Mark's Adventures in SodaStreaming, Part I

Back in April, I lucked into getting a free SodaStream machine with one reusable bottle.  I promised my Facebook friends that soon, I would bring them reviews of various SodaStream syrups.**

I bought four different syrups (Target had a 40% off sale on various SodaStream products at that time).  After some trial-and-error*, here's what I think of each one:

SodaStream Diet Dr Pete (their version of Diet Dr Pepper) - not bad, but I had to add a little more syrup than the instructions call for to boost the flavor.  (The instructions for the syrups say that for one liter, you should fill it up to the second line in the cap.)  The first time I tried it, I followed the instructions, and I thought the end result was a little weak to be called a Dr Pepper clone.  Sweetener: Sucralose, which disappointed me somewhat because it is not my preferred artificial sweetener (I prefer a blend of aspartame and acesulfame potassium).  When I ditched sugary sodas for zero sugar versions in 2010, I tried just about every such soda I could find.  I remember disliking Pepsi ONE, and that was the only diet soda I tried that had sucralose.  Going back to the Diet Dr Pete, I found that the sucralose left a sweet aftertaste that, while I didn't mind it so much with this flavor as I did with Pepsi, I'd rather do without it.

Pepsi Zero Sugar - I wanted to try one cola syrup, and I had three to choose from (Pepsi Zero Sugar, formerly known as Pepsi MAX; Diet Pepsi; and SodaStream's own diet cola).  I decided on Pepsi Zero Sugar, and I was not disappointed at all.  I plan to add lime- and cherry-flavored bubly drops in future attempts.  Sweetener: Acesulfame potassium, aspartame _and_ sucralose.  Yes, all three appear in the ingredients list for this syrup.

Starry Zero Sugar - Without any bubly drops, I like it, even though I wonder how it would compare to Sprite Zero Sugar (the lemon-lime diet soda I liked best when taste-testing various diet sodas 14 years ago).  After adding a couple lime bubly drops to 8 ounces of Starry, it tastes more refreshing and not quite as sweet.  Sweetener: Sucralose and acesulfame potassium.

SodaStream Diet Ginger Ale - I liked it, but once again, I had to add a little more syrup than the instructions called for.  In the end, I still like the taste of Canada Dry better, so I'll be on the lookout for Canada Dry drink mix packets.  Sweetener: Acesulfame potassium and sucralose.

Coming soon: I'm going to try some powders next, starting off with A&W Root Beer, Orange Crush, Strawberry Sunkist, and Pineapple Sunkist.  I would never have tried those mixes with plain water, but SodaStream could be a game changer.  Then, from there, batten down the hatches!  I'm going to try four different Frutal flavors (that's a powdered drink mix made in Mexico that I found on Amazon)--Tangy Limeade, Citrus Punch, Summer Colada, and Tropical Berries.

*All that trial-and-error yielded some learning experiences:

• Pro tip #1: Like the Girl Scouts say, be prepared.  Have that syrup cap filled up to before you start carbonating the water, so that once you've finished fizzing it up, boom, you can add the syrup right after taking the bottle out of the machine.  The last thing you want is to fuss with opening a new bottle of syrup and then getting just the right amount into the cap while so much valuable fizz is escaping from your bottle.
• Pro tip #2: When the top light (the one with the three drops) lights up, keep carbonating for a couple more seconds.  That is, unless you don't mind soda that goes flat in short order.
• Pro tip #3 (which some of you already know): Pour the syrup down the side of the bottle, not right down through the top.
• Pro tip #4: Tighten that cap on your reusable Sodastream bottle like hell.  Take full advantage of that silicone seal on the inside of the cap!  Otherwise, the fizz will slowly escape and the soda will go flat overnight.
• Pro tip #5: You probably know this if you've used SodaStream syrups before, but always refrigerate the syrup after opening.  (I mention this one anyway because I didn't know about this instruction until I noticed it on the back of the first syrup I used.)

Two Issues I Have With SodaStream:

