Checking In

I listened to Uncle Ken's song, but I couldn't understand most of the words.  I don't know if it was because of her accent or the quality of the recording.  I have that problem a lot with rock and country music, so maybe it's just me.

How about that Mueller report?  It seems that everybody who reads it gets something different out of it.  I'm looking forward to hearing Uncle Ken's take on it because, if you can't believe a Beaglesonian, who can you believe?  I read something, or maybe I saw it on TV, the other day that said, according to a recent poll, people have pretty much lost faith in the news media, and that they trust Wikipedia as much as any other source.  They seemed to imply that was a bad thing, but I'm not sure why.

I see that Joe Biden is promising to return America to the way it was before Trump took office.  That makes him sound like a reactionary.  Trump used to be a reactionary, but now he's more of a progressive because he wants to keep things going in the direction that they are now, only faster.

Here's one for the "Every time you think you've seen it all, you discover that you ain't seen nothing yet" department:  Three days running, one of our local TV news programs has displayed the following headline:  "Alpena man caught on camera sexually abusing dog."  I am not making this up!  I don't know any of the details, which is probably for the best.  I've heard lots of people make jokes about that sort of thing over the years, but I never believed that anybody actually did it.  What's next?

Quarter Moon in a Ten Cent Town

I've always loved this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebcJ2WycQ4o  Actually it's titled Easy From Now On and and the phrase Quarter Moon In A Ten Cent Town only appears once in the song, but it's something that always stuck with me, the clean beauty of the quarter moon contrasted with the tawdriness of the ten cent town.  Not ten cent in the sense that it is a small town, but ten cent in the sense that it has a rigid hierarchy as to who is who and who stands where and nobody thinks outside that, or if they do, says anything about it, because people would look at them funny and  chatter about them in the drugstore over sodas.

I've heard this song hundreds of times.  I have an armada of maybe 300 CDs and I rotate through them, and everytime the CD (also titled Quarter Moon In A Ten Cent Town) that contains the song comes to the head of the line I smile.  I have a picture in my mind, as I do for most all my favorite songs, maybe not quite what the song says but what I think it says.

The girl has this apartment over the store in the one or two blocks of downtown that the town has. She is doing okay as far as the town goes, she has a boyfriend who is kind of a lout, but this is the best that she is going to get in this town.  But then she wakes one morning at 3AM and sitting up in her bed she glances out the window and there is the quarter moon (in the ten cent town), and she realizes she can do better than this, all she needs to do is get out of town and she can be riding high in a fandagled sky.

This is a little story I wrote about it, and since I have nothing to respond to this morning, here it is.

His name ain't even Billy Bob like he likes to call himself.  It's William Kilpatrick, of the Beacon County Kilpatricks, the guys that own the feedstore and the dimestore.  And I never even fucked him.  That's what all the high school girls who wait behind the counter have to do, or should I say get to do, because they all want to because then they get to ride down main street in his Camero.  Getting his wild oats out, that's what Mr and Mrs Kilpatrick say leaning forward on the couch all pukey smiles, and when he's done with that stuff why he'll come straight back to you Honey and then you two can raise some children.

Why did I ever think that was a good idea?  Did I ever think that was a good idea?  I don't think so, it was just this and then that and the next thing you know I was on the arm of the golden boy, the most eligible bachelor in all of Beacon County, so gee maybe I better make the best of it.

And that's what I had been thinking, though actually not thinking, just this and that like I said before, but sure enough headed sometime in the future when Billy Bob would get tired of those charming shenanigans and become William Kilpatrick and move me into that nice house on Illinois Street and fuck me so I could have his kids.

And maybe that would have all happened if I didn't happen to wake up that night in the apartment above the dimestore and notice that sharp little glow out the window, and getting up out of bed there it was, a quarter moon. That’s what the moon is when it’s just about to wink out or just beginning to come back, but I remembered counting the coins out of the register last night and a quarter is like a coin too. 

And Deanna she was moping around because Billy Bob had found someone else to ride beside him and I was telling her it was probably the best thing that ever happened to her, but she was all fidgety and bumped the cash drawer right out of my hands and all the coins scattered over the black linoleum and the dimes, because they were the smallest and the shiniest, they shined like so many stars, and Deanna picked one up and squinted, “Shit,” she said, “this ain’t even a ten cent town.”

So there I was staring out the window at that quarter moon in a ten cent town and it all came together and I remembered seeing early in the morning sometimes that Greyhound come stop right down the street, and luckily I didn’t have much to pack and hell, I even had time to make myself a cup of coffee.

I got the book

My my my, look at that blueberry pie.  The crust looks flaky and the blueberries ripe and sweet and ready to eat.  I guess that Old Dog can't take credit for the blueberries that probably came out of the can (though I could be wrong, he could have started with fresh blueberries and did whatever) but the real art of pie making is in the baking.  Tea, I don't know, just coffee's weak sister to me, but then this is America and a man can choose his own hot liquid in a cop.  Altoids, I am a user myself.  I buy the big tins and use them to fill the little tins which fit nicely into my pocket.  I prefer the cinnamon and then the peppermint, but the wintergreen and spearmint still find a way into my heart.


I hate the phrase woman of color (strangely you don't often hear man of color).  Colored woman was a euphemism and woman of color is even more roundabout.  And even more oddly colored woman means a black woman whereas with woman of color she could be black or Mexican or maybe Asian or Arab or Inuit, who I think prefer to be called Eskimos, but I don't run into them very often.  And Latino and Latina are okay, but you'd best not call her an actress instead of an actor, and I am not sure what the lady standing on first base with a glove on one hand and peering at the plate wants to be called.

And what of those of us of the dawgs and Uncle Ken persuasion?  Caucasian is too long and hard to spell, and Whites is so pale.  I suppose we could be Euro-Americans that sounds kind of, I dunno, continental.  And we straight people used to be called straight as in straight as an arrow (in my hippie days we called people who weren't hippies, straight people, but also if you happened to be unstoned for any length of time you considered yourself straight.) are now called cis without even a capital letter.  They get the all caps LGBTQ and we get cis all small letters.  Maybe there should be an investigation.   


When he was younger Trump was very much a New Yorker and took on the political views of those around him, and perhaps even voted in democratic primaries, though I rather doubt that he voted in any election, just too demeaning for anybody of his eminence.  And in regard to the traditions and beliefs of the Republican party, he is not much of a Republican.  What happened was not so much that he became a Republican, but the Republicans (following the well-confirmed theory that they have shit for brains) have all become Trumpists.

Finally got a hold of the Mueller Report.  Just reading the introductions now. 

Coincidence? I Think Not!

I looked up Senator Joseph McCarty yesterday to see if I had known what I was talking about the day before.  Turns out that I didn't but, of course, that's never stopped me before.  It seems that McCarthy didn't get that way from the shock of discovering Commies in government service, he was always that way and just used the Commies, and the gays as well, to make a name for himself.  Another thing I found out was that McCarthy was a Democrat before he became a Republican.  I recently read somewhere that Trump was also a Democrat at one time, so I checked it out just to be sure.  According to Wiki, Trump was a Democrat until 1987 when he switched to the Republicans.  He was affiliated with the Reform Party from 1999 till 2001, and was back with the Republicans by 2009.  It also says that he was an Independent from 2011 till 2012 but, other than that, he has been a Republican ever since.

Back when Trump was campaigning for the nomination, I advanced the theory that he was sent by someone just to give the Republicans a bad name.  Uncle Ken challenged me to name exactly who had sent him, and all I could come up with was "they".  It just occurred to me that, since McCarthy had an abrasive personality and a general disregard for the truth, not unlike Trump and, since they both were Democrats before they were Republicans, it's possible that it was the Democrats who sent both of them to give the Republicans a bad name.  Of course it's only a theory, but somebody ought to investigate that.  Who knows what they might turn up?

Congrats to Old Dog on the return of his appetite.  What's the fun of cooking if you can't eat what you cook?

Another hunger

Speaking of Old Dog, the last I heard he was being troubled by loss of appetite.

Whatever was causing the loss of appetite appears to have vanished.  I think my taste buds and sense of smell are finally working properly and I'm getting much joy and pleasure of chowing down.  The minor changes I've been making in my apartment have greatly improved the kitchen situation and I've been cooking up a storm.  It started with the biscuits and gravy, then I baked a nice blueberry pie, and last night I put some pinto beans to soaking so I could make some refried beans.  It's at the point where if I have a hankering for something I'll find a recipe online and make it my own damn self.  This morning, for instance; I had a taste for breakfast burritos like you can get at McDonald's.  No tortillas?  No problem, they're real easy to make and a lot better tasting than most commercial alternatives, and cheaper, too.

-----

Well, Uncle Ken, I can state with 100% certitude that the clap hurts like a bitch and is not a recommended experience.  What the "comfort ladies" of Okinawa and the liberated Southern Belles could not accomplish was achieved by an unlikely candidate, a long-term steady girlfriend of the college co-ed persuasion.  It puts a strain on a relationship to inform your girlfriend that she has the clap and that's all I'm going to say about the matter.

