Tag: Canada

Audio Tape – How Quaint

When we cleaned out the house last month, a lot had to be thrown away. There were certain items, however, where I drew the line. Specifically, I kept audio tapes. These little five and seven inch reels chronicle my time in radio.

I know I work in television, but in many ways I still maintain my undying love for radio. It’s where my broadcasting career started. In high school, it was the career I lusted after.

Radio has changed. What I found romantic has been beaten out of the medium by national chains and their bean counters. I still love radio.

Unfortunately, my audio tapes represent a dead storage format. I’m not sure audio tape recorders are made anymore. I don’t have one.

We used to have a very nice audio deck at the TV station. Where it is now is a mystery to me. Audio, like everything else, is recorded digitally, not on tape.

Luckily, my friend Rick still has two audio decks in his basement. One is in the studio, the other sadly sits in storage. Even the deck in the studio needed to be re-cabled before we could roll on the tapes.

They’re too nice to chuck, too dated to use.

First, we listened to an aircheck from the early 1970s. I was working at WBT in Charlotte, NC. 1110-WBT was a blowtorch – a 50,000 watt AM station that could be heard from Canada to Florida (and we had a jingle which claimed just that).

I thought I was a pretty good disk jockey then. Wrong. This aircheck will never see the light of day again.

There were a few things of note on the tape. Our hourly IDs were voiced by Johnny Olsen, who was the announcer on virtually every Goodson-Toddman game show of the era. Rick, who can recognize most contemporary VO guys, drew a blank.

Trust me, back then he was immediately recognizable.

This tape was meant to get me a job. In order to attract some attention, I opened with a medley of jingle singers trying to sing my name – and failing. That was actually pretty cool.

The other tapes included more recent airchecks, a few custom jingles and the “TM Song.” TM, a jingle company in Dallas, produced a sales presentation jingle, singing all their clients call letters.

There’s just no way I could have let these tapes become unplayable. And now, they’re stored digitally and protected from another era of electronic obsolescence.

Blogger’s note: I have worked on this audio for over an hour. How frustrating!

For some reason you sometimes have to click on the play button twice. I wish I knew why. Adding this reminder is much simpler than fixing it.

How I Became A Maine-iac

Here’s the setup. I had vacation time I needed to take (and there’s more where that came from). So did my friend Bob from North Carolina. Neither of us wanted to spend much money, but he had a plan.

If we went on vacation to Maine, he could do some work for a radio station that carries his syndicated morning show, and we could visit Maine on the cheap. Anyway, he loves Maine and is very attached to the radio station in Bangor where he’s been heard for 10 years.

We made our plans, such as they were.

We’d drive up to Maine on Sunday and stay until Wednesday. I needed to be back in time to hand off the camera, “Clicky,” to Helaine and Stef who were going to a concert.

In return for Bob’s on-air visit, the station would arrange a place for us to stay. This was the first in what would be a string of incredible luck and good fortune that marked our trip.

Bob flew up from Charlotte, and we left midday Sunday. Though my car’s a convertible, you can’t drop the top when the trunk’s full – and it was full. That’s OK. Our 415 mile, six hour fifteen minute, trip was a little long for that much wind noise. And, as it turned out, once we got to Maine, the top stayed down!

We drove through Connecticut, into Massachusetts and then onto the Mass Pike. We exited near Worcester and then headed northeast into the Merrimack Valley and New Hampshire. From there, we paralleled the coast, without seeing it, on I-95.

Maine is a big state. Once you’re north of Portland, there is little but trees to see. We watched for moose!

Off the Interstate, we drove east toward Mt. Desert Island. It sounds foolish when you first say it, but it’s pronounced “deh-ZERT.”

The topography of Mt. Desert Island was set into motion as the Earth’s tectonic plates collided to form mountains. It’s only in the last tens of thousands of years that the true lay of the land was set by the advance and retreat of glaciers.

It’s an island – you expect to see water. There’s more than you expect! The island was scoured by glaciers, which formed lots of lakes, harbors and Eastern United States’ only fjord!

Our home was in the town of Southwest Harbor. More succinctly, it was on Southwest Harbor.

Because of the shape of the harbor, it has wide tide swings. High and low tide can sometimes be separated by 10-15 feet! For the tidally deprived, that’s a difference in depth. The actual water’s edge can, and does, retreat by hundreds of feet.

