"And so she and the other kids who grew up here who were having issues or struggling in certain things weren’t able to get the attention that they needed — the help they needed from the school.... You can’t just focus all your resources on one group of children and everybody else is falling behind...."
The numbers are confusing. We're told that 2,000 Haitian migrants may have been added to a city of 18,000 and also that 11,000 may have been added to a county of 38,000. There are also claims of being "verbally accosted" and stared at ("It’s not safe. They just stare at you and won’t talk to you. They stand there staring at my house with cameras on their phones. I don’t know if they’re recording, what they’re doing"). The mayor objects to the attention: "Stop playing politics with the smaller communities. We don’t like this. We don’t appreciate this. We would rather you do your job and actually do something instead of talking about this."
I don't know if this is the town's official motto, but we talked a lot about it: "Where everyone fulfills their God-given purpose!"
It seemed to be a grandiose claim, but I said maybe the people interpret God's requirements narrowly, so that it's not understood to be terribly difficult. My son Chris, texting, said, maybe God does not give them any particularly challenging purpose. I contemplated whether Chris was saying something different from what I'd just said and decided he certainly was. My idea was that people are self-serving, and his idea was that God was easy-going and pretty darned nice. Hearing that, Meade noted that "fulfills" could mean that citizens are simply wherever they are in a process of fulfilling.
We walked through the festival atmosphere on historic Main Street, by the Wabash River, but given the hubbub and live, loud rock music, we kept moving until we arrived at the memorial for the men who died in the War of the Union....
We set up on the lush grass by the county courthouse, which looked like this at 3:01:51 — 3 minutes before the beginning of the total eclipse:
And here it is, at the very beginning of the totality:
Thanks to Vincennes for hosting us and many others. The show was free and the number of dollars we spent was equal to the number of minutes of the totality of the eclipse. Meade bought a pulled pork sandwich at a food truck:
The text at the pig silhouette in the lower right corner of the truck deserves contemplative comparison to the aforementioned "Where everyone fulfills their God-given purpose!" It says: "Every butt loves a rub."
"... describing the measure as a 'blatant attack' on educators.'Attorney General Todd Rokita (R) last week launched the Eyes on Education website, which he said is a 'transparency portal' for parents to see 'real examples of socialist indoctrination from classrooms'.... Alongside the form for submissions, Rokita’s office linked the Parents’ Bill of Rights, which in part outlines the state’s legislative efforts, including a bill passed in 2023 that requires schools to catalogue their library books and allows parents to request removal.... As of Tuesday evening, the portal had more than 30 documents uploaded to it.... One document showed a photo of a rainbow Pride flag hanging on a school wall, emblazoned with a raised fist — a symbol of Black power. Another was a screenshot of a scholarship form that said priority would be given to students from underrepresented groups...."
"... and evolved to become a sort of wearable yearbook for college and high school seniors in the state.
The students would use corduroy clothes — typically pants and skirts in cream or yellow — as canvases that were illustrated with favorite activities, sweethearts’ initials and other personal details. The practice continued for decades before it started to die out in the 1970s.
In 2018, about two years after Ms. Bode Aujla started her ready-to-wear brand Bode, which includes pieces made with antique materials and historical techniques like quilting, she started selling custom senior cords in an attempt to revive the tradition...."
"Last fall, the actor Jeff Goldblum appeared on the 'Today' show in a Bode senior cord suit that featured illustrations of a Pittsburgh Steelers pennant, pancakes and a 'Jurassic Park' logo. Earlier this year, Indiana University bought a senior cord jacket from the brand, and Bode sent along matching pants as well.... After [a] Vogue issue with [Harry] Styles, Ms. Bode Aujla said, her brand got requests to make other pieces with similar illustrations. But Bode avoids replicating drawings. Each piece, Ms. Bode Aujla said, 'is someone’s personal cord.'"
