Author Archives: Sam Ross Jr.

Today we play Lamestream media, in which we mix first-hand observations with many that are second-hand, third-hand, fourth-hand or worse, and report it all as indisputable fact.

Earlier this week, while eating soft-serve ice cream at a favorite local stop with my son and two granddaughters, we happened to sit at an outdoor picnic table adjacent to a threesome – fifty-something man, younger man and younger woman – all conversing entirely in a language other than English.

I didn’t play close attention, but it was hard to miss the absence of English.

It wasn’t Spanish, Chinese, German or any other language I could easily recognize if not understand. I’m thinking some sort of Arabic tongue, or even middle European. It was not clear to me.

My son votes for it having been Russian.

This may or may not be related to a spate of similar reports I’ve heard anecdotally.

It seems Johnstown area medical providers are seeing a significant pickup in non-English speaking patients, who use a cell phone program to speak their native tongue into the machine and have it repeated in English for the would-be providers.

And then there is the story making the rounds about someone seeing a large number of foreign-looking women clad all in white being bused from the train station to a downtown hotel. The person sighting this supposedly followed the parade to the hotel and asked an employee there what was happening.

Said employee is reported to have explained that he didn’t really know, but the white-clad women had an entire floor of the hotel and government vouchers were paying for it all.

Perhaps this is more behind-the-scenes work of the Myopia 2025 people?

Unlike the Lamestream media, which runs with suspect narratives as long as the alleged story fits their agenda, I concede this women-dressed-all-in-white story is a bit light on details and odd sounding at best. It recalls stories that made the rounds when I was young about insanely inexpensive Corvette sales.

One version of the story attributed it all to an aggrieved woman being divorced by her husband and said husband instructing her to sell the car and forward his share of the proceeds.

Another version had the previous Corvette owner having succumbed in the vehicle, perhaps to carbon monoxide poisoning, and not having been discovered for many hot summer weeks, thereby leaving behind a stench that drove down the sales price.

Could there have been such Corvette sales? Yes. Do I know of any personally? No.

Back to language, there is a tale related from a distance of an abundance – a recent flood, it seems – of non-English speakers into the Carlisle area in the center of this state.

The explanation given was that the government is dispersing illegal immigrants into the Erie and Harrisburg areas, with the Harrisburg contingent spilling over into nearby Carlisle.

I wonder aloud if the ranks of Democratic voter registrations have increased significantly in these areas.

Can I dismiss out of hand these reports? I cannot with the way your government has been facilitating illegal immigration on the watch of Clueless Joe Biden and Border Czar Chameleon Harris.

And, it is fair to note that Donald Trump was impeached twice and continues to be harassed in the court system on flimsier evidence than these stories.

A little more than a month ago, I noted that the Pirates were contenders for a wild-card spot in the postseason, with caveats that included this was due largely to a very weak National League beyond the top three teams.

I also said that while the Pirates had a chance, I didn’t expect them to make it because there were so many competitors for the three wild-card spots. The point was made that with so much competition, some teams were almost guaranteed to win on any given night and even if the Pirates ran hot for a time, they would have trouble gaining on all the other teams vying for the spots.

When I wrote that July 6 post, the Pirates were 42-46, four games out of the third and final wild-card spot.

The Pirates got hot, winning 10 of their next 14 games, including a season-high six-game win streak. Along the way, the Pirates inexplicably took two of three from the Philadelphia Phillies and then two of three from fellow wild-card contender, the St. Louis Cardinals.

On July 23, the Pirates and San Diego Padres each were just one-half game out of the third and final wild-card spot.

It all turned sour, though, when the Pirates dropped two of three against the Arizona Diamondbacks, another wild-card contender, beginning July 26.

As play began today, Saturday Aug. 10, 2024, the Pirates’ wild-card hopes were flagging. They have lost five straight games, seven of their past eight, and sit 4.5 games out of the last wild-card berth, with four teams between the Pirates and those third-seeded New York Mets.

The Pirates were 55-52 after a July 30 win. They now sit at 56-59. With 47 games remaining they are approaching the ¾ pole of the season. If this were a horse race, you’d be about to tear up your ticket if you’d bet on the Pirates.

