The hits kept coming, until they didn't: "But what about Howard Sprague?"

Remember caption contests?

This one originally was a BEER MONEY column for the pre-merger Tribune, to be greeted by dozens of yokels picketing the newspaper in protest of multi-syllable words. It was titled "After Andy, the deluge," and was published on July 23, 2009. Following is the retitled version from the blog, updated on Jul9 19, 2012. Note that 3rd district councilman Price lost to Greg Phipps in the 2011 "Democratic" primary, with Phipps going on to win the seat in the general election. Also note that mangled syntax aside, and in retrospect, Price's point about jail overcrowding was spot on.

Regime change ... when, exactly?

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ON THE AVENUES: But what about Howard Sprague?

(2012 Preface: After publishing the original version of this column a couple weeks back, I decided to go back through and update it for the year 2012. Part of the reason for doing so is that it is almost impossible for me to remain satisfied with something previously written. Another is that there always are new readers. And, finally, I like to make ON THE AVENUES the court of record).

When confused and uncertain, we generally recoil from the challenges of the future, reverting instead to comforting visions of one or the other redemptive halcyons from a past viewed with rose-tinted hindsight, and accordingly, cultural mythology tends to supplant rational thought, not buttress it.

This being a presidential election year, we can expect reams of historical revisionism masquerading as irrefutable argumentation. America’s Christian theocracy is particularly adept at such pipe-dream panaceas, its televangelistic hawkers mounting gleaming Chinese-made soapboxes to beseech us: Turn back the hands of time, all the way to a state of being that never existed in the first place … and don’t forget your checkbook, sinner.

Nostalgia is a vehicle powered by the warm fuzzies of selective memory. There’s nothing necessarily wrong about that, at least until comfortable reveries are mistaken for public policy, which brings us to an otherwise forgotten New Albany city council meeting that took place three years ago.

During a brief and typically ephemeral discussion of community policing “wants and needs,” the since deposed 3rd district councilman Steve Price launched into a meandering tangent addressing his views of modern methods of law enforcement. Of course, untangling Price’s stream-of consciousness syntax was a constant challenge throughout his eight years of chronic council underachievement, but at the time, his point was relatively clear.

He was lamenting the disappearance of old-fashioned, user-friendly civic drunk tanks, those helpful domiciles formerly providing wayward inebriates a warm place to sleep and voluminous black coffee before releasing them into waiting streets (and revolving barstools) the following morning.

Price concluded that nowadays, such pitiably harmless transgressors actually are compelled to pay their way out of jail; lacking cash, their incarceration contributes to the overcrowding problem therein. His former council colleague Jack Messer, a full-time police officer, asked Price to explain how the city might better handle such time and space continuums, and Price responded with this bit of sage advice:

"We need to do things like Andy used to do 'em."

---

So, to which person named Andy was the ex-councilman referring?

Was it Andy Warhol? That’s unlikely, because the Ruthenian-American pop artist certainly was too avant-garde for a down-home devotee of Dave Ramsey.

Maybe Andy Kaufman, the late and lamented inter-gender wrestling champion and performance artist? Obviously, too ironic.

Andy Roddick? He’s too athletic for New Albany, and in the wrong sport.

Andy Dick? Too clever by half.

Andy Capp? Too impenetrably English.

Andy Garcia? Too confusingly ethnic.

No, it’s none of the above, because given Price’s preferred homilies, paranoiac utterances and ceaseless non sequiturs, there could be only one answer.

He meant the fictional Sheriff Andy Taylor of Mayberry, as played on television by the late comedian Andy Griffith in his eponymous show, which was produced back in the Golden Age of Post-War Faux-Paneled Imperial America, a time period coinciding with Price’s blissful youth and visions of Otis Campbell’s nightly resting place dancing soothingly in his head.

I recalled Price’s words in the wake of the iconic Griffith’s recent passing, as otherwise sensible people immediately focused their attention on hazy objects depicted in the nation’s rear view mirror and advocated a “return” to the Mayberry ethos, which would provide workable solutions to the pressing problems of our troubled times, while recapturing lost innocence, albeit it for the small price of forgetting everything we’ve learned since kindergarten.

---

Unfortunately, Price never has been alone in suggesting that a city like New Albany in the milieu of the Internet, crystal meth, iPhones, EPA sewage treatment decrees and state-imposed starvation budgets can be governed according to lessons learned from a television series originally broadcast in black and white, featuring a folksy sheriff in a rural town, with a switchboard operator listening on party lines, and a habitual vandal whose repertoire does not extend beyond rocks thrown at picture windows.

Like so many others, I watched The Andy Griffith Show as a child, but then something happened to me. 

I grew up. 

Four decades have passed since the series went off the air, and in light of experience, I see Mayberry a bit differently. 

Sheriff Taylor’s town didn’t boast much in the way of ethnic and religious diversity, did it? In fact, it was the era of enforced segregation in the South, and there wasn’t an African-American or Hispanic to be seen. 

Most of the women depicted on the series were in the kitchen frying chicken or baking peach cobbler, and Helen Crump’s job as schoolteacher was about the highest point on the professional ladder for a female. Suffrage might have been bragged about, but was it truly universal?

Do you really think any of those toilets led to a sewage treatment system? Rather, think of leaky pipes emptying into yonder creek, and maybe a septic tank or three. Television news was a monopoly of three major networks, newspapers toed a Democratic or Republican line, and American foreign policy strove to support “our” murderous tinhorn dictators so as to forestall Communist-installed versions of the same.

And then, there’s the demographic reality we always neglect in places like Mayberry in the 1960’s: Young and talented people left town in droves, as soon as they possibly could, leaving older citizens and second-raters to navigate a decline into irrelevance, something that should be all too obvious to New Albanians surveying the local scene in 2012.

Mayberry was, and is, an entertaining place, but like Andy Taylor himself, it was, and it remains, entirely imaginary. If pressed, we might find other useful role models from the era: Rooster Cogburn, Captain Kirk and maybe even Puff the Magic Dragon.

But seriously, in the year 2012 – how does any of it help us?

The farewell tour continues: "Ilmatyynyalukseni on täynnä ankeriaita," from March 20, 2010.

As NA Confidential prepares to ride off into the sunset, I'll be reposting selected bits from the past. This one's from the spring of 2010. Already I was starting to "know" better, but my daddy raised me stubborn. Too bad for me.  

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Ilmatyynyalukseni on täynnä ankeriaita.

Excuse the title. I've been looking for an excuse to use obscure linguistics in a title. Basque was my first choice ... but ...

I can appreciate where you’re coming from. Both of you.

You’ve landed here only recently, and in the course of surveying the landscape, there have been judgments based on first impressions. Some of these will survive scrutiny, others not. That’s the classic, enduring beauty of the learning curve.

I’ve lived here in Floyd County my whole life, and have always had a mailing address within ten or so miles of City-County Building, but because my residency in the city of New Albany only began in 1993, I’m considered an outsider by many (mostly older, mostly bitter) New Albanians. Consequently, I know what it’s like to arrive here and be childishly derided for not being FROM here.

The ones who never accomplished anything will always resent you for your talent, your skill, and most of all, your mobility. If they perceive you being of temporary assistance to them in their goals of universal doltery and egalitarian misery, they’ll lionize you until you think for yourself. Then it will be over, and you’ll feel predictably dirty the next morning.

It’s frustrating, but ultimately, it’s their loss. They can do nothing to improve the planet. You can. The question is: Who wins?

Doers … or delusionals?

My involvement with the eternal morass of New Albanian politics dates back about six years. Before that, I was busy with the original pub and brewery on the north side. When I remarried, we bought a house on Spring Street, and began absorbing contemporary ways of thinking and planning as they pertain to historic urban cores. All I could see was an underutilized, savaged doughnut hole. I had to learn why it had happened, and how best to rectify it.

