American cars

As a child of the 50s and 60s I was obsessed with cars. I filled notebooks with drawings of how I thought they should look. The highlight of my year was going to the Indianapolis Auto Show with my dad. Back then, “foreign cars” were odd, small, and to my thinking, not very appealing.

Through my adulthood I’ve always bought American cars (except for that one kind-of-regrettable Saab.) My 1984 Mustang Turbo convertible was probably my favorite, and driving it solo across country with our dog Lola for company was sublime.

It makes me sad to see the state of the big three today. In September I thought about buying a new Ford Focus, but when I went to the dealer to take a closer look I discovered they are just a shadow of the original models, of which we’ve owned two: dumbed down styling, a reduced choice of body types, and little, if any improvement in mileage. They scream “bland!” so I walked away.

I hope the government rescues the car companies so they can try again. I want them to succeed. I want to buy their products—just not the ones they’re offering now.

~

I’m much too young to feel this damn old

That’s the title of my current favorite country song. Why? I reached the august age of sixty last week. Besides the inconcieveability factor of such a thing, I still visualize myself as thirty.

My wife took me to Chicago for the weekend of my birthday. We stayed in my favorite hotel (the Intercontinental on Michigan Avenue), friends from Indianapolis came up and joined us, and we went to the Vic to see Steve Earle and Tom Morello of Rage Against The Machine. We did the galleries in River North on Saturday afternoon. We took the El to go to dinner. The whole weekend made me feel young again.

There’s been a sudden burst of energy regarding my physical condition. I bought a tape measure and took stock of the sorry sight of my gut. The measurement shocked me. I rejoined the Rec Center and have been swimming a half mile three times a week. I bought a weight bench and put it in the alcove in our bedroom. I’ve actually used it—frequently. My goal is to have a “six-pack” at sixty. (I'm not there yet.) Maybe I can market myself as Mike Six-pack.

Thanksgiving came and went. We drove to Indy and were hosted by my gracious sister and her husband, twenty-five in all. There was a bit of political tension because about half those in attendance are Republicans, and there was this Obama thing that had taken place a couple of weeks earlier.

On Saturday, they threw a party for my sixtieth birthday. It was eight days after the fact, and I tried to feel festive. It was sweet, and a little sad. I can’t help but obsess about the (maybe) two productive decades I have left. And why do they have to be in what looks like one of the most challenging periods in our history? Why couldn’t they have been easy sailing?

~

The depression comes to Southernmost

I read blogs and newspapers and all the articles are about bailouts and banks going under, people losing their homes, and still it seems abstract to me. That is, until another of my favorite businesses closes its doors.

Earlier this summer, we lost a treasure in Carbondale: the feed store that had been downtown for more than 100 years. They tried to hang on selling pet food and plants for your garden and seed for bird feeders, but in June they closed. Then I called Animal Crackers, the slightly nutty, hippie-dippie pet store/kennel to schedule baths for the dogs. Phone disconnected. Store closed. Last week, we saw the signs go up in the windows of one of our favorite stores, Kaleidescope. They (used to) sell reasonably-priced imported items, candles, cards, scarves, jewelery—a perfect source for a wife or sister’s birthday gift.

Tonight it was a punch to the stomach when I drove into Murphysboro and dropped by the grocery store to pick up some things for dinner. I suddenly noticed all the shelves had empty spots, and when I got to the checkout, the magazine racks were bare. I asked, “are you closing?” “Yes, December 13.” I tried to imagine what it’ll be like in this little town with the grocery store an empty building.

Each of these businesses employed people, and gave vitality to our community. They feel like canaries in the coal mine.

~

The freest I ever felt was when I ditched my Ford Pinto. I had moved to Chicago in 1970-something, and urban living meant a car was superfluous. I let my sister take over the car payments and gladly walked away from other expenses like car insurance, gasoline, oil, maintenance, parking tickets, registrations and city stickers. I saved up enough money on my meagre $6,000 salary to go in with a buddy and buy a 40 acre farm in Wisconsin.

My sister actually needed the Pinto, because she was studying nursing in Indianapolis, and had to get to school in a city with almost no public transportation. I, on the other hand, availed myself of my bicycle and the CTA and made out like a bandit.

But in the end, I, like my country, just couldn’t wean myself from the automobile. A few years later I bought a beat-up pickup truck and I was once again a slave to the oil companies and the car companies.

