Black Lives Matter

I did indeed mistake peat moss for peat.  I should have known better, on my visits to Ace I see big plastic bags of the stuff and nowhere on those bags does it say flammable, or inflammable even.  That just slipped my mind which Beagles is always helpful in informing me is the sort of thing that is normal for people of our age.

I suppose you could still sell sacks of peat moss at Bog 'n Berry days, but there goes the bonfire.

Gun talk, gun porn.  You guys.

The city is indeed laid out eight blocks to a mile, sixteen to a half block.  In my early youth I thought the world stretched on that way forever.  There were awkward things like sometimes the block went east and west instead of north and south and then you had things like 61st Street and 61st Place, but that was pretty regular too; there was never a 62 1/2 St.  Then there was Archer Avenue which was the exception that proved the rule.  On the north side you had a plethora of diagonals and all streets had names instead of numbers and they weren't even alphabetical.  I didn't know how people lived like that. 


Even though the city was platted that way, there are scooches here and there.  How about the way State Street scooches over to the east north of Madison?  I knew the story of that once but I have forgotten.  Surprisingly, it wasn't that interesting.

According to some studies?  According to some studies???  Is Old Dog picking up bad habits from Beagles?  You know this canard about Americans being the most generous people in the world is trotted out everytime they want to cut spending on the poor on the specious theory that their is a great big feather bed of charity that the poor will tumble into. 


Hmm, on further consideration it appears that Old Dog may be pulling my leg.  The generous people of Albania surely wouldn't be at 83.  But I am on my high horse now and will continue to ride.  How do you measure something like generous?  I believe that giving to those sooper dooper PACs counts as charitable.

I did want to say something about Black Lives Matter.  They were a couple hundred of them at State and Wacker just outside my balcony Monday evening and they were clearly torn on whether to go west on Wacker or north on State Street.  The cops clearly wanted them to go west and maybe that is why they decided to go north and the cops had to change their whole pattern and move their cars and stream out on their bicycles to protect them I guess, but probably mostly to keep them from breaking windows.

And as they were passing under my balcony, they were rather rude, jumping and taunting and yelling and the poor cops had to stay calm and clearly they were sweating in all their gear on a hot day.  As a man of my ilk I should be for those demonstrators, but it didn't seem right.

Well most of those demonstrators were surely upright citizens with a point to make, but not all of them.  And some of those cops were probably kind of racist and probably mean, but not all of them. 


And certainly these recent killings are abhorrent, but what does tying up rush hour traffic have to do with that?