I have been washing pans and fighting the heat and doing a little writing the past week. Not that I have been contributing much here.
Speaking of our weather here in Muncie:
Severe Thunderstorm Watch issued July 28 at 11:57PM EDT until July 29 at 5:00AM EDT by NWS Storm Prediction Center
SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WATCH 563 IS IN EFFECT UNTIL 500 AM EDT FOR THE FOLLOWING LOCATIONS IN . INDIANA COUNTIES INCLUDED ARE ADAMS ALLEN BLACKFORD CARROLL CASS CLINTON DELAWARE DE KALB ELKHART FULTON GRANT HOWARD HUNTINGTON JAY KOSCIUSKO LAGRANGE LA PORTE MADISON MARSHALL MIAMI NOBLE PULASKI RANDOLPH ST. JOSEPH STARKE STEUBEN TIPPECANOE TIPTON WABASH WELLS WHITE WHITLEY
***
Air Quality Alert issued July 28 at 5:05PM EDT by NWS Indianapolis
...AIR QUALITY ALERT REMAINS IN EFFECT THROUGH MIDNIGHT EDT...
The officials at the Indiana Department of Environmental Management have declared an Air Action Quality Day, which remains in effect through midnight EDT.
An Air Quality Action Day for Ozone has been issued. Ozone levels are expected to be in the Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups range.
Active children and adults, and people with respiratory disease, such as asthma should limit prolonged outdoor exposure.
Here are some recommended actions that the public can take to reduce ozone forming emissions: * Walk, bike, carpool or use public transportation.
* Avoid using the drive-through and combine errands into one trip.
* Avoid refueling your vehicle or using gasoline-powered lawn equipment until after 7pm.
* Turn off your engine when idling for more than 30 seconds.
* Conserve energy by turning off lights or setting the air conditioner to 75 degrees or above.
For additional information, please visit the IDEM Smog page at: https://apps.idem.in.gov/smogwatch
No bike riding this week. Walking, yes. Kind of.
I walked from work yesterday up to the new restaurant on Walnut between Main and Jackson for barbecue. I kept missing the bus. Perhaps a bit dry, but what great baked beans.
Wednesday, I walked to the sheriff for registration, getting there during the lunch hour. Lieutenant Brown was a bit snippy about me sitting around in the hall, that I could go sit anywhere I liked. Oh, well, that comes with the status, but I would think he would be more civil to the people justifying his salary. I waited for the bus back here.
Wednesday we had our power outage – the transformer out by the BMW blew up. I walked to Target, got my meds. Without electricity, my dinner seemed unlikely to cook in the crock pot, so I did a bit more walking about being returning for my prescription. I decided BW3 wanted too much for their hamburgers; Chinese posed a problem with the carbs; Burger King might be gone but certainly was closed for remodeling; Panera's power was out, and so was The Outback; and MCL did not appeal to me. By the time I got back to the room, power was on, and my chili was heating up.
Joel C sent me a letter critiquing my “Road Tripping.” Well, that got me thinking while I scrubbed pans on Thursday. I had already been talking to KH how I was no longer going to submit the separate pieces of my longer stuff. Joel's letter made see some issues in my story, and from that I saw how I had been trying too hard to have it both ways – as a standalone and as part of a longer novel. I got home and start rearranging my story on the computer as I had done it in my head while working. There is a quasi-Zen state achieved through washing pans.
I really do not remember Thursday. Off work early again. More rewriting. Did I go somewhere? McClure's, I am sure. I finished off my crock of pork and beans as a chili. I remember feeling that I had accomplished little.
Which is why I work feeling very disgruntled yesterday morning. Nothing specific, just a general annoyance at the difference between goals and achievements. The half rack of ribs raised my spirits.
A nap yesterday did me some good. I decided to quit pushing regardless of my energy. Again, hours spent on revising my story. I do recall a trip to McClure's, but then staying in with the A/C.
Hearing of Sinead O'Connor's death hit hard. No, I will not call myself a fan; I did not follow her music; I just admired her style and the beauty of her voice.
