Life In The Great Midwest

My Man Mitch

2012-01-25T09:23:00.003-06:00

Never felt so good to be a Hoosier. Twenty years ago we made the smart choice in leaving Illinois to move back to the free world of Indiana, where the U.S. Constitution still means something.

A photo I took of Mitch as he waved to me at the Indy500 parade three years ago.

For the first time in the last three years I am proud of my country because it feels like common sense is finally making a comeback.”

In case you missed the Mitch response last night here are my favorite quotes.

“The President did not cause the economic and fiscal crises that continue in America tonight. But he was elected on a promise to fix them, and he cannot claim that the last three years have made things anything but worse: the percentage of Americans with a job is at the lowest in decades.”

“He seems to sincerely believe we can build a middle class out of government jobs paid for with borrowed dollars. In fact, it works the other way: a government as big and bossy as this one is maintained on the backs of the middle class, and those who hope to join it.”

“As Republicans our first concern is for those waiting tonight to begin or resume the climb up life’s ladder. We do not accept that ours will ever be a nation of haves and have not’s; we must always be a nation of haves and soon to haves.”

“Contrary to the President's constant disparagement of people in business, it's one of the noblest of human pursuits. The late Steve Jobs - what a fitting name he had - created more of them than all those stimulus dollars the President borrowed and blew.”

Out here in Indiana, when a businessperson asks me what he can do for our state, I say ‘First, make money. Be successful. If you make a profit, you'll have something left to hire someone else, and some to donate to the good causes we love.”

“The extremism that stifles the development of homegrown energy, or cancels a perfectly safe pipeline that would employ tens of thousands, or jacks up consumer utility bills for no improvement in either human health or world temperature, is a pro-poverty policy. It must be replaced by a passionate pro-growth approach that breaks all ties and calls all close ones in favor of private sector jobs that restore opportunity for all and generate the public revenues to pay our bills.”

“It's not fair and it's not true for the President to attack Republicans in Congress as obstacles on these questions. They and they alone have passed bills to reduce borrowing, reform entitlements, and encourage new job creation, only to be shot down time and time again by the President and his Democratic Senate allies.”

“No feature of the Obama Presidency has been sadder than its constant efforts to divide us, to curry favor with some Americans by castigating others. As in previous moments of national danger, we Americans are all in the same boat.”

We will fall for the con job that says we can just plow ahead and someone else will pick up the tab. We will allow ourselves to be pitted one against the other, blaming our neighbor for troubles worldwide trends or our own government has caused.”

And here’s my favorite:

“In word and deed, the President and his allies tell us that we just cannot handle ourselves in this complex, perilous world without their benevolent protection. Left to ourselves, we might pick the wrong health insurance, the wrong mortgage, the wrong school for our kids; why, unless they stop us, we might pick the wrong light bulb!”

The entire content is here.

Mitch is about to win one last battle in my state. the Indiana Right To Work law. It will be the last courageous act of a conservative governor restricted to a limit of two terms.

While Mitch will be moving back to the private sector next January we should be in good shape for another eight years. This guy will win easily.

NYT Has A Decent Article on Taxes

2012-01-23T19:57:00.002-06:00

Both our current administration and the New York Times appeared to have little or no understanding how the "real" economy worked or the impact of incentives on tax policy. In more recent years they grasped that changing tax policy can impact economic incentives, which in turn, can increase their chances of being re-elected.

Their first major foray was "cash for clunkers" which gave a tax deduction for turning in your old car for a new one. Like most one-time incentives, it accelerated purchases into the current period, giving a boost to auto manufacturers and car dealerships (and sticking the tax credit to the deficit). Lately the administration has gotten bolder, offering 100% deduction for capital purchases in the current year for tax purposes (which has the same effect as "cash for clunkers", except on a wider scale as tax incentives for corporations and private companies), and then giving a 2% "payroll tax cut" which finally eliminates even the concept that social security is anything more than a "pay as you go" system and that there is nothing there waiting for you when you retire.

My view of tax policy is that the goal of a sound policy is to:

1) raise the revenue that you set out to achieve
2) minimize negative effects or dis-incentives of the policy

Examples abound of a failure of #1, including raising marginal taxes on the wealthy (they change their behavior or move to another jurisdiction) and the distortive effects of #2 are legendary, including over-investment in non-productive housing stock (due to the mortgage interest deduction) and the massive numbers of lawyers and accountants that make a living on the entrails of our bewildering and counter-productive tax system.

In recent years the NYT, as the sounding arm for the administration, has started to realize that the haphazard and counter-productive effects of our current tax system are legion, and that better core policies could improve revenues while minimizing negative behavior. This article called "A Better Tax System" (Instructions Included) laid our four principles that seem reasonable overall:

1) Broaden the base and lower rates
2) Tax consumption rather than income
3) Tax "bads" rather than "goods"
4) Keep it simple, stupid

I would say that their item 1 corresponds to my number 1, above, because a wider base with a less sloped marginal top is the core to a sustainable base of revenues that won't fluctuate as much over time. Items 2-4 are under the negative minimization principle.

Of course part of the reason that this article seems to make sense is that it was written by a non NYT staffer who works for an opposition candidate. But I do think that the NYT and the administration are starting to realize that our current tax system is an unholy mess with huge dis-incentives (the highest corporate taxes in the world drive jobs overseas), that doesn't raise revenue broadly, and has huge dis-incentives in terms of ability for companies and individuals to plan ahead.

Too bad it is too late in the game for them to do much more than talk about it. Also shame on the prior administration for never spending the political capital to attempt to change the system and reform it. They neglected to wield their power to make America more competitive.

Cross posted at Chicago Boyz

Walgreens Hates Pigeons

2012-01-23T19:26:00.002-06:00

And so do I!

I don't think that they can find any more places to put those "pigeon spikes" on the sign.

Monday Morning Blues

2012-01-23T03:14:00.000-06:00

Rubber Duck Car

2012-01-22T03:27:00.000-06:00

Seen today in a Madison grocery parking lot.

Saturday Night Sixties

2012-01-21T16:00:00.001-06:00

France 2012

2012-01-19T21:09:00.006-06:00

Tonight I attended a meeting about the France trip I will be going on in late June/early July 2012. I met a bunch of the people I was with in France in 2011. It was good to see them again.

They had a slide show on a big screen of France 2011. A feeling of immense pride and accomplishment ran through my veins while I watched the images scrolling across the screen.

I saw photos of me dripping with sweat in full combat with intense heat and enormous mountains on my bicycle. I liked the look on my face. I saw myself with my trip mates later that day smiling and drinking wine and eating goat cheese in our cabins.

I remembered how intense it was racing in a real bike race with cameras, scooters, official cars and the like.

It was great recalling how I was humbled by some with their biking abilities, and how satisfying it was being able to humble others.

All of us France alumni agreed that besides personal events such as weddings and births of children that it was the best event of our lives.

Several of us will be going next year. My trip mates were astonished to learn that I have been training two months already for this trip.

I have a lot of unfinished business with myself, others, and the Plateau de Beille.

I can't wait.

Social Distortion and Time

2012-01-16T19:38:00.000-06:00

Dan and I are going to see Social Distortion out in Reno, Nevada. Social Distortion has been around for years and years, meaning that at one time or other I have owned their music on record, on cassettes, on CD's, and finally in MP3 format. But pretty much everything got lost along the way.

So in order to catch up on Social Distortion and what they are playing now I just typed "Social Distortion Setlist" and went to the set list wiki and filled up my iPod with the songs that they have been playing on the recent tour. Good thing too, because most of the songs I am familiar with are from their earliest couple of albums and they seem to be playing some new music. I'll just clear everything else off my shuffle and play this while I am working out and running and soon I will be ready for the show.

In the end I just need to break down and buy all their albums again in electronic format and probably will do so after the show. It is a good cause, anyways, since like Lemmy I can hardly believe that Mike Ness is still alive after all these years.

Another surprising thing is that I typed "Social Distortion" in Google and Dan's concert review was #3 on the list, even ahead of their Wikipedia entry, which stunned me. Either Google is smokin' something or we have a few more readers than we expect. Probably the former...

Natural Gas

2012-01-16T15:26:00.000-06:00

In a post about interest rates I wrote about being a little kid and over-hearing my grandfather (who was actually "grandfathered" in as a CPA because he was a practicing accountant before they had the exam) talk in the early 1980's saying that he though interest rates "would never go below 10%". At the time inflation was rampant (as Volker came in) and interest rates were in the 20% or so range, so this seemed like a valid observation. As we all know, interest rates have fallen to near-zero right now and even a "ceiling" of 10% (rather than a floor) seems far away.

Along the same lines, when I started in the energy business in the early 1990's, the "rule of thumb" of what a utility would pay for natural gas was about $2 / unit. The price would rise in the winter during the peak heating season and fall in the summer as utilities re-filled their storage, and it would vary around the $2 / unit mark, but not deviate too significantly. At the time there wasn't a lot of vision forward on prices that I was aware of, but if you mentioned anything like the $14 / unit peak that was hit in 2005-6, you would have been laughed out of the room.

Today natural gas, propelled by innovation and "fracking", has dropped to a price level that no one would have foreseen back in 2005-6. Per Bloomberg:

Supplies may reach a seasonal record of 2.4 trillion cubic feet in March, which is when heating demand usually ends and producers begin piping more gas into storage, Cooper said. Unless production falls or cold weather bolsters demand, prices will drop to $2.40 per million Btu, and perhaps below $2, as gas overflows storage caverns and clogs pipelines, he said.

To think that natural gas would return to 1990 price levels is amazing. Even using the governments' figures, which I think understate inflation dramatically, in the 21 years from 1990 to 2011, inflation makes the $2 in 1990 the equivalent of $3.51 today, per this inflation calculator.

What happened? Free enterprise and capital markets happened. Fracking and innovation allowed new natural gas deposits to be found in our country which brought forth huge reserves of US energy and drove down costs even while usage soared.

This low price for natural gas is not a short-term phenomenon. These reserves are significant and since natural gas is often found alongside oil, with oil at $100 / barrel the fact that natural gas is at a low price won't impact it as much as you'd think because anything the driller gets is just profit on top of the huge profits for US sourced oil. The largest "threat" to low prices for natural gas in the US is actually the "high" price of natural gas overseas, because US drillers and pipelines can ship it to foreign countries in a liquified (LNG) format if their high prices make it economical. Per this WSJ article:

(T)he current low natural gas prices are attracting market demand from around the world. There are already federal permits for 3 trillion cubic feet per year of natural gas exports, Apt said. "Will we export that bounty, and if we do, will that drive up U.S. prices," he said. Natural gas sells for about $8 in Europe and $14 in Japan, but less than $4 here.

The real longer-term issue is whether other countries in Europe and Asia will also find large reserves of natural gas in shale just like they did in the US, and whether they will drill for it or avoid drilling out of environmental concerns. The French have already banned "fracking" but my (unproven) opinion is that this really says more about the power of the nuclear lobby in France, since the low price of natural gas has really been the final nail in the coffin of nuclear energy (along with the obvious issue of Japan) because it makes the plant's un-economic to build. Likely the Ukrainians (smarting from Russia's bullying over natural gas pricing), the Poles, and the Chinese will take up this technology in earnest and change the overall economics, even if countries like France are content to wait idly by.

As far as the US electricity industry, natural gas is causing coal plants to be mothballed or for their owners to choose to not spend money on costly "scrubbers" to comply with EPA guidelines, changing the long term footprint of the US market. Since the nuclear boom was a "mirage" anyways (basically we will get a plant out of Southern Company and one in South Carolina, which won't even keep up with likely decommissioning of units), this lower priced power is killing the market for new plants entirely.

For heavily indebted companies like Energy Futures Holdings (which bought up TXU assets in Texas), the low price of natural gas spells difficulties, since gas fired "peakers" set the "market price" for energy and with the price of gas at $2 / unit, not $8 or $10 / unit, they will make less money on their "base load" coal and nuclear plants which need to run all the time. Some of these utilities had a great summer in 2011 with high temperatures (especially in Texas) which helped to offset the increasing competitiveness of gas-fired generation.

The other key item to keep in mind is that when we buy US produced energy, we enrich our OWN country rather than sending wealth overseas, often to countries that despise us (and even if we don't buy directly from Iran, the high cost of oil overall benefits them just the same whether or not we buy or someone else). The new innovative technologies have enormously benefited the United States, making us more competitive in business and reducing energy bills for tens of millions of households. And while energy companies do have "breaks" in the tax code to some extent, this innovation was not part of a government program and is in stark contrast to the failures of the energy department "research" and political backing of "green" energy which is likely to be a major campaign issue in 2012.

If only they'd unleash our oil companies in the US we would likely be able to dramatically increase our production and further reduce our dependence on foreign energy producers, while enriching our own country. The parable of natural gas is plain for all to see, which is that markets work if you let them, and that government intervention is usually far more harmful than inaction.

Cross posted at Chicago Boyz

Monday Morning Blues

2012-01-16T02:50:00.000-06:00

Homemade Tacos

2012-01-15T15:56:00.002-06:00

These are easily better than they have to be.

To make tacos it’s so easy to brown some ground beef, pork chicken or venison, toss in a packet of prepared spices (I prefer the Taco Bell store bought spice) and cook. Add the meat to a store bought corn or flour tortilla with lettuce, cheese and chomp, done.

I like fresh chopped onion along with pickled jalapenos and chopped fresh cilantro on my tacos too. Tomato and sour cream? No.

I have eaten tacos at those upscale Mezcan restaurants. They’re damn good but get 2 tacos for about $6? True ethnic bodegas in Chicago neighborhoods such as this one are delicious and less expensive but not worth the risk of getting robbed on the way home or having my car stolen.

We found this great taco recipe a few years ago that is very different tasting, nothing like the seasoning packets. In fact, they do not possess the usual flavor notes most taco fans are accustomed to. What makes them even more special is frying our own fresh corn tortillas. Dan and Carl have had our fresh fried nacho chips at tailgates. Frying wedge shaped tacos shells isn’t much different. This in itself makes any taco much better than it has to be regardless of your seasoning choice.

For the meat filling:

Start by adding a small amount of oil to a hot skillet. Toss in one small diced onion, a pinch of coarse salt, then stir for about three minutes on medium. When the onions become transparent add three large cloves of garlic either chopped or pressed. Stir for about 30 seconds. The next step is where the real magic happens.

Add to the onion, garlic and oil a spice (that has been pre-mixed) that consists of:

1T chili powder (I could pull a foodie snob trick here and recommend Penzys but brand any will do)
1t ground cumin
1t ground coriander
½ t dried oregano
½ t cayenne

Stir for a minute or so, this will bloom the spices to form a paste-like substance and bring out much more flavor. Then add 1-1.25 lbs lean ground beef. Stirring the beef and chopping it with a wooden spatula will give it the finer crumb that I prefer. Stir until cooked.

Then add:

½ c canned tomato sauce
½ c chicken broth
1t brown sugar
2t cider vinegar
Salt & pepper to taste

Fold in well then reduce heat to low and allow the resulting matter to reduce, up to 30 minutes.

While this is going on take a wide skillet and fill it with ¼ to 1/3 “ of oil. Heat but be careful not to burn it. I buy fresh corn tortillas and they’re everywhere. I cut one into quarters to test the oil temp. Then add a whole one using two pair of tongs. Fold it into ½ by holding up one side with tongs leaving a 2’ gap forming a wedge. It will soon become crisp, then flip to fry the other half, again keeping the gap using the tongs. This takes less than 2 minutes total per tortilla.

I try to challenge myself constantly to cook food better than restaurants serve. For the most part, I do. It takes work and time but worth it. The rewards beyond the taste is not having to go anywhere, drinking as I feel like it, having a good time (it’s like a hobby), and doing as I wish when full. It’s frugality at it’s best and there is no tipping : )

Homemade tacos…better than they have to be.

Saturday Night Sixties

2012-01-14T16:00:00.001-06:00

Time and Money

2012-01-14T15:44:00.000-06:00

Chicago winters are hell on your shoes. Aside from protecting them with those rubber shoe protectors, you can either 1) shine them yourself 2) go to a shoe shine stand. Since my poor shine technique leaves them not much better off than being dirty, I usually try to rely on a shoe shine stand.

The problem is that it takes about 20 minutes or so of standing in line and then getting your shoes done to do this right. And I usually don't have 20 minutes when I am thinking about my shoes and I happen to be somewhere where a shine is available. As a result, I am stuck with a few pairs of forlorn and nasty shoes in the closet.

Thus I had a brainstorm recently and decided to just take my shoes to my dry cleaner, since they can also send them off for a shoe shine. "Just a shine?" my dry cleaner asked in her Korean accent... she seemed a bit confused. Yes indeed, just a shine.

Since then I've taken in all my shoes and given them a new lease on life. I am certain that this seems like a big waste of money (it is $7) but that is not far from the price of a shine plus tip and this takes no extra time at all.

But what is time really worth? I talked about this to a friend of mine in the investment world who refinanced his house and spoke of the endless rounds of re-submitting the same or slightly different documents over and over again and answering (virtually the same) questions until it hurt. Did he even "break even" on the re-financing after this was all taken into account? If your job is by the clock / corporate your off hours aren't worth much; but if your job involves planning and marketing yourself or thinking of new ideas / research in fact those hours can be quite valuable.

I think that a shoe shine at $7 with a time commitment of zero is a good deal, for me at least. What's your time worth?

