Patio Boat

Newt-mania Runs Its Inevitable Course

2012-01-27T11:00:00.000-08:00

As the Florida vote approaches on Tuesday, it seems a good time for another update on America's longest-running primetime reality show: the GOP Presidential Primary.

I spent a bit of time this week watching both Florida debates, then flipping around a few of the cable "news" networks afterwards. But rather than go into a cranky old man rant about the horror of what passes for journalism in 2012, here are a few quick impressions of what I saw in the debates, plus what I think we might see on Tuesday:

Mitt Romney -- Looked much, much better this week than he did in the previous debate appearances that I've seen. Romney added a new debate coach to his team, and the change seems to have paid great dividends for his debating style, which seemed much crisper and more pointed than it has prevous been. He also seemed much more at ease with the fact that he's incredibly wealthy. That may be an unplanned dividend for the Romney campaign from the release of his income tax information. He was trying to hard too obscure the fact that he only pays 13.9% of his vast income in federal taxes that it had to be a palpable relief to let the cat out of the bag.

This good week for Romney is the result of what getting thumped by Newt Gingrich will do for a candidate. It will make that candidate take a good long look in the mirror, then make genuine changes to his campaign. I doubt the Romney campaign would've changed anything if it wasn't for their South Carolina debacle, so this is an excellent example of how a competitive primary can create a stronger general-election candidate.

Romney looks set to pull out of his campaign tailspin, and head on to a major victory in Florida, where his advantages in money and organizational support already gave him a major edge. A disaster here might've mortally wounded the Romney campaign, but as long as he pulls out a Florida victory, he should be well positioned for smooth sailing the rest of the way.

P.S. Note to Mitt: if you think you're making any sense when you try to explain why Romneycare in Massachussets is any different than the federal Romneycare that Obama signed into law ... you're the only one who even claims to think that. And we all know that you're smart enough to know that there's no substantial difference, so it doesn't come across well at all.

Newt Gingrich -- Admittedly, Romney's job this week was pretty easy. All he had to do was point to the next podium and say, "Ladies and gentlemen, may I remind you that this is Newt Gingrich."

The GOP's second flirtation with Newt seems to be ending as quickly as the first. This is a pretty well-documented pattern at this point. The rise comes when Newt gets down in the polls and comes out guns-a-blazin'. The Republican base loves the fight they see out of him and turn en masse to him as the anti-Romney. Then the GOP's elected officials and party leaders start working to head off what they see as an utter disaster looming in November if Gingrich is at the top of the ballot.

Worst of all for Gingrich's campaign, Newt plays into this by replacing the Angry, Bitter Newt that voters love with Pompous, Pedantic, Professorial Newt ... and that's the guy who was on display in these two debates. The only thing left in all America that Republicans and Democrats agree on is that everybody hates Pompous, Pedantic, Professorial Newt.

What will be interesting now will be to see if his sudden reversal of fortune leads Gingrich to restore the scorched-Earth campaigning style that is really his only chance to win this nomination. His SuperPAC is apparently launching $6 million in advertising over the next few days, so the scorched Earth campaign may be back. Whether it works after his drubbing in the debates is another matter.

P.S. Note to Newt: if you get housed by Mitt Romney in two consecutive debates with the nomination on the line, you may want to rethink the whole "I will crush Obama by engaging him in seven three-hour long Lincoln/Douglas debates" strategy. That lunar colony seems more likely.

Rick Santorum -- I continue to be astonished that Santorum didn't emerge as the anti-Romney after Iowa. I suspect that it speaks more to his lack of resources and experience with a national campaign than anything else.

Santorum did everything he needed to do to take over from Gingrich as the anti-Romney if this second Gingrich resurgence craters as badly as the first one did. Santorum's campaign doesn't plan to spend any money on TV ads in Florida, so as to make itself more financialy competitive in the caucuses in Maine and Nevada (Sat., Feb. 4) and the caucuses in Colorado and Minnesota (Tue., Feb. 7). This strikes me as a very smart strategy. I also think that staying out of the Romney-Gingrich fracas will pay dividends for Santorum on Tuesday because he may be the only clean man standing after a weekend of epic mudslinging plays out.

If I had to make a prediction now -- and it's my blog, so I can make whatever darn predictions I want, darn it! -- it would be that Santorum looks pretty strong by Super Tuesday (11 primaries on March 6) and that he may be carrying Newt Gingrich's endorsement by then. If Gingrich drops out of the race by then, Santorum could give Romney a respectable run at the polls, though he won't have the organizational and resource strength to ultimately defeat Romney for the nomination.

Note to Rick: Eh, you did fine this week. You don't need my advice right now. You need $20 million in campaign donations.

Ron Paul -- Is soldiering on bravely, but obviously at a disadvantage in a large state with a closed primary, since his libertarian and Democratic supporters are shut out and his web-based campaigning tends to get shouted down by a flood of TV ads. After Florida I would bet that his organization concentrates on the various caucuses where their enthusiastic base has a better chance to make an impact in their final delegate count.

Note to Ron: Please stay in the race. The other three guys obviously need somebody willing to point out that their budget math doesn't add up.

My Bold Prediction for Florida (retail value: $0.02.):

Romney: 38%
Gingrich: 27%
Santorum: 24% (<--This would be the big surprise.)
Paul: 11%

Indy Colts Haiku: Conference Championships Edition

2012-01-23T14:50:00.000-08:00

... in which our intrepid haiku correspondent consoles herself with the belief that if she blurs her vision a bit when she watches this year's Super Bowl, one goofy-looking QB named Manning wearing a blue-and-white shirt will be just as good as any other.

Super Bowl XLVI At The Petroleum Palace: A Different Man(ning) For The Job

Baby Brudder to
Represent; Captain Comeback
Gets Colts fans' lament.

The GOP Presidential Primary: The Newt-Pocalypse

2012-01-22T12:28:00.000-08:00

This week's events in the Republican presidential primary made it official. The Republican presidential primary has replaced "American Idol" and "Survivor" as America's favorite reality TV show. Until Monday the punditocracy was complaining that the race lacked excitement and that Mitt Romney's nomination had become a foregone conclusion. Then we saw four days of campaign higgledy-piggledy that will go down in the annals of American politics. After two debates, two dropouts and endorsements, one ex-wife, a fifteen-percent tax estimate, and an Iowa recount, Newt Gingrich stood triumphant at the top of the Palmetto State pack.

Here are yesterday's results from South Carolina, and a bit about the state of each campaign:

Candidate (Votes, Percent, Delegates)

Newt Gingrich (243,153, 40.4%, 23 delegates) - Gingrich won convincingly in the statewide contest, and swept every Congressional district to secure every delegate that was up for grabs. Whatever else happens, Gingrich's one-week comeback from a double-digit deficit in the polls to a double-digit victory in the actual election will forever be the stuff of campaign legend -- especially given the ex-wife scandal that only seemed to fuel his momentum. (It may also give an entire generation of politicians who are doomed to a thumping on Election Day false hope, but that'll be their problem, not Newt's.)

So, what happened? This result seems to have validated two theories about this year's election. The Anybody-But-Romney theory is alive and well. There's a corollary to that theory. The Republican base has been energized by their opposition to Obama and emboldened by the success of Tea Party candidates in 2010. They are in no mood for a polite debate of issues and policies this Fall. They want a fight, and Gingrich's combative stance in this week's debates played perfectly to that zeitgeist.

So what happens next? If Gingrich can maintain his edge over Santorum in Florida, there's a very good chance that in another two weeks he will be standing alone as the only Anybody-But-Romney still in the race. But Gingrich also has some structural problems in his campaign that will work against him. He failed to qualify for the ballots in some states -- Virginia and Missouri are the larger ones I've heard about so far -- which will likely to hand some large delegate counts over to Romney by default. That speaks to the lack of solid organization for Gingrich in many states, a problem that will worsen as the state-by-state, week-by-week nature of the primary process comes to the fore.

And though Gingrich was able to stand brilliantly atop his baggage in South Carolina, that pile of baggage can get awfully heavy as the primary campaign continues on. Voters in Florida (Jan. 31), Maine and Nevada (Feb. 4), and Colorado and Minnesota (Feb. 7) are about to get a SuperPAC-sized dose of reminders about Gingrich's past. The upside for the GOP in Gingrich is that his past is so well known and so well publicized that it seems unlikely that the electorate will be shocked by anything new.

Mitt Romney (167,279, 27.8%, 0 delegates) — Romney fell from a double-digit lead a week ago to a failure to secure even a single delegate. We've all heard the well worn saying that you learn more from failure than success. But the most important thing about learning from failure is that if you pay attention you will learn the lessons you didn't want to learn or didn't think you needed to learn. If you don't pay attention, you will learn the wrong lesson and will soon enough get another opportunity to learn the lesson you should have learned.

Until this week I didn't think that anything Romney would do in this campaign would be interesting. Now I think that Romney's campaign has suddenly become the most interesting campaign because there's a truly pivotal opportunity for him to learn either the right lesson or the wrong lesson from Saturday's results.

Romney's decision not to release tax returns emerged as a major issue this week, especially after he said that he paid about a 15% rate and dismissed the money he earned from speaking fees as "not very much" when it turned out to be nearly $375,000, an amount that very few Americans would characterize as "not very much."

The reason I think this is especially interesting is that I think Mitt Romney is about to learn the wrong lesson from this week's collapse. This is what Romney had to say this morning in a Fox News interview in which he said that this week he will release his 2010 tax returns and an early estimate of his 2011 returns:

"I know people will try and find something, but we pay full, fair taxes," Mr. Romney said. He said voters would see that he pays a "substantial amount" in taxes and had tithed to his church.

This sounds to me as if Mitt Romney learned the wrong lesson from this week's tax-return kerfluffle. The reason that gaffes and quotes out of context stick to a candidate is not because of the gaffe itself. All of these candidates have to talk non-stop for twelve months, so they're inevitably going to say something that sounds dumb. These things only stick to a candidate when voters think it encapsulates a basic flaw in the candidate.

In Mitt Romney's case, I don't think anybody believes he cheated on his taxes or broke the federal tax code, no matter how many Cayman Island banks may have been involved. The reason the tax-return issue sticks to Romney is because the perception has grown that he is so wealthy and so insulated that he doesn't understand the issues of everyday Americans. That perception is the reason it sticks with voters when Romney refers to himself as "unemployed", says "I like to fire people," or offers up a $10,000 bet during a debate. This is also why Romney's attempts to come across as a genuine man-of-the-people instead come across as inauthentic, a problem that increases the perception that Mitt Romney doesn't believe what he says on issues such as health-care reform or abortion.

In this case, a lot of Republican voters who are paying a considerably higher tax rate than 15% have begun to think that Mitt Romney doesn't really understand their anger at the tax code, since the tax code seems favor him.

So if I had one piece of good campaign advice to offer up to Mitt Romney this week it would be this: stop pretending that you aren't enormously wealthy. Americans like and admire wealthy people, even when they go so far as to be obnoxious about their wealth. Just ask Donald Trump!

Instead, Romney has developed a habit of insisting that people want him to apologize for his wealth. The truth is that nobody wants Mitt Romney to apologize for being wealthy. Mitt Romney's wealth isn't his problem. His inauthenticity is his problem. He would do better if he started showing up to every single campaign event in a chauffered Rolls-Royce, wearing a three-piece suit, lighting cigars with hundred dollar bills, and reminding people that he's a very smart man who made a vast fortune for himself and his investors. He could at least then make a plausible case that if he created that sort of corporate wealth when he was in charge of Bain Capital, he could do the same for the entire nation if he was President of the United States.

The politics of belief are enormously important in campaigns. People will vote for a candidate if they think he believes what he says even if they don't agree with him on many or most of the policy issues. As voters it is enormously important to us that we elect officials who are being honest with us. And all the consultants and all the campaign ads in the world can't create that in a candidate.

If Mitt Romney does not understand this, he should know that Newt Gingrich understands this very much and also understands how to capitalize on it.

Despite all of that, I still think Mitt Romney is very likely to ultimately win the nomination. One of the best reasons was stated clearly this morning by George Will today on ABC's "This Week" show:

"Here's a small sliver of a silver lining for Mitt Romney. All across the country this morning people are waking up who are running for office as Republicans -- from dog-catcher to Senate -- and they are saying, 'Good God, Newt Gingrich might be at the top of this ticket.' And that can't make them happy."

Romney still has all the advantages of establishment support, a well constructed campaign apparatus that reaches across all 50 states, and personal wealth that he can call on if the chips are down. He may very well emerge as a much stronger nominee if he learns the right lessons from his failure in South Carolina.

Rick Santorum (102,055, 17.0%, 0 delegates) — My money would have been on Santorum to emerge as the Anybody-But-Romney candidate, mostly based on all of the negatives that Gingrich brings with him. Finishing a distant third in South Carolina didn't help him, but his narrow post-recount victory in Iowa gives him a good case to continue on through Florida, Maine, Nevada, Colorado, and Minnesota. If he hasn't won another state after those contests, there will be considerable pressure on him to depart the race.

Gingrich has already shown the ability to fall in the polls as quickly as he has risen, so hanging in and waiting to see what happens seems to me to be a very reasonable strategy for Santorum.

Ron Paul (77,993, 13.0%, 0 delegates) — His 13% in South Carolina seems likely to be a reflection of his future primary tallies, though that could change considerably in states like Virginia and Missouri in which he and Romney may be the only remaining candidates on the ballot. He seems much more likely to do well in caucus states where his enthusiastic Libertarian base may form a greater percentage of the vote, and that is likely to be where we see him concentrate his efforts.

Herman Cain (6,324, 1.1%, 0 delegates) — About 6,000 votes of this total is the proxy vote for Steven Colbert's pseudo-campaign, which has taken aim at the current campaign finance rules. I'm surprised the total was this low, even given the confusing "Vote Cain for Colbert" methodology. The low Cain/Colbert vote total seems to be an indication that the voters in South Carolina took the actual race at the top very seriously. It's also likely an indicator that Independents and Democrats who did show up to vote in the GOP contest thought their vote was better directed among the genuine candidates.

Rick Perry (2,494, 0.4%, 0 delegates) — Perry headed back to Texas and endorsed Gingrich. This endorsement may have done Gingrich more good than just handing over the five percent or so of voters who still favored Perry. Perry's endorsement added significantly to the appearance that Gingrich has emerged as the genuine Anybody-But-Romney candidate. Frankly, I would've expected Perry's nomination to go to Santorum, since their platforms have been so similar. I can't help but wonder what would've happened this week had Perry endorsed Santorum instead.

Jon Huntsman (1,161, 0.2%, 0 delegates) — Huntsman pulled out of the race and endorsed Romney earlier this week. That was about the only piece of good news for Mitt Romney this week. Just imagine: without Huntsman's endorsement Romney could've finished even farther behind Gingrich!

Michele Bachmann (494, 0.1%, 0 delegates) — She must be sitting at home in the midst of a Minnesota winter, dreaming of the warmth of the Florida campaign, and thinking, "Why Newt? Why not me?"

Gary Johnson (213, 0.0%, 0 delegates) — Pulled out of the Republican primary in December to run for the Libertarian nomination. I can't help but wonder if his vote total yesterday means that 213 Libertarians in South Carolina don't know how to spell "Ron Paul."

And that's the South Carolina wrap-up. What will happen in Florida? I don't know, and neither does anybody else. That's why this is such a fascinating campaign!

Some of My Favorite Photos of 2011

2012-01-20T15:47:00.000-08:00

I was looking for a photo from this Summer and realized that I was really a pretty neglectful photoblogger and photo-Facebooker for much of this year, especially during the Spring and Summer. The funny thing is that it wasn't due to a lack of photos -- we have about 2,500 photos from 2011 sitting on my hard drive -- it was just a matter of taking the time to sort through them to pull out a few of the best. So, I went through this year's photo folders and pulled out some of my favorites. Monique took most of them, so if you see one you really like in here, the odds are good that she deserves the credit.

Be forewarned, there are an astonishing 43 photos in this post. Frankly, I could've run the count up to a hundred. Looking them all over again, one thing was clear: we had a lot of good times in 2011. Here's some of the best evidence...

Okay, this one's cheating since it's from the very end of 2010. It's a Very Magee Christmas in my Dad's front yard! Pottersville, New York.

Monique in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands.

John sailing with friends off Tortola in the Sir Francis Drake Channel.

Monique in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands.

John in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands.

Katie the Beagle enjoying the special pillow that Monique made for her, so that her head would have a soft spot when she flops out of her bed. Not that Katie the Beagle is a spoiled dog or anything.

Zoe on Casper Mountain, Wyoming.

Cathy, Zoe, Uncle John, and Mike enjoying the successful construction of the new bike trailer. Casper, Wyoming. (Note Zoe's stylin' set of rabbit ears.)

Zoe the gardener. Casper, Wyoming.

Mike standing at the edge of an abyss while overflow water from Spring flooding roars into a canyon. Near Casper, Wyoming.

Roses and peonies by our decrepit picket fence. Wolverine Lake, Michigan.

Stella sunbathing on our dock. Wolverine Lake, Michigan.

Tiki Night fireworks. Wolverine Lake, Michigan.

The French car-wash crew (Malcolm and Henry) in the MGB. Wolverine Lake, Michigan.

Malcolm, Stella, Ann, Henry, and Michelle (left-to-right) at the fair. Wolverine Lake, Michigan.

Fun in the sun with Malcolm, Henry, Anna, and Lexi (left-to-right.) Wolverine Lake, Michigan.

John and Malcolm head off for high-speed adventures. Wolverine Lake, Michigan.

Sigh. Wendy and her new ski boat getting towed back to the dock. Wolverine Lake, Michigan.

The car-wash crew: John, Malcolm, and Henry (left-to-right). Wolverine Lake, Michigan.

And how shiny did the car-wash crew get the MGB? I give you "Michelle: Self-Portrait in MGB Hood." Wolverine Lake, Michigan.

Another fine reflection upon the good work done by my car-wash assistants. Wolverine Lake, Michigan.

(Michelle took a lot of great car-reflection photos this year, but I don't have them all on my hard drive. Michelle, if you read this and send me some of those really cool ones you took at the Concours d'Elegance, I'll add them to this post.)

Monique and Michelle -- probably rehearsing the "Sisters" number from "White Christmas." Wolverine Lake, Michigan.

Arsen and Katie the Beagle on the boardwalk. Wolverine Lake, Michigan.

Babs and Michelle standing in our kitchen. What I especially like about this photo is that it looks like a graceful dance pose, but in reality they are just startled to look up and realize that our skylight is raining on them. Wolverine Lake, Michigan.

John and Babs head off for high-speed adventures. Wolverine Lake, Michigan.

Monique and Katie the Beagle head off for low-speed adventures. Wolverine Lake, Michigan.

Brigitte, Babs, Michelle, and Monique (bottom-to-top). Wolverine Lake, Michigan.

Brigitte and Stella. Grosse Pointe, Michigan.

This photo of Arsen about to make a point still cracks me up. Traverse City, Michigan.

John was a wee bit tired after the rugby game. Traverse City, Michigan.

Arsen staring up from galley of the tall sailing ship Manitou. Traverse City, Michigan.

Monique and John having top-down fun in the FUN MG. Sleeping Bear Dunes, Michigan.

Morning glories. Wolverine Lake, Michigan.

Fall colors. Adirondack Mountains, New York.

The lake of my childhood. Loon Lake, New York.

On the fall colors cruise with the Windsor-Detroit MG Club. Near Plymouth, Michigan.

2011 Corvette Grand Sport vs. 1976 MG MGB Roadster. Wolverine Lake, Michigan.

Proof that a new Corvette is a chick magnet. Wolverine Lake, Michigan.

Last pontoon cruise of the year. Wolverine Lake, Michigan.

John's self-portrait in pumpkin. Wolverine Lake, Michigan.

Katie the Beagle helps Monique to install our new hardwood floor. Wolverine Lake, Michigan.

John does battle behind the dash of the MGB. Wolverine Lake, Michigan.

Katie the Beagle stands atop John on New Year's Eve to greet 2012. Wolverine Lake, Michigan.

Another update on the GOP primary

2012-01-19T16:10:00.000-08:00

I hadn't planned to do another GOP primary update until after we saw the South Carolina results, but it's been such a news-o-rific few days that I thought I'd pass along a few thoughts on what's been happening:

1) Late-night comedian Stephen Colbert is now running a shadow campaign and asking folks to vote for Herman Cain as a vote for Colbert. This seems likely to attract a lot of non-Republican votes, but not likely to have much impact on who wins in South Carolina. However, in a close outcome even a few protest votes for Colbert/Cain might make a difference and the current polls are very closely split between Romney and Gingrich.

What's most worth paying attention to in Colbert's campaign is the message that he and Jon Stewart are delivering about the utter hypocrisy of the "SuperPAC" finance process and the general state of campaign finance regulation. If you've never checked out their shows, (Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Colbert Report) it's worth visiting their websites to watch a few clips of their commentary on Colbert's SuperPAC and campaign.

2) Speaking of close outcomes, it turns out that Rick Santorum actually won the vote in Iowa! The Iowa Republican Party has issued its final vote count for the Iowa caucuses, reversed the preliminary initial outcome of an eight-vote victory for Santorum, and declared Santorum to be the winner with 29,839 votes (24.6%) a 34-vote victory over 29,805 to Mitt Romney. This minor adjustment in the vote count shouldn't mean anything in terms of delegate allocation.

The real impact of Romney's apparent win a couple of weeks ago was that Romney got two weeks of good press for "winning" Iowa. Now it turns out that he didn't even do that. Some guys have all the luck.

3) We also had two midweek dropouts: Jon Huntsman and Rick Perry. That they dropped out wasn't a surprise, though the midweek timing of each was a bit unusual.

I thought Huntsman would drop out the morning after finishing third in New Hampshire. He spent another five days on the campaign trail in South Carolina before yielding to the inevitable. Perry looked briefly as if he would drop out after Iowa, then decided to bypass New Hampshire for South Carolina. But he'd faded badly in the polls and was likely under a lot of pressure to stop splitting the Anybody-But-Romney vote.

Huntsman endorsed Romney and Perry endorsed Gingrich. Neither had enough of a following in South Carolina to make a big impact with the endorsement. The departures probably helped Romney and Santorum more than the endorsements. Huntsman's departure cleared the field of any competition for Romney among GOP moderates. Perry's departure narrowed the Anybody-But-Romney field to Gingrich and Rick Santorum, since Ron Paul has never seemed to fit the Anybody-But-Romney role.

Looking forward, if the nomination is still up for grabs in April, the Perry endorsement of Gingrich could play a significant role when Texas votes on April 3. That's an advantage for Gingrich, since Mitt Romney's victory is already a foregone conclusion in Utah (Huntsman's home state) when it becomes the last state to vote on June 26.

With so much afoot, let's go back and revisit my post-Iowa questions. We already have a much clearer view than we did two weeks ago:

1) Can Rick Santorum capitalize on his Iowa finish to accumulate the money, resources, and endorsements that will let him compete with Romney in states where Romney has a long-established presence?

--He's already won a state since he lost that close decision in Iowa. Unfortunately for him, that state was Iowa, via a recount that comes a bit late. Santorum did pick up the endorsement of a group of conservatives and evangelicals over the weekend. However, it doesn't seem to have helped him in the polls. If he does indeed finish a distant third or fourth in South Carolina, he would need to bounce back very strongly in Florida (Jan. 31) to stay in the race. Otherwise he's going to get a lot of pressure to cede the Anybody-But-Romney position to Gingrich.

The Iowa recount outcome gives him a plausible rationale for staying in for Florida, no matter what happens in South Carolina. He can now say, "Hey! I won a state, too!" But it may not give him the resources to mount an effective campaign in Florida. I'd guess that South Carolina is Santorum's last stand.

2) How long does Newt Gingrich stay in the race? If he does go full-scale negative on Romney, does it stick?

--Gingrich has been hammering Romney in South Carolina, and it seems to be working. Gingrich has regained considerable momentum and is tied with Romney in the South Carolina polls.

3) If Santorum fades, can Perry find a second wind from the Anybody-But-Romney vote? It seems improbable, but it's not out of the question.

--The answer was a clear, unambiguous "No." Perry's disastrous 2012 campaign will also almost certainly prevent another try in 2016.

4) Will Ron Paul campaign all the way through to the convention? His enthusiastic support could be a significant asset for the eventual GOP nominee. If he bolts the party again, it could spell disaster in the general election.

--He looks set to campaign all the way through to the convention, and to stick in the party once his fate is sealed. Since so much of his support comes from outside the traditional GOP base, keeping him in the race probably does the Republican Party some good by drawing voters into their tent. I doubt he'll get much pressure to shut down his campaign until somebody has the nomination mathematically secure. In the meantime, if he can run up a high enough delegate total he could have a significant impact on the party platform and VP selection at the convention.

Indy Colts Haiku: Playoff Bonus

2012-01-15T10:30:00.000-08:00

None of you were expecting a Colts haiku during this year's playoffs, since the Colts' record placed them so very far away from the playoff pool. However, our intrepid haiku reporter has discovered one tiny ray of sunshine amid the storm clouds in Indy:

From the If-I-Wash-It-One-More-Time-It-Will-Disintegrate Files

Yes, we dug out our
Harbaugh #4 T-shirt.
Go, Captain Comeback!

--Mary Campbell-Droze

Thoughts on the GOP presidential primary results in New Hampshire

2012-01-11T10:30:00.000-08:00

I thought it would be fun to take another look at the GOP presidential race, now that the New Hampshire primary is in the books.

Let's start with a look at the finish, with a few comments on the top finishers:

1. Mitt Romney (96,814 votes, 39.3%, 7 delegates) - This was a good night for Romney. New England candidates tend to have about a 15% hometown edge in New Hampshire, so this would've been a win for him even without that. He also gave by far the sharpest and most focused of the post-primary speeches. Given the relatively small number of delegates at stake in New Hampshire, last nights results matter most in terms of a jumping-off point for the rest of the campaign. Those nationally televised victory and concession speeches matter, and Romney won both the election and the post-election speech. A failure in New Hampshire would have been a major setback. Instead, he is heading straight down the happy path of his campaign's plan for victory. If he follows this up with decisive wins in South Carolina and Florida, there will be a lot of pressure on the other candidates to fold their tents, so as not to damage the party's chances in November.

2. Ron Paul (56,259 votes, 22.8%, 3 delegates) - Likely to be the high-water mark for Ron Paul 2012. Much of his support came from independents or disaffected Democrats, groups which may not be able to show up in the same numbers in later states with more restrictive primary voting rules. One interesting item fairly widely reported afterwards is that a lot of folks think Ron Paul won't bolt the party and run independently because of the political damage it would do to his son, Sen. Rand Paul. I think that's probably right. So here's a thought: if Ron Paul manages to run up a sizable delegate count for the convention, perhaps we'll see Rand Paul in the VP slot.

3. Jon Huntsman (41,537 votes, 16.9%, 2 delegates) - Thanks to his laser-sharp focus on New Hampshire and a burst of late momentum, Huntsman managed to bring enough Democrats into the New Hampshire primary to only get trounced by Romney by more than twenty percent. Where now, Jon Huntsman? South Carolina? Seems unlikely. Florida? Huntsman's message might play well there, but I doubt he has the resources to get that message out in a state that size. Worse yet, his post-election speech was the worst speech I've ever seen him give.

About the only role Huntsman seems likely to play going forward is to siphon votes from Romney on the left. That might benefit an Anybody-But-Romney candidate on the right, but it seems to me more likely to continue to split the Anybody-But-Romney vote and actually benefit Romney more than his opposition. I'm not sure what 2013 holds for Jon Huntsman, but "President Huntsman" ain't it.

