KELOLAND.com Blogs

There’s the McCormick reaper.

There’s Elias Howe’s sewing machine.

There’s Eli Whitney’s cotton gin.
 

And then there’s this contraption, sort of a tequila gin, or is that redundant? 

Click “play” and…play…

Just in case it hasn’t dawned on you that the President so many of us hopefully elected is snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, yesterday’s Republican victory in that cradle of U.S. democracy, Massachusetts, should snap you out of your denial.  52 percent to 47 in a state that hasn’t sent a Republican to the U.S. Senate since Republican Edward Brooke lost in 1979.  He was elected in 1967.  He was also the first black man elected to the Senate, as I recall. 

Of course, this puts what’s left of health care reform in deeper jeopardy, which is about the only part of the Obamarama agenda I still care about.  I had written off any chance of getting out of those damned wars long ago.  That’s on the list with closing Guantanamo.  I never did care much about that one. 

This administration has been spinning its wheels at a snow-packed intersection since the beginning, apparently too dumb to realize that if you back up a few inches you might get some bare pavement and just enough traction to move forward.  The voters of Massachusetts have figured that out.  But, apparently having forgotten the shambles left behind by the previous administration, they’re still backing up seeking traction. 

There will be more of this as more promises fall by the wayside.  Unfortunately, the Obamarama has left us with only two choices: going backwards or spinning our wheels at that intersection that was supposed to propel us into much-needed change.  Right now, backwards appears to have more appeal.  I don’t get it.  But it does. 

I still hear that plaintive wail, “Give him more time.”  He’s had a year and nothing has happened…nothing, except a continuation of the policies set in motion by the guy we repudiated, the guy who got us into all these messes.  This guy can’t even get his redneck…excuse me…blue dog Democrats…to toe the mark.  It's time to get that bunch of fence riders...including Princess Stephanie...potty trained. The Senate leader of his party is a wimp who may be the next Democrat to fall in his home state.  The only one in the whole hierarchy who seems to have any whip-cracking ability is the much-detested Pompom Pelosi in the house. 

Barack Obama’s honeymoon, such as it was, just ended and the whole party is in danger of being over.  Going backward is hardly the way forward, but when the only other choice is neutral, it’s understandable why voters are seeking any traction they can find.

Mad?  You’re damned right I am.  This isn’t the change and leadership I voted for.  But it’s still better than stepping backward into the quicksand we know is there.  We might as well elect Sarah Palin and John Thune president and vice-president, in any order.  At South Dakota would get something out of it.  Free Medicaid, maybe? 

I just finished reading an article about the woes of the Washington Pavilion as its helmsmen of the moment try to figure out what works and what doesn’t in the face of a 300 hundred thousand dollar deficit.  Looking at the rundown of failures starting with Joan Rivers, and successes...a diverse group ranging from comedians Lewis Black and Ron White to chestnuts like “Annie” and the Oak Ridge Boys…what’s the question? 

You book your comedians off of Comedy Central.  Unbleep the “F” word and let the good times roll, the same word Joan Rivers uses so fluidly.  What’s the difference?  Age. 

We’re a conservative bastion.  We don’t mind hearing our uncles cuss up a storm, but we wince when our grandmother becomes a verbal grandmonster. 

We don’t want social experiments.  We want entertainment, proven entertainment, like “Annie.”  “Equus” might work…if you sell it as a play about a troubled horse, like Black Beauty or Fury.  People will be howling for their money back, but you might fill the seats for a few minutes. 

We don’t care about new material.  We want to hear what made us laugh to begin with.  I once asked Williams and Ree why they didn’t change their act.  Terry Ree’s answer was simple:  “People want to hear what made them laugh in the first place.”  We want to nudge the person next to us, saying: “Oh, you gotta hear this one.” 

Maybe the real question is: “Why do we keep hiring outsiders who know nothing about their audience to run the Pavilion?”

