Premonitions

I'm not generally one for premonitions, but I had a terrible premonition as I was driving in to work today. It's time for the terrible San Francisco earthquake that I've feared ever since I first moved out there in the early 90s.

I'm sure that notion is just the cumulation of all that has been terrible in 2016. It's only natural to think, "Okay, now what's really the absolute worst possible thing that can happen next?" And I guess for me, that's it.

San Francisco's an odd place. At one level it's this beautiful tourist destination filled with all these wonderful, fascinating people and places. But when you live there, it's just home, filled with it's pluses and minuses, like any place you can live. San Francisco has much more in common with Detroit than it thinks it does or would ever admit. Having lived both places, I know. But the last couple of times I was out there I was struck by the sense that it's been living in a golden age lately, the sort of time when we'll look back and mourn all that was and has been lost. I felt that dark cloud on me this morning.

As I said above, the notion was probably just a reaction to all that has been terrible lately. Fortunately for my current state of mind it doesn't feel like a personal, nearby premonition of danger -- though too much of my life is tied into people in San Francisco for the notion of a major earthquake there to strike me as anything other than personally horrible. As we're reaching the end of 2016 I've been reduced to laying on our couch in the evenings, listening to Gregorian chants to sooth the soul. I'm usually pretty buoyant, but hours of Gregorian chant are not a sign of an optimistic brain.

Heck, maybe it's just this nasty cold I've been fighting off that last couple of days.

In general I think the premonitions are usually your subconscious telling you to pay attention to things that your conscious thinking patterns have tried to bury or deny. Well, there are lots of signs of bad things in the future out there right now for lots of people I love. Maybe my subconscious has decided to round up all the signs to give them a specific aspect.

But, man, it's hard to shake the feeling that something else bad is coming down the pike. I hope I'm wrong.

Crossing our Atlantic: a five-year summary of progress

The nice thing is that I don't even have to say what particular incident caused me to write this. It could apply to several things in my life lately. And I have a feeling you'll all have a topic of your own to which it could apply:

2011
ME: Hey, our current course brings us pretty far north.
RESPONSE: Full steam ahead!

2012
ME: There's a warning out about a high number of icebergs in those waters.
RESPONSE: Full steam ahead!

2013
ME: We're starting to see some pack ice on the horizon.
RESPONSE: Full steam ahead!

2014
ME: Holy Mother of God! You're steaming straight into an iceberg pack at night in the fog!
RESPONSE: Full steam ahead!

2015
ME: Good Lord, we've struck a monster! We're going down!! Man the lifeboats!!! Women and children first!!!!
RESPONSE: What was that scraping noise on the bow? Please rearrange the deck chairs and tell the band to play a bit louder. It's hard to hear them over the emergency klaxon. Full steam ahead!


Preview of Coming Attractions:

2016
JOHN: Nice airship. So, you say it's filled with hydrogen and painted with aluminum oxide rocket fuel to make it silvery and shiny?

The Super Bowl snowstorm

Detroit suffered a double blow on Super Bowl Sunday:

1) The Detroit Lions spent their 49th consecutive year as Super Bowl spectators. Sigh.

2) We got 16.7 inches of snow, the 3rd-largest single-storm in Detroit history.

For the most part we spent our Super Bowl huddled inside, watching the Super Bowl and celebrating Brigitte's birthday.

Even the electric reindeer showed up to pay his respects.


But on Monday, it was time to pay the piper. The next morning dawned cold and crisp: six degrees and not a cloud in the sky.

Snow drifts washed across the lake like waves, piling up on the island.

With the ground buried deep in snow the local birds enjoyed a breakfast feast at our feeder.

Out by the street the roads were plowed but the cars were buried. Several of our neighbors had already chipped away at the mess (Thank you!!!) but there was still plenty more snow left to shovel.

The well plowed roads of Wolverine Lake. As village president the number-one complaint that I get about our plowing is that it fools people into thinking the roads elsewhere are equally passable.

They weren't.

You could drive around Wolverine Lake just fine, but school was cancelled all over Michigan on this Monday. and even on Tuesday in a lot of districts, including our own. Kudos to our DPW for once again being ahead of our surrounding communities.

Of course, the clean roads did us no good at all, since our cars were entirely buried in the driveway:

It was time to get to work. Arsen and Monique cleared a path to Arsen's garage where -- miracle of miracles! the new snowblower that he bought last week was ready to serve. This was the most timely purchase of the decade!

Meanwhile, in our own driveway progress was a bit slower.

Notice between the garages. Our neighbor Wendy is making her way out by climbing over the snow drift and over to the wee path out our driveway.

Eventually, the snowblower made its way to our side of the street.

Our poor little Christmas reindeer were already buried before we started to clear the drive.

And afterwards? Hopeless!

Our mailboxes were free!

As was our driveway:

The final result. Hurrah! Freedom for our motor vehicle fleet!

One final task remained, clearing the snow from our porch:

In defense of my attire, it had warmed up to a balmy eleven degrees.

That evening, as we all enjoyed a well earned rest and recovery, the last few rays of the sunset cast a pink light on the snowy lake:

And to the East? Moonrise!

All in all, a proper snowstorm properly cleaned up.

But that was enough for this winter, thank you. We're now ready to go down to the Virgin Islands in a couple of weeks. Please! Oh, please!

This n'that, the kvetching about my health edition

Wow, two months since my last post?!

What can I say? 2014 was a busy, busy year ... followed by an utter collapse into exhaustion.

This, then, I suppose is mostly just a note to assure the blog-o-sphere that I'm not dead, kidnapped, or a recent convert to the Rajneeshi cult on the basis of their Rolls-Royce obsession.  (Are the Rajneeshis even still around? If not, what happened to all the Baghwan's Rolls?)

To sum up the last couple of months: Thanksgiving, Christmas prep, Christmas in Glens Falls, utter exhaustion, and then ... back to work. (I'll probably post a batch of Christmas pictures here sometime soon because this is a convenient place to do that.) Mostly the two-month hiatus for the blog has been a reflection of just how tuckered out I was by the end of 2014.

