The Eve of December

That's one down and two to go.  In its wake, Black Friday and Cyber Monday,...

And let's not forget Small Business Saturday, Uncle Ken, another new bit of consumerism hype.  From what I've read the term Black Friday as a holiday spending spree is relatively recent, dating from the 80s.  I remember learning in school that Black Friday referred to the start of the Great Depression of 1929 but it goes back much further than that, to the middle of the 19th Century when a couple of scoundrels tried to corner the gold market.  In any case, it always seems to be about the money and not much more.  Imagine a Christmas holiday season with no presents at all, focusing only on the birth of a certain baby.  Wacky concept, huh?

That's why I like Thanksgiving, a holiday with no particular agenda or gift-giving, just a chance to get together with folks and share a meal.  This year's trip to my sister's new home was a modest affair, with her traditional lasagna.  I've noticed a growing trend of people acknowledging that they don't really like turkey (or green bean casserole) but everything else is fine, especially the stuffing and other traditional side dishes.  This year I brought my popcorn popper and made a couple of batches, movie-style and a sugar glaze kettle corn type.  Very well received and historically valid, I think.  I also showed off with a little bit of baking.  I like bagels and cream cheese and I've often wondered about the recipes on the inside of the Philadelphia Cream Cheese package.  The Double-Lemon Cream Cheese Bars seemed like a good challenge and I gave it a shot.  Not a simple task but the result was excellent and I'll make them again; slightly extravagant but they freeze well.

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And I am jealous of, may I call him Tom Tom, Old Dog's Roma tomato...

No, you may not.  It's just a damn tomato; not everything needs a name or adjective.  Jolly Jay, Gutsy Gretch...sheesh!

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How was y'alls weekend?

I wonder where that y'all comes from?

Mr. Beagles is well tuned into the zeitgeist, Uncle Ken, as shown by this recent online article: https://theconversation.com/yall-that-most-southern-of-southernisms-is-going-mainstream-and-its-about-time-193265

And the zeitgeist is tuned into Mr. Beagles, as shown by this recent design from one of my online T-shirt sources, with a nod to Abbey Road:

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The Red Mango has some competition; a Yellow Mango has entered the chat room.

The holidays

 That's one down and two to go.  In its wake, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, which are the waves of Christmas battering down on the bones of the turkey and the broken dishes of the yams and cranberries, and all that crap the eating of which is more a chore than, I don't know, our expression of thankfulness.

I never liked that food especially, and when my sister's plan to have that kind of Thanksgiving in her apartment fell through because one of the nephews decided to go to his girl friend's family for the holiday, that was fine with me.  Harry Caray's offered some kind of Thanksgiving dinner which I declined in favor of spaghetti and meatballs and I never regretted my choice, the meatballs were big and the sauce was thick and tasty.

So now the joy of Christmas lights and the painful din of Christmas songs, and there is some kind of general gemutlichkeit among the citizens which is pleasant.  And you know sometimes it seems to just go on and on, and then suddenly it is right there in front of you.

The last couple of years we have gone without giving any presents at all, and it has been great, but now for some unknowable reason my sister wants to bring it back.  The horror, the horror.

In the height of my beer-drinking days I embraced New Years Eve wholeheartedly.  Perhaps the less said about that the better, but anymore I just mope around and nurse a few beers until The Fireworks.  It seems like they get bigger each year.  They shoot them off not only at Navy Pier but from all of the bridges, so that they are exploding at eye level maybe fifty feet from me, and they go on and on and on.

And then I am ready to face all of long January, all of short February (the longest little month of the year), and maybe halfway through March there are reports of the slender girl in the pea green gown hanging out with the crocuses.  Can tomatoes be far behind?

And speaking of tomatoes, I am sure Old Dog has heard of this:  https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/spacex-launches-tomato-seeds-supplies-to-international-space-station-3558150

Tom Tom Tomato may be bursting with pride on the north side, thinking about how, just by being delicious, his ilk has been able to use humankind to launch into space, and after this the whole universe likely.  That experiment of achieving world domination by not being destroyed in the human digestive system has come a crapper, but this new plan is so crazy that it just might work.

The C-word

 Here it is:

C word

I had the complete word up there, just to see if it would get a reaction, but after a couple hours it just looked so nasty, especially on Thanksgiving that I took it down.

scandal at the Institute

 I think the phrase WTF has become like it's own word now, you know like SNAFU, the fuck has been subsumed by the acronym.  What did I say fuck right out in the open there, well I'll be a mother fucker?  Did I say mother fucker?

Why yes I did about five years ago.  And fuck?  I've said that many times over my time in the Institute.  Time in the Institute, have to say that I do not like the ring of that.

I have been using that search function to do detective work on this.  I think the four syllable word has only been used that one time, but the famous four letter word has been used, well, a lot.  

But, let's call it the C-word, has only been used that one time.  And like five years ago.  My guess is that at some point since then the censors at blogspot decided that it belonged behind a warning and since then some bot has been searching back issues for it, like those wheels I was talking about on my last post before all this excitement, grinding exceedingly fine.

But why not mother fucker then?  My impression has always been that that is the big kahuna of cuss words, but maybe it is used so often that it has lost its bang, and maybe the C-word, used more sparingly, still retains its power.

But I am guessing it is more of a lgbtq thing (google tells me that that has been supplanted by lgbtqia+, but let's tackle that another day).  I didn't want to risk blogspot putting this behind a warning so I will test the C-word in a subsequent post.

Happy Thanksgiving Dawgs.  

WTF?

 This is a test.... This is only a test.  I read somewhere once that it's not considered to be profanity if you just spell out the initials.  Let's see if they flag this one.  By the way, I did not receive the email.  The first I heard of it was when I read about it here.