Book of condolences to open for Sinéad O'Connor
Russell Crowe says Sinéad O’Connor was ‘a hero of mine’ as he shares heartwarming story of meeting (A class act is Mr. Crowe)
I woke before the alarm clock this morning. The plan is to get groceries, then more writing when I return. Do some submissions. Start work on MW's project. I asked CC if she would like to spend an hour tonight downtown, and so I will probably be staying here tonight.
My big accomplishment for the week was getting my Masque of the Red Death: The Play in paperback and on Amazon.
I did a lot of note-taking, and I will apologize for dumping much of it here.
Food prices are rising at twice the general rate of inflation
The overall harmonised index at 4.6pc in July compared with a year earlier is down from an annual increase of 4.8pc in June.
Core inflation, which excludes energy and unprocessed food prices, is estimated to have risen by 5pc since July of last year, down from a rate of 5.7pc in June.
For the Eurozone as a whole, the annual inflation rate was 5.5pc in July.
Americans whine when the rest of the world is facing inflation that is often worse than we have it. Our economy has been doing better than any expected.
This has been the week when Florida Republicans declared that slavery was not so bad, that it taught the enslaved useful skills. So Why are Republicans so afraid of confronting America’s racial past?
I’m bewildered about why some on the right think too much knowledge is a dangerous thing, a fear demonstrated not only by restricting teaching about race but also through challenging or outright banning books in school and public libraries on any variety of topics, including many literary classics. While it’s true that the left too often wants to turn schools into laboratories for progressive ideology, expanding thoughts and ideas is always preferable to restricting them — something progressives should remember when they suggest clamping down on conservative voices on social media or barring right-leaning figures from speaking on college campuses.
Rather than banning reading material advocated by the left, the right should insist on adding books promoting conservative viewpoints. If that means building bigger libraries to accommodate the widest array of philosophies and opinions, everybody wins.
I like the proposal – more ideas, not censorship – but if another explanation is true – that the Trump base sees themselves as victims of racial discrimination, then I am not sure if it will work. Like toddlers wanting their favorite toy, they will not stop crying until it is restored – or forcibly corrected for their whining ways.
We white people have been running the show in this country from the start. Africans were not running down to the beaches, volunteering for slavery in America so they could learn blacksmithing and tailoring. No white Americans were knocking on the door for this job training. The Florida law would have us tearing own the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Indianapolis, empty all of our Civil War museums. For, why would the North fight to destroy an institution that was a benefit to the African-American?
We would need to change our history of the Underground Railroad – why would anyone be desperate to leave an institution teaching them useful skills?
What slavery taught the enslaved was to endure brutality – the beatings, the rape, the mental cruelty – of the slave owners and a society that tolerated the slave power.
This is like saying The Holocaust gave Jews and Romany and gays and Communists vocational skills. Or that the Potato Famine was merely a glitch in agriculture policy.
Another bit of politics: Ball State President: Biden student loan proposals don’t address systemic problem
Geoff Mearns said colleges and universities have no real stake in addressing the student debt problem.
“We need to construct a mechanism to reward institutions whose student borrowers repay their loans,” he said. “And, conversely, hold accountable those institutions whose student borrowers default on their loans at very high rates.”
The university president also said too many students are dropping out of college without attaining a degree, and those people – with smaller amounts of debt – have the highest default rates.
Onto other things: Practising their beliefs: A claim for the late origins of Judaism (interesting); The Egyptian Egg Ovens Considered More Wondrous Than the Pyramids (and no mention of ancient aliens having a hand in this); The Best International Crime Fiction of July 2023 (which has an Indiana connection); Anderson hosts prestigious national youth bowling tournament; Two Poems by Joyce Mansour; Nothing Special: A Q&A with author Nicole Flattery; A Distinct Phenomenon in Itself: C. V. Raman’s Discovery of Why the Sea is Blue (1921); For Ruth Madievsky, Voice Is Everything; and Gouverneur Morris and the Drafting of the Federalist Constitution.
The glass half empty: The decline of the Roman Empire and the decline of the West should give you some things to think about:
The book is lucid and absorbing. Complicated matters ranging from the fall of the Roman empire to the nature of the financial instruments cooked up by the Bretton Woods agreement (1944) are expertly explained, while a drumbeat of jaw-dropping facts and figures consistently startles (did you know that by the middle of the century, nearly one third of the populations in Western countries will be retired, or that no less than one quarter of global industrial production is now located in China?).