The irony is that if somehow the Pirates did make the wild-card round of the postseason, I’d like their chances in the best-of-3 series format they would face.

Unlike the regular season, when pitching depth is the key and the fourth or fifth starters, as well as bullpen and bench strength often make the difference, in a short series, having two dominant starting pitchers can be enough. The Pirates have that in Mitch Keller and rookie Paul Skenes, even though each had a bit of a rough outing in their most recent starts.

But those two are capable of shutting down any lineup on any given day, which would have given the Pirates hope in that abbreviated best-of-3 format for the wild-card round.

If the Pirates could get there, they could win a series. But the odds are, they won’t get the chance.

Is anyone else thinking that the respective vice president selections seem to indicate neither presidential candidate wants to win this fall?

Let’s start with Donald Trump giving the nod to J.D. Vance.

Traditionally, VP picks are made with the eye toward winning a swing state or segment of the general electorate that the presidential candidate might not deliver.

In Vance, Donald Trump has a mini-Trump. Vance is from Ohio and Trump figures to win that state without any help. Vance, although in his past he has publicly rebuked Trump, since has become an acolyte in the church of MAGA.

Some Democrats have laughingly suggested that Vance will be Trump’s attack dog. This just in, Trump does a mighty fine job on his own of stating his position and disparaging the opposition.

This is not to say that Vance is not qualified for the job, even though left-wing cynics note his relatively short stay of approximately two years in the Senate. They might recall fawning over Barack Obama, who was in the Senate maybe three years before moving on to being president of these United States.

It’s not that I believe Vance cannot do the job. For political reasons, though, I’d have gone for someone like Tulsi Gabbard to have been Trump’s VP pick. She is articulate, accomplished, and could have helped him in some demographic areas.

But, for anyone thinking Vance is not up to the VP job, let us consider the pantheon of severely limited VP people who have served in that post up to and including the current one, Chameleon Harris.

Now to the other VP candidate. Tim Walz is Chameleon Harris with male genitalia added – presuming that is correct on both sides.

Walz seems to have fibbed about his military service in the pursuit of taking away guns whose ownership is guaranteed by the 2^nd Amendment.

Tim is equal opportunity on snatching freedoms, denying 1^st amendment rights, too, when it suits his purpose.

Walz wants an open border, proposing buying ladders to enable illegals to mount border walls. He is all for putting tampon dispensers in boys bathrooms, loves the smell of shops being burned by BLM protesters, but dallied for days before calling on the National Guard in Minnesota to quell the out-of-control street violence.

Tim also loves communism, particularly as practiced by the Chinese and, despite massive media efforts to paint him as a folksy Midwestern moderate, there is footage of Walz proclaiming himself a leftist progressive and being proud to do so.

Waltz is OK with abortion up to and past birth. Let that one sink in for a moment, although he’s likely denying this now, too. He was all for COVID lockdowns, even setting up snitch lines for neighbors to turn in neighbors for ignoring ridiculous mandates.

Walz as a VP candidate is doing a whole lot of denying facts these days. In this way, Walz mirrors his Chameleon Harris partner on the Democratic ticket. Harris also has spent copious amounts of her recent time trying to run away from her record. They should fit well together.

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro might have helped the Harris ticket immensely. But, owing to the Democratic Party now being a tenuous coalition of fringe groups, Shapiro’s Jewish heritage weighed against him.

Shapiro likely could have delivered Pennsylvania, but that Jewish thing offended the Hamas wing of the party, so he is gone.

I don’t think Trump helped his cause by picking Vance and now Harris has done the same thing to her chances with Walz.

Regardless, if Trump and Vance just stick to talking about the issues and the dubious track records of their counterparts, they could and should win. That is presuming votes are counted fairly, and that’s a whole different matter.

Back in my days working for the local Daily Bugle, an editor began a campaign to emphasize positive events in this area. He came up with a logo “Good News” to be inserted into stories.

As these things tend to go, quotas were established. News, sports, features, all had to use the Good News labels daily, sometimes multiple times a day.