Our landlord/hosts were Mary Jo and Rhonda. They own the house we were in, one next door and another home well inland. They could not have been friendlier or more gracious.

Let me stop here and say, everyone was friendly and gracious. This wasn’t because I’m TV-boy, or because Bob has been on the radio for a decade. People on Mt. Desert Island and everywhere else we were in Maine were just nice.

The perfect example came later in the trip. We were on a tiny island – only 75 full time residents. I was in the general store looking for Chapstick. No luck. As I was about to walk out, a woman approached me, handed me one, and said it was in her purse, unopened.

I offered to pay for it, but she said (and this is an exact quote), “It’s my good deed for the day.” To me, that one sentence typified Mainers.

Our house was interesting, in that it was bigger inside than out. Built like a boat, it had slightly low ceilings and no wasted space.Upstairs there were three bedrooms. The two Bob and I used each had large picture windows that opened onto the harbor.

The bathroom was compact as well. I wouldn’t have mentioned it, but I’ve never been in a shower so small you had to be under the water at all times.

After unpacking, we headed to Cadillac Mountain. Cadillac is inside Acadia National Park, and at 1,500 feet above sea level, offers an amazing view in all directions.

While we waited for the Sun to set, we looked around. The air was clear and clean and richly blue. Below us were Bar Harbor and a number of coastal islands. Holland America’s Amsterdam was leaving port, continuing its New England/Canada itinerary.

We left the mountain and drove into Bar Harbor. With only 5,000 or so permanent residents, it is definitely a tourist town. However, don’t think honky tonk.

This is Mt. Desert Island. There are no 7-Eleven’s, McDonald’s, Starbucks or any other franchise or (shudder) big box stores. It is 1950s America as depicted on sitcoms – all white (97.88%), all Christian, all industriously hearty.

We had to get up early (for me) on Monday. Bob was going on the radio from a natural foods supermarket over 50 miles away. This would be the beginning of the “Fatiguing of Geoff.”

Getting up early is no problem. It’s the getting to bed early part I can’t hack. Day-by-day that took its toll.

The appearance was Bob’s. I was just an appendage. Still, I was impressed with how he handled himself and the genuine affection of the listeners who came by.

On Sunday’s arrival I had discovered my laptop’s PC card slot was no longer functioning. That meant no Internet! There was, however, an Internet Cafe in the market. This would be my only time online during the vacation.

It’s tough to remember each and every thing we did, and in the proper order, but we visited nearly every inch of the island and its three main towns: Bar Harbor, Southwest Harbor and Northeast Harbor.

We also ate lobster. I’m not talking one meal here. We ate lobster twice each day – lunch and dinner.

Lunch was a lobster roll. Think chicken salad on a hot dog bun, but substitute lobster for the chicken! Dinner was boiled lobster.

It doesn’t take long to understand lobster is a major employer on Mt. Desert Island. It’s not some ‘photo op’ touristy thing. You see men, and at least one woman I saw, scurrying about on stubby lobster boats nearly every time you see water.

Lobster buoys, the makings of the prototypical Downeast Maine photo, are everywhere. Yes, they’re hung on walls and piled on docks, but any stretch of water deep enough for lobsters has hundreds, sometimes thousands of traps marked with buoys.

Though surrounded by water, Mt. Desert Island is not a bather’s paradise. The water is too damned cold, even during the height of the season, when it’s in the low 50&#176s!

Even if the water was warmer, there is only one sandy beach – Sandy Beach! The rest of the coast is speckled with large rock outcroppings, and crashing surf.

We spent part of one afternoon at Sandy Beach and Thunder Hole – both are in Acadia National Park. Thunder Hole is a natural rock formation which, when conditions are right, produces 30-40 foot tall columns of sea spray accompanied by thunderous booms.

Though Hurricane Florence was passing off to the east, and we came before and stayed through high tide, Thunder Hole was silent.

On Wednesday, our last day, we took the mail boat past the Bear Island Lighthouse to Islesford on Little Cranberry Island. This tiny community has a permanent population of 75.

At first, I thought it was neat to be an interloper in their little society. Then I thought, do they feel as if they’re zoo animals on display? Wherever reality lies, I felt welcome and I loved the island!

It is small enough to transverse on foot. Bob and I followed an unmarked road to a lonely stretch of rocky beach. We turned around and walked, cross island, to an art gallery.

