HE'S COMING! HE'S REALLY COMING!
But I've blown it, too. It's been a little over a week since I posted here, and I could have been beating the drums all along. Mea culpa, dear readers, mea culpa.
But it's not me who's the author of this wonder, that being the fact that SAM WESTERN will be in town TOMORROW NIGHT to speak at the Saratoga Inn. So it's not 100% my fault that very few people around the valley seem to be aware that SAM WESTERN will be in town TOMORROW NIGHT to speak at the Saratoga Inn.
Sam Western, longtime LIANT readers may recall, is the pamphleteer behind the most talked-about book about Wyoming, maybe ever, Pushed Off the Mountain, Sold Down the River: Wyoming's Search for Its Soul. He's now making the rounds as a speaker through Wyoming's humanities endowment speaker's bureau, and his next stop is here tomorrow night!
Very longtime LIANT readers are aware of my enthusiasm for this man and his book, and of my own efforts to bring him here to be the speaker for our chamber of commerce banquet in January, efforts that, alas, got the kabosh from the higher-ups.
So it's no suprise that I'm VERY EXCITED that SAM WESTERN will be in town TOMORROW NIGHT to speak at the Saratoga Inn.
But why don't you know about this?
Politics, I guess. Politics and misplaced faith.
Last I heard, this wonderful, wonderful news was all set to appear in our local newspaper and on the chamber's big purty marquee, but it is not, today, Thursday, the day before SAM WESTERN will be in town to speak at the Saratoga Inn.
I'm sure the Soroptimists, who are the brave and wise souls who are bringing my proto-hero to town, are going to want the newspaper editor's head on a plate, but I also know what the editor will say back to the pitchfork and torch crowd: the only way to guarantee that a specific announcement is going to appear in a particular edition of a paper is to buy an ad. Which will only make them madder, but as my deeply experienced coffee buddies constantly counsel me, it is highly unwise to pick a fight with a guy who buys ink by the barrel.
So anyway, I'm doing what I can to help spread the word.
Once again, SAM WESTERN will be in town TOMORROW NIGHT to speak at the Saratoga Inn.
7:30 p.m. Refreshments and stuff. Book signings. I'll be at the front of the line waiting to shake the man's hand.
Woo!
Friday, April 25, 2003
FRIDAY FIVE, AGAIN
Just because I'm stumped for something to write about during this, my lunch break from Retail Heaven doesn't mean it's OK for you, my dear readers, to go another day without hearing from me.
Thank goodness for Jill and the girls over at The Friday Five for breaking the ice in Your Humble Blogger's Humble Head.
1. What was the last TV show you watched?
I watched CSI last night up at my parents' house. It's become a Sherrod family tradition to have a large, satisfying meal and then watch quite possibly the grossest things on TV today - Survivor (gross for its exhibitions of really obnoxious behavior, backstabbing, pettiness and that silly guy Rob still fantasizing about a threesome with those girls) and CSI. That they are also the two most insect-intensive programs ever devised (at least the most so outside, e.g., the Discovery Channel and its ilk) is just a happy bonus. That one of the lead characters on CSI is a forensic entomologist just melts my bug-lovin' heart. Gotta love anything that features an entomologist as a lead.
2. What was the last thing you complained about?
A tough decision I'm facing. I have a dear old friend who is in a worse financial pickle than I am, who wants me to move in with her to share expenses until we both "get back on our feet." My first impulse was to say "sure" because she really is very dear to me... but then I looked at the place with an eye to cramming me and the Collie of Folly (who would be one of four, count them, four dogs in one goofy two-story townhouse) in there with whatever stuff might fit and... no, it looked like kind of a bad idea.
"Kind of" changed to "very" when, unable to sleep last night, I whipped out my Sewer King-inspired handy dandy "Am I Wasting My Time Or Should I Just Go On Con Watch" spreadsheet and ran the numbers. I wouldn't even be saving money. And I'd be giving up my autonomy, my backyard full of ducks, my chalkboard-painted walls...
So, nah.
But my friend is kind of counting on me now. And I'm going to have to tell her I've changed my mind - as soon as I can track her down.
I was just complaining about this to my wacky boss at the dust-gatherer store before heading home for lunch. So yeah, that's the last thing.
3. Who was the last person you complimented and what did you say?
I told the Collie of Folly she was a very good dog when she didn't argue with me about whether or not it was time to "load up" in the front seat of my car.
She counts as a person, right?
4. What was the last thing you threw away?
The plastic wrap around the last piece of my super duper homemade semi-Sicilian pizza that I made for my #1 reader Wednesday night. I threw the wrapping away and then I ate the pizza cold. Damn, I'm a good cook when I bother. Even the leftovers are lovely.
5. What was the last website (besides this one) that you visited?
I was reading a book review at Economist magazine's web page. The review was of an interesting tome examining the political history of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony - how it's been interpreted by everyone from Adolf Hitler (who ordered it played on his birthday often) to Ian Smith, who made it Rhodesia's national anthem. Looks interesting.
Just because I'm stumped for something to write about during this, my lunch break from Retail Heaven doesn't mean it's OK for you, my dear readers, to go another day without hearing from me.
Thank goodness for Jill and the girls over at The Friday Five for breaking the ice in Your Humble Blogger's Humble Head.
1. What was the last TV show you watched?
I watched CSI last night up at my parents' house. It's become a Sherrod family tradition to have a large, satisfying meal and then watch quite possibly the grossest things on TV today - Survivor (gross for its exhibitions of really obnoxious behavior, backstabbing, pettiness and that silly guy Rob still fantasizing about a threesome with those girls) and CSI. That they are also the two most insect-intensive programs ever devised (at least the most so outside, e.g., the Discovery Channel and its ilk) is just a happy bonus. That one of the lead characters on CSI is a forensic entomologist just melts my bug-lovin' heart. Gotta love anything that features an entomologist as a lead.
2. What was the last thing you complained about?
A tough decision I'm facing. I have a dear old friend who is in a worse financial pickle than I am, who wants me to move in with her to share expenses until we both "get back on our feet." My first impulse was to say "sure" because she really is very dear to me... but then I looked at the place with an eye to cramming me and the Collie of Folly (who would be one of four, count them, four dogs in one goofy two-story townhouse) in there with whatever stuff might fit and... no, it looked like kind of a bad idea.
"Kind of" changed to "very" when, unable to sleep last night, I whipped out my Sewer King-inspired handy dandy "Am I Wasting My Time Or Should I Just Go On Con Watch" spreadsheet and ran the numbers. I wouldn't even be saving money. And I'd be giving up my autonomy, my backyard full of ducks, my chalkboard-painted walls...
So, nah.
But my friend is kind of counting on me now. And I'm going to have to tell her I've changed my mind - as soon as I can track her down.
I was just complaining about this to my wacky boss at the dust-gatherer store before heading home for lunch. So yeah, that's the last thing.
3. Who was the last person you complimented and what did you say?
I told the Collie of Folly she was a very good dog when she didn't argue with me about whether or not it was time to "load up" in the front seat of my car.
She counts as a person, right?
4. What was the last thing you threw away?
The plastic wrap around the last piece of my super duper homemade semi-Sicilian pizza that I made for my #1 reader Wednesday night. I threw the wrapping away and then I ate the pizza cold. Damn, I'm a good cook when I bother. Even the leftovers are lovely.
5. What was the last website (besides this one) that you visited?
I was reading a book review at Economist magazine's web page. The review was of an interesting tome examining the political history of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony - how it's been interpreted by everyone from Adolf Hitler (who ordered it played on his birthday often) to Ian Smith, who made it Rhodesia's national anthem. Looks interesting.
Tuesday, April 22, 2003
WHAT IF THEY GAVE AN INFO SESSION...
...And nobody came?
Well, now I know. Last night marked Rawlins' turn to host a public information session regarding the proposed capital facilities tax and, well, the choir showed up but the pews were empty.
Our good sheriff gave his County Jail Slide and Pony Show, in other words, for a hauntingly empty room at the Jeffrey Center, his audience consisting of, well... the entire membership of the jail planning committee, the mayor of Rawlins, the former mayor of Rawlins, the capital facilities tax campaign coordinator, a deputy sheriff, a county juvenile detention officer, the county treasurer, that amusing man from Elk Mountain who ran for governor, the Oracle, and Your Humble Blogger.
To liven things up, I proposed that the Oracle give the sheriff's talk, the coordinator give the Oracle's talk (on the Saratoga community center, natch), and the sheriff give the coordinator's talk. It could have happened; we've all heard all of these talks enough times to make it quite feasible. Hell, I could probably give the sheriff's talk in my sleep - I've been hearing it for something like three years in more or less its current form, and I've been hearing arguments in favor of a new Carbon County jail over the dinner table at Fort Sherrod since long before I was of voting age, as My Own Dear Personal Dad was the first sheriff who had the guts to say the Yellow Submarine (long the county's affectionate nickname for the current jail, a woefully inadequate and antiquated facility perched like a boil atop the county courthouse with walls painted, in Miss Quote's phrase "daffodil yellow") had to go.
We don't know what to make of this lack of interest, the Oracle and I. We hover between hope and utter disgust. Rumors are in the air that the tax proposal and all the projects planned for it are dooomed, dooooooomed, that Hanna hates our community center project, that the valley hates the overpass for Rawlins, that everybody hates the jail... but we never seem to get a chance to address them head on (hence the persistent belief on the part of certain knucklhead members of the press who shall remain nameless, and a few others, that the Oracle and I are trying to build a duplicate of the $300,000-a-year subsidized day care nightmare known colloquially as the Hanna Rec Center. For the record, we are not. Not even close. We did tour the place, pretty much to establish what we do not want).
What I personally hear most often is individuals approaching me with some version of the following: "Well, Kate, I'm planning to vote yes on the tax, but it sounds like nobody else is" or very seductive words to that effect (well, that and merciless and tireless teasing on the part of the Sewer King about how funny it is that his brother, the Oracle, and I, the two most harrumphingest libertarian types in the whole valley, are campaigning to add an extra penny to the sales tax. A gifted ironist, that Sewer King. Gifted) -- seductive because they suggest that actually most folks are going to vote yes. Ponder that again... everybody who approaches me is saying he or she personally plans to vote yes, but those nameless, faceless, uncounted and possibly merely theoretical "others" oppose it.
If there is one thing I have learned to trust it is my instinct not to trust any blanket statements about what unnamed and unnumbered "others" think. It's too easy to invent these others out of one's own delusions, too easy to project one's own doubts, fears, suspicions, and bad motivations onto these others. I've done it myself, haven't you? "Well, I like that shirt you're wearing, really I do, but 'other people' think you look ridiculous in puce."
So anyway, I'm not going to worry about it. If the tax passes, yay, the jail starts getting built (on top of pilings sunken into that stupid akalai swamp... joyous, by the way, that others, including no less a person than jail committee member Judging Wade is constantly reminded of the bit in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" when the king regales his son about his castles, built one by one on top of each other as they sank into the swamp... "But the fourth one, the fourth one stands!"). Of course, the jail will get built one way or the other - the other way being, as the Choir indicated last night, an additional $20 in property taxes for each property owner in the county... which wouldn't be all bad, as that way the mineral companies will pay a good share of it.
And the Schmommunity Center will still happen in some fashion, though caveat voter: the ultimate design and contents of the building will more likely be determined by the wishes of the private donors who cough up the bucks, and what they want might not be what you guys want. And the big money that is possibly floating around for the thing isn't really all that interested in recreation as such. Conferences, meetings, performing arts space, yes. Sports? Less so, at the very least.
Speaking of sports and things, yes, I voted yes on the skate park, after putting a few of the darling kiddies on the spot in the council meeting, the ringleader of which is due to report to me this Friday afternoon about how much money they plan to raise through raffles and whatever to help defray the cost, how soon they plan to have it to us, and when they're going to show up to help put the equipment together on the island.
Yeah, I caved, basically. I have a soft spot for kids, too, and I remember what it was like to be a teenager here with nothing to do but hang out in front of the 7-11 at night or go to keggers or drive up and down the highway (cruising in Saratoga: lock the wheels and hit the gas). And probably what the Former Minister of Fun and his cohort did in the 80s is not possible any longer because of liability and other standards - home-built equipment, Superman insists, ain't gonna cut it and the first boo-boo that pisses off the first mom could cost us a bundle in court if that's what we put in.
All I can say is the little twerps had better use it. I'm going to be watching them. And so are my downtown businessmen who keep complaining about skateboarders and property damage. If the kids have any brains at all, by the way, those businessmen will be the first ones they hit up for help.
!Bah. Onto some writing that pays.
...And nobody came?
Well, now I know. Last night marked Rawlins' turn to host a public information session regarding the proposed capital facilities tax and, well, the choir showed up but the pews were empty.
Our good sheriff gave his County Jail Slide and Pony Show, in other words, for a hauntingly empty room at the Jeffrey Center, his audience consisting of, well... the entire membership of the jail planning committee, the mayor of Rawlins, the former mayor of Rawlins, the capital facilities tax campaign coordinator, a deputy sheriff, a county juvenile detention officer, the county treasurer, that amusing man from Elk Mountain who ran for governor, the Oracle, and Your Humble Blogger.
To liven things up, I proposed that the Oracle give the sheriff's talk, the coordinator give the Oracle's talk (on the Saratoga community center, natch), and the sheriff give the coordinator's talk. It could have happened; we've all heard all of these talks enough times to make it quite feasible. Hell, I could probably give the sheriff's talk in my sleep - I've been hearing it for something like three years in more or less its current form, and I've been hearing arguments in favor of a new Carbon County jail over the dinner table at Fort Sherrod since long before I was of voting age, as My Own Dear Personal Dad was the first sheriff who had the guts to say the Yellow Submarine (long the county's affectionate nickname for the current jail, a woefully inadequate and antiquated facility perched like a boil atop the county courthouse with walls painted, in Miss Quote's phrase "daffodil yellow") had to go.
We don't know what to make of this lack of interest, the Oracle and I. We hover between hope and utter disgust. Rumors are in the air that the tax proposal and all the projects planned for it are dooomed, dooooooomed, that Hanna hates our community center project, that the valley hates the overpass for Rawlins, that everybody hates the jail... but we never seem to get a chance to address them head on (hence the persistent belief on the part of certain knucklhead members of the press who shall remain nameless, and a few others, that the Oracle and I are trying to build a duplicate of the $300,000-a-year subsidized day care nightmare known colloquially as the Hanna Rec Center. For the record, we are not. Not even close. We did tour the place, pretty much to establish what we do not want).
What I personally hear most often is individuals approaching me with some version of the following: "Well, Kate, I'm planning to vote yes on the tax, but it sounds like nobody else is" or very seductive words to that effect (well, that and merciless and tireless teasing on the part of the Sewer King about how funny it is that his brother, the Oracle, and I, the two most harrumphingest libertarian types in the whole valley, are campaigning to add an extra penny to the sales tax. A gifted ironist, that Sewer King. Gifted) -- seductive because they suggest that actually most folks are going to vote yes. Ponder that again... everybody who approaches me is saying he or she personally plans to vote yes, but those nameless, faceless, uncounted and possibly merely theoretical "others" oppose it.
If there is one thing I have learned to trust it is my instinct not to trust any blanket statements about what unnamed and unnumbered "others" think. It's too easy to invent these others out of one's own delusions, too easy to project one's own doubts, fears, suspicions, and bad motivations onto these others. I've done it myself, haven't you? "Well, I like that shirt you're wearing, really I do, but 'other people' think you look ridiculous in puce."
So anyway, I'm not going to worry about it. If the tax passes, yay, the jail starts getting built (on top of pilings sunken into that stupid akalai swamp... joyous, by the way, that others, including no less a person than jail committee member Judging Wade is constantly reminded of the bit in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" when the king regales his son about his castles, built one by one on top of each other as they sank into the swamp... "But the fourth one, the fourth one stands!"). Of course, the jail will get built one way or the other - the other way being, as the Choir indicated last night, an additional $20 in property taxes for each property owner in the county... which wouldn't be all bad, as that way the mineral companies will pay a good share of it.
And the Schmommunity Center will still happen in some fashion, though caveat voter: the ultimate design and contents of the building will more likely be determined by the wishes of the private donors who cough up the bucks, and what they want might not be what you guys want. And the big money that is possibly floating around for the thing isn't really all that interested in recreation as such. Conferences, meetings, performing arts space, yes. Sports? Less so, at the very least.
Speaking of sports and things, yes, I voted yes on the skate park, after putting a few of the darling kiddies on the spot in the council meeting, the ringleader of which is due to report to me this Friday afternoon about how much money they plan to raise through raffles and whatever to help defray the cost, how soon they plan to have it to us, and when they're going to show up to help put the equipment together on the island.
Yeah, I caved, basically. I have a soft spot for kids, too, and I remember what it was like to be a teenager here with nothing to do but hang out in front of the 7-11 at night or go to keggers or drive up and down the highway (cruising in Saratoga: lock the wheels and hit the gas). And probably what the Former Minister of Fun and his cohort did in the 80s is not possible any longer because of liability and other standards - home-built equipment, Superman insists, ain't gonna cut it and the first boo-boo that pisses off the first mom could cost us a bundle in court if that's what we put in.
All I can say is the little twerps had better use it. I'm going to be watching them. And so are my downtown businessmen who keep complaining about skateboarders and property damage. If the kids have any brains at all, by the way, those businessmen will be the first ones they hit up for help.
!Bah. Onto some writing that pays.
Friday, April 18, 2003
BLOGGING FOR DOLLARS?
Well, dear readers, I knew all of that whining about being an unemployed hack for hire of a hobo wannabe writer fending off ridiculous job offers and jacking up your water rates would pay off someday.
Somebody wants to pay me to blog!
Now, before any of you wailing and crying and gnashing your teeth and pouring ashes over your head at the thought of having to pay to read my drivel, rest assured that said drivel will still be free; I shan't be discontinuing LIANT, and as far as I know my Hip New Employer doesn't charge to read stuff on their site, either. No indeed; said HNE, Backwash.com*, simply channels some of its advertising revenue to keeping its contributors in gum and mouthwash, or maybe it's in ramen noodles and Sanka, or maybe it's in Schlitz and cigarette papers, or maybe it's in teabags and carpet fluff.
In other words, I ain't getting rich off of this new gig, but as you know I'm a sucker for anything that nudges up that fame bubble, especially if that anything involves me doing pretty much what I'm doing anyway (Mark Ames' formula for evaluating such prospects – a ratio of fame to work, i.e. how can I squeeze out as much fame from as little work as possible – suits me as well!).
Look for me on the site pretty soon (as soon as I get this column posted to LIANT and a different one posted to Backwash, actually) under the in-your-ribs moniker of "Officially Elected Hobo Scribe."
I don't suppose I'll inflict quite so much municipal/Wyoming politics on the Backwash audience as I do on you (unless you think I should. Should I?) (hell, why should I start using my mindshare responsibly now?), nor so many book reviews, but I can prattle on about national issues and trends as well as anybody else, I guess, so that's probably what I'll do.
