producers and such. Not exactly the brightest stars in the sky.)

Ahem, so as I was saying … the goose that laid the golden egg.

There was a moral to that story.

The moral - don’t kill the friggin’ goose.

That’s what we’ve been doing here for, oh, about the last decade or so - ever since “Survivor,” “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?” and Fox News became pop sensations.

Remember how everybody had to have their version of “Survivor,” “Millionaire” and Bill O’Reilly after that?

Yeah, how exciting those times were.

Same as when everybody had to have their turn on the movie involving a mother and daughter or father and son who mysteriously switched bodies and had to live life through the different set of eyes that such a madcap situation would force upon one.

They make one of those movies every year - for release alongside the latest Hugh Grant-playing-a-sassy-something-or-the-other star vehicle and something artfully inane involving Steve Martin.

Speaking of the inane, we have “American Idol,” which we can thank for the 15 minutes of fame being awarded right now to the megauntalented Taylor Hicks, and its various and unimaginative ripoffs - seriously, whoever gave the go-ahead to that idiotic show featuring inventors ought to be sentenced to community service cleaning up after Wiggles concerts.

And don’t even get me started on television news - where we have two archetypes, the brooding conservative administration mouthpiece and the brooding liberal administration critic, doing battle 24-7, with whatever Nancy Grace is supposed to be in terms of her place in society thrown in for good measure.

(Some village down in the Deep South is missing its resident airhead - and if you’re willing and able to find a home for her, please, would you come take her back? Thanks.)

It would be nice to see something original - though I know what would happen if this original TV show or movie or whatever were to hit it big, as things often do.

Somebody would decide that they liked it so much that they had to make it theirs - and then, well, we’d be back to square one.

A seller’s market

Stop the Presses column by Chris Graham

If I could make it through life without anybody trying to sell me anything, I’d be just fine.

This is why I don’t like shopping, for starters.

“Sir, can I help you?” I am almost always asked when I do decide to go shopping.

Or can’t avoid it - you know, at Christmas.

I mean, I’m not Scrooge or anything.

Ahem.

“Yes, leave me the h-e-double-hockeysticks alone,” I want to say.

But I don’t - I’m not all that confrontational in real life.

(Though I do play the confrontational type on TV. Or will be, soon.)

No, I usually just sigh and resolve to not go shopping again unless I absolutely have to.

It’s the same for me with TV commercials - which are easier to avoid, sure.

But really, should I have to TiVo every single show that I want to watch?

What happens - God forbid - if there’s something live on that I want to take in?

I’ll tell you what happens.

“Take her breath away …”

Click.

“Try Selsun Blue.”
Click.

“I never thought about changing toothpastes.”

Click.

“Have you ever felt … less than fresh?”

Click.

Just once, I’d like to be able to turn on the TV and not be inundated with somebody trying to get me to buy something that I don’t need.

And no, public broadcasting doesn’t count - just because they call them corporate underwriters doesn’t make them any less invasive.

Ditto for DVDs - it didn’t take long for them to figure out how to get you to have to watch their commercials before you can start your movie.

So I can’t go shopping, can’t turn on the TV in my living room …

Can’t open Mad magazine (what, me worry about how Alfred E. wants me to buy a video game … nah).

You can’t even open most Web sites without some shlock trying to get you in trouble with the boss because he thought it would be neat to add music that you have to play to access his site and read the dumb ads that you wished you could have avoided in the first place.

For that matter, we have my own Augusta Free Press site - which even I can’t look at without having to scroll down 30 or 35 or 40 ads selling me on any number of products and services.

Which reminds me - if you’re not busy, of course …

Nationwide audience to learn about Valley Turnpike

Story by Chris Graham

Wayne Bronson knows where the buffalo once roamed through the Shenandoah Valley.

“Sometimes you can stop on the roadside and see the original path cut out by the buffalo herds,” said Bronson, the executive producer of “Road Trip to History,” a 12-part series on the Valley Turnpike, now U.S. 11, that will air nationwide on RFD-TV later this year.

Bronson’s Kearneysville, W.Va.,-based Oak Tree Productions is working with local historical societies up and down the U.S. 11 corridor to chronicle the history of the turnpike and the communities situated along the one-time migratory path that became popular with Native Americans and then later Colonial-era settlers.

