Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.

Blogging Corzine’s AARP call

AARP is hosting what it calls a tele-town hall with Gov. Jon Corzine — an opportunity for seniors to talk with the governor via telephone.

The governor, speaking via phone, has been pushing senior programs, touting an expansion of funding for those programs as something the “reflects our values.”

There has been nothing new, so far. The tele-town hall has been, like most of his appearances lately, an aggressive sales job — only in this case Doug Johnson from AARP has played the role of Corzine's sychophantic pitchman.

This message was sent using the Picture and Video Messaging service from Verizon Wireless!

To learn how you can snap pictures and capture videos with your wireless phone visit www.verizonwireless.com/picture.

Note: To play video messages sent to email, QuickTime� 6.5 or higher is required.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Doggie diaries: The story of Rosie and Sophie Puppies gone wet and wild!

This is what all of us should be doing on a hot April afternoon — not cutting the lawn as I’m about to do.

This message was sent using the Picture and Video Messaging service from Verizon Wireless!

To learn how you can snap pictures and capture videos with your wireless phone visit www.verizonwireless.com/picture.

Note: To play video messages sent to email, QuickTime� 6.5 or higher is required.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Energy ground zero

Clean coal may be coming to New Jersey — a Massachussets firm wants to build a $5 billion, 500-megawatt electrical generating facility that would capture emissions, pump them a hundred miles and store them under the Atlantic Ocean.

If approved and built, it would be the first plant of its kind and would move us in a new energy direction, say advocates. It would allow us to continue using coal — the cheapest energy source — without its polluting effect, they say.

But there is a flaw in the reasoning. Finding a way to limit or eliminate the emmissions from energy sources seems a positive step, until it is made clear that there are other environmental problems with coal and other fossil fuels.

Even if the sequestration process works flawlessly, we’re still left seeking energy sources that require us to disturb large amounts of land — to find the coal and to create the piping infrastructure that would allow us to bury it.

I think Jeff Tittel, president of the New Jersey Sierra Club is correct:

“Coal is like heroin — cheap, plentiful and addictive, but very dangerous and to get it they take down mountains along with square-miles of trees, adding to the carbon output and environmental damage.”

Rather than find ways to make bad fuels less bad, we need to reduce our energy consumption — more efficient homes, cars, buildings — and find ways to make truly renewable sources like wind and solar cheaper.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Saturday wasn’t dead: Blogging Graham Parker


Trademark shades, white shirt and gray jeans, acoustic guitar and that gravel-filled growl he calls a voice, bluesy….It’s Graham Parker.

Thirty three years after his first album — the classic Howlin’ Wind — made its appearance, Parker is still going strong, if flying well below the radar.


Evidence of this was his solo performance last night in Titusville, at Concerts at the Crossing at the Unitarian Universalist Church at Washington Crossing. The 250-or-so-seat venue was just short of capacity, something I wasn’t expecting but should have (the number of people who asked “who?” when I told them I had interviewed him and was going to the show was far larger than the ones who remembered him).

But Parker played to the crowd with a delicious sense of humor — ascerbic, at times, but completely without malice. He moved between an acoustic guitar and an electric one, strumming mostly, but rocking through his set with elan, 20 songs ranging from his Howlin’ Wind (“Not If It Pleases Me”) to a number of songs from his funny self-release, Carp Fishing on Valium (songs written to accompany a book of short stories of the same name).

Highlights, of course, were the five cuts from Squeezing Out Sparks — it is 30 years since that amazing record hit the stores, a fact he acknowledged by dubbing the tour “From the Sublime to the Ridiculous” (Sparks to Carp).

And there were the jokes — self-deprecating — and stories (he introduced “Custom Fanny,” a brilliant send-up of the Rolling Stones, with a story about how Brian Porker — the protagonist of his stories — comes to audition to replace Mick Jagger, a story that featured a dead-on Keith Richard imitation).

So, while the great Graham Parker may not command the same audiences he did back in the late-’70s or 1981 (when I last saw him live), he remains a vital presence on stage and a songwriter deserving of more attention than he’s getting.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.