"So Let it be Written, So Let it be Done"

I don't suppose you ever watched the movie "The Ten Commandments", but that was a recurring line in it.  The evil pharaoh (Yule Brynner) would say that each time he issued a new edict.

I never had a problem with writing, although I remember that a lot of kids did. One teacher used to make writing assignments as punishment for one infraction or another. She would pass out this sheet of paper that was called "full scap paper", or maybe it was "fool's cap", and the offender had to fill every bit of it with words of repentance. Every bit, that is, except the top and bottom line, upon which we were forbidden to ever write. One time the whole class had to do it because somebody had circulated a petition for redress of grievances which we had all signed. We were supposed to write an essay about what we had allegedly done wrong and how sorry we were about it. I instead went into a full rant about my constitutional rights. I got so worked up that I even wrote on both the top and bottom line in defiance of the standing edict. The teacher was not pleased. She told me to rewrite the whole thing, which I was eager to do. I told her that, if she didn't want me to write on the top and bottom line and into the margins this time, she would need to give me more than one sheet of paper because I had a lot more that I wanted to say about this subject. She must have changed her mind about the rewrite because she tore my original draft up into little pieces and told me to shut up and sit down, which I did.

My deer blind was intentionally built so that no more than one person could fit into it. Ice fishing shanties can be communal structures, but deer blinds should never be. When my father and I went deer hunting, we deliberately sat far enough apart so that we couldn't talk to each other. Unlike dogs, deer and other wildlife are not comforted by the sound of a human voice. Indeed, the are downright paranoid about it. Plenty of time for talking back at camp or in the car on the way home. When you're hunting you need to shut up and pay attention.

I never worked the main gate at Bliss Fest. I did a lot of mowing and chainsaw work and, for several years I was the porta-potty coordinator. One day I complained to our director that the porta-potties were not being pumped out in a timely fashion, so he put me in charge of them. Let that be a lesson to you! I didn't pump them out myself, I just coordinated with he contractor who supplied the units and maintained them for us. Unlike his predecessor, this guy was so cooperative that I asked him what we could do to make his job easier. This resulted in the Porta-Potty song that's on the tape I gave you awhile back. It was a big hit, probably the most popular song that I ever wrote. It's like that famous guy said: "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American people."

They did eventually straighten the dog policy out, after sufficient time had passed that nobody remembered I was the one who had originally brought it up. What they did was compile a list of all the kennel facilities in the tri-county area. When somebody showed up at the gate with a dog, they gave him the list and told him to come back without the dog. There was some mumbling and grumbling at first but, people came to accept the idea once they realized that it was the same rule for everybody and was being consistently enforced.

beagles the gatekeeper

Interesting what you said about the spoken word and the written word, they are quite different. People are always more cautious with the spoken word. A very good reason for that is what you said, that it will live on at least as long as the paper, and of course come back to bite you in the ass, unlike the spoken word where you can claim never to have said that.

But there is something else, it is somewhat more formal, people feel like they are walking into a classroom and the teacher is standing there with that thick wooden ruler, tap, tap, tap, and they get all tongue tied and stammer and can’t get anything out. Probably the reason that you can ask somebody anything over a pot of coffee or a pitcher of beer, and they will talk their ass off, but try to get them to write a letter or anything and the best you can get are a few sentences that are so vague they are almost meaningless.

I remember that particularly well in subbing when the way to shut up a kid was to shove a paper in front of him and ask him to write about his summer vacation. Well it didn’t exactly shut him up because then he would be all whiny about he didn’t know what to write, so I’d say well tell me what you did and he would be all motor mouth, but when I said fine, write what you just said, but then he’d just stare at the paper, the pencil in his sweating fist still as the winter snow.

I don’t know why that is. Well I suppose one of the reasons is all those rules for written language, the spelling the grammar, the mysteries of the semi colon and the Goddamn split infinitive.

Myself I have always written pretty much the same way as I talk, I expect you do the same.

Which makes me wonder what it would be like if we ever met in person. Will probably never happen because I know you hate being in the awful city and I can’t see myself making the long trip up to your frozen wastes. It’s kind of nice to think of the two of us jawing away in your deer blind, but then when a deer poked his nose out of the woods I would be all like, “Run deer, this guy is going to shoot you,” and that would probably be the end of our friendship.

It’s kind of interesting this new written language, this text/twitter language, with its b for be, and 4 for for, and most interesting to me the abbreviations, like LOL (I used to think that meant Lots of Luck). I wonder how those abbreviations make it into text/twitter speak, IMHO is widely accepted whereas GFY (go fuck yourself) is not. I guess these abbreviation words start out as slang and then when enough people are using them, they will be accepted. I wonder if somebody has written a dictionary about it. Once they do there will probably become a proper text speak, a bumpkin text speak, a cool text speak, etc.

Well what would you do if you were the gatekeeper (and maybe you were) of blissfest when up pops the Arkansas traveler with his adorable big eyed kids and his friendly little dog, and he says, all wide-eyed innocence, that he didn’t remember reading that part of the rules, and maybe he did, and maybe he didn’t, but here he is with his fambly, are you going to say, “Rules are rules,” and send him back to Arkansas?

Rules? We Don't Need No Stinking Rules!

You're probably right about there being more bull shit on the internet than there is in books. I think that's because it's way easier to publish something on the internet than to get somebody to print it up and bind it in a book. If somebody really wants to publish a book, he can always find somebody to do it, but he might end up having to pay for it himself. They call that "self publishing", and the outfits that do it are called "vanity presses". The internet is generally free and accessible to anybody who can type with two fingers. Before the internet there was no shortage of bull shit in the world, but most of it was put out orally instead of in writing. The spoken word tends to dissipate out into the atmosphere and be lost from memory eventually, but the written word is more durable, and more easily reproduced. Maybe the reason there is more bull shit on the internet is that, once it's published, it never goes away. Even if the original author recants and deletes his posting, once copies have been made, the thing takes on a life of its own and may circulate forever.

The reason I say that our immigration problems have gotten worse is that more people seem to be worried bout them now, but that may only be a perception caused by all the media coverage the subject has been getting lately. Before the Mexican issue, there were issues with Chinese, Japanese, and Irish immigrants. The only immigrants that never caused concern were the Slavs, and maybe the Germans, but that's just because those people are so nice that everybody welcomed them with open arms. (I make small joke.)

I don't think you understand my point about the dogs of Bliss any better than our director did, which may be because you also are a college graduate. (I make another small joke.) Let's try again: Long before the festival, a list of the rules was sent out to all the ticket outlets and everybody on the mailing list. Additionally, a big sign listing the rules was erected by the main gate. If anybody was ignorant of the rules, it was their own fault. The family I told you about traveled a couple hundred miles to attend this festival as part of their family vacation. The parents had to explain to their young children, who had never been separated from their dog before, that dear Fluffy could not go on vacation with them and had to be left in a kennel. Fluffy was not happy about this and the kids weren't either. Anybody who has ever been on a family vacation will tell you that, if the kids ain't happy, ain't nobody happy. When they get to the festival, these unhappy kids see several other dogs running around, which doesn't make them any happier, or their parents either. You know who is happy? The scofflaws who brought their dogs to the festival. The were able to defy the rules with impunity. They were not turned away at the gate, nor were they approached by anybody during the festival and told to remove their dogs from the premises. "Rules? We don't need no stinking rules! Rules are for suckers like your parents who don't have the balls to break them. Now run along, little kids, before I sic my dog on you."........ I ask you Uncle Ken, is this fair?

We are going to my daughter's for Thanksgiving and will be getting home late, so I won't be going  online tomorrow. Happy Thanksgiving!

Just the facts Jack

Books are certainly more fact checked than internet articles. Well I am speaking of books published by the major publishing houses. First the editors aren’t going to accept anything that is a tissue of lies, and then, after the book is accepted, they have teams of fact checkers go through it to make sure that the facts are straight. By facts I don’t mean anything like an opinion like Reagan was a secret socialist, but something like the dow jones was at such a point on September 3, 1987.

There are some publishing houses of the left and the right and the middle loony who probably don’t fact check anything as long as it agrees with their particular point of view, but you generally don’t find their books in a Barnes and Noble.

All you need to get on the internet is a website, or not even that, you can just make comments on an article, you can say anything you damn well please. As percentages go there is certainly a lot more crapola on the internet than you will find in a public library or a book store.