Cross posted at Chicago Boyz

LITGM Going Strong

2012-01-14T09:32:00.000-06:00

I just looked at something. This blog has been in existence since Nov. 20, 2004. That is seven years plus, eons in internet time. 3,767 posts so far. No plans to stop. Thanks to all of you readers, and authors past and present for making this project so special!

Bordain Loves Tiki Too

2012-01-14T09:30:00.000-06:00

Any long term readers of this blog know that I love anything tiki. Especially with the infinite winters and darkness here in Chicago.

Recently I was watching the great Anthony Bourdain show "The Layover" when he stopped over at San Francisco and a local chef took him to "The Tonga Room". The Tonga room is the best tiki place I have ever been to in the US and Dan and I went there when we were in San Francisco to run a race a couple years ago.

Here you can see the pool they also have with simulated thundershowers (you don't get wet) regularly to boot. Anthony drank something out of a skull drinking vessel and seemed pretty blotto after that which is very understandable.

Can't Stop Dancin'

2012-01-13T18:34:00.000-06:00

Interesting Videos

2012-01-11T22:26:00.000-06:00

I received some Apple gift cards for xmas and went in search of some new songs to buy. Over at Pitchfork they had some interesting "top lists" (and I am a sucker for any list) including best music videos of the year.

This is Rammstein, the German metal band, in a completely ridiculous send up of 60's beach movies.

Here is something for Dan. A video of the fantastic Joy Division song "Transmission"(live) done in a very intricate Playmobil mode. I especially like the drummer.

Just Sayin'

2012-01-11T16:27:00.001-06:00

The Euro Is Already Gone

2012-01-10T06:28:00.000-06:00

Today I read an article about the fact that the German government can issue debt with a negative yield.

Germany sold six-month treasury bills at a negative yield for the first time amid demand for the debt securities of Europe’s biggest economy as a haven from the sovereign debt crisis roiling the region. The government auctioned 3.9 billion euros ($4.98 billion) of securities maturing in July at an average yield of minus 0.0122 percent, the Federal Finance Agency said in an e-mailed statement today. It was the first time it sold the securities at a negative yield, Joerg Mueller, a spokesman in Frankfurt, said in a telephone interview. The Netherlands sold 107-day bills at minus 0.007 percent on Dec. 12.

Thus purchasers are paying the German (and Dutch) governments for the privilege of lending them money.

Meanwhile, Italy is having a tough time finding buyers for its bonds. In order to sell debt, the yield is now above 7%, a line that (for some reason) in the popular press is read as the dividing line for "unsustainable", kind of like the "Mendoza line" for baseball batting averages.

Italian bond yields rose above 7% on Friday (Dec 23) as worries about the government's debt problems resurfaced. The yield on 10-year Italian government bonds edged up to 7.04%, after falling below 6% earlier this month. Italian yields first topped 7% in November amid fears that Italy could fall victim to the same debt crisis that led to bailouts for Greece, Ireland and Portugal.

On the face of it, this seems odd. Germany and the Netherlands are issuing bonds in Euros, just like the Greeks, Italians, Ireland and Portugal. Theoretically, all of these countries have the same "backstops" built into the Euro, and there is no exit mechanism.

The debt market is saying something different than what the politicians are saying - the debt market doesn't believe the hype and, when the dust settles, they want to be holding paper from the creditworthy countries (Germany and the Netherlands) and not the PIIGS (the above countries plus Spain).

Back when Dan and I were in college we had a friend nicknamed "Strohs". Since we were all very poor back then when we played poker often people used "markers" instead of cash. At the end of the game (generally when we ran out of beer and / or someone passed out) you might hold cash or you might hold "markers" which were really IOU's from each person at the game. "Strohs" markers were a deck of cards marked with the ubiquitous "Dogs playing poker" picture, and thus at the end of the game if you held his marker, they were "Dogs". "Strohs", while a good friend of ours, wasn't an especially credit-worthy guy (at the time). He earned his nickname by showing up for college with some clothes in a hefty trash bag and a pallet of Strohs 30 packs with which he filled his entire closet top to bottom.

So as the night wore on, if you held "Dogs" in your pile of chips and markers, your betting became especially reckless. It was common to say "I'll raise you a bucket of dogs" which probably meant you were bluffing because if you lost all you did was remove the markers with which payment was unlikely to happen out of your stack of chips, for the promise of winning "real" markers (equivalent to the German debt above) or actual cash, instead.

For years books and magazines have focused on "yield" and also the credit worthiness of individual companies and (mostly) ignored currency risk. A friend of mine in the investment business talked about a customer who bought a huge Australian debt position and their piddly yield was irrelevant as currency gains from the Australian dollar (which I wrote about here) drove the position to a huge gain, when translated back into (weak) US dollars. Obviously this trader was ignoring yield and betting on currencies.

This is what appears to be happening today. When Europe's dust cloud settles, people don't want to be holding "a bucket of dogs" backed by promises from PIIGS governments', they want the equivalent of the old Deutschmark from Germany. That is why they are essentially ignoring yield and accepting a negative yield from one country and demanding a 7% yield from another country ostensibly backed from the same currency.

Cross posted at Chicago Boyz

Old Man Winter

2012-01-09T20:53:00.003-06:00

Is he dead, or what??

Fabulous January weather we’re having. Only started the snowblower once and that was to get it ready in late October, preparing it for the dark days. Changed the oil and greased her up good. So far, we have had two snowfalls each less than 2”.

I am not that old that I can’t manually shovel a 2”snowfall.

The heating (utility) bill is lower and the woodpile has not been depleted except for two fires at Christmas.

Life is good. And the dog’s life is good too.

Dot had some big paws to fill and so far she has filled them well at two years old.

I am a bit different from most serious pointing dog owners. There are many who believe in keeping their dog(s) outside all year. They claim having a dog in the home ruins their nose. I call bullsh!t.

My dog must not only hunt (she does), she needs to be a lovable house pet. Dot is both. She’ll sit on my footstool or lap until I need another beer or to let one go. It makes me feel guilty to get up and displace this peaceful and loving pup at rest. She will sit there for hours resting on my leg, having fallen asleep for a while only to awaken and find she's still there. Friends who own cats claim Dot is more of a cat than a dog. Well, they should see her hunt.

Who needs a warm fire when all I need is a warm, soft bird dog, some cotton sweats, comfy slippers and watching Tim Tebow beat those awful Stiller heathens from the east?

Do I get an amen?

Monday Morning Blues

2012-01-09T04:22:00.000-06:00

Butch McGuire's Has Christmas Spirit!

2012-01-08T13:08:00.000-06:00

The sports bar Butch McGuire's on division street (famous for bars like "Mothers" and where the movie "About Last Night" was supposedly set) is known for their Christmas decorations. I went there recently to check them out (and have a beer) and was mightily impressed.

This is a view of the front bar from the doorway and you can clearly see the two levels of train tracks as well. There are also dual level trains in one of the other dining rooms off the bar.

Here is a close up of the trains.

I like Santa in the outhouse reading a Pl*yboy magazine, too. Nice touch.

Highly recommended if you are in the vicinity. Per the bartender they keep the decorations up until near St. Patrick's day when they are replaced with the seasonal green for drinking.

Cross Posted at Chicago Boyz

Famous Photos

2012-01-08T07:31:00.004-06:00

Gerry from Valpo has met more famous people than I can even name. It always cracks me up when he tells his stories, and I hope more are coming. Maybe he can put up a new category "famous people Gerry has met" so we can keep track of the photos and stories here in LITGM. In fact, I think I will do that right now. I need to go back and re-categorize the Bobby Knight stuff.

Last night I went to the fights here in Madison and some of the guys from a very famous gym in Milwaukee were competing. It was Duke Roufus's gym.

Duke is a legendary Muay Thai fighter, and his gym is putting out guys fighting in the UFC. His picture is up in our gym - there is a loose affiliation between our gym and his.

One of Duke's most successful fighters is Anthony "Showtime" Pettis. Pettis threw one of the most incredible strikes in MMA history with this insane kick on Ben Henderson.

As an interesting side note, Henderson has gone on to great things in the UFC and has a championship bout in Tokyo in the near future. I have a friend in Phoenix that trains Jiu Jitsu with him.

Here is Showtime and a local Madison legend.

This ends my collection of photos with famous people. And they aren't even that famous for anyone outside of the MMA sphere.

Me And The Pope

2012-01-08T06:31:00.006-06:00

By request.

It was Friday, October 5, 1979. Pope John Paul ll was in Chicago, a very rare occurrence for a Pope to be visiting the Midwest.

The Pope was originally from Poland and the reason for his visit may have been the fact that Chicago has the largest Polish population outside of Warsaw (count me as one). The Pope was going to say Mass in Grant Park that day and millions were expected to attend.

Most offices in the downtown area decided to shut down Friday, as mine did. But I had to go in because there was a high profile assignment (my latest designs for some new McD packaging) that was ultimately my responsibility. My plan was to go in very early and get out by noon.

Our office was located at 360 N. Michigan, on the southwest corner of Michigan and Wacker where the London House was still open on the street level and WLS radio was on the fourth floor. I could go on about that, let’s just say I often rode in the elevator along with some very famous DJ’s and rock stars of the day. On the way down, if the elevator stopped at the fourth floor it was always interesting to see who would climb in.

When I rode down about noon to head over to the Metra Electric train the crowds along Michigan had already formed. One of our building engineers at the door told me the Pope was about to travel south on Michigan to Grant Park. So WTF? Figured I would hang around to check that out.

I positioned myself on the east side of the bridge and peered north up the avenue. Far away were some flashing lights. Not long after, as the motorcade drew near those of us on the east side crossed over to the center medium railing since the northbound lanes were closed. I stood on the railing and watched the Pope go by no more than fifteen feet away. What a sight.

Being raised Roman Catholic it was unavoidable to have a very strange feeling come over me. I would call it a rapture. No shit. As the short motorcade passed a huge flock of onlookers walked south down the avenue following the motorcade. I went along.

Having seen parades for the White Sox World Series Championship, one Chicago Bulls Championship, one Chicago Bears Super Bowl Championship and most recently one Chicago Blackhawks Stanley Cup victory parade, nothing comes close to what I witnessed as the Pope rode through town. It was so enormous, it is simply indescribable to see millions of people in the biggest crowd Chicago had ever seen.

No way was I going to see the Grant Park Mass. Instead, I caught the train and watched it from our apartment in Park Forest IL.

On Monday when I arrived in the office a coworker named Joe Murphy passed by and said to me, “Hey, nice photo of you and the Pope!” Whaaaa? He told me there was a photo of me and the Pope in Saturday’s Chicago Tribune special section on the Pope. Joe then said,” It looked like you were in the car with the Pope.”

I dashed down the elevator, crossed the bridge and went to the Trib’s first floor store where back issues could be purchased. I looked at one and saw the photo. I then bought five copies, some for me and others for my mom and grandmothers.

A closer crop

Is still have one copy. It was used to scan in the photo above.

Saturday Night Sixties

2012-01-07T16:00:00.007-06:00

It’s Saturday night. Time to relax. Let’s set the wayback machine for the 60’s, my favorite decade.

Pour yourself a big, stiff cocktail. Put a thick wax platter on the turntable of the hi-fi and gently drop that needle.

Here's an old Polaroid I found recently of me and the great Buddy Rich, one of the finest jazz drummers of all time. Very nice gent, Buddy was. We spoke for a few minutes. Buddy was surprised to have a young fan like me ask for a photo and autograph. Few passers-by even knew who he was. Taken in Grant Park, Chicago in or around the summer of 1979. His band performed live that night. They were insanely great. I am such a sucker for a big horn band.

Miller Lite - the end

2012-01-04T22:15:00.000-06:00

I was watching "the soup" when I saw this clip from some redneck wedding show. I love the caption and the way he savors the Miller Lite on the way down.

Instant Feedback

2012-01-04T20:21:00.005-06:00

Carl knows that as of the last five years or so, I have made it a closet hobby of mine to follow famous athletes, rappers and others who have suddenly been thrust out of poor and/or tough surroundings into the limelight with riches far beyond most of our imaginations. I have thought several times of perhaps becoming an advisor of sorts in matters financial for these folks in the next life. There has got to be money in that.

Imagine the money you could save someone like Fafty Sent or LeBoom Jimes.

But to me, that alternative career isn't half as fun right now as looking at what these idiots blow their money on. The last I read, I believe the figure is around eighty (80!) percent of all professional athletes end up broke as a joke. Why? Several things.

Cars.
Yachts.
Huge parties where they pay for everything including ten thousand dollar bottles of champagne.
Enormous mansion.
Along with that, a huge posse of money suckers, many living on the famous persons dole.
Many girlfriends/wives and resulting children to support, and losing tons of money in messy divorces.
Poor business investments.
Jewelry.
Gambling.

My latest fascination is Floyd Mayweather, the famous boxer. I have seen guys blow through money before in fantastic ways (LaTrell Spreewell and Alan Iverson each blew through a hundred million dollars) but Mayweather may be taking the cake.

Besides all of the poor behavior and bad investments such as this (NSFW language):

and the standard gargage full of bullshit such as this (also NSFW language, complete with hangers on):

it seems that Floyd has a penchant for gambling. Most would call it a gambling problem, but you know, it is what it is.

I am a "friend" of Floyd on fazebook and recently he posted photos of some of his sports betting tickets. Mayweather loves to post his winning tickets on fazebook and twooter. Of course we never see the losing tickets so from the size of these wagers you can imagine how much cash Floyd is probably burning through. Some new photos of bets showed up today (all winners, of course), right before Floyd has to check into jail for 90 days for beating up his woman (big man indeed). The amounts Mayweather is betting are staggering.

First a little bit about sports betting in general. The object for the casino is to set a line and get half of the bets on one side, and half on the other. This sounds odd, but the casino on winning bets keeps a "vigorish" or "vig" for short. Others call it the "juice". Most of us normal humans when we bet $100 or whatever get charged a 10% vig. So if you bet $100 and won, you would receive $190 back (that is your original bet plus $100 minus ten percent). If you lose, well, you just lose. By trying to line up the bettors equally on both sides of the bet, the casino makes an automatic ten percent. Cash.

The casinos get instant feedback on the lines that they set and I will show you how in a second. First, a quick primer on the line. If the Bears are playing the Packers, and the Packers are favored by 11 points, this is designated by saying that the Packers are -11. If you want the Bears, you would take the Bears +11. If the score ends up Packers 54, Bears 40 and you had the Bears, you would lose. The Bears scoring 40 plus 11 gives 51, and doesn't clear the required 54 to win the bet. If it was Packers 54, Bears 43 for the final score and you had the Bears +11, that bet is a tie, or "push" in casino speak and you would receive your original bet back and that would be the end. It also works the other way. If you had the Packers -11, and the Packers beat the Bears 54 to 40, you would win. If it ended up Packers 54, Bears 44, you would lose that bet because the Packers only won by ten points, and you needed them to win by more than eleven.

Back to that instant feedback. If the casinos set the line at Packers -11 like in the example above, and gamblers all start piling in on the Packer side of the bet, the casino will move the line to encourage gamblers to start taking the other side (the Bears, in this case). You still get the line you bet on, but all future bets will be with the new line. So if the money comes into the Packers and the casino wants money to start coming into the Bears, they will move it up, typically a half point at a time until equilibrium is reached. First it will be -11.5, then -12, etc, until the casino is more comfortable. It works the other way as well. If money come into the Bears, the casino will move the line as needed. It is interesting to follow the line on a game from Monday to Sunday in the pros. Some move a lot (perhaps a big injury) and some don't move at all (uninteresting games, or maybe the line is set just right). Lines are also interesting to watch if you have black helicopter gambling theories like me (such as point shaving and game fixing in college and pro football) but I will stay away from that stuff to keep this post reasonably on track.

Ok with that simple primer, lets look at some of Floyd's recent tickets. Of course these are all winners because what habitual gambler shows his losses? None that I know of.

From this ticket you can see that this is a bet of eighty thousand dollars, is a halftime bet, and Floyd has Auburn +1 in the Chick-Fil-A bowl that took place on Dec. 31. The halftime score was Auburn 28, Virginia 17, making this a winner. Floyd won back his orignal bet plus $72727.25. You math sharpies will note that this is 9%, not the 10% vig that I discussed earlier. That is what you get for being a baller in Vegas. 1%.

In this one, Floyd took Purdue and a one hundred fifty thousand dollar bet, -1 in the Little Caesars Bowl on Dec. 27. This bet was on the final score of the game, which Purdue won 37-32. Floyd won $136363.65 (again, 9% vig).

Here Floyd is betting on some hoops action. He had Wisconsin -6.5 for the halftime score in a recent game vs. Savannah State on Dec. 13. Wisco was killing them at halftime and for his efforts here, Mayweather won a cool $181818.20 (again, 9% vig).

Here is the largest ticket Floyd recently showed us. A massive four hundred thousand dollar bet on the 49ers on December 24. Floyd won $347826.10. You will note that is 13% vig - I am not sure why this is. I am guessing that as the bets get into stratospheric range, perhaps the casinos get a bigger rake. I honestly don't know on that.

Rumors are flying that Floyd placed a million dollar bet on the Patriots vs. the Broncos a few weeks ago.

The point of this post is that by showing you all of the above evidence you can all probably see that Floyd Mayweather, although he is a fabulous boxer, will be broke as a joke when it is all said and done. In the above videos you can see that he is an idiot, and that by posting these winning tickets, he has losers that probably dwarf these, and not to mention he probably loses money at cards, roulette and all the other crap in Vegas.