-----

Always glad to learn a new word like lexigraphy; thanks, Uncle Ken.  And that got me thinking not only of a word's meaning but also it's use and context.  There was a recent conference with a lot of political movers and shakers that was, apparently, addressing the needs of minority women in the political arena. I heard an interview where this one participant kept mentioning "women of color" and it occurred to me that "colored women" means the same thing.  Or doesn't it?  A person could get a poke in the nose for using words in the wrong order.

 

Hindsight is 20-20

While I had heard of the Birchers previously, my theory of Us and Them was formulated independently while I was in the army, and I joined the Birchers a few years afterwards.  I remember hearing people talk about Joe McCarthy when I was quite young, but I didn't learn any of the details until much later.  The Birchers I knew were still McCarthy fans long after most people had turned against him, but I never formed an opinion of him one way or another.  The way I understand it, he started investigating Communist infiltration of our government and then just went nuts with it.  I can see how that could happen, because the Commies had been our allies in World War II, and then turned into our enemies a few years later.  My theory is that there actually were some Commies in the woodpile left over from the days when it was fashionable.  McCarthy likely over reacted to this discovery, which caused a backlash that drove him even farther over edge.  Some people do not respond graciously to constructive criticism you know.

Like I said, slavery was a divisive issue that easily could have derailed the effort to form a United States of America.  Our Founding Fathers were kind of in a hurry to put this thing together because they were worried that England might come back and try to re-take their former colonies, which it almost did in the War of 1812.  The US was losing that war, you know, until the English decided that they really didn't want those troublesome Americans back in their empire and let us off the hook.  If it wasn't for that, we might all be speaking English today.

"Suffrage" is an old fashioned word that used to mean granting somebody the right to vote.  I think it derives from "suffer", which used to mean "allow".  You may remember that, In the King James Bible, Jesus said "Suffer the little children to come to me and forbid them not, for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven."  Therefore, the Constitution did not allow women's suffrage until the 19th Amendment was passed.  Previous to passage of the 15th Amendment, each state had the power to decide who got to vote.  The 15th prohibited the states from denying their citizens the vote because of "race, color, or previous condition of servitude", and the 19th prohibited them from denying it because of sex.  Prior to that, some states were already allowing women to vote, I believe Colorado was the first.  The 19th Amendment just made it uniform throughout the republic.

lexigraphy

Pissing and moaning, an odd combination methinks, so I went to the google machine and it derives from well, the clap, which makes pissing painful and hence causes the pisser to moan.  Not a very savory origin of the phrase, but then the phrase itself is disparaging.  It's not like people speaking up for what they think is right, it's more like just going on and on about something that there's nothing to be done about to the point of being annoying.

But what of the clap?  I had thought of it as a name for all STD's but apparently it is specific to gonorrhea, and it refers to, well an act similar to that storied boyhood activity of Left ball, Right ball, Smash the prick in the middle, with the act of applause taking the place of the left and right balls.  It was supposed to alleviate the symptoms, but it didn't, and it is not recommended by current medical science. 

And why is the clap, the syph, the measles, but on the other hand simply gonorrhea, syphilis, and pneumonia?  But perhaps we have had our dose (get it?) of high-toned lexigraphical discussion for the morning. 

I didn't mean echoing in the sense of repeating what Trump has said from hearing it, but simply saying the same thing, which is a loose usage of the word echo, so I apologize for my lax grammar and the resultant tarring of Beagles with the Trump brush.  But wait a minute wasn't Beagles a Bircher, and weren't the Birchers big fans of investigation?  Wasn't Tail Gunner Joe one of their heroes? 

Of course Beagles is no longer a Bircher, but I think his experience with them birthed his theory of them.  More likely Beagles early developed a theory of them and that is what lead him to become a Bircher.

Speaking of the 13th Amendment ( I stretch that speaking of thing a bit, it has a ring I like), how about the 19th that gave women the vote?  See, looking back from our progressive times who could imagine that an amendment to the beloved document was needed to prohibit slavery and suffrage?  What kind of people would would allow such things in the first place? 

Pissing and Moaning

I will support Uncle Ken's rule about pissing and moaning, as long as he promises never to enforce it.  How about that?

My political opinions were formed long before I ever heard of Donald Trump, so I am certainly not echoing him.  I would say that he is echoing me except that he doesn't agree with all my opinions, and he doesn't express the ones he does agree with as well as I do.  For instance, instead of harping about what bad people those immigrants are, he should focus on the fact that there are way too many of them for our present system to handle effectively.
 https://a.msn.com/r/2/BBWhUEj?m=en-us&referrerID=InAppShare

The reason our constitution doesn't prohibit slavery is that the delegates could not agree on the issue and, if both sides had dug in their heals and insisted that it be resolved one way or another, it would have been a deal breaker, so they decided to leave it for a future generation to settle, which they eventually did.  The 3/5 rule was a compromise. The slave states wanted to count them all and the free states didn't want to count any of them.  At least that's the way I remember it from school.

It's true that I don't get around much anymore because I am unwilling to devote any time or energy to it.  The internet has replaced the break area at work and the bars after work as my primary theater of socio-political activity, which is fine with me because it's cheaper, easier, and less stressful.

I think the reason the Electoral College is still around is that the states don't want to give up the 20 minutes of fame that they get every four years.  So much power has devolved to the federal government over the years that people like to remind themselves that this is supposed to be The United States of America, not the 50 Provinces of Washington, DC.



   

American pie

It's probably a sickness but I require a steady diet of politics in my news feed.  When some other event like a royal wedding or the passing of an ex prez blots that out like the moon does to the sun several times a year I piss and moan about it, so there it is.  Perhaps I should be more tolerant then of Beagles's pissing and moaning about the investigations.  But when Beagles's words echo Trump it gives me pause.  But I propose a rule for The Institute.  Any of the esteemed colleagues has a right to piss and moan about anything at anytime, but he then has to accept the other colleagues pissing and moaning about his pissing and moaning, and likewise they have to accept his pissing and moaning about their pissing and moaning about his pissing and moaning.  But then isn't that what we already do anyway?

Perhaps this is splitting hairs but it seems to me that by talking of people who are free and people who are not free, the constitution, if not enshrining, is certainly accepting the fact that some people are slaves and there's nothing wrong with that.   It's kind of like writing in a lease that eating people is not allowed before noon on weekdays which would accept cannibals.

It seems to me that it would not be so hard to run into a card carrying republican up there in ruby red Cheboygan.  Perhaps he should get out more, see if the ketchup in his restaurant has been replaced with salsa, chat up the charming man or woman in the MAGA hat, get his thumb on the pulse of his neighbors.

I rub elbows a bit.  I have my improv troupe, my watercolor class on Saturday mornings and another on Thursday afternoons, my condo activities, Friday nights at the Ten Cat, but I live in the sapphire blue Trump hating capital of the USA and Trumpists are hard to find.  I wonder if they have secret signs to reveal themselves to each other, frequent shadowy bars, have underground balls like our gay brethren used to do before Will and Grace.

I said that the electoral college should be replaced by something that would be truer to the concept of one man one vote, not that such a thing will actually happen.  What would be the point of a democrat introducing a resolution that would go nowhere? 

Cherry AND blueberry.  The red and blue mixing together, Republicans and Democrats standing together beneath a crispy crust to deliver a tasty treat to Uncle Sam.  Perhaps Old Dog can bring us together again, quick as a cat can wink her eye.

If Memory Serves

I seem to remember that the Birchers liked Thomas Jefferson, but my memory ain't what it used to be, and maybe it never was.

I also seem to remember that, while everybody knew about the Watergate burglary before the election, they didn't know that Nixon himself ordered it.  Or did he?  Maybe it was ordered by one of his people and Nixon tried to cover up exactly who was responsible.  Regardless, the worst things Nixon did was kiss up to Red China and throw Taiwan and South Vietnam under the bus.  Anything else he did wrong pales by comparison.

I find it hard to believe that anybody doesn't think that Trump is a bald faced liar, but it's been a long time since I talked to a card carrying Republican.  Say what you want about Trump, but I think both his fans and his foes agree that he hasn't changed much since he was elected, which is more than you can say about a lot of politicians.  That was my point, anybody who voted for Trump knew what they were voting for so they shouldn't complain about him now.  Of course, anybody who didn't vote for Trump can complain about him all they want.

The reason I mentioned that joker in the Ukraine was because his election appears to be another effort to "stick it to the Man", as Uncle Ken so eloquently put it when we were discussing Trump's election prospects.  Another thing about that joker is that he's Jewish, and the Ukrainians are not known for their love of the Jewish people.  Maybe electing a Jew was their way of expressing contempt for their government, since they don't have any Blacks.

In order for a constitutional amendment to pass, it must be introduced in Congress and passed by both houses.  Then it has to be ratified by 3/4 of the state legislatures.  I am not aware of anybody, Democrat or Republican, who has recently introduced a proposal to abolish the Electoral College in Congress.

Slavery is certainly not enshrined in the US Constitution.  The only mention or it that I am aware of is in Article III, Section 2, where it says that all free persons, except Indians not taxed, and 3/5 of all "other persons" are to be counted in determining each state's representation in the House of Representatives.  In keeping with the 10th Amendment,  the slavery question devolved to the individual states, until it was prohibited nationally by the 13th Amendment after the Civil War.