4. Newt Gingrich (23,230 votes, 9.4%, 0 delegates) - Gingrich continues to slip in the polls and the results. He really needed a strong result in New Hampshire plus a strong post-election speech to make a go of it in South Carolina. He had neither. We all look forward to the promised savage chaos of your well-financed South Carolina campaign farewell, Newt, but say farewell to the presidency.

5. Rick Santorum (23,085 votes, 9.4%, 0 delegates) - Failed to capitalize on his Iowa success at the polls, and also failed to deliver a post-campaign speech that was as good as his post-caucus speech in Iowa. The fact that Santorum apparently would have won Iowa had it not been for a 20-vote clerical error in favor of Romney doesn't matter in delegate counts. In the mediasphere it has turned into "Mitt Romney, who won in both Iowa and New Hampshire." Santorum will need to knock it out of the park in South Carolina if he wants to become the an Anybody-But-Romney candidate with a genuine chance to win.

6. Rick Perry (1,745 votes, 0.7%, 0 delegates) - Skipped New Hampshire -- other than the weekend debates -- in favor of campaigning in South Carolina to re-establish himself as the Anybody-But-Romney candidate. During the debates Perry stated that he wanted to re-invade Iraq, so he might have done better to skip the debates, too. Perry will need to finish a strong second to Romney in South Carolina, a result that seems unlikely.

7. Buddy Roemer (924 votes, 0.4%, 0 delegates) - Reports of life in Buddy Roemer's candidacy may have been premature. I used to think that running a single-issue presidential candidacy in New Hampshire was a good way to get your issue into the national debate, especially for candidates like Roemer who had a reasonable resume. Watching him get utterly shut out of the free media bonanza of all of those GOP debates over the last year has made me reconsider whether that is true. Perhaps it's more of a comment on Roemer's effectiveness as a candidate than the general effectiveness of that strategy.

Below the Buddy Line lay the dropouts, the obscure, and the other doomed candidacies:

8. Total Write-ins (739 votes, 0.3%, 0 delegates)
9. Michele Bachmann (348 votes, 0.1%, 0 delegates)
10. Fred Karger (338 votes, 0.1%, 0 delegates)
11. Kevin Rubash (248 votes, 0.1%, 0 delegates)
12. Gary Johnson (179 votes, 0.1%, 0 delegates)
13. Herman Cain (155 votes, 0.1%, 0 delegates)
14. Jeff Lawman (125 votes, 0.1%, 0 delegates)
15. Christopher Hill (105 votes, 0.0%, 0 delegates)
16. Benjamin Linn (84 votes, 0.0%, 0 delegates)
17. Michael Meehan (49 votes, 0.0%, 0 delegates)
18. Joe Story (41 votes, 0.0%, 0 delegates)
19. Keith Drummond (36 votes, 0.0%, 0 delegates)
20. Bear Betzler (29 votes, 0.0%, 0 delegates)
21. Joe Robinson (26 votes, 0.0%, 0 delegates)
22. Stewart Greenleaf (23 votes, 0.0%, 0 delegates)
23. Mark Callahan (20 votes, 0.0%, 0 delegates)
24. Andy Martin (19 votes, 0.0%, 0 delegates)
25. Linden Swift (18 votes, 0.0%, 0 delegates)
26. Vern Wuensche (15 votes, 0.0%, 0 delegates)
27. Timothy Brewer (15 votes, 0.0%, 0 delegates)
28. John Davis (14 votes, 0.0%, 0 delegates)
29. Randy Crow (12 votes, 0.0%, 0 delegates)
30. James Vestermark (3 votes, 0.0%, 0 delegates)
31. Hugh Cort (3 votes, 0.0%, 0 delegates)

One other note on the results. There was some discussion among the punditocracy about whether the turnout totals reflected on general Republican enthusiasm for this year's election. A total of 246,238 votes were cast in the GOP primary last night, a slight uptick from the ~240,000 votes cast in 2008, though the number of true Republicans may have been down some from 2008. The biggest factors in favor of larger turnout this year were the essentially uncontested Democratic primary combined with the added appeal to moderates and Democrats of Ron Paul and Jon Huntsman. A factor in favor of a smaller turnout among Republicans was the expectation that Romney would win this primary handily. All in all, I'd call it a push. The turnout numbers will be something to keep an eye on as the race goes on, but I'd be pretty cautious about drawing many concrete conclusions from them. They're more likely to be something cited by the spinmeisters on either side without true merit.

So, what have we learned towards answering the four questions I laid out after the Iowa caucuses?

1) Can Rick Santorum capitalize on his Iowa finish to accumulate the money, resources, and endorsements that will let him compete with Romney in states where Romney has a long-established presence?

--The answer in New Hampshire was no. If Santorum can't rebound with a strong showing in South Carolina the influx of donations that followed his Iowa finish will dry up quickly.

2) How long does Newt Gingrich stay in the race? If he does go full-scale negative on Romney, does it stick?

--Gingrich's SuperPAC got a $5 million donation from billionaire casino owner Sheldon Adelson last week. That's giving him the resources to wage a fierce negative advertising campaign in South Carolina based on a film about Romney's record of job destruction at Bain Capital. That seems unlikely to restore Gingrich's chances of winning, but it may prove instructive as a preview of the general campaign in terms of how well those charges stick to Romney.

3) If Santorum fades, can Perry find a second wind from the Anybody-But-Romney vote? It seems improbable, but it's not out of the question.

--Perry gets an "Incomplete" grade this week, since he skipped New Hampshire. Santorum faded this week, but the current FiveThirtyEight.com projection based on the polls in South Carolina has Perry getting just 6.6% of the vote there. "Incomplete" seems likely to turn to "No" next week.

4) Will Ron Paul campaign all the way through to the convention? His enthusiastic support could be a significant asset for the eventual GOP nominee. If he bolts the party again, it could spell disaster in the general election.

--The Ron Paul campaign looks likely to run the full course, especially given his strong New Hampshire result and strong nationwide network. If so, he seems likely to prove to be a significant factor at the GOP convention, especially with the vice-presidential nomination. As I mentioned previously in this post, despite Ron Paul's history I now view him as unlikely to bolt the GOP to run a third-party campaign, based on both his own denials and the damage that would do to the political career of his son, Senator Rand Paul.

What's in Store for Me in 2012, Part 3: The Other Stuff

2012-01-10T16:46:00.000-08:00

Okay, it's the final stretch of 2012 resolutions and forecasts. Feel free to skip by this post if you're only here for the beagle haiku. Mostly I'm writing it all down here so that I can go back at the end of the year to see how I did. I usually come up with a list along these lines in my head at the beginning of each year. It'll be interesting to see at year's end whether writing it down has made me more successful in getting some of this stuff done.

Village of Wolverine Lake - I realized that I didn't mention the village in my "2012: Politics" post. That was just because I don't expect much to change in 2012. I intend to continue to do my best to be a good village president. I'm sure we'll do a 2012 goals session this year, hopefully in our January work session, so perhaps I'll have more to pass along on that front then.

Diet and exercise - I haven't yet written the blog post I meant to about it, but as some of you know, I lopped sugar out of my diet last year after reading the Gary Taubes article Is Sugar Toxic? in the New York Times in April and taking a look at my own expanding waistline.

From just eliminating sugar I dropped about twenty or twenty-five pounds in about six months, though I packed a bit of that back on over the holidays. During the time I lost the weight I didn't hit the gym much, cut my portion sizes, or cut down the beer consumption -- all of which would have helped. In truth, once I'd done it for a couple of weeks I found it easier than anything else I've ever tried as a diet.

Since a bit of physical reform is always a good way to start the new year, I'm back on the straight and narrow -- this time including the gym, portion-size, and beer parts of that equation. That'll hold at least until we go down to Florida in late February, at which point I'll have to figure out how fruity tropical drinks figure into the equation. After that, it'll be more of the sugar ban, and we'll see about the other stuff. I know I'll feel better and live longer if I shed some weight. So, I'll just keep plugging away at it until I'm at a reasonable long-term weight.

Travel - We have a really cool two-week vacation in the Florida Keys coming up in late February. Monique and her sisters rented a house in Marathon, and we're going down there with her folks and the full French crew. I'll also be traveling out to San Diego in April for the American Society for Indexing conference, where I'll be hosting a "Publisher's Roundtable" panel discussion. Hopefully I can manage to spend a few days beyond that outside the confines of the conference hotel. And 2012 is a "Christmas in Glens Falls" year, so we'll be back in Glens Falls at the end of the year, whatever else happens.

That's about all that's planned right now. I hope we'll manage a couple more things, but I fear that vacation time will be in short supply this year between the Florida Keys and the days I'll need to burn on various village and 2012 election things. One of my biggest regrets at the end of each year is that I haven't visited enough family and friends because I would love to spend more time with them all. I'd like to squeeze a couple more visits into the schedule, but I'm not entirely optimistic.

Work - I'm going to try to improve my focus at work this year. For the last year or two I've noticed that I'm more easily (or more frequently) distracted. I think this has kept me from following through with genuine depth in some cases where more focus was demanded. And a few things fell off my to-do lists that shouldn't have. E-Mail tends to be my number one distraction, so step #1 is to occasionally turn off Microsoft Outlook and Internet Explorer when I'm working on things. Fewer distractions = more effective work. Or at least that's my theory.

Writing - As I mentioned in the previous post, I plan to submit a few poems for publication this year. Once upon a time I used to publish poems here and there. But for much of the last twenty years I've written little fragments of poems, but have done very little polishing or completing of them because they didn't have anywhere to go. I just wrote stuff down because things would get in my head, and writing them down was the best way to set them free so that I could move along with my day.

Having this blog gave me a place to post those sorts of things, which encouraged me to finish up a few of the better fragments and post them here. But that doesn't mean that they're quite as polished or finished as they could be. Submitting a few for publication would force me to put in that extra little bit of elbow grease to call a poem truly finished. I think I'd enjoy doing that again.

I doubt I'll see much or any genuine publication, but when I give up on publishing a particular poem I promise to put it up here with a list of the magazines that found it unworthy.

This initiative is at least in part Mary Campbell-Droze's fault. As part of her work on LitFinder she occasionally comes across truly terrible poetry that somehow made it to publication. Then she sends some of those along in e-mails from the "Poetry Coroner." Whenever I see one of those missives I think, "Wow, that poem's even worse than the stuff I write!" It's an encouraging thought.

MGB - Last January's resolution to look into buying a fun toy one day rather quickly became the FUN MG in our garage. There's no lack of maintenance that needs doing when you have a 36-year-old British sports car, but I think a few projects will likely rise to the top of the list, mostly safety related:

1) Tires - he current low-profile wheels and tires result in a bit of tire rub when I hit bumps, especially when two people are in the car. I'll need to sort that out before I get a cut tire. It might be a matter of buying narrower wheel spacers that move the tires in a bit. (A spacer is a disk that connects the MGB's wheel hubs to the low-profile rims.) Or I might swap back to the set of bolt-on wire wheels that came with the car. It'll all take a bit of thought and investigation, hopefully before the MGB's back on the road this Spring.

2) Seat belts - The previous owner put in lap belts when he restored the interior. The car originally came with three-point shoulder belts, and putting a set back in seems like a good safety move to me.

3) Antisway bar - An antisway bar is a bar that transfers pressure from the inside corner of the car to the outside corner when a car goes around curves. That keeps the body from rolling towards the outside of the curve. It turns out that the cheap-o's at British Leyland didn't put a front antisway bar in the 1975 and 1976 models of the MGB because they thought it would be an easy and unnoticed cost-cutting measure.

The FUN MG still handles pretty well, but every now and then I can feel it pushing a bit when I go around a curve at speed. I think an antisway bar would improve that, and the basic underpinnings of the car are still designed to have one installed. This would be my first real alteration to the car, so I'll want to think it through to be sure it's what I want to do and that I understand fully how it works with the suspension. I'm sure I'll learn a lot if I proceed, which should be both fun and interesting.

Home improvement - Installing the living room floor in 2011 was a big step foward, but there's still no shortage of stuff that needs fixin', replacin', or improvin'. I plan to start with one my leftover from 2011, installing the two new toilets we bought last year. If that goes well and I'm feeling my plumbing oats, I might just put in a new faucet in the kitchen. And if that works out without a flood ... it might finally be time to put in a dishwasher.

Plumbing aside, there are a few other items that need doing sooner instead of later. The kitchen ceiling is a disaster, thank to our leaky skylight. Now that I've fixed the skylight, I need to fix the ceiling. The lakeside porch continues to slowly crumble in place. Last year's temporary garage-door fix seems unlikely to be a long-term solution. Everything needs painting. The picket fence is in disrepair. The ... well, heck. This list could go on forever. As always, I'll try to pick a couple items off the list, fix 'em, and move on.

I have no illusions about home perfection. Mostly I'm just hoping to keep one step ahead of entropy.

That's about it. And all that is more than enough. It's a bit funny that my job and the village got so little attention on this list, since I spend the bulk of my waking hours on those two things every week. I guess what I'm mostly trying to do here is to figure out how to be reasonably productive with what time and energy I have leftover beyond that. It'll be interesting to look back at the end of the year to see how much -- if any -- of the stuff I outlined in these three posts gets done.

We shall see.

What's in Store for Me in 2012, Part 2: The Patio Boat Blog

2012-01-09T10:25:00.000-08:00

I'm sure some of you have noticed several political posts in a row and are thinking, "Where the heck is the beagle haiku that I have come to expect from the ol' Patio Boat?!" Worry not, this place isn't morphing into a full-time political blog. But you are likely to see a heftier dose of politics this year than in previous years.

When I started up the Patio Boat blog my only real intention was to put up a little place where I could update friends and family on what's happening in my life, and maybe have a little place where I could post up a bit of poetry on occasion. It's not a one-theme blog, nor is it intended to be a commercial blog. (But could it kill y'all to just occasionally click on an ad, huh? I've got an old British sports car to maintain.)

That first year I made a real effort to post on a near-daily basis. That was a good way to get into the blogging habit, but I found that I was also posting up stuff that would serve better as a Facebook update or even a tweet on Twitter.

If you want to read that sort of stuff, you can always friend me on Facebook, where you will be subjected to fairly regular status updates, the vast majority of which consist of telling you what I'm eating for lunch in my cube. You can also follow me on Twitter at @Patioboater. I tweet a genuine original thought once or twice a week, and usually retweet several things a week, usually cool weather and astronomy photos, links to interesting blog posts, and earth-shattering Weird Al Yankovic news. I try to keep a pretty high threshold on deciding what to retweet, so if I do retweet something, the odds are pretty good that it's something that I found to be genuinely cool, interesting, or funny.

Last year I decided to write an average one genuinely good blog post per week. Critics may say there weren't any genuinely good ones, but I think that sort of schedule benefited the blog. So, that's what I'll aim for again this year. In terms of blog content you will indeed be seeing more posts around politics this year than in previous years. When I started up the blog I declared politics to be one of the out-of-bounds topics because ... well, I'm a politician (albeit a minor-league one) and because I hate blogs that club you over the head with whatever agenda a politician is trying to push.

So, you're still not going to see those sorts of posts from me here. I'm sure I will occasionally discuss the presidential election, but am more likely to discuss the mechanics of the election more than anything else, as was the case with my last few posts on the topic. I might also occasionally touch on policy points as the year goes on, but when I do so I will try to make sure that whatever I post is supported by citations. Polite opposing opinions are always welcome, but I will certainly ask you to have your facts in order and supported by reasonably reliable sources. I have grown increasingly annoyed by a national political discussion that has spiraled far, far away from actual facts, and I'm not going to put up with it here. (So, there!)

What I really intend to concentrate on here are the mechanics of politics, especially the electoral process. As I mentioned in the previous post, I've taken an interest in trying to figure out how we can improve our current system in Michigan. There are a lot of differing proposals and options out there. I'd like to take a closer look at some of them. I find that it helps me to do so logically by writing about them, and as coincidence would have it I have a handy place to post just that sort of stuff. So you'll see some of that here as the year goes on.

On the beagle haiku front, as of today we occupy three of the top four slots on Google when you search on the phrase "beagle haiku". But we've been bumped out of the #1 slot. It's time to do something about this disgrace!

So, what I'll do is promise to write and post more beagle haiku. What I'd like you all to do is to post the link below somewhere, anywhere. It takes you to a results list of all the Patio Boat posts that were tagged with "Beagle haiku":

http://patioboat.blogspot.com/search/label/Beagle%20haiku

C'mon, America! We can do this! Let's reclaim the #1 spot!

Also on the haiku front, I am making a public offer to double Mary Campbell-Droze's fee as our Indianapolis Colts haiku correspondent. Hopefully, that will keep her and her contributions in the fold for another year, including an NFL draft special that will consist entirely of seventeen syllables dedicated to Andrew Luck.

On the non-haiku poetry front, you might see less of that this year, though I confess there wasn't a whole lot of poetry-writing last year, either. It's been about twenty years since I put any effort into having any of my poems published, but I decided that it might benefit my writing to brush a few of my efforts up to that level of scrutiny. So, that means that a few poems are likely to go out for a few rejection slips before they appear here. On the bright side, once I give up on getting a poem in a genuine physical magazine, you'll get to see it with a list of the magazines that found it unfit for publication. That should be fun.

And what else? Eh, the usual stuff. Look for a few posts on the MGB, the lake, home improvements, occasional photoblogging, or whatever strikes my fancy. After all, it's still just the ol' Patio Boat.

What's in Store for Me in 2012, Part 1: Politics

2012-01-08T13:29:00.000-08:00

Howdy all (this, of course is the definition of "all" that means "the half-dozen or so family members and friends who stop by occasionally, mostly in hopes of a new beagle haiku.")

Now that I have a bit clearer idea of what I'll be doing with myself in 2012, I thought it might be a good to lay out a few of those things on the ol' Patio Boat blog. We'll start this post on my plans for the 2012 campaign. Later this week I'll have a couple more posts, one on what to look for on the blog itself this year, and finally a slumgullion of a post on the other stuff -- from MGBs to beagle haiku -- that seems likely to come across my radar in 2012.

But first, Campaign 2012:

So, let's start with what I'm not doing in 2012. As my Facebook friends might already know, I am not running for the Michigan State House this year. It feels a little weird to loudly proclaim what I'm not doing, but quite a few people whose opinions I respect -- from both parties -- had asked me if I'd consider it. So I took a good look at what it would take to run a state house campaign, then thought about my own personal goals for the next couple of years.

Put it all together and it all added up to me not running for anything in 2012.

So what am I planning to do with my political self in 2012? Probably two things will take up most of my time:

1) I'll be working on Andy Meisner's re-election campaign for Oakland County Treasurer. I'll try not to digress into campaign speechifyin', but as you all know, I'm a big believe that local governments have the most direct impact on people's lives. This is a great example of that. Four years ago Andy foresaw both the looming foreclosure crisis, and the opportunity for a good county treasurer to minimize the impact on the rsidents of Oakland County. He campaigned on "Preventing foreclosures and protecting property values" in 2008. Four years later I'm proud to say that he's been successful in doing just that. This is a local official who's had an enormous positive impact for folks who most needed help. And in doing so he's benefited all of us who live in Oakland County by helping to maintain our neighborhoods during an enormously difficult time. I'm very much looking forward to helping him continue to do that for another four years.

2) I'll be taking a closer look at how our state government in Michigan functions these days, and what can be done to make it work better. I already had some thoughts on this before I took a look at a state rep campaign. I think that investigation confirmed some of those thoughts, while also giving me quite a bit more to chew on. It's not all bad, but it could and should be much better.

I don't like to complain about things unless I have a better and practical alternative to offer. So, I'm going to try to spend some time in 2012 looking a bit more closely at Lansing, thinking about what we can do to have a state government that is more effective and more responsive to all of us in Michigan. I'm not sure what'll come out of that, but I'll be sure to let you all know what I come up with.

Buddy Roemer Lives!

2012-01-08T11:38:00.000-08:00

My apologies to Buddy Roemer, who is apparently still running for President on a platform of campaign finance reform, despite not having made the cut to appear on stage for a single one of the sixteen GOP debates to date.

Um, sorry for saying that you'd dropped out of the race months ago, Buddy. I shoulda just said that you'd dropped out of sight months ago.

I suspect there are interesting things to be found both in his message and in how totally ineffective he's been in getting that message out. That's a real challenge, isn't it? How do you get a message out about reforming the current campaign finance system when those proposed reforms mean that you might not have any resources with which to get that message out effectively.

I reckon I'll have more thoughts to share on that topic down the road.

Santorum's Michigan Problem

2012-01-05T09:21:00.000-08:00

Just a quick follow-up to yesterday's long message on the Republican presidential primary, this time focusing on what I meant about the problem the Santorum campaign faces in building a national campaign after Iowa and New Hampshire. The news reports of the presidential primary will often focus on where the candidates stand in the polls. But to actually win an election you need to have an organization in place that will get your message out to voters and make sure that your voters show up to support you on election day.

This article from mlive.com has the absolutely perfect summary of what I was talking about:

Rick Santorum's Michigan campaign limited to a Facebook Page managed by Grandville man

The title says it all, but the article also has some interesting information on how the Republican delegates from Michigan will be allocated. Michigan has a fairly easy qualification threshold for candidates that I won't go into here, so presumably Santorum will be on the Michigan ballot. Even appearing on the ballot has been challenge for Santorum and other candidates in some states, most notably Virginia where he, Gingrich, and Perry failed to collect the 10,000 valid signatures required to appear on that state's ballot.

But once on the ballot, how does Santorum compete for delegates here? Part of the answer lies in how the Michigan GOP will allocate its delegates. Michigan's Republican Presidential primary has 59 delegates up for grabs. Seventeen of them are awarded proportionately based on how the candidates fare in the statewide vote count. The remaining 42 of are allocated three apiece across the state's 14 congressional districts, where (I believe) all three are awarded to the winner of each district.

This may seem an unduly convoluted system to a lot of folks, but it's actually a pretty good system for ensuring that campaigns truly reach out across the state to engage with congressional districts, and don't just fly in, drop a bunch of TV ads on folks, and fly out. It's really a system that gives candidates with organizational savvy and party support a chance to compete effectively against deep-pocket media campaigns. It also does a good job of setting up the in-state organization that candidates will need to compete in the general election.

So, to compete most effectively for Michigan's 59 delegates you need to run a good statewide campaign, but you also need to put together some organizational competence in each of the 14 congressional districts. As you campaign you would then focus your local efforts on the districts in which you have a chance to win. To do this well you really need a solid statewide organization, as well as organizational support from the local politicians in each district.

What does Rick Santorum have at the moment? One guy with a Facebook page.

What does Mitt Romney have at the moment? Well, his father was a former two-term governor of Michigan, so that's a pretty good start. Plus, whatever work he's already done for this year's primary aside, he also had the a pretty solid organization in Michigan in 2008 where he won the state and beat McCain 39% to 30% and more importantly received 24 delegates compared to 5 delegates for McCain and one for Mike Huckabee. (Michigan was stripped of nearly half of its delegation in 2008 for holding an early primary.)

It's safe to say that Romney has a fair-sized headstart over Santorum in Michigan.

This year the campaign calendar around this event looks like this:

Feb. 4 - Maine, Nevada
Feb. 7 - Colorado, Minnesota
Feb. 28 - Arizona, Michigan
March 3 - Washington
March 6 - Super Tuesday (13 states)

So, Santorum has a two-week window to focus on Arizona and Michgan. However, Super Tuesday comes just one week after Arizona and Michigan, and that's the day that will probably do the most to decide the eventual Republican nominee. And on Super Tuesday Santorum faces his Michigan problem, times thirteen.

So what does the Santorum candidacy do? A lot of his strategic advantage over Romney is his potential to win working-class votes in Rust Belt states like Michigan. But Michigan looks to me like an awfully steep hill to climb between now and Feb. 28. The other state on that day is Arizona, where Romney can call on a solid Mormon base, his recent endorsement from Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), and a nice tan that should play well in the TV ads in the Sun Belt. Hardly an enticing prospect, either.

My guess is that if Santorum does manage to secure the Anybody-But-Romney vote after South Carolina, he may run a token media campaign in Arizona and Michigan if the polls look like he can peel off some delegates. But he'll really be putting all his effort into the Super Tuesday states.

Michigan may never see more of Rick Santorum in the 2012 primary than that Facebook page run by a guy in Granville.

Thoughts on the Republican Presidential Primary, Now That Iowa Is in the Books

2012-01-04T15:43:00.000-08:00

[Here's another one of the entries I plan to write this year in some depth about various aspects of the 2012 campaign. In these posts I plan to mostly discuss the mechanics and strategies of campaigning, but to not spend a lot of time on the issues themself. In general I'll try to keep partisan sniping to a minimum, but just to be clear to anybody new to the Patio Boat, I'm a Democrat and will undoubtedly be spending both time and money in support of Barack Obama's re-election this year.

One additional caveat. I read Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight blog pretty regularly and respect a lot of his insights into polling and elections in general. I didn't link to anything in particular from that blog below, but I'm sure that I've relied on it as a source for both statistics and insight. If you don't read Nate's blog, but you have the intestinal fortitude to make it to the end of this post, you should probably read the FiveThirtyEight blog yourself.

And with those caveats provided, on to the post itself...]

The Iowa caucuses are an interesting phenomenon. The Iowa Democratic Party originally moved their caucuses forward to January back in 1972 to give their ancient mimeograph machine time to print up enough copies of the rules and platform proposals before their state convention. This turned out to give them the spotlight and a very large say in the nomination process. In 1976 the Republicans moved their caucus forward to the same date, and every four years since then the nation's presidential aspirants have descended like a flock of bloviating locusts to espouse the wonders of ethanol subsidies and the corn dogs at the Iowa State Fair.

Although Iowa isn't particularly representative of most of the nation, both it and its fellow small-state early bird New Hampshire serve a fairly useful purpose for the rest of us by providing a credibility check. It's the electoral equivalent of a sign that says "You shall not enter this ride unless you are taller than this."

These two states strain out both the small fry who never should've tried (Thaddeus McCotter, Buddy Roemer) and the bigger fish who enter with a splash but lack the ability to connect with voters outside their home ponds (Tim Pawlenty, Michele Bachman, maybe Rick Perry.) Because of their smallish scale and the long run-up to their contests, they provide a candidate with limited resources (Rick Santorum, Jon Huntsman) a chance to catch on over time by meeting with voters and appealing directly to them. A good result in Iowa or New Hampshire can lead to the sort of deep-pocket campaign contributions that let a candidate compete in heavily populated states such as Florida, New York, and California -- where small-scale retail politics are swamped by the cost of media buys and the need for professional campaign organizations.

The best thing about Iowa is that after more than a year of positioning and polling, real votes that matter are cast. It's like the first game of the NFL season. There's been a lot of preparation. Training camp and pre-season were interesting to the football junkies. But as soon as the first game is in the books, all that preceded it is forgotten.

There were only twenty-five delegates at stake yesterday, but last night's Iowa results brought a lot of shape to this year's Republican Presidential primary, while also raising some new and interesting questions. Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum finished in a virtual tie, while Ron Paul finished only a few percentage points behind them. The results were close enough that under Iowa's rules the three of them probably each gained seven delegates to this year's Republican National convention. That's a genuine tie, despite the difference in finishing order, since the point of this exercise is to gain a majority of the delegates to the convention, so that you can secure the nomination.

(Delegate allocation is probably worth a post of its own one day, and is a really interesting piece of tactical campaigning. Much of Barack Obama's 2008 victory over Hilary Clinton resulted from his campaign's focus on securing delegates, while Clinton tried to establish momentum and an air of inevitability by running up vote totals. That point may yet come into play for the GOP this year, since Mitt Romney is certainly playing the "inevitable candidate" card.)

