Guilty

I've been feeling increasingly guilty about neglecting my Cincinnati son and his family lately.
We haven't seen them since Christmas and I know that my granddaughter Lisa is growing and developing at an amazing rate. She'll be 2 on May 30.
Steve called yesterday to ask about dirtbike training for a 16-year-old neighbor kid. I took him and his brother Sean through the Northern Illinois University trail riding course when they were in their teens. It was based at a campground near Hart, Mich. and consisted of about 5 days of intensive training in the art of riding sand and mud, threading a bike down a single-track trail where the trees are closer together than the handlebars are wide and surmounting logs and other obstacles, culuminating in a couple of days of riding a great trail system through the Manistee National Forest.
Sadly, the course is no longer offered. But the Motorcycle Safety Foundation, whose beginning RiderCourse I taught for 10 years, has created a dirt riding course and it's offered in Cincinnati.
So I e-mailed him the contact info on the dirt riding course and he sent me a couple of great photos of Lisa that he shot minutes after we got off the phone. Here's one of them.

Weak links

You don't have to be smart to work at a polling place on election day.
I've seen that truth borne out time and time again in my newspaper career.
And yesterday, was no exception.
My county used state-of-the-art touch-screen voting machines for the first time in the May 2 primary. It made voting a breeze and should have made the final tabulation even faster and easier than the previous computerized system.
The county clerk said she hoped to have all of the votes tallied within 90 minutes of the 6 p.m. closing of the polls.
But she apparently had forgotten about the weak links in the election process.
Despite having attended a training session that covered all aspects of operating the new equipment, poll workers in several precincts shut down their voting equipment improperly, not giving the computers time to write the results to a disc. As a consequence, it was impossible to upload the digital voting data to the master computer in the clerk's office at the courthouse. Fortunately, the machines generate a paper backup.
But that meant the numbers had to be manually read out and typed into the master computer.
I hung around the courthouse until 10:30 p.m. When I called about 11:30 p.m., I was told it would be at least another hour.
I'm reminded of the time when a neighboring county introduced computerized voting machines back in the early 1990s. The county clerk, who runs the election process, proudly boasted that she would have the votes tallied by 8 p.m.
But that was based on the assumption that the poll workers would be quick about packing up their equipment and getting the data modules to the courthouse as soon as possible.
The last precinct straggled in around 9 p.m.
Their excuse?
Their polling place was in a church and the ladies of the church insisted on feeding them dinner after the polls closed.
Nobody said democracy is perfect. It's just better than any of the alternatives.
When the results were finally posted this morning, our friend Ken Campbell had won a resounding victory in a three-way race for the Republican nomination for county sheriff. Ken was clearly the best qualified. He's one of the guys who ran the combat pistol course I took a year or so ago and is also an instructor at Jeff Cooper's Gunsite firearms training facility in Arizona. He got 60% of the vote with the other two guys receiving only about 20% each.
In this heavily Republican county, the GOP primary nomination is tantamount to election, since the Democrats seldom put up candidates for the November contest.
I've never had a political candidate's sign in my yard, largely because my previous life as a newspaper reporter required me to at least give the impression of impartiality, but I made an exception this time and stuck a big blue Ken Campbell for Sheriff sign out there.
I guess I need to check Ken's website to see if we need to turn in the sign or hang onto it in case there is a Democrat candidate in the fall election.

What about Bob?

Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour program debuted this morning on XM satellite radio.
I'd marked my calendar and made a point of being tuned to XM Channel 40 Deep Tracks to catch it at 10 a.m.
I'm not sure what I expected. I guess I hoped for something more intimate and self-revelatory. But that's my problem, not Dylan's.
He strung together an hour of music on the theme of "weather," starting off with Muddy Waters and running the musical gamut through the Staple Singers, Judy Garland, Dean Martin and my personal favorite weather-related song, Frank Sinatra's "Summer Wind." He also threw in a lot of musical trivia and details, like how "Walking in the Rain" led to the release of the imprisoned black musicians who introduced it and reminding me that Johnny Mercer wrote the lyrics to "Summer Wind."
For awhile there, I had to keep reminding myself that I wasn't hearing Tom Petty's XM show, although Dylan sounded a bit more self-conscious than Petty.
All things considered, I thought it was a pretty good first effort. It was interesting to hear Dylan in this role and I hope he loosens up a bit.

