Don't Mess With Texas

Texas state flag.

That's how the anti-littering signs are authored along the Texas roadways. Texas is a proud state. Many facilities display an unfurled Texas flag, with no accompanying US flag, not because Texans are unpatriotic, because they are anything but; it is just that something sticks in their craw about a requirement to raise something higher than the symbol of their beloved republic. 

Tonight we are in Fort Worth, visiting friends on an intermediate stop that's famous for two things that stand out in my mind.

First are the stockyards. Between Bozeman and Fort Worth we have seen literally tens of thousands head of cattle.  These days cattle are raised primarily on private land and auctioned off on web sites and on cable TV, or purchased by roving brokers and transported on trains and trucks. But it wasn't always so.

For the drovers heading the cattle up the Chisholm trail to the railheads, Fort Worth was the last major stop for rest and supplies. Beyond Fort Worth they would have to deal with crossing the Red River into Indian Territory. Between 1866 and 1890 more than four million head of cattle were trailed through Fort Worth, which was soon known as “Cowtown.” Cowtown soon had its own disreputable entertainment district several blocks south of the Courthouse area known all over the West as “Hell’s Half Acre”. 

When the railroad finally arrived in 1876, Fort Worth became a major shipping point for livestock. This prompted plans in 1887 for the construction of the Union Stockyards about two and one half miles north of the Tarrant County Courthouse. It went into full operation about 1889.

With the buying and the selling, and the cattle driving, its wasn't long before the slaughtering and the meat packing concentrated in Fort Worth as well.

It soon became apparent that instead of shipping to other markets to process the cattle, it would be much more desirable to keep more of the business in Fort Worth by having local packing plants. A search began to lure major packers to the City. By about 1900, after much work by local businessmen, both Armour & Co. and Swift & Co. were persuaded to build plants adjacent to the Stockyards. 

Construction began in 1902, but not until after the exact site of each plant was decided by a flip of the coin. Armour won the toss and selected the northern site and Swift began to build on the southern tract, which was the site of the original Livestock Exchange and Hotel. Swift & Co. received an unexpected financial bonus when a large gravel pit was found on the southern site that was ultimately used in the construction of both plants. 

The new Livestock Exchange Building in its present location, as well as the pens and the barns, were also started in 1902. The new building was designed to house the many livestock commission companies, telegraph offices, railroad offices and other support businesses.

While construction was underway, the Fort Worth Stock Yards Company, which now included the two meat packers, incorporated much of the area north of the river adjacent to the Stockyards as North Fort Worth. In 1909 the City of Fort Worth annexed the new city with the exception 

Fort Worth Stock Yards at night.

Today, the stockyards are a historical district, with dining, drinking, rodeos, a museum and cowboy hall of fame among the principal attractions.

Fort Worth likes to say it is where the west begins. I guess that kinda depends on your perspective. We started from Montana, so if we took the slogan to heart, we would actually say the West ends here. But we are not quite prepared to give up our cowboy hats and boots as we move further east, so I guess we will just take that slogan as an expression of local civic pride instead of a geographic verity. The second cousin of Dallas is actually the United States 18th largest city, or as our youngest said as we were driving across downtown this afternoon, a place that is starting to look like New York.

The second thing that Fort Worth is famous for, in my mind at least. is it is the city where President John F. Kennedy spent his last night alive.  

The morning of November 22, 1963, President Kennnedy spoke to a breakfast function assembled by the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce in the ballroom of the Hotel Texas, accompanied by Mrs. Kennedy and escorted by Texas native, Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson.

LBJ, Jackie Kennedy Onassis and JFK at the Hotel Texas, November 22, 1963.

A bit later Mr. Kennedy stepped out of the hotel to say a few words to his fans gathered around, and promote Fort Worth's motto in the background, in the company of Texas Governor John Connally as well. Mrs. Kennedy stayed inside as she did not want to expose her hair to the drizzle.

JFK, John Connally and LBJ, November 22, 1963.

Air Force One made its last flight with John F. Kennedy as commander in chief aboard, later that morning, a hop and a skip from Fort Worth to Dallas's Love Field. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Local Color: Cheyenne Wyoming

As we make our travels we'll link to a story or two or three from the local media.

The first today is an opinion piece from Maureen Bader of the Wyoming Liberty group, about the egregious lie that "97 percent" of "climate scientists" (whoever and whatever those are) are absolutely convinced of human caused global warming with dire ensuing consequences.