"The bill, which will go into effect Sept. 15, allows abortion only in cases of rape, incest, lethal fetal abnormality or when the procedure is necessary to prevent severe health risks or death.... Before settling on the exceptions, Republican legislators disagreed on how far the law should go, with some GOP members siding with Democrats in demanding that abortion be legal in cases of rape and incest.... The push by Indiana Republicans to restrict abortion access stands in stark contrast with the overwhelming support for it by voters in Kansas... In Indiana, Democratic legislators described the Kansas vote as a warning to their Republican colleagues to consider the potential fallout from voters...."
I'm back home now, but I was in Indianapolis for a few days. Some photos from the Lockerbie Square Historic District. The last picture is the home of the "Hoosier Poet" James Whitcomb Riley (which got me to recite "Little Orphant Annie," something I've known by heart for more than 60 years):
"The museum’s director and chief executive, Charles L. Venable, said in an interview on Saturday that the decision to use 'white' had been intentional and explained that it had been intended to indicate that the museum would not abandon its existing audience as part of its efforts toward greater diversity, equity and inclusion.... Malina Simone Jeffers and Alan Bacon, the guest curators for the museum’s upcoming 'DRIP: Indy’s #BlackLivesMatter Street Mural' exhibition... said... they could not remain as guest curators.
'Our exhibition cannot be produced in this context and this environment,' said Simone Jeffers and Bacon, the co-founders of GANGGANG, a local art incubator working to elevate artists of color... Kelli Morgan, who was recruited in 2018 to diversify the museum’s galleries, resigned in July, calling the museum’s culture 'toxic' and “'discriminatory'.... [Morgan said] she was disappointed that, despite the fact that the museum had begun training its leaders in diversity, equity and inclusion, it had still included the language in the job description."
I'm having a text conversation with someone about this, and he gave me permission to quote:
Weird
I also think attempting to show diversity by having an art exhibition that is specifically Black Lives Matter stuff shows kind of a lack of imagination
Why not find some great art by black painters, it’s like the only way to be diverse is to just slap a modern political movement on the walls
But maybe I look at it in that way because I feel like they exposed their insincerity, and are just showing Black Lives Matter bc they feel obligated
But that's not the Hoosier Pete Buttigieg. The elision after "because" was "in 1988." The quote is from Dan Quayle speaking to the California delegates at the Republican National Convention in 1988.
I also found this really Trumpesque line: "This is what I say about the scorn of the media elite: I wear their scorn as a badge of honor."
And here's one where it really seems that he's talking about Trump: "People that are really very weird can get into sensitive positions and have a tremendous impact on history."
Quayle really was a man who looked into the future: "In George Bush you get experience, and with me you get the future"/"The future will be better tomorrow"/"I believe that I've made good judgments in the past, and I think I've made good judgments in the future." So why not credit him with predicting the Trump presidency?
The quote I was actually looking for was his awkward riff on "A mind is a terrible thing to waste":
What a waste it is to lose one's mind, or not to have a mind is being very wasteful, how true that is.
In a panel discussion following Friday night’s debate in New Hampshire, [Chris] Matthews went on a rant against socialism, recalling his Cold War–era visits to Vietnam and Cuba: “Being there, I’ve seen what socialism is like. I don’t like it, OK? It’s not only not free, it doesn’t freaking work. It just doesn’t work.” As his fellow MSNBC panelists looked aghast, Matthews continued, saying that if “the Reds had won the Cold War, there would have been executions in Central Park, and I might have been one of the ones getting executed, and certain other people would be there cheering, OK?”
"If nobody has emerged as a viable alternative by then, Michael Bloomberg’s campaign will be stepping in.... [I]f Bloomberg is the last Democrat standing against Sanders, he may well attract substantial support from Democratic elected officials and put up a strong fight. Still, he would face enormous opposition from the left.... At that point, the victory scenario would involve a long, bloody struggle all the way to the convention, with the Sanders movement claiming at every step of the way that the party is rigging the race against them, culminating in a convention where his enraged supporters will again try to shout down the proceedings. Unless one of the non-Bloombergs can somehow get off the mat and defeat Sanders, this is probably the best-case scenario for liberals at this point. It seems more probable that Sanders crushes the field and brings his historically unique suite of liabilities to the ticket. At the moment, the party is melting down over a vote-reporting fiasco in Iowa. In time, we liberals may look back at this moment as a high point."
