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ETC...The cover-up is worse than the ugly truth

BY JIM KENNEDY

Posted 1/05/11

In my house, we have an artificial Christmas tree. When my wife, Anne, and I were first married, we got real trees for a few years, but this meant having to suffer through allergies as we’re both sensitive to what I’ll just call pine dander.

There’s something of a tug of war over Christmas tree timing in my household. Anne likes the tree to go up early and come down within a few days of Christmas. My preference is to put the tree up late and keep it up until a week after the new year. This year we’re doing it my way, so as you read this, there’s still a tree standing in the house.

Back when I was a kid, my family went back and forth on real and artificial trees. Once we even got a live tree and planted it in the front yard after the holiday season. As I recall, it destroyed the carpet. My parents similarly went to artificial, which is part of the reason I was so interested in going with real trees early on.

What finally sold me on getting an artificial tree a few years back is just how realistic they look, at least compared to the artificial trees of my youth. Back then, artificial trees were pretty much one shade of green, and the branches looked like green bottle brushes.

The modern artificial Christmas trees, by contrast, have a few shades of green with some brown mixed in and relatively realistic looking pine needles.

This dissertation on real and artificial pine trees is pretty much just a roundabout way of getting to the point of what I’m writing about this time around, namely cell phone towers.

They’re all over the place anymore, though there’s only one in Harford County that I could point out and say for sure where it is. It’s the one that’s supposed to have been designed to blend in so as to be less of an eyesore than the usual cell phone tower. It’s the one you can see from the intersection of Pleasantville Road and Route 152 that’s supposed to look like a Godzilla-size version of the Christmas trees of my youth.

Curiously, this mess was erected even though the person who made the decision could have seen other similar artificial tree cell towers elsewhere in the region. The first time I saw one was near the border of New York and Connecticut. I had to keep looking back at it because I couldn’t believe someone would build something so ugly then leave it up.

My understanding is that there’s a way around all these cell phone towers, disguised and otherwise. The theory is lightweight airplanes with solar panels exist today that can soar largely above the weather, circling more or less indefinitely and providing cell phone coverage. Presumably if this technology proves to be cheap and reliable, eventually high-flying cell phone antennae will eventually replace cell towers.

Either way, we’re probably stuck with cell towers for the foreseeable future. Maybe they’d look better if we could get our kids to make some ornaments to hang on them.