JEOPARDY

 Apparently, the same people managed the search for a new host of "Jeopardy" as managed the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan.

INFLATION

 OVERWHELMING

 The news about impending inflation has been convincing, but recently, it is overwhelming:

·         Food stamp payments have been increased by 25%, effective October

o   About 42 million people in the US get food stamps

o   A family of four will now get $628 per month

·         Over 2,700 homes in Austin, TX have sold for more than $100,000 above asking price this year, up to August 11.

o   I thought the price was $400,000?

o   Nope, it’s over $500,000.

·         The last increase in Social Security payments for 55 million older Americans was 1.3% or about $20 per month.

The list goes on, and since January of 2021 when the current administration took office, a consumer cannot but notice the price of gas, food and just about anything. Consumer prices in June and July went up 5.4% over last year.

The President says it is temporary. (see his statement on July 19, 2021). He also cancelled the pipeline from Canada on his first day in office and last week asked OPEC to increase production. Hmmmm.

How do you protect yourself and your family? First, wages are not going up that fast. If you are retired, it is tough. The best thing you can do is own property worth about $10 million, but the Biden administration has promised to tax that heavily when you die, so, “temporary.”

I dunno, it’s an issue.

INFRASTRUCTURE

 I’M IN FAVOR OF GOOD ROADS AND BRIDGES

That’s my idea of “infrastructure,” but apparently the politicians view it differently. For example, on page 508 of the bipartisan “Infrastructure” Bill to be voted on later this week is a provision to implement a new tax on the miles you drive in your car or truck. 

Remember when the gas tax in Missouri was raised in the early 2000s? Popular, despite the dig into the pockets of most active people. The roads in Missouri were terrible, example I-70 from Kansas City to St. Louis, and the bridges were the worst in the nation. What did the DOT do?

THEY BUILT A REALLY NICE OFFICE BUILDING AND BOUGHT A JET!

Depend on the driving tax to become permanent and to further boost inflation.

TRIBUTE TO OLIVER B. MILLER

WARNING: THIS IS VERY FAMILY ORIENTED, probably pretty boring for others.

I have been meaning to write about Oliver Miller for a long time in the spirit in which I started this blog—to provide some insight into my life, especially as that life was different or unique in terms of today. Everyone’s life is unique when the people they touch are taken into account, and Oliver was one of those unique influences to me.

Oliver’s wife, Jenny was my paternal grandfather’s younger sister. An attractive, energetic and pleasant woman who raised two daughters, Carol who lived in Valentine and Doris who married Ralph Ekwall. Doris was a character, actually she suffered from some emotional illnesses over the years, owned racehorses and her husband, Ralph, was a genuine gentleman. The “attractive” reference is significant. Looking back at those old pictures, we are not a family that made it on looks. The current Emma is a beautiful girl (see below) but definitely an outlier.

Oliver was, by any measure, a highly-talented man in various realms involving things mechanical. He was a mechanic by trade in St. Edward before he took a job with Loup River Power, the Depression Era project that built a canal and a hydro plant to serve the Columbus area. A great photographer, he set up his own dark room in his basement along with a fairly sophisticated shop where he would purchase a gun barrel and then manufacture the rest of the parts for a rifle. That basement had a unique, to me, smell. They had natural gas in Columbus, and they had gas appliances (furnace? Water heater?). The smell was new to me, it was only years later that I learned the compound responsible was ethyl mercaptan used as the odorant in natural gas.

He was responsible, despite only an eighth-grade education, for developing and fabricating many of the dredge parts that were used to remove the sand from the settling basins at the Loup Headgates where the Canal started. The Loup River descended out of the Sandhills at a strong current and carried a lot of sand. Before it could be slowed and diverted via the canal, the sand had to be minimized so that the canal would not fill with silt immediately; ergo, huge sand piles.

Just in the last 20 years, nearly a century after the canal was conceived, the sand has become quite valuable and is being loaded and shipped around the country for various purposes including glass and other industrial products and sand for the oil frac process.

