LTE: French elites called out

I thoroughly enjoyed Stephen Clarke's op-ed "French elites appalled by treatment of one of their own" (Page B7, May 21). He perfectly describes my impression of elites like Dominique Strauss-Kahn abusing those perceived to be of a lesser station.

 

This sense of entitlement, however, doesn't begin and end with molesting the help. It also includes abusing taxpayers — particularly American taxpayers - who among other things paid for Strauss-Kahn's $3,000 per night hotel rooms.

 

It's ironic to think that what he spent in just two weeks on hotel rooms as head of the International Monetary Fund can easily finance his stay for a year at an American prison, should he be convicted.

 

Pete Smith, Cypress

http://www.chron.com/default/article/Letters-Israelis-vs-Palestinians-1684011.php

LTE: A-OK with Grier

Jennifer Mathieu Blessington writes that she is leaving HISD for imposing assessment tests that measure students' — and teachers' - performance. I note with interest that Blessington, while criticizing the status quo of assessment tests, offers no alternative for measuring teacher performance other than to note that "in years past my colleagues and I were allowed to create our own tests to see how our students were doing."

 

It's ironic that she would reminisce fondly about the complete lack of accountability in years past that contributed to the failure of our school systems in the first place. That reminds me of the attempt by education reformers more than a decade ago to have teachers in Texas take a high school equivalency test in order to qualify to teach. The teachers' unions protested loudly, and it disappeared. I thought it strange to think that teachers would object to proving that they have the barest minimum of education in order to be allowed to teach our kids, but it's consistent with their insistence to be held to no standards at all.

 

If teachers like Blessington want to be taken seriously, they should come up with rigorous performance standards already common to most other professions, instead of complaining when others like Superintendent Terry Grier fill the vacuum by imposing standards on them.

 

Pete Smith, Cypress

http://www.chron.com/default/article/Letters-Teachers-and-leadership-1690907.php

MS-150 Chronicles, Part Three

SATURDAY, April 16, 2011

Saturday Dark Thirty in the morn, and about now, 13,000 Riders (or thereabouts) are lined up at various staging points in West Houston, Katy and scores of other points in between to start the MS150 ride to Austin. Meanwhile, I head out before sunrise on the last leg to a work assignment in Chicago in possession of a large coffee, hash browns and a Jack-In-The-Box Sourdough breakfast sandwich, basically an Egg McMuffin on steroids and on sourdough bread. Served all day. I will never eat McDonalds again if there's a Jack-in-the-box in the neighborhood. I had actually given up on McDonalds some months back, and as I roll down the road, I wonder how they survive at all.

There's a variety of reasons to abhor McDonalds. It's not just their unchanging, Stalinesque menu, or their measly portions, or a nitwit staff that gets the order wrong 50% of the time, or $2.29 for a glass of orange juice from concentrate, or even the rampant hiring of Illegal Immigrants right under the noses of ICE and the Justice Department. The number one reason not to patronize McDonalds? We'll get to that in a second. In the meantime, I thought I would share some honest-to-god conversations I have had with McDonalds' personnel in the past four months, from all four borders of this great nation, and generally speaking through the drive-through window:

- “You got my order wrong, you got my two partner's orders wrong. No, we didn't switch bags. None of us have what we ordered.”
- “I asked for ketchup, salt and pepper. You didn't give me any.”
- “OK, can I get more than one ketchup, one salt, and one pepper?”
- “What do you mean, your 'jefe no está aquí'? I don't know what that means, but I'm pretty sure it's not taking care of my problem.”
- “I asked for three creams and three sugars on the side. You put them in my coffee.”
- “Look, my bill is six dollars and 41 cents. I gave you eleven dollars and 41 cents. All you need to do is give me a five dollar bill in change.”
- “You just handed me my order; my hamburger is cold. How is that even possible?”
- “What part of 'don't put any whipped cream in my milk shake' did you not understand?”

All the other hassles aside, what is worst about McDonalds is their policy of not serving you breakfast after 11am (10am in some markets). Pull up to the drive-through station at 11:01, and you are made to feel like an idiot for not bothering to have checked your watch beforehand, all the more galling inasmuch as the message is delivered by somebody who can't make change in their head and requires pictures on the register to tally your order. McDonalds is as full of themselves as Microsoft was, say, back in the 90s when they thought they could do no wrong while simultaneously providing crap product, their Mission Statement based on the premise that their customers are cattle and must be controlled.