I agree with Old Dog, if you don't like the news, you don't have to watch it or read it.  I pay more attention to the news now than I ever have, due largely to the influence of my esteemed colleagues, but I still tune out the things that bore me, like those eternal investigations.

Speaking of Old Dog, the last I heard he was being troubled by loss of appetite.  Could it be because he has been eating his own cooking lately?  Of course there is a learning curve with any new enterprise that we entertain, but that doesn't mean you have to eat all of your mistakes.    

Pie in the sky

I get tired of royal weddings and the weeklong funerals of past prez's, but I don't know what is to be done about it.
 
Change the channel or turn off the TV, radio, and computer.  I don't think that the decision makers at the news outlets have a clue about what they're doing and are not sure if stories are truly important or just ratings grabbers.  They may as well toss a coin; the news cycles are so swift that nothing seems to have any weight.  It wasn't that long ago that you didn't hear anything except coverage of the Notre Dame fire.  And today?  Nothing.  Sometimes I think that I am getting smothered by the news when, in actuality, very little of the news affects my day to day reality.  Shakespeare said something about a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing, and all I can think of is FoxNews, CNN, and all the other performers in the media circus.  Basta!

-----

Uncle Ken laments the lack of response to his thought experiment but that shouldn't prevent him from expounding further.  Nobody seems to care about my recent kitchen adventures but that won't stop me from yapping about it.  I'm starting to have a well stocked larder and I could be going off the deep end, running short of storage space.  Do I really need three kinds of sugar?  Probably not, but there you go.  I bought my first pie pan today and the challenge is a good crust; there's a lot that can go wrong and I still haven't decided between cherry or blueberry for the filling.  Maybe both?

investigations forever

I don't recall Beagles complaining about the Clinton/Benghazi investigations taking too long and costing too much money, but it would not be the sort of thing that would raise my ire and make an impression on me so I will have to bow to Beagle's memory.  I shall have to differ on the subject of meager results.  I think the Mueller report had plenty of results, and the end is not yet.  

I get tired of royal weddings and the weeklong funerals of past prez's, but I don't know what is to be done about it.  The media gives the people what they appear to be interested in, and once one segment of the media takes on something the rest follows.  I was, and remain riveted by the story, and so are a lot of other people and if Beagles finds it boring I guess he can start keeping up with the Khardasians.

I don't think anybody except the cabal in the white house and those rubber-gloved plumbers knew anything about Watergate until that security guard found the tape on the door.  At the time of the election Nixon was calling it a third rate burglary, and it wasn't for Woodward and Bernstein of the ahem, media, I don't know if we would ever have found out about it.  I don't think the public was disinterested in it until the press beat them over the head about it, I think the more they heard about it the closer to the edge of their seats they were, I certainly was.  

I guess it is to the Bircher's credit that they hated Nixon, but then didn't they hate everybody (including lovable old Ike)?  I may be mistaken but I think they liked Goldwater.  Did they like anybody else who I might have heard of?

It's a talking point among the Trumpists that dems should stop opposing Trump's agenda because he won the election and therefore this is what the people want. What Beagles said sounds a little like that, it was got my ire up.  And what follows from the idea that people knew what he was like when they elected him?   How does that change anything?  And you know 50 percent of reps think he never lied about anything so they clearly do not know what he is like.

The obvious rejoinder to the electoral college being enshrined in the constitution is so was slavery.  One man one vote sounds a lot more in tune with what people think is fair.  If the repubs who doff their hats in respect for the grand old ways came to believe that the electoral college worked against them they would be working to change it as fast as Charming Billy's girl on the hill could bake a cherry pie.  

Did So

I did so say something about the investigation of Hillary's emails.  I said that I didn't understand what the fuss was about since she had already admitted that she had used poor judgement, and that what she did was not illegal at the time she did it.  More recently, I compared the Mueller investigation to all those Clinton investigations over the years.  My problem with all of them is that they took way too long for the meager results they delivered.  Furthermore, I never said that Trump shouldn't have been investigated, I just said that I was tired of hearing about it.  Same thing with Watergate.  Everybody knew about Watergate before the election, but it didn't seem to bother them until after the news media beat them over the head with it for six months or more.  I never did like Nixon, and I never voted for him.  I think one of my Bircher people said it best at the time:  "Prosecuting Nixon for Watergate is like prosecuting John Dillinger for stealing chickens."

I never said that Trump should be allowed to do anything he wants just because he was elected president.  I just said that people knew what he was like and they voted for him anyway.  By the way, we did not elect Trump, they did.  In this case I don't mean "They" with a capital "T", I just mean that, since neither of us voted for him, it was those other people who did vote for him that elected him, not us.  Furthermore, the Electoral College may be outdated and unfair, but it is enshrined in our constitution.  Changing it would require a constitutional amendment, it cannot just be ignored like the thing about those Marina City cats.

I read about that militia guy who was arrested.  Interestingly, he was not arrested for detaining illegal immigrants, although several people in authority have said that they don't approve of that.  He was arrested for illegal possession of firearms and ammunition because he has some kind of felony conviction on his record.  People who are convicted of a federal felony are banned from possessing firearms for life you know, and I believe some states have similar laws on the books for state felonies. Be that as it may, if the current rate of illegal immigration continues, it's only a matter of time before somebody takes the law into their own hands.  Remember, you heard it first from Talks With Beagles.

the joker becomes the king

Yes the repubs were investigating everything Clinton.  My point was that Beagles never complained about them taking too long and costing too much money.  Maybe he never got around to it.

But seriously Russians and the prez collaborating to win the election?  Doesn't that sound like something that should be looked into?  And if Beagles was paying attention there was plenty of evidence that this might be going on.  And part of the reason it took so long and cost so much money is the prez obstructed it at every turn.  And actually Mueller never said peep.  It was mostly the prez, but also the dems who kept bringing it to the front page. 

I don't think everybody knew what Nixon was like because his popularity went south with Watergate so his supporters must have had a change in their opinion.  Of course no such thing is possible with Trump (though I note he has dropped a few points in the latest polls, but I don't want to get my hopes up.  I have been disappointed often in the past.), but the idea that most Americans wanted him to be prez therefore we should let him do whatever he wants is erroneous in that more Americans voted against him than for him, only an unfair outdated election system gave him victory. 


Oh and I had a thought about Beagles while I was facing the board Thursday.  That no colored lights rule went into effect before last Christmas and the board decided not to enforce it at that time.  Well I said why don't we just not enforce it?  I won't say that an audible gasp went up from the board, but it was close to that.  Why, why, that can't be done they stuttered, it would set a terrible precedent.  I didn't mention the rule they passed five years ago where all cats had to be registered and photographed and the owners had to pay a fee, which has never been enforced and the result has not been anarchy in the hallways, because I felt I was winning my point and I did not want to piss them off.


Re: the joker in the Ukraine there was an article in the New Yorker just after Christmas https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/07/how-mark-burnett-resurrected-donald-trump-as-an-icon-of-american-success about how the producer of Survivor took a down on the heels, distrusted by his fellow real estate types, nowhere man with amber waves of hair and made him the star of The Apprentice, and the rest is history.

We laugh at the clowns in Ukraine, the Phillipines, Italy, Brazil, but then we have to look at who we elected.  When I was in Texas I thought geez what a bunch of nutty cowboys and then I opened the newspaper and a bunch of Larouchies had swept the dem primary.


Oh and did you see where Dumb and Dumber got busted along the border?     https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/4/21/18509998/fbi-arrests-leader-private-militia-accused-of-detaining-migrants-on-us-border

Investigations Eternal

I remember that Benghazi thing, but I don't remember much of the details.  Weren't they trying to pin something on Hillary with that one?  Seems like they have been trying to pin something on Hillary since forever, and on her husband before that, with no success.  As for me, I lost interest in investigations back in the Watergate days.  It was, and still is, the same thing in the news every day, over and over and over.  All they really need to tell us, once, is that an investigation is under way, and then once again when it's over.  Everything in between is just redundant.  The thing is, everybody knew what Nixon was like before the election, and they knew what Trump was like before the election, but they elected both of them anyway.

Speaking of weird elections, did you guys hear about that joker who was recently elected president of the Ukraine by a landslide?  I'm not joking when I call him a joker, he's actually a comedian on TV.  The closest thing he's had to political experience was the time he played the part of an incompetent Ukrainian president in a movie.  I have heard that some actors get so immersed in a part that they become like that in real life.  Well, look at Trump.  He played the part of a mean prick who fires people on TV, and now he is one.

I have thought about Uncle Ken's thought experiment and, all kidding aside, I concluded that I like the current era and my current age just fine.  Neither of them are perfect, nothing ever is,  but they're both better than what has come before.  My only regret is that it took me so long to learn what I know that it's too late to do anything with a lot of it.  It's like that old German proverb:  "Ve get too soon olt und too late schmart."

the straight skinny for seven lousy bucks

First of all I want to mention that the Benghazi investigations went on longer and likely cost as much, and came up with no indictments, no nada, and yet I don't recall Beagles pissing and moaning about that.  Secondly I think it came up with a lot.  The fact that both sides have there own spin on it is to be expected.  Because two sides have different opinions does not mean that they are both equally right or wrong.  I would differ on Obama being faulted for not doing enough in 2014, but that is not something I will go into now.

