Schmaltz und Grieben

     

 

December 2010

12/31/2010: 

 

DAILY GAAAAAAZ-O-LEEEEEEN! AWARD: "New Years Plans--who, me? I have a liter of tequila, a box of .38 hollowpoints, and a full tank of gas. Why do you ask?" -- who else but Mitch Berg

Posted by Alois on

12/29/2010: 

 

I HUSTLED DOWN IN TEXAS (with a hat tip to that blazing Johnny Winter song Jimmy Loeffel taught me on the guitar back in high school): So my 25-year-old son decides that it's time to finish college; in his defense, his education was interrupted first by Hurricane Katrina and then by a trying sojourn in Israel, where he sporadically attended Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Some years later he mysteriously turned up in a small town in the Texas hill country, where he continued to wow the multitudes with his professional misanthropy not only on his blog(s), but also as a journalist of some note writing for an Israeli audience.

Later he wound up in Austin. I suppose, for a young man of Michael's intellectual eccentricities, that was inevitable.

And somehow, whilst he was in Austin, he managed to be accepted by my beloved alma mater of the University of Wisconsin-Madison (no, I never gave any money to the athletic program or played on any teams or even tooted a horn for the band). So, being the devoted father that I am, I hied myself to Texas over Christmas weekend to pick up my son and his faithful pit bull "Monk" and take them back up to wintry Wisconsin.

 

Photo: Alois vom Lugers, 2005  

It's always a risky proposition to travel through the center of America in late December-- trust me, I could tell you stories all night (which makes me wonder just exactly how clever I really am, since I seem to wind up doing it about every other year). Snow-covered ground through much of Illinois, cruised through my hometown southwest of St. Louis without scarcely taking a look, saw Route 66 State Park where Times Beach used to be (that's where we went swimming in the Meramec River as kids, before America's worst toxic-waste disaster), and ate the best barbequed brisket and skin-in potatoes of my life at Missouri Hick BBQ in Cuba (something of a BBQ nazi, I was taken by their billboard advertising "The Ozark's (sic) Finest Smoked Meats," as opposed to the tiresome BEST BBQ IN THE WORLD!).

  A freezing rain/ice event was predicted that night for southwestern Missouri, so even though it was late and I was tired I pushed on into Oklahoma and spent the night in Claremore, just outside of Tulsa. 36 degrees and rainy in the morning, but at least there was no ice on the roads.

I've spent a fair amount of time on the high plains of Oklahoma (not surprising, for a guy who used to research tornadoes), but I had never been through the southeastern "Appalachian" part of the state. Thusly I availed myself of the opportunity to take US 69 down to the Red River and the fringes of the Dallas metroplex. It was a singularly depressing experience. Barack Obama needs to spend less time in Chicago and DC dinner clubs and take a cruise down 69. These people are desperately poor, living in a kind of third-world poverty most of us don't associate (yet) with the United States of America. The bigger towns literally have people selling garage-sale junk on the highway, in much the same way you see third-world people selling trinkets to rich tourists from the West.

So much for the American dream.

Groped my way through Dallas in a driving rainstorm (NOT recommended for tourists), had another plate of tasty BBQ and met some friendly folks in Waxahachie, plowed through Waco late on Christmas Eve (as well as Willie Nelson's crossroads hometown of Abbott), and reached Austin at a fairly reasonable hour, shivering in 37-degree temperatures. At least it was reasonably early enough that Mike didn't feel that it would be untoward to take Monk for a walk in the upscale NW Austin neighborhoods above his apartment, where I was introduced to the pestilential Austin deer. We saw at least a hundred of these critters in one neighborhood, and one "pack" even approached us on the sidewalk, utterly unafraid of humans (or pit bulls, for that matter).

Photo via Impact News 

The next morning we were off, bright and early, bound for Kansas City. It was Christmas Day and traffic was mercifully light, even if I didn't feel like exploring Dallas again and opted instead to take I-35W and go through Fort Worth {whose long-suffering Texas Christian University Horned Frogs were only days from winning the Rose Bowl over our over-puffed Wisconsin Badgers--ed.}. Then it was north to the Red River, which, unlike last time I saw it in 2005, had a fair amount of water in it. Onward to Norman, where I had participated in the Symposium on Tornadoes in 1991; this time I settled for finding a Sonic drive-thru that was actually open (barbecue was a dead issue on Christmas Day in the South).

It was dark before we reached Wichita and then had to endure the long slog up the Kansas Turnpike to KC. It was pushing midnight when we arrived at a not-too-swell motel in a seedy section of Kansas City, Kansas that accepted pit bulls--I guess Mike hadn't learned that nifty little trick of referring to his dog as an "American bulldog mix". But it was so cold and windy in Kansas City that the key cards wouldn't work in the outdoor locks. The manager arranged to put us up in a Ramada Inn down the road, for the same price. (We used "don't ask, don't tell" with regards to Monk.)

Not long after we'd crossed into Missouri the next morning, swatches of snow began to appear on the ground. By the time we reached Winterset, Iowa (birthplace of John Wayne and setting for "The Bridges of Madison County") a few hours later, the ground was snow-covered and the temperture had fallen into the single digits.

"Welcome back," I said to Mike.

"Gee, thanks," he replied, glumly, having not seen snow since a freak storm in Jerusalem years ago.

At our latitude, it also gets dark pretty early at this time of year, and by the time we'd reached central Iowa the ambient light and scenery were pretty much like this:

 

Image credit: Keith Gormezano 

We stopped in Farley (near Dyersville of "Field of Dreams" fame) for gas and sandwiches, where a very pretty--and very pleasant--young lady came over to admire Monk. Less than an hour later, we were back in Wisconsin. We had done it: 2500 miles up and down the backbone of America during the dead of winter in four days and three nights, with nothing negative to show but a little bit of indigestion.

Life was good.

Posted by Alois on

12/19/2010: 

 

ANATOMY OF A BLIZZARD: The mega-event of December 11 is captured on various DOT-cams in and around Madison, WI:

 

 

 

 

I came very, very close to being stuck on the road during this monster; I was on my way to pick up the girls' basketball team and drive them to Milton when the coaches had the (belated) wisdom to call the whole thing off. It was the first time in my driving career that I remember being actually frightened.

Posted by Alois on

12/09/2010: 

 

I CAN'T WAIT TO SEE WHAT HAPPENS NEXT: Lessee... first the Obamessiah promised us that the Great DepRecession was over, even though almost no one believed him (and note the clever Bush-bashing... one of these days, pal, you're going to have to take responsibility for the nation's well-being).

Then somebody happened to notice that, well, um, unemployment is actually still on the rise.

Dead silence from the White House as this inconvenient tidbit is digested.

Today? We hear from the Anointed One's minions that if we don't play ball with his latest plan, we're risking a "double-dip deprecession."

Wow! That was some recovery! Thank you, Mr. President!

You know, if George W. Bush had dared to engage in this kind of duplicity, the left would have dropped dead from apoplexy.

Which, come to think of it, would have saved us from this whole mess...

Posted by Alois on

  

THIS IS THE CENTRAL SCRUTINIZER:

 

  

...the white zone is for loading and unloading only. If you have to load or unload, go to the white zone. You'll love it. It's a way of life...

Posted by Alois on