The Total Experience

The problem I have with sheath knives is I lose them.  I don't know where they go, but I've never had one last for more than a few trips.  The folding knife I use for deer hunting is a specialty tool.  It has three blades, one of which I don't use, but the two that I do use are perfect for the job.  One of them is actually a little saw, which I use to split the rib cage and the pelvis. There is more than one way to gut a deer, some people don't split the rib cage and the pelvis, but I prefer to because it makes the insides more accessible.  

Cleaning fish and game is not a pleasant job, but it goes with the territory.  Most people don't clean fish and small game until they get home or back to camp.  That's okay, assuming that you are going directly home, but not if you're going to stop at the bar for four hours on the way home, leaving your prize to ferment in the trunk of your car the whole time.  Deer and other big game are usually field dressed where they fall, and may even be skinned and quartered if they have to be packed out a long distance.  In this area, most hunters drag their deer to the nearest road or trail where they can pick it up with some kind of motor vehicle.  Field dressing reduces the weight, and also helps the meat to cool a bit while you go get your vehicle.  Once their deer is loaded onto their vehicle, many hunters take it to a professional butcher who will process it for a price, but I prefer to do it all myself.  For me, it's not just about killing things, I embrace the total experience.

Uncle Ken:  Like I said, I was not aware that the amount of white space at the end of a post could be controlled.  I know that now, but I still don't know how to do it.  

End of November

Good post about the fat doe, Mr. Beagles, but this city slicker has a question: Why a folding knife and not a proper hunting knife with a sheath?  No judgement, just curious.  Being unable to close the knife seems a little scary to me especially in a field situation.

No hunting in my background, but plenty of time fishing and bonding with my spirit animal, the mosquito.  Nothing fancy, usually just sitting in a boat with a cane pole waiting for the little red and white bobber to bob.  Good times, but scaling and cleaning fish is not a task I enjoyed.

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Another Thanksgiving Day is in the history book but the more I read about history I can see why some folks call it The Day of Mourning.  Anyhow, I felt like an outlaw in defiance of travel restrictions and went to my sister's home.  There were only six of us and there was plenty of social distancing.  It was another turkey-free day, with duck and chicken being the birds of choice.  I brought a couple of pies, alas, nothing home made.  Sara Lee's frozen Dutch Apple pie is surprisingly good.

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Speaking of history, today I learned that there was an assassination attempt on Harry S Truman in 1950.  A couple of Puerto Rican nationalists came damn close and I wonder why I never knew about this before today.  Have any of you guys ever heard about Oscar Collazo?  This was news to me but it's very possible I learned it at one time but it has slipped my memory.

 

 

monday morning housekeeping and commercials

There is white space and there is big white space.  I know Old Dog likes a little white space to follow his posts to sort of frame them I guess.  My watercolor buddies are wont of going on, after they have framed their latest work, about how much better it looks in a frame with a mat around it.  Myself I think it's still the same old painting, but I know I am in the minority on that.  

But the white space which I shortened was the size of the white space following Beagles's post Swamp Things of November 19.  It just seemed like wasted space.  That's all.  I won't mention it again.  

And I just now noticed that we have a comment from Free Tim Boxer Dog(?) on the 24th following Old Dog's Welcome Free Tim post.  The song of my youth, Dirty Water, calls attention to the banks of the River Charles which is surely what runs through Boston to the sea.  I expect most coastal cities (Chicago sometimes likes to refer to itself as the third coast) are situated on the mouths of rivers and hence are on swamps.  

Well commercials, the price we pay for watching  free tv, are universally hated by viewers because they are a bunch of freeloaders. If the company paid honest money to bring you that show, would not the honest viewer repay his debt by paying heed to the sponsor and perhaps in gratitude, buyimg the product?

Muting the commercials is only a half-hearted method of freeloading, you still have to watch it so as to know when it's over. and watch it closely so you won't miss a second once your show resumes.  

And tv is awfully crappy, well you get what you pay for.  Did I say pay for?  Well why not Netflix?  Ten bucks a month, 30 cents a day.  Not only do you get a smarter version of television, but all the commercials are gone.  It's not all that great, many of the sitcoms are just slightly better than regular tv, and those series that people rave about, and almost brag about spending the weekend totally binging on, I don't see it.  The first few episodes are often good but after that they are just stretching things out indefinitely, the same shit over and over.  The selection of movies is small, but there are usually about ten good ones at any given time.

I have succumbed. It makes those last two or three hours of the evening pass by smoothly, and I have come to forget what commercials are like.  

But last night I came across a regular tv channel that was showing a marathon of 30 Rock which was one of my faves back in the day, but unavailable on Netflix.  Suddenly commercials were back,  but you know I scarcely noticed them.  Sitting here this morning I cannot tell you what any of them were about.  I don't remember seeing Flo at all.  I did notice though that they were much louder than the shows.  It seems to me that there ought to be a law, and I think there was one, maybe two, and yet they are still as loud as ever.  

White Space?

 I never noticed that there was white space at the end of my posts.  I also didn't know that white space can be deleted.  How do you delete nothing?

We usually hit the "mute" button when the commercials come on TV.

I originally wrote that deer story for my daughter, but I was so pleased with it that I wanted to share it with my esteemed colleagues at the Institute.  I don't know about Tim, but I knew that my other two colleagues, being city slickers, have never experienced anything quite like that, and a little cross cultural diversity never hurt anyone.  Also, Uncle Ken tends to worry about me when I don't post for a few days, and I wanted to assure him that I was still alive and not mad at him.  

commercials

 Speaking of helpful hints for the blog, Beagles, when you finish your post the polite thing to do is to delete any white space at the end of your post.  There was like a screenful of white at the end of your last post and I have taken the liberty of deleting it.  

And that was some grisly post, but as a guy who is unwilling to give up his Italian beef sandwiches I guess I have nothing to say.  Nothing to add either however, we have no deer and no muck holes, let alone shittangles on State Street.  

We, well I, was  talking about auto insurance a couple posts back, and you know they all have funny commercials.  Myself I prefer Flo and her gang and I really don't get that stupid lizard.

Let's drop the boring topic of insurance and get into something more interesting like commercials.

If you grow a crop of corn, the canner is going to pay you cash on the barrelhead if he wants that corn, and the store is going to pay him to get the can, and if you want to take that can home with you you are going to pay the grocer.  If you put together a whale of a show, anybody who wants to see it is going to have to pay to get in the door.  But how do you get payment for that whale of a show if you put it on the radio?  How do you collect from the freeloaders who just dial in?  Commercials of course.  Now there had been advertising before radio but if you didn't want to read the Burma Shave signs you could just turn the other way.  A commercial you have to put up with all sixty seconds of it.  Oh you could plug your ears, but kind of a pain in the ass, and how do you know when it will end and your program will begin again?  So you might as well listen, or watch. since I have moved us into the age of television where we get those car insurance commercials.

Flo is with progressive, while the lizard is from Geico.  I find Flo much more entertaining than that lizard (why does he have that annoying English accent?  Isn't being a lizard enough?). but as to who has the better insurance program I have no idea.  