Well, that and my incredible collection of stories and nonsense about the Sewer King, the Oracle, Tad the Grocer, Jet Fuel, the Heart Surgeon, the Lady of the Lagoon, Squeaky, Sketch, and the rest of the gang. Nobody can ever get enough of those. Not even the people who know these characters personally.
Onward!
*Backwash, in the persons of the Bewitching Vagabond and the Zenball Wizard, having been the first big bad website out there to take notice of little ol' me and start directing traffic my way about a year or so ago. Once I was even, for reasons that are still unclear to me, one of the site's "Top 40" rates sites for a week in 2002. No accounting for taste. Or something.
Well, dear readers, I knew all of that whining about being an unemployed hack for hire of a hobo wannabe writer fending off ridiculous job offers and jacking up your water rates would pay off someday.
Somebody wants to pay me to blog!
Now, before any of you wailing and crying and gnashing your teeth and pouring ashes over your head at the thought of having to pay to read my drivel, rest assured that said drivel will still be free; I shan't be discontinuing LIANT, and as far as I know my Hip New Employer doesn't charge to read stuff on their site, either. No indeed; said HNE, Backwash.com*, simply channels some of its advertising revenue to keeping its contributors in gum and mouthwash, or maybe it's in ramen noodles and Sanka, or maybe it's in Schlitz and cigarette papers, or maybe it's in teabags and carpet fluff.
In other words, I ain't getting rich off of this new gig, but as you know I'm a sucker for anything that nudges up that fame bubble, especially if that anything involves me doing pretty much what I'm doing anyway (Mark Ames' formula for evaluating such prospects – a ratio of fame to work, i.e. how can I squeeze out as much fame from as little work as possible – suits me as well!).
Look for me on the site pretty soon (as soon as I get this column posted to LIANT and a different one posted to Backwash, actually) under the in-your-ribs moniker of "Officially Elected Hobo Scribe."
I don't suppose I'll inflict quite so much municipal/Wyoming politics on the Backwash audience as I do on you (unless you think I should. Should I?) (hell, why should I start using my mindshare responsibly now?), nor so many book reviews, but I can prattle on about national issues and trends as well as anybody else, I guess, so that's probably what I'll do.
Well, that and my incredible collection of stories and nonsense about the Sewer King, the Oracle, Tad the Grocer, Jet Fuel, the Heart Surgeon, the Lady of the Lagoon, Squeaky, Sketch, and the rest of the gang. Nobody can ever get enough of those. Not even the people who know these characters personally.
Onward!
*Backwash, in the persons of the Bewitching Vagabond and the Zenball Wizard, having been the first big bad website out there to take notice of little ol' me and start directing traffic my way about a year or so ago. Once I was even, for reasons that are still unclear to me, one of the site's "Top 40" rates sites for a week in 2002. No accounting for taste. Or something.
Thursday, April 17, 2003
BACK TO WORK... SORT OF
I started an extremely part-time job today.
It was fine, really.
I'm back in the wonderful, wacky world of retail, just in time to join a good friend of mine in completely freaking out getting everything ready for the end of mud season, when the tourists come back with their disposable income, unreasonable demands, and terrible taste in tee shirts. She insists that lots of people are going to queue up to buy tank tops depicting several cartoon moose pulling down their cartoon jeans (don't ask) and baring their cartoon butts (really: don't ask) at the viewer. I'm willing to stipulate that she is right, though I still insist that I'd really rather not meet those kind of people...
Still and all, I do need ink for my printer and electricity to run it and stuff.
At least the interaction is brief.
And it's going to be fine and dandy and mostly harmless. Our staff meetings include margaritas, and I will have zero responsibility, which is glorious, since I have plenty of that in my other other life.
Nice contrast there, today. At 4:30 p.m. I stopped being Kate Sherrod, retail peon and became Kate Sherrod, Municipal Budget Bee-hatch. Yup, that glorious day came at last: our "goal setting" workshop for the FY 2004 budget for the Town of Saratoga.
We're still in the process of figuring out the actual size of the pie we're going to get to carve over the next two months of workshops, meetings, strategy sessions, etc., so we didn't talk dollar figures, natch. Really, we didn't talk about much at all, except for the upcoming capital facilities tax election (May 6 - for god's sake, go vote, people! And please, vote yes! There's a county jail, a water plant for Dixon, a decent town shop for Hanna, a sewer lift station for Riverside, water line replacement in Encampment, and of course the community center in Saratoga at stake! And this is the most equitable way to pay for all of these facilities... and the county jail, which, you may remember, My Own Dear Personal Dad fought to construct more than TEN YEARS AGO when it would only have cost five or six million dollars is now looking more like 15 million, and do you think it's going to get cheaper if we don't lock in a project now?) and the community center, and the fact that our favorite local newspaper hasn't caught on yet that its favorite police chief has resigned, though the paper up in Rawlins has.
Ah, me.
But I digress, as usual.
Now you'll all have to excuse me. The aforementioned ODPF is hungry, and MODPM is off working an even more part-time job at the branch library, and so it falls to me to feed the boy. Into the kitchen wid' me!
I started an extremely part-time job today.
It was fine, really.
I'm back in the wonderful, wacky world of retail, just in time to join a good friend of mine in completely freaking out getting everything ready for the end of mud season, when the tourists come back with their disposable income, unreasonable demands, and terrible taste in tee shirts. She insists that lots of people are going to queue up to buy tank tops depicting several cartoon moose pulling down their cartoon jeans (don't ask) and baring their cartoon butts (really: don't ask) at the viewer. I'm willing to stipulate that she is right, though I still insist that I'd really rather not meet those kind of people...
Still and all, I do need ink for my printer and electricity to run it and stuff.
At least the interaction is brief.
And it's going to be fine and dandy and mostly harmless. Our staff meetings include margaritas, and I will have zero responsibility, which is glorious, since I have plenty of that in my other other life.
Nice contrast there, today. At 4:30 p.m. I stopped being Kate Sherrod, retail peon and became Kate Sherrod, Municipal Budget Bee-hatch. Yup, that glorious day came at last: our "goal setting" workshop for the FY 2004 budget for the Town of Saratoga.
We're still in the process of figuring out the actual size of the pie we're going to get to carve over the next two months of workshops, meetings, strategy sessions, etc., so we didn't talk dollar figures, natch. Really, we didn't talk about much at all, except for the upcoming capital facilities tax election (May 6 - for god's sake, go vote, people! And please, vote yes! There's a county jail, a water plant for Dixon, a decent town shop for Hanna, a sewer lift station for Riverside, water line replacement in Encampment, and of course the community center in Saratoga at stake! And this is the most equitable way to pay for all of these facilities... and the county jail, which, you may remember, My Own Dear Personal Dad fought to construct more than TEN YEARS AGO when it would only have cost five or six million dollars is now looking more like 15 million, and do you think it's going to get cheaper if we don't lock in a project now?) and the community center, and the fact that our favorite local newspaper hasn't caught on yet that its favorite police chief has resigned, though the paper up in Rawlins has.
Ah, me.
But I digress, as usual.
Now you'll all have to excuse me. The aforementioned ODPF is hungry, and MODPM is off working an even more part-time job at the branch library, and so it falls to me to feed the boy. Into the kitchen wid' me!
Tuesday, April 15, 2003
LIBRARY MUSINGS
Just now I finished my latest library book – since I became a full-time hobo, I'm able to catch our little branch library when it's open, and of course I have ample time for reading – and happened to look at the date due slip on the front page.
The library acquired this book (Frank Herbert's God Emperor of Dune for those of you who care) in June of 1982, when it was first published and I was just 12 years old. I first checked it out in January of 1986, when I was 16. During that span of four years, only five other people read this book.
Only six others have read it since me.
With a little effort, I bet I could tell you who those eleven people are. There aren't that many science fiction fans around here to begin with, and few of those use our public library.
Regardless of whether I know who they were, I feel connected to them as I hold the book which they held, too. I feel their curiosities as I proceed through the story. I wonder what they thought of the subtle sexiness of Leto-the-almost-worm, the army of women he formed around him, the worry about a made-up planet's ecology that permeates every page.
I have a queer urge to try to track them all down and ask them. I want to see what else joins us besides common possession of this book. What other books bind us? What else do we share?
Who all of us is still trying to make a go at living here?
I look at the list of library card numbers and wonder, am I the last? Are any of those people still here? Will someone read this book after me, and who will that be?
What's the likelihood that this book will now just spend the rest of eternity gathering dust on that high shelf in the Saratoga Branch Library, until it all returns to dust?
How much of this physical volume's fate is tied to the likelihood that the Sci Fi Channel will continue its efforts to transfer Herbert's works to the small screen. We've had a good mini-series version of the original Dune novel and an interesting adaptation of Dune Messiah/Children of Dune mooshed into another show. Is a movie of God Empereror of Dune now in the works, and if so, how strange will James Macavoy, who played Leto in the recent mini-series, look with his face and arms poking out of a CGI worm suit?
Will that make more people want to read God Emperor? Will that send some curious 16-year-old to the Saratoga Branch Library to check it out, or just funnel him over to Amazon et al to buy a cheap paperback copy of his very own?
Not that even shitty paperback editions of new books are very cheap anymore. I hate to sound like a codger (OK, I'm lying: I actually pretty much get off on sounding like a codger, on out-codgering my coffee buddies. I know it's weird, but I also know that when I actually am a codger I will be well practiced at it, good at it, not shocked or ashamed or afraid of it. I will age much more gracefully than all of you dingalings who cling foolishly to the vanities of youth, you silly young whippersnappers, you!), but the sticker shock of seeing books that I could have afforded simply by skipping my coffee group once or twice a week now exceeding my former hourly wage by a bit is profound.
When I was a teenager, I bought the original three Dune books for something like $3 apiece. The Elric books (which I've also since checked out of the public library – I seem to be on a weird book-nostalgia trip these days, turning ever more often to the stuff I read in high school to see if it still gives me a thrill. It does, but it's a different thrill from what I felt then, but that's probably the subject for another blog) were $2.95 apiece when I was a teenager, and I snapped up all six of them in the course of a speech season's wanderings through the malls in Cheyenne, Casper, Rock Springs, then moved on to Moorcock's other slim volumes about Corum, Erekose, Jerry Cornelius, devouring like Agak and his sister Gagak until the supply was exhausted.
Of course, I can remember when candy bars were 26¢ with tax, too. And remember my cranky old grandfather grousing about how you used to get more chocolate for a nickel back in his day. My current ramblings are about as productive. I'm digressing, as I will with no editor to sit on me and make me stick to my subject, which was what again?
Oh yeah, the weird continuity of library books, and the likelihood that anyone else is going to borrow the one I just returned. Which is small; the population has changed rather dramatically since the first time I checked out God Emperor of Dune and the library's collection reflects this; recent acquisitions (narcissist that I am, I dub anything acquired after I left Saratoga in 1988 as "recent") tend more toward what I regard as true Old Fart Literature: endless hack mystery novels and westerns, with a smattering of "book club" books like Ahab's Wife, plus a complete selection of L. Ron Hubbard's awful Battlefield Earth novels (Beggars can't be choosers; someone bequeathed every last Scientoscatological one of these to the Read and Return section. I wonder if anyone has ever taken them out; unlike the rest of R&R, these still sit in the bottom of the spinner rack in perfect order, showing none of the wear and tear that paperbacks display almost immediately after first being opened. Definitely one-reader depredation on those suckers) no saner person would touch.
So, OK, this is the part where certain among my readership feel anew the urge to urge me to get a life already. I've just devoted something like 1000 words to my having checked out a library book that only a few other people have checked out. What next, a thorough examination of the dust motes slowly accumulating on my nicknack shelf? A discourse on the contents of my refrigerator? A song-by-song criticism of all of the tunes I ripped off during Napster's heyday?
Hey, you never know. Anything to dissolve that writer's block, you know?
Cuz you know, I aspire to being one or two of those dusty, infrequently consulted hardcovers on the shelves there someday myself.
Just now I finished my latest library book – since I became a full-time hobo, I'm able to catch our little branch library when it's open, and of course I have ample time for reading – and happened to look at the date due slip on the front page.
The library acquired this book (Frank Herbert's God Emperor of Dune for those of you who care) in June of 1982, when it was first published and I was just 12 years old. I first checked it out in January of 1986, when I was 16. During that span of four years, only five other people read this book.
Only six others have read it since me.
With a little effort, I bet I could tell you who those eleven people are. There aren't that many science fiction fans around here to begin with, and few of those use our public library.
Regardless of whether I know who they were, I feel connected to them as I hold the book which they held, too. I feel their curiosities as I proceed through the story. I wonder what they thought of the subtle sexiness of Leto-the-almost-worm, the army of women he formed around him, the worry about a made-up planet's ecology that permeates every page.
I have a queer urge to try to track them all down and ask them. I want to see what else joins us besides common possession of this book. What other books bind us? What else do we share?
Who all of us is still trying to make a go at living here?
I look at the list of library card numbers and wonder, am I the last? Are any of those people still here? Will someone read this book after me, and who will that be?
What's the likelihood that this book will now just spend the rest of eternity gathering dust on that high shelf in the Saratoga Branch Library, until it all returns to dust?
How much of this physical volume's fate is tied to the likelihood that the Sci Fi Channel will continue its efforts to transfer Herbert's works to the small screen. We've had a good mini-series version of the original Dune novel and an interesting adaptation of Dune Messiah/Children of Dune mooshed into another show. Is a movie of God Empereror of Dune now in the works, and if so, how strange will James Macavoy, who played Leto in the recent mini-series, look with his face and arms poking out of a CGI worm suit?
Will that make more people want to read God Emperor? Will that send some curious 16-year-old to the Saratoga Branch Library to check it out, or just funnel him over to Amazon et al to buy a cheap paperback copy of his very own?
Not that even shitty paperback editions of new books are very cheap anymore. I hate to sound like a codger (OK, I'm lying: I actually pretty much get off on sounding like a codger, on out-codgering my coffee buddies. I know it's weird, but I also know that when I actually am a codger I will be well practiced at it, good at it, not shocked or ashamed or afraid of it. I will age much more gracefully than all of you dingalings who cling foolishly to the vanities of youth, you silly young whippersnappers, you!), but the sticker shock of seeing books that I could have afforded simply by skipping my coffee group once or twice a week now exceeding my former hourly wage by a bit is profound.
When I was a teenager, I bought the original three Dune books for something like $3 apiece. The Elric books (which I've also since checked out of the public library – I seem to be on a weird book-nostalgia trip these days, turning ever more often to the stuff I read in high school to see if it still gives me a thrill. It does, but it's a different thrill from what I felt then, but that's probably the subject for another blog) were $2.95 apiece when I was a teenager, and I snapped up all six of them in the course of a speech season's wanderings through the malls in Cheyenne, Casper, Rock Springs, then moved on to Moorcock's other slim volumes about Corum, Erekose, Jerry Cornelius, devouring like Agak and his sister Gagak until the supply was exhausted.
Of course, I can remember when candy bars were 26¢ with tax, too. And remember my cranky old grandfather grousing about how you used to get more chocolate for a nickel back in his day. My current ramblings are about as productive. I'm digressing, as I will with no editor to sit on me and make me stick to my subject, which was what again?
Oh yeah, the weird continuity of library books, and the likelihood that anyone else is going to borrow the one I just returned. Which is small; the population has changed rather dramatically since the first time I checked out God Emperor of Dune and the library's collection reflects this; recent acquisitions (narcissist that I am, I dub anything acquired after I left Saratoga in 1988 as "recent") tend more toward what I regard as true Old Fart Literature: endless hack mystery novels and westerns, with a smattering of "book club" books like Ahab's Wife, plus a complete selection of L. Ron Hubbard's awful Battlefield Earth novels (Beggars can't be choosers; someone bequeathed every last Scientoscatological one of these to the Read and Return section. I wonder if anyone has ever taken them out; unlike the rest of R&R, these still sit in the bottom of the spinner rack in perfect order, showing none of the wear and tear that paperbacks display almost immediately after first being opened. Definitely one-reader depredation on those suckers) no saner person would touch.
So, OK, this is the part where certain among my readership feel anew the urge to urge me to get a life already. I've just devoted something like 1000 words to my having checked out a library book that only a few other people have checked out. What next, a thorough examination of the dust motes slowly accumulating on my nicknack shelf? A discourse on the contents of my refrigerator? A song-by-song criticism of all of the tunes I ripped off during Napster's heyday?
Hey, you never know. Anything to dissolve that writer's block, you know?
Cuz you know, I aspire to being one or two of those dusty, infrequently consulted hardcovers on the shelves there someday myself.
PATTERN RECOGNITION
Pattern Recognition
by William Gibson
(New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2003)
Science fiction is usually an attempt to make the unfamiliar familiar, to bring us ordinary car-driving, Guiness-swilling, paper-wasting, TV-watching humans into worlds where cars fly, Guiness comes in pill form, paper is rationed and TV is fully interactive. Outer space. Alternate histories where the Nazis won or where the computer was invented in the 19th century. Time travel.
But now, when, as David Foster Wallace observes "we can eat Tex-Mex with chopsticks while listening to reggae and watching a Soviet-satellite newscast of the Berlin Wall's fall – i.e. when damn near everything presents itself as familiar" the real challenge is making the familiar strange.
Which brings me to William Gibson's latest novel, Pattern Recognition.
Pattern Recognition is a serious departure from the "high tech/low life" scenarios he developed for his Sprawl trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive) and his other stuff (Virtual Light, Idoru, All Tomorrow's Parties). It is set very much in our aforementioned car-driving, Guiness-swilling, paper-wasting, TV-watching present, specifically about a year after the September 11 attacks; its milieu is the very internet culture in which you, my reader, and I, Your Humble Blogger am now engaged, a perfectly evoked subculture of fanatical followers of a mass of film snippets that surface online from time to time dubbed "the Footage" and the very 21st century "post-geographic" life of a 33 year old woman whose overwhelming sensitivity to media blitz, to corporate logos and branding, would be a crippling mental illness if she hadn't found a way to make it pay, and pay well.
Cayce Pollard is a human divining rod for marketing success, able to tune her hilarious and completely understandable allergy to bad media figures like the Michelin Man and Tommy Hilfiger to evaluate new logos and marketing strategies on a deeply intuitive level, only occasionally resorting to slyly funny criteria as is detailed early in Pattern Recognition when she is asked to give a yay or nay to a redesigned sneaker logo which resembles, to Cayce, a "syncopated sperm":
Briefly, though, she imagines the countless Asian workers who might, should she say yes, spend years of their lives applying versions of this symbol to an endless and unyielding flood of footwear. What would it mean to them, this bouncing sperm? Would it work its way into their dreams, eventually? Would their children chalk it in doorways before they knew its meaning as a trademark?
The story of Cayce's career as a "cool hunter", who keeps track of street fashion, noting trends almost before they emerge, who engages in early pattern recognition and then helps corporations "point commodifiers at it" would make a pretty interesting novel all by itself, but as usual Gibson has more on his mind than just the teasing out of cultural data like this.
