Yep, people were getting smarter until the boomers came along – hey, there is no arguing with science, and if UPI says a study says so, it must be true. And while the study applies to cognitive function over 50, let’s face it the parents of the boomers were always sharper, grittier, and nicer than boomers (yes, technically I’m one, but just barely). They had to be – they grew up in the depression, went off and won WWII, came back and made America the most prosperous country on earth (probably the solar system, maybe the galaxy, possibly the universe). According to science -or at least some associate professor of sociology so my trust level is sky high – fat, dumb ,and drunk is no way to go through life. OK, the dean said that, and it’s a great proverb that should be stenciled in every nursery, but it mostly applies as boomers are fatter, dumber, and more depressed than previous generations. Tough times make you lean, smart, and happy when they are over, or so I’ve been told. Maybe by science.
Boomers Go Backwards Again
Nov 18
Apparently Sam was right, the fundamental things still apply as time goes by. The importance of diet and exercise doesn’t get less if you are well or if you are sick. Who knew?
Finally some science we can all get behind.
Anti-social Media
Nov 9
I had high hopes for nextdoor, but like all social media it’s just another conduit for the worst in us, and ads. Each social media franchise demonstrates just how awful a different swath of people are: Twitter – celebrities and the media; Facebook – your relatives and friends; Linked In – your coworkers; nextdoor – your neighbors. Nobody left out. They each do it in their own way, and I’ll admit I prefer the earnestness to get ahead of Linked In to the smugness of Twitter.
Anyway, at one point I had managed to stop all email notifications from nextdoor but as the little girl said in Poltergeist, They’re Back. So I clicked the little unsubscribe link at the bottom of the first offending email and turned off all notifications – there were slider bars and radio boxes but I put them all to OFF/NO. Still, I keep getting emails. When I unsubscribe, nextdoor says oh, you’ve turned off this kind of notification. No, I’ve turned them all off, you just keep sending them anyway.
As you can see from the screen capture, I have unsubscribed 5 times, starting with Cat emails – yes, they actually have a Cats category of notification. The ancient Egyptians have a lot to answer for by domesticating, and I use that word loosely, cats. Talk about your unintended consequences, I’m sure no Egyptian thought that by keeping mice down with a pet many millennia later those of us without a cat obsession would be tortured over the internet by those with a cat obsession, or that instead of keeping the mouse population down they would keep the bird population down.
Somehow, I think I’m going to find out just how many category of notification emails nextdoor has before this is all over.
I know, first world problems and all, and I’d rather be complaining about the annoying side of the internet than starving.
Mathiessen State Park
Oct 22
Now that our most recent trip is over I’m going to name it Midweek Getaway I. But back to the beginning before we get to the end.
It was a dark and stormy night – well it was, trite and florid doesn’t mean not true. How about now the night of our discontent is made glorious day? Too derivative? Ok, the morning was perfect, if you were filming a horror movie. The chill fog made the appearance of brain eating zombies not just possible but expected.
Matthiessen State Park was literally on the way to the interstate so we stopped to see the sights and stretch our legs. Another beautiful park, but hard to tell in the cold fog. So after a brief visit we were on the road again.
Except we had to stop for gas. Normally putting gas in the car is a no brainer, but this time was different. There were two regular unleadeds (do they even make leaded anymore?). The 88 octane regular was 4 cents cheaper than the 87 octane regular and had its own blue nozzle. Huh? The 88 octane gas had no ethanol, the 87 did and shared a black nozzle with the other grades that did. The yellow nozzle had the E85 gas. So there I stood, racking my brain trying to determine if it was ok to fill up from the blue nozzle. I did, and so far it’s been ok.
Three and a half hours with a stop at Culver’s for lunch we were home and only the clean up of Midway Getaway I was left. I hope you enjoyed reading about the trip almost as much we had taking it.
Starved Rock Park
Oct 21
The day started cold and dreary, the kind of day only a corgi can love. We lingered over our breakfast, ordered the night before and delivered to our room in place of the free breakfast normally provided. And then with our bellies full and properly caffeinated it was off to Starved Rock and the day’s adventure.
We were about the tenth car in the main parking lot – we didn’t exactly have the place to ourself, but it was close. The trail led us along the Illinois River up and down various prominences including Starved Rock itself. The route back led us into several canyons which, despite the name, are the stars of the park. Somewhere along the way back the sun came out in full force and not long after so did the crowds.
