"The blog has made Glab into a hip town crier, commenting on everything from local politics and cultural happenings to national and international events, all rendered in a colorful, intelligent, working-class vernacular that owes some of its style to Glab’s Chicago-hometown heroes Studs Terkel and Mike Royko." — David Brent Johnson in Bloom Magazine
From The Pencil’s correspondent, District 9 delegate Cathi Crabtree, at the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia at 5:00pm:
I am so excited to be here! The gavel just started the convention and it is so exciting! Still feeling very honored and privileged to be a delegate for Hillary Rodham Clinton!
Proceedings have started and I’m getting so angry with the radical Berners who are disrupting this historical event.
But I’m proud of the Indiana Bernie delegates for behaving with dignity.
Hah! Pencillistas, start paying attention! Only one of you has pointed out that my spanking new logo for our coverage of the Democratic National Convention featuring delegate Cathi Crabtree actually has her name misspelled.
Sheesh. Come to think of it, Cathi herself hasn’t even raised cain about it so I assume she missed it, too, unless she’s so self-effacing, modest, and unwilling to confront a wrong that she decided to remain mum about the whole deal. But, um, that wouldn’t be our Cathi, would it?
Logo Designed By Big Make
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Fightin’ Words
So, Cathi and her delegate pals Martha Hilderbrand and Jeanne Smith just spent a couple of days in an SUV and all three will share a single hotel room on the outskirts of Philly through the four days of the Dem gathering. What makes this combo so remarkably successful thus far is the fact that Cathi and Jeanne have yet to strangle each other. See, Cathi’s a rabid Hillary backer and Jeanne…, well, Jeanne goes for Bernie.
Uh oh.
But, as I say, so far Nuh uh. No fighting. No voices raised. No petrified Martha Hilderbrand huddling in a corner of their hot rod speeding through the Allegheny Mountains.
The Dems hope and pray the convention plays out in exactly that serene fashion. We’ll see. Based on my readings of social media and certain Bernie-tilting websites, there still are scads of peeps hoping beyond hope for a Sanders coup. And, weirdly — extremely weirdly — some Bernie-istas are chanting “Lock her up” on the streets of Philly already.
Nice choice, huh? Borrowing the fave screech from last week’s Republican National coronation of D. Trump as Strongman-in-Chief. Go figure.
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You Never Liked My Mother!
Hah, again! Some commentator on NPR this AM was talking about Hillary’s major drawback in this historic election: Her un-likability. That’s an inarguable assessment. Me? I’ve said all along that for all the charisma her old man, former Prez Bill Clinton, possesses, she’s the exact opposite.
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This commentator said voters were asked a poll question on the order of If Hillary was a member of your family, which one would she be?
Very few selected her as Mom, Sis, or a favorite aunt. In fact, clear majorities ID’d her as their harsh, unloveable aunt or — shudder — their mother-in-law.
My gal Hill has an image problem, babies.
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To The Nines
Dig Cathi Crabtree, all gussied up for those Democratic “hospitality tables” late yesterday afternoon:
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Cathi’s Communiques
Here’s Cathi’s filing, this AM at 7:21 EST:
Monday morning. Ready to get down to the business of the Democratic national convention
In the lobby drinking coffee and waiting for them to open up the room where we will have our daily breakfast meetings. Will get our credentials for the day there, get the schedule of what’s going on, and also there will be a guest speakers. I don’t know who they are yet.
Been looking at the schedule of caucuses. It’s going to be really hard to pick because many of the things I would like to see overlap on the schedule.
Sporting my “bitch, please” Benghazi hearings tee. I saw Amy Schumer wearing it and had to have one so I ordered it sometime ago.
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Last night, Cathi and Co. attended the big welcoming bash for delegates at the Philadelphia Art Museum. Here’s her missive re: their arrival therein:
OMG! So we just arrived at the museum and it’s amazing! Met group and volunteers outside. They handed out little flags for all of us as we arrived!
There’s a live jazz singer and it’s just phenomenal the music was incredible!
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Meanwhile, Jeanne Smith reports that last night Art Museum soiree was an “amazing drunk party with two great bands.”
She acknowledges the two wings of the party (capital P) are more or less circling each other warily. “We are all a little in the dark,” she says. Then she adds, “Lots of people thinking it’s not over.”
Here’s a pic of the three with two other Monroe County delegates, state Dem chair and IU SPEA instructor John Zody and former Indiana House majority leader former Indiana Senate minority leader Vi Simpson.
Cathi, too, gushed over last night’s fete (report filed at 11:52pm):
The museum is actually open so we can see much of the artwork.
I feel so swanky!
There was a superlong line at the bar but a good man pointed us to another bar with no line. It’s not a cash bar — it’s free so watch out!
String trio playing Coldplay!
So many amazing little appetizers incl. cucumbers stuffed with fava bean hummus.
We went outside and there was a DJ so we danced a lot!!! So fun.
Met delegates from all over, incl. Guam.
Oh by the way having the time of my life!!!
More tomorrow!
Hot Off The Dance Floor
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July 25th Birthdays
Thomas Eakins — A native of Philadelphia, Eakins is viewed as one of the most important visual artists in American history. A realist painter, portraitist, sculptor, photographer, and teacher, he wrote his father while an art student in Paris: “[The female nude] is the most beautiful thing there is in the world except a naked man, but I never yet saw a study of one exhibited.”
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Gavrilo Princip — The man who started World War I?
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Rosalind Franklin — Perhaps science’s most overlooked female. She was instrumental in the discovery of the DNA helix but her two male colleagues, Watson & Crick, weren’t terribly eager to share the credit with her.
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Steve Goodman — Songwriter who gave us “City of New Orleans” and this great classic:
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Louise Joy Brown — English woman acknowledged as the world’s first test tube baby.
