“I think for all we owe our veterans, it would be a wonderful thing if the old Washington County Hospital could become a veterans hospital.” – Hagerstown

“We agree. Don’t tear the hospital down. Use it for a senior center or VA center. And the emergency room area is already set up for a trauma center.” – Huyetts

Hagerstown, Maryland — the town where I was born, the home of the Maryland Symphony Orchestra, the Hagerstown Suns, and, according to the website TotalBeauty.com, the second-ugliest men in the country.

The website, which so far as I can tell serves no purpose other than to provide space for Oil of Olay and Herbal Essences to place advertising, has posted a list of the eight American cities with the ugliest men. For their purposes, TotalBeauty.com has defined “ugly” to be the poor state of one’s “brains, muscles, teeth, fat and lungs — they’re all on the inside of the men in these cities.” Nice to know a website plastered with ads for makeup, with a huge chunk of its content seemingly taken up by reviews and recommendations of beauty products, isn’t superficial.

Here’s the assessment of Hagerstown:

Less than 10 percent of the men in Hub City hold a bachelor’s degree. They’re not spending their spare time in gyms, either — nearly 30 percent don’t exercise regularly, 30 percent are obese, and an off-the-charts number of Hagerstownians smoke, compared to the rest of the country.

Was this the shittiest place ever for Planet Fitness to open a franchise, or what? I wonder how they’re doing . . .

It’s obvious to me that Colleen Rush, who wrote this list, has never been to Hagerstown. Otherwise, the review would not have been nearly as complimentary. She doesn’t mention, for example, Hagerstown’s ongoing history of racial and sexual bigotry, or its embarrassingly inept one and only newspaper, the Herald-Mail. (Thank fuck she’s never seen Mail Call.) Neither does Ms. Rush comment on my hometown’s weird combination of self-loathing and vanity, which has made its inclusion on one of the Google-bait bullshit best/worst lists of a lame cosmetics website into an irresistible story for the local media. In the last few hours I’ve heard or read about Hagerstown and its second-ugliest bunch of dudes on the radio, TV, and several places on the internet.

Does anything on TotalBeauty.com really warrant this much attention? I mean, okay, we were four slots lower than Detroit, for fuck’s sake. That stings. I understand. But let’s not wallow in it! Instead, look on the bright side: at least we beat El Paso! It ain’t much, but shit . . . we’re doing something right.

What we need to do is call up Bethesda, which somehow landed at the #1 spot on another TotalBeauty.com list, the one for the ten cities with the hottest guys. That place is what, 60 miles down the road? We need to find out what they’re doing. And Frederick, too. Ever been to Frederick? God, that’s a nice town.

Alex Knepper, a writer for New Majority, the website founded and run by my favorite Republican, David Frum, attended the town hall meeting Senator Ben Cardin held right here in good ol’ Washington County, Maryland, last week. Knepper is like Frum — a conservative, but of a more reasonable breed that values rational discussion of ideas over pandering histrionics. Needless to say, he felt a little out of place in Hagerstown.

He wrote up his experience at the town hall, which was held this past Wednesday at the Kepler Theater at Hagerstown Community College. His article doesn’t mention the asshole detained by the Secret Service for holding up a sign reading “Death to Obama, his wife, and his two stupid kids,” but maybe Alex wanted to cut us a break. Here’s some of what he did decide to share:

Twenty minutes into my two-hour wait to get a seat at Senator Ben Cardin’s town hall event, I started keeping a “Nazi tally” by counting references I overheard to Adolf Hitler, Germany, or the Nazi Party. Besides the usual suspects, the Lyndon LaRouche brigade was out in full force handing out fliers and pamphlets likening Obama to a new Hitler (although the real problem is the Jews, if you ask them, so I’m not sure why they don’t welcome that). It was a common theme, and not just amongst the anti-Semites: “This is exactly how Nazi Germany began!” was a standard echo heard in line.

After a couple of arguments with Christian fundamentalists who accused me of not really being on their side because I’m a godless libertarian-type, the lines funneled in. “Welcome to an exercise in democracy, son,” a guard told me. Indeed. By way of contrast, while standing in line to question Cardin, I spotted an eleven-year-old boy being told by an older woman that “this isn’t what democracy is about.”

