Camping With The Corps

The government funds a lot of things. Take advantage of them!

We have enjoyed staying at Army Corps parks on our trip. We are now at Leech Lake Army Corps Park in Minnesota. Despite its name, there's not a lot of leeches in the lake, but a few mosquitoes.

With my Geezer pass, the cost is only about $11 a night which is for an electric only site. So we have to limit our water usage for the three days we are here.

And no, you don't have to be in the Army - or any service branch - to use an Army Corps park.  It is just a campground, open to the public.  In fact, there is a reunion of SeaBees behind us (taking up several spaces and playing revile and taps on the bugle every day!).  So if they let the Navy in, well, they let just about anybody. ;)

Within a short walk of our camper is an amazing bathroom and shower house which is kept spotlessly  clean by the staff. It's a nightly ritual for us to go to the shower house and use the handicap stall and enjoy the unlimited free hot water - no one else is there! By the way, as I mentioned before this blog, it makes a lot more sense to shower at night and keep your sheets clean than to go to bed all dirty and wake up in the morning and shower. Mr. See taught me that.

What was really surprising was that this Army Corps Park had a laundromat. Most parks of a reasonable size have a coin-op washer and dryer so it wasn't too surprising. What was really surprising is the washers and dryers here are free. They ask that you limit yourself to two loads per day so that other people can use the washers and dryers.

I wrote before about public space, twice.  There are, of course, forces in this country which want to do away with public space and public parks. They would prefer that people be forced to buy their own piece of recreation in the form of vacation homes or vacation home rentals. But I think that type of philosophy is anti-civilization.  The greatest civilizations are not necessarily known for their private mansions of the very rich, but by their public parks, monuments, and other public spaces.  And yes, even the famous mansions and palaces are better known when they become open to the public as museums and attractions, than as obscene private homesteads.

What we see in our travels are not just well-off retirees in expensive motorhomes and fifth wheel trailers, but many people who are young and of modest means, car-camping with a tent for the weekend. For them, this is a great inexpensive getaway from the drudgery of working life. And yet there are those who would want to take that away.

(Caveat - we had a hailstorm yesterday and the six young ladies in a huge tent across the way spend the day trying to dry out everything they owned.  Tenting is not for the faint of heart!).

I also wrote before how many people believe that a vacation is something having a very finite duration, that involves spending an enormous amounts of money. My credit union used to have something called a "vacation loan," where you could borrow money to go to Disney World and then spend the rest of the year paying off a week's worth of fun. It sounds more like slavery to me.

If the weather is willing, we will go out in our kayak this afternoon (Update, tomorrow afternoon - hailstorm!).  Our Kayak is an old, 17-foot tandem Old Town Kayak that we bought second hand for $200. It must be at least 20 years old and it's pretty beat up. But it gets us out on the water and we take a small snack or lunch with us maybe a bottle of wine. We paddle upstream or upwind and enjoy the scenery and then break out our luncheon and let the wind or current push us back to our starting point. It's a pretty inexpensive way to have fun.

It doesn't cost a lot to live and enjoy life - or it shouldn't, anyway.  Some folks want to make life something you have to buy and pay for.

Don't let them.

Expensive Coolers

Do you really need a $500 cooler?

A reader writes with a link to an article about expensive high-end coolers.  Do people really need a $500 cooler?  And they get that expensive - plus some.  But some "consumer" studies have shown that these fancy coolers are really not much better - if not in fact worse - that more plebian models. And promises of keeping things ice cold for days are a little over-stated.

I wrote before about coolers. When I was a kid, my Dad would buy these 99-cent Styrofoam coolers at the grocery store.  He would put them in the back seat of the car and they would squeak, squeak, squeak, as we went down the road.  And of course, they would break - a corner would crack off and Dad would yell at us for "breaking" it, when in fact, it just fell apart.   It never really kept things cool, but that was because he would empty the tray from the icemaker into it (all of six cubes) and not into a ziplock bag or anything (they had yet to be invented) so all our food got warm and no doubt we all got food poisoning.

Ahhh... Memories!

The gold standard of coolers back then was the Coleman "steel-belted" cooler, which usually came in a hammertone green color or perhaps grey.  They cost a whopping $99 back then, which would be over $700 today, 50 years later.  And yea, Dad thought that was an unnecessary extravagence.  Of course, he might still own that cooler today, or someone in the family would.  Today,they are still $99 or less, but with inflation, they are far less costly than before.  And since then, Coleman has expanded their line (and others such as Igloo, have entered the picture) with all-plastic blow-molded coolers insulated with sprayed-in expanding foam.