There is that whole thing about commercials during the superbowl, but a snob like me is not impressed.  They get big name stars and they do all this whiz bang stuff with special effects and production values, but the commercial itself, the story line as it were, never rises above the level of a Bud Lite commercial.  

And here is the thing if I want to buy a superior product, I would think that the company that had the smartest bosses would produce the best product.  And if they are spending all that money on something extraneous to oh, brewing their beer, that is money not spent on brewing the beer so it is likely to be inferior.  And some may say, well it's marketing, this is the smart way to get people to drink your beer, so you see they are smart after all.  Well, maybe so, but then don't they think that I am stupid falling for their stupid commercial?  I won't be drinking beer from some brewer who thinks that I'm stupid. 

The Big Fat Doe

 This happened on Tuesday, but I was too tired to write about it that evening.  I wrote this story yesterday and emailed it to my daughter.  I tried to copy and paste it to the Institute, but it got all glitchy on me.  I tried to make it work for long time, but finally gave up.  

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I must have dozed off because there were five deer in front of my blind, and I had no idea how they got there.  The closest one was about 10 yards out and walking straight towards me.  I almost didn't want to shoot it but, when it stopped and turned broadside, I decided it was a gift from the Deer Spirit and it would be ungrateful of me to not accept it.  

It was a good hit.  The deer was dead on its feet, but that didn't stop it from running 50 yards into the shittangles before collapsing in a muck hole.  I didn't want to work on it under those conditions, so I dragged it back to the clearing,  guts and all, collapsing in a couple of muck holes myself in the process.  It took me a good hour.  I don't like to rush a job like that, I like to savor every moment.

Did I mention that it was a big fat doe?  How big was it?  Probably not as big as the 10 point buck that I shot in 2011, but bigger than any other deer I have ever harvested.  How fat was it?  By the time I finished field dressing the deer my folding knife was so jammed up with fat that I couldn't close it.  Later, after skinning the deer with the same knife, I soaked it in dishwater for an hour and then still had to use toothpicks to clean the remaining fat out of the folding parts.  I must have used that knife on a dozen deer over the years, and I never before had it plug up with fat like that.  Unlike the fat of domestic livestock, deer fat doesn't enhance the flavor of the meat, so all that fat will have to be trimmed off or the meat will  taste tallowy.  

I like to skin my deer as soon as I get them home because the skin comes off easier when the meat is still warm, and it helps the meat to cool quicker, which does enhance its flavor.  By the time I got this big fat doe home, however, the meat was already pretty cool and the carcass was starting to stiffen up, so I lost that advantage.  I shot this big fat doe at 9:00 AM, and I finished working on it just in time to open a beer and watch the 6:00 o'clock news on TV.  I'm sure glad that I do this for fun because I would hate to have to work that hard for mere money.

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Free Tim:  Whenever you start a post and leave it without clicking on the "Publish" icon, it gets saved as a draft.  You can add to it or edit it any time, or you can just delete it and start over.  You can edit a post after you publish it, but then the "Publish" icon becomes an "Update" icon.  When you click on that it saves your changes to the already published post.

cars

 I spent much of my teenage years hanging out at the corner of 55th and Kedzie Avenue, smoking cigarettes and trying to look tough, and watching the cars go by, the cars, the cars, I loved the cars.  I knew every make and every year and most of the models,  They were  beautiful things then all chrome and fins and outlandish designs.

But I've only owned two cars in my life, when I was down in Herrin in southern Illinois in 1969 and I needed one to get around because it was a small town and I needed to drive back to Champaign to hang with my beer drinking buddies on days off.  The first one was a Corvair which, true to its rep blew a tire and flipped over, and the second one was a Ford Fairlane, in which I limped back to Champaign in 1971 when my CO was done and parked in a lot behind my apartment and let it die.

Maybe that was when no-fault insurance came in, I seem to remember the name and the brouhaha, but all that was over for me, insurance, gasoline, engine troubles, license plates, stickers, looking for a parking place, all that crap knocked into a cocked hat and booted far away never to darken my thoughts again.

Knocked into a cocked hat?  Apparently a cocked hat is one of those hats like the tea partiers used to don when they were in a festive mood, which are triangular, and then there was the game of skittles, some early form of bowling, and when your ball left a split in the form of a triangle which apparently was hard to convert, you might find yourself muttering "Damn, knocked that into a cocked hat."

I never really liked cars after that.  Noisy, smelly, dangerous, who needs them?  Not me. I liked to walk, later I had a bike, and if the situation was dire the bus system worked very well,  Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Now that I live downtown a car is even more useless.  It's a small fortune to rent a place to keep it when you are not slogging through heavy traffic. Garage fees seem exorbitant as does paying by the hour, and then there are those parking tickets,  Here is what a joyful innocent I am, I have no idea what a parking ticket costs.

Well that's just me.  I know if you live in a swamp, or if you have kids who have to be driven everywhere then you have to have a car, and likely the joy of living in a swamp or having kids outweighs the pain of having that hunk or metal wrapped around your neck.

So no real point here, it was just the talk of no-fault insurance reminded me of how glad I am to be outside of that and I just wanted to share my happiness.

Michigan No Fault

 In Michigan we have something called "no fault" auto insurance.  That means everyone is required to insure themselves.  It replaced something called "personal liability and property damage" insurance, way back in the 1970s if memory serves.  With no fault, your own insurance company pays you regardless of who is determined to be at fault in an accident.  I think you can still sue the other guy if he is determined to be at fault, but that's over and above what your own insurance pays you.  No fault was supposed to be cheaper, I suspected that it wouldn't be and voted against it, but they passed it anyway.  Sure enough, insurance premiums went up soon after no fault was passed, and they have continued to go up ever since.  Of course some of that is due to general inflation, but not all of it. The good news is that, if you are hit by an uninsured motorist, it doesn't affect your payout. There must be lots of uninsured motorists out there because newspaper accounts commonly include "no proof of insurance" in the list of charges when they report a driver getting ticketed for something else.  Another common infraction reported is "driving with a suspended license".  

The difference between insuring your auto and insuring your health is the roads are owned by the government and your body is not, at least not yet.  They keep telling us that driving is a privilege not a right.  I don't know if health care was ever considered a privilege, but many people nowadays consider it to be a right, and I tend to agree with them.  I think health care is more comparable to police and fire protection than it is to driving.  We are not required by the government to insure ourselves against crime and fire, although we have the option of doing so if we want to.  Health care could be like that, with the government providing a certain basic level of protection, leaving people the option of buying additional protection if they want to.  Let's face it, rich people are always going to be better off than poor people, but I don't see anything wrong with the government providing a safety net for the poor, as long as they don't make us all poor in the process.   

I'm not in the mood to write a bio right now, maybe later.

Swamp things

Welcome to the New Guy!  I've noticed that my colleagues call him "Free Tim" but since his Blogger profile says "FreeTim," I will use that.  I like the sound of "Mr. Tim" too, so maybe I will use that once in a while instead.

