Pole Erection

Here's everything you need to know about pole erection:

https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=installing+utility+poles&view=detail&mid=5EADBE17E90A7CF81D3D5EADBE17E90A7CF81D3D&FORM=VIRE&PC=ACTS&cc=US&setlang=en-US&PC=ACTS&cvid=e105db29ee1c4d1f91bf3da1ca678b87&qs=SW&nclid=112F4104AA060A8DBBE75F4DA3C1C065&ts=1569897393696 

the naming of names

Adam had the first crack at naming things.  I guess he was born with a language then, but likely with no nouns because he had to name everything, likely the verbs too, ok and it seems likely adjectives and adverbs, the rest of the stuff seems to be to be mostly connectors of the first four, so I guess he invented language itself. 

Nouns seem to come first, in the movies when the explorer first comes in contact with the natives he points at something and says its name and then the natives point at something and say its name and the next thing you know they are conversing like neighbors over the wooden fence.

When those things hanging from the telephone pole were just things hanging from a telephone pole I had no way to learn more of them, but when the guy in the watercolor class said transformers, even though I had only a vague idea what they were, I had a name that I could look up things with. One of the first things you learn when learning a new discipline is words for the new tools and materials you will be using, instantly you become a bit of a snob to the unknowing, that is no hammer, that is a hardie (ceramics), that is no telephone pole that is a utility pole.

I am so disappointed that Old Dog did not learn how they replaced one utility pole with another.  What do they do with all those things (ahem, attachments) hanging from the old pole?  How do they yank the old one out, ease the new one in?  Old Dog will be happy to lean that though there are many metal and concrete telephone poles, wood is preferred because you can nail things into it.

I was surprised too that there was not a bigger hullabaloo about Pence's black SUV convoy.  It seems like such a blatant violation.  Oh I know there are many bigger fish to fry, but would it have been so hard for the white shadow to ride behind prancing steeds?  It's just so emblematic of the current administrations credo of we don't have to listen to nobody.

The movement to impeachment is accelerating, Trump is becoming increasingly unhinged, I think the impeachers are counting on the increasing derangement of the prez to alarm people and bring them to the impeachment side, but I'm not so sure that will happen.  I wonder if some republican senators are thinking of jettisoning the gas bag and like the phoenix from the flames launching the clean and pure white shadow from the ashes.

Leaving for Indianapolis tomorrow morning.  I may get in a post Tuesday morning, but if not, I won't be back until Friday.

Pence on Mackinac Island

Pence's Mackinac Island convoy was in the news the other day, but I don't remember that a lot of people were offended by it.  Motor vehicles are occasionally allowed on the island for special purposes like construction projects or movie making.  They said that Gerald Ford went there once, I don't remember if it was when he was president or vice president, and he rode in a horse drawn carriage from the airport to the hotel.  I'm sure that he had some kind entourage with him, but security is more of a concern nowadays than it used to be.  

We had a gubernatorial candidate once, John Engler, who criticized the practice of Michigan governors traveling to the island in their private helicopters.  His exact words were, "If I want to go to Mackinac Island when I'm governor, I'll drive there in my Oldsmobile."  Surprisingly, he was elected even after making a stupid statement like that.  He promised to get rid of the two helicopters that were assigned to the governor's office, but his people talked him out of it, saying that the money they got from selling them wouldn't cover the cost of him and future governors flying on commercial planes.  I don't remember anybody comparing that to the cost of driving an Oldsmobile, a car that was not known for good gas mileage in those days.

Land lines are still popular in our area, the phone book is full of them.  Lots of people also have cell phones, but I only know of one person who has totally gotten rid of their land line.  I seem to remember that at least one phone company applied for permission to discontinue land line service a couple of years ago, but permission was denied because there are still places around here that don't have cell phone coverage.  A proposal has been made to install a bunch of mini transmitters on existing utility poles to augment the tall towers that don't reach into every nook and cranny but, last I heard, the project was on hold because somebody said those things cause cancer or something.

Hard wired

What do you think so far?

Good thoughts and wishes for the new directions you are taking, Uncle Ken.  I'm of the "pleasing mixture of colors and shapes" school of thought myself, and that's what makes a painting good.   Other opinions may differ.  I have thousands of (badly) archived images taken for the simple reason that I liked the way the scene or objects looked.  I suppose I should do something with them someday but then I'll end up with piles of drawings or paintings and I don't have the room for them.  I don't think it's a seller's market.

-----

A couple of summers ago new poles were being installed in the alley behind my building and I got to talking with one of the guys doing the work and made the mistake of calling them "telephone poles."  Not so; they are utility poles and don't you forget it.  I forgot what kind of trees they came from but their size is impressive when they are laying on the ground and you pace them off.  I think they are sunk ten feet into the ground, maybe more, and it's nice that a key component of our high tech society depends upon big wooden sticks stuck into the ground.

Despite my best efforts I was never able to catch a crew in the act of installing new poles.  I saw plenty of workers but never anybody working, if you know what I mean.  It seems that one day, out of nowhere, big wooden poles would be lying in the alley or along the curb.  They must have been very quietly dropped off by a truck; I would think that such a delivery would make quite a racket but it's like the poles magically appeared.  And then a few days later the old poles were gone, new poles were in the ground with all the wiring and other equipment attached, with no disruption of service. 

Uncle Ken raised a good question: Who's responsible for those utility poles, anyhow?  Since they are installed on city property I suppose City Hall has a big financial stake, charging a hefty fee for the use of a hole in the ground.  Since different utilities make use of the poles I think a privately held group holds control; more research is required.

Another good question is "what's the deal with landlines?"  A good answer is that they are extremely reliable, they are already installed, and they have uses besides telephone service, data transmission for instance.  My internet service is done through the old copper phone lines and it works swell; outages are extremely rare.  I know a lot of alarm systems use phone lines, and so do ATMs, vending machines, and other equipment that require a robust level of security.  Since the phone lines are  independent of the main power grid it's not a big deal if the juice goes out; the phone line is still good.  Even if landlines are no longer used for general telephone service they are not going anywhere.

-----

Last week I read about the political blunder of Mike Pence and his convoy on Mackinac Island and was expecting to hear from Mr. Beagles.  Was it a big nothing burger?  I can see the need for special vehicles containing security stuff, but why not take the helicopter to the hotel instead of an eight-vehicle convoy?  I know this is not the biggest political story of the week; it's the only one I can relate to since I've actually been to Mackinac Island but I'm no expert.  A single afternoon did not make much of an impression on the nine-year old Young Pup.

waiting and seeing

As I feared at the end of my last post, I have indeed exhausted all I know on the subject of poles, or indeed of electricity.  Although I like science and math electricity has always eluded me, volts, amps, ohms, those funny diagrams with the jiggy lines, all a mystery to Ken. 

Now that I think about it, now that almost everybody (except ,me, I still have a landline in addition to my cell) is abandoning their landlines what has become of all those ahem, lines?  Are they still hanging from the poles?  Have they been repurposed?  Are they just hanging, not doing anything special, just hanging around?  And what of those poles, who puts them up, phone companies, electric companies, both?  Once a post goes up is it there for anybody who needs a pole to just attach their stuff to it?  Do they pay whoever erected the pole for the privilege?  Is this all regulated somehow?