What the sports books must get from all of this is instant feedback. If you are setting lines up and losing to Floyd Mayweather, you need to get that fixed pronto. I am sure Floyd does no reading whatsoever and bets emotionally rather than rationally so if he is beating the lines/odds at the books, they for sure are taking that information to market. They would be stupid if they weren't.

Protecting Yourself AND Your Property

2012-01-04T08:17:00.006-06:00

Last Saturday morning we were driving down the road. About ¼ mi away in front of an upscale home owned by a doctor and his family there were three squad cars. Immediately I turned and said to her, “looks like there was a break-in”. I was correct.

The doctor and his family went to Florida for Christmas week and while they were gone some cowardly and evil burglars broke in. They tore up the house real good by breaking objects and vandalizing. Missing were all the electronics such as TV’s, stereos, video games, DVD players, computers, Christmas gifts and all her jewelry (the high price of gold makes fencing jewelry quite attractive to thieves). They also took some cash hidden in a drawer and left no drawer unturned. They owned no guns. Another neighbor told me this story while she was walking her dog on Monday.

She told me the Dr.’s wife could not contain herself when telling the story through sobs and tears. The experience of losing so much was more than she could handle after being violated in such a way. Also heard that they did not have an updated security system or burglar alarm.

Yesterday I noticed a security company van in front of their place. Think I know what it was doing there. I plan on speaking with the Dr. or his wife to get the details but waiting a while until they calm down a bit.

To me, this crime could have only occurred if a vehicle were able to park in the garage with the door closed to load up the vast amount of bulky items and be hidden from passers-by or neighbors while plundering the home. It must have happened in the middle of the night, possibly Christmas night when other neighbors are diverted by family activities or sleeping. Someone knew that the family was away obviously, since this is a rare occurrence in these parts.

While I like to think of my local community as crime free there will be times when evil creeps in and no one is immune to evil. We are as prepared as possible. Some simple tips:

-Have an updated security system with infrared cameras attached to a recording device. A good security system will have a police and fire alert option. Not for personal protection, it helps shorten the time that an intruder will be in the home when you are not.

-Keep the outdoor perimeter well lit.

-Use timers to illuminate indoor lights when not at home.

-Buy a good quality fire-proof safe to store firearms, valuable documents, jewelry, photographs and mementos.

-Install deadbolt key-only locks on all exterior doors.

-On garage doors use the side rail bolt after leaving for a period of time and then exit through another door. Opening a remote control automatic garage door is incredibly easy and the preferred method of thieves to break in, drive in, close the door, then load and haul out quantities of large, expensive possessions without being detected. Here’s one way to deter this method.

While not confirmed, I believe this method is how the Dr.’s home was raided and plundered.

-Buy a small battery powered radio and turn it on with the volume up and leave it in the center of the main floor when not at home.

-Own a dog that barks at external noises. It may be annoying but a necessary annoyance.

While nothing is a guaranteed deterrent at least these tips will help keep the amateur thieves away. Any other suggestions are welcome.

On a similar note. Last Saturday the bro was at our farm with a nephew to get in a little trigger time. When they arrived at the range where we hold Gunstock each year they noticed a huge mess and it was fresh. Beer cans, spent cartridges, shells, plastic packaging from ammo boxes were littered all over the place and our target boards were blown to bits by shotguns. He phoned immediately to tell me about it. We are considering options there as well. We are assessing everything from installing a gate to lock and seal off the dirt road to installing hidden infrared trail cams to capture license plate numbers along with posting warning signs. We are also retracting all permission to hunt we have granted to relatives and friends unless one of us are there and present with them. We don’t suspect our friends or relatives but unfortunately this is what we need to do. How sad is it that we have to spend all this money to protect our properties. But it’s much less expensive considering the alternative.

It’s no longer safe anymore to be anywhere or anytime. Owning, possessing and carrying a weapon is simply not enough. If I am home and an intruder enters he is in for the very last surprise of his life. I have no problem scraping brain matter from the walls, spackling 00 buck holes and repainting. My close neighbors are all armed to the teeth as well. After this latest occurrence we have discussed it and are all much more aware of our neighborhood security by watching each other’s backs more than ever.

On the subject of firearm ownership, there is good news. Seems that 2011 was a record year for the sale of legal firearms.

“With a week left in December, the FBI said the monthly record has already been broken, and that was only set last month when 1,534,414 background checks were requested from the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS).”

In addition, overall crime is down. Any coincidence?

Protect yourself and your property. It’s cheaper than the alternative.

Portugal's Prime Minister Tells Citizens to Emigrate

2012-01-02T19:33:00.000-06:00

Portugal is an EU and Euro member with a population of 10.5M. Portugal is one of the "PIIGS" (along with Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain) that are having severe debt and austerity problems caused by a lack of confidence in their ability to service their huge financial burdens.

Portugal is relatively uncompetitive within the EU. They benefited from inflows and subsidies from the EU over the years and used it to raise living standards and develop a large and expensive public sector.

One advantage Portugal does have is their connections to former "empire" countries that also speak Portuguese including Angola and Brazil. These countries, while they have their own very significant problems, are not shackled with the anti-competitive rules and regulations that burden companies in the EU. While Portuguese citizens are not at the top of the education group in EU terms, in Angolan or Brazilian (general) terms they are very well educated and can assist multi-nationals taking advantage of the natural resources that Angola and Brazil are blessed with.

In this context, when asked what young people should do when faced with high unemployment, this article the conservative prime minister told them to "just emigrate".

While many thought that his comments were not appropriate, there are few avenues for ambitious young people since the gravy train of EU subsidies is drying up and EU labor policies make it very difficult for companies to remove redundant staff in order to make room for more productive and cost compeititive new graduates.

This is a practical, if sad, solution to the problem of a non-competitive state which is forced to support the high cost and social benefits of the EU. It also perfectly crystalizes the "fixed pie" view of the left - keep jobs and barriers high for those that have them, and watch as the nation slowly loses competitiveness, falling hardest on those newest to the work force.

It is a blessing to the former colonies, however, who will receive the youngest, most productive and aggressive citizens who can make their fortune overseas rather than waiting in line (in vain) for a spot in the bureaucratic system.

Cross posted at Chicago Boyz

Rolling Stone Botches Top 100 Guitarists

2012-01-02T17:26:00.001-06:00

Rolling Stone magazine compiles "top lists". Their top lists used to be very bad; they seemed to solely represent the personal preferences of their editor. Recently the lists have gotten better as they use a "panel" of musicians and critics to select which is an improved system. And in any list, there is a lot of judgement, and should be a little fun.

Even with these improvements, in my opinion, Rolling Stone botched the Top 100 Guitarist list. The list is far too tilted to the past; their #1 guitarist, Jimi Hendrix, DIED OVER FORTY YEARS AGO. Thus my methodology includes "relevance" in the calculation, and someone who died over forty years ago, correspondingly scores lower. I read through the list carefully, consulted outside sources, reviewed my own music, and built a "methodology" that resulted in my own list.

Alternative Methodology:

In reading through the list Rolling Stone and the musicians doing the evaluations obviously employed a lot of criteria. This isn't the "most talented" list, or we'd be looking at Steve Vai and John Petrucci as #1 and #2, but they don't make the Rolling Stone(nor mine)list at all. Rather than use a "subjective" evaluation criteria, I made my own up, and made it more explicit.

- Skills - ranked 1-3, with Neil Young a 1 and Eddie Van Halen a 3
- Innovation - ranked 1-3, with Jimi Hendrix a 3 and Nick Mars a 1
- Relevance - ranked 1-3, with Dave Grohl a 3 and Hendrix a 1
- Songwriting - ranked 1-3, with Neil Young a 3 and Yngwie Malmsteen a 1
- "Bonus" - an arbitrary category I added which allows for 0-2 points to be added for outsized contributions beyond the above categories. Dave Grohl gets 2 points for being the best rock drummer in the entire world; Matthew Bellamy gets 1 point for being the best singer on the entire list

In the process you were either a "top 100" guitarist or you weren't; then I started scoring the methodology on the top 100. Then I looked at the results and seemed if they made sense, and adjusted the scores accordingly.

Results of the Analysis:

As a result, the list I came up with is dramatically different than the Rolling Stone list, since it doesn't just contain dead blues or rockabilly musicians and it weighs newer contributions higher than what happened 40+ years ago.

- only 46 of the 100 guitarists on the RS 100 list made the adjusted list
- 4 of the top 10 in the adjusted list weren't even ranked in the Top 100 by RS
- 13 of the top 25 guitarists in the adjusted list weren't even ranked in the Top 100 by RS

Here are my top 10:

1. Matthew Bellamy, Muse - he is like Brian May and Freddie Mercury rolled into one. He is riding a pop culture wave with the vampire movies but on the other hand he is bringing heavy, guitar arena rock to the masses. Go see Muse in concert and see for yourself

2. Dave Grohl, Foo Fighters - another highly relevant guitarist his band the Foo Fighters are filling stadiums and bringing NEW guitar rock to another generation of fans. It's been 20 years since Nevermind, time to move on

3. Trent Reznor, Nine Inch Nails - you need to work backwards from the monstrous guitar riffs on songs like "Head like a Hole", "Closer" and "The Hand that Feeds" and remember who created them. On top of that he basically invented modern industrial rock and won a grammy for his film score, as well as having epic battles with his record company and being in the forefront of modernizing the music business (inadvertently)

4. Jack White - Colbert summed it up best on one of his shows when someone asked a rock critic what band he liked and the answer was "whatever band Jack White is in". Also a genius in business and fashion like Reznor he too is keeping the guitar flame alive

5. Jimmy Page - not just a guitarist but an epic songwriter and performer

6. James Hetfield / Kirk Hammett, Metallica - been to a sporting event in the last decade? Chances are you are hearing their riffs which I find astounding since as a kid we waited for days to see them along with the scrubs of humanity and now they are one of the biggest bands in the world, with crossover success

7. Billie Joe Armstrong, Green Day - like Bellamy, Grohl and Reznor also off the RS 100 list, but his absence is even more of a head-scratcher considering that Green Day brought punk to the mainstream, breathed new life into the concept album, and spawned a highly successful musical, to boot

8. Prince - Prince can obviously sing, write original material, play guitar, and set trends across the globe. A modern genius.

9. Eddie Van Halen - here for his originality, and the fact that he is still trying to be relevant. And also that his music is the "official drunk music of the Bears tailgate" although we argue whether VH I or II is the "true" Bears #1 album

10. Stevie Ray Vaughan - ripped apart blues rock from the moment he stepped on stage, his death after sobering up still one of the worst things to happen in rock and guitar music history

And then you get 11-25, in no particular order:

- Rivers Cuomo, Weezer - he is one of the few relevant songwriters today on the radio and doing collaborations that actually plays a damn guitar solo
- Tony Iommi, Black Sabbath - invented metal, missing 2 fingertips to boot
- Dave Mustaine, Megadeth - not only a great guitarist, gets bonus for being alive
- Trey Anastasio, Phish - while I am not a "jam band" fan the fact that he wasn't on this list is criminal. The guy is astoundingly accomplished and his fans travel the world to see them
- Josh Homme, Queens of the Stone Age, others - a great guitarist and singer, leading one of the few hard rocking and musically and critically relevant bands around
- Tom Sholz, Boston - also an astounding omission by RS. Don't they remember the 70's? He defined guitar rock
- Angus Young, AC DC - 'nuff said
- Brian May, Queen - seminal riffs with Queen
- Lindsay Buckingham, Fleetwood Mac - cannot believe he was ranked #100 by RS. A producing, playing, songwriting genius who also defined the 70's and much of the 80's
- Billy Corgan, Smashing Pumpkins - singer / songwriter / scene stealer from the height of Chicago grunge. Another astounding RS omission
- Dave Murray / Adrian Smith, Iron Maiden - Who would have thought that Iron Maiden would be one of the biggest bands in the world in 2012? But they are. And much of that is owed to their twin guitar attack
- Dan Auerbach, Black Keys - one of the few bands on the rise with actual heavy, hooky guitar and cool aesthetic
- The Edge, U2 - responsible for their shimmering guitar sound that still packs them in on monster tours with new material of good quality
- Jimi Hendrix - here he is, 40+ years gone
- Noel Gallagher, Oasis - another astounding omission by RS, Oasis was the biggest band for a decade of guitar heavy rock

Everybody else, ranked 26-100

Jeff Hanneman / Kerry King (Slayer)
Rudolf Schenker / Uli John Roth (Scorpions)
Beck
Caleb Followhill / Matthew Followhill (Kings of Leon)
Adam Jones (Tool)
Mark Knopfler
Jerry Garcia
John Frusciante (Red Hot Chili Peppers)
Kurt Cobain
Joe Perry
Bruce Springsteen / Nils Lofgren
Brent Hinds (Mastodon)
Glenn Tipton / K.K. Downing (Judas Priest)
John Mayer
Win Butler (Arcade Fire)
Richie Sambora
Kid Rock
Dave Keuning (The Killers)
Frank Black (The Pixies)
Keith Richards
Pete Townsend
David Gilmour
Carlos Santana
Tom Morello (Rage Against the Machine)
Johnny Marr (The Smiths, Modest Mouse)
Joe Walsh
Slash
Alex Lifeson (Rush)
Steve Howe (Yes)
Chad Kroeger (Nickelback)
Nick Mars (Motley Crue)
Walter Becker (Steely Dan)
Dean DeLeo (Stone Temple Pilots)
Mike McCready / Stone Gossard (Pearl Jam)
Ace Frehley (Kiss)
Scott Ian (Anthrax)
Nick Valensi / Albert Hammond Jr (The Strokes)
Alex Kapranos (Franz Ferdinand)
Eric Clapton
George Harrison
Neil Young
Billy Gibbons
Jonny Greenwood (Radiohead)
Dickey Betts / Duane Allman (Allman Brothers)
Andy Summers (The Police)
J Mascis
Peter Buck (REM)
Jerry Cantrell (Alice in Chains)
Bob Mould (Husker Du)
Mick Jones (The Clash)
Yngwie Malmsteen
Joe Satriani
Gary Rossington / Allen Collins (Lynyrd Skynyrd)
Ted Nugent
Phil Collen / Steve Clarke (Def Leppard)
Rodrigo Sánchez / Gabriela Quintero (Rodrigo Y Gabriela)
Frank Zappa
Randy Rhoads
Ritchie Blackmore
Robert Fripp
Dimebag Darrell (Pantera)
Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth)
Kim Thayil (Soundgarden)
Kenny Wayne Shepherd
Andy Partridge (XTC)
Steve Stevens (Billy Idol)
Rick Nielsen / Robin Zander (Cheap Trick)
Mike Ness (Social Distortion)
Jeff Beck
Mick Ronson (David Bowie)
Mike Campbell (Tom Petty)
Michael Schenker (UFO)
George Thorogood
Johnny Ramone
Robert Cray

And here's the ones that were on the RS list that weren't on my list

B. B. King
Chuck Berry
Albert King
Freddie King
Derek Trucks
Les Paul
James Burton
Chet Atkins
Buddy Guy
Bo Diddley
Scotty Moore
Elmore James
Ry Cooder
Curtis Mayfield
John Lee Hooker
Mick Taylor
Steve Cropper
Mike Bloomfield
Hubert Sumlin
Link Wray
Stephen Stills
Muddy Waters
Clarence White
Otis Rush
John Lennon
Albert Collins
Rory Gallagher
Peter Green
Robbie Robertson
Ron Asheton
Johnny Winter
Duane Eddy
Leslie West
T-Bone Walker
John McLaughlin
Richard Thompson
Robert Johnson
Dick Dale
Joni Mitchell
Robby Krieger
Willie Nelson
John Fahey
Buddy Holly
Lou Reed
Nels Cline
Eddie Hazel
Carl Perkins
Bonnie Raitt
Tom Verlaine
Dave Davies
Paul Simon
Roger McGuinn
Steve Jones

Like any list, it is a matter of judgement and personal preference. Enjoy!

Cross posted at Chicago Boyz

Monday Morning Blues

2012-01-02T05:13:00.002-06:00

A Book Review

2012-01-01T10:27:00.005-06:00

Never been a bookworm. Literary classics, poetry, novels and fiction just never interested me. My preferences were always newspapers, biographies, historical events and conservative opinion books.

For Christmas I was the recipient of the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson. Smart gifters, excellent choice. Thanks kids.

I am not an Apple ‘fanboy’. Saying that would be an understatement. I have been an Apple Evangelist and what they called a dedicated power user since 1988. As a graphic designer it was my business to be out front and the Mac was the best career enhancer I could ever imagine.

Having met and shook hands with Mr. Jobs in person is one tiny part of my life I’ll never forget. Getting a personal tour of the Cupertino HQ in 1998 was an indescribable experience.

This bio is 570 pages of nonstop wheeling and dealing, real life conflicts, successes and failures along with the vast amounts of wealth so many individuals earned. Hippie capitalists. That’s what they was.

It’s about the life of one individual so driven its no wonder Jobs died so young, even if he did eat the most healthy organic vegan food his entire life. According to the author, Jobs blamed his pancreatic cancer on not taking care of his medical health after suffering from kidney stones a few years earlier. His ‘reality distortion field’ is well documented in business as well as his life.

The book begins by recounting his early life and goes into great detail about the inner conflict he had by being adopted. The author may have spent too many pages on Jobs early (pre-Apple) years. He seemed to be setting up a platform in which to judge his later behavior and unequaled determination to succeed as what I consider an excellent example of a visionary entrepreneur.