I seem to remember Old Dog once telling us about a relative of his developing something like this.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/snipex-alligator-the-ukrainian-sniper-rifle-capable-of-penetrating-armored-vehicles/ar-AA14tBCy?ocid=winpstoreapp&cvid=cb92ee2074514b6dbf1c52c5590fbf32

Mea culpa!

It's all my fault and I take complete responsibility!  I would think that the context, in reference to The Economist, would be legitimate use but I guess not.  If the Powers That Be (TM) want to put it behind an "Adults Only" warning that's fine with me.  It's their game; they can make the rules.  But it sure took them long enough to flag the post, didn't it?  No complaints in the comments section either, to the best of my knowledge.

Keep calm and carry on, as our friends across the pond would say.

 

 

Your post titled "Same but different" has been put behind a warning for readers

 I'm guessing Beagles got this email also, Old Dog (The offender) maybe not because he is not a founding member. 

I guess you may skate for seven years but the long arm of Blogger will eventually grind you exceedingly fine.  Mixed metaphor, did that on purpose.

Hello,

    As you may know, our Community Guidelines (https://blogger.com/go/contentpolicy) describe the boundaries for what we allow-- and don't allow-- on Blogger. Your post titled "Same but different" was flagged to us for review. This post was put behind a warning for readers because it contains sensitive content; the post is visible at http://talkswithbeagles.blogspot.com/2016/08/same-but-different.html. Your blog readers must acknowledge the warning before being able to read the post/blog.

    We apply warning messages to posts that contain sensitive content. If you are interested in having the status reviewed, please update the content to adhere to Blogger's Community Guidelines. Once the content is updated, you may republish it at https://www.blogger.com/go/appeal-post?blogId=2098621150745021924&postId=4544729758155381757. This will trigger a review of the post.

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my weekend

How was y'alls weekend?

 I wonder where that y'all comes from?  I don't believe Beagles has ever been south of the Mason Dixon line.  Well possibly in basic training, but I think you are too busy there to be exchanging bon mots with the natives.

You know I spent a few years in Chattanooga, but it was from the age of one to four so I was not exchanging bon mots with the natives either.  I was a mere 62 miles north of the Mason Dixon Line for the two years that I was in Herrin.  They didn't say y'all, but they did say you 'uns, and they were rather proud of it.  They were a little more sophisticated than those deep south types, but they weren't hard and mean like those skinflint Yankees.  Like baby bear's porridge, they were just right.

Thinking back I likely washed my dishes but I can't say that I did any cast iron seasoning.  I once had a cast iron frying pan, but I left it behind somewhere along the rocky road of life.  I can't recall ever seasoning it.  The internet says it is not too bad:  All you need is dish soap, oil, and a bit of patience. But I am lost at that mention of a bit of patience, very ominous.

And I did clear out the jungle on the balcony, (yes that is my garden in the photos) leaving just a few sunflower stalks for the finches to perch on and for the morning glories to climb on eons from now when spring returns as that skinny young girl in the pea green gown.

And I finally got around to ditching my corrupt Medicare Advantage insurance.  Bloody thieves sucking up dough from taxpayers and spending it on all those commercials where they are protecting our health but of course all they are doing is sucking money from both you and your doctor.  It took about two hours, much of that drumming my fingers angrily and listening to Muzak.  Actually it's not Muzak, just like some strange sounding music likely picked by somebody's fourteen year old nephew drunk on White Claw.

Whatever happened to Muzak?  It had a certain je ne sais quoi, that the current clamor does not possess.  All I know about White Claw is that it takes up way too much space on what should be the beer shelves.  But I am sure that it does not have the je ne sais quoi of Mad Dog 2020 or, what's the word?  Thunderbird!

And I am jealous of, may I call him Tom Tom, Old Dog's Roma tomato growing strong in Old Dog's sunny abode as the Dog himself hums patiently while seasoning his cast iron, and all I have is a bag of scraggly crapola sitting on the balcony waiting to be hauled into the stairwell.

Another wonder of nature

Not to be a buttinsky but I wonder if Old Dog can vary the speeds, and stretch out the moments when the sun crosses the horizon.

Double-click on the little playback image and you'll get a new full-size window; in the bottom right there is a "settings" icon and you can vary the speed.

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I couldn't get Old Dog's time lapse pictures to work,...

That's odd; it plays fine with my browser (Firefox) even from a private window.  Maybe you have some kind of security thing on your computer, I dunno.  If you are looking for a dandy program (free!) to play and convert all kinds of media files, I suggest VLC Media Player.  I've been using it for years for offline viewing of YouTube videos, never had a problem.

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How was y'alls weekend?

Just chuggin' along, this cooler weather is a good time for cast iron maintenance, seasoning the pans as needed.  I spend more time in the kitchen than anywhere else, experimenting and most importantly, cleaning up afterwards.  I wish I had my new habits decades ago; I think I would have gotten more joy out of things that I've done but better late than never.  A nice thing about the big city is that there are plenty of resale shops with all kinds of hidden treasures.  About a week ago I scored one of those popcorn poppers with the crank handle that you turn and it's working amazingly well.  If you want some caramel or sugar-glaze popcorn this is the real deal, no burning and hardly any "widows."  For two bucks it is the best deal I've had all year.

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While watching a documentary about Lower-Lower Wacker Drive I saw a great aerial view of Marina City and I think I may have seen Uncle Ken's balcony.  It's on the right floor and all the green stands out like a sore thumb.  What do you think?

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And look at this: one of the Roma tomato plants that I've successfully germinated is having a baby.

snow

 Reading Beagles' account of snowfall at the tip of Michigan, my juices were flowing to come back with my own adventures with snow and I have to say there have not been many, and they have mostly been pleasant and that is likely because I have only owned an automobile for two years of my life.

