Iron Filings - 83
August 31, 2024
Cold Iron – 263
Iron Filings - 83
Once again it's time to announce that I'm running for President of the United States on The Pleasant Party Platform. I've done this regularly over the years and have yet to win but it's worth a shot. I'm a big fan of Kamala Harris but she should have some friendly opposition to keep her on her toes; you know, policy questions and not the idiocy about her race or her genes. She also has that one characteristic so absent in so many politicians: she smiles. The Pleasant Party platform has only one plank: It's not serious. It never is.
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Just once I'd like to be put on hold with a recording telling me: Honestly, your call is not very important to us. We just don't care.
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Make Of It What You Will Observation – As often as we can we get out on the road and head on up to Rockford or Madison to see our kids and grandkids. They're nice drives, occasionally boring, but it does give us a chance to see – this is, after all, America's bread basket – how the crops are doing. This year the crops are doing beautifully, enough so that the farmers should start complaining soon: abundance usually means lower prices. What doesn't seem to be doing so well are the bugs. My wife likes to tell the story about how, years ago, her father – who managed sixty farms in the DeKalb area – would come home after a day out in the country and practically have to shovel the bugs off his windshield.
For us, that was often the case after one of our drives - the front of the car and windshield would be covered with bug carcasses. Now? Not so much. While I don't miss cleaning the goo or the trip to the car wash, it does make me wonder where all the bugs have gone. It's kind of worrisome; you know, the whole food chain thing: the big bugs eat the smaller bugs and the birds eat the big bugs and so on. Our unscientific suspicion is that the main disrupters are all the chemicals put on the fields to produce those abundant crops. There are times when I admire the unique and beneficial ways we mess with the planet, but we forget again and again the obvious, that we need to be a little more aware that this is the only planet we have.
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Sometimes I wonder about all the furor over voting with some states wanting to impose all sorts of restrictions on voter eligibility. Those states are worried about preventing fraudulent voting of the sort that's never been proven to exist anywhere in any kind of consequential sense. My own experience over the years of voting in five different states for various elections has been pretty simple. You register to vote and your particulars go into a book. On election day you give your name and – wow! – there you are in the book: an eligible voter. Never once have I been asked for my voter registration card or any other form of identification. Of course if they make you put on a MAGA cap and paint your feet red before they'll even register you – well, that's a different matter.
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We just finished our annual Corn Fest with its numerous musical acts, free sweet corn, zillions of vendor booths, and a huge carnival. So it was with some irony that I just read that, back in 1924, here in my little northern town, there was also a big gathering just outside of town with food and rides and speeches and family fun. The sponsor of that gala event was the Ku Klux Klan. They don't sponsor our current Corn Fest.
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Favorite Quote of the Month: "In Chicago we don't say, 'I love you.' We say, 'Yes, I'll drive you to O'Hare.'"
G.K. Wuori © 2024