Then it was off to lunch – a single smash burger for my better half and double smash burger for me – in beautiful downtown Utica which manages to pack a lot into its single block. Following lunch we took a bit of a scenic drive (sounds better than driving aimlessly while digesting) before heading to the far end of the park.
First we visited three canyons (Ottawa, Kaskaskia, Illinois) and had our obligatory vacation chat with a couple we’ll never meet again. Then we set off down the road to another parking lot and more trails leading back down to the river and more canyons. Eventually the clouds rolled in and thickened, the day grew late, and the dogs were growing hoarse from barking, so we called it a day.
Dinner was in LaSalle at a restaurant the other couple recommended – they live relatively close, come here often, and claimed this is the prettiest place in Northern Illinois – not a lot of competition, but it is really beautiful.
Our vacations aren’t any better than yours, they just have better press.
We hit the road again for a brief tour of scenic north central Illinois. Nothing says scenic beauty like absolutely flat with either the corn still standing but dead or mown down. Ok, we’ve heard tales and seen pictures of Starved Rock Park and decided to see it for ourselves.
After a late lunch with friends heading from Iowa to Florida (Kriss and Tammie Morris) – who wouldn’t this time of year – we checked into our hotel which seems to have different names that generally include the words “Grand”, “Grizzly”, “Bear”, and “Resort” but not always and is suffering from a lack of guests like all the other ones we’ve stayed in this year.
And then it was a hop, skimp, and a jump to the park itself where we braved the late hour and threat of rain to visit St Louis Canyon and a nameless (at least to us) ridge. Wow, is this northern Illinois? Because clearly, Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore. Big elevation changes, trees, waterfalls, in two words natural beauty.
And the end of today’s photos too
The New York Times ran this bombshell: Trump avoids taxes bigly. Since there really wasn’t anything new in this news story (we already knew about the huge, near billion dollar loss claimed a long time ago and his tax avoidance from the bombshell report just before the 2016 election) what we’re left with is that the Times really hates Trump and really wants to influence elections, which come to think of it we already knew that too.
Well, what is new is that the Times wants to mislead you that they were not part of a felony, namely the release of his tax return data: “it obtained printouts from his official Internal Revenue Service tax transcripts, with the figures from his federal tax form, the 1040, from someone who had legal access to them.” And it’s a felony for someone who has that legal access to provide it to someone who doesn’t (i.e. the New York Times). There was a time not that long ago I had legal access to certain classified information, and as part of that access it was made quite clear it would be a crime for me to provide it to someone who didn’t (like the New York Times). I’m not claiming that the Times did anything illegal by receiving or publishing the information, I’m just claiming that it was a crime for the leaker to provide it to the Times although if it’s a crime to knowingly accept stolen property in many jurisdictions, one has to wonder at the difference. There was a crime committed here, and it wasn’t by Trump, it was by the Time’s source.
The Times tries to draw a lot of conclusions from the returns. While you can’t make up stuff from whole cloth on a tax return, keep in mind that while an accountant’s job is to provide a client a clear, complete, and accurate picture of the client’s finances to the client, a tax accountant’s job is to provide a legally defensible picture of the client’s finances to the IRS that minimizes the client’s taxes – so the less clear, less complete, and less accurate while remaining legally defensible the better. I don’t think you can tell exactly how successful a businessman he is from his returns because they will always look less successful, and how much less is a factor of how good their tax accountants are. Nobody brags to the IRS how much money they make.
While Trump’s image as a super successful businessman, not deserved in my opinion, may have been somewhat important in his 2016 campaign, I don’t think it plays much of a role in 2020. Trump wasn’t the first, or last person, to relentlessly sell themselves far beyond their reality (what else is the Kardashian empire built upon), or to discover that if the debt you owe is a significant fraction of the lenders worth suddenly your success becomes very important to the lender. If a bank has to write off a few thousand dollars when it forecloses on a house that’s covered in the interest rate it charges; if a bank has to write off over a 100 million dollars when it forecloses on a real estate empire, executives at the bank lose their jobs. To me Trump isn’t the poster child of how do you make a small fortune – start with a large fortune; he’s more of how do you make a small fortune – keep the small fortune you start with.
