Mark Howell's - "Soundings"
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Soundings

The scandal regarding the bilking of millions of dollars from the Internal Revenue Service through prisoner fraud -- including by as many as 50 inmates from the Monroe County Detention Center over several years -- can be traced to the service's Achilles heel, its computer problems.

In 1988, a fateful decision was made at the IRS to invest in a Tax System Modernization, which turned out to be a computer system so awful that, to this day, the service has difficulty paying technicians enough money to mess with the thing.

After seven years of trying unsuccessfully to install the new system at the IRS, the General Accounting Office released a report that failures in programming had led to huge financial losses there. The primary failure at the IRS was the result of "inadequate design and planning," said the report.

The service had been sold a multi-million-dollar system of computers and databases that could not be integrated with its existing computers. That led to the failure of its move toward a paperless system and made current inefficiencies much worse. Now, said the GAO, "employees of the IRS are unable to access current and correct information to effectively serve American taxpayers."

In 1996, Arthur A. Gross was appointed computer czar at the IRS. His first job, he said, was "to recruit technology executives to rebuild America's tax system." The ads he came up with for the positions concluded: "PLEASE NOTE: THESE POSITIONS ARE NOT FOR THE FAINT OF HEART."

Gross, himself a technology expert, resigned in 1998 over friction between him and new IRS commissioner, Charles O. Rossotti, also a technology expert.

Despite a Congressional call for massive changes in program planning and implementation of computers at the IRS, the service still struggles like a dinosaur to adapt. Almost a decade later, in a test of employees on their security against hackers, 60 IRS employees complied with a trick request that they provide their user names and change their passwords to those the caller suggested.

Naturally enough, the caller claimed to be trying to correct a computer problem.

The IRS today has about 100,000 employees and contractors with access to tax return information processed on about 240 computer systems and more than 1,500 databases.

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Novelist, poet and Solares Hill book reviewer Rosalind Brackenbury (see page 8) has this to say about poet-painter Joan Hodous: "Joan's painting and poems express two sides of a creative life. It is rare for a painter to be a poet, although many poets have longed to be painters. In her record of a long life, her vibrant paintings show all the turbulence and vigor of her visions while the accompanying poems make a quieter and more philosophical statement ... These two aspects of one woman's creative passion are an inspiration and a joy."

Hodous reads from her latest collection of poetry, "It All Counts," at Voltaire Books, 330 Simonton St., on Saturday, March 6, at 4:30 p.m.

On Monday, March 8, from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m., her paintings are on display in a group show at Gingerbread Gallery, 1207 Duval St.

The quote from Brackenbury is from the introduction to "It All Counts." Hodous herself tells Soundings that "working with rhyme and meter definitely spurs my imagination. It inspires the painting which follows."

Hodous will illustrate her reading with large prints of her paintings.

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The U.S. Army, reports Associated Press, needs to eliminate its remaining stockpiles of chemical weapons and plans to blow some of them up.

Congress had ordered that stockpiles of 125,000 chemical weapons still remaining from the Cold War be destroyed by 1994, but that deadline was extended to 2012. Now the government "faces a time crunch to get rid of these weapons and as many as 1,000 of them are currently leaking or in need of immediate attention," says A.P.

The Army plans to use explosives to blow up the weapons in Colorado and Kentucky. Environmentalists are urging the neutralization of all chemical weapons instead, not just the immolation of a few.

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The People's Theater of Key West is challenging local writers to develop short monologues and scenes for its "Junior's Prayers" project through June.

The project is part of the new company's wordcraft workshop that meets from 6 to 8 p.m. every Sunday at its offices on Simonton Street.

Junior Byers, an elderly man living in Washington, D.C., who survived a near-death experience, invited neighbors to drop notes on the things they'd like him to pray for into a large jar in his front yard. Monologues and scenes will profile the characters who drop the notes in Junior's jar.

Scripts are reviewed in weekly workshops and considered for inclusion in a larger work the company will produce later in the year.

E-mail newtheater@ rocketmail.com, visit peoplestheaterofkeywest.com or call 294-6813 for more info.

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Heart disease is the number-one killer of women in the United States and takes approximately 450,000 women each year, or about one every minute.

Local physician Dr. Giovanni Campanile discussed this prevalent disease in women at the Zonta Club of Key West's general membership meeting on Feb. 16.

