Exotic Feline Rescue Center

We finally visited the Exotic Feline Rescue Center after 8 years in Southern Indiana, an excellent post-Thanksgiving day trip.

It’s a couple miles off 46 East on the way to Terre Haute.  The entrance has a vague resemblance to an autobody parts store or some such.  You pay your entrance fee, and one of the volunteers/employees [...]

Creepy Farmers’ Market Simulacrum

Sarah snapped these pics of this extremely creepy Farmers Market simulacrum on display in the entrance to the Kroger’s near us.
“Hey, people seem to really like these ‘farmers’ markets.’  Let’s arrange our sterile fruits and veggies imported from South America, Australia, etc and present it all as the produce raised by a disturbing robot/Cylon ‘farmer’!  [...]

Football with Headscarves

Love this photo from an article about public charter schools in Minneapolis:

We’ve applied to a new charter school in town for Celie and Iris next year (not that we’re sure we’d send them if they got in, yet).  I doubt it will be full of Somali or Hmong immigrants, however.

Bon Iver “The Wolves (Act I & II)”

I initially resisted this guy — he came to town a while ago and I decided not to go because he struck me as a bit too affected in the Devendra Banhart mode: solo folkie strumming acoustic guitar, but “weird” in ways that seemed predictable. But the album grew on me, especially this song. [...]

Perpetual Garage Sales in Elkhart, Indiana

Sad NY Times article about hard times in Elkhart, Indiana:
To understand just how grim things have gotten in this northern Indiana town, consider a new law passed last month by the City Council that limits residents to one garage sale a month.

It seems the perpetual garage sales — which for scores of people in [...]

Reflections on World Music

Let’s face it, World Music is a dubious category that can have an annoying/patronizing side: oh, those festive native costumes and delicious exotic polyrhythms.  At its worst, World Music can be dull global pop that would seem completely middle-of-the-road minus the foreign language/accent and colorful outfits.  Our town has this annual Fall world music festival [...]

Canvassing for Obama

The whole family went canvassing Saturday on a semi-rural stretch south of town.  Sarah had been assigned this cluster of 30 or so residences in this area and handed a google map with the addresses highlighted.  These were people whom the campaign had reason to suspect of being undecided or wavering or persuadable.  We parked [...]

Barney Smith

I surged with Hoosier pride watching Barney Smith’s little speech.  Here’s a short piece about Barney, a former lifelong Republican who was fired from a t.v. tube factory in Marion, Indiana (to the Northeast of Indianapolis).
He was awesome! And such a Hoosier, totally authentic.  His wife worked at a high school cafeteria; cafeterias are [...]

Hoosiers, Craveables, & Riblets

Two recent news stories. First, Report ranks Indiana 11th fattest among states:
Indiana is still getting fatter, just not as much as some other states.
In an annual report released Tuesday by the Trust for America’s Health, obesity in Indiana continued to climb as a percentage of adults but once again dropped in its ranking among [...]

Flood!

Amazing flooding here in Bloomington!!! I had to take my shoes off to wade across Third Street — the water was up to my knees, splashing up in the wake of a bus against the window of the coffee shop, and I chatted with a guy whose bike had been swept away downstream in Jordan [...]