This morning I found myself taking stock of all the adventures I have had in my adult life. Most recently, I have walked Broadway in New York from the depths of Ground Zero through the blaze of Times Square to the greenery of Central Park and the Upper West Side. I’ve hiked the historic streets of Washington DC, the white sand beaches of Kaanapali and Grand Cayman and floated in the mist under Niagara Falls.

While I am fortunate to have the means and opportunity to have gathered these vivid and treasured memories it was the mundane setting of the stacks of dry goods and produce under the grid of fluorescence at Cub Foods this morning that underscored their only common denominator.

It was there that I found myself flush with gratitude and good fortune as I watched my wife pluck a small jar of sea salt from the shelf.

Wise men know that no one bears the the scars of our existence more willingly or ably than our brides. I’ve always said “Show me a successful man and I will show you a man that married well.”

It is the dividends of a marriage to a wonderful woman, undeservedly so I might add, that make even the most prosaic activities a bounty to my being. I am in awe of the fierce but gentle love and concern she has for her brood and the tolerance she has for my foibles, not the least of which, my ego.

If I were King, she would be the crown that legitimizes my station.

As we walked the sterile isles of Cub, our over-burdened cart informing of the three at home, I realized how hard it will be someday when the littlest leaves the nest but at the same time looked forward to having her to myself again some day.

…and that is what I am thankful for this season.

The NARN is taking today – Thanksgiving Saturday – off.

Enjoy the weekend!

The Question: What Nickname Should A Conservative Blog Employ For President-Elect Barack Obama So As To Not Offend Our More Tender Readers?

“Oprah” by a slim margin.

HT Flash

A few years back, I had a conversation with a friend of mine, a psychologist by trade. 

He was talking about a client of his who’d spent twenty or so years in US Army Special Forces – a “Green Beret”, specializing in “unconventional warfare” around the world.  This client had spent most of his career in Latin America – and while the closest he’d come to fighting an actual “war” was in Panama, he’d apparently spent a long time in a lot of pseudo-war situations.  My friend didn’t go into many details, but Latin America from the late seventies through the mid-nineties was full of brushfire wars and counterinsurgencies where the USSF was involved to one level or another, training local troops and working with local communities.  While they weren’t “at war”, per se, there was apparently enough danger involved that the client spent a good chunk of his twenties and thirties operating on some sort of war footing. 

The problems – for the client – started when he got out of the service.  He’d spent the best years of his life, literally and figuratively, in one Latin-American insurgency zone or slum or another, looking over his back and watching for threats around every corner as he did his job, training local soldiers and building things and giving vaccinations and whatever else Green Berets did when they were on the job in the Third World toward the end of the Cold War.  He’d spent so much time doing that that it became normal for him; when he got out of the Army, he missed it. 

So the client had spent several  years of his post-service life, my friend said, putting himself into situations where he felt that little stab of danger, where he got to exercise his self-preserving habits; he lived in the worst possible neighborhoods; he hung out at the worst bars; he did whatever it took to keep himself on that “war footing”. 

To do anything else just didn’t feel normal.

The post-election hangover on a blog is sort of like that.  Win (’02, ’04) or lose (’06 and ’08), there’s a huge letdown and readjustment, as the fever-pitch of excitement fades into the post-election waiting for the new regime (or the new take on the current regime) to take hold. 

This past election was the fourth election cycle this blog has been through.  Every year, a number of new political blogs fade out after the election; without an election, what do you write about?  Not me, of course – I’ve been doing this long enough to know the pattern, so it doesn’t especially faze me.  But there’s always a period of readjustment, as one switches from the always-on mental scrum of writing about politics-as-current events, and switches to politics-as-daily-routine, along with writing about all of life’s other routines.  Or, y’know, not writing about them; there are bloggers for whom politics is the only subject.

The readjustment is particularly jarring this time around.  This electoral season was so intense, so fraught with consequence on both sides, and just-plain more-engrossing than the last couple of turns.  We’ve spent most of the last year writing about what has been was supposed to be an epochal generational and social shift in American politics; going from that epic clash to two years of talking about congressional maneuvering is a jarring shift.

The readjustment is coming along, though. 

Although I can hardly wait for 2010…

“Black Friday” stampede on Long Island kills a store worker:

A worker died after being trampled and a woman miscarried when hundreds of shoppers smashed through the doors of a Long Island Wal-Mart Friday morning, witnesses said.

