Brad Warthen's Blog

Bothering seagulls

My wife and I were walking on the beach this afternoon, and we saw this flock of seagulls -- the birds, not the guys with the weird hair -- snoozing on the dry sand, up above the tide line. It was cool walking into the wind, warm walking with it.

My wife mentioned that if Morgan were with us, she'd be scattering the gulls. That was one of her favorite activities. You remember Morgan -- I wrote about her back here. Best dog ever.

Anyway, the gulls seemed to be in such a torpor there in the sun that I thought they might let me get really close with the camera. Which they did, although their patience had a limit.

No, I didn't hurt them, so get outta my face. I just thought they were beautiful, and wanted to photograph them. Is that so wrong?

By the way -- a few feet away from the gulls was this concentrated pile of shells. They could not have collected this way on their own. My wife's theory is that someone, probably a child, had accumulated this collection in a pail, but had brought them back to the beach and deposited them here.

Giving back to the beach -- I liked that thought.

I spent everything I had for this hat

Finding myself at the Surfside Pier this afternoon, and having forgotten to bring a hat (having the sun glaring down in the gap over my shades drives me nuts), it occurred to me that I had never, in all these years, bought a hat that said "Surfside Beach."

And "all these years" is a lot of years. My grandfather bought two lots down here in about 1957. He built a little cottage on one of them. In about 1968, he built a house on the other lot, which is on a freshwater lake about two blocks from the ocean. He sold the other one to a friend of the family, and the lady lived there for about the next 30 years. Then it was sold and torn down to make way for TWO houses of the tall, skinny, stilted variety that started cropping up around here about 15 years ago. Here's a coincidence for you -- Tim Kelly has stayed in one of those houses, which are right across the street from the "new" house. Very small world.

Anyway, needing a hat, I spotted this beauty. I hope you like it, because it cost $8.99 plus tax (see the price tag still on it, my little tribute to Minnie Pearl), and I only had a sawbuck in my wallet.

In fact, I had to take $2 out of my wife's purse to buy coffee at this coffee shop so I could come post this. I didn't want the coffee, but you have to have cover. Speaking of cover, as I've mentioned before, this coffee shop is actually sort of a front. The real business is a commercial bakery in the back. Zoning rules required that it be a retail business, so they put in the coffee shop as a sort of retail fig leaf. A few minutes ago, the young counterwoman said she was leaving, but I didn't have to leave; I should just let the guy in the back know when I leave. Very casual. I'm glad I'm not keeping her, the way the old man did the waiter in "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place." She had enough on her mind because she was trying to keep tabs on a little boy out in front of the cafe, in the bright sunlight. She had to keep telling him to get out of the street. She had been sitting in the sun in front of the place when I arrived, and it was easier to keep track of the boy that way, so I felt bad that she had to come in on my account. I felt worse that she had to brew decaf for me. She said she didn't mind. But it occurs to me that she would have been perfectly happy if I had just come in to use the internet connection rather than insisting on buying something. Since the main business is in the back and all.

She's getting married soon, so I congratulated her.

By the way, I didn't really come in just to post this. I came in to get my column ready to post tomorrow. What, you think I don't have better things to do?

But I thought they were AGAINST brassieres (which shows how little I know)

Did anyone else do a double-take this morning upon reading the news about the woman who was extremely indignant about the scrutiny she received after the underwire in her full-figure bra set off the metal detector?

No, there weren't any pictures. And yes, I thought of Jane Russell, too, but that's probably unfair either to Nancy Kates (the lady in question) or Ms. Russell.... Anyway, back to the subject at hand... Hey! Boys! Over this way... Pay attention...

Ms. Kates said she would "talk to her family lawyer as well as the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Organization for Women and decide how to pursue the incident."

The ACLU I can understand. But isn't the NOW historically opposed to bra-wearing? Or am I remembering that wrong? Maybe so.

NOW you tell me...

Several people have now pointed out to me the fact that the NRDC backed down on its previous assertion about S.C. beaches being so dirty.

Yeah, I know. I saw the news story. It ran the day I was packing up to leave the beach. So thanks a lot for the heads-up there, you environmental hammerheads. Not that I'm bitter or anything.

And to add insult, in that very day's paper, as I'm heading back home to the Midlands, I'm greeted by this news:

With temperatures approaching 100 degrees today and Sunday, hundreds of people would normally flock to the Saluda rapids at Riverbanks Zoo to cool off.

