WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
Linkskrieg: From Brainiac, Minnesota to Tokyo Fast Foods
byVanderleunonJanuary 17, 2020
The Brainiac of Congress
What an important victory for the people of Minnesota!
This is what happens when communities come together to oppose mining projects that will line the pockets of fossil fuel execs at the expense of our planet. https://t.co/H1iHhGbuLm
Obergruppenfuhrer wannabe and Bernie Sanders key staffer in Iowa, Kyle Jurek, got arrested a few days before the Project Veritas sting video where he loudly boasted about mass murdering and imprisoning those who will not submit to the will of Landru or Lenin, on an array of charges including drunk driving. But wait! There’s more! The little darling was bailed out of jail and there is no comment from the Sanders campaign on where the money came from and who sprung him. The Morning Report – 1/17/20
What to Expect During the Senate Impeachment Trial As a former Secretary of the Senate — the Senate’s chief legislative, financial, and administrative officer it’s painful to hear pundits and so-called legal experts misinform people. Much of the disinformation and errors seem to be coming from CNN (surprise!) and, of course, the Twitterati. I’m happy to help set the record straight.
Anybody know what the deal is with gay men and the formality they seem to prefer in names? Maybe your experience is different, but every gay man I have ever known – and remember, I lived in San Francisco just off Castro Street for several years – wanted to be called Robert, or Michael, or James. Never Bobby, Mike or Jimmy. A notable exception would be Pete Buttigieg. Though, I suppose if you are a gay man and Butt is already part of your name, adding Peter to the mix would be a bridge too far. Thoughts from the ammo line | Power Line
Why I think the media organizations are in really big trouble: How can major news organizations sustain their operations with a declining viewership that’s less than a mid-size popular podcast? To make my point, let’s compare one I really like, Mark Dice, and CNN (because I’m from Atlanta) with clown Don Lemon. Don Lemon is CNN’s second highest-rated show, and he averages ~800k viewers per show; yes, you read that right. Compare that to Mark Dice, who has 1.53mm subscribers on YouTube. In a 5-10 minute video, he’ll get between 150k and 500k viewers, and sometimes even upwards to a million. This is with Dice swimming upstream against content suppression and YouTube manipulating view counts. CNN continues to pay airports. Dice provides funny commentary on real stories, while CNN provides commentary on fake stories.
Democrats Block Resolution Condemning Iran For Murdering Protesters, Shooting Down Plane | “Consideration and a vote on House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s resolution was blocked … by a vote of 226-191,” The Daily Caller reported. “The resolution would have condemned the Government of Iran for killing 1,500 Iranian citizens who were protesting their government, as well as condemned the Government of Iran for shooting down Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752, killing 176 people.”
Information Removal: A Strategic Approach For someone who is just starting out on this endeavor, I believe there is a more organized and time-saving way to approach the removal process. Below I will describe an overview of how I approach this project. The links may change over time, but the methodology will likely save you a great deal of time and enable you to accomplish more of your effort more quickly. The following list is also not all inclusive. It represents a calculated approach, targeting specific websites, in a specific order to help streamline your removal efforts. A more comprehensive list is constantly maintained at the following link and should also become referenced as you find yourself getting deeper into this project. https://inteltechniques.com/data/workbook.pdf
Today, in Los Angeles, shade is distributed to people who can afford it. If you go into neighborhoods that were designed to be wealthy residential enclaves, the sidewalks are wider and include strips of grass four to ten feet wide, for the easy planting of thick, leafy trees. Pershing Square, for example, used to be full of shade trees. But after a new underground parking structure destroyed the root system, the thick, dense tree canopy was replaced. Other parks lack trees because of a strategy Bloch has reported on called crime prevention through environmental design. In LA, there is an idea that increased visibility in public spaces will lead to higher levels of public safety. In several instances, it’s believed the LAPD has installed pole cameras in parks or in public housing projects and cut down mature trees to give the camera a clear sightline. Shade – 99% Invisible
Mine was/is 521 B Allen Ave. The Past Is Never Dead Until I was nine years old, I lived in Los Angeles, just a few miles from the LA Coliseum. I still remember the address: 1711 W. 60th Street. Isn’t it weird that I would remember that address? I haven’t lived in that house for 72 years, yet there it is, 1711 W. 60th Street, a permanent little memory in my brain, probably occupying space that I might have used all these years for other things. My home was located in one of those quintessential LA neighborhoods you see in movies every now and then, a row of palm trees in front of little pastel-colored stucco bungalows. I visited there a few years ago and the neighborhood looked exactly the same. Apparently, time doesn’t pass when you’re a little pastel bungalow in LA.
