Category: Willful Ignorance

It was a perfect day for cruising along the lakeshore. Full sun but not too hot. The sand beach, which is still mostly underwater, was packed with bathers but most people arranged themselves on the lawn where the old railroad tracks were. Giant boom boxes were cranking competing salsa tunes and barbecue equipment was everywhere, even those stainless steel consoles that run on propane. One group was grilling a whole pig on a spigget rotating above a double wide oil drum cooker. The whole trick was riding our bikes slow enough to take this all in.

On top of it all, a super patriotic trucker drove slowly through the parking lot with a sound system mounted on the outside of its cab. The playlist included AC DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long.”

We walked up to Wegman’s this afternoon and while we were cutting through the cemetery our neighbor, Steve Greive, yelled out his truck window at us, “You’ll be there soon enough.” I had no idea what he had yelled. Peggi translated. On Culver we walked by one torn-out book page after the other. Some high school kid had dropped pages every few steps for ten blocks. I picked up one of them and it was Sarah Palin’s book, “Going Rogue.” I couldn’t believe it. I had photographed that book in the Little Free Library in front of a house Culver Road just a few weeks ago. Sure enough the trail of pages stopped at the library. I thought it would be fun to transcribe one of the paragraphs from the page I picked up but it is too mundane.

We ran into Jan, another neighbor, in Wegman’s and we told her we saw her husband and Dave Pitt, the tree surgeon, down on Hoffman Road this morning. She told us Dave had run out of firewood and he was borrowing some. This made no sense at all and we all laughed.

Speaking of funny. I have not laughed so hard for so long in quite some time as I did to Dana Carvey’s stand-up Netflix show, “Straight White Male, 60.” The Church Lady was never this funny.

Too busy watching tv to check in here. Remaking America every night. I fell asleep just before Ted Cruz brought the house down. My favorite speaker so far has been Tiffany.

Somewhere in the seventies the Dictators played a gig in the back room of WCMF. Their Manifest Destiny lp had just come out and they rocked the place like they were downtown in the War Memorial. Sleeping With The TV On was my favorite song on the record.

Rich Funke’s website starts with this headline. “Good Morning sports fans, thanks for coming out:” My father put it this way. “It’s gotta be tough competing against a sportscaster.” Rich Funke lawn signs are everywhere. Nevermind that Ted O’Brien has admirably represented us in the NY State Senate and has boldly stood up for the environment. Funke says. “I’m not a politician.” That’s great. So how is he going to get anything done?

Mr. Funke came to our door but we were not home to experience him in person. When he stopped at our neighbor’s place Jared was up on his roof, relaxing in the sun. He had a bird’s eye view of the Funke hairpiece. My friend, Frank, has some politically astute reasons to just say, “No thanks.”

Who picks up for the low-lifes? Public works employees, conscientious neighbors, walkers? Somebody is keeping us from drowning in rubbish.

Check out what this one kid dumped down at the end of Hoffman Road, right near an informal entrance to Durand Eastman Park. 2-for-99 cent Garcia y Vega Grape cigar packages, a fat free Gummy Bears bag, Hershey chocolate and Reese’s peanut butter cup packaging, a receipt from the 7-Eleven on Culver and some small drug bags. Think for a few minutes about what this character might look like.

A friend of ours is running for NYS assembly in the the town of Greece, the same town that W. came to when he wanted to sell the country on privatizing social security and the same suburb of Rochester where two women had their day in Supreme Court on Monday. I wish him luck.

As someone who came up in Catholic schools where the nuns would stop everything in the middle of a lesson and take us over to the church for some reason or start talking about religion in the middle of math class I understand that I (or my parents) asked for the intrusion. But when addressing the town on a legislative matter why should someone be made to feel uncomfortable or be put in a position of sucking up to some cult?

The town claims to be trying to recruit members of various faiths to offer prayers, “non-sectarian prayers” of course. Just what boundaries surround “non-sectarian prayers?” This calls for active, performance-art resistance, wacky, outrageous prayers to all sorts of imaginary devils, witches and gods.

It was tempting to go beyond this point on the Charlotte Pier but we chickened out and turned back but not before we spotted a Snowy Owl. Winter is not for the faint of heart.

“Five hundred years after Copernicus, it sure still looks as if the sun is going around the earth.” I snagged that line for Adam Gopnik’s piece on the New Yorker site. I like taking the counterintuitive route, bundling up and stepping outdoors in inclement weather. It’s some kind of kick.

I’m just passing through so I could pretend that I don’t notice but that is not so easy. There is an awful lot of science bashing going on here. It’s kinda like the OJ trial where the TV shows that grew up around the murders discovered they could keep the story alive by pretending that there were two sides to the story. Panels of experts were equally divided regardless of how unbalanced the evidence loads were.

It’s not just climate change deniers. Tennessee, South Dakota and Louisiana have passed legislation that allows the teaching of creationism as an alternative to evolution in their public schools. Evangelicals have mounted similar efforts this year in Oklahoma, Missouri, Kansas, Texas and Alabama. “Teach the controversy.” As John Adams said, “Facts are stubborn things.” There is no controversy.

It seemed everybody was making a big deal about the New Yorker cartoon with the Obamas burning the flag. They could just have easily been disposing of the sacred flag in the proper manner. When Jeff Munson and I were leaving the VFW (beersRcheap) last night we spotted this odd deposit box for flags. We had never seen one before. It looks like someone has defaced a US Mailbox and then written this note on the side reminding people to not put their brand new flags in here.

How did they get away with both of these things? And thirdly, according to usa-flag-site.org “The flag, when it is in such condition that it is no longer a fitting emblem for display, should be destroyed in a dignified way, preferably by burning”. I will have to add this photo to my “Funky Signs” section.

When I was in the country band, “The On-Fours’, we played the Elks Clubs, Moose Lodges, Eagle’s Clubs, American Legions and VFWs in all those southern Indiana towns. The VFWs were the darkest and the smokiest and there was the least amout of dancing in there. I did drum duty in this band for a couple of years. Dave Mahoney took my place when we moved to Rochester.