Tux sucks wind, once more.

Nothing but the revealed truth for Portland Press Herald's Tux Turkel,when it comes to the reworked plan by ex governor Angus King to plaster yet another scenic Maine mountain ridge with what will certainly be  poorly producing, subsidy-dependent  eyesores.

In his article Builder reduces impact of Highland Wind plan.   Tux swallows the King's public relations noise as glibly as a raw oyster, and pronounces it Good:
"The developer of a controversial wind farm proposed for Somerset County has redesigned the project to benefit residents and reduce visual impacts on the Appalachian Trail and the Bigelow Preserve."

Note he didn't write: "The developer of a controversial wind farm proposed for Somerset County SAYS THAT HE has redesigned the project to benefit residents and reduce visual impacts on the Appalachian Trail and the Bigelow Preserve."

Nope. If it comes from the King, it's gotta be so, in Turkel's star-struck eyes.

Lynda Clancy shows 'em how to write.

I really liked Lynda's Herald Gazette article "Warren blasts CRC health, methadone culture" 

Unlike some reportage  from that occasionally fine newspaper, here Clancy effortlessly draws together milieu, storyline, meeting participants, backstory, the conflicting sociologies and economics of this event, in which a California based company held a public meeting on its proposal to place a methadone clinic in the tiny Midcoast Maine town of Warren

The simple lines that won my heart was when she wrote:  Still another person shouted, "Let him talk! Let the man finish." 

Documenting that tempering voice in the midst of jeers and uproar revealed to readers the essential civic decency of the wrathful  townfolk, even in the midst of this highly charged event, where angry town residents in the packed gymnasium are not only rejecting the proposal, but also signing petitions calling for the ouster of town manager and code officer. 

It was like a written version of  Norman Rockwell's "Freedom of Speech" painting, something I recently had the pleasure of lingering over in its original form. 


Great work, Lynda. Something that the town ought to keep in its archive. 

(But then I'm an amateur historian, and loathe the general run of  low-information and frequently critically deficient coverage of locally important events that all too many other journalists are, alas, prone to produce.)