Warren and the Burden of Motherhood For her, and for the droves of liberal feminists she represents, being a mother isn’t worth the investment of a life. Women should not invest themselves in the lives of their own children. Instead, the virtuous investment is to use taxpayer money to place all small children in institutions.
I read the article on information removal. I don’t understand. Why should I care. It looks like a ton of work, why? It seems to be designed to appeal to the paranoid.
Gordon ScottJanuary 17, 2020, 8:33 AM
Our little cheater/brother lover/bigynist is actually my representative, although I’ve yet to lay live eyes on her. She doesn’t come to north Minneapolis much. Somalis are not popular with the black people who live here.
Copper mining is not popular at all with white Minneapolis millenials, gays, lesbians and Jews, all of whom would gnaw their arm off rather than vote against her. The 100,000 or so Somalis will vote for whoever their tribal leader tells them. But it’s very popular up north in what we call the Iron Range. This area used to be solid union blue. Now it’s purple, trending red, and this could kick it over the line.
Gordon ScottJanuary 17, 2020, 8:38 AM
Oh, and if Trump held a rally in Duluth (the only town up north with an arena big enough), they would be able to cancel the election in NE Minnesota. He is very popular there. In NW Minnesota, more of a farming area, he’ll get at least 75 percent. Of course this will be balanced by Minneapolis and St Paul which will go in similar numbers for whatever the Dems put up, and the Dems do have an extensive cheating operation in the cities.
John VenletJanuary 17, 2020, 9:05 AM
In regards to the past not being dead, the house address, where I lived in for the first 8 years of my life, was, and still is, 1344 Underwood SE. It still has the same aluminum siding my dad installed in 1968, that funky gold color, on its exterior. Doesn’t look too bad, either, just a bit faded. It also still has the just over basketball sized rock with the quartz vein in it, my Dad dug up, while putting in a flower bed for my Mum, sitting in the same place along the edge of the driveway, right where he left it. I also recall the phone number. We said it verbally as Cherry 3 2897 (243-2897). I wonder if the toys my brothers and I buried behind the garage, using Dad’s old army shovel, are still buried there?
pfsmJanuary 17, 2020, 12:02 PM
I’ve lived in mining areas and growth areas. Therefore, of the four houses I lived in with my parents, only one still exists, and it’s the one that we lived in temporarily while the fourth one was being remodeled.
The first one, a cabin at Copper Canyon, Nevada, was still there, though abandoned, when I saw it in 1970. Later it was replaced by an acid pit – this is a hole in the ground filled with dilute (just a couple of percent) sulfuric acid. Scrap iron is thrown into it, and any copper content in the water plates out onto the scrap iron. Apparently this recovers enough copper from the water to be worth the trouble.
The second home was the caretaker’s residence at a Lutheran bible camp near Auburn, Washington. The property was bought by an outfit called World Vision and subsequently transferred to King County for park land. In the process every trace of the camp was removed; they did everything but burn over the land.
The third one – the one that still exists – is a little two-story place that had only an outside stairway when we lived there. My father moved it from another lot across the lake on his lowbed trailer.
The fourth one is the place we lived from about 1949; I left in 1962. It had lakefront and a couple of old-growth Douglas firs; a volleyball court that Pop put in, a secluded, shaded lawn beside the house, and a good-sized lot across the road where the contracting equipment, the shed, and the diesel fuel tank lived. When my parents moved out in the 1970’s a crazy car dealer bought it and razed the house preparatory to putting up a mansion. But that dream went up in cocaine, and now the property has a mobile home on the lake lot, and two or three newer homes on the ex-equipment lot.
So my memories are of places rather than actual buildings.
SnowgooseJanuary 17, 2020, 12:16 PM
I hate to say it folks, but she’s right. Maybe once, maybe the only time. But she’s right. Even a blind pig…
Please educate yourselves before you toss out uninformed, half-baked opinions. Not that she or most of the liberal Minnesota legislators, governor, representatives and senators deserve credit for protecting the valuable water resources of NE Minnesota. In the 1960s Reserve Mining fought tooth and nail to continue dumping mine tailings in Lake Superior until the Court finally put a halt to it. The Polymet Mine, in extracting copper, nickel and other minerals, would expose the Lake Superior Watershed to ruinous pollution from sulfide bearing waste. Superior is the largest freshwater lake in the world, very clean and incredibly beautiful. The mining waste would be a threat for hundreds of years. Sulfide bearing ore has never been safely stored.