And I guess our old pal wiki is the exception that proves the rule. Information on wiki is viewed by a lot of people, and they have the ability to object to anything they don’t think is true and that is considered by monitors, who check with experts, so wiki is certainly accepted by scholarly gents such as ourselves, sipping our brandy and smoking our cigars in the sumptuously appointed reading room of The Beaglesonian Institute.

Nobody ever solves the problems of immigration anymore than one ever solves the problem of terrorism. There will always be somebody sneaking across the border and there will always be somebody hurling a bomb. Most Americans don’t like winter. Why don’t we just pass a law against that and spend the treasury hiring people to, I don’t know, put a big roof on the country and build furnaces every fifteen square feet?

How do you measure that the immigration problem is worse now than in Reagan’s time?

I wasn’t there for the Bliss Fest Tyranny so I will have to take your word for it. I imagine they don’t want to have dogs running all over the place because while most dog owners are decent law abiding citizens, many of them are big fucking assholes with big fucking asshole dogs. They could make an announcement saying that only decent law abiding citizens can bring a dog, but everybody, especially big fucking assholes, think that they are law abiding citizens. So it’s easier just to say no dogs allowed.

And then some decent law abiding guy arrives with his nice little dog who he has brought all the way from Arkansas, and you can turn him away, or you can tell him to be careful with his dog. Myself I am going to cut the Arkansas traveller a break. The rule of law and all that, but I think there is no reason to be so rigid about it all the time. The reason that they made the rule was so that the festival could be held without asshole dogs barking their heads off, not because they hated dogs. If a few dogs slipped in there won’t be the problem, so the spirit of the law is upheld.

Well more can be argued about this. My general theory is that laws are just words and people are people.

I wonder how much you watch fb. Do you get all those dumb lefty and righty packaged rants? I say packaged rants because the people don’t write them themselves, they just pick up something from some fringe group or they repeat what somebody else posted. God knows why, certainly no mind is going to be changed by viewing them, and really I think they are just identifying themselves as being on one side and sticking their finger in the eye of the other side, and I think this is one of many factors polarizing the country.

Normally I don’t get involved, but when they express something that is not a fact, I feel that I should step in.

Back during the Trayvon thing a right winger I know posted a picture of some gang banging, jewelry encrusted, armed, guy holding up a handful of money and sneering and the quote said here is a photo taken from Trayvon’s webpage. You can just tell sometimes that things are bogus, so I went to Snopes and sure enough it was a photo of some other guy and it was being passed around on fb one wingnut to the other wingnut.

Just a couple days ago there was one from another friend of mine who is a lefty about how Black Friday was originally called that because that was the day they had a big slave sale before the civil war. That didn’t sound right either, so I went back to snopes and sure enough it was bullshit.

I informed both the wingnut and the lefty. The wingnut said something like it might as well be true and left it up. The lefty agreed with me that we weaken our credibility by posting lies, but then she left hers up too, because she had gotten it from her sister and didn’t want to offend her, and like the wingnut she believed it might as well be true.

Maybe we spend too much time with the brandy and cigars and should be out informing the citizenry. On the other hand, it sure is comfy in our big stuffed chairs in our reading room.

Fact and Fiction

I don't think that books are any more "fact checked" than what you find on the internet. I have read several books over the years that claimed to be factual, only to have them declared to be false by somebody else later on. One example that comes to mind is the one about the Kazzars that we discussed awhile back. I read that book before the internet was even invented. I wasn't sure if I believed it or not, I just though it was an interesting theory. You were able to find information on the internet that said this guy's theory had been discredited a long time ago. I suppose you could have found the same information in a library or book store, but it probably would have taken you a lot longer. Of course there's a lot of garbage on the internet, but the internet certainly doesn't have a monopoly on false information. It's like they told us in the army: "Don't believe anything you hear and half of what you see."

I didn't remember exactly how Reagan's amnesty plan was passed and implemented, but I do seem to remember that it was supposed to solve our immigration problems once and for all. Three decades or so later we have more immigration problems than ever. How can this be? Do you think it might have been more effective if it had been passed by a Democratic administration?

I am not saying that we should deport Pedro because of a defective tail light, I'm saying that Pedro should have never been allowed to get away with entering the country illegally in the first place. Mexicans have been allowed to slip in and out of this country since forever. My position is that, if they don't want to enforce the law uniformly, then they should just repeal the law. Either let them in or don't let them in, but don't tell them that they can't come in and then hold the wire up with a wink and a nod. It's like that argument I had with the director of the Bliss Fest a long time ago. Stop me if you've heard this one:

There was a well publicized  rule that no dogs were allowed at the Bliss Fest but, every year, a few dogs managed to slip in somehow. I was approached by a family from out of town who had left their dog in a kennel when they came to the festival. This was traumatic for all involved because the dog and the kids had never been separated before. They asked me why other dogs were allowed and not theirs, and I promised to bring the subject up at the next board meeting. The director explained that they couldn't allow everybody to bring dogs to the festival but it was not a problem if only a few people did, so they let it slide. I told him about the family I had talked to, and that they had a valid point. Why should they be inconvenienced for doing the right thing while others are rewarded for doing the wrong thing? "No dogs allowed" means no dogs. If you want to allow some dogs and not others, then change the rule accordingly. You could charge extra for dogs and require that they be leashed or something. The director claimed that he didn't understand my point, and he was a college graduate.

For some reason, this Ferguson thing has not caught my interest as much as the Martin-Zimmerman case did. Now that the verdict is in, I may look it up on Wiki this weekend. I thought that their account of Martin-Zimmerman was pretty fair, and I have no reason to believe that they will treat this case any differently. Our local media has focused on the riots and the anger, not so much on the facts of the case.

events of the day

I was a little unclear about what Reagan did, specifically what he did with executive order because that was mostly what the reps were all on fire about Sunday morning, none of them went into the contents of the bill itself. It wasn’t an easy internet search. The hardest part was finding a source that wasn’t blatantly partisan.

In my opinion that is the main problem with the internet. If you go into a bookstore, every book has been fact-checked and evaluated by respectable people while if you go on the internet every nutbar has a book, so they outnumber the books that have been fact-checked, and because when they are listed in google the only indication you have of their contents is a sentence, and in order to find out anything about the article you have to click on it, and wait for all their stupid images and twitter feeds to load before you can read the article.

Anyway, Reagan did sponsor and sign into law an amnesty bill vastly more sweeping than what Obama executive ordered. But did he executive order it? I think what happened is he executive ordered a provision to help immigrant families. So there.

What Reagan gave the immigrants is way more than what Obama is giving them, but I think amnesty is the word that pops out of the conservatives mouths whenever you give immigrants any break at all, so there is nothing I can do about that.

It has no effect on those applying legally.

I think enforcing a bad law, like for instance deporting Pedro who has been working a job and raising a family and paying taxes and keeping his nose clean because one night his tail light goes out, breeds more disrespect for the law than, well, letting it go by.

Ferguson went down last night. As to whether the cop unfairly shot the kid or not I don’t know. I am waiting for some kind of report but I am not hearing anything. All the knowledge I have has been leaked by one side or another. Basically, let me call it the white side, believes the guy was well shot, and the other side, let me call it the black side, believes he was unfairly shot. Neither side is interested in any further facts.

But it doesn’t really matter. How anybody thinks that rioting in some little town by St Louis is going to help their cause is way beyond me.

Sounds Like Amnesty to Me

I don't know if all presidents have done it, but I read somewhere that there was some kind of amnesty program like that when Reagan was in office. I remember thinking at the time that it was a bad idea, but I must not have been too concerned about it because I soon forgot about it until years later when, like I said, I read about it somewhere. The reason I thought it was a bad idea was that it rewarded illegals while penalizing the guys who were trying to get into the country legally. Well, not exactly penalizing, but it sent the wrong message. Why bother with all the paperwork and waiting when you can just sneak in and, sooner of later, they will make you legal? I am a great believer in either enforcing a law or repealing it. When you have a law on the books that is not enforced it just breeds disrespect for the law in general. To my knowledge, this Mexican thing has never been enforced properly, so they might as well just open the gates and let everybody come and go as they please. To be fair, though, they ought to do the same for the Canadians.

