The Electron Pencil

Heads Up

1. Tomorrow begins a two-day celebration of the life of this holy land’s premier socialist, Indiana’s own Eugene V. Debs. A documentary film entitled — what else? — American Socialist will be shown at The Bishop followed by a discussion with historian Paul Buhle. The event is sponsored by WFHB, The Bishop, the Burroughs Century, the Indiana University Office of the Vice Provost in Charge of Research, The Ryder Film Series, and Verso Books. Buhle has written dozens of books about the history of radicalism in America.
2. The next day, Saturday, there’ll be a day trip to Terre Haute to see the Debs family home now on the campus of Indiana State University. Then, at 5:00pm at the I Fell Gallery, I along with some of Bloomington’s finest wordsmiths and cogitators will read from Debs’ writings. My piece will be from his seminal 1902 labor tract, “What’s the Matter with Chicago.”
3. My guest today on Big Talk will be Sue Sgambelluri, a fundraiser for IU, and candidate for the Dist. 2 seat on Bloomington’s city council. She’s facing two-term incumbent Dorothy Granger and environmental activist Daniel Bingham in the Democrat primary in May. The lone Republican to file for any local office in this year’s election, Andrew Guenther, is running unopposed in that party’s primary.

Debs

Sgambelluri

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Ready, Shame, Fire!

Al Jazeera, still a top-notch news gathering outfit even after it discontinued its American cable TV operations almost exactly three years ago, Tuesday ran this illuminating piece on the NRA’s pernicious public relations apparatus:

An Al Jazeera reporter went undercover to infiltrate the NRA and cozied up to the flacks who spin the lobbying gang’s message that automatic rifles are more important to you than your internal organs.

Whenever some loon sprays a schoolyard with bullets, the sane among us wring our hands and wonder why we don’t have more stringent gun protections. That’s when the NRA spin masters earn their blood money. We’ve seen, countless times, social media posts from our more troglodyte-ish “friends” the finger-shaking “How can you politicize this horrible tragedy” scold directed at those of us who’ve reacted to said tragedy by calling for reasonable, rational gun laws. Well — guess what — that brand of bullshit is packaged and marketing by the NRA’s PR teams.

“Just shame them to the whole idea” of stronger gun laws, the flacks advise their enablers and abettors all over the world.

As if to be concerned about the lives of kids is something to be ashamed of.

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A Writer’s Life

A new biography of literary titan Nelson Algren comes out next month. Never a Lovely So Real, will be released by WW Norton & Co. on the 16th.

Algren wrote the gritty The Man with the Golden Arm, an unflinching portrayal of poverty, brutishness, crime, love, morphine addiction, and assorted vices in Chicago’s Near West Side Polish neighborhood set in the period immediately following World War II. The city’s Polish community and its civic leaders in general suffered apoplexy when the novel came out in 1949.

The animus toward Algren lasted well into the 1980s when a section of Evergreen Street was proposed to be designated Nelson Algren Way. Algren had lived in a walk-up apartment in the Wicker Park neighborhood and had famously courted the French feminist author Simone de Beauvoir there. She later wrote that she experienced the first climactic event (ahem) of her life therein. This, of course, came (pardon the pun) even after she’d been keeping company with the philosopher/author Jean-Paul Sartre, illustrating one thing or another about the French and their putative boudoir capabilities. Anyway, local Polish-American leaders and other bluenoses fought tooth and nail against the proposal but ultimately lost.

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BTW: Frank Sinatra would star in the 1955 film adaptation of the novel directed by Otto Preminger. Sinatra’d already won the Academy Award for his comeback performance in From Here to Eternity and wanted to broaden his acting chops with his portrayal of Algren’s protagonist, the recovering addict and in-demand card dealer Frankie Machine. The movie, The Man with the Golden Arm, is one of those public domain titles that can be found, uncut, on the internet. For some reason, probably sloppy paperwork, whoever was in charge of such things neglected to renew the movie’s copyright. Same thing with another Sinatra vehicle, Suddenly, the tale of a gang conspiring to assassinate the President of the United States.

People might not realize what a fabulous actor Frank Sinatra was. Check out either of these two films and see for yourself.

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Here was my draft lead for this post, pre-5:00am today:

I’ll say this: John Hamilton is running hard, real hard.

After reading the blockbuster IDS exclusive story at that early hour, I edited the lead to read:

John Hamilton can take a four and a half week vacation with his family and come back on May 8th safely ensconced as the re-elected mayor of the city of Bloomington.

