We're going up to Becker Vineyards for the fourth of July. They make the best wine in Texas. It's actually good wine, not just good Texas wine. At least some of it is. For the fourth, Becker brings in a cannon. A big, loud cannon. They fire it off every now and then.
I think that's about it. Wine and a cannon. That's enough for me.
Like Gaby's (see below), our tomatoes are not at their best. I'm watering them, but they look tired at the end of the day. Some flowers are not fruiting, and the existing fruits are in no rush to ripen. This weather is brutal for all, except maybe the goats, who seem unfazed.
In an act of drought defiance, I have decided to keep a small plot of grass green. About 20 x 30 feet. I am watering it. I just overseeded it and fertilized. It's going to be as green as an Oregon country club fairway.
I know, it's idiotic. It's the opposite of what one should do in a dry spell (a three-year dry spell, to be more exact). But we're letting 22 acres go as dry as dust—one big crunchy, brown pasture waiting for a prairie fire. Other than infrequent watering of our flowers and bushes (and tomatoes), we're letting the rest of our yard and barnyard die. So my Private Protest Patch—smaller than your typical country club putting green, to stay with that analogy—is small potatoes. Or tomatoes.
Up yours, drought.
An excerpt from an e-mail sent by Gabrielle "Gaby" McCormick, proprietor of the wonderful Welfare Cafe in Welfare, Texas:
It will be July next week and the temperatures are so hot that the tomatoes are not flowering and the existing fruit is dying on the vine. Its dry and I am afraid it is going to be a lot dryer before it gets cool and wet. I am not sure if the fall garden can be started without rain because we want to limit the amount of water we take out of the aquifer. What would we do if we didn’t have a grocery store to go to for provisions?
Our neighbor, Herbert Weltner, who passed away in 1999, knew what it was like to live totally off the land or “self sufficiently” as he would say. We would pass him working in his garden every morning and evening on our way to and from San Antonio. He always had a gentle smile and wave of the hand. He was no more than 5’4” and probably didn’t weigh more than 130 pounds. He was born in 1916 into a family which would ultimately have eight siblings. Their ranch was at the head water of Camp Verde Lake.
When Herbert was born he could not drink his Mother’s milk so his father had to buy goat’s milk for him at a ranch several miles away. Later, on his small ranch in Welfare he raised milk goats which he had learned how to do from his father. His garden was approximately 4,000 square feet and produced many varieties of vegetables with corn and sweet potatoes being the dominating crop. With the exception of eggs they were life long vegetarians.
This morning I ran over to the Pico convenience store on Johns Road for my iced tea and papers. It was clean, bright, and tidy. But the iced tea (Luzianne from a dispenser) was weak, and the only hot food was yesterday's burritos, fried chicken sticks, and pizza. So I ran over to Taco Cabana for sustenance. In all, it's quite a jaunt, but it fits into my Weekly Tour of Town to See What's Going On.
I have received several suggestions that I adopt the convenience store at Blanco & Plant as the new CSFH, but I'm not sure it's going to work out that way. That place is bad, but it's cleaner, brighter, better-stocked, and better-managed than the original CSFH. How could I justify a step up? And it doesn't solve the breakfast taco issue.
The Valero on 46 makes food, but it's way too clean for me.
There are a couple of obvious candidates on north-north Main, but I think that the taco issue will remain, and I suspect that at least one of them is run by the old CSFH crowd. It might turn out to be a bad sequel.
I'm going to have to let this play out on its own. Stay tuned. I appreciate any suggestions.
Another shot at Newsweek for Smart People. I'm really getting obsessive about this; I need to cancel the subscription.
Jeremy McCarter, in a piece that should have been titled "Chicken Soup for the Liberal Progressive Soul," makes roughly ninety-seven assertions that are baloney stuffed with baloney. I shall comment on the one that strikes closest to home for me. The article pretends to be about Henry Fairlie, a dead writer imported from Britain (imported before his death), who embraced an elite, pro-government, Tory version of conservatism. McCarter shamelessly uses Fairlie (a pitiful drunk as well as a gifted observer) as a springboard for his own viewpoint.
McCarter admits that he thought that some of Fairlie's anti-Republican conservatism was "overheated," but "then I watched Sarah Palin speak. Fairlie's disgust at the GOP's small-minded demagoguery anticipated the day when it would reach its fullest expression—when the movement would have no farther to fall." Fairlie, McCarter writes, "would have been thrilled by Barak Obama's story and what it demonstrates about the possibilities of American life... and he would have eviscerated Palin's notion that there's such a thing as 'Real America.'"
Oh, please. Okay, Palin is a nitwit. A great-looking, vivacious, appealing, populist nitwit. There's no getting around that. But she's entirely right about the Real America. Oh, you can argue the semantics. If you really wanted to annoy McCarter, you might dub it the Silent Majority. Perhaps McCarter would like the sound of "the Little People." But there is an America out there that few smart journalists, politicians, or business executives have ever experienced. Intellectually, they know it's there, and they make gestures in its direction, but it plays no role in their daily consciousness. They underestimate its size and importance. They have never vacationed there, much less adopted citizenship.
I learned about the Real America through my wife's wonderful family, and their roots in cities that sprawl around refineries. I learned about it watching their military service, an abstraction to the elite. I learned about it after moving to a small town in the Texas Hill Country, where people purposely choose locations, lifestyles, incomes, and principles that would make McCarter sneer.
I like Real America. I've seen the other version. I lived in it for decades. Real America is better. There's a whole lot of Real America out here, and from time to time its inhabitants get pissed off about people like McCarter, then the country—and the government—jerks to a new direction.