What is it about swamps, anyhow?  Three of us are from Chicago, a city  originally built on a swamp.  Mr. Beagles lives among the swamps of northern Michigan, and now I see that FreeTim resides near the briny marshland of the Baker Hill area, awfully close to the Atlantic Ocean.  And he has wild turkeys wandering nearby, something to think about as Thanksgiving approaches.

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I scoured the web for like ten solid minutes and i could not find that $250 a dose anywhere.

Haw, Haw, Haw!  Perhaps the humor was too subtle, but go back and read that paragraph again.  Everything after "What if..." was intended to be an increasingly absurd bit of hyperbole.  Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't but I'm surprised that anyone would take it seriously.

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And hey guys, where are those bios.

Saving it for my memoirs.

 

 

becoming a hero by being a burden

 About those mandates, I always thought that car insurance was a good comparison.  If you don't have insurance and you get into an accident I believe you are in big trouble, and in trouble too if you get pulled over for the proverbial faulty tail light.  You never hear anybody complain about the state mandating that all drivers carry insurance, and that is because nobody wants to get into an accident with somebody who has no insurance and are likely not to pay their share of the damages to your automobile.

As we all know if you have no insurance and end up in the hospital likely you won't be paying your bills, so that everybody else will have to pick up those bills.  Does that sound right?

Well then how does a mandate, seeking to recover that money sound so bad?  Why is that so terribly onerous?  The cost was less than actually getting insurance, but high enough so that any reasonable person would just buy the insurance so that at least then they would have insurance if they ended up in a hospital and not have to suffer the shame of being a burden on their fellow citizens.

But somehow those who were a burden on their fellow citizens were looked upon as heroes or at least victims of the state by the rabid anti Obamacare forces just for exercising their god-given right of being a burden on everybody else.  

Go figure.

bathrooms and where are those bios?

 I found another comment from Free Tim.  This was in reply to a post from Tim that I found following a September 13th 2017 post of mine titled Arguing like a Beagle.  I would suggest that Free Tim just comment on current posts because we don't always remember what we were talking about 3 years ago.  Even as I speak he is being promoted to a Fellow so he can post directly so that shouldn't be happening again.  But since he did take the effort to make that comment I will post that here again.

Well, some would say why are two bathrooms even still A Thing, in most homes there is one bathroom and everyone uses it it's not A Thing, until then those same parents get together to fund a school and suddenly it's suddenly segregation by apparent-gender and Woe To Any Kid who happens to look a little like the other gender. The Third Bathroom thing is to give some kids safety from being picked on, I get that and it feels like a good thing. Aren't the parents "solving" a problem they created with the two-bathrooms thing?

Say, why not just have one, huge, bathroom for all the kids in the first place and simply put toilets (not urinals) in it? There would be more space for everyone due to not needing three sets of door entries. Toilet stalls typically have doors, the kids could just close their individual door while peeing. Just let them pee!
My utility box has an icon of a wrench on the outside of it, because inside there are... wrenches. Why do we put icons of humans (instead of icon of a toilet) on the outside of restrooms?

Food for thought, I'm not a school teacher I'm sure they'd have a different angle on it.

btw THIS posting has a comment on it. :) cheers , FreeTim

I remember back in the early seventies back before the transgender wars as a bow to women's rights all the hip bars went to having unisex bathrooms, just because having separate johns was considered sexist.  It wasn't really any problem and that still goes on in like the very pc coffeshop I used to visit every Saturday morning before my watercolor class.

I guess it gets to be more of a problem in places like train stations where you have to serve a lot of people.  My sister says that in Europe all big bathrooms are unisex with the toilets like in separate rooms.  Myself I love those urinals that are packed with ice but you hardly ever see that anymore, and I would prefer urinals to bowls, but I guess I could get along without them just to get along.

As a substitute teacher I have plenty of stories about taking the kids to the bathroom, but I will leave them for now.

And hey guys, where are those bios.  If you guys don't write them yourselves, I will write them for you.  

Medical Discounts

 "I wonder about Beagles getting that 20 percent discount on his hospital bill because he had no insurance.  As we all know insurance companies make deals with hospitals so that they actually pay quite a bit less than that number on your bill.  So if the insurance company pays less than full price and the uninsured pay 20 percent less, who pays full price?" - Uncle Ken

To be fair, this happened 12 years ago.  The hospital in question has since gone bankrupt under suspicious circumstances and was bought out by a big conglomerate chain that turned it into an outpatient clinic.  If you need to stay overnight, they ship you to their big hospital in Petoskey.  I would be surprised if I went there today and was offered the same deal.  Somebody told me at the time that the reason they gave uninsured patients a discount was that they saved a lot of paper work and didn't have to wait as long for their money.  As for my dentist, he did a lot of work on both of us back when we still had insurance from the paper mill.  We went to him for over 40 years and, since he retired, have been dealing with his daughter who took over the practice.  Maybe those discounts were a reward for customer loyalty.

Since we have been on Medicare, we have noticed on bills from different doctors that they  sometimes accept the 80% as full payment and don't charge the 20% copay.  There used to be a chiropractor in town who did the same thing with other insurance programs, but he moved to Arizona a long time ago.

The wife of a friend of mine survived a bout with cancer some years ago.  Last I heard, they were still paying the bills in monthly installments.  The only difference between that and insurance is that, with insurance, you pay the monthly installments before you get sick and,  if you never get sick, they still keep your money.

 

Uncle Ken's bio

 The individual mandate originated in the Heritage Foundation, and was part of Romneycare, back when he seemed to be a decent person, which he stopped being when he ran for prez, but now he seems to be becoming again.  He wears a coat of many colors.

If people were so poor that they can't afford insurance then they could get medicaid or their insurance would be so heavily subsidized that they could afford it.  The people it mainly went after were those people who could well afford it. but were skating because they gambled that nothing would happen to them.

I wonder about Beagles getting that 20 percent discount on his hospital bill because he had no insurance.  As we all know insurance companies make deals with hospitals so that they actually pay quite a bit less than that number on your bill.  So if the insurance company pays less than full price and the uninsured pay 20 percent less, who pays full price?

I was kind of hoping that we would be writing short bios because now we have a new guy.  I'll start with my own, though I tend to be pretty loquacious (anybody who uses the word loquacious, you have to know that they are loquacious) so this may go on a little longer than it should, but you know i love the sound of my own voice.

I was born in Chicago in 1945, the son of a Hoosier son of a chicken farmer and a city slicker Bohunk from Berwyn.  Had a normal and pretty pleasant childhood.  When I went to high school I had many classes with Beagles though i don't think we ever hung out together after school. 

Went to college at the University of Illinois where I just squeaked by because I was a big beer drinking goofball.  Dodged the draft for awhile and ended up getting a CO which I served in southern Illinois.  Bartended and drank a lot of beer for a long while, thinking somehow I would become a writer. 

When it became apparent that that was not going to happen I went to the local junior college and got a data processing certificate.  When that didn't get me a job I sought my fortune in Austin Texas.  Got a pretty good job, but I thought I could do better so I quit and then discovered that not only could I not do better, but that I could not get any other job at all, and returned dead broke to live in the attic of my parents' house in Chicago.

