You're so pretty, like a tree

(picture of our tree stolen from Kristin's blog)
We really jumped the gun on the Christmas season, and got our tree on Monday, November 23. This is definitely the earliest I’ve ever gotten a tree, but they had ‘em at Home Depot for $35, and we figured that there’s no such thing as too much Christmas cheer, so let’s go for it.
Also this way the tree is getting watered earlier than it would otherwise, hopefully helping it live longer.
I still have a bit of sap residue on my hands after washing them twenty times. It’s very Griswold.

We currently have only five ornaments, all courtesy of my Aunt Jan, who gets us these fancy official White House ornaments every year. They’re really well made and esoteric, one of them explains something about William Henry Harrison, or Rutherford B. Hayes ----- regardless, if you’re going to have a small amount of ornamentation, White House historical ornaments are the way to go.
Thanks Aunt Jan!

~Abby and I just had some deep dish pizza over on Madison and Wabash, she’s in the city for the day to see the Addams Family musical at the Oriental, so we got to hang out for a bit and eat and chat. She’s very grown-up and mature and fun to talk to, and I wish she would come to the city more often to hang out (hint, hint).

~Thinking about Chinese ownership of some of our debt, I think we might be, as a public, mis-understanding it, we seem to think that the Chinese are buying up our T-bills as some sort of benevolent act, like they’re helping us out to be generous.

I don’t think this is correct.
They’re doing it because they think it’s the safest possible low-yield investment that exists.
In other words, the Chinese buy up our debt specifically because they know we won’t go bankrupt.

This being the case, I doubt that Chinese ownership of our debt will cause us to go bankrupt.

It’s a symbiotic relationship --- they’re not doing us a favor.

Dad or Joel, ponder this one and we’ll have some fun Thanksgiving discussions :)

Dancing in the Dark

There’s much to be said about Friday and Saturday, but that’s Kristin’s area, so I’ll just say that Kristin and her friends celebrated Gaby’s life, and her birthday, with a weekend full of friendship and heart and love, and I was very privileged to be able to share in it.
There was a seven hour campfire in our back yard, and laughter, and good talks and hugs and all of that. I think they did Gaby proud.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

And then we came to last night, Sunday evening.

Kristin and I drove up to Milwaukee in the mid afternoon, and were stymied for a while in trying to find a place to eat. Everywhere in Milwaukee, especially shitty little sports bars, asked us if we had reservations. What the heck?

We then stumbled upon a fancy looking restaurant with a beautiful view of the river, and had no problem getting a table immediately. Molly Cool’s, it is called.

Molly Cool’s is where I want to eat the rest of my meals for the rest of my life.

The décor is fancy polished wood, complemented by 30 huge televisions because PACKERS.
More specifically on this night, Packers beating the hell out of the Cowboys.
Since Kristin and I have a special dislike for Texas, and a love of the Pack, this was excellent.

Our waitress tells us that drinks are 2-for-1. We assume this means we will each order one drink, and only be charged for one drink total. Kristin gets a wine, I get a Spotted Cow.

Our waitress arrives with two glasses of wine, and two pints of Spotted Cow.

Goddamn I love Wisconsin, where there’s nothing odd about having two beers simultaneously.

And then the most delicious 1 ¼ pounds of fresh live lobster is served up to me for twenty bucks. I don’t really know how to eat lobster, so I’m making a bit of a mess, but heck, Packers, Spotted Cow, who cares if the lobster gets a little nuts.

I head to the restroom, and as I’m at the urinal, alone in a line of ten of them, a mustachioed Wisconsinite saddles up right next to me, smiling.
“Hey, Packers 17! Didya see the play?”
Hell of a play, man, Rodgers is the man!

Wisconsin is the only place where it’s enjoyable to have friendly urinal conversations.

So the Pack win, we’re all full of lobster and crab and double-drinks, and we walk on over to the arena.

Because BRUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCE.

This is my third show, Kristin’s first.

Bruce kicks off with “Cadillac Ranch,” which is an upbeat, singalong rocker about black hearses. Bruce’s catalog is heavy on dark lyrics overlaid with jaunty rock.

We get Born To Run, in it’s entirety, with 10th Avenue’s huge horn buildup. We get Curt Ramm’s insane trumpet on Meeting Across the River. We get larynx-tearing vocals on Backstreets, for my money perhaps my favorite song ever written about regret and despair.

And then we get another concerts worth of rock and roll redemption.
Loose Ends! Into the Fire!

