It's late, so this will be a short entry. Like most other people, I stayed up watching TV Thursday night.
The debate? No, I didn't watch that. I was watching "The Streets of San Francisco" on Channel 59. Boy, that Karl Malden sure can act up a storm, can't he? Almost lifelike. And those car chases! So realistic! What a coincidence that every cop car is a Ford LTD, and every bad guy also drives a Ford LTD. It's almost as if promotional consideration had been paid by, say, Ford!
But seriously, folks, you're a great crowd. Yes, I watched it.
So, quick analysis: One candidate looked presidential, confident, in command and relaxed. The other one looked like a used-car salesman trying to sell a rusty Pinto to a guy who's drowning.
While one guy nodded, took notes, and listened with a thoughtful look, the other guy gripped the podium and pleaded with the crowd in frustration like a Baptist preacher in a room full of Catholics.
Substance-wise, there wasn't a whole lot of difference between what either one of them said. Terrorism? Bad. Nuclear proliferation? Bad. Iraq situation? Either bad and getting worse, or bad and getting better. Saddam Hussein? Bad. Osama Bin Laden? Bad.
Either one of them, frankly, is screwed come Nov. 3. One guy goes home, and the other one gets to clean up the mess in Iraq.
Luckily, as the President pointed out, we have Poland on our side. The President pounced on Kerry when he failed to include Poland's 2,500 peacekeepers who are fighting alongside U.S. soldiers and Marines in Iraq. I think that should solidly swing to the President's side the vote of many of the undecided members of the Polish War Veterans and Polish Falcons.
Personally, the debate convinced me of whom I'm going to vote for. My money is on the man who appeared calm, forceful and in command of the facts. This November, I'm voting for Jim Lehrer.
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It looks like a Propel Charter School will be opening Downtown in the Executive Building after all, reports Jennifer Eisel in The Daily News. The state Charter School Appeal Board this week overturned the McKeesport Area School Board's rejection of Propel's application:
Many of the charter school students figure to come from McKeesport, since Propel allows parents in the school district in which it is located to have first choice of sending their child to the facility. If there are spots available, enrollment would then by open to students in nearby school districts such as Duquesne, East Allegheny, Clairton, South Allegheny and Elizabeth Forward.
Eisel reports that Propel will cost those districts up to $6,000 for each student that attends the charter school; according to her story, McKeesport Area school district will set aside up to $1.4 million to cover potential losses. MASD expects to lose two to three students in every classroom through sixth-grade.
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There's no joy in Saintsville as the Expos slink out of town. The Montreal Gazette's editorial brings up several points that should resonate with Pirates fans (an endangered species these days if there ever was one):
For baseball is a numbers game outside the white lines, too: The payroll disparity between the Expos and New York Yankees was just $6 million U.S. in 1991, when the Yankees had a payroll of $27 million and the Expos $21 million and majority owner Charles Bronfman looked out onto the horizon of baseball's future and decided to sell his ownership stake. This year, the payroll gap is $142 million --- $183 million for the Yanks, just $41 million here. ...
Let's be frank. Making baseball work in Montreal was never easy from Day 1; the new economics just made things all that much more difficult. But Montreal is not unique. Other franchises are nearing the burnout stage, too.
Yeah, we're looking at you, McClatchy. Wait ... I know how to fix the Pirates! We need to build a new baseball stadium! Oh, wait, we already tried that.
I think the nation's capital is a fitting home for the Expos, which was cast off by its former owner so that he could scoop up the Florida Marlins, and then run into the ground by a consortium of other baseball team owners who had absolutely no interest in making the Expos competitive with their own franchises. What better metaphor is there for Washington, D.C., than importing a failed sports team that has spent the past three years operating in bad faith?
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In a similar Pirates-mourning vein, the always entertaining Eric Heyl had some great rhetorical questions of his own in a recent Tribune-Review column. He called it a "Jeopardy" style format, but I was thinking more about Carnac the Magnificent as I read it:
Answer: A local sixth-grader on the cusp of adolescence who probably doesn't follow baseball.
Question: Who is someone born in 1992, when the Pirates last had a winning season?
Answer: A base fare of $9 and a 12-seat minivan operating 90 minutes each weekday between Downtown and Oakland.
Question: What will the financially struggling Port Authority of Allegheny County's bus system soon consist of?