Growing up it seemed like snow was around all winter.  Snowball fights, snowmen, taking the sled a couple blocks down to the railroad yard and sliding down.  And money, there was real money, money made of metal, those huge Franklin half dollars, walking liberty quarters, buffalo nickels, and wheat straw pennies with exotic lead pennies sprinkled through like raisins in a very cheap raisin bran, and all you had to do was shovel a neighbor's walk.

Snow shoveling was the best of chores.  Mowing a lawn, you know you could always be made to do it again because it was uneven or something, but snow, once it was off the sidewalk that was all there was to be said of it.  And you know, it was kind of a neighborhood thing, everybody out there on a winter's evening puffing away, and if there were some old folks on the block you didn't mind extending your excavation across their sidewalks too.

But anymore the sidewalk is twenty floors below me.  The guys do the shoveling, and a pretty good job of it too.  Not like that chintzy little museum of broadcast communications who didn't use to bother and there were about eighty feet of snow hardened to ice sloping down to Kinzie an inviting opportunity to tobogganing  down feet first your head bobbing on each bump in the hardened snow.  Wrote the alderman about that, and maybe many others did too, or maybe the owners had an angel visit them at midnight, but now they keep it pretty clear.

Dawn has 25 likes and 10 comments so far.  I just put up Dusk right now after learning of Beagles' interest.  

It Could Have Been Worse

 At least we got the septic system fixed before the snow started.  Although the weather was unseasonably warm and dry while they were working on it, I was worried because this is November after all, and the snow could start at any time.  Indeed, the snow did start November 11, the day after the septic work was completed.  At first it was melting as fast as it fell, but there were a couple of days when we woke up to a solid inch on the ground, all of which was gone by noon.  Thursday evening it started snowing for real, and we had a foot or so on the ground by Friday morning.  

Friday is grocery shopping day in our house, but I have been known to bump it to Saturday if that happens to be convenient.  This time, however, we were a little low on milk and I wasn't sure that it would last till Saturday.  When I left for Walmart, the sun was shining and the snow was melting, so I figured plowing the driveway could wait till Saturday.  When I came out of Walmart, it was snowing and blowing, the visibility was bad, and the tire tracks I had made in the driveway on my way out were almost obliterated.  I stopped to pick up the mail on my way in, but there was no mail in the box, and the two letters we had put in it were still there.  There was no mail Saturday either, probably because the county had not plowed our little dead-end road yet.  

I didn't get the driveway finished on Saturday, but I did make a pretty good dent in it before the snowing and blowing started again.  Turned out that we only got an inch or two additional overnight, and I was able to finish the driveway today.  I expect the county will come by and plow me back in tomorrow, so I will have to do that part again before I put the garbage cans out for Tuesday's pickup.  Both the mail person and the garbage people have to turn around in our driveway because we are the last house on the road, so I try to keep it open for them.  My neighbor has a plow on his truck, and he often plows all the way to the corner before the county comes and plows our driveways back in again.  He usually opens the end of our driveway in the process, but this time he must have been too busy doing his own.

I haven't heard the official numbers, but it looks like we got about 18-24 inches total.  The reason I haven't heard the official numbers is because our TV satellite feed is currently not picking up our local channels.  A guy is scheduled to come fix that next Friday the 25th.    At least we still get the Weather Channel, and they are not predicting snow for the next seven days.

I couldn't get Old Dog's time lapse pictures to work, but Uncle Ken posted the morning one on Face Book, and I was able to access it there.  Ever cool! He promised to post the evening one later, and I'm looking forward to seeing that. 

How was y'alls weekend? 

shaking Bill Clinton's hand

Today - Cloudy with a high of 32 °F (0.0 °C) and a 63% chance of precipitation. Winds variable at 3 to 6 mph (4.8 to 9.7 kph).

Tonight - Sleet with a 68% chance of precipitation. Winds variable at 6 to 10 mph (9.7 to 16.1 kph). The overnight low will be 24 °F (-4.4 °C).

That map that Old Dog found does not agree with what my Yahoo weather says, but weather folks, like reasonable people can disagree.

I am carrying on that first time I voted (when did the dawgs first vote by the way?) and I thought I would copy for you about how I shook Bill Clinton's hand.

In the late fall of 1992 Debbie and Ed came to visit me.  We were comfortably ensconced and enbeered in a cozy tavern when Debbie piped up why don't we go to Bill Clinton's victory celebration in the Palmer House just a half mile away.  Well shit, weren't we quite comfortable where we were, and actually Debbie the place must be packed and we could never get in.

But she persisted and we found ourselves tramping down State Street, and when we got there there wasn't hardly anybody, we were like in the front row.  There were all these shiny eyed young people sporting red white and blue star and full of pep and enthusiasm while Ed and I huddled in our big old overcoats with an Old Style tall boy in each pocket.

Music, confetti, short speeches and then came the time when Bill and Hillary shook hands.  We pulled back a bit afraid that in the process of taking our hands out of our pockets one of our tall boys would topple to the floor.

But then Bill coming down the line, caught my eye.  I mean caught it.  It was like he had come to this joint just to see me, just me, and to shake my hand.  It was a hearty grip, his eyes intent, his teeth pearly white, and as I reeled back along came Hillary, the same damn thing.

I put up Old Dog's Dawn on my page about eight last night, and as of early this morning it has garnered 19 likes and 7 comments and this is not even prime time.

Batten down the hatches...

Just saw this map in one of my rabbit holes; hope that Mr. Beagles has plenty of food, firewood and gas for snow removal.  Stay warm, Beaglesonians.

wonders of nature

 

I went back to July to get the first photos of young Red.  A far cry from his current ample magnificence but even at that young age you can see his fighting spirit.