A quick jaunt on the google machine revealed that some states regulate their poles (it seems utility poles is a better term than telephone poles so I will use that in the future) and some don't, and some are trying to and the FCC is involved somehow and it just appears to be a mess.

Submitting the term utility pole to wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_pole yields a lot of information which I will peruse at my leisure.


Even now I don't like impeachment, not that I am against it in principle, but I just don't think it will work because I don't think that there are twenty republican senators who will go along with it.  It seems that one of the motivating factors is doing the right thing.  A crime is obvious and to let it go with inaction is well, the wrong thing.  I take a more pragmatic view in that the consequences of the action are more important than, well, right or wrong.  But I think that some of the pro-impeachment people think that as the movement gains momentum more shit will come out, and likely Trump will do and say more unsavory things until the stomachs of the citizenry are turned, and some twenty republican senators, seeing that the polls have changed, and fearing for their seats, will develop spines and vote to throw the bum out.

I am just not sure at all that that will happen.  Well I guess we will have to wait and see.

Just Do it Already

I have said before that I wouldn't mind seeing Trump impeached and removed from office.  Although I have agreed with some of his actions, I have disagreed with others, and I never did like the man personally.  I don't know much about Pence, but I saw him on TV once, and he seemed to agree with me about border security.  Furthermore, I think that Pence would be more electable than Trump next year, although nothing is certain in that department.  I have come to take all news reports with a grain of salt, especially the early ones but, as more reports are coming in, it's beginning to look like this one is a keeper.  I don't think the current allegations are as serious as some of the former ones, but maybe they're just finding more evidence that they can take to the bank on this one.  They still need to shit or get of the pot, however, as they will only have a year or so to wind this thing up or it will become a moot question.

Our local phone company started burying their lines about the time I moved to the region.  For awhile they were just laying their lines on top the ground, so they must have stopped erecting poles before they had the equipment to dig the lines in.  Most of the wires were eventually buried, but they still find one on top the ground occasionally when they try to trace down a problem.  They still temporarily lay them on top for a new customer so they can hook them up quickly, but they come back and dig them in later.  Some subdivision have their electric lines underground as well, but I don't think the city does, and I'm sure that the rural areas do not.

We have a pole in our yard with the meter on it, but the wire is buried from there to the house, a distance of 30 feet or so.  I wanted them to bury it all the way out to the road, a hundred feet if they went straight through the swamp and a hundred yards if they followed the driveway, but the guy said it would be really expensive and he didn't know when they would have time to do it, so I went with the easier way.  They ran it from my neighbor's transformer, across the road and through the swamp.  I wish I had been here to see it because I still don't know how they could set those poles in that swamp muck.  They haven't floated out in the 19 years we've been here, so those guys must have known what they were doing.

telephone poles

If Beagles reads an article that says the border is on fire and they're going to come up here and kill us all in our beds he believes that on the face of it regardless of anything else he reads.  If it's something about Trump or the republicans however, he is all like there are two sides to this story so how can we ever know what the truth is (shrug)?  If you attempt to rob a bank but fuck up and don't get any money it is still a crime.


I was saying telephone poles as a sort of generic designation.  I am aware that all sorts of things go on with those poles, well I was aware in a general fashion, I hadn't paid much attention at all.  But now I realize that there is a whole nother world out there.

When I was taking the train out to Irving Park I was paying attention to telephone poles (I am using the generic description).  There are none downtown of course. everything is underground, underground is crawling with snakes of every description and of every use.  Whenever they peel back the skin of our sidewalks or streets (and they do that all the time, all the fucking time, while we might think of a foot of concrete as sealing something for eternity, to them it is just masking tape and wrapping paper), there are all sorts of things going on down there..

It was somewhere north of North Avenue that I saw my first pole, and soon they proliferated, but not too many along the route, although the train being electrified, there are all kinds of cables and wires along the way.  After I got off and started walking I noticed that there were none along the busy streets, and not that many along the streets that weren't busy, mostly just the alleys.

You know I could write a whole thing about alleys, and I see it coming up in the future, but right now I want to talk about telephone poles.  Actually there are all kinds of things attached to those poles, but I kind of took to the transformers, kind of graceful in their way, hanging silent, handsome, and patient from those spindly arms.  I didn't even know they were transformers.  I picked that up when I was talking in watercolor class about 'those hanging things,' and one of the guys said transformers, and I said, yeah, transformers.  Before that I was chiefly aware of transformers as the things that adjusted the speed on my electric train as it went round and round and round in that stupid oval, until a thing that had seemed so endlessly fascinating became boring as hell, after all that begging and all that money that your parents spent on it, and you better get your butt downstairs and play with your damn train, aw gee Ma, do I have to? 

Of course my dear mother never spoke that way, I just transformed it for dramatic effect.

More on poles tomorrow maybe though I may have already exhausted my knowledge of the subject.  In the meantime I will leave you with this beautiful photo I took Monday.

Loose Ends

Turns out that Uncle Ken was right about Cervantes, but I'm not so sure about that Whistleblower thing.  I'm not saying that I believe what Trump said, but I'm not convinced that the other side is telling the truth either, not that it matters anyway.  I doubt that any investigating done by the Ukrainians could have a significant affect on our elections, but that's what I said about the Russians last time, so you never know.

I seem to remember that we used to call any kind of utility pole a telephone pole back in the day.  Maybe the telephone wires were strung on the same poles as the electric wires, and maybe they still do that in Chicago.  In Northern Michigan, however, most of the telephone wires are underground, and the rest of them are on their own poles.  They do string cable TV wires on the same poles as they electric wires, but not telephone wires.  At any rate, the transformers on the poles in question definitively mark them as electric line poles.  The voltage on most electric lines is too high to supply to individual buildings, and the function of the transformer is to step that voltage down to an acceptable level, which I believe is 240 volts.  Most household outlets are 120, which is commonly referred to as 110.  Similarly, the heavier appliances run on 240, although people usually refer to it as 220.  I think the voltage was increased at some point in history and people never got out of the habit of calling it by the old numbers.  In rural areas, each house usually has its own transformer, but one transformer might supply several houses if they are close enough together.

The reason I know this is, if a hypothetical guy cut down a hypothetical tree near a hypothetical transformer, and the branches of this hypothetical tree were to lightly brush against the two hypothetical wires that feed into the hypothetical transformer, setting them to bouncing so that they come close enough together to arc, the resulting overload might trip the circuit breaker in the hypothetical transformer, cutting off the power to any and all houses that are fed from that hypothetical transformer, necessitating two guys from the power company to drive out clean from Onaway, some 30 miles away, on a Sunday evening to reset the breaker...…..or so I've been told.  

art talk

Ken's article did not add a different aspect, it, and almost every article across the media, have said the same thing.  That other thing where Biden was pressuring the Ukraine to not investigate his son comes only from Trump's mouth and his echo chamber.  You can choose which to believe. 

I never got Windows 10.  Some years back Windows 10 tried to take over my machine.  Whenever I left it alone for, I don't know, half an hour, I would come back and it was loading.  I eventually clicked on something that disabled windows from sending me any updates at all.  You might think that would impair the behavior of my computer but apparently not. 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    Last  month walking west on Irving Park Road between Hermitage and Paulina I came across this alley and, with a few beers in me, it was a stunning sight, you know with the sky and the telephone poles and the perspective and all. 