Over the next 30 years I watched, horrified, as the city I grew up in, and every other city I lived in or visited, ate up the countryside around it, spewing out strip malls and vinyl-sided subdivisions as far as the eye could see. I knew in my heart it was not healthy, and I knew it was not sustainable.

Now we’ve reached the point where billions of dollars of taxpayer money are gonna be spent to bail out GM and Chrysler and Ford. I think this is a fool’s mission.

There once was a time where our government was able to fund public scoools, trolley lines, universities, libraries, museums and more. Then all the public money got sucked into building and maintaining highways. The automobile reached into our pockets and caused us to spend more than we could afford as a society. Now we’re at a crossroads.

~

Christmas came early this year

Our Christmas cactus has bloomed way before it should have, usually sometime after Thanksgiving.

Oddly too, today, a week into November, it is so warm I was able to pick a bunch of zinnias, still blooming in the garden.

I’m feeling a sense of calm and confidence that I haven’t had for quite awhile now.

Christmas came early this year.

~

Happy Halloween

Our pumpkin. It’s a Barack O’Lantern.

~

We.Are.SO.Not.Listening

I came across one of the best dismissals of the mainstream media over at Democratic Underground this afternoon. We.Are.SO.Not.Listening. Here are a couple of choice paragraphs:

We are uninterested in whatever it is you have to say, whatever product it is you’re trying to hawk, whatever polls, surveys, or demographics you want to trot out and declare as gospel, and whatever opinions you insist on proffering as though any one of us still gives a flying fuck. Because we don’t.

or how about this:

Tens of thousands dead in a war you promoted like a ratings-grabbing miniseries sure to bring in the viewers and the bucks, Constitutional rights torn and tattered while you made a spectacle of shredding the once-noble profession of journalism with your stunning displays of ignorance, a middle-class that all but disappeared while you discussed missing teenagers and the fading careers of the once rich-and-famous, a government that tortured, imprisoned, raped, and plundered with abandon while you busied yourselves with looking the other way.

We.Are.So.Not.Listening.

~

Who says Sarah Palin doesn’t read?

Infocloud has obtained this list of Sarah’s top 10 newspapers and magazines:

10. NonReaders Digest

9. The Russian Observer

8. The Juneau Juno

7. Snowmobile and Driver

6. Popular Creationism

5. Better Igloos and Tundra

4. UnCosmopolitan

3. NEWSWEAK

2. The Wasilla Flat World Telegram

1. The New York Review of Book Burning

Hats off to the Satirical Political Report for digging through her subscription records.

~

Feeling reamed

So on CNN they celebrated and acted relieved when the closing bell of the New York Stock Exchange went off and the dramatic losses of earlier this week had been regained. I couldn’t share their upbeat mood and had to turn off the television.

Something has been taken away from us this week. After eight years of watching our rights and freedoms disappear one by one, and this past year of seeing our wealth diminish as housing values plummeted, I’m used to it. But this week was the capper.

Now they’ve stolen an additional trillion dollars of our money. They’ve changed the laws so they won’t let us go bankrupt anymore. Wall Street bankers scamper away with severance packages in the millions.

I knew the final throes of the Bush years would be intense. But even I didn’t see this coming. To think there are still people who believe John McCain and Sarah Palin are agents of change and plan to vote for them makes me heartsick.

I have a lot of years under my belt and I’ve never quite felt so frightened about the outcome of an election.

~

For your viewing pleasure

I just can’t help myself:

‘Nuff said

Garrison Keillor, my man

“Or as Jesus said, ‘Whatsoever ye do unto the least of these, the same ye do unto me.‘ And so the great test of the state is the state of the public schools and the treatment of the elderly, the ill, the demented, the incarcerated. And so the adoption of torture as American policy, and loosing the darkness of the soul upon some poor manacled taxi driver at Guantánamo who got snatched up six years ago because he had the same last name as somebody on the CIA's list, and some fine young Caltech grad is shoving Ahmad's head into a toilet—this is no small matter.”

~

To those who say they'll sit this one out

When I read the news on Salon about Obama’s choice of Joe Biden this morning, I raced through the story to get to the reader’s comments. To me, people’s reactions are the true story.

