After an unintended extended hiatus, I’m reviving this heap with a purpose. Because things that move are more interesting than things which are fixed, what we’ll have here is everything and anything having to do with how we move ourselves and our stuff.

Yeah, there will be the important but often boring “transportation policy” matters: infrastructure, gas taxes, user fees, pavement. (But with your help we’ll try to remove as much of the boring as possible, because anything that effects you is usually at least somewhat interesting. At least to you).
But this site will also I hope have lots of cool (and useful) stuff: riverboats, neat old (and new) cars, getting there by air, shortcuts and blue highways, scenery, train whistles in the night, etc., etc.

The great Iowa writer Richard Bissell (Dubuque boy) maybe wrote it best:

I’m afflicted with the hobo philosophy; Weary Willie and Dusty Rhodes are fellow travelers. My wife is thinking of Bridgeport. But I’m thinking of getting to Bridgeport, of moving in the direction of Bridgeport, of the act of going. I’m thinking of the road and the cars and trucks and the tollbooths, stoplights, rooftops, diners, railroad tracks, church steeples, factories, people with flat tires, truck stops, coffee, gas pumps, road maps, perhaps rain or snow and the windshield wiper going Swish Swish Clank Clank.
This is very much a work in (barely) progress and will take a bit of time to gain momentumj, but I hope you’ll be along for at least some of the ride.

*about this blog’s title

Don’t take it too seriously. We’re all idiots here – and I mean that in the good, Johnny Damon  sense. (And I mean that in the good, Jesus-in-the-Fenway-centerfield Johnny Damon sense, not the shorn, Evil Empire Johnny Damon  sense).

Cedar Rapids, Iowa July 4 2008

Time Check neighborhood

Members of Castle Rock Community Church of New Orleans at work in Lisa Kuzela’s house in the Time Check neighborhood. The house had about 5 feet of water in its first floor.

Pastor John Gerhardt of Castle Rock Community hauls a load of debris from Lisa Kuzela’s house in the Time Check neighborhood. The church sent 10 people to Cedar Rapids and Iowa City for three days of demolition and recovery work. Gerhardt’s wife Wendy Gerhardt, nee Rhatigan, was born and raised in Cedar Rapids. Castle Rock’s trip north came after a church group from Cedar Rapids cancelled its planned trip to New Orleans for relief work.

John Gerhardt: “We can look at people with all sincerity and say, ‘We can get through this.’ It causes some stress, but you can get through it.”

Gerhardt’s neighborhood had about 6feet of floodwater, about the same as Kuzela’s area of Time Check. He said about half the residents have sinced returned.

“There’s a sprint at the beginning, to get all your stuff out of your house. But then it becomes a marathon.”

Lisa Kuzela snaps a photo of the church crew at work.

Little Bohema neighborhood

If you’re fortunate enough to have been there, you know why the Little Bohemia was one of America’s great corner taverns. If you’re not, you may be too late.

There was substantial debate over the question: Did the neighborhood get its name from the Little Bo, or vice versa? It was a reputed hangout of Grant Wood and Marvin Cone, which sounds reasonable because Cone actually painted it.

 Some (ok, a few) people have asked what the town looks like three weeks after the Cedar River crested, so here’s a few quick shots from downtown on my lunch hour. At crest, the river stopped just about midway along the block between the railroad tracks and 5th Street SE- that’s five blocks away and nearly 30 feet in elevation from where it’s supposed to be.

Nearly every downtown building has stuff like this parked out front. The silver machine is an industrial-strength dehumidifier (there are plenty bigger than this one), powered by the trailer-mounted portable diesel generator at left.

Much heavy debris removal – furnishing, carpet, wallboard, plaster, etc., appears finished, but you have to lower the humidity before rebuilding to prevent mold formation. I don’t know about this particular building, but the county Public Health teams are measuring humidity levels over 50 percent in flood-damaged homes. That has to be brought under 20 percent to prevent mold. Businesses (or their insurance companies) are bringing in these. Homeowners are just letting them sit to dry out – plus, most of those lucky enough to get back in their homes are still in the tear-out phase.

The humidifiers breathe through these tubes, pulling out damp air and leaching out the moisture.

If you’re a railroad expecting a flood, what you do is, you park a bunch of freight cars loaded with stone on your bridge. Sometimes this works. Cedar Rapids and Iowa City (CRANDIC) Railway bridge downstream from the Eighth Avenue bridge.

