bogen.org

As if we needed more proof that the Federal government has absolutely no idea how to prevent terrorism in airports and on airplanes.  At least all the very short and very young terrorists who try and smuggle automatic weapons on to planes in their hair are being searched.  Stupid waste of everyone’s time and money.

Thirteen days since I committed any thoughts to bits.  What on Earth have I been doing with the time?

Sarah and I have been laboring to get our visas from Brazil for our trip to Brazil in March.  The process will cost us almost $200 each.  The other alternative, which would only cost us $110 each, would be to make two trips to Chicago, no less than four days apart, to the Brazilian consulate between the hours of 09:00 and 14:00 Monday through Friday.  So, like most people who don’t live right around the corner from a Brazillian consulate, we are using a company which does the legwork for us.  This, of course, is what is nearly doubling the price of the visa.

People continuously ask me why I ride my bike in the winter when I could just as easily drive or ride the bus.  Perhaps the following four points, lifted from bikewinter.org are a good start towards an explanation:

• Year-round cycling helps you live life more indulgently. You can eat at your favorite restaurants more often if you aren't constantly spending $10-$20 to use a parking ramp. You can hang out with friends at your favorite coffee shop more often if you aren’t constantly spending $15-$25 to fill up your gas tank. You can more easily take a trip to Europe if you don’t have to deal with $1500 automotive engine repair bills. Cycling helps you live richly, even if your income is limited.
• Exercise staves off winter poundage and blues. If this is the season when your main physical activity is walking to and from the omnipresent platter of holiday cookies and when the lack of sunshine sends your spirits plummeting, even a short daily bike commute can keep you in fair physical and mental health.
• Variety is nice. I enjoy the sounds and smells of leaves swirling under my tires; if the stiff winds are slowing me down, I look forward to speeding on the return trip. A dark rainy day can be soothing; the ride is smooth, the streets quiet and the light delightfully spooky. I’d rather feel the snow on my face than brush it off a windshield. We are lucky to live in such a weather rich area; a bicycle provides a front row seat for enjoying it.
• The weather isn’t always so bad. When the thermometer hits 60 degrees in February, my bike and I are ready to take advantage of it

The last point is especially true.  Madison had two days last week with a high of 50 degrees.  Since I was commuting by bicycle, all I had to do to enjoy the weather was stow a layer of clothing in my bag and bike home just like any other day.  Automobile drivers were all hanging their heads out the windows of their cars trying to soak up the nice day and cursing the people in front of them for not moving fast enough.

From our Questions About Sausage Department:

• Why is it so hard to get good pepperoni?
• Why does hot Italian sausage rarely have any sort of hot and spicy flavor?
• Why are so many companies that make mediocre sausage still in business?

Yesterday, I took the bus to work.  While standing at the bus stop in the morning, forty-four vehicles passed by me.  Seven of the forty-four had more than one occupant (I decided that the car with one lady and one very large dog did not fall into the multi-occupant category).  None of the seven multi-occupant vehicles had more than two occupants.  There were thirty-seven people on the bus at one point.  So, in a space no longer than that of three cars set bumper to bumper, thirty-seven people managed to get where they were going for no more than $37.  On the other hand, it took a bumper-to-bumper line of cars several blocks long and forty-four parking spaces (which the city of Madison estimates to cost $20,000 per space downtown) to get the other fifty-one people where they were going.

The new GMC Yukon XL has a gas tank that holds over thirty-six gallons of gasoline.  Gasoline costs over $2/gallon right now in San Francisco (thanks, Bush/Cheney energy policy, or lack thereof).  It probably takes three minutes to put nine gallons of gasoline in the the gas tank of Sarah’s Saturn.  So, if one owned a 2003 GMC Yukon XL, it would take no less than twelve minutes and $72 to fill up the tank of one’s vehicle.  Should I mention that the GMC Yukon XL is supposed to get 13.1 miles per gallon in the city?  Since that estimate is always high, let’s assume that the Yukon XL gets less than that figure.  But, let’s also be generous and give the, um, truck the benefit of the doubt by assuming 12 mpg in the city.  When I owned a Chevy Corsica, and when I drove it to work for two months in San Francisco, I put gas into the tank once a week.  If memory serves me, that car had a fifteen gallon tank.  I got somewhere around twenty-four miles to the gallon during that commute.  So, I was driving about 360 miles per week.  The Yukon XL would require thirty gallons of gas a week (360 / 12) to perform the same duties.  At today’s prices, it would cost a Yukon XL owner $60 week(!) just to get to work and back.  Don’t forget the fact that the truck lists (bare-bones) for over $37,000.  So, put down $5,000 to buy the car.  Then, finance the remaining $32,000.  If you could get a 0% interest loan, you would still be paying $533.33 a month in car payments for five years.  So, the monthly costs of owning a GMC Yukon XL and driving it to work and back each week in the Bay Area would be on the order of $773 per month!  Here in Madison, gasoline is only(!) $1.69 (thanks, GeeDubya!) so the equivalent scenario would only cost $735 month.  Of course, all of these calculations discount insurance and on-going maintenance costs.  How anyone afford to own and operate an SUV while remaining financially sound is beyond me.