My ilk did look forward to the release of the Mueller Report as our salvation from the amber toad, but two years ago we still believed in the inevitable progress of the Liberal Agenda, and that when the people, of whom the Trumpists are a part, saw what a liar and thief the man was they would turn on him, and seeing his poll numbers going down the weak-kneed reps in the senate, like the cowardly lion, would regain their courage.  In the two years since the investigation began we saw that no foul deed by their hero would sway the horde, and so yeah, the report has so far not changed that many minds.  On the other hand it may have changed enough.  I remember a prerelease poll that said that 70 percent said that their minds would not be changed no matter what came out.  But that 70 percent is hard-core pro and anti Trumpists and nobody expects them to change their minds.  It is that 30 percent of what Beagles likes to call the wishy washies that steer the ship of state these days.

Anyway their is still stuff to come out.  And I've heard the Mueller Report is well-written and it costs about seven bucks and I will be picking one up at Barnes and Nobles this very morning.


The condo board can be quite powerful.  When the evil queen and her court ruled our money was spent like water on crapola and nothing could be done about it until her term ran out.  The current board does not seem to be so autocratic. I guess they could fine somebody and if they didn't pay the fines they could eventually kick them out, but that would probably involve lawyers and publicity and other residents would get upset that maybe they could be kicked out too. so I don't see that happening.


I guess my thought experiment has fallen on barren ground with the dawgs.  Sometimes I throw this stuff in to divert from politics, but the dawgs are pretty pragmatic and don't like to speculate on things that can never happen.

Oh well, it's springtime in Chicago finally, and don't it feel good?  Will be flip flopping out to Barnes and Noble this morning and then maybe I'll read out on my newly opened balcony..


Rats, just back from Barnes and Noble and they won't have the report for a few more days.

Making a little dough

It's always good news when the little guy can prevail against the powers that be, such as Uncle Ken's crusade for the Christmas lights.  But how much real power does the condo board have?  Is it within their purview to have residents tossed out of the building, evicted with extreme prejudice, with their property being bought at fair market value?  The ways of condo boards are mysterious to me.

-----

It's too early for me to have any opinion on the Mueller Report except to say it seems pretty balanced; all sides are spinning it's content for their best advantage, it's like there are two versions, one that makes the Pro-Trumpists happy and one that makes the Anti-Trumpists happy.  There's something for everybody and from what I've read so far it looks like an early loser is Obama for failing to take any action against the Russian shenanigans in 2014.

-----

I don't know if Mr. Beagles is still baking bread but I have a new-found respect for his efforts.  I've been meaning to develop a good recipe for biscuits and gravy but I never had a good work surface in my small kitchen until recently.  The sausage gravy was not a problem to develop, just requiring a little trial and error with ingredients, but I never knew that biscuits could be so tricky, and such a mess,  Working with flour is not neat and tidy, that stuff  winds up everywhere if you're not careful.  And not all flour is created equal; the best stuff is White Lily brand, which is not usually available outside of the southern states.  I seldom follow recipes exactly, tweaking and adjusting the ingredients as I go along but my fourth version is almost a winner.  Knead I say more?

-----

And a Happy Zombie Jesus Day to one and all.

The Saga Continues

https://a.msn.com/r/2/BBW67nU?m=en-us&referrerID=InAppShare

After consuming two years and millions of our tax dollars, it looks to me like the Mueller Report is inconclusive at best.  Each side sees in it what they wanted to see in it from the beginning.  Now there will be an extensive period of further investigation, which will surprise me if it turns up anything of substance.  By the time people get tired of investigating Trump he will be long gone, either by losing the election, term limiting out, or dying of old age. Then there's the Wall.  Last I heard, it was going to take at least a year to complete.  By then all the people who want to enter the country illegally will already be here.  So what's the point?

On a lighter note, congrats to Uncle Ken on his success in persuading the board to rethink the lighting issue.  Of course, that's not over with either, but it's off to a good start.  With any kind of luck they might make a decision in time for this Christmas season.  If not, there's always next year.

Like I said, you can't go backward in time, only forward.  After some thought, I have concluded that the decade I want to live in is somewhere in the future.  After seeing one turn of the millennium,  I wouldn't mind seeing another one.  By then I will be 1,055 years old, which seems like a good age to be.

a victory for many colored Christmas lights

Remember that Christmas light thing?  I made jpgs from my petitions and along with an accompanying, rather florid, email sent them off to an address that supposedly resulted in all the board members getting a copy.  I thought I would have heard back from at least one of them, but I never did.  Because I am a student at Truman College I have a Truman email account but I never access it, and I wondered if something like that was going on with my letter to the board members.

But then a few days before last night's board meeting I learned that my letter and petitions were on the agenda.  I kind of loaded up for bear, preparing stinging phrases to sling at them and whatnot.  As I wrote in a letter to a friend recently I wanted to vanquish the board and stand over their bloody bodies and give a tarzan yell. But really that is no way to make your point in the modern world, or at a boring board meeting anyway.

And it turns out the board was not all that sure about it themselves.  The white only rule only won by a narrow vote and those who voted against it were eager to revisit the issue, and maybe my hundred signatures weren't all that many out of almost a thousand apartments, but it was more of a survey than the board had ever done, and in the end while they couldn't vote it out that very night, they did vote to revisit the issue and to take a survey, which from the results of my experience I am confident that it will go my way.  So even if I didn't get the fireworks I wanted, I think it went well enough.


Well of course you can't go back in time.  It is a thought experiment.  That's like those politicians that say they won't answer a question because it is hypothetical when actually most of what we talk about is hypothetical.  I was going to hold back on my preferences to see what the dawgs had to say, but since Beagles declines I will tell mine, and actually it's not that surprising.  I'd go back to the sixties, let's say 1968 to be specific.  I was 23 at the time, which looking back, I was too melodramatic, so let's put the age at 34, that was the age at which I decided to go to computer school so I was a little mature at that age.


And yesterday was the Mueller report.  It does seem damning enough in the way Trump and gang told blatant lies to the American people and how Trump tried to stifle the report.  But really isn't that something we all already know?  Apparently a sitting prez cannot be indicted and Trump's hold on the republicans is as strong as ever so I don't see any major change in all this.

They Never Was

Uncle Ken covered the subject quite well, I don't think that I could have said it better myself, but here's an old saying that sums it up:  "Things sure ain't like they used to be but, in a manner of speaking, they never was."  I think what makes the good old days so attractive is that we tend to remember the good parts and forget about the bad parts.  We even tend to romanticize the times before we were born because there are things about them that appeal to us, and we focus on that instead of the things about them that don't appeal to us.

I don't think I would want to go back in time unless I could take something back with me.  It might be fun living in the Stone Age with modern tools and weapons but, without them, life would be nasty, brutish, and short.  Then again, if I was the only one with modern tools and weapons, the locals might want to burn me at the stake for witchcraft.  Either that or they would worship me as a god, and who wants that kind of responsibility?  I have seen "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" at least once, but I don't remember how it ended.  It's all just a fantasy anyway.  You can't really go back in time, you can only go forward.

As long as we're visiting Fantasy Island, I wouldn't mind being young again if I knew what I know now, but I wouldn't want to go back and learn everything all over again the hard way.  There might be a way to do that if the people who believe in reincarnation are right.  The way I understand it, you aren't supposed to remember anything from your former lifetime, but occasionally somebody does.  Usually it's somebody who dies unexpectedly and wakes up in a young child's body.  Their memories of their former lifetime soon begin to fade, however, and they eventually lose them all.  In Eastern cultures that believe in this stuff, such a person would be respected, but here his recollections would be dismissed as childish fantasy.  Human memory is a funny thing anyway, you can remember something that didn't happen and forget something that did, so there's no way to verify or refute this theory.

the good old days

As an old Champaign beer-drinking buddy of mine was fond of saying, nothing is as good as it used to be, except us.  There is always a trend to look back to some former time and be nostalgic.  By the way this has been going on throughout history, even back when there was no history people were thinking back on some time when things were better.  Of course if we go back in history we have fewer gadgets and we don't live as long, but that doesn't seem to matter so much.  This is just my opinion but it seems to me that the recurring theme in all these good old days fantasies is that people were better then, they were nicer to each other, they were more honest, they were less materialistic, and more concerned with human values.  But surely history tells us otherwise, if you go back in history you do not find people getting nicer and nicer.

Make America Great Again is not a new phrase thought up by Trump, it has been used throughout our history in various forms.  Because, because Americans think, without thinking much about it, that there was a time when America was truly great, and that something happened, somehow we were betrayed by, well folks of the opposite party or their ilk, and now we have to go back and undo that change so that we can make everything right again.  This is something we feel in our bones, but if we go to the history book we can find no such time.

Age is the suspect.  When we are young we are loved and cared for, as we grow older we are cool and dashing, and later maybe we are doing even better financially and all, but you know, we are no longer cool, and cool becomes something unintelligible that those stupid damn kids are up to, and our hair goes white or we lose it altogether, and we need glasses to read the fine print and we can no longer boogie boogie boogie all night long like we used to do. 

