On the road between Versailles (Ver-sails) Kentucky and London (Luhhhn-dun) Kentucky we find ourselves confronted with signs for some kind of bluegrass / country music hall-of-fame / old-fashioned good-timey fun. Naturally, we digress from our destination (Cumberland Falls) to check out what fun can be had:

An old barn -and a new barn!?!?! What!?!?! That's cra-za-zee!




The grocery-store merry-go-round is rusted, the rumps of children just a misty memory. The country music themed tchotchke (that's how I spell it godammit!) stores are silent. Sometime you build it and they -don't- come.




Candy canes, empty walkways, and denuded trees. It's a happy place!




Even the crickets have left the country-themed, old-timey streets and therefore can't lend their voices to the chorus of desolation that is this forsaken spot between Versailles and London.




A bronze hillbilly stands behind an aspiring hillbilly.




If you put your head in this hole, you can pretend there are other people here!

We visited the country music store and bought a CD (out of pity). We got a Faron Young CD (I had never heard of him) mostly because there is a song on the CD called "Unmitigated Gall" which seemed like an awesome title for a song. (Though my gall is mostly mitigated.) Faron is pretty twangy and likes to switch from a deep bass to an Orbison-like falsetto. Here's a YouTube video of him in 1961. The other cool thing about him is that he continued to sing even after injuring his tongue in an auto accident. (True story, it came from the liner notes.) I didn't love the whole CD, but my hat's off to Mel Tillis who wrote "Unmitigated Gall". (Really, "unmitigated" is such a difficult word to put in a song -- it's a remarkable feat that it works so well.) Here's the first verse:

"Well, how can you have the unmitigated gall
To come back now, expecting me to fall?
Right down on my knees and kiss your feet? Yeah, feet.
Feet that one day went a-walking out on me
With a fast talking slob, you hardly new his name.
Your mind is de-arranged."

(yes, de-arranged!)

Knocking around the zoo on a Saturday afternoon in a zoo-style trick or treat extravaganza we happened upon the same Praying Mantis we encountered months before in downtown Louisville.

Roaming Kentucky-based praying mantis courtesy of Squallis Puppeteers -- supplying creatively ugly puppets for such functions as the Louisville Zoo trick-or-treat night and the ACLU's Reproductive Freedom Project. Because what says reproductive freedom better than a ten-foot-tall praying mantis?




Here is the very rarely seen "gummy Dorothy" from the "Wizard of Floss".






We carved our pumpkins -- mine is the self-portrait on the right.




Tammy-Faye-o-Lantern!




We also returned to Muscatatuck National Wildlife Refuge on the way back home.





This is the same tree that attacked her in the Spring.




That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

I am a poor person. I don't own a car. In fact, I am one of the millions of Americans who are "un-vehicled." When I need to get somewhere, I use the public option. The public option I prefer, the train, demands a small co-pay, is slightly inconvenient, but nevertheless gets me to work just the same as a Mercedes, a Hummer, or a private helicopter. Somehow the country has not turned socialist because of this public option.

If there is a public option for the un-vehicled, why not for the uninsured?

Publically funded and accessible to everyone for a co-pay of about $3-- the CTA Green Line!

Left out of the debate re:healthcare are the various states that do provide some sort of "public option" even now. My daughter receives socialized medicine via Illinois' AllKids program. This saves me, a fellow well-below the poverty line, about a grand per year. Beyond that, it saves me the nightmare of going into major debt because of a health issue. Basically, if you're a kid then Illinois is Canada.

The "other side" of the debate (the pro-sick children side) questions the government's largesse, as if providing health care for citizens were some kind of crazy splurge (if so, then every other developed nation on the planet needs to learn to withhold basic services as well as the US). For example, this blogger doesn't like getting $75. He's free to give his stimulus back, of course.

AllKids was apparently created by our previous governor, a famous nutcase and crook. But, hey, people are complex beings -- perhaps he did one or two good things between hair appointments and pay-to-play schemes.