This leads to my one and only resolution for 2015, which really I made around mid-November 2014: I will put more effort into the maintenance of myself than I put into the maintenance of my rusty old pickup truck. That's all.

The vow itself has its roots in a couple of items, most notably the neglectful way I've treated my body the last couple of years, simply because I had put my own health toward the end of my to-do priority list. By the time I hit December it was obvious that:

1. I'd gotten way over weight again.
2. I'd hit my all time record for being out of shape.
3. The combination of #1 and #2 was making me increasingly less productive at a time when I needed to do more than ever.
4. If I continued down that path I could look forward to early disability and death.

Point number four in particular was brought home to me by two things. The first was the terrible condition in which I found my brother Mike when we went out to Wyoming for The Big Road trip. He had worked himself into a genuine health crisis. (I'm happy to say that Mike has reversed the course and already looked in much better shape when I saw him at Christmastime.) The second wake-up notice happened as I was lecturing somebody at work about going to see a doctor immediately because he had chest pains, and he said, "Well, I just want to get such-and-such done first...."  In the midst of that it occurred to me that I'd better start giving myself that lecture. I wasn't having chest pains, but I felt I had launched myself on that trajectory. In particular my weight and lack of fitness really began to concern me given my long family history of diabetes.

Now I've had my long-deferred physical. I'm happy to say that I don't seem to have done too much long-term damage to myself yet.  (There was also a gentle suggestion that at age 47 nothing good can happen to me if I go back on a rugby pitch. Sigh)

Next step: a colonoscopy. So, um ... self-maintenance isn't all glamour, I reckon.

Also, as part of the drive to achieve a minimal mediocrity in self-maintainance I finally went to an ophthalmologist to get my eyes looked at. My reading vision had been sliding for the last couple of years and although I was still squinting my way to literacy it was pretty obvious that a pair of reading glasses were in my future. What I didn't expect was to come away with a bifocal prescription. I had kinda noticed that my distance vision wasn't what it once was, but I was really surprised to get a distance prescription along with my reading prescription.  (And joy of joys I have an astigmatism, so off-the-rack El Cheapo reading glasses are never going to work very well for me.) The good news is that my distance vision is still well within the DMV limits, so I hadn't entirely turned into a Mr. Magoo driving disaster.

For now I opted for two different pairs of glasses, one for reading and one for driving. But I can already see that I'm going to move to a genuine set of bifocals sooner instead of later. And ... yeah, walking out of the eye doctor's place with my first *two* pairs of glasses is a pretty good wake-up call for my health, too.

I plan to do a lot more living and to do a lot more stuff with that time. So, whatever else may be on my plate ... taking better care of myself has to move up to number one.

Go away, Winter, and take your beard with you!

As some of you know, I grew a wee little beard this winter to help fend off the cold. Today, I went to the barbershop:

Before

After

Now all I have to do is convince the weather to match my newly shorn state. Darn it, Winter, the calendar says that it's now Spring. It's time for you to go!

2014 Resolutions in Brief

It's my first day back in my cubicle after my lovely two-week holiday staycation, so lunchtime seemed a good time to write down a few thoughts about what I want to do in 2014:

1) Take better care of myself -- For too long I've been treating my body like an old truck, except that I actually treat my old truck better than I treat myself. It finally caught up with me in 2013, especially in the form of three bouts of bronchitis, one of which was severe enough to bring on a ten-day stretch of total silence due to laryngitis.

I could make all the resolutions in the world to do specific things, but I can't actually do any of them unless I start taking better care of myself and get myself into better shape.

2) Unsubscribe -- My personal e-mail has become a horrible junk pile of missives from an enormous variety of organizations. I realized recently that I'm deleting 50 or 100 e-mails a day without reading them just to try to get to the worthwhile stuff.  I've had enough.  I used to be pretty softhearted about e-mails from various political organizations or charities that I like, but no more. If I'm inclined to delete it more often than not, I'm just going to unsubscribe. I need to regain some control.

3) Be more focused at work -- For various reasons my job is the great enemy of focus. I swim in an every-flowing river of instant messaging, e-mails, and meetings. This year I'm going to try to do less skipping about from fire to fire, and more focusing on tasks to completion. I need to do a better job of focusing on the big picture. Focus, focus, focus.


And that's it.  You'll see there's no "write a novel" or "run for office" or, well ... anything too specific there. (Not even, "Finally write that photoblog post with the electric car exhibit from the Concours of America, which was way cool.")

It may or may not be obvious to the casual reader, but those three items are not unrelated. I ran myself into the ground last year. It's not a coincidence that my blogging dropped off hugely last year. I need to rebuild my health, my energy, and my focus in 2014 if I'm going to accomplish any of the million-and-one other things I'd like to do, and that needs to be job one.

This n'that to kick off 2013

I've been a neglectful blogger thus far in 2013, so I reckoned I'd at least put together a little post with some updates and a bit of conversation about what the start of 2013 looks like to me.


The Grumpy Old Man Update

The second half of 2012 was a bit of a nag for me, healthwise.  My busted and disclocated finger pretty much hurt like hell right into the fall, I tweaked my back again, and then Monique and I managed to come down with *two* rotten colds right in a row during the holidays.

Sheesh!

I have some friends and family members who've dealt with genuine life-threatening illnesses in the last year, so I'm truly grateful that none of those woes were anywhere in that neighborhood.  But I did notice that it really had an impact on my overall productivity.  Sometimes I like to think that I mostly just sloth around and don't do much, but the last six or eight months made me realize how much I usually do get done. One of the reasons you've all seen less blogging around here lately is that the blog had to take a bit of a back seat as I tried to at least take care of the minimum on other fronts.

So I'm going to try to take a bit of better care of my overall health in 2013 because it helps me to do the other things I want to do.

