Ypsi’s water tower, and its missing whatsit

My friend Eric sent me a huge photo of Ypsilanti’s infamous water tower yesterday. The image, which is beautiful, was taken in 1900, when women carried parasols, and Cross Street was still a dirt road scarred by wagon tracks. It’s an amazing photo. The structure was just ten years old at the time, having been completed for $21,435.63 in 1890. Here, from Wikipedia, is a little more background:

An ordinance passed on April 14, 1898 established a yearly rate schedule for residences with running water. Rates were based on the number of faucets in use, the type of business that customers operated and the livestock they owned. A residence with one tap was charged $5.00 and a private bathtub cost an additional $2.00. Saloon keepers paid $7.00 for one faucet, $3.00 for each additional faucet and $1.00 for each billiard table. Each cow a person owned cost $1.00. People who failed to pay their bill were subject to a $50.00 fine and ninety days in the county jail.

And here’s the photo:

watertower1900

Do you notice that little observation area at the top of the shaft? It’s not there now. At least I don’t think it’s there now… unless it’s somehow retractable. Maybe it just pops out when the conditions are right, like when a warm breeze caresses the tip just right. I suspect, however, that it was trimmed off at some point – a kind of architectural circumcision, if you will. Anyway, I’m now curious as to what happened, and why it was removed. I imagine that, as the water tower is built on the highest point in the City, the observation area was used for the spotting of fires and the like, but I’m not sure. If anyone knows, leave a comment.

Oh, and whatever you do, don’t take a photo of the tower in its current state. Photographing water towers these days is apparently illegal.

Posted in Civil Liberties, Ypsilanti | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 19 Comments

Sheriff Joe Arpaio suspected of misusing up to $80 million

I had wanted to write about something different tonight, but it looks as though tough-guy Republican sheriff Joe Arpaio may be getting ready to serve some time in pink boxer shorts alongside the illegal aliens he’s so fond of rounding up in front of TV cameras. Here’s a clip from Talking Points Memo:

Joe Arpaio, the Arizona sheriff infamous due to his attention-grabbing immigration enforcement related stunts and the accusations his office discriminates against Latinos, allegedly misused millions in funds intended for jail operations, Maricopa County officials said Wednesday.

Excerpts of the reports, obtained by TPMMuckraker, show officials from Arpaio’s office made trips to Orlando, D.C., Honduras, Tempe, Belize, Alaska and Puerto Rico on the county’s dime and racked up other questionable expenses, like $741 at Sardella’s Pizza and Wings. The county was also charged $350 for a hotel room upgrade for one official’s spouse. One employee went on multiple extradition trips without submitting receipts for the $62,750 he or she spent — including $1,341 on Disney World Yacht Club Resort food and entertainment.

Others expenses charged to the county, according to the report, include $1,684 for a portable generator for parade lights on an army tank; $635 at Buca di Beppo when members of the Honduran National Police were in town; and $500 on a carriage ride.

The Maricopa County Office of Management and Budget unveiled the first evidence of misuse of public funds by Arpaio’s office to the county Board of Supervisors on Wednesday, which the Arizona Republic reported were the result of hundreds of hours of staff research…

No word as of yet as to how this might impact Sheriff Joe’s run for President.

Posted in Other, Politics | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Lovecraft, and his insight into ancient evil (and Republicans)

I received an odd letter today from a former Ypsilantian who now finds himself living among the natives of Hawaii. He wanted to let me know about a quote that he’d stumbled across concerning Republicans. The piece, according to him, was penned in 1936, by none other than H.P. Lovecraft, the man behind Cthulhu (think Dick Cheney with tentacles) and the Necronomicon (imagine a compilation of everything ever written by Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter, translated into Arabic, and with a few incantations thrown in). Here’s the quote:

“As for the Republicans—how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical ‘American heritage’…) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead.”

Brilliant stuff, isn’t it? I love the phrase, “a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science.” It’s almost as though he could see the future. I’d always thought that our Republicans today were a different breed than anything that had walked the earth before, but apparently there were already visible signs in 1936 as to what would come.

