Whitcomb: Finding Mr. Fixit; Hail the Mass. Migration; Heat Up Some Sand for the Winter
Robert Whitcomb, Columnist
Whitcomb: Finding Mr. Fixit; Hail the Mass. Migration; Heat Up Some Sand for the Winter
“You go to my head
With a smile that makes my temperature rise
Like a summer with a thousand Julys
You intoxicate my soul with your eyes.’’
-- From the 1938 song “You Go to My Head,’’ music by J. Fred Coots and lyrics by Haven Gillespie
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“Oh, blameless people are always the most exasperating.’’
-- Mary Ann Evans, whose pen name was George Eliot (1819-1880), one of the greatest English novelists
“A deeply cynical, KGB-trained liar, {Putin} will happily violate any treaty naïve ‘realists’ force Ukraine to sign. If there is a brief peace, Putin will use it to rebuild his battered army and reinvade until Kyiv succumbs. He is counting on nuclear blackmail, high {natural} gas prices, and food shortages to erode the West's resolve to stand with Ukraine and democracy against predatory autocracy. It's critically important to prove Putin wrong, even if he finds it humiliating.’’
-- William Falk, editor-in-chief of The Week magazine, in its June 17 issue
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I had a nice old-fashioned Americana experience last week. I was looking for a boat-trailer part for a friend and so found myself in a wooded, exurban part of Rhode Island. Winding roads took me through second- or third-growth woods broken up by small ‘50s-‘70s ranch houses, old farm houses and ridiculously proportioned newish McMansions to the home/outdoor-and-indoor workplace of someone who, it had seemed, had a part that would fit. Unfortunately, it came close, but not quite close enough to work.
But the elderly man who had it for sale was a great character.
Clearly, he was ready to try to repair anything. His yard, populated by very healthy-looking free-range (at least in daylight) chickens, was strewn with trailers and other mechanical/metal stuff, in various states of repair or non-repair. The gent, despite some obvious health problems, seemed ready to take on any project -- a Mr. Fixit who reminded me of how “handy” so many men (and some women) of my father’s generation were.
He was also full of stories from his long, practical life, including working on the Jamestown Bridge, driving a bus for the Army and other jobs that came along. And he turned out to be quite a Rhode Island historian and observer of local politics. Indeed, he seems to have been on friendly terms with many of the major local politicians of the past few decades.
We talked about how few young people can fix physical things these days, such as changing flat tires. (Tires are much sturdier now.)
You could visualize sitting with him by a pot-bellied stove in the winter or, wearing ratty old visors, standing on a dock with him in the summer swapping tales while smoking a cigar or a corn-cob pipe.
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We love our mail carriers, and especially Rob Lynch.
A lady came running down a street near us last Wednesday in a panic. She told my wife, who had been visiting a neighbor, that she had accidentally locked herself out of her first-floor apartment, with her two very young children inside. My wife called 911.
Meanwhile, the lady spotted the estimable Mr. Lynch, who was delivering stuff nearby, and told him about the emergency. He quickly wheeled over a garbage bin to stand on to reach the height of a window in the apartment, got it open and dove into the house, head and arms first, and unlocked the door for the hugely relieved mother. My wife then canceled the 911 call, to forestall further drama on that narrow street, which isn’t much more than a lane.
Of course, mail carriers across America perform acts of kindness every day. They’re part of the glue that holds our country together.
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A group of neo-Nazis has been leaving flyers in some New England communities, inspired by the Trump/GOP/QAnon Party’s lie-and-hate-filled rhetoric. Just last week, a bunch of these hate publications were strewn in parts of Providence’s East Side. Is it because of the area’s substantial Jewish population? I won’t give the name of the group for fear that it might gain them more followers in these fraught times.
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Some Rhode Islanders complain because, at least for now, the influx of home buyers from vibrant (but very expensive and traffic-clogged) Greater Boston is driving up prices. (Higher mortgage interest rates will slow and perhaps reverse housing-price inflation in the coming months)
Still, in the long run, the immigration is a good thing. It’s bringing a wide variety of interesting and often highly educated people to the state. They’ll demand improvements to the Ocean State’s generally mediocre public schools and to other public services, too. Further, many of them are at least moderately prosperous. They’re likely to spend more at the state’s retail stores and restaurants, etc., than most native Rhode Islanders. And some will use the expertise and contacts they developed in and around “The Hub” to create businesses in the Ocean State.
Provinciality can have its charms, but cultural and economic dynamism are healthier. And let’s face it: Northern Rhode Island has for years been becoming part of Greater Boston.
Heat Up Some Sand
Energy experts are chipping away at the storage problems posed by the intermittent nature of electricity generated by solar arrays and wind turbines. Consider that in cold (but warming) Finland, engineers have come up with what they call a “sand battery,’’ in which low-grade sand is heated to 500 degrees Celsius (932 degrees Fahrenheit) in a silo by means of electricity generated by solar and wind power. Sand retains heat for a long time and so the air from these silos can be used to warm buildings during the far-northern winter. It’s another way to avoid using fossil fuel, thus slowing global warming and reducing revenues that Vladimir Putin can use to murder people.
And the developers are looking into how the process can be used to generate electricity, too.
There’s lots of sand in New England. Let’s hope that our engineers look into the Finnish project.
