Good evening,
Whitewater’s weather tonight should be clear and comfortable. People sometimes say that summer nights in the 50s or 60s are comfortable. That’s true (and tonight is forecast for 60 degrees), but even occasional colder nights are agreeable. Hard not to find these days other than agreeable. It’s the beginning of America’s largest summer holiday, these few days commemorating our beginnings. Just wonderful.
I went out to visit Whitewater’s business park, on the east side of this small city. I always find my visits depressing — the layout is bleak, uninviting, and dull. Roads and curbsides snake among bland buildings and empty lots. Businesses are so far apart, with too much empty space in between, and the area lacks the hustle and bustle characteristic of production, growth, and prosperity.
I’ll post some photos of the park next week.
No visit would be complete without a quick stop at the site of Whitewater’s forthcoming Innovation Center. I took a few pictures there, too. Those pictures, also, deserve their own post, but I will include just one, for now. It’s of a crooked fence, near one of the gravel driveways into the site:
What a waste of federal and local money all this is. We’ll spend millions for something no better in design — and less useful in function — than an average, modern middle school. If the federal government must tax and spend, it would have done better to give the money to needy people as cash grants. Even a spendthrift idea like that would be more useful than the current project.
As for the driving vanity of the bureaucrats and politicians behind this effort, could we not have satisfied that overweening need and pride for less than several million? We might have built a marble statute for each of them, given each a gold watch, with a vacation cruise for the lot of them, and still saved most of the money now prodigally spent.
I took my photos from the street, and just beyond the curb, so that I’d not run afoul of the warning from No Trespassing signs. The day was over, and no one else was nearby, with only one car passing while I was there. The area was so ugly and in such contrast to the green field nearby, that there was no reason any onlooker should want to go closer.
In the foreground of the picture, however, one can see a few wildflowers, any one of which is better looking, and greener, than anything one will find looking through to the other side of the fence. I took a picture of them, to cleanse the palate, so to speak:
Much better. Even my poor photography cannot obscure something so lovely.
Why not end tonight with something equally impressive as these flowers, and something truly innovative? Here, from the sessions that led to The Birth of the Cool, is a recording of Boplicity.
Enjoy.
Link: Boplicity.