Tag Archives: Wisconsin

Windbreaking News: Election 2012

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In the last week before Election Day, the vote of hot air balloonists in Wisconsin is still up in the air. According to Google, from October 1 to October 21, over 750 political ads were unleashed on the Wisconsinite public every single day. Personal appearances by presidential  and senatorial candidates have gone up dramatically.

 

Will Loftus, longtime balloonist, isn’t happy. “State and national politicians have been appearing all over Wisconsin like a rash on a baby’s bum. I hate to vent, but it breaks my heart to see that amount of hot air go to waste. All I hear from the politicians is talk about Medicare, taxes, wars in those foreign countries, jobs, and this country’s future. Why do they keep speaking to special interest groups? Frankly, I’m deflated. Political hot air is a renewable energy resource, yet not one politician has addressed that. I’m just your average citizen with a $25,000 hot air balloon. What about me and my needs?””

 

Unidentified sources close to Windbreaking News estimate that capturing political hot air would provide every citizen in Wisconsin a 30-minute ride in a hot air balloon each day for one month. Identified sources confirm this, and a random poll conducted by a random pollster on a random day in Random Lake* found that voters felt “let down” on hearing this news.

 

 

(*Random Lake, WI is known for its palindromic population: 1551.)

 

 

 

Photo courtesy of Nicolas Raymond http://www.freestock.ca/view_photog.php?photogid=1

The left doesn’t know what the right is doing

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It happened again. In a blatant act of partisanship, my right hand conspired against my left, made a wild grab for power, momentarily grasped it, and blocked my left hand from taking any action.

 

I was almost ten the first time. John F. Kennedy, winner of the Democratic nomination for president, chose LBJ (Lyndon Baines Johnson) as his running mate. Kennedy would have preferred someone else, but Johnson, a homegrown Texan, guaranteed the southern voters that Kennedy needed. The two men came to El Paso in September 1960 to campaign. I stood among the crowd lining the streets. (I have no idea who I was with, and my fact checker (AKA older sister ) doesn’t remember it at all.)

 

As Johnson’s motorcade drove by, he stuck out his hand. I rushed forward, thrust my right hand through the crowd and grabbed hold for two seconds. I don’t know what thrilled me more, that I had touched a famous person, or that I had discovered that fame resided in a hand just like my own, five-fingered with an opposable thumb. Like all famous hands, it  had a much wider span than mine, but it was attached to a man who could have been my neighbor or my teacher.

 

The second time happened last Friday, September 28. Earlier in the week I gave up all of my personal information for a free ticket to attend a speech by Michelle Obama at nearby Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. I arrived later than I had planned because I had morning classes. About 400 other people were late as well. Most of them stood in front of me, waiting to get through security and into the auditorium. About one hundred stood behind me. By the time I got out of the security area, a young volunteer directed me away from the auditorium toward a small tent next to the building, saying, “The fire marshal won’t allow any more people into the building. You can hear the speech from inside the tent.”

 

Was I unhappy? Yes. If I had wanted long lines, endless waits, and annoying security, only to be turned away at the gate, I would have booked a flight.  No one seemed happy, but we remained civil (this is the Midwest) and followed directions, mooing and lowing as we crowded into the fenced area beneath the tent. I amused myself by exchanging complaints with the others and by watching the well-dressed Secret Service men walk back and forth talking to their wrists. Forty-five minutes past the scheduled time for the speech, a group of grim wrist talkers guided Mrs. Obama around the perimeter of the holding pen. When she got close to me, I whipped out my phone, took some quick videos, shoved the phone into my left hand to distract it, and grabbed her outstretched hand with my right. Her hand felt just like mine, only more famous, and attached to a woman much taller in person than on TV.

 

Still picture from my iPhone video.

After the gripping event, I left, as did almost everyone in the tent. Watching the speech online appealed to me more than standing in a covered corral listening.

 

Later that day my husband asked if I planned to wash my hand. “Better yet,” I said, “I plan to sell it on eBay.”

 

Let me know if you’re interested.

 

IMPORTANT WORDS FROM YOUR SPONSORS:

 

I am yearstricken’s right hand, and I approve this message.

 

I am yearstricken’s left hand, and I don’t.

 

 

 

If you took a bath today, thank a pig

Humor, Things that happened before now, , , , ,

 

Seriously. If you took a bath today (and we all hope you did), thank a pig. Actually, you should thank a pig farmer. Sort of.

 

Okay, not a pig, and not a pig farmer. You should thank the state of Wisconsin and its city Sheboygan, and the foundry it once had that was bought by John Michael Kohler and his partner Charles Silberzahn in 1873, who founded a company called Kohler & Silberzahn, which made farm equipment, including big tubs used as watering troughs and hog scalders.

