Category Archives: History

Independence Day

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“Too often in recent history liberal governments
have been wrecked on rocks of loose fiscal policy.”

Here’s a revolutionary idea.

Independence Day commemorates our declaration of independence from the King of England. The revolution officially began two days earlier when the Second Continental Congress approved the legal separation of the American colonies from Great Britain, a resolution proposed by Richard Henry Lee of Virginia in June. After voting for independence on July 2, Congress debated and revised the Declaration itself for two whole days and approved it on July 4.

In the centuries since, only the 111th Congress has moved with anywhere near the speed of that first gathering, since the 111th Congress passed trillions of dollars of spending on millions of pages of bills in less than 100 days. And no one in Washington read any of them.

The Declaration of Independence fits on one page. Everyone in the Continental Congress read the whole thing.

In Peoria just one hundred fifty-seven years ago Rep. Abraham Lincoln said,

Nearly eighty years ago we began by declaring that all men are created equal; but now from that beginning we have run down to the other declaration, that for some men to enslave others is a “sacred right of self-government.” … Our republican robe is soiled and trailed in the dust. Let us repurify it. … Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize with it.

Lincoln spoke of the enslavement of persons. Today our republican robe is soiled and trailed in the dust by a government that would enslave We the Overtaxed People, taking more and more of our rights and our land and our life’s blood to its own purpose.

Just to rekindle our liberal friends, Franklin Delano Roosevelt made the “loose fiscal policy” quote.

The 112th Congress is back to its usual wiener roasts and Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus is indeed still fiddling in Washington.

Two hundred thirty-three years ago today, General George Washington marked July 4 with a double ration of rum and an artillery salute for the soldiers who fought off the foreign monarchy that did enslave us. It is now time to mark July 4 with a double ration of electoral salute to those who would be the modern monarchy of government.



Much of our litigious life today grew out of English Common Law. We abandoned one really good idea in the first Revolution, though. We abandoned the No Confidence vote.

An earlier version of this column appeared in 2009.

On the Road Again

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A day late.

According to most folks here, I’ve been goofing off in South Puffin for the last couple of weeks. OK, I did goof off there some of the time, but I spent a month on the road over the past three days.

Rufus had left his truck at my little island house (y’all understand how nice it is to live on an island you can drive to, yes?) And I volunteered not only to drive it off the island but to take it all the way north.

Road trip!

Traffic on the southbound 18-mile stretch into the Keys had backed up to Homestead. The great state of Florida has finished eight-years of the five-year project to rebuild most of that two-lane highway into a wider two-lane highway so it can handle more traffic without tie-ups. They have about two-years to go before they finish.

The planning proved itself Saturday. Traffic on the new single-lane southbound 18-mile stretch into the Keys had backed up to Homestead because one lane was blocked by an accident and its emergency vehicles. A fire truck, an ambulance, and a bunch of police cars had parked around a couple of scrunched cars.

Fortunately, I was northbound.

Oddly, none of the emergency folk was working on any of the cars as I flashed past. They were all looking over the pastel green concrete guardwalls into the marsh below.

I love road trips. Sights I have never seen before, people I’ve never talked to, expensive gasoline. I have to wonder why, though, when it hadn’t rained for six months in South Puffin did Rufus’ truck need ark building lessons just a couple of hours after I re-entered the United States?

Some of that rain slowed me to 30 mph on the Interstate when most of the other cars were going slower. Many pulled off. Other than the rain, the boat dragged up on a flatbed tow truck, half a dozen other accidents, and a few micronaps, the first day on the road was uneventful.

And the truck got really clean.

It is unusual to see a V-bottom boat lying on its keel and chine on a tow truck bed when there is what appeared to be a perfectly good boat trailer right there on the road. Of course, right behind the boat trailer was a sedan with its nose and its tail stove in. I’m thinking the car rear ended the boat, knocked it off its trailer into the road, and got itself rear ended in turn.

I landed at a AAA-rated motel in Walterboro, SC. I have no idea how they got a AAA rating. I had planned to stay in the Country Hearth until they stiffed me by not honoring their coupon or their marquee price; I won’t stay there again. The motel I did choose had an easy and fast Internet connection and a micro fridge but I didn’t find the ice maker until morning.

Late arising, I missed the Continental breakfast (dried bread with a dollop of lemon Jell-O).

The best part of the trip came by mistake. I like the (lower case) blue routes meaning the real thing, not the website, but this trip needed speed so I planned to bang it out on the Interstate. Until I got to Richmond and found nothing but traffic. I hate traffic. I hate traffic lights. The roads should clear whenever I need to drive.