"Unless one of the non-Bloombergs can somehow get off the mat..." How is Buttigieg on the mat? He's surging in the New Hampshire polls. Bernie has been expected to win New Hampshire for so long that he needs a clear win not to lose momentum to Buttigieg.
Have the Democrats decided to act panicked? I'm just speculating that they are desperate to stop Bernie and that acting panicked is a way to motivate people to get out there and vote for Buttigieg. Quick! Before it's too late!
But Biden isn't backing off and letting Pete take the lead. Here he is 2 days ago disparaging Pete:
"I do believe it's a risk — to be just straight up with you — for this party to nominate someone who's never held a office higher than mayor of a town of 100,000 people in Indiana." (You have to listen to that 15-second clip so you can hear how he says "Indiana." My Indiana-born husband reacted strongly to what felt to him condescension and disdain.)
ADDED: The freeze frame on that video makes it look like Buttigieg is wearing a strawberry earring. No disparagement intended! Just an observation made necessary by the clarity of the image.
"I think my movies are more novelistic than journalistic and I think when my films work, they work because you feel you’re present in the sequence that you’re watching and hearing. I like the sense of immediacy that it gives."
“I’ve made movies in 17 states, but I never made one in the Middle West before, with the exception of a public housing film in Chicago. I thought it would be interesting to make a movie about a small town in the Middle West,” he tells Deadline. “A friend of mine told me about Monrovia and I visited it, liked what I saw, and started to make a movie there.”
He filmed on hog farms, in cornfields, at a Masonic lodge, Lions Club, high school, veterinary clinic, tattoo parlor, barbershop, restaurant, a baby shower, a wedding and more. The film contains moments of conversation between townspeople, including some old duffers at a diner who discuss a recent experience eating carrots....
Monrovia is overwhelmingly white, nestled within a county that Donald Trump carried in 2016 with more than 75% of the vote. Wiseman shows the intrinsic role of Christian traditions in daily life (“People are very religious,” he states) but he doesn’t overtly address the politics hovering in the background. Some critics would have preferred he confront red state mentalities.
“That’s the film they want to make. That’s not the film I want to make,” he declares. “I don’t like to make obvious films.”
You can see the carrot scene in the trailer for the movie:
... I can’t help but notice the utter stillness that envelops me as I descend the only staircase leading to the City Market Catacombs... As we walk through the 20,000-square-foot expanse of brick-arched passageways, the exposed dirt floors crunching under our feet, [the tour guide] explains to me that the subterranean chambers are all that remains of Tomlinson Hall, a once sprawling music hall that opened in 1886 and later succumbed to a fire in 1958. (The only above-ground vestige of the original structure is a single archway.) The setting is spooky, but Manterfield is quick to point out that despite the name, the catacombs never held remains – at least not of the human variety. “See those hooks attached to the archways... Those were used for hanging meat to dry.”
Some mindboggling architectural ugliness in the Fountain Square neighborhood of Indianapolis, collected here on Instagram.
We just got back from Indianapolis, and we spent some time in that area, where there are many old dilapidated houses — even boarded-up houses — alongside some very nicely restored houses and the things you see in those photographs. I've been trying to figure out how the crazily ugly architecture like that can happen. Is there something on real-estate television making real people want things like that? Is it possible that 50 years from now, that sort of thing will seem wonderful the way the Googie architecture of the 1950s sees to us now?