(On the other hand, I'm also thinking about trying to play in an old boys' rugby match in Savannah in March, so "better care of my overall health" has some challenges right from the start.  But aiming for a few old boy events each year keeps my overall motivation to stay in shape a lot higher than it would be otherwise, so it's still an overall plus.  I'll just try not to bust anything this year.)


Writing

Random acts of poetry are hereby officially reinstated at the ol' Patio Boat blog.  I had thought last year that I'd try writing and polishing a few poems and actually submitting them to some magazines, something I hadn't done in 20 years or so.  In reality I wrote very little poetry last year.  Part of that may be the aforementioned productivity decline.  But I think a big part of that was the direct result of cutting off my primary publication outlet.

The truth is that although I published a few poems in magazines way back when, I was always much more the sort of poet who would noodle around with something, show a few friends, and then move on.  So why fight it? If I write something fun or interesting, I'll post it up here.  Hopefully that'll make me a bit more likely to write something fun or interesting this year.

Otherwise on the blog? Eh, I'll post something when I have something interesting to say.  The Ol' Patio Boat blog remains what it has been pretty much from the start, a place for me to write down some thoughts and share them with those of you who are interested, mostly in the form of first-draft ramblings with dubious sentence structures.  A more commercially viable blogger would've broken this melange into four or five discrete and well-edited posts. But you all just have to put up with this.  Or not.  Nobody's forcing you.  Go watch a cat video on YouTube if you want. See if I care.


The Broadcast News Ban Grows

I want to personally thank the U.S. Congress for the monumental stupidity of the unending fiscal-cliff debacle in December. They finally got me to do what I probably should've done years ago: change the dial on my old clock-radio from our NPR news station to the classical music channel. And fortunately for my peace of mind this happened before the airwaves filled with unending details of school shootings.

I banished television news a few years ago, and I had pretty much banished radio news from the rest of my morning. The remaining holdover was waking up every morning to the headline news.  In truth, it was a pretty effective wakeup call.  Nothing will get you out of bed to turn off the radio faster than a terrible news story.

But it was also a pretty depressing way to wake up, and it was taking a toll on my psyche. I had begun to wake morning in despair about the world. Now I wake up to a random bit of symphony or concerto and generally think, "Gosh, how pretty." The downside is that it's a lot harder to actually wake up and get out of bed while lying in a warm bed and listening to lovely classical music. For now, I'll take that risk.

I've banned the radio news in the morning a few times before as part of a news ban.  This time it feels more permanent.  We shall see.


The MGB Slumbers

The Michigan roads are covered in salt during the wintertime, so my little MGB is tucked away under cover in the garage.  Salty roads are the mortal enemy of rust-prone British sports cars.  Alas, I'll have some work to do before all is ship-shape for the first Spring drive.  Here's the current list:

The lighting and wiring woes continue -- There was good progress on this front last year, but my right rear taillight went out again during my final drive of the fall.  I need to solve that.  The poor little car has two problems, really. First, many of the connections are now 37 years old and worn, dirty, or corroded. Second, many of the newer connections made by previous owners weren't done properly. Hopefully cleaning and/or replacing some of those connectors will have the lights back in business.

Sigh. I know you all continue to be shocked that my old British sports car has electrical issues, but there it is.

The overdrive/wiper and turn-signal switches, plus the horn -- My overdrive switch slowly began failing last year, and is pretty much kaput. This makes me sad because the overdrive is a positive boon whenever I top 50 mph. To fix it, I'll need to take apart a bit of the steering column, which means that it might be an opportunity to also fix or replace my turn-signal switch (which doesn't turn off after the turn) and maybe even figure out how to make the regular horn button in the middle of the steering wheel work again.  I love my A-OOGA horn, but it's not always convenient when large trucks bear down on me and I need to make a loud and joyous sound **NOW**.

The hole in the driver's seat -- Somehow last summer I tore a small hole in the leather seat. I tried covering it over with duct tape and managed to make it into a larger hole.

This is why I can't have nice things.

It needs fixing, and I'll probably need to find somebody who knows what she's doing, which means that I'll probably do best to take the seat out of the car and haul it over to Bev's Canvas Covers, which did a bang-up job replacing the zippers on my tonneau cover and did a great job on the seats for my neighbor's pontoon boat.  Removing the seat to get its upholstery fixed has has another benefit. It would make it easier to work on the steering-wheel console, and it would probably also make it easier to ...

Install the shoulder belts -- The MGB currently just has lap belts. I did buy a new pair to install last summer, before I got distracted by the broken finger and the broken fuel pump and the electrical woes.  The MGB is a relatively safe car for a tiny mid-70s convertible, but replacing those lap belts for actual shoulder harnesses is an important upgrade that would make me feel better about hauling people around in it.

Put it all together and it's a good-sized project list that I'd be more inclined to tackle if my garage wasn't 25 degrees. (Note to self: add "Build heated, insulated garage with more room" to the list of vital MGB repairs.)

All of this during the winter when I can't drive anyway makes me start to look at other cars and dream that they don't have their own list of issues -- as in, "Oooh, look at this pretty Jaguar convertible on eBay. The ad says everything works!" -- but really I'll be happy again with the FUN MG as soon as its warm enough to get back to work on it, which should be soon enough.

Alas, thanks to the ever-increasing pace of global warming, old British sports cars are an increasingly weather-appropriate choice in Michigan!


Politics

I'm focusing on village issues in 2013. Now that we've put the worst of the financial hardships behind us (Knock on wood!) we're in a good place to work in making Wolverine Lake the best community it can be. Besides, current national and state politics just make me despair for democracy and our republic. (Thus the aforementioned news ban!)

One of the things I've had some interest in doing is digging into some real statistical analysis of redistricting and the gerrymander.  But that has begun to feel a bit to me like doing a tree count in the midst of a forest fire.

