bogen.org

Like anyone who likes to travel, I constantly maintain a list of places I want to see and things I’d like to do or experience.Boeing a few years ago floated the idea of building a supersonic commercial airliner, but like most ideas that captivate the mind and offer some hope that the world isn’t in a constant race to the bottom, that idea quickly died. At the time, Boeing was looking down the barrel of an unknown future filled with airline fleets of the Airbus A380, the gigantic airliner recently flown in Europe. Boeing thought that airlines might like to offer their customers the option of getting somewhere faster, rather than arriving in a massive heap of humanity. As it turned out, the airlines are too mired in their own cess pools of tunnel vision and cost cutting to care much about what their customers liked. (If you need evidence of that, I challenge you to find me ten people who actually want to be dehumanized at the airport security line, then crammed into an impossibly small seat, and charged for the privilege.) Why do I bring up this piece of aerospace trivia?

Nearly ten years ago, I decided that I wanted to fly on the Concorde some day. It occurred to me that I probably was never going to fly faster than the speed of sound any other way, so I needed to get onto the Concorde. The problem was that I didn’t have $20,000 dollars to spend on a round-trip flight to Europe for Sarah and I. Time passed and I never was able to get together $20,000 for the purpose of a pair of airline flights. As we all know, the Concorde now flies no more and my chance to travel faster than the speed of sound now sits grounded in a museum hanger in Virginia.

As I read about Hurricane Katrina the last few days, I started wondering if I missed my chance to see New Orleans, too. For the last four years, after reading about New Orleans’ extreme vulnerability to hurricanes, I’ve been saying that I need to see New Orleans before it is gone forever. As I went to bed last night, it appeared that New Orleans was going to join the Concorde on my list of missed opportunities.

Now that the city has been spared the full fury of an apocalyptic storm, I’ve pushed New Orleans back on to my list of places I need to see, and soon. Next time, the Big Easy may not be so lucky.

I go to far more garage and yard sales than the average person. I don’t go to every garage sale, and there are certainly people who go to more than I do. However, for anyone who is contemplating a garage sale of their own, let me offer some advice to get more people to your sale and sell more of your items.

1. Keep your prices realistic.

   I cannot emphasize the point enough that you will not get rich selling all the trash in your basement to the public at large. It quite simply will not happen.

   That small, underpowered microwave you bought ten years ago for $80 and let moulder in the basement is not worth $50 today. It might be worth $5 to a starving, broke, and desperate college student. If you insist on getting $50 dollars for it, I hope you are prepared to give it a good home because you’ll still own it at the end of the sale no matter how long your garage sale runs.

   Used books are a classic example. If I can buy used books from a used book store for $0.50 cents per paperback, why should I pay you $1.00 per paperback?

   Rusty tools from the sixties aren’t antiques; they are simply rusty tools. Furniture made out of particle board and veneer isn’t worth more than $5-10 a piece, no matter how big it is.

   People go to garage sales to find bargains; people don’t go to garage sales to get ripped off.

2. Price items clearly.

   Unless you want to spend all day answering the eternal question, “How much do you want for this garden gnome made out of macaroni and styrofoam,” put obvious prices on your items.

   If you don’t have prices on your items, many people will just leave without buying a single thing. They figure you have unrealistically high notions about how much your crap is worth but didn’t have the guts to put those notions into print. They’ll simply leave without asking the price of a single item.

3. Use the word “firm” if you are not willing to negoiate on price.

   If you absolutely must have $60 for Aunt Nellie’s prized doily collection, then put a price tag on it that reads, “$60 firm.” Otherwise, you’ll waste everyone’s time and patience. People will spend all day offering you $20-$40 dollars for the doilies and you’ll be frustrated with time and time again having to state that you want $60.

   Even if we think you’re crazy for asking the price you are, we can at least respect and understand that you’re not willing to negoiate on price.

4. Don’t use those stupid pre-printed price stickers.

   Are you so lazy that you can’t write on masking tape? You won’t make much money having a garage sale, but you want to reduce your net even more by purchasing little pre-printed stickers?

5. Surliness does not sell.

   Yes, I’m a stranger on your property. However, you invited me here to peruse the physical remnants of your youthful indiscretions (Yanni and Barry Manilow CD’s anyone?). If you’re lucky, I’ll hand over a few greenbacks in exchange for that odd kitchen gadget you not only don’t remember how to use, but don’t remember why you might want to use it.

   However, if you treat me only slightly better than you might a strung-out, home-invader thief, chances are I’m not going to do you the favor of purchasing your trash.

   There’s a reason that surly doesn’t sell in the retail world: people don’t like giving their money to people they don’t like. Faking friendliess for a total of fifteen minutes over the course of two hours has never killed or blinded anyone.