Will shoot & post photos from other neighborhoods as soon as I can.

A group of American advisers led by a small State Department team played an integral part in drawing up contracts between the Iraqi government and five major Western oil companies to develop some of the largest fields in Iraq, American officials say.

The disclosure, coming on the eve of the contracts’ announcement, is the first confirmation of direct involvement by the Bush administration in deals to open Iraq’s oil to commercial development and is likely to stoke criticism.

In their role as advisers to the Iraqi Oil Ministry, American government lawyers and private-sector consultants provided template contracts and detailed suggestions on drafting the contracts, advisers and a senior State Department official said.

It is unclear how much influence their work had on the ministry’s decisions.

Those were no-bid contracts, btw. Of course, it wasn’t about oil.

A bit of good news: ABC won’t get the chance to screw up another presidential debate:

The campaigns want to get the media off the stage. Journalists are not the collective third candidate in this election, although at times it’s obvious they consider themselves to be just as important as political leaders. That runaway narcissism has severely damaged the craft, and the campaigns have wisely decided to give the press a time-out.

So, Scottie McClellan’s memoir gets all the attention for telling us all something we already knew (ie, the president is a weak, morally degenerate sociopath) and this, which examines just how they lie to us, sinks like a stone:

Defense Department counterintelligence investigators suspected that Iranian exiles who provided dubious intelligence on Iraq and Iran to a small group of Pentagon officials might have “been used as agents of a foreign intelligence service … to reach into and influence the highest levels of the U.S. government,” a Senate Intelligence Committee report said Thursday.

A top aide to then-secretary of defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, however, shut down the 2003 investigation into the Pentagon officials’ activities after only a month, and the Defense Department’s top brass never followed up on the investigators’ recommendation for a more thorough investigation, the Senate report said.

The revelation raises questions about whether Iran may have used a small cabal of officials in the Pentagon and in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office to feed bogus intelligence on Iraq and Iran to senior policymakers in the Bush administration who were eager to oust the Iraqi dictator.

…this is from that Senate Intelligence Committee report released this week. These are the “people” his Maverickness wants to leave in charge of our strategic future.

…as they say on the radio news as you’re tooling down the Interstate in the Family Truckster:

“The prices that we’re paying at the pump today are, I think, going to be ‘the good old days,’ because others who watch this very closely forecast that we’re going to be hitting $12 and $15 a gallon, and then, after that, when world oil production goes into decline, we’re going to talk about rationing,” Robert Hirsch, Management Information Services Senior Energy Advisor, said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” “In other words, not only are we going to be paying high prices and have considerable economic problems, but in addition to that, we’re not going to be able to get the fuel when we want it.”

Whether Hirsch is precisely accurate or not, the way we live is about to change. Given some sane political leadership and a populace accepting of reality, I don’t think it’s anything we can’t cope with and adjust to. But will we get those givens?

Imagine the mess we’d be in if we hadn’t had those run-government-like-a-business types in charge…it’s getting increasingly difficult to avoid the conclusion that the invasion and occupation was nothing more or less than a big bidness opportunity for somebody:

A Pentagon audit of $8.2 billion in American taxpayer money spent by the United States Army on contractors in Iraq has found that almost none of the payments followed federal rules and that in some cases, contracts worth millions of dollars were paid for despite little or no record of what, if anything, was received.

The audit also found a sometimes stunning lack of accountability in the way the United States military spent some $1.8 billion in seized or frozen Iraqi assets, which in the early phases of the conflict were often doled out in stacks or pallets of cash. The audit was released Thursday in tandem with a Congressional hearing on the payments.

In one case, according to documents displayed by Pentagon auditors at the hearing before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, a cash payment of $320.8 million in Iraqi money was authorized on the basis of a single signature and the words “Iraqi Salary Payment” on an invoice. In another, $11.1 million of taxpayer money was paid to IAP, an American contractor, on the basis of a voucher with no indication of what was delivered.

(snip)

The disclosure that $1.8 billion in Iraqi assets was mishandled comes on top of an earlier finding by an independent federal oversight agency, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, that United States occupation authorities early in the conflict could not account for the disbursement of $8.8 billion in Iraqi oil money and seized assets.

Read, as they say, the whole thing, especially the parts about

From Wall Street Journal’s MarketWatch:

Gasoline at $7 a gallon by 2012?
That’s the prediction of analysts at CIBC. They also believe crude will surpass $200 a barrel in the next four years.