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On this date in 1989, Steve Rubell died. He was the co-owner and master of ceremonies of perhaps the apotheosis of the decadent, me-decade 1970s, Studio 54. The nightclub/disco actually occupied the old CBS TV studio on 54th Street in Manhattan. For one New Year’s Eve party there, four tons of glitter were dumped on the dancefloor, leading Rubell’s biz partner, Ian Schrager, to observe it was “like standing on stardust.” And you need never read another word to better understand the ’70s.
(L-R) Andy Warhol, Calvin Klein, Brooke Shields & Rubell At Studio 54
The Pencil’s Cathi Crabtree, reporting directly from Philadelphia, in whose Brotherly Loving precincts she and her delegate-mates have just arrived, sends along this sked from the state’s Convention delegation:
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I suppose the 5:00pm event is the ritual loosening up of delegates by means of free hors d’oeuvres and booze. Looks like the 7:00pm thing will offer more of the same. Plus, isn’t “hospitality table” code for open bar?
Man, I hope Cathi, Martha & Jeanne packed an ample supply of Tylenol. There promise to be three oversized heads in their shared hotel room early tomorrow morning.
Natch, Cathi’s first act in Philly is to show the town what a Hudsucker Posse hoop wiggler looks like. Here she is, outside her hotel:
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Stick right here, babies, there’s tons more to come as The Pencil covers the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia through the eyes and ears of CC this week.
Our intrepid Democratic National Convention correspondent Cathi Crabtree, along with her delegate-mates Martha Hilderbrand and Jeanne Smith, all are back on the pavement this AM. The three expect to hit Philly sometime early this afternoon, perhaps around 2.
(BTW: Another local favorite daughter, Ellettsville’s Vi Simpson, already has arrived in the City of Bro. Love. Our area’s going to be well-represented this year.)
They spent last night in Wheeling, West Virginia, taking refreshment at the Wheeling Brewing Company where they happened to be waited on by a young fellow from Bloomington.
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Wheeling’s in that weird little finger of West Virginia jutting up between Ohio and Pennsylvania. It calls itself “The Friendly City,” and was in the forefront of the move by some 50 counties of the Commonwealth of Virginia to resist that state’s secession after the start of the US Civil War. The area around Wheeling was populated by German farmers, very few of whom owned slaves, while in the rest of what was then Virginia, a good 31 percent of the population were slaves. After Virginia seceded in April, 1861, those 50 western counties held what became known as the First and Second Wheeling Conventions in the town’s Independence Hall. Delegates to the caucuses elected to split off from Virginia and form a new state, with its new capital in Wheeling.
A fitting stop for this trio of Bloomington’s Dem delegates.
Cathi’d been in a mad rush as she, M & J prepped to peel out yesterday morning. She did find a brief moment to send me a couple of thoughts:
I feel extremely fortunate to be representing the 9th District of Indiana as a National Democratic Delegate. Even as I prepare to leave, I’m still a bit in disbelief.
I am so excited and am looking forward to having the time of my life while still getting the business accomplished.
My hope for the convention is that we leave UNITED and ready to work our butts off to get Hillary elected! Not only do I fully support her and believe in her, but also the alternative (whom I won’t name) is WAY too frightening.
Don’t you wish every news operation’s reporters and correspondents would refuse to name he who shall remain unnamed?
Stay tuned for more tomorrow morning, the first day of the historic Dem powwow.
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Road Rage
It’s been quite a while since I’ve gone off on a rant about Bloomington’s drivers. They are, in my unassailable opinion, the worst of any city in which I’ve lived, driven through, or flown over.
My last screech about them had to do with their utter inability to cope with roundabouts. Back then, I’d feel my blood pressure begin to soar any time I come within a mile or two of one. Since then, thankfully, I’ve learned to expect the worst from our town’s hearse pilots. The driver in front of me, petrified, might slam on the brakes when another car is within a quarter of a mile of the roundabout they’re entering but I no longer shriek with rage. I expect it now. I say to myself, like a Buddhist monk, This is the way of life here. On straightaways and between crossroads in the city, Bloomington’s drivers creep along as if either 1) they’re carrying live thermonuclear devices in their trunks or 2) the roads are polka-dotted with landmines. If Bloomington’s drivers went any slower they’d be standing still.
In fact, quite a number of them do indeed stand still, for instance, when they approach an intersection and they haven’t yet decided which way they’re going to turn. Why, the smart thing to do, acc’d’g to these Magellans, is to come to a complete stop and ponder the possibilities.
These are all driving cardinal sins one must accept if one is to continue living in these parts with her or his sanity intact.
Now, as you know if you’ve been paying attention to this communications colossus, I have of late been spending a few hours nearly every day of the week at the Paynetown SRA, overlooking Lake Monroe. Simply being there is an invaluable therapy for me as I try to get back to normal after battling My Olive Pit™.
How relaxing a place it is. Bald eagles soar. Blue herons stand in shallow water, gulping wiggling fish down their long necks. Killdeer skitter here and there, running interference for their broods. The sunsets are spectacular, the lapping of the waves hypnotizing. I honestly believe I’ve healed quicker from my chemoradiation treatments simply by spending time there.
You’d think such a bucolic and pacific locale would cause my fellow species-mates to become even more unhurried than they normally are.
But no.
Weirdly, simply being on the hilly, unlighted, tree-tunneled drive down to the lake seems to make drivers believe they’re on a drag strip. I’ll be puttering along at the posted 25 mph limit and some gas pedal jockey in a titanic SUV towing a seaworthy yacht behind him will be tailgating me so closely I can see the color of his eyes in my rear view mirror. This kind of pressure comes whether I’m driving into the place or out of it.
It’s madness. I often pull to the side and signal for them to pass me and when they do, they shoot me looks as if I’ve been blocking a fleet of fire engines racing to an inferno.
Once I yelled at a guy, “What the hell’s your hurry?” He flipped me the bird.
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As I say, it’s just weird.
Even weirder: Once I get onto State Road 446, heading northbound back to Chez Big Mike, there’s a several mile stretch of curvy road on which one would be wise to go no faster than 35 or 40 mph. Then, past The Cabin saloon and breakfast nook, the road straightens out and the speed limit rises to 55 mph.