A recent letter to the editor published in this paper ("Harrington should have done more research," June 6), cited the claim that "97 percent of climate scientists agree that climate-warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activities."

There is no basis for this claim according to a May 26 Wall Street Journal oped as it is based on flawed studies.

One of these flawed studies, for instance, left out articles by scientists who questioned the consensus. Another showed that 97 percent of scientists agreed that temperatures have risen and humans are a significant contributing factor.

However, it did not include responses from solar scientists, meteorologists or other scientists "likely to be aware of natural causes of climate change."
That 97 percent study represented the views of only 79 of 3,146 scientists who responded to the survey because only those 79 "listed climate science as their area of expertise."

In another 97 percent study, views from 200 of the most prolific writers on climate change were reviewed and "97 percent to 98 percent of the 200" believe man is responsible for most of the warming. This is 200 out of thousands of writers on climate change.

Besides, using a so-called consensus to prove a fact is just a variation of the bandwagon and appeal to authority fallacies. Just because a lot of smart people believe something, doesn't mean it's true.

I am clearly stupid, ill-informed and mal-motivated, or in Paul Krugman's term, anti-intellectual, for I research and analyze on my own, have a mind of my own, and don't kowtow to the 97 percent or the bullies in the White House and the blogosphere who purvey it.

The tourism business is booming in the northern Rockies, which as far as we can tell won't transform into tropical rain forest for millenia to come, so up in Sheridan, a couple is renovating and re-opening the Sheridan Inn.

Bob and two employees spent nearly two months assessing the building and figuring out what it would take to get it up and running prior to purchasing the hotel, restaurant and lounge in October. The Townsends are the majority owners, and several employees back in Oklahoma also invested in the inn.
"We've always been fond of this building, because I've known it to be the historical center of this community," Bob said.

Historic Sheridan Inn.

The Townsends plan to reopen the restaurant, rent the hotel rooms for the first time in 49 years and remodel the basement into a business conference center and gift shop.

Shawn Buckley, director of Sheridan Travel and Tourism, said that the reopening of the inn is a welcome addition to the tourism industry and downtown business district.

"It's an iconic chunk of Sheridan's identity," Buckley said. "With all the excitement and all the energy, it's exciting to advertise it and it's a great feather in our cap."

And now we learn that EPA, not sufficiently satisfied with having labeled life giving and sustaining carbon dioxide gas as a pollutant, is determining tribal boundaries and taking lands away form private parties and the state.

Wyoming legislators renewed Monday the ongoing battle over an Environmental Protection Agency ruling that would include Riverton as a portion of the Wind River Indian Reservation.

Members of the Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone tribes and state officials found themselves at odds with the handling of the matter during a public hearing at Central Wyoming College in Riverton. State officials say that the EPA does not have the power to delineate tribal boundaries, while tribal officials stand behind the agency’s ruling.

You have to wonder if Dick Nixon was sane when he created the monstrosity that has become the EPA. 

Wyoming Powers America

We left final instructions with our house sitter before setting out on the road today. We crossed east through Montana, skirting Billings, down past Little Bighorn National Monument, and then into and through Wyoming. 

We traveled through historic buffalo country. Click the photos to enlarge.

Which means we passed legions of cows and sheep along the way as well as their fair share of deer and antelope at play.  



A deep winter snow pack, rejuvenating spring rains and cool spring weather have the grass growing prolifically -- even before we get to Colorado. We saw our first hay cuttings. We are rooting for a year where there will be three. 

But most interesting is the geology.

Obama Stay Home

I don't think we will see Barack Obama out campaigning for Democratic candidates later this year.

Here is the latest out of Gallup.

Dear President misunderstands the average American, he is not honest and trustworthy, he is not strong and decisive, he does not share your values, he is unable to manage the government effectively and he does not have a clear plan for solving the country's problems. Other than that he is a fantastic leader and a great president. All these responses are the lowest since Gallup first fielded these questions on Dear President's abilities and performance in March of 2008.

Here is the trend on honesty.

These is brutal. This is systemic. It's started to move off the charts.

Cantor Loss Good News for Democrats in Montana.

That is, if you want to believe the lefty publishers of the Bozeman Daily (if you don't count Monday as a weekday) Chronicle. They are twisting themselves into pretzels to find good news for appointed Senator John Walsh's run to retain his gifted U.S. Senate seat. And they found it -- they thought -- in Eric Cantor's Virgnia House District 7 primary shellacking by a tea party candidate.

