Vilsack, Pederson spells VP?

"From everything I hear, he's on the very short, short, short, short, short list" - Tom Harkin

It's a long, long way from that evening in 1997 when six of us showed up at the El Charro Mexican restaurant in Conesville to talk to this obscure state senator from Mt. Pleasant and his wife.

I became a Vilsacker that night and while I haven't been 100% happy, I've been happy enough.

As someone who believes in and practices the minutiae of grass roots get out the vote, I like having someone on the ticket who believes in that stuff. I'm remembering 1994, when Bonnie Campbell ignored the field operation and spent all her time and money on TV ads - and really ineffective ones at that.

The Vilsacks, on the other hand, know and appreciate the drudgery of phone banks and absentee ballot drives. The best yard sign plan I ever saw was written by Christie Vilsack.

I realize I'm sounding like one of those people who cares more about the courthouse than the White House - and I guess that's what I am. The interesting thing from my parochial perspective is: Vice President Vilsack makes Sally Pederson an incumbent governor before any 2006 primary. Chet Culver must have profoundly mixed feelings.

Naaah, it doesn't matter. It's gonna be Bill Richardson.

Double Secret Probation

Fire code violations and unsanitary conditions will force a University of Iowa fraternity to close next month - though the chapter's leader says the house is in good shape.

"I don't think that the house is in that bad of shape," said Daniel Kurtzman, Beta Theta Pi fraternity president. "Things are going to get a little bit dirty."



Hm - the place looks a lot like MY old house did! check it out

Part Butler and Part Buddy, Aide Keeps Kerry Running

The saga of Marvin Nicholson Jr., John Kerry's Body Guy:

He keeps little black books filled with the names and numbers of people Mr. Kerry meets; dials many of his telephone calls; helps select his neckties and opening one-liners; collects gifts from well-wishers; transports his leather briefcase, three hunter-green duffels and two navy suit bags; and, at night, often stays by his side until he is ready to go to sleep. Here in Youngstown on Tuesday morning, as rain threatened an outdoor rally, Mr. Nicholson had a large green-and-black umbrella at the ready...

I met this guy once back in the early days of Caucus 04. For those of you not used to the length of caucus cycles, that means a year and a half ago.

We chit-chatted amiably for a couple minutes and then he excused himself, explaining that he needed to get back to the candidate.

I let him go with one of Pete Clemenza's lines from The Godfather: "Take a walk around da neighborhood, do your job."

And he got it.

Ill-informed Hockey Geography Rant

I pay virtually no attention to pro hockey, what with not being Canadian and all. But I have as much right to an uninformed opinion as anyone else so here goes.

In tonight's big game the Tampa Bay Lightning defeated the Montreal Canadiens. There are so many things wrong with that statement.

First of all, nicknames should be plural, not conceptual. The only pro sports nicknames that should not end in an S are those ending in X (as in Sox). I'll give college a little more leeway. Fighting Irish is at least plural, but I never felt right about Crimson Tide.

But the bigger issue here, and this needs to be enshined in the Canadian constitution as soon as possible:

No hockey team should be located in any city in which it is never even theoretically possible to play hockey out of doors at some time in the year. The line should follow roughly the last Ice Age glaciation of 12,000 years ago.

Chicago? Fine. Philadelphia? Borderline. Denver? Well, the mountains make it OK but remember the Avalance is really the Quebec Nordiques.

But Atlanta? TAMPA BAY?!? MIAMI????

PHOENIX? What, do they use cacti for nets? What is Arizona doing with Winnipeg's team?

I blame this all on the trade that sent Gretzky from Edmonton to the LA Kings back in the late 80s. Then the Minnesota NORTH Stars move to Dallas and became the Stars, and Minnesota, which loves its hockey so much it should be annexed to Canada, wound up with an expansion team with a stupid non-plural name.

A semi-related issue is that the Stanley Cup finals end in June. I don't know if they play hockey in Australia, but if they do that's where hockey should be played in June.