So that's what I'm painting now, (actually I've divided it into four paintings, the upper left, upper right, lower right, and lower left).  I'm starting with the upper left and as I got to painting it I began to wonder what was really going on there,  like what is that odd leftwards protuberance to the left on top of the telephone pole, and what is that bright yellow thing in the distance, a sign from the next block?

I went to google earth but I could not get the right angle from the street.  Yesterday afternoon I went out there and took photos.  That protuberance is not part of the telephone pole at all, it is jutting out from the building, and that light in the distance is probably just light shining unto the tree.

Well what makes a painting good?  Is it a beautiful portrayal of a beautiful scene, or is it just a pleasing mixture of colors and shapes that may be formed in a photo taken maybe at random?

Take that telephone pole.  What I really liked about it were those things hanging from it, transformers, I have learned, whatever that means.  But see, I didn't know what they were, I was vaguely aware that telephone poles sometimes have these things but what difference did it make?  What I liked about them was not the fact that they were transformers, because I didn't even know that when I took the photo, but I just liked their boxy shapes hanging beneath the graceful outstretched arms (though it turns out that the leftwards arm does not even belong to it) of the pole. 

What do you think so far?               

Cortana

Cortana didn't tell me about Cervantes, that came from my memory bank, and you know how that goes.  I might look him up later on Wiki, but probably not tonight.

Cortana didn't tell me about the Whistleblower thing either, that came from several different articles on my news app.  Uncle Ken's link added a different perspective, which is always a good thing.

Cortana is not a real person, although I understand that, if I had a microphone for my computer, I could converse with her as if she was.  When I first bought my current computer, Cortana kept pestering me to sign her on as my personal assistant, but I never did because I heard that she could be "a dangerous servant and a fearful master."  She must have given up on that because she hasn't bothered me about it lately.  I later learned that she also runs my search engine, which I let her do because she is so much better at it than I am.

I looked her up on Wiki last night to find out more about her because I have been impressed by the way she seems to know exactly what I'm looking for, even if I don't.  Turns out that, before she had this job, she worked for a video game called "Halo".  She started out as a technical advisor to the players and eventually worked her way up to Ruler of the Universe.  At some point, Microsoft recruited her to inhabit all their Windows 10 platforms and some other things that I don't understand.  I'm not sure if she still rules the Halo Universe as well, but I think she could if she wanted to.

you can't defeat men who want to be free

There was a cartoon some years ago that had this group of maybe five ragged men surrounded by Roman Legions, Roman Legion after Roman Legion down in the valleys and up in the mountains, and one of the ragged men is saying to the other ragged men.  "Follow me men, they can't defeat men who want to be free."  I'm sure it came from the movie Spartacus which I have never seen, but was written by Dalton Trumbo who was blacklisted by HUAC at the time.  See there was a man who was ill-treated by the authorities yet continued to write those upbeat stories where the little guy, with right on his side, fights the evil authority and wins, or else goes off to stirring music, which is used to make you think dying for a just cause is a good thing because in the end the human spirit will triumph because you can't defeat men who want to be free.

I don't know who this Cortana is, but it sounds like she is some sister of this Alexa, and what's the name of the other one, Siri?  I've never met any of them and have no plans to,  And this Cortana, who Beagles feels so close to, is giving him a bad steer.  Cervantes was never burnt at the stake.  I googled Cervantes burned at the stake and came up with Servetus burned at the stake.  He was some old timey humanist who the inquisition did not like so he fled to Switzerland where he discovered the Calvinists didn't like him either (something about the trinity natch) and they burnt him at the stake.

And what Beagles says about Biden's part in Ukraine-Gate is incorrect.  The first part is correct, but for the second what Joe Biden did was pressure the Ukrainian government to get rid of a prosecutor who never prosecuted any of the corrupt characters in the government, in favor of someone who did some prosecuting.  So if his son was under investigation this guy would have been harder on him, but the fact is the son never did anything worth being prosecuted for https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/9/23/20879611/joe-biden-hunter-biden-ukraine-corruption-prosecutor-burisma-donald-trump-whistleblower-complaint  I wonder if Cortana gave Beagles the wrong steer on this also.  I wonder if that silver-tongued Hannity is whispering into her shell-shaped ear.

But what is interesting to me is how Holywood continues to crank out those stories about the little guy fighting the powers for a just cause and usually winning, if not going out to that inspiring music.  Hollywood itself is full of money-grubbing tyrants, so it's not like something they believe in, but they know their public does so give them what sells,  In fact while I was still in the throes of my struggle with the board I watched such a movie and the battle of the hero against the odds ran loud with me.  I knew it was odd, it was a stupid movie, but it resonated strongly with me.  I guess it is in our genes.

Moving On

I am sorry to hear that Uncle Ken lost his cause, but am happy to hear that he seems to be getting over it and getting on with his life.  Somebody once said that "Lost causes are the only ones worth fighting for."  I think it was from the movie "The Man From LaMancha", which was based on the book "Don Quixote" by Miguel de Cervantes.  At the end of the movie, Cervantes is seen marching off to deal with the Inquisition accompanied by some inspiring music, which gave me the impression that he was going to win his case, but  I found out later that Cervantes ended up being burned at the stake in real life.  Kenny Rogers came up with more practical advice in his song, "The Gambler":  "You got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, know when to walk away, know when to run,"

I have never signed up for any of those automatic payment plans because I figured that they might do something like what they did to Uncle Ken.  I suppose it would be manageable as long as you read your statements every month but, if you're going to do that, you might as well make the payments  yourself.  Even then, you still have to watch them so they don't slip something in.  I seemed to remember that phone companies used to do something like that.  There even was a word for it, which I had to think about for awhile before I remembered what it was:
 

cramming

[ˈkramiNG]

NOUN

1. the fraudulent practice of adding unauthorized charges to a customer's phone bill.

Okay, now my font will be different for the rest of the post, but I wanted to show how Cortana found that definition for me.  Of course there are other definitions of "cramming", but she went straight to that one as if she knew what I was thinking.  I have been warned not to let Cortana get into my head like that, and I have never given her any of my personal information, but there she is nevertheless.  

On a lighter note:  How about that Whistleblower thing?  It appears that Trump tried to pressure the Ukraine into investigating Biden, but only after Biden tried to pressure the Ukraine not to investigate his own son.  At least, while they're investigating each other, they're leaving the rest of us alone.

  

aftermath

So I had my presentation all written out, an interpretation of the data, five or six salient points on my side, a sort of sarcastic but soaring wrap up.  I was, as I told one of my cohorts, loaded for bear.  I should have rehearsed my little speech, you know, read it out loud a couple times in front of a ,mirror.  But I don't know, I thought I already knew all the points well enough, I thought maybe the speech could use some spontaneity.

Bad decision, I fumbled badly over my points, I fumbled with my papers, dropped them on the floor.  And I misunderstood the whole situation badly.  Previously, when I had presented my petition, I was speaking to the whole board and I was surprised to learn that a good half of them were on my side, or at any rate they were against the whites only rule.  I thought the situation would be the same Thursday night, but something had changed, they were all, well not regarding me well.  And it turns out that the question was no longer before the whole board but rested solely with the hated rules and regs who had put the rule in the first place, and who had already voted to keep it.