The comments were mostly positive, except for several bitter posts from those disappointed he didn’t choose Hillary. Most claimed they’ll sit out the election, or vote for McCain. The best arguments I can make for them to reconsider came from this letter, written by a woman named Jen:

Of course folks who campaigned for Hillary may be disappointed that she is not the VP candidate. Though, I can't see how this can come of a surprise. Moreover, as the Clinton campaign memos leaked to the Atlantic made embarrassingly clear, this was hers to loose. And she did, just like Gore in 2000.

I'm not thrilled with Obama or Biden. But to say you'd sit this one out means you've been living in a different country than I have in the past 8 years.

You haven't been living in a country that now is a torturer; or turned its back on its citizens in New Orleans, turning them into refugees; or expanded rampant deregulation that helped fuel the housing crisis that put cash in the pockets of speculators. You apparently aren't living in a country where food banks are running out of supplies and are turning hungry families away. Or killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians. Or trying to reduce the benefits available to returning veterans.

You are going to sit this one out and potentially allow McCain to be elected who will continue most of the misguided policies of his predecessor?

That's reprehensible.

~

Beautiful light

When I saw the light falling on this BB King poster I got from Hatch Show Prints in Nshville I had to snap it. It is lying on a side table in my studio, in a pile of things I intend to deal with in some fashion. This one I would like to frame and place over the piano but that’s low priority.

Finished posting all our photos from Ireland here. Going through them brought the trip back to mind.

Since we’ve been back—a week now—I’ve only been to town twice: to the liquor store on Sunday and last night to see Mama Mia. It was the kind of movie we seldom gravitate to, but I loved Meryl Streep and the surreal color and fantasy of it. But not going to town has been a conscious decision, based on a desire to bask in summer in the woods by the lake. Taking a G&T and getting into the water on a floatie at the end of the day is sublime. I forget about the cares of the day as a gentle tide takes me out to the middle of the small lake. Sounds mostly of wildlife, hardly ever a car passing.

Our garden, such an ambitious undertaking, has had mixed results. Just as we left for Ireland the tomatoes began to ripen, and looked like they’d be abundant and big. Then some horrible caterpillars attacked the leaves of the plants and almost killed them. We did manage to can nine jars of dill pickles today from our cucumbers. But that was almost the entire crop to date. Lots to learn and I’m glad to be doing it. It is a great counterpoint to my mostly online, high-tech career.

~

Processing Ireland

I knew it would be intense, coming to terms with the Irish part of me. Visiting Ireland had always been something I intended to do. I put it off for one reason or another, for years. My twenties, thirties and forties passed by, I didn’t go. Finally I did. I have been changed in ways I’ll be discovering for years.

The pain of Ireland is inescapable, never far below the surface. Within minutes of meeting our cousin in Roscommon, he’d taken us on a walk through a hedge and a gate to the ruin of an abbey, its monks killed centuries ago by the English. The next day he took us to Strokestown, a museum of the Irish “ascendancy”—protestant landlords whose children had elaborate tea parties while their Irish tenants starved to death. The famine museum there was in great contrast to the cheery meal of Irish stew and tea we had next to the gift shop after the arduousness of our trek through the manse.

These images haunted me. I didn’t want to go there bearing grudges. If you put your ear to the ground, listen carefully, in this country you hear the screams of your ancestors, you wonder what that has done to your own psyche, played out in 1950s America, a land of abundance, far from places like this.

~

Being in Ireland just as the US economy crashes and burns is interesting. Our cab driver on the way from the airport to downtown Dublin launched into an anti-Bush tirade. Clearly, Americans are now out of favor worldwide.

Our money is almost worthless. A pint of Guinness costs about $10. Same thing for a bowl of Irish stew. I remember when we were in Mexico years ago and it seemed like the pesos were a form of Monopoly money. Now dollar bills feel like pesos.

The photo above is of the garden behind Dublin Castle. We spent a tranquil half-hour sitting there, taking in the atmosphere.

~

Our Sunday adventure

We were having a party. Friends were drinking wine and talking, kids swimming in the lake. Peaceful and the best kind of high-summer Sunday afternoon.

A few of us walked down behind the garage where I’ve set up a shooting range for bow and arrow practice. We took turns shooting arrows at the target, talking about the days when people used bows and arrows to get food or protect themselves.