“You can travel the road and realize the obvious things - the Civil War history that took place here and that kind of thing. What most people don’t know about is the history of the road. It’s one of the oldest roads in America,” Bronson told The Augusta Free Press.

The turnpike dates to the 1830s - when the Virginia General Assembly agreed to participate in the construction of a road connecting Winchester and Harrisonburg that would be financed largely by tolls assessed on those who used it.

The tolling system remained in place until 1918 - when the state legislature enacted a gasoline tax to finance transportation improvements and maintenance.

The pike was rebuilt during the Great Depression to become the modern-day U.S. 11.

“The idea of the program is different than anything of this nature that you’ve seen before - in that each program is presented by the people who live and work in that particular town,” Bronson said.

“We don’t write a script for them - we basically go in with a film crew, and they tell us about the history of their town and the history of the Great Valley Road and how the two are connected,” Bronson said.

“We’re hoping to get stories from the heart - that people will talk about their history and their culture. And if they say it in their own words, we think it will come more from the heart than if we write it for them and say, ‘Say this,’ ” Bronson said.

The first installment of the “Road Trip to History” series is scheduled to air on RFD-TV in October, Bronson said.

Do you believe in ghosts?

The Top Story by Chris Graham

Brenda Gordon didn’t want to admit to herself that she believed in ghosts.

Being confronted with evidence of their existence will tend to make a believer out of anybody, of course.

“I moved into the house that my dad lived in, and he’s been dead since 1997, and the doorbell started ringing - and there would be no one there. And it started ringing on dates and times that made us really believe it was him trying to contact us,” said Gordon, who lives in Greenville in the southern part of Augusta County.

“We checked out the wiring and checked out everything in the area - there are no houses near us, we’re out in the county. It just made sense that it was him,” Gordon said.

“When you see something with your own eyes, it really is different than just hearing about it or hearing other people’s beliefs. When you see something yourself, and you can’t deny it, it really makes you a believer,” Gordon told The Augusta Free Press.

Gordon is a member of the Waynesboro Paranormal Research Group that investigates reports of ghost sightings and hauntings across the Shenandoah Valley and across the state of Virginia. River City resident Wayne Harrup founded the research group last summer while recuperating from a stroke that he jokes made him interested in ghosts “since I almost became one of them.”

“I’m not trying to make anybody a believer or a skeptic. What I’m trying to do is present what’s out there as it is - here’s what we have, and you can pick and choose whether you believe or you don’t believe,” Harrup told the AFP.

Ghost hunting is certainly getting a lot of play in popular culture these days - most notably through the Sci-Fi Channel hit “Ghost Hunters,” which is helping to bring the so-called science of the paranormal into the mainstream.

The “CSI” aspect of “Ghost Hunters” plays well on television - but does purchasing high-tech gadgets like electromagnetic-field detectors and electronic-voice-phenomenon meters and infrared cameras and using the term science to describe what they’re doing with them make the ghost hunters of the 21st century any different from the ghost hunters from other epochs?

“We are not wide-eyed believers. We are not fanatics. I will try to go beyond the pale to prove that there’s a natural explanation for something,” Harrup said.

“We do use scientific instrumentation - as much as we can afford it, anyway,” Harrup said. “We have EMF meters that detect electromagnetic fields. We have laser thermal detectors so we can detect cold spots.

“We approach it from a scientific basis,” Harrup said.

“Real science,” counters James Randi, a professional magician who founded the James Randi Educational Foundation, which investigates claims of the paranormal from a decidedly skeptical point of view, in 1996, “demands evidence.”

“All the rest of it is blind faith - and there are two kinds of faith,” Randi told the AFP. “There’s faith in things like how Sophia Loren will not be at my doorstep when I come home tonight - that’s based upon past experience and good common sense. Evidence-based thinking is a totally different thing altogether from faith-based thinking.

“There are all kinds of systems for looking into this sort of thing - but they’ve got to adopt some standards, to start with. You’ve got have standards. You’ve got to start making definitions and establish your baseline from which you worked. They haven’t done that - because they take anything that they come up with as being significant. They don’t have standards that they work with - and if they don’t, they don’t have a science. They like to believe that they’re active scientists because they have instruments with them,” Randi said.