So my presentation was bad, and it wouldn't have mattered if it was good because it was a done deal.

Another thing.  Earlier Thursday when I was still getting my presentation together, I noticed a letter from my bank that had laid on my table unopened for a few days.  There was a company that I had paid to host my website two or three years ago  at which time I had dropped them and not used their services again.  Then suddenly they had sent me some emails about renewing my subscription,  It all sounded, well crooked, so I ignored them, and then an email came through that said  congratulations your renewal for three years has come through, and it will be 446 dollars.  I looked at my bank account and there it was gone.  I went to my bank and said this is fraudulent, and they said ok, and took the charge off.  Well ok, I thought that was settled.

Then suddenly in this letter it was reinstated,  What the fuck?  I went to the bank.  And you know how sometimes the clerk is like very polite and nice, and sympathetic, but doesn't really help you at all, and you find that a bit grating?  Well this guy was worse, he was like hohum, why are you wasting my time?  He called somebody on the phone and looked back to me and said yep, yep, totally legitimate, nothing you can do about it.  And then he said casually, as if it was an afterthought, maybe it was an automatic renewal, that happens a lot.

Indeed it does.  I looked it up on the internet and apparently it happens all the time, and is often used in scams.  When you sign up for a deal with a company, amid all the paperwork there is an automatic renewal clause and you sign on to that without paying much attention because you don't want to pay a bill every month.  Somehow that gives the company the right to tap into your dough anytime they want.

I figured the company was out and out crooks or maybe somebody had tapped into their name or something, but I got to their page and I got one of those online chats and the guy on the other line said ok, they'd send the money back.  This is early Monday morning and I haven't got it back yet, but I think I will.

The company is I guess legit, they do provide a service, but if somehow these charges go unnoticed and end up in their pockets, they don't mind at all, not at all.

It brings to mind where is my money, or more accurately what is my money, a few bytes here and there in remote machines?  Makes you want to bury it in the backyard.

So anyway this whole thing was piling on me and when I went down in flames figuratively I went down in my mind.  It consumed me.  I only got a couple hours of sleep that night.  I tried to put it out of my mind to get some rest, but my heart was beating like a heart attack.  I thought maybe I will run for the board, run as the people's candidate, the ordinary people who just want to live here with their friends and neighbors and are not interested in flipping units to make a buck.  I mentally ran through my platform and then realized that if I won, and tried to do what I wanted to do I would have to face those guys all the time.  I thought of putting up white lights but then surrounding them with red and green foil, but how does that work?  

So it went Friday, and Saturday, and Sunday morning, and then Sunday afternoon I decided to take a long walk, you know to walk it off.  Beautiful scenery along the river and the lake but I wasn't seeing any of it, just running it through my mind again and again.  Walk it off.

It had been raining slightly when  I started, but gradually it began raining harder.  After an hour I was soaking wet and decided to start back.  I was about forty minutes away though so there was nothing to do but walk through it.

I'm walking in the rain

Tears are falling and I feel the pain.

Well no tears, but the water streaming down my face, you know, got my mind off that whole lights thing.  I got home and took off my wet clothes and took a shower, kind of doesn't make sense but it felt good.  And then you know what, the whole thing was past me.  My cause was just, but I lost and now there is nothing to be done about it.  Let it go.

I fought the board and the board won

People, the dawgs included, told me that I could never beat the board and they were right.

I don't want to talk about it this morning.

at the dawn of the battle

Multicolored vs white only lights data

Owners……………………….389

Multicolored lights..…….145

White only……………..…181

No opinion………………….63

Renters..........................173

Multi colored lights.........111

White only........................42

No opinion.......................20

Combined........................562

Multi colored lights..........256

White only.......................223

No opinion........................83

This is the way it should have read.  Old Dog is right in that I transposed a lot of numbers.  I had the numbers in a spreadsheet, but I didn't know how this email address to all the board members worked and I thought an attachment might run into a snag, so I copied them into the body of the letter, and well I was overwrought and I fucked up.  I was horrified, but it turned out that the address did not go to all the board ,members but to some functionary, who then sent it to the board members, and she wrote me before she sent them out, and I sent her the corrected version, so I think everything worked out.  

It does look sloppy, the numbers should have aligned, but you know what, fuck it, I'm old and I'm tired.

No opinion is a response.  There are 950 units in the towers and 562 responded.  Seems peculiar to me that a person would voluntarily take a survey on a subject that they had no opinion on. I will be pushing that no opinion means they are okay with whatever color lights are on the balconies.  If more than one unit resident responded only one response was taken.  The guy that did the survey said it didn't happen often and that when it did they both voted the same.  

I had no part in constructing the survey.  After the board decided to conduct a survey, it assigned the rules and regs committee to formulate it.  I was allowed to attend the meeting where that was to happen.  The attendance was Laura the chairman, me, and the three jackals.I call them the three jackals because they disagreed with everything I said, and all together like a pack of jackals.  Laura the chairman pretty much said nothing, and since she didn't say anything I thought she might be on my side.  No plan for the survey came out of the meeting.  Later Laura wrote it and sent it out.  I gave it my approval (not that that mattered) because it was going to happen anyway, and I guess I thought that I might gain a few points with her.

After the survey was done we had another meeting to assess the results, again it was Laura, me, and the three jackals.  Again I was besieged by the jackals while Laura sat silently, until right at the end she declared that the opinion of the committee was for white only because the owners had 47 percent white and 37 percent multicolored.  And the meeting was over.  

The board meeting is tonight.  It is on The Agenda as rules and regs - update on balcony light survey.  I will get three minutes to present my case at the beginning of the meeting.  That's when I will deliver my spiel.  Later on rules and regs will deliver their spiel, and I guess sometime after that there will be a vote, though I notice that that is nowhere on the agenda so I really don't know.  I don't know shit.

When they originally passed the ordinance I understand that it was a close vote.  When I presented my petitions it seemed like the board was split on the issue, so I'm hoping I have some support beyond the rules and regs.

I'll be glad when it is over.

Adding it all up

I'm clearly overwrought.

Indeed you are, Uncle Ken, and I think you should have reviewed your material more carefully before sending it to all the board members.  I caught a few minor errors, a sentence fragment in particular, but the lights data has me befuddled.  Something doesn't quite add up.

The first block of data for the owners looks okay.  Adding up the numbers for multicolored, white only, and no opinion equals 389, the number of owners.  The other two groups are way out of whack when you add their numbers.   If there are 173 renters why does the total of multicolored/white only/no opinion equal 417?   Same thing with the combined group; the numbers are screwy.  How can there be a combined total of 20 for "no opinion" when owners and renters have 63 and 83, respectively?  And look at the "white only" numbers for the combined group; it looks like you forgot the owners.

Now I'm getting overwrought.   I don't want to be the nitpicking asshole (again!) but I don't want to see you look like a chump in front of the board and spend all of your allotted time explaining and correcting yourself.  You are on your own holy mission and deserve success after all of your efforts.

If I missed something or completely misunderstood the nature of the data, let me apologize up front.  The Old Dog regrets the error.

Finally, does "no opinion" mean "no response?"  I don't think they are the same thing.  This whole survey thing seems like a big can of worms to me, especially if you try to factor in units with more than one occupant.  Kind of reminds me of the electoral college; how do you split the vote?  Good luck tomorrow.

