Musing of the Moment: Visiting Ole Miss

At the start of our spring break, Mrs. Nasty, my son, and I planned to go to a baseball game at Ole Miss on Saturday and then a baseball game at Alabama on Sunday. 

With the spring weather, we eventually couldn't see a game at Alabama since inclement weather was imminent on Sunday, so Alabama rolled out a double header on Saturday when we would be watching Ole Miss play Purdue. 

So we hung out in Oxford, Mississippi for a couple of days and saw Ole Miss win a baseball game on an opposite-field, walk-off homer in the bottom of the 10th. 

Mrs. Nasty graduated with her Master's from Ole Miss over twenty years ago, so it had been a long time since we had been there. 

Of course, as one could expect, the campus and Oxford have changed quite a bit. There are new buildings everywhere. The football stadium is much bigger. There's another student recreation center. The baseball stadium is significantly more posh. 

With the new buildings, they have built within the campus, so the campus felt more cramped than I remember it. Mrs. Nasty felt the same way. 

At least a few things have stayed the same. The square is still vibrant. 

And Ajax Diner is still one of my favorite restaurants of all time. They need to update their main page of their website though. 

Stay Positive: Ontario

Yesterday the Nasty Family started a bit past 6am and drove from East Central Illinois to Niagara Falls, Ontario. We're on a family vacation based on the fact that my daughter has a national dance competition in Sandusky Ohio starting on Tuesday. We went to Niagara Falls for a couple days, and then we'll drive through upstate New York and Pennsylvania to get to Sandusky. 

We crossed the border at Detroit-Windsor and drove all the way to Niagara Falls, which had us cross a mighty good portion of Ontario, which is an enormous province. 

I wouldn't call the drive beautiful. It's pretty enough. The terrain reminds of certain parts of Michigan.

But I would call the drive impressive. 

Once we got past Windsor and out on Ontario Highway 401, Mrs. Nasty and I were both struck by the sheer number of wind turbines there are in that part of Ontario. In addition, we noticed many households that had solar panels, and there were a number of concentrated solar fields. 

This is what happens when a government provides smart incentives to its citizens to invest in renewable energy. I would say the first 50-60 miles of the drive on 401 there was not a landscape that did not have wind turbines dotting it. Very impressive.

As my daughter smartly said on the drive, "The US needs to take some notes from Canada." 

Here are some links about information and incentives given regarding clean energy:

• "Canadian Wind Energy Association"
• "Canadian Solar Power/Wind Power Generation"
• "Canadian Solar Energy Programs"
• "Solar Tax Credits, Incentives and Rebates in Ontario"

Once we got on the 403 and around Lake Ontario and the Hamilton metro area, there were wineries all over the place. Every exit around that area had at least two wineries featured. 

I'm not much a fan of Canadian whiskey (bourbon is my drink of choice), but I suspect I'd like Canadian wine, especially if they offer some good red wines. 

Today at the hotel I picked up the self-proclaimed "Canada's National Newspaper," The Globe and Mail. 

I read that paper today, and in comparison, USA Today, which is also available at the hotel, reads more like a newspaper for dumbasses, for Americans who don't like to read. 

Three articles in the paper offer some helpful, non-US takes on the G20 Summit where MoscowDon basically isolated the US and looked like the doofus he is:

• "Why the G20 Is Needed More Than Ever"
• "Global Steering Committee Hits the Ditch"
• "Beware the Populist Prescription"

I need to read The Globe and Mail more often. 

Stay Positive: The Bookmobile

I belong to a group on FB called "You Might Be From Waterloo/Cedar Falls If You Remember." Today someone had a post about remembering the library's Bookmobile. 

That photo is an older one, but I fondly remember the Bookmobile. One day a week it would park at a strip mall a block from my house, and my mom or dad would take me to it. 

I thought it was so great -- a bus full of books that traveled around the city delivering knowledge. From my perspective now, I really admire how my mom got me hooked on reading at an early age and supported me. Not enough kids have parents who do that kind of work. 

And I'm trying to pass on my mom's practices to my kids. 

Random Notes from a Crank

I just have to vent this question. When the @#$% are The Bottle Rockets going to put out a new album? 

This weekend we're headed up to Iowa to visit my dad. We haven't visited since my mom's funeral in early February. We'll visit her grave on Saturday and take my old man out to dinner at Texas Roadhouse. He's moving to a smaller apartment in the old folks home. And yes, you just read "old folks home." I prefer that term to "assisted-living facility," which sounds way too technical and sterile. He's going to give my daughter a Norwegian doll of my mom's, which will make Hannah cry. And apparently he wants to give my son a bunch of old coins. He's been more upbeat when I have talked to him lately, so I think he's gotten somewhat used to being solo. I think the move to different apartment will also help.

I wish I could still read Latin like I used to. Right now one of the books I'm reading is Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor. Back when I was in Latin classes, I have the privilege of reading Julius Caesar, Cicero, and others in their native tongue. Cicero's speech about the Catalinarian conspiracy is a serious work of art. And I enjoyed Julius Ceasar's style of writing: direct and concise. 

I started reading Brian Wood's comic books about Star Wars. His series informs readers about what was happening between Episode IV: Star Wars and Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back. I do believe I'm hooked. I dig the depiction of Leia as a warrior princess. It's a fun narrative. 

Lately the only fiction I read is sequential art. 

For Father's Day I bought my dad The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression by Amity Shales. Virg was born in '27, so he was a little kid during the Depression. I'm thinking about buying the graphic version of the book that came out a while back. 

"The Masculine Mystique"

I'm catching up on my magazine and journal reading, and I came across a thought-provoking article in The Atlantic that I recommend  if you care about the American family, fatherhood, or feminism. That trio casts a pretty wide net. However, I will say that the article only looks at things from a heteronormative point of view. Fair warning.

In the paper copy of the magazine, the article's title is "The Masculine Mystique" by Stephen Marche, but the online version is titled "Home Economics: The Link Between Work-Life Balance and Income Equality."

Here a some quotations that might pique your interest:

• "Men's absence from the conversation about work and life is strange, because decisions about who works and who takes care of the children, and who makes the money and how the money is spent, are not decided by women alone or by some vague and impersonal force called society."
• "The central conflict of domestic life right now is not men versus women, mothers versus fathers. It is family versus money."
• "It is an outrage that the male-female wage gap persists, and yet, over the past 10 years, in almost every country in the developed world, it has shrunk." 
• "We live in a hollow patriarchy: the edifice is patriarchal, while the majority of its occupants approach egalitarianism. This generates strange paradoxes."
• "The hollow patriarchy keeps women from power and confounds male identity."
• "A conversation about work-life balance conducted by and for a small sliver of the female population only perpetuates the perception that these are women's problems, not family ones."