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Posts Tagged ‘miscellany’

Degrees of separation from fame or infamy

Posted in Personal, tagged , , , , , on June 3, 2022| Leave a Comment »

My high school’s most famous graduate is either an actress featured in “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home” or a homicidal maniac.

I thought for sure it was the maniac, until I Googled the person I thought was going to be the runner-up, which led me to my high school’s Wikipedia page, which under the heading “Notable alumni” listed two: the person I Googled and the actress.

All of this was prompted by one of those questions that pop up on social media (which you should never answer, by the way, because it’s all just data mining, not harmless fun): Are you your high school’s most famous graduate?

Almost no one would be able to answer yes to that. But it made me think about what the answer for my high school might be.

I went to a small, Catholic high school in Phoenix, Arizona (I’m not Catholic, but the school was practically around the corner from my house, so I chose to go there). One of the school’s graduates who achieved a sort of fame actually came from my circle of friends and my graduating class, Robert Walesa, but he was more notorious than famous. A few years ago, after being stopped for drunken driving and sent home in a cab (not hauled to jail), he got mad, grabbed a rifle, drove his other car to a spot near the DWI checkpoint, shot a sheriff’s deputy from a distance and drove away. Eventually, they figured out who did it and came to his house. He met them at his front door and fatally shot himself on the spot.

He made national news, but it was of a routine sort of shocking news nowadays. I doubt many people remember him.

Better known, I hope, was Jeff Feagles, who graduated a year behind me. He was a football player and made it to the NFL, where he played 22 years as a punter and twice was named to the Pro Bowl.

It was while Googling Feagles that I learned that an actress named Catherine Hicks graduated from my high school in the late 1960s. Among other things, she is known for playing Dr. Gillian Taylor, the whale biologist in “Star Trek IV.” That’s certainly the role I recognize her from, but she had many more, including Marilyn Monroe in the 1980 TV movie “Marilyn: The Untold Story,” for which she received an Emmy Award nomination.

I think Hicks gets the edge over Feagles.

But I think the best-known person who graduated from my high school, disturbingly, might be another infamous member of my own graduating class, though thankfully not from my circle of friends. He did not seem to any of us like a homicidal maniac, but a little more than 16 years after graduation, Armand Chavez made national news and lingered in the headlines much longer than my former friend.

You might recognize him better by the alter ego he adopted after being expelled from medical school, Diazien Hossencofft. He claimed to be a thoracic surgeon and geneticist, and he sold bogus cancer treatments and anti-aging injections for thousands of dollars. And he probably would have gotten away with all of that for a long time had he not also convinced a girlfriend to murder his wife.

The murder story has been the subject of TV episodes of “Crime Stories,” “Court TV,” “American Justice,” “The Investigators,” “Snapped,” “Monstresses,” “Sins and Secrets,” “I’d Kill For You” and “Charmed to Death,” according to Wikipedia.

There is unlikely to be any other graduate more famous or infamous. The school closed in 1989 because of declining enrollment, so even the youngest graduates already are in their 50s. If any of us are going to make it big, we are running out of time.

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When virus is out of sight, it’s out of mind

Posted in In the news, Personal, tagged , , on December 4, 2020| Leave a Comment »

Seeing is believing, but if believing required seeing we would have no churches.

When you buy a car, you don’t require that the dealer take the car apart and demonstrate how each element of it functions before you believe it will drive.

Do you understand how your flat-screen TV works?

Your cellphone?

A colleague recently wrote about losing a relative to COVID-19. The relative had a terminal form of cancer, but COVID-19 quickly took away however many months she would have had left. My colleague wrote of her frustration about people refusing to wear masks, which studies conducted during the months of the pandemic have proven can sharply limit the spread of the virus.

But one line she wrote about why people find it difficult to stick with the strict precautions that public health officials call for caught me short: “I know it’s hard. The last eight months have felt like a dystopian hellscape, our sense of reality warped by a disaster in slow motion.”

I told her I thought the reason it has been difficult is exactly the opposite – the world does not appear to be a hellscape or a disaster. If we went outside and brimstone were falling from the sky, we’d go back in to get our asbestos umbrella – “The scientists say we’ll catch fire if we don’t keep an asbestos umbrella with us at all times!”

The reason it’s hard to get people to change their behavior from what they were doing every day until this past spring is that everything looks exactly the same as it did a year ago. Unless you personally have known people who suffered extreme complications from COVID-19, the danger of the disease can seem remote. It’s hard to keep up your guard day after day when nothing happens to you.

A recent letter sent to The High Point Enterprise questioning whether the pandemic continues to rage through society said, “Doesn’t the definition of ‘pandemic’ include ‘excessive deaths’? I’ve yet to see bodies stacked on the roadsides.”