6. Put big, eye-catching stuff where we can see it.

   If the furniture and sporting goods are all in the garage, and I drive up to the sale and see a set of rusty pots and pans and a well-used scratching post near the curb, I won’t even slow down or get out of the car. Put things people might want to buy where they can see them. While it is a nice idea to force people to walk by all the garbage you’re selling to see the one or two interesting items, you need to get people out of their cars first. The only reason we’ll get out of our cars is if we see something interesting.

7. Have plenty of change on hand.

   If you can’t break a twenty, you shouldn’t be in business.

8. Decide ahead of time if you’ll take a check.

   Nobody likes to ask if you’ll take a check and see you hemming and hawing. Decide before you open up shop in the morning whether or not you’ll take checks.

9. Inventory your stuff to see if having a garage sale is worth your while.

   There are any number of people who would do better to place a classified ad in the newspaper and save themselves the trouble of sitting in their garage for six hours on a beautiful Saturday. If all you have to sell is a Rotato,a stack of thirty broken Commodore 64′s, a coffee cup from an out-of-business convenience store, and a complete set of 1987 National Geographic magazines, you don’t have a garage sale; you have a compulsive-urge-to-save-useless-items problem. Place a classified ad or hang some fliers on bulletin boards at local grocery stores for the Rotato and the magazines and call it good.

10. Put up signs.

    Just because you know to take a right off of Raymond Rd, onto Lindeman Rd, bear left at Russian Kale Cir, turn left at Crawling Stone Dr., and your house is the second one on the right doesn’t mean I do.

    You’re going to get people from all over town who might as well be driving in Africa for all that they know their way around your neighborhood. Put up a few signs to guide us to your sale.

11. The only thing worse than no signs is bad signs.

    I see it done time and time again where someone gets a handful of small, free signs from the local newspaper for placing an ad announcing their garage sale. The signs are 8.5″ by 11″. The top two thirds of the sign read (cleverly enough) “Garage Sale.” The bottom third of the sign is a small white box.

    After getting the signs in the mail, these folks carefully write their address in the small white box with a fine tip black marker. They then dutifully trot out to the nearest large intersections, plant their signs in the ground, and hurry back to their houses so they are ready for the innumerable cars that will surely descend upon them any minute now.

    Those folks are crazy.

    How many businesses in the world advertise their location and services on 8.5″x11″ pieces of paper along the side of the road? None. The reason is that signs of that size are TOO DAMN SMALL to read from a car moving along at thiry miles an hour. I cannot believe how many people simply do not make that connection.

    Signs for moving traffic have to be big. The writing on them needs to be big. The writing needs to be uncluttered by other things like more writing, funny pictures, balloon strings, etc.

    So, how can you make good signs? Here are a few suggestions:

    • If you make a sign, make it big. If you make it billboard sized, you’ll probably violate your city’s sign ordinance, but you’ll definitely get customers.
    • Don’t list every item you’re selling on your sign. This happens more often than you might think and quite frankly nobody can read the things because the writing is tiny and we’re all moving along at 30mph. If we can just find your damn house, we can see for ourselves just what you’re selling.
    • Take a lesson from city street signs and business signs. These signs are made by professionals–people with hundreds of years in the sign-making business. You’ll notice that the signs get bigger as traffic gets faster. You might also notice that text is larger than is necessary to read the sign while standing next to it. That’s because the target audience is moving relatively rapidly and needs to start reading the sign from farther away.
    • The absolute best way to get people to your garage sale is to make signs with big bold arrows. Arrows cannot be misunderstood. You’ll notice that curves in the road aren’t marked with signs that read, “Hey, genius. Slow down, there’s a curve coming up ahead. Prepare to gently turn the wheel just a hair to the left for a while.” In instances like that, arrows are used. We can all understand what an arrow is trying to tell us as we motor along at 65 miles an hour. Similarly, arrows tell me which way to turn at a given intersection to make it to your house. A sign reading “Broken Toilet Ln–Multi-family sale” does not. Use an arrow at each intersection I encounter to give me turn by turn directions directly to your house. A big bold arrow is much easier to see and understand while driving in an unfamiliar part of town than “4902 Dead Lawn Ct.”

While I can’t guarantee that following these tips will make your garage sale one that the neighbors and the riot control squad will discuss for years, they can help make the difference between a net profit of twenty bucks and fifty bucks.

Have fun out there and remember, “Just because you’re selling it, it doesn’t mean that I’m buying it.”

Gas prices are now a major concern for many people. Prices here in Madison are at $2.69 a gallon while they are higher around the state and around the nation. Recently, the Bush Administration agreed that it will not raise fuel efficiency standards for pickup trucks, big SUVs, and minivans.

People in various groups–including that inveterate junk mailer, the Sierra Club–railed against this idea. Their position is that the government ought to force industry to produce large vehicles that get better gas mileage.