They work pretty well, are cheap and durable and you can literally find them by the side of the road (when they blow out of someone's pickup truck bed).  I must have owned a half-dozen in my lifetime.  They do suffer from some design defects.  To begin with, they are not very thick in terms of insulation, as most people use them to keep food cold for a few hours at most.  You are expected to fill them with ice and cold beverages and the lack of insulation is made up for by more ice.

Second, the seals are often poorly designed, or in the case of some Igloo coolers, nonexistant.  The plastic top snaps in and that's it - no seal.  The Igloo rotating top cooler is even worse - it has no insulation on the lid.

And then there are the hinges - often cheap and sometimes just folded pieces of plastic, as was the case with our Coleman "steel belted" cooler which was given to us by a friend.  We actually found a Coleman outlet store in Lake George, New York, and they sold replacement stainless steel hinges which we used to repair our old "steel belted" cooler.  It lives on, today, albeit a little rusty around the edges.

For years, people lived with these kind of coolers.  They were relatively inexpensive (by the 1980's even I could afford to buy one - and one for Dad for Father's Day) and they worked pretty well.  They were durable, too.

But like so much in the last 20 years or so, the next generation is re-examining everything that was done before and saying, "Gee, couldn't this be done better?"    Enter Yeti.

Yeti hit the scene a few years ago and we first saw them on the dock at the marina - because boaters have a lot of disposable income to spend.  Yeti solved the design problems of the older coolers by increasing the thickness of the insulation, putting a good water- and air-tight seal on the lid, providing it with decent hinges and a latching mechanism that appeared to be lifted from the hood of a Jeep.  They weren't cheap - some models cost $500 and up.  But they sold well to people who had money to spend (or thought they did) and having a "Yeti" sticker ($10) on the back of your pickup truck (next to your "Salt Life" sticker, natch!) showed the world that you were a serious outdoorsman and could afford nothing but the best gear.

Yea, status rears its ugly head, once again.  No one puts "Coleman" stickers on the back of their pickup trucks.

But it went beyond that.  The Yeti people sold a line of stainless-steel vacuum-insulated cups (what we used to call a "bomb calorimeter" in science class) that once again, leapfrogged the old-school cups and containers.  Tervis Tumblers?  Oh, pleeze, so 20 minutes ago!  And you poors with your red solo cups, getoutahere!   Again, it was also a status thing, to be seen sipping your hot coffee from your $20 Yeti tumbler, while the poors had to deal with Styrofoam cups.

But like so many other things, first to market is often last in the marketplace, and competitors took notice of the Yeti trend and started selling knock-offs for cheap, that worked almost as well or maybe better sometimes.  Walmart sold stainless steel tumblers for 1/4 the price of Yeti.  In fact, they came out with a host of Yeti-like coolers under their Ozark Trail line, and for most people, these types of coolers and accessories work just as well as a Yeti, for less than half the price.  There is no secret sauce to cooler technology.

In fact, the real evolution in cooler technology is in electric coolers.  Years ago (a decade or more) we bought a Coleman theromelectric cooler.  It works great for what it is - you can't use it to cool food, but to keep it cool.  One reviewer online complained that she filled her Coleman thermoelectric with warm sodas about a half-hour before her son's little league game and was upset when they weren't ice cold an hour later.  It just doesn't work that way and most people don't understand basic thermodynamics, even on a colloquial level, which is why they get ripped-off time and time again.

We paid $99 for that Coleman thermoelectric and it has worked well and still works (we used it when we rehabbed the condo recently).  I have had to replace the power cord once and the 110V adapter (power supply) can be a bit flaky (they don't like to be dropped) and I have had to buy two replacements on eBay. For what it is, it works well.  Maybe the Yeti people need to do a Yeti-ization of that cooler.  Thermoelectric cooling works, it just needs to be upgraded a level or two.

So, in a way, it is a good thing that Yeti came out with its $500 coolers, as it forced the rest of the industry to up its game.  It's like all the "luxury" accessories for cars back in the 1960's - air conditioning, power locks, power windows, cruise control - all pretty standard today on even the cheapest of cars.  The Yeti people showed what could be done if you thought outside of the box (no pun intended).