Got a pretty good job being the computer guy at a tiny state agency, where after ten years I once again thought I could do better, and it turned out that I couldn't.  I had a variety of short jobs that didn't work out and temp jobs, and for the last seven years until I retired I was a substitute teacher.

Somewhere along the line maybe ten years ago I got to thinking about Beagles.  Back in 1963 it was a big deal to go to college, not that many people did and if you got the chance you should certainly take it.  When Beagles, who did well in school, declared he was not going to college it shocked the school.  I didn't agree with what he did, but I rather admired him for going against the grain.

His sister had been a waitress when I was tending bar at the Chinese restaurant in Champaign and when I reconnected with her back when everybody was reconnecting on facebook I asked about her brother and she gave me his email and his facebook page, and we started corresponding.  I am a bleeding heart liberal, but other bleeding heart liberals bore me because they already believe what i believe so I like to talk to conservatives (not at the level of calling each other names, but more analytical, like why do you believe what you believe), and we began exchanging emails on politics. and sometimes other subjects crept in.  In order to preserve our deathless prose Beagles went to blogspot and got the blog and it has been running ever since. 

My hobby is watercolors and one day in class one of the women said that i ought to show my paintings at the Ten Cat.  Ten who?  But it turned out it was a north side bar and when I called them timorously asking if I could put my paintings in their windows they said sure.  When I asked them if they didn't want to see them first they said Naw, so that's the kind of quality control that they had.

I had longed for a Friday night bar since I had left Champaign and the Ten Cat became that.  I became pretty good friends with Old Dog and when I told him about the blog he was interested and he became the third Fellow of The Institute.

That's my story I encourage other Fellows to do the same, though if you want to keep it shorter than I have, well that would be fine.

Welcome to Free Tim

 Glad to have you aboard.  This forum has been in need of new blood for some time.  It seem hard to believe that Uncle Ken and I have been doing this for ten years, but we have.  Funny, we weren't that close in high school, but by now I cherish his friendship, even though we often disagree.  

After the paper mill closed, my wife and I were without health insurance for about seven years.  Then we had it when I worked for the schools, and then we didn't have it for about four years after that.  The only severe health crisis we had was in 2008 when I came down with a bleeding ulcer and was hospitalized for several days, two of them in intensive care.  I was retired, but not on Medicare yet.  What with follow up visits and some expensive dental work, our health care costs added up to almost $20,000 for the year.  I don't remember what the cost of insurance premiums would have been if we had it, but I remember calculating at the time that we paid our medical bills with the money we saved by not having insurance for those four years.  We got a 20% discount from the hospital because we didn't have insurance, and a 10% discount on most of the other bills by paying them as soon as they came in.  Our dentist routinely gave us breaks on his work for the same two reasons although, come to think of it, this has not been the case since he retired and turned the practice over to is daughter a few years ago.  We never asked for any of those discounts, they just gave them to us of their own volition. 

Back in my paper mill days, I still believed that They were all in it together, companies, unions, governments, and any other institutions that were always telling people what to do.  I figured that, since They were the ones that wanted us to have insurance, They should pay for it.  

 "Charity wards?  Why not bring back the poorhouse?" - Uncle Ken

I have heard bad things about both charity wards and poor houses, but at least people were taken care of in those days.  What do you want for free?

Free Tim's first post

 I  went back and found this comment from Free Tim yesterday.  Since those comments are tiny things on blogspot I am putting it into a regular post.  

I'm a bit on the fence about ACA (Obamacare) being mandated because if someone can't afford the cost of the lowest insurance they likely can't afford the fine/ penalty either, so why punish the poor for being poor? On the other hand, ACA has been a lifesaver for many to be able to afford insurance, and the website has helped literally millions easily find insurance, perhaps all the arguing about ACA has only helped the visibility, to their benefit because then they hear about it and at least go check it out.


[ Here is my PSA the site is healthcare.gov ]

The health care system itself is ridiculously expensive compared to those of other countries and is a bit rigged towards the insurance companies where the uninsured pay a lot more (sometimes more than double) and the cost of seemingly small things (soap for surgeons hand washing as one example) is hugely expensive.

Personally feel lucky at the moment to have workplace health insurance, but retiring soon and then I'll no doubt be among those looking into it more deeply. COBRA only lasts so long and then runs out.

Some may think why have insurance at all "I'm healthy," they'll think. or worse, "I'm young I don't need it."
Well, ... I broke my leg once sledding due to my own grandstanding and lack of skill I was standing up "surfing" on the sled... true story!, and it was $5,000.oo for the medical due to it breaking in a non-normal way. I'm fine it was many years ago now, but let me tell you I was highly anxious at that bill until I read the bottom line - Patient Balance = 0

For context it was in the early 1980s, today it'd be 15,000.oo

 

A new Fellow at the Institute. Welcome Tim

 For the sake of the argument I meant what we had when Obama took office.  Actually I could go back probably to our childhoods.  Beagles liked it better when his company paid the full fare (but of course that was a cost for the company so that was figured into his pay so he was actually paying for it).  And of course a lot of people went uninsured, but Beagles is principally only interested in how things are going for him.  

I am pretty skeptical about the kindly country doctor.  Surely there were some, but likely their were others who were not so kindly.  Charity wards?  Why not bring back the poorhouse?

But anyway I am going to take Beagles' answer for a yes.  Thank you very much and I will close my argument.

And I have big news.  I have emailed that commenter, and he has mailed me back and he is willing to give it a try. I asked if I could announce this and he has responded: 

Sure if you like, and I look forward to hearing any background you care to share.  You sound like an interesting group to bat around well-reasoned ideas.  I'll do my best to keep up in an interesting way, but you all have been at this writing-sharing for quite some time and I'm out of practice.  :)

 

Greetings from Boston, where I live with my love Sabrina (we've been together 16 years, although not married) and Kensie, 10 years old and our rescued 6-year old Boxer dog, "Rocky", who is very new to us (two weeks) but is working out very well and is keeping us in top physical shape with all the dog walking and play tug-of-war games.      Tim

 Welcome to The Institute Tim.  Right now you are just in the comments section, but we will find a way to get you into full fellowship.  I suggest you select an Institute name such as Beagles, Old Dog, and Uncle Ken, but you can remain Tim if you like.

Myself I live in downtown Chicago, I am retired and never married but I have a couple of cats.  Beagles was in my class in high school in Chicago.  I hadn't seen him since then, but maybe ten years ago we began exchanging letters and after two or three years of that we established the blog,  Maybe three years ago I recruited the guy on the next barstool at the Ten Cat Tavern and that is Old Dog,

I now call on my Fellows to give whatever short bio they want to.

And guys, let's keep an eye on the comment section.

It Depends

  "Is Obamacare better than what we had before it?" - Uncle Ken

That depends on how far back you want to go.  Obamacare without the individual mandate is probably better than what we had immediately before it.  I expect, however, that the individual mandate will be restored by the Democrats the first chance they get.  What we had a few decades before that was better yet.  That was when the Company paid the whole insurance premium and we paid nothing.  When I first started at the paper mill, the Company paid half and we paid half.  We eventually got the Company to pay three quarters and, finally, all of it.  We only had that for a few years, and then it started going back the other way.  

