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Donald Dodd is president and publisher of Salem Publishing Company. Aug. 26, 2010 OnStar is on track: It amazes me what technology can do to make us safer, even in our vehicles Saturday morning, I sat in the driver’s seat of a new Chevy Cobalt purchased for Salem Publishing Company from Sturgeon Chevrolet. In the passenger seat was Terry Gorman, the guy who sold the car. He was giving me the rundown on how everything worked. Windshield wipers. Lights. Sound system. Air conditioner. Yeah, I knew about all that stuff. Then we got to OnStar and my mouth dropped open. Please don’t think this is a free ad for OnStar. This is just a column from a guy who never realized how far some of this technology has come. Besides being incredibly fascinating, the safety aspects of OnStar are too good to turn down. Say, for instance, you are traveling on a dark night down a curvy, hilly Ozark lettered highway, swerve to miss a 10-point buck and take a half-dozen six-inch diameter white oaks with you down a steep embankment. You’re in semi-shock and banged up, not really knowing exactly where you are and unable to get out of your equally banged-up truck. You push the OnStar red button with the cross in the middle of it, and no matter where you are, someone on the other end answers. I am not sure if they are located in Toledo or outsourced in Taiwan, but they answer. You tell the OnStar folks what’s going on, and by using the GPS technology buried away somewhere on your vehicle, a minute or two later an ambulance is headed your way. Let’s say you were knocked out during the crash. Well, OnStar knows you had a wreck because they have techno gizmos I don’t understand all over your truck. They call you, you don’t answer, they send an ambulance to your GPS coordinates. Amazing. I know what some of you are thinking. Big brother is watching you. You don’t want someone in Toledo or Taiwan knowing you are sitting at the Dairy Queen sucking down a strawberry milk shake when you are supposed to be finishing up your shift at the plant. Anyway, do you remember Big Brother? He was a fictional character in George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Big Brother helped the totalitarian state keep an eye on every move the citizens made, using telescreens for complete surveillance. I thought about “Big Brother is watching you” as Terry told me all the things OnStar could know about me and my new car. OnStar could tell me if my tire pressure was low, let me make a hands-free phone call, let me know if I can drive with the warning light on or pull over immediately, give me directions, or let a tow truck know where I am because my radiator overheated. Some of you might think the technology is a little too much invasion of privacy, with all those OnStar people - and who knows who else - knowing our whereabouts. Imagine the boss sitting at his computer and seeing that your GPS coordinates look more like the parking lot of your favorite fishing hole than, say, the customer you are supposed to be visiting. Maybe so. But the benefits outweigh the negatives when you think about your 17-year-old daughter unconscious in a vehicle down that embankment. Instead of hours of searching to find her, OnStar has an ambulance on the way when minutes could mean life and death. Aug. 19, 2010 EPA, other agencies seem to be wielding more power than originally intended: Not many people around here, or a lot of places for that matter, appreciate a federal agency run amok. For folks who never won an election, they seem to carry a lot of weight. Rep. Jo Ann Emerson scolded the EPA in her column a few weeks back, and just this week the U.S. Chamber of Commerce asked a federal appeals court to review the EPA’s declaration that greenhouse gases endanger human health and welfare. We all know that the EPA and the American economy are on a collision course when it comes to electric power and our natural resources, be it coal, oil or whatever. EPA isn’t getting a lot of argument against the fact that greenhouse gases, global warming and all that stuff are problems, but there are many people who believe it isn’t right for the EPA to try and, for all practical purposes, legislate through the Clean Air Act. I am not smart enough to figure all this scientific stuff out. If I was, heck, I’d probably be living in Washington, D.C., maybe working for the EPA. But I do know that most Americans, myself included, like the people we elect to office to make laws and decide what’s good and what isn’t good for us. That way, if it doesn’t work out for us, we can throw the bums out. Anyway, Salem and the little 20-megawatt biomass system some folks would like to put here seems to be caught in the fray, so to speak. Even if the aldermen and ProEnergy, the company who would like to spend $40-$50 million on a plant here, give the biomass a green light, the EPA might step in and turn the lights off on the project. We and our elected officials need to be making the decision, not the EPA. Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.) said as much Aug. 13 when he came to Salem to meet with local politicians and breathe a little fire into the biomass project, something he would dearly love to see happen. There is no doubt in my mind that in 1970 when President Richard Nixon proposed an EPA, he had no idea it would develop a life and an agenda of its own, employing 18,000 red-tape experts. You can say the same thing about a lot of agencies that become political weapons for special-interest groups, political parties and foreign interests. Everyone’s voice seems to be heard except ours. Yes, we need to become more conservation-minded when it comes to power generation. To me, the answer is a combination of conservation and using but not abusing the many resources we have, everything from wind and solar to oil and gas, and yes, even biofuels such as wood. I don’t think the EPA sees it that way. From what I have seen the EPA just wants to shut it all down, robbing America of the resources that have made us the greatest place to live on the face of the earth. I am sure no one from the EPA will ever read this, and if they did, they probably wouldn’t care what a small-town publisher in rural Missouri has to say. But this small-town publisher is one of many Americans who think this way about government agencies treading on democracy, and my belief is that one day our voices will be loud enough to be heard, loud enough to get something done, loud enough to let the EPA know that, whether they like it or not, they work for us.Aug. 12, 2010 Recovery Act funds will help broadband projects across the area There is good news on that front as federal funding (our tax money) amounting to $1 million will be spent on expanding broadband in Texas, Wright and portions of Ozark and Shannon counties. It is