Quite frankly, the Sierra Club is dead wrong in their approach to this issue.The problem with increasing Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency (CAFE) standards is that it takes entirely too long to have any effect. In addition, it only affects new vehicle purchases. It does nothing to get fuel guzzling behemoths off the road that have been purchased in the last ten years.

If the Sierra Club was truly interested in getting more fuel efficient cars on the road it would be a big player in the oil market. Nothing is going to get SUVs off the road faster than gas prices moving towards four of five dollars a gallon. In addition, higher gas prices not only discourage people from buying new SUVs, they discourage them from buying and driving old SUVs.

For instance, a Ford Excursion has a 44 gallon fuel tank. At current prices ($2.69/gallon), it costs $118.36 for an Excursion owner to fill up their tank. Annecdotal reports place Excursion gas mileage in the single digits. So, if we’re generous and assume that means 9 mpg, an Excursion can travel 396 miles on a tank of gasoline.

Our 1998 Saturn wagon, for comparison, gets about 31 mpg on the higway and 29 mpg in the city. It has a 12.5 gallon fuel tank. If we were to run that tank dry and fill it up at $2.69 per gallon, it would cost us $33.63. Assuming we were doing highway driving, we could then travel 387.5 miles on a tank of gasoline.

If someone is dumb or wealthy enough to spend $118-plus every time they fill up their tank, then let them. Most people simply cannot afford that for very long, no matter how much credit card debt they rack up.

So, if the Sierra Club is really interested in getting SUVs and other mosters off the road, they ought to be buying up oil as quickly as possible to drive up the price. As long as they don’t put the oil into the market, they can create artificial shortages that further drive the price of oil (and hence, gasoline) upwards. If you want to change how people act, hit ‘em where it hurts–in the pocketbook.

Sarah and I took advantage of beautiful weather on Sunday to go for a long bike ride. Sunday’s weather in Madison was sunny with a high in the low seventies. With just a few wisps of clouds in the sky and a breeze out of the west, it perfect weather for biking.

We grabbed our flat tire kits, some water, and our helmets, jumped on our bikes and started pedaling out of the driveway about 11:00, bound for Mt. Horeb, Wisconsin.We traveled through Madison and Fitchburg to reach the Military Ridge Trail. The Military Ridge Trail is a rail-trail that runs forty miles from Madison to Dodgeville. The grade is gentle but contstant between Madison and Mt. Horeb, which lies along the trail nearly half-way between the two trail endpoints.

Why Mount Horeb over all the other places we could go? Well, it’s about twenty-two miles from our house to Mt. Horeb’s downtown district. Round-trip that’s a bit over forty miles. That distance is just right about for a pleasant mid-day ride. In addition, we both wanted to get some more lefse from one of the cafes downtown. Finally, we were nearly out of the mustard we bought two weeks ago at the mustard museum.

So, yeah. We biked forty miles yesterday to eat lefse and buy mustard. Call us crazy, but don’t call us out of shape.

The last time we biked to Mt. Horeb, we rode back to Madison in a huge, black ambulance courtesy of the Mt. Horeb Volunteer Fire Department. As we were riding down Segoe on our way out of town, that same ambulance came barreling down Mineral Point Rd. bound for the UW Hospital with all its lights and sirens running. We yelled after it that we’d see it back in Mt. Horeb and continued on our way, both of us hoping that we were just kidding.

The ride along the trail was great. The sun was warm, but not punishing. The air was relatively dry; the breeze was constant but not overwhelming. The trail was dry but not dusty. While there were plenty of people on the trail, we never really ended up in any sort of traffic jam. We made good time and found ourselves in Mt. Horeb in about 13:00.

As we got in to town, the civil defense siren started screeching, and since the skies were absolutely cloudless in all directions, we certainly weren’t worrying about tornadoes. As it turns out, the siren is used to summon the volunteers to man the ambulance. Soon, the large black ambulance we had seen in Madison earlier went screaming down the road toward the east. We crossed the street and started to lock up our bikes. We hadn’t been doing that for more than a few seconds when the big black ambulance came screaming down the street, but now heading west. Suffice it to say that more than one person walking the street was heard to comment that perhaps the folks driving the ambulance needed a map.

Anyway, we got our mustard at the Mustard Museum, and enjoyed a light lunch at one of the local cafes (which included a generous portion of lefse) before getting back in the saddle and heading towards Madison and home.

While the constant, gentle, upward grade of the trail from Madison to Mt. Horeb can be tiresome after a while, essentially coasting twenty miles back to Madison is a heck of a lot of fun.

I never knew living outside the fashion mainstream could be so rewarding.Sarah and I were (unfortunately) at one of the large local malls this weekend. Our business there required us to walk from a store at one end of the mall to a store nearly at the other end (clever planning by those mall organizers; making us walk by every store in the mall). As we walked along the mall corridors, we started to wonder just which department store had suffered a massive explosion of perfume bottles. The smell was absolutely overpowering. It seemed like nearly everyone under the age of thirty that passed us in both directions exuded an odor that could be best described as “unholy.”

