Local Gossip--Consider the Source or Lack Thereof

      One of the permanent features of small town living is gossip. In a big city if somebody tells you something, you don't know the person or their story anyway; no surprise your response is, “Yeah, so what?” Here, folks pump for details.

       Local gossip has it that Kalmes Club 528 is closing. I would be one of the first to know, if it were because that would be the end of my little part-time, weekend gig. A fallacious story may arise from the owners occasionally lamenting slow nights, but it is not true. However, people may make it true if they eat out every weekend at chains like Olive Garden & Texas Road House.

      Sometimes, tho' gossip comes out of a vacuum. Wednesday, in Dubuque I checked with both the County Attorney and Sheriff's Dept. on the fate of Toby Donovan. They were remarkably niggardly with info and would only say that he is a resident of the Iowa Medical and Classification Center in Oakdale, Iowa. I recall visiting my mother there in the late fifties, when she had tuberculosis. We have mostly eradicated TB, but it seems proliferated criminality!

      Toby's parole was revoked on 23 May, and he has been at IMCC since. The spokesperson explained the facility “assesses treatment needs and determines where the individual should be—Fort Madison, Fort Dodge, Newton or another facility.”

     When I expressed surprise at the length of time was taking, she was defensive and resistant to telling me anything more.

The lesson here is to cast a critical eye on gossip and consider the source or lack thereof.

Unseen Pollution

Who would have thought that the weather wasn't telling us the entire story about human impact on the environment? A researcher was describing the effects of light pollution the other day. Never gave that one a thought. Apparently, flooding areas with light seriously inhibits nocturnal animals.  We know the curse of every big city dweller is lights that blot out the stars.

In terms of light pollution the Coohey River Walk is of particular concern because it is located so close to the river. However, the city utility says the lights are on a timer turned off at midnight and back on at 5 a.m. The pool and park are less of a location problem, but there is no reason to have them on, as the pool closed over two weeks ago. The new bulbs for the baseball diamond mystify me. The light spill is so spectacular, it allows me to mow most of my lawn while they are on.

Eyes, critical and otherwise, need light, but we are not nocturnal, and shades and hoods that keep light from spilling where we don't need/want it is something else we must think about. As if there isn't enough already!

Critical Eye Opener

      For a long time, it has seemed that city (ours anyway) utilities are dangerously autonomous, though I knew there was a Iowa Utility Board in far off Des Moines. I had long objected to more than a dozen utility installations on my easement—two by the phone company alone, poles, guide wires and miscellaneous electricity boxes, the biggest installed in my absence and that Cascade Utility pays its workers better than the city workers, who must have a wider range of skills, and should earn more.

      Like every other property owner in town I was assessed for the installation of new underground cables, which I believe the utility should have installed, since it and the organization from which it buys power profits from increased capacity, not me. I am struggling to use less electricity all the time—relying on trees for air conditioning. Most summers I don't turn on the AC a half dozen times.

      This summer at least, I thought for the $700 I spent I would have fewer obstacles to mow around, but when that didn't materialize, I wrote a letter to the Iowa Utility Board. Here's the crux of response I received: In addressing your concerns about the upgrading of your electric service, the Iowa Utilities Board has direct jurisdiction over rate-regulated utilities, but not the municipal utilities.

Now there's a critical eye opener—the Iowa Utility Board only regulates the Rural Electric Cooperative or big providers like Alliant. They don't do anything. Administrative code is all that disciplines city utilities like ours.

Loggerheads, Dunderheads & Constipated Congresses

      Since July of last year, I've spent a good deal of mind-time in the Civil War researching my Margaret Chew monologue. Maggie was wife of Thomas Chew, owner of the Cascade Mill, and the city's most prosperous and prominent citizen circa 1850 and 60. I am using her to tell the “True story of John Yates Beall, who spent the summer of 1862 in Cascade with the Chews and was hanged shortly before the war ended. By then, the Union army was gunning for him.

      A fascinating and very scarey period in U.S. history that one doesn't inhabit long before seeing where the war came from: intransigence. Everybody dug into their position. The current constipated U.S. Congress seems similarly afflicted and might benefit from reading up on the period.

      Recently, somebody asked why I hadn't publicly taken a stance on gay marriage. Ans: for this very reason. At present, the movement seems on a roll and willingly to ignore the fact that a portion of the population considers their activities anathema, a violation of the natural order.

      However, on another such thorny issue, abortion, as a nation (though Texas and couple Southern states may be exceptions) we appear to have arrived to a place of stasis, where neither those who consider it murder nor those who don't and want unlimited access prevail. 