In the beginning, I looked around and thought I understood the lay of the land. I spoke out accordingly. As I met people who were outside my comfort zone of the Grant Line pub, and who had put much more thought into matters like this than I had, it began to occur to me that my initial snap judgments were utterly and embarrassingly mistaken. Much had been misread on my part, which is understandable given my inexperience.

Too bad I spouted before I grokked, but so it goes. You live, and you learn.

In New Albany, for better or worse, the more one learns, the murkier it gets, and the more affairs become resistant to glib, simple answers of the sort that satisfy the populist in all of us. We want these sort of answers, and badly. It’s easier to believe them and to range outside self-imposed cultural boxes. Unfortunately, they’re seldom true.

Obfuscation, self-destructiveness and perhaps plain ol’ simple insanity are parts of everyday life here, maybe more so than most suspect. So it is that sometimes, you get off on the wrong foot and miss things. It’s difficult to see what’s progressive, and what isn’t. Some times, one must shrug and accept the daily torrential abuse for what it is: Fear, and loathing, and on occasion, chemical imbalance.

In the end, it comes down to this: If you’re smart enough to know better, you’re obliged to ... know better. 

To know. 

That’s the key word. In a city that by and large hates knowledge, hates achievement, and hates itself, knowing is the only conceivable coping mechanism.

The dark side in NA? It’s not the place to be. Trust me. The capable mustn't be divided by pettiness and intemperance, because there are too damned few of us.

BEER MONEY: New Albany Is A State of Mind (2009).

As noted in today's previous post, my two-years-and-five-month run as a guest columnist at the pre-merger New Albany Tribune began in 2009. This was the very first column, which ran on January 10. The photo was my official newspaper photo, as attached here to a 2010 column about something I'm no longer allowed to address openly, hence the "redacted" discretion. 

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New Albany Is A State of Mind

You might recall that roughly 2,500 years ago, there lived the Greek philosopher called Socrates, a man whose dogged pursuit of knowledge endeared him to succeeding generations of admirers, although not to his fellow Athenians. In fact, most of his neighbors considered him not only an annoyance, but a heretic, too, and if there’s anything to be gleaned from reading history, it’s that there’s always time enough for a priest to throw another heretic on the fire.

So goes the eternal tyranny of the majority, and yet thanks to Plato’s writings, we now recognize Socrates as a peerless moral and social critic. Appropriately, he has been honored by the tag of gadfly, a term for describing “people who upset the status quo by posing upsetting or novel questions, or just being an irritant.”

That’s my kind of guy, although naturally gadflies are detested by small, non-expandable minds of the sort that are the norm in human societies the world over, and who assign themselves the task of protecting the status quo whether or not it is sensible.

Accordingly, you can picture the scene in the agora, with Socrates and his small band of youthful followers avidly questioning accepted beliefs, while the “little people” of Athens hover nearby, muttering, and eavesdropping on the dialogues.

These many centuries later, I can almost hear the anonymous bellow from behind the adjacent stone wall, followed by the pitter-patter of fleeing sandals:

“Hey, Socrates, if you aren’t happy here, then why don’t you get the hell out and leave us alone?”

Socrates stayed, of course, and was made to pay dearly for it. During a period of political upheaval, he was put on trial and convicted of corrupting the morals of Athenian youth. Offered the opportunity to devise his own punishment, the philosopher wryly suggested that his “sentence” include a regular monetary stipend and free meals for life.

Instead, the humorless judges gave Socrates the choice of exile or death, and he opted for the latter, drinking the hemlock, cementing his martyrdom, and proving that in ancient Greece as in modern-day America, folks don’t take kindly to having their premises examined, not to mention taxed … but let’s leave Their Man Mitch’s properties and proprieties out of it, shall we?

---

And so there I was, cradling a craft-brewed pint of beer within the cozy confines of Connor’s Place and reflecting on the dubious merits of “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten,” when suddenly that nagging, familiar existential question reared up and bit me … again.

“New Albany is a state of mind … but whose?

Numerous other pressing questions have come and gone since I was a youngster growing up in Georgetown, experiencing the sort of small town ambience remembered with warm fuzziness primarily by those who never actually lived through the crushing boredom of it all, queries like, “Where can we get served?” and “Is it really cheating if the teacher doesn’t catch you?”

But nowadays the tough questions keep getting harder to answer, like this one:

Have you ever been standing in the supermarket, trying to fathom the industrial process bakeries use to remove the flavor and texture from white bread in order to make it marketable to the terminally fearful among us, when suddenly a remarkably obese woman down the aisle starts screaming obscenities at her own helpless children, and you realize that all this prattle about free people making informed choices to suit their individual needs must be coming from those who’ve never driven an automobile through New Albany’s decaying streets, artfully dodging listless vagrants, texting drivers and the occasional neglected, doomed dog or cat?

---

In 2008, Barack Obama enunciated “change” and “hope” as electoral mantras, and predictably, local voters went big for Obama’s befuddled Republican opponent. Therein lies a glimpse of New Albany’s personalized 800-lb gorilla, and the civic psychosis that so degrades our future prospects as a city. It is our persistent failure to muster any degree of comprehension as to what is occurring in the larger world outside the municipal devil we know, and to imagine another way of life.

As an example, consider the simple notion of riding a bicycle in an urban setting. Doing so in New Albany can be profoundly dangerous, in part because of the gaping potholes, and more importantly, as previously observed, because local drivers are notoriously unskilled and inattentive. However, the problem goes beyond an absence of empathy.

Numerous New Albanian drivers actually can’t imagine riding a bicycle, and moreover, they can’t imagine life outside the confines of an automobile – and if they can’t imagine something, how on earth could anyone else?

To them, anyone who is able to imagine biking and also to achieve it must be mistaken or defective, and poses a vague threat. Any person riding a bicycle surely must be too poor to afford a car, or is restricted to biking owing to mental illness, a DUI conviction, bad personal credit or contrarian tendencies.

In other words, a heretic. Do I hear the sound of flicking Bics?

In this and related matters, the New Albany Syndrome is a very real and self-defeating malady, and one of my goals in life is to somehow locate the source of the dysfunction and drive a stake composed of equal parts modernity and rationality straight through its heart so that future generations just might enjoy a better place to live and work.

Socrates had it right: The unexamined life is not worth living … and the examination begins now.

From BEER MONEY at the Tribune to ON THE AVENUES at NAC -- how my weekly column came to be.

In response to an inquiry, here's a repeat (26 December 2016) of the story about how ON THE AVENUES came to be. NA Confidential is winding down and will soon cease operations in the current format, although there'll be an archive at my new web site, currently under construction.

ON THE AVENUES will reappear at the next joint, so stay tuned.

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NA Confidential was born in October, 2004. Almost 11,000 posts later, the experience sometimes verges on the coherent, but at the start I had little idea how to proceed, beyond writing for posterity about what was happening right here in New Albany.

Consequently, after five years of beating the bushes, my big break beckoned as 2008 drew to a close.

New Tribune guest columnist in January. (December 8, 2008)

Last Friday afternoon I met with Steve Kozarovich, publisher of the New Albany Tribune, and agreed to write a 900-word column on a weekly basis, beginning Thursday, January 8, and running on Thursdays thereafter. It is a (modest) for-pay gig, joining paid columns I write biweekly for LEO and quarterly for Food and Dining magazine.

This announcement is provided as a courtesy to the publisher, who now has the opportunity to begin fielding complaints before the column actually appears.

From January 2009 until February 2011, I met 111 consecutive "Beer Money" column deadlines at $40 a pop, then decided to run for city council, necessitating a suspension of my weekly Tribune contribution.

Today's last Tribune column for a while: "Let’s all say ‘yes’ for change." (February 17, 2011)

 ... And so, here's the finale ... for now. I expect to be back (a) after a primary loss, or (b) after a general election loss, or (c) after a general election victory. After all, there is a precedent for public officials (Ed Clere) writing a weekly column, is there not?

BAYLOR: Let’s all say ‘yes’ for change

This will be my last column in The Tribune for a while, and there’s a reason for the hiatus.

I've decided to take a dram of my own medicine and file to run for city council in the coming primary — yes, as a Democrat, and for an at-large seat.