Yes, copper is necessary for the wind turbines blighting the countryside. What a waste. Each wind tower (don’t call them wind farms, they have nothing to do with agriculture, they’re electrical power plants) requires tons of copper to come on-line. Without subsidies from the government (that’s you and me – the taxpayers) they wouldn’t exist. What do we get for this? Expensive and unreliable electricity. The US Fish and Wildlife Service, under the Obama Administration, approved the killing of up to 4200 bald eagles by wind companies without penalty. This doesn’t include golden eagles and other birds potentially at risk. Do you know what would happen to you if you killed an eagle?
Yes, this project would provide jobs in NE Minnesota. This mine would be active for a couple decades, then what? The history of mining is replete with exhausted mines empty of resources, and a legacy of pollution. We don’t owe these miners jobs, in sutu. Maybe they’ll have to relocate or begin new careers. Farming is a comparable example. I live in southern Minnesota, have for all my 69 years. All my life I have seen farmers, their children and grandchildren forced off the land by economic conditions, especially farm consolidation and production efficiency. Nobody ever said we have to create conditions to ensure those families can continue to stay on those small family farms. Minnesota mining has had a good run but the price for extending it is too steep.
SnowgooseJanuary 17, 2020, 1:46 PM
That’s supposed to be “in situ.” In place…
ckJanuary 17, 2020, 2:22 PM
Buttplug is a made up name, it’s not even his given name. He’s a weird little red diaper baby.
A good blog-site makes you think.
So I sat and thought for a bit. And I realized that all the homes/houses that I’ve dwelt in, expect one, still exist (last time I checked, and not counting strictly temporary accommodations such as my college dorm and apartments).
When I was born my parents lived with my grandparents home in Arlington MA. Still there. I took my girlfriend on a tour of the old family hangouts last year and saw that my grandfathers garden was now a two car driveway, but the house was in fine shape. The nearby house that my father rented was also there. He told me that he wanted to buy it back in 1960 but it was 25K and he could buy a house in Pembroke for 20K. That house in Arlington is now listed for one million.
My parents house in Pembroke was refurbished and another family is living there. Same basic house. I wonder if they discovered that the basement floods in the spring yet?
I spent most summers growing up on Cape Cod at my grandparents. First the cottage, then the house Gramp built when he retired. Both still there, neither are still in the family.
The only house that is gone is my original house in Weymouth, the first house I bought. Burnt to the ground sixteen years ago after a porch fire got started in an unknown origin. The Weymouth Fire Department came but they forgot to bring any water, (Summer, the tanker had been to three grass fires and only had ten seconds of water in the tank and the hydrant was dead), so the house burned to the ground. We rebuilt and from here I type this remembrance.
Larry GeigerJanuary 18, 2020, 9:00 AM
9732 N. Orr Ct., Jacksonville, FL (age 5 to 12. The address is embedded in my brain)
RAymond4-1983 (7241983)
9700 W. 92nd Terr., Overland Park, KS 66212 (my wife’s childhood home. Also embedded)
1655 Harbor Dr., Merritt Island, FL 32925 (age 12 to college)
I can quote these addresses at a moments notice. I don’t know why. These kinds of things stick in there.
VanderleunJanuary 18, 2020, 10:42 AM
Like I mentioned in the item mine was 521B Allen Avenue in (Glendale) Los Angeles. I looked it up via streetview on Google Maps and it was still there, the same structure 60 years after I stopped living there. What a money machine.
I can remember the addresses to all the houses I’ve lived in, but only one of the apartments. From time to time I look them up.
2461 Pinetree Dr. has aged quite well, although Claude O. Owen elementary is gone. Pity. The school was a wonderful example of late 50’s space age architecture, complete with fallout/tornado shelters.
My grandmother’s house, 8601 Grayfield was probably built in the late 30’s, or early ’40’s. It’s there as well, but Dearborn has been long lost to the islamic horde. More pity.
1441 Citrus, our first home here in So Cal, is now a huge apartment building.
117 Florence is still there, but it’s being surrounded by the crappy high density four story tenements that are destroying what is left of the small towns and suburbs here.
When my folks divorced in ’72 my grandmother put her life savings into the down payment of my current home. My mother worked hard for twenty five years to pay the mortgage, but her retirement went belly up, and she went broke. I moved in to pick up up the slack. I was spending the summer in West Virginia, in ’98 when my grandmother passed on. Unbeknown to me, Mom quit claimed the house to my name. I returned from WVa in August with plans on relocating there, only to find out that I was now a homeowner. It is for that reason that my wife and I have a very good life despite our own rather modest income. My gratitude runs sad and deep. This neighborhood, too is slowly changing. All the new neighbors are Korean or Chinese. There are no kids on the block at all.
