Monday, September 23, 2013

Snuffy Smith's Sugjestionions for New Sitty Seal




                 Official Portsmouth City Seal
     which our officious First Ward councilman
            Kevin W. Johnson wants to change




   




















        Kevin, how do you feel
        About this new sitty seal?
        Do you think it duz the trick,
        Or am I just a redneck hick
        Who really duzn’t know
        His ass from Ohio?










  What Porchmuth needs is more class,
  More wine tastin’ and less grass,
  More Scarlit Tan’gers,
  Less fly-by-night shitty man’gers.
  In short, less sons-off-guns
  And many more Kev’n Johnsons.








“The devil is running Scioto County.”
              Ohio Governor John Kasich




         While we’re at it, Kevin,
        Talkin’ ‘bout Porchmuth as heaven,
        Lets keep things on the levil
        And not furget the devil
        Witch Kasick & Co. feel
        Should be on our sitty seal.









A sitty seal should have a hero,
But on that score we’s come up zero.
Greeks had Hurlculies, Romuns Ceesar,
Persha had Irksies, Russya the Zar.
‘stead of Promeeth’us, the fire bring’r,
We got the guy who gives us the fing’r.








A pritty flour don’t need no gildin’
But a sitty seal should have a bildin’.
I mean what’s a seal wif out an edifuss?
Its like a hernia wif out a truss.
I’m nom’natin’ Martings, I am,
Our sitty’s greatist hystorical scam.
























Heers D’rek, folks, Mr. Kleen Gov’ment.
Who was surely heaven-sent.
But his resyoumay left out somethin’:
His crime and suspendered sentencin’
‘bout witch the search commitease
Sed knot a word—what a sitty!










The best and brite-test should be on the seal,
Like Kalb who closed the Ameresco deal.
With Kalb and Malone to help with math,
The sitty wont have to take a bath,
And D’rek Allen, if he’s not to dense,
Wont get ‘nother suspendered sent’nce.









‘bove all The Mall must be on the seal
‘cuz we believe The Mall wuz the reel deal.
Youse knows yur from Porchmuth if youse b’lieve
In The Mall, for who’s death we greeve
Even tho’ it finely came a cropp’r
In the mind of owr fingerin’ d’velop’r.










Speekin’ of suspendered sent’nces
And crooks who didnt do penences
And who us’n wants on the sitty seal,
I’m gonna nom’nate Tom Bihl
‘cuz wen alls sed and done
Toms a real crooked sun-of-a-gun.









Jes’ like we furget the drawers and hewers,
So we furget the sitty’s overflowin’ sewers
And the local awffall that flows threw ‘em.
Oh, how we wish we never knew ‘em!
Shure, we want sewers on our seal
‘long with the afourmenshunned Tom Bihl.









Iff’n you turn back the old clock
Shure, Plimuths got its hysterical rock
But thay says every dogs got its bone
And we’ve got a rock of our own.
Shure Jim Kob stole it from Kentucky,
Frum where’s it wuz a layin’ in the mucky.








Dont think we got sumpin’ to hide.
Shure we got our Bonnie ‘n Clyde,
As soon as plug some won as steal.
We’s proud to have ‘em on are seal.
There mobs the infumus S.O.G.P.
Bin robbin’ us since 1963.









Friday, September 20, 2013

SSU: Offensive Ranking


Claudius in Hamlet” “Oh, my offence is rank. It smells to heaven.”





Do you belong to some group or institution, such as a college, by which you are at least occasionally or possibly even often embarrassed? Let me admit I do. The college by which I am embarrassed is Shawnee State U., where I taught for a number of years. Today, for example, the Portsmouth Daily Times  featured a story about “SSU Being Listed Among ‘Smartest’ Colleges.”  Granted it is ranked pretty low on that smart list of 501 colleges, at 460, but still it’s among the smartest. Because college rankings are a circulation building/ money making racket that U.S. News should be given the credit or blame for starting. U.S. News use to divide up about 500 colleges into four levels I, II, III, IV. But that created public relations problems, especially for those schools in group IV, the bottom group. SSU used to regularly rank near the bottom of group IV. When it did, you didn’t read about it in the PDT. You didn’t hear SSU bragging about it either. When I reported on the low rankings in River Vices, some people at SSU said the rankings were not reliable and should be ignored. But now it’s front-page news when SSU is among the smartest, even if it is pretty far down  the smart list.  What happened? Did SSU go from one of the dumbest to one of the smartest universities in America in about ten years? Unfortunately, no. What changed was how U.S. News classified the colleges. They were not I, II, III, IV. No, they were collectively all classified as I, as smart. It’s like the children in Lake Wobegon, Garrison Keillor’s imaginary hometown in Minnesota, “where all the children are above average.” All the colleges in U.S. News are now smart, it’s just that some are smarter than others. Do you understand why Public Relations pays so well? It’s because the way a thing appears is more important than what it really is, and public relations people specialize in making something appear what it’s not. Those colleges at or near the bottom are still smart, no matter how low they are.  

