Seriously, Effingham? That's all the news in the county?

The internet, as soon as it went mainstream, became a news junkie's ultimate hit.  Some of us, though, still get a buzz by reading news from a paper product - a newspaper or a magazine, though there are fewer of us each day judging by how many people the newspapers are firing.  So imagine the glee at opening my mailbox to find a newspaper I didn't order accompanied by a letter stating that I now have a free, FREE, four-week trial subscription to that paper.  It happened yesterday, a gratis trial of my hometown semiweekly, the Effingham Herald.  This Herald, though, was more flea circus marching band than trumpet fanfare because, if you believe the paper's thin pages, there is hardly any news happening here.  Really?  No news in a rural but rapidly growing area of Georgia?

Sure, we in The Ham like to think of ourselves as small, but we have more than 52,000 people according to the 2010 Census.  We are one of the fastest growing counties in the state - for a few years, one of the fastest in the whole dang country.   How can there be only ten pages of news content in the Herald and its competitor, the Savannah Morning News's Effingham Now?  Calling it ten pages of news is also generous since many of those pages were consumed by advertising.  There has to be much more happening here, and I believe a lot of news, or even "news", isn't making it into the paper.  (Disclosure: I write all this lovingly since I have contributed to both papers in the past.)

First of all, where are the church service reports?  Growing up in Dade County, Georgia, which at the time was five-times smaller than Effingham, virtually every church had a blurb about the previous Sunday's services - Saturday for the Adventists - in the Dade County Sentinel (or, as my family called it, The Weekly Wipe).  But the greatest church report section of all time was just across the state line at The Sand Mountain Reporter.  "On a cloudless Sunday morning, Brother Cotton Tishaw preached a stirring message of damnation, interrupted only by a call to the outhouse.  The Lord then blessed us with a hamburger fry on the grounds, and Brother Tishaw was highly complimentary of Mable Sue Spurgin's pimento cheese burgers, which he says went perfectly with the salsa he keeps in the breast pocket of his sport coat."  Are there no churches in The Ham willing to even say "Brother Bob preached about the evils of alcohol.....for the 34th consecutive week"?

The front page of the Effingham Herald makes mention of the major cities within the county - Guyton, Rincon, and Springfield.  But where is the community news from Sand Hill?  From Marlow, Ebenezer, Booger Holler (surely there's a Booger Holler somewhere) and a host of other small communities?  One of my high school friends used to write the weekly news from Wildwood, Georgia for our local paper.  "Went to visit Mr. Moss the other day, and am happy to report that his gout is much better, and that his neighbors came together to help clean up the toilet paper left in his trees by the naughty neighborhood teens", even though the naughty teens included my friend and yours truly.  Are there no Mrs. Zipperer's in The Ham whose house got t-p'd while she suffered from 'the gout?'  How about Paw Paw Shearouse's tulips or the beginning of hunting season on Low Ground Road? 

Finally, the big boys of the big city newspapers make a killing by spreading gossip, but anyone who grew up in the South knows that Yankees are amateurs when it comes to spreading rumors and malicious lies to the point to where they become the gospel.  Why doesn't the Effingham Herald take the bold step of adding an anonymous gossip columnist?  Better yet, add two of them - The Reb (as in Effingham High School Rebel) for the northern half of the county and The 'Tang (as in Mustang - where is your mind?) for the southern half.  You don't even have to be specific.  Imagine opening The Reb's column to read, "Is Farmer Bucky's filly harvesting to a different tiller these days?"  That sentence alone could refer to half the county in half a dozen different ways.  Everyone would be talking and, therefore, buying the paper.

I don't fault the folks at the Effingham Herald or Effingham Now.  They probably have only one person writing the stories, taking the pictures, laying everything out, and doing the website.  But the reason newspapers don't make enough money to pay more people is that they didn't follow the prospective news consumer to the areas in which they get their news and because many of them forgot that news is much more than handouts from police departments and government agencies.  News is talking about the folks with the folks.  I haven't given up on small town newspapers.  I just hope they don't give up, first.

Update: Effingham Commission Chairman referendum

Well, not really an update, as I am still waiting for some answers from State Senator Buddy Carter.  I asked him a couple days ago whether local legislation was absolutely necessary for the county to hold a referendum on removing the commission chairman's position or if that referendum could be brought about via a petition drive.  He told me he didn't know, but that he would find out and get back to me.