 

 

I guess we also have to be thankful for the fire that burned down that original foundry seven years later because Kohler added an enameling shop when he rebuilt. Now he could cover his cast-iron troughs with a protective coat of enamel.

 

Three years later in 1883, Kohler came up with the idea of selling an enameled hog scalder as a bathtub. In exchange, he supposedly received a cow and 14 chickens. I’m curious about what gave Kohler the idea. He must have been on farms and seen hogs immersed in those tubs. Did one of the hogs remind him of someone he knew? History would be a lot more interesting if we had the answers to questions like that.

 

 

From that point on, Kohler focused on enameled bathroom fixtures. In 1911 the company introduced a built-in, one-piece tub, and the rest of us have been awash in their products since then.

 

I had no intention of writing about bathtubs today. Although I manage to get in hot water on a regular basis, I hardly ever take a bath. I prefer showers.

 

I started out today planning to write something about the word “bubbler,” Wisconsin talk for drinking fountain. It seems that Kohler is responsible for that, too; he put the capital “B” in the word when he trademarked it in 1889. Now it’s used generically, mostly in Wisconsin but also in Rhode Island, eastern Connecticut, southeastern Massachusetts, and Australia. In my experience, I’ve never heard anyone pronounce it with the capital, but then I’ve never been to Sheboygan.

 

In spite of its usage in both the U.S. and Australia, neither the Oxford English Dictionary nor the Cambridge Dictionary Online has an entry for “bubbler.” Merriam Webster Online and the Random House Dictionary (dictionary.com) give one of its meanings as “a drinking fountain that spouts water.”

 

 

If you go to Kohler’s website, you’ll find at least 53 different bathtubs: rectangular, circular, key-hole shaped, kidney-shaped, free-standing, sunken, and jet-streamed. They still make the Bubbler, too. Americans love their tubs and drinking fountain; go to Facebook and you’ll find that bathtub and Bubbler have their own Facebook pages. I also discovered that Pig scalder is on Facebook. In one of instances that proves that history sometimes moves backwards, it mentions that in New Zealand some farmers use their old cast-iron bathtubs for hog scalding.

 

 

Posters courtesy of http://blog.kohler.com/2011/05/18/the-one-piece-bath-turns-100/

When personal guilt is not enough

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When the thrill of carrying personal guilt wanes, life can grow dull, and you may begin to feel powerless, even depressed. You may look back with longing on your childhood when you first felt the thrill of knowing you were responsible for the feelings of other people. All those adults with their volatile emotions relied on you, a small child, to maintain their equilibrium. Heady days, indeed.

 

Just follow this road for the rest of your life. (Photo courtesy: http://thedisorderofthings.com/)

 

As you grew, did your responsibilities expand to include the feelings and well-being of your friends? If so, you are just the person I would like to talk to today: an adult with a strong sense of responsibility. Now, not only do you carry the blame for the moods and poor choices of your spouse and children, but you also have culpability if your relatives, co-workers, boss, or anyone you encounter in your daily life experiences negative emotions or engages in bad behavior. You stride through life with confidence, on tiptoes, blindfolded, across broken glass, barefoot, while walking backwards, and you do it with aplomb and lots and lots of band-aids.

 

You think life cannot get any better than this, but then something changes. The adrenaline rush of your power over people and that crazy, wild ride on the roller coaster of other people’s emotions starts to depress you. When you wake up in the morning, you are no longer energized by the idea of trying to make all of the people in your life happy and solve every single one of their problems. Wallowing in guilt over the bad choices other people make starts to feel like a duty instead of a pleasure. One day you wake up and think, “I am tired of carrying all of this guilt. It’s too much for me.”

 

Friend, I understand how you feel. However, giving up is never the answer. You may think you need less guilt when you actually need more guilt. You have grown accustomed to your personal guilt and are starting to find fault with it, to resent the way it nags you, or wakes you up in the middle of the night to talk.

 

Don’t get rid of your guilt until you hear my solution. I’m here today to help you re-energize your life, to infuse your life with new meaning. I know you’re thinking it is too good to be true, but believe it, friend, I can help you enjoy guilt again!

 

How, you ask? By assuming regional guilt. Yes, you heard me, you can assume responsibility for whichever region you live in! Fresh guilt is the answer.

 

Map of Wisconsin, my adopted homeland, where I gargle guilt for breakfast.

