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Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 3.13.14

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Good morning.

Sunrise today is 7:10 AM and sunset 6:59 PM. The moon is in a waxing gibbous phase with ninety-one percent of its visible disk illuminated. Thursday will be an increasingly cloudy day, with a high of thirty-seven.

Whitewater’s Fire & Rescue Task Force will meet at 6 PM tonight.

600px-Uranus2
Image of the planet Uranus taken by the spacecraft Voyager 2 in 1986. Via Wikipedia.

On this day in 1781, Herschel discovers a planet:

The German-born English astronomer William Hershel discovers Uranus, the seventh planet from the sun. Herschel’s discovery of a new planet was the first to be made in modern times, and also the first to be made by use of a telescope, which allowed Herschel to distinguish Uranus as a planet, not a star, as previous astronomers believed.

Herschel, who was later knighted for his historic discovery, named the planet Georgium Sidus, or the “Georgian Planet,” in honor of King George III of England. However, German astronomer Johann Bode proposed the name “Uranus” for the celestial body in order to conform to the classical mythology-derived names of other known planets. Uranus, the ancient Greek deity of the heavens, was a predecessor of the Olympian gods. By the mid-19th century, it was also the generally accepted name of the seventh planet from the sun.

The planet Uranus is a gas giant like Jupiter and Saturn and is made up of hydrogen, helium, and methane. The third largest planet, Uranus orbits the sun once every 84 earth years and is the only planet to spin perpendicular to its solar orbital plane. In January 1986, the unmanned U.S. spacecraft Voyager 2 visited the planet, discovering 10 additional moons to the five already known, and a system of faint rings around the gas giant.

Puzzability‘s Easy as Pi series continues with Thursday’s game:

This Week’s Game — March 10-14
Easy as Pi
This Friday is Pi Day: 3.14. For each day this week, we’re celebrating by starting with a word and adding the two-letter chunk PI (before, within, or after) to get a new word. The two-word answer phrase, described by each day’s clue, is the shorter word followed by the PI word.
Example:
Noisy bird that’s a sorcerer
Answer:
Mage magpie
What to Submit:
Submit the two-word phrase, with the PI word second (as “Mage magpie” in the example), for your answer.
Thursday, March 13
Ask an Enterprise captain for proof of age at the bar

City, Liberty, New Whitewater

Why Whitewater?

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This post is the third of a trilogy about Whitewater.  Months ago, I posted the first two of this series. (See, How Many Rights for Whitewater? and What Standards for Whitewater?).  

Those earlier posts may be summarized simply:

Of rights —

All of America, and all of Wisconsin, for all of Whitewater.

Of standards —

The best of Wisconsin, of America, and of civilized places beyond, for all Whitewater.

If rights matter (and they do) and standards matter (and they do), one question yet remains:

Why Whitewater?  

Why write about this place, rather than another?  Why contend over this small city’s future, rather than that of another place?

This, truly, is the easiest answer of all:

The people of our small city are entitled to rights and standards by virtue of life, itself.

There’s no better place in which to write, contend, and live.  

Not partial rights, not sham standards, but a full and genuine measure of both.  No one should live that he or she is no more than an extra in someone else’s film, or an ornament for a vain man’s pride.  

Someone once told me, by way of a supposed rebuke, that it was wrong to expect as much of officials in Whitewater, and for the residents of our city. She believed that one should settle for less from government, and expect less for residents, as this was a small town incapable of better.

To contend as she did is to contend falsely, to advance a dark and cynical view.  

All around us, among many thousands, one finds talent and accomplishment.  It is right to see as much, but even if one saw none of this, still it would be wrong to suggest that those who live here are deserving of less.  

There are also residents here, as there are in every community, who are ill or disabled – but they also are entitled by nature to the rights and care owed to all others.  Often, they are deserving of additional care and comfort.  

People see as they’d like, and love as they’d like, but as for me, I see Whitewater, and love her, in this way: through an unshakable belief that people in our city merit rights and standards naturally and necessarily.  

Here, as beautiful and as deserving as anywhere.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 3.12.14

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Good morning.

We’ll have a gradually sunnier day today, with a high of twenty-eight.

On this day in 1933, Pres. Roosevelt gives his first fireside chat:

…eight days after his inauguration, President Franklin D. Roosevelt gives his first national radio address or “fireside chat,” broadcast directly from the White House.

Roosevelt began that first address simply: “I want to talk for a few minutes with the people of the United States about banking.” He went on to explain his recent decision to close the nation’s banks in order to stop a surge in mass withdrawals by panicked investors worried about possible bank failures. The banks would be reopening the next day, Roosevelt said, and he thanked the public for their “fortitude and good temper” during the “banking holiday.”

At the time, the U.S. was at the lowest point of the Great Depression, with between 25 and 33 percent of the work force unemployed. The nation was worried, and Roosevelt’s address was designed to ease fears and to inspire confidence in his leadership. Roosevelt went on to deliver 30 more of these broadcasts between March 1933 and June 1944. They reached an astonishing number of American households, 90 percent of which owned a radio at the time.