Because this very newspaper has a policy against permitting its columnists to conduct campaigns in print, and actually enforces it more often than the city’s own long neglected codes, I must return temporarily to the realm of the blogosphere.

And in the blogosphere I was destined to remain, because concurrent with my hiatus, Community Newspaper Holdings Inc. cashiered Kozarovich and combined our local newspapers into a new entity, the News and Tribune. It was to be headquartered in Jeffersonville, instituting a Clark County-centric focus that has become steadily more annoying to New Albanians during the years since, and it caused my column to walk the plank.

This just in: Merger kills a newspaper column. (May 23, 2011)

Damn, I knew I should have actually won that election ... then I could still have a newspaper column, just like Ed Clere, although I'm told that the beer column idea is still on the table for the Spectrum section.

The now departed Coach K used the word "hiatus" prior to my council bid. I had to fetch a thesaurus to know what he meant. Now, somewhere, he and Lucy Van Pelt are holding the football aloft and laughing.

Just my luck. Who'd have known that Linus's older sister worked for the Retirement Systems of Alabama?

Is it time to go underground, yet?

To Matt Nash: It's all yours now. Torture the troglodytes often, will you ... and try to give us some New Albany news, okay? The Clark County stuff's already getting old.

Right now, the regular columnist spots are full. I can't pick up anyone else and still get in letters, cheers and jeers and any editorials in a timely manner.

I still had to drop another columnist (McDonald) on top of when you and Kelley Curran decided to run for office because space became less available after the merger. I'm also trying to keep a balance between Clark County folks like Dodd and Harbeson and Floyd County writers like Amy and Nash. And, of course, I have a freelancer/stringer budget to worry about.

It's possible a spot would open up in the future and I'll let you know if that happens.

Shea Van Hoy

I spent a few months licking wounds and plotting revenge against the perpetrators, then realized there was much yet to say and write. The answer was to DIY, in this blog forum.

The newspaper's dead and buried, so welcome to electronica. (May 26, 2011)

Beginning last week, my Thursday column was reinstituted in this space. The column ran in the News and Tribune from January 2009 until February 2011, when it went on "hiatus" during my run for council. Earlier this week, I learned that the hiatus had been transformed into permanent absence owing to changes in the newspaper's structure.

This just in: Merger kills a newspaper column.

As a writer, deadlines have a wonderful way of concentrating thought, and so it is my desire to get back into the weekly column habit. This blog's the place for it until something else comes along.

Furthermore, conceding that the newspaper's current staff will disagree with me, the consolidation of two editions into one of the same size inevitably will have the effect of reducing coverage of New Albany (and to an extent, Floyd County) affairs. Stated simply, New Albany has lost its newspaper.

"Our newspaper is dead -- long live the Internet", or something like that.

For the time being, and perhaps for a long time to come, this blog is more important than ever before. While I don't have the time to transform NAC into a comprehensive news and commentary entity, repositioning my weekly column and moving it from Thursday newsprint to Thursday bandwidth is attainable, so that's how we'll start the ball rolling. In conjunction with social media, it's enough for now. I am aware of like-minded ideas for on-line publishing in the community, and will continue monitoring these in the hope that something comes to fruition.

But what to call this new column?

Later this morning, my Thursday column will reappear here. The old "Beer Money" tag, which referred to the limited usefulness of the bare farthings grudgingly paid by the Retirement Systems of Alabama to guest columnists in publications like One Southern Indiana Newspaper, no longer makes sense, seeing as remuneration has completely disappeared.

Instead, my new Thursday column will openly hearken back to the long-departed days of independent, truly local journalism in New Albany: "On the Avenues." Some of you will know what I mean by this. Look for the Green Mouse to make appearances, too.

In the days of my youth, back when the Tribune actually mattered, a lifer named Jack Powers was the staff do-it-all. He covered the social and political waterfronts in his column, "On the Avenues," with the help of an all-purpose editorial source and assistant, the so-called Green Mouse.

My column honors these quaint and mostly forgotten aspects of local journalism in New Albany.

BOOKS: "Capitalism & Disability," by Marta Russell.

My friend Loren is COO at Sweet Behavior LLC, and he mentioned this book a while back. I bought it immediately and read these essays earlier in the month. 

I can tell you is made an impression, and before the reference to capitalism is dismissed out of hand, as many of you will do, I'd recommend at least reading the publisher's tout here. 

There's quite a bit to this. 

Capitalism & Disability

This book comprises a collection of groundbreaking writings by Marta Russell on the nature of disability and oppression under capitalism. 

Spread out over many years and many different publications, the late author and activist Marta Russell wrote a number of groundbreaking and insightful essays on the nature of disability and oppression under capitalism. In this volume, Russell’s various essays are brought together in one place in order to provide a useful and expansive resource to those interested in better understanding the ways in which the modern phenomenon of disability is shaped by capitalist economic and social relations. The essays range in analysis from the theoretical to the topical, including but not limited to: the emergence of disability as a “human category” rooted in the rise of industrial capitalism and the transformation of the conditions of work, family, and society corresponding thereto; a critique of the shortcomings of a purely “civil rights approach” to addressing the persistence of disability oppression in the economic sphere, with a particular focus on the legacy of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990; an examination of the changing position of disabled people within the overall system of capitalist production utilizing the Marxist economic concepts of the reserve army of the unemployed, the labor theory of value, and the exploitation of wage-labor; the effects of neoliberal capitalist policies on the living conditions and social position of disabled people as it pertains to welfare, income assistance, health care, and other social security programs; imperialism and war as a factor in the further oppression and immiseration of disabled people within the United States and globally; and the need to build unity against the divisive tendencies which hide the common economic interest shared between disabled people and the often highly-exploited direct care workers who provide services to the former.

The godshuizen of Brugge "offer a vision of a person-centered environment for elderly living today."

A short time back I posted about ways to help the elderly live without nursing homes and institutional settings.  

Grow Old with Me

Consider this one a corollary.

From Our House to “Godshuis”, by Thomas Dougherty and Dr. Randall Smith (original source: The Catholic World Report)

If the recent coronavirus pandemic has revealed anything to us, it should be how badly we house many of our elderly. But “house” is perhaps not the right term. Instead of “housing” them, we too often warehouse them.

Today, the elderly leave society when they enter an elderly facility, too often to be forgotten by the community. It is this separation perhaps more than any other single factor that contributes to the suffering of the elderly today ...

The conclusion:

The godshuizen of Bruges, as well as many others around Belgium and the Netherlands, offer a vision of a person-centered environment for elderly living today. God’s-houses could be simply constructed and built on small parcels of urban land as they were centuries ago. Small individual homes for elderly living are already being offered as an alternative to institutional nursing home care.

Who will Trump's cultists blame when they finally understand they've been conned?

(Be aware: NAC is going away soon)

Donald Trump's entire "career" in and out of politics has been one long, sustained confidence trick. The owners of capital "get it," and shill with enthusiasm because they can only gain from the con man's game.

Generally speaking, when the victims of a con game realize they've been duped, they're angry. It may or may not be the con man's fault, but it's not theirs; no one likes looking in the mirror and confronting their own gullibility.

Politically, it's never been about Trump's narcissistic grifting. Rather, it's about wealth consolidating its power and enhancing its vampiric capital accumulation as the populace is distracted by the grift; and, it's about those Americans, primarily white, who've embraced Trump's con game with open arms.


When they realize they've been had, as inevitably they will, who's up to be blamed? It won't be Trump himself, as rejecting a deity is hard work, and he'll be exonerated by having been "stabbed in the back" or some such nonsense.

It won't be the con man's disappointed victims, swindled and left to founder, because the mirror's cracked by the weight of the dominant caste racism and gibberish.

I think most of us already have a suspicion about the answer to this question, and it's not a pleasant one. In a collective sense, why do humans cherish being conned? Now if you'll excuse me, I have a pitchfork to sharpen.