Bad idea this weekend.

A combination of high runoff pollution and a sewage leak from an upstream treatment plant have caused state health officials to continue urging people against swimming, wading or tubing at “the rocks,” as the area is known.

“Stay out of the water at that area,” said Adam Myrick, spokesman for the state Department of Health and Environmental Control. “And keep your pets out of the water and keep them from drinking the water.”

Great. All of this goes to back up that the best thing to do on vacation is sit in the house and read a good book. I spent a great deal of my time last week finishing this book and starting this one. It seems appropriate at this point to consider the opening passage of the latter:

Standing at the frigate's taffrail, and indeed leaning upon it, Jack Aubrey considered her wake, stretching away neither very far nor emphatically over the smooth pure green-blue sea: a creditable furrow, however, in these light airs. She had just come about, with her larboard tacks aboard, and as he expected her wake showed that curious nick where, when the sheets were hauled aft, tallied and belayed, she made a little wanton gripe whatever the helmsman might do....

Fortunately for Capt. Aubrey, he didn't have to worry about the ocean being to polluted to sail through -- at least, not unless she were becalmed, and floating in her own waste...

Welcome to the beach

Generally, I make a point of keeping up with the local news wherever I am. Hence my occasional reports in this venue from Memphis, or from up in PA (where over the weekend the biggest news seemed to be the question of whether Joe Paterno would retire).

Today, I'm at the beach in SC, where I am greeted by this lovely news in The Sun News:

    South Carolina's beaches, including those in Horry and Georgetown counties, are the sixth most polluted in the nation, according to a report released Tuesday by a nonprofit environmental group.

    Local and state experts denounced the report, saying area beaches are safe. Officials with Horry County, North Myrtle Beach, Myrtle Beach and the state Department of Natural Resources all complained of inaccuracies and misinterpretation of data in the National Resources Defense Council's report....

That second paragraph makes me feel SO much better, doesn't it you? Well, of course YOU feel better; you're not at the beach, are you?

As I left to come to my favorite blogging spot at the beach, I told my daughter not to go near the water until I got back. I told her it was because of the buddy system of aquatic safety. I didn't want to freak her out totally.

Driving slower

"Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?"
            -- the late George Carlin

When I drove to Memphis a couple of weeks ago, I did a new thing -- I drove under the de jure speed limit. Normally, I do what most people do, stay under the de facto limit -- staying carefully under a speed that is 10 mph over the limit.

This change on my part wasn't due to some newfound respect for the law. We know that here in the United States, no state actually means for us to drive below the stated speed. If they did, the police would stop and ticket us for exceeding it. We all know that a trooper will sit right there and watch you go by if you're doing 78 in a 70 zone, for instance. But go 85, and he'll get you. (One exception to this may be the Mississippi patrolmen, who are apparently too busy speeding themselves to notice anyone else doing it.)

Nor was I doing it to help fight the War on Terror. I agree with Samuel Tenenbaum that we should lower the limit to 55 and enforce it, but in the meantime, driving that much slower than the surrounding traffic is not only unsafe, but will not have a sufficiently measurable impact on energy independence to make taking your life in your hands worth it. We've all got to do it for it to help.

No, I drove below the limit because my family was packed into three cars, and one of those contained my wife and daughter and the six-month-old twins, and they had to stop frequently. My wife said it made her nervous to try to stay within sight of each other, so I went on ahead, but tried not to get too far ahead.

And you know what? I kind of liked it. It was ... more relaxing.

Anyway, when I was getting ready for this trip, I ran into Samuel, and he said "Drive 55!" And I said I didn't think I could do that, because I had to drive to Pennsylvania, pack my daughter's belongings into my truck, drive back from Pennsylvania with all the stuff, and unload it at the place where she's going to be living back in South Carolina, all between Friday morning and Monday afternoon. But I did promise to stay below the posted limits. "But that means you'll be driving 70!" Actually, no, I assured him -- since so much of the trip is in Virginia (limit 65), and the limit in PA is 65 or 55, and the small bit of Maryland is 65 or 60 (around Hagerstown), and the first 50 miles of North Carolina is 60, my average would be far below 70.

So I did it yesterday, and the results were good.