870 SW 34th Street (Miami), on Bird Road (Coral Gables then, as I remember, but greater Miami now) before that, and down in Perrine before that. I remember the 8750 address because where our backyard ended the Everglades began & pretty much nothing but glades from there to Tampa, an amazing stomping ground for a pre-teenage boy.
Alas, in this case Tom Wolfe was right; some 20 years ago I was able to pick out the property in an aerial photo published in National Geographic and, as far as the eye could see, from the edge of our old property there was nothing but more houses.
Note regarding my above comment; yes I remember the 8750 address even though I, obviously, couldn’t type it right & wrote 870 instead. 😉
Snakepit KansasJanuary 18, 2020, 3:14 PM
Snowgoose,
Nicely written piece. Don’t worry about your minor spelling mishap. Almost nobody here will think twice about a fat finger…except maybe 10, who trolls off and on and occasionally has something interesting to say.
jwm,
All of my known family comes from WVA. I’ve spent a good amount of my youth there and was fortunate enough to bridge some business trips with a stop in between to go deer hunt with uncles last month. Cross Lanes and Spencer are where my ancestors lay.
ghostsniperJanuary 18, 2020, 5:29 PM
jwm sed: “This neighborhood, too is slowly changing.”
========
Has it always been this way but we never noticed because we were the ones doing the changing? But now that we are old we notice the change because other people are doing it?
Ghost, it’s always been so here. The tragic story of life in So Cal is that people arrive here, fall in love with the place, and then hate seeing it change. It’s like standing at a conveyor belt with no off button. Part of what makes it so poignant to me is being up to my eyeballs in The Lost Canyon Project. I’ve been hard at work restoring the artwork and shows of my late mad friend Pete Hampton. (You can see his stuff over at my blog.) He was born in 1940, and lived his first nine years deep in the Puente Hills above La Habra. He saw the groves, and most of the hills destroyed in the Post WWII housing boom. He would have been a mad genius in any age and time, but he was so fixated on seeing the countryside saved, that it became his sole mission in life. Ultimately, it drove him to destruction. I knew him from when I was eleven years old, and for many years we were close friends despite the difference in our ages. Perhaps I caught the germs of his madness, and his passion for nature. I’ve been immersed in his artwork, and writing for the last year and a half. I don’t know that my mental health has improved with the experience. Pete saw So Cal go from agriculture to suburbia. I’ve watched it devolve from the coolest state in America to a corrupt shithole, and rolling insane asylum.
The immigrants here, particularly the Chinese, and Koreans are not here because they fell in love with the place. They care no more for the country than than they do for the paper and plastic that wraps a meal at Jack in the Box. They’re here to exploit the system and the land for every penny they can wring out of it. And yeah, no doubt I sound like a typical cranky old fart who hates “teh progress”. Cuz that’s just what I am.
JWM
ghostsniperJanuary 19, 2020, 5:09 AM
I know John, I know.
Yesterday my son in FL sent me a map link to a new restaurant his family went to recently. I looked at the link then went to street view. And just stared at it. The old Steely Dan song, “Reelin’ In The Years” blew through my brain.
Going on 50 years ago I was driving my 66′ Mustang convertible with “pipes, throats, and tires” on that street, McGregor Blvd, with Qzzy’s “Paranoid” screamin’ through Pioneer-Jensen triaxle sound system and the roadway was saturated from an afternoon rain. The car in front of me wasn’t going fast enough and for a 17yo with places to go that just wouldn’t do, so I passed them on this 2 lane street at about 70 mph, without looking ahead adequately. I was almost around them but seen I was quickly closing in the the approaching car in the opposing lane. At the very last second I whipped that Mustang to the right, barely missing the car I was passing, back into my lane. My Mustang had 10″ wide tires on 7″ wide Cragar mags on the rear and were underinflated to avoid wearing out the centers of the treads. Swerving back into my lane I over corrected and when I tried to correct the car went sideways and blew one of those underinflated tires off the rim. Now I was in trouble. I was going, by now, 60 mph, sideways, in the opposing lane, as a line of cars were coming toward me, with 1 tire missing from the back of the car. Oh dear. There was only one way out, take it off the road, which I did – to the left. At that time, late 1972, the west (left) side of McGregor Blvd, along that stretch, was a large gladiolous (flowers) field from the road all the way back to the river bank. The flowers in early fall were about 6-8 feet tall and my Mustang mower leveled a swathe about 5′ wide and a quarter mile back into that sweet smiling jungle. I pushed down so hard on the brake peddle that I broke the steering wheel in 2 places. When I came to a stop the hood was missing, the front end destroyed, windshield shattered, and Ozzy was still wailing. No seat belts of course, and my mouth was bleeding. I just sat there for a bit.
