Tannishblog

Sometimes one altered aspect of a society is overlooked for another. The news media only has room for the most sensational scoops. So many interesting things fall through the cracks. Much has been said about our right to bear arms, the need to curb availability of handguns, or the often disastrous deeds of gun owners legal and not.

The NY Times today has a short editorial on a Florida law that loosens accountability for people who shoot first and ask question later. It’s troubling at best considering similar laws are on the books or slated in other states.

The law, passed in the last year in 15 states and being considered in eight others, allows the extraordinary use of deadly force when a person simply doesn’t want to back away from a confrontation.

We’re going back to the wild west, here. Who is most likely to benefit from such a law? Police, for one.

In one case, a retired police officer shot twice and seriously wounded an apparently unarmed neighbor who had knocked on his door in a dispute over the number of garbage bags put out for collection. The shooter will remain free as long as his self-defense argument holds, and it well may.

I would add others: people struggling with anger management issues; disgruntled employees; ex-military types affected by PTSD; people engaged in questionable activities that could lead to a crime; bouncers; and fearful people.

Fear is becoming endemic in America. Although much has been written about our emerging Culture of Fear, the new media has been largely silent on the topic. Perhaps the omission is out of a echo of guilt?

We Americans fear, more each year. In our escalating fear, we become controllable. Media broadcasts bombings, shootings, rape, traffic fatalities with abandon, forgoing any mention of goodwill, charity, civility and helpfulness. As a result, we lock our doors, alarm our cars, hand cell phones to our teens, send the young ones to day care centers after school to keep them off the streets. We’ve installed metal detectors in our high schools, airports have them, too, and x-ray machines. We drink water from store bought bottles because we fear contaminates in tap water. We worry about data theft, identity theft, burglary, contracting diseases, baldness, bad breath, our weight. Many things we worry about are statistically unlikely, many are silly. But some fears are indeed wise. Chose for yourself which are valid, and trust your assessment.

Commercials and advertising feeds our fear of countless little things. Mostly, ads exploit us in three ways: our fear of rejection; our fear of insecurity; and our fear of belonging. In addition, ads promote themselves through three channels; power, sex appeal, and status. through these messages, some overt, some subliminal, we are fed artificial needs, and artificial fears. It make us buy things.

The combination of fear and slack gun laws will directly affect many of us. It will kill and maim many people. As fear expands and guns proliferate, situations that could be mended with words will instead end in gunfire. And it can happen anywhere.

Am I promoting fear by writing this? You bet! This one’s real, though. Be aware of the dangers in our dysfunctional world, but don’t give in to them.

Saturday found us driving to Wabasha, MN to the Anderson Hotel, currently a B&B with the distinction of enabling guests to room with one of the six cats in residence. The oldest hotel in Minnesota, it's celebrating 150 years. Part of this celebration are painted cat statues scattered about town.

The Hotel:              

The Cats:       

Wabasha, a river town on the Mississippi bout 80 miles SE of the Twin Cities, is named after Chief Wa-Pa-Sha and is home to the American Eagle sanctuary. A peaceful old railroad town, it provides a bridge into Wisconsin at a narrowing of the river. My guess is the town grew up around a ferry crossing and the rail stop.

The Town:    

From here, we drove back to Chicago and normalcy. Today we chill out and phyche ourselves to resume the usual grind. School's starting soon, I'ts still the busy season at work, and it'll take most of the year to recover from our spending bltz. Driving the rental car back to the store acted as the proverbial nail on our mini vacation. I guess we should be lucky we could do this much. Next year, who knows?

What to do in the Twin Cities… the first thing that came to mind is Mall of America. As my wife loves to tell me, I don’t shop. I go into a store only after I have researched the item I need, then I get it, buy it, and go home. That, she tells me, is not shopping.

Today, I get a huge helping of what shopping means. We get to MOA by 9:40, before the stores open. We leave at 9:30, after the stores closed. In those almost twelve hours, we walk 4 miles of corridors and scores of stores. I say "scores" because we agreed to stay clear of the familiar ones we can shop in Chicagoland, concentrating on the unique shops, local interest tourist traps, and local restaurants. No sense in driving four hundred miles to shop at Bloomingdale’s and eat at Ruby Tuesday’s, when each can be found within a mile of our house. Even with restrictions in place, we barely managed to see the whole place - it’s that huge.

Collapsing gratefully in our rental car, we get lost in the dark highways of Minnesota. Chicagoland is almost famous for its nimbus of orange light eminating from the many thousands of sodium street lights, so bright that a drive sees better in the night time than in daylight. No so, here. It’s a straight shot from the mall to our hotel, perhaps seven minutes, yet in the unfamiliar dark I managed to turn off the route and end up in Saint Paul by accident. Our seven minute drive took half an hour.

So that was our day, paying homage to America’s favorite pastime - Shopping. Highlights included the many various Minnesota-themed stores, an artsy venue called "the Afternoon," and the "Lake Woebegone" store. Also, I found a place that custom embroider baseball caps. Now I have one that says "Tannishblog."

Tomorrow we kick about for half a day, then drive south along the Mississippi to Wabasha, where we stay at a B&B and take in the riverfront. If Internet is available, I’ll write more, otherwise, the story will continue Sunday night, when we get home - with pictures.

Have you ever noticed how our media attends to war coverage in disproportion to other news? War and Terrorism, it’s all the same thing.