So here's a thought experiment for the dawgs.  If you get to use any age or any time, what would you want to go back to?  For instance would you like to be in your 20's in the 90's, or in your 50's in the 60's?  Or pick any age and then pick a time before your time, the roaring 20s, the civil war, when knights were bold, that glorious time just after we discovered fire but before that damnable wheel entered the picture.


Oh I am a big fan of O Winston Link, have three or four of his books on my shelves right now.  But have you heard the story of how he got himself a trophy wife, and then a trophy locomotive also, and then a guy to care for the engine, but the guy cared more for the trophy wife and they ended up locking him in the basement.  Beautiful photos though. 

I have been to Union several times and they have yards and yards of trains and trains.  One of the best things I like about it is all the old guys swarming the engines fixing things up.  They all had, I imagine nowhere jobs, pushing a pencil or clacking keys in some dusty office, when all they really wanted to do in life was play with trains, and now that they are retired that is all they do and they couldn't be happier.  Their good old days are right now Jack. 

Beagles the Reactionary

I first started calling myself a reactionary back in the 50s when I read somewhere that was what the Communists called somebody who was opposed to Communism.  Like a lot of words, reactionary has more than one definition.  My understanding of the word in a political context goes something like this:  A liberal wants to change things, a conservative wants to keep things the way they are, and a reactionary wants to put things back the way they were before the liberals changed them.  Those guys who wanted to restore the monarchy after the French Revolution were certainly reactionaries, but they weren't the only reactionaries in history.  I began to question my reactionaryism when Uncle Ken asked me, if I could turn back the clock, what time would I turn it back to, and I didn't know.  I think that I'm still a reactionary on some issues, like gay marriage for instance, but not on every issue.  I wouldn't want to abolish civil rights for minorities, but I would oppose any attempt to give minorities more civil rights than the rest of us.  So I guess I am a reactionary or a conservative, depending on the issue.

Ayn Rand was a reactionary in that she opposed Communism, socialism, or any other kind of collectivism.  This was understandable because she spent part of her childhood in Soviet Russia and she didn't want to see the US go down the same drain.  Donald Trump is a reactionary in that he wants to "make America great again", which implies that it used to be great but is not so great now.  One may dispute the accuracy of that assertion, or anything else that Trump says for that matter, but nothing says you have to be truthful to be a reactionary.  Conversely, nothing says that you have to untruthful to be a reactionary, or a conservative or a liberal for that matter.

Speaking of accuracy, I don't think the Japanese took the Philippines in one day.  I also don't think  they were trying to take the Hawaiian Islands when they attacked Pearl Harbor.  It is my understanding that their mission was to disable the US Pacific Fleet, and they were only half successful in that attempt.  I read somewhere that another Japanese force was sent to disable the other half of the fleet out on the open sea, but they couldn't find it in the fog.

Speaking of the Philippines, is it possible that they modelled their money on ours instead of the other way around?  I don't know why they needed their own money anyway because they were still a US territory at the time.  I seem to remember that they staged some kind of rebellion around that time, so maybe it had something to do with that.

Still on track

It seems like the Institute can't get enough of trains; I still have a few memories to relate and maybe I'll get to them but the stories from you guys are more interesting to me.  When Uncle Ken mentioned his interest in photographing trains I remembered an exhibit I saw many years ago at Roosevelt University, photos by O. Winston Link.  They were terrific, all black and white photos as part of a project showing steam engines of one of the Pennsylvania rail lines.  Very dramatic and you could almost feel the trains rumbling through the gallery.  There was only one time that I recall that I saw a working steam locomotive up close and personal; must have been in the early 50s and the Old Dog was a mere pup.  The family was meeting some friend or relative, I forget which, but it wasn't at a downtown station.  It could have been at a station on the northwest side, maybe the Milwaukee Line.  Anyhow, I could see the train approaching and I was probably less than ten feet from the tracks but, having only seen steam engines on TV and at the movies, I was not prepared for the reality.  The noise, the smells, and the heat left me stupefied.  It was frightening and exhilarating, a wondrous tonic for a little kid.

Steam engines are long gone but there is a railway museum (in Union, Illinois?) that still fires them up once in a while.  It's another one of those places that I've always meant to go to but never got around to.  There was a not too shabby facsimile of the steam engine experience at the Smithsonian in the late 60s, a  beautifully restored locomotive with a looping soundtrack.  Close your eyes and you could hear the train approaching in all of it's clanging glory.  Except for the lack of the oily and steamy odors you would swear that it was the real, live thing.  It was that loud, and wonderful to behold.

-----

Some time back a topic of discussion was the territorial nature of the United States and, because the Institute is finely attuned to the cosmic zeitgeist, there is a recent book discussing the same.  This one was written by a history professor at Northwestern, Daniel Immerwahr, and it's titled How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States.  I haven't read it yet but according to the book reviews (mostly very positive) and a few audio interviews, it sound like a doozy.  There is a lot of information I didn't know, such as even though residents of US territories are considered US citizens they do not have the same protection of the US Constitution that we in the states enjoy.  If you go to Puerto Rico and are arrested you are not guaranteed a trial by jury.

And I've wondered why the US has so many military bases on tiny and obscure islands and the reason is The Guano Islands Act of 1856.  This is heady stuff, the fact that if an American citizen finds guano on an uninhabited and unclaimed island that island can be considered US territory.

The biggest surprise to me involves the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and what we were not taught in school.  I did not know that there were simultaneous attacks on Guam and Wake Island, both US territories, and the next day the Philippine Islands, a major US territory, was attacked and occupied by the Japanese.  But FDR's "day of infamy"  speech doesn't mention the Philippines, a tremendous loss of territory for the US.  There are complex nuances at play and racism is a major factor.

The last tidbit about the book concerns the design of the US dollar bill, which was based on the 1903 Filipino ten peso note; I did not know that.  What a world we live in.

 

the virtue of selfishness

My older sister was not much of a book reader but somehow she glommed onto Atlas Shrugged.  Peculiar because not only is it a long book but it has a lot of fifteen page pauses in the action while the characters discuss Ayn Rand's philosophy.  Somehow she passed her fervor unto me and I swallowed it hook line and sinker.  I remember writing my parents in my freshman year how nobody should be dependent on anybody else and therefore as soon as I got out of college and got that high-paying job that that education entitled me to I would be reimbursing them for all their costs of putting me through college.  Surprisingly that did not fill my parents with joy.  Unsurprisingly that never happened. 

The fervor of objectivism left me as suddenly as it possessed me.  I can't really remember how it worked anymore.  The idea was you had to stand up for yourself and look after your own interests and you really didn't owe anybody else anything.  But if you were an objectivist you couldn't rape and pillage the way those viewpoints would lead to.  You had to be fair, you had to be honest, you couldn't do any double-dealing or take anything by force.  You had to follow a pretty strict moral code or else you didn't have the right to call yourself an objectivist, you were just a pirate.  Although I seem to recall there was a pirate in Galt's Gulch, but I think he did his pirating kind of morally.


I don't see either Ayn or Donald as reactionaries.  I always think of reactionaries as people who want to bring back royalty,  I think the term comes from the days of Napoleon where the people who wanted to bring back the king were reactionaries and the people who didn't were called liberals, although many of those liberals were quite conservative by present day standards. 

You may say Napoleon, and Ayn Rand, and Donald Trump want to be king, but not really.  They want to be the one and only ruler, like a dictator, but they don't want to bring back all that royalty crapola.  I would compare Ayn Rand to Stalin and Donald Trump to Hitler.  I'm sure that Ayn would have liked to be in charge (ethically of course) so that she could promulgate the tenets of objectivism, having said that maybe she was more like a libertarian in that she thought objectivism would just naturally occur, kind of like I used to believe in the Liberal Agenda.  Donald Trump of course has no ideology.  Even he is not an ideology because what he says today is not the same as what he will say tomorrow.  He just wants to do whatever he wants to do whenever he wants to. 

The D&M Don't Come Here No More

The Detroit & Mackinaw Railroad never went to either Detroit or Mackinaw City.  It was a short run, from Bay City to Cheboygan, and one of the last family owned railroads in the country.  There was another line that came through Cheboygan, the New York Central, which was bought out by the Penn Central, and ceased operations around 1980.  The D&M bought the old Penn Central trackage between here and Mackinaw City, but they never did much with it, mostly used it to store empty boxcars for Proctor & Gamble, their last freight customer in Cheboygan, passenger service having been discontinued in the 1960s.  After the paper mill closed in 1990 there was no reason for the D&M to come here, and they tore out the track shortly afterwards.  I think they still came as far as Onaway for a few years, but then they shut down entirely, probably because the current generation of owners was ready to retire and their kids didn't want to bother with it anymore.  Some of the trackage around Boyne City was bought by somebody who, last I heard, was running excursion trips on summer weekends.  The rest of it went into the Rails to Trails program, snowmobiles use it in the winter and bicycles in the summer.

There was a train ferry, the Chief Wawatom, one of the last coal fired steam ships on the Great Lakes, which carried railcars across the straits between Mackinaw City and St. Ignace.  It was built like an icebreaker and could cross the straits under almost any conditions.  It had trouble meeting environmental standards for awhile, there was some talk about improving it, but they scrapped it out about the time the Penn Central ceased operations.  There is still one coal fired ferry, the Badger, that runs between Ludington, Michigan and Manitowoc, Wisconsin, but it only carries automobiles.  There was some talk about shutting it down for pollution a few years ago, but they fixed it up and, last I heard, it was about to start another season.

