Jeronne Maymon: Man-Child

He's six feet, six inches tall, and weighs 250 pounds. A big young man, but not at all unusual for Division One college hoops. Today, Jeronne Maymon may get his official release from the athletic scholarship (an oxymoron if ever there were one) granted to him by Marquette University.

The freshman's dad tells a State Journal reporter things "ain't working out".
Maymon was a part - let me say that word again - part of the Madison Memorial High basketball team that ended its past two seasons in the state championship game. He was recruited by no less than five Division One schools, and chose Marquette.

Now, he's fired Marquette.

They didn't let him play the position he wanted to play, and they didn't give him enough playing time. His dad says Coach Buzz Williams didn't design their offense around his boy.

My, my - whatever happened to the old saying "there's no I in team"? I know. There's no I, but there is a "me".

Anyone who doesn't understand that Division One athletics is a cutthroat business that chews people up and spits them out can stop reading right now.
Marquette hoops coach Buzz Williams had precious little to say Monday when he told the media Maymon was quitting. But earlier in the season, he said of Maymon "He's got to work every possession. When he figures that out completely, he's going to be really, really good. He hasn't figured that out yet."

Jeronne went to see his alma mater host Verona Tuesday night, but wouldn't talk to reporters. Apparently his dad is doing all the talking now.

I have two words for young athletes who let family members do their talking (and negotiating) for them: Ron Dayne. At least the free-agent football player is picking up a few bucks doing ads for a local hot-tub dealer and hawking his book, "The Dayne Game".

I have an idea that it must be very hard for young athletes, who've been pampered and treated specially all their young lives, to realize that the world does not revolve around them. College freshmen, no matter how heavily recruited, do not set the agenda or determine the lineup or game plan for the team.

He who thinks he is indispensable often learns the hard way, he's not.

Old geezers like me are given to mouthing clichés that start with the phrase "the kids these days", followed by a rant about how much tougher life was when we were younger. One thing the kids these days seem to think is the most important thing is "respect". God forbid you should "disrespect" a young person.
Back in my day, respect was something you earned.

Apparently a lot of young people have confused "respect" with civility. Or maybe my idea of respect is vastly different from theirs, which to me seems synonymous with "admiration".

Good luck, Jeronne Maymon. Perhaps you and your dad can find a Division One team that admires you more than Marquette.

Anybody wonder if Vander Blue is re-thinking his commitment to Marquette?

Let The Salt Fly!

First of all, I don’t give two hoots about snow, even the 18 inches that fell on my back yard last week. I have a giant gas-sucking all-wheel-drive SUV that has the best snow/ice tires Tom Holmes could find. I used to have to be on-the-job at 3AM, when the plow jockeys were taking a well-deserved break at Perkins on the Beltline. And I was never late, summer or winter.

Second, since when is a blizzard that was predicted DAYS in advance a time to “experiment” with how the city is going to deal with plowing the streets?

Third, Mayor Cieslewicz says if he had it to do over, he'd do the same thing again. Oh, really? The Italians have a word for that: testaduda. Head of wood. STUBBORN. And, wrong.

Fourth, we're conducting a top-to-bottom review of our policy on plowing in LATE DECEMBER? How about October - or April? Now?

You’d think Dave Cieslewicz was from Miami, not Milwaukee. Fire Chief Amesqua is from Tallahassee, but she’s been up here long enough to know better. And Streets Superintendent Al Schumacher is a native Madisonian.

Disclosure: Al Schumacher and I have been good friends for years. His daughter and mine were big buddies all through their years at LaFollette High and they roomed together during their years at UW-Madison. Al worked his way to the top of the department he’s been a part of for three decades.

I have absolutely no proof, but I suspect when Cieslewicz, Amesqua, and Schumacher and their top lieutenants got together last Tuesday, Al was forced to do a lot of listening and not much talking. He’s been keeping this city’s streets in DAMN good condition since taking the reins several years ago. There’s grousing about the streets on the isthmus, but, what’s new?

Year after year, the city adds more miles of streets, but does Al get more plows? Nope. He’s forced to make due with what he’s got at his disposal. But he has to follow the orders of the Mayor.

A week after the blizzard, local talk radio and the blogosphere - including the Mayor’s blog - are still abuzz about the debacle. The mayor’s latest blogpost is titled “Bilandicked”, a reference to the Chicago mayor who got ousted after a monumental failure to plow the streets after a blizzard.

Former Mayor Paul Soglin’s blog, WaxingAmerica.com, is filled with intelligent post-blizzard give-and-take. One of the points hizzoner eloquently made: what's better - keeping some salt out of the lakes, or having thousands of cars idling for hours, pouring carbon emissions into the air?