Here's my two cents on how each of the candidates fared yesterday, and what it means for their campaigns:

Candidate (Votes, Pct%, Delegate Estimate)

1. Mitt Romney (30,015, 24.6%, seven delegates) — Mitt did what he needed to do here: cross the Iowa threshold as a credible candidate. He's still the probable nominee for a lot of reasons, including his experience and contacts from the 2008 campaign, as well as his personal deep pockets. You don't need to be incredibly wealthy to run for President, and wealth alone can't buy you a victory. But it's kind of like major-league baseball, where deep pockets let the New York Yankees paper over mistakes that would sink a team with fewer resources. Next for Romney it's "on to New Hampshire!" where the former Massachusetts governer has what amounts to a hometown advantage and a big lead in that state's polls.

What's been more interesting is that Romney's campaign — which has been slick and well-managed, in accordance with the Romney brand — is the "Anybody-But-Romney" phenomenon that has propelled each of the other candidates ahead of him in the polls. It seems as if a majority of Republican voters really and truly don't want Romney to be their nominee. The problem for the GOP is that each Anybody-But-Romney candidate has in turn been examined closely and found wanting by their electorate. This may make pundits impatient, but I think it's been a very beneficial process for the Republican Party and will help them in the general election. Romney is a known commodity after the 2008 campaign, and his presidential campaign experience and resources have shown in his 2012 effort. But taking the lead in the Anybody-But-Romney race has exposed each of the other candidates to some of the scrutiny and criticism that he or she would face in the general election. None of the non-Romney candidates have faced that before, and if the Republican party chooses somebody other than Romney, they will have a stronger candidate for it.

Romney's problem now is that his poll numbers seem to have a ceiling around 30%. If a single genuine Anybody-But-Romney candidate emerges sooner instead of later, Romney could be in genuine trouble. Ironically, although Romney's best campaign pose is the aura of the inevitability of the frontrunner, he genuinely needs multiple candidates to split the vote long enough for him to rack up an insurmountable delegate count. It's a weird problem.

Current Michigan Governor Rick Snyder faced a similar issue in his 2010 primary as the de facto moderate among a group of candidates who all ran far to the right. That worked well for Snyder as the other candidates split the conservative vote and allowed Snyder to win. I don't, however, think the same effect will work for Romney in a series of primaries that are designed to whittle down the field. If Romney quickly finds himself alone with Ron Paul and only one other candidate, he could be in unexpected trouble.

1A. Rick Santorum (30,007, 24.5%, seven delegates) — Santorum lost the final count by just eight votes, but that hardly mattered. What really mattered was that his late surge as the final Anybody-But-Romney candidate pushed him from the back of the pack into realms of credibility that he never had before this week. His virtual tie for first place in Iowa has made him a viable 2012 candidate for the Republican nomination. Santorum took Iowa seriously by campaigning personally in every county in Iowa. All future Iowa caucus campaigns should study his playbook. He also seems to have genuinely benefited as a candidate from a year of hardcore retail campaigning. Practice helps, and his post-caucus speech was a huge improvement over what I saw of him a year ago when he first announced his candidacy. One other important note here: although Romney finished a few votes ahead, the Iowa caucus process allows same-day caucus registration among independents or people in other parties. Exit polls showed that Santorum did better among actual Republicans than either Romney or Ron Paul.

Aside from momentum, improved oratory, and popularity among actual Republicans, Rick Santorum has another genuine advantage at this point: the apparent blessing of his one-time boss, media mogul Rupert Murdoch. If Murdoch does now put the Fox News machinery behind Santorum, that could make up for all sorts of lack of resources and organization in the states that follow New Hampshire.

Santorum's other advantage at this point is that he truly does seem to be the Anybody-But-Romney. Whereas Romney strikes everybody as willing to say whatever he thinks will gain him votes, Santorum seems to genuinely believe what he says. That's a very attractive quality for voters, though it may prove to be a double-edged sword if the electorate decides that he genuinely means it when, for example, he says that states should be able to outlaw contraception, a position that has already caused a stir in the blogosphere.

However, being the most socially conservative in a GOP primary isn't a problem for Santorum. It's undoubtedly to his advantage. But Santorum has some tactical problems that he'll need to overcome quickly if he's going to become the nominee. Problem number one is that he doesn't yet have the resources and organization to compete effectively in the large states. That may change in the wake of Iowa — especially if he can follow this up this result with a strong performance in New Hampshire, where he has also spent a good deal of time on retail campaigning. Santorum's second problem is that this is his first time in the Anybody-But-Romney shark tank. He will now face the scrutiny and negative campaigning that comes in that role. A pass from Fox News would help him greatly to survive this scrutiny during the primary, but it might not be doing the GOP any favors in the general election to nominate a candidate who would otherwise have failed the Anybody-But-Romney staying power threshold.

When reporters in 2016 talk about the surprises that come out of the Iowa caucuses, Rick Santorum will be near the top of the list. By then we'll know whether he capitalized on these results, or turned out to be another just another Hawkeye State flash in the pan.

3. Ron Paul (26,219, 21.4%, seven delegates) — It's hard to see how a candidate wins the Republican nomination when his support seems to come from a coalition of libertarians, independents, and college students. But Ron Paul has completely captured that coalition, and if Mitt Romney has a low ceiling, Ron Paul seems to have a high basement due to his widespread support among that group. Romney supporters should probably hope that Paul keeps campaigning all the way through to the convention because Paul's support seems likely to go in the Anybody-But-Romney column if he does pack it in. On the other hand the Ron Paul crowd might just opt out altogether if presented with a Romney/Santorum choice.

If Paul does make it all the way to the convention, he'll likely have a decently sized delegation because he seems certain to pick up delegates in states that apportion their delegates instead of awarding them all in a "winner takes all" primary. More importantly, the eventual nominee will almost certainly have to accomodate him in some way to make sure he stays in the GOP camp. Paul departed the GOP and ran as the Libertarian candidate in 1988. He was the third in total votes that year, though he only gained 0.5% of the total. He'd be a much, much bigger obstacle to a GOP general-election victory in 2012 if he bolted the party again.

One of the really interesting things to watch in coming months will be how Ron Paul fares in the future contests, how long he stays in the race, and what he does once it's over and he's not the nominee.

4. Newt Gingrich (16,251, 13.3%, possibly one delegate) — Just a few weeks ago Gingrich had the Anybody-But-Romney tiger by the tail. Today he's trying to recover from a slip to fourth place in Iowa, and an equal decline in national polling.

It might've been possible for Gingrich to recover from this finish in Iowa -- John McCain got about 13% in Iowa in 2008 -- but instead Gingrich's post-caucus concession speech will go down in the classics of primary defeat with Howard Dean's Iowa scream. That moment resonated not just because of what it was, but because it seemed to embody the problems of a fading campaign. So it was last night with Gingrich, who blamed his defeat on negative campaigning by Romney without seeming to understand his own role in providing the grist for the Romney machine's mill. At times defiant, angry, and pedantic, Gingrich quickly moved from quasi-endorsing Rick Santorum to lecturing Ron Paul about foreign policy to seemingly preparing to deliver a platter of cold revenge to Mitt Romney in future primaries.

As I said in a Tweet after watching it: "Bitter Newt is more entertaining than Pompous Newt."

This is another place where the shape of the 2012 GOP primary is going to be interesting. If Gingrich decides to stay in the campaign to savage Romney, he risks continuing to split the Anybody-But-Romney vote and actually helping Romney by serving as a spoiler. I doubt Gingrich sees it that way, though.

5. Rick Perry (12,604, 10.3%, no delegates) — All that hoopla, money, and endorsements when he entered, but today Rick Perry was back home in Texas "reassessing his campaign." It sounds as if he'll stay in at least until South Carolina. He's probably hoping for a Santorum implosion, after which he can regain the mantle of the Anybody-But-Romney candidate. That's not a bad strategy for him at this point. Perry seems to be campaigning better than he did after his disastrous entry into the race, and his campaign still has more money and national infrastructure than any of the other non-Romney candidates.

If Santorum can't cut it in the spotlight, Perry might have a resurgence. It makes sense for him to stick around for a few more states, even if he really can't win the nomination this year. The GOP traditionally turns to the 2nd-place finisher from the previous election as their next nominee. If Perry can right the ship and show good form down the stretch, he might have a chance to take another crack at it in 2016. He's almost certainly never going to get another shot at it in the future if he departs the race with just a 5th-place finish in Iowa to show for all the money he spent.

(BTW, I thus far managed to avoid discussing Rick Santorum's Google problem, but I should mention that when you enter "Rick Perry" into Google, the first couple of results on Google's suggested-headings list are not advantageous to a GOP candidate. Weird Internet problems for 21st century campaigns are another one of those topics that's probably worth a post later this year.)

6. Michele Bachmann (6,073, 5.0%, no delegates) — The winner of last year's 2011 Iowa Straw Poll is now one-and-done in the contests that matter, since she announced today that she's leaving the race. Her semi-concession speech last night was a pretty loopy moment in a pretty loopy campaign. She said that "The process has worked and Iowa has clearly spoken" ... then proclaimed that it was on to New Hampshire. Huh?!

But I think we can give her a pass on the final bit of intellectual incoherence in her often incoherent campaign. It must've all looked so good last year when she was the first of the candidates to ride the Anybody-But-Romney bubble that I can understand wanting to sleep on it one last night before folding her tent.

This was a pretty good case of the Iowa voters spending a good long stretch with a candidate and deciding that what we had here was not a presidential nominee. Well done, Iowa.

7. Jon Huntsman (745, 0.6%, no delegates) — What I like here is that the AP story about Bachmann pulling out of the race said this about her finish: "Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann said Wednesday she's ending her bid for the Republicans presidential nomination after her last-place finish in Iowa's leadoff precinct caucuses." If Bachmann finished "last" with 5.0%, what does that say about Huntsman's 0.6%?

One of the saddest images last night came from a caucus site where the volunteers were counting votes by stacking each candidate's ballots on a piece of paper for that candidate. Little stacks of red ballots for Romney, Santorum, Gingrich, etc, stood there in neat piles. But there was nothing at all on the sheet laid out for Jon Huntsman. You don't need to win Iowa to win the nomination, but what does it say when nobody in a precinct will vote for you, even if you didn't compete seriously in that state?

Frankly, I've decided that I don't understand Jon Huntsman's campaign strategy at all if he genuinely wants to be the nominee. He chose not to compete in Iowa because it skews so conservative. But Iowans don't like to be ignored, so only 745 of them chose to ignore the snub to vote for him. That averages out to fewer than eight voters in each of Iowa's 99 counties. So, after taking a pass on Iowa and receiving the drubbing that resulted, he's hoping to do well enough in New Hampshire to go into South Carolina, Florida, Michigan, etc., with enough momentum to win the nomination. But does he genuinely expect to gain momentum in South Carolina, which may skew even more conservative and evangelical than Iowa? You can't win the nomination by only winning Utah.

I can only conclude that Huntsman just hoped that Mitt Romney would depart the race early for reasons unknown, even though that seems a sucker bet given Romney's deep pockets and 2008 experience. Without Romney in the way, Huntsman might've had a chance to gather much of the establishment support that has gone instead to Romney. Huntsman's problem now is that after taking a pass on Iowa, he's about to take a Granite State drubbing. And as far as I can tell, I don't think that Huntsman has ever made a compelling case for why a voter should vote for him instead of for Romney. I strongly expect that on the morning after the New Hampshire primary we can look for a source within the Huntsman campaign to tell CNN that Huntsman has returned to Utah to "reassess his campaign."

8. No Preference (135, 0.1%, no delegates) — Really? These candidates have campaigned in Iowa for as much as two years, but 135 of you bundled up to brave the January weather, sit in a caucus meeting, then say that you have developed absolutely zero preference among them?

In truth, this is a pretty low number for a "None of the Above" option. I think that's driven by the genuine divide you can see between Romney voters and the Anybody-But-Romney voters.

9. Other (117, 0.1%, no delegates) — I saw a tweet last night that said that six of these votes were for "The Lizard People". I can't believe the lamestream media has thus far excluded The Lizard People from the GOP debates. I demand that we see them on stage in Saturday's debate, so that the American people can decide for themselves!

P.S. Yes, this means that Jon Huntsman only finished 739 votes ahead of The Lizard People.

10. Herman Cain (58, 0.1%, no delegates) — Ladies and gentlemen, the Herman Cain book tour and late-night pizza run has departed the public stage. Few people thought he'd really be the nominee, but I don't think anybody anticipated the salacious details of his implosion. Gary Hart, you now have a new first mate on the S.S. Monkey Business's eternal tour of the Isles of Libido.

11. Buddy Roemer (31, 0.0%, no delegates) — The former Louisiana governor dropped out long ago, but his name apparently remained on the ballots. He tweeted at one point last night that he had nearly enough voters to form a bowling league. As it turns out, his 31 votes were more than three times as many as the difference between Romney and Santorum. I can't help but wonder what those 31 people think about that this morning.

[Update, Sunday, Jan. 8: My apologies to Buddy Roemer, who is apparently still running for President on a platform of campaign finance reform, despite not having made the cut to appear on stage for a single one of the sixteen GOP debates to date.

Um, sorry for saying that you'd dropped out of the race months ago, Buddy. I shoulda just said that you'd dropped out of sight months ago.

I suspect there are interesting things to be found both in his message and in how totally ineffective he's been in getting that message out. That's a real challenge, isn't it? How do you get a message out about reforming the current campaign finance system when those proposed reforms mean that you might not have any resources with which to get that message out effectively.]

So, that's the field. Here's my guess at what the campaign will hinge on over the next few months. There are some interesting possibilities:

1) Can Rick Santorum capitalize on his Iowa finish to accumulate the money, resources, and endorsements that will let him compete with Romney in states where Romney has a long-established presence?

2) How long does Newt Gingrich stay in the race? If he does go full-scale negative on Romney, does it stick?

3) If Santorum fades, can Perry find a second wind from the Anybody-But-Romney vote? It seems improbable, but it's not out of the question.

4) Will Ron Paul campaign all the way through to the convention? His enthusiastic support could be a significant asset for the eventual GOP nominee. If he bolts the party again, it could spell disaster in the general election.

You'll note that none of those "interesting" items involve Mitt Romney himself. I fully expect the Romney-Bot 2012 to continue on to the end in just the same way it has campaigned for the last two years. I don't, however, know if Romney's advantages in money, endorsements, and organization will overcome the fact that a majority of Republican voters just don't seem to want to vote for him. My guess is that the answers to the four items I list above have more to do with the final outcome than anything Romney is likely to do.

We shall see.

Colts Haiku, the 2011 Week 17 Finale (Plus a Wallace Stevens-esque bonus!)

2012-01-02T18:28:00.000-08:00

In which our intrepid Indianapolis Colts haiku correspondent shows that she still had plenty more ways to describe the awfulness of this season, despite the fact that the Colts have (mercifully) run out of games:

Et tu, Irsay?

Oh, boo hoo! Last one
Not wearing a bloody to-
ga's a rotten egg!

--Mary Campbell-Droze

Mary has also taken the opportunity to address the future of the Colts, now that they have secured the #1 draft pick with their successful "Suck for Luck" campaign. This time she needed considerably more than 17 syllables, plus the assistance of one of the Patio Boat's other favorite poets:

The Emperor of Passing Offense
(With Apologies to Wallace Stevens)

Call the holder of big huge stats,
The messed-up-neck one, and bid him tip
His hat and bow with prized but humble words.
Let the benches offer up the best
As they have used to bear, and let new Luck
Send footballs past next season's tacklers.
Let this be finale supreme.
The only emperor is the emperor named Manning.

Take from the Petroleum Palace
Lacking a 5th MVP, that QB
On which we'd pinned two Super Bowls once
And dread that we'd no more save face.
If his honored feats conclude, Canton
Will show how many games he won.
Let new Luck address the dream.
The only emperor is the emperor named Manning.

Colts Haiku, Week 16

2011-12-22T20:59:00.000-08:00

In which our intrepid haiku correspondent discovers the physical dangers of an unanticipated winning streak...

Probability Theory As Expressed By Wayne Campbell (No Relation)

The Colts win *two* games.
Ow! Ow! Darn these monkeys fly-
ing out of my butt!

--Mary Campbell-Droze

Monique's Pork Paté recipe

2011-12-21T11:30:00.000-08:00

Because the Internets demanded it, here's Monique's pork paté recipe, which originally came from her grandmother. Having now spent many a Christmas season smelling this as she prepares it, let me assure you all that it smells just as good during the cooking as you think it would smell.

This recipe is also enthusiastically endorsed by Katie the Beagle who has spent hours drooling and staring adoringly at piles of pork, hoping for the one miraculous mistake that will drop it all on the floor.

--------------------------------------

Mommer's Pork Paté

~ 6 lbs. -- Pork Shoulder (or another fatty cut of pork)

4 Large onions

Bacon strips

6 tablespoons -- Paprika (I use 3 tbs hot paprika and 3 tbs sweet paprika)

3 tablespoons -- Bouillon grains

Mustard

Dash of pepper

Dash of garlic powder

The measurements for bouillon, paprika, mustard, pepper and garlic are approximations. Use them to taste.

Cube the pork meat and onions and saute until the meat is well browned.

Move the meat and onion mix into a large pot and add water, bouillon, and paprika and simmer for a good hour. Add water as needed to keep the mix from burning or sticking to the pot. Because I make large quantities I have to do the browning in stages and I just keep adding the newly browned meat and onion mix to the pot as I go. When it is done cooking there will be a nice, thick sauce. (At this point, you can take a few spoonfuls out and have that for dinner....) Remove from heat and cool for a couple of hours or even refrigerate at this point for later mincing or creaming.

Mince the meat and onion mixture in a meat grinder or food processor adding a few dollops of mustard as you go. The idea is to produce a creamed consistency that will form a nice ball if you take a hand full and squeeze it.

Preheat the oven to 375

Take a meat loaf pan and place strips of bacon on the bottom. Form a loaf shape with the creamed meat mix, packing it together firmly. Put that in the loaf pan, then cover the top with strips of bacon. Bake for however long it takes to cook the bacon on top, around 45 minutes. I sometimes make several smaller loafs in one loaf dish by wrapping each on the bottom and sides with tin foil and placing them all in the loaf pan together, tightly.

This recipe is a lot of work which is why I only make this once a year... And, I have to admit, my pate sometimes comes out a little crumbly which I think has to do with the fattiness of the meat used. Crumbly is not ideal since you want a nice, smooth, pate-like consistency in the end but whether crumbly or smooth, it always tastes great!

Colts Haiku, Week 15

2011-12-19T14:17:00.000-08:00

In which our intrepid Indianapolis Colts haiku correspondent gleefully discovers that her beloved Colts will not have to share the historical ignominity of an 0-16 record, as they finally managed to win a game after 14 weeks of futility.

"All I Want For Christmas Is A Still-Breathing Indianapolis Colts Football Team Franchise"

Rumors are flying
Faster than Santa's reindeer.
Still, Claus delivers!

--Mary Campbell-Droze

The 0-16 disgrace of my beloved 2008 Detroit Lions' still stands alone as the crown jewel atop NFL history's dung heap. The remaining players from the NFL's last perfect team, the 1972 Miami Dolphins, have a tradition of opening a bottle of champagne when the last undefeated team finally gets beaten each season. I propose that in Detroit we should start a similar tradition, but with a fohtie of Mickey's Malt Liquor.

Meet the She-Hulk

2011-12-16T12:30:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine sent me a link to an article about a breast-cancer campaign in Mozambique starring female comic-book heroes: Superheroines Give Self Exams In Breast Cancer Awareness Campaign. That led to a bit of back-and-forth about one of the featured characters, the She-Hulk, who happens to be one of my favorite comic characters. So I reckoned I'd pass along a few words about the Savage, Sensational She-Hulk, aka Shulkie, the Jade Giantess, and the Jolly Green Glamazon.

She-Hulk's an interesting character, one of my favorites in all comic-dom. She was the last superhero created by Stan Lee at Marvel. She was not created out of a burst of energy or late-1970s women's equality, but instead to preempt the copyright for a female version of the Hulk because the Incredible Hulk TV show had proven to be so popular. (Marvel feared the TV production company might come up with their own female version of the Hulk for which Marvel wouldn't have a license.)

She-Hulk is Bruce Banner's cousin Jennifer Walters, who's an attorney and gained her powers from an emergency blood transfusion from Bruce. Unlike the Hulk she usually keeps her intelligence when she's green & hulky. She's also interesting in that her inner conflict between herself and her superhero identity is that she generally has a lot more fun being She-Hulk than being an attorney. Her attorney-dom comes into play pretty often, though. She's undoubtedly the top lawyer superhero in all the land. Somehow the fact that an attorney superhero was created out of a copyright pre-emption move fits just about right. And despite the dubious legal motivations for her creations, she's turned out to be one of the more interesting comic book characters of the last thirty years.

Her first comic was Savage She-Hulk (1980-1982) which had a decent 25-issue run in the early 80s, mostly battling gangsters in Los Angeles. It was a pretty straightforward comic, and though it didn't feature some of the clever narrative devices of later incarnations, it was enough to launch She-Hulk as a legitimate hero in the Marvel Universe. After Savage She-Hulk ended its run in 1982, Shulkie popped up in a lot of the team books, especially Avengers, where she's been a member on-and-off since the early 80s, and the Fantastic Four, where she took over for the Thing for a few years in the mid-80s.

In 1989 she got her own book again, and the 60-issue run of Sensational She-Hulk (1989-94) was a genuinely ground-breaking comic. John Byrne wrote and drew many of the issues. In this book She-Hulk often broke the fourth wall, addressed the audience directly, and was very aware that she was in fact a comic-book character. This was fairly unprecedented in superhero comic books, and served as a genuinely clever plot device at times. When Sensational She-Hulk ended its run five years later, it had become the longest running series for a Marvel female superhero to date.

She-Hulk also had a pretty good solo run in her own She-Hulk comic that ran in two volumes (Vol. 1, 2004-2005 and Vol. 2, 2006-2007) in the mid-2000s. For much of that run she was an attorney at a law firm that dealt with the legal havoc wreaked by various superheroes and supervillains. After a superhero mishap left her disbarred she took work as a bounty hunter. That run only lasted a few years, and was best for the first 30 or so issues when Dan Slott was writing it and filled it chock-full of Marvel-Universe in-jokes.

That was before Slott got promoted to write Amazing Spider-Man. Aside from the general sales challenges that comic books starring women superheroes often had, that seems to me to have been one of the biggest problems in sustaining a She-Hulk comic book. When somebody talented took over and had a good run, they got promoted to the bigger titles. The flip side is the good thing about She-Hulk. Because she's a second-tier character, writers and artists can take chances with her that they wouldn't take with a marquis character like Spider-Man. So you tend to get a pretty uneven assortment of brilliance and dreck that mostly just serves as an excuse for artists to draw some panels of green cheesecake. (Not, mind you, that there's anything wrong with a nice slab of green cheesecake! I just prefer my cheesecake with the clever writing and plotting that's been the hallmark of the best of the She-Hulk books.)

And that, my friends, is more than you ever wanted to know about She-Hulk.

Colts Haiku, Week 14

2011-12-13T12:01:00.000-08:00

... in which our once-fearless reporter begins to understand what a season headed to 0-16 really feels like, week in and week out:

"The bitch hit me with a toaster."
--Bill Murray, 'Scrooged'

The Ghost of Christmas
Present didn't give me one.
Yet to Come brings coal!

--Mary Campbell-Droze

As a Lions fan, I can state authoritatively that by the time we hit 0-13 in 2008, I probably would've chosen the toaster over watching another disaster.

Frankly, It's Beyond Swiffering

2011-12-08T08:53:00.001-08:00

Retrospect: the new
Hardwood flooring shoulda been
Beagle-hair colored

Colts Haiku, Week 13

2011-12-04T21:03:00.001-08:00

In which our intrepid Indianapolis Colts haiku correspondent realizes that rooting for an 0-12 team is quite relaxing, now that expectations have fallen lower than a Sergio Aragones bottom-margin cartoon:

If Bill Gaines Ran A Football Team And Al Jaffee Did The Playbook As A Fold-In

At this point, I take
My cue from Alfred E. Neu-
man: "What, Me Worry?"

--Mary Campbell-Droze

As for the Lions debacle this week on Sunday Night Football, it was like a bizarre episode of Spy Vs. Spy in which the Black Spy stands there quietly while the White Spy commits a dozen incredibly stupid penalties then implodes in a giant fireball.

Stupid Lions.

The Sleepy Beagle

2011-12-01T09:51:00.001-08:00

Katie the Beagle left her iPaw unguarded for a while last night while she slept. Curiosity drove me to check it out to see what her daily calendar looks like. As it turns out, it consists entirely of a single schedule, set to recur every day, with one varient for warm weather:

8:00 am - Wake up.
8:01 am - Go into Monique's office. Crawl on bed. Go back to sleep.
11:00 am (Nice days) - Ask to go outside to bask in sunlight. Sleep in sun.
1:00 pm - AFTERNOON WALK WITH MONIQUE!!!!
1:45 pm - Back to sleep in Monique's office.
7:30 pm - John comes home. Solicit belly rub and walk.
7:31 pm - Walk with John
7:50 pm - DINNER!
7:50:23 pm - After dinner, climb up onto couch and go to sleep
8:30 pm - Table scraps! Stare hopefully and pitifully at John and Monique when they finish dinner.
8:31 pm - Climb on couch. Solicit belly-rubs and petting. Optional nap.
8:50 pm - Liver snaps!
9:00 pm - More belly rubs and petting
9:15 pm - Climb into living-room bed. Sleep.
11:55 pm - Late-night piddle
Midnight - Bedroom bed. Sleep.

Total planned sleep time per day: 22 hours, nine minutes. I would claim that she must be narcoleptic, but as near as I can tell, this is the general sleep ratio for all beagles.

Indianapolis Colts Haiku, Week 12 (plus two bonus haiku!)

2011-11-28T09:33:00.001-08:00

Week 12: in which our intrepid Colts correspondent conveys the pathetic feelings of a Colts fan just sort of hoping they might beat the spread this week:

The 'Suck For Luck' Strategy: One Long Season of Footballus Interruptus

"Hey wow, look! Wait...no.
Ha! It's there! It's---uh, oh well.
Yes! Yes! Go! Go! Crap!!"

--Mary Campbell-Droze

In keeping with Patio Boat's business model, which continues to be "copying and pasting other people's haiku for the revolutionary price of FREE" we also present these 17 syllables of birthday well wishes from Ryan Claytor, which reflect so well the core values of the Patio Boat blog (apart from rubbing Katie the Beagle's belly, of course, which remains our most important mission):

Birthday Haiku:

It's John Magee Day!
Time for Colts, Rugby, and Cars.
... Enjoy your home brew!

--Ryan Claytor

This does, however, remind me to point out to the general audience that MC-D has the Patio Boat's complete and total Indianapolis Colts monopoly. I already suffered an 0-16 with the Lions, and see no need to transfer any allegiance to the sinking ship from Peytonville.

And so I in celebration of the Lions recent return to their earlier won-loss habits, I present this extra bonus Lions haiku, in which I would like to point out that Oakland Raiders great Ted Hendricks was not a role model.

Lions, Week 12: The Thanksgiving Turkey

Ndamakong Suh:
"Kick 'em in the head, Ted" was
Not a coaching point.

--John Magee

Woo-Hoo! Heat in the MGB!