“A lot of times what they’re doing is they’re going around, and they’re pretending to understand the science behind it, and they’re using scientific tools, but they’re misusing them,” said Benjamin Radford, the managing editor of The Skeptical Inquirer and the author of several books shedding light on how those who investigate the paranormal go about their business.

“It’s like if you give someone a ruler, and they’re using it as a pry bar, well, the ruler works as a ruler, but it doesn’t work for everything. And so in the same way, if they’re taking all this high-tech equipment around, it’s not that the equipment is necessarily faulty, but the science comes from the user, not from the equipment,” Radford told the AFP.

“A lot of times these ghost-hunter groups use a wide variety of impressive-looking equipment. For example, they’ll use EMF meters to read magnetic fields. And they’ll go to a particular part of a house or an allegedly haunted area, and they may get a high reading for some reason - and oftentimes this will, to them, be evidence of a ghost. This is pure pseudoscience - because there’s no proven link between the existence of a ghost and an electromagnetic field. It just simply doesn’t exist,” Radford said.

“What you find is a lot of times what these ghost hunters are doing is essentially looking for any sort of anomaly - anything that they find strange or weird by whatever criteria that they’re using that they can attribute as being a ghost or some sort of spirit or entity. For example, if a person holding this EMF meter can’t immediately figure out why there may be a higher reading in one area than another, then that can be deigned as evidence of a ghost - whereas it’s simply evidence of their ignorance of what is causing these phenomena. It could be it’s an equipment glitch, it could be that there are wires going through the walls that they aren’t aware of. All they’re really saying is - I don’t know what causes this, therefore it must be a ghost, or it’s likely to be a ghost,” Radford said.

It hasn’t been all that long since ghost hunters didn’t have to worry about being put under the microscope for their shoddy application of scientific instrumentation and techniques. Back when Troy Taylor, a nationally known ghost hunter and author, first started delving into the paranormal in the mid-1980s, investigators didn’t have the luxury of being able to rely on technology to prove that something was there.

“The reason for that is that back at the time when I first got involved in it, there wasn’t any kind of high-tech equipment that we could use,” Taylor said.

“Video cameras - not everybody had one, they weren’t that common. That’s been a big change in more recent years. As more people have gotten involved in the field in the mid and late ’90s, you started to see things like the use of electromagnetic-field detectors adapted for use in the field. That stuff was around - but was so specialized that nobody really had anything like that,” Taylor told the AFP.

Taylor said he still favors what worked for him in the good ol’ days.

“My own approach hasn’t been that different - mainly because I approach it more from a historical perspective as far as using history to track down real evidence of ghosts. And by history meaning not only just past events, but people who’ve lived at a location - for example, people at a location report a ghost, and go back and research the history of the location and find out that previous occupants with no connection to the current occupants were also seeing the same ghosts,” Taylor said.

Harrup, for his part, favors an approach to ghost hunting that is a mix of the scientific and the psychic.

“If you get really experienced in this field, you learn one thing really quickly - nothing is written in stone. Every investigation is different. You just have to learn how to adapt yourself and your methods to where you’re at,” Harrup said.

And for the record, the focus on science and obtaining proof of the existence of the paranormal isn’t what drew Harrup to the ghost-hunting business in the first place.

“We’re not about running around and taking pictures. If we get pictures, great. Believe me, I love the pictures and such. But that’s not the main thing. I don’t care if they come outside and do a can-can dance and sing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ on my EVP. If we help the people who are alive and living there as well as those who may have lived there before and died, then I’m happy,” Harrup said.

Goldberg … Goldberg … Goldberg …

Story by Chris Graham

Bill Goldberg is thinking about getting back in the ring - but it’s not necessarily a wrestling ring that has his eye right now.

“My relationship from the beginning with Jeremy is as color commentator - but if I was to participate in the MMA world as a fighter, I guess we figured out where I’m going to be,” said Goldberg, who will serve as a color commentator on the World Fighting Alliance’s “King of the Streets” pay-per-view scheduled for July 22.

