What happened in '92? That was the year that your man Bill Clinton won against Bush I. If you are referring to the Hanging Chad Fiasco, that happened in 2000. It did look kind of fishy when the Supreme Court gave it to Bush II, but the recount was dragging along, Inauguration Day was fast approaching, and somebody had to be president. I seem to remember that the recount ultimately gave it to Bush II anyway. Funny thing about those recounts, every time they have one, it never comes out exactly the same as the first tally. Kind of makes you wonder if any vote count is really accurate. What were they doing with those goofy punch cards anyway? Even little old Cheboygan County had optical scanners by then. We never even had those punch cards, we went directly from the mechanical machines to the optical scanners. Just goes to show that it's not a good idea to buy every new "improvement" when it first comes out, better to wait a few years and see if it's going to last.
I don't think our local paper is losing much circulation to the internet because they also put out an internet edition that you can get for free if you subscribe to the paper paper. What they did is start inserting a magazine called "The Mackinaw Journal" once a month and moving our subscription expiration date forward one day for each Mackinaw Journal they gave us. My hypothetical wife, who notices all kinds of things that the average person would miss, called their attention to it. At first they denied it, but they eventually told us about the Mackinaw Journal. It's a fine little magazine, but we never ordered it and assumed we had been getting it for free. If they wanted to sell us the Mackinaw Journal, they should have asked us if we wanted it and billed us separately if we did. When we told them we didn't want the Mackinaw Journal under those circumstances, they said it was not optional, we had to take it the way they gave it to us. Our local office said there was nothing they could do about it because the decision had been made at the corporate level. I didn't even know they had a corporate level but, apparently, some outfit in the U.P. has owned our little paper for some time, and now they were asserting their dominance over it. We had already resolved not to renew our subscription some months before they announced they were shutting down the printing press in Cheboygan because they already had one in Sault Ste. Marie that could handle our paper in its spare time. The press in Cheboygan had been operating since the 1960s when it replaced a much older machine. As far as I know, there was nothing wrong with it, they just didn't want to deal with it any longer.
Petoskey was a big tourist draw in the 1920s and still is. Actually, many of them aren't really tourists, they're resorters. The Blogger spell checker says there is no such word as "resorters", but there is so. There is even a weekly newspaper that comes out of Indian River called "The Straitsland Resorter". It's no substitute for the Cheboygan Daily Tribune, but I think they know how to spell their own name! Okay, I seem to remember the old fashioned word for it is "cottagers". Happy now Mr. Spell Checker? Anyway, these are people who own summer homes or cottages and visit them regularly, while a tourist is a transient visitor who may never come back again. Some of those "cottages" are pretty fancy, fancier than most of the homes of our permanent residents. They are occupied for the "season", and shuttered up the rest of the year. The "season" doesn't just mean summer, it is a social thing that lasts for a month or two, after which the whole entourage goes off to enjoy another season in Acapulco or someplace. Talk about your fat cats!
There once was a brewery in Cheboygan, but it closed down a long time ago. The old building still stands, but there has been an auto transmission repair shop in there for as long as anybody can remember. This new outfit didn't want the building, they just bought the name from whoever owned the rights to it and put up a brand new building downtown. There is a tavern in the same building as the brewery where you can sample their product and eat cheese and stuff like that. I might go there some day if they ever add a yellow beer to their product line but, till then, I'll keep drinking Milwaukee's Best in my garage like regular guys do.
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