Author: TheGentlemanAtLarge

It’s Like the other Tuesdays, but Different

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ Leave a comment

Hey y’all,

So . . . it’s Tuesday. And on this Tuesday, unlike most Tuesdays, the fate of humanity rests in your hands. Fortunately it’s super easy to stave off damnation for another four years – all you gotta do is vote.

And I know. Voting is hard. You have to take time out of your busy day to go all the way to a special place, and wait in a line, and answer a bunch of questions. It’s like going to Chipotle at rush hour only you’re still hungry after. And it probably doesn’t even make a difference, right? The lizard people call all the shots anyway.

Wrong! Sad!

It’s really pretty easy to come up with excuses not to vote, and so I’m going to go ahead and try to head a few of the popular ones off here:

  • They both stink! It doesn’t make a difference. – Ok so this is just demonstrably untrue. But there’s been a ton of lip service about the staggering differences between our main party candidates this year, and at this point nothing you read here is likely to change your mind. If you really believe that the candidates are indistinguishable, then sure – leave that bubble blank.

    Because here’s the thing – Google Analytics tells me that the vast majority of you, My Dear Readers, reside in Montana, California, and Illinois. That means that the presidential races in your state is probably pretty well buttoned up.

    You’re still not off the hook for voting.Down ballot races are way more important than the one at the top (especially if you don’t live in Florida, or Michigan, or North Carolina or something). Feel strongly about Planned Parenthood funding? I wonder how your state legislators feel about that. Fond of public land access? Jeez, maybe there’s a state supreme court or Gubernatorial candidate on the ballot who could really change how that works.And then there’s the initiatives. Legal marijuana! Weird shady tax things! A new school playground! This stuff is up to you! Remember Brexit? The Columbian peace deal falling apart? That shit wasn’t decided by elected officials.

    So yeah, even if you really can’t tell the difference between the two options for president, you still need to vote.

  • I don’t have time. – I know we’re all busy in these crazy days, but come on. You’ve got time. Americans watch between four and five hours of TV per day. We spend about 90 minutes gazing at our phones. We spend 42 hours a year sitting in traffic, and we spend at least a couple hours each day screwing off at work. If for just one day, you woke up in the morning and were perfectly efficient, you would have a brand new 8 hours to fill with whatever you’d like to do. Maybe preserving our democratic process could make the list?
  • What do you mean vote? I thought American Idol got cancelled? – You are correct! And I know you’re just jonesing to get all that vote mojo out. May I suggest National and Local elections? Warning – You cannot text your vote.

vote

  • Eh, fuck black people. And Hispanics. And women. And Muslims. And the disabled. And the 1st, 4th, 5th, 8th, 13th, and 19th Amendments. And the Geneva Accords.  And the fabric of democracy. – I mean, I guess if that’s how you really feel it’s actually pretty hard to argue with.
  • I don’t know where I’m registered. – It’s cool. We have a tool for that. Click right here to see where and when you can vote!
  • There are armed white men standing outside of my polling place. – Yes. The “poll observers.” We were worried about those guys, especially after the Malheur Farce. The best thing you can do is call a local hotline to report voter intimidation. In the meantime, you can probably lure them away by telling them that you just saw a Bad Hombre trying to sneak into a voting booth around the corner.
  • I am still an undecided voter. – I get it. This election is tricky. It’s like being in a pizza place where the only options for toppings are anchovies and shattered light bulbs. You’re torn between, “ew, I can see its eyeball,” and “it’s possible I won’t die.” I guess my only advice would be to order the actual food, even if it’s not your favorite.
  • Shouldn’t we just be able to text our votes in? – Still no.
  • I am actually dead. – It never stopped Mayor Daley from getting elected in Chicago! Just kidding. Voter fraud isn’t really a thing. Unless you consider voter suppression and contortionist congressional redistricting fraud, in which case, yeah I guess.