Graffitti seen on the UW campus:  "Dick Cheney before he dicks you."  Good stuff.

A fairly sizable subset of Wisconsin’s population firmly holds to the belief that bratwurst should only be cooked in both beer and butter.  Cooking brats in beer is something I wholeheartedly endorse.  But butter?!?  This is sausage we’re discussing here.  Does sausage as a general rule need more fat added to it during the cooking process?  Who decided that there just wasn’t enough fat in a brat, and that using a whole stick of butter for six-twelve brats (a common ratio, from what I’ve seen on-line) was the only civilized thing to do about the situation?  I thought that creaking noise I can hear from our house was the trees blowing in the wind.  As it turns out, that noise is the arteries of our neighbors hardening under another onslaught of brats cooked in butter.

It must be question day.

Why are nearly all parking garages designed by graduates of the Soviet Concrete Gulag School of Design?  Granted, parking garages are just a convenient way of stacking automobiles, but do they always have to be dark, smelly, and generally unpleasant?

Why can't the Bush administration turn their frustratingly persistant natures into a force for good instead of corporate evil?  If Bush/Cheney and crew would just take it into their minds to end hunger or AIDS, instead of fighting meaningless wars, the world would be a better place.  Clearly, nothing anyone does or says affects the thinking of the current administration in their march towards war.  Why can’t the Bush/Cheney cabal decide that nothing is going to swerve their march towards energy efficiency or providing universal health care in the US, instead?  Is that just too humanitarian?

I am sooo tired of hearing about the Iraq "crisis" in the media.  There is an Iraq crisis but it is not the one about which the media is reporting and it is not the one about which Colin Powell spoke at the UN.  The only people who truly believe that there is an "Iraq crisis" related to Iraqi disarmament is the Bush administration and the sycophantic bootlickers who blindly support them.  Everyone else thinks that the only current Iraq "crisis" is the failure of the US government and other governments around the world to halt the seemingly inevitable drive towards testosterone-driven, imperialistic, Texas six-gun-slingin', hypocritical, unnecessary war.  If Saddam Hussein was as difficult to catch as bin Laden and if Hussein wasn’t sitting on billions of gallons of oil, does anyone truly believe we’d be preparing to fight a war to go after him?  Hussein just happens to be relatively easy to find, burdened with a wealth of petroleum, and lacking in international allies who happen to be important US trading partners.  It’s all so unbelievably stupid I can’t even read about the "Iraq crisis" in the newspaper any more without letting go of a very big sigh of frustration.

Today, I put some pictures on the site.  There are only three, but if you haven’t been to visit us, or most likely won’t visit us, you might find them interesting.

Madison cuisine leaves quite a bit to be desired.  Last night we supped at State Street Brats with two other couples before attending the Wisconsin/Alaska-Anchorage men’s hockey game.  State Street Brats serves brats, burgers, and beer, essentially.  All of this is churned out as quickly as possible, with little care given to appearance or flavor.  The restaurant was loud, dark, and dominated by sports on television.  The decor might be best described as "durable."  The sad thing is that this particular joint was no better or worse than many other places we’ve eaten in Madison since moving here.

Album that has seen nearly constant play in my CD player since I got it:  Lori McKenna’s "Paper Wings & Halo."

The Atlantic published an interesting breakdown of Bush’s State of the Union speech as seen by a former presidential speechwriter.

The other night I broke one of my primary rules regarding film selection when I found myself watching In the Bedroom.  The rule that was broken?  "Thou shalt not watch any movie that employs Sissy Spacek in a lead role without being forcibly compelled to do so."  Such a rule exists to save me from sitting through a yet another patented Sissy Spacek cry-yell-and-break-things-a-thon.  Unfortunately, In the Bedroom contained such a scene, including many other Sissy Spacek simply-break-down-and-cry scenes.  However, the movie (minus those pointless bits of Sissy Spacek dreck) wasn’t bad.  Definitely not what I expected given the title.