As we walked back past the garage, someone noticed a three foot long copperhead snake in the driveway. It slithered under Paul & Michelle’s car. He got in (gingerly) and drove away, leaving the snake in the open again. Our other friend Paul was carrying the bow and suggested he shoot the snake with an arrow. We all laughed. “Thwapp!” With just one shot the snake was pinned to the dirt through the middle of its body and couldn’t get away. It started writhing and seemed to be in a lot of pain. That’s when Jay said, “I’ll get the axe and chop its head off.” He did just that. A small group of small children watched, amazed.

Paul picked up the snake’s carcass with a hoe and flung it into the woods, and everyone pretty much went back to what they were doing. Though the adrenaline level was a little higher than before.

Afterwards, I felt bad for the snake. Wrong place at the wrong time. But you can’t have copperheads hanging around your garage.

~

My 1943 copper dream

I have this compulsive habit, and have had for years. It’s looking closely at all the pennies I receive, to make sure I don’t let a 1943 copper one slip through my hands.

I’ve done this since I began collecting pennies as a kid. They went in these neat little books, snapping securely into their designated spots. It intrigued me that the 1943 pennies were dark gray, made of zinc-coated steel instead of copper which was needed in the war effort. But my mom told me about the ever-so-rare 1943 copper ones. Legend has it they were from copper that was left over in the molds when the casting began. Those are worth a lot of money.

And so began my ritual. I got quick at it, emptying my pocket at the end of the day, turning over the pennies to see if they have the characteristic wheat sheaves on the back. That makes the old ones easy to spot. I keep them no matter what their date because they’re rare too now, and toss the rest into a jar where they will collect until that rainy day when there isn’t any other cash around the house. (The way our economy’s going, that day may come sooner rather than later.)

So far, I haven’t found the penny, and the minute I do, I’m selling it. This site says it’s worth $200,000 or more.

~

How the other half lives

Straight from Architectural Digest: John and Cindy McCain’s hot tub. I really, really, don’t want to imagine what this looks like when they’re in there together.

~

Shock and awe comes to Indianapolis

A shocking article appeared in yesterday’s Indianapolis Star, detailing plans for turning the east side of the city into a “mock battlefield” for two weeks this summer. 2,300 Marines will be landing helicopters in parks, at an abandoned shopping mall, stadiums, and the State Fairgrounds.

“Our aim in Indianapolis is to expose our Marines to realistic scenarios and stresses posed by operating in an actual urban community, thereby increasing their proficiency in built-up areas,” Col. Mark J. Desens, commander of the 26th MEU, said in a statement. “Residents in many areas can expect to see helicopters flying overhead, military vehicles on the roads and Marines patrolling on foot,” Desens said.

The readers’ comments following the article were even more disturbing than the news itself. For every person who suggested that this is outrageous and a precursor for imposing martial law, there were at least five brain-dead commenters saying things like, “God Bless our Marines. Welcome to Indianapolis.”

Yes, welcome to Indianapolis. Welcome to soldiers patrolling our streets with machine guns to make sure we don’t get out of hand. With the economy in freefall, it’s only a matter of time before all hell breaks loose and the government cracks down. They’re getting ready. I wonder if their training will include house-to-house searches?

~

Supporting our troops

I stopped writing on this blog for awhile because my sense of outrage had become dulled. This bit of news just sharpened it:

Imagine you’re on your third posting to Iraq, patrolling the dangerous streets, probably suffering from post traumatic stress syndrome, and you’re dealing with another all-too-common American middle-class problem. While you’ve been risking your life to make the Middle East safe for the oil companies, back home in Iowa the bank is preparing to foreclose on your house and throw your family onto the streets. Bloomberg News—not exactly a left-wing sort of outfit—reports today that foreclosures around military bases in the U.S. are four times higher than the national average.

In other news, Carly Fiorina, McCain’s financial adviser, is calling for more tax cuts for the wealthy to get the economy back on track.

~

The People’s Republic of Ann Arbor

We boarded the train (yes, train) in Carbondale on a sunny Friday morning, headed for Chicago. There we’d lay over for five hours, awaiting our connecting train to Ann Arbor. The Chicago part of our journey was interesting, but it’s the Ann Arbor part that matters. Late at night, we pulled into “A2,” tired and questioning whether we’d ever take a train again.

