Using Your Money to Bribe Billionaires

 There are murmurs, whispers, and threats the Chicago Bears might move to NE Indiana.  I am beyond skeptical. 

Fuzzy has a great breakdown at his place. The Mayor of Hammond (the basis for the fictional town on A Christmas Story) thinks the stadium will generate significant new business, a “Bearsville ” outside the stadium. 

Does he realize the team will only play 8 or 9 games a year in that stadium? No Ruth’s Chris nor high rise hotel can survive on traffic from game days only. Has he driven to Chicago and looked around st the entertainment offerings right around Soldier Field? 

Exactly, and Chicago has far more going on than Da Region. 

I think the Bears are using this offer as a velvet hammer to force Chicago and  Illinois to a weaker negotiating position. 

I’ve run across this strategy more times than I can count in negotiations. “We.don’t want to change, but your competition has a better deal on the table…”

If I was a betting man…I am pretty sure who is getting played here. 

Don’t Panic, Have a Cigar

 I took a late lunch yesterday afternoon and smoked a small cigar out on the patio. With the temperature in the upper sixties, I perfectly comfortable in a sweatshirt. Are those things bad for me? Yes. Do I care? No. I’ve been smoking cigars since I was about eight, so I think I’ll be okay. 

Yeah, I worked late to make up for it. 

No Friday music because Google is being a jerk. 

Definition of schizophrenia

 Temperatures will push the 60s for the next couple of days before snow flakes fly this weekend. 

'Nuff said.

Boo Radley is dead

 

I read Robert Duvall has died. I believe he is one of the best character actors to grace film or stage. 

From Thhe Godfather to Lonesome Dove he was excellent.  I particularly liked him in Open Range. 

He may have appeared in an occasional bad movie, but he was never bad in a movie. 

Sound the fog horn, Smitty

 Ahhoooga. 

Dense fog blankets the neighborhood this morning. The neighbor's porch lights are fuzzy lights in the distance. I'm not worried about my commute in the low visibility conditions,  I walk down hall to get to my office. 

I got ambitious and made a pan of lasagna for dinner. Actually,  I made two pans since I divided it into two baking dishes. We took the extra pan over to my daughter's. The wife and I still have enough leftover for lunch today. 

After dinner I baked a batch of chocolate chip cookies while the wife did laundry.  Normally baking is her purview, but she asked and I did. 

Today is my mother's birthday. I miss you mom.

Annual Screed

 We have once again reached that time of year in mid-February were I need to make a proclamation. No, not Happy Valentine's Day (sure, that too), no, IT IS TIME TO TURN OFF YOUR CHRISTMAS LIGHTS.

Look, you don't have to take them down, but you can unplug them. It's not hard. 

I rant on this every year. There are three houses within a block fighting hard to maintain the Christmas spirit. Whatever, time's up. 

I'm convinced the lady on the corner believes you just leave the lights on until they finally burn out sometime in April or May and then just replace them next November. 

Side note: are you OK Freddie?

She'd walk down through the garden In the morning after it rained

This week was one of those strange collection of days that individually seemed to drag interminably, yet here we are at Friday wondering where the week went. 

It seems we are slated to get a big warmup, with temps peaking in the fifties and sixties next week. I'm ready for the snow to go away. 

You might have guessed from the previous entry I've been working on the Great American Novel. I'm rewriting what is the final draft. Maybe. Probably.  I hope. 

I think this effort is far better than my last book. That one needed about three more revisions to make it passable. So it goes. 

I've thought about trying to submit this novel to an agent and trying to get it published by a real publisher. We shall see. In the end it is probably just more meh drivel. I can live with that. Still, I'm no judge, but I think it is not too bad. It is very different from my previous effort. 

Yeah, yeah, you don't care about any of that. I know why you are here -- Friday music! Well, here you go:

I’ve got questions

Would you read this book?:

In rural small-town 1930's Indiana, a boy becomes a bootlegger-- and a man too.

Fifteen-year-old Matt Wyatt knows the Depression is squeezing the life out of his family's farm. When the Crawford clan offers his father a lifeline -- cash in exchange for quiet runs of moonshine--Matt becomes the least-suspected bootlegger in Polk County. What starts as a thrill soon plunges young Matt into a world of violence, loyalty, and moral compromise.

Anchored by the girl who steals his heart, Matt navigates dusty back roads, outlaw justice, and the thin divide between right and wrong as one run goes terribly wrong and the consequences will follow him far beyond the Indiana flat lands he calls home.

Spanning the last days of Prohibition to the shock of Pearl Harbor and World War II, Hoosier Flats is a coming-of-age novel about duty, family, and the heavy price of growing up in hard times.