1. The machine is expensive, the CO2 canisters are expensive ($32 for a canister that is supposed to carbonate 60 liters of water--I have not been able to verify that yet), and as far as bottles and syrups go, you would do well to hold out for sales on those (like Target had in April, and Kroger had earlier this month).  As I said at the beginning, the main reason I'm even trying SodaStream to begin with was that I got the machine and one bottle for free.  You may want to see if someone local to you on Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist is selling their machine cheap (plus they'll probably throw in whatever they got with it, too--bottles, syrups, and maybe even a CO2 canisters).
2. My pet peeve is this: You'd think that one advantage of SodaStream would be the ability to make flavors that aren't already available at supermarkets--Coca-Cola Freestyle soda machines (which I've seen at restaurant chains like Five Guys Burgers & Fries and Zaxby's) have this ability.  However, that has not been the case with SodaStream.  You'd think that if you're a sales executive at SodaStream, you'd want to drive sales by introducing flavors that can't be found elsewhere.  Consider: Recently, Mountain Dew came out with three limited edition flavors (Liberty Chill, Star Spangled Splash, Freedom Fusion).  But those three flavors only come with high fructose corn syrup--no zero sugar versions.  SodaStream could have theoretically filled that void by making zero sugar syrups of those flavors.  (I mention Mountain Dew precisely because PepsiCo owns that brand, and PepsiCo bought SodaStream in 2018.)  Pepsi's ownership means that SodaStream will not be making syrups for Coke, Keurig Dr Pepper, or any other Pepsi competitor anytime in the foreseeable future.  Here's another idea: How about bringing back some discontinued Pepsi sodas as SodaStream syrups--Pepsi Jazz (a diet cola that came in three flavors: Black Cherry and French Vanilla, Strawberries and Cream, and Caramel Cream), Crystal from Pepsi (the citrus cola formula they had briefly in late 1994, not to be confused with the first Crystal Pepsi), and Josta.

**Why the delay in publishing this article?  Two things happened:

• First, as I mentioned earlier, there was some trial-and-error in using the SodaStream machine, bottle and syrups.  I wanted to make sure I was giving each of the four syrups a fair assessment, and not downgrade one based on a mistake I made.
• Second, before that, I battled gosh-darn pneumonia for a month.  I was sick for 10 days with what I thought was a bad allergic reaction to some dust before I even went to the hospital.  Once I finally checked myself in, I was in the intensive care unit for 4 days.  I estimate that it took another 17 days to recover the strength I had lost from being sick for so long.  I'm just about 100% now.

A Misadventure in Do-It-Yourself Repair

Anyone can share and celebrate success.  But it takes strength to admit failure.  So, now, I'll share with you a failure I had, and how I only recently conquered it.

Self-reliance is one of my core values.  And some of you may know that this extends to trying to repair my own stuff, especially the machines that help me take care of myself.

My dishwasher was not washing the dishes in the top rack.  Furthermore, whatever dishwasher detergent I put in the dispenser, would only be partly dissolved.  It wouldn't matter whether the detergent was a powder or liquid, name brand or store brand--half of it would be stuck inside the dispenser.

Long story short, the cause was my own darn fault.  I had taken apart the dishwasher to replace the filter and clean the spray arms*, and I thought I put everything back together.  It turned out that I forgot to include one tiny, but important part: the spray nozzle.

I didn't immediately recognize its importance when I saw it three weeks ago, while doing some cleaning up in my laundry room.  Then I realized, Hey, little this plastic part is the same gray color as the upper and lower spray arms in my dishwasher.

I took another look at a YouTube video** about cleaning those spray arms in hopes that I could figure out where that part was supposed to go.  And yep, it was supposed to go smack dab in the middle of the lower arm.

Even after putting that part back in its place, I had my doubts as to what impact a tiny little part*** would have.  I said to myself, "That might be better--I'll just have to find out, won't I?"

To my amazement, the dishwasher worked the best it has in a long time.  I had been using the dishwasher without that part for over a year, which meant I had been washing glasses, mugs and anything else I would have put in the top-rack by hand for that long.

Before this month, the frustration I had with my dishwasher had gotten to the point where I seriously considered buying one of those newfangled Chinese countertop dishwashers**** on Amazon.  Two weeks ago, I deleted those dishwashers from my Amazon wish list.  That felt so good.

*At that time, the dishes in both the top and bottom racks were coming out dirty.  The root cause of that problem had nothing to do with the filter or the spray arms; it was actually a clogged kitchen drain.  Every time my dishwasher tried to drain out the dirty water at the end of a cycle, it would back up into the kitchen sink, and some of it would end up back in the dishwasher.  Once I unclogged that drain, it made a huge difference in the bottom rack, which left me with the top rack to deal with.

**That video is available here. 

*** It certainly is a critical part, and replacement parts sites price them accordingly.  RepairClinic charges $30.76 plus shipping for it.  As of April 25, someone on eBay had a used one for $18.  It's a good thing I didn't throw mine out by mistake.

****These little countertop dishwashers come from a variety of brands, just not any that I would necessarily trust for kitchen appliances.  They also require plenty of countertop space and would set me back at least a couple hundred bucks.

Learnings:

1. Don't assume that there's only one problem.  It's possible the spray arms and the filter were issues, but so was the clog in the kitchen drain.

2. No tool will work well if it's incomplete.  Even a tiny part can make all the difference.

Appendicitis Awareness Day

On this day two years ago, my appendix turned heel on me.

Only thing is, I didn't know it at the time. No one in my immediate family ever had it.

I had just lifted up a TV--a Panasonic 43" plasma set, and you may know how heavy those are--when I felt that pain. I didn't give it much thought--I probably just took an Advil or a couple Tylenol. I thought I had just strained something, and the pain would go away soon.