It didn’t take long to figure out there was something strange about the island’s vehicles. Most homes had a car or truck parked outside – a very old car or truck.

When the island’s tiny, your car’s engine will never wear out. However, the exterior is another story. Exposed to salt air 24/7/365, the finish dims and sometimes rust pokes through.

This was a great trip with a great friend – a guy I met my first day as a professional broadcaster, over 35 years ago.

The trip itself was better than the sum of its parts. Yes, Maine is spectacularly beautiful – possibly the most beautiful place I’ve ever been.

It was more beautiful because the Sun was strong each day, the temperatures mild, the stars very bright. I might not have enjoyed it as much if it hadn’t cooperated with me. Still, that’s an outcome I didn’t have to worry about.

I shot over 1,000 photos on this trip. Some of them illustrate this entry. There are nearly 180 more in my online photo gallery. I hope you get a chance to take a peek.

Global Warming And Me

It is increasingly difficult to be a skeptic when it comes to global warming. That’s not because I am doubting my scientific beliefs, but because it’s more socially acceptable to be fearful of Vanuatu being inundated or Greenland turning green.

I was listening to the Faith Middleton Show today on Connecticut Public Radio. Global Warming was the topic and Dean James Gustave Speth of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies was a guest.

Dean Speth is a heavy hitter on the subject. I could copy his CV here, but I am so overshadowed by his achievements, I’d rather not risk the comparison.

Still, after hearing Dean Speth, I felt I had to send him this note:

Dear Dean Speth,

I listened to your broadcast today with great interest. Though I am skeptical of the harshest global warming pronouncements, I enjoy listening to experts, such as yourself and learning when I can.

Trust me when I say, it would be much easier to be a believer. It is a much more socially acceptable viewpoint to have.

Nearly ten years ago, I was invited to the White House to listen to then Vice President Gore speak on the subject. In spite of all I’d been told, he was a masterful speaker, making scientific points to an audience of meteorologists without benefit of notes or a written script. And yet, I wasn’t won over.

Though it’s purely anecdotal, most of the other meteorologists I spoke with then and speak with now, feel as I do. As operational forecasters, we use computer modeling on a daily basis and understand how weak it can be. We know we can’t always forecast tomorrow’s temperature accurately, much less next month’s or a few decades from now. Heck, we can’t always accurately initialize the models! It’s not for lack of trying.

Long range global modeling makes too many assumptions and takes too many shortcuts to keep me comfortable.

Unfortunately, the rhetoric concerning global warming has gotten so out of hand that lay people are starting to say they notice it! Summers are warmer. Storms are stronger. Winters have less snow.

Last summer and fall, our wild tropical season was attributed by many (Trenberth and Shea as an example) to global warming. Has it abated this year?

If global warming is science and not politics, why is every consequence I hear a negative one? Are there no positives, even in the most dire global warming scenarios? Won’t I save on heating oil? How about road wear and plowing in North America, Europe and parts of Asia? Won’t Siberia and the Great Plains of the US and Canada have a longer growing season?

And if Kyoto is the answer, why are the exclusions that exist in that treaty, and other exclusions which some countries have unilaterally declared (Germany’s removal of coal restrictions) for themselves, never mentioned? You made no mention of these today when declaring all the industrial countries had ratified Kyoto. If I were India or China, I’d ratify a million Kyotos which weaken my competitors and don’t touch me.

Again, it would be so much easier to believe. I am not a political extremist. I believe a clean and pure environment is good in the abstract. I am just scared we’re being sold an expensive bill of goods based on shaky science and strong emotional appeal.

Thank you for taking the time to read my email.

Sincerely,

Geoff Fox

Hamden, CT

I don’t expect Dean Speth to read my email and have a Eureka moment. I didn’t expect to be won over when I listened either.

Still, one of us has to be wrong. If it’s me, I’d rather know now than later. I hope he feels the same way.

Visiting Colima Volcano

Aboard the Norwegian Star

I woke up early enough to hear the Captain on the P.A. system. The harbor pilot was coming on for our entry into the harbor at Manzanillo. I moved to the balcony.

It certainly was the warmest we’ve felt so far. The humidity was way up too. That’s the way it should be, nearly 1,500 miles south of Los Angeles.

The ship slowed as it moved into the channel. Along side, two tugs watched our every move (though we weren’t using the tugs for guidance).

A small boat with a handful of soldiers moved up and down alongside the ship. This boat was loaded for bear. It looked like everyone onboard was holding an automatic weapon.

After a shower and quick breakfast, I was off to meet Gilles. He would be my guide for Colima Volcano.

Two gangways led of the ship. I went down one, looked, didn’t see Gilles and moved on. I went to the second. He wasn’t there either!

I paced the quay for 20 minutes, looking for a tall, thin man with a volcano t-shirt. Nothing. I asked a guard. Still no positive response.

I borrowed a phone from one of the ship’s officers and called Helaine and Stef. They were gone.

Panic was starting to set in. Stood up, I’d be alone in the ‘crying lane’ on the ship.

Back up in the cabin, I re-read Gilles email. He would meet me at the gate. I hadn’t seen a gate. Oops. I’d stopped too soon.

Long story short, it wasn’t long before I was in Gilles SUV and we were heading out of Manzanillo.

Gilles is around 6′ 2″, thin and looks like the college teacher he is. Though from France, via Canada, he is married to a woman he met here (also at the university). They have a four year old daughter.

After a few minutes of city streets we were on a divided highway heading out-of-town. The ocean was on our right, though not for long.

You’ll be glad to know there are toll roads in Mexico. This was one. Gilles fished out a 100 peso note for the 85 peso toll and we continued.

We began seeing the volcano over 25 miles away. Even then it was a large presence.

As we approached Colima, we left the highway for a more traditional road, then cobblestones through a town and finally onto a winding rutted dirt road running along the edge of a cliff.

It wasn’t long before we came to a substantial gate blocking our progress. There was no lock. We opened it and continued, closing the gate behind us.

There was another gate farther up the path and we repeated the process.

A few minutes later, the path opened up and we were in a meadow. Cows were lazily grazing the short grass on this open space, about 5,000 feet above sea level. East of us, dominating the sky was Colima. It is magnificent.

Even if you’d never seen a volcano, it is immediately obvious. The sides are steep and a light gray, courtesy of the ash which accompanies eruptions.

Gilles took some cloth chairs from the back of the SUV and placed them under a banyon tree. We sat and watched, hoping there would be some activity. The volcano does ‘go off’ a few times a day – though not in a cataclysmic fashion.

As we watched super heated steam escape from the top, another truck pulled up. Inside were three Mexican men, in the forties. They sat down and watched too.

I asked if I could take a photo and then spoke with them. Though from Colima, one admitted he had never been to this spot. But, even with the volcano an ever present part of their lives, they wanted to come and watch. They sat and drank wine.

Even without major activity, Colima was active. The plume’s steam intensity varied with time. Every once in a while a different plume of steam or smoke would rise from one of the mountain’s faces. Gilles said, at night you would often see the glow of molten lava.

After a while we turned to leave. After all, I had a ship to catch.

I think the altitude, or maybe just the excitement and early angst got to me. I became very tired and began to yawn. It was uncontrollable – almost comic, as I kept taking down those huge swigs of air.

I’m back on the ship now. It was quite a day.

This is one of those things you remember forever.

JetBlue Emergency Update

When JetBlue’s Airbus A320 landed with its nose gear perpendicular to its motion, I wondered if anyone would try and connect this incident with JetBlue’s maintanence, performed in El Salvador and primarily by mechanics not certified by the FAA.

JetBlue doesn’t even fly out of the US, except to get its planes repaired or maintained.

Today the story hit the Washington Post. I’ve attached their story to the link below.

Continue reading “JetBlue Emergency Update”

My Internet Connection S-L-O-W-S to a Crawl

Sunday evening, playing poker on the laptop, I first noticed the problem. My Internet connection would stop for a few seconds – sometimes 10s of seconds – before resuming. The poker site I play at allows you to check the connection of the others at your table. They were fine, I was not.

Comcast has been very dependable. So, I did nothing, figuring all would be well on Monday morning. Guess again.

Helaine asked me what was going on. Her connection was slow. Steffie later chimed in with the same complaint. “The Internet is sketchy,” she said.

Between the three of us we spend an awful lot of time online and we’re spoiled with reasonably fast connections. This was totally unacceptable.

I decided to call Comcast when I came home from dinner. I worked my way through the phone tree (press 1, press 2, press 1 again). My hold time was somewhere around 10 wasted minutes.

