Goober Pyle: You know that's not as stupid as it looks, readin' a day-old paper. I do it myself sometimes - kinda gives you a sense of power, don't it? I mean knowing how everything's gonna come out.
—The Andy Griffith Show, "Goober Goes to an Auto Show" (2/5/68)
------------------------------------------
As the race heats up in Baltimore's 10th District, I've noticed my hit count going up as well. Through a few tools I'm able to tell how people got here. I've noticed that several people are entering the candidates' names followed by "Baltimore" or "10th District" or some variant thereof, into various search engines. Why anyone wants to know what I think of a particular candidate is beyond me, but all right.
The cool thing about the Internet is that if you put something out there, chances are someone's going to find it. Some things come up quickly and easily in a Google (or whatever) search, but other things do not. This is often referred to as the Hidden Web, or the Invisible Web. Stuff on these sites is usually archived material, or material that you need to log in to access, or non-HTML pages, or something else. It takes some deep searching to find this stuff, but it's there. And this, to me, is the more interesting material.
At any rate, I was looking at a list of search terms that led to this page and began to realize, Hey. I don't have to be the one GENERATING the material all the time. I can just be a conduit for other people's stuff. So what I did was backtrack through other people's searches on the 10th District candidates to see what else they might have found.
Let's start with the incumbent, Ed Reisinger. The first thing you get when you look him up in Google is the link to his page on the City Council website. Nice photo, that. I'd say that it looks like his high school graduation picture, but according to a questionnaire he submitted to the Baltimore Sun, probably not so much. There's also an Ed Reisinger website that's out of date, short on information (a lot of "coming soon") and rather poorly designed (e.g. photos forced into shapes they weren't meant to have).
One of the most disturbing things I found, however, was an article in the City Paper from October of 2004, shortly after the last primary but before the general election. It doesn't bug me that Reisinger reportedly had a blood alcohol level of .068—he was in a bar, after all—it was his repeated denial of having more than one beer. Ed's about my size, maybe a little bigger. One beer just ain't gonna get that job done. But the article goes on to quote him as saying he "doesn't have a lot of faith in Baltimore City juries". And in my eyes, that's a metric boatload of "Wow." There's also a couple of pieces here and there about his attempts to get the property tax rate lowered, and a recent piece in the Sun about a bridge on Fort Avenue that quotes Reisinger. My impression from this piece is that the Sun isn't too thrilled with him, given the way the quote was placed near the end of the piece and reported thus:
"Am I worried about it? Yeah, yeah," says City Councilman Edward L. Reisinger. "You got school buses going over there to get to Fort McHenry and to school, you got employees of Tide Point coming and going. I mean, that bridge is used, a lot."
It wouldn't have killed anyone to cut the extra "yeah" and either paraphrase or quote him with a couple more verbs. But I admit I'm a bit of a grammar snob, so maybe that's just me. Incidentally, the online edition doesn't have the extra emphasis on the word "lot", however it was there in the print edition, which is why I put it back in there.
I'll take the challengers alphabetically.
Donnie Fair also has kind of an odd photo on his website. Donnie wears glasses and looks good in them; I don't know why he took 'em off. I'm also not sure I get the picture of the Key Bridge on the webpage. Did the bridge move into the 10th? Why not use the Hanover Street Bridge? I think Hanover Street has a great-looking bridge. The rest of the website looks pretty nice and clean, although again it's light on information (again, a lot of "I'll have more to say about that soon" stuff). Donnie appears to be playing the "outsider" card, which works exactly once when it works at all.
Apparently, Donnie did NOT reply to the Baltimore Sun's questionnaire, so I can't link to it. There are, however, some links to an article in the Examiner that appeared a couple of weeks ago. The article was about the 10th District being one of the "races to watch", but the article itself doesn't mention him. Instead, the comments following the article (they're listed in reverse chronological order) are all anonymous (with two exceptions) and written by supporters of both Donnie Fair and Terry Hickey. Reisinger's supporters are nowhere to be found in this one. The article itself kind of rides the fence but doesn't commit to anybody. A fun little mudslinging contest, that.