More or less the operating premise of the Democrat Party.

I continue to push North to St. Louis and start to look for the interesting little towns that dot America like so many exclamation marks. I'm not disappointed, soon crossing Lebanon, St. James and Cuba. I zip through St. Louis, hit the Illinois state line, and in my path lay Mt. Olive, Divernon and Farmersville on my way to Springfield, IL, Abraham Lincoln's home. More about America's third most popular president later.

Settling in for a long, fairly boring stretch through Illinois, I start messing with my GPS, a reliable source of entertainment when neither satellite radio or the countryside offers any. For example, you can amuse yourself by doing a GPS search for Food, and it will offer you different categories: Mexican, Italian, American, French, German, Fast Food, etc. There's even a search option for "British Isles". Seriously? The mind boggles as to what British delicacies one might find in one's travels through America: Bangers and Mash, Shepherd's Pie; Corned Beef and Cabbage, Boxty, Haggis, Black Pudding, Lobscouse & Spotted Dog......

How to explain the Brits' lack of concern about the stuff that they eat and the near retardation of the British palate since their earliest days? My theory is that Her Majesty's subjects simply had other priorities. See, the Empire had to devote so much in terms of resources to the Admiralty and the Trading Companies so as to maintain their world domination, that there was nothing left to devote to the finer virtues, such as cooking, the arts, and music. So, the French did the cooking, the Italians did the Art, and the Germans did the music. Sadly, a century ago, America took over dominion of the world, whilst British cooking continued its long stagnation.

Says the guy who lives in the country that gave the world McDonalds.

The skies cleared some in the morning. I was up just prior to first light, and after a couple of cups of coffee I stepped outside with the dregs of my cup and a fresh ciggie. My room was on the lee side of dawn, but that was no big loss, as the Early sky was a uniform grayish white mass almost totally lacking in the texture you expect from clouds. By mid-morn the mass to the West had divided itself into some righteous clusters, while the bulk to the East and overhead remained an amorphous blob. The result as the sun rose was sunlight that didn't hit the ground, but did increasingly illuminate the clouds to the West as it sifted right to left. The effect was cool. Darkness to the right, a riot of activity overhead, and clear almost laser-beam like rays populating the skies to the West. This could only mean that the amorphous blob couldn't have been so terribly high as to block the sun from its cousins, particularly in the early portion of sunrise. The effect was interesting and again, something of a novelty.

You see so much more of weather when you're driving.

I roll out from the Motel and head north. As if on cue the clouds all draw back together and once again, steady rain comes down. This is nothing like the Tornadic conditions of the day before and this rain falls straight from the sky, spreading itself evenly across my windshield, each droplet exactly the same size. I set the stroke on my intermittent wipers, and I don't need to change it for the next hour.

As I drive, I'll also mix things up by changing the language on the GPS from British Isles to, say, German. You just haven't lived until you've heard that female German GPS voice – I call her Helga - command you to "Rechts Abbiegen!", or inform you that you are “Ankunft am Bestimmungsort!”. You can almost picture Helga in spiked heels, leather and fishnet stockings, a whip in her right hand, a peaked SS Officer's hat framing her blonde locks, lipstick as red as blood. Suffice to say, while German is not the language of love, it is arguably the language of S&M. It gives me some insight into ze Germans. “Helga, Paddel mein Hintern!”.

I try not to dwell on ze Verführerin and shift my focus to other things. To honor the impending nuptials of Prince William and Kate, I reprogram the voice on my GPS to “English”. The voice is of course female, but with none of the complexity of Helga. I name her Fanny, and contemplate the sheer triviality of my GPS including an English accented voice in its repertoire. Speaking of the Royal Wedding, I'm amazed at Americans' continuing fascination with the royal family. Thomas Paine must be rolling in his grave, if not spinning like a centrifuge, but my overall impression is that the institution, while mostly harmless, is hardly blameless.

One need only look at the serial embarrassments of the current British royal family to sense the urgent need for change: the inbred homeliness, the infidelity, the murderous intrigue, the Oedipus Complex. And that's just Prince Charles. Not that he hasn't been provoked into a lot of his bad behavior. The deal he had with his mother was that if he married Diana and produced heirs, that she would surrender the crown to him. Then she went and Welshed on the deal (pun intended), and now Prince Charles approaches his dotage, less likely than ever to be addressed as King Charles. What to make of all this?