One night later, I felt a fever. But at that time, I figured I just needed to get plenty of rest and take plenty of fluids--that ought to work, right? The only worry I had was that maybe my luck with avoiding COVID-19 ran out; what if I got it from someone at my most recent food shopping trip?

The next night, I had sweats and chills, and the pain in my abdomen also got worse, and for those reasons, I should have gone to the hospital. I still insisted in my mind that these would ultimately go away.

It was another two days before I finally went to the hospital. At the time, I couldn't even keep down sips of water, so I thought maybe I had unknowingly given myself food poisoning from something I cooked at home. (As it turned out, not being able to keep down food or drink was caused by constipation, which was the result of all the rest I had taken.)

Based on elevated white blood cell counts and a CT scan of my abdomen, my doctors came to the diagnosis of acute appendicitis. Since the medical standard is to remove the appendix when appendicitis is present, I figured that I would have surgery in short order.

However, the doctors informed me that due to the severity of the inflammation, it would not be wise to perform surgery right away, because with all the inflamed tissue, there was the risk that the surgeons might cut away some tissue that might ultimately be good tissue.  In the meantime, I was fed intravenously, and I also received antibiotics through the IV.

Long story short, I got sent home way too early due to a spike in COVID-19 cases.  I had to go back to the hospital a few weeks later after a stabbing pain erupted in the area of the appendix, and I ended up finally getting appendectomy until March 9.

In the nearly two years that have passed, I wonder how I could so easily forget how tough things were while I was sick, weak and hospitalized:

• The time I had to walk around, just hours after my appendectomy, just to turn my bladder back on (and with the IV machine hooked up to my arm)
• The times I had to walk around, even when I was in pain, to get my digestive system going again (also while tethered to the IV machine)
• The pain from the gas the day after the surgery (especially in the shoulders) Not being able to get a good night's sleep, much less be able to sleep on my side
• Constantly waking up with sweat on the back of my head and my chest, the sweat smelled like bile
• The stabbing pain on February 28--that was my appendix at its worst, and I was sure it had burst at that point
• The inconvenience of showering while tethered to the IV machine
• The frustration of putting my hospital gown back on after showering
• The times I had to drink down that potassium--yuck!
• Having to wear slip-on shoes and suspenders for the first two weeks after my surgery because it was impossible to wear a belt or tie shoes without feeling pain in the abdomen

Why do I want to remember all this?  Because I do not want to ever again feel so sick that I have to be hospitalized.

So, if you ever feel pain above the belly button and it moves to the right lower abdomen, and the pain feels like someone hanged a plumb bob on your intestines, you probably have appendicitis and you need to get that looked at.

Volume 14, Number 1: Out With Trump

Good evening, my fellow Americans.

Earlier today, former Vice-President of the United States, Joseph R. Biden, Jr., was projected to win the state of Pennsylvania, and with that, become the 46th President of the United States. I for one feel greatly relieved.  And I'll tell you why.

In 1976, Jimmy Carter, at that time the Democratic presidential nominee, running against incumbent President Gerald Ford, asked Americans a very simple question: Are you better off today than you were four years ago?

This year, Donald Trump, President of the United States since January 2017, did not ask that same question. It would have been a public relations gaffe for his re-election campaign if he had, because today, many Americans are not better off. More than 236,000 Americans have died from a virus that Trump said, back on January 22, was "one person coming in from China." 10 million more Americans are out of work, due mainly to that very same coronavirus, as many businesses that greatly depend on interpersonal activity and/or large gatherings of people have suffered (e.g. bars, restaurants, movie theaters, tourism).

Four years ago, a number of Americans thought that it might be time to give a non-politician a try. One thing Trump said at that time apparently resonated with a lot of them: Echoing a phrase used by politicians on both sides of the proverbial aisle since the 1980s, he likened Washington, D.C. to a swamp infested with alligators, and he would drain the swamp. (Note: Almost 63 million Americans voted for him in 2016, but it's not clear as to how many voted for him based on the party he represented, how many voted for him based on feeling threatened by change, and how many voted for him precisely because he was not a politician.)

By voting for Trump, however, they ignored objective editorials from various newspapers and magazines endorsing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (according to Wikipedia, 500 endorsed her specifically, and another 30 said "anyone but Trump"; links to many, if not all, of these editorials can be found within this article).  He was, has been, and is everything you don't want in a President: He is simultaneously a con man, a liar, a bully, a coward, and a manchild.