Shawnee State may be higher in the bottom group than it was ten years ago, but that may be because U.S. News in its ever changing criteria for ranking now attaches more importance to SAT scores than it did in the past and it allows universities, SSU included, to not report SATs for all of its students, thereby providing a skewed ranking. Some institutions deliberately have submitted falsified or incomplete data about students to U.S. News. Of course with the high ethical standards that prevail in southern Ohio, SSU would never deliberately do something like that, but in what it fails or is unable to report it has an advantage over institutions that can and do provide data on all students. I was surprised to see that in the rankings of the Washington Monthly magazine, which some people think more accurate than U.S. News rankings, SSU is ranked about in the top half of its top 200 smartest colleges. I couldn’t believe some of the good colleges SSU is ranked above in the Washington Monthly list. At this rate, SSU may be ranking as high as Ivy League colleges in another ten years. But would that be what it really is or only what it appears to be? An education is not worth much if it does not include critical thinking, that does not stress the importance of distinguishing between what something really is and what we  would like to believe it is. SSU has helped many students get an education and get ahead in life and I am glad I did my small part in helping them. But I would not be helping them if I encouraged them to mistake appearances for realities.

Those professors at SSU were right ten or fifteen years ago to question the validity of U.S. News rankings and they would be right to continue to question them now, for if SSU was not nearly as bad as it used to be ranked, it is not nearly as good as it is now ranked, as the State of Ohio recognizes by using the graduation rates at public colleges to determine how much funding those colleges get. And by that criteria SSU faces a grim fiscal future and doesn’t have Vern Riffe to bail it out any longer. About the time it is ranked as high as Princeton, SSU may go under. By that time it might have to revise Claudius’s line in Hamlet to say, “O, my rank is offensive. It smells to heaven.”

Sunday, September 15, 2013

Sitty Man'ger's Going to Hell, Snuffy's Goin' Fishin'



"According to a story in the Celina, Ohio newspaper, The Daily Standard, dated Oct. 2, 2004, “Former Celina Safety-Service Director Derek Allen received a $250 fine and a suspended 90-day jail sentence in Miami County Municipal Court in Piqua (Ohio) on Sept. 24 for a count of dereliction of duty, a second degree misdemeanor.”   My Daily Tribune (click here)



I’m gonna go fishin’


Deer Reeders,

The bankruptures, drunks, adulterators, and drugged deelin’ pimps on shitty clowncil’s hired a convicted crim’null fur shitty man’ger wen they’se cud have had a Porchmuth holler boy like me whooze only recurd is fifty speedin’ vileations like this shitty clowncil Saddle feller and that con Kob  krook.  Iffen they ‘loud me chaw I’d be the shitty man’ger today. And  thay dint even tell Porchmuth sitisins they wuz a hirin’ a crim’null named Dreck Allen till it wuz fate d'accomplished  if you’ll pardon my  French. Dont  missunnerstan’ me. I’m thinkin’ it makes sense hirin’ a crim’null fur shitty man’ger cuz after awl this is Porchmuth and you  want sumbody with experiens cuz if your  startin’ a howse of ill repute your not gonna adverties for virgins, are  you? But shootn’t you  tell sitisins  your  hirin’ a hooker and not virgin and then not spring it on ‘em after the knots bin tied, or tell ‘em on the  weddin’ nite, so to speak. “Oh, by the way, your bride, I meen your shitty man’ger’s, a hooker” withowt  alertin’ the sitisins first? No, that ain’t mountain dew, not in my holler. My addvice to this Allen feller is dont give up your day job just yet cuz this scandul’s gonna  snowbowl like a snaky slalom in Boozy  Idoho,  and our officious First Ward  shitty clowncil  member Cavein Jonson  will haf to go back to the drawin’  bored to cum up wif another skeem, and by the way he’s not the only Cavein Jonson on the shitty clowncil. Thay say the rode to hell is paved with Cavein Jonsons. Cavein W. Jonson wants the bran’ new shitty man’ger to  be howsed in the Martin’ Bildin’ a few doors  down frum hiz faled so-called hysteric antic shoppe in witch the banker Crampp whose dubbled up with the  p's bailed him out and now  lives there that’s goin’ threw a change of life after leavin’ the SOGP in a huff becuz the govinment money being laundered sumhow went down the drane with the fall guy. Crampp's distensing hisself from the bank so’s he wont disgrace it should he be indicated. Awl this the new shitty man’ger  wood have knowed  in time. First they don’t tell you he’s a crim’null and then they don’t  tell you he waz derelection in hiz duty and they wont tell hiz celery becuz  you don’t want to bounce a chick that big in broad daylite  cuz that’s hiway rubbery. The three final lists wuz a setup—a guy from Whyomin’ for rejoonal ballast, a gal for jender ballast, and a guy with a crim’null recurd whose a derelect, the top rechoirments witch the other two lacked. Shouldn’t the hiring consultan firm that handled this be indicated for frawd? It isn’t as if the shitty clowncil didn’t already have this Allen rite where they want him. He’ll have  all kinds of responsihillbillies and expectorations and  no authoritee  and absolootly no hope. It wuz my expectoration that there’d  be a honeymoon period for Allen, but this ain’t a hirin’, its a shotgun weddin’ and the feud that’ll follow will make the Hatfields and McCoys look like a baptist picknick. And me? That job dont kneed me.  I’m gonna go fishin’ and catch me some catfish and catch up on my chawin’.