Yeti has had its ups and downs over the years.  They over-produced back in 2016 and had an excess inventory problem.  Today, like just about everyone else, they have excess inventory as Americans stopped buying "stuff" in response to the recession.  In a recession, the first thing to go are luxury items like $500 coolers, boats, and motorhomes.   Of course, the gun nuts have been blowing up their Yeti coolers in a hissy-fit demonstration of stupidity because Yeti doesn't sufficiently support their cause.  It is not that Yeti is against gun ownership, they just choose not to sponsor it,  This is akin to gays boycotting Coors not because they are anti-gay, but because they pulled their ads from the Advocate.  That, of course, didn't happen - the gays are not  that stupid - but give it time, they'll probably do that next in this era of hyper-partisanship.

But beyond stupid NRA stunts (and who is dumb enough to blow up their cooler for an organization that cares nothing for them and is rife with corruption?) the Yeti people have illustrated that while it is possible to "reinvent" a decades-old technology, the marketplace will quickly copy those improvements, unless they can be protected by intellectual property.  In the case of coolers, there isn't much to protect.

Swingers!

 

There is a whole secret world of swingers - or not-so-secret.

We visited a naturist campground on gay weekend and it was interesting and fun.  The owner has gay weekends and lesbian weekends as well as "swinger" weekends where swingers groups rent out the whole campground for the weekend.  We also discovered "swinger" campgrounds where every weekend is a heterosexual swing party.

I never knew!

Some of these groups are formally organized, with membership criteria, ID cards and so forth and so on. Many only accept heterosexual married couples - single men are not allowed!  It was explained to me that some single guys can be quite annoying, thinking that every female is "available" and pestering and hitting on them in a disturbing fashion.  I could see that.

These folks - and I met a few at another campground, are just ordinary people. They might be your neighbors and coworkers or even your boss.   They aren't harming anyone, so what's the big deal?   I didn't think so, anyway.  But in the supercharged political climate we have today, well, you can see why they want to keep it on the "down low."

Like I said, they could be the neighbor next door, and they come in all shapes and sizes and genders and colors.

There are, so to speak, secret symbols and handshakes.  If you see a flag or pin or other symbol with an upside-down pineapple on it, you're in swingtown!

There are codes of behavior at these sort of events.  Gays are sometimes welcome, other times it is just straight couples.  Single men are sometimes allowed, provided they behave of course.  Men are always screwing up a good thing (no pun intended).

What is interesting about these events is that is isn't just one or two people - or even a dozen - but hundreds.  And they don't occur just in big cities (which, as Fox News tells us, are full of depraved people) but oftentimes out in the conservative "heartland of America".    So yea, the idea of Republican "cocaine-fueled orgies" in the Nation's Capitol are not too far-fetched.

Although that point needs to be addressed.  While there may be a lot of drinking involved, drugs seem to be frowned upon at these sort of things.  The last thing they want is some methed-out crack-head going off and requiring that they call the Police, at which point, things can get awkward - although many a Police officer may actually be in attendance.  So most of these events prominently note that drugs are not allowed.   It is only the Lady G who indulges such things.

Again, I am not sure what the point of this is, other than an awful lot of people lead secret lives - perhaps most do - and their sexual proclivities, between consenting adults - are no one else's business.  Of course, some folks would like you to think that only you have sexual desires and thus are some sort of deviant or bad person.  If they can get you to believe this, well, they can control you.

Sex is a normal thing, even if we don't like to think about our parents or our grandparents having it. But they did, otherwise you wouldn't be here!

Indian Names

America has treated the indigenous people poorly, but retained many of their names for places and things.

We were staying in Blackhawk Park Campground (Army Corps of Engineers - $11 a night!)  and went kayaking on the Mississippi - or at least in a couple of side-channels of it.  We also rode our bikes around and found a marker for the Black Hawk trail - a series of historical markers put up in the 1930's by a doctor Charles Porter who wrote a history of the ill-fated Sac tribe, who were basically massacred in 1832 as they tried to cross the Mississippi River.

Dr. Porter's account was the first written which was sympathetic to the Indian point of view.  The tribe had signed a treaty agreeing to stay on the Western side of the Mississippi, but apparently didn't understand that aspect of the treaty.  When they returned from hunting season to the East side of the Mississippi, they found settlers had taken over their farmland.  They tried to escape back across the Mississippi, but were mowed down by a  blunderbuss loaded with shrapnel, mounted to a riverboat warship, after they tried to surrender.

Of course, the folks who killed off the Sacs justified their actions on the grounds they were defending themselves from wild Indians who were attacking them.   And no one really bothered to correct the record until Dr. Porter did in the 1880's.