I could rant at length, and I'm sure I'll come back to write more about this eventually (fair warning!) but in the meantime let me pass along four things I've been thinking about that would help to restore some sanity to our badly broken political process. Each is worthy of a long post and discussion of its own, but I wanted to write them down somewhere before I turn my back in disgust, and the end of this long, rambling blog post to kick off the new year is as good a place as any:

1) Abolish the Electoral College -- This one's such an easy constitutional amendment that even a non-lawyer like me can write it: "The President and Vice-President shall be elected by a direct vote of the qualified voters."

2) Eliminate the Gerrymander -- I'm sure there's a good way to word the requirement. But what it means is that legislative districts should be drawn by non-partisan commissions to maximize compactness and to follow permanent political boundaries to the greatest extent possible.

3) Open primaries -- Primaries shall not be restricted to partisan races. They shall be open to all qualified candidates. The general election will consist of a runoff between the top two vote-getters in the primary.

4) Eliminate term-limits for the legislature -- This really only applies to Michigan or other states that have enacted legislative term limits.  It might not be quite as useful as the first three, but the unending spectacle of an amateur hour in Lansing that's generally run by lobbyists has made me firmly believe that term limits for our legislature were a mistake.


And that's it.  I'm out of lunchtime to write this post, and I'm sure I'm out of readers of this post by the time I'm typing this sentence. So if you doggedly made it to this paragraph let me just say, "Have a great 2013!"

Random pre-storm Hurricane Sandy commentary...

... from my Facebook account today:


John Magee 
We're already seeing cloud bands and wind from Hurricane Sandy in Detroit. I sincerely hope all of my friends and family on the East Coast have battened down the hatches and gotten themselves out of flood zones. I have a feeling this is going to be a bad one.

Phil Gaven 
I haven't any hatches to batten. I'm hatchless.

John Magee 
Phil, strap down the beehives and put little teeny weeny life jackets on all the bees!

Jeffrey Kofsky 
I just wish I had a wheelbarrow full of booze!

John Magee 
Jeff, It's not enough to just have a wheelbarrow full of booze when Frankenstorm hits. I had to do important pre-storm preparations ... like making sure I had a cooler full of mixers on hand and ready to go.

Jeffrey Kofsky 
And most of those are sold at stores that actually require you to wear pants in order to be served, I suppose. Tough life!

John Magee 
In these trying times we need to pull together as a nation and stop worrying about the arbitrary issues that politicians use to divide us, like who is and who isn't wearing pants at the store.

The Outrage Machines

One of my Republican friends posted a link on my Facebook wall to this Fox News story (US officials knew Libya attack was terrorism within 24 hours, sources confirm) and then said:

"John, Please explain this away with one of your impartial blogs. Lie after lie after lie for a week until someone was hauled in front of congress. Ambassador Rice should have resigned rather than lie on five different Sunday talk shows for the President. Truly sickening."

By the time I saw the post it was late -- and frankly, I was more interested in the enormous wheelbarrow filled with hooch that I had just won -- so my reply was certainly not what he desired:


"You want me to start fact-checking Fox News, now? Isn't there a whole chunk of the Internet dedicated to that?"


But after thinking it over a bit further today, I think it might be a good idea to write a bit to explain why I reacted that way, so here goes.

There is a large section of the media that are outrage machines, devoted to creating outrage and then directing that outrage towards partisan ends.  The largest and most successful segment is the conservative-oriented Fox News and Rush Limbaugh segment, with all of the associated pundits, commentators, and writers.  The left wing has never been nearly as successful at this, but although Air America proved a fiscal flop on the radio, MSNBC and Current are actively flying the liberal flag on cable TV.  And Doonesbury still crushes Mallard Fillmore on the comic-book pages, so at least we Democrats still have that going for us as long as Garry Trudeau keeps plugging away.

There are also an awful lot of institutions out there that make a good-faith effort to provide what passes for non-aligned journalism these days: assorted newspapers, wire services, trade journals, web sites, local TV news, radio news, PBS and NPR, and the national news networks. Many of them have partisan leanings of one sort or another, especially the web sites.  If you looked at PBS and NPR on that list and immediately thought either "liberal media bias" or "false equivalency sellouts", you now at least have an honest answer as to where you stand on the news consumer political spectrum.

The real bias that I find in most of the non-outrage-based news organizations is towards circulation and ratings numbers.  Or, if I may quote the popular saying in newsrooms regarding stories with violence and crime, "If it bleeds, it leads."  One of the real flaws in modern journalism is the enormous 24/7 news hole that they need to fill and the business needs that all too often drive them to value ratings over informative content.

And so the outrage machines spend all day every day shouting about whatever it is they're outraged about that day because that's what they do.  And the more legitimate news organizations also spend a lot of the day inflating the importance of whatever news they have because they have an overwhelming need to convince you that whatever it is they have to plug the news hole at that moment is so important that you must devote your time and attention to it.  (Or, to put it as a local TV news tease, "Tonight we have new information that could save your life. We'll tell you about it after the break....")

When the Information Age started to break, I had a naive belief that now people would free themselves of the narrow tunnels through which they viewed the news and take advantage of the new opportunity to search for themselves across a sea of diverse opinions.  I should have thought a bit more carefully about human nature before jumping to that conclusion.  In general we seem to have instead chosen to take advantage of the explosion of news and information availability to search diligently for the pack of opinions that exactly match our own preconceived notions.

A depressing number of Americans choose to immerse themselves in the outrage machines of the right or of the left to point that they exclude opposing or neutral opinions from their news diet, and instead engage solely with the straw men summoned by their own side.  To these people liberals are idiots who want to destroy America and conservatives are a pack of greedy fascists who don't care about anybody but themselves.  If you find yourself uttering either opinion on a regular basis, you may be spending a wee bit too much time in your outrage machine.