Let me illustrate. I live in Wisconsin. Normally we have a lot of snow in the winter; however, this winter we have had very little. Since I do not like the cold, I am enjoying this weather. To certain irresponsible people, that seems like a guilt-free pleasure, but that’s where they are wrong. States like Wisconsin are the freezers where other regions store water they will need in spring. We keep it here in the form of snow because ice cubes are hard to shovel. But what if this year, we don’t produce enough snow to melt and send  down the river to the thirsty people who are too busy sitting around in the sunshine to come up here and get it themselves? They will suffer, and the reason they will suffer is because I am selfish. I wanted a warm winter and I got it. Can I control the weather? No, of course, not, but what does that have to do with anything?  I secretly wished for mild weather, so I must take some responsibility for the drought that follows. Wishes have consequences, folks.

 

But, you say, what about next winter? Maybe next winter you will have record snowfall, and then where will your regional guilt be? Friend, I have this guilt problem under control. Lots of snow leads to flooding in the spring. Through my taxes, I help support a state that idly stands by letting snow melt and fill up rivers that overflow their banks. Do I do anything to stop it? No, I’m happy that the snow melts. Do you see how my selfishness has once again brought misery to the multitudes. Snow or no snow, it’s a win-win situation for me. Behold the beauty of the logic of guilt.

 

Today if you are ready to give up your personal guilt, stop and think about it first. Do you really want to give up that kind of power? Do you want to go back to being an ordinary person, responsible to manage only your own feelings and choices? Or, do you want to expand your power and responsibility and achieve world dominion through guilt?

 

If you have come to the place where personal guilt is not enough, please consider regional guilt. You are only limited by your imagination. Take control of your life today. Be a responsible adult and choose guilt.


Dear reader,

 

If this message has been meaningful to you in a negative way, please let me know. I count on my readers to be troubled and disappointed by the things I type. Could you take a minute and write to me, letting me know that I am responsible for how you feel today. And if you are planning to make a bad choice based on something you read on this blog or some comment I made on your blog, could you drop me a line. It would mean the world to me.

 

Culpably yours,

 Yearstricken

 

Too busy to blog

Humor, Rants, , , ,

Yearstricken is a whiner. I love her and all that (I’m her beloved iPhone), but seriously, she is a whiner.

We talk a lot, so I know all about her schedule this semester: six different classes plus student event scheduling. In fact, I know it by heart because I’ve heard her say it a hundred times or more. Yes, two of her classes are in the evening, so she has some long days, but, people, I am on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week! You don’t hear me whining about it, do you? I have to hear her repeat the same things over and over, day after day, and do I complain? No, I do not. And do you want to know why? Because I am not a whiner.

She said this morning that she was tired and didn’t have time to write on her blog, so I thought I’d do it for her. Right now it’s 9:37 a.m., and we’re in the classroom. She’s at the board writing and I’m in her pocket. It’s a lower level English class and they’re working on pronunciation, one of her favorite subjects.

She’s had them practice saying “Good morning, y’all” and “howdy” for the last 10 minutes, so they’re pretty good at it now. On the board she just wrote three of the possessive adjectives: his, her, your. Next to those she wrote: “Bless _____ heart.” The students can say “Bless his heart” and “Bless her heart” without much problem. She’s careful to tell them not to pronounce the “h,” so in unison they repeat several times “Blesses heart” and “Blesser heart.” It’s taking a bit longer to get them to pronounce “your” correctly. She writes on the board “Bless yer heart” and underlines “yer.” Then she blabs on about how people in Wisconsin speak a dialect; it is not Standard English, which is the correct way to speak and which happens to be spoken in Texas, where she is from. It’s warm there most of the times, she says, as the students watch her mouth move. Then she whines about how people in Wisconsin say “You wanna come with?” and then leave you hanging because they don’t finish the question, so you don’t know if the person wants you to come with you or me or her or him or them, and if you don’t know who you are going with, how can you know if you want to go. This way of talking, she says, has something to do with the weather; it’s cold, too cold to even finish your sentences. Her students, of course, only hear and understand two words of what she said: Wisconsin and cold. They all nod and smile, some of them even repeat the word “cold” out loud, so she’s satisfied they understand. She loves her students for that.

She prides herself on teaching her students proper pronunciation, or as she calls it “talking purty.” When her students have classes with the other instructors, those teachers have to try to break the students of talking “purty.” Yearstricken feels like she’s doing a great job and even thinks the other instructors are complementing her by calling her “Miss Pronunciation.” I love her for that.