Someone requests Living Proof, and Bruce has to teach the band how to play it on the spot. He stops Max’s drum intro and corrects him. As he strums his chords, he’s also calling off parts to Charlie on keyboards with his left hand.
It’s played pretty much flawlessly.

Kitty’s Back. No Surrender. Higher and Higher.

What a great weekend! What a great night!

Reason #57 that I love Paul Fitz

Last night Scott, Kristin and I went over to Orbit Room for some dinner and drinks. It’s rather out of the way, quiet-ish. We also discovered to our immense joy that on Thursdays you can get a buffalo chicken wrap for $5, and Makers Mark for $4.

This alone would have made it a good night.

But then whom should appear in front of me but the Scrabblor himself, the Red Mick, Paul Fitzgerald, my longtime college buddy, my fellow campus radical. I don’t think I’ve seen Fitz in two years.

He was stopping by the bar to interview for a DJ’ing job, and luckily had time to hang out and catch up.

As we talked, he mentioned that he’d chopped off his thumb in a freak bicycle chain greasing accident. And, yep, just above the knuckle of his right thumb, there was nothing but scar-tissued stub.

Yikes.

Turns out he has a little souvenir of this accident. He calls it his lucky charm, and carries it with him wherever he goes.

On a necklace, preserved in yellow resin in a clear camera-film case, hanging from a screw, is his decapitated thumb.

It’s hard to tell it’s a thumb until you see the entire thumbnail is intact. There’s black grease still on the flesh, from his bicycle chain.

It’s disgusting, and awesome.

I asked Paul why the hell he calls it his lucky charm since it’s so obviously unlucky.

“Well, it cut off above the knuckle, it could’ve been worse, so that part was lucky.”

Damn right. Paul’s always had that kind of attitude about things, and it’s one of the biggest reasons I love that dude. As he put it, “without the knuckle there’d been nothing to ‘oppose’ with.”

If you see him, make him show you the thumb.

After you finish your meal.

peregrinations

-Parks and Recreation keeps getting funnier, and the fact that it involves Paul Schneider and Chris Pratt as comic rivals should be enough for anyone who enjoys either (a) humor or (b) acting, or a combination of the former and the latter.

For what it's worth, if you haven't seen Paul Schneider's work in All the Real Girls or Lars and the Real Girl, you'd do yourself a favor to check out both films. Away We Go he's in a bit, and he's the only watchable part of Elizabethtown.
He's the kind of actor that makes me believe in the power of goodwill and honesty, which is insane. And it's a strange coincidence that he's in two great movies that have "real girl" in the title.
In conclusion, Paul Schneider makes me feel confident about America.

-The music that I love in the autumn is not friends with the music I listen to in the summertime. And yes, I think I blog about this at least four times a year. But I have the itunes on shuffle, and "Under the Blacklight" by Rilo Kiley comes on, and I practically wore that album out this past summer. But a man wearing a red and black flannel shirt and drinking hot coffee in the autumn dusk doesn't listen to that. It doesn't feel right anymore.
"Motion Picture Soundtrack" by Radiohead comes on, and I'm home again.

I feel more like myself in the autumn then I do any time else. Hopefully I'm 130% Colin now to make up for only being 90% me the other times of the year.

-I'm not sure when I became such a dude, but I watch a hell of a lot of football this year, to the point where if someone says something like "The Giants are having a bit of a mid-season dive" I not only know what they are referring to, but I actually haven some kind of opinion on it.
I'm not saying that I was ever a very interesting person to talk to, but I fear that I'm only conversant now on, like, two things: Senate committee maneuvers, and the importance of left tackles. Anything beyond that and I'm clueless.
Also, I think I've become an even bigger Brett Favre fan since he left the Packers. I like the idea of an old guy aching to prove it, and prove it, again and again. The Revenge Diaries, the hit one-man show by Brett Favre.
But, yeah, I watch football every Sunday now, and then Jay and I watch it on Monday nights at the Streetside while eating our cheap wings.

15 year-old me would be shocked that this isn't being done ironically.

-Brian Eno gave some interview, and nailed a really sharp observation: "Kitsch is a way that posh people admit to themselves that they like things that ordinary people like." He says this in discussing how, in the 70s the cool kids could never admit to liking ABBA, but that now ABBA is cool in a kitschy way. Or, say, football, I suppose.
Smart feller, that Brian Eno.

Happy November.

Ezra Klein agrees with me a week later on my Public Option Head Fake Theory

With regards to my public option musings in the previous post, published last Tuesday, I'm heartened to see the only Washington Post writer who matters, Ezra Klein, making the exact same point today, a week later.
Steve Benen at the Washington Monthly seconds his (my) point.