Following the development of Apple products in print reflected my own life and career. The stories behind these astounding developments are fascinating.

His mid career failures are what made Mr. Jobs the pinnacle of success he became. Having been in many corporate environments myself so many of the accounts of corporate chicanery made me feel right at home.

The difference is Jobs was in total control of his destiny. Me? Not quite so much.

What many PC devotees will never understand is that a closed and completely integrated system such as Apple, while it may cost more, is a reliable, stable platform that ‘just works’ and is far more valuable than all the other cheap tech junk that has been and continues to be produced. This book explains the how’s and why’s of this elegantly closed technology better than I ever could. There were many quotes in the book from Bill Gates where he admitted many times and in so many words that Jobs ate his lunch.

An odd thing happened to me when it comes to technology. I was on the bleeding edge decades ago. I lusted for it and could not wait to beta test what was on the Adobe horizon and I did.

Today I still do not own an iPhone and so far refuse to. Bought my wife an iPad and it suits her computing needs so much she cannot put it down. And that’s why I refuse to be tethered to a device. For me, pads pods and phones are distractions to living a social life and to enjoy what the real world has to offer. So I own the cheapest mobile phone possible (free) with no bells, whistles or 'apps'. I choose to run away from being connected to everything all the time.

If you hate Jobs and Apple this book may give you plenty of reason to hate them even more. But given the chance it could change a few minds. Getting a behind the scenes look at one of the most successful businessmen in history was worthy of my reading time.

It’s been said that truth is stranger than fiction. This book is proof.

Saturday Night Sixties

2011-12-31T16:00:00.000-06:00

This is not just any Saturday night, it's New Year's Eve. We call it amateur night so we'll just hunker here in the bunker as always.

Let’s set the wayback machine for the 60’s, my favorite decade.

Put a thick wax platter on the turntable of the hi-fi and gently drop that needle.

Happy New Year

2011-12-31T08:43:00.002-06:00

From all of us here in the Great Midwest to all of you wherever you are, may the new year be full of good luck, good food and good times.

Monday Morning Blues

2011-12-26T06:23:00.002-06:00

Merry Christmas To You!

2011-12-25T09:40:00.004-06:00

From all of us here at The Country Bunker in Valpo.

Wishing you all the best in 2012.

Saturday Night Sixties

2011-12-24T16:00:00.007-06:00

This is not just any Saturday night, it's Christmas Eve. Time to relax and enjoy your family.

Let’s set the wayback machine for the 60’s, my favorite decade.

Put a thick wax platter on the turntable of the hi-fi and gently drop that needle.

BONUS: A duo of Sinatra Christmas duets. I'll drink to that!

Merry Christmas Everyone!

Big Yellow Taxi

2011-12-22T08:17:00.005-06:00

When I first started going to a Chicago art school in 1971, the only cabs on the street were made by the Checker Motor Company. But I couldn’t afford to take one.

They had a lot of room. A large back area with fold down stools could easily carry five passengers. The trunk was huge.

This is what made me think about Checker cabs.

Seems today’s Chicago cab drivers are lobbying the city to add a $75. fee to passengers if they vomit in the cab. Puke in a cab, pay up. Sounds fair to me.

During my working years in the city it was impossible to get around without cabs. When I needed to head over to a photo studio or visit a printing plant for a press check there was a petty cash box with the receptionist. I took a twenty, signed for it and upon my return provided change and receipts.

More than once I got into and old Checker cab with vomit in the back. If I caught the aroma in time I jumped out. Once it took a block or two for the smell to hit me and I told the cabbie to stop. After jumping out without paying he ran after me demanding a fare. I was fast back then. If that lazy clown didn’t clean the puke out of his cab he didn’t deserve a fare.

The majority of cabbies back then were Americans. Today they are mostly swarthy middle eastern or African immigrant men with hellacious body odor. They are on their mobile phones the whole trip speaking gibberish. Many have Islamic religious displays in the front seat.

Today the cabs come in all shapes but in small sizes compared to the old Checkers. A Checker cab was a limo compared to modern cabs. If I am in the city calling a cab today and a Scion pulls up I wave him off. Even the Fords and Chevy sedan cabs are very cramped for my 6’3” frame considering the wall between front and back seats. Some use mini-vans but they’re not much more comfortable.

Cabs in New York City are different. Between 2000 and 2005 I did a lot of business in Manhattan. Most of my trips called for me to stay an entire week. They came at a once per month clip but I always enjoyed Manhattan. Lived like royalty when I was there, all on the company dime. Do that twelve times a year for for five years and you will understand why Chicago IS truly the second or even third city. No comparison, take the cabs for instance.

It may be different six years later but I recall the cabs in NY were sparkling clean, almost new. The drivers (even the Paki’s) were polite and knew their way around. It seemed that you got farther on a fare in NY vs. Chicago. I remember getting in and after the cabbie dropped the flag a tape would play, the voice being a famous New Yorker talking about the city. There was even a message from Mayor Rudy. Always felt safe in a NY cab.

In Chicago my cab experiences changed over the years. In the 70’s a cabbie not only knew his way around town, he/she was efficient in getting me there. They took short cuts with the intent on getting a bigger tip, forgoing the company meter fare to get to the destination quickly. Worked for me.

In the past few years a cab ride in Chicago made me turn into a human GPS. I had to tell the cabbie how to get from point A to point B. Many times they refused to listen and even drove under the posted speed to hike up the fare. They may be counting on the 15-20% we are made to feel guilty about paying.

Guess what Shamir, no teep for yoooo!

If I were Chicago’s new Mayor Street Punk (that’s my pet name for him) I would strike a deal with cabbies. Provide barf bags in the back seat as the airlines do only bigger. If a passenger isn’t sober enough to barf in the bag and makes a mess in the back seat reduce the barf tax to $35. on weekdays and $50. on weekends.

Fare enough?

My Santa Wears Brown

2011-12-21T13:42:00.005-06:00

Thank gawd for the internets.

No longer do we need to battle traffic, slow-poke idiot drivers and finding parking in crowded areas. I hated the shopping, the driving, the cussing, the hair pulling, the waste of fuel and the huge waste of time. Don’t miss it at all.

The days of being dragged around by the wife to far-away malls that offered nothing more than local malls are over. Gawd, do I hate that shit. I refuse to shop with her for gifts and haven’t for over a decade. You go your way and I’ll go mine, babe. It’s quicker and keeps us together longer. Not only that, I am no longer dragged off to some chick cafe/bistro for an overpriced lunch that I have no appetite for. She is fine with that. My wasting of whole days are over.

Not only do the internets provide convenience, it allows us to find off-beat items and stuff you won’t find in malls and at damn good prices. Plus, they bring it to my door. I love the internets.

For the past two weeks the doorbell rings each day with another package on the steps and a brown truck speeding away.

My Santa wears a brown suit and drives a brown truck. And his little helper has a salty mouth. Must be a teamster.

Soon we can all get back to normal.

Chicago Weekend and Anecdotal Observations

2011-12-19T20:36:00.003-06:00

My clan spent the weekend in Chicago. We had a fabulous time and really packed in a lot of activity into 48 hours or so.

Our first stop was the observation center of Sears Tower. Yes, I understand it is now the Willis tower, but I am old school that way and to me it will forever be the Sears. Sort of like some people still call the Aon Center "Big Stan". The kids were blown away by the view up there and we had a nice day for it. The kids went out onto the "Ledge". I was getting a bit of vertigo and couldn't do it.

Next stop was Macy's (yes, the old Marshall Fields) to see the windows. My wife used to come down here when she was a child with her grandparents. The windows were entertaining and there were also some street performers down there to try to suck some tourist money.

Inside, Macy's was decked out wonderfully. They must have needed an army to get it all together. We signed up for dinner at the Walnut Room - one hour wait but the ambience was spectacular. Sorry I cut off the top of the tree here, but there was really no way to get it all in.

Dinner was surprisingly affordable, with most entrees between ten and twenty dollars. The menu was limited - I had the beef short ribs and they were delicious. I think they limited the menu due to the enormous crowds which was a smart move. They had fairies circling the crowd and granting wishes and spreading fairy dust around on the patrons which also added a nice touch.

We later went to the Auditorium Theater to see the Nutcracker. It was great as always and the Auditorium is a wonderful place to see a show. So beautiful.

On Saturday we woke up and hit the Field Museum. My kids have never been there (nor even to Chicago) and my wife and I hadn't been there in a quarter century. There is literally no way you can get through this place in one day. After about five hours or so we were all on information overload and gave up.

Of special interest to us were the dinosaurs, minerals and wild animal exhibits. Disappointing to me was the fact that many of the cultural exhibits have succumbed to political correctness. I don't really want to get into that part too much though as there is so much positive to learn at the Field, that I really encourage everyone to see it. The cost for my family of four was $90. This is the new scam they have - it is actually cheaper to purchase a family membership to the museum than to pay for four admissions if you include all of the special exhibits - right now they have whales and chocolate. The whale display is highly recommended - I really didn't learn much from the chocolate exhibit, but I have read several books in the past about chocolate production so you may be interested in it.

Below is yours truly with the official dino of LITGM, the Parasourolophus.

The Field Museum looked great:

And I enjoyed the details of the building from an age long ago:

We then went to the Christkindlmarket on Daley Plaza. It was an absolute mob scene. We shuffled through one aisle of that and got out of there. You literally could not fit one more person in there.

For dinner this night we went to Emilio's for tapas. It was fantastic. If you enjoy this type of food I highly recommend it.

On Sunday we went to Ed's for breakfast. The tone there was not as caustic as for the typical lunch or dinner, but the wait staff still was disprespectful as always, referring to my children as "brats" and tossing straws on the table, etc. It was a great time. The food was quite delicious and reasonable.

On the way home we stopped at IKEA in Schaumburg as my wife wanted to get some ideas for the house we are building. This was a punishing two hours for me and the kids as this is like valhalla for a person like my wife. The kids liked looking at some of the things, but we were all completely drained after this and even my wife admitted that she had to call it a day. We left with about $40 worth of flotsam designed by Swedes, made in far eastern countries.

My kids were absolutely amazed at the El. My wife and I, having spent a lot of time here in the past sort of shoulder shrugged it, but whenever a train went over our heads (loudly) the kids just stopped and looked up in total amazement. I told the kids that this is the best transportation system the 1890's has to offer. They didn't get the joke, but when I told them how old it was they were once again blown away. They had never seen anything like it and couldn't understand why the train was above us instead of on the ground. I will be getting my oldest a book on the subject for Christmas.

The kids were also amazed at the noise level of the city. People, trains, cars, trucks, ambulances, buses, bikes, etc. I also realized that the kids had never seen bums before and they wondered what was up with that. The kids also enjoyed the hustle and bustle of getting cabs and such. Eventually they wanted to hail them themselves which was fun.

We stayed at the Wyndham on North St. Clair Street. We got a nice rate for $139 a night, which netted out to around $220 a night after parking ($52 per night) and the outrageous taxes. I don't recommend it because it is right by Northwestern Hospital and the wife and I were awakened several times a night from the ambulances wailing. Nice place though, if not a bit tired. We didn't eat or drink there.

In general, Michican Avenue and all the sights looked fantastic. Chicago seems to be doing a booming tourist business, even in this tough economy. We had a lot of fun and I recommend if you can, to spend a night or two there this holiday season and do some stuff or if you already have plans, to do it next year.

The only thing I really regret was not being able to see the Lexington Green (of ChicagoBoyz fame) library. That is on the bucket list though.

Monday Morning Blues

2011-12-19T03:29:00.000-06:00

Saturday Night Sixties

2011-12-17T16:00:00.002-06:00

What Norway Can Teach Illinois About Toll Roads

2011-12-17T07:09:00.000-06:00

When I was in Norway at the tiny (and picturesque) town of Mundal, I noted what appeared to be an abandoned highway toll booth near the edge of town. Since the meticulous Norwegians would never leave behind something like this without good reason, I started looking more closely at this find.

Surely enough, the meticulous Norwegians had a sign on the booth (in English, no less) describing why this toll booth was historic in their eyes.

Per the sign:

This toll station was situated on rv5 (close to Nork Bremuseum) from November 1994 to November 2010. The toll financed the road between Fjaerland and Sogndal. For most of the period, this was the road with the highest toll in Norway. The Norwegian Booktown and Fjaerland's Historical Society will use the house to document the history of Fjaerland's struggle for road-connection with the outside world. Until 1986 you could only travel to Fjaerland by boat / ferry.

As they noted on the sign the toll was very expensive. From what I have been able to find the toll cost 180 kroner each way (approximately $20 USD) but cut a substantial amount of time out of the drive to Mundal. However, once the road was paid for, the Norwegians dismantled this toll booth and stopped charging drivers, which is why they now have plans to use it as part of the historical site.

On the other hand, you have the State of Illinois, whose toll authority plans to dramatically increase tolls starting January 1, 2012. Per this article - Illinois toll road increase:

The cost of a trip on the Tollway system for the average I-Pass driver would increase to $1.18, up from today’s average of 63 cents per trip

Note that for non-iPass (electronic tolling) drivers, the increase is effectively doubled; welcome to Illinois, tourists or those too poor or disorganized to afford an iPass (you need to replenish by credit card). This is one of the most regressive of all taxes.

The key concept of the Norwegian toll road system was:
- build something that hadn't existed previously that was worthwhile
- when it was paid off, dismantle the toll booth and eliminate the tolls

This concept doesn't apply in Illinois, where drivers have paid off the previous toll roads long ago but they not only continue to collect tolls, they INCREASE the tolls ON THOSE SAME ROADS to finance their continued existence as an organization.

“We are confident that the vast majority of customers and communities we serve stand behind us in support of this 15-year investment in the Illinois Tollway’s future,” said Illinois Tollway Executive Director Kristi Lafleur in a news release. “Now is the time to move forward with these critical infrastructure improvements to provide congestion relief on the Tollway and coordination with the other transportation and transit agencies to do something new and innovative with an eye to the region's future transportation needs.”

Really? Was there a referendum, or chance for toll payers to vote on these changes? Of course not - there were some public meetings, but no formal mechanism that allowed toll users to express their displeasure with this toll increase.

As far as "new and innovative" items, there is nothing here that qualifies in that realm. The tollway doesn't even reach into Chicago, so none of the problems of desperate traffic conditions within the city would be addressed by this $12.1 capital program. Here are the "innovative" (their words) items:

Projects slated for completion under the capital plan include:

Reconstructing and widening the 52-year-old Jane Addams Memorial Tollway (I-90) from the Tri-State Tollway (I-294) to Rockford
Reconstructing more than 20 miles of the central Tri-State Tollway (I-294) and the Edens Spur (I-94)
Preserving the Reagan Memorial Tollway (I-88)
Preserving the Veterans Memorial Tollway (I-355)
Repairing roads, bridges and maintenance facilities
Other capital projects, including local interchanges

Thus basically you are paying AGAIN to keep these highways running in Illinois, that you already paid for, plus a big taxpayer funded bureaucracy to boot. Once a tollway, always a tollway, and now we need to pay a bunch of politically connected contractors to rebuild it AGAIN.

Here are the signs behind the Norway booth. Wouldn't it be great if instead of being Norwegian destinations, they were names we'd recognize in Illinois? But it isn't going to happen - not only will they never take them down, they will RAISE the tolls to make you pay for it AGAIN (and give themselves a raise, for certain, to boot).

Cross posted at Chicago Boyz

Point Reyes, California

2011-12-16T18:31:00.000-06:00

Recently I traveled to California and visited Point Reyes National Seashore. This park is north of San Francisco along the coast, accessible through the town of Point Reyes Station. This park is large considering how close it is to populated areas and has a lot of different types of scenery from coastline to meadows to wildlife.

We had unbelievably clear weather the entire time we were in California. Not only did it not rain a single drop for an entire week, most of the time there wasn't even a cloud in the sky. To put this in perspective, they filmed the movie "The Fog" in Inverness, a small town in Point Reyes... so we were very lucky.

These are yellow Lupine flowers.

They introduced Tule Elk into the park and they are readily visible from the road. These photos were taken in the drive up to the north end of the park. They also have elephant seals on the beaches at the southern end but we did not have time to go to that side of the park.

Point Reyes is highly recommended if you are near San Francisco, especially if you are lucky and have a clear day and can see for miles and miles.

Cross posted at Chicago Boyz

I Been Fez'd

2011-12-16T18:08:00.002-06:00

It came in yesterday.

My very good friend from high school, Chris From Colorado sent it to me.

When Chris was staying here at the country bunker last October for GunstockIV the subject of Shriners came up after too many drinks one night. We had some laffs.

Shriners are an odd lot and those among us who don’t belong aren’t sure just what they’re up to when they are not riding magic carpet go carts, Harleys and riding seated on flat bed semi trucks playing musical instruments in local festival parades.

Usually adorned in tight white polyester knit polo shirts tucked into polyester knit black trousers to show off their ample beer guts they make it known that Shriners are a powerful force to be reckoned with. But their look is incomplete without...the Fez.

Anyone ever see a Shriner under 60 years old? They don’t take just anybody, no.

Everything you ever wanted to know about the wonderful Fez is here.

Since I have declared myself The Potentate of Pork, overseeing the cavernous Temple of The Mystic Knights of All Things Swine, this is an appropriate addition to my Fez collection. After all, I am 58 and my middle section is getting out of control. Can’t be the pork. Must be the canarbles.

