• A story Facebook doesn’t want you to read

    February 8, 2022
    US politics

    Wisconsin Right Now posted on Facebook:

    We have a new article posted on https://www.wisconsinrightnow.com/ that deals with an issue that is being censored. Since we are already on super-secret double probation and have been threatened with the complete removal of our pages and profiles for our coverage of the KR trial, we have chosen not to share the story on FB.

    The article is from Stephanie Soucek:

    “We had to do this! It was life or death!” He took the first dose and started to feel better within a few hours. 

    As we look around the world and even right here in the United States of America, it is clear that there has been an overall effort to take away our freedoms under the guise of keeping us safe. When it comes to COVID, only the government-sanctioned experts know best—even though they’ve been wrong and flip-flopped many times the past two years. One could easily argue that more harm than good has been done by restricting our freedoms in order to “keep us safe.”

    It is alarming when debate about what treatments work best is shut down and the government will decide what doctors and “science” you should trust and listen to. alternative COVID treatments including inexpensive repurposed drugs like Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine that have been approved for human use by the FDA for decades have been suppressed and made difficult to obtain for the purposes of treating COVID.

    And expensive treatments like Remdesivir are pushed as one of the only drugs used for the treatment for COVID. Yet in November 2020 the WHO came out with a study claiming Remdesivir should not be used to treat COVID patients in hospitals because it was ineffective.

    According to an article from NBC News: “In light of the interim data from the WHO’s ‘Solidarity’ trial — which included data from more than 11,200 people in 30 countries — “remdesivir is now classified as a drug you should not use routinely in Covid-19 patients,” the president of the European Society of Intensive Care Medicine, Jozef Kesecioglu, said in an interview with Reuters.” Yet it’s the main drug still being pushed by the CDC and many hospitals in the US today. Why?

    I suppose nothing has disturbed me more than hearing about the first-hand accounts of patients being refused alternative COVID treatments they request, even after being told by the hospital that nothing else can be done for them and they will likely die. On top of that, some of these hospitals have refused to release patients when they or their families request to be released in order to get a second opinion or alternative COVID treatments somewhere else. Second opinions have saved people’s lives at times and a patient has the right to get a second opinion or try another treatment in order to potentially save their lives.

    There are stories right here in Wisconsin of families who have suffered because of hospital protocols. One such story comes from a woman who shared the heartbreaking story of her husband, who died last year at the age of 55 after being admitted into a Milwaukee area hospital. Out of respect for her family’s privacy she asked to remain anonymous. Her husband became sick in late September 2021 and tested positive for Covid shortly after.

    After about a week of not getting better on his own she took her husband to the hospital. Shortly after being admitted his oxygen levels dropped and he was transferred to the ICU. She says she was unable to go into the hospital to be with him during this time and the communication between her and the hospital was poor. He was given 4 treatments of Remdesivir before his liver started being negatively affected. She requested they stop using Remdesivir and try other potential alternative COVID treatments such as ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, and monoclonal antibodies but was told that wasn’t allowed because of hospital protocol (based on the CDC guidance).

    She says once she became power of attorney she requested to have a meeting of care for her husband but the doctor refused. They continued with four more treatments of Remdesivir. A little more than a week after being admitted to the ICU he was put on a ventilator. His kidneys were failing, which is a potential side-effect of Remdesivir. Disagreements occurred among doctors about whether or not he should be transferred and he ended up being transferred to another hospital and sadly died the next day.

    She believes (with good reason) that treating him with Remdesivir and the hospital not being willing to try alternative COVID treatments is what truly took his life. She hopes telling her husband‘s story will help raise awareness and help other people avoid similar tragedies.

    Another woman I talked to named Debbie tells the story of her father who was diagnosed with Covid and Pneumonia last year December. He wasn’t doing well so he was admitted into a hospital in northeast Wisconsin where he was sent to the ICU and put on oxygen, plus they started treating him with Remdesivir.

    He started to get worse and the family was told he would likely need to be put on a ventilator soon. The family was distraught and thought he would likely die based on everything happening. They asked to stop treatment of Remdesivir and asked if the hospital could try an alternative COVID treatment like Azithromycin with Ivermectin. The family was told it wasn’t approved and it doesn’t work.

