Summer means blueberries

Every summer, we wait for a simple, single email to arrive from the Rhynard farm: The blueberries are ready!
The Rhynards grow some of the most fabulous, easy picking blueberries anywhere. These are high-bush blueberries, which mean the wonderful fruit is right in front of you. No stooping needed.
The family has, I'd guess, about 10 acres in cultivation, so that means, oh, about a zillion blueberries. 




A serious net overhead keeps out marauding birds, and beneath that, you can collect as many blueberries as you want.
I concentrated on one bush - one - and picked about 4 pounds of ripe, sweet, wonderful blueberries. All told, we came home with about 8 pounds.
There's a lot of blueberry cobbler, blueberry pie, blueberries on cereal, blueberries with cream ahead. I can't object.
It's summer in mid-Michigan, and that's something that makes it wonderful.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Santana!

 I thought Kissy Missy was crazy when she kept sending in entries for WHNN's tickets to the Santana concert at the Soaring Eagle Casino. She wasn't. She pretty much overwhelmed them on a Text to Win Wednesday, and she won. And the seats were fabulous! I had expected to get a place up on The Hill - but we gasped when we saw that they had given us seats in Row G.

The crowd was, well, interesting. We now have reached the point where rock concerts include a fair number of people who arrive with canes, walkers and wheelchairs, but they still wanna rock! The osteoporosis crowd still wants to boogie! But it wasn't just Music for the Elderly - other members of the crowd were as entertaining as Walgreen's After Dark. My favorite: a young woman wearing a dress in what can only be described as a crazy quilt of different paisley patterns. Watch out for the brown acid, man. Her tattoo matched her dress.

And the show was excellent. There's a reason Carlos Santana has been a headliner for more than 40 years. It was remarkably well produced, integrated video on a huge crystal-clear LED screen with musicianship from a jawdroppingly excellent band that went beyond first-rate. The show ran 2 hours, 40 minutes without a break, and won't be forgotten - even by the aging hippies.

A snake in the grass

Literally, a snake in the grass.
This little feller - a garter snake about 2 feet long - made himself known as he slithered across the warm sidewalk leading to the Morning Sun's employee entrance. He quickly made use of his natural coloring to blend in with the grass, but he popped up near one of the pine trees.
Isn't he cute?
Name him Cuddles.

Management for Dummies

I recently was in a Barnes and Noble bookstore, and I took notice of how the offerings were laid out.
Any good brick-and-mortar retailer will display items close to each other that complement each other. Crackers near soup in a supermarket, socks near shoes in a department store, tent stakes near tents in an outdoor shop.
"For Dummies" next to "Management" in a book store.
How well do they know their customers?

Anatomy of a gas price increase

Monday morning, Speedway initiated what amounted to a statewide increase in the price of gasoline in Michigan.
Speedway is a division of Findlay, Ohio-based Marathon Petroleum Co. and owns and operates more than 280 convenience stores and gas stations in Michigan. There is nothing illegal about a private business setting a price for a product, and Speedway set the price for a gallon of unleaded regular gasoline at all 284 of its operating stores at $3.899 on Monday morning.
What happened next was most interesting as the market responded to this.
Here are some screen shots of the GasBuddy iPhone app:




This was taken at 3:02 p.m. Monday. The prevailing price had been around $3.79. Pretty much every competitor in Mt. Pleasant matched the price within hours. No surprise there - it always happens.
In Alma/St. Louis, the previous prevailing price was $3.47, and Sound Off callers were demanding to know why Mt. Pleasant prices were more than 32 cents higher than Alma prices. Here's what it looked like Monday afternoon, about five to six hours after the Speedway move; Speedway stores are on Wright Avenue.



But by early Tuesday morning, prices in Alma/St. Louis  had this eerie look of sameness:

Several Sound Off callers angry about the $3.79 price in Mt. Pleasant cited prices of $3.54 in Houghton Lake. Here's how it looked Monday afternoon after the Speedway move - the Speedway outlet is next to U.S. 127:






You'll note that the Admiral and Clark stations are the only stations actually charging $3.54, but those are the prices drivers remember. But by Tuesday morning, they had matched the Speedway price. Only the BP station in Prudenville, to the far right of the screenshot, remained firm for a time at $3.61, but by Wednesday morning, it, too, had matched the price, while Clark and Admiral already were knocking a few pennies off.



Competitive pressures always force prices down, and that's happening. In fact, 224 Speedway stores had dropped their prices by Wednesday. But most had dropped only 1 to 5 cents; the biggest drops were 13 cents at individual stores in Fraser and Lansing.
Considering how big the increase was - in Sturgis, it was 60 cents a gallon, in Alma, it was 42 cents - those don't amount to much.
The increase stuck.
What's driving the increase? The price of crude oil is down to the $82 range. Gasoline futures are below $2.65. Granted, those prices are high, but down considerably from where they were earlier this year.
This move left Michigan with the highest average price of unleaded gasoline - $3.855, according to Michigan AAA through Wright Express and the Oil Price Information Service - of any state that doesn't have frontage on the Pacific Ocean.
What's the message here? 