The former WCW and WWE heavyweight champion was contacted by WFA chief executive officer Jeremy Lappen about his interest in the mixed martial-arts broadcast. It didn’t take much for Lappen to sell Goldberg - who will join veteran boxing play-by-play man Barry Tompkins on the broadcast - on getting involved.

“I had an affiliation with the Pride organization over in Japan - I did a little bit of color with them. I’ve always looked to expand that - and when Mr. Lappen gave me a ring and gave me the opportunity to step on board, after knowing his background and seeing the card, I think it was pretty much a no-brainer. It’s about time that in the States that there’s a very viable competitor to the UFC - and I think that we’ve got it now,” Goldberg told reporters on a conference call last week.

Goldberg, who owns a martial-arts school in Oceanside, Calif., is a long-time MMA devotee - “I’ve trained throughout my football career, my wrestling career and my normal human existence just for the entertainment value of it, and I find that it’s an area where you can never have all of the knowledge. There’s always something more to learn.”

The 39-year-old’s education is extending to life outside the squared circle - he has been working to make a name for himself in Hollywood, where he will begin filming on a remake of the 1980s Steven Seagal star vehicle “Half Past Dead” next month.

His busy schedule - which includes spending time with his son, Gage, who was born last month - might preclude him from getting back into a wrestling ring anytime soon.

“You never say never. I would love to be part of somebody competing against the tyrant, shall we say,” Goldberg said, referring to the WWE, which he left in 2004 after a tumultuous year-long run.

Goldberg addressed reports that he has been in talks with TNA Wrestling - stopping short of confirming the reports while conceding that he has given the idea some serious consideration.

“Look at Sting - he went over there, he’s the one that opened my eyes to the possibility of me coming out of retirement,” Goldberg said.
“There were many other business deals that had to be made with Spike TV prior to me to even considering stepping in the ring with TNA. But first and foremost, if there’s a viable competitor out there, and they really want to compete against the best, then that’s the place for me,” Goldberg said.

“Not to say it’s out of the question, but I really don’t have plans to be doing it any time in the near future. I’ve got this movie coming up, and another TV series. I’ve got to find the time,” Goldberg said.

Soccer at a pop-culture crossroads

Story by Chris Graham

Everything about soccer in the United States would seem to point in the direction of the sport taking on more prominent status in American popular culture.

An estimated 18 million Americans are on an organized youth or adult soccer team - only basketball has more active team participants. Read more

PB&Gone

Stop the Presses column by Chris Graham

I have this running game that I’m playing with the guy in charge of ordering at the grocery store.

The game: I buy two boxes of Peanut Butter Cookie Crisp each week, and he keeps the Peanut Butter Cookie Crisp coming. Read more

Declaration of (public broadcast) independence

Story by Chris Graham

It’s spring, which means it’s probably time for Congress to threaten to cut funding for public broadcasting.

A move by a congressional subcommittee to slash funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting that was reversed last week by the House Appropriations Committee had people again discussing the merits of taxpayer funding for PBS and NPR. The move also ramped up talk concerning a proposal advanced by two progressive citizens groups that would scrap the current system in favor of establishing a public trust with its own dedicated funding sources and an independent oversight panel that would get public television and public radio out from under the foot of Congress and the White House.

“Certainly people should be fighting for funding for public broadcasting - PBS, NPR and all of the other projects that are reliant on public funding. The way we see it, though, is that calling for continued funding without calling for a radical change in how the funding is done, what you’re doing is you’re fighting almost a war of attrition,” said Steve Rendall of the New York City-based Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, which is working with the Pittsburgh-based Center for Independent Public Broadcasting to win support for the idea of creating an independent public-broadcasting trust.

“The goal would be to make U.S. public broadcasting the equal of public broadcasting in almost every modern country - and that is relatively independent from commercial and political pressures,” said Jerry Starr, the executive director of the Center for Independent Public Broadcasting.

“If we had an independent source of funding, you could do away with the congressional appropriation and the various kinds of harassment that go with that - that typically come from conservative organizations speaking through Republican politicians expressing dislike for a program that PBS might have put on that serves a constituency that they don’t value,” Starr told The Augusta Free Press.

Where the CIPB and FAIR see the money coming from - from a levy on television advertising or from commercial broadcast-license sales - is where conservatives raise the red flag.