Now, today, that thousand acre flower field is gone, replaced by countless commercial establishments along the street and behind all of that are several large higher end housing developments with multi-million dollar mansions along the river front. In fact, I designed several of those mansions and many of the lesser homes in those developments. I contributed greatly to the demise of what once was. Sometimes I grieve.
ghostsniperJanuary 19, 2020, 6:38 AM
Just reread that – littered with spelling errors.
CallmelennieJanuary 19, 2020, 7:18 AM
Zo, Gerard mein leiben, if what you are engaging in ist “Linkskreig”, then shall ve say zat your website is part of ze “Linkswaffe” or perhaps ein “Linksmacht”. Or is it merely ein solitary “Panzerlinkswagen” in ze “Drang Nach Linken”
Asking fur ein freunde
VanderleunJanuary 19, 2020, 8:13 AM
I see nuffing, I hear nuffing, and I say NUFFING!!! I vill pop off in mein Panzerlinkswagen!
CallmelennieJanuary 20, 2020, 10:30 AM
Die Krauto-logism ist die besten komedie, ja? ………… Herr Oberstlinkenfueher Vanderleun?
G706January 20, 2020, 9:21 PM
The house I grew up in still stands in the town 2 miles from where I live now. The house I lived for the first 10 years of married life is gone, smashed by a falling fir tree while we were riding the eastbound Empire Builder across North Dakota in the winter of ’08. Now I live in the 1907 farm house my Grandfather bought in 1942. And yes I still remember the address and phone number of the first place.
Real World Address for Donations, Mash Notes and Hate Mail
Gerard Van der Leun
1692 MANGROVE AVE
APT 379
Chico, Ca 95926
Green Pants Interior by Klahn
Who Am I? by Carl Sandburg
My head knocks against the stars.
My feet are on the hilltops.
My finger-tips are in the valleys and shores of universal life.
Down in the sounding foam of primal things I reach my hands and play with pebbles of destiny.
I have been to hell and back many times.
I know all about heaven, for I have talked with God.
I dabble in the blood and guts of the terrible.
I know the passionate seizure of beauty
And the marvelous rebellion of man at all signs reading “Keep Off.”
My name is Truth and I am the most elusive captive in the universe.
Duty, Beauty, Liberty, Country, Honor, Family, Faith — Plus a few simple easy to follow rules for guys
Men saw the stars at the edge of the sea
They thought great thoughts about liberty
Poets wrote down words that did fit
Writers wrote books
Thinkers thought about it
Take it where you find it
Can’t leave it alone
You will find a purpose
To carry it on
Mainly when you find it
Your heart will be strong
About it
Many’s the road I have walked upon
Many’s the hour between dusk and dawn
Many’s the time
Many’s the mile
I see it all now
Through the eyes of a child
Take it where you find it
Can’t leave it alone
You will find a purpose
To carry it on
Mainly when you find it
Your heart will be strong
About it
[Chorus]
Lost dreams and found dreams
In America
In America
In America
Lost dreams and found dreams
In America
In America
In America
And close your eyes
Leave it all for a while
Leave the world
And your worries behind
You will build on whatever is real
And wake up each day
To a new waking dream
Take it where you find it
Can’t leave it alone
You will find a purpose
To carry it on
Mainly when you find it
Your heart will be strong
About it
[Chorus]
Change, change come over
Change come over
Talkin’ about a change
Change, change
Change come over, now
Change, change, change come over
I’m gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I’m gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I’m gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I’m gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I see my light
See my light
See my shining light
I see my light
See my light
See my shining light
The Brainiac of Congress
Why I think the media organizations are in really big trouble: How can major news organizations sustain their operations with a declining viewership that’s less than a mid-size popular podcast? To make my point, let’s compare one I really like, Mark Dice, and CNN (because I’m from Atlanta) with clown Don Lemon. Don Lemon is CNN’s second highest-rated show, and he averages ~800k viewers per show; yes, you read that right. Compare that to Mark Dice, who has 1.53mm subscribers on YouTube. In a 5-10 minute video, he’ll get between 150k and 500k viewers, and sometimes even upwards to a million. This is with Dice swimming upstream against content suppression and YouTube manipulating view counts. CNN continues to pay airports. Dice provides funny commentary on real stories, while CNN provides commentary on fake stories.
Gerard Van der Leun
Comments on this entry are closed.
I read the article on information removal. I don’t understand. Why should I care. It looks like a ton of work, why? It seems to be designed to appeal to the paranoid.
Our little cheater/brother lover/bigynist is actually my representative, although I’ve yet to lay live eyes on her. She doesn’t come to north Minneapolis much. Somalis are not popular with the black people who live here.
