Nothing to Do But Feed All the Kangaroos

Have you been out shopping yet? Well, why not? America is depending on you! In honor of this guy, I bring you a little Black Friday doggerel:

Black Friday

We must fight impending doom

Heed the mandate - go consume!

Join the buying polyglot

In the Rosedale parking lot

Time to fight financial stress

Get out and buy that GPS

Hank Paulson's fought the stormy seas

Of manufactured urgency

The Big 3 come with cups in hand

As mendicants to Waxmanland

Detroit's adrift, or so it seems

With pension plans as Ponzi schemes

The bills are steep, the air is rank

With wealth transfers to Citibank

You try to run, nowhere to go

With your drained portfolio

Do you dance? Or do you cry?

With brokers falling from the sky?

The sun gleams through my windowpane

It always does despite the rain

Of finances sour and dispatches bleak

And tragedies that fill the week

How do you face it? Are you pissed?

I'd rather be an optimist

I'll be here all week. Try the veal.

Happy Thanksgiving!

(Photo from Orlando Sentinel)

Count your blessings -- chances are pretty good you don't root for the Detroit Lions. And if you need any further reason to be grateful on that score, check out the invaluable Curse of Bobby Layne website. A splendid compilation of 50 years of futility and probably one of the better concentrations of schadenfreude you'll find on the Web.

Guilty Pleasures Part Thirty-Four -- Thanksgiving 1983

You know what I'm thankful for? That we're already 25 years past 1983. Was it really a quarter century ago? It's hard to believe that we're that far away now. It's amazing when I look at the Top 100 chart for the year and I remember every single song. 1983 was a year of great transition in our family. I was in the middle of my college years and we ended up moving to a new home on edge of town. In order to make things work, my dad had to go through a series of very complicated financial transactions and for a few painful months was paying mortgages on 3 houses. I can't even imagine the stress that must have caused, especially because interest rates were just awful -- a typical 30-year loan carried a 13.4% interest rate. That financial strain changed my life, because it meant that the semester I'd planned for the following winter, which was supposed to be in Spain, ended up being back at Beloit. Goodbye Spanish major and hello, English major. As a consolation prize, I ended up running the school newspaper instead.

In those days a lot of my interest was in drinking beer and listening to music. And it was a good year for both drinking beer and for music, despite such dubious milestones as Frank Stallone's "Far From Over" and the collected works of Laura Branigan. But there were some songs that are easy to forget that would push your fun button. And the videos were always a hoot, in the classic 1980s incoherent way. Remember any of these?

Dead Giveaway, featuring Jody Watley getting all robotic

Der Kommissar, with icy Eurobabes and unexplained tarantulas

Twilight Zone, with gratuitous chorus girls dressed in dominatrix outfits

Our House, with moms in drag and great Wallace and Gromit-style wallpaper

Come On Eileen, with fashions by Oshkosh B'Gosh

Just a festival of odd random stimulation! When you try to sort all that stuff out now, it makes it easy to understand why beer was so necessary back in the day.

So, you know the drill -- pick your favorite (if you have one) and/or tell me what was going on for you back in 1983.

The rest of us are playing for second place

Why? Because Iowahawk owns the blogosphere.

Change You Can Believe In

I am pleased to announce that I will be joining the team at Truth vs. The Machine in the coming days. This is an exciting opportunity to work at one of the most prestigious addresses in the Minnesota blogosphere, with a very high-level group of bloggers. We're still working on the details but I'll have more to tell you soon.

In case you are wondering: this feature will continue, but it may undergo a bit of "repurposing" as a result of my move to TvM. Stay tuned.

Uneasy Lies the Crown

If you've followed this feature for any length of time, you've likely noticed that I post regular, somewhat tongue-in-cheek updates on my son's (and my daughter's) various teams. If you've read these breathless dispatches, you've also noticed that, in the main, my son has played on teams that haven't been especially, ahem, successful. But right now things are very different. And it's making me a little queasy.