The unidentified worker, employed as an overnight stock clerk, tried to hold back the unruly crowds just after the Valley Stream store opened at 5 a.m.

Witnesses said the surging throngs of shoppers knocked the man down. He fell and was stepped on. As he gasped for air, shoppers ran over and around him.

Europe has soccer games; we have Black Friday.

So as I reported yesterday, I forgot to defrost the turkey.

“Run to Rainbow”, I was told, “and get a pre-made turkey!”.

“No”, said the stubborn, penurious Scandinavian.  “There must be another way”.

And indeed, not only was there…

…but it rocked. The best turkey I’ve made in recent years.

Could have been all the biking.

Could be my boss knows what she’s doing:

The Swedish study found that workers’ risks for angina, heart attack and death rose along with the reported incompetence of their bosses.

I’ve had a couple of “heart attack/stroke” bosses.  And at least one that I think might have been carcinogenic if I’d have stayed at that company much longer.

A few years back, on this blog’s first Thanksgiving, I wrote a piece for Thanksgiving that, six years later, still pretty much says everything I want and need to say:

I moved from North Dakota to Minneapolis in October of 1985. It was a spur of the moment thing – in fact, it started with a drunken statement to a bunch of classmates at a college homecoming party two weeks earlier. It was five months after graduation, and they’d all come back to Jamestown (my hometown and college) with stories of their fun careers, fun cities, fun lives…

I was doing roofing and siding, wondering what the hell one did with an English degree. But after five or six gin and tonics, I found myself dancing with Monica Costello, and telling her “Yeah – I’m still here in Jamestown”. Really, she asked? “Yeah, but I’m moving”. Where, she asked. I thought about it for a second. “Minneapolis” seemed to be a place I could afford to get to. When, she asked. “Two weeks”, I blurted out without really thinking.

Damned if everyone didn’t remember that promise when we all sobered up. So – two weeks later, I loaded two duffel bags and a guitar into my ’73 Malibu, and I was off.

Six weeks later, it was Thanksgiving. I still had no job, I was broke and malnourished and cold. I’d had a few interviews, but no bites. I had dinner at a friend’s place. And on the way home, I drove downtown, and walked out onto the Central Avenue bridge, and looked out over the city in the dark. If you’ve never seen it, looking at downtown Minneapolis in the dark, when everything’s all lit up, is stunning; for someone just in off the prairie, it was like looking at Manhatten. I was cold, and scared out of my shorts about my short-term prospects – and for the first time, I felt strangely at home in this new city.

And every since then, Thanksgiving has seemed like the turning of the new year for me – the time when I reflect on the past year’s agonies and flubs and successes, and look forward to the next year. Much more so – for me anyway – than New Years’ Eve, which is more decompression from Christmas than anything.

Things to be thanksful for?  Many.

But I forgot one. I’m thankful to be here. Now. Doing what I’m doing, and with the chance to be doing the same thing – or better – next year.

God bless you all. And if you don’t believe in God – well, bless yourself silly.

And that’s all still true.  It’s been an “interesting” year, in the classic Hindu sense of the term.  But I am – we are – still here.  And as I frantically scour the internet for directions on how to cook the turkey that I neglected to defrost two days ago (how do I forget that every single year?), it feels almost trite to count off all the things I’m thankful for.

I’m here.  But there’s less of me (I lost 20-30 pounds this past year.  It’s been a difficult year on the family front, but there are more than enough of the little sparks of hope that keep one going.  Yes, I am doing better than I was this time last year, or even four years ago.

As I look at the news from Muimbai, I am thankful that I live in a place at a time where people furrow their brows and cluck with concern about “nasty campaigning” and “partisanship” over things that would pass for “high school pranks” in parts of the world where nastiness means “AK74s” and “partisanship” means “piles of bodies lined up behind a warehouse”.

I’m thankful for the outlet this little old blog provides, and for all the people who’ve come into my life in the almost seven years I’ve been doing this.

So Happy Thanksgiving to all of you!

Poor Joe. His role in the Obama administration?

For Biden, No Portfolio but the Role of a Counselor

Which is nicey nice for nada. Please stay out of the way and keep your mouth shut.

One can’t imagine John McCain taking that tact with Sarah Palin. She’d put one of her Naughty Monkeys up his…well you know. Another post-mortem observation proving McCain/Palin would have been a better team for America in this time and place.