The Fez is a very powerful icon, making virtually anyone a member of a mystic, double-secret cult.

Omerta.

The feeling one gets when wearing a Fez is indescribable to anyone who has never worn one in public. People stare in amazement. Young kids stop and point. Dogs bolt toward me and piss on my shoe. Now that sure gives me a thrill up my leg.

Thank you Chris. I like it. A lot.

Think I’ll look to see if they come in Realtree® camo.

Coyotes

2011-12-12T18:00:00.000-06:00

I rarely see them out here.

Living in the woods and on the edge of vast rural farmlands and wood plots here in northern Indiana one would think Coyotes would be hanging around my property. Honestly, I rarely see them. And I never hear them.

I know what they sound like too. It’s nothing like a wolf howl. It is more of a yip, yip laughing or squealing dog sound. I’ve heard them during early morning turkey hunts in southern Illinois.

One day my next-door neighbor yelled out to me to come over and look at something. He pointed to a pile of what appeared to be dog shit. That’s coyote shit he claimed. Wayne is an avid outdoorsman as you’ll find and I greatly respect his advice. Know why it’s coyote shit? he asked. Look at all the fur in the poop. That’s rabbit fur. Coyotes love rabbit. That fur passes right on through ‘em.

His claim seemed correct. So there may be a few around but I rarely see them.

While I may not see or hear coyotes they now have a serious problem with them in urban Chicago.

Of the few I have seen in the area one was a roadkill and others were seen crossing SR49 when driving. Most will never think of a coyote when they see one. They look like grungy mutts or stray dogs. I kicked one up years ago when bird hunting. It ran away like the wind and over the horizon before any of us could get a shot. I am always aware of them while bird hunting because when my dog goes out of sight I fear she may encounter a few. Dot runs a lot faster than most dogs but if coyotes got a jump on her it could get ugly.

What grabs me is the PC way in which the ChiTrib article advises urban dwellers with dogs to deal with coyotes. It’s not much different from the way they advise avoiding crack-head gang-bangers who carry weapons.

Imagine some 20something hipsters wearing earflap knit hats with pom-poms dangling from strings encountering an urban coyote in Bucktown while walking their Pug.

My favorites from the article (snarky comments are mine):

-Avoiding contact with coyotes by keeping dogs on leash and staying on designated trails (where coyotes fear to go?)

-Constructing a fence around your property that is at least six feet tall (with concertina wire on top? would one need a city permit to install a residential 6' fence?)

-Carry a stick and noise-maker can even be an aluminum 'shaker' can or a horn (I prefer to carry a 9 iron and a Glock model 22 in .40cal)

Suggestions for an encounter with a coyote when walking your dog include:

-Making eye contact (Yeah, right)

-Yelling or making loud noises (and yelling in a stern voice - BAD, BAD COYOTE)

-Throwing things at it (like a .40 cal corbon)

-Making yourself appear as large and menacing as possible (so wear a big North Face down parka, would’jah?)

-Never turn your back on a coyote (or a crack-head gang-banger)

-Using mace or pepper spray, suggested by many FB friends, but this can backfire by people accidentally spraying themselves with it rather than the predator (now how stupid would one need to be?)

Where I live it is legal for me to strap on my holstered and loaded Glock and take it with me in full view when I walk the dog. Some locals openly carry in the grocery store. I’ve seen it. If I begin to see coyotes on a regular basis I will and never would I be afraid to cap one in the head.

Carrying personal protection would never be allowed in Chicago, where only gang-bangers and outfit hitmen cap living creatures in the head.

Monday Morning Blues

2011-12-12T03:03:00.000-06:00

My message to Kenny Williams - "You are High"

2011-12-10T16:23:00.000-06:00

The White Sox had a disastrous collapse in 2011 as their free agents mostly turned into duds. Adam Dunn had what was possibly the WORST ALL TIME season for a hitter, mainly because the Sox kept playing him over and over even while he was striking out every time and was killing us in the middle of the order. It was painful to watch, and as someone with a lot of games in terms of tickets, I mostly stopped watching.

Along with that you have the other duds, such as Peavy, who is always hurt, and Rios who showed just enough flash that we bet on him in 2011 just to see it go way down.

They let Jenks go before the start of 2011 and he did little for Boston but the way that it happened wasn't classy. Ozzie's team quit on him and then Ozzie quit and then he lured away Buerhle. No disrespect to Buerhle the Marlins offered him more money and he gave a lot of good years to the White Sox but it is a bitter pill to swallow. It would seem that if the White Sox were serious about winning that they could have tried harder to keep Buerhle... but the only way that the White Sox appear to be willing to try to win is the cheapest way, since they are locked in to killer (bad) deals with the likes of Dunn.

So... the Sox lose their #1 pitcher (Buehrle) and trade away their closer (Santos) and get little to nothing in return. But here is what Kenny has to say about all this:

Williams: White Sox leave Dallas in good shape

Huh? Here is how he comes to that convoluted logic:

"You know, if we have some guys have some bounce-back years and go back to their career norms, yeah," said Williams of his team's chances to contend with Detroit in the American League Central as presently constructed... Williams refers to needed bounce-back years from designated hitter Adam Dunn, center fielder Alex Rios and second baseman Gordon Beckham with the bat, while Jake Peavy rounds back into healthy form at the top of the rotation.

Uh... with no #1 starter replacement, no closer, and a lineup mostly consisting of guys that are hurt all the time (Quentin), who suck consistently (Beckham, Rios, Dunn), or guys that are in the tail half of their career (Konerko, AJ), AND NO CLOSER... it looks like a hard year for the Sox.

So my message to Kenny is - if you think that things are all right after a "debacle" year with the #1 starter and closer departing and little to replace them, "you are high".

Saturday Night Sixties

2011-12-10T16:00:00.000-06:00

Like Fallin’ In Love Again

2011-12-09T14:30:00.005-06:00

It’s no secret here on the blog that I have been an Apple Computer evangelist for twenty-five years. Since 1988 their products have amazed me, occasionally frustrated me and downright enraptured me as they brought me great fortune.

The Mac and Adobe software is my industry standard. Nothing compares, especially the price. But it is worth every penny.

The desktop model here in the home office is just over six years old. It’s running OSX 10.4 and Adobe CS 2. It just works, like everything Apple. But, there comes a time when biting the bullet is necessary. By that I mean upgrading everything.

You see, the old desktop Mac was powered by the old PowerPC chip from Motorola operating Mac OSX 4.11. Three years ago or so Apple bought into the Intel produced processor chipset and told Motorola to take a hike. What this means is I could not upgrade my Adobe imaging software due to the old Motorola PowerPC processor. Adobe software is now up to Creative Suite v5.5 so I got by skipping over three upgrades (saving a lot of $$). It didn’t matter. The work got done. That’s how all tech companies milk us for upgrade purchases.

Generating professional imaging and layout files in Adobe CS2 posed no problems to me at all except that my clients are all using CS4 and CS5. This makes their files hard to work with when I need to work with them here in the home office. Not long ago, clients needed to save their files to be backward compatible for me to work with them. This is considered somewhat unprofessional.

It’s similar to having a home remodeling contractor asking to borrow your circular saw and hammer to do the job. Not good, not good.

So I bit the bullet last week and bought the mother of all laptops, the Macbook Pro. And what a fine tool it is, costing up to three times what most users pay for a cheaper Dell, Lenovo or similar PC laptop. The comparison ends there.

What Apple includes in proprietary software along with the OS more than makes up for the price. It’s so elegant I can’t think of words to describe it.

It took me all of two days to configure it, install upgrades and copy over all my business files. The only task left is to install font management software for my collection of 16,000 fonts and it’s good to go. My needs surpass the needs of most users who rely on databases and number crunching, etc. Apples. Oranges.

With a cheap cable I can connect the laptop to my Apple 23” cinema display so my menu palettes can reside on the laptop screen while the main image isn’t violated by them on the big display. Clean and crisp.

Another advantage with the laptop is being able to take it anywhere. Some of my clients want contractors to work onsite with their own laptops. The recession has kept some from having workstations available for contractors. They are counting paperclips, so why waste capital on expensive workstations? I understand. Now I can work in those places again, if I choose to.

This is the last professional computer I will ever need to buy. Since I am semi-retired and intend on (Carl, please pay close attention here) fully retiring in 3.5 years.

This laptop should last far longer but when it craps out I will just migrate over to the iPads, which should be awesome by then. And I can say g’bye to Adobe.

After spending two days with the new laptop all I can say is…the best is yet to come. And Apple, as always, leads the way.

Say what you will. Others only wait, follow and copy. Apple is at $393 per share today. Just think if you bought some five years ago when it was at $80. Just sayin'.

Comments Back

2011-12-09T05:33:00.001-06:00

I have re-opened the comments - hopefully the idiot spambots will have taken their leave and we can get back to our regularly scheduled blogging.

Comment Suspension

2011-12-07T07:29:00.001-06:00

This blog has been the target of a massive wave of spam over the past few days. This is highly unusual - with word verification and all, we typically get one or two here or there, but as of the last week it has picked up in intensity and as of the last day got a bit out of control. The spam comments are left on old posts.

I have the blog now set so only Carl, Gerry and I can leave comments. I plan on reopening comments to all in a couple of days. Thanks for your understanding.

Sight Seen

2011-12-05T17:34:00.007-06:00

While waiting in line for a parking spot to tailgate at last Sunday's Chicago Bears loss to a piss-poor KC team, this SUV was ahead of us waiting in line.

Best. Bumper sticker. Of. The. Decade.

Low light made me crank up the ASO but due to very low light and no tripod, I could not snap a crisp in-focus shot.
.

Monday Morning Blues

2011-12-05T04:06:00.000-06:00

Saturday Night Sixties

2011-12-03T16:00:00.001-06:00

Very Taxing

2011-12-01T07:16:00.008-06:00

Carl's entry two posts below on taxes was excellent. He knows his tax math inside out.

Instead of leaving a long comment/rant I offer the words of a guy I always admired for his wit. Another Dennis Miller has been spawned. Good stuff. Adam Carolla takes the words right out of my head.

Half the people in this country carry the load, the other half that pays nothing whines that it's not enough.

Being the age that I am it's become obvious that each generation believes their problems lie with the past generation and the blame only gets more insipid. And I thought the Gen-X'ers were crybabies.

Damn sick of it. 2012 cannot come fast enough. But I don't know much good will it do.

Concert Review - Social Distortion

2011-11-30T07:17:00.004-06:00

Tuesday I saw Social Distortion here in Madison at the Orpheum theater. It has been a very long time indeed since I have seen a real live rock show.

Sx Dx is one of my favorite all time bands going way back. They have always been on my short list to see live, so when I saw that they were coming to Madison I was thrilled. Not so thrilled that it was on a weeknight and me having to go to work on 4 hours of sleep, but I just don't care. Had to go. I will deal with the lack of sleep later.

I was meeting some folks at the show so I got there around 7.15 - the show was supposed to start at 8 and surprisingly, started a bit early. I met my crew and we had a nice conversation while the two warmup bands were doing their deal. The first warmup band, Suedehead was like an Oasis clone that sucked more (believe it or not). Pretty lukewarm reception.

The next band was Chuck Ragan. It was a trio that had a guitar, violin and upright bass and did that Irish rock thing. Not my deal, but the crowd sure did like them.

I should add that at the first notes of the opening band I realized that I forgot something at home - my earplugs. Damn. I am getting old and just can't handle the volume of these shows anymore. I had to laugh because just 20 short years ago I was the first idiot up front and stage diving and all that insane behavior.

Social Distortion came on with a rousing roar from the crowd that was well lubed by that time, and a huge cloud of marijuana smoke enveloped everyone. I hadn't smelled that odor in a long time indeed and laughed.

I was stone sober having to work the next day, so it was interesting to notice the drunk and disorderly behavior of the crowd. The crowd was interesting to say the least. Many had that fifties greaser/mod look that Mike Ness has made a living out of for so long. A lot of the ladies looked like pinups with tattoos, always a good combination in my book.

I lasted two songs and couldn't take the sonic level anymore, and had to excuse myself to the foyer and watched the rest of the Sx Dx show from there. I could still see the band perfectly and the volume was cut in half which was about perfect for me.

The sound was dialed in wonderfully from back there (not far from the sound guy, of course) and I enjoyed the show immensely. It was good to see Mike Ness looking better than he has in the past. His voice is still in one piece too. I have seen some live clips of Sx Dx on youtube where he is a bit hoarse.

Ness did a bit of politicking as most artists tend to do these days, and as expected it was for the Dems blah blah. I didn't let it ruin my good time.

I highly recommend catching these guys if they come close to your area if you are a fan. The song "Bakersfield" was my favorite of the night, along with the classic "I Was Wrong".

I am going to suffer a bit today from lack of sleep, but it was definitely worth it.

Cross posted at ChicagoBoyz.

What Do Hungry Children in Oregon Have to do with Tax Policy?

2011-11-29T20:43:00.000-06:00

The recent edition of "Parade" magazine when I saw a list of things that you can do to help others in need. I was struck by their plea to "Feed Hungry Children in Oregon" where they said that

Oregon has the nation's highest rate of "child food insecurity." About 252,000 kids - or nearly 30% of the state's youth - aren't sure where their next meal is coming from.

This surprised me because I never thought of Oregon as a state that had this sort of poverty. The example they gave in the article was as follows:

My husband and I both work full-time, but we make minimum wage, and some months it's either pay our bills or buy food, says his mom, Nichole (her child is featured in the photo, above).

While this is a sad and heart rending story, there is another connection as to why their parents are having a hard time finding higher wage work. Per the Tax Foundation:

Oregon's personal income tax system consists of five separate brackets with a top rate of 11% kicking in at an income level of $250,000. That rate ranks the highest among all states levying an individual income tax.

While tax policy may seem arcane to individuals worrying about food security, it is important to realize the CRUCIAL impact that state income tax rates play in state competitiveness. Of all the components of a tax burden, the ONE element that can be most easily modified or avoided is the personal income tax levied by a particular state. For instance, if you earn $1M a year, you'd be paying about $75,000 more in tax in Oregon than you would in Texas, Florida, Nevada, or other states that don't levy a personal income tax (it isn't $1M times 11% because of the graduated nature of the tax up to $250,000 and the fact that state taxes are deductible on Federal returns, so the $75,000 is a rough estimate).

A high marginal personal income tax rate falls DIRECTLY on those most likely to invest in a business that would hire someone like the family in this photo. A high marginal tax is analogous to seeking out the very individuals that could bring a state jobs and economic prosperity and telling them to invest elsewhere. You could go door-to-door and punch them in the face, or just set the nation's highest personal income tax rate, the net effect is exactly the same.

The biggest fallacy the high marginal tax crowd falls into is the "fixed pie" thinking - since businesses and high income earners are unlikely to move, if you tax them more they will just sit like sheep and take it and pay into the state to fund their myriad social programs. That may be true in the short run and for individuals that are tied to their community, but I guarantee that every wealthy person has an accountant who carefully tells them the negative impact of residing in such a high tax state and the benefits of moving elsewhere on their take-home pay. If they have a choice to invest more in Oregon or go elsewhere, other states look much more inviting. Over time, investment slows, and then there are more and more articles with the sad faced children just like this one, and pleas for the rich to pay their "fair share".

The problem is, the rich aren't stupid, and a high state income tax is basically pushing them to invest and live elsewhere, particularly somewhere warm with a tax friendly climate like Nevada, Florida or Texas.

Cross posted at Chicago Boyz

Monday Morning Blues

2011-11-28T02:51:00.000-06:00

Saturday Night Sixties

2011-11-26T16:00:00.008-06:00

Great Big Book Of Horrible Things

2011-11-26T12:22:00.001-06:00

I recently read and highly recommend a book called "The Great Big Book of Horrible Things" by Matthew White with the sub-title "The definitive chronicle of history's 100 worst atrocities". Since it is the holiday season, not being involved in one of these events is definitely something to be thankful for...

As someone who has spent their entire life reading books about history and military history in particular, this "organization" of cataclysmic events is very interesting. The author has different types of events, such as major dictators, not just wars, as he attempts to "rank" and chronicle each occurrence. Here are the top ten items per the author:

1. Second World War 66m
2. Chinggis Khan 40m
2. Mao Zedong 40m
4. Famines in British India 27m
5. Fall of Ming Dynasty 25m
6. Joseph Stalin 20m
6. Taiping Rebellion 20m
8. Mideast slave trade 18.5m
9. Timur 17m
10. Atlantic slave trade 16m

(as a note the First World War comes in tied for 11th at 15m)

The first thing that came to my mind is that I didn't even know what some of these items were; I know relatively little about ancient Chinese regimes and I had never even heard of the Taiping Rebellion which occurred from 1850-64 and per this book at least killed more than World War I (of which I know a great deal). Here is a wikipedia article on the Taiping Rebellion which also quotes the 20 million figure (for what it is worth).

I also find interesting the separation of individual dictators from the military conflicts that they led or sponsored. He did not break out Hitler from WW2 since Hitler's atrocities were mostly contained within that time span. However, Stalin's atrocities occurred pretty much from the moment he took power until the day he died so he received a separate section dedicated to his crimes. The author also makes a special section on the communist crimes where he aggregates the various tyrants and crimes in one spot for sad if easy reading.

In order to "make the list" you needed to reach over 300,000 killed. At the back of the book the author lists some atrocities that failed to "make the cut" in case an atrocity had a particular cheering section. I didn't see the Sri Lanka civil war listed but a look at wikipedia put the death toll at 80-100k or so which means they weren't even close to the cut off point.