John Walsh's first senate vote after his being appointed to the Senate by his pal in Montana's governor's mansion, was to increase the debt limit to $18 trillion, bless his heart. 

Steve Daines, who currently holds Montana's sole seat in the House of Representatives is Walsh's opponent. 

Earlier this year, the Bozeman Chronicle's environmental news reporter referred to Steve Daines in a Twitter post as a "tea party moron." The reporter, Laura Lundquist, also reported last fall that a dip in Montana deer population is due to global warming, a finding that our friends in places like Virginia, Texas and Alabama, with their significantly warmer climes and dramatically larger/denser deer populations, would no doubt find quite surprising. God bless Laura Lundquist for giving me so many opportunities to be anti-intellectual.

When your premise is that the successful campaign of a tea party candidate is good news for a borrow and spend Democrat, you got to dig pretty deep. And so the Bozeman Chronicle did. Here is the headline and the lead, above the fold, on page one.

Pollster who has Daines ahead said same for Cantor

TROY CARTER, Chronicle Staff Writer | 5 Comments

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor's primary election loss Tuesday has thrown into question the most recent poll placing Montana's Republican U.S. Rep. Steve Daines comfortably ahead of Democratic Sen. John Walsh by 23 points.

Few expected the second most powerful Republican in the House of Representatives to lose to unknown tea party candidate Dave Brat. Cantor had his incumbency, support from big-name Republicans and more campaign cash — $5 million vs. $200,000.

Editorial policy at the Bozeman Chronicle

Cantor's internal polling showed him leading 62 to 38 over Brat at the end of May. Another survey of likely Virginia voters by polling firm Vox Populi showed a dip in Cantor's numbers but still showed Cantor with a 52-41 lead.

A more recent Vox Populi poll showed Daines holding the support of 56 percent of voters compared to Walsh's 33 percent in Montana's U.S. Senate race.

The Chronicle ginned up a "political scientist" (an oxymoron if I ever heard one) to claim bias and distortion. Walsh's campaign said wait until there is a new poll that reflects voter reaction to our new campaign ads. The Chronicle pushed the dated (March 18) Rasmussen poll which had Daines ahead of Walsh by a mere 14 points as more reliable.

Rasmussen came out with a new poll this afternoon -- result Steve Daines now beating John Walsh 53 percent to 35 percent, an 18 point lead, a growing lead that is within the margin of error of the Vos Populi poll that the Chronicle was trying so mightily to discredit.

Someone should send the Chronicle a tub of mustard to go with their pretzels.

A Tree Falls in the Forest

Sadly, sometimes a tree falling in a forest raises more than philosophical questions. Earlier this week in Yellowstone National Park, a dead tree, remnant of the 1988 fires that burned more than a third of the park, fell in the Midway Geyser Basin area.

An international visitor to Yellowstone National Park died Monday afternoon after being struck by a falling tree.

The 36-year old man was from Taiwan, the Republic of China. He was part of a group that was hiking the Fairy Falls trail, which is north of the Old Faithful area and west of the Grand Loop Road.

The man left the trail and ascended a nearby tree-covered slope in an apparent attempt to get a better view of Grand Prismatic Spring, when a lodgepole pine tree fell and struck him in the head.

Other visitors who witnessed the incident made their way back to the trailhead, where they encountered two park maintenance employees working in the area, who relayed the information to Yellowstone law enforcement rangers.

Dead trees amid new growth in Yellowstone, residue of the 1988 fires.

The victim was moved by rangers to the trailhead to await helicopter transport to a medical facility, but after attempts to revive him failed, he was declared dead at the scene.
Yellowstone rangers who responded reported windy weather conditions in the area at the time, and that the fallen tree had been a standing, dead lodgepole, fire-killed during the park’s 1988 fires.

This is a very tragic result. People, if you are out in the woods and hear lumber cracking, look up and around. If you see a trunk or branch falling your way, jump as clear as you can. Be careful out there.

Long Live the Tea Party -- The Tea Party is Dead

Which the intellectuals at the Post, the NY Times, NBC, ABC, you name 'em, all the MSM, have been claiming.

In Virginia House Majority Leader Eric Cantor got shellacked today.

WASHINGTON -- The demise of the Tea Party has been greatly exaggerated.

The face of the Democratic Party in Virginia.

The anti-establishment force within the GOP was strong enough Tuesday to oust House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in a stunning upset by a political newcomer, Randolph-Macon College economics professor Dave Brat.

