Today's Cap Times has an article about parental snooping on their kids' Internet activity/cell phone usage and the technology that enables it. According to the piece, there are many services and pieces of software out there that lets parents monitor the activity of their children. A company called SpectorSoft is doing brisk business with sales growing "by 25 percent a year for the past three years". They have a service that allows parents to read every text message their child receives in real time and have "sold 500,000 copies of its snoopware to families."
The article also mentions that these products and services appeal to parents "who are often left in the dust by tech-savvy teens". Sales numbers are one thing but how many non-tech-savvy parents were actually able to install the software and then learn how to use it effectively? I've worked in IT for a while and, let me tell you, there are a lot of people out there for whom "non-tech-savvy" is an understatement. Yes, I've encountered people who think the DVD tray is a cup holder. One guy, when told to close all open windows, got up from his chair and closed all the windows (of the glass kind) in his house. And then there are those who have never used the right mouse button before and, when told to do so, become fearful of ever using the left mouse button again. It's like they're scared that pushing both at the same time would be like crossing the streams in Ghostbusters and lead to total protonic reversal.
Snoopware is great but completely useless unless you know how to use the stuff.
I have an 11-year old stepson at home and I have Windows Live Family Safety on his laptop. While it has many features, I use only a couple. The one I use the most is time limits. I can make sure his session is locked when it approaches bed time and cut out his access completely when he misbehaves in such an egregious manner as to require denying access to the laptop as a punishment. The other one I use is web filtering. It's set on the lowest level so as to filter out only the most obvious stuff. There is also a log of web usage but I've only looked at it once or twice. I saw that the kid does e-mail, goes to YouTube, and goes to some online gaming sites but not much else so I don't bother to look at the log. Besides, I've got better things to do than perusing it – like being there as he creates worlds in Blockland.
But he's 11. Right now I don't have any reason to worry about him surfing porn because he won't do it. The easiest way to get him to leave the living room is to put on a movie that has topless women in it. The kid hates boobs. He's repulsed by the mere sight of them. This situation will no doubt change soon but I am not worried about porn in the least. Now, maybe his mother is but I don't know. I viewed the stuff as a kid but it was in magazines and I turned out OK. The only difference is going to be that he is going to the miss out on the pages stuck together. (And, if he's straight, the lovely forests of Venus.)
My worry is downloading. Viruses are a pain but that can be mitigated pretty well with anti-virus software and Windows' User Account Control. Hell, with my shiny new router I can put his laptop on a guest channel to shield my PC and his mother's. No, what I worry about is torrenting. The last thing I need is to be slapped with a lawsuit by the RIAA or MPAA, not to mention I'd probably have no bandwidth left.
As far as the issue of trust goes, I'm in the middle somewhere. I certainly trust that teenagers will do and say the stupidest things but I don't want to be Big Brother and monitor everything. Parents weren't able to snoop in on every conversation before the Internet and ubiquity of cell phones so why start now? I think it is a bad lesson to teach kids that Big Brother is going to be watching them. But, on the other hand, it's also a bad lesson to teach kids that they can have freedom without any responsibility.
I guess I'll just have to wait and see what the future holds and how the boy develops as a teenager. So much of this is contingent upon circumstances which vary greatly from family to family. Right now I have no plans to change anything unless I have reason to believe trouble lies ahead. I want the boy to understand that I want him to enjoy himself online, to flex his creativity, and feel that he has some privacy. But I also want him to understand that he is a child and that his mother and I are the ones in charge. He gets to earn our trust and the amount of freedom he has is commensurate with the responsibility with which he uses it.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Lastly I'll note that the new version of Windows Live Family Safety was just made available today along with the rest of the Windows Live Essentials suite. I am using a beta of this version now on a Windows 7 machine. One big difference I noticed was that it moves all the parental controls online. Out of the box, Windows 7 parental controls are apps on the PC. Now you are sent to log into a Windows Live account (or Hotmail) and access all the controls from a webpage. Once you save settings, they sync with your computer and are enforced.
While I like the idea of being able to 86 the kid's use of the computer remotely if he fucks up big time, it's been hit or miss as far as how long it takes the synching to occur. I actually posted a question at the Family Safety forums asking how long a delay I can expect between saving and synching as was told that "from their experience", it was pretty much instantaneous. This did little to allay my fears. Hey Microsoft, have someone with technical knowledge man the boards. I don't need all the details on the APIs or anything but it would have been nice to have gotten an answer based on the program's technical specifications along with some reasons why your mileage may vary. Also note that the program's website is much more interested in touting features than it is in giving documentation.
Going by balloon messages appearing in the Notification Area, I've seen changes applied after a few seconds, a few minutes, and a few hours.
30 September, 2010
Coming Soon: New Restaurants
I once asked Linda Falkenstein what kind of restaurant she'd like to see here in Madison and she told me that she wants to be able to go out and eat Burmese food. Well, there's no Burmese restaurant in town, yet anyway, there are some restaurant openings of note.
Of most interest to me, Steven Buchholz of Cream Café recently tweeted:
A little bird told me a former chef of Sardine is opening a New York style deli in the once "Africana" space on Atwood.
This is good news. There's some passable to good corned beef in Madison but, having grown up on some delis on Chicago's far north side, none stack the meat as they should. Like this:
On State Street, Pepe's Casa has opened. I assumed that it was going to be a Mexican joint but saw a sandwich board out on the street that said they had American food. I'm hoping this means that they serve both. Anyone tried their food yet?
The other day I noticed that a new candy store is going to be opening up on the 500 block of State Street. It's going to be called something like BeeBee's Campus Candy.
And thanks to Ms. Falkenstein, I've learned that the Underground Food Collective's Underground Kitchen will be opening on 7 October. Plus there's going to be more Italian available that same day with the opening of Nostrano on the other side of the Square. I have this feeling that I'll be referring to this joint as Nostromo.
Of most interest to me, Steven Buchholz of Cream Café recently tweeted:
A little bird told me a former chef of Sardine is opening a New York style deli in the once "Africana" space on Atwood.
This is good news. There's some passable to good corned beef in Madison but, having grown up on some delis on Chicago's far north side, none stack the meat as they should. Like this:
On State Street, Pepe's Casa has opened. I assumed that it was going to be a Mexican joint but saw a sandwich board out on the street that said they had American food. I'm hoping this means that they serve both. Anyone tried their food yet?
The other day I noticed that a new candy store is going to be opening up on the 500 block of State Street. It's going to be called something like BeeBee's Campus Candy.
And thanks to Ms. Falkenstein, I've learned that the Underground Food Collective's Underground Kitchen will be opening on 7 October. Plus there's going to be more Italian available that same day with the opening of Nostrano on the other side of the Square. I have this feeling that I'll be referring to this joint as Nostromo.
29 September, 2010
Dumbest Person Ever Attends Obama Rally
I heard a couple humorous stories about Obama's visit yesterday...
The first involves someone who has to be amongst the dumbest people ever. Apparently some guy just had to satisfy his craving for cannabis during the event so he crawls into some bushes in front of the Historical Society and lights up. Secret Service agents spot him and do a double take because they cannot believe their eyes. Once they determine he's not a threat, they pawn him off onto the police.
Every law enforcement officer and Secret Service agent within a 30-mile radius is there and he lights up a joint. What a maroon!
Secondly, while Secret Service agents have a reputation for being very stoic, I was told that one of them invited a couple of hottie co-ed volunteers up to the press room. The perks of the job.
The first involves someone who has to be amongst the dumbest people ever. Apparently some guy just had to satisfy his craving for cannabis during the event so he crawls into some bushes in front of the Historical Society and lights up. Secret Service agents spot him and do a double take because they cannot believe their eyes. Once they determine he's not a threat, they pawn him off onto the police.