I suppose the concept is to expand our horizons…and lose money.  But if the issue is to get this white elephant into the black, hire local leadership…and book off Comedy Central. 

A side note here.  Why are we so wrapped up in helping Haiti, promising aid years into the future?  Anybody remember New Orleans and the Lower Ninth Ward which have been waiting for help…supposedly…since Katrina was a Van Tassel?  Again, I find myself asking the television: “How come we can always find the wherewithal for other countries, but not our own, in wars and peace…and health care?”

First of all, I am in a unique position.  I’m not elected to anything.  As of the January First I can’t be fired from anything.  And, more and more, I don’t really care about anything, at least not to the point of ranting about it.  That means that I have a practical right as opposed to a theoretical right to use the First Amendment (the freedom of speech one) to…rant, about anything, gratus. 

Here we go again with another apology.  This time Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Tom Daschle’s weak sister successor (there’s that first amendment right already) has his feet to the fire for comments he made about President Obama.  As you may have gathered from the above use of my first amendment right, I’m not wild about Harry.  Never have been, ever since I met him during a Daschle deal in Sioux Falls before we South Dakotans so wisely turned him out.  I had never even heard of the guy and I thought he was a wimp.  Harry spent all of this last Saturday apologizing.

Harry’s sin was suggesting during the last presidential campaign that a light-complected man of color without a “negro accent”…unless he wanted one…could find himself in good stead on the path to the White House. 

Well…what the hell?  I could swear I have heard the President…and a lot of white politicians…slip into a dialect of the moment that will make a point on an audience of the moment in order to get elected.  I’m told the sainted Senator Karl Mundt used to dress dapper in D.C. and shabby in S.D. to get elected by South Dakota’s working poor, most of us.

The path to the Rose Garden is no rose garden.  It’s not for the sensitive.  Futhermore, don’t the results of 2008 bear out the accuracy of what Reid said?  That’s all subject to interpretation, or course, but Lightweight Harry Reid (no relation to Light Horse Harry Lee of the Old South or Dan Reid, the Lone Ranger*) certainly wasn’t proven wrong.  Reid may be guilty of political incorrectness, but not of political reality; not provably.   

How about Senator Dianne Feinstein on Face the Nation?  No sooner did she finish making Reid’s excuses than she said a “Philadelphia lawyer” would be needed to sort out how to keep guys who want to blow up their Fruit of the Looms off planes.  Dianne, what did Philadelphia lawyers do to anybody, beyond what any other altruistically phony lawyer has done?  You owe all Philadelphians an apology even though the City of Brotherly Love is one of the most crime-ridden cities in the world.  Oops, now I owe the world an apology.  Sorry. 

As for comparisons with Trent Lott, who I always assumed ran a little dumb anyway, saying the U.S. would have been a better place had an avowed old racist been president that’s comparing oranges and tangerines.  Close, but no cigar on that one, Republicans.  But the constitution gives us the right to say dumb things.  It gives the rest of us the right to counter them or ignore them.  Quite often, we get carried away with the "countering" part, demanding public apologies and blood. 

Where is Jimmy the Greek when you need him to trump you?  Come to think of it, his racial statements that got him fired as a football analyst can’t be proved inaccurate, either.  Okay, so fire me.  I demand my First Amendment rights. 

By the way, my ol’ man was stationed at Gitmo during WWII.  I’m sure he would apologize if he were here.  He probably wished they had closed it down then when they turned him loose. 

If anybody should have spent the weekend apologizing it’s the Bengals and the Eagles.  It looks we’re brewing up a SuperBowl consisting of the best of the lame…worst.  Sorry.  I meant the strategically challenged.    

*Wikipedia lists Tonto as a “laconic” Indian.  I think an apology is due to Jay Silverheels…and maybe Iron Eyes Cody.  We need to revisit Hemmingsen’s concept of a National Day of Apology, maybe as a sidebar to Columbus Day.  Sorry, Italians.  Did you know the Green Hornet was like a great nephew of Harry Reid?  No, wait.  I think it was Dan Reid.  Eh, never mind. 