Cantor said Tuesday that serving in Congress and as majority leader "has been one of the highest honors of my life" and that he would continue to promote the conservative cause. "It's disappointing, sure. But I believe in this country. I believe there's opportunity around the next corner for all of us," he said.

Cantor, the second-most powerful House leader, is the highest-ranking Republican to lose renomination to a Tea Party challenger since the movement rose to prominence in 2010. It is likely to go down as one of the most stunning primary defeats in congressional history.

Just so you know, the tea party "nut" that beat Cantor, as you are sure to hear him described, is a tenured and thoughtful economics professor.

Meanwhile in my old home district in Northern Virginia, the "progressive" Democrats have nominated a Volvo car dealer to fill the seat of retiring punk and bully Jim Moran in a seat that is certain to stay Democratic in November. Isn't that precious, the Democrats elect someone who thoughtfully sells imported cars. Just what we need for the middle class in America!

You Meet the Most Interesting People ....

On the golf course. 

Played the back nine with a fellow today who thinks the world is run by a few dozen people who get together each year to decide what will happen in the world. On returning home they buy off whoever needs to be bribed to secure the agreed to results. He thinks "they" paid off the Supreme Court to get Citizens United. He thinks "they" were responsible for planting explosives at the World Trade Center and shooting the missile into the Pentagon on September 11th, all to gin up fear to justify a massive military response. When I noted that two people I had known literally for decades told me they saw a plane hit the Pentagon (smoke was billowing out) a few minutes after the attack and before it was reported in the news media he demanded names and phone numbers. I thought better of it.

He ranted and raged about Monsato and GMO's.

"Chemtrail" 747.

He told me that I needed to learn about Geo Engineering, pointing out contrails in the sky, saying that's not condensation -- it's poison. Those are chemtrails. He wanted to give me a poster. I said, no thanks. I promised to do research.  Here is what I learned.

“The term chemtrail is a combination of the words “chemical” and “trail,” just as contrail is a contraction of “condensation trail.” The term does not refer to other forms of aerial spraying such as agricultural spraying (‘crop dusting’), cloud seeding, skywriting, or aerial firefighting. The term specifically refers to aerial trails … caused by the systematic high-altitude release of chemical substances not found in ordinary contrails, resulting in the appearance of characteristic sky tracks. 

“The chemtrail … trails left by aircraft are chemical or biological agents deliberately sprayed at high altitudes for purposes undisclosed to the general public and directed by various government officials.

“… the existence of chemtrails … phenomena as streams that persist for hours and that, with their criss-cross, grid-like or parallel stripe patterns, eventually blend to form large clouds. Proponents view the presence of visible color spectra in the streams, unusual concentrations of sky tracks in a single area, or lingering tracks left by unmarked or military airplanes flying at atypical altitudes or locations as markers of chemtrails.

Contrails dissipate. Chemtrails persist. Got it. The earth's future hangs in the balance. Now we know what that Air Force pilot who bought our home to back in Arlington has been up to ye, all these years. And here we thought that he transported troops and materials.

My new friend says the only politician "who gets it," is Bernie Sanders.

Point understood and well taken. Time to move on. 

Hillary Clinton Depends on the Stupidity of the American People

Taking the lead from Dear President and his White House apparatchiks Hillary Clinton is pushing hard dependence on the stupidity of the American people. “We came out of the White House not only dead broke, but in debt,” she told ABC News in an interview airing Monday night. If my spouse was in line for a $14 million book advance I would actually say I was filthy rich. Count me in as just not dumb enough to be a Democrat.

Oh, what difference does it make?

On the Road to Bathgate Act 4g: More on George S. Foster

When we wrote a blog post on my great (or grand) uncle, George S. Foster, we briefly mentioned his daughter, Marguerite Foster Huff, whom I had known in my youth. She was the only descendant I had known. At some level I think I understood that Marguerite was divorced, but I couldn't have vouched for the fact. Well, the other day we happened across this bit of a confirming news item.

Sherman Daily Democrat (Sherman, Tex.), April 21, 1922

Marguerite is a hard lady to track down because of so many first name spelling variations. But now that we found her and know her ex husband's full name, as is so often the case in this kind of research, one discovery led to several others.

Perhaps more interesting and informative than the broken nose news snippet is this biography on Marguerite's father in law, published by the Texas State Historical Association. Her father in law fit neatly in the mold of the Foster family politicians. Huff, Sr., was a lawyer and banker, just like Aunt Marguerite's dad.