Journalist Robert Trout coined the phrase “fireside chat” to describe Roosevelt’s radio addresses, invoking an image of the president sitting by a fire in a living room, speaking earnestly to the American people about his hopes and dreams for the nation….

Here’s Puzability’s Wednesday game:

This Week’s Game — March 10-14
Easy as Pi
This Friday is Pi Day: 3.14. For each day this week, we’re celebrating by starting with a word and adding the two-letter chunk PI (before, within, or after) to get a new word. The two-word answer phrase, described by each day’s clue, is the shorter word followed by the PI word.
Example:
Noisy bird that’s a sorcerer
Answer:
Mage magpie
What to Submit:
Submit the two-word phrase, with the PI word second (as “Mage magpie” in the example), for your answer.
Wednesday, March 12
Generously allows others to use one’s permanent markers

City, Laws/Regulations, Local Government

Last Night’s Zoning Rewrite Meeting (Residential Sections)

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Beginning at 7 PM last night, after an immediately prior Planning Commission meeting, Common Council and the Planning Commission held a joint public hearing to consider proposed changes to Whitewater’s residential zoning code.  

The meeting lasted until about ten, with further consideration of the changes scheduled for Tuesday, March 18th.  

A few remarks, below, on last night’s meeting.  

A well-organized, public process.  Tuesday’s meeting was well-organized, orderly, civil, and transparent.  That’s true of this entire process of rezoning: it’s been publicly announced, commented on, and advanced over a multi-year period in a transparent way.  

It’s simply false to imply (as did the Banner‘s publisher on Monday) that this has been a process-deficient effort.  Nothing’s been hidden, nothing’s been rushed.   

A process like this is proof that Whitewater can deliberate over contentious issues thoroughly and civilly.

Unfounded pre-hearing worries over students at the public hearing.  One sometimes reads, but more often hears, all sorts of narrow, provincial fear about students or student housing.  Among those concerns, consider this absurd gem, again from the Banner:

….In addition the Whitewater Student Government (WSG) Senators evidently have been invited to this meeting – From WSG Facebook “We will have a special meeting tomorrow at 6:30 p.m. Afterwards every senator and board member will head downtown to City Hall for the Whitewater Zoning Rewrite meeting at about 7 p.m. We want to ensure Whitewater students are represented”….

Got that?  Someone invited the Visigoths inside Rome’s city walls.  Oh dearie me, there goes the empire… 

These remarks are both condescending and unbecoming of a free place.

First, they assume that representatives of student government needed to be invited, as though they were incapable of reading the City of Whitewater’s website and following developments in the city in which they reside on their own initiative.  

(It’s even stranger that those who have earned a salary at UW-Whitewater think so little of the students who attend, and who are, after all, the means of their very sustenance.)

Second – and more significantly —  those who reside in the city have a right under law to attend a municipal public meeting.  They don’t need an invitation – the failure to provide one cannot serve as a basis for exclusion from a public meeting.  

Attendance is a right, and it matters not in the least what a local publisher thinks or frets about the matter.  

A sensible decision to continue the meeting.  It was a long night, because many exercised their right to speak, and then participants reviewed methodically the contents of the proposed changes.  Continuing the remainder of the review again soon is a practical decision.   

It’s contradictory to complain (erroneously) that this process has been a closed one and then whine that the open meetings involved are taking too long.  

Understanding the consequences of market changes.  Some of those who spoke last night recognized that although they would have preferred more single family homes in their neighborhoods, market changes in those areas now mean that it’s economically advantageous to sell their homes as apartment residences.  

That’s rational, and follows a similar pattern on Tratt Street.  

Parties favoring restrictive zoning overlays.  I’m strongly opposed to allowing those not advocating restrictions for their own neighborhoods to impose restrictions on others’ neighborhoods.  Property owners in a neighborhood should be the ones to propose encumbering their properties and others’ homes – petitions should not come from the city manager, politicians in town, etc., not feeling the weight of those restrictions themselves (there and then, in that petition).

The Right’s problem in Whitewater  I’m a libertarian, and so neither Republican nor Democrat, neither of the Left nor Right.  

Although the Right in Whitewater hasn’t asked, I’ll offer them some sincere advice: you’re going to need a new generation of local voices on the Web, because your current right-of-center publication just can’t carry a political argument well, in either reasoning or composition.  

Whitewater will always do better with many rather than few.  I have always hoped for, and believed in, a city of many diverse opinions.  

It doesn’t matter that they’ll differ from mine – it matters first that people may express themselves, and second that by doing so they’ll enrich the city.  

Whitewater is not one thing, it’s many things.  

I find the idea of trying to sum the city into one number sometimes rigid, often silly, and always unworthy of an American marketplace of ideas.  

Still, conservatives, on politics you very much need new standard-bearers in the city.  You and others will both be better for it.  