The town halls are exactly what you’re seeing on television. The crowds are overwhelmingly conservative — and I mean Glenn Beck conservative, not David Frum conservative. I’m talking angry, ready-to-roll conservative, not rational, let’s-discuss-philosophy conservative. I can’t think of any more appropriate word than ‘redneck’ to describe most of the crowd. Literally every person who took more than ten seconds to preface his question was shouted down by “Ask your question!” by an array of overfed hicks. They were also prone to shout “You work for us!” and “You just don’t get it!” at Cardin, as if Cardin should be expected to represent the ideals of the 9/12 Project or something.

Several commenters accused Alex of elitism (a charge he smugly accepted — Alex ain’t as likable as Frum, but he’s a conservative college student, so what the fuck else should I expect?), but unfortunately I think he hits the nail on the head. “An array of overfed hicks” comes pretty damn close to Hagerstown in a nutshell.

Lou Scally friended me on Facebook today — how cool/chilling is that? For those of you who aren’t from the Hagerstown area, Lou is our local media megastar. He’s the weatherman for Hagerstown’s one and only TV station, WHAG, and the morning host for WJEJ radio. Around here, he’s the uncrowned king. More people from Hagerstown know his name than the name of whoever the hell the mayor is.

So why is this fucking with me a little? Because Lou and I have never met in person. He can only know me through this here repository of sacrilege and profanity. And while I find Lou as endearing as everyone else around here (sure, his nickname is “Lyin’ Lou,” but we mean it affectionately), I have occasionally been somewhat critical of his skills as a meteorologist, and made rather coarse comments about his personal tonnage. Which has me wondering why Lou even wants to have me on his friend list.

I’ve come up with two theories. First, Lou is just that cool. He has a sense of humor about himself, views his work and his place in the community with a degree of reasoned detachment, and maybe also enjoys the occasional dirty comic featuring Captain Kirk singing Björk lyrics. If McAsherson and I hadn’t pulled the plug on The Snark-Gap Transmission, he would no doubt be inviting us to fill-in for him at WJEJ on a regular basis so he could sleep in, fuck the wife, and go base-jumping and fly an F-16 and do all the other totally balls things Lou Scally does.

Second, Lou is not cool with me at all. He read the article I wrote after his speech at the Sharpsburg Memorial Day parade a few years ago and was not fucking amused. He friended me so he can follow the blog without the indignity of having www.stevelikestocurse.com in the browser history of his work computer and continue patiently assembling his list of justifications for my imminent murder. He hopes to use my profile to anticipate my movements throughout the day and week, so he can determine the optimum time to make his move. Or perhaps he’ll lure me to him with a phony invitation to fill in for him at WJEJ. If you want to get away with murder, you need to do it someplace totally deserted, where there won’t be another human soul to catch you in the act. Where better than a radio station?

Stated more directly: She’s a big fat quitter.

She tries to put a noble face on it with the whole “I’m not going to put Alaskans through that,” but the truth is she’s bailing out. So she’s decided not to seek another term. Fair enough. Great, actually. What about her present term? The one she was elected to by the people of Alaska? The one she’s only completed half of? Feh! Doesn’t matter. Why taunt the electorate with a full term when they know already they won’t be given the rare privilege of voting for you next time? It’d be cruel, really.

This is so stupid and bizarre that it almost surpasses all the other stupid, bizarre shit Palin’s done since winking and smiling her way into national politics nearly a year ago. If our federal and state governments operated the way they ought to, with citizen legislators and executives serving their terms and then returning to their private lives instead of entrenched career politicians sticking around for decades at a time, elected officials opting against seeking reelection would be the rule rather than the rarest of exceptions. Following Sarah Palin’s line of thought (I cannot call it “logic”), all those one-term public servants would just as well skip town halfway through rather than finish out there terms. Otherwise they’re just milking it, just drawing a paycheck. Nevermind their constitutionally mandated duties as elected members of the government.

Hell, why limit it to those who decide not to seek reelection? What about those who have lost elections, or who are forced to leave office by term limits? What’s the point, for instance, of a two-term President of the United States hanging around Washington, D.C. for two extra months waiting for us to inaugurate the new guy? According to Sarah Palin, he’d be doing us all a favor if he just packed up and hit the bricks and let his V.P. run out the clock instead.