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To Do This Weekend: St. Elias Church, 4200 Homestead-Duquesne Road, Munhall, hosts a "vocal tribute to Frank Sinatra" Saturday evening. Tickets are $25 and include the show, food, beer and pop, and there will be casino-style games, including poker, slot machines and blackjack. Doors open at 6:30 p.m.; for more information, give a ring-a-ding-ding to (412) 461-5847.
Resurrection Church, Church Street off of Greensprings Avenue, West Mifflin, hosts a chicken Parmesan dinner from 12 noon to 6 p.m. Sunday. Dinner is $7 for adults and $3 for children.
I'm trying to get myself into the habit of taking the bus to work. Not because of any great hippie organic environmental save-the-whales vibe --- I do drive two V-8 powered barges, after all --- but because I have to pay to park, and I'm trying to save a couple of bucks here and there. (The rising price of gas to fuel those V-8 powered barges is also a factor in my decision.)
It's a two-bus ride to work; I have to take one of the "suburban" feeder buses for the first ride, and then switch to one of the radial buses that runs directly to Downtown Picksberg. That requires changing buses either at the transit center on Lysle Boulevard in Our Fair City or out somewhere along the side of the road.
Yesterday morning, during the first part of the journey, I had an entire 54-seat coach to myself for most of the 20-minute ride. (The second bus I caught into Pittsburgh was packed to the roof; it lacked only a yak and some chickens to look exactly like a commuter train in New Delhi.)
I can't imagine how it's cost-effective to run a 54-seat bus to pick up two people. Mind you, I appreciate the convenience of being able to walk to the bus stop, and the trip did save me parking fees and gasoline. But even if both I and the high schooler had both paid the full cash fare (I used a pass), we wouldn't have covered even half of the bus driver's wage for that trip, much less wear and tear and fuel on the bus.
Of course, running nearly-empty buses isn't cost-effective. The Port Authority is planning to increase the base fare about 75 cents (from $1.75 to $2.50), eliminate many suburban routes, eliminate weekend and holiday service, and cancel any service after 9 p.m. unless it can get a $30 million subsidy from the state or federal government.
Our Fair City stands to lose out big time. The Mon-Yough area has one of the region's largest concentration of suburban bus routes --- a relic of the old Penn Transit and Ridge Lines days --- and I suspect they would be among the first to get the axe. (Local service around McKeesport was already severely whacked once, several years ago, which left many buses running only from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. --- thus making them nearly useless for commuters.) All of the feeder routes in and around Homestead and Munhall would likely suffer as well.
The issue becomes whether you regard public transportation as a luxury item or a necessity. For someone like me, it's kind of a luxury --- I save wear and tear on my car and parking fees, and get to read the paper. A lot of conservatives argue that public transportation should be privatized for that reason --- they say that only car-hating hippie liberals ride the bus, and that autos help the economy. If public transportation is so necessary, they say, then let the private sector step in and run bus service.
They ignore their history. The private sector used to run bus service in Pittsburgh and nearly every other metropolitan area as recently as the 1960s. They couldn't make a profit at it --- which is how we ended up with Port Authority in the first place. And I don't see a lot of people wearing Birkenstocks and carrying Starbucks coffee on the buses in my neighborhood. I see a lot of single moms, minorities and the elderly, who either don't have cars or can't drive.
For the poor and senior citizens, who make up a large percentage of the Mon-Yough area, public transit is usually the only lifeline to work, the doctor, or the grocery store. (Fester had more to say on that angle a while ago, and he said it better than I can.)
As Jonathan Potts pointed out at The Conversation recently, there's probably some hyperbole in the Port Authority's announcement that's designed to force the state Legislature into helping it out; and there are plenty of places the agency could cut money (not extending Pittsburgh's par three, three-hole miniature subway to the North Shore, for one).
The Gospel According to Matthew says the poor "will always be with us." Conservatives want to get them off of the dole and into the workforce --- which is a good thing.
But if we want them to get to work --- or get to school so they can find something better than a minimum wage job, or get to health care so they're well enough to hold whatever jobs they find --- then we have to support public transit in some way, shape or form.
Which means the taxpayers end up paying one way or another, either directly in the form of food stamps and welfare, or indirectly by supporting public transit. Since public transit enables people to contribute to society, paying for it is probably a better bet than paying people to stay at home.
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It's the stingy man who winds up spending the most: In reality, yesterday's bus ride cost me $12. Since the bus driver and I were basically by ourselves, he struck up a conversation and we wound up shooting the bull during the entire ride.