Whew. Where to begin? Some quick first impressions:

1. When first saw the hed I was immediately angry at the person who conveyed it to me. You know, kill the messenger and all that.
2. As I delved into the article, I thought, That damned Hamilton! He paid this guy off to slander his opponent! You know, misdirected anger and all that.
3. I read the thing six times, looking for flaws, for weaknesses, for chinks in its armor. I found none.
4. At 6:00am, I was mad as hell at Amanda Barge.

She allegedly committed three cardinal sins:

1. Sexual harassment (at least morally, if not federally defined)
2. Getting intimately involved with a county contractor
3. Preying on someone who suffers from the very malady she’s been trained to deal with and should know not to fuck with

We might add a venial sin:

1. Don’t commit to emails or texts evidence that’ll kill your political career

Damn. Damn. Damn it all. First the Mueller report and now this? What are these people trying to do, turn me off to the whole goddamned system?

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Microgreens

BTW: Impression # 5: the IDS scoop is further evidence the Herald Times is fast becoming an afterthought in this town. I’ve got to guess Brendan Drake took his tale to the HT and found no takers. It was a college newspaper that grabbed the story and held it by the neck for more than two months.

That, my friends, is journalism.

The lead story in the Herald Times online today? The restaurant La Vie en Rose Cafe has new hours. Oh, and the Hive restaurant has some tasty new menu items including a Baja Bowl, with “a base of dressed field greens topped with chicken breast, bacon, Sartori cheddar cheese, marinated red onion, pico de gallo, avocado salsa and microgreens.”

Suddenly, I’m not so down on Indiana University’s Media School.

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Get Out Of Jail Free

I’ll do here what I did on social media yesterday (posts quoted in chronological order):

1. Hoo boy. Now do we get to stop seeing memes about Mueller being a superhero who’ll save us from the evil archvillain?
2. In other words, nobody’s gonna save us from ourselves but ourselves.
3. And another thing: I never bought into the fantasy that Trump’s campaign conspired with the Russkies to swipe the election. His business is largely financed by Russians, sure. But he never intended his run for the presidency to be anything more than a brand-building exercise, so why would he collude to win? For their part, the Russians pushed his campaign via bots, hackers, and trolls because they wanted to fuck with our electoral system — and consequently the very fabric of our society — in the worst possible way. They got precisely what they wanted.

And I’ll add this new observation: I notice a lot of posters saying something on the order of Now we have to look forward to the criminal investigations in New York and Washington DC and hope they’ll get us an impeachment or indictment of Trump.

See? People are still looking for that White Knight, that quasi-messianic figure in the cloak of a righteous prosecutor who’ll deliver us from evil, amen. Isn’t that what got us into this damned mess in the first place? People looking for a solitary man to save us?

We’re the nation of Shane. And shame.

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Trivia Time

You’d think Easter would have been yesterday, at least acc’d’g to the Roman Catholic Church’s formula for determining the date each year of its primary holiday

Common knowledge has it that the Church determines Easter using the following formula:

1. The first Sunday after…
2. … the first full moon…
3. …after the vernal equinox.

So, the vernal equinox this year occurred a couple of minutes before 9:00pm (Coordinated Universal Time; the modern-day replacement for what we used to call Greenwich Mean Time) Wednesday, March 20th. The moon turned full at about a quarter to two the next morning, Thursday, March 21st. Ergo, Easter should be yesterday, n’est-ce pas?

Non. The Church way back in the year 325 CE determined the vernal equinox to forever be April 21st, despite what the most advanced astronomers of the day (primarily Arabs and Chinese) already knew to be the real nature of the phenomenon.

So, the Catholics and other Western Christrians among us’ll have to wait four weeks for the moon to make its pokey way around its orbit before they can start digging into their dyed eggs and ham.

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Thesaurus: Tired, Old, Fussy, Cranky, Stubborn….

Headline:

So, what is the DCCC?

It’s the Party’s strategic and fundraising arm devoted to getting more and more Democrats elected to Congress. It was started in 1866.

Like many things that are more than 150 years old, it long ago started to stink.

Headline:

A more up-to-date def. should read:

It’s the Democrats’ mirror image of the old white men of the Republican Party who are scared to death they’re losing their exalted position of privilege and are willing to fuck up everything in the slim hope they may keep their throne.

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Make no mistake, redux: The Devin Nunes lawsuit is simply the opening salvo in a concerted effort by the neo-fascist Right to bankrupt any and all dissenting, oppositional electronic media.

Sure, the sane among us say Nunes’ legal action against a couple of Twitter account holders, Twitter itself, and some political strategist wouldn’t even get to summary judgement. I mean, this is the textbook def. of a nuisance lawsuit. That’s not the point.

Even defendants in nuisance suits have to spend good, hard-earned dough on lawyers before the case is thrown out. That’s the point. As Nunes himself has said, this particular instance of legal harassing is simply “the first of many.”