    But this family was desperate and decided to get a prescription for ivermectin along with a Z pack from a doctor in Michigan. They couldn’t get the prescription filled initially because the pharmacy they went to refused, so thankfully they found a pharmacy out of town that would fill it.

    They ended up hiding the treatment for her dad with some of his belongings they sent into the hospital. When recalling what they did Debbie’s words were “We had to do this! It was life or death!” He took the first dose and started to feel better within a few hours. He took a second dose the next day and within 24 hours his oxygen levels were improving and he was ready to go home within days of taking the treatment and was home by Christmas.

    The family strongly believes that had they not given him the treatment they snuck into the hospital he likely would have died. How sad that they had to hide what they were doing because the hospital refused to allow this type of treatment.

    As I am writing this article, two men on ventilators—Daniel Pisano, 70, in Florida and Stephen Judge, 69, in Arizona—died within a day of each other, even as their families were still fighting with hospitals for the chance to try alternative treatments including Ivermectin.

    There are many great healthcare facilities and doctors out there. But there are many other stories like this of families battling hospital protocol over their loved one’s lives.

    We have to ask ourselves why isn’t there more of a willingness to try alternative COVID treatments, especially when other efforts have failed? Why are some hospitals ignoring the family‘s wishes and telling them “it’s protocol directed by the CDC” as if there’s no other choice?

    Why is our government working with big tech to suppress the voices of doctors, scientists, and others who disagree with certain government protocols, even as those protocols fail at times?

    According to an editorial in the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, “The CARES Act provides incentives for hospitals to use treatments dictated solely by the federal government under the auspices of the NIH, providing hospitals with bonus incentive payments for all things related to COVID-19 (testing, diagnosing, admitting to hospital, use of remdesivir and ventilators, reporting COVID-19 deaths, and vaccinations) and (2) waivers of customary and long-standing patient rights by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).”

    We have to ask ourselves why these incentives were put in place.

    Thomas Jefferson once said, “Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves, therefore, are it’s only safe depositories.” We should not be putting such blind faith in what our government or big tech tells us is right. Our government has too much control over what we can watch and listen to, what we must inject into our bodies, and what type of treatments we are allowed to use even if our own doctors disagree with the government’s protocols.

    I wonder how many lives could have been saved if alternative COVID treatments and information weren’t being suppressed. We must demand more transparency and accountability from our government, and we must fight for our liberties before it’s too late.

    You don’t have to believe anything you just read to ask the question of why the government is handling COVID as it is.

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  • Presty the DJ for Feb. 8

    February 8, 2022
    Music

    The number one album today in 1969 was the soundtrack to NBC-TV’s “TCB,” a special with Diana Ross and the Supremes and the Temptations:

    The number one album today in 1975 was Bob Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks”:

    (more…)

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  • The Biden malaise

    February 7, 2022
    US politics

    Remember this?

    The Hill:

    The United States economy added more than 7 million jobs over the last 12 months for the first time in history. Wages are rising, the national gross domestic product is booming, and the end of the pandemic appears just around the corner after the vast majority of Americans opted to take the safe and effective vaccines created by American scientists.

    (See today’s 6 a.m. post for the correct description of that jobs number.)

    But Americans aren’t feeling it. In fact, they are in a historically bad mood, about the country, about their leaders and about their own lives.

    For nearly two decades, more Americans have said the country is on the wrong track than heading in the right direction. More than half the country has said the country is moving in the wrong track in every Gallup poll since December 2003.

    Since George W. Bush won reelection in 2004, Americans have disapproved of a president’s job performance more than they approve in 142 of 203 months, according to those same Gallup polls.

    Blame hyperpartisan politics, which have cut into any president’s chances of building a multiparty coalition. Blame the Great Recession, which continues to exert its influence over everything from our outlook on the economy to child fertility rates. Blame rising gas prices and inflation, which dampens any gleam of hope that might come from low unemployment rates and a jobs bonanza.

    And, most obviously, blame a pandemic that has killed nearly a million Americans, shuttered schools and businesses and left a frustrated and angry populace.

    “We’re pushing a million deaths and the total disruption of our existence first with a president who denied it and secondly with a president who’s had difficulty communicating where we are and where we’re headed,” said Lee Miringoff, who runs polling at Marist College. “It’s made for a lot of dissatisfaction and frustration.”