Speaking of shutting their eyes to science, did you read that, except for Mike Castle in Delaware, not one of the 37 Republicans who were in the running for Senate this year believe that global warming is real? The following comes from Think Progress:

Last week, the Wonk Room published an exclusive analysis of the Republican candidates for the U.S. Senate, finding that only Rep. Mike Castle (R-DE) supported action to fight global warming pollution. That Tuesday, Castle was defeated in his primary by Tea Party candidate Christine O’Donnell, who believes evolution is a myth and opposes stem-cell research. Yesterday, Bill Maher cited that report in a discussion with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, bemoaning the dominance of anti-science Republicans. After Matthews played a clip of O’Donnell warning in 2007 of “mice with fully functioning human brains” — evidently a mangled reference to a mouse with surgically constructed ear from cow cells grafted onto its back — Maher noted that the “real issue” is the Republican opposition to science:

MAHER: I don’t know, when I saw all this coverage of the witch stuff, I was laughing yesterday. Because that is not really important to the election. It is just a side show, as you would say. It was funny. I don’t think it should hurt her. It was something she was doing in high school. But when you think this about scientific issues facing this nation, people could be really helped by stem cell research. That’s a real issue. There are 37 Republican candidates for the Senate. Not one believes global warming is real and man made. Except the one, Mike Castle, the guy she defeated in Delaware.

I haven’t said it in a while, but we’re totally fucked.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

I wanted to post tonight, but now I’m having second thoughts…

Please, whatever you do, don’t ask me what color panties I’m wearing if you see me tomorrow. It would totally freak me out.

And, for what it’s worth, I think it’s a damned good PSA… If you’ve got a kid, keep them the hell away from the internet. Nothing good can come of it. Either you get stalked by perverts, or, worse yet, you grow into a sad, friendless, grub-white lump of a man who spends every night hunched wheezing over a dirty keyboard at his kitchen table instead of enjoying life in the real world. Seriously, there should be a PSA for that.

Posted in Mark's Life | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 12 Comments

Mourning in America

In advance of the upcoming elections, the Republicans are pulling out all the stops and running to the right as fast as the can in order to ingratiate themselves to the newly-political, clearly-delusional members of the American Tea Party movement. Here, to give you a flavor of what’s headed our way, is a new ad produced by a group calling itself Citizens for the Republic, followed by a bit of background from the Washington Post.

“There’s mourning in America. Today, 15 million men and women won’t have the opportunity to go to work. Businesses shuttered. Twenty-nine hundred families will have their homes foreclosed by nightfall. This afternoon, 6,000 men and women will be married, each of their children to be born with a $30,000 share of the runaway national debt.”…

This is a smart ad, created by Strategic Perception’s Fred Davis, one of the GOP’s favorite admen. Davis produced commercials for George W. Bush and John McCain but is perhaps best known for his “Demon Sheep” ad for Carly Fiorina. Davis thinks his latest will stand out because when “everyone else is shouting, a whisper can be the most powerful form of communication. And God knows the world is shouting.”

The ad is not subtle in blaming current circumstances on Obama. Quite the contrary, the narrator says that under the president’s leadership, the country is “fading, and weaker, and worse off.” In a gesture of charity, perhaps, the ad allows: “His policies were a grand experiment, policies that failed.”

Can’t blame the man for trying? Good guy, bad policies? To the point: Vote Republican in November and “choose a smaller, more caring government, one that remembers us.”…

[“Us,” if you didn’t already figure it out, is code for white America.]

Of course, it’s all fucking bullshit. The recession, which analysts tell us is now over, by the way, got its start under Bush. But that doesn’t stop them from blaming it on Obama, and from suggesting that he’s attempting to tax us to death on top of it, even though taxes are only being raised on the top 2% of Americans. And, in those cases, the rates are just returning to their turn-of-the-century levels – as was stipulated in the legislation drafted by the Bush administration. If you’ll recall, those temporary Bush tax cuts were sold to the American people with claims that business owners, if they could just keep more of their money, would invest in research and development, grown their operations, and create new jobs. That, as we now know, though, never happened. Instead, the disparity between rich and poor grew to levels unseen since just prior to the Great Depression. And, now that the homes in our neighborhoods are being foreclosed upon, and the erosion of the American middle class is becoming painfully tangible, people are looking for scapegoats to hang the blame on. And the people who voted for Bush sure as hell aren’t going to accept responsibility. They aren’t going to acknowledge that we had a budget surplus until Bush got into office. They aren’t going to acknowledge that the illegal war in Iraq, that they wanted so desperately, is bankrupting us. Instead, they’re going to blame Barack Obama and those fucking elitist, big-goveernment Democrats. And, as a result, corporate strength will grow, deregulation will continue, social programs will be slashed, and working men and women will lose even more ground. If people had any sense, they’d be in the streets, demanding that corporate money be removed from politics, and taxes be raised on the super-wealthy. But instead they’ll blame that racist Kenyan socialist in the White House who brought all of this about over the course of just one year.

foxtaxllies2

[Tonight’s post was brought to you by the Pledge for America.]

Posted in Media, Observations, Politics | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 30 Comments

Connect

BUY LOCAL... or shop at Amazon through this link Banner Initiative Josh Tear Header