And here is my Halloween pumpkin who is not going gently into that good night.

On the other hand here is a proud young lady who says winter be damned, it's my party and I'll bloom when I want to.

Are you saying that these kinds of sky shows are happening like all the time?  I never would have thought.  Maybe that speed up time thing (is that the technical term?) is kind of like a microscope or a telescope and you can see things that you can't see without them.

That light in the middle right looks so much like a spotlight that I wonder if maybe it is a spotlight.  You still see them from time to time.

I wonder if I could get a copy of that file to wow my friends with.  Not sure what kind it is.  I clicked on facts for nerds and it was too nerdy for me.  I know Old Dog has a distaste for facebook but I would like to hoist it up the flagpole and see how many salutes it gets.

Not to be a buttinsky but I wonder if Old Dog can vary the speeds, and stretch out the moments when the sun crosses the horizon.

The media is cautiously noting the fall of Trump, and I rather agree, but I have to admit this is about the fifth time that I have declared at last Trump is gone for good, but this time I really think it's true.  Of course that is also what I said the last four times. 

More Red Mango

The other day I mentioned all the political spam I've been getting and now there are no signs it will be letting up.  Besides the appeals from the Herschel Walker folks, this morning I got a couple of emails from Donald J. Trump himself, begging for donations for his presidential campaign.  I think I'll pass.  And maybe DeSantis hasn't announced anything yet but there is a presidential campaign that's active and asking for money; another pass.

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I'm in the process of repotting some of my plants and I thought you folks would like a Red Mango update.  He's gotten a lot bigger since the last update in September.

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Do you do this often?  Are you showing this one because it is the most spectacular?

I do this stuff once in a while and I consider this kind of work a series of happy accidents.  I just set it up and see what happens, no creativity involved but it's a fun diversion.  I don't think that sequence is particularly "spectacular" because the morning sky looks like that more often than not.

It's been gloomy the last couple of days but I caught Monday's nightfall and there is a whole different kind of cloud movement.  I'd like to know what is creating all the light shining on the bottom of the clouds; very curious.

sure fire cocktail party fun facts

 Old Dog that time lapse of the sunrise is downright beautiful.  I can't believe so much shit was going on.  Do you do this often?  Are you showing this one because it is the most spectacular?  I just read an article in the New Yorker about a guy who composes music for movies.  I wonder if this video would be even better set to music or if that would be a distraction from its, I don't know, silent grandeur.

Me and my sister take a lot of photos of sunrises, and some of them are pretty damn good, but they are static.  Also I don't think an easterly view would provide as much drama as your southerly view.  Well done Old Dog.  I look forward to seeing more in the future.

I thought I would do some internet research so I googled patriots for victory and I got like three pages of the Boston Patriots most recent win.  What did you do to earn their attention?  Just out of curiosity do the more recent ones mention Trump less prominently?  Have they begun to mention that nice young chap in the sunshine state.

The Blaze in the Everglades, I am certainly looking forward to that.  I think Trump is a natural King Kong and DeSantis has reptilian ways that make him a natural for the inscrutable Godzilla.  I also think Trump is closer to Mussolini who was kind of a clown while DeSantis has the more centered evil of Hitler.

I don't think Chicago has the favorable balance between consumers and pig farms that Fort Polk has, but our more, ahem, processed waste does make it to the farmers as some kind of sludge.  There was a story going around some years ago that there was something about the tomato seed that resisted, um, processing so that farmers kept finding tomato plants among their corn, but this turned out not to be true, which is too bad because I always found that an interesting story that helped me pick up chicks at snazzy cocktail parties.

But wait a minute corn and tomatoes, doesn't that sound like succotash?  Looking it up there are many varieties. the common element being corn.  I guess my summer meals of diced tomatoes, bell peppers, chili beans, and garbanzos and corn is a form of succotash.  How about that?

No matter how you vote somebody has to process it so it's roughly the same effort, and if it's a little more effort then it is well spent for the convenience of the voter, and the promotion of voting.  Have to say though I was less enamored of the power of the vote in 2016 than I have been in 2020 and 2022.

It would be sweet to see Two Gun Bobert go down, but in the grand scheme she is just a squeaky gnat.  Look out for Greene cozying up to Trump's fave McCarthy while the likely DeSantees of the Freedom Caucus aim to take him down.  A lively and entertaining squabble for the grand old party this postseason.

Sleet turning to snow this morning.

Vote Early, Vote Often (2)

 It's got to make more work for the clerks.  First, they have to issue and process the mail-in ballot applications, then they have to process the ballots themselves, check signatures etc.  In some states, they also have to give the voters a chance to "cure" any errors on their ballots.  

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/lauren-boebert-in-danger-as-thousands-of-votes-for-opponent-could-be-fixed/ar-AA14685d?ocid=winpstoreapp&cvid=6783a03f13b145b0b66d0be6d26a5f58

This voter ID thing could be easily solved by having the Secretary of State issue a free picture ID to everybody when they register to vote.  When the township clerks did the registering, they used to issue each registrant a plain old paper card with the instruction to show it when they went to vote.  I carried mine around for years and was never asked to show it, so I threw it into my "miscellaneous" drawer and forgot about it.  Now that the Secretary of State is doing the registering, they could make picture IDs with the same equipment that they use to make driver's licenses.  

I didn't know about the early voting centers.  Michigan just passed a law that requires nine days of early voting.  I assumed that they would use the same precinct polling places that they use now and would have to pay somebody to staff them for those nine days.  If they make early voting centers like they have in Chicago, I imagine that they will be farther from home than our local precincts.  In our relatively thinly populated area, the traveling distance to the early voting center might easily cancel out the perceived convenience of voting early.  