“This is the same problem that we’ve had with public broadcasting for decades,” said Cliff Kincaid, the editor of the Washington, D.C.,-based Accuracy in Media Report.

“They want to force taxpayers to pay for programming that they may not want, that they don’t watch, that they don’t enjoy. And now they want more money - a billion dollars a year - and they want it to be independent of any federal input. This is a typical left-wing socialist approach - and it’s moving in the wrong direction,” Kincaid told the AFP.

“What’s being proposed by a lot of people is not true independence,” said James Gattuso, a telecommunications-industry analyst with the Washington, D.C.,-based Heritage Foundation.

“If you have a trust fund where the money comes from the taxpayers, you’re still spending resources from one group of people for programming on the system regardless of whether they want to support that or not. That’s different than an independent source of funding where people voluntarily give their money to support that,” Gattuso told the AFP.

Starr said that the characterizations of the funding sources coming from advertising or broadcast-license sales as being taxes are off base.

“We don’t consider it a tax as such - but rather a use fee. That is, if you want to graze cattle on public lands, you pay a use fee to the government for that. If you want to drill for oil on public lands, you pay a use fee for that to the government. If you want to lay cable in a municipality, you pay a use fee to that municipality for that privilege. And yet the broadcasters have a monopoly over the public’s airwaves, and they are owned by the public by statute, and only leased to the broadcasters in public trust, and they pay nothing for it. They make billions of dollars in profits, and they pay absolutely nothing for it,” Starr said.

“A small tax on commercial broadcasters would be sufficient to fund this public trust. And then we would have a chance of being truly alternative at a time when we truly need one,” Starr said.

The idea is gaining steam among public-broadcasting supporters for that very reason, according to Rendall.

“A lot of people mistook us at first - as if we were talking about eliminating public-broadcasting funding, which isn’t at all what we’re calling for,” Rendall told the AFP.

“The more we talk to people about this, the more open they are to it. It is, after all, a way to protect public broadcasting from anybody’s influence. A lot of people who want to see public broadcasting protected from the political winds think this is a good idea,” Rendall said.

Gattuso said it is “encouraging that people are talking about independence - to the extent that people are realizing that independence might be the only way out of the dilemma of how do you fund programming.”

“It’s distressing, though, that the independence so far being proposed is only half of the equation,” Gattuso said.

“It’s more or less cherry-picking the concept of independence. You get the independence in terms of oversight and accountability, but you don’t get the quote ‘independence’ from receiving taxpayer dollars. It’s almost like you’re asking for the benefits, but not the responsibilities of independence,” Gattuso said.

Virginia beefs up sex-offender registry: Are enhancements enough to make registry an effective tool?

Visitors to the Virginia Sex Offender and Crimes Against Minors Registry Web site can now click on an interactive map that pinpoints where offenders live in proximity to where they live - and get instant information on the nature of their offenses and even where they are employed.

Those changes, part of an overhaul to the registry unveiled last week, are what you can see. The ones that you can’t see - namely, the commitment of $9 million to add 50 new state troopers to the Virginia State Police to beef up enforcement of compliance of offenders with the registry’s reporting requirements - are possibly the key to the registry’s long-term success.

“The unfortunate thing that we discovered with the old system was that so much of the information on the registry was based on an honor system by the criminal - and not surprisingly, some of the information wasn’t accurate,” said Attorney General Bob McDonnell, who spearheaded the changes to the system as part of his package of legislative proposals aimed at getting tough on sexual predators that was passed in the Virginia General Assembly earlier this year.

“We’re spending, with the new budget, about $10.5 million to improve the registry - including about $500,000 for computer software upgrades, about $500,000 for data entry and administrative personnel to maintain it, and $9 million in actual state police, 50 new troopers, whose job it will be to go out and physically verify all the information provided by the criminal. And then if they don’t register or reregister, the state police have the resources to go out and look for them promptly and charge them with a violation,” McDonnell told The Augusta Free Press.

Where sex-offender registries like the one launched in Virginia in 1994 often fall short is in the area of enforcement, according to Wayne Logan, a professor at the William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, Minn., who has studied sex-offender registries nationwide.