So that’s it. You just wasted another 4 minutes of your day reading this post. Put your phone away and go to the damn polls. If you ride your bike there you won’t even waste all that time in traffic.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail


 

 

 

Things We Can Agree On

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ 1 Comment

The National Dialogue, over the last year or so, has been . . . contentious. A lot of us feel pretty strongly about more than a few things, and there’s been some awfully heated disagreement over foreign policy, healthcare, what constitutes a crime, and so forth. It feels like there’s nothing we can agree on. And so I’m pretty excited for November 9, when we can finally open our arms to President Stein and put this terrible, horrible, no good, very bad election behind us.

In the meantime, as two people collectively spend like $200 million in a week to scuff each others’ shoes, I thought it might be nice to focus on a few things we can agree on. Remember, we’ve got much more in common than we do apart.

  • Clear coffee cups are wrong – This is even truer if you take cream.
20161028_101132
The horror. The horror.

 

  • The left lane is not for driving – It’s for passing. And turning left. And that’s really it. If you’re over there for more than like 30 seconds at a time, you’re probably doing it wrong.
  • Airplanes are for silence – Unless the plane is actively crashing and we’re coordination an evacuation, there’s really nothing to discuss. Keep it to yourself.
  • Pie>Cake – “Cake” is a fancy word for flour and air.
  • Climate change is a thing – Look, we still have a lot to fight about. Let’s pull together on this one. It’s not something stupid like healthcare as a human right, after all, and just acknowledging it doesn’t mean we actually have to do anything about it. Besides, once we get on the same page here we can spend more time talking about that Walking Dead premier.
  • Toilet paper rolls over the top – Like a waterfall. If you’re in the loo as a guest in someone’s home, and they’ve accidentally loaded it upside down, please feel free to correct it. Don’t feel pressure to bring it up, we can all be forgiven for an occasional mistake.
We can all agree that's how it's supposed to look.
Correct.
  • Butter goes on the counter – So it spreads. If it’s warm out, I suggest a butter bell.
  • The whole “Rolling Coal” thing has really run its course – We get it, high school was awesome. That night you won state was like, the best ever. But there really are better ways to memorialize your fading relevancy than being this much of a twat.
  • No touching – There should be no bumping, brushing, glancing, shaving, or other forms of incidental contact between strangers at any time. Wait your turn. This includes concerts, shopping malls, mass transit, and sporting events.
  • Iceberg lettuce is a crime – It’s like slimy, perishable, packing peanuts. Advertising salad and serving iceberg amounts to fraud, and should be prosecuted accordingly. Enough with the emails. This is what true crime looks like.
  • Keep shit out of the hinge – If you borrow a pocket knife, don’t use it for spreading peanut butter. Or jam.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail


 

Rooting for the Goat

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ Leave a comment

Well, the Cubs won the Pennant. After nearly a century of being the losing-est team in baseball, Chicago’s blue-eyed darlings defied convention, broke the spell, and are headed to the World Series. Cubs fans, now scattered across the globe, can be found yelling gleefully at strangers something about a goat.

Because you see the Cubs, for the last seven decades, have not just been a bad baseball team. They’ve been terrible. So bad you could forgive their coke sniffing frat boy fan base for being so irritating because the team was just so damn pathetic. They’ve been plagued by losing seasons and bad luck for so long that the only conceivable culprit at this point is witchcraft. Voodoo. A curse.

The last time the Cubs played in the World Series was 1945. Things were looking up, the Cubs led the seven game series 2-1 heading into game four at Wrigley Field, until William Sianis showed up with his pet goat and insisted they both be seated. The usher denied the goat access, allegedly on the grounds that the animal smelled bad. Sianis threw up his hands and swore that “The Cubs ain’t gonna win no more.” They went on to lose the game and then the series.

After the final game Sianis sent a telegram to the team reading, “Who stinks now.” The spell was cast. The Cubs have not won a World Series since.

curse-of-the-goat
PC: Nick Merrell – The curse of the goat.

Baseball is a game fraught with superstition. Pitchers won’t step on the lines. Players don’t wash the luck out of their jocks. But even for baseball the Curse of the Goat runs deep. In a pivotal playoff game in 1969 a black cat wandered onto the field and gazed into the Cubs dugout. They lost momentum and lost the Pennant race.