---

This "Never Trumper" is hilarious. She cannot countenance the grift, but on the other hand, because providing health care and other basic public services would be both unAmerican and unfair to the accumulators of capital, she just might change her mind. 

Yawn.   

Sorry, I don’t mean to make a pro or con statement about what should happen with health care. I’m saying that some version of socialized medicine exists in most European countries, and I think we would agree that they’re all democracies.

I didn’t suggest that the imposition of socialized medicine was somehow going to end our democracy. I merely said that it was going to usher in things that were irreversible that were not going to be good for our country.

A change is coming to the model village, and NA Confidential is winding down.

For several years a division of Google, Blogger hasn't ever been a particularly relevant (or efficient) communications platform from a writer's standpoint. Maybe it was okay briefly when it began back in 1999, or whenever it appeared. So was Bill Clinton, for a few minutes at least.

My only allegiance to Blogger all along has been the low cost of writing (zero), which is a good thing for a blog that has yet to earn its first penny in revenues. 

As it stands right now, the latest Blogger update has incapacitated NA Confidential by denying me the use of labels. These are important to keep things straight. Think of an old school file cabinet with infinite file folder capacity but only a finite ability to mark the folders. Soon it's chaos. Blogger already had a label limit that I never knew about because there was no reason to care for so long as processes worked.

Now they don't. The "matching suggestions" label finder is beached and inoperative, the assumption being I've exceeded my label limit, but there no longer is a pathway inside to look and see, or to make corrections, and trying to arouse interest from a human reminds me of banging my head against Yosemite. NAC is floating out on the water, without any way to repair an engine failure.

Fuck Blogger -- to death, in its entirety. 

However, I digress.

Since last November, in response to (a) incessant threats of retaliation from the hypocritical community pillars in this one-thought town, (b) the escalating time requirements of my two jobs, and (c) a very real sense of fatigue and burnout, I've been steadily reducing the blog output and refraining (for the most part) from commentary on local issues. 

In essence, I've been smothering my baby in fits and starts. Readership has plummeted. All eyes have been averted from local issues, consumed with the social media-inspired culture war at the national level. Meanwhile the arrogance, cupidity and vandalism proceed apace in this barely literate, perennially dirty little river town, and it might as well be 2004 all over again. 

You know, this used to be fun. 

Now it's like going to work at a job you detest, not because of your own motivations or interest level, but due to hideous working conditions. Blogger is making it twice as hard to do half as much, an example of inane big tech insanity that I have no interest in indulging any longer. 

All that's left is an official announcement, and while this isn't exactly it, I can't tell you how much longer I intend to post regularly here. 

The plan at present is to maintain NA Confidential as best as I can as an archive and reference resource (when the arrests begin, I need to be able to say I told you so), and to build a full-fledged WordPress-powered, stand-alone web site under a different name. I'll post there regularly, and use it as a place for my writing -- travel, beer, whatnot. Negotiations are underway with a local designer. 

I'll keep you posted. 

This saddens me, of course. And yet all things must pass, and the sheer, pervasive dumbassery of the year 2020 offers an ideal opportunity to make a clean break with the past. 

The dipshits in Nawbany win again, but don't they always? 

Look, an outsider like me doesn't climb into the ring imagining miracles. It's asking a lot to vanquish the overwhelming forces of decades-ingrained ignorance, venality, greed, corruption and inertia by summoning comic book levels of strength and firepower. 

Rather, you try to take the bout 15 rounds, looking for chances to score points, all the while conducting yourself with guile and aplomb before the cliquish big fish drown you in their insufferably small pond. 

It's gone 16 years, not 15 rounds, and the final bell is about to sound. 

I'm not yet sure what will become of the ON THE AVENUES column; either it or something similar probably will continue at the new digs. I will keep you informed about the changes to come. 15,000+ posts later, thanks very much for reading.   

(unless I change my mind, naturally)

These post-COVID ideas for cities could be scaled down for Nawbany.

It's a British publication, and in some ways these ideas are scaled for cities much larger than Nawbany. 

At the same time, the guiding principles are intelligent and applicable, and could be scaled down to fit -- if we had anyone here in a position of authority who could read and assimilate information absent an expectation of cash-stuffed envelopes. 

Bike superhighways

Garden streets

A digitally enabled high street

Multipurpose neighborhoods

Unlikely in this god-awful stupid place, but a boy can dream pro bono.

From garden streets to bike highways: four ideas for post-Covid cities – visualised, by Chris Michael, Lydia McMullan and Frank Hulley-Jones (The Guardian) 

As the pandemic wreaks havoc on existing structures, we look at some visions for post-Covid cities – and how they hold up

There is a huge, looming, unanswerable question that overshadows our cities, like an elephant squatting in the central square. Will a Covid-19 vaccine or herd immunity return us to “normal”, or will we need to redesign our cities to accommodate a world in which close proximity to other people can kill you?

After an anxious summer in the northern hemisphere, during which those of us who were able to safely do so mimicked a kind of normality with limited socialising on patios and in gardens, winter is coming – and it will test the limits of our urban design. Regardless of whether we “solve” this latest coronavirus, humanity now knows how vulnerable we are to pandemics.

Can we mitigate the effects of the next great disease before it happens? And has the colossal disruption to the way we work and travel created a renewed impetus to organise cities in a more sustainable, more pleasant way?

We asked four architecture firms to share their visions of what cities should do, now, to better design everything from offices to streets to transport – and we have analysed each one – to help inoculate our cities against a disease that is proving so difficult to inoculate against in our bodies.

ON THE AVENUES: Magic and loss.

For one who is accustomed to recording his thoughts on paper, because he has always understood in his particular case that writing is the very best way to make sense of things, it follows that once properly ordered, thoughts can make the leap from written to spoken language. 

Not before.

In short, if I cannot articulate a topic in writing, chances are I’ll do no better trying to explain it to you in conversation.

Some might say this process is bass-ackwards, given that the implications are broader than the enumerated recipe for Cincy chili or a description of what happened on a certain day in Moscow in 1999. Also involved are feelings and emotions encompassing far more complexity than the norm, which must be retrofitted in writing so I can convey them in chatter.

Naturally small talk can proceed without pre-authorization. That’s what it is: small, mostly inconsequential, and how about those Packers? An absence of forethought has fewer implications when little more than the meaningless passing of time is the goal.

But as the far too often maligned band Chicago’s keyboardist, singer and songwriter Robert Lamm once observed, “Time passes much too quickly, when we’re together laughing” (Beginnings, 1969), and later, “Forever is a long, long time – longer than we ever realize” (Forever, 1986).

“I wish I could sing it to you,” crooned Lamm during Nixon’s first term.

I’d settle for being able to write it, and now I’ll try to do so.

---

A close friend from high school died recently. In itself, while profoundly sad, this isn’t unusual. It happens in turn to all of us, and with each of us.

Every rose has its thorn, and every beginning an end. We are finite creatures. We come eventually to a conclusion. In Lamm’s 80s-era ballad, he spoke of “forever” not as the cosmic duration of his love; rather, the active element of love ends with his death or his lover’s.

Consequently, Lamm promised, “I’m going to love you the rest of my life.” Life spans are the delineation of love, and a terminus. The word “forever” then is repeated, but ignore this. It is necessary for the song’s musical arrangement to make sense, not the sentiment itself.

After all, this is a pop tune, not theology.

When I say we were close friends in high school, it’s a statement of fact. We were very tight then. And, factually, our friendship did not survive for very long after high school. Alas, it wasn’t merely the expected usual happenstance that we went our separate ways, although geographically, we surely did.

There was a rupture of some sort. It definitely was an estrangement. A point came when he left no doubt that we were no longer friends. I’d run into him here and there, at reunions and occasion visits home. He’d acknowledge me, but a stiff Arctic breeze ran through the courtesies. I cannot recall having a substantive conversation with him literally in four decades.

Happily, by all accounts he lived a vigorous and productive life in California during the past 30-odd years, both professionally and personally. A lovelier family would be hard to imagine. To me, they’re his greatest achievement. His career in the film industry was stellar. None of it comes as a surprise to me, because we all knew he was destined for great things. There was no doubt.