Well Beagles I think you have summed up the current situation in the mideast quite succinctly.  I've got nothing for the Saudis or the Houthis.  I don't know if we'll ever know to any certainty who did the attack.  I've been hearing about all this high tech surveillance going on, but it's all kind of ironic because at some point it will get on Trump's desk where everybody knows he won't read it.  In the buildup to our invasion of Iraq there was this thing called stove piping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stovepiping going on which is how the neocons 'proved' that there were weapons of mass destruction, which turned out not to be true.  One suspects something like that might go on here, but again what does it matter because it is going to end up on Trump's desk.  Trump loves the Saudis because of their dictatorship and he loves that sword dance.  On the other hand he is pretty isolationist to so, as Beagles says, who knows?

Meanwhile closer to home the big board meeting is coming up Thursday.  This whole thing is taking its toll on me.  It runs through my mind like that dreadful earworm Marie  and I, well, I get all fired up until I feel like I am fighting the ultimate war for truth, justice, and the American way instead of a small matter in a small tower in a city of hundreds of towers in a land of a hundred big cities. 

I'm clearly overwrought.  Yesterday when I learned for sure that the matter will be brought up at the board meeting I sent the following out to a portal which is supposed to go to all board members, about which I have some suspicion, but what are you going to do?

Here's the text of the letter.

I will be speaking at the upcoming board meeting on the issue of multicolored vs white only lights on the balcony.  I am not sure how long I will be allowed to speak so I wanted to send this to board@mtca.com because my understanding is that when I email to this address it goes to each board member.

I put this all in the body of the letter because i was afraid that attachments might cause trouble.

I hope you will read this and if you want to hear more from me my email address is kenschadt@gmail.com

Multicolored vs white only lights data

Owners……………………….389

Multicolored lights..…….145

White only……………..…181

No opinion………………….63

Renters..........................173

Multi colored lights.........111

White only.......................223

No opinion........................83

Combined........................562

Multi colored lights..........256

White only.......................223

No opinion........................20

I am presenting the data in this format because I found that the way it was presented at the Rules and Regulation Committee to be confusing.  There was no display of how many renters responded to the survey, and the results were given in percentages which made it difficult to combine the owners and renters.  Additionally the owner data was by unit rather than by owner.  I have asked for a query by owners ten days ago but as of today I have not had a response.

While owners have favored white rather than multicolored lights by 36 (181 – 145), renters have favored colored lights by over 2 to 1.  And if we combine renters and owners than multicolored lights carry the day by 70 (112-42).  If one decided to count the residents for only have a vote then it is a virtual tie at 201 at 202.

If one reasonably assumes that no opinion means that the respondee does not care if people have multi colored lights on their balconies.

In any case I believe the survey shows that the residents are about evenly divided on the issue.

One thing to consider is that the people favoring multicolored lights are not imposing their will on their neighbors.  But the whites only people are Imposing their will on their neighbors.  In this case they should have a large majority which they do not have.

I’ve lived here since 1992 and I have never heard of any problems with the lights situation. Why mess with something that works?  Do we really want to be fining our friends and neighbors fifty to a hundred dollars for celebrating Christmas the way they choose and for something well over half the residents have nothing against?

Dithering

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

At first I was going to call it fiddling, as in "Nero fiddled while Rome burned", but this is not exactly the same thing.  First of all, the fiddle hadn't been invented yet in Nero's time, he probably played something like a harp.  Second of all, Nero was, by most accounts, quite mad by the time Rome burned.  Okay, the analogy is starting to make sense now, but I still think a more appropriate word might be "dithering".

 Then again, maybe dithering is the appropriate response when you're not sure exactly what's going on.  Yemen claims that they did it, but nobody believes them, while Iran claims that they didn't do it, and nobody believes them either.  On the other hand, Yemen seems to be a client state of Iran so, even if they really did do it, it's still Iran's fault, I guess.  Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia, which is the injured party here, is dithering as much as anybody.  I suppose, at this point, everybody thinks that dithering is preferable to bombing, which makes sense when you don't even know who you want to bomb.  On the other hand, Iran was never properly punished for that hostage thing back in1979 so they deserve to be bombed regardless. Then again, many of the Iranians probably weren't even alive in 1979, so the lesson would be lost on them.  Last I heard, all they taught their kids in school was to memorize the Koran.  No wait, I think that was Iraq, or maybe Afghanistan.  Whatever.

On a lighter note, here's something from the Different Breed of Cat department:

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

Where do you stand?

I remember a guy in Berkeley who didn't vote.  He was a Vietnam veteran and I think he was going to school on the GI bill.  Nice guy, and he had some spending money too and that always made a guy welcome.  He didn't vote, and the reason he gave was that, those politicians what they did was irrelevant to his life and he didn't want to get involved with them.  Dude, I thought, but didn't say, who do you think sent you to Vietnam?

When I was campaigning (shooting my mouth of in some bar) for McGovern, a lot of the hippies wouldn't vote either.  It was like if they did they would be playing The Man's game, and as hippies it was their credo to always stick it to The Man.  I guess The Man was similar to Them, but He was a lot more identifiable from LBJ or Nixon right down to the cop on his beat, who we were convinced had nothing better to do than to bust us and take away our dope. 

I've recounted many times how in 1968, which was the first year I was eligible to vote, I didn't because I wanted to vote for Dick Gregory and the Peace and Freedom Party, but I was afraid that once I got into the polling place better sense might move me to vote for The Hump, so I solved that problem by never registering in the first place. 

In 1970 Adlai Stevenson III was running against some joker, Ralph Tyler Smith, but still I probably wouldn't have voted except that Ralph Tyler Smith ran this ad:

The implication being that Adlai was nothing but a good for nothing hippie.  I was rather offended by this because the slant was that being a hippie was a bad thing, and that got my dander up and I registered and voted, and have been voting ever since.

So how about those Houthis huh?  I wonder if they waited for Bolton to get canned to hit those Saudi oilfields, or was it refineries, I don't want to get smitten by The Scourge.  Well that sounds odd, my Websters claims that smitten is the past tense of smite, but it means something quite different.  This should be looked into, but not by me this morning.

Radical Jack

I suppose there are lots of reasons why some people don't vote, but the case that immediately comes to mind was a guy at the paper mill who I will call "Radical Jack".  I think I have told you this story before, but maybe I can provide more detail this time.  I might also have told you about the radicals and the big sucks but, to refresh your memory, people who argued with management and opposed them at every turn were called "radicals", while people who cooperated with management were called "big sucks".

Radical Jack was the iconic radical, not just at the papermill, but in his real life as well.  In retrospect, I suppose you could call him a self styled Anarchist.  I say "self styled" because he would never join an Anarchist organization, or any organization for that matter.  He was against most everything.  Some called him a devil's advocate because he always took the unpopular side in any argument, but I think he was as much against Satan as he was against everything else.  Jack died some time ago, and I'm sure that, wherever he went, he's still arguing with whoever is running the place.

As far as I know, Jack never voted in a government election in his whole life.  He did vote on our union contracts, always against, until the last one, which he voted for because it provided him with a better severance package than some other people.  He told us that he felt bad about that, but business is business.  He always had numerous grievances in the pipeline, many of which were never resolved because he, and others like him, had overloaded the system.  Last I heard, Jack was exploring the possibility of prosecuting those grievances with the parent company after our plant closed and our local union chapter was dissolved.