This situation can only be resolved by a return to old-time hockey...

Let the circling Expos land at Dulles

I've been calling this one for years. The Beltway Boys want convenient baseball, and the Washington Expos - no, it has to, HAS to be the Senators - are the price of keeping the anti-trust exemption. George Will must be peeing his pants in excitement.

Somewhere Walter Johnson is smiling.

Of course, Peter Angelos and the Orioles may have other plans.

Speaking of Walter Johnson. I don't think he gets quite the glory the winningest pitcher of the 20th Century deserves. And the main reason is that he played for a team that is no more, in a city that has been without baseball for 30 years now.

Enough about the Big Train. Another Big Johnson - the Big Unit - whomped the Cubbies last night...

$50 Bill Gets Colorful, Hi-Tech Makeover

"'The new design is more secure than ever before. We believe it will be extremely effective in discouraging counterfeiters.'"

Hey! I didn't know Ginger Grant was on the $50 bill...

To the new owners of 714 Brookside Drive



I used to own this house. If you have any questions about it please feel free to call me and I’ll help you the best I can.

I’m sorry it is such a mess. You should have seen it four years ago when we moved in, expecting to stay here the rest of our lives. I’ll spare you the long story. Let’s just say things didn’t work out. Some of us are better off now, others are worse off.

A few things you should know.

You’ve probably already figured out that the carpets are ruined. We had too many cats. We loved them all but it was still too many.

There’s a wasp nest the size of a beachball in the playhouse/shed out back so be careful.

The fenced in area was a garden. We grew gigantic sunflowers there a couple years ago. There’s catnip everywhere – I transplanted a bunch to my new home to try to keep something positive from here. A few perennials and volunteers may still pop up. I suppose if you want you can tear it up and put plain old grass there. I hope you don’t. There’s also raspberries growing along the fence on the creek side.

Ducks like to come up into the yard and we always welcomed them with bread, corn, and assorted breakfast cereals. We’ve seen a few other critters too including possums, owls, and even a deer once.

The neighbors are nice. They put up with a lot from us and hopefully they will be happier with whoever eventually comes to live there.

My hope is that this will be a happier home for someone new than it was for us.

---

The actual sale this morning, by the way, was rather anti-climactic. No auctioneer, no dramatic scene, not even anyone there. The bank just faxed in its bid and that was that.

National Scoop the Poop week

I doubt Hallmark has a special card for this one...

but I did find a theme song

The return of Farmer John

After a year off I am going to have a garden again this year.

It seemed a shame last summer. Here I am, living on the best farm land on the planet, and I hadn't planted one seed, hadn't picked a single tomato. The year before I spent every free minute pickling and canning and freezing and harvesting.

I tried last year. Did the rent a city garden plot thing. Problem is I live on the far north side and the public garden is on the far south side. After one 35-minute bike ride with tools lashed to the side baskets, I called it quits.

I'd had a garden every year since 1994. Five different locations. One was along the side of my apartment parking lot: 20 feet long and 12 inches wide. Row of pole beans, row of peas.

This new spot is a tiny patch with four gigantic boulders and a big light post to work around, but it should work. I dug it up today - the soil looks a little weak but I'll work on it. Now let's see if the seeds I saved from the 2002 purple pole beans will sprout...

I've already got transplanted catnip growing all over Gaslight Village. You can't stop the stuff, it's a native weed! In a couple years it'll be everywhere. (Aside: Supposedly the reason Gaslight Village has all sorts of semi-wildflowers and interesting bulbs is that the city was after Old Man Black to mow. So he planted the stuff and said "NOW make me mow it.")

The Paul Westerberg Nickel?

The back of the new commemorative nickel is supposed to somehow honor Lewis and Clark. But instead it brings to mind the cover of that great 1987 Replacements Album Pleased To Meet Me.

I hope Paul Westerberg is getting royalties on the new nickel. That, and also on every hit the Goo Goo Dolls ever had.

