G. Frink's

Pat Riviere-Seel's volume of poetry entitled "The Serial Killer's Daughter" was inspired by the life and 1984 execution of Velma Barfield.

Velma Barfield murdered at least four people, among them her mother. She also committed arson, although not as a murder weapon.

She received the death penalty for using arsenic-based rat poison to kill Stuart Taylor in 1978, and was executed in North Carolina's Central Prison on Nov. 2, 1984.

The poem below is excerpted from "The Serial Killer's Daughter."

Pat explains that it is "in the daughter's voice."

A Second Look

After the funeral I returned
to the burned house, the walls'
scorched black odor of smoke
heavy as my sorrow.

Look here, a room spared.
All can be repaired, a neighbor tried
to offer comfort. I know better.
Whatever happened here
turned to ash. What did I expect --
understanding? Explanation?

Yesterday, when we left
him alone, passed out on the bed,
I should have insisted
that Mama drive away, could
have kept her in the car.
I didn't ask why she went
back inside the house.

Daddy had asked for Winstons.
We stopped for ice cream.
She didn't buy him cigarettes.

"The Serial Killer's Daughter" was a runner up in the Main Street Rag Publishing Company's 2008 Chapbook Contest.

Past president of the North Carolina Poetry Society, and a friend since we were at North Carolina State University together, @Pat Reviere-Seel also has a published collection of poems called No Turning Back Now.

Some of my social networking peers scoffed when Ronald Herberman, director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, warned more than 3,000 staff to take careful cell phone radiation precautions, especially for children.

Typical of their skepticism was a Plurk friend who responded:

next drinking water will make the list!

That reaction was not unexpected. Nor is it to be sneered at.

More than a decade ago, when scientific data began to indicate brain cancer may be caused by microwave emissions from cellphones, the cellphone industry responded with claims of harmlessness to consumers, and attempts to suppress the research and control it.

Industry reaction to early work done by Henry Lai and Narendra "N.P." Singh at the University of Washington makes the case quite clear. In 2005 the University of Washington Alumni Magazine engineering writer Rob Harrill reported:

As Lai and Singh sought funding to conduct follow-up studies, word of the research began to get out.
According to internal documents that later came to light, Motorola started working behind the scenes to minimize any damage Lai's research might cause.
In a memo and a draft position paper dated Dec. 13, 1994, officials talked about how they had "war-gamed the Lai-Singh issue" and were in the process of lining up experts who would be willing to point out weaknesses in Lai's study and reassure the public.
This was before the study was published in 1995.

The cellphone industry subsequently took substantial control of the process of funding and carrying out studies.

The cellphone industry strategy of denial and control is a variant of one I saw burn through the lives of people around me after the first U.S. Surgeon General's Report on Smoking and Health was issued on Jan. 11, 1957, arriving in the mail as though it were another present honoring my tenth birthday.

I believed that's what it was.

So I opened and read the report with a mixture of astonishment and horror as I walked from the mailbox beside the Honeyhill Road to the farmhouse where I grew up. In the years that followed, an answering campaign of tobacco industry propaganda stalked through my world like a mind poison while lung cancer took away early to the grave one smoker and another whom I knew and loved.

Dr. Herberman is simply arguing that we take the kinds of precautions now that so many have died wishing had been adopted from the outset with tobacco:

Studies in humans do not indicate that cell phones are safe, nor do they yet clearly show that they are dangerous. But, growing evidence indicates that we should reduce exposures, while research continues on this important question.

He argues that the potential effects on children are of special concern, both because they are immediately vulnerable and because the effects spool out across their lives. The illustration below indicates how deeply at varying ages electromagnetic radiation form a cell phone can penetrate the brain:

He recommends ten reasonable measures:

1. Do not allow children to use a cell phone except for emergencies. The developing organs of a fetus or child are the most likely to be sensitive to any possible effects of exposure to electromagnetic fields.
2. While communicating using your cell phone, try to keep the cell phone away from the body as much as possible. The amplitude of the electromagnetic field is one fourth the strength at a distance of two inches and fifty times lower at three feet. Whenever possible, use the speaker-phone mode or a wireless Bluetooth headset, which has less than 1/100th of the electromagnetic emission of a normal cell phone. Use of a hands-free ear piece attachment may also reduce exposures.
3. Avoid using your cell phone in places, like a bus, where you can passively expose others to your phone’s electromagnetic fields.
4. Avoid carrying your cell phone on your body at all times. Do not keep it near your body at night such as under the pillow or on a bedside table, particularly if pregnant. You can also put it on “flight” or “off-line” mode, which stops electromagnetic emissions.
5. If you must carry your cell phone on you, make sure that the keypad is positioned toward your body and the back is positioned toward the outside so that the transmitted electromagnetic fields move away from your rather than through you.
6. Only use your cell phone to establish contact or for conversations lasting a few minutes as the biological effects are directly related to the duration of exposure. For longer conversations, use a land line with a corded phone, not a cordless phone, which uses electromagnetic emitting technology similar to that of cell phones.
7. Switch sides regularly while communicating on your cell phone to spread out your exposure. Before putting your cell phone to the ear, wait until your correspondent has picked up. This limits the power of the electromagnetic field emitted near your ear and the duration of your exposure.
8. Avoid using your cell phone when the signal is weak or when moving at high speed, such as in a car or train, as this automatically increases power to a maximum as the phone repeatedly attempts to connect to a new relay antenna.
9. When possible, communicate via text messaging rather than making a call, limiting the duration of exposure and the proximity to the body.
10. Choose a device with the lowest SAR possible (SAR = Specific Absorption Rate, which is a measure of the strength of the magnetic field absorbed by the body). SAR atings of contemporary phones by different for “sar ratings cell phones” on the internet.