Whether the argument itself is persuasive is a different matter. The central claim is that imperial systems tend to fall apart right at the moment of their maximum power and prosperity. In developing the structures that channel the flow of resources to an imperial core, so the argument goes, empires also generate secondary concentrations of wealth and power in peripheral territories, which eventually enable the periphery to challenge the imperial centre. In the case of Rome’s Mediterranean empire, we can trace this long-term process in central Europe and the western Eurasian steppe – those Goths did not just come out of nowhere. And we see it now, too, in the rapidly growing economies of what we used to call “the developing world”, which are eroding Western dominance.
One problem that prevents imperial centres from dealing effectively with these peripheral challengers is the rise of peer superpower competitors: the Sasanian Empire in antiquity, which ruled over the Iranian plateau from 224 to 651 CE, and China today. Often, though, it is the unexpected, exogenous shock to the system that tips the balance towards terminal decline. In the case of the Roman Empire, it was the coming of the Huns that unexpectedly triggered the mass population movements that pushed the Goths and other groups into Roman territory. And today it is Covid-19, which has (among other things) exacerbated Western financial crises that first erupted in 2008.****
... In one crucial matter, however, there is no real point of comparison at all. Western populations are ageing themselves out of the demographic profile necessary to sustain an accustomed quality of life or even, more troublingly, to pay off the massive debts racked up during the boom years. This is a deep structural problem, highlighted by the authors, for which there is no obvious analogy from the later Roman empire.
There is of course an even bigger problem that affects not only the economic livelihoods and well-being of the British, Europeans and North Americans – the populations around which the whole discussion is unapologetically oriented – but which affects us all: environmental collapse. Climate change is noted in passing towards the end of the book, but is not systematically addressed. Yet it could well bring about the fall of everything. Indeed, it is not a Western nor even an international problem, but a planetary one. We can look to ancient Rome for some tips about how to handle large-scale shifts in Western political economies, but if temperatures continue to soar, entire ecosystems falter and drinking water begins to run out, it is hard to imagine that any such tips will make much of a difference.
What good is an empire, if we kill off our species?
Sugar Cream Pie: Indiana's unofficial state pie was once a desperate measure.
Though it was already beloved in select communities, sugar cream truly began its rise to the top in 1944. That’s when Duane Wickersham opened a restaurant in Randolph County, Indiana, and started baking around 20 pies per day. Over the next decade, demand quadrupled. In 1962, Wickersham patented the recipe and opened a factory. Today, “Wick’s” makes 10,000 pies per eight-hour shift, and 75 percent of them are sugar creams. In 2009, Indiana locals—known as Hoosiers—pushed to make the pie their state’s dessert, but the proposal never reached the governor’s desk. Whether or not the designation is official, no one would dispute that sugar cream pie is a distinctly Hoosier treat.
And what I cannot eat until I get even more weight off of me. Such a terrible thing to do without sugar cream pie.
A betrayal’: Prison employee accused of taking thousands in payments from ‘high net-worth’ inmate:
A Bureau of Prisons employee who works as a correctional counselor at the Federal Medical Center Devens has been charged with accepting payments from an inmate under his care, in violation of his duties as a public official, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said Monday.
William S. Tidwell, 49, of Keene, N.H., is also charged with lying to a bank about a loan he received from the inmate’s business associate and forging the associate’s signature to support this false claim, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said in a statement.
Tidwell allegedly received over $90,000 in benefits and a $50,000 property loan, officials said. He was charged in federal court in Boston with receipt of payments by a public official in violation of his official duties, making false statements to a bank and identity theft. He will appear in federal court in Boston at a later date.
Color me surprised – not.
Back to Muncie – who knew there was luxury here?
MRC and Ridenour opt for smaller version of the second phase of Canal District
WS Property Group has worked with the city to develop White River Lofts, a 55-unit apartment building along Washington Street. Ridenour told The Star Press that the Phase 2 apartment project would have a similar look to White River Lofts and consist of 66 units. The mayor said the White River Lofts development, which was initially described as a "luxury" development, has been successful in terms of its occupancy.
The Drive-By Truckers do Warren Zevon:
I have a letter to write, so enough for now.
sch 9:05 AM
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