Author: Peter Ratcliffe

Warning, none of this really matters, reading this might waste your time. Enough about Hudson, it’s time to discuss something far less important.

French linguists are in a bother about the impending death of the circumflex by a consensus of an obscure and uptight committee of whoever actually manages such things. That funny little hat of an accent was originally introduced to signify that a word had lost a letter there next to the vowel it capped somewhere along the way and to make French spelling even harder.

Growing up we feared bad spelling and grammar. I’m of an age and generation where proper spelling and grammar might even have been beaten or at least browbeaten into some of us. We were told that poor spelling and grammar would limit our career options, our choice of university and be a dead giveaway that we might be lower class than we were and so clearly it meant the possible difference between a mansion and a double wide and who we might marry. Bad choice of motivation for young men when Ellie May Clampett and Daisy Duke were so damned hot.

Language is indeed a dynamic beast. Long ago those less rigid or perhaps less educated stewards of American, a colloquial offshoot of English Proper, played with stiff English minds by dropping the ‘”u” from many words like honour and colour. Not stopping there, they changed the “ough” to “u” in words like “through”. I’m sure many British purists still cringe when we use those rough edged lower class American compactions, and many are surely glad that the Americans had fought their way out of colonialism lest that poor English become contagious. Obama’s dropped ending “g” is probably causin’ clenched British sphincters whenever he speaks, I have to remind myself that he may have attended Harvard, but he grew up in Chicago.

I grew up, and therefore any attempt to educate me happened, in the US. I attended an exceptional municipal public school system and in High School was blessed to follow the AP (Advanced Placement) English and science stream.  We were taught AP English by a wonderful gentle PhD, surely my first exposure to a gay man as a teacher, but we never ever talked about that and he was wonderful as a man and as a teacher. His first name was “Mister” always and while his ruler never struck flesh, it often flashed loudly out of nowhere onto your desk for all manner of spelling and grammar transgressions causing immediate shock and terror because your stupidity was about to be projected, analyzed and humiliated for the benefit of the entire class. And some call those the “good ole days”?

Growing up Canadian in the US and coming back to Canada in my mid-twenties, I’m caught betwixt and between. Generally, I have adopted the British versions because it saves people from asking: “You are American, eh?”

Modern English is in a precipitous slide and that slide is being accelerated by advancing technology. On social media are so many people who clearly don’t understand the use of the lowly apostrophe. Purists might argue that we never should have allowed the lazy writers to devolve English with a simple contraction tool. Your (preceding purposeful apostrophe abuse) maybe going to hate me for saying it, but apostrophe confusion is so pervasive I say we follow the French Accent Assassins lead and just kill the poor misused and usually abused apostrophe.

Texting and Smartphones are making the changes happen faster. Why bother with “your”, “you’re”, and “you are” when a simple “UR”  or “ur” will do? Everyone knows what you mean and only the old and cranky like me grumble about the younger generation and cringe while reading it, plus we take ten times longer to text because we don’t know texting English and we have to kill those stupid and sometimes embarrassing autocorrect changes that we did not want done for us.

All to say that, so long as we can understand each other, and if we could learn to not judge each other by versions of our language, then the stiffness and structural constraints of any language don’t really matter much.

So, WTF, go have a wonderful day and please don’t forget to smile and LOL a lot and just try to accept that our language is a changin’ faster than ever.

My shorts are in an ever tightening knot about Pine Lake. Sure, Pine Lake is not an essential part of Hudson, despite once being the now removed iconic picture on our Town’s website. But what does Pine Lake say about us, and are we listening?

I’ll write a few brief paragraphs each on one point of why I’m bothered. I could go on for pages and pages, but this is my quick top of the head morning coffee list. I’ll write them in no particular order of importance so that those who wish to comment can refer to a point they wish to discuss. Feel free to add your points of bother to the discussion, or just rank them from your personal highest to lowest importance.

#1) Pine Lake is a depressing eyesore that a significant part of Hudson drives by each day. Many of us start and end our day passing this reminder that Hudson is somehow so broken that we can’t fix Pine Lake.

#2) Pine Lake had value to far more than the few property owners around it. In the past, I have made early morning panic stops to move dinner plate sized turtles across the road so they wouldn’t get hit, I smiled when the beautiful herons were there on my way home from work and we took our grandchildren there on village walks to see and feed the ducks. Many people fished Pine Lake, many stopped and sat and Pine Lake was a great first impression of Hudson year round. Now it’s an eyesore.

#3) Hudson acquired Pine Lake from private owners and committed in writing to maintain it for the town use. We have failed to honour that legal document in a timely fashion and have no current plan to end this situation. What is exactly is the word of Hudson worth when residents and friends are driven to legal action against their own town trying to force us to honour our own past commitments?