There came a night when the man putting together sports pages had limited options, so he put Good News art into a story of a track meet.

This horrified the overall newspaper editor, who read it the next day and noted that while it was Good News for the victorious team and all event winners, perhaps the losing team/athletes would not view it as Good News.

I cannot recall the exact timing, but Good News proclamations in stories long ago went the way of the dodo bird, joining local ownership of our newspaper, television and radio outlets in the distant memory category.

But I do feel that good things about the area bear mention. So, allow me to commend Southmont Borough for promising and delivering.

The back story is my wife has wanted rid of bushes she once planted in front of our house (we’ve been here pushing four decades) that had become larger than promised. She visited the folks at Southmont’s borough building and was promised such trimmings are picked up curbside the first Monday of each month. A shredder makes wood chips of it all and the mess is gone.

My wife, with the considerable help of my son and a borrowed reciprocating saw, labored mightily Sunday. They took out the bushes and produced two stacks of cuttings, each the size of a small car, that were piled near the curb.

I doubted the brush would be picked up in prompt fashion, but I was wrong. Bright and early on Monday two men who must be part magicians made the piles disappear.

I went out later in the day to clean up a bit of leftover residue, but they had done a good job.

Again, congratulations on a job well done.

Alas, the rules of cosmic balance have not been repealed. For all light, there must be some darkness.

I have written here previously of my problem getting my most recent water/sewer payment to the Greater Johnstown Water Authority confirmed.

Said payment was due Aug. 2 and I had called when the check had not been cashed, only to be told a tale of woe that implicated the post office. I was instructed then to call back Tuesday if the check had yet to be cashed.

It would be cashed by then, the woman had predicted boldly on that first call, noting people were working late to make it so.

That didn’t happen, so I called again today (Tuesday) as instructed.

This time I got a mathematics lesson, as in four women going through 20,000-plus bills takes time. I resisted the urge to suggest more help be hired and the bills being mailed earlier to provide more time.

Instead, I took her word that I had until Thursday before it became a problem for me and she virtually guaranteed things would be handled by then.

Maybe I can get the Southmont tree/limb workers to help out at the GJWA?

I awoke early this morning to see tanking prices across the board in gold, silver, bitcoin and stocks, with all the attendant hysteria from pundits and investors alike.

Meanwhile, the world is in a state of flux beyond financial matters. Think Ukraine, Israel, etc. Time for some news and views.

NEWS: Chameleon Harris noted the disappointing job numbers released last Friday and had a spokesman shill (Chameleon is incommunicado, it seems) blame it on Donald Trump.

VIEWS: Showing her financial ignorance – or political tone deafness – Chameleon expects you to believe that nearly four years after he left as president, Trump policies produced a punk job report late in the watch of the Biden regime. OK, so Chameleon doesn’t get it. But where are all those self-appointed fact checkers to decry the sheer lunacy of this claim? I searched and could not find any debunking from the usual sources so often employed to rail against Trump utterances.

NEWS: Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro is pushing hard to be on the Harris ticket as VP, but is running into resistance.

VIEWS: Shapiro offends the Harris far-left crowd because he’s Jewish, as a college student doubted there could be side-by-side Israeli and Palestinian states existing in harmony and allegedly covered up an instance of sexual harassment committed by an aide in his office. Once thought to be the front-runner for VP, Shapiro seems to be slipping. He’s tried his best to apologize, reversing himself on the Israel-Palestine matter and generally grovelling before his detractors. Please, Harris, take him off our hands.

NEWS: Ukraine Beggar Boy Zelenskyy couldn’t wait to rush to the media to note the arrival of some F-16 jets to help him lose less slowly to the invading Russians.

VIEWS: Zelenskyy, who never met a handout he was satisfied with, immediately noted that he hadn’t gotten enough F-16s. What does Zelenskyy want? More than whatever he’s gotten. There is no word yet whether Zelenskyy is stripping down the jets to sell them off on a parts basis to fund his retirement account.

NEWS: China is the world’s largest producer of beer, brewing just under 360 million hectoliters (a hectoliter is 100 liters) in 2023. The U.S. was a distant second at 193 million hectoliters produced.