As odd as Palin’s abrupt abdication is, it’s not unprecedented. The first thing it reminded me of was the resignation three years ago of the mayor of my own dear Hagerstown. At least Palin is waiting until the end of the month before quitting. Our guy, Richard Trump, didn’t even have the class to give notice. He quit effective immediately. And not even in person — he left the city council a note:

As of February 1, 2006, I respectfully resign the position of Mayor. I respect your understanding in this manner and will be glade to cooperate with any matters.

There are no typos in there. That’s exactly how the Honorable Mayor of the City of Hagerstown Richard F. Trump wrote it. He shared Sarah Palin’s way with the language, obviously. Now they have something else in common.

Despite the fact that she’s a welcher, an embarrassment to her party and our whole national political culture, and an obvious head-case who’s been nothing but trouble from day one, I’m sure there are still factions within the Republican party who salivate at the prospect of a Palin 2012 presidential bid. They’ll play along while she continues to put a selfless, righteous spin on her decision to walk out on the people of her state. They’ll continue to apologize for her erratic behavior, her awkward, stilted speaking style, her evident lack of skill and qualifications. They’ll do this for god only knows what reasons — maybe because to the sex-starved evangelicals that constitute her base she still passes for an attractive woman, maybe because they saw how effective her race-baiting demagoguery was at stirring up the rubes during campaign rallies last year, maybe because they honestly believe someone as clumsy and inarticulate and just plain dumb as her could possibly stand a chance running against the incumbent president, who is possibly the most skilled politician we have ever seen.

Whatever the reason, if the Republicans value their place as a major political party, they should cheerfully wave Sarah Palin out the door on July 26, then lock it behind her and break off the key.

Shit. I can dream, can’t I?

What do I do when there’s nothing I feel like writing about? I mock the opinions of my fellow citizens and the rag newspaper that disseminates them with another installment of my award winning^* series, Riffing on Mail Call!

(^*Last year it won the coveted Cursey Award for Best Blog Series Written in Response to a Stupid Feature in the Herald-Mail. That was a crowded category, as you might imagine. And just because I never publicized it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.^†)

(^†Although in this case it didn’t.)

These comments were culled from the June 24 edition of Mail Call, published by Hagerstown’s paper of record, the Old Gray Lady with progressive nonfluent aphasia, the Herald-Mail.

“The Saturday paper: I read about the 10-year-old girl that died of cancer, got her last wish. She wanted to see the Disney movie Up. But what I can’t believe is it was put on page 12, A12, and the front page, they put ‘School system gets $9.4 million in stimulus funds.’” - Clear Spring

You’re right, a child getting to see a movie is far more important to the people of Washington County than the millions of dollars in new funding doled out to their schools. This is actually a rare instance where the Herald-Mail did something right. The story about the girl seeing Up before she died belonged on page A12 — and that’s assuming it deserved to be in the newspaper at all. It’s a human interest story. It’s sweet, it’s sad, it’s nice the girl got her last wish. But it’s not news. Ashley and I joke all the time that one day we’ll pick up a copy of the Herald-Mail and the front page story will be some useless Marlo Barnhart write-up about the pastor of a local church, and then buried in one of the back pages will be a story bearing the headline “Six Dead in Bloody Prison Riot, Eleven Confirmed Escaped and At-Large in Hagerstown Area.”

It’s really not that far-fetched.

We had a “tea party” of our own here in Hagerstown. The great Rick Rottman blogged about it over at Bent Corner, and posted an excerpt from a press release promoting the event. You can read the press release in its entirety at the Hagerstown Tea Party blog, where you can also check out the schedule of events for today’s three-hour tea party, which will give attendees the opportunity to take part in some bold and courageous acts of political protest, including:

Registration!

Ceremonial dropping of tea bags into pool!

Sign-waving on the Dual Highway!

And what tax protest would be complete without a speech from our spineless and useless local representative Delegate Chris Shank?