Every law enforcement officer and Secret Service agent within a 30-mile radius is there and he lights up a joint. What a maroon!
Secondly, while Secret Service agents have a reputation for being very stoic, I was told that one of them invited a couple of hottie co-ed volunteers up to the press room. The perks of the job.
Intercity Rail in Peril
Wisconsin's Republican gubernatorial candidate Scott Walker says he would put the kibosh on the extension of the Hiawatha line to Madison. Indeed, Republicans are a threat to rail projects around the country. But they are by no means alone.
Now some freight railroads are actively working against passenger rail.
Opposition from freight railroads is threatening the Obama administration's multibillion-dollar push to make high-speed passenger trains an integral part of the U.S. transportation network.
The standoff demonstrates the difficulties of introducing new passenger service to a rail network that is at least 90% owned by freight railroads and outfitted for slower trains.
To save time and money, government officials want new high-speed rail routes to operate on the vast system of train corridors that already crisscross the U.S., unlike European and Asian countries that have built dedicated tracks for high-speed rail.
But Norfolk Southern Corp., Union Pacific Corp. and other railroad companies are balking at sharing their tracks or rights-of-way with trains that would run between 90 and 200-plus miles an hour. They argue that mixing high-speed passenger trains with slower freight trains would create safety risks, prevent future expansion and cause congestion.
I read at one time that some freight carriers are more amenable to sharing track with passenger trains than others but I can't recall which carriers felt what way. To my knowledge, neither Canadian Pacific nor Wisconsin & Southern have put up a fight against intercity rail service to Madison.
Now, how W&S will react to both intercity and commuter rail here in Madison could be an altogether different story.
A side note on the above quote. ("unlike European and Asian countries that have built dedicated tracks for high-speed rail") Richard Longworth blogged about a paper by the Germany company Siemens, who build trains, called "High-Speed Trains Running on Freight Line Tracks: The Experience of Germany".
It's always been assumed, at least by me, that any real high speed network in the Midwest would need dedicated tracks, separate from freight lines, with all the expense this implies. The Siemens paper says this isn't necessarily so.
In Germany, it says, freight and passenger trains share the same rails: there probably isn't room for separate lines. This means that the shared lines have to be upgraded to handle both high speed rail and heavyweight freight, with curves straightened, grade crossings eliminated (for safety reasons) and "passing loops" installed. Rail automation has been upgraded to 21st-century standards to prevent accidents. (In 1998, 101 persons were killed in a terrible ICE accident: since then, there have been no fatalities on the system.)
All this, of course, is hugely expensive. But the dual use allows the expense to be more quickly amortized. And virtually everyone agrees that this dense train network is crucial to German prosperity.
It would seem that freight and passenger trains using the same tracks at the same time would produce inevitable delays. Siemens says the Germans avoid this by scheduling most freight trains for off-peak hours, with most daytime traffic reserved for passenger trains.
And while I'm on the subject of transit, check out Jarrett Walker's post "The Perils of Average Density". He calls the notion "effective transit requires high density" a fallacy and proceeds to look at the various ways density is calculated. Here's something that folks in the Madison area should take into account when contemplating commuter rail here:
Transit reacts mainly with the density right around its stations. It is in the nature of transit to serve an area very unevenly, providing a concentrated value around its stops and stations and less value elsewhere. So what matters for transit is the density right where the transit is, not the aggregate density of the whole urban area.
This is one reason why the Transport 2020 plan for light rail in Madison turns me off. Some of the stops are in the middle of nowhere because the plan is to utilize existing rail which is not laid out with passenger rail in mind.
Now some freight railroads are actively working against passenger rail.
Opposition from freight railroads is threatening the Obama administration's multibillion-dollar push to make high-speed passenger trains an integral part of the U.S. transportation network.
The standoff demonstrates the difficulties of introducing new passenger service to a rail network that is at least 90% owned by freight railroads and outfitted for slower trains.
To save time and money, government officials want new high-speed rail routes to operate on the vast system of train corridors that already crisscross the U.S., unlike European and Asian countries that have built dedicated tracks for high-speed rail.
But Norfolk Southern Corp., Union Pacific Corp. and other railroad companies are balking at sharing their tracks or rights-of-way with trains that would run between 90 and 200-plus miles an hour. They argue that mixing high-speed passenger trains with slower freight trains would create safety risks, prevent future expansion and cause congestion.
I read at one time that some freight carriers are more amenable to sharing track with passenger trains than others but I can't recall which carriers felt what way. To my knowledge, neither Canadian Pacific nor Wisconsin & Southern have put up a fight against intercity rail service to Madison.
Now, how W&S will react to both intercity and commuter rail here in Madison could be an altogether different story.
A side note on the above quote. ("unlike European and Asian countries that have built dedicated tracks for high-speed rail") Richard Longworth blogged about a paper by the Germany company Siemens, who build trains, called "High-Speed Trains Running on Freight Line Tracks: The Experience of Germany".
It's always been assumed, at least by me, that any real high speed network in the Midwest would need dedicated tracks, separate from freight lines, with all the expense this implies. The Siemens paper says this isn't necessarily so.
In Germany, it says, freight and passenger trains share the same rails: there probably isn't room for separate lines. This means that the shared lines have to be upgraded to handle both high speed rail and heavyweight freight, with curves straightened, grade crossings eliminated (for safety reasons) and "passing loops" installed. Rail automation has been upgraded to 21st-century standards to prevent accidents. (In 1998, 101 persons were killed in a terrible ICE accident: since then, there have been no fatalities on the system.)
All this, of course, is hugely expensive. But the dual use allows the expense to be more quickly amortized. And virtually everyone agrees that this dense train network is crucial to German prosperity.
It would seem that freight and passenger trains using the same tracks at the same time would produce inevitable delays. Siemens says the Germans avoid this by scheduling most freight trains for off-peak hours, with most daytime traffic reserved for passenger trains.
And while I'm on the subject of transit, check out Jarrett Walker's post "The Perils of Average Density". He calls the notion "effective transit requires high density" a fallacy and proceeds to look at the various ways density is calculated. Here's something that folks in the Madison area should take into account when contemplating commuter rail here:
Transit reacts mainly with the density right around its stations. It is in the nature of transit to serve an area very unevenly, providing a concentrated value around its stops and stations and less value elsewhere. So what matters for transit is the density right where the transit is, not the aggregate density of the whole urban area.
This is one reason why the Transport 2020 plan for light rail in Madison turns me off. Some of the stops are in the middle of nowhere because the plan is to utilize existing rail which is not laid out with passenger rail in mind.
A Visit to Minhas (Craft?) Brewery
The boy and I went to Monroe a couple weeks ago for Cheese Days and while we were there, we took a tour of the Minhas Brewery. Minhas was formerly the Joseph Huber Brewing Company which was bought in 2006 by Mountain Crest, owned by Manjit & Ravinder Minhas – both Canadians. Unfortunately most of my photos didn't turn out but let me offer a few things.
You begin in the bottling area by watching a video that features both of the Minhases and a brewer e talk about the company, extol the virtue of their beers, etc. Since being bought out, the brewery now churns out a lot more beer than it used to. Two times more. (Heck, maybe even a greater amount than that – I can't recall the exact figures.) Lazy Mutt Farmhouse Ale is their best seller although some of the beers they produce are for the Canadian market so I can't say if Lazy Mutt sells the most overall or just in the States. Why this is I don't understand because beer I've had with the Minhas label is total crap. I bought one of their sampler packs which had, if memory serves, Minhas 1845 Pils, Fighting Billy Bock, Lazy Mutt, Swiss Amber, and perhaps a couple others. I couldn't tell the beers apart because they all tasted like watery, adjunct-laden piss water. One was advertised as being an all-malt and it too tasted for shite. They all tasted the same and none would even make a good lawnmower beer.