We stopped in at Milktooth to get some waffles, grits, and pancakes before hitting the road back to Madison. But there was a huge St. Patrick's Day march/walk going on when we got back to the car, and we drove way down a one-way street before we got to where the police had blocked the street off. It wasn't enough that the nice Indianapolis cop was able to give us permission to drive the wrong way on a one-way street, there were all kinds of roadblocks keeping us from escaping from this area of town, and the cop spent 10 minutes looking at his information trying to figure out what else we'd need to do. It involved finding a sequence of alleys — things that are not on Google Maps. And we had to remember these weird, winding directions.
I photographed the low-level chaos from the car window.
You know, in the movies, protagonists in strange towns — in a panic, and going at high speed — are able to find these secret escape routes.
At one point, we needed to make a left turn across the lane that the marcher/walkers were on. We were coming out of an alley, so it was not blocked off, and the cop had told us to cross in front of them — the same cop who was preventing us from cutting through from the street he was guarding. When we reached that point, there was a woman in a car in front of us, and she seemed as though she was going to hesitate forever, the stream of marcher/walkers being endless.
Meade got out of the car and — risking seeming threatening — approached her to explain what she had to do and stopped a few walkers and motioned her out before getting in the car and nudging into the left turn and over to the on-ramp to I-70 just a few feet away.
Asks the NYT about one of the 20 cities in the running for Amazon's second headquarters.
One area where Indianapolis stands out also happens to be one of Amazon’s top priorities, according to its proposal: “A stable and business-friendly environment and tax structure.”...
[Bob Stutz, chief executive of Salesforce.com’s Marketing Cloud, which is based in Indianapolis] lived in Austin, Tex. (another Amazon finalist), before moving to Seattle, and watched its evolution from sleepy state capital to technology hub and hip cultural magnet. “Austin was never a cool place,” he said. “Now it’s a hotbed of cool. Indianapolis isn’t quite there yet, but I see a lot of similarities.”
Last year Bon Appétit magazine devoted a feature to the “Brooklynization of Indy” that focused on the city’s explosion of craft breweries, artisanal bakeries and farm-to-table restaurants.... Of the 20 finalist cities, Indianapolis has the least traffic congestion and the lowest average home prices....
I hope Indianapolis wins! It's the crossroads of America! It has room to grow, and you, Amazon, can be part of making that happen. You can really contribute, instead of adding to the traffic/housing insanity of places like Austin and Boston.
"The Indiana University student [Lukas Cavar (luckless caver?)] had been exploring Sullivan Cave, about 10 miles south of his school in Bloomington, Ind., on Sunday with other members of the Caving Club, a campus extracurricular group that promotes 'responsible caving practices with opportunities to visit caves around the area.' Over several hours, Cavar got separated from the group — and then left behind in the cave after the other the club members exited and padlocked the entrance gate.... On Sunday, after he realized he had been forgotten by the group, Cavar spent hours screaming out of the cave’s locked entrance — about a 1½-by-3-foot hole in the ground, surrounded by concrete with metal bars welded into place — in the hopes that someone would hear him from a nearby road. No one did.... He used the energy bar wrappers to collect moisture and the water bottles to collect rainfall and puddled cave water. Cavar also licked the cave’s damp walls to quench his thirst. Hunger drove him to consider foraging for cave crickets, although he didn’t eat any of the small insects.... His friends noticed that he missed physics class Monday, which was unlike him, they said. When he didn’t show up Tuesday and never went to work that day, they knew something was wrong..... When Norrell and other friends couldn’t find Cavar around campus, they contacted the Caving Club, and that’s when they realized that he might still be in the cave...."
Glad he survived, but what an incredible screwup! How does something like that happen? How many people were in the group? How do you separate yourself from the group and not remain aware that they are leaving a place that has a 1½-by-3-foot exit hole with a lockable gate on it? How does the group not take care to count that everyone's out before locking the gate? What kind of kind of "caving club" is this? And how sad to have friends who not only lock you in a cave but only notice your absence when you fail to show up for physics class and only think of trying to help you after you miss that class twice.
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