Mr. Obama has moved quickly to assemble his White House staff and the beginnings of (Bill Clinton’s-JR) cabinet, he is lagging behind even the chronically late President Bill Clinton in bringing clarity to the role his vice president will play.

Breaking up is so hard to do.

“I’m sure that there will be discrete assignments over time,” said David Axelrod, a senior adviser to the president-elect. “But I think his fundamental role is as a trusted counselor. I think that when Obama selected him, he selected him to be a counselor and an adviser on a broad range of issues.”

Ah, discrete assignments over time. Well played Axelrod. Methinks those assignments will entail such tools as a discrete infra-red remote control and a strategically placed hassock emblazoned with the seal of the Vice President.

while Mr. Obama held a news conference in Chicago on Tuesday, Mr. Biden was home in Delaware, having spent Monday night in Wilmington stuffing Christmas stockings with his wife for a charity event.

Quaint. We all know how committed to charity Joe Biden is…stuffing a sock where his wallet is.

The President-Elect did not return phone calls from Jill Biden pleading for Mr. Obama to “Please get Joe the (h-e-toothpick-toothpick) out of the house – he’s driving me crazy.”

Mr. Biden seems to be adapting. He is hiring for his office, including a chief of staff, Ron Klain, who has worked with him since he was chairman of the Judiciary Committee in the 1990s. With Mr. Obama having settled on Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of state, Mr. Biden, whose most recent Senate post was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has privately told people that he recognizes he will not be the point man on foreign policy.

Poor Joe. He will have to fight for that remote too.

The only guy I feel more sorry for than Joe having nothing to do, is the Chief of Staff of The Guy With Nothing To Do.

Hey! Joe’s the Maytag Man! (He He)

Mr. Biden has also interviewed candidates for chief economist, and associates say he is honing his economic credentials.

Not unduly angry?

Aides say Mr. Biden and Mr. Obama sometimes rib each other in private meetings, and they maintain that Mr. Obama was not unduly angry at Mr. Biden for his gaffe predicting that Mr. Obama would be tested by a world crisis in his first six months in office.

So he was pissed, just not unduly. Ouch.

Since then, however, Mr. Biden has not had much to say to the news media.

Because they’re not asking him any questions.

Through a spokeswoman, he declined to be interviewed for this article, itself a break from his voluble past.

Franken Loses Crucial Ruling in Minnesota Recount

Minnesota’s Canvassing Board voted unanimously to reject Franken’s request to include thousands of absentee ballots that are not included in the recount in the Minnesota senate race between the Democratic challenger and Republican incumbent Norm Coleman.

Which means it’s all but over for Al Franken’s bid for Norm Coleman’s Senate Seat as the recount is so far and will likely continue to substantiate Coleman’s narrow victory.

(more…)

Surprising results from the recount, says the PiPress – most of Coleman’s pick-up is coming from Minneapolis:

But Minneapolis — the biggest, bluest pile of all — is turning [the notion that the inner city should be a treasure trove of dangling Franken chads] on its head. With nearly half of its ballots recounted, the city Franken calls home isn’t doing the candidate any favors. And that could be dimming Franken’s hopes of catching Coleman before the state canvassing board meets Dec. 16.

‘Things are clearly moving in the wrong direction for Franken,’ said [the inevitable] Larry Jacobs, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for the Study of Politics and Governance.

With fewer than half of the ballots counted in Minneapolis, Franken has lost 86 votes, while Coleman has lost just 37. In other words, the city could be blunting any recount advantage Franken might have in the rest of the state as the recount rolls toward its Dec. 5 deadline.”

So here’s the question:  why was Minneapolis’ original count so short of Coleman ballots?

…that I’m going to plead “discrimination against Christians” as I’m going to assert that an awful lot of secularists and self-appointed PC cops are so very very irritating (emphasis added):

[Florida Gulf Coast University] administration has banned all holiday decorations from common spaces on campus and canceled a popular greeting card design contest, which is being replaced by an ugly sweater competition. In Griffin Hall, the university’s giving tree for needy preschoolers has been transformed into a “giving garden.”

The moves boil down to political correctness.

“Public institutions, including FGCU, often struggle with how best to observe the season in ways that honor and respect all traditions,” President Wilson Bradshaw wrote in a memo to faculty and staff Thursday. “This is a challenging issue each year at FGCU, and 2008 is no exception. While it may appear at times that a vocal majority of opinion is the only view that is held, this is not always the case.”