Saturday Pictures

Saturday Pictures

June 7, 2014

(Click to enlarge)

We went up Hyalite Canyon, where the road is now re-opened from the dam to the Hyalite Lake trailhead.

Thunderstorm runoff introduced warmer water that at long last melted the ice cover on the reservoir.

Looking across the reservoir you can see they still have reserved five to ten feet of capacity to accommodate additional snow melt run off and spring rains. 

Hyalite Creek is running full, cold and fresh.

The canyon cliffs are as spectacular and imposing as ever.

As is common, the mountains are making weather.

There are still plenty of snow fields on top.

We considered hiking the first section of the trail to Grotto Falls, but thought better of it when we saw snow and ice still covering large sections at the bottom. By the time we got as high as the falls, no doubt the snow cover would be 100 percent.

Getting the Government You Vote For

It's works for me so long as someone else bears the burden.

Sometimes you run across a quote that you just can't pass up. This one comes from Austin, Texas. Austin is a university town (U of T), the artsy town, and the state capital, which means it is home to the highest echelons of the highly paid, secure and fringe benefit laden state bureaucracy, and populated with wall to wall know-it-all moral relativists who can find a demon to justify blocking any fiscally, economically or commercially viable market and efficiency based outcome and spending unlimited funds to do so. These are smart and creative people who know better what is good for a person than any individual can ever know for him or herself.. Whenever stuff doesn't work, costs too much, collapses of its own weight, or generates enormous "unintended consequences," why that is just some other evil person's fault who they will make sure to target and make pay in the next round of collectivism.

The relativists vote to concentrate power and expand the collective, to deputize crony capitalists (for local government, this typically means commercial real estate interests whose economic power is concentrated these days in a relative handful of national REITs) who go along with the crowd, and to punish those who don't, without judging when and how the collective and its mercenaries will ultimately come back to bite and consume them. Here is how the Austin vote went the last presidential election -- more or less opposite the state as a whole.

With 100 percent of the states precincts reporting, Obama won more than 60 percent of the vote in Travis County, home to Austin, the state's most liberal city. Romney trailed with just over 36 percent of the vote.

These are the really smart people who are prone to vote for a person based on his or her identity and little or nothing else, not because that's the right thing to do, of course, but they just know in their scientific bones that everyone who doesn't vote their way is an evil misogynist, racist, greedy capitalist, privileged white guy or whatever, who unites with others to vote the opposite way base on another spurious set of identities. 

Now, here is the quote.

“I’m at the breaking point,” said Gretchen Gardner, an Austin artist who bought a 1930s bungalow in the Bouldin neighborhood just south of downtown in 1991 and has watched her property tax bill soar to $8,500 this year.

The collective's tax and spend policies are gentrifying
Gretchen Gardner out of her 23 year long residence.

“It’s not because I don’t like paying taxes,” said Gardner, who attended both meetings. “I have voted for every park, every library, all the school improvements, for light rail, for anything that will make this city better. But now I can’t afford to live here anymore. I’ll protest my appraisal notice, but that’s not enough. Someone needs to step in and address the big picture.”

Uh, that would be you lady, the brainless, navel gazing, power aggrandizing, reflexive voter who asked for this. Duh!!!!

But Can He Count to Ten?

Next time you come to Virginia or travel to DC, visit Thomas Jefferson's Montpelier. 

Montpelier Mansion, Montpelier, Virginia, April, 2011.

And while your at it, go another 29 miles southwest and visit James Madison's Monticello.

It's nice to be reminded of Madison every time we look at the back of a nickel produced between 1938 and 2003. Cheers!

Caddying for the Cubs

Looking across North Branch of the Chicago River to
the 17th green at Glen View Club.

Glen View Club in Golf, Illinois, where I caddied from the ages of 10 to 18 was and is a private country club. Its membership during my tenure from 1964 through 1972 was mostly corporate and conservative, old money being much preferred over the nouveau riche. Glen View was the sort of place that invited you to apply for membership. You did not approach it.

With a fixed and stable membership, it was pretty much the same lineup that showed up to play golf time after time. Ladies day was Tuesday mornings. Doctors played Wednesday afternoons. Saturday mornings and Sundays before 11:00 am were reserved for men. Husbands and wives and some cobbled together pairs, played couples golf, teeing off from 11:00 am on Sundays into the late afternoon. Many of the caddies had regular loops, and there were regular groups of players.  