It's a beautiful morning

I was going to comment on what a relief it is to have weathered another election but it isn't quite over yet if my spam folder is to be believed.  I'm amazed at all the spam email I've received from MAGA candidates running in different states like Arizona, Colorado, New York, Florida, and Georgia, more than 100 since October 20th when I decided to try and track this stuff.  And since there is now a runoff in Georgia I've received more than 20 emails on behalf of Herschel Walker since November 9th.  And if Donald J. Trump can be believed, for a modest donation I can enter a lottery for a visit to Mar-a-Lago!  Despite all the names attached to the emails they all originate from one organization, patriotsforvictory, that I've never heard of.  I have no idea why I am so popular with those guys but if they want to waste their resources trying to squeeze a few bucks out of me, they can go right ahead.  But I'm glad that the spam filters for my email are working, and working well.

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A while back Uncle Ken mentioned that Chicago uses some landfills, a fact I was unaware of; I thought they burned the stuff.  The 47th Ward, my long time home, has a weekly newsletter that had a recent pitch for the disposal of Halloween pumpkins.  They mention that in Cook County 37% of landfill material is food waste and that Chicago produces 500,000 tons of organic waste a year.  Shouldn't that stuff be composted into something useful or used as animal feed?  Way back in the day while doing KP at the soon to be renamed Ft. Polk there were two trash cans, one for inedible garbage and one for edible garbage.  The edible garbage can was a foul, festering mass but its contents were sold to the local pig farmers, no doubt at a handsome profit.  We should do the same thing here; half a million tons of organic waste should be worth a lot to somebody, shouldn't it?

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And now for something completely different, here's a time lapse of this morning's sunrise from astronomical twilight to full daylight.  Turned out well, I think, considering it was shot through a dirty double-paned window.  I've never seen clouds move like that before, going in different directions at different altitudes.  This is one of my best wastes of time yet.

the first time I voted

 The reason we have mail-in and early voting is so that more people (not just black people), can vote.  Some people work on Tuesdays, some people have a hard time getting around.  What is wrong with getting more people to the polls?  Aren't we always urging people to go out and vote, why not make it easier for them?

And it doesn't make more work.  Every vote has to be counted no matter where or how it is voted.  With a mail in vote you don't need guys like me to tell you how to slip the ballot into the machine, and with big early voting centers you don't have to set up so many little neighborhood polling places.  I have to admit though that I love the neighborhood polling places.  I couldn't use mine this last time because I was away from my polling Tuesday so I went to an early vote center, and it was easy like going to the supermarket, but I didn't get that feeling like Joe America in a Rockwell painting that the friendly neighborhood place gives you.

There have been and continue to be efforts made to keep black people out of the polling places.  There are efforts to make them supply ID they may not have and their neighborhoods often get fewer polling places.  In Texas they had one drop box for each district so that the city of Houston had exactly one box the same as in all the podunk little towns.

And it takes longer to count the ballots because in places where the Trumpies have seized the legislatures they don't allow them to count any mail in ballots until after the election.

Which gets me to thinking about the first time I ever voted.  I first became eligible to vote in the 1966 mid terms, but I was pretty hippie then and voting was square.  By the time the election of 68 came around they were drafting us into that crazy Asian war so we become a bit more political.  I certainly did not like Nixon (though I had been for him back in 60), and Humphrey (Dump the Hump) was being held back from saying anything bad about the war by Lyndon.  For me at the time Dick Gregory's Peace and Freedom was the obvious solution.

But did I have the courage of my convictions?  I was afraid that once I got into that dark booth alone, that a sudden temptation to not throw my vote away might overcome me and cause me to pull the lever for (Yuck) the democratic party???  With the wisdom of youth I avoided that conundrum by never registering to vote.

By 70 I had avoided the draft by doing my CO work in Herrin IL, and Adlai III was running against Ralph Tyler Smith a bumptious blowhard from Granite City (wiki informs me that he was Karl Rove's first client) for Illinois senator.  I kind of liked egg-headed Adlai, but not enough to go to all the hard work of voting for him. 

But then Ralph Tyler Smith ran an ad where half of Adlai's head looked normal and the other half was all hair and headbands and assorted hippie crapola, the thrust being don't vote for this guy, he is a lousy hippie.  Naturally that got my dander up and I went straight out and registered and come November I pulled the lever and Adlai went on to victory, and I have voted in every election since.

Vote Early, Vote Often

 Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that I believe the last two elections were rigged or stolen,  I'm just saying that I wonder why we need all that crap like early voting and mail-in voting.  All it does is make more work for the clerks and delay the reporting of the final count.  I understand that it's supposed to benefit the colored people, but I don't know how.  I have not heard of anybody trying to prevent colored people from voting in the last 50 years, so why can't they just vote the same way as everybody else?  I have seen people standing in long lines waiting to vote on TV, but we don't have that problem here.  I've been voting since 1968, and I've only had to stand in line for more than a few minutes once in 2016.  After that one time, our precinct people set up more booths and rearranged the traffic flow in the room, and it hasn't happened since.  This year the parking lot was full, and the workers said it had been busy all day, but I was in and out of there in 15 minutes. 

election day

 One of the benefits of living in Marina City is that my polling place is just one flight of stairs beneath me.  After a few years you get to know the election judges (they are not really judges, it's just the word they use for election workers), make a little joke without being too overtly political because you know.  They are all so cheerful, they seemed to be having such a good time, that I allowed myself to becoming one.

There was some online course for the job, and online courses, how grueling can they be?  Very, it turns out.  It took about five hours and was terrifying in its detail.  Did they expect that I was going to remember all this?