2011-11-26T16:00:00.001-08:00

I am bursting with manly pride today. Flush with the unbelievable success of our hardwood floor installation -- and I do mean "unbelievable ... I still can't believe how well it turned out -- I turned to a couple of other overdue tasks. First I re-tarred the skylights to prepare for the winter. After dancing on the rooftop for a while, I came back to ground and finally tackled my other overdue winter task: replacing the defunct heater fan switch in the MGB.

A heater may seem irrelevant to a convertible that will never see the roads when the snow flies, but on cool evenings in the summer a bit of heat wafting up from the floor would be nice. And it'd be darn nice to have a few extra degrees of warmth if we manage any more late fall cruising and when the spring cruising season starts up. The MGB's heater itself seemed to be just fine, but the fan would never go on. So, in a burst of sheer optimism that the problem was just the fan switch and not the fan itself, I ordered up a fan switch from Little British Car Co. and studied up my various MGB guides in hopes that I might get a chance to take a crack at it this weekend.

Fixing the headlight switch shortly after I got the car this summer was a piece of cake compared to this switch, though the two switches look almost identical. The headlight switch can be reached directly from beneath the dash. To get to the heater switch you need to remove the glovebox and the center vents. This gave me a chance to discover what I had already suspected. If God had meant for me to be an MGB mechanic, he would've given me much smaller hands!

Here I am trying to blindly unscrew the fastener behind the center vents. This process involved lots of language that we shan't repeat on a family blog like the ol' Patio Boat. Everything else was pretty easy, but reaching those screws behind the vent was a royal pain in the patootie, in part because my stubby screwdriver was a bit too short to reach past the back of the vents and my long screwdrivers were a bit too long to fit behind the dash.

If anybody ever has to do this themselves, what you really want for this is a phillips-head screwdriver with a full-size head that's about five inches long. I'll buy one for myself if I ever have to go behind my dash again, though my stubby screwdriver (about 3" long) eventually did the job.

Frankly, it looks as if the MGB is eating me in this photo.

Eventually, I got the dash and vents out. In this photo the nifty new fan switch has already been installed and tested. Success! For anybody wondering about the part I used here, I went with the original part from Lucas, the Prince of Darkness. I did the same for the headlight switch I replaced in July. There are some cheaper replacement switches out there, but the Lucas part has the label nicely beveled in, and looks a little nicer on the dash.

Here are the center vents. You can see how they go back a bit. The nice thing is that once you have them out, you can remove the right-hand one from the assembly before you put them back in. This makes it a snap to screw the vent-holding assembly back in place.

And here's the vent going back into the dashboard. After that the glovebox went back in lickety-split and I was in business and ready for a test drive. I suppose a better photoblogger would've taken more pictures, but I was trying to get it done before the sun set and before the rain fell.

The sun was down when I finished the job, but tonight's rain hadn't yet arrived, so I took it for a spin. It was only 57 degrees today, but I'm happy to report that my feet were toasty warm with the top down. When the rain started to fall and I put the top up, I actually had to take off my jacket because I was too warm.

Success!

As an added bonus, my speedometer seems to be wavering a little less at speed. I think it's possible that the bumping around behind the dash may have loosened its cable a bit where it's sticking. A proper lubication for that is still on the to-do list, but even a manly man who has installed a hardwood floor, cooked a turkey and two pies, tarred the skylights, and repaired a busted heater switch in his British sports car has to call it a day sometime.

And so, with an MG-Experience-approved Old Speckled Hen ale in hand, I shall call it a day and reflect happily upon one of the most productive week-long staycations I've ever had.

Colts Haiku: Week 11

2011-11-25T22:06:00.001-08:00

Yes, it's late. But don't blame our intrepid correspondent, who continues to carry on bravely. This time it was Patio Boat headquarters that was asleep at the switch, lulled into thanksful unconsciousness by thoughts of L-tryptophan past, present, future, and pigskin...

What Is The Sound Of One Fan Napping?

If the Colts have a
Bye in a losing season,
Can anyone tell?

--Mary Campbell-Droze

John and Monique Are Thankful for Our New Hardwood Floor

2011-11-25T15:13:00.001-08:00

This is what we like to call the "before" photo. Notice the butt-ugly stained white carpeting on the left, and the painted subfloor to its right. We pulled up 2/3 of that butt-ugly carpeting last year out of sheer disgust, but hadn't yet decided what to do in its place. Monique slapped a cool painted design over the subfloor, which was fun enough for a while. But we had tired of it.

Even Katie the Beagle looks depressed by this floor.

Eventually we settled on a plan. We found 2/3 of a pallet of Home Legend hand-scraped maple saddle flooring on sale for 25% off in the surplus section at Home Depot. It was just enough to cover our living room, and the color was just what we'd been looking for. This is an "engineered floor." Each 3-1/2-inch x 35-1/2-inch plank has actual wood on top with a high-density fiberboard underside that clicks-and-locks in place to let you assemble a floating floor without having to glue or nail it together. It also claims that the seven layers of aluminum-oxide protection on top will protect it for 55 years. (I hope I get the opportunity to find out if that is so. I sure as heck don't intend to undertake this project again for at least another 55 years!)

With the flooring purchased, we needed to find the time to install it. So we took Thanksgiving week off from work and hoped that five days (Saturday-Wednesday) should be enough time to move everything, install the floor, then get everything back in place in time to host Arsen and Brigitte for Thanksgiving dinner. In retrospect, we should've been hosting an HGTV film crew. It was just the sort of arbitrary and ridiculous time crunch that those home-improvement shows love.

And now, to work!

Monique cleaning and prepping. Next to the vacuum is our neighbor Mike's very nice mitre saw, which he was kind enough to lend us. It made sawing the floor pieces a snap. Thanks, Mike!

And now, a home improvement couplet:

Off, off with all the trim.
One shouldn't do this on a whim.

The craftsman at work. Note the stylin' work clothes. You can also see the first layer of the foam underlayer and the beginning of what would become giant piles and clouds of sawdust. If we had this to do again, I probably would've set up the saw out on the porch. Fortunately, our neighbor Mike also loaned us his shop-vac and the attachment for the saw. Once I had that set up the cloud of dust was considerably reduced.

The first batch of flooring is in!

Monique plotting and planning.

Katie the Beagle has moved from depressed about the floor to suspicious of all the activity.

This corner is a pretty good example of the sort of measuring and cutting that needed to be done to make it all fit correctly. To achieve excellence I employed a fine old home-flooring motto: "Measure twice, cut once, throw away the first board after you botch it, measure a couple more times, cut again, then cover with a crapload of trim."

In retrospect, I would've been well served to place my thumb a few inches farther to the left. Oh well, nine digits is plenty to finish this project...

Katie the Beagle continues to monitor the situation.

And now she comes down off the couch to help Monique fit a loose board.

Almost done!

The floor is in! Now John begins rewiring the home entertainment system while simultaneously delivering his masterful impersonation of an elephant seal.

Flooring in the sunlight.

Flooring in the shadows.

Katie the Beagle awards this new hardwood floor the Good Beaglekeeping Seal of Approval!

The floor was finished, the trim put back on the wall, and the furniture put back in place literally five minutes before Arsen and Brigitte showed up for Thanksgiving Dinner. If this had in fact been an HGTV show, you would think we made up the timing of it all for TV.

This photo of Brigitte has nothing to do with the floor. But it is hilarious.

John puts all of that sawing practice to good use on the turkey.

Katie the Beagle also awards the turkey scraps the Good Beaglekeeping Seal of Approval!

And now, with tummies full of turkey, festive Holiday Pumpkin Ales in hand, and a football game on the TV, it's time to kick back, relax, bask in the glow of our lovely new floor, and give thanks that we don't have to do THAT again anytime soon!

Aaaaahhhhhh.

Beer in the Bottle

2011-11-15T18:44:00.001-08:00

More news on the 2011 Holiday Pumpkin Ale! It has now been bottled.

Laverne and Shirley shoulda worked in such an elegant bottling factory.

Science tells us the alcohol content came in right on plan: 4.85%.

Will it be tasty? The preliminary taste test came in A-OK. The real proof will come with the unbottling on Thanksgiving Day 2011, when the Old Sloshingforth Brewery will toast the opening of the holiday season!

Colts Haiku, Week 10

2011-11-14T09:30:00.001-08:00

In which the Colts' 0-10 record drives our intrepid Indianapolis Colts haiku correspondent around the bend. She goes happily, skipping sweetly, her blonde pigtails dancing erratically behind her like a Curtis Painter third-down pass....

Vultures Don't Sing, And Those Look Like Weeds To Me

Hark, the birds sing so
Sweetly this time of year! Oh,
Look! Flowers! Flowers!

--Mary Campbell-Droze

Colts Haiku, Week 9

2011-11-09T12:20:00.000-08:00

In which the ongoing disgrace of the winless Colts has led our grief-stricken haiku correspondent to turn her attentions to the head coach of the San Francisco 49ers and the quarterback of the New York Giants. I can see her problem. At least we Lions fans had Matt Millen to hold responsible for our ignominy.

Meanwhile, Kaylee the Granddaughter and Katie the Beagle are nowhere to be seen, having long since fled the scene for pursuits less stinky than the Colts, like filling dirty diapers and rolling in goose poop.

Delegated Gratification As Demonstrated By An Ex-Colt And A Sibling

Captain Comeback and
Baby Brudder: this season's
Only source of cheer.

--Mary Campbell-Droze

Practical gift-giving for the new MG owner

2011-11-07T15:33:00.000-08:00

Alternate title: If you think I went commercial when I let the Google Ads onto the blog, you ain't seen nothing yet!

As Monique and I began to move into holiday mode and look at gift-giving options, it occurred to me that it might not be a bad idea to point a few of you towards some useful gifts for the new MGB owner. And while this post is entirely and completely self-serving, stops anybody from looking at at their Christmas shopping list and thinking, "I dunno ... maybe I'll get John a Scottish Shaving Kilt" it may be well worthwhile.

For starters, the FUN MG's birth certificate from the British Heritage Motor Trust would be pretty cool. (To get that, you'll need the VIN from its registry on the MG Experience site.)

On the MG book side, I've already picked up most of the basics, but a copy of MGB Electricals Systems (The Essential Manual) by Rick Astley would be handy, 'cause, you know, it's a 35-year-old British car. There are a few electrical issues I still need to sort out. Go figure.

Looking for the perfect stocking stuffer for the new MGB owner? We only have one ignition key and one door/trunk key, and a deep fear of misplacing them. If we had a few blanks, we could take them down to our local locksmith, cut some copies, and sleep better at night. Here are the ones listed at Little British Car Co. in Farmington Hills that should fit our car:

Ignition keys:

BL STYLE MG IGNITION KEY FITS 1975-1977 (SAME AS 163-375) (BLP1120AA75)
MG CREST KEY, STYLE AA2 FITS MGB/MIDGET IGNITIONS 70-77 (SAME AS 163-370) (CP1028AA)

Door/trunk keys:

MG CHROME CREST KEY, STYLE FS FITS MGB, C, MIDGET IGNITIONS/62-69, TRUNK DOORS 62-80 (NOT PICTURED) (SAME AS 163-330) (CP1028FSC)
MG CREST KEY, STYLE FS FITS MGB, C, MIDGET IGNITIONS/62-69, TRUNK DOORS 62-80 (SAME AS 163-330) (CP1028FS)

Speaking of Little British Car Co., they're a mail-order parts supplier located in Farmington Hills that offers very good prices on all things MG. As an added bonus they don't charge shipping if you pick up from them directly, though you have to arrange that in advance. It's difficult to link directly to things within their site, but if you click on the "Specials" tab at the top of their page, you'll find that they offer up a near infinity of fun stuff for MGs and other Little British Cars, especially fun trinkets like coasters, patches, hats, mugs, shirts, etc.

What do I mean by "an infinity of fun stuff"? Well, Katie the Beagle would like me to point out that she will not be needing the canine MG shirt (MG DOGGIE SHIRT RED MEDIUM 21-30 lbs; CNPDOGMGMED) because she has absolutely no intention of riding in the MG. (Or any other car, if she has her way!) And I should mention that nobody should feel obliged to blow $155 on a Biggles-style World War II British Flight Helmet (FLIGHT HELMET X-LARGE, 219-995) and another $115 on the goggles to match (VINTAGE RAF GOGGLES, 219-945). Fortunately, the cockpit of the MGB is well protected from the wind.

Hopefully if you look around there you can find something better than an Automatic Twirling Spaghetti Fork. Well, unless you find an MG-branded Automatic Twirling Spaghetti Fork. That'd be pretty ... well, that'd still be pretty useless.

And finally, a 2012 MGB Calendar from mgbcalendar.com would've been a good idea, but I already have one coming. One of next year's goals will be to get a picture of the FUN MG in the 2013 calendar, even if it means that Monique and I have to drive it to more fun places for photo ops. That's just the cross we'll have to bear. Work, work, work...

Breaking Holiday Pumpkin Ale News!

2011-11-03T20:31:00.000-07:00

Be very, very quiet. The little yeasties are doing their thing:

The Old Sloshingforth Brewery thanks you for your attention.

The 2011 Holiday Pumpkin Ale

2011-11-02T21:45:00.000-07:00

It all began with our hops crop:

John started by harvesting the hops:

Katie the Beagle, do you think this will turn out yummy?

Then you need to carve up some Jack O'Lanterns. And what better way to carve up a bunch of Jack O'Lanterns than to throw a pumpkin carving party for Monique's birthday?

Wait, that Jack O'Lantern isn't a pumpkin! That's a birthday cake!

Now THESE are pumpkins!

Carve 'em up!

Lexi and Anna get to work on their well decorated pumpkins:

The results?

Next up. Roast the leftover Jack O'Lantern trimmings, then trim the skin:

Katie the Beagle continues to help:

Boil up the pumpkin chunks:

After 45 minutes add some hops and some amber malt extract:

Boil, boil, toil and trouble:

Mash the pumpkin. Then add some irish moss (to help clarify the beer later), the remaining hops:

And the spices:

Boil for another 15 minutes, then strain out the pumpkin and hops. We pulled out the leavings with a course mesh strainer; ran water through the leavings to rinse out the sugars and flavors; poured the runoff back in the brew pot; then poured the wort through a fine mesh strainer and into the brew bucket. The truly obsessed with clarity could use some cheesecloth, but that seems like a pain in the tuchus. Next time I think we'll add a big strainer to that process for easier sparging and runoff. Thus does the process of industrialization grow:

Add water to make five gallons. When the wort cools below 80 degrees, pitch your yeast and seal it up.

After the yeasties do their thing, you'll need to bottle, but that's another step yet to come.

2011 Pumpkin Holiday Ale Recipe

Ingredients

10-12 lbs. Jack O'Lantern trimmings
~5 gallons water
2 1.5-kg cans of Thomas Cooper amber malt extract
~ 2 ounces mostly dried Golden hops from the plant outside our door
1 packet Coopers Ale Yeast (premoisten for 30 minutes before pitching)
1/2 cup ground cinnamon
1/4 cup ground nutmeg
1/4 cup whole cloves, crushed
1 tsp. Irish moss

Steps
1) Roast pumpkin in turkey roaster at 375 degrees for 90 minutes. Let cool.

2) Trim skin from pumpkin scraps. Put in pot with a couple gallons of water.

3) Boil pumpkin for 40-45 minutes

4) Add malt extract and 3/4ths of the hops.

5) Boil wort for another 40-45 minutes.

6) Add the spices, the rest of the hops, and the Irish Moss.

7) Boil for another 15 minutes.

8) Strain out the pumpkin and hops.

9) Sparge those leavings: run some water through them a few times and pour the runoff back in the brewpot until it's reasonably clear. (This will pull out more sugar and flavor)

10) Pour the pot through a fine mesh strainer and into the brew bucket.

11) Let cool to below 80 degrees.

12) Pitch yeast.

13) Seal, and wait for the yeasties to do their thing.

14) Once the yeast is done, bottle.

15) Enjoy with the rest of your holidays! The last batch of this that we did was pretty raw at Thanksgiving, but had mellowed nicely by Christmas and New Year. And it was yummy.

Indianapolis Colts, Week 8: Halloween-ku

2011-10-31T09:28:00.000-07:00

That Round Thing In Our Wins Column Is Not The Great Pumpkin

It's at the door! eek!
It rings the bell! aaigh! It shouts
"LOSING SEASON!" No-o-o-o-o-o-o!!

--Mary Campbell-Droze

Indianapolis Colts Haiku: Week 7

2011-10-27T08:00:00.000-07:00

In which our intrepid haiku sports reporter discovers that neither Katie the Beagle nor her granddaughter Kaylee want to appear in a haiku for a team this stinky*, and so she finds a Colts mascot more appropriate to their disastrous season:

The Godzilla Assessment Factor in Football Exploits (GAFFE)

Dudes in rubber mon-
ster suits are more convincing.
C'mon, Colts! REALLY??

--Mary Campbell-Droze

*Katie the Beagle did, however, offer to roll in the 2011 Indianapolis Colts, an honor she reserves for only the most stench-worthy of stinkers.

The Great Sports Car Debate: 2011 Corvette Grand Sport Coupe v. 1976 MGB Roadster

2011-10-22T20:20:00.000-07:00

As many of you know, our neighbor Wendy works for GM and occasionally brings her work home with her in the form of various cars that need to be driven. And while I have yet to score my long-promised drive in a Chevy Volt, this weekend's driver was not going to escape me or Monique. Why? Because as you may have guessed from the title, Wendy brought home a 2011 Grand Sport Corvette this weekend.

And indeed, today Wendy was kind enough to let both Monique and I take the 'Vette for a little spin around the lakes on a sunny October afternoon. Since I never did quite get around to putting "New Grand Sport Corvette" on my shopping list before I bought the MGB this summer, this made for an excellent opportunity to compare and contrast with a modern American sports car with a top speed of 185 mph with a mid-century British roadster with a top speed about half that.

What did we think? First, let's look at the tale of the tape:

Seats

2011 Grand Sport Corvette: Leather.

1976 MGB Roadster: Leather. (Hah! Take that, Corvette! The MGB's right with you so far.)

Curb Weight

2011 Grand Sport Corvette: 3,331 pounds.

1976 MGB Roadster: 2,335 pounds.

Length

2011 Grand Sport Corvette: 175.6 inches.

1976 MGB Roadster: 153.2 inches.

Wheelbase

2011 Grand Sport Corvette: 105.7 inches.

1976 MGB Roadster: 91 inches.

Legroom

2011 Grand Sport Corvette: Less

1976 MGB Roadster: More (A surprise to you all after those length and wheelbase numbers, I'm sure, but quite true.)

Mileage

2011 Grand Sport Corvette: 16 mpg city, 26 mpg highway.

1976 MGB Roadster: 22 mpg city, 30 mpg highway.

Safety Features

2011 Grand Sport Corvette: StabiliTrak® Electronic Stability Control System, three-point seat restraints, crumple zones, front and side-impact air bags(5), etc., etc., etc....

1976 MGB Roadster: Um, lap belts? Yeah, lap belts!

Warranty

2011 Grand Sport Corvette: Guaranteed bumper-to-bumper 3 years/36,000 miles, drivetrain 5 years/100,000 miles.

1976 MGB Roadster: Guaranteed to force me to use my AAA card.

Driver Sight Lines

2011 Grand Sport Corvette: A digital windshield head-up display appears just above the hood.

1976 MGB Roadster: The top of the windshield crosses just in front of my eyes.

Speedometer

2011 Grand Sport Corvette: 0-200 MPH physical indicator plus digital windshield head-up display

1976 MGB Roadster: The speedometer waves cheerfully and randomly at the driver.

Price

2011 Grand Sport Corvette: Starts at $55,000 and goes up quickly, depending on options.

1976 MGB Roadster: Less than 1/10th that. (Thank goodness!)

Chick Magnet Factor

2011 Grand Sport Corvette: Photographic evidence submitted above.

1976 MGB Roadster: Rust magnet factor.

Electrical Equipment

2011 Grand Sport Corvette: A full assortment of high-end 21st Century electronica.

1976 MGB Roadster: Courtesy of Lucas, Prince of Darkness. ("The proper gentleman does not go motoring at night.")

Transmission

2011 Grand Sport Corvette: 6-speed manual.

1976 MGB Roadster: 4-speed manual with electronic overdrive.

0-60 MPH

2011 Grand Sport Corvette: Timed under four seconds.

1976 MGB Roadster: Timed with a sundial.

Engine

2011 Grand Sport Corvette: 6.2 Liter 430-hp LS3 V8 engine

1976 MGB Roadster: 4 plucky hamsters from Abdington, England.

(For those who truly want to know, my MGB has a rebuilt 1.8 liter 4-cylinder engine that's been upgraded a bit with racing cam, performance headers & exhaust, Weber carb, and an electronic ignition. It's a smidge stronger than a standard MGB motor, so at a guess it probably puts out around 90-95 hp. I've never timed it, but I can probably go 0-60 in somewhere around 12-13 seconds ... if I get a stiff tailwind.)

And so, with the tale of the tape told, let's take these cars for a spin.

Our drivers:

John

Wendy (left) and Monique

The road test:

Hey, wait for me!

Speed limit 45 mph? Yeah, right. (Actually, we were both far too scared on behalf of our insurance rates to go much over the speed limit in the 'Vette, tempting though it was.)

Windy Michigan roads in October. A good idea in any car, frankly.

Oooh, look at the Corvette with its fancy-shmancy functioning taillights. I doubt a Corvette owner ever feels the sense of accomplishment I achieved when I got my MGB's courtesy light, parking lights, taillights, and headlights to *all* work at the same time ... after only ten weeks of ownership.

The Review:

So what did we think? First off, the Corvette Grand Sport is an awesome car. It's one thing to read about horsepower and torque numbers, it's another to tap the accelerator when you're going 35 mph in 3rd gear and watch the speedometer shoot up over 60 mph in a silky-smooth instant. And when I took it through a series of curves and hills near us that present a nice, windy challenge for the MGB, it cruised through them at 50 mph as if the road was straight as a string.

But there's its problem, too. I know I'll be subject to public mockery for typing these words in the Motor City, but the Corvette Grand Sport is waaaaaay too much car to drive on the street. Seriously, I never really got it out of third gear (out of six) on the little roads around us because the speed limit is 45-50 mph. Did I mention that this thing has a top speed of 185 mph?

Don't get me wrong. The Corvette Grand Sport was tons of fun to drive, even if I never did get it to more than 1/3 of its top speed. But it was also weirdly frustrating because the car is so clearly designed specifically to do things that a variety of very good state and federal traffic safety laws expressly forbid. I would love to own one of these things. But I'd immediately need to go up to the Waterford Hills Road Racing track and sign up to run hot laps every day because this car obviously wants to do things that no sane person would do on a public road. It's the automotive equivalent of using an M-60 machine gun to go squirrel hunting.

And I would never in a billion years want this car to be my daily driver because I might just as well go down to the Michigan Secretary of State office and surrender my license. They'd have it in three months, anyway, so I might as well save myself the speeding fines and points on my record.

The MGB on the other hand, for all of its dodgy electrical systems and its wee little engine, is a lot of fun to drive on the same roads that the Corvette tames effortlessly. The handling transmits the bumps and curves very directly to the driver, and its little engine is still peppy enough to zip you along the road nicely. And with the top down there's an earnest rawness to it that seems to be missing in the Corvette, which seemed kind of bored with the incredibly modest demands we made of its much greater talents.

Maybe that's the key to why we've enjoyed the MGB so much this year. It makes it feel as if you're driving a bit faster than you really are. And that turns out to be a surprisingly good thing.

The final verdict?

Well, I was prejudiced in favor of the MGB, of course, but after talking with Monique I think we both agree on this one:

2011 Grand Sport Corvette: Enormously more car.

1976 MGB Roadster: Probably more fun.

(But I plan to pester Wendy tomorrow to let me drive the 'Vette again for a few more hours, just to make sure.)

Colts 2011 Haiku, Week 6, in which our intrepid poet starts to capture the spirit of their winless start to the season

2011-10-18T09:00:00.000-07:00

Back from haiku hiatus. This week's offering is accompanied by the evocative intonations of Fleshgod Apocalypse: "The Imposition" from their latest album, 'Agony.'

GRRRRRRRRRCOLTSSUCK!COLTSSUCK!
GAAAAAAAAATHEYREALLYREALLYSUCK!
DOOOOOOOOMFORANDREWLUUUUUUCK!

--Mary Campbell-Droze

The Day All Life on Earth Almost Ended

2011-10-17T14:21:00.000-07:00

Okay, so to me this is a wee bit more concerning than whatever partisan bickering is undoubtedly filling the cable-news-sphere today. Check out this story from Gizmodo.com: The Day All Life on Earth Almost Ended.

The lead sentence sums it up pretty well: "On August 12th, 1883, a pack of life-extinguishing comets came within a few hundred miles of slamming into the Earth, nearly killing everything on the planet...."

Kinda puts into perspective the hubbub over Ron Paul's right eyebrow toupee, shortages of the iPhone 4s, the latest photos of Kim Kardashian's booty, or whatever's occupying the chattering class today, doesn't it?

This is going to sound like a nerdy rant, but among the things that irritate me about our nation's declining space program and general turn away from science is that for the first time in the history of the Earth we could soon have the technologically to prevent our own extinction at the hands of a dinosaur killer. Although I have my occasional misanthropic moments, I by and large rather like humanity and don't want to see us wiped out entirely. So it would hearten me to see us continuing to develop that capacity.

Of course, for the first time in the history of the Earth we're already capable of inflicting a dinosaur-killer-level conflagration on ourselves, courtesy of much the same rocket and nuclear technology that got us into space. So there's a yin-and-yang with everything, I suppose.

Colts 2011 Haiku, Week 5, in which I make that case that "Coltish" may soon replace "Lionesque" as the preferred NFL term for "hopeless ineptitude."

2011-10-14T12:13:00.000-07:00

Mary Campbell-Droze has been excused from her haiku duties this week, and so I have come off the bench and taken on the task in her absence. I can neither confirm nor deny the rumors that she is away at Stanford practices, scouting potential #1 2012 draft pick QB Andrew Luck.

Colts 2011, Week 5

Colts now oh-and-five.
Vague signs of life from Painter.
Kaylee, Katie: "Yawn."

--John Magee

Ryan Claytor Artist Lecture and Exhibit at Mott Community College

2011-10-05T20:13:00.000-07:00

If you're interested in comics, graphic novels, or visual arts, you might want to head up to Flint this weekend to catch Ryan Claytor's Artist Lecture at Mott Community College. (Noon, Friday, October 7th; Visual Art and Design Building, Rm #129; 1401 E. Court Street; Flint, MI 48503.) The lecture is accompanied by an exhibit of his work that's running until Tuesday, October 11.

Those of you who have dropped by the ol' Patio Boat before have heard me plug Ryan and his autobiographical And Then One Day series. But if you haven't heard of him, his work ranges from funny and telling anecdotes to some very interesting examinations of comic art itself. He also doubles as a comic studio art instructor at Michigan State University, University of Michigan - Flint, and Mott Community College, and his classes have consistently produced some of the more interesting self-published student work I've seen.

Whether you've run into Ryan before or not, he always has insightful things to say about comics, art, and the challenges of being a working artist. So, it'll be well worth your time to stop by the lecture. Alas, Monique and I will be off at a wedding this weekend, so I won't get to hear what he has to say. However, I did manage to shake free from work last Friday afternoon to drive up to Flint to check it out. So I can at least share a quick review of this excellent exhibit of Ryan's work.