The mistake with this particular noxious dialect of PC is that nothing in human life, in social interaction, and in civil society is “always the case“.  No opinion, majority or minority, need or should be “always” front and center in the public view; neither should the majority be squelched because it’s not unanimous.

The majority is part of a “diverse” group, too…

Minnesota has a few rituals that we locals rely on to see in the changes in the seasons. The Vikings choking (sometimes in the playoffs, sometimes in pre-season); farmers bitching about there not being enough rain (or, otherwise, too much rain); the DFL trying to put lipstick on the pig of “huge confiscatory tax hikes”…

…and, every fall or winter, the DFL/Strib (pardon the redundancy) taking another hit piece at charter schools.

Charter schools – essentially “districts within districts”, schools calved off from regular school districts which elect their own board, hire their own teachers and, most importantly, develop or adopt their own curriculum – started in Minnesota, and have been a huge success. So huge, in fact, that the DFL/teacher’s union (pardon the redundancy) has tried to strangle the phenomenon from the cradle all the way into the movement’s twenties.

And the effort continues:

When charter schools started in Minnesota in the early 1990s, they were touted as a higher-quality alternative for parents, particularly poor and minority families, looking to escape underperforming district schools.   

But a study released today by the University of Minnesota’s Institute on Race and Poverty finds that most charter schools have fallen short of that promise and perform worse than comparable district schools on state tests.

The reason for this, of course, is that charter schools are atomic units; the buck stops in the building. If a kid “underperforms”, a public school has the option of shunting the kid off to Special Ed, or in bigger districts to an “Alternative Learning Center”, where they’re “off the books” for purposes of “No Child Left Behind” accounting. In a charter school, all the kids in the building get counted toward the same average; the charter school has noplace to hide the kids who are dragging the school’s average down.  

And the biggest growth vector among the charters? Inner-city schools chartered by black and Asian parents who are dissatisfied with the public district. And what do you think is going to happen – at least in the short term – when a population that’s been woefully underserved by the public schools gets its own school, and congregates as a big group?

Their “test scores”, in the short term, might suffer. Presuming you pay attention to test scores. More on this below.
Make no mistake – there are charter schools that don’t pass muster, that do a poor job of teaching kids. Is the percentage as high as that of our failing inner-city school districts?

I don’t know, but I strongly doubt it.

But at least the claim above is based on some numbers. The next bit?

Well…:

In the process, it said, charters also intensify racial and economic segregation and compound the problem by encouraging districts to compete by creating ethnic niche programs.

I’m tempted to ask – do the Strib’s Patrice Relerford and Emily Johns know that charter enrollment is voluntary? And that the big driving force behind urban charter schools is the flood of disaffected African-American parents who believe – with complete statistical accuracy – that Minneapolis and Saint Paul’s districts serve them incredibly badly? And that given the motivation, not only is “segregation” voluntary, benign and (given the proportion of black families making up the charter school market in the city) inevitable, but fussing about “integration” is a fussy manifestation of white liberal guilt.

And when in Minnesota, whenever white liberals are guilty, Myron Orfield can’t be far behind:

“So many people are seeing charter schools as a solution to poor, segregated neighborhoods,” said Myron Orfield, the institute’s executive director. “The sad part is, they’re getting these kids to switch schools and then they’re doing worse” than district schools.

Rubbish.

The “studies” on which this “report” is based don’t measure individual achievement; indeed, no studies of relative performance of charter and public schools ever do. Whether a school does “better or worse” than another school is utterly meaningless; the only issue that matters is how do individual kids do?

And the only way to cut through the misleading spin on the poorly-chosen test parameters is to find parameters that matter. In this case, the only meaningful measure is “how many individual students‘ performances improve versus decline?”

If you believe in the free market, you pay some homage to the “wisdom of crowds”. And there is a crowd effect here:

Minneapolis and St. Paul charter enrollment has grown by 21 and 11 percent, respectively, over the past school year, according to the Center for School Change. Last year, more than 28,000 Minnesota students enrolled in charters.

That doesn’t begin to tell the story, of course. Saint Paul’s school population has dropped by 12% – about an eighth – as parents yank their kids from the district to go into charters and open enrollment. Minneapolis is faring even “worse”. In the meantime, the number of charter schools – and the number of kids in them – booms.