Which almost nobody does.
Most drivers inch along at 45 or even 41 mph. Now, I’m the guy tailgating them as if I’ve got the lights and siren going. No matter. One or two of them may speed up two, maybe three mph but it’s as if their cars are incapable of doing 50.
I’m learning to be more patient with these reprobates as well.
I tell you, driving in Bloomington teaches one restraint.
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Rinse That Rage Away
This’ll make me feel better:
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BTW: Should anyone tell you there was no good music in the ’70s, you tell them to shut their mouths.
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July 24th Birthdays
Alexandre Dumas — The père half of the père/fils pop & boy set of Dumases, both French novelists of the 19th Century. Daddy-o Dumas penned The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers as serial novellas which he later compiled into the more familiar fat books we’re know and love today. One contemporary described him as “the most delightfully amusing and egotistical creature on the face of the earth. His tongue was like a windmill – once set in motion, you never knew when he would stop, especially if the theme was himself.”
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Robert Graves — A British poet and critic, he supported himself by writing popular historical novels including a couple of my very favorites, I, Claudius and Claudius, The God.
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Amelia Earhart — Mareica’s most famous missing person until Jimmy Hoffa disappeared in 1975. Her truncated 1937 attempt to circumnavigate the world was undertaken largely as a way to gain newspaper and radio attention for the aviatrix who was looking forward to the publication of a new book that year. She was, at the time of her flight, a visiting lecturer at Purdue University in the Department of Aeronautics. She also offered career counseling to Purdue women. Among the seemingly countless theories as to her whereabout after her plane’s signal was lost near Howland Island in the South Pacific was the story that the Japanese had captured her after her plane had crashed and forced her to be one of their many Tokyo Roses.
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Chief Dan George — Born Geswanouth Slahoot and later changing his name first to Dan Slaholt, then Dan George, he was nominated for a 1971 Academy Award for Best Supporting actor for his role as Old Lodge Skins in Little Big Man. He actually was a First Nation chief, leading the Tsleil-Waututh band of Vancouver District, British Columbia, Canada.
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Frances Oldham Kelsey — Canadian physician and pharmacologist, she served on this country’s Food & Drug Administration in the early 1960s. There, she fought against the approval of the drug thalidomide, a tranquilizer and analgesic that also was being prescribed to pregnant women for morning sickness in 20 countries around the world, including her native Canada. She’d been alarmed by a British study that indicated thalidomide had harmful nervous system effects. As she fought with the drug’s manufacturer, it became known that many pregnant women who took thalidomide gave birth to armless and legless babies. Kelsey was recognized by President John F. Kennedy for distinguished civilian service. Her thalidomide battle spurred the federal government to strengthen the FDA’s testing and approval process.
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Bella Abzug — “Battling Bella,” she was a co-founder of the National Women’s Caucus and served as a member of the US House representing New York’s 20th District. When she was a child, her parents ran the Live and Let Live Meat Market. She and then-congressman (and future NYC mayor) Ed Koch introduced the first federal gay rights bill in 1974.
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On this date in 1980, Peter Sellers died. He’s famous for having played three roles in Stanley Kubrik’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. It’s forgotten that he was slated also to play a fourth role, that of Major T.J. “King” Kong, pilot of the B-52 carrying thermonuclear weapons into Soviet territory. Sellers tried to get out of playing this fourth role because he thought he already was doing too much in the film and because he thought he wouldn’t be able to master a Texas accent. At one point, very early in shooting, he sprained his ankle and so claimed to be unable to work within the cramped space of the B-52 flight deck set. John Wayne and Bonanza‘s Dan Blocker both were offered the role but turned it down because Kubrik’s and co-screenwriter Terry Southern’s script was considered “pinko.” Slim Pickens eventually took on the role.
Hah! Cathi Crabtree, The Pencil’s Philly correspondent all next week was in such a hurry to begin her trek to the Democratic National Convention that she loaded her pooch into the car early this AM so as to get him over to the kennel and neglected to note that the place wouldn’t be open for another hour. Oops.
(L-R) Martha Hilderbrand, CC & Jeanne Smith
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Got the hound back out of the car and then loaded the big lug back in, all the while Duke the Dog looked at her, thinking, “This dame’s whack, man!” I know this because Duke emailed this global communications colossus w/o CC’s knowledge while waiting to be re-loaded, just to vent.
Personal to Crabtree: Don’t be mad at Duke for using your smartphone, okay? I made him an offer he couldn’t refuse to join the team as a second correspondent. Don’t be shocked when you see a semi full of Milk Bones parked in front of your crib when you get back later in the week.
Stay tuned here Monday through Friday this coming week for Crabtree’s reports from the historic convention.
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Roadrunners
Why not? Goin’ faster miles an hour.
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Scare Me Into Loving You, Donald
The most terrifying line from the just completed Republican National Convention?
I alone can fix it.
Kiddies, this mofo has to be stopped, dig?
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Four Dead In Oh-Hi-Oh
Just picked up a copy of the new book entitled Above the Shots by IU Lilly Library archivist Craig S. Simpson and his co-writer Gregory S. Wilson.
It’s an oral history of the Kent State University killings of four protesters by Ohio National Guard soldiers in May, 1970. Simpson and Wilson spoke with and recorded people from all angles of the incident including the then-mayor of the town of Kent, witnesses, protesters, a Guardsman, and many others.
The myth that’s grown up around the tragic incident is that the four were sweet and innocent little lambs who were slaughtered by savage mercenaries for no good reason other than to see their blood flow. The truth, as always, is far more complicated.
Guardsmen Advance At High Noon At Kent State
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The town of Kent had been wracked by riots and arson in the days before the ultimate confrontation on the campus green. In fact, many of the country’s campuses had experienced violent, frightening upheavals as students and agitators rebelled against the draft. Overwhelming fear and tension put cops and Guardsmen on a neural tripwire. As the skirmish line of Guardsmen pursued the crowd of protesters around the green that fateful day, they found themselves backed into a corner at one point, so it was inevitable that the trigger finger of at least one scared rifleman would twitch.