I find myself sort of hoping that the economy won’t recover until winter is over just based on fuel prices.  When I filled my propane tank at the cabin last fall the gas was a-dollar-twenty.  Just a week ago, after an overnight jump of 12 cents, it cost me $1.84.  That’s about three hundred bucks for 150 gallons. 

The reason is that farmers have been sucking the propane supply dry to dry their late-harvested corn, some of which came in so wet they’re losing money trying to make it salable, so they can sell the dry corn to the ethanol plant which will soak it down in water to convert the kernels into car fuel.  Too bad we can’t heat our homes…or dry our crops…with that corn contrail steaming into nowhere (picture below) from the ethanol plant in Aurora.

And that brings us to motor fuel.  I recently stopped at the Cenex station in Toronto facing a befuddling array of no less than seven kinds of “gasoline.”  More than one customer stood there scratching his head and freezing his butt as he pondered the menu worthy of Minerva’s.  I finally found what passes for regular these days, but was tempted to take a Mason Jar of that stuff on the left “to go” for later internal experimentation.  Judging by some of the blood alcohol levels that have been turning up in South Dakota lately it may have already been discovered. 

The big grocery chain in Sioux Falls doesn’t have Cenex’s variety, but the one at 49^th and Louise does offer as much as a 12 cent discount with a store receipt at the manager’s discretion.  And on a cold Sunday…Sunday only…they’ll install it for you.  A heck of a deal, until you pick up a pop while you’re paying up and realize you have just spent your savings.  Not only that, you’ve bought a corn sweetener and I have a hunch the margin on that fountain drink is a lot better than the store’s margin on gas…ohol…oline…ocorn…O’brian…whatever it is that’s flexed its way into my flex fuel tank. 

Meanwhile, back at the economy, a sobering note…

The economy that “recovers,” when it does, won’t be the same economy we left behind.  It can’t be in this case.  Old jobs are gone forever.  Your next Chrysler is going to be a Fiat as per a government fiat.  “Normalize” or “stabilize” would be better words than “recover.” Case in point, Northern Minnesota was the Texas of iron ore until 25 years ago. 

This picture shows what’s left: ghost towns and ghost mines and percolating puddles of past prosperity.  My relatives’ fortunes took a deep dive when the mines collapsed.  Some places have recovered…morphed…but they’re not mining communities anymore with their iron pink houses and roads.  The economy we left behind isn’t the one that’s going to come back.  That’s like waiting for federal aid for Hurricane Katrina.  It ain’t comin’.  Actually, you'd better hope the old economy doesn't fire up.  Everybody will start sucking up 3.50 gas again.  We'll blame that on China.  But, I doubt your unemployment will cover it.

Makes that Mason Jar from the gas station look tempting.  Well, hold that one back for next week’s Viking game.  Eh, this whole thing is just a shabby effort to clean up some "photo stock."

Here we are, already, knocking at the door of a new decade.  It seems like we just started the new century a couple of years ago.  I expect somebody will start the same argument as we had at the turn of the century.  Does the new decade start in 2010 or 2011?  I don’t know about the math of the thing, but we Americans like our round numbers, so January 1, 2010, is the start of the “Twenty Teens” as far as I’m concerned. 

Another paradox.  At the dawn of each day we tend to look forward, even losing sleep over the prospect whereas at the dawn of new decades and new centuries we tend to look backward.  As you may have noticed over the years, I’m not an optimist by nature, but as I look back at my six decades on this earth, a lot of it spent complaining about the human condition, I conclude that man has actually been and is a positive influence on the planet, even the worst of us, despite a lot of “collateral damage.” 

Let’s look at the record.