Pete Report

Pete's home from the vet and recuperating from his ordeal.
I picked him up a little after 3 p.m. and he insisted on lying across my lap for the drive home. Ever try to drive a 5-speed, 2-seat Honda del Sol with a six-month-old Aussie across your lap? Shifting was a bit of a challenge, but we managed.
And, yes, I was right about the cause of our phone problems.
The repairman found Pete's gnawing had damaged one of the phone wires going into the junction box outside the back door.
At least it made for an easy fix. He was only here about 10 minutes.
Pete spent a couple of hours lying next to me on the couch, dozing and whimpering occasionally while I watched TV.

Trust

Pete’s at the vet getting neutered and I’m sitting at home feeling very guilty.
Not because of the decision to neuter – the long-term benefits far outweigh the negative aspects – but because of the terror he must be experiencing.
He has a reasonable expectation that Maria and I will protect him from harm and this procedure, however beneficial, represents a betrayal of that trust.
He looked genuinely alarmed when I handed his leash to the vet’s assistant and left him with her in the examining room.
I keep thinking of the John Belushi quote from “Animal House:” “You fucked up. You trusted us.”

Another Pleasant Valley Sunday

Like I said eariler, something is always breaking or failing or wearing out around here.
Today, it’s our telephone line. We have no dial tone and are receiving no calls.
Oddly, though, our DSL internet connection that uses the same phone line, is working fine.
I’ve found a few places where Pete, the Aussie, has chewed on phone cords – specifically the cordless kitchen phone and the lines running to the box outside the back door – so he is, of course, a suspect.
The phone company suggested I sign up immediately for their line protection program, which involves a $3.50 monthly charge and a $25 up-front fee, noting that when the phone guy shows up tomorrow it would otherwise be a minimum $50 charge, plus labor.
I kinda like not getting phone calls on a Sunday. It’s 6:15 p.m. and on a normal Sunday we would have heard from Maria’s mother, her daughter (multiple times) and both of her two brothers. Sprint’s digital cellular service is weak here, so our cell phones are useless inside the house, except up in the attic. If I want to use my cell phone from home, I usually go out to the back yard to get a signal.
We took Pete up to Petsmart for puppy school this afternoon. The young 20-something woman with a fuzzy brown puppy who usually sits to our left in the puppy training corral was there in her usual stiletto-heeled sandals and high-maintenance look. She remembered that Maria is a newspaper editor and started jabbering about a photographer friend who was getting divorced from his wife and who needed a job. At the same time, her puppy was entangled in a vicious fight with another dog and the instructor and other dog’s owner were trying to separate them. She, of course, was completely oblivious to this little drama until the instructor – down on her knees in the middle of the fray, yanked on the girl’s slacks leg and said, “Hey. Would you please control your dog?”

She, of course, took offense and defended her dog with a lame, “Poor puppy. He doesn’t know any better.”
Those of us who witnessed it instantly recognized that we had just gotten a preview of how she will inflict her misbehaving children upon an innocent public if and when she becomes a mother.
During the mid-class potty break in the mulched area to the side of the store, she confided to Maria that she thinks the instructor doesn’t like her and muttered darkly about complaining to the management because she paid “good money” for this course.
I cringe whenever I hear that expression. Ever hear of “bad money?”
Christ! What a self-absorbed twit.
Her dog’s name is Amos and I’m tempted to start calling him Anus just to tweak her up.

Hey, Kids! What time is it?