• Let's start with the con man part. Trump claims to be one of the most successful businessmen ever, yet he has left behind all sorts of short-lived business and bankruptcies. He claims to be an expert on just about everything. I am reminded of Gilderoy Lockhart, the character from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets who frequently bragged about his wizarding prowess, particularly in Defense Against the Dark Arts, yet could not prove any of it because all he ever did was take credit for what other witches and wizards had done. He published a postcard of guidelines for COVID-19 that he claimed were his own. (Incidentally, it has been reported that the Trump Administration owes the United States Postal Service $28 million for those postcards.)  Like Lockhart, he wrote a dozen or so books boasting of his expertise, but I wonder how much of that is him claiming credit for what various financial experts, business owners and real estate moguls had done.  Like Lockhart, too many people bought into his stories and blindly believe everything he says.  Only difference is, once Lockhart realized he was in over his head and could not live up to the reputation he had built, he tried to leave his job in less than one year.
• Liar - Trump has claimed to be worth billions of dollars, but he owes loads of money next year (according to the New York Times). He claimed he could not disclose his taxes because he was being audited; that is not a valid legal reason. For weeks, he constantly downplayed the COVID-19 threat, first by understating its magnitude, then saying it would disappear soon. Then, once he recognized that COVID-19 was a pandemic, he claimed he knew it long before anyone else did. He knew that absentee voting would be primarily Democratic (since they understand science and medicine and thus would be less likely to risk exposing themselves to the coronavirus at the polling places on Election Day), so he unleashed a torrent of baseless claims that absentee voting would be fraudulent. Most recently, he has been spreading falsehoods about the American electoral process in an last-ditch effort to spread doubt about its outcome.  It got me thinking of the 2019 HBO documentary Chernobyl, when Valery Legasov says in the final episode, "Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid."  It got me thinking that the sooner we, as a country, realize our debt to the truth, and begin paying on it, the better.  That debt to the truth, however deep it is now, would have become much worse with four more years of Trump boasting about how great and prosperous this country is.
• Bully - Trump's behavior during his first debate against former Vice President Joe Biden (Cleveland, September 29), constantly talking over his opponent and refusing to acknowledge that the time allotted to him was up, is the sort of crap bullies do. Bullies also resort to projection--they do things and then say, no it's the other person who's doing it. He calls the media "fake news" when they have fact-checked him more often than any President in the last four decades. Even Fox News, a network known for leaning heavily in favor of Republican poloticians, has felt his wrath.  Another example of projection was when he claimed the Democrats were politicizing the coronavirus--on February 28, he said, "This is their new hoax"--when what they were doing was warning people about it, and he was the one politicizing it.
• Coward - Chronically in denial, Trump blames everyone but himself when things go wrong--China, the media (even Fox News), former aides, former allies, and Democrats (especially the previous President, Barack Obama). To borrow from another Harry Potter book (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire), people have to choose between what is right and what is easy. Choosing what is right takes courage, and taking responsibility takes courage, no matter how difficult it may be to summon that courage. Instead, he and his yes men constantly choose to deny the truth over accepting it (e.g. not listening to scientists on climate change, not listening to medical experts on COVID-19, not denouncing racism, not rebuking acts of domestic terrorism).  When the coronavirus reached this country, he did not take a leadership role, leaving the states' governors to fend for themselves to the point where they had to compete against each other for resources. At his numerous "yes man" rallies, he did nothing to rebuke, renounce or even discourage chants like "Send her back!" (July 22, regarding Rep. Rashida Tlaib of my home state of Michigan) or "Lock her up!" (October 18, regarding Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer).  During the September 29 debate, when offered the opportunity to condemn actions by far-right, anti-immigrant white supremacist groups, he said of one such group, the Proud Boys, that they should "stand back and stand by." All of this shows a lack of courage.
• Manchild - Trump shows a lack of professionalism and maturity by resorting to petty insults (e.g. referring to the coronavirus as "the China virus," calling Joe Biden "Sleepy Joe"). You can find some more here.  (As an aside, I thought he would have learned from the late George Herbert Walker Bush, who insulted the opposing ticket during his failed re-election campaign in 1992.)  On April 23, after attending a U.S. Army biosecurity presentation that showed that the coronavirus could be neutralized on nonporous surfaces by disinfectants or prolonged exposure to sunlight, he gave a press conference in which he rambled on about a bunch of what-ifs--what if this light can be introduced inside the body, what if disinfectants can be injected. It famously drew this look of disbelief from Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus task force coordinator.  More to the point, the lack of clear guidance in that speech meant that manufacturers of disinfectants and bleach had to reiterate statements that such chemicals should not be used internally; still, a May survey taken by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stated that Americans had been doing exactly that.  Five months later, when he and his wife tested positive for COVID-19 (after failing to adhere to at least two of the COVID-19 guidelines that, back in March, he called his own), he stayed at Walter Reed Hospital for only a couple of days, then went right back to the White House. What kind of person puts himself at risk of giving other people the same virus? Let me give you a hint--when we were children, anytime our parents told us we were sick, a lot of us refused to believe it. Yep, sounds like a manchild to me.  And finally, this past Tuesday night, he wanted the ballot-counting stopped while he was ahead in Georgia and Pennsylvania, refusing to acknowledge that due to the larger number of absentee ballots and the largest quantity of votes collected in any U.S. election, more time was needed to make sure that every legitimate vote counted.