One author has already called the cell phone industry strategy Big Tobacco 2.0? and her characterization has frightening merit. We know how this ends of it goes badly. It need not go badly. The death toll need not climb toward or past 5 million a year, as it has with smoking, before we conclude that action is merited.

We can and if we recover our collective sanity will take control of this issue back from the industry and see to it that the data required to support resonable decisions is accumulated and applied with all deliberate speed.

Well, of course, the New York Times pushed condescension at BlogHer.

Disdain for bloggers is a long-running Times lite motif, and the Times is historically one of our society's enforcers of certain boundaries.

This week, when the Old Grey Lady pushed, Erin Kotecki Vest pushed back.

Please listen to the interview in which Daniel Ellsberg details what is at stake.

If you are moved to action, as I was, please visit the Electronic Frontier Foundation website and use your zipcode to find your Senator’s phone number.

Call and read the short statement there or, far better, one of your own composition.

If you get no answer, click the link at the bottom of the page and e-mail your protest to your senator.

When you read my novel "The Four," you will understand why I greeted with a flash of rage the U.S. Supreme Court decision today banning the death penalty for child rape.

Yet rage, I believe, is no basis for justice. So I refocused emotion's energy on constructive reason.

Although there is within me the impulse to tear child rapists limb from limb, that impulse is quieted by the knowledge that our justice is too often unjust.

We have in this country a dismaying, recent history of hysterical child sex crime allegations that were later proved false, of death-penalty murder convictions that
DNA evidence proved wrong and of otherwise punishing the innocent in capital cases.

This is not a defense of the majority legal argument. In my view child rape does grave and lasting damage to the child, inflicting psychological harm whose pain may increase with age until it becomes unendurable. I see no hope for a punishment to fit that crime.

Instead, I find myself in agreement with Louisiana-born Sister Helen Prejean, who wrote in "The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions:"

Honorable people have disagreed about the justice of executing the guilty, but can anyone argue about the justice of executing the innocent?

We few North Carolinia voters made Mary Fant Donnan the Democratic labor commissioner nominee yesterday.

Expecting turnout would be low, I was still unaccountably sad to find just one other voter at my Wylie School (Raleigh, N.C.) voting place Tuesday morning.

Just 44 voters had preceded me to the digital ballot box in an area where I could count almost half that many Mary Fant Donnan signs in well-manicured front yards, and had yet to see a John Brooks sign.

      Lonely Wylie School (Raleigh, N.C.) voting place, Tuesday.

Photo by George Frink | (c)

It was the same everywhere.

Less than two percent of the registered voters went to the polls in North Carolina yesterday.

Donnan won by a landslide 68% to her opponent John Brooks' 32%.

Donnan will face incumbent Republican Cherie Berry in November, and I went to Fletcher Park where the flowers are blooming and more people walked with me in the warm sun than had gathered with me at the polling place four blocks away. Mothers with babies in strollers smiled at me as I made pictures of the flowers.

      Fletcher Park flower.

Photo by George Frink | (c)

Triple espresso, black and leaded, please.

No sugar or other abominations, thank you.

Yes. I'm addicted.

The addiction may lengthen my life, according to findings published this month in the Annals of Internal Medicine, or by the lights of those studies, at least do me no harm.

After watching two sets of deeply beloved grandparents miserably endure decaffeinated coffee, I decided to drink it the way I like it, and the way they liked it, and die when undenatured coffee kills me. If it does.

Only perchance, then, does strong coffee bring me Alzheimer's prevention and IQ preservation, some protection against the Frink family vulnerability to diabetes, a little insurance against liver cancer and perhaps other benefits.

My coffee obstinacy is one of the reasons my sons Jack and George Rankin are fond of muttering darkly, "Dad's never going to change," although I have given coffeeless life one dreary, sleepy go after another at their behest.

I succeeded each time, always feeling as though I had betrayed my grandparents. You see, my grandparents gained nothing at all from their misery. The New England Journal of Medicine reported years ago that the coronary heart disease and/or stroke their misery was prescribed to curtail was unaffected by their sacrifice. In a widely-cited, October 11, 1990, article the NEJM reported:

These findings do not support the hypothesis that coffee or caffeine consumption increases the risk of coronary heart disease or stroke.