The author also attempts to attract readers with an interesting use of graphics. This is from the back cover and I found it to be very engaging.

All in all the book is excellent not because it necessarily shows anything new but that it attempts to look at disastrous events in this new "ratings" analysis. Many of the death totals are nothing more than guesses especially the ones in ancient times (and civilian deaths tied to even recent wars also range wildly, such as on the Second Congo War), but the orders of magnitude are good fodder for discussion, at least.

Cross posted at Chicago Boyz

"Too Big To Fail" Follow up

2011-11-26T11:22:00.001-06:00

There was a made for HBO movie called "Too Big To Fail" about the 2008 financial crisis. I recommend watching it (even though it was controversial in some circles for showing Hank Paulson as a virtual saint) especially for people who aren't in the finance industry because it is intelligently written (based on a book) and they really got big name actors to play the part of Wall Street CEO's.

The Wall Street Journal has an "overheard" box on the back page of the financial section and they had some interesting observations on Wall Street in 2011 on how the various players have shrunk in market capitalization.

Here are the current market caps of the "Too Big To Fail" parties:

- Lehman Brothers (Dick Fuld) - bankrupt
- JP Morgan-Chase (Jamie Dimon) - 110B Corrected
- Vikram Pandit (Citigroup) - 69B
- John Mack (Morgan Stanley) - 25B
- John Thain (Merrill Lynch) - bought by bank of America (see below)
- Lloyd Blankfein (Goldman Sachs) - 52B
- Rickard Kovacevich (Wells Fargo) - 123B
- Bob Willumstad (AIG) - 38B (resurrected by Federal Government)
- PREVIOUSLY Bear Stearns - sold to JP Morgan-Chase

In the movie Wells Fargo was treated as an afterthought. Not mentioned are two banks listed below and Bank of America is given only a small part in the movie, even though they ended up buying Merrill Lynch (I don't even know who played Ken Lewis).

US Bankcorp 45B
PNC Financial 44B
Ken Lewis (Bank of America) 52B

The fact that these banks which are generally thought of as "regional banks" like US Bankcorp and even Wells Fargo have market caps in line or ahead of the giant Wall Street banks is a sea change in reality.

As these Wall Street companies become smaller what you are also seeing is the relative shrinking of the financial sector as a total portion of the US market capitalization. Financials returned -48% over the last 10 years vs. -17% for the S&P 500 (for the link to work change the time frame to 10 years and you can see the results).

These companies have an outsize impact on the economy of New York in particular because they pay out such a high percentage of their revenue in compensation. According to this article the compensation will drop 20 to 30% this year compared to the prior year.

In the first nine months of the year, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup set aside almost $93 billion to pay employees, up from $91.25 billion in the year ago period, according to Johnson Associates. The final number, however, is not set until the fourth quarter, when firms have a clear idea of their total revenue for the year.

While employee compensation as a percentage of market capitalization is not always a good metric to use for comparison purposes, in this case it is enlightening. Much of the outsize pay (some would say obscene) that these New York traders and executives receive is justified by the profits (and high stock prices) that result from their actions. But if the banks are paying out such a high percentage of their total market capitalization in profits every year, that justification starts to take on water a bit.

As far as alternative metrics, Business Insider had an interesting article on Wal-Mart, which employs 1% of the US work force. This analysis attempted to show what would happen to the average worker if Wal-Mart plowed back all their profits into employee wages (just a theoretical case). Per the article:

If Walmart took its entire $22 billion of annual pre-tax income and used all of it to give each one of its 2.1 million employees a raise, this would amount to about $10,000 a year apiece. In other words, if Walmart decided to use 100% of its operating profit to pay all of its employees more, the average store associate's salary would go from $20,000 to $30,000.

In an even sharper turn down the rabbit hole of linked causality, Wal-Mart itself is essentially moving off Wall Street to become a private company. This is obviously an exaggeration but Wal-Mart is using its profits to buy back stock, and much of its stock is held by the descendants of Sam Walton in the first place, so the outstanding stock metric is even lower than it appears. Wal-Mart has 3.46 billion shares outstanding but the "public float" is only 1.73 billion shares. And Wal-Mart is working hard to whittle away that public float, per this article...

Wal-Mart said on Friday that it would buy back $15 billion more of its shares to try to improve returns for its shareholders. The initiative, which was announced at the company’s annual shareholders’ meeting here, comes after a previous $15 billion repurchasing plan that was announced last year. The company bought back 244 million shares, worth about $13 billion, under that program

So there you go. Wall Street, that icon of capitalism, justifies high salaries for traders and executives on the basis of stock capitalization values that no longer support this line of reasoning. And on the other hand, the core basis for Wall Street, the raising and allocation of capital, is turned on its head as one of the largest and most well-run companies, Wal-Mart, essentially plows its earnings into a de-facto move to privatization and off Wall Street in the first place.

Cross posted at Chicago Boyz

More Winamac

2011-11-26T07:39:00.003-06:00

Going through photos from yesterday I found images worth publishing.

Here's both dogs on separate points in opposite directions. Enlarge and look close.

Penny and Scott, with a hen in the air.

Close crop of the same image.

Damn, that was a great day.

Go Beat Me Doggie, 8 To The Bar

2011-11-25T15:09:00.010-06:00

Am I getting to old for this shit? Maybe, but I’ll never quit.

Just for fun.

Monday we arrived at Winamac ready to rock the birds. Sure wish someone told Dottie.

We got our limit for four hunters last Monday but not until after chasing my sweet ‘lil pup all through the bush for an hour or so. Not one to stretch the truth, my pup just lost it that day. It’s all in the game. Gun dogs have great days, bad days and Mothe%*#&in days. Monday was one of those Mothe%*#&in days.

The best I can hope for is a pup that will hunt close, within forty yards or less, and stay staunch on point. That’s all I ask. Dot has so much energy (being a pup) that her youthful exuberance causes her to just up and go nuts at times. She gets so jacked up on birds she throws caution to the wind once in the thick, at times. This is both good and bad.

Good that she has that natural ability, bad that she can screw up a hunt. But we did get our limit for four hunters (8 birds) Monday. Scott’s dog Penny saved the day. That’s the best thing about having two dogs in the field. At least we stand half a chance.

When training a gun dog the worst thing to do is sting the pup with the remote when it is out of sight. IF pup is on a bird it will will associate the sting with the point. Not good, not good. It's hard to tell if the dog is on point when it's out of sight and the collar bell goes silent. This one thing can drive a guy nuts when training or hunting. Patience is so necessary.

Wednesday was a good day for Dot. I only needed to sting her once and I did it early when I saw her 40 yards out and would not respond, running away. She got the message and all was well after that but we ended up one bird short of a three hunter limit (6) at the two hour mark. My lower back and feet were just killin’ me. Walking in soft, uneven fields and through nasty thickets may not be hard for a fit guy like Dan From Madison to do but it takes it’s toll on these old bones of mine. Two hours is about all I can take these days.

The weather this week has been nothing less than spectacular for late November and today was no exception with temps in the 50’s and a SSW breeze. It was the first day we had a bluebird sky this year . And Dot was on today.

Son Andy came home from Indianapolis so I surrendered my hunt pass to him. He carried the gun and shot, I took the opportunity to guide and snap some photos. Scott and Penny were along for the morning making our bag limit four.

From what I see most gun dogs at Winamac are English Setters, all with seasoned and knowledgeable hunters and handlers. They are in all shapes, sizes and colors and each one is a masterpiece. Second on the list would be German Shorthair Pointers with Brittany Spaniels coming in third. It’s been rare to see any English Pointers the past few years. But we did see some guys with a Beagle and a Golden Retriever. They didn’t do so well. I wonder why?

Dottie was very good today, she rarely got out of range and she held staunch on each and every point. She listened well and no stinger from the remote was needed. We limited out in 40 minutes. Then we headed for the lot and a mini-tailgate. Some other hunters came out and commented on our “buffet”. I told him we don’t need a football game to tailgate.

Dot’s coming along nicely. But I am sure there will still be a few of those Mothe%*#&in days to come from her. Patience will be needed.

Her legs are long, her body is lean and she runs like lightning. What a sight it is to see her rip through the thick stuff as if it isn’t even there. I am amazed that these dogs don’t poke their eyes out on the sticks and thorns. But she (as all my gun dogs have) manages to bleed at the muzzle and at times, the legs and paws after a day in the field. No big whoop. She could go all day (unlike me) and I am very pleased with her progress.

Next hunt is Monday and that will close the final day of the season at Winamac.

Trump Tower

2011-11-25T09:25:00.000-06:00

The base of the Trump Tower parking garage is lit up for the holidays. Here is a view looking south towards the river.

It is difficult to get a photo from the ground that captures the entire height of Trump Tower and the lit up "pylon" on top. You can see the reflection from the lights of the adjacent IBM building alongside.

Cross Posted at Chicago Boyz

Michigan Avenue at Night

2011-11-24T09:36:00.000-06:00

Chicago has cleaned itself up amazingly well. From the dumpy downtrodden almost-Cleveland it could have been (watch the Blues Brothers to see it at its bleakest) the downtown seems shiny and new. We also have been lucky this year with little or no snow so far (there was a bit of a flurry one day but it melted immediately) and a warm day for Thanksgiving.

Giving Thanks

2011-11-23T13:13:00.003-06:00

I get a chuckle out of those folks who live and die by certain tenets, especially when they are completely and totally wrong. I hear a lot about "Separation of Church and State" here in Madison, because this is a liberal nuthouse and also because the Freedom From Religion Foundation always makes a stink out of the Christmas Tree in the Capitol Rotunda. Oh, did I just say that? Nah, Scott Walker did.

That's right. It is a Christmas tree. It isn't a holiday tree or anything else. I smirk at the fact that the Freedom From Religion folks don't necessarily object to the tree itself, rather to the what the tree is named.

This Thanksgiving as always, I re-read the Mayflower Compact:

In the name of God, Amen. We, whose names are underwritten, the loyal subjects of our dread Sovereign Lord King James, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, King, defender of the Faith, etc.

Having undertaken, for the Glory of God, and advancements of the Christian faith and honor of our King and Country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the Northern parts of Virginia, do by these presents, solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God, and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic; for our better ordering, and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the colony; unto which we promise all due submission and obedience.
In witness whereof we have hereunto subscribed our names at Cape Cod the 11th of November, in the year of the reign of our Sovereign Lord King James, of England, France, and Ireland, the eighteenth, and of Scotland the fifty-fourth, 1620.

Oh sure, no religion involved in the founding of this country.

I wish the Freedom From Religion folks and others would spend their time on seriously pressing issues, such as the fact that anyone who is not a Muslim in certain countries get summarily executed (or the right type of Muslim, if you want to get technical with Sunni vs. Shi'a). I always say that if you want to "free Tibet" you need to rip that silly bumper sticker off your car and get to the dirty work of sending them guns since that is the only way they will ever get "free". Same sort of deal. There is nothing here stopping you from being a Muslim, or a Jew, or a Christian or Buddhist. Work on those places where women are treated like cattle, or people are murdered in cold blood FOR their religion.

That said, I am very thankful for my family, blogmates, friends and commenters here at good 'ol LITGM. Have a great Thanksgiving everyone. Pass the stuffing.

The Gun Dog Journal – 2011 Edition

2011-11-22T10:03:00.015-06:00

So here we are, in the middle of hunting season. Dottie and me.

Saturday was the first time she has been on birds in the field in over two months but this was not a training session. Anticipation. How would my two-year old setter perform? Would she bolt and make me chase after her screaming like an idiot while pressing the shock transmitter? Would she find a scent, lock on point and allow us the opportunity for a clean shot? Would she flush the birds out of range? Would she be a blue ribbon field champ finding and pointing birds with reckless abandon while being obedient and responsive?

All of the above.

At the Winamac State Fish And Wildlife property we arrived Saturday morning half an hour before the 9am EST start to register at the DNR shed.

It wasn't long ago when all hunters needed to arrive three hours early to register in person, in the cold inky darkness on the day of the hunt. That meant waking up at 3am since Winamac is in the eastern time zone but only an hours drive away. They only allow 120 hunters on the property so showing up late meant you might have gotten up way too early for nothing. We would stand in line shivering for at least an hour waiting to register but I never missed getting in. The farther back in line meant you may not get one of the better zones. Late arrivals were SOL.

Then it was off to Nancy’s Lunch, a tiny diner in Winamac. I enjoyed going there. It was full of local farmers, cops and hunters in day-glo orange. The full breakfast that I ate with coffee while reading the Chicago Trib was about four bucks including tip.

On the menu it read, “ We’re a happy bunch at Nancy’s Lunch and there’s no time for sorrow. Eat your fill, pay your bill, come back again tomorrow.”

Yep, we’re those so-called bitter clingers out here in rural Indiana and I for one am damn fvcking proud to be one.

After breakfast it was about a three-hour wait between registration and hitting the field and that was a real pain, but an annual ritual I enjoyed so it was well worth my time.

The intertubes took over and four years ago the Indiana DNR opened online pre-registration beginning September 1. That means registering online at midnight, since this is a very popular spot for wing shooters. I stayed up, signed in and waited…and waited…and waited. The damn server was overloaded with thousands of others trying to register at the same time at all the other state managed properties as well.

Hunting buddy Scott and I kept touch over the phone while registering as a tag-team. We managed to get the days and areas we wanted but I didn’t get to sleep until 2:30am. I had my license and papers to prove I was pre-registered. Now I am able to leave the bunker at 6:30am instead of 3am. But I do miss eating breakfast at Nancy’s Lunch.

Last Saturday I showed up at the Winamac property DNR shed with the bro. The lady remembered me but not my name. I told her area 3, the name’s Gerry. Ooooh, you’re not on the list she replied. I showed her the paper and she said there must be some mistake as she looked at the paper and showed it to another DNR guy. After asking if this has happened before she looked up and said only once, a few years ago. Dang.

Other groups of hunters were arriving, festooned in day-glo orange caps and brush pants. It got busy quickly. So what would the DNR folks do about this mishap? I had the paper. We sat in chairs and waited watching others come and go.

Time was wasting and for a moment I thought she would probably refund my fee and we would go home to watch football.

Then, she called me to the desk and told me we were good to go. Another DNR guy told me that he called the Indianapolis DNRHQ and cleared it up. They would allow twelve hunters in area 3 instead of the usual ten and apologized. We asked about Monday, the other day we had registered for. He said to bring the paper and all would be good.

Not a good start for the day. We had just enough time to hit the field on-time and prepared for a beautiful morning hunt. The weather could not have been better.

One thing I love about Winamac is seeing the same guys each year in the area parking lot. Everyone is friendly and seeing all the fabulous gun dogs puts a smile on my face. Dogs, guns and gamebirds. This is my small slice of heaven in what to me is the best week of the year next to fishing in Canada during early June.

I don’t ask for much Lord, just these two weeks each year. Please hear my prayer and make it worthwhile until we meet.

Here we go. We always have a plan. I know area 3 well and where I think the birds will be. My plan would have us walk about a quarter mile down a dirt two-laner. A couple of very old doods followed with a black lab. I’ve seen them at area 3 before. Labs are not good upland bird dogs. They’re excellent for waterfowl but not so much for quail, grouse and pheasant. Stubborn those lab owners are. They think their dogs walk on water and while they may, I would never waste my time hitting the field with one.

Dotttie was leashed and almost jerking my arm from my shoulder. This is good. She knows what we’re doing.

So I finally release her and she does the zig-zag pattern. She ranges out far and I blow the whistle. She heads back. So far so good.

Then we hit a patch of standing corn and I lose her. She doesn’t respond. My remote has a beeper on the collar that I hit before hitting the zapper button. The idea is for the dog to associate the beep with the zap, become conditioned to the beep and obey without further stimulation. Then we see a rooster shoot up from the corn into the air well out of range.

The bro takes a very long shot with his Weatherby O/U using #5 shot and downs the pheasant. What a shot! He claims he led the bird by about four feet. The bro is one of the best wing shooters I have ever been in the field with. Damn, what a shot. But I am getting pissed at Dot. She is way out in front and flushes two more roosters that fly into an area being worked by two other hunters, so we pass on following them. Dot is trying my patience so I blow the whistle, yell DOTTIE COME! and nothing. I hit the beeper and nothing. So I again scream DOTTIE COME! then a beep and a sting from the remote. I hear a distant yelp before I can hear her collar bell and she returns.

So with Dot on leash we rested near some pines a while, about 45 minutes into the hunt. She wanted to run, but not yet little pup.

Upon release she stayed a lot closer and soon went on point. A hard point, this is good. We walked in and flushed a rooster. Bird down. Yes! Now we’re talkin’. Only a few minutes later another hard, solid point. Bird up, bird down. Three in the bag. Hot damn!

About ten minutes later in some tall brown glass her collar bell went silent. I could barely see Dot on another solid point. We walk in as I calmly say whoah, whoah Dottie. She stays staunch, on point. We flush, I shoot, Dot is on the dead bird, we limit out.

One hour and fifteen minutes and we bagged our limit. Not bad for a two-year old dog. We walked back to the lot with ear-to-ear grins heading for a cold beer.

The best things are worth waiting for. Many things that are worthwhile take patience and hard work. I have the time.

Dottie’s gonna’ be a fine bird dog. It’s just that she has some big paws to fill.

