Solon Economou

AMVETS raise the roof for Veterans Day

"Veterans Helping Veterans"

The crew from Healy Brothers Construction donated labor and expertise.

Cape Cod AMVETS Post 333 has literally raised the roof for Veterans Day.  And added one more chapter to the AMVETS motto, "Veterans Helping Veterans."

Three weeks ago Post 333 was contacted by the VA center in Hyannis regarding a Gulf War disabled vet in need of assistance.  The Air Force vet had lost her husband and has a teenage girl.  She was diagnosed with cancer, lost her jobs, and almost lost her house.  After long and painful treatment, the cancer is in remission.

But her roof and kitchen ceiling were another story.  A group from AMVETS went over to inspect the "leak" and discovered the entire roof needed replacement, and fast.  Water was pouring in, and heat was pouring out.  The AMVETS temporarily covered the roof with a tarp and put the call out to get the job done by Veterans Day.  The new roof was installed on Monday, November 9, two days ahead of time.

This was a true community effort involving AMVETS, local businesses and organizations, and individual Cape Codders.  The labor and expertise were donated by Healy Brothers Construction, the roof shingles by Mid-Cape Home Centers, and the disposal container by Nauset Disposal.  Volunteers too numerous to mention will do the ceiling, the floors, and related work.

The vet is now attending Nursing School at Cape Cod Community College hoping to give back to those in need.  And living in a dry, warm house.

Veterans Day services:

• Cape Cod AMVETS Post 333 will hold a Veterans Day service at 11am on Wednesday, November 11, at Merrill Park on Route 28 in West Dennis. 
• A Veterans Day service will be held at 10am on Wednesday, November 11, at Saint Mary's Episcopal Church on Route 6A in Barnstable. It will include a color guard and patriotic music.  Featured speaker will be Yarmouth Police LT Steve Xiarhos, father of our fallen AMVET brother, Marine CPL Nick Xiarhos.

All are invited to attend these services or any of the other Veterans Day services being held on Cape Cod to honor our vets.  Remember, all gave some, some gave all.

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Cape's Tanionos presents Agganis Award to Orioles' Markakis

John Tanionos of East Sandwich recenty traveled to Baltimore to present the prestigious  2009 Harry Agganis Award to Baltimore Orioles star outfielder Nick Markakis.  Markakis has been called the face of the Orioles franchise and was honored with his very own shirt this season called, "Nick the Stick, Camden's Finest."

Tanionos, National Athletic Awards Chairman for the American Hellenic National Progressive Association (AHEPA) and past president of the Cape Cod AHEPA chapter, presented the plaque at Camden Yards.

Left: The Cape's John Tanionos presents the Agganis Award to Orioles slugger Nick Markakis. Right: Nick "The Stick" Markakis in action.

Agganis, one of the greatest athletes of his generation, is remembered as an All-American quarterback for Boston University and a slugging first baseman for the Red Sox, batting cleanup after baseball's greatest hitter, Ted Williams.  Agganis was also scheduled to sign on as quarterback with the Cleveland Browns or Baltimore Colts for the fall of 1955.  He was batting .313 for the Sox when he suddenly died of a pulmonary embolism while being treated for pneumonia.  The Harry Agganis Hellenic Athlete Award was established in his honor.

Tanionos himself, as a teenager, played in several Harry Agganis Basketball Tournaments and said,  "Never beyond my wildest dreams did I ever think I would one day present the Harry Agganis Hellenic Athlete Award to a professional athlete."

Markakis, now in his fourth year with the Orioles, has a career batting average of .299.  A right fielder, he has recently established the Right Side Foundation to help improve the lives of distressed children, whether they are abused, hungry, abandoned, grieving or lonely.

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Sheriff keeps it clean for Shining Sea Bikeway

   Joe Doud pauses on the path as an inmate works at cleaning filth off the wall.

As Cape Cod citizens and dignitaries gather on July 2 for the Shining Sea Bikeway extension dedication ceremonies in Falmouth, it won't be evident what the Sheriff's department has been doing to prepare for the celebration.  And that's the way Sheriff Jim Cummings wants it. 

Political speeches at the event notwithstanding, Cummings is making sure attendees have a "clean" forum by cleaning up graffiti and other offensive or distracting sights.

Joe Doud, 74, an East Falmouth resident and frequent user of the town's Shining Sea Bikeway, pauses for a moment (above) near the conclusion of his three-mile walk.  Doud strolls the popular trail three or four times a week. 

Behind him a Barnstable County inmate, assigned to a supervised labor crew and dispatched by Cummings, is hard at work removing graffiti that was scrawled on a bikeway wall.  Unremoved, the graffiti would have surely put a damper on the upcoming dedication ceremonies. 