The view from the race course

My colleague Holly Mahaffey put together a great Storify on Le Tour de Mont Pleasant. Check it out!

The Amazing Races

I do not look good in Spandex, and I never will.
But watching the Spandex people competing in Le Tour de Mont Pleasant continues to amaze me - their sheer athleticism, their focus, their determination.
Friday night, I met a young woman named Katie Hamel from Grand Rapids:



Saturday, it was the closed-course criterium races in downtown Mt. Pleasant. These actually are my favorite races. You see the riders up close. You see their faces. You can sit on the sidewalk cafe at Max & Emily's and watch the action.
I met Chris Uberti, who won the Pro Category 1 and 2 criterium. He's very matter-of-fact about the challenge: 75 minutes of high-speed street racing, then three laps of flat-out sprinting around a course with difficult, technical turns. And he wasn't even winded.



Sunday, the race course expands to the entire county. This year's course was 120 miles long, traveling through the Isabella Reservation, Shepherd, Winn, Blanchard, Beal City, Lake Isabella, Weidman, across the hinterlands of northern Isabella County, through Rosebush and back to downtown Mt. Pleasant.
The winner was a guy whom I'd love to invite over for dinner named Jake Rytlewski (right-LESS-key), originally from Bay City:



But Le Tour de Mont Pleasant was not without controversy. What really happened out on the course that caused the disqualification of 19 riders - and a stunning protest at the finish line?



This event is well on its way to becoming a fixture in June in central Michigan. It's a niche we can fill - and fill well.

The key to fitness

I was talking to one of the riders in Le Tour de Mont Pleasant bicycle race about what it took to be a world-class cyclist.
"I'm not that strong," he said. "I just know how to suffer."
But he looked great in Spandex.

This park or that park

I recently ran across an ad in the New York Times Magazine for a recent condominium conversion in New York. It's simply named 1212 Fifth Avenue, and it's near Fifth Avenue and East 102nd Street - at the far, far, very upper Upper East Side.
It's an amazing building, built in the 1920s as a rental, and later used to house people who trained at Mount Sinai Hospital. After being sold to a developer, it was gutted completely, and built into a showpiece.
What's interesting is the neighborhood - across the street is Central Park. The marketing materials have photos of "the neighborhood" like this:

Now, as it happens, we also live on a park - Horizon Park. "The neighborhood" is like this:

There is, however, a slight difference in price. An 1,800-square-foot, three-bedroom condominium unit at 1212 Fifth Avenue goes for, oh, a mere $2.66 million - it is, after all, not the best neighborhood. Our 1,800-square-foot condo went for ... a lot less.

I recall being told many years ago that New York is not real. Uh, huh.

Gus. Just Gus.

Three cats now live at Horizon Park South.
Minden and Munchen have been here since we moved in. They are, of course, our haughty, snotty Siamese, who clearly rule the world and consistently remind us that cats once were worshiped as gods.
Now there’s Gus.
That name’s really all you need to know about Gus.
Gus.
We inherited Gus. He had been Kissy Missy’s mother’s constant companion from the time he wandered out of the Upper Michigan forest as a scrawny little kitten. No one really knows where he came from. Was he feral? Was he dumped as part of an unwanted litter? There’s no way to find out, but he certainly survived.
And he prospered and grew.
Gus seems to be a Maine coon cat, one of the largest breeds of domestic cat. He weighs more than 17 pounds, yet he thinks of himself as a cuddly little kitten.
But he doesn’t have the kind of elan the other two display. Jeff Foxworthy describes “redneck” as a “glorious lack of sophistication.”
Gus.
He's a redneck cat. 
It’s not hard to imagine a guy with Gus’ personality popping a beer at a funeral. It’s not hard to imagine a guy with Gus’ personality driving a big ole truck.
Maybe I’ll turn on a NASCAR race on TV and see if Gus is fascinated. Whatcha bet?
The Siamese, by the way, clearly are appalled at the entire situation.

Celestial dorkdom

Just cool. At 7:35 p.m., I was able to spot Mercury in the gathering dusk, low on the western horizon. Venus and Jupiter are brilliant higher in the western sky - and Mars is ruling the east.
Spotting Mercury is tough, and it disappeared into the haze shortly afterward, but even more a moment, seeing four planets in the sky at once is just, well, dork cool. 

Suspicious. Very suspicious

A suspicious white powder led to the Ranzenbergers missing their flight home from Washington, D.C.  Consider being held up at security the price of freedom.

