The inauguration is over…
7 minute read
January 21, 2025, 10:12 AM
I guess that is that. The inauguration is over and done with, and Donald Trump is once again our president, for better or for worse. I didn’t vote for him, and I suspect that the next four years are going to be a wild ride. And despite what the doomsayers in the news media as well as social media have said, we’re going to make it through this and get to the other side. After all, we survived one Trump presidency, and we can survive another. Watching how quickly a lot of things normalized after another administration was in charge after Trump left office in 2021 lends some credence to that.
It’s kind of interesting to watch Trump’s rise to politial prominence over the last decade or so and kind of put it together. I feel like it started with his questioning the legitimacy of Obama’s citizenship. Recall that during the 2008 election, a lot of noise had been made about Obama’s citizenship, and therefore his eligibility for the presidency. At the time, it was considered fringe, i.e. only lunatics, referred to as “birthers”, believed that Obama wasn’t a natural born citizen. Obama released his certificate of live birth from the state of Hawaii, and that was more or less the end of it. Obama was elected, and we all moved on. Then fast forward to around 2011, and Donald Trump, then just a rich New Yorker with bad hair, a big mouth, and a reality TV show, started making a lot of noise about the whole birth certificate thing, years after the issue had effectively been settled, with the idea that the certificate of live birth was insufficient, and that he wanted Obama’s long-form birth certificate. A lot of other people joined in on this, and it became an issue all over again, even though the issue had been settled, and Obama had been president for more than two years by this point. I figured that the Obama administration would ignore it and just keep on doing their thing, and let the whole matter burn out because the administration won’t bite. After all, Trump was just a nutter. He was a rich and influential nutter, but a nutter all the same. But then, surprisingly, the Obama administration took the bait, and released his long-form birth certificate in response. Suddenly, Trump just got a lot of legitimacy in the political sphere. He made a lot of noise, and the president responded. If the president had simply ignored it, I wonder if Trump would have just faded off of the political stage and we would only see him whenever he was opening a new hotel or firing a contestant on his TV show. I wonder if the Obama administration’s responding to Trump’s noise was the biggest mistake that the they made during their eight years, even though they had no way of knowing it at the time. I appreciate the rationale that they gave for it, that they were trying to put the issue to bed once and for all and move on from it, but the action gave legitimacy to the revival of a long-settled issue and enabled Donald Trump. Sometimes you have to let things die a natural death rather than attempting to execute them, even if you find them undesirable to have around, and this was one of those things where they should have simply ignored it and let it fizzle out on its own.
Continue reading…Categories: National politics
At long last, she is home…
11 minute read
January 18, 2025, 8:46 AM
I have some good news: at long last, my New Flyer D35HF transit bus is home. I had it brought in via truck, basically because I considered all of the various factors and it just worked out better to get it trucked in rather than driving it. The main factor was that we still have a few remaining mechanical issues with the bus, and we’re just about there when it comes to fixing it, but I was getting tired of having a long-distance relationship with the bus mechanic. Make no mistake: General Diesel is a great shop, and I would recommend them to anyone in the Charleston area who needs trucks or buses serviced. They were extremely helpful to Elyse and me, they were very communicative about what was going on with the bus, they answered all of my questions, and they were happy to rescue us after the last two attempts at retrieval ended unsuccessfully. But my being more than 500 miles away had its challenges, as I couldn’t actually go over and see what was going on myself, and I also had no real access to the bus, because any trip down required a large commitment of time and money for traveling, lodging, etc. Add to that how we had already made three attempts to bring her home, and while we certainly made something out of most of those trips separate from the bus-related activities, that time and expense was starting to add up. The thought was that a successful transport would involve transportation to Charleston for Elyse, myself, and possibly also Tristan, along with lodging, fuel, and a three-day time commitment. And this was for a bus that none of us were particularly familiar with because we had collectively spent all of about three days with her over the span of about a year. And after three failed retrieval attempts, I wasn’t feeling another one. We were also really lucky that all of our breakdowns happened in the Charleston area, because that was an easy return-to-launch-site kind of mission abort. It might have been a whole different story had this happened somewhere in rural North Carolina, for instance, which was still very far from home, but also far from our shop. All of that said, shipping the bus was starting to sound pretty attractive, paying once and knowing with certainty that she was going to make it all the way here, plus that freed me up to attend to other things.
The process of shipping the bus was a challenge, mainly because I had never done something like this before and therefore didn’t know what I was doing. I started by using Shiply, which was essentially an online brokerage service where you put out a proposal for something that you need transported and then shippers bid on it. That was overwhelming. I was getting bombarded by bids from all kinds of little shipping companies that I had never heard of, and all of them seemed very pushy, which didn’t make me comfortable at all. That pushiness was a real turnoff, especially when there was no hurry to complete this job (it wasn’t hurting anything staying in South Carolina), and I refused to be rushed, especially when I didn’t know much about what I was doing. I ended up going back to my various contacts and got more recommendations for how to transport this thing, and tried again. One contact recommended uShip, which is similar to Shiply. I put a request for proposals out for there as well, however, that led to the same overwhelming bombardment as Shiply, plus a number of shippers did their own research and contacted me outside of uShip to try to get around uShip’s fees. I was contacted through Schumin Web‘s Facebook page, my contact form, as well as on my Fine Art America store’s contact form (which is something that I didn’t know existed). My response to that sort of behavior, going around the platform where I made the request, was automatic disqualification. I was not going to enable that sort of shady behavior in any way, shape, or form, so by not respecting boundaries, they had de facto self-selected out of the process.
Categories: Frederick, New Flyer D35HF
When the bridge is gone…
6 minute read
January 3, 2025, 5:21 PM
On December 27, Elyse, Aaron Stone, and I went on a little outing that included a stop at Fort Armistead Park in Baltimore, which is located adjacent to the Key Bridge. This bridge was destroyed in the early morning of March 26, 2024 in a shipping accident that was captured live on camera, where the MV Dali collided with a support pier. Following evidence collection for an investigation into the accident, the debris was removed and the shipping channel was reopened.
I had first visited Fort Armistead back in 2022 on a previous outing with Elyse and Aaron, which is a popular location to photograph ship traffic going in and out of the Port of Baltimore, and got a few shots of the Key Bridge at that time:
Categories: Baltimore, Baltimore County, Roads, Ships