If you want to blame anybody for the deaths, blame the commander who allowed the Guardsmen to carry loaded weapons. They could have controlled the crowd just as easily with only fixed bayonets. I’m looking forward to reading this book, now that I’m just about finished with Larry Tye’s Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon.
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July 23 Birthdays
Arthur Treacher — Who here is old enough to remember Arthur Treacher’s Fish & Chips fast food restaurants? Who here would even know who he was? Treacher was a Sussex, England-born stage actor and singer who specialized in butler and valet roles. He was noted for playing Jeeves, based on the character in P.G. Wodehouse’s series of Bertie & Jeeves short stories. At the end of his career, he served as the second banana to Merv Griffin on the latter’s 1965-70 talk show. BTW, there are still several ATF&C franchises in Long Island and Ohio.
Treacher (L) With Griffin
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Vera Rubin — Born Vera Cooper, she was a groundbreaking astronomer who discovered discrepancies in the expected angular motions of galaxies. Many other astronomers scoffed at her findings until they were proven by advanced technology and more precise measurements. Her findings led to astrophysicists advancing the hypothesis of dark matter.
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Tony Joe White — Songwriter who gave us, among many others, Rainy Night in Georgia, made a hit by Brook Benton in 1970. Here’s White’s recent version:
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Dino Danelli — Drummer for the Rascals. I’ll use any excuse to post a Rascals vid:
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Philip Seymour Hoffman — Why do you think they call it dope?
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On this date in 2012, Sally Ride died. The first American woman in space. The Russians had launched a woman into space as early as 1963 but the land of the free and home of the brave refused to let an astronaut with a vagina suit up until June 18, 1983. Researching this, I also discovered she was the youngest American astronaut to go into space, flying on STS-7, the Challenger, at the age of 32. Oh, she also remains the only acknowledged queer astronaut.
Cathi Crabtree’s road trip toward history hasn’t even begun yet (she and her Democratic Convention delegates-mates set off for Philadelphia Saturday morning) but she’s already spinning in the whirlpool of emotions and excitement surrounding it.
She sat on the phone last night. On the other end of the line was…, well, let’s let Cathi herself tell it:
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Here’s a sampling of responses to her announcement of same on Facebook:
Did you stutter and laugh a lot like a teenager with a huge crush?
OMG…😳😍✨💖✨💖😍!!!
Really??
so wonderful! I still cherish the time I had speaking with Hillary in 2008!
Living vicariously through you!
So cool, Cathi; WHAT A THRILL! Goooooo Hillary! 👍👏
Soooooooooo cool – I’m excited for you!!
Tell her tomorrow is payday so I’m sending her some $$
Looks like Hillary’s gonna have a new president for her fan club by the end of next week.
Be here every day next week, Monday through Friday, as we follow Cathi and her pals delegatin’ for the Dems in Philly.
I’ll guarantee you this: It won’t be the hate, fear & fascist fest the just-concluded GOP rally was this week.
Right now, it promises to be a scream-orgy for those who’ve longed to see a woman move into the Oval Office.
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The Duality Of Me
I was proud of myself this AM for coming up with what I thought at the time was a great nickname for Donald Trump.
Great, because it makes both an historical political reference and is offensively puerile. I was in the shower when this brainstorm struck.
Here it is: Il Douche-ay.
Like it? Mussolini and all? Insulting while spot-on accurate?
Il Duce
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At first I was infatuated with it. Then I had those second thoughts that define the civilized, thinking human being I fancy myself as.
Sure, douche is a commonly accepted pejorative these days. But why? Because women’s nethers are so gross? Because an amoral, narcissistic, demagogic know-nothing (and proud of it) is so disgusting that only the washing-out of such a yucky part of the female anatomy will do to describe him?
So, naturally, I’m scrapping the whole thing. Damn. But, as Bertrand Russell once said, “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.”
Even wise guys.
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July 22nd Birthdays
William Archibald Spooner — Beloved, absent-minded, tongue-tied Oxford don after whom the descriptor “spoonerism” was coined. He was notorious for flip-flopping letters, words, and whole phrases, inadvertently, to comic effect. Some examples (from The Telegraph):
At a wedding: “It is kisstomary to cuss the bride.”
“A well-boiled icicle” for “well-oiled bicycle.”
To a lazy student: “You have tasted a whole worm.”
Paying a visit to a college official: “Is the bean dizzy?”
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Emma Lazarus — “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
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Edward Hopper — American artist of the ashcan school, he painted that famous image of the big city corner diner (“The Nighthawks”) that is for sale, in excruciatingly altered form (“Boulevard of Broken Dreams”), in every chintzy gift shop in America.
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George Clinton — Do fries go with that shake?
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Willem Dafoe — One of the odder castings of Jesus in the history of filmdom.
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On this date in 2013, Dennis Farina died. My favorite line of his, from the movie Midnight Run: “Sidney, siddown, relax, have a sandwich, drink a glass of milk, do some fuckin’ thing.”
The Electron Pencil is the place to be every morning next week as the Democrats gather for their every-four-years love fest in Philadelphia. Indiana Congressional District 9 delegate Cathi Crabtree will be reporting in throughout each day she spends with her fellow Dems, Monday through Thursday, July 25th through the 29th.
We’ll be carrying Cathi’s impressions, bits of gossip, scoops, and more starting Monday with her report on the car ride with two other delegate pals, Jeanne Smith and Martha Hilderbrand, through Ohio and Pennsylvania on their way to the City of Brotherly Love.
(L to R) Cathi, Jeanne & Martha
[BTW: The gals will be bringing their hoops along so travelers along Interstate 70 just may be in for a treat when the three pull into a rest stop.]
