Go West, Young Man....

...and grow up with the country! That's the whole quote, often mis-attributed to Horace Greely but actually penned by an editorial writer for an Indiana newspaper. My wife and I are headed west for a week or so, and we've vowed to leave most of our modern tech stuff at home. No laptops, no BlackBerrys, just a cell phone, and not even a "smart" cell phone. We're doing something we've talked about for a long time, going out to Arizona to take in some Spring Training games. Hence, there'll be no blogging until after the 3rd of March.

No updating the Facebook status. No obsessing about the retirement funds. No scanning the web just to check on what's goin' on in the world. Sunshine, baseball, poolside margaritas, room service. No e-mail. Just a digital camera and one cell phone with our private number, so our daughter, who's house- and dog-sitting can check in, and vice-versa.

Friday night, we were at a gathering of some of the city's finest old-school news folks. A friend of long-standing, who like me is a former news anchor, was taking pictures, making videos, and even updating his Facebook status on his phone. One of those new-fangled things we really shouldn't call a phone, because it's really so much more. His phone even synchs with Outlook on his desktop computer at home, so he can take his "office" with him wherever he goes. No thanks.

I still recall the look on the young man's face at the phone store when I went in to 'upgrade" from an analog to a digital cell phone several years ago. He said something like "what do you want it to do - games, videos, send pictures, e-mail - what apps do you use most?". I said, after a suitable pause, "I would like it to have the capability to place and recieve phone calls". After a suitable pause on his part to digest this, he steered me to a Motorola Razor, which I still have. It places and recieves calls just fine.

So it's off to Arizona, and a hiatus in the blogging. But I suspect I'll be sneaking into the "Business Center" at the hotel where we're staying, and "just checking up on things" with one of the computers available there. I suspect my wife will, as well. Maybe just a quick look at Facebook.....

A Big Bowl of Wrong

One of the biggest things on the web yesterday was the video of a CNBC reporter ranting against the Obama mortgage bailout plan, which this fellow (Rick Santelli) calls the "Chicago Tea Party". Those of us who pay some attention to what our money's doing got the video clip e-mailed to us by lots of friends and associates. Briefly, what Santelli ranted against was what he calls "the government rewarding bad behavior" - folks who bought waaay more house than they could afford, those who willingly lied on mortgage applications, and those amateurs who thought they could flip a house and make a small but quick fortune, and then got caught when the chickens came home to roost. Santelli, and a lot of folks like him, think the Obama mortgage bailout plan will do more harm than good.

We bought our suburban Madison home eleven years ago. As I've said before, we got a good deal on it, because the couple who built it in 1997 were going through a very bitter divorce and they wanted to unload it. Two years ago, our house was assessed (and appraised, by the way) at just about TWICE what we'd paid for it in 1998. While we paid a few thousand dollars below market value in '98, we didn't get so good a deal that the house was worth twice as much nine years later. Although the "comps" in the neighborhood supported the appraised value, my wife and I were pretty sure that our home wasn't "really" worth that much. Things were going up fast, but we were confident the huge growth in prices would slow. We didn't know it would be so much sooner than everybody thought. When we bought the home, I was 49 years old. I told my wife to pick out the house she wanted, and told her to make it a good one, because it was going to be the house they carried me out of with a sheet over my dead body. During one ten-year period in my younger days as an itenerant broadcaster, I lived in eleven different places. This was the LAST house, as far as I was concerned.

We didn't use our house as an ATM during the years of quickly appreciating prices. We made every payment on time. We shook our heads in disbelief at the prices some of our acquaintances were paying for crackerbox houses in tony Madison neighborhoods like Nakoma. 350 grand for 1450 square feet? No thanks. There are so many numbers being thrown around about the "housing crisis" that it's hard to put it in perspective. But the one that keeps coming up from Santelli and his crew is 92....the percentage of mortgages in the U-S that are being paid on time. So we're like the huge majority of people who have mortgage notes: we pay it on time. Our 401-K's have been halved; our houses are now assesed and appraised at what's much closer to a "true" value; for many of us, our pay has been frozen or reduced; and we're paying higher prices for everything.

