Ruminations, Haunts, and Errors

If the new, Metra-based travel arrangements (schedules?!? ugh!) for our annual July 3 & 4 Grant Park rituals didn’t further confirm that we’re not in Lakeview any more, today yet another significant break with that era arrived as I put the new city stickers on the car windshields–without accompanying Zone 383 residential parking permits.  True, they take up less space now, but it also means that some of the prime parking will be off-limits when we want to head over thataway for dinner, alas.

Somewhat ironically, when we decided to stop by Julius Meinl on our way back from Steppenwolf on Saturday, I couldn’t bring myself to park in the 383 zone, even though Liz pointed out that we still had the sticker and enforcement of expired stickers never begins before July 15.  Still, it felt better to go find a spot (relatively easily, as it turns out) over in the LV2 zone:  I benefitted from the 383 restrictions for five years, so I understand how important it is to keep the ‘unentitled’ vehicles out of the way.

Add that to the fact we bought city stickers even though we have a garage, and some might find me daft.  But $75 per car per year isn’t much; call me silly, but I like having Streets & San have enough funds to provide municipal services.  We deliberately stayed in the city, so I think a little civic duty to keep it running and orderly is proper.

But can we reset the sticker rollover date to something like October 1?  Scraping those things off in the heat of summer is just no fun!

Blogged with Flock

• When gasoline prices seemed to zoom past the $2 mark a few months back, WBBM-AM started highlighting the filling stations with area’s lowest pump prices. It was intriguing at first, but why do they still continue? The current price level is almost certainly quasi-permanent, so it’s not news any more. For a station to lower its prices in a gamble to be mentioned on the air seems like an ineffective advertizing strategy. Moreover, to gush over ‘gas for only $1.99!’ or ‘look, it’s down a nickel from a few days ago’ is nothing but make-news sensationalism. Really, even if you’re throwing 20 gallons into an SUV twice a week, a nickel-per-gallon change in price comes out to…$2. Two whole dollars a week, not even a grande at Starbucks! If $2 a week, $100 a year, has a significant effect on your finances, I posit that the price of a gallon of gas (and the fluctuations thereof) are really the least of your problems.
• Speaking of making news from nothing, I was shaking my head the other morning at Red Eye’s headline that screamed about the impending crime wave of iPod thefts. Turns out my skepticism was justified, as even cursory digging indicated precious little evidence that iPods have been or are becoming a significant target. Sheesh, I know the red funny papers are fluff to kill time on the morning commute, but can’t they at least just oversimpify the real news (fluffy and otherwise) that’s out there?
• Yes, Newsweek deserves some heat for shoddy journalism–going to press with a story about desecration of the Koran that wasn’t properly verified–and their public retraction and contrition was necessary given the obvious consternation it caused in Afghanistan and elsewhere. (Even if some top brass at the Pentagon do not believe that the story was the basis for the deadly riots.) But for the White House to have the audacity to scold and lecture about the terrible human price that is the cost of going forward without first getting the facts straight and the dire need to repent for such sin…well, that might be funny if the underlying hypocrisy weren’t so galling and sad.

Time to release some thoughts peskily bouncing around my head so I can do something else…

• On southbound I-94 south of Milwaukee there’s a billboard for The Fish radio station that reads ‘Safe for the Whole Family’. Umm, tell me, how can radio (or for that matter TV or any media outlet) be safe or unsafe? Inappropriate? Disturbing? Infuriating? Annoying? Sure. But barring volume excessive enough to cause hearing damage, radio simply conveys ideas and concepts which by their very nature can’t be safe or unsafe. (I won’t even bring up the issues of what defines ‘family’ and how one defines a single standard of family-safe anything.)
• Bulls hosting the opener of a playoff series…and winning. Been a while since those concepts were legitimately strung together! And to think for the better part of decade that was the norm, even during Jordan’s great Birmingham (mis)adventure.
• The weather tonight is certainly an improvement over the chilly weekend, but I still don’t understand why the Cubs scheduled–months in advance–night games for tonight and tomorrow. Sitting outside at night is generally unpleasant in these parts during April and most of May. If it were to help acclimate the team after a road trip, okay…but this is the middle of a homestand! Night games still constitute less than a third of the Cubs home schedule, save ‘em for July and August when they’re most useful for players and fans alike!
• Recently reported was a possible HIV-eating bacterium that works by attaching to certain sugars on the virus coating, discovered by a UIC dentist no less. Ain’t biochemistry grand?
• A Blue state with a Red governor managed to enact a reasonably non-contentious civil-unions law through the good old-fashioned legislative process. Hard-liners on both sides of the gay-marriage issue are probably disappointed in the end result, but maybe that means it struck a balanced compromise. Think whatever juju that led to such productive use of the political process can make it’s way down I-95 to enlighten those inside the Beltway? Nah, I didn’t think so either. Sigh.

A couple weeks back the news/weather types were making much ado about nothing, but today we’ve got a real snowfall to deal with. While an inch in North Carolina leads to chaos and day-long traffic jams, Chicagoans just shrug off the snowdrifts and keep going:

Given the conditions shown here, I certainly don’t want to drive my Honda right now let alone a big, clunky mail truck. But I just had to laugh when I looked out the window to see this…I get this mental image of the mail carrier barrelling down the street, sliding and screeching to a halt, and casually stepping out with an air of ‘Hey, perfect parking job!’

Here’s what my aforementioned vehicle looked like when the snowfall had (mostly) stopped

Surprisingly, we decided that there was no pressing need for a vist to IKEA today after all.

Christmas in Bartonia means lots of driving of late, from Milwaukeeland to the southern end of the collar counties. As my passenger has a tendency to succumb to highway hypnosis, all that time in the car lends itself to various ponderings…

• Good driving requires multiple things from people: Rules of the Road, Operating a Vehicle, Situational Awareness, Predictive Analysis, and Temperment. That our training and licensing systems only really deal with the first two aspects probably explains in large measure why so many people do stupid or annoying things on our roadways. (Okay, there’s some implicit training in Situational Awareness, but Not Hitting the Object Right in Front of You and Checking Your Blind Spot are hardly comprehensive.) While the other three aspects are more difficult to teach or measure, arguably they are more important–especially on city expressways.
• WXRT fades out around Racine, so we ended up listening to an all-Christmas music station for a while. Fortunately they played a wide mix of songs covering all styles and eras. The juxtaposition of classic crooners (Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, etc.) and more contemporary acts (Luther Vandross, Mariah Carey, etc.) allowed me to identify exactly what drives me nuts about American Idol-style singers: they put vocal embellishments on essentially every note and phrase rather than simply using them for effect. Tony Bennett and Billie Holliday knew that extended notes sometimes need a vibrato to make them interesting, and bent notes or variant rhythms add a nice jazzy style to a song; in contrast, the modern divas can’t seem to sing any part of a song straight, so it sounds to me that they’re either just showing off or else don’t appreciate the more subtle aspects of musical phrasing.