Big Blue, my son's in-house Irondale basketball team, is off to a 3-0 start in the 7-8 in-house league. All three games have been routs, including the last one, a 72-29 thrashing of another Irondale team. As has been the case with most of these teams, I've been serving as an assistant coach, mostly because my voice carries pretty well. While my son really has enjoyed the experience of playing with a group of very talented kids, especially at an in-house level, winning by 43 points is problematic. It's no fun for the kids on the other team. I know, because 2 years ago Ben was on a basketball team that lost a game 70-6.

As it happens, a couple of the kids on Ben's team this year were on the team that did the thrashing 2 years ago. Both of these kids are fine young men and are good sportsmen -- they do not play unfairly, but they and their teammates have significantly more talent than some of the kids on other teams. And as a result, they are dominating. We've seen some of the other teams that our lads will face later on and there's no reason to believe that these teams will fare much better than the teams we've played thus far against our talented squad. It's good for Ben, because he'll have a lot of fun playing on a winning team. The key is to keep games from turning into this (initial part of this link not safe for work). That is my job this year, because it's no fun to get your butt kicked when you're a 13-year old kid. Teaching basketball is only part of the process. Teaching good sportsmanship is much more important.

Two Men Say They’re Jesus, One of Them Must Be Wrong

Obama promotes fiscal restraint, big spending

No wonder he won the election. That takes talent.

Does anyone at the AP even bother to read the headlines anymore?

WPA Blues

So it sounds like we're going to be piddling around again. Barack Obama has proposed a jobs program to repair infrastructure that could employ up to 2.5 million Americans by 2011. It's the WPA all over again.

The WPA and similar New Deal programs were everywhere and you still see evidence of the work that was done today. Walk down the steps at Minnehaha Falls and you'll still see evidence of the work that the WPA did there. The picture I've posted is of the Outagamie County Courthouse back home in Appleton, an FDR-era structure that is one of the finest examples of Stalinist architecture that you'll ever see, with the extra special irony of a larger-than-life sized bust of Senator Joseph McCarthy inside the building.

And that is only one of the many ironies of the WPA and similar New Deal-era programs. The problem with them was pretty simple - they didn't really work because they unsurprisingly misallocated the time and talents of the participants. And by tying up so many workers for so long, they simply prolonged the Depression. WPA had its hands in just about everything -- including the "Voodoo Macbeth" that a very young Orson Welles staged as part of the Federal Theater Project.

The people who participated in the WPA tended to be ambivalent about it. Besides the efforts of Welles and others involved in the various arts programs that the WPA sponsored, the organization itself brought on some interesting art of its own, including the WPA Blues written by Casey Bill Weldon, in which the protagonist worries that in the name of progress, that the WPA is going to tear down his domicile:

Everybody's working in this town and it's worrying me night and day
Everybody's working in this town and it's worrying me night and day
If that mean working too, have to work for the WPA

Well well the landlord come this morning and he knocked on my door
He asked me if I was going to pay my rent no more
He said you have to move if you can't pay
And then he turned and he walked slowly away

So I have to try find me some other place to stay
That housewrecking crew's coming from the WPA

We're going to learn a lot more about what the president-elect has planned in the coming weeks. I don't think it's necessary to man the ramparts -- it's possible that my friend Rich's theory is correct and that Obama is more of a centrist than he might have appeared to be. But that's the problem with a guy who is still tabula rasa for most people. And we don't know if the housewrecking crew's coming from the WPA.

Iowahawk Is A Genius, Volume XXXIV (or thereabouts)

Remember how Congress sent the mendicants from Detroit back on their corporate jets last week because they didn't come with a plan? Iowahawk has figured it out. Just read it.

Happy motoring!

Stasis You Can Believe In

Victor Davis Hanson asks a good question:

So a mere two weeks after victory, 'hope and change' and 'a break from the past' reified into parceling out posts to dozens of Clintonite retreads, plenty of the old requisite Ivy-League law degrees, ample influence from establishment ex-lobbyists, de rigueur Sidwell Friends for the kids, and apparent sudden existential angst and uncertainty over FISA, getting out pronto from Iraq, closing down the Constitution-shredding Gitmo, and overturning the McCarthyite Patriot Act—and all to acclaim and relief from aristocratic Beltway pundits of both parties? So that was all the election was about? Just new faces on the same old, same old?

