Notoriously Nice ®

Mike Courtney, Activist?

Those of you who know me know that I prefer to keep a low profile. More like an invisible profile. But after watching a crew fill the same potholes for the third time, and after watching the city repave the streets leading to the Country Club but not the smaller streets I figured that someone had to step up and since no one else volunteered, that someone evidently is me.

I'm ashamed to admit that I didn't know who my District 10 council person was until a few minutes ago. I might have voted for him in the last election. Or not. (Local politics in Charleston only get attention when there is a controversy. Or when there are potholes.)

As I walked down the street taking photos, not only of the recently filled potholes but also of the numerous cracks that someday will be potholes, several neighbors came out and asked me what I was doing. After I explained they all said, "I'm glad someone is doing that." I can't fault them. Before today I had hoped someone else would do that.

I don't want Councilmember Riegel to think that this is just about my street so now that the rain seems to have stopped I'm going to go out and take photos of and make notes about other side streets.

I realize that budgets are tight and that the city is doing the best it can with street maintenance. All I want to know is if streets like mine are on the list. If now I want to know how to get them on the list.

And before anyone asks, I will not be running for office in the next election. Potholes have given me more exposure than I wanted.

Something you do at 2 AM when you can't sleep

Looking over my playlists on iTunes and Google Music (there's some overlap but they aren't the same) two things struck me. 1) Evidently I haven't listened to any new music since 2007 and 2) How drunk was I when I downloaded Hanggai's "Drinking Song" and was it because I'd had a good time somewhere that I don't remember?

You knew that the banking crisis of '08 would spawn novels

Other People's Money is the first Brit one. It probably helps if you appreciate British humour while you read it.

Everything about this novel is great until you get to the last chapter entitled, appropriately, 'The End', when Justin Cartwright ties up all of the loose ends quicky. I hate when an author does that.

Other than that it's a great read.

Sex, Lies, and a Russian Winter

Snow Drops is set in Moscow in the early 2000's. Nick, a lawyer for a Brirish law firm in Moscow, falls in love with Mahsa, only to discover that nothing in the new Russia is as it seems.

A.D. Miller was the Moscow correspondent for the Economist during those years so he's well aquainted with what life was like then. It is his first novel and it was a Man Booker Prize finanist. (If you don't know what the British Man Booker Prize is think of our Nationial Book Award, only with more sales.)

I'm looking forward to the cold war resuming. It means great fiction.

I think one of the biggest victims of the end of the cold war was John le Carre. He lost his enemy and his focus. With the rise of the oligarghs in Russia he seems to be back on track. Our Kind of Traitor isn't Smiley but it gives me hope.

Mike is reading again

It's been a long time since I did mini-book reviews (I blame Netflix) but get ready for a flood of them. Don't be surprised if most of the books I review are by British authors. That's the way I roll.

Further adventures of a single guy.

I bought two pair of Wrangler jean shorts at Walmart because 1) I needed them to replace two that I'd worn for 10 years and that now have holes in them in places that might get me arrested in South Carolina, and 2) they are the only ones I've seen that didn't hang below my knees, or worse, hang mid-calf. (Not a good look for old guys like me even if I could slam dunk a basketball.)  The only problem I had with them is that they were dark-blue-jean color and I really wanted something more bleached out like the Levi's I was replacing, but I took what I can get.

That's the preamble to today's laundry experiment. I figured that if Levi's can bleach jeans, I can too. I put them in the washer and put bleach in the dispenser. I have one of those smart washing machines that senses how many clothes are in it and adjusts the water level accordingly. I ignored the fact that two pair of shorts wouldn't require a lot of water and I added 3/4 of a cup of bleach (like you would use for a full load) to the dispenser. Then I hit the start button.

The good news is that the shorts didn't come out whiter than a Republican President. The bad news is that they came out looking as dark-blue as when they went in.

Since I'm a guy I figured that there was only one explanation. I didn't use enough bleach. So back in the washer, this time with 2 cups of bleach.

The good news? The shorts don't have holes in them. The bad news? They're still as freaking dark-blue as when I bought them.

Wrangler, I salute you! You've discovered the perfect color-fast blue dye. Please share your secret with the Mars people. Those blue M&M's keep staining my hand.

Of course it's possible that all of this time Clorox hasn't been making my whites whiter than white.

 

When you live on a golf course you don't need to buy golf balls

Golfers with wicked hooks drive them into your yard.

Speaking of my grandmother

All I know about this photo is that it was taken in the mid-to-late 1920's near Whitesburg, KY. That's my grandmother, Harriet Johanna Upington Courtney and her father-in-law (my great-grandfather) Michael Henry Courtney*. Dad is on the left, Uncle Bob is next to him. And Uncle John is the one with his fingers in his mouth. Of the five, Bob is the only one still living.

*My grandfather was William Henry Courtney. My father was William Henry Jr. I'm William Henry III. Because there were so many Williams my parents decided to nickname me Mike after Michael Henry. It stuck. Sometimes I pretend to be William but most of the time I'm Mike.

Life, the Universe, and My Grandmother

While boxing up books to make room for more books on my shelves* I came across my paternal grandmother's astronomy textbook from when she was a student at Campbell-Hagerman College**.

I hadn't looked at it in years and glancing through it today I was struck again by how much our knowledge of the universe increased over the 20th Century and a bit of the 21st. In fact, in the 1904 text the only time the word "universe" is mentioned, and then briefly, is as the "stellar universe". In other words, our Milky Way galaxy was thought to be the universe.

Even our galaxy was a mystery. "As to the Milky Way itself, it is not certain whether the stars which compose it form a sort of thin, flat, continuous sheet, or whether they are arranged in a sort of ring with a comparatively empty space in the middle, where the sun is situated, not far from the center." The thin, flat, continuous sheet theory came close but now we know our star and planets reside somewhere close to the edge, not the near the center.

Astronomers in 1904 had very good telescopes and took photos of other galaxies. The problem was that they didn't know what they were looking at. Everything that wasn't a star was a "nebula" (from Latin for "cloud.") They knew the difference between the gaseous nebulae like the one in Orion's belt and the "long oval with dark lanes in it, and a bright nucleus much like a star" that turned out to be the Andromeda galaxy. But they thought both existed within the Milky Way. It wasn't until 1925 that Edwin Hubble determined that the Andromeda nebula was, in fact, a separate galaxy and a significant distance away from the our Milkly Way galaxy.

*For giggles I mesured my bookshelves. If they were one long book shelf it would be 82' long. Not nearly enough. I'd buy more bookshelves but I have no place to put them.

**The Campbell-Hagerman College for Girls opened in 1903 at the former Thomas January House on West Second St. in Lexington, KY. The college closed in 1912 and after several incarnations it was subdivided into apartments in 1960. My grandmother was born in 1885 so it's likely that she was in one of the first classes.