My friend Claire told me that [i]Calumet K[/i]

is available as a free audio book! It's a great story about a guy building a grain elevator back in the 1890s.

LibriVox recording of Calumet "K", by Samuel Merwin and Henry Kitchell Webster. Read by Betsie Bush.

"A novel, with several elements of rather unusual interest. As a tale, it is swift, simple, and absorbing, and one does not willingly put it down until it is finished. It has to do with grain-elevator business, with railways, strikes, and commercial and financial matters generally, woven skilfully into a human story of love." --The Commercial Advertiser"
'Calumet "K"' is a novel that is exciting and absorbing, but not the least bit sensational. It is the story of a rush.... The book is an unusually good story; one that shows the inner workings of the labor union, and portrays men who are the bone and sinew of the earth."--The Toledo Blade.

"The heroine in this case is the hero's stenographer; but the action of the story grows out of the attempt of rival capitalists and grain men to balk the building of a grain elevator by a set date." --The Burlington Free Press

(Excerpts from the advertising material at the end of "The Merry Anne" by Samuel Merwin)



Note: This book contains racial comments that may be offensive to modern listeners.

For more free audio books or to become a volunteer reader, visit LibriVox.org.

M4B audiobook of Complete Book

Hey! Just got my copy of The Austrian School of Economics

The Austrian School of Economics

I'm just looking it over. Here's a nice quote from the preface:

Based on the assumption that the individual was the decisive economic agent, and thus centering its research on individual preferences and on the intersubjective balancing of these preferences in the context of markets, the Austrian school has consistently pointed to the fact that institutions such as money, states [?, ed.], and markets had emerged without any planning, without any central purpose, and without force [in the case of states, maybe kinda sorta]. They had emerged on the basis of human interaction alone, and in a manner that was therefore natural, befitting both humans, and human logic. This basic insight counters all political and economic ideologies that view such institutions as working arenas for the establishment or development of authoritarian activity aimed at influencing or even controlling the direction of individual preferences or their intersubjective balance.

This meant that during the interwar period in Austria, the Austrian School was attacked, sometimes fiercely, by political parties of both the left and the right. the Austrian school not only denied the legitimacy, but also the efficacy of many economic policies. furthermore, the school had always identified itself with a universal science in which there was no room for national, religious, or class-oriented constrictions. In ways it even represented a kind of alternate world to many of the country's idiosyncrasies: it focused exclusively on the individual and asserted that individual action on the basis of subjective preferences was the starting point of r research; it was based on a realistic image of humanity that was not suited for inconceivable flights of idealistic fantasy and therefore not amenable to cheap political exploitation; it was free of magniloquent utopias, upheld the principles of self-determination and non-violence, and was united in its fundamental criticism of any monopolistic and forceful intervention of the state. In addition, it emanated a highly scholarly ethos which made possible the emergence of an uncommonly cosmopolitan and tolerant discourse.

Hah! Only five typoes. Considering the complexity of some of those terms, I'm proud. Oh yeah, the bracketed comments are mine (I'm sure that was obvious).

To elaborate on that point... I mean, maybe the original groups who first decided to conquer and enslave their neighbors found themselves together in one place without planning or force, but they didn't accomplish their conquest without force. Although I'll have to consider whether a hierarchic society can arise without that special case of force we call fraud.

Funniness

You may have to hang out in some odd corners to get this guy's bit, but I think anyone can understand this one.

Hey! Atlas Shrugged opens Friday!

Marshall Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication

is an important contribution to the development of interpersonal and world peace.

The Wikipedia article on him looks like a good place to start studying him and his works. And here's the article on Nonviolent Communication.

But back to Naomi Aldort

I thought I'd quote a bit from the intro to Raising Our Children, Raising Ourselves:

When you have the courage to stop defending the way you are, or the way your parents raised you, you can open up to the possibility that you are much greater and more magnificent and capable than you thought you were.

The Dallas SOS (Secular Organizations for Sobriety) group

has a helpful page - they call it a toolbox.  Here's one that I use a lot myself:

Fear — use it if you get it. Don’t live in fear, but use it. The same goes for horror, shame, regret or any other negative thoughts or feelings that may come when you think about your drinking days. Don’t stifle or deny these states of mind. Use them as tools to reinforce yourself, not stumbling blocks.

Maybe I should add the link to the page where I found this; there are a ton of other useful links there.

