Good morning.
Friday looks like a day of heavy rain, with thunderstorms in the morning, and a high of seventy-eight for the day. Rainfall could be between a quarter and half of an inch.
On this day in 1957, the Soviets successfully launch Sputnik into orbit, and the space age begins:
New York Times‘ reporters consider the impact of that feat:
Scientific American‘s daily trivia question asks about food. (Clicking on the question leads to its answer.)
Whitewater’s a small Midwestern town. Part of the charm of that way of life is finding a simple, small-town grill. Nothing fancy, nothing pretentious – all very traditional, familiar, and comfortable. Rick’s Eastside Pub & Grill is that sort of place: pub food, beer on tap, in an open, rectangular dining room.
What will you find? You’ll enter on the right, with the grill to the far right, a u-shaped bar in the center, and over a dozen tables in front of the bar and to the left. I’d guess about seven bright monitors with sports programming, easily seen from about any seating location.
A few electronic games line the wall to the left of the bar. There’s no American grill in the Midwest without at least one.
I visited twice, with a dining companion who enjoyed a salad both times, but for me it was two of the highlighted dishes: once a Rhode Island Red burger (hamburger, fried egg, and bacon) and then at supper the beef brisket on pepper bread.
On each visit, I chose a beer on tap (Fat Tire Ale for the first visit, Spotted Cow for the second) and a coke.
I thought the brisket was good, and the burger very good – a burger with a fried egg is – really should be – a pub staple. You’ll have your choice of how you’d like the burger cooked, and my preference is always rare (one tastes the meat most fully that way).
I looked around, to see my fellow patrons on both visits, and there were tables and a bar with happy diners, including two larger groups seated at tables conveniently pushed together to become larger ones.
The crowd was middle aged during these visits.
Now I know – and you know, too – that there’s more than one style of dining. There’s much to enjoy in a fashionable, upscale establishment – but there’s equal enjoyment in a small-town, causal, Midwestern grill. To enjoy dining out, to appreciate different selections, is to enjoy more than one style and one cuisine. There’s a type, of food and atmosphere, to each style.
The question is whether the establishment presents that style well and enjoyably.
A friend and I were cycling a month ago, in another area, and we stopped into a place like Rick’s in that community. We sat at the bar over lunch, talked with the bartender and other patrons, and had a great time. Had we been in Whitewater that day, we would have had a similar and good time at Rick’s.
What I’ve not tried on either of my visits – but have heard is popular – is the fish fry at Rick’s.
That’s something, to be sure, for another visit.
Easily recommended.
Enjoy.
LOCATION: 561 E Milwaukee St Whitewater, WI 53190. (262) 473-9879.
OPEN: Mon – Thu: 11:00 AM – 2:00 AM, Fri- Sat 11:00 AM – 2:30 AM, Sun 10 AM – 10 PM.
PRICES: Meal & beer for under $10.
RESERVATIONS: Unnecessary.
DRINKS: Beers, sodas, other drinks.
SOUND: Moderate – no background music (probably different on a fish fry night.)
SERVICE: Friendly servers on both visits.
VISITS: Two (lunch and supper).
RATING: 3.5 of 4.
RATING SCALE: From one to four stars, representing the full experience of food, atmosphere, service, and pricing.
INDEPENDENCE: This review is delivered without financial or other connection to the establishment or its owner. The dining experience was that of an ordinary patron, without notice to the staff or requests for special consideration.
Good morning.
The week gets wetter as it progresses: today’s forecast calls for a forty-percent chance of thunderstorms and a high of seventy-eight.
On this day in 1990, divided for forty-five years, East and West Germany reunite:
Berlin, Wednesday, Oct. 3 — Forty-five years after it was carved up in defeat and disgrace, Germany was reunited today in a midnight celebration of pealing bells, national hymns and the jubilant blare of good old German oom-pah-pah.
At the stroke of midnight Tuesday, a copy of the American Liberty Bell, a gift from the United States at the height of the cold war, tolled from the Town Hall, and the black, red and gold banner of the Federal Republic of Germany rose slowly before the Reichstag, the scarred seat of past German Parliaments.
Then the President, Richard von Weizsacker, drawing on the words of the West German Constitution, proclaimed from the steps of the Reichstag: ”In free self-determination, we want to achieve the unity in freedom of Germany. We are aware of our responsibility for these tasks before God and the people. We want to serve peace in the world in a united Europe.”
Scientific American‘s daily trivia question asks about food. (Clicking on the question leads to its answer.)
Last night was a lengthy but interesting session for Whitewater. Lots of topics, a few of which I’ll mention below. These topics are in the order of the agenda items presented last night, with two exceptions: the upcoming Crop Walk and the status of the Janesville Transit bus, that I’ve placed ahead. (See, in a post from yesterday, Janesville Transit’s Ghost Bus.)