I have a theory. I believe that Queen Elizabeth – belying her kindly persona – has decided that she likes being Queen too much to surrender it to anybody, and as time goes on and her mental faculties dwindle, her hold on the throne has become ever-more vise like. The only question is: has she always been like this, or did she get like this over time? My money is on the former. Monarchy has always been a pretty cut-throat business, as the process of Succession in Britain has proven over the centuries. Think Henry the Eight, for example. But the current state of affairs may provide an opportunity for the very fundamental change necessary to rejuvenate the Crown, and what better way for that to occur than a good old fashioned Coup? Queen Elizabeth needs to be overthrown. Further, I think Prince Charles thinks he's just the man to do it. In his idle moments – which are many - don't tell me he doesn't have this checklist running through his head:

- Finance improvements for the Tower of London.
- Declare Self the Pope of the Anglican Church.
- Imprison Mother and other family members as necessary.
- Ascend to the throne.
- Banishment and executions as necessary.

But that it were true. Can you even imagine the royalties on that reality TV show?

As I drive out of Springfield, IL, I pass Atlanta, Normal and Pontiac on my way to Joliet, just outside of Chicago. I'm just about there when the ZZ Top classic "Jesus Just Left Chicago" comes on the radio. Spooky. Not that I have a Jesus complex, but having just visited Abraham Lincoln's home in Springfield, IL on the heels of my extended meditation about royalty, I'm struck by the other ways that Americans celebrate royalty, in this case, Abraham Lincoln. Earlier in the day I had stopped into the Abraham Lincoln Residential museum, as worshipful a shrine as one could imagine, and staffed with about a dozen of Forest Service guides, all equally as worshipful of Honest Abe. Left to nobody's influence other than theirs, I would conclude that Lincoln was, if not Jesus Christ reincarnated, at least worthy of a regard not generally due to mere mortals.

Dressed in their Forest Service parkas, the Guides would shepherd groups of twenty through the Lincoln residence. The tour was informative and fun, but the reverence was palpable, so much so that our Guide failed to remark at all on the Lincoln Outhouse, which consisted of one stall and three stools, with the middle stool a mini-throne compared to the other two. It occurred to me that the only reason to have one stall but three stools is that those three would on occasion be used simultaneously. The mind boggled at the possibilities: family-time? business meetings? And why not three different stalls? It's not like he lacked the funds.

Not wanting to be a buzz-kill, I keep my questions to myself, but take pictures for posterity's sake.

Now, average Folk in America don't much cotton to deification, are not prone to hyperbole, and generally disdain the elevation of any person much above anybody else. But that is not to say that there is not a segment of society that does not devote itself to such notions, and these folks are generally are in the employ of the federal government, and inclined to ascribe to other government employees such as Lincoln a stature that allows them to sustain their own sense of self-worth. And so it was that I was forced to endure a battalion of Lincoln worshipers in the near proximity of his home, not to mention my trajectory towards Chicago.

The Visitor's Center was my first clue. Lincoln mugs, Lincoln key chains, Lincoln coasters, Lincoln frig magnets – a vast trove of Lincoln plunder in the gift shop. Next to the 1/64th scale recreation of Springfield were statues of his head and hands cast from plaster impressions taken some time during his presidency. Next to them was a sign inviting visitors to touch the Great Man's head and hands. I wander over to the library section, and wonder whether or not Abe in the Afterlife was chagrined by the – count them – fifteen thousand books written about him in the wake of the Civil War, much less any invitation to fondle his extremities?

There is a school of thought that says that Old Abe brought much of the hero worship Vibe upon himself. This was the guy who stood for having his head encased in plaster, after all, and as History has recorded, was more than inclined to the Florid and Self-Sacrificial Speech. Lincoln was prone to agonize, publicly and privately, over his every decision and its import, with all of it methodically recorded for posterity. And is it just me, or was Abe Lincoln cognizant of the fact that even his private utterances, whether recorded by himself or others, would eventually be revealed - and in just the right sequence - so as ensure his place in history?

Me, I think old Abe has a few things to answer for in that regard, but is otherwise OK. I rank him third on our list of Presidents behind Ronald Reagan and Calvin Coolidge, both of whom I hold in high regard for their modesty and lack of concern for their legacy, traits shared by only a few other American presidents.