The pay is not much, I think around $250 for at least fifteen hours or longer.  I wasn't in it for that, I was in it more for curiosity, to see how it worked, to have a little adventure, and a little of, I don't know, civic duty.  There had been some media stories about election deniers coming out to jam up the works, not that I expected any in my very blue district, but you never know.

My polling place was a few blocks west in one of those gleaming new steel and glass skyscrapers just east of Wolf Point.  The polls opened at six and we were there at five.  Kind of a motley crew it seems, most of us being new, including the boss, who is called an election coordinator.

We all arrived just after five, and the place looked a little set up with all the booths and stuff but there was the big metal chest o drawers locked and sealed.  The first step was the checking of numbers and the breaking and putting on of seals, always recording the numbers.  Inside was all kinds of crap, much of it electronic stuff, most of it heavy.  

The coordinator didn't seem to be very coordinated so one of the judges basically took over.  They all had manuals, dog eared and post-it noted, which I, as a late chosen did not have.  I faded into the background, doing just the simplest of tasks.  

Anyway it was hard, complicated work getting set up and it wasn't until six thirty before the first voter was able to cast his vote.

Marina City is more than half old folks, but this place was built just a couple years ago and I would say the average age was maybe a little over thirty.  And it is pretty snazzy, so I am assuming the residents have pretty high-powered jobs.  The leaders of tomorrow, as I guess we thought we would be in the days of the Mickey Mouse club, and maybe we were, but I don't know how well we did, and myself, I was on the sidelines, far from the action.  

Anyway the torch is passing to these guys with their outlandish jobs and ways.  But they were pretty nice guys and gals, they thanked us for the work we were doing and we thanked them for voting, and thinking of it now, in about two hundred voters there was not a single incident of rudeness.  And by the way, no Oath Keepers showed up to poll watch, in fact we had no poll watchers at all.  In fact I think there was very little of that threatened action anywhere in the country.

Anyway once they started coming in it was very nice.  As the guy who knew the least I was the guy who told them to take their ballots out of their privacy shields and slide them gently into the machine, and then wait to see if the machine accepted it and if so they were done and I handed them an I Voted sticker.

The second ballot was judges.  A bunch of names nobody heard of and apparently most of these kids didn't know that they could just skip that part of the ballot, and some of these guys spent maybe half an hour scrutinizing those names and I had a tremendous urge just to walk up to them and say you don't have to do that, but that would clearly have been out of line.

Anyway after that morning rush, there was nothing.  Nothing, nothing, nothing, for eight hours.  Well there was a voter every now and then, but mostly it was nothing.  We had no breaks including lunch.  Oh they sent some donuts, but you know what, fuck donuts, what's the big deal with them anyway?  There were two cold pizzas (a veggie and a cheese, how exciting) and some warm bottles of water. Eight hours of strangers staring at each other and trying to find something new on their phones to divert themselves.

About five the evening rush came and things picked up, and we thought we were close to quitting time.  But then right at the last minute some people came who were registered in a different address and wanted to switch or who had gotten a mail ballot and not mailed it and this and that and we had to use some device which wasn't working and we had to call this guy and then that guy and then do this and that.  When I say we I mean that guy who took charge I was sitting around numbed, thinking only of that nice cool fresh air outside.  It finally got settled but it set back our time for packing up, and filling that big metal chest of drawers was a lot more complicated than taking everything out.  We didn't get out till after nine thirty.

When I thought we were getting out at eight, I had thoughts of dropping in somewhere for an Italian beef and three or four quick cold ones, but at nine thirty, back and feet aching, all I wanted to do was fall into bed.  When I tuned into CNN first thing I saw was that that idiot Ron Johnson had won that election in Wisconsin and I thought oh fuck.

But by next morning it was not so bad at all.  There is a very small chance that we could keep the house and the odds in the senate are about even.  Not all that great, but way better than I had expected.  And the Trumpiest of candidates mostly lost, and maybe Trump is fading, and much of that republican chest bumping was inspired by him and now maybe there will be more, dare I say it, cooperation.  Maybe.

And Beagles now gets to enjoy another term of Gutsy Gretch's bold leadership (though I was surprised that Trumpy Tudor came so close).  And apparently the dems have taken the Michigan legislature.  Can it not be far away when bells will be ringing in the freehold as Beagles marries his gay dog?

And all in all I was impressed, the way I was when I was on jury duty, about how well random people drawn together for a common cause work together without some official boss telling them what to do.  

There is yet hope for America.

Bears Do More Than Shit in the Woods

 Like all creatures great and small, bears have their place in the grand scheme of things.  People hunt them for the same reasons they hunt other animals, for the adventure, the challenge, and because they are good to eat.  I used to try to defend hunting to non-hunters, but I don't anymore. Hunting is not for everybody, as are neither baseball, football, nor prize fighting.  The Michigan DNR issues a limited number of bear hunting permits each year in the Lower Peninsula.  Last I heard, they were holding a regular season in the Upper Peninsula where bears are more plentiful.  The intent is to maintain a sustainable population while minimizing bear-human conflicts. 

When Old Dog mentioned that bird, I thought he was talking about albatrosses.  They remain aloft, riding the thermals and swooping down to catch fish, except for once a year when they land to breed and nest.  They have a difficult time getting airborne afterwards, I suppose because they only do it once a year.  Their clumsy take off attempts have earned them the nickname "goony birds".  That godwit is a whole 'nother story.  I have no idea how they manage it.  

I didn't know that Asian Indians fed their dead people to the vultures, but I have read about certain American Indian tribes that used to do something like that.  They used to put their dead people on raised platforms and let the birds and the elements pick the skeletons clean.  They would come back later and collect the dry bones, but I don't remember what they did with them.  