Crop Walk Proclamation. Best part of the entire night: a proclamation for Sunday’s Crop Walk, on 10.6.13 at 12:30 PM, from Fairhaven to St. Luke’s Episcopal Church.
The Bus. Funding for this item isn’t in Whitewater’s preliminary 2014 budget, and will be discussed as a possible budget addition on November 5th. Placing the item then will afford the municipal administration the chance to sneak funding back into the budget at the last minute.
Expect Janesville’s transportation director to pull out all the stops, in an Amazing Dog and Pony Show™. Be prepared to hear anything, anything at all, from proponents. In the meantime, backers of this project will push every behind-the-scenes, big corporation and big government connection they can find to keep a bus rolling for their selfish ends.
One will have to be prepared for just about any dodgy claim on its behalf.
State of the Schools Address. It’s a good practice for the district leaders to offer addresses like this at local government meetings.
I’ll consider this presentation, from the Whitewater Schools’ district administrator and business manager, in a separate and later post. A schools presentation deserves its own space.
Proposed 2014 City Budget. Budget season begins. Next session is 10.15.13.
Mutual Aid Between Police Departments. In the end, it’s not relationships with other departments, but relationships between the police department and the rest of this community, that matter most. Outside of a select few, those intra-city relationships are often poor, and this leadership (like the one before it) seemingly has no idea how to improve genuinely those relationships.
An Extension of Historic Starin Neighborhood Association’s R-O District to N. Fremont Street. R-O limits a residence to two unrelated occupants. The deal passed as expected, with a 6-1 vote.
Legal non-conforming uses may be permitted by application and run with the property after sale. Big question, though: will the municipal administration stop, at this street?
The last one couldn’t stop – will his one?
Class B Beer and Liquor License. Other than residential zoning, nothing gets Whitewater going like distribution of a limited-in-number Class B Beer & Liquor License.
I agree with Mr. Binnie that Whitewater would be better off if the state did not limit Common Council’s ability to issue licenses to qualified establishments. All three of the establishments from 10.1.13 seem to be good candidates.
On the 4-3 vote, Council approved the Alcohol Licensing Commission’s prior recommendation of a license for Casual Joe’s 2 (to be opened along James Street). Another license may be on offer if (1) the city’s population officially increases by 500 people, or (2) another license holder loses his or her license.
I’ll assume that the vote would have been the same regardless of the quality of the applicants’ advocacy, but perhaps it would not have been.
Watching the proceedings, it’s impossible, I think, to ignore that Blackthorne Scribe’s team was of uneven strength and tone. Some were very polished, others not so much, and perhaps unaware that they were mishandling their own case by odd mixtures of presumption and pique.
Advocacy’s tone – but not substance – depends on one’s medium: aggressive and acerbic works in print, not so much on the radio, not at all on television, and rarely in person (away from cameras). For the most part, Wisconsinites recoil from visible irritation or pique (on television or in person).
Tyler Sailsbery (of the Black Sheep and Casual Joe’s 2), by contrast, is just right for this sort of presentation: even in tone, relaxed and extemporaneous in delivery, knowledgeable about his subject.
I don’t have a circumstance in mind where we’d be on opposite sides at a public forum, but I’d not make the mistake of underestimating him.
Buried Power Lines at the East Gateway Project. Dr. Kidd proposed reconsideration of buried power lines along the new East Gateway remodeling. The project is two-million, the powerlines would be another three-hundred thousand. I’ll concede that buried lines look better, and the time to bury them would be during construction. Dr. Kidd’s right.
The question isn’t that the East Gateway project will be lovely – no doubt it will. The question with the project is that, truly, one has almost no idea what it will spur other than new roads and sidewalks.
The artist’s pictures of the upcoming transformation are beguiling, but revealing, too:
It looks better, of course, but what’s the same? The building and and shops behind those trees and new sidewalks are the same.
What will beauty bring? Even the artist behind the design drawings doesn’t know – he or she merely reproduces what’s already at the intersection.
All this money, but what comes from it?
I don’t know, and I don’t know anyone else who does.
Good morning.
We’ll have a sunny midweek day, with a high of seventy-eight. Sunrise is 6:54 AM and sunset 6:34 PM. The moon is a waning crescent with 6% of its visible disk illuminated.
The Community Development Authority Board meets today at 5 PM.
On this day in 1869, Gandhi is born.
Closer to home, in 1950, the first Peanuts strip appears on 10.2:
On this day in 1958, a very different Janesville sees a strike:
1958 – Janesville Auto Workers Strike
On this date 4,000 members of United Auto Workers Locals 95 (Fisher Body) and 121 (Chevrolet) at Janesville’s two GM plants walked off the job as part of a national strike over GM’s refusal to agree to a contract patterned after those reached with Ford and Chrysler. The desired contract demanded pay increases of 24 to 30 cents an hour and raises in supplemental unemployment benefits and severance pay. [Source: Local Union No. 95 UAW]
Scientific American‘s daily trivia question asks about a chemical mix. (Clicking on the question leads to its answer.)