In other words, nuisance suits will be a planned strategy whose only possible goal is to bankrupt speakers and the media that carry them.

See, here’s the diff. between the Terrified Right and the rest of us: They see foreigners and outsiders and brown-skinned aliens as the danger. Uh-uh. The fabric of our democracy or republic or however in the hell you want to describe this holy land will be unraveled by our own fellow citizens. The truth is, as cartoonist Walt Kelly’s creation “Pogo” famously observed, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

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Losing Touch

BTW: If you’re thinking the dismantlement of the news media and the death knell of investigative journalism are theoretical horrors of the future, disabuse yourself. To wit: Thousands of jobs in newspapers and other news disseminating operations have been lost already this year. Observers are saying this is the biggest mass layoff in the biz since the Great Recession.

One result: Most of us will be getting our news from knuckleheads who post memes on social media.

My journalistic idols, Mike Royko, Studs Terkel, and Molly Ivins are spinning like driveshafts in their graves.

Ivins

Terkel

Royko

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Seat Seekers

Here’s the podcast link for yesterday’s Big Talk featuring Ron Smith, candidate in this year’s Democratic primary for outgoing Bloomington city council member Allison Chopra’s District 3 seat. Smith’s going toe-to-toe with Jim Blickensdorf, owner of Grazie Italiano restaurant on the square. No Republican has filed in that party’s primary for the seat so the winner between Smith and Blickensdorf will be the de facto general election victor.

Gambelluri

Smith

Next week’s guest will be Indiana University fundraiser Sue Sgambelluri. She’s facing off against Daniel Bingham and incumbent Dorothy Granger in the Dem primary for the District 2 seat. Andrew Guenther is running unopposed in the Republican primary.

Tune in every Thursday at 5:30pm, immediately following the Daily Local News on WFHB, 91.3 FM, for Big Talk. All Big Talks are archived here.

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Doings

Saturday, March 30th is going to be jammed packed w/ stuff to do.

There’ll be a meet & greet for all the city council candidates at the Upland Brewing Company from 3-5pm, sponsored by Democracy for Monroe County, Indivisible Bloomington & the 9th District, and The Indiana Latino 9th District Democratic Caucus.

Then, dash over to the I Fell Gallery for readings from the works of Indiana’s biggest-ever socialist and labor organizer, Eugene V. Debs The Debs thing runs from 5-7pm and is sponsored by the Writers Guild at Bloomington, the Burroughs Century, WFHB, and the Ryder Film Series.

I’ll be reading from Debs’ 1902 piece for the Chicago Socialist magazine entitled, “What’s the Matter with Chicago?” Debs spent years in prison for labor organizing and then for opposing US participation in the Great War. He even ran for president from his jail cell.

His family home still stands, surrounded by a parking lot, on the campus of Indiana State University in Terre Haute. The Loved One and I once spent a delightful, sunny fall Sunday afternoon sitting in its back yard, surrounded by plaques commemorating some of this holy land’s most famed labor agitators.

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Bottle-fed

The Loved One seems to be losing here ardor for recycling these days. I hadn’t thought about it much but she’s been digging into some of the realities of the practice. We “progressives,” or what in the hell ever you want to call us, like to recycle because it makes us feel a touch better about a world that seems to be getting snowed under by single-use plastics, paperboard packaging, and heavy metal detritus.

It’s not that TLO doesn’t care about the shithouse we’re turning our planet into. It’s just that recycling of late has become as effective a habit as spitting in the wind.

New York Times business reporter Michael Corkey suggests recycling is a dying proposition these days due to any number of factors in a March 16th piece.

Me? I’d be happy if we went back to packaging consumer liquids in glass and then bringing the empties back to the store for pennies. The grocery stores, in my youth, were essentially recycling centers before anybody even knew what the word recycling meant.

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Viagra Voters

Make no mistake at all: The swatch of ignorant old white men who largely comprise President Gag’s base really are itching for a civil war. They’re depressed about seeing their exalted place in this holy land’s hierarchy slipping away. They’re depressed because they’re getting older, crankier, achier, more hard of hearing, less able to get a boner, and all the rest of the maladies and misfortunes that beset aging males.

They’re pissed because younger guys are…, well, younger, less cranky, less achy, can hear perfectly, can sustain an erection for hours on end, and seemingly aren’t aging a second.

The old bastards feel they have nothing to lose. So what if the globe’s climate is going to hell? I ain’t gonna be around to see it! So what if the demographics of this nation are inexorably changing. I want to ensure a privileged place for my grandchildren, dammit! So, as long as the clock’s running out on them, why not foment a civil war? A good rain, as Travis Bickle so presciently observed, will clean up the streets good.