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They’ll set off Saturday morning, knock off about halfway to Philly for a night’s sleep and then hit the big town sometime late Sunday afternoon. The three will stay together in a hotel room outside the Philly city limits (Personal to Cathi and her colleagues: You might want to stay away from those Philly Cheese Steak sandwiches, especially with onions, as long as you have to spend your nights in such close quarters with each other.) The party has made scores of deals with local hotels to put up their delegates. In Cathi’s case, for instance, she and her cohorts will pay $2000 for their five-night stay.
For Cathi, attending this historic convention (the first woman will be nominated by a major party) will be both serious and a lark. Cathi was inspired to run for district delegate in honor of her Mom who died almost exactly a year ago. Crabtree mère was a big Hillary fan. Cathi tears up as she recalls making the decision to go for it. “I’m a feminist,” she says. “I was raised a feminist by my mother — although I didn’t know it at the time.”
She positively glows as she talks of the trip and the convention. “It’ll be like a vacation,” she says. “I want to take in everything I can!”
Well, good luck, girl. Delegates’ days begin at seven in the morning with a mandatory breakfast meeting at each hotel. There, she’ll get important news of the day, an updated schedule of events, and her daily events pass. Then it’s off to downtown Philly on a shuttle bus. She’ll bounce between the arena and the nearby convention center where various caucuses will be held and seminars and presentations offered. Each day’s gavel comes down at either 3 or 4 in the afternoon and the festivities can last until 11pm or midnight and then there are after-parties that will only break up at about two in the morning. An exhausted Crabtree will climb aboard the shuttle bus for the trip back to her hotel bed, which she’ll only enjoy for a scant few hours before the whole orgy starts again.
Cathi Crabtree is a mechanical engineer at the Crane Naval Support Activity installation 25 miles southwest of Bloomington. The US Navy’s Surface Warfare Center and the US Army’s Ammunition Activity center are the base’s primary tenants. The naval side of things is responsible for designing warships and their weapons systems and the army’s people design things that explode. “There are hardly any women engineers, either at Crane or in the country at large,” Cathi says.
She claims it was at Crane where she found her political and philosophical footing. Cathi hates to admit it but she voted for the first time at the age of 25 — for Ronald Reagan, “because of the guy I was dating,” she adds hastily. “Then I became informed. I’m a late bloomer.”
As a member of Federally Employed Women (FEW) she heard visiting speaker Toby Strout, executive director of Bloomington’s Middle Way House, speak about the non-profit’s work with abused woman. Next thing Cathi knew, she’d signed up to volunteer. Since that time, Cathi has served on Middle Way’s board, was instrumental in starting up Bloomington’s short-lived National Organization for Women (NOW) chapter, and is an 11-year member of Bloomington’s Commission on the Status of Women.
Just as important, she spent four years jamming with the Bleeding Heartland Roller Derby before she retired in June, 2015. She skated as Cat Scratch — and she’s got the tattoo to prove it.
AKA Cat Scratch
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And now, she’s the celebrity correspondent for this global communications colossus. “I’m excited to share my experience with more people,” she says. “I was thrilled when you asked me to do it.”
I mean, honestly, who in this world would turn down such a request from The Pencil?
“I hope I can fit everything in,” she says. “I want to network with other people who think like me. I want to make the 9th District and Monroe County proud.”
Well, I’m thrilled, too. Come here every morning next week and I bet you’ll be, too.
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July 21st Birthdays
Ernest Hemingway — A native of Oak Park, a Chicago suburb, he professed after he became an adult to have loathed both his hometown and his mother. He studied music as a child, playing the cello, and later claimed his music lessons helped him create metric structure in his writing. “Be brief,” he advised.
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Marshall McLuhan — The medium, he famously said, is the message.
McLuhan (R) With Woody Allen (Center) in “Annie Hall”
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Janet Reno — The first woman to serve as United States Attorney General. She was nominated by Bill Clinton in 1993 after his first two choices, Zoe Baird and Kimba Wood, were rejected by the Senate for having employed illegal immigrants as nannies.
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Garry Trudeau — New York City-born cartoonist who bestowed “Doonesbury” upon a wildly appreciative American public.
[Image: Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP]
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Robin Williams — “If women ran the world we wouldn’t have wars, just intense negotiations every 28 days.”
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Charlotte Gainsbourg — French singer who somehow survived recording the song “Lemon Incest” with her father Serge Gainsbourg when she was 12 years old. Now, I must go disinfect myself after typing those words.
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On this day in 1998, Robert Young died. People of a certain age may remember him best as the genial daddy-o in Father Knows Best. I prefer to think of him as the unflappable, hard-bitten cop, Sgt. Finlay, in the groundbreaking movie about murderous anti-semitism, Crossfire. Oddly, the novel upon which the film was based, The Brick Foxhole by Richard Brooks, was actually about murderous homophobia. Hollywood in the year 1947, though, was still under the thumb of the Hays Code which branded homosexuality a sickness so the producers had to rework the story.
Three Roberts, (L to R) Mitchum, Ryan & Young, In “Crossfire”
So, Bertolt Sobolik is out as general manager of WFHB.
Sad, that. Bertolt was just what the station needed after its GM search nightmare in the wake of the Chad Carrothers exodus. Bertolt was serious, knowledgeable, steady, and hard-working. The station has hungered for those qualities in a boss ever since Carrothers quit.
And now it’s Bertolt’s turn to quit.
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It’s no surprise: Bertolt threatened to resign weeks ago after certain members of the WFHB board chastised him in an unofficial letter for imagined derelictions of duty and attitude problems. Bertolt oversaw the station’s first successful fundraiser in years and had already reinvigorated the volunteer base. Some bad attitude.
Anyway, board members Kelly Wherley and Angela Backstrom are following Sobolik out the door, leaving the board with only six members at this moment. President Louis Malone had exited not long ago.
It wouldn’t be easy for even the strongest of non-profits to lose such a raft of assets.
How long will it be before Ivy Tech takes over the station?
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You Take The Good With The Bad
Forty-seven years ago today:
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I was 13 years old, spending my days as a junior counselor at Riis Park day camp and my evenings staring up at the moon, wishing I could see Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin bouncing around on its dusty surface.