I was in such a happy mood by the time he let me out that I left my umbrella on the seat and didn't remember it until the bus was out of sight.
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Maybe it's just not a good time to be in the transportation business in Western Pennsylvania. Travel agents are recommending that USAirways not buy any green bananas, according to U.S. News & World Report:
This time, U.S. Airways passengers realize it's not just bankruptcy as usual. Charles Wysor, president of Ambassador Travel in Pittsburgh, has been telling customers they should book flights with another airline if they're planning travel after January 1. Businesses in Pittsburgh, where U.S. Airways is the dominant carrier and offers nonstop service to 91 cities, are still flying the airline, hoping to help keep it afloat. But they're doing contingency planning. "I'm very concerned," says one corporate travel manager. She has analyzed alternative service to the 70 cities where her company typically flies and has come up with a mishmash of bad options that would normally require connections instead of the usual U.S. Airways nonstops. "I can't imagine what we'd do without them," she frets.
(In) November the Three Rivers will cease to exist, and the Pennsylvanian will begin a temporary extension to Chicago. Amtrak had extended the Pennsylvanian to Chicago in 1998 so it could carry mail, but ended that arrangement last year when it changed the train's schedule.
Early in March 2005, Amtrak will end the Pennsylvanian's extension to Chicago. The New York-to-Pittsburgh train's schedule will be adjusted in April. Ending Pittsburgh-to-Chicago service on the Three Rivers and the Pennsylvanian means several towns in Ohio will lose passenger-train service entirely, Amtrak said. ... In Ohio, cities including Youngstown, Akron and Fostoria will no longer have Amtrak service.
(Energy) inventories are being strained by one of the worst hurricane seasons to hit the United States since officials began keeping records in 1851. As those storms swept the Gulf of Mexico over the last five weeks, they delayed or stopped oil and gas production and transportation. With high oil prices and cleanup efforts continuing in storm-hit areas, AAA predicted gas prices could continue rising.
Every week for the past two months, I've gone to the grocery store near my house. My buddy calls it the "House of Rancid Lunchmeat," but I haven't gotten anything rancid from the deli.
I did get some detestable apples there recently (you've got your Golden Delicious, your Granny Smith, your Red Delicious, and your Detestable) and they were utterly inedible.
Some apples are good for eating raw; some apples are good for recipes. These were good only for throwing at mean old ladies' houses on Halloween. But even that wasn't solely the fault of the House of Rancid Lunchmeat --- the apples didn't look good when I bought them. Since I have that Depression-era hunkie hatred of throwing away food, I finally gave the rest of the bag to someone I know with a farm, so that she could feed them to her horses. For all I know, the horses wouldn't eat 'em, either. Horses are not known for their fear of throwing away food; very few of them could be considered "thrifty."
I wonder who the horses gave the apples too? The pigs? They'll eat anything. I don't think they have pigs on her farm, though ...
Where was I? Ah, yes, in the middle of a story that's going nowhere, and which has absolutely no payoff. You may as well just go somewhere else now, because it's all downhill from here.
Anyway, every week I go to the House of Rancid Lunchmeat and write a check, and every time the cashier has to go to the office to get it approved, because the House of Rancid Lunchmeat only has one check approval machine. And since there's usually a line of people buying lottery tickets at the office, I wait at the checkout line patiently while the people behind me think of new and interesting ways to kill me with produce and things they can snatch from the displays near the cash register.
(I can see the scene at the coroner's office now: "How do you think they got a National Enquirer way up there? And check out this picture of Barbra Streisand on the cover! Did you know she's gotten heavy?")
This week, the cashier looked at me and said, "Have you applied for a check-cashing card?"
I said, "No, would that make this easier?"
She said, "Oh, my, yes! I wouldn't have to go to the office." And she handed me an index card to fill out.
"You know, you're the first person to tell me this, and I've been coming here for two months," I said. "Thank you."
I resisted the urge to turn around and tell the people fuming in line behind me, "See? It's not my fault!"
Good thing, too, because by now they were building a effigy out of Juicy Fruit PlenTPaks and preparing to set it on fire with blister-packed Scripto lighters.
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Who the heck was Granny Smith, anyway?
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Subdivided Bob is "nebby"; a reader helps him track the etymology of the word. It's better'n goin' to a liberry an' at!
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The weekly newspaper in Crawford, Texas --- the small town where President Bush has his ranch --- has endorsed John Kerry.