Although it was before our time, I have been told that it was even better before health insurance was invented.  Larger counties had a charity hospital, like your own Cook County has even unto this day.  Many of the smaller counties had a charity ward or a charity wing in their local hospitals.  To be sure, it was no frills health care, but it was free.  Small town doctors would often treat poor people for free, making up the difference by charging their paying customers a little more.  I have heard that some country doctors would even take a chicken or a bushel of potatoes for payment but, while that may be just folklore, it should have been true.  Of course, most people were more honest in those days and paid their bills eventually if they possibly could.  My wife's parents were unable to pay for the birth of one of their children until years later.  The doctor had since retired, but they tracked him down and payed their bill.  

The way I remember the maggot thing is that maggots will only eat dead tissue, not living tissue.  The maggot cure was indicated if you had gangrene or something like that and proper medical care was not available, like in a POW camp.  I don't remember the pissing treatment, but I suppose it would be better than nothing if clean water was not available.  It wouldn't disinfect the wound, but it might flush out dirt or powder residue that would lead to infection if left in there.  

This just in:

https://a.msn.com/r/2/BB1b8TVM?m=en-us&referrerID=InAppShare

Bitterroot Valley pizza distribution

 You military dawgs might be surprised to learn that your peacenik brother had experience with the military other than dodging the draft.  When I entered the U of I in 1963 ROTC was mandatory for all male students.  They dropped it at the beginning of the next year but still I had a full year of it including drilling and polishing my brass and having to salute pricks.

It was in one of those classes that the instructor (what a choice gig teaching on a college campus) told us if we were ever wounded and the medics weren't around the thing to do was to grab a handful of maggots and stuff them into the wound and when they had eaten their fill wipe them off and piss on it to disinfect your wound.  So you see I know a lot of that military stuff.

The closest I ever got to big sky country was maybe an hour and a half in the southeast corner of Nebraska.  Shithole was the wrong word, I meant something more like pissant.  Not pissant in the sense of its scenery and those wild Montana Skies like in the John Denver song and the bold hearts of those rugged outdoorsishly handsome people, but just that there aren't that many of them.  I did some rough math and a citizen of Montana gets a vote and a half to my single vote, not that big an edge Old Dog might think, but if we are splitting a pizza and the big sky guy is getting 3 slices to my 2. I will be pissed.  And when his buddy from Wyoming comes along and gets 3 to my 1 I will be really pissed.

And for all that, it's not the worst part of the electoral college as is the winner take all nature of it.  California and New York went to the dems in a landslide and Texas went to the reps in a squeaker.  The popular vote in these three states is way different than how the electoral votes were meted out.

And where is Old Dog's American fighting spirit?  Where is his sense of you can't fight men who want to be free?  Does he survey the paltry army of the citizenry with its slingshots and baseball bats and compare that to the insurance company's vast weaponry of sleek tanks and mighty cannons and conclude that we have no chance, and just shove his hands in his pockets and slink away?  If the founding fathers shared that sentiment we would be calling trucks lorries, and wastebaskets dustbins and watching stupid soccer instead of the great American Pastime.

I scoured the web for like ten solid minutes and i could not find that $250 a dose anywhere.  There hasn't been a lot of talk about the cost, but it is surely going to be much lower, if not free, via the government because this is something you want everybody to take because otherwise it is ineffective.  Obviously we can't know about long term effects of the vaccine but we are pretty sure about the short term effects of the covid on us old folks. 

There's this thing we see a lot in those congressional hearings where the questioner bears down on the questioned with the thundering cannon, "a very simple question Mr Jones Yes or No.   And it's kind of bogus because you can frame the question where the Mr Jones gets hammered no matter how he answers. 

Well kindly Uncle Ken would never resort to such skullduggery, but I do want to ask Beagles a simple yes or no question.  Is Obamacare better than what we had before it?

PS, just now invited the commentator Free Tim to take part in the blog, waiting to hear from him.

Hurry Up and Wait

 We used to do a lot of that in the army.  They would tell us to hurry up to get somewhere and get ready for something that often times happened much later, or not at all.  During one of those long waits, somebody shouted out in frustration, "Let's do something even if it's wrong!"  It was a good joke, but that's all it was, a joke.  Doing a wrong thing instead of nothing at all is no way to win a battle or to accomplish anything worthwhile even in the real world.  I think that's what Obamacare was all about, doing something even if it's wrong.  Obama was so intent on doing something about healthcare that he was willing to accept any compromise, even if it ran contrary to his original purpose, which allegedly was top make healthcare more affordable.

Trump's plan was no better.  He was working with a Congress dominated by Republicans who were elected on the promise of repealing Obamacare but, instead of repealing it, he tried to patch it up and re-brand it as Trumpcare.  No wonder he couldn't get Congress to go along with it.  The only good thing that came out of it was the repeal of the individual mandate, or so I thought.  Now I find out that the mandate was not repealed, the penalty for violating it was just reduced to zero.  So now we have a law with no teeth in it, subject to being restored with dental implants by the next administration.  They might have been better off leaving the mandate in place, since it was the most unpopular part of Obamacare, which might eventually have motivated a future Congress to repeal the whole package.  

I've said it before and I'll say it again, insurance is not part of the solution, it's a big part of the problem.  

Between the lines

I would have thought that the reps would be glad to have this stinking blob of rotting meat taken off their necks but instead they are clinging to it like what they truly are, a bunch of maggots.

Interesting choice of words, Uncle Ken, and they may mean more than you intended.  If you have gangrene, maggots may be exactly what you need in order to remove the rotting flesh, leaving only healthy tissue behind.  Maggot therapy is a real thing but you will need a doctor's prescription if you want to order any hygienic maggots; they are surprisingly expensive.  Will the metaphorical maggots improve the health of the body politic?  Only time will tell.

-----

Those shithole states like Montana don't want the popular vote because they know they have an edge in choosing the president and they want to keep it that way.

Montana a shithole state?  Is that an informed opinion based on the time you've spent in Big Sky Country?  I didn't realize that their three electoral votes gave them such an edge, but good for them.

-----

I should be following health care issues more closely, I know, but I don't see the point.  On one side you have the welfare of the citizenry and on the other side you have the combined forces of the medical profession, pharmaceutical giants, insurance companies, and the legal profession.  Follow the money and see where it leads and in whose pockets it ends up in.  It seems to me that the outlook is bleak.

-----

A lot of hooplah lately about vaccines for Covid-19; two or three of them are supposed to be more than 90% effective but I'm a little wary.  I'd like more assurances about long term effectiveness and possible side effects.  What if it turns out the vaccines work but you have to take a new dose once a month for the rest of your life or you will suffer major organ failure?  Miss one dose and you die within a week.  Oh yeah, the cost has gone up a little but it's still only $250/dose.  Such a bargain!

a much better plan than no plan

 Of course you are against Obamacare.