I don't remember much about the Coal Age in Chicago, but I do remember that a lot of houses still had those coal chutes long afterwards. I don't think our house had one or, if it did, my dad got rid of it soon after we converted to fuel oil. Our fuel oil tank was in the back yard, up against the garage wall. My dad didn't like the looks of it, so he built a small shed to cover it up. After we converted to gas, we got rid of the tank, but not the shed. He later fenced that area in and made a dog pen out of it, cutting a dog sized hole in the shed to make it into a dog house. We had two big dogs at the time, and the shed was plenty big for both of them, but whichever dog got in there first wouldn't let the other dog in. So my dad divided the dog house in half with plywood and cut another doggie door on the other side. Soon after that, the weather got cold and both dogs started crowding in together on one side, and there were no more arguments about it.

Everything I know about creosote came from wood burning stoves, and it never occurred to me that coal furnaces would also produce it. They must have, though, because they had those chimney sweeps in Europe, with their tall hats and funny clothes. I saw one once peddling his ass down a street in Berlin. I thought that he was going to a costume party, but the other guys told me that he was a real chimney sweep. The uniform was a tradition with the trade, as was the bicycle he was riding with all his rods and brushes hooked up to it somehow. He seemed like a happy guy, smiling and waving back at all the passerby who cheerfully called out to him as he peddled along. The guys told me that the reason people were happy to see him was that, according to popular mythology, if you saw a chimney sweep in the morning, you would have good luck all day.

They still burned a lot of coal in Berlin when I was there, but it wasn't like the coal I've seen in the U.S. This stuff was somehow formed into uniform bricks that could be stacked up like regular building bricks. It must have been anthracite coal, because the chimneys in Berlin didn't make lot of smoke, and two bricks would heat the average apartment all night long. I understand that, during the Berlin Airlift, they actually flew that stuff in with all the other supplies after the Russians closed the border.

All our snow melted and I got up on the roof to clean our chimney yesterday. Winter weather is scheduled to return tonight, so I got it done just in time. Depending on how much snow we get, I may have to plow the driveway tomorrow. If not, I'm going deer hunting.

The Obama strikes back and the coal age

Oh Obama made a mighty proposal. It has nothing to do with letting more immigrants in, what he said was that if you are an immigrant in this country, and you have been here for five or more years, and you have a child who is a citizen, you get sort of a temporary green card for I think about three years.

Well it’s really not that big of a deal, these are guys that nobody was going after really, those 11 million who almost everybody, except the wingiest of the wingnuts, and reps running in a primary, said well we can’t send them all away. It was just guys who worked hard and kept their noses clean (a criminal record makes you ineligible), and who were probably going to stay here anyway, but now they no longer have to sweat that a burnt out taillight will send them back across the border.

I watched the Sunday morning talk shows last Sunday, and the reps are, as I earlier observed, hopping mad. But they have no alternative plan, they have pretty much no way, except trying to get elected in a couple years, to fight it. And this sort of thing is what most Americans are for anyway, and now Obama gets all the credit.

It helps to ease our pain after that awful election.

There is the problem about how it was enacted, that is what had all the reps hopping mad on the shows, they scarcely said a word about the bill itself, but it is apparently legal, and has been done by all presidents, maybe not to this extent, but so what?

I do know about creosote. I remember when those contractor guys would cruise the neighborhoods and just happen to notice that your chimney looked a bit askew and unless you let them fix it your whole family would likely be dead in the morning.

Growing up in Gage Park it seemed like everybody burned coal. On the hottest day of the summer a coal truck manned by huge sweaty black guys would pull up in front of your house. Just seeing black guys close up was exotic enough, but then they would fill their wheelbarrows with coal and push them down the narrow gangway, and dump them through a window by your backyard. The coal bin. A whole room in your basement.

It was Dad’s job to fill a shovel from the bin, haul it maybe ten feet to the furnace, open those awful doors like the gateway to hell with its shimmering redness and blast of hot air. First he had to take out the clinkers which had passed through a grate, and I think that they were taken out to the alley.

It was a big day, well it was certainly a big deal for Dad when we got this gleaming new stoker. What it did was take the coal from coal bin and feed it into the furnace, and then I think it took out the clinkers. I’m not sure if that’s what happened because even as it was a tremendous ease on Dad, it wasn’t as exciting as seeing the furnace open it’s fiery mouth to be fed.

Later still it was natural gas, which was really boring, except that there was something very sneaky about gas and you never knew when it was going to explode and blow up the whole house, but outside of that there was nothing to see.

Obama Made a Speech?

Funny, the stock market went up today and they are predicting a thaw in the weather for the next few days. Usually, when that guy makes a speech, the stock market goes down and the weather goes to hell, or so it seems. I did catch something on the news that said he has a new plan for immigration "reform" which, I suppose, means that he wants to let even more Mexicans into the U.S. Was the speech about that?

I'm looking forward to that thaw because my wood furnace is backing up smoke every time I open the firebox door to put in more wood. It does that once in awhile anyway but, when it starts doing it every time, it means that it's time to clean the creosote out of the chimney. I try to do that once a month during the heating season, but I can't do it when the roof is covered with snow like it is now. That's because it's a steel roof, and steel gets really slippery when it's wet or snow covered. That's a good thing, and the reason we had a steel roof put on there in the first place, because it causes the snow to slide off so you don't have to shovel it off. It's got to be thawing, though, for the snow to slide off like that, which is why I'm looking forward to the thaw they are predicting.

We had shingles before we had them covered with steel. A shingle roof is easier to walk on but, if you don't shovel the snow off, alternate periods of thawing and re-freezing causes an ice build up on the eves, which causes water to accumulate under the snow. This water tends to seep under the shingles and, when it re-freezes, lifts the shingles up, allowing even more water to seep in. No good can come of that. When it starts to leak into the house, you have to go up on a ladder and bust up the ice dam with a hammer to let the water run off. By the time you do that, the damage to the ceiling has already been done, so it's best to shovel the snow off before it has a chance to accumulate significantly. I did that for years, but it's kind of dangerous, and I'm not getting any younger, so we finally had the steel roof installed. Now I only have to go up there to clean the chimney once a month, which is better than going up every time we get a significant snowfall.

Do you even know what creosote is? Well, there's different kinds of creosote, but the kind I'm talking about is the kind that builds up in the chimney of a wood burning stove or furnace. What happens is, when the warm smoke meets the cold end of the chimney, unburned carbon condenses out of the smoke and adheres to the inside of the chimney. This stuff builds up in layers that reduce the chimney's inside diameter, causing it to not draw properly so that smoke backs up into the house when you open the firebox door. It can also catch fire under certain conditions, but that's never been a problem for me. The worst thing that I've experienced is when the creosote builds up to a certain point and then flakes off, falling down the chimney into the elbow that connects the stove pipe to the firebox. It's not hard to rake it out of the elbow with the poker but, if you neglect to do that periodically, it will block the elbow off. No good can come of that. Even if you clean out the elbow, there is still that restriction caused by the stuff that hasn't flaked off yet, so it's best to clean the chimney when you start getting excessive smoke backing up.

Ah, the joys of rural living! You city folks don't have interesting things like that to keep you occupied throughout the winter, which is probably why the winter seems to pass so slowly for you.

the polar vortex comes to the windy city

Our official temp comes from O’Hare. They take temps all over the area when they give the weather, especially all those burbs and who the hell cares what the temp is there? If those burb people want to know what the temp is why don’t they move back to Chicago where respectable people live? They should just give the temp downtown where I live and forget about all those other people.

The burbs, I don’t have a lot of respect for the burbs. We used to call them the sticks, and laugh at their skinny phone books. Anymore they have like taken over, and instead if having a nice grid system like respectable Chicago has, they are all higgedly piggedly stretched out over everywhere so that driving down the same street you leave one suburb and then come back to it, and leave it, and come back, and they change the names and numbers of the streets, and the streets are all curvy. Lump them in with the backpackers and skateboarders and snowmobilers and jet skiers.

Sometimes, living by the lake, we get a little air conditioning on those godawful hot hot hot days, and the freeze comes later here because the lake is always at least thirty degrees, but in the spring when those awful suburbanites and even Gage Parkers are sipping lemonade in their shorts, we are freezing our asses off from that east wind.

Maybe polar vortex is not accurate, but I like it, it has a nice ring. And it looked like that in the weather maps last year where there were a lot of concentric circles growing bluer and colder as you go inward, and half the time Chicago was smack dab in the middle.

There are indeed gusts going through downtown on a windy day, where you are strolling along State as merry as the month of May and you turn onto Randolph and you are knocked off your feet. But other than that Chicago is not particularly windy. When they measure those things Chicago is about average.