Just look at the amount of money that is saved by this public option:

a) Personally, it saves me (a poor person) at least $1000 in health care since I don't have to add my child to my health care.

b) If I did add my child to my health care, the service would be less convenient and cost more. So, again personally, I save mental strain there. My emotional state comes at a small price, let's say 50 cents.

So far, we've saved $1000.50.

c) When my child gets sick I don't have to take her to the emergency room for a routine illness. I'm not saddled with a ridiculous bill and the taxpayers/ hospitals are not paying insane amounts of $$ because my uninsured daughter got the flu. (For the slow people out there: getting the flu is not a moral issue. Good people get the flu too. Everyone deserves treatment for their flu.) The average emergency room visit was $1881 (in Florida in 2006, anyway).

Now we've saved $2881.50.

d) Because I have access to health care, my daughter gets preventative medicine. This saves untold $$$ to everyone. How could we even estimate it? Think of all of the emergency room visits and illnesses prevented simply because people in Illinois can take their kids to the doctor. I'm going to be conservative and say we save, maybe, an average of $10,000 per child.

Now we've saved $12,881.50.

e) As mentioned before, all healthcare insurance costs go down. There's more -- not less -- competition with a public option. So by simply having this option available, everyone saves a little bit. If everyone in Illinois saves just $1 a year then that's $12,901,563.

Now we've saved $12,914,444.50.

f) Would you rather live and work in a state that offered a public option or one that didn't? Do you prefer to live in a place that takes care of children or one that doesn't? Would you be more likely to move your business and family to a place with a public option? Let's put people's happiness at $.50. Another incalculable: how many taxpayers move to Illinois in part because of this tiny safety net?

Now we've saved $12,914,445

e) I forgot! I save my place of employment money as well. Think of the savings to those always-mentioned "small businesses" when their workers don't need to add their children to their health care.

So this is what socialized medicine gets you: a more competitive marketplace and less money spent.

I'm not saying AllKids is perfect -- I'm sure it isn't. This is Illinois after all. But from my perspective, AllKids has been great. It makes the standard of care here at least as good, if not a little better, than it was in the Federated States of Micronesia. When my daughter was sick, I took her to the clinic, payed $10, got some anti-biotics, and she was fine in two days. Imagine the hassle at an emergency room!

So, yes, we need a public option. A real one. Will we get one? Probably not. (You really should read this article!)

Here's how our $75 dollar hating blogger ends his blog-thing:

"It doesn’t really matter if you subscribe to the Obama apologist thought process that government can take care of everything without being intrusive and even if it is intrusive, it intrudes more on the evil bastards that work for a living than on the innocent victims that welcome its assistance."

I love this run-on sentence, from linguistics standpoint. One could parse it so many ways. Let me try to paraphrase: "I doesn't matter if you agree with Obama that government can take care of everything without intruding*. Further it doesn't matter if you think that if government is intrusive, it intrudes upon evil working people more than innocent victims who receive government assistance."

So basically, um... actually I'm not sure what Mr. Blogger dude means. He, and other pro-sick children folks seem to not believe in even the most basic social contract. The people give power to the government, agree to abide by its rules and government in return should do nothing whatsoever to provide basic protection to its citizens in the form of healthcare. Taking care of your citizens is a non-zero-sum game -- everyone wins!



* I doubt Obama really thinks this. But how could I know?

Kiddieland in Melrose Park is set to close after 81 years. The reasons have to do with the price of real-estate and a family feud -- a year round Costco will make more for the landlords than a seasonal amusement park. A lot of people are making a last pilgrimage to the site. Like others, Kiddieland has been a childhood mecca for three generations of my family. The photos below were taken with my cell-phone camera. Sorry for the shoddy quality.




The Tilt-A-Whirl used to test my intestinal fortitude as a child. The blue half-spheres still swing young and old alike upon their rusty grooves.

