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PolicyGuy: Public Policy in the States. K-12, health care, budgets
When I was a little nipper (pre-elementary school) my dad was in the Air Force and it seems to me a lot of those base-housing backyards featured the familiar shield of Falstaff beer. These were the formative years when I learned what a "church key" was. While Falstaff was a relatively well-distributed beer, a lot of "yard beers" are regional brews favored by loyal locals and offered at bargain prices. When my dad got out of the service and we settled in Indianapolis, he was partial to Weidemann's. He usually bought this in dark brown, barrel-shaped bottles with a short neck, but for awhile he bought it in miniature keg small enough to lay on its side in a refrigerator with a thumb-tap in one end. Here's where I learned how to pour a fine glass of beer down the side of a glass, ending with just a half-inch of so of foamy head (don't worry, Mom, these were all for Dad. Mostly.)
When we later moved to Missouri one of my dad's friends was the local Stag beer distributor, and dark gold cans of Stag were the standard in the little beer refrigerator behind my father's basement bar. I was in high school then, so of course my friends and I derided the old men who drank that, though we'd take it if we could get it. I mean, it's not as if we had the luxury of being more discriminating; beggars can't be connoisseurs, you know. In fact, one of my (underage) cousins got busted one time for having a case of Olympia ("Oly's") in his car and had to pay a "real beer" fine for something that barely qualified as beer. I think he would have been less embarrassed if he had been caught shop-lifting a case of tampons (which were said to be great for cleaning the heads of your 8-track tape player). Update:
History means the endless rethinking — and re-viewing and revisiting — of the past. History, in the broad sense of the word, is revisionist. History involves multiple jeopardy that the law eschews: People and events are retried and retried again. --John Lukacs
Equally unlike his fellow Watergate convicts, Mitchell never published a book about his years in power, never sold his soul to pay lawyer's fees, never dished dirt on Richard Nixon to delight university audiences on the lecture circuit or viewers of The Mike Douglas Show. He never "found God." In electing to tough it out, one columnist wrote, Mitchell stood "up to his hips in midgets among the other Watergate characters...dividing the men from the boys." "Among the WASP Westchester country club Mafia," another columnist observed of Mitchell's behavior in Watergate, "the code of omertà holds." Richard Nixon, toasting his former attorney general at a post-prison party he threw for Mitchell in San Clemente, put it simplest: "John Mitchell has friends — and he stands by them."
Stunningly, no one bothered to chronicle the life of John Mitchell: child of the Depression, World War II combat veteran; Wall Street innovator; gray-flannel power broker to governors and mayors in all fifty states; Richard Nixon's law partner, consigliere, and winning campaign manager in 1968 and 1972; America's top cop, as attorney general, during the Days of Rage, the May Day riots, and the Pentagon Papers; and Public Enemy Number One when, in the words of a British observer, "the great black cloud of Watergate seemed to settle over America like a kind of grand judgment, not just on Nixon himself, but on the whole of post-war America."
John Mitchell bore witness to the most searing political turmoil in America since the Civil War. After all, it was Mitchell who ran the Department of Justice, and the administration of justice in those years occupies the central role in all lingering controversies from that era: Was justice done in the enforcement of school desegregation and antitrust laws? In the battles against antiwar protesters and radical groups? At Kent State and Jackson State? In the cases of Daniel Ellsberg and Lt. William Calley, Jimmy Hoffa and Robert Vesco, Abe Fortas and Clement Haynsworth, John Lennon and the Berrigan brothers, the Black Panthers and ITT?
... 250 people, including two presidents, a vice president, two chief justices, three secretaries of state, two CIA directors, and a great many staff members of the Nixon White House and the Committee to Re-elect the President ... Also questioned were party officials and secretaries employed at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in June of 1972. These sessions included the only extensive interviews ever conducted with the woman whose telephone was wiretapped in the Watergate break-in and surveillance operation and more than eight hours of interviews with the only man who monitored the wiretap.
For the class of 2012...
- ...There has never been a Soviet Union (yet).
- ...There has always been one Germany.
- ...Nelson Mandela has never been in prison.
- ...Salman Rushdie has always been under a death sentence.
- ..."Imelda" has always been the nickname of someone with a lot of shoes.
- ...Ronald Reagan has never been president.
- ...Pete Rose has always been banned from baseball.
- ...There has always been a Sega Genesis.
- ...Bart Simpson has always been 10 years old.
- ...Iran has always been pissed off.
Favre fans have not just been supporting Favre with their words; they’ve been going after Rodgers. And many haven’t minced words.
After the morning practice Friday, Rodgers talked about some of the abuse directed at him.
“I understand it to some point if I put myself into a Favre fanatic’s shoes,” Rodgers said of getting booed. “The things I can’t understand, the things I really take personally, is when I’m driving up to the (parking lot) gate and punching in my punch code and somebody says (expletive) to me. That kind of bothers me.
“Or when a little kid is yelling swear words at me. That kind of gets to me. They expect a high level of play and they miss Brett Favre. I understand that. But the (expletive) and the little kids saying swear words to me, I don’t understand that.”
Our favorite coffee shop is The Black Sheep in South St. Paul where owner (and my official 50th birthday barista) Peter first wowed my wife with an awesome and unexpected leaf design worked into the foam of her latte. It was an impressive demonstration well beyond my own bag of tricks for catering to my wife, but I didn't feel threatened.