I want to say that I like Berghoff and I am raking on only those brews that actually have the Minhas label. Berghoff is a good middle-range brew like Leinenkugel's. It's cheaper than your top of the line craft brews but is more expensive than most swill.
Not surprisingly, they also make soda (Blumer's and Berghoff Root Beer) as well as energy drinks, none of which I'd ever heard of. Plus there were other beers I'd never heard of – Clear Creek Ice, Boxer Lager, and Rani Lager, a supposed Indian-style beer brewed here in Wisconsin and apparently only sold in Canada. That's globalism for ya. And I had no idea there was a Berghoff Artisan Collection. Anyone know what beers comprise it? The brewery has also introduced Minhas IPA. Not sure if it's been distributed yet or not as I've never seen it on store shelves. But there were cases of it in the warehouse.
While I think Minhas brews mostly total crap, they're doing well and keeping Cheeseheads employed. More power to 'em.
At the end of the tour we retired to the tasting room. I had a Minhas Oktoberfest while the kid went with root beer. The Oktoberfest was probably the best beer I've tasted with a Minhas label. While it was pretty watery, it actually had a bit of a malt backbone and something resembling a malt-hops balance. This was a good lawnmower beer.
Outside the tasting area was a gift shop and a beer museum with lots of memorabilia. One room was full of old bottles and also had an old Capital poster back from the days when the brewery was still named Garten Bräu. It reads: "A family of award winning beers from Wisconsin's finest lager brewery". In addition to a photo of a couple bottles and a glass, it also listed the brewery's offerings.
There have certainly been some changes over the years, not the least of which is the name change. The Lager (a.k.a. – Bavarian Lager) is gone. Weizen was brewed for the first time in a while this year but wasn't bottled. And oh for the days when Wild Rice was a seasonal! In college we drank Maibock every spring and Wild Rice every summer. I never knew I had it so good.
Despite the changes, it's heartening to see just how much of their line-up has remained the same. (Plus you've got all the new brews.) Capital certainly hasn't abandoned the lager though I hear that both the Dark and Special Pilsner aren't selling too well so I expect that one or both of them will be put into hibernation anon. That would truly be a sad day. But if it happens, might I suggest Mr. Kirby, a roggenbier or a zwickel as replacements?
Actually, I think my bitching in favor of lagers (and/or German styles) is paying off. At dinner recently, a friend of mine ordered a Capital Oktoberfest and told me that Capital was his favorite brewery and "I'm really a lager man at heart." Another friend related to me today that he had a Lakefront Riverwest Stein beer earlier this week and found it to be very tasty. And this is coming from someone who has been mainly sticking to IPAs and Belgians for a while, although he enjoyed many kölsches this past summer.
Love your lager!
You begin in the bottling area by watching a video that features both of the Minhases and a brewer e talk about the company, extol the virtue of their beers, etc. Since being bought out, the brewery now churns out a lot more beer than it used to. Two times more. (Heck, maybe even a greater amount than that – I can't recall the exact figures.) Lazy Mutt Farmhouse Ale is their best seller although some of the beers they produce are for the Canadian market so I can't say if Lazy Mutt sells the most overall or just in the States. Why this is I don't understand because beer I've had with the Minhas label is total crap. I bought one of their sampler packs which had, if memory serves, Minhas 1845 Pils, Fighting Billy Bock, Lazy Mutt, Swiss Amber, and perhaps a couple others. I couldn't tell the beers apart because they all tasted like watery, adjunct-laden piss water. One was advertised as being an all-malt and it too tasted for shite. They all tasted the same and none would even make a good lawnmower beer.
I want to say that I like Berghoff and I am raking on only those brews that actually have the Minhas label. Berghoff is a good middle-range brew like Leinenkugel's. It's cheaper than your top of the line craft brews but is more expensive than most swill.
Not surprisingly, they also make soda (Blumer's and Berghoff Root Beer) as well as energy drinks, none of which I'd ever heard of. Plus there were other beers I'd never heard of – Clear Creek Ice, Boxer Lager, and Rani Lager, a supposed Indian-style beer brewed here in Wisconsin and apparently only sold in Canada. That's globalism for ya. And I had no idea there was a Berghoff Artisan Collection. Anyone know what beers comprise it? The brewery has also introduced Minhas IPA. Not sure if it's been distributed yet or not as I've never seen it on store shelves. But there were cases of it in the warehouse.
While I think Minhas brews mostly total crap, they're doing well and keeping Cheeseheads employed. More power to 'em.
At the end of the tour we retired to the tasting room. I had a Minhas Oktoberfest while the kid went with root beer. The Oktoberfest was probably the best beer I've tasted with a Minhas label. While it was pretty watery, it actually had a bit of a malt backbone and something resembling a malt-hops balance. This was a good lawnmower beer.
Outside the tasting area was a gift shop and a beer museum with lots of memorabilia. One room was full of old bottles and also had an old Capital poster back from the days when the brewery was still named Garten Bräu. It reads: "A family of award winning beers from Wisconsin's finest lager brewery". In addition to a photo of a couple bottles and a glass, it also listed the brewery's offerings.
There have certainly been some changes over the years, not the least of which is the name change. The Lager (a.k.a. – Bavarian Lager) is gone. Weizen was brewed for the first time in a while this year but wasn't bottled. And oh for the days when Wild Rice was a seasonal! In college we drank Maibock every spring and Wild Rice every summer. I never knew I had it so good.
Despite the changes, it's heartening to see just how much of their line-up has remained the same. (Plus you've got all the new brews.) Capital certainly hasn't abandoned the lager though I hear that both the Dark and Special Pilsner aren't selling too well so I expect that one or both of them will be put into hibernation anon. That would truly be a sad day. But if it happens, might I suggest Mr. Kirby, a roggenbier or a zwickel as replacements?
Actually, I think my bitching in favor of lagers (and/or German styles) is paying off. At dinner recently, a friend of mine ordered a Capital Oktoberfest and told me that Capital was his favorite brewery and "I'm really a lager man at heart." Another friend related to me today that he had a Lakefront Riverwest Stein beer earlier this week and found it to be very tasty. And this is coming from someone who has been mainly sticking to IPAs and Belgians for a while, although he enjoyed many kölsches this past summer.
Love your lager!
What Kind of Beer Is That?
Here's an interesting (well, if you're a beer geek) article about a new style of beer and the trouble beer nerds are having in classifying it.
After thousands of years of brewing, it's not every day that someone comes up with a new beer style. But in the last few years, West Coast craft brewers have been churning out what looks like a porter but tastes like a sweet India Pale Ale. Everyone loves it. In its debut as a category at this year's Great American Beer Festival, it garnered 53 entries; only 15 of the 79 categories had more—and those were mostly stalwarts like blonde ale and barleywine.
The problem is, no one can decide what to call it.
Cascadia Dark Ale? American-Style India Black Ale? India Black Ale or India Dark Ale?
27 September, 2010
Janusz Prusinowski Trio and Kwadrophonik Stop In Madison
Head on down to Mills Music Hall this Thursday to catch a couple Polish bands pay tribute to the roots, inspiration, and music of Chopin.
The Janusz Prusinowski Trio plays traditional Polish village music while Kwadrophonik will mix folk with jazz and classical by using two pianos and an arsenal of percussion.
It will appeal to fans of world folk, experimental music, and Chopin.