I’d stake the mortgage on both Li’l Duce and Iowa’s Steve King feeling that way. As long as it has to be done, they’re thinking, let’s do it! The president recently bragged about all the tough guys who support him and King of late has been posting new civil war memes on social media.

Plus, President Gag’s sociopathology coupled with his messianic delusions seem a perfect formula for him to foment a civil war here or a nuclear war elsewhere.

We’re in a race to see what happens first: the president leaves office or he sets off a series of events leading up to a traumatic comeuppance for America and the world.

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Writing Right

People who aren’t writers don’t realize that writers are writing even when they’re not sitting in front of their keyboards. Perhaps the term even is inapt; I might have substituted the word especially.

My best writing is done when I stand at the sink, say, in the morning, washing dishes. Or while I’m driving. Or vacuuming. In other words, whenever I’m engaged in any sort of repetitive activity. Now and again, I wake up in the middle of the night with a melodic, trenchant line or graf running through my head and I have to jot it down so I won’t forget it when I rise.

For me — and, I’d imagine, for most writers — the words we string together, when strung properly and with inspiration, are music. I love to run through them repeatedly, listening to their tone and melody, grooving on them, quite possibly the way George Gershwin or Jimmy Webb played their songs, perhaps continuously, in their heads as each tune came into fruition.

Not only that, I love to “play” lines and grafs written by others in my head, just to hear another writer’s music. For instance, here’s a graf from Truman Capote’s novella, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, describing the moment the narrator first sees Holly Golightly:

Perfect Casting.

I went out into the hall and leaned over the banister, just enough to see without being seen. She was still on the stairs, now she reached the landing, and the ragbag colors of her boy’s hair, tawny streaks, strands of albino-blond and yellow, caught the hall light. It was a warm evening, nearly summer, and she wore a slim cool black dress, black sandals, a pearl choker. For all her chic thinness, she had an almost breakfast-cereal air of health, a soap and lemon cleanness, a rough pink darkening in the cheeks. Her mouth was large, her nose upturned. A pair of dark glasses blotted out her eyes. It was a face beyond childhood, yet this side of belonging to a woman. I thought her anywhere between sixteen and thirty; as it turned out, she was shy two months of her nineteenth birthday.

One of my favorite sports books of all time was a memoir written by Pat Jordan about his brief professional baseball career entitled A False Spring. He never made it past the lowest minors. He was a dumb kid, on his own, with a few bucks in his pocket and no idea what to do with his life when he wasn’t aiming fastballs and curveballs at his catcher’s mitt. At one stop in a small Georgia town, Jordan lived in a rooming house. He describes the dinner put out by the landlady each night, how his fellow lonely roomers dug into their meals silently, staring into their plates, raising their heads only to reach for seconds. The landlady, Jordan wrote, placed hot bowls of meats and vegetables and freshly baked rolls and mashed potatoes on the table, “the steam rising from them like charmed cobras.”

Beautiful. Jordan, like Capote, makes you imagine much more than the details his words convey.

I’d love to take that charmed cobras line and use it myself, rather like a songwriter borrowing a few bars from an old favorite tune. Lines like those rattle around in my cranium all day long, bouncing off my own lines, creating a jumble of white noise, out of which I pluck the lines I’ll use in whatever I’m working on today.

But I have to be careful not to swipe big swatches of verbiage from other writers. I might use the charmed cobras imagery one day but there is, of course, a limit to such scrounging. I wouldn’t limn a waif-like, chic, ethereal young woman with whom I’d become instantly infatuated using the precise 146 words Capote did to sketch Holly Golightly.

Adam & Eve, Garden of Eden [Image: Jane Adams]

The thing is, the lines I might create on my own could very well get mixed up with the beautiful lines I cherish from other writers. That’s a pitfall all writers must try to avoid. Only one wordsmith, acc’d’g to Mark Twain, never had to worry about plagiarism. Twain wrote:

It all began with Adam. He was the first man to tell a joke — or a lie. How lucky Adam was. He knew when he said a good thing, nobody had said it before. Adam was not alone in the Garden of Eden, however, and does not deserve all the credit; much is due to Eve, the first woman, and Satan, the first consultant.

Hey, that’s a graf that’ll be rattling around in my brain for the foreseeable future too. I’d better be on my guard not to inadvertently swipe it one day.

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The Challengers

I get the feeling listeners are really digging my Big Talk series featuring candidates for Bloomington city council this election year.