It's just after 4 a.m. at Washington National Airport, and Kissy Missy and I are waiting for security to open up. We ended up spending an extra night in Washington after missing our flight out last night.
We missed it because I was held up at security.
These are not problems I had heard about before, but I guess I might simply have been out of touch.
 1. Carrying both an iPad and a laptop will subject you to additional scrutiny. This additional scrutiny will take time.
2. Do not, under any circumstances, carry anything remotely resembling a white, powdery substance.
I made that fatal error. A container with what appeared to be a powdery substance was detected in my luggage. The line was stopped as a bag-check expert was summoned. This took a while, and several hundred people behind me fumed.
I felt insecure.
 Finally, the brave man from the Transportation Security Administration approached.
"There isn't anything in there that can hurt me, is there?" he asked. This is a standard question, designed to be asked as the owner of the suspicious luggage is standing there.
 If the luggage will do something bad, it's going to get the owner, too. I suspect the suicide agent was looking for me to flinch or twitch, or say something stupid like, "No, the bomb will go off later."
 I didn't flinch or twitch. I said, "No."
He asked again.
 I was cooperative.
At that point, he explained that I had been pulled out due to signs that I was carrying a container of a suspicious powdery substance.
 "Oh, the baby powder," I offered helpfully.
It was in a clear, zippered section of my luggage, beneath my dirty clothes. He carefully and thoroughly examined my possibly suspicious laundry on his way to finding the prize. This investigator knew what he was after now: A canister mysteriously labeled with some variation on the words, "Baby Powder."
There it was, beneath clear plastic, in a zippered pouch. He struggled with the zipper, however.
 I offered to help.
This was suspicious.
 He eventually removed the suspect container from the zippered pouch. He examined it closely. It was labeled Johnson's Baby Powder, and a close look revealed it was of the corn starch variety.
It wasn't clear if the further labeling of this suspicious white powder as "medicated" might have set off more alarm bells.
 He swabbed the outside, and in a scene that might have been from "CSI," he placed the swab into a sensor array. Apparently unsatisfied with the result, he did it again. Finally, the result: Baby Powder. Thank you, TSA. My safety is your business. I feel safer now.
Unfortunately, the process took so long we missed our flight, and it was the day's last flight to Grand Rapids. Now, we will try again. The baby powder was left at the hotel. I will try not to Fit The Profile.

Spring break in D.C.

It's spring break, and this year, it's Washington. Some business, but a little bit of playing tourist. 

Washington really is one of my favorite cities. it's not just the sense of federal power that pervades this place - but it's the tremendous sense of history, of being someplace where things happen that actually matter.

Traveling in and around Washington on the surface streets is an utter nightmare. It's best to avoid that.
Most Washingtonians are wise enough to do that, and use the city's most excellent subway system, the Metro. At left, Kissy Missy waits for a Blue Line train.
The trains run pretty much on time, and they get you pretty close to where you want to go.

There's a lot of advertising, of course, and it's kind of fun to note that there's a lot of advertising for CMU's Off-Campus programs here. There actually are seven sites in the D.C. metro area.
An awful lot of U.S. military officers earn their master's degrees from CMU. Only a few of them actually climb Mount Pleasant; most earn their degrees off-campus.

 The Washington metropolitan area leads the country in the number of people with university educations. Nearly 1 in 2 adults in the region has completed at least a bachelor's degree.
In Michigan, it's about 1 in 4. Washington is growing. That makes a lot of people mad. 

Today was a tourist day. After spending time at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, we took an after-dark tour of the monuments.
At left, Kissy Missy checks in on Facebook from the Jefferson Memorial.

At right, me and Tom.










Just waiting for Michelle to let us in. Hope she knows we're in town. 

The Marine Corps memorial is just blocks away from where we're staying in Arlington, Va. 

And it was the first chance I'd had to visit the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. memorial. It's impressive.

The American Patriot's Bible - Now in Camo!

From the publisher's blurb: "Part of Thomas Nelson's Signature Line of exclusive Bibles, The American Patriot's Bible shows how "a light from above" shaped this nation. It reflects how the history of the United States connects to the people and events of the Bible - and how that connects to today's world. There is a family-record section, images from U.S. history and hundreds of articles relating to patriotic history. The Bible was edited by Dr. Richard Lee, founder and pastor of First Redeemer Church located in metropolitan Atlanta, Ga."

This version comes with  an Official Multicam ® Camouflage, Flexible Cloth cover. It's sure to appeal to real Americans.

Dr. Lee also is the author of "The Coming Revolution: Signs from America's Past That Signal Our Nation's Future," also published by Thomas Nelson.  

Truly something every red-blooded, commie-hating American family should have. 

What War on Religion?