I've spent a lot of my lifetime with a pretty good view behind the curtain of news organizations and their product.  I grew up around a small-town newspaper (the ol' Glens Falls Post-Star, shoutout to Hometown, U.S.A.!) worked for a couple of newspapers, and later worked at least part-time for it and a couple of other small newspapers.  I also spent several years as a high-volume periodical indexer mostly working with business periodicals, which was an unimaginably great opportunity to see beyond the day-to-day details of the news and really understand the structures and frameworks upon which nearly all "news" stories are based, be they ginned-up outrage messaging, genuine journalism, or the eyeball-trolling that makes up the bulk of the news cycle.

For those unlikely to spend a few years in an intellectual sweatshop perusing the back pages of Bond Buyer and American Metal Market, you can see much the same effect if you compare sports radio and commentary with political radio and commentary -- same structures: different themes, topics, and details.

And so whenever I see any news story, I reflexively evaluate it for a lot of things beyond the details in the story:

• What's the source?
• What's the bias?
• What's the credibility?
• Who is quoted and cited?
• Is there confirmation from other media sources?
• Can I trust this individual item, or should I confirm it myself from a different news source?
• Is it noise or is it news?

On my own scale of news evaluation, Fox News scores pretty highly for having a clearly understood bias -- which is a plus with me, since at least I know where they're coming from -- but very low on the credibility scale due to their well-known and long established habit of embroidering fact with a complicated web of half-truths, omissions, and the occasional flat-out whopper.

Before shooting me as the hopelessly liberal biased messenger of that evaluation, let me give you two fairly recent news stories from reasonably credible sources:

• Business Insider, May 22, 2012: STUDY: Watching Only Fox News Makes You Less Informed Than Watching No News At All.
• Live Science, Sept. 25, 2012: Fox News Climate Coverage 93% Wrong, Report Finds.

Or, if you would prefer a more entertaining take on Fox News's credibility, I refer you to the cumulative broadcasts of The Daily Show for the last umpteen years.

And so when that Fox News story got posted on my timeline with the comment at the top of this post, I didn't think, "My gosh, this is terrible. This set of facts makes me entirely re-evaluate everything I've learned over the last three years and nine months of the Obama administration."

I really had three simultaneous thoughts:

1) How is this story any different than the hourly scream of outrage at Obama's presidency that appears nonstop on Fox News?

2) I have no interest in digging into this particular story to try to disentangle what is true, what is half-true, what is omitted, and what is outright lie.  It's an enormously time-consuming enterprise, just to get to the starting point. There are tons of people interested in and dedicated to this sort of fact-checking of the opposition outrage machines. I ain't one.

3) You spend your days immersed in an outrage machine, and now you want me to explain why you're outraged?  It seems self-evident.

But in any event, the posting did make me do a bit of thinking, which is always good.  So here's my post on that story.

-----

P.S. All of which isn't to say that I don't think there are some pretty good questions that need answering about the Mideast embassy riots and the Libyan incident in general. To start with, why the heck was there apparently no freaking security at that consulate?  Who exactly was responsible for that? How close are we to finding the perpetrators? Do we get to drone-strike their asses? Have we done so already?  (And better yet, can we start being a bit more selective about when and how we're using drone strikes? Killing off a specific terrorist is great, but it's also limited in efficacy when you generate enough ill-will to create five more.)

But international crises are notoriously complex, and understanding them well enough to evaluate what went on and who knew what when takes a lot of research and usually requires access to classified security briefings.  I don't have any of that stuff at hand and I am certainly unlikely to collect all the data anytime soon.

P.P.S. Speaking of news sources, if the situation is as grim as my description above, what would I recommend?  In general, my advice would be the same as I'd give to anybody about their eating habits: moderation and variety. As a longtime news junkie, I find that my own news intake often lacks moderation, so I try to make up for that sin with variety.

My primary news sources are the four newspapers that I get regularly: The New York Times, The Detroit Free Press, The Oakland News, and the Spinal Column, our local weekly newspaper.  I don't read them cover-to-cover every day.  Most mornings I just hit the sports section and the comics ... it's about all I can stand of the news in the morning.  But I do try to give them a good regular browse in the evening when I get a chance.  And I usualy dig in a bit deeper on Saturday and Sunday mornings.  I also get a pretty good variety of newsletters and magazines that I browse and read as time permits.

On the broadcast side, I usually catch the headline news on NPR in the morning, the Daily Show and the Colbert Report at night, and I DVR most of the Sunday-morning punditry shows, both local and national.  I watch very little local television news, and practically no cable television news at all, though I will tune in on occasion when something newsworthy happens, mostly to see commentary from the various perspectives.  In the mornings and when I drive I listen to podcasts instead of the radio, usually on non-news topics like fantasy sports, science, and comic books.

And on the web I tend to browse around a bit from story to story and my sources vary from time to time.  Sometimes I'll check Google News, just to see what their front page looks like. On the local front I find that MLive.com often makes a good news supplement to my newspapers.  I've been giving Twitter a good (Monique would say, "obsessive") workout as we come down the stretch in this election cycle, and have found some pluses and minuses. Twitter tends to get more than a little echo-chamberish, so I'm trying to make sure I have a good assortment of perspectives in there, but I'm not at all convinced I've found the right balance yet.  I'm sure I'll write up a post about the experience of following this election via Twitter after it's all wrapped up.

Finally, in the place of moderation, I do occasionally concede to sheer news exhaustion and institute a full news ban until I'm ready to engage with it all again.  I think the longest in the last decade or so lasted three or four months.  I find that I need a reasonably coherent perspective to be able to absorb as much news as I usually do, and stepping away from it altogether is a great way to find my center again.  When you spend a lot of time within the news cycle, it becomes increasingly difficult to differentiate between news and noise.

So, if you've found yourself in a state of perpetual outrage at the news, let me heartily recommend a few months away from the outrage machines.  You'd be surprised at what they look like when you check back in.

A Wheelbarrowful o'Booze

After a longish day and evening, I arrived home to discover that I had won one of the top raffle prizes at this year's "Taste of the Lakes" benefit fundraiser for Lakes Area Youth Assistance: an entire freaking wheelbarrow filled with wine and liquor!