Many thanks to Szymon Wozniczka, who also helps organize the Polish Film Festival here in Madison, for organizing this show. This Madison appearance is a real coup as the bands were only going to do two dates here in the States with stops in Chicago and then New York. But Szymon talked them into stopping here in Madison rather than having them wait around for nearly a week between dates. He inveigled them at first to reduce their fees and then finally to accept door receipts.
MadCon Recap 2
While Harlan Ellison was the guest of honor, he wasn't the only guest there. I got to meet Ace!
(I think that she's even taller than Sylvester McCoy!)
Sophie Aldred played Ace on Doctor Who from 1987-89. She was the final companion of the classic series and the template for Rose. She blew stuff up with Nitro 9, beat the crap out of a Dalek with a baseball bat, and generally kicked some butt. I think that it also had to do with the fact that she was relatively close to my age. I recall seeing Sylvester McCoy in La Crosse as part of a promotional tour he was doing. We would get to see DW not long after it had aired in the UK instead of having to wait for years for PBS to show them. Ace and the Seventh Doctor were current, as it were. They were of my time instead of a recent past.
Sophie was a real sweetheart and told some good stories. She talked about how she got into acting and recalled when she got the part of Ace. At the time she was doing Fiddler on the Roof. The guy playing a rabbi had also been on DW – he'd been a Dalek. When Sophie got the call that she'd been given the part, the guy gave her a postcard with three Daleks on the front. On it he had written "Welcome to the family. You will not be exterminated."
Sophie also related how she was a DW fan as a kid and had always been terrified of Cybermen. She had only recently tried to listen to any of the DW audio dramas she'd done for Big Finish. Her first was The Harvest, a Cyberman story. She'd put her children to bed one night and put it on only to turn it off after a short time because it was too damn scary to listen to alone at night. Along these same lines, Sophie also talked about the new series. One night, again after having put her kids to sleep, she and her husband watched "The Empty Child" – the Ninth Doctor episode with the kid who has a gas mask attached to his face and who goes around saying "Are you my mummy?". As they were watching it, she heard one of her kids saying something but couldn't quite make it out as the living room door was closed and the kids' bedrooms are upstairs. So she opens the door and looks up the stairs. All that can be made out is this short shadowy figure at the top of the stairs pleading, "Mummy!" Sophie said she was petrified.
As I said above Sophie was a great. Luckily she and her handler (a friend of hers) went downtown and around campus. They saw the Capitol, wandered State Street, and eventually made their way to Memorial Union. She said that it was lovely and was surprised at the lack of tall buildings here. I say she was lucky because I ran into one of Harlan Ellison's friends outside who finished a sentence with an emphatic "Fucking Madison!" as I approached. When he saw me he apologized and I asked what the problem was. He said that, whenever he comes to Madison (the guy is from the UK), he always gets stomach problems from the food. This, I discovered, was because he always stays out by East Towne Mall and eats at buffets in the area. He said he was friends with Jamie Oliver, has taken meals with Anthony Bourdain, and used to be a chef and restaurant consultant.
I told him that his problem was that he sticks around the 1960s suburban mall part of town. "Head downtown," I urged him. "We do actually have good food here." I directed him to the Japanese restaurant across the street and to Maharaja. I hate to see a visitor come here all the way from England get stuck eating crappy food in a crappy mall and not seeing the more scenic aspects of town and eating some of the great food we have on offer.
Above are some of the other guests at the con. You've got sci-fi authors Mark Tiedemann, Gene Wolfe, and Pat Rothfuss plus uber-fan Richard Russell. I believe this was from a panel discussion the topic of which was "Style or Substance – What Got Us Into Science Fiction & Fantasy in the First Place?" Now, aside from Harlan, I didn't know squat about these other guys. I'd heard of them but had never read anything by them. (Rothfuss is from Madison originally and he now resides up in Stevens Point.) This was one of those panels that I hadn't originally decided to attend but did because of the way my schedule turned out and I found it immensely interesting. (This is often the case at cons.)
There was a long, rueful discussion about how sci-fi/fantasy was, at some point, segregated from literature generally. It's like there's mainstream fiction and then its bastard children of sci-fi and fantasy. I believe it was Gene Wolfe who brought this up first. I was reminded of a book that I'd read recently - The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England. In it the author talks about how royalty would often listen to books being read to them. One example was Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. There was a time when stories of the fantastic were mainstream. They weren't considered unserious or childish but rather to be fit for adults and part of the corpus of great literature. (Oh, and poetry too.) I suspect that this view didn't end with the arrival of the Renaissance and is more likely a 20th century phenomenon.
Wolfe also said that mainstream literature today is dominated by those in the upper-middle class, i.e. – university professors. True or not, I don't know but it made me wonder about sci-fi/fantasy. If the guests at the con that weekend were anything to judge by, I'd say Tor Books doesn't churn out fantastic fiction by a coterie of blue collar workers. Wolfe is surely right to say that railroad engineers don't write mainstream fiction but I'm not sure they write sci-fi either. And, in looking at the con's attendees, I have to wonder about the fans' class status. I recently found the blog of Christopher MacDonald who wrote the book Rush, Rock Music, and the Middle Class: Dreaming in Middletown and I just couldn't help but wonder if sci-fi/fantasy is, however fantastic lit had been considered in the past, a middlebrow pursuit. (There's my deep thought for you, my antagonistic anonymous commenter.) I have no statistics to back up this view but I would offer it to anyone reading this who finds him-/herself in charge of programming at a con. "Is Science Fiction/Fantasy a Middle-Class Pursuit?"
Another writer I encountered there was Allen Steele. Again, heard the name but have never read him. He seemed like a really nice guy. Can I retract that? Nice guys finish last. Steele seemed to me to be a very dorky guy. Friendly and dorky – the perfect combination. He broke down during a reading of his and had to leave the room to regain his composure. Apparently a tragedy had befallen his family and there was some stuff in the story that brought him back to it. I met him outside afterwards – he's an evil smoker like me – and chatted briefly. I told him that that same tragedy nearly befell my family so I was sympathetic and kinda sorta vaguely understood his pain. He thanked me for the kind words before heading in to take a seat at the banquet. I hope to meet him again and hear him talk more at a future con.
These are just some of the people behind Night of the Living Dead – The Puppet Show. Some crazy theater geeks in Milwaukee devised it. They weren't able to perform it live and so instead we got shown the DVD and had a Q&A afterwards. It was pretty funny. Definitely a lo-fi production deserving of some more technical virtuosity which I'm sure will come with time. I can imagine that seeing it done live is a much better experience. The next performance is on the 28th of next month at the Oriental Theatre in Milwaukee.
Maddie – the significant other of Dane 101's Jesse Russell and whose last name I don't know (sorry, Maddie) – was also in the audience and asked if they'd ever performed in Madison. They have not. She got that look in her eye which led me to believe that this situation might be changing soon. Keep an eye out at Dane 101 for its sponsoring of a weird zombie/steampunk night out on the town.
On Sunday I attended a panel on the book Chicks Dig Time Lords which is a compendium of essays and interviews by and about women in Doctor Who fandom. I'd seen a similar panel at Chicago TARDIS last year but at MadCon there were eight contributors instead of just a couple. I'm sure I'll write more about this subject after I read the book. But let me offer two things:
1) Christa Dickson contributed an essay on DW slash. She's firmly in the pro-DW smut corner. So does she just enjoy slash or is she also a kinky vixen? I personally don't have a problem with people writing and reading stories about The Doctor getting buggered by Captain Jack. It doesn't ruin the show for me, doesn't insult me – go for it. Dickson doesn't have to defend it to me. But what does it say about slash fans?