Years of mulling these tough issues with a critical eye convinces me the thornier ones may require equivocating solutions, but intransigence only brings war.

Attention Spanning Generations

     The younger generation sat nearby engrossed in their devices, as the adults sat lamenting the effects of human attention being trained on inanimate sources, whose only objectives seem selling products and services one doesn't need or will harm us.

     We recalled The Interpreter—for me delightful and distressing in equal measure—I lost too much money and worked too hard publishing it, but never felt more engaged. "A kind of final Hurrah before the alien invasion of devices," an adult conjectured.

     Then I recalled interviewing Maude Hutton and other members of a generation ago, now all 100+ or gone: the first thing they did when you entered, was shut off the TV. In my generation that had already eroded turning it down.

A good conversation (Thanks to Imelda et al.) is a critical eye opener: We have been skidding down the slippery slope of devices for a long time.

Saving the Boss's Job Union Action

      Just when we thought unions were down for the count, there is Market Basket, a supermarket chain located in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, which sounds a bit like Costco—workers earned living wages with good benefits.

      Then one day the company came along, and replaced the CEO Arthur T. DeMoulas with a relative Arthur S, same last name, who set about maximizing shareholder profit at the expense of the workers. The old fast-food formula that has pushed a lot of Americans out of the middle class into the lower class, enriched the one percent, and made America practically a third world country, in view of the  disparity between the haves and have-nots.

      With no formal union, just a few organizers, the 600 Market Basket employees have refused to deliver supplies until the former CEO is reinstated. MB store shelves are bare for a month now.

Strange times make strange bedfellows, and any critical eye loves the originality of a impromptu union striking to save the boss's job!

Unintended Feminist Consequences or Is Women's Lib One Toke over the Line?

      My Claddagh Court buddy opines that the reason I lost last time I ran for city council was that I can't a) castrate pigs and b) don't even own a gun!

      For out-of-staters, this is an inside Iowa joke. A woman named Joni Ernst is running for Tom Harkin's U.S. Senate seat. Her early advertising bragged she knew how to “cut pork” because she grew up castrating pigs on her father's farm and “went viral.”

      Lieutenant Colonel Ernst, currently commander of the largest battalion in the Iowa National Guard, appears in another advert on a motorcycle packing a pistol to a shooting range where she does target practice. With the gun violence plaguing this country that she will be called upon to vote on if she is elected?

Critical Eye, a long-time, hard-line feminist, sits wondering if female suicide bombers and pistol packing female lieutenant commanders aren't a reflection of Feminism gone awry? Is this where you end up when you march for the right to control your own body and take out a loan in your own name? The law of unintended consequences on steroids? What?

Wedding Bells Toll Family Charm

      Wedding season is upon us, and though I don't get invited to many, I find them highly entertaining. (Or perhaps because I don't get invited to many!)

      This past weekend I attended an elegant affair at a Cedar Rapids hotel, that was a marked contrast to many. Summer & flowers being so synonymous, they are almost cliché. The remarkable shindig décor featured not a single posy! Rather fish swimming in bowls and vases, with luminescent marbles at bottom. Cool and novel.

      My cousin, who, one might assert has a surfeit daughters (7), married off the youngest last fall, A prominent feature of the wedding was a phalanx of raven-haired sister-bridesmaids in matching maroon chiffon carrying single white calla lilies. The bride carried 7 maroon callas, a lovely visual reflection of the family.

      Hands-down winner of the most hands-on event was the niece's. Her master gardener-groom manages a greenhouse and grew the flowers; friends helped pick and transport them to the mountain resort for the ceremony.. Early afternoon, relatives set the tables in the gazebo, with the white dishes the bride had accumulated Goodwill, St. Vincent's, et al. Along with a stupendous variety of vases, which we then filled with the friend-picked flowers under the aesthetic guidance of the bride's art-major/florist friends,  A fine reflection of a family that is a buzzing hive of worker bees.

In weddings, a critical eye can discover the strength and individual charm of a family.

.

Blooming Algae!

      Over the weekend officials in Toledo, Ohio issued a Do-Not-Drink H20 Order. National TV news attributed the ban to an algae bloom in Lake Eire, from whence the city's water hails. Some news sources pointed out boiling it only intensified the problem. National Public Radio, at least, also informed us, what caused the algae bloom: nutrient runoff from local farms, which, when warmer temps occur, stimulates the growth of algae..

Critical eye would like to know how long this society can condone unsustainable farming that taints the drinking water of whole cities. Some rural residents, drinking beer on my patio this weekend, saying they can hardly sit in their own yards, for the flies generated by a local beef operations. We suppose the answer to that will be beef confinement operations!