If there was to be anything new and exciting it was generally in the way of guests and so it was for me one Monday morning in the late 1960s or early 1970s. The club pro, Ed Oldfield Sr., hosted a foursome of Chicago Cubs, on a rare major league baseball midsummer off day, to play as his guests. The foursome was made up of Ron Santo, Glenn Beckert, Kenny Holtzman and Peanuts Lowery.

Ice On Lake Superior

Yes, it is still there.

Doyle Rice at USA Today says,

I'm gonna keep writing about this until the last cube of ice is melted (if that happens). Unimaginably, there's still ice from the savage winter of 2013-14 on the south shore of Lake Superior near Marquette, Mich.

The Marquette Mining-Journal newspaper reports that according to some forecasts, the ice may last until July:

In more global warming news,

FEMA help?

State seeking FEMA damage assessment for 2013-14 winter freeze

June 4, 2014

John Pepin - Journal Staff Writer (jpepin@miningjournal.net) , The Mining Journal

Save |            

MARQUETTE - State officials are seeking a Federal Emergency Management Agency assessment of winter freeze damage in the Upper Peninsula and parts of the northern Lower Peninsula, after costs from nine counties affected in the region have totaled $14.7 million.

"Right now, we've kind of met a milestone, we have exceeded the $13.7 million that's required to now go to FEMA with a damage assessment," said Teresa Schwalbach, Marquette County emergency management program coordinator, in an update briefing Tuesday to the Marquette County Board.

A state emergency declaration was issued by Gov. Rick Snyder for Marquette County April 17, which made state resources available to local jurisdictions without cost. Some of the items communities have sought under the declaration included leak detectors, construction equipment, steamers and manpower.

Article Photos

Workers from Ishpeming contractor A. Lindberg & Sons work to repair a section of water main on Seventh Street between Division and Bank streets in Ishpeming in May. Ishpeming has had more than 30 water main breaks since the end of December. The region has now surpassed a $13.7 million threshold to seek federal funds for the winter freeze emergency. (Journal photo by Zach Jay)

Marquette County has incurred $5 million in costs.

In May, Snyder added eight additional counties in the Upper Peninsula and northern Lower Peninsula to the Region 8 emergency list including Chippewa, Delta, Gogebic, Luce and Mackinac in the U.P. and Charlevoix, Cheboygan and Emmet counties in the northern part of Lower Michigan.

Those counties are now hoping for a presidential declaration which would make federal funds available to the region, which suffered one of the worst winters in decades. Marquette County had 79 consecutive days with below freezing temperatures and frost depths reaching 8 feet or more, cracking numerous water mains and other pipes.

Remember, it's science.  Good luck to all.

Morton Grove Before the Baby Boom: The Complete Story of The Dells

Canopy over The Dells front entrance, 1934.

Welcome to the third in our ongoing Morton Grove roadhouse series. This jam-packed post documents the story and the times of  the establishment known as The Dells.

It was originally the home of the Huscher family before it was converted into a "swanky roadhouse." During the late 1920s and early 1930s, The Dells eclipsed its competition. Located at the northwest corner of Austin and Dempster, it became the best known and most patronized of the roadhouses in my hometown of Morton Grove, Illinois. The Dells offered live music and entertainment, dancing, fine food, comfort and ambiance. 

The Dells was an incredibly popular and successful commercial enterprise. It boasted a spacious dance floor, broadcast its music performances over the radio airwaves, and, because it was not subjected to the musician union local controls within the city, freely imported nationally renowned musicians and entertainers. The Dells had tasty cuisine -- steak, poultry, seafood and even frogs legs -- in a well appointed setting on a tranquil wooded lot.

There was more, of course, because The Dells' prosperous run was concurrent, not the least bit coincidentally, with the Volstead Act and prohibition. Additional attractions included beer, liquor and gambling and gangland wars over the profits of the same. The Dells was said to be owned or controlled by Al Capone and his gang. It is commonly referred to as the most notorious of the Morton Grove roadhouses.

U. S. Government Climate Deception

Sinking into the mud and rising tidal waters are two totally different things, but not in the federal government for Dear President has spoken. Their motto is to scare and deceive.

Slate.com shows us what global warming has in store for us. In Washington, DC, the Jefferson Memorial goes underwater along the tidal basin and the tidal Potomac. Your kiddies had better go to the National Mall on their eighth grade class trip, because by the time the grandkids come along it ain't gonna be there no more.

The National Capital Planning Commisson is all over it. They are out to save the monuments, like yesterday. We are already suffering right now.

