Author Archives: Mark

Standard

Posted by

Posted on

April 5, 2014

Posted under

Excursion 19 (10/4/2013)

Comments

1 Comment

Excursion 19, Part 2 (The Edsel)

In which our intrepid hero misses an important clue…

When I was a kid, like a lot of kids who read a ton of books, I had a reading vocabulary that was much bigger than my speaking vocabulary.  One word that I knew the meaning of was French in origin:  hors d’oeuvres.  In my mind, I pronounced this word something like “whores davores.”   I knew the word meant something like appetizers.  There was another word that meant basically the same thing:  “orderves.”   I don’t even know how many years passed before I finally realized that “orderves” and “hors d’oeuvres” were actually not synonyms but the same damn word.

 

Continue reading →

Standard

Posted by

Posted on

April 5, 2014

Posted under

Excursion 19 (10/4/2013)

Comments

2 Comments

Excursion 19, Part 1 (Definite Feeds for Definite Needs)

In which our intrepid hero encounters aged agrarian advertising…

I learned a new (to me) word the other day:  earworm.   You and I and everybody we know have experienced them; an earworm occurs when a piece of a song or melody gets stuck in your head and you can’t get it out.   It seems to me that there is a linguistic equivalent, of sorts, to an earworm, and that is when a particular phrase gets into your head.  It may not repeat itself but it is there and will come to mind, unbidden, with the right trigger.  Let’s call them eyeworms, just for the sake of convenience.  Earworms and eyeworms alike must be gold to advertisers.  Surely that is something they seek:  a commercial jingle or an advertising pitch line that lodge in people’s brains like G.I.s on Omaha Beach.  Think for a moment—do you remember any commercial jingles or advertising slogans from your childhood?  God knows I can.  “I’d like to teach the world to sing, in perfect harmony, I’d like to buy the world a Coke and keep it company.”   “When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight.”  “I can’t believe I ate that whole thing.”  “You’ve come a long way, baby.”

 

Continue reading →

Standard

Posted by

Posted on

March 29, 2014

Posted under

Excursion 18 (9/13/2013)

Comments

Leave a comment

Excursion 18 (Cornucopia)

In which our intrepid hero contemplates the passage of time…

For my 18th excursion across Ohio, I decided to head northwest, essentially in the direction of Findlay.  Northwestern Ohio is heavily agricultural and relatively sparsely populated (until you get up to the Toledo area) and this excursion, conducted in mid-September, came at the tail end of Ohio’s agricultural season.  Over recent months I had driven all around Ohio, but typically every week or two, which turned out to create an odd, strobe-like effect when it came to crops like corn.  You’d go out one time, and see seedlings, then the next time young stalks and before you really had a chance to adjust, you were seeing corn in its full growth.  The effect could be jarring, like seeing a child after an absence of a couple of years, missing the interim of wild growth.  Watching in this fashion the 2013 crop come in created a sense of acceleration of time for me, like things were moving too quickly.  Of course, we experience that in our own lives, too.

Continue reading →

Standard

Posted by

Posted on

March 2, 2014

Posted under

Excursion 17 (9/5/20130

Comments

3 Comments

Excursion 17, Part 2 (Town & Country)

In which our intrepid hero ducks and cranes…

One of the things I like best about eastern Ohio is the surprises of slopes.  Western Ohio is flat, often flat-flat, and its vistas cannot surprise.  But eastern Ohio is full of hills, usually wooded, and sometimes quite large.  As a result, if you are driving through eastern Ohio you are sometimes gifted with the pleasure of arriving at the top of a hill or ridge to see a wonderful expanse of countryside stretching out before you.  All of a sudden, there it is.

Continue reading →

Standard

Posted by

Posted on

March 1, 2014

Posted under

Excursion 17 (9/5/20130

Comments

2 Comments

Excursion 17, Part 1 (The Eagle Has Landed)

In which our intrepid hero encounters an unusual eyrie…

I saw a UFO once.  I use this term in its literal sense—an unidentified flying object—rather than as a synonym for “flying saucer” or “alien spacecraft.”  I was probably about 13 or 14 years old at the time.  It was very early in the morning—I was outside putting stuff in the car, as my family was getting ready to go on some trip (one of our rare vacation trips, I suppose).  The sky was perfectly clear and I just happened to notice an odd little circle hovering high up in the sky.  It was extremely tiny and I was kind of surprised I even managed to see it in the first place.  I couldn’t figure out what it was, and neither could my family.  My father suggested getting his spotting scope, so we brought it outside and looked at the object through it.  Even through the spotting scope, we couldn’t really make out any details.  We eventually decided it was most likely a weather balloon, which I still think is the most likely explanation.