If you've even driven in Minneapolis or St. Paul - across the border in the land of ten thousand lakes - following a huge snowfall, you know the streets are white. Not with snow, but with salt. The way the Beltline looked Thursday - bare pavement, lots of salt residue.

So the "experiment" of plowing the itty-bitty streets and not concentrating on keeping the main roads open is over, and it has FAILED, by any definition or metric.

Next time the sky-is-falling crowd on TV tells us there's a blizzard coming, and Mayor Cieslewicz gathers his team, a suggestion: let Al Schumacher do more of the talking, and have the Mayor and Fire Chief do more of the listening.

Mysterious Disappearance

When’s the last time you had to fax something to somebody? I had to do it a few weeks ago, and was surprised that the business that I was dealing with wouldn’t let me scan the document and e-mail it to them. I suspect in a few days I may have to fax my property tax bill to my mortgage escrow company, unless this year they’ve become enlightened enough to allow me to do it via e-mail.

Fax machines were the rage in the 80’s and 90‘s. Remember that crappy paper you used to have to use - the stuff that would get all curly? Plain-paper fax was the next big step, but now - it’s so, well, so 90’s to fax anything.

For about 50 bucks today, you can get a half-way decent machine that will scan your documents, photos, or whatever to JPEG or PDF files, and with a few more clicks you can send whatever you’ve scanned via e-mail. To use a fax machine at home, you pretty much need a land-line.

Do you have an answering machine? That’s another thing going the way of the five-cent cigar and the buggy whip. Nearly every telephone service provider will give you voicemail for a couple cents a day, whether it’s a land-line or wireless phone.

How about a phone book - do you still have one of those monstrosities around your house, in a place where you can actually get at it? For professional reasons, I had to have a land-line re-installed in my home a month or so ago, and a couple days later AT+T dumped about 30 pounds worth of paper on my front porch. Phone book. Dinosaur.

While we’re on the topic….how about the Rolodex? Got one on your desk at work? Didn’t think so. Everything’s electronic now, and any decent computer office program has a “contacts” function that’s superseded the once-ubiquitous Rolodex.

Here’s something else that’s rapidly disappearing…the folding paper map. Even if it’s not built into your car, GPS is available on so many devices now that paper maps are becoming a thing of the past. Unless you count printing out directions from MapQuest or GoogleMaps on your computer.

When I lived in Los Angeles a couple decades ago, I carried a couple big, thick, spiral-bound Thomas Brothers maps with me everywhere - one for L-A County and one for Orange County. Seemingly everybody had a Thomas Brothers map. The business electronics firm I briefly managed back then sold them like hotcakes. They were about 30 bucks apiece. We also sold a lot of fax machines.
And we sold photocopy machines. We were an Adler-Royal dealer, and back around 1985 Adler-Royal did a survey and found that the word most frequently associated with “photocopier” was “jam”.

We also sold “typewriters”. Remember them?

One more thing I hope is on the road to obsolescence is stamps and envelopes you have to lick. I buy only the “forever” stamps, and only the kind that you peel off and stick on. And I buy only the “self-sealing” envelopes. I hate slicing my tongue open on those things! Maybe someday the greeting card folks will get the message.

Information, Please

Where you go for information about severe weather may be a function of how old you are. If you’re my age, and can remember dinosaurs roaming the earth, it may have been radio or TV. But if you’re a generation younger, it was more likely you got more “real” information from the internet or your cell phone.

Nobody expects the newspaper to have the latest up-to-the-minute news about changing weather and road conditions, but they try hard to keep their website updated. The three local TV news stations were good until about 7, when they have to join their network programs, and are relegated to a few minutes at half-past for a quick local update. But they run updates on the “crawl” above or below the picture.

Local radio tries to cover breaking and developing news, but news staffs have been downsized so much in the past year the handful who still draw a paycheck doing radio news are stretched too thin to be of much service. On Wednesday morning, after 7 o’clock, WIBA-AM was doing its best to keep current, my old pal Sly on WTDY-AM was railing about Penelope Trunk’s latest outrageous statement; and the “music” stations were doing “frequent updates”.

Local radio is useful in reporting school closings, if you’re listening at the right time; the TV’s run the school closings in a continuous crawl at the top or bottom of the screen; and several of the broadcast stations have the closings (or, “closures”, as several of the TV anchors now say) on their websites.

Radio or TV is likely where parents get school closings, but the younger set has a new-age workaround: the cell phone or the social media website. Your kids probably found out school was closed via text message from a pal, or when they logged onto their Facebook or MySpace page.

It amuses me to watch the development of how electronic mass media are dealing with the sea changes taking place. A couple of the local TV stations ran live chats, on their websites, for people to exchange information, and ask questions. Actual example: “Will there be trash pickup tomorrow?” Response: “We’re looking into it”. Gee, thanks.

