Archives for 2020

Some friends of mine have a bunch of hens who are their pets, and they love them to bits and dote on them. They are all named after NPR announcers, too. You should see their henhouse- a family of four could live in there. At any rate, they bought scarves for their hens, and the recent snow gave them an opportunity to use them. Personally, I think every hen needs a scarf now:

I think we can all agree that Pearl needs a scarf, right?

Afternoon Open ThreadPost + Comments (136)

I’m not a big car guy. I buy a car, I drive it into the ground, I buy another car. Lather, rinse, repeat. My current daily driver is a 2004 Honda CR-V, a car so dull it has its own ironic song and music video. It has 80K miles, and I think I drive it too much.

Right now it is snowing, and I will go out whenever I feel like it, because of AWD and Blizzak snow tires. I buy AWD cars and put snow tires on in the winter because of this:

A red version of this 4WD vehicle was the first car I ever drove. It was my dad’s, and it had one purpose: to get him to the hospital no matter how much snow was on the ground. A secondary purpose was having something to display his McGovern/Daschle/etc. stickers on. I don’t know if it’s possible for an American male to care less about cars than he did.

The Scout II was a handful to drive. It was overpowered (V-8), had touchy brakes, was prone to roll over, and it had a disconcerting habit of turning cookies on ice if you weren’t extremely careful. My brother and a carload of his friends found this out the hard way on an icy bridge outside of town. They were inches from death–after a 360, that Scout ended halfway up the new solid concrete guard rail on that bridge. Another few inches, and they’d have been in icy water. Nobody was injured, but the car was totaled.

After that accident, my dad did the only sensible thing – he went out and bought a new Scout II. This one was green. It was in that car that I had a near brush with death on an icy four lane road on the edge of town late one night, when I hit the brakes to slow down for a turn, and the Scout did a 360 in the middle of the road. Luckily, no cars were coming, and there was no damage except to my underwear.

When it snowed and the old man wasn’t on call, we’d take that thing out and pull people out of ditches, and just generally fuck around busting through drifts. If you haven’t driven with 4WD or AWD in the snow, or on crappy back roads, it makes what can be a white knuckle experience a lot easier and a lot of fun. We also liked to take the Scout when we had dates because it had a front bench seat. For teenagers, cars are freedom, and driving a car that gave you the freedom to go more-or-less anywhere was a feeling that I don’t think I’ll ever forget.

This whole reminiscence was triggered by an article in an overlanding mag about a company that rehabs Scouts. The Scout (and a bigger version, the Traveler Travelall) were produced by International Harvester between 1961 and 1980 (1953-1975 for the Travelall). Mechanically, they were kind of a piece of shit. The guy in the article doing the rehab basically gets rid of everything but the body, which makes sense to me, given all the work that we had to do on those cars. But that was par for the course for pretty much all domestic cars at the time. Luckily, the invisible hand of the free market has created a rising tide for all car manufacturers, and US cars don’t fall apart after a couple of years anymore.

Anyway, I thought it might be fun to reminisce about your first car. I need to go to the grocery store now, and I hope the roads haven’t been plowed.

I Feel Safest of All; I Can Lock All My DoorsPost + Comments (145)

Last night’s was the first debate I watched this cycle. I really wanted to wait until the field was winnowed down to those who could actually win. Here are a few thoughts:

David Muir, who did the bulk of the questioning, was terrible and foreshadowing of the garbage Democrats are going to have to wade through this Fall. His foreign policy (i.e., for him, war) questions were especially awful. They could all be summed up as “are you wimpy Democrats going to actually give me some wars or not?” I watched the debate on ABC’s streaming service, and it was all house ads. One ad I saw multiple times was David Muir riding in a Blackhawk, David Muir putting on his bulletproof vest — basically, studly David Muir looking studly. You’d think he was a special ops soldier, instead of a guy anchoring a newscast that exists only to sell hemorrhoid cream and diabetes test strips to old people. The good news is all of the major candidates were able to turn his questions around and give answers that weren’t dodges, but didn’t buy into his villager framing.

Though she had more time at the end, the moderators called on Yang and Steyer more that Warren in the early going. She was good as always. Her passion when she looks into the camera and talks about the issues is just riveting, to me. She’s also very good on her feet and unruffled. My only critique, is mild – her answers are a little information-dense, but they got better later. I wish she would catch on.

Pete was uneven. He had some platitudinous, fluffy answers. But he also did really well on a couple, like the ones about war and his defense of Biden. I heard one answer that really concerned me – it was to Linsey Davis’ question about why South Bend had an increase in arrests of people of color under Pete’s leadership. His first answer was a dodge, but since she’s apparently a real journalist, she drilled him again. Then, he went into an explanation of how terrible some of the gang infested neighborhoods in South Bend (pop 100K, home of Notre Dame, really?) are, so as part of his law enforcement strategy, those neighborhoods were targeted for more enforcement. I heard this as: we rousted young black men and hung bullshit weed charges around their necks. I don’t think that answer is getting full coverage, but I can’t imagine he gained any votes in the black community last night, and that’s a real problem for him as a candidate.

Amy Klobuchar is a really good debater, clearly the best on the stage last night. She’s also tough, and you can tell she hates Pete. He might remind her of the young full-of-shit staffers that she’s crushed under the heel of her sensible pumps over the years, without even getting her perfect haircut mussed up. Anyway, she went at him, hard, a couple of times. Towards the end she just basically took over from Steyer, who was blowing hard on race, and gave a really touching replay of her story coming up from nothing in Minnesota. There was a lot of emotion in that response, which is a great balance to the toughness she exhibited earlier. She’s the full meal deal. I think if she were the candidate moderates coalesced around, she would be very effective.

Biden was a little word-salady, as usual, but overall he did fine. There were some flashes of Joe, the guy underneath that everyone loves. His praise of Vindman, and having the audience stand up to honor him, was a great example of what I mean. I think fighting for his political life agrees with him.

Bernie was Bernie. As he was walking on, I noticed that he was wearing the uniform of every business traveler in the 80’s – grey poly/wool blend pants, a blue sportcoat, cheap shirt and tie. He probably bought it off the rack at the JC Penney in Burlington, and before the debate I can see him telling someone “these clothes are perfectly fine, they still have a lot of life in them.” He’s such a total character, and it’s part of what makes him hard to touch. He is shouty and pointy, but I just can’t imagine Klobuchar trying the same kind of attack on him that she did with Pete. I don’t think anyone did any real damage to him, and the response to the question of whether anyone likes him brought out good responses from Biden and Amy, and were a plus for him.

I had heard that Yang has a sense of humor and is pretty good at the debates. He seemed nervous and maybe a little deflated. He had to lay off staff this week, so I think maybe this thing just got real for him. I wasn’t impressed, and I came in expecting more from him.

Steyer could have spent his money better, but rich people wasting money is apparently what our politics have come to.

I think we get lost in the weeds of the fighting between the different candidates, but to me, the unity question at the start made everyone look good, there was no nasty infighting (Klobuchar landed a couple of punches on Pete, but they were all fair game), and it didn’t spend more than a few minutes on the intricacies of health care policy. Overall, a good night for Democrats. Any of the major candidates could beat Trump.

One more thing: A couple candidates mentioned “debating Trump”. Not gonna happen, in my opinion. Trump doesn’t need debates – they’re a risk – so he just won’t do it. He has Fox and Facebook on his side, the networks will all cover his Nuremberg rallies, and his Twitter feed will drive election coverage.

Debate ThoughtsPost + Comments (100)