The trends toward tolerance and inclusion that are reviled by some presidential candidates are the very reason two Catholics and a Mormon can run for the highest office in the land without their respective faiths presenting much of a political impediment. Either the candidates are all willfully ignorant of American history (even the historian!) or they believe the rest of us are.
  Read more from the Daily Forward:

Why there's no future in technology

David Pogue, one of my favorite technology writers, explains why it's so tough to predict the future of technology in this Scientific American column. 
My favorite quote:
"The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys."—Sir William Preece, chief engineer, British Post Office, 1876
or
"Apple [is] a chaotic mess without a strategic vision and certainly no future."—TIME, February 5, 1996
or
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."—Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943

Inside journalism - the reality of it all

This seems to be a documentary.

The long-lasting Escort

This was the scene early one morning at Walgreen's - two little white Escorts, side by side. One is mine, the other, well, it's around, but I don't have any idea whom it belongs to.
My Escort is beat up and getting a little rusty. It's 11 years old, and the odometer just rolled past 190,000 miles.
But it still gets me where I want to go. It still starts with one turn of the key. It still gets decent gas mileage.
They don't make them any more.

Blame Iran

Iran's saber-rattling in the Straits of Hormuz is taking cash out of our pockets.
The energy traders on Wall Street are worried. They probably should be. Iran is declaring it can control one of the choke points in the world's supply of oil.
The U.S. Navy is standing by to stop the Iranians if they try, but if it comes to that, that's a shooting war.
Shooting wars disrupt business. That's already driving up the price of crude oil - it went past $100 a barrel today - and the futures price of gasoline.
Given that increase, I think we can expect a retail price move within the next couple of days, probably to a prevailing major-brand price of at least $3.559 a gallon in Michigan. There's still a little play in the prices, for now, but unless something changes drastically, what you see today might be the best you get for a while.

640-1240 Conelrad: Alert today, alive tomorrow!

I remember this stuff - and I was so disappointed that Dad didn't want to build a fallout shelter in the back yard.

Today's Earworm: The Winters Brothers Band

Back in the mid-1970s, yet another album of country rock came into the WBRN studios. This was nothing out of the ordinary - southern rock was hot in those days. The Allman Brothers Band, the Marshall Tucker Band, Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Atlanta Rhythm Section and others combined really high quality musicianship, extended jams and a country sensibility. I loved it - still do.
This album came from an obscure band called the Winters Brothers Band, and it was truly excellent. They came from Nolensville, Tenn., and I fell in love with this extended jam:



That's been running through my head for the last couple of weeks.
The band's still playing, still working hard, still jamming, 35 years later.

Hipsters: A clear and present danger

Now it can be told: The Muppets brainwash your children against capitalism

From Fox News:

The new single from Elliot Street Lunatic

Elliot Street Lunatic is a mid-Michigan band with a remarkable sound.
I first became aware of them when they played at Rubble's a few months ago, and got blown away by their sound. They don't sound at all like a college-town bar band.
They're young, hard-working, have day jobs and love their music. They're getting some attention, as well.

Here's their new single - Ghost Town.

Ghost Town by Elliot Street Lunatic


It's available on iTunes.

A woman dressed as a mattress

Saturday afternoon in Mount Pleasant: A woman dressed as a mattress goes through the checkout line at Ric's.

A superior customer experience

My old friend Jack Telfer, the editor of the Midland Daily News, wrote a column today pointing out how drastically things have changed since he (and I) were teenagers. I’m actually older than he is. He wrote it with what I took to be an air of disapproval at how many things we took for granted have been replaced by new and different ways of doing things.
All these new and different things entered the capitalist marketplace and were accepted. They might just as easily have failed, except they were better than the systems they replaced.
Jack looked askance at how his daughter told him to just recycle a 4-pound telephone directory, because she and her family looked things up online. He was surprised that she would rather “do the work herself” than allow the directory to do it for her.
It doesn’t work that way, Jack. My wife can take her 4.9-ounce iPhone and look up any business, anywhere. It will tell her which location is closest. She can put the address into Google Maps and get directions. She can call (or e-mail, or instant-message) the shop and find out if the product she wants is in stock, if the website doesn’t already tell her. She can carry all this in her purse, something she can’t do with a 4-pound directory.
In short, it’s a superior product and a superior customer experience.
Jack also waxes nostalgic over full-service gasoline delivery. I much prefer self-serve, and have for more than 30 years. My own gas tank is a little quirky; when the automatic shutoff kicks in, there’s still room for 3.5 gallons of unleaded. I know this. I can fill it to where I want it and save myself a trip to the service station.
My wife’s car, on the other hand, is absolutely full when the shutoff kicks in. Don’t even try to top it off to round it up to the next dollar.
No gas jockey would know, or would be expected to know, these things. And I’m old enough to remember the smeary, ugly jobs gas jockeys did while “washing” my dad’s windshield. Thanks, I’ll do it myself for a superior customer experience.
Automatic tellers? A lifesaver. For nearly 30 years, I’ve pulled cash from the bank after hours. Even when the bank’s open, it’s simpler, faster and more secure to get cash while in my car. I still use tellers for deposits or anything special, but there’s no reason to waste their time and mine – and the time of the person behind me in line - if it’s a routine stop for pocket money. It’s a superior customer experience.
Self-serve scanning and bagging at the supermarket? I’ll do it when I can. The lines are shorter, I’m at least as good at scanning as most cashiers, and not once have I put the bleach on top of the bread. Now, I can even bag my groceries according to where I’ll put them away.
And weirdly enough, the robot voice saying “Thank you for shopping at Meijer” sounds more sincere than most human cashiers. It’s all part of a superior customer experience.