And all that is on top of all his other press conference gaffes, the longest government shutdown in American history (which led to the infamous January 2019 fast food buffet, when he fed "hamberders" to the NCAA national football champion Clemson Tigers (having them wait until the shutdown was over would have made much more sense, especially seeing as it ended less than two weeks later), the First Lady wearing that "I REALLY DON'T CARE, DO U?" jacket (June 2018), and that Goya product endorsement flap (less than four months ago).  Oh, and Betsy DeVos as the Secretary of Education.

Simply put, the non-politician-as-President experiment backfired. Donald Trump was a bad choice--he demonstrated a lot of the very qualities all those editorials warned the country about four years ago.  Contrary to one of the duties the President has (uniting his people, especially in times of crisis), he has exploited and aggravated the differences that Americans have had with one another for decades.

Trump was so bad, Scientific American magazine endorsed a candidate for the first time ever by endorsing Biden. A week later, the New England Journal of Medicine, which also had never published an editorial on a presidential election, urged its readers to not re-elect Trump. Trump was so bad, at least three former Republican state governors (Rick Snyder, Michigan 2011-19; Bill Weld, Massachusetts 1991-97; and Tom Ridge, Pennsylvania 1995-2001) publicly announced that they would vote for Biden. Trump was so bad, USA Today, which had never explicitly endorsed a presidential candidate in its 38 years of existence, endorsed Biden.

Thankfully, enough people across this country resolved to move on from this troubling chapter in our history. It's a shame that the Republicans, as a party, didn't.

I understand that one man alone will not change the fortunes of the United States of America.  A lot needs to be fixed.  We're living in a country that has consumed more than it has produced for the better part of the last five decades, and whose chief legal exports today are sports and entertainment. Seemingly every issue has been politicized and generalized. This country needs better public education so more people learn math, science, and basic life skills, and learn about past mistakes in history (not just the good parts).  This country needs to roll its environmental laws back to 2016. Corporations must stop outsourcing American jobs to other countries--not only manufacturing jobs, but customer service and technical support jobs, too (hello, General Motors--you're damn right I'm talking to you).  As it is, the materials we collect for recycling every day, should be recycled here instead of being shipped off to the Far East.

On top of that, there will be resistance, both in Congress that is split between the two main parties, and among the rank-and-file.  Millions of American adults and their children will need to resolve and overcome any prejudices they may have, instead of blaming everyone from minorities and immigrants to entire other countries.  In short, things may get rougher before they get better.

But electing Biden as our new President is a start.  I look forward to finding out whom he will nominate for his Cabinet.

Let us hope this country can reunite--if not right away, at least in the long term--and let us do what we can to make it so.

Sincerely,

Mark D. Rabinowitz

November 7, 2020

Volume 13, Number 1: Rachael Reynolds

Four years ago today, September 9, 2014, suicide hit as close to home for me as it ever has.  Rachael Reynolds, a 19-year-old woman who had graduated from Farmington High School the year before, ended her life by jumping off a freeway overpass in Farmington Hills.  Farmington High is just a couple miles southwest of my high school (Harrison High), and the freeway overpass in question is just a couple miles away from either school.  From what I read on her Twitter page, she had dropped out of college and wasn't happy with her body, even though she certainly looked nice to me.  Her final tweet: "The worst and the last day."

It's particularly awful when it's someone so young, someone who does not have the life experience to understand when someone else--someone who just might have gone through a similar situation in their youth and recognizes the pain--says to them, "Don't give up--things are going to get better."

Take it from me--yeah, things can and do get better.  Fifteen years ago, I was out of work and heavy in debt.  And I had no way of knowing where my next job would come from.  I was fearful of becoming a burden on my family, fearful that I would descend into a life of shame and destitution.  It took support from my family, a few years of working dead-end jobs that barely made ends meet, and a little good luck*, but I got out of that mess.  If, on the other hand, you take your life, you wipe out whatever chances you may have.

The real challenge is when the depression and anxiety becomes so severe that in an instant, you forget all the previous times things got better and the good times and how everybody goes through some kind of shit that nobody else does and how there just might be some good luck in the future to address the problems you have today.

Here's my perspective on asking for help.  I've come to realize that it is not a sign of weakness or incompetence--an act of strength. It takes strength to overcome anxieties about how people may think of you as a person based on what you say, strength to ask questions when you don't have the answers, strength to persist in telling your story if the first person or the first two people or the first 100 people don't listen

Metro Detroiters, remember the Electrifying Mojo?  He said, "If you ever feel like you're nearin' the end of your rope, tie a knot.  Keep hangin', keep rememberin', that there ain't nobody bad like you."