The windy appellation came when there was a battle between Chicago and New York to see who would host the 1893 World’s Fair. It was mostly a war of words, and Chicago turned out to have more blowhards, and New York, to make fun of us, called us the windy city, and being as we always rather admired blowhards, we accepted the name and used it ourselves. There’s some other story about how we came to be the windy city, but the only thing I remember about it is that it is not as interesting, so the hell with it.

Tongues are wagging after Obama’s speech last night. Oh how those Republicans are shaking their fists and stomping their well-shod feet. There’s nothing they can do about it until they take their senate seats, and by then it will be too unpopular. I think it is a coup for the dems and a slap in the face of the reps after they creamed us in that last election. Though, as you said about the weather, anything can happen before it’s over.

They Got the "Blowing" Part Right

You may be on to something with your theory about why young people like new stuff. Another reason they keep "improving" things is to get us to spend our money. Do they think we are going to throw away our old stuff before it's worn out or used up just because there is a "better" version on the market? Maybe the new stuff is better, or maybe not but, as long as my old stuff is good enough for my purposes, I'll just keep it. Thank you very much!

We only have four or five inches of snow on the ground right now, while Buffalo, New York has four or five feet. Other locations around Michigan have gotten a foot or two, but the worst of it seems to have missed us here in Cheboygan. One thing, though, they got the "blowing" part right! This is not unusual for us when we get these lake effect events. You look at the weather map on TV, there's a lake effect band to our north, and another to our south, while Cheboygan lies in a clear streak. Occasionally we get hammered and the others don't, but that's the exception rather than the rule. A couple times in the last week or so it looked like Chicago was getting dumped on, which is why I asked.

Cheboygan is certainly not the coldest place in Michigan but, Pellston is only about 20 miles away, and I think they still brag about it being the "Icebox of the Nation". That myth originated in the days when there weren't as many airports around as there are now. Official weather stations are usually located in airports, and Pellston has had one for a long time. Truth be known, Gaylord, which is about 50 miles south of Pellston, commonly reports colder temperatures, being at a higher elevation, but they must have not had their airport as long as Pellston has. Fargo, North Dakota used to frequently report the coldest temperature in the nation, but you hardly ever hear about them anymore either.

I remember that, when they used to give the weather predictions for Chicago, they used to always end with "cooler at the lake". Of course, that's when Midway was the primary airport. Now I think they report separate temps for O'Hare, Midway, and the Loop. I think the reason Chicago is known as the "Windy City" is the way the wind coming off the lake has to funnel between those tall buildings, which must intensify it. Truth be known, I never noticed the wind to be all that bad in the old neighborhood.

I remember last year when you guys were way colder than we were, and they blamed it on the "Polar Vortex". The weather guy on our local station claimed that there was no such thing, it was just the same old jet stream that has been around forever. Sometimes the jet stream splits, and the northern branch gets labeled "the polar jet", so maybe that's what they were talking about. What happened last winter was that polar jet dipped south and brought all that Arctic air down here where it doesn't belong, and this winter is starting out the same way. There's no guarantee that it will stay that way all winter, though. It's early yet, anything can happen before it's over.

give us your snow, keep your snowmobilers

You know, we old folks get the bad rap of never wanting to try anything new. I personally think that it is because we are wise enough in our experience to know that there is nothing new under the sun. Those good for nothing whippersnappers, they will sometimes talk in praise of the wisdom of the aged, but that is always about some hypothetical character, it is never about one of us in person.

There is this ill-founded sentiment crazy across the land that newer is a synonym for better. All I want to say is that sometimes a newer product is better, but I want to add an addendum, that sometimes it isn’t. And here is where I part ways with the whippersnappers who believe newer is always better.

There is some logic for this. When kids come into the world, they don’t know anything, whereas those of us who have been around awhile know a few things, so we have an advantage over them which they resent. But if something new comes up, then neither one of us knows anything about it, and so we are on equal footing. None of these kids has the vast knowledge of say, the blues that we have accumulated over many years of experience, so they invent rap.

But anyway, what I was thinking that maybe one of the reasons that you didn’t want to try craft beers was because it was new. This is probably not the case but if you throw that threat at someone it is kind of like calling them chicken, and sometimes it impels them to try something.

Mad Hatter IPA brewed by New Holland is as yellow as any Milwaukee’s Best. I never heard that about Bud being dry and Miller being sweet. Certainly not my experience in that they both taste perzackly the same to me. Most craft beers are on the hoppy side. The blurbs on the cans never speak of what kind of malt they are made from, but they go on and on about this or that kind of hops blended with this other kind of hops from this famed valley or whatever. Kind of like the way they describe some wines, and pretty silly I will agree, but I basically like a bitter beer and that’s why I like pale ales and IPAs.

Snowmobilers, what a bunch of losers. All winter long the papers are full of them fulfilling Darwin’s theory. Throw in the jet skiers, and the motorcyclists, and the dune buggy guys, all of them with the only idea in their head that the faster they are going and the more noise they are making the more fun they are having. Maybe I could speak to those Legs Inn people and open up the place in the winter and have specials for all snowmobilers on those really high alcohol IPAs.

Well I said if you held your hand out palm first, so that would make it your left hand, but I don’t want to get to deeply into the subject where we would be talking about what Illinoisans hold out for someone to poke to show where they live.

I was going to address that weather issue. In the rest of the country, Chicago is considered to be a place where it gets very cold in the winter. They always have that guy from CBS standing in the middle of Michigan Avenue asking the pedestrians if they think it is cold. But here in the heartland we know that Milwaukee is colder and so is Detroit, and how about that Minneapolis. Nobody speaks much of Cheboygan and I suspect you Cheboyganders like it just fine that way, but I went to look on my Yahoo weather thing and right now at seven AM you are one degree warmer than we are in Chicago. Well our weather is measured at O’Hare, and looking out my balcony windows towards the river and the lake I expect if I were to step out it would be somewhat colder.

The weather wasn’t much of a problem on my trip. It was in the teens and windy but no snow, and we didn’t do any back packing (backpackers, toss them in with the snowmobilers and their ilk. True, they don’t make much noise, but they are annoying, and as long as we are on the subject of annoying people let’s toss in skateboarders). It got a little chilling when we stepped out to read the historical markers (we never pass up a historical marker (we saw the point where the survey decided that Kansas was here and Nebraska was over there)).

People here are always saying that they don’t care how cold it gets as long as it doesn’t snow. That’s because all they care about is their stupid cars. Myself I love snow, nothing prettier in the world.

The thing about global warming is that while on average the surface of the earth will be warmer, some places will be hotter and some will be colder. There is speculation that that awful jet stream that gave us such a humdinger is because there is hardly any polar ice anymore, and we can expect winters like the last one all the time now.

It's Not the Name, It's the Taste

I don't care about the name, the color of the label, or any of the social crap that may be associated with any particular brand of beer. I drink beer because I like the taste of it. I don't drink nearly as much as I used to before I got that ulcer, but I still drink my two beers a day because I like the taste of it. There are two main components that determine the taste of beer, the malt and the hops. It is the proportionate blending of malt and hops that determine whether a beer is "dry" or "sweet". Of course beer doesn't really taste dry of sweet, but that's the words that are used to describe it. I think they say something similar about wine. A sweet beer is heavy on the malt and light on the hops, while a dry beer is just the opposite. Budweiser is generally considered to be a dry beer, while most of the Miller products fall into the sweet category. Stroh's and Pabst are somewhere in between those two. The craft beers I have tasted seemed to fall into the dry category, but it's hard to tell because they're not even yellow, so it's like comparing apples to oranges.

There are two ways to make home brew, from scratch and from a kit. I have never tried making beer from scratch but, from what I have read, it sounds more difficult and time consuming than making it from a kit. The kit consists of syrupy stuff that comes in a can. The malt and hops are already mixed for you. You can tinker with the taste by adding more malt or hops, or you can just try a different brand of kit until you find one you like.

Legs Inn closes for the winter because it's a big barn of a building with no insulation. It's been a few years but, last I heard, it was owned and managed by George and Kathryn Smolek, the third generation of Smoleks to run the place. I don't think they have winter jobs, they work hard spring to fall and go down to Chicago for the winter to rest up. Deer season is not nearly as big a deal around here as it used to be, but I'm sure there would be enough business for them to stay open if they wanted to. After deer season comes the skiers and snowmobilers, which would certainly keep them busy till spring.