We had two reasons to visit Ann Arbor. Our friends Gail and George moved there last year after a valiant effort as urban pioneers trying to bring Detroit back to life. It was a bigger challenge than they realized, so they decided to move to a gentle, nurturing city where life would be less difficult and more rewarding. The other reason is that my boss, Nancy D., had just moved there also, and a visit offered me an opportunity to work face to face with her for at least a day. In this age of telecommuting, a face to face session with your boss can be all too rare.

I expected to like it, but I wasn’t prepared to be as charmed as I was by Ann Arbor.

There are certain cities where liberal values prevail. The most prominent are places like Boston and San Francisco, but there’s a second tier that in some ways offers more hope. In the Midwest, where I’m from, those cities are places like Bloomington, Indiana, Madison, Wisconsin, and Ann Arbor, Michigan. They’re small enough that the liberal agenda completely takes over and changes their fabric.

What do you find in a liberal-agenda city like Ann Arbor? First off, a thriving inner city. A bustling downtown chock full of restaurants and retail stores, coffee shops, hot-dog stands, libraries and post offices, galleries and bars. Public schools that people support and that work. Public transportation, parks and libraries and other amenities for the people. Efforts to conserve energy like solar panels and bio-diesel fuel for buses.

Ann Arbor has all of these and more. It is clear this place didn’t just come to life last year, but has been nurtured and supported for decades. It’s what happens when people treat civic life as important, and don’t retreat into gated communities to keep the riff-raff at bay.

As the national economy heads into uncharted and frightening territory, the Ann Arbor city council is preparing to make it easier for residents to put food on the table. They’re working on an ordinance to allow city-dwellers to raise poultry in their backyards. To that I say “cock-a-doodle-doo!”

~

The winter that just won’t go away

I’m the first to admit it: I suffer from SAD—seasonal affective disorder. No matter how I try to psych myself up for it, winter just pisses me off. The years I lived in California didn’t help much: I got used to things such as the crocuses blooming right after New Year’s Day. Now that I’m back in the Midwest, I find myself thinking, “there are places where they don’t put up with this shit.”

Winter has dragged on here in Southernmost Illinois this year. The weather reports say tomorrow is going to be 50 degrees, and the next morning you wake up to gray skies, more snow, maybe another ice storm, a drizzly rain, and the ground stays white. White with tired old snow, crusty, marred by yellow spots where the dogs have pissed, fallen branches—a truly dismal sight.

But I do take comfort in this. Maybe global warming isn’t as bad as we thought. There are those who say this means it’ll be OK.

I hope so.

~

Forgetting to be green

We’ve stopped buying water in plastic bottles, even though our tap water is not exactly of the highest quality. Still, when we filter it in the Brita pitcher, some of the Mississippi mud taste goes away. (It was Mark Twain who described the water in this region quite well: “It’s too thick to drink, and too thin to plow.”)

We thought we were being green by saving up the endless stream of plastic bags from the grocery store in a nifty IKEA plastic bag holder, and bringing them back to the store from time to time, placing them into the Trex collection box, where they’ll be made into vinyl decking planks. But the whole notion of their manufacturing source—petroleum—made me want to stop using them entirely.

So, we acquired a number of canvas bags for shopping. Now it’s just a matter of getting into the habit of remembering to bring them to the store. That’s a several step process: placing them by the front door after emptying the groceries, taking them out to the car so they’ll be there when I arrive at the store, and remembering to bring them in with me when I go shopping.

I’m starting to get into these habits after many years of walking into stores bagless, but it’s not easy to do. More than once I get into the store, pull out the shopping cart, and realize I don’t have my canvas bags with me. So I go back to the car and get them—that is if I’ve remembered to put them in the car in the first place.

If this seems like a stupid post, I’m writing it kind of like when one ties a string around their finger to remember something. It may activate a few brain cells and help me make this a habit.

~

What you don’t want, throw out

I’m such a sappy-hearted Midwesterner that most weekends I listen to A Prairie Home Companion twice: once on Saturday night, and again late Sunday morning. Garrison Keillor’s voice has a calming effect on my nerves, though I hate his singing.