In closing, I'd like to share a song about what a terrible option suicide is. Out of Control by Oingo Boingo.  This lyric should always stay in my head: "Don't you know / That everyone around you / Has felt the pain you feel today." I wish everyone who has ever contemplated suicide would instantly hear this song, which Danny Elfman wrote in 1990.


*Luck--that could be another blog entry in itself.  The two bits of good luck I needed to get out of the mess I had in 2003 didn't come until 2005 (when I got the help I needed to get out of that debt) and 2007 (when I landed the job I have now).  Had I ended my life in 2003, I would have left behind loved ones wondering what they could have done or said to prevent it, denied myself the opportunity to prove I could overcome my problems; left behind still more people wondering if they inadvertently left a proverbial straw on the camel's back that proved to be one too many; and obviously, I would have missed out on what I have now.

Volume 12, Number 2: The Legends Fest Fiasco

August 13 marked the first anniversary of the Legends Fest fiasco in Dudley, Georgia.

If you don't know what Legends Fest was: In a nutshell, it was a pro wrestling event created by a man named Greg Greene, who, in a span of a little over two months, managed to get a mix of current independent wrestlers and superstars of days gone by (as listed in the poster shown below)--mostly the latter--to show up for the event.  Thing is, he did not plan on paying them.

I wasn't there for this sham of an event, but it struck a nerve with me for two reasons:

• First, because I've followed WWE since 1987 and therefore am familiar with a lot of the names on the poster.  Examples: Arn Anderson and Tully Blanchard, who were two of the famous Four Horsemen in NWA/WCW, also worked as a tag team in the WWE called The Brain Busters (Bobby Heenan was their manager).  Ted DiBiase, the Million Dollar Man, main-evented WrestleMania IV (losing to Randy "Macho Man" Savage for the then-vacant WWE Heavyweight Championship).  Ronnie Garvin, I remember from that time he lost to Greg "The Hammer" Valentine in a retirement match, only to make Valentine's life miserable as a referee.
• Second, and more importantly, I've had a number of situations in which my time and energy were wasted and I got next to nothing in return--a summer job from Hell in 1992 (it was supposed to be a research job but it ended up being door-to-door sales); the time in 1999 when I met with someone to buy a used car (they never got a cent from me, but they wasted a lot of my time), only to find that he didn't have a clear title; and a 2007 job interview with a company that claimed to be in marketing but ultimately was nothing but street peddling.

OK, enough about me.  Back to Legends Fest.  A few dozen former wrestlers, plus a few young wrestlers currently working the independent circuits, went through all the trouble to get there.

The first red flag might have been raised on July 20, when Greene announced that the event was being moved from Dublin to the much smaller town of Dudley (or, as at least a few of the talent involved would put it, "the middle of nowhere").  His explanation: "Due to overwhelming responses we have found it would be necessary to hold Legends Fest in a more suitable location."  I'd love to know what "overwhelming responses" and "suitable location" meant, knowing what we know now.  Maybe the folks at the venue Greene wanted to use in Dublin overwhelmed him with messages saying they didn't want his sham of an event in their town.  Maybe he didn't sell enough tickets to pay for the use of the Dublin location and decided a cheaper venue would be more suitable given the situation he put himself in.

Two days before the event, B. Brian Blair (one-half of The Killer Bees, a tag team that performed in WWE in the 1980s) noted that the talent Greene had listed on the poster was too expensive for the local demographic; when he called Greene, he responded by stating that they got the money from sponsorships--never mind that the poster mentioned no sponsors, and Greene probably never had any to begin with.

Greene had booked rooms at two different hotels in Dublin (Quality Inn and La Quinta), but with a credit card that got declined.

The building that Greene chose to hold the event in was an abandoned school (the Millville Alumni Association Complex, which, according to former WCW announcer Scott Hudson, had once been Millville High School).  There were no signs outside the building to indicate that any kind of event was going on--or in any of the surrounding towns, for that matter.  A number of the people listed on the poster (Garvin, Ricky "The Dragon" Steamboat, Davey Richards, Angelina Love) had already smelled a rat and did not show up.

On top of all that, Greene didn't have the money to pay the talent, even though he claimed to have sold more than $10,000 worth of tickets.  Greene said that he was expecting payment from the site through which he set up ticket sales for the event, Eventbrite, but that they e-mailed him at 4am on the morning of the event to tell him they would not wire him the money, at least not as he had expected.  It is likely that Greene did not have a legal PayPal account, and that is why he did not receive the money from Eventbrite.