It doesn't matter which hand you use to describe where you live in Michigan, but it should be turned so that the thumb is on the viewer's right to correspond with a map of the Lower Peninsula. you can represent the U.P. with the other hand if you want to, but then you can't use it to point to the desired location on your primary hand.

There is a certain amount of philosophy associated with law and politics but, when push comes to shove, it's the precise "letter of the law" that counts. While the constitution may be read as a philosophical document, its primary function is to describe the powers and limitations of the three main branches of the federal government. It doesn't matter what you think it means or what I think it means, it matters what the courts determine that it means. A future court might decide that it means something different but, until it does, the latest ruling stands. I think that you're right about the Second Amendment, and so did a previous Supreme Court ruling, but that ruling was overturned by a more recent ruling. The Michigan State Constitution avoided that controversy by clearly stating that citizens have the right to bear arms both in the state militia and as individuals. Of course, that's only good in Michigan, but I wouldn't be surprised if other states have something similar.

How was the weather on your trip, and what did you find when you got home? Most of the Eastern U.S. has been pretty stormy lately. We haven't gotten nearly as much snow as some other places but, of course, it ain't over yet. Kind of makes you hanker for some global warming, doesn't it.

the tip of the mitt and the breakfast of champions

Lienie’s just tastes like regular lawn mower beer to me. I can’t imagine that brew your own beer could taste any good. You have a very good brewery, New Holland in your state, that brews a very good Mad Hatter’s IPA, but this is America and you can drink what you like. I expect you consider craft beer to be kind of oh, I don’t know, hippie, because they tend to have goofy names and whatnot.

I had to look up this Legs Inn, and it turns out that it is closed for the season. Closed for the season, what is with that? Didn’t deer hunting season just start? Isn’t that THE season in Michigan, especially your part which, if Legs’ website is to be believed, is called the Tip of the Mitt.

Which reminds me of goings on in watercolor class last Saturday. Our teacher is from the burbs of Detroit, and then it turned out that one of our other students was from Michigan and so we started talking about Michigan. One of the other students held out her hand palm first with the thumb crooked way over and she said that was how Michiganders explained to other Michiganders where they lived by pointing out with their other hand to somewhere in their palm.

Wait a minute, it would have to be their left hand wouldn’t it? And that wouldn’t include the upper peninsula would it? When I piped in with that yooper and looper thing everybody seemed aware of that, but when I broached the subject of the stump jumpers and those other guys, all I got was blank stares. Well we Illinoisans, living in our balmy climate, don’t keep up on the frozen north.

You are indeed more aware of what the constitution says than most people, and I have to admit, than me, but mostly you like it because you like what you interpret it to say. You want to hang on to Old Betsy till its pried out of your cold dead fingers, so you believe that that very iffy second amendment, which it is clear to any reasonable person is speaking only of arming militias, declares that super rifles are just fine anytime. In fact, you already know what is right and wrong, so all you have to do is look into the constitution for proof of something you already know. Likewise a person who believes the exact opposite of everything you believe can find proof of everything in that very same document. You guys might as well be talking about the back of cereal box.

I have been reading The Brethren, by Bob Woodward about the Burger Court. A real eye opener about what goes on in the supreme court. Nothing is simple.

You know before I looked into philosophy I thought it would be like mathematics, where the first guy came in and proved a few things and then the next guy came along and, using that, proved a few more things and so on. But instead what happens is the first guy says this and that, and then the next guy comes around and says the first guy was full of shit and what it really is is this other this and this other that, and the next guy says both those guys are full of shit and so on.

And I thought the law would be like that, something would come up and they’d go through their law books and find the applicable facts and stamp it this way or that, but it’s nothing like that. It’s not as bad as that, you can’t just say this law or amendment is bullshit and dismiss it out of hand, you have to go to the effort of explaining how it doesn’t really mean what everybody else thinks it means, but that’s not really all that hard.

Already Tried It - Didn't Like It

I have tried a few craft beers and I wasn't crazy about any of them, except for Lienenkugel's. (I'm not sure about the spelling, but that's how it's pronounced.) Lienie's, as it's affectionately called by it's fans, began in a little Wisconsin town, where it had been brewed by the same family for three generations. I used to hang out at Legs Inn, in Cross Village, Michigan. That place is famous for, among other things, it's extensive inventory of domestic and foreign beers. One day, I think it was back in the 1990s, Willie, their chief bartender, was traveling in Wisconsin when he came across some Lienie's which, at the time was only sold locally. He contacted Jacob Lienenkugel, the patriarch of the family, and expressed an interest in adding his beer to the Legs Inn repertoire. Jacob told him that Miller had recently bought the company, but had promised to keep the name and the recipe the same. Willie brought a couple of cases home with him and soon arranged for the brand to be sold at Legs Inn on a regular basis. It was so successful that Jacob, his son, and his grandson traveled all the way to Cross Village to congratulate the owner, and to sample some of the Polish cuisine, for which Legs Inn is also famous. Not long after that, Lienies started appearing in stores all over Northern Michigan, but only in bottles, which are more expensive than cans, so I never buy it, although I used to drink it at Legs because it was he same price as all their other domestic beers. Lienenkugel originally only produced a regular yellow beer but, soon after they went national, they branched out into several designer varieties, and the yellow stuff is hard to find on the shelves anymore.

I used to brew my own beer from a kit, not from scratch. I ordered my supplies from Bierhaus International, I think in Erie, Pennsylvania. Most of the ingredients came in a can of syrupy like stuff, and all I had to add was water, sugar, and yeast. I finally gave it up after the company "improved" the formula of my preferred brand several times, raising the price each time. Each change also modified the taste and, each time, I preferred the earlier version. It finally got to the point that I liked store bought beer better, so I quit making my own.

I don't think of the Bible or the constitution as holy instruments of God, but I respect and admire them both as historical cornerstones of what used to be American culture. I don't claim to be an expert on either document, but I think I know more about both of them than the average man on the street. In my opinion, the constitution neither condones nor prohibits gay marriage, or abortion either for that matter. The 10th Amendment clearly says that such matters are not in the federal domain, and are "reserved to the states respectively, or to the people". I think the U.S. Supreme Court overstepped its bounds when it legalized abortion, and will overstep its bounds again if it legalizes gay marriage. The only valid constitutional argument for gay marriage is Article IV, Section 1, which says that each state must give "full faith and credit" to the laws of every other state. This seems to imply that each state must recognize gay marriages that are performed in a state where they are legal, but I don't think it can be construed to mean that every state must legalize the performance of gay marriage within its own borders. From what I've read and heard, however, that is not the argument that the gay marriage advocates are using. They are using the "equal protection under the law" clause, which is probably in  there somewhere, but I don't know exactly where so I can't quote it for you.

Have a nice trip.

try it, you'll like it. I mean craft beer, not gay marriage.

How about Pepsi and Coke? I had a friend who claimed he could tell the difference between them, so I poured a couple glasses of Royal Crown when he was out of the room, and had him come in to tell which was Pepsi and which was Coke. He took a taste of each, shook his head puzzled for awhile and then said they both tasted like Royal Crown to him. So maybe he could tell, but certainly I couldn’t.

I have a friend in Missouri who brews beer and is an expert. When I challenged him to a taste test of lawnmower beers he refused the blind test. I suspect he knew that even he could not tell the difference.

Old Milwaukee was Schlitz’s cheap beer, like Busch to Budweiser. The beer distributers used to come by the bar to promote their beers and we though the Stroh’s guys were cool, but the Schlitz guy was an asshole. That’s where I got my dislike for Old Milwaukee, and from there to Milwaukee’s Best, though like I said, I’m sure that I couldn’t tell in a taste test.

But have you ever tried a craft beer, a pale ale? I have my favorite brands of craft beer, but that is not as important to me as what kind of beer it is. If you haven’t I suggest that you try it. It might cost you ten bucks a week more, but your beer drinking experience would more than make up for that.

You know the bible has been written and translated from various languages and councils of mere mortals have decided what goes in it and what to leave out, but the hardcore literal bible guys maintain that even if it was mortal men doing the writing and editing, the hand of god was right there at every step making sure they wrote it right, so it’s really the same as if god sat down on a rock and wrote it.

The constitution we pretty much know who wrote it and when. There are some who think the hand of god guided every word but most of us don’t. However there are many who think it is some mystic thing, the product of these far seeing wise men, but if you read their biographies there was nothing super about any of them. And may I remind you it was written by a committee, during a hot summer, way before air conditioning.