We all try to avoid taxes just like we all try to avoid stepping in dog poo. It’s just most of us don’t have a lot (either money or scope) to work with. I mean, when TurboTax tells you it was able to save you $312 in federal taxes, do you whip out your check book and send the treasury a check for that amount? You could, you know. Of course not, you wonder why it couldn’t find more. Do you contribute to an IRA – why then you’re a tax avoider. The financial side of retirement planning consists of maximizing your income in retirement and deciding if that income is sufficient for your needs and desires, and a huge part of that maximization is tax avoidance. Tax avoidance is just finding legal ways of keeping more of your money and sending less to the government which spends it so carefully and wisely. Tax evasion is doing it illegally.I’ll tell you something I think is of interest on a tax return: charitable giving. You have every incentive to brag to the IRS about how much you give. I didn’t see anything in the Times about how much Trump has given over the years, just a lot of he has very complex finances and does everything he can within the law to minimize his taxes. But you have to wonder how much he gives, and if it reflected poorly on him I would expect the Times to note that.
We do have Joe Biden’s tax returns and the Bidens are not generous people. Before 2007 they never gave more than $400, as in a couple tenths of a percent in income. Then until 2017 they stayed below 2%, except for 2013 when it jumped for a year to 5%. So please, don’t tell me how compassionate Joe is.
Best of RTAWE
Sep 15
We’ve consulted the judges, tallied the scores, checked and rechecked the figures, and we are ready to tackle our first favorites post of the great Road Trip Almost Without End now that it’s ended (for some reason I always hear “It’s over Belle” in my head when thinking about the end of the trip).
The category is: favorite tollway state (for some reason I always whisper that in my head. Perhaps a few too many episodes of Password).
Okay, we got our first tollway bill and it just happens to be from our winner – drumroll please – Massachusetts. They are the winner because they caused the least disruption – it was all automatic from beginning to end, just a little sign that you were on a tollway.
We encountered our first tollway in Pennsylvania and they still had the toll booth infrastructure in place, but with one of those flashing roadside signs telling us to ignore it as they were all electronic now. Nobody did, we all crept up to the booth and then stopped and stared at the empty booth before zooming on. After that first one, I went through as fast as I was able, but there were plenty of people who kept acting like they were going to have to physically pay a toll.
New York was the worst because it had a mix of automatic plate readers and physical booths (half of which gave you a ticket and the other half that took your money, and one pair we didn’t have to pay at all but took it still took just as long) plus the construction where they were taking out toll booths and then a mile or two down the road where they were installing automatic plate readers both of which slowed down traffic – you just never knew what was coming and you had to slow down twice as often.
Maine was simply annoying – but at least it was all physical. They had a 3 dollar toll near the New Hampshire border and a 1 dollar toll up north. No doubt it was because they wanted to get all the money from the tourists down south but the aggravation of stopping to pay a 1 dollar toll almost, almost won them the worst spot.
The only redeeming feature of the toll booths was the Ben Hur-esque experience of pulling away – all those drivers after separating into many lanes were all trying to beat the other drivers back into two lanes. Boy did I want to whip the horses and the other drivers, only there were no horses or whips, mores the pity.
And the picture is in honor of Mr. Revere who didn’t pay no stinking tolls on his great road trip.
UPDATE: New York is also the most inept since 6 months later we have never received a bill from them.
The Day After
Sep 9
RTAWE – the day after.
Ran, lifted weights, went to the grocery store, paid bills, ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner at home, downloaded pictures to the computer, logged food and exercise for the first time in 24 days.
We aren’t on the mountain top anymore.
The Road Trip Almost Without End Reached its End, 24 days after the start. The bags are unpacked, I’ve had a couple of glasses of St Louis water, and I’m looking forward to sleeping in my own bed, eating non-restaurant food, and lifting weights in the basement again.
Almost 4,400 miles, 10 hotels/AirBnbs, 13 states, countless joys, and most importantly no nights sleeping in the car.
States in order:
- Missouri
- Illinois
- Indiana
- Kentucky
- West
- Virginia
- Maryland
- Pennsylvania
- New York
- Massachusetts
- New Hampshire
- Maine
- Vermont
- Ohio
I don’t know if we will ever be gone so long or change locations so frequently again.
Oops, I left this off but I have to add it: “Live Free or Die!”