In 1986 the curse followed Bill Buckner to the Red Sox. In the 10th inning of a World Series game, he committed a Little League level blunder that led to his team’s loss. He was wearing a Cubs batting glove under his mitt.

But nothing compares to the bad luck of 2003 (the Chinese Zodiac year of the Goat). It was the 7th inning of the fourth-of-seven games in the National League Champion Series. The Cubs led the series 3-2 and the game 3-0. A high foul ball left the bat of Luis Castillo for an easy out into the glove of left fielder Moises Alou. Instead, the now infamous Steve Bartman leaned across the wall to catch the ball, interfered with Alou, and watched the Cubs go on to lose the series.

This curse, it seems, is the real deal.

And it’s why this recent spate of Cubs good luck is so bittersweet. The Curse of the Goat, more than a winning team, is something to rally behind. For our entire lives, the Cubs have been the essential underdog, the original Bad Luck Bears.

The annual Sisyphusian trudge through the regular season is as essential to the Cubs experience as the ivy covered walls at Wrigley Field. The Cubs without the curse is like contemplating Thanksgiving without turkey. Sure, it’s kind of the worst part of the whole thing, but it needs to be there.

Without the Curse, the Cubs are just another sports team, adrift in a city that loves its sports. Championships come and go, and the fair weather zealots (looking at you, Blackhawks fans) drift from franchise to franchise based on a complicated algorithm of athletic merit and nearby dive bars.

The Curse is a part of old Chicago. Of Al Capone, and deep dish pizza, and Meigs Field. To see it go is like seeing the Sun-Times give way to the Trump International. It’s the cruel wheel of progress that values glamour over tradition.

So yeah, like any expatriated Chicago kid, I’ll probably keep an ear tuned for news on the World Series, even if I haven’t seen a baseball game in years. And maybe that makes me a bandwagon fan. Maybe. Except that this midwestern expat is rooting for the goat.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail


 

Should You Buy a Pass This Year?

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ 1 Comment

Rejoice! For summer’s tyrannic reign is over.

The larch are popping, rains have arrived, and it’s finally cool enough to think straight. In a few days, the woods will alight with the echoing booms of the autumn harvest, and the white horizon will creep a bit lower. Woodsmoke will hover in the air, soups will steam gently on the range, and we’ll tighten our coats around our necks and brace for the most wonderful time of year.

But in the meantime, there’s business to attend to. Primarily: should you buy a season pass this year? A pass is no small investment; in some places it’s pushing $2k for the privilege of taking a ride to the top of the mountain. It would be foolhardy to plow blindly forward, and there are a number of considerations at play.

Here are a few study questions to help you with the hardest decision of the fall.

Do you like Skiing? This one seems elementary, but it’s worth thinking long and hard about. Sure, all your friends like to ski, but do you usually just take one token run then head to the lodge for alpines and cheese fries? Remember that skiing is difficult, dangerous and cold. Also, ski hills aren’t country clubs. Lodge privileges are open to the public! If you don’t actually like to ski, maybe save a few bucks and spring for a nice jacket so that you look the part curled up with a book next to the lodge fire.

What’s the long range forecast? Are we looking at a dismal forecast like the terrible drought of aught-8? Or on the cusp of another glorious powmageddon like ’11 (or dare we dream of ’96!)? predicting the weather five months out is a notoriously tricky job, but there’s no reason not to try. I wonder what The Blob is up to? Or equatorial sea surface temperatures in the Pacific? Best to bone up on your climate science before pulling trig on a pass!

BitterrootPowFest (2 of 11)
Should you buy a pass this year?

Is there a boycott you need to know about? The relationship between ski hill operators and passholders is not a traditional business/customer trade off. There’s usually only one or two real options for skiing, and they’re selling a fix to a large number of addicts. It really looks a lot more like drug dealer/junkie relationship, where mutual contempt is on a constant simmer, but everyone knows that at the end of the day people are going to put their principles aside and go skiing. But keep an eye out for a boycott, sometimes the people need to make their voices felt, and you’d hate to be the only scab in the lift line.