As we learned later, the males of the species are partially responsible for this problem. As this column points out, usage of Axe body spray is extremely popular amongst teenagers and young adults and it has a particularly strong scent:

“Thomas, like a bull to a red rag, headed straight for the cans of Axe, squatting like an arsenal of stink bombs on the drugstore shelves.

One by one, he tested the different ‘scents’ — Orion, Voodoo, Apollo, Phoenix — with macho names better suited for Marvel comics heroes or wrasslin’ stars than pheromone babe magnets.

A few squirts later, Aisle 5 looked less like Rite Aid than a World War I trench after a mustard gas attack. “

Let’s face it. No one wants to walk through a haze of B.O. By the same token, no one wants to carve their way through a cloud of airborne chemicals and perfumes as they walk past the front of Pottery Barn.

Where did Moderation go and how do we get it back? If it’s on vacation, we’ll just have to cut that vacation short.

I’m not a body spray user and I don’t play one on T.V. I don’t own any cologne or aftershave and don’t want to. I use a minty toothpaste, Ivory soap on my skin and hair, a mildly scented deodorant, and that’s about it. At the same time, no one has ever complained to me about my odor.

You probably can’t find six women alive who actually like the smell of an Axe body spray. Heck, you probably can’t find six women alive who don’t have bed memories of horribly misused and abused male cologne in high school or college. It’s just another example of the power of marketing. Marketers somehow convince people that they need a particular stench to cover up their natural scent. Of course, these same people are wearing so many other scents created by the cosmetic industries that their natural scent hasn’t been smelled in public since 1993.

On another note, I was flipping through the newspaper this weekend and I saw that Walgreens is advertising a special on Curious Britney Spears Deliciously Whipped! Body Souffle.

What the Hell is a body souffle?

I know what a regular souffle is. Heck, I think I could even make a souffle if I liked them enough to bother. That doesn’t mean I’m eager to go smearing it all over my body.

What, exactly, separates a body souffle from more prosaic items like lotion? Is it a whipped lotion? Does it actually have egg whites in it like a true souffle? Can it be eaten? Should the user bake him or herself after applying the souffle like one would a normal souffle?

Britney is far from the only transgressor here. A Google search turns up many other products calling themselves body souffles. My guess is that cosmetics companies had trademarked just about every conceivable plant, animal, and biome for their existing products and they needed a new genre from which to draw their names. And what do all people do? Yes, they eat.

This has got to be stopped before I see things like Body Barbeque Sauce, Thigh Tenderizer Rub, and Soy Sauce for Oily Hair on my store shelves.

That assumes, of course, that I could see those products on the shelves through the clouds of heavily perfumed air.

See actual pictures of wanted criminals!! You’ll quake in your shoes as you read descriptions of their dastardly deeds. You’ll lean in closer to the monitor to study their faces so you can recognize them in the produce aisle at the grocery store. You may even find yourself dreaming of what you’ll do with all that reward money.

Unfortunately, you can’t do any of that on my website. Instead of wanted criminals, I have pictures that were taken last weekend when Sarah’s parents visited us.

Sarah and I have been very busy the two weeks.The last weekend in July, I rented a car and drove out to Watertown to visit my parents and help them with a few projects.

For a change, I drove through northern Iowa on State Highway 9. As a general rule, I find Interstate travel really boring, so I often try to find a few highways and byways to spice up the trip a bit. Since Watertown is a minimum of nine hours from Madison, plenty of spicing is necessary.

I can’t say northern Iowa is most scenic place I’ve ever been. In fact, it’s not even close. However, it forces central Illinois to bend over a take a kick in the rump. You don’t know boring until you’ve driven an Interstate highway through central Illinois. At least I got to see interesting towns like Decorah, Carasco, and the like on the trip. Many of those small Iowa towns have obviously spent no small amount of time, money, and effort keeping their downtowns from completely dying by sprucing up buildings, lightposts, and sidewalks. I even got to see the home office of the company we all know and love, North Iowa Boar Semen.

Once I was in Watertown, I spent a fair amount of time helping my father with the computers at his business. In addition, I replaced the bike tires on my mother’s bicycle (the tires were so drived out that they were probably one good bump away from completely disintegrating) and gave it a general tune-up. We shopped at the Watertown Farmer’s Market, watched a few Twins games on TV, and generally kept things low-key.