But of last night’s meeting – well done, I’d say.  

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 3.11.14

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Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be rainy, with a high of forty-one.

Whitewater’s Parks & Rec Board meets at 5:30 PM.

On this day in 1941, Pres. Roosevelt signs the Lend-Lease Bill into law.  Here’s how the New York Times reported the story:

Washington, March 11 _ President Roosevelt signed the history making lease-lend bill at 3:50 P. M. today immediately after receiving it from the Capitol, where the House completed action by accepting the Senate amendments by a vote of 317 to 71.

Five minutes after the bill was signed the President approved a list of undisclosed quantities of war materials to be transferred at once from the American Army and Navy to the British and the Greeks, to bolster these powers in their life-and-death struggle with the Axis. Most of these first materials, the nature of which the President guarded, will go to Great Britain. Having thus promptly set the machinery to motion toward making the United States “the Arsenal of Democracy,” Mr. Roosevelt began work on a request to be sent to Congress tomorrow for an immediate appropriation of $7,000,000,000 with which to press the lease-lend effort to the fullest possible extent under the new law. This, he intimated, would be likely to include help to China as well as to Great Britain and Greece, and to all other nations which later may find themselves under threat of the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo alliance.

Here’s Puzzability’s Tuesday game:

This Week’s Game — March 10-14
Easy as Pi
This Friday is Pi Day: 3.14. For each day this week, we’re celebrating by starting with a word and adding the two-letter chunk PI (before, within, or after) to get a new word. The two-word answer phrase, described by each day’s clue, is the shorter word followed by the PI word.
Example:
Noisy bird that’s a sorcerer
Answer:
Mage magpie
What to Submit:
Submit the two-word phrase, with the PI word second (as “Mage magpie” in the example), for your answer.
Tuesday, March 11
Judge at the trial of Jesus who fails to show up on time

Local Government

Stodgy Residents Love Nothing More than Prohibition(s)

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There’s no better way to identify those few stodgy, stuffy town squires of Whitewater than by their love of prohibiting others’ conduct.

Not a ban alone, but also gleeful announcement of whatever restrictions, prohibitions, regulations, limitations, proscriptions, interdictions, etc., that they’re able to proclaim —

KEEP OFF THE LAWN

DO NOT APPROACH FOXES OR OTHER WILD CANIDS

OVERNIGHT PARKING IS PROHIBITED

NO MAN-EATING SNAKES

STAY ON CAMPUS 

MORSELS OF FOOD MUST BE CHEWED AT LEAST 20 TIMES

(25 TIMES FOR TAFFY OR BEEF JERKY)

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 3.10.14

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Good morning.

Our week begins with sunny skies and mild temperatures, with a Monday high of forty-nine.

Tonight at 6 PM, the Planning Commission meets; at 7 PM there will be a joint meeting of the Planning Commission and Common Council for a public hearing of proposed residential zoning code changes from the Zoning Rewrite project.

From Fox News comes the story of a pug that wandered through a police line, only to challenge officers and a K9 engaged in a standoff at a nearby house. After the confrontation, the pug executes a tactical retreat.

For more about the encounter, see Fox News Insider.

On this day in 1854, an act of oppression later falls to a victory for liberty in Racine:

1854 – Glover’s Capture
On this date, Joshua Glover, a slave from Missouri, was captured by federal agents in Racine. Abolitionists led by Sherman Booth stormed the Milwaukee jail where he was held and got him safely to Canada through the Underground Railroad. [Source: Badger Saints and Sinners by Fred L. Holmes, pg 184-202]

Puzzability begins a new series that’s all about pi:

This Week’s Game — March 10-14
Easy as Pi
This Friday is Pi Day: 3.14. For each day this week, we’re celebrating by starting with a word and adding the two-letter chunk PI (before, within, or after) to get a new word. The two-word answer phrase, described by each day’s clue, is the shorter word followed by the PI word.
Example:
Noisy bird that’s a sorcerer
Answer:
Mage magpie
What to Submit:
Submit the two-word phrase, with the PI word second (as “Mage magpie” in the example), for your answer.
Monday, March 10
Suggestive robbery on the high seas

 

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 3.9.14

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Good morning.

Sunday will be mostly sunny with highs in the lower forties.

It’s on this day in 1862 that the Confederate ironclad Virginia clashes with the Union Monitor off Hampton Roads, Virginia.

20140309-075903.jpg

“The Monitor and Merrimac: The First Fight Between Ironclads”, a chromolithograph of the Battle of Hampton Roads, produced by Louis Prang & Co., Boston via Wikipedia

On this day in 1959, a famous houseguest is born:

Kato Kaelin Born
On this date Kato Kaelin was born in Milwaukee. He made a few appearances in film and TV, but is mainly known for his testimony in the O.J. Simpson trial. Kaelin lived on Simpson’s estate when O.J.’s wife was murdered. [Source: Internet Movie Database Inc.]