There has never been a people that paid more lip service to living healthy; nor a generation that abused our bodies more…booze, cigarettes, drugs, living too well.  And there are all those “collateral chemicals” in our food.  There’s a contingent that says, “They’re killing us.”  I say look at our life expectancy.  It’s a couple of decades longer than it was just a few decades ago.  Hey, that means we have literally changed time, not the way the Einsteins envisioned it, but we have stretched time.  We may spend a lot of it ailing and aging, but the alternative isn’t anymore attractive than it ever was.  

Now you may ask: “What good has come out of Iraq, for instance?”

Iraq used to be Babylon and that culture gave us our beloved “zero,” as in the year 2000 or 2010.  Could computers run on a system of ones and twos?  No, it’s ones and zeroes.  Ergo, Iraq gave us our laptops.  It has also added a lot of zeroes to our national debt. 

The Romans didn’t invent the zero; Iraq did.  But can you imagine how dumb the Super bowl would look with the number XOX?  It would look like a tic-tac-to game instead of a football game.  If the Vikings get in that’s what it will look like anyway, I’m a-guessin’.

What did the former Evil Empire give us?  Well, unlike Iraq and the rest of its neighbors today, it was a nice stable enemy and it knew what to do with Afghanistan until we started meddling.  It was like a bad father, a constant reminder of what you didn’t want to grow up to be.  They didn’t spend a lot of time trying to please the world, like we do.  I doubt if the Soviets had cute little archeological euphemisms like B.C.E, “Before the common era,” the politically correct, non-offensive, Anglo Saxon term for A.D.  Shhh. We can’t say “After Christ.”  It might make Islamics who have their own calendar mad, or the Chinese, or the Hittites, even though they’re extinct.  Another term we could lose is the new Washington media darling “Pushback.”  That used to be backlash, but I suppose it has a racial connotation to somebody.  I won’t even get into “Iconic.”  Like a virus, it will just have to run its course. 

We are a non-offensive country at heart.  When a Nigerian tries to blow up an airliner with his underwear even though his own father turned him in, do we profile?  No, we shake down little old ladies for their shampoo.  Why did that guy have a lighter or matches anyway?  You can’t smoke on planes anymore.  Did he smuggle flint and steel on board?  My theory is that El Qaida sets these guys up and secretly video tapes the idiots for yuks at their “Holiday parties” in some cave in Afghanistan…or a hotel suite in Pakistan.  “Look at what the underwear guy used for a fuse…heh, heh, heh…”

The money guys are starting the new decade with a clean slate.  The same guys who watched all our retirement money go down the drain are now advertizing that they have found the way, that they know what they’re doing now.  I’m doubtful about that part of humanity. 

Progress is something we have to be careful of.  Do you suppose the Tiger Woods episode was triggered by OnStar?  When he it the tree, On Star told his rear view mirror: “We’re sending a woman with a golf club to get you out.”  Me, I’d have answered:  “Maybe you could gimme a few hours here…” 

Oh, well.  Thanks to Tiger, David Letterman is embarking on a better decade and Charlie Sheen is helping them both out. 

Just some itinerant thoughts from a wandering, wondering mind as we embark on our next ten years of discovery…A.D, a very “Uncommon Era.”

Sioux Falls and South Dakota have lost another of their leading citizens, perhaps their main cheerleader with the death this holiday season of Al Schock.  I suspect the average older citizen only knew him as the owner of Terrace Park Dairy, a Lions Club activist, a teller of corny jokes with a corny Lawrence Welk accent left over…like Welk…from his German upbringing on the South Dakota side of the North Dakota border.  Younger citizens probably didn’t recognize the name at all.  I don’t know if that would have bothered Al.  An optimist, he would see it as a sign that we are moving forward. 

I don’t know that I would describe Al Schock as I knew him as a mover and shaker so much as a pusher, a guy who nudged things along like a drover, like the Eros program with all its jobs that we hardly know is there.  I don’t know how Al locked onto that one.  The timing was awful since our very influential senator, Karl Mundt, was stroked out when it came time for the heavy lifting in Washington.  Undeterred, Al and some of his allies just “adopted” North Dakota Senator Milton Young to keep the cause moving.  Young, at the time, wasn’t a whole lot healthier than Mundt, but they got the job done. 