Happy Birthday, Dad

Monday would have been my Dad’s 98th birthday.
Dad’s been gone a long time, and I’m only now beginning to get a handle on what kind of a person he was. His life was so very different from mine, and I’m now starting to realize that good part of that was his doing.
I’m now the age Dad was when I started high school. The poor man.
Dad was driven by duty: duty to God, duty to family, duty to country. It was so much a part of his being that even asking why that duty existed was heresy.
I started ninth grade three weeks after Woodstock.
Dad didn’t think much of rebels. Dad didn’t think much of people who were hip and cool. Dad didn’t think much of the Revolution of the ’60s. Dad really hated rock-and-roll.
His son knew nothing else, loved rock-and-roll, and desperately wanted to be cool. The idea of a career in the media? Heresy.
It was a good thing Dad a duty to family. I might have been family, but without that sense of duty, I would have been out on my behind about, oh, 1970.
It wasn’t until near the end of his life, when my boss exuberantly told him that I was the best thing that had ever happened to the boss’s radio station (the boss was drunk, but what he said had an impact on Dad) that Dad finally thought maybe I might have known what I was doing.
Dad never sat at a computer, but he insisted I learn how to type. That, in and of itself, changed my life. He was a U.S. Navy storekeeper in the South Pacific in World War II, then came back to civilian life and worked the rest of his career as an accountant. I suspect he would have loved Excel and Access, but I have no idea how he would have reacted to the world of the Web, iPads, iPods, mobile phones and satellite video.
I can't even imagine what he would have thought of a world where major players are called Google and Yahoo.
Dad was something unusual in his generation: A university graduate. He graduated from the University of Michigan in 1940, at the age of 26. He wasn’t too unhappy when it took me until 26 to graduate from Central, although he never understood the appeal of “that teachers college” I fell in love with the first time I walked onto the campus.
It was a great place to meet girls, Dad.
And even though he was a U of M grad, he didn’t think much of college professors. I think it was from him that I first heard the term “overeducated fool.”
We were so, so different. I learned from him that I had to accept my own children as being very different from me, as well. That wasn’t something Dad tried to teach, but I learned it anyway.
Funny thing. I don’t think he told me he loved me until after I graduated from college. I think he maybe, maybe, accepted me. But I’m not sure he ever liked me.
I don’t know if I ever would have or could have been friends with my dad. Maybe that was the whole point.
I’m glad Dad did his duty to his family. It got me here.
Happy birthday, Dad.

Will there be a middle class for my kids to join?

From The Atlantic: A continued push for better schooling, the creation of clearer paths into careers for people who don’t immediately go to college, and stronger support for low-wage workers—together, these measures can help mitigate the economic cleavage of U.S. society, strengthening the middle. They would hardly solve all of society’s problems, but they would create the conditions for more-predictable and more-comfortable lives—all harnessed to continuing rewards for work and education. These, ultimately, are the most-critical preconditions for middle-class life and a healthy society.
Can the Middle Class Be Saved?

But can this be done by a rotten political system? Both parties are not rotten in quite the same way. The Democrats have their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen, egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP. To those millions of Americans who have finally begun paying attention to politics and watched with exasperation the tragicomedy of the debt ceiling extension, it may have come as a shock that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics.

From Truth-out.org: Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult

Has this been on "Dirty Jobs?"

A steeplejack from Fedewa Inc. of Nashville, Mich., uses a power washer to get the crud off the bottom of Union Township's 500,000-gallon water tower at the township hall. The crud is a mix of dirt - and, um, mold.

Can we do justice to a hero?