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Helping feed Bourne's hungry

Sheriff Cummings receives John D. Fox Award in Bourne

   Ann Marie Riley presents Sheriff Jim Cummings with the John D. Fox Award in Bourne.

Barnstable County Sheriff Jim Cummings accepts the prestigious John D. Fox Award from Ann Marie Riley, coordinator of Bourne Friends Food Pantry.  The accompanying ceremony, a late May Volunteer Appreciation reception, applauded the Sheriff for dispatching inmate crews to offload the pantry's weekly delivery of foodstuffs.  They have been doing it for about a year.

The plaque the Sheriff is holding (above) also singles out the three crew supervisors - Sgt. Joe Brait and Deputies Nick Bevilacqua and John Curry.  The award was named after John Fox, a Bourne resident who passed away several years ago after spending more than a decade as a pantry volunteer.  "When in doubt, give it out," was his motto on food distribution, according to the town's council on aging director. 

The council and its affiliate group, Friends of the Bourne Council on Aging, sponsored the reception.   

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Inmate workers ramp it up

Sheriff's community service crews build goodwill on Cape Cod

   Sara Putnam watches as inmate Fred Thompson builds a handicapped ramp for her front door.

Sara Putnam of Hyannis is 62 but she looks, sounds, and feels a whole lot older.  Four strokes, diabetes, and the grueling regimen of thrice-weekly dialysis treatments can do that to you.

But at least her frequent falls are largely in the past, thanks to Barnstable County Sheriff Jim Cummings and four of the inmates he oversees at the county correctional facility.  The Sheriff has dispatched the foursome, one of two community service crews, to build a handicapped ramp to the front door at Sara's Winter Street home.

"This is so nice of them," Sara explained from inside her home as the rap-tap-tap of hammers and the bzzz of electric saws floated through an open window.  "I really can't thank them enough.  I've fallen so many times.  And every year I seem to get a little weaker."

"The value to local property taxpayers and project recipients is self evident.  Inmates, meanwhile, have a healthy and refreshing outlet for their talent, a way to give back at least some of what we pay to incarcerate them." - Sheriff Cumming

Sheriff Cummings noted his stack of worthwhile projects grows longer, never shorter, "but that's better than having it the other way around."  Cape towns and other local public sector agencies are eligible recipients along with non-profit organizations.  Ms. Putnam's ramp was requested by the non-profit Cape Cod Organization for the Rights of the Disabled (CORD).

CORD helped Mrs. Putnam secure funds to purchase the wood, along with the other ramp materials.  That contribution, combined with a generous discount from Home Depot, accounts for about $5,000 worth of the job.  The value of the inmate labor is almost $6,500 when you include the sergeant assigned to supervise the four-day job.  That brings the bottom-line donation to about $11,500.  "I could never afford that," Sara acknowledges.

In a typical year, inmates perform in the neighborhood of 40,000 hours and normally do at least one project in each of the Cape's 15 towns.  Some communities get more than one visit and municipal projects - park and beach clean-ups, school paintings, housing authority fix-ups - top the list.

Only about 5 percent of the inmates are eligible for the work-crew program.  Automatically excluded are inmates awaiting trial, those named in a restraining order, and anyone convicted of certain violent crimes.  Major drug and sex offenders are also ineligible. 

Sheriff Cummings said, "the value to local property taxpayers and project recipients is self evident.  Inmates, meanwhile, have a healthy and refreshing outlet for their talent, a way to give back at least some of what we pay to incarcerate them."

 Sara is of course the biggest winner of all, having freed herself of a major worry.  She last fell in February and has had multiple spills in the five years since she suffered her first stroke.

"Those winter appointments for six AM dialysis treatments are the worst," she says.  "All that ice.  The trickiest part was trying to go down those front steps using this," she adds, nodding with her chin to her metal walker.

"No more of that," she grins.

Anyone looking to get an inmate labor crew for a project should call David Neal at the Sheriff's Department at (508) 563-4305.  In order to be eligible, the project must be for either a public-sector agency or a non-profit and must be headquartered on Cape  Cod.  No work is done for individuals or for profit-making entities.  Crews are already booked through early fall and even longer lead times are sometimes required.  So jobs that need to get done quickly normally go unfilled.

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Hacked by Jesus freaks!

Hallelujah brothers, hallelujah sisters!  It's happened.  My web site, www.solonicus.com, has been hacked and taken over by Jesus freaks.  I always suspected the Chinese Communists might come after me, or the Democrats, or the Republicans, or maybe Barney Frank and Chris Dodd.  But Jesus freaks!