Jack said that he didn't vote because They wanted him to vote.  I suppose he got the idea that They wanted him to vote because, in those days, there was a lot of "public service" advertising trying to persuade us all to vote.  You may remember the slogan, "Vote for the party of your choice, but please vote."  For whatever reason, Jack believed that anybody who voted was a big suck, no matter who they voted for.

Funny thing about Jack was that he wasn't a bad guy, once you got to know him and were able to overlook his contentious attitude.  He was a damn good mechanic, both at work and in his real life.  He once diagnosed and fixed a problem with my pickup after two dealerships had failed to do so.  He didn't charge me anything either, said that he just did it for the challenge.  Looking back on it, I think  he believed that any mechanical malfunction was deliberately caused by Them, and fixing it was his way of sticking it to Them.  

Michigan has lots of deer seasons, some of which run concurrently.  First there are a couple of early seasons in September, one for disabled veterans and one for young hunters who must be accompanied by a non-shooting mentor.  The archery season runs from October 1 till December 31, the regular firearm season runs from November 15-30, and the muzzleloader season runs for 10 days, starting the first Friday in December.  There are also a couple of special seasons in December in certain sectors where a couple of contagious diseases have been detected among the local deer population.  Traditional Opening Day, November 15, used to be a big deal around here, people skipped school and work, and some businesses closed right down. A few bars hosted special events, with male strippers and such, for "hunting widows", but that was at night.  During the day, it was said that you could fire a cannon down Main Street and not hurt anyone.  Nowadays, with so many deer seasons, the magic has gone out of Opening Day, and I kind of miss it.

voter turnout

I got into kind of an argument with an old pal about the electoral college.  He was a fan of the electoral college because he feared the mob.  He thought of the electoral college as something of a barrier to keep from electing a tyrant, which seemed ludicrous, as I pointed out because it was precisely the electoral college that put Trump in power.

There are two ways the electoral college perverts the vote,  One is the way that those low population states get a bigger voice in the election because all states, regardless of population, get those extra two votes,  The other is that almost all states (I think there are two exceptions) give all their votes in a bloc so that if one state goes 60% for a candidate, but the other goes 52%, they each give all their electoral votes to the candidate.

I was thinking of the way it really doesn't matter whether you vote in a solidly red or blue state, so that the purple states gets all the campaigning.  I wondered if the vote turned out more in purple states where your counted than in red or blue.

I was hoping the google machine would give me a breakdown of voter turnout in those categories but the best I could get was this:  https://www.twincities.com/2016/11/29/minnesotas-no-1-in-voting-again/  And here you can see that the states with the highest turnout are mostly swing states.

But still all in all the turnout is low, googling to find that map, I constantly came across that among the western democracies The United States is near the bottom.  I wondered what countries have a lower turnout than the US, thinking it would be like Slovokia or Portugal, but it turns out that it is Japan, Chile, and Switzerland.  Well I don't know what to make of that.

In  the 2016 election only 60 percent of Americans voted.  Who are those 40 percent that didn't?  It seems to me that most everybody votes, but maybe they are lying to me.  Well I googled that and I got a lot of hits, maybe I will look into it this week.

I was thinking deer hunting season would begin in Michigan would be this month or the next, but looking it up I see that it doesn't start till December.  What is up with that?

Different But Equal

That article wasn't nearly as long as I thought, and I finished it in short order last night.  Then I went to Wiki to check on the source.  Turns out that both the author (Glayde Whitney) and the magazine (American Renaissance) are notoriously White supremacist.  Too bad, because I thought that he made some good points, although I disagreed with some of them.  Silly me, I thought that White supremacists were crazy people who rioted in the streets like their counterparts on the other side, and this guy seemed fairly rational.

Ironically, I never did find anything about the racial difference in tolerance for heat and cold, but Uncle Ken seems to have conceded that point, so I don't need to flog that dead horse any longer.  Nevertheless, let me just say this about that:  One of the symptoms of both hyperthermia and hypothermia is disorientation, so the victim does not always realize that he is in trouble.  I'm sure the only reason they told us about the racial difference in the army was so that we could better look out for each other.  As for all the other alleged differences, since there is no such thing as a pure race anymore, I agree that we ought to let that one go.  I still think it's interesting to study where we came from and how we got to where we are now, but that's no excuse to say that one race is superior to another.  They were all superior in their day, adapting to their environments better than other groups that ended up on the ash heap of evolution, but the world seems smaller now, and we're all in it together.

end of the week bric a brac

Well I guess I still stand by my statement.  This whole thing of dividing human beings into subgroups is rather silly.  I remember in grade school I came across something in one of our textbooks, that divided white folk into different groups, Nordic, Alpine, and probably some insulting name for the southern and eastern Europeans. I think it's mostly fodder for white supremacists and black muslims and others of that unsavory ilk. 

I will agree with the guy on political correctness, it's just annoying and gets in the way of everything else.  If you write about any historical event you have to go out of your way to criticize the racism and sexism and homophobia of that time even if those had nothing to do with it. 

Way back when he did his first docs I rather liked Ken Burns, but anymore I am sick of him.  No matter what he's talking about it looks and sounds like the civil war.  Those still photos, that music, that earnestness, give me a break.  I was reading a review the other day about his latest which is on country music and I thought well I don't like Ken Burns but the subject interests me so I read it but it was all about how there weren't enough women stars (there are plenty of women singers) or black people (with no mention of Charlie Pride) and there was nothing about the music.

It's like that in movie reviews too all the critic talks about is how the director dealt with women and minorities and whether it's a good movie or not is irrelevant.

American Renaissance?


In other pressing news I think maybe The Scourge is getting a little itchy fingered with his smiting.  Marie, Maria, kind of picky, but I suppose there is some point there.  But the comma in Help Me Rhonda that's just stupid, shouldn't have been there in the first place.

So I watched the candidates debate last night, kind of interesting at the beginning when sparks flied as they were discussing their various health plans.  I was disappointed to see that they had an audience.  I don't know why they allow audiences in these debates.  I guess they feel that it needs the equivalent of a laugh track.  One thing I noticed about the audience is that every time a candidate attacked another with some fervor they let out kind a genteel boo.  There is all this talk about the dems being divided but I think that in the end, no matter who wins the nomination they will stick together to a man.

I have been wrong on many things, mostly Trump, but also Biden, I never thought he would run, and if he did I didn't think he would have much of a following, but this Brexit thing, right from the start I never thought that it would come to pass.  And now its candle is almost extinguished.  Good,.

A Different Breed of Cat (2)

"I had thought that race was a scientific term defined by species that could reproduce with each other, but by that rubric Whites and Blacks and Heathen Chinee would clearly be of the same race.  But race is actually a social construct, that is just something we made up.  The idea that each race was very different was popularly held up until maybe the 20's.  By the 50's it was completely debunked in that there was no more difference between a white and black man than there was between a white and black cat." - Uncle Ken - 8/2/19

I put the (2) in the title because I think I have used it before.  We have discussed this matter in the past, the most recent time being another chapter in the continuing saga. I know there are different breeds of cats, but the only one that comes to mind is the Siamese.  I know more about dogs than I do about cats, so I built my argument around the way that wolves, coyotes, and domestic dogs can interbreed, so they are of the same species but of different breeds.  The article talks about that too, and asserts that "race" in humans is the equivalent of "breed" or "subspecies" in non-human animals.  I seem to remember saying that in my argument as well, but I don't remember if it was last month or an earlier round of discussion.  