I haven't mentioned lately that I'd like to get together with like-minded ex-drunks (perhaps I should put that in quotes - it's an ongoing struggle) for a stroll through one of our local parks here in the northern suburbs of Minneapolis. Or Minneapolis, itself, of course - wonderful parks there, too.

I really like Naomi Aldort

I'll link her own webpage - the articles page - but her videos on YouTube are great stuff too.

Progressive Parenting: get with it.  (Don't confuse true progress with that proto-Nazi crap Presidents Wilson and both Roosevelts were pushing.)

It's quite likely your parents raised you wrong.

Mourn.

If that's the case, you're probably raising (or already did raise) your kids wrong.

Apologize and make amends.

Here's how.  To do the latter, not the former.

I was looking at my photo albums of my German trips

Back in the early '80s and I came across some pics of myself that kind of blew me away.

I guess I always thought I always had the gut I have now.  I mean, yeah, it was bigger a couple times - and pretty huge when I was guzzling gallons of beer daily - but I saw it as pretty big even back before I graduated high school.

I find these pics rather inspirational!  I believe I'll go exercise more.

Well, not right now.  It's damn near 1:30 AM.  It took me this long to figure out where the h my scanner hid the pictures. 

By the way, even though it's been almost 30 years to the minute since I've seen the G-- family, I still remember their names.  That's Roland behind me, Frau G-- (I'm afraid that's as much of her name as I ever got), Birgit (yes, that's spelled right), and Herr (Joseph) G--.  If they give me permission, I'll put their whole last name here.  Interestingly, their name translates to almost the same thing as the town they lived in.

I enjoyed my stay with them immensely, and I learned a lot of German from them.  Heck!  They took me to Austria and Switzerland, with a heck of a long side-trip to Luxemburg!  And the Bodensee (Lake Constance) from Lindau to Meersburg!  Each of those was a daytrip.

Roland took a trip to Canada and the US the next year (1982) and stayed with us one night.  And I missed him on my second trip to Stuttgart, because I butchered the plans to meet.  I had arranged - well, I agitated for it anyway - the group tour of the Mercedes-Benz factory, because I wanted to tell my Dad all about it, so I didn't feel I could skip it.  But I was hoping to get away in time to catch Roland. 

But it was a big factory.  Whenever the guide said, "Now let's go see the blah, blah, blah..." my heart just sank with dismay.  I was the only one who cared and all I could think about was getting back to the D--s place to catch Roland.

The D--s, now...  Let's just say that that was about nail number 297 in the coffin of that relationship.  Not the final one, but one of them.  I pounded the last one home myself.  But that's a shameful story that won't ever be written down anywhere.

And I don't remember having any big conversation about the Mercedes factory with Dad either.

I just got the VLC Media Player

Seems pretty cool.  It's nice to be able to speed up Youtube videos.

It's free.  Here's their website: http://gofree.com/download/Video/Media-Players/vlcmediaplayer.php?gclid=CI_o_r3QzKcCFZFoKgodU27dFQ

Oh! Crap! We're springing ahead tonight?!

But I'm not ready!!

Out of the nest the chick must fly

The nest fits him not for eternity.

-Rhyme R Us.

It's likely that this couplet has been written before, but I claim to have come up with it independently. I like the double meanings in the archaic form.

I said this to my daughter this morning. She took her gloved hand off the doorknob and, rather flatly, asked, "What does that mean?"

"What do you think it means?"

"Uh...Leaving the house?"

That's what I get for offering my pearls in such a concrete situation.

Here's a fun quote

from Reimarus,

"Contradiction is a devil and father of
lies, who refuses to be driven out either by fasting
and prayer, or by miracles."

Pg. 76. It's a quick read. I've gotten this far since 9:00. About half the book.

You might want to look to the WikiPedia article to find out who Reimarus was.

Guess I'd better go to bed now.

My run yesterday reminded me a bit too much of Jack London's short story

To Build a Fire.

It was 1°F and snowing lightly when I headed out at 11:15 AM. Not windy at all. It was supposed to warm up into the teens sometime, so I expected to benefit from that before I was done, so I didn't bother with the balaclava or the strip of polar fleece I tie around my face to protect my nose and cheeks. And I didn't wear the safety vest, because it was daylight.

Everything went along just dandy for four miles, then the wind picked up. I managed another two miles into that before I gave it up as a bad job and headed back home. The plan was to run another three into that wind, but my beard and mustache were iced up - I mean solid - like a half inch thick - and my energy drinks were already turning to slush, so they'd be worthless, excess weight if I didn't head straight back right then.

