“A Billionaire for the Rest of Us”

The 2018 gubernatorial race in Illinois is taking shape as a battle of the billionaires. A leading Democratic contender is a billionaire. The Republican incumbent may be a billionaire. I’d say that only his hairdresser knows for sure, but the governor is just folks, droppin’ -gs and whatnot and goin’ to the barber every four weeks. No hairdresser for him.

I offer this parodic campaign slogan to any billionaire who’d like to use it. I was happy to discover that it appears nowhere on the Internets:



Does being a billionaire disqualify one from running for public office? I don’t think so. But I’d rather put my vote elsewhere.

[The barber data is made up. I have no idea how often Bruce Rauner gets a haircut.]

A social network

Tim Flannery says that for trees, life ”in the slow lane” is “clearly not always dull”:

But the most astonishing thing about trees is how social they are. The trees in a forest care for each other, sometimes even going so far as to nourish the stump of a felled tree for centuries after it was cut down by feeding it sugars and other nutrients, and so keeping it alive. Only some stumps are thus nourished. Perhaps they are the parents of the trees that make up the forest of today.

From the foreword to Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees, trans. Jane Billinghurst (Vancouver: Greystone, 2016).

[Two pages in, and I’m gaping.]

Domestic comedy

“. . . farm-fresh, hand-crafted, local . . .”

“You had me at farm-.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

Budget!

For the first time in more than two years, Illinois has a budget. Yes!

Related reading
All OCA Illinois budget crisis posts (Pinboard)

[How many times have I called state legislators in the last three years? I’d guess seventy-five times or so.]

Zippy fedora

[Zippy, July 5, 2017.]

Better late than never.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

[I seem to recall R. Crumb in a documentary saying that clothing folds are the most difficult things to draw.]

Wise words on Fulham Road

Barnaby Capel-Dunn writes about wise words on Fulham Road. Read them. And try to find the florist’s signboard with Google Maps. It can be done.

Ballpark design

From the podcast 99% Invisible, an episode about the design of new stadiums ballparks: “In the Same Ballpark.” Mark Lamster, an architecture critic, quoted therein:

“They all have the same DNA, they all kind of look kind of the same, except the whole idea is that each one is idiosyncratic and individual. It’s a tall tale.”

Stefan Hagemann, this one’s for you.

A sardine cartoon

At George Bodmer’s Oscar’s Day: sardines on the road.

A voter-suppression effort, rerouted

From the Chicago Tribune:

A letter from the panel President Donald Trump formed to look into alleged voting irregularities finally has arrived at the Illinois State Board of Elections after first being sent to the wrong office.

Last week, Trump’s Election Integrity Commission sent a letter to election authorities across the nation seeking voter roll data that includes name, address, birth date, the last four digits of Social Security numbers and voting history going back to 2006.

The letter arrived Wednesday at Secretary of State Jesse White’s office. Many states’ top election administrator is the secretary of state, but the State Board of Elections handles those duties in Illinois. White’s office sent the letter to the the state elections board.

Here is yet another example of the new administration’s failure to employ people who understand the workings of the institutions that the administration seeks to undermine. A Google search for who is in charge of elections in illinois points to the website of the State Board of Elections. From a page on that website:

Illinois law currently provides that Illinois’ centralized statewide voter registration list is not available to any person or entity other than to a state or local political committee for political purposes or to a governmental entity for a governmental purpose. Private information, such as driver’s license numbers or the last four digits of a [S]ocial [S]ecurity number are never provided to any entity.

The Tribune reports that at least forty-four states have refused to turn over at least some of the information requested. Among those states: Indiana, whose former governor, Mike Pence, heads the commission with the Orwellian claim to Election Integrity. If it doesn’t go without saying, there is no evidence of widespread “voting irregularities” in Illinois, or in any other state.

Brief Interviews with an apology

[Photograph by Michael Leddy.]

I took this photograph (and you can pretty much guess where) because I liked the combination of plain materials (trash bag, notebook paper, marker) and extraordinary rhetoric: an explanation of what’s wrong (“Out of order”), an apology (“Sorry”), a helpful hint about how to proceed (“Use another one” — and notice that delicate euphemism “one”), an expression of gratitude (“Thank you”), and a smile. How could I not agree to use another one, right?

It was only when I saw a thumbnail of the photograph on my desktop that I recognized an uncanny resemblance. As my friend Marjorie would say, “It’s weird”:

 

The smaller you go, the more pronounced the resemblance. It’s weird:

 
Related reading
All OCA DFW and signage posts (Pinboard)