And yet, those decades are Lindsey Buckingham’s second-hand news to me. My high school friend chose to exclude me from his life. My affection was unrequited. In the words of the Hoosier novelist, so it goes.

It puzzled me greatly for all those years, and always will. It also hurt tremendously, because to be brutally frank I idolized him, from the moment we became friends in 1974-75 all the way to the present day, even two weeks after he was claimed by cancer, far too young.

It’s an injustice, the c-word. I’ve been in pain and anguish, mourning his passing as intensely as that of my own two parents. My eyes are wet writing this. I feel so bad for his wife and kids – and one grandchild, I think.

Obviously, there’ll be no resolution now. Lamm was right. Time passed much too quickly; the laughter stopped too soon, and forever remains a long, long time.

But I will say this.

A few years ago it occurred to me that I’d always blamed myself for committing the offense, for doing “something” – whatever the hell this really means – to prompt the estrangement. Evidently it was easier, or maybe simply less painful, to carry this burden of guilt with me than admit that maybe my hero was anything less than perfect.

So, finally I stopped blaming myself. It wasn’t easy.

Life’s a mystery, and human beings are not mathematical formulas. We all are flawed, each and every one of us. Kaka can and will occur. I have dark patches, and the black dog has been known to come around. Maybe with him, too.

I’ll always dearly love my friend, and smile when I think about the old days – good, bad or otherwise. We were a good team, while we were. I’m sure he had his reasons, and I respect them. In the end, our separation was as much his loss as it was mine, a 50-50 split.

You did good, Mikey. You absolutely rocked it. I’ll always miss you. I’ll never forget you.

Goodbye.

---

It’s funny, but for a very long time I resisted the urge to refer to myself as a writer, perhaps because we’ve grown up in a dysfunctional society that can’t fathom a person “being” something if it can’t be measured by time sheets or a tax return.

That’s bogus, of course, but it’s precisely who we are.

I’m the first to concede that four decades of purported adulthood spent writing sentences probably haven’t earned me a single year’s poverty-level American wage. Fortunately this isn’t the only way to look at it. Writing is what I do, irrespective of other considerations, and it’s been a part of what I’ve always “done.”

As far back as my package store days, stocking the famous “import door” of the walk-in cooler in the barren physical and intellectual wasteland of early 1980s downtown New Albany, I photocopied sheets at my own expense with beer prices and descriptions, and handed them to regular customers in lieu of a web site.

For the first ten years of the Public House, I wrote, edited and published the FOSSILS homebrewing club newsletter on basic sheets of paper with staples and stamps. The club was non-profit, but since our business hosted the majority of meetings and club members also were regular customers, there was a tangential and mutually beneficial relationship with revenues.

There you have it. I’m a writer.

I think and process information in terms of writing.

Most of the time I follow my muse from sheer compulsion, not in pursuit of pay. At times, the money comes. To me, it’s all good. We shouldn’t be asking people what they do for remuneration, anyway.

It’s gauche.

In closing, here’s a snippet of dialogue from Warren Beatty’s epic film Reds (1981). Beatty, as journalist/socialist John Reed, is meeting with factory workers trying to unionize when the cops arrive to break up the "unAmerican" gathering.

Cop: This is an illegal assembly.

Reed: Excuse me, Officer. These men have the legal right to assemble. That's all they're doing.

Cop: We know what the hell they doing. What the hell you doing?

Reed: Me?

Cop: You.

Reed: I write.

Cop: You write? You wrong. Get him out of here!

Let the record show I have NOT so much as implied or suggested in the slightest that the policeman is employed by the city of New Albany.

In any event, my name’s Roger, not John. 

---

Recent columns:

September 17: ON THE AVENUES: Stuck inside of Nawbany with the Flanders blues again.

September 10: ON THE AVENUES: The Weekly Wad lives on in the minds of malcontents.

September 3: ON THE AVENUES: If you really want to be my friend.

August 27: ON THE AVENUES: Structural racism, white fragility, and my old school.

"On Louisville, Breonna Taylor, and Muhammad Ali."

Photo credit: The Nation.

From one of the few sportswriters capable of mattering, talking straight.  

On Louisville, Breonna Taylor, and Muhammad Ali, by Dave Zirin (The Nation)

Louisville is hallowed ground, the birthplace of Muhammad Ali. It will now, thanks to Daniel Cameron, be also remembered as the home of an unspeakable injustice.

 ... If struggle is truly the secret of joy, then I’ll repeat: It felt like hallowed ground.

Daniel Cameron, the Kentucky Attorney General, has desecrated this hallowed ground. In his ambition to remain a Republican rising star, mentored by McConnell and beloved by Trump, he chose his career over justice and made the decision to use Breonna Taylor’s body as a stepping stone to reach even greater heights ... but to me this is less about the color of Cameron’s skin than a naked and grotesque expression of what it takes to rise in GOP circles: You protect the cops, you blame the dead, and you assert, no matter the cost, that Black lives—particularly the lives of Black women—simply do not matter. 

 For the people of Louisville, Breonna Taylor’s name will not be forgotten as surely as Muhammad Ali’s. Maybe someday people will walk Breonna Taylor Boulevard in downtown Louisville and speak her name not merely as a tragedy but as a turning point towards true justice. Daniel Cameron’s name, if remembered at all, will be thought of like the person who stole young Cassius Clay’s bicycle, which inspired the 12-year-old Clay to take up boxing. He will be the anonymous, ignofarm-near-me/">minious cudgel of immorality whose blows didn’t put the people of Louisville down for the count, but propelled them to rise off the mat.

Strong Towns: Redlining in Kansas City: What local reparations might look like.

The actual title of the article is "The Local Case for Reparations," which Lauren Fisher explains. It's about reparations for redlining, in case you're wondering.

 

On Monday, I was wringing my hands about how our morning article would go over. Within it, Chuck discusses a local strategy for investing in disinvested neighborhoods using opportunities and incentives that are often extended to large investors. Instead of wasting resources on big businesses that will take more than they give to a city, this approach would immediately, measurably uplift entire communities. Pretty much normal Strong Towns stuff. So why was I so nervous about it? The title is “The Local Case for Reparations.” I was worried about the reactions we’d receive. This piece is challenging to people with all kinds of views on reparations for slavery. It changed the way I think about the issue. Maybe it will do the same for you.

Previously:

On understanding reparations.

“It feels like planners in the U.S. sort of exist in a history vacuum. It’s important for them to look at this information and understand that a lot of city planning really involves dismantling systems like zoning and redlining.”

The Strong Towns no-gimmicks approach truly is a "third way" for the city of New Albany because it crosses political boundaries.

Black licorice, but not the Grand Funk song because, well, the lyrics have not stood the test of time.

In fact, I'm notorious for not listening to the lyrics. Consequently, the words to the old Grand Funk tune from 1972 surprised me. Yes, I'm a very slow learner. 

But you can listen to the song here if you wish. Musically, the song is strong. Lyrically? Not so much. 

Meanwhile, the New England Journal of Medicine reports that a man died from eating too much black licorice. This is neither a pun nor a joke. Here's the story from The Guardian.

 

A Massachusetts construction worker’s love of black licorice wound up costing him his life. Eating a bag and a half every day for a few weeks threw his nutrients out of balance and caused the 54-year-old man’s heart to stop, doctors reported.

A comeback for TEE?

American railroad buffs tend to be fascinated by the physical infrastructure of trains and their accessories. Going back to my Eurailpass years, the obsession with me is the act of traveling by train. 

Brussels to Barcelona in eight hours: Proposal to relaunch Trans-Europe Express (The Bulletin)

German federal transport farm-near-me/">minister Andreas Scheuer has proposed at a European transport council meeting in Brussels to relaunch the Trans-Europe Express (TEE) 2.0 network of high-speed and night trains between major western European cities.

