Someone Clean the Cage

We shared this story/thread to a friend and it brought back memories of last February 2nd.  Ahhhh Phil.

The text that follows was taken verbatim from an email sent me by this day in history. It is far more than you might want to know but the Candlemas reference is intriguing and I'll read about that and get back to you.

By the way, this is the 125 Groundhog Day. Someone clean the cage.


1887 : First Groundhog Day

On this day in 1887, Groundhog Day, featuring a rodent meteorologist, is celebrated for the first time at Gobbler's Knob in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. According to tradition, if a groundhog comes out of its hole on this day and sees its shadow, there will be six more weeks of winter weather; no shadow means an early spring.
Groundhog Day has its roots in the ancient Christian tradition of Candlemas Day, when clergy would bless and distribute candles needed for winter. The candles represented how long and cold the winter would be. Germans expanded on this concept by selecting an animal--the hedgehog--as a means of predicting weather. Once they came to America, German settlers in Pennsylvania continued the tradition, although they switched from hedgehogs to groundhogs, which were plentiful in the Keystone State.
Groundhogs, also called woodchucks and whose scientific name is Marmota monax, typically weigh 12 to 15 pounds and live six to eight years. They eat vegetables and fruits, whistle when they're frightened or looking for a mate and can climb trees and swim. They go into hibernation in the late fall; during this time, their body temperatures drop significantly, their heartbeats slow from 80 to five beats per minute and they can lose 30 percent of their body fat. In February, male groundhogs emerge from their burrows to look for a mate (not to predict the weather) before going underground again. They come out of hibernation for good in March.
In 1887, a newspaper editor belonging to a group of groundhog hunters from Punxsutawney called the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club declared that Phil, the Punxsutawney groundhog, was America's only true weather-forecasting groundhog. The line of groundhogs that have since been known as Phil might be America's most famous groundhogs, but other towns across North America now have their own weather-predicting rodents, from Birmingham Bill to Staten Island Chuck to Shubenacadie Sam in Canada.
In 1993, the movie Groundhog Day starring Bill Murray popularized the usage of "groundhog day" to mean something that is repeated over and over. Today, tens of thousands of people converge on Gobbler's Knob in Punxsutawney each February 2 to witness Phil's prediction. The Punxsutawney Groundhog Club hosts a three-day celebration featuring entertainment and activities.

Not very subtle

Yahoo ran this picture in the marquee "news" stories for the past couple days with the headline: "How Romney would rank among presidents "

If you didn't read a word further, you would think that the object of the article was how Romney compared to old George and JFK.   There is Mr. Smiley smack dab up there with the two and actually first in line.  The story was about "who had the most money" but the picture and headline conveyed another slant. This wasn't an accident.

Now that Newt is on the radar and at times gets billing and notice far above his rank and abilities, the "establishment" who sees Newton as the lynch pin that will unloose a democratic landslide this fall, takes every opportunity to do stuff like this in a pursuit of a Romney nomination.

Idiotic grin aside, Romney would be about the richest President ever if elected - certainly in wealth if not adjusted for inflation wealth so that would be that.  Just a reminder then, before we settle into the Sunday morning talk shows, that these faux-cameo stories are everywhere and we all need to consider the source.

FlipFlop and a Howl

We've had a bit of winter/spring flip flop this last week, punctuated each time by the presence of our resident coyote.

He showed up, or traces thereof, after the weekend snow, following his route down the drive and across the lawn area by the beach and then again yesterday, during the amazing sunset and when spotted ran like the dickens to avoid photo capture.

Weeks of flipflop weather are confusing to everyone and the older you get the more impatient you become with the cold part of it.  As kids, we loved snow more than we sought the heat of summer. Not so much anymore.  We have flipfloped in our aging process. We wonder also what this does to our pets and those animals caught up in the midst of our suburban sprawl.

Wiley Coyote can't have a very good life as it is and then to get hit by a January spring probably sets his little mental clock ticking like mad.  He takes the same path probably daily in search of our cat or anyone's cat, a squirrel or just a dropped leftover from dinner.  He knows that if he takes that trail, more than likely he will return to his abode with something to eat.  When he disappears for a few days at a time, we reason that he has altered course because the pickings were easier or the route less precarious in some other direction.

All this struck us this morning at 5am as we walked our usual route to the railroad station in our little town, a bit of a sprinkling of snow on the ground - a dusting so to speak - some wind and a lot of slush, where we patiently waited for the train to take us up the tracks a hundred miles to the city where we found our bagel and coffee cart waiting, walked the blocks to our appointment passing the opening and shutting of building doors and the rush of warm air from them, over steaming grates on the side walk and the occasional plunge into ankle deep curb-water, all in search of a paycheck and a meal.

We may as well have been coyotes.

 

White Sunday Mornings

Yesterday was snow day - long awaited.  The NorthFork Patch ran this picture and it caught my eye if for no other reason than there are NO footsteps down to the bottom of the stairs so it goes to figure that someone ventured out of a basement and saw the above. Just a hunch.