Cayce is also a "Footagehead", one of the aforementioned fanatical devotees of the spookily compelling fragments of what may or not be a complete film that surface from time to time on the internet (the debate over whether or not these fragments are meant to stand alone or are part of an emerging narrative is one of the many interesting items of contention on the "Fetish:Footage:Forum" internet site that is hands-down the best ever evocation of online community I have yet encountered in literature). She is captured by the seemingly effortless timelessness of it, the way the man and woman featured could be interacting in any decade of the last 100 years; others are fascinated with the "are they or aren't they lovers" aspect, still others with the question of authorship. Footageheads are consumed, like addicts; like early Christians or Masons they subtly recognize each other without recognizing each other.
The Footage is the one new marketing phenomenon of the 21st century, Cayce's boss says, and he must have the secret. She can have anything she wants or needs if she'll just find the author, find the story behind it, the how and why. Of course, she goes for it.
Other critics have seemed troubled by the idea that people can become obsessed with such a small and incohate thing (missing, it would appear, Gibson's own well-known fascination with Cornell boxes*, and its similar surfacing in the plot of Count Zero when a woman tracks down the mysterious author of a weird new range of Cornell boxes to an artificial intelligence housed in an orbital community), but I myself have developed perhaps a comparable obsession, though with a finished product. About two years ago, back when I still had cable, I got hooked on a show on the Sci-Fi Channel called Exposure, a showcase for short films.
I've seen a lot of cool stuff there, and have become a devotee of Atom Films as a result. Cool stuff, disturbing stuff, stuff I remember and think about...
But Chel White's Dirt (clock on the highlighted text to check it out; you can watch it in RealMedia or Windows Media at that site) is something else altogether. Watch it and maybe some of you will see what I mean. The rest of you can just chalk it up to me being a freak again, right there next to the time when I shared with our coffee group that I personally have eaten every single one of the insects served up in the Survivor Amazon "bug eatin'" immunity challenge (though the beetle grub I ate was much smaller. Though it still had its pincers. Entomologists are weird, weird people).
Now, Dirt's similarities to Gibson's Footage are small, but the grip it exerts on a certain type of imagination is not; were Cayce a real person, I'm sure she'd be as into this real film as I am, fascinated by its stateliness, its weirdness, the arrestingly Byronic beauty of its main character, the perfect diction and compelling voice of its narrator (an NPR "radio personality" in real life), and the surprising, strangely inspiring twist its brief plot takes. We have a man, perhaps a bit younger than myself, confessing that ever since he was a child he has had a fetish for dirt, for soil. At first it was enough to feel it with his fingers, but soon he was burying himself in it, sleeping in it, finally eating it at the dinner table, until he "had to have it cooked into all the meals I ate... small bits of earth in my steak, in my chicken... dirt gravy, and dirt sprinkled onto everything."
Eventually, vegetable plants begin to sprout in his flesh, "so that I became self-sustaining... I could eat my own vegetables and rely on no one but myself for my survival... I became my own ecosystem and this, this is what empowered me."
Everything about this little film thrills me, chills me, sucks me into its weird little world. The only way I could be more intrigued with it would probably be if it had been released in bits and pieces, out of order, and left as clues all over the internet.
So the Footage fetish makes perfect sense to me!
There are many other tweaky and satisfying elements to the story – post Cold War spookdom, a brilliant evocation of post-Soviet Russia that I could suspect might owe a great deal to the equally brilliant work of the eXile, that fabulously bitchy alternative newspaper started by two genius expatriate assholes in Moscow, the bizarre characters that staff and run boss Hubertus Bigend's cutting-edge marketing firm, gorgeous throwaway prose describing Tokyo's "virtual-looking" skyline, train rides through England, Russian hotel life...
One standout for me: an excursis on the Curta calculator, an entirely mechanical device invented and perfected by an inmate of the concentration camp at Buchenwald. I have long hailed Gibson as the ultimate pornographer of machines and materiel, a man who can create fetishes for plastic, whose treatment of the material composition of objects puts them sensuously in the reader's hands:
"The sensation of its operation is best likened to that of winding a fine thirty-five millimeter camera"... Large fingers moving surely, gently, clicking the black tabs into a different configuration. He grasps the knurled cylinder in his left, gives the knob at the top a twirl. Smoothly ratcheting a sum from its interior. He raises it to see the resulting figure in a tiny window.
I must give thanks by night and day that William Gibson became a novelist, because he would be a force for evil as an advertising copy editor. Since I read the above passage, about a device I had not before known existed, I have slavered after a Curta calculator (they really exist; they are sought by collectors, they fetch fabulous sums in mint condition, they will work forever without battery or electricity) and there is no conceivable reason I should ever want or need one. Where would I put it? On my eclectic mantle shelf, there to sit looking like an elegant, fetishistic hand grenade?
Still my hands twitch, my eyes shine at the thought of possessing a Curta.
All in all, Gibson's best novel since Neuromancer, Pattern Recognition is the first of his works to even come close to matching his initial achievement, and may actually exceed it, for it adds to Gibson's always haunting prose a lighter heart, a buoyancy, even when the narrative bogs down in excruciating descriptions of jet lag ("soul delay" in Gibson parlance – the idea being that when one takes long, transoceanic flights the soul doesn't travel at the same pace as the body, gets left behind attached by a long tether, and reels in only gradually once one reaches his destination). It is science fiction only in its slight extension of what is possible with current digital technology, and that will annoy some purist Gibson fans, but if it wins Gibson a Hugo or Nebula Award, I, for one, will not mind a bit.
Even those of you who think they hate science fiction will find something to love in this book.
* Cornell Boxes being the creation of artist Jospeh Cornell, who assembled various small objects like ticket stubs and dried flowers and champaign corks into little dioramas evoking various experiences. They're exquisite things. You can see photographs of a few of them at this web site.
**Incidentally, it is because of Exposure that I am most likely the only person in Saratoga, maybe even Carbon County, maybe even Wyoming, who is ever in the least bit familiar with the animated and live action shorts that get nominated for the Academy Awards each year.
Pattern Recognition
by William Gibson
(New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2003)
Science fiction is usually an attempt to make the unfamiliar familiar, to bring us ordinary car-driving, Guiness-swilling, paper-wasting, TV-watching humans into worlds where cars fly, Guiness comes in pill form, paper is rationed and TV is fully interactive. Outer space. Alternate histories where the Nazis won or where the computer was invented in the 19th century. Time travel.
But now, when, as David Foster Wallace observes "we can eat Tex-Mex with chopsticks while listening to reggae and watching a Soviet-satellite newscast of the Berlin Wall's fall – i.e. when damn near everything presents itself as familiar" the real challenge is making the familiar strange.
Which brings me to William Gibson's latest novel, Pattern Recognition.
Pattern Recognition is a serious departure from the "high tech/low life" scenarios he developed for his Sprawl trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive) and his other stuff (Virtual Light, Idoru, All Tomorrow's Parties). It is set very much in our aforementioned car-driving, Guiness-swilling, paper-wasting, TV-watching present, specifically about a year after the September 11 attacks; its milieu is the very internet culture in which you, my reader, and I, Your Humble Blogger am now engaged, a perfectly evoked subculture of fanatical followers of a mass of film snippets that surface online from time to time dubbed "the Footage" and the very 21st century "post-geographic" life of a 33 year old woman whose overwhelming sensitivity to media blitz, to corporate logos and branding, would be a crippling mental illness if she hadn't found a way to make it pay, and pay well.
Cayce Pollard is a human divining rod for marketing success, able to tune her hilarious and completely understandable allergy to bad media figures like the Michelin Man and Tommy Hilfiger to evaluate new logos and marketing strategies on a deeply intuitive level, only occasionally resorting to slyly funny criteria as is detailed early in Pattern Recognition when she is asked to give a yay or nay to a redesigned sneaker logo which resembles, to Cayce, a "syncopated sperm":
Briefly, though, she imagines the countless Asian workers who might, should she say yes, spend years of their lives applying versions of this symbol to an endless and unyielding flood of footwear. What would it mean to them, this bouncing sperm? Would it work its way into their dreams, eventually? Would their children chalk it in doorways before they knew its meaning as a trademark?
The story of Cayce's career as a "cool hunter", who keeps track of street fashion, noting trends almost before they emerge, who engages in early pattern recognition and then helps corporations "point commodifiers at it" would make a pretty interesting novel all by itself, but as usual Gibson has more on his mind than just the teasing out of cultural data like this.
Cayce is also a "Footagehead", one of the aforementioned fanatical devotees of the spookily compelling fragments of what may or not be a complete film that surface from time to time on the internet (the debate over whether or not these fragments are meant to stand alone or are part of an emerging narrative is one of the many interesting items of contention on the "Fetish:Footage:Forum" internet site that is hands-down the best ever evocation of online community I have yet encountered in literature). She is captured by the seemingly effortless timelessness of it, the way the man and woman featured could be interacting in any decade of the last 100 years; others are fascinated with the "are they or aren't they lovers" aspect, still others with the question of authorship. Footageheads are consumed, like addicts; like early Christians or Masons they subtly recognize each other without recognizing each other.
The Footage is the one new marketing phenomenon of the 21st century, Cayce's boss says, and he must have the secret. She can have anything she wants or needs if she'll just find the author, find the story behind it, the how and why. Of course, she goes for it.
Other critics have seemed troubled by the idea that people can become obsessed with such a small and incohate thing (missing, it would appear, Gibson's own well-known fascination with Cornell boxes*, and its similar surfacing in the plot of Count Zero when a woman tracks down the mysterious author of a weird new range of Cornell boxes to an artificial intelligence housed in an orbital community), but I myself have developed perhaps a comparable obsession, though with a finished product. About two years ago, back when I still had cable, I got hooked on a show on the Sci-Fi Channel called Exposure, a showcase for short films.
I've seen a lot of cool stuff there, and have become a devotee of Atom Films as a result. Cool stuff, disturbing stuff, stuff I remember and think about...
But Chel White's Dirt (clock on the highlighted text to check it out; you can watch it in RealMedia or Windows Media at that site) is something else altogether. Watch it and maybe some of you will see what I mean. The rest of you can just chalk it up to me being a freak again, right there next to the time when I shared with our coffee group that I personally have eaten every single one of the insects served up in the Survivor Amazon "bug eatin'" immunity challenge (though the beetle grub I ate was much smaller. Though it still had its pincers. Entomologists are weird, weird people).
Now, Dirt's similarities to Gibson's Footage are small, but the grip it exerts on a certain type of imagination is not; were Cayce a real person, I'm sure she'd be as into this real film as I am, fascinated by its stateliness, its weirdness, the arrestingly Byronic beauty of its main character, the perfect diction and compelling voice of its narrator (an NPR "radio personality" in real life), and the surprising, strangely inspiring twist its brief plot takes. We have a man, perhaps a bit younger than myself, confessing that ever since he was a child he has had a fetish for dirt, for soil. At first it was enough to feel it with his fingers, but soon he was burying himself in it, sleeping in it, finally eating it at the dinner table, until he "had to have it cooked into all the meals I ate... small bits of earth in my steak, in my chicken... dirt gravy, and dirt sprinkled onto everything."
Eventually, vegetable plants begin to sprout in his flesh, "so that I became self-sustaining... I could eat my own vegetables and rely on no one but myself for my survival... I became my own ecosystem and this, this is what empowered me."
Everything about this little film thrills me, chills me, sucks me into its weird little world. The only way I could be more intrigued with it would probably be if it had been released in bits and pieces, out of order, and left as clues all over the internet.
So the Footage fetish makes perfect sense to me!
There are many other tweaky and satisfying elements to the story – post Cold War spookdom, a brilliant evocation of post-Soviet Russia that I could suspect might owe a great deal to the equally brilliant work of the eXile, that fabulously bitchy alternative newspaper started by two genius expatriate assholes in Moscow, the bizarre characters that staff and run boss Hubertus Bigend's cutting-edge marketing firm, gorgeous throwaway prose describing Tokyo's "virtual-looking" skyline, train rides through England, Russian hotel life...
One standout for me: an excursis on the Curta calculator, an entirely mechanical device invented and perfected by an inmate of the concentration camp at Buchenwald. I have long hailed Gibson as the ultimate pornographer of machines and materiel, a man who can create fetishes for plastic, whose treatment of the material composition of objects puts them sensuously in the reader's hands:
"The sensation of its operation is best likened to that of winding a fine thirty-five millimeter camera"... Large fingers moving surely, gently, clicking the black tabs into a different configuration. He grasps the knurled cylinder in his left, gives the knob at the top a twirl. Smoothly ratcheting a sum from its interior. He raises it to see the resulting figure in a tiny window.
I must give thanks by night and day that William Gibson became a novelist, because he would be a force for evil as an advertising copy editor. Since I read the above passage, about a device I had not before known existed, I have slavered after a Curta calculator (they really exist; they are sought by collectors, they fetch fabulous sums in mint condition, they will work forever without battery or electricity) and there is no conceivable reason I should ever want or need one. Where would I put it? On my eclectic mantle shelf, there to sit looking like an elegant, fetishistic hand grenade?
Still my hands twitch, my eyes shine at the thought of possessing a Curta.
All in all, Gibson's best novel since Neuromancer, Pattern Recognition is the first of his works to even come close to matching his initial achievement, and may actually exceed it, for it adds to Gibson's always haunting prose a lighter heart, a buoyancy, even when the narrative bogs down in excruciating descriptions of jet lag ("soul delay" in Gibson parlance – the idea being that when one takes long, transoceanic flights the soul doesn't travel at the same pace as the body, gets left behind attached by a long tether, and reels in only gradually once one reaches his destination). It is science fiction only in its slight extension of what is possible with current digital technology, and that will annoy some purist Gibson fans, but if it wins Gibson a Hugo or Nebula Award, I, for one, will not mind a bit.
Even those of you who think they hate science fiction will find something to love in this book.
* Cornell Boxes being the creation of artist Jospeh Cornell, who assembled various small objects like ticket stubs and dried flowers and champaign corks into little dioramas evoking various experiences. They're exquisite things. You can see photographs of a few of them at this web site.
**Incidentally, it is because of Exposure that I am most likely the only person in Saratoga, maybe even Carbon County, maybe even Wyoming, who is ever in the least bit familiar with the animated and live action shorts that get nominated for the Academy Awards each year.
PATTERN RECOGNITION
Pattern Recognition
by William Gibson
(New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2003)
Science fiction is usually an attempt to make the unfamiliar familiar, to bring us ordinary car-driving, Guiness-swilling, paper-wasting, TV-watching humans into worlds where cars fly, Guiness comes in pill form, paper is rationed and TV is fully interactive. Outer space. Alternate histories where the Nazis won or where the computer was invented in the 19th century. Time travel.
But now, when, as David Foster Wallace observes "we can eat Tex-Mex with chopsticks while listening to reggae and watching a Soviet-satellite newscast of the Berlin Wall's fall – i.e. when damn near everything presents itself as familiar" the real challenge is making the familiar strange.
Which brings me to William Gibson's latest novel, Pattern Recognition.
Pattern Recognition is a serious departure from the "high tech/low life" scenarios he developed for his Sprawl trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive) and his other stuff (Virtual Light, Idoru, All Tomorrow's Parties). It is set very much in our aforementioned car-driving, Guiness-swilling, paper-wasting, TV-watching present, specifically about a year after the September 11 attacks; its milieu is the very internet culture in which you, my reader, and I, Your Humble Blogger am now engaged, a perfectly evoked subculture of fanatical followers of a mass of film snippets that surface online from time to time dubbed "the Footage" and the very 21st century "post-geographic" life of a 33 year old woman whose overwhelming sensitivity to media blitz, to corporate logos and branding, would be a crippling mental illness if she hadn't found a way to make it pay, and pay well.
Cayce Pollard is a human divining rod for marketing success, able to tune her hilarious and completely understandable allergy to bad media figures like the Michelin Man and Tommy Hilfiger to evaluate new logos and marketing strategies on a deeply intuitive level, only occasionally resorting to slyly funny criteria as is detailed early in Pattern Recognition when she is asked to give a yay or nay to a redesigned sneaker logo which resembles, to Cayce, a "syncopated sperm":
Briefly, though, she imagines the countless Asian workers who might, should she say yes, spend years of their lives applying versions of this symbol to an endless and unyielding flood of footwear. What would it mean to them, this bouncing sperm? Would it work its way into their dreams, eventually? Would their children chalk it in doorways before they knew its meaning as a trademark?
The story of Cayce's career as a "cool hunter", who keeps track of street fashion, noting trends almost before they emerge, who engages in early pattern recognition and then helps corporations "point commodifiers at it" would make a pretty interesting novel all by itself, but as usual Gibson has more on his mind than just the teasing out of cultural data like this.
Cayce is also a "Footagehead", one of the aforementioned fanatical devotees of the spookily compelling fragments of what may or not be a complete film that surface from time to time on the internet (the debate over whether or not these fragments are meant to stand alone or are part of an emerging narrative is one of the many interesting items of contention on the "Fetish:Footage:Forum" internet site that is hands-down the best ever evocation of online community I have yet encountered in literature). She is captured by the seemingly effortless timelessness of it, the way the man and woman featured could be interacting in any decade of the last 100 years; others are fascinated with the "are they or aren't they lovers" aspect, still others with the question of authorship. Footageheads are consumed, like addicts; like early Christians or Masons they subtly recognize each other without recognizing each other.
The Footage is the one new marketing phenomenon of the 21st century, Cayce's boss says, and he must have the secret. She can have anything she wants or needs if she'll just find the author, find the story behind it, the how and why. Of course, she goes for it.
Other critics have seemed troubled by the idea that people can become obsessed with such a small and incohate thing (missing, it would appear, Gibson's own well-known fascination with Cornell boxes*, and its similar surfacing in the plot of Count Zero when a woman tracks down the mysterious author of a weird new range of Cornell boxes to an artificial intelligence housed in an orbital community), but I myself have developed perhaps a comparable obsession, though with a finished product. About two years ago, back when I still had cable, I got hooked on a show on the Sci-Fi Channel called Exposure, a showcase for short films.
I've seen a lot of cool stuff there, and have become a devotee of Atom Films as a result. Cool stuff, disturbing stuff, stuff I remember and think about...
But Chel White's Dirt (clock on the highlighted text to check it out; you can watch it in RealMedia or Windows Media at that site) is something else altogether. Watch it and maybe some of you will see what I mean. The rest of you can just chalk it up to me being a freak again, right there next to the time when I shared with our coffee group that I personally have eaten every single one of the insects served up in the Survivor Amazon "bug eatin'" immunity challenge (though the beetle grub I ate was much smaller. Though it still had its pincers. Entomologists are weird, weird people).
