Like a True Nature's Child,

We were born, born to be wild.
-Steppenwolf, 1968

Marco keep your eyelids up and see what you can see.
-Dr. Seuss, 1937

As I wrote recently, I went on vacation for a week to northern Wisconsin. I will always encourage people to drive across country rather than fly (and not just because I’m not a big fan of flying), because we live in such a huge, such a diverse country, filled with deserts, mountains, rolling plains, river valleys, shoreline, rain forests, and cities. Very few countries offer the geographical diversity that the United States offers. And, the people within the US are just as diverse. When you drive for a thousand miles, you get a first-hand glimpse of the heights and depths of that diversity.

And, more importantly, you will always have a story to tell. And the most interesting people on the planet are those with a story to tell. Hmm, I kind of implied that I am among the most interesting people on the planet, which kind of makes me out to be an arrogant ass. What I’m saying is, YOU can be among the most interesting people on the planet. Hell, you know what I mean.

A large portion of our drive is through Illinois….where we spend the most hours, by far, as we enter through the southernmost portion, and leave through the northernmost point. We bypass Chicago, which is the only interesting city in the state, and instead go through places like Metropolis, whose claim to fame is having a statue of Superman in front of the county courthouse, and Rockford, whose claim to fame is being the home of one of history’s greatest rock bands, Cheap Trick (and after that, its interest factor drops dramatically). So, it’s not surprising when the highlights of the trip occur on the interstate itself. One of which was the guy we saw with the Vespa scooter tied to the roof of his Nissan Sentra, which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. The second was the group of bikers we saw.

With mostly flat roads, you can see for some distance in Illinois, so we saw this group of bikers overtaking us pretty early. They looked pretty tough from a distance, so we kept in the right lane and let them pass. My wife was driving. In a few minutes, the 4 bikers on Harleys came alongside. One of the bikers had a woman sitting in the “bitch seat.” 3 of the bikers, plus the “bitch,” had no helmets. A 4th biker, one of the solo riders, had one (Illinois does not have a Helmet Law). They looked especially tough….lots of road dust, scraggly beards, and one of them had a shaved head with a tattoo on his head. On. His. Head. Did we stereotype? Sure, I suppose, but considering you see more guys with skull tattoos in prison then you do in, say, an orthodontist or investment banker’s office, you can understand why. We gave them a wide birth, allowing them to pass easily. Once the quartet passed us, they smoothly moved into the right lane and kept up with their pace, and pulled ahead of us, their Michigan license plates clearly visible.

Naturally, my 10 year old, Thing 1, would not stop commenting about the tattoo on the side of the head, as I completely expected. But in a few seconds would be the vehicle that would capture MY attention. Shortly after the bikes passed us, we were overtaken by a small SUV pulling a trailer. The trailer appeared to be a motorcycle hauler, as there were frames on the trailer to which you could hold two motorcycles and tie them down into place. The hauler passed us and then pulled in front of us, it’s Michigan plate visible. At this point, I realized the hauler must be with the motorcycles. I had to snicker….these badass-looking bikers, who easily could’ve passed for Hells Angels, Pagans, or Del Fuegos, and they need a hauler to move their bikes and catch a ride in case the poor widdle babies get tired. I wouldn’t say this to their face, in case they actually WERE Pagans, but I sure as hell was thinking it.

The hauler and the motorcycles pulled further on ahead, and then we were passed by a Honda mini-van, which pulled in front of us once it cleared us. It too had Michigan plates, which I took to be a coincidence. It was then that I realized the rear window was dirty, and there was something written in the dirt. I strained my eyes, until I could make it out:

CAUTION:
MOTORCYCLE
PERCESSION

So in summary…we have 4 bikers (and 1 bitch) that looked like they were going to the rally at Sturgis to kick some ass. One SUV with a motorcycle hauler, to carry them when they got tired, and a (dirty) mini-van, warning people to be careful (as though it was a “Wide Load” vehicle), driven by an apparently illiterate person. From Michigan.

This is indeed a great and colorful country. With bad spellers.

The most practical use for a hijab

I was in the nearby Wal-Mart Supercenter that's down the road from my office, and I saw two Muslim women, in full-length burqas (I guess that's redundant....it's not like they have summer length burqas that only go to the knees, and flash a little leg), with the hijab head scarf, but without the face-covering niqab veil. The hijab was rather tight, as normal. What stood out though was the fact that she had a Blackberry Curve wedged INSIDE her hijab, so that it was pressed tightly to her ear, enabling her to have a hands-free conversation.