I do a search on the GPS for Fast Food and there's an address for The Gyro Shack in Joliet. Score. Ten minutes later, I'm walking into a cramped little, well, shack: counter seating for - I kid you not - three. Trying to make my Daddy proud, I have made a point of pronouncing "Gyro" correctly. Since our earliest trips to Greektown in Detroit, he would admonish me to pronounce it "Yeer-oh, with the emphasis on the first syllable. Don't disrespect these guys by pronouncing it any other way". We would then be served one of the best things you could ever eat, shaved pieces of lamb heaped on a puffy flat bread and dressed with onions, tomatoes, cucumbers and sour cream sauce.

"I'll have a Yeer-oh sandwich with fries", I says. "OK" says the burly counter guy, in classic Chicago-ese, "what kind of Pop you want with that Jeer-oh?" You can't make this stuff up. Two minutes later I've got a Gyro the size of a small fireplace log, fries and Pop, in this case a diet Pepsi. Total: $6.40. I had also asked him for some extra sour cream on the side. He said, "trust me, you won't want any sauce on the side"; he was right. My Gyro was laden with the stuff, oozing out of the sides, making a happy mess on my fingers and dripping onto the wrapper.

I read the Chicago Tribune as I eat, watch a hockey game on the TV and shoot the breeze with the guy to my left, who is also eating a Gyro, reading a paper, watching hockey and talking to a complete stranger to his right, standing up at the counter built for three patrons. I contemplate the Quantum inferences until I realize that this guy, inexplicably, has a side of extra sour cream sauce.

Minutes later, I'm out of there with the uneaten half of my Gyro stored in the cooler. I head slightly East and start looking for a motel. By this time, the MS150 Riders are all in to LaGrange. I wonder how things are going, and if even Heartache's tent at Schlumberger could possibly be serving anything better than a Joliet Gyro.

MS150 Chronicles, Part Two

Friday, April 15, 2011

I arrived in Gravette without event on Friday morning, still scratching my head over the revelation that April 15 was not the day that Americans needed to submit their tax returns. It appears that the entire country was given until the following Monday because the official Washington, DC holiday of Emancipation Day - normally scheduled for April 16th but falling on a Saturday - had been rescheduled to the 15th so as not to cheese all of the residents of DC out of an extra day off from work. Dumbfounded at the boundless capacity of government workers to reward themselves days off not granted to the lesser mortals of the Private Sector, not to mention their capacity to overpay themselves for same, I roll into the parking lot at HQ, check in, talk to all the Necessary People, check out another van, Tool up and start hoofing it to Chicago Friday afternoon. The skies are clear of clouds but overcast to the horizon, the light a diffuse white, but still the kind that made sunglasses mandatory. Heading north out of Gravette, I cross the state line into Missouri, and quickly run through Noel, Ginger Blue and Saginaw on my way to Joplin, then bear East towards Springfield.

Settling in for a long and oft-travelled stretch through Missouri, I turn on my recently-acquired Sirius satellite radio and scroll through the hundreds of options. For all of its early misadventures and strange history, satellite radio is a boon to the traveling worker, the preferences of some of my weird Early Adopter friends notwithstanding. I'm talking about you, Mike Mullally, who has an individual button programmed for every genre, happily flitting from Jazz to Reggae to Blues. Me, I settle onto the narrow range of channels devoted to Rock & Roll and Right Wing Talk Radio, and throw in BBC for some variety, as well as for the ability to keep track of the impending Royal Wedding. More about that later.

I continue to run through my choices on Sirius radio and discover that there's a channel devoted strictly to Pearl Jam. Seriously. Pearl Jam Radio, 24 by 7. This is great news, not because I'm a Pearl Jam fan - quite the contrary. The reason this is good news is that if Sirius Radio sees fit to devote an entire channel to a bunch of lightweights from Seattle whose sole accomplishment was to outlive Kurt Cobain, then there just HAS to be a channel devoted to the Motor City Madman himself, Ted Nugent. One frustrating hour later, I find that there is no channel devoted to the Nuge. What is more grating is that, over time, I discover that the only place Sirius plays Ted Nugent is on a channel called “Hair Nation”. I hope for Ted's sake that he does not know this.