    The result is a population that is unsatisfied not just with politics, but with life. Data from the General Social Survey (GSS), conducted by the National Opinion Research Center, found that for the first time in 2021, more Americans said they were not too happy than the share who said they were very happy.

    As recently as 2018, twice as many Americans said we were very happy than those who said they were not too happy, a trend that stretches back to the GSS’s earliest work in the 1970s.

    Fewer Americans say they are living an exciting life, too. Just 36 percent called their lives exciting, according to the latest GSS data, the lowest figure ever recorded and down from 49 percent three years ago. Meanwhile, 59 percent said their lives were routine, the highest that share has ever been and the first time since 1991 that more than half of Americans have described themselves that way.

    A recent Gallup survey found just 69 percent of Americans are satisfied with their overall quality of life, down 15 points from 2020. Only 1 in 5 Americans are satisfied with the moral and ethical climate of the nation. The share who are satisfied with the state of the economy dropped 25 points between 2020 and 2021, and another 10 points over the last year.

    “There may be not a lot to be happy about,” said Jeffrey Jones, a senior editor at Gallup. “It’s kind of hard to see the bright side.”

    Today’s bleak outlook is fueling pessimism in tomorrow, as well. Just 49 percent of Americans said they were generally more optimistic about what is ahead for the world in 2022, compared with 47 percent who said they were more pessimistic, according to a Marist College poll released in December.

    In recent years, the share who were more optimistic than pessimistic has hovered around or just below 60 percent.

    “We feel like we’re sliding backwards in so many ways,” Miringoff said. “Sliding backwards does not make for a happy people.”

    American voters almost always take out their frustrations on the party in power, especially when that party’s leader, the president, is not on the ballot.

    There are a thousand caveats about money and strategy and the candidates who will stand for office in this year’s midterm elections, but the historical record is unambiguous: The last time a president’s party gained seats in a midterm election, in 2002, twice as many Americans reported being very happy as not too happy, half thought the country was on the right track, and Bush’s approval rating was in the 60s.

    Now, after so long in the doldrums, there is virtually nothing a president — or, for that matter, the opposition — can do to snap America out of its pessimistic streak.

    Getting America back to a positive outlook “is usually a slower process,” Jones said. “The record would suggest probably not a lot is going to change.”

    Certainly not with this administration. Nor with a future Trump administration 2.0. The Democratic Party is hopeless and should never be allowed to govern at any level again, but the Republican Party needs to move past Trump (who even in the unlikely event he got elected in 2024 would only result in a four-year presidential election campaign in all parties) and find the correct leader for our times.

    How did Carter’s “malaise” speech work out?

     

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  • From the Bureau of Lying Statistics

    February 7, 2022
    US business, US politics

    Tim Nerenz:

    78 economists’ forecasts make up the “consensus” forecast for job growth each month, and the January consensus forecast was +125,000.

    A few days ago, ADP’s payroll print surprised the consensus with a net loss of 301,000 jobs, influenced by supply chain disruptions, Omicron business interruption, and termination of unvaccinated employees not factored into the forecasts.

    But then [Friday], the government (Bureau of Labor Statistics) reported a huge gain of 476,000 jobs in January – a 3 sigma deviation from consensus and twice the number of the highest forecast. The financial press describes the reaction of analysts as “gobsmacked”. It takes quite a bit to smack the gobs of professional market manipulators; kudos, BLS.

    But wait…there’s more; they also retroactively added 709,000 jobs to November and December prints. Where did those jobs come from? By re-allocating previously claimed gains from the “it’s working” months of April, May and June. “It” gets to work twice, apparently. Who knew?

    When pressed by the gobsmacked financial publication reporters, BLS explained that the miracle 467k January bump resulted from “adjustments” to seasonal and annual benchmark parameters in their models; the unadjusted count was a LOSS of 2.8 million jobs in January, or so they say.

    Wait, what? Are the Packers’ special teams filling in at Dept. of Labor for its vax-terminated and Omicron-sheltered stat jockeys? And where do I find the seasonal adjustment knobs on my bathroom scale, sleep number bed, and fit-bit?

    In meteorological terms, January payroll counts show a temperature of 30 below but BLS came up with a balmy 48 wind chill index. Do you put on the parka, chook, and swampers or just throw on a hoodie to take the dog out for a squirt? Your dog will figure out who got it right in a minute, but dogs don’t tweet.