Copper mining is not popular at all with white Minneapolis millenials, gays, lesbians and Jews, all of whom would gnaw their arm off rather than vote against her. The 100,000 or so Somalis will vote for whoever their tribal leader tells them. But it’s very popular up north in what we call the Iron Range. This area used to be solid union blue. Now it’s purple, trending red, and this could kick it over the line.
Oh, and if Trump held a rally in Duluth (the only town up north with an arena big enough), they would be able to cancel the election in NE Minnesota. He is very popular there. In NW Minnesota, more of a farming area, he’ll get at least 75 percent. Of course this will be balanced by Minneapolis and St Paul which will go in similar numbers for whatever the Dems put up, and the Dems do have an extensive cheating operation in the cities.
In regards to the past not being dead, the house address, where I lived in for the first 8 years of my life, was, and still is, 1344 Underwood SE. It still has the same aluminum siding my dad installed in 1968, that funky gold color, on its exterior. Doesn’t look too bad, either, just a bit faded. It also still has the just over basketball sized rock with the quartz vein in it, my Dad dug up, while putting in a flower bed for my Mum, sitting in the same place along the edge of the driveway, right where he left it. I also recall the phone number. We said it verbally as Cherry 3 2897 (243-2897). I wonder if the toys my brothers and I buried behind the garage, using Dad’s old army shovel, are still buried there?
I’ve lived in mining areas and growth areas. Therefore, of the four houses I lived in with my parents, only one still exists, and it’s the one that we lived in temporarily while the fourth one was being remodeled.
The first one, a cabin at Copper Canyon, Nevada, was still there, though abandoned, when I saw it in 1970. Later it was replaced by an acid pit – this is a hole in the ground filled with dilute (just a couple of percent) sulfuric acid. Scrap iron is thrown into it, and any copper content in the water plates out onto the scrap iron. Apparently this recovers enough copper from the water to be worth the trouble.
The second home was the caretaker’s residence at a Lutheran bible camp near Auburn, Washington. The property was bought by an outfit called World Vision and subsequently transferred to King County for park land. In the process every trace of the camp was removed; they did everything but burn over the land.
The third one – the one that still exists – is a little two-story place that had only an outside stairway when we lived there. My father moved it from another lot across the lake on his lowbed trailer.
The fourth one is the place we lived from about 1949; I left in 1962. It had lakefront and a couple of old-growth Douglas firs; a volleyball court that Pop put in, a secluded, shaded lawn beside the house, and a good-sized lot across the road where the contracting equipment, the shed, and the diesel fuel tank lived. When my parents moved out in the 1970’s a crazy car dealer bought it and razed the house preparatory to putting up a mansion. But that dream went up in cocaine, and now the property has a mobile home on the lake lot, and two or three newer homes on the ex-equipment lot.
So my memories are of places rather than actual buildings.
I hate to say it folks, but she’s right. Maybe once, maybe the only time. But she’s right. Even a blind pig…
Please educate yourselves before you toss out uninformed, half-baked opinions. Not that she or most of the liberal Minnesota legislators, governor, representatives and senators deserve credit for protecting the valuable water resources of NE Minnesota. In the 1960s Reserve Mining fought tooth and nail to continue dumping mine tailings in Lake Superior until the Court finally put a halt to it. The Polymet Mine, in extracting copper, nickel and other minerals, would expose the Lake Superior Watershed to ruinous pollution from sulfide bearing waste. Superior is the largest freshwater lake in the world, very clean and incredibly beautiful. The mining waste would be a threat for hundreds of years. Sulfide bearing ore has never been safely stored.
Yes, copper is necessary for the wind turbines blighting the countryside. What a waste. Each wind tower (don’t call them wind farms, they have nothing to do with agriculture, they’re electrical power plants) requires tons of copper to come on-line. Without subsidies from the government (that’s you and me – the taxpayers) they wouldn’t exist. What do we get for this? Expensive and unreliable electricity. The US Fish and Wildlife Service, under the Obama Administration, approved the killing of up to 4200 bald eagles by wind companies without penalty. This doesn’t include golden eagles and other birds potentially at risk. Do you know what would happen to you if you killed an eagle?
Yes, this project would provide jobs in NE Minnesota. This mine would be active for a couple decades, then what? The history of mining is replete with exhausted mines empty of resources, and a legacy of pollution. We don’t owe these miners jobs, in sutu. Maybe they’ll have to relocate or begin new careers. Farming is a comparable example. I live in southern Minnesota, have for all my 69 years. All my life I have seen farmers, their children and grandchildren forced off the land by economic conditions, especially farm consolidation and production efficiency. Nobody ever said we have to create conditions to ensure those families can continue to stay on those small family farms. Minnesota mining has had a good run but the price for extending it is too steep.