For the birds

They will be able to jump on their bicycles and peddle their asses off to Michigan any time they want.

I hope this was a Freudian Slip and you meant pedal Mr. Beagles.  No need for me to speculate on the ass peddling going on around here, or so I've read.

That trail sounds excellent and I didn't know that I could ride a bike to the Indiana border right now.  Years ago the furthest I rode a bike south was to the South Shore Country Club, around 71st Street, I think.  A very nice ride along the lake with very few joggers, skaters, or other annoying pests.  Beautiful view, too.  The only downside was that I picked up a nail on my rear tire and had to walk the bike home, a long way back to the Wrigley Field area with plenty of time to ponder the foolishness of not having my tools and tire kit with me.  Didn't think I'd need them; famous last words, eh?

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How 'bout them bears?  I like living in a world where we have big predators roaming around, breaking into homes and shops and stealing cookies.  Keeps us humble, I think, to know that humans aren't always going to end up on top when dealing with other life forms on this ball of dirt.

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This past spring I went on a spiel about cold brew coffee and how great it was.  It still is, but now I found something better: the French Press.  My niece had one that was too big for her use so she very kindly gave it to me.  The Folger's has never tasted better and it's not too much of a pain to clean up after.  The elegant simplicity is a big plus in my mind, and I've been curious about that kind of coffee maker ever since I saw one used in the film The Ipress File more than fifty years ago.  If it's good enough for Harry Palmer it's good enough for me.

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To get back to Nature for a bit, there are some things that I think are simply miraculous, like this bird.  How can a bird fly thousands of miles without stopping?  What about food and water, or sleep?  The reality of this hurts my brain, it's like I could be able to run up to Beaglesonia, non-stop, and maybe do a loop around Lake Michigan for the run home.

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With the passing of Jerry Lee Lewis I think that the founders of Rock&Roll are all gone now; Little Richard, Elvis, The Everly Brothers, Chuck Berry, and one of my favorites, Bo Diddley.  There are many more whose names elude me right now but I can't forget Carl Perkins, a true giant of the genre.  I only have one of his albums, a CD with more recent artists on it and it's called Go Cat Go.  Lots of good stuff on it and worth a listen.

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Curious tale about body disposal, Mr. Beagles, with some aspects I haven't considered, like moisture content.  And here's a fun fact about what the folks in India also do about bodies besides burn them: they let the vultures eat them.  There's a regular ceremony involved and it doesn't take the birds long to pick the bodies clean.  Chinese tourists love to watch this and take pictures, which pisses off the locals.  I read this online so it must be true.

GREATEST CITY INNA WORLD!!!

 Well I suppose there are worse things than living under the wise leadership of Gutsy Gretch.  

As a child I had occasion to visit the wolverine state.  My youngest aunt lived in Grand Rapids.  It was a long road trip but those tiny wooden shoes we bought in Holland kept the peace in the backseat.  One year the Michiganders moved into a new development and it was the oddest thing I ever saw in my life.  The houses were tiny by bungalow standards, and far apart, and the streets were curvy, and the only trees to speak of were tiny saplings not much taller than I was.  Who lives like that?

Many years later when I went down to Champaign I was amazed that all the houses along a block were different, and many of them were built of wood instead of obviously superior brick.  Also if you didn't count the dorm towers there was nothing taller than three or four stories, what a hick town.

But after a few years of hanging around with my beer drinking hippie friends I never wanted to go back to Chicago again.  People were too cold and rude, all that hurly burly, and that awful racism of Gage Park, who needed it?  Not me.

Later down the road I did a couple years in southern Illinois, and there was definitely no hurly burly down there.  Maybe a little too sleepy for me and I was glad to get back to the moderate hurly burly of Champaign.  But in the middle of the eighties the hurly burly had died down so much that I could not get a job and I was off to Austin.

Not only did it have all those hills and all that music and all that Mexican and bbq food, after Champaign it was like a big city, half a million people then.  But going back to Chicago to visit the folks I noticed that it was not that big compared to Chicago.  Not that that mattered because I was never going back there.  

Except when hard times hit Texas and I was broke and without prospects.  I really didn't want to go back to Chicago, I wanted to see the world.  All those years in Champaign I had been thinking that life was pretty much the same no matter where you were, but Austin had opened my mind to how different things were in different places. 

But like I said, I had no money.  I had to depend on the folks and it seemed awfully rude to ask them for dough to say, move to Seattle when that big old attic was just sitting there.

All those years that I had been away I had been reading Chicago newspapers and I thought it was a land of unbridled mayhem, and my thought when I moved back was would I ever get out of there alive?

Last night I was sitting on the balcony of an Italian restaurant eating artisan sausages and sauteed peppers while my sister had some kind of risotto.  Below us the hurly burly of State Street burlied along.  The nighttime lights of the building twinkled and way down on the other side of the river was the marquee of the Chicago Theater.

I will not ever get out of here alive.

I rode a bike everywhere in Champaign, often back from the bar which, well, I am lucky to have gotten out of Champaign alive.  Austin though was too damn hilly to be riding a bike, and in Chicago the ride would not be the peaceful glide like in Champaign.

State Street is about a half mile from the Chicago part of that Marquette trail.  I've walked it as far as maybe 31street.  I don't think I will ever go much further, even if there are tiny wooden shoes at the end.