It is statistically evident that the United States is seeing “excess deaths” (that’s the term to Google). The number of deaths from all causes each year normally falls into a certain limited range, but a research letter published by the Journal of the American Medical Association in October reported that from March 1 to Aug. 1 the number of deaths in the U.S. was 20% higher than that normal range – that’s more than 225,000, of which only 150,000 officially had been attributed to COVID-19.

And you don’t have to look far to find recent news stories documenting the toll that the current surge in virus-related hospitalizations is taking on health care workers across the country – but unless those workers are part of your immediate family, you do have to choose to look.

Among the statistics that the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services publishes on its website, and updates every day, is the number of state residents hospitalized for COVID-19. Many county health departments, including Guilford’s, do the same. On Friday, 166 Guilford residents were hospitalized.

But the bodies are not stacked by the roadside.

Perhaps if this pandemic were like the 1918 Spanish flu, and one of the groups hardest hit was young children, there wouldn’t be so many skeptics. The emotional wounds would be more open and raw and distributed across the population.

No one would demand to see children’s bodies stacked like cordwood before believing there was a problem.

No one would think of suggesting that the deaths of a few hundred-thousand children was acceptable, as Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick suggested in the spring about the deaths of seniors from COVID-19: “No one reached out to me and said, ‘As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?’”

But, at least so far as we know in the less than one year scientists have had to study the disease, COVID-19 does not have serious effects on most children.

In fact, most adults who are infected feel no effects or have mild symptoms, and even most infected seniors recover.

The issue, though, has never been that you personally were likely to die if you caught this disease. If that were the only risk, you would be well within your rights to not wear a mask and even to offer to deep-kiss any willing stranger.

But with this highly infectious disease, when you are infected you may not know it, so if you take minimal or no precautions, you easily infect other people. They then infect other people, and so on, and so on, and eventually the virus reaches someone whose health is fragile, but you will never see it. All you see is that the number of deaths went up yesterday, and you don’t believe you could have had anything to do with that.

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The world’s wealthy flood to Hudson

Posted in In the news, Online media, tagged , , on July 15, 2019| Leave a Comment »

Hudson, North Carolina, is a thriving vacation hotspot where several hundred property owners are making an outrageous amount of money from renting rooms or entire houses to well-heeled tourists.

Or so says an email I received this past week touting a “study” of data from websites “like Airbnb and VRBO,” two sites where people can post property for short-term rentals. These have become increasingly popular ways for people to find places to stay while on vacation or traveling for business.

The email came from the “head of media and PR” for a website called AllTheRooms, which calls itself “the world’s first vacation rental search engine” and “a trusted source of vacation rental market data for a number of organizations.”

If the Los Angeles Convention and Visitors Bureau trusts AllTheRooms, maybe I should too.

According to AllTheRooms, Caldwell County’s own Hudson is the 472nd fastest-growing vacation rental market in the United States. There were 435 rental properties in Hudson listed online as of May, an increase of over 14 percent from a year earlier.

What’s more, they rent at an average of over $1,100 a night and are booked an average of 58 nights a year.

Hudson rental hosts took in nearly $9 million from May 2018 to May 2019.

Consider that Hudson’s entire population was 3,698 in the Census Bureau’s 2017 estimate. If there are 435 rental properties in town, that’s a huge percentage of the overall number of parcels in town.

Clearly, Hudson’s wealthy tourist trade is the best kept secret in Caldwell County. Money is just sloshing around the town, yet no one in the rest of the county knew it.

Funny thing, though. If you search Airbnb or VRBO, you get results that are not just wildly different from what AllTheRooms touted, the results are from an entirely different universe.

Airbnb shows zero rentals available within the Hudson town limits. There are about a dozen in all of Caldwell County, ranging from $40 to $140 (the most expensive is for a full house atop a mountain near Zacks Fork Road).

VRBO shows two rentals in the Hudson town limits, one for $79 a night but one in the neighborhood of AllTheRooms’ numbers: $669 a night for a two-bedroom, one-bath loft with room for two people.

I thought maybe AllTheRooms simply had a typo and sent me data for Hudson, NY, instead of Hudson, NC, but on Airbnb and VRBO the rentals available in that other Hudson fall well short of the nightly rental cited in the email, though at least the number of rentals available is closer.

So I decided to check a different market entirely: Atlanta, listed by AllTheRooms as the 14th fastest-growing vacation rental market, with 6,923 rental properties going for an eye-popping average of $1,858 a night.

That’s what the list said.

That’s not what Airbnb says.

Airbnb says there are 306 rentals in Atlanta, and a huge percentage appear to be less than $100 a night.