2) Secondly, Carol Barrowman, sister of John (a.k.a. – Captain Jack) was a stitch. She was a funny lady in her own right plus had some hilarious tales of hanging out with her brother in Cardiff, where Torchwood is filmed. For example, there's a Doctor Who exhibition in Cardiff. While they were there one time, John had Carol guard the entrance to the new series section. He proceeded to remove the wax figure of Captain Jack and take its place. So a couple children walk up to him and he jumps out at them screaming which scares the living crap out of them and they go running off. Good times.
I brought home a sonic screwdriver for the kid as well as a couple fantasy novels. I’d bring him to cons but he’s just not ready in either age/temperament or geekiness. But you’ve gotta start somewhere. Of course there were a couple books for me as well. I grabbed one by James Roberts who, in addition to being an author, is also on the board of the August Derleth Society. We chatted for a bit and I found that he was a really nice fellow. Plus I got to hang out with my fellow bus rider Paul who is also a chair of OddCon.
All in all, a successful weekend.
(I think that she's even taller than Sylvester McCoy!)
Sophie Aldred played Ace on Doctor Who from 1987-89. She was the final companion of the classic series and the template for Rose. She blew stuff up with Nitro 9, beat the crap out of a Dalek with a baseball bat, and generally kicked some butt. I think that it also had to do with the fact that she was relatively close to my age. I recall seeing Sylvester McCoy in La Crosse as part of a promotional tour he was doing. We would get to see DW not long after it had aired in the UK instead of having to wait for years for PBS to show them. Ace and the Seventh Doctor were current, as it were. They were of my time instead of a recent past.
Sophie was a real sweetheart and told some good stories. She talked about how she got into acting and recalled when she got the part of Ace. At the time she was doing Fiddler on the Roof. The guy playing a rabbi had also been on DW – he'd been a Dalek. When Sophie got the call that she'd been given the part, the guy gave her a postcard with three Daleks on the front. On it he had written "Welcome to the family. You will not be exterminated."
Sophie also related how she was a DW fan as a kid and had always been terrified of Cybermen. She had only recently tried to listen to any of the DW audio dramas she'd done for Big Finish. Her first was The Harvest, a Cyberman story. She'd put her children to bed one night and put it on only to turn it off after a short time because it was too damn scary to listen to alone at night. Along these same lines, Sophie also talked about the new series. One night, again after having put her kids to sleep, she and her husband watched "The Empty Child" – the Ninth Doctor episode with the kid who has a gas mask attached to his face and who goes around saying "Are you my mummy?". As they were watching it, she heard one of her kids saying something but couldn't quite make it out as the living room door was closed and the kids' bedrooms are upstairs. So she opens the door and looks up the stairs. All that can be made out is this short shadowy figure at the top of the stairs pleading, "Mummy!" Sophie said she was petrified.
As I said above Sophie was a great. Luckily she and her handler (a friend of hers) went downtown and around campus. They saw the Capitol, wandered State Street, and eventually made their way to Memorial Union. She said that it was lovely and was surprised at the lack of tall buildings here. I say she was lucky because I ran into one of Harlan Ellison's friends outside who finished a sentence with an emphatic "Fucking Madison!" as I approached. When he saw me he apologized and I asked what the problem was. He said that, whenever he comes to Madison (the guy is from the UK), he always gets stomach problems from the food. This, I discovered, was because he always stays out by East Towne Mall and eats at buffets in the area. He said he was friends with Jamie Oliver, has taken meals with Anthony Bourdain, and used to be a chef and restaurant consultant.
I told him that his problem was that he sticks around the 1960s suburban mall part of town. "Head downtown," I urged him. "We do actually have good food here." I directed him to the Japanese restaurant across the street and to Maharaja. I hate to see a visitor come here all the way from England get stuck eating crappy food in a crappy mall and not seeing the more scenic aspects of town and eating some of the great food we have on offer.
Above are some of the other guests at the con. You've got sci-fi authors Mark Tiedemann, Gene Wolfe, and Pat Rothfuss plus uber-fan Richard Russell. I believe this was from a panel discussion the topic of which was "Style or Substance – What Got Us Into Science Fiction & Fantasy in the First Place?" Now, aside from Harlan, I didn't know squat about these other guys. I'd heard of them but had never read anything by them. (Rothfuss is from Madison originally and he now resides up in Stevens Point.) This was one of those panels that I hadn't originally decided to attend but did because of the way my schedule turned out and I found it immensely interesting. (This is often the case at cons.)
There was a long, rueful discussion about how sci-fi/fantasy was, at some point, segregated from literature generally. It's like there's mainstream fiction and then its bastard children of sci-fi and fantasy. I believe it was Gene Wolfe who brought this up first. I was reminded of a book that I'd read recently - The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England. In it the author talks about how royalty would often listen to books being read to them. One example was Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. There was a time when stories of the fantastic were mainstream. They weren't considered unserious or childish but rather to be fit for adults and part of the corpus of great literature. (Oh, and poetry too.) I suspect that this view didn't end with the arrival of the Renaissance and is more likely a 20th century phenomenon.
Wolfe also said that mainstream literature today is dominated by those in the upper-middle class, i.e. – university professors. True or not, I don't know but it made me wonder about sci-fi/fantasy. If the guests at the con that weekend were anything to judge by, I'd say Tor Books doesn't churn out fantastic fiction by a coterie of blue collar workers. Wolfe is surely right to say that railroad engineers don't write mainstream fiction but I'm not sure they write sci-fi either. And, in looking at the con's attendees, I have to wonder about the fans' class status. I recently found the blog of Christopher MacDonald who wrote the book Rush, Rock Music, and the Middle Class: Dreaming in Middletown and I just couldn't help but wonder if sci-fi/fantasy is, however fantastic lit had been considered in the past, a middlebrow pursuit. (There's my deep thought for you, my antagonistic anonymous commenter.) I have no statistics to back up this view but I would offer it to anyone reading this who finds him-/herself in charge of programming at a con. "Is Science Fiction/Fantasy a Middle-Class Pursuit?"
Another writer I encountered there was Allen Steele. Again, heard the name but have never read him. He seemed like a really nice guy. Can I retract that? Nice guys finish last. Steele seemed to me to be a very dorky guy. Friendly and dorky – the perfect combination. He broke down during a reading of his and had to leave the room to regain his composure. Apparently a tragedy had befallen his family and there was some stuff in the story that brought him back to it. I met him outside afterwards – he's an evil smoker like me – and chatted briefly. I told him that that same tragedy nearly befell my family so I was sympathetic and kinda sorta vaguely understood his pain. He thanked me for the kind words before heading in to take a seat at the banquet. I hope to meet him again and hear him talk more at a future con.
These are just some of the people behind Night of the Living Dead – The Puppet Show. Some crazy theater geeks in Milwaukee devised it. They weren't able to perform it live and so instead we got shown the DVD and had a Q&A afterwards. It was pretty funny. Definitely a lo-fi production deserving of some more technical virtuosity which I'm sure will come with time. I can imagine that seeing it done live is a much better experience. The next performance is on the 28th of next month at the Oriental Theatre in Milwaukee.
Maddie – the significant other of Dane 101's Jesse Russell and whose last name I don't know (sorry, Maddie) – was also in the audience and asked if they'd ever performed in Madison. They have not. She got that look in her eye which led me to believe that this situation might be changing soon. Keep an eye out at Dane 101 for its sponsoring of a weird zombie/steampunk night out on the town.
On Sunday I attended a panel on the book Chicks Dig Time Lords which is a compendium of essays and interviews by and about women in Doctor Who fandom. I'd seen a similar panel at Chicago TARDIS last year but at MadCon there were eight contributors instead of just a couple. I'm sure I'll write more about this subject after I read the book. But let me offer two things:
1) Christa Dickson contributed an essay on DW slash. She's firmly in the pro-DW smut corner. So does she just enjoy slash or is she also a kinky vixen? I personally don't have a problem with people writing and reading stories about The Doctor getting buggered by Captain Jack. It doesn't ruin the show for me, doesn't insult me – go for it. Dickson doesn't have to defend it to me. But what does it say about slash fans?
