On this date Louis Joliet [also spelled as Jolliet], Father Jacques Marquette, and five French voyageurs departed from the mission of St. Ignace, at the head of Lake Michigan, to reconnoiter the Mississippi River. The party traveled in two canoes throughout the summer of 1673, traveling across Wisconsin, down the Mississippi to the Arkansas River, and back again. [Source: Historic Diaries: Marquette & Joliet via Wisconsin Historical Society.
From NASA, a video on that agency’s Aqua satellite and its instruments:
Google’s daily puzzle asks about food: “What do you call a cluster of fruit on the world’s largest herb?”
Monday night was Planning Commission night in Whitewater. The agenda for the meeting is available online.
The Commission selected a chairman (Greg Meyer) & vice chairman (Lynn Binnie), and representatives from Planning to the Community Development Authority (Greg Meyer) and Urban Forestry Commission (Karen Coburn).
Every nominee was uncontested and supported unanimously. One can have consensus, although I’d think some ideological division would be useful to the city. I’ve been critical of some recent and unanimous decisions of the commission, but I’m unsure where this commission will be in six months or so.
Here’s why.
First, although the city administration will soon have a leadership vacancy, there’s been a decline in managerial leadership at city hall long before the city manager’s recent announcement of a job offer to become Walworth County highway commissioner.
Clarity and consistency will be more important than ever – decisions that involve simply a hodgepodge will confuse the devil out of businesses and business prospects.
Second, lack of clarity also puts at risk a commercial re-zoning initiative that’s in process. It’s a necessary step, but it will be an insufficient one if clear zoning fuel runs though a clogged planning filter. To make re-zoning effective, businesses will need to know that revised zoning ordinances will be embraced at all parts of local government. (Members of the zoning re-write team come from different parts of the community, including the Planning Commission.)
Considering the Planning Commission’s recent work, I’m not sure how it will hold up.
The recent 5.14 session was a routine one, but routine isn’t in the offing for the months ahead (and the city will be better without the routine of these recent years).
Yesterday, I initially typed, but later corrected, the daily temperature forecast as forty-six (rather than eighty-six). An example of wishful thinking: I like colder weather. Today, a bit colder, but still warm: a forecast of seventy with sunny skies.
There’s a date change for a Community Development Authority meeting originally scheduled for today, to interview for a CDA director. The interview is now Thursday at 1 PM.
What a poor process this is: no list of candidates with biographies, as a suitable interview process for someone who should be the chief development official in the city. Worse, the CDA has a consultant who helped (in some capacity) with this, and this is the process they produce: all draped with silence. The Innovation Center’s director search was like this, long and hidden, mediocre and substandard throughout.
The CDA used Redevelopment Resources as a consultant – but if that firm’s work cost a penny, it was a copper coin too much. No one of any talent would be connected with a process that was a little bit here, a little bit there, all of it in the dark. The first thing the consultant needed to do – and failed to do – was show and bring into effect a proper search process.
Something more pleasant, to cleanse the palate — on this day in 1929, the first Academy Awards:
The Wisconsin Historical Society reports this day in 1913 as the day that
Big Band Leader Woody Herman [Was] Born
On this date Woody Herman was born in Milwaukee. A child prodigy, Herman sang and tap-danced in local clubs before touring as a singer on the vaudeville circuit. He played in various dance bands throughout the 20s and 30s and by 1944 was leading a band eventually known as the First Herd. In 1946, the band played an acclaimed concert at Carnegie Hall but disbanded at the end of the year. The following year, Herman returned to performing with the Second Herd that included a powerful saxophone section comprised of Herbie Steward, Stan Getz, Zoot Sims, and Serge Chaloff. He died in 1987. [Source: WoodyHerman.com].
Google’s daily puzzle is for readers: “You’re playing the character who speaks first in Shakespeare’s longest play. What’s your opening line?” more >>
I received a note from Open Road Media, the publisher of an electronic edition of James Hilton’s Lost Horizon. Noticing that I was reading the book’s print edition, they suggested that I might consider their new electronic version, just out.
Of course: I’d prefer an e-book to a print copy, as they’re easier to store, often in several devices at once, and are a sound conservation practice, too.
A copy from Amazon is available online. (I neither charge nor accept promotional items for anything at FREE WHITEWATER. These remarks are those of a reader like anyone else.)
The Open Road Media edition is sparkling – properly formatted and easy to read on a computer, smartphone, iPad, or Kindle. (I’ve tried it on all these devices). Easily recommended.
It’s common with a publisher’s message like this to receive a second question, about some topic in the book. In this case: What the idea of Shangri-La means to me.
I’d suppose that Hilton’s Shangri-La captivates readers initially as a place of near agelessness, a version of a fountain of youth story. That’s understandable, of course: concerns over aging and mortality are common enough.
Yet, the Shangri-La of the story is not a simply a place of near-agelessness. It’s a place with a confident way of life, as Chang, a representative of the lamasery, explains:
We rule with moderate strictness, and in return are satisfied with moderate obedience. And I think that I can claim that our people are moderately sober, moderately chaste, and moderately honest.
Chang knows his way and his mind – he’s confident, even when peppered with skeptical questions. It’s not the place, but the state of mind, that matters most. One lives well if one lives clearly, confidently.
Often one sees in a place what one believes one will see. Yet, I cannot avoid thinking that Shangri-La is about believing deep within oneself in, and of, something. Clarity and confidence in the face of the harsh natural conditions beyond the valley, or the political violence and disorder that looms in the world outside.