VRBO also shows more than 300 places, though many are pricier than on Airbnb — but nowhere close to $1,800 a night.

It’s a terrible thing when you can’t trust a stranger’s email from a website you never heard of to give you accurate numbers on secret tourist millions in a nearby town. It makes me wonder whether the Los Angeles CVB and the other organizations listed as trusting AllTheRooms really do trust it.

What is the world coming to?

Mostly, though, I’m disappointed that we weren’t able to do a news story about all the new wealth flooding Hudson. That would have been exciting.

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Don’t go batty over a bat in the house

Posted in Personal, tagged , on June 21, 2019| 2 Comments »


I learned a lot about bats and rabies the past few days.

The main thing I learned is that many people are not rational about bats.

A bat got in my house. We don’t know quite how. When we eventually found where it hid, I was able to cover it with an old T-shirt and get it out of the house.

That, to me, was that.

Some well meaning friends and coworkers disagreed. They urged us to get rabies shots.

“If bats are rabid, they shed the disease as they fly,” one said, so we probably had been exposed.

This seemed unlikely to me.

And yet, the urgency of those warnings lingered in my mind and made me finally call a doctor – who agreed with me and, it turns out, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which says, “People can’t get rabies just from seeing a bat in an attic, in a cave, at summer camp, or from a distance while it is flying. In addition, people can’t get rabies from having contact with bat guano (feces), blood, or urine, or from touching a bat on its fur.”

Further, bats rarely contract rabies, the CDC says: Even among bats submitted for rabies testing because they could be captured, were obviously weak or sick, or had been captured by a cat, only about 6 percent had rabies.

Merlin Tuttle, one of the world’s leading bat conservationists, wrote in an article on his website, “Merlin Tuttle’s Bat Conservation,” that the risk of humans getting rabies from a bat – even a rabid bat – is highly exaggerated:

“Given the consequences of a wrong decision, it is appropriate to take each possible exposure to rabies extremely seriously, … . However, simply being near or even touching a rabid animal is not considered to be an exposure, … . An exposure requires a bite or contact between an open wound or mucous membrane with saliva or nervous tissue from an infected animal.”

Regardless of these assurances, some people argued that it would be better to be safe.

“Here’s the scary thing: by the time you have symptoms of rabies, it’s too late and almost always fatal,” one wrote to me on Facebook.

Maybe. But 100 percent assurance carries its own cost.

Last year, a woman who encountered a bat in Georgia and wasn’t certain whether it bit her got treatment, which cost $17,000. A woman in Maryland paid $11,000, and one in North Carolina paid $22,000.

In all of those cases, though, there was either a bite or a suspected bite, and doctors recommended getting treatment.

In our case, the only thing that bit me may have been karma. My mother was quick to assert that the bat in our house was divine justice because once, many years ago, while my parents were away from home I took a furry, toy bat and thumbtacked it to the ceiling in their bedroom.

If having a bat in my own house was punishment for frightening my parents, and I had it to do over, I’d tack that sucker to the ceiling again.

It was hilarious.

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Fear isn’t rational decision

Posted in Personal, tagged , on April 14, 2019| Leave a Comment »

What are you afraid of?

Most of us are afraid of things that very rarely happen, according to a recent poll of nearly 1,500 North Carolina residents by Elon University.

Well, except for being shot in a public place. That USED to be pretty rare, but a majority — 51 percent — perceives that it’s at least somewhat of a possibility now, and more than a third, 37 percent, feel they are very much at risk.

The poll asked people how safe they personally feel about 37 hypothetical risks. “Shootings in public” topped the list of what people felt least safe about. Only 7 percent said they felt very safe.

But close behind that was terrorism, with 33 percent feeling very unsafe and only 7 feeling very safe.

What’s most odd about that is that there is very little difference how people in our state’s big cities feel about the risk of terrorism and how those in sparsely populated counties feel. In fact, more rural residents — 34 percent — than urban residents — 30 percent — feel very unsafe, even though there has never been a terror attack in a rural part of the United States for the very obvious reason that in order to inspire terror, there have to be a lot of people hurt and a lot of TV cameras nearby to broadcast the news. It would take over an hour for some TV crews to get to Pineola in Avery County from Charlotte.

Things make a little more sense if you combine the “very unsafe” and “somewhat unsafe” answers.

Then the thing that the most people feel at least somewhat unsafe about is walking along roads that don’t have sidewalks, 66 percent. Only 5 percent feel very safe about it.

People are very slightly more afraid of snakes (a total of 56 percent feel either very or somewhat unsafe) and ticks (57 percent) than tornadoes (51 percent).