Can you imagine how shaken the President must feel to learn that the 425-circulation Lone Star Iconoclast has gone over to his opponent? I can see him now, with his head in his hands. He turns to Karl Rove and says, "My God, if we've lost the Iconoclast, we've lost Prairie Chapel Road and the Tonkawa Falls RV park."
The Iconoclast's surprise endorsement is expected to have a wide-ranging impact on absolutely no one. Except perhaps on the Iconoclast:
At the Yellow Rose, one of a handful of businesses that have opened since Bush bought the ranch while he was Texas' governor, manager Teresa Bowdoin rolled her eyes when a reporter asked if she sold the paper at the store. "I'd just as soon burn it," she said. "I understand it's a free world, but sometimes I feel like they're shoving the free world down our throats."
Bowdoin said several local business owners had talked about pulling their advertising from the paper because of the endorsement. She said the Iconoclast was hurting itself by opposing the man who had brought fame and economic growth to town. "We'll never advertise with them again," she said.
Computer problems prevent much in the way of blather from these quarters today. My modem decided to go "piff!" which makes it difficult to upload items to the server. ("Piff!" is a technical term meaning that it stopped working without any apparent warning.) I did attempt to fix the modem, but banging it off of the edge of the desk didn't help.
If I can't upload my screedy rantings and inflict them on tens, if not dozens, of people, then what good are they? If a blog falls in the forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
(No, but it would be a good start, I can hear you muttering.)
Now, I get to dig out the 14.4 modem --- which will be like draining Lake Erie with a bendy straw. In the meantime, why not check out some of these fine blogs and Web publications?
Other things that regularly catch my eye on the 'net include Rip Rense's The Rip Post and Eric Zorn's Notebook.
And apologies to Bill Watterson for stealing (and re-wording) today's headline. It's not imitation, it's a homage, I swear.
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A few quick hits of news: The very nice family from whom I bought the sleek, gray Mercury one year ago was almost wiped out in the flooding, reports Mike Bradwell in the Observer-Reporter:
At Community Motors in Canonsburg, owner Joe Mastrangioli spent last week talking with an insurance company. But as a new week began, he was uncertain how much money he would recover for the 150 new and used cars that were lost in the Sept. 17 flood.
The flood had the potential of being particularly devastating to car dealers, who carry inventory in the millions of dollars. Mastrangioli, who has one insurance carrier for his new-car stock and another for used vehicles, said Friday that he is disputing the money he was offered for the new cars.
He said he also learned that some "business interruption insurance" he purchased was canceled because his dealership's damages were caused by a flood. The coverage was to provide money to pay employees if the business was forced to temporarily shut down, he said.
The weekend is a blur already. I spent Saturday screwing around with the sleek, gray Mercury, which looks like it's about to spit up an alternator after just 65,000 miles. The last Mercury used to cough out alternators at an alarming rate, too. You'd think that after 100 years of automaking, they'd be able to get little things like, say, electricity right. "Quality is Job One," eh? Well, curse you, Bill Ford Jr.!
Sunday I spent catching up on my reading. And my sleeping. I've decided that sleeping is my favorite hobby, and that like Ralph Wiggum, I'm very good at it. Go with your strengths, that's my motto.
Anyway, on Sunday I finished two books about the late nineteeth century and early twentieth. One was Vincent Curcio's enormous (700 dense pages) biography of Walter P. Chrysler, who founded --- that's right, Chevrolet. No, not really. Called Chrysler: The Life and Times of an Automotive Genius, the emphasis is really more on the times rather than Walter Chrysler's life.
Occasionally, Curcio detours from Chrysler's biographical details to make long excursions into American economics and the creation of the automobile industry. This helps to put Chrysler's work into context, but I suspect part of the reason that Curcio did it was because there wasn't a whole lot of source material about Walter Chrysler to draw upon. He died in 1940, and much of what was written about him before his death was vetted by the Chrysler Corporation's PR department. Then, too, he labored in the shadow of true pioneers like Henry Ford and Billy Durant, who were infinitely more colorful than Chrysler, and thus had contemporary biographers who were only too happy to leave reams of source material.
Thus, from Curcio's book, the best we can come away with is the impression that Chrysler was hard-working and hard-drinking, that he cheated on his long-suffering wife occasionally, and he had a talent for picking excellent engineers and designers. And that's about it. Walter Chrysler wasn't a radical visionary, he was a plodder; and he came to the auto industry fairly late, so he wasn't much of an innovator. These aren't bad qualities, mind you --- his methodical nature gave him the fortitude to persevere through numerous setbacks, and his late entry into the business allowed him to learn from other people's mistakes. As it was, his Chrysler Corporation, which he created from pieces of foundering Maxwell Motors, quickly leaped from the back of the pack to near-parity with General Motors and Ford, where it has stayed ever since.