Now, Dirt's similarities to Gibson's Footage are small, but the grip it exerts on a certain type of imagination is not; were Cayce a real person, I'm sure she'd be as into this real film as I am, fascinated by its stateliness, its weirdness, the arrestingly Byronic beauty of its main character, the perfect diction and compelling voice of its narrator (an NPR "radio personality" in real life), and the surprising, strangely inspiring twist its brief plot takes. We have a man, perhaps a bit younger than myself, confessing that ever since he was a child he has had a fetish for dirt, for soil. At first it was enough to feel it with his fingers, but soon he was burying himself in it, sleeping in it, finally eating it at the dinner table, until he "had to have it cooked into all the meals I ate... small bits of earth in my steak, in my chicken... dirt gravy, and dirt sprinkled onto everything."
Eventually, vegetable plants begin to sprout in his flesh, "so that I became self-sustaining... I could eat my own vegetables and rely on no one but myself for my survival... I became my own ecosystem and this, this is what empowered me."
Everything about this little film thrills me, chills me, sucks me into its weird little world. The only way I could be more intrigued with it would probably be if it had been released in bits and pieces, out of order, and left as clues all over the internet.
So the Footage fetish makes perfect sense to me!
There are many other tweaky and satisfying elements to the story – post Cold War spookdom, a brilliant evocation of post-Soviet Russia that I could suspect might owe a great deal to the equally brilliant work of the eXile, that fabulously bitchy alternative newspaper started by two genius expatriate assholes in Moscow, the bizarre characters that staff and run boss Hubertus Bigend's cutting-edge marketing firm, gorgeous throwaway prose describing Tokyo's "virtual-looking" skyline, train rides through England, Russian hotel life...
One standout for me: an excursis on the Curta calculator, an entirely mechanical device invented and perfected by an inmate of the concentration camp at Buchenwald. I have long hailed Gibson as the ultimate pornographer of machines and materiel, a man who can create fetishes for plastic, whose treatment of the material composition of objects puts them sensuously in the reader's hands:
"The sensation of its operation is best likened to that of winding a fine thirty-five millimeter camera"... Large fingers moving surely, gently, clicking the black tabs into a different configuration. He grasps the knurled cylinder in his left, gives the knob at the top a twirl. Smoothly ratcheting a sum from its interior. He raises it to see the resulting figure in a tiny window.
I must give thanks by night and day that William Gibson became a novelist, because he would be a force for evil as an advertising copy editor. Since I read the above passage, about a device I had not before known existed, I have slavered after a Curta calculator (they really exist; they are sought by collectors, they fetch fabulous sums in mint condition, they will work forever without battery or electricity) and there is no conceivable reason I should ever want or need one. Where would I put it? On my eclectic mantle shelf, there to sit looking like an elegant, fetishistic hand grenade?
Still my hands twitch, my eyes shine at the thought of possessing a Curta.
All in all, Gibson's best novel since Neuromancer, Pattern Recognition is the first of his works to even come close to matching his initial achievement, and may actually exceed it, for it adds to Gibson's always haunting prose a lighter heart, a buoyancy, even when the narrative bogs down in excruciating descriptions of jet lag ("soul delay" in Gibson parlance – the idea being that when one takes long, transoceanic flights the soul doesn't travel at the same pace as the body, gets left behind attached by a long tether, and reels in only gradually once one reaches his destination). It is science fiction only in its slight extension of what is possible with current digital technology, and that will annoy some purist Gibson fans, but if it wins Gibson a Hugo or Nebula Award, I, for one, will not mind a bit.
Even those of you who think they hate science fiction will find something to love in this book.
* Cornell Boxes being the creation of artist Jospeh Cornell, who assembled various small objects like ticket stubs and dried flowers and champaign corks into little dioramas evoking various experiences. They're exquisite things. You can see photographs of a few of them at
Pattern Recognition
by William Gibson
(New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2003)
Science fiction is usually an attempt to make the unfamiliar familiar, to bring us ordinary car-driving, Guiness-swilling, paper-wasting, TV-watching humans into worlds where cars fly, Guiness comes in pill form, paper is rationed and TV is fully interactive. Outer space. Alternate histories where the Nazis won or where the computer was invented in the 19th century. Time travel.
But now, when, as David Foster Wallace observes "we can eat Tex-Mex with chopsticks while listening to reggae and watching a Soviet-satellite newscast of the Berlin Wall's fall – i.e. when damn near everything presents itself as familiar" the real challenge is making the familiar strange.
Which brings me to William Gibson's latest novel, Pattern Recognition.
Pattern Recognition is a serious departure from the "high tech/low life" scenarios he developed for his Sprawl trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive) and his other stuff (Virtual Light, Idoru, All Tomorrow's Parties). It is set very much in our aforementioned car-driving, Guiness-swilling, paper-wasting, TV-watching present, specifically about a year after the September 11 attacks; its milieu is the very internet culture in which you, my reader, and I, Your Humble Blogger am now engaged, a perfectly evoked subculture of fanatical followers of a mass of film snippets that surface online from time to time dubbed "the Footage" and the very 21st century "post-geographic" life of a 33 year old woman whose overwhelming sensitivity to media blitz, to corporate logos and branding, would be a crippling mental illness if she hadn't found a way to make it pay, and pay well.
Cayce Pollard is a human divining rod for marketing success, able to tune her hilarious and completely understandable allergy to bad media figures like the Michelin Man and Tommy Hilfiger to evaluate new logos and marketing strategies on a deeply intuitive level, only occasionally resorting to slyly funny criteria as is detailed early in Pattern Recognition when she is asked to give a yay or nay to a redesigned sneaker logo which resembles, to Cayce, a "syncopated sperm":
Briefly, though, she imagines the countless Asian workers who might, should she say yes, spend years of their lives applying versions of this symbol to an endless and unyielding flood of footwear. What would it mean to them, this bouncing sperm? Would it work its way into their dreams, eventually? Would their children chalk it in doorways before they knew its meaning as a trademark?
The story of Cayce's career as a "cool hunter", who keeps track of street fashion, noting trends almost before they emerge, who engages in early pattern recognition and then helps corporations "point commodifiers at it" would make a pretty interesting novel all by itself, but as usual Gibson has more on his mind than just the teasing out of cultural data like this.
Cayce is also a "Footagehead", one of the aforementioned fanatical devotees of the spookily compelling fragments of what may or not be a complete film that surface from time to time on the internet (the debate over whether or not these fragments are meant to stand alone or are part of an emerging narrative is one of the many interesting items of contention on the "Fetish:Footage:Forum" internet site that is hands-down the best ever evocation of online community I have yet encountered in literature). She is captured by the seemingly effortless timelessness of it, the way the man and woman featured could be interacting in any decade of the last 100 years; others are fascinated with the "are they or aren't they lovers" aspect, still others with the question of authorship. Footageheads are consumed, like addicts; like early Christians or Masons they subtly recognize each other without recognizing each other.
The Footage is the one new marketing phenomenon of the 21st century, Cayce's boss says, and he must have the secret. She can have anything she wants or needs if she'll just find the author, find the story behind it, the how and why. Of course, she goes for it.
Other critics have seemed troubled by the idea that people can become obsessed with such a small and incohate thing (missing, it would appear, Gibson's own well-known fascination with Cornell boxes*, and its similar surfacing in the plot of Count Zero when a woman tracks down the mysterious author of a weird new range of Cornell boxes to an artificial intelligence housed in an orbital community), but I myself have developed perhaps a comparable obsession, though with a finished product. About two years ago, back when I still had cable, I got hooked on a show on the Sci-Fi Channel called Exposure, a showcase for short films.
I've seen a lot of cool stuff there, and have become a devotee of Atom Films as a result. Cool stuff, disturbing stuff, stuff I remember and think about...
But Chel White's Dirt (clock on the highlighted text to check it out; you can watch it in RealMedia or Windows Media at that site) is something else altogether. Watch it and maybe some of you will see what I mean. The rest of you can just chalk it up to me being a freak again, right there next to the time when I shared with our coffee group that I personally have eaten every single one of the insects served up in the Survivor Amazon "bug eatin'" immunity challenge (though the beetle grub I ate was much smaller. Though it still had its pincers. Entomologists are weird, weird people).
Now, Dirt's similarities to Gibson's Footage are small, but the grip it exerts on a certain type of imagination is not; were Cayce a real person, I'm sure she'd be as into this real film as I am, fascinated by its stateliness, its weirdness, the arrestingly Byronic beauty of its main character, the perfect diction and compelling voice of its narrator (an NPR "radio personality" in real life), and the surprising, strangely inspiring twist its brief plot takes. We have a man, perhaps a bit younger than myself, confessing that ever since he was a child he has had a fetish for dirt, for soil. At first it was enough to feel it with his fingers, but soon he was burying himself in it, sleeping in it, finally eating it at the dinner table, until he "had to have it cooked into all the meals I ate... small bits of earth in my steak, in my chicken... dirt gravy, and dirt sprinkled onto everything."
Eventually, vegetable plants begin to sprout in his flesh, "so that I became self-sustaining... I could eat my own vegetables and rely on no one but myself for my survival... I became my own ecosystem and this, this is what empowered me."
Everything about this little film thrills me, chills me, sucks me into its weird little world. The only way I could be more intrigued with it would probably be if it had been released in bits and pieces, out of order, and left as clues all over the internet.
So the Footage fetish makes perfect sense to me!
There are many other tweaky and satisfying elements to the story – post Cold War spookdom, a brilliant evocation of post-Soviet Russia that I could suspect might owe a great deal to the equally brilliant work of the eXile, that fabulously bitchy alternative newspaper started by two genius expatriate assholes in Moscow, the bizarre characters that staff and run boss Hubertus Bigend's cutting-edge marketing firm, gorgeous throwaway prose describing Tokyo's "virtual-looking" skyline, train rides through England, Russian hotel life...
One standout for me: an excursis on the Curta calculator, an entirely mechanical device invented and perfected by an inmate of the concentration camp at Buchenwald. I have long hailed Gibson as the ultimate pornographer of machines and materiel, a man who can create fetishes for plastic, whose treatment of the material composition of objects puts them sensuously in the reader's hands:
"The sensation of its operation is best likened to that of winding a fine thirty-five millimeter camera"... Large fingers moving surely, gently, clicking the black tabs into a different configuration. He grasps the knurled cylinder in his left, gives the knob at the top a twirl. Smoothly ratcheting a sum from its interior. He raises it to see the resulting figure in a tiny window.
I must give thanks by night and day that William Gibson became a novelist, because he would be a force for evil as an advertising copy editor. Since I read the above passage, about a device I had not before known existed, I have slavered after a Curta calculator (they really exist; they are sought by collectors, they fetch fabulous sums in mint condition, they will work forever without battery or electricity) and there is no conceivable reason I should ever want or need one. Where would I put it? On my eclectic mantle shelf, there to sit looking like an elegant, fetishistic hand grenade?
Still my hands twitch, my eyes shine at the thought of possessing a Curta.
All in all, Gibson's best novel since Neuromancer, Pattern Recognition is the first of his works to even come close to matching his initial achievement, and may actually exceed it, for it adds to Gibson's always haunting prose a lighter heart, a buoyancy, even when the narrative bogs down in excruciating descriptions of jet lag ("soul delay" in Gibson parlance – the idea being that when one takes long, transoceanic flights the soul doesn't travel at the same pace as the body, gets left behind attached by a long tether, and reels in only gradually once one reaches his destination). It is science fiction only in its slight extension of what is possible with current digital technology, and that will annoy some purist Gibson fans, but if it wins Gibson a Hugo or Nebula Award, I, for one, will not mind a bit.
Even those of you who think they hate science fiction will find something to love in this book.
* Cornell Boxes being the creation of artist Jospeh Cornell, who assembled various small objects like ticket stubs and dried flowers and champaign corks into little dioramas evoking various experiences. They're exquisite things. You can see photographs of a few of them at
Sunday, April 13, 2003
YOU THINK I SHOULD WHAT?
So, while I desperately cast about for enough paying work to keep the Unabomber Cabin heated and dog food in the Collie of Folly's bowl, I have swallowed a bit of my pride (there's still plenty left, I assure you) and done the paperwork to go on unemployment for a bit while I await the college transcripts that will allow me to become a substitute teacher, responses from magazines to queries I've sent, checks for articles I've already sold, etc.
But of course, the good State of Wyoming doesn't know my good intentions, and couldn't care less about them if it/they did know. So, there are some flaming hoops through which I've had to jump in order to collect that little bit o'money to keep the power company and the landlord happy while I straighten out all of this foofraw. So, among other things, I've had to re-register with Job Service.
Now, since I first registered with them, the day after I arrived back in this fair state with my Ryder truck full of books and my killer Bostonian resume, the service has undergone some admirable changes. For on thing, folks can register online (this made even easier for me since my old record was still in the database; I just had to add all of my snazzy new skills and experience to it). For another, job leads can be sent via e-mail or phone.
And that, of course, is where the hilarity comes in.
As far as I can tell, Job Service is relying pretty much solely on its dueling databases to match up slackers like me with what jobs are out there. And, well, its algorithm for making those matches could use a little work.
Now, I can very well understand why its systems might think that I would be eager to pull up stakes, abandon family, friends and civic responsibilities to go be a part-time telemarketer in Jackson paid on a commission basis. I can. Barely. Understand it.
But under what universe's laws of probability, physics and personnel management am I qualified to become the next director of special education for the Cody Public Schools?
Or a senior accountant for a law firm in Douglas?
But, of course, I have to follow up on these leads because if I don't, I will be considered a vagabond, a moocher, a lazy ass trying to get a free lunch. And it would appear that all of the article queries I'm sending out, all of the story leads I'm chasing down, all of the project contracts I'm pursuing via services like CreativeMoonlighter.com don't count as looking for work.
So, I'm sure the supe at the Cody schools got a good laugh at my expense, though perhaps he got several laughs. If I'm qualified for that job, who isn't, after all? But, I do what I must so that I can do what I can so that I can do what I can't stop doing, which is, of course, writing.
But, just to keep the bums happy, I did take an extremely part-time job, helping out a girlfriend of mine this summer. She's managing a silly little gift store in downtown Saratoga for yet another friend of mine, and has decided that she wants weekends off. So, what the hell, it's some money, it gets me out of the house (apart from my coffee group and the odd public meeting, I'm becoming a fearful hermit), it's as close to zero responsibility as I'm likely to get, and staff meetings consist of margaritas at the Crazy Liver Cantina next door.
Plus, she doesn't care if I write on the job. Which I will have to do, and copiously, if I want any fun stuff in my life like wine or a phone line in the near future. And I really should have both of those.
Meanwhile, please excuse me. I have to fill out an application for a ranch management position in Powell.
Never mind that I don't know a heifer from haenfeffer.
So, while I desperately cast about for enough paying work to keep the Unabomber Cabin heated and dog food in the Collie of Folly's bowl, I have swallowed a bit of my pride (there's still plenty left, I assure you) and done the paperwork to go on unemployment for a bit while I await the college transcripts that will allow me to become a substitute teacher, responses from magazines to queries I've sent, checks for articles I've already sold, etc.
But of course, the good State of Wyoming doesn't know my good intentions, and couldn't care less about them if it/they did know. So, there are some flaming hoops through which I've had to jump in order to collect that little bit o'money to keep the power company and the landlord happy while I straighten out all of this foofraw. So, among other things, I've had to re-register with Job Service.
Now, since I first registered with them, the day after I arrived back in this fair state with my Ryder truck full of books and my killer Bostonian resume, the service has undergone some admirable changes. For on thing, folks can register online (this made even easier for me since my old record was still in the database; I just had to add all of my snazzy new skills and experience to it). For another, job leads can be sent via e-mail or phone.
And that, of course, is where the hilarity comes in.
As far as I can tell, Job Service is relying pretty much solely on its dueling databases to match up slackers like me with what jobs are out there. And, well, its algorithm for making those matches could use a little work.
Now, I can very well understand why its systems might think that I would be eager to pull up stakes, abandon family, friends and civic responsibilities to go be a part-time telemarketer in Jackson paid on a commission basis. I can. Barely. Understand it.
But under what universe's laws of probability, physics and personnel management am I qualified to become the next director of special education for the Cody Public Schools?
Or a senior accountant for a law firm in Douglas?
But, of course, I have to follow up on these leads because if I don't, I will be considered a vagabond, a moocher, a lazy ass trying to get a free lunch. And it would appear that all of the article queries I'm sending out, all of the story leads I'm chasing down, all of the project contracts I'm pursuing via services like CreativeMoonlighter.com don't count as looking for work.
So, I'm sure the supe at the Cody schools got a good laugh at my expense, though perhaps he got several laughs. If I'm qualified for that job, who isn't, after all? But, I do what I must so that I can do what I can so that I can do what I can't stop doing, which is, of course, writing.
But, just to keep the bums happy, I did take an extremely part-time job, helping out a girlfriend of mine this summer. She's managing a silly little gift store in downtown Saratoga for yet another friend of mine, and has decided that she wants weekends off. So, what the hell, it's some money, it gets me out of the house (apart from my coffee group and the odd public meeting, I'm becoming a fearful hermit), it's as close to zero responsibility as I'm likely to get, and staff meetings consist of margaritas at the Crazy Liver Cantina next door.
Plus, she doesn't care if I write on the job. Which I will have to do, and copiously, if I want any fun stuff in my life like wine or a phone line in the near future. And I really should have both of those.
Meanwhile, please excuse me. I have to fill out an application for a ranch management position in Powell.
Never mind that I don't know a heifer from haenfeffer.
Friday, April 11, 2003
NOTHING GETS CHEAPER, DOES IT?
Morning strolls around Saratoga Lake with My Own Dear Personal Mom and the Collie of Folly are much noisier than a few weeks ago, as our teeming populations of migratory birds begin to return. The herons are back, with their deep, bullfrog grunts, the blackbirds have taken up residence again amongst the reeds, chirruping in their sing-song-y way.
And back at Kate's Landing, the air is thick with an early trico hatch, after which the trout have started to leap. It must be April...
Ah, spring. That time when a young woman's fancy turns to thoughts of... water rates.
Wednesday night we, your Saratoga/Carbon County Impact Joint Powers Board, a.k.a. the Sewer King and all his court (which includes Your Humble Blogger, Tad the Grocer, the Fat Cat Republican Bastard, and a few stray others who have not, thus far, done anything interesting enough to be included in these chronicles, but we can just for fun call them the Lady of the Lagoon and the Heart Surgeon*), performed a sadly necessary evil.
We voted to recommend that the town council (which also includes Your Humble Blogger, of course) approve the first increase in water rates in something like four years.
Now, really, it's not much of an increase. The base rate will stay at $14 a month for residential users and $20 a month for commercial users. It is the "step rate" – the additional charges paid by those who use more than 7001 gallons monthly – that we are adjusting, by 30¢ for each "step"**. This is more or less the same strategy proposed two years ago, when this board last visited its rate structure; the philosophy behind adjusting the step rate rather than the base being that it is wiser to impose more of the higher costs for water (and bear in mind, your bill is not just for the fluid coming through your faucets; we have to pay for and maintain the delivery, storage and treatment systems, too) on those who use more of it – the users of, e.g., 20,000 - 60,000 gallons.