The series began four weeks ago with Kate Rosenbarger, running for the District 1 seat currently held by Chris Sturbaum. Then came Miah Michaelson, challenging Dave Rollo in District 4; Andrew Guenther, the Republican, setting his sights on the District 2 seat occupied by Dorothy Granger; and, last week, Jean Capler, shooting for one of the three At-Large seats now held by Susan Sandberg, Jim Sims, and Andy Ruff.

Coming up Thursday: Ron Smith, punching it out with fellow first-timer Jim Blickensdorf for the District 3 prize (incumbent Allison Chopra’s not running this time around).

That leaves six more weeks of programs before the May 7th primary and — guess what — there are six remaining challengers for city council seats. Swear to god I didn’t plan it that way. The political oddsmakers in the sky just seemed to smile upon me, mathematically, when I came up with the idea for this series in January. And speaking of oddsmakers, I’m going to post an informal betting book here the Monday before Primary Day, setting the odds for each candidate. Not that I expect anybody around these parts to actually lay down any of their hard-earned cash on the results — sheesh, I’ve never lived in a town with such a dearth of bettors.

Looking To Lay A Bundle On Steve Volan.

BTW: I’m not inviting any incumbents on for this series because…, well, I don’t have enough free time slots for them. I figure they get covered by the Herald-Times; WFHB’s Sarah Vaughan does a fabulous job squeezing CATS Week down to digestible morsels for the Daily Local News; and every once in a great while one of them might be mentioned on a WFIU newsbreak during Morning Edition or All Things Considered.

In fact, one of this town’s political junkies challenged me the other day, suggesting I was short-changing the incumbents. I explained my reasoning to this person at which point s/he said, “Isn’t that unfair?”

In the interest of all honesty, I replied, “Sorta, I guess. So what?”

The Incumbents (L-R): Ruff, Piedmont-Smith, Chopra, Sturbaum, Granger, Rollo, Sandberg, Volan, Sims.

So, When You’re Dead….

Birch Bayh

Funny little tidbit I found in yesterday’s New York Times story about the death of former Indiana Senator Birch Bayh. The author of the piece was going down the list of historic accomplishments of the Hoosier Dem (and, yeah, there were such things as statewide Hoosier Dems in a long, long ago world) and got to Title IX, which changed the landscape of college sports among other things. More on that 1972 federal civil rights  law in a bit but eyeball this excerpt:

Title IX brought him his greatest satisfaction, Mr. Bayh said — even though many others were involved in its passage, as he acknowledged, notably Representatives Edith Green of Oregon and Patsy Mink of Hawaii.

“I’d say probably this had a more profound impact on more Americans than anything else I was able to do,” he said in a telephone interview for this obituary in 2010.

Did you catch that?  “… [H]e said a telephone interview for this obituary….” How did the writer, noted NYT obituarist (yep, the word does exist) Adam Clymer, preface his interview with Bayh? “Good morning, Senator, I’m writing your obituary and I was wondering….”

It’s common knowledge that obituaries for public figures are written well in advance of their deaths. But I honestly didn’t know the writers thereof actually called their assigned subjects and said, essentially, Tell me about your life so that we can run a story about you when you drop dead.

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Unintended Consequences

Title IX, among many other things, ensured that women could get an equal crack at school sports. Since the federal law’s passage in ’72 female participation in school athletics had increased about 900 percent (high school) and 450 percent (college) acc’d’g to a 2006 research paper.

Thing is, colleges and universities had to figure out a way to pay for all the new female sports teams Title IX gave rise to. And since the only collegiate sports that generate revenue are football and men’s basketball, those particular sports have since become the corrupt cash cows we now know them to be. They have to bankroll all the other sports that, really, nobody goes to see.

Lots Of Seats Available.

I’ve gone to an Indiana University baseball night game a time or two and the crowds in those games couldn’t possibly have paid the bill to keep the lights on. The IU Women’s basketball team drew an average of 4,102 to its 21 home games in 2017-18, acc’d’g to official NCAA figures. At $5.00 a pop ($3 for kids aged 3-18) that’s a per game gate of, at best, $20,510. That does not pay the entire freight when you consider the tabs for uniforms, travel, food, coaches’ salaries, exercise equipment, the electric bill, balls and nets, and a hundred other invoices.

It’s up to the unpaid slaves who fill out collegiate football and men’s basketball rosters to generate enough scratch to cover every other sport’s chits. The more dough these sports earn, the more college athletics depts. get to spread among the likes of the men’s swimming and diving and women’s cross country teams.

Collegiate football and men’s basketball have become big business, of necessity, and with that come all the sins and crimes big business engenders. I’m not blaming women’s sports for this, just saying nobody in 1972 could have foreseen the fallout from this gender parity.