This doesn't prove that I'm right, but it does prove that I'm occasionally prescient regarding political attitudes of the journalistic left.
Yippeee.
And I think I should get a shout-out from these guys when they (unknowingly) jack my (not so creative) musings.


Also: right now, in a recession, deficits aren't important. Long-term, post-recession, they are incredibly important. (That's just opinion, but one that seems to be grounded in eminently defensible facts)
It's important to differentiate between these two things, or else you end up sounding like my father, a hardcore New Deal democrat with oddly Hooverite fiscal leanings.
Just kidding, Dad :)
Go Keynes.

Crazy like a fox (mean mugs and shoulder shrugs)

I saw a huge, huge, HUGE fox on the birding trail today with my fourth graders. They pointed it out, and said "hey look a fox!" I scoffed upon seeing it, since it was the size of a 40 pound dog, and said "that's a dog. . . .umm, nope, good god, that's a fox."
It was huge. And a fox, for sure. Good lord that's a big fox.


*The public option debate is a smokescreen, I think.
The health-care bill is pretty much set, and it's going to pass ----- the real meat is in the extremely huge insurance regulations, the expanded Medicaid eligibility, and the individual mandate.

What this public-option debate is doing, I think, is setting up a pretty typical Obama dynamic, which is not very good politics, short-term, but is very good public policy.

The bill gets trimmed down a few notches from what the President publicly wants ("a strong public option to keep the insurers honest"), and the Senators who made this happen (Nelson, Snowe, that sonofabitch Lieberman) get to crow about their fiscal conservatism, even though a public option is a money-saver.
Liberals get a bit pissed, but accept a victory, conservatives are still pissed over anything, and it seems like a mild win for the President. We end up with the biggest health care changes since Medicare ---- this one basically saying "Everyone must have health insurance. If you can't afford it, the government will subsidize it for you." It establishes a huge new benchmark for health care.

However, this back and forth over the public option provides a good cover for the centrists to pass the important parts, in that it gives them something showy to take credit for defeating. The public option really isn't that important. This happened with the stimulus, too, when they insisted on taking the bill down to $800 billion, because $900 billion was arbitrarily "too big."

But in the long game, the short-term hit that the President takes to pass the bill will pay off ---- the stimulus is backloaded into the next two years, and will continue to keep the economy afloat for a bit, while the health bill will start to pay off in terms of people getting coverage, and people getting subsidies to buy their coverage.

It's chess, not checkers. Just like with the stimulus, the President is taking a short-term hit and compromising on showy particulars to get the big, meaty, important stuff passed. It's a tough ploy, but smart.

*You know who makes good chilli? The girls that Ben and I date. Kendle won the Eastin's chilli cook-off, and Kristin made a fancy chipotle-chocolate-espresso veggie chilli that I just finished eating some leftovers of. Good eating!!

there's always someone cooler than you

I bought a backpack today, on my way home from teaching at the lakefront (and in case you were wondering, it was beautiful today and awesome and the birds came out and were very visible).

My shoulder bag is great for the rare occasions when I have a meeting and need to look grown-up, keeping documents unwrinkled, but it's killer on my shoulder, and most days I'm a bookish beardo who just needs a sack to throw his library books and camera into. So I needed a backpack, like a highschooler on day one.
Jay and Simone got me a REI gift card last year, so I went over to REI.

This store will make you feel like a lazy city slicker sissy even if you've just hiked for two hours and have a dead crayfish in your back pocket (yes, and yes). This store is for hardcore outdoors types.

Or for Lincoln Park dads who work in finance all day and want to wear North Face on the weekends, and their wives who do super-extra-intense stroller pushing to the Starbucks and yogilates classes and need special pants for it.

But still, the place is intense.

Do you know how many kind of backpacks there are?
Approximately 400. And they all have an extra nine straps that you'll never use unless you are hiking Mount McKinley, and a bunch of special pockets and whatnot for your "outdoor" gear.

I realize I am treading into Andy Rooney territory here.

But anyway, I found one bag that was just right. It's black, and as boring as possible, and only has two regular straps, though they are made of "airlift", which is some gooey stuff that makes it easy on your shoulders.
Backpacks are also expensive. And look kind of nerdy. But, I am a nerd, so=win.

Great story, huh?

Last night we ordered 80 chicken wings. I think that was too many for 5 people. But fun and cheap, regardless. I am a big fan of Monday wings.

Also, Megan and Marty are now walking-distance neighbors and have a really rad apartment. That is an excellent autumn development.

Okay, back to work. Time to test this pack.