When I got back to Thirty Sixth Avenue, about three miles from my house, I decided to walk for a bit and finish off my first slushee. The wind quickly bit through the layers wet clothing - the outer layer was wet with snow melt (even though I looked like a walking snowman) and the inner three layers were wet with sweat). At the verge of shivering I had to start running again.

Like Jack Frost's sled dog, I had to keep up a good pace all the way home, or feel the bite of the lash. Running over the railroad bridge at two miles was a bitch, because I was completely exposed to the wind. I tried walking again at a mile, but I got chilled even quicker that time.

Oh, I should mention that the first time I started walking, besides to drink, it was because the restriction of my vision caused by my hood pulling my hat brim down, a slight fogging of my glasses and the fact that the whole world was white caused me to miss the fact that the sidewalk dipped down suddenly to the street and I had a rather jarring landing that caused my hip to hurt.

Another post-mortem thought - a lesson I need to take - is that I really didn't power-up enough for the run. I only had one medium-large bowl of cereal to eat for breakfast. Even though I run slow, with the low temperature, I was probably burning more that 100 Kcal/mile.

I wish someone had snapped a picture of me when I got in the door. I got that wet crap off me as quick as I could and jumped in the shower. I still had ice chunks to pick out of my beard as the water was heating up.

I went to grade school with this guy!

He won't be at the reunion, though.



He's different now, though. I guess being reincarnated as an orange has mellowed him out and made him funnier.

Oh my god! The 30th reunion is coming up!

The guys organizing it sent out a list of everybody so they can update their info. Looking at all the names of all the girls I had crushes on, but was too shy to do anything about...

Going down that list, I had the hots for darn near all them at one point or other.

One of them lives quite close here, it appears. Actually too close to make her place a destination for a long run. Wait, that's right - I've got to run home again, too. Well, I've got one scheduled for that distance in late May. Not that she'd want to have a chat - let alone an illicit rendezvous - with a tired, sweaty, bald guy. There're undoubtedly people who make that kind of thing work, but I've never figured it out.

I don't know if my problem was shyness, as much as it was that I couldn't figure out how to narrow my choices. The moment I figured that out, I ended up married.

Huh.

Yeah, there were guys back in high school, too. Didn't think about 'em much. Spent all my time with them, but that was just a given. They didn't require thought.

Frickin' hilarious how terrified I used to be of maybe discovering that I was actually gay. That lurking terror... I'd like to find out how to get that out of young boys' minds. It's the source of so many tragedies.

Anyway... I don't think I can be of much help to the reunion committee. I've lost touch with everybody. I can't even keep track of a GDSOB phone number for 12 hours. I won't go into that except to say, when I had the phone in my hand and couldn't find the number, I had to wonder what my unconscious was trying to say. At the least it was saying, "Wait a bit." I won't entertain other possibilities here.

Then there're those with "deceased" after their names. There were two of those whom I didn't know at all. The rest were friends of mine, or people I liked and wanted to know better. I hope we don't learn that there are more than we know about now. It doesn't look like the list has grown much since the twenty year reunion.

Maybe it's just me, but I have the impression that the SSHS Class of '81 liked each other more than the average group of 400-some kids. I might have been one of the harder ones to get along with myself. I remember having some extraordinary mood swings.

I'm having a flashback to one explosion that's making me sick to my stomach. I think my whole life since has been dedicated to making sure that doesn't happen again. Mostly unconsciously, thwarting my efforts to achieve anything great.

I gotta go burn up this adrenalin.

You're wrong, Kenny

A little song can change the world. Though, I can't think of one of yours that would have.

Look at what Sara Bareilles did.

I want everyone armed with King of Anything. How long has it been out, and what's been going on in the world during that time?

This is beautiful.

This has meaning to someone today.

No, just one simple meaning.

I've signed up for a couple races.

Grandma's Marathon in Duluth on June 18th and the Afton 50K Trail Run on July 2nd. Grandma's will actually function as a training run for the latter.

Just so you know, a Marathon is about 42K; a 50K is an ultramarathon. I mean, sure, the big boys in ultramarathoning consider it a weenie race, but I kind of think it's a big deal. You should see the altitude profile of this thing: up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down... And that's just the 25K course! We get to start all over again! And it's a trail run, so it's all grass and dirt. Some of those things have you jumping over logs, scrambling over rocks and wading rivers. I don't think this one is like that, but I don't know. I'm going to have to do some training runs over there and scout the place out.

I also fully intend to run the Twin Cities Marathon again this year. I believe I'll be presenting a different image come the Holidays.