Yours trewly,

Snuffy


Friday, August 30, 2013

Adelphia Building: Mulling Things Over

An Adopt-a-Block group  organized by Mike Mearan helped beautify the area in front of the empty Adelphia building with a plant that the State Police removed after identifying it as marijuana. 

One of the definitions of the word mull is to chop up marijuana so that it is smokable.  In “Committee Mulls Use of Adelphia Building,” an article in the Portsmouth Daily Times  (Aug. 29, 2013), Frank Lewis is up to his old trick of hiding the truth by blowing smoke, in this case about the Adelphia building. “One of the many city-owned properties sitting unattended may just have a use after all,” is the way he starts out his exercise in deception, by which he means the city’s water department might move there.  It has sat unattended for almost ten years for good reason: because it is a worthless moldy disaster. Anyone new in town  would have no idea from Lewis’s article what a long sordid history that building has and would have no inkling it had a serious black  mold problem, which is  likely to have grown only worse since it was first discovered and a lot of rain has fallen since. The history of building committees in the last ten years is the story of utter incompetence and bad recommendations, and the committee that is involved in  this crackpot idea is no exception. What else can you expect from a committee that has Allison Kalb filling the designated absentee seat? Yes, I can believe the committee mulled this proposal  over very carefully, following the example of Jim Kalb, who when he was mayor often worked in his office after  midnight, mulling things over. Because  the new editor of the PDT was probably not yet at the  newspaper when all this took place, he would have no idea based on Lewis’  report what a foolish idea it is for the Water Dept to be talking about moving there. The city getting stuck with the Adelphia building was a swindle perpetrated by shyster city council appointee Mike Mearan, and using money to try to repair it is a waste. If money is used for anything, it should be to tear the leaking, moldy eyesore down.  The Water Works chief said his crew could repair the place. Sure, and then we  would have a flock of city workers filing for disability because of illnesses caused by the mold, following the example set by former malingering police chief Horner who claimed mold in the Municipal building had made him ill.

I recommend that the editor of the PDT, and anyone else not familiar with the sorry history of the Adelphia building, take a gander by clicking on the following  River Vices articles:

Adelphia: O, Brother
Black Mold of Portsmouth
Mearan's Conflict of Interest


Thursday, August 22, 2013

JUST SAY NO TO ED HUGHES

Model of Brain Circuity

The Leedoms, Austin and Wally,  have been doing their usual eagle-eye detective work and have come up with some incriminating evidence about  local businessman Ed Hughes, whom many people in Portsmouth have never heard of, even though he has been in business for some thirty years.  Hughes’ business is treating drug addicts in a counseling centers that he operates in Portsmouth.  It has become a multi-million dollar business.  The funding for  these operations comes  from the state and federal governments, that is from taxpayers. On Tuesday, August 20, 2013, Austin posted an update on this developing story, which you can access by clicking http://portsmouthohio.tv/  