If nothing else, President John F. Kennedy inspired us to dream. He’d promised in a speech to a joint session of Congress on May 25, 1961, that this holy land would put a man on the moon and bring him back safely to Earth by the end of the decade. A huge motivator for him to make such a grandiose pledge was the Soviet Union’s “lead” in the space race. Much of that had to do with a fiction he himself had peddled in his race against Richard Nixon for the presidency in 1960 — that is, the “missile gap” that put us at a disadvantage to the Soviets in sheer numbers of inter-continental ballistic missiles capable of delivering thermonuclear weapons across the oceans.
The truth of the matter was we were far ahead of the Soviets in total numbers of ICBMs, nuclear warheads, and the advanced technology that gave us reasonable assurance our missiles would hit their targets. So, JFK lied to gain an advantage on Nixon (a lesson Nixon never forgot.)
Even the Soviets’ so-called lead in the space race (the USSR had beaten the US in putting a satellite in orbit as well as the first man in space) was built on a foundation of sand. The Soviets’ Sputnik was nothing more than a hollow, polished metal ball that accomplished nothing save allowing Russian leaders to crow and the flight of Yuri Gagarin into space was only the rare exception in a series of tragic attempted manned launches that resulted only in a number of cosmonauts being burned to embers. At least this nation waited to make sure we weren’t sending men to certain doom in our haste to beat the Russkies.
Still, the driving force behind the advances NASA made in those early days was the military’s need for dependable, safe, lightweight missiles to deliver big bangs over Warsaw Pact cities. The rockets that would launch the Mercury and Gemini spacecraft into orbit originally were designed to carry H-bombs.
Without our capability of pushing the planet into a nuclear winter, there might be no moon landing, at least none as early as July 20th, 1969.
We are an odd and fascinating species.
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July 20th Birthdays
Alexander the Great — Aristotle’s most famous student.
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Gregor Mendel — A man obsessed with peas.
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Thomas Berger — Author of my choice as The Great American Novel: Little Big Man.
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Cormac McCarthy — Author of the Border Trilogy (All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain) and many other beloved novels.
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Diana Rigg — Mrs. Emma Peel.
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On this date in 1993, Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster was found dead in a Washington DC park. Although his death was ruled a suicide, it served as the starter’s gun for the now-decades-long race by the wingnut Right to brand Hillary Clinton a serial killer.
We live in a weird culture. Take, for instance, our twin obsessions with age and weight.
Saturday night The Loved One and I went out to dinner at Turkuaz Cafe with the Fergusons, Tyler and Dave. (BTW: Do yourself a favor and get on over to Turkuaz for lunch or dinner. Whatever. It’s worth it if only for the cup of red lentil soup that comes with every entree.)
It was a fine night overall, a delightful capper to a brilliantly sunny, comfortably warm day. I’ve missed chatting with Dave since last August when I moved my back office from Soma Coffee to Hopscotch. Soma’s a block and a half from his law office. I’d be sitting at my customary Table 1 and he’d come in for his daily cup of the life-giving and a muffin. He rarely could resist joining me for a spot of badinage and I always welcomed his interruptions. He and I would go on and on ad infinitum about the law, politics, and whatever else came to mind. One day he informed me that in Indiana there’s a little-known law that any old citizen can demand a special prosecutor be called to investigate…, well, anything. Say you think the mayor’s a crook — as long as you have some decent evidence to that effect, you can petition the county to call in a special prosecutor who’ll rake the Boss over the coals. That very day, Dave and I promised each other we’d be forever on the lookout for even some slight malfeasance in our happy town so that we could make headlines as the first private citizens to call for a special prosecutor.
Dave also is one of our town’s finest raconteurs. He should be recognized as such with a plaque or at least a spot of graffito on a women’s rest room wall.
As for Tyler, if you don’t already know all about her, she’ll be more than happy to come over to your house this minute to fill you in (although if plane fare is called for, she’d ask that you pick up the tab.)
The food was terrific, even more so because I could actually taste bits and pieces of it. I had the Turkuaz kabob with lamb. It’s prepared with vegetables and a red pepper sauce in an earthen casserole. Yum.
My taste buds have yet to return to full strength. I’d say they’re running at about a 25 percent capacity, if that. And I’m still producing only trace amounts of saliva. Together, these two side effects from chemotherapy and radiation have pretty much quashed all my desire to eat. Food tastes either like cardboard, like nothing at all, and in certain tragic scenarios (tomatoes, tomato sauce, chocolate, honey, etc.) like the sourest, most rancid dreck I’ve ever shoveled into my trap.
As a result, I’ve lost 75 pounds (and counting) since mid-March. Now, let’s be frank — my pre-cancer treatment girth most assuredly was throwing the Earth’s orbit out of whack. I admit it. I’d hit the truly round figure of 335 pounds before I started getting zapped and poisoned. I’m pushing 260 now with no end of the narrowing in sight.
Here’s a picture of Dave and me outside Turkuaz Saturday night:
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Before my weight loss, I was easily two of Dave. Now, as you can see, I’m more like 1½ of him.
I posted the pic on social media with some self-deprecating humor about what an old goat I am and how in the hell did that happen w/o me noticing it? See, because we’re supposed to fight aging with every ounce of our being. The old, we’re told, are only old because they let themselves get that way. The lazy, disgusting bastards.
Take a look at this slide show:
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(Just to clarify: I love the fact that I’m 60 this year. I hear people talk about how fun it would be to go back to their 20s and I think, really? You’re kidding, right? You actually want to go back to a time when your hormones ruled, when you had no idea of who you were or what this confounding existence was all about? When you were so insecure that you’d fall for any and every goofy-assed trend that came along just so’s you’d be part of the in-crowd? Not me, babies.)
Anyway, it surprised me when several people reacted to my post with wonderful compliments on how good I look now. Well, wonderful in their intent.
