Articles by Dennis E. Powell

Dennis E. Powell is crackpot-at-large at Open for Business. Powell was a reporter in New York and elsewhere before moving to Ohio, where he has (mostly) recovered. You can reach him at dep@drippingwithirony.com.

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Jun 07, 2023

How About Useful Products?

By Dennis E. Powell | Posted at 10:25 PM

Last week I saw a short video that demonstrated an amazing new fabric. Controlled by a small “smartphone” application, this fabric changes color. It is very expensive, so the only people who will have garments made from it are teenagers.

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May 31, 2023

The Silent Majority's Silent Power

By Dennis E. Powell | Posted at 9:07 PM

If you’re of a certain age, when you hear the phrase “the silent majority” you probably think of Richard Nixon. He used the phrase in the sense that while the loudest and weirdest voices make up the majority of the news broadcasts, they do not make up the majority of the people, who go quietly about their business, saving their opinions for when they matter.

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May 24, 2023

Reporters Reported

By Dennis E. Powell | Posted at 10:49 PM

When I was a WOR Radio in the early 1980s everyone smiled when Bruce Eliot came into the newsroom to get a cup of our superior coffee. He was an amiable guy, always with a good joke.

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May 17, 2023

In a Handbasket

By Dennis E. Powell | Posted at 9:13 PM

It’s a little mortifying to learn that the Temptations’ hit song, “Ball of Confusion” was a hit 53 years ago. The worrying part is how long ago it was released. And how it came a half century too early.

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May 10, 2023

Rabbit Ears? Um, Yeah, Sorta

By Dennis E. Powell | Posted at 11:44 PM
The websites told me to forget it: there is no way in the world I can get over-the-air broadcast television where I live. I was inclined to believe them. I’m glad I didn’t.
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May 03, 2023

Re-finding Newfoundland

By Dennis E. Powell | Posted at 10:45 PM

Coincidence, surely, is the reason that the two places on earth I’d most like to visit (but probably never will) are islands.

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Apr 26, 2023

The Best We Can Do?

By Dennis E. Powell | Posted at 11:18 PM

Never the sharpest brick in the pile, and never having been accused of honesty, Joe “Bugout” Biden has not aged well.

All really that can be said of him now is that the ravages of time have cast doubt whether his latest falsehood is deliberate or an artifact of senile dementia. The effect is the same: his one hard and fast rule is never, ever to tell the truth. Dishonesty is the one area where he and Donald Trump are real competitors and both deserve to win.

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Apr 19, 2023

Hi-Fi in the Modern Age

By Dennis E. Powell | Posted at 9:57 PM

Time was, and it’s well within living memory, that the nicest thing you could say about an audio amplifier as found in a high-fidelity system or “stereo,” was that it was “a piece of wire.”

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Apr 12, 2023

Stark Thoughts on Vaccines and Treatments

By Dennis E. Powell | Posted at 10:40 PM

The headline last week would have been hopeful news indeed, if we hadn’t been here so many times before. “Cancer and heart disease vaccines ‘ready by end of the decade’” was the story in The Guardian.

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Apr 05, 2023

Up the Amazon Without a Paddle

By Dennis E. Powell | Posted at 10:33 PM

Photography was nothing new to me. I took my first published news picture when I was in third grade, and was getting regularly published by the time I turned 13, the year I started winning photography awards. This isn’t to brag — most people were shooting their Instamatics, while I had been given a Yashica A twin-lens camera for Christmas when I was eight years old. So I had some experience.

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