Here's one more question: if it tuns out that President Obama pursues many of the same policies that George W. Bush pursued, but receives acclaim instead of denunciations, what does that say about those bien pensants who have been doing the denouncing over the past 8 years?

Big Blue Wins Again

Three in a row for Big Blue, as the Irondale 3 team cruises to a 72-29 victory over Irondale 6 (the Orange team) at Island Lake Elementary School in Shoreview. The game followed a familiar pattern with the Blues jumping to a big early lead and cruising from there. Ben had a good overall game, scoring 4 points including a buzzer beater at the end of the 6th period (we play eight 5-minute periods in this league).

The team takes a break next week for Thanksgiving then resumes play on Saturday, December 6 against the mysterious Mounds View 73 squad (sounds like a Grateful Dead album, eh?) Game time is 1 p.m., again at Island Lake. Remember, Mr. Dilettante is the place to go for exciting coverage of Irondale 7-8 in-house youth basketball.

Hecker's Veto

If you live in the Twin Cities and your domicile isn't under a rock, it's almost certain that you've heard the name of Denny Hecker. Hecker built a hydra-headed empire that sprung out of his small armada of car dealerships. In recent years he also acquired Advantage Rent-A-Car and for a time even got into the home mortgage business. He was a friendly looking, ruddy-faced guy and you'd see his mug on at least one commercial just about every day if you watched even an hour of television, it seemed. His earworm jingle and slogan "Good people helping good people" is pure Twin Cities.

It all seems to be spinning out of control now. I'd heard rumblings that he was in trouble and there were reports that he was fighting it out with various suppliers and had filed a federal lawsuit against Chrysler Financial Services, which had allegedly cut off financing that Hecker had needed to finance his operations.

But now we learn that Hecker has had to close six of his dealerships and has sold 3 others. Some of the dealerships in question are pretty big ones:

In a news release late Friday, Hecker said the shutdown of the Blaine Bargain Lot, Forest Lake Chrysler Jeep Dodge Mitsubishi, Monticello Dodge Ford and Mercury Suzuki Kia, Rosedale Hyundai, Shakopee Chrysler Jeep Dodge and Stillwater Ford Lincoln Mercury has resulted in layoffs for about 400 employees, about a third of Hecker's workforce.

In addition, Hecker's Inver Grove Heights Hyundai, Inver Grove Heights Volkswagen and Peninsula Dodge in Redwood City, Calif., were sold.

It's difficult to tell if these moves will stop the bleeding, but it's yet another sign of the overall weakness we're seeing in the economy. People are afraid to make big purchases now. Mrs. D reminded me of that with an observation she made this morning. She noted that on our street, no one has bought a new car, or even a used car, in the past year. We live on a short street and there are 24 houses on it from beginning to end. You know everyone's vehicle on a street like that and nothing has changed here. Until people are willing to spend money again, the changes won't be happening on short residential streets, but the changes will continue on the main thoroughfares where car dealerships are located. And eventually, different changes may come to our short residential street.

Speaking of State Championship Teams

Behold the 1963 Xavier High team, state champions. The young man who is second from the front on the left side did fairly well for himself later on in life. This year is the 50th anniversary of XHS basketball and for the most part it's been a highly successful run. We'll probably have a few more vintage posts of this sort over the course of the next few months.

Kimberly 28, Verona 14

Congratulations to the alma mater of Stinger, Coco and Marge. And my dad, too. 28-0 over the past two seasons and two Wisconsin state titles in Division 2. Not bad at all.

The Recount Continues

I'm really trying not to watch the Coleman v. Franken recount play out, because it's enough to make you crazy. But if you want the raw numbers, go here. And if you want to know what's happening, let the redoubtable Gary Gross be your guide. Gary has been all over this story and he'll follow it through with his usual combination of tenacity and good sense.

November 21, 1995

I remember it being a cold but sunny Tuesday morning. As it turned out, two things happened that day that are historic. First, the Dow Jones industrial average climbed over the 5000 mark for the first time. At Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, the Dayton Peace Accords were initialed, marking the end of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. And at 1:52 p.m. CST, in a room at United Hospital in St. Paul, our first child was born.