Ninety percent of women have one or more risk factors for developing heart disease, yet only one in five women believes it is her greatest health threat. Dr. Campanile helped club members with the facts as it prepares to offer a heart-health outreach to provide women in the Lower Keys with education and access to screening and diagnostics, including women who are uninsured or under-insured.

Thanks to the club, women will receive a comprehensive heart-health exam at WomanKind, including an individual consultation with an advanced registered nurse practitioner who will review the person's health history, listen to the woman's heart with a stethoscope and check her blood pressure, draw blood and send it to be tested for cholesterol and provide a complete metabolic profile plus blood count.

For more on Zonta's initiative, call Amber Shaffer at 294-9119. To schedule an appointment for a woman's heart health screening at WomanKind, call 294-4004.

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Key West Burlesque's original revue show that hit Key West just three years ago is back as a monthly revue at Aqua, 711 Duval St. Cover is $5 and there are some crazy drink specials going all night.

The next of the monthly shows is in March, with host Marky Pierson presenting Moana Amour, Cheeky Derriere, Lola Lafleur, Marquee Vonfister, Lily Vixxen, Golly G, Hunny Bunz, Buffy L'orange, Rocky Bottom and queenie Tatah Dujour.

Stay tuned.

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Florida Keys Community College's library gallery is showing a rare collection of comic-book art on loan from Shirrel Rhoades, Solares Hill film critic (see page 10), book author and formerly executive vice-president of Marvel Entertainment and the publisher of Marvel Comics.

Colorful artwork and memorabilia are unveiled on Wednesday, March 3, at 5:30 p.m. at the library on campus. Rhoades will give an illustrated talk on the "13 Milestones in Comic Book History" with plentiful references to his superhero pals, Spider-Man, the Hulk and the X-Men.

Star of the collection is a one-of-a-kind painting made in an unexpected medium -- the ashes of the late, legendary comic-book writer and occasional penciler, Mark Gruenwald.

"Anyone from 9 to 90 will enjoy the show," says library specialist Steven Parker, who with Friends of the FKCC Library coordinates such events. The talk is free. The show goes to April 17.

In 2005, Rhoades donated a major collection of famed black-and-white photographs to the community college, many of them now hanging in the halls of the administrative building.

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News reports state that President Obama has been making a "last-ditch effort" to save health-care reform. The earliest reported use of the phrase was by William of Orange, who wrote in 1677: "There's one certain means by which I can be sure never to see my country's ruin: I will die in the last ditch."

Thomas Jefferson also used the phrase in 1821 in describing "a government ... driven to the last ditch by the call for liberty."

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Writing in the Miami Herald, Edward Wasserman noted last week that "a licensed medical doctor in a devastated city who is doing anything other than giving care -- like standing in front of TV cameras bemoaning the lack of doctors -- is running afoul not of journalism ethics but of medical ethics ... Interestingly, when [CNN's] Dr. Gupta was asked about his priorities, he told Larry King: 'I'm a doctor first' ... Maybe the next time the networks, rich enough to employ physicians as journalists, will send them to the disaster zone not to offer commentary about a medical emergency that a dozen other staff journalists could cover but to help care for the people who need it."

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Average retail gasoline prices in Miami rose 3.3 cents per gallon in the past two weeks, averaging $2.74 a gallon.

This compares with the national average that has increased 3.5 cents per gallon in the last week to $2.65 a gallon, according to gasoline price website MiamiGasPrices.com.

Gas prices for Keys consumers continue to be considerably higher.

• • • • •

Correction of the Week, from the artsbeat blog in The New York Times online edition:

"David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, who has already written extensively about President Obama in the pages of his own magazine, will soon have another platform to do so. Random House said Monday that it had acquired a biography of Mr. Obama by Mr. Remnick and would publish it on April 6.

"In an interview on Monday, Mr. Remnick said that the biography, 'The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama,' would not be simply a 'pumped up' version of a 12,000-word New Yorker article he wrote about the Obama campaign that the magazine published in November 2008.

"An earlier version of this post misquoted Mr. Remnick. He said the book would not be a 'pumped up' version of the article; he did not say that it would not be a 'pimped out' version of the article."

• • • • •

Quote for the Week:

"What a good thing Adam had. When he said a good thing he knew nobody had said it before."

-- Mark Twain,

Notebooks

(pub. 1935)