I’m a guy in my mid-50s, the time of life when going to funerals starts to become a sad, routine part of life.
I’ve been going to funerals, but not of people my age. I’m going to another funeral tomorrow of a young person, an achiever, who died young.
His name’s Brian Backus, or more specifically, Pfc. Brian Backus, U.S. Army.
I got an e-mail from his dad with the subject line “Sad news.” No, it went beyond, far beyond sad. “Sad” doesn’t do it justice.
The boilerplate casualty announcement from the Department of Defense doesn’t tell the story, just as they don’t ever tell the story:
DOD Identifies Army Casualty
The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom.
Pfc. Brian J. Backus, 21, of Saginaw Township, Mich., died June 18, in Kandahar province, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when insurgents attacked his unit with small arms fire. He was assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 87th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division, Fort Drum, N.Y.
For more information, media may contact the Fort Drum public affairs office at 315-772-8286.
U.S. Department of Defense
Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Public Affairs)
When I met Brian, he was probably 7 years old, a Tiger Cub in Pack 3582, Harbor Beach. I had just become the Scoutmaster of Troop 582 in Harbor Beach, and Brian’s dad was the pack’s Cubmaster and the chairman of the troop committee. Even though my family spent only a couple of years in Harbor Beach, we became close to the Backus family.
Every summer, until the middle part of the decade, we were part of the staff of summer Cub Scout camps at Camp Rotary and Paul Bunyan Scout Reservation. These camps were just magic. Oh, we went by the book, sort of, but the staff made these camps go far beyond the ordinary. They were staffed by adult leaders who were really good at what they did and had fun doing it, and youth staff (our kids) who were bright and creative and destined for achievement.
Brian became president of his class at Harbor Beach High School. He went to the University of Michigan for a while, but ended up joining the Army. He became a medic.
I can’t describe the admiration I have for combat medics and hospital corpsmen, whose job it is to save lives even as the battle rages around them. Courage, sacrifice – those words don’t do justice to what they do, either.
Katherine had maintained the closest contact with Brian. They Skyped occasionally, and she had talked to him just a few days before he died. She cried when I broke the news to her.
What made it even harder was that Brian was the second member of that magic Cub Scout camp youth staff to die. Matt Boles of Mt. Pleasant, who died in a swimming accident in 2009, also was part of that group of kids and adults who gathered around lakeside campfires on summer nights and shared the joy of being outdoors, being Scouts, being destined for great things.
The gym at Harbor Beach High School, the largest gathering place in that little town on Lake Huron, will be packed tomorrow. The town’s streets were lined with mourners when Pfc. Backus’ body was returned, and most of those people will be there, as well.
The Army honor guard will salute the fallen hero. “Taps” will be played and there will be many, many tears. Many, many words will be said, but none of them will do justice to all the tomorrows that changed forever when Brian died.

The European way:

The resurfaced south end of South Mission Street is open, and it's been restriped for very obvious pedestrian crosswalks - and shoulders that aren't quite official bike lanes, but certainly will be used that way.
The traffic lanes are a little narrower than they used to be, and it's almost certain we'll hear from people griping about it. That's how seriously we love wide-open, fast-flowing traffic.
So imagine what it would be like to take a European approach to traffic management, as reported by The New York Times?
In a land I've heard public transportation referred to as "welfare wagons," I think it might be kind of a tough sell.

Stayin Alive in the Wall

Just brilliant. Thanks to Tom Moore for turning me on to this.

Uncle Jay explains the news

Uncle Jay fills us on on what the news really, really means this week.

A rainbow over the mountain town

A gorgeous double rainbow appeared over Mt. Pleasant this evening.
It stretched virtually horizon to horizon. Where was the end of the rainbow?
One Tweet from czach1r: The double rainbow ends at Kelly/Shorts stadium. How FREAKING epic.
Nah - it ended at the state police post. You see that in the photo.
But that's not what Kissy Missy informed me: "The rainbow ends at the sewage treatment plant."

The Jazz Police

For the second time in the past three years, the Mt. Pleasant High School Jazz Band was invited to play at the Detroit International Jazz Festival.
The Oiler jazz band was hot, and among the hottest pieces they played was "The Jazz Police."
High school jazz bands are placed on their own stage near the fountain at Campus Martius on Woodward Avenue where Woodward, Monroe and Michigan Avenue come together. At this gathering place, people on their way to see the "name" acts on the jazz festival bill suddenly stopped, wondering who this hot band was.
Mt. Pleasant? High School? Awesome.

Diary of a Band Dad

This fall, we've got not one, but two bands to follow.
Robert's a senior at Mt. Pleasant High, and he's in his second year as a drum major for the MPHS Marching Band.
And Kat's a freshman at CMU, and she's joined the Chippewa Marching Band as a member of the flag corps.
The Oiler band finished band camp - and if the sound after just a few days of practice is any indication, they're a really tight unit with a great show.
The Marching Chips, meanwhile, are the largest band CMU has ever had, with about 280 members. The pregame show sounds like it always has - and when the CMU Fight Song filled Kelly/Shorts Stadium late Sunday, it darn near made me cry.
Weirdly, both bands' shows feature music from Styx. I'm expecting a lot of that to be stuck in my head the next few months.

The rainbow - a sign?