The Tidal Basin of the National Mall is one of the most photographed and visited landscapes in Washington. It is also an example of how climate change is effecting the National Capital Region. Scientists and arborists are noting that the cherry trees are blooming sooner each decade with the earlier arrival of warm spring temperatures. More frequent and intense storm events cause ponding of water along the basin's walks. The Tidal Basin reminds us that our infrastructure systems, including roads, rails, bridges, sewers, power grid, and water lines are vulnerable to the changing climate. We need to understand the impacts of these changes and to work collectively to ensure the resiliency of the National Capital.

For proof they show us a picture of the ponding.

In the National Capital Planning Commission's confirming photo, the Potomac tidal basin overruns the seawall on the west side of Jefferson Memorial (to the right in the top picture). It's so bad that the blooming cherry trees are marooned and a new walkway installed twenty yards inland (left edge) from its original location. My, if that isn't real evidence of the destructive impact of rising oceans, then what is?

Except for one thing that they neglected to mention -- like the facts, as reported by the Washington Post when it still had some pretense to being an actual newspaper.

The big problem seems to be a section of the sea wall that is breaking from the memorial's plaza and settling into the Tidal Basin. The "ring road" along the memorial's circumference also seems to be shifting, officials say.

Such movement is an alarming -- and chronic -- problem at the Jefferson Memorial, which was built in the late 1930s and early 1940s atop pilings and caissons sunk into an artificial mud flat that is about 100 feet deep. Engineers have been struggling for decades to keep everything firmed up.

Efforts are being made to save the portions of the seawall immediately adjacent to the memorial.

The brown goo oozed from the drill hole like a primordial porridge -- from 60 feet beneath the Jefferson Memorial, it was some of the muck that's under the Mall and part of the stuff that has been slowly swallowing the memorial's sea wall for years. 

Centuries of Potomac River sediment and layers of dredged fill, it is the material engineers are drilling through to reach bedrock and anchor the famed memorial's sea wall, for the first time, on a solid foundation.

It's a man made problem for sure, but the men were engineers who did an inadequate job decades back.

In a bit of engineering detective work, experts have discovered that the wall has been slipping away from the memorial's north plaza because the timber pilings that were used to support the wall were probably not long enough to reach bedrock when the memorial was built in the 1930s and '40s. 

Studying old photos, engineers were able to determine that the piles were about 65 to 75 feet long, although bedrock starts about 80 feet down, National Park Service civil engineer Steven D. Sims said.

The walkway actually floods, twice a day, at high tide and at high tide. The inner loop curving around to the memorial has been abandoned.

Except for the seagulls and ducks.

Most of the walkway around the tidal basin was built decades before the sections adjacent to the Jefferson Memorial and is in no danger of flooding except for a few days once every decade of two, when a tropical system wanders up the Potomac. 

Remember, it's science. Good luck to all.

Showing a New Face

You might have noticed that we posted a new snapshot on the right, keeping up with changing seasons and adjustments in facial hair. Meanwhile, says the New York Times:

The National Security Agency is harvesting huge numbers of images of people from communications that it intercepts through its global surveillance operations for use in sophisticated facial recognition programs, according to top-secret documents.

The spy agency’s reliance on facial recognition technology has grown significantly over the last four years as the agency has turned to new software to exploit the flood of images included in emails, text messages, social media, videoconferences and other communications, the N.S.A. documents reveal. Agency officials believe that technological advances could revolutionize the way that the N.S.A. finds intelligence targets around the world, the documents show. The agency’s ambitions for this highly sensitive ability and the scale of its effort have not previously been disclosed.

We are always happy to make our government's job easier in all its endeavors. NSA, here is the full-size version. As for the Bobcat thing, first thing people ask in Montana when you meet up is, "Are you a Cat or a Griz?"  I know where I live.

May Top Ten Posts

In view of the severity of last winter, which set in hard the third week of November and did not yield until late April, we have been most pleasantly surprised by the advent of real spring during May in Bozeman. The saying goes, we have a wonderful spring in Montana -- all three days of it. This year we are getting a gloriously long month and perhaps more.

We have been out on the golf course all month. And we are developing a vegetable garden plot (more on that to come). We were not able to get up in the mountains as much as we would have liked in recent weeks for Saturday pictures because many of the prime scenic locations remained blocked by the deep winter snow packs. We have been making the rounds almost exclusively at Cottonwood Hills golf course

Cottonwood Hills went tech in May with a webcam,
bandwidth courtesy Barack Obama. Thanks Dear President.

