Ours Is Bigger Than Yours.

Well, this was an interesting week. That's interesting in the Minnesota use of the word. If you've not encountered interesting in Minnesota, let me use it in another sentence:

When you step out of the fitting room in a new dress and your friend says: Gee, that's an interesting look for you.

Translation:  That is totally butt ugly; get it off now before I experience permanent damage to my eyesight.

My erstwhile fair chaperones.

I did go to the best State Fair in the whole country on Wednesday after work, chaperoned by my cousin and her aunt. Aunt M is another New Yorker. She walks fast, takes no guff standing in lines, and laughs at everything. My cousin, Wisconsin born and Minnesota raised, is much more sanguine, although I happen know she can holler with the best of them, will eat fried food, and is mortified by standing in line with 2 New Yorkers. I can judge how crazy I'm making her if, after an inane comment, she replies with one of two words: FINE or WHATEVER. 
 

But off to the Minnesota State Fair the three of us went. Our first stop, of course, was roasted corn, followed by them eating fried pickles (I tasted,) onion rings (I tasted,) and I think there was a hot dog or corn dog or pronto pup in there...I declined to taste that. But I did have a strawberry malted at the dairy building. Between that and seeing the butter heads, I was in Minnesota heaven. 

At the DFL booth (Democrat-Farmer-Labor party) Elizabeth Warren was winning the bean count by a mile. St. Amy was not even close. Pete Buttigieg was holding his own, but the clear winner was Warren. Not at all surprising in this state at this moment. Will it hold? I have no clue. But all the same, the snippets of conversation I heard at the booth gave me hope that our state will stay true to its local proclivities. 

Best part of the Fair? Well, I think it's the seed art, but the line was really long so we didn't get a good look. And the Fine Arts building had some radically wonderful pieces this year.  Every year, Minnesotans enter their work for consideration and every year, it does not disappoint. Our friend Betty Rosenstein had one of her weavings accepted this year; it's always a joy to see the names of someone we know. ..especially when there's an award involved. 

The week, however, turned Minnesota interesting with the mass murder in Odessa, Texas, right in the middle of panicking about the approach of Hurricane Dorian. Odessa's shooting spree only serves to highlight in importance of thoughts and prayers when dealing with Texas and guns. Obviously thoughts and prayers do work. It was a whole four weeks between El Paso on August 3rd and Odessa on August 31st! That news was so incredible that a mere few hours after Odessa, the state of Texas actually loosened gun regulations in the state by allowing bills passed in the legislature to go into effect:

 

At schools:

• HB 1143 prevents public school school districts and open-enrollment charter schools from regulating how licensed individuals store their firearms or ammunition in their vehicle on a school parking lot.
• HB 1387 removes limitations on the number of faculty and staff that can be designated as armed school marshals per campus. Previously, there could only be one marshal per 200 students or one marshal per school building.

At places of worship:

• SB 535 clarifies that places of religious worship are the same as other private properties: They must give notice if guns are banned on their premises. Churches, mosques and synagogues were previously off-limits.

After federal or state disasters are declared:

• HB 1177 allows citizens to carry firearms without a license — if they’re not prohibited by law from having a gun — for a full week after a declared state of disaster. The law also allows disaster shelters to accommodate those with firearms.

 At apartments, homes or other private property:

• HB 302 prohibits residential lease agreements from restricting lawful possession of a firearm by tenants, guests, owners and landlords alike.
• HB 2363 updates how certain foster homes can store their firearms. Previously, they had to store items separately in locked locations. Now, items can be stored together with a trigger-locking device in the same secured location.
• HB 121 defends License to Carry holders who trespass in a space prohibiting guns — as long as the holder promptly leaves the property after being asked.

These folks are gonna need a lot more than just thoughts and prayers. They're gonna need caskets and burial go-fund-me pages. Does anyone care about this epidemic of gun violence? Certainly not the Texas legislature or the US Senate. All that big talk about having a conversation about background checks? Ha.

A friend related this story to me. She went shopping for school clothes with her daughter and 2nd-grader granddaughter. 

Grandmother: What kind of sparkle light-up shoes do you want this year? FROZEN again?

Kid: We can't have those any more, Grandma.

Grandmother: How come? You love sparkle light-up shoes!

Kid (looking at Grandma like she just fell off the turnip truck): If there's an active shooter in the building, he can see us if our shoes flash. 

The part that got me was the phrase active shooter. What kind of school experience are ou kids having when they have to know they can't wear sparkly shoes because an active shooter might see them?

And then we were distracted by little ol' Dorian. 

 

Now, having grown up on the east coast, I will tell you right out that I prefer hurricanes to tornadoes and blizzards. You get a fair amount of warning with hurricanes and there are actual things you can do to protect home and hearth. No guarantees, mind you, but I taped the picture window in the living room enough times to know how to do that and put up plywood. These days, you get enough warning to do that AND evacuate. With a tornado you may get three minutes. And blizzards, well, you hunker down and ride it out.

The Saffir-Simpson Scale was introduced in 1971 to categorize these forces of nature. They even re-evaluated the hurricanes on record to categorize them for the sake of comparison. If nothing else, it put the event in some sort of order of destruction. ANYONE who lives on the east coast knows hurricanes come in category 1-5. You'd have to be living under a rock not to know that, since in the last decade we've had a bunch of 5's. 

 

They stared keeping records in 1924, and since that time, there have been 41 storms designated at 5. 21 of those hurricanes happened AFTER 1971. I am not going to talk about global warming or possible causes for the uptick in hurricane severity. Nope. That wasn't the most interesting part of News of the Weird. This was:

1:28 PM · Sep 1, 2019·Twitter Web Client

In a perverse sorta way, it's almost bragging. Our hurricanes are the biggest ever. This is not a penis-size contest. This is about violent storms and destruction. Not that he remembers anything about destruction and devastation. 
 

I bet the wankers in Texas are bragging how they have more mass shootings with bigger guns than anyplace else in the world. Feckless Leader is probably telling Paramour Putin that his violence is the biggest ever. Is he eyeing the riots in Hong Kong with unabashed envy? I wonder what he said in that made-up phone call with the Chinese. "You think your people are upset?" You gotta wonder. 

 

A significant part of the developing cone of tragedy this week is the steadily worsening cognitive dissonance the occupant of the Oval Office exhibits. This, coupled with the increasing episodes of aphasia gotta make you wonder who is running the country, because it sure as hell isn't Donald Trump. 

Maybe this is the time everyone should be re-reading (or reading if you never have) Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America.

The Wifely Person's Tip o'the Week

“We can state with conviction, therefore, that a man's support for absolute government is in direct proportion to the contempt he feels for his country.” 

― Alexis de Tocqueville