His writing is also wonderful because it conjures up rich images that link me to my own past. When he writes about his uncles, taciturn and with very little to say at the family reunions, he could be writing about my now-long-gone uncles too. In his latest column, “The Old Scout,” he riffs on cleaning house, and he ties it to our upcoming election. The last paragraph resonates:

I think of when I was in college and owned about three cardboard boxes of stuff and a corduroy sportcoat and six pairs of jeans and a Webster's Third Unabridged and an Underwood typewriter. I can't be that guy again, but sometimes when life is too much, you want to walk out the front door and leave it all behind and start over. That's how I feel about this election. The White House is a vacuum. The man is a mistake on two legs, a national wrong turn. Stop the car and turn around.

~

on the fence

I hoped it wouldn’t come to this: a moment for Democrats to seize, paralyzed by a 50/50 split in sympathies. The vitriol spewed by both the Obama and Hillary camps has surprised and saddened me.

I understand and support womens’ longing for a female president. Feminine values are sorely needed in the way we shape this world. Maybe we’d have less war, and more caring at home—though forgive me if I’m stereotyping women with that statement. Yet someone’s gender cannot be the defining reason they should be president.

Why does Hillary get to be a feminist champion? Her 35-year claim on experience was mostly played out in her role as someone’s wife—an enabling wife for that matter. I am a man, and I am a feminist. This does not fit my understanding of feminism.

I proudly support our Illinois senator. He opposed the Iraq War from the beginning, when doing so was unpopular. He does not take money from PACs. He inspires. And 43% of the electorate has not gone on record that they would never vote for him. That part of the population does not oppose Hillary because she’s a woman. They oppose her because for some reason, they don’t like or trust her.

For those who are on the fence, I offer links to two videocasts. The first is from Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig.

The other, you may have seen. It’s the famous Yes We Can song.

My final argument is this: Hillary has taken Barack’s slogan, “yes we can,” and perverted it into “yes she can.” That begs the question: is it about her or us?

~

Welcome to New Hooverville

“Over the last six months, more than 250 homeless people have pitched tents near the Ontario airport, creating a burgeoning shantytown that sprawls across vacant lots and spills into side streets.” This from an article in today’s Los Angeles Times. It’s a new kind of “suburban sprawl.”

In the Great Depression, these places were called Hoovervilles. When I began a search for an image to go with this post I discovered there must have been hundreds, or even thousands of these shantytowns. There were images from all over. Cincinnati, Grand Forks, Brooklyn, DC, Seattle. It’s clear that they became an inevitable fact of life, and now they’re back. Little surprise: when you squeeze blood from the turnip that used to be called “the Middle Class” people become desperate, and they either die or must live out their shattered lives somewhere.

“Residents live in donated tents with mattresses. They light fires in barrels or grills to stay warm. High winds can topple the portable toilets, spilling their contents. Inside one, someone scrawled "God Hates Us All" in black marker.”

Just as we did with the homelessness problem that crept up on us in the 1980s and 90s, I bet Americans will come to accept these new shantytowns as a natural part of the landscape. Only I hope they won’t call them Hoovervilles. It’s time for a new name. How about “Bushboroughs?” It has a classier tone, I guess to reflect the fact that these shanties won’t be built of old packing crates, but rather high-tech nylon tents from North Face. And now they have porta-potties and social services. We’ve come a long way.

“Tents now cover several large dirt lots on both sides of Cucamonga Avenue. Side streets are lined with battered vans and recreational vehicles. Dogs run wild. A 6-month-old was recently found living in a tent with his mother. Authorities said they would provide better shelter for all mothers with children they find.”


In my travels in Mexico and Costa Rica, I have been appalled when I noticed similar patched-together settlements on the edges of cities and towns. Seeing people living in huts made of tarpaper, odd bits of wood and plastic is gut-wrenching. I know such places can be found in India, Brazil, throughout Africa, and in other desperately poor countries. God help us, it’s now official: this new “Gilded Age” has made us just like the third world.

~

New logo

“Damn near irrelevant”

Republican Greg Ballard, the new “accidental mayor” of Indianapolis, has just appointed Randall Tobias as head of the city’s airport authority. You may recall that Tobias, Bush’s hand-picked “abstinence czar” who oversaw a nine billion dollar budget, hurriedly resigned last year when he was outed as a client of the notorious D.C. Madam’s escort services. Before that he had been an Indianapolis icon, as CEO of Eli Lilly, a company which more or less owns Central Indiana lock stock and barrel.