I briefly considered taking a photo of it with my Blackberry (also a Curve, which is why I knew). However, that's kind of ballsy and brazen, even for me. You'll just have to take my word for it that it looked like the clumsiest Bluetooth headset ever. But, in the day of tiny cell phones, it sure does make it easy to hold, since you can't press it between your shoulder and ear like a regular phone.

Wisconsin's Victoria's Secret

Retail shopping in Wisconsin is an interesting experience. The harsh reality of Wisconsin is that the weather sucks. A lot. They get their first snowfall in October, and their last in April. They then have 2 months whose weather can best be described somewhere in between "planting season" and "brisk."

Around Fourth of July weekend, people get brave enough to venture into outdoor swimming areas (until then, most swimming is indoors....because of the climate, some genius in marketing figured out that if you build an indoor waterpark in a state that sees freezing weather 8-9 out of 12 months a year, people will flock to it like prison inmates to Soap-on-a-Rope). But, until those magical 3 months of summer (I will say this, no state in the country is more beautiful and has more going for it than Wisconsin in the summer), the weather always has the potential for astronomical amounts of suckage.

Therefore, the concept of One Stop Shopping is heavily embraced. Wal-Marts and Targets were welcomed with open arms throughout the state, and Wal-Mart Supercenters and Super Targets even more so. To be able to buy groceries, beer, hardware, rent videos, get film developed, buy electronics, and seeds for the garden in the Spring, all under one roof, and then being able to go straight to the car and go home, without having to go to 5 different stores in weather so cold your boogers are freezing inside your nose? Entire towns gave the big middle finger to their small businesses just for the opportunity to stay warm.

Even home improvement stores have gotten into that market. Where you used to go only for tools, lumber, and other home improvement-related goods, stores like Menards now sell limited amounts of groceries and books.

But the store that merges convenience in a matter more entertaining than all the others is Fleet Farm. Fleet Farm can almost be described as "Home Depot / Lowes / Menards.....for Farmers." There, you can buy stuff to build an animal pen, as well as windows and doors for barns (or, the home). But, it takes the convenience of home improvement shopping and merges it with the sporting goods shopping of Wal-Mart or Target, and offers a lot of recreational goods. I have been in grocery stores smaller than the section of the store that sells fishing poles and equipment at the Fleet Farm in Antigo. Across the aisle, they have water recreational gear.....inner tubes, water skis, etc. Elsewhere in the store is an entire section for all your hunting needs. Rifles, bows, arrows, ammo, knives, etc. In Fleet Farm, you can buy deer piss that will A, mask your natural smell, and B, make a buck think he's smelling a doe in heat, thus making it easier for a buck to walk right by you, allowing you to eat venison all winter while smoking a cigar in your easy chair underneath a mounted deer head.

And last but not least....they have a complete line of clothing. High-wasted jeans for those fashionable women who still think it's 1991. Practical clothing for men, women, girls and boys. Hip-waders, hunting jackets, clothing covered in camoflauge and trimmed in blaze orange. The camo is so that you can hide from deer, the blaze orange is so that other hunters see you.

But, what is amazing about Fleet Farm is that there is nothing.....NOTHING....that they won't trim with camoflauge and/or blaze orange. Which is why, when given the opportunity to go there (my daughters were going fishing with their uncle for the first time, and needed fishing poles), I jumped at the opportunity. Because, I knew I would see the following:



Yes, those are blaze orange panties, with some kind of animal motif. The kind of motif that folk artists will often paint on saw blades, but rarely on lingerie. And I also saw this:



Camo panties, for the hunter (huntress?) who likes to be completely in "kill" mode. Or, realizes that serial killers live in the woods, and just like in the movies, at some point she'll have to be running in fear while only in her underwear. Of course, the hot pink trim seems defeat that purpose, but I will never pretend to understand the mind of a hunter. But I will say this....tomorrow, Saturday, you can bet somewhere in Wisconsin, there is a young woman packing a bag for a honeymoon, and in her bag is at least one pair of underwear that you see here.

Breakroom Fridge Day 4

Here’s an update. You can see the right side of the pizza curling up more than it was the day before, as it dehydrates and shrinks in upon itself.

Another update….the office manager and the operations manager have every intention of leaving it there. They know who the pizza belongs to, and are waiting to see if the guy gets a clue and gets rid of it.

And the onions were indeed a condiment of sorts for burgers they grilled a while ago for lunch, left there by the same guy who apparently is too big of a pussy to finish his last slice of frozen pizza.