If the plan to reinstate the rail link, abandoned in 1987, is agreed by his European counterparts, Brussels, Liège and Antwerp stations could be connected to Barcelona in around eight hours.

The farm-near-me/">minister is keen to cut travel time and make journeys more appealing between several European cities by reviving the TEE trains – a luxury service from the glory days of European rail travel from the late 1950s to the 1970s, when overnight rail travel was common ...

A belated update: Sara Martin got her headstone.

The National Jug Band Jubilee and the Kentuckiana Blues Society were successful in collecting enough funds to provide a headstone for Louisville jazz singer Sara Martin (1884-1955). The photo is from the unveiling in 2017. I mentioned this way back on July 13, 2014. Unfortunately the link to Louisville Music News is broken.

 

 

Before LeBron James, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lawler ... before Kong itself ... there was King Oliver.

The song Sweet Like This may not be the very best example of Joe "King" Oliver's work, but as a cut included on an LP called Guide to Jazz, it was my introduction to his body of work. The album was intended as accompaniment to a book of the same name, by the French jazz critic Hugues Panassié, and was released in the mid-1950s. At the age of 10, or thereabouts, I checked it out from the New Albany-Floyd County Public Library and committed it to cassette tape.

You might say that I caught up with rock and roll a bit later.

Why think back to King Oliver? Because of Sara Martin. And who was Sara Martin? Louisville Music News explains.

A Headstone For Sara Martin, at Louisville Music News

Here’s a fundraiser for all Louisville music fans – and I mean EVERYBODY - to pay attention and donate a few shekels toward: Louisville blues singer Sara Martin, noted for her early 20th Century recordings which earned her the nickname of “The Famous Moanin’ Mama” (and “The Colored Sophie Tucker”), is buried in an unmarked grave in Louisville Cemetary. The Kentuckiana Blues Society and the National Jugband Jubilee have joined forces to raise money to buy a headstone for Martin’s grave ...

Democrats? Acting more aggressively? Probably a pipe dream, but worth a post at least.

This is a slightly rosy assessment of policy options, especially in imagining there'll be a transition as we've known it; again tonight Donald Trump trolled the country about not going away peacefully. 

And all my white Republican friends were silent like tombs. I believe categorically that what we're witnessing at the present time is (a) the cancerous decay of late-stage capitalism; (b) the equally malignant pathology of decadent capital accumulation; and (c) a fanatical determination on the part of white America to remain the dominant caste, come what may.

I've no firm idea how I can help those in need, given that the bulk of you insist on identifying with the abysmal, corrupt two-party system.

But I'm open to suggestions.

Republicans will replace RBG but Democrats hold the trump cards – no, really, by David Litt (The Guardian)

Progressives should not worry about what will happen if they mimic McConnell’s constitutional hardball. Their representatives need only act with a little less restraint

... For one thing, America’s political institutions are currently biased – in many cases quite aggressively – in favor of conservatives. Restrictive voting laws make casting a ballot disproportionately difficult for lower-income, non-white and young Americans. Unprecedented gerrymandering gives Republicans a built-in advantage in the race for the House, and according to FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver, the Senate’s bias toward rural states makes the chamber about seven points redder than the nation as a whole. Thanks to the electoral college, two of the past five presidential elections have been won by Republicans who lost the popular vote – one reason why even before Justice Ginsburg’s death, 15 of the past 19 supreme court justices were appointed by GOP presidents.

The conservative movement, in other words, already had it pretty good. The average American disagrees with Republican orthodoxy on every major issue: healthcare, climate change, gun violence, immigration, taxes, Covid response. Yet thanks to the biases embedded in the American political process, Republicans have not just remained viable, but secured extraordinary amounts of power. We can’t know for certain who would benefit from upending the status quo that existed at the time of Justice Ginsburg’s passing – but we do know which party has the most to lose.

Friday, September 25 is the soft RE-opening for dining inside at NABC Pizzeria & Public House.

Trek to the Deck, 1999.

Think of it as a public service announcement. We did curbside at NABC on Saturday, and if I may say so myself, the Roundhouse was brilliant. Sunday was spent eating leftover pizza and bread sticks. I've emphasized one passage in bold.   

Facebook post 

Well, guess it’s that time of year again, ya know, the one where there was a pandemic & you haven’t had customers in your building for six months?!

Soft opening THIS Friday September 25th on the Pizzeria dining room side.

We will resume our regular carryout service as before meaning customers will call in an order, you’ll be quoted a pick up time only this time you’ll be required to wear a mask upon pick up.

We will continue to be a first come first serve operation with the exception of the “waiting room” being outside the building to encourage physical distancing.

DOORS OPEN at 11am THIS Friday September 25th 2020

PLEASE NOTE our hours of operation have changed for the time being:

Friday & Saturday LUNCH & dinner
11am - 9pm

Monday- Thursday dinner only
3pm - 9pm

Masks must be worn upon entry and only taken off while seated at your space please.

ALL employees will wear masks properly and continuously.

We will be very diligent about cleaning spaces especially after each use.

IF the allotted spaces fill to capacity we will get a cell phone number from you and ask that you wait outside the building.
We will call you as soon as a space is cleaned, sanitized and available!

Operating a restaurant during COVID-19 has been challenging to all of us. We are, thankfully, a popular independent, local, family owned & operated business. We all need each other to make this work.

Please be patient, kind, & respectful to one another. We are doing the best we can do under these circumstances.
Hand washing, mask wearing, & distancing is the key to all of our health.
Be safe & well during pandemic & cold&flu season

RECAP:
11-9 on the weekends Friday & Saturday

3-9 Monday-Thursday

Masks must be worn upon entry and only taken off while seated at your space please.

IF the allotted spaces fill to capacity we will get a cell phone number from you and ask that you wait outside the building.

The Real Me.

 

For a long time, I haven't wanted to think too deeply about the part my childhood played in my development. Nothing overtly horrible happened then, mind you. It's just the way those experiences shaped future consciousness. We always had enough of everything in terms of material things. But what was my brain being fed?    

I've remarked often on the pandemic's uncanny way of exposing our inner selves and amplifying what already was there. Personally, it reminds me of the places suffering from drought, where the reservoir levels drop and expose what was flooded so long ago. 

This all started when I set down to think for the first time what it meant that my father was a fervent supporter of George Wallace. Subsequently, as much as I'd love to put all this back into the box and padlock the lid, various occurrences keep triggering memories of my earlier years. Last week a very big example of this occurred when one of my closest friends in high school died. 

I'm still not able to comment intelligently about his passing, apart from acknowledging considerable grief and anguish. This reaction may make more sense if you know that we didn't have a conversation in the 40 years since; it was an estrangement at his behest, and I've no better idea today as to why it happened than I did at the time. Of all the male friends I've ever had, Mike quite might well be the only one I flat idolized. He was my hero, and he could do no wrong in high school. Now, even at the age of 60, I feel the same way in spite of it all that came between us -- whatever it was.  

I'll never know what happened, and it's a tad overwhelming, as well as a miasma compounded on a daily basis by all the rest of the bat-shit-craziness gripping the rest of you populating this failed nation.   

Clearly it's time to dispense with the narrative, 1960-1978. Perhaps I'm missing something important by closing the account, but at the same time there's enough chaos to manage without those ghosts tormenting me. 

An exhibition themed around public urinals -- in Brussels, not New Albania.

Among the innovations witnessed at Poperinge's triennial pop-up Beer and Hop Festival beer hall in 2014 was the notion of charging a one-time "piss pass" fee for using temporary loos (Euro 1.20), with heavy-duty plastic, open-air pissoirs helpfully available for the gents.

The installation pictured here was festooned with a campaign poster for one of three competing hop queen triads. They're humorously reclined amid hops, and it should be pointed out that their team placed it there for a reason -- to reach the "swing" voter.

Verily, it was all in good fun. Seeing creative teenage hop queen candidates advertising with professionally printed posters on outdoor urinating stations was precisely the sort of thing to remind us that we no longer were experiencing a New Albany state of mind.