    BLS tweaking their model parameters is not new or particularly newsworthy; it happens every year. This administration has made two that are historically unprecedented, removing jobs for January of 2021 and creating jobs for January 2022. The year over year results will be fodder for the mememeisters in memistan – my newsfeed is filling up already.

    May be an image of text that says '400 Seasonal Adjustments ttm As of January 300 200 100 309 2008 2010 2012 201 2016 2018 (100)2006 (200) (300) (400) (500) Source: BLS, SouthBay Research Inc 2020 2022'
    Why should you believe ADP and not BLS? If ADP is proven long, it loses business. What do the BLS bureaucrats lose by having their statistical fudging exposed? Certainly not their jobs

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  • Presty the DJ for Feb. 7

    February 7, 2022
    Music

    Today in 1969, Jim Morrison of the Doors was arrested for drunk driving and driving without a license in Los Angeles:

    The number one British album today in 1970 was “Led Zeppelin II”:

    The number one single today in 1970:

    (more…)

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  • Presty the DJ for Feb. 6

    February 6, 2022
    Music

    The number one British album today in 1965 was “The Rolling Stones No. 2”:

    The number one single on both sides of the Atlantic today in 1965:

    The number one single today in 1982 …

    … from the number one album, the J. Geils Band’s “Freeze Frame”:

    (more…)

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  • Presty the DJ for Feb. 5

    February 5, 2022
    Music

    The number one single today in 1966:

    The number one single today in 1983:

    Today in 2006, the Rolling Stones played during the halftime of the Super Bowl:

    (more…)

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  • Presty the DJ for Feb. 4

    February 4, 2022
    Music

    The number one single on both sides of the Atlantic today in 1965:

    The number one British album today in 1967 was “The Monkees”:

    The number one single on both sides of the Atlantic today in 1978:

    (more…)

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  • Presty the DJ for Feb. 3

    February 3, 2022
    Music

    Today in 1959, a few hours after their concert at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa, Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson got on a Beechcraft Bonanza in Mason City, Iowa, to fly to Fargo, N.D., for a concert in Moorhead, Minn.

    The trio, along with Dion and the Belmonts, were part of the Winter Dance Party Tour, a 24-city tour over three weeks, with its ridiculously scheduled tour dates connected by bus.

    Said bus, whose heater broke early in the tour, froze in below-zero temperatures two nights earlier between the scheduled concert in the Duluth, Minn., National Guard Armory, and the next scheduled location, the Riverside Ballroom in Green Bay.

    Holly’s drummer had to be hospitalized with frostbite in his feet, and Valens also became ill. The tour got to Green Bay, but its scheduled concert in Appleton that evening was canceled.

    After the concert in Clear Lake, Holly decided to rent an airplane. Holly’s bass player, Waylon Jennings, gave his seat to the Big Bopper because he was sick, and Valens won a coin flip with Holly’s guitarist, Tommy Allsup. Dion DiMucci chose not to take a seat because the $36 cost equaled his parents’ monthly rent.

    As he was leaving, Holly told Jennings, “I hope your ol’ bus freezes up,” to which Jennings replied, “Well, I hope your ol’ plane crashes!”

    Shortly after the 12:55 a.m. takeoff, the plane crashed, instantly killing Holly, Valens, the Big Bopper and the pilot.

    The scheduled concert that evening went on, with organizers recruiting a 15-year-old, Robert Velline, and his band the Shadows. Bobby Vee went on to have a good career. So did a teenager in the audience, Robert Zimmerman of Hibbing, Minn., who became known a few years later as Bob Dylan.

    <!–more–>

    The number one single today in 1968:

    The number one single today in 1973:

    The number one album today in 1979 was the Blues Brothers’ “Briefcase Full of Blues”:

    Birthdays begin with one of Dion’s Belmonts, Angelo D’Aleo:

    Dennis Edwards of the Temptations:

    Eric Haydock played bass for the Hollies:

    Dave Davies of the Kinks:

    Two-hit wonder Melanie Safka:

    Tony Butler played bass for Big Country:

    Lol Tolhurst played keyboards for the Cure:

    Who is Richie Kotzen? You know him as Mr. Big, whose career really wasn’t, having one hit:

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  • Presty the DJ for Feb. 2

    February 2, 2022
    Music

    First, to continue a decades-long tradition: It’s a great day for groundhogs. Unless they see their shadow and predict six more weeks of winter, in which case they should be turned into ground groundhog.