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Council Contests

Here the link to yesterday’s Big Talk podcast with my guest Jean Capler, candidate for one of the three At-Large seats on the city council in this years’ Democratic primary.

Smith

Stay tuned for next week’s show with Ron Smith, who’s going toe-to-toe with another first-timer, Grazie Italiano founder Jim Blickensdorf, in the council’s District 3. Smith is a social worker who’s served on any number of national, state, and local social service agencies including the Area 10 Agency on Aging and the Child Welfare Policy and Practice Group. As a side note, he and his long-time bride, Lynne Schwartzberg are huge Chicago Cubs fans, a detail that makes me want to vote for him three times, only I don’t live within the city limits.

Anyway, Big Talk airs every Thursday at 5:30pm, immediately following the Daily Local News, on WFHB, 91.3 FM. You can access the full archive of Big Talk podcasts online here.

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A Delicious Odium

There’s a ton of stuff I’m proud of accomplishing, abstaining from, avoiding, or just detesting. I’ve never done heroin, for instance. Too chicken.

Another is I’ve always detested Friends. I seem to recall giving the sitcom a shot back in the ’90s. Within seconds I wanted all the characters to be wiped out by a disease or terrorists or something. I’m thinking of this because I watched an old HBO special featuring Janeane Garofalo the other day. She was riffing on the Dave Mathews Band and Hootie & the Blowfish. She said there was a certain type of person who bought their albums. The kind of person who liked Friends.

The Hathaways

I’ve always liked Janeane Garofalo. That is, except when she donned horn-rimmed glasses and started getting all political. I just wanted to scream, “You’re not a policy wonk, for chrissakes!”

Then, last night, The Loved One and I were talking about the first sitcom we ever remember seeing as kids. For her it was The Mothers-in-Law. For me: The Hathaways. Swear to god, The Hathaways was about this California couple who for some ungodly reason raises a trio of chimps as their children. It made My Mother the Car look like the finest work of George Bernard Shaw.

Pure Evil.

Back to wanting bad things to happen to the characters in Friends. I recall thinking the exact same thing when I saw The Big Chill. I just hated those people. I hated their little problems. I hated the relationships. I hated the fact that they danced while cooking some detestable communal dinner. I prayed for evil-doers with powerful firearms to burst in and put them all out of my misery.

Does any of this make me a bad person?

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Signs Of The Times

Had a brief pre-coffee chat w/ one of the folks running for Bloomington city council this AM. This person — let’s call her/him Tyler — says the incumbent s/he’s running against is playing dirty pool. The incumbent, sez this challenger, is getting a bunch of apartment building owners to put up yard signs (for the incumbent) on their properties.

The challenger doesn’t like this because, s/he asks, “What about all the people who live in the apartments? Do they all support the incumbent?”

Turns out the practice is not illegal nor is it much frowned upon in casual conversation among pols. Still, the challenger says, “When people put yard signs up in front of the homes, you know that’s the voice of the person who lives there.”

Fair enough. I pointed out, though, that businesses — restaurants, specialty shops, taverns, etc. — put up candidates’ signs all the time. That’s no guarantee that the business owners’ employees want those candidates to win.

You’re looking for every edge you can get, I guess, when you’re running for office.

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Eyeless in Daytona Beach

I love this story. In 1915, some smart alecks came up with an idea for a prank. Send an airplane up and have someone therein drop a baseball from it. Then see if a catcher could actually, y’know, catch it, down on the ground, a few hundred feet below.

Interestingly, it doesn’t matter how high the airplane would be because, as all us post-Galileo humans know, objects reach a terminal velocity when falling. So it’s not as though if the plane were 15,000 feet high the ball would end up speeding down to Earth at thousands of MPH.

Anyway, the two smart alecks recruited an old catcher named Wilbert Robinson, who by then had become the manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, to don his catcher’s gear and try to catch the pelota while the team was in spring training at Daytona Beach, Florida. The plane went up, circled overhead, Robinson craned his neck, looking straight up in the air, pounded his mitt, and got ready to gather the spheroid in.

BTW: the people behind the prank were future Hall of Fame manager Casey Stengel, one of the game’s most storied characters (he’s famous for aphorism and malapropisms like “The key to being a good manager is to keep the five guys who hate you away from the five guys who haven’t made up their minds yet,” and “They say some of my stars drink whiskey but I have found that those who drink milkshakes don’t win many games”) and noted aviatrix Ruth Law Oliver. She would go on to set a distance speed record by flying from Chicago to New York State, some 590 miles, the next year.

Wilbert Robinson, a fireplug of a man at 5’8″ and 215 pounds, watched the object drop into his mitt from an original altitude of 520 feet. It hit the leather with a sickening splat. Robinson screamed, “Help me lads! I’m covered in my own blood!”