VIEWS: This raises, in no particular order, questions about whether I can get beer shipped here cheaply by Temu, whether those production figures can be boosted to help investors deal with today’s hit to their portfolios, and should we be more concerned by this beer gap or China’s mounting military and computer superiority?

NEWS: The U.S. reportedly has warned Israel that an attack is imminent from Iran and/or its proxies to “punish” Israel for taking out some terrorist leadership in recent weeks.

VIEWS: Not to fear, Clueless Joe Biden will meet with his national security team in the White House situation room today and sort things out. Or not. Will Chameleon be there and will she take questions afterward from media other than those working for the Democratic National Committee?

NEWS: It is alleged that democratic-oriented MSNBC edited a Joe Rogan podcast to indicate he was supporting Chameleon Harris when in reality he was praising Tulsi Gabbard.

VIEWS: And you are surprised by this? There are reports that Rogan is suing over the misrepresentation. Hope he gets one of those outlandish multi-billion dollar settlements.

NEWS: Some cable financial shows were calling the Friday and Monday market carnage the “Harris selloff.”

VIEWS: That can’t be. Why would a candidate who is intent on spending more money, raising income taxes, opening our southern border even wider to illegals, increasing regulation, limiting oil production and outlawing consumer items ranging from internal combustion cars to gas stoves, be perceived negatively by the investment markets?

Donald Trump’s signature rally song is “God Bless the U.S.A.” (Proud to be An American), sometimes sung in person by Lee Greenwood.

I humbly suggest Kamala Harris rallies should have as their anthem the Culture Club standard “Karma Chameleon” from the early 1980s.

It works on many levels.

First, Democrats are all too fond of identity politics and having candidates tick all the DEI boxes, but not necessarily the one for competence. That’s how Harris got onto the Biden ticket in the first place.

Woman? Check.

Non-white? Check.

Protected minority? Check.

Culture Club’s lead singer was cross-dressing Boy George, a gay icon. I know. I read it on the internet. Check one box and maybe two.

Also, just as it truly can be said that Trump is proud to be an American, it’s also becoming abundantly clear that Harris and her sycophants are proud to be running a chameleon for president.

When I was a child, chameleons were popular pets, remarkable for their ability to change color. Back then, we thought the small lizards did so to blend in with their background of the moment. Doing a bit of research just today for this, I discovered scientists say the color changes more often have to do with emotions – looking to mate, looking to fight, looking to submit to a perceived threat.

I don’t care that Harris goes from highlighting her Indian ancestry, to emphasizing being black, to playing the sex card. These days anyone can “identify” as anything.

I’m a white, American, heterosexual male. But if I decided later today to identify as a black, Norwegian, gay male I am sure acceptance would be universal.

What does bother me is that Harris is quite the chameleon on issues.

Fracking? She wants it banned. Said so repeatedly while running for president for a few minutes in 2020.

Oh, Pennsylvania is a key state in her election hopes and fracking is big in the state? Of course she’s not for banning fracking and how dare you suggest that, despite various videos of her saying this. You’re just attacking her because she’s an Indian/Black woman.

And then there’s the Harris role as so-called border czar. Clueless Joe said she was in charge of the border. Since things didn’t go that well, Kamala Chameleon now denies it.

But on March 24, 2021, NBC news reported Biden had put Kamala in charge of managing the southern border.

About two and one-half months later, NBC’s Lester Holt pressed Harris on the issue during a sitdown interview. In Holt’s defense, that is before Lamestream media got the marching orders only to speak glowingly of Kamala Chameleon.

Holt kept asking the chameleon why she had not visited the border. First, she insisted “we” have been there. When Holt persisted that this was not accurate, Kamala Chameleon gave the tellingly vacuous response “And I haven’t been to Europe.”

Kamala, among her other questionable foibles, has advocated on social media for raising bail money to get rioters out of jail. But her media apologists are busy attempting to scrub that from the record, too.

Moving away from changing positions on issues, Kamala Chameleon can be counted on to stay on a consistent track when it comes to fashion. Always, it seems, we see this woman dressed in a pantsuit.

