Weather in the Midwest

We had some nice thunderstorms this evening and I was reminded of how different they are in the Midwest, as compared to the East. I grew up in Upstate New York and thought I knew about thunderstorms until I moved to Iowa as an adult. In my first summer in Iowa, I discovered that whatever electrical storms I had seen while growing up, they weren't Thunderstorms.

In the Midwest, these storms are a whole different beast. I had never seen what I can only call "horizontal lightning" before. I remember walking across a parking lot one evening as a storm was approaching, and suddenly something shot over my head. I ducked involuntarily and looked up to see lightning jump from purplish-black cloud to cloud, not ground-ward, and moving laterally across the sky above me. It was very impressive and I hadn't seen lightning like that before. That was just the first difference; even cloud to ground lightning in the Midwest was grander and more vivid. It didn't take long to become much more attuned to weather and weather changes than I had living back East.

Okay, calm down...

This will be a short post. Michael Jackson has died. I was dumbfounded to see NBC's Brian Williams on the evening news tonight speaking at length with a correspondent in California while the video feed showed a crowd of reporters and fans milling about on the hospital grounds. I will make a wild guess and conclude that ABC and CBS (and CNN and CNBC) all had similar hand-wringing on their evening news programs. My condolences go to Jackson's family, but please the rest of you, get a grip. The curmudgeon in me has to conclude that Jackson hasn't been relevant as an entertainer for at least a decade or two, unless you count providing scandals and bizarre behavior as entertainment. As it has for years, pop "culture" mystifies me.

Why the network news programs should treat his death like the passing of a head of state is beyond me. I bet Andy Rooney wouldn't spend that much time on this story. Grumble, grumble.

Stand In Line For A New Phone?

I have to admit that I've never stood in line for hours and hours just to buy some new "toy." I've stood in line for concerts (in my youth), but not for "stuff" like phones. This Marketplace piece on people standing in line for the new 3GS iPhone just makes me shake my head. It's not like the phone itself is new: iPhones have been around for some time now. It's a new version, but c'mon.

Here's a quote that just makes me curmudgeonly:

Ritchie says now that smart phones have made it possible, we're all expected to be on call around the clock. Employers want to be able to reach their employees at will. Clients expect immediate attention. Friends feel snubbed if you don't text them back, right now.

I've never wanted to be on call around the clock, personally or professionally. People need "downtime" and you don't get that if you're always available. I like having friends, but "friends" who "feel snubbed if you don't text them back, right now" aren't really friends. I'm not sure what they are; I guess it's safe to assume they would definitely be younger than me and not curmudgeons.

What Makes One Curmudgeonly?

I've been an elected member of our local elementary school board since 1988 and throughout those years, we've been faced with serious underfunding issues. In Illinois, public education is funded primarily by property taxes at the local level. Without getting really detailed and boring, that system was workable up to the first half of the 20th century, but it's hopelessly maxed out now. Schools are subject to the same kinds of increasing costs (mostly related to salaries and benefits for staff which may consume 80% of a School District's budget) as the rest of the world, but property tax revenue is pretty much tapped out. In addition, as an early effort to pander to the voters, Illinois placed property tax limitations on schools in the Chicago suburbs years ago, so school districts are left with nowhere to go for necessary funds. Oh, did I mention that Illinois has a 3% flat income tax, one of the lowest in the nation? The State itself is now going broke itself with an estimated $11 billion deficit.

There are a lot of other reasons for our financial problems (like too many districts, too many local government units, etc), but IMO the biggest problem is our political leaders' inability to actually lead. Rather than suggest to us what we should do to solve societal problems, our so-called "leaders" devote their energy to telling us what they think we want to hear.

This is a leading cause of curmudgeon-ness (at least for me). No matter what political party is in power (and right now the State legislature and executive branch is controlled by Democrats), 99% of the politicians in Illinois are unwilling or unable to actually provide leadership. The pandering to the public is mind-numbing and relentless ("Taxes are too high," "Cut waste in government before we raise taxes"). The result has been gridlock. And don't get me started on our ex-Governor Blago; he was the King of Pandering. He's (in)famous for handing out free rides to everyone in the State over the age of 65 on public transportation (without providing any cash to the transit systems, of course). Well, that's only one of the things he's (in)famous for...

What politicians won't tell the public is that while Illinois has made graft, waste, and cronyism an artform) most of the State's budget issues are related to human services (education, health care, senior citizen care, highways, and the like). Citizens are all for cutting services that benefit someone else, but not so keen on cutting something that might affect themselves. And that's the underlying problem, for which we can maybe thank Ronald Reagan. We have lost that concept that there is a "public good" and that we as a people do things for the benefit of the many, not just for the benefit of the few. This was pretty much assumed back in the 1950s, but no more. As a society, we're preoccupied with "not in my backyard" and "what's in it for me?"

To quote Ashleigh Brilliant: "I don't have any solution, but I certainly admire the problem."

It's been a while

Well, it's been a ridiculously long time since I messed with this, but I'm going to try to post more regularly. My kids think I've gotten more curmudgeonly, which makes sense since curmudgeons are only ripened with age. Stay tuned.