This is my daughter's fourth or fifth time at Kiddieland. We go once every summer. It's hard to quantify "fun" but the kids seem to have their $23 dollars a ticket (for the whole day and all the rides) worth of fun. With shorter lines, I wonder if the fun-quotient isn't the same or better than the thousands you'd pay for Disneyland or hundreds you'd pay for Great America. My daughter and her friend liked the water-tube-slide thingy so much, they went on it ten times -- not something that would be likely to happen at Disneyland where there might be an hour wait for a ride.




The "Little Dipper" -- an ancient wooden roller coaster -- is the stuff of nightmares if you are under six. For anyone else, only the general ricketyness is of concern.




This is currently the stuff of my nightmares. This hot dog is wrapped in the American flag and showering itself with ketchup and mustard in an effort to pretty itself up and make you want to eat it -- a very self-defeating act for a hot dog. I cut off the bottom part of the wiener because, well, this is a family blog and some things are just too disgusting.

Kiddieland is full of retro detail like the hot dog above -- must have been the cool thing in condiments at some point. Or was there a point in time in the last eighty-one years that people didn't know to put ketchup on their hot dogs and needed that self-same hot dog to point the way to fully condimented bliss? Were their periods, say during WWII, when patrons would only trust an American hot dog as opposed to a German frankfurter?

Another retro detail (sorry, no picture): a large tin thermometer that is also a vintage advertisement for Mail Pouch chewing tobacco that greets you as you begin the log ride. (See also.)







Enjoying the Scrambler as it scrambles. Sadly my favorite ride, The Polyp, was closed. That's right, they aren't just for Ronald Reagan's colon -- Who wouldn't want to ride a polyp? If only they could stay in business, Kiddieland could invite children to ride the "Malignant Melanoma" or "Weeping Staph Infection."





Dig the Buck Rogers style space pod with attached guns that make old-style "wooga-wooga" noises. This area of the park (which really only has two areas) has a number of retro-futurist "spin your child" rides.

The only thing I can think of that has the same non-corporate, home-made, and purely "for the heck of it" vibe as Kiddieland is Circus Bruno. I don't know if Circus Bruno still exists.

Or perhaps Kiddieland just seems more charming now because it's closing?




We stayed their seven hours and the kids would have stayed longer. I have never tested my daughter's staying power at Kiddieland -- I always give up first.




As a kid I wanted nothing more than to ride in the mini-trolley car on the right. I would run out of the gate and zoom right for it -- disappointed if the front seat was taken. The trolley or new-fangled "moto-bikes" would then spin benignly at a speed of 5mph while all the kids made clanging/beeping noises. It's a bit hard to see the allure.

Yet, there is a whole aesthetic that I was introduced to as a child at Kiddieland -- something to do with the flashing lights on the bumper cars, the shined chrome on the fins of the merry-go-round convertibles, the sleek Zephyr-like lines of the mini-railroad that travels through the parking lot -- something about that old-time amusement park aesthetic is something truly magical, home-grown, and as American as ketchup on hot-dogs. There's a lot about Kiddieland I don't like as a parent, namely the fact that I have to be there all day, but I also can't deny that something of Kiddieland is stuck in me. So when they finally take down the multi-colored mini Ferris wheel that is made up of five kid-sized cages there will be the ghost of at least one little boy who was stuck at the top, all of fifteen feet in the air, and thought: "ohhhh gosh, I"m flying!"

This summer I took a stroll through my mind (the Temptations helpfully suggested the trip). I read "War and Peace":

It's the translation by Anthony Briggs. For what it's worth, I found it less fussy and more readable than any other version. Certainly the prose is rendered in a non-flashy, direct manner without constant notes -- and he helpfully (to me) translates all the French that's used in the book right there on the page rather than as a footnote. It took me over a month to read and I enjoyed it immensely. By the end, I found that I was in complete accord with Tolstoy's humanistic world-view. It was a deep, rewarding experience that snuck up on me (okay, sneaked up on me, whatever). I mean, it seemed like a good story to begin with, but really became something much deeper. I did skim the umpteenth time that Tolstoy broke the narrative to give his views on Napoleon and history and great-men and determinism, yadda, yadda...

