The 30-Park Geas continued yesterday with a trip up to Milwaukee, the charming and colorful city only 90 minutes away from Chicago by train:
All right, it's not that bad everywhere—just in the road-contstruction hell near the Amtrak station that made me walk nearly a mile out of my way. Downtown Milwaukee has improved in the past few years, and even appears to have something like a skyline:
Of course, I've been to Milwaukee many times, and I have even gone to Miller Park. But, because of the rules I put down for myself, and because it's so close (I was gone from home less than 11 hours), I went up yesterday to see the game.
Where Washington has a Presidents Race, Milwaukee has the original Sausage Race:
For those keeping score at home, Polish won yesterday—and so did the home team, which brought them to 3½ games behind the Cubs, which is getting too close for comfort.
The 30-Park Geas continues this afternoon with Washington at Milwaukee, my second trip to Miller Park but first as part of the geas. Milwaukee is in second place, 4 games behind the Cubs, and has won their last 5 in a row. This game counts, in other words. (Washington is still in last place, and could stay there until the 2015 season.)
Still, it's Milwaukee, and I can never get out of my head the speech a Russian defector gave in an episode of Barney Miller, explaining what the Soviet Union was then like: "Imagine you're in Milwaukee. You walk in any direction, one hundred miles, and you're still in Milwaukee. No matter where you go, you're still in Milwaukee." At which point, Wojo begins screaming.
Milwaukee has changed since then. Really.
Game photos probably tonight, or tomorrow morning.
Parker and I checked out the annual festival in Boystown, and lasted 45 minutes before both of us suffered serious crowd fatigue. The walk did both of us some good, though my sunscreen, nowhere nearly as effective as the natural stuff he sheds all over the place, seems not to have lasted, so I'll definitely feel the walk longer than he will.
Crowds, though. My goodness. The weather was perfect today—I mean, perfect—so the entire city squeezed itself into four blocks of Halsted Street. Parker got his tail trod upon twice, patted on the head by perhaps a hundred people, and looked at me on the walk home as if to say, "how much farther to Bataan?" Poor guy.
Also, I finished Small Gods, a literary amuse guele before tackling Howard Zinn's People's History of the U.S..
I just finished Paul Johnson's History of the American People, which I started four weeks ago. Well-written as it was, I couldn't help noticing, around when the book got into the Harding administration, that perhaps Mr. Johnson leans farther to the right than I do. He made some good arguments for more-conservative views of modern American history, and I'll think about them, but parts of his discussions of Nixon, Reagan, and Bush père made me snort.
Still, I recommend the book, and I found it a great way to review, essentially, my college degree.
And now, as a palate-cleanser, I will snack on the next Discworld novel (specifically, #13, Small Gods). One's reading mustn't be too heavy all the time, what what!
Perfect weather yesterday allowed me to finish my BFR. It almost didn't happen, as my usual flight instructor, Chris, got sick the night before and couldn't fly and the plane I'd scheduled lost its transponder earlier in the day. But, the flight school found a plane and an instructor, so off we went. Next time I see Chris, he'll sign off, and I'm good to fly again.
If you have Google Earth, you can not only see my route of flight, but also the actual plane I flew, sitting in its parking space right there in the Google Earth satellite photo.
Not the people, the rhetoric:
[K]now-nothingism—the insistence that there are simple, brute-force, instant-gratification answers to every problem, and that there's something effeminate and weak about anyone who suggests otherwise—has become the core of Republican policy and political strategy. The party's de facto slogan has become: "Real men don’t think things through."
This comports with my Wills professor, ten years ago, who called stupidity "the omnibus explanation." Yep.
Via Scott Adams: Apparently, the Sumerians thought farts were funny:
Academics have compiled a list of the most ancient gags and the oldest, harking back to 1900BC, is a Sumerian proverb from what is now southern Iraq.
"Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap," goes the joke.
Those ancient rubes. We're much more advanced today.
The Chicago Tribune had another write-up of Monday night's storm. Apparently, it produced unprecedented electrical activity:
Over four hours, about a half-year's worth of lightning bolts bombarded the Chicago area, electrifying the night sky as trees were split, transformers were zapped and houses were set ablaze.
As work crews picked up Tuesday from the previous night's storms, meteorologists were assessing the staggering power of a historic thunderstorm.
Nearly 90,000 thunderbolts had hit northern Illinois, according to the National Lightning Detection Network. At the storms' peak, it was firing off more than 800 bolts per minute; and that only counts those that hit the ground.
I still need to do some high-altitude maneuvers (clouds were about 2800 ft, too low for slow turns and stall practice), but I finished much of my biennial flight review today. Interested people who have Google Earth can download the KML file.