The more I think about it, one other thing that Rand and Trump have in common is that they are both reactionaries.  I use to consider myself a reactionary, but I'm not so sure anymore.  Maybe I'm getting soft in my old age.

 

trains

I never quite made it deep into the world of railfans.  See wouldn't the term train nuts be more fun and descriptive?  I certainly thought so, but when I mentioned that to actual train nuts they didn't think so. 

I grew up a couple blocks from a trainyard (as one of the dawgs said, who doesn't in Chicago?), but we neighborhood kids took them for granted, and I rode the train between Chicago and Champaign a lot, but I have no memory of what the twelfth street station looked like.  Between downtown Urbana and my apartment there was a lonely little track between two railyards where sometimes a long line of boxcars rumbled by.  I liked to edge up to as close as was safe and let the cars caress my eyes, the ka thunk, ka thunk, caress my ears.  I liked the little peeks between the cars that showed the world on the other side, as close as a few steps away, but for the moment it might as well be a thousand miles away.

The first time you take the watercolor class that I have been taking for just under thirty years, you do things like plaids and color wheels and mixing colors and not until the end do you get to paint anything as exciting as an apple.  But when you return after that first term you can paint anything you want.  Well that was great, but what did I want to paint?  Um, maybe trains, they're kind of colorful and there's all those pieces, the locomotive the box cars and tank cars and cabooses and all different colors and they always seem to have a nice background.  Yes let's do trains. 

I bought a book, i ended up buying a pile of books, I subscribed to the magazine Trains for maybe five years.  There was a guy in the class who was a bona fide railfan, he knew the names of all the engines and how to tell them apart and where all the trainyards in the city are.

The trainyards are private property and officially tresspassing is verboten, but in practice it's just too damn hard to keep people out, and those railfans are pretty harmless, all they want to do is take a mess of photos.  The engineers are pretty tolerant, because who doesn't like to be thought of as a hero for backing old number nine unto some backtrack.  They would talk to us and once they even let us into the cab, but had us leave as soon as they had to move old number nine.

But after awhile, a few years, they all began to look alike, all the names sounded alike, I had taken photos from every angle possible, and  tht ka thunk, ka thunk, the rhythm of the rails, was getting monotonous.  I guess if I was a true railfan this would just have opened me into a wider world of minutiae, but I wasn't.  I started painting cats.

I thought I would say a few words about trains and then get on to Ayn Rand, but I guess she will have to wait till tomorrow, and I'm kind of waiting to hear what Old Dog has to say.  He doesn't seem like much of a Randian, but her song was strong in our youth.

Rand Meets Trump

Like I said, I've always liked trains, but I never became a fanatic about them like some people.  I guess I could say the same thing about Ayn Rand.  I had read at least one of her books,  "We the Living" and I had watched part of  "The Fountainhead" on TV once, and I knew that she had somewhat of a cult following, but that was about it.  Then I stumbled onto an internet forum group called "The Rand Café".  They talked about other interesting subjects, but it was supposed to be mostly about Ayn Rand.  They liked to entertain these hypothetical fantasies like,  "A priest, a rabbi, and your brother-in-law are drowning and you can only save one of them.  Which one do you save?"   Although they were polite about it, they kind of hinted that, unless I read "Atlas Shrugged", I couldn't possibly know what I was talking about.  So I read "Atlas Shrugged".

I had tried to read it once before, just after I got out of the army, but I couldn't get into it.  This time, though, I had no problem with it.  I suppose that my previous reading of "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" had imbued me with the patience and perseverance to tackle another really long book.  About the time I finished it, however, the Rand Café went out of business, so I never had the opportunity to expound upon the principles elucidated in "Atlas Shrugged".  Suffice it to say that I agreed with most of them, but I think the author carried them way too far.  I also took exception to Rand's labeling her personal philosophy "Objectivism", since I had recently discovered that I was an objective realist, which is not the same thing.

So what if Ayn Rand were to rise up from the dead today and meet Donald Trump?  Well, they  are both egotistical and self centered, but would those shared traits endear them to each other?  I think not.  I mean, being self centered, by definition, would seem to preclude bonding with another self centered person, because there is only room for one self in the center.  Trump is an authoritarian, while Rand is more of a libertarian, so that would be grounds for disagreement.  On the other hand, both of them are fans of capitalism and not fans of socialism, so they should agree on economics, if not politics.   Trump is a bit of a lady's man, and Rand was a bit of a man's lady, so they might be able to form a bond with that, if only a temporary one.   Too bad this is only hypothetical, because the two of them would make great running mates in the next presidential election, if only they could agree on which one should be president and which one should be vice.

heyday

That story about the big engineer broke my heart. I imagine Beagle's dad had been chuckling previously at the thought of the surprise he was going to give his kid, and how wide with glee would open the eyes of the big engineer, and then bam, the kid blows up.  Well I guess this sort of thing happens all the time with little kids.  I can see your dad walking away with Beagles and kicking some gravel and thinking, 'stupid kid.'

I think maybe the first time I noticed The City of New Orleans was when my ears perked up at the mention of Kankakee.  Kankakee?  There's a song that mentions Kankakee?  It's still a stop on The City of New Orleans, and on the more frequent Illini that goes only as far south as Carbondale.  I'm surprised that Beagles caught it at Union Station because I always got in at the Illinois Central station on Roosevelt, but maybe some other railroad company ran the one that Beagles rode,  The twelfth street station, as it was called, was torn down many years and the train runs by the lake approaching from the south then heads west on something called the St Charles Air Line which goes over the tracks to maybe Halsted and then backs down to pick up the tracks that take it to those long underground tunnels that take it into Union Station.

I'll wager Dagny (Dagny, I've long wondered where that name came from and do young objectivist couples name their daughters that and just now googling to make sure I got the name right I came across a site where you could buy Dagny toddler's clothes.  Frightening thought, toddlers in day care building their own Galt's Gulch.  (I wonder how objectivists feel about Trump, I have to think that half of them must love him to pieces, and the other half hate him to pieces.)) Taggert thought of replacing the rails in the tunnels with Reardon steel, but I would have thought that Beagles would have heard of Chicago' railroad supremecy before that/  Back in the heyday of passenger traffic it you wanted to go from ocean to ocean, except maybe in the deep south, you had to get off your train in Chicago and get on another one to continue your voyage.

Heyday.  I had to look that one up too.  It seemed to me that it should have been hayday, like in rolling in the hay.  But it turns out that it's heyday, like in I guess everybody says hey to you like you are flying so high, like you are riding the St Charles Air Line riding down to New Orleans and heading for your first stop in Kankakee.

The City of New Orleans

The song was made popular by Arlo Guthrie, but other people have done it over the years.  I believe it was written by Steve Goodman.  The first time I heard that song, it was like deja vu all over again because I had actually ridden the train about which the song was written.  I must have been about 15 because it was before I got my driver's license.  Ironically, my destination was Kankakee, the place that had filled my heart with panic at least a decade previous.  I knew this farmer there for whom I did some work in the summer in exchange for hunting privileges in the fall.  I had met him a couple years previous through my father's hunting club and, after the farmer and the club had a falling out, I kept going out there myself until I graduated from high school and left the state.  Eventually, I recruited a few other guys, one of whom had a car of his own, but this time there was no one available to give me a ride to Kankakee, so I decided to take the train.  It took an hour and a half to drive to Kankakee from my house in a car, and I think the bus ride to Union Station took almost that long, but it was worth it for the experience.  On the way out, I noticed that the train also stopped closer to home, I believe it was around 67th and Western, so I got off there on the return trip.  I found out that a number of trains made that run to Kankakee, so it was just luck that put me aboard the City of New Orleans that day.

Union Station was mostly underground, but there was a big skylight above where the trains were all lined up.  The ticket agent told me what track my train was loading on but, when I found it, the train on that track had a sign on it that said "City of New Orleans".  I must have looked confused because this nice Black gentleman wearing some kind of uniform asked if he could help me.  I told him that I wanted to go to Kankakee, not New Orleans, and he explained that was name of this particular train and, although it's ultimate destination was New Orleans, it would stop at Kankakee along the way.  I didn't know that trains have names like ships, and I don't think that all of them do, but this one did.

All the trains pulled into Union Station head first, and the tracks all ended right in front of them, so we had to back up to get out of there.  That seemed to take a long time, but I suppose it would, seeing as we were backing up underground.  I read decades later in Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" that Chicago has one of the most extensive underground track systems in the world, and I believe it because there were at least another dozen trains lined up alongside the one I was on.  Once we got turned around and out into the daylight, it was a quick trip to Kankakee, too quick for my taste, because I really enjoyed the ride.

I also rode the Chicago and Northwestern a few times to visit my friend in West Chicago, and that was a nice ride too.  Once I got my driver's license, however, my days of riding the rails were over.  Like I said, I have always liked trains, but driving a car is more efficient because you don't have to first go to the station and have somebody pick you up at the other end.  I suppose it's different if you live on the North Side where the streets are too narrow and there's no place to park, but I never have.