My bike is resting in the garage again today.  I’ve been ill all week with a mysterious collection of symptoms so I haven’t felt like sitting on my trusty steed for nearly an hour a day in sub-zero wind chills.

The day before the Shuttle Columbia disintegrated in the atmosphere, I’d finished Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff.  Having read the book, I felt particularly attuned to the dangers that astronauts faced and the accolades (or lack of the same) that many of the early astronauts got and that many of the modern astronauts do not receive unless they are killed.

You have to wonder how astronauts who flew after the Challenger disaster and before the Columbia disaster feel about the accolades accorded to the dead astronauts who were on the Columbia.  More than once I’ve seen the astronauts who were on the Columbia labeled as "heroes."  Does that mean that all astronauts are heroes but we, as a society, only acknowledge the heroism of astronauts who die in the line of duty?  Or are astronauts only heroes if they die while performing their job and live astronauts are simply brave passengers on a particularly unique bus?  Either way, it seems hypocritical to label the Columbia astronauts as "heroes" while denying that accolade to all the other astronauts who have flown on the Shuttle.  Either all astronauts are heroes, or no astronauts are heroes.  However, I seriously doubt that society is prepared to examine its use of the word hero to avoid watering down yet another form of praise.  The Columbia astronauts were brave, smart, and supremely skilled, but unless one uses the mythological sense of the word, they were no more heroes than anyone else who has ever gone into space on the Shuttle.

The word I’ve been guilty of abusing of late is "essentially."  If it were possible to exorcise this word from the English language through overuse, you could kiss "essentially" goodbye and pin the blame squarely right on my chest..

We saw A Bridge Too Far this weekend.  While stocked to the rafters with big names, the film left a bit to be desired.  For instance, it was wholly impossible for me to believe that Gene Hackman was a leader of Polish paratroopers.  Also, it was impossible to watch the film without continuously reflecting upon what a colossal mistake it was to let Montgomery plan the whole affair.  Montgomery may have beaten Rommel at El Alamein, but his Operation Market Garden was a disaster.  As Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands said, "My country can never again afford the luxury of another Montgomery success."  So, I’m watching the movie, and all I can think about is how this sort of operation should have been given to Patton.  He understood how to use armor and mobile units.  Montgomery was a buffoon and many of the people who died because of Market Garden died as a direct result of his inflated ego.

"It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper."  – Rod Serling

Like many other people, I consciously avoided Bush’s State of the Union address on Tuesday night.  My Smirking, Deceit, Half-Truth, Misdirection, and Obfuscation detectors would most assuredly have suffered overload had I been exposed to more than ten or fifteen seconds of Bush’s speech.  As it was, the excerpts that appeared in the newspapers the next day were bad enough to set off many of these same alarms.  Bush’s supposed health care initiative is a joke.  Canada seems to do well enough with single-payer health-care.  Bush/Cheney attacked this idea by stating that single-payer doesn’t work and pushing some sort of crazy health insurance scam.  Of course, we’re all sure that the lawn and leaf bag full of cash bestowed on Bush/Cheney by the insurance industry had nothing to do with that policy decision.  Bush’s justifications for war with Iraq were predictable, and predictably weak.  Beyond the easily foreseen topics of the speech itself, I can only watch so many television close ups of various people applauding spuriously.

Sarah and I finalized our reservations this week for a trip to Brazil in March.  Friday, I went to the doctor to get immunizations for the trip.  After getting three shots (tetanus/diphtheria, hepatitis A, and hepatitis B), I informed Sarah that our trip to Brazil was no longer a vacation.  We were now on a Mission To Have Fun in Brazil.  Any trip that is preceded by multiple immunizations is not a vacation, it is a Mission.

We drove to the Stoughton Opera House last night to see the Ribbon Highway–Endless Skyway Tour.  The tour is a Woody Guthrie tribute tour that has a rotating set of singers.  The show was fun and well done.  The performers sang some five and six part harmonies, which is always delightful to hear, as well as many smaller solo numbers.  For once, the backing band wasn't too loud, and the singers were not overpowered by the merely serviceable drummer.  We have attended too many concerts of late where the sound system apparently was installed and calibrated by a deaf person and we could only hear and understand the vocalists in between ham-fisted attacks on the snare drum and cymbals.

My favorite picture that was displayed at the show last night was a picture of Woody Guthrie’s guitar on which it was written, "This Machine Kills Fascists."