First off, let me assure anybody who remembers the raging controversy from the positioning of Ryan's exhibit in the Small Press Spotlight exhibit at the San Francisco Cartoon Art Museum that the restrooms are far, far away from this exhibit. Inconveniently so, really ... at least a hundred feet away. You practically need to take a taxi to get there. You can barely see them even with the zoom lens pointing down the hallway from the entrance:

(Click on any of the images to enlarge them.)

So, instead of a wall next to the restroom, Ryan has an entire gallery room all his own, and he makes great use of it. Two of the walls are covered with sequences of original artwork from his books:

Another wall has a fabulous piece of his titled "Ceci n'est pas une intervalle de temps" which is based on René Magritte's famous painting "La trahison des images" ("The Treachery of Images").

This is the piece in this exhibit that really hit me. I had come across it before in one of Ryan's books, but for some reason I had mistakenly thought that the original was on standard comic art board. So you can imagine my surprise when it turned out to be the full height of the wall! It's a great, thought-provoking piece, and I spent a good deal of time looking it over from several different angles. The full size suits it.

The far wall of the exhibit also contains some very interesting work, a series of the three posters that Ryan created for the last three MSU Comics Forums with both the original art and the finished poster presented side-by-side:

Of greatest interest in this particular poster is that it represents an entirely new phase in Ryan's work. This is the period in which he abandoned a career built on bright, insightful autobiographical visual narrative to instead latch onto the coattails of America's #1 Internet Superstar Canine, Katie the Beagle!

Obviously this is a dramatic shift to commercial opportunism for Ryan. I expect that from here on out his work will mostly consist of portraits of the Kardashians, Paris Hilton, Lassie, and other members of the glitterazzi who move in Katie the Beagle's circles.

By the way, if you're wondering how these sorts of exhibits collect up these series of works, they rely on the generosity of keen patrons of the arts:

I must say, this in particular tickled me. I've always seen these little cards thanking the donors who made an exhibit possible. But when I started to collect up a few bits of comic art that I liked, I never in a million years imagined that I'd one day be a patron of the arts with a piece that would be needed for an exhibit.

Ahhh, "The Magee Collection." Yeah, I like the sound of that: the Rockefeller Collection, the Getty Collection, the Magee Collection....

If you want to check out the work on loan from the Magee Collection, or other (obviously lesser) Ryan Claytor works that haven't come from such luminous heights, you have until Tuesday, Oct. 11. Your best bet if you're running up to Flint is to do it Friday and catch Ryan's lunchtime lecture, too.

After October 11th you're out of luck. Unless you have access to the fabled Magee Collection, that is.

Ryan Claytor Artist Lecture

Friday, October 7th, 2011 at Noon

Mott Community College

Visual Art and Design Building, Rm #129

1401 E. Court Street

Flint, MI 48503

~and also~

Ryan Claytor Gallery Exhibition: Comics and Visual Narrative

Monday, Sept. 26, 2011 – Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Gallery Hours: 8am-5pm M-F

Mott Community College

Visual Art and Design Building, Fine Art Gallery

1401 E. Court Street

Flint, MI 48503

MC-D Eschews the Haiku Format in Week 4. (Just like the Colts eschew wins.)

2011-10-04T14:09:00.000-07:00

Due to recent complaints by the establishment that Colts content has been lacking, I will make up for it in one fell swoop. I give you the Anti-Haiku: the '70s lyric.

A Painter-ly Paean
[sung to the tune of that song by America]

Well you tried to win it Monday
But once again you clenched
So you sigh and look to Sunday
Was it better on the bench?
You're not ready to be Peyton
But instead you'll have to do
Since we all agree: this season will be poo

Well we got so hopeful for you
Mister Golden Hair---surprised?
And we'd be much worse without you
(You're not Sorgi in disguise!)
We've got a fairly decent Defense
But a crap Offensive line
And this likely won't be remedied in time

Do we need to go no-huddle?
Well you bet your derrière!
Rise above this friggin' muddle
Just show us you've got a pair!
We can't duck it---
We're Indy fans; we don't say "Chuck it"

Next up: an ode to Kerry Collins, "Suite: Kerry Blue Eyes" (or "Cross-Eyes" if the poor dear is still concussed).

--Mary Campbell-Droze

MC-D's Indianapolis Colts Haiku, Week 3

2011-09-26T07:32:00.000-07:00

D and Addai: Indy's Dynamic Dyad; Kaylee Becomes a Cowabunga Keiki

Colts look better!
KateAgrees. The grands take Kaylee
On her first beach trip.

--Mary Campbell-Droze

At this point I would be remiss if I didn't note that the quantity of Indianapolis Colts content in the haikus themself seems to be falling in direct inverse proportion to the number of losses they are piling up. (On the bright side for Mary, Peyton looked good up in the press box last night. At least he wasn't wearing a cervical collar!)

Who Will Create the Frame for the 2012 Election?

2011-09-22T09:00:00.000-07:00

(So here's a post in which I try not to be Mr. Crankypants about politics, but instead try to share a look at politics in a way that may actually help some of you to see some of the same things I see when I look at the upcoming campaign. Let me know if you find it helpful, and I may crank out a few more as November 2012 looms.)

You will often here political commentators talk about "framing the issues" but I don't know that they often do a good job of explaining what it is, or how it's done. The reason framing of issues is especially important in an election campaign.

If the battle lines follow the framing of the current jobs and deficit debate, the Democrats might finally be on the winning side of the rhetorical frame for the first time in a long time. The shape of what we'll likely see became a bit clearer to me as I read this story in the Sunday New York Times: Obama Offers Plan to Cut Deficit by Over $3 Trillion (New York Times, Sept. 18, 2011)

In particular, these two paragraphs struck me:

Mr. Obama’s proposal is certain to receive sharp criticism from Congressional Republicans, who on Sunday were already taking apart one element of the proposal that the administration let out early: the so-called Buffett Rule. The rule — named for the billionaire investor Warren E. Buffett, who has complained that he is taxed at a lower rate than his employees — calls for a new minimum tax rate for individuals making more than $1 million a year to ensure that they pay at least the same percentage of their earnings as middle-income taxpayers.

That proposal, which was disclosed on Saturday, was met with derision Sunday by Republican lawmakers, who said it amounted to “class warfare” and a political tactic intended to portray his opponents as indifferent to the hardships facing middle-class Americans.

If that's the framing for the 2012 election, the Democrats will win. And the Republicans will have helped them by making such a huge screaming deal out of long-term deficits, and by then forcing the question of "tax cuts for billionaires" vs. "cut Grandma's Social Security check and take away her arthritis medication."

However, in terms of the linguistic battlefield for the 2012 election, I'm not sure it will play out that way. The GOP deserves credit for one of their great strengths, their ability to impose a verbal frame on an issue by repeating their preferred term in lockstep. For example, this is how they brought us "the death tax" to replace "the estate tax" a change that worked to their great advantage in that debate.

Language provides a powerful frame for issues because the terms to discuss an issue often serve to define it in a voter's mind. And the best way to get the media to adopt your preferred terminology is to repeat it incessantly. Democrats are notoriously undisciplined on this front, which is why they keep debating Social Security "entitlements" instead of "earned benefits."

You'll also notice the GOP's talking-point discipline in the current tax debate as GOP pols and pundits focus exclusively on the income tax without including regressive federal taxes like payroll and excise taxes, or state or local taxes that also tend to be regressive. It is simply not at all true that lower- and middle-income families don't pay federal taxes. In fact, they pay those other taxes as a much greater portion of their income than do the wealthy. And so from the anti-income-tax crowd you will see a steady succession of charts showing only the income tax without ever discussing payroll, excise, state, or local taxes, or indeed the total tax burden.

Cutting out one piece of an issue from the broader debate also provides a frame. If you can convince a lot of people that most of America is freeloading off a tax burden that goes only on a very few, that seems a lot more unfair than if you demonstrate that the overwhelming majority of Americans pay a greater percentage of their income in federal taxes to pay for Social Security and Medicare than do the wealthy.

(FWIW, here's a link to a pretty good analysis of total tax burden by income from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.)

One last thought about the linguistic framing we're seeing as we head into 2012. One of the odder current verbal ticks of the GOP is their insistence on calling the wealthy "job creators." I understand why they do it, but this one might come back to bite them because reality keeps demonstrating that showering the wealthy with tax cuts doesn't actually create any jobs. I sense increasing eye-rolling as that phrase gets thrown out there more and more often. It just feels like rhetorical trickery taken that one step too far. In an age of nearly 10% unemployment while we have the lowest tax burden on the wealthy and the highest corporate profits in 50 years, that gap between linguistic framing and reality starts to look pretty awkward. We'll see how it plays out.

As the campaign cranks up over the next 14 months, don't just look at what the candidates are saying. Look at how they're saying it. That will tell you how they're framing their argument and their campaign.

Caution: The Most Disturbing Limerick Thread of All Time

2011-09-21T10:12:00.000-07:00

The trouble started with the usual cast of characters and an e-mailed link to some weird (and in this case truly disturbing) news:

-----
From: Tim Kardos
Subject: What rhymes with todger?

Chinese bloke gets eel lodged up todger:
Anguilline exfoliation treatment ends in 'severe pain'

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/19/eel_incident/
-----

From: John Magee

Aaaaagh!!!!! This isn't limerick-able. It's really more suited for some sort of horrible horror movie.

The horror. The horror.
-----

From: Mary Campbell-Droze

So far I have a title: The Artful Dodger Todger Lodger. And it sounds like Mugs would prefer that's as far as I get.
-----

From: Tim Kardos

A word for todger that rhymes
Would help in composing these lines
About a Chinaman's penis
And a bath with some eelies
Thank god they didn't have spines
-----

From: Mary Campbell-Droze

The lesson we learned from this farce:
Take care if your clothing's too sparse.
Whether eel-filled lakes
Or in public---Pete sakes!---
Just be sure to cover your arse.
-----

From: John Magee

The eel in the Chinaman's todger
Was quite an unwelcome guest lodger.
It swam up the urethra
Which you'd usually peethra,
To which I say, "AAAAAGGGH! AAAAAGGGH! AAAAAGGGH! Don't tell me any more! Dear God, please make it stop!"

Colts/Katie/Kaylee Update, Week 2, in which MC-D's pain continues...

2011-09-20T09:24:00.001-07:00

Hark! Hark! The Colts Do Yark!

Colts get dog-bit. Ra-bies?
Kate sez, "Not me!" (Kaylee
drools, but is teething.)

-- Mary Campbell-Droze

NFL Week 1 Beagles, Colts, n' Grandaughters Haiku Report

2011-09-12T14:14:00.000-07:00

Pondering the Post-Peyton Playbook and Performance Pithily, or, PPPPPPTH

Dear Kate: Colts ain't great.

But Captain Comeback's Niners

Win! Kaylee says, "FUB!"*

* "Football" is currently a single-syllable word within the 14-month-old demographic

--Mary Campbell-Droze

The Lost Souls Fantasy Football League 2011 Preview

2011-09-08T15:33:00.000-07:00

Howdy everybody, and welcome to the Lost Souls 2011 Preview!

Will United Loonies, Inc., repeat as the playoff champion? Will the Death Mutants continue their incredible run of regular-season points championships? The numbers (courtesy of David Dodd's stats forecast on Footballguys.com) don't lie. But they have been known to shade the truth a bit on occasion. This time they forecast a new King of Lost Souls and a closer title race than ever before. Indeed, it looks as if nearly everybody could make a run at the title this year. So without further ado, it's on to the show!

2011 Forecast Rankings
1. The Wraiths, 11-1, 89.4 ppg.
2. Death Mutants, 10-2, 88.5 ppg.
3. United Loonies, Inc., 8-5, 86.7 ppg.
4. Puking Buzzards, 7-6, 85.6 ppg.
5. Sirenian Sisters, 6-6, 82.9 ppg.
6. Rapid Molasses, 6-6, 82.1 ppg.
7. Custom Critters, 6-6, 81.4 ppg.
8. Spaz Corps, 5-7, 79.9 ppg.
9. Screaming Babies, 5-7, 79.7 ppg.
10. Savage Iguanas, 4-8, 77.0 ppg.
11. Howling Huns, 3-9, 73.4 ppg.
12. Spandex Stallions, 2-10, 71.9 ppg.

1. The Wraiths, 11-1, 89.4 ppg.
QB - Drew Brees (346.6 pts.), Jay Cutler (267.4 pts.), John Beck (92.3 pts.)
RB - Ray Rice (245.8 pts.), Rashard Mendenhall (220.5 pts.), Mike Tolbert (131.9 pts.), Demarco Murray (85 pts.), Marion Barber (78.8 pts.)
WR - Vincent Jackson (181.1 pts.), Brandon Lloyd (158.3 pts.), Dez Bryant (155.4 pts.), Mario Manningham (145.4 pts.)
TE - Aaron Hernandez (111 pts.), Dustin Keller (94.4 pts.)
K - Nate Kaeding (130 pts.), Shaun Suisham (116 pts.)
D - Philadelphia Eagles (160.3 pts.), Arizona Cardinals (51 pts.)

Break up The Wraiths! The projections forecast a new King of Lost Souls! We shall see whether they can really knock off the Death Mutants, but Ray's team is a legitimate title contender led by studs QB Drew Brees, RBs Ray Rice, RB Rashard Mendenhall, and WR Vincent Jackson. The Wraiths also benefit from strong depth at QB, RB, and WR, the potent Philly defense, and top kicker Nate Kaeding bringing up the rear. This team looks good from top to bottom, and they look deep enough to weather the bumps and bruises of the season. We could be witnessing the dawn of the next Lost Souls dynasty.

2. Death Mutants, 10-2, 87.5 ppg.
QB - Sam Bradford (292.1 pts.), Blaine Gabbert (78.4 pts.), Peyton Manning (???.? pts.)
RB - Adrian Peterson (245.5 pts.), Steven Jackson (202.2 pts.), Mark Ingram (178.6 pts.), James Starks (108.6 pts.), Ben Tate (60.6 pts.)
WR - Andre Johnson (200.4 pts.), Larry Fitzgerald (178.8 pts.), Austin Collie (128.8 pts.), Jacoby Ford (114 pts.)
TE - Antonio Gates (135 pts.), Lance Kendricks (80.8 pts.)
K - Stephen Gostkowski (127 pts.), Garrett Hartley (61 pts.)
D - New York Giants (131.3 pts.), Atlanta Falcons (107.3 pts.)

The numbers had already forecast a fall from the top spot for the Death Mutants before today's neck surgery put Peyton Manning out for most of the year. Now, it's time to see how Plan B(radford) goes.

Maybe years of anti-Bryan legislation have finally taken their toll. Or perhaps it's just roster neglect from a sleep-deprived father of twins. Whatever the cause, the Mutant dynasty is suddenly vulnerable thanks to Manning's neck injury, aging RB Steven Jackson, TE Antonio Gates's sore feet, and suspect kicking and defensive squads. Will the Mutant King be toppled? Bryan hasn't had to scramble mid-season in quite a while. Stay tuned, fasten your seat belts, and hang on tight to your stud QBs. It's gonna be a bumpy ride!

3. United Loonies, Inc., 7-5, 86.7 ppg.
QB - Michael Vick (367.1 pts.), Matthew Stafford (302.4 pts.), Colt McCoy (237.1 pts.)
RB - Frank Gore (208 pts.), DeAngelo Williams (179.3 pts.), Marshawn Lynch (156.8 pts.), Willis McGahee (103.3 pts.), Bernard Scott (97.4 pts.)
WR - Dwayne Bowe (163.5 pts.), Reggie Wayne (145.3 pts.), Sidney Rice (113.5 pts.), Mike Williams SEA (89.5 pts.)
TE - Vernon Davis (121.9 pts.), Jared Cook (92.1 pts.)
K - Adam Vinatieri (114 pts.), Robbie Gould (105 pts.)
D - Pittsburgh Steelers (183.3 pts.), Miami Dolphins (81.3 pts.)

Poor Loonies. Always forecast to at least be a bridesmaid. Always doomed to mediocrity.

2010 was an exception to that rule, however, as the Loonies rallied late last year to win the playoffs after a disappointing regular season. In theory the addition of high-scoring paragon-of-virtue QB Michael Vick could lift the Loonies to their first regular-season championship. In reality the Loonies will get four total games between Vick and QB2 Matthew Stafford, leaving 3rd-stringer Colt McCoy to lead the Loonie squad for most of the season. Beyond the looming QB debacle the entire Loonie squad is flush with injury-prone malingers. Even K Adam Vinatieri missed 10 games on the DL in 2009. Let's face it, I'm screwed. Andrew Luck, here we come!

4. Puking Buzzards, 7-5, 85.6 ppg.
QB - Philip Rivers (350.8 pts.), Joe Flacco (280.8 pts.), Andy Dalton (206 pts.)
RB - Darren McFadden (211.2 pts.), Matt Forte (200.5 pts.), Daniel Thomas (101.9 pts.), Michael Bush (92.2 pts.), Stevan Ridley (65.3 pts.)
WR - Roddy White (184.7 pts.), Kenny Britt (141.5 pts.), Steve Johnson (140 pts.), Marques Colston (122.5 pts.)
TE - Jason Witten (124.3 pts.), Jermaine Gresham (80.2 pts.)
K - Lawrence Tynes (111 pts.), Dan Bailey (106 pts.)
D - New York Jets (160.3 pts.), Indianapolis Colts (73 pts.)

The Buzzards look set to make another strong run this year, led by the studly quartet of QB Philip Rivers, RBs Darren McFadden and Matt Forte, WR Roddy White, and TE Jason Witten. If those four live up to expectations this is another squad that could make a run at the title. If not, well then the buzzards will be circling high above ... er, the buzzards. (Do they do that? It seems awfully cannibalistic.)

5. Sirenian Sisters, 6-6, 82.9 ppg.
QB - Ben Roethlisberger (320.9 pts.), Mark Sanchez (276.6 pts.), Shaun Hill (17.1 pts.)
RB - LeSean McCoy (217.7 pts.), Maurice Jones-Drew (215.2 pts.), Jonathan Stewart (112.3 pts.), Jerome Harrison (72 pts.)
WR - Hakeem Nicks (181.5 pts.), Santonio Holmes (153.6 pts.), Santana Moss (130.2 pts.), Lee Evans (100 pts.), Chad Ochocinco (96.5 pts.)
TE - Marcedes Lewis (103.8 pts.), Chris Cooley (59.4 pts.)
K - Jason Hanson (111 pts.), Jay Feely (101 pts.)
D - New England Patriots (146 pts.), San Diego Chargers (115.7 pts.)

After several good drafts the window of opportunity is wide open for the Sirenian Sisters. QB Ben Roethlisberger "With Cheese", RB LeSean McCoy, RB Maurice Jones-Drew, WR Hakeem Nicks, and WR Santonio Holmes all look poised for career years. This could be the year that the Sisters vault to the top. (Note to Self: Conduct investigation into why Monique picks good players off my draft lists, while I pick crap. Second Note to Self: Be sure to give Monique bad Yahoo rankings for her draft next year. Third Note to Self: Be sure to delete these "Notes to Self" before posting this preseason writeup where she can see it.)

6. Rapid Molasses, 6-6, 82.1 ppg.
QB - Matt Ryan (297.4 pts.), Ryan Fitzpatrick (214.2 pts.), Alex Smith (191.4 pts.)
RB - Jamaal Charles (244.1 pts.), Peyton Hillis (214.5 pts.), Chris Wells (171.2 pts.), Montario Hardesty (69 pts.)
WR - Greg Jennings (168.6 pts.), Miles Austin (162.3 pts.), Mike Thomas (119.8 pts.), Greg Little (83.5 pts.), Antonio Brown (65.6 pts.)
TE - Brandon Pettigrew (91.5 pts.), Todd Heap (58.7 pts.)
K - Sebastian Janikowski (110 pts.), Matt Prater (98 pts.)
D - New Orleans Saints (130.7 pts.), Chicago Bears (124 pts.)

The Molasses look like another squad that will be a serious title contender again this year after finishing 2nd in total points in 2011. There's a lot of young studliness on this squad in the form of QB Matt Ryan, RBs Jamaal Charles and Peyton Hills, WRs Gregg Jennings and Miles Austin, and TE Brandon Pettigrew. (Hmmmn ... here we have yet another wife who's drafting acument his weekend has again proven she knows more about fantasy football than her husband. Gentlemen, it's apparent to everybody that we all married up without ceding fantasy football, too. Please, pick up the pace. Men everywhere are relying on you.)

7. Custom Critters, 6-6, 81.4 ppg.
QB - Tom Brady (359.6 pts.), Donovan McNabb (230.4 pts.), Jake Locker (25 pts.)
RB - Ahmad Bradshaw (190.2 pts.), Reggie Bush (164.4 pts.), Joseph Addai (139.6 pts.), BenJarvus Green-Ellis (122 pts.)
WR - Mike Wallace (168.7 pts.), Julio Jones (126.2 pts.), Jeremy Maclin (117.8 pts.), Nate Burleson (103.3 pts.), Plaxico Burress (101.3 pts.)
TE - Owen Daniels (117.3 pts.), Visanthe Shiancoe (61.5 pts.)
K - Alex Henery (123 pts.), Connor Barth (102 pts.)
D - Green Bay Packers (158.2 pts.), Dallas Cowboys (89 pts.)

The Critters look like another team that could make a run at the title. Any squad with QB Tom Brady is always going to be a contender, but they'll need better-than-expected seasons from some of their other players to get over the top. Fortunately for Critter fans everywhere, the roster features a lot of players with upside this season. It seems likely that two of their four RBs (Bradshaw, Bush, Addai, and the Law Firm of Benjarvus Green-Ellis) will manage to outproduce their projections. There's crazy upside between their young WRs (Wallace, J.Jones, and Maclin) and their savvy vets (Burleson and Plax), and TE Owen Daniels spent the preseason as everybody's fantasy sleeper darling. At worst, the Critters look like a team finally ready to move out of the second division.

8. Spaz Corps, 5-7, 79.9 ppg.
QB - Aaron Rodgers (380.4 pts.), Matt Hasselbeck (213.3 pts.), Colin Kaepernick (34.6 pts.)
RB - Chris Johnson (240.8 pts.), Fred Jackson (164.2 pts.), C.J. Spiller (108.8 pts.), Pierre Thomas (105.9 pts.), Thomas Jones (81.2 pts.)
WR - DeSean Jackson (147.1 pts.), Wes Welker (135.5 pts.), Lance Moore (113.8 pts.), Steve Breaston (75.2 pts.)
TE - Rob Gronkowski (115.8 pts.), Heath Miller (78.4 pts.)
K - Neil Rackers (116 pts.), Dan Carpenter (102 pts.)
D - San Francisco 49ers (109.2 pts.), Tennessee Titans (62 pts.)

The Good: Two top-shelf studs: QB Aaron Rodgers, RB Chris Johnson.
The Bad: Suspect starting production at WR1, WR2, TE, and Defense. Suspect depth at QB and RB.
The Spazzy: Weird Al Yankovic with his finger in a light socket.

9. Screaming Babies, 5-7, 79.7 ppg.
QB - Matt Schaub (301.6 pts.), Eli Manning (286.6 pts.), Vince Young (40.9 pts.)
RB - Arian Foster (235.9 pts.), Felix Jones (196.1 pts.), Jahvid Best (173.4 pts.), LaDainian Tomlinson (84.9 pts.), Kendall Hunter (57.2 pts.)
WR - Brandon Marshall (145.3 pts.), Percy Harvin (137.7 pts.), Mike Sims-Walker (110.8 pts.), Braylon Edwards (94.7 pts.)
TE - Jermichael Finley (130.3 pts.), Zach Miller (81.0 pts.)
K - Josh Brown (104 pts.), David Akers (96.0 pts.)
D - Detroit Lions (113 pts.), Tampa Bay Buccaneers (101.3 pts.)

Who'd have thought it? Eli is the right Manning to own this year. The End Days are nigh, my friends.

Beyond their backup QB, there's a lot to like on Chris's improving roster, starting with QB Matt Schaub. But there's also a ton of injury potential with red-cross question marks around RBs Arian Foster, Felix Jones, Jahvid Best, as well as all four WRs: Brandon Marshall, Percy Harvin, Mike Sims-Walker, and Braylon Edwards. If the pieces fall into place, the Babies could scream up the rankings. But it's more likely that they'll end up in the diaper dumpster.

10. Savage Iguanas, 4-8, 77.0 ppg.
QB - Tony Romo (353.9 pts.), Matt Cassel (246.8 pts.), David Garrard (188.4 pts.)
RB - LeGarrette Blount (189.1 pts.), Shonn Greene (171.7 pts.), Cedric Benson (161.6 pts.), Ricky Williams (81.1 pts.), Shane Vereen (46.2 pts.)
WR - Calvin Johnson (197.5 pts.), Malcom Floyd (111.8 pts.), Robert Meachem (97.5 pts.), Deion Branch (85.7 pts.)
TE - Jimmy Graham (109.3 pts.), Tony Gonzalez (91.4 pts.)
K - Mason Crosby (129 pts.), Rob Bironas (103 pts.)
D - Kansas City Chiefs (60.3 pts.), Oakland Raiders (59 pts.)

Incredibly enough, a case can even be made for the Savage Iguanas to lizard their way back to fantasy relevance in 2011. QB Tony Romo, RBs LeGarrette Blount and Shonn Greene, WR Calvin Johnson, TE Jimmy Graham, and K Mason Crosby could all be top players at their positions. But there's a problem in a WR2 position that looks like a committee of Malcom Floyd, Robert Meachem, and Deion Branch. And the KC/Oakland combination at defense is the poster child for this year's "Draft Duds Not Studs" campaign.

Ron, you shoulda persisted. If you had just tried to draft Chris Johnson a few more times this year, I'm sure that Bryan would've eventually put him on your squad!

11. Howling Huns, 3-9, 73.4 ppg.
QB - Josh Freeman (302.2 pts.), Cam Newton (232.2 pts.), Chad Henne (181.5 pts.)
RB - Michael Turner (196.2 pts.), Knowshon Moreno (167.3 pts.), Delone Carter (90.9 pts.), Roy Helu (76.5 pts.)
WR - Mike Williams TB (157.4 pts.), A.J. Green (124.9 pts.), Steve Smith CAR (110.1 pts.), Michael Crabtree (77.3 pts.), Emmanuel Sanders (52.8 pts.)
TE - Kellen Winslow (94.2 pts.), Greg Olsen (80.7 pts.)
K - Billy Cundiff (113 pts.), John Kasay (58 pts.)
D - Baltimore Ravens (132.3 pts.), Carolina Panthers (62.7 pts.)

The current state of the Huns can only mean one thing: Bryan, you need to start doing more household chores so that Cynthia can get back to concentrating on football! This looks like a rebuilding year for the Huns, much as it will be for her beloved Panthers. Cynthia's going about it the right way with a lot of youth with upside on the squad: QBs Josh Freeman and Cam Newton; RBs Knowshon Moreno, Delone Carter, and Roy Helu; and WRs Mike Williams (the good one from TB), A.J. Green, Michael Crabtree and, Emmanuel Sanders. There may be a future in Hun-dom, but 2011 looks like a lost cause.

12. Spandex Stallions, 2-10, 71.9 ppg.
QB - Kevin Kolb (272.4 pts.), Jason Campbell (248.7 pts.), Kyle Orton (225.8 pts.)
RB - Ryan Mathews (170.0 pts.), Tim Hightower (159.8 pts.), Brandon Jacobs (142.1 pts.), Ryan Grant (132 pts.)
WR - Anquan Boldin (138.7 pts.), Pierre Garcon (123.2 pts.), Johnny Knox (107 pts.), Hines Ward (95 pts.), Derrick Mason (72.6 pts.)
TE - Dallas Clark (120.0 pts.), Fred Davis (78.7 pts.)
K - Matt Bryant (111.0 pts.), Josh Scobee (109.0 pts.)
D - Minnesota Vikings (108.3 pts.), Cleveland Browns (56.7 pts.)

