McShame

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I could not believe this:

McCain and his wife arrived at the La Crosse Center under heavy security, including Secret Service protection and officers from the La Crosse Police Department and La Crosse County Sheriff’s Department.

McCain stepped out of a silver Chevrolet Suburban at about 10 a.m. The motorcade — which followed a short route from the Radisson — included about 20 vehicles. McCain entered the La Crosse Center on the far south end of the building, using a Jay Street entrance.

Here is the route of the 20-vehicle motorcade:

Route of McShame's motorcade

Now it’s hard to see from this picture, but there is a walkway that leads from the Radisson’s second floor to the second floor of the La Crosse Center, and it’s not that hard to find your way to the South Hall from there. I’ve been on that path several times, so it shouldn’t be too hard for a security person to show him the way.

The following map (it’s rotated a bit less than 90 degrees from the photo above) shows how to get from the walkway on the upper right to the stage at the left. The cluttered nature of the map makes the route look more difficult than it actually is.

getting to the stage without a motorcade

Total walking distance: two blocks. Do we really want a president who can’t walk two blocks, and would prefer to drive TWENTY SUVs instead?

Transportation Liberation

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Save the Planet, Save Money, and Save Your Sanity by Not Driving

Hybrid vehicles and bio-fuels may help, but they are not the solution. Solving the global warming problem will take dramatic action, and becoming car-free is an action with a lot of impact.

Read on →

Chewed up and Spit Out

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We just read two very moving letters by Cindy Sheehan. The first, written this morning, was a message of disgust at the Dummycratic party and its inability to stand up to Emperor Bush and stop the war. Then as the day ground on, she apparently suffered from a lot of abuse from all directions, and threw in the towel on her activist efforts.

The political bureaucracy has done what it seems to be designed to do: it has taken another good-hearted person and worn her down to the point that she has nothing left to offer:

I am going to take whatever I have left and go home. I am going to go home and be a mother to my surviving children and try to regain some of what I have lost.

Please read both letters. There’s a lot written between the lines that this country needs to learn.

One Laptop per Child

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A friend and reader writes…

I was wondering what you think about the 60 Minutes report in case you missed it

This story has been circulating in the geek press for over a year now. It goes something like this:

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is developing a rugged and inexpensive laptop to be distributed to schools around the world, and their goal is to bring the machines’ cost down to 100 dollars apiece. Here is the Wikipedia entry on it. Mainstream America was introduced to the program by a 60 Minutes segment last weekend.

This project is Really Cool for a lot or reasons that weren’t discussed in this report. In a way, it resembles the “put a man on the Moon” project in its stimulation of innovation.

I like the way they’re getting power from hand-cranked generators. I like the use of Open Source software (Imagine if Micro$oft were writing the software for this: it would be expensive and impossible to understand). I like the networking scheme, where the computers all communicate with each other directly, rather than thru a router or a hub.

I worry about what will happen to all of these machines once they get old and worn out. Will they be refurbished or recyled? Or will they end up in dumps, adding to the burden of toxic e-waste? I hope this team is thinking about that.

It can be amazing what people can build, create, or invent once they are provided with adequate tools. That’s why food aid groups hand out things like shovels as well as food. There will be many surprising benefits to come from the spread of these tools of communication, education and invention.

St. Stupid Day Parade video

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Five years later.

Our first “published” video is now out on YouTube. (An iPod-compatible version can be downloaded here.) The St. Stupid Day Parade is an annual event put on by the First Church of the Last Laugh, and it’s a colorful costumed spectacle that mocks consumer culture and the corporate power structure in the heart of San Francisco’s financial district.

Speaking of podcasts, RoZ has been producing a music show for about six weeks now. It’s called Whirling Rainbow, and if you like interesting music that’s new to your ears, you should check it out.

20 inches, with more to come

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Looking at the picture in the previous post, taken early Saturday afternoon, I’m amazed at how little snow there is in the picture, relative to what it looks like now. By Sunday morning, the white canyon you see was filled back up with snow, and the guy with the snowblower only had enough endurance to make one pass down the block, clearing less than half the width of the sidewalk.

By the time I finished clearing the walk, there was nearly an inch of new snow on the spot where I’d started.

And they’re predicting that we get to go thru the same drill Wednesday and Thursday. Sigh.

A Saint Lives in Our Neighborhood

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sidewalk shoveled on our streetNone of this snow was there Friday afternoon. This is what our block looked like early Saturday afternoon.

The saint is the guy on the block with a well-running snowblower. We heard him go by at about 7 am. Most of the time, I get kinda cranky when someone is running noisy machinery that early on a Saturday morning. But I knew what he was up to, and went back to sleep with a feeling of intense gratitude.

This illustrates one of my favorite things about life in small-town Wisconsin: Neighbors look out for each other. Our lots are fairly narrow, so unless one lives on a corner, we are only responsible for about fifty feet of sidewalk. After a small storm, the first one out with the shovel usually clears the neighbor’s sidewalk as well as his/her own.

When the snow is a foot or deeper, clearing that fifty feet of sidewalk by hand is daunting. Mind you, it’s doable, but it’s not the trivial chore presented by lesser storms. But there always seems to be one person on every block with a well-run snowblower who finishes his fifty feet of sidewalk in about five minutes, and decides that it’s not that big of a deal for the well-oiled machine to do the entire block.

As it was, I spent about an hour re-establishing access to our back door, and carving a minimal path to the garage and the alley. So the saint down the street made sure nobody on the block would get fined by the city, but I was left with a lot of work to make our yard functional.

By the way, we woke up to about 12 inches. It let up long enough for the city to pile snowbanks four feet high between our houses and the street. As I write, the weather service has cancelled the Winter Storm Warning. Now we have a Blizzard Warning. By morning, that nice clean sidewalk should have another 10 inches, or the wind will replace everything we moved out of the way with snow drifts, or both.

So the most depressing thing is that tomorrow we get to repeat the shoveling we did today.

What it means so far

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Lightning. Thunder. And eight inches of snow in about five hours.

Never seen summer thunderstorm-type lightning in a snowstorm. Little rumbles, maybe, but not boom-booms like this.

The High Impact Winter Weather Event is far from over.

UPDATE: I was wrong about the eight inches in five hours. I went out with a ruler and measured it, and it was more like ten inches.