Quick scheduling change: I’ll move restaurant reviews to Thursday, and the weekly Anderson comic to Wednesdays, beginning. There will be a new comic today, and a new restaurant review tomorrow.
It’s the month for Halloween, and just in time, Janesville Transit brings Whitewater a trick, but certainly no treat: a Ghost Bus.
One may safely call it this, as it’s almost entirely empty after dropping riders off at multi-billion-dollar Generac, with those few passengers remaining being about as rare and difficult to see as the shades, specters, and apparitions that supposedly haunt graveyards and abandoned houses.
Hundreds of thousands in public money, over a three-year period, and a splashy advertising campaign online and in print, and for it, there’s almost no Whitewater ridership outside of Generac employees.
I’ve embedded the relevant documents from tonight’s Common Council meeting at the bottom of this post.
What do they show (assuming these are even accurately reported passenger trips)?
Generac – flush with a market capitalization of $2.92 billion and a stock price up 72% over the last year – accounts for 30% of all riders, with the Janesville terminal supplying 29%, other Janesville stops 21%, the Milton Piggly Wiggly 10%, Milton other stops 3%, the UW campus only 5%, and non-students, non-Generac workers in Whitewater only 2% of riders.
That’s why the bus seems empty – because when driving through the city, it is empty (or nearly so).
Useless for merchants, useless for ordinary residents, who are stuck subsidizing a big corporation and a bigger city’s transit system.
In my office, I have page upon page of all the color print advertisements Janesville Transit has purchased – full page, many of them – to hawk this bus. They’ve also bought web ads at a local newspaper, thereby creating a conflict with that paper’s reporting on this pricey effort.
For all that money spent, and all the grand crowing about how many passenger trips there would be for our city, what happened?
Janesville’s transit director first said that 2012 was his test year, then it was 2013 that would be the test year, and here we are, near the end of ’13: all that advertising, all those grand claims, most of it at public expense, with the largest portion for a billion-dollar corporation shipping non-resident employees to Whitewater, and here are the embarrassing results.
This is a money-suck, crony capitalist failure. These thousands, for example, could better provide genuine support to small, local merchants, in the downtown or elsewhere.
Generac can and should pay its own way.
What’s really scary about Janesville Transit’s Innovation Express Ghost Bus?
That anyone in Whitewater might pour still more public money into this scheme.
For the Love of Mountains from Al Boardman on Vimeo.
Good morning.
A new month begins. We will have a sunny day with a high of eighty.
Common Council meets tonight at 6:30 PM.
October 1st brings anniversaries good and bad. On 10.1.1908, Ford Motor Company rolls the first Model T off the production line. On 10.1.1949, Mao Zedong declares himself head of state of the so-called People’s Republic of China. Ford didn’t do everything right, but even on his worst day, he was an incomparably better man that Mao ever was. The choice between peaceful American industrialization and violent communist oppression isn’t even a choice: it’s the chasm between civilization and mass murder.
On 10.1.1866, the leading advocate of a Flag Day, who later taught school in Fredonia, is born:
1866 – Bernard Cirgrand Born
On this date Bernard Cirgrand, known as the founder of Flag Day, was born. Bernard showed his patriotism in 1885 by placing a small flag on his school desk on June 14. As it happens, June 14, 1777 was the day that the stars and stripes were decided upon by the new Senate. Bernard wrote many articles and many speeches trying to urge a national Flag Day to be celebrated. In 1916 President Woodrow Wilson finally declared June 14 to be Flag Day. [Source: National Flag Day Foundation]
Scientific American‘s daily trivia question asks about RNA. (Clicking on the question leads to its answer.)
Clicking the informational flyer below produces an even larger image.
Of residential zoning restrictions in Whitewater (restricting residential occupancy to no more than two unrelated persons in an R-O overlay district), a few points may safely be made:
Considering these circumstances, no matter how contentious they’ve been, I’ll offer a compromise: limit these sort of restrictions to this area, and to no other, for at least a decade.
I’ll support the municipal administration’s proposal here – even though I think it’s a mistake for the city and even the long-term selling prospects of the very residents of the neighborhood.
(It’s in the spirit of compromise, with warmth in my heart, that I offer today’s Monday-music post: Smash Mouth Covers Why Can’t We Be Friends?)
There are, to my mind, only two reasons one would support this proposal: (1) under a misguided understanding of what restricting long-term selling prospects will do to resale values a generation from now, or (2) to make a point.
Fair enough, and here’s my point: this is an inherited issue, that’s distracting the city from more important matters. The sooner this municipal administration sets this matter side, and breaks with the policy of the last one, the better off the city will be (to spend time on other, more pressing matters). There’s a chance to end this years-long issue, if only the administration commits to future restraint.
Let those who want this here, even if it should work to their long-term economic disadvantage, have their way – and then move on.