My mother always told me that if you can't say anything nice, you shouldn't say anything at all. So, here goes. Well, um ... TE Dallas Clark would've been good if Peyton Manning wasn't broken.

Oh, Susan, Susan, Susan. I can only imagine you were hoping the lockout would continue well into the regular season so that you wouldn't have to roll this motley assortment onto the field. On the bright side, Spandex Stallions fans around the globe congratulate you on your clever strategy of locking up the Andrew Luck draft pick this early!

And that's the 2011 preview. Have a fun season everybody. And remember, friends don't let friends trade their stud QBs to Bryan.

Mr. Crankypants Sez "I told you so."

2011-08-26T13:10:00.000-07:00

Mostly I just wanted to cleanse the palate to move on to lighter topics, but first I needed to cough an "I told you so" hairball out of my bloggin' throat.

Ten-year T-bill returns are still well below where they were on the Aug. 5 downgrade of U.S. Credit. Despite everybody losing their mind during the second week of August, the stock market continues to limp along in stagnation. Here's a graph with the S&P 500, Dow Jones, NASDAQ, and 10-year t-bill rate all indexed to 100% at the close of business on Aug. 5:

This economy badly needs a major dose of economic stimulus and a huge jobs program. I know that idea gives people the heebie jeebies because we budgeted $800 billion in 2009 to deal with this economic disaster all we managed to do was to keep the Great Recession from turning into the second Great Depression. (Come to think of it, that's not all that bad for $800 billion.)

But we are losing trillions of dollars in potential productivity because we're stuck in neutral. And it's not just an economic disaster. It's a personal disaster for the millions of people who have lost their jobs and who now can't find good jobs.

I know the national debate has been focused obsessively on the long-term deficit -- which was created by the Bush tax cuts, by the way. But that deficit is a problem that gets much more manageable if you have a functioning economy. If you need an analogy, think of a second stimulus as electric paddles on a heart in defribulation. You wouldn't want it to be an ongoing treatment, but a good jolt is just what we need right now.

As for what shape that stimulus would take, I'd focus in two areas: infrastructure and jobs creation for the long-term unemployed. Our national infrastructure is still a mess, and continuing to fall behind our international competitors will only worsen our long-term prospects. Fortunately, although there's a lot of work that needs doing out there, there are also a lot of people who desperately need work. We can work out some pretty good ways of getting them together. (Want a starter? Municipal governments, state governments, libraries, and schools have all cut out tons of local services in the past few years to deal with their own fiscal crises. Let's get some three-year federal grants back into those areas to re-hire staff and rehire the teachers, cops, and firefighters that have been laid off over the past couple of years. That's easy AND good for our communities. It'd probably take a half-dozen Congressional staffers an afternoon to put together the whole program.)

Then let's just go ahead and build a high-speed rail system on the East Coast, the West Coast, and in the Midwest. And after that, maybe we can finally address our crumbling electric grid...

... What's that? Oh, you're still freaked out about the deficit? I have an easy solution if that's really your concern. Let's go back to the tax rates under Clinton, WHEN WE HAD OUR LONGEST, STRONGEST PERIOD OF ECONOMIC EXPANSION SINCE WORLD WAR II. Cutting taxes on the wealthy didn't lead to the giant economic boom and employment growth that it was sold with. And even that sales job relied on them "sunsetting" in ten years because even the most ridiculous projections couldn't make them work in the long run. So, here's another easy policy decision. Let's not do the thing that didn't work and led to economic disaster. Let's do the thing that worked.

What brought Mr. Crankypants back from his blogging exile, you ask? Sorry, I'm indexing part of a math book this afternoon, and preparing to index some economics charts and graphs on Monday. And I'm tired of policy debates that ignore math and economics.

Okay, Mr. Crankypants now returns you to your regularly scheduled and undoubtedly more-congenial-on-a-Friday-afternoon blog reading.

Mr. Crankypants Presents Remedial Economics 101

2011-08-08T09:07:00.000-07:00

If you think that this morning's stock-market plunge is a validation of S&P's rating downgrade for U.S. debt, you don't understand the purpose of the ratings

Just a quick recap of the first morning of stock trading after S&P downgraded the rating of U.S. debt from AAA to AA-Plus. Here are the numbers from this morning's open to noon:

Stocks
Dow 11,120.42 -324.19 -2.83%
Nasdaq 2,438 -94.54 -3.73%
S&P 500 1,157 -42.79 -3.57%

Bonds & Currencies
10 Year Yield 2.38% -0.17

Stocks down, bond rates down, cats & dogs living together, MASS HYSTERIA! Total validation for the S&P downgrade and the national debt as our #1 problem, right?

Wrong.

The decline in the rate on 10-year treasury bonds means that money is flowing into U.S. debt, not out. When more money tries to buy something the price -- in this case the interest rate -- goes down. S&P's rating was for U.S. Treasury bonds, not for stocks. Investors are actually moving their money out of stocks and into U.S. debt.

Why? Because what the smart money fears is not a U.S. debt default. The smart money fears the absolute sluggishness of a stagnant economy. Our nation's problem is not debt at 2.38%. Our problem is high unemployment and a lack of growth.

And from what I have heard out of Washington and on the news, both today and over the past few months, there are an awful lot of politicians and commentators who either have never studied history and basic macroeconomics, or who have chosen to ignore history and basic economics in favor of shilling for their pet policies.

So here's tip #1 for you today.

If you hear a politician or commentator saying today that the stock-market plunge validates the view that our economy's problem is our national debt, that person is either ignorant or lying to you. Either way, you should ask yourself if he or she really has your best interests or the nation's best interests at heart.

Musings from the Navel Observatory

2011-08-04T15:11:00.000-07:00

The manager of my friendly local comic-book shop asked me a pretty good question yesterday about the cover of a comic book that showed just about every anatomical detail *except* for the title character's belly button. It set off an exchange on navel arcana that I thought might be of interest to folks who have a belly-button of their own.

In an attempt to boost my hit count with the Google image crowd while pumping up my PG-13 street cred, I present the salacious-yet-belly-button-bereft cover in question for Warlord of Mars: Deja Thoris, issue #5:

Gretchen: Why does Dejah Thoris not have a belly button? I was looking at the cover for today's issue and no belly button. But then on the inside art she does. Then looking at a lot of older covers she has no navel. Is she not supposed to have one since she's an alien?

----------

John Magee: That's a really good question. She's not human, that's for sure. (I've seen human anatomy, and what's on those covers ain't quite human.)

I've been meaning to go back and re-read my old Edgar Allen Burroughs John Carter books -- it's been a couple of decades -- and I'll try to see if there's anything in there on Martian birthing or umbilical cords.

In semi-related belly-button viewing information, I know that the costume designers on the original Star Trek had a lot of issues because they were prohibited from showing belly buttons during a prime-time broadcast in the late 60s. (Oh, the navel-gazing issues they had in the sixties....)

----------

Gretchen: Whoa! my husband and I are watching the whole original star trek run; we just finished the first episode of season 2. Now i'm going to have to look for that. Strangely though, there was one episode with this girl wearing overalls and nothing more, and there were definite side-boob shots. Weird that they'd allow that but not navels...

----------

John Magee:I came across another good nugget in the same interview with that costume designer for TOS. He said that what they tried to do for those sorts of outfits was to create the appearance that something could slip and expose more. That *that* was much sexier than just exposing the skin in the first place. It's something I've always noticed in costuming since then, and it's quite true.

Also on the navel observatory front, the possible exposure of America to Barbara Eden's belly button was rumored to be a constant challenge for "I Dream of Jeannie." And supposedly Mort Walker used to always include Miss Buxley's belly button in panels of "Beetle Bailey" specifically because his comic syndicate forbid him to draw her belly button, so it always forced his editor to remove them from the panels with an exacto knife. He allegedly had an entire jarful of Buxley belly buttons by the time he retired.

I have no idea how I've picked up this much belly-button trivia over the years. Just imagine if I had spent that time putting useful knowledge into my head!

By popular demand, another picture of the new toy. Plus, bonus poetry from MC-D!

2011-07-19T07:48:00.000-07:00

The public has risen and one and demanded more information about our new toy. (Well, okay, Scott Pollack expressed mild curiosity. Whatever.) And so it is that I shall provide a wee bit more information.

The new toy is a 1976 MGB roadster that I bought last weekend after a lot of research into classic convertible options, but a surprisingly brief search for an actual car to buy. For those with a need to know automotive details, it has the four-speed overdrive transmission and a lot of nice upgrades from the previous owner: a Weber carb, K&N air filter, racing headers, an upgraded cam, electronic ignition, solid-state fuel pump, leather seats, a kickin' Dual stereo (with a big, honkin' subwoofer), and custom low-profile wheels and tires. When all four hamsters in the engine compartment are running full speed on their little wheel, it probably puts about about 100 hp. Most importantly, the body seems to be in really good shape with very little rust ... a bit of a rarity for British cars in Michigan.

We had gobs and gobs of fun this weekend taking it for little drives and errands in the hot July sun.

I don't know that Monique was entirely convinced that we needed a sporty little convertible. However, the nice thing about old MGBs is even really nice ones are pretty cheap, so the fun-to-cost ratio is extremely high. And indeed, much fun was had as she took it out for her first outing behind the wheel:

Monique prepares to take her first cruise in the new toy.

And finally, we close with a commemorative poem from Mary Campbell-Droze. Take it away, Mary:

I learned to drive in an MG Midget!
It was so tiny there was no room even to fidget.
I also learned to drive in a Rambler station-wagon.
My turning radius finesse was, as a result, a bit laggin'.

--Mary Campbell-Droze

Summertime Arrivals

2011-07-17T19:59:00.000-07:00

Not much blogging around the ol' Patio Boat lately, but mostly we've been busy with a host of the entirely predictable summertime arrivals:

Stella, who arrived in late June.

Wolverine Lake's weed harvester, which arrived with Wolverine Lake's weeds.

Fireworks, which arrived right on schedule on Tiki Night.

Kayaking expeditions, which arrived with the sunny summertime weather.

Wendy's ski boat, which at long, long last arrived with its boat lift.

Stella's friend Ann, arriving at the airport.

Henry and Malcom, also arriving at the airport.

Michelle, seen here with Monique after they arrived at the Oakland County Fair.

John's midlife crisis, which arrived in our driveway this week with a convertible top and a shiny black paint job....

A Wee Bit of Philosophy

2011-07-14T14:41:00.001-07:00

For various reasons I was thinking about life lately, and this philosophical thought popped into my head:

Life is a series of choices. Who we are is the sum total of the choices we have made, for good or for bad.

This is something that I don't think I understood very well when I was younger and making some bad choices, often without even realizing at the time that this was what I was doing. I wish I had a good mechanism for passing along that bit of hard-won wisdom to a few of my younger relations, so as to save them a lot of trouble down the road. But I suspect that you have to come to that realization after making a lot of your own bad and good decisions.

Your Patriotic American Duty

2011-06-29T14:50:00.000-07:00

I have once again fulfilled my patriotic duties as an American and voted ... for the Major League Baseball All-Star Team. The good news is that it's really easy these days, since you can vote online at MLB.com's online All-Star Ballot.

The bad news is that it's really easy these days, since you can vote up to 25 times per day online at MLB.com's online All-Star Ballot. Worse yet, they make it really easy to stuff the ballot box this way. So over the past few years the All-Star fan voting has become a bit of ballot-box stuffing exercise for the big-market teams in New York and Boston.

But I like to fight back for El Tigres in my little way, and fortunately this year Detroit has several very deserving hitters. Here's who I voted for (25 times! Ugh!) this year:

American League:
1B - Cabrera, Miguel - Should've been last year's AL MVP.
2B - Cano, Robinson - Okay, the Yankee ballot-box stuffers have this one right.
SS - Peralta, Jhonny - A hometown vote for the Tiger, but he's also having a great season.
3B - Rodriguez, Alex - On the decline, but still an All-Star.
C - Avila, Alex - Monique's Tiger. Need I say more? Plus, he's actually the best catcher in the AL so far this year.
DH - Martinez, Victor - Having a great season protecting Miggy.
OF - Bautista, Jose - Out of nowhere, Babe Freaking Ruth materialized in Toronto.
OF - Granderson, Curtis - We miss you, Curtis!
OF - Suzuki, Ichiro - A down year, but a great player.
Write-in - N/A

National League:
1B - Votto, Joey - Last year's NL MVP. I might've voted for Pujols despite the down year, but his broken arm made it a bit academic.
2B - Weeks, Rickie - Having a surprisingly good season at a thin position.
SS - Reyes, Jose - Back to All-Star form in his contract year. Coincidence? I think not.
3B - Polanco, Placido - Monique's former Tiger.
C - McCann, Brian - He's no Alex Avila, but he's a pretty good catcher.
OF - Braun, Ryan - Living up the the hype.
OF - Holliday, Matt - A steady and perennially underrated batter.
OF - Kemp, Matt - If he's going to hit like this, he should break up with Rihanna every year!
Write-in - N/A

Back to our core competency...

2011-06-27T09:26:00.000-07:00

... beagle haiku written by other people and provided to this site for the revolutionary new price of "free". In this case, we have an outstanding contribution from Arsen Darnay, who shared the beagle-watching duties while Monique was off in Wyoming preparing for the arrival of our new niece:

While Amelia
Was late, Katie chased rabbits
In rainy Grosse Pointe.

--Arsen Darnay

This n'That

2011-06-23T15:01:00.000-07:00

Yeah, yeah, yeah ... I'm a slothful blogger. However, this is not my fault. I blame my large staff of beagle-haiku freelancers, who have failed to crank out a beagle haiku in weeks. As a result, we have now fallen to #2 in the world Google beagle haiku rankings.

Do I have to do all the writing around here?

Eh, apparently so. Let's catch you all up on the last couple weeks.

The Wyoming Update: Yes, since I didn't deliver my promised update, Amelia Arden Magee was indeed finally born on Saturday, June 4, at 11:08 am Mountain Daylight Time. In defense of my non-updating from Wyoming, she didn't arrive until just moments after I departed for the airport to return to Michigan. Tardy baby. That slacker kid better start catching up, or she'll never get into a good college.

Fortunately, her very kind Aunt Monique was able to delay her return to Michigan for a few more days to help smooth the transition and watch Zoe while Mike and Cathy were busy with the new arrival.

Welcome, Amelia! And special thanks to Monique for being such an incredibly helpful wife!

Village Budget: We passed our village budget in June with the least hubbub we've had since in years, and the result is a village that is in the best financial shape it's been in since I moved here, despite the horrible municipal economics of Michigan.

Last year's budget cuts were the most painful period I've ever had in politics, and I say that as a man who endured George W. Bush's re-election in 2004. I really hated some of the things that we needed to do to put our finances in order for the next few years. But I felt that the results evident in this year's budget was a real vindication of the effort we put in last year into long-term planning for the Michigan fiscal apocalypse.

It gives me hope that it is possible to solve the seemingly unsolvable in politics, as long as everybody works together in good faith.

Random Political Thought: I was thinking about the Democratic Party's electoral flop in 2010. It occurred to me the real lesson of that election may be that activists get tired, while deep pockets never rest. An awful lot of Democratic activists were pretty burned out after 2008, while the Citizens' United decision pumped GOP coffers full of untraceable money. It'll be interesting to see how that dynamic plays out in 2012.

And no, I haven't really decided exactly what I'm doing with my activist self in 2012, but I'm sure that at the very least I'll be lending a hand with Andy Meisner's Oakland County Treasurer reelection campaign. (http://www.andymeisner.com/)

Hmmn ... methinks the effort might need to start with a refreshing of the campaign website, which doesn't seem to have been touched since 2008.

Work: Busy, busy, busy and spending much of my time getting a new workflow up and running, which has turned out to take considerably more time and effort than I had anticipated. I could go on and on, but then I'd have to give this whole post the "Mr. Crankypants" tag. Mostly I'm just irritated at myself for not getting things done more quickly, and for not properly anticipating the work that would need to go into some of this stuff. Oh, how I wish I had a handy scapegoat!

Insomnia: For a variety of reasons (mostly adding up to "I've been even more blob-like than usual lately) I decided to lop sugar out of my diet a couple of months ago. This is worthy of its own post, and I've meant to write on it. But one of the interesting side effects is that for the last two months my general mild insomnia and late-night-nik-ness has really jumped up a notch.

I've spent a lot more time than usual staring at the ceiling at 3 am or 4 am lately, and I absolutely have to say one thing about the whole experience: I truly wish the spackle on our bedroom ceiling had been better sanded when our house was built.

Finally, and most importantly, the Patio Boat (The real patioboat, that is): The Ol' Stealth Pontoon finally launched upon Wolverine Lake yesterday, the latest launch ever. The sad delay was mostly due to some chewed-up wiring, rainy weekends, our time in Wyoming, and scheduling problems with our pontoon trailer guy. We're now back on the lake.

Woo-hoo!

And good luck to you all in getting another post out of me now that the pontoonin' season has arrived.

Ahoy from Wyoming!

2011-05-31T17:32:00.000-07:00

I've been a terribly negligent blogger the last couple of weeks, but in my defense it's been a busy time. So I thought I'd pass along a quick post o' updating for those who are interested.

Monique departed for Wyoming last Saturday. Why Wyoming? Because that's where the action is. To be specific, the action is the impending arrival of a new niece, and Monique and I are lending a hand by watching our already-here niece Zoe while my brother Mike and his wife Cathy took on the slightly more demanding task of actually having a baby. Monique got a headstart on me because I needed to stay around Wolverine Lake last week for our village council's budget work session.

Before Monique left I picked up a bag of oranges, four pounds of hot peppers, and a minikeg of Bell's Two-Hearted Ale to prepare dietetically for my bachelor week. Saturday morning I shipped Monique off to Wyoming, and then -- aside from work and village stuff -- I spent the rest of my week eating things with too many hot peppers, then cooling the fire with a tasty Bell's Two-Hearted Ale.

I had planned to finish prepping the pontoon boat for launch upon our return, but it rained nearly all week. So instead I watched nearly the entire 2nd season of "Archer" on the DVR. As you can see, it was a week filled with giant accomplishments.

Saturday morning I flew out to Wyoming to join everybody in the excitement of the new niece. Except ... there isn't a new niece yet. The due date has come and gone, but as of this evening, little Zoe is still a single sibling. We're just about out of May, so it looks like it'll be a June baby. Words like "induce" are being bandied about, so I suspect we'll have niece news to pass along soon.

And now ... well, I'm updating the blog and watching a Tigers game. (Thank you, Mike, for subscribing to the baseball Extra Innings package.) Yesterday we took a nice long drive over Casper Mountain and down a bumpy dirt road. I can only assume it was an attempt to shake the baby out of Cathy.

And that's about it from Wyoming. Mike and Cathy are out having dinner, taking advantage of what might be their final opportunity for a while to dine like adults. Monique is giving Zoe a bath. I'm typing.

We'll let you know when there's news. In the meantime, no news is no news.

Putting the "Doggin' Around" in Doggerel

2011-05-20T13:15:00.000-07:00

It started the way these sort of Friday-afternoon doggerel threads usually do. An inciter who shall remain nameless noted a recent incident of the financial sector acting the way that ... well, sadly the way that we've come to expect the financial sector to act.

Except that in this case the screwing wasn't figurative.

Subject: indications that I am in the wrong line of work number 17

German insurer Munich Re held orgy for salesmen

By Stephen Evans
BBC News, Berlin

One of the biggest insurance companies in the world held a party for salesmen where they were rewarded with the services of prostitutes. The gathering was held at a thermal baths in the Hungarian capital Budapest as a reward to particularly successful salesmen....

--------- Reply from MC-D ----------

Even though they're both in sales,
Insurance men and hos, they differ:
Insurance men sell mainly hope
While hos typically deliver.

------ Reply from Patioboater -------

True Story from Detroit. More's the Pity.

I doubt this effort's scan and rhyme
But this seems like a darned good time
To tell 'bout Motown's recent case
When crooked postmen lost some face.

Here are the shocking lurid facts.
Millions for fleet repair contracts
Were swapped for nights with local strippers.
(These schlubs were quick to drop their zippers.)

Hookers galore with this disgrace.
How could these crooks keep up the pace?
Well, here's the detail that'll grab ya.
That dirty bribe came with Viagra.

--------- Reply from MC-D ----------

We know your schedule's awful busy,
So we cheer your return to the world of poesy!

------ Reply from Patioboater -------

When time to dust off my skills of poesy
What better topic than lurid idiocy?

Eleven things I'd like to say about the death of Osama Bin Laden

2011-05-04T19:55:00.000-07:00

I was going to post a truly eloquent, well-thought-out post about the death of Osama Bin Laden and what it means. But it's late and I'm tired. So instead, here are eleven fairly random items:

1) I'm glad he's gone.

2) Yes, I really think he's dead.

3) I don't think the Pakistani government was keeping him under house arrest. But, yes, I think some members of the ISI may have had an inkling of his whereabouts. I doubt we'll ever know the truth of just how much Pakistan knew.

4) I don't particularly care one way or the other about the pictures.

5) Yes, I do think Barack Obama's changes in Afghanistan and counterterrorism policies led to his capture. And yes, I think we would have captured him much sooner if we had concentrated on Afghanistan and counterterrorism after 9/11 instead of choosing to invade Iraq.

6) I flipped around the various news channels late Sunday night to try to find out more, and there was a lot of genuine reporting going on for the first hour or two after the announcement. In addition to channels with news, I also turned on Fox "News" three times. This is what I saw on those three occasions:

--Former Bush Chief of Staff Andrew Card trying to explain how George W. Bush was really the guy responsible for this.

--Some guy in the crowd in front of the White House waving a Bush/Cheney sign.

--Geraldo Rivera at what appeared to be a frat party, with some very drunk college students.

7) No, I did not make up any of the items in number six. More's the pity.

8) I don't intend to follow much more that the blogosphere has to say on the topic. It's pretty clear that the silly season has started up again already.

9) I don't think this is the end of the "War on Terror" but maybe it's the beginning of the end. I don't think terrorism will ever go away altogether. It never has. But I think that between this and the successful protest-driven regime changes in the Middle East this Spring, we might just see a long, steady decline in Middle Eastern terrorism. That would be a welcome development for the whole world.

10) None of those guys on Navy Seal Team Six on Sunday ever have to buy a drink if I'm in the bar.

11) I was only going to list ten items, but I wanted to use the phrase "Osama Bin Laden sleeps with the fishes." So here it is. I like it. It may not be a mature, reasoned response, but it makes me happy.

Peru's Extremely Depressing National Anthem

2011-04-27T07:34:00.000-07:00

When I stepped out of the shower this morning, I happened to catch the very end of a radio story that said Peru was thinking about changing its national anthem because it's too depressing.

I didn't happen to catch any of the depressing lyrics, so that provided a morning's worth of amusement for Monique and I as we tried to imagine the lyrics of Peru's very depressing national anthem. I imagine something like this:

We Are Peru

O, we are Peru.
We're not as good as you.,
Or even Argentiiiiina!

We all smell like glue,
And guano it is true,
And our national dish is raw fish
Pickled in lemon juice. Eeeew!

Brazil has lots of babes,
And Chile makes great wine,
But all we have are spitting llamas.
(And they're not very nice. Ugh!)

Our land is mostly high desert,
Without much oxygen,
And many of our bauxite mines
Are all mined out. Sigh.

O, we are Peru.
We're not as good as you.
And we're too depressed
To sing this anthem any more.

P.S. Okay, so I got curious enough to go look up the actual lyrics on Wikipedia. Good heavens, my version is full of rose petals and fluffy puppies by comparison:

For a long time the opressed Peruvian
the ominous chain he dragged
Condemned to a cruel servitude
for a long time, for a long time
for a long time he quietly whimpered...

Truly, the Greatest Story Ever Told

2011-04-25T12:35:00.001-07:00

I was setting up a few indexing system rules this afternoon, and testing the setup by randomly linking a test document titled "The Military Establishment" to random indexing terms of different types. The result is below.

The Military Establishment
IDX Adrian, Michigan (Geo)
IDX The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Novel) (Work Hub)
IDX Alien and Sedition Act of 1798 (Statutes)
IDX Apollo 13 (Spacecraft) (Named Things)
IDX Brown v. Board of Education 347 U.S. 483 (1954) (Court Cases)
IDX Edsel (Automobile) (Products)
IDX Great Depression, 1929-1934 (Events)
IDX Portia (The Merchant of Venice) (Fictional character) (Named Characters)
IDX United Nations (Organization Hub)
IDX United States. Department of Defense (Organization Hub)
IDX Washington, George (American president) (Person Hub)

The mind boggles at the world-spanning tale told herein!

The Easter Beagle

2011-04-24T21:13:00.001-07:00

Katie the Beagle
Enjoyed a walk, ham, egg, ham.
More ham. Now she snores.

Recipe for Intellectual Whiplash

2011-04-20T13:53:00.000-07:00

Recipe for intellectual whiplash:

Start with four meetings on widely disparate topics:
--Atlas validation of person-hub UIDs for Biography in Context portals
--Mercury load data for machine-aided indexing of Literature Criticism Online and Something About the Author
--Taxonomy categorization and learning objectives for MindTap
--Keyword supplements for online indexing of 21st Century Novels

Add one pinch of URL spot-checking for Opposing Viewpoints in Context relevance ranking

Write a long e-mail on taxonomy tagging process for videos and transcripts migrating from an old media system to a new server.

Mix vigorously for an afternoon.

Top with a frisson of contracts, invoices, and pre-publishing product capitalization timecards.

... and then, yeah, you'll see why my poor little brain has all it can do to read the paper and watch a baseball game by the time I get home and eat dinner.

Problem, Solution, Happy Anniversary!

2011-04-17T16:24:00.000-07:00

Many of my home improvement projects have been a true joy, a genuine improvement in our domestic abode. But every now and then, something falls a wee bit short. Such was the case with one aspect of my HDTV wall mount: the temporary solution I devised for our stereo and TV components. Because our old TV lived in a cabinet with a shelf for the components, I needed to find a new place for all of those boxes and cables when we put the TV up on the wall. While I looked for a permanent solution, I stacked everything on a little shelf made from pegboard. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

It was not a good idea.

The leaning tower of stereo components.

Oooh, look. Collapsed pegboard! How scenic in our living room!

So, yes, that was not the elegant solution that I really had in mind. Which, I suppose might've been okay for a temporary solution ... except that it had now entered its fourth year. Suffice it to say that Monique thought it fell somewhat short of her aesthetic ideal.

The solution? Well, after failing for several years to find a stereo cabinet that fit the space, I decided to knock together a little wooden box, slap some stain on it, and declare victory. Then I had a smarter idea. Since our 10th anniversary was coming up, this was an excellent excuse to have somebody with genuine skills build a little stereo cabinet for us. And so, thanks to the fine artistry of Phil Gaven and Shininglass Studio, tragedy -- my sad and deficient pegboard shelf -- has been transformed into triumph -- a beautiful custom-built cherry and birdseye maple stereo cabinet. It made for a lovely 10th anniversary gift to ourselves.

It's not just pretty. Not only is it solid cherry and birdseye maple, it also has some nifty features like an adjustable shelf and a hinged back panel. It also goes beautiful with the Shininglass reference book stand that Monique and I gave ourselves for our anniversary a couple of years ago. Astute readers may notice an anniversary pattern emerging, one that bodes well for overall improvements in the level of our wood furnishings for years to come.