And, as this timely article reminds us, the development of the public urinal not only goes back almost 200 years, but references social developments ranging quite far removed from the simple need to relieve oneself while following the path to the next whiskey bar.

Standing room only: Brussels exhibition tells story of public urinals, by Richard Harris (The Bulletin)

In further proof that Brussels’ cultural scene is nothing but varied, an exhibition themed around public urinals is coming to the city later this month.

After runs in Berlin and Paris, LaVallée in Molenbeek presents the exhibition Cottages: Public Toilets, Private Affairs by French photographer/videographer Marc Martin, who describes himself as “one who explores the visibility of sexual minorities and claims a freedom to express – explicit or not – a diversity of practices”.

“By confronting the notions of beauty and repulsion, of good and bad taste, I readjust the level of tolerance, including of the LGBTQI community,” he says.

And the first thing they do is cut down an enormous healthy tree.

In the final analysis, the local demolish 'n' develop cadre needn't be all that proficient at what they do. They can take down a 100-year-old tree to accommodate "luxury" townhouses with a lifespan of two decades, and it doesn't matter. 

Skill and ability is irrelevant; just learn to read the tea leaves and know exactly when to give the pay-to-play wheel a mighty heave.

Then it's out with the chain saws. 

My personal view? The in-crowd in the festering boil of a dirty river town can go ... nah, never mind. The Pavlov's Dog effect in Nawbany means that I write or say something true, and someone close to me gets an electrical shock. 

Do we even have a Tree Board? 

Redevelopment machinations and those awesomely cute townhouses coming to Vincennes Street where the demolitions just went down.

I'm still English and German. I miss that tiny slice of Finnish.

My Ancestry.com "origins" update has arrived, and not to belabor the point, but it should surprise no one, including me, that I'm 85% Germanic Europe/Northwestern Europe/England, with a little bit of Viking sprinkled in.

The estimate has come a long way since 2016 (here).

And in 2018.

Where there are wine windows, there might be beer windows.

"Wine windows" in Florence and a handful of nearby locales date to a time when nobles were granted a concession to sell their wine in sizes no larger than the aperture through which commerce was transacted. They came in handy during times of plague, and some are being used again during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

In Tuscany, Renaissance-Era Wine Windows Are Made For Social Distancing, by Sylvia Poggioli (NPR) 

At the Vivoli café, an artisanal ice cream landmark, its tiny window had long been boarded up, says Giulia Gori, daughter of the owner. "But during the lockdown, we started using it again," she says. When the Italian government allowed restaurants and cafés to take orders to go, the café started offering takeout. "The customer rings the bell, places an order and we put the ice cream cup on the sill, avoiding direct contact with the customer." It's not exactly curbside pickup, but is as close as can be approximated in a centuries-old city not designed for cars ...

SHANE'S EXCELLENT NEW WORDS: A guide to conspiracy theory slang.

Here's one that we can add to Nawbany's lexicon.

Pyro·demo·redevelopment: the coincidence wherein buildings standing in the way or redevelopment plans magically catch on fire and are bulldozed. 

I'm not saying I believe we have a plan to torch buildings so redevelopment, and the (redacted)-to-play can be hastened.

Only that there are certain coincidences, that's all. It's probably nothing, right?

From plandemic to breadcrumbs: conspiracy-theory slang (1843 Magazine by The Economist)

Those who think the world is full of intrigue and plots often have their own language

There’s nothing new about looking for answers. At a time when religion is on the retreat in many countries, people often look to alternative theories of life and the universe, particularly in periods of uncertainty. As coronavirus has spread, so have conspiracy theories: protesters gather to denounce masks, vaccines and 5g networks; social-media feeds teem with histrionic videos about murky cabals and worst of all, it has reached your family WhatsApp group. But if you’re going to argue with a conspiracy theorist, you’d better speak their language. If someone tells you to “follow the breadcrumbs”, resist the urge. When you hear someone disparaging “sheeple”, stand proudly as a member of the flock. After all, it’s much harder to refute lies if you’re ignorant too.

From 2000: Beercycling beginnings in Poperinge, with previously unpublished photos.

Concurrently with the motor coach beer tours of Europe in 1998 and 1999, I was becoming a quasi-serious bicyclist back home. It was only a matter of time until the lightbulb fired, and when it did, a few of us began planning a bike-oriented trip to Belgium in 2000. We chose three Belgian cities as hubs -- Tournai, Poperinge and Brugge -- with the aim of renting bikes, riding by day and partying at night. 

My beercycling comrades were Kevin Richards, Bob Reed, Buddy Sandbach and Kevin Lowber. We were a quartet during the Tournai stay, which included a day of guided mountain biking, monthly brewing day at the Vapeur museum brewery, and a meeting with the visiting Danish contingent of Kim, Allan and Kim (who were in Belgium for football matches). Lowber joined us in Poperinge for three days in West Flanders.

I've tidied this account from some years back and updated it in places. Most of the photos are mine, but a few are Buddy Sandbach's.

---

“The (German) attack had not penetrated to the decisive heights of Cassel and the Mont des Cats, the possession of which would have compelled the (British) evacuation of the Ypres salient and the Yser position. No great strategic movement had become possible, and the Channel ports had not been reached. The second great offensive had not brought about the hoped-for decision.”

--From the official German account of the offensives on the Western Front in 1918, as quoted by John Keegan in his book, The First World War.

Our fatigued foursome arrived by train on Sunday at lunchtime in the Belgian “hop town” of Poperinge, a tidy, friendly place that had the good fortune to remain somewhat safely behind British lines throughout the Great War and thus was spared the wholesale devastation suffered only ten kilometers away in Ieper (Ypres). 

The street called Ieperstraat, which leads from the tiny train station to the center of town, was packed with shoppers, strollers and snackers. The festive atmosphere came as a complete surprise, seeing as stores and shops seldom opened on Sundays in Europe then, but we later learned it was a special annual shopping day, precisely the sort of delightful phenomenon to encourage a few midday beers.

Checking into the legendary Hotel/Restaurant Palace, we found the newly arrived Kevin Lowber carving a massive slab of beef, anxiously awaiting us in the shadow of an equally oversized bottle of red wine. He’d just come into Poperinge from Brussels. 

Biking in and around Poperinge was slated to begin on Monday, and this seemed to merit a map, strategy and tactics session. Adjourning across the hall to the hotel’s cozy world-class beer bar, we discussed the riding itinerary for the coming days.

A plan of attack quickly fell into place. Monday would take us to Ieper for a ride through the battlefield sites south and east of town. 

On Tuesday, we would meet Luc Dequidt, chief of Poperinge’s amazingly comprehensive tourist bureau, for a two-wheeled tour of local attractions, hopefully to include the tasting cafe near the St. Sixtus abbey (home of the scrumptious Westvletern Trappist ales); the brewing town of Watou; the Helleketel forest: and row after row of the tall hop trellises that take on a life of their own each three years during the town’s hop festival.

Wednesday was chosen as the day for us to assay what German military might had failed to achieve more than a century earlier: Seize the heights of Mont des Cats and Cassel. From our Poperinge base, this projected foray into France wouldn’t be altogether difficult, totaling less than 30 miles roundtrip; more importantly, it would provide a glimpse of northern French beer culture, which naturally was my ulterior motive all along.

Riding east towards Ieper on Monday, the French hills almost always could be seen rising on the horizon to the southwest, and although they aren’t particularly lofty, the default flatness of Flanders magnifies their significance. 

One can readily understand their strategic importance in wartime. There were constant reminders of combat on Monday, as our journey took us past numerous Great War monuments and cemeteries of the British Commonwealth forces, whose final resting places attest to the global scale of the First World War: Irish, Australian, Canadian and Indian soldiers, buried alongside lads from Manchester and Newcastle. The resting places of Belgian, French and German soldiers also were seen.

Monday’s lunch sag came in the center of Ieper, a town utterly devastated from 1914-1918, then painstakingly rebuilt in the years preceding the next world conflagration. 