    (Back when I had radio ambitions, I came up with the idea of having a live remote from Sun Prairie where Jimmy the Groundhog would see his shadow and predict six more weeks of winter, then return to the station, only to dramatically go back to Sun Prairie to breathlessly report that someone assassinated Jimmy the Groundhog. It would work with Punxsutawney Phil too.)

    Today in 1959, Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and the Big Bopper all appeared at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa.

    That would be their final concert appearance because of what happened after the concert.

    (more…)

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Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog

The thoughts of a journalist/libertarian–conservative/Christian husband, father, Eagle Scout and aficionado of obscure rock music. Thoughts herein are only the author’s and not necessarily the opinions of his family, friends, neighbors, church members or past, present or future employers.

  • Steve
    • About, or, Who is this man?
    • Facebook
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    • Adventures in ruralu0026nbsp;inkBack in June 2009, I was driving somewhere through a rural area. And for some reason, I had a flashback to two experiences in my career about that time of year many years ago. In 1988, eight days after graduating from the University of Wisconsin, I started work at the Grant County Herald Independent in Lancaster as a — well, the — reporter. Four years after that, on my 27th birthday, I purchased, with a business partner, the Tri-County Press in Cuba City, my first business venture. Both were experiences about which Wisconsin author Michael Perry might write. I thought about all this after reading a novel, The Deadline, written by a former newspaper editor and publisher. (Now who would write a novel about a weekly newspaper?) As a former newspaper owner, I picked at some of it — why finance a newspaper purchase through the bank if the seller is willing to finance it? Because the mean bank lender is a plot point! — and it is much more interesting than reality, but it is very well written, with a nicely twisting plot, and quite entertaining, again more so than reality. There is something about that first job out of college that makes you remember it perhaps more…
    • Adventures in radioI’ve been in the full-time work world half my life. For that same amount of time I’ve been broadcasting sports as a side interest, something I had wanted to since I started listening to games on radio and watching on TV, and then actually attending games. If you ask someone who’s worked in radio for some time about the late ’70s TV series “WKRP in Cincinnati,” most of them will tell you that, if anything, the series understated how wacky working in radio can be. Perhaps the funniest episode in the history of TV is the “WKRP” episode, based on a true story, about the fictional radio station’s Thanksgiving promotion — throwing live turkeys out of a helicopter under the mistaken belief that, in the words of WKRP owner Arthur Carlson, “As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.” [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ST01bZJPuE0] I’ve never been involved in anything like that. I have announced games from the roofs of press boxes (once on a nice day, and once in 50-mph winds), from a Mississippi River bluff (more on that later), and from the front row of the second balcony of the University of Wisconsin Fieldhouse (great view, but not a place to go if…
    • “Good morning/afternoon/evening, ________ fans …”
    • My biggest storyEarlier this week, while looking for something else, I came upon some of my own work. (I’m going to write a blog someday called “Things I Found While Looking for Something Else.” This is not that blog.) The Grant County Sheriff’s Department, in the county where I used to live, has a tribute page to the two officers in county history who died in the line of duty. One is William Loud, a deputy marshal in Cassville, shot to death by two bank robbers in 1912. The other is Tom Reuter, a Grant County deputy sheriff who was shot to death at the end of his 4 p.m.-to-midnight shift March 18, 1990. Gregory Coulthard, then a 19-year-old farmhand, was convicted of first-degree intentional homicide and is serving a life sentence, with his first eligibility for parole on March 18, 2015, just 3½ years from now. I’ve written a lot over the years. I think this, from my first two years in the full-time journalism world, will go down as the story I remember the most. For journalists, big stories contain a paradox, which was pointed out in CBS-TV’s interview of Andy Rooney on his last “60 Minutes” Sunday. Morley Safer said something along the line…
  • Food and drink