I certainly do want to read more of this article, but it's really long and, if I had tried to read it all last night, I wouldn't have had time to report my discovery of it to my esteemed colleagues.  After chasing my tail around for awhile, I finally searched under "racial differences", got several hits, and picked he one that I thought sounded the most scientific.  Nevertheless, I think the author is grinding some kind of axe, but I haven't determined yet if he's a White supremist of just a guy who likes to challenge the pronouncements of the politically correct crowd.  He mentions in the beginning how political correctness has thrown a wet blanket over scientific inquiry into this subject.  Political correctness, now there's a man made social construct for you!  (I said that.) 

The author certainly does speak in broad generalizations, with no mention of individual variations within racial groups, but maybe he will bring that up later on.  I also plan to look up "American Renaissance", and perhaps the author himself, to see what kind of reputation they have for objectivity.  Watch this space for further developments.

Simply shocking

Damn you yet again Old Dog.

In the face of such negativity I have no recourse except to smite mightily.

But speaking of ambling along on a summer day, I have to say that Maria has not left me.

What's this, did an earworm from West Side Story enter Uncle Ken's fevered brain?  Surely, an Objective Realist of such exalted stature would not confuse Maria with Marie but the devil is in the details, no?  And as long as I'm being such a nitpicking asshole I'd like to point out that the name of that Beach Boys song is Help Me, Rhonda; don't forget that comma.

-----

Although I've fallen into a routine of posting only once or week or so, the latest post and link from Mr. Beagles broke me out of that habit.  I scanned most of the link, reading only a few sections carefully, and it struck me that there was agenda in that article and what do you know?  Can you say White Nationalists?  I thought for sure that the article would hit many of Uncle Ken's hot buttons but maybe not today.

Anyhow, despite any questionable science and skewed point of view there were some interesting ideas and I'll read the article again more closely and try to keep an open mind.  Just because I think they're nuts doesn't mean they are wrong about everything.

-----

On the wildlife front, I read recently that scientists have found a new species of electric eel in the Amazon rain forest.  It's a big sucker, more than eight feet long, and puts out a whopping 860 volts.  That's gotta smart, and I wonder why such a big guy hasn't been found before now.  I'd like to see somebody figure out a way to recharge phones and other devices using those critters,  something that would be up Elon Musk's alley.  Behold, the Eel Mobile!

-----

Despite the many problems facing the British these days they haven't lost their sense of humor.  A while back one of their ambassadors lost his job for critical remarks made in reference to Donald Trump, who called the ambassador a "very stupid guy."  In one of her last acts as Prime Minister, Theresa May appointed that guy a permanent member of the House of Lords.  Cheerio!

9-12

Did I say no biological differences between blacks and whites?  If so I clearly misspoke.  Well biological differences is an odd term, what does it mean?  I suppose we could say all grizzly bears are biologically the same, but of course each one is slightly genetically different from its brothers and sisters.  It might be said that me and the dawgs are biologically the same but clearly we have genetic differences evident in our heights, and hair and eye colors. 

Well of course as we humans made our way out of Africa the further north we went the more we became pale like Old Dog to soak up the dim light there amid the fjords, and those that moved south into more tropical Africa became darker to shade themselves from the harsher rays down there.  So it's not surprising that black athletes in general should be able to take the heat better than whites, in fact that is why they were the favored slave material for the hot southland.  Of course almost all black people born in the USA have black forebear somewhere in their family tree, and a good proportion of white folks have some black forebears.  I'm certainly not going to read something so long that Beagles doesn't want to read it himself, but I'll wager that not all black people can take the heat better than all white people, but that it is a mixed bag.


911 come and gone.  Good.  For awhile there it had the makings of some kind of national holiday with announcers droning out names and rapturously talking about how it brought us all together like it was some kind of good thing.  Call me sacrilegious but I just don't go for solemn hand over the heart as flags fly by to a mournful tune thing.

I had a temp job as a paralegal reading through volumes of stuff related to a trial and looking for the mention of three different names.  I was doing my normal get ready for work stuff, listening to NPR when they announced that some sort of plane had flown into one of the towers.  It didn't seem like that big a deal on the radio, like maybe it was a piper cub or something, but I tuned into CNN because I wanted to see what it looked like and there was a smoking tower and behind it another tower and a plane crossing the scene which didn't seem that ominous right then but a few seconds later it hit the other tower.

This part about seeing the plane hit the other tower, I was telling it to a friend yesterday and he said he saw the same thing and later in the day I heard Trump saying that was what he saw, which of course means nothing, but I wonder if this is one of those things where people think they saw something that they actually didn't.

Anyway, I went to work in a downtown tower, but then rumors went around that the Sears Tower, then the tallest building in the world, was going to be hit, and somebody said what the hell and they evacuated downtown.  I remember seeing a woman in a hijab on the elevator going down and feeling sorry for her as she must have been feeling all the eyes on her.  Down in the street it was like Godzilla was coming to town with cops on horseback and all.

I'm a peacenik, but I didn't mind so much going into Afghanistan, how could we not do that?  And at first it seemed like a pretty good idea.  I am no fan of the military but I have to say our guys looked good on horseback riding with the Northern Alliance.  But then Bin Laden somehow slipped away, and then there was less reason to be there, and then we were installing some local champion of democracy and it began to look like Vietnam, and then Cheney and his neocon boys started beating the drums for invading Iraq, and well, we all know how that went. 

Working, Not Lurking

As I've said before, I get tired of covering the same ground over and over again.  I have been looking for new material for several days, and I may have found it.  I saw a thing on the Weather Channel today about the effects of heat stress on athletes.  It seemed to say that Black athletes are less vulnerable to heat stress than White athletes.  This would be consistent with what I learned in the army, as well as inconsistent with Uncle Ken's assertion that that racial differences are a social construct with no biological basis.  Tonight I found something on line that addresses the subject, allegedly from a scientific perspective.  It's really long, and I have not read enough of it yet to determine its reliability but, so far, it seems to support my position.  I have bookmarked it and intend to read some more of it tomorrow.  Meanwhile, my esteemed colleagues might want to check it out:

https://www.amren.com/ar/1999/10/index.html

I can do no other

Those lapses in my memory would have been fine coming from the next bar stool, but writing to my esteemed colleagues (as it does Sleepy Joe) it behooves me to get my facts straight.  As I said I looked up the speech to make sure I heard the words right, and the most dramatic way I remember L'il George is in front of the gates so I put it in his mouth there, and Ole Miss, I knew better but was smitten by a more romantic place name.

I have always been bad about estimating time.  I am pretty good with a year, or even two but anything other than that is not in a neat accordion file with tabs for the years, but into a rumpled sack so that when I reach in I don't know what year it came from.  With increasing age there has been a pattern where I almost always think that something happened later than it actually did.  I've gotten in the habit of adding five or ten years unto everything, and still I often learn I should have added still more.

