Our spring line-up

From one of the more enthusiastic military junk dealers whose catalogs I get.


Here's a deal you can't pass up! Not one, not two, but four ludicrous Italian Crusher hats. You'll be crushed, no doubt, when you wear these beauties into combat and your enemies die laughing. Luigi, que pazza?! How many times I'm-a-tella you? The pockets, they go on the pants, on the pants, not the hats.

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Clearly, somebody took Mussolini's hearkening back to the glory days of Rome a bit too seriously. "Never issued:" I bet they weren't.

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And finally, evidence that the French military is following our lead in doing away with don't-ask-don't-tell, they're dumping their field closets. Just the thing for camping it up at the old campground.

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That's all for now!

Jalopnik's Worst Car / Driver mapping

The Jalopnik blog (motto: Drive Free or Die) listed its readers' selection of which cars map to poor driving skills. The article is here. Here's the summary:

• 10: Prius
  
• 09: Minivans
  
• 08: Ram Pickups
  
• 07: Nissan Murano
  
• 06: Volvo
  
• 05: BMW
  
• 04: Subaru WRX/STI
  
• 03: Ferrari
  
• 02: Mercedes G-Wagen
  
• 01: Lexus RX
  

Some of this, I believe, reflects an international view (Volvos are not generally deprecated in the US, in particular, but as far back as the Eighties, they were the motorcyclist's special bête noire in the UK, Volvo drivers being seen as even more distracted and dangerous than the run of the mill Conservative Party Member with six drinks under his belt.

It also seems to take into consideration parking habits as well as behavior exhibited under way. And with the Prius, the accusations seem pretty vague, but perhaps further study will show that a silent car is one you can forget you're driving. Who knows? Anyway, I was glad to see that neither the G35 nor the 350Z showed up on the list, as did not the 2003 Chevy Express 3500 Kamper Konversion. Dodged (pun fully intended) the bullet again.

See the Jalopnik post for mildly amusing pictures of the vehicles in question, in embarassing situations.

Georgetown prognostication

See if you get the same feeling from this article as I do. Namely, the Georgetown developer got a break on the demolition grant, but isn't saying whether he has money to build the new thing.

That is, there'll be a demolition site sitting there for years while the current guy goes broke and the city scrambles to find somebody else. See Maiden Lane as an example, or remember what South Main and William used to look like.

Is this just the way it goes, or is Ann Arbor especially trusting?

Who am I (to stand and wonder, to wait ...)

I have been characterized, when anyone pays enough attention to bother characterizing me, as a "liberal" and even a "Democrat," primarily because I often mock, abuse, cast stones at, and generally disrespect Republicans and conservatives. I respond, when I pay enough attention, by asserting I am Rubber, You are Glue ... --- Oh, yeah! Well, yo' momma so left of center, she ... by asserting that I approach issues without reference to ideology or partisanship, and that I am just mindlessly cynical a true independent.

The current social and economic situation in Detroit gives me a perfect opportunity to demonstrate the extent to which I cannot be easily lumped into one political grouping, just because I usually make the sign of averting when I hear of take a position in opposition to that of the Republican party. Some people see the appointment of an Emergency Financial Manager for the city as a disenfranchisement of the voters, since it effectively yanks the rug out from under the Mayor and City Council, for whom, hard as it may be to imagine, someone actually voted. My view is, to quote a associate of mine, so what's your point?

The City of Detroit, under the leadership of people elected by the city's voters, has become an embarrassment, an international joke, and a flaming disaster, not only for itself but for the whole state. No matter how much both of us may regret it, Detroit and the State of Michigan are inseparable, part of the same family, as it were, and the patience of the family is exhausted. Detroit -- its leaders, its voters, and all -- just got a bad performance review, and the state is putting them on an improvement plan.

Whether or not the EFM can "succeed" (and the definition of success in this case is wildly unclear, ranging from, on the one hand, a return to at least marginally balanced books to, at the other extreme, selling the whole place to North Korea,) something has to be attempted. Under the current crew of idiots Mayor and Council, nothing would have been tried, nothing would have changed, no effort beyond quibbling and posturing would have been imaginable.

So, while the state Democrats consider whether they can make an issue of it in opposition to the Governor's reelection campaign, and the Republicans undoubtedly hope to smear the Dems as being "soft on Detroit," I'm in the unusual position, for me, of backing Snyder.

Missed it by that much!

Son of a ... I had the interview nailed! My resume absolutely killed them. They loved my background in management and my process improvement chops. We were within a few thousand on the salary and perks -- down to quibbling about clothing allowance and so on. And then this little Italian guy in the back of the room has to stick his head up.

"Sorry to even bring this up -- dumb question, really. You are, um, a Catholic, right?"

Dammit, dammit, dammit!