#4) I believe that we have somehow made the restoration of Pine Lake a much bigger, more complex and more expensive deal than it really is. I know the government can get complex, but repairing a damn dam that’s been there for 50+ years should not be such a big deal.  We need a will to find a simple good solution. If we manage to complicate every problem like we seem to have complicated Pine Lake then it’s no wonder we don’t get anything fixed.

#5) Pine Lake and the discussions surround the required repairs divide Hudson into smaller groups exactly where we should be coming together. I’ve seen comments that support the repair if we can do it for $25K, which is totally unrealistic, others that practically demand that we repave every road in town before we get to repairing Pine Lake. Has it become a case that I won’t support your top project until my top project is funded? We have a town, but sadly we just don’t seem to have the community we once had.

#6) Pine Lake is just the visible tip of the horrible infrastructure deficit iceberg we’ve allowed and Hudson is the Titanic bearing down with a broken rudder and out of fuel. We know that there’s much to be done, yet year after year we see not enough getting done. So the lingering image of a mud flat mess instead of a pretty lake is confirmation that we are really too broke to fix things that matter, especially things that we said we’d maintain.

So, if you want to know what’s really wrong with Hudson, stop and stare for a while at the muck that was Pine Lake. Hudson is really just stuck in the muck.

Did anyone miss me?

It’s early days of this Duff blog adventure, and like many of you, I do miss the paper once known as the Hudson Gazette and its several subsequent aliases. I thought I’d start by discussing what I already know about the differences between weekly paper and blogging and offer to answer any questions you decide to throw my way in discussion below.

Jim Duff is away on vacation, but as Jim is a guy who never stops thinking and I have knowledge of the general part of the planet he’s visiting, so I know he’s secretly in another part of the world peeking into Hudson’s future by visiting and researching small towns without ability to borrow more money.

Since someone must herd the potential for disaster or good here, I’ve been entrusted with the keys to this online blog, a potential castle of knowledge and wisdom. You will behave or I will be ruthless in deleting your posts.

We’re competitive, so I also hope to help generate enough new traffic to not only embarrass Jim’s efforts to date but also to add value and help make some sense of the time and energy that Jim has invested in starting this blog and perhaps even help define a future direction.

I’ve been attempting to be quite active in posting and commenting in support of Jim’s endeavour here, and to drive some discussion. Why? Because on most days he’s my best friend and I know Jim to be deeply interested and caring about Hudson and also the world around him. This bloggy place should become a very good place for Hudson, so I’m willing to donate a bit of my busy days to help this great little town many of us live in think about itself a few minutes at a time.

There is a commonality to editing or writing for a small town paper and to posting on a blog, but also many differences, so let me wander through that and hope you see why you should visit this place.

There is certainly a lot of room in both formats room for judgement and criticism, which neither Jim nor I fear, so long as it is respectful, reasoned and reasonable. I do know Jim to be fearless, only a fearless man would have published without edits literally every word of every column of the over 200+ columns that I wrote for him. Jim and I are generally like minded, but we often disagree and argue passionately both principles and details. There are issues we’ll never completely agree on, but over the past 10 years we are indeed best of friends. I have learned much from him and perhaps have been able to teach him a little. I know that what he says is always worth listening to, even if you chose to disagree.

This blog of Duff’s, in a few short weeks, has created opportunities for dialogue and learning that never rose from all those columns I wrote over ten years. In a few short weeks there have been, by way of dialogue on this blog, in near real time, changed views and new mutual respect between people who seemed unlikely to ever come to consensus or agreement. There have been new understandings of past history and also entrenched positions and future challenges.

There have been new connections between both like minded and different minded people, and I know that some small forms of community activism will spring from the depths of knowledge and connections available herein. That all this has happened so quickly should be very positive in Hudson if we can continue to generate enough interest and traffic,

We like your participation, but silence is also golden so long as you come and read with an open mind. Trust me, I understand that many people will read what’s here and not wish to comment or get involved in having a public voice. Passive activity is a great and constructive part of blogging, so please bring your friends along. The more sides of every issue we discuss, and the more people who follow and absorb, the smarter and stronger we become as a community.

You each have, should you choose, that wonderful gift that Jim Duff came to me with one day: Say whatever is on your mind and it will be heard by some. And tell me what we should talk about, what’s on your mind and why. If you don’t want to post publicly feel free to email me: peter@rptmotion.com

Today is a gift, so have a great day, have some fun, hug someone, share something positive with a friend, make a new friend or call an old one.