Monique with the now-emptied wheelbarrow.  I had to scoot off to another fundraiser before the drawing.  But fortunately Monique was able to stay behind to collect our winnings!

As God is my witness, I have no idea where we're even going to put all this booze.  It's too bad none of my friends like to drink.  And since Monique is usually done after a glass of wine, I reckon I'll have to swill nearly all of it myself.

I don't want to have to guzzle it all, but I feel I need to ... for the kids, you know.

(A sudden cry goes up around Wolverine Lake: "You need somewhere to put it? Put it in ME!")

BTW, we figured out what most of it is, but if any of my Russian-speaking friends and family can tell me what this bottle of Ukrainian liquor is, I'd be grateful.  I'm guessing it's some sort of pepper-infused schnapps.

If the next few months of postings seem even more incoherent than usual ... well, you'll know why.

And finally, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention to all of you that LAYA is a great program for at-risk youth run in conjunction with our local schools, police, municipalities, and courts.  If you'd like to help out, there are tons and tons of ways to get involved, and they can always use more help.  You can find out more at Lakes Area Youth Assistance.

Back in Business

Hurrah! After being reduced to an incommunicado mess by my broken and dislocated right ring finger, I am finally back to ten-fingered typing at my normal rate.  This means that I am well overdue to get the ol' Pontoon Boat back up and running.

So, what did you all miss while I was away?  I did do a little bit of posting over at Facebook during the blog outage, so I reckoned I'd copy along some FB posts to catch you non-FBers up on the last couple of months.  Upon review, it looks like the usual mix of whining, lunch, and monster movies, wrapped up by a fun two-week visit from my nephew Shea and niece Atlee.

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John Magee
and Monique are watching "Rebirth of Mothra 2." The insane plot of this thing makes me believe it's the "Axe Cop" of giant monster movies.

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John Magee
and Monique just saw the Transit of Venus by projecting it on a piece of paper with a pair of binoculars. Awesome!

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John Magee
has spent $200+ on wheel alignments in the last year and would prefer that the state fix the damn roads instead of futzing around with a marginal income tax break that won't put nearly that much money back in my pocket. The Belle Isle Grand Prix track disaster wasn't an unlucky coincidence. It was just another day of crumbling state infrastructure for most of us.

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John Magee
is watching an Ishiro Honda quadruple-feature (Gojira, Rodan, Mothra, and The H-Man) while Monique and Katie the Beagle snooze. I suspect their dreams are filled with screaming Japanese people and inexplicably huge monsters.

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John Magee
is very proud that the Michigan International Speedway has yet to accidentally blow up a dryer truck during today's rain delay. #BetterThanDaytona

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John Magee
just learned that my dental insurance doesn't cover sedation unless you're having at least *two* wisdom teeth pulled at once. This leads to two interesting questions: 1) How cheap ... er, frugal, am I? 2) If I do save $300+ by going with the local, am I entitled to spend some of that on a fun toy?

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John Magee
Actual conversation as Monique and I drove home from Columbus, Ohio, today:

MONIQUE: "What exactly is a buckeye, anyway?"

JOHN: "It's a kind of nut."

MONIQUE: "Oh. ... That explains a lot about this state."

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John Magee
Actual conversation from last night, after we drove the MGB to Ann Arbor via Pontiac Trail:

JOHN: "We motored our roadster through the countryside."

MONIQUE: "I'm going to write a complaint letter to 'Wheeler Dealers.' They've corrupted your vocabulary with British."

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John Magee
For those wondering, my sister Susan did indeed survive the drive from Gettysburg to Detroit with all four kids plus Wilson. We immediately dispensed a therapeutic margarita and she is now recovering on the couch.

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John Magee
Lunch in the Cube: leftover linguine with beurre au citron, clams, eggplant, and peppers. (Atlee thought we should have seafood for dinner last night after she and Shea spent all day swimming and trying to catch fish with their hands.)

Susan Magee Riordan Atlee will no doubt have a very convincing reason why you should have seafood each evening. :-)

John Magee You'd be surprised at how easily I'm convinced on that front.

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John Magee
returned home to find Atlee (age 8) serving as DungeonMaster and running Shea & Monique through a Dungeons & Dragons game. However, I don't think those are *quite* official 4th edition rules she is running.

John Magee The plot is oddly reminiscent of "Return of Mothra 2."

Phil Gaven Set the record straight. Time to go all nerd-Santini on them Uncle John.

John Magee What really surprised me was when Katie the Beagle took over as DungeonMaster.

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John Magee
is increasingly annoyed at Phil Gaven for pointing out that every time anybody clicks on a sponsored "Romney for President" link, they force the Romney campaign to lose money. Sure, it's an incredibly effective bit of slacktivism that gives the average person a tool to fight back against millionaires and billionaires, but that Romney website is soul-deadening.

John Magee Ugh. That very post caused a Mitt Romney sponsored link to pop up in my sidebar. CLICK. There goes another little piece of my soul, nibbled away by the mendacious vapidity of the Romney campaign.

Phil Gaven While you're there, play this fun game: Find the Non-White People

John Magee Dear God, please don't make me linger.

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Susan Magee Riordan
Now I remember the chaos of four kids. Maybe Rich and I can slip out of Detroit Monday morning before John and Monique notice we've "accidentally" left Emerson behind.

John Magee We'll ship him to you via UPS.

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John Magee
Shea has decided to root for the Swiss in the Olympics. He likes their stance on neutrality. (And chocolate.)

I'm not dead, really.

After a frenzy of posting in the first few months of this year, the last month turned into an unexpected posting desert.  Sorry to leave you all with a critical deficit of beagle haiku and other nonsense, but I had two good excuses:

1) Market Share Reporter: Trends Over Time -- As mentioned in the previous post, this was the book that devoured Monique for four months. In the last few weeks before it went to the printer it swallowed me alive, too. I thought I had a clever idea that would whittle the creation of its index down to a manageable size given a very tight deadline. Instead, it turned out that I had a clever idea that whittled the creation of its index down to an Oh-my-God-it's-waaaaaay-too-big-to-edit-in-this-amount-of-time!!! size.