I’m not saying we should scrap it, and I would agree that it has served us well, but I don’t get all tingly about it. And it’s really all about how you interpret it. Twenty years ago nobody would have thought that the constitution called for gay marriage and anymore it is fast becoming the law of the land.

Going down to Missouri on Sunday and won’t be back until late Tuesday, so I’m going to miss a few of our exchanges.

Cheap is Good

We had a guy at the paper mill, he had a real name, but everybody called him "Sauce" because he drank a lot of beer. He never came into work drunk, at least not so that you could tell. Looking back on it now, maybe he just stayed drunk all the time so that it became his natural state. He took an early retirement option that they offered because he didn't like some of the changes they had made in the work system. I didn't see him for a couple years, and then one day I saw him riding a bicycle way out in the country. I stopped and offered him a ride, he put his bicycle in the back of my truck, and we talked as I drove him to his destination, which was a bar that was miles from town. He told me that, the last time he was arrested for drunk driving, the judge said that he had to either give up drinking or give up driving. So he sold his car and bought a bicycle, which he used to make the rounds of all the bars for miles around Cheboygan. He said it was a good life and that he was happier than he had ever been. Sauce told me that, while all beers are not alike, one is just as good as another, so you might as well buy the cheapest brand you can find. If you are drinking a certain brand of beer and somebody gives you a different brand, the first one will taste a little funny, but the second one will taste just fine.

I think Sauce was right about that. I took a blind taste test once because somebody challenged me to tell the difference between Stroh's and Pabst. The bartender lined three glasses of beer up on the bar and I tasted each one while blindfolded. One I was sure was Stroh's, one I was sure was Pabst, and the third one I declared to be none of the above, maybe Budweiser. Everybody laughed when the bartender revealed that all three of them were Pabst, and drawn from the same tap. They were surprised, though, when I declared that, since I don't normally drink blindfolded, I intended to stick with Stroh's. Years later, when I couldn't find any Stroh's in our local supermarket, I remembered what Sauce had told me about beer. He used to drink something called "Old Milwaukee", but I couldn't find that either. They did have Milwaukee's Best, which was the cheapest beer in the store, so I tried that. Sometime after that, I found myself in a restaurant that carried Stroh's, so I ordered one for old times sake. You know what? I decided then and there that I liked Milwaukee's Best better. than Stroh's after all.

The thing to remember about the Constitution of the United States of America is that, without the constitution there would be no United States of America. First you had the states, sovereign and independent, and then they ratified the constitution which bound them into the union. I read somewhere that some of the Founding Fathers did not expect the constitution they had written to last long. They believed that, in a decade or two, a future generation might decide to scrap the whole thing and start all over. To do this, they would need to call another constitutional convention, but they never did. Maybe it's because the constitution contains an amendment process, or maybe it's because the Supreme Court developed as a vehicle to re-interpret parts of the constitution from time to time. For whatever reason, our constitution seems to have stood the test of time. Like the Bible, some people swear by it and some people swear at it, but it's been around for a long time, and it's not likely to go away anytime soon. Deal with it!

beer and that piece of paper

All those ‘yellow’ beers, we beer snobs call them lawnmower beers (the kind of beer you down a can or two of on a hot summer day of mowing the lawn), taste alike to me. I generally buy whatever is cheaper at the grocery store, though I’ll pay twenty cents more, but not more than that, for a six pack of tall boys for Old Style, just because of that supposed Chicago connection. And even though Milwaukee’s Best is sometimes the cheapest beer of them all I never touch it. If you blindfolded me, I am sure I couldn’t tell the difference, but it just sounds so cheap.

But those beers did have their images. Stroh’s was a hippie beer in Champaign while PBR was a redneck beer. I think Stroh’s still exists somewhere. When it first came out it claimed to be Fire Brewed, whatever that meant, but they don’t claim that anymore though I don’t know if they have changed their brewing process. Actually there are only two or three lawnmower breweries (most of them owned by furriners) anymore and they own all the brand names and I think when they run out of Stroh’s cans they just start bringing the PBR cans under the hose. 

PBR is now a big hipster beer. Whoever brews it knows that if they advertised it with hot young bodies at the beach, the hipsters would leave it in droves, because then it would no longer be their underground ironic beer, so they don’t.

Are there any hipsters in Cheboygan? Actually with your close trimmed beard and your PBR drinking, I suppose you could be taken for an aging hipster, rather than a crazy old coot. I don’t know if that is a step up though.

Back in the day I kind of liked the diversity of lawnmower beers. There were the standards, and then there were beers like Hamms and Blatz, all those cool old beers. Anymore there are only two or three brands on the beer shelf, and the rest is taken up by the Lite beers which kids these days think is beer, and even worse, all those soda pop concoctions like hard lemonade. Kids these days, no damn good.

But the other part of shelf is taken up by the craft beers. I love them. Back in the day I liked the lawnmower beers okay, but it seemed like they could have more taste. When I could afford it I would get those foreign beers and they were better, though like you said, they were just watered down versions of what the furriners drank.

But anymore I am a craft beer guy. They are more expensive, but they have so much more taste that it is worth it. In a bar or a restaurant I will always drink craft beer, but at home I drink some lawnmower beer. Once the craft guys go to easy hauling cans rather than bottles I may never touch a lawnmower again.

The founding fathers drank whiskey, not beer. Back since biblical times people had been drinking wine and beer because, as you said, the water was no good, but they were very weak, with only enough alcohol to kill the germs. Whiskey was the man’s drink, because it was so much easier to transport, and so easy to make out of that all that corn you had grown and after feeding the animals it was just sitting around. The Germans were the ones who drank beer, and who ever liked the Germans?

As a man who has spent years bartending and who imbibes a bit himself, I have to say that the theory that you build up a tolerance after drinking a lot of beer and seldom get drunk is the purest malarkey I have ever heard.

After all this beer talk, how boring to return to politics, especially the especially boring constitution. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have it, it does give us some ground rules to fight over so that we don’t start shoving the gunpowder into our muskets, but it is mainly about how we interpret it, and like the bible, I think you can make it say whatever you wanted it too. I don’t think it is a sacred document written by god while all the founders were passed out.

If they found a long lost diary where the founders wrote that all they meant in the second amendment was that there could be militias, and they certainly didn’t mean for everybody in the country to be packing heat, especially if the heat two hundred years hence consisted of weapons way more powerful than anything they ever dreamed of, and they hoped that nobody ever interpreted it that way, and as a matter of fact they were going to rewrite it but first they had to make a whiskey run, but then you know how those whiskey runs go, you pull out the cork just to make sure that this is a good purchase and the next thing you know it is morning.

If they found that document I am sure you would say, “What a bunch of hooey.”

Beer is Good For Your Constitution

When I first moved here there were two kinds of beer drinkers in Cheboygan, the Pabst drinkers and the Stroh's drinkers. I was one of the Stroh's drinkers because it was the closest thing I could find to what I used to drink in Germany. Of course it didn't have the alcohol content of German beer, but it was the closest in taste. The German beer sold in the U.S. may be made in Germany, but they make a watered down version for export, and I thought that Stroh's tasted more like real German beer than the German made beer that was sold in the U.S. The Stroh's company was eventually bought out by Miller, I don't know what became of Pabst. After that, it got harder and harder to find Stroh's around here, and I assumed that Miller had discontinued the brand, so I switched to Milwaukee's Best, which is also a Miller product. I guess Pabst and Stroh's are still around, but not around here. I have never seen a restaurant that carries Milwaukee's Best, so I usually order Miller Genuine Draft when I'm dining out. I don't care much for the craft beers because they are more expensive and usually the wrong color. Call me a bigot if you want to, but I believe that the only beer worth drinking is yellow beer.

I have read more than once that the Founding Fathers of our great nation drank a lot of beer in their day. Some sources claim that was because most of the water in those days wasn't fit to drink, but I think it was just because they liked it. I don't have the exact quote at my fingertips, but  Benjamin Franklin is known to have said that beer is proof that God loves man and wants him to be happy. If you drink a lot of beer on a regular basis, you build up a tolerance so that it hardly ever makes you drunk. I never did drink with the intention of getting drunk anyway, I drank beer because I liked it and, if I ever got drunk, it was by accident. After I recovered from my bleeding ulcer back in 2008, I resumed drinking beer, but I cut my consumption by two thirds. The beer may not have caused the ulcer, but according to the doctor, it certainly didn't do it any good. I would rather limit myself to two beers a day than give it up entirely, and I haven't had a sick day since.