Off to a good start

One of the state's largest embarrassments has been removed, and I'm not talking about that old railroad station in Detroit. Kwame Kilpatrick and his stalking horse, Bobby Ferguson, are in the federal pen, down in Milan. The folks down there have been leaving a light on for them for a long time. Once again, the most cleverly-crafted piece of legislation in decades, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations act - lovingly known as RICO - has been used to prosecute people who richly deserved prosecutin'. RICO is as close as we can get to a law against being a bottom-feeding, knuckle-dragging dickhead.

As one of the many millions of people who have Googled RICO in the last few days, I found some interesting cases to support my assertion that it's a well-written law, aimed straight at the practice of scumbaggery. Did you know that RICO has been tried (not always successfully) against all of these?

• Catholic dioceses in abuse cases
  
• The Hells Angels
  
• An anti-abortion group
  
• Major League Baseball
  
• The Key West, Florida Police Department
  
• The Gambino crime family
  

Now Kilpatrick and Ferguson join this club. Did I really say an embarrassment was removed? What was I thinking?

Conflicted again ... but not very much

So Hugo Chavez is dead. The bastard was two years younger than I am, and managed to do a lot more damage in his time than I ever could, so I'm somewhat jealous. A bit more seriously, a public death of an incurable disease is nothing I'd wish on anyone (with a few exceptions, I suppose.) And for the people who had been conned into seeing him as a great savior, standing between them and Yankee neocolonialism, my sympathies. Being deeply confused doesn't exempt one from grief and dispair (consider the Tea Baggers in our own nation, for example.)

But in the course of all the breast-beating and US-blaming in which his party is now wallowing, let's recall what he was: a South American dictator. History records almost none of that breed, on the left or the right, who were anything more than the scum that rose to the surface of the soup pot.

It was sad to watch the resurgence of so-called Socialism in the South, driven by Chavez' Venezuela and his antics. Socialism was not at all what they were offering, and none of them, Chavez included, actually wanted any such thing. When you're rebelling, you claim to be a socialist because it sounds like the antithesis of whatever you're rebelling against; when you get into power, you claim that you've carried out a socialist revolution, and you tell the nation that everyone has to get in line and oppose the forces that are trying to undermine ... etc., etc. This is all straight out of "Being a Despot for Dummies." Standard stuff, but the truly poor, the truly downtrodden keep buying it, decade after decade, despot after despot.

Problem is, when your newly-empowered despot starts running around the globe, fraternizing with Iran, talking smack at the UN, and nationalizng oil refineries, then foreign investment declines. The economy becomes a zero-sum game, and instead of building a better life for all, the country is faced with a choice of whose lives will be improved. And that, friends, is where Socialism in the underdeveloped world falls flat on its ass. Suddenly, there's an opposition party (or several), repression becomes necessary, the army and police become concerned with "maintaining order," and civil liberties begin to vanish. You turn up the rhetoric against whoever it is, externally, that you can blame (and they may, in fact, be to blame for some of your woes.) As the result of a process, not necessarily a plan, you slip into totalitarianism. Many of the Arab Spring revolutions will go or have already gone this path; bet on it in Syria. Chavez, the Castros, Mohamed Morsi -- they're nothing new, just a batch of jumped-up faction fighters "from the back of Nephin Mountain," as Patrick O'Brian put it.

Another piece of good advice

Some time back, I said about one of my various ailments, "You really don't want to get this," or words to that effect. Well, WRT slipping on the ice and breaking your dominant wrist, ditto.

I am getting back most of the use of it, including some typing, but I still have substantial numbness in the fingers, making precision questionable. I drop a lot of stuff. However, I can now wield my chef's knife with the right hand, a distinct sign of progress.

Anyway, Linda and I strongly recommend Stabilicers as a way of not slipping. Yaktrax not so much; they wear out and break, leaving you with a broken coil spring dangling from your boot.

Needless, I hope, to say, I wasn't wearing anything like this when I went off the side of the porch.

This has been your good advice of the day.

Interesting choice of words

Michigan is considering a bill that would make it harder (although not very hard) on people who own abandoned property and do nothing about it. Well and good and not especially fascinating except for this quote from Sen. Virgil Smith, D-Detroit, who introduced the bill:

"The banks have been proactive working with us. They don't want to sit on property. It hurts their bottom line."

I bet it does.

Many years ago, we took on a small data processing contract from the Girl Scouts. Basically a matter of doing the data entry and some cross-tabs for a member-satisfaction survey. Besides scalar responses, there was a lot of free text, and we read all of it in an effort to reduce it to something the Council could act on. One pair of questions was something like this: "Which activity do you like least?" and "Why?"

One of the younger respondents answered, "Sitting on the floor" and "Hurts my butt." Somehow, the quote above about the banks brought that to mind.

Dog fighting station wagons?

Video here of some idiots shooting paintballs at each other while flailing around in a couple of overweight Audis. The still above is circa 1972, with me driving and a gentleman who shall remain nameless on the roof rack.