Can you get a deal? Do you have a buddy in the ticket office? Does your local hill offer a AAA discount? Is there anyone that you can blackmail or kidnap? If not, then there are other ways to save some coin. Ski bums across the west have made great progress in working off passes by hanging chairs, bootpacking bowls, and other unpleasant and labor intensive tasks. It’s worth seeing if you can work something out!

How about uphill traffic? Does your local hill allow skinning? Experts are torn on what uphill traffic policies do to ticket sales. Some folks are worried that people won’t buy tickets if they can hike, other folks actively boycott ski hills with retrograde skinning policies. Where do you stand?

What about a weekday Pass? If you’re thinking about buying a pass, then you probably live in a little mountain town. And if you live in a little mountain town, then you probably have some kind of weird, probably-at-least-partially-made-up job that trades trivial things like “health insurance” and a “living wage” for a great deal of flexibility. See if your ski hill offers discounted mid-week passes. You don’t want to wait in the Saturday lift lines anyway.

These study questions are intended to help you decide weather to pull the trigger on a pretty significant purchase this winter. Ultimately, the choice is up to you. I hope it helped!

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail


 

 

Entropy at Work

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ Leave a comment

Those of us who were born recently enough to only have followed the last several national elections may be forgiven for coming to the conclusion that our democracy is in the throes of unraveling, and that the Great American Experiment is, at last, a failure.

2000 found us stating that we were faced with the worst candidates in history. In 2004, we took it all back and declared that no, in fact, these were the worst candidates we’d ever been forced to elect. In 2008 the ascendancy of our country’s first black president gave rise to latent white nationalism from coast to coast, and was the most polarizing election in memory. The most polarizing election in memory, of course, until 2012, when the TEA party hijacked the Republican party and talking heads spoke exclusively in superlatives for like eight months. That shit was wild.

But then we have 2016. Holy crap. The world, it seems, is on the cusp of demise.

trump

 

This election cycle has seen the most inflammatory language we’ve ever heard on the presidential stage, and it has incubated the ugliest in all of us. The last debate nearly came to blows, the candidates finally resorted only to libel. The Republican party is actually imploding before our eyes, and zealots across the political spectrum are openly calling for revolution if they don’t get their way.

Isn’t it great?

See, our body politic is reeling right now, but there isn’t really any better way for it to unfold. What we’re seeing here is entropy at work. Entropy, remember, is that pesky tenet of thermodynamics that you heard about in college and forgot about as soon as f’ing possible. That tendency in a closed system to err toward disorder.

Physicists deal with it all the time in a candid way, but entropy is a constant in all of our lives. You ever notice how it’s a full time job to keep the kitchen clean? Or the bedroom picked up? How a clean house will apparently descend into chaos over the course of a week if it’s allowed? That’s entropy. And it’s at work right now in our body of representatives.

It takes an outside force to restore order. It takes effort. The Trump campaign is, like he promises (one of the few things he’s right about), well positioned to fix a broken system. He really is poised to Make America Great Again, the same way that months’ worth of moldy pizza boxes under the couch are poised to get you to clean the living room.

Partisan inflexibility has gridlocked Congress for more than a decade. It’s that ineffectiveness that’s given rise to a candidate like Trump. People are sick of that shit, and this is what we’ve come up with: a big, orange cudgel brandished at our representatives that they’d better get their damn affairs in order or we’ll give ’em more of this whack job.

I hope that the Trump candidacy is simply an indication that our national politics have reached a state of squalor unparalleled outside of Shel Silverstein poems (a garbage fire, in other terms). That it’s time, now, to clean our bedroom. To put away those dishes. To wash and fold those piles of dirty clothes. Unchecked, the state of things will always tend toward disorder and chaos. I hope that we can agree that it is time, now, for a reset. It’s physics, after all.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail