Category: Just Shelley

Recovered from the Wayback machine.

Today is the 4th of July and St. Louis will again have its spectacular fireworks display—considered one of the top ten in the country—over the Mississippi tonight. Unfortunately, the annual summer festival, Live on the Levee is off the levee due to the recent flood. Currently, water levels in St. Louis are at 37 feet, and falling. Flood stage at downtown St. Louis is 30 feet.

I won’t be attending the fireworks this year, but next year I plan on “adopting a shell” (paying for the cost of a single firework), and joining the party.

Other news from St. Louis this week has not been as bright or happy. We’re relieved that a man wanted for serial killing, has been captured but reminded again of the persistent problems we in the Midwest have with meth addiction and methamphetamine labs. Though state and federal officials have mounted a strong effort to fight the production of meth in Missouri, we’re still one of the highest meth producers in the country.

To fight off the challenge from InBev, Anheuser Busch has had to cut salary benefits and bonuses in order to bring the price of the company stock up without InBev’s intervention. Unfortunately, the move may not be enough as InBev begins the process of attempting a hostile takeover. Oh, in case you’re interested, InBev makes both Beck’s and Stella Artois—wouldn’t you rather have a Bud or Corona?

More jobs were lost to St. Louis when Chrysler announced it would be closing its minivan plant here and cutting back the number of jobs at the remaining truck plant. No one was really surprised at the cuts, but many were disappointed, and these are jobs that Missouri could ill afford to lose.

Too bad we don’t have the biotech industry that wanted to open research centers here in Missouri to help offset these job losses. The biotech industry decided not to invest in this state because of recent legislative efforts against stem cell research.

Governor Blunt signed into law a modification of the state’s harassment laws because of the recent events related to Lori Drew, MySpace, and the suicide of Megan Meier. This was an ill-considered modification. I can agree that threats of violence coming through the internet should be treated the same as those coming in via phone. However, the bill also includes under the term of “harassment” any communication that knowingly causes emotional distress. Now, how would you define emotional distress? Most chat in political weblogs would fall under “harassment” if we use “emotional distress” as a guideline.

However, such acts will be a misdemeanor unless you’re over 21 and the other person is under 17, or you’ve been convicted of harassment in the past, so I guess we can continue to battle it out in weblog comments. Both of these caveats would also have meant that Lori Drew still would not have been charged in this state under this law— she did not write the text that caused Megan to suffer emotional distress. Those messages were written by her 13 year old daughter, and an 18 year old employee.

This same bill also provides support for spanking in the school systems, though how such two acts came to be combined is something I guess only a politician would understand. I also find it difficult to understand how the legislature can support a humiliating punishment such as spanking, which causes enormous emotional distress to children, yet seek to limit the infliction of emotional distress via words through the internet. I guess there must be something in the water in Jefferson City, because the logic of our representatives actions escapes me.

To end on a light note, the fireflies are out this week. One can live through any number of hot, humid summers in order to see fireflies come out at dusk. The effect is magical. I have been attempting to photograph these wonderful creatures and will post my admittedly sad efforts in a later post.

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Before weblogging and RSS—long before Facebook, Twitter, or the next poor bastard service, doomed to be worshiped and then sacrificed on some given Friday—I used to write long essays I’d publish online by hand editing the HTML and posting the static files. Having to manually create the HTML template and design, incorporate navigation, and craft the links and images, took a considerable amount of time.

To justify the time, I wanted to make sure that what I published was worth the effort. I would research a story and edit and re-edit it, and look for additional resources, and then re-edit the story again. My one essay on the giant squid actually took two months to research, and days, not minutes, to edit. Even after publication, I would tweak the pages as old links died, or to refine a section of the writing.

Now, we have wonderful tools to make it easy to put writing or other content online. We can think of a topic, create a writing about it, and publish it—all in five or less minutes. We’ve also come to expect that whatever is published is read as quickly. We’ve moved from multi-page writings, to a single page, to a few paragraphs, to 140 characters or less. Though there is something to be said for brevity, and it takes a true master to create a mental image that can stand alone in 140 characters or less, there still is a place for longer writings. We don’t have to be in a continuous state of noise; a race to create and to consume.

Other than a few posts, such as this, all writings at Just Shelley will be spread across pages, not paragraphs, or characters. Such length will, naturally, require a commitment of your time in addition to your interest. However, I can’t guarantee that your time will be well spent, or even that your interest will be held (though the former will, naturally, be dependent on the latter). All I can guarantee is that I probably took longer to create the writing than you will in reading it.

I am using a tool to publish, true, and even providing an Atom feed. There are no categories, tags, or taxonomies, though, because everything here fits under one bucket: it is something that interests me. Taxonomies would just clutter the site’s zen-like structure, as well as set expectations I’m almost certainly not going to fulfill.

To further add to my state of web regression, I’ve not enabled comments, though I’d love to hear from you through some other means. As anachronistic as it may seem nowadays, this is not a site that’s community built. It’s not that I don’t care about you or community, or that I’m asking you to be a passive observer. My hope is that if I don’t inspire you—to talk, to write, to howl at the moon— I make you think; if I don’t make you think, I provide comfort; if I don’t comfort, I entertain; if I don’t entertain, at a minimum, I hope I’ve kept you in the house long enough not to be hit on one of those rare occasions when a meteorite falls from space and lands in front of your home just as you were leaving.

Just Shelley is my place to be still, and my invitation for you to be still with me.

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

second update Unfortunately the Hesco barrier erected by the National Guard failed. Though I admire the tenacity of the Guard, I’m not surprised the barriers failed.

Winfield is now, more or less, cut off, and many homes will, unfortunately, be damaged. How many, no one knows for sure at this time. The town gave it their all, but the Mississippi is one big river.

update This NECN in Boston shows how fast the water flows through a levee break, and how widespread the flooding is now. The National Guard is disheartened by the break, as they worked on the levee for nine days. This levee was also the destination for the sand bags I helped fill.

The flood crest has been raised at St. Louis, and there’s a possibility of flooding south of Lemay Ferry Road from River Des Peres. This is the drainage river that runs through St. Louis, and is also the waterway that puts us most at risk during a flood. However, the Mississippi would have to crest about 13 feet higher to put us at risk.

We will have to rethink how we manage our waterways in the future. We can’t keep putting our fingers in the dike, and hoping for the best.

The last levee in Lincoln County still holding back the water breached this morning. I don’t think anyone was surprised when a sand boil, a mix of water and sand, appeared in the side, signaling that water was undercutting the foundation of the levee. The folks in Winfield and surrounding areas made a mighty effort to save the levee, but it was not enough.

The waters should be cresting this weekend, though we have more rain in both the Mississippi’s upper river basin, and along the Missouri river basin. Whether this means the flooding will continue hasn’t yet been determined.

Another major event impacting on St. Louis is the InBev offer for our local, beloved Anheuser-Busch. A-B, the largest beer company in the US, has remained in control by family members to this day, and has been an important St. Louis and Missouri business. A-B is very generous to the community; many members of the family are very active environmentalists; from all accounts the company is a good employer— well, needless to say, no one wants InBev to buy the company but greedy, rapacious stock holders.

We’ve already had warnings from employees in other countries where InBev has made acquisitions, and left a swath of destruction in its path. By all accounts, InBev is only interested in profits and power, not a legacy.

This week, A-B turned down the offer, and InBev has already made the opening move of a hostile take over. Hopefully the A-B people can hold their own, but this war will leave this community scarred. The only way that A-B might be able to hold off the bid is by decreasing costs and increasing profits, both of which could mean the end of our gentle neighbor, regardless of who owns the company. I would wish InBev in Missouri…right in the middle of the Mississippi river.

Lastly, St. Louis’ Archbishop Burke is leaving for a position in Rome. Burke’s four year tenure here has been marked by disruption and antagonism, as Burke trounced Catholic presidential candidate Kerry for supporting choice with abortion, excommunicated the members of the St. Stanislaus Kostka, just because the church members wanted to control their own property, and condemned one of the local rabbis for opening her arms to women wanting to be ordained as Catholic priests. Burke has also skirted perilously close to crossing the line in allowable political activity, going just far enough to try to influence local and national elections, but without endangering the church tax exempt status.

I am not surprised at Burke’s appointment to Rome, and wrote not long ago that he had ambitions beyond St. Louis. I am, also, not disappointed at Burke’s leaving, though whether the man appointed in his place will be any better for the community is hard to say.