Now that I think about it, I might owe the Herald-Mail an apology. The last two weeks on The Snark-Gap Transmission, I’ve referred to my hometown sentinel, Hagerstown’s own Old Gray Lady with late-stage dementia, as the worst newspaper in the world. I’m still bewildered how the Herald-Mail has been able to survive the ongoing massacre of print newspapers to this point, when better papers with larger circulations, like the late Seattle Post-Intelligencer for example, have been forced to stop publication and shift to online-only models. But “worst newspaper in the world” sounds a bit strong today. I was reminded not long ago that the Herald-Mail isn’t even the worst newspaper in this region of the United States, let alone the whole damn world.

Reminded by what? you ask. Bless your heart. I was gonna tell you anyway, but thanks for asking.

Reminded by this op-ed written by Andrew Breitbart, published by the Washington Times, the real worst newspaper in the world. Seriously, doesn’t it strike you as slightly hypocritical how pundits of the conservative persuasion lost their minds this past election cycle over every questionable association Barack Obama has ever had, from serving on boards with Bill Ayers to attending church with that nutty Jeremiah Wright, but they don’t seem to mind that their most popular right-leaning newspaper is owned by fucking Sun Myung Moon?

It’s a hypocrisy that’s gone over Andrew Breitbart’s head, it seems. Then again, if I were as dim a bulb as Andrew, I’d probably be happy to be published anywhere that would have me. The clinical term for it is “desperation,” and it’s a main factor (along with the states “paranoid” and “delusional”) in the ability of WorldNetDaily to attract columnists.

Every so often, usually when I have nothing else to write about but sometimes when I see something particularly interesting/puzzling, I take a few minutes to consider selected comments and respond in my own inimitably self-satisfied way.

. . .

Wait, did I say “venerable” up there? I meant to say “inveterate.”

These comments were culled from the December 3, 4, 5, 8 and 9 editions of Mail Call. Through a myriad of local and national topics, there was one subject to which the Mail Callers returned again and again: our next president, Barack Obama. In no particular order:

I voted for Obama to get us out of these wars, but yet he is getting us in deeper. He is sending 10,000 more troops into Afghanistan, and the war on Iraq he is letting go, too. So he is worse than Bush, and his pick of Hillary Clinton as secretary of state is devastating. The Dow is now down 500 points.

— Boonsboro

If you voted for Obama because you thought he would end the war in Afghanistan, you must not have been paying attention. Barack went out of his way to stress his desire to escalate operations in Afghanistan. He hammered this point home on the stump and in all three televised debates with John McCain. He wants to send in more troops and he wants to find Osama Bin Laden. He’s got this nutty idea that it’s important to bring to justice the guy who enabled the bloodiest terrorist attack in human history. That Barack, what a card.

As for Iraq, I’m with you, I’d love to see that war over and done with. It was a mistake that has cost tens of thousands of lives, both from the coalition forces and from the Iraqis, and it needs to end. But it’s not as if he can just snap his fingers and withdraw on January 20. What he has said is that he wants to bring combat troops home as soon as possible, but responsibly. I wish we hadn’t sent our men and women over there, but since we’re there, and since things seem to be going better now than they were a few years ago, we might as well clean up the mess we made and try to leave the place a little better than we found it. Hopefully that won’t take too long, but if you expect President Obama to close down Iraq on his first day, you’re dreaming, and you haven’t been listening.

A story that caught my eye this morning has the headline “Lawmakers consider boosting MD wineries.” Our county delegation to the Maryland General Assembly is considering introducing legislation that will ease restrictions on local wineries, allow them to open earlier and serve food to visitors. Dick Seibert, who owns and runs the Knob Hall Winery near where I grew up in Clear Spring, wants to sell locally made cheese to those who drop by for a tasting or a tour when his new winery building is finished and his first wines start coming in next year. Knob Hall and other wineries in Maryland currently operate under statutes originally intended for liquor stores, and are not allowed to serve food. The legislation being considered would create a new class of liquor license for the state, a W license, that would be designed specifically for wineries.

This could be a rare and welcome example of our representatives in Annapolis actually doing something positive for their constituents. The only member of the local delegation quoted in the story, the normally impotent Chris Shank, says it “sounds like an excellent idea.” No shit. Robert Everhart, chairman of the county liquor board, seems to think it’s a good idea, too. “We’re not against a W license,” he says, although a provision in the new license that would allow wineries to open at 10 A.M. troubles him. He’d rather it were noon. Does he expect many people to show up at Knob Hall before lunch, anxious to get drunk one free sample at a time?