Millions of new jobs?

A friend shared this story with me yesterday:

He was driving through a drive-thru at a McSomething place and engaging in conversation with a cheerful young woman, and somehow the conversation got around to her general overall perkiness. Then she dropped Da Bomb:

"Hey, I've got three jobs. I have to keep my pep up somehow."

There it is. The New Economy in one phrase. One car breakdown or week sick away from homelessness.

Want fries with that?

Lyric of the day

Want it in writing
I owe you nothing
Want it in writing
I owe you nothing

The Replacements

Denise

Columbine Five Years On: This one's for Denise

When I was a senior in high school, I didn't have a car. OK, I was a Geek. Picture Anthony Michael Hall in any John Hughes film, only without scripted dialogue. (Or you can picture Donna from That 70s Show if you prefer. I know I do.)

We weren't even called Geeks yet then, so we didn't even get the identity and solidarity of a name.

I rode up to school waaaaay too early in the morning with my dad the gym teacher, and in the afternoon walked myself either back home or to the grocery store where I was a bagboy, clean-scrubbed in a white shirt and a tie.

But lunchtime was a problem. We seniors had Senior Privileges, which basically meant open campus for lunch. Not having a car made the customary McDonald's run difficult, but a mighty SENIOR dare not be seen in the cafeteria for fear of looking Uncool. Even a Geek Senior is still a Senior.

Of course I was Uncool anyway. The harrassment mostly stopped after 8th grade but I was still awkward, trying desparately to fit in with people who wanted nothing to do with me. Right around this time Elvis Costello made an album that he wanted to call Emotional Fascism. (I was Officiallly Weird bacause I listened to it.) The phrase was perfect for High School USA circa 1981. My brother home-schools his son because of shit like that. He doesn't want my nephew's sweet little spirit crushed and tortured by an institution and a peer group that could care less.

Anyway, back to lunch. The only remaining alternative was The Shack.

The Shack was a well past its prime drive-in located just down the hill from school, about a two block walk. They had very salty fries, burgers with lots of onion, and root beer in an old fashioned paper carton with a clip on the top.

I went by myself because my regular friends (picture the geeks from Sixteen Candles. Or picture Molly Ringwald if you prefer. I know I do) Anyway, my regular friends had different free hours. And I kind of kept The Shack secret from them.

You see, The Shack was the hangout for The Dirtballs.

I'm ashamed that I ever referred to fellow human beings as "dirtballs." It's an evil, evil phrase, sort of like "Zero Tolerance". But that's what everybody called them, even the teachers, like it was a proper noun. Just like Butt-Head's given name was Butt-Head. Every school had the type, every school will: smoking cigarettes on the corner between metal shop classes, not good at sports (no matter how skilled you are, skateboards don't count), not good at class, not noticed at all.

The Shack was where the Dirtballs went to cut class. And into this mix of misfits walks The King Of The Dipshits (Molly Ringwald: "That's kinda cool...)

And to my amazement I met... human beings. I remember Conrad who drew amazing pictures, along with a lot of band logos. I talked with my... friends? Too strong a term. I talked with my warm acquaintances for endless lunch hours, talking about music, school, petty gossip, Normal Stuff, sharing our contempt for the mutual enemy of Geeks and Dirtballs: the Jocks.

See, the Jocks partied as much as the Dirtballs. They just didn't get caught, or they had enough mainstream social skills - I'm talking like a grownup now - that they could hide it. (Geeks didn't party. One of dad's jobs was to discipline Jocks who got caught at parties. This was a significant social disadvantage, in that it was widely assumed I was a narc. But Dad usually knew where the party was before I did.)

The Dirtballs and I saw through the hypocrisy and passed the ketchup.

They might have laughed at me behind my back, like the Jocks did. But I never FELT like they did, and that mattered.

But most of all I remember Denise.