I stayed in Watertown until Sunday afternoon, at which time I climbed behind the wheel of my rental car and pointed it east towards Madison. That was earlier than my original plan but I was ready to get back to Madison and I wanted to surprise Sarah. I tried a different route back to Madison on my return. I drove the Interstate highway south out of Watertown and east out of Sioux Falls. Just before I-90 turns north to go through Rochester, MN, I started traveling state and county highways southeast through Minnesota. I was aiming for the bridge across the Mississippi River between McGregor, IA and Prairie du Chien, WI.

As I traveled SE through southeastern Minnesota and northeastern Iowa, I traveled through some fantasically pretty country. The sun was casting a warm, cool glow across the land, the air temperature was pleasant, the the surrounding country was rolling. Though I occasionally passed a hog barn or two (the smell is unmistakable), that only seemed to add to the ambience.

About 23:30 I rolled back into Madison. I rang the door bell, and Dalla came flying out of the bedroom in full roar. She isn’t used to someone ringing the doorbell that late at night and gave me the full alarm bark routine. Sarah wasn’t expecting me until the evening of the next day, so she was mildly surprised as well. In the end, it was good to be back because we were dog-sitting for another dog starting early the next morning, and Dalla needed to get her cut checked out at the vet.

We had just a few days to get our house in order because Sarah’s parents, Mike and Tina, were coming to visit on Thursday afternoon. We did prosaic but necessary things like mowing the lawn, weeding, laundry, cleaning, grocery shopping, etc.

Wednesday night, Sarah and I took in a Madison Mallards game at Warner Park in Madison. While attempting to order tickets for Sarah, her parents, and myself to see the Thursday game, I stupidly ordered tickets for the Wednesday night game instead. So, Sarah and I attended the Wednesday night game, rather than let the tickets go to waste. The weather was quite hot and humid, but we had good seats and the beer wasn’t too expensive. The Mallards nominate one opposing player each game to be the so-called Great Dane Beer Batter (the Great Dane is a local, popular brewpub). If the Great Dane Beer Batter strikes out, all beer is half-price for the next half-inning. That night, the Beer Batter struck out twice, so we had plenty of opportunity to cool off with half-price beers.

Thursday, Mike and Tina arrived. We made fish tacos on the grill before heading out to the Mallards game. While the Beer Batter that night failed to strike out, the game was exciting and the Mallards won. A good time was had by all.

I should mention that Mike and Tina arrived on a plane and rented a car to get them around town. They ended up with the last car on the lot, a 2005 Dodge Magnum. I have to admit that the Magnum is a stylish car, but I would never buy one. The transmission, first of all, transmitted no power to the wheels when the car was put into reverse and no feet were applied to the gas pedal. That was pretty much the opposite of every car I’ve ever driven. The back window is not just small, but far away from the rear view mirror. That made looking in the rear view mirror somewhat like looking through a ship’s porthole. In addition, all the windows except the windshield and the two front windows were deeply tinted. That made the back seat and cargo area really, really dark, even when the sun was out. That was somewhat disconcerting to see when I looked in the rear view mirror. Neither Mike nor I was able to find a comfortable position for the headrest on the front seats. It’s as the headrests were designed for a different species of animal. The car had plenty of power, even with a V-6, but it also had its share of hesitation on the highway when trying to move quickly in a passing situation. All in all, I now understand why I don’t see many of these cars on the road.

Friday found us in said Magnum on our way to Dodgeville, WI and the annual Lands End warehouse clearance sale. Lands End is based in Dodgeville, and once a year they fill up a local hockey arena with all their unsold samples, catalog returns, and the like. Everything is priced with bargain basement prices and people drive from hundreds of miles away to shop there. When I was there, I found out that I wear the same size shirts as those ordered as samples. Sample clothes were the most deeply discounted, so I was able to get a fairly large number of clothes for a reasonably small sum of money. I got shoes, a terry cloth robe, a sport jacket, new swim trunks, and a passel of shirts. Some of the shirts sold for as little as $5.00 after discounts.

After the sale, we traveled back towards Madison along Highway 18/151. We stopped in Mount Horeb to see the world famous Mustard Museum. If you’re ever in the area, I encourage you to stop and see this unique attraction. Perhaps the best part of the Museum is tasting all the various mustards. We tasted a reasonably large number of mustards while we were there and left with a few mustards for the road. The Museum itself is one of the least self-conscious places you’ll ever visit. It may be corny, but it is unabashedly so.

What naturally follows the consumption of mustard? The consumption of lefse, of course! For those of you not familiar with lefse, it is a Scandanavian flatbread made out of potatoes. My mother makes a mean lefse and she usually shares some of the fruits of her labor with us around Thanksgiving and Christmas. However, once those holidays are gone, it can be a long dry spell before I get to taste good lefse again. Grocery store lefse doesn’t taste anything like homemade lefse, so I’ve given up on that source.