Donnie did make it into this Examiner article, along with the other challengers.
Donnie Fair made it into the City Paper a couple of years back, as well. I'd be curious to know if the plan ever made it to fruition, with or without him.
Here are a couple of interesting things that Donnie posted to the Web
He contributes to a forum called bonnevilleamerica.com, which is for enthusiasts of a specific kind of motorcycle . Among the comments he posts (you have to search deep to find these) are:
I sometimes find myself riding in Washington, DC, the land of flaming retarded drivers.
And, in another post, responding to a question about "loud pipes" on his bike:
Q: What clued you in to them being too loud, the car alarms going off?
A: I'm 1/2 of a baffle away from straigh [sic] pipes (no reducer either). Living in the 'hood such as I do and taking the occasional ride through the ghetto, my personal best is 3 alarms in one afternoon. Sweet!
Nice, that. He mentions the "ghetto" in another post, too.
This is an interesting comment he made a couple of years back. Scroll to the last item. As near as I can figure, Donnie's letter was lifted from the Baltimore Sun and reproduced at this website, but I can't be sure.
One more thing about Donnie Fair before I move on: I have it from an Informed Source (thanks, Edna Source) that the current crop of candidates are doing a bunch of their campaigning based on lists of people who voted in the last primary. Donnie Fair's name appears to be absent from that list. Oops.
Next up is Terry Hickey. Hickey's got the best website of the three, but one thing that it does (actually I think Donnie Fair's site does this too) is, when you click on the "Contact Us" link, it automatically launches your default email handler. Now, I have a few email addresses, as many people do (and should). I have my "A" list address, but I also have a couple of "spam collector" addresses in Hotmail and Yahoo. This is the address I'm going to use in most cases when it's not a relative or close friend. With these sites, I don't get a choice. This also means that, when I'm on my work laptop, say, I'd be giving out my work email. That's not going to piss off the guys in IT very much. So my alternative is to say "Screw it, I'm not writing to you at all."
(Of course, I can parse out the email address from the automatically-opened window, but that's not the point. The point is that the website is being presumptuous.)
Anyway.
Hickey's responses to the Sun questionnaire are quite detailed, far more so than Reisinger's (which is presented as a series of bullet points). They may, in fact, be too detailed. I don't know how many people have that kind of attention span, but you can't say he doesn't have his act together.
There are a lot of links on Google to various organizations that Hickey either started or is involved in, and of course there are the Examiner articles I noted above. There's also a City Paper review of a play called The Mineola Twins which gives a Terry Hickey a pretty good review, but I have no idea whether it's the same Terry Hickey. Another review has photos in it, and the bottom photo does kind of look like him, so who knows. As a Long Islander, I have to appreciate any play that's about a town on Long Island. (Plus, Hickey's a Native New Yorker, but he's from upstate so it doesn't count.)
I chased down a whole bunch of posts on a home theater forum that I thought was him, but I was mistaken. That was irritating, but I can't hold it against him. But the bottom line is that I couldn't find anything from Hickey that gave me pause, despite there being a LOT of stuff out there.
The last Democrat on the ballot is Hunter Pruette. He doesn't appear to have a website, or really much of an online presence at all. There's a blog that endorses him, and he's mentioned in the Examiner article. Oh, and he did submit a response to the Sun's questionnaire. But that's about it. Other than that, Pruette's the Invisible Man.
Finally, we have the Republican candidate. His name is Duane Shelton, and according to the City Paper, he's the chair of the city's Republican Committee. This is the same Duane Shelton who ran for Mayor a few years back, and garnered about 400 votes. And that's about it, (no questionnaire for the Sun) so he's pretty invisible too.
So there you have it, the online footprints of the candidates revealed. If you have something else you found, feel free to share it with me. This was a fun exercise AND led to probably my longest post ever.