Mystery Food in the Office Fridge

I might make an entire series out of this. I noticed this next to the pizza, that I described below. I had no idea what it is,other than it's been there since I got back from vacation (last Monday). There are really no words to describe this, other then “oniony” and “pepperish."

Breakroom Fridge Experiment

This slice of “pizza” (I use the quotes because it came from a frozen box, and I’m not sure if everything on it is edible…and I don’t think this is any closer to pizza than Budweiser is to beer) entered the breakroom fridge yesterday after lunch, when one of the guys here in the office couldn’t polish off his lunch.

I am willing to bet it will still be there on Friday. I am even considering asking the office manager to not touch it, just to see if it moves on its own (or by the hands of the person to whom it belongs).

This is Day 1. I will post new photos each day.

July 20, 1969

Author's note: I actually wrote this yesterday, but didn't have a chance to post it here. And, I found that the lunar landing took place on July 21 in Australia, so maybe I'll make this in honor of Aussies that worked on our space program at those remote satellite stations....but, it's July 22 in Aus right now, so never mind.

40 years ago today, two men from the United States walked on the moon, a feat never before accomplished in all of human history, and only replicated 5 times since.

I will not debate this fact.

My father is the smartest man I have ever met, or will meet. If you met him, you would be able to say the same thing as well. I’m not saying this to give you an inferiority complex, I’m saying this because he was a brilliant man. When he was a teenager, he built his own planetarium. When other kids were learning sports, he was playing around with metallic sodium, dropping it into puddles of water to see the minor explosion. And when he looked into the sky at night, he knew what he wanted to study his entire life.

In the 1950’s, the US was locked in a military race with the USSR. Each country divided up the best German rocket scientists they could find after the war, and they both went to work trying to put men in space. To win this, the US created the National Defense Education Act, which essentially paid college tuition for anyone who wanted to go to school for science, math, or engineering and use these skills to either blow up the planet, or watch it from 200 miles up in space. My dad was one of them, and in 1960, he packed up his belongings and went from Chicago to California to study Astronomy at Pomona College, one of the few colleges in the US where one could major in this degree program. By 1970, he had a PhD in Astrophysics from UCLA. So yeah, he was pretty friggin smart.

And sadly, there aren’t many like my dad anymore. Long ago, this country lost interest in pursuing the sciences, and in some cases, retarded our scientific growth. Once we landed on the moon, we felt we hit a peak, and had to try something more challenging. Whereas a sports team, upon winning one championship, does what it can to win that championship every year, our country seemingly decided, “Nahh, we’re good, we just wanted to beat the Soviets here,” and we packed it in. We went from a space program that used a missile capable of carrying 250,000 pounds of payload, to a space shuttle that could carry only 50,000. And thus we lost our edge. The space program had so much potential, and so much of it wasted. But still, my dad loved it. He loved the innovations we got from it, and the new discoveries, especially when he saw the first images from the Hubble Telescope. I didn’t see him cry when his mother and father died, but I saw him cry when the Challenger exploded in replay after replay.

We, as a country, need to set our clocks back 40 years. We need to remember that money spent in the pursuit of exploration, science and peace is worth way more than money spent helping those who don’t want help, or money spent in learning new ways to kill. We need to remember that our worth as a society is not in how many lawyers we have, or how good our professional sports teams are, but how educated our population is, and how hard we work to pull our citizens from the depths of ignorance. And we need to do this intelligently. I remember asking my dad about Bush’s plan to use the Moon as a jumping point to Mars, and he laughed it off as a joke, explaining to me how stupid it is to cart all that infrastructure to the Moon (the facilities, the fuel, etc), when the Moon only saves you a few days travel time to Mars (on a 6 month trip). We don’t need to dream big….we just need to keep dreaming, and keep pushing, and keep innovating. And we need scientists willing to do this. Scientists like my dad. I sometimes hear people question whether or not we walked on the moon, and to those people, I can say with assurance that it was people like my dad who put those men on the moon, and if they were as smart as my dad, then it damn well did happen. We were at one time a nation of people who dreamt of nothing but putting people in space, and the benefits from those dreams are immeasurable. We need to go back to having those dreams again. We may not have been a better country then, but people back then were sure working a lot harder to make it a better country. People like my dad, who taught two generations of college students the same love for the stars that he had.

And one day, maybe his love of science will rub off on someone else with that same dream, which is to never stop learning, and never stop pushing for the stars, so that we can one day set foot on the Moon, and continue our unfinished business.

40 years ago today, two men from the United States walked on the moon. I will not debate this.