called MoBroadbandNow, and the numbers are staggering. Gov. Jay Nixon just announced the $49.1 million in federal funding from the U.S Department of Agriculture awarded Aug. 4 “to three Missouri businesses to bring broadband access to schools, businesses, health care providers and consumers.” Socket Telecom, Finally Broadband and Big River Telephone Co., businesses that probably already have a lot of money, will do the work. “Just as the railroads and interstates transformed Missouri communities in decades past, these projects will help connect many more areas of Missouri with the information superhighway of the future,” Nixon said. “They have the potential to connect doctors and patients at the speed of light; open the doors of our colleges and universities to more students; and expand markets for small businesses to not only the rest of the state, but to markets across the globe.” I thought we were already doing that, except for a place or two a mile or so outside of Maples and Eunice. Here is how it breaks down: • Socket Telecom will use $23.7 million to provide a fiber-to-home project to portions of eastern Boone County and western Callaway County; the project will include Millersburg and portions of Fulton. • Big River will use $24.4 million to create a broadband network reaching 90 percent of the homes in their service area, which includes Bollinger, Cape Girardeau, Madison, Perry, St. Francois, Ste. Genevieve and Washington counties. • Broadband will use $1 million to help provide broadband service in Texas and Wright counties, and portions of Ozark and Shannon counties. Somehow, those numbers don’t add up. But I assume there are a lot more people in those areas so they need a lot more broadband. And that’s not all. In addition to the $49.1 million, the USDA recently also announced $32.5 million in awards for other Missouri broadband projects. In the first round of grants announced by the feds in January, Ralls County Electric Cooperative received a $19.1 million competitive award to expand broadband Internet to residential and commercial customers in northeast Missouri. Additional broadband awards are expected to be announced by the end of September. Is this Christmas or what? The gov and our government are tossing around a hundred million dollars for broadband, which I am sure is important for us and future generations. But I keep asking myself the same question as I watch billions of dollars flow from the economic recovery plan, while millions lose their jobs, insurance and homes, and we don’t have enough money to buy every kid a schoolbook. Can we afford it? By the way, what is broadband? I quote from Wikipedia: “Broadband in telecommunications refers to a signaling method that includes or handles a relatively wide range (or band) of frequencies, which may be divided into channels or frequency bins. Broadband is always a relative term, understood according to its context. The wider (or broader) the bandwidth of a channel, the greater the information-carrying capacity.” Of course we need more bandwidth, and we’re gonna get it, and we’re also gonna pay for it somewhere down the road. Aug. 5, 2020 Farewell to Mitch Jayne Mitch Jayne started writing a weekly column for The Salem News about five years ago. A couple years later I approached him about publishing his column in The Licking News, too. I figured since his column would appear in two newspapers, I ought to get a little discount off the $10 a week he charges each newspaper. I thought wrong. Mitch never was one to beat around the bush, and he told me “if the column isn’t worth $10, then you probably shouldn’t run it.” That made sense, and I have been writing Mitch Jayne a check for $20 a week for a few years now. The $20 has been well spent, and I have received countless e-mails, letters and calls complimenting us on publishing Mitch’s column. His weekly column on life in the Ozarks—he called it Driftwood—was a steady supply of folksy humor, the kind older folks could remember and younger folks could learn from. Mitch, who used to teach in a one-room schoolhouse, was all about learning and teaching. Mitch’s last column was July 22. He wrote about a guy and a bear and, well, you probably read it. At the end of the column he wrote that he was supposed to be at a National Park Service event in Big Spring at Van Buren that weekend but was a “bit under the weather” and wouldn’t be able to make it. Truth is, Mitch was recently diagnosed with cancer and had little precious life left to live. He died Monday in a Columbia hospital. Luckily for Mitch and the thousands of folks he touched through stories and music and deed, he had 80 years here with us. I can’t imagine many people living life quite like Mitch did. We all know about his life because he wrote about it for years. Through his columns and books we learned about “slicker than deer guts on a door knob” and the many sayings that help make Ozarks culture what it is, the culture that Mitch, an ol’ Indiana boy, fell in love with. I got to know Mitch back in the 1960s when he was one of the Darlings on the Andy Griffith Show, and I was a faithful fan. I got to know him even better when I watched the re-runs around the fraternity house in the 1970s, and later in life when I’d laugh at the way Earnest T. Bass chased after Mitch’s television sister, Charlene. When I started publishing Mitch’s column I corresponded often with him by e-mail and a few times on the telephone. He told me he was almost deaf and had to have some kind of contraption connected to the phone to hear me. Most every time we communicated we’d end the conversation by saying next time I was in Eminence or he was in Salem, we’d get together and meet face to face. Lucky for me, that chance came three months ago at the Ozark Natural and Cultural Resource Center when Mitch attended an event that paid tribute to Howe Teague, a former bluegrass great himself. “Mitch Jayne is here! Mitch Jayne is here!” people whispered to me as I came into the building. Sure enough, there he sat in the back of the room with his wife, Diana. One of those contraptions that helped him hear was in his lap, and Mitch was doing his best to hear the bluegrass, all the while fiddling around with that contraption. I went over to Mitch and introduced myself. He broke into a big grin and seemed genuinely pleased, even excited, to meet me. We talked a bit, and then off I went, figuring one of these days I really would stop in to see him in Eminence, and would spend hours listening to stories about Mayberry and the Darlings, one-room schoolhouses and his days in Hollywood. That day won’t come, but I am so glad I got to meet him, and so glad we will have columns and books that will teach us about the Ozarks and its people Mitch loved so dearly. (Back to Home) (Back to Top)
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