The hacked web site was still active when I wrote this, but it may be gone by the time you can read it.  The gist is that some bozo's grandfather was a Presbyterian minister and now this bozo wants everyone to come to Jesus via my web site and about a thousand others that were similarly hacked.  The FBI has been called in.  Maybe they can pray they'll catch the hackers.  But it does me no good, as my site is irretrievably taken over and inaccessible . I have kept my domain name in case I want to have some one build me another one.

As a matter of information, the people I've been dealing with regarding the web site are catalog.com and webhero.com (What a misnomer!).  Maybe you want to deal with them, maybe you don't, but I believe web site security is lacking.  Webhero sent out a rambling letter sort of blaming Microsoft's FrontPage (which I use) and insecure passwords.  The latter point is somewhat disingenuous, as webhero gave me my 16-character password.

Well, that's all from here.  Just p------ off,  just a warning to others, and one last thing--if you want me to come to Jesus, use a more Christian approach.

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Cape Cod whales spur radical wind turbine blade design

 Cape Wind poised to provide nearly ALL of Cape Cod's electricity

For those naysayers who doubt that Cape Wind can produce the equivalent of 75 percent of the Cape's electricity, I have to agree that that figure is not exact.  Actually, Cape Wind could provide the equivalent of 93 percent of the Cape's electricity.  That figure is not Jim Gordon's--he is much too modest for that.  It is mine.  The latest research and facts bear that out.

The idea for a different turbine blade took root on Cape Cod years ago.  Dr. Frank Fish, a biology professor at West Chester University in Pennsylvania, was looking at the bumps on the leading edge of the flippers on a humpback whale sculpture here on the Cape and wondered why they were there.  Recognizing that there was a reason and that nature is rarely wrong, the question simmered for years, and then he decided to run some tests.

The result is a collaboration between Dr. Fish, and Dr. Paul Jacobs and Thomas McDonald, both of Technology Development Associates (TDA) of Rhode Island, to design a radical wind turbine blade that has proven, in actual performance tests, to increase electrical power generation by up to 25 percent over existing blade designs.

Historically, all blade designs have been streamlined, presumably to minimize drag and maximize efficiency.  It was curious, therefore, why nature had endowed humpback whale flippers with leading edge bumps, or tubercles, with which to glide smoothly through the water.  These bumps seemed counter-intuitive.

Preliminary laboratory tests comparing conventional blades with bumpy leading edge, or tubercle technology, blades showed promising results.  The tubercle technology blades demonstrated a reduction in drag, higher efficiency, less noise and less blade vibration.  This design showed the potential to significantly improve both the performance and economic viability, in dollars per kilowatt-hour, of wind-generated electrical power.

The next step was an in situ test, which was conducted by the Wind Energy Institute of Canada on full-size tubercle technology blades fabricated by the aptly named Whalepower Corporation of Toronto.  The tests were conducted on an actual tubercle technology wind turbine, running alongside conventional wind turbines, on a bluff overlooking the Atlantic Ocean on Prince Edward Island.

The results were obtained from a year of testing, with winds ranging from dead calm to gale warning.  The mean wind speeds of 5 to 7 meters/second pretty much span the mean wind speeds for Cape Wind's Nantucket Sound wind farm.

Newly released results show that the radical leading edge turbine blade alone increases electrical energy output by a staggering amount of 22 to 24 percent.  Those naysayers of Cape Wind's claim of generating 75 percent of the electricity for Cape Cod were right.  Using tubercle technology blades, it could now be closer to 93 percent.

This increase comes without taller towers, without bigger turbines, in fact without any change whatsoever in existing moving parts.  It can be achieved merely by using the radical new blades or retrofitting existing blades with a tubercle leading edge.

With the Cape Wind farm permitting process now in the final stages, it is possible that we will have the pleasure of being among the first to see these radical tubercle blade designs running right off our shores.

And as unconventional as they may seem, they will effectively serve to remind us what we all learned in kindergarten: that nature is seldom wrong.

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Sheriff looking for disaster relief volunteers

New round of classes to be held in Orleans.

Barnstable County Sheriff James M. Cummings is once again offering public-spirited volunteers a chance to join one of his highly regarded Community Emergency Response Teams.           

To qualify for CERT you must be at least 16-years-old and willing to attend nine weekly training classes.  The early evening classes will begin on April 7^th, end on June 2^nd, and be held at Nauset Community School in Orleans.  Residents of all Cape communities are eligible.            

An earlier round of certification classes, held in Sandwich between early January and early March, has concluded.  This second opportunity is geared for mid to outer Cape residents. 

More than 275 individuals have been CERT-trained thus far and of those about 225 remain active.

CERT responders do not replace but rather supplement professional emergency workers.  Said Sheriff Cummings: "They are an important part of this county's preparedness plan, especially when the professional response has been temporarily overwhelmed or is still being mobilized.

