The Mighty Twenty Three

One of the oldest  (before 1877) and longest urban bus routes, for many years the longest streetcar route in the world, is SEPTA's 23 bus, here in the Quaker City. Described as "SEPTA's rolling cash register", it winds from the wealthy reaches of Chestnut Hill, through historic Germantown, through the "Badlands", downtown and ends in deep South Philadelphia. Ridership changes from white to black to Asian to white en route.

Folks still work at getting it back to be a streetcar line, especially after seeing route 23 streetcars in robust daily service in San Francisco.
Among the landmarks it passes in North Philly is Fair Hill Cemetery, resting place for early Quakers, abolitionists and female rights advocates. According to some often verbose passengers that cannot comprehend the site signage or the several murals nearby, it is a) the oldest black cemetery or b) the oldest pet cemetery in a)Philadelphia or b) the United States. This may be due to the Quaker tradition of marking graves with very modest stones.

 

 

These days SEPTA's 23 and other busses have become more and more festooned with advertising that often covers the entire bus, making it look like a Heineken bottle or a large gin & tonic. They also have ads for personal injury lawyers (who sue one another to gain ad space on our public transit) on the back.

 

The 23 also passes two wonderful places, to me heavens on earth. First is the Reading terminal Market, which lends joy to conventioneers and jury members among many others. Its inside -

 

 





 Even better, just a few stops further south, is the Italian market, a mecca to some and a great place to get some python, buffalo tongue or a pig (that's a whole pig, as in pig roast). Someday maybe Connie and I can rent a place above one of these stores...

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hipper Than Thou

Here in the City of Brotherly Love, we are getting way hipper than most folks think. Not only did we have a "Texting Lane" around city hall (this was an April Fool's joke on the part of Hizzoner Mayor Nutter). Now, to outdo all others, we have UNICYCLE Lanes, or at least one of them, to wit see below-

 

 

We are getting so hip that now the old old Koch'e Deli in West Phila is Zagat rated, for crying out loud.

 

Where will it end? 

About the Best Thing I Do

It is good to ask oneself what value one's activities have from time to time.
After retiring I decided to join my Connie as a reading coach for a program called Philadelphia Reads. She works downtown and every Thursday during the school year two classes of first graders come to her building from the Isaac Sheppard School, a 114 year old elementary public school in the poorest ZIP code in the city (or perhaps the country). Each week I get to help a kid learn to read. In a lot of cases, these coaches and their teachers are the only adults in the kids lives that think learning to read is important.
I never ask about parents because usually there is only one. Vacations are another bad topic, since they mostly never have any. They come in never really clean clothes, bright and cheerful and glad to see us. Then you learn that the oven at home has too many cockroaches so no hot food or, more importantly to them, cake. One child I coached was obviously dyslexic, but despite three tries by his teacher to get his mom to see a doc, he made no reading progress for the entire year.
This year, even this early into the school year, my kid is making good progress. At first he would not let go of his teacher's hand and worried (in Spanish) about people falling out of the neighboring office towers - he had never seen things so big. Now he is braver, speaks clearly, and holy moly, he reads better every week. So there may be hope for him, no matter how hard our legislators try to destroy his life chances.

Stalwart Beauty and Let's All Help the Rabbits

Rescued from a short life as junky desk décor, our little rose has bloomed four times, and this one is from a couple of days ago. As the beautiful color of the leaves fades into crappy stuff we need to get rid of, this joyous flower is a wonder in November.

And let's all be sure to note that here in the Land of Giants, our state legislature has decreed that November is Rabbit Breeders Month. We do not need schools, health care. roads, busses, pension funds or stuff like that. However we very much need more rabbits. Who knew it was hard to breed rabbits? Ah, Pennsyltucky, home of the myopic and the brave!

Too Much Technology "Lite"

Lately I have come to feel that we are misusing the term "technology." All over the place its used to describe what really amounts to mostly useless tweaks to computers, which even though we carry them in our pockets today, are not new any more, they were invented in 1947.  Even the New York Times "technology" section mostly describes what really amount to titillating toys that enable the mild minded to pass time gazing at glowing screens or spreading useless personal information about themselves or what they ate for lunch. You can even blab at folks and watch them endure your boring yammering. Worse yet they may even be interested in your yammering since the glowing screen has removed them from the real world in which thinking is so often useful or required.
Its mostly nonsense, and it is a lousy excuse for "technology". In the early days of television folks used to hope for a vast educational asset but what we got is mostly a barren wasteland full of night soil of the mind. Similarly "edu apps" are promoted as helpful to "digital natives" (these are young kids whose lives are impoverished by early access to pads and pods and other such junk - I actually heard this bullshit on NPR today) who will in all likelihood grow up unable to boil water or rake leaves. Or care about the world they take up space in.
We were supposed to have bullet trains and personal jets and X-ray glasses. That's technology! All we got are crappy little gizmos that waste our time.

Let's Say Goodbye to Texas

Lets all think about what would happen if the country let Texas leave the union. A number of things to consider-
First, we would get rid of Senator Cruz, the loudest Whining White Person in the country. And the slack minded yokels who think he is so great. I wonder what they would think about him when their social security checks stopped? And remember Texas  has more uninsured people than just about any other state, and they want to keep it that way.
We would not have to hear from Rick Perry, except as a joke from another country. That new country could have as many branches of government as it wants and dear Rick would not have to worry about which three he wants to abolish.
Oklahoma would not have to suck so hard to keep Texas from floating off into the Gulf of Mexico.
I'm sure lots of good ol boys would be delighted to be a separate nation. That is until they had to come up with their own currency and find out no one will lend them money because they would not be able to stop laughing, since the state won't have much revenue once the oil companies have their way. After all somebody will have to make up for the federal subsidies they get from all of us.
They could build a huge wall along their border with Mexico, until they discovered that they don't really have the bucks to finish it.
The opposite of secession is decession like "de-aquisitioning" works of art. We don't really have to wait for the Texans to take action. Perhaps we could even sell Texas to Mexico, or perhaps France. Or maybe we could "gift" Texas to, say, Iran.

Fear and Loathing of the Future

The "Anti Economist" column in Harper's is always a worthy read, as is the whole magazine.
In the most recent issue the columnist Jeff Madrick noted that 218 out of 233 Republican House members have signed a pledge to vote against taxes regardless of circumstances. They signed this myopic pledge at the urging of one Grover Norquist, who makes his living it seems by getting others to change centuries.
I wonder how many of these pledge signers also claim to want to run the government "like a business." Perhaps they know of a business that can never, no matter what, raise prices, and the utopia it occupies. Every single one of them, along with the so called "self made" success characters, becomes dependent on government the instant their car tires touch a paved road. Paved roads wear out. Paving costs more money now than then, and will cost more in future. But some think they would prefer gravel roads. They come from gerrymandered cocoons into which no breath of modern thinking can penetrate.
The reason I think is fear and loathing of the future. And part of the fear just may be that the idea of being returned home from Washington to the lousy places they come from.. Can't say I blame them.