She was a year behind me in school but the same age. (I'd skipped a grade back in the days before gifted classes, and I paid a big social price.) I'd been in classes off and on with her since elementary school but never really paid attention to her.

Denise was usually the only girl at The Shack but she didn't seem to be attached to anyone. I'd been in classes off and on with her since elementary school but never really paid attention to her. Denise wasn't the kind of person you would ask out on a Date. She was the kind of girl you would Hang Out With, or in today's terms Hook Up With. She was short and petite, with dark eyes and dark brown hair that was long and feathered back like they did in the 70s. Sometimes she wore big round glasses but usually not. She was blunt and articulate and a lot of times funny. I suppose she was pretty. But by definition there was no such thing as a Pretty Dirtball Girl so I didn't let myself acknowledge it.

The Shack had a jukebox. Denise used to play Alice Cooper and dance, turning slowly, her slim hips swaying in her faded jeans:

It's hot tonight
Too hot for talkin'
It's hot tonight
I sweat tonight
I sweat no sleeping
It's too hot tonight
Dogs are barkin'
Cats are screamin'
Streets are steamin'
Gods own heats the devil' demon
My turn tonight
To burn with fever
I burn tonight
I smoke tonight
I'm all on fire
It's damn hot tonight

I wondered what the smoke on her lips tasted like.

We all used to play the country songs on the jukebox and laugh at them, our own in-joke. Our favorite was "I'd Love To Lay You Down" by Conway Twitty. We'd sing along in mock country voices. To this day when I hear that song I think of Denise.

It started as an awkward necessity, sharing my meals with these people I had no business talking to. But before long I started forward to seeing Denise and the gang. I suppose I had what you would call a crush on her. But the social barriers between Geeks and Dirtballs were too great for me to Hang Out with her. I have no idea what she thought of me and I'll never know. She was just good enough to have lunch with, I guess.

I went to college. All my friends went to college, in my middle class world it was just assumed that's what you did next. She went to wherever it is Dirtballs go after high school: to work, to tech school, the military, to a party, I don't know. I just graduated and turned my back, or maybe the circumstances just changed and the happenstance that forced us together was done. Either way I never saw Denise again.

---

A few years later I was home from grad school on a break, reading the local paper. I saw a picture of a familiar face in a place it didn't belong.

Denise was killed in a car accident when she was 28 years old. She left behind a baby.

This is not my Great Lost Obsession. It's just a sad story. I don't mean it's sad simply because she died too young. Our story - me and Denise, young and alive - repeats itself year after year, decade after decade, generation after generation. People reaching out to each other in adolescent awkwardness and failing to connect, because their imagination is too small to fully reach past their differences. Eventually some of us get to a point where we can try to overcome the class divisions, the cultural expectations. But even then it can be too late. The wounds may be too deep, the moment may have passed, or in our case it's the Big Too Late.

And it's fresh in my mind today because of this anniversary and because I have a teenager of my own now.

I remember watching TV in the fall of 1999 when the kids went back to Columbine.

Some girl was giving a speech about how we should respect each other's diversity and differences.

The camera switched over to the crowd. Everyone was wearing matching WE ARE COLUMBINE T-shirts. Identical. Every kid.

Except for: the CHEERLEADERS.

Nothing had changed.

---

Last week a kid in Davenport took a gun to school. He wanted to scare someone who'd been bullying him.

Now this kid is in serious trouble. They're talking stuff like federal weapons charges. Zero Tolerance.

The bully is presumably still going to school.

Nothing has changed.

The right references Wellstone?!?

"Specter is facing Representative Patrick J. Toomey, a conservative who has attacked Mr. Specter as a Ted Kennedy liberal too supportive of abortion rights and the United Nations.

I represent the Republican wing of the Republican Party, Toomey said recently.

Mr. Specter has said Toomey is not far right, he's far out."