That used to be how Buffalo Bob Smith opened the Howdy Doody show on Saturday morning TV.
I recently rented a DVD with 4 episodes just to refresh my memory about that cultural icon of the 1950s - the show ran from 1947 to 1960. It was a struggle to get through all four episodes and the only thing that kept me engaged was the cultural anachronisms like the gravel-voiced Chief Thunderthud and the bizarre ADD/HD behavior of Clarabelle the Clown and the commercials in which Smith told kids to ask their moms to buy Wonder Bread and Hostess Twinkies.
But I bring up that opening line today because I just noticed, for about the 10th time in the last few weeks, that my Windows XP (SP2) refuses to recognize that Indiana is observing Daylight Savings Time.
For many years, certainly since the Uniform Time Act of the 1960s, Indiana and Arizona were the only states that did not observe Daylight Savings Time. When the rest of the country fiddled with its clocks to "spring ahead" an hour in the spring and "fall back" an hour in the autumn, we dwelt in the Land that Time Forgot and did nothing. Consequently, our neighbors in Ohio and to the east fell into step with us in the colder months and the folks from Illinois to western Kansas were in synch with us in the warmer months.
Our new governor, Mitch Daniels, decided this was somehow hampering Hoosier commerce with customers in other states - I never could understand why - and persuaded the Legislature to put us on DST starting this year.
But the folks at Microsoft apparently haven't gotten the word. They reach out and tweak my Windows XP with updates on a regular basis, but they haven't gotten around to addressing the time change issue.
So when I glanced at my computer clock in the bottom right corner of my monitor a few minutes ago, it read 10:35 a.m., when it was actually 11:35 a.m.
I can't imagine than no one from Indiana has e-mailed them about this issue, but just in case, I think I'll suggest they fix it.

Money Pit Redux

The downside to having a lot of stuff is that, sooner or later, all of it is going to cause problems.
Today's problem list is topped by the clothes dryer. We have a washer-dryer combo - washer on the bottom, dryer on the top. I had a splendid one that I paid $1,000 for when I lived in my condo in Indianapolis, but when we moved into this house in 2001, Maria insisted on bringing along her own washer and dryer, despite my predictions that they would not fit into our half-bath/laundry room.
So I included my washer-dryer in the condo sale.
Of course, when it came time to move her appliances into the laundry room, guess what. They were too big. So we ended up giving them to her Amish brother and paid about $1,000 for another combo unit.
A couple of weeks ago, the washer unit started making a horrible screeching sound on final spin. So I called the appliance repair guy. Naturally, we couldn't get it to screech while he was here. He examined the drive belt and pronounced it sound and went away after charging me $65.
Early this week, the dryer started making a scraping noise like a piece of metal was stuck between the drum and its housing.
So I called the appliance guy again and now I'm waiting for him to show up and take more of my money.
Next on the list is the pair of MotoLites mounted on the front brake calipers of my BMW K1200GT motorcycle. They're halogen auxiliary driving lights that I added in the interest of (a.) being more conspicuous in the traffic mix and (b.) being able to see better at night. I discovered last night that they aren't working.
That forced me to finally make an appointment at the nearest BMW dealership - 100 miles away in Savoy, Ill. - for the long overdue 24,000-mile service. I'm on their schedule for 9 a.m. May 23, so let's pray for good weather that day.
Third is our 2002 Subaru Forester, which needs a new catalytic converter. The "check engine" light has been on for nearly a year because the electronic sensors don't like the information they're getting from the exhaust system. The techies at Subaru say it's not a crisis and we won't hurt anything by driving it, but eventually we'll see a degradation of performance and have to pony up the $1,100 or so for a new catalytic converter.
Close behind is my 1994 Honda del Sol, which is waaaaaaay overdue for a new timing belt ($600). The owner's manual says timing belts should be replaced every 60,000 miles. My car has 185,000 miles on the odometer and is still on the original timing belt. Clearly, I'm on borrowed time and it could fail any day.
And I almost forgot about the construction crew scheduled to work on my roof tomorrow. We've had roofers chasing a leak for more than a year and finally we think we have a correct diagnosis.
Seems the bozos who did our current roof did a mostly okay job except they didn't get the flashing right around the main chimney. This made it possible for wind-driven rain to come through our bedroom and bathroom ceilings.
The work tomorrow, which is estimated to cost us $1,800, will correct that problem and also remove an old unused chimney that has served as a point of entry to our kitchen for birds on at least three occasions and also admits minor amounts of rain. This, obviously, is must-do stuff considering how much damage continued rain infiltration could do.
Sometimes I think I retired a bit too early.

Cleaned up

Dressed up... sorta, for a Chamber of Commerce awards dinner. At least I'm not wearing a BMW motorcycle t-shirt.

