The Green Bag

The most amazing and spirit-lifting thing happened to me yesterday.

When Micah and Teri were making their plans to visit, they had told me that one day while they were here, they wanted to go to Daytona Beach for one day, because Marissa had asked for that for her birthday (two weeks from today). With the weather being so iffy early in the week, they decided that they’d do their six days at Disney, giving Hurricane Ike time to make up its mind about where it was going to go (those poor people in Texas).

While rearranging basement storage spaces for Christmas decorations, I decided to finally pull out a stack of magazines that have been on a back corner shelf for many years. I knew that I had saved September issues of Seventeen Magazine ever since Sheri was born. Well that is up until 2000. Short story here: I took all of them to the high school for a memory display during the 2000 OHS Alumni Reunion. Before I got back to reclaim them, someone had thrown them all away! I've been very sad about that ever since. Bygones be bygones.

Got a copy of The Vermont County Store catalogue today, and just had to sit down and look through it. Lordy, how I love that catalogue. Where on earth else would you find Cloverine Salve, Blue Waltz perfume, and maple sugar Santa Clauses?

I've posted photos from our vacation in The Green Bag Gallery

Sometimes you sign your kids up for just the right thing at just the right time. We decided to go with the National Little League for Kate and Caroline. Caroline is playing T-Ball/Coach Pitch. If they can't hit it after 5 pitches, they get the T. Caroline almost always hits a pitch! And Kate is playing softball, majors division. That's always interesting since most of the girls still can't pitch really well, but its better than minors!

Anyway, because some parent was at the right place at the right time and was persistent enough, Brandon Inge, 3rd baseman for the Detroit Tigers, came to our fields today to give autographs. He also posed for pictures and threw out the first pitch for one of the baseball games. What's really neat is that he did this on his own time, he was not compensated and it was his birthday. What a nice guy!

I tagged this page on del.icio.us last week, but haven't had time to blog about it until now. This map of the Eisenhower Interstate System is one of the most interesting maps I've ever seen.

When you disregard the actual distances between cities on the map, the relationships between the different Interstates becomes immediately clear. Thanks to some history bits on the radio, I recently learned about Henry Joy and his relationship to the Interstate 80 transcontinental route between New York and San Francisco.

Claire: Just give me the tape, Lyle.
Lyle: No way. I'm gonna post this on YouTube and make millions!
Zach: YouTube is free, you idiot!

Can You Place All 50 States On A Map With No Border Lines?

My first score wasn't so great, but second time out I got 49/50, average error of 4 miles in 156 seconds. How well you do on this depends both on how well you know your states and how many of the early ones touch a border so you can get the placement right. My first round started with South Dakota and Arkansas. I also screwed up on Connecticut without any other states around it. None of mine were far off the mark, I was still within 100 miles even on those bad ones in the first round.

Yeah, a lot of entries today, but I gotta post one more. Last night a verse from the Alice Cooper song, I Love America, popped into my head. I wonder why...

I love the Tigers, but I hate the Mets
I ride my Hog, but I race my Vette
I gotta job, but I'm still in debt
I love America

Go Tigers!

I've made a conscious decision to not blog about politics here. I've decided that if I get the burning desire to tackle political issues, I'll take them over to chacadwa.com and air them there, but the past couple of times I was going to do that, I decided that it wasn't that important, and didn't blog it at all. But this ain't about politics directly, it's about the ads. And there's a lot I could going to say about those, but I'll limit myself to this:

Sometimes, political ads backfire. Badly. There is a particular proposal on the ballot - I'm not going to say which one, because that's irrelevant - and the only information I have about that proposal at all is the negative radio ads that run against it. I have no doubt that ever word of those ads are true. For a given value of true. These ads are incredibly insulting to my intelligence, because they're so blatantly spinning the facts to get an emotional reaction.