Just saying – when the Strib starts writing about charter schools, look for Education Minnesota’s fingerprints.

They’re all over Orfield…

I had a conversation with a very intelligent acquaintance last week. He’s from the UK. We were talking about financial planning and the topic of college costs and health care came up.

He moved here to marry an American and has been here long enough to offer a personal comparison between costs and accessibility for college and health care here and in the UK.

He was extolling the virtues of near-free college and universal (read socialized) health care in the UK.

Coincidentally, I came across this today (from the Telegraph in the UK):

High earners face increased National Insurance payments and a new supertax under a raft of measures announced in today’s pre-Budget report.

Okay, so Superman, he’s a champion of good, not evil. Supertramp; a favorite 70’s band. Super Bowl: a clash of the best in the NFL. Supermodels. All good.

And yet…supertax? That can’t be good. Now that my acquaintance is making that kind of dough, here in the rebel states I might add, I wonder if his comparison would be so glowing?

As widely predicted, Alistair Darling (he’s the [liberal] dude with the eybrows-JR) introduced a new top level of tax, which will be imposed on people earning over £150,000 a year. They will pay 45p in the pound, up from 40p, from April 2011.

That’s a nice little holiday gift. A five percent tax hike. As of this writing, $1 trades for $1.5166 Pounds. So £150,000 a year is about $230,000 a year in the US.

Hey, we should nationalize health care so we can join the other taxed up the wazoo nations of the world that pay more to stand in line for crappy health care – and soon everything else as socialism bleeds their economies dry.

Another timely coincidence:

Today I finally went to the doctor to see about the pain in my shoulder that commenced during a volleyball match in August and has sustained a searing continuum. My doctor referred me to TRIA Orthopaedic Center a couple weeks back (this is not a veiled endorsement of Tria by the way). I was advised an appointment was’t necessary. Just show up and they would see me.

If I learned anything today (other than that thankfully surgery wasn’t indicated) was that health care in America can be a lot better and TRIA, from my vantage point, is the standard.

Bear in mind, it was one visit, to one provider; behold:

1. I arrived at Tria at 2:30 PM; a walk-in.
2. The decor was bright, modern and pleasant
3. I was greeted by a concierge (really) who asked for my name and why I was visiting
4. She walked me to the elevator, pushed the button for the second floor, rode up with me and walked me to the desk where I would get started with my visit
5. I had nary the time to fill out the medical questionnaire and my name was called
6. Five minutes later and I was getting x-rays done
7. Five more minutes later and the doctor came in and told me I have tendonitis and he would like to prescribe a shot of Cortisone and a couple subsequent physical therapy visits
8. Thirty seconds later a nurse handed a shot of Cortisone to the doctor
9. After a pleasant visit regarding my condition and the doctor’s prognosis, I put my shirt back on
10. I was out the door five minutes later

All in, I was there for little more than a half hour. It was pleasant, efficient and I got the feeling, inexpensive; as health care goes any way. An extraordinarily well-choreographed experience. And they were busy.

As for my chap from the UK, he was selling it. I wasn’t buying it. Plus I pretty much believe the exact opposite of anything Michael Moore flaps his flaccid jowls about.

Contrast my experience today with anything run by the government (save the military – those guys are so cool plus they have bravery, guns and bombs and stuff).

Is one experience, one day, with one health care provider proof of anything? Yes. That healthcare can be done right and without the government.

My shoulder feels better already.

…and so irrelevant.
…and so going out of business.

In a review of AC/DC, Chris Riemenschneider of the Star Tribune is confused.

Pining for a real job in journalism, he must think weaving politics into a music review will lead to getting “discovered.”

“War Machine.” The best song on the new CD, it starts with a slow, lumbering, tank-attack beat and quickly builds to atom-bomb intensity, with Angus shredding his guitar as if it was the U.S. Constitution during the Iraq War.

Well, he did get a mention in the Wall Street Journal.

…too bad it’s for all the wrong reasons.

I hope you have other “skills” Chris.

Bill Clinton?

Obama’s would-be choice for SecState tells us a bit about his confidence and demeanor. It tells us he no less lacks a capacity for leadership and change than he did before he decided to run for high office. So much for the “team of rivals.” So much for change for that matter.

And, to boot, it would appear all the media fuss about Hillary as SecState may be for naught.