Paul Eubanks (another promoter, who had been in the business since 1984, and had never met Greene before the event) said Greene asked him for a loan--first for $1,000, but this request was later increased to  $5,000.  Eubanks and Hudson also said the local sheriff threatened to shut down the show unless the talent was paid.  Greene ended up writing a load of checks that bounced--many from his own mother's checkbook, which he had stolen.  According to multiple witnesses, Greene was sweating and stuttering and had a dry mouth, and nobody knew that he had no money until he gave Anderson a chair to sit in, which broke, and a fuming Anderson--1/4 of the classic Four Horsemen of NWA/WCW--then said he should pay him $1,000 on top of what he was already owed.

In spite of the money issues, the performers were determined to put on a show for the fans who came, even though they risked injury doing a job that wasn't going to pay anything.  Eubanks and Francisco Ciatso (another indie wrestler; pronounced KEE-aht-soh) did what they could to make the show happen, even after Greene repeatedly threw Eubanks under the bus for his own screw-ups, even despite the fact that some of the talent booked in the matches either left or never showed up, meaning Ciatso had to book a few matches on the fly.  Even then, things did not stop going wrong--the lights went out and the toilets backed up.

Ciatso summed up Greene as a mark who wanted to rub elbows with wrestlers of the past and set up this sham of an event just for that purpose.

On August 18, Greene was arrested in Virginia on multiple felony charges, including 23 counts of deposit account fraud, 15 counts of forgery, theft by deception, and making false statements.

As of this time, I do not know if Greene has already stood trial on these counts.

I've compiled a whole bunch of media related to the fiasco, mainly for you to peruse and enjoy, but also partly for me to refer back to at a later time.  Some of these go into a lot more detail about what happened.  Check 'em out.

The first of two podcasts Sean David Hubbard did on the subject: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/prosperitywrestlingradio/2016/08/16/pwr-presents-rampage-rants-monday-night-mayhem-disaster-in-dudley
The second of those two podcasts: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/prosperitywrestlingradio/2016/08/23/pwr-presents-rampage-rants-monday-night-mayhem-disaster-in-dudley-part-2
Del Wilkes speaking about what happened a day or two afterwards: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2U9bfS5gpCc
The Courier-Herald, a newspaper in Dublin, published a story about the event here: http://matchbin-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/public/sites/654/assets/I70R_CH_8_16_16_WEBSITE.pdf
Mallorie Bradley, the fiancée of "Dreamkiller" Eric Wayne (one of the independent wrestlers at the event), posted a couple videos showing herself and "Mr. Wonderful" Paul Orndorff confronting Greene.  Orndorff is the one in the blue shirt, guarding the door while Bradley chews him out: https://www.facebook.com/mallabamaslam/videos/10208307875947671/
https://www.facebook.com/mallabamaslam/posts/10208313727853965
Another video of Bradley and Orndorff confronting Greene, which I believe was originally recorded by Stormie Lee Sloane (another of the indie talent at the event): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wz1tZeKEXKg
A Gerweck Report podcast, featuring an interview with former Smackdown GM Theodore R. Long: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiEuRR2bOwc
A Reddit thread on the subject: https://www.reddit.com/r/SquaredCircle/comments/4xmphl/promoter_stiffs_legends_local_indy_talent/
Scott Hudson's account of the whole thing: http://www.wrestlingepicenter.com/news/2014//473221113.shtml
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/psp/2016/08/16/tipping-point-special-on-the-dudley-debacle
(Francisco Ciatso and Stormie Lee Sloane interview)
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/psp/2016/08/19/peach-state-pandemonium

Volume 12, Number 1: Holocaust Remembrance Day

At some point in the mid- to late-1980s, my father gave me a small paperback book.  It was Victory--the fourth (and final) volume in The Eyewitness History of World War II, by Abraham Rothberg, which Bantam Books had originally published in the 1960s.  A little over halfway through this volume is a passage about the Shoah* that resonated with me the first time I read it, and it still does today.  I'd like to share it with you now, especially given the incredibly ignorant comments that White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer made less than two weeks ago.

On April 14, 1945, Allied troops advancing into Germany saw firsthand the horrors of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.  Among those soldiers was R.W. Thompson, a captain in the British Army who would later become the war correspondent for the London Sunday Times.  The following are excerpts from what he wrote:

The blue smoke of many fires hangs thickly in the pine woods along the road from Winsen to Belsen.  In the clearings the young corn is green and all the loveliness of spring, of budding life, is in the air, and the smouldering grasses of the pine woods bring a wonderful tang to the nostrils so that you expand your chest and feel your youth still in you, and are glad to be alive.  Then suddenly a new tang creeps into the odours of burning.  It is the stench of death.  It is the stench from the great charnel-house our armies have overrun so that all mankind shall now--and this time neither to balk nor forget--the appalling crime Hitler and the Nazis have done against humanity, against the very basis of life and faith itself. ... 