 It has brought coverage to about 20 million Americans, allowed children to stay on their parents' health plans up to age 26 and provided free preventive care and contraception to millions of people, among other provisions. Among its most popular measures are its strong protections for those with preexisting conditions.

Obviously you would prefer that plan Trump had which even now I expect he is ready to unveil in a couple weeks, or maybe the plan of the reps, to whom you show your fealty everytime you go to the polls. who in the eight years they held the presidency did nada.  And whose then leader, Moscow Mitch, declared in the first days after Obama was elected that his main purpose was to see that Obama was not reelected, and fought him tooth and nail at every turn, so that in order to get anything at all done he had to consort with the slimy tentacles of the insurers.

Oh and here is a big reveal, one I hadn't expected when I hopped in the googlecopter, repealing it would cut the taxes on the rich. Surprise surprise, another 'grass roots' movement is revealed to be funded by rich guys.  Here is the link to the article which also contains the previous paragraph: https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/07/politics/affordable-care-act-obamacare-tax-cut-rich/index.html

Was that only nine days ago when I heard  Wolff declare that the orange witch was dead, and I felt that peace that passeth understanding, and wrote something to the effect that now I could drop, at least for a time, the subject of politics that had often made me so apocalyptic and red-faced in the past?  Well that was because I foolishly had not realized that he would just deny it happened and not move his fat ass off the throne. and that the reps in the main would go along with the lie.  My peace no longer passeth understanding.

But I am glad that Beagles read the excerpt from Obama's book.  The man is a very good writer,  I have never read any of those presidential books, but I will be buying this one, when it comes out in paperback.

Links Are Good

 I didn't mind reading that long article about the possibilities of a contested election.  It's just that I figured I had gotten enough out of it by the time I had read it halfway through.  The author certainly has done his homework, and seems to have covered all the bases.  I also read the Obama article all the way through, and found it interesting to view the issue from the other side.  Nevertheless, I'm still against it.

links

 I didn't mean for Beagles to read the whole article from Washington Post (not Loyola) that was just a reference to where I got those two paragraphs from.  I should have put them into italics like I usually do.  The link was just to say where they come from in case you wanted to check up on them.  

I totally agree that it is not likely to happen.  I know the recounts will show nothing.  I know the lawsuits are baseless.  I do worry a little bit about Trumpists throwing up a shitstorm and somehow in the aftermath there will be Trump with his smug grin, or more likely Moscow Mitch with his sly one.  I worry about that less now that several republican office holders have come out in favor of letting Biden have that security briefing, though one still has to wonder about all of them avoiding admitting that Biden won the election,

What Canada has is the single payer.  What Obama wanted to slip in towards the end was the public option where the govt joins in the market place for insurance and because it does not need to turn a profit is the cheapest, and therefore almost nobody is going to choose any other insurer and that is likely to drive all insurance companies out of business so you end up with single payer which is what Canada has. 

I was going to copy the whole article into a post to make it easier reading, but there are all these photos and blogspot goes crazy when you add alien formatting to its posts and after about an hour I am going to have to admit that I could not make that work,  

It is an excerpt from Obama's upcoming book, and there is some irrelevant stuff.  He probably makes himself look too good like we all do when we write about ourselves but he freely admits that he made mistakes along the way.  He is a good writer, so it is well-written, and it gives a pretty good explanation about how Obamacare came to be.  

I urge you to at least give it a try.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/11/02/barack-obama-new-book-excerpt-promised-land-obamacare

I Stand Corrected

 Uncle Ken told me to spend five minutes with the Google Machine, which I did, and that's what I came up with.  Now he gives me several other links to read.  I spent about an hour reading about half of the first one, the one from Loyola, then I skipped ahead to the closing paragraph.  That's all I have the energy for tonight.  The other links will have to wait, if I live long enough, and I am no spring chicken anymore.  At this point, I am willing to concede that Uncle Ken was right about the possibility of a contested election leading to electoral chaos and a constitutional crisis.  Of course, as an wise old philosopher once said,  "All things are possible, but not all things are bloody likely."  Nevertheless, a possibility is a possibility, and should be recognized as such.

I don't believe I've ever said that Obamacare didn't go far enough.  What I did say was that it was a sweetheart deal for the insurance companies.  The individual mandate was the worst part of it, and now that's gone, so the rest of it is probably better than nothing, but not much.  My preference would be something like what they have in Canada, but I don't think that's ever been seriously proposed.  Another option might be free government run hospitals, like the one they have in Cook County.  Small rural counties would never be able to afford something like that, so it would have to be done on the state or federal level.  

how obamacare came to be

But state legislatures that conclude the popular-vote total has somehow been corrupted could claim the constitutional authority to submit competing slates of pro-Trump electors and ask Congress to accept that result instead. That radical move would set up a potential clash between the House, with its Democratic majority, and the Senate, which is likely to remain in Republican hands. This bicameral breakdown would create electoral chaos and a constitutional crisis.

On Thursday, as Trump’s electoral college prospects dimmed, Donald Trump Jr. retweeted conservative commentator Mark Levin: "REMINDER TO THE REPUBLICAN STATE LEGISLATURES, YOU HAVE THE FINAL SAY OVER THE CHOOSING OF ELECTORS.” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) signaled potential support in an appearance on Fox News’s Sean Hannity. “Everything should be on the table,” Graham said. 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/11/06/state-legislatures-electoral-college-steal/

This took a bit of searching, but it's not as simple as that seems.  There are challenges that could be made and lawsuits suited and etc.

And you would think doing fancyasspants crap like that would enrage the American populace.  But on the rep side you see very little outrage at the current behavior of the prez, and last I heard 70 percent of the reps think the election was dishonest.

Here is a very long but very interesting story about Obamacare from Obama himself.  Beagles has often complained that Obamacare has not gone far enough and this will explain why it has not.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/11/02/barack-obama-new-book-excerpt-promised-land-obamacare

Looking Stuff Up

Here's the article I read the other day about Colorado joining the Popular Vote Compact:

https://a.msn.com/r/2/BB1aHEmU?m=en-us&referrerID=InAppShare

"There was one possible maneuver that has worried me.  A state government can decide, for whatever reasons, they don't think that their primary was run fairly and choose their own slate of delegates, but I just heard that this won't work because it is the house that decides whether to seat the primary or state-determined slate." - Uncle Ken - 11/10/20

 "I have not confused the primary with general election.  Declaring an election invalid and replacing the slate with one chosen by the governor is a real thing.  I have heard it discussed several times, and at least one Trumpist office holder, whose name slips my memory at the moment, has proposed it,  I suggest Beagles to go to the google machine for five minutes." - Uncle Ken - 11/11/20 

Here's what I found about that:

https://www.sacbee.com/opinion/article243441296.html

I believe the headline is misleading.  As the article says, the state legislature can choose their state's electors any way they want, but it doesn't say they can change them after the election.  The reason all the states presently choose their electors by a vote of the people is that their state legislators have passed a law to that effect sometime in the past.  If any of them chose to rescind that law and replace it with a different one, it would only affect future elections, not past ones.  "I'm not so wise as the lawyer guys but, strictly between us two", I don't think they can change something like that retroactively.