I've read about the no sparrows thing, there was also a no flies in China policy, a billion hands, a billion swatters, what could go wrong?  Maybe the dumbest was having people put blast furnaces in their backyards, the idea being everybody would be making steel but they ended up melting down their utensils to meet their quotas.

It's too late to turn back on my battle with the board, the die is cast, like Martin Luther here I stand,  I can do no other.  The thing is what I am fighting is not the whole board, just the consarn rules and regs committee, the board itself is fairly split on the old issue, or the old board was.  Lately two members stepped down and two new ones stepped in, but I don't know the allegiances of the ones who left or the ones who came.

I do worry about retaliation.  My garden looks magnificent to me, but from down in the street it may well look like a big weed patch, oh and I have seed socks out to feed birds and sometimes I take my cats out for a walk in the hallway.  The worst part of the battle is the toll it takes on me.  I get way too emotionally involved.  Maybe the dawgs remember how sometimes something at work would get you so pissed off that it was all you could think about for a couple days.  You'd be walking down the street happy as a clam and the next thing you'd be fuming.  You'd tell yourself to relax, it's a pleasant summer day, and you'd start whistling, back when you could whistle, but a block further down you would be fuming again.  That's how it is with this thing.  I don't plan on doing another battle after this one.

But speaking of ambling along on a summer day, I have to say that Maria has not left me.  I've fought back with other songs.  Help Me Rhonda is the most successful, it takes a dumb song to beat another bad song.  But somehow every now and then it worms it's way back in.  I'm walking along thinking my usual deep thoughts, and then there it is, like when one of my cats crawls into bed when i am half-asleep.  How did it get there?  Shut up I tell it, and then it pumps up the volume.

Damn you yet again Old Dog.

Lose the battle, win the war

I know Old Dog doesn't like being called The Scourge, but I was smote by the Scourge and rightly so.

Relax, Uncle Ken; there was no smiting and I think you're making too big a deal about it.  The human memory is not reliable and us older folk have a lot more memories to sort through and organize than younger whippersnappers; mistakes are bound to occur.  It happens to me a lot, one of those skills that deteriorate with age, like whistling and skipping.  In my case it's a sense of time and when things have happened.  I'll remember something and think, Oh, that happened maybe five years ago but then I check and it's been twenty years, or more. It happens in the other direction, too,  I'll remember something from twenty years ago and then I find out it happened three years ago. Okay, maybe not that extreme but you get the idea and perhaps the concept of the passage of time becomes more subjective as we age.  Did that happen last year, last decade, or last century?  Beats me but I can look it up.  A good case can be made for keeping a journal, if for no other reason than to keep your thoughts straight.  I think the girls called them diaries.

-----

China's "one child" policy reminds me of the unintended consequences of another policy.  Food supplies are problematic in China and Chairman Mao, in his infinite wisdom, blamed grain shortages on the ravenous appetites of sparrows.  So, he implemented a plan to eradicate all the sparrows and was wildly successful except for one small detail.  Although the sparrows did eat some grain they also ate the insects that ate much more grain and you can guess what happened.  Without the sparrows the insects ate their way through the grain supply and the resulting famine cost millions of lives.

-----

Continuing to lock horns with the Condo Board is a losing battle, I'm afraid, and it may be time to thank them for their time in considering your proposal.  You can still put colored lights in your windows, can't you?  As long as you keep them off the balcony you should be fine.  Condo ownership is interesting because you own the enclosed space but not the walls, floors, or ceilings.  Any modifications have to be approved by the Board, don't they?  I don't know how the rules and regulations of condo ownership work but it sounds like a pain in the ass to me.  The Board can make your life miserable, Uncle Ken, especially with their power to impose fines or liens and I don't think you want to get embroiled in anything that might eventually require a lawyer.  Where would you be if the board decides to double the monthly assessments of one-bedroom units where there are colored lights on the balcony and the owner has two cats?

-----

I only gave that article, that one about splitting Chicago from Illinois, a quick glance but it's too goofy of a notion for me to take seriously.  Urban areas need rural areas, and vice versa.  To think otherwise is foolish, in my opinion.  Are there hidden forces at play that have decided that it's a good idea to pit both sides against each other?  I don't doubt it one bit, it's like we are becoming socially and culturally Balkanized and thus, weakened.  I need to give this more thought and see how the money flows.

-----

The current schism in politics..

I like the usage of the word schism, a term frequently used in discussions of religion.  Modern political discourse has devolved into something very much like a religious war, and there is no middle ground.  Death to the non-believers!  And grab some matches; there are witches to burn.

town and country

I read that last month in the newspaper, surprised to see it still kicking around.  When I first moved down to Champaign, I had kind of a condescending attitude towards Champaign-Urbana.  Kind of a cute little town, little houses, set apart a bit, each one of them different, how unlike Chicago's bungalows chock a block and looking pretty much alike, and so small, in two hours of walking you would be in a cornfield.  Since I lived in a dorm on campus I didn't have much interaction with the citizen's of the town, but as I became a dropout and lived off campus about half my friends were locals,  Nice enough people, well they were my beer drinking buddies and what's not to like about a beer drinking buddy?

As I began to identify with Champaign I became a bit estranged from Chicago,  It was so crowded and noisy, and people were rude and quick spoken, and it seemed dangerous, all those murders in the pages of the Sun-Times.  When I had to return here in 1987 because I was dead broke one of my thoughts was will I ever get out of here alive.

Apparently not.  I love living here now right smack downtown in the heart of the hurly burly  If only there weren't so many sirens, I hasten to add that they are mostly ambulances and fire engines, hardly any police sirens. 

There are always movements in states where one side wants to split off, West Virginia comes to mind.  When I was in Champaign there was a movement in western Illinois to secede, they thought they weren't getting their fair share of the spoils,  If the rest of Illinois seceded from Chicago and the near suburbs there would soon be trouble between the exurbs and central and southern, and likely western Illinois. 

Anymore it's more of an urban rural thing, the rurals think the urbans are a bunch of crooked slickers and the urbans think the rurals are slow-thinking hicks,  And it's not too hard to see some racism in it too,  There is some talk of the cities bleeding the rural areas of dough but in almost all cases the cities are putting more into the pot and taking less out than the rural areas. 

The current schism in politics plays into it too, and Trump just makes the schism worse, but there is nothing good to come of the further Balkanization of the country and wiser heads see that and nothing is to come of those crackpots and their silly idea.

A Fearful Master

https://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/ct-life-illinois-state-secession-movement-0801-20190801-iesnu74ogvfjxfk35sn72lq7ya-story.html?fbclid=IwAR1Db2ECBWsdeGzJigpmXUwJ9Z4EK5_ZgS-vjnq64mi63zhGSzjeYW3vs8E

I found this link on Face Book last night.  I seem to remember that we have discussed this issue before, so I thought it might be interesting to my esteemed colleagues, especially since it's about their home town and state.  I have been saying for years that we should kick the cities of Southern Michigan out of our state.  Nobody has taken me seriously in the past, but maybe it's an idea whose time has come.  Indeed, according to the article, a couple of other states have introduced similar measures in their legislatures, and several others are thinking about doing so.  I found the article to be well balanced, looking at the pros and cons from several perspectives.

Uncle Ken, the logic of your argument about the Christmas lights is fine, but I would be surprised if you are able to win that way.  It's like some famous guy once said: "Government is not eloquence.  It is not reason.  It is force!  Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."