It can be so very tempting to look at a rainbow at see a sign in the sky. It's part of our makeup.
Of course, the scientific among us will see refraction and angles and say it's merely pish-tosh that such a natural phenomenon would be "a sign."
But if it were ... wow. I came back from a city meeting tonight to see a horizon-to-horizon, stunning, perfect rainbow, perfectly centered over the Morning Sun's plant.
It's been tough there. Over the past 12 years, the paper has weathered the bankruptcy of two different parent corporations. We've seen layoffs. We've seen cutbacks and freezes, but through it all, we've done good journalism and served our communities.
Now, we've got new leadership at the top of the corporation, people who seem to have vision, who aren't afraid to try things.
And there's a sense of optimism inside.
Perhaps it really is a sign.

A sharp, painful contrast

The contrast could not have been more profound.
Today was Robert's final performance at Blue Lake. He was second clarinet in the wind ensemble, the top band at the camp, and we went over to see the concert and pick him up.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, a Mt. Pleasant family was dealing with an unspeakable tragedy. TheMorningSun.com's Patricia Ecker had confirmed the identity of a young woman killed Friday night or Saturday, and the identity of the suspect - her older brother, who had just gotten out of prison.
Patricia called me and I would act as a rewrite man, putting the story on the Web.
I pulled out my Mac and aircard, and set up shop under a rehearsal pavilion at the fine arts camp. I pulled the suspect's prison mug shot and record from the Michigan Department of Corrections website and put the story together.
I was in the woods. Nothing but trees and beauty surrounded me. The wonderful sound of the camp's symphonic band, whose concert preceded the wind ensemble's, drifted the few hundred yards from the band shell, mixing with the sounds of birds and chipmunks.
All around me was wonder and beauty. On my screen was horror and tragedy. I was almost overwhelmed by the stark, brutal contrast.
At Blue Lake, these young people were growing up with art and music, surrounded by talent and achievement.
Back home, something had gone terribly, awfully wrong.
I posted the story, went to the wind ensemble concert, and turned off my phone. For an hour, at least, I wanted to enjoy my family's talent and achievement, but I remain haunted by the contrast.

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Early morning Survival Flight

Early Memorial Day morning, I heard the clatter of a helicopter over the house.
This isn't unusual - we live just a little more than a mile from Central Michigan Community Hospital and helicopter ambulances fly in and out of the hospital on a regular basis.
The early-morning flight, however, was unusual, and I didn't immediately recognize the markings on this air ambulance.
I know St. Mary's FlightCare, Covenant LifeNet and Spectrum Aero Med, but I couldn't place this one. I finished loading TheMorningSun.com's Memorial Day edition, then drove over to take a look.
It turned out to be a University of Michigan Survival Flight helicopter, done in maize and blue (talk about branding), and it didn't spend a lot of time on the ground.
I don't know anything about the patient who was being transferred to Ann Arbor at dawn on a holiday or why they were being sent there. I do know that helicopter flights aren't taken lightly.
I've had the opportunity to ride a helicopter ambulance twice: once as an observer (I love my job), and once as a patient. I'm pretty sure that flight 12 years ago saved, if not my life, my ability to function.
But a helicopter ride in a fully staffed air ambulance isn't cheap. It's tough to get an average price for a helicopter ambulance flight, but I've seen cost estimates anywhere from $3,000 to $25,000. A 2007 British study put the average cost at ₤6,000, or about $8,700.
No one - no one - faced with the potential loss of a loved one's life does this calculation: "Well, that helicopter will cost $9,000, plus the cost of the hospital stay ... We can get a nice funeral done for about $6,000 ... Let's just keep Mom here and not tell her."
A generation ago, there might not have been any other option but to start picking out Mom's casket. Options are better now.
The question is how it's paid for.

Behind the scenes on "The Daily"

TheMorningSun.com's daily Webcast, "The Daily," went on location to downtown Mt. Pleasant for Memorial Day. Sue Field and I were at Jimmy John's before the Memorial Day parade.

Last day of high school

I'm not sure exactly how I feel about this - today was Katherine's last day of high school.
Seniors, of course, get out before the rest of the student body, and graduation is set for next weekend. Classes are over.
She's still taking her college class - she's got one more week of JRN 202 at Central.
Graduation, orientation, imagination ... a lot on her mind.
And she's at the Wheatland Traditional Arts Festival tonight with That One Kid.
Life is so about to change.

From another world

A truly awesome Web video from Boston.com.

Beautiful Saturday

The temperature is in the mid-40s.
I'm looking at a pile of snow at least 4 feet high.
Yet my neighbor is wearing shorts, and people are exclaiming about how warm and wonderful the weather is.
. . . I think we've lived in Michigan far too long.

On being stupid

Ever notice that the only people who ever say, "I am so stupid" are usually really bright people who had a lapse in judgment? The truly stupid never even realize it.