On hold systems have two options:

1) Incessant announcements (which drive you nuts when you start hearing them the fifth, sixth, twentieth time).

2) No announcements, just a little light elevator music. That was Comcast’s choice and it’s really not much better.

While on hold I wondered if I was really in the queue? Maybe I’d be listening to these European studio musicians for the rest of my natural life!

A pleasant sounding woman, from Central Ontario it turned out, answered the call. She made me jump all the usual hoops – reboot, unplug, replug, etc. She could see there was a problem with packet loss and offered to send a service tech, but the system wouldn’t let her schedule one. Could I call back later?

After work, and on whisper mode with Helaine asleep in the next room, I dialed Comcast again. As I was waiting for a live person, I scooted over to DSLreports.com to see if anyone else had reported this trouble. The Comcast Connecticut thread was four pages long! I had plenty of company.

This time a Canadian guy (I didn’t ask if he was Canadian – but I worked in Buffalo, just across the Niagara River from Canada and know their regionalisms, eh) picked up. He started to do his dance and talk about sending a technician to the house, but I stopped him.

The problem isn’t here, in my house. It’s far away at some router. I even know the router’s address: 12.125.51.34. It’s owned by AT&T and probably serves as Comcast’s connection from Connecticut to the Internet in general.

If I know this, why doesn’t Comcast’s tech support guy? Why spend money and send technicians when there’s no problem they’ll fix? Why not tell me loads of others have reported problems, we’re working on it?

If I asked someone high up at Comcast whether they wanted this fixed right away and wanted their customers informed, I’m sure the answer would be yes. They want the best possible result spending the least amount of money. Yet their actions show there’s a disconnect between what would benefit them and their customers and what they’re delivering. And, they might not know this customer service problem even exists.

There is no one served by what went on tonight. Not me. Not Comcast. Their phone people were polite and pleasant but never even brought me one step closer to satisfaction.

I really don’t want to have to call back on this tomorrow.

Radio Is In My Blood

I am not really in television – it’s more radio with pictures. Radio was always my first love. As a kid, I knew I’d go into radio (and I did). TV was an afterthought. Other than the actual skill of forecasting the weather, there’s nothing I do on TV that I didn’t do on radio first.

This is going to make me sound old.

I went to high school in the same building that housed the New York City Board of Education’s radio station. We were FM back when no one listened to FM. That was mainly because no one owned an FM radio!

WNYE-FM had an eclectic mix of educational programs. It’s tough to visualize today, but teachers in NYC would bring clunky Granco FM radios into their classrooms so the students could listen to, “Let’s Look at the News” or “Young Heroes.” There’s little in the way of TV today that’s equivalent.

Looking for a way to get out of conventional English classes, I became a radio actor for English class credit. I was cast in dozens and dozens of morality plays and historical recreations. I was young Orville Wright, Thomas Jefferson, Jackie Robinson (in that less politically correct time) and lots of kids named Billy.

In the morality plays, I often had lines like, “If I ride my bike over the hill, mom will never know.” By the second act, my arm was in a cast and I was sorry. In these shows, no transgression went unpunished.

All through high school, I listened to radio – listening to the disk jockeys more than the music. The disk jockeys were cool and hip and in control. They talked back to the boss with impunity, or so it seemed to me. They were quick and witty and sarcastic. I wanted to be a disk jockey.

Though I grew up in New York City, my favorite radio station was WKBW in Buffalo. You could only hear “KB” from dusk ’til dawn, but it boomed in like a local at our apartment in Queens.

The nighttime jocks on “KB” were unbelievable. Over time, there were Joey Reynolds, Bud Ballou, Jack Armstrong and others. KB Pulse Beat news with Irv Weinstein, who I’d later know personally, was a tabloid newscast, back when rock stations had to have newscasts.

This is not to say I didn’t listen to WABC in NYC, because I did. There’s little doubt that Dan Ingram is the best disk jockey to ever point a finger at a board operator. He was all the things that the “KB” guys were, but he operated within the more heavily produced WABC universe. At WABC there was a jingle for everything except going to the bathroom… and maybe there was a jingle for that too.

Back on track… must get back on track… where is this going?

In college, I knew I wanted to be like them. I wasn’t as cool as they were. I certainly didn’t have ‘pipes’ (the euphemism for a deep, throaty voice). Still, I wanted to be on the air.