Mentioning my paternal grandfather, Homer’s siblings, his oldest sister was named Emma. That first name has become pretty common in the family, my grandniece/god daughter is Emma and she was born on November 5, 1999, the same day my paternal grandmother, Emma, was born in 1886. Now, gets a bit tricky: my grandmother’s maiden name was Emma Martenson, and when she married, she became Emma Peterson. Homer’s sister was Emma Peterson and when she married, she became Emma Martenson. (The spellings may be different, they were pretty cavalier about that back in the day. The current relatives in Sweden spell it Mårtensson). Well, that got off track.

Come holidays, Jenny would cook and Oliver would hold court. He knew a lot of stuff, was very well read and the discussions were fascinating covering topics from aviation to guns to his favorite, automobiles. It was the dawn of the jet age in aviation, so I learned the basic principles of a ram jet engine, and it was a time of rapid development in the auto industry. I have no idea how much of my education came from those discussions, but it had to be a lot. I remember in particular a discussion about the basic principles of a diesel engine, a topic I reviewed with my brother when he was in high school, so I was no older than 11.

We always had to cut the day short in those holiday visits as we had to get home to milk. Sixty-five years later, I can vividly remember that house, the people and the discussions.

FOSBURY FLOP

The Masters will always be connected for me to the Fosbury Flop, the high jump technique developed by Dick Fosbury that revolutionized the high jump in the 1968 Mexico City Olympics.

We had Masters tickets, took customers and, since I was busy and couldn't get there except for a short time, I caught a ride to Augusta with Jon Winkel, (sp) who was second in command of the Long Lines business and Chuck Long's varied interests. 

Conversations can take odd turns, and somehow we arrived at the topic of how Jon went to the national finals in the high school high jump. He placed second. To Dick Fosbury. The flop is used universally now, and it is reasonable due to the fact that the body's center of gravity is always below the bar if done correctly.

We watched the Masters, and if you ever have a chance to go, it is different than any other golf tournament I have experienced. Go if you get a chance.

BTW, that 1968 Olympics was where Bob Beaman broke the long jump record by TWO FEET. A sport where the record had advanced by 7 inches over the previous 19 years and his record still stands as an Olympic record. 

I'll borrow a phrase from Ilhan about other things there--some other guys did some stuff.

BASEBALL 2021

Kansas City finished first in the Cactus League, spring training. They won two-thirds of their games.

Shall we translate that into regular season success? Dunno. They start with a home game today, April 1, in Kansas City against Texas.

We'll see whether you will be bombarded by baseball stuff this year.

WEATHER, 2.0

Well, that weather stuff got out of hand, didn't it? Cold, freezing rain, power outages, water main breaks causing boil orders, no internet, no gasoline and shortages in the stores.

Texans bounced back. The boil order was lifted this morning (Saturday, a week later) and there are no significant power outages. Let the finger-pointing begin.

My opinion, that's what this blog is about, right?, is that the power issue goes back to Three Mile Island. In writing to Jerry this morning, it dawned on me that it happened in 1979, right at the beginning of the 24-hour news cycle. They jumped on that wagon. The longitudinal health effects study was discontinued after it was discovered there were no health problems caused by TMI. Likewise, the lawsuit was thrown out of court in Harrisburg, PA. Meanwhile, the American nuclear industry died. We are so far behind France and Japan that it may take forever to catch up.

Another meanwhile--Germany is negotiating with France to get some of its (France's) nuclear-generated power because their solar panels are coated with snow. The US Navy has been operating nuclear-powered vessels for 60 years without a nuclear accident although the Soviets have had plenty.

C'mon man, to quote our linguistically and cognitively challenged President. Are we such sissies about a bit of cold weather? A term that we have been throwing around a lot, "first world problems."

Let's launch off into the land of energy managed by politicians. Yeah, that's the ticket.