…it’s difficult to see Sen. Clinton achieving confirmation unless our elected representatives are ready to ask a few questions about conflict of interest along similar lines. And how can they not? The last time that Clinton foreign-policy associations came up for congressional review, the investigations ended in a cloud of murk that still has not been dispelled. Former President Bill Clinton has recently and rather disingenuously offered to submit his own foundation to scrutiny…, but the real problem is otherwise. Both President and Sen. Clinton, while in office, made it obvious to foreign powers that they and their relatives were wide open to suggestions from lobbyists and middlemen.

Ah, but is that enough in this soon-to-be rarified era of Liberal lunacy control of the White House and The Hill?

In matters of foreign policy, it has been proved time and again, the Clintons are devoted to no interest other than their own. A president absolutely has to know of his chief foreign-policy executive that he or she has no other agenda than the one he has set. Who can say with a straight face that this is true of a woman whose personal ambition is without limit; whose second loyalty is to an impeached and disbarred and discredited former president; and who is ready at any moment, and on government time, to take a wheedling call from either of her bulbous brothers? This is also the unscrupulous female who until recently was willing to play the race card on President-elect Obama and (in spite of her own complete want of any foreign-policy qualifications) to ridicule him for lacking what she only knew about by way of sordid backstairs dealing.

Read the whole article and behold a laundry list of why Hillary Clinton should not be in public office let alone representing us to the world.

G’nR’s Chinese Democracy is available – at Best Buy, at any rate.

NPR’s music reviewer may have preferred the delay:

Chinese Democracy wins points just for entering the world. After all these years, hearing it is like finally seeing the monster at the end of a horror movie: It’s no longer a mystery, but at least now, the real action begins.

Rumor has it their next album will be called either Man-Made Global Warming or President Hillary. 

Last week in the process of renewing a business credit line, my bank checked my credit as a matter of course.

The next day, “Jeff” with “American Equity” or something along those lines left me a message. He was “verifying” a recent transaction and was calling “…to assure me that the terms of my loan were the best options available to me or to make sure that I was offered the best terms available in the marketplace”….or some other malarkey.

It was pretty convincing. It sounded like someone calling on behalf of my bank. It would have to be right? My bank wouldn’t inform any other entities of my business dealings with them…right?

So I called “Jeff” back. He was a bit surprised by my accusatory tone once he informed me that he had nothing to do with my bank and where he got the information.

It turns out Jeff’s company, which has absolutely nothing to do with my bank, subscribes to a service that alerts them to credit checks of highly qualified borrowers. Within 24 hours. Name, phone number and amount borrowed are all provided for a fee.Who provides this data you ask? Is it a form of identity theft?

It turns out Experian, one of the “Big Three” credit bureaus, provides this data to other lenders when you apply for credit. Apparently, they don’t have to inform you, and if I hadn’t received “Jeff’s” cold call, I would never have known that my name, phone number, credit score and transaction information are available to anyone willing to pay a fee for it.

Cross-Sell Triggers (sm)

Daily triggering tool for expanding customer relationships.

Cross-Sell Triggers^SM, an event-based triggering tool, empowers you to deliver daily cross-sell and up-sell offers based on customer-initiated inquiries for new credit occurring within the last 24 hours.

Retain your most profitable customers

Cross-Sell Triggers allows you to respond immediately to retain customers who inquire about credit elsewhere.

Build loyalty and expand customer relationships

Respond to changing customer needs by making the right offer at the right time, thereby increasing your product-to-customer ratio.

That’s nice. I’d actually prefer a little privacy when I shop for credit.

Scumbags.

I haven’t verified this yet but apparently you can call Experian and opt out. Gee, thanks for the consideration. Thanks for taking up my time to call you, presumably wait on hold, and take back my rights to privacy.

Scumbags.

I guess I always considered the credit bureaus to be in the business of tracking and evaluating potential credit consumers. I also assumed that my credit information was not accessible without my consent.

Wrong on both counts.

Word to the wise.

When I was a kid, I built a ton of models – plastic replica airplanes, cars, ships and tanks, mostly. 

One of the keys to building a good model was getting a thin coating of glue on the surfaces that were to be joined together; toluol-based model glue operates by chemically melting plastic surfaces to basically “weld” them together. 

This was back about the time that felt-tipped markers first came on the  market.  I thought “Hmmm – how about if you could put glue in a felt-tip marker to guarantee a super-thin coating of glue?”