SFMAWG seeks SwC

Short, Fat, Middle-Aged White Guy seeks Spinster with Cat.
A few weeks ago, I was sitting in a weekend newspaper planning session when I noted that an upcoming Sunday newspaper would come out on Valentine's Day.
"We should do something," I said.
"How about online dating?" someone chimed in, and everyone looked at me. They knew I'd met Kissy Missy online.
"A first-person story!" the editor said. They'd all heard the story, and now, I'd get a chance to tell it to the whole world.
It also seemed like a good opportunity for a video - and it was.
Apparently, this adventure was too good to keep. On Wednesday, Central Michigan Life, the student paper at CMU, did its own version of our story as its Campus Vibe front.
When you've got a great story, people want to tell it.
Happy Valentine's Day, Sweetheart.

City deer

Well, they're certainly here.
These deer aren't dumb. I was traveling along West Campus Drive this afternoon, and I spotted this little feller calmly nibbling at what was under the snow.
It's perfect habitat for adaptable critters. There's plenty of food - evergreens, shrubs, ornamental fruit trees, even a few oaks. There's lots of cover - this guy and at least one other were well-concealed most of the time in the brush along the Great Lakes Central Railroad tracks that run through campus.
The Chippewa River is just a few blocks away. Traffic isn't particularly heavy, except when classes change.
And no one's out to hunt them.
It's deer Eden.

The Christmas of the Antique Apple

It was an old-fashioned Christmas, with old-fashioned applie pie, and this year, it even featured old-fashioned apples.
Here's the story: A number of years ago - I'm trying to picture the kitchen where I first tried the recipe, and it's not coming to me - I ran across the basic recipe for Dad's Extreme Apple Pie. That wasn't what it was called, of course, but that's how it's known today.
Extreme? A single pie requires five pounds of apples.
When I was growing up, Mom made apple pies fairly often. She always looked for a particular type of apple - the Northern Spy. Even 40 years ago, they were hard to find, and today, they're extremely hard to locate in grocery stores.
They don't sell well in 21st century superstore produce departments, where the visual presentation is paramount. Frankly, they're not pretty. They look like beat-up old farm apples. And they don't travel well.
But this antique breed of apple is fabulous for pies, with firm flesh, and just the right mix of sweet and tart.
And on Christmas Eve, like a Christmas present, there they were - one 10-pound bag - in the produce section at Meijer. Kissy Missy snapped them up.

And the perfect version of Dad's Extreme Apple Pie was made on Christmas Day 2009.

For the second time in a month, the whole gang was here. Matthew slid up from Grand Rapids - literally. Andrew's back from Tech, settling in for a new adventure. Miranda was here. Katherine, and Robert and Jamie, and Kissy Missy and I all shared the kind of Christmas I'd always envied other people having. What we had: "Miracle on 34th Street" on the babble box, and on the table, pot roast, mashed potatoes, corn, carrots, asparagus (from Peru - ya gotta love the 21st century), with Dad's Extreme Apple Pie, a Sarah Lee sweet potato pie and Sleeping Bear made-in-Michigan ice cream for dessert.
And gifts, given from the heart.
What we didn't have: Relatives who sit with silent disapproval, adults playing adolescent mind games, and underwear for Christmas.

Eighteen

She's 18.


Friday was Katherine's 18th birthday. I keep calling her my "mature, responsible adult daughter." She doesn't know that I (mostly) really mean it.

I always joked that she was the one who was born with a champagne glass in one hand, cigarette in the other, wanting to know who was in charge, baby. Actually, she objects to both ideas, but she still has the attitude she was born with. She is, after all, a ginger.

Sometimes she's an airhead. Sometimes she's a blonde. But along the way she found a fierce dedication to doing things right, and working hard enough to make them happen.

I greeted her on her birthday morning with Alice Cooper's "Eighteen" at a tooth-rattling volume. She just shook her head. Her friends gave her, among other things, "Pride, Prejudice and Zombies." If you have to ask, you won't get it.
After school, I took her to register to vote. Then she went, for the first time, to the casino. Go there on your 18th birthday and the Soaring Eagle will give you $30 on a Players Club card.
She played, and came home with a pocket full of cash.
She says she'll put it in the bank. My mature, responsible, adult daughter.
(Photos by Lisa Yanick-Jonaitis)

Really. Dad's working.

So, Dad's been spending lots of time at Ford Field recently.
Beal City won the Division 8 state football championship.
Clare made it to the finals.
Central Michigan won the Mid-American Conference championship.
Dad was there with a video camera.
It's not ESPN, but it's great for TheMorningSun.com.

Katherine does her homework

Yes, I know I'm old. When I was a senior in high school, the most sophisticated equipment I got to use for school was a manual Royal typewriter, a Headliner and a Compugraphic. And my dad's 1948-model Kodak 35RF.
The idea of producing homework on video? You mean like TeeVee?