I drive a 2000 Ford Ranger. And for those of you who wonder why the founder of the Energy Party doesn't drive a Prius, consider three things:

I can't afford a Prius. I don't foresee a time anywhere in the near future when I will be able to afford a Prius.

I am the designated truck owner in the family -- my large, extended family. No one closely related to me owns a large, truck-type vehicle of any kind -- certainly no SUVs, I'm happy to say. Whenever one of my 20-something children has to move from one apartment to another, or building materials are needed, or an attic full of stuff has to be hauled either to Goodwill or the dump or whatever, I'm the guy; I've got the truck.

I've done everything I can to be responsible about this truck-ownership thing. I went out of my way to find a 4-cylinder, manual transmission. (What this means is that I'm not only the designated truck owner, but the designated truck driver, since no one else has confidence with the manual shift, and I prefer to drive my own truck anyway.)

This brings up an ironic digression. We looked into renting a truck for moving my daughter from PA. It was going to cost more than $700 -- we tried several vendors -- plus the cost of renting a car to get up there. So we decided to give away a lot of her stuff -- my daughter's fine with that -- and haul back only what I could get onto my Ranger. (To get your mind around this, picture the Beverly Hillbillies, only we opted not to take a rocking chair for Granny.) But I needed new tires. So I splurged and bought (via credit card) four new tires. Changing the tires revealed bearings that needed repacking, the need for new tie rod ends, and original shocks that were overdue for replacement at 110,000 miles. Total: $1,450 dollars. Samuel and Jerry Whitley, who is a CPA, told me that at least I was investing it in my truck instead of wasting it on a rental. So I guess that's something. And it drives really well down, without that shimmy every time I went over the slightest irregularity in the road.

Where was I? Oh, yeah, my point: I drove under the speed limit the whole way. Normally, my truck gets about 22 mpg in town. I had never had it on the highway for an extended period before. Driving below the limit, I got 27 mpg on my first tank of gas. I refilled when we finally rolled into Carlisle, PA, last night, and I had gotten an awesome 28.7 mpg on the second tank. Not as good as the 31 or so we had done in my wife's car on the Memphis trip, but this is a truck -- and as we know, Detroit has put zero effort into making the things efficient, on account of their being exempted from CAFE standards all those years.

So I think it was worth the extra hour and a half or so it took -- or whatever. I didn't want to actually do the math, because that might make me want to hurry on the trip back. It's like a Zen thing. We left Cola at 10 a.m., stopped several times, and got to Carlisle at about 8:10 p.m.

And it was also a more relaxing drive. Once you drop the usual "Gotta get there! Gotta press the guy in front of me!" mode, your head gets into a better place. I noticed this on the Memphis trip as well.

It's about Obama, and rightly so

Republicans and fellow travelers have been griping for about a week now about the coverage of Barack Obama's trip abroad. They see it as unfair; they see it as favoritism. This point of view can be seen reflected in Robert's cartoon of Wednesday.

But they're missing an important point: Obama going abroad and meeting foreign leaders is news because it's something new. John McCain going abroad to hang with foreign leaders is old hat, dog-bites-man stuff.

My point is sort of underlined by the results of the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, which finds Obama having a lead in a straight-up match, but McCain having a distinct advantage when it comes to whether voters are comfortable with the candidate's background and values. As the WSJ reports today:

    ...With the nominations of both parties effectively settled for more than a month, the key question in the contest isn't over any single issue being debated between the Democrats' Sen. Obama or the Republicans' Sen. John McCain. The focus has turned to the Democratic candidate himself: Can Americans get comfortable with the background and experience level of Sen. Obama?
    This dynamic is underscored in a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll. The survey's most striking finding: Fully half of all voters say they are focused on what kind of president Sen. Obama would be as they decide how they will vote, while only a quarter say they are focused on what kind of president Sen. McCain would be.
    The challenge that presents for Sen. Obama is illustrated by a second question. When voters were asked whether they could identify with the background and values of the two candidates, 58% said they could identify with Sen. McCain on that account, while 47% said the same of Sen. Obama. More than four in 10 said the Democratic contender doesn't have values and a background they can identify with....

The bottom line is, folks are still making up their minds about Obama, so every move he makes is of high, relevant interest to voters. Both his detractors and admirers should welcome this.