    • The Roesch/Prestegard familyu0026nbsp;cookbookFrom the family cookbook(s) All the families I’m associated with love to eat, so it’s a good thing we enjoy cooking. The first out-of-my-house food memory I have is of my grandmother’s cooking for Christmas or other family occasions. According to my mother, my grandmother had a baked beans recipe that she would make for my mother. Unfortunately, the recipe seems to have  disappeared. Also unfortunately, my early days as a picky, though voluminous, eater meant I missed a lot of those recipes made from such wholesome ingredients as lard and meat fat. I particularly remember a couple of meals that involve my family. The day of Super Bowl XXXI, my parents, my brother, my aunt and uncle and a group of their friends got together to share lots of food and cheer on the Packers to their first NFL title in 29 years. (After which Jannan and I drove to Lambeau Field in the snow,  but that’s another story.) Then, on Dec. 31, 1999, my parents, my brother, my aunt and uncle and Jannan and I (along with Michael in utero) had a one-course-per-hour meal to appropriately end years beginning with the number 1. Unfortunately I can’t remember what we…
    • SkålI was the editor of Marketplace Magazine for 10 years. If I had to point to one thing that demonstrates improved quality of life since I came to Northeast Wisconsin in 1994, it would be … … the growth of breweries and  wineries in Northeast Wisconsin. The former of those two facts makes sense, given our heritage as a brewing state. The latter is less self-evident, since no one thinks of Wisconsin as having a good grape-growing climate. Some snobs claim that apple or cherry wines aren’t really wines at all. But one of the great facets of free enterprise is the opportunity to make your own choice of what food and drink to drink. (At least for now, though some wish to restrict our food and drink choices.) Wisconsin’s historically predominant ethnic group (and our family’s) is German. Our German ancestors did unfortunately bring large government and high taxes with them, but they also brought beer. Europeans brought wine with them, since they came from countries with poor-quality drinking water. Within 50 years of a wave of mid-19th-century German immigration, brewing had become the fifth largest industry in the U.S., according to Maureen Ogle, author of Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer. Beer and wine have…
  • Wheels
    • America’s sports carMy birthday in June dawned without a Chevrolet Corvette in front of my house. (The Corvette at the top of the page was featured at the 2007 Greater Milwaukee Auto Show. The copilot is my oldest son, Michael.) Which isn’t surprising. I have three young children, and I have a house with a one-car garage. (Then again, this would be more practical, though a blatant pluck-your-eyes-out violation of the Corvette ethos. Of course, so was this.) The reality is that I’m likely to be able to own a Corvette only if I get a visit from the Corvette Fairy, whose office is next door to the Easter Bunny. (I hope this isn’t foreshadowing: When I interviewed Dave Richter of Valley Corvette for a car enthusiast story in the late great Marketplace Magazine, he said that the most popular Corvette in most fans’ minds was a Corvette built during their days in high school. This would be a problem for me in that I graduated from high school in 1983, when no Corvette was built.) The Corvette is one of those cars whose existence may be difficult to understand within General Motors Corp. The Corvette is what is known as a “halo car,” a car that drives people into showrooms, even if…
    • Barges on fouru0026nbsp;wheelsI originally wrote this in September 2008.  At the Fox Cities Business Expo Tuesday, a Smart car was displayed at the United Way Fox Cities booth. I reported that I once owned a car into which trunk, I believe, the Smart could be placed, with the trunk lid shut. This is said car — a 1975 Chevrolet Caprice coupe (ours was dark red), whose doors are, I believe, longer than the entire Smart. The Caprice, built down Interstate 90 from us Madisonians in Janesville (a neighbor of ours who worked at the plant probably helped put it together) was the flagship of Chevy’s full-size fleet (which included the stripper Bel Air and middle-of-the-road Impala), featuring popular-for-the-time vinyl roofs, better sound insulation, an upgraded cloth interior, rear fender skirts and fancy Caprice badges. The Caprice was 18 feet 1 inch long and weighed 4,300 pounds. For comparison: The midsize Chevrolet of the ear was the Malibu, which was the same approximate size as the Caprice after its 1977 downsizing. The compact Chevrolet of the era was the Nova, which was 200 inches long — four inches longer than a current Cadillac STS. Wikipedia’s entry on the Caprice has this amusing sentence: “As fuel economy became a bigger priority among Americans…
    • Behind the wheel
    • Collecting only dust or rust
    • Coooooooooooupe!
    • Corvettes on the screen
    • The garage of misfit cars
    • 100 years (and one day) of our Chevrolets
    • They built Excitement, sort of, once in a while