Monday Morning Blues

2011-11-21T04:26:00.001-06:00

Bullying The Bully

2011-11-20T07:23:00.002-06:00

When finally cornering a bully it must be brutal. A bloody nose, a black eye, and a Louisville Slugger to the kneecaps would work. It is so delicious to see this assclown get beaten up and, as expected, the bully doesn't take it too well. Unfortunately it will not be heard by many who should hear it. So I am simply doing my part to spread the word.

Click on the image and listen. It is so good I had to listen to it twice. Enjoy!

>

BAM! POW! BING!

Saturday Night Sixties

2011-11-19T16:00:00.006-06:00

Brown Sash With Two Stripes

2011-11-18T06:37:00.003-06:00

Wednesday Night was another Muay Thai test. I didn't think I would ever do better than my last test, but I was wrong. I completely and totally kicked this test's butt. My partner was great too - and this is important.

I was counting the achievement certificates on the wall and that was my ninth test. It is my last before my test for the black sash. The ultimate goal in our gym.

As a reminder, there really is no rank system in traditional Muay Thai. Most people involved in the art in Thailand are fighting to feed themselves, not to keep in shape or enjoy an art as we are for the most part at the gym. We do have some fighters that have something to prove to themselves in that area, but for the most part we are all just people who want to learn an art, stay in shape, spar lightly and have fun.

I have been doing this for over four and a half years constantly now. I saw video of myself doing this last test and I have to admit, I looked pretty smooth. I was extremely pleased. So is my instructor. I have been molded into a western/thai hybrid artist that our gym is after. Note I said artist, not fighter. Sure I could fight, but that isn't in the cards for me, a business man, father, and responsibility holder. I could use a broken nose right now like a hole in the head.

So my black sash test is sometime next year. I am on a probationary period right now. I don't have to test with the other guys and girls anymore. I have heard that the black sash test will be in front of the whole gym and that there may be an essay and a speech involved as well as sparring the instructor and others, and all the rest. There has never been a formal black sash test at our gym so this will all be new to everyone. There is only one black sash holder at our gym besides the instructor, and he was simply handed his one day. It will be interesting. I have no idea how this will all go down.

When I get that black sash, although I know it means nothing in the "real" Muay Thai world, it will mean a lot to me. I have never achieved anything of real physical significance in my entire life that was publicly recognized. Sure I have had great times running and cycling, but never really "won" anything. I may break down and cry when this happens. I might jump for joy. I have no idea. I have given everything to this art for what will be 5.5 years of my life by that time. I have seen a ton of people come and go in the gym, and the gym is in its third different location since I started there.

Oh yeah, I am also training this winter for two more weeks in France on the bike in the mountains and all that comes with that such as biking on the trainer, running, strength training and so on.

I better eat my Wheaties.

Norway and Germany

2011-11-15T19:42:00.000-06:00

I recently traveled to Norway and as a minor military historian was fascinated by their historical entanglement with Germany. I was not able to travel to see the coastal fortifications in the Northern part of the country that I wrote about here.

Balestrand and The Kaiser

Balestrand is a beautiful little community along a large fjord (Sogenfjord)in Norway. While we were there I stayed at the Hotel Kviknes, which has a long tradition as a fine tourist hotel.

The Kaiser brought a portion of his fleet up the fjord with him while he visited Norway as a tourist. I saw a photo from a local guide but I can't seem to find one on the internet. He had a touring vessel and it looked like a couple of light cruisers but am not certain.

This is the chair in the Hotel Kviknes where the Kaiser supposedly sat when WW1 was declared. There was a young couple having a drink at the table and they were nice enough to let me get a photo of the bottom of the chair which was marked accordingly.

Stalheim Hotel and the Kaiser

The Stalheim Hotel is one of the most famous hotels in Norway, known for its fabulous views as you can see below.

Kaiser Wilhelm II was the Emperor of Germany at the start of WW1. For twenty years in a row the Kaiser visited this hotel in Norway during the summer. Below is a monument to the Kaiser, which apparently is misspelled (per the manager of the hotel, who gave us an excellent historical tour).

This is a view of the Stalheim hotel today, which has been substantially rebuilt since the world war I era.

Bergen and WW2

The Germans attacked Norway in 1940. Here is a solid summary of the campaign at wikipedia. Per wikipedia the German soldiers had orders not to shoot unless fired upon; apparently they hoped that the citizens in Norway (and Denmark) would view them favorably. This likely factored in with their racial politics, and the long history that Norway and Germany shared.

But the Norwegians did resist. While they were ultimately defeated (and caught mostly unawares by the invasion) they had a major victory with the destruction of the Blucher, a heavy cruiser with 8" guns which was damaged by shore batteries and then sunk by land based torpedoes. At that engagement they also damaged the pocket battleship Lutzow, which had to reverse away full speed from the guns. This is a photo of a print on the wall in the Hotel Kviknes.

You can get a fantastic overhead view of Bergen if you take a cable car called the Fliobanen. I went up there looking for evidence of the German u boat pens that were constructed in Norway (and to have a beer and be a regular tourist, too). Apparently there are some remnants (it is damn hard to get rid of the immensely strong concrete structure) used by the Norwegian navy today but I wasn't able to find them.

The Norwegian merchant marine made very large contributions to the Allied war effort. After the fall of Norway in 1940 their ships sailed with the Allies under the name "Nortraship". One side of the "Sailor's Monument" in Bergen contains an engraving of a merchant ship with sailors drowned in the cold sea.

Voss

After Bergen fell quickly to the Germans the Norwegian army regrouped (and were receiving British and French help to the north) and made a stand at Voss. We visited there (it is a quick train ride from Bergen) and when I inquired about history the guide said that Voss was blasted by the Germans and ruined because the men made a stand there. Today it is very attractive and you can take a cable car up to the ski resort atop the mountain.

On Occupation

When researching the war effort there are many references to the resistance against the German occupiers. The famous "heavy water raid" in 1943 which was rated as "the most successful sabotage effort in WW2". There were many other books about individuals who resisted and / or escaped over the border to Sweden.

Due to the high amount of German soldiers present in Norway any acts of concerted resistance would have been suicide. I am not aware of a "standard" for occupation but in terms of soldiers as a percent of citizens Norway has to rank near the top of the list. There were hundreds of thousands of German military personnel in Norway at various points of campaigns with under 4 million inhabitants, a ratio that made serious resistance efforts impossible.

The biggest contribution that Norway made to the Allied cause, in my opinion, was the fact that the German navy was seriously degraded upon completion of the Norway campaign. Per wikipedia

At sea the invasion proved a significant setback. For the Kriegsmarine the campaign led to crippling losses, leaving the Kriegsmarine with a surface force of one heavy cruiser, two light cruisers and four destroyers operational. This left the navy weakened during the summer months when Hitler was pursuing plans for an invasion of Britain.

Cross posted at Chicago Boyz

Poultry Update

2011-11-15T12:52:00.000-06:00

Below is a photo of an old pig barn that is on our farm and a hammock that I have not used one single time.

Have you ever been in a pig barn? Yes? Then you know the smell. That stench has faded for the most part, but I don't think it will ever go completely away. We were this close to tearing down this structure but we didn't and we are glad we kept it. On the right side is a lean to that the small horses go into when it is raining. It had to be shored up as it was in pretty sad shape when we inherited it.

On the left you can see a wire cage - it is actually a dog kennel type thing that we got from a hardware store pretty cheap. That is the outdoor section of the chicken area - it has to be fenced since we have predators like hawks, foxes and coyotes. When we are there we let the chickens out and they love to eat the grass. If you look closely you can see a small square door by the fenced in area with a ramp. The chickens can go in and out of the structure as they please but we shoo them inside for the night just in case a predator tries to get over zealous. Of course the inside is heated in the winter and has a fan in the summer. Most of the old pig barn is used for horse hay storage, grain for the horses and other things. We came to find out that you can't ever have enough "storage" when owning a place like this.

So here is the inside of the chicken area.

In the foreground is Angel, the white one, and Red, well, the red one. Behind them we have the taller silky rooster, which I have named "The Situation" and next to him is JWoww (you will have to brush up on your Jersey Shore to understand these names). Sitting in the laying box is Sammi and below her under the ladders is Snooki. When daylight is long we get up to three eggs a day. Right now we are getting about one every other day.

This is pretty much a money loser if you consider the feed and electricity to keep these things alive, but it is enjoyable, pretty cool to get fresh eggs, and the kids and I have fun with them. We handle them a lot so you can pick up most of them and pet them if you desire. I love watching these stupid animals cluck and scratch around. We are making another coop like this and will be getting six more exotic chickens for that area.

Horse Update

2011-11-15T07:17:00.002-06:00

At our hobby farm we have cattle for beef, chickens for eggs, cats for rodent control, a dog for a warning system (and to kill a coyote/fox if needed) and horses for pleasure. I don't really do the horse thing but the wife and kids sure do love 'em. It is nice that we have our own grass hay to feed them, making their maintenance cost very low, just need to keep their hooves taken care of and the occasional vet visit.
Below are Cowboy, the miniature horse and Tanner, a Pony of the Americas.

Cowboy came to us virtually free from a farm that had too many. Tanner was totally free. There seem to be a lot of places that are trying to scale down during the difficult economic times. Cowboy is fully grown. He is pretty fluffy now since winter is coming. It is amazing to me how animals just do their thing when the weather comes. Tanner is also fully grown. Cowboy isn't trained yet, but Tanner participates in cart and sled driving and is ridden in kids classes.

Below is Lady Astor, we just call her Lady.

She is a Shire cross and stands 17 hands. She is a magnificent animal. She is ridden in dressage and hunt classes and also pulls a cart. My wife has won a competition with her driving cart already and we have only had her for a year and a half. It is hard to describe how large this beast it until you are right up on her. Very mild mannered though. That is a qualification to living on our hobby farm - if the animal is "hot" it isn't for us.

Winter is coming and that means sleigh rides. It helps make the season pass more quickly when you are doing fun things like that.

Monday Morning Blues

2011-11-14T03:24:00.000-06:00

Saturday Night Sixties

2011-11-12T16:00:00.007-06:00

The Creeping End Game of Government Bureaucracy

2011-11-12T09:40:00.000-06:00

In today's Wall Street Journal there are two articles that seem to be completely disconnected but are really linked at the core. One is titled "Health System Reflects Greece's Ills" which summarizes Greece's public sector health policy:

Like nearly all Greeks, Mr. Gianakouras was covered by a state social security fund, which provided $13,6000 for the hospital bill. There was just one more thing: Mr. Gianakouras said he gave his surgeon "black money" - $5000 Euros in cash - to perform the operation.

'If you don't pay', he said, 'you don't get anything done'.

While we might be surprised by this type of situation in the United States and a few other western countries, it is the way the world operates elsewhere when the government or constitution gives "rights" to citizens without the means to pay nor proper incentives to get work done in an organized and systematic (market-based) fashion. This system was brought to a fine art in the former Soviet Bloc countries where the free-market was squeezed almost entirely into niches; a vast, parallel system of bribes, favors, and illicit goods and services ran alongside the "official" system which got little or nothing done.

Alongside the uselessness of utilizing the official channels is the general impunity of the government workers that run the sham system. Periodically there are calls to remove "corruption" but that implies that corruption is a deviation from the system when in fact corruption is the system itself. There is little or no motivation for the government workers to follow rules and bribes and favors are commonplace, so what is the point in going after them in the first place for participating in a system that can't work?

A different article discusses the "penalty" faced by SEC workers for their failure to spot the Bernie Madoff fraud, titled "SEC Discipline over Madoff" which can be easily summarized in the first paragraph:

The SEC admitted Friday that it has disciplined eight employees over their handling of the $50 billion Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme without firing any of the workers.

In one of the most obvious cases of gross governmental negligence (there are entire documentaries about individuals that tried to bring Madoff's scam to light and were ignored by the SEC employees so I won't summarize them here), there is NO CONSEQUENCE for these workers for their failures.

The core concepts of moving away from the free-market to a governmental run system are 1) bribes , corruption and favors being built in to the system to make it work 2) general impunity of workers for participating in this sham "rights based' process.

My advice is to befriend governmental workers and medical care professionals in the future as our system moves more towards the "Greek" model of over-promising care to everyone and under-funding and not incenting the hard work necessary for quality care to occur. And be prepared for a wall of government workers who can rule with impunity based on arcane processes and standards not tied to the free market or any sort of accountability based system as our "investment" in government increases; the first thing these workers will do is build a system where they are put "first" before the mission that they are trying to accomplish.

I never thought that my classes on "command economies" would ever come in so useful, but it shows the long-term arc of our creeping end game in the West.

Cross posted at Chicago Boyz

Odd Movie Poster

2011-11-10T20:32:00.002-06:00

Saw this on the way to work on Wacker Drive... maybe a damn Tw*light movie worth watching?

The automated poster got stuck halfway between two ads...

Doing Something Really Stupid

2011-11-09T14:00:00.001-06:00

Will I ever learn?

I love sausage. Especially pork sausage. For years I loved eating hot links. Those are spicy pudgy sausages popular with the inner city urban types. Moo & Oink were always a favorite hot link brand of mine.

Yesterday while shopping at the grocery store I did a very stupid guy thing that most guys do shopping in a grocery store. I made an impulse buy. There they were. Scott Peterson Hot Links. Never tried them but Peterson makes a good frank so I picked up a pack for $2 on sale. Looked good at the time.

Reading labels is a fetish of mine. Seeing the price per pound, evaluating the value proposition and eyeballing the ingredients is a big part of my shopping experience especially when it comes to food. The wife hates when I do that because it slows us down when we shop together.

Once arriving home I took a look at the ingredients. The first ingredient on a label is known to be the most prominent ingredient. Not surprised to see chicken. Mechanically separated chicken? Ok. Most hot dogs now contain mostly chicken and turkey, which is why I usually prefer to buy franks which are all beef.

Then I spotted this: salivary glands and lymph nodes. Eeewww. Being fully aware that some by-products make it into commercially prepared sausages this never occurred to me. Using snouts, cheeks, scrotums and anuses is one what I expect but glands? OK, fine.

Is this what the meat processors do, carefully carve out salivary glands and lymph nodes, toss them into a lug marked ‘for use in hot links only’?

(O go ahead and click to enlarge, it's ok)

Sweet Baby Jesus, PLEASE DON’T LIST THIS CRAP ON THE DAMN LABEL!!! Call it meat and meat by-products so I don’t notice and leave it at that. Alpo can stuff offal in their cans but don’t sell it to people like me who prefer eating flesh.

Steve H has been writing about his recent homemade sausage escapades and noted that salivary glands were included in some chorizo he bought. I read his blog yesterday and yet, stupidly grabbed these hot links and tossed them into my cart without even looking. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

Me and the bro have made bulk sausage for freezing quite a few times. We bought pork butt and extra fat, usually 20-40 lbs., spiced it up, let the chunks sit overnight then ground it and stuffed it into natural hog casings in my kitchen using my Kitchen Aide pro stand mixer with the grinding and stuffing attachment. We’ve made andouille since a good Cajun sausage is hard to find locally. The bro has a great smoker so he smokes it all up and we are good to go to make honest seafood gumbo for another six months.

We’ve made an outstanding Italian spicy sausage too. And I once made some decent chorizo but never considered using salivary glands. Who the hell even sells them? Where on God’s green earth can I buy them at retail?

I am way too grossed out to eat these hot links. I refrain from eating offal and innards. That’s for third world peasants and foodie nincompoops. So these will get tossed in the woods across the street for the raccoons, opossums and coyotes to fight for. Hell, I only feed my gun dogs the finest high-protein dry meal.

Gag. I will never be confused with this guy. And WTF is he eating in this image?

Don’t tell me, it looks way too personal.

Ag Update

2011-11-08T14:31:00.000-06:00

That is a photo of Arthur, our prize steer. He is not quite a year and a half old. His confirmation is the best we have ever seen from our tiny herd of Scottish Highlands and of the Highlands we have seen on other farms. We suspect winter will be good to him and he will be enormous (for the breed) by next summer and ready for butchering. He was our first calf. Here he is back in May of 2010 right after he was born with his mom, Annabelle.

We butchered two steers this year and the beef is of a very high quality - my wife and I were both surprised at how good it is. We sold one full beef in quarters and kept the other for ourselves. It is pretty cool to have good ground beef and steaks in stock at all times.

The ground beef is extremely lean - well, all grass fed beef typically is. If you are used to grain fed steaks and aren't looking for a change, this probably won't be for you. We use no hormones and feed these animals nothing but pasture grass in the summer, and hay from our fields in the winter. The taste is not wild, but to me, "beefier". You don't get the buttery melt in your mouth taste of a well marbled ribeye from a place like Ruth's Chris, but the best cuts from our beef hold up well.

You have to be careful cooking the beef - this isn't a breed for well done steaks, if that is how you like them. Fortunately my family all likes medium rare to rare (barely cooked in my case).

Burgers are great too, but care again must be taken not to over cook them or you will have a sawdust sandwich. The burger is where you really get the beef flavor that everyone must have enjoyed a long time ago, before feed lots, hormones, grain and all the rest.

It was very easy for my wife to sell the extra steer - there is a high demand, at least in these parts for naturally raised grass fed beef. People like to come by and see the "happy" cows munching on grass. We say "organic" and that is OK as our tiny operation is so small that we don't have to be certified organic to say such.

We are ready for winter as the hay is all put up and ready to go.

More ag updates as time provides.