“The Achilles heel to registration is that it depends on lawbreakers to comply with the law. It’s an honor-based system - and we know throughout the country that registration rolls are rife with errors, and they are also to a very significant extent incomplete in terms of not having information for all people who should be lawfully registered,” Logan said.

“From the perspective of the registrant, they are able to weigh the burden of registration versus the chances of getting caught. It’s the classic difficulty for the criminal-justice system - where theoretically rational criminal actors are weighing the costs and benefits. But it seems that many registrants are saying that it’s not worth the burden, so I’ll roll the dice with respect to maybe being caught and maybe prosecuted at the felony level,” Logan told the AFP.

The assignment of 50 state troopers to the enforcement of registry requirements will allow the state police to build an “ongoing rapport” with the offenders that they are responsible for, said Thomas Turner, a Virginia State Police lieutenant who oversees the state sex-offender registry.

“Before this, an individual could register, and he would not be heard from again for 90 days. That process is going to change in the fact that we’re going to physically verify where he’s living within the first 30 days,” Turner said.

“The troopers then will have an ongoing rapport with those offenders that they are responsible for - they’ll have a better idea of if they’re there or not there. They’re going to have an on-line contact with us and letting us electronically that they’ve been there and the time, date and location they’ve verified he was there, and the times they went by and he wasn’t there. Those are things that are going to be available to us - so we can look at an offender and say, well, it’s been 30 days since anybody had contact with this guy, and now he’s failed to reregister. We can respond pretty quickly,” Turner told the AFP.

The enhanced verification that the commitment of troopers to the process will provide will mean that the information on the registry should be more reliable. Adding to the reliability is the increase in information that will be required of offenders.

“The work addresses, the updated photographs, the mapping - that’s going to be a positive plus,” Turner said. “Because you can now look at street addresses in relation to where you’re at - schools, the availability of the system to allow you to register to receive community notification. It’s going to be helpful to persons who have a need to know who’s coming in and out of their zip code and contiguous zip code at schools and so forth. The more schools that register, the better decisions they’ll be able to make about bus stops and locations where they leave children in the evenings.”

“It appears to me that this is where states are moving - many states are ramping up the amount of information that is available,” said Bill Chamberlin, a communications-law expert and director of the University of Florida’s Marion Brechner Center Citizen Access Project, which is in the process of updating its 2002 rankings of states’ access to sex-offender information nationwide.

“Indiana, for example, which is ranked currently ranked as being more open than Virginia, provides a recent autograph, home address, full name and alias, date of birth, sex, height, weight, Social Security number, drivers license, description of the offense, name and address of any employers. There’s a fair amount on there,” Chamberlin told the AFP.

Among the registry Web site’s regular visitors is House Majority Leader Morgan Griffith, R-Salem, who was instrumental in the passage of the package of bills aimed at sexually violent predators this year.

“When I was buying a new house a year ago, I got into the registry and looked up the addresses of everybody that was nearby. They were far enough away that I felt comfortable and bought the house. If there had been one next door, I might not have bought the house,” Griffith told the AFP.

The bottom line to Griffith is that while no system of this nature is going to be 100 percent effective in preventing offenders from committing additional crimes upon their release, “this is clearly money well spent.”

“If a predator is determined to do something bad, he’s going to do it. But we can protect our families and not put them in situations where they’re more likely to be targets,” Griffith said.

“I think it might take 50 years to see, but I think statistically we can reduce the number of kids who are molested. You will never eliminate it completely from society - I’m not that naive. But we can probably reduce by 25, 50, maybe even 75 percent - and that’s saying something,” Griffith said.

(Published 06-19-06)

Summer in the Shenandoah Valley

Golf Things Considered column by John Rogers
JSpencerRogers@msn.com  

The Valley has been changing, and the daylight stretching out, as the solstice draws near. There’s a fullness along the country roads where trees recently bare take on a middle-aged kind of thickness, swaying contentedly with the last of spring breezes. The cacophony of cicadas, tree frogs, crickets and a million other mate-seeking critters makes such a steady droning that you actually have to think about it to hear their song. And along the Shenandoah, tawny bales of fresh-hewn hay spot the fields like Civil War infantry frozen in time. Read more

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