I know you don't care much for the constitution but, like it or not, it is the supreme law of the land. Everybody who is elected to federal office and everybody who joins the military takes an oath to preserve and defend it, and there's probably a reason for that. Without the constitution the government people could do anything that they wanted to. You may think that would be all right when the Democrats are in power, but what about when the Republicans take over? So what if the Founding Fathers may have been a little drunk when they wrote it? All that proves is that they had the good sense to realize that people like themselves should not be trusted with unlimited power.

we don't need no stinking Article III, Section 2, Paragraph 2

You would think that North and South Dakota would want to unite and become Greater Dakota. That has a ring to it. I mean South Dakota, who hears that and thinks hot beaches and string bikinis? They hear North Dakota and all they can think of is even worse. They came out with a beer called Dakota in the late eighties, but it didn’t last very long, not only was it (ugh) a wheat beer, but who the hell thinks anything about Dakota is cool?

Speaking of beer, and I love speaking of beer, I wonder what kind you drink. Is there a beer of northern Michigan, the way Old Style was the beer of Chicago (even though it was brewed in Cheeseland)? Myself I have gotten into the craft beers, the pale ales and the IPAs, but not some of these new-fangled IPAs with 8 percent alcohol, because I like to extend my beer drinking experience as long as possible.

I’ve never read the constitution. Actually as someone who loves politics the way I do, my knowledge of the technical aspects is woefully sketchy. I have to admit that I don’t think it is that important, because what really counts is how people interpret it and what they do with it. Who knows where Article III, Section 2, Paragraph 2 comes from? Maybe it was late on a hot afternoon and they were all deeply into their whiskey, and some asshole, who was probably also drunk, insisted they stick it in, and wouldn’t shut up about it, and they wanted to get home to their suppers, and they all said, “Fine.” And the next morning when they saw it there they were all (even the asshole) embarrassed and thought about taking it out, but then one of the wiser heads said, let’s not bother, what kind of goofball with too much time on his hands is ever going to even notice it.

I can’t imagine that even someone like Ted Cruz would ever try to introduce a law that would be exempt from judicial review. The whole idea is ridiculous because laws are built on other laws, and if some of the laws are based on exempt laws than how do you ever change them? All I can think is that that asshole was really drunk and everybody else was real hungry.

Politicians of either party love to piss and moan about the supreme court, but none of them really want to fuck with it, because they are like those poor deluded fools who don’t want to raise taxes on the rich because they expect to be rich someday. The people always prefer optimistic politicians, and optimistic politicians assume that their party will soon have control of the gummint and they will be able to load the court with their own people.

Oh we Chicagoans don’t want to talk much about Gary, nobody does. At least the poor people in Chicago can go down to the Magnificent Mile and see rich people and dream that foolish deluded dream that someday they might be rich someday too, but Gary is desolate all over. But you are right that the big cities have more in common with each other, and probably the burbs have more in common with each other, and the small towns with each other, than any of them have with other parts of their states. The big cities in the reddest states have democratic, or at least liberal, mayors, and the rural areas in the bluest of states have the most conservative representatives.

I think this is because the gummint is highly visible in the big cities, and hardly visible at all in rural areas which makes them think we don’t want no dadburn gummint.

According to the Book

I have a book, "How the States Got Their Shapes" by Mark Stein. It says that congress was always trying to make new states approximately equal in size, but things came up that tended to frustrate this plan. Texas and California were both independent republics before they joined the union and they basically said that the union had to accept them as they were or not at all. Texas actually was larger than it is now, but they sold some land to the feds to pay off the debt they had incurred in their war of independence from Mexico. They also gave up that little strip, which became the panhandle of Oklahoma, so that they could be south of a line previously drawn by the Missouri Compromise and come in as a slave holding state. Congress had created the Dakota Territory mostly from land left over from the Minnesota Territory when Minnesota became a state. This territory was too big to make into a state that they wanted to be approximately equal to Kansas and Nebraska, so they divided it into two states.

The passage I quoted to you about congress and the supreme court didn't just come from "somewhere in the constitution", it came from Article III, Section 2, Paragraph 2. I gave you the numbers so that you could look it up if you didn't believe me. Don't feel bad, not many people know about that clause because it has seldom been used. What it means is that congress can exempt certain laws they pass from judicial review. All they've got to do is put wording in the bill that says "This law shall not be subject to judicial review". I believe they did that to a couple of laws passed during the Civil War, but I'm not sure about that. It also says that congress can make "regulations" under which the court may operate. This probably meant when the court was first being set up, but I think a smart lawyer could make a case for congress passing such regulations even unto this day. Congress, however, has not seen fit to exercise their authority over the court for a long time. I don't know why, maybe few congressmen have read the constitution or even care what it says.

The reason I brought the Chinese into this was that you said something about all the laws that have been passed which have benefitted me. I was trying to think of some, and then I realized that there weren't many laws that have been materially harmful to me either. Of course I care what the government does, but I only have one vote, and I have to get on with my life as best I can regardless of what the government does or doesn't do.

I agree that most states are not any more united within themselves than they are with the rest of the states. I think that's mostly a result of how the demographics have evolved over the years. For instance, Chicago has more in common with Gary, Indiana than  it has with Peoria, Illinois because Chicago and Gary sit side by side across the border from each other. If you've ever driven that stretch of I-94 that links them together you know there is a lot of traffic on that road. I've never driven to
Peoria, but I would be surprised if somebody told me that there was that much traffic on whatever road links it with Chicago.

Of course I care what's good for the country, and I would probably support it if the country ever made up it's mind about what that is. Like the states, only more so, the country contains a great diversity of people who have never come close to a consensus about anything important in my lifetime. Be advised that a consensus is more than a simple majority. A consensus is when almost everybody agrees, and the few who don't are willing to go along with it because they are tired of arguing about it. Most Native American tribes operated by consensus, but there was plenty of vacant land in those days, and anybody who disagreed with the tribe's consensus could move a few miles down the river and start a tribe of their own. You can't do that today, you have to travel hundreds of miles,  live in the swamp, work for low wages, and put up with long winters. Even then you will have neighbors, but they won't bother you much because they are at least as goofy as you are.

states shmates

Oh I agree that we are not going to change the senate in any foreseeable time. But there are interesting stories on how that came to be. For instance why is there a North and South Dakota for instance, what in God’s name is the difference between the two? And I’m sure you know that Texas joined with the agreement that they could become five states if they wanted to. What a liberal nightmare eight more conservative senators, and not just conservative senators, but Texas conservative senators.

But they never will because they are all proud of being Texans. When I lived in Austin they would have music festivals on the river and they would be pretty raucous, but when the band, as they always did, played some jingoist song about Texas, they would stand every man jack of them with their hats over their hearts and not a dry eye among them. Illinoisans would all be snickering, and what kind of songs do we have? Illinois, Illinois, by the river gently flowing, who the hell ever sings that?

And in fact Chicagoans look with contempt at the burbs, who look with disgust at Chicagoans, and both of them are only scarcely aware of downstaters, who don’t know the difference between the two and don’t care because they hate them both, and poor little southern Illinois thinks it is just an extension of Kentucky.

You’ve explained to me how Michigan has, I think, Yoopers and Loopers and stump jumpers, and something else, and Southern Michigan, which I think is just another way of saying Detroit. Missouri has St Louis at one end and Kansas City at the other and in between a big red bible belt.

I guess I am just saying that the idea that each state is a little, or big, conglomeration of like-minded people is a bunch of hooey.

There has been talk about reforming the electoral college, and it’s not so much that it’s unfair, because it is not near as unfair as the senate, as that it results in every election being decided in a handful of purple states while red and blue states stand around with their hands in their pockets while their issues are ignored.

I don’t know what that phrase you quoted from somewhere, in the constitution I suppose, is supposed to mean, but I am pretty sure that congress cannot pass a law that effects the supremes. I suppose they could pass an amendment, and I think they could maybe fiddle with their numbers, but what if they passed a law changing its powers and then the court declared it unconstitutional? Of course they do effect it in a way not envisioned by the constitution, which foolishly did not foresee political parties (what were they thinking?), by choosing who gets to be a member of the court.

