Posts Tagged → bait
Harrisburg’s Midtown Scholar A+ experience
One of the pleasures of maintaining a blog is the opportunity to write about any old subject the author desires. It could be cats, dogs, selecting household paint colors (the best quality I ever saw were at the Farrow & Ball store in Dublin, Ireland. The best. Unbelievable, really.), gardening, hikes, nature photos, cooking, the funny turns of daily life, and of course politics and culture. Well, I had long ago hoped to write about all of these things, minus the cats. But the political developments since the Obama years have grown into a now direct threat to American democracy. As was Obama’s stated plan for “fundamental change,” whether Americans wanted it, or not. So the political stuff has dominated here, even though there should be so much more to life to write about.
Despite the incredible political developments since Biden’s Satanic Red Hell speech in Pennsylvania last week (during which Biden made no mention of China or fentanyl or the open border and instead declared official US military war against his political opponents), and a federal judge stopping the corrupt FBI from any further handling of the thousands of pages of medical records, accounting records, and private legal records that the FBI stole from President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home for political gain against him, I am taking a moment to recognize a local used book store. Why not, we all need a break from the political misery that is gripping our beautiful nation.
And we are recognizing not just any book store, but the Mid Town Scholar book store here in Harrisburg. A small business run by a guy named Eric Papenfuse, who had the fatal attraction of politics inflame his brain. He served as Harrisburg’s beleagured mayor for eight years, and is now blessedly back to running a really neat used book store that provides so much happiness for so many people.
Yay Eric!
I want to thank Eric for having the Mid Town Scholar open at all. In 2012, when I ran for state senate, Eric’s book store café in Mid-Town hosted all of the political debates in a safe and nice atmosphere, with good seating for a large audience, and good electronics for communicating with the public. It was a real service to the public to provide that forum, which I always appreciated and which the Harrisburg area and Dauphin County benefited from.
So fast forward just a few years and I am looking for A River Runs Through It in paperback, as a gift for my son who is beginning his life adventure as a young adult. I grew up bait fishing and fly fishing in Central Pennsylvania’s trout streams, limestone and freestone, and Norman Maclean’s Siddhartha-like use of the unifying river theme in his amazing book is an important idea for all young people to begin life’s journey with. And so I was determined that this wonderful book was going to be my gift to the traveling boy.
Problem was, I could not really find it in paperback. Not new or even just slightly used, for any reasonable amount. And it seemed a lot of sellers wanted an arm and a leg for what should be a five buck book, especially one that was literally eaten by a dog. After failing to find what I wanted at Abe Books, and despairing of Amazon’s heartless tactics, I decided on a whim to try our local community’s used book store, Mid Town Scholar. And I was like “I’ll be damned,” because they actually had two copies. Each for a great price.
So I ordered both copies online, one for my son and one for me, as my own original from 1992 long ago swam off into someone else’s book collection. Within a few days I had professional email notices telling me exactly where my two books were, and that I could pick them up in person, if I wanted to, either at the café in Midtown Harrisburg, or possibly at the warehouse not far from my home, when they were ready. And so that is what I opted to do, to pick it up at the warehouse. Even though this is not how I was supposed to pick up the books, the staff still emailed with me and helped me get what I wanted in the way I wanted it. In a nutshell, I met the nicest, most cheerful and personable people working for Mid Town Scholar, who treated me most professionally and who delivered A+ customer service.
Thank you, Mid Town Scholar staff! What an excellent experience.
And on top of all the excellent technical support and customer support experience, both books were brand new. They did not seem to have any wear or use. Talk about receiving something rewarding ordered unseen on line, and relying on someone else’s judgment about its quality, and being more than pleasantly surprised. I don’t know if Mid Town Scholar can replicate this kind of experience every time for book buyers, but I will say I am really pleased with my experience from beginning to end.