Soon enough, most of my pre-sets are programmed. Those buttons do not include Howard Stern or The Playboy Channel, not that I didn't check both of them out. Stern had hugely amused Sharon and me some 15 years ago on a driving vacation, and I had to admit to some fascination over how Playboy would project itself in a non-visual medium. As it turns out, The Playboy Channel is nothing but a bunch of addle-brained bimbos, all vying to drop the F bomb as much as possible and in as many forms – adjective, verb, adverb and noun – as possible before they run out of things to say in the hour allotted to them. This gaggle is talking to a Rapper I've never heard of who invites them to visit him at “one of his houses in Houston”. Turns out he has three, and one of them is in The Woodlands. I'm struck by the incongruity of a Rapper having a house in The Woodlands, much less boasting about having three in Houston. See, Houston isn't exactly a Hot Bed of Hip Hop (at least not since the days of Willie Dee and the Geto Boys), and bragging about owning three homes in Houston makes even your average Houstonian wonder why one is not enough.

This bit of entertainment aside, there's little else to hold my attention on The Playboy Channel, so I surf for Howard instead. I find him quickly enough, curious about whether his radio show is as vile as his TV show used to be, as I've not listened to him on the radio since 1996. The modern Howard on the radio gets real old, real quick. The same infantile obsession with women's body parts as the TV version, only now Howard gets to drop the F Bomb however and whenever, and once again in as many forms as possible, as if there's a competition between him and the Playboy Bunnies on Channel 99. I move on once Stern starts recounting his most recent session with his psychotherapist, who is treating Howard for - amongst other things – an addiction to Porn. Stern revels in the gory details, including his obsession with Porn involving women dressed up as nurses. I change the channel and put Howard on my Celebrity Suicide Watch-list, along with Charlie Sheen, Rosie O'Donnell and Bill Maher.

Strange to think that these Celebrity Nut Cases should have so much in common, all of them not just world-class Haters, but Self-Loathers to boot. I give them a year before one of them puts a gun in their mouth, and wonder what Group Therapy would look like, was this the Group. Of the four of them, my money is on Charlie to actually pull himself together, with Maher as the odds-on favorite to do himself in, and O'Donnell a close second. Howard's making too much money not to be consoled by it, at least for now.

By early evening I'm in mid-state Missouri, having passed by the Missouri State Highway Patrol Eternal Flame. Seems that the MSHP, or perhaps some do-gooder legislators, have conspired to erect a quasi-religious shrine to fallen state troopers. I'm conflicted on this point. For one thing, Eternal Flames are problematic at best, since I'm pretty sure none of them stays lit perpetually, as has been proven by the several that have gone out in a very public fashion. And what happens when they do go out? Do you just relight the damn thing, no harm, no foul? Does somebody just reset the clock?

Don't get me wrong: I've got no truck with honoring the fallen dead, and Missouri State police have done me a considerable kindness by honoring my 11% Rule, which states that a motorist can safely exceed the posted speed limits by 11% without fear of being pulled over. I have for this reason always had a tender spot in my heart for State Police across the land, all of whom seem more devoted to public safety than revenue generation, and all of whom observe the 11% rule. There is one caveat to this rule: when you go zipping past them at 78 mph on a highway posted 70, you must show them respect by slowing your vehicle until you're out of eyeshot.

Back to the Eternal Flame. In addition to the cost (natural gas doesn't grow on trees, and even sacred cows like, say, the EPA have – if only technically – a half-life), I'm struck by two things: 1) the underlying pessimism of such a project, assuming as it does that public safety will never improve to the point that an Eternal Flame would become irrelevant, and 2) the elevation of one group of Folks over another. I mean, why not a Security Guard Eternal Flame? For sheer volume of candidates to honor with an Eternal Flame, you can't beat an industry that puts an individual in harm's way without benefit of guns or body armor, much less one that lacks the backup of a vengeful and motivated fraternity such as that available to your typical cop, all mobile, and all armed to the teeth.

Plus, statistically, it's a no-brainer: Per capita, Security Guards drop like flies. Were we to extrapolate that criterion, it occurs to me that there's any number of groups deserving of Eternal Flames; Convenience Store Clerks, for example. Why, in Southwest Houston alone, we could stock a Convenience Store Shrine and keep it refreshed indefinitely, or at least until Plexiglas enclosures become the rule, and not the exception.

The clouds have grown thicker and are moving progressively closer to the ground. I'm rolling through foothills, and the clouds are touching the tops of the hills. It's a neat effect, as I can still see far into the distance between the hills, but only underneath the immense layer of clouds that stretches to the horizon both West and East and occupies the sky like a dome in my forward vision. To the East a piece of it actually appears to curve to the ground, obscuring the north end of a short stretch of farmland between the hills. The bottom of this cloud layer is otherwise flat as a pancake, and offers me some perspective on the succession of hills I see ahead of me. I'm rolling up an alley of sorts, and my GPS indicates that I'll be on this generally northeasterly route for some time. Behind me I catch the remnants of clear skies in my rear view mirror, almost cheerily bidding me “adieu, good luck, enjoy your trip up Tornado Alley!”.