I typed “images of Kamala Harris in a dress” into the Google search engine and was rewarded with six pictures, and one was of her wearing pants. Change that inquiry to substitute “pantsuit” for “dress” and one gets a sampler of six images – no dresses.

The fact that there were any dress photos at all neatly coincides with these images predating her being anointed a presidential candidate. A July 30, 2024, story in the New York Times headlined “Kamala Harris is Dressing to be President” notes the pantsuits are an intentional, political move.

This makes Kamala Chameleon the biggest empty pantsuit, intellectually speaking, since Hillary.

We began this post on a musical note (pun intended) and we will end similarly.

Songstress Helen Reddy was a chameleon, too, going with the flow.

Her 1972 hit “I Am Woman” became the anthem of the women’s rights movement, blaring over loudspeakers at rallies ever since. “Hear me roar . . .’ the lyrics went. “I am strong. I am invincible. I am woman.”

But Reddy also had a 1975 hit “Ain’t No Way to Treat a Lady” in which the song was about being a victim of a cad love interest. Sample lyrics: “That ain’t no way to treat a lady, no way to treat your baby, your woman, your friend.”

From invincible to victim, Reddy was a chameleon opportunist, willing to play both sides of an issue.

Kamala Chameleon supporters ought to play these conflicting Reddy tunes as walking offstage music.

Allow me to share with you some of my “Atlas Shrugged” experiences of late.

In case you have yet to read “Atlas Shrugged,” the seminal magnum opus of Ayn Rand, it was written in 1957 but reads like current events, detailing governments and bureaucracy gone wild with over-regulation and ineptitude, punishing producers in order to reward those leaning on the oars.

It is a tale of despair, failing institutions and general malaise.

This brings me to my water bill. The good folks of the Greater Johnstown Water Authority make it their habit to have the bills issued with a short time to submit payment. By way of contrast, my Penelec bill, received last week, is not due until the middle of this month. But I’m mailing it out today.

My water bill payment was due today, Aug. 2. I received it July 26 and mailed out the check July 27.

Because of my experiences with the postal service – more on that later – and the GJWA, I became concerned when I looked at my checking account online today and the check had yet to be cashed.

A call to GJWA followed, with the recorded message that they were busy and I’ve have to wait for someone to answer. I waited for a time, then hung up and tried to check the website, but that was not all that helpful, either, so another call was placed. And the wait began.

Eventually, a woman answered and told me, in no particular order, that the post office had not delivered mail for an undefined period, then dumped a lot of mail on the GJWA and they were behind going through said mail. The staff is short-handed, she continued, but would be staying late and I should call back Tuesday because I had a grace period until Wednesday.

I presume I will need to add the water/sewer payment to my mounting list of bills either paid directly from my checking account or directly billed to my credit card, which is then automatically paid from my checking.

The reason for that, specifically regarding the credit card, is in the past I was having problems either receiving the bills through the mail in timely fashion, or having the billers receive my check through the mail in a timely manner.

As a person with a credit rating on the far side of 800, I pay my bills, unless mechanisms such as the postal service or the bill providers fail me.

Hopefully the GJWA payment situation is soon rectified.

I’m still hoping PennDOT can get its act together.

Previously I’ve written about the problems with a title transfer and antique plate transfer regarding a C4 Corvette I purchased – in early April!

We are at about the 5^th submission trying to get this rectified. Not all the problems have been with PennDOT, but that institution has more than held its own in terms of gumming up the works.

I submit to you some curious doings with PennDOT on other matters. I had two license plate registration renewals for other vehicles due at the same time (this month). I mailed them back, in separate envelopes and with separate checks, the very same day from the same mailbox.

One check was cashed rather quickly. The other check was cashed 10 days later.

Fortunately, I have gotten back both renewals, with a delay on that end, too.

Back on the matter of the Corvette, attempt No. 5 was priority mailed Tuesday. Pray for me.

The good news is that it’s a hobby car, not necessary for day-to-day transportation, so I pay to insure it and have it stored and collect dust while waiting to have the technicalities of ownership completed.

Is it too much to ask GJWA to mail out bills earlier?