The Last Person to Leave Chicago Please Turn Out the Lights

I spent many a happy day in New Buffalo during my youth.  Indeed, it was on a drive back to Chicago from there that I first resolved to live in Michigan when I grew up.  I was seven years old at the time, and my father told me that I should get that idea out of my head right now.  "You can't live in Michigan," he pontificated, "nobody lives in Michigan."  "Grandma lives in Michigan," I retorted.  "Grandmas don't count, " he shot back, "nobody else lives in Michigan."  I could read pretty well by then, and I reminded him of the sign that said, "New Buffalo High School - Home of the Bisons" and expressed doubt that the student body consisted entirely of grandmas.  At this point my mother intervened because my father and I were both getting angry at each other about it.  I closed with, "Very well, I won't mention it again, but mark my words, I will be living in Michigan when I'm 21." And I was.

If this new trail is completed, Chicago kids won't have to wait to grow up before leaving the city for a better life. They will be able to jump on their bicycles and peddle their asses off to Michigan any time they want.  Good for them!

 https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/58-mile-trail-connecting-southwest-michigan-to-chicago-could-be-done-by-2026/ar-AA13HQ5Q?ocid=winpstoreapp&cvid=8ab38fd1374a4ac4b77c0b08240266a0&infiniteIframe=4&infiniteReadingLastFrame=true

motherless bears have a hard time when their mother is gone

 The DNR is looking for locations of denned bears in the northern Lower Peninsula to grow the surrogate sow program, which places orphaned bear cubs with mother bears.

So what's the deal here?  Are bears an integral part of the ecosystem, or do people just like to have them around?  Maybe it's to make sure that there are enough of them around for big spending out of state hunters to come up and hunt them?

What kind of asshole goes hunting bears?  I have no fault with deerslayers like Beagles who fill their freezer, but coming all that way just to kill some poor creature shitting in the woods, I don't know.  

That thing about orphaned bears sounds nice though.  Is Mama a big ol loveable ball of fur whose heart goes out to the motherless, or is she just not remember how many cubs she had when she wakes up in the spring?

Bear Follow-up

 This came in my e-mail today from the Michigan DNR.  It pertains to what I posted the other day about the DNR checking out bear dens.  It appears that they do sedate the mama bears, but it didn't say if they find them awake or just want to make sure that they stay asleep while they work on them.  

See a bear den in northern Lower Peninsula? Let us know (govdelivery.com)

The Killer

 Roughly ten years before the British invasion was the hillbilly invasion, or if you like you may call it the birth of rock and roll.

Sam Phillips, Sun studios, Elvis, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash, all gone now, and the last one Jerry Lee Lewis now also gone.

I guess I first saw him on Ed Sullivan because that's the way things went back in the fifties.  Who was this guy playing his piano with his feet, his butt, banging away?  Well my sisters were all into Elvis and this rock and roll thing so of course I had to be against it, so maybe I didn't quite approve of him right then.  Then quick as he burst onto the scene there was that marriage to his fourteen year old, cousin, was it?  Maybe not a big deal in the south, particularly Louisiana, the wildest of the forty eight (at the time) states.  When I was in Texas, even the Texans, who were pretty damn wild themselves, clucked their tongues at the state to the east.  But kind of alarming to the rest of the country.

Anyway his career was gone.  Well not quite, he got into country music, and I kind of did too, and there he was.  Saw him maybe in the late seventies, a roadside inn twenty miles west of Champaign, not like a stage or anything just a piano in the middle of the room, maybe thirty tables around him, that was it.  He sang his sad songs, and then he was down the road.

We used to bring tapes into the watercolor class, music to paint by.  I brought in my Jerry Lee Lewis tapes once and some young girl was not impressed.  He sounds like some hillbilly trying to sound like Elvis she opined, and I guess she was not that far off.

With the fullness of time his reputation got restored some what, but he was still a wild man, sort of like James Brown, I remember reading in the papers about how he caused some late night fuss drunk at the gates of Graceland, bemoaning that this should all of been his.

I'll close with this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4NquCaWIQI

How Not to Cremate a Body

 When we lived in Indian River, back in the 1970s, I used to burn our trash every day because we were using disposable diapers on our daughter and didn't want to keep them around until dump day.  We used to put the non-burnable stuff in a separate can, the dogs got the bones and food scraps, and everything else went into the burn barrel.  To help the used diapers burn, I would dump a pint or two of fuel oil on them before I lit the fire.  Fuel oil works better than gasoline as a fire starter because it burns hotter and slower.  It's safer too, I never even got my eyebrows singed using fuel oil. 

One of my dogs died in midwinter, when the frozen ground would have made it difficult to give it a proper burial, so I decided to cremate it instead.  I placed the body on top of the day's garbage, soaked the whole pile with a larger than usual amount of fuel oil, and lit the fire.  The dog's hair burned off right away, but the rest of the dog just charred a bit.  More fuel oil didn't help much, so I repeated the process every day for what seemed like a long time.  The charred carcass eventually disappeared, but my wife refused to go anywhere near the burn barrel for the rest of the winter.  This was probably for the best because it didn't smell good around there and my wife, being a non-smoker always did have a more sensitive nose than I did.

I found out later that a human, and I suppose a dog body, is about 90% water.  Before it will burn, all that water has to be cooked out of it.  What they do in India is build a big pile of carefully stacked firewood and put the body on top.  The firewood burns all night, and they sweep the ashes into the river the next morning.  They use natural gas in the US, and the only thing left is the human ashes, which go into an urn that you can put on your mantel piece or wherever you want.  

I read somewhere that, before Hitler committed suicide, he left instructions for his body to be cremated.  His staff tried to do it by just dumping gasoline on the body and touching it off, which didn't work any better than my experiment with the dog.  They didn't have time to repeat the process for days, so they buried the remains of the remains in the courtyard.  The Russians found it, but they didn't tell anybody for decades and accused the US of keeping Hitler alive in some secret location.  They finally came clean about it after the Cold War officially ended, but nobody believes anything the Russians say even unto this day.