When the second war swept through Belgium, one young Ieper native resolved to escape. He made it somehow to the then-colony of Belgian Congo, and later to South Africa, where he enlisted in the British armed forces and fought against the German occupiers until war’s end in 1945. 

After returning home he founded a restaurant and pub, sold it, then opened another, called Ter Posterie for its location opposite Ieper’s post office.

I can’t remember this man’s name, and certainly he would have no reason to remember mine, but nonetheless I met him on three different occasions, all in all, and enjoyed the long beer list, savory food and consistent hospitality at Ter Posterie, where we convened at the terrace that day in 2000 and discussed our progress. 

By 2000, active control of the business had long since passed to his daughter, but the old man still frequented the establishment, and when glimpsing an English speaker, would spin his life story for the visitor in a narrative honed over thousands of ale-side retellings. 

Sadly, during subsequent trips, Ter Posterie’s colorful founder was observed to be sadly descending into advanced dementia, and since passed way, as has Ter Posterie. Both will be remembered fondly. 

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Tuesday’s riding schedule was light, but rich in intangibles owing to the presence of Luc and his wife. We kept a leisurely pace on the country lanes radiating from Poperinge, never very far from the smell of manure and the sight of hops. It was a pub crawl on human-powered wheels: Westvleteren 12-degree Trappist at the terrace of the then-newly built tasting café opposite the abbey, through the woods and fields to the fabled “brewing village” of Watou and refreshing Witbier from the small town’s Van Eecke brewery, then south and east via wooded lanes back to Poperinge.

At the edge of the Helleketel forest there used to be a delightful small brewery and tasting café known as the Bie, which has relocated twice (to Loker, then Dentergem) during the period since we rode past in 2000 and found it closed on Tuesday. If memory serves, we got inside in 2001 and 2002.

Amazingly, yet another brewery is located near Watou, which is really no more than a collection of houses: St. Bernardus, which used to produce beer by contract for the monks of St. Sixtus under the Sixtus name. The contract was terminated, and the brewery began to brew its own line of abbey-style ales that arguably is the finest of all secular recreations.

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Wednesday proved to be the highlight of the Poperinge interlude, with the group primed for climbing the two French hills and having lunch in Cassell. 

Arriving winded at the summit of the Mont des Cats, we saw a conveniently situated Trappist monastery, which might have provided liquid incentive had it been situated a few miles north in Belgium. Unfortunately, there are no Trappist-certified breweries in France, so instead the monastery makes acclaimed cheeses and butter, some of which were destined for sampling later at our midday feast.

(As of 2011, the monastery at Mont des Cats has licensed a Trappist Ale brewed by the makers of Chimay. It does not bear the Trappist appellation because brewing does not occur at Mont des Cats.)

For beer, one must descend the Mont des Cats and proceed to the small town of St. Sylvestre Cappell, home to the brewery that produces Trois Monts, or “three mountains”: Mont des Cats and Mont Cassell (in France) and Mont Noir (in Belgium). 

Trois Monts is exemplary proof that good beer and France are not mutually exclusive, although this view continues to be held by many otherwise intelligent and discerning beer aficionados, whose Francophobia is permitted to hold sway at the expense of their taste buds.

They’re missing good things. Bieres de garde perhaps are best understood as a sort of appellation of origin, describing beers from northern France, but beyond that there are few hard and fast rules. 

Often they are made with top-fermenting yeast, but not always. Usually they are aged in a process akin to lagering. Colors and strengths range across the spectrum. Many, but not all, are bottled in 750 ml corked bottles. If there is any one characteristic that seems common among the better French bieres de garde, it is a richly complex malt character. These are beers that taste fine alone, but better when they accompany food.

Thus, having scaled the heights of the Mont des Cats and scrambled down the other side in pursuit of a restorative glass of Trois Monts, we found it in a tiny roadside café where the proprietor spoke no English but was happy to learn that we weren’t “English”, and who seemed amused by our interest in the local brew. 

Temporarily sated, our final and more formidable objective lay before us: Cassel, the town straddling the top of the hill of the same name.

A half-hour’s ride along the highway brought us to the foot of the hill, and we began the winding ascent that culminated in the town’s main square. A narrow lane took us further toward the top, ending in a wooded park with a large windmill situated to our left. I knew from previous research that this was the Grail, for located just beneath the windmill was our real reason for coming: T' Kasteel Hof.

The windmill is the highest point in Flanders, with unobstructed views far and wide even on a hazy day, and the café just below it, one that clings to the side of the steep hill, is considered one of the finest beer cafés in France. I’ve been to few others, but it would be difficult to imagine any better. 

(Admittedly, I'm several years out of practice. Craft revolution, and all.)

T’ Kasteel Hof specializes in all things local. The food is from French Flanders, as are the beers. We found seats on the patio after walking through the crowded main room, where spontaneous applause greeted our entrance; bowing in appreciation of this unexpected acknowledgement of our collective biking prowess, we were disappointed to learn that the group of senior citizens actually was applauding a speech of some sort by one of its own.

Instructed that the kitchen was being overloaded by the tour group and only cold food was available, each of us opted for a mixed cheese and pate plate. Three would have sufficed for all five beercyclists, such was the size of the portions. Three 750 ml bottles of French Bieres de Garde were shared: Hommelpap (four hop varieties, earthy and a moderate 7% abv), Kasteel (the house ale) and Pot Flamand, the latter two falling on the sweetly malty side of the flavor spectrum, as I expected.

As if a convivial atmosphere, bountiful food and delicious beer weren’t reason enough to seek out t’ Kasteel Hoff, the pub also boasts a shop for carry-out sales: Bieres de garde, local honey and jam, liqueurs, post cards and souvenirs -- more of each than any of us were able to carry, and Kevin Lowber drew the short straw in this regard: He had made the mistake of bringing his backpack, which was filled with booty gathered by the others, our rental bikes being unequipped with panniers or hauling apparatus.

With ground to cover back to Poperinge and expressing ample regrets over having to leave so soon, we lugged our booty to the bikes and debarked in a meandering northeasterly direction, enjoying the countryside and melting away the lunchtime caloric intake. The group seemed hale and hearty, except perhaps Buddy, and therein is yet another story.

On the night preceding our Cassell reconnoitering, after benedictory drinks with Luc, we’d dined as a group in the Hotel Palace’s restaurant and enjoyed several bottles of French red wine with the uniformly excellent meats, breads and pastas.

After dinner, adjourning once again to the nearby bar and seeking the inimitable service provided by Guy, the owner, Kevin Richards elected to continue drinking wine. For reasons that remain obscure to this very day, Buddy felt emboldened to undertake an impossible task, attempting to match Kevin bottle for bottle.

Knowing better from previous experiences, the remainder of the contingent nursed our Belgian ales and retired to bed early in preparation for the big day. 

For those readers who have witnessed such ill-conceived ventures in the past, it should come as no surprise that during our ascent of the two French hills, Buddy began to perceive the error of his ways, particularly during lunch, when he was overheard to remark that a nap would feel good. On the ride back to Poperinge, Buddy was flagging. For a while, it seemed that Bob (our unofficial chaplain) might have to offer last rites, but he rallied and finished the course.

A meal on the main square at Café Paix and a few ales at a pub during the evening’s televised Euro Cup soccer match capped off a long and fruitful day. Not for the first time, I asked myself why it had taken me so long to discover the joys of biking in Europe.

As a reminder, once every three years (2020's renewal has been rescheduled for 2021) Poperinge celebrates its heritage of hops with a festival that captures the attention of beer lovers throughout the world, but remains consummately local in orientation, with much of the town actively participating in the fun. 

The town welcomes visitors at all times, not only during the festival, and it is hard to overstate the many charms of the area, especially for those infatuated with Belgian beer. Poperinge is eternally relaxed and efficient. 

As has happened so many times since, it was with grudging reluctance that my friends and I group departed on Thursday morning, walking back up Ieperstraat to board the train to Brugge and travel to the final phase of a remarkable trip.