Is it too much to ask the postal service to deliver mail reliably and in timely fashion?

Is it too much to ask PennDOT to get its act together?

Not that long ago, these would have been givens. These days, not so much.

Likely you have similar stories from your personal experiences with services we used to be able to take for granted would be handled speedily and correctly.

It is very likely things only will worsen from here. Spoiler alert: Rand’s book anticipates a lot more pain for the masses – and she’s been eerily correct so far.

Don’t you feel secure that there is a stalk of broccoli occupying The Oval Office as the nation and the world devolve into chaos?

Yes, I know Clueless Joe is but a figurative head of state. But many people don’t realize that. They are oblivious to the puppeteers pulling the strings, from DR. JILL BIDEN!!!!, to the Obamas, to Susan Rice and any other number of people actually calling the shots.

But the bad guys in other nations do know that Clueless Joe is but a neutered figurehead, unlikely to take any bold action as his leftist party tries to usher the Cackling Hyena into Joe’s vacated post.

If you are inclined to do bad things, as they are, now is the time.

Just in recent days I’ve read that Ukraine is losing ground fast to the Russians and begging bowl Zelenskyy is out looking for more handouts that can be lost in the transition. Billions of dollars of aid cannot be tracked and now our Pentagon is floating the tall tale that it has overestimated the value of aid to Ukraine by $6-plus billion over the past two years. And that means we have even more financial room to send lots more aid!

Right.

We have a bit of a problem in the Middle East, where Iran-backed terrorists blow up kids on an Israeli soccer field and the Israelis take out a Hamas head while he’s vacationing in Iran as retribution. Got to hand it to the Israelis, they don’t lack a backbone and they have a leader still able to find his way off a stage, or climb a pair of airplane steps, or not fall off a bicycle, or, or, or.

That terrorist attack on the kids was neatly ignored by the world. But the Israeli retaliation, well, that brought public reproach on a massive scale.

Oil and gold spiked upward Wednesday on the Middle East developments, but Biden mouthpiece Karine Gay Par-ee, said Joe is on top of this and conflict will not be allowed to expand on the Clueless One’s watch. Note to Gay-Par-ee, too late!

Notably, Putin didn’t invade foreign lands, Middle Eastern terrorists were not mounting major attacks on Israel or regional shipping, North Korea’s Kim I Am FaTTT was well-behaved and China was not circling Taiwan when Donald Trump was president,

With Trump gone and Clueless Joe in charge, all that has changed. If Cackling Kamala can be slipped into power, expect more of the same.

Meanwhile, on the domestic front, the FBI once again is being outed as an organization headed by partisan hacks. The Secret Service shows a similar face.

There’s been one assassination attempt on Trump and experts say to expect even more as the weaponized FBI and Secret Service do their bit to get Kamala into office.

No problem, though, the FBI will be delving into the Secret Service failures. That would be the same FBI that was quick to put out that the would-be assassin was some right-wing nut based on an unconfirmed social media presence, but chose to ignore a similarly unproven social media presence that indicated the pimply faced shooter was a left-wing nut who supported Biden.

Trump vows to hold another outdoor rally in Butler. Hey, Donald, spend a few bucks and hire your own security for that one.

But at least the Olympics provide a break from all this.

What? The Opening Ceremony was turned into an extravaganza of Christian-bashing, gay celebrating, fat-promoting, sexually explicit garbage?

Glad I skipped that, just as I have skipped the entire Olympics coverage. The combination of pro athletes long having been welcomed to this one-time amateur event, and the rampant politicization of the Olympic charter, which supposedly bans politicization of events, but looks the other way when said politicization has a hard-left lean, combine to make it must-miss TV for me.

Readers, if you sleep well at night confident that all is well, you are deluding yourself. I hope you wake up before it’s too late.

It seems I was premature in bidding adieu to the stench that had permeated the area over the past several days.

Although I can stand on my porch and detect nothing that unusual in terms of smells, I have been a told a person passing through Hollsopple today (Wednesday) found the stink so revolting she had to roll up the windows in her vehicle.

The unpleasant smell apparently was evident elsewhere in that area.