Not being a chemical engineer, that was about as far as it went – but when I was in my mid-teens, I saw that someone had indeed invented the glue pen. 

I’ve had a few other such ideas – including, I have to say, this one:

“Two mobile applications, NMobile and Trapster, are providing drivers with up-to-date maps of speed-enforcement zones with live police traps, speed cameras or red-light cameras. Each application pulls up a map pinpointing the locations of speed traps within driving distance and an audio alert will sound as vehicles approach an area tagged as harboring a speed trap. Both applications rely on the wisdom of the crowds for their data with users reporting camera-rigged stop lights and areas heavily populated with radar-toting police officers via the iPhone or their web-based application…

So close, but yet so far, again.

A:  “Only one, and that’s not funny”

Joe Lieberman appears in an ad for a phone company.

It’s kinda funny.  Not “wet your pants” funny… 

 …but, y’know, droll.

Look for the Obama Administration to get calls for a central humor vetting office from this guy:

…this is a horrible ad, because speaking as a progressive, the last person I want to see on an ad for things that matter to me is Joe Effing Lieberman. And I really don’t want to see it with the tagline “switching is easy,” because I interpret that as an insult. See, I didn’t take Lieberman’s words on the campaign trail lightly. When he blithely suggested that a question about whether President-elect Obama was a socialist was “interesting,” I took offense to it.

Er…yeah.  I’ll bet he did. 

…And when, after the election, the Democratic caucus voted to retain Joe Lieberman as Chair of the Homeland Security committee when he didn’t offer so much as a public apology for his statements, when he so easily switched his allegiance back to the group that he had so vilified repeatedly on the campaign trail, I took offense, not only at the Democratic caucus who let him off the hook, but at him, for making it clear that his personal honor is a joke, that he never gives more than lip service to anything he claims to care about.

[Which is a bad thing with Democrats, but a good one for Republicans, apparently – Ed.]

I’m guessing that Working Assets means this as a tongue-in-cheek joke, but it’s falling flat on me right now. It’s a little too soon for that kind of humor, especially since Lieberman is in a position where he can do great damage to progressive causes if he desires…

AIRMAN CRONAUER:  “You in more dire need of a &*(#(#$*#()^^^^^^CARRIER INTERRUPTED #*$#*(#))))))++++++++  than any human ever born”. 

So I checked in on Nick Coleman’s latest column, and I thought…

…no. Wait. I retired from fisking the Non-Monkey.

Never mind.

It was Wednesday, November 23, 1988. 

I was going to head back to Jamestown for Thanksgiving.  I didn’t want to miss Christmas in the bars; lots of extra money and tips for working the Xmas holiday, so I figured I’d tough it out. 

So I worked out a Wednesday through Saturday “vacation” with my boss, packed up the night before, and got ready to leave. 

The phone rang; Wyatt, hung over as usual, grunted “got it” upstairs before I could get to it.

Wyatt, as usual, had been “entertaining” again.  I’d never really kept track, but he’d kept to his old average of seven or eight women a week, including the “girlfriend”.  There were a few semi-regular ones, but I hadn’t gotten a look at whomever it’d been the night before.  I’d gotten home from the bar a little too late. 

As I was packing my duffel bag, Wyatt walked down the stairs wearing a pair of basketball shorts.  He was moving with a little more purpose than his usual hung-over shamble.  He looked worried.

“Hey, dude”, he said in a whisper very unlike his usual booming baritone with the fake arklahoma accent.  “Could you do me a favor?  I’m in a big-ass jam.  Teresa’s on her way over.  Could you give Jennifer a ride home to Saint Louis Park?  And keep it all quiet, OK?  She’s hot, man”.

I stood for a moment.  On the one hand, Saint Louis Park was on my way out to 94, more or less.  It wasn’t far out of the way, really.

On the other, I wanted Wyatt to rot in hell.  He was late on the bills again.  His dog was crapping all over the place, again.  He was hitting the bottle with both fists, again.  And his drug-dealer friends – oh, yeah, the coke dealing – were over at all hours of the day and night.

“Ummm…”, I started, looking up the stairs as a woman came down the stairs.  Early twenties, auburn hair, gorgeous…

“…sure”. 

“Hi, I’m Jennifer”, she said. 

“Mitch”. 

“See ya, Jenn”, Wyatt said, ambling toward the kitchen as we walked about door. 