To me, sacrifice is cutting out the "extras" in life so you can pay your bills on time. No more $4 cups of coffee, shopping for bargains at the grocery store, tightening the belt in general. So when President Obama says we're all going to have to sacrifice to make things better, I say "already there, Mr. President". Please don't ask me to "sacrifice" so the guy down the street who bought more house than he could afford and fudged the numbers on his mortgage application can be bailed out. I'm not moving just because there's a "for sale" sign in his yard. And let's stop throwing billions or trillions of dollars around without having some earnest, serious debate about it in D-C.

Zero Point Zero

It's nice to know that 139 dweebs who work part-time at the state capitol will get a 5.3% raise, but the rest of the state's workforce will get exactly what Dean Vernon Wormer pronounced: zero point zero. Oh, wait - there's about a dozen of the game-show hosts up there who made a big show of renouncing their pay hike. According to the list of 12 in the Wisconsin State Journal this morning who refused the raise, both the state senator and state representative from my district took the money. I guess I don't begrudge the senator....he's the oldest man in the legislature and has only a few million dollars from his real estate empire set aside for his retirement, which HAS to be coming one of these days....doesn't it??

A state budget deficit of over five billion dollars, a stumbling state economy, over sixty thousand Wisconsinites unemployed, but by God those politicians take care of themselves. Even Diamond Jim (who can't get a pay raise unless he's elected again) told his cabinet heads they'll be getting zero point zero. And these are folks with FULL-time jobs, who can't even collect the rich per-diem's the 139 dweebs use to pad their paychecks.

Full disclosure: my wife is a state employee (UW Health) and she makes more than the dweebs, so we're not gonna starve. But it rankles me that she works very hard at her FULL-time job and gets top marks in her performance reviews, and the dweebs, who've run the state into the hole year after year, will get about $2500 bucks more each year. I guess I can't accuse Diamond Jim of following the tactics of the Captains of Industry and Titans of Wall Street. At least he's not giving his inner circle any increases or bonuses while the ship lists dangerously.

I understand it's more of a contrast than a comparison when you're talking multi-million-dollar-bonuses and a $2500 pay increase, but the issue is not money, it's leadership. Every one of those 139 dweebs should have renounced the increase. And this foolishness about how "it's in the budget and we can't change it now" is hogwash and everybody but the dweebs sees through it. And for those who are "giving the increase to charity" - no. Wrong. Write a check back to the state treasury. It's MY money and I'LL decide which charities to support. But then, to have all 139 of them agree on anything is asking for more than leadership. It's asking for vision, courage, and a lot of things which USED to be part of "leadership".

Diamond Jim swings...and misses....

To hear Diamond Jim tell it last night, everything's going to be OK, we're gonna tax those rich bastards and smokers even more, and with Obama's fat check on the way, we might miss a snack or two but we'll still be able to live pretty high on the hog. Say WHAT? Now wait a minute here. The guv spoke for about 35 minutes last night. I didn't have a stopwatch on it, but I'm thinking about 3 minutes total was very general discussion about what might get cut to make up the 5-billion-dollar defecit...and 32 minutes was about all the stuff we're NOT going to cut.

I know politicians don't like to hand out bad news, and even when they have to, it's always candy-coated to make it as palatable as possible. But last night's biennial budget address induced a sugar high. No more QEO's. Banished. Plenty of money for the big University on the other end of State Street (a good thing); money for the first set of "Doyle Scholars" or whatever they're calling the kids who promised to get good grades and stay out of trouble so they could get a slot at a Wisconsin college or university. Yes, the good times will continue to roll.

So who's comin' out on the short end here? Well, the rich folks of course; and .... well....we'll probably have to cut a whole lot of state employees, but let's not talk about that.