Two years ago, however, you did not see this rate increase, because your mayor and council (of which number I could not yet be counted; I was still but a humble newspaper reporter. OK, not very humble, but I was still just a chronicler and not a maker of these big and weighty water decisions) didn't want to institute the rate increase at that time, choosing instead to make up the shortfall with money from the Town's general fund.
This ain't happening this time around, though, because A) It's a foolish maneuver; water and sewer services are among the only programs in which your municipal government engages that have any chance at all of paying for themselves and the way instituted by state law to make them pay for themselves is, yes, rate adjustment – while the town's general fund does not enjoy that kind of flexibility, depending as it does on property taxes (which rates we do not set), population-based shares of sales and gasoline and other taxes (over which we have no control), etc. In other words, the town is on a fixed income and the water and sewer departments are not, and B) We ain't got money slushing around in the general fund to bestow willy nilly like that this time around, either. Were the general fund to be tapped to protect high water users from a small rate increase this time around, something else would have to give. And since we're already looking at a pretty bare bones budget (the fun begins April 17! Woo hoo!) this time around, whatever had to give would probably make you guys howl even more than would a rate increase.
Such is the reasoning behind my decisions, anyway.
And really, let's have a look at the big picture for a moment.
What this does to Saratoga's average water bill is raise it from $36.10 to $40 even (and bear in mind, we were below the statewide average of $38.67 last year, and this statewide figure is bound to increase, too, so I'd be willing to bet we'll still be below the state average).
That $3.90 difference will allow us to plunk an additional $19,110 annually into the water fund, which is used to cover operating expenses for the water treatment plant (and that includes utilities – gas and electric price increases affect that plant, too, oh yes!) (oh yes, and salaries for the people who keep the plant running, come in the middle of the night when your water main breaks, etc.) and is also used to build up a reserve fund that we use for the big maintenance projects. Since time immemorial, our target amount for the reserves is $100,000, as that is a good number to conjure with when doing things like building water towers, replacing ancient water mains, or buying new ozonators like we had to do in 2001.
As it stands now, with our current water rates, we're not going to hit that magic figure, hence our proposed increase in the step rate.
Let me stress again that this is at this stage a proposed increase. It's the Town Council's decision, and we will vote on it this coming Tuesday, and there is still the possibility that I will be overruled by my colleagues on that august body.
But I'm going to vote for it, poor starving writer though I am, child of seriously yard-proud, lawn-watering parents though I be.
Nothing ever gets cheaper, does it?
*The Lady of the Lagoon being the lovely lady lawyer who owns the property adjacent to our ammonia factory-cum-sewer lagoon about which I have discoursed so eloquently elsewhere in this here blog. The Heart Surgeon gave himself the name, after regaling us (with some prompting from YHB, natch) with his recent tale of woe: he was cutting a doorway in a cinderblock wall and his masonry blade struck something unexpected, kicked back, and sliced very, very cleanly into his chest. He is very, very lucky it was a smooth masonry blade instead of something more serrated and wicked and has the pulse, optimal body temperature and rows of stitches to prove it.
**The steps being 7001 to 20,000 gallons (current rate, $1.70; proposed new rate, $2.00); 20,001 to 60,000 gallons (current $1.80, proposed $2.10); and 60,001 or more (current $1.90, proposed $2.20).
Morning strolls around Saratoga Lake with My Own Dear Personal Mom and the Collie of Folly are much noisier than a few weeks ago, as our teeming populations of migratory birds begin to return. The herons are back, with their deep, bullfrog grunts, the blackbirds have taken up residence again amongst the reeds, chirruping in their sing-song-y way.
And back at Kate's Landing, the air is thick with an early trico hatch, after which the trout have started to leap. It must be April...
Ah, spring. That time when a young woman's fancy turns to thoughts of... water rates.
Wednesday night we, your Saratoga/Carbon County Impact Joint Powers Board, a.k.a. the Sewer King and all his court (which includes Your Humble Blogger, Tad the Grocer, the Fat Cat Republican Bastard, and a few stray others who have not, thus far, done anything interesting enough to be included in these chronicles, but we can just for fun call them the Lady of the Lagoon and the Heart Surgeon*), performed a sadly necessary evil.
We voted to recommend that the town council (which also includes Your Humble Blogger, of course) approve the first increase in water rates in something like four years.
Now, really, it's not much of an increase. The base rate will stay at $14 a month for residential users and $20 a month for commercial users. It is the "step rate" – the additional charges paid by those who use more than 7001 gallons monthly – that we are adjusting, by 30¢ for each "step"**. This is more or less the same strategy proposed two years ago, when this board last visited its rate structure; the philosophy behind adjusting the step rate rather than the base being that it is wiser to impose more of the higher costs for water (and bear in mind, your bill is not just for the fluid coming through your faucets; we have to pay for and maintain the delivery, storage and treatment systems, too) on those who use more of it – the users of, e.g., 20,000 - 60,000 gallons.
Two years ago, however, you did not see this rate increase, because your mayor and council (of which number I could not yet be counted; I was still but a humble newspaper reporter. OK, not very humble, but I was still just a chronicler and not a maker of these big and weighty water decisions) didn't want to institute the rate increase at that time, choosing instead to make up the shortfall with money from the Town's general fund.
This ain't happening this time around, though, because A) It's a foolish maneuver; water and sewer services are among the only programs in which your municipal government engages that have any chance at all of paying for themselves and the way instituted by state law to make them pay for themselves is, yes, rate adjustment – while the town's general fund does not enjoy that kind of flexibility, depending as it does on property taxes (which rates we do not set), population-based shares of sales and gasoline and other taxes (over which we have no control), etc. In other words, the town is on a fixed income and the water and sewer departments are not, and B) We ain't got money slushing around in the general fund to bestow willy nilly like that this time around, either. Were the general fund to be tapped to protect high water users from a small rate increase this time around, something else would have to give. And since we're already looking at a pretty bare bones budget (the fun begins April 17! Woo hoo!) this time around, whatever had to give would probably make you guys howl even more than would a rate increase.
Such is the reasoning behind my decisions, anyway.
And really, let's have a look at the big picture for a moment.
What this does to Saratoga's average water bill is raise it from $36.10 to $40 even (and bear in mind, we were below the statewide average of $38.67 last year, and this statewide figure is bound to increase, too, so I'd be willing to bet we'll still be below the state average).
That $3.90 difference will allow us to plunk an additional $19,110 annually into the water fund, which is used to cover operating expenses for the water treatment plant (and that includes utilities – gas and electric price increases affect that plant, too, oh yes!) (oh yes, and salaries for the people who keep the plant running, come in the middle of the night when your water main breaks, etc.) and is also used to build up a reserve fund that we use for the big maintenance projects. Since time immemorial, our target amount for the reserves is $100,000, as that is a good number to conjure with when doing things like building water towers, replacing ancient water mains, or buying new ozonators like we had to do in 2001.
As it stands now, with our current water rates, we're not going to hit that magic figure, hence our proposed increase in the step rate.
Let me stress again that this is at this stage a proposed increase. It's the Town Council's decision, and we will vote on it this coming Tuesday, and there is still the possibility that I will be overruled by my colleagues on that august body.
But I'm going to vote for it, poor starving writer though I am, child of seriously yard-proud, lawn-watering parents though I be.
Nothing ever gets cheaper, does it?
*The Lady of the Lagoon being the lovely lady lawyer who owns the property adjacent to our ammonia factory-cum-sewer lagoon about which I have discoursed so eloquently elsewhere in this here blog. The Heart Surgeon gave himself the name, after regaling us (with some prompting from YHB, natch) with his recent tale of woe: he was cutting a doorway in a cinderblock wall and his masonry blade struck something unexpected, kicked back, and sliced very, very cleanly into his chest. He is very, very lucky it was a smooth masonry blade instead of something more serrated and wicked and has the pulse, optimal body temperature and rows of stitches to prove it.
**The steps being 7001 to 20,000 gallons (current rate, $1.70; proposed new rate, $2.00); 20,001 to 60,000 gallons (current $1.80, proposed $2.10); and 60,001 or more (current $1.90, proposed $2.20).
Tuesday, April 08, 2003
FLYING ELEPHANTS...?
I've seen a peanut stand,
Heard a rubber band,
I've even seen a needle wink its eye
...But I think I've seen 'bout everything, when I seen the Oracle sing.
It was a very weird weekend in LIANTland, dear readers, and not just because of the temporary stretching of LIANTland's borders.
First of all, thank you all for your condolences on the poor performance I turned in with My Own Dear Personal Dad at Saturday's cribbage tournament. I'm as baffled as you are, and can only attribute our dead-last finish to the verity of the old saw about where pride goeth.
In our defense, do you know the fates of the two teams we did manage to beat? That's right. They placed first and second.
But that, despite the startling unlikeliness of the number of completely worthless hands dealt to the pair of us, despite the stunningly bad timing with which those 20-point hands appeared just when our opponents pegged out, despite the surrealism of getting whipped by people whom I taught to play the game (and also by Famous Bill and the latest contender for the always coveted title of Town Drunk), was not, as my epigram might suggest, the strangest thing that happened this weekend.
I also went on a road trip, my first since my error-riddled trip to my best buddy's wedding in Chicago last summer.
And that, dear readers, was some strange stuff, that ol' Platte Valley Community Center Roadshow and Wet Bar...
We piled into the Oracle's Suburban early of a Sunday afternoon, the five of us: the Oracle, Napaman (distinguishable from Superman only by his lack of a cape and his dashing little red mustache), my Worthy Successor, my Rawlins Counterpart, and Your Humble Blogger, to head out on what was doubtless only the first of many fact finding missions.
Destination: Hot Springs, South Dakota and the Mueller Civic Center (no apparent relation to the current FBI director of the same name).
Purpose: See what a 27,000 square foot civic center looks like and interrogate those responsible for its erection and perpetuation.
Other purpose: Blatantly violate the Sunshine Laws by talking shop all the way there and back again. At which we failed miserably because, well, a lot of other stuff was more fun to talk about.
See, the Oracle and Napaman are both old running buddies of my dad's, and have colorfully checkered histories in their own rights besides, and love to shock and delight bright eyed young things like my Worthy Successor, my Rawlins Counterpart and myself with tales thereof.
Also, the Oracle likes to drive really fast, and Napaman likes to tease him about it.
Also, the Oracle can't stand driving on anything more elaborate than a two-lane highway, and Napaman likes to tease him about it.
Also, Your Humble Blogger made the mistake of remarking that she pretty much knows at least one person in every incorporated town in Wyoming, but left out those two important modifying terms, "pretty" and "much" and quite forgot that not every incorporated town in Wyoming is a member of the Wyoming Association of Municipalities, meaning it's unlikely that I've met the mayors of some towns I keep forgetting exist – and through which we drove.
The scene there being something like this: We zip through a little eyeblink town between Wheatland and the state line at a moderately ungodly speed. As its two or three businesses blur by, Napaman chimes in:
"Hey, Kate, who do you know in (insert name of one-horse here)."
Me: "..."
Oracle: "Haw haw, see what you get for bragging, Kate?"
Me: "Tphttht!"
WS and RC" "Tee hee!"
Repeat as necessary.
(By the way, yes, these are the same two guys who routinely commemorate major holidays by turning ugly, plague-ridden poultry and other livestock loose in each other's yards, just to put this all in perspective)
In between towns, the boys regaled us with great old chestnuts like the time Napaman, MODPD and several other members of the august body known as the Saratoga Volunteer Fire Department crammed themselves into my grandmother's pristine, single-owner, vintage Volkswagen Beetle and drove up the sidewalk on Bridge Street to the entrance of the Rustic, bought a case of beer and drove the rest of the block on said sidewalk (obviously this was back in the days before those big silly New England-style lightposts were installed when the town put in geothermally heated sidewalks).
We arrived at our destination, Hot Springs, S.D., only about two hours earlier than our ETA (for some reason the Oracle confined himself to a modest 85 m.p.h. for the duration of the trip), peckish and curious. We tooled up and down the streets of a town that looks like the bastard child of the University of Wyoming (home to lots of big handsome sandstone buildings), Saugerties, N.Y. (home to wildly zigzagging streets that veer left and right and up and down almost by the block) and one of Mad King Ludwig's more modest castles, while gawking somewhat at the 65 degree waters of the Fall River.
Dinner was at a Chinese restaurant (yummy!) next door to a public house known only as "The Bar." With a name like that, we couldn't possibly stay away, even though the only drinkable beer on tap was some Amber Bock. The Bar apparently caters to bikers during Sturgis Season and to biker wannabes the rest of the time.
Oracle: "Hey Kate, who plays this song we're listening to?"
YHB & WS (pausing to listen): "Steppenwolf."
Oracle: "Oh."
Napaman: "Who're they?"
Oracle: "Pardon my companion. He listens to both kinds of music."
Napaman: "Yup, country AND western."
YHB: "..."
Oracle: "So, who plays this song we're hearing now?"
YHB & WS (pausing to listen): "Steppenwolf."
Repeat as necessary.
Cut to the next morning, as the crew straggles one at a time into the continental breakfast room at the Hot Springs Comfort Inn. Among the usual rolls and cereals and single-serving packages of coffee creamer (in case the watered down decaf is too strongly coffee-flavored for one's tastes) is... a waffle iron. And lots of little cups of waffle batter. And a spray can labled "Waffle Off" which the Oracle immediately begins to refer to as Waffle Offal when the lot of us offer our unsolicited advice to any breakfast room patron who dares try to make a waffle.
The scene:
Enter Unknown Hippie Girl Breakfast Room Patron, who fumbles around looking for a teabag and discovers the waffle iron.
UHGBRP: "Cool, a waffle iron!"
YHB (excitedly egging her on): "There's batter there, too."
UHGBRP: "Cool!"
UHGBRP begins to make the waffle. YHB starts nudging the Oracle and giggling while muttering "This one's going to be good!"
We have invented a new sport: waffle watching. Were we more inclined to gamble, we might have been placing bets on how badly each BRP's waffle would stick to the iron. Were we inclined to gamble. But instead, the Oracle being a killjoy spoil-sport, or possibly just really getting off on getting to say "Waffle Offal" as often as possible, chimes in with:
"Hey. You'd better spray some of that Waffle Offal on so it doesn't stick."
UHGBRP: "Oh. Good idea." (sprays. All over. While we cough and wave the haze of petroleum distillates and artificial flavors away from our faces).
YHB: "Aww, you told her."
Napaman: "Why do you care?"
YHB: "Well, duh!" (pointing out the spectacle of waffle parts and bits and corpses strewn about the Breakfast Room).
Napaman: "You're pretty easily entertained, aren't you?"
YHB: "You should be glad I am, so that I can easily entertain you!"
Napaman: "Good point."
Oracle (catching the spirit after all): "Shh! There she goes!"
We all watch breathlessly as UHGBRP opens the waffle iron. We watch as she lifts the warped and previously melted plastic fork. We watch as she slides the fork effortlessly under the first Waffle Quadrant. We sigh as the Waffle Offal works its magic and the WQ comes free. We watch as she tackles Quadrant Two. We sigh. But then, but then, but then... Quadrant Three is stuck!!!! And Quadrant Four is also recalcitrant!
But UHGBRP is obviously a pro, and gingerly, gently coaxes the waffle from the iron with the kind of patience YHB can only muster when, well, writing one of these here blog entries. To each her own, as it were.
In any case:
YHB: "Ohhh! She's got it! Judges?"
UHGBRP scored a 10 for dexterity, a ten for style, and a 9.9 for skill. Not bad at 7:30 a.m. in Hot Springs, S.D.
And yes, the tour of the Mueller Center was delightful and illuminating and encouraging. They built the whole thing, a theater, gym, kitchen and conference rooms, for only $1.5 million!
...In 1987.
Oh, but...
1987.
How much diff–
1987.
Oh. Well.
Cut to the homeward journey, once again at impressive but not ludicrous speed, and I'm beginning to think the Oracle's brother and other frequent passengers have maybe exaggerated the weight of the Oracular Foot. We hit a few white-out blizzards, drive past a few lots filled with disgusting green tractors (we all in the car know that tractors are meant to come in only one color, the color god and McCormick intended: bright red), through a few more nameless and absurdly pretty little towns (mercifully without comment on whether or not I had acquaintances there. Napaman, unlike, say, Sketch or the Great Gay Banker, knows when a joke stops being funny) and on and on until we decide that it is vitally important for all concerned except for our Designated Oracle (who used up all of his drink tickets years ago) to have a beer in Rock River.
Our fate is of course sealed when we notice that we have, in fact, reached the exact counterpart of the tavern of the previous eve, minus a definite article. The sign at the establishment we entered said, simply, "BAR."
That was it, really, until the truly miraculous happened, something so strange that I'm glad indeed to have four witnesses.
As we round the bend around Arlington, Wyo. and see a truck sort of run off the road, the Oracle starts softly chuckling to himself, and then, inexplicably, to sing.
"I've seen a peanut stand, heard a rubber band..."
Clearly it is time for me to go see Mrs. Sketch and get my bi-annual earrigation again. Sounds awfully like the lyrics to that old song from Walt Disney's "Dumbo," doesn't it?
The lyrics to which are now playing on an endless loop in Your Humble Blogger's Humble Head. Round and round and round. I've even seen a needle wink it's eye.
Confirmation! For as we finally pull, about an hour later, into the Oracular Driveway in Saratoga, there he goes again. "I think I've seen 'bout everything/When I see an elephant fly."
I can only conclude from this that the Oracle is very happy indeed to be a grandfather, and has thrown himself into the role with gusto.
Meanwhile, rains of crabs and periwinkles can't be far behind, and I hear they've discovered oil on the moon.
And I've heard the Oracle singing each to each. I do not think he sang for me.
I've seen a peanut stand,
Heard a rubber band,
I've even seen a needle wink its eye
...But I think I've seen 'bout everything, when I seen the Oracle sing.
It was a very weird weekend in LIANTland, dear readers, and not just because of the temporary stretching of LIANTland's borders.
First of all, thank you all for your condolences on the poor performance I turned in with My Own Dear Personal Dad at Saturday's cribbage tournament. I'm as baffled as you are, and can only attribute our dead-last finish to the verity of the old saw about where pride goeth.
In our defense, do you know the fates of the two teams we did manage to beat? That's right. They placed first and second.
But that, despite the startling unlikeliness of the number of completely worthless hands dealt to the pair of us, despite the stunningly bad timing with which those 20-point hands appeared just when our opponents pegged out, despite the surrealism of getting whipped by people whom I taught to play the game (and also by Famous Bill and the latest contender for the always coveted title of Town Drunk), was not, as my epigram might suggest, the strangest thing that happened this weekend.
I also went on a road trip, my first since my error-riddled trip to my best buddy's wedding in Chicago last summer.
And that, dear readers, was some strange stuff, that ol' Platte Valley Community Center Roadshow and Wet Bar...