Casey Stengel

Ruth Law Oliver

Wilbert Robinson

The players and reporters who’d gathered around to watch the stunt roared with laughter. What Robinson hadn’t known was Oliver somehow had forgotten to bring a baseball up with her in the plane. Thinking quickly, she’d grabbed a grapefruit from her brown bag lunch and dropped it instead. Naturally, it exploded when it hit Robinson’s mitt and thereby splattered him not with his own blood but grapefruit juice. Some of the juice had got into his eye, resulting in stinging pain. Robinson thought the momentum of the “baseball” had put his eye out, the poor bastard.

Another version of the story has Stengel convincing Oliver to drop a grapefruit rather than a baseball even before she’d gone up. I prefer the other story.

Robinson took the prank in good stride. Hell, he was probably thrilled to realize he hadn’t lost an eye or several pints of blood. Acc’d’g to lore, from then on Robisnon referred to airplanes as “fruit flies.”

And people wonder why I still love baseball.

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Artful Dodgers

I had a ball Tuesday night at Art Night. It’s a semi-regular gathering of hippies, young and old, at a rented loft space around the corner from the old hobby shop at College Ave. and 4th St.

Led by Travis Puntarelli, the gang sprawls out on the floor or sits at a mismatched collection of tables to draw pictures or write poetry while musicians of various ages regale them with song. Puntarelli, of course, is one of Bloomington’s premier songsters. He plays a variety of instruments including guitar and keyboards. One woman played a type of squeezebox that I’ve never seen before. It was fairly simple, producing mainly a continuous key tone.

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Among the performers, our town’s favorite gadfly, Marc Haggerty, strummed a few tunes on his acoustic guitar and a young woman named Daisy warbled some heavenly songs, including old folk chestnuts and some lilts that would have sounded right at home in the shtetl.

As far as I can gather, the thing takes place every other week. Puntarelli et al rent the space per night from the building’s owner and they doll the place up for each occurrence.

It’s another of the 1,625,380 reasons why Bloomington’s a special place.

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Electric scooters, natch, are just the beginning. In fact, all the hand-wringing and fist-shaking going on these days over the rentable transit toys in this town will soon be for naught, I’m guessing, because the Birds and the Limes soon will be replaced by better technologies.

1995 Harley Fat Boy

For instance, Harley-Davidson, the venerable American motorcycle manufacturer, just may be entering the rent-a-thing game soon.

Harley’s coming down hard after its 1990s-through-early-‘Aughts heyday. Back a quarter of a century ago, during the Clinton Era prosperity years, every white guy with an income over 75 G a year and all the homebound knickknacks he could cram into his McMansion had to cop a Harley and pretend he was an outdoor toughie. Funny thing is, a huge percentage of all the Road Kings, Softails, and Fat Boys sold back in those days days sat in garages collecting dust because their owners found riding a motorcycle was, y’know, hard friggin’ work. Anyway, now that the only people with money are the uber-wealthy, nobody’s buying Harleys anymore and so the co. is desperately seeking ways to remain a going concern.

It may be making a foray into a potential untapped market with rentable electric scooters. Harley this year has introduced a couple of concept home-rechargable scooters. The two new bikes don’t require drivers to have motorcycle licenses. Harley also recently purchased the StaCyc company, maker of electric bicycles for kids.

Kids’ E-bike

Harley E-scooter Prototype

It’s a good bet we won’t have to worry too much longer about where everybody’s leaving their electric scooters nor will we have to fret over the growing number of head injuries suffered by helmet-less users thereof.

After the lightning bolt rollout of the scooters hereabouts and in other locales, whoever intros the next rentable get-around device most likely will be sure to make arrangements for helmets and dumping-off spots for whatever the next generation of wheeled-dealios looks like. At least that’s the hope.

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So Help Me, Molly!

The big buzz at SXSW is the new doc is being screened in Austin this year. Entitled Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins, it’s about the life of the iconic plaster-saint-smashing columnist from the Lone Star State.

Ivins

Molly Ivins long has occupied a place in my very exclusive personal journalistic pantheon that also includes Mike Royko and Studs Terkel. Plying her trade in one of the weirdest political places on Earth, Ivins was thoroughly unafraid to call bullshit on any and all lickspittlers, ass-kissers, hogs-at-the-trough, holier-than-thous, and any other leeching, grabbing, manipulating, prevaricating, propagandizing reprobates, no matter which political party they belonged to. Coming from Texas, she was well-acquainted with the likes of Lyndon Johnson, Ann Richards, the Bushes, Mary Kay Ash, H. Ross Perot, Karl Rove and other natives of the state, be they angels or Lucifers.