As the winds get a little pushy, lightning starts to dance between and within the clouds. I notice with interest that the clouds turn blood red just a second before a lightning bolt. I've not seen that particular phenomenon before, so that is pretty cool. When it shoots from one cloud to another, the originating cloud turns red, and then a second later the receiving cloud, and then the lightning crosses between them. The lightning show continues for the next fifty miles. As I drive through this valley, I try to take several pictures, but none of them come out.

Satellite radio is not offering much in the way of local news and information, so I switch over to normal radio and try to pick up a weather report, without much luck. Soon enough I am rolling through yet another tollbooth, and the operator cheerfully volunteers that “there's tornadoes straight ahead!”, and that “if you run into any hail, you might want to pull over and seek shelter!”. She's so chipper about the whole thing, it ticks me off a little bit. If there's the likelihood of tornadoes, shouldn't she be sternly warning me to seek shelter? I'm not entirely sure I want to get all the way to the “running into hail” stage before I start looking for them. I decide to be less of a pussy about it after I realize that the Toll Booth operator was happily dispensing change and receipts in a driving rainstorm out of a structure about as sturdy as your typical Outhouse, or at least the variety typically found in your less affluent trailer parks.

I continue on for another ten miles or so, and side winds push the car violently to the right some three times in the space of a mile. I'm due for a fill-up, so I drop off of the highway and head a half mile East into a nearby gas station. By this point, the rain is coming down in sheets, something that had not escaped my attention, as I had dialed up the intermittent wipers about once every ten seconds in the mile just prior to getting off the highway. I pull up to a pump, start the gas and run inside to use the bathroom. I know, I know, you should never leave your gas hose unattended, because anything can happen, including the failure of the auto-stop feature on the nozzle, but since that hasn't happened since Dallas some six months ago, I'm thinking hey, what's the likelihood? I finish my business and hustle back out to the car. By this time, the rain has gone from a vertical deluge to a horizontal one, and I'm drenched head to toe in the time it takes me to replace the gas nozzle and grab my receipt.

I head West back to the highway, and within seconds I've driven into a fierce hail storm. With the lightning and the rain, I can't see the hail at all, but the sound as it rattles off the company car is unmistakable. Luckily, I come up on a highway overpass and tuck myself into the last available spot up front on the right shoulder, mere feet from the downpour of hail, which is clear to see now. I'm transfixed for a few minutes as it comes down in sheets, half the size of golf balls and maintaining it's round shape even after striking the ground. A shift in the winds pushes the hailstorm over my van and for five seconds it strikes the front seemingly a thousand times. About then a cop car pulls in front of me. His backup lights advertise that he has thrown it in reverse, and would not look unkindly on any effort of mine to back up so as to provide him some shelter. I look in my rear view mirror and see that the guy behind me has backed up, creating some room. I do likewise, and the cop pulls safely under the bridge.

The hail storm lasts another twenty minutes, coming and going in sheets. Five minutes after that, the hail and rain have practically stopped, and the skies ahead have actually cleared to a dirty yellow. I pull out with the cop and other drivers, roll on another twenty miles, find a motel and call it a night. Curiously, I've not felt the need to listen to satellite radio for the previous two hours.

MS150 Chronicles, Part One

PROLOGUE

Well now, it seems things don't always work out how you planned. Having returned from an extended contract job in San Diego, I had been home for a week, got reacquainted with Sharon, and was primed and ready to go for the MS150 ride on April 16th. Road Bike preventive maintenance? Check. Training Rides? Check. Official MS150 certification of road bike? Check. In this case, the word “Check” means that I have done none of these things, but see, having done 10 of them in the past, including nine in a row, I have come to the realization that training, preventive maintenance and certifications are so much Fooferall, if not a downright obstacle to the mission at hand: riding 175 miles over a weekend with 13,000 other folks, including a statistically significant percentage of which are on prescription medication for Hyper Attention Deficit Disorder.

Not that that doesn't make them nice persons.