Al Schock was one of the first to note, seriously, that Sioux Falls needed a more solid base than the Stockyards and Morrell, that both could find themselves in jeopardy someday, solid as they looked at the moment.  One of the leaders of the Sioux Falls Industrial Development Foundation and its state counterparts, Schock actively wooed big industry, at the same time realizing that a whole bunch of little ones could fill the bill, too.

There were a lot of ground breakings, companies that came and companies that went.  Fire truck makers and motorcycle helmet makers; car part companies and credit card companies.  A company that made gold-painted shovels for ground breakings could have made a fortune, we attended so many of them.  Little by little, the strategy worked. 

Al had aspirations, I think mostly with the greater good in mind.  He had his pile, after all.  He once asked me to be his press guy when he ran for Congress…or was it the Senate…a long time ago?  I pointed out that he would be facing POW war hero Leo Thorsness who really wanted a piece of George McGovern.  All of them were war heroes in a very real sense.  All carried the scars of intense battle.  With a young family, I couldn’t take the risk.  I have no regrets, nor did Al, at least openly.  We bumped into each other years later, probably about the time I was retiring from KELO.  Al asked: “How long ago was that when I asked you to help in my campaign?”

We reckoned it was at least twenty years.  Al…always the optimist…went on to say that loss was one of the best things to happen to him, as he put it: “I went to work and built up my company and sold it to the French for more than they got for the whole Louisiana Purchase.”

He wrote one of his many books about the company he and Brother Ozzie built.  He sent me a copy, which I kept forgetting to pay for.  The money was going to his beloved Lions Club.  I found myself speaking at that club and noticed Al in the audience.  I called him to the front and gave him the price of the book, advising that he should keep money since the book made it sound like he finished up broke.  That line brought down the house.  Lions like to twist each other tails…and tales. 

Like Lawrence Welk, Al Schock was one of dose driven German boys who done good in a new land, even fighting for it, literally, against the old one in World War II.

Christianity, several religions, actually, are just heading into their peak season.  At the same time, everything else is in the windin’ down season.  Even winter.  It’s only starting and probably the worst is yet to come, but each day from here on out gives us a little bigger sliver of sunlight whether we can see it or not. 

The harvest season is pretty much wound down, especially if we get all that snow.  We have crossed the Rubicon.

This got me thinking about my New England road trip last fall, when the lobstermen in Maine were hoping to fish right through Christmas.  Curious, I picked up the phone and called Mark Alley in Jonesboro, Maine. 

His finger is on the pulse on lobsterdom.  He makes the traps that start the nasty looking little devils on their way to our tables.

Click “play” for my visit to the Down East Wire Trap Company…

I supposed that rookin’ could be the other way around.  The lobsterman I talked to this morning was getting $3.45 a pound which he said “sucks.”  One of the major Sioux Falls grocery chains is selling one pounds…the ones just to big to slip through that escape hatch…for ten bucks a piece.  What the heck; the holidays only come once a year.  My order is in.  But it’s just not the same as hiking down to the wharf and buying ‘em right off the boat. 

It’s been such a crummy week that for once I’m looking forward to Christmas and all its falderal, however you spell falderal.  I’ve been nursing some kind of crud that makes me dizzy, or maybe it’s just the news. 

