Thank you, sir! May I have another?

Gas around here shot up over $4 per gallon for the first time today. At the rate it's going, we'll see $5 before the 4th of July and $6 by Labor Day.

Don't spend it all in one place

Last week, I was among the many who received property tax rebate checks from the county as a result of a cap passed by the state legislature a few months ago. However, even something good like this provides another example of how inefficiently our local government operates.

Thousands of Lake County taxpayers received rebate checks for $0. The county spent whatever its postage rate is x however many people got those checks to let them know they got nothing. I wonder if anyone tried to cash them.

And speaking of incompetent customer service resulting in paltry rebates, I heard back from American Airlines. They supposedly sent me a check for my hotel for the extra night I spent in San Antonio. I should have stayed in a nicer place.

The e-mail I got announcing that my reimbursement was on the way said, they would work hard to prevent future schedule disruptions. Of course, that completely misses the point. Schedule disruptions happen. It's the insufficient response to those problems that needs to be prevented.

1...2...5 (3, sir!)

Lake County took a lot of national abuse for not getting ballots counted promptly on election night. It was well after 10 PM Central time before the county began reporting any numbers.

Many folks in the national media assumed some kind of shenanigans was going on. This is, after all, the most politically corrupt county in the nation. One CBS reporter contacted the Post-Tribune (a local paper) and asked if Lake was borrowing from Cook County (Chicago) politics, but really, the Cook County folks are jealous of what goes on here.

CNN and Fox News had a field day with Lake County also. Here is a link to a snippet of Wolf Blitzing Gary Mayor (and county Dem chair) Rudy Clay.

The official explanation was that the county decided not to release numbers until after the over 11,000 absentee ballots had been counted. Counting that many ballots takes a lot of time. After all, each counter only has 20 fingers and toes (in most cases).

I think they were just trying to get a little spotlight on themselves by reporting last, and by possibly changing a close presidential race. If that was the plan, it failed because the Clinton-Obama race wasn't that close.

However, the race between the democratic candidates for governor, Jim Schellenger and Jill Long-Thompson, was neck-and-neck all night, with Schellenger up by a slim margin before Lake County reported. The late Lake numbers were enough to put Long-Thompson past Schellenger for the win. Long-Thompson had been endorsed by the steelworkers union, so it was expected she would do well here.

The play for attention worked, though, but probably not the way they hoped. Now, the entire nation thinks our county is either run by idiots who can't even count, or is so corrupt that they'll try to fix an election even in the bright spotlight of the national media. Correct on both counts.

The best and most ironic comment on this was in the Times (another local paper) this morning. George Van Til, the county surveyor, said we (the county) look "stupid" because of all this. This comes from a guy who won reelection in spite of the fact that he stole gas from the county and let his teenage son drive his county-issued car around - until he got caught. It's not the inability to count votes that makes us look stupid. It's continuing to elect guys like him.

Former President visits

Last week, those of us in Schererville got a chance to see something we had never seen before. A former President of the United States came to visit.

Bill Clinton made an appearance to stump for votes for his wife, Hillary, in advance of Indiana's primary today.

Those of you who have read my profile know that I don't favor either party particularly, but I always vote in the Democratic primaries. That is because Lake County, where I live, is so heavily Democratic that the primary is the only chance I have to vote for local officials. That means the local Democrats think I'm one of them.

It also means I get to vote for Hillary or Barack Obama, the Senator from Next Door, so I thought it might be useful to hear what Bill had to say. I also thought it would be a good chance for my older boys (11 and 9) to see a former President and get a taste of the process.

But first, we had to hurry up and wait.

The doors to the little banquet hall that Clinton would be speaking at opened at 2:45. We were not told when Bill would actually speak, but we were prepared for a long wait.


The crowd waits breathlessly

We showed up right at 2:45 and had to wait in a little bit of a line to get in. Security was not as tight as I would have expected for a former President. Bags were checked, but that's about it. In fact, I went through a more thorough security check to get into the arenas for the NCAA tournament.

For the occasion, in honor of Hillary's drinking habits, I wore my most obnoxious Boilermakers shirt.

The place was standing room only, but not because it was overly crowded. There were no chairs, so all we could do was stand. The room was a little less than half full, maybe about 200 folks. It was almost all adults too. My kids were the only grade school age children there. There were a couple of babies and toddlers, and a few HS kids as well. There were also a few media types, and seemingly every Schererville cop. It would have been a good day to rob a bank.

I was about 40 feet from the podium, which meant I could see OK, but it would have been better if I'd worn heels. My kids had trouble seeing, but they could find an angle on occasion.

Clinton started around 3:30, so it was only a 45-minute wait. Bill has a reputation for being a charismatic speaker, and he did not disappoint. He was concise, by his standards, funny, and at times blunt. And his style wasn't typical of most politicians. Politicians generally speak as if they are talking to idiots. In many cases, they are. They'll pause. After. Every. Word. As if you need a few minutes to process each one. I can't stand that. Bill spoke like he had somewhere else to go (which he did), even though he went on for 40 minutes.

He was giving us some of the main points of Hillary's platform (jobs, energy, health care, education, balance the budget, get out of Iraq, etc), the details of which I'll leave out here. You can get that other places.


Bill doing his thing

His speech didn't end until ten minutes after the doors opened at his next stop in Crown Point. Those folks undoubtedly had a longer wait than we did.

Even though he was campaigning for his wife ("I'm just here as a volunteer campaign worker."), I expected to see more presidential stuff. Perhaps this is against protocol - I certainly wouldn't know - but I thought the presidential seal would be on the podium, but it wasn't. He does have security, though. I saw four Secret Service guys total. There was one on each side of the stage when he spoke, and two others joined the party when Clinton shook hands afterwards.