A few other observations: just as in Washington, there's clearly a huge partisan divide in the state legislature. Every time Diamond Jim talked up one of his pet programs, the Democrats would leap to their feet and applaud. The Republicans would sit on their hands and examine their shoelaces. I even saw one of them fiddling with his BlackBerry while the Dems were cheering. Before the broadcast on public TV, one of the local stations had a set-up piece live from the capitol with the requisite Republican and Democratic point-counterpointers. The Democratic guy, Mike Sheridan, said it wouldn't be an easy couple of years ahead. The Republican lady, Miss Kitty (she who invoked the name of Saint Vincent Lombardi when shilling for a bogus "we demand the NFL Network bill" a few months ago), said the new budget would mean more taxes, taxes, taxes. Suffice it to say no new ground was broken.

Then, after Diamond Jim talked and pressed the flesh leaving the chamber, the folks at Public TV did a brief analysis with Todd Berry of the state taxpayer alliance. He said what I was thinking during the speech....pretty much what Diamond Jim is proposing to do, is to move a few things around in the budget, plug some holes with the Obama money, and push the problem into the next biennium. Except you couldn't hear what Mr. Berry was saying very well. The sound person had the audio mix so badly screwed up it sounded like Berry was speaking from a closet in a noisy bar a few blocks away. Too bad they couldn't have created that effect for Diamond Jim.

Nobody Rights Good No More

I was tempted to keep score on the number of TV ads I've seen in the past week hawking a sale for Presidents' Day, President's Day, or Presidents Day. For those who are punctuation impaired, Presidents' Day is correct. Plural possessive. I recall Macy's getting it correct in their print advertising, but wrong on their TV advertising. How does THAT happen? On Madison TV, the Ashley Furniture folks spent a small fortune on TV ads, hawking their Presidents Day (sic) sale.

OK, I'm a stickler. Within arm's reach of my keyboard is Warriner's Sixth Grammar and Composition, a book stolen from Hortonville High decades ago. To me, it beats the tar out of stuff like the grammar-checker in Word 2007, which I've caught several times trying to "correct" what's already correct in my writing. At least, correct according to Warriner.

My kids, products of the Madison Metropolitan School District and the University of Wisconsin, drive me nuts with stuff like "me and her are going to the mall" and their constant confusion of the correct useage of bring and take. (Which usually results in a bellow of "BRING Me Out To The Ball Game" from the old man.) They're getting better at it though, probably no thanks to my snide comments. My son just wrote a really good op-ed piece that would have passed any grammar check, and a while back my daughter pointed out an incorrect sign at a supermarket lane which said "15 items or less". (Again, for the non-sticklers among is, it should be "15 items or fewer".)

Which brings me to the promo I saw on Fox TV's "House" last night, which said "Fox: Less Commercials, More TV". If you're paying attention, you know it should be FEWER commercials, more TV. Anything you can count, ya know. I've always wondered about the premise of those "fewer ads" announcements. Apparently ads, the biggest source of TV revenue, are bad.

This morning, on a local TV news show, they mentioned (I can't remember in what context) Tom Daschle, who "withdrew his nomination for Secretary of Health and Human Services". Daschle withdrew his NAME from nomination, but he can't withdraw a nomination he didn't make, a subtlety lost, I'm sure, on the young TV folks. Reminds me of the late William F. Buckley's retort to a letter to the editor of National Review, wherein the writer said "please cancel my subscription". Buckley's retort: "Cancel your own damned subscription".

They Just Don't "Get It"....

The Roman philosopher Seneca said "luck is when preparation meets opportunity", although a lot of 'sconnies think it was Vince Lombardi who first said it. And if that's what luck is, one of our local guys, Matt Kenseth from just down the road in Cambridge, was lucky yesterday when he won the rain-shortened Daytona 500. He led only one lap of the famous race that starts the NASCAR season, but it was the lap he led that counted. It was the one before the rain came and NASCAR said the race was over. He won the NASCAR championship in 2003 and has had some really good years, but last year wasn't one of them. It's a great start to the new season for the personable young man.