To know more about Ed Hughes, I recently watched a DVD at the  Shawnee State library (Baffled by Addiction: A Seven Part Series for Loved Ones), and I have read a Portsmouth Public Library book that Hughes and Ronald Turner, M.D., published in 2009: Baffled by Addiction?: Strategies to Help Your Addicted Loved Ones. Hughes calls those he lectures to Loved One Groups. Coming from a large alcoholic family myself, I am all too familiar with that particular addiction, which led me to become interested in addictions in general. The strategies Hughes offers in Baffled by Addiction? represent what the state of the art in the treatment of addiction was about twenty-five years ago, which he presumably learned at Western Kentucky U. The letters after Hughes' name, MPS and LICDC indicate he has some kind of accreditation. LICDC may stand for Licensed Drug Counselor but what MPS stands for I have been unable to figure out. Could it be Master of Professional Studies? In any event the times and the thinking about addiction have changed. Addiction studies has  become more scientifically sophisticated,  as I learned from watching  the series of Charlie Rose PBS programs on the brain, which were  fascinating, especially number 7, on how the brain is involved in addiction.  

The single most important fact I learned  was that heavy drug use permanently alters the neurological circuitry of the brain.  As far as the circuitry or the neurological wiring of the brain goes,  once an addict always an addict. It is possible to become a recovering addict but not a recovered addict, as Alcoholic Anonymous has long preached. The recovery process must continue for the rest of the life of the addict.  Recovery is a lifelong and therefore a very expensive process, and there is no guarantee, in fact there is a high degree of probability, that the addict  will  relapse because the altered circuitry of the brain leaves the addict with a craving that is easily triggered by the faintest suggestion or reminder of the drug.

The key element in addiction  is a simple organic chemical, dopamine, which functions like a neurotransmitter in the brain. Dopamine plays a crucial role in addiction because it is the key chemical in the reward-motivated behavior the brain is based on. When we do something that is pleasurable, dopamine is transmitted neurologically throughout the brain, producing a feel-good state of mind. What addictive drugs do is hijack and intensify the natural high produced by dopamine. But it is not only drugs that can produce addiction: repetitive compulsive behavior can as well. Another name for this kind of addiction is process addiction.

Process Addiction

According to  the clinical psychologist Dr. Tian Dayton in her article “Money Addiction,” “There is a change in brain chemistry with a process addiction that’s similar to the mood altering effects of alcohol or drugs. With process addictions engaging in a certain activity, say viewing pornography, compulsive eating or an obsessive relationship with money, can kick start the release of brain/body chemicals, like dopamine, that actually produce a ‘high’ that's similar to the chemical high of a drug.” Money may be the most pervasive drug in America and the most trafficking in it takes place on Wall Street, but the trafficking goes on everywhere, including in our chronically economically depressed city of Portsmouth, with its high per capita of drug addicts. In addition to many drug addicts, Portsmouth also has at least a couple wealthy money addicts, Hughes apparently being one of them, who were able to replace their alcohol addiction with a money process addiction.  The alcohol craving is still there, and capable of taking over their brain again, but it is the money addiction that is now in control of their brains and their miserable lives; it is the dopamine high they get from money that makes them so dopey.  Drugs are not essential to developing a process addiction: however, dopamine is necessary to the process of developing an increasing dependency on money. 

It may be just an urban legend, but the putative wealthiest  man in Portsmouth was supposedly asked, “Don’t you have enough money by now?” and he is alleged to have answered, “There is never enough money.” As Dr. Dayton wrote in “Money Addiction,” “[J]ust as with a drug or alcohol, tolerance increases and they [money addicts] may find themselves needing to devote increasingly larger amounts of time to these activities, to achieve the same mood altering high that only a little once provided. Because of this they become increasingly preoccupied with all things related to getting and maintaining their substance to the exclusion of other things,” the substance in this case being money.

The Profit Motive Panacea

The profit motive is America's dopamine. Hughes refutes the Republicans' religious faith in privatization. The profit motive is not the panacea they proclaim but rather a curse, at least where the business of treating addiction is concerned.  Based on information the Leedoms have so far uncovered,  I have reached the tentative conclusion that Ed Hughes is addicted to money, which he makes by treating and in too many cases mistreating addicts in his counseling centers.  No doubt some patients have been helped at Hughes’ Scioto County Counseling Center, but the financial and social costs to the taxpayers is astronomical and the number of people who are worse off because of his clinic is possibly much too high. The Second Chance counseling center in Boneyfiddle, in the former juvenile detention center, is more like a minimum security jail than a clinic, with the inmates preying on the community with petty thefts, as the residents of that area, of which I am one, have discovered. Hughes' counseling operations in Scioto County are magnets, drawing addicts from far and wide to Portsmouth. I have been told by a very reliable source that Ed Hughes once approached the 14 St. Community Center to ask if he could use that facility to treat drug addicts, but when he declined to discuss the finances of such an arrangement, an official at the center closed the door on Hughes and is thankful now that he did.