2) Secondly, Carol Barrowman, sister of John (a.k.a. – Captain Jack) was a stitch. She was a funny lady in her own right plus had some hilarious tales of hanging out with her brother in Cardiff, where Torchwood is filmed. For example, there's a Doctor Who exhibition in Cardiff. While they were there one time, John had Carol guard the entrance to the new series section. He proceeded to remove the wax figure of Captain Jack and take its place. So a couple children walk up to him and he jumps out at them screaming which scares the living crap out of them and they go running off. Good times.
I brought home a sonic screwdriver for the kid as well as a couple fantasy novels. I’d bring him to cons but he’s just not ready in either age/temperament or geekiness. But you’ve gotta start somewhere. Of course there were a couple books for me as well. I grabbed one by James Roberts who, in addition to being an author, is also on the board of the August Derleth Society. We chatted for a bit and I found that he was a really nice fellow. Plus I got to hang out with my fellow bus rider Paul who is also a chair of OddCon.
All in all, a successful weekend.
MadCon Recap 1
Harlan Ellison may have been ill and he may have decided that his appearance at MadCon this past weekend was to be his last but I think the whole "Harlan Ellison is dying" meme out there is a bit presumptuous. He may have some terminal disease I don't know about but I can tell you that neither he nor any of his friends with whom I spoke at the con gave any indication that Harlan has anything but a case of old age.
His writing hand shook at times, which made autographing impossible but the guy talked for 6+ hours over the course of the weekend. He's 76. He's old and it showed. While Ellison wasn't in peak physical condition, it's not like he was brought into the room in a wheelchair. Similarly his memory may not have been perfect, he was still very sharp.
Holding court on Friday, he talked about having attacked a guy at a signing at Frugal Muse earlier in the afternoon and having made a kid cry at Old Country Buffet that evening. The exact nature of these events was not revealed on Friday. I caught only about half of his talk on Saturday and left it still not knowing of Ellison's exploits here in Madison. Finally on Sunday he explained the Old Country Buffet incident. OCB came in for quite a drubbing with their prime rib and clam chowder having been singled out for being especially horrid.
Firstly I was taken aback by the fact that Ellison was taken to OCB as I was told by one of the con's co-chairs that Harlan had specifically asked to go to Quivey's Grove after the signing at Frugal Muse. Things just didn't work out and they were short on time, apparently. And so some little girl ended up being terrified by Ellison. The reason is thus: Harlan did not get along with his sister very well (he may have said he hated her) beginning at a young age. She teased him mercilessly. And so when he saw a girl harassing her younger brother at the OCB, Harlan stepped in and told her that, if she didn't stop, something would come and eat her brains out of her head.
I never did find out what happened at Frugal Muse.
But there were plenty of other good stories to be had. For instance, I learned about him dissing a former high-ranking KGB official in Sweden as well as his adventures with the guy he claimed was the model for The Godfather's Luca Brasi. This same guy also, shall we say, lobbied on behalf of Ellison in his quest to regain the rights to some of his material. The accountant at a publishing company was quite surprised to have a guy built like a brick shithouse approach him and give him notice that he knew where his daughters went to school.
So, whether Harlan is about to croak or whether he's just old and creaky is beyond my purview. However I will say that his performance at MadCon sure made it seem like the latter. Methinks this Harlan-Ellison-is-dying thing is just another of his cons.
Viking Brewing Update
As I noted last week, Viking Brewing has been resurrected and will soon be undergoing a name change.
I contacted owner/brewmaster Randy Lee about when we can expect his beer back on store shelves and he replied that he's looking at mid-December. So it looks like The Dulcinea will have her Hot Chocolate before the year is out.
I contacted owner/brewmaster Randy Lee about when we can expect his beer back on store shelves and he replied that he's looking at mid-December. So it looks like The Dulcinea will have her Hot Chocolate before the year is out.
Beware The Daily Page
Caveat surfer. Isthmus' site, The Daily Page, is giving lots of viruses. Or, more likely, the ads on the site are giving viruses. Infected PCs are getting Anti-Virus Studio - malware.
I've been getting rid of it by going into Safe Mode and deleting the folder in C:\Docs and Settings\[user name]\App Data, emptying all temp folders, and clearing browser cache. Let's hope this gets cleared up soon.
UPDATE: The crack IT squad at The Daily Page is on the case. I presume it should be cleared up soon, if not already.
I've been getting rid of it by going into Safe Mode and deleting the folder in C:\Docs and Settings\[user name]\App Data, emptying all temp folders, and clearing browser cache. Let's hope this gets cleared up soon.
UPDATE: The crack IT squad at The Daily Page is on the case. I presume it should be cleared up soon, if not already.
24 September, 2010
MadCon 2010 - Day 1
I ran into a few people I know at the con including JM of Eating Madison A to Z. It was hardly a surprise to see him in the gaming room.
Sophie Aldred was a total sweetheart. She told some really funny stories. Of course I completely forgot to bring the stuff I wanted to her autograph with me. Must remember to pack Night Thoughts and Ghost Light. I asked her about the upcoming Lost Stories audio adventures and she said that most of them were recorded. In addition, she said that she loved A Death in the Family, a new DW that wasn't lost and that will be released next month.
Harlan Ellison was, considering his ill health, exactly like I expected him to be. For a guy who is dying, he had no problem holding court for nearly two hours. Tomorrow I hope to find out what he did to the guy at Frugal Muse earlier today and why he made some kid cry and Old Country Buffet this evening. And, while I'm at it, why he was at Old Country Buffet when he was supposed to be at Quivey's Grove.
Sophie Aldred was a total sweetheart. She told some really funny stories. Of course I completely forgot to bring the stuff I wanted to her autograph with me. Must remember to pack Night Thoughts and Ghost Light. I asked her about the upcoming Lost Stories audio adventures and she said that most of them were recorded. In addition, she said that she loved A Death in the Family, a new DW that wasn't lost and that will be released next month.
Harlan Ellison was, considering his ill health, exactly like I expected him to be. For a guy who is dying, he had no problem holding court for nearly two hours. Tomorrow I hope to find out what he did to the guy at Frugal Muse earlier today and why he made some kid cry and Old Country Buffet this evening. And, while I'm at it, why he was at Old Country Buffet when he was supposed to be at Quivey's Grove.
Hey, where the white women at?
Viking Brewery Resurrected (And Books On the Way Too)
This spring Viking Brewing up in Dallas went on hiatus. Well it looks like Randy Lee was made an offer he can't refuse. An Icelandic brewery with the same name has been looking at distributing in the States and has bought the rights to the name here and provided Lee with an influx of cash to resurrect his brewing outfit.
After sixteen years, the Viking Brewing Company of Dallas, Wisconsin need’s to find a new name. Recently, the brewery sold its U.S. Trademarked name “Viking” to the Viking Brewery - Vifilfell Ltd. of Akureyri, Iceland who wanted to import its Viking beer into this the U.S. Randy Lee, owner of Viking Brewing Co. USA had this to say, “We’ve been in negotiations with Viking, Iceland for some time now, and we finally reached terms that we can both live with. It’s going to be difficult to come up with a new name because we’ve been Vikings for so long that we just don’t know how else to behave, but I guess, now we will have to become civilized.”
To celebrate, there will be a viking funeral up in Dallas on 2 October. Yes, they are going to torch a viking ship on a pond. And The Dulcinea will be able to drink their Hot Chocolate again.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
In other beer-related news, I hear that photographer Carl Carey will soon be releasing a book of photos of Wisconsin taverns. Plus a different author is hard at work on a book about the history and architecture(?!) of the same venues. Expect that book out in a couple years.