I hope this happens, because it is an excellent idea. I’m not a wine drinker — I don’t drink much alcohol of any kind, I’d rather just have a Coke — but helping a new local industry succeed is in everyone’s best interest.

Winemaking has become sort of a big deal in Maryland the last few decades. We ain’t no Santa Ynez Valley, I haven’t seen Miles and Jack around, but the Maryland Wineries Association has been promoting the industry since 1984, and today its website lists thirty-five wineries either currently operating or opening within the next year, all across the state. Not too shabby. And this is no recent fad, either; the timeline on the MWA’s website puts the earliest winemaking in Maryland in 1648 and has Charles Calvert, son of the man who first settled the colony, planting grapes in 1662. The first American book on viticulture was written by John Adlum, who lived in Havre de Grace over in Harford County. So yeah, Maryland and winemaking, we go way back.

Knob Hall is currently the only winery in Washington County, but if the bill creating the W license passes when it’s introduced into the general assembly next year, Dick Seibert might have some competition. There are still hundreds and hundreds of acres of farmland around here that haven’t been sold to developers. I’d much rather see grapes on those acres than McMansions or shopping centers.

We used to make things here. From 1931 until 1984 Hagerstown was the home of Fairchild Aircraft. We built missiles and planes during World War II, including the C-119 Flying Boxcar which was flown home to our aviation museum over the weekend. No more. We used to make furniture in Hagerstown. Not anymore. We used to be a central location for the railroad — that’s why Hagerstown is still called the Hub City. Now the once great Western Maryland Railroad, where my grandfather worked for most of his adult life, no longer exists. CSX has taken up residence in its old yard, and the Hagerstown Roundhouse Museum struggles to survive not far away, but the stretches of abandoned track west of Big Pool testify to what we have lost, and the empty lot next to CSX where one of the largest roundhouses in the world once stood reminds us of what we have given away. 

So bring on that class W liquor license. Wine’s not airplanes, it’s not furniture, and it’s not the railroad, but it’s something we can produce around here. It’s an industry we can make our own. Maybe someday we’ll be able to define ourselves here in Washington County by our vineyards instead of our abandoned stores and the rows and rows of identical mass-produced houses that cover so much of the countryside.  I’d drink to that.

The good news is most of the candidates oppose teaching creationism in science classes (at least I think so — more on that in a second). The bad news is the proponents of creationism around here are getting a little better at disguising their contempt for proper science education. Our local creationists have been doing their homework at Answers in Genesis, it seems.

I’m not thrilled with the responses the candidates gave. Only one gave the right answer; the others who seemed to oppose teaching creationism alongside evolution as an alternate theory hemmed and hawed and skirted the issue, or outright dodged the question. Dodging a direct question about whether pseudoscience should be taught to students in public school natural science classes doesn’t speak well for your intellect or your guts, school board candidates. Would they be so reticent to come out against teaching Ptolemaic astronomy as an alternative to a heliocentric model of the solar system?

The question asked of the candidates in the Herald-Mail feature read “What is your position on science education, particularly with regard to evolution vs. intelligent design?” Below are the relevant quotations from the responses of each candidate.

Russell Williams: “People who have not learned what a good scientific study is will be taken in by these often worthless products and treatments. Students should be taught that testimonials are worthless in evaluating a product. All students should have a clear understanding of what constitutes a random population, the Hawthorne effect, and what is involved in a double-blind study.”

Thanks for sharing, Russell, but how about answering the goddamn question? I infer from his response that he fancies the scientific method and would be a big opponent of proliferating pseudosciences like creationism. Go check out his picture — he even looks a little bit like a shaved James Randi. But if that’s the case, why did he dodge the question? Wanting to educate students in science so they can recognize hoaxes and phony sales pitches is great. I’m all for graduating students from high schools who aren’t credulous marks-in-waiting. So why not just say, “I oppose teaching intelligent design,” Russell? Your tap-dancing is suspicious.