Shangri-La isn’t compelling because its residents live longer; it’s compelling because its residents live soundly and confidently. From that, many things are possible, including an enduring, everlasting community.
We’ve another warm day ahead, with a high of forty-six eighty-six, and a one-third chance of thunderstorms in the afternoon.
Whitewater’s Common Council meets tonight at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1911, the Supreme Court enforced the Sherman Antitrust Act against Standard Oil, breaking up that vast company.
The Wisconsin Historical Society notes that on this day in 1911,
…the Janesville City Council proposed ordinances banning fortune-tellers and prohibiting breweries from operating bars in the city. For more on Wisconsin brewing history, see the “Brewing and Prohibition” page at Turning Points in Wisconsin History. [Source: Janesville Gazette].
I’ve no confidence in fortune tellers, but one can be confident that a community that worries over them is on the wrong track.
Google’s daily puzzle ask about astrophysics: “When a star collapses, its mass is squeezed into a single point that has zero volume. What is its density?”
In the 13th district recall battle between Sen. Majority Leader Fitzgerald and challenger Lori Compas, Fitzgerald recently expressed his doubts about Compas’s control of her own campaign:
For the record, Fitzgerald said he doesn’t buy Compas’ Pollyanna image. He knows some people are painting the race as a David-vs.-Goliath contest.
But Fitzgerald said he thinks her husband is one of the main forces behind her campaign, as well as unions and protest groups. “I don’t for one minute believe she is the organizing force behind this whole thing,” he said.
Fitzgerald’s foolish assertion is that her husband, rather than Compas herself, is one of the main forces behind her campaign. Any person of normal understanding will interpret this one way, and one way only: that Fitzgerald thinks she can’t do what he considers to be a man’s job.
When Fitzgerald speaks this way, he might as well say that Compas should leave the campaign trail, and promptly resume a woman’s station in the kitchen.
That position is both condescending and easily ridiculed as condescending.
Sure enough – within a single day – Compas produced a video mocking Fitzgerald’s narrow, patronizing remark:
I’m involved with neither campaign, but the greater advantage is lack of connection to the Fitzgerald campaign: it saves one an embarrassing association with another of his gaffes.
I’d guess that Fitzgerald will remain the favorite in this Republican-leaning district, but he sounds worse every time he tries to speak on his own. Far from Compas needing to rely on her husband, Fitzgerald would do well to rely on his wife, or any other overly-generous woman who can endure his views.
Her views are not my own. No matter: someone listening to Compas for even a few minutes would know that she was presenting her own remarks, of her own design. A candidate writing her own remarks is doing still more, and thus running her own campaign.
(From my recent post: “She read from prepared remarks, rather than extemporaneously, but spoke well and easily. Her remarks were obviously her own, and Compas read them with a familiarity that made looking at them necsssary only briefly.
In this way, she would step back from the lectern, and then occasionally move toward it, in a kind of gavotte. I’d never coach someone to do this, but it was surprisingly innocuous, and almost effective.”)
There’s not the slighest chance Lori Compas’s remarks were not her own. If they were another’s, she would either have stayed closer to the lectern throughout, or tried to memorize the address in a way that would have produced a stilted, halting cadence. Her delivery was that of someone who wrote her own words, and then wanted independence from the podium by stepping back occasionally. A more polished speaker would have navigated the podium more effectively, but her words were surely her own.
Predictably, Compas’s campaign unsettles Fitzgerald (“I’m sure Fitzgerald resents her candidacy, her imposition on his time, his moment, his influence. She must seem something between impertinent and alien to him.”)
Fitzgerald is mistaken to think she’s merely a Pollyanna; it’s closer to the truth to say he’s cynical.
(Again: “She’s smart, but here’s her great strength: she’s evidently and manifestly sincere. If one comes away with a single impression, it’s that she means what she says. That doesn’t make her right, but it does make her politically effective.”)
The majority party controls Wisconsin’s executive office, both chambers of the legislature, with a conservative majority on the state’s supreme court.
Yet for all the majority’s advantages, Lori Compas has Scott Fitzgerald rattled. more >>
It’s a warm and sunny Monday ahead for Whitewater, with a high of seventy-nine. Whitewater’s May 14th will be a day of 14 hours, 38 minutes of sunlight, 15 hours, 44 minutes of daylight, and a waning crescent moon.
Whitewater’s Planning Commission meets at 6 PM tonight.
On this day in 1804, Lewis & Clark set out westward.
The Wisconsin Historical Society marks today as the beginning of a ten-week strike in the Milwaukee beer industry:
1953 – Milwaukee Brewery Workers Go On Strike
Milwaukee brewery workers begin a 10-week strike, demanding contracts comparable to those of East and West coast workers. The strike was won when Blatz Brewery accepted their demands, but Blatz was ousted from the Brewers Association for “unethical” business methods as a result. The following year Schlitz president Erwin C. Uihlein told guests at Schlitz’ annual Christmas party that “Irreparable harm was done to the Milwaukee brewery industry during the 76-day strike of 1953, and unemployed brewery workers must endure ‘continued suffering’ before the prestige of Milwaukee beer is re-established on the world market.”
Google’s daily puzzle asks about a famous figure in law enforcement: “What office did the man who created the “Ten Most Wanted Fugitives” list hold when he implemented the program?” more >>