As we discovered on Friday, Schubert’s Old Fashioned Cafe and Bakery in Mount Horeb makes a mean lefse. Their lefse is slightly bigger than that made by my mother, but considering the cost, that’s a good thing. If you eat smaller lefse, you simply eat more of them to make up for the difference. Schubert’s lefse is about as close to homemade lefse as you’re going to find short of the real deal. Spread with butter and sugar it was a real treat and worth every penny.

Our bellies temporarily full of lefse and mustard samples, we headed back to Madison to ponder the eternal question: what to have for dinner. Given that we had more than a few jars of high-quality mustard in the car, naturally we decided on mustard friendly foods: bratwurst and Bavarian pretzels. We stopped at our local purveyor of fine German foods, Bavaria Sausage on our way back to the house. Once there, we bought some pretzels that had been made in Germany, 1/2 cooked, frozen, and then shipped to America. We also bought a array of wurst to fix on the grill.

So, for dinner, we had wurst, pretzels, kraut, mustard, German-style pilsner, German weiss beer, and a Reisling. It was a truly excellent Teutonic dinner.

Saturday, we jumped in the mighty Magnum again and headed west once again towards Spring Green. Once there, we had lunch at the General Store Cafe before heading off to our tour of Taliesin.

Taliesin is an interesting study in contrasts. Quite frankly, portions of the building were never meant to last and they are doing their best not to. You can see light under some of the walls (especially in Wright’s bedroom) where the walls and the foundation don’t really meet. The mitered glass panes that Wright invented in many cases no longer meet. The building has no heat so for all intents and purposes, it closes in the winter as temperatures inside the building reach 0°F. In addition, plenty of racoons, squirrels, and other varmints and rodents move into the house in the winter. After all, Wright spent his winters in Arizona, so why should he invest his time and money in winterizing his Wisconsin place? One of the other people on our tour kept badgering the tour guide to find out why the Taliesin Foundation didn’t install heating, insulate the walls, replace the windows with double panes of glass, etc. In short, why wasn’t the Foundation turning Taliesin into a modern building? The answer, of course, is that if you turn Taliesin into a modern building, it would no longer be Taliesin. Taliesin was never built to last forever.

The day we were there, a wedding (apparently quite a rare event) had taken place on the grounds earlier in the day. As such, we didn’t have to worry about wearing little booties over our shoes to protect the carpet and we got to take some pictures inside the studio (which is usually strictly verboten). Unfortunately, we didn’t get to take any pictures inside the house (apparently, tour groups earlier that day had gotten to do so; a nearly unheard of treat).

While I understand that Wright’s buildings have engineering problems, specifically with roofs leaking and foundations slipping, it is impossible to deny that the man was an artist. There is something about his buildings that is difficult for me to define, yet I can see it and feel it in the design. They seem incredibly well scaled to human dimensions. In addition, they seem to blend into their surroundings extremely well; better than almost any modern building I can name. Taliesin, the house, is 38,000 square feet. And yet, from various points around the hill, it doesn’t look much bigger than 5,000 square feet. From the outside, modern McMansions look ten times bigger and thousands of times less at home in their environment than Taliesin. The monstrosities that clutter our modern subdivisions are factory-produced concrete blocks compared to Wright’s hand-carved marble statues.

After touring Taliesin, we headed out for the grounds of American Players Theatre. Once where, we unpacked a picnic dinner that Sarah and Tina had made complete with beer, wine, and dessert. We sat at a picnic table in the woods in a nice picnic area enjoying the dinner before the show. We eventually walked up the trail to the theatre to see the play, The Play’s The Thing.

The show was very good. The first half the show dragged a bit, but the second half was gut-bustingly funny. It was great to sit in a nice outdoors theatre to watch professional theatre under the stars. At times during the show, a bat would zoom across the heads of the audience members in pursuit of some unseen bug or moth. The facilities that APT provides for their customers are reasonably good considering that they do all of their shows outdoors during just a few months of the year. I highly recommend catching a show at APT if you ever get the chance.

Sunday, we drove up to visit the International Crane Foundation just north of Baraboo, WI. Along the way, we rode the Merrimac Ferry across the Wisconsin River. The Merrimac Ferry is the last free ferry in Wisconsin and while the ride isn’t terribly long, it is a nice change from just riding in the car. You can get out, stretch your legs, and watch the water slide by.

We stopped in Baraboo to have a bit of lunch, and arrived at the Crane Foundation in the afternoon. All in all, I would rate our time at the Crane Foundation as something of a mixed bag. The tour guide who showed us around drove Sarah and I crazy. We thought he was incredibly patronizing and unnecessarily loquacious. In addition, very little of what he had to say was very interesting. Quite frankly, if you are going to the Crane Foundation, don’t wait around for a tour; just wander the grounds and you can see all the same things at your own pace. In addition, there just isn’t that much to see. There are cranes behind fences but that’s about it. They aren’t busying doing crane-y things; they can’t fly around. They are pretty much limited to sticking their beaks through the chain link fences, eyeing tourists, and squawking periodically. So yeah, we got to see some unique and interesting birds, but the cost of doing so was quite high.