At home, or in the car, I’d practice ‘talking up records.’ That means talking over the instrumental bridge that opens songs before the singing begins, and stopping on a dime, effortlessly, as the singing began. That’s called “hitting vocal,” and I was very good at that.

I started in radio at WSAR in Fall River, MA. I was part time, making $2.50 an hour. Before long, the company I was working for, Knight Quality Stations (some of which weren’t on at night, and none of which had quality), sent me to Florida to be program director at WMUM, aka – “Mother.” I was still making $2.50 an hour or $130 for a 6 day, 48 hour week.

WMUM was an “underground station.” Again, it’s a concept tough to understand today. We played everything without resorting to a playlist. It was some sort of misguided Utopian programming concept that never really took hold anywhere for long. But in 1969, at age 19, “Mother” was an unreal place to be.

We were hip and cool and broadcast from a building located adjacent to the parking lot for Lake Worth, Florida’s beach. From our studio, through the soundproof glass, you could watch the sun rise over the Atlantic Ocean. The beach was always filled with girls in bathing suits.

“Mother” didn’t hold its allure for long. Within 18 months, I had moved on to our sister AM station and then two other stations in the West Palm Beach market.

At age 21, I went to Charlotte, NC. There I did nights on a station that truly was heard from Canada to Florida. During my tenure, we even got mail from Cuba and Scandinavia. WBT was a classic radio station with good facilities, excellent promotion and nurturing management. I didn’t know how good I had it until I left.

I became a radio gypsy, moving to Cleveland and Phoenix and finally Philadelphia. I moved enough to qualify for the U-Haul Gold Card. I worked nights at WPEN in Philadelphia for a few years before moving to mornings.

We were a good AM station, playing oldies, at about the time music on AM was dying… rapidly.

I think I was pretty good at WPEN. If you’ll remember that this aircheck is over 25 years old, and I was more than 25 years younger than I am now, you can listen to it by clicking here. I really enjoyed what I was doing.

After a while we could see things weren’t going well in the ratings. A new program director was brought in to change things. Brandon Brooks, my friend and newsman on the show, came to me. Things were going to change but, “Don’t worry Geoff. They can’t fire you.”

I was gone within two hours.

My radio career never got back to that place. I continued to work, but it wasn’t the same. I finally ended up at WIFI, a top-40 FM station where I constantly worried that I, personally, was leading to the degradation of youth and society.

The scene played over and over again as I answered the hitline. I’d say, “Hello, WIFI.” On the other end, a young voice would respond, “Play, ‘We Don’t Need No Education.'” To me, it was like screeching chalk on a blackboard.

WIFI was my last stop before getting into TV. Still I miss radio nearly each and every day.

This is not to say I want to leave TV. I don’t. But, I do have this fantasy where I do radio in the morning and TV in the evening. That’s why, whenever someone from radio calls and asks me to fill-in or come on the air, I jump at the chance. It’s really an involuntary response.

It’s still in my blood.

The reason I’m writing all of this is because of someone I saw today at a charity event. I was helping present a check and toys to support shelters for abused women at the Verizon Wireless store in North Haven. A man walked up to me and said hello. It was Pete Salant.

I know Pete, though not that well. My sense is, Pete could go one-on-one with me with any bit of radio minutiae. It runs through his blood as well. In fact, with him broadcasting is an inbred thing, as his dad&#185 was a giant when CBS was the “Tiffany Network.”

Pete was known mostly as a radio programmer – and a damned good one. It’s probable, though I really don’t remember anymore, that within Pete’s career, he turned me down for a job… maybe more than once. I know he ran places where I wanted to work. Today, he creates commercials for radio station that run on TV.

It was good to see him. It’s always good to think about radio.

&#185 Pete tells me it was actually his cousin… and not a very close one… who was with CBS: “Dick Salant was my cousin twice-removed (grandfather’s first cousin), not my dad.” I’m going to leave the original posting as is, because I want to try and keep this blog as a contemporaneous record, but add the correction here.

Phantom Lightning

As the power failure/blackout story progresses, the Canadian power authority has begun to blame a lightning strike in Northern New York State.

This would be a subject I have some expertise in. So, take my word. There was no lightning strike in Upstate New York this afternoon that might have set off the blackout. Period. End of story.

Continue reading “Phantom Lightning”