Don't mistake me for a Cheney-Wolfowitz-Feith-Rumsfeld fan (though there is an anti-Rumsfeld pretend book review in the same issue of NFSP that I find hilarious). The direction toward which Real America jerks the nation is not always my first pick. There are indeed small-minded and uninformed people out here, and I recognize that there are none in New York City. But to deny that Real America exists, to ignore the clear, compelling differences between the world that McCarter inhabits and the world that many, many Americans have chosen is to expose the ignorance of smart people who proclaim truths in their smart magazines.
In this week's Newsweek for Smart People, Jonathan Alter argues for government health insurance, and touts Medicare's low 3% admistrative cost, versus 10% to 20% for private insurers. He says that health care is an example of something that government does more efficiently than private enterprise.
Medicare's overhead is low for all the wrong reasons.
Medicare does not evaluate or rate its insureds. If you are over 65, you're covered. That saves a lot of front-end administration and indulges an economic model that no business could survive, even under universal coverage. If you do not evaluate the risks, you cannot predict claims and cannot intelligently set a premium.
Medicare barely supervises its payments to providers. File a claim, get a check. That saves a lot of back-end administration, and it leads to repeated substantial fraud, a massive uncontrolled expense.
In the middle, Medicare makes no effort to balance income and expense, because its economic model is precisely backward: healthcare costs whatever it costs, and Medicare sends the bill to the taxpayer. That saves a lot of administration, in the same way that Paris Hilton saves administrative expense by spending whatever she wants.
And yet, paradoxically, Medicare is so stingy with payments, and so buried in paperwork, that many physicians refuse to accept new Medicare patients.
Is it possible that if Medicare staffed up and raised its administrative overhead to 15% of budget, then its overall cost would decrease by a greater absolute amount? Yes. More than possible. Probable.
Medicare's 3% administrative overhead is not evidence of efficiency. It is a consequence of negligence within a system that lacks an incentive for sound management.
In the course of building the greenhouse, we've been talking to the electrician about a backup generator. It wouldn't be funny freezing or roasting 350 orchids when the power went out.
So today the power goes out for about twenty minutes. A reminder.
Generator prices have dropped dramatically over the last few years, in part because companies are now making consumer-grade units in addition to their commercial units. The last time I looked at a 10kw generator, it was about $12,000 installed. Now you're looking at maybe $4,000 installed. That's more like it.
We're watching Stupid TV, my favorite. House Hunters. Joe and Deann are looking for a house in the Naples, Florida, area. The second house was listed for $350,000. I caught the address and Googled it. Turns out that Joe and Deann bought it in the summer of 2006 for $340,000. And that it's back on the market today for $279,000. A $61,000 loss, which--since they're young--means it's almost certainly under water. I doubt that they could afford to sell at a loss like that, so it's probably a foreclosure.
The way things have been going in Florida, it's surprising that it's fallen less than 20% in value. Of course, it ain't sold yet.
I think I've reached the punch line at the end of the long-running Convenience Store From Hell joke. I went in this morning and, as usual, there were no large cups. I asked Marta for large cups. She threw down her mop (she was actually mopping), and stomped off to get cups. She returned, muttering something about refusing service.
At the register I asked her to elaborate on her feelings. "Every time you come in here you find something wrong!" she exploded.
"That's because something is always wrong. I just wanted a cup."
"Did you know we have two other stores?" she stormed.
"Um, you don't have cups because you have two other stores?"
"We're busy. We have a lot of things to do."
"But every time I come in here, Marta [the other Marta--I call them both Marta to protect their privacy] is standing in the kitchen talking on her cell phone."
"Well, that's her. You don't see me standing around, do you? I'm always working. I'm busy."
Actually, she's usually standing outside on the sidewalk, smoking, but I decided not to get into that. The point is, it turns out that it's my fault that it's the Convenience Store From Hell. It would be a flawless convenience store if I didn't keep asking for cups and lids and ice and stuff. The problem is not that they're out of cups. The problem is that customers ask for cups. There's a lesson in there for all of us.
I think that settles it. I need to find someone else to pick on. Though I am left wondering how one could refuse service when they don't offer any.
Our local supermarket chain, HEB, is increasingly aggressive about its house brands. Name-brand foods are being pushed off the shelves. Whether it's salad dressing, sausage, or potato chips, the HEB brand is at eye-level in abundance and the name brand you want is in small quantities on lower shelves. In some categories the only brand available is one of theirs: Hill Country Fare, HEB, or Central Market.
Hill Country Fare is what might politely be called a "value" brand, meaning that it's mediocre. The HEB brand is just below the middle--you'd rather have Green Giant, but HEB won't kill you. The Central Market brand is good, but it's only available in specialized categories. Even if their brands were great, I would resent being deprived of choice.
If HEB feels that brand loyalty in a certain category isn't particlularly strong, they blatantly push the name brands off the shelf. You can only get Kingsford charcoal in the little bag they sell in convenience stores, but there are twenty shelf-feet of HEB charcoal in 25-pound bags. I know the difference in charcoal (binder and filler, meaning clay, meaning ash), and I'd rather get the good stuff. So should I switch to lump charcoal instead of briquets? The choice is Central Market brand in big bags, or B&B in little bags.
In a small town, HEB can stick it to its customers. The only alternative is the Wal-Mart superstore. They have the name brands, but they cater to what might be considered a non-foodie crowd, so the selection is strong in lard, weak in prosciutto. The meat is poor and adulterated; the vegetables are limp and limited. So you buy dry goods at Wal-Mart, then you buy meat and veggies at HEB. If you're nuts.
If an HEB mouthpiece were to address this situation, he or she would avow that they're all about giving us choice and value. Competition from house brands keeps the brand names on their toes. This is, of course, precisely the argument that Obama makes about government health insurance. You can look forward to having government health care shoved down your gullet.