    • A wagon by any otheru0026nbsp;nameFirst written in 2008. You will see more don’t-call-them-station-wagons as you drive today. Readers around my age have probably had some experience with a vehicle increasingly rare on the road — the station wagon. If you were a Boy Scout or Girl Scout, or were a member of some kind of youth athletic team, or had a large dog, or had relatives approximately your age, or had friends who needed to be transported somewhere, or had parents who occasionally had to haul (either in the back or in a trailer) more than what could be fit inside a car trunk, you (or, actually, your parents) were the target demographic for the station wagon. “Station wagons came to be like covered wagons — so much family activity happened in those cars,” said Tim Cleary, president of the American Station Wagon Owners Association, in Country Living magazine. Wagons “were used for everything from daily runs to the grocery store to long summer driving trips, and while many men and women might have wanted a fancier or sportier car, a station wagon was something they knew they needed for the family.” The “station wagon” originally was a vehicle with a covered seating area to take people between train stations…
    • Wheels on theu0026nbsp;screenBetween my former and current blogs, I wrote a lot about automobiles and TV and movies. Think of this post as killing two birds (Thunderbirds? Firebirds? Skylarks?) with one stone. Most movies and TV series view cars the same way most people view cars — as A-to-B transportation. (That’s not counting the movies or series where the car is the plot, like the haunted “Christine” or “Knight Rider” or the “Back to the Future” movies.) The philosophy here, of course, is that cars are not merely A-to-B transportation. Which disqualifies most police shows from what you’re about to read, even though I’ve watched more police video than anything else, because police cars are plain Jane vehicles. The highlight in a sense is in the beginning: The car chase in my favorite movie, “Bullitt,” featuring Steve McQueen’s 1968 Ford Mustang against the bad guys’ 1968 Dodge Charger: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMc2RdFuOxIu0026amp;fmt=18] One year before that (but I didn’t see this until we got Telemundo on cable a couple of years ago) was a movie called “Operación 67,” featuring (I kid you not) a masked professional wrestler, his unmasked sidekick, and some sort of secret agent plot. (Since I don’t know Spanish and it’s not…
    • While riding in my Cadillac …
  • Entertainments
    • Brass rocksThose who read my former blog last year at this time, or have read this blog over the past months, know that I am a big fan of the rock group Chicago. (Back when they were a rock group and not a singer of sappy ballads, that is.) Since rock music began from elements of country music, jazz and the blues, brass rock would seem a natural subgenre of rock music. A lot of ’50s musical acts had saxophone players, and some played with full orchestras … [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CPS-WuUKUE] … but it wasn’t until the more-or-less simultaneous appearances of Chicago and Blood Sweat u0026amp; Tears on the musical scene (both groups formed in 1967, both had their first charting singles in 1969, and they had the same producer) that the usual guitar/bass/keyboard/drum grouping was augmented by one or more trumpets, a sax player and a trombone player. While Chicago is my favorite group (but you knew that already), the first brass rock song I remember hearing was BSu0026amp;T’s “Spinning Wheel” — not in its original form, but on “Sesame Street,” accompanied by, yes, a giant spinning wheel. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qi9sLkyhhlE] [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxWSOuNsN20] [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9U34uPjz-g] I remember liking Chicago’s “Just You ‘n Me” when it was released as a single, and…
    • Drive and Eat au0026nbsp;RockThe first UW home football game of each season also is the opener for the University of Wisconsin Marching Band, the world’s finest college marching band. (How the UW Band has not gotten the Sudler Trophy, which is to honor the country’s premier college marching bands, is beyond my comprehension.) I know this because I am an alumnus of the UW Band. I played five years (in the last rank of the band, Rank 25, motto: “Where Men Are Tall and Run-On Is Short”), marching in 39 football games at Camp Randall Stadium, the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome in Minneapolis, Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor, Memorial Stadium at the University of Illinois (worst artificial turf I had ever seen), the University of Nevada–Las Vegas’ Sam Boyd Silver Bowl, the former Dyche Stadium at Northwestern University, five high school fields and, in my one bowl game, Legion Field in Birmingham, Ala., site of the 1984 Hall of Fame Bowl. The UW Band was, without question, the most memorable experience of my college days, and one of the most meaningful experiences of my lifetime. It was the most physical experience of my lifetime, to be sure. Fifteen minutes into my first Registration…