One of four or five, maybe six or seven, Mid Town Scholar Book Store warehouses in the Harrisburg area
This particular warehouse was a beehive of activity as friendly staff wrapped book orders for shipping. It was here that Seong met me and handed me my wrapped books. That I was supposed to pick up downtown at the cafe, not here at the warehouse. Seong and everyone else was cheerful and happy to see me get what I wanted. I had a great experience
This is the Mid Town Scholar book store warehouse that I was informed about in my customer order email. It is quite unassuming, but behind these doors lie a treasure of unimaginable value and fun. Thank you for letting me pick up my books here, folks
Books are nowhere near dead, and I encourage everyone to buy some used books. They don’t need batteries, they don’t strain your eyes, and it is amazing what was printed not too long ago. For five bucks you can enter a book’s magical world and learn a lot, and then hand the book off to someone else. Or leave it in a doctor’s office with a note to the next owner.
Asking PA Fish & Boat to protect our best trout waters
June 17, 2019
Mr. Tim Schaeffer, Executive Director
Pennsylvania Fish & Boat Commission
1601 Elmerton Ave, Harrisburg, PA 17110
Dear Tim,
This past weekend I listened to a presentation about making Pennsylvania’s best, most productive trout streams “all-tackle,” which includes bait fishing. While the presentation was primarily about the newly acquired stretch of Spruce Creek, a clear timetable was laid out for making all of our best trout waters all-tackle over the coming three years.
Traditionally, or at least for several decades in many cases, these few hundred miles out of 80,000 miles of Pennsylvania waterways, have been restricted to artificial lures and flies. Those limitations were installed to protect trout from being gut-hooked or gullet-hooked by swallowing bait left to sit on the bottom of the waterway. Once a fish is gullet- or gut-hooked, it is guaranteed to die. This is fine for a put-and-take waterway, or for panfish, or for private waters. But for expensive stocked trout paid for by the license-buying fisherman, or even worse, for native reproducing trout, using bait is almost always a death sentence that eliminates the re-use (through catch and release) of that limited and valuable resource.
The main representation of this all-tackle proposal is that using bait in moving waters does not result in nearly as much fish mortality as once believed. Several studies or carefully observed fishing situations over the late 1990s to 2017 were cited as evidence.
Not having had the time to review this evidence, or to compare it to other factors like increasingly improved water quality state-wide, which resulted in better stream conditions and more trout, my concern is this proposal is moving too fast and asking too much. We just do not really know all that is happening in our best streams. The consequences of being wrong about this could easily set Pennsylvania’s best trout waters back, and it would take years to rebuild them to their current productivity. Additionally, we must consider the long road we have walked to educate anglers that trout and other sport fish are worth much more being released alive than they are being hung on a stringer and then stuffed into a freezer for a year. The cultural progress we have all made on this point has strengthened the use of fishing methods that strongly enhance the success of catch-and-release waters. Would allowing bait on all our catch-and-release waterways be taking a step backwards, after slowly, painfully teaching fishermen that a dead trout is much less useful or fun than a trout slipped back into the water alive to be caught again?
I request that PFBC staff conduct and issue their own wide-ranging analysis of catch-and-release bait fishing in moving waters before adopting anything beyond the Spruce Creek all-tackle catch-and-release stretch. If PFBC staff are confident that, under the right conditions, bait fishing will not result in undue or excessive fish mortality and the degradation of our hard-won resource, then that will be enough for me to drop my opposition. So long as the proper monitoring is in place to ensure that the decision is correctable, should new information develop.
Separately, it made me happy to see you appear officially in public in casual clothes, including shorts. The stuffy formality that used to attach to these executive director positions was a barrier to effectively reaching and communicating with the user communities. Easy but professional informality speaks volumes that you are most focused on solving substantive policy issues, good government, and on effectively connecting with the public, not on self-aggrandizement. What a breath of fresh air, it is exactly what Pennsylvania needs, thank you.
Sincerely yours,
Josh First