The Chesapeake Energy chief on his compensation, the 'opportunity' in $2 natural gas, his brawl with the coal industry, and a few words on President Obama.
Speaking of fracking, two links to fishermen and those salacious lies they tell…
Time to save Susquehanna is now upon us--TOM VENESKY OUTDOORS
Mike Bleech: We cannot afford to lose a world-class fishery
Yesterday morning, while saving an aged coal patch structure from the ravages of termites, this here show was aired on WILK: Marcellus: The Economic Miracle.
As the show droned on, the two guests, Zane Shuck and Daniel Soeder, made it sound as if the questions being asked about fracking’s effects on our environment were silly.
And then one of them (sorry, not sure who) said that the “cumulative effect” of fracking on streams “is still being studied.” And with that, I scrambled for my notepad. What the muck? Who?
If you follow the link and scroll down by date, you can listen to the audio.
Welcome or not, I would be remiss if I did not weigh in on the marking of Gort’s 7-year anniversary.
Long before Gort jumped into the electronic fray, I did so. And the ensuing onslaught of electronically-generated anonymous hate email overflowed my inbox on a regular basis. This stuff was as vicious as it was banal.
At some point, being tired of it all, I mistakenly invited some of these phony brave to tell me I was (insert insult here) in person. As in, far, far from the preying eyes of the police where I could make like a thug on them.
Guess what? No takers. Not even one.
The thing was, because of the incendiary Internet back-and-forth, there were those who thought I was an out-of-control madman with a trail of aggravated assaults behind me. While that may have been somewhat true in a professional sense while at the former job during a previous life, fact is, I ain’t never been arrested for anything.
So, one day I received a prompt to call one of these Internet upstarts, this new guy going by the name of Gort. And being true to who I really am, I told him to snag a twelve-pack and head on over. And much unlike the legions of phony brave who failed before him, he snagged some of those aforementioned agricultural amusement aides and came on over.
Now, when you meet someone for the very first time, conventional wisdom says you avoid subjects such as sex, sports, religion and politics. But, as you must have clearly discerned by now, Gort and I are about as conventional as a coal-fired, Greenpeace-flagged sea-going vessel.
And I must say, while we were obviously diametrically opposed in so many ways, we were able, as he once penned it, to “disagree without being disagreeable.” Well, that is, until he admitted to being a devoted fan of the Philthydumpia Eagles. Too green for my blue tastes. Lucky for him that my brother wasn't on hand that night.
While I consider Gort to be a friend to this day, he is what you might call an Internet friend, meaning I might actually be in his company once a year. Maybe. And despite the many anonymously-driven slings and arrows over the years, what we’ve both gotten out of opining away on the Internet are new friendships that are probably too many to count.
Much of what you see on local blogs today was done first on one of our sites. Be they embedded videos, podcasts, polls, forum pages, home-made videos, on-line radio, photo-shopped pics of a local flavor or calls for face-to-face meet-ups, we were, in my spinning vortex of a mind---co-trailblazers. So, while he may call me the local blogfather, I view him as my co-conspirator who was and still is quite taken with the dark political side.
Knowing the hefty malinvestment one must make to do what Gort has done for seven-plus years, he deserves any and all accolades that may find their way to him.
And Gort, thanks for giving the locals someone else’s ankles to bite at from the deepest, darkest cesspools of Anonymityville.
Later
1 comment:
Blogfather,
Thank you so much. You were my insperation and then my mentor. You're a cool dude.
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