In retrospect, I produced an index that should've taken six full-time weeks in two weeks of mostly evenings and weekends crammed around the day job. I hope not to do such a thing again anytime soon.  Needless to say, it cut deeply into my available beagle-haiku time.

2) And then, just a couple of days after MSR:TOT went to press I developed excuse #2, which I present in haiku:

Ahhhh, rugby: Thanks for
My dislocated right ring
Finger. Can't type. OUCH!

Monique has asked that I stop describing exactly what happened to my finger, so I shall simply say that the full-time splinting of my poor abused finger will end in another week or two.  After that I may begin to rebuild my typing speed.

In the meantime, look for any posts in the next few weeks to be short.

Howdy from San Diego

Howdy all, from sunny San Diego.  (Well, okay, from mostly foggy San Diego down here by the beach this time of year, but the sun came out for a few hours this morning, so I feel justified.)  This is a pretty long post for what I had originally intended as a quick update, but I assure you that you'll want to read all the way to the end.  Alas, like Moby Dick, the worthwhile end will be much better if you read all the blubber that proceeds it, so without further ado here we go...

If you're wondering why I'm out here in San Diego, it's because I'm attending this year's American Society for Indexing (ASI) conference, which is here at the Bahia Resort Hotel on Mission Bay. Yes, that's the conference that my mother and ex-sister-in-law once described as "the most boring conference ever" after looking at the detailed schedule one year.  In fact, a friend of mine just said that he'd rather attend "International Watching Paint Drying Conference in the Mojave Desert in July."

Those people, however, are crazy. Because for the next three glorious days, I'm not going to have to start a discussion of my job by saying, "You know when you want to look something up in a book, so you go to the back and see that list of stuff that's in the book, that's an index...."  I may even toss around phrases like "polyhierarchical thesauri", "letter-by-letter vs. word-by-word", and "systematically controlled and validated metadata" if I'm feeling especially saucy.

Sadly, Monique is not in attendance at this year's ASI conference. As has been the case with every previous one I've attended (Boston, Toronto, and Minneapolis) she is buried in a book on deadline, so yet again there was really no reasonable way for her to shake loose, much though she wanted to.  I think we may have finally learned the lesson of ECDI's publishing scheduling, which is that they almost always have a large book due in May, which means that nobody anywhere gets to see Monique in April.

So, Monique is once again the victim of a book deadline that keeps her from a fun trip. This is sad, but not as sad as the time a book deadline meant she had to bail out of the Detroit Rugby Football Club's trip to the French Riviera for the 2007 World Cup.  And no matter how many times that I claim that I was the real victim of that deadline snafu ("Hey, I was going to spend the week with my wife on the French Riviera, and instead I ended up sharing a room with a smelly old rugby player! I'm the victim here!") I might be willing to concede that she got the worst of that book deadline debacle, too.

All of this means that I headed West bachelor-style to chit-chat about indexing for three or four days while Monique and Katie the Beagle stayed home with their noses diligently to the grindstone. I actually flew out here yesterday, since the welcome reception and address are tonight, and I knew that waking up at 5 am Eastern time to make a flight that would get me here in time would leave me a gibbering mess this evening, and the ensuing jet lag would probably leave me a still-gibbering mess when I need to be coherent Friday morning to host my panel.  Also, I figured it would good to have a few hours today to check in on my work e-mail and finish my admittedly modest preparations for my panel.

After I arrived at the airport yesterday I dug up the right Super Saver shuttle from the airport (ahh, the frugal employee when travelling on the company dime), arrived at the hotel, and eventually got sent down the parking lot towards Room 120, the door of which I found on the parking-lot side of a long row of semi-attached suites and cottage that stretched along the bay.

This seems a good time to digress for a moment to mention to those who don't know that I actually lived in the Mission Beach / Pacific Beach area of San Diego for a few months back in 1993 after I finally stumbled out of college ("... and good riddance!" I believe it said on my diploma) and decided that being penniless and unemployed on the beach in San Diego was a heck of a lot better than being penniless and unemployed in the Adirondack Mountains all winter.  In Pacific Beach I didn't actually have a room or anything, but my old college roomie Jimmy Zaun and his roommates very graciously let me pitch my tent behind their house while I was there, as long as I didn't mind sharing the yard with their dog.  (Which worked out okay ... until that sad day when the dog ate my tent while everybody was away and I became penniless and tentless. That was what life coaches like to call "a low point.")

Other than one weekend trip Monique and I made out here for a rugby tournament a few years ago, pretty much my entire experience of staying in San Diego involves sleeping in a tent and sharing a yard with a dog behind a house in Pacific Beach. Keep that in mind as my frame of reference.

And so, when I made my reservations I told the reservation clerk that I didn't need anything on the bayfront. The parking-lot side would be fine.  Really, she should just stick me in whatever room came at the low group conference rate and was convenient for them.  All I really plan to do in the room is to sleep and maybe do a bit of work. Frankly, if a tent had wifi and a shower, that would probably do just as well for me.

As it turns out, Room 120 was a nice step up from a tent!

Here's the bed. I made it my office while I answered e-mails and did some conference prep. Check out the commanding view of the parking lot behind the bed, per my request.

The dresser drawer and TV.

The closet. It has an iron and ironing board, which was my only real worry since I knew I'd have to attempt some ironing after folding my shirts into a suitcase.

The adjoining door to the room on the bayside. Really, my only beef with the set up was that they leave the TVs on in these rooms and set to the "hotel features" channel.  Since there was nobody in the bayside room last night, it was on all night and when I woke around 2 am I thought to myself that it was a pity I couldn't sneak in and mute it because I'd tired a bit of the incessant background music.