Sunday night, we broke new culinary ground at ate at Lombardinos, an Italian restaurant here in Madison. Neither Sarah nor I had eaten there even though we’ve been biking by it and its garish mural for years. Tina and Mike had never eaten there and they had stayed in the motel acrross the street several times.

Sarah and I were both unimpressed by the restaurant on the whole. We both thought that the staff could be described as dismissive at best, and rude at worst. Sarah and I thought the calamari were good, and the pizza we had as an appetizer was good. Mike seemed quite enamored with his eggplant and spaghetti dinner. Tina didn’t seem displeased with her scallops. Sarah didn’t exactly rave about her tuna steak. My dish was thoroughly forgettable, and hence, wildly overpriced. So, the food is passable, but the service stinks. If that’s the case, why not eat somewhere with passable food that is cheaper and the service is better?

My favorite moment of the meal came when Mike asked for pepper for the olive oil. The server came back with one of those pepper howitzers that often are used in restaurants. A pepper howitzer is three foot tall pepper grinder, usually made of wood, that allows the server to dispense pepper from several feet away. This particular pepper howitzer apparently needed servicing because it hardly dispensed any pepper before completely failing to dispense any more despite the server’s efforts. What is the point in having such a monstrous pepper grinder if it doesn’t work? In the end, we got more pepper out of the pepper shaker on the table than out of the pepper howitzer.

This is one heck of a long entry, but I’ve been working on it for a few days.

There are very few things I enjoy more than reading the reviews of truly awful movies. Sure, I’ll most likely never see the movies in questions, but I sure get a kick out of reading the reviews.The beauty of bad movie reviews is that the critics don’t feel bound by the traditional movie review framework. After all, if a movie is among the worst ever, does each part of its awfulness require in-depth examination? Instead, they let fly with all sorts of cutting commentary liberally dotted with words obviously dredged from the depths of the thesaurus.

So, without further ado, allow me to present just a few of the reviews The Dukes of Hazzard.

There are routine movies and others that blaze a trail. There are routine bad movies and others so horrendous that they redefine bad, that make us look up synonyms for agonizing and abysmal and then gnash our teeth because the language has not kept pace with the decline of film.

…

Three back-to-back chases form the climax. They’re excruciating. The comedy is nonexistent. The filmmakers couldn’t buy a laugh in a burning poppy field. The movie is only 97 minutes long, but it makes time stretch, so that it’s impossible to feel comfortable in one sitting position for more than five minutes.

– Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle Movie Critic

At one point, the film’s narrator says, “If you have to go to the bathroom, now would be the wrong time.” I beg to differ. There is no wrong time to flush this turd.

– Peter Travers, Rolling Stone Movie Critic

Since it is not possible to endure The Dukes of Hazzard without finding some other task to occupy one’s mind (straight viewing could result in brain damage), I passed the time by re-constructing what might have been the pitch meeting in which Warner Brothers executives green-lighted this project. This is reproduced here in lieu of a review (which would amount to a lot of negative adjectives strung together with phrases like “one of the worst movies of the year” and “makes The Devil’s Rejects look a lot more appealing”).

– James Berardinelli, ReelViews Movie Critic

Now moving to the head of the line is The Dukes of Hazzard, a redo of a hit show that was already so awful the filmmakers really had to try hard to do it one worse; that they succeeded, perhaps, is how they justify their paychecks, because one really must put substantial effort into making movies this willfully and unbearably awful.

– Robert Wilonsky, Dallas Observer Movie Critic

If you’re interested in playing fantasy football during the 2005 NFL season, this is your chance. I’m looking for people to fill out a fantasy football league running on NFL.com. None of us are cut-throat players, though we have been known to engage in some Three Stooges nose grabbing and eye poking.

It doesn’t cost anything to join the league and it really doesn’t take much knowledge to play. If you’re at all interested, contact me and I’ll send you the information you need to join.


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Dalla had a bit of a misadventure in the not too distant past and she is still paying for it today.On the last day of July, which was a Sunday, Sarah and Dalla were out hiking on one of the local hiking trails. Dalla was running free since there weren’t any other people or dogs around, while Sarah hiked along the trail. After their hike, Sarah and Dalla got back into the car and came home to eat breakfast and get started on their day.

Shortly after arriving back at the house, Sarah noticed that Dalla had a good sized cut on the upper part of her right front leg. The cut wasn’t bleeding, but Dalla was licking at it. Sarah wasn’t sure if the cut rated emergency vet treatment, so she got in touch with one of our neighbors who is also a dog owner to get her opinion.