We walked out to my car. 

We started talking as I drove down the hellish little one-way, past the crack house.  Jennifer was an art student at Minneapolis College of Art and Design.  She loved Russian literature, I found out around Dale Street.  By Snelling, I found she knew some people I knew, in the Minneapolis music scene; we had at least two common acquaintances.  And she played guitar.

By the U of M, we were comparing Bob and Tommy Stinson anecdotes.

And by downtown Minneapolis, I was falling madly in love. 

And damn, that sucked.  I was living in a garret next to a crack house, working as a nightclub DJ, eating ramen most of the time, sharing a miserable rodent-trap house with a slacker and an addict.

Worse?  We were hitting it off. 

“Worse“, I thought, as I listened to her talking about her big senior project.  “That’s how screwed up my life is.  I’ve met someone just mind-warpingly gorgeous, and we’re hitting it off famously, like I’ve never hit it off with a woman at a first conversation before, and the first thing on my mind is all the reasons it can’t possibly work out.” 

I drove down Hennepin to Lake Street, past the Walker and the Guthrie; she loved the theatre, and I could fake a love for art as well as anything else.  She’d been in plays.  I’d been in plays.  She’d been to a production of Lion in Winter that she’d loved, recently; I’d played Henry II in Lion in Winter, just five years earlier, in college.

As we drove past Lake Calhoun, I was grinning ear to ear, as I cringed inside.  “There really is no way.  There is no f*cking way“. 

She lived at her parents’ place, near the junction of 7 and 100 in Saint Louis Park, the near-western suburb of Minneapolis. 

“So what can you tell me about Wyatt?” she asked after directing me down an arterial off of 7.

“And if there’s no f*cking way for me, there’s no f*cking way for him, either”.

“Wyatt has a girlfriend.”

Her head spun toward me. 

“On top of that, he is probably banging seven or eight other women a week that he picks up in bars.”  She cocked an eyebrow.  “Serious.  The guy’s a whore.  If he’s bagged one chick in the last year, he’s bagged two hundred”. 

 I felt a weight lift from my soul.

Jennifer was quiet, except for directing me down a street toward the cul-de-sac where her parents lived, in a brownish rambler with trees all over the place.

“He doesn’t believe in protection.  Not at all.”  A brief flash of alarm crossed her face.  “Seriously.  Get yourself tested.  The guy’s a poster boy for “high VD risk”.  [Anyone but me remember when it was called “VD”? – Ed.] 

She was looking at me; like I was crazy, or she was alarmed by the information, or (I’d suspect at twenty years’ remove) a little of both.

“Look, sorry, but the man is a pig.”  I paused for a moment.  “You deserve better”, I added. 

She sat for a moment and wrinkled her face in contemplation. 

“Well, thanks…”, she said, sounding a little nonplussed.  “Good to know.”

I gritted my teeth.  “Look, sorry.  But when I say he’s a pig…”

“Yeah…” she said, opening the door.  “Gaah.  Seriously – thanks…”

Our eyes met for a moment. 

“Happy Thanksgiving”.

“You too!”

She got out of the car and closed the door.

I watched her walk in the door, and inside. 

I turned back toward Highway 100 for the six hour trip to Jamestown.

It was good news, in a way, that I never saw her again.

As Washington flirts with bailing out the auto industry, Ivan Osorio wonders what we’re saving, and ponders the downside of socializing the market:

As The Wall Street Journal’s Paul Ingrassia notes, Detroit doesn’t need more money, but radical change, including getting rid of union contracts, which, as he noted on NPR this week, include burdensome work rules. Here’s one example he cites in his Journal op ed:

A few years ago the UAW even waged a spirited fight to protect the “right” of workers to smoke on the assembly line, something that simply isn’t allowed at, say, Honda’s U.S. factories. Aside from the obvious health risk, what about cigarette ashes falling onto those fine leather seats being bolted into the cars? Why was this even an issue?

In what other industry would this even be tolerated?

Yet even that is not all — then there is the UAW “Jobs Bank,” which keeps allegedly laid-off auto workers on at full salary and not working. This is beyond Soviet. In the former Communist bloc, people had a saying: “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.” Not even pretending to work and getting paid for real beats that every time.

He invokes the Russian “Lada” marque – not that you have to go back to the USSR to see the historic failure of socialism in the auto industry.