Anyway, Rufus routed me onto 301 North. Our family drove 301 most weekends when we kept the boat on the Eastern Shore. I drove across the Bay bridge and up. Good looking corn. Golden waves of grain. Brick mansions and horse fences and development houses. Kent Island looks built up beyond its ability to support concrete but the rest of the ride showed me you can go home again.

I stopped in Chestertown, MD. We had kept the boat at Kibler’s Marina (now the Chestertown Marina) on the Chester River and most weekends went no farther than Devils Reach to drop the hook. A fellow washing down his boat and I talked a bit. He had not known Joe Strong.

I met Joe Strong in 1960 or so, about the same time my folks did. He and my dad were contemporaries so he was an old guy to me. The lifelong Chestertown resident was a 1938 graduate of Chestertown High School; my dad was a 1937 graduate of West Chester High School. During World War II, Joe enlisted in the Navy and attained the rank of lieutenant; my dad enlisted in the Army and attained the rank of lieutenant. Joe was assigned to Cape May, N.J. where he flew patrol missions over the Atlantic. After the war, he returned to Chestertown, where he owned and operated C. W. Kibler & Sons, selling coal and fertilizer and lime and seeds. He also owned Kibler’s Marina and opened the Old Wharf restaurant next door where he helped the 11-12 year-old me collect Coke™ bottles for the deposits so I’d have some change to bowl ducks when my folks were working on the boat.

Joseph Wilbur Strong Sr. died in Delaware in 2005 just 4 months after my dad died in Florida.

The marina has changed — Joe’s old CCKW truck that he used to haul boats on the shallow railway was replaced by a Travelift years ago — but people still work on their own boats there.

This was also Bentley weekend. I passed a Continental GTC with the top down somewhere in Georgia and chatted with the owner of a Mulsanne at a gas stop in Virginia. I don’t know if he was a lawyer or a politician. By the way, it is rather a joy to spend some time on the Bentley Configurator. Even if spell-check doesn’t think so.

Perhaps the oddest part of the trip came on Monday when Rufus drove me from his Bucks County, PA home to Newark to catch a plane to Philly so I could catch a plane to Vermont. USAir priced the Vermont flight alone at over $600, but by flying into Philly in a propeller driven aircraft, I saved $500.

It’s been decades since I flew out of Newark. They have added gates but they haven’t found much new space so it is a very cramped airport. USAir tagged my carry-on for gate check (obvii) but I snagged an exit row seat in Row Two, and I ended up playing footsies with the aft-facing passengers in Row One and trying to disguise my laptop bag so they wouldn’t gate check it, too.

The second leg was not only late but oversold by three seats. I made it aboard although they gate checked my carry-on again.

So, here I AM™ in North Puffin.

I had some issues getting the laptop hooked back up in my desk dock. I can’t find my good keyboard, so I’m using a spare with goofy Home/Del key placement. My good Yamaha speakers got stupid while I was gone and couldn’t remember how to make noise. I plumbed in a spare pair which work fine, so I’ll have to figure out why the Yammies don’t. And I still haven’t found my webcam. It’s packed somewhere. Or gate checked.

And !@#$%^ Comcast turned off the Internet just when things were getting good last night.

I missed walkies during the trip so tying up my sneaks felt good this morning. I did a little property inspection here and down the road. The state probably figures it is done with the flood cleanup. They have shoveled out most of the debris and have spread new gravel over the road shoulders. The neighbors have cut up a few of the washed up trees into firewood size chunks. The southernmost camp looks fairly clean of the big stuff although their shed is now sitting, orphaned, almost by the road and their docks are still scattered and demolished. The family next to them has removed the skirt from their trailer which looks pretty ratty. The high lake waters drained last next door, so there is some debris and a lot of silt on that lawn. About all I have to do as a result of the flooding is mow.

And this morning, I learned how to say nothing at all by investigating what ontologists do.

Internet is up again. I gotta get back to work.

 

Heck of a job, Brownie!

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If I lived in Gaza, I’d surely be peeved.

Long ago in the tiny Duchy of Grand Fenwick there hatched a plot to tap the unbelievable nation-building largesse the United States grants to pretty much anyone whom we bomb into the stone age.

The Palestinians, knowing this story, have been lobbing bombs and rocks and bullets as far as they could fling them (Israel) for 63 years or so and all that happens is that Israel spanks them.

Along come some rabble rousers in Libya (we don’t know who they are). About 63 minutes later, we send in the Tomahawks at a million bucks a pop (for a war that isn’t a war). Haliburton should be on the ground there with concrete trucks and “advisors” in six weeks.