I also once rode an excursion line, the Algoma run, north from Sault Ste. Marie, Canada.  That's an interesting scenic trip, and I would recommend it to anybody who likes trains.

Urbs in Horto

I have always liked trains.

You and me both Mr. Beagles and I wonder if it's related to growing up in Chicago.  There was no escaping the trains, especially before the arrival of the interstates and superhighways.  Even today, since so many train crossings are at street level as you go further west, it's likely that you will have to stop and wait for some mile-long freight train to make it's way through the city.  As a child, sitting in a car with no radio, it became a guessing game, wondering what was in all those boxcars, tank cars, coal cars (coal, duh!). and cattle cars.  Flat cars were easy, this was before shipping containers were used so the cargo was out in the open in front of god and everybody.   Once I saw a bunch of army tanks which was a very cool sight to my ten year-old eyes.

With so much of our extended family living in Wisconsin we made plenty of trips on the Chicago and Northwestern line during some winter holidays.  In those days driving to northern Wisconsin in the winter was simply out of the question; it was all two lane roads and you couldn't predict whether or not the roads were plowed.  The train we took was the Flambeau 400, which ran from Chicago to Ashland, via Green Bay.  I don't know if it was considered posh but I recall a couple of trips in a passenger compartment and some meals in the dining car.  It was a bumpy ride and I spilled my drinks more than once but it was still a good experience.

One thing I'll never forget was the restroom situation.  They were tiny compartments and the I think the toilets flushed directly on the tracks.  It seemed that way; to flush you had to press on a floor lever and you could see a little trap door open and the noise of the train got a lot louder.  That's something you should about when you are walking along the tracks and a passenger train goes whizzing by, but maybe things are different today.

-----

Chicago is an Urbs in Horto, indeed.  I've gotten used to the proliferation of rabbits but this weekend I read about something new: a wild turkey roaming in my neck of the woods, a little more than a mile east of me.  I'll have to keep my eyes open and maybe check to see if they're in season.

The Big Engineer Wimps Out

I have always liked trains.  As a little kid I used to watch them switching cars across the street, which led me to declare that I was going to be an engineer when I grew up.  My parents told me that I used to proudly introduce myself to people as "I'm (my real name) the big engineer!", but I don't remember doing that.  I believe it, though, because it sounds like the kind of thing I would have done in those days, as I was a precocious child.  By the time I grew up, however, the railroads were in decline and there was no future in the business, or so I was told.

The switch engine they used was a diesel, but there were still a few steam locomotives in service back then, although they were phasing them out.  I remember there was a controversy at the time about phasing out the firemen as they phased out the steam engines.  On the one hand, you don't need a fireman on a diesel engine but, on the other hand, there was concern that the engineer shouldn't be alone in the cab in case he had a heart attack or something.  They eventually came up with something called the "the dead man switch".  The engineer had to keep his hand on the spring loaded switch or the engine would shut down.

I actually had the chance to ride in the cab of a steam locomotive once, but I blew it.  My dad and I were out by the tracks with our two collies when this steam engine came to a stop right next to us.  To my surprise, the engineer leaned out and told my dad that I was a nice looking kid, and asked if he could take me with him to Kankakee.  I must have been pretty young because I remember my dad picking me up and trying to hand me to the engineer as he reached down for me.  For some reason I had the impression that it was a one way trip they were planning for me, and I screamed bloody murder, which caused them to abandon their plan.   I later heard my parents talking about it, and my father couldn't understand why I wimped out because he knew that I liked trains.  It turned out that my dad and the engineer knew each other from the bar and they had set this whole thing up ahead of time.  I wasn't really supposed to go to Kankakee, just to the end of the switch yard and back.  I suppose they added the part about Kankakee for dramatic effect.  Unfortunately, nobody had told me about the plan, I guess they thought I had ESP or something.  Like I said, I was a precocious child, but not that precocious.

the romance of public trans

I wasn't able to picture railroad yards on 51st Street, but then when Beagles mentioned Central Steel and Wire I realized oh yeah, that's where the Orange Line is.  Beagles wouldn't remember the Orange Line since it didn't start running until 1993.  It runs from the loop along the Stevenson expressway to Western where it runs south until it picks up those railroad tracks where Beagles bow-and-arrowed his bunny, and follows it until it gets to just north of Midway and jogs over to the airport.

See that's another thing the north side had, along with named east-west and diagonal streets, el trains.  Well there was the Red Line (all the trains were color-coded in the mid-nineties) which ran south along the Dan Ryan, but you had to cross into the ghetto to get there and we were too weenie to do that.  The only time I rode an el train was on those rare occasions when I got to go to Wrigley.  We would take the bus to downtown and then walk down into the loud and dirty and exciting station and roar through the tunnel until we burst into the sunlight and rode high above the streets of the city, of the mysterious north side where everything looked a little different though it was impossible to put your finger on in exactly what how.

It was thought by some that the Orange Line would open up the southwest side for yuppies.  Well maybe not yuppies but millennials who aren't into automobiles and who love public trans.  But there were no Starbucks's or health clubs or vegetarian restaurants or book stores on the southwest side and that just never happened. 

I used to love automobiles, and spent my teenage evenings on 55th and Kedzie (where by the way a Starbucks has just gone up where Talmans used to be) smoking cigs and trying to look tough, and I could name the kind, the year, and the model of almost every car that went by, but then I think most of the teenagers of that time could.  But outside of a couple years when I lived in southern Illinois I never owned one.  Eventually I learned the bus lines of Champaign and then of Austin and became a public trans man,  I could read the paper on my way to work and I never had to worry about finding a parking place.

But trains are so much faster and more exciting than busses and when I came back to Chicago in the fall of 1987 I was mad to ride them.  I didn't have to be going anywhere I just rode them to the end of their line and back for the fun of it. 

I ride the red and brown lines all the time now and tend to read a magazine rather than stare bug-eyed out the window at the cars that look like toys and people who look like ants, but still I enjoy the whole process. Climbing the stairs up or down from the street you enter into the foyer of another world, and when you flash your card at the reader (not as satisfying as plunking in that token, but probably more convenient), you are among the elite.  You can travel either way and as far as you want, and at certain points you can transfer to other lines and theoretically, you could ride the rails for eternity.  When you leave the train and pass through the same turnstyle others are using to enter then  unless you pay another fare anywhere you go you will have to hoof it, you are just an ordinary pedestrian like everybody else.

So the next time I am on the Orange Line passing Whipple I will think of Beagles down in that ditch sixty years ago barking like a beagle, much I suspect, to the amusement of the dog, and that busybody Edna, and his dad, and probably to Beagles himself.

Urban Rabbits

There were lots of rabbits near our house on 51st Street, but you wouldn't see them often unless you knew where to look.  You might see one occasionally on a lawn at night, but their home turf was in the big prairies along the railroad tracks behind Central Steel and Intag.  Actually, that territory stretched from Seven Swamps, just across California Avenue, all the way to Midway Airport.  We weren't allowed to hunt there with guns, but I did manage to shoot a rabbit with a bow and arrow once.  I guess we were technically trespassing on railroad property, but nobody cared what kids did in those days.  I didn't count it as real hunting anyway, it as mostly about training my two beagles so they would be ready for the few times a year when my dad took me hunting for real out in the country.

I knew about those prairies because my dad and I used to take our two big collies over there on Sundays to give them some exercise when I was quite young.  They always flushed out a rabbit or two, but they didn't chase them very far, and they were no good for real hunting because they were gun shy.  We got a beagle when I was maybe 10, but we never did anything with him until I was 12 or 13, after our two collies had died.  Old Duke never did amount to much, but he was responsible for teaching me how not to train beagles.  You can't really teach a beagle to hunt rabbits anyway, they either have the instinct or they don't, but they will get better at it the more practice they get.  Rabbit season runs for six months in Michigan, but it was about half that long in Illinois, so I decided to start training Duke in the summer to give him a head start on hunting season.

I kept Duke on a leash until we got across 51st Street and down to where Whipple Street petered out by the railroad tracks.  There was a brushy ditch that ran between the sidewalk and the tracks, and I was sure we could flush out a rabbit there.  I released Duke and invited him to follow me down the bottom of the ditch, but he preferred to walk on the sidewalk, I suppose so he could better see where the rabbit went after I flushed him out.  When I did flush a rabbit, Duke just stood there on the sidewalk watching it go, so I somehow had to teach him that he was supposed to chase it.  I put the leash back on Duke, drug him down into the ditch, and shoved his nose at the rabbit's trail but, as soon as I released him, he just went back up and sat on the sidewalk again.  Thinking that he might learn by example, I dropped down on my hands and knees, sniffed the ground and bayed like a hound in full cry.  I thought this might inspire Duke, but he just sat on the sidewalk watching me make a fool of myself.

When I looked up to see what Duke was doing, I saw this lady standing next to him, watching me as well from the sidewalk.  I thought I recognized her from my dad's store, so I said hello, but she looked away, pretending that she hadn't seen me, and hurried off before I could explain to her what I was doing.  I found out later that the lady had gone to my dad's store straightaway and told him, "Charlie, I always knew there was something strange about that boy of yours, and now he has finally gone over the edge."  In telling me about it later, my dad requested that I do my dog training out of sight of the street from now on, since he had to live and do business in this neighborhood.  That turned out to be for the best, because it caused me to explore the other prairies, and I found lots of better places to train my dogs.

