Drinking Blue Ruin &c

The only time we ever drink gin is when our Austin friends come to visit. I bought a pint of the cheap stuff Thursday and pitched it into the freezer, the secret to making gin palatable. We had gin & tonics out of jelly-jar glasses and then vinho and vino when we ate both shrimp and beefsteak. They are good guests, requiring mostly enough light to read and a certain amount of food, but little maintenance otherwise. They even took away a small damncat we've been trying to place.
Looks like New Orleans may be finished, but maybe tomorrow evening they'll be gloating and saying they dodged a bullet. I suspect the city will survive as a kinda theme park New Orleans in the Quarter and the casino district on Canal down by the river and the rest will end up abandoned for residential living. I remember going on to a Missippian friend about what a cool place NOLA was, and his response was yeah, maybe, but for him it was the place his high-school classmates went to become whores and junkies. For the Port of New Orleans things are problematic, as a lot of commerce moves through there, farm commodities from the Midwest and such, given that the Mississippi meets the salt water there. Price of oil has jumped on the weekend markets as many offshore rigs are abandoned, and gasoline should be doing a jump this week.

Labor Day weekend in **Adrift

We've spent the last couple days watching Gustav with a certain complacency, reasonably certain that he'll land far away from us but not forgetting the last minute right that Rita hung three years ago. That one went for us; the next one could go against us. So we pass the afternoon watching the Weather Channel – old people's porn – with one eye. Gus is at 150 mph right now with gusts up to 175, and that's pretty fierce wind. The streets here are full of out-of-towners, lots of boats in the bay, lots of boat trailers in the parking lot by the boat launch, people down on the waterfront barbecuing and fishing. We have old-and-dears in town for a couple days, connections to a former life in Austin.
McCain picked a woman but not Kay Bailey Hutchison. One of our friends lived a time in Alaska and swears that there will be slime oozing out of the walls about Sarah Palin before too long. Still, an interesting dodge from Johnny Mac. A wingnut conservative blog I check sometimes has about a million ecstatic comments on the choice. And the goo-goos seem to be working themselves into a lather about guns and such. Someone said last night on PBS that it's 70 days until the election. Would that it were over already.

McCain veep

There are four or five names circulating as likeliest choices for John McC's vice president. Historically an insignificant post, the vice presidensity [yeah, yeah, I know] got fat during the Frat Boy's debacle and will stand important if McCain should win not just for inherent powers but also for the possibility of promotion for the v.p. As someone pointed out, from the way he moves and sometimes seems to drift McCain is apparently in poor health so his vice could well inherit the big chair. Someone suggested Kay Bailey Hutchison last night as a possible, and I was struck by the genius of the idea. All of Hillary's Harridans who are nursing rancor toward Obama could go and vote for a woman for at least something big and important, and I suspect a lot of them would, enough to hurt in a close election. I think with a true-believing feminist that gender trumps everything, even ideology. But what do I know?

Food fight

The Victoria area may have its own tomato fight with the Tom-Tom celebration in Yoakum, but that pales beside a massive food fight in Europe. The world's most famous food fight takes place in Valencia, Spain, on the third Wednesday in August. Tens of thousands gather to chunk tomatoes at each other for a long time. It's a good-natured sort of goofiness and sounds like fun if you happened to be in Spain in August. To read about the Tomatina, click here.

More muerte

A woman writes an affecting story in the Newspaper Tree site about retrieving the body of her brother, killed in a doper shooting in Wazoo:

The morgue in Juarez screams Third World. It’s basically just a wooden shed that one might see out on a deserted landscape between nowhere and hell. Once you get past the initial stench and into the dark choking air you could see the profiles of the corpses. There was no ventilation, not even a breeze, as if the room was sucking life from the living. It was high noon in June, 2002. The bodies were shrouded in black tarp and the flies congealed in and around my little brother’s mouth, eyes and ears. I cried just for the sadness of it … the sadness of such an insult to his dignity, to his pride, his ego. ...

Read all the story here. To mess with a Porfirio Diaz saying: Poor El Paso ... so far from God, so near to Mexico.
I taught on the same campus as the medical school at UACJ and the autopsy facilities for the city were on the grounds. I watched once a group of ostensibly educated middle-class people take it all in as a nightwatchman talked about the various ghostly manifestations he said he had encountered around the place.

Light rail

State Sen. Eliot Shapleigh of El Paso is an interesting guy. He's nearly the only pol around in Texas who'll speak the flat truth that the state needs an income tax. In an ed-page piece in the World's Worst Newspaper, he makes a case for light rail as a solution to transportation needs in his city. In part:

From 1881 to 1902, El Paso's street car service consisted of a few modest wooden cars, drivers and sturdy mules -- the most famous being Mandy the Mule.
At the turn of the last century, El Paso-Juárez was the leading international light rail region, and mules like Mandy were the engines that made it run.

He goes on to mention how a company owned by GM and an oil company bought up the city's streetcar system and shut it down. The car companies did the same all around the country in the 30s and 40s, trying to move people into cars as primary transport. Before that there were a lot of streetcar lines in towns around the country and interurban lines between towns. I remember playing along abandoned lines in the middle of our street in Abilene in the 40s. Read all of Shapleigh's article here. People took trains for outings and travel between towns. Two, three years ago I talked to a guy in Bloomington who said his family had ridden the train in from that village into Victoria on Saturday mornings to shop and go to the movies and then rode a train back in the afternoon. He was only around 70, so we're not talking 1926 but more like in the 40s. Rail is an idea that is more attractive daily when a little run into town costs $12 or $15 in gasoline.

More Tribune

From an architecture site:

... [T]he Tribune Tower exemplifies the way American architects have elevated office buildings to sacred status. Newspaper publisher Colonel Robert R. McCormick held a $50,000.00 international competition to design, "the most beautiful and eye-catching office building in the world."

Click through to see some of the tower. WGN's featuring the interior in ads promoting a new format. WGN was owned by the Tribune ... stands for World's Greatest Newspaper. They did that sort of thing back when. Another Chicago station, WLS, was owned by Sears. WLS stood for World's Largest Store. Colonel McCormick was a benevolent autocrat, a man who lived much like an English gentleman and hated the British. One of our standard typefaces at the Trib was called McCormick. All the old-timers spoke of McCormick with great affection. Management would pull something sleazy and the old guys would say 'This wouldn't be happening if the colonel were still alive.' McCormick was a really powerful man in the first half of the last century.