Once an obscure skill practiced by a handful of baristas, latte art is invading the home. Amateur artists have posted thousands of photos and videos of leaves, flowers and swans made in foam, on Web sites like YouTube, Rate My Rosetta and CoffeeGeek.
Coffee shops offer classes in creating designs, and latte artists organize winner-take-all cash contests, or "throw downs," in which amateurs challenge each other, as well as local professionals. Espresso-machine vendors are doing a brisk business in special pitchers and custom steam tips that are affixed to machines to aid milk frothing. One online retailer says sales of its $79 "Latte Art Beginner's Pack," with instructional DVD, frothing pitcher and milk thermometer, are up 65% this year.
The pastime is not for those with weak wills -- or shallow pockets. High-end home espresso machines sell for as much as $7,000. Beginners can go through multiple gallons of milk a week as they practice.
Some aspiring artists concentrate on the pour. First-timers mistakenly think they can paint the design on top of the coffee, says Nicholas Lundgaard, a 23-year-old software engineer in Houston, who took up latte art three years ago after seeing photos on the CoffeeGeek Web site. Actually, it's "a fluid canvas, where shapes fan out from the place you're pouring," he says.
Mr. Lundgaard spent evenings hunched over his espresso machine, studying exemplars on YouTube and rehearsing his "wiggle," the back and forth motion of the hand pouring milk. To avoid wasting costly milk, Mr. Lundgaard practiced with water, switching to milk every now and then to gauge his progress.
Another foam artist, Milwaukee pathologist Robert Hall, says he had to pour five or six drinks a day for a year before he could get a rosetta right every time. One big obstacle was his wife's preference for skim milk, which produces stiffer, less yielding foam than milk with lots of fat, he says.
Not everyone wants to suffer for their art. After seeing a latte-art video, Oleksiy Pikalo, a 31-year-old electrical engineer from Somerville, Mass., decided there had to be an "engineering approach." Using a kit and spare parts found on eBay, he built a programmable computer printer that stamps designs -- such as words or corporate logos -- on foamed drinks in edible brown ink. One design shows a kingly figure saying, "Can your latte do this?"
Mr. Pikalo presented his invention at a national computer-graphics conference this week and has started a company, OnLatte, to sell his machine, at a tentative price of $1,500. His YouTube video has drawn more than 818,000 views and 2,500 comments.
Update:
Glenn Eller is a lanky, baby-faced 20-something from Katy, Texas, a cushy suburb outside of Houston.
He is friendly, quick to laugh and has an odd affinity for Oreos topped with Cheez Whiz.
He's single.
He's looking.
And when he leaves Beijing after competing in the Olympics, he's going back to Georgia and his day job: teaching other baby-faced 20-somethings how to shoot and, if necessary, kill people.
Walton "Glenn" Eller III — that is, Army Spc. Eller — is a marksman trainer in Fort Benning, Ga. And he's one of six members of the U.S. Army Marksmanship Unit (USAMU) that is competing in shooting in the Olympics.
It's not among the sexiest events to watch, so you probably won't catch him on the tube. But just because shooting doesn't make for good TV doesn't mean it's lacking in drama.
Not when you consider that our nation is at war.
And members of our military are competing against military personnel from countries we have strained relationships with.
And we're competing in a country with the kind of human rights record that forced the Olympic torch to be hidden from protesters.
So while the latest incarnation of the Dream Team has garnered the most attention, the 14 Olympic athletes in the U.S. military — six of whom are in the USAMU — likely feel the most tension.
Then there's this uncomfortable truth: During times of war, a lot of people die. It's up to military trainers, like Eller and fellow Olympians Maj. Michael Anti and Staff Sgt. Libby Callahan, to help make sure the American casualty numbers stay low.
Not to take anything away from Michael Phelps — whose surgeon-like focus has received a lot of ink recently — but the word "focus" takes on a whole new meaning when you're not only representing your country but also juggling life and death to protect that country.
Update:
A Night at the Prom
Regular readers of this blog know that my wife and I have a pretty simple philosophy when it comes to our teenage daughter, Faith, dating: No. (See here and here.) Therefore you might be surprised to hear that Faith went to the prom last Saturday night. And yes, there was a boy involved from an unrelated gene pool. How did this happen? One word: conspiracy.
Scouring ancient texts, researchers from Wolverhampton University found the jokes laid down in delicate manuscripts and carved into stone tablets up to three thousand years old.
Dr Paul MacDonald, a comic novelist and lecturer in creative writing, said ancient civilizations laughed about much the same things as we do today.
He said jokes ancient and modern shared “a willingness to deal with taboos and a degree of rebellion.”
“Modern puns, Essex girl jokes and toilet humour can all be traced back to the very earliest jokes identified in this research,” he commented.
Lost civilisations laughed at farts, sex, and "stupid people" just as we do today, Dr McDonald said.
But they found evidence that Egyptians were laughing at much the same thing.
...
The world's oldest surviving joke "is essentially a fart gag", he said.
The 3,000-year-old Sumerian proverb, from ancient Babylonia, reads: "Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap."
...
Dr McDonald commented: "Toilet humour goes back just about as far as we can go."
In a big country, dreams stay with you,
Like a lover's voice, fires the mountainside...
Stay alive..
So take that look out of here it doesn't fit you
Because it's happened doesn't mean you've been discarded
Pull up your head off the floor -- come up screaming
Cry out for everything you ever might have wanted
I'm not expecting to grow flowers in a desert
But I can live and breathe
And see the sun in wintertime
Me: The Night Writer, John Stewart; 50 years old and smart enough to have married my trophy wife first.