See, losing 75 pounds in a mere few months is terribly unhealthy. I’m constantly fighting dehydration and under-nourishment. My body has begun eating up lean muscle mass, having had its fill of my fat. Most often when I stand up, I have to steady myself against the dizziness that overwhelms me. I’m as weak as a kitten. I want to sleep most hours of the day. My metabolic blood panels (the numerical results of testing done on my blood samples, measuring my sugar [glucose] level, electrolyte and fluid balance, kidney function, and liver function) cause much head-shaking among my army of doctors.
I am, in short, still a wreck.
Even though slicing the equivalent of a 12-year-old girl off my silhouette ought to be a boon for my overall health and longevity, doing it this way is flat out wrong. In fact, all my doctors cautioned me early on in my treatment: You’re gonna lose weight but you’ve got to try to control it. Don’t look at it as a diet or anything good that’s happening. You’ve got to keep your strength up. Etc.
So, yeah, I’m skinnier now. But it doesn’t mean I look good. In fact, it’s prima facie evidence that I’m still awfully sick.
Then again, I’m alive. I’ll take the now as opposed to the then.
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Scoop Coup!
Hey, you’d better be here every day of the upcoming Democratic National Convention (Mon-Thu, July 25-28). The Electron Pencil has struck a multi-penny deal with a special correspondent who’ll be roaming the scene.
I’m thrilled. She’s thrilled. You will be too! (We hope.)
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Stay tuned for the great unveiling of our correspondent. Her identity, that is; she’ll remained clothed throughout. Phew!
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July 18th Birthdays
A veritable treasury of birthdays today, including that of our very own Brother William Morris, host of WFIU’s Soul Kitchen, civil rights lawyer, volunteer for Indiana Legal Services and scads of other do-good orgs. around the region, teacher, and all-around cool-as-all-hell guy.
Hendrik Lorentz — Without old Hank, Albert Einstein might not have been able to conjure up his special theory of relativity. From the Nobel Prize organization’s biography of him:
The so-called Lorentz transformation (1904) was based on the fact that electromagnetic forces between charges are subject to slight alterations due to their motion, resulting in a minute contraction in the size of moving bodies. It not only adequately explains the apparent absence of the relative motion of the Earth with respect to the ether, as indicated by the experiments of Michelson and Morley, but also paved the way for Einstein’s special theory of relativity.
Lorentz’s mother’s maiden name was Geertruida van Ginkel, a fact I add here only because it makes me chuckle.
Lorentz (R) & Einstein
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Margaret Brown — Born Margaret Tobin, she became known as “The Unsinkable Molly Brown.” She was raised in poverty in Hannibal, Missouri (also home of Samuel Clemens — Mark Twain) and moved to Leadville, Colorado as an 18-year-old. She’d always hoped to marry rich but instead settled for love in the form of a self-educated mining engineer named J.J. Brown. Brown developed a safe system to prevent mine cave-ins that allowed the Ibex Mining Co. in 1893 to retrieve huge amounts of copper and gold from the Little Jonny Mine. The couple became extremely wealthy as a result. Margaret was aboard the Titanic when it sank. She helped load survivors on lifeboats and later helped oar her own lifeboat. She chided crewmen to return to the stricken liner to attempt to save passengers. Her valor and insistence led to her nickname and a 1960 Broadway musical about her.
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Vidkun Quisling — His name sounds like the kind of guy he was — a wishy-washy, spineless, shoulder-shrugging collaborator with Adolf Hitler. A quisling, natch.
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Jessamyn West — The short-story writer and novelist was born Mary Jessamyn West in North Vernon, Indiana. Her family moved to southern California when she was six. There, she attended Sunday school classes under the direction of Frank Nixon, father of future president Richard. Jessamyn was Richard’s second cousin. She credited Frank’s teachings of the social gospel as the inspiration for her later adherence to socialism.
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Red Skelton — Born Richard Bernard Skelton and raised in Vincennes, Indiana, on the Wabash River, he and his first wife, Edna Stillwell, developed a bit called the Doughnut Dunkers in which Red pantomimed different types of people dunking doughnuts in their coffee. President Franklin Roosevelt enjoyed Red’s humor so much he made the comedian the emcee of his yearly official birthday celebrations.
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Nelson Mandela — An amateur actor, boxer, runner, and law student who was thrown out of one college for his early forays into activism, Mandela spent 27 years in prison before his triumphant release in 1990.
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John Glenn — The first American to orbit the Earth. Testifying before the House Space Committee in 1962, Glenn told the representatives he was against the idea of women becoming astronauts.
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Hunter S. Thompson — According to lore, Boston Globe magazine editor Bill Cardoso invented the term, “gonzo journalism,” borrowing the word from Southie Irish slang indicating the last man standing after a night of drinking and brawling.
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Dion DiMucci — Former front man for the doo-wop act, Dion and the Belmonts, he struck out on his own in the 1960s and, mere weeks after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., charted with the most heart-breaking pop song ever, “Abraham, Martin and John.” To this day, just hearing the song brings tears to my eyes.
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On this date in 1988, Nico died. In 1969, Mary Jo Kopechne died. In 1817, Jane Austen died. And, finally, in 1610, Caravaggio died. (Images in slideshow.)
When I was a kid I went to the neighborhood public school for sixth through eighth grades after spending six years at the Catholic St. Giles school. My first year at the new school, Miss Lucente (who was young, wore miniskirts and who was the obsessive late night fantasy of most of the boys in class) made us write essays about what we would do if we were elected president. The best of the essays would go into the next edition of the Lovett Lantern, our school’s monthly news pamphlet.
It was one of the extremely rare assignments I took seriously. I may have mentioned this before, but I had a philosophical aversion to homework. My thinking was, I give you every day, Monday through Friday, from 9:00am to 3:00pm. Anything after that is my time. What I do in late afternoons and evenings is none of your business nor do you have any right to tell me what I should do during those hours. This was especially true of reading assignments, BTW. I read voraciously and I had zero patience for the nonsense my teachers wanted me to read.
Anyway, I dove into Miss Lucente’s assignment with great gusto. I scrawled out about 1500 words on lined paper with my trusty Bic pen (with the end well-chewed). I talked about the programs I’d set up to foster health, the environment, and literacy. I even talked about creating an organization called WHEEL (Western Hemisphere Economic & Environmental Legislation) — yeah, I know the title really doesn’t make sense for an organization but gimme a break, I was 11 years old for chrissakes. I wrote that I’d pick some Republicans for my cabinet — guys like Nelson Rockefeller and Chuck Percy — because we needed bipartisanship.
Honestly, I went all out on this thing. The other kids turned in 250-word papers that said they’d work for world peace and feeding the hungry, you know, boilerplate teen beauty pageant platitudes. Natch, my essay made the Lovett Lantern.
Okay, so it was a fabulous effort for a pre-adolescent little jerk but, let’s be frank here, it wasn’t the kind of thing real presidential candidates would offer. I had no idea, really, how government worked. I didn’t know what real-life programs and organizations existed that already did what my proposals called for. I hadn’t the foggiest notion if Republican heavyweights like Percy and Rockefeller would paly ball with a Democratic president.
In other words, it was childish.
Just like every single thing Donald Trump has called for and promised.
“Veterans will get timely access to top quality medical care,” Trump promised again, reading from a teleprompter in a hotel ballroom. He guaranteed vets the “right to choose their doctor,” be it at VA facilities or at private medical centers.
New additions to the policy include the creation of a 24-hour, human-staffed (“a person – not a computer!”) White House hotline that would take calls of complaints about the Department of Veterans Affairs. This hotline, Trump said, would “ensure that no valid complaint about the VA” goes unanswered. The way Trump tells it, the buck will stop with him: instructing his staff that “valid” unresolved hotline issues be brought directly to him so that he can “fix it myself, if need be.”
He promises a bunch of things but there’s absolutely no mention of how they’ll be implemented, save for his boasts that any vet’s problem that’s left unresolved he’ll “fix it myself, if need be.”
Clearly the man has zero idea of how the presidency works and what his responsibilities will be. As if all the president has to do is sit there by his phone and wait for citizens to call him with complaints so he can promptly address them. He wants his supporters to believe the president is a glorified customer service rep.
News flash to Donald Trump: There are 330 goddamn million people in this country. And if we’re limiting our numbers solely to veterans, there are some 21.5 million living veterans in our country, acc’d’g to the US Dept. of Veterans Affairs.
Good luck with that cauliflower ear you’re in line for, Donald Trump.
But he won’t get one. Not if the voting public has any sense.
His brag about what he’d do for veterans is just the latest in his seemingly endless line of uninformed, childish, blowhard verbal ejaculations he’s been spraying us with since he declared his candidacy in June of 2015.
See, Donald Trump is no more aware of what it takes to be president and what he might have to do should he win the election than this 11-year-old was.
That’s what we’d be getting if we, by some weird, ugly twist of fate, elect him President of the United States of America — the equivalent of a pre-adolescent who plays pup tent with himself late at night while dreaming of his young, miniskirted sixth grade teacher.
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July 11th Birthdays
Thomas Bowdler — British medical doctor who gained fame for re-writing Shakespeare without any mention of the sexual intrigues, affairs, murders, etc. that ran through pretty much every stanza of the original works. He called his sanitized version The Family Shakespeare. It became so popular that his name became synonymous with censored, expurgated forms of literature, movies, and art. Countless works have been “bowdlerized” in the two centuries since his death. Bowlder also “created” a safe version of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
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Isabel Lewis — Born Isabel Martin she was the first woman hired as an astronomer at the US Naval Observatory. She wrote numerous articles on astronomy for magazines and newspapers and has been credited with popularizing the science. Her articles for the New York Evening Sun were collected in a 1919 book entitled Splendors of the Sky.
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Bull Connor — Born Theophilus Eugene Connor, he became nationally known when, as Birmingham, Alabama’s Commissioner of Public Safety, he directed his police force to allow KKK members to savagely beat Freedom Riders and reporters. He then ordered firemen to attack protesters with high-powered fire hoses and police to subdue them with snarling dogs during a May, 1963, civil rights protest. The nationally televised incident focused America’s sympathy on the marchers. Connor was an ardent segregationist who was known to spit in the faces of black and white protesters.
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E.B. White — Born Elwyn Brooks White, the notoriously shy author and poet wrote Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web and edited William R. Strunk’s The Elements of Style (also known as Strunk & White.) James Thurber wrote of White that when it came to meeting strangers, he “has always taken to the fire escape.”
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Venetia Burney — An 11 year-old English girl who, upon learning that American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh had discovered Pluto (which had heretofore been unseen by human eyes), suggested he name it after the Roman god of the underworld who had the capability of turning himself invisible.
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Brett Somers — C’mon, if you’re of a certain age, you remember her on the Match Game where she sat next to Charles Nelson Reilly. She also was the wife of Jack Klugman.
Somers & Reilly
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Suzanne Vega — Born Suzanne Peck, she is an American singer-songwriter who hit the charts in the 1980s with “Luka” and the ’90s with “Tom’s Diner.” In 2006, she was the first big pop star to perform live on Second Life which, shockingly enough, still exists.
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Jhumpa Lahiri — London-born author of Indian parents who moved to America when she was two years old. She has written the bestselling novels The Namesake and The Lowland as well as the Pulitzer Prize-winning short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies.
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On this date in 2008, Michael DeBakey died. He was a pioneering heart surgeon who invented a vital type of pump for use in the heart-lung machine, was among the first to perform coronary artery bypass surgery, was instrumental in the development of the Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (MASH) unit, and developed the first external heart pump. He and his colleague at the Baylor University College of Medicine, Dr. Denton Cooley, were to perform the world’s first artificial heart implant on a human patient in May, 1969. DeBakey rescheduled the surgery so he could travel out of state to give a speech and while he was gone Cooley re-rescheduled the surgery back to the original date and performed the surgery himself, earning worldwide fame. Cooley’s action initiated a feud between the two that lasted until their deaths.
