Something About Polk

I'm closing in on finishing James Thurber's "92 Stories," and have found a treasure-trove of delights.

One such is a bit called "Something About Polk," focusing on the then-current (and also now-current) general ignorance of the accomplishments of James K. Polk, the 11th President of the United States.

He was impressed that a previous reader of a book on Polk was indignant enough about the author's dismissive view of Polk to write in the margin three concrete facts about the former president, showing he wasn't as "almost unknown" as the author thought.

The facts, for the curious:

1. Governor of Tennessee

2. Twice Speaker of the House of Representatives

3. The Jackson leader in the fight against the U.S. Bank.

Thurber, of course, agreed with the author -- he himself knew little of Polk, and lamented that he'd neither been shot or impeached or anything to help the common man cement an idea of Polk in their heads, unlike other presidents.

I learned the word "roorback," or a last-minute political trick, coined from such a trick played by Polk's opponents meant to convince voters that Polk was a slave-trader who branded his slaves, as reported in a fictional book by Baron Von Roorback.

But even contemporary historians and writers dismissed Polk as forgettable, with Thurber pointing out that Carl Sandburg included an anecdote about Polk's wife in his "Abaraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years," but not about Polk itself.

He concludes the best would be to make up more memorable Polk stories and share them to the point they entered the zeitgeist, and concludes thus:

"These are all that I can think of myself, and i am afraid that none of them is going to hurl our hero into immortality, but at least they are a start in the right direction. Let somebody else try it. There's no great rush."

I suspect he would have been amused by this:

Ah, Irony.

A commenter pointed out the missing apostrophe in CANT, and an awful lot of people got offended or snippy on the poster's behalf.

I'm a technical writer, so I make a living fixing things.

I also make a fair number of mistakes in published documents, so I know the sting. Nevertheless, it's important to get as much correct as we can, something I'm reminding myself as of late. What's important, of course, is to learn from our mistakes and not take offense when they're pointed out to us.

 

Verdict: Still Flickering

While we have nice, new light switches and a few new switch plates, we also still have a flickering light in the basement.

What to do?

I talked today with an electrician in our ward, and he figures the light driver is broken and the light should be replaced. I'm game to do so, but it's still a bit infuriating, as these lights aren't all that old.

A few more things I may try first:

1. Check the connections in the fixture. Might have a loose connection. Or I might still have it wired to a bit of wiring that goes to a light that is no longer serviced by that particular bit of wire.

2. Replace the breaker. I'm less sure this will do anything, but as it's less expensive than replacing the fixture, and there's a good chance I won't be able to find a fixture that'll match the twin in the same room.

A little disappointed that replacing the switches didn't work, but I'm not sad I did it -- the switches were original equipment with the house and the plastic on some of them was a bit brittle, so to have new switches in the wall is fine, and I'm only out the time spent in replacing them.

The light *is* flickering less, however. It still is flickering, though.

It's not quite this bad, but I am getting to the point I want to knock Mr. Waturi's artificial testicles off his desk.

"Let's Go, Old Man."

Got to hang out with my brothers today, first time in a very long time. Al, Randy and I drove down to Utah to see Jeff. We stopped at his house for a while, then took he and Jenia out for lunch.

Jeff is set for back surgery at the end of the month and isn't as mobile right now as he'd like, so we finished the rest of the day with just the travelers. We went to the Hill Aerospace Museum -- a first for me -- and looked at many, many planes.

Forgot -- on the way in, we stopped at Smith and Edwards, where Al was in search for flying poops. No luck on that. 

It was a good day.

*COMPETENT* Bad Guys!

 

Got a call early this morning from our daughter, concerned that she had a headlight out on her van.

A bit of a concern, yes, because she doesn't want a ticket for driving with only one headlight, and their other vehicle is off-limits at the moment as it's going to be headed to the shop.

She's in North Dakota, though, and I'm in Idaho. All I could do was suggest she find an auto parts store, buy the replacement bulb, and see if they'd replace it for her. I know they'll do that in our neck of the woods.

She discovered, however, that the folks at the auto parts store thought the job looked too hard and recommended she take it to a mechanic.

She bought the bulb anyway, drove the van home, (thinking all the time about the "incompentent bad guys" at the auto parts store) and got to tinkering. She found a screwdriver and managed to get one of the bolts out, but couldn't budge the other three. I suggested a few things.

She reported back a bit later with the photo above, showing success.

Not a big deal, maybe, but for her it was. She got it done, and that's always a good feeling.

Get Off Your Duffs, Boys

Dear Senator Cook and representatives Mickelsen and Horman:

I'm tired of reading stories like this:

For Decades, Calls for Reform to Idaho’s Troubled Coroner System Have Gone Unanswered

An Idaho Baby’s Unexplained Death Got No Autopsy and a Scant Coroner’s Investigation. State Law Says That’s Fine.

You, as my elected senator and representatives in the Idaho Legislature, ought to lead the fight to put meaningful coroner system reform in place in the state. And if that means putting money from state coffers into the coroner system to mandate better training and qualifications rather than "Hey, he or she won the election, so he or she is coroner," so be it.

It takes brave people to do things that aren't popular with the loud voices in this state. I voted for y'all to be brave and to actually do something in the legislature, rather than toe whatever line supports the status quo. The state needs to put resources at elected coroners' disposal, require training, and offer support other than the weak-sauce laws that appear to stretch back to Idaho's 1890 statehood.

Idaho and Idahoans make a lot of noise about protecting the lives of unborn children. Maybe they ought to put as much noise into figuring out why infants are dying, why Idaho's death rate from drug overdoses is magically much lower than other surrounding states, and other issues that tie in with the state's antiquated views on coroners, their duties and qualifications, and the state resources at their disposal.

Sincerely,

A dissatisfied customer,

Brian Davidson

Why Am I Doing This?

When I started this blogging year, I made it a goal to hit an average of 20 posts a month.

There's one month left in 2024, and I have thusfar made that average with a little bit of a cushion:

December brings a few expected posts, including a recap of the books I've read for the year, and a few other things that repeat year to year, so I'm fairly confident I'll meet my goal.

Why bother blogging? Partly, my blog is a journal where I record things that happen to me and my family. Partly because I've been doing it since 2008 and feel like keeping it going, even if I never hear from anyone about it. I guess I'm doing what I can to fight the dead internet theory. Also, I haven't had a year with more than 200 posts since 2012, and that feels like a lifetime ago.

Floating around in the ethers somewhere is another blog I started earlier, but lost track of somewhere along the line. And if the Wayback Machine ever gets back up and operational, there's some stuff there from me from the mid-1990s. (Looks like it *is* operational; I had heard they'd suffered some kind of massive cyberattack and were offline.) I'm an internet fossil. The stuff I did at the University of Idaho was just me dabbling with HTML. They gave us a limited amount of storage space for stuff, and I do recall getting an email from them saying I'd hit my limit, but they decided to give me more space. Not that I was producing magnificent stuff, but I did have a fair bit put up there.