https://www.bing.com/search?q=ex+post+facto+constitution&form=WNSGPH&qs=AS&cvid=2f31703f691c4f0ea0aa0a487420e787&pq=ex+post+facto&cc=US&setlang=en-US&PC=ACTS&nclid=112F4104AA060A8DBBE75F4DA3C1C065&ts=1605152866298&elv=AXK1c4IvZoNqPoPnS%21QRLOPePz2Z2Er857j4YTYw8RNAcvB3tdJOQ%217E5P52wNVDYgAl3UVc4SiBch9UIAHOSSGqKOciNsZAAFLdYCnZEghO&wsso=Moderate

I used to get email alerts whenever a comment was posted on our forum, I would then mark anything that looked suspicious as "spam".  For some reason, those alerts stopped a long time ago, leading me to believe that we hadn't gotten any comments lately.  At Uncle Ken's suggestion, I checked the comments section tonight and saw that was not the case.  While I still believe most of them are spam, I have no objection if either of my esteemed colleagues wants to sort through them looking for a keeper.  

life in the comments section

 I have not confused the primary with general election.  Declaring an election invalid and replacing the slate with one chosen by the governor is a real thing.  I have heard it discussed several times, and at least one Trumpist office holder, whose name slips my memory at the moment, has proposed it,  I suggest Beagles to go to the google machine for five minutes.  

But like I said it is not a credible threat, but the Trumpists don't care.  They are just shooting off their mouths to please the MAGA hatted horde and rile the Georgians to a fever pitch to get at least one senator, and probably two out of the deal.  Already both candidates have called for the resignation of their republican secretary of state because he allowed a fair election to take place.  

That thing about the state giving all its electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote has been around for at least ten years now.  I don't see it going anywhere for some time.  Those shithole states like Montana don't want the popular vote because they know they have an edge in choosing the president and they want to keep it that way.

So anyway I was watching a Universe rerun and the subject was life on other planets and they were talking about all these planets that have been discovered but none of them is a likely candidate for our carbon based kind of life.  Actually I think it was dated because I think we have discovered better looking candidates since then.

And as long as we are looking at life on other planets how about life in the recesses of the comments section?  Old Dog did a voyage of discovery a year or two ago, but yesterday I took an excursion into the forbidden forest and there have been a lot more visitors since them.  Some are just some form of ad, and some of them are too peculiar to know what they are, but some appear to be legitimate readers with something to say.  I have long wanted to see The Institution expand beyond its current three crusty characters and would like to try to contact some of these people and invite them into the hallowed halls.  What say you Fellows of The Institute?

To see them all you have to do is click on that new post thing and on the next screen is a list of options on the left side, one of which is comments and if you click on that you will see them.  

It doesn't have to be me, if either of the dawgs wants to explore I welcome them to do it.

Not to Worry

 Uncle Ken, you seem to have the primary confused with the general election.  While it is true that the Constitution doesn't tell the states how to choose their electors, if a state wants to change the way they choose their electors, they have to do it before the election, not after.  The only state that I know of that does it differently is Nebraska.  They apportion their five electors in proportion to how the vote turns out.  For example, if Trump won by a narrow margin in Nebraska, he would get three electors while Biden would get two.  To the best of my knowledge, all the other states give all their electoral votes to whoever wins the state popular vote.

  That said, their is no federal law that requires an elector to vote for the candidate to which he is pledged, although I read somewhere that some states have passed such a law and the Supreme Court has ruled that they can do that.  Faithless electors are extremely rare, but not unheard of.  I believe the most recent case involved a guy in Utah who switched sides and voted for Reagan back in the '80s.  

Just the other day I read about a movement afoot that would effectively nullify the electoral college.  Colorado passed a ballot proposal that would give all of their electoral votes to whoever wins the national popular vote.  A number of other states have already passed this, but it won't go into effect unless enough states pass it to guarantee 270 electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote, which hasn't happened yet.  

a wee bit worried

 As you know CNN is on here from waking to sleeping, I read several; political websites, two newspapers and a couple of magazines and every one of them tells me there is no way, despite Trump's wriggling and spitting, he is not going to be getting the boot in January.  There was one possible maneuver that has worried me.  A state government can decide, for whatever reasons, they don't think that their primary was run fairly and choose their own slate of delegates, but I just heard that this won't work because it is the house that decides whether to seat the primary or state-determined slate.

I would have thought that the reps would be glad to have this stinking blob of rotting meat taken off their necks but instead they are clinging to it like what they truly are, a bunch of maggots.

So yeah I am a little worried. 

Dangerous Dan McGrew

I'm pretty sure that Dangerous Dan was playing solitaire, and that there was no money involved at this point.  Later, the mysterious stranger "tilted a poke of dust on the bar and called for drinks for the house", but this story is about much more than money.  I could have quoted the whole poem from memory, but it was easier to provide a link to it.

 https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45082/the-shooting-of-dan-mcgrew

Monday Muttering

The COVID crisis hit close to home when my brother-in-law died of the virus yesterday.

I'm sorry to hear that, Mr. Beagles.  It's a little awkward for a relative stranger to offer condolences in such a personal matter but it's all I got; my deepest sympathies to the Beagles family.

-----

It ain't over 'till it's over and it ain't over yet.   I think we have to wait until December, that's when the electoral college closes the door on this mess.  But who knows for sure?  There could be some obscure loop hole that will throw everything back to the legislature or courts.  Anyone who tries to predict Trump's behavior is playing a sucker's game, I think.  He is apt to say or do anything, and I mean anything, just to see what happens in the hope of saving his bacon.  The specter of pending prosecutions looms large and we are still in for quite a ride.

-----

I wasn't aware of the connection between O. Winston Link and the Norfolk & Western Railroad until Uncle Ken mentioned it.  There was an exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College back in 1986, "O. Winston Link: Ghost Trains, Railroads of the 1950’s" and that was where I first saw his work.  Beautiful prints, maybe 16" x 20" with plenty of detail.  My favorite photo was the image looking out of the window of this lady's living room, with a big steam locomotive a little too close for comfort, in my opinion.  But Hester Fringer was not in the least bit disturbed.

Final locomotive fun fact: prior to a 1938 record-breaking speed run in England, the engineers of the Mallard added aniseed to the bearing lubricating oil in order to produce a "nasal" warning if bearings overheated.  Clever chaps, wot?

a brand new week

 I've reread those last couple posts about my reaction to the election and I don't get what was so hard to understand.  I went to bed that night in the dumps because I felt that we were going to lose the election, moped around the next morning with CNN in the background of my activities, and then they said that Wisconsin had turned blue.  My my, what was with that?  And then I saw that the red was like the proverbial tip of the iceberg and underneath that there were all those mail in votes that where overwhelmingly blue and as the blue spread across the map my spirits soared.

But wait, what happened to the big blue wave?  It was not that big at all.  Reading those pre election polls I had cradled the hope that the American people, the vast mass of that flag waving sea, had seen the light, seen through the torrent of lies and bad behavior, and now were ready to march with Sleepy Joe into the brave new world.  But it was hardly so, our margins were so slim along the reclaimed blue wall, that they could have easily gone the other way.  And worse, we hadn't taken  the senate.