After three quick hours of rewiring, all the boxes were installed and happy in their new home. Yeah, three hours sounds like a long time. There were a lot of connections. And not all the wires reached. And I'm pretty sure I pulled a hamstring about halfway through, though that's more an indictment of my general level of fitness than the complexity of getting everything hooked back up correctly.

Voila! The new cabinet in its new home.

As you can see, it fits perfectly between the trunk and the bookshelf. Custom built furniture! Hurrah!

While I'm on the topic of furnishings, I would be remiss if I didn't point out that Katie the Beagle received a furnishing upgrade of her own recently. Now that she's an enormous 22 pounds, she doesn't always fit conveniently in her bed. Sometimes her head would flop out of the front opening of her bed at night and lean awkwardly down towards the floor.

So Monique made her a little green pillow all her own, so that she can her head can rest easy.

Katie the Beagle, what do you think of it?

"I'm just glad my pillow isn't made of cherry and birdseye maple!" says Katie.

At least I didn't bring a boat back with me

2011-04-09T22:33:00.001-07:00

Hi everybody! I've arrived safe & sound back in Michigan after a week of travelling about the East Coast.

A truly committed blogger would have photoblogged the trip as he went. A blogger with more gumption than me would at least write up an account of the trip now that he's back home.

But me? I'm just going to swipe this bit of nonsense from a Facebook discussion that followed a post by my sister, paste it up here, and call it a night.

(Hey, it can't all be fabulous photos of tropical islands.)

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Susan Magee Riordan hopes her husband was kidding when he asked her to sleep in the driveway so his boat could sleep in the bed. Ha ha ha....kidding, right? Right? Yeah, I didn't think so either. Friday at 8:05am

David Shabat You've never seen the personal ad: "Man seeking woman with boat. Please send picture of boat". Friday at 8:30am

John Magee I believe your mother once had a boat engine in her bathtub for several months. Perhaps the tendency to attract boats in inappropriate rooms is a genetic disorder. Friday at 12:04pm

Susan Magee Riordan Sure John- blame the victim... Friday at 12:17pm

John Magee No blame. You can't help it if you're a victim of Inappropriate Boat-Part Location Permissiveness disorder. Perhaps we should have a telethon. Friday at 1:41pm

David Shabat Holy Crap, I only read stories about IBPLPD! Now, a real, live case! Friday at 1:43pm

John Magee It's sad, really. You think this is the sort of thing that you only see in exotic Discovery Health Channel documentaries late at night, and then you find out that you know a real live case. Friday at 1:46pm

David Shabat Dear God, I heard all the gene therapies have only yielded results such as Auto part permissiveness, and in one case, nothing but cat food cans. I truly hope they find a cure. Friday at 1:48pm

John Magee Won't you please donate to help this vital research? Call 1-800-BUY-JOHN ext. ABOAT. Friday at 2:02pm

Susan Magee Riordan ‎[can't type, laughing too hard] Friday at 2:05pm

No Comics for Me This Week!

2011-03-30T16:41:00.000-07:00

At lunchtime today I went to stop by my friendly neighborhood comic-book shop, "Comic City" in Novi, to see what was new on the racks this week.

Alas, when I got there, it turned out that it had been stomped by Godzilla.

I *hate* when my local comic-book shop gets stomped by Godzilla. No comics for me this week! I hope they rebuild quickly.

P.S. No need to panic, comic-book fans. It's just a comic cover promotion that IDW ran for their new Godzilla comic in which comic stores that made a large pre-order could get their own cover of their shop getting crushed by our big, radioactive friend. Here's the story from BleedingCool.com: All Eighty Variant Covers Of Godzilla #1 From IDW.

And now, the post that nobody wants to read. We present your 2011 Gabbling Gadwalls!

2011-03-28T17:41:00.000-07:00

Hurrah! It's time for my annual recap of my draft in the HQ Forum Masters fantasy baseball league, which took place Sunday evening in cyberspace with participants from as far away as Hong Kong.

(Yes, Susan, you're excused now. You can move on to somebody else's blog.)

For anybody still left ... anybody? Anybody? ... Well, we shall push on nonetheless.

As most of you all know, I like my fantasy sports, and my favorite of all is baseball, mostly because it has such a statistical bent. Really, a fantasy baseball team is like a 23-part Sudoku with groin strains. Most of what I know about spreadsheets, databases, Excel functions, and statistical analysis I have learned via fantasy baseball.

This particular fantasy baseball league that I play in was put together six years ago by some of the regulars on the forums over at BaseballHQ.com, a fantasy baseball analysis site that I like to read and on whose boards I've probably posted more than my fair share of geeky fantasy baseball comments. I joined it after its first year. This league is the closest thing to an "experts league" that I'll ever play in -- several of the competitors genuinely get paid to write about fantasy baseball. In five years I've won it once, finished in the top four four times, and never finished worse than 7th out of 15 teams. (Last year I was as high as 2nd place with 48 hours to go, but faded to 4th at the finish. Sigh.)

One of the fun things about the league is that we usually write up post-draft recaps of our own drafts. It's fun to see what people think about the team that they just picked the day before, and it's also a good way to learn the different way that people look at what is essentially an identical statistical problem: pick the 23 players (27 with reserves) who give you the best chance to amass the best statistics in: runs, home runs, RBIs, stolen bases, batting average, pitching wins, saves, strikeouts, earned run average, and WHIP (walks + hits / innings pitched.)

And so, without further prelude, here's the 2011 post-draft recap of your Gabbling Gadwalls!

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I nearly always seem to have a late pick in this draft, and this year was no exception. With the 11th pick this year, I figured I'd probably stick with my usual strategy of picking up positional value where I could find it. And so it always seems like I'm drafting nothing but catchers, pitchers, and the occasional middle infielder in the early rounds. In truth, I'd be happy to take studly 1B and OFs early, but the truly studly ones are usually gone by the time the 11th pick comes around. And so I take value where I can find it; scrape together a corner infield, outfield, and bullpen from the dregs; and hope to come out with enough productivity, balance, and depth to be able to work the category standings with in-season moves.

Usually it works out okay for me during the season, and at least puts me in position to compete for a top-three finish. I also made a conscious decision to roll the dice on some injured and injury-prone guys this year, since we'll have an unlimited DL for the first time. Yes, that's right. All those other years that I had old, injury-prone players it wasn't even on purpose.

Was all of this a good strategy this year? We shall see.

Here's the blow-by-blow:

1.11 Mauer, Joe C MIN - Yup, I'm going with a top catcher in the first round yet again. Mauer's a bit riskier than I'd like, given his knee trouble this Spring. But I figure he'll DH if he's not catching, which'll work out fine. I figured all along it would come to a choice between Mauer and Tulowitzki here, and thought really hard about Tulo, but I just couldn't quite find the love. Undoubtedly this is the year Tulo wins his first NL MVP.

2.5 Lincecum, Tim SP SF - I had really hoped that A-Rod would slip to me here, but he went three picks earlier. Then I thought I had clicked on Roy Halladay in my queue, but he had just been picked. This was okay, though, because I was quite happy with Lincecum. I liked the statistical impact of the top three pitchers (Halladay, Lincecum, and King Felix) better than the impact of any of the hitters (Werth, Bautista, Choo) available here.

3.11 Reyes, Jose SS NYM - He's gotta stay healthy some year, right? Right?

4.5 McCann, Brian C ATL - Yup, it's another "two top catchers" draft for me. Coming into the draft I wanted two of the top five catchers (Mauer, V-Mart, McCann, Posey, and Santana) if I could swing it. McCann was the last of those five on the board, and I was happy to grab him, since I ranked McCann a smidge over the two sophomore catchers because of his track record. The dropoff was steep after those five, and I really wanted no part of any of the catchers outside of the top eight.

5.11 Hart, Corey RF MIL - The first of many already-injured players I would draft. Hopefully he'll be back soon to give me some of productivity I gave up by drafting catchers and a starting pitcher early.

6.5 Young, Michael 3B TEX - Just a good value pick here, especially because 3B is so shallow this year. This was the first sign that my batting lineup was going to be the fantasy baseball equivalent of the Washington Redskins "Over the Hill Gang" of the 70s.

7.11 Hunter, Torii CF ANA - Not really "Old Reliable" any more. Mostly just old.

8.5 Carpenter, Chris SP STL - Oooh, an old pitcher. That should balance my old hitters.

9.11 Pierre, Juan LF CHW - Too much value to pass up here, even though he only helps in three categories (R, SB, BA) and hurts in two categories (HR, RBI). This is a seriously power-deficient lineup so far.

10.5 Lee, Derrek 1B BAL - Ahhh, an old 1B. Welcome to the Senior Citizens' Dugout, Mr. Lee. Your training table is waiting.

11.11 Street, Huston RP COL - Just for a change of pace from the old and injury-prone guys, I anchor my bullpen with a young and injury-prone closer. Street was the 14th closer off the board. I had to skip the run on genuinely good closers because I was too busy making up for my C,SP,SS,C start in the first four rounds.

12.5 Infante, Omar 2B FLA - Looks like a productive value with a full-time gig. Does this pick look better if I call him an All-Star 2B? No? I thought not.

13.11 Nishioka, Tsuyoshi 2B MIN - Rolling the dice on the Japanese import to close out my middle infield. He looked good in Spring Training. I'm kinda pleased with this pick. That can't bode well.

14.5 Ordonez, Magglio RF DET - Ahh, yes, back to our core competency: old and injury prone.

15.11 Lyon, Brandon RP HOU - Oooh, look! A guy who's not really injury prone! Of course, he's not really good, either.

16.5 Ibanez, Raul LF PHI - Funny story. I tried to draft Trevor Cahill with this pick because I was seriously deficient in starting pitchers by this point. Alas, my draft window had locked up, and no matter how many times I tried to pick Cahill, it just stared back at me, unmoving. So instead I had to watch helplessly as the autodraft picked Ibanez off the top of my queue, where I had innocently stashed him for my next offensive pick as part of my ongoing effort to acquire old and injury-prone players.

Funny.

You know, like getting a sharp stick poked in your eye is funny ... to a bystander.

This may work out okay, though. Ibanez has what I desperately still needed at this point: power. And he probably wouldn't have lasted much longer. My outfield consists of five guys aged 28, 35, 33, 37, and 38. The 28-year-old is the one starting the season on the DL. I can't possibly imagine what can go wrong with this plan.

17.11 Arroyo, Bronson SP CIN - He's not good, plus he has mononucleosis. But I missed out on the last good or healthy starting pitcher long ago.

18.5 Peavy, Jake SP CHW - At least he'll start the season on the DL, where he can't hurt my pitching stats too much. Lord only knows what he'll do when he finally steps on a mound.

19.11 Bedard, Erik SP SEA - Does it look at this point like I was all about drafting starting pitchers who are injury disasters with upside? 'Cause I was all about drafting starting pitchers who are injury disasters with upside at this point.

20.5 Garcia, Jaime SP STL - Hmmmn ... young, talented. He doesn't belong on this roster.

21.11 Rodney, Fernando RP ANA - This closed out my pitching picks. Oddly enough, I had Rodney queued up and watched a different Angel reliever, Jordan Walden, get picked a few picks before I picked the guy who is starting the season with the closer gig. Rodney has defied implosion expectations before. Perhaps he'll do so again. Or at least maybe he'll chip in a few saves before imploding and wrecking my WHIP. Given my other two closers, another save source to start the season seemed prudent.

This pick filled out my nine-man pitching staff. However, with one starting pitcher already on the DL and the slim odds that all three of my closers make it through the season, there's in-season work to be done on the pitching front.

22.5 Smoak, Justin 1B SEA - I kinda had him up my sleeve to fill out my corner infield. I still like his upside. If he doesn't work out ... well, it was the 22nd round.

23.11 Matsui, Hideki DH OAK - Needed the best available hitter to fill my UT slot. Hideki Matsui was the best available hitter. Usually I don't like to clog up my UT slot with a DH-only guy, but how could I pass up the chance to add an injury-prone 36-year-old to this lineup? Hopefully he'll sneak into five games at OF sooner instead of later, because I desperately need a backup OF.

Reserves:

24.5 Porcello, Rick SP DET - Just rolling the dice on the upside.

25.11 Burnett, A.J. SP NYY - I need the Ks and Ws. As for everything else A.J. has brought the last few years ... well ... um, maybe I can find a few safe matchups for him.

26.5 Guillen, Carlos 2B DET - Picked him up to tuck away on the DL and serve as my backup MI when he's finally back on the field.

27.11 Johnson, Dan DH TB - My Plan B in case Smoak doesn't work out. He should be 1B-eligible after the first week or two. Sure, all he brings to the party are HRs. But this party badly needs some HRs. Normally this would be my Russell Branyan pick, but somebody actually drafted him this year. I've picked up Branyan in the reserves the previous three years straight to serve as my HR-source in the hole. Hopefully Johnson can serve as a poor man's Russ Branyan. I can't believe I just typed the phrase "a poor man's Russ Branyan."

Summary: How do I feel about this draft? Eh, okay, I suppose, but I'm not as fond of the results as I've been some other years. This squad is even more brittle than I had meant it to be, despite my plans to target the injury-prone this year. FWIW, the HQ projections show my starting lineup at 1,092 R, 226 HR, 1,028 RBI, 151 SB, and .288 BA, and my pitching at 86 W, 76 Sv, 1,048 K, 3.59 ERA, and 1.25 WHIP. Those aren't stats good enough to win the league, and the power is decidedly lacking. But it should be good enough to give me a base to improve on, and I don't feel as if I lost the league on March 27th.

What I like: My catchers, Lincecum & Carpenter at the top of my rotation, Bedard in the 19th round, Matsui in the 23rd round.

What I don't like: seven starting batters in their mid-30s, the back end of my starting rotation, dubious bullpen, lack of power.

Roster:
Catcher - Mauer (C), McCann (C)
Corner Infield - D. Lee (1B), M.Young (3B), Smoak (1B)
Middle Infield - Reyes (SS), Infante (2B), Nishioka (2B)
Outfield - Hart (OF)(DL), T.Hunter (OF), Pierre (OF), Ordonez (OF), Ibanez (OF)
Utility - H.Matsui (DH)
Starting Pitchers - Lincecum (SP), Carpenter (SP), Arroyo (SP), Peavy (SP)(DL), Bedard (SP), J.Garcia (SP)
Bullpen - Street (RP), Lyon (RP), Rodney (RP)
Reserves - D.Johnson (1B), C.Guillen (2B)(DL), Porcello (SP), A.J.Burnett (SP)

The State of Wolverine Lake: HOPEFUL!

2011-03-15T19:19:00.000-07:00

Today I delivered my annual “State of Wolverine Lake” speech at the Lakes Area Chamber of Commerce’s annual “State of the Lakes” event at which leaders from several of our local communities give the Chamber of Commerce an update on the state of their municipality. I thought some folks who couldn’t make it might be interested to see what I said, so I’ve expanded out my outline with the words (more or less) that accompanied a lovely chicken lunch at the Edgewood Country Club:

Good afternoon,

Thank you to the Chamber for giving us all this opportunity to update you on the issues that face our communities. But before I get to the body of my update on the State of Wolverine Lake, I wanted to take a moment to recognize the terrible disaster that has happened in Japan. It may seem to be quite remote to those of us here in Oakland County, but when we look around we find that the impact may be closer than we expect. For example, I found out just a couple of days ago that my neighbor, Nick Humphrey, who is stationed with the Marines in Okinawa, has been deployed to the main island to help in the recovery efforts there. I know there are a lot of other folks out there who have loved ones there. In our increasingly small world, a disaster like that touches all of us. Let’s keep all of them in our thoughts and prayers.

Now on to the village, where the State of Wolverine Lake this year is hopeful. Like everybody, we’ve had to do quite a bit of budget cutting in the last year, and we lost some good employees. But because of the work that we did last Spring as part of our long-term budget planning process, I think that we’re well situated to ride out the next couple of years, despite the likely cuts in state revenue sharing, which is something that we anticipated.

Like all of us dealing with the current economy, we’ve tried to make the cuts in a way that had the least impact on the services that we offer our residents. I like to think we’ve done as good a job of that as possible. You’ve heard me speak about a few of those items before -- especially our joint policing effort with Walled Lake, which saves both communities hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. But I really don’t want to stand here in front of you and talk about budget cuts for yet another year.

I want to talk about the things we are doing to make our village a better place to live, despite these difficult economic times.

Let me begin by talking about two places where the residents of Wolverine Lake have stepped up and filled the gaps left by our budget cuts.

• Last year we reduced the fish-stocking line item in our budget by $500. Village residents stepped up and collected more than $600 to replace the missing money. They told us loudly and clearly that this is a program that they value.

• Last year we eliminated the village contribution of $5,000 to our annual Tiki Night Fireworks display on July 3. The members of our fireworks committee have increased their fundraising efforts, and because of their hard work we were just able to sign a three-year contract with Zambelli Brothers to maintain the same great display that we’ve had the last several years. This is our lake’s signature event, and it will continue to be a great event, thanks to the hard work of our village’s residents.

These two items are especially important because our residents have stood up and said that they value these services so much that they are willing to go the extra mile to see them maintained.

We’re also working hard to continue to improve the infrastructure of the village:

• We just paved and accepted a new road in the village: Heron Hills Dr. in the Heron Hills Condominium development.

• We opened a new section of pathway on South Commerce Rd. to pedestrians and bicyclists off one of the most dangerous spots of road in our community. In doing this we worked together with our neighbors in Walled Lake to hook that pathway to their sidewalk system. As a result, hundreds of village residents who live on the East side of the lake now have safe access to Walled Lake. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank Walled Lake's administration, DDA, and elected officials for joining with us to get this done.

• And speaking of the both the Eastern District and of working with our neighbors, we have worked together with Commerce Township to get a sewer main built down South Commerce Rd. so that we can extend sewers to the village's Eastern District. We’re very grateful to Commerce Township for partnering with us to make this happen. When this line is installed this Spring we will have nearly completely ringed the lake with sewers. Those hookups are replacing dozens of old, failed septic systems that previously leached into the lake.

• Now that we have better pathways in the village, we’re working on giving folks more places to walk. Right now our Park & Recreation Board is working on a really great concept: Pocket Parks. These are small parks with just a little bit of playground equipment – maybe a slide and a couple of swings – that will give families a place to walk with their kids and have a little fun. This is an idea that won’t cost a lot of money, but that can be a nice improvement in a neighborhood.

• Our Park & Rec Board is also working on a plan for some beautification of our village and subdivision entrances. Again, this isn’t something that’ll cost a lot of money, but it will say that this is our village and these are our neighborhoods, and we’re proud of them.

Finally:

• Real estate outreach –This Spring we launched our new real-estate outreach program. This is a program that’s been put together by a committee consisting of volunteers from the village and local real estate professionals. We wanted to join in a partnership with local agents to help them to explain to their clients why the village is a great place to live, and it’s been a true success so far. The committee put together an information packet and a flyer filled with all sorts of helpful information for somebody thinking about living in the village: subdivision contacts, tax rates, village services, events, and a whole lot more.

A few weeks ago, 40 local realtors took part in our first outreach event where we got this distributed this information and took some time to get their input into what we can do to help them sell homes in Wolverine Lake.

Is this program succeeding? Well, ten days ago a new resident came in to file closing papers on new house and this new village flyer was right on top of her papers.

If you’re a local real estate agent who hasn’t yet participated in the project, please stop by our village office and we’ll get you set up with this information.

So, that's a nice list of things that we're working on. But why do I say that the state of Wolverine Lake is hopeful? Here’s the thing that makes the state of Wolverine Lake hopeful today.

All these things I just spoke about don’t happen just because our village council decrees them to be so. These accomplishments have taken and will take hundreds of hours of effort by volunteers who care about the village and are willing to do what it takes to make it a better place, whether it’s knocking on hundreds of doors to fill out petitions for a sewer; sitting in long, long, lo-o-o-o-o-ng meetings; or raising money to make sure that Tiki Night continues to be a great, unique event that brings the whole village together.

That is what makes me hopeful about the state of Wolverine Lake. We’re still here, and every day we’re working hard to make our village a better place to live. And we will continue to do that.

It makes me very proud to be the President of Wolverine Lake.

Thank you.

More photos of sunshine and tropical island splendor

2011-02-24T09:38:00.000-08:00

However, they won't be found in the Patio Boat blog, where we're currently battening down the hatches and spreading salt on the deck in preparation for tonight's sleet and snow.

Monique put together a really nice blog post of our trip to St. Thomas here: A Week of Hot Sun and Sand in the Winter.

Well ... okay, maybe one photo, just to carry me past the freezing drizzle that's knocking at my window.

I Can't Believe I Got On the Return Flight...

2011-02-21T09:14:00.000-08:00

Just a quick photographic comparison of our Saturday on St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, and our Sunday back in Wolverine Lake, Michigan:

Saturday.

Sunday.

Saturday.

Sunday.

Okay, I've convinced myself. Next week ... er, year (sigh) ... we flee Michigan for *two* weeks!

The View From Afar Of This Week In News

2011-02-20T12:42:00.000-08:00

One of the loveliest things about vacationing is that it gets me away from all sort of electronic media. This time around I didn't go on a complete news ban, but instead followed the news by reading a variety of newspapers as I sat under palm trees on a tranquil Caribbean beach. The nice thing about following the news at that distance is that it's a lot easier to see the big patterns without getting sucked into the daily froth.

So, before I lose the tranquility, I thought I'd share my thoughts on a few of last week's big stories, working from the international stage to Michigan.

Middle East Protests -- Democratic protests and possible reforms continue to sweep through the Middle East. It looks as if the reform advocates may be gaining the upper hand now in Bahrain. It's a rather pleasant thought that the ideas of Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Jr., may turn out to be a more effective tool for democratic reform than bombing countries back into the Stone Age. I fear there's a long way to go until we know how this will all turn out, but I wish them all well, especially the protesters in Iran and Libya.

GOP Budget Slashing in the US House of Representatives -- Well, it sure looks like the freshman Tea Partiers had fun on Capital Hill last week. It'd be fun to sort through the details, but overall it looked to me like an exercise in defunding a long list of Republicans pet peeves without actually addressing any of the real causes of structural federal budget deficits. After the last election I thought we'd have an enormous government-shutdown train wreck at the start of the next budget year, but it looks as if the train wreck will happen even sooner than I thought, with the debt-ceiling bill. Frankly, I expect a long, ugly shutdown that will wreak true damage on the economic recovery. I hope I'm wrong.

Wisconsin Union Busting -- So, let me get this straight. The governor of Wisconsin has decided that instead of renegotiating contracts, just flat-out banning public employee unions is the best way to pay for the $100-million-plus in tax cuts for businesses that Wisconsin enacted a few months ago. Well, at least he's made it clear that he considers union-busting to be more important than actual fiscal reform. I hope he enjoys the general strike that seems to be looming.

One More Thought On the Last Two Items -- Since tax revenues are now the lowest percentage of GDP since the Eisenhower Administration, and since union membership is at its lowest point since the 1930s, is it just barely possible that tax cuts and union busting isn't really a good prescription for national prosperity? It doesn't seem to be working out all that well so far. Just a thought.

Governor Snyder's Proposed Michigan Budget -- I'm really of a mixed mind here. On the one hand I really admire Snyder for finally rolling out something that looks to me (at first glance, anyway) like an actual balanced budget that doesn't rely on gimmicks and fiscal chicanery. On the other hand, as near as I can tell, it looks to me as if it pays for a billion dollars in business tax cuts by raising taxes on the poor by $330 million with the elimination of the earned-income tax credit (EITC) and by adding somewhere around a billion dollars in tax revenue by taxing pensions, which were exempted from taxation in the 90s during the Engler administration. I would bemoan the removal of the last $300 million of legislative municipal revenue sharing, but that always seemed a foregone conclusion to me.

It would be pretty easy to be cynical about those proposed vast shifts of taxation from corporations onto the backs of the poor and elderly, and to say that apparently according to the GOP tax hikes are only bad when they're on businesses or the wealthy.

But I think I'm going to hope that the legislative process works to correct some of the worst of the proposed budget -- especially the EITC removal. There's a lot to like in a budget process that at least attempts to deal with the real long-term numbers. Snyder at least seems open to suggestions. And unlike the Republicans in D.C. and in Wisconsin, he doesn't seem to be trying to use genuine budget issues to hammer home a long wish list of partisan policies. This gives me some hope that we may see something genuinely good for Michigan come out of this. We may even see genuine healthy debate about government spending priorities, something that seems in short supply elsewhere these days.

We shall see.

By Popular Demand: A Caribbean Sampler

2011-02-20T10:24:00.000-08:00

More complete photoblogging to come, but since I had a request to quikly throw a few photos from last week's trip to the U.S. Virgin Islands up on the blog, here goes:

We'll start with a favorite activity: sipping fruity rum drinks on the balcony of the condo at Bluebeard's Beach Club resort on the South shore of St. Thomas. This also gives you a pretty good sense of the view from our room, which was filled with white sand, blue Caribbean water, palm trees, and the occasional humongous cruise ship.

Monique at the resort.

John sailing with friends in the Sir Francis Drake Channel during a brief trip to Tortola in the British Virgin Islands.

Unfortunately, the cruise came to a short, sudden stop after John took the helm. Sadly, due to an obscure bit of 18th-Century British maritime law he's now forbidden to set foot in the United Kingdom or its territories for the next ten years.

Monique and Dick snorkeling at Coki Point Beach.

A view of our resort's beach and our rooms.

Dick, Mom, John, and Monique having -- Surprise! Surprise! -- fruity rum drinks. This time at the resort's beachside bar during sunset.

Monique high above Charlotte Amalie harbor.

And finally, Monique's favorite photo: a FedEx truck driving onto a ferry. Why does she especially like this? I'll leave it to her to explain, but my theory is that she wants to pack herself in a box and ship herself back to St. Thomas next winter.

The Delightful Dozen (Or So) Apps

2011-02-10T11:45:00.000-08:00

My brother Mike acquired an iPhone, so I thought I'd write up a wee list of the apps that I use the most on my iPod Touch. There are others that are fun, of course, but these are the dozen or so that have provided the most practical usage.

Web Browsing

Safari -- This almost feels like cheating because it comes with the original package, but it's probably the app that I use most often. I'm still amazed at how much web browsing I can do on my little iPod Touch screen with this.

Social Networks

Facebook & Twitter -- Both apps provide surprisingly good experiences. If you like FB & Twitter on your computer, you'll like and use these apps a lot.

News

New York Times -- Downloads the previous day or two of stories from the NYT. One thing I find especially handy about this, since I only have wi-fi connectivity on my iPod Touch, is that it downloads the full paper, which means that I can browse it at my leisure while I'm not connected to the web. This also means that stories pop up instantly, instead of needing individual downloads. (One tiny bummer, though, is that it often crashes on start-up, meaning that I sometimes need to open it two or three times before it comes up for good.)

The Weather Channel -- Has a really good Doppler radar map, in addition to weather forecasts and severe weather notices. Nifty and useful!

Practical

Flashlight -- Yeah, it's kinda silly, and it's certainly not a full-strength flashlight. But I've had several occasions now to use this when our power has gone out. It's essentially a white screen that gives you the best possible illumination if you're trying to use your iPod Touch to light up the dark.

Information and Research

Access My Library -- Gives you immediate access to all of the Gale reference and periodical databases to the local library you select. The best part is that it finds local libraries and then asks you to select the one for verification, which happens really easily. This is the best thing going if you want genuinely authoritative information instead of going the google route and taking your chances with the web.

Internet Movie Database (IMDB) -- Really easy to use, and the quickest way to answer the question, "What did that actor ever do after this?"