Anyway, this year, things did not go as planned, and I was called back to work 36 hours before the start. I took solace in the fact that, even though I wasn't going to be able to do the ride, my Friends and Family had come through for me with almost $1,400 in donations. So, my MS150 Chronicles will not be a recounting of the Ride, but the Road; specifically, from Houston to Chicago over the MS150 weekend.

THURSDAY

Regretting however temporarily the circumstances that had decided that my course lay not in a generally westerly direction from Houston towards Austin on my trusty Bridgestone road bike, but in the company vehicle northbound for Chicago, I rolled from Houston towards our home office in Gravette, AR Thursday afternoon. Gravette is centrally located to something on at least three points of the compass: go ten miles North and you hit Missouri, where you can purchase alcohol; go ten miles East and you come to Bentonville, AR, WalMart's corporate headquarters; go ten miles West and you hit Oklahoma, where you can purchase alcohol.

Not sure if there's any point in ever heading south of Gravette, except to drive home.

The drive Thursday is unremarkable, except for the fact that the GPS has routed me via Hwy 59, skimming the border of Louisiana, instead of the usual route straight up I-45 through Dallas. No complaints here. Pre-GPS, I had intentionally taken the more Easterly routes to Gravette so as to avoid I-45, given that it is devoid of scenery and necessitates driving through Dallas, best described as one vast Speed Trap, its downtown an incoherent jumble of concrete and glass, unpleasing to the eye and made even more-so by those godawful colored lights they use to outline their skyscrapers. What's up with the red, green and white anyway? Kind of makes you wonder why they didn't form a Committee before they started Tarting up their skyline, and that's saying a lot for any of you who know me, as I am no lover of Committees. Plus, there's not a restaurant in the Metroplex that's worth a damn any closer than Ft. Worth.

My travels on what I've come to call the Eastern Route include an assortment of colorful town names, and I'm zipping up Hwy 59 through Lufkin and then Nacodoches, then past the municipalities of Kilgore, Naples, Detroit and Idabel, and that's before I even break Latitude on the aforementioned Metroplex. The country is beautiful: rolling hills with beautiful ranches on either side of the road. I'm surprised at the amount of land given over to livestock as opposed to crops, but then, this is Texas.

Now is as good a time as any to tell my story about Dallas' Overpasses. Seems that several of my fellow Contract employees hail from Dallas, and at least three of them – apropos of absolutely nothing - have volunteered in conversation that Dallas is home to the biggest highway overpasses in the country, and specifically the “High Five”. I did not know what the High Five was prior to this, so I looked it up on the Internet, and according to Wikipedia, it is an “award winning five-level Stack Interchange”. Now, I don't know if Dallas is home to the biggest overpasses in the country, as Houston has several with all the elevation and velocity of a world-class Roller Coaster. What I do know, though, is that we don't consider it a particular source of civic pride, and nobody in Houston goes around bragging on them as if they're the Sistine Chapel.

I also suspect that attendance to whatever awards ceremony it is that hands out statues to Five Level Stack Interchanges is likely not Standing Room Only, except perhaps in Dallas, TX, devoid as they are of culture.

I cross over into Oklahoma and continue my border skimming route, this time with Arkansas mere miles to my right. Even though Arkansas is the objective, I must run through a significant portion of Oklahoma before I make the inevitable jog to the East. I move through Broken Bow and quickly pass Heavener, Shady Point and Panama. But, let us say more about Dallas.

Whatever its other deficiencies, as a matter of principle, I avoid Dallas primarily because it is home to two of the biggest, greediest, most self-aggrandizing Assholes in professional sports franchise history: Jerry Jones of the Dallas Cowboys and Mark Cuban of the NBA Mavericks. Not that Houston hasn't had our share of greedy, self-aggrandizing professional sports franchise Assholes, mind you. As Exhibit A, I give you Bud Adams - the man who took the Houston Oilers to Tennessee after ripping off the city for $90 million dollars. The difference between Houston and Dallas is that we had the good sense to drive our Asshole out of town, whereas Jerry Jones and Mark Cuban not only wander the streets of Dallas as free men, but are celebrated by Dallas High Society, are frequently invited into the homes of decent people and even allowed within 500 feet of elementary schools, playgrounds and daycare centers.

But I digress.

I make it through Texas, a sliver of Oklahoma and then on into Arkansas without incident, stopping about two hours south of Gravette. It's a pretty low mileage day as these trips go, but I'm not due in until 9am on Friday. I find a Notel Motel for the night and settle in, intending to hit the road around six in the morn.