That’s supposed to be “in situ.” In place…
Buttplug is a made up name, it’s not even his given name. He’s a weird little red diaper baby.
A good blog-site makes you think.
So I sat and thought for a bit. And I realized that all the homes/houses that I’ve dwelt in, expect one, still exist (last time I checked, and not counting strictly temporary accommodations such as my college dorm and apartments).
When I was born my parents lived with my grandparents home in Arlington MA. Still there. I took my girlfriend on a tour of the old family hangouts last year and saw that my grandfathers garden was now a two car driveway, but the house was in fine shape. The nearby house that my father rented was also there. He told me that he wanted to buy it back in 1960 but it was 25K and he could buy a house in Pembroke for 20K. That house in Arlington is now listed for one million.
My parents house in Pembroke was refurbished and another family is living there. Same basic house. I wonder if they discovered that the basement floods in the spring yet?
I spent most summers growing up on Cape Cod at my grandparents. First the cottage, then the house Gramp built when he retired. Both still there, neither are still in the family.
The only house that is gone is my original house in Weymouth, the first house I bought. Burnt to the ground sixteen years ago after a porch fire got started in an unknown origin. The Weymouth Fire Department came but they forgot to bring any water, (Summer, the tanker had been to three grass fires and only had ten seconds of water in the tank and the hydrant was dead), so the house burned to the ground. We rebuilt and from here I type this remembrance.
9732 N. Orr Ct., Jacksonville, FL (age 5 to 12. The address is embedded in my brain)
RAymond4-1983 (7241983)
9700 W. 92nd Terr., Overland Park, KS 66212 (my wife’s childhood home. Also embedded)
1655 Harbor Dr., Merritt Island, FL 32925 (age 12 to college)
I can quote these addresses at a moments notice. I don’t know why. These kinds of things stick in there.
Like I mentioned in the item mine was 521B Allen Avenue in (Glendale) Los Angeles. I looked it up via streetview on Google Maps and it was still there, the same structure 60 years after I stopped living there. What a money machine.
I can remember the addresses to all the houses I’ve lived in, but only one of the apartments. From time to time I look them up.
2461 Pinetree Dr. has aged quite well, although Claude O. Owen elementary is gone. Pity. The school was a wonderful example of late 50’s space age architecture, complete with fallout/tornado shelters.
My grandmother’s house, 8601 Grayfield was probably built in the late 30’s, or early ’40’s. It’s there as well, but Dearborn has been long lost to the islamic horde. More pity.
1441 Citrus, our first home here in So Cal, is now a huge apartment building.
117 Florence is still there, but it’s being surrounded by the crappy high density four story tenements that are destroying what is left of the small towns and suburbs here.
When my folks divorced in ’72 my grandmother put her life savings into the down payment of my current home. My mother worked hard for twenty five years to pay the mortgage, but her retirement went belly up, and she went broke. I moved in to pick up up the slack. I was spending the summer in West Virginia, in ’98 when my grandmother passed on. Unbeknown to me, Mom quit claimed the house to my name. I returned from WVa in August with plans on relocating there, only to find out that I was now a homeowner. It is for that reason that my wife and I have a very good life despite our own rather modest income. My gratitude runs sad and deep. This neighborhood, too is slowly changing. All the new neighbors are Korean or Chinese. There are no kids on the block at all.
JWM
870 SW 34th Street (Miami), on Bird Road (Coral Gables then, as I remember, but greater Miami now) before that, and down in Perrine before that. I remember the 8750 address because where our backyard ended the Everglades began & pretty much nothing but glades from there to Tampa, an amazing stomping ground for a pre-teenage boy.
Alas, in this case Tom Wolfe was right; some 20 years ago I was able to pick out the property in an aerial photo published in National Geographic and, as far as the eye could see, from the edge of our old property there was nothing but more houses.
Note regarding my above comment; yes I remember the 8750 address even though I, obviously, couldn’t type it right & wrote 870 instead. 😉
Snowgoose,
Nicely written piece. Don’t worry about your minor spelling mishap. Almost nobody here will think twice about a fat finger…except maybe 10, who trolls off and on and occasionally has something interesting to say.
jwm,
All of my known family comes from WVA. I’ve spent a good amount of my youth there and was fortunate enough to bridge some business trips with a stop in between to go deer hunt with uncles last month. Cross Lanes and Spencer are where my ancestors lay.
jwm sed: “This neighborhood, too is slowly changing.”