Games

Scrabble -- A tremendous time-killer. Mostly I just play vs. the computer, though there is also a multi-player option for folks who have multiple devices online. My only regret is that it doesn't include definitions for words, which was one of my favorite features of my old Palm Scrabble game.

Angry Birds -- Just as addictive as the hype suggests. Who wouldn't want to while away their time by smashing birds into structures in their suicidal attempt to crush those evil pigs?

e-Readers

Kindle (Stanza and e-Reader Pro are also very good, especially if you want to read free Project Gutenberg books.) - The thing that puts the Kindle app at the top of my e-Reader app list is that it synchs automatically with my Kindle, so that it takes me to the most recently read spot in a book. This is especially handy when I get stuck somewhere without my Kindle, but want to kill time by reading a few pages or a chapter. The one missing from my list is iBooks. I have downloaded it and tried it out. But truthfully it hogs so much processor power that it runs interminably slowly on my iPod Touch 2g. It may do better on newer devices.

Honorable Mention

These are also useful, or have at least provided me with a few moments of fun: YouTube, Calculator, Clock, SpawnHD, and eBay.

Happy Apping, Mike!

The Lowdown on the e-Reader Hoedown

2011-02-07T15:36:00.000-08:00

As some of you already know, Monique and I have been working diligently to catch up with the world of dedicated e-Readers and e-Books. (I've been reading e-books via assorted PDAs for years, including my iPod Touch, but had never before owned a dedicated e-Reader.) I held off posting on this until I had enough to report out on, and I reckon this is a good time for an update on the devices, our reading experience, and checking out e-books from the library.

The e-Readers Themselves

Let's start with a quick review of the devices that we looked at, in order of increasing sophistication, and our quick opinions of each. Most of them come in a cheaper wi-fi version, or a slightly more expensive model with 3G network capability that lets you buy books just about anywhere that you can get a cell-phone signal:

Borders Kobo 2 - A very simple little black & white e-Reader. Pros: the wi-fi version can now be found for $99; EPUB compatible, so can be used for library e-Books; comes pre-loaded with 100 classic books. Con: As near as I can tell, you can't loan books to other Kobo users.

Borders Sony Pocket Edition - Similar to the Kobo, but slightly smaller. This is either an advantage or a disadvantage, depending on what you're looking for.

Barnes & Noble Nook Black & White - Similar to the other two, but perhaps a bit more polished. Pros include EPUB compatibility and the ability to loan books to other Nook readers.

Amazon Kindle 3 - The best of the black & white e-Ink e-Reader devices. Cons: Not EPUB compatible, and until a few weeks ago would not allow you to loan books to other Kindle owners. The number of books that offer this capacity is pretty limited at present, though that may change for the better as Amazon works out rights and permissions with publishers. (I'm not sure how this compares with Nook lending or whether more titles are lendable on the Nook.)

Apple iPod Touch - I mention this because I have one and have been using it as my e-Reader all along. Frankly, it's pretty good. The screen isn't as big as the other e-Readers, and the battery doesn't last as long. But the small size is a nice convenience, as is the fact that I usually have it in my pocket, since it keeps my calendar and contacts. e-Reader apps on my iPod include e-Reader, Stanza, iBooks, and Kindle. I might do a post about just them later.

Nook Color - Living somewhere between a true e-Reader and an iPad. Pricier than a Nook B&W, but a good deal cheaper than an iPad.

Apple iPad - One slick device. It's bigger and heavier than all the rest. Kind of overkill if you just want to read books.

After looking them all over we started with a Kindle with 3G capability, which Monique got me for my birthday. A few weeks later I reciprocated and got her one for Christmas, so we're now a two-Kindle household. We chose the Kindle because it was simply the best device. After a couple of months of usage, I can confirm this opinion. It's light, it reads well, the ergonomics of the buttons are good, and the screen is as comfortable to read as a printed page. Frankly, this is about as close to the convenience of reading a book as I expect to get.

The user interface of the Kindle seemed the easiest and quickest, too. Amazon's really put a lot of effort into making it dangerously easy for you to order book after book on the Kindle, and it shows. We bucked up for the 3G models of the Kindle. The extra connectivity is convenient, especially while traveling. Buying a book while riding in a car was really nice. However, if price is really an issue for you a wi-fi only model would probably be fine as long as you have a wi-fi network at home.

Another bonus with the Kindle is that it synchs with the Kindle app I downloaded for my iPod Touch. This has turned out to be a real bonus. If I'm reading a book on the Kindle but don't have it with me (say I'm stuck in a long line at the market) I can fire up the Kindle App on my iPod Touch and read a few pages. Then -- as long as my iPod has had a chance to connect with the web afterwards -- the next time I pick up my Kindle it will synch forward to the last page I read. That's pretty darn slick, and has already shown itself to be a real convenience.

So far I've read about ten books on the Kindle, plus picked up a daily subscription to the Detroit Free Press, which doesn't offer home delivery most days. I have truly enjoyed my Kindle experience.

The other B&W e-Readers were all nice devices, but they seemed to be a generation behind the Kindle in a lot of little ways that just added up to a better e-Reader experience on the Kindle. I don't think you'd go too far awry with any of them if you decided that you'd prefer an e-Reader with EPUB compatibility so that you can check out library e-Books, and that might very well be a good enough reason to go with one of the others. The black-and-white e-Ink screens of all of them were very good.

The backlit color screens of the iPod Touch, Nook Color, and iPad all seem likely to impose a bit of eye strain after a while. That plus the considerably shorter charge life of the color devices seemed to be a definite downside if what you really want is a text reader. Mind you, I might acquire an iPad one of these days, but I don't think it'll ever be my primary e-Reader.

A few weeks ago I also bought a Kobo from Borders, so that I could try library downloads. Owning it confirmed my initial thoughts at the time I bought the Kindle. The Kobo is perfectly fine to read on, but it's just a bit more awkward in several different little ways. If I had to choose just one device on which to read a book, I would choose the Kindle.

Borrowing e-Books from the Library

As I mentioned above, I also picked up a Kobo from Borders a few weeks ago, so that I could try borrowing e-books from our local library. It's great that the Kindle makes it so easy to buy a huge variety of e-books, magazines, and newspapers. But that can also quickly become a pricy habit!

I won't go into the technical detail of how library downloads work via Adobe Digital Editions, but it does take a wee bit of effort to figure out and install. (A friend who has been through the process and can walk you through the steps would be really helpful here.) Once figured out, however, borrowing library e-Books turns out to be pretty quick and easy, albeit a bit more complicated than just buying books through either the Kindle or Kobo's e-store.

Alas, there is one downside that I didn't anticipate. There just aren't nearly enough books available through our local library to keep up with the demand right now. Currently there are 1,479 EPUB titles available through my local library. All but 272 are checked out. That's an astonishing 82% checkout rate! And many of those 272 "available" titles seemed to be books that would just as easily be found through Project Gutenberg. In fact, quite a few were already *on* my Kobo because they were included with the 100 free classics that were already on my Kobo when I bought it.

I suspect that the big uptick in e-reader ownership over the past few months may have led to quicker-than-expected growth in EPUB borrowing. My guess is that anything in a library that has an 82% checkout rate is going to get more attention in the next year's acquisitions budget. I expect the number of titles and their availability to increase greatly in months and years to come. So I wouldn't let that discourage you too much. But you might want to check your local library's catalog before plunging in.

In the meantime, most of the checked-out titles had a very small wait list, usually somewhere between 0-2 patrons. So most of those books would be available within a month or so if you placed a hold on them. The best tip I can give anybody who truly wants to find an EPUB book to download immediately is to use the "Advanced Search" and be sure to check the "Only show titles with copies available" button. I probably spent more time looking for an available EPUB book than I did sorting out the technical details of downloading, so your ability to navigate the catalog really matters. Once I started using the advanced search, it became much easier to dig up a few books I was interested in reading.

(Commerce Township library belongs to a "Download Destination" coalition hosted by OverDrive Digital Media. I rather suspect it's a standard interface for a lot of libraries. I found the OverDrive interface to be much more useful than the general library catalog because it did a much better job of distinguishing between EPUB books, PDF books, and various audiobook files.)

And that's it for now. However, much more to come on this topic in the future.

Beagle Haiku that Brigitte Posted on Facebook

2011-01-29T11:46:00.000-08:00

Katie the Beagle
Knows few words we say to her,
But knows we love her.

My response to Chaser, the incredible Border Collie; he knows more than 1000 names of things.

--Brigitte Darnay

Perhaps this is why Katie the Beagle inspires so many haikus. She's a beagle of few words, so poetry of few syllables is just right.

Booty from the MSU Comics Forum

2011-01-23T18:09:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I zipped out to East Lansing to swing by the annual Michigan State University Comics Forum. Over the past few years the MSU Comics Forum has become one of the best events on the calendar each year for anybody interested in comics. Alas, I got out there a bit late and missed the first couple of sessions, but I did get a chance to attend one creators' panel (with Joe Foo, Jeremy Bastian, and Nate Powell, moderated by Jay Jacot -- more on their work later) and to spend some time in the Forum's Artists' Alley, which had a really nice assortment of mostly Michigan-based comic artists.

As usual at this sort of thing, there was more cool stuff than I had dollars, and alas, a some really cool items from some great artists went unpurchased. Alas, you just can't buy all the cool comics. (Trust me, I've tried!)

But I was pleased with my stack of treasures when I returned with them, and am doubly so now that I've read them all. So, without further ado, here's a list of my booty:

(Oh, wait. One last bit of ado: apologies in advance for some of the blurriness in the pages I scanned below to give you a taste of some of these treasures. Rest assured the fault lies with me, and not with the artists.)

Let's start with this nifty bookmark from Ryan Claytor's Elephant Eater Comics:

"What's that, you cheap #%&%*&@?" you say, "You had all of Ryan's swag in front of you and you came back with a freebie bookmark?!"

As regular Patio Boat followers know, I've plugged Ryan's work frequently and enthusiastically, and honestly I already have all of his books (you should, too!) so Ryan went home without any of my cash this year. But I wanted to mention him at the start because he did much of the organizing of this year's event. He also created the nifty poster at the top of this post, featuring media superstar Katie the Beagle. (Um, "featuring" Katie the Beagle if you look closely enough. That's close enough for me, anyway, and that poster's goin' up on the wall!)

If you want to be a cheap #%&%*&@, too, and check out Ryan's work for free, you can do so at his website, where he's rolling out his latest issue of And Then One Day at a steady one-page a week clip.

Next up: a 24-hour comic from Jay Jacot:

For those who haven't encountered them before, 24-hour comics are comics that are written and drawn in a single 24-hour stint, usually at a "24-Hour Comics" session with a gathering of local comic artists. The resulting comics can sometimes be a bit sketchy -- as is the case with The Chase: A Twist of Fate -- but since the purpose is often shaking artists out of their usual process, that's hardly surprising. I always find them interesting to read because they tend to have a really raw and fresh vibe to them.

If you haven't seen Jay's work before, I'd recommend checking out his sci-fi detective Tao of Snarky comic, either in the Tao of Snarky compilation, or at his website where he's publishing pages from his new Snarky comic at a page-a-week pace.

What's next? Why it's The Amazing Cynicalman by Matt Feazell:

This wee eight-page Cynicalman chapbook was a freebie for drawing Cynicalman on a post-it note, a blatant bit of Artists' Alley self-promotion that worked just dandy. I hadn't picked up a Cynicalman collection in a couple of years, and this one had a couple of strips that genuinely cracked me up. You can check out Cynicalman yourself at Matt Feazell's website.

Now we come to a couple of items from Megan Rose Gedris. The first is a graphic novel, Yu+Me: dream, Vol. 1. This collects up the first four volumes of her Yu+Me: dream webcomic, a romance that chronicles the coming of age of a high school girl in Catholic school who discovers that she may be a lesbian. This collection is filled with interesting characters, some beautiful images, and some very compelling storytelling.

The web comic ran from 2004 through October 2010, and the story is now complete on the web. I really liked this book a lot, so I'm sure I'll check out the webcomic to see how it all turns out.

Since I bought a volume of Yu+Me: dream, Megan was kind enough to throw in a chapbook with the first ten pages of her new webcomic: Meaty Yogurt, the tale of a girl growing up in a small town.

This one really caught me up, too, so I can tell that Megan Rose Gedris's various webcomics are going to get a lot of traffic from me in the next few weeks.

Now, for something completely different, the Tales of a Checkered Man webcomic by Denver Brubaker, the adventures of a middle-aged aspiring superhero.

I picked up a little two-dollar chapbook with the first 23 strips of this webcomic, and a few of them cracked me up. Check it out for good-natured almost-superheroic fun.

This seems a good time to break up this list of reviews with a bit of discussion of the web and comics. This is a great time to read comics. The growing popularity of webcomics has given all sorts of artists a platform on which they can publish essentially for free. And more and more artists and storytellers are rising to that challenge. Every year I grow more and more impressed at the depth and breadth of the talent that is out there toiling in a world beyond superhero comics and the comics page in the newspaper.

Don't get me wrong ... I love my paper comics. But one of the big pieces of hype about the Internet in the 90s was that it would unlock a new platform for artists of all genres and democratize creativity. But it was one thing to speculate that the web might do that back in 1995, and it's another thing entirely to stand here in 2011 and watch it happening in independent comics. There is a new generation of artists out there who are doing some amazing things, and part of the reason is that they have always been free to draw their story the way they wanted. I can't wait to see what the next fifteen years brings from them.

And now, with that little pep talk over, it's on to another webcomic collection: Desmond's Devastating Dozen by Joe Foo.

This limited-edition book (hand signed and numbered with a sketch by Foo, natch) collects up a dozen of Foo's favorite panels from Desmond's Comic, the adventures of a wolverine who works as a character in a popular video game. The webcomic updates once a week on Tuesdays, and I can see I'm going to have to add another regular Tuesday stop to my lunchtime comics browsing!

Now, just when you think you've seen everything that can possibly be done with Zombies, we get Apooka: The World's Most Adorable Zombie written by Jon Hickey with art by Mike Roll.

I suppose this is perhaps more of a children's picture book than a comic in format, but there's no denying that Apooka is cute as the Dickens. Apooka is not a webcomic, but you can pick up an adorable copy of your very own of this book or its sequel via the web at the Apooka online store. This is without a doubt my favorite zombie book that I have ever read. (Though I must confess that I haven't yet read Night of the Living Trekkies, which I picked up from the Science Fiction book club last month. We shall see who remains my top zombie after that.)

We come now to the girl who put the "Booty" in this post's title, Cursed Pirate Girl: The Collected Edition, Vol. 1 by Jeremy A. Bastian, which collects up the first three issues of the Cursed Pirate Girl comic.

Before we go any further, click on the page below and check out the enlarged version:

So why did Cursed Pirate Girl put the "booty" into this post's title? Because when I came to Jeremy's table I picked up the book, paged through a couple of pages, and realized that I was three dollars short of the purchase price. So I grabbed my jacket, walked outside, and strolled around East Lansing in January in single degree temperatures until I could find an ATM. That's right, the art in this book is so cool that it made me wander around Michigan on the coldest day in January so that I could find enough booty to buy it. Now that I've had a chance to see the entire book, it was well worth it. Anybody who knows how I feel about Michigan in January knows that this is the highest compliment I can possibly pay to any artist. Any further praise I could heap on this imaginative and brilliantly detailed comic would just be redundant.

Speaking of the Interent and comics, this book has an Internet story of its own. The money to fund this printing was raised through Kickstarter, an Internet site that lets fans collect up enough money to fund an artistic project. One of the great advantages of established publishers is their ability to provide writers and artists with an advance on a project. Kickstarter creates an alternate way to raise the sort of capital that you need to make full-time work on a project possible for most folks. It might not be the right path for a lot of projects, but in this case it's been a huge success.

Finally, despite my Michigan-Winter defying love for Cursed Pirate Girl, we come to my absolute favorite of the treasures I brought home: Swallow Me Whole by Nate Powell, the keynote speaker for the 2011 MSU Comics Forum.

Swallow Me Whole was released in 2008 and won the 2009 Eisner Award for Best New Graphic Novel. When I came to Nate's table he had a little pile of them on the front with a sign that said, "Winner of the 2009 Eisner Award." I looked at the sign, looked at him, and said, "Wow, this book won the Eisner Award? That's commendable. I guess I should buy a copy."

This is the dorkiest thing I have ever said to any creator in any forum. Really. Winning an Eisner Award is "commendable"? Good heavens.

Um, sorry, Nate. My bad. But thank you for talking to me kindly after that opener, nonetheless. And thank you for creating such a fabulous book. Swallow Me Whole is a graphic novel about a teenage girl and her family as they deal with mental illness. What makes this book so moving and powerful is the way that Powell uses the artwork to reflect the inner landscape of the characters. It's well worth seeking out.

And that's it for now. Thanks again to Ryan Claytor and everybody else who worked to make this year's MSU Comics Forum such a great event. I'm already looking forward to 2012!

My (Hopefully) Final Words on Civil Debate, Fox News, Tuscon, Etc.

2011-01-14T15:32:00.000-08:00

They'll be brief. Frankly, I considered writing another long blog entry on the topic, but the mere thought of doing the research for it by taking another dive into the political rhetoric of the last few years made me want to take a shower. So here instead are a few quick thoughts:

1) I think we should all ask ourselves some questions about what people who purport to speak for our political candidates or points of view are saying, and how they are saying it. Is what they are saying acceptible? Responsible? Admirable? Is it Christian? Would Ronald Reagan or John F. Kennedy have said such a thing? (To pick a respected spokesman for both the right and the left.)

If it falls short of those criteria, why are you permitting it? Speak up, and speak up to the people who claim to be speaking for you. Because if you stand by silently, you are as guilty as those who are speaking on your behalf.

2) The Ol' Boiling-Frog Analogy is one of the most overused analogies in the world of rhetoric -- the frog that will sit quietly in a pot of warm water as the heat is turned up to boiling. It may apply here.

One of the things that I have done occasionally over the last seven or eight years is to go on what I call a "news ban" for a few weeks or months. I pretty much avoid all TV and radio news, and mostly all printed news other than the local weekly paper (The Spinal Column) and an occasional newsmagazine or Sunday paper.

The truly jarring part is entering back into the world of broadcast news. When you see the cable news channels with fresh eyes, it's truly appalling. Local television news is sadly not much better. If you truly think the rhetoric of the past few years has been acceptible, you might want to step out of the loop for a few months. You might find that you have a different opinion when you look again.

What we choose to put in our own heads makes a big difference in who we are. If we choose to fill our heads with garbage ... well, there's a well-known programming axiom -- Garbage In, Garbage Out -- that applies. The Information Age comes with personal responsibilities. In an era in which we each can choose what goes into our head, we each have a personal responsibility to choose wisely.

3) If you get a chance to catch Obama's speech this week at the Tuscon Memorial, it's worth your half-hour.

And that's it. I'm going to head home, have a large well-earned martini, grill a big steak, maybe watch a movie or two, and take a blessed break from broadcast news for the next few days.

Have a good Martin Luther King, Jr., weekend, everybody.

A Few Thoughts on This Weekend's Events in Arizona

2011-01-10T16:37:00.000-08:00

I've been trying for a couple of days to write down my thoughts about the murder of six people this weekend during the attempted assassination of Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona this weekend. I've found myself at a suprising loss for words.

My first thought when I heard about it was, "I'm surprised this didn't happen sooner." This makes me very sad.

My second thought was, "Yet again."

One thing that's been lost in the media accounts is that this really isn't an isolated incident. It's just the first recent incident that claimed a national politician. Political shootings seem to be in style recently: six people died at Kirkwood City Council shooting on Feb. 2, 2008, and in December 2010 a gunman opened fire at a school board meeting in Florida.

Most disturbing perhaps is the way this hostility has trickled down to the local level. Even before last weekend's shooting I've heard concerns from a lot of local politicians -- both Republican and Democrat -- about the possibility of this sort of shooting around here. Indignant citizens are nothing new in politics. But there's been a vibe in the air lately that's different, more threatening.

This is hardly a concern that's unique to Michigan. Just to cite an example I came across yesterday, I read an account by a former councilman in South Portland, Maine, who let himself be bullied out of office by death threats and what may have been an attempt to sabotage his car (This incident is inspiring me to speak up... by David Swander Jacobs.) His experience was four or five years ago, but this weekend's shooting made him think that the time to remain silent about what he'd experienced had passed.

The problem has been out there for a while, but it's been growing. Threats and bullying are nothing new in politics, but the current toxic atmosphere and constant barrage of threats, implied or otherwise, is something we haven't seen in this country in a long, long time.

I don't think we know much yet about the motivations of Jared Loughner, the shooter in Tuscon. From the little I've read, his politics seem more "crazy grammar police" than right or left. But I do know that he's not an isolated data point. He's part of a trend, a trend that seems to have declared "open season" on politicians.

I've been involved in political campaigns for 20 years and running public meetings for 10 years, and I've never personally seen anything like the vitriol that spewed forth from the right over the last few years. And yes, I'm talking about Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and their ilk.

When crackpots say they want to poison the Speaker of the House (Beck, here) or talk about beheading journalists (O'Reilly, here), or put gunsights up over a list of political enemies (Palin, here) we call the police. When talking heads are paid millions of dollars do this on TV, we call it "Fox News."

Those three examples took me about three minutes of Googling to find. There are hundreds more out there. Out of a sense of balance I had intended to put up a similar comments from a mainstream liberal commentator, but frankly I couldn't find one.

I'm not talking about right vs. left here. And I'm not calling for an end to heated political debate. But debate in a civilized society has its boundaries. I'm talking about indecency vs. decency. It's sadly apparent that one side of the political spectrum has chosen to be disproportionately represented in the "indecency" column.

What can be done about it? I don't really know, but I have a couple of ideas. For one thing I don't intend to let some things pass by silently that I might have let pass before. I generally have thought that a good old-fashioned shunning is appropriate for most of the vitriol peddlers, and that pointing out their misdeeds only brings attention to them.

But now I think it might be more important to point out that what they're doing is wrong.

I'll also try to be more mindful of my own words in the future, and to encourage everybody I know to do the same. I've always tried to measure my words in public forums. Mulling the events of the past few days and the atmosphere of the past few years has made me even more determined to be responsible for what I say.

We are all leaders by example, doubly so in difficult times.

I don't know if any of that will make a difference. But I do know that the vast majority of people I know are good and decent. The time has come for decent people to say, "Enough."

Colts-Katie-Kaylee Haiku: Playoff Edition

2011-01-09T22:22:00.000-08:00

In which our NFL-Beagle-Granddaughter haiku correspondent discovers that a short poetic format is perfectly suited to the length of the Colts' 2010 NFL Playoffs run:

Katie & Kaylee Still On a Roll!

Colts end a complex
Season. Beagles and grandkids,
Though, are fun year-round.

--Mary Campbell-Droze

My Winter Wimpiness Knows No Bounds

2011-01-08T07:43:00.000-08:00

It is a beautiful Winter day outside. The sun is shining, sparkling off a blanket of fresh snow. The two little girls next door are skating on the rink shoveled out from the lake in front of their house. Snowmobilers and four-wheelers are zipping across the smooth ice. And Monique has set off in her snow boots to walk across the lake and meet up with some friends.

Yet all I can do is look at the ol' Weathertech STX 7000 weather station, see that it is 13.7 degrees outside, and think, "My God, it's cold out there. What are all you people, nuts?!"

I'll be making something warm for breakfast, then having it with a nice latté as I read the paper and listen to the radio. What do those four activities have in common? You do them inside! Where it's not twenty degrees below freezing!

I'm pretty sure Katie the Beagle is with me. She's curled up underneath a blanket on the couch.

Patio Boat

Newt-mania Runs Its Inevitable Course

Indy Colts Haiku: Conference Championships Edition

The GOP Presidential Primary: The Newt-Pocalypse

Some of My Favorite Photos of 2011

Another update on the GOP primary

Indy Colts Haiku: Playoff Bonus

Thoughts on the GOP presidential primary results in New Hampshire

What's in Store for Me in 2012, Part 3: The Other Stuff

What's in Store for Me in 2012, Part 2: The Patio Boat Blog

What's in Store for Me in 2012, Part 1: Politics

Buddy Roemer Lives!

Santorum's Michigan Problem

Thoughts on the Republican Presidential Primary, Now That Iowa Is in the Books

Colts Haiku, the 2011 Week 17 Finale (Plus a Wallace Stevens-esque bonus!)

Colts Haiku, Week 16

Monique's Pork Paté recipe

Colts Haiku, Week 15

Meet the She-Hulk

Colts Haiku, Week 14

Frankly, It's Beyond Swiffering

Colts Haiku, Week 13

The Sleepy Beagle

Indianapolis Colts Haiku, Week 12 (plus two bonus haiku!)

Woo-Hoo! Heat in the MGB!

Colts Haiku: Week 11

John and Monique Are Thankful for Our New Hardwood Floor

Beer in the Bottle

Colts Haiku, Week 10

Colts Haiku, Week 9

Practical gift-giving for the new MG owner

Breaking Holiday Pumpkin Ale News!

The 2011 Holiday Pumpkin Ale

Indianapolis Colts, Week 8: Halloween-ku

Indianapolis Colts Haiku: Week 7

The Great Sports Car Debate: 2011 Corvette Grand Sport Coupe v. 1976 MGB Roadster

Colts 2011 Haiku, Week 6, in which our intrepid poet starts to capture the spirit of their winless start to the season

The Day All Life on Earth Almost Ended

Colts 2011 Haiku, Week 5, in which I make that case that "Coltish" may soon replace "Lionesque" as the preferred NFL term for "hopeless ineptitude."

Ryan Claytor Artist Lecture and Exhibit at Mott Community College

MC-D Eschews the Haiku Format in Week 4. (Just like the Colts eschew wins.)

MC-D's Indianapolis Colts Haiku, Week 3

Who Will Create the Frame for the 2012 Election?

Caution: The Most Disturbing Limerick Thread of All Time

Colts/Katie/Kaylee Update, Week 2, in which MC-D's pain continues...

NFL Week 1 Beagles, Colts, n' Grandaughters Haiku Report

The Lost Souls Fantasy Football League 2011 Preview

Mr. Crankypants Sez "I told you so."

Mr. Crankypants Presents Remedial Economics 101

Musings from the Navel Observatory

By popular demand, another picture of the new toy. Plus, bonus poetry from MC-D!

Summertime Arrivals

A Wee Bit of Philosophy

Your Patriotic American Duty

Back to our core competency...

This n'That

Ahoy from Wyoming!

Putting the "Doggin' Around" in Doggerel

Eleven things I'd like to say about the death of Osama Bin Laden

Peru's Extremely Depressing National Anthem

Truly, the Greatest Story Ever Told

The Easter Beagle

Recipe for Intellectual Whiplash

Problem, Solution, Happy Anniversary!

At least I didn't bring a boat back with me

No Comics for Me This Week!

And now, the post that *nobody* wants to read. We present your 2011 Gabbling Gadwalls!

The State of Wolverine Lake: HOPEFUL!

More photos of sunshine and tropical island splendor

I Can't Believe I Got On the Return Flight...

The View From Afar Of This Week In News

By Popular Demand: A Caribbean Sampler

The Delightful Dozen (Or So) Apps

The Lowdown on the e-Reader Hoedown

Beagle Haiku that Brigitte Posted on Facebook

Booty from the MSU Comics Forum

My (Hopefully) Final Words on Civil Debate, Fox News, Tuscon, Etc.

A Few Thoughts on This Weekend's Events in Arizona

Colts-Katie-Kaylee Haiku: Playoff Edition

My Winter Wimpiness Knows No Bounds

And now, the post that nobody wants to read. We present your 2011 Gabbling Gadwalls!