We’re making a big mistake in Gaza as well as the North African nations now undergoing civil war. We ought not send in private contractors. We should show the entire region how the United States of America really builds nations.

It’s time to send in the big guns.

It’s time to send in FEMA.




Broke

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Don got me thinking about fixing or tossing stuff (we call it “repair or replace” now, because that’s how we roll). I grabbed a long-favorite 10-year old shirt this morning and noticed the cuffs are fraying. I suppose racer tape will keep that from being too too noticeable but I need to find my roll with the pale red, blue, green and white stripes to keep peeps from remarking on the tape.

Anyway, I never bought a netbook but I do have a Palm Tungsten T and a pellet stove.

Both broke.

Even if I hadn’t lived in Vermont (motto: Bet ya can’t name two of our towns) for more years than anywhere else in my life, so far, I come from an old Quaker family that never threw anything away. My loft is living proof. When we moved here, I brought 30,000 pounds in two moving vans and still had to tow the race car behind my truck. When my parents and grandfather moved out of the family home, I got the rest of the family history.

New Vermont motto: If Harper can’t find it in the attic, you don’t need it.

When I “upgraded” to Windows 7, it immediately orphaned my Palm PDA. The Palm still works perfectly well but the Palm HotSync™ app won’t load and my calendar and address book sync doesn’t.

Real Vermonters, tinkerers all, really really used to believe in fixing things.

I have tried to “fix” the Palm. I still have some hope but it is on the shelf for now. Meanwhile, it got cold in here.

The pellet stove has been difficult all this heating season. It all started when Anne noticed the fire was “doming” in the firepot. The dome threatened to pus fire back into the pellet poop chute. Not a good thing. Pellet stoves put out very little ash and what ash this one did make seemed to form a dome instead of flying out of the firepot like good ash should. I was down to South Puffin at the time and couldn’t tell if our new pellet supplier caused the problem or that the forced combustion air system wasn’t forcing enough (or any) air. The combustion fan ran but Anne couldn’t detect any air going through the firebox. Trouble was, we had no way of knowing if that meant there wasn’t any air going through the firebox or just that Anne couldn’t detect any air moving.

I have tinkered with it, cleaned it, and even invented new parts for it for most of the past couple of months. The fire kept doming. On Friday, the automatic pellet feeder stopped feeding pellets. And I’ve washed my hands entirely too many times, although not of the stove.

Wood ash gets into everything. I should have remembered that.

I thought I was doing a good job cleaning the stove but I took it apart this weekend. Something was blocking the air flow and by golly I was going to find it. I found hideyholes I didn’t even know existed. And to find them, I disassembled things I wasn’t sure actually came apart. I even had to RTM.

That’s why I had to keep washing my hands. Wood ash and soot gets into everything.

The right “brick” — it’s actually cast iron — in the firebox hides a passage to the flue. The brick should come out by pulling it up and then towards the front of the stove. The peeps who designed this thing and wrote the manual obviously never worked on a stove after it had been in operation.

Got the brick out. Lots of dust and soot and ash buildup clogging everything. Lots.

I took a bucket load of the dust and soot and ash out of the stove, learned a bit more about how it works, and discovered that it goes back together a whole lot better when clean than it came apart when clogged.

On to the feed auger which was what started this entire exercise.

I cleaned out the feeder tube and the auger still didn’t turn. When I say “cleaned out the feeder tube” I ain’t whistling Dixie. Our vacuum cleaner apparently has an Express Mode on the hose operation which sucked a magnet off the refrigerator at 50 paces. It made short work of the pellets in the tube. Pretty simple operation that. Suck, let some fall past the screw, suck more. A quick look with a mirror showed shiny metal everywhere so I pushed the start button. Ignition and combustion air but no pellet feed. I could hear and feel the feed motor running.

Turns out I looked too quickly.

A better look with a mirror showed some pellets still hiding up in the northeast corner, sort of jammed between the screw and the square corner (square corner???) of the tube. Wiggling the screw didn’t move them and the gear motor made it impossible to turn the screw. I couldn’t even bend a tool up to them, including the ubiquitous coat hanger.

Real Vermonters, tinkerers all, are ingenious about finding solutions. I called Anne.

Anne fixed it.

I had given her bad instructions for disassembling the auger assembly back when we were trying to clear jams over the phone but she made ’em work anyway. I asked her to show me what she had done to clear the feed tube jams. She wasn’t able to pull the motor-and-brackets-and-auger out of the tube but she unbolted it and could turn it through almost a full rotation and that cleared it.

We have fire thanks to our own ingenuity.

But I AM™ ashamed to admit I replaced the Palm with an iPod Touch.