Toomey gets off the better soundbite, though Paul Wellstone is spinning in his premature grave. At least it made sense when Howard Dean borrowed it. "Far out" sounds faux-60's; I'm hearing it in a Marcia Brady voice. (Groovy!)

Joe Hoeffel awaits the winner...

The Troops Are Coming Home

Flag-draped coffins are secured inside a cargo plane on April 7 at Kuwait International Airport. Military and civilian crews take great care with the remains of U.S. military personnel killed in Iraq. Soldiers form an honor guard and say a prayer as, almost nightly, coffins are loaded for the trip home.

A lot of news organizations are not showing pictures like this one. It's awful but it needs to be seen.

Is Hy-Vee Hiring?

"Kurt Warner spent the first part of his career looking for an NFL job. And after winning two MVPs and a Super Bowl MVP in his first three seasons as the Rams starter, he's looking for work again. On Monday, Warner was informed by Rams coach Mike Martz that he will be cut after June 1..."

Dean as the 21st century Goldwater?

The parallels to today are startling, a sort of Dean bizarro world stuck on opposite day -- a Republican Party that was trying to be "Democrat-lite" and an establishment hostile to "outsider" forces. With Goldwater railing against his party's establishment and the special interests that controlled it. Throw in innovative use of tactics and technology (Goldwater pioneered the use of direct mail) and a crushing defeat, and you've got the Dean phenomenon...

It may seem obvious to note that Goldwater begat Reagan, but I'll note it anyway. I'll also note that my daughter loves the phrase "opposite day."

Please return the egg: Godzilla vs. Rainforest

I need to upgrade this thing for photos. You'll just have to follow the links and decide for yourself if the Iowa Environmental/Education Project (a/k/a The Fake Rainforest) bears a frightening resemblance to the Mothra Egg Incubator from the classic 1964 film Godzilla vs. Mothra.

I can see it now: we build the thing, and Godzilla emerges from the Iowa River and stomps it. Then he knocks over the hotel and convention center...

"He's headed down I-80! Evacuate the Coral Ridge Mall!"

Americans have NO appreciation for foreign film.

An automotive rock and roll cliche, or just great road music?

It seems like I spent the whole day today driving.

And I got in one of those moods where only one kind of music sounded right.

See, I always grossly overpack the music. A 15 block drive to the office takes 4 CDs. A run up to Cedar Rapids? At least ten. Weekend road trip to Wisconsin calls for a milk crate of 100.

Of course, I always play the same one or two for the whole trip, but the point is to have the wide selection AVAILABLE.

So Today I had maybe 20 CDs with me, but all I could play was Springsteen. Over and over and over.

Inspirational verse of the day #1

Blame it on the lies that killed us
Blame it on the truth that ran us down
you can blame it all on me Terry It don't matter to me now
when the breakdown hit at midnight there was nothing left to say
but I hated him
and I hated you when you went away

Now, I've never been to New Jersey. I suppose some parts of Cedar Rapids could PASS for Jersey if you look at `em just right. But anyway, that was today. Four lanes and Born To Run at top volume.

Inspirational verse # 2

In the tunnels uptown
The Rat's own dream guns him down
as shots echo down them hallways in the
night No one watches when the ambulance pulls away
Or as the girl shuts out the bedroom light

Outside the street's on fire in a real death waltz
Between flesh and what's fantasy
and the poets down here don't write nothing at all, they just stand back and let it all be
And in the quick of a knife
they reach for their moment and try to make an honest stand
but they wind up wounded, not even dead
Tonight
in
Jungleland

Both Inspirational Verses Of The Day end in gutteral Spring-screams. One of the things about great music of any kind: it doesn't hold anything back.

So walk tall, or baby don't walk at all.

Packers can give Vikings lumps of coal

"Thousands of beer-guzzling cheeseheads streaming across the border for a Christmas Eve football game at the Metrodome..."

"I'll be grouchy because I'm missing the game," said the Rev. Steven McKinley.

The Packers are 4-0 on Christmas Eve games the last 15 years.