"They are a collective finger in the dike," Sheriff Cummings concluded, "and that can make a big difference." 

CERT follows a national model established 14 years ago by the Los Angeles Fire Department and made more relevant by the terrorist strike on 9/11.  Sheriff Cummings praises the teams in a story published in the January-February issue of Sheriff magazine, trade publication of the National Sheriffs' Association.

There is no charge for classes and seating is limited to 25.  The slots always fill quickly, as happened with the first round of classes in Sandwich.  If you are 16 or older and interested, check the Sheriff's website (www.bsheriff.net).

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Guv'ner Deval Patrick to tax gonorrhea!

I'm not making this up!  Bear with me, beer-drinking lovers!

We know Guv'ner Deval Patrick wants to impose horrendous additional state taxes on gasoline, meals, room occupancy, beer, yada-yada.  As if the burden of the poor struggling taxpayer were not already sufficiently onerous, his solution to everything is to impose an additional onerous tax burden on us.  Taxing the people, not patriotism, is indeed the last refuge of the scoundrel. 

Where does the tax on gonorrhea come in?  Politicians have been trying to do this for years.  Look at Patrick's proposed 5 percent sales tax on beer.  The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta has discovered an inverse statistical correlation between the incidence of gonorrhea and the tax on beer.  Specifically, they claim that an increase in tax of 20 cents on a six-pack of beer leads to a decrease in gonorrhea by 9 percent.

They've reasoned that teenagers drinking a lot of beer are more likely to engage in sex, thereby increasing the incidence of gonorrhea.  Duh!

I wonder how many hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars those deep thoughts cost us?  Ogden Nash said it in a two-liner: 

Candy is dandy,

But liquor is quicker.

The claim is that by making beer more expensive with a tax increase, teenagers will afford less, drink less, have less sex, and therefore contract less gonorrhea. Yep, more taxes solve everything, even venereal disease.

Quite obviously then, the proposed tax on beer is a de facto tax on gonorrhea.

Now gonorrhea is not a nice thing to have.  Or so I'm told.  It is not a nice thing to pass on to a friend--sometimes they get upset, go wild-eyed and start screaming like a banshee and try to shove a fork in your neck, no matter how much you swear you don't have any idea how it possibly could have happened!  Or so I'm told.  But to tax it?  That is outrageous!  Can't a person get stuck with a case of good old-fashioned gonorrhea without the government sticking everybody else for it?

Well, Guv'ner Patrick wants to tax everything else;  he may as well try to tax gonorrhea.  I'm sure the Guv'ner is a good man, but his headlong spiral into tax madness appears to be that of a man who is hell-bent on not getting re-elected.  Guv'ner Patrick really needs to learn how to practice safe tax.

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The Sheriff wants YOU!

Third Annual Citizens Academy to begin in March

Sheriff's Citizens Academy in session.  Photo courtesy of the Sheriff's website.

There are at least two ways to get into Barnstable County Sheriff Jim Cummings' Correctional Facility in Bourne.  One is to commit a crime, and the Sheriff will be glad to provide you with accommodations in his splendiferous establishment.  You may have to perform a little road clean-up work or the like, but it's a small price to pay for guaranteed room and board.

The second way is to sign up for the Sheriff's third annual Citizens Academy.  Sheriff Cummings announced the dates for the Academy today.  The eight-week course will start on Monday night, March 23rd, and run on consecutive Mondays till the middle of May.  The sessions will start at 6:00 pm and run for 2 1/2 hours.

Sheriff Cummings says, "Our mission is a lot more varied than...running a house of correction and jail.  This is a great opportunity for interested citizens to see exactly how we go about our business."

Space is limited to 30 attendees, and enrollment is first come, first served.  In the first two years of this popular course, the Academy had to turn applicants away.

The modern, 4 1/2-year old, Correctional Facility is currently home to more than 400 inmates.  Besides experiencing the popular (for those not obligated to remain) facility tour, Academy attendees will see how K9 teams sniff out drugs; observe Sheriff's criminal investigators and how they use state-of-the-art technology to help solve crimes; inspect the Emergency Communications Center, a mobile van that can take and send messages from the site of major ongoing incidents; and much more.

Sheriff Cummings says, "Our mission is a lot more varied than...running a house of correction and jail.  This is a great opportunity for interested citizens to see exactly how we go about our business."

To sign up for this popular Academy, go to the Sheriff's website at www.bsheriff.net.  There you will be able to access an application form as well as liability-release and background-check paperwork.  If you don't have access to a computer or have questions about the Academy, call Shaun Cahill at 508-375-6121 who will be glad to help you out.

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