Continue reading →

Standard

Posted by

Posted on

March 1, 2014

Posted under

Excursion 16 (8/18/2013)

Comments

Leave a comment

Excursion 16, Part 4 (The Hanging House)

In which our intrepid hero encounters some bad noose…

This year I “celebrate” my 20th year of studying extremists in the United States, something that began as a completely unplanned and odd little outgrowth of my dissertation (which had nothing to do with extremism or, for that matter, the 20th century).  By January 1995, I was spending a lot of time looking at domestic extremists and the April 1995 Oklahoma City bombing essentially changed my life forever, causing me to focus on extremism and terrorism, first voluntarily and soon professionally.  I’ve done that ever since.  But my very first encounter with extremism occurred decades earlier, when I was a child.

Continue reading →

Standard

Posted by

Posted on

March 1, 2014

Posted under

Excursion 16 (8/18/2013)

Comments

2 Comments

Excursion 16, Part 3 (Requiem for a Limousine)

In which our intrepid hero sees horses and horseless carriages…

When I was a kid, my father bought a horse.  He liked to hunt and his hunting buddies liked to go deer hunting up in the Gila Wilderness.   They used horses to get back up in the mountains where there were no roads, so my dad decided he needed a horse, too.  He found a quarterhorse with the dubious name of Maude, a former barrel racer whose career in rodeo ended with an injured leg.  I don’t know how much Maude cost him, nor how much it cost to keep Maude at a time when not much money was coming in.  Horses are expensive.  My father did save on the stabling.  He convinced an uncle-in-law, who owned a small farm that grew cotton and alfalfa, to let him build a corral on the uncle’s property (probably paying him some form of rent).  This began for me a long relationship with Maude and an even closer relationship with Maude’s manure.

Continue reading →

Standard

Posted by

Posted on

February 18, 2014

Posted under

Excursion 16 (8/18/2013)

Comments

13 Comments

Excursion 16, Part 2 (Ashes to Ashes, Rust to Rust)

In which our intrepid hero returns to the Rust Belt along the Ohio River…

The city where I grew up, El Paso, Texas, had industry of a sort, but mostly of the resource-processing kind, such as the city’s numerous refineries (oil, copper, etc.).  I think the first time I ever encountered America’s stereotypical industrial economy was the first time I visited Cleveland, Ohio, circa 1989.  I was driving on one of the Interstates in the metro area and there was a certain point where, if I looked south, all I could see, it seemed, was a vista full of smokestacks belching fumes.  That was my welcome to industry.  Of course, by then Cleveland had already been a rust belt city for some time, so I could only image what it might have been like in, say, the 1950s.  Still, even in the 21st century, Cleveland still operates as an industrial city, both in the old sense (polymers, automobiles, etc.) as well as in the newer sense (information technology, biotechnology, etc.).

In contrast, the cities and towns along the Ohio River have been less able to weather the storm.

Continue reading →

Standard

Posted by

Posted on

February 18, 2014

Posted under

Excursion 16 (8/18/2013)

Comments

Leave a comment

Excursion 16, Part 1 (Consider the Lilies)

In which our intrepid hero experiences his first ever car chase…

Ohio, it turns out, is not a particularly sunny state.  Ohio’s major cities average only between 63 and 77 days of sunshine (defined as 30% or less cloud cover) per year.  More than half of the days in Ohio have at least 80% cloud cover.  Chicago has more clear days than Columbus (which falls somewhere in the middle of Ohio’s range); Boston has several weeks worth of more clear days; Dallas has nearly twice the number of clear days as Columbus; and Las Vegas has three times the number of clear days as Columbus.   I was unable to find out how 2013 compared to the average for Ohio, but it seems to me, based on my excursions in 2013, that either 2013 was a particularly cloudy year for Ohio or I must have had been particularly unlucky in the days I was able to drive, because when I look back at the photographs I took in 2013, it seems like it was cloudy on almost every excursion.

Continue reading →

Standard

Posted by

Posted on

February 2, 2014

Posted under

Excursion 15 (8/6/2013)

Comments

4 Comments

Excursion 15, Part 5 (Happy Trailers)

In which our intrepid hero uncovers a little Lost City…

My opinions about mobile homes and travel trailers is decidedly mixed.  While I like the idea of being a hermit crab, going around with your house on your back, taking all of your conveniences with you, I find that the practical reality is less than the ideal.   Because of little things like plumbing and electricity, you aren’t really free but still tethered to campgrounds, and having to deal with things like hooking up sewage, etc., does not appeal to my lazy nature.  Although I admit that they seem to be great for cooking meth in.

Continue reading →