After sixteen years, the Viking Brewing Company of Dallas, Wisconsin need’s to find a new name. Recently, the brewery sold its U.S. Trademarked name “Viking” to the Viking Brewery - Vifilfell Ltd. of Akureyri, Iceland who wanted to import its Viking beer into this the U.S. Randy Lee, owner of Viking Brewing Co. USA had this to say, “We’ve been in negotiations with Viking, Iceland for some time now, and we finally reached terms that we can both live with. It’s going to be difficult to come up with a new name because we’ve been Vikings for so long that we just don’t know how else to behave, but I guess, now we will have to become civilized.”
To celebrate, there will be a viking funeral up in Dallas on 2 October. Yes, they are going to torch a viking ship on a pond. And The Dulcinea will be able to drink their Hot Chocolate again.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
In other beer-related news, I hear that photographer Carl Carey will soon be releasing a book of photos of Wisconsin taverns. Plus a different author is hard at work on a book about the history and architecture(?!) of the same venues. Expect that book out in a couple years.
22 September, 2010
The Economic Ties That Bind (Madison to the Rest of the World)
Foreign Policy magazine has published a Global Cities Index for 2010 and I see that Chicago ranks sixth. We here in Madison are only about 140 miles away from one of the biggest and most influential cities on the planet. But this isn't really news. Lots of Madisonians head south to take in a concert by a group that rarely, if ever, comes to Madison to perform. Despite all the buy local hoopla, tons of the food on our grocery store shelves comes from Chicago. (This is probably especially pronounced in the ethnic grocery stores.) And I'm sure there are countless other examples of how Madison is, in certain ways, a satellite of Chicago.
It seems to me that with Amtrak service coming to Madison in less than three years, we have a good opportunity to create more ties to the Midwest's most important portal to the world. I nodded my head in agreement with urban planner Barry Gore's quote in a recent CapTimes article:
Gore is particularly miffed by the mayor’s efforts to piggyback a public market project onto the train station and a new parking ramp. He says Cieslewicz is more concerned about turning the downtown into a tourist attraction than fostering any tax-generating business development.
“I can’t see why a public market is suddenly the most important land use to pursue,” says Gore. “Are we to believe that businessmen and women coming to Madison from Chicago or Milwaukee on the train will want to buy some asparagus on arrival or departure?”
While I'm not against putting a public market in Madison, I do question the wisdom of making it a priority to place it across the street from the train station. It is very disappointing to see our mayor eschew/demote the view that the train stop is going to be a portal to A) Milwaukee, our state's largest city and B) Chicago, the region's powerhouse and a global city and instead advocate on behalf of asparagus. Not that his promotion of the public market is proof-positive that he isn't taking a wider view but, for me, it certainly makes his concerns seem very parochial.
A lot of what having a train stop here will or won't do for Madison is dependent on our next governor. Scott Walker has pledged to put the kibosh on the whole thing if elected. He oversaw Milwaukee County's Income Maintenance Program's descent into disaster and, if this article by Steve Jagler at Milwaukee's BizTimes is any indication, he isn't particularly interested in anything other than promoting himself:
County government has played virtually no role in the attraction of economic development and jobs in recent years.
The county also has been the slowest among the local government players at the table to embrace the aerotropolis concept of development around General Mitchell International Airport. The county-owned land in the former Park East Corridor still stands vacant.
By contrast, the City of Milwaukee government has been the driving force in bringing companies and jobs to the Menomonee Valley, the 30th Street corridor, the former Tower Automotive site and other developments, including the Manpower Inc. headquarters in downtown Milwaukee.
Meanwhile, the county’s economic development director position has been vacant since October of 2008, when the county’s previous director of economic and community development, Robert Dennik, left the job to become a vice president for Pewaukee-based VJS Construction Services.
And, ironically, who does he finally pick for the position?
Walker, who is campaigning as the Republican nominee to be the next governor and is vowing to stop the federal high-speed rail project if elected, is asking the county board to approve the appointment of a former high-speed rail planner in Gov. Jim Doyle’s administration to be the county’s next director of economic development.
One conclusion that Jagler reaches:
Whenever possible, Walker has taken a minimalist position of government advocacy and involvement. He has tried to diminish the size and the reach of the county government. He has tried to privatize much of county government. Walker believes the private sector is best left alone.
While there are certainly areas that the state government apparatus should stay out of, I do believe it has a role to play in advocating for Wisconsin's businesses and economy as a whole. And Walker doesn't seem to be the least bit interested in doing so. What we need is a governor who is willing to step up to the plate and work with the private sector to strengthen our economic ties to Chicago, not one who fiddles while Rome burns.
An example I read somewhere (Richard Longworth's blog?) was about a hypothetical Chicago law firm with a global clientele. The Chicago office would do the global business (partners are there as is O'Hare) but it could have satellite offices elsewhere to handle business within the U.S. Perhaps Milwaukee or Madison could have one of those offices instead of somewhere like Indianapolis. Again, it's purely a hypothetical. However, Barrett seems more like someone who would try to partner with Chicago/take a more regional view to try and get Wisconsin's foot in the global door than Walker who seems more interested in aggrandizing his own power while his backyard falls to pieces.
Similarly, Madison needs a mayor with a wide view of our city and its place in the region. Cieslewicz may be the right man for the job but linking a public market to the new train stop doesn't instill any confidence in me that he is. Madison is home to what I am told is the largest private venture capital fund in the Midwest - Venture Investors - as well as the UW, which is a huge research institution and apparently also has a kick-ass entrepreneur program. I don't know the exact role city government has in putting together seemingly disparate pieces of the economic puzzle but instead of saying, "Come and buy our asparagus", perhaps the mayor could be looking at the Amtrak stop as a potential way to get law firms to open satellite offices here or of having firms partner with the UW here in developing solar technology, et al.
It seems to me that with Amtrak service coming to Madison in less than three years, we have a good opportunity to create more ties to the Midwest's most important portal to the world. I nodded my head in agreement with urban planner Barry Gore's quote in a recent CapTimes article:
Gore is particularly miffed by the mayor’s efforts to piggyback a public market project onto the train station and a new parking ramp. He says Cieslewicz is more concerned about turning the downtown into a tourist attraction than fostering any tax-generating business development.
“I can’t see why a public market is suddenly the most important land use to pursue,” says Gore. “Are we to believe that businessmen and women coming to Madison from Chicago or Milwaukee on the train will want to buy some asparagus on arrival or departure?”
While I'm not against putting a public market in Madison, I do question the wisdom of making it a priority to place it across the street from the train station. It is very disappointing to see our mayor eschew/demote the view that the train stop is going to be a portal to A) Milwaukee, our state's largest city and B) Chicago, the region's powerhouse and a global city and instead advocate on behalf of asparagus. Not that his promotion of the public market is proof-positive that he isn't taking a wider view but, for me, it certainly makes his concerns seem very parochial.
A lot of what having a train stop here will or won't do for Madison is dependent on our next governor. Scott Walker has pledged to put the kibosh on the whole thing if elected. He oversaw Milwaukee County's Income Maintenance Program's descent into disaster and, if this article by Steve Jagler at Milwaukee's BizTimes is any indication, he isn't particularly interested in anything other than promoting himself:
County government has played virtually no role in the attraction of economic development and jobs in recent years.
The county also has been the slowest among the local government players at the table to embrace the aerotropolis concept of development around General Mitchell International Airport. The county-owned land in the former Park East Corridor still stands vacant.