I don't know about you, but I decided what I thought about John McCain a long time ago. I thought he should have been nominated and elected in the year 2000, and I think we'd all be better off if that had happened. Yeah, I know some people have changed their minds about him since then, but I have not, nor have a lot of others.

But all of us -- including those of us who like what we've seen so far -- are still making up our minds about Obama. And I don't know about you, but I'm going to be paying close attention to what all this intense scrutiny reveals, for good or ill, as I make up my mind for November.

The Three Amigos in Colombia

Having read that John McCain was in-country at the time of the Colombian rescue, or just before it, I shouldn't have been surprised to learn, from the Greenville paper, that Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman were there, too. An excerpt:

    The setting seemed appropriate for conspiratorial murmurings, a sort of New World "Casablanca," in a Spanish colonial era seaside fortress inside a 475-year-old city that long ago outgrew its old walls.
    "Right before we went into dinner, President Uribe grabbed me and said he had something to tell me and Sen. McCain and Sen. Lieberman, so I went and got John and Joe," Graham told The Greenville News.
    Graham said that Uribe and Colombia’s defense minister, Juan Manuel Santos, eased them away from the dining area into a quiet corner. It was around 8 p.m. when Santos briefed the trio, saying, "We’re going to initiate a hostage rescue tonight," and went on to describe how government agents had infiltrated the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, Graham recalled...

Yet another adventure of the Three Amigos, last seen hanging with Gordon at No. 10.

Sales tax polar opposites (heads-up, Paulistas: This post mentions Ron Paul!)

One of our regulars sent this from out of town (I'm not identifying him for now on account of his being out of town):

Brad,
    We're up in New Hampshire visiting my mother.  Thought you'd be interested to  hear what I have observed -- in four days of driving around the small towns of NH, I've yet to see a yard sign for McCain.  But I've seen at least ten for Ron Paul.  No Obama's either. 
    And I don't know if you've ever been up here but it's a somewhat unsettling experience to go into Wal-Mart and buy $99.75 worth of stuff and pay ZERO sales tax.   And on top of that, NH has no income tax either.   How do they manage to survive without taxing everything?  (yes, higher property taxes but with much less government also).  If it weren't for the snow, I think my wife and I would consider retiring here.   I hate snow almost as much as I hate taxes.

This message reminds me of something I meant to pass on from my recent trip to Memphis, which is the polar opposite of New Hampshire when it comes to sales taxes.

The first day we were there, I was driving to the new home of one of my wife's kinfolks -- way out past Collierville, I believe, to the very limits of suburban development, which if you know Memphis means way out East -- and traversing all that sprawl caused me to work up a powerful thirst. So we stopped at a new Kroger (right across from a new Starbucks, of course), and I got a bottled water, and a diet Pepsi for my youngest daughter.

It got my attention when the total was exactly $3.00, so after I fed the three ones into the self-checkout apparatus, I looked at my receipt: Yep, 22 cents of it was sales tax. (See the receipt below.)

The reason Tennessee has such outrageous sales tax rates is that the state has no income tax, and none on the horizon (when ex-Gov. Don Sundquist tried to get one enacted, he had his head handed to him). We do have an income tax, but we are hard on Tennessee's heels when it comes to sales tax. If Richland County manages to pass the penny for local transportation needs, we won't be far behind.

The reason, in our case, is the severe restrictions placed by the state on local governments' ability to raise revenue through other means, combined with South Carolina's utter failure to come to grips with road construction needs at the state level. In the Volunteer State, local governments have wheel taxes and the like to fund roads and other transport needs and wants. (Also, local governments build and maintain far more of Tennessee's roads; the state of South Carolina reserves to itself the right to mismanage most of our roads.) Or at least they did back when I lived there. If someone has more up-to-date info, it will be welcome.

 

The party's over

We had a nice time in Memphis over the last few days -- all of my kids and grandkids were there, as well as all of their relations on that side of the family. But the all-day drive back Monday, and the shock today of starting the process of putting out a week's worth of pages in three days, has me feeling sort of like one of my twin granddaughters when we put them into the stroller at the end of the big-bash wedding reception Saturday night. Or rather, at the end of it for them -- bigger people got to keep on dancing.

Specifically, I'm feeling like Baby A, on the right. Baby B took it all a bit more philosophically.

That's life. Some people keep on dancing, but some of us have to strap in and get back to flying the airplane. Or sailing the ship. Or whatever -- I'm not really up to metaphors today...