We piled into the Oracle's Suburban early of a Sunday afternoon, the five of us: the Oracle, Napaman (distinguishable from Superman only by his lack of a cape and his dashing little red mustache), my Worthy Successor, my Rawlins Counterpart, and Your Humble Blogger, to head out on what was doubtless only the first of many fact finding missions.
Destination: Hot Springs, South Dakota and the Mueller Civic Center (no apparent relation to the current FBI director of the same name).
Purpose: See what a 27,000 square foot civic center looks like and interrogate those responsible for its erection and perpetuation.
Other purpose: Blatantly violate the Sunshine Laws by talking shop all the way there and back again. At which we failed miserably because, well, a lot of other stuff was more fun to talk about.
See, the Oracle and Napaman are both old running buddies of my dad's, and have colorfully checkered histories in their own rights besides, and love to shock and delight bright eyed young things like my Worthy Successor, my Rawlins Counterpart and myself with tales thereof.
Also, the Oracle likes to drive really fast, and Napaman likes to tease him about it.
Also, the Oracle can't stand driving on anything more elaborate than a two-lane highway, and Napaman likes to tease him about it.
Also, Your Humble Blogger made the mistake of remarking that she pretty much knows at least one person in every incorporated town in Wyoming, but left out those two important modifying terms, "pretty" and "much" and quite forgot that not every incorporated town in Wyoming is a member of the Wyoming Association of Municipalities, meaning it's unlikely that I've met the mayors of some towns I keep forgetting exist – and through which we drove.
The scene there being something like this: We zip through a little eyeblink town between Wheatland and the state line at a moderately ungodly speed. As its two or three businesses blur by, Napaman chimes in:
"Hey, Kate, who do you know in (insert name of one-horse here)."
Me: "..."
Oracle: "Haw haw, see what you get for bragging, Kate?"
Me: "Tphttht!"
WS and RC" "Tee hee!"
Repeat as necessary.
(By the way, yes, these are the same two guys who routinely commemorate major holidays by turning ugly, plague-ridden poultry and other livestock loose in each other's yards, just to put this all in perspective)
In between towns, the boys regaled us with great old chestnuts like the time Napaman, MODPD and several other members of the august body known as the Saratoga Volunteer Fire Department crammed themselves into my grandmother's pristine, single-owner, vintage Volkswagen Beetle and drove up the sidewalk on Bridge Street to the entrance of the Rustic, bought a case of beer and drove the rest of the block on said sidewalk (obviously this was back in the days before those big silly New England-style lightposts were installed when the town put in geothermally heated sidewalks).
We arrived at our destination, Hot Springs, S.D., only about two hours earlier than our ETA (for some reason the Oracle confined himself to a modest 85 m.p.h. for the duration of the trip), peckish and curious. We tooled up and down the streets of a town that looks like the bastard child of the University of Wyoming (home to lots of big handsome sandstone buildings), Saugerties, N.Y. (home to wildly zigzagging streets that veer left and right and up and down almost by the block) and one of Mad King Ludwig's more modest castles, while gawking somewhat at the 65 degree waters of the Fall River.
Dinner was at a Chinese restaurant (yummy!) next door to a public house known only as "The Bar." With a name like that, we couldn't possibly stay away, even though the only drinkable beer on tap was some Amber Bock. The Bar apparently caters to bikers during Sturgis Season and to biker wannabes the rest of the time.
Oracle: "Hey Kate, who plays this song we're listening to?"
YHB & WS (pausing to listen): "Steppenwolf."
Oracle: "Oh."
Napaman: "Who're they?"
Oracle: "Pardon my companion. He listens to both kinds of music."
Napaman: "Yup, country AND western."
YHB: "..."
Oracle: "So, who plays this song we're hearing now?"
YHB & WS (pausing to listen): "Steppenwolf."
Repeat as necessary.
Cut to the next morning, as the crew straggles one at a time into the continental breakfast room at the Hot Springs Comfort Inn. Among the usual rolls and cereals and single-serving packages of coffee creamer (in case the watered down decaf is too strongly coffee-flavored for one's tastes) is... a waffle iron. And lots of little cups of waffle batter. And a spray can labled "Waffle Off" which the Oracle immediately begins to refer to as Waffle Offal when the lot of us offer our unsolicited advice to any breakfast room patron who dares try to make a waffle.
The scene:
Enter Unknown Hippie Girl Breakfast Room Patron, who fumbles around looking for a teabag and discovers the waffle iron.
UHGBRP: "Cool, a waffle iron!"
YHB (excitedly egging her on): "There's batter there, too."
UHGBRP: "Cool!"
UHGBRP begins to make the waffle. YHB starts nudging the Oracle and giggling while muttering "This one's going to be good!"
We have invented a new sport: waffle watching. Were we more inclined to gamble, we might have been placing bets on how badly each BRP's waffle would stick to the iron. Were we inclined to gamble. But instead, the Oracle being a killjoy spoil-sport, or possibly just really getting off on getting to say "Waffle Offal" as often as possible, chimes in with:
"Hey. You'd better spray some of that Waffle Offal on so it doesn't stick."
UHGBRP: "Oh. Good idea." (sprays. All over. While we cough and wave the haze of petroleum distillates and artificial flavors away from our faces).
YHB: "Aww, you told her."
Napaman: "Why do you care?"
YHB: "Well, duh!" (pointing out the spectacle of waffle parts and bits and corpses strewn about the Breakfast Room).
Napaman: "You're pretty easily entertained, aren't you?"
YHB: "You should be glad I am, so that I can easily entertain you!"
Napaman: "Good point."
Oracle (catching the spirit after all): "Shh! There she goes!"
We all watch breathlessly as UHGBRP opens the waffle iron. We watch as she lifts the warped and previously melted plastic fork. We watch as she slides the fork effortlessly under the first Waffle Quadrant. We sigh as the Waffle Offal works its magic and the WQ comes free. We watch as she tackles Quadrant Two. We sigh. But then, but then, but then... Quadrant Three is stuck!!!! And Quadrant Four is also recalcitrant!
But UHGBRP is obviously a pro, and gingerly, gently coaxes the waffle from the iron with the kind of patience YHB can only muster when, well, writing one of these here blog entries. To each her own, as it were.
In any case:
YHB: "Ohhh! She's got it! Judges?"
UHGBRP scored a 10 for dexterity, a ten for style, and a 9.9 for skill. Not bad at 7:30 a.m. in Hot Springs, S.D.
And yes, the tour of the Mueller Center was delightful and illuminating and encouraging. They built the whole thing, a theater, gym, kitchen and conference rooms, for only $1.5 million!
...In 1987.
Oh, but...
1987.
How much diff–
1987.
Oh. Well.
Cut to the homeward journey, once again at impressive but not ludicrous speed, and I'm beginning to think the Oracle's brother and other frequent passengers have maybe exaggerated the weight of the Oracular Foot. We hit a few white-out blizzards, drive past a few lots filled with disgusting green tractors (we all in the car know that tractors are meant to come in only one color, the color god and McCormick intended: bright red), through a few more nameless and absurdly pretty little towns (mercifully without comment on whether or not I had acquaintances there. Napaman, unlike, say, Sketch or the Great Gay Banker, knows when a joke stops being funny) and on and on until we decide that it is vitally important for all concerned except for our Designated Oracle (who used up all of his drink tickets years ago) to have a beer in Rock River.
Our fate is of course sealed when we notice that we have, in fact, reached the exact counterpart of the tavern of the previous eve, minus a definite article. The sign at the establishment we entered said, simply, "BAR."
That was it, really, until the truly miraculous happened, something so strange that I'm glad indeed to have four witnesses.
As we round the bend around Arlington, Wyo. and see a truck sort of run off the road, the Oracle starts softly chuckling to himself, and then, inexplicably, to sing.
"I've seen a peanut stand, heard a rubber band..."
Clearly it is time for me to go see Mrs. Sketch and get my bi-annual earrigation again. Sounds awfully like the lyrics to that old song from Walt Disney's "Dumbo," doesn't it?
The lyrics to which are now playing on an endless loop in Your Humble Blogger's Humble Head. Round and round and round. I've even seen a needle wink it's eye.
Confirmation! For as we finally pull, about an hour later, into the Oracular Driveway in Saratoga, there he goes again. "I think I've seen 'bout everything/When I see an elephant fly."
I can only conclude from this that the Oracle is very happy indeed to be a grandfather, and has thrown himself into the role with gusto.
Meanwhile, rains of crabs and periwinkles can't be far behind, and I hear they've discovered oil on the moon.
And I've heard the Oracle singing each to each. I do not think he sang for me.
Thursday, April 03, 2003
"FIVE IS GOOD..."
With just two days left before the Big Cribbage Tournament at the Crazy Liver Cantina (not its real name), My Own Dear Personal Dadand I decided it would be in our best interest to maybe start thinking about, you know, training. A retiree and a newly-minted hobo have to be careful about spending that much money to enter (the fee is, after all, $10) and we'd best make sure we finish in the money!
Of course our best course of action was to find some sparring partners, and fortunately for us, my Novel Walking Partner and her husband, Famous Bill, were available. Originally MODPD and FB were going to head off to the big city to buy some railroad ties (don't ask) but the weather has been disgustingly springlike, gale force winds, heavy snowfall, mud and all, so we all just stayed in and played instead.
My Own Dear Personal Mom, knowing that the family fortune would be at stake on Saturday, did her part by baking brownies to keep up our strength and make sure MODPD and I stay at fighting weight.
Good thing, too, because NWP and FB wound up beating us a terrifying two out of five games, though perhaps had we tracked the aggregate number of pegs the results would have been even worse... for our opponents. HAW!
Refrain of the day, sort of pitifully whimpered at the end of each round by NWP: "Five is good for a crib..."
HAW!
That's right, MODPD and Your Humble Blogger are mean (but not lean) pegging machines when it comes to cribbage, wily and sneaky and deceptive and nearly unstoppable even before the first hand is counted. As we knew would be so. Sherrods are born with a cribbage board in one hand and a deck of cards in the other (explaining, perhaps, the high incidence of Caesarian sections in our clan dating all the way back to the time when the procedure was first initiated in Paracelsus' day because he didn't want to wait around for his wife to have "natural" childbirth before counting his crib). My Own Dear Personal sister is undefeated at two- and three-player cribbage, and was so even when we were tots and played with the likes of FlyBoy Campbell, who was always trying to convince us that we couldn't count His Nibs in our hands because we were girls.
Yup, playing cribbage with a pair of Sherrods could probably be compared to trying to play Risk with a pair of Atriedes. Shouldn't even be attempted.
Be assured, dear readers, we would handicap ourselves to even up the stakes on Saturday if it weren't for the fact that, well, I'm unemployed, and MODPD likes to go play in Las Vegas and has to stake himself somehow.
And man, this is so much more fun than working.
With just two days left before the Big Cribbage Tournament at the Crazy Liver Cantina (not its real name), My Own Dear Personal Dadand I decided it would be in our best interest to maybe start thinking about, you know, training. A retiree and a newly-minted hobo have to be careful about spending that much money to enter (the fee is, after all, $10) and we'd best make sure we finish in the money!
Of course our best course of action was to find some sparring partners, and fortunately for us, my Novel Walking Partner and her husband, Famous Bill, were available. Originally MODPD and FB were going to head off to the big city to buy some railroad ties (don't ask) but the weather has been disgustingly springlike, gale force winds, heavy snowfall, mud and all, so we all just stayed in and played instead.
My Own Dear Personal Mom, knowing that the family fortune would be at stake on Saturday, did her part by baking brownies to keep up our strength and make sure MODPD and I stay at fighting weight.
Good thing, too, because NWP and FB wound up beating us a terrifying two out of five games, though perhaps had we tracked the aggregate number of pegs the results would have been even worse... for our opponents. HAW!
Refrain of the day, sort of pitifully whimpered at the end of each round by NWP: "Five is good for a crib..."
HAW!
That's right, MODPD and Your Humble Blogger are mean (but not lean) pegging machines when it comes to cribbage, wily and sneaky and deceptive and nearly unstoppable even before the first hand is counted. As we knew would be so. Sherrods are born with a cribbage board in one hand and a deck of cards in the other (explaining, perhaps, the high incidence of Caesarian sections in our clan dating all the way back to the time when the procedure was first initiated in Paracelsus' day because he didn't want to wait around for his wife to have "natural" childbirth before counting his crib). My Own Dear Personal sister is undefeated at two- and three-player cribbage, and was so even when we were tots and played with the likes of FlyBoy Campbell, who was always trying to convince us that we couldn't count His Nibs in our hands because we were girls.
Yup, playing cribbage with a pair of Sherrods could probably be compared to trying to play Risk with a pair of Atriedes. Shouldn't even be attempted.
Be assured, dear readers, we would handicap ourselves to even up the stakes on Saturday if it weren't for the fact that, well, I'm unemployed, and MODPD likes to go play in Las Vegas and has to stake himself somehow.
And man, this is so much more fun than working.
Wednesday, April 02, 2003
"CHIEFS"
"Some days it's a good day to die, some days it's a good day to play basketball."
- Victor Joseph in Chris Eyre's "Smoke Signals"
Wyoming almost never makes it to basketball's "Sweet Sixteen" and wipes out spectacularly on those rare occasions when we do.
It may, then, seem strange to those who aren't in the know to say that Wyoming is one of the great basketball capitals of the known world. It may seem strange, but it isn't.
It's just that Wyoming's basketball gods very rarely make it to college, and when they do, they don't usually make it through college. And never, ever, do these gods manifest themselves at the University of Wyoming or any other Division I school.
That's because these gods live "on the rez," as budding filmmaker Daniel Junge shows us in his documentary "Chiefs."
Junge spent two years filming the lives of several members of the 2000 and 2001 Wyoming Indian High School boys basketball teams, on and off the court, then heroically edited down all of that footage into a taut, often moving, and definitely illuminating 90 minute film, which aired nationwide last night on PBS's "Independent Lens" program.
There's a lot to love, to be astonished by, and to be saddened by as Junge's images roll on with very little commentary from the filmmaker. These boys carry the hopes of an entire nation with them onto the basketball court, and are expected to live up to a proud legacy – 20 straight trips to the state tournament, numerous state championships, undefeated seasons – ever under the watchful eyes of their ancestors (many of whom were directly involved in establishing that legacy, those record seasons, those statistical marvels, those packed gymnasiums all over Wyoming). Every team in the state, even those from schools in Casper and Nebraska and Lander whose benches hold triple the number of players as the Chiefs because their schools hold ten times as many students as Wyoming Indian, wants a piece of them, making the Chiefs' entire season into an endless repeat of the plot of "Hoosiers."
Except those Indiana boys never had to deal with the social conditions and the occasional racism that were and are a fact of life for young men like Brian Sounding Sides, Ben and Al C'Bearing, and Tom Robinson.
Wisely, Junge does not dwell on these in the maudlin muckraking way of so many documentarians observing the tragedies of indigenous peoples. Junge also wisely does not dwell on the obviously "Indian" elements of these players' lives. A quick shot of a team session in a sweat lodge, a glimpse of a drum circle, are enough, as are quick looks around the Wind River Indian Reservation in central Wyoming – an area hard to make look picturesque, and Junge didn't try.
He didn't need to.
The realities of these players' lives come through simply and elegantly on their own. They are very aware of themselves as Indians, but they also have to learn trigonometry like any other high school students, also play video games... Marijuana use is a big issue, as is the deceptive easiness of life when every tribe member gets a "cap check" representing his or her equal share of the tribe's mineral royalties, removing a lot of the urgency behind the need to plan for the future or find lasting employment after the glory days of high school basketball are gone and the player has joined the many who went before him, playing "independent" basketball in year-long intramural reservation basketball leagues.
It's almost as if these players' lives are shortened and intensified when they are Chiefs; at age 16 they may not even be six feet tall yet, but their vertical leaps of 20 inches or more and their stunning prowess at slam dunks, steals and flying alley oops that no other Wyoming high school players ever seem to reach, combined with the closeness of small town school life and the even greater closeness of tribal life make these boys living gods at their schools, with small fry clamoring for their autographs after games and everyone noting their every moves in practice, in school, and on the boards. Then they graduate.
A few each year go off to college, after a fashion. As the film progresses, we see Brian Sounding Sides boarding a plane to fly off to attend a united tribal college in North Dakota. It will be his first time flying, but more importantly, it will be his first time living a life removed from his own people, what's left of their ways, and the equally insular world of high school basketball, which brings these boys out amongst the predominantly white populace of Wyoming but tightly restricts and controls their interactions there. Play basketball. Brief visit to Target (to buy eyedrops to hide the pot-smoking). Sit in motel room. Ride bus.
Within three weeks, Sounding Sides decides he "doesn't like" college and is back on the rez. As the film's epilog shares, he now lives at home, and plays independent basketball.
A question "Chiefs" inspires but does not address is, is it possible to keep all of the qualities that make Indian basketball great but ditch the insularity, the lack of preparedness for the rest of the world that sends all but a rare few of these hoop gods back to the reservation before they've even finished a year outside? There are always a few glimmers of hope; one of the C'Bearings is a student now at Chadron State in Nebraska, we are told in the epilog, and Tom Robinson won a rodeo scholarship to a community college in Wyoming. There's two... out of how many?
God help me, I recognized some of the independent league players from the days when I was a high school student and they were playing ball lo these... 14 years or so ago?
Can this change?
I don't know the answer to that.
But I do know the happiness that is nonetheless there in these young men's stories. A Saratoga girl who grew up watching the Panthers take on the Chiefs in several sports, I have a lifetime of memories of watching the Indians' families pack even our gymnasium, hundreds of miles away from the reservation. Often there would be more Chief than Panther fans in our little gym, and even I, not the world's greatest basketball fan, hated to miss a game just for the raw excitement of being part of such a passionate gathering. These games were my first experiences of the "good" side of being part of a mob – for even though both sides really, really wanted to win, the rivalry was friendly, the action kept on the court (I understand that some of this sportsmanship has declined since my years as a student here, but that is just hearsay. I haven't been to a game since I stopped making my living covering them, but the last time I saw the Chiefs play anyone – the very state championship game that is the climax of this film – I saw sportsmanship and fair play, on the court and in the stands, that would make Gary Medicine Cloud, the team's groovy old bus driver, very proud). And the cheering was all for them! Ten or 12 of the tribe's finest players (who've grown up in a land where every single household sports a basketball hoop outdoors). Gods indeed.
A lot of people would give up a lot to experience even one game of that kind of support, of that kind of adulation, let alone a whole season, a whole four-year career. How about you?
I'm very excited that more people are going to get to see this as a result of Junge's film. But there are some things I would have liked to see more of in it, most especially the team's assistant coach, whose name I missed (it was only mentioned once, at the very beginning), an uncle of one of the star players and himself a former Chief who made good and came back to the rez to coach. I have a personal, slightly selfish interest in the stories of other people my age who have chosen to come back here and tackle leadership roles in a state that, let's face it, is not an easy place for a young person to have a life and make a living, and this guy seemed to be carrying his responsibilities well.