I began the unforgettable walk that you must read about.  At first it was little worse than a kind of enormous hutted camp with here and there the wooden towers where the guards had watched.  The whole enormous area hidden in lovely pine woods divided into barbed-wire enclosures containing about thirty long huts to house, on military standards, less than fifty men.  Here the inmates, men, women and children, were new, but recently brought in.  For the first time for days there was water, and for the first time for weeks these people were washing themselves and their clothes.  The only odd thing was that here and there men and women were excreting--just casually anywhere. There is no sanitation in this hell in the woods. 

And now before my eyes was the slow destruction of human beings, stripped of all human dignity, forced down to the level of the beasts, and so to die in utter ruin.  This thing, this hell far beyond the dreams of Dante, holds some 60,000 souls--souls!  These are not souls, these tragic travesties of humanity that sit and rot in their own excrement, these things that were human once, reduced now to skeleton death by slow deliberate starvation, but first stripped of all remnants of human dignity so that in truth they are dead before they die.  By the barbed wire lie the dead, some bits of clothing, others naked, men, women and children, almost unrecognizable as the remains of human kind, though they died but an hour since. ... 

They lie down and they die.  Now deep into the camp the dead lie in bundles, neat bundles, grotesque limbs in terrible positions.  Here is a small cart loaded with a dozen corpses, the faces like parchment tight against the skulls.  They are only just dead.  A brown stocking is limply around a leg that a small black garter less than 4 centimeters in diameter cannot clasp.  A shock of auburn hair crowns the dead face of this woman that stares sightless to the blue sky.  The normal world of life is receding.  Horror is not yet too deep for an individual to mean something.  This woman had a life, a purpose, was beloved of someone.  But now the dead are in hundreds, the dead, the living and the near-living.  The dead in small bundles of threes or fours under the shadow of the pines, the dying in attitudes of sleep by the roadside, some dying peacefully, some suddenly sitting up chattering.  Here a woman sits with eyes round in deep sockets, and a younger woman tries to quiet her babbling.  She is babbling like a grotesque travesty of a child.  If you did not know, she might be asking for a toy to play with, but she is asking for death. ... 

And so slowly the Chaplain takes me to the great burial ground where our soldiers are scooping pits with bulldozers to accommodate all this dead and putrefying human wreckage, deliberately, slowly, brought to pass by Adolf Hitler and the so-called Aryan** race.  Morning and night the heavy truck with its trailers brings its cargoes of bodies to the great pits.  Stand with me at this brink of this death pit.  It is my job, your job, the world's job.  It is about 30 feet deep, but you cannot see how deep because it is nearly filled now with human bodies, littered together in the embrace of death.  Here are girls, boys, men, women, naked, half-naked, upside down, sideways, all ways, some staring up to the sky, others with their heads buried in human remains.  So stare in silence and let this crime beyond expression sink in.  Across the sandy clearing is the incinerator, but it ran out of petrol.  A rough record by the chief burner of bodies records seventeen thousand burned last month.  They say each body was roughly clubbed as it went in, for there is so little difference between the dead and the near-dead.  There is no differences in the faces even. ... 

I found it difficult to speak to Germans at all.  I used to walk through crowds of them--civilians or prisoners--as though they weren't there, yet feeling a kind of flaming wall around me. ... 

I am now a complete idealist.  I have given up all the "isms."  I believe in the human spirit above all things, and that only by a change of heart can civilization be saved.  For although it is the Germans who have done this thing, it is not only the Germans who can do it.  Prisoners of Germans did it to other prisoners.  Mankind can do this thing to mankind.

We must pass what we learned about the Shoah down from one generation to the next because every new generation, each being more distanced by time from the terrible events by time than the one before it, is more susceptible to being lied to.  In particular, a man named Bradley R. Smith thought that my generation, a generation for which the vast majority of their parents were born well after the Second World War ended, would be vulnerable to lies (for example, he claimed that Allied bombings of railroads were to blame for the starvation of the prisoners).  Smith published his lies in a number of student newspapers in 1991, including a full-page ad in The Michigan Daily.

"I was taught that humans, all things being equal, would be humane to one another.  I didn't hear about the Shoah until I came to the United States.  And when I did, I was rocked to my roots, because it seemed to deny everything I thought I had known about us humans!"
Prof. Ralph Williams, 9/21/2016

*I have referred to this event as the Holocaust, mainly because it was the most widely-used term growing up, and it is widely in use today.  However, as Prof. Williams pointed out last year, that term is also used in the Bible to describe burnt offerings.  He added that the person who first used that term regarding the persecution and murder of millions of Jews by the Nazis later regretted doing so.

**The original wording from Mr. Thompson was "Adolf Hitler and the German race."  I changed "German" to "so-called Aryan" because, while Germany as a country was the primary guilty party, not all Germans willingly participated in the Shoah; to the contrary, a number of German-born people resisted in any way they could, with the price often being their lives.