(Or: of no news, entertaining consumer affairs help and silly vacation tips)

Vacations, no-school-whacky schedules, family commitments all make for a lazy summer.

You can tell things are bad when a story about a leaking water fountain in city hall almost makes the paper. The offending oasis soiled the carpet outside the office of public works director Charlotte Katzenmoyer, collapsed a ceiling tile in the basement and soaked a few file-laden boxes stored in the hallway. Not much else to report, including the fact that no computers were damaged by the incident.

Perhaps put off by the potential headline of “Nothing damaged in city hall leak” the short never saw the light of day.

Which is not to say “no news” is always quashed. I still remember a headline in one of the dailies many years ago that blared, “No one injured when school bus hits tree.” Aside from the seemingly “Dog Bites Man” aspect of the headline, things got even sillier when you read the story and realized no one but the driver was on the bus anyway. Which seems to minimize the possibility for injury. And also begs the question: “If a school bus hits a tree in the forest and no one’s on board…”

Sorry.

Now Comes the Summer of Consumer Discontent

A friend of mine (ok, so I don’t catch dirt, I’ll fess up: it was my wife) returned from a conference which featured a presentation by a guy named Bob Sullivan, who prepares “The Red Tape Chronicles” a blog for MSNBC.com which covers internet scams and computer fraud. His latest book is titled, “Gotcha Capitalism, How Hidden Fees Rip You Off Every Day and What You Can Do About It.”

Anyway, his presentation included a few sites and blogs he recommends people should check out regularly (his included, of course—he has a book to sell). I have poked around them, and while I’m not in the business of promoting the blogosphere, they are fairly enlightening/entertaining. In no prioritized order, here they are (complete wwith obligatory catchy phrase):

The Ripoff Report (“Don’t Let Them Get Away With It”)

The Consumerist (“Where consumers bite back”)

My 3 Cents (Billed as “The Consumer Revolution”)

Pissed Consumer (My personal favorite for obvious reasons)

Consumer Affairs (“Knowledge is Power” it says…)

Like you had nothing else to do.

Lazy, Hazy Crazy Days of Summer

We’re into the day trip thing. We used to spend an inordinate amount of time in Baltimore and D.C., but now that our oldest is in college in Philly (and working there this summer) we’ve started poking around there. Some things we recently found out:

The Adventure Aquarium and Battleship New Jersey on the Camden waterfront makes for an interesting time in an odd yin/yang kind of way. Here’s a key tip for the Aquarium: It’s open until 5 and later in the day is better. Up until about 2 or thereabouts the place is filled with scads of little kids from camps. Not that there’s anything wrong with loud high-pitched voices in rooms with low ceilings…

Also, you don’t have to drive across the Ben Franklin if you don’t want to. (A friend of mine once lived in Philly, worked in New Jersey, and had a funny line about what happened while he drove across the bridge every day. But I’ll keep it to myself in case one of the two people who read this is from Jersey.) You don’t even have to drive to Philly, either – depending on the number of people, Amtrak’s a financially viable alternative these days, with gas, parking, etc.

The PATCO high speed line takes you from center city and hooks up with the River Line, which plops you off right at the Aquarium.

Or the River Link ferry leaves from Penn’s Landing for a nice little trip across the Delaware.

Another interesting juxtaposition of sites involves the Eastern State Penitentiary, which is the proverbial stone’s throw away from the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

A quirky, little-known place is the Insectarium on Frankford Avenue in Philly’s “Great Northeast.” It opened in 1992 when Steve Kanya, who owned “Steve’s Bug-off” exterminating firm, decided to take the building next door and turn it into a museum dedicated to the things he was trying to eliminate. While some of the “interactive” parts of the museum are showing some wear and tear (a diplomatic way of saying they’re often broken) it’s definitely an interesting place if you like creepy crawly stuff. Of special interest in the educational department is a working beehive (the bees enter and exit through a tube in the wall) behind glass. Of special interest in the gross department is a display featuring real-live mockups of a kitchen and a bathroom infested with roaches.

Finally, if you want to turn the day trip into an affordable overnight, here’s a Priceline tip (yes, we’re cheap and big fans of the priceline bidding thing). Go to the Philadelphia Convention Center website (oh, excuse me, the official name is the Pennsylvania Convention Center) and find the dates when there are no conventions scheduled there. Then enter a low bid on priceline for a center city hotel. With no conventioneers around, the hotels are looking for business and will take reasonable – and sometimes ridiculously low – bids.

And please, save any comments about convention centers for somewhere else.

Local trip notes

Took the 10-year-old son to the Ephrata Cloister. Was the first time I’d been there since, oh, 1998, when our daughter hit the magic age of 10, which, in our family, translates to “The Summer of One-Day-A-Week Knowledge Infliction Excursions.”

New (or so it was to me, advancing age being what it is) was a film at the beginning of the tour where characters explained, in first-person, the history/concept of the Cloister. It’s an interesting film that places things in great context (though a warning – apparently the film’s makeup artist was absent from school on the days they covered: “Beards – how to make them look real.”)

That was followed by a 45-minute or so tour given by a guide who was both knowledgeable and enthusiastic about the topic. Even more impressive was the fact that it was on one of those hot-as-you-know-where days a few weeks ago and while our guide was dressed in an ankle-length robe he didn’t break a sweat.

I thought that would pretty much do it for our son, but to his credit after the tour he wanted to stick around and poke into every nook and cranny. As we were leaving, I asked him what he thought, and he said, “Well, I didn’t understand much of it, but looking at all of the old stuff was pretty cool.”

Fair enough.

Turns out what he didn’t understand was the whole celibacy aspect (or, as he called it, “that celi-whatever thingy”). I was in no mood to delve into the birds and bees discussion, which turned out to be the right call. That wasn’t the point he got out of it at all. Turns out that at the age of 10, evidently most girls suffer from severe cootie infestations (not his words – just putting my childhood nomenclature in his mind). Consequently, the idea of creating a society where males and females work and live separately is not so much an oddity as it is, in the mind of a 10-year-old boy, a work of sheer genius.

And at that point I’ll leave well enough alone.