Eagle Watch

If you have a good broadband internet connection, check out www.infotecbusinesssystems.com/wildlife
It's a realtime webcam of a bald eagle nest in British Columbia where the eggs are set to hatch any time now.
Thanks to my ATO Fraternity brother Dave Knight for this one.

It's for your own good, Pete

Pete, out for a car ride.
Our 6-month-old Aussie, Pete, has a rendezvous with destiny on Monday next.
Pete is going to the vet to get neutered.
I'm reminded of the Gary Larson cartoon of the dog with the smug smile on his face telling the family cat that he (the dog) is going to get "tutored."
As a male, I have a very negative visceral reaction to this business of making my little friend Pete into a eunuch.
He loves me and he trusts me and this is how I pay him back. It seems like betrayal on a horrific scale.
But the vet and others who know about dogs tell me I'm really doing Pete a favor. Male Aussies who aren't neutered have a very high risk of testicular cancer. Also, the overwhelming majority of dogs who get hit by cars are un-neutered males out looking to get laid.
So the best way to assure that Pete will have a long and presumably happy life with us is have him neutered.
I hate it, but I guess it's got to be.

Getting Malled

Shopping, shopping, shopping...
God! How I hate shopping.

The dawn patrol

Got up at 6 a.m. and left home in semi-darkness to make an 8 a.m. dental appointment some 50 miles south of here on Indy's southside.
I had allowed for rush hour traffic that didn't materialize, so I arrived in time for a quick McDonald's breakfast. Took a chance on the bacon, egg and cheese McGriddle sandwich. Gack!
Wrapping blueberry pancake-ettes around bacon, egg and cheese is not my idea of a pleasing taste combination.
Also, what's up with the "Let us add the cream and sugar" campaign with their supposedly deluxe coffee? I think they were losing their ass on sweetener and creamer excesses and decided to cut their losses by controlling the stuff, while making it look like an added service.
Anyhow, I think I need to find a dentist closer to home. I wonder how many I passed on my way to my current dentist...

No cake for Adolf

Today is Adolf Hitler’s birthday.
He would have been 117 if he were alive today.
When I was a kid, the pulp magazines of the time were full of speculation that Hitler had escaped from Berlin during the last days of the Third Reich and was hiding out in South America or maybe Africa or Southeast Asia. The barbershop I went to as a kid had a subscription to Police Gazette, a smarmy rag that wasn’t all that different from the stuff you see at the supermarket checkout counter.
A lot of writers made a pretty good living cranking out stories about how Hitler and Martin Bormann and Dr. Josef Mengle were skulking around somewhere in the bush, having been spirited out of Europe by an underground network of Nazis and Nazi sympathizers.
Now we know that Hitler and his new missus did themselves in down in the Fuhrerbunker and their burned bodies were discovered by the Russians. There is supposedly some pieces of Hitler’s charred skull deep in the archives of the Kremlin.
Forensic evidence likewise finally determined that Martin Bormann was killed while trying to break out of Berlin.
Mengle, it turns out, was the only one of the three to actually make it out of Germany and Europe, hiding out in Argentina until his death in 1979 while swimming.
But even if Germany hadn’t lost the war, Hitler was doomed. Research of his medical records indicates he was in the final stages of syphilis, probably contracted as a young man in Vienna or perhaps as a solder in World War I.
So he only made it a few days past his 56th birthday.