Various local radio and TV stations now offer “breaking news” updates via cell phone messages or text blasts. Everybody’s trying to be everything to all people on all delivery platforms, and it’s creating some interesting scenarios. Quite a few people I know said they got more of what they wanted to know from Twitter, Facebook, and their smart phone.

When Apple comes out with its new tablet some time next year, it’s liable to be a huge leap forward. Word is it will be a PDF reader, iTunes player, video player, internet surfer, Apple aps runner, Kindle-killer, you-name-it. It will further change a world where a third of us DVR TV and watch it when WE want, discover new music not through radio but on the internet, and consider our cell phone our most important personal electronic device.

Since I’m not usually an “early adopter”, I’m going to have to keep scrambling to keep up. But it’s going to be a fascinating story as it develops

Grothman The Grinch

Quick: who’s better at fake outrage - politicians or talk-show hosts? Macht nichts, as my mother’s mother often said.

Glenn Grothman, a Republic from West Bend (Rush calls it the “Democrat Party”, so I’ll return the favor with the “Republic Party”) is outraged about WHEDA spending 14 hundred bucks on flowers for its employee Christmas party.
I know, they call it a “holiday party” in Madison.

WHEDA is the state agency that helps find low income housing for the poor. A week ago today Grothman, who’s on the WHEDA board, sent a super-snotty letter to the Wisconsin Housing and Economic Development Authority, calling the expense ree-donk-you-luss.

He suggested the money would have been better spent as a donation to the Salvation Army.

And, for once, instead of kowtowing and groveling, the folks who run WHEDA essentially told Grothman to blow it out his…..bee-hind. Not one cent of taxpayer money was used.

Hurray!!!!

Grothman is one of the many people who apparently think government employees should be exempted from the perks and motivators connected with any similar job in the private sector. He grumbles about the “waste of taxpayer money”.

He should know better. Grandstander!

As I understand it, the folks at WHEDA aren’t state employees in the same sense as plow truck drivers, prison guards, and state senators and their staffs. WHEDA doesn’t take money in taxes from the state. It sells bonds to raise the money to run the operation, loaning money to low-income families and boosting economic development. WHEDA charges fees like any other lender. They run a 25-million-dollar budget.

Disclosure: my wife and daughter both work for UW-Health, so they’re “state employees”.

State employees deserve the same kind of perks and motivators that private-sector employees do. It annoys me no end when I hear whining about some state or municipal employee going to a convention, whether it’s in Boise, Beaver Dam, or Bora Bora. So what?!

And if said state/municipal employee at a convention elects to spend some of those “taxpayer-paid salary dollars” at a local night-spot, to take in a play or performance, dine at a fine restaurant, or buy some memento of their visit, I’ll join the local Convention and Visitors Bureau or Hotel Association in thanking them for stimulating the economy.

Every worker needs incentives, whether they earn their pay with their head or their hands. The attitude that “government employees” shouldn’t keep up with the latest thinking at a convention, or be given a night out on the town for a job well done, is just plain wrong.

I wonder how the Washington County Convention and Visitors Bureau feels about their state senator’s attitude. I’ll bet The Flowersmith, Bits ‘n Pieces, Blossom Florists, or any other florist in Grothman’s home town of West Bend would love to take an order for 14 hundred bucks.

Good Neighbors

They say we’re often at our best when things are the worst. The blizzard that struck Tuesday night wasn’t really a “natural disaster”, but it did show us who’s boss. Snow totals varied around the area, but we got just under 21 inches in our south suburban Madison neighborhood.

We decided to tackle the job of clearing the driveway at first light, after we’d had a few cups of coffee and scanned the local TV stations to get a feel for how the storm was being handled. For my money, Channel 27 had the best coverage early on, with reporters stationed all around town doing “live shots”.

We live on a secluded cul-de-sac of seven homes, built about a dozen years ago. We’ve known all our neighbors for years. It’s been a stable neighborhood. Abby and Tim just bought the house across the way, and we got to meet Abby for the first time as she was shoveling out their driveway yesterday morning.

First up in the morning are usually Dean and Deanne, who live two doors away. We’ve watched each other’s kids grow up. Dean’s the kind of guy who can fix anything mechanical, and anybody in the neighborhood who’s got a car problem asks Dean for his advice, which is top-notch and freely given.

Dean was out there at oh-dark-thirty blowing his driveway clean, as my wife and I sat on our butts drinking coffee and taking in the news. Later, when we went out to start the snow-moving task, he drove past in his huge Dodge Ram pickup truck, checked our welfare, and did another round of snowblowing on his own driveway. That's his big red Ram truck in the photo above, behind the tree.