The other thing that's missing is the Lady Chiefs, Wyoming Indian's girls basketball team. During the years covered by this film, the girls team was not as successful as the boys, but they did make it to state at least one of those years (I'm working from memory here, just an hour after watching the film, at the Unabomber Cabin, with no live internet connection, so I can't look it up)... and I have to say, I've always admired them even more than the boys, and not just for how well they play (always, always tough, my jock sister, who faced them often, informs me).
See, I spent the 2001 Wyoming State Basketball Tournament chaperoning Saratoga's middle and high school pep band, hauled off to Casper to cheer on our boys team, through games and restaurants and malls (always malls. There are only three in the whole state of Wyoming, and woe to the team sponsor who keeps a busload of teenagers away from one of them whenever one is near) and our motel.
Which we shared with Wyoming Indian's boys and girls teams.
And a few screaming, bratty little children... babies, toddlers, the odd pre-schooler.
You see, more than one of those girls basketball players were mothers. Some had more than one child. And they were still going to high school and playing basketball, and playing it damned well, with the kids in tow even on away trips. No, they weren't state champions, and I'm not saying it's a great thing they got pregnant while still in their teens, but I'm still going to say bully for them for keeping the kids, trying to raise them, and still trying to finish their own educations.
And play boobs to the wall, tough, physical basketball.
I hope someday, someone notices them, too. Hail to the Chiefs... and also the Lady Chiefs. And the little Chiefs they're already raising and teaching to play.
And hail to Daniel Junge for showing them to us without sentimentality, without a relentless agenda, without a smothering weight of interpretation and explanation.
More, please.
"Some days it's a good day to die, some days it's a good day to play basketball."
- Victor Joseph in Chris Eyre's "Smoke Signals"
Wyoming almost never makes it to basketball's "Sweet Sixteen" and wipes out spectacularly on those rare occasions when we do.
It may, then, seem strange to those who aren't in the know to say that Wyoming is one of the great basketball capitals of the known world. It may seem strange, but it isn't.
It's just that Wyoming's basketball gods very rarely make it to college, and when they do, they don't usually make it through college. And never, ever, do these gods manifest themselves at the University of Wyoming or any other Division I school.
That's because these gods live "on the rez," as budding filmmaker Daniel Junge shows us in his documentary "Chiefs."
Junge spent two years filming the lives of several members of the 2000 and 2001 Wyoming Indian High School boys basketball teams, on and off the court, then heroically edited down all of that footage into a taut, often moving, and definitely illuminating 90 minute film, which aired nationwide last night on PBS's "Independent Lens" program.
There's a lot to love, to be astonished by, and to be saddened by as Junge's images roll on with very little commentary from the filmmaker. These boys carry the hopes of an entire nation with them onto the basketball court, and are expected to live up to a proud legacy – 20 straight trips to the state tournament, numerous state championships, undefeated seasons – ever under the watchful eyes of their ancestors (many of whom were directly involved in establishing that legacy, those record seasons, those statistical marvels, those packed gymnasiums all over Wyoming). Every team in the state, even those from schools in Casper and Nebraska and Lander whose benches hold triple the number of players as the Chiefs because their schools hold ten times as many students as Wyoming Indian, wants a piece of them, making the Chiefs' entire season into an endless repeat of the plot of "Hoosiers."
Except those Indiana boys never had to deal with the social conditions and the occasional racism that were and are a fact of life for young men like Brian Sounding Sides, Ben and Al C'Bearing, and Tom Robinson.
Wisely, Junge does not dwell on these in the maudlin muckraking way of so many documentarians observing the tragedies of indigenous peoples. Junge also wisely does not dwell on the obviously "Indian" elements of these players' lives. A quick shot of a team session in a sweat lodge, a glimpse of a drum circle, are enough, as are quick looks around the Wind River Indian Reservation in central Wyoming – an area hard to make look picturesque, and Junge didn't try.
He didn't need to.
The realities of these players' lives come through simply and elegantly on their own. They are very aware of themselves as Indians, but they also have to learn trigonometry like any other high school students, also play video games... Marijuana use is a big issue, as is the deceptive easiness of life when every tribe member gets a "cap check" representing his or her equal share of the tribe's mineral royalties, removing a lot of the urgency behind the need to plan for the future or find lasting employment after the glory days of high school basketball are gone and the player has joined the many who went before him, playing "independent" basketball in year-long intramural reservation basketball leagues.
It's almost as if these players' lives are shortened and intensified when they are Chiefs; at age 16 they may not even be six feet tall yet, but their vertical leaps of 20 inches or more and their stunning prowess at slam dunks, steals and flying alley oops that no other Wyoming high school players ever seem to reach, combined with the closeness of small town school life and the even greater closeness of tribal life make these boys living gods at their schools, with small fry clamoring for their autographs after games and everyone noting their every moves in practice, in school, and on the boards. Then they graduate.
A few each year go off to college, after a fashion. As the film progresses, we see Brian Sounding Sides boarding a plane to fly off to attend a united tribal college in North Dakota. It will be his first time flying, but more importantly, it will be his first time living a life removed from his own people, what's left of their ways, and the equally insular world of high school basketball, which brings these boys out amongst the predominantly white populace of Wyoming but tightly restricts and controls their interactions there. Play basketball. Brief visit to Target (to buy eyedrops to hide the pot-smoking). Sit in motel room. Ride bus.
Within three weeks, Sounding Sides decides he "doesn't like" college and is back on the rez. As the film's epilog shares, he now lives at home, and plays independent basketball.
A question "Chiefs" inspires but does not address is, is it possible to keep all of the qualities that make Indian basketball great but ditch the insularity, the lack of preparedness for the rest of the world that sends all but a rare few of these hoop gods back to the reservation before they've even finished a year outside? There are always a few glimmers of hope; one of the C'Bearings is a student now at Chadron State in Nebraska, we are told in the epilog, and Tom Robinson won a rodeo scholarship to a community college in Wyoming. There's two... out of how many?
God help me, I recognized some of the independent league players from the days when I was a high school student and they were playing ball lo these... 14 years or so ago?
Can this change?
I don't know the answer to that.
But I do know the happiness that is nonetheless there in these young men's stories. A Saratoga girl who grew up watching the Panthers take on the Chiefs in several sports, I have a lifetime of memories of watching the Indians' families pack even our gymnasium, hundreds of miles away from the reservation. Often there would be more Chief than Panther fans in our little gym, and even I, not the world's greatest basketball fan, hated to miss a game just for the raw excitement of being part of such a passionate gathering. These games were my first experiences of the "good" side of being part of a mob – for even though both sides really, really wanted to win, the rivalry was friendly, the action kept on the court (I understand that some of this sportsmanship has declined since my years as a student here, but that is just hearsay. I haven't been to a game since I stopped making my living covering them, but the last time I saw the Chiefs play anyone – the very state championship game that is the climax of this film – I saw sportsmanship and fair play, on the court and in the stands, that would make Gary Medicine Cloud, the team's groovy old bus driver, very proud). And the cheering was all for them! Ten or 12 of the tribe's finest players (who've grown up in a land where every single household sports a basketball hoop outdoors). Gods indeed.
A lot of people would give up a lot to experience even one game of that kind of support, of that kind of adulation, let alone a whole season, a whole four-year career. How about you?
I'm very excited that more people are going to get to see this as a result of Junge's film. But there are some things I would have liked to see more of in it, most especially the team's assistant coach, whose name I missed (it was only mentioned once, at the very beginning), an uncle of one of the star players and himself a former Chief who made good and came back to the rez to coach. I have a personal, slightly selfish interest in the stories of other people my age who have chosen to come back here and tackle leadership roles in a state that, let's face it, is not an easy place for a young person to have a life and make a living, and this guy seemed to be carrying his responsibilities well.
The other thing that's missing is the Lady Chiefs, Wyoming Indian's girls basketball team. During the years covered by this film, the girls team was not as successful as the boys, but they did make it to state at least one of those years (I'm working from memory here, just an hour after watching the film, at the Unabomber Cabin, with no live internet connection, so I can't look it up)... and I have to say, I've always admired them even more than the boys, and not just for how well they play (always, always tough, my jock sister, who faced them often, informs me).
See, I spent the 2001 Wyoming State Basketball Tournament chaperoning Saratoga's middle and high school pep band, hauled off to Casper to cheer on our boys team, through games and restaurants and malls (always malls. There are only three in the whole state of Wyoming, and woe to the team sponsor who keeps a busload of teenagers away from one of them whenever one is near) and our motel.
Which we shared with Wyoming Indian's boys and girls teams.
And a few screaming, bratty little children... babies, toddlers, the odd pre-schooler.
You see, more than one of those girls basketball players were mothers. Some had more than one child. And they were still going to high school and playing basketball, and playing it damned well, with the kids in tow even on away trips. No, they weren't state champions, and I'm not saying it's a great thing they got pregnant while still in their teens, but I'm still going to say bully for them for keeping the kids, trying to raise them, and still trying to finish their own educations.
And play boobs to the wall, tough, physical basketball.
I hope someday, someone notices them, too. Hail to the Chiefs... and also the Lady Chiefs. And the little Chiefs they're already raising and teaching to play.
And hail to Daniel Junge for showing them to us without sentimentality, without a relentless agenda, without a smothering weight of interpretation and explanation.
More, please.
SKATE PARK DILEMMA
OK, dear readers, here's where your youngest councilman really, really needs your help. This is not a rhetorical request; I really need to hear from any of you who actually care about the following.
No matter how we've looked at it, in Saratoga and elsewhere, the municipal revenue situation pretty much sucks. Sales tax collections are down, and with them many other revenues we, your town government, depend on to pay for the services we provide you.
The budget sessions that will commence in less than two weeks are already looking painful, as we begin to balance interests that already compete fiercely even in good revenue years, figure out what we can and can't touch, what is already irrevocably committed and what goes on the chopping block.
In the midst of all of this, your town hall staff has presented us with drawings and a price tag for a project that was near and dear to the heart of our recently-ex-recreation director (the Minister of Fun in these pages): a skateboard park.
The departed MOF was one of the original small band of kids who built the skate park that once occupied the very spot – one of the tennis courts on Veterans Island – onto which this new equipment would be installed. They did it because they wanted it and were willing to work for it, to pay for it, to maintain it.
Tragedy of the Commons time: After the park's builders grew up and went away (they were my immediate contemporaries, ranging in age from a year older than me to about five years younger), the equipment fell into disuse and disrepair, neglected pretty much altogether until, many years later, some kids in Encampment decided they wanted a skate park down there, and cannibalized the Veterans Island equipment with the Town of Saratoga's tacit blessing.
Skateboarding is still somewhat popular today, but since the stuff at Veterans Island is gone, today's kids do it downtown, much to the annoyance of a few local business owners whose property gets damaged betimes, through accident and, alas, occasional vandalism.
A few of the youngsters approached what was then a Recreation Department of two – laughably, given my campaign stance that recreation is not a legitmate function of government and government's coercive powers, I was the second of those two – and asked if something could be done to bring back the skate park at Veterans Island.
As I recall, the MOF's response was "sure, what do we want to do?" with an emphasis on "we" because he knew very well the council's general stance on projects like that: we don't throw town money around on projects that just a couple of people want unless that couple of people can demonstrate widespread support for them in the form of, yes, donation money!
I.E., take the Playground Ladies, who held countless fundraisers, distributed countless coin cans around town, wrote countless grants, and mounted a full-on media campaign to come up with the necessary funds to buy the fancy playground equipment they installed – again as a community effort – at Kathy Glode and Veterans Island parks, as your model. They got help, cooperation, and some of the funding from the town, but they knew better than to demand that the taxpayers foot the entire bill for their little dream.
Ditto the dog park, built partially with town funds but mostly with money raised by Pals for Pets and with their volunteer labor and in-kind donations from local businesses and dog lovers.
The kids asking to revive the skate park, predictably, said whatever it took to get the MOF to start working on a plan, which he did, with some input from the young'uns as to what kind of equipment they'd like best.
The MOF even went so far as to make some coin cans for the kids to use to start collecting donations to support their project, admonished them frequently that this park was only going to happen if they took ownership of it (in the hope that because they'd invested in it themselves, they would take care of it instead of letting it get trashed or vandalized. Hey, the MOF and I are still a little young; allow us a bit of hopeful naivete from time to time, wouldja?).
Alas, predictably, as the MOF began to beaver away at a small stack of grant applications, the enthusiasm for making this a group effort appears to have disappeared. He reports the last few meetings he called to work on the project were attended by... the MOF himself and no other.
Fine, then.
We did not stop the MOF's grant writing efforts, but I personally, at least, clicked the park's icon then and there and moved it into the delete bin. If the people who say they want it so bad can't be bothered to do the work to make it happen, that tells me everything about their attitude toward it, toward us, toward the concept of public property and common resources.
BUT... (there's always an enormous "but") in the wake of the MOF's departure, others among the town hall staff have chosen to take this program and run with it.
Last night, two of them plunked a plan down on the table in front of us, and a price tag of over $30,400.
Now, there is some controversy over a grant the MOF wrote to support this venture at this point. How much is it for? When will we know if we get the funds, etc.?
With this in mind, and knowing the background of this project as I do, and knowing the ugly revenue picture we're already facing, I was prepared to give this the thumbs down last night if the issue of whether or not to spend that much money was to be forced then and there. As it was, I urged the rest of the council to wait until we knew the status of that grant before deciding on this. If we've got $25,000 coming from the Tony Hawk foundation, this becomes a bit less difficult to contemplate. If we've got to pay for the whole thing out of Town revenues... I'm inclined to say no.
But I was elected to represent you, the people of Saratoga. It's not just my wishes that count here. So I really need, within the next two weeks, to hear what you all think.
If I don't hear from any of you, on the street, by e-mail, whatever, then I am going to vote my own political conscience: town revenues are to be spent to benefit the entire populace and not just small interest groups. You as a taxpayer do not have a choice as to whether to contribute your share to the kitty; ethics thus dictate that I spend this money on things that all of you use. Roads. Fire protection. Ambulance service. Police. Bridges.
(Some have already quibbled that not everyone will use the community center that is to be built partially with sales tax. To them I point out: you get a direct choice on this on May 6 of this year, when the voters of Carbon County get to decide whether or not to approve the Capital Facilities Tax. If you don't want this facility, then vote no. BUT, shut the hell up about how we need one if you do. People have been demanding some form of this thing for my entire life, and it's getting old. It will get older still if that tax gets defeated. Get it?)
I cannot logically place a skateboard park in the same category with these other services that pretty much everyone agrees are necessary, if not essential to a town.
Can you?
But, if you guys really want one, if you really, really think this is a legitimate use of funds, you'd better tell me now.
Before you decide, though, contemplate the opportunity cost we would be incurring. $30,000 is about half the cost of a fire truck. $30,000 is more than last year's entire operating budget for the ambulance service. $30,000 is about what we lose annually in keeping the swimming pool open (and that's after we factor in the admission fees, the fees for swimming lessons, etc. – which brings up another point: there will be no financial return on a skate park. Ever. Just an operation and maintenance drain at best, if it gets used beyond the span of its novelty value). We're catching up on deferred maintenance on the streets – crack sealing, pothole filling, etc.
What do you think, folks?
OK, dear readers, here's where your youngest councilman really, really needs your help. This is not a rhetorical request; I really need to hear from any of you who actually care about the following.
No matter how we've looked at it, in Saratoga and elsewhere, the municipal revenue situation pretty much sucks. Sales tax collections are down, and with them many other revenues we, your town government, depend on to pay for the services we provide you.
The budget sessions that will commence in less than two weeks are already looking painful, as we begin to balance interests that already compete fiercely even in good revenue years, figure out what we can and can't touch, what is already irrevocably committed and what goes on the chopping block.
In the midst of all of this, your town hall staff has presented us with drawings and a price tag for a project that was near and dear to the heart of our recently-ex-recreation director (the Minister of Fun in these pages): a skateboard park.
The departed MOF was one of the original small band of kids who built the skate park that once occupied the very spot – one of the tennis courts on Veterans Island – onto which this new equipment would be installed. They did it because they wanted it and were willing to work for it, to pay for it, to maintain it.
Tragedy of the Commons time: After the park's builders grew up and went away (they were my immediate contemporaries, ranging in age from a year older than me to about five years younger), the equipment fell into disuse and disrepair, neglected pretty much altogether until, many years later, some kids in Encampment decided they wanted a skate park down there, and cannibalized the Veterans Island equipment with the Town of Saratoga's tacit blessing.
Skateboarding is still somewhat popular today, but since the stuff at Veterans Island is gone, today's kids do it downtown, much to the annoyance of a few local business owners whose property gets damaged betimes, through accident and, alas, occasional vandalism.
A few of the youngsters approached what was then a Recreation Department of two – laughably, given my campaign stance that recreation is not a legitmate function of government and government's coercive powers, I was the second of those two – and asked if something could be done to bring back the skate park at Veterans Island.
As I recall, the MOF's response was "sure, what do we want to do?" with an emphasis on "we" because he knew very well the council's general stance on projects like that: we don't throw town money around on projects that just a couple of people want unless that couple of people can demonstrate widespread support for them in the form of, yes, donation money!
I.E., take the Playground Ladies, who held countless fundraisers, distributed countless coin cans around town, wrote countless grants, and mounted a full-on media campaign to come up with the necessary funds to buy the fancy playground equipment they installed – again as a community effort – at Kathy Glode and Veterans Island parks, as your model. They got help, cooperation, and some of the funding from the town, but they knew better than to demand that the taxpayers foot the entire bill for their little dream.
Ditto the dog park, built partially with town funds but mostly with money raised by Pals for Pets and with their volunteer labor and in-kind donations from local businesses and dog lovers.
The kids asking to revive the skate park, predictably, said whatever it took to get the MOF to start working on a plan, which he did, with some input from the young'uns as to what kind of equipment they'd like best.
The MOF even went so far as to make some coin cans for the kids to use to start collecting donations to support their project, admonished them frequently that this park was only going to happen if they took ownership of it (in the hope that because they'd invested in it themselves, they would take care of it instead of letting it get trashed or vandalized. Hey, the MOF and I are still a little young; allow us a bit of hopeful naivete from time to time, wouldja?).
Alas, predictably, as the MOF began to beaver away at a small stack of grant applications, the enthusiasm for making this a group effort appears to have disappeared. He reports the last few meetings he called to work on the project were attended by... the MOF himself and no other.
Fine, then.
We did not stop the MOF's grant writing efforts, but I personally, at least, clicked the park's icon then and there and moved it into the delete bin. If the people who say they want it so bad can't be bothered to do the work to make it happen, that tells me everything about their attitude toward it, toward us, toward the concept of public property and common resources.
BUT... (there's always an enormous "but") in the wake of the MOF's departure, others among the town hall staff have chosen to take this program and run with it.
Last night, two of them plunked a plan down on the table in front of us, and a price tag of over $30,400.
Now, there is some controversy over a grant the MOF wrote to support this venture at this point. How much is it for? When will we know if we get the funds, etc.?
