Articles by Dennis E. Powell

Dennis E. Powell is crackpot-at-large at Open for Business. Powell was a reporter in New York and elsewhere before moving to Ohio, where he has (mostly) recovered. You can reach him at dep@drippingwithirony.com.

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Dec 22, 2010

The View from Mudsock Heights: Forget the Better Mousetrap -- We’re Building Better Mice

By Dennis E. Powell | Posted at 11:50 PM

It was a good year for mice. The headline in Medical Daily last week is typical: “Reproductive scientists create mice from 2 fathers.” It seems that through impressive scientific jiggery-pokery in the lab, researchers at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center were able to extract a cell from each of two male mice, combine their DNA, put the results into a surrogate mouse mother, and produce a mouseling that was not genetically related to the mother at all. (What has this to do with cancer research? Good question.)

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Dec 16, 2010

The View from Mudsock Heights: Just in Time for Winter, Everything is Put Away, or So I Think

By Dennis E. Powell | Posted at 6:30 PM

It happens, at least to me, every spring: I’m all fired up to get and stay ahead of the lawn and the garden, always mindful of my grandfather’s advice that keeping a place looking good is a lot easier than getting it there in the first place.

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Dec 08, 2010

The View from Mudsock Heights: A Stunning News Story that Began a Year of Stunning News Stories, All of Them Tragic

By Dennis E. Powell | Posted at 8:00 PM

It was an unusual Monday in many ways. Thirty years ago today, I started work at the supermarket celebrity tabloid called Star Magazine. I was supposed to have gone to work at WOR Radio, at the time the number one radio station in the country, but that had gotten postponed a month. I’d already left Gannett newspapers. So Star was something to do until the WOR job began.

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Nov 29, 2010

The View from Mudsock Heights: How J.K. Rowling Invented the Secretary of Homeland Security

By Dennis E. Powell | Posted at 10:31 PM

It is a good thing that there’s a new Harry Potter movie. I have no idea if “Harry Potter and the Beginning of the End” or “Voldemort Strikes Back” or whatever it is called is any good. The New York Times says it is, but it might be anyway. The Potter movies have been wonderful (well, except maybe for the last one).

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Nov 22, 2010

The View from Mudsock Heights: We’re Beginning an Important Sesquicentennial, and It’s an Opportunity to Learn Some History

By Dennis E. Powell | Posted at 5:00 PM

We’ll soon be hearing more and more about the Civil War. Or, as it is sometimes called, the “Great Rebellion,” the “War of Northern Aggression” — in some places, it is still simply called “the War.” That’s because we’re soon to begin commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the outbreak of hostilities. Some of us remember the centennial of the war. I do.

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Nov 10, 2010

The View from Mudsock Heights: The Cinnamon and Sniffles Season Has Finally Arrived

By Dennis E. Powell | Posted at 3:50 PM

We’ve entered the time of year when things are different from how they look. As the skies and the woods and the yards turn to gray and brown, the things that stimulate our other senses grow stronger.

That’s especially so out here in the country.

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Nov 01, 2010

The View from Mudsock Heights: On the Passing of Halloween As a Good and Innocent Children's Festival

By Dennis E. Powell | Posted at 3:38 PM

It was five years ago, riding back on the West Virginia side of the Ohio River from Ashland, Kentucky, that I noticed it. We had been at the dedication of a memorial to Jack Kerouac at the Paramount Theatre there. What was stunning about the trip home was the festoonery. Every house, it seemed, had some elaborate Halloween decoration. Even fairly woebegone trailers could be counted on to have out front a 20-foot-high Frankenstein’s monster, well lit and kept inflated by a powerful fan.

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Oct 23, 2010

The View from Mudsock Heights: The Autumn We Happily Anticipate isn’t Always the One We Get

By Dennis E. Powell | Posted at 7:59 PM

Shortly after I moved here I received one of those documents that make the e-mail rounds. It was based on the then-popular “you might be a redneck” comedy act, only each stanza of this one ended with “you might live in Ohio.”

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Oct 16, 2010

The View from Mudsock Heights: Events Remind Us That Our Language is Always Under Attack

By Dennis E. Powell | Posted at 4:46 AM

It’s election year, which means that the national media are dusting off their maps and trying once again to figure out exactly where Ohio is. You will note that I said “media are,” not “media is.” That’s because I’m a member of a secret organization dedicated to the preservation of endangered portions of the language. “Media” is plural — the singular is “medium” (as in “The Athens News is an unparalleled advertising medium.”) Likewise the word “data.” If someone says “that data is not available,” he or she may know whether or not those data are available, but he or she is illiterate.

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Oct 08, 2010

The View from Mudsock Heights: Marketing Photographs in the Modern Manner

By Dennis E. Powell | Posted at 6:32 AM

The project finally got far enough along that I could do something with it.

For years I’ve carried around tens of thousands of negatives and transparencies, the result of a career of writing stories and making photographs. But the digital world has so taken over photography that the real, silver-based stuff is all but dead. Soon it will be so far in the margins that any work of chemical photography will be proceeded by the ubiquitous and annoying word “artisan.” So if all those many thousands of images were to have any further life, they would need to be digitized.

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