It’s only some wars. If Israel or America is involved, sometimes the UK, the news is unavoidable. News outlets squeeze the story for all its worth. But in the rest of the world all we hear is the sound of crickets. Wars happen everywhere, all the time. IN Sri Lanka a civil war has been going on for two generations. In Africa, war is endemic. American news outlets care little.

Have you ever noticed how the way wars and terrorism is covered resembles the style used for sports coverage? The late Howard Cosell would be proud; every grunt and curse is broadcast in the news equivalent of high-definition, propagated through news wire services in cyclic regurgitation.

It must help to feed the Money God. Newspapers and television stations are businesses, and businesses have only one purpose - to make money. They wouldn’t be the way they are if it didn’t sell. That brings up the question of who is responsible for the outlandish sensationalism in today’s media. The answer seems obvious - the consumers are. If we didn’t continue to buy it, watch it, read it or listen to it, these same businesses would have to find another way to turn a profit. If we weren’t so perverse as to suck up all the bad news in lieu of the good, things would be different.

Kind of gives a new spin to the phrase "You get what you pay for."

Today the family is off for it’s annual time shift to visit the Renaissance. This is a tradition with the wife and I for as long as we’ve been together, and my daughter has never missed a year since her very first summer. This time, as friends are coming, we’re borrowing the neighbor’s minivan which, if we can sustain a speed of exactly 88 MPH, should be able to propel us backward in time.

I’ve got this fantasy going that when I retire, I’ll grow my beard longer, dress in renaissance drag, and stroll the grounds as a troubadour ogling the women all day. What a life!

If you ever find yourself (under mysterious circumstances) driving on I-94 through the Illinois/Wisconsin border on a weekend in the summer, you owe it to your progeny to spend a day at Bristol. Good times for everyone!

Excuse me while I ponder this aloud. I’m trying to follow the logic. First pass a sweeping education reform bill with a friendly-sounding name ( lets call it No Child Left Behind) with the aim of holding teachers and school districts accountable for student achievement. OK, Sounds good.

Next, we rearrange government spending to funnel funds to our war efforts by cutting from - among other places - education budgets. Then we wait three years and hold the states responsible for failing to meat the new guidelines without adequate funding.

And how does the federal government plan to sanction the recalcitrant states? By withholding money! The states have no money to implement the new law because funding for the necessary transition period was cut, so failure to conform to NCLB was inevitable. Because they failed, the feds are threatening to not pay the states.

… I’m still not getting it… How does this benefit the children? They only get one chance to go through school, they have no means to make up for the effects of undercutting education costs. Most families who have children enrolled in public schools do not have money enough to pull them out and send them to private teaching institutions.

Corporations are pressuring the federal government to revamp our public education system lest our nation loses a competitive edge. Civil liberty organizations are bemoaning the educational divide between white and minorities. They all are asking the wrong people. Our education system cannot be mandated from Washington. But if the same parties donated the money they spend on lobbyists to education groups within the state they operate, perhaps the problem of plummeting test scores would miraculously correct itself. If Washington would sanction such efforts by providing (gasp!) tax-relief to corporate and private benefactors, perhaps something good would happen.

Just a thought. ("I don’t suppose I’m right," said Pooh…)

The NY Times has a too-short blurb (see: Go Speed Racer!) on a Silicon Valley start-up named Tesla Motors, which is producing the first ever all-electric sports car. Great Name!

According to the web site, the Tesla Roadster can do 0 to 60 in four seconds and run 250 miles per charge. Yes, its expensive, as is all new technologies. The company is marketing it as a must-have status symbol With it’s looks, it will be. After all, what’s a mere 75,000 to the average pro quarterback or to a multi-platinum rapper? Chump change.

All new technologies must become commercially viable before they’re adapted by the public, first as a niche then going mainstream as competition and other market forces demand affordability. The rapid advances in computer tech is a great example of this paradigm. I’m waiting eagerly for space travel to follow the same pattern. This little guy is a good start, though.

This is one hot-looking car! A geek’s dream. I might have a tough time choosing between Racing Green or Thunder Gray Metallic finishes (Electric Blue is cool, too.) Hey, a guy can dream, can’t he?

It occurred to me that the US government cannot hold back the tide of research on stem cells. If we don’t advance the science, other nations will. We can be assured of two things: American scientific leadership slipping another notch, and a grabbing of market share of any resulting viable product by foreign corporations unencumbered in their research, ensuring the US to play "catch up" in what promises to be a lucrative marketplace.

Our new-found squeamishness will cost Americans money in the long run. It guarantees a widening of the income/entitlement gap because only the richest Americans will be ale to afford to travel to France, say, for state of the art hospital care. You can bet the squeamish, religious ones will gladly pay for any beneficial care for their loved ones regardless of how the technology was obtained. Don’t ask, don’t tell.

"Who knows where the winds of outrageous fortune will take you…" Or something pompous like that. Who knows where the randomly chosen link will take you. That’s more like it. From Mike Shea’s Website, via Reddit.com,  I found Stephen King’s "Everything You Need To Know About Writing."

It’s all there, in under 10 minutes.

From the Dept. of English & Comparative Literature at San Jose State University comes the 2006 winners of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, awarded to authors of bad opening sentences to imaginary novels.

All aspiring novelists take note (me, too.)