Cement blocks and show always look colder than it is. Long ago, I actually played  in a polka band that had a regular Sunday morning gig called the Michigan Polka Party.  Most of the time it was taped on Saturday afternoons at the Germania club in Saginaw, Michigan.  Germanias were common in heavily German areas and this place had a big auditorium, lots of rooms and a space where the Polka was treasured.  I played in this ensemble when my trumpet teacher was in an auto accident and laid up and to be honest I was plenty nervous - TV and all. I was also pretty nervous because I wasn't very good. 

The place was a maze of corridors, little reception rooms, endless bars all done in black wood and glass, and one felt a time warp to some place in the middle of Bavaria but on Saturdays, about 3pm we would show up and so would more German speaking people than I knew existed and pretty soon we would play the Pennsylvania Polka (the show's theme song) and the crowd would go to town.  We played for an hour and a half and everyone (not me I was 15) shot to one of the many bars and then to a dinner of potatoes and boiled meat.

The second or third week there I was feeling a bit more confident and went exploring after our performance.  The place was old - see picture - and once was the Academy of Music which explained the stage and all, and I of course got lost - a bridge too far. Long story short, I found a door and a stairway out of the place and when I saw the picture in the NorthFork Patch that was the first thing I thought of. Very cold northern Michigan day with the usual new snow, block stairway up and out and not a footprint.

gotcha'

if only..............

I was asked to write a piece for a national political blog

You can preview it here.  If you are a republican, this may not be to your liking but then again who knows.

The FACE of the GOP

We are strong believers in the "picture=1,000 words" school of thought. Here we are treated to belligerent and smug.  Governor Christie is out defending his friend, Mr. Romney, who looks on with that smug little smile that drives liberals nearly crazy.

We are reminded of the popular kid in grade school - the first to wear Pat Boone white buck shoes because he could afford them and afford to get them dirty and when challenged, he had some bully who wanted to suck up to him out in front just in case he needed a little muscle.

The discussions surrounding Mr. Romney have centered somewhat on Bain Capital, the VC/leveraged buyout creation of Bain & Company.  Mr. Romney puts great store in turning around companies that Bain invested in and therefore learning how capitalism works. The "Bain Way" was to micromanage until companies turned around.  This is a Venture Capital method, popular in the middle 1980s, and under Mr. Romney's turn at Bain, marginally successful.

When Bain Capital formed, Mr. Romney was the face of it - raising the initial seed money and transforming the fund from a mildly successful VC firm into a more robust leverage buyout firm.  This is where his link to capitalism eludes us.

The pundits and talking heads are equating "equity" participation with capitalism and not really dealing with the venture/leverage area at all.  Simply, if you go out and by 100 shares of Apple Computer in the stock market you are an equity holder in Apple.  In some very minor percentage, you own a wee bit of  the company. You have made an equity investment of sorts. Your money went to someone else who had owned the shares; now they have your money and you have the shares.  Apple saw NONE of that money.

Venture Capitalists would have gone to Apple and said, "You (the company) need money. I want shares. I will invest in you directly so that the company gets the money to work with. You will issue me new shares so I own a sizable chunk of your equity directly bought from your company and not another shareholder".  Clear so far?

The leverage buyout guys are different and here is how.  They take a hard look at your company but instead of buying shares or investing directly like a venture capitalist would, they just figure it might be cheaper to go to the shareholders and offer to buy up all their shares and once they have control, they clean house, fire a lot of people and then decide what to do with what they own. They may choose to put more money in and revitalize it, or they may choose to sell it off piecemeal and recapture their investment, or somewhere in between. They might also borrow all the money against the breakup value of the company and finance the takeover, pay back the investors with the proceeds and hopefully pocket a fair bundle of money in the end.

This later scene is Bain Capital at the time Mr. Romney was running it. Reports have it that he did very little "running it" if any. He was on to the next deal - the rainmaker so to speak. He was successful in picking apart potential companies about half the time. He NEVER created a job. He only lost jobs when he closed companies or they didn't "get better".  But as a CEO of the target company (which he never was) he created nothing. He spent money and hoped.

I'm as sure that this gives him the insight to run the business of the United States just as sure as the little boy who surveys the pile of crap in the living room and concludes that there must be a pony in there somewhere.

Bucket List

I'm scared to death of heights to the point that a ladder gives me the willies. Not something I can do anything about and in my twilight years not something that I'm interested in changing.

That brings me to a little note that I received in my email this morning about in 1908, on this day, Teddy Roosevelt conferred national monument status to the Grand Canyon. It couldn't have been named outright as a "national park" as Arizona, where most of the canyon rests, wasn't a state until 1912, some four years later. All trivia aside, the canyon is on my bucket list, heights and all.
Like so many in my age group, the old Walt Disney show on Sunday night gave me my first view of this place - Winston Hibbler was the announcer and we took a plane ride under the rim of the canyon that was, on a 14" black and white, some pumpkins.  My real picture of the area came from music. I still have the LP 33-1/3 with the Philadelphia Orchestra and Eugene Ormandy of Grofe's Grand Canyon Suite.

Musical descriptions of places, stories, rivers etc. are generically called "tone poems" and music history is chock full of them.  Composers painted with melody and harmony as assuredly as painters with oil and brush. It is just a little more abstract and relies on a canvas in the mind rather on the wall over the sofa.

Anyway, I want to go to this place before I die or can't navigate the walkways and see if it is as clear in person as it is in my mind's eye.