Those Pesky Local Elections

2011-11-07T15:00:00.013-06:00

Tuesday morning there will be a local election. I will be among the first to vote, as always. Showing up fifteen minutes ahead of time has been a habit of mine after twenty years of commuting to Chicago. I never have missed a chance to vote. It gives me the right to bitch. The regulars are always there with me, waiting for the polling place to open.

There’s Betsy, the hot little MILF with big dark hair from down the road. She competes in marathons and stops by the polling place while on her morning run wearing that delightful tight black spandex. Woah, wouldn’t want to miss seeing THAT? And there’s Ted, a retired grizzly old steelworker who is as pissed off at the union bullshit as I am. We talk firearms and share hunting stories for a short time since elections happen during the hunting season. Small talk.

This election is local, one where the turnout is very light. This one is mainly for mayor of Valpo and a few other local seats.

Our current mayor is Jon Costas.

Jon is a neighbor of ours living only four doors away. He’s a good man. We have had a few conversations, but I wouldn’t call our relationship as being close. He has a band called The Conservatones and they perform at the Valparaiso Independence Day festivities. Jon beat a long time incumbent democrat attorney who was a do-nothing toad. Jon is a republican who promised to only serve two terms before returning to his lucrative law practice.

Don’t get me wrong. I like Jon a lot. He has helped Valpo lift itself from being a sleepy little rural county seat into a modern community that draws successful businesses. He oversaw the rebuilding of our town square that now boasts fine dining bistros and a vibrant nightlife. It draws folks from far away and they spend their money here. He found state and federal funds that the old mayor never knew existed in order to repair decaying streets and sewers in the older section of town. While I may have a slight problem with that, the money was there for the taking. If we didn’t grab it and use it some urban area would have stolen it and wasted it.

Last year the Indiana Chamber of Commerce gave Valparaiso their top award recognizing this town as their community of the year.

So why do I find myself as conflicted as Chaz Bono standing in front of a urinal?

We built a home on the outskirts of Valparaiso twenty years ago for a number of reasons. We liked the idea of living in a rural area and near a town that is not connected to that unending wasteland known as urban sprawl. Valparaiso is surrounded on all sides by rolling hills of woods and corn and bean fields, not connected to other communities with unending mini malls, chain restaurants, nail parlors, currency exchanges and auto dealerships.

The schools here are outstanding and while there is a drug problem like any other community there are no gangs to speak of. Violent crime is non-existent since everyone here is very well armed. When we go to a grocery store or any other business the employees smile and chat, not like the scowls we were used to living in Illinois.

We left Illinois to get away from urban problems, sprawl, government corruption, malfeasance and the insane intrusion of a state and local nanny government run amok. As they say, love it or leave it and we chose to leave it. We proved to be correct and have no regrets.

This is as close to living in Mayberry USA as Mayberry USA could be to me.

My main problem with Jon is he has bought into what is called ‘regionalism’. Here in northwest Indiana regionalism is a way of co-joining a few counties through a taxing authority in order to create a tax base that supposedly will go to The Greater Good™. Horsehockey!

Lake County Indiana to the west has suffered the loss of industry and failed to plan for any alternative. We never considered moving there. It is a prime example of the democrat industrial union complex that feeds on state and federal handouts without putting the money to good use. They steal it. Since Lake County is in such nasty financial shape their politicians and a lapdog local media have concocted this ‘regional’ concept where they intend on sticking their vacuum hose into the wallets of adjoining counties to pay for past malfeasance and corruption. In doing so they promise growth, jobs and a regional transportation system that will cost an estimated one billion dollars (and we know this is a fraudulently low estimate) that residents here in Porter County have overwhelmingly voted down in a state sanctioned referendum.

Jon is a regional advocate. He wants us to help pay for a shiny new choo-choo in Lake County. Strike one.

Jon also is a strong proponent of multiculturalism. We have waaay too much section 8 housing in Valpo as it is and he seems to welcome more. I have no problem with new neighbors but we need responsible new neighbors, not some Lake County taker transplant low-life grifters just for the sake of broadcasting some benevolent political correctness. Strike two.

I am a firm believer in term limits. Jon promised two terms and now he wants three. Jon considered running for Attorney General until Mitch asked him to step aside for the more conservative Greg Zoeller, who won. Being a good soldier Jon stepped down but he obviously has his sights set on higher office and a lifetime political career. Strike three.

What is our alternative?

Bob McCasland is Jon's only challenger. Bob has served the town as an elected republican official. He is going the independent route to challenge Jon for the second time. Bob stopped by our country bunker before the last election to meet and greet. I invited him in and we spoke.

A nice guy Bob is, he is a local native and a fine family guy who means well and has good intentions. I like him. I told Bob that Jon was doing a fine job. He’s a neighbor, I explained. I was being honest. Bob understood and parted as a friend. Getting to know local politicians in this way helps keep my faith in the system.

This time Bob might get my vote. Bob is against regionalism in any way shape or form. He wants to keep our community tight and exclusive. I just don’t know yet how I will vote and probably won't until I have the punch card in my hand.

It’s a tough choice. Out here. In the hinterlands.

But no matter what happens, our town will still win. That's why I love living here.

Monday Morning Blues

2011-11-07T03:24:00.000-06:00

Cool Photo

2011-11-06T18:56:00.000-06:00

When we were at Cafe Benelux in Milwaukee where I had this beer flight I also took a photo of a cool Heineken windmill with one of the servers walking by. I liked it, at least.

Around Milwaukee October 2011

2011-11-06T18:49:00.000-06:00

Recently I traveled up north to Milwaukee. You can see the Miller Brewery Tour highlights here. The inside joke among me and my friends is that Milwaukee's motto should be

It's better than you think

Because that's the truth.

Upper left - I was impressed with their conversion of older industrial buildings into condominiums as well as new construction. But I think that the sign for "The Point on the River" that said "It Reminds me of Amsterdam" was pushing it a bit too far... Upper middle - great buildings being renovated downtown. Upper middle - near where a friend of mine lives someone put some yard sculpture together with what appears to be buried cars in their front lawn. Upper right - a cool brand new building in the arts section of town. Lower left - a Ford Falcon used to deliver Jimmy John's. They built this car from 1960-1970 so someone has kept this guy running a long time. Lower middle - the famous city hall. Lower right - The Fonz! We were in our high end hotel and someone came right up to us to see if we had directions to the Fonz statue, and we were able to accommodate. Apparently he is a real tourist attraction.

Cross posted at Chicago Boyz

Saturday Night Sixties

2011-11-05T16:30:00.013-05:00

Damn, what a week. My contract has been fulfilled so this Saturday is special.

Back into semi-retirement mode for me, I've got a lot of livin' to do.

Time to set the wayback machine for the 60’s, my favorite decade.

Tonight, I'm pouring a Rusty Nail. Make it a double. On the rocks.

Ring-A-Ding-Ding!

Miller Brewery Tour

2011-11-04T20:19:00.000-05:00

Recently I went on the Miller Brewery Tour in Milwaukee. You can get more information about the tour here. The tour is free and highly recommended.

After a short 10 minute movie featuring an animated "Fredrick Miller", the German immigrant who purchased Plank Road Brewery and turned it into what is now Miller Brewing (technically part of Miller / Coors), the tour begins.

The highly automated process that fills the bottles and cans is very impressive. You overlook these processes from a hallway above and they have a short movie on flat screen TV's at this stage in addition to narration from the tour guide.

You can see the beer stacked up in the huge distribution warehouse. There is a north and south building with a "beer bridge" and conveyer connecting the two facilities. In addition to brewing the usual beers here they also brew Leinenkugel's, and Pabst (gulp) on contract.

The buildings connected together are in "Miller Valley". As you can see it is a valley and this is apparently the worlds largest hand painted sign (per the guide, at least).

At the end you tour the caves where the original Frederick Miller stored his beer to keep it cool in the summer, packed in ice from nearby lakes.

They give three free samples at the end of the tour. For us it was Peroni, Miller Lite, and one of your choice. The beer actually tasted excellent, cold and right out of the keg. Someone I was touring with said that it seemed strange to get a "free lunch" (beer without paying and a free tour) and I said that I had paid for this tour hundreds and hundreds of times over in my lifetime of "investment" in Miller products.

Another Beer Flight

2011-11-02T19:09:00.002-05:00

While in Milwaukee at the cool Benelux Cafe in the third ward I got the following beer flight. I texted a photo to Dan and his comment was

I'll bet you aren't going to work tomorrow

And he was right. But what a good flight.

Delirium Tremens
Maredsous Blonde
Saison Dupont
Tripel Karmeliet

Pitfalls of Banking

2011-11-02T18:59:00.000-05:00

As I walk to work every day I pass a series of "Payday lenders". These companies offer an advance to individuals without cash at a high interest rate, which is implied in the "fee" for providing cash as well as the short duration of the loan (a couple of weeks or a month). These practices are often frowned upon in the media as "taking advantage" of the poor.

As I pulled cash from an ATM I had to pull out the receipt of the prior person at the cash station (they had already left long ago) in order to get at my receipt because they just left it in the ATM. You can see the receipt below (it didn't have any identifying information).

This person is not someone who should be banking at all. They had a balance of $141 or so in their account, but they withdrew $140 with a $3 fee for using an out-of-network ATM, meaning that they were now going negative in their account. I don't know what bank they use (it isn't Chase) but many of these banks charge $20 or $30 or more for every single overdraft. Thus the "true" cost of pulling out this cash is really $3 out of network fee plus the $30 or so overdraft fee. This is a huge cost as a percentage of the money withdrawn ($33 / $140) = 23%, and if you assume any sort of "time" in order to compare it to a loan such as you'd get for a payday then it is astronomical. Let's assume 1 month duration and that it isn't APR just straight interest then let's multiply by 12 and you get 276%. Under any sort of "compounding" model it would be much higher.

The wikipedia entry under "payday loan" is surprisingly balanced, given that the industry has an overwhelmingly negative connotation in most media.

Payday lenders do not compare their interest rates to those of mainstream lenders. Instead, they compare their fees to the overdraft, late payment, and penalty fees that will be incurred if the customer is unable to secure any credit whatsoever. The lenders therefore list a different set of alternatives (costs expressed here as APRs for two-week terms)

$100 payday advance with $15 fee = 391% APR;
$100 bounced check with $48 NSF/merchant fees = 1,251% APR;
$100 credit card balance with $26 late fee = 678% APR;
$100 utility bill with $50 late/reconnect fees = 1,304% APR.

The banks too prey upon those who are low income or (relatively) financially illiterate; the fees by transaction can add up very quickly even for a small account. As a percentage of the account or if any sort of "time" basis is factored in, the results can be significant.

While I am not an expert in the system and don't know all of the alternatives it seems obvious that giving people access to credit, the immediate ability to withdraw cash, and not limiting their ability to accrue fines and fees is a sort of recipe for disaster. The person who withdrew this sum from the ATM, for certain, isn't the type of person who is going to fare well in a modern banking system.

Cross posted at Chicago Boyz

Crappy Beer Challenge "Bar Wear"

2011-11-01T22:08:00.000-05:00

One time I was walking through a mall years ago when I saw a store that sold "bar wear". I wasn't sure what they meant but...

I was recently on the Miller Beer Tour in Milwaukee and I noticed this line of hats. Ha! Virtually the only drinkable beer on this entire list is Blue Moon. Dan should put on a hat each time he tries a different awful beer. Don't forget Olde English 800!

"folk art" battleship

2011-10-31T21:05:00.001-05:00

I was recently in Milwaukee at a very interesting antique store in the 5th ward called the "Riverview Antique Market". A model caught my eye...

Of course it was a very well made "4 stacker" US destroyer of WW1 vintage. These destroyers were built in large numbers towards the end of WW1 to defeat German U-boats and were subsequently transferred to England in 1940 as part of "lend lease" as the US tried to help the Allies while remaining neutral prior to our entry in WW1.

When I looked at the price tag I was appropriately saddened as they described it as a "folk art battleship". The antique owner didn't even think to spend a couple of minutes online trying to figure out if it was a model of a real ship or just an "art object" that someone built from scratch.

Sad but likely only 1 in 10,000 individuals who passed by that model would have seen that it was a "real" model; the odds are probably even less in a hipster neighborhood of people looking for "vintage" objects. After all, it is all just art, anyways.

I, for one, was impressed.

Cross posted at Chicago Boyz

Monday Morning Blues

2011-10-31T02:48:00.000-05:00

Saturday Night Sixties

2011-10-29T16:00:00.006-05:00

Championships

2011-10-29T07:24:00.003-05:00

I was saddened when the St. Louis Cardinals won the World Series last night. I was sadder when they knocked my beloved Milwaukee Brewers out of the playoffs.

As was proven in Moneyball, the playoffs are quite the crap shoot. Much different than a 162 game season.

And that brings me to the point of this post. Do championships really tell what team is the "best" for any particular year? And does it really matter?

I used to get a lot more broken up about my teams losses in the past, but now take them as they come. I look at things from a much more, how should I say - pragmatic - point of view now.

Even though Ohio State only (only!) won one National Championship under Jim Tressel, they were called chokers and all sorts of other crap by media and fans of other teams. The Buckeyes were a force almost every single year. BUT they lost a couple of title games and all of a sudden they are chumps? I think not. Of course that all unwound with the corruption and other scandals, but you get my drift.

It seems that all anyone cares about is the title, and putting together a string of victories in football, or a killer season in baseball (such as Texas did this year) is, to me, a much greater accomplishment than winning one series or game. The Patriots a couple of years ago ran the table until the Super Bowl, when they lost. I still say they were the best team that year - but they failed to win the big one so they are marked as losers? Huh.

The Packers to me were the best team at the time of last years playoffs. They were only 10-6 during the regular season, but won their last five games, and are now elevated into football valhalla. If they run the table this year, and then, say, Rogers gets hurt and they stumble during the playoffs, will they be labeled chumps? Yes! It ain't fair, I tells ya.

But like the song says, that's just the way it is.

Something To Consider

2011-10-28T06:04:00.003-05:00

Doesn't matter which side you are on.

I consider myself a rabid conservative but George has a point. Maybe I am a libertarian after all. Tell you what, I ain't no fuck!ng hippie protester. But I sure have been p!ssed off lately.

Madison Police Set Bar Low For Commendations

2011-10-27T06:11:00.003-05:00

So I saw this in the online gazette today. I will give you the short version.

A woman lost her child five years or so ago. She has ridden her bicycle for that child since then. A criminal stole her bike out of her garage. Someone found the bike on the side of the road, and put up an ad on Craigslist to sell it. The cops were alerted and got the bike from the person selling it.

Here is the money line in the above referenced article:

The officers involved are now up for commendations- for their role in finding her bike.

This is typically a family blog, but what the fuck?!

I know cops have a dangerous job. I really do. But in general, they aren't going out every day and dodging bullets or breaking down crack house doors. Especially in Madison.

In this case, all some cops did was RECEIVE a phone call from some concerned citizens about the selling of the bike (it appears that the cops didn't even browse Craiglist!) and go drive over there and get it; that is an impossibly low bar that is set for commendations. I wonder what they get if you really do something insanely brave, such as save a life. Sheesh.

Meanwhile, the asshole that did this to me twice in one week is still at large.

All told, the damage and thefts cost me about $5,000 plus several nights of lost sleep. This smash and grab is a huge problem in Madison as there have been a ton of these types of crimes as of late. I am told that they now have video of the perp. Hope they get him. Commendation time if so! Hell, they will probably give those officers a year off.

Cracked Me Up

2011-10-25T18:53:00.004-05:00

These came to me in an email from an old boss of mine from the 80's, he's another Apple Disciple. Funny enough to share, I thought. Click to enlarge.

Whose That Girl?

2011-10-24T06:46:00.002-05:00

Trooper York is fond of playing the Whose That Girl game so in true internet fashion I am stealing the idea from him. I don't plan on doing it often. If you think about this one, you can guess it correctly. So, Whose That Girl?

Monday Morning Blues

2011-10-24T03:20:00.000-05:00

Hail Mary History

2011-10-23T18:01:00.003-05:00

I watched most of the amazing Michigan State vs. Wisconsin game last Saturday. The Badgers lost via a last second hail mary. I got to wondering, what was the original "Hail Mary"? As always, wiki provided the answer in seconds, and it was in a 1975 playoff game featuring Dallas vs. Minnesota. Staubach threw it, and while being asked about it in the locker room mentioned the term "Hail Mary" due to his Catholic faith.

I youtubed and quickly found the play. I also found the WHOLE GAME, that you can watch below if you have some spare time. It was so cool to watch this piece of historical football footage. Immediate things you will notice.

The turf was a mess at the old Met in Minneapolis.

Not a single one of these men could compete in today's NFL.

They had different equipment - from the facemasks to the pads.

The formations were a lot more like the college game. The shotgun and empty backfield was rarely used, and a lot of the time a two running back set was also used. The west coast offense was not discovered yet - it is clear that both teams based their offenses around the run.

It was great to see Landry and Bud Grant, along with a lot of other names from the past.

Clipping was called. That penalty I think is gone now, called an illegal block from behind or some nonsense.

The refs showed the penalty to both sides of the stadium.

There are a lot of other little things that you will look at and say - hey, I remember that. Just a cool little trip to the past.

As a side note, the Hail Mary was disputed, as the Vikings said that Pearson pushed off and they wanted offensive pass interference. At the end of the game the field was littered with trash and the head ref got nailed with a whiskey bottle and was knocked unconsious. Ah, the good 'ol days.