Duty

I just finished Duty by Bob Greene, the Chicago Tribune columnist.
It's a memoir about Greene's father, who raised his family in Columbus, Ohio. And it's about Paul Tibbets, another Columbus resident, who happens to be "the man who won World War II."
Tibbets was the commander of the 509th Composite Group and the pilot of the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
Greene's father, Robert Greene, also served in World War II, holding the rank of major and fighting in Italy.
The book is about Greene's effort to know his late father - to understand his dad's life and the impact the war had on it. His conversations with Tibbets yielded a series of newspaper columns and grew into an ongoing friendship. He had lingering questions he never got to ask his father, so he poses them to Tibbets - things like how today's sexually liberated America squares with the morals and standards his generation professed and what's become of civility and good manners in public.
He also probes Tibbets' feelings about committing what was at the time the single most violent act in the history of mankind and whether incinerating Hiroshima troubles his conscience.
It's a book that deserves a wide audience, especially among those who question the rightness of Harry Truman's decision to use atomic weapons to end the war.
Tibbets' answer, echoed by countless soldiers who would have had to invade Japan, as well as by many Japanese, is that Truman and Tibbets did the right thing.
Tibbets' mission was a factor in the lives of most of the people I know - certainly those who count American soldiers, sailors or airmen among their ancestors.
That includes me. Had there been no war-ending atomic attacks, my first father-in-law, an Army captain in the 144th Field Artillery Group, would almost certainly have been shipped from Europe to the Pacific to participate in the invasion. He wrote to his wife on V-E day that he expected to be ordered to the Pacific soon. Had he been one of the predicted hundreds of thousands of casualties, my first wife would not have been born in 1946. And, while I may have fathered two sons with another woman, they would not be the two fine young men I call my sons today. And my granddaughter, had she been born, would have a different heritage.
Greene writes about a Memorial Day weekend trip he took to Branson, Mo., with Tibbets, his navigator and his bombardier and their wives. One evening, they were guests of a Japanese-born violinist - now an American citizen and country music star (yeah, go figure). The entertainer tells Tibbets he and his family lived near Hiroshima at the time of the attack and afterward fled into the mountains.
He said his father told him that if the war had continued "all would have died;" that his father had said the end of the war spared the lives of men, women and children all over Japan.
And he thanked Tibbets for his role in ending the war.
Tibbets turned 91 in February. At the time of the writing of Greene's book, he was still driving - a Toyota - and enjoyed dining at Bob Evans restaurants.
He still makes occasional public appearances. I had the honor of shaking his hand at a militaria show in Louisville, Ky., a few years ago.

Congressman Steve Buyer

I had a pleasant conversation with my Congressman today.
Rep. Steve Buyer, R-Ind., was back in Indiana's Fourth Congressional District checking in with constituents and his office arranged for my wife, who is editor of a medium-sized daily newspaper, to meet with him.
I was also invited along because Steve has an interest in the Patriot Guard Riders.
Even knowing that, I was a little surprised when he thanked me profusely for my involvement in the PRG and for what we do to honor U.S. military personnel who die in the service of their country.
I'd met Steve a time or two before at political functions. He has an easy manner and comes across as an old friend rather than a politician.
He said he's working on a bill, similar to the law recently passed in Indiana, that would shield the families of our war dead from the insults of those would would show up at funerals to demonstrate for any religious or political purpose.
Earlier this year, the Indiana General Assembly passed a bill making it a felony to disturb the peace at a funeral. Further, the bill requires any protestors to remain at least 500 feet from a funeral. It was immediately signed into law by Gov. Mitch Daniels, just in time to protect the family of a Kokomo soldier.
Members of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kans., had expressed intentions of demonstrating at the Kokomo kid's funeral but they never showed up.
Likewise, they were absent from the funeral of an Indianapolis soldier last week.
Buyer's bill would pertain to demonstrations on federal land, such as Arlington National Cemetery and other military cemeteries.
He said he hopes to get it through Congress and on President Bush's desk for signature in time for Memorial Day.

For Spc. Antoine McKinzie

With the PGR.

First PGR mission

I finally made a Patriot Guard mission today.
Fellow Indianapolis BMW Club member and fellow K1200GT rider Harold Patterson and I joined about 150 other riders - mostly Harley-Davidson guys - to shield the family of an Indianapolis soldier from the wackos from Topeka.
Actually, we never saw the protesters and I'm waiting for the evening TV news to see if they even showed up.
For me, the highlight of the day was the moment when we were all standing at attention, saluting the funeral procession as it headed south on Zionsville Road from the Pike High School Performing Arts Center and the car carrying the soldier's parents came by.
The mother was sitting in the front passenger seat with the window rolled down. She smiled at us and said, "Thank you."
We formed a double line of bikes about a half-mile long as we followed the hearse about 8 miles to Crown Hill Cemetery.

--
Sent from my Treo