By contrast, the City of Milwaukee government has been the driving force in bringing companies and jobs to the Menomonee Valley, the 30th Street corridor, the former Tower Automotive site and other developments, including the Manpower Inc. headquarters in downtown Milwaukee.
Meanwhile, the county’s economic development director position has been vacant since October of 2008, when the county’s previous director of economic and community development, Robert Dennik, left the job to become a vice president for Pewaukee-based VJS Construction Services.
And, ironically, who does he finally pick for the position?
Walker, who is campaigning as the Republican nominee to be the next governor and is vowing to stop the federal high-speed rail project if elected, is asking the county board to approve the appointment of a former high-speed rail planner in Gov. Jim Doyle’s administration to be the county’s next director of economic development.
One conclusion that Jagler reaches:
Whenever possible, Walker has taken a minimalist position of government advocacy and involvement. He has tried to diminish the size and the reach of the county government. He has tried to privatize much of county government. Walker believes the private sector is best left alone.
While there are certainly areas that the state government apparatus should stay out of, I do believe it has a role to play in advocating for Wisconsin's businesses and economy as a whole. And Walker doesn't seem to be the least bit interested in doing so. What we need is a governor who is willing to step up to the plate and work with the private sector to strengthen our economic ties to Chicago, not one who fiddles while Rome burns.
An example I read somewhere (Richard Longworth's blog?) was about a hypothetical Chicago law firm with a global clientele. The Chicago office would do the global business (partners are there as is O'Hare) but it could have satellite offices elsewhere to handle business within the U.S. Perhaps Milwaukee or Madison could have one of those offices instead of somewhere like Indianapolis. Again, it's purely a hypothetical. However, Barrett seems more like someone who would try to partner with Chicago/take a more regional view to try and get Wisconsin's foot in the global door than Walker who seems more interested in aggrandizing his own power while his backyard falls to pieces.
Similarly, Madison needs a mayor with a wide view of our city and its place in the region. Cieslewicz may be the right man for the job but linking a public market to the new train stop doesn't instill any confidence in me that he is. Madison is home to what I am told is the largest private venture capital fund in the Midwest - Venture Investors - as well as the UW, which is a huge research institution and apparently also has a kick-ass entrepreneur program. I don't know the exact role city government has in putting together seemingly disparate pieces of the economic puzzle but instead of saying, "Come and buy our asparagus", perhaps the mayor could be looking at the Amtrak stop as a potential way to get law firms to open satellite offices here or of having firms partner with the UW here in developing solar technology, et al.
Harlan Ellison to Make It to MadCon After All
While there was some question as to whether Harlan Ellison would be here this weekend for Madcon 2010 due to health issues, it has been announced that he will be here as he is feeling well enough to attend.
HARLAN ELLISON HAS INFORMED US THAT HE IS FEELING SOMEWHAT BETTER, AND HE HAS DECIDED THAT HE WILL BE FLYING TO MADISON THIS WEEK FOR MADCON 2010 AT THE CROWNE PLAZA HOTEL. HARLAN HAS INFORMED US THAT HE WILL BE APPEARING DURING ALL 3 DAYS OF MADCON.
THE SCHEDULE THAT IS UP ON THE WEBSITE MAY GO THROUGH SOME CHANGES TO REDUCE THE LOAD ON OUR GUEST OF HONOR, AND MADCON EXPECTS THAT THERE WILL BE LIMITATIONS DURING ANY SIGNINGS.
HARLAN ELLISON HAS INFORMED US THAT HE IS FEELING SOMEWHAT BETTER, AND HE HAS DECIDED THAT HE WILL BE FLYING TO MADISON THIS WEEK FOR MADCON 2010 AT THE CROWNE PLAZA HOTEL. HARLAN HAS INFORMED US THAT HE WILL BE APPEARING DURING ALL 3 DAYS OF MADCON.
THE SCHEDULE THAT IS UP ON THE WEBSITE MAY GO THROUGH SOME CHANGES TO REDUCE THE LOAD ON OUR GUEST OF HONOR, AND MADCON EXPECTS THAT THERE WILL BE LIMITATIONS DURING ANY SIGNINGS.
21 September, 2010
Rumor Mill
President Obama is coming to Madison on the 28th. He'll be speaking at a location somewhere on campus that remains secret.
From the rumor mill: it's to be at Camp Randall.
That seems odd. Late September and you want to hold a rally outdoors? Well, there ya go Ms. Ziff.
From the rumor mill: it's to be at Camp Randall.
That seems odd. Late September and you want to hold a rally outdoors? Well, there ya go Ms. Ziff.
Harlan Ellison May Not Make Madcon
(Nevermind. He'll be there after all.)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Bummer. Harlan Ellison has taken ill and may not make it to MadCon this weekend.
MadCon 2010 has been informed by our Guest of Honor, Harlan Ellison, that due to ill health it is very likely that he will not be able to travel to Madison for MadCon. However, Harlan is determined that even if he is unable to travel to MadCon that he will still be appearing at MadCon telephonically for his talks on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, including his after-dinner talk for the Saturday Night Banquet with the Guests. Additionally, he is sending along a package of signed, tip-in bookplates.
A final decision will be made by Harlan on Wednesday, Sept. 22, as to his ability to travel. MadCon is making the necessary arrangements on the assumption that Harlan will not be able to make this trip, and will do everything we can to make sure that we have the best possible audio set-up so that Harlan can hear your questions and that all of MadCon's attendees can hear all that Harlan has to say. He has made it very clear that he will not disappoint his fans and that these talks are not to be missed.
Well, at least I'll still be able to meet Ace and get my copy of Night Thoughts autographed by her.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Bummer. Harlan Ellison has taken ill and may not make it to MadCon this weekend.
MadCon 2010 has been informed by our Guest of Honor, Harlan Ellison, that due to ill health it is very likely that he will not be able to travel to Madison for MadCon. However, Harlan is determined that even if he is unable to travel to MadCon that he will still be appearing at MadCon telephonically for his talks on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, including his after-dinner talk for the Saturday Night Banquet with the Guests. Additionally, he is sending along a package of signed, tip-in bookplates.
A final decision will be made by Harlan on Wednesday, Sept. 22, as to his ability to travel. MadCon is making the necessary arrangements on the assumption that Harlan will not be able to make this trip, and will do everything we can to make sure that we have the best possible audio set-up so that Harlan can hear your questions and that all of MadCon's attendees can hear all that Harlan has to say. He has made it very clear that he will not disappoint his fans and that these talks are not to be missed.
Well, at least I'll still be able to meet Ace and get my copy of Night Thoughts autographed by her.
20 September, 2010
Feingold Falls Behind in Poll
Today over at Glenn Greenwald's Twitter feed he posted:
Horrible: RT @markos "New PPP results for dkos, will post tomorrow-Feingold down by double digits, MASSIVE intensity gap"
What do people see in Ron Johnson? Hey folk up nort - Feingold is not going to take away your guns. He voted against the TARP bailouts. Or did he?
On Ron Johnson's site it says "His [Feingold's] vote for the $862 billion failed stimulus bill is a prime example of a career politician..."
Hmmm...
About the only thing Johnson has going for him, to my mind, is his willingness to drill for oil in the Great Lakes.
Horrible: RT @markos "New PPP results for dkos, will post tomorrow-Feingold down by double digits, MASSIVE intensity gap"
What do people see in Ron Johnson? Hey folk up nort - Feingold is not going to take away your guns. He voted against the TARP bailouts. Or did he?
On Ron Johnson's site it says "His [Feingold's] vote for the $862 billion failed stimulus bill is a prime example of a career politician..."
Hmmm...
About the only thing Johnson has going for him, to my mind, is his willingness to drill for oil in the Great Lakes.
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