We'd had a bit of a scare a month earlier and Mrs. D had spent about a week in the hospital with pre-term labor. She'd returned home and had been on bed rest. When we woke up that morning, it was clear that something was up. We called the hospital and they told us to come down. We worked our way down from our townhome in Shoreview, stopping once so I could get my cup of morning coffee. Momentous events require coffee.

Once we got to the hospital, we went to our room and Mrs. D went through the experience. Things were progressing along slowly but it seemed possible that this would be the day. The nurses and doctors came and went, none seemingly too worried about things. It was possible that it might be days before the baby would arrive, we were told, or the baby might come today. It seemed like a long morning. We'd been through the Lamaze classes and we were clued into what we might expect. We'd brought music to listen to and Mrs. D's favorite teddy bear, which she'd received as a gift in college. Whatever it took.

As the morning dragged toward noon, she turned to me and said, "look, I don't think anything is going to happen any time soon. Why don't you go and get some lunch. Take your time." Knowing that she was in good hands, I left the hospital and walked down to a Subway shop on West 7th. I got myself a turkey sub and a Pioneer Press and had a good long hour of decompressing. Although we were both excited about the possibilities of the day, it was good to get away and think about things other than the life-changing event that might happen. I strolled back to the hospital, got on the elevator and headed for the maternity ward.

When I got back, it was obvious that Mrs. D had had an eventful hour in my absence. She was rocking uncomfortably back and forth in the bed and she looked at me and said, "you can't leave now." There was a nurse nearby and we were told that the obstetrician would be arriving shortly. "It looks like the baby is going to come today," I was told. The next hour was a blur. I remember trying to hold Mrs. D's hand, and hold the teddy bear to give her a focal point. I remember trying to fish through our bag to change the tape (yep, we still had cassettes). I put on some Miles Davis - Kind of Blue, a favorite and something that would be comforting enough. As the bottom of the hour passed and we headed toward 2, it became pretty clear that this was the time. A close family friend had arrived to offer support and was pretty much horrified to realize that she had walked in at the moment of truth. She quickly beat a hasty retreat the waiting room. I will never forget the look on the friend's face.

Meanwhile, the moment had arrived. Childbirth is simultaneously amazing, frightening and a little bit bizarre. As the song "All Blues" wailed softly in the background, I saw the baby emerge. It was our son. As the nurses quickly took him to the side table to give him his first exam, the Apgar score, he let out a healthy wail. Mrs. D looked at me. I looked at her. It was the beginning.

My son is a 7th grader and is straddling the childhood he is leaving and the exciting world of adulthood that is beckoning. He's turned into a bright, energetic kid with a quick wit and a great enthusiasm for learning more about the world he entered that cold, clear Tuesday. He's been a source of great joy.

At times, it's obvious that 13 years have passed. But it still seems like we just brought him home from the hospital.

Fearless Dilettante Football Predictions - Manos de Piedra Edition

If you're as old as I am (and if you are, enjoy that Early Bird Special!) you probably remember the great boxer Roberto Duran. He was a fearsome figure in the ring and he was said to have manos de piedra, which translates to "hands of stone" in English. That's a good physical characteristic for a welterweight boxer, but not so much for an NFL receiver. We'll get to that in a moment. First, let's talk about some other games. And a tip of the sombrero to this guy for suggesting the title of today's picks.

Kimberly Papermakers 41, Verona Wildcats 10. Tomorrow's game decides the WIAA Division 2 championship and, at least theoretically, this should be a tough game for the Papermakers. But the last four games should have been, too, and the red-clad scourges from just north of Darboy have been leaving a path of destruction in their wake. No reason to assume it's going to end tomorrow.

ACTUAL RESULT: KIMBERLY 28, VERONA 14. Congratulations to the Papermakers!

Wisconsin Badgers 31, Cal Poly Mustangs 14. This one probably looked like a walkover when it was scheduled, but the Div I-AA Mustangs come into the contest 8-1 and have the look of a team that merits respect. If the Badgers lose this one, they could be looking at a very bad bowl game, so they need to take care of business. The guess here is that they will but that it won't be easy.