    • Keep on rockin’ in the freeu0026nbsp;worldOne of my first ambitions in communications was to be a radio disc jockey, and to possibly reach the level of the greats I used to listen to from WLS radio in Chicago, which used to be one of the great 50,000-watt AM rock stations of the country, back when they still existed. (Those who are aficionados of that time in music and radio history enjoyed a trip to that wayback machine when WLS a Memorial Day Big 89 Rewind, excerpts of which can be found on their Web site.) My vision was to be WLS’ afternoon DJ, playing the best in rock music between 2 and 6, which meant I wouldn’t have to get up before the crack of dawn to do the morning show, yet have my nights free to do whatever glamorous things big-city DJs did. Then I learned about the realities of radio — low pay, long hours, zero job security — and though I have dabbled in radio sports, I’ve pretty much cured myself of the idea of working in radio, even if, to quote WAPL’s Len Nelson, “You come to work every day just like everybody else does, but we’re playing rock ’n’ roll songs, we’re cuttin’ up.…
    • Monday on the flight line, not Saturday in the park
    • Music to drive by
    • The rock ofu0026nbsp;WisconsinWikipedia begins its item “Music of Wisconsin” thusly: Wisconsin was settled largely by European immigrants in the late 19th century. This immigration led to the popularization of galops, schottisches, waltzes, and, especially, polkas. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yl7wCczgNUc] So when I first sought to write a blog piece about rock musicians from Wisconsin, that seemed like a forlorn venture. Turned out it wasn’t, because when I first wrote about rock musicians from Wisconsin, so many of them that I hadn’t mentioned came up in the first few days that I had to write a second blog entry fixing the omissions of the first. This list is about rock music, so it will not include, for instance, Milwaukee native and Ripon College graduate Al Jarreau, who in addition to having recorded a boatload of music for the jazz and adult contemporary/easy listening fan, also recorded the theme music for the ’80s TV series “Moonlighting.” Nor will it include Milwaukee native Eric Benet, who was for a while known more for his former wife, Halle Berry, than for his music, which includes four number one singles on the Ru0026amp;B charts, “Spend My Life with You” with Tamia, “Hurricane,” “Pretty Baby” and “You’re the Only One.” Nor will it include Wisconsin’s sizable contributions to big…
    • Steve TV: All Steve, All the Time
    • “Super Steve, Man of Action!”
    • Too much TV
    • The worst music of allu0026nbsp;timeThe rock group Jefferson Airplane titled its first greatest-hits compilation “The Worst of Jefferson Airplane.” Rolling Stone magazine was not being ironic when it polled its readers to decide the 10 worst songs of the 1990s. I’m not sure I agree with all of Rolling Stone’s list, but that shouldn’t be surprising; such lists are meant for debate, after all. To determine the “worst,” songs appropriate for the “Vinyl from Hell” segment that used to be on a Madison FM rock station, requires some criteria, which does not include mere overexposure (for instance, “Macarena,” the video of which I find amusing since it looks like two bankers are singing it). Before we go on: Blog posts like this one require multimedia, so if you find a song you hate on this blog, I apologize. These are also songs that I almost never listen to because my sound system has a zero-tolerance policy — if I’m listening to the radio or a CD and I hear a song I don’t like, it’s, to quote Bad Company, gone gone gone. My blonde wife won’t be happy to read that one of her favorite ’90s songs, 4 Non Blondes’ “What’s Up,” starts the list. (However,…
    • “You have the right to remain silent …”
  • Madison
    • Blasts from the Madison media past
    • Blasts from my Madison past
    • Blasts from our Madison past
    • What’s the matter with Madison?
    • Wisconsin – Madison = ?
  • Sports
    • Athletic aesthetics, or “cardinal” vs. “Big Red”
    • Choose your own announcer
    • La Follette state 1982 (u0022It was 30 years ago todayu0022)
    • The North Dakota–Wisconsin Hockey Fight of 1982
    • Packers vs. Brewers
  • Hall of Fame
    • The case(s) against teacher unions
    • The Class of 1983
    • A hairy subject, or face the face
    • It’s worse than you think
    • It’s worse than you think, 2010–11 edition
    • My favorite interview subject of all time
    • Oh look! Rural people!
    • Prestegard for president!
    • Unions vs. the facts, or Hiding in plain sight
    • When rhetoric goes too far
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