Her guiding dictum: “Raise hell, big time. I want y’all to get out there and raise hell about damned near everything. My word, there’s a world out there that needs fixing. Get out there and get after it!”

Even though she seemed often barely able to keep her head above the surface of slime and muck, Ivins maintained a refreshing sense of optimism, as embodied by this hopeful line:

It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America.

I’ll be looking for this film to come here via Peter LoPilato’s Ryder Film Series or, at least, Netflix or some other streamer.

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Pod(cast) People

I’ve been absent from this global communications colossus for a few days for 23 or 24 reasons so I haven’t yet posted the link to the podcast of last week’s Big Talk.

Guenther

My guest was the sole Republican running in this year’s local election, Andrew Guenther, who’s hoping to unseat incumbent city council member Dorothy Granger in Bloomington’s District 2.

Guenther, 24, is the youngest candidate in this year’s beauty pageant but don’t let that fool you. As far as I’m concerned nobody running in 2019 has done as thorough a job as he has in preparing for public office. The dude has done his homework, appropriately enough, considering he graduated from college only last summer.

Here’s the link to the Guenther interview.

BTW: I was in the studio yesterday with At Large candidate Jean Capler. She’s angling for one of the three seats now occupied by Susan Sandberg, Jim Sims, and Andy Ruff.  Also running in that Dem primary are first-timers Vauhxx Booker and Matt Flaherty.

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“It’s exciting.”

So says one of my many pals who’s doing real, hard-core scientific research into CBD oil. I sought this scientist out because I’ve been swamped in recent weeks by social media and conventional advertising pokes and nudges and, hell, downright demands that I gulp the stuff down for whatever bedevils me.

As a rule, whenever I hear about some new panacea that’ll cure anything and everything from cancer to the blues, the skeptic’s corner of my brain immediately shuts my eyes and ears down so I won’t drown in the sea of hype.

Frankly, I was hoping my scientist pal would tell me CBD oil was a load of bullshit.

It ain’t.

This researcher pointed out that CBD oil, in fact, was approved this past summer by the FDA for treatment of a couple of types of childhood epilepsy. The oil, sez this person, also apparently has been shown to an almost proven degree that it’s an fairly good pain reliever. Indiana University researchers in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences are poking their noses into the stuff just about every day of the week now. They do, however proffer a few caveats.

1. CBD oil is unregulated. The bottles you cop from a dispensary or the 21st Century version of the Avon Lady or Fuller Brush Man are less regulated than even vitamin supplements, which are notoriously free of oversight from reputable labs and approval authorities. This means the stuff you’re getting may not really even be CBD oil. In fact, this researcher tells me, another scientist colleague has tested hundreds of bottles of CBD oil from various sources and found the different samples to to contain a bewildering number of ingredients and an even more wide-ranging percentage of the actual thing that you thought you were buying.
2. Nobody knows precisely what compounds or molecules are doing the things you want CBD oil to do. This is important because once scientists determine what’s doing what to what , the purity and dependability of CBD oil can be more confidently assured. Then you wouldn’t have to worry about charlatans and snake-oil peddlers trying to sell you a bottle of sewing machine oil with a CBD oil label.
3. CBD oil increases ocular pressure, meaning people who suffer from glaucoma should avoid it.

I’m still skeptical of the claims that this thing will bring about world peace and the cessation of all human discomfort. But I’m eager to hear more results based on the research by people who don’t have skin in the game and whose methods are above reproach.

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One Of A Kind

Speaking of science, researchers have discovered what they’re calling one of the rarest forms of life on this planet: A Bloomington Republican.

Guenther

That rara avis will appear on this afternoon’s Big Talk. My guest at 5:00pm today on WFHB, 91.3 FM, will be Andrew Guenther, the only person running for office in this year’s local Republican primary. Guenther’s hoping to unseat incumbent District 2 city council member Dorothy Granger, who herself is looking to fend off a couple of challengers in the Democratic primary. The primaries are May 7th and the general election November 5th.

Guenther just graduated from college just last year. He grew up in farm country in the north part of the state and moved down this way to attend IU. He loved Bloomington so much he decided to stay here and already has made his mark in our little civics universe by serving on several boards and commissions.

I’m featuring selected, non-incumbent challengers for Bloomington’s elective offices from now through May 2nd, the week before the primaries. Thus far mayoral challenger Amanda Barge (twice) and city council aspirants Vauhxx Booker, Kate Rosenbarger, and Miah Michaelsen have graced the Big Talk mics.

As usual, I’ll post a link to the Guenther podcast here tomorrow AM.

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