With this in mind, and knowing the background of this project as I do, and knowing the ugly revenue picture we're already facing, I was prepared to give this the thumbs down last night if the issue of whether or not to spend that much money was to be forced then and there. As it was, I urged the rest of the council to wait until we knew the status of that grant before deciding on this. If we've got $25,000 coming from the Tony Hawk foundation, this becomes a bit less difficult to contemplate. If we've got to pay for the whole thing out of Town revenues... I'm inclined to say no.
But I was elected to represent you, the people of Saratoga. It's not just my wishes that count here. So I really need, within the next two weeks, to hear what you all think.
If I don't hear from any of you, on the street, by e-mail, whatever, then I am going to vote my own political conscience: town revenues are to be spent to benefit the entire populace and not just small interest groups. You as a taxpayer do not have a choice as to whether to contribute your share to the kitty; ethics thus dictate that I spend this money on things that all of you use. Roads. Fire protection. Ambulance service. Police. Bridges.
(Some have already quibbled that not everyone will use the community center that is to be built partially with sales tax. To them I point out: you get a direct choice on this on May 6 of this year, when the voters of Carbon County get to decide whether or not to approve the Capital Facilities Tax. If you don't want this facility, then vote no. BUT, shut the hell up about how we need one if you do. People have been demanding some form of this thing for my entire life, and it's getting old. It will get older still if that tax gets defeated. Get it?)
I cannot logically place a skateboard park in the same category with these other services that pretty much everyone agrees are necessary, if not essential to a town.
Can you?
But, if you guys really want one, if you really, really think this is a legitimate use of funds, you'd better tell me now.
Before you decide, though, contemplate the opportunity cost we would be incurring. $30,000 is about half the cost of a fire truck. $30,000 is more than last year's entire operating budget for the ambulance service. $30,000 is about what we lose annually in keeping the swimming pool open (and that's after we factor in the admission fees, the fees for swimming lessons, etc. – which brings up another point: there will be no financial return on a skate park. Ever. Just an operation and maintenance drain at best, if it gets used beyond the span of its novelty value). We're catching up on deferred maintenance on the streets – crack sealing, pothole filling, etc.
What do you think, folks?
Monday, March 31, 2003
SAVE THE SNOW SNAKE!
aka "Lynx, schmynx"
Let me start off this entry with a great big "mea culpa."
I've been totally wrong in my attacks on the Medicine Bow National Forest's draft management plan. Totally wrong.
Oh, don't get me wrong; I still consider this document to be 25 lbs. of the worst quality of crap imaginable. I have just been laboring under a delusion that this was so for all the wrong regions.
I got my first hint that something was amiss when I realized that your Forest Service was concerned, not with Canada Lynx themselves but with lynx habitat. See, it really doesn't matter that there ain't never been no such animal in the Snowy Range, at least not since the last ice age (perhaps); it's the habitat that's important.
You know, in case any lynx want to drop on by sometime. Wouldn't want to be churlish and not have a guest bedroom ready, would we?
So, I started thinking that I needed to ease up on these poor folk who just want to make our forest friendly for the animals who don't live there... but then, as I leafed through the thick sheaves of 25 lbs. of crap over this last weekend, I noticed something truly horrifying.
Dear readers, I am stunned and dismayed to learn that there is not a word in this thing about your favorite and mine, the common snow snake (Thamnophis sosemanuk).
Ahh, the snow snake! Winter sports enthusiasts are doubtless familiar with Sosemanuk, the popular Cree Indian game inspired by this remarkable creature, in which two or more players chuck sticks or "snakes" down a snow-covered hillside to see whose stick slides the farthest. Opinions differ on whether or not actual specimens of T. sosemanuk were once used where sticks are employed today, but it is generally agreed that the practice of using live snakes today would both impractical and unethical due to the increasing rarity of these creatures.
But even without the use of live T. sosemanuk in sport, it is a certainty that of all the animals in the Bow whose habitats are threatened by human activity, the snow snake is the most vulnerable. Why, just yesterday in the Sierra Madre mountains above Encampment I personally observed a cross country skier (who will of course remain nameless) wantonly skiing right over a snow snake trail (snowsnake trails being easily recognizable by their two-track appearance, as these creatures always travel in parallel pairs) without any concern for disturbing the noble animals which had created what he doubtless thought was an easy track laid down just for him.
On this particular trip, I did not see any actual snakes, but their trails were everywhere. I could only conclude from this evidence that we had harried them into hiding, as they are known to be a most introverted snake, or that the animals who had made the trails I observed had been cruelly run over by a skier and killed.
It is also possible that they were there but I just didn't see them, for they are of a mottled white and grey pattern on their scales to allow them to blend in with the wintry landscape in which they thrive, escaping predation from lynxes and sphinxes alike (and no, I've never seen a sphinx up there, either, but that doesn't mean they're not there, surely?).
Friends, how long are we going to allow this to continue? Sightings of these lovely creatures are becoming more and more seldom as the years progress. It may already be too late!
Time is running out on the comment period for this management plan! Write our local forest ranger, his district master, whomever you can, and tell them to help save the snow snake.
You know you won't be able to live with yourself until you do.
aka "Lynx, schmynx"
Let me start off this entry with a great big "mea culpa."
I've been totally wrong in my attacks on the Medicine Bow National Forest's draft management plan. Totally wrong.
Oh, don't get me wrong; I still consider this document to be 25 lbs. of the worst quality of crap imaginable. I have just been laboring under a delusion that this was so for all the wrong regions.
I got my first hint that something was amiss when I realized that your Forest Service was concerned, not with Canada Lynx themselves but with lynx habitat. See, it really doesn't matter that there ain't never been no such animal in the Snowy Range, at least not since the last ice age (perhaps); it's the habitat that's important.
You know, in case any lynx want to drop on by sometime. Wouldn't want to be churlish and not have a guest bedroom ready, would we?
So, I started thinking that I needed to ease up on these poor folk who just want to make our forest friendly for the animals who don't live there... but then, as I leafed through the thick sheaves of 25 lbs. of crap over this last weekend, I noticed something truly horrifying.
Dear readers, I am stunned and dismayed to learn that there is not a word in this thing about your favorite and mine, the common snow snake (Thamnophis sosemanuk).
Ahh, the snow snake! Winter sports enthusiasts are doubtless familiar with Sosemanuk, the popular Cree Indian game inspired by this remarkable creature, in which two or more players chuck sticks or "snakes" down a snow-covered hillside to see whose stick slides the farthest. Opinions differ on whether or not actual specimens of T. sosemanuk were once used where sticks are employed today, but it is generally agreed that the practice of using live snakes today would both impractical and unethical due to the increasing rarity of these creatures.
But even without the use of live T. sosemanuk in sport, it is a certainty that of all the animals in the Bow whose habitats are threatened by human activity, the snow snake is the most vulnerable. Why, just yesterday in the Sierra Madre mountains above Encampment I personally observed a cross country skier (who will of course remain nameless) wantonly skiing right over a snow snake trail (snowsnake trails being easily recognizable by their two-track appearance, as these creatures always travel in parallel pairs) without any concern for disturbing the noble animals which had created what he doubtless thought was an easy track laid down just for him.
On this particular trip, I did not see any actual snakes, but their trails were everywhere. I could only conclude from this evidence that we had harried them into hiding, as they are known to be a most introverted snake, or that the animals who had made the trails I observed had been cruelly run over by a skier and killed.
It is also possible that they were there but I just didn't see them, for they are of a mottled white and grey pattern on their scales to allow them to blend in with the wintry landscape in which they thrive, escaping predation from lynxes and sphinxes alike (and no, I've never seen a sphinx up there, either, but that doesn't mean they're not there, surely?).
Friends, how long are we going to allow this to continue? Sightings of these lovely creatures are becoming more and more seldom as the years progress. It may already be too late!
Time is running out on the comment period for this management plan! Write our local forest ranger, his district master, whomever you can, and tell them to help save the snow snake.
You know you won't be able to live with yourself until you do.
Tuesday, March 25, 2003
PRETZEL LOGIC
Now this is just mean.
I was just taking a peek at my own blog to see who's sponsoring me lately - to my amusement recently, it was for quite some time a resort in Jackson Hole, the town that is ultimately to blame for my entire blogging career and much else besides (it is my birthplace), but I see today that it has changed.
Some really dumb antiwar protesters (and bear in mind, I do not think those two terms together are inherently redundant, at least not all of the time; I have just chosen to write mostly about the protesters who are dumb because they are more amusing, and I blog to amuse much more than to enlighten or irritate) are supporting me. But what they're advocating is even meaner than puking on the steps for someone to clean up or beating the hell out of some gal's SUV.
Pretzels for Peace.
Send pretzels to the White House.
I get it, I get it. I remember when GWB choked on a pretzel a while back, and yes, I guess I see where it's funny. But I still file this under unconstructive and dumb, as well as mean, on the order (though of course not the magnitude) of sending a fifth of Jack Daniels to someone who was diagnosised with cirhossis or something.
Wonder if the Secret Service knows?
Well, well... they certainly didn't hear it from me! Honest!
Now this is just mean.
I was just taking a peek at my own blog to see who's sponsoring me lately - to my amusement recently, it was for quite some time a resort in Jackson Hole, the town that is ultimately to blame for my entire blogging career and much else besides (it is my birthplace), but I see today that it has changed.
Some really dumb antiwar protesters (and bear in mind, I do not think those two terms together are inherently redundant, at least not all of the time; I have just chosen to write mostly about the protesters who are dumb because they are more amusing, and I blog to amuse much more than to enlighten or irritate) are supporting me. But what they're advocating is even meaner than puking on the steps for someone to clean up or beating the hell out of some gal's SUV.
Pretzels for Peace.
Send pretzels to the White House.
I get it, I get it. I remember when GWB choked on a pretzel a while back, and yes, I guess I see where it's funny. But I still file this under unconstructive and dumb, as well as mean, on the order (though of course not the magnitude) of sending a fifth of Jack Daniels to someone who was diagnosised with cirhossis or something.
Wonder if the Secret Service knows?
Well, well... they certainly didn't hear it from me! Honest!
THANK GOD ALMIGHTY... OR SOMETHING!
Oh my dear readers, I've been trying these last few days to come up with the right way to break the news to you, and finally, subscribing as I do to the notion that it's better to rip the band-aid off in one swift ouch of a motion rather than peel it back slowly and agonizingly so that one feels the rip of each individual hair from its follicle, I'm just gonna tell ya!
No, I'm not going to discontinue this page. Heavens no! But the content is going to change some. Probably for the juicier and the better overall.
That's because as of last Thursday I am a HOBO!
That's right, HOBO.
Possibly because of this here web page and other daunting personal problems of my own, like my complete inability to keep a desk neat and purty without assistance, possibly for reasons I can't even imagine and really don't want to waste the brain space trying, they just don't want me to be a chamber chick anymore.
So, I must fall back on my own personal resources to keep Molly the Collie of Folly in dog food and a roof over my library.
No, I don't know for sure yet if staying in Saratoga is an option, though it is my dearest wish. I live here for a reason, and it sure isn't for the lucre, and I have commitments to keep. Like two years or so yet on my term as a town council member, like the community center we've yet to build, like being the Savant of the Sewer, like holding down the floorboards on the porch of the Hotel Wolf. And I'm going to try.
I'm harrassing every publication whom I even think might be interested in featuring some form (possibly a bit less, ah, trenchant) of Content By Kate (if you know of one, suggest me! Pick me!). I'm wandering around town looking at part-time work. I'm probably going to be a substitute teacher for a while.
And I'm enjoying the freedom, the paradisacal slackerdom I've never allowed myself to enjoy before. As is the Anthropologist Formerly Known As The Minister Of Fun (AFKATMOF) who was strongly encouraged to fall on his own dear personal sword within 24 hours of my own receipt of the invitation to do so. We sat at his house on Friday (a funky little shack that makes the Unabomber Cabin look like a... well, words fail me. Suffice it to say that his house is in much the same general condition of mine, but is slightly larger and somewhat cheaper. We're friends for a reason, dear readers) and toasted our unexpected good fortune as we gleefully listed off all of the monkeys that are no longer on our backs, all of the pressing issues and deadlines and other crap that is no longer our problem, singly or together.
It was pretty fun.
Only a little bit scary. At odd moments. But we're both young and brilliant and completely unencumbered (I consider the Collie of Folly a partner rather than a dependent; at least she's a good remedy for writer's block) and not afraid of living like Spartans. We love the Spartans. We actually know their lifestyles in intimate detail. We even know the names of the kings who reigned before Leonidas (Cleonymus, if anyone cares). But we probably won't be declaring war on Athens anytime soon. We'll be too busy fishing. And floating the river.
The options that lay before each of us are truly staggering, now that almost the last claims on our loyalties have been rendered farcical. The hard part is choosing.
I even sat for a while this morning and thought about moseying over to our local urn-and-boomerang manufacturing plant and seeing if they'd want my help from time to time. I got an A+ in wood shop once upon a time, am not afraid of sharp metal objects or of computers, and am terribly, terribly fond of the smell of sawdust. Plus the idea has appeal in other ways.
No one is likely to question my motivations while I am making a boomerang.
No one is going to be trying to sniff out my agenda in making boomerangs.
It is highly unlikely that one person will start raising holy hell because I am making someone else's boomerang first.
The possibilities that I shall be hilariously misquoted in the newspaper while making boomerangs is quite remote.
I shall probably not be required to constantly explain, while making boomerangs, that I have no control over when the state highway department decides to open Snowy Range Road for the season.
The political implications of my boomerang making would not be scandalously discussed, in hushed tones, over cheap cocktails and cheaper cigars by people who don't even know what a boomerang is.
I would not be required to tell anyone what I'm thinking about while I make boomerangs.
Nor would I be likely to be accused of imaginary personal slights to people I haven't seen in six months while making boomerangs.
Somebody stop me, I've got myself half talked into this!
No, not really. Don't be silly, dear readers. Just another temporary case of YHBPsychosis. Still giddy with freedom and possibility and the notion that my time is my own. Mostly.
Let's see... it's 1 p.m. and once I click "publish" everything on my to-do list will be completed for the day. I think I'll have a glass of wine with MODPM.
Hope your day is as happy and productive.
P.S. Please ignore the banner ads currently sponsoring this page. Stupid protesters. I have no control over whose banner ads get placed on this page - something I only gain if I start paying for hosting, which is doubly not an option now. But I am not opposed to our action in Iraq, and do not encourage anyone to give money to the loonies who are, no matter how stylish the clothing they're offering.
Oh my dear readers, I've been trying these last few days to come up with the right way to break the news to you, and finally, subscribing as I do to the notion that it's better to rip the band-aid off in one swift ouch of a motion rather than peel it back slowly and agonizingly so that one feels the rip of each individual hair from its follicle, I'm just gonna tell ya!
No, I'm not going to discontinue this page. Heavens no! But the content is going to change some. Probably for the juicier and the better overall.
That's because as of last Thursday I am a HOBO!
That's right, HOBO.
Possibly because of this here web page and other daunting personal problems of my own, like my complete inability to keep a desk neat and purty without assistance, possibly for reasons I can't even imagine and really don't want to waste the brain space trying, they just don't want me to be a chamber chick anymore.
So, I must fall back on my own personal resources to keep Molly the Collie of Folly in dog food and a roof over my library.
No, I don't know for sure yet if staying in Saratoga is an option, though it is my dearest wish. I live here for a reason, and it sure isn't for the lucre, and I have commitments to keep. Like two years or so yet on my term as a town council member, like the community center we've yet to build, like being the Savant of the Sewer, like holding down the floorboards on the porch of the Hotel Wolf. And I'm going to try.
I'm harrassing every publication whom I even think might be interested in featuring some form (possibly a bit less, ah, trenchant) of Content By Kate (if you know of one, suggest me! Pick me!). I'm wandering around town looking at part-time work. I'm probably going to be a substitute teacher for a while.
And I'm enjoying the freedom, the paradisacal slackerdom I've never allowed myself to enjoy before. As is the Anthropologist Formerly Known As The Minister Of Fun (AFKATMOF) who was strongly encouraged to fall on his own dear personal sword within 24 hours of my own receipt of the invitation to do so. We sat at his house on Friday (a funky little shack that makes the Unabomber Cabin look like a... well, words fail me. Suffice it to say that his house is in much the same general condition of mine, but is slightly larger and somewhat cheaper. We're friends for a reason, dear readers) and toasted our unexpected good fortune as we gleefully listed off all of the monkeys that are no longer on our backs, all of the pressing issues and deadlines and other crap that is no longer our problem, singly or together.
It was pretty fun.
Only a little bit scary. At odd moments. But we're both young and brilliant and completely unencumbered (I consider the Collie of Folly a partner rather than a dependent; at least she's a good remedy for writer's block) and not afraid of living like Spartans. We love the Spartans. We actually know their lifestyles in intimate detail. We even know the names of the kings who reigned before Leonidas (Cleonymus, if anyone cares). But we probably won't be declaring war on Athens anytime soon. We'll be too busy fishing. And floating the river.
The options that lay before each of us are truly staggering, now that almost the last claims on our loyalties have been rendered farcical. The hard part is choosing.
I even sat for a while this morning and thought about moseying over to our local urn-and-boomerang manufacturing plant and seeing if they'd want my help from time to time. I got an A+ in wood shop once upon a time, am not afraid of sharp metal objects or of computers, and am terribly, terribly fond of the smell of sawdust. Plus the idea has appeal in other ways.
No one is likely to question my motivations while I am making a boomerang.
No one is going to be trying to sniff out my agenda in making boomerangs.
It is highly unlikely that one person will start raising holy hell because I am making someone else's boomerang first.
The possibilities that I shall be hilariously misquoted in the newspaper while making boomerangs is quite remote.
I shall probably not be required to constantly explain, while making boomerangs, that I have no control over when the state highway department decides to open Snowy Range Road for the season.
The political implications of my boomerang making would not be scandalously discussed, in hushed tones, over cheap cocktails and cheaper cigars by people who don't even know what a boomerang is.
I would not be required to tell anyone what I'm thinking about while I make boomerangs.
Nor would I be likely to be accused of imaginary personal slights to people I haven't seen in six months while making boomerangs.
Somebody stop me, I've got myself half talked into this!
No, not really. Don't be silly, dear readers. Just another temporary case of YHBPsychosis. Still giddy with freedom and possibility and the notion that my time is my own. Mostly.
Let's see... it's 1 p.m. and once I click "publish" everything on my to-do list will be completed for the day. I think I'll have a glass of wine with MODPM.
Hope your day is as happy and productive.
P.S. Please ignore the banner ads currently sponsoring this page. Stupid protesters. I have no control over whose banner ads get placed on this page - something I only gain if I start paying for hosting, which is doubly not an option now. But I am not opposed to our action in Iraq, and do not encourage anyone to give money to the loonies who are, no matter how stylish the clothing they're offering.
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Your Humble Blogger Wrote a Book!
Suppertime Sonnets, a selection of poetry from another blog of mine, available now as an ebook