 

a bevy of bunnies

What is going on in with rabbits?  They're everywhere.  It seems like I first started noticing them when I became, well sort of a north sider.  I threw in that 'sort of,' because I can't quite bring myself to directly call myself a north sider.  I feel like I am being a traitor to the land of my youth, like I have left the bungalow belt of Gage Park for the glittering north side with all those bars and restaurants and streets with exotic names and a whole fan of diagonal streets.  I still make a yearly trip to the old neighborhood, and I make excursions to Chinatown, Pilsen, Hyde Park (the south side does seem to have more distinct neighborhoods while the north side is all pretty much the same), but most other times when I leave the house I am heading north.

And you know what I see a lot of on the north side?  Rabbits.  I first remember noticing them walking from my mother's retirement home to the Ten Cat.  On this lawn, on the edge of that gangway, over by those bushes, standing flat dab in the middle of the lawn and staring openly at you with no fear, a bevy of bunies.

The thing is I don't remember them growing up in Gage Park.  As kids we certainly would have noticed rabbits.  The bungalow yards are not that expansive, but there were vacant lots, there was that whole stretch of wilderness along the railroad tracks west of St :Louis.  There were snakes.  At some point we discovered that the prairie by the tracks was full of garter snakes, and then we realized that our own lawns were full of them, and they could be caught by young boys and stored in coffee cans, but really they didn't make very good pets so we lost interest in them pretty soon.  And of course there were squirrels aplenty, but no rabbits.

I lived downstate for about twenty years, a much more rural area with much bigger lawns, and no bunnies to speak of, likewise the two years that I lived in Texas.

I don't know if it's a north side phenomena, or something to do with time, conditions that may have become more favorable to rabbits living in urban areas, and I just happened to have become 'sort of'' a north sider in the meantime.  Or maybe the whole thing is in my head.

I went to the google with is the rabbit population growing in Chicago and I got a whole pageful of articles.  I suspect if you google anything you will get a pageful of whatever theses you are entertaining, but here's one article I found: https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/urban-rabbits-bunnies/BestOf?oid=27092070

From Israel to Palos Park

Sorry to hear about the death in your family, Uncle Ken.

All I know about Israel's recent election is that some yahoo promised to annex the West Bank if he was re-elected.  Well, why not?  Israel has been occupying it since 1967 and won't give it back until the Palestinians recognize Israel's right to exist.  That will never happen, so why not make it official?  The West Bank should have been part of Israel in the first place, but the United Nations, in it's infinite wisdom, decided to gerrymander it into part of the proposed Palestinian State, which never came to be.

There wasn't exactly a no man's land by the Berlin Wall.  West Berlin used the land right up to the wall for streets and buildings.  There was a cleared strip of land on the East side which was commonly called the "Death Strip" that was mined and guarded to keep people away from the wall.  A deer or wild hog would occasionally trip a mine or a flare, so I suppose there were rabbits there as well.  West Berlin had an extensive park system called the Grunewald that somewhat resembled the Cook County Forest Preserves, and wildlife had free run of it.  We used it for training, but not on the weekends because that's when the locals had free run of it.

Speaking of the Cook County Forest Preserves, the more I think of it, Dan Ryan Woods was only part of it.  Other parts had different names, and I don't remember which part had the toboggan slides, but it was near the Village of Palos Park where my parents lived.  There also was Palos Heights and Palos Hills, but I think they were separate communities.  There may have been an actual park called Palos Park as well, and maybe that's where the slides were located.

Fore!

Uncle Ken, I may have met your sister and her husband last year at one of your corn-fueled openings but my memory for names has gotten worse over the years.  Please extend my condolences to your sister.  That line looks weird to me, like it's not properly phrased. but I'm drawing a blank; there must be a better way to express such sentiments.

-----

Where were the toboggan slides, Dan Ryan, Palos Park, or both?  When I ran cross country in high school our arch-rival was Luther South (we were Luther North) and their home course was in Dan Ryan Woods, if memory serves.  Anyhow, we had to run up that damn toboggan slide, twice, and it was a killer.  Unless you have your own toboggan slide to practice on I don't think you can properly train for it; bleachers are a poor substitute.  It might have been fun sliding down those runs in the wintertime but running up them on a chilly and drizzly October afternoon?  Not so much.

-----

I read something interesting about the Berlin Wall recently and maybe Mr. Beagles can offer additional insights.  Between the East and West sectors there was an expansive "no man's land," heavily populated by thousands of rabbits.  Since there were no predators the rabbits were in their own little neutral zone, safe from harm and peril.  Was watching the rabbits a pastime enjoyed by all?

-----

The Mueller report seems to be dead in the water.

I'm not so sure about that.  That four page summary from Barr came out amazingly quickly for a document that had hundreds of pages and I bet there were thousands of attachments to go with it.  The Republicans are going over the report with a fine toothed comb, redacting their asses off, in order to put the best possible spin on the whole situation,  Although Mueller may not have come to any definitive conclusion I bet that he has set up a roadmap for further investigations.  This isn't over, not by a long shot, and I expect the full report will be leaked if it hasn't been already.  But it could be that there is really nothing in the report that we don't already know, plenty of evidence of shady and unethical behavior but nothing specifically illegal that can be proven in a court of law.

With all of the accusations against Trump over the last couple of years there is only one that has really gotten under his skin, the fact that he cheats at golf.  Maybe that will prove to be his ultimate undoing; the Republicans with the deep pockets can forgive a lot of sins but cheating at golf?  Never!

hell in a handbasket

My brother in law died Monday night, why I didn't post yesterday.  He was the nicest guy in the world.  Soft-spoken, invariably nice to everybody.  He hadn't been well for the past year and now he is gone.


It seems like Netanyahu eked out a victory again Well he and the centrist party have tied, I think it is 35/35, but most of the other parties are conservative so he will have an easier time of forming a coalition government.  I don't like these coalition governments that seem to be the result of the parliamentary systems.  Doesn't seem right that a party that had maybe ten percent of the vote can become part of the ruling coalition.

And what has become of Israel's liberals?  Doesn't seem that long ago that there used to peace parties, and now there is none of that.  And the Palestinians have never been weaker.  Their allies are squabbling among themselves, and it looks like their main supporters, the Saudis, are more interested in cozying up to Trump than championing their cause.  The United States used to pretend to be an honest broker urging the Israelis to stop playing cowboys and Indians with the Palestinians and urging some kind of peace talks, but there is none of that pretense anymore, and anybody that speaks up against AIPAC or the state of Israel is branded as anti Semitic and marginalized.

The Mueller report seems to be dead in the water.  We, and the House and Senate will only see what Barr allows us to see.  It will go to the courts but that takes a long time and things get tangled.  I have to wonder why Mueller is being so silent in all this.

And now Trump is going hog-wild, I mean hog-wilder, how do you even measure this, firing everybody who is not totally subservient and even that doesn't always save them.  And how about that Betsy Devos who went ahead with White House's plan for cutting the special olympics, only to be cut down by Trump and then she says meekly well yes, she is now against it. 

And this just in this afternoon, Barr is now announcing that he is going to investigate the investigation the way Trump has been asking for.  He is certainly Trump's footpad.

Camp Cuisine at it's Finest

 We went to Camp Kiwanis a few times when I was in the Scouts.  I remember staying in those barracks type cabins and in our pup tents at least once.  Another time we started out in tents, but ended up in a cabin because of the weather.  We had just set up our camp and were in the process of cooking supper over open fires.  We had three or four different fires going and each group was cooking something different.  I seem to remember that our group was doing cube steaks.  The rain didn't deter us at first, until it put out our cooking fires and filled our pots with water.  Then a ranger came roaring into camp in his pick-up truck and told us that we had to evacuate immediately because, the last time it rained this hard, our camp site was under three feet of water.  We struck our tents, threw all our gear on them, hastily rolled everything up, and threw it into the ranger's truck.  Then he led the way to one of those cabins and wished us the best of luck before racing off the save someone else.  The cabin had a coal burning stove, which was a good thing because we were soaking wet and starting to shiver by then.  We steamed ourselves dry in short order, and then started wondering what to do about supper.  There was a big cannibal pot, I don't remember if it was ours or it came with the cabin, into which we dumped the remains of our aborted cooking attempts, including the rain water that went with them.  Then we dumped in some canned goods to thicken it up, including some peaches, which proved to be a nice touch.  We simmered it on the coal stove for awhile, and it turned out really good.  Tasted better than it looked anyway.  If we'd have had more adventures like that, I might have re-enlisted in the Scouts, but mostly we just went to meetings, so I got out after three years, six if you count the Cub Scouts.

I don't remember the sand hill, the only hill I remember near Palos is the toboggan slide.  I went there once with some kids.  I wasn't crazy about it, too fast for my taste, but then I never did enjoy roller coasters either.

I think that Old Joe is Joe Biden. I seem to remember reading about him apologizing for touching all  those people.  Said that he never meant any harm by it, but promised not to do it again because times are different now.

I think the Democrats are making the same mistake that the Republicans made last time, too many candidates.  I am hoping that somebody runs against Trump in the primaries this time, just one guy, not a dozen or two.