ACTUAL RESULT: BAD-GERS 36, POLY 35 (OT). Polly wanna cracker? Poly needs a kicker. My goodness, what an embarrassing performance. But it could be worse. Read on.

Minnesota Golden Gophers 24, Iowa Hawkeyes 20. Iowa has really turned it around after a poor start to the season and the Gophers are probably still sucking wind after their tough loss in Madison last week. By all accounts, this is a game the Hawkeyes should win. That's why I'm picking the Gophers.

ACTUAL RESULT: IOWAY 55, LAKELAND DENTAL ACADEMY 0. I'm not sure who should be more embarrassed - the Gophers for offering the worst performance they've ever offered in a Big Ten game, or me for actually thinking the Gophers would beat Iowa. Feh.

Green Bay Packers 34, New Orleans Saints 27. As much as I love my Packers, they've been a little, shall we say, schizo this year. They really had it going on against the hated Bears last week, which augurs a bit of a letdown against an erratic but dangerous Saints team. Drew Brees is very good but the Saints don't play much defense. The guess here is that the Packers play a little bit more.

ACTUAL RESULT: SAINTS 51, PACKERS 29. What do you call a team that wins 37-3 one week and loses 51-29 the next? 5-6 sounds about right.

Jacksonville Jags 24, Purple Helmeted Love Warriors 21. Remember Troy Williamson? He was the speedy wide receiver the Vikings drafted a few years back with the hand-eye coordination of the Venus de Milo. He's been shunted off to Jacksonville this year where he has accomplished, well, nothing. For some reason, he's blaming Brad Childress for his inability to play the position at an NFL level and has apparently challenged the Chiller to a fistfight at the 50-yard line. This may be one of the more hilarious developments surrounding the utterly humorless Purple in some time. Do you suppose that if Troy Williamson can't catch a pass, he would have the ability to catch Chilly's jaw with a right cross? I'm thinking Troy Williamson will punch more like these guys than Roberto Duran. I think it likely that the Jags will say "no mas" to this sideshow pretty quickly. As for the game, the Vikings don't do well on the road, or in Florida. Hard to see either trend changing this week.

ACTUAL RESULT: VIKINGS 30, JAGWIRES 12. Jagwire, as in haywire. The Vikings are offered repeated gifts and have the wit to accept them. Give the Purple the nod.

Doing the Right Thing

If you follow golf, you may have heard of J. P. Hayes, a PGA tour veteran and 2-time winner on the tour. As it happens, J. P. went to Xavier High School and was a classmate and friend of my brother Pat. He had a tough hop at Q-School, but his misfortune is a tale of honor. Stinger has the skinny -- go read it because it's a good story. Anyone who is an alumnus of XHS should be proud of this guy.

Party Like It's 1999

Looks like all those forlorn Democratic operatives are starting to wipe the dust from their eyes and are now emerging from their covens along the Potomac. So far the prospective Obama administration has more retreads than Bandag. Tom Daschle! Eric Holder! Hillary Clinton! Rahm Emanuel! Hey, we're getting the band back together!

In some respects, none of this is especially surprising. One of the main bones of contention surrounding the President-elect's campaign was his lack of experience, so it would be churlish to deny him the opportunity to avail himself of some experienced Washington hands. Every president needs people around him who know what's going on, because there's simply too much information for one person to process. And while the old Clinton hands aren't the people I want running the government, there are worse people that Obama could have chosen. It's not as if he's named Ramsey Clark as attorney general, or William Ayers as secretary of education. So far, at least.

I am amused at how retrograde "change" turns out to be, though.

Morning Reading Part II

Two things worth noting:

This new website, How Obama Got Elected, is interesting. Some people are arguing that this proves that people are stupid or somesuch. I don't believe that. I do believe that people can only make informed decisions if they are informed, though.

Also, since there's never a bad time for a fisking of Nick Coleman, let's go to the experts over at KAR. As always the language is saltier than a drum of anchovies so as they say, content warning.

And Norm Coleman won the election again yesterday. His effort to win it again begins today. And if he wins this recount, look for Al Franken to keep finding someone to count things to his liking.