Breaking news! The Mitten War

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From the outside, underneath all those layers of winter clothing, your typical Wisconsinite looks kind, self-effacing, and a just a little fluffy. (It’s the down jacket. Really.) But unzip that jacket, take off the sweater, remove the long johns, call in a surgeon to open the chest cavity, and you will find a heart much like your own, a heart filled with mitten envy.

As the temperature goes down and the war heats up, Michigan pulls out its gloves and puts on its mitten (Map from:http://wiroots.org/maps/wi_mich_1891.jpg)

While the rest of the nation frets about the economy, global warming, and Mitt Romney’s hair, tensions between Wisconsin and Michigan have been escalating. The Wisconsin board of tourism recently started a campaign to lure people to the state by depicting Wisconsin as a mitten. This enraged Michigan who has long been luring people to its state by posing as a mitten. (They have satellite images to prove it.) I’m sure you’re aware of how effective this has been. You want a vacation without the hustle and bustle of working people clogging up the streets as they go to and from their jobs? Then Detroit is your place; your Michigan fits your desire like a mitten.

What the people of Michigan have failed to understand, because I have not yet revealed it to them, is that the tourism campaign is actually a federally funded study on the effects of beer on Wisconsinites. (People here drink 38.2 gallons per person per year, which based on drunk driving arrests is probably about 30+ gallons too much.)

As part of the study, the members of the tourism board were forced to sit in a room with nothing but a large map of Wisconsin and an unlimited amount of beer. Although it took one member just three beers to see Wisconsin as a mitten, it took most of them six beers to see it. The lone holdout had to stand in the corner, squint, and drink another beer before he saw it.

The government is developing a rating system for tourism campaigns in every state and soon you will start seeing a little beer steins as the bottom of posters and flyers based on the average number of beers needed to understand or appreciate them.

Unfortunately, I am not a beer drinker, so I can’t see the mitten in the map. I may have to do my own study using wine. I’ll keep you posted. However, I was able to do about 90 minutes of research by squinting at a map of Wisconsin during a recent meeting I attended. I saw two things.

First, I saw a man gargling Green Bay.

Gargling Green Bay

Second, I saw a man with his hand at his throat wondering where he lost his mitten.

Where is that mitten?

As your Mitten War correspondent, embedded in the throat of Wisconsin, I am thankful that so far only words and images have been hurled about, But I’m worried; the only thing keeping Michigan’s mitten from grabbing Wisconsin by the throat is Lake Michigan.

Do you recall Scott Walker, Wisconsin’s governor?

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You may recall reading about him in the news. He has a well-documented allergy to unions, which causes him to break out in legislation that in turn makes a lot of people sick. The only relief he can get from his allergy is to receive regular doses of cash from large corporations. The half of the state that got sick from his legislation hasn’t found any relief yet. Today, November 15, they are going to try to get relief by trying very hard to remember him, or as they say in these parts, recall him.

Why I Will Never Say “Oh Shoot!” Again

Humor, Rants, , , , , ,

While in exile, Ovid the Roman poet wrote:

 

The country here is grotesque, the people savage, the weather awful, the customs crude, and the language a garble. . . . [The people] all carry knives at their belts and you never know whether they’re going to greet you or stab you. . . .

 

Like you, when I first read this, I thought, “Whoa. He was exiled here in the States?” But as you know, just as many of his works are no longer extant, he himself is no longer extant. And considering the number of angry people out there, it’s amazing how many of us are still extant.

 

People seem to be getting stabbier. So you’ve got to wonder why here in Wisconsin, we are going to be allowed to carry concealed weapons at our belts or in our pockets or, for larger people, in our coin slots. November 1st we can all start carrying things that make us more confident and sure that we are right, and if you think differently, would you mind stepping over here. I have something to show you that will help you see my point: a gun, or as I like to think of it, a consensus builder. We are the 49th state to get in on all the fun of being not only belligerent, but also deadly. (The very reason I miss Texas so much.)

 

We are going to need new ways to describe new behaviors. Road rage is not enough. To save valuable time for the psychiatrists who will be defending all those shooters who were drunk and temporarily insane, and also were traumatized as children by clowns with inappropriately sized shoes (and, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, balloons!), I have created a list. I’m using bullets because that’s so apropos, and also fitting:

 

  • Avenue anger
  • Boulevard blowup
  • Freeway fury
  • Interchange ire
  • Underpass umbrage
  • Expressway exasperation
  • Street heat
  • Highway hotheadedness
  • Path provocation
  • Bicycling belligerence
  • Overpass outburst
  • Sidewalk surliness
  • Hall huffing
  • Roundabout rampage
  • Footpath frenzy
  • Pew pushing
  • Mall malice
  • Blog bulleting

Concealed weapon and concealed weaponer