Since the reputed wealthiest man in Portsmouth is also, like Hughes, a former alcoholic, I suspect recovering alcoholics may be prone to process addictions, and particularly to a money addiction, which happens to be our national addiction. Something should be done to help those unlucky enough to be one of Hughes' Loved Ones. Since he now gets his high with money he makes on addicts, I think campaigning against him makes sense, and the most appropriate slogan might be, Just Say No to Ed Hughes.


Tuesday, July 16, 2013

From Pill Mills to Counseling Centers





In the first part of this  post I am going to summarize an article by Kristen Gwynne on the drug Suboxone that appeared in the online site Salon on August 22, 2012 (click here). It appears that the pain clinics, or “pill mills,” which wildly over-dispensed OxyContin (generic name oxycodone) in Portsmouth and Scioto County are being replaced by “counseling centers” that will be dispensing Suboxone to people addicted to opioids ( a synthetic drug resembling opium), of which the most popular  and deadly one in Portsmouth was oxycodone (OxyContin). The name Suboxone suggests to me that it is a substitute, not only pharmaceutically but financially, for oxycodone. Suboxone and oxycodone are pharmaceutical cousins, but Suboxone is less toxic.  Taking the less toxic Suboxone is supposed to make the withdrawal from the more toxic opioides like oxycodone easier. But as Gwynne points out there are serious problems with Suboxone. She interviewed Joe, a 23-year-old recovering addict who has been using Suboxone for three years. For much of that time he has been self-medicating with Suboxone, which he buys on the black market because the cost is cheaper than it would be if he were seeing a doctor and visiting a clinic. Joe says that if he were seeing a doctor and visiting a clinic,   a 90-day treatment program would cost him  $35,000. Because he doesn’t have insurance, or $35,000, he turns to the black market, where it is cheaper. But finding a doctor to treat him would not be easy in any case. Seventy-five percent of doctors qualified to prescribe Suboxone are limited to treating 30 patients a year, and twenty-five percent are allowed to treat 100 a year. Joe has been dependent on Suboxone five times longer than he was on OxyContin, so there is a dependency problem with Suboxone at least for some addicts. The owner of the new counseling center in Portsmouth is quoted as saying Suboxone is not addictive. That statement is not true.

The title of Gwynne’s article on Suboxone is “Doctors and Dealers Battle for Addicts.” Will that be the situation in Scioto County and in Portsmouth in particular? Is there already, a competition between doctors and drug dealers for addicts? Is there already a black market for Suboxone? 

 Lysol, Clearasil, and Suboxone

A British conglomerate, Reckitt-Benckiser (RB),  originally developed Suboxone.  Many of the cleaning, polishing, and other household products in the American homes are manufactured by RB, which hadn’t had  much experience with pharmaceuticals. RB originally manufactured Suboxone in pill form, but the U.S. Food and Drug Administration notified them that an alarming number of children were being poisoned by the drug. Reckitt-Benckiser made the drug child-proof by producing Suboxone in strips, which are placed under the tongue, where the drug is slowly absorbed into the blood stream. Since the law requires bottles with dangerous drugs to have child-proof caps, the question arises just how kids were getting access to the pills. The only answer that I can think of (Reckitt-Benckiser didn’t provide an explanation on their website: click here) is that the child-proof caps on medicine bottles in households with drug- addicted adults were not always put back on once they were taken off, nor were they likely put back in the medicine cabinet, if they had even ever been put there. This problem serves to remind us that drug-addicted people do not, probably cannot, act responsibly, even when the safety of children is concerned.

In God We Trust. All Others Pay Cash

The doctors and pill mills of Scioto County did a cash only business with oxycodone. Will it be the same  in Portsmouth with Suboxone? If so, we can  expect that addicts, some of whom will be attracted to Portsmouth because of Suboxone dispensing “counseling centers, will turn to breaking into homes and cars to help pay for the drug, as they did with oxycodone. Because counseling centers, like the pill mills, will be bringing money into the city, the tendency will be to scrutinize them less closely, especially if they are advertising in the Daily Times and the Community Common, but the price the community may have to pay for the kind of patients, or customers, counseling centers attract will in the final analysis be much too  high, even higher than the $35,000 Joe couldnt pay every ninety days.
   

                     You put Suboxone under your tongue and what do you get,
                     Ninety days older and $35,000 in debt.
                     St. Peter don’t open those Pearly Gates 'cause I can’t enter, 
                     I owe my soul to the counseling center.



A sub-lingual Suboxone strip