I've always been a fan of motor racing, but wasn't an avid NASCAR fan until Matt jumped from the junior circuit to the big-time about a decade ago. My wife, who didn't know a piston from a pistol, got to be friends with Coleen Kenseth, when she dropped off her dry-cleaning on the way to work one day in 2001 and Coleen said "are you any relation to the guy who's on the radio?". The two became fast friends, and finally my wife said "let's watch NASCAR this weekend". For the uninitiated, NASCAR does a great job of explaining the sport during the weekly telecasts. My wife learned about drifting, drafting, camber, caster, restrictor plates, and all sorts of other technical stuff. I learned that Matt was about to land a huge sponsorship from DeWalt Tools long before a lot of other folks - because my wife heard it from Coleen.

We also learned that among our professional peers, we were unusual in that we actually watched the races. The most common reaction when either of us would be "caught" talking NASCAR with somebody else at the workplace would be something like "oh, yah...NASCAR. I just don't get that". You soon learn that even here in Wisconsin, which has produced a disproportionately high number of very successful race drivers, a lot of folks still consider NASCAR to be a largely southern thing which evokes images of good old boys and rum-runners. When they'd say "I just don't get that", it was code for "why the hell are YOU a NASCAR fan???". Just to tweak my nose at the NASCAR snobs at work several years ago, I put a four-inch high "17" decal in the window of my big black Caddy ElDorado. (Kenseth's car is number 17.) Reactions ranged from "you put a NASCAR thing on a car like THAT?" to "what does the 17 mean?".

I'm hard-pressed to think of another major sport or activity which has done as good a job marketing itself over the past decade as NASCAR. But still, one of the problems drivers like Matt Kenseth...and Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson face is that they're not "good old boys". One of the widely-read NASCAR columnists recently called Gordon and Johnson "cool Californians, rather than colorful southerners". And it's often pointed out that Kenseth is from "WES-consin", a pronunciation that annoys every 'sconnie. So, to all my 'sconnie friends who "don't get it", remember that a home run is just three left turns.

Reporter Facebook "Fan Clubs"

There's a disturbing new trend among certain local TV reporters. They're forming their own "Fan Clubs" on Facebook. I don't like it one bit. Fan clubs, indeed. It's a big bowl of wrong, as Jeff Green from Curb Your Enthusiasm would say.

As near as I can tell, the "adult" Facebook craze hit Madison in January. It seemed all of a sudden everybody I know was joining. Being the father of two twenty-somethings, I've been aware of Facebook for years, and have given my kids plenty of lectures, gone unheeded I'm certain, of the dangers of posting stuff to your Facebook page that you wouldn't want a prospective employer to see. I signed up early in January when a former colleague sent me an "invite" to see some pictures he'd posted. When my wife joined a few weeks ago, she immediately "friended" both kids. About an hour later, she said "I think I'd better un-friend them", and did. There really is such a thing as too much information. At her place of work, the I-T folks have been ordered (wisely) by the top brass to ban access to Facebook from workstation computers. It can be a gigantic time-waster for those who lack discipline.

It's been a fun diversion, and I've been able to re-connect with a lot of folks I worked with or knew in years gone by. You can tell a great deal about an adult based on their Facebook presence. You can quickly identify those people who really need to find a life. For the younger folks, it's hard to tell. Many of them apparently have "online identities" which differ greatly from their true personality. I guess they're just engaging in light fantasy.

The local reporters who have just recently formed their own "Facebook Fan Club" page are all, not surprisingly, under 30. And from what I can tell, the only people who've joined their fan clubs are the other young reporters who have a fan club and a few of their co-workers. I'm not opposed to Facebook fan clubs for things like sports teams, fermented malt beverages, and such. I'm even a Facebook fan of Senator Russ Feingold. But the local reporters' fan club come-ons say things like "join my fan club and get to know me and send me story ideas!!!". I guess this is why I proudly wear the mantle of the curmudgeon, having managed reporters for over 30 years. Instead of goofing off on Facebook, how about actually leaving the building and talking to some REAL people, and finding some REAL news, and reporting it?!?!?

I'm a dinosaur and I know it.