Back in the early part of the decade when I was hobbling around with a cane, before I had my hip replaced, Dean would come over with his ATV - complete with snow blade attached - and plow out my driveway. He’d never take a cent. I did try to make sure he was never short of beer, though.

Toni and I put in about a half-hour of snow removal at 7 o’clock and took a break. The phone rang, and it was our next-door neighbor Cecilia calling to make sure we were “provisioned” for the storm. She and her husband Anthony are two of the best neighbors you could ever wish for. We watch each other’s houses when we’re on vacation, loan each other stuff, and just get along swimmingly.

Speaking of hip operations, the first day I was home from the hospital in 2001, Anthony and Cecilia were the first people to visit, bearing food and gifts, wanting to know if there was anything they could do to help me re-hab. You couldn’t find better people anywhere. Anthony’s snowblower is much bigger than mine - and I can’t count the times he’s come over after a huge snowfall to pitch in.

And my good neighbors Sam and Tara next door the other way are another great couple. During the years when I had to leave for work at 3AM to get to the radio station, Sam would often be over with his big snowblower at 6 AM to make sure Toni got out of the driveway and off to work OK. Sam is a wizard with power tools, an accomplished cabinet maker. He’s lent his expertise to everybody in our tiny little neighborhood.

Tom, across the way on the other side of the cul-de-sac, has shared with us the fruits of his huge garden year after year. Nobody grows tomatoes and peppers like Tom. Daphne and James own the house two doors to our east, and when we moved in 10 years ago, Daphne was the first to welcome us to the neighborhood.
We’re lucky. We’ve got great neighbors who watch out for each other, help each other, watch out for each other’s children, and enjoy each other’s company. That’s the way it’s supposed to be, but I still think we’re pretty fortunate to have such wonderful neighbors.

It didn’t take a blizzard to make me aware of how good we’ve got it. My neighbors seem to be at their best no matter what.

Snowmeggedon (2)

They were right. It's a real old-fashioned blizzard. I had to shovel a couple feet of snow off the back deck at 5AM so the dog could do her thing. But I'm still grumpy about how the local media handle "big weather".

Apparently, the operative presumption is that we are very, very stupid people, incapable of foresight or the capacity for rational action. This assumption explains why we are inundated with inane stories in the local broadcast media about being careful on the roads, carrying several weeks’ supply of food and water with us if we venture out, and the general nannyism for which Madison is famed.

A cell phone with a charged battery pretty much covers it these days. Unless you’re stuck in a line of traffic on the interstate and goin’ nowhere for 12 hours. Or, did they fix that problem?

Five minutes of watching TV this morning was enough to terrify the weak-minded.
Whenever there’s snow coming - and these days, EVERYTHING is a “storm” - the cycle begins long before the weather portion of the local news broadcasts. In the case of a storm like this one, which really is a storm, it becomes elevated to an “event”. One of the local stations transitions to STORM MODE; one of the others drags out that tired old story about taking bottled water and candles in your car.

Yesterday early afternoon, one of the local newsies was posting on one of his social media sites that the ante had been upped to EIGHTEEN inches of “the white stuff” on the way. I posted that I’d heard it was going to be 42 inches.

Confessing that I am an old curmudgeon with no tolerance for being talked to like I’m a moron, I acknowledge that the broadcasts are not targeted to me. These four-act plays they run every time the sky clouds up in the summer or a snowfall of more than 2 inches is expected tire me. It’s like a meteorological version of The Damnation Of Faust (with apologies to Berlioz).

First they seduce and abandon us (like poor Marguerite); then warn us of the demons and spirits that lurk in the storm; and then they redeem and save us.
I believe all the good folks really care about is whether or not their kids’ school is open, and when the snow will end. I’m just going to go ahead and assume that plows are out and it’s dicey out there. It would be news if plows WEREN’T out and roads were NOT horrid.

If I was in charge, I’d send camera crews out into the storm in old beater cars to CAUSE wrecks. There’d be some dandy video! I’d have them ride along with the plow jockeys and be sure the camera is rolling when some idiot pulls out in front of the plow. Colorful audio there, no doubt.

I’d have the reporters stake out the entrances to ER’s, lying in wait to catch some fat old fart like me coming in on a gurney after attempting to shovel too much snow at once.

Instead of a “live blog” - which is really a chat, not a blog - I’d have some young reporter try to hack into the e-mail server for the National Weather Service, to see what they really knew - and when they knew it - about the “blizzard”. Be more interesting than the “live blog” for the socially inept.

I’d send somebody over to Edgewood or the UW to find a sociology professor who could assure us that the “blizzard” is having a disproportionate affect on the poor and minorities. Now that’d be really “Madison”!!!!!!

But, that’s why I’m not in charge. I’d have waaaay too much fun with this “deadly snow event”.