The sense of betrayal and associated memories are really what turned me back to the pleasures of the dark brew as soon as I bumped into new evidence that my espresso stream might be good for me. Not the science.

Recollections how much my Grandfather George Frink enjoyed making a fine pot of boiled coffee over a hunting camp fire would come flooding back. Like a waking dream song I would see the joy my Grandfather B.L. Hinnant took in his marvel of a glass-pot percolator and feel again the satisfaction grandmothers Elvy Frink and Ruth Hinnant found in a fresh-made afternoon cup of coffee.

They drank coffee and we talked, the way Southern writers and their kin have talked for generations, creating together what I eventually understood as a family intellectual life.

The memories of our conversations amid the smells of their coffee were always with me, yet I was slow to understand how preparing and drinking coffee is for me a celebration of the best nurturing, sustaining aspects of my birth family.

Unintentionally, my sons led me to this understanding and so in this one thing they are exactly right about me.

Dad is not going to change away from the celebration of family which attends his daily brewing of coffee.

Southern Baptist arbiter dicta says women should not be ordained as pastors, but the SBC may have it upside down and backward. @blogbarger offers the top ten reasons why men should not be ordained.

Eugene E. Cho hits the The Ultimate Fighting Jesus right in the nose.

More people are in slavery than at any other time in history.

Slavery may be the fastest growing criminal enterprise, one the U.S. State Department’s annual Trafficking in Persons Report, released this month, plainly says requires more intensive enforcement effort.

Or the problem will continue to grow worse.

Rapidly shrinking enterprises, like the Southern Baptist Convention, are not required to die.

They prefer death to adaptation.

Like the SBC, they often rush to embrace death by refusing to effectively apply easy-to-use, cost-effective technologies and services which speak directly to the markets which are their life's blood.

Technologies like wireless communication and services like Twitter, which was at last poorly employed at the SBC convention in Indianapolis.

Why Twitter? asked pastor Joe Thorn, a Saint Charles, IL-based Baptist blogger whom I see as an SBC technology leader.

His answer offered practical applications of Twitter, without noting that Twitter and other wireless-dominated services can speak directly to cellphone-communication-fixated youth the SBC must reach and convert in order to forestall an almost 50% decline in church numbers forecast for 2030 by Frank Page, past president of the SBC.

"The reality is it's our fault," Page said earlier this year.

Yes, and that means the problem of decline is one Baptist leaders can solve by altering course to seriously apply effective new solutions.

Yet solutions that work for comparable organizations are left on the shelf, or when one like Twitter is taken down and used, merely tasted. Toyed with really, although Ed Stetzer of Lifeway's "tasting" was almost a game try at tweeting the Indianapolis convention.

Game, but unsuccessful. Stetzer's twitterstream did almost nothing to help his followers understand the direction, real import and impact of events. Even Thorn gently derided Sitzer's effort as keeping "people informed about who’s wearing what at the SBC."

Worthwhile application of available wireless technology at the SBC convention in Indianapolis would have seen application of Twitter, not as though it were a toy, but in ways that made it possible to follow the content events. Well, follow the content of events as understood by the Southern Baptist twitterati (an elite which currently has no members).

BrightKite would have been put to work mapping attendee travels so that everyone could follow those in whom they were interested, often literally from room to room.

There would have been proliferation of individual audio and video streams via Qik, Sesmic and their competitors to provide remote audiences with sights and sounds as they occurred and from a wonderfully enriching variety of perspectives.

An entrancing, enlightening, audience-recruiting measure of virtual attendance and participation would have been the result.

Instead of the SBC's continued embrace of inflexibility and decline toward death.

When I was a child, the Lumbee earned my enduring admiration by vanquishing the Ku Klux Klan with war whoops and gunfire at the Battle of Hayes Pond, thus successfully defending their reputation for both ferocity and integrity.

It was disappointing to hear that just-elected Southern Baptist Convention President Johnny Hunt, a Lumbee Indian, came equipped with a padded resume.

Hunt's advanced degrees are variously honorary or issued by what the Baptist Center for Ethics publication Ethics Daily calls "diploma mills."

My disappointment grew when I learned that, looking back, Hunt's personal resume isn't the only one to consider here. Robert Parham, executive editor of Ethics Daily, wrote:

One of Hunt's own "sons in the ministry" was forced to resign from the prominent First Baptist Church of West Palm Beach, Fla., in part because of his diploma mill degrees.
Highly recommended to the church by Hunt, Steven Flockhart was forced out "over a controversy involving fabricated education credentials," reported Baptist Press, which noted that the Palm Beach Post had discovered that Flockhart had obtained correspondence degrees from Covington Theological Seminary, "a Georgia school not accredited by any recognized accrediting agency."

Can a man who presumes the title "Dr." as though he had a valid academic Phd., and fails to accurately assess his own key staff, lead his denomination out of the land of memebership "free fall"?

A majority of those voting at the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting in Indianapolis said "yes," and it is faintly conceivable that he will prove to be something of respite from hard-line conservatism which is grinding the SBC down. We will see, but today I am moved to give thanks for being a Presbyterian.