The same amount of people, 16 percent, feel equally unsafe about dogs and deer, but more (31 percent) feel very safe about deer (only 27 percent feel very safe about dogs).

And again, urban and rural residents feel exactly the same level of risk about deer — 4 percent very unsafe in both, even though there are a lot more deer in Kings Creek than Raleigh.

People are least afraid of trains: Only 4 percent feel very unsafe about trains, and just 8 percent feel even somewhat unsafe.

On the other hand, people feel pretty darned safe about driving — only 5 percent very unsafe and 20 percent somewhat unsafe — even though there are literally hundreds of traffic accidents each day across the state and being a good driver has little to do with it — at least half of the drivers involved do nothing wrong. Some multi-car wrecks have only one driver at fault, and if something falls onto the road — a tree, a jumping deer, a big rock thrown by an angry teenager, a fish dropped by an eagle — then no driver is at fault.

But the poll left a lot of areas of risk uncovered.

For instance, what about your coffee shop exploding, not because of terrorism but plain old natural gas? It happened in Durham on Wednesday and killed the shop’s owner, injured nearly 20 people, destroyed one big building and damaged several others.

What about losing your job by accident? Just happened to a judge in Texas because he told someone he planned to run for higher office, and the Texas state constitution says a candidacy announcement by anyone holding a judicial office amounts to an official resignation. (Seems like a judge ought to be familiar with that, though.)

Perhaps most importantly, what about the risk of bees living inside your eyes? Just this past week a woman in Taiwan went to her doctor about pain in her eye, and the doctor found four sweat bees had somehow gotten into her eye socket, surviving there by drinking her tears. We have sweat bees in every county in North Carolina — you stand far more chance in Sawmills of encountering sweat bees than terrorists, and now they know humans are edible.

Good luck if your eyes don’t itch for the rest of the day.

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What would an all-moderate party look like?

Posted in In the news, tagged , on December 18, 2015| Leave a Comment »

A column earlier this week by Eric Frazier of the Charlotte Observer raised the idea of moderates banding together to form a third major political party based on their shared interests “in safe, incremental social change, protecting business and the economy, a strong defense and pragmatism in foreign affairs. They want the trains to run on time and the stock market to rise while everybody more or less gets along.”

I can see them now, gathering for their first national convention in Peoria, or perhaps Omaha, a place the party leadership feels is representative of middle America. Some perhaps suggested St. Louis, but that has been too much in the news for all the wrong reasons. Why remind people of all that? Phoenix would have been out because others feel that its vast sprawl and congested freeways seem a bit too much California Lite. Indianapolis would be too urban and gritty.

The party chooses a medium-sized convention hall, nothing grandiose, and fills it with beige banners emblazoned with the party’s interim motto — a temporary selection made as a compromise — printed in a plain, unadorned font, “Can’t we all just get along?”

The first day’s convention action item: Choose a party symbol.

Suggestions for the party symbol, the iconic image that would be the party’s visual counter to the Republican elephant and the Democratic donkey, range from the mythic phoenix and griffin to the more prosaic bald eagle.

As sensible moderates, party delegates agree to hold a series of votes to winnow the selection. Eliminated in the first round are all mythical animals, which are deemed to carry an implication that the party is not realistic, which is, if nothing else, the main thing moderates are all about.

Eliminated in the second are such African animals as the hippo, which many feel would appear to be just a blob when reduced to red-and-blue iconography at the presidential debates, and the rhino, which the moderate former Democrats object is too reminiscent of a Republican elephant. The moderate former Republicans don’t quite agree but want to be reasonable.

Everyone kind of likes the eagle, but the eagle is everywhere already. It adorns sales flyers as much as political pamphlets. Stephen Colbert has helped cement it as the symbol of pistachio nuts, and the moderates agree they should avoid that association.

A large plurality then backs choosing an American wild stallion reared up on its hind legs.

But the moderate former Republicans object that a horse is awfully close to the Democratic donkey. If you reject the rhino, it’s only fair to sideline the stallion. The stallion-backers mildly try to make the case to keep it, but then others also object about the stallion being wild. The party is supposed to be for moderates who favor reason and practicality. “Wild” is another thing. Let the Republicans and Democrats be wild.

Finally the voting narrows to the only proposal not eliminated: a black lab. No one’s particularly enthused about it, but no one hates it either, and isn’t that the essence of compromise? Plus, black labs are tremendously loyal and reliable dogs, and unfailingly friendly to everyone – no decent person would hate a black lab.

That settled, the delegates break for the day and head for an evening at Applebee’s to toss back a few light beers and prepare for the second day’s action item: considering an alternative to the temporary motto. Among the options: “Half a loaf is better than none,” and “If no one ever settled, your mother would still be single.”

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