It is an interesting story but it got me to thinking about how many places and things in our country have Indian names.  Much ado was made by the far-right when Mount McKinley was reverted back to its native "Denali" name - but the same right-wingers would refuse to give up their GMC Denali SUVs, of course.  It was a tempest in a teapot.

Other than a few Eastern States, most of the States in our Country have Indian-derived names. There are a few named after European Royalty - Georgia, the Carolinas, Louisiana, Virginia - and still others after British lands (New York, New Jersey, etc.). And of course there are Spanish names such as Colorado and California. But the rest are mostly Indian names.  I got started on this wondering how Iowa got its name. Yes, Indian. So much for the "Denali" controversy.

And it seems the further West you go, the more native American names are used.  In Central New York, the New Holland Land Company (New Holland being the name of New York before the British took over, but that's another story) ran through all the names of Roman and Greek history (Greece, Syracuse, Pompey, Rome, Utica, etc.) before the surveyors started using names of the ex-girlfriends and family members.  But out West, it seems the settlers were less imaginative and content to use the designations of the people they displaced, albeit with the pronunciation mangled and the spelling anglicized.

Of course, we have named a few things after American "royalty" - the State and District of Columbia, named for Washington - and many cities,towns, counties and so forth named for Jefferson, Lincoln, Madison, Mason and others.  Of course, this was a problem when many States decided to "honor" confederate generals and leaders, many of whom were little more than war criminals.  Those names seem to be fading to obscurity, though. The Indian names remain.

Streets, roads, towns, cities, rivers, streams, lakes - many have Indian names.  In fact, the only thing not having an Indian name are Indians themselves, who Columbus mis-identified even as he slaughtered and enslaved them.

I am not sure what the point of this is, other than I never knew how Iowa got its name.

The Victim Mentality, Revisited

One the province of Liberals, the victim mentality defines the post-Trump GOP.  It's all about the grievances, people!

A lot has changed since I started writing this blog over a decade ago.  Back then, the Democrats were out of power and had a list of grievances against them.  They were all victims of society, prejudice, and the very wealthy!  Well, today they still are, but the Republicans have jumped on the victim bandwagon and are riding it to this day.

In a way, this is part of the classic Trump switcharoo, or the "I'm rubber, you're glue, bounces off me and sticks to you!" which sounds like a childish taunt that Trump would actually say as an adult.  It works, though, and every major demagogue throughout history has used it.  I'm a crook?  No, she's the crook! Lock her up!    We see how that is playing out.  Projection much?

So it was a natural for Trump to engage in victim politics in a bigley way.   He complained to be a victim of just about everything, from the press coverage during his campaign, to the Park Police head-count of his inauguration "crowd."  Everything and everyone was against him, and he constantly whined about how unfair the world was.  Like a small child, really.

The victim mentality is part and parcel of Externalization and it is handy to have when you want to blame others for your woes.  Whether you are a 20-something stoner living in your mother's basement or a 70-something three-time loser living in Marjorie Merriweather Post's old mansion, the effect is the same.  Nothing is ever your fault. But for external forces, you would be successful.  Everyone is unfair to me!  It gets tiring after a while.

But even if Trump fades into the sunset (let's hope - the guy is almost as old as Biden!) the victim mentality and the grievance lists of the GOP will continue unabated.  And this is troubling for the "Party of Personal Responsibility(tm)" as they are looking and less like like a party of principles (that ship sailed years ago) and more of a party of opportunity.  Do anything, say anything, to get in power and stay in power.  Something they accused Democrats of, years ago.

The big problem for the GOP is that their aging demographic of Baby Boomers is dying off to the tune of about 8,000 a day - and not being replenished by a younger crowd.  There are just not that many College Republicans (who for some reason, are all in their late 20's).   When the Boomers are gone, the next largest demographic will be the Millennials, and they may be far less inclined to vote Republican.

So it becomes apparent why the GOP and CPAC have dropped all pretenses and embraced Civil War as a means of political change.  CPAC has actually endorsed terrorism at this point.  The bus is going off a cliff as we speak and everyone is thinking that maybe it isn't so bad.

And of course, if  you call them out on this, they say it is just a joke - an attempt to "own the libs" and whatnot.  But of course, it ain't the libs being "owned" as of late - people are going to jail and even dying for their false God and it appears more may be in the works.

All because people want to play the victim card - when in fact, they are really victims of nothing but their own malfeasace.