Hit these links:
https://polarnightenergy.fi/about
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-61996520
While we’re on the need to get off fossil fuels as soon as possible, I hope that more attention is paid to using fast-growing hemp as a replacement for plastic (which is made from petroleum) and paper (thus slowing deforestation).
See:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327203397_Hemp_is_the_Future_of_Plastics
and:
https://www.hempbenchmarks.com/hemp-market-insider/huge-potential-for-hemp-plastic/
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Given the current European economic crisis caused by the war and the perilous nature of Europe’s reliance on Russian gas, look for other governments there to take somewhat similar steps.
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Other theaters in the top 10 include Radio City Music Hall, in New York City, The Fox Theatre, in Atlanta, and the Chicago Theatre in, of all places, Chicago. PPAC has been brilliantly run by CEO J.L. Singleton and his colleagues for decades. It’s been a godsend for Greater Providence’s cultural and economic life and a key part of downtown Providence’s revival.
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Mostly as a self-conscious way of making amends for past discrimination, many media outlets (especially “mainstream media”) have given coverage – especially since the Black Lives Matter movement got cooking – of members of various minority communities, especially racial and sexual, in ways very disproportionate to the percentages that these groups represent in the nation’s population. I wonder if this serves more to gain white/straight sympathy for these people than it does to make many white people – especially followers of the GOP/QAnon Party -- even more resentful that they don’t have the dominance they used to have.
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Readers have noticed the increasing practice of stores asking customers at checkout to contribute donations, tacked on their bills, to various public- and private-sector charities. (It’s awkward to refuse, so I often give a few bucks.) But the store owners get the corporate PR credit for this, and because of the Trump tax law in effect, most consumers get no deduction on their taxes from these contributions.
Further, public tax money should be paying for the lion’s share of the social and other services, many aimed at helping poor people, that customers are being asked to help pay for.
Hurtful Hill
It’s a sensitive time indeed.
The small South Pomfret, Vt., ski area Suicide Six, one of America’s oldest ski areas, is changing its “insensitive” name, and will announce a new one later this summer.
“Our resort team embraces the increasing awareness surrounding mental health and shares the growing concerns about the insensitive nature of the historical name,” says a statement on the ski area’s Web site. “The feelings that the word ‘suicide’ evokes can have a significant impact on many in our community.” Especially these days? Of course, some will snarl that this is “politically correct.’’
The first rope tow, at the start powered by a Ford Model T engine, was installed at Suicide Six in 1936 on “Hill No. 6,” from which the area derived its name. Its founder, Wallace “Bunny” Bertram, a Rhode Island native, had joked that to ski down Hill No. 6 would be suicide. Bertram had been captain of the ski team at Dartmouth College, just up the road in Hanover, N.H.
Too bad that those invasive and insatiable little green crabs (which seem to like to eat anything organic) are destroying so many soft-shell clams – aka “steamers’’ – those dwindling culinary treasures of the New England coast. You steam them, dip them in butter and drink the juice from the steaming.
Green crabs flourish in the rising sea temperatures associated with man-made global warming. And, yes, humans can eat them, but because they’re so small, it’s hardly worth the effort to dig out the meat.
So This is ‘Freedom’?
Robert “Bobby” Crimo III, the young man held in the mass murder in Highland Park, Ill., attended at least one Trump rally, and there are other indications that he is probably a fan of the man who tried to stage a coup on Jan. 6, 2021. But then, the orange traitor and TV star is an appealing showman for some impressionable and/or crazy people.
His father, Robert Crimo Jr., is a long-time supporter of the former president/would-be dictator. And it bears noting that on May 27, three days after the Uvalde, Texas, massacre, the elder Crimo “liked’’ an archived Tweet by Trump that read: "Protect the 2nd Amendment like your life depends on it." Or at least his version of the amendment. Hit this link for some history:
The elder Crimo's Twitter account has had all his own posts deleted; he does, however, remain a follower of one Twitter account -- an old one of Trump’s, who remains barred from new Tweeting because of his endorsement of an attempt to violently overthrow the federal government so that he could stay in power.
In 2019, the elder Crimo, who has hired a defense lawyer, ran for mayor on an anti-gun-control platform but was defeated by a gun-control candidate, Nancy Rotering, the current mayor.
Meanwhile, isn’t this item from The Washington Post comforting?
“The Illinois State Police confirmed on Tuesday (July 5) that the father of the Highland Park parade shooting suspect sponsored his son’s application for a gun permit months after relatives reported that Robert E. Crimo, III had threatened to ‘kill everyone’ and that authorities had ‘insufficient basis’ to deny the application.’’
Gun fetishists and their corporate enablers (gun sales are extremely profitable) and political helpers (including the right-wing extremists controlling the Supreme Court) like to tout “freedom’’ as they grotesquely misinterpret, either out of ignorance or cynically, the Second Amendment – you know, the one about “a well-regulated militia’’. It’s generally the only amendment they’re interested in.
The real freedom that is being lost is our freedom to go about in public places and at public events without fear of being gunned down, usually by disturbed young men, almost always white and sometimes with emotions riled up by conspiracy lies from the GOP-QAnon Party. They’re armed with military-style weapons engineered to kill and maim as many people as possible in the shortest period possible.
Illinois has, by U.S. standards, serious gun-control laws (though the Supremes’ latest ruling may get in the way). But the assault rifles and other guns pour in from neighboring Red States.
It can only get worse.