There’s another Eli Lilly/Bush-crony dickhead running around Indiana these days, that’s the state’s governor, Mitch Daniels. Don’t even get me started on him. He’s the one overseeing a hemorrhage of jobs out of Indiana and selling off state assets like the Indiana Toll Road to private investors so he can appear to have balanced the budget. This is the same budget director for Bush who estimated the Iraq War would cost less than $100 million. Sheesh, these whack-jobs do stick together, don’t they?

“Damn near irrelevant to the position” is how Ballard characterized Tobias’ entanglement with the escort service, the Indianapolis Star reported. I like the “damn near” part of that assessment a lot. It shows Ballard has an open mind. He’s quick to forgive and forget, and probably just wants someone who can “get the job done.”

I’d say Ballard himself was damn near irrelevant if he hadn’t accidentally become the mayor of my old hometown.

~

Seven layer salad, red velvet cake and puppy chow

The sociologist in me has always loved the fad recipes that sweep through American culture. I remember fondly the days of red velvet cake, and kind of gag when I think the day may come I find myself eating another serving of seven layer salad.

Down here in the rural reaches of Southernmost Illinois we’re fortunate to belong to an electric co-op. That frees us in a New Deal sort of way from corporate utility behemoths like Ameren, and as a result our rates stay low. But my favorite benefit is that each month the co-op sends out a comfy 50s-style magazine, Illinois Country Living, and reading it brings out my inner farmer.

Eventually, I get around to the recipe section, because the offerings, a barometer of what a certain part of America is eating, are also an indication of how America sees itself. It seems only women are allowed to submit these recipes, as if real men don’t cook. Usually, they’re fatty and sweet, and they use a lot of refined and processed foods (1 can Campbell’s™ Mushroom soup, 8 ounces Velveeta™ Cheese...).

This month, as I thumbed through the recipes, I came across one endearingly called, “puppy chow”—a crunchy chocolate-peanut butter thing made out of Crispix™ cereal and Skippy™ peanut butter and Toll House™ morsels. I laughed out loud, and decided I had to make it. The next day I bought a box of Crispix™ and that night mixed in the melted chocolate and peanut butter and then tossed it all in a paper bag filled with powdered sugar.

When the puppy chow was ready, I ate about a dozen pieces and quickly lost interest. It’s no substitute for those organic pecan cookies or even a genuine bowl of ice cream. The dogs can have what’s left of the puppy chow. At two chunks each per night, it’ll last a long time. And besides, they’re already familiar with the form factor.
~

Guns or butter?

Long morally bankrupt, the US is now falling into a tailspin of financial turmoil. How could it not? Reality has finally reared its head. Truisms are called that for a reason. You can’t have guns and butter.

This from James Howard Kuntsler, whose blog, “Clusterfuck Nation” has recently caught my eye:

The United States is so broke, its people at every level from the Federal Reserve on down don't know whether to shit or go blind. The homeowners cringing in the media rooms of their 5000-square-foot personal family resorts don't know how long they can stay put microwaving pepperoni hot pockets with the default clock ticking. The mortgage "servicers" don't know how they will persuade interested parties like, say, the Illinois State Cafeteria Workers' Pension Fund (holder of X-amount of mortgage-backed securities underwritten by, say, Merrill Lynch or Deutsche Bank) to foreclose on properties scattered everywhere from Key West to Bainbridge Island -- or if there is actually any legal mechanism known to man that would make it possible to "work out" the sliced-and-diced collateral. The millions of maxed-out credit card holders and the issuers of their plastic are stuck together paddling a leaky tub in a sea of troubles every bit as wide, deep, and polluted as the one the mortgage junkies and their enablers are sinking in.

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mikal is definitely not in philly

When I first began blogging, I had just moved from Indianapolis to a loft in Center City Philadelphia, so I used my locale as part of my blog’s name. Silly me. Why didn’t it occur to me, after having lived all over the U.S. that my chances of staying in Philly indefinitely were slim-to-none?

Three years ago we moved once again, this time to Carbondale, Illinois, and it was kind of a big adjustment to no longer be doing the big city thing. Yet I never got around to changing the name of the blog, because I had lots of posts and the comments indicated a handful of interested readers. I didn’t want to risk losing them. (In case you didn’t come here from there, you can read them here.

But posting to “mikalinphilly” seemed inauthentic somehow. So one of my New Year’s resolutions was to put it to rest. Welcome to infocloud. Anyway, this new title more accurately reflects the scattered and unpredictable nature of the things I write about.

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