They huddled about the problem, and decided to disinfect the wound and bandage the leg with dog-friendly bandages since it didn’t seem to be bleeding and Dalla didn’t seem hampered in any way. Then, on Monday, Sarah would take Dalla in to the vet to get a professional opinion.

Monday morning rolled around, and Sarah took Dalla in to the vet. The vet decided that Dalla needed stiches to close the wound, which meant that Dalla needed to spend the day at the vet’s office because she would also get anesthesia to knock her out during the suturing.

When Monday afternoon rolled around, I stopped by the vet to pick up one slightly woozy Elkhound mix. The vet said that Dalla wasn’t allowed to lick the wound, so she needed to wear an Elizabethan collar. Dalla decided rather quickly that she wasn’t going to wear an Elizabethan collar, so the vet suggested that a kids size T-shirt might also fit the bill.

Well, we don’t have many kids size T-shirts around the house. Probably because we don’t have kids. Anyway, once we got home, I needed some way to fashion a T-shirt that Dalla could wear until Sarah came home. I couldn’t take Dalla to the store because it was hellishly hot that day and I couldn’t leave her in the car. At the same time, even if it had been cool, I couldn’t leave her in the car because she would lick at her wound while I was in the store. I couldn’t leave Dalla with Sarah because Sarah was on a long bike ride with her riding club. So, I took Dalla (and Maya, another dog we were dog sitting) into the basement for some T-shirt hacking.

First, I grabbed one of my old T-shirts that I got at MacWorld Boston 1995. I tried it on her to see how it fit. “Badly” is the word that best described its fit.

I’m not sure how much experience any one else has in modifying human clothing to fit a dog, but I had none. Looking at the T-shirt I could tell that it was too big in almost every direction, but it wasn’t immediately obvious how to fix it. Sure, I could cut off a bunch of fabric to shorten the shirt, but that wasn’t going to make it tighter around her chest. And, yeah, I could sew the shirt together in such a way to make the chest tighter, but then I had to deal with the fact that the arm holes and shoulders were still ten to twenty sizes too big. How was I going to fix that problem without sewing them or the head hole shut?

After some extensive fitting on my unwilling and uncooperative model, I managed to use scissors, sewing machine, and safety pins to produce a serviceable, but ugly dog T-shirt. I even managed to save enough of the front so that Dalla’s back (she wore the T-shirt backwards) still showed the MacWorld slogan from that year.

Eventually, Sarah got home, we had dinner, and went to the store to get some smaller shirts. Again, if you haven’t been shopping for dog T-shirts, it isn’t easy. Most kids clothes aren’t sold with suggestions for fitting them to dogs. All the kids clothes generally appeared to be about the same size, so it was a good thing that Sarah measured Dalla before we left. Using those measurements, we were able to determine that Dalla wears boys size small T-shirts.

For all of last week, and all of this week, Dalla wanders the house in a modified Hanes T-shirt. She seems completely oblivious to the whole affair. She scratches at it once in a while, but other than that, she seems resigned to her role in bringing the torn white T-shirt back into the American fashion mainstream.

What happened to the Basic car wash?Sarah and I were at the filling station the other night putting more gold in the pockets of oil producing nations. While we were waiting, we started talking about the various car wash options available to the public at that particular station:

• The lowest priced car was the so-called Deluxe Wash. That consisted of water, soap, and those air-dryers for cars.
• The mid-priced wash was the so-called Premium Wash. The only difference is that this wash includes some sort of side panel jets.
• The highest-priced wash was the so-called Ultimate Wash. This included two or three things the Premium Wash didn’t.

What is the Basic Wash? You can drive through the car wash bay but they don’t turn any machines on? How about the Standard Wash? You can drive through the car wash bay and they’ll turn on a couple of fans to blow the dust off your car?

It seems that when you start your product line at Deluxe and go up from there, you’re being disingenous in the use of that term. For something to be considered Deluxe, there needs to be a Standard or Basic against which the Deluxe can be compared. If your Deluxe product barely meets the idea that most people have of a standard version of the product, you’re not fooling anyone by choosing fancy names.

Sarah and I were talking about scars last night and I started lamenting that I don’t have any interesting scars.There are people who have scars that tell an interesting story:

• “That’s the scar I got while part of the Navy’s Underwater Demolitions Team…”
• “I got that scar while hiking barefoot up Mount Everest…”
• “That scar marks the spot where the tiger’s jaws closed around my arm…”

Instead, all of my scars are from really mundane, boring events and accidents:

• The scar on my elbow is from falling off my bicycle at an extremely low speed while trying to make a tight corner right in front of the house.
• The scar on my finger is from a cut that I got while fixing a bicycle.
• The scar on my leg is the result of a cut I got while hiking.
• The scar near my eye is from the time another kid hit me in the head with a tennis racket when I was just a little kid.

I guess I’ll just have to start doing more interesting things if I want to get more interesting scars.