So I was in a bit of a funk Wednesday afternoon through Thursday when I realized that even though the margin was slim we had defeated Trump.  And even if the odds were daunting we had a chance of taking the senate.  All in all it could have gone so much worse.  My mood brightened through that day and Friday and the early morning of Saturday.  By then I figured it was in the bag, and paid hardly an ear to CNN relating the story a handful of votes at a time.

There was another load of votes coming in from Pennsylvania and maybe that would be a big story, but they had been saying that all day, and then the screen went black for a second and then there was that huge BREAKING NEWS screen with music to match, and then Wolff was calling it for Biden.

No big deal, I had been expecting this all along, but hearing it was like a great weight leaving my shoulders.  No more Trump, no more of that whiny sneering voice, no more Bill Barr, Stephen Miller, Rudy "The Gnome" Guliani and that whole shitwagon of thugs and thieves and swaggering low lives.  Oh my God.  

It was a beautiful day, the middle of an extraordinary sweep of Indian Summer and my door was wide open to gentle breeze and now the cars were honking.  I walked down to the Jewel and it was all smiling faces.  The honking increased, a happily jeering crowd appeared across the river from Trump Tower.  It went on deep into the night.

I know there was probably nothing like that going on in the bustling streets of Cheboygan let alone on that lonely road leading out to the swamp, but I am not gloating, I am just sharing my uncontrollable joy,  And now I am done.  There are many hard roads ahead, but like a guy who has had a boil lanced I am much calmer and I hope that in future conversations of a political bent I will not be going at with the white hot fury that disturbed even me.

And I didn't think that poetry was hard to understand at all,  All Gerard Manly Hopkins was saying was that no matter how dark the night the sun will rise in the morning.  He credits the Holy Ghost for this, which is where we part, but otherwise I think the meaning is clear.

That truth and beauty thing, well that could mean anything and I take issue with the idea that truth and beauty are just two sides of a coin, I think they are almost opposites, but we can take that up at another time.

What I am wondering is what kind of solo game is Dangerou Dan playing?  I can only think of solitaire and how would money be involved with that?

Well another fine morning is beckoning,

Okay, Now It's Over

 Well, it won't officially be over until the Board of Canvassers in each state does whatever it is they do to make it official but, for all practical purposes, it's over.  Trump's legal challenges might uncover some irregularities, but I doubt it will be enough to change the outcome.  

In Michigan, the Republicans were able to maintain their majority in the state legislature, but not in the state supreme court. According to our local paper, Cheboygan County voted overwhelmingly Republican, which is what they usually do.  The map I saw the other day showed that most of the rural counties in Michigan went red, it was only the urban counties that went blue, which is also par for the course. 

The COVID crisis hit close to home when my brother-in-law died of the virus yesterday.  He had been in a nursing home with Parkinson's disease for the last five years.  Last I heard, about 50 others in the same home tested positive, but I don't know if any of them have died besides my brother-in-law.  As far as I know, the home has been following all the procedures, but they had this outbreak anyway.  

Sorry Uncle Ken, but I didn't make any sense out of your poem.  I'm not much of a poetry fan except for Robert Service and Rudyard Kipling.  

"A bunch of the boys was whoopin' it up in the Malamute Saloon.                                          The kid that handled the music box was hittin' a jag time tune.                                                 Back of the bar in a solo game sat Dangerous Dan McGrew                                                   And, watchin' his luck, was his light of love, the lady that's known as Lou."

Now that's poetry!

  

I hope this makes everything clear.

 The fat lady has advanced way beyond the scales.  She has adjusted her horned hat, shifted her spear, taken a surreptitious cloud of throat spray and taken a deep breath and quick as a cat can wink her eye will be singing her sweet song.

I see where Beagles was confused about the content, in transposing from my fb page I had somehow dropped the snippet of Gerard Manly Hopkins.  Here it goes:

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

I hope that makes everything clear.

Other than that I don't see what was so hard to understand, but sometimes I just get jiggy with it.

Is Beagles hinting that maybe I have watched to much coverage of the election?  Probably guilty.

It Ain't Over Yet

 While the fat lady may be practicing scales in her dressing room, she has yet to step out onto the stage and sing.

I don't know how to respond to Uncle Ken's posts today.  Maybe it's me, but I found them to be confused, almost incoherent.  This might be the reason why:

https://a.msn.com/r/2/BB1aJTGK?m=en-us&referrerID=InAppShare

late morning

  Honestly Beagles sometimes I wonder is there no poetry in your soul?  Is there nothing more to you than your truck and your furnace?  Do you never raise your eyes to contemplate beauty, like a sunrise or a sunset, or more immediately those crackerjack photos I posted a few days ago,  Probably just a couple trains to you, reminding you only of how a train once went through Cheboygan and how that effected the toilet paper factory.

Speaking of poetry, the previous paragraph was just a segue to get to the subject of poetry, because I know the dawgs love poetry and I wanted to insert a posting of mine from facebook and it contains some poetry.

Crept away from CNN and into bed last night before ten weeping and trembling. Woke up and listened to NPR and read the morning papers and just now tuned in to CNN just as Biden took the lead in Michigan, and now all those urban mail in votes are coming in and there is hope yet, brothers and sisters. As the poet Gerard Manly Hopkins wrote:

Not a big Holy Ghost man myself, but you get the drift.

early evening

  That was late in the morning, and as the day progressed (starting a new post because cutting and pasting the poem had somehow moved my right tab leftwards.  Rather than fuck with the settings I am doing another post) our victory has become surer and surer.  You know I was aware how states with Trumpist state houses had forbade the counting of mail in ballots until after polls closed to please Trump who wanted to use that to steal the election.  But when they were counting the ballots CNN didn't emphasize which states were doing that, hence my premature despair,

But then as the day progressed and it was soon apparent that nothing like the great blue wave was going to happen the despair crept in again.  Mainly in that we did not take the Senate.  That is going to be a big problem going forward.  One which I am not going to go on and on about, because it is Indian summer right now, and I want to get out on the balcony.  There are some clouds near the horizon and I am expecting a beautiful sunrise.  I am expecting some beauty.

And since there can never be too much poetry let us hear from John Keats.

   "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

                Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

Notice, not a word about furnaces or trucks.

late morning

How Can They Do That?

 According to my news app, the experts are already "calling" states a few hours after the polls closed.  This after other experts have been predicting that the results won't be known for several days yet because of all that mail in voting.  Last I heard, some states have reported that they already have had more mail in ballots turned in than they usually have total ballots cast.

We voted the old fashioned way today.  My wife and I went separately at two different times this afternoon, and there was no line either time.  We just breezed right through.  There were long lines in the 2016 presidential election, but our guys have since gotten more booths and redesigned the traffic flow in the room.  I suppose all that mail in voting took some of the pressure off as well.  

Our furnace guy came around this morning and put the permanent fix on our furnace.  The temporary fix has been working fine, but I feel better knowing that the permanent fix is in.