Mind you, the last motel room I stayed in was at the Scottish Inn in Unadilla, Georgia, when we broke down coming back from the Keys. That room was about 15 feet from a very busy freight-train track and an at-grade crossing, which meant that the entire room rattled when trains went by and we got to hear a very loud train whistle (two short, one long) at least once an hour, if not more often.  A little looped description of the many lovely amenities of the Bahia Resort hotel was paradise by comparison.

There were only two other little oddities I should mention about Room 120: no water glasses and no coffee maker for the morning.  Hey, the Scottish Inn in Unadilla didn't have a coffee maker, either, but this was a pretty nice place to have cheaped out on that front.  And at least the Scottish Inn had a few plastic cups for our tooth-brushing and water-drinking pleasures.

However, I'm a pretty low-maintenance hotel guest.  This may come from having worked in a couple resort hotels as a bellhop when I was younger. My sister Susan also worked in a high-end resort, and has fabulous tales of annoying, spoiled, demanding guests and why you should be nice to your reservations clerk on the phone. Anyway, I'm a heck of a lot more inclined to empathize with hotel employees under siege from guests than I am to whine about a coffee maker or a water glass.  I had a water bottle with me that would do just fine when refilled with tap water. And if I had to head out of the room in the morning to find coffee, that would be just fine and a great excuse to get me the heck out of the room.

I took full possession of Room 120: set up the laptop and iPad on wi-fi, checked in with the work e-mail, and even unpacked the suitcase and put things in drawers -- I am sooooo civilized and happy not to be living out of a backpack in my tent! Then I headed out to have a walk up the Mission Beach / Pacific Beach boardwalk to Crystal Pier, and possibly to find a tacqueria to grab a quick dinner.  After a lovely dinner of two fish tacos and a veggie burrito I walked back to the hotel and good ol' Room 120, checked my fantasy baseball scores, and called it a night.

Walking up and down the boardwalk was about all I could afford the first time I lived here, but it's one of the world's great free activities. And most of the time I couldn't afford a fish taco or a veggie burrito, so two fish tacos and a veggie burrito for dinner felt downright decadent. To be honest, as I walked around last night I was feeling great about thinking how far I'd come in the 19 years since I first washed up on this shore. I'd gone from unemployed, penniless, homeless, and tentless to bust my way back up into the middle class and become a gainfully employed, semi-respectable citizen with a fabulous wife, a little house on a lake in Michigan, and a heck of a nice little room here at a very nice hotel for the weekend.

It was a good feeling, even if I was feeling just a bit smug about it all.  And sometimes it's nice to feel just a bit smug, too.

This morning I got up, did a bit of work on the laptop, and then headed out to find some coffee in the hotel lobby.  Coffee in hand I walked back down to the beach, read the paper, and watched the waves for a while.  Eventually I grabbed some lunch -- two fish tacos and a veggie burrito again, this time at a different tacqueria that was closer though not as good as the one I ate at last night -- and headed back to Room 120 to check in with the work e-mail again and finish my panel prep.

(No beach photos yet because I didn't bring the camera on either of my expeditions beyond Room 120)

Here comes the part that was worth reading all the way through this long blog post.

While I was sitting on the bed working with laptop in lap, the maid knocked on the door. I told her to go ahead, that it wouldn't bother me, and she set to work with some fresh towels.  Then it occurred to me that while she was here I should ask her about getting a couple of water glasses.  She says it's no problem, and opens up the door to the adjoining room on the bayside.

"That's funny, I thought. The adjoining door was unlocked." And then I realized that all last night while the TV over there was blaring the hotel features at me, I could've just opened the door and muted it, since nobody was in that room.

Then it occurs to me that I could do that very thing right now, while the door was open and the maid was digging me up a couple of water glasses.

To think is to act, so I zipped through the door where she's pulled out a couple of water glasses from the adjoining room's kitchenette...

... which was in fact, the kitchenette of my bayside suite.

That's right.  I had entered a one-bedroom bayside suite through the bedroom door, which connects to the outside; assumed that the door to the main part of the suite was just a door to somebody else's adjoining room; and for my first twenty-four hours in San Diego I was feeling smug about good ol' Room 120.  Which it turns out is Bayside Suite 120.

The living room area.

The kitchenette.  With a coffee maker, I hasten to add.

The "Welcome" fruit plate, with delicately carved seashells of white and milk chocolate.

The patio. (Here on the Patio Boat blog we approve strongly of patios!)

The bay view.

More bay view.

... with the Mission Beach roller coaster in the background.

Yeah, I'm an idiot.

I guess when I told the reservations clerk that she could put me wherever was cheap and convenient for her, it was convenient for her to put me in a bayside suite at the conference group rate.  Remember the part earlier when I told you to always be nice to your reservation clerk on the phone?  Yeah, always be nice to your reservation clerk on the phone.

So, I don't think I'm going to get to feel smug about much of anything for a while because I'm obviously a blithering idiot.  But I do think I'm going to like Suite 120.

More from the ASI conference coming soon, when and if I get a chance.  Perhaps I'll expand on the wonders of polyhierarchical thesauri....

Why China Is Kicking Our Ass: New Evidence from Today's New York Times

While perusing the New York Times this morning, I think Monique and I may have identified an opportunity for improvement in our efforts to keep pace with Chinese economic development:

From the China Daily advertorial, page A13, of the Jan. 29, New York Times:

Some 84 projects averaging 2.55 billion yuan ($403 million) each are planned for development within the city limits of Chengdu. Together they are expected to create more than 250,000 jobs for locals.


Please contrast that with this advertisement on page A16, three pages later in the same New York Times:

While China is investing more than $30 billion in manufacturing, high-tech, green energy, and urban development projects in one of their large inland cities, we're tearing up our old railroad tracks and making jewelry out of them.

Sigh.

(For those who have never heard of Chengdu before, it's the capital of Sichuan province in southwestern China.  It's a city of 7.1 million people with a metropolitan area of more than 14 million people, which makes it about 50% larger than the Chicago metropolitan area, the U.S. inland city with which it is sometimes compared.)

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

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.