On the other hand, my brother said the air is good in downtown Johnstown today, at least it is eight floors above street level.

Yesterday, however, he said the smell was so strong as to prompt searches for its source.

Because nature abhors a vacuum, even when it’s merely a lack of information, I’ve been told no shortage of amateur analysts have taken to social media with theories to explain the unpleasant smell.

Among the suspects cited are farmers mixing manure with water to be used as fertilizer because it’s been dry here of late. Doubtful.

Others cite a school allegedly watering a football field with a manure mixture and it running off into a nearby river, neatly ignoring the unlikely nature of the first supposition, and the geographic reality of no river close enough to get such runoff.

State officials are claimed to have floated manure-baited traps on rivers to deal with an abundance of pest flies.

Perhaps a plane of uncertain government sponsorship is trying to poison us?

And so it goes.

I’m just rooting for it to continue long enough to attract national attention and perhaps land the area a segment on History’s Greatest Mysteries.

Critics of our fair Greater Johnstown area often refer to a stench about the place, in a figurative sense.

They speak of crime, political corruption, the powerbrokers operating from bases in nonprofits, rampant poverty and the like.

But, in recent days, there was a stench of a different sort, an unpleasant aroma that permeated the area.

Various media reports detail people calling 911, and being told to reserve such calls for mischief, like the fights at the Ferndale Jubilee. More on that later.

The other day, I noticed the unpleasant smell myself, which has been described as manure-like. I found it to be not unlike the stench that greets one driving past the Dornick Point Sewage Treatment Plant along Cramer Pike on a warm summer evening. But officials contacted by the media regarding various treatment facilities pleaded innocence

No, I didn’t call 911 for an explanation.

Media reports indicate the smell was wide-ranging, with confirmed stink in Davidsville, Richland, East Taylor Township and elsewhere.

Only because the media accounts tended to agree will I accept their version without dispute. I say this because the local NBC affiliate’s noon report, which my wife had on in the background as I wrote this, had the news reader talking about Senator Bob Mendez resigning due to corruption.

The accompanying chyron at the bottom of the screen also had “Bob Mendez.” Memo to the station, it’s Bob MENENDEZ!

The Altoona CBS affiliate had its announcer pronounce the name correctly, but also had the incorrect “Mendez” spelling on its chyron.

Beyond the media, an unpaid correspondent of mine told me his tale of leaving a Somerset County facility and proceeding home through Jerome, Davidsville, Hollsopple and onward to the lofty perch along Ridge Road between Hollsopple and Hooversville where he lives, expecting to meet aromatic relief there. Alas, he did not.

All the way, he was accompanied by the stench, prompting him to take measures such as looking in the bed of his pickup truck for an unwanted passenger, and then moving to examining the soles of his shoes to check for having stepped in something.

Another person had contacted him about the stink being present in Bon Air. As an aside, I always got a laugh in my childhood about the community of Bon Air (Good Air) being located above the belching blast furnaces of Bethlehem Steel, located down the road in Franklin. It’s all relative, I guess.

It seems the Johnstown Stench (what a nickname for our next minor league sports team!) has dissipated, leaving behind a trail of unanswered questions. Those include will it repeat as does The Hum, a low-frequency noise heard periodically ’round the world?

If only it were that easy to rid the area of the other stench that afflicts us. In this case, we speak specifically of crime.

Ferndale’s Jubilee has been a summer highpoint since I was a child and even well before, this having been the 93^rd example. Despite a time when it nearly had its lamp extinguished due to lack of volunteer workers and the like, the event continues.

But the stench of crime was rife this year at Ferndale’s signature event.

Media reports indicate one man has been arrested for passing counterfeit $50 bills, said man reportedly having heroin and additional funny money on him when arrested.

My son, wife and two granddaughters hit the Jubilee at mid-week, spending legitimate cash. I’d thought about us returning Saturday for the fireworks, but life intrudes.

Subsequent events, such as fights and arrests Saturday at the Ferndale event, make me grateful for having stayed home.

To sum up, the unpleasant manure smell seems to have passed. Our figurative stenches remain with us.