I remember some vet hanging around when I lived in Berkeley, who was getting the GI bill, pretending to be going to school, and he would be saying something like your hypothetical Chinaman, about how those fools in the government had nothing to do with him. And I would be thinking, he just spent a couple years halfway around the world, and now he was living off the largess of the land, and how could he think the government didn’t effect him? It’s just craziness.

But I do think it a little odd, the way you think in terms of how what the gov does effects you, and you are not concerned beyond that. Shouldn’t we think in terms when we go to the polls, of what is best for the whole country?

Well that is a core difference between liberals and conservatives. The liberals want to be altruistic and the conservatives think everybody should look out for themselves.

Well, like everything else, it is more complicated than that, but still it makes one wonder, why do a couple nice young boys, growing up in the homogenous community of Gage Park, end up having such differing political views? Nature? Nurture? Looking back through history it seems like every conflict has a left vs right component, but maybe that is just the way we look at it, like everything looking like a nail to the man who has a hammer.

These United States

I think it's important to remember that the original 13 states that formed the United States were each sovereign and independent to start with, the United States did not spawn them. First there were states, and then they became united. The only two other states that started that way are Texas and California. Although the rest of the states were carved out of U.S. territories, there would not have been a U.S. to have territories if the original 13 had not formed the United States. Nowadays we have come to think of each state as a subdivision of the United States, but that's not how it started, and that's not how it still is legally. I think that's why we still haven't gotten rid of the Electoral College, it makes the individual states feel important, lest we forget that they are individual states. It would take a constitutional amendment to change that, and you can't pass a constitutional amendment unless three fourths of the state legislatures ratify it. For the same reason, you are unlikely to see the senate become just another house of representatives any time soon.

Maybe the congress can't exactly over rule the supreme court, but they can regulate it and set limits on it's powers. For it is written: "In all the other cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make." - Constitution of the United States of America, Article III, Section 2, Paragraph 2.

The argument about whose fault is the current state of American politics is kind of like an argument about whose fault is the proliferation of illegal drugs. We usually think of the drug dealers as being responsible, which is why there are harsher penalties for dealers than for users. When you think about it, though, if the users didn't use, the dealers would soon be out of business. Well, some dealers lure little kids into the habit by giving them free or cheap drugs to start them off, but still, the kids could just say no. Hey, wouldn't that be a great anti drug slogan? "Just say no!" I wonder why nobody has ever thought of that before. (I make small joke.)

The only reason I brought up the gun issue was I was trying to think of some recently passed laws that have actually benefitted me. The more I think about it, though, there haven't been a lot of recently passed laws that have actually harmed me either. There are certainly some laws that have pissed me off, like Obamacare, but truth be known, most of them don't materially affect me one way or the other. It's like that old Chinese saying: "When the sun rises, I work. When the sun sets, I sleep. I plow the earth to eat. I dig the well to drink. What has the emperor to do with me?" Nevertheless, we both have opinions about stuff like that. If we didn't, what would we have to talk about?

Speaking of politics, I forgot to tell you how I single handedly elected a member of the Cheboygan County road Commission. This wasn't in the recent election, it was back in the August primary, but if this guy hadn't gotten the Republican nomination, he likely wouldn't have been elected to office because all our local stuff usually goes Republican. Anyway, this guy initially lost by five votes, but he asked for a recount and won by one vote......my vote! So don't let anybody tell you that one vote doesn't matter.

political blah blah blah

Surprisingly I remember that compromise maybe all the way from high school. Remember that Paul Simon song, “When I look back on all the crap I learned in high school, it’s a wonder I can think at all.” I think most of what we learned in high school was a bunch of crap, but I do remember Mr Parkhill and that US History course that wasn’t all rah rah America which opened my eyes a bit and maybe I learned it there. Another compromise we made back then was counting slaves as 3/5 of a person. That never quite worked out, and about a hundred years we had to have that war to settle it.

That thing with each state having two senators was way back when we only had thirteen states and they were much more equal in population than they are now. Just on the face of it it isn’t fair that each person in California gets 1/20,000,000th of a senator while each person in in Wyoming gets 1/300,000th. I don’t hear any national politician talking about it, probably because it would be political suicide, but I just want to point out that it is unfair.

And to a lesser extent so is the electoral college. People do talk about changing that from time to time, but there doesn’t seem to be much of a movement in that direction. There should be.

When rich guys buy advertising they are using it to buy the election. Well not always, mostly they are such dingbats that they lose, but probably they can influence that ten percent who can’t find France on a map, and in a close election that can be enough.

It has always interested me in who is at fault for the dismal level of politicos, the people or the politicians. I think it is the people who allow themselves to be manipulated. They should study the issues, isn’t that what smart guys like you and me are always telling them what to do? But then there are very few elections where you and me would agree on who is the best candidate.

Congress can’t overrule the supreme court. They can craft a bill that they hope the supremes won’t throw out, but likely they are the guys who benefit from the big spending, so fat chance they will try to do anything to stop it, and what is the chance of congress ever passing anything these days anyway?

So they made it easier to get a concealed carry permit in Michigan, which must mean that more people can carry concealed weapons, so now we not only have good citizens carrying weapons we also have pretty good citizens carrying weapons, and you somehow feel that this is a buffer, that they will have to undo this particular law, and all the other little incremental laws before they jackboot into your house and pry Old Betsy out of your hands? You know when they passed prohibition, they didn’t first outlaw scotch and then bourbon, and then wine and then beer. If they are going to outlaw guns they will likely do it in one fell swoop. Not that they will, although I expect I would have a hard time convincing you of that.

As far as I know there are no anti gun bills in congress. In the recent flurry of primaries gun control was not an issue. The only gun action going around is piddling on the borders of concealed carry. There is probably a gun control lobby somewhere, but they pale to insignificance next to the NRA, so why are you worried about losing Old Betsy?  

Something Has Already Been Done

Something has already been done about all that stuff. I think what you want to do is undo what has already been done and do something else instead.

The idea of each state having two senators was put into the constitution because the less populous states wanted the whole congress to be like that, and the more populous states wanted the whole congress to be like the House of Representatives is now. Each side threatened to take their marbles and go home if they didn't get their way. If either side had done that, there would have been no United States of America, and we might all be speaking English today. (English English, not American English) The bicameral system that they ended up with was a compromise. I thought you liked compromises.

Rich guys don't buy political office, they buy advertising. If people would just ignore the ads and make up their own minds about how to vote, the ads would be ineffective. Therefore, this one is the people's fault. As Ann Landers used to say, "Nobody can take advantage of you without your permission."

I don't know why they even have lobbying groups. They're not in the constitution you know. I agree that something should be done about this one.

I seem to remember that they had limits on campaign spending for awhile, but the Supreme Court threw them out. Congress can over rule the Supreme Court but, for some reason, they seldom do.

I remember when some Republican congressmen were talking about suing Obama, but nothing ever came of it. It was about his deciding not to enforce certain sections of the Obamacare law. We discussed this at the institute, but we never did reach agreement. My position was that the constitution tells the president to enforce the laws, it doesn't say he gets to decide which ones to enforce and which ones not to enforce. I believe your position was that, since the constitution doesn't specifically say that he has to enforce all the laws, the president can do anything he wants. This one could have made an interesting court case, but it was not to be.

I can think of a few laws that were passed in my lifetime which I liked, but they were all on the state level. There was the time Michigan voters turned down an attempt to legalize abortion, but the U.S. Supreme Court said we had to do it anyway. More recently, we passed a state constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. I heard on the news tonight that one was upheld by the U.S Court of Appeals, but it still has to go the Supremes, who will likely overturn it. Probably the best thing, from my point of view, was when Michigan and some other states made it easier to get a concealed weapon permit. I don't want one myself, but it's kind of a buffer zone thing, one more hurdle that the antis will have to jump over to get at my long guns. Speaking of buffer zones, I see that four more states and numerous local jurisdictions have legalized pot, which makes my cigarettes a little safer. Okay, one good federal law, the one limiting spam on the internet and the telephone. Too bad, though, that it exempted political spam, which is the worst kind.

I don't want Dick Cheney or anybody else shooting my deer for me. I do know one guy, however, who once brought in a hit man to kill problem deer in his apple orchard. The DNR gave him a special "damage control permit", but the guy didn't hunt, so he recruited one of his friends to do it for him, which is legal. I told the guy that deer taste better than apples and that, if I had a nice orchard like his, I would let the deer harvest the apples for me. The guy eventually gave up on the orchard, which never became profitable, but I don't think he ever took up hunting.