My sons and I got close enough to shake his hand, so we did. He and I actually chatted a few seconds about No Child Left Behind, which I think is useless and which he said Hillary wants to do away with.

And then he was gone, off to Crown Point.

One strange thing about this event was that there was no handouts, which is a sign, I suppose, of how cash-strapped Hillary's campaign is. There were no buttons, stickers, pins or signs given away. They did have a place to sign up to help, but as you can see, they weren't getting much interest.


Little help? Please?

They did give us a black-and-white flier on the way out, but I wasn't sure what we were supposed to do with it. It wasn't any different than the one I received in the mail earlier that week.

Bill and Hillary hit this region hard. We hardly saw Obama in NW Indiana, but the Clintons were here at least once a week. We'll see today if that pays off.

Sports(wo)men of the year

The leaders in the clubhouse for the Sportsmen of the Year award should be the ladies of the Central Washington University softball team, who literally carried Western Oregon University's team to victory in a game last week. It wasn't just any loss for CWU either. It ended their postseason hopes.

Credit CWU first baseman Mallory Holtman for thinking of the idea to carry WOU's Sara Tucholsky around the bases. I would have never thought of that, not because I wouldn't have wanted to help, but because I would thought it would be illegal. She asked anyway, and found out it wasn't.

Kalama-Air Zoo

Last weekend, I took my two older boys to a Cub Scout overnighter at the Kalamazoo Air Zoo museum.

The itinerary for the event called for a night of building rockets, touring the old museum building, where we were sleeping that night, and watching a movie. The next day, we would shoot off the rockets and tour the new Air Zoo building.

The only problem with this schedule is that it didn't start until 7 PM, and once the rocket construction ended around midnight, that is when they would show the movie. That's fine if you have a bunch of HS kids, but these are all elementary schoolers. Most of these kids are usually in bed by 9, and now we're keeping many of them up until 1:30 or 2 AM to watch a movie.

For me, this kind of event means a night of next to no sleep. I do not sleep well away from home generally, and do particularly poorly when I sleep in a crowded room on an air mattress on the floor.

Still, I thought I'd try to take advantage of the relatively quiet time in our sleeping area during the movie and try to sleep then. That plan was foiled because the father and son camped out closest to me (about 10-15 feet away) happened to be the Fabulous Fartersons, and they chose that moment to launch and all-out Fart Fight.

The next 30 minutes - or perhaps it was a week, I don't know - went like this:

Father: RIPPPPPPPPPP!
Both: "heeheehee!"
Father: "SHHHHHHHHHH!"
Son: RIPPPPPPPPPP!
Both: "heeheehee!"
Father: "SHHHHHHHHHH!"

And so on. If that's not a special father-son bonding moment, I don't know what is. Just think of the stories the son will be able to proudly tell his children and grandchildren. With any luck, that particular skill will be hereditary so they can show it off at family reunions. Imagine, a four-generation fart-fight. A veritable choir of flatulence. This assumes, of course, any of them can overcome that overwhelming talent and successfully breed anyway.

After that, we learned that the father is also a world-class snorer, but he wasn't the only one in the room. So, I didn't so much sleep as pass out and come to a couple of hours later.

I did learn something in those wee hours of the morning though. I didn't realize Kalamazoo's airport, which the museum borders, has commercial flights, but two Northwest flights left there by 7:30 Sunday morning.

Before we launched the rockets on Sunday, we got to visit the hangar where the museum does its restorations. Among the equipment we saw was a Sopwith Camel, which is best known as the kind of plane Snoopy flied in his fantasy battles with the Red Baron. The real Red Baron was supposed shot down by a fighter in a Camel, but it was later learned that he was down by Australian ground fire.

The rocket launch was fun for the kids. It was a very windy day, so they traveled a long way. The new museum was also fun. It had more newer planes than the old one, including a Navy Tomcat and a Blackbird spy plane. They also have a flight simulator where you can control the flight and do things like barrel rolls. It got the better of my kids though. They got upside down and couldn't get out of it.

Still, it was a fun time for the kids. I hope someday to forget it.

We're so sorry, but go pound sand

That's the basic message I got back from American Airlines after I wrote them about their policy that assured that people who were stranded by the MD-80 inspections remained that way.

To review, my flight was one of the first ones canceled when the FAA ordered AA to inspect their entire fleet of MD-80s. When I called the airline to ask about getting home, all they were willing to do to me was rebook me on another of their flights the next day. That flight was also on a MD-80, which meant it had zero chance of leaving as scheduled, and we both knew it. It also meant that I would have to go through the same run around for yet another day. I believe it was four days before AA flew out of San Antonio again.

So, while the chairman of American was going on television telling everyone how American was getting people on their way, even if it meant rebooking on another carrier, I was left to fend for myself.

I eventually got home on Southwest the next day. Ironically, Southwest had a similar problem a couple weeks earlier.

American wrote to tell me that they were "sorry that you found our rebooking policy to be less than convenient," but that since I was unwilling to spend an indefinite period of time in beautiful San Antonio waiting for them to get their act together, all they would consider reimbursing me is my hotel cost for the extra night. They aren't even promising that, just that they'll consider it if I send in the proper documentation.

"Less than convenient." That's a big, steaming pile of something less than pleasant.

Oh, they did refund my ticket for the trip I never made. Big of them.

I will send in my documentation, and perhaps before my kids go to college, I'll get a refund for my hotel. You'll pardon me though if I don't hold my breath.