I also worked on writing a book. Here are the first two paragraphs:

"The Feast

A rivulet of pig's blood trickled underneath one of the enormous yams. Two rows of yams flanked the sides of a muddy road that led up to the feast house. Each yam was tied to a log and hung liked enormous, deformed Christmas stockings between two oil drums. These giant tubers, hairy with crazed roots and as long as a small child, hung in fat clusters beside the little road. Each cluster of yams weighed hundreds of pounds. A few had to be trucked in on flat-bed pick-ups and hoisted by six men... ten men... fourteen men. The size of the yam was rated by the amount of men it took to carry it on thick poles strung through the bark-roped top of the yam clusters. That's a fourteen-man yam... Each of these monstrous yams was dressed at the top with a garland of green vines. In spite of all the manly endeavor it took to grow, harvest, and carry the yams to the feast, the long row of yam clusters that flanked the road looked something like dressed-up, shy dancers at an awkward party.

The pig's blood flowed beneath the yams into a muddy crevice where barefoot children were playing. The riot of children were landing here, near the pig's blood, after they slid on their butts down a muddy streak in a grassy hill. The morning had brought the usual downpour, but now the weather was sunny, humid, and steaming as the warm pig's blood streaked across the haphazardly placed bits of cement that called itself a road on its way down the small hill in Pwudoi, Pohnpei, Micronesia, Pacific Ocean. The bloody path trickled towards the ocean, towards the open mouths of a tangle of eels, waiting in the dark maze of a mangrove swamp. The blood crossed the island's narrow circumferential road, went under the cement beams of the policeman's house and through his small sakau market where people were sitting on plastic coolers and drinking a gray, dirty mildly psychoactive liquid out of emptied-bottles of cheap Filipino rum. From the cement edge of the market, the blood dripped into the waiting maws of the eels."

In preparation for my wedding, I painted eight portraits of authors in oil on canvas.

This is Haldor Laxness, (I mean Halldor Laxness) Icelandic Nobel Laureate:



This is Tillie Olsen -- my favorite of the eight that I painted, mostly because the hand doesn't totally suck.



This is the poet Robert Lowell:



There's only one person in the world who could inspire me to paint eight portraits and write a book, that's Kristin Gourlay. Here we are in Quebec after the marriage:



Here are our hands on the top of Mont Tremblant, Quebec:




We picked up some Elk Pate (you know, with the slash above the "e") in Quebec and brought it back for my daughter's birthday.






What's better than an Elken meat-spread on your birthday?

Then we went camping in Eastern Kentucky with our new tent.


What a great summer! Too bad it's over... but even that Temptations song alluded to earlier came to an end -- eventually -- after eight interminable minutes of psychadelic noodling (and I'm huge fan, okay! Check out this CD! You won't be disappointed!) and the Temptations dropped off one-by-one so that now I think they tour with the ashes of an original member and maybe one guy who joined them when they were doing duets with Rick James... Ah yes, seasons turn, the great wheel of heaven grinds on, cloud nine dissipates, papa is a rolling stone and gets a brand new bag -- and honest papas love their mamas better, by the way - and so we write an end to the summer, farewell -- those ashes are now cold from the fire that once made my sweet, sweet s'mores...

Something exciting is approaching in the Fourth of July parade -- probably Tootsie Rolls.



Blowing rainbow bubbles -- 'cuz the Fourth is all about freedom and equality, baby.



The Grace Lutheran 25th Grade School reunion (No, we didn't go to 25th Grade, it just felt like it). Stevie and Martin sit on a plate of baked beans and hug, just like the old days.



Nyah nyah nyah, you're extinct and I'm not!



Climbing trees at Brookfield Zoo.



Brookfield Zoo's new "wall of effervescence" where kids and adults can explore the world of trapped air.