And Chrysler had a Zelig-like ability to keep popping up around the big names in the industry --- perhaps he wasn't as colorful as Henry Ford or Billy Durant, but he knew them well. In fact, when Durant fell on hard times, Chrysler and other slipped him money to keep him afloat. Chrysler began his career as a railroad mechanic; and ground his way through several jobs and worked his way up to railroad management.
He made friends throughout the industry, and most importantly, kept them. When the American Locomotive Co. was looking for someone to take over their failing Pittsburgh Works, located on the North Side, an executive decided to give Chrysler a shot at turning it around. He did; and when that same executive, who also held a position on the board of directors at General Motors, needed someone to help stabilize GM, he thought of Chrysler again. Chrysler never looked back.
During his time in Pittsburgh, Chrysler and his family lived up in Bellevue Borough, where he regularly drove around the North Hills in a Stevens-Duryea touring car. According to Curcio, his neighbors on Seville Place --- now North Harrison Avenue, just off Lincoln --- remembered him fondly for years after.
Curcio also has several interesting anecdotes about the construction of the Chrysler Building in New York --- which was financed by Walter Chrysler himself, not the Chrysler Corporation --- but overall, this is not a book to be recommended to the casual reader. Also, I'd have enjoyed more images.
The other book I finished was The Devil in the White City by Eric Larson, a heavily-romanticized account of the construction of the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago interwoven with the story of a serial killer named H.H. Holmes. This book is very accessible to the casual reader, even if ... ahhh ... no. I'm not going to review it, because I read it as part of a book club I belong to, and I don't want to blab all my thoughts just yet.
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Billy Durant, by the way, is the most intriguing character in the entire Chrysler book. Durant was a salesman and huckster who in the early 1900s, bought a whole bunch of small car companies (mostly using other people's money) and merged them into General Motors. He nearly gained control of Ford Motor Company, too. The people who had loaned Durant the money became alarmed at him reckless spending and pushed him out of the company.
So Durant borrowed some more money, created a car company named for French race car driver Louis Chevrolet, and used it to purchase General Motors again and install himself back as chairman. Then he began buying up a bunch of small auto parts suppliers --- including the predecessors of AC and Delco, which are still part of GM --- until he got pushed out of GM again.
Durant --- do you see a pattern here? --- borrowed some more money, purchased a bunch of small car companies, and created Durant Motors, which he intended to become as big as GM. (In fact, he tried to take control of GM a third time.) But his luck ran out --- the small companies he grabbed this time didn't have the agglomeration of talent that GM had, and Durant Motors went bankrupt during the Depression.
Rather than a biography of Chrysler, I'd love to see a book about Billy Durant --- or maybe a movie. I'm not sure who would play Durant --- Robert Preston in the movie The Music Man comes to mind.
I'm also not sure who'd go to see it; me and Durant's family, I guess.
There's more about Durant here, plus information about the short-lived Durant car. I also love the Durant song. What deathless lyrics: "I wanna drive a Durant. I wanna see if I can't ..."
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In other business, what genius decided that men should wake up early every morning and --- bleary-eyed, groggy and half hungover --- scrape their faces with sharp scraps of steel? I had to plaster practically an entire roll of toilet paper to my face.
Jimmy Johnson of "Arlo and Janis" has the same problems, I see.
Brooke McEldowney's "9 Chickweed Lane" was good on Saturday, too --- in fact, I've had the same conversation with my own grandmother (though my response was not quite as witty by half).
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I've long suspected that no one reads this Web page. Either I'm correct, or all of you folks are too polite to point out that I never answered the trivia question I posed on Wednesday. Namely, which infamous radio show was sponsored by Rexall Drug Stores?
Actually, Rexall sponsored several shows, but the only one that might be considered "infamous" was "Amos 'n Andy." By the time Rexall signed on as the sponsor in the late 1940s, "A 'n A" were already considered "politically incorrect," though they'd survive as a networked program on radio into the 1960s. This ad from 1954 --- the dawn of the civil rights movement --- is nothing short of stunning.
Yogi Berra was right; nostalgia ain't what it used to be.
And until tomorrow, good health to all from Rexall!
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