========
Has it always been this way but we never noticed because we were the ones doing the changing? But now that we are old we notice the change because other people are doing it?
Ghost, it’s always been so here. The tragic story of life in So Cal is that people arrive here, fall in love with the place, and then hate seeing it change. It’s like standing at a conveyor belt with no off button. Part of what makes it so poignant to me is being up to my eyeballs in The Lost Canyon Project. I’ve been hard at work restoring the artwork and shows of my late mad friend Pete Hampton. (You can see his stuff over at my blog.) He was born in 1940, and lived his first nine years deep in the Puente Hills above La Habra. He saw the groves, and most of the hills destroyed in the Post WWII housing boom. He would have been a mad genius in any age and time, but he was so fixated on seeing the countryside saved, that it became his sole mission in life. Ultimately, it drove him to destruction. I knew him from when I was eleven years old, and for many years we were close friends despite the difference in our ages. Perhaps I caught the germs of his madness, and his passion for nature. I’ve been immersed in his artwork, and writing for the last year and a half. I don’t know that my mental health has improved with the experience. Pete saw So Cal go from agriculture to suburbia. I’ve watched it devolve from the coolest state in America to a corrupt shithole, and rolling insane asylum.
The immigrants here, particularly the Chinese, and Koreans are not here because they fell in love with the place. They care no more for the country than than they do for the paper and plastic that wraps a meal at Jack in the Box. They’re here to exploit the system and the land for every penny they can wring out of it. And yeah, no doubt I sound like a typical cranky old fart who hates “teh progress”. Cuz that’s just what I am.
JWM
I know John, I know.
Yesterday my son in FL sent me a map link to a new restaurant his family went to recently. I looked at the link then went to street view. And just stared at it. The old Steely Dan song, “Reelin’ In The Years” blew through my brain.
Going on 50 years ago I was driving my 66′ Mustang convertible with “pipes, throats, and tires” on that street, McGregor Blvd, with Qzzy’s “Paranoid” screamin’ through Pioneer-Jensen triaxle sound system and the roadway was saturated from an afternoon rain. The car in front of me wasn’t going fast enough and for a 17yo with places to go that just wouldn’t do, so I passed them on this 2 lane street at about 70 mph, without looking ahead adequately. I was almost around them but seen I was quickly closing in the the approaching car in the opposing lane. At the very last second I whipped that Mustang to the right, barely missing the car I was passing, back into my lane. My Mustang had 10″ wide tires on 7″ wide Cragar mags on the rear and were underinflated to avoid wearing out the centers of the treads. Swerving back into my lane I over corrected and when I tried to correct the car went sideways and blew one of those underinflated tires off the rim. Now I was in trouble. I was going, by now, 60 mph, sideways, in the opposing lane, as a line of cars were coming toward me, with 1 tire missing from the back of the car. Oh dear. There was only one way out, take it off the road, which I did – to the left. At that time, late 1972, the west (left) side of McGregor Blvd, along that stretch, was a large gladiolous (flowers) field from the road all the way back to the river bank. The flowers in early fall were about 6-8 feet tall and my Mustang mower leveled a swathe about 5′ wide and a quarter mile back into that sweet smiling jungle. I pushed down so hard on the brake peddle that I broke the steering wheel in 2 places. When I came to a stop the hood was missing, the front end destroyed, windshield shattered, and Ozzy was still wailing. No seat belts of course, and my mouth was bleeding. I just sat there for a bit.
Now, today, that thousand acre flower field is gone, replaced by countless commercial establishments along the street and behind all of that are several large higher end housing developments with multi-million dollar mansions along the river front. In fact, I designed several of those mansions and many of the lesser homes in those developments. I contributed greatly to the demise of what once was. Sometimes I grieve.
Just reread that – littered with spelling errors.
Zo, Gerard mein leiben, if what you are engaging in ist “Linkskreig”, then shall ve say zat your website is part of ze “Linkswaffe” or perhaps ein “Linksmacht”. Or is it merely ein solitary “Panzerlinkswagen” in ze “Drang Nach Linken”
Asking fur ein freunde
I see nuffing, I hear nuffing, and I say NUFFING!!! I vill pop off in mein Panzerlinkswagen!
Die Krauto-logism ist die besten komedie, ja? ………… Herr Oberstlinkenfueher Vanderleun?
The house I grew up in still stands in the town 2 miles from where I live now. The house I lived for the first 10 years of married life is gone, smashed by a falling fir tree while we were riding the eastbound Empire Builder across North Dakota in the winter of ’08. Now I live in the 1907 farm house my Grandfather bought in 1942. And yes I still remember the address and phone number of the first place.