 

(see new webcam view across the putting green towards the first tee at left) because the surging and merging snow melt runoff over the banks of the creek and the East Gallitan River has temporarily made Bridger Creek golf course more like a 16 and 1/2 than an 18 hole links.

We want to thank our readers for their loyal readership. We like to research, learn, inform and entertain. Your joining with us makes the experience incredibly worthwhile and rewarding. You are awesome. 

Our top ten most viewed post list in May has a good mix of perennial favorites and new postings. Here they are top to bottom:

Dear President has plowed under the secure military golf
course (right) to make way for his latest NSA expansion.

1. CNN was once the world's premier news organization under Ted Turner. If something important was happening, CNN was the news source I would reflexively go to first. Bernard Shaw, Peter Arnett and Susan Rook, they were the bombs. John Holliman was cool. Now it is the last. The network has become a purveyor of speculation, misinformation and reality trash under the leadership and tutelage of NBC News alumnus Jeff Zucker. Accents are more valued than acumen. In NSA Overeaches are Bush's Fault? we unmasked one of Christiana Amanpour's know nothing reports from Europe.

2. Baby boomers are nothing if not nostalgic. In Growing Up In Morton Grove I recounted boyhood memories of growing up on Austin Avenue in the sleepy suburb north of Chicago during the boom. That the post has received a welcoming and lasting reception warms our hearts well.

Jock Hutchison (left) 1921 British Open champion
golfer of the year and Chick Evans,
1916 U.S. Open winner, circa 1920. Evans
was also a member at Glen View Club.

3. When I was growing up in Morton Grove, summer mornings I would jump on my bike around 7:30 am, ride up Austin Austin Avenue to Beckwith Road, turn left and then cut right across Chick Evans golf course, and zigzag across Golf Road to the entrance of Glen View Club where I caddied from the ages of 10 to 18. I sometimes looped for an old codger by the name of Jock Hutchison who played several times a week. Jock said he had won the British Open. I scoffed. In The Masters (Repost) I atone for my youthful disbelief by recognizing the man who was also first in a series of legendary honorary starters at The Masters.

4. The replacement contractor for Healthcare.Gov has turned out to be outrageously expensive and absurdly behind schedule. Who could have predicted that? Well me. Check it out at Accenture Comes Through For Healthcare.Gov.

5. Succulents don't weather well in Montana winters. It's a different story in the land that gave us Sam Houston. The special spousal guest post, Mildly Painful, Painful and Very Painful -- Texas Cactus, recounts everything you might want to know about cacti in the Lone Star state.

6. Here a lobbyist, there a lobbyist, everywhere a lobbyist. From the mortgage meltdown, to the Obamacare website disaster, It's That Fella Across The Street recounts the ubiquity of the lobbying crowd from our days inside and around The DC Beltway.

7. With the golf season in full swing again, training for the uninitiated is freshly in order. Readers of this blog who are new to the game are learning how to survive a season of professional golf coverage in The Golf Channel: Spouse's Guide To Sanity (Special Guest Post).

HWY 281 closed by Devil's Lake's rising waters.

8. If you want to actually learn something about climate change, read this post, Real Climate Change at Work, about Devil's Lake, North Dakota. Droughts and floods, arctic cold and stifling heat -- they are all there, and episodically come and go, having absolutely nothing to do with global warming or with Dear President wiping his brow while giving a Georgetown speech in July. Obama has not visited North Dakota. He would learn too much.

9. On The Road to Bathgate Act 1: Fargo the Movie, is an ever popular pop culture story on the Paul Bunyan statue that found new legs this spring with the debut of Fargo, the series, on FX. "You should have seen it right after they put it up," said Reinhold Henschel, who owns Reiny's Bar, one of a handful of businesses in the town of 75 people about 10 miles south of the Canadian border. "It was foggy, and people couldn't see it until they got right up to it. Then, it says, 'Brainerd,' and they thought, 'What the hell?" You can join the 383 of us who like Reiny's on Facebook, here. 

10. We drove up to Kalispell to attend the Glacier Bancorp Annual Shareholders Meeting (GBCI). Glacier is a holding company of community banks, headquartered up the Flathead Valley, a gateway to Glacier National Park and hence the name. It is one of our largest stock holdings, a conservatively and well managed company that unlike most all the rest of the banking industry did not accept TARP money from Uncle Sam and never suspended, did not even cut, its dividend during the financial crisis. They walk the talk.