Skip to main content

Go figure!

I-35 is the great north-south highway running from Duluth to Mexico,
not missing a single tornado along the way.  In the Twin Cities, it divides,
going through both downtowns Minneapolis and St. Paul before
reconnecting again on the other side.

On the Minneapolis side, 35-W makes a snaky double-curve,
quite like a country road to a section corner needing to adjust
for putting square road grids down on a global surface.  Right there,
at the double-S, Highway 62 has been wandering through the
spaghetti patch.  It made for a perfect traffic mess.













Politicians and traffic engineers, though, just what to do:  rebuild it.

Governor Pawlenty had a splendid idea!  Tiny Tim does not believe
in big government spending--he believes in borrowing the money
and letting somebody else figure it out, later--so he proposed that
the private contractors who wanted to bid on the huge job should
put up their own money to finance the job, and get paid later.

Wow!  He is smart!  The contractors are smarter:  nobody bid.

Today, the huge intersection is completely rebuilt, as such public
projects usually are, with taxpayer money, and the public is happy!
Our newspapers are resplendent with how good the intersection
is working, how beautiful it is, how much time is saved and how
few nerves are frayed getting north-south, and east-west.

We hate taxes.
Government is too big.
Private firms are better than public projects.
Throw the bastards out!
Why didn't they do this years ago?
Somebody should fix the schools, too.

Go figure!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...

On Watching a Formerly Sane Man Descend into Abject Religion

If you read the previous post, you know the apparatus, pictured here, is a torture machine. There are ten of them in our house, purportedly to circulate air to dry out all the problems caused by a water leak. We live in Tucson:  it has not rained in Tucson since the Gadsden Purchase. A mudslide the size of the one in Washington State could course through our neighborhood and it would be bone-dry and stone-hard before it quit moving. I suspect it is the CIA, and probably the Border Patrol! We are, after all, only about a hundred miles from the border. I fully expect a large suburban assault vehicle to pull up to the house, and for lots of people with UPPER CASE LETTERS on their shirts to interrogate us, and I will have to explain that all the drugs I use come from Walgreens and Total Wine. But it won't work.  Our minds are going. We are getting short with each other and, if they promise to turn off the fans, I will confess to having invented the Arab...