For now, my original point still holds:  why in the blue heck do we need state lawmakers to tell us whether or not we can have a referendum on an issue that affects all of three state lawmakers?  A petition drive I could at least understand as long as the signature threshold isn't outrageous. 

And, to answer a friend's question from the other day, NO, I am not about to lead any petition drive for anything.  Unless Georgia needs an official state cigar, which of course is taboo these days thanks to the Tobacco Nazis.

More to come when I get some answers from the Senator.

"Green" housing is uglier than a bowling shoe

(picture courtesy of Effingham Now, a Savannah Morning News publication)

I don't know Charles Davis from Adam.  I'm sure he and I could have a beer or whatever he likes to drink and get along just fine.  But Mr. Davis, I'm sorry; your "green" home may have locked down the championship belt for the ugliest thing in all of Effingham County, Georgia

Normally, I am very much in favor of anything that helps me reduce my "contribution" to the cost of Georgia Power's new nuclear plant being built by another company.  I am not anti-nuke - it is a viable "clean" energy source, more viable than most.  It is the deception by Georgia Power and their political class enablers in Atlanta that bother me just a smidge.  So when I saw a story in Effingham Now about a new "net-zero energy" house built in my hometown of Guyton, Georgia, I was curious.  I would have started to read the story, but my eyes immediately were locked on a picture of the house on the paper's front page; locked because it was as if I were watching a mash-up of a train wreck, the Hindenburg crash, and a Jean Claude Van Damme movie.

I couldn't stop looking at it.  The horror!  Guyton's "green" home was net-zero energy because energy has enough sense to stay away from such ugliness.  Half of what I was looking at was a piece of a red storage shed, or perhaps an old British phone booth on steroids, with an umbrella sticking out from the top (this turned out to be the "guest house", about the size of my bathroom).  The other half resembled part of a double-wide plucked from Low Ground Road just around the corner from my house, tricked out with some fancy new siding.  This is the home of the future?

After rinsing my eyes out and taking them to the garage to find some sandpaper so I could buff out any remnants of the hideousness, I returned to the article to see who in their right mind would build such a thing.  It was, indeed, Mr. Davis, president of Earth Comfort Company in Rincon.  Davis' company makes energy-efficient buildings, so naturally he wanted to live in an energy-efficient home.  Nothing wrong with someone wanting to do that.  Don't try to tell me, though, that it is the "home of the future." 

First of all, the look.  Ugly things work for some folks; some people like well-done steaks, and Paulina Porizkova married Ric Ocasek.  But most people want a house to look like, well, a house.  There are already a myriad of styles of housing and some degree of beauty in most.  I'm sure Mr. Davis thinks there is plenty of beauty in his pair of boxes, but folks I know want a home to look like home.  To be sure, the pictures of the interior of the house were very nice as it was decked out with furniture from IKEA, which has surpassed ABBA as Sweden's greatest export. When Mr. Davis and his partners in the construction of his Frankenstein (modular home builder Clayton Homes) figure out how to pair their greenness with an exterior that looks like a place where the kids could play a one-person game of catch with a tennis ball, then the "home of the future" talk can start.  At least it can when the price comes down.

The total cost of land and Mr. Davis' 1,300 square feet (1,000 for the main shoe box, 300 for the guest Jack-In-The-Box):  $256,000.  When you can buy the same size home in parts of Effingham County for less than half that (40% of that in some areas), you are not marketing your product to very many people.  True, you have "net-zero energy" costs, at least you do in the beginning.  The picture from the article that stood out for me included an executive from Georgia Power.  He will deny it, but it looked as if he were salivating at the prospect of finding some way, any way, to get money out of Mr. Davis' pocket book.  It is the modus operandi of monopolistic utilities:  preach conservation, then find an excuse to raise your rates because too people are actually conserving.

If Mr. Davis and his ilk (miss hearing you use that word in Memphis, Mike Fleming) bring down the cost, then "green" housing might catch on, even if it does look like a bad Lady Gaga costume.  And by bringing costs down, I do not mean via hand outs or tax breaks from the government, which fail every time (see the recent slew of bankruptcies in the "green" energy industry, despite untold millions in government help).  That said, I would never wish any ill will on someone trying to make it in a business in which they believe, so good luck Mr. Davis.  I just wish you'd build a DaVinci rather than a pointy public art sculpture next time.