The Senate has inked its last deal and is on its way to passing a health care bill that may or may not be a Christmas present.  Nobody knows, including those who voted for it early this morning.  The Republicans tell me it’s not what I want, but they don’t tell me what I do want except less paperwork, of course, and more choices.  The Democrats ask me, “If it’s bad would AARP be for it?”  Remember the uproar when AARP backed  that medicare drug insurance plan with the donut hole deductible in it.  Oddly enough, a lot of people are happy with that, as long as their prescription money doesn’t go for abortion, and I’m within a few months of finding out for myself...about the drug plan.  So, I’ll let you know.  On the other hand, CBS News has told me twice in the last week about people who just got sick of taking all their prescriptions, dumped ‘em all and are still with us.  Makes you wonder whose watching the drug commercials, doesn’t it?  Once, during an appointment, I asked a doctor if she knew what all those “initialalized” diseases were.  All she could come up with was: “We’ll, I certainly know what E.D. is” from the secondary medical education she was getting from commercials for things like Viagra and Cialis.  Remember when C-Allis was an old Persian Orange tractor? 

I stayed up later than I felt like staying up to watch the Vikings embarrassment.  I told my son in the first quarter “You know they’re going to lose this, don’t you?”  I’ll make a cynic out of him yet.  Even if they make the SuperBowl, remember: it’s a Sunday night game even in Miami.  Two thirds of the game will be played after dark.  If the Vikes make it, it will probably be reduced to the dullest play-by-play team money can buy and three cameras.  One for the game, one on the commentators and one for the goofy fans and all those injury insights and half time coaching profundities from the sideline.  “I’ve just talked to Coach Childress as he steamed by.  He says Merry Christmas and the Vikings are ‘questionable’ for the second half.  Well. actually, he texted me as he walked by.”  
Could they get anymore cell phone commercials in a game? 

But, hey, you can’t go by me.  The room is spinning and I just found out that Kevin and Pat Williams aren’t brothers, they’re a wall.  I’ll try to come up with something more illuminating before Christmas.  Maybe I’ll go out to the garage and dig out some of my favorite Christmas toys.  Back seems less frustrating than forward. 

Lil’ Ol’ Sioux Falls isn’t a big city despite the traffic on 41^st Street which isn’t bad if you’ve driven in any other big city.  New York isn’t a big city.  There are lots of metropoli that are equal in population or bigger around the world; lots of “villages” of 300 thousand. 

What really makes Sioux Falls sound like a big city is the weekly barrage of robberies and shootings and knifings, something we never used to have.  Sometimes as I ply the streets I wonder if I’m the only one in town not packin.’  In the old days, we had a couple of robberies a year, mostly convenience stores and usually all be one guy.  The series ended when he was finally caught.  It was usually a short series.  The exception was one robber who did so many of them we labeled him “The Balding Bandit” because the notable part of the robber’s description…the only thing that set him apart from anybody else…was his youthfully receding hairline.  He eventually was tripped up and died in prison. 

The robbery trend also used to pick up toward the end of the year, toward Christmas and when the weather got cold.  Stealing to buy Christmas presents, a real paradox. 

One thing that has changed dramatically is the number of easy targets.  The only pickins’ used to be convenience stores.  Today the video lottery emporiums are the most popular stop, drop and roll targets, bandits rolling off into the night with casino winnings they never could have scored on the machines. 

Murders and knifings?  They were virtually unheard of.  Any robbery or dispute that brought the cops kept us in news for months afterwards.  One time a new viewer from another part of the country…San Francisco, I think it was…sort of complained that we had no news, at least not like she was accustomed to, the “if it bleeds it leads” variety.

My only response, as a resident, was: “Yeah, and we kind of like it that way out here.”   

Again, ah, for the good ol’ days. 

One other note here.  The guy who claimed to have written the Hokey Pokey Dance...copyrighted a year before I was born....has died.  We all did that one in high school.  I thought he had died decades ago, but Robert Degen made it to 104 down there in Kentucky horse country.   The funeral was pretty normal.  They played his dance.  Everything was fine until they tried to close the coffin just as they got to the part of the song where "You put your right foot in, you put your right foot out..."  

I thought I would never get to